The Power Page 0,30

To follow him. They couldn't hang around in that atmosphere anymore, so they followed him to New Salem, with all their tools - including the Master Tools."

"You told me that he was a leader of the original coven," Cassie said. "But I wonder if he was a leader before the coven moved to New Salem - or only after."

The faces of the Circle members were very sober.

"I think he's trying to do the same thing again," Adam said. "Turn everybody against us so we don't have anywhere else to go - but to him. He's the only one who can defend us."

"He can go to hell," Deborah said, as if this ought to be obvious.

"Yeah, well, I'm sure he doesn't think we're going to come crawling to him right now," Nick murmured. "Things may look a little different in a couple of weeks."

"I think we'd better have a talk with Faye," Diana said.

They lay in wait for Faye by the back entrance of the auditorium, where Deborah thought she was most likely to come out. When she did she had the clipboard on her arm.

"Alone at last," Nick said, and they surrounded her, the eleven of them, forcing her to a stop. Looking at the faces of the Circle members right then, Cassie was reminded of the way Faye, Deborah, and Suzan had looked when they had caught her spying on them in front of the school. Beautiful, focused, and deadly. Dangerous.

Faye looked around at them and tossed her head. It didn't work as well with her hair gathered up in a bun.

"Get out of my way. I have work to do," she said.

"For him?" Adam asked tightly. Diana laid a hand on his arm and spoke herself.

"Faye, we know you can't talk now. But we're going to have a ceremony tonight, because it's the night of Hecate - "

"And our birthday," Chris put in, aggrieved.

" - and we want you to be there."

"You're going to have a ceremony?" Faye said, looking less like a rich man's girl Friday and more like her old self, the black panther. "You can't. I'm the coven leader."

"How can you be the coven leader when you're never even with the coven? We're going to have this ceremony tonight, Faye, at the crossroads of Crowhaven and Marsh Street. With or without you. If you're there, you're welcome to lead it."

Faye looked for backing from Deborah and Suzan, her age-old supporters. But the biker's petite face was set in a hard scowl and Suzan's china-blue eyes were blank. No help was coming from that quarter.

"Traitors," Faye said contemptuously. Her beautiful, sulky mouth pinched, but she said, "I'll be there - to lead the ceremony. Now you'd better get out of here before a hall monitor spots you."

She turned and stalked away.

They all managed to get through that day without serious trouble, although Suzan received a detention for not throwing away a cupcake wrapper. Not for leaving it at a table or anything, just for not throwing it away as soon as she was done eating. It was a Type-A infraction.

That night they celebrated the Henderson brothers' birthday quietly, at Adam's house. Chris and Doug were extremely disappointed. They wanted a beach party with skinny-dipping. "And all kinds of wildness," Chris said. Adam said it was this or nothing.

Faye showed up around ten, wearing the black raw-silk shift she'd worn the night of the leadership vote. "In my day it was white," old Mrs. Franklin chuckled, leading her into the untidy living room with its comfortable, shabby furniture. "But times change."

Faye didn't even answer her. "I'm here," she said with a haughty glance around. "Let's go."

Cassie studied the silver diadem nestled in Faye's midnight-dark hair, the silver bracelet on Faye's rounded arm, and the garter, made of green leather lined with sky-blue silk, on Faye's thigh. She wondered what the real ones, the ones used by the original coven, looked like.

There wasn't much talking as the seven girls walked slowly down Crowhaven Road. Diana and Faye were in the lead, and Cassie heard Diana speaking in a low voice. The blond girl was carrying a white bag that held the things necessary for casting a circle and beginning a meeting.

They reached the crossroads. "It has to be a junction where three roads diverge," Diana had said, "to symbolize the three stages of womanhood: maiden, mother, and crone." Here Marsh Street met Crowhaven Road running north and south.

"Do we have to be right in the road?" Suzan said