Nora Roberts - The Hollow

“Is it?” She brushed past him to take her seat at the table.

“Okay.” Quinn gave Cal’s burger one wistful glance before she started on her grilled chicken. “We’re all up to date on what happened at the Square. Bad birds. We’ll log it and chart it, and I’m planning on talking to bystanders tomorrow. I wondered if it might be helpful to get one of the bird corpses and send it off for analysis. Maybe there’d be a sign of some physical change, some infection, something off that would come out in an autopsy.”

“We’ll just leave that to you.” Cybil made a face as she nibbled on the portion of the turkey sub she’d cut into quarters. “And let’s not discuss autopsies over dinner. Here’s what I found interesting about today’s event. Both Layla and Fox sensed and saw the birds, as far as I can tell, simultaneously. Or near enough to amount to the same. Now, is that simply because all six of us have some connection to the dark and the light sides of what happened, and continues to happen in Hawkins Hollow? Or is this because of the specific ability they share?”

“I’d say both,” was Cal’s opinion. “With the extra click going to shared ability.”

“I tend to agree. So,” Cybil continued, “how do we use it?”

“We don’t.” Fox scooped up fries. “Not as long as Layla pulls back from learning how to use what she’s got. That’s the way it is,” he continued when Layla stared at him. “You don’t have to like it, but that’s how it is. What you have isn’t any good to you, or to the team, if you won’t use it, or learn how to use it.”

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t, but I’m not going to have you shove it down my throat. And trying to shame me into it isn’t going to work either.”

“What will?” Fox countered. “I’m open to suggestions.”

Cybil held up a hand. “Since I opened this can of worms, let me try. You’ve got reservations about this, Layla. Why don’t you tell us what they are?”

“I feel like I’m losing pieces of myself, or who I thought I was. Adding this in, I’m never going to be who I was again.”

“That may be,” Gage said easily. “But you’re probably not going to live past July anyway.”

“Of course.” On a half laugh, Layla picked up her glass of wine. “I should look on the bright side.”

“Let’s try this.” Cal shook his head at Gage. “The odds are you’d have been hurt today if something hadn’t clicked between you and Fox. And it clicked without either one of you purposely trying. What?” he asked as Quinn started to speak, then stopped herself.

“No. Nothing.” Quinn exchanged a quick look with Cybil. “Let’s just say I think I understand where everyone’s coming from, and everyone makes a point. So I want to say, Layla, that maybe you could consider looking at it another way. Not that you’re losing something with this, but you could be gaining something. Meanwhile, we’re still going through Ann Hawkins’s journals, and the other books Cal’s great-grandmother gave us. And Cybil’s working on finding where Ann might have gone the night Giles Dent faced down Lazarus Twisse at the Pagan Stone, where she stayed to have her sons, where she lived until she came back here when they were about two. We’re still hopeful that if we find the place, we may find more of her journals. And Cybil also verified her branch of the family tree.”

“A younger branch than all of yours, so far as I can tell,” Cybil continued. “One of my ancestors, a Nadia Sytarskyi, traveled here with her family, and with others in the mid-nineteenth century. She married Jonah Adams, a descendent of Hester Deale. I actually get two branches, as about fifty years later, one of my other ancestors-Kinski side- also came here, and hooked up with Nadia and Jonah’s grandchild. So, like Quinn and Layla, I’m a descendent of Hester Deale, and the demon who raped her and got her with child.”

“Making us all one big happy family,” Gage put in.

“Making us something. It doesn’t sit well with me,” Cybil added, speaking directly to Layla, “to know that part of what I have, part of what I am, comes down from something evil, something neither human or humane. In fact, it pisses me off. Enough that I intend to use everything I have, everything I am to kick its ass.”

“Does it worry you that it may be able to use what you have and are?”

Cybil lifted her glass again, her dark eyes cool as she sipped. “It can try.”

“It worries me.” Layla scanned the table, the faces of the people she’d come to care for. “It worries me that I have something in me I can’t fully understand or control. It worries me that at some point, at any point, it may control me.” She shook her head before Quinn could speak. “Even now I don’t know if I chose to come here or if I was directed here. More disturbing to me is not being sure anymore if anything I’ve done has been a choice, or just some part of a master plan created by these forces-the dark and the light. That’s what’s under it for me. That’s the sticking point.”

“Nobody’s chaining you to that chair,” Gage pointed out.

“Ease off,” Fox told him, but Gage only shrugged.

“I don’t think so. She’s got a problem, we’ve all got a problem. So let’s deal with it. Why don’t you just pack up and go back to New York? Get your job back selling-what is it-overpriced shoes to bored women with too much money?”

“Step back, Gage.”

“No.” Layla put a hand on Fox’s arm as he started to rise. “I don’t need to be rescued, or protected. Why don’t I leave? Because it would make me a coward, and up until now I’ve never been one. I don’t leave because what raped Hester Deale, what put its half-demon bastard in that girl, drove her mad, drove her to suicide, would like nothing better than for me to cut and run. I know better than anyone here what it did to her, because it made me experience it. Maybe that makes me more afraid than the rest of you; maybe that was part of the plan. I’m not going anywhere, but I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m afraid. Of what’s out there, and of what’s inside me. Inside all of us.”

“If you weren’t afraid you’d be stupid.” Gage lifted his glass in a half toast. “Smart and self-aware are harder to manipulate than stupid.”

“Every seven years good people in this town, ordinary people, smart, self-aware people hurt each other, and themselves. They do things they’d never consider doing at any other time.”

“You think you could be infected?” Fox asked her. “That you could turn, hurt someone? One of us?”

“How can we be sure I’m immune? That Cybil and Quinn are? Shouldn’t we consider that because of our line of descent we could be even more vulnerable?”

“That’s a good question. Disturbing,” Quinn added, “but good.”

“Doesn’t fly.” Fox shifted so Layla met his eyes. “Things didn’t go the way Twisse planned or expected, because Giles Dent was ready for him. He stopped him from being around when Hester delivered, stopped him from potentially siring more offspring, so the line’s been diluted. You’re not what he was after, and in fact, according to what we know, what we can speculate, you are part of what’s going to give me, Cal, and Gage the advantage this time around. You’re afraid of him, of what’s in you? Consider Twisse is afraid of you, of what’s in you. Why else has he tried to scare you off?”

“Good answer.” Quinn rubbed her hand over Cal’s.

“Part two,” Fox continued. “It’s not just a matter of immunity to the power he has to cause people to commit violent, abnormal acts. It’s a matter of having some aspect of that power, however diluted, that when pooled together is going to end him, once and for all.”