“Writer’s tools,” Jordan said.

“Yeah, and you’re damn good with them.”

“Excuse me?”

Mildly annoyed with the interruption, she glanced up to see him staring at her with a kind of narrowed intensity that brought heat to her face. “I said you were good. So what?”

“So . . . there’s a first time for everything. Need another drink,” he said and walked out of the room.

Dana shifted, then huffed out a breath. “Short break,” she announced, and followed Jordan to the kitchen.

“What’s the deal?”

He pulled a soda out of the refrigerator. “No deal.” he popped the top, then shrugged. “You never—well, since I moved to New York, you’ve never had a good word to say about my work.”

“I was pissed at you.”

“Yeah, I get that.” He started to take a swig, then set it down. Truth, he thought again. No matter how it exposed him, there had to be truth between them.

“The thing is, Dana, it mattered. There’s nobody’s opinion I respect or value more when it comes to books than yours. So it mattered what you thought of my work.”

“You want to know what I think of your work? My honest opinion?”

“Yeah, let’s be honest.”

“Well, you did buy me this really terrific ring, so I guess I should come clean.” She took the soda, sipped, handed it back. “You have such an amazing talent. You have a gift, and it’s obvious that you nurture and appreciate it. Every time I’ve read one of your books I’ve been astonished by your range, your scope, your skill with the language. Even when I hated you, Jordan, I was proud of you.”

“How about that,” he managed.

“I’m not sorry I swiped at it before. Maybe it made you work harder.”

He had to grin at her. “Maybe it did.”

“Are we okay now?”

“We’re a lot better than okay.”

“Then let’s go back, because I haven’t finished. And I’m going to be very interested in what you think of what I have to say next.”

She walked back out to the living room, settled down on the floor again. “Okay,” she said, raising her voice over the conversations. “Break’s over. The point I was trying to make was that however skilled Jordan might be, this is more than a writer’s point of view. It’s more than a series of events entertainingly woven together in story form. When you read it, you start to see how often he’s linked to one of those events, or is to one of the people involved in the event. In fact, he was the first, years ago, to see or feel anything, well, otherworldly about the Peak. He once thought he saw a ghost there.”

She stopped, amused to see Malory pick up a highlighter from the crate and begin to mark the sections under discussion on Flynn’s copy.

“Jordan was the first of us to see, and own, one of Rowena’s paintings,” Dana continued. “Flynn’s my brother, Brad’s my friend, but Jordan stepped up from being a kind of brother, from being a friend, to being my lover.”

“He broke your heart.” Malory meticulously coated typed words with bright yellow. “A shattering of innocence. Sorry,” she said to Jordan, “but there’s a very strong kind of magic in that.”

“And it was Jordan’s blood that Kane shed.” Nodding at Malory, Dana smiled. “He’s the one who left home—orphaned, alone, young, on a quest. And came back,” she concluded, meeting Jordan’s eyes, “to finish it.”

“You think I have the key.” Fascinated, Jordan sat back. “I follow the logic, and the traditional elements of your theory, Dane, but where? How? When?”

“I can’t know everything. But it makes sense. It just plays through. I haven’t hammered it all out yet. There’s still that business about goddesses walking and waiting. Walking where? Waiting for what? Then there’s that image I saw when I was trying to put myself into a trance.”

Something started to click in his head, then shut off again at her last statement. “When you did what?”

“An experiment. Like meditation. Blank out the mind, that sort of thing, and see what formed. I saw the key, just sort of floating on this blue-green field. Probably my wall at Indulgence, as that’s what I’d been staring at. It was like I could reach out and touch it. But I couldn’t.”

Frowning, she looked back, imagined it all again. “Then the field changed. White with these blurry black lines running across it. And I heard these words in my head.”

“You heard voices?” Brad asked her.

“Not exactly. But I heard the words. Wait a minute, let me think, get it right. ‘She walks the night, and is the night with all its . . . all its shadows and secrets. And when she weeps, she weeps for day.’

“So, doesn’t it make sense that she’s the goddess—whoever the hell she is? That’s got to be one of the last pieces to put into place.”

“I can put it in place,” Jordan told her. “It’s mine. I wrote that. Phantom Watch.”

There was a moment of stunned silence, then everyone began talking at once.

“Hold it!” Brad got to his feet, held up his hands. “I said hold it! Let’s not lose the thread. First, let’s eliminate any coincidence. Dana, did you read the book?”

“Yes, but—”

“You did?”

She rolled her eyes at Jordan. “I’m not going into another round of pumping your creative ego. Yeah, I read it, but it was years ago. Even I don’t remember every line of every book I’ve ever read. I didn’t recognize it when I heard it.”

“I read it, too.” Zoe raised her hand like a girl in a schoolroom, then, mortified, immediately lowered it. “It was great,” she said to Jordan. “But the woman, the one you wrote about walking at night, wasn’t a goddess. She was a ghost.”

“Good point,” Brad put in. “But it’s an interesting touch that Jordan wrote that book about Warrior’s Peak, that he created that ghost because he thought he saw her one night.”

“You did?” Zoe asked. “That’s so cool!”

“We went up there to camp. Brad and Flynn and I. Brad managed to . . . liberate some beer and cigarettes.”