by L. J. Smith
“Untie her,” Cassie said. “I’ll check upstairs.”
Cassie heard Diana, Adam, and Faye ripping apart her bedroom before she saw them. Everything they touched, they left tattered and torn.
“You’re wasting your time,” Cassie said from the doorway. “The book isn’t here.”
Diana was the first to look up. “Tell us where it is, or we’ll burn this whole house down.”
“We’re good at burning things,” Faye said. “As you know.”
“And I’m good at putting fires out,” Cassie said. “As you know.”
Adam narrowed his eyes. “She’s becoming less fearful,” he said. “Let’s show her why that’s a mistake.”
Together, Adam and Faye stared Cassie down. She fell to her knees, gasping for air—but she had anticipated this attack. This time she was ready.
When she’d tapped into her dark magic earlier in the day, it had left a resonance. A tingle of that power remained on the tip of her tongue and fingers. She urged it to come again, more easily this time. The words uttered themselves: Audire sonum malum.
Suddenly Adam, Faye, and Diana all covered their ears with their hands. They wailed. Whatever spell had come to Cassie hit the spirits like a screeching alarm.
Cassie felt her strength flare. She stood up tall and repeated the spell again.
Her friends backed away, crouched over, trying to escape the sound blaring inside their own heads. They could barely drag themselves to the doorway.
Cassie stepped aside, allowing them to stumble by her and down the stairs. She followed them, guiding them with her spell, past Nick and her mother in the kitchen and out the way they came in.
Cassie pursued them until the blur of their doubled-over bodies disappeared down the block, lost to the sunshine. Then she rushed to her mother, who was untied but sitting in the same chair, drinking a glass of water.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I only wish I could have stopped them.”
Nick surveyed the damage their visitors had done to the front door and windows. “I can replace the glass and repair the door,” he said. “But they’ll probably just break through it again.”
Cassie’s mother appeared unreasonably calm considering what she’d just been through. She rubbed at the tender rope burns on her arms and wrists, but she spoke loudly and clearly. “We have to take stronger precautions.”
“Nick and I have been trying to research a guarding spell to protect the house,” Cassie said. “But we haven’t been able to find one that would work on a demon.”
“I know one,” her mother said matter-of-factly. “I still remember the spell your grandmother used when she built the secret room.”
She gave Cassie a somber look. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had to worry about demon spirits entering the house.”
Nick had been pushing some broken glass into a small pile near the door. When he looked up, he asked, “Does that include me? Do I count as a demon or a human?”
Cassie’s mother blushed, feeling Nick’s shame for him. “You’ll be fine here as long as the spirit doesn’t take full possession of your body.”
Nick returned his focus to the pile of glass. “Then that should be no problem,” he said. “As long as I’ve got Cassie pulling for me, there’s no way that’ll happen.”
Cassie looked at Nick’s face and saw so much weariness there, but also extraordinary strength. She wasn’t sure what she would have done without him.
CHAPTER 11
Cassie and Nick were sprawled on the couch, watching a movie to unwind. They’d treated themselves to a day home from school, so she and Nick could make the necessary repairs to the house after yesterday’s attack. But they’d finished the job in record time, leaving the rest of the afternoon for just the two of them. The movie was a romantic comedy, one Cassie had seen before and loved—yet she couldn’t help watching Nick as much as she watched the film.
She wasn’t searching him for a sign of the demon any longer. This was different, looking more for the comfort Nick’s face brought her. His dark eyes and strong jaw, the way he could focus on her in such a way that made her feel like the only person in the world, or at least the only one that mattered. And he was warm. Always, like a heated rock to curl up beside.
While watching the screen, Nick subconsciously ran his fingers up the length of Cassie’s arm, from her wrist to her elbow, and back down again.
Or maybe it wasn’t subconsciously.
Cassie felt the sensation in her whole body. She knew she should pull her arm away, but instead she found herself closing her eyes to better enjoy it.
