The Hollow Page 0,4

something other than gorgeous green eyes and soft, glossy pink lips. "Do you want a Coke?"

"No, thanks. Do you know how many calories are in that can?"

"It's worth it. Sit down."

"I'm too jumpy." As if to prove it, Layla rubbed her hands together as she wandered the office. "I get jumpier every day that nothing happens, which is stupid, because it should be a relief. But nothing's happened, nothing at all since we were all at the Pagan Stone."

"Throwing sticks and stones and really harsh words at a demon from hell."

"That, and Gage shooting at it. Or Cal..." She stopped, faced Fox now. "I still get shaky when I remember how Cal stepped right up to that writhing mass of black and shoved a knife into it. And now nothing, in almost two weeks. Before, it was nearly every day we saw it, felt it, dreamed of it."

"We hurt it," Fox reminded her. "It's off wherever demons go to lick their wounds."

"Cybil calls it a lull, and she thinks it's going to come back harder the next time. She's researching for hours every day, and Quinn, well, she's writing. That's what they do, and they've done this before-this kind of thing if not this precise thing. First-timer here, and what I'm noticing is they're not getting anywhere." She pushed a hand through her dark hair, then shook her head so the sexy, jagged ends of it swung. "What I mean is... A couple of weeks ago, Cybil had what she thought were really strong leads toward where Ann Hawkins might have gone to have her babies."

His ancestors, Fox thought. Giles Dent, Ann Hawkins, and the sons they'd made together. "And they haven't panned out, I know. We've all talked about this."

"But I think-I feel-it's one of the keys. They're your ancestors, yours, Cal's, Gage's. Where they were born may matter, and more since we have some of Ann's journals, we're all agreed there must be others. And the others may explain more about her sons' father. About Giles Dent. What was he, Fox? A man, a witch, a good demon, if there are such things? How did he trap what called itself Lazarus Twisse from that night in sixteen fifty-two until the night the three of you-"

"Let it out," Fox finished, and Layla shook her head again.

"You were meant to-that much we agree on, too. It was part of Dent's plan or his spell. But we don't seem to know any more than we did two weeks ago. We're stalled."

"Maybe Twisse isn't the only one who needs to recharge. We hurt it," he repeated. "We've never been able to do that before. We scared it. " And the memory of that was enough to turn his gilded brown eyes cool with satisfaction. "Every seven years all we've been able to do is try to get people out of the way, to mop up the mess afterward. Now we know we can hurt it."

"Hurting it isn't enough."

"No, it's not." If they were stalled, he admitted, part of the reason was his fault. He'd pulled back. He'd made excuses not to push Layla on honing the skill-the one that matched his own-that had been passed down to her.

"What am I thinking now?"

She blinked at him. "Sorry?"

"What am I thinking?" he repeated, and deliberately recited the alphabet in his head.

"I told you before I can't read minds, and I don't want-"

"And I told you it's not exactly like that, but close enough." He eased a hip onto the corner of his sturdy old desk, and brought their gazes more level. His conservative oxford-cloth shirt was open at the throat, and his bark brown hair waved around his sharp-featured face and brushed the back of his collar. "You can and do get impressions, get a sense, even an image in your head. Try again."

"Having good instincts isn't the same as-"

"That's bullshit. You're letting yourself be afraid of what's inside you because of where it came from, and because it makes you other than-"

"Human?"

"No. Makes you 'other.' " He understood the complexity of her feelings on this issue. There was something in him that was other as well. At times it was more difficult to wear than a suit and tie. But to Fox's mind, doing the difficult was just part of living. "It doesn't matter where it came from, Layla. You have what you have and are what you are for a reason."

"Easy to say when you can put your ancestry back to some