The Pagan Stone (27 page)

“You okay?” Quinn rubbed a hand over Cybil’s back.

“Yes.” A weight of stress and doubts dropped away. She might have to pick them up again, but for now, it was a beautiful day in June. “Yes, I am.”

“Quite a view,” Quinn added, nodding toward the men at the grill.

“Camera worthy.”

“Excellent idea. Be right back.”

“Where’s she going?” Layla asked.

“I have no idea. Just as I have no idea why it apparently takes three grown men to cook some hamburgers.”

“One to cook, one to kibitz, and one to insult the other two.”

“Ah. Another mystery solved.” Cybil lifted her brow when Quinn dashed out with her camera.

“Aren’t those dogs and burgers done yet?” Quinn called out, and putting the camera on the deck rail, peered through the viewer, adjusted angles. “Hurry up. This is a photo op.”

“If you were going to take pictures, you might have given us some warning so we could fix ourselves up,” Cybil complained.

“You look great, Miss Fussy. Stand more over there. Cal! Come
on
.”

“Just hold your pixels, Blondie.”

“Fox, he doesn’t need you. Stand over here between Layla and Cyb.”

“I can have both?” Strolling over, Fox wrapped arms around each of their waists.

For the next five minutes, Quinn directed, ordered, adjusted until the five of them were arranged to her satisfaction. “Perfect! Set. I’ll take a couple by remote.” She hurried down, positioned herself between Cal and Gage.

“Food’s going to get cold,” Cal complained.

“Smile!” She clicked the remote. “Don’t move, don’t move. I want a backup.”

“Starving,” Fox sang out, then laughed when Layla dug her fingers into his ribs. “Mom! Layla’s picking on me.”

“Don’t make me come over there,” Quinn warned. “On three. One, two, three. Now just
stay
put while I check to make sure I got a good one.”

The mutters and complaints apparently held no sway as she hurried up to the deck, bent down to call back the last two shots. “They’re great. Go, Team Human!”

“Let’s eat,” Cal announced.

As they sat, as food was grabbed, conversation rolled, beers were uncapped, Cybil knew one true thing. They called themselves a team, and they were. But they were more than that. They were family.

It was a family who would kill the beast.

So they ate, as the June afternoon slipped into June evening, with the flowers blooming around them, and the lazy dog—sated with handouts—snoring on the soft green grass. At the edges of that soft green grass, the woods stayed silent and still. Cybil nursed a single beer through the lazy meal. When the interlude passed, she wanted her head clear for the discussion that had to follow.

“We got cake,” Fox announced.

“What? Cake? What?” Quinn set down her own beer. “I can’t eat cake after eating a burger and potato salad. It’s against my lifestyle change. It’s just not . . . Damn it, what kind of cake?”

“The kind from the bakery with the icing and the little flowers.”

“You bastard.” She propped her chin on her fist and looked pitifully at Fox. “Why is there cake?”

“It’s for Gage.”

“You got me a cake?”

“Yeah.” Cal sent Gage a sober and serious nod. “We got you a Glad You Didn’t Die cake. Betts at the bakery wrote that on it. She was confused, but she wrote it on. She had cherry pie, which was my first choice, but O’Dell said it had to be cake.”

“We could’ve bought both,” Fox pointed out.

“Somebody brings cake
and
pie into this house,” Quinn said darkly, “somebody
will
die. By my hand.”

“Anticipating that,” Cal said, “we just went for the cake.”

Gage considered a minute. “You guys are idiots. The appropriate Glad You Didn’t Die token is a hooker and a bottle of Jack.”

“We couldn’t find a hooker.” Fox shrugged. “Our time was limited.”

“You could give him an IOU,” Layla suggested.

Gage grinned at her. “All markers cheerfully accepted.”

“Meanwhile, I guess we’d better clear this up, clean it up, and take a little time before we indulge in celebratory cake—of which I can have a stingy little sliver,” Quinn said.

Cybil rose first. “I’ve been working on something, and need to explain it. After we clear the decks here, do you all want to have that explanation, and the inevitable ensuing discussion, inside or out here?”

There was another moment of silence before Gage spoke. “It’s a nice night.”

“Out here then. Well, as the men hunted, gathered, and cooked, I guess the cleanup’s on us, ladies.”

