by L. J. Smith
"We hope," Laurel murmured.
"Well, that's the theory," Melanie said.
Diana looked at Adam, who had been unusually quiet. "What do you think?"
"I think it's worth a try. It'll take a lot of mental power to back it up, though. We'll all have to concentrate—especially since we're not a full Circle." His voice was calm and even, and Cassie admired him for it. She kept her face turned in Diana's direction, though as a matter of fact her eyes were fixed on the walnut cabinet.
Diana turned to Cassie. "What about you?"
"Me?" Cassie said, startled, tearing her eyes away from the cabinet door. She hadn't expected to be asked; she didn't know anything about pendulums or peridot. To her horror, she felt her face redden.
"Yes, you. You might be new to the methods we use, but a lot of the time you have feelings about things."
"Oh. Well…" Cassie tried to search her feelings, scrabbling to get beyond the guilt and terror that were uppermost. "I think… it's a good idea," she said finally, knowing how lame that sounded. "It seems fine to me."
Melanie rolled her eyes, but Diana nodded as seriously as she had at Adam. "All right, then, the only thing to do is try," she said, dropping the peridot and its silver chain into the palm of her left hand and clasping it tightly. "Let's go."
Cassie couldn't breathe; she was still reeling from the impact of Diana's clear green eyes, slightly darker than the peridot but with that same delicate transparency, as if there were light shining behind them.
I can't do it, she thought. She was surprised at how stark and simple everything was now that she had actually looked Diana in the eyes. I can't do it. I'll have to tell Faye—no, I'll tell Diana. That's it. I'll tell Diana myself before Faye can, and I'll make her believe me. She'll understand; Diana is so good, she'll have to understand.
Everyone had gotten up. Cassie got up too, turning toward the door to hide her agitation—should I tell her right now? Ask her to stay back a minute?—when the door flew open in her face.
Faye was standing in the doorway.
Suzan and Deborah were behind her. The strawberry blonde looked mean, and the biker's habitual scowl was even darker than usual. Behind them were the Henderson brothers, Chris frowning and Doug grinning in a wild way that was disturbing.
"Going somewhere without us?" Faye said. She was speaking to Diana, but her eyes remained fixed on Cassie.
"Not now," Laurel muttered.
Diana let out a deep breath. "I didn't think you'd be interested," she said. "We're going to trace the dark energy."
"Not interested?. When all the rest of you are so busy? Of course, I can only speak for myself, but I'm interested in everything the Circle does. What about you, Deborah?"
The biker girl's scowl changed briefly into a malicious grin. "I'm interested," she said.
"And what about you, Suzan?"
"I'm interested," Suzan chimed in.
"And what about you, Chris?"
"I'm—"
"All right," Diana said. Her cheeks were flushed;
Adam had come to stand at her side. "We get the point. We're better off with a full Circle, anyway—but where's Nick?"
"I have no idea," Faye said coolly. "He's not at home."
Diana hesitated, then shrugged. "We'll do our best with what we have," she said. "Let's go down to the garage."
She gestured at Melanie and Laurel and they went first, elbowing past Faye's group, who looked as if they wanted to stay and argue some more. Adam took charge of Sean and got him out the door, then began herding the Hendersons. Deborah and Suzan looked at Faye and then followed the guys.
Cassie had been hanging back, hoping for the chance to speak to Diana alone. But Diana seemed to have forgotten her; she was engaged in a staredown with Faye. Finally, head high, she walked past the tall girl who was still semi-blocking the doorway.
"Diana…" Faye called. Diana didn't look back, but her shoulders tensed: she was listening.
"You're going to lose them all," Faye said, and she chuckled her lazy chuckle as Diana went on to the staircase.
Biting her lip, Cassie stepped forward furiously. One good shove in Faye's middle, she was thinking. But Faye rounded smoothly on her, blocking the doorway completely.
"Oh, no you don't. We need to talk," she said.
"I don't want to talk to you."
