by L. J. Smith
There was lots of food. Dried pumpkin seeds (“Without salt,” Laurel said), pumpkin bread and gingerbread baked by Diana, boxes of chocolate- and orange-frosted doughnuts from Adam, a bowl of mixed Halloween candy provided by Suzan, soft drinks and spiced cider, and a large paper bag of Chris’s that rattled.
“Nuts! Yeah! For virility!” Doug yelled to the other guys, with an uncouth gesture.
“Hazelnuts symbolize wisdom,” Melanie said patiently, but the Henderson brothers just sneered.
And there were apples: winesaps, greenings, macintoshes. “Apples for love and death,” Diana said. “Especially at Halloween. Did you know they were sacred to the goddess Hera?”
“Did you know the seeds contain cyanide?” Faye added, smiling oddly. She’d been smiling oddly at Cassie ever since Cassie had emerged from behind the streamer curtain with Adam at the dance. Now, leaning over to take a piece of gingerbread, she murmured in Cassie’s ear, “What happened back there when he followed you? Did you blow your chance?”
“It isn’t nice to fool around with guys who’re taken,” Cassie whispered tiredly, as if explaining to a five-year-old.
Faye chuckled. “Nice? Is that what you want for your epitaph? ‘Here lies Cassie. She was . . . nice’?”
Cassie turned her head away.
“I know an apple spell,” Laurel was saying to the group. “You peel an apple in one long spiral, then throw the peel over your shoulder, and if it doesn’t break, it forms the initial of your true love.”
They tried this, without much success. The peelings kept breaking, Suzan cut herself on Deborah’s knife, and when Diana did manage to throw a peeling over her shoulder, it only formed a spiral.
“Well, that’s sacred to the goddess at least,” Laurel said, frowning. “Or to the Horned One,” she added mischievously, looking at Adam.
Cassie had been deliberately breaking her apple peels; the whole fortune-telling thing made her uneasy. And not just because Melanie mentioned cheerfully, “They used to execute witches for this kind of divination on Halloween.”
“I’ve got another one,” Laurel said. “You throw a nut in the fire, say a pair of names, and see what happens. Like Suzan and David Downey,” she added impishly. “If the nut pops, they’re meant for each other. If it doesn’t, they’re doomed.”
“If he loves me, pop and fly; if he hates me, burn and die!” Suzan quoted dramatically as Laurel tossed a hazelnut in. The round little nut just sizzled.
“Laurel and Doug,” Chris snickered, throwing in another.
“Chris and Sally Waltman!” Doug countered.
“Cassie and Nick!”
Deborah tossed that one in, grinning, but Faye was noticeably unsmiling.
“Adam . . .” she said, holding a nut up high between long red nails and waiting until she had everyone’s attention. Cassie stared at her, poised on the edge of her brick. “. . . and Diana,” Faye said finally, and flicked the hazelnut into the flames.
Cassie, mesmerized, watched the nut where it lay on glowing embers. She didn’t want to look at it; she had to.
“There are lots of other Halloween traditions,” Laurel was going on. “It’s time to remember old people, people who’re coming to the winter of their lives—or that’s what my Granny Quincey says.”
Cassie was still staring at that one hazelnut. It seemed to be jiggling—but was it going to pop?
“It’s getting late,” Adam said. “Don’t you think we should get started?”
Diana brushed pumpkin-bread crumbs off her hands and stood. “Yes.”
Cassie only took her eyes off the fire for an instant, but in that instant, there was a sound like gunfire. Two or three nuts had exploded at once, and when Cassie looked back she couldn’t see the one Faye had thrown. It had popped—or she’d lost track of it. She couldn’t tell which.
A heartbeat later it flashed through her mind to wonder about Deborah’s nut—for Cassie and Nick. But she couldn’t tell what had become of that one, either.
“All right, now,” Diana said. “This is going to be a different kind of Circle. It’s going to be more powerful than anything we’ve ever used before, because we need more protection than we’ve ever needed before. And it’s going to take everybody’s help.” She followed this with an earnest glance at Faye, who replied with a look of utmost innocence.
