and then... you were there again." He'd held her, she thought. They'd held each other. "Where did you go, Gage? We need to know what happened to each one of us."
"I didn't go far. Back to the apartment where I used to live. Above the bowling alley."
At the knock on the door, Cal rose, but he kept his eyes on Gage's face. "I'll get that."
"There was a physical thing with you," Gage went on. "With your eyes. The irises, the pupils were covered, the whole of your eyes were white. And no, I couldn't help. I stepped toward you, and right into the apartment."
Cal came back, set the pizza boxes on the table. "Were you alone?"
"At first. I couldn't get the door open, the windows. That seems to be a recurring theme."
"Trapped," Layla murmured. "Everyone's afraid of being trapped, being locked in."
"I heard him coming. I knew-I know the sound of his feet on the stairs, when he's drunk, when he's not. He was, and he was coming. Then I was back in the kitchen."
"There's more. Why are you holding back?" Cybil demanded. "We all went through something."
"When I reached for the doorknob, it wasn't my hand. Not this hand." Gage held his up, turned it, studied it. "I saw myself in the mirror. I was about seven, maybe eight. Before that night at the Pagan Stone, younger than that. Before things changed. Before we changed. And he was drunk, and he was coming. Clear enough?"
In the silence, Quinn reached down for her tape recorder, ejected the tape, put in a fresh one. "This hasn't happened before, am I right on that? That all of you were affected at the same time, that so many were affected?"
"Dreams," Cal said. "The three of us have dreams, usually on the same night, not always about the same thing. That can happen weeks, even months before the Seven. But something like this, no. Not outside of those seven days."
"It went to a lot of trouble to get to us," Fox commented, "to cherry-pick our particular and specific fears."
"Why were you the only one who was hurt?" Layla demanded. "I felt them bite me, but I didn't have any bites when I came out of it. But you did. They're healed now, but you did."
"Maybe I let it in too far, and my own ability worked against me. Made my fear more real, more tangible. I don't know."
"It's possible." Quinn considered. "Could it have started with you? Given the timing, it could have started with you first. Used more, well, juice. Fed off that for the rest. Not just your fear, but your pain, too. It used the connections. You to Cal or me-one of us was probably next. Then Layla, then Cybil, and rounding it up with Gage."
"Like a current. The energy." Layla nodded. "Moving from one to the other. Fox weakened the current when he broke free. And back down the line. If that's the way it happened, it could be a kind of defense, couldn't it? Something we could use."
"Our energy against its energy." Quinn gave in and flipped open the pizza box. "Positive against negative."
"I think we'll need to do more than think of raindrops on roses." Cybil slid a slice out for herself. "And whiskers on kittens."
"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