Nora Roberts - The Pagan Stone

IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN A WASTE OF THEIR TIME, efforts, and Gage’s blood. Cybil gnawed on that in the days-and nights-that followed. Everything that had seemed logical, everything she’d been able to document, verify, research, speculate on now seemed completely useless. What had begun for her months before as a fascinating project was now the sum total of everything that mattered. What good was intellect, she thought as she rubbed her exhausted eyes, when Fate twisted what should be into the impossible?

How had time run out? How could that be? Hours now, essentially, she could count in hours the time they had left. Everything she learned, everything she saw, told her that at the end of those hours she would lose the man she loved, the father of her child. She would lose the life they might have made together.

Where were the answers she’d always been so good at finding? Why were they all the wrong ones?

She glanced up as Gage came into the dining room, then put her fingers back on the keyboard though she had no idea what she’d been typing.

“It’s three in the morning,” he told her.

“Yes, I know. There’s a handy little clock in the bottom corner of the screen.”

“You need sleep.”

“I have a pretty good idea what I need.” When he sat down, stretched out his legs, she shot him a single hot look. “And what I don’t need is you sitting there staring at me while I’m trying to work.”

“You’ve been working pretty much around the clock for days now. We’ve got what we’ve got, Cybil. There isn’t any more.”

“There’s always more.”

“One of the things I tripped over when it came to you was your brain. That’s one Grade-A brain you’ve got. The rest of the package gets the big thumbs-up, too, but the brain’s what started the fall for me. Funny, I never gave a damn, before you, if the woman I was hooked up with had the IQ of Marie Curie or an Idaho potato.”

“IQ scales are considered controversial by many, and skewed toward white and middle-class.”

“See.” He tapped a finger in the air. “There you go. Facts and theories at the fingertips. It just kills me. Whatever the scale, you’re one smart woman, Cybil, and you know we’ve got what we’ve got.”

“I also know it ain’t over till the fat lady sings. I’m trying to gather more information about a lost tribe in South America that may have been descended from-”

“Cybil.” He reached out, laid his hand over hers. “Stop.”

“How can I stop? How can you ask me to stop? It’s July fourth, for God’s sake. It’s three hours and twelve minutes into July fourth. We only have now . Tonight, tomorrow, tomorrow night, before we start back to that godforsaken place, and you…”

“I love you.” When she covered her face with her free hand and struggled with sobs, he continued to speak. Calm and clear. “That’s a damn big deal for me. Never looked for it, and I sure as hell never expected it to slap me in the face like a two-by-four. But I love you. The old man told me my mother made him a better man. I get that because you make me a better man. I’m not going back to the Pagan Stone for the town. I’m not doing it just for Cal and Fox, or Quinn and Layla. I’m not doing it just for you. I’m doing it for me, too. I need you to understand that. I need you to know that.”

“I do. Accepting it is the problem. I can walk into that clearing with you. I just don’t know how I can walk out without you.”

“I could say something corny about how I’ll always be with you, but neither one of us would buy that. We’ve got to see how the cards fall, then we’ve got to play it out. That’s all there is.”

“I was so sure I’d find the way, find something .” She stared blindly at the computer screen. “Save the day.”

“Looks like that’s going to be my job. Come on. Let’s go to bed.”

She rose, turned into him. “Everything’s so quiet,” she murmured. “The Fourth of July, but there weren’t any fireworks.”

“So we’ll go up and make some, then get some sleep.”

THEY SLEPT, AND THEY DREAMED. IN THE DREAMS, the Pagan Stone burned like a furnace, and flaming blood spat from the sky. In the dreams, the writhing black mass scorched the ground, ignited the trees.

In the dreams, he died. Though she cradled him in her arms and wept over him, he did not come back to her. And even in dreams, her grief burned her heart to ashes.

SHE DIDN’T WEEP AGAIN. CYBIL SHED NO TEARS AS they packed and prepared throughout the day of July fifth. She stood dry-eyed as Cal reported there were already some fires, some looting and violence in town, that his father, Chief Hawbaker, and a handful of others were doing all they could to keep order.

All that could be done had been done. All that could be said had been said.

So on the morning of July sixth, she strapped on her weapons, shouldered her pack like the others. And with the others left the pretty house on the edge of Hawkins Wood to strike out on the path to the Pagan Stone.

It was all familiar now, the sounds, the scents, the way. More shade than there had been weeks before, of course, Cybil thought. More wildflowers, and a thicker chatter from birds, but still much the same. It wouldn’t have been so very different in Ann Hawkins’s time. And the feelings clutched tight inside Ann as she’d left these woods, left the man she loved to his sacrifice, not so different, Cybil imagined, than what was tight in her walking into them.

But at least she would be there, with him, to the end of it.

“My knife’s bigger than yours.” Quinn tapped the scabbard hooked at Cybil’s waist.

“Yours isn’t a knife, it’s a machete.”

“Still, bigger. Bigger than yours, too,” Quinn said to Layla.

“I’m sticking with my froe, just like last time. It’s my lucky froe. How many people can say that?”

They were trying to take her mind off things, Cybil knew.

“Cybil.” The word came in a conspirator’s whisper, and from the left, from the deep green shadows.

When she looked, when she saw, Cybil’s heart simply broke.

“Daddy.”

“It’s not.” Gage stepped back to her, gripped her arm. “You know it’s not.”

When he reached for his gun, Cybil stilled his hand. “I know, I know it’s not my father. But don’t.”

“Don’t you want to come give Daddy a hug?” It spread its arms wide. “Come on, princess! Come give Daddy a great, big kiss!” It bared its sharklike teeth, and laughed. And laughed. Then it raked its own claws down its face, its body, to vanish in a waterfall of black blood.

“That’s entertainment,” Fox said under his breath.

“Poorly staged, overplayed.” Shrugging it off, Cybil took Gage’s hand. Nothing, she promised herself, would shake her. “We’ll take point for a while,” she said, and with Gage walked to the front of the group.

THEY’D PLANNED TO STOP FOR REST AT HESTER’S Pool, where the young, mad Hester Deale had drowned herself weeks after giving birth to the child Twisse put inside her. But the water there bubbled red. On its agitated surface, bloated bodies of birds and some small mammals bobbed and floated.

“Not exactly the right ambiance for a quick picnic,” Cal decided. With his hand on Quinn’s shoulder, he leaned over to brush his lips at her temple. “You okay to go another ten minutes before we break?”

“Hey, I’m the three-miles-a-day girl.”

“You’re the pregnant girl. One of them.”

“We’re good,” Layla said, then dug her fingers into Fox’s arm. “Fox.”

Something rose out of the churning water. Head, neck, shoulders, the dirty red sludge of the pond, dripping, running. Torso, hips, legs, until it stood on the churning surface as it might a platform of stone.