Cassie watched Diana draw a circle inside the ruined foundation with her black-handled knife. The bonfire was at the center. Everyone was serious now, their eyes following the path of the knife as it cut through the soil, making an almost perfect ring with a single gap at the northeast corner.
“Everyone get inside, and then I’ll close it,” Diana said. They all filed inside and sat along the inner perimeter of the ring. Only Raj was left on the outside, watching anxiously and whining a little in his throat.
“After this,” Diana said, closing the gap with a sweep of the knife, “no one leaves the protection of the circle. What we’re summoning up inside will be dangerous, but what’ll be hanging around outside will be even worse.”
“How dangerous?” Sean said nervously. “What’s inside, I mean.”
“We’ll be safe as long as we don’t go near the fire or touch it,” Diana said. “No matter how strong a spirit it is, it won’t be able to part from the fire we use to summon it. All right,” she added briskly, “now I’m going to call on the Watchtower of the East. Powers of Air, protect us!”
Standing facing the dark eastern sky and ocean, Diana held a burning stick of incense and blew it eastward across the circle. “Think of air!” she told the coven members, and at once Cassie not only thought of it, but felt it, heard it. It started as a gentle breeze blowing from the east, but then it began to gust. It became a blast, a roaring wind beating in their faces, blowing Diana’s long hair backward like a banner. And then it diverted, flowing around the circumference of the circle, enclosing them.
Diana took a burning stick out of the fire and moved to stand in front of Cassie, who was seated at the southernmost edge of the circle. Waving the stick over Cassie’s head, she said, “Now I’m calling on the Watchtower of the South. Powers of Fire, protect us!”
She didn’t need to say, think of fire. Cassie could already feel the heat radiating on her back, could picture the pillar of flame bursting up behind her. It raced around like sparks across gunpowder, to form a circle of wildfire just outside the circle of wind.
It’s not real, Cassie reminded herself. They’re just symbols we’re visualizing. But they were awfully concrete-looking symbols.
Diana moved again. Dipping her fingers in a paper cup, she sprinkled water across the western perimeter, between Sean and Deborah. “I’m calling on the Watchtower of the West. Powers of Water, protect us!”
It surged up, a phantom glass-green wave, cresting higher and higher. The swell flowed around to encompass the circle with a wall of water.
Lastly, Diana moved north, facing Adam and scattering salt across the northern line. “Watchtower of the North,” she said, in a voice that wavered slightly and showed how much this was taking out of her. “Powers of Earth, protect us!”
The ground rumbled beneath them.
It caught Cassie off guard, and the rest of the group was even more startled than she was. They weren’t used to earthquakes here in New England, but Cassie was a native Californian. She saw that Sean was about to jump up.
“Deborah, get Sean!” she cried.
In an instant, the biker girl had grabbed Sean and was forcibly holding him from running. The tremors became more and more violent—and then with a sound like a thunderclap, the ground split. A chasm opened all around the circle, spewing up a strong, sulfurous smell.
It isn’t real. It isn’t real, Cassie reminded herself. But surrounding her she saw the phantoms of the four elements Diana had invoked, layered one after another. A circle of raging wind, then a ring of fire, then a wall of seawater, and finally a chasm in the earth. Nothing from the outside could pass tho
se boundaries—and Cassie wouldn’t like to bet on anything from the inside getting out safely, either.
Shakily, Diana walked over to sit down in her place between Nick and Faye. “Okay,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Now we all concentrate on the fire. Look into it and let the night do the rest. Let’s see if anything comes to talk to us.”
Cassie’s eyes shifted to Melanie, beside her. “But if we’re protected from everything outside, who’s going to be able to come talk to us?” she murmured.
“Something from here,” Melanie whispered back, looking down at the barren earth inside the circle. Inside the foundations of the house.
“Oh.”
Cassie gazed into the flames, trying to clear her mind, to be open to whatever might be trying to cross the veil between the invisible world and this one. Tonight was the night, and now was the time.
