“I guess this means we’re going to the benefit tonight,” Faye said.
“Is that what that place was?” Doug asked.
Melanie nodded. “The New Salem Historical Society benefit. The ancestors are going to burn it to the ground.”
So this was the great revenge the ancestors had been building up to. Cassie realized it made perfect sense. The benefit was the ideal place to take vengeance on New Salem. Everyone who was anyone would be there.
“Why would they give us this warning?” Chris asked.
“Because they don’t want us to miss it,” Deborah said.
Nick finally put his sunglasses back on. “We have to try to stop them.”
“How?” Melanie said, almost to herself. “They’re so much more powerful than us. The only way we can stop them is to destroy them.”
“Melanie’s right,” Diana said. “All the more reason we need to complete our Circle. Our only hope is to get Scarlett to cross over.”
“Like that’ll ever happen,” Faye murmured. “Stopping the ancestors from destroying the benefit is one thing. Getting Scarlett to come to our side is another.”
Cassie thought back to Scarlett’s initiation. After the hunters killed Suzan and Scarlett inherited her place in the Circle, it had felt like the worst thing in the world. If only Cassie had known then just how incorrect that premonition was. Things had since gotten much worse.
“How could we possibly win Scarlett over?” Laurel’s voice cracked with frustration. “What do we have to tempt her with? Nothing that competes with being all-powerful and having eternal life.”
Cassie studied Adam’s face. He was looking down, seemingly lost in his own thoughts, totally unprepared for what Cassie was about to bring to the table.
“We have Adam,” Cassie said, and his head shot up.
“Scarlett wants Adam,” she said declaratively. “He’s our best shot to win her over.”
Adam stuttered, unable to find the right words. He shook his head. “No.” Slowly, painfully, he said, “That can’t be our only option.”
A cold determination flooded Cassie’s veins. “There’s no escaping this,” she said.
Diana placed a comforting hand on Cassie’s shoulder. “That’s a brave sacrifice to make.”
At first Cassie thought Diana meant it was a brave sacrifice for Adam to make, then she realized that Diana was speaking to her.
Only after Cassie acknowledged Diana’s compliment did she turn her attention to Adam. “You have to do it,” Diana said to him. “For the Circle.”
Adam stared straight down at the ground as if he couldn’t face any of them. “How do I . . .” He paused.
Faye laughed out loud. “I think you know exactly how, Adam. You already have.”
Adam looked sadly at Cassie, and she strained to return his gaze with love. She had to be calm now. She couldn’t lose control.
Bleary-eyed and nauseated, she said, “You have to use the benefit to get closer to Scarlett. Convince her you’re in love with her, not me. It’s our only hope of getting her to cross over.”
“We’ll all be there with you,” Diana added.
“You can’t say no, man,” Nick said.
“Alright,” Adam said finally. “I’ll do it for the Circle.”
And though it’s what Cassie had insisted upon, something inside her shattered.
Sally Waltman was the flyer on New Salem High’s cheerleading squad. Cassie watched from the bleachers as she got tossed, flipped, and thrown about, all while maintaining her bright white smile. Sally is really something, Cassie thought, an overachiever in the best way. And she came from a long line of prominence. Her father was the chairman of the board of the Historical Society—that’s why Cassie had come to watch her practice. It was time to take Sally up on her offer to help the Circle.
Sally had spotted Cassie midway through practice, so when the squad broke up, she headed straight in her direction. Her face was flushed and shiny, and she dabbed it softly with a white towel. “What’s up?”
“I need a favor,” Cassie said. “But that’s not the worst of it.”
Sally flipped her towel back in a roll around her tiny shoulders and took a seat beside Cassie. “Don’t leave anything out.”
Cassie described how the ancestors planned to trap everyone inside the Historical Society benefit and then burn the place to the ground.
Sally kept her eyes on her teammates making their way across the field to the locker room. “After what they did to the auditorium, I doubt they’re bluffing.”
She seemed to be replaying the horror of that event in her mind, frame by frame, the color leaching from her face. “I can’t tell my dad. Not without explaining how I know.”
“You shouldn’t,” Cassie said. “The Circle will stop them, but we need to be there. Can you get us in?”
“That’s a given; I’ll put you all on the list. But how will you stop them, Cassie? All the people who’ll be at that benefit . . . I can’t imagine . . .”
“We’ll do whatever we can,” Cassie said, careful not to make any false promises. “Armed with defense spells, we’ll counter them one for one, the way Nick and I managed to do at the auditorium.”
It almost sounded like a plan. But what Cassie didn’t mention was that in the auditorium she was battling her possessed friends. The ancestors were much stronger and more powerful now that they had their own bodies.
Sally brushed back a strand of hair that had fallen in front of her eye, and Cassie noticed her hand tremble.
“I won’t let anyone get hurt,” Cassie said. “You have nothing to worry about.”
It was the false promise she probably shouldn’t make, but it seemed to calm Sally. She rose and stepped down the bleachers toward the field.
“I’ll see you there,” she said.
Cassie unzipped the garment bag holding her beaded halter-neck evening dress. Diana crossed her bedroom to admire it.
“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Is it new?”
“Suzan picked it out for me, one day when we were shopping,” Cassie said. “I told her I had no use for an evening dress, but she insisted I buy it. She said it was too perfect to pass up.”
Faye looked away, and all the girls got quiet.
