Secret Circle - The Captive Part 22

Oh, thank G.o.d, thank G.o.d, she thought. Now everything would be all right. Her mother was safe, her mother would take care of things. "Oh, Mom, I was so scared," she gasped.

But something was wrong. Her mother wasn't hugging her back. There was no response at all from the

upright but lifeless body in the nightgown. Ca.s.sie's mother just stood there, and when Ca.s.sie pulled back, she saw her mother was staring emptily.

"Mom? Mom?" she said. She shook the slender white figure. "Mom.' What's the matter?"

Her mother's beautiful eyes were blank, like a doll's eyes. Unseeing. The black circles underneath seemed to swallow them up. Her mother's arms stayed limp at her sides.

"Mom," Ca.s.sie said again, almost crying now.

Nick had pushed the door open again. "We have to get her out of here," he told Ca.s.sie.

Yes, Ca.s.sie thought. She tried to convince herself that it was the light, that maybe outside of the red glow

her mother would be okay. They each took one of the limp arms and led the unresisting figure into the hallway. Melanie, Laurel, and Deborah converged from different directions.

"We looked in all the rooms on this floor," Melanie said. "There's no one else up here."

"My grandmother-" Ca.s.sie began.

"Help us get Mrs. Blake downstairs," Nick said.

At the bottom of the stairs, the black prints turned left and then crossed and recrossed. A thought flashed into Ca.s.sie's mind.

"Melanie, Laurel, can you take my mom outside? Out of the light? Will you make sure she's safe?"

Melanie nodded, and Ca.s.sie said, "I'll be out as soon as I can."

"Be careful" Laurel said urgently.Ca.s.sie saw them leading her mother to the door, then she made herself stop looking. "Come on," shesaid to Nick and Deborah. "I think my grandma's in the kitchen."

A line of footprints led that way, but it wasn't just that, it was a feeling Ca.s.sie had. A terrible feeling thather grandmother was in the kitchen, and that she wasn't alone.

Deborah walked like a stalking huntress, following the black marks down the twisting hallways to the old wing of the house, the one built by the original witches in 1693.

Nick was behind Ca.s.sie, and Ca.s.sie realized vaguely that they were protecting her, giving her the safest place in line. But there was no safe place in this house now. As they crossed the threshold into the old wing, the red light seemed to get stronger, and the air even thicker. Ca.s.sie felt her lungs laboring.

Oh, G.o.d, it looked like fire in here. The red light was everywhere and the air burned Ca.s.sie's skin. Deborah stopped and Ca.s.sie almost ran into her. She struggled to see over Deborah's shoulder, but her eyes were sore and streaming.

She felt Nick behind her, his hand gripping her shoulder hard. Ca.s.sie tried to make her eyes focus, squinting into the thick red light.

She could see her grandmother! The old woman was lying in front of the hearth, by the long wooden table she had worked at so often. The table was on its side, and herbs and drying racks were scattered on the floor. Ca.s.sie started toward her grandmother, but there was something else there, something her mind didn't want to take in. Nick was holding her back, and Ca.s.sie stared at the thing bending over the old woman.

It was burned, black, hideous. It looked as if its skin was hard and cracked. It had the shape of a man, but Ca.s.sie couldn't see eyes or clothes or hair. When it looked up at them she got a brief, terrifying impression of a skull s.h.i.+ning silver through the blackness of its face.

It had seen them now. Ca.s.sie felt as if she and Nick and Deborah were welded together; Nick was still holding her, and she was clutching Deborah. She wanted to run, but she couldn't, because there was her grandmother on the floor. She couldn't leave her grandmother alone with the burned thing.

But she couldn't fight, either. She didn't know how to fight something like this. And Ca.s.sie could no longer feel any connection to the elements; in this horrible oven of a room she felt as if she were cut off from everything outside.

What weapons did they have? The hemat.i.te in Ca.s.sie's pocket wasn't cool anymore; when she thrust her hand in to touch it, it burned. No good. Air and Fire and Earth were all against them. They needed something this creature didn't control.

"Think of water," she shouted to Nick and Deborah. Her voice was stifled in the oppressive blistering air. "Think of the ocean- cold water-ice!"

As she said it, she thought herself, trying to remember what water was like. Cool. . . blue. . . endless. Suddenly she remembered looking over the bluff when she'd first come to her grandmother's house, seeing a blue so intense it took her breath away. The ocean, unimaginably vast, spread out before her. She could picture it now; blue and gray like Adam's eyes. Sunlight glinted off the waves, and Adam's eyes were sparkling, laughing ....

