The Captive Page 0,27

Adam demanded.

"Yes," Cassie said shakily.

"What were you two doing?" Nick said, looking at them in disbelief. And even Adam asked, "How did you get over the fence?"

Deborah gave him a scornful look. "I didn't mean you," he said.

Cassie gave him a scornful look. "Girls can climb," she said. She and Deborah stood up and began brushing each other off, exchanging a glance of complicity.

"It's gone now," Adam said, wisely dropping the subject of fences. "But at least we know what it looks like."

Nick made a derisive sound. "What what looks like?"

"You can't still say you didn't see it," Deborah said impatiently. "It was here. It went for Cassie and me."

"I saw something-but what makes you think it was this so-called dark energy?"

"We were tracing it," said Adam.

"How do we know what we were tracing?" Nick rapped back. "Something that was around the place Lovejoy was killed, that's all. It could be the 'dark energy'-or just some garden-variety ghost."

"A ghost?" Cassie said, startled.

"Sure. If you believe in them at all, some of them like to hang out where murders are committed."

Deborah spoke up eagerly. "Yeah, like the Wailing Woman of Beverly, that lady in black that appears when somebody is going to die by violence."

"Or that phantom ship in Kennybunk-the Isidore. The one that comes and shows you your coffin if you're going to die at sea," Adam said, looking thoughtful.

Cassie was confused. She'd assumed it was the dark energy they were tracking-but who could tell? "It did end up in the cemetery," she said slowly. "Which seems like a logical place for a ghost. But if it wasn't the dark energy that killed Jeffrey, who was it? Who would want to kill him?"

Even as she asked, she knew the answer. Vividly, in her mind, she saw Jeffrey standing between two girls: one tall, dark, and disturbingly beautiful; the other small and wiry, with rusty hair and a pugnacious face.

"Faye or Sally," she whispered. "They were both jealous tonight. But-oh, look, even if they were mad enough to kill him, neither of them could have actually done it! Jeffrey was an athlete."

"A witch could have done it," Deborah said matter-of-factly. "Faye could've made him do it to himself."

"And Sally's got friends on the football team," Nick added dryly. "That's how she got herself voted Homecoming Queen. If they strangled him first, and then strung him up..."

Adam was looking disturbed at this coldblooded discussion. "You don't actually believe that."

"Hey, a woman scorned, you know?" Nick said. "I'm not saying either of them did it. I'm saying either of them could have."

"Well, we won't figure it out by standing here," Cassie said, shivering. Adam's jacket had slipped off when she went over the fence. "Maybe if we could try to trace it again-"

It was then she realized she wasn't holding the crystal.

"It's gone," she said. "Melanie's crystal. I must have dropped it when that thing rushed us. It should be right here on the ground, then. It's got to be," she said.

But it wasn't. They all stooped to look, and Cassie combed through the sparse, withered grass with her fingers, but none of them could find it.

Somehow, this final disaster, incredibly tiny in comparison to everything that had happened that night, brought Cassie close to tears.

"It's been in Melanie's family for generations," she said, blinking hard.

"Melanie will understand," Adam told her gently. He put a hand on her shoulder, not easily but carefully, as if keenly aware that they were in front of witnesses.

"It's true, though; there's no point in standing around here," he said to the others. "Let's get back to school. Maybe they've found out something about Jeffrey there."

As Cassie walked, the Cinderella shoes hurting her feet and Laurel's silvery dress streaked with dirt, she found herself looking straight into the Blood Moon. It was hovering over New Salem like the Angel of Death, she thought.

Normally, on the night of the full moon, the Circle would meet and celebrate. But on the day after Jeffrey's murder Diana was still sick, Faye was refusing to speak to anyone, and no one else had the heart to call a meeting.

Cassie spent the day feeling wretched. Last night at the high school the police had found no leads as to Jeffrey's killer. They hadn't said if he'd been strangled first and then hung, or if he'd just been hung. They weren't saying much of anything, and they didn't like questions.

Melanie had been kind about the necklace, but Cassie still felt guilty. She'd used it