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of Shadows, but there was another priority first.

"We have to warn the parents around here," she said, "the ones who're at home, who don't . work. Is somebody doing that?"

"I'll go to my house," Chris said. "Both of my parents are home."

"My mom works," Deborah said. "That just leaves Faye's mom," said Diana. "I'll go tell her," Suzan offered, surprising Cassie. "She knows me, she might take it best from me."

"And the crones," Cassie said. "I mean," she amended quickly, "Adam's grandmother and Granny Quincey and Aunt Constance."

"They're at my house; they came over this morning," Melanie said. "Something to do with your mom, I think, Cassie. But I can't leave this circle." "I'll go," Cassie said.

Diana flashed a smile at her. "I think crones is a good name for them," she said. "It's what they are, and I think Granny Quincey, anyway, would be proud to be crone to our coven."

So would my grandma, I bet, Cassie thought, and she plunged outside again.

There was a strange smell out here, a smell like low tide, like crawling and decaying things. Cassie ran to the edge of the cliff, taking the back route along the bluff to Melanie's house, and she saw that the ocean was dark and wild. The water was neither blue nor green nor gray, but a sludgy, oily color that seemed to be a mixture of all three. Specks of foam were flying on the wind, and there was white froth everywhere.

Above, the clouds took on fantastic shapes, boiling and changing as if molded by unseen hands. The rain drove into Cassie's face. It was a savage and awe-inspiring scene.

No one answered her knock at the door of Number Four. Cassie wasn't sure anybody inside could hear it over the wind and rain. "Aunt Constance?" she shouted, opening the door and peering inside. "Hello?"

She started toward the room that had been given to her mother, and then stopped, turned back guiltily, and wiped her sandy, muddy Reeboks on the mat. Even so, she dripped water on the spotless, mirror-polished hardwood floor as she hurried to the bedroom. The door was barely ajar, and a strange brightness flickered inside.

"Hello? ... Oh, my God!" Cassie poked her head around the door and froze. The room was lit entirely by dozens of white candles. Around the bed were three figures, three women whose appearance was so strange and fantastic that for a moment Cassie didn't recognize them.

One was tall and thin, another was short and plump, and the third was tiny and doll-like. They all had long hair: the tall one's was black and thick, longer than Diana's, the plump one's was silvery-gray and untidy, waving down past her shoulders, and the tiny one's was gauzy and white like floating wisps of seafoam. And they were naked.

Cassie's eyes were popping. "Great-aunt Constance?" she gasped to the one with long black hair.

"Who did you expect?" Melanie's aunt said sharply, her meticulously tweezed eyebrows drawing together. "Lady Godiva? Now go away, child, we're busy."

"Don't be unkind to her," said the plump woman, whom Cassie was now able to identify as Adam's grandmother. She smiled at Cassie, entirely unself-conscious.

"We're trying something to help your mother, dear," the tiny figure, Laurel's Granny Quincey, added. "It's a sky-clad ritual, you see; that's why we're naked. Constance had her doubts, but we convinced her."

"And we need to get on with it," Great-aunt Constance said, gesturing with the wooden cup she was holding. Granny Quincey was holding a bunch of herbs, and Adam's grandmother, a silver bell. Cassie looked at the bed, where her mother lay as motionless as ever. Something about the light in the room made that sleeping face look different, just as it made the three women look different.

"But there's a hurricane coming," Cassie said. "That's why I'm here; I came to warn you."

The women exchanged glances. "Well, if there is, there's no help for it," Adam's grandmother sighed.

"But - "

"Your mother can't be moved, dear," Granny Quincey said firmly. "So you go along and do what you have to, and we'll try to protect her here."

"We're going to fight Black John," Cassie said. The simple statement seemed to hang in the air after she'd said it, and the three old women looked at each other again.

Great-aunt Constance opened her mouth, frowning, but Granny Quincey interrupted her. "There's no one else to do it, Constance. They have to fight."

"Then be careful. You tell Melanie - and all of them - to be careful," Aunt