by L. J. Smith
“You’re not my leader,” Faye called out. She blinked her eyes and looked around, surveying the situation. She appeared a little dazed, but her eyes had returned to their normal color.
Cassie exhaled with relief. “Faye, thank goodness you’re all right.”
Faye tossed back her mane of black hair and tilted her head. Just as quickly as Faye had seemed normal, her eyes went dark as night. Cassie started backing away in fear. Scratches and bite marks were reddening upon Faye’s hands and arms, and eel-like lesions were forming on her neck and face.
“I’m on your side, Cassie,” Faye said, moving closer still. “And I want you to be on my side.”
“Cassandra holds the book. She is ours,” a bold voice behind Cassie said. It was Adam. His features were now firm and serious.
Diana curled her fingers and twitched. “Cassandra shall not be against us; her blood is required.”
Cassie continued her backward retreat from the group and realized Scarlett had disappeared. She caught sight of her just as she was about to flee through the mouth of the cave.
“So this was your plan all along?” Cassie ran after Scarlett, shouting. “To poison us this way just so you could have a black magic Circle?”
Scarlett whipped around and put her hands on her hips. “What was it you asked me back at the Mission House? ‘Who’s Daddy’s favorite?’ Now you have your answer.”
“But none of us have to be this way.”
Scarlett continued toward the water and showed no sign of slowing down or even listening.
“Bring us the book, dear one,” Adam called out.
“I was falsely accused, but the book shall set us free,” Melanie’s deep voice repeated.
Of course. Scarlett was going home to get their father’s Book of Shadows. But there was no way Cassie was going to let that happen. The dark energy was still coursing through her as well—the remnants of the evil spell remained in her veins. She reached for it mentally, through her own blood and bones. She raised her hands and harnessed every trace of its power toward Scarlett and shouted out, “Non fugam!”
Scarlett was instantly thrown backward, as if she’d run up against a pane of glass.
From the ground, she turned to Cassie, stunned. “You didn’t.”
“Congelasco,” Cassie said, freezing Scarlett in place. Then without hesitation, Cassie lifted her hands to the sky. “Spelunca est a carcere!”
Now no one but Cassie was free to leave the cave. Squeals came from the entire Circle as they scrambled in vain to follow her.
“She doth betray us!” Diana shouted.
“Cassandra,” Adam nobly called to her. “You’re making a terrible mistake.”
But before any of them had the chance to try to stop her, Cassie ran for the water’s edge. She climbed into one of the boats and set the oars with a splash. She rowed hard, still facing the mouth of the cave. The sun was setting in vivid pinks and purples, outlining the cave’s arching shape in a brilliant silhouette. Under any other circumstances, Cassie would have considered the sight of it beautiful.
Chapter 31
Cassie arrived back at her house in a cold sweat. Her clothes had been splashed wet from her furious rowing; she’d wanted to get as far away from the caves as fast as she could. Now she was safe in her bedroom, but she was alone—she’d never been so alone in her entire life. Her friends and her one true love were lost to her. Her mother was out, but even if she were home, how could Cassie explain this terrible series of events, especially when it began with her disobeying her mother’s warning? This was all her fault. And only she could fix it. It was just Cassie, now, and her book.
She turned to where it was resting on her desk among loose pens and paper clips, misleadingly tranquil. Because it was only posing as a book. It wasn’t just a bunch of pages sewn together within a cover—it was an entity, alive as she was. Cassie understood that now. She took the book into her hands and sat with it on the edge of her bed, holding it in her lap.
She remembered the last time she had sat like this, in this same position, when her mother first presented her with it. Cassie had made so many mistakes since then.
Cassie ran her fingers over the book’s aged, leather binding. When her mother first offered it to her she’d told Cassie that in the wrong hands, it could be extremely dangerous. But what she hadn’t known then was that even in the right hands it was extremely dangerous. Her mother had assured her that she was strong enough to handle it, but she wasn’t. Cassie wasn’t nearly strong enough then.
She was now.
Cassie traced the embossment of the book’s cover symbol with the tip of her pointer finger. She dug her fingernails into the indentations already scratched into its surface. The book still felt cruel in her hands, but this time would be different. This time she knew exactly what she was in for, and she would do it right.
She took a deep breath and cracked the book open again, as if for the first time.
Her eyes immediately melded to the page, to the words scrawled upon the paper’s yellowed surface. At first they appeared much the same as before, but then the text began to slowly wilt and lose its color. The squiggly lines and archaic symbols seemed to lighten and float up from the page. They reshaped and rearranged themselves into new forms, and the curl of each brushstroke straightened along a level plane of letters Cassie recognized. Suddenly she could decipher the book’s language and translate it at once to simple English.
