Page 226 of The Seven Rings
He thought of Clover leaning out the window. “All right, I do feel that.”
“She knows she can’t kill me—any of us—as much as she’d love to. She loses if she goes too far. She can only hurt and scare, and yes, she’s escalating there.”
“There’s gotta be a reason for that.”
Cleo looked at Owen with approval. “Yes, there does.”
“You’ve got an idea on that, Lafayette?”
“I do.”
Enjoying her wine, she leaned back against the counter. “She feels it, too. They’re getting stronger, not just the brides, all of them. So are we. Nothing she’s thrown out has worked in the long run. We’re all here, together.”
“There are four people, maybe not officially, but essentially, living in this house now. When’s the last time that happened?” Sonya asked, then answered. “Since Patricia, since before Patricia. Clover and Charlie with some friends for a while, but what kind of friends were they to leave Clover at that point in her pregnancy?”
Gucci Mane expressed Clover’s opinion with “Fake Friends.”
“And that, the man I love, my best friend, my favorite cousin, isn’t us. She feels that. We’re more of a threat to her than she’s ever faced.”
“And you’re the biggest threat in that group,” Trey pointed out.
“No slap at female power,” Owen put in, “but it’s fucking hard to be somewhere else and know, at any time, something can come down.”
“And no return slap at male ego, because I know it is. But…” Sonya lifted a hand, let it fall. “That’s part of who we are, too, isn’t it? And I know, I just know, when it comes down to it, the end of it, we’ll be here together.
“It’s not just me, Trey. It’s never been just me.”
“Things started changing when you got here. That’s something Clover told me before I came in tonight.”
“Oh! Twice in one day? That’s—”
“A sign of something stronger,” Trey finished. “She said something was coming. She didn’t say, or didn’t know, what or when.”
“Samhain.” Cleo checked her pot, stirred, nodded. “The night the veil thins between the living and the dead. A high holy day, a major Sabbat.”
“That’s a witch thing, right?” Owen took a sniff at the pot himself. “Wouldn’t that be a big night for her?”
“Light kills dark,” Cleo said simply.
“Halloween,” Sonya murmured. “It seems really… apt.”
And it gave Trey what he felt was a solid bargaining chip.
“October thirty-first. That’s the line. If we don’t have the rings, or a clear and solid path to them, Owen and I go in.”
“The Gold Room? But—”
“It has to end sometime, Sonya. And at some point, you have to go on the offense. Add, for all we know, that might be the way to get the rings. Taking it to her. That’s as logical a method as any.”
“I might go along with that,” Cleo considered, “with one amendment. We all four go in. Sonya’s right. It’s going to be all of us.”
Since he’d expected that counter, Trey flicked a glance at Owen, got a half shrug.
“Agreed,” Owen said. “We’ve got that piece of her dress Jones ripped off. You’ve got her blood on those stones. I don’t know dick about that kind of thing, but there should be a way to use them.”
“She’s strongest there,” Sonya began.
“That could be the point,” Trey argued. “Up to now, it’s mostly been fending her off.”
