The Glory Hand (16 page)

Shrieking, the girls of Lakeside took off through the woods.

But Cassie didn't move. Anger held her there, her body rigid, staring up at the tree. Abigail had made a promise -perhaps an unspoken one, but a promise nevertheless - that something important would happen tonight, that Consecration would somehow help her understand why her mother had loved Casmaran so. But
this
... it had all been a sick,
sadistic
game, designed to arouse hatred. A hatred she
couldn
't even put into words, and yet which she couldn't rid
herself of,
like the ashes that permeated her hair, the ashes that tainted her mouth with the taste of an unknown evil.

The stampede of the escaping Lakeside campers dwindled in the distance. Abigail and the other seniors - had they fled, too? Or were they still up in the tree, watching her?

Don't panic,
she told herself.
Don't give Abigail and her friends the satisfaction of seeing you freak out.
She walked slowly away from the tree, trying to find the path back, but her thoughts tripped her up, slowed her pace, drew her down uncharted paths of their own.

She passed through a cleft between two massive boulders, and looked up. Two hulking figures were standing above. Watching her.

Men.

For a moment she stared at them, her heart pounding in her chest like two fists banging on a locked door.
The ice

men?

No more thinking. No time to think.

Run.

But as she plunged into the thicket she couldn't stifle her thoughts . . .
Why can't you turn off your mindl
The sharp rhythm of her feet pounding against the earth struck a tempo of hard questions, and like the footfalls of the figures running in pursuit, the words thudded in her mind with a heavy tread.

Ice man . . . Burning man . . .

The sea had swirled in glacial flames.

Ice and Fire.

The Chill could scorch and freeze at once, afflict with jungle-sweat and arctic cold.

Ice man . . . Burning man . . .

Cassie's mind leaped the outer bounds of her memory, to the
Pandora,
when she was four years old, to the kerosene-slick sea wild with flame ... To the Burning Man, who had seemed to want her more desperately than he had wanted to survive the inferno.

Ice and Fire.

The Burning Man who had wanted her - only her - who had reached out to snatch her from her mother's arms.

Why did he want me then? Why do the ice men want me now?

She pushed through the undergrowth where brambles tore at her sweatshirt, and scrambled over the sharp rocks that mauled her knees, until she stumbled at last onto the trail.
Keep running.
She swore at herself for having given up dancing. Her muscles ached and her breath came in gasps. But still she ran, past Iris, past Robin. (
The ice men don't want them . . . They want me\)
She dashed ahead until she lost her friends, gulping air into her lungs that burned from smoke and ashes.

Ice Man . . . Burning Man . . .

Feet pounded on the earth behind her. Gaining.

At last, the shimmer of the lake through the trees, the watery expanse frozen under a faint moon into a sheet of ice. She plunged out onto the lawn.

The other girls burst out of the forest behind her, Robin and Chelsea . . . finally Iris. The moment they emerged from the shadows and saw their faces smeared with ashes like chimney-sweeps, their hair wild and gray, their panic dissolved into hysterical laughter. They collapsed into the soft grass, clutching their sides. Cassie stared at them numbly.

'What a trip!' Robin shouted.

Chelsea tugged at her hair. 'What a disaster!'

'The worst!' Iris giggled, covering her mouth with her hand.

'Just wait till next summer.' Chelsea slammed her fist into her hand. 'When
we're
seniors, we'll consecrate the little nerds in Lakeside so they'll never forget it!'

'LookV

The laughter trailed off. A hulking figure loomed in silhouetted at the edge of the forest, and Cassie tensed to run.

But as the form moved slowly onto the lawn, the girls started laughing again. It was Jo, with Melanie riding piggyback on her shoulders, baring her teeth and rolling her eyes up until only the whites showed: 'The ice man's gonna get ya!'

But Cassie wasn't laughing. She was the only one who wasn't laughing.
Ice man . . . Burning Man . .
. She had no intention of telling the others - they would tease her if she told them. And yet she felt an uneasy certainty that her pursuers were still lurking in the forest, watching her, like the cold eye of the moon gazing at her through the pines.

Chapter 12

They were dancing side by side, but Cassie knew it wasn't a duet. It was a duel. She and Abigail were performing to the same music, but on different edges of it, the dark and the light, like the two sides of the dance pavilion where they circled each other, one submerged in the pine shadows, the other shimmering in the sunshine reflected off the lake. And the audience - the girls from Lakeside, the seniors, and Sarah - watched with silent fascination, the way they might have watched a tightrope walker performing without a net, Cassie thought, fearful, yet waiting for the fatal fall. Strange, she had felt so tense the moment Sarah had touched the needle to the record of
Swan Lake
and the audience had hushed. But now that she was moving across the smooth oak floor, her body swept up in the tempo, she forgot the stress, possessed by a calm that only came when she danced.

In her two weeks at Casmaran, she had grown in self-confidence and strength, and her body was lean and taut again, her mind swept free of the old cobwebs. She had dismissed the 'ice men' as just another of the seniors' pranks. Abigail had barely spoken to her since the night of Consecration, and she wondered whether the senior was avoiding her because she knew they would be competing today. Cassie had been thinking of nothing but this moment. And dreading it.

* * *

Abigail danced wildly, as if overcome by a seizure, her arms and legs flailing out as she spun across the floor, her dark hair flying. Her body was so limber, it seemed that she could contort it, twist it any way she wished, that whatever her mind willed, her body could achieve. And she seemed to take a savage pleasure in that.

Why did Abigail dance so fiercely? Cassie wondered. I don't have anything against her. What has she got against me? If only Abigail knew my reason for wanting to win . . . If only she knew about my mother, and about how important it was that I dance the solo for her . . . Abigail couldn't have a reason for winning as important as that.

But Abigail danced as if she
did
have a reason, as if she were daring Cassie to try and beat her. And it was that defiance that troubled Cassie, as if there were something crucial at stake, something vital that had to do with power and control, and forces she might never understand. Something terribly urgent, as dark as Consecration . . . and as disturbing as Miss Grace's kiss.

Abigail. . . Cassie was too swept up in the dance to watch her now, but she could feel the wind of the senior's movement, glimpse the blur of her body out of the corner of her eye. Abigail seemed to spin out the shadows like a spider weaving a web, shadows that shrouded the rafters and lingered in the corners of the pagoda. And as Cassie whirled across the floor, it seemed as though Abigail had woven those shadows to entrap her.

The flickering spider-shadows and the hot, shimmering air . . . Cassie felt as though she were being pursued, and as the tempo of the dancing rushed faster and faster, she realized that there was a strategy to Abigail's movement.

She's forcing me towards the edge.

Cassie had avoided looking down over the side of the pavilion into the lake, uncertain how it would affect her. Now she had no choice: she saw the water slapping the pilings of the dance pavilion, water thickened with algae to a sickly green. Water that threatened great depth, a spawning place for the Chill.

The phobia had been Cassie's secret, one she had kept from her friends at Lakeside, a secret she had even tried to keep from herself. And yet Abigail was edging her over to the splintered wood molding, all that stood between the dance floor and the water. Abigail's body spun, a malicious blur, dominating the center of the dance floor, so that Cassie had no choice but to move towards the brink.

She knows about the Chill. (How could she know?) Abigail knows, and she's using it against me.

But just when Cassie expected to feel the cold shooting through her, she felt a rush of confidence instead, and leaned over the water to taunt her murky reflection. For one moment it seemed as if she were standing still, that the pavilion, the audience, even the lake were spinning around
her,
that she was the center, the way her mother had made her feel at the center when she had danced for her in the studio at Cliff's Edge. Her mother had applauded her then, and as the music ended with the fading of strings, the girls were applauding her now.

The pavilion stopped spinning and Cassie stared out at the lake, half-expecting the wind from her dance to have sent ripples to the far shore. Even before Sarah announced it, she knew she had won - not just the lead in the dance, but something much more important.

'You were terrificV

The girls from Lakeside crowded around her, Iris and Robin and even Chelsea showering her with congratulations. She hugged each of them, then pulled away. Abigail was walking across the dance floor to shake her hand, but the look in her eyes turned that gesture into a hostile act.

'Congratulations.'

'You were great,' Cassie said, forcing a smile.

'But
you
won.' Abigail's fingernails cut into Cassie's palm as they shook hands, and Cassie pulled her hand away. When Abigail turned back to join the other seniors, Cassie was left with the vague impression that winning would cost more than if she had lost, that she had started a journey that might lead to a terrible destination:

'Let's split,' Robin said, and Cassie followed her down the steps of the dance pavilion, trying to salvage what was left of the victory and take it with her.

She stopped. 'Wait... my ballet shoes.'

'Get them later.' Iris shot a telling glance back at the dance pavilion and Cassie understood: everyone had left except Abigail and her friends.

'To hell with her.' Cassie started defiantly back up the steps. Robin followed, and reluctantly Iris tagged along. Cassie hoped she had left the ballet shoes near the top of the steps, so that she would be able to grab them and head back to camp before Abigail saw her. No such luck.

'You wouldn't by any chance be looking for these?' Abigail was dangling the shoes over the lake. Perched on the edge of the dance pavilion, the seniors laughed, reflections of their bodies distorted in the green water.

'Give them here.' Cassie reached for the shoes, but Abigail pulled them away and held them farther out over the water. 'Give them here or I'll . . .'

Abigail smirked. 'You'll what?'

Cassie stepped forward and shoved Abigail, pushing her over the edge. Abigail fell off the stage but . . . there was no splash ... no moment when she plunged beneath the murky surface.

Abigail fell off the edge into midair and . . .

Abigail's body, which must have weighed a hundred pounds, fell terribly slowly, like an astronaut in outer space, a specter in a dream.

Impossible.
It was the word that Cassie and Robin and Iris would have wanted to say, had they been able to speak. But all Robin could do was lick her upper lip, while Iris crossed herself in a panicky reflex. Cassie shook her head to rid her mind of what she saw.

Impossible.

Abigail fell off the edge of the dance pavilion, fell ten feet and then . . .

The moment of impact, the instant when Abigail should (,
_a
ve plunged into the water, drenched and humiliated . . .

It never came.

When the tip of Abigail's foot touched the surface of the lake, she rebounded off it, up into the air and back onto the floor of the dance pavilion, as if her body had been repelled from the water by a force more potent than gravity.

It's just another one of the senior's tricks . . . It's got to be a trick.

Cassie wanted to laugh, to pretend she knew how it was done, but her lips were numb. It would take time to recover from the shock of what she had seen, but they weren't giving her time. One by one, each of the other seniors repeated it - the busty blonde, Tris, the redhead nicknamed Buns, and the other - jumping off the stage, touching the water with one foot, then rebounding off it back to their places. It was like a bizarre dance, Cassie thought, a dance that violated important rules that no one should break, an unnatural dance that she could never learn, that she would never
want
to learn, because it was somehow evil. Like those crazed men in India (what were they called?) who walked over hot coals without feeling pain. What powers did anyone have, she wondered, to defy the laws of gravity?