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either.”
    â€œWhat will?” Fox countered. “I’m open to suggestions.”
    Cybil held up a hand. “Since I opened this can of worms, let me try. You’ve got reservations about this, Layla. Why don’t you tell us what they are?”
    â€œI feel like I’m losing pieces of myself, or who I thought I was. Adding this in, I’m never going to be who I was again.”
    â€œThat may be,” Gage said easily. “But you’re probably not going to live past July anyway.”
    â€œOf course.” On a half laugh, Layla picked up her glass of wine. “I should look on the bright side.”
    â€œLet’s try this.” Cal shook his head at Gage. “The odds are you’d have been hurt today if something hadn’t clicked between you and Fox. And it clicked without either one of you purposely trying. What?” he asked as Quinn started to speak, then stopped herself.
    â€œNo. Nothing.” Quinn exchanged a quick look with Cybil. “Let’s just say I think I understand where everyone’s coming from, and everyone makes a point. So I want to say, Layla, that maybe you could consider looking at it another way. Not that you’re losing something with this, but you could be gaining something. Meanwhile, we’re still going through Ann Hawkins’s journals, and the other books Cal’s great-grandmother gave us. And Cybil’s working on finding where Ann might have gone the night Giles Dent faced down Lazarus Twisse at the Pagan Stone, where she stayed to have her sons, where she lived until she came back here when they were about two. We’re still hopeful that if we find the place, we may find more of her journals. And Cybil also verified her branch of the family tree.”
    â€œA younger branch than all of yours, so far as I can tell,” Cybil continued. “One of my ancestors, a Nadia Sytarskyi, traveled here with her family, and with others in the mid-nineteenth century. She married Jonah Adams, a descendent of Hester Deale. I actually get two branches, as about fifty years later, one of my other ancestors—Kinski side— also came here, and hooked up with Nadia and Jonah’s grandchild. So, like Quinn and Layla, I’m a descendent of Hester Deale, and the demon who raped her and got her with child.”
    â€œMaking us all one big happy family,” Gage put in.
    â€œMaking us something. It doesn’t sit well with me,” Cybil added, speaking directly to Layla, “to know that part of what I have, part of what I am, comes down from something evil, something neither human or humane. In fact, it pisses me off. Enough that I intend to use everything I have, everything I am to kick its ass.”
    â€œDoes it worry you that it may be able to use what you have and are?”
    Cybil lifted her glass again, her dark eyes cool as she sipped. “It can try.”
    â€œIt worries me.” Layla scanned the table, the faces of the people she’d come to care for. “It worries me that I have something in me I can’t fully understand or control. It worries me that at some point, at any point, it may control me.” She shook her head before Quinn could speak. “Even now I don’t know if I chose to come here or if I was directed here. More disturbing to me is not being sure anymore if anything I’ve done has been a choice, or just some part of a master plan created by these forces—the dark and the light. That’s what’s under it for me. That’s the sticking point.”
    â€œNobody’s chaining you to that chair,” Gage pointed out.
    â€œEase off,” Fox told him, but Gage only shrugged.
    â€œI don’t think so. She’s got a problem, we’ve all got a problem. So let’s deal with it. Why don’t you just pack up and go back to New York? Get your job back selling—what is it—overpriced shoes to bored women with too much