they knew.
Is this what I was brought here for? she thought. To join the Circle? There was no longer any doubt in her mind that she'd been brought here, deliberately, and for a very specific reason.
She got no answer from the voices inside her, not even from the deepest voice. And that was disturbing.
But she didn't have time to worry about it. Not now. She looked at her mother's face, drawn and anxious, but also full of a kind of half-concealed pride and hope. Like a mother watching her daughter high-dive in the Olympics, and waiting for the judges' scores. Her grandmother looked the same.
Suddenly, despite the aching pain in her chest, Cassie was filled with a surge of protective love for them. Both of them. She managed a smile as she and Melanie and Laurel stood in the doorway.
"So, Grandma," she said, "does our family have a Book of Shadows?"
The tension broke into laughter as the two women rose.
"Not that I know of," her grandmother said. "But anytime you like, we'll take another look through the attic."
The meeting on Wednesday afternoon was tense. Everyone was on edge. And Faye clearly had a hidden agenda.
All she wanted to talk about was the skull. They should use it, she said, and immediately. All right, then, if not use it, at least check it out.
Try to activate it, see what imprints had been left on it.
Diana kept saying no. No checking it out. No activating it. They needed to purify it first. Ground it. Clear it. Which Faye knew would take weeks, if done properly. As long as Diana was in charge -
Faye said that at this rate Diana might not be in charge for long. In fact, if Diana kept refusing to test out the skull, Faye just might call for a leadership vote right now instead of waiting until November. Was that what Diana wanted?
Cassie didn't understand any of it. How do you check out a skull? Or ground it or clear it? But this time the argument was too heated for anyone to remember to explain to her.
She spent the entire meeting not watching Adam, who had tried to speak to her beforehand, but whom she'd managed to evade. She clung grimly to her resolve all the way through, even though the energy it took to ignore him exhausted her. She made herself not look at his hair, which had grown a little longer since she'd seen him, or at his mouth, which was as handsome and humorous as ever. She refused to let herself think about his body as she'd seen it on the beach in Cape Cod, with its flat, sinewy muscles and bare long legs. And most of all, she forced herself not to look into his eyes.
The one thing Cassie did glean from the meeting was that Diana was in a precarious position. "Temporary" leader meant that the coven could call a vote at any time and depose her, although the official vote was in November for some reason. And Faye was obviously looking for support so that she could take over.
She'd gotten the Henderson brothers on her side by saying they should use the skull right away to find Kori's killer. And she'd gotten Sean on her side simply by terrorizing him, it looked like. Deborah and Suzan, of course, had supported her from the beginning.
That was six. It would have been six on Diana's side too, but Nick refused to voice an opinion. He showed up at the meeting, but sat through it smoking and looking as if he were somewhere else. When asked, he said it didn't matter to him whether they used the skull or not.
"So you see, you're overruled," Faye told Diana, her honey-colored eyes hot with triumph. "Either you let us use the skull - or I call for a vote right now and we see if you still come out leader."
Diana's jaw was set. "All right," she said flatly, at last. "We'll try to activate it - just activate it and no more - on Saturday. Is that soon enough for you?"
Faye nodded graciously. She'd won, and she knew it.
"Saturday night," she said, and smiled.
Kori's funeral was on Friday. Cassie stood with the other members of the Club and cried along with them during the service. Afterward, at the cemetery, a fight broke out between Doug Henderson and Jimmy Clark, the boy Kori had gone with that summer. It took the entire Club to get them apart.