Pagan Stone by Nora Roberts (2008)

I had to finish the Sign of Seven Trilogy, and this one focused on Gage, the boy who lost his mother early and was raised by an alcoholic father who beat him, but who was good friends with Cal and Fox - all born on the same day. Gage is a professional gambler, who loves to travel around the world and can read people well, but doesn't like to get too close to anyone (except Cal and Fox.) Of course the third remaining woman in the series, Cybil, is also an independent person who likes to travel and whose father committed suicide, thus deserting her family. Besides their evolving romance, most of the book centers around preparing for the showdown with the Big Evil One. Gage and Cybil are the ones who can see into the future, and their skills are used to outguess what will happen and to find the weaknesses in the Evil One. Though I am a great supporter of research, I wasn't convinced that so much of it could be done online (though they do mention a professor who actually read books and gave them information from those), and I wasn't sure how useful it would be in this case. I have to admit, that some of it did come in handy, like determining safe zones from mapping out where all the evil incidents had occurred before. Again, I don't really enjoy reading about this type of magic and evil, but Roberts continues to spin a decent tale, though very predicatable, and I did like this unusual last couple.