“That’s a good idea. I should have had it.”

“And I should’ve brought it up before.”

“Yeah. Now that you have, you should give it to Cyb, give her whatever information you have. She’s the research queen. I’m good, she’s better.”

“And I’m a rank amateur.”

“Nothing rank about you.” Grinning, she took a leap, bounced up into his arms. The momentum had him skidding. She squealed, as much with laughter as alarm as he tipped backward. He flopped; she landed face-first.

Breathless, she dug in, got two handfuls of snow to mash into his face before she tried to roll away. He caught her at the waist, dragged her back while she screamed with helpless laughter.

“I’m a champion snow wrestler,” he warned her. “You’re out of your league, Blondie. So-”

She managed to get a hand between his legs for a nice, firm stroke. Then taking advantage of the sudden and dramatic dip of his IQ, shoved a messy ball of snow down the back of his neck.

“Those moves are against the rules of the SWF.”

“Check the book, buddy. This is intergender play.”

She tried to scramble up, fell, then whooshed out a breath when his weight pinned her. “And still champion,” he announced, and was about to lower his mouth to hers when the door opened.

“Kids,” Cybil told them, “there’s a nice warm bed upstairs if you want to play. And FYI? The power just came back on.” She glanced back over her shoulder. “Apparently the phones are up, too.”

“Phones, electricity. Computer.” Quinn wiggled out from under Cal. “I have to check my e-mail.”

CYBIL LEANED ON THE DRYER AS LAYLA LOADED towels into the washing machine in Cal’s laundry room. “They looked like a couple of horny snow people. Covered, crusted, pink-cheeked, and groping.”

“Young love is immune to climatic conditions.”

Cybil chuckled. “You know, you don’t have to take on the laundry detail.”

“Clean towels are a memory at this point, and the power may not stay on. Besides, I’d rather be warm and dry in here washing towels than cold and wet out there shoveling snow.” She tossed back her hair. “Especially since no one’s groping me.”

“Good point. But I was bringing that up as, by my calculations, you and Fox are going to have to flip for cooking detail tonight.”

“Quinn hasn’t cooked yet, or Cal.”

“Quinn helped with breakfast. It’s Cal’s house.”

Defeated, Layla stared at the machine. “Hell. I’ll take dinner.”

“You can dump it on Fox, using laundry detail as leverage.”

“No, we don’t know if he can cook, and I can.”

Cybil narrowed her eyes. “You can cook? This hasn’t been mentioned before.”

“If I’d mentioned it, I’d have had to cook.”

Lips pursed, Cybil nodded slowly. “Diabolical and self-serving logic. I like it.”

“I’ll check the supplies, see what I can come up with. Something-” She broke off, stepped forward. “Quinn? What is it?”

“We have to talk. All of us.” So pale her eyes looked bruised, Quinn stood in the doorway.

“Q? Honey.” Cybil reached out in support. “What’s happened?” She remembered Quinn’s dash to the computer for e-mail. “Is everyone all right? Your parents?”

“Yes. Yes. I want to tell it all at once, to everyone. We need to get everyone.”

She sat in the living room with Cybil perched on the arm of her chair for comfort. Quinn wanted to curl up in Cal’s lap as she’d done once before. But it seemed wrong.

It all seemed wrong now.

She wished the power had stayed off forever. She wished she hadn’t contacted her grandmother and prodded her into seeking out family history.

She didn’t want to know what she knew now.

No going back, she reminded herself. And what she had to say could change everything that was to come.

She glanced at Cal. She knew she had him worried. It wasn’t fair to drag it out. How would he look at her afterward? she wondered.

Yank off the bandage, Quinn told herself, and get it over with.

“My grandmother got the information I’d asked her about. Pages from the family Bible. There were even some records put together by a family historian in the late eighteen hundreds. I, ah, have some information on the Clark branch, Layla, that may help you. No one ever pursued that end very far, but you may be able to track back, or out from what I have now.”

“Okay.”

“The thing is, it looks like the family was, we’ll say, pretty religious about their own tracking back. My grandfather, not so much, but his sister, a couple of cousins, they were more into it. They, apparently, get a lot of play out of the fact their ancestors were among the early Pilgrims who settled in the New World. So there isn’t just the Bible, and the pages added to that over time. They’ve had genealogies done tracing roots back to England and Ireland in the fifteen hundreds. But what applies to us, to this, is the branch that came over here. Here to Hawkins Hollow,” she said to Cal.

She braced herself. “Sebastian Deale brought his wife and three daughters to the settlement here in sixteen fifty-one. His eldest daughter’s name was Hester. Hester Deale.”

“Hester’s Pool,” Fox murmured. “She’s yours.”

“That’s right. Hester Deale, who according to town lore denounced Giles Dent as a witch on the night of July seventh, sixteen fifty-two. Who eight months later delivered a daughter, and when that daughter was two weeks old, drowned herself in the pond in Hawkins Wood. There’s no father documented, nothing on record. But we know who fathered her child. We know what fathered her child.”

“We can’t be sure of that.”

“We know it, Caleb.” However much it tore inside her, Quinn knew it. “We’ve seen it, you and I. And Layla, Layla experienced it. He raped her. She was barely sixteen. He lured her, he overpowered her-mind and body, and he got her with child. One that carried his blood.” To keep them still, Quinn gripped her hands together. “A half-demon child. She couldn’t live with it, with what had been done to her, with what she’d brought into the world. So she filled her pockets with stones and went into the water to drown.”

“What happened to her daughter?” Layla asked.

“She died at twenty, after having two daughters of her own. One of them died before her third birthday, the other went on to marry a man named Duncan Clark. They had three sons and a daughter. Both she, her husband, and her youngest son were killed when their house burned down. The other children escaped.”

“Duncan Clark must be where I come in,” Layla said.

“And somewhere along the line, one of them hooked up with a gypsy from the Old World,” Cybil finished. “Hardly seems fair. They get to descend from a heroic white witch, and we get the demon seed.”

“It’s not a joke,” Quinn snapped.

“No, and it’s not a tragedy. It just is.”

“Damn it, Cybil, don’t you see what this means? That thing out there is my-probably our-great-grandfather times a dozen generations. It means we’re carrying some part of that in us.”

“And if I start to sprout horns and a tail in the next few weeks, I’m going to be very pissed off.”

“Oh, fuck that!” Quinn pushed up, rounded on her friend. “Fuck the Cybilese. He raped that girl to get to us, three and a half centuries ago, but what he planted led to this. What if we’re not here to stop it, not here to help this end? What if we’re here to see that it doesn’t stop? To play some part in hurting them?”

“If your brain wasn’t mushy with love you’d see that’s a bullshit theory. Panic reaction with a heavy dose of self-pity to spice it up.” Cybil’s voice was brutally cool. “We’re not under some demon’s thumb. We’re not going to suddenly jump sides and put on the uniform of some dark entity who tries to kill a dog to get his rocks off. We’re exactly who we were five minutes ago, so stop being stupid, and pull yourself together.”

“She’s right. Not about being stupid,” Layla qualified. “But about being who we are. If all this is part of it, then we have to find a way to use it.”