Wind rattled the windows in their cas.e.m.e.nts, and the faucet in the sink began to shake. It burst a leak somewhere at its base and a thin stream of white water sprayed up. Something burst in the dishwasher, too, and water gushed on the floor. Water was hissing out of the pipe under the sink.

"Now!" Deborah shouted. "Come on, get him now!"

Ca.s.sie knew it was wrong even as Deborah said it. They weren't strong enough, not nearly strong enough to take this thing on directly. But Deborah, always heedless of danger, was lunging forward, and there was no time to scream a warning or make her stop. Ca.s.sie's heart failed her and her legs went weak in the middle of the rush toward the black thing.

It would kill them-one touch of those burned, hardened hands could kill-but it was giving way before them. Ca.s.sie couldn't believe they were still alive, still moving, but they were. The thing was backing away, it was crouching, it was running. It turned and went through what had been the old front door, searing the handle black as it went. It went out into the darkness and then it was gone.

The door hung open, rattling in the wind. The red light died. Through the doorway Ca.s.sie could see the cool silver-blue of moonlight.

She dragged in a deep breath, grateful just to be able to breathe without hurting.

"We did it!" Deborah was laughing. She pounded Nick on the arm and back. "We did it! All right! The b.a.s.t.a.r.d ran!"

It left, Ca.s.sie thought. It left, deliberately. We didn't win anything.

Then she turned sharply to Nick. "My mother! And Laurel and Melanie-they're out there-"

"I'll go check them. I think it's gone for now, though," he said.

For now. Nick knew the same thing she did. It wasn't defeated; it had withdrawn.

On trembling legs, Ca.s.sie went and knelt by her grandmother on the floor.

"Grandma?" she said. She was afraid the old woman was dead. But no, her grandmother was breathing heavily. Then Ca.s.sie was afraid that if the wrinkled eyelids opened, the eyes underneath would stare blankly like a doll's- but they were opening now, and they saw her, they knew her. Her grandmother's eyes were dark with pain, but they were rational.

"Ca.s.sie," she whispered. "Little Ca.s.sie."

"Grandma, you're going to be all right. Don't move." Ca.s.sie tried to think of anything else she'd heard about injured people. What to do? Keep them warm? Keep their feet elevated? "Just hang on," she told her grandmother, and to Deborah she said, "Call an ambulance, fast!"

"No," her grandmother said. She tried to sit up and her face contracted with pain. One k.n.o.bby-knuckled hand clutched at the thin robe over her nightgown. Over her heart.

"Grandma, don't move," Ca.s.sie said frantically. "It's going to be all right, everything's going to be all right. . ."

"No, Ca.s.sie," her grandmother said. She was still breathing in that tortured way, but her voice was surprisingly strong. "No ambulance.

There's no time. You need to listen to me; I have something to tell you."

"You can tell me later." Ca.s.sie was crying now, but she tried to keep her voice steady.

"There won't be a later," her grandmother gasped, and then she settled back, her breathing careful and slow. She spoke distinctly, kneading Ca.s.sie's hand in her own. Her eyes were so dark, so anguished-and so kind. "Ca.s.sie, I don't have much time left, and you need to listen. This is important. Go to the fireplace and look on the right-hand side for a loose brick. It's just about the level of the mantel. Pull it out and bring me what's inside the hole."

Ca.s.sie stumbled to the hearth. A loose brick-she couldn't see; she was crying too hard. She felt with her fingers, sc.r.a.ping them on the roughness of mortar, and something s.h.i.+fted under them.

This brick. She dug her fingernails into the crumbled mortar around it and worked it back and forth until it came out. She dropped it and reached into the cool dark hollow now exposed.

Her fingertips found something smooth. She eased it closer with her nails, then grasped it and pulled it out.

It was a Book of Shadows.

The one from her dream, the one with the red leather cover. Ca.s.sie took it back to her grandmother and knelt again.

"He couldn't make me tell where it was. He couldn't make me tell anything," her grandmother said, and smiled. "My own grandmother showed me that was a good place to hide it." She stroked the book, then her age-spotted hand tightened on Ca.s.sie's. "It's yours, Ca.s.sie. From my grandmother to me to you. You have the sight and the power, as I did, as your mother does. But you can't run away like she did. You have to stay here and face him."

