The Unwanted (33 page)

“What’s happening?” Cassie asked. “What are they doing?”

“He’s playing with them,” Eric told her. “First he flushed them out to make them mad, and now he’s teasing them. Watch!”

The ravens tumbled around the hawk, rolling in the air as they darted toward the bigger bird, then dropping away before he could attack them. Finally he wheeled over the sea, found the wind once more, and sailed serenely back, ignoring the screaming ravens as he dropped to the peak of the cabin roof.

For a few minutes the ravens circled him, attempting to lure him back into the air, but he sat calmly where he was, his beak once more methodically combing through his feathers. Losing interest at last, the ravens drifted back to their nests. Within a few minutes the marsh was quiet again, only the soft murmurings of the feeding ducks occasionally punctuating the rhythmic washing of the surf beyond the dunes.

Feeling the warmth of the sun on their backs, Cassie and Eric started walking slowly back toward the cabin. A deep sense of peace settled over Cassie, and once more she understood why Miranda had been able to live here by herself, why she’d loved the marsh so much. It was a universe sufficient to itself, teeming with life and activity, but somehow set apart from the rest of the world.

Then, a second later, the quiet that hung over the marsh was shattered by a high-pitched screech as Kiska leaped from the roof, climbing into the air.

“What is it?” Cassie gasped. “What’s wrong with him?”

Eric said nothing for a moment as he gazed into the sky, one arm shielding his eyes from the sun. The bird spiraled higher, then leveled off, soaring across the marsh toward the park.

A moment later he disappeared from their view.

“Where’s he going?” Cassie cried. “If anyone sees him—”

Eric grabbed her hand. “Come on,” he yelled. “I think I know where he’s gone. I’m sure of it!” Pulling Cassie with him for the first few steps, he began running through the twisted labyrinth of trails. Cassie hurried after him, doing her best to keep up, her feet slipping in the mud every few steps. As Eric reached the edge of the marsh and paused to catch his breath, she caught up.

“What is it?” she asked. “Eric, where are we going?”

“After Kiska,” Eric gasped. “Will you stop asking questions and just come on?”

“Look!” Eric shouted. He came to a sudden stop, and Cassie had to throw herself to one side to keep from crashing into him. She stumbled, then she caught herself, regained her balance and followed Eric’s gaze.

They had come up Commonwealth Avenue, and the square opened before them. But Eric wasn’t looking at the square. He was pointing off toward the Congregational Church.

Cassie searched the sky for a moment, before finding what she’d been looking for.

High up, almost out of sight, Kiska was circling in an ever-tightening downward spiral. Slowly the speck in the sky grew larger, and then Cassie heard once more the faint sounds of his screams as he cried out in preparation for an attack.

“But what is it?” she asked. “It’s just the church—”

“Not the church!” Eric yelled. “The graveyard! He’s over the graveyard, Cassie!”

Her heart pounding anew, Cassie rushed around the corner then across the street and into the square. The little cemetery next to the church came into view, and she could see clearly what Kiska had somehow known and Eric had guessed.

In the graveyard, crouched in front of Miranda Sikes’s grave, was Lisa Chambers.

Around her were half a dozen of her friends. Cassie recognized Jeff Maynard and Kevin Smythe, along with Teri Bennett and Allayne Garvey. The others were faces she’d seen before, but had no names for.

But she knew what they were doing, knew it just as surely as had Kiska and Eric.

“No!” she screamed. “Don’t do that!”

Lisa looked up, and when she saw Cassie and Eric, a cold grin spread across her face. “I can do what I want,” she taunted. “There’s nothing you can do to stop me!”

“Yes there is!” Eric shouted from behind Cassie. “Look!”

He pointed into the sky. Lisa and her friends looked up, then froze where they were.

Kiska was streaking down, his high-pitched scream of attack electrifying the air, his talons reaching out.

Cassie gasped, staring at the strange spectacle, knowing what would happen in just a few more seconds.

And she wanted to let it happen, wanted to let Kiska tear into Lisa the way he had torn into the corpse of the mouse only a little while ago.

But once more Miranda’s voice welled out of her memory, speaking softly to her.

She tried not to listen, tried to shut out the words. But she couldn’t do it.

Miranda spoke, and she had to listen.

“No!” she screamed out loud. “Kiska, don’t!”

