There was a moment of shocked silence.
"Is he..." Cassie couldn't finish the question.
"He wasn't looking too good when they got that chunk off him," Nick said, and then, with less sarcasm, "He's been dead since last night."
"Oh, God," Laurel whispered. There was another silence, just as shocked and even longer this time. Cassie knew they were all seeing the same thing: A crystal skull surrounded by a protective ring of candles- and one of the candles going out.
"It was Faye's fault," Sean began in a whine, but Faye interrupted without looking at him. "It was his fault."
"Wait, wait," said Diana. "We don't know the dark energy had anything to do with it. How could it have, when we know it came here and then stopped?"
"I don't think that's much comfort," Melanie said in a low voice. "Because if it wasn't the dark energy, who was it?"
There was a sort of strange shifting in the group, as if everyone was standing back and looking at all the others. Cassie felt a void in the pit of her stomach again. The principal was-had been-an outsider, who hated witches. And that meant they all had a motive-especially anybody who blamed the outsiders for Kori Henderson's death. Cassie looked at Deborah, and then at Chris and Doug.
Most of the rest of the coven was doing the same. Doug glared back, then gave a wild, defiant grin.
"Maybe we did do it," he said, eyes glittering.
"Did we?" said Chris, looking confused.
Deborah just looked scornful.
There was another silence, then Suzan spoke in a petulant voice. "Look, it's too bad about Fogle, but do we have to stand here forever? My feet are killing me."
Adam seemed to shake himself. "She's right; we should get out of this place. There's nothing we can do here." He put an arm around Diana, and gestured everybody else ahead. Cassie lingered. There was something she wanted to say to Diana.
But Diana was moving now, and Cassie didn't have a chance. With the Henderson brothers in the lead, the group was taking a different route than the one they had taken in, cutting toward the northeast corner of the cemetery. As they approached the road, Cassie noticed the ground sloped up. There was a strange mound of grassy earth near the chain-link fence on this side; she almost tripped when she reached it. But even stranger was what she saw when they had passed it and she looked back.
The front of the mound was faced with stone slabs, and there was an iron door, maybe two feet square, set between them. The door had an iron hinge and a padlock on it, but it couldn't have opened anyway. Pushed right up against it was a large, irregular hunk of cement. Grass was growing up around the cement, showing it had been there a while.
Cassie's hands were icy cold, her heart was thudding, and she was dizzy. She tried to think, noticing with only part of her mind that she was passing by newer gravestones now, marble slabs with writing not worn smooth by time. She was trying to figure out what was wrong with her-was it just reaction to all the events of the past day and night? Was that why she was shaking?
"Cassie, are you okay?" Diana and Adam had turned around. Cassie was grateful for the growing darkness as she faced both of them and tried to get her mind clear.
"Yeah. I just-felt weird for a minute. But wait, Diana." Cassie remembered what she had wanted to say. "You know how you were asking me about my feelings before... well, I have a feeling about Mr. Fogle. I think the dark energy did have something to do with it, somehow. But..." She stopped. "But I don't know. There's something else strange going on."
"You can say that again," Adam said, and he reached for her arm to get her moving once more. Cassie evaded him and shot him a reproachful glance while Diana was staring into the distance. He looked at his own hand, startled.
There was something strange going on, something stranger than any of them realized, Cassie thought. "What is that thing back there, with the iron door?" she asked.
"It's been there for as long as I can remember," Diana said absently. "Something to do with storage, I think."
Cassie glanced back, but by now the mound was lost in darkness. She hugged herself, tucking her hands under her clasping arms to warm them. Her heart was still thudding.
I'll ask Grandma Howard about it, she decided. Whatever it was, it wasn't a storage shed, she knew that.
Then she noticed that Diana was toying with something around her neck as she walked lost in thought. It was a fine golden chain, and at the end of it dangled a key.
Chapter Three
"I think," Melanie said quietly, "that it's time to talk about the skull. Adam's never told us exactly how he found it-"
"No, you've been very secretive about that," Faye put in.
"-but maybe now is the time."
Diana and Adam looked at each other, and then Diana nodded slightly. "All right, then, tell it. Try not to leave anything out."