“I had a visit today, from our resident demon.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” All business, Quinn reached for her tape recorder. “Where, when, how?”
“In the cemetery, shortly after I left here this morning.”
“What time was that?” Quinn looked at Cybil. “Around ten, right? So between ten and ten thirty?” she asked Gage.
“Close enough. I didn’t check my watch.”
“What form did it take?”
“My mother’s.”
Immediately, Quinn went from brisk to sympathetic. “Oh, Gage, I’m sorry.”
“Has it ever done that before?” Cybil asked. “Appeared in a form of someone you know?”
“New trick. That’s why it had me conned for a minute. Anyway, it looked like her, like I remember her. Or, actually, I don’t remember her that well. It looked like pictures I’ve seen of her.”
The picture, he thought, his father had kept on the table beside his bed.
“She-it-was young,” he continued. “Younger than me, and wearing one of those summer dresses.”
He sat now, drinking his cooling coffee as he related the event, and the conversation nearly word for word.
“You punched it?” Quinn demanded.
“Seemed like a good idea at the time.”
Saying nothing, Cybil rose, crossed to him, held out her hand for his. She examined his, back, palm, fingers. “Healed. I’d wondered about that. If you’d heal completely if it was able to wound you directly.”
“I didn’t say it wounded me.”
“Of course it did. You punched your fist into the belly of the beast, literally. What kinds of wounds were there?”
“Burns, punctures. Fucker bit me. Fights like a girl.”
She cocked her head, appreciating his grin. “I’m a girl, and I don’t bite… in a fight. How long did it take to heal?”
“A while. Maybe an hour altogether.”
“Longer, considerably, than if you’d sustained burns from a natural source. Any side effects?”
He started to shrug that off, then reminded himself every detail mattered. “A little nausea, a little dizziness. But it hurt like a mother, so you’ll have that.”
She cocked her head, sent him a speculative look. “What did you do afterward? There’s a couple of hours between then and now.”
“I had some things I needed to do. We punching time clocks now?”
“Just curious. We’ll write it up, log it in. I’m going to make some tea. Do you want any, Quinn?”
“I want a root beer float, but…” Quinn held up her bottle of water. “I’ll stick with this.”
When Cybil walked out, Gage drummed his fingers on his thigh a moment, then pushed to his feet. “I’m going to top off my coffee.”
“You do that.” Quinn held her own speculative look until he’d left. Rocks weren’t the only things that shot off sparks when they slapped together, she mused.
Cybil put the kettle on, set out the pot, measured her tea. When Gage stepped in, she plucked an apple from the bowl, cut it neatly in quarters, then offered him one.
“So here we are again.” After getting a plate, she quartered a second apple, added a few sprigs of grapes. “When Quinn starts talking root beer floats, she needs a snack. If you’re looking for something more substantial, there’re sandwich makings or cold pasta salad.”
“I’m good.” He watched her as she added a few crackers, a handful of cubed cheese to the snack plate. “There’s no need to get pissy.”
She cocked that brow at him. “Why would I be pissy?”
“Exactly.”
Taking one of the apple slices, she leaned back against the counter, and took a tiny bite. “You’re misreading me. I came down because I wanted tea, not because I was annoyed with you. Annoyance wasn’t what I felt. You probably won’t like what I was feeling, what I do feel.”
“What’s that?”
“Sorry that it used your personal grief against you.”
“I don’t have any personal grief.”
“Oh, shut up.” She took another, and this time angry, bite out of the apple. “That is annoying. You were in the cemetery. As I sincerely doubt you go there for nature walks, I have to conclude you went to visit your mother’s grave. And Twisse defiled-or tried to-your memory of her. Don’t tell me you don’t have grief for the loss of your mother. I lost my father years ago, too. And he chose to leave me, chose to put a bullet in his brain, and still I have grief. You didn’t want to talk about it, so I gave you your privacy, then you follow me down here and tell me I’m pissy.”
“Which is obviously off,” he said dryly, “as you’re not in the least pissy.”
“I wasn’t,” she muttered. She let out a breath, then nibbled on the apple again as the kettle began to sputter. “You said she looked very young. How young?”
“Early twenties, I guess. Most of my impressions of her, physically, are from photographs. I… Shit. Shit.” He dug out his wallet, pulled a small picture from under his driver’s license. “This, this is the way she looked, down to the goddamn dress.”
After turning off the burner, Cybil moved to him, stood side-by-side to study the photo in his hand. Her hair was dark and loose, her body slim in the yellow sundress. The little boy was about a year, a year and a half, Cybil judged, and propped on her hip as both of them laughed into the camera.
“She was lovely. You favor her.”
“He took this out of my head. You were right about that. I haven’t looked at this in… I don’t know, a few years maybe. But it’s my clearest memory of her because…”
“Because it’s the one you carry with you.” Now Cybil laid her hand on his arm. “Be annoyed if that’s how you have to handle it, but I’m so sorry.”
“I knew it wasn’t her. It only took a minute for me to know it wasn’t her.”
And in that minute, she thought, he must have felt unbearable grief and joy. She turned back to pour the water into the pot. “I hope you hit a couple of vital organs, if organs it has, when you punched it.”
“That’s what I like about you, that healthy taste for violence.” He slipped the picture of his mother back into his wallet.
“I’m a fan of the physical, in a lot of areas. It’s interesting, isn’t it, that in this guise, its first push was to try to convince you to leave. Not to attack, not even to taunt as it has before, but to use a trusted form to tell you to go, to save yourself. I think we have it worried.”
“Yeah, it looked really concerned when it knocked me on my ass.”
“Got up again, didn’t you?” She arranged the plate, the pot, a cup on a tray. “ Cal should be here in another hour, and Fox and Layla shortly after. Unless you’ve got a better offer, why don’t you stay for dinner?”
“Are you cooking?”
“That is, apparently, my lot in this strange life we’re leading at the moment.”
“I’ll take that offer.”
“Fine. Carry this up for me, and we’ll put you to work in the meantime.”
“I don’t make charts.”
She shot him that smug look over her shoulder as she started out ahead of him. “You do today if you want to eat.”
LATER, GAGE SAT ON THE FRONT STEPS, ENJOYING the first beer of the evening with Fox and Cal. Fox had changed out of his lawyer suit into jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt. He looked, as Fox habitually did, comfortable in his own skin.
How many times had they done just this? Gage wondered. Sat, sharing a beer? Countless times. And often when he was in another part of the world, he might sit, sip a beer, and think of them in the Hollow.
And there were times he came back, between the Seven, because he missed them as he’d miss his own legs. Then they could sit like this, in the long evening sunlight without the weight of the world-or at least this corner of it-on their shoulders.
But the weight was there now with less than two months left before what they all accepted was do or die.