Faye ignored her. "Is it in here?" She moved quickly to the walnut cabinet and pulled at a handle, but the drawer was locked. They all were. "Damn. But you can find out where she keeps the key. I want it as soon as possible, do you understand?"
"Faye, you're not listening to me! I've changed my mind. I'm not going to do it after all."
Faye, who had been prowling around the room like a panther, taking advantage of this unique opportunity to examine Diana's things, stopped in her tracks. Then she turned slowly to Cassie, and smiled.
"Oh, Cassie," she said. "You really kill me."
"I'm serious. I've changed my mind." Faye just smiled at her, leaning back against the wall and shaking her head. Her heavy-lidded golden eyes were glowing with amusement, her mane of pitch-black hair fell across her shoulders as her head moved. She had never looked more beautiful—or more dangerous.
"Cassie, come here." Faye's voice was just slightly edged with impatience, like a teacher who's put up with a lot from a backward student. "Let me show you something," Faye went on, catching Cassie's elbow and dragging her to the window. "Now, look down there. What do you see?"
Cassie stopped fighting and looked. She saw the Club, the in-crowd at New Salem high school, the kids who awed—and terrorized—students and teachers alike. She saw them gathered in Diana's driveway, their heads gleaming in the first rays of sunset: Suzan's strawberry-blond hair turned to red, Deborah's dark curls touched with ruby, Laurel's long, light-brown hair and Melanie's short auburn and the Henderson brothers' dishevelled yellow all highlighted by the ruddy glow in the sky.
And she saw Adam and Diana, standing close, Diana's silvery head drooping to Adam's shoulder. He was holding her protectively, his own hair dark as wine.
Faye's voice came from behind Cassie. "If you tell her, you'll kill her. You'll destroy her faith in everything she's ever believed in. And you'll take away the only thing she has to trust, to rely on. Is that what you want?"
"Faye…" Cassie seethed.
"And, incidentally, you'll get yourself banished from the Club. You know that, don't you? How do you think Melanie and Laurel are going to feel when they hear that you messed around with Diana's boyfriend? None of them will ever speak to you again, not even to make a full Circle. The coven will be destroyed too."
Cassie's teeth were clenched. She wanted to hit Faye, but it wouldn't do any good. Because Faye was right. Cassie thought she could stand being blackballed, being a pariah at school again; she even thought she could stand destroying the coven. But the picture of Diana's face…
It would kill Diana. By the time Faye got finished telling it her way, it would. Cassie's fantasy of confessing to Diana and having Diana understand vanished like a pricked soapbubble.
"And what I want is so reasonable," Faye was going on, almost crooning. "I just want to look at the skull for a little while. I know what I'm doing. You'll get it for me, won't you, Cassie? Won't you? Today?" Cassie shut her eyes. Against her closed eyelids the light was red as fire.
Two
Somewhere on the way downstairs Cassie stopped feeling guilty.
She didn't know exactly how it happened. But it was necessary, if she was going to survive this. She was doing everything she could to protect Diana—and Adam, too, in a way. Adam must never know about Faye's blackmail. So Cassie would do whatever it took to protect them both, but by God she wasn't going to feel guilty on top of it.
She had to handle Faye somehow as well, she thought, marching behind the tall girl past Diana's father's study. She had to keep Faye from doing anything too radical with the skull. She didn't know how; she'd have to think about that
later, but somehow she would do it.
If Faye had looked back just then, Cassie thought, she might have been surprised to see the face of the girl behind her. For the first time in her life, Cassie felt as if her eyes were hard, like the blue steel of a revolver instead of the soft blue of wildflowers.
But right now she had to look neutral—composed.
The group on the driveway looked up as she and Faye came out the door.
"What took you so long?" Laurel asked.
"We were plotting to kill you all," Faye said breezily. "Shall we?" She gestured at the garage.
There were only traces of yesterday's chalk circle left on the floor. Once again the garage was empty of cars—they were lucky Diana's father worked so much at his law firm.
Diana, her left fist still closed, went over to the wall of the garage, directly behind the place Cassie had been sitting when they had performed the skull ceremony. Cassie followed her and then drew in her breath sharply.
