“I didn't know you were so interested. You never seemed to be before.”
Faye glared. “One way or another I'll find out, Adam.”
“There's nothing else where I found it. Believe me, this was the only one of the Master Tools hidden there.”
Faye took a breath and then relaxed and smiled. “Well, the least you can do is give us all a chance to look at it.”
“No,” said Diana. “Nobody even touches it yet. We don't know anything about this except that it was used by the old coven-by Black John himself. That means it's dangerous.”
“Do we know for sure this is the crystal skull Black John wrote about?” Melanie asked, her voice quiet and rational.
“Yes,” Adam said. “At least, it fits the description in the old records exactly. And I found it in a place just like the place Black John described. I think it's the real thing.”
“Then it needs to be cleared and purified and studied before any of us work with it,” Diana said. She turned to Cassie. “Black John was one of the leaders of the original coven,” she said. “He died not long after New Salem was founded, but before that he took the coven's most powerful tools and hid them. For safekeeping, he said-but really because he wanted them for himself. For personal gain and revenge,” she said, looking at Faye meaningfully. “He was an evil man, and anything he touched is going to be full of negative influences. We're not going to use it until we're sure it's safe.”
If Black John had had anything to do with this skull, he must have been bad, Cassie thought. In some way she couldn't explain, she could feel darkness emanating from it. If she hadn't been so heartsick and dizzy, she would have said so-but surely everyone else could see for themselves.
“The old coven never found the lost Master Tools,” Laurel was saying. “They searched, because Black John had left some clues about where he might have hidden them, but they didn't have any luck. They made new tools, but none were ever as powerful as the originals.”
“And now we've found one,” Adam said, with a flash of excitement in his blue-gray eyes.
Diana lightly touched the back of his hand as it held the skull. She smiled up at him, and the message between them was clearer than words: pride and triumph shared. This was their project, something they'd been working on for years, and now they had succeeded at last.
Cassie clenched her teeth against the pain in her breastbone. They deserve a chance to be alone and enjoy it, she thought. With brittle, forced cheerfulness she said, “You know, I'm getting tired. I think maybe it's time…”
“Of course,” Diana said, instantly concerned. “You must be exhausted. We all are. We can talk more about this at the meeting tomorrow.”
Cassie nodded, and nobody else made any objections. Not even Faye. But as Diana was instructing Melanie and Laurel to walk Cassie up the beach to her house, Cassie accidentally met Faye's gaze. There was an odd, calculating expression in those golden eyes that would have bothered her if she hadn't been beyond caring by now.
At home, every light was blazing, even though the first streaks of dawn hadn't yet appeared over the ocean. Melanie and Laurel walked Cassie inside, and they found her mother and grandmother both sitting up in the parlor-a stiff old-fashioned room at the front of the house. The two women were wearing nightgowns and robes. Cassie's mother's hair was loose down her back.
Cassie saw at once by their faces that they knew.
Is this what I was brought here for? she thought. To join the Circle? There was no longer any doubt in her mind that she'd been brought here, deliberately, and for a very specific reason.
She got no answer from the voices inside her, not even from the deepest voice. And that was disturbing.
But she didn't have time to worry about it. Not now. She looked at her mother's face, drawn and anxious, but also full of a kind of half-concealed pride and hope. Like a mother watching her daughter high-dive in the Olympics, and waiting for the judges' scores. Her grandmother looked the same.
Suddenly, despite the aching pain in her chest, Cassie was filled with a surge of protective love for them. Both of them. She managed a smile as she and Melanie and Laurel stood in the doorway.
“So, Grandma,” she said, “does our family have a Book of Shadows?”
The tension broke into laughter as the two women rose.
“Not that I know of,” her grandmother said. “But anytime you like, we'll take another look through the attic.”
The meeting on Wednesday afternoon was tense. Everyone was on edge. And Faye clearly had a hidden agenda.
All she wanted to talk about was the skull. They should use it, she said, and immediately. All right, then, if not use it, at least check it out.
Try to activate it, see what imprints had been left on it.
Diana kept saying no. No checking it out. No activating it. They needed to purify it first. Ground it. Clear it. Which Faye knew would take weeks, if done properly. As long as Diana was in charge-
Faye said that at this rate Diana might not be in charge for long. In fact, if Diana kept refusing to test out the skull, Faye just might call for a leadership vote right now instead of waiting until November. Was that what Diana wanted?
Cassie didn't understand any of it. How do you check out a skull? Or ground it or clear it? But this time the argument was too heated for anyone to remember to explain to her.
She spent the entire meeting not watching Adam, who had tried to speak to her beforehand, but whom she'd managed to evade. She clung grimly to her resolve all the way through, even though the energy it took to ignore him exhausted her. She made herself not look at his hair, which had grown a little longer since she'd seen him, or at his mouth, which was as handsome and humorous as ever. She refused to let herself think about his body as she'd seen it on the beach in Cape Cod, with its flat, sinewy muscles and bare long legs. And most of all, she forced herself not to look into his eyes.