The Secret Circle: The Complete Collection (24 page)

Read The Secret Circle: The Complete Collection Online

Authors: L. J. Smith

Tags: #Young Adult, #Fantasy, #Romance, #Vampires, #Juvenile Fiction, #Teenage Girls, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Love & Romance, #Witchcraft, #Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Social Issues, #Young Adult Fiction, #love, #Dating & Sex, #Massachusetts

BOOK: The Secret Circle: The Complete Collection
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Now
! Go in!
But at that instant a scream tore through the room.
It was a scream of terror, high and wild, and it lanced through the utter silence. The door stopped opening, and Cassie felt herself being pulled backward. The door was receding, faster, faster. Then, just before she found herself outside the skull, a face flashed before her eyes. The same face she’d seen before. But it wasn’t receding; it was traveling toward her. Getting bigger. Bigger and bigger so fast—it would burst the crystal. It would—
“No!” cried Diana.
Cassie felt it at the same instant, an overwhelming sense of evil. Of something rushing toward them at incredible speed. Something that had to be stopped.
She never quite knew what happened next. Sean was sitting on the other side of Faye. Maybe he was the one who moved first; maybe he panicked and tried to bolt. In any case there was a commotion. Faye seemed to be trying to do something and Sean to stop her, or maybe it was the other way around. They were struggling. Diana was crying, “No, no!” Cassie didn’t know what to do.
She tried to check her instinctive flinching away from Faye, but it didn’t matter. Faye lurched forward and Cassie felt the pressure of Faye’s knee leave hers. The circle was broken, and Faye’s candle went out.
Instantly all the other candles were snuffed out too, as if by a blast of wind. In the same instant Cassie felt the rushing thing reach the limits of the crystal. It burst out of the skull and past the dark, smoking candles. Cassie didn’t know how she could tell this—everything was pitch-black. But she
felt
it. She could sense the rushing thing like an inkier blackness. It exploded past her, blowing her hair straight up and to the side. She threw out an arm to protect her face, but by that time it was gone.
There was a faint cry in the darkness.
Then everything was quiet again.
“Turn on the
lights
,” somebody gasped.
Suddenly Cassie could see. Adam was standing by the light switch. Diana was standing too, her face white and frightened. Around the circle every face reflected alarm and consternation—except Nick’s. His was impassive as usual.
Faye was just sitting up. She looked as if she’d been blown backward by some tremendous force. Fury blazing in her eyes, she turned on Sean. “You pushed me!”
“No, I didn’t!” Sean looked around the room for help. “She was trying to get to the skull! She was lunging for it!”
“You lying little
worm
! You were trying to get away. You were going to break the circle.”
“She—”
“No, I
didn’t
!”
“All right!” shouted Diana.
Adam came up beside her. “It doesn’t matter who did what,” he said, his voice tense. “What matters is that—energy—that escaped.”
“What energy?” Faye said sullenly, examining her elbow for bruises.
“The energy that knocked you flat on your back,” Diana said grimly.
“I
fell
. Because this little snot
pushed
me.”
“No,” said Cassie before she could stop herself. She was beginning to shake in delayed reaction. “I felt it too. Something came out.”
“Oh,
you
felt it. The expert.” Faye gave her a glance of scorn and disdain. Cassie looked around at the others, who were still sitting, and was surprised to see uncertainty in their expressions. Surely they had felt it too?
“I felt—something,” Melanie said. “Something dark inside the skull. Some negative energy.”
“Whatever it was, it was released when we broke the circle,” Adam said. He looked at Diana. “It’s my fault. I shouldn’t have let this happen.”
“You mean you should have kept the skull a secret from the rest of us,” Faye said sharply. “For your own personal use.”
“What difference does it make?” Laurel cried from the other side of the circle. “If something
was
released from the skull, it’s out
there
right now. Doing God knows what.”
“It’s—bad,” Cassie said. What she wanted to say was “evil” but that seemed such a melodramatic word. Yet that was what she had sensed in the dark, rushing thing. Evil. The intent to destroy, to harm.
“We’ve got to stop it,” Adam said.
Suzan was fiddling with a button on her blouse. “How?”
This silence was long and uncomfortable. Adam and Diana were looking at each other, seeming to have some grim unspoken conversation. The Henderson brothers were also telegraphing something to each other, but they didn’t look as if they minded having something murderous and evil loose in the immediate community. In fact, on the whole they looked pleased.
“Maybe it’ll get whoever got Kori,” Chris offered at last.
Diana stared at him. “Is that what you think?” Then her face changed. “Is that what you
were
thinking when we were reaching into it? Is that what you were
willing
?”
“We were supposed to just try and read the last imprints,” Melanie said, her voice as angry as Cassie had ever heard it.
The Henderson brothers looked at each other and shrugged. Deborah’s expression was somewhere between a scowl and a grin. Suzan was still fiddling. Nick, face expressionless, stood up.
“Looks like that’s all for tonight,” he said.
Diana exploded.
“You’re damn right it is!” she cried, astounding Cassie. She snatched up the skull in her two hands. “Now this is going to a safe place, where it belongs. Where it should have gone in the first place. I should have known you were all too irresponsible to deal with it.” Hugging the skull to her, she strode out of the garage.
Faye was instantly alert, like a cat who sees the flicker of a mouse’s tail. “I don’t think that was a very nice way to talk to us,” she said throatily. “I don’t think she
trusts
us, do you? Hands up—how many people here want to be led by someone who doesn’t trust them?”
If looks could maim, the one Melanie threw Faye would have left her a basket case. “Oh, get
stuffed
, Faye,” she said in her classy accent. “Come on, Laurel,” she added, and got up to follow Diana toward the house.
Cassie, not knowing what else to do, followed
them
. Behind her she heard Adam saying to Faye in a low, tightly controlled voice, “I wish you were a guy.”
And Faye’s laughing, husky answer: “Why, Adam, I didn’t know your tastes ran that way!”
Diana was putting the skull back in the Pyrex dish when Adam came in behind Cassie. He went to Diana and put his arms around her.
She leaned against him a moment, eyes shut, but didn’t hold him in return. And after that moment she moved away.
“I’m all right. I’m just angry with them, and I’ve got to think.”
Adam sat on the bed, running a hand through his hair. “I
should
have kept it a secret from them,” he said. “It was my own stupid pride—”
“Don’t,” said Diana. “It would have been wrong to keep something from the Circle that belongs to them.”
“More wrong than to let them use it for stupid, malicious reasons?”
Diana turned away and leaned against the cabinet.
“Sometimes,” Adam said quietly, “I wonder about what we’re doing. Maybe the Old Powers should just be left asleep. Maybe we’re wrong to think we can handle them.”
“Power is only Power,” Diana said tiredly, not turning. “It’s not good or bad. Only the way we use it is good or bad.”
“But maybe nobody can use it without ending up using it badly.”
Cassie stood and listened, wishing she were anywhere else. She was aware that in some terribly civilized way, Diana and Adam were having a fight. She met Laurel’s eyes and saw that the other girl was just as uncomfortable.
“I don’t believe that,” Diana said finally, softly. “I don’t believe that people are that hopeless. That
evil
.”
Adam’s expression was bleak and longing, as if he wished he could share her belief.
Cassie, watching his face, felt a stab of pain, and then a wave of dizziness. She shifted, looking for a place to sit down.
Diana immediately turned around. “Are you all right? You’re white as a ghost.”
Cassie nodded and shrugged. “Just a little dizzy—I guess maybe I should go home. . . .”
The anger had drained out of Diana’s eyes. “All right,” she said. “But I don’t want you out there by yourself. Adam, would you walk her back? The beach way is faster.”
Cassie opened her mouth in reflexive horror. But Adam nodded quickly.
“Sure,” he said. “Although I don’t want to leave
you
alone. . . .”
“I want Melanie and Laurel to stay,” Diana said. “I want to start to purify this skull properly, with flower essences”—she looked at Laurel—“and other crystals.” She looked at Melanie. “I don’t care if it takes all night; I want to get it set up. And I want to start now. This minute.”
The two girls nodded. So did Adam. “All right,” he said.
And Cassie, who had been standing with her mouth open, suddenly thought of something and nodded too. Her hand automatically patted her front jeans pocket to feel the hard little lump there.
 