Specific words jumped out at her: spiritus immundus, evil spirit; daimonion, demon. Nytramancia, the black art.
Some of the words formed into what Cassie understood were titles of other books.
Das puch aller verpoten kunst, ungelaubens und der zaubrey. The Book of All Forbidden Arts, Heresy and Sorcery.
De Exorcismis et Supplicationibus Quibusdam. Of Exorcisms and Certain Supplications.
Sacrifices, Pacts.
Conjurations, Commanding Spirits.
These were the dark rites Cassie would have to learn in order to save her friends—and Adam. She must master the book’s evil, not be afraid of it, and not be ashamed of her connection to it. It was her destiny—there was no question. But she didn’t know how she was going to do it alone.
Copyright
Cover art © Michael Frost
Cover design by Sarah Nicole Kaufman
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
The Secret Circle: The Hunt
Copyright © 2012 by Alloy Entertainment and L. J. Smith
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
www.epicreads.com
Produced by Alloy Entertainment
151 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001
www.alloyentertainment.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.
ISBN 978-0-06-213042-6
EPub Edition © JULY 2012 ISBN 9780062130440
12 13 14 15 16 CG/RRDH 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
First Edition
Created by
L. J. SMITH
Written by Aubrey Clark
THE
SECRET
CIRCLE
The Temptation
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
&nbs
p; Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Copyright
Chapter 1
It was a cool, purple night, and the candles continued to burn, flickering orange and yellow against the cave walls. But the hunters no longer mumbled their soft chant. They’d fallen silent. Their hardened bodies littered the ground, with their faces frozen in a soundless eternal scream.
Cassie looked at her hands, dirty and shaking. What had she done?
She glanced at Adam. He appeared pale and sickened, unsteady on his feet like he might faint.
Diana seemed a little dazed, unable to figure out what had just occurred.
The smell of death was thick in the air. As Cassie breathed it in, her mouth filled with the heady, metallic taste of guilt.
Then Max’s voice boomed. “You just killed my father. He’s dead! Do you understand that?”
Slowly, Cassie’s friends surrounded her, but they were no longer themselves—their faces had altered into distorted and ugly shapes. Adam sneered with narrowed blackened eyes and spoke in a voice that wasn’t his own. “Give us the book, dear one,” he said. “Or die.”
Diana curled her fingers and twitched. “Better yet,” she said, “give us the book and then die.”
So much death, Cassie thought. When will it stop? Fear coursed through her.
She tried to back away, but she found herself pinned against the rocky wall of the cave. There was nowhere to run.
Melanie reached out and grabbed Cassie by the neck. She squeezed her long fingers tight around Cassie’s throat, cutting off her breath.
Laurel clapped and cheered in a piercing, morbid singsong: “Die, die, die!”
I’m not ready to die! Cassie tried to scream.
But she couldn’t find her voice, and she couldn’t breathe, and soon the flickering cave walls went black—
She startled awake, gasping for air.
Cassie looked around her dark bedroom, confused about where she was. She mentally rifled through the last twenty-four hours, separating what was real from what she’d just imagined. The truth gradually snaked itself around her guts.
Her nightmare was her reality.
That evening at the caves, after performing the curse that destroyed the witch-hunters, the boy she loved and all her closest friends had turned into monsters before her eyes. The truth of it pierced her chest like a slick blade and remained there, stuck—there was no release.
The alarm clock on her nightstand told her it was almost morning, but the sky through her window was clouded over in charcoal gray. A storm must be coming. She reached over to the lamp’s hanging beaded cord and tugged it to life. Scattered around her bedroom floor, Cassie saw pages and pages of her handwriting—translations, notes, doodles—all scribbled the previous night while she worked through Black John’s Book of Shadows. She’d fallen asleep trying to figure out a way to save her possessed friends.
Now, beneath the soft yellow glow of her lamp, Cassie reexamined what she’d written on each page. She’d translated reams of dark magic spells and incantations, but, so far, she’d had no luck finding a single word referring to demon possession.
Cassie picked up her father’s Book of Shadows from where it lay on the floor. She rested it upon her lap and stared at its aged cover. It looked like any old book, but she knew the power contained in its pages. Opening it didn’t burn her fingers anymore, the way it once did. Because it was a part of her now, and she was a part of it—for better or worse.
A crack of thunder caused Cassie to flinch. Then the sky opened, unleashing a violent rain against the glass of her windows.
She blushed at her own jumpiness. Her spell had trapped her friends in the cave, Cassie reminded herself, so at least for now, she was safe. However, running her fingers through the book’s tattered pages, Cassie reflected that safe was hardly how she’d describe what she felt at the moment. Determined was more like it.
