If we only had a larger crystal, Cassie thought. But there was no larger crystal. She thought desperately of the protruding outcrops of granite in New Salem . . . but they weren't crystal, they wouldn't hold and focus energy. Besides, she didn't just need a big crystal, she needed an enormous one. One so huge - so huge . . .
I like to think of crystals as a beach, she heard Melanie's laughing voice say in her mind. A crystal is just fossilized water and sand . . .
Along with the words came a picture. A glimpse of Cassie's own hand that first day on the beach at Cape Cod. "Look down," Portia had hissed, seeing Adam coming, and so Cassie had looked down, ashamed, staring at her own fingers trailing in the sand. In the sand that glittered with tiny flecks of garnet, with green and gold and brown and black crystals. A beach. A beach.
"With me!" Cassie shouted. "All of you think with me - give me your power! Now!"
She pictured it clearly, the long beach stretching parallel to Crowhaven Road. More than a mile of it, of crystal piled on crystal. She sent her thoughts racing toward it, gathering the power of the coven behind her. She focused on it, through it, looking now at Black John - at the crystal skull with its grinning teeth and its hollow eyes. And then she pushed with her mind.
She felt it go out of her, like a rush of heat, like a solar flare with the energy of the entire Circle driving it. It poured through her into the beach, and from the beach into Black John, focused and intensified, with all the power of Earth and Water combined. And this time when the skull exploded it was in a shattering rain of crystal like the blasted amethyst pendant.
There was a scream that Cassie would never forget. Then the floor of the house at Number Thirteen disappeared from under her feet.
Chapter Sixteen
"Are you okay?" Cassie asked Suzan, whom she happened to be lying on. "Is everybody okay?"
The Circle was lying scattered over the vacant lot as if some giant hand had dropped them. But everyone was moving.
"I think my arm's broken," Deborah said, rather calmly. Laurel crawled over to her to look at it.
Cassie stared around the lot. The house was gone. Number Thirteen was a barren piece of land again. And the light was changing.
"Look," Melanie said, her face turned up. This time there was joy and reverence in her voice.
The moon was showing silver again, just a thin crescent, but now the crescent was growing. The blood color was gone.
"We did it," Doug said, his blond hair disheveled more wildly than Cassie had ever seen it. He grinned. "Hey! We did it!"
"Cassie did it," Nick said.
"Is he really gone?" Suzan asked sharply. "Gone for good this time?"
Cassie looked around again, sensing nothing but brisk air and the endlessly moving sea. The earth was quiet. There was no light but moon and stars.
"I think he is," she whispered. "I think we won." Then she turned quickly to Adam. "What about the hurricane?"
He was fumbling at his belt with the radio. "I hope it's not broken," he said, and put the headphones on, listening.
Limping and crawling, they all gathered around him, and waited.
He kept listening, shaking his head, flicking the channels. His face was tense. Cassie saw Diana beside her, and reached out to take her hand. They sat together, hanging on. Then Adam sat straight suddenly.
"Gale force winds on Cape Cod . . . storm moving northeast. . . northeast! It's turned! It's heading out to sea!"
The Henderson brothers cheered, but Melanie hushed them. Adam was talking again.
"High tides . . . flooding . . . but it's okay, nobody's hurt. Property damage, that's all. We did it! We really did it!"
"Cassie did it - " Nick was beginning again, irritably, but Adam had leaped up and grabbed Cassie and was whirling her in the air. Cassie shrieked and kept shrieking as he swooped her around. She hadn't seen Adam this happy since ... well, she couldn't remember when she'd seen Adam this happy. Since the beach on Cape Cod, she guessed, when he'd flashed that daredevil smile at her. She'd forgotten, in their months of trouble, that grimness wasn't Adam's natural state.
Like Herne, she thought, when she was deposited, breathless and flushed, back on her feet. The horned god of the forest was a god of joyful celebration. Chris and Doug were trying to dance with her now, both together. Adam was waltzing Diana. Cassie collapsed, laughing, just as something large and furry hit her and rolled her over.
"Raj!" Adam said. "I told you to stay at home!"
"He's about as obedient as all of you," Cassie gasped, hugging the German shepherd as his wet tongue lapped her face. "But I'm glad you came. All you guys, not the dog," she said, looking around at them.
"We couldn't just leave you in there," Sean said.
Doug snickered, but he slapped the smaller boy on the back. "'Course not, tiger," he said, and rolled his eyes at Cassie.
Cassie was looking at Faye, who had been sitting a little apart from everyone else, the way Nick used to do. "I'm glad you came to join us too," she said.
Faye didn't look anything at all like a stenographer. Her mane of pitch-black hair was loose over her shoulders, and the black shift exposed more pale honey-colored skin than it covered. She looked a little bit like a panther and a lot like a jungle queen.
Her heavy-lidded golden eyes met Cassie's directly, and a small smile tugged at the corners of her lips.
Then she looked down. "I can do my nails red again, anyway," she said lazily.
Cassie turned away, hiding a smile of her own. That was probably as much acknowledgement from Faye as she was ever going to get.