Captive (22 page)

She's wandering, Cassie thought. She doesn't know what she's saying. But her grandmother was going on.

"Your idea about getting out the old books and reviving the old traditions-you think you were the only ones to come up with that, don't you?"

Cassie just shook her head helplessly, but Deborah, brows drawn together in a scowl, said, "Well, weren't we?"

"No. Oh, my dears, no. In my day, when I was a little girl, we played with it. We had meetings sometimes, and those of us with the sight would make notes of what we saw, and those with the healing touch would talk about herbs and things. But it was your parents' generation who got up a real coven."

"Our parents?" Deborah said in disbelief. "My parents are so scared of magic they practically puke if you mention it.
My
parents would
never
-"

"That's now," Cassie's grandmother said calmly, as Cassie tried to hush Deborah. "That's now. They've forgotten-they made themselves forget. They had to, you see, to survive. But things were different when they were young. They were just a little older than you, the children of Crowhaven Road. Your mother was maybe nineteen, Deborah, and Cassie's mother was just seventeen. That was when the Man in Black came to New Salem."

"Grandma . . ." Cassie whispered. Icy prickles were going up and down her spine. This room, which had been so hot, was making her shiver. "Oh, Grandma, please . . ."

"You don't want to know. I know. I understand. But you have to listen, both of you. You have to understand what you're up against."

With another cough, Cassie's grandmother shifted position slightly, her eyes going opaque with memory. "That was the fall of 1974. The coldest November we'd had in decades. I'll never forget him on the doorstep, kicking the snow off his boots. He was going to move into Number Thirteen, he said, and he needed a match to light the wood he was carrying. There was no other kind of heat in that old house; it had been empty since he'd left it the first time."

"Since what?" Cassie said.

"Since 1696. Since he'd left the first time to go to sea, and drowned when his ship went down." Her grandmother nodded without looking at Cassie. "Oh, yes, it was Black John. But we didn't know that then. How much suffering could have been prevented if we
had . . .
but there's no use thinking about that." She patted Cassie's hand. "We lent him matches, and the girls and young men on the street helped him rebuild that old house. He was a few years older than they were, and they looked up to him. They admired him and his travels- he could tell the most marvelous stories. And he was handsome-handsome in a way that didn't show his black heart underneath. We were all fooled, all under his spell, even me.

"I don't know when he started talking to the young people about the old ways. Pretty soon, I guess; he worked fast. And they were ready to listen. They thought we parents were old and stodgy if we opposed them. And to tell the truth, not many of us objected very strongly. There's good in the old ways, and we didn't know what
he
was up to."

The shivers were racing all over Cassie's body by now, but she couldn't move. She could only listen to her grandmother's voice, the only sound except for the thin hiss of water in that quiet kitchen.

"He got the likeliest of the young ones together and paired them off. Yes, that's about the size of it, although we parents didn't know then. He made matches, giving this girl to this boy, and this boy to that girl, and somehow he made it all seem reasonable to them. He even broke up pairs that had planned to marry-your mother, Deborah, was going to marry Nick's dad, but
he
changed that. Switched her from one brother to the other, and they let him. He had such a grip on them they would have let him do anything.

"They did the marriages in the old way, handfasting. Ten weddings in March. And we all celebrated, like the idiots we were. All those young people so happy, and never a quarrel between them, we thought; how lucky they were! They were just like one big group of brothers and sisters. Well, the group was too big for one coven, but we didn't think about that.

"It was good to see the respect they had for the old ways, too. They had the Beltane fire in May and at midsummer they gathered Saint-John's-wort and mistletoe. And in September I remember all of them laughing and shouting as they brought the John Barleycorn sheaf in to represent the harvest. They didn't know what the other John was planning.

"We knew by then the babies were coming soon, and that was another reason to celebrate. But it was in October that some of the older women started to worry. The girls were all so pale and the pregnancies seemed to take so much out of them. Poor Carmen Henderson was flesh and bones except for her belly. That looked like she was carrying twin elephants. There wasn't much celebrating at Samhain; the girls were all too sick.