Cassie awoke for the second time that morning to a room that was sunny and bright. She climbed out of bed, thankful the storm had passed, and went to her window to greet the ocean. Admiring the way it rolled and sparkled never ceased to calm her—but today the beach struck her as lonesome, abandoned. No person could be seen for miles.
Cassie dressed quickly and went downstairs to find her mom making enough pancakes to feed an army.
“Oh, no,” she said aloud.
Her mother looked up from the sizzling butter in her frying pan. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” Cassie said. “But for the moment, there’s the small problem that no one’s here to eat these.”
Cassie picked a pancake from the top of a pile, rolled it in her hands, and bit into it like a piece of licorice. Sitting down at the kitchen table, she tried to figure out the best way to explain the events of last night to her mother. But there was no best way. She just had to come out with it straight: They’d gone to the caves, performed the hunter curse, and Scarlett betrayed them.
“The hunters died,” Cassie said, still hardly able to believe it herself. “The spell killed them all, even Max’s dad.”
Her mother’s naturally pale skin appeared to whiten. She pitched forward, ignoring the pancake currently sizzling and smoking in the pan, and motioned Cassie to continue.
“Now the whole Circle is possessed. To perform the curse, we had to call upon Black John’s ancestors, and they’ve taken hold of everyone and won’t let go. I’ve been poring through Black John’s book trying to find a way to save them, but I haven’t been able to find anything remotely helpful.”
“I told you to leave that book alone.” Her mother’s voice sounded severe, like a scolding. She turned off the stove and abandoned her pancake batter, then reached for a dish towel and wiped off her hands. She was quiet for a few seconds, twisting the towel sorrowfully in her fingers.
Cassie knew she should have listened about not touching her father’s book. Maybe her mother thought she’d gotten what she deserved.
But when she finally looked up, the only emotion on her mother’s face was concern. “Is it awful that all I can think right now is how happy I am that you’re okay?” she said. Her long dark hair framed her face like a shroud.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Cassie said, but the look she gave her mom betrayed her true concern.
“Possession is serious, Cassie. If there’s a way to save your friends, it won’t come easy, and you surely can’t do it alone.”
Cassie’s heart sank like a heavy stone.
An odd expression crossed her mother’s face, a flash of discomfort, of pain. “There’s a man,” she said. “On the mainland. In Concord. He used to live in New Salem a long time ago.”
Cassie waited for her mother to say more, but she didn’t.
“Who is he?” As far as Cassie knew, her mother had broken ties with everyone from her past days in New Salem.
“Last I heard, he was the head librarian at a research institute that specializes in the occult.” Her mother began cleaning up—something she always did when she was ill at ease. “He may know something.”
“Why haven’t you ever mentioned him before?” Cassie asked.
Her mother averted her eyes. “We didn’t exactly part on the best of terms.”
“But you think he can help?”
“If there’s a man alive who knows how to perform an exorcism, it’s him.”
Exorcism, Cassie thought. Just the word brought a shiver to her spine. She imagined heads whirling around like spinning tops, projectile vomiting. Was that what was in stor
e for the people she loved most?
“He’s a scholar, an academic,” her mother said. “Not a priest or anything like that. His name is Timothy Dent.”
She focused on the task of collecting the broken eggshells from the countertop and dropping them into the trash. “We should go see him right away. The more time that passes, the worse it’ll be for your friends.”
Cassie took a sip of her mother’s cup of coffee and found that it had already become cold.
“Have a little more to eat.” Her mother placed a plate of pancakes and a bottle of maple syrup on the table in front of Cassie and handed her a fork and knife. “You can’t help anyone else if you don’t take care of yourself first.”
Cassie nodded, but the last person she was thinking of right now was herself.
Chapter 2
Cassie’s mother waited in the car while Cassie ran inside the Cup for two to-go cappuccinos and some biscotti for the road. She opened the door to the coffee shop with a shakiness she couldn’t name—part exhaustion, part dread. Why was her mother so tight-lipped about this man they were going to see? Her stomach felt too queasy for biscotti.
Once inside the shop, she inhaled a deep breath of coffee-scented air and tried to steer her feelings toward hope. The Cup was crowded as usual, which gave her a few minutes to collect herself. She observed the line of people waiting at the counter: a twenty-something girl yapping on her cell phone, a taller, older woman deliberating over apple or strawberry rhubarb pie. Then Cassie spotted broad shoulders beneath a black T-shirt that she recognized instantly—Max. Her breath caught in her throat.
With everything that had happened, it was hard for Cassie to believe that only a few hours before she’d seen Max at the caves, where he’d watched his fellow hunters fall dead at the hands of the Circle. Cassie knew she would never be able to forget the way Max passed his eyes over each member of the Circle as his father breathed his last breath in his arms. How he’d glared at Diana, threatening her not to follow him, before running from the cave and disappearing into the night.