So that was how she found herself walking on the beach alone with Adam.
There was no moon that night. The stars shone with a fierce, icy brilliance. The waves roared and hissed on the shore.
Not romantic. Raw. Primitive. Except for the faint lights of houses above on the cliff, they might have been a thousand miles from civilization.
They were almost all the way to the narrow path up the bluff to Number Twelve when he asked her. She’d known in her heart that she couldn’t avoid it forever.
“Why didn’t you want anyone to know that we’d met before?” he said simply.
Cassie took a deep breath. Now was the time to see what kind of actress she was. She was very calm; she knew what had to be done, and somehow, she would do it. She
had
to do it, for Diana’s sake—and his.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, and marveled to hear how casual her voice sounded. “I just didn’t want anybody—like Suzan or Faye—to get the wrong impression. You don’t mind, do you? It didn’t seem very important.”
Adam was looking at her in an odd way, hesitating, but then he nodded. “If that’s what you want, I won’t mention it,” he said.
Relief washed over Cassie, but she kept her voice light. “Okay, thanks.
Oh
, by the way,” she went on, fishing in her pocket. “I’ve been meaning to give this back to you. Here.” It was strange how her fingers seemed to cling to the chalcedony rose, but she managed to open them and drop it into his hand. It lay on his palm, the quartz crystals seeming to capture a little of the starlight.
“Thanks for loaning it to me,” she said. “But now that I’m an official witch, I’ll probably be finding my own stones to work with. And besides”—she curved her lips in a teasing smile—“we don’t want anybody to get the wrong impression about
that
either, do we?”
She had never in her life acted like this with a boy, teasing and carefree and confident. Almost flirtatious while making it clear that she meant nothing by it. And it was so
easy
—she’d never imagined it could be this easy. It came, she supposed, from the fact that she was playing a role. It wasn’t Cassie standing here; it was someone else, someone who wasn’t afraid because the worst had already happened and there was nothing left to fear anymore.
A wry smile had touched Adam’s lips, as if he were responding automatically to her tone, but it disappeared almost instantly. He was looking at her hard, and she forced herself to return his gaze blandly and innocently, the way she had returned Jordan’s on the beach that day in August.
Believe me
, she thought, and this time she knew the power of her own thoughts, the power she could draw on to enforce her will.
Sky and water, sand and sea; As I will, so let it be
. Believe me, Adam. Believe me. Believe me.
He looked away from her suddenly, turning sharply toward the ocean. It reminded Cassie, to her surprise, of the way she had broken free of Faye’s mesmerizing gaze.
“You’ve changed,” he said, and there was wonder in his voice. Then he turned back to look at her with that hard, unrelenting gaze again. “You’ve really changed.”
“Of course. I’m a witch now,” she said reasonably. “You should have told me that in the beginning—it would have saved a lot of trouble,” she added in a scolding tone.
“I didn’t know. I could sense—something—in you, but I never thought of you being one of us.”

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