Just like that, he wasn’t her Adam at all. He was a many-faced monster, exactly like in her nightmare. Cassie was poised to recast the guarding spell on the cave, but with a flick of Adam’s fingers her legs spilled out from under her.
Chapter 5
Diana appeared from the deep shadow of the cave, followed by Melanie and Laurel. Faye, Deborah, and the others were behind them. They were all still visibly possessed, but more subtly than before. The irises of their eyes were less noticeably etched in black, and the slithering lesions festering on their faces were less pronounced. But it was obvious to Cassie they weren’t themselves.
Scarlett hung back in the shadows—the only one besides Cassie who was not possessed. Satisfied, she watched Cassie writhing on the ground, struggling to regain her strength.
“Did she bring us the book?” Melanie asked.
Diana twitched awkwardly. “Search her,” she commanded.
Faye kneeled down, her mouth leering threateningly. Deborah crouched at Cassie’s side and roughly patted her body up and down, frisking her for the book.
Cassie scanned all the faces hovering over her. Weak as she was, limp on the ground, she strove to decipher which ancestors had invaded her friends. If she paid close enough attention, she thought she might be able to recognize who some of them were, based on what Timothy had told her earlier that day. If they revealed themselves, maybe she could use it against them.
Deborah stood up and turned brusquely to the others. “No book,” she said.
Sean and the Henderson brothers grimaced. Adam kicked a stone in frustration.
“Patience,” Diana said. “We’ll get it from her one way or another.”
Scarlett wrapped her arm around Adam’s waist and smiled down at Cassie. Her red hair was knotted and untamed, dusty from the cave. Adam drew her in and kissed her forehead. “It won’t be long now,” he said.
Cassie flinched. Adam and Scarlett? Were they . . . together?
Adam was holding her so close. He rubbed the small of her back with his thumb, and Cassie could sense their silver cord now, humming and connecting them. Even with Adam possessed, their cord remained.
It felt like Cassie had been knifed in the heart. She coughed, unsure if it was the spell Adam had cast or purely her heartbreak causing the twisting pain.
Diana crossed her thin arms over her chest. Cassie concentrated on her familiar cheekbones and her long golden hair, searching for any sign as to who inhabited her body. Could it be Black John’s sister, Alice?
Cassie looked at Sean, slinking and beady-eyed, and then at Chris’s and Doug’s sharp-featured identical faces. She wondered if each ancestor chose its host for a reason. It would make sense, she thought, that the spirits would identify the most comfortable body for their invasion. But for the moment, none of the spirits were immediately recognizable.
Adam stepped forward and held his open hands—priest-like hands, Cassie thought—over her body. He stared down at her with his hard black eyes, and she grew weaker still. She could feel her life force draining from her veins, leaking out in a puddle beneath her body.
“Leave her, Absolom,” Diana said. “This is a waste of your energy. We need to regain our strength.”
Absolom?
“She’s right.” Scarlett pulled Adam back by the arm. “We’re finally free. Let’s get out of here.” She turned to the group. “Follow me.”
Diana and the others made their way to the boats behind her. In the darkness they appeared to vanish into thin air after only a few steps.
Faye called back to Cassie from the void. “Don’t worry,” she said in her husky voice, which was at once both foreign and familiar. “This won’t be the last you see of us.”
Those final words echoed inside the cave like a warning, ringing out with truth.
Still lying on the ground at the mouth of the cave, Cassie shook with fear. She looked around to be sure she was alone, that—for the moment at least—all the ancestors had gone.
But she wasn’t alone. Someone stirred behind her and sluggishly said her name.
“Nick?” she said.
It hadn’t occurred to Cassie that she didn’t see him earlier; he must have been hanging back in the cave all along.
He stepped out into the moonlight and came into full view.
Weak and sweating, uneasy on his feet, he looked like he was suffering from the flu. “Don’t be afraid,” he said feebly. But Cassie could see the darkness in his eyes and the slithering things beneath the skin of his face.
With Diana and the others gone, Cassie felt her strength returning. She was able to climb up to a standing position and back away from Nick, watching him carefully.
“Don’t come any closer!” she screamed.
He inched nearer to her in spite of her warning. “Help me, please,” he said. “It’s taking every ounce of strength I have, but I’m fighting off whatever this thing is inside me.”
“Stay where you are.” Cassie raised her hand and searched her mind for a spell.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Nick said. He dropped down to his knees. “You have to believe me. Ask me anything, I swear it’s really me.”
Cassie knew questions would do no good, but she remembered Timothy’s warning and the feeling of Adam’s racing heart against her chest. Hearts can’t lie, she told herself.
“Put your hands on your head, where I can see them,” Cassie said. “And leave them there.”
Nick did as he was told, and Cassie took a careful step closer.
“Stay very still,” Cassie commanded, as she slowly lifted the palm of her hand to his chest.
It was a drum gone haywire. Fast as Adam’s, Nick’s heart was pounding as if it were trying to escape his body.
Cassie was about to pull her hand away and take off running when she noticed Nick’s shoulders gently settle. He’d closed his eyes, reveling in her touch. Her contact seemed to soothe him. His breathing slowed, and then his heartbeat did, too.
He didn’t move. Cassie kept her hand in place and felt his heartbeat return to a measured and regular rhythm.
“It’s easier when you’re near me,” Nick said.
Timothy had told Cassie that love was the most powerful spell of all—that’s what had made her trek out here to the caves in the first place. Her plan was to seek out Adam. But this, this she hadn’t planned for.
Cassie released her hand from Nick’s chest. “You can relax,” she said.
He was sickly and sweating, barely fighting off the demon within him. But he was doing it. He was winning.