"And then on November third, it started. Your uncle Nicholas, Deborah, the one you never knew, called me to come to his wife's bedside. 1 helped Sharon have little Nick, your cousin. He was a fighter from the first minute; I'll never forget how he squalled. But there was something else, something I'd never seen in a baby's eyes, and I went home thinking about it. There was a
power
there I'd never seen before.

"And two days later it happened again. Elizabeth Conant had a baby boy, with hair like Bacchus's wine and eyes like the sea. That baby
looked
at me, and I could feel his power."

"Adam," Cassie whispered.

"That's right. Three days later Sophie Burke went into labor-her that kept her own name even when she married. Her baby, Melanie, was like the others. She looked two weeks old when she was brand-new, and she saw me as clearly as I saw her.

"The strangest ones born were Diana and Faye. Their mothers were sisters and they had their babies at the same moment, in two separate houses. One baby was bright like sunlight and the other one was dark as midnight, but those two were connected somehow. You could tell even at that age."

Cassie thought of Diana and a pang went through her, but she pushed it away and went on listening. Her grandmother's voice seemed to be getting weaker.

"Poor little things ... it wasn't their fault. It isn't
your
fault," the old woman said, focusing suddenly on Deborah and Cassie. "Nobody can blame you. But by December third,
eleven
babies had been born, and they were all strange. Their mothers didn't want to admit it, but by January there was no way to deny it. Those tiny babies could call on the Powers, and they could scare you if they didn't get what they wanted."

"I knew," Cassie whispered. "I knew it was too weird for all of those kids to born within one month ... I
knew."

"Their parents knew, too, but they didn't know what it meant. It was Adam's father, I think, who put it all together for them. Eleven babies, he said-he guessed that with one more that made a coven. And who was the one more? Why, the man who'd arranged for all those babies to be born, the man who was going to lead them. Black John had come back to make the strongest Circle this country had ever seen-not from this generation, but from the next, Adam's father said. From the infants.

"Nobody believed the story at first. Some parents were scared, and some were just plain stupid. And some didn't see how Black John could come back from the dead after all those years. That's one mystery that hasn't been solved yet.

"But gradually some of the group were convinced. Nick's father, who'd lost his own fiancee, seen her married off to his younger brother-he listened. And Mary Meade, Diana's mother; she was as smart as she was pretty. Even Faye's father, Grant Chamberlain . . . he was a cold man, but he knew his infant daughter could set the curtains on fire without touching them, and he knew that wasn't right. They got some of the others talked around, and one cold night, the first of February, the bunch of them set off to talk to him about it."

Cassie's grandmother shook her head. "To talk! If they'd come to us, to the older women, we might have warned them. Me and Laurel's grandma, and Adam's grandma, and Melanie's great-aunt Constance-we could have told them a few things, maybe saved them. But they went alone, without telling anyone. On Imbolc, February first, more than half the group that
he
had put together went to challenge him. And out of that group, not one came back."

Tears were running slowly down the seamed old cheeks. "So you see, it was the brave ones, the strong ones that went and died. The ones that are left are the ones too scared or too stupid to see the danger-I'm sorry, Deborah, but it's true." Cassie remembered that both Deborah's parents were alive. "All the best of Crowhaven Road went to fight Black John that Imbolc Night," her grandmother said.

"But
howl"
Cassie whispered. She was thinking of that row of gravestones in the cemetery. "How did they die, Grandma?"

"I don't know. I doubt if anyone alive knows, unless it's . . ." Her grandmother broke off and shook her head, muttering. "There was fire in the sky, and then a storm. A hurricane from the sea. The older women got together the babies that had been left with them, and the young parents that hadn't gone with the group, and we managed to save them. But the next day the house at Number Thirteen was burned to the ground, and all the ones who'd gone to challenge Black John were dead.

