“My God.”
“Gage went in like a battering ram, and Fox took off again. It took both of us to take Napper out. Fox was already running up the stairs when we got inside the old library. And it was hell in there. We were too late, too. She was jumping, hell, she was diving off that ledge when we ran out on the roof. I thought he was going to go over after her. He was bloody from fights, from being rammed by books that flew around like missiles, and God knew what else. There was nothing he could do. He knows it. But once in a while it takes ahold of him and gives him a good, hard squeeze.”
“If she’d believed him, believed in him and done what he asked-what she promised him-she’d be alive.”
Cal kept his calm gray eyes even with hers. “That’s right. Exactly right.”
“But he won’t blame her.”
“It’s harder to blame the dead.”
“Not for me, not at the moment. If she’d loved him enough, believed in him enough to keep her promise- only that, to keep her promise-he wouldn’t have had to risk his life to try to save her. I didn’t say that to him, and I’m going to try very hard not to. But I feel better now that I’ve said it out loud.”
“I’ve said it out loud, and to his face. I felt better, too, but it didn’t seem to do the same for him.”
Layla nodded. “There’s something else. Why Carly? She wasn’t part of the town, but she was infected, apparently, in minutes. So strongly that she committed suicide.”
“It’s happened before. It’s mostly people who live in the Hollow, but outsiders can get caught up.”
“I bet most of them get caught up as victims of someone who’s infected. But here she is, the woman one of you loves, and she’s caught up immediately. I wonder about that, Cal, and I wonder how it was he heard her calling, that she was able to call him, that she was able to wait until he ran out on the roof so he had to watch her jump.”
“Where are you going with this?”
“I’m not sure. But it might be worthwhile to have Cybil do a search on her, a genealogy. What if she’s connected? What if Carly was on one of our twisted family trees?”
“And Fox just happened to fall in love with her?”
“That’s the point. I don’t think any of this just happened. Cal, have you ever been in love-really in love- with anyone before Quinn?”
“No.” He answered without hesitation, then took another contemplative sip of coffee. “I can tell you Gage hasn’t either.”
“It uses emotions,” she pointed out. “What better way to cause pain than to use love against one of you? To twist it like a knife in the heart? I don’t think she was just infected, Cal. I think she was chosen.”
Fifteen
THAT NIGHT, THEY READ, AND FOR THE FIRST time in many pages, the first in the many months that had passed for Ann, she wrote of Giles and Twisse.
It is a new year. What was has passed into what is, and what may be. Giles asked that I wait until the new to make record of what came to be in the old. Do such turnings of time truly form shields to block the dark?
He sent me away before I ever had birth pangs. He could not do what he had determined to do with me besidehim. It shames me that I wept, even begged, that I would hurt him with my tears and my pleas. He would not be swayed, nor would he send me from him weeping.He dried my tears with his fingers, and pledged that if the gods were willing, we would find each other again.
At that moment, what did I care for gods, with their demands, their fickle natures and cold hearts? Yet my beloved had pledged to them before ever to me, and so I was no match for gods. He had his work, his war, he told me, and I-and he put his hands on my belly and the lives growing in them-had mine. Without me, his work would be nothing, and his war would be lost.
I did not leave him weeping, but with a kiss as our sons squirmed between us. I went with the husband of my cousin, away from my love, the cabin, the stone. I went away on a soft night in June, and as I did, he called these words to me.
It is not death.
There was kindness in my cousin’s house, such kindnessI have written on other pages. They took me in, kept my secret even when it came. Bestia, the Dark. Twisse. I lay in fear and in pain on the cot in the small loft of their little house. It came in the lie of a man while my sons began their struggle toward life.
I felt its weight on my heart. I felt its fingers gliding through the air, seeking me, like the hawk seeks the rabbit.But it did not find me. When my cousin’s husband would not go with him, would not join him with torch and hate on the journey to my love, to the cabin, to the stone, I felt its fury. I think I felt its confusion. It had no power here.
And Fletcher, dear Fletcher, would be spared what would come to the Pagan Stone.
It would be tonight. I knew it at the first pain. An end that was not an end, and this beginning. These tied togetheras Giles wished it, as he willed it. Let the demon believe it was his work, his will, but it was Giles who turned the key. Giles who would pay for opening the lock.
My sweet cousin bathed my face. We could not call for the midwife, or for my mother, whom I longed for. It was not my beloved who paced the room below, but Fletcher, so steady, so true. As the pain built until I could no longer hold back my cries, I saw my love standing by the stone. I saw the torches lighting the dark. I saw all that happened there.
Was this the delirium of birthing, or my small power? I think it was both, the first strengthening the other. He knew I was there. I pray this is not merely the wish of an aching heart, but truth. He knew I was with him, for I heard his thoughts reach for mine, and meet for one blessed moment.
Love, be safe, be strong.
He wore the bloodstone amulet, and those red drops gleamed in his fire, and in the torches they carried towardhim.
I remembered his words to me when he spelled the stone.
Our blood, its blood, their blood. One for three. Three into one.
Now I pushed, pushed, through the pain, through the blood, fighting my war for life. I saw the faces of those who’d come for him. And grieved for what had been done to them, what would be done to them. I heard young Hester Deale condemn him, and me. And still I pushed, and pushed. Sweat and blood and half mad from it all. I watched her run as Giles freed her.
I saw the demon in the eyes of a man, and the hate in the men and the women who carried its curse like a plague.
It came in fire, my beloved’s power. His sacrifice came in fire and in light, and in the blood that boiled around the stone. Our first son was born while that light blinded me. While my screams rose with the screams of the damned.
As the fire blazed, as it scorched the earth, my son loosed his first cry. In it, and in the cries of his brothers as they left my womb, I heard hope. I heard love.
“It confirms a lot of what we knew,” Cal said when Quinn closed the book. “Adds more questions. It can’t be a coincidence that Ann gave birth as Dent confronted Twisse.”
“The power of life. Innocent life.” Cybil ticked points off on her fingers. “Mystical life. Pain and blood-Ann’s, Dent’s, the demon’s-the people Twisse brought with him. Interesting, too, that Twisse came to the house where Ann was hidden, and got nothing. Even then, he couldn’t infect the people in that house, or on that land.”