Cassie reached out again, this time to brush her fingers through his damp hair. Her love might not have been strong enough to save Adam, but Nick’s love for her was proving to be strong enough to save himself. He’d managed what no one else in her Circle could do. He’d broken through the possession.
Why wasn’t Adam’s love strong enough to do that?
“You’re going to be okay,” Cassie said.
Nick’s eyes filled with tears. He reached for Cassie and held her with all the energy he had left. She buried her face in his shoulder, like she used to do with Adam, and she realized just how much she needed to feel the warmth of another human body. She clung to it—to him. Nick was shaking, and she could feel herself shaking right there with him.
Chapter 6
Cassie lay awake, staring at her bare bedroom ceiling. By now Nick was, she hoped, sleeping downstairs in the secret room. So far, he’d been able to keep the demon at bay, but he’d told her on the boat ride back to her house that he could still sense it inside him. He’d said it with such a calm honesty, so open and unguarded, as they rowed through pitch-black night, that Cassie wasn’t as frightened by the admission as she maybe should have been.
But now, in the quiet of her bedroom, Cassie worried that Nick could be a ticking time bomb. There were no guarantees the demon wouldn’t get the best of him. How long could he possibly fight it off without being overpowered?
Cassie sat up, resigned, and turned on her lamp next to her bed. She couldn’t sleep; her body insisted that she remain awake and ready for anything, at least tonight.
On her nightstand was the chalcedony rose Adam had given her the first day they met. She took it into her hand and admired its tiny black spirals. She turned it over to watch its gray and blue swirls sparkle beneath the lamplight, and then pressed it into her palm. The jolt of electricity that ran through her hand and up her arm was exactly how it felt to touch Adam back at the cave. The sensation was so real and true—if only she could say the same of Adam himself.
Cassie returned the chalcedony rose back to her nightstand and turned over on her side. As if the cord between Adam and Scarlett weren’t enough. As if his not being able to break through the possession weren’t enough. He and Scarlett had gotten together?
Cassie swallowed down the urge to cry. She would obviously have to be the one to bring Adam back, since he couldn’t do it himself. And there was no time to lose.
She retrieved her father’s Book of Shadows from its hiding place beneath her bed and sprawled out with it on her bedspread, alongside a notebook. Finding the exorcism spell was the only way to put a stop to all this pain—and at the moment the pain was almost unbearable.
Cassie’s eyes moved swiftly across the book’s pages, searching for the section Absolom might have contributed. Every few minutes, though, she found herself zoning out, thinking back to her meeting with Timothy. He had said the exorcism spell was dangerous, that Absolom may have tampered with it.
Dangerous how? she wondered. But if it was successful, well . . . Cassie was driven by the possibility of it. She could do this, she thought. She would do it—but suddenly a gust of wind shot her sheer curtains open and sent her papers whirling into the air.
Cassie fell backward, momentarily disoriented. Before she could figure out what was happening, Faye was standing in her bedroom, her pitch-black hair blowing wild. It was unclear to Cassie if Faye had come through the window or if she had just appeared.
Faye’s eyes were lit black coals, and she splayed her fingernails like claws. Her dark dress flapped across her body in silk waves.
All she did was casually wave her fingers, and Cassie lost her sense of space. Her bedroom seemed to buckle beneath the overbearing energy of Faye’s presence.
Cassie’s vision went hazy, and the walls began to spin as if she were on a carnival ride. She couldn’t tell if Faye was growing larger before her eyes, or if she herself was shrinking, or if the whole thing was a hallucination. This was nothing like the magic Cassie was used to seeing. Faye was using dark power that didn’t follow any rules of nature. She didn’t even need to call out spells. All she did was focus her mind and her black eyes on her intentions, and they manifested.
Cassie concentrated as best she could and called out a spell: “I protegat ipse a veneficia!”
Faye paused to smirk at Cassie’s feeble attempt before casting another spell that drove Cassie to the ground. Then she honed in on Black John’s Book of Shadows. A simple nod of her head, and the book began to tremble. It levitated up from the bed at Cassie’s side, seemingly light as a feather.
That’s what she came for, Cassie realized. The book. Cassie lunged for it, catching it in midair, and hugged it close to her chest with both arms.
Faye narrowed her searing eyes and reharnessed her energy. She appeared huge to Cassie now, hovering above her, a force of evil so sinister she couldn’t be contained.
Cassie cried out.
To her own ears, Cassie’s scream sounded as faint as the squeak of a mouse, a whimper lost in the wind. But somehow the book had heard her. She felt it warm to her chest like a living being. It clung to her, desperate as a child.
Faye shook with aggravation, but she would not relent. She exhaled deeply, sending a draft through the room, and then inhaled again. A dark shadow emitted from her eyes, encircling the book. She raised her outstretched hands, finally resorting to calling out a spell. “Obedire me!”
Her voice crashed like thunder, unnerving Cassie. The whole room shuddered, and Cassie’s hair blew back from her face, but the book remained still.
The book was bound to Cassie. It was hers, and it might have been the only thing in this world Faye couldn’t command at will.
Faye’s recognition of this drove her into an even more violent rage. She roared at the room, a human hurricane, sending lamps smashing against the wall and Cassie’s nightstand tumbling onto its side. The walls shook, and everything not nailed down toppled over helplessly against the force of Faye’s wrath.
Cassie shouted out a protective spell to keep from being crushed, but Faye’s magic was too powerful.
There was a flash of lightning and a cold wind, and then water—icy pellets of rain falling from . . . where? The ceiling? It poured down fast and hard in soaking gray sheets.