As the women cleared and carried, Gage walked over to the edge of the woods with his friends and watched Lump sniff, lift his leg, sniff, lift his leg.

“Dog’s got wicked bladder control,” Fox commented.

“He does that. Good instincts, too. He won’t go any farther into the woods than that anymore, not without me. Wonder where the Big Evil Bastard is now,” Cal asked.

“The hits it took today?” Fox’s smile was fierce. “It’ll need some alone time, you bet your ass. Jesus, Gage, I thought you had the bastard. Nailed it right between the eyes, ripped holes all over it. I thought: Fucking A, we’re taking it out right here and now. If I hadn’t gotten so goddamn smug, it might not have gotten by us and bitten you.”

“I didn’t die, remember? The cake says so. It’s not on you,” Gage continued. “Or you,” he added to Cal. “Or any of us. It got under our guard and took me down. Temporarily. But it showed us something we didn’t know. It’s not all illusion anymore, or infection. It can take on corporeal form, or enough of one to do damage now. It’s evolved. In the who-did-damage-to-who department today, I’d say we broke even. But in the strategy department? We kicked its ass.”

“It was fun, too. Yelling at each other.” Fox dipped his hands in his pockets. “Like therapy. I did worry that Layla was going to take a page out of Cybil’s playbook and punch me. Man, she really clocked you.”

“She hits like a girl.”

Fox snorted. “Not from my angle. You had little X’s in your eyes for a couple seconds there.”

“Bullshit.”

“Birdies circling over your head,” Cal put in. “I was embarrassed for you and all mankind.”

“You want to see some birdies?”

Cal grinned, then sobered. “Cybil was pretty quiet during dinner.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I guess we’d better go find out what she’s got on her mind.”

Cybil switched to sun tea, and noted Gage had gone back to coffee. Though she’d been sorry to cut back on the mood, she’d turned the music off herself. It was time Team Human, as Quinn had called it, got back to business.

“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick roundup of today’s events,” she began. “Gage’s brainstorm about using a substitute bloodstone and drawing Twisse in with our own negative and violent emotions worked.”

“Points for us,” Quinn commented.

“Points for us. More points for us because we have to assume that it believes it destroyed the bloodstone. It believes it’s destroyed our best weapon against it. Still, our ambush had mixed results. We hurt it. Nothing screams like that unless there’s pain. It hurt us. It was able to solidify its form, at least temporarily, but long enough to sink its teeth into Gage. We all saw the wound, and it looked nasty, but hardly life-threatening. And we all know he nearly died from it. We thought venom, poison. Gage, I don’t know if you have a sense of what happened to you.”

“It burned,” he said. “I’ve been burned, all three of us have. But I’ve never felt anything like this. Felt like my goddamn bones were cooking. I could feel it spreading, closing me down. I could think, I could feel, but I couldn’t move or speak. So yeah, I’d go with venom, some sort of paralytic.”

Nodding absently, Cybil scribbled some notes. “There are a number of creatures both in nature and in lore that poison and paralyze their prey. Several species of marine animals and fish, arachnids, reptiles. In lore, the Din, a magical catlike beast, possesses an extra claw that holds paralytic poison. The vampire, and so on.”

“We’ve always known it could infect the mind,” Cal put in. “Now we’ve seen it can poison the body.”

“And may have killed humans and guardians just that way,” Cybil agreed. “Everything in our research, everything we’ve learned tells us that this demon left the last guardian for dead, but the guardian lived long enough to pass the power and the burden to a human boy. So it’s very possible the guardian was poisoned, its injuries more severe and the poison more concentrated and powerful than in Gage’s bite today. It’s talked about devouring us, consuming us, eating us. Those may not be colorful euphemisms.”

Quinn winced. “May I just say: Eewwww.”

“I’ll second that eewwww and add an Oh God,” Layla said.

“The missing,” Cybil continued. “In our documented and anecdotal evidence, there are always people missing after the demon sweeps through. We’ve assumed they’ve gone off insane, or died, killed each other—and that’s very likely true for some, maybe even most. But there were likely others who it used for . . .”

“Munchies,” Fox added.

“Somehow this discussion isn’t making me feel more optimistic and cheerful.”

“Sorry.” Cybil offered Cal a smile. “I’m hoping to change that. Ann Hawkins finally decided to pay me a visit, in Gage’s room while he was sleeping. I’ve given you the highlights of our conversation—the pep talk, we’ll say. But not all the highlights, because I wanted to check some things out first. She said Gage was alive, more than alive. That he’d brought something back. Another weapon.”