From the sound of the movie alone, she recognized the scene of the hero getting to kiss his dream girl for the first time. When she reopened her eyes, she found Nick watching her as he continued stroking her arm.
Finally, she pulled away from him.
Nick clicked off the TV and leaned in closer.
Cassie felt her face get hot. Was he going to kiss her? She could tell he wanted to. His breath was heavy, needy, close to her ear.
“Nick, no,” Cassie said.
He exhaled with frustration and looked down. “Because of Adam?”
Cassie nodded.
“But these past few days have been . . . and you know how I feel about you, Cassie.”
If only Adam were as strong as Nick, Cassie thought. Why wasn’t his love enough to break through the possession?
“You know how I feel about you, too,” Cassie said.
Nick shook his head. “Not really.”
He tried to reach for Cassie’s hand again, but she didn’t let him. “I think we should get back to work translating the spell.”
She stood up and made her way to the stairs without looking Nick in the eyes.
He followed behind her, sullenly.
Up in her room, Cassie went right to the top drawer of her desk. She opened it roughly and pushed aside the decoy pile of sketchbooks and folders set there to hide the pages she’d copied from her father’s book.
Cassie unfolded the pages carefully upon her desk, straightening out their edges. To the naked eye, they appeared to be blank because of the protective spell she’d cast on them.
Nick plopped down on her bed as she rested her palms upon the papers. She whispered the secret incantation to reveal their text:
Hidden words, dark to pale
I who concealed you, now lift your veil
Gradually the familiar ink-black swirl of Cassie’s handwriting reappeared.
She sat at her desk, bent over the pages, examining the strange triangular symbol that she hadn’t been able to get out of her head since Max pointed it out to her. A triskelion within a circle, Max had called it. Once believed to exorcise evil spirits. Other than that symbol, the text on the page was mostly nonsense to Cassie, a jumble of ink that meant nothing.
She stared at the string of writing before her until the lines all blurred together. There were a few characters she understood, a few dozen ancient words, a handful of symbols. But it was the same characters and words that she understood every time, and the same ones she didn’t understand over and over again. She wasn’t figuring out anything new.
Nick lay on her bed playing a game on his phone.
“Nick,” she said, trying to regain his attention. “I don’t understand why translating these pages has been so difficult.”
Nick tossed his phone down and joined Cassie at her desk, standing behind her, with his hands on the back of her chair. “Well, if you can’t translate it, no one can,” he said, sounding annoyed. “You’re the one who’s bound to the book. And this isn’t even a language.” He smacked the papers with his fingers. “Don’t your translation skills come from within you? From your blood?”
“That’s just it,” Cassie said. “Timothy said Absolom might have doctored the exorcism, which means he probably made it a dark-magic spell. But it must be a level of darkness even I can’t access. I’ve tried and tried, but I just can’t do it.”
“Then
we’re doomed,” Nick exclaimed, sweeping the papers off Cassie’s desk.
He was sweating, and his chest heaved up and down with his breath.
Could their conversation downstairs have left him upset enough to stir the demon?
He turned around so Cassie couldn’t see his face.
“Nick, come closer,” Cassie said. She put her hand on his back, but he shrugged it off and bent down to pick up the papers from the floor.
“I have it under control,” he said, shaking the papers at her. “It’s just this spell—”
He stared at the writing on the crinkled page in his grip. “It’s . . .”
Suddenly his eyes turned black. His upper lip curled oddly to the left. He began to mumble: Discedere, malum spiritus. Exi, seductor. Relinquere haec innocens corpora.
Cassie tore the papers away from him and smacked her hand onto his heart. It was beating faster than even Adam’s had, that night at the caves.
“Calm down!” she screamed. “Stay with me, Nick.”
He took a few deep breaths, and his heartbeat slowed, thankfully, but his eyes were still darker than their usual mahogany brown.
