The Pagan Stone Page 0,83

take a little time before we indulge in celebratory cake-of which I can have a stingy little sliver," Quinn said.

Cybil rose first. "I've been working on something, and need to explain it. After we clear the decks here, do you all want to have that explanation, and the inevitable ensuing discussion, inside or out here?"

There was another moment of silence before Gage spoke. "It's a nice night."

"Out here then. Well, as the men hunted, gathered, and cooked, I guess the cleanup's on us, ladies."

As the women cleared and carried, Gage walked over to the edge of the woods with his friends and watched Lump sniff, lift his leg, sniff, lift his leg.

"Dog's got wicked bladder control," Fox commented.

"He does that. Good instincts, too. He won't go any farther into the woods than that anymore, not without me. Wonder where the Big Evil Bastard is now," Cal asked.

"The hits it took today?" Fox's smile was fierce. "It'll need some alone time, you bet your ass. Jesus, Gage, I thought you had the bastard. Nailed it right between the eyes, ripped holes all over it. I thought: Fucking A, we're taking it out right here and now. If I hadn't gotten so goddamn smug, it might not have gotten by us and bitten you."

"I didn't die, remember? The cake says so. It's not on you," Gage continued. "Or you," he added to Cal. "Or any of us. It got under our guard and took me down. Temporarily. But it showed us something we didn't know. It's not all illusion anymore, or infection. It can take on corporeal form, or enough of one to do damage now. It's evolved. In the who-did-damage-to-who department today, I'd say we broke even. But in the strategy department? We kicked its ass."

"It was fun, too. Yelling at each other." Fox dipped his hands in his pockets. "Like therapy. I did worry that Layla was going to take a page out of Cybil's playbook and punch me. Man, she really clocked you."

"She hits like a girl."

Fox snorted. "Not from my angle. You had little X's in your eyes for a couple seconds there."

"Bullshit."

"Birdies circling over your head," Cal put in. "I was embarrassed for you and all mankind."

"You want to see some birdies?"

Cal grinned, then sobered. "Cybil was pretty quiet during dinner." He glanced over his shoulder. "I guess we'd better go find out what she's got on her mind."

Cybil switched to sun tea, and noted Gage had gone back to coffee. Though she'd been sorry to cut back on the mood, she'd turned the music off herself. It was time Team Human, as Quinn had called it, got back to business.

"I suppose it wouldn't hurt to do a quick roundup of today's events," she began. "Gage's brainstorm about using a substitute bloodstone and drawing Twisse in with our own negative and violent emotions worked."

"Points for us," Quinn commented.

"Points for us. More points for us because we have to assume that it believes it destroyed the bloodstone. It believes it's destroyed our best weapon against it. Still, our ambush had mixed results. We hurt it. Nothing screams like that unless there's pain. It hurt us. It was able to solidify its form, at least temporarily, but long enough to sink its teeth into Gage. We all saw the wound, and it looked nasty, but hardly life-threatening. And we all know he nearly died from it. We thought venom, poison. Gage, I don't know if you have a sense of what happened to you."

"It burned," he said. "I've been burned, all three of us have. But I've never felt anything like this. Felt like my goddamn bones were cooking. I could feel it spreading, closing me down. I could think, I could feel, but I couldn't move or speak. So yeah, I'd go with venom, some sort of paralytic."

Nodding absently, Cybil scribbled some notes. "There are a number of creatures both in nature and in lore that poison and paralyze their prey. Several species of marine animals and fish, arachnids, reptiles. In lore, the Din, a magical catlike beast, possesses an extra claw that holds paralytic poison. The vampire, and so on."

"We've always known it could infect the mind," Cal put in. "Now we've seen it can poison the body."

"And may have killed humans and guardians just that way," Cybil agreed. "Everything in our research, everything we've learned tells us that this demon left the last guardian for dead, but the guardian lived long enough to pass the power