“Part of the perks,” he said grimly, and pulled her back across Main.
“I don’t have that perk.” She spoke quietly and jogged to keep up with his long, fast stride. “If you hadn’t blocked me, I’d be bleeding.” She lifted a hand to the cut on his face that was slowly closing. “It hurts though. When it happens, then when it heals, it hurts you.” Layla glanced down at their clasped hands. “I can feel it.”
But when he started to let her go, she tightened her grip. “No, I want to feel it. You were right before.” She glanced back at the corpses of crows scattered over the Square, at the little girl who wept wildly now in the arms of her shocked mother. “I hate that you were right and I’ll have to work on that. But you were. I’m not any real help if I don’t accept what I’ve got in me, and learn how to use it.”
She looked back at him, took a bracing breath. “The lull’s over.”
Two
HE HAD A BEER SITTING AT THE LITTLE TABLE with its fancy iron chairs that made the kitchen in the rental house distinctly female. At least to Fox’s mind. The brightly colored minipots holding herbs arranged on the windowsill added to that tone, he supposed, and the skinny vase of white-faced daisies one of the women must have picked up at the flower shop in town finished it off.
The women, Quinn, Cybil, and Layla, had managed to make a home out of the place in a matter of weeks with flea market furniture, scraps of fabric, and generous splashes of color.
They’d managed it while devoting the bulk of their time to researching and outlining the root of the nightmare that infected the Hollow for seven days every seven years.
A nightmare that had begun twenty-one years before, on the birthday he shared with Cal and Gage. That night had changed him, and his friends-his blood brothers. Things had changed again when Quinn had come to town to lay the groundwork for her book on the Hollow and its legend.