The fire began smoking.
Just a little at first, as if the wood were damp. But then the smoke got darker—still transparent, but blacker. It streamed upward and hung in a cloudy mass above the bonfire.
Then it began to change.
It was twisting, swelling, like thunderheads rolling together. As Cassie stared, her breath clogging in her throat, it began to mold itself, to form a shape.
A man-shape.
It seemed to develop from the top down, and it was wearing old-fashioned clothes, like something out of a history book. A hat with a high crown and a stiff brim. A cloak or cape which hung down from broad shoulders, and a wide, severe linen collar. Breeches tied below the knees. Cassie thought she could make out square-toed shoes, but at times the lower legs just dwindled into the smoke of the fire. One thing she noticed, the smoke never actually detached from the fire, it always remained connected by a thin trail.
The figure floated there motionless except for eddies within itself.
Then it drifted toward Cassie.
She was the one who seemed to be facing it straight on. A sudden thought came into her mind. When Adam had first taken the crystal skull out of his backpack on the beach, it had seemed to be looking directly at her. And again—at the skull ceremony, she remembered. When Diana had pulled the cloth off the skull then, those hollow eyesockets had seemed to be staring right into Cassie’s eyes.
Now this thing was staring at her in the same way.
“We should ask it a question,” Melanie said, but even her usually calm voice was unsteady. There was a feeling of menace about the cloudy shape, of evil. Like the dark energy inside the skull, only stronger. More immediate.
Who are you? thought Cassie, but her tongue was frozen, and anyway, she didn’t need to ask. There was no doubt at all in her mind who the shape in front of her was.
Black John.
Then came Diana’s voice, clear and carefully calm. “We’ve invited you here because we’ve found something of yours,” she said. “We need to know how to control it. Will you talk to us?”
There was no answer. Cassie thought the thing was moving closer to her—but maybe it was just an illusion.
“There are terrible things going on,” Adam said. “They have to be stopped.”
No illusion. It was coming closer.
“Are you controlling the dark energy?” Melanie asked abruptly, and Laurel’s voice blended with hers: “You’re dead! You’ve got no right to be interfering with the living.”
“What’s your problem, anyway?” Deborah demanded.
Too fast, Cassie thought. Too many people asking questions. The shape was drifting steadily closer. Cassie felt paralyzed, as if she were in danger that no one else saw.
“Who killed Kori?” Doug Henderson was snarling.
“Why did the dark energy lead us to the cemetery?” Deborah jumped in.
“And what happened to Jeffrey?” Suzan added.
The trail of smoke connecting the shape to the fire was stretched out thin, and the shape was right in front of Cassie. She was afraid to look into that cloudy, indistinct face, but she had to. In its contours she thought she could recognize the face she’d glimpsed inside the crystal skull.
Get up, Cassie.
The words weren’t real words, they were in her mind. And they had some power over her. Cassie felt herself shift position, begin to rise.
Come with me, Cassie.
The others were still asking questions, and dimly Cassie could hear barking far away. But much louder was the voice in her mind.
Cassie, come.
She got to her feet. The swirling darkness seemed to be less transparent now. More solid. It was reaching out a formless hand.
Cassie reached out with her own hand to take it.
Chapter 5
“Cassie, no!”
Later Cassie would realize it was Diana who had shouted. At the time the words came to her only through a fog, and they sounded slow and dragging. Meaningless, like the continued mad barking that was going on somewhere far away. Cassie’s fingertips brushed the transparent black fingertips before her.
Instantly, she felt a jolt like the thrill that the hematite had given her. She looked up, shocked, from her own hand to the smoky, swirling face, and she recognized it—
Then everything shattered.
There was a great splash and icy-cold drops of water splattered Cassie from head to foot. At the same instant there was the hissing sound of red-hot embers being suddenly drenched. The smoky man-thing changed, dwindling, dissolving, as if it were being sucked back into the fire. A fire that now was nothing more than a sodden black mess of charred sticks.