"We never found most of the bodies. They were washed out to sea, I suppose. But one thing we did find was the burned corpse at Number Thirteen. We knew it was
him
by the ring he wore, a shiny black stone we used to call lodestone. I forget the modern name. We took him out to the old burying ground and put him in the bunker. Charles Meade, Diana's father, dropped that chunk of concrete in front of it. We figured that if he'd come back once, he might try again someday, and we meant to stop him if we could. And after that the parents that had survived hid their Books of Shadows and did their best to keep their children away from magic. And it's strange, but most of them forgot what they could. I guess because they couldn't remember and stay sane. Still, it's funny, now, how much they've forgotten."

The cracked voice had been growing weaker and weaker, but now Cassie's grandmother grasped Cassie's wrist hard. "Now, listen to me, child. This is important. Some of us didn't forget, because we couldn't. I'd named my daughter for a prophetess, and she did the same for her daughter, because we've always had the second sight. Your mother couldn't bear what her gift showed her, and so she ran away from New Salem; she ran all the way to the other coast. But I stayed, and I've watched all my premonitions come true, one by one. The babies that were born on Crowhaven Road in that single month grew up different, despite everything their parents could do. They were drawn to the Powers and the old ways from the beginning. They all grew up strong-and some of them grew up bad.

"I've watched it happen, and in my mind I've heard Black John laughing. They burned his body, but they couldn't burn his spirit, and it's always been here, waiting, hanging around the old burying ground and the vacant lot at Number Thirteen. He was waiting for his coven, the one he'd planned, the one he'd gotten born. He was waiting for them to come of age. He was waiting for them to bring him back.

"I knew it would happen-and I knew only one thing could stand against him when it did. And that's
you,
Cassie. You have the strength of our family, and the sight, and the Power. I begged your mother to come home, because I knew that without you the children of Crowhaven Road would be lost. They'd turn to him, the way their parents did, and he'd be their leader and their master. You are the only one who can stop him from taking them now."

"So that's what you and Mom fought about," Cassie said in wonder. "About me."

"We fought about courage. She wanted to protect you, and I knew that by protecting you we'd lose all the others. You had a destiny even before you were born. And the worst was that we couldn't tell you about it-that was what the prophecies said. You had to come here all unknowing and find your own way, like some innocent sacrifice. And you did. You've done everything we could have wanted. And the time was coming when we could have explained it all to you . . . but she fooled us, that Faye. By the way, how'd she do it?"

"I . . ." Cassie didn't know what to say. "I helped her, Grandma," she said finally. "We found the crystal skull that belonged to Black John, and it was full of dark energy. Every time we used it, somebody died. And then-" Cassie took a deep, ragged breath. "Then, tonight, Faye told us to bring the skull to the cemetery. And when she uncovered it there-I don't know-all this darkness came out . . ."

Cassie's grandmother was nodding.
"He
was master of dark things. Just like the real Man in Black, the lord of death. But, Cassie, do you really understand?" With a supreme effort, the old woman tried to sit up to look in Cassie's face. "When you took the skull to his burying place and let that energy out, it was enough to bring him back. He's
here
now; he's come back again. Not a ghost or a spirit, but a man. A walking, breathing man. He'll look different the next time you see him; once he's had a chance to pretty himself up. And he'll try to fool you." She sank back wearily.

"But, oh, Grandma-1 helped let him loose. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry . . ." Tears swam in Cassie's eyes.

"You didn't know. I forgive you, child, and what's done is done. But you have to be ready for him . . ." Cassie's grandmother's eyes drifted shut, and her breath had a frightening sound.

"Grandma!" Cassie said, shaking her in panic.

The old eyes opened again, slowly. "Poor Cassie. It's a lot to face. But you have strength, if you look for it. And now you have this." Feebly, she pressed the Book of Shadows again into Cassie's hands. "The wisdom of our family, and the prophