by Nora Roberts
“While I doubt we’re going to hear the guys do a chorus of ‘Do-Re-Mi,’ even if lives depend on it, roses and kittens are a springboard.” Considering big trauma, Quinn treated herself to an entire slice. “If each of us has personal fears, don’t we all have personal joys? Yes, yes, hokey, but not really over the top. Oh God, this is good. See, personal joy. Pepperoni pizza.”
“That’s not how Fox broke its hold,” Layla pointed out. “I don’t think he mentioned focusing on pizza or rainbows.”
“Not entirely true.” Because Lump’s eyes filled with love, Fox peeled a piece of pepperoni off his slice, fed it to the dog. “I thought about how what was happening was bullshit. Not easy when hungry mutant spiders are crawling all over you.”
“Eating here,” Cal reminded him.
“But I thought more about how we were going to kick the Big Evil Bastard’s ass. How we were going to end him. I kept thinking that, like I was telling him. Trash talking, lots of very foul language. That’s a personal pleasure, on a very real level. And when those things started falling off me, thumping on the ground, I started feeling fairly perky. Not, the hills are alive, spinning around like a lunatic perky. But not half bad, considering.”
“It’s always worked that way for you. Once you figured it out,” Cal added. “And it’s worked for me, for Gage. We’ve been able to break down the illusions—when they are illusions. But I tried, and I couldn’t this time.”
“So you bought it.”
“I—”
“You bought it, at least for a few minutes. Because it was too much, Cal. Everything that matters to you gone. Quinn, your family, us, the town. And just you left. You didn’t stop it, so everyone and everything was gone, killed, destroyed. But you. It was too damn much,” Fox repeated. “Those spiders weren’t real, not all the way real. But I saw my hand after they had at me, and it was swollen to the size of a cantaloupe, and bleeding. The wounds were real, so I’m saying Twisse put a hell of a lot into this one.”
“It’s been over a week since the last incident. Also starting with you, Fox.” Cybil laid a slice on a plate, walked it over to Gage. “It used Block’s jealousy, his anger, maybe his guilt, fed off that, used that to infect him enough to have him attack you.”
“So where did it get the extra amps for this?” Gage shrugged. “If that’s the question, there are plenty of negative emotions running around this town, just like any place else.”
“It’s specific,” Cal disagreed. “It was specific to Block. This was specific to us.”
Cybil slid a glance toward Layla, but said nothing as she took her seat again.
“I was upset, and angry. So were you,” Layla said to Fox. “We had . . . a disagreement.”
“If it can cook up something like that every time one of us gets pissed off, we’re toast,” Gage decided.
“They were both upset.” Quinn considered how best to phrase it. “With each other. That could factor. And it may be that when the emotions involved are particularly intense, when there’s sexuality involved, it’s more potent.”
Gage lifted his beer. “Again. Toast.”
“I happen to think intense human emotion, emotion that draws from a well of affection,” Cybil added, “and good healthy sex, is a hell of a lot more potent than anything the son of a bitch can throw at us. That’s not spinning in circles on a mountaintop naïveté. It comes from studying human relationships and their power, and this particular situation specifically—and how it’s come to us. How many times have the three of you had a scene like you did before in the kitchen?”
“What scene?” Quinn wanted to know.
“It was nothing,” Cal muttered.
“You were in each other’s faces, shouting obscenities, and about to come to blows. It was . . .” Cybil’s smile was sly and just a little feline. “Stimulating. Countless times, I wager—want to take the bet?” she asked Gage. “Countless times, and I up my bet to wager several of them have resulted in fists in faces. But here you are. Here you are because at the core, you love each other. That’s the base, and nothing changes it. It can’t shake that base. It must beat its fists—if fists it has—at the barrier it can’t pass. We’re going to need that base, and we’re going to need all those intense human emotions, especially if we’re going to do the incredibly foolish and attempt a blood ritual.”
“You’ve got something,” Quinn stated.
