“Sure.”

After cutting one neatly in half, she dropped it in the toaster. “Bad dream?” She angled her head when he glanced up at her. “I had one, woke me at first light. So did Cal and Quinn. I haven’t heard, but I imagine Fox and Layla-they’re at his place-got the same wake-up call. Quinn’s remedy, weights and machines. Mine, yoga. Yours…” She gestured to the cards.

“Everybody’s got something.”

“We kicked our Big Evil Bastard in the balls a few days ago. We have to expect him to kick back.”

“Nearly got ourselves incinerated for the trouble,” Gage reminded her.

“Nearly works for me. We put the three pieces of the bloodstone back together, magickally. We performed a blood ritual.” She studied the healing cut across her palm. “And we lived to tell the tale. We have a weapon.”

“Which we don’t know how to use.”

“Does it know?” She busied herself getting out plates, cream cheese for the bagels. “Does our demon know any more about it than we do? Giles Dent infused that stone with power more than three hundred years ago in the clearing, and-theoretically-used it as part of the spell that pulled the demon, in its form as Lazarus Twisse, into some sort of limbo where Dent could hold it for centuries.”

Handily, she sliced an apple, arranged the pieces on a plate while she spoke. “Twisse didn’t know or recognize the power of the bloodstone then, or apparently hundreds of years later when your boyhood ritual released it, and the stone was split into three equal parts. If we follow that logic, it doesn’t know any more about it now, which gives us an advantage. We may not know, yet, how it works, but we know it does.”

Turning, she offered him his plated bagel. “We put the three pieces into one again. The Big Evil Bastard isn’t the only one with power here.”