She stopped and coughed. Ca.s.sie looked at Deborah, who was listening intently, and then back at her grandmother. "Grandma, please. Please let us call the ambulance. You can't just give up-"

"I'm not giving anything up! I'm giving it all to you. To you, Ca.s.sie, so you can carry on the fight. Let me do that before I die. Otherwise it's all been meaningless, everything." She coughed again. "It wasn't supposed to be like this. That girl-Faye-she fooled me. I didn't think she would move this fast. I thought we would have more time-but we don't. So, now listen."

She drew a painful breath, fingers holding Ca.s.sie's so hard it hurt, and her dark old eyes stared into Ca.s.sie's. "You come from a long line of witches, Ca.s.sie. You know that. But you don't know that our family has always had the clearest sight and the most power. We've been the strongest line and we can see the future- but the others don't always believe that. Not even our own kind."

Her eyes lifted to look at Deborah. "You young people, you think you come up with everything new, don't you?" Her seamed old face wrinkled in a laugh, although there was no sound. "You don't have much respect for old folks, or even for your parents. You think we lived our lives standing still, don't you?"

She's wandering, Ca.s.sie thought. She doesn't know what she's saying. But her grandmother was going on.

"Your idea about getting out the old books and reviving the old traditions-you think you were the only ones to come up with that, don't you?"

Ca.s.sie just shook her head helplessly, but Deborah, brows drawn together in a scowl, said, "Well, weren't we?"

"No. Oh, my dears, no. In my day, when I was a little girl, we played with it. We had meetings sometimes, and those of us with the sight would make notes of what we saw, and those with the healing touch would talk about herbs and things. But it was your parents' generation who got up a real coven."

"Our parents?" Deborah said in disbelief. "My parents are so scared of magic they practically puke if you mention it. My parents would never-" "That's now," Ca.s.sie's grandmother said calmly, as Ca.s.sie tried to hush Deborah. "That's now. They've forgotten-they made themselves forget. They had to, you see, to survive. But things were different when they were young. They were just a little older than you, the children of Crowhaven Road. Your mother was maybe nineteen, Deborah, and Ca.s.sie's mother was just seventeen. That was when the Man in Black came to New Salem."

"Grandma . . ." Ca.s.sie whispered. Icy p.r.i.c.kles were going up and down her spine. This room, which had been so hot, was making her s.h.i.+ver. "Oh, Grandma, please . . ."

"You don't want to know. I know. I understand. But you have to listen, both of you. You have to understand what you're up against."

With another cough, Ca.s.sie's grandmother s.h.i.+fted position slightly, her eyes going opaque with memory. "That was the fall of 1974. The coldest November we'd had in decades. I'll never forget him on the doorstep, kicking the snow off his boots. He was going to move into Number Thirteen, he said, and he needed a match to light the wood he was carrying. There was no other kind of heat in that old house; it had been empty since he'd left it the first time."

"Since what?" Ca.s.sie said.

"Since 1696. Since he'd left the first time to go to sea, and drowned when his s.h.i.+p went down." Her grandmother nodded without looking at Ca.s.sie. "Oh, yes, it was Black John. But we didn't know that then. How much suffering could have been prevented if we had . . . but there's no use thinking about that." She patted Ca.s.sie's hand. "We lent him matches, and the girls and young men on the street helped him rebuild that old house. He was a few years older than they were, and they looked up to him. They admired him and his travels- he could tell the most marvelous stories. And he was handsome-handsome in a way that didn't show his black heart underneath. We were all fooled, all under his spell, even me.

"I don't know when he started talking to the young people about the old ways. Pretty soon, I guess; he worked fast. And they were ready to listen. They thought we parents were old and stodgy if we opposed them. And to tell the truth, not many of us objected very strongly. There's good in the old ways, and we didn't know what he was up to."

The s.h.i.+vers were racing all over Ca.s.sie's body by now, but she couldn't move. She could only listen to her grandmother's voice, the only sound except for the thin hiss of water in that quiet kitchen.

"He got the likeliest of the young ones together and paired them off. Yes, that's about the size of it, although we parents didn't know then. He made matches, giving this girl to this boy, and this boy to that girl, and somehow he made it all seem reasonable to them. He even broke up pairs that had planned to marry-your mother, Deborah, was going to marry Nick's dad, but he changed that. Switched her from one brother to the other, and they let him. He had such a grip on them they would have let him do anything.

