The Power Page 0,2

to dig up the skull. There was no way to get around that. Cassie could see it happening in face after face: the ending of disbelief and the slow beginning of grim accusation.

It's like The Scarlet Letter, Cassie thought wildly as she stood apart with all of them looking at her. She might as well be standing up on a platform with an A pinned to her chest. Helplessly, she straightened her back and tried to hold her chin level, forcing herself to look back at the group. I will not cry, she thought. I will not look away.

Then she saw Diana's face.

Diana's expression was beyond stricken. She seemed simply paralyzed, her green eyes wide and blank and shattered.

"She swore to be loyal and faithful to the Circle, and never to harm anyone inside it," Faye was saying huskily. "But she lied. I suppose it's not surprising, considering she's half outsider. Still, 1 think it's gone on long enough; she and Adam have had enough time to enjoy themselves. So now you know the truth. And now," Faye finished, looking over the ravaged members of the Circle, and especially her deathly still cousin, with an air of thoughtful gratification, "we'd probably better be getting home. It's been a long night." Lazily, smiling faintly, she started to move away.

"No." It was a single word, but it stopped Faye in her tracks and it made everyone else turn toward Adam.

Cassie had never seen his blue-gray eyes look this way before - they were like silver lightning. He moved forward with his usual easy stride. There was no violence in the way he caught Faye's arm, but the grip must have been like iron - Cassie could tell that because Faye couldn't get away from it. Faye looked down at his fingers in offended surprise.

"You've had your turn," Adam said to her. His voice was carefully quiet, but the words dropped from his lips like chips of white-hot steel. "Now it's mine. And all of you" - he swung around on the group, holding them in place with his gaze - "are going to listen."

Chapter Two

"You've told the story your way," Adam said. "Some of it's been close to the truth, and some of it's been just plain lies. But none of it happened exactly the way you told it."

He looked around the Circle again. "I don't care what you think of me," he said, "but there's somebody else involved here. And she" - he glanced at Cassie, just long enough for her to see his blue-gray eyes, still shining like silver - "doesn't deserve to be put through this, especially not tonight."

A few of the coven members, notably Laurel and Melanie, looked away, slightly ashamed. But the rest simply stared, angry and mistrustful.

"So what's your side of the story?" Deborah said, scowling. Her expression said she felt she'd been taken in, and she didn't like it.

"First of all, it wasn't like that when Cassie and I met. It wasn't love at first sight . . ." Adam faltered for a moment, looking into the distance. He shook his head. "It wasn't love. She helped me, she saved me from four outsider guys with a gun. The witch-hunting kind of outsiders." He looked hard at Chris and Doug Henderson.

"But she didn't know - " Deborah began.

"She didn't know what I was, then. She didn't know what she was. Witches were something out of fairy tales to her. Cassie helped me just because I needed help. These guys were after me, and she stashed me in a boat and sent them all off running in the wrong direction down the beach. They tried to get her to tell where I was, they even hurt her, but she didn't give me up."

There was a silence. Deborah, who admired physical bravery above all other qualities, looked quizzical, her scowl smoothing out a little.

Faye, though, was squirming like a fish trying to get off a hook, and her expression was unpleasant. "How sweet. The brave heroine. So you just couldn't resist fooling around with her."

"Don't be a jerk, Faye," Adam said, giving Faye's arm a little shake. "I didn't do anything with her. We just - " He shook his head again. "I told her 'thank you.' I wanted her to know that I wouldn't forget what she'd done - remember, at the time I still thought she was an outsider, and I'd never known an outsider who did anything like that for one of