“I could read it,” he said, with a tremble in his voice. “For a few seconds I could understand the spell.”
Cassie glanced at the indecipherable text on the paper in her hand and then back at Nick. It all became clear. “Not you,” she said. “The demon inside you.”
Nick wiped the sweat from his brow. “I could read it because I’m possessed?”
Cassie nodded. “Whatever Blak ancestor of mine that’s trying to possess you can decipher the spell.”
They both got quiet as they allowed this new possibility to settle over them: Nick would have to give himself over to the demon in order to translate the spell.
“No,” Cassie said, before Nick even opened his mouth to speak. “It’s too dangerous.”
“It’s our only hope,” Nick insisted. “I have to give up control to the demon. Then I’ll come back again.”
“But what if you can’t?”
Nick took the papers from Cassie and went to her desk. He let his eyes pass quickly over the text. “I’m strong enough,” he said. “And once the spell is translated, you’ll be able to rid the whole Circle of demons.”
Cassie wanted to believe that Nick would be able to return, that she would be able to bring him back—but she couldn’t really be sure.
“I don’t want to do this,” she said.
But Nick had already opened Cassie’s notebook to a blank page and picked up a pen.
Cassie was terrified of what they were about to attempt, but Nick refused to be deterred. He closed his eyes for a moment, pen in hand, with the spell before him.
“I know I can do it,” he said, and when he reopened his eyes, they were black as marbles.
Cassie stepped back.
Nick sat up, unusually rigid. For a few seconds, he made no sound or movement. Then he began talking in a voice that wasn’t his own, in a language he could have never known—a low, guttural growl. And then he began writing.
Cassie watched from over his shoulder.
Nick’s whole body trembled, his neck twisted in impossible ways, but he continued to move the pen across the paper.
His script was shaky but clearly legible. Across the top of the blank notebook page, he wrote:
R i t e
F o r
E x o r c i s m
He was doing it. Cassie could hardly believe her eyes.
The veins on the insides of Nick’s arms wriggled beneath the skin. A disturbing high-pitched sound escaped his mouth, the screech of something sinful and starving.
The letters spurted from his pen faster and faster. He worked for about two minutes without pause. Then with one sudden motion he slammed the pen down onto the desk and looked up at Cassie. His face bubbled; his lips effervesced.
“Cassandra,” he said. His voice was unfathomable, a bottomless cavern. “Get me out of here.”
Cassie shuddered. Get who out of where? “Nick? Is that you?”
Nick’s eyes rolled back into his head. His whole body shook, and he fell onto the floor, convulsing.
Cassie leaned over him, smacking his cheek, pressing on his racing heart. “Nick, come back to me,” she screamed. “It’s Cassie, please come back to me.”
A gurgling sound came out of Nick’s mouth, and she realized he was choking on his own tongue. “Nick!” she yelled, pulling him upright and hugging him close to her chest. She held him so they were heart to heart.
“Please don’t leave me,” she said into his ear. “I can’t go on without you.”
The awful gurgling sound stopped, but Nick’s body still convulsed.
“I’ve got you,” Cassie said. “I’m here, and I’m not letting you go.”
She kissed his soaking-wet head and his face. She encircled his torso so tightly they could have melded together as one.
Gradually, the shaking lessened.
Cassie continued holding him, rocking him back and forth, as his heartbeat began to steady.
In those few minutes, the spell ceased to be relevant. Nick, heavy in her arms, was her whole world.
It was a while before he coughed and startled himself awake. She reawakened with him. He blinked his eyelashes rapidly and looked around the room. When he locked eyes with Cassie, she saw they were back to their normal color.
“What just happened?” Nick asked.
Cassie reached for the notebook that now contained the full text of the exorcism spell. “This happened,” she said. “You did it.”
“And I made it back?”
“Yes,” Cassie said, throwing her arms around him again. “You did.”
