The Power Page 0,46

adults were arguing softly: exclamations of worry and disagreement came to Cassie's ears. "Could we not ... ?" "No, not there . . ." "But where, then?" "Oh, mercy, my bread is burning!"

And then, soft laughter. "Of course! We should have thought of it earlier."

Where? Fending Kate off, Cassie twisted to try and look into the kitchen.

"Jacinth, what's wrong with you?" Kate cried. "You're not listening to a word I'm saying. Jacinth, look at me!"

Desperately, Cassie stared into the dark kitchen. It was too dark. The dream was fading.

No. She had to hang on to it. She had to see the end. Grandmother, help me, she thought. Help me see ...

"Jacinth!"

Darker and darker -

Long skirts rustling, moving out of the way. And just a glimpse ...

"The old hiding place," Jacinth's mother said in a satisfied voice. "Until they are needed again."

Darkness took Cassie.

She woke confused.

At first, she couldn't remember what she'd been looking for in the dream. She remembered the dream, though. Who was Jacinth? An ancestress? One of her great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, she supposed. And Kate?

Then she remembered her purpose.

The Master Tools. The members of the first coven had hidden them from Black John, because they'd known he might come back. Cassie had gone into the dream to find out where, and she had succeeded.

She'd wondered why Black John had come after her grandmother the night he was released. Not just for the Book of Shadows, she realized now; not just because he'd known her mother and grandmother before. He'd wanted something else from her grandmother. He'd wanted the Master Tools.

But her grandmother hadn't known where they were. Cassie felt sure that if she had, the old woman would have told Cassie. All her grandmother had known was that her own grandmother, Cassie's great-great-grandmother, had told her the fireplace was a good place to hide things. And now, because of the dream, Cassie knew that the loose brick had already been a hiding place in Jacinth's time.

But there had only been one loose brick, and nothing but the Book of Shadows had been stored behind it. Cassie knew that, and she knew that the original coven had been looking for a long-term solution, a place to put the Master Tools "until they were needed" by some future generation. Not just a loose brick, then. Cassie thought about the glimpse of the hearth she'd gotten between the women's skirts in the last second of her dream. The fireplace had been a different shape than it was in modern days.

Cassie lay for a few moments in the velvet darkness. Then she rolled over and gently shook Diana's shoulder.

"Diana, wake up. I know where the Master Tools are."

They woke Adam by throwing pebbles at his window. The three of them went to Number Twelve armed with a pickax, a sledgehammer, several regular hammers and screwdrivers, a crowbar, and Raj. The German shepherd trotted happily along beside Cassie, looking as if this kind of expedition in the wee hours was just what he liked.

The waning moon was high overhead when they got to Cassie's grandmother's house. Inside, it seemed even colder than outside, and there was a stillness about the place that dampened Cassie's enthusiasm.

"There," she whispered, pointing to the left side of the hearth, where bricks had been added since the time of her dream. "That's where it's different. That's where they must have bricked them up."

"Too bad we don't have a jackhammer," Adam said cheerfully, picking up the crowbar. He seemed undisturbed by the chill and the silence, and in the sickly artificial light of the kitchen his hair gleamed just the color of the garnets in Diana's pouch. Raj sat beside Cassie, his black and tan tail whisking across the kitchen floor. Looking at the two of them made Cassie feel better.

It took a long time. Cassie grazed her knuckles helping to chip the ancient mortar away, using a screwdriver like a chisel. But at last the bricks began to drop onto the cold ashes of the hearth, as one after another was pried out. Each was a different color; some red, some orange, some almost purple-black.

"There's definitely something in here," Adam said, reaching inside the hole they'd made. "But we'll have to get rid of a few more bricks to get it out.... There!" He started to reach again, then looked at Cassie. "Why don't you do the honors? It's okay, there's nothing alive inside."

Cassie, who didn't want to encounter a three-hundred-year-old cockroach, nodded at him gratefully. She reached inside