"It's burned." She hadn't noticed that last night. Well, of course not; it had been too dark.
Diana was nodding. "I hope nobody is going to keep arguing about whether there was any dark energy or not," she said, with a glance back at Deborah and Suzan.
The wood and plaster of the garage wall was charred in a circle perhaps a foot and a half in diameter. Cassie looked at it, and then at the remnants of the chalk circle on the floor. She had been sitting there, but part of her had been inside the skull. Diana had told them all to look into it, to concentrate, and suddenly Cassie had found herself inside it. That was where she'd seen—felt—the dark power. It had begun rushing outward, getting bigger, determined to break out of the crystal. And she'd seen a face…
She was grateful, suddenly, for Adam's calm voice.
"Well, we know what direction it started in, anyway. Let's see if the crystal agrees."
They were all standing around Diana. She looked at them, then held her left fist out, palm up, and unclasped the fingers. She took the top of the silver chain with her right hand and drew it up taut, so that the peridot just rested on her palm.
"Concentrate," she said. "Earth and Air, help us see what we need to see. Show the traces of the dark energy to us. Everybody concentrate on the crystal."
Earth and Air, wind and tree, show us what we need to see, Cassie thought, her mind automatically setting the simple concept in a rhyme. The wood of the wall, the air outside; that was what they needed to help them. She found herself murmuring the words under her breath and quickly stopped, but Diana's green eyes flashed at her.
"Go on," Diana said tensely, in a low voice, and she started up again, feeling self-conscious.
Diana removed the hand that was supporting the crystal.
It spun on the chain, twirling until the chain was kinked tightly, and then twirling the other way. Cassie watched the pale green blur, murmuring the couplet faster and faster. Earth and Air… no, it was useless. The peridot was just spinning madly like a top gone wild.
Suddenly, with broad, sweeping strokes, the crystal began swinging back and forth.
Someone's breath hissed on the other side of the circle.
The peridot had straightened out; it was no longer twirling, but swinging steadily and hard. Like a pendulum, Cassie realized. Diana wasn't doing it—her left hand holding the chain remained steady. But the peridot was swinging hard, back toward the center of the chalk circle on the floor, and forward toward the burned place on the wall.
"Bingo," Adam said softly.
"We've got it," Melanie whispered. "All right, now you're going to have to move it out of alignment to get outside. Walk—carefully—to the door, and then try to come back to this exact place on the other side of the wall."
Diana wet her lips and nodded, then, holding the silver chain always at the same distance from her body, she turned smoothly and did as Melanie said. The coven broke up to give her room and regrouped around her outside. Finding the right place wasn't hard; there was another circle burned on the outer wall, somewhat fainter than the one inside.
As Diana brought the crystal into alignment once more, it began to swing again. Straight toward the burned place, straight out. Down Crowhaven Road, toward the town.
A shudder went up Cassie's spine.
Everyone looked at everyone else.
Holding the crystal away from her, Diana followed the direction of the swinging. They all fell in behind her, although Cassie noticed Faye's group kept to the rear. Cassie herself was still fighting every second to not watch Adam.
Trees rustled overhead. Red maple, beech, slippery elm—Cassie could identify many of them now. But she tried to keep her eyes on the rapid swish of the pendulum.
They walked and walked, following the curve of Crowhaven Road down toward the water. Now grasses and hedges grew poorly in the sandy soil. The pale green stone was swinging at an angle and Diana turned to follow it.
They were heading west now, along a deeply rutted dirt road. Cassie had never been this way before, but the other members of the Circle obviously had—they were exchanging guarded glances. Cassie saw a chain-link fence ahead, and then an irregular line of headstones.
"Oh, great," Laurel muttered from beside Cassie, and from somewhere in back Suzan said, "I don't believe this. First we have to walk for miles, and now…"
"What's the problem? Just gonna visit some of our ancestors underground," Doug Henderson said, his blue-green eyes glittering oddly.
"Shut up," Adam said.
