He followed the tracks of Fox’s tires across the little bridge over his snow-and ice-crusted curve of the creek.

Lump padded toward the house from the direction of the winter-postcard woods, leaving deep prints behind him. His tail swished once as he let out a single, hollow bark.

“Wow, look at Lump.” Quinn managed to poke Cal with her elbow as the truck shoved its way along the lane. “He’s positively frisky.”

“Snow gets him going.” Cal pulled behind Fox’s truck, smirked at the Ferrari, slowly being buried, then laid on the horn. He’d be damned if he was going to haul the bulk of what three women deemed impossible to live without for a night or two.

He dragged bags out of the bed.

“It’s a beautiful spot, Cal.” Layla took the first out of his hands. “Currier and Ives for the twenty-first century. Is it all right if I go right in?”

“Sure.”

“Pretty as a picture.” Cybil scanned the bags and boxes, chose one for herself. “Especially if you don’t mind being isolated.”

“I don’t.”

She glanced over as Gage and Fox came out of the house. “I hope you don’t mind crowds either.”

They got everything inside, trailing snow everywhere. Cal decided it must have been some sort of female telepathy that divided them all into chores without discussion. Layla asked him for rags or old towels and proceeded to mop up the wet, Cybil took over the kitchen with her stew pot and bag of kitchen ingredients. And Quinn dug into his linen closet, such as it was, and began assigning beds, and ordering various bags carried to various rooms.

There wasn’t anything for him to do, really, but have a beer.

Gage strode in as Cal poked at the fire. “There are bottles of girl stuff all over both bathrooms up there.” Gage jerked a thumb at the ceiling. “What have you done?”

“What had to be done. I couldn’t leave them. They could’ve been cut off for a couple of days.”

“And what, turned into the next Donner Party? Your woman has Fox making my bed, which is now the pullout in your office. And which I’m apparently supposed to share with him. You know that son of a bitch is a bed hog.”

“Can’t be helped.”

“Easy for you to say, seeing as you’ll be sharing yours with the blonde.”

This time Cal grinned, smugly. “Can’t be helped.”

“Esmerelda’s brewing up something in the kitchen.”

“Goulash-and it’s Cybil.”

“Whatever, it smells good, I’ll give her that. She smells better. But the point is I got the heave-ho when I tried to get a damn bag of chips to go with the beer.”

“You want to cook for six people?”

Gage only grunted, sat, propped his feet on the coffee table. “How much are they calling for?”

“About three feet.” Cal dropped down beside him, mirrored his pose. “Used to be we liked nothing better. No school, haul out the sleds. Snowball wars.”

“Those were the days, my friend.”

“Now we’re priming the generator, loading in firewood, buying extra batteries and toilet paper.”

“Sucks to be grown up.”

Still, it was warm, and while the snow fell in sheets outside, there was light, and there was food. It was hard to complain, Cal decided, when he was digging into a bowl of hot, spicy stew he had nothing to do with preparing. Plus, there were dumplings, and he was weak when it came to dumplings.

“I was in Budapest not that long ago.” Gage spooned up goulash as he studied Cybil. “This is as good as any I got there.”

“Actually, this isn’t Hungarian goulash. It’s a Serbo-Croatian base.”

“Damn good stew,” Fox commented, “wherever it’s based.”

“Cybil’s an Eastern European stew herself.” Quinn savored the half dumpling she’d allowed herself. “Croatian, Ukrainian, Polish-with a dash of French for fashion sense and snottiness.”

“When did your family come over?” Cal wondered.

“As early as the seventeen hundreds, as late as just before World War Two, depending on the line.” But she understood the reason for the question. “I don’t know if there is a connection to Quinn or Layla, or any of this, where it might root from. I’m looking into it.”

“We had a connection,” Quinn said, “straight off.”

“We did.”

Cal understood that kind of friendship, the kind he saw when the two women looked at each other. It had little to do with blood, and everything to do with the heart.

“We hooked up the first day-evening really-of college.” Quinn spooned off another minuscule piece of dumpling with the stew. “Met in the hall of the dorm. We were across from each other. Within two days, we’d switched. Our respective roommates didn’t care. We bunked together right through college.”

“And apparently still are,” Cybil commented.

“Remember you read my palm that first night?”

“You read palms?” Fox asked.

“When the mood strikes. My gypsy heritage,” Cybil added with a flourishing gesture of her hands.

And Cal felt a knot form in his belly. “There were gypsies in the Hollow.”

“Really?” Carefully, Cybil lifted her wineglass, sipped. “When?”

“I’d have to check to be sure. This is from stories my gran told me that her grandmother told her. Like that. About how gypsies came one summer and set up camp.”

“Interesting. Potentially,” Quinn mused, “someone local could get cozy with one of those dark-eyed beauties or hunks, and nine months later, oops. Could lead right to you, Cyb.”

“Just one big, happy family,” Cybil muttered.

After the meal, chores were divvied up again. Wood needed to be brought in, the dog let out, the table cleared, dishes dealt with.

“Who else cooks?” Cybil demanded.

“Gage does,” Cal and Fox said together.

“Hey.”

“Good.” Cybil sized him up. “If there’s a group breakfast on the slate, you’re in charge. Now-”

“Before we…whatever,” Cal decided, “there’s something we have to go over. Might as well stick to the dining room. We have to get something,” he added, looking at Fox and Gage. “You might want to open another bottle of wine.”

“What’s all this?” Quinn frowned as the men retreated. “What are they up to?”

“It’s more what haven’t they told us,” Layla said. “Guilt and reluctance, that’s what I’m picking up. Not that I know any of them that well.”

“You know what you know,” Cybil told her. “Get another bottle, Q.” She gave a little shudder. “Maybe we should light a couple more candles while we’re at it, just in case. It already feels…dark.”

THEY LEFT IT TO HIM, CAL SUPPOSED, BECAUSE IT was his house. When they were all back around the table, he tried to find the best way to begin.

“We’ve gone over what happened that night in the clearing when we were kids, and what started happening after. Quinn, you got some of it yourself when we hiked there a couple weeks ago.”

“Yeah. Cyb and Layla need to see it, as soon as the snow’s cleared enough for us to make the hike.”

He hesitated only a beat. “Agreed.”

“It ain’t a stroll down the Champs Élysées,” Gage commented, and Cybil cocked an eyebrow at him.

“We’ll manage.”

“There was another element that night, another aspect we haven’t talked about with you.”

“With anyone,” Fox added.

“It’s hard to explain why. We were ten, everything went to hell, and…Well.” Cal set his part of the stone on the table.

“A piece of rock?” Layla said.

“Bloodstone.” Cybil pursed her lips, started to reach for it, stopped. “May I?”

Gage and Fox set theirs down beside Cal’s. “Take your pick,” Gage invited.

“Three parts of one.” Quinn picked up the one closest to her. “Isn’t that right? These are three parts of one stone.”

“One that had been rounded, tumbled, polished,” Cybil continued. “Where did you get the pieces?”

“We were holding them,” Cal told her. “After the light, after the dark, when the ground stopped shaking, each one of us was holding his part of this stone.” He studied his own hand, remembering how his fist had clenched around the stone as if his life depended on it.