The Secret Circle: The Complete Collection (122 page)

Read The Secret Circle: The Complete Collection Online

Authors: L. J. Smith

Tags: #Young Adult, #Fantasy, #Romance, #Vampires, #Juvenile Fiction, #Teenage Girls, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Love & Romance, #Witchcraft, #Fiction, #Fantasy & Magic, #Social Issues, #Young Adult Fiction, #love, #Dating & Sex, #Massachusetts

BOOK: The Secret Circle: The Complete Collection
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Cassie could see that the injury to his leg was serious. Nick was in shock. Magic was the only chance of saving him.
Cassie hovered her free hand over the spear of metal impaled through the flesh, and silently cast a spell:
Periculosum metallic tutum esse liberum
.
The hole in Nick’s leg opened like a mouth, releasing the metal beam to the air. It rose and fell to his side, into the red pool of his blood.
“I’m okay,” Nick insisted. “I can get up. Don’t waste your energy on me. You have a spell to cast.”
Resanesco
, Cassie thought.
Resanesco
.
Nick stirred as the wound stitched itself sealed, cleanly. Still squeezing Cassie’s hand, he lifted his head just high enough to catch a glimpse of his injury.
“It’s not even as bad as I thought,” he said.
Cassie inhaled a thankful breath. Nick would be okay. She was about to help him up when a new string of words entered her mind.
Let him feel the love I have for him, and let it be enough
. She said them to herself silently, just as she had the others.
“Thank you, Cassie,” Nick said, rolling over onto his side. “But I’m really fine.”
“Hurry up!” Scarlett called out. She’d managed to get everyone else in formation. The ancestors were still trying to regain their strength.
Cassie helped Nick to his feet and led him to the Circle. When they stepped into place, the fire began to smolder. Gray smoke rose from its source, darker and darker, until it formed a coal-black cloud overhead.
Cassie picked up her father’s book from its place on the ground. She held it up high for all her friends to see. Then she held it over the fire and allowed the spell to come:
I cast you out, unclean spirit, in the name of goodness.
All sources of light and truth, we appeal to you and your sacred boundless power.
Be gone, darkness. Leave us a dwelling place of light.
We renounce you, all symbols of darkness, demons, and all evil.
The fire hissed and sizzled. Red-hot embers shot up like sparkles from the flames.
For a moment Cassie had a thought: What if she didn’t drop the book into the fire? What if the infected rats had accomplished enough to weaken the ancestors? Maybe they were soon to die anyway. Then Cassie and her Circle could have the best of both worlds—she could keep the book without her relatives trying to control it.
One by one, the ancestors climbed to their feet and struggled toward the circle’s perimeter. Their sickened eyes were furious and helpless as they watched and waited for what Cassie would do next. Blood dripped from their noses and ears.
The book called to Cassie. It screamed her name. She pulled it back slightly from the heat of the flames. This book was her past, she thought. It was her last and final connection to her father and to her lineage.
It felt like a living precious diamond in her hands. A one-of-a-kind power. Could she really just cast it away? Destroy it forever?
No. She couldn’t.
She took one giant step back from the fire and hugged the book tightly, embracing it over her heart. It had a heartbeat, too, she realized—its own. And their two hearts beat together as one.
All other sound drifted up and away. Only the book existed to Cassie now. And then he spoke to her.
“Cassandra, my one and only,” he said.
Him
. Her father.
His voice was like a poison that seized Cassie’s throat.
“Don’t disappoint the long line of witches that brought you here,” he said. “The witches that made you. They are all you have.”
Cassie’s pulse quickened. She couldn’t catch her breath.
“All their knowledge is yours,” he said. “Their power is yours. Don’t throw it away.”
Everything began to spin. Cassie lost all sense of up from down, left from right. Her own body felt like nothing. An empty shell.
“Don’t turn your back on your past,” her father said. “Destroying that book will destroy who you really are.”
Who am I?
Cassie thought.
I am Cassandra Blake, child of Alexandra and John, beloved daughter, loving friend.
I am power.
But I can surrender that power to the flames.
If I have power without love, I have nothing.
Something inside Cassie’s mind clicked. If evil was what she really was, who she really was, then so be it. Let evil be destroyed. Let light triumph over darkness once and for all.
A feeling of warmth enveloped her like daybreak.
She shouted the final words of the spell: “Depart, evil spirits. Leave this good and innocent world!”
Cassie lifted the book up and heaved it into the fire. “Depart, Father!” she screamed out. “Depart!”
Her father’s cry rang out for all to hear.
The ancestors could do nothing to stop her. The moment the book hit the flames their bodies stiffened, and as it burned, they burned.
Flames penetrated the ancestors’ chests as if the fire started in their hearts and spread upward and out from there. Their mouths softened as they wailed. Noses liquefied, eyes dissolved. The ground beneath their melting bodies broiled and withered. Alice moved her head from side to side on her shoulders. Her face took on a mournful expression as she stretched her neck and cried out. The grief-stricken sound seemed to ricochet off the moon.
The fire pit popped.
The book glowed orange like a lit coal. From its flame-engulfed pages, Cassie’s father’s scream went quiet. It was their final requiem. Scarlett, Cassie noticed, had begun to tremble. A darkness drained from her eyes and mouth like a black, smoky mist.
The wind stirred, making a rushing sound through the air. It carried with it a strange sense of change.
Cassie stared down into the fire, and it suddenly seemed to be everywhere. Far and wide, hers was the only screaming voice now. It echoed from within the center of the flames.
I’m in the fire,
Cassie thought.
I am it.
When it exploded, an ashy mist rose like a mushroom cloud, throwing Cassie skyward.
She landed flat with her arms wide open to her sides. There was an unnatural warmth to her face and a heaviness in the air. She sat up, blinked her eyes, and looked around.
Only her Circle remained. All else was gone: the ancestors, the book, even the fire.
They’d done it. In her soul, Cassie knew they had won.
The Circle gathered around her, bending, leaning.
“Cassie?” Adam said. He was staring at her strangely. So was Diana.
“Are you okay?” one of them said, just before everything went soft and gray, and all Cassie saw was darkness.
Cassie reopened her eyes to the Circle huddled around her. Adam was holding her hand.
She sat up slowly, weak and woozy. “I feel different,” she said. “Do any of you feel different?”
Adam told her to keep calm, that the spell must have been too much for her.
“Nobody else feels different?” she asked. “Scarlett?”
Scarlett’s face appeared airy and open. “I do,” she said. “I feel good.”
But Cassie didn’t feel
good
. There was a new void in herself, an emptiness. She felt
powerless
.
She got up on her feet and focused her energy on a small round rock upon the ground. It was the simplest spell she could think of, to try and make it rise. She focused every ounce of energy she had on that little pebble, and nothing happened. It didn’t budge.
“Timothy warned us that there would be consequences,” she said.
“Cassie, what are you talking about?” Adam asked.
“There needed to be a sacrifice,” Cassie said. “And it was me. I’ve lost my magic.”
Chapter 26