“I was a little out of it, but I’m pretty sure I came back empty-handed.”

“Not in your hands,” Cybil told him. “Its blood, our blood, their blood. And now, Gage, your blood.”

“What about my blood?”

“Oh! Oh well,
shit
!” Quinn’s grin spread.

“Hardly a wonder we’ve been friends so long.” Cybil nodded at her. “You survived,” she said to Gage. “Your body fought off the poison, the infection. Antibodies, immunoglobulins.”

Layla raised a hand. “Sorry, science isn’t my strong suit.”

“Antibodies are produced by the immune system, in response to an antigen—bacteria, toxins, viruses. Basically, we’ve got hundreds of thousands of blood cells capable of producing a single type of antibody, and its job would be to bind with the invading antigen, and that triggers a signal for the body to manufacture more of the antibody. It neutralizes the effect of the toxin.”

“Gage’s blood kicked the poison’s ass,” Fox said. “He’s got an advantage on that, like me and Cal. Our healing gifts.”

“Yes. It helped him survive, and because he survived, his blood produced the antibodies that destroyed the toxin, and his blood now contains the basis for immunity. It bit you before,” Cybil reminded Gage. “At the cemetery.”

“I didn’t have a reaction to that like I did today.”

“It barely nipped you, and on the hand. Did it burn?”

“Yeah, some. Yeah, a lot, but—”

“Did you feel any nausea or dizziness?”

He started to deny it, then considered. “Maybe a little. Maybe it took longer than I expected to heal.”

“You’ve survived two bites—one minor, and one serious—and closer to the heart. It’s speculative,” she hurried on, “it’s not a hundred percent. But antibodies can recognize and neutralize toxins. It’s a leap of faith from the science to taking what Ann said to me as what I’m suggesting now. But we don’t have the time, the means, or the ability to test Gage’s blood, analyze it. We don’t have a sample of the poison.”

“I don’t think anyone’s going to volunteer to get one,” Fox added.

“You could be immune,” Cybil said to Gage. “The way some people are to certain venoms after being bitten, or diseases after recovery from them. And your blood may be a kind of antivenom.”

“You’re not suggesting you send some of my blood off to the lab and have it made into a serum.”

“No, first because serology is complicated and again, we don’t have the means or the know-how. But this isn’t just about science. It’s also about parascience. It’s about magicks.”

Cybil laid her hands on her notebook as the moon made its slow rise through the trees. “You and Cal and Fox mixed your blood twenty-one years ago and opened the door for Twisse, as we believe Dent planned all along. The six of us mixed blood, ritualistically, and fused the three sections of the bloodstone you were given into one.”

“You’re banking that another blood ritual, mixing mine with all of yours, will transfer this immunity—if I have it—to the rest of you.”

“Yes. Yes, I do.”

“Then let’s do it.”

Just like that, she thought, relieved. Just like that. “I’d like to do a little more research on the ritual itself—when, how, where it should be performed.”

“Don’t hedge your bets, sugar. It happened here, so it should be here. It happened today, so it should be today.”

Layla spoke before Cybil could. “I agree with Gage and not just because of the
eewwww, oh God
. Though that’s a factor. Twisse is hurt, but it won’t stay that way. We don’t know how long we have before it comes back. If you think this is a defense, then let’s put up the shield now.”

“Cyb, you researched blood rituals inside and out before our last trip to the Pagan Stone. You know we can do this.” Quinn looked around the table. “We know we can do it.”

“We need words, and—”

“I’ll handle it.” Quinn pushed to her feet. “Writing under pressure is one of my best things. Set it up, and give me five,” she added before she walked into the house.

“Well.” Cybil blew out a breath. “I guess it’s here and now.”

She scouted through Cal’s gardens for specific flowers and herbs, and continued to snip when Gage crossed the lawn to her. They stood in the wash of moonlight.

“Making a bouquet?”

“Candles, herbs, flowers, words, movements.” She moved a shoulder. “Maybe they’re trappings, maybe they’re largely symbolic, but I believe in symbols. They’re a sign of respect, if nothing else. Anytime you shed blood, anytime you ask a higher power for a favor, it should be with respect.”