The Sign of Seven Trilogy (86 page)

He scanned the graphs, but as far as he could see, it didn't appear that any one area, or sector, of the Hollow experienced more episodes of violence or paranormal activity. Main Street, of course, but you had to factor in that Main got more traffic, more people used it than any of the other streets or roads in and around town. It was the primary route, with the Square the hub.

He visualized it that way, as a wheel, then as a grid, with the Square as the central point. But no particular pattern emerged. Waste of time, he thought. They could play at this for weeks, and nothing could change. All it proved was that at one time or another, nearly every place within the town limits had been hit.

The park, the ball field, the school, the old library, bowling alley, bars, shops, private homes. Documenting wasn't going to stop them from being hit again when . . .

He stepped back, used both his eyes and his memory to build Hawkins Hollow on its map. Maybe it meant nothing, but hell, the stupid pushpins were right there. Picking up the box, he began adding blue ones to the map.

“What are you doing?” Cybil demanded. “Why—”

He cut her off simply by holding up a finger as he shuffled through his memory, added more pins. There had to be more, he thought. How the hell was a man supposed to remember every applicable incident in some wild theory? And not all of them would involve him. He and Cal and Fox had been tight, but they hadn't been joined at the hip.

“Those locations were already marked,” Cybil pointed out when he paused.

“Yeah, that would be the point. And these particular locations have all been hit more than once, some at each Seven. And some of those have already had an incident this time.”

“Multiple hits would be logical.” Quinn moved forward to study the map. “A town the size of Hawkins Hollow is limited. Other than Main Street, it's fairly spread out, but that's logical, too, as Main has more activity, more people per square foot.”

“Yeah, yeah. Interesting, isn't it?”

“It might be, if we knew what the blue pins represented,” Cybil said.

“Places, memories, highlights, lowlights. The bowling center. The three of us spent a hell of a lot of time there as kids. I lived on the third floor, worked there—so did Cal and Fox—for spending money. The first violent incident, at least the first we know about, happened in the center on the night of our tenth birthday. At least one act of violence happened there every Seven. Already this time, you had the mess on Valentine's Day, and Twisse shot me back to the apartment—illusion or not, it felt pretty damn real. I got the shit kicked out of me plenty of times up there.”

“Violence drawing violence,” Cybil murmured. “It returns to locations where you, or one of you, had a violent experience.”

“Not just. See this.” He tapped the map. “I had sex for the first time in the house that sits here. I was fifteen.”

“Precocious,” Quinn commented.

“The opportunity presented itself. Next Seven, the lady of the house tried to burn it down, with everyone in it. Didn't work out for her, fortunately. By the next Seven, my first conquest had married her college sweetheart and moved away, and the rest of the family moved to a bigger house well out of town. But the guy who bought the place broke every mirror in the place—that would be July of '01, and according to his wife, whom he attacked, started screaming about devils in the glass. The school—God knows we put in time at all three levels—we got in our share of fights there, copped our share of feels and long, wet kisses once we hit high school.”

“Violent or sexual energy. Yours,” Cybil added. “You, Cal, and Fox. Yes, that is interesting.”

“There's bound to be more. There's also some interest in the fact that up until last month, there was never an incident of any kind at Fox's farm. It wasn't real, but it happened. Nothing ever happened at Cal's parents' place either. But it's something we should watch out for.”

“I'm going to call him right now.” Quinn dashed out of the room.

“Well, King of Swords, your observant and analytical mind may be on to something.” Cybil tapped a finger on the map. “This is our house. No incidents here before we moved into it.”

“There might have been something we didn't know about.”

“No major incidents, because if there had been, you'd know. But after we move in, it starts here. Aimed at us, very likely using our own energy as part of the fuel. The first incident you're aware of happened at the bowling center when the three of you were there. This time around, the center was the scene of the first major illusionary incident, when four of the group were there. Quinn saw the demon here, when she was driving to Cal's house to meet him for the first time, which put four of the six of us in the area—for the first time.”

“What are you looking for?”

“A pattern in the pattern. The second Seven, one of the first major occurrences involved a woman coming out of this bar, and firing a gun. You were hit.”

“Yeah, then hit on.”

“The three of you on the scene, and of course, the alcohol making the woman more susceptible. But as you were just seventeen, it's doubtful any of you spent appreciable time at that bar, or had any sort of experience there that would—”

“The old man spent plenty of time there.” Understanding where she was headed, Gage checked the urge to keep that area buried. “Kicked me out, literally, when I went in looking for him. I was around seven. It was the first time he seriously laid into me. That's what you're looking for?”

“Yes.”

When she offered no sympathy, no gesture of comfort, his stomach muscles relaxed again. “The last Seven we tried the ritual again, so we were at the Pagan Stone at midnight. I don't know where the first incident took place, but it was the worst of them. That year was the worst of all.”

“All right, let's backtrack. You knew it was coming; you were prepared. Things happened, as they are now, before that stroke of midnight on July seventh. What do you remember happening first?”

“The dreams always come first. I came back early spring that year. We bunked in this apartment Cal had back then. I saw the little fucker crouched right on the Welcome to Hawkins Hollow sign when I first drove into town. Forgot about that. And the first night, or early morning, the three of us stayed in Cal's place, the crows hit.”

“Where?”

“Main Street, that's where they like it best. But heavier on the building where we were. Yeah, that took the biggest hit. And there were a lot of fights at the high school. People put it down to end-of-year tempers and stress, but there were a lot of fights at the school.”

“We can work with this, I think,” Cybil responded as she swung back to her computer and began peppering the keys. “A lot of inputting, cross-referencing, and so on, but we can work this.” She glanced up briefly when Quinn came back. “Is he coming?”

