The Pagan Stone Page 0,7
looked into eyes the same color, the same shape as his own. As his heart squeezed, his mother smiled at him.
Chapter Two
Chapter Two
SHE'S SO YOUNG. THAT WAS HIS FIRST THOUGHT. Younger, he realized, than he as they stood studying each other over her grave. She had a calm and quiet beauty, a kind of simplicity he thought would have kept her beautiful into old age. But she hadn't lived to see thirty.
And even now, a grown man, he felt something inside him ache with that loss.
"Why are you here?" he asked her, and her smile bloomed again.
"Don't you want me to be?"
"You never came before."
"Maybe you never looked before." She shook her dark hair back, breathed deep. "It's such a pretty day, all this May sunshine. And here you are, looking so lost, so angry. So sad. Don't you believe there's a better place, Gage? That death is the beginning of the next?"
"It was the end of before, for me." That, he supposed, was the black and white of it. "When you died, so did the better."
"Poor little boy. Do you hate me for leaving you?"
"You didn't leave me. You died."
"It amounts to the same." There was sorrow in her eyes, or perhaps it was pity. "I wasn't there for you, and did worse than leave you alone. I left you with him. I let him plant death inside me. So you were alone, and helpless, with a man who beat you and cursed you."
"Why did you marry him?"
"Women are weak, you must have learned that by now. If I hadn't been weak I would have left him, taken you and left him and this place." She turned, just a bit, so she looked back toward the Hollow. There was something else in her eyes now-he caught a glint of it-something brighter than pity. "I should have protected you and myself. We would have had a life together, away from here. But I can protect you now."
He watched the way she moved, the way her hair fell, the way the grass stirred at her feet. "How do the dead protect the living?"
"We see more. We know more." She turned back to him, held out her hands. "You asked why I was here. I'm here for that. To protect you, as I didn't during life. To save you. To tell you to go, go away from here. Leave this place. There's nothing but death and misery here, pain and loss. Go and live. Stay and you'll die, you'll rot in the ground as I am."
"Now see, you were doing pretty well up till then." The rage inside him was cold, and it was fierce, but his voice was casual as a shrug. "I might've bought it if you'd played more Mommy and Me cards. But you rushed it."
"I only want you safe."
"You want me dead. If not dead, at least gone. I'm not going anywhere, and you're not my mother. So take off the dress, asshole."
"Mommy's going to have to spank you for that." With a wave of its hand the demon blasted the air. The force knocked Gage off his feet. Even as he gained them, it was changing.
Its eyes went red, and shed bloody tears as it howled with laughter. "Bad boy! I'm going to punish you the most of all the bad boys. Flay your skin, drink your blood, gnaw your bones."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah." In a show of indifference, Gage hooked his thumbs in his front pockets.
The face of his mother melted away into something hideous, something inhuman. The body bunched, the back humping, the hands and feet curling into claws, then sharpening into hooves. Then the mass of it twisted into a writhing formless black that choked the air with the stink of death.
The wind blew the stench into Gage's face, but he planted his feet and stood. He had no weapon, and after a quick calculation, decided to play the odds. He bunched his hand into a fist and punched it into the fetid black.
The burn was amazing. He wrenched his hand free, jabbed again. Pain stole his breath, so he sucked more of it and struck out a third time. It screamed. Fury, Gage thought. He recognized pure fury even when he was flying over his mother's gravestone and slamming hard to the ground.
It stood over him now, stood atop the gravestone in the form of the young boy it so often selected. "You'll beg for death," it told him. "Long after I've torn