Nobody had any hold over him.

Not true, Gage admitted as he studied the white scar across his wrist. Not altogether true. A man’s friends, his true friends, always had a hold over him. There were no truer friends than Caleb Hawkins and Fox O’Dell.

Blood brothers.

They’d been born the same day, the same year, even-as far as anyone could tell-at the same moment. He couldn’t remember a time when the three of them hadn’t been… a unit, he supposed. The middle-class boy, the hippie kid, and the son of an abusive drunk. Probably shouldn’t have had a thing in common, Gage mused as a smile curved his mouth, warmed the green of his eyes. But they’d been family, they’d been brothers long before Cal had cut their wrists with his Boy Scout knife to ritualize the pact.

And that had changed everything. Or had it? Gage wondered. Had it just opened what was always there, waiting?

He could remember it all vividly, every step, every detail. It had started as an adventure-three boys on the eve of their tenth birthday hiking through the woods. Loaded down with skin mags, beer, smokes-his contribution-with junk food and Cokes from Fox, and the picnic basket of sandwiches and lemonade Cal ’s mother had packed. Not that Frannie Hawkins would’ve packed a picnic if she’d known her son planned to camp that night at the Pagan Stone in Hawkins Wood.

All that wet heat, Gage remembered, and the music on the boom box, and the complete innocence they’d carried along with the Little Debbies and Nutter Butters they would lose before they hiked out in the morning.

Gage stepped out of the shower, rubbed his dripping hair with a towel. His back had ached from the beating his father had given him the night before. As they’d sat around the campfire in the clearing those welts had throbbed. He remembered that, as he remembered how the light had flickered and floated over the gray table of the Pagan Stone.