Nick was exhausted by the possession. Cassie had to help him to the bed and give him water to drink. She watched him sleep for almost an hour, following the rise and fall of his chest, listening to his even breaths. She wanted to touch him but wouldn’t dare disturb his slumber. He’d given everything, and now he needed his rest.
While Nick continued to sleep, Cassie examined the spell. It was mystifying to look at, all hard-pressed inky lines, abrupt starts and stops. Nick’s distress was visible in every stroke. Cassie read it over, and over again.
Nick woke to her still analyzing its contents, absorbing each and every detail. “What does it say?” he asked groggily, wiping the sleep from his eyes.
“We need a personal item from each of our friends,” Cassie said, turning to him. “Something that’ll contain some of their energy or essence.”
She looked around her bedroom as Nick threw off the covers and stood up. In her closet, she found the hoodie Adam had left at her house, and in her jewelry box was a pair of gold hoop earrings Diana had recently let her borrow.
“That’s a start,” she said, placing the two items side by side on her bed, in the center of the Nick-shaped indentation lingering on the sheets. “But how will we find stuff from everyone else?”
Then she remembered everything that had been left in the basement when her friends were all sleeping there.
“The secret room,” Nick said, sharing the thought with her.
The two of them hurried downstairs to rummage through their friends’ belongings. They tore through the room, pulling at every drawer and opening every closet, tossing useless finds aside and out of the way.
Nick found a pair of Sean’s sneakers, Doug’s skateboard, and Chris’s baseball cap. Cassie grabbed Deborah’s motorcycle helmet, Laurel’s favorite scarf, and a pair of Melanie’s eyeglasses.
Then Nick held up a satiny red thong. “I’m pretty sure this is Faye’s,” he said.
Cassie ripped it from Nick’s hands, laughing. She couldn’t help it. She was giddy. Their friends were as good as saved.
They stood over the great pile of stuff they’d accumulated, admiring it.
“Where should we perform the spell?” Nick asked.
Cassie reached into her pocket and unfolded Nick’s translation.
“It says here it should be performed at the point of origin. What do you think that means?”
“Maybe where the possession took place,” Nick said. “That would be the caves.”
Cassie agreed. The remote caves where all this began seemed like an appropriate location.
“Do you think we should bring Max?” Cassie asked. “Someone besides us should be there in case something goes wrong. Though the caves are probably the last place he wants to see again.”
“He might say no, but we should ask him.” Nick gathered their friends’ belongings into his arms to carry upstairs. “I’ll go over to his house and talk to him about it while you gather the rest of the materials.”
Cassie felt her chest fill with hope. “We make quite the pair,” she said.
“The daughter of an evil witch,” Nick said, smiling. “And a half-possessed screwup.”
“The dream team,” Cassie laughed.
That evening, Cassie, Nick, and Max rowed through the dark, out to the caves. Max wanted to come. He’d told Nick he felt it was his duty to see the demons’ destruction through—after all, they were his father’s true murderers.
Nick docked the boat, tying it with thick rope to a protruding stump. He and Cassie entered the cave, with Max following close behind. They got right to work, solemnly preparing the spell. But the strange energy of the space didn’t go unnoticed. So much had happened there. Max stood over the spot where his father had lain dead. His shoulders seemed to fold in on themselves; his head hung down listlessly.
Cassie went to him. “You can wait outside by the boat,” she said. “It means a lot that you’re here, but I know this must be painful for you.”
“It’s not only that,” Max said. The hard dirt of the cave floor shuffled loudly beneath his feet. “Do you really think they’ll be saved?”
“I hope so.” When Max remained quiet she added, “Don’t you?”
“Of course,” he said immediately. “I want Diana to be okay.” Then he lowered his voice. “I just don’t know if I’m ready to see her again, to have her be back for real.”
Cassie glanced at Nick preparing the spell. “In all honesty, I feel the same way about Adam. I’m nervous to face him after . . .” She paused. “After all that’s happened.”