“As soon as he sees his parents.”

“Get Fox and Layla over here, too.”

“She got something?” Quinn asked Gage.

“Apparently.”

“Defense is as integral to any war as offense.”

“Integral,” Gage repeated.

“We pinpoint the highest-risk locations, then take the necessary defensive steps.”

“Which would be?”

“Evacuation, fortification.” She waved the question off as she might a persistent fly. “One thing at a time.”

Gage didn't put much stock in evacuation or fortification, but he followed Cybil's line of thinking. He saw the pattern within the pattern. He edged back as the others arrived, as the six of them crammed into the little office.

“We've agreed we're catalysts,” Cybil began. “We know the three men released the entity we call Twisse, as that was the name it was last known by, by performing a blood ritual. We know that Quinn's first sighting was in February, the earliest we have on record—when she arrived. Layla and Quinn, both staying at the hotel, had their first shared sighting there. It's escalated since, faster and stronger. In the bowling center at the Sweetheart Dance when four of the six of us were there. The attack on Lump at Cal's when all six of us stayed there. We've logged the individual and mutual sightings this time. Again the bowling center, the Square, Fox's office and apartment, this house. So when we go back to previous Sevens, there's a locational pattern.”

“Bowling center's a major site.” Quinn studied the updated map. “The high school, the bar, what was the Foster house, the area around the Square. Obvious reasons for all that. But it's interesting that before this year, neither Fox's building nor this house had any incidents. We're on to something here.”

“Why didn't we see this before?” Cal wondered. “How the hell did we miss it?”

“We never did charts and graphs,” Fox pointed out. “We wrote stuff down, sure, but we never put it all together this way. The logical, visual way.”

“And you see it every day,” Cybil added. “You and Cal live here. You see the town every day, the streets, the buildings. Gage doesn't. So when he looks at the map, he sees it in a different way. And doing what he does for a living, he instinctively looks for patterns.”

“What do we do with this?” Layla asked.

“We add as much data as possible from these guys' memories,” Cybil began. “We input that, study and analyze the resulting pattern, and . . .”

“We calculate the odds on the first strike or strikes,” Gage finished when she looked at him. “Bowling center year one, the bar year two. We don't know, because we were at the Pagan Stone, what took the first hit year three.”

“We might.” Frowning at the map, Cal pinned a finger to a spot. “My father stayed in town. He knew we were going to the clearing, to try to stop this, so he stayed in case . . . I didn't know it. He didn't tell me until after it was all over. He planted himself in the police station. A couple of guys in the bank parking lot, going at each other's cars—and each other—with tire irons.”

“Did anything significant happen to any of you there?”

“Yeah.” Fox hooked his thumbs in his front pockets. “Napper jumped me there once, beat half the snot out of me before I got my second wind and beat the rest of it out of him.”

“Just what I'm after,” Cybil told him. “Where'd you lose your virginity, Cal?”

“Well, Jesus.”

“Don't be shy.” Muffling laughter, Quinn bumped his shoulder.

“Backseat of my car, like any self-respecting high school senior.”

“He was a late bloomer,” Gage pointed out.

Cal hunched his shoulders, then deliberately straightened them again. “I've since made up for it.”

“So I hear,” Cybil said, and Quinn laughed again. “Where were you parked?”

“Up on Rock Mount Lane. There weren't many houses along there back then. They'd just started to develop, so . . .” He angled his head, and once again laid a finger on the map. “Here, right about here. And last Seven, two of those houses burned to the ground.”

“Fox?”

“Alongside of the creek. Well outside town limits. There are a few houses tucked in there now, but they're not part of the Hollow. I don't know if that plays in this.”

“We should log them in anyway. What we'll need you to do, all of you, is dig back, think back, note down anything, anywhere, that might be significant. A violent episode, a traumatic one, a sexual one. Then we'll correlate. Layla, you're a hell of a correlator.”

“All right. My shop, or what will be my shop,” Layla corrected. “It's been hit hard every Seven, and already took damage this time. Did anything happen there?”

“It used to be a junk shop.”

The tone of Gage's voice, the quality of silence from both Cal and Fox told Cybil this wasn't only significant. It was monumental. “A kind of low-rent antique store. My mother worked there part-time off and on. We were all in there—I think maybe our mothers got together to have lunch in town, or poke around. I don't remember. But we were all in there when . . . She got sick, started to hemorrhage. She was pregnant, I can't remember how far along. But we were all in there when whatever went wrong started going wrong.”

“They got an ambulance.” Cal finished it so Gage wouldn't have to. “Fox's mother went with her, and mine took the three of us back to the house with her. They couldn't save her or the baby.”

“The last time I saw her, she was lying on the floor of that junk shop, bleeding. I guess that's pretty fucking significant. I need more coffee.”

Downstairs, he bypassed the pot and went straight out on the porch. Moments later, Cybil stepped out behind him.

“I'm sorry, so sorry this causes you pain.”

“Nothing I could do then, nothing I can do now.”

She moved to him, laid a hand on his arm. “I'm still sorry it causes you pain. I know what it is to lose a parent, one you loved and who loved you. I know how it can mark your life into before and after. However long ago, whatever the circumstances, there's still a place in the child that hurts.”

“She told me it was going to be all right. The last thing she said to me was, ‘Don't worry, baby, don't be scared. It's going to be all right.' It wasn't, but I hope she believed it.”

Steadier, he turned to her. “If you're right about this, and I think you are, I'm going to find a way to kill it. I'm going to kill it for using my mother's blood, her pain, her fear to feed on. I swear a goddamn oath right here and now on that.”

“Good.” With her eyes on his, she held out a hand. “I'll swear it with you.”