Free The Pagan Stone by Nora Roberts Page A

Cal shook his head at her. “It’s pretty stupid of you not to cop to that when the house was bleeding and shaking and you were stuck in the dark with demon boy crawling on the window.”
    “Now that we’ve established Cybil completely loses her head in a crisis, we should ask ourselves why it couldn’t come in.” Fox sat on the floor, scratching Lump on his big head. “Maybe it’s like the vampire deal. Has to be invited.”
    “Or, keeping Dracula inside of fiction where he belongs, it just wasn’t up to full power. And won’t be,” Gage reminded them, “for a few more weeks.”
    “Actually . . .” Cybil frowned. “If we consider vampyric lore, it’s not impossible the undead, drinker of blood, and so forth, doesn’t have its legitimate roots in this demon. Some of that lore speaks of the vampire’s ability to hypnotize its victims or foes—mind control. It feeds off human blood. This is more your area, Quinn, than mine.”
    “You’re doing fine.”
    “All right, to stick with this channel, vampires are often said to have the ability to turn into a bat, a wolf. This demon certainly shape-shifts—which adds the possibility of the shape-shifter, of which the lycanthrope is a subset, found in various lore. To some extent, these might be bastardizations of this demon.”
    She picked up her own notebook, scribbled in it as she continued. “Undead. We know now that it can take the form of someone who’s died. What if this isn’t, as we thought, a new trick, but an ability it had before Dent imprisoned it, and is only now, as what we’re told is the final Seven approaches, able to pull that out of its hat again?”
    “So it kills Uncle Harry,” Fox proposed, “then for fun, it comes back as Uncle Harry to terrorize and kill the rest of the family.”
    “It does have a sick sense of fun.” Quinn nodded. “Should we start sharpening stakes?”
    “No. But we’d better figure out how the weapon we do have works. Still, this is interesting.” Thoughtfully, Cybil tapped her pencil on the notepad. “If it couldn’t come in, that might give us a little more security, and peace of mind. Have any of you ever seen it inside a home?” Cybil asked.
    “It just gets the people in it to kill themselves, or each other, or burn the place down.” Gage shrugged. “Often all of the above.”
    “Maybe there’s a way to block it, or at least weaken it.” Layla slid off her chair to sit on the floor beside Fox. “It’s energy, right? And energy that feeds on, or at least seems to prefer, negative emotions. Anger, fear, hate. At every Seven, or the approach of one, it targets birds and animals first—smaller brains, less intellect than humans. And it recharges on that, then moves, usually, to people who’re under some influence. Alcohol, drugs, or those emotions again. Until it’s stronger.”
    “It’s coming out stronger this time,” Cal pointed out. “It’s already moved past animals, and was able to infect Block Kholer to the point he nearly beat Fox to death.”
    As Layla took Fox’s hand, Cybil considered. “That was target specific, and it wasn’t able to infect the chief of police when he got there and dragged Block off. Target specific might be another advantage.”
    “Unless you’re the target,” Fox pointed out. “Then it seriously sucks.”
    Cybil smiled at him. “True enough. It doesn’t just feed off hate, it hates. Us especially. As far as we know, everything it’s done or been able to do since February targets one of us, or the group as a whole.”
    She set her notebook on the arm of the sofa. “It’s expending a lot of energy to scare us, hurt us. That’s a thought I had today when it had me trapped in here. Well, before it went dark and I wasn’t so cocky. That it was using up energy. Maybe we can taunt it into using more. It’s stronger, yes, and it’s getter stronger yet, but anytime it puts on a big show, there’s a lull afterward. It’s still recharging. And while