Faye's voice came from behind Cassie. "If you tell her, you'll kill her. You'll destroy her faith in everything she's ever believed in. And you'll take away the only thing she has to trust, to rely on. Is that what you want?"
"Faye..." Cassie seethed.
"And, incidentally, you'll get yourself banished from the Club. You know that, don't you? How do you think Melanie and Laurel are going to feel when they hear that you messed around with Diana's boyfriend? None of them will ever speak to you again, not even to make a full Circle. The coven will be destroyed too."
Cassie's teeth were clenched. She wanted to hit Faye, but it wouldn't do any good. Because Faye was right. And Cassie thought she could stand being blackballed, being a pariah at school again; she even thought she could stand to destroy the coven. But the picture of Diana's face...
It would kill Diana. By the time Faye got finished telling it her way, it would. Cassie's fantasy of confessing to Diana and having Diana understand vanished like a pricked soap bubble.
"And what I want is so reasonable," Faye was going on, almost crooning. "I just want to look at the skull for a little while. I know what I'm doing. You'll get it for me, won't you, Cassie? Won't you? Today?"
Cassie shut her eyes. Against her closed eyelids the light was red as fire.
Chapter Two
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.