The Hollow Page 0,73

a good man, even the best of men might do if all he loved was threatened.

WHEN THE SIX OF THEM WERE TOGETHER THAT evening in the sparsely furnished living room of the rental house, Fox read the passages from Ann's journal that had flicked the switch for him. He laid out his theory, as he had for Layla.

"Jesus, Fox. Guardian." Cal's resistance to the idea was palpable. "It means he protected. He'd dedicated his life to that purpose, and all the lives he remembered before the last. I've felt some of what he felt, I've seen some of what he saw."

"But not all." Gage paced in front of the window as he often did during discussions. "Bits and pieces, Cal, and that's it. If it went down this way, I'd say that these particular bits and pieces would be ones Dent would do his best to keep hidden, for as long as he could."

"Then why let Hester go?" Cal demanded. "Wasn't she both the most innocent there, and the most dangerous to him?"

"Because we had to be." Cybil looked at Quinn, at Layla. "We three had to become, and Hester's child had to survive for that to happen. It's a matter of power. The guardian, lifetime after lifetime, played by the rules-as far as we know-and could never win. He could never completely stop his foe."

"And becoming more human," Layla added. "I was thinking that through today. Every generation, wouldn't he have become more human, with all the frailties? But Twisse remained as ever. How much longer could Dent have fought? How many more lifetimes did he have?"

"So he made a choice." Fox nodded. "And used the kind of weaponry Twisse had always used."

"And killed innocent people so he could buy time? So he could wait for us?"

"It's horrible." Quinn reached for Cal's hand. "It's horrible to think about it, to consider it. But I guess we have to."

"So if we go with this, you're descendents of a demon, and we're descendents of a mass murderer." Cal shook his head. "That's a hell of a mix."

"We are what we make ourselves." There was a whiff of heat in Cybil's words. "We use what we have and we decide what we are. Was what he did right, was it justified? I don't know. I'm not going to judge him."

Gage turned from the window. "And what do we have?"

"We have words on a page, a stone broken in three equal parts, a place of power in the woods. We have brains and guts," Cybil continued. "And a hell of a lot of work to do, I'd say, before we put everything together and kill the bastard."

Chapter Thirteen

THERE WERE TIMES, TO FOX'S WAY OF THINKING, when a man just needed to be around guys. Things had been quiet since Block had pounded him into the sidewalk, and that gave him thinking time. Of course, one of his thoughts had been Giles Dent killing a dozen people in a fiery blaze, and that one wasn't sitting well with anyone.

They were in the process of reading the second journal now. Though there'd been no stunning revelations so far, he kept his own notes. He knew it wasn't always what a person said, or wrote, but what they were thinking when they said or wrote it.

It was telling to him that while she wrote about the kindness of her cousin, the movements in her womb, even the weather, the daily chores, Ann Hawkins wrote nothing of Giles or the night at the Pagan Stone for weeks after the events.

So he spent some time turning over in his mind what she hadn't written.

He sat with his feet on Cal's coffee table, a Coke in his hand, and chips within easy reach. The basketball game was on TV, but he couldn't concentrate on it. He had a big day tomorrow, he mused, and a lot on his mind. The trip to the doctor's office would be pretty quick, all in all. There wasn't that much for him to do, really. And it wasn't anything he hadn't done before. A man of thirty knew how to-ha-handle the job.

He was prepared for court. The docket gave them two days, but he thought they'd wrap it up in one. After that, they'd all meet. They'd read, they'd discuss. And they'd wait.

What he should do was go home, get out Cybil's notes, his own, Quinn's transcriptions. He should take a harder, closer look at Layla's charts and graphs. Somewhere in there