“I think I do. I want to wait to hear back from a couple more sources. But yeah, I think I do.”
“Spill!”
“For one thing, it means all six of us, and we’ll have to go back to the source.”
“The Pagan Stone,” Fox said.
“Where else?”
LATER, CAL GRABBED A MOMENT ALONE WITH Quinn. He drew her into her bedroom, and with his arms around her, just breathed her in. “It was worse,” he said quietly, “worse than it’s ever been because for a while I thought I might have lost you.”
“It was worse, because I couldn’t find you.” She tipped her head back, sank into the kiss with him. “It’s harder when you love someone. It’s better and it’s harder, and it’s pretty much everything.”
“I want to ask you a favor. I want you to go away, just for a few days,” he continued, talking fast. “A week, maybe two. I know you’ve got other writing projects you’re squeezing in. Take a break, maybe go back home to—”
“This is my home now.”
“You know what I mean, Quinn.”
“Sure. And no problem.” Her smile was sunny as June. “As long as you come with me. We’ll have ourselves a little holiday. How’s that?”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. I’ll go if you go. Otherwise, you’re going to want to drop this. Don’t even think about picking a fight,” she warned him. “I can practically see you trying it out in your head, calculating if you got me mad enough I’d walk. You can’t. I won’t.” For emphasis, she put her hands on his cheeks, squeezed. “You’re scared for me. So am I, just like I’m scared for you. It’s all part of the package now.”
“You could go buy a wedding dress.”
“Now that’s fighting dirty.” But she laughed, kissed him hard. “I’ve already got some lines on that, thank you very much. Your mother and mine are bonding like Super Glue and . . . more Super Glue over wedding plans. Everything’s under control. We had a bad day, Cal, but we came through it.”
He drew her back, breathed her in once more. “I need to take a walk around town. I need to . . . I need to see it.”
“Okay.”
“I need to take a walk with Gage and Fox.”
“I get it. Go on. Just come back to me.”
“Every day,” he told her.
WHEN HE GOT THEM OUTSIDE, CAL WALKED THE neighborhood first. The light was soft, easing in on evening. There were the houses he knew, the yards, the sidewalks. He walked by his great-grandmother’s house, where his cousin’s car sat in the drive, and flowers budded and bloomed along the walk.
There was the house of the girl he’d been crazy about when he’d been sixteen. Where was she now? Columbus? Cleveland? He couldn’t quite remember where she’d gone, only that she’d moved away with her family in the fall of the year he’d turned seventeen.
After that Seven, when her father had tried to hang himself from the black walnut tree in their backyard. Cal remembered cutting the man down himself, and having no time for more, tying him to the tree with the hanging rope to hold him until the rage passed.
“You never did score with Melissa Eggart, did you, hot-shot?”
How like Gage to remember and to turn the memory into something normal. “I doubled. Was working my way up to stealing third. Then things got busy.”
“Yeah.” Gage slid his hands into his pockets. “Things got busy.”
“I’m sorry about before. And you were right,” he added to Fox. “It’s stupid to swipe at each other.”
“Forget it,” Gage told him. “I’ve thought about walking plen
ty of times.”
“Thinking and doing got miles between them.” They turned, headed toward Main. “I wanted to punch something, and you were handy.”
"O’Dell’s handier, and he’s used to getting punched.” When there was no sarcastic rejoinder from Fox, Gage eyed him. He thought of the ways he could handle Fox’s mood, and opted for what he did best. Needling him. “Are you having intense human emotions?”
“Oh, suck off.”
“There he is.” Gage swung an arm over Fox’s shoulders.
“Punching you still isn’t out of the question.”
“If she was pissed at you,” Cal said helpfully, “she’s not now. Not after your white-charger routine.”
“It’s not about that. About being pissed, about saving the girl. It’s about wanting and needing different things. Look, I’m heading home from here. I didn’t shut anything down, lock anything up.”
“We’ll go with you, check it out.”
