Chapter 1
It was a cool, purple night, and the candles continued to burn, flickering orange and yellow against the cave walls. But the hunters no longer mumbled their soft chant. They’d fallen silent. Their hardened bodies littered the ground, with their faces frozen in a soundless eternal scream.
Cassie looked at her hands, dirty and shaking. What had she done?
She glanced at Adam. He appeared pale and sickened, unsteady on his feet like he might faint.
Diana seemed a little dazed, unable to figure out what had just occurred.
The smell of death was thick in the air. As Cassie breathed it in, her mouth filled with the heady, metallic taste of guilt.
Then Max’s voice boomed. “You just killed my father. He’s dead! Do you understand that?”
Slowly, Cassie’s friends surrounded her, but they were no longer themselves—their faces had altered into distorted and ugly shapes. Adam sneered with narrowed blackened eyes and spoke in a voice that wasn’t his own. “Give us the book, dear one,” he said. “Or die.”
Diana curled her fingers and twitched. “Better yet,” she said, “give us the book and then die.”
So much death, Cassie thought. When will it stop? Fear coursed through her.
She tried to back away, but she found herself pinned against the rocky wall of the cave. There was nowhere to run.
Melanie reached out and grabbed Cassie by the neck. She squeezed her long fingers tight around Cassie’s throat, cutting off her breath.
Laurel clapped and cheered in a piercing, morbid singsong: “Die, die, die!”
I’m not ready to die! Cassie tried to scream.
But she couldn’t find her voice, and she couldn’t breathe, and soon the flickering cave walls went black—
She startled awake, gasping for air.
Cassie looked around her dark bedroom, confused about where she was. She mentally rifled through the last twenty-four hours, separating what was real from what she’d just imagined. The truth gradually snaked itself around her guts.
Her nightmare was her reality.
That evening at the caves, after performing the curse that destroyed the witch-hunters, the boy she loved and all her closest friends had turned into monsters before her eyes. The truth of it pierced her chest like a slick blade and remained there, stuck—there was no release.
The alarm clock on her nightstand told her it was almost morning, but the sky through her window was clouded over in charcoal gray. A storm must be coming. She reached over to the lamp’s hanging beaded cord and tugged it to life. Scattered around her bedroom floor, Cassie saw pages and pages of her handwriting—translations, notes, doodles—all scribbled the previous night while she worked through Black John’s Book of Shadows. She’d fallen asleep trying to figure out a way to save her possessed friends.
Now, beneath the soft yellow glow of her lamp, Cassie reexamined what she’d written on each page. She’d translated reams of dark magic spells and incantations, but, so far, she’d had no luck finding a single word referring to demon possession.
Cassie picked up her father’s Book of Shadows from where it lay on the floor. She rested it upon her lap and stared at its aged cover. It looked like any old book, but she knew the power contained in its pages. Opening it didn’t burn her fingers anymore, the way it once did. Because it was a part of her now, and she was a part of it—for better or worse.
A crack of thunder caused Cassie to flinch. Then the sky opened, unleashing a violent rain against the glass of her windows.
She blushed at her own jumpiness. Her spell had trapped her friends in the cave, Cassie reminded herself, so at least for now, she was safe. However, running her fingers through the book’s tattered pages, Cassie reflected that safe was hardly how she’d describe what she felt at the moment. Determined was more like it.
Cassie awoke for the second time that morning to a room that was sunny and bright. She climbed out of bed, thankful the storm had passed, and went to her window to greet the ocean. Admiring the way it rolled and sparkled never ceased to calm her—but today the beach struck her as lonesome, abandoned. No person could be seen for miles.
Cassie dressed quickly and went downstairs to find her mom making enough pancakes to feed an army.
“Oh, no,” she said aloud.
Her mother looked up from the sizzling butter in her frying pan. “What’s wrong?”
“Everything,” Cassie said. “But for the moment, there’s the small problem that no one’s here to eat these.”
Cassie picked a pancake from the top of a pile, rolled it in her hands, and bit into it like a piece of licorice. Sitting down at the kitchen table, she tried to figure out the best way to explain the events of last night to her mother. But there was no best way. She just had to come out with it straight: They’d gone to the caves, performed the hunter curse, and Scarlett betrayed them.
“The hunters died,” Cassie said, still hardly able to believe it herself. “The spell killed them all, even Max’s dad.”
Her mother’s naturally pale skin appeared to whiten. She pitched forward, ignoring the pancake currently sizzling and smoking in the pan, and motioned Cassie to continue.
“Now the whole Circle is possessed. To perform the curse, we had to call upon Black John’s ancestors, and they’ve taken hold of everyone and won’t let go. I’ve been poring through Black John’s book trying to find a way to save them, but I haven’t been able to find anything remotely helpful.”
“I told you to leave that book alone.” Her mother’s voice sounded severe, like a scolding. She turned off the stove and abandoned her pancake batter, then reached for a dish towel and wiped off her hands. She was quiet for a few seconds, twisting the towel sorrowfully in her fingers.
Cassie knew she should have listened about not touching her father’s book. Maybe her mother thought she’d gotten what she deserved.
But when she finally looked up, the only emotion on her mother’s face was concern. “Is it awful that all I can think right now is how happy I am that you’re okay?” she said. Her long dark hair framed her face like a shroud.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Cassie said, but the look she gave her mom betrayed her true concern.
“Possession is serious, Cassie. If there’s a way to save your friends, it won’t come easy, and you surely can’t do it alone.”