“L
et’s just get you home, Cassie,” Adam said. “Everyone else can take care of cleaning up.”

Cassie didn’t have the strength to decline, so she made a motion toward the bluff. Adam put his arm around her shoulders and guided her along. Cassie didn’t offer much more than a nod good-bye to her friends, but they seemed to understand.
Only Scarlett ran after them. “Wait,” she said. “I have to tell you something.”
Cassie stopped and turned.
Adam tensed up. “Can’t it wait?”
“I’m sorry, but it can’t.” Scarlett spoke almost directly to the ground. “The cord that you saw, Cassie. The one between Adam and me. It was just a ruse.”
Cassie felt her heart skip a beat.
“A ruse?” Adam said for both of them.
Scarlett nodded. “It was a visualization spell that I cast. It wasn’t real. I was just trying to tear Cassie down however I could.”
Cassie let this truth settle over her like ash. It felt like both a final moment of destruction and a cleansing rebirth. Scarlett continued talking.
“I realize now that it was the darkness controlling me all along,” she said. “I was out of control. And I’m so ashamed.”
Cassie closed her eyes for a moment. She couldn’t decipher if the trembling in her chest was happiness or anger or sadness. She’d had so many doubts about Adam these past weeks because of something that was a lie.
“I don’t know what to say,” she mumbled. “I need some space right now, Scarlett.”
Cassie ventured toward the beach. She heard Adam tell Scarlett to head back to the others, to help clean up. Then he chased after Cassie.
He caught her by her hand, pulled her in toward him, but at the sight of her face he faltered.
Why wasn’t she smiling?
Cassie turned to the water. Only a gentle wind was blowing, but it felt to her like a frigid gust beating against her skin.
“I knew it,” Adam said to the back of her head. “I told you. I never doubted for a second that you were my one and only soul mate.”
But Cassie did have doubts. She’d been so fooled by a fake cord that she almost let Adam go.
She wanted to feel moved now, to be calmed. But everything hurt too much.
She’d heard her father’s voice calling out from the book, warning her not to turn her back on her past. He told her that destroying the book would destroy who she really was. And it had.
Her power was gone. She’d surrendered it to the flames—and she knew! She had known, somewhere deep inside herself, that this would happen. It was a decision she had made.
If I have power without love
, she’d thought,
I have nothing
. If evil was what she was, who she was . . . she chose to sacrifice it all to the fire.
Now she had to live with that choice forever.
Adam held Cassie from behind, by the shoulders. “Aren’t you the slightest bit relieved the cord was just a trick?”
She was, but it seemed almost beside the point under these new circumstances.
Love without power
, she thought.
If I have love without power, do I still have nothing
?
“I’ve lost my magic, Adam,” she said, turning to face him. “Do you not understand that?”
Adam averted his eyes.
“Now our Circle is unbound.” Cassie found herself frantically worrying aloud. “And you might need to replace me. A loss of magic would probably have different terms than death, so it might not necessarily have to be a replacement of bloodline.”
Adam cautiously placed his hand upon Cassie’s shoulder. “Calm down,” he said. “You’re getting ahead of yourself. Maybe there’s a way we can get your powers back.”
He brought Cassie in for a warm, firm embrace. “And I hope you know that I will stand by your side, no matter what happens.”
Of course Adam would. Cassie didn’t doubt that for a second. But he was refusing to acknowledge certain facts. A powerless witch was a liability.
She pulled away from Adam’s hug and looked out at the ocean spanning in front of her. She thought of Timothy, on his own and driven mad by not being able to practice witchcraft. That was the lonely, discouraged fate of a powerless witch—they were better off alone, better off isolated than to drag everyone around them under with their frustration.
Cassie wouldn’t say so out loud, but she wondered if there might be a better place for her than New Salem after all.
She turned and began walking toward her house again. Adam loyally trailed behind her, having given up on trying to make her talk, on trying to get her to look on the bright side. But he followed her the whole way home.
For the first time since they’d met, Cassie knew that Adam couldn’t understand what she was going through. He could never comprehend how sometimes love, even true love, just wasn’t enough.
Chapter 27

C
assie was slumped in the leather recliner in the corner. She hadn’t even wanted to attend this meeting, but coming and zoning out seemed easier than formulating a decent excuse to miss it. She stared at the modern artwork that decorated the walls of Diana’s living room. Abstract lines in black and gray and beige. Completely bereft of emotion, like she felt at the moment. Dead inside.

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