With a sigh, Layla tried to bury her own questions-and the annoyance that had been working up through them- and went back to see how Fox had weathered what must have been an emotional half hour.

He sat at his desk with the look of a man who was seriously worn at the edges. “She cried,” he said immediately. “Sage, she’s not much of a crier, but she sure cut loose.

Then she called Paula, and Paula cried. I’m feeling a little overwhelmed, so if crying’s on your agenda, could we get a continuance?”

Saying nothing, Layla walked to his fridge, got him a Coke.

“Thanks. I’ve got an appointment to… Since I just had a physical a few months ago, they’re sending my records to the place where they do it. Sage, she’s got a friend in Hagerstown who’s her doctor. So I’ve got-we’ve got-an appointment day after tomorrow, and the day after, since Paula’s going to be…”

“Ovulating?”

He winced. “Even with my upbringing, I’m not completely at ease with all this. So day after tomorrow. Eight. I’ve got court, so I’ll just go there after.” He rose, put a dollar in the jar. “This is fucking bizarre. There, that’s better. So what’s up next?”

“I am. Quinn told me you were supposed to meet with Cal and Gage last night, and that you wanted to meet with them to tell them about a theory you have.”

“Yeah, then I got a better offer, so…” He trailed off. He knew that look in her eyes. “That pisses you off?”

“I don’t know. It depends. But it certainly baffles me that you have an idea you think worth discussing with your men friends, and not with me.”

“I would have discussed it with you, but I was busy enjoying mutual multiple orgasms.”

True, she had to admit. But not altogether the point. “I was with you all day in this office, all night in bed. I think there was time in that frame to bring this up.”

“Sure. But I didn’t want to bring it up.”

“Because you wanted to talk to Cal and Gage first.”

“Partly, because I’ve always talked to Cal and Gage first. A thirty-year habit doesn’t change overnight.” The first hint of annoyance danced around the edges of his voice. “And mostly because I wasn’t thinking about anything but you. I didn’t want to think about anything but you. And I’m damn well entitled to take time for that. I didn’t consider my idea about Giles Dent as foreplay, and I sure as hell didn’t consider talk about human sacrifice as postcoital conversation. Hang me.”

“You should’ve… Human sacrifice? What are you talking about? What do you mean?”

The phone rang, and cursing, Layla reached across his desk to answer. “Good afternoon, Fox B. O’Dell’s office. I’m sorry, Mr. O’Dell’s with a client. May I take a message?” She scribbled a name and number on Fox’s memo pad. “Yes, of course, I’ll see he gets it. Thank you.”

She hung up. “You can call them back when we’re done here. I need to know what you’re talking about.”

“A possibility. Ann wrote that Dent intended to do something no guardian had done, and that there’d be a price. The guardians are the good guys, right? That’s how we’ve always looked at them, at Dent. The white hats. But even white hats can step into the gray. Or past the gray. I see it all the time in my line of work. What people do if they’re desperate enough, if they feel justified, if they stop believing they have another choice. Blood sacrifice. That’s the province of the other side. Usually.”

“The deer, the one Quinn saw in her dream last winter, lying across the path in the woods with its throat slit. The blood of the innocent. It’s in the notes. We speculated that Dent did that, that he sacrificed the fawn. But you said human.”

“Do you think that sacrificing Bambi could have given Dent the power he needed to hold Twisse for three hundred years? The power to pass what he did to me, Cal, and Gage when the time came? That’s what I asked myself, Layla. And I don’t think it could’ve been enough.”

He paused, because even now it left him slightly ill to consider it. “He told Hester to run. On the night of July seventh, sixteen fifty-two, after she’d condemned him as a witch, he told her to run. That came from you.”

“Yes, he told her to run.”

“He knew what was about to happen. Not just that he’d pull Twisse into some other dimension for a few centuries, but what it would cost to do it.”

She put a fist to her heart, rubbed it there as she stared at Fox. “The people who were at the Pagan Stone.”

“About a dozen of them, as far as we can tell. That’s a lot of blood. That’s a major sacrifice.”

“You think he used them.” Slowly, carefully, she lowered to a chair. “You think he killed them. Not Twisse, but Dent.”

“I think he let them die, which being a lawyer I could argue isn’t the same by law. Depraved indifference we could call it, except for the little matter of intent. He used their deaths.” Fox’s voice was heavy on the words. “I think he used the fire-the torches they carried, and the fire he made, to engulf them, to scorch the ground, to draw from that act-one no guardian had ever committed, the power to do what he’d decided had to be done.”

The color died out of her face, leaving her eyes eerily green. “If it’s true, what does that make him? What does that make any of us?”

“I don’t know. Damned maybe, if you subscribe to damnation. I’ve been a subscriber for nearly twenty-one years now.”

“We thought, we assumed, it was Twisse who caused the deaths of all those people that night.”

“Maybe it was. In part, even if my idea’s crap, it was. How many of them would have gone to the Pagan Stone, looking to kill Giles Dent and Ann Hawkins if they hadn’t been under Twisse’s influence? But if we tip that to the side, and we look at the grays, isn’t it possible Dent used Twisse? He knew what was coming, according to the journals, he knew. He sent Ann away to protect her and his sons. He gave his life-white hat time. But if he took the others, that put a lot of bloodstains on the white.”

“It makes horrible sense. It makes sickening sense.”

“We need to look at it, and maybe when we do, we’ll know better what has to be done.” He studied her face, the shock that covered it. “Pack it in, go on home.”

“It’s barely two. I have work.”

“I can handle the phones for the next couple of hours. Take a walk, get some air. Take a nap, a bubble bath, whatever.”

Bracing a hand on the arm of the chair, she got slowly to her feet. “Is that what you think of me? That I crumble at the first ugly slap? That I can’t or won’t stand up to it? It took me a while to get my feet when I came to the Hollow-hang me-but I’ve got them now. I don’t need a goddamn bubble bath to soothe my sensibilities.”

“My mistake.”

“Don’t underestimate me, Fox. However diluted, I have that bastard’s blood in me. It could be, in the long run, I can handle the dark better than you.”

“Maybe. But don’t expect me to want that for you, or you overestimate me. Now you might have a better idea why I didn’t bring this up yesterday, or you might just want to stay pissed about it.”

She closed her eyes and steadied herself. “No, I don’t want to be mad about it, and yes, I have a better idea.” She also had a much better idea what Quinn had meant by her warning. Working, sleeping with, fighting beside. It was a lot to ask of a relationship.

“It’s hard to separate the different things we are to each other,” she said carefully. “And when the lines get blurred, it’s harder yet. You said, when I came in, you were feeling overwhelmed. You overwhelm me, Fox, on a lot of levels. So I keep losing my balance.”

“I haven’t had mine since I met you. I’ll try to catch you when you stumble if you do the same for me.”

And didn’t that say it all. She glanced at her watch. “Oh, look at that. I nearly missed my afternoon break. Only a couple minutes left. Well, I’d better put them to good use.”