The Pagan Stone

“Aren’t those dogs and burgers done yet?” Qui

“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, Qui

“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,” Qui

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 a

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 a

“What? Cake? What?” Qui

“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,” Qui

“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 gri

“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,” Qui

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 gri

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 Qui

“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,” Qui

“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.”