"They did the marriages in the old way, handfasting. Ten weddings in March. And we all celebrated, like the idiots we were. All those young people so happy, and never a quarrel between them, we thought; how lucky they were! They were just like one big group of brothers and sisters. Well, the group was too big for one coven, but we didn't think about that.

"It was good to see the respect they had for the old ways, too. They had the Beltane fire in May and at midsummer they gathered Saint-John's-wort and mistletoe. And in September I remember all of them laughing and shouting as they brought the John Barleycorn sheaf in to represent the harvest. They didn't know what the other John was planning.

"We knew by then the babies were coming soon, and that was another reason to celebrate. But it was in October that some of the older women started to worry. The girls were all so pale and the pregnancies seemed to take so much out of them. Poor Carmen Henderson was flesh and bones except for her belly. That looked like she was carrying twin elephants. There wasn't much celebrating at Samhain; the girls were all too sick.

"And then on November third, it started. Your uncle Nicholas, Deborah, the one you never knew, called me to come to his wife's bedside. 1 helped Sharon have little Nick, your cousin. He was a fighter from the first minute; I'll never forget how he squalled. But there was something else, something I'd never seen in a baby's eyes, and I went home thinking about it. There was a power there I'd never seen before.

"And two days later it happened again. Elizabeth Conant had a baby boy, with hair like Bacchus's wine and eyes like the sea. That baby looked at me, and I could feel his power."

"Adam," Ca.s.sie whispered.

"That's right. Three days later Sophie Burke went into labor-her that kept her own name even when she married. Her baby, Melanie, was like the others. She looked two weeks old when she was brand-new, and she saw me as clearly as I saw her.

"The strangest ones born were Diana and Faye. Their mothers were sisters and they had their babies at the same moment, in two separate houses. One baby was bright like sunlight and the other one was dark as midnight, but those two were connected somehow. You could tell even at that age."

Ca.s.sie thought of Diana and a pang went through her, but she pushed it away and went on listening. Her grandmother's voice seemed to be getting weaker.

"Poor little things ... it wasn't their fault. It isn't your fault," the old woman said, focusing suddenly on Deborah and Ca.s.sie. "n.o.body can blame you. But by December third, eleven babies had been born, and they were all strange. Their mothers didn't want to admit it, but by January there was no way to deny it. Those tiny babies could call on the Powers, and they could scare you if they didn't get what they wanted."

"I knew," Ca.s.sie whispered. "I knew it was too weird for all of those kids to born within one month ... I knew."

"Their parents knew, too, but they didn't know what it meant. It was Adam's father, I think, who put it all together for them. Eleven babies, he said-he guessed that with one more that made a coven. And who was the one more? Why, the man who'd arranged for all those babies to be born, the man who was going to lead them. Black John had come back to make the strongest Circle this country had ever seen-not from this generation, but from the next, Adam's father said. From the infants.

"n.o.body believed the story at first. Some parents were scared, and some were just plain stupid. And some didn't see how Black John could come back from the dead after all those years. That's one mystery that hasn't been solved yet.

"But gradually some of the group were convinced. Nick's father, who'd lost his own fiancee, seen her married off to his younger brother-he listened. And Mary Meade, Diana's mother; she was as smart as she was pretty. Even Faye's father, Grant Chamberlain . . . he was a cold man, but he knew his infant daughter could set the curtains on fire without touching them, and he knew that wasn't right. They got some of the others talked around, and one cold night, the first of February, the bunch of them set off to talk to him about it."

SIXTEEN.

Ca.s.sie's grandmother shook her head. "To talk! If they'd come to us, to the older women, we might have warned them. Me and Laurel's grandma, and Adam's grandma, and Melanie's great-aunt Constance-we could have told them a few things, maybe saved them. But they went alone, without telling anyone. On Imbolc, February first, more than half the group that he had put together went to challenge him. And out of that group, not one came back."

Tears were running slowly down the seamed old cheeks. "So you see, it was the brave ones, the strong ones that went and died. The ones that are left are the ones too scared or too stupid to see the danger-I'm sorry, Deborah, but it's true." Ca.s.sie remembered that both Deborah's parents were alive. "All the best of Crowhaven Road went to fight Black John that Imbolc Night," her grandmother said.