Nora Roberts: Blood Brothers

“We have to talk. All of us.” So pale her eyes looked bruised, Quinn stood in the doorway.

“Q? Honey.” Cybil reached out in support. “What’s happened?” She remembered Quinn’s dash to the computer for e-mail. “Is everyone all right? Your parents?”

“Yes. Yes. I want to tell it all at once, to everyone. We need to get everyone.”

She sat in the living room with Cybil perched on the arm of her chair for comfort. Quinn wanted to curl up in Cal’s lap as she’d done once before. But it seemed wrong.

It all seemed wrong now.

She wished the power had stayed off forever. She wished she hadn’t contacted her grandmother and prodded her into seeking out family history.

She didn’t want to know what she knew now.

No going back, she reminded herself. And what she had to say could change everything that was to come.

She glanced at Cal. She knew she had him worried. It wasn’t fair to drag it out. How would he look at her afterward? she wondered.

Yank off the bandage, Quinn told herself, and get it over with.

“My grandmother got the information I’d asked her about. Pages from the family Bible. There were even some records put together by a family historian in the late eighteen hundreds. I, ah, have some information on the Clark branch, Layla, that may help you. No one ever pursued that end very far, but you may be able to track back, or out from what I have now.”

“Okay.”

“The thing is, it looks like the family was, we’ll say, pretty religious about their own tracking back. My grandfather, not so much, but his sister, a couple of cousins, they were more into it. They, apparently, get a lot of play out of the fact their ancestors were among the early Pilgrims who settled in the New World. So there isn’t just the Bible, and the pages added to that over time. They’ve had genealogies done tracing roots back to England and Ireland in the fifteen hundreds. But what applies to us, to this, is the branch that came over here. Here to Hawkins Hollow,” she said to Cal.

She braced herself. “Sebastian Deale brought his wife and three daughters to the settlement here in sixteen fifty-one. His eldest daughter’s name was Hester. Hester Deale.”

“Hester’s Pool,” Fox murmured. “She’s yours.”

“That’s right. Hester Deale, who according to town lore denounced Giles Dent as a witch on the night of July seventh, sixteen fifty-two. Who eight months later delivered a daughter, and when that daughter was two weeks old, drowned herself in the pond in Hawkins Wood. There’s no father documented, nothing on record. But we know who fathered her child. We know what fathered her child.”

“We can’t be sure of that.”

“We know it, Caleb.” However much it tore inside her, Quinn knew it. “We’ve seen it, you and I. And Layla, Layla experienced it. He raped her. She was barely sixteen. He lured her, he overpowered her-mind and body, and he got her with child. One that carried his blood.” To keep them still, Quinn gripped her hands together. “A half-demon child. She couldn’t live with it, with what had been done to her, with what she’d brought into the world. So she filled her pockets with stones and went into the water to drown.”

“What happened to her daughter?” Layla asked.

“She died at twenty, after having two daughters of her own. One of them died before her third birthday, the other went on to marry a man named Duncan Clark. They had three sons and a daughter. Both she, her husband, and her youngest son were killed when their house burned down. The other children escaped.”

“Duncan Clark must be where I come in,” Layla said.

“And somewhere along the line, one of them hooked up with a gypsy from the Old World,” Cybil finished. “Hardly seems fair. They get to descend from a heroic white witch, and we get the demon seed.”

“It’s not a joke,” Quinn snapped.

“No, and it’s not a tragedy. It just is.”

“Damn it, Cybil, don’t you see what this means? That thing out there is my-probably our-great-grandfather times a dozen generations. It means we’re carrying some part of that in us.”

“And if I start to sprout horns and a tail in the next few weeks, I’m going to be very pissed off.”

“Oh, fuck that!” Quinn pushed up, rounded on her friend. “Fuck the Cybilese. He raped that girl to get to us, three and a half centuries ago, but what he planted led to this. What if we’re not here to stop it, not here to help this end? What if we’re here to see that it doesn’t stop? To play some part in hurting them?”

“If your brain wasn’t mushy with love you’d see that’s a bullshit theory. Panic reaction with a heavy dose of self-pity to spice it up.” Cybil’s voice was brutally cool. “We’re not under some demon’s thumb. We’re not going to suddenly jump sides and put on the uniform of some dark entity who tries to kill a dog to get his rocks off. We’re exactly who we were five minutes ago, so stop being stupid, and pull yourself together.”

“She’s right. Not about being stupid,” Layla qualified. “But about being who we are. If all this is part of it, then we have to find a way to use it.”

“Fine. I’ll practice getting my head to do three-sixties.”

“Lame,” Cybil decided. “You’d do better with the sarcasm, Q, if you weren’t so worried Cal’s going to dump you because of the big D for demon on your forehead.”

“Cut it out,” Layla commanded, and Cybil only shrugged.

“If he does,” Cybil continued equably, “he’s not worth your time anyway.”

In the sudden, thundering silence a log fell in the grate and shot sparks.

“Did you print out the attachment?” Cal asked.

“No, I…” Quinn trailed off, shook her head.

“Let’s go do that now, then we can take a look.” He rose, put a hand on Quinn’s arm, and drew her from the room.

“Nice job,” Gage commented to Cybil. Before she could snarl, he angled his head. “That wasn’t sarcasm. It was either literally or verbally give her a slap across the face. Verbally’s trickier, but a lot less messy.”

“Both are painful.” Cybil pushed to her feet. “If he hurts her, I’ll twist off his dick and feed it to his dog.” With that, she stormed out of the room.

“She’s a little scary,” Fox decided.

“She’s not the only one. I’m the one who’ll be roasting his balls for dessert.” Layla headed out behind Cybil. “I have to find something to make for dinner.”

“Oddly, I don’t have much of an appetite right now.” Fox glanced at Gage. “How about you?”

Upstairs, Cal waited until they’d stepped into the office currently serving as the men’s dorm. He pushed Quinn’s back to the door. The first kiss was hard, with sharp edges of anger. The second frustrated. And the last soft.

“Whatever’s in your head about you and me, because of this, get it out. Now. Understand?”

“Cal-”

“It’s taken me my whole life to say what I said to you this morning. I love you. This doesn’t change that. So pitch that out, Quinn, or you’re going to piss me off.”

“It wasn’t-that isn’t…” She closed her eyes as a storm of emotions blew through her. “All right, that was in there, part of it, but it’s all of it, the whole. When I read the file she sent, it just…”

“It kicked your feet out from under you. I get that. But you know what? I’m right here to help you up.” He lifted a hand, made a fist, then opened it.

Understanding, she fought back tears. Understanding, she put her palm to his, interlaced fingers.

“Okay?”

“Not okay,” she corrected. “Thank God about covers it.”

“Let’s print it out, see what we’ve got.”

“Yeah.” Steadier, she glanced at the room. The messy, unmade pullout, the piles of clothes. “Your friends are slobs.”