The hawk, already into his final dive as he prepared to attack the crowd of terrified teenagers, whirled in the air, flapped wildly for a moment until he caught the wind, then reversed his course and began climbing upward once more. A few seconds later he leveled off and wheeled back toward the marsh.

Eric and Cassie watched until he’d disappeared, then Eric’s eyes narrowed. “You should have let him do it,” he said, his voice bitter.

Cassie shook her head. “I couldn’t. Miranda—” She broke off, but Eric looked at her, his eyes penetrating.

“What?” he pressed. “What about Miranda?”

“She never wanted to hurt anybody,” Cassie said quietly. She started across the street to the graveyard, where Lisa and her friends were now backing away. As Cassie stepped through the gate into the cemetery itself, they turned and fled. But it wasn’t until they were gone, and she and Eric were alone, that she finished what she’d been saying. She looked down at the defaced headstone that marked Miranda’s grave, and the shredded remains of the uprooted flowers she’d planted there so short a time ago. “She never wanted to hurt anyone,” Cassie said again. “And she doesn’t want me to hurt anyone either.”

Eric’s jaw tightened. “But she’s dead! She doesn’t care what you do.”

Once more Cassie shook her head. “But I don’t feel as though she’s dead,” she said quietly. “I feel as though she’s
still alive inside me, and sometimes I can … well, I can almost hear her talking to me. And she doesn’t want me to hurt anybody.”

“Even if they hurt you?” Eric challenged.

Cassie hesitated. “They—they can’t hurt me,” she faltered. “Not unless I let them.”

“But they
are
hurting you,” Eric insisted. “When Lisa does something like this, it hurts you just as much as your mother hurt you and my father hurts me.” The bitterness in his voice hardened into anger. “Just because they aren’t beating up on you doesn’t mean they’re not hurting you. And they won’t stop as long as they know they’re succeeding.”

She knew he was right, knew that what Lisa and her friends were doing stung just as much as any of the slaps she’d ever received from her mother.

But how could she stop them?

Then, slowly, an idea began to take shape in her mind.

Maybe, after all, there was a way. Maybe Eric was right. If they thought they weren’t hurting her at all …

Quickly, before she lost her nerve, she made up her mind. And when she told Eric what she was going to do, he nodded his agreement.

“It’s perfect,” he said. “It’s just perfect.”

Then they began repairing the damage Lisa had done to Miranda’s grave.

It was almost eight-thirty when Cassie and Eric walked around the end of the school building and cut across the playing field to the gymnasium entrance. The double front doors to the gym stood open, light from the foyer spilling out onto the front steps and the yard beyond. A couple of kids were standing at the edge of the lighted area, passing a cigarette back and forth between them.

Cassie paused in the comforting shelter of the darkness, then spoke quietly. “Maybe—maybe we shouldn’t go in at all.”

“But we already decided,” Eric replied. “Besides, I can hardly wait to see their faces.”

Cassie felt a knot of fear tighten in her stomach as she
remembered the expression on her stepmother’s face when she’d come downstairs half an hour ago.

Rosemary had been sitting in the little den at the front of the house. When Cassie stepped in from the foyer, she’d glanced up from her knitting and gasped, her eyes widening in shock. But before she could speak, Cassie had hurried out the front door and down the street, where Eric was waiting for her on the corner in front of the church.

“Did she say anything?” he asked.

Cassie had shaken her head. “She didn’t have a chance.” She’d chuckled. “For a second I thought she was going to faint.”

But now, as the throbbing rhythms of rock music reverberated from the building and she thought of the crowd of teenagers inside—all of them friends of Lisa Chambers—she was beginning to lose her nerve.

As if sensing what was happening, Eric took her arm. “Come on,” he said. “You can’t back out now.” His grip on her arm tightening, he led her out of the shadows, and they hurried up the steps into the gym.

Charlotte Ambler stood at the door to the gym itself, keeping a watchful eye on the crowd that covered the dance floor. So far everything seemed to be perfectly normal, and she was enjoying a brief respite from the tension that had permeated the school almost from the day Cassie Winslow had arrived. When she’d heard the rumor that Eric Cavanaugh had broken his date with Lisa Chambers for tonight and was planning to bring Cassie Winslow to the dance, she’d had a sinking feeling that something was going to go terribly wrong. So she’d made sure she got to the gym and taken up her station even before the doors had opened, hoping her very presence could avert whatever trouble might be brewing. During the last hour, with no sign of either Eric or Cassie, she’d begun to let herself relax. Apparently they weren’t coming at all.

