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.
And 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 toward 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 her 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; those were 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 Cassie 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; the hand that held 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 burned circle 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 that 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 herself 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 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.
Melanie 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, 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.