Cassie didn't want to go inside. She'd seen many cemeteries in New England—it seemed there was one on every other street in Massachusetts, and she'd been to Kori's funeral down in the town. This one didn't look any different from the others: it was a small, square plot of land cluttered with modest gravestones, many of them worn almost completely smooth with time. But Cassie could hardly make her-self follow the others onto the sparse, browning grass between the graves.
Diana led them straight down the middle of the cemetery. Most of the stones were small, scarcely reaching higher than Cassie's knees. They were shaped like arches with two smaller arches on either side.
"Whoever carved these had a gruesome sense of humor," she breathed. Many of the stones were etched with crude skulls, some of them winged, others in front of crossbones. One had an entire skeleton, holding a sun and moon in its hands.
"Death's victory," Faye said softly, so close that Cassie felt warmth on the nape of her neck. Cassie jumped, but refused to look back.
"Oh, terrific," said Laurel as Diana slowed.
The light was dying from the sky. They were in the center of the graveyard, and a cool breeze blew over the stunted grass, bringing a faint tang of salt with it. The hairs on the back of Cassie's neck were tingling.
You're a witch, she reminded herself. You should love cemeteries. They're probably your natural habitat.
The thought didn't really make her feel less frightened, but now her fear was mingled with something else—a sort of strange excitement. The darkness gathering in the sky and in the corners of the graveyard seemed closer. She was part of it, part of a whole new world of shadows and power.
Diana stopped.
The silver chain was a thin line in the gloom, with a pale blob below it. But Cassie could see that the peridot was no longer swinging like a pendulum. Instead it was moving erratically, round and round in circles. It would swing around a few times one way, then slow and swing back the other way.
Cassie looked at it, then up at Diana's face. Diana was frowning. Everyone was watching the circling stone in dead silence.
Cassie couldn't stand the suspense any longer. "What does it mean?" she hissed to Laurel, who just shook her head. Diana, though, looked up.
"Something's wrong with it. It led here—and then it just stopped. But if we've found the place, it shouldn't be moving at all. The stone should just sort of point and quiver—right, Melanie?"
"Like a good hound dog," Doug said, with his wild grin.
Mela
nie ignored him. "That's the theory," she said. "But we've never really tried this before. Maybe it means…" Her voice trailed off as she looked around the graveyard, and then she shrugged. "I don't know what it means."
The tingling at the back of Cassie's neck was getting stronger. The dark energy had come here—and done what? Disappeared? Dissipated? Or…
Laurel was breathing quickly, her elfin face unusually tense. Cassie instinctively moved a little closer to her. She and Laurel and Sean were the juniors, the youngest members of the Circle, and witch or not, Cassie's arms had broken out in gooseflesh.
"What if it's still here, somewhere… waiting?" she said.
"I doubt it," Melanie said, her voice as level and uninflected as usual. "It couldn't hang around without being stored somehow; it would just evaporate. It either came here and did something, or—" Again, though, she could only finish her sentence with a shrug.
"But what could it do here? I don't see any signs of damage, and I feel…" Still frowning, Diana caught the circling peridot in her left hand and held it. "This place feels confused—strange—but I don't sense any harm the dark energy has done. Cassie?"
Cassie tried to search her own feelings. Confusion—as Diana said. And she felt dread and anger and all sorts of churned-up emotions—but maybe that was just her. She was in no state to get a clear reading on anything.
"I don't know," she had to say to Diana. "I don't like it here."
"Maybe, but that's not the point. The point is that we don't see any burns the dark energy could have left, or sense anything it's destroyed or hurt," Diana said.
Deborah's voice was impatient. "Why are you asking her, anyway?" she said with a jerk of her dark head toward Cassie. "She's hardly even one of us—"
"Cassie belongs to the Circle just as much as you do," Adam interrupted, unusually curt. Cassie saw the arch, amused glance Faye threw him and wanted to intervene, but Diana was agreeing heatedly with Adam and Deborah was bridling, glaring at both of them. It looked as if an argument would break out.