Adam was standing on the other side of the circle, holding the cooler, whose contents had doused the fire. Raj was behind him, hair bristling, lips skinned back from his teeth.
Cassie stared from her own outstretched hand to Adam’s wide eyes. She swayed. Then everything seemed to go soft and gray around her, and she fainted.
“You’re safe now. Just lie still.” The voice seemed to come from a great distance, but it had a note of gentle authority. Diana, Cassie thought vaguely, and a great longing swept over her. She wanted to hold Diana’s hand, but it was too much trouble to move or try to open her eyes.
“Here’s the lavender water,” came another voice, lighter and more hasty. Laurel. “You dab it on, like this . . .”
Cassie felt a coolness on her forehead and wrists. A sweet, clean smell cleared her head a little.
She could hear other voices now. “. . . maybe, but I still don’t know how the hell Adam did it. I couldn’t move—felt like I was frozen.” That was Deborah.
“Me, too! Like I was stuck to the ground.” That was Sean.
“Adam, will you please sit down now so Laurel can look at you? Please? You’re hurt.” That was Melanie, and suddenly Cassie could open her eyes. She sat up and a cool damp cloth fell off her forehead into her lap.
“No, no—Cassie, lie still,” Diana said, trying to push her back down. Cassie was staring at Adam.
His wonderful unruly hair was blown every which way. His skin was reddened, like a skier with a bad case of windburn, and his clothes looked askew and damp. “I’m all right,” he was saying to Melanie, who was trying to sit him in a chair.
“What happened? Where are we?” Cassie said. She was lying on a couch in a shabby living room she knew she should recognize, but she felt very confused.
“We brought you to Laurel’s house,” said Diana. “We didn’t want to scare your mom and grandma. You fainted. But Adam saved your life.”
“He went through the four circles of protection,” Suzan said, with a distinct note of awe in her voice.
“Stupid,” Deborah commented. “But impressive.”
And then came Faye’s lazy drawl: “I think it was a tremendously devoted thing to do.”
There was a startled pause. Then Laurel said, “Oh, well, you know Adam and duty. I guess he is devoted to it.”
“I would’ve done it—so would Doug—if we could’ve got up,” Chris insisted.
“And if you could’ve thought o
f it—which you couldn’t,” Nick said dryly and a little grimly. His expression was dark.
Cassie was watching as Laurel dabbed with a damp towel at Adam’s face and hands. “This is aloe and willow bark,” Laurel explained. “It should keep the burns from getting worse.”
“Cassie,” Diana said gently, “do you remember what happened before you fainted?”
“Uh . . . you guys were asking questions—too many questions. And then—I don’t know, this voice started talking in my head. That thing was staring at me . . .” Cassie had a sudden thought. “Diana—at the skull ceremony in your garage, you know how you had the skull under a cloth?” Diana nodded. “Did you have it facing any particular way under the cloth?”
Diana looked startled. “Actually, there was something about that that worried me. I put the skull facing the place where I’d sit in the circle—but when I took the cloth off, it was facing the other way.”
“It was facing me,” Cassie said. “Which means either somebody moved it or . . . it moved itself.” They were looking at each other, both puzzled and uneasy, but communicating. Cassie felt closer to Diana than she had in weeks. Now was the time to make up, she thought.
“Diana,” she began, but just then she noticed something. Adam’s mask of horns and oak leaves was sitting on a chair beside Diana, and one of Diana’s slender hands was resting on it, caressing it as if for comfort. It was an unconscious gesture—and a completely revealing one. A bolt of resentment shot through Cassie’s heart. Herne and the goddess Diana—they belonged together, right? And Diana knew it. Later tonight they’d probably perform that little ceremony Faye had been talking about.
Cassie looked up and found Faye looking at her, golden eyes hooded and ironic. Faye smiled faintly.
“What is it?” Diana was saying. “Cassie?”
“Nothing.” Cassie stared down at the threadbare violet rug on the hardwood floor. “Nothing. I feel all right now,” she added. It was true, the disorientation was almost gone. But the memory of that smoky face stayed with her.