Blood Brothers Page 0,113

pad. "Put those into a teenage boy, and that says susceptible to me."

"It's a valid point." Cal shoved his hand through his hair. Why hadn't they seen it themselves? "The dead crows. There were a couple dozen dead crows all over Main Street the morning of our birthday that year. Some broken windows where they'd repeatedly flown into the glass. We always figured that was part of it. But nobody got hurt."

"Does it always start that way?" Layla asked. "Can you pinpoint it?"

"The first I remember from the next time was when the Myerses found their neighbor's dog drowned in a backyard swimming pool. There was the woman who left her kid locked in the car and went into the beauty salon, got a manicure and so on. It was in the nineties that day," Fox added. "Somebody heard the kid crying, called the cops. They got the kid out, but when they went in to get the woman, she said she didn't have a baby. Didn't know what they were talking about. It came out she'd been up two nights running because the baby had colic."

"Sleep deprivation." Quinn wrote it down.

"But we knew it was happening again," Cal said slowly, "we knew for sure on the night of our seventeenth when Lisa Hodges walked out of the bar at Main and Battlefield, stripped down naked, and started shooting at passing cars with the twenty-two she had in her purse."

"We were one of the cars," Gage added. "Good thing for all concerned her aim was lousy."

"She caught your shoulder," Fox reminded him.

"She shot you?"

Gage smiled easily at Cybil. "Grazed me, and we heal fast. We managed to get the gun from her before she shot anyone else, or got hit by a car as she was standing buck naked in the middle of the street. Then she offered us blow jobs. Rumor was she gave a doozy, but we weren't much in the mood to find out."

"All right, from pattern to theory." Quinn rose to her feet to work it out. "The thing we'll call Twisse, because it's better to have a name for it, requires energy. We're all made up of energy, and Twisse needs it to manifest, to work. When he's out, during this time Dent is unable to hold him, he seeks out the easiest sources of energy first. Birds and animals, people who are most vulnerable. As he gets stronger, he's able to move up the chain."

"I don't think the way to stop him is to clear out all the pets," Gage began, "ban alcohol, drugs, and sex and make sure everyone gets a good night's sleep."

"Too bad," Cybil tossed back, "because it might buy us some time. Keep going, Q."

"Next question would be, how does he generate the energy he needs?"

"Fear, hate, violence." Cal nodded. "We've got that. We can't cut off his supply because you can't block those emotions out of the population. They exist."

"So do their counterparts, so we can hypothesize that those are weapons or countermeasures against him. You've all gotten stronger over time, and so has he. Maybe he's able to store some of this energy he pulls in during the dormant period."

"And so he's able to start sooner, start stronger the next time. Okay," Cal decided. "Okay, it makes sense."

"He's using some of that store now," Layla put in, "because he doesn't want all six of us to stick this out. He wants to fracture the group before July."

"He must be disappointed." Cybil picked up the wine she'd nursed throughout the discussion. "Knowledge is power and all that, and it's good to have logical theories, more areas to research. But it seems to be we need to move. We need a strategy. Got any, Mr. Strategy?"

From his spot on the floor, Fox grinned. "Yeah. I say as soon as the snow melts enough for us to get through it, we go to the clearing. We go to the Pagan Stone, all of us together. And we double-dog dare the son of a bitch."

IT SOUNDED GOOD IN THEORY. IT WAS A DIFFERENT matter, in Cal's mind, when you added the human factor. When you added Quinn. He'd taken her there once before, and he'd zoned out, leaving her alone and vulnerable.

And he hadn't loved her then.

He knew there was no choice, that there were bigger stakes involved. But the idea of putting her at risk, at deliberately putting her at the center of it with him, kept him awake and restless.

He