As the band wound up its first set of the night, the last electronic wailings of the synthesizer fading away, she sensed someone behind her and turned, prepared to welcome the latest arrivals.

Turned and froze.

Standing perfectly still, her face an ashen white, her eyes wide, stood Cassie Winslow.

Except that it wasn’t Cassie.

It was Miranda Sikes.

The black skirt—the same black skirt Miranda had worn every day of her life—fell from Cassie’s waist to the floor.

She wore Miranda’s thick black woolen sweater, and wrapped around her head in loose folds that almost concealed her face, was Miranda’s black shawl.

She cradled Sumi in her left arm while the fingers of her right hand slowly stroked his fur.

The cat’s eyes, large and golden, glowed dangerously in the soft light from the gymnasium.

“C-Cassie—” Charlotte breathed. A wave of dizziness swept over her, and she had to reach out to the wall to steady herself.

“Cassie?” the eerie apparition said, her voice echoing with the oddly detached quality of Miranda Sikes. “I’m not Cassie. Cassie’s gone. I’m Miranda. I’m Miranda Sikes.”

Moving slowly and deliberately, she walked past Charlotte and paused in the doorway that led to the dance floor.

It was only then that Charlotte saw Eric Cavanaugh standing just inside the building, his face pale, his eyes fixed on Cassie. Her heart thumping erratically, Charlotte hurried over to him. “What’s going on, Eric?” she asked, her fear giving way to sudden anger. “Is this some kind of a joke?”

Eric only shook his head, pretending to be puzzled. “I—I don’t know,” he stammered. “When I picked her up, she was dressed that way, and all the way over here she wouldn’t say a word. I—I tried to talk to her, but she wouldn’t answer me. I’m not even sure she heard me.”

Charlotte closed her eyes for a moment in a vain effort to shut out the strange image of Miranda that Cassie had managed to create, shut out the reality of what must have happened.

A hush fell over the crowd of teenagers inside the gym as one by one they became aware of the dark figure that stood framed in the doorway.

Cassie didn’t move. She simply stayed where she was, her fingers stroking Sumi, her eyes—wide and unblinking—flicking over the crowd. And then, across the room, she found what she was looking for.

Lisa Chambers, her back toward Cassie, was standing with Teri Bennett and Allayne Garvey next to the punch bowl.

Her eyes fixed on Lisa, Cassie moved slowly across the now silent room.

The crowd parted before her, watching her slow progress. When she was ten feet from Lisa Chambers, she stopped.

    Lisa suddenly realized the room had grown totally silent, and her skin began to crawl as she felt eyes watching her.

She turned around.

The cup of punch in her hand crashed to the floor as she stared at the black-clad figure that stood ten feet away.

It was Cassie.

It
had
to be Cassie.

But somehow it wasn’t.

It was Miranda, her empty eyes glaring balefully.

She felt Teri and Allayne move away, and suddenly she was standing alone, facing the accusing eyes. Icy fingers of panic began to close around her, and her legs began to tremble.

The cat hissed dangerously, its fur rising up to stand on end.

Then Cassie’s hand came up, her forefinger pointing directly at Lisa. “You,” she breathed. “It was you.…”

Once again she moved forward, and as she came closer to Lisa, the hand of fear squeezed tighter on the other girl.

The cat’s teeth were bared now, and its back had arched as it once more spat out at Lisa. Then it crouched down, its tail twitching as it prepared to spring from Cassie’s arm.

As Cassie took one more step, Lisa screamed and twisted away from the approaching figure.

Stumbling, she lurched into the table. Its legs gave way, and the table, with its punch bowl and cups, crashed to the floor, Lisa sprawling on top of it. She tried to scrabble away
across the floor, but the tablecloth entangled itself around her and she flailed helplessly, still shrieking with fright.

Then, behind her, she heard a peal of laughter. Whirling around, she stared up at Cassie, who was smiling mockingly at her as she pulled the shawl off her head.

“You said I was crazy, didn’t you?” Cassie asked. “Isn’t that what you told everyone? Well, I just decided to be what you said I was. How did you like it?”