Nora Roberts - The Hollow

“Obviously, I spent the night with Fox.”

“Playing chess?” Quinn grinned as Layla stripped on her way to the shower. “Isn’t that his game?”

“We never got to that. Maybe next time.”

“From the smile on your face, it’s obvious he has a few other games,” Cybil commented.

“I feel…” She jumped into the shower. “Used and energized, amazed and stupefied.” She whipped the shower curtain back an inch. “Why didn’t you tell me about the perk?” she demanded. “About how they recover, sexually, the same way they heal?”

“Didn’t I mention that?”

“No.” It was Cybil who answered, giving Quinn a hard poke.

“Speaking of energy, the Energizer Bunny is a worn-out, sluggish rabbit comparatively.” Quinn gave Cybil a sympathetic hug. “I didn’t want to make you feel sad and deprived, Cyb.”

Cybil just narrowed her eyes. “How many times? And don’t try to tell me you didn’t count,” she added as she pulled the shower curtain open.

Layla pulled it back, then stuck out a hand, five fingers spread.

“Five?”

Then put the tips of her pinky and thumb together to add another three.

“ Eight? Holy Mother of God.”

Layla switched off the shower, grabbed a towel. “That’s not counting twice this morning. I have to admit, I’m a little tired, and I’m starving. And I’d kill for coffee.”

“You know what?” Cybil said after a moment. “I’m going to go down and scramble you some eggs, pour you a giant cup of coffee. Because right at the moment, you’re my hero.”

Quinn stayed behind as Layla, wrapped in the towel, rubbed lotion on her arms and legs. “He’s a sweetie.”

“I know he is.”

“Are you going to be able to work together, sleep together, and fight the forces of evil together?”

“You’re managing it with Cal.”

“Which is why I ask, because the combination can have its moments. I guess I wanted to say that if you run into one of those moments, you can talk to me.”

“I’ve been able to talk to you from the first. I guess that’s one of our perks.” Because it was true, Layla considered as she drew on her robe. “My feelings for him, for just about everything right now, are tangled and confused. And for just about the first time in my life, confusion isn’t such a bad thing.”

“Good enough. Well, try not to work too hard today because we’re having a summit meeting tonight. Cal wants to know what Fox came up with.”

“About what?”

“I don’t know.” Quinn pursed her lips. “He didn’t mention anything to you? A theory.”

“No. No, he didn’t.”

“Maybe he’s still working it out. In any case, we’ll talk about whatever we talk about tonight.”

By the time Layla got to the office, Fox was already in and on the phone. With his next client due in shortly after, it wasn’t the time, in her opinion, to pin him down about their other collaboration and theories.

She checked his schedule, hunting for a reasonable span of free time, then stewed while she worried about why he hadn’t mentioned anything about it to her.

When Sage came in just as Layla was about to take advantage of a lull, Layla decided she was outnumbered for the workday.

“Fox gave me a call, asked me to come by. Is he free now?”

“As a bird.”

“I’ll just go on back.”

Thirty minutes passed before Sage came out again. It was obvious she’d been crying even when she sent Layla a brilliant smile. “Just in case you’re not aware, you’re working for the most amazing, most beautiful, most incredible man in the entire universe. Just in case you didn’t know,” she added, and ran out.

With a sigh, Layla tried to bury her own questions-and the annoyance that had been working up through them- and went back to see how Fox had weathered what must have been an emotional half hour.

He sat at his desk with the look of a man who was seriously worn at the edges. “She cried,” he said immediately. “Sage, she’s not much of a crier, but she sure cut loose.

Then she called Paula, and Paula cried. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, so if crying’s on your agenda, could we get a continuance?”

Saying nothing, Layla walked to his fridge, got him a Coke.

“Thanks. I’ve got an appointment to… Since I just had a physical a few months ago, they’re sending my records to the place where they do it. Sage, she’s got a friend in Hagerstown who’s her doctor. So I’ve got-we’ve got-an appointment day after tomorrow, and the day after, since Paula’s going to be…”

“Ovulating?”

He winced. “Even with my upbringing, I’m not completely at ease with all this. So day after tomorrow. Eight. I’ve got court, so I’ll just go there after.” He rose, put a dollar in the jar. “This is fucking bizarre. There, that’s better. So what’s up next?”

“I am. Quinn told me you were supposed to meet with Cal and Gage last night, and that you wanted to meet with them to tell them about a theory you have.”

“Yeah, then I got a better offer, so…” He trailed off. He knew that look in her eyes. “That pisses you off?”

“I don’t know. It depends. But it certainly baffles me that you have an idea you think worth discussing with your men friends, and not with me.”

“I would have discussed it with you, but I was busy enjoying mutual multiple orgasms.”

True, she had to admit. But not altogether the point. “I was with you all day in this office, all night in bed. I think there was time in that frame to bring this up.”

“Sure. But I didn’t want to bring it up.”

“Because you wanted to talk to Cal and Gage first.”

“Partly, because I’ve always talked to Cal and Gage first. A thirty-year habit doesn’t change overnight.” The first hint of annoyance danced around the edges of his voice. “And mostly because I wasn’t thinking about anything but you. I didn’t want to think about anything but you. And I’m damn well entitled to take time for that. I didn’t consider my idea about Giles Dent as foreplay, and I sure as hell didn’t consider talk about human sacrifice as postcoital conversation. Hang me.”

“You should’ve… Human sacrifice? What are you talking about? What do you mean?”

The phone rang, and cursing, Layla reached across his desk to answer. “Good afternoon, Fox B. O’Dell’s office. I’m sorry, Mr. O’Dell’s with a client. May I take a message?” She scribbled a name and number on Fox’s memo pad. “Yes, of course, I’ll see he gets it. Thank you.”

She hung up. “You can call them back when we’re done here. I need to know what you’re talking about.”

“A possibility. Ann wrote that Dent intended to do something no guardian had done, and that there’d be a price. The guardians are the good guys, right? That’s how we’ve always looked at them, at Dent. The white hats. But even white hats can step into the gray. Or past the gray. I see it all the time in my line of work. What people do if they’re desperate enough, if they feel justified, if they stop believing they have another choice. Blood sacrifice. That’s the province of the other side. Usually.”

“The deer, the one Quinn saw in her dream last winter, lying across the path in the woods with its throat slit. The blood of the innocent. It’s in the notes. We speculated that Dent did that, that he sacrificed the fawn. But you said human.”

“Do you think that sacrificing Bambi could have given Dent the power he needed to hold Twisse for three hundred years? The power to pass what he did to me, Cal, and Gage when the time came? That’s what I asked myself, Layla. And I don’t think it could’ve been enough.”

He paused, because even now it left him slightly ill to consider it. “He told Hester to run. On the night of July seventh, sixteen fifty-two, after she’d condemned him as a witch, he told her to run. That came from you.”