Suzan had always been the best when it came to prepping for a fancy party, so it was with a little bit of a heavy heart that Cassie and the others continued the tradition in her absence.
“I’ve been thinking about her all night,” Deborah said.
Laurel marveled at the dress’s intricate beadwork. “We all are,” she said.
Now it was Diana’s bedroom instead of Suzan’s serving as the backdrop to their primping. It looked like a movie studio dressing room. There were backlit mirrors propped up on every flat surface, curlers warming on the dresser, perfume in the air.
Melanie directed Cassie to sit down on the chair facing the largest mirror. “We’ve got to get your hair done,” she said. “What are you feeling tonight, up or down?”
“Do it up,” Laurel shouted from inside Diana’s closet.
Cassie agreed. “Up,” she said, and Melanie went to work, massaging lavender-scented oil onto her scalp.
Cassie closed her eyes, enjoying the soothing smell of the oil and Melanie’s strong fingers kneading the tension from her temples. For a moment everything felt like normal. What a long-missed luxury it was to listen to her friends debate over something as insignificant as which dress most brought out the color of their eyes, and which shoes made them appear taller but not too much taller.
Faye stepped out of the bathroom holding up two nearly identical skimpy black satin dresses. “I can’t decide,” she said to Deborah. “Which one?”
Deborah, who was lounging on Diana’s bed already dressed in a white tuxedo with purple trim, somehow noticed a distinction between the dresses. “That one,” she said definitively, pointing to the one on the left.
“That’s what I thought, too,” Faye said.
Diana asked Cassie to zip up her pearl-colored gown. It cascaded down her legs in a long, flowing train.
Cassie caught herself relaxing. She almost felt happy. But then Diana began talking about Max.
“This’ll be our first fancy party as a couple,” she said, and that was all it took for the girl talk to veer into the territory of boys.
Cassie grew sullen and quiet. She remembered the stomach-curdling fact she’d been striving to force away—that Adam would be spending the night flirting with Scarlett.
“Cassie,” Diana said, “come back to us.”
Cassie tried to smile.
“You have nothing to worry about,” Laurel said. “Whatever happened with Scarlett while Adam was possessed only happened because he was possessed. He was literally someone else.”
“You’d have to be possessed to get with that girl,” Deborah added.
“Adam couldn’t stray from you even if he wanted to,” Melanie said into the mirror, with a bobby pin between her lips. “That cord works better than a short leash.”
Cassie exchanged a nervous glance with Diana that gave all the girls pause.
“What was that?” Faye asked, stepping between them. “One of those words made you uncomfortable, either cord or leash, and either way we want to hear the story.”
Diana averted her eyes, but Cassie said Faye was right. She turned around on her chair to face them and described the cord that had appeared between Adam and Scarlett.
“The first time I saw it was when I was half-unconscious after battling Scarlett at the broken-down cottage on Hawthorne Street,” Cassie said. “And the second time, it caught Adam off guard the night of the spring dance.”
“How is that even possible?” Melanie asked.
“I don’t understand how,” Cassie said. “I wish it wasn’t real, but it is.”
Diana’s lips formed a pout. Even she was at a loss for what to say to make the truth less painful.
Melanie was mentally sorting through this new information. “So when Adam was possessed,” she said, “and he and Scarlett were so close . . .”
“It wasn’t just the possession making him act crazy like we thought,” Laurel said. “He and Scarlett have an actual connection?”
Cassie’s heart sank. “I guess it’s possible to have more than one soul mate. At least if you’re Adam.”
Melanie and Laurel stared down at the carpet, heartbroken for Cassie.
Then Deborah hopped off Diana’s bed. She placed one hand on Faye’s shoulder and the other on Cassie’s.
“I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said. “But I will personally take Scarlett out with a debeautifying spell tonight if she tries anything with Adam.”
Faye gave Deborah a high five. “Now you’re talking! We’ll make her so ugly that the sight of her will make babies cry.”
Cassie let herself laugh. It was going to be a difficult night, but she was glad she had her friends back on her side.
Chapter 21
The town hall ballroom, with its marble floors and high ceilings, was the setting for all formal events in New Salem—and the Historical Society benefit was the nicest event of all. Tonight’s party would be crowded with the town’s elite: academics, politicians, and everyone wealthy enough to spring for a table.
Cassie spotted Sally across the dance floor, dressed in a peach cocktail dress with a bow around the waist. She was standing with Max.
“They’re already here,” Sally said, pointing to Scarlett and the group of ancestors huddled in the corner.
They appeared more sinister than ever in formal wear. Absolom, whose dark hair was slicked back with a shiny gel, murmured something while looking at Cassie, and the group exploded with laughter.
“No sign of Adam yet?” Diana asked, extending her hand to Max. He wore a gray suit that was just tight enough to show off his physique.
Melanie scanned the crowd. “Nope.”
Laurel glanced at the corners of the room and each emergency exit. “There’s nothing out of the ordinary going on,” she said. “Yet.”
Faye gave Deborah a nudge. “Let’s go get a drink.”
Cassie checked the door at the exact moment Nick stepped inside. He was wearing a black suit and tie, and for once he had traded his leather boots for a pair of shiny oxfords.
He headed straight for Cassie. “I hear you came here stag,” he said playfully. “Does that mean I get the first dance?”
Melanie raised her eyebrows and politely led Laurel away. Diana was off somewhere with Max.