“No, I got it. I’ve got some actual work to do. If anything else needs going over tonight, I’ll crib off your notes. See you later.”
“He’s got it bad,” Gage commented as they watched Fox head down Main. “Real bad.”
“Maybe we should go with him anyway.”
“No. We’re not what he wants right now.”
They turned, walking the opposite way as night crept closer.
Eighteen
COUNTING ON PAPERWORK TO KEEP HIM BUSY and distracted, Fox settled down in his home office. Flipping his CD player to shuffle for the variety and surprise factors, he prepared to make up for the fractured workday with a couple of hours at his desk.
He drafted some court petitions on an estate case he hoped to wrap up within another ninety days, shifted to fine-tune a letter of response to opposing counsel on a personal injury matter, then moved on to adjusting the language in a partnership agreement.
He loved the law, the curves and angles of it, its flourishes and hard lines. But at the moment, he was forced to admit, the work couldn’t light a spark in him. He’d be better off cruising ESPN.
The file he’d put together for Layla still sat on his desk. Because it annoyed him, Fox dropped it in a drawer. Stupid, he thought. Stupid to think he understood her simply because he usually understood people. Stupid to think he knew what she wanted because it was what he wanted.
Love, he had good reason to know, didn’t always do the job.
Better to stay in the moment, he reminded himself. He was good at that, had always been good at that. Much better to focus on the now than to push himself, and Layla, toward some blurry and nebulous tomorrow. She had a point about there being no clear future for the town. Who the hell wanted to set up shop in a place that might not exist in a few months? Why should anyone invest the time and the energy, plant the roots, sweat it out, and hope the good guys won in the end? They’d all gotten today’s ugly memo that the clock was ticking down for the Hollow, and for the six of them.
And that was bullshit. Annoyed, he shoved away from the desk. That was absolute bullshit. If people thought that way why did they bother to get the hell out of bed in the morning? Why did most of them at least try to do the right thing, or at least their version of it? Why buy a house or have kids, or hell, buy season tickets if tomorrow was so damn uncertain?
Maybe he’d been stupid to assume where Layla was concerned—he’d cop to that. But she was just as stupid to back away from what they could make together because tomorrow wasn’t lined up in neat columns. What he needed was a different approach, he realized. For Christ’s sake, he was a lawyer, he knew how to change angles, detour around obstacles and reroute to the goal. He knew about compromise and negotiation and finding that middle ground.
So what was the goal? he asked himself as he wandered to the window.
Saving the town and the people in it, destroying the evil that wanted to suck it dry. Those were the big ones, but if he set those life-and-death matters aside, what was Fox B. O’Dell’s goal?
Layla. A life with Layla. Everything else was just details. He’d fumbled the ball on the way to the goal because he’d gotten bogged down with details. The first thing to do was carve them away. Once he did, what was left was a guy and a girl. It was as simple and as complex as that.
He turned back to his desk. He’d toss the file, it was just a symbol of those details. As he reached for the drawer, the knock at the door had him frowning. It had to be Gage or Cal, he thought as he walked out of the office to answer. He didn’t have time to hang out. He needed to work on his more simplified, whittled-down approach to winning the woman he loved.
When he opened the door, the woman he loved stood on the other side.
“Hey, I was just . . . Are you alone?” His tone changed from flustered surprise to irritation as he grabbed her hand and pulled her inside. “What are you thinking, wandering around town at night alone?”
“Don’t start on me. Twisse will go under after a day like this, and I wasn’t wandering. I came straight here. You didn’t come back.”
“We don’t know what the hell Twisse might be able to do after a day like this. And I didn’t come back because I figured you’d want to get some sleep. Besides, before this afternoon’s performance, you weren’t real happy with me.”
“Which is exactly why I thought you’d come back, so we could talk about it.” She poked a finger at his chest. “You don’t get to be mad at me over this.”
“Excuse me?”
“You heard me. You don’t get to be mad because I didn’t jump headfirst into plans you made without consulting me.”
“Wait a damn minute.”
“No, I will not wait a damn minute. You decided what I should do for the rest of my life, where I should live, how I should make my living. You made a file.” Indignation flashed from her eyes, her voice. From where he was standing, it all but flashed out of her fingertips. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it includes paint chips and possible names for this imaginary boutique.”
“I was thinking puce, color-wise. I don’t think puce gets enough play. As for names, topping my list right now is Get a Fucking Grip—but it probably needs work.”
“Don’t curse at me, or try to make this a joke.”
“If those are your two requirements, you’re in the wrong place with the wrong guy. I’ll drive you home.”
“You will not.” Feet planted, she folded her arms. “I’ll walk when I’m ready to go, and I’m not ready. Don’t even think about kicking me out or I’ll—”
“What?” How could he help but make it a joke? It was ludicrous. He lifted his fists in a boxing pose. “Think you can take me?”
The temper that gushed out of her was hot enough to boil the air. “Don’t tempt me. You sprang this on me. Out of the blue, then when I don’t do a happy dance and fling myself into the program, you walk away. You tell me you love me, and you walk away.”
“Sorry, I guess I needed a little alone time after realizing the woman I’m in love with isn’t interested in building a life with me.”
“I didn’t say—I never meant . . . Hell.” Layla covered her face with her hands, took several deep breaths. The anger evaporated as she lowered her hands. “I told you once you scare me. You don’t understand that. You’re not easily scared.”
“That’s not true.”
“Oh, yes, yes, it is. You’ve lived with this threat too long to be easily scared. You face things. Some of it’s circumstance, some of it’s just your nature, but you face what comes at you. I haven’t had to do a lot of that. Things were pretty ordinary for me, right up until February. No big bumps in my road, no particularly big moments. All in all, I think I’m doing reasonably well. All in all,” she repeated on a sigh as she began to wander the room.
“You’re doing fine.”
“I’m scared of what’s here, of what’s coming, what may happen. I don’t have Quinn’s energy or Cybil’s . . . savoir faire,” she decided. “I do have persistence, once I commit to something I do m
y best to see it through, and I have a way of putting the big picture into components that I can reason out. So that’s something. It’s not as overwhelming, not as frightening when you have those smaller pieces to work with. But I can’t seem to reason things out with you and me, Fox. And that scares me.”
She turned back to him. “It scares me that I’ve never felt for anyone what I feel for you. And I told myself it was okay, it was all right to have all these feelings rush in and grab me. Because everything’s crazy. But the fact is, it’s all crazy, but it’s all real. What’s happening around us, what’s happening inside me, it’s all real. I just don’t know what to do about it.”
“And I added to the mix with the idea of starting a business here, making it more complicated and scary. Understood. We’ll take it off the table. I didn’t look into it to put pressure on you. We’ve all got enough of that as it is.”
“I wanted to be mad, because it’s easier to be mad than scared. I don’t want to be at odds with you, Fox. Everything that happened today . . . you were there. I woke up from that nightmare, and you were right there. Then you didn’t come back.” She closed her eyes. “You didn’t come back.”
“I didn’t go far.”
Emotion swam into her eyes when she opened them. “I thought you might have. And that scared me more than anything else.”
“I love you,” he said simply. “Where would I go?”
She launched herself into his arms. “Don’t go far.” Her mouth found his. “Don’t kick me out. Let me be with you.”
“Layla.” He took her face in his hands, easing her back until their eyes met. “All I want at the end of the day is for you to be with me.”
“I’m here. It’s the end of the day, and I’m here. That’s where I want to be.”
Her lips were so soft, so giving. Her sigh, as her body molded to his, like music. Her hands brushed his face, through his hair as he circled her toward the bedroom. And in the dark, they lowered to the bed. She reached out, their legs tangling as they lay facing each other. As they stirred each other with long, lingering kisses, he could see the gleam of her eyes in the dark, the curve of her cheek, feel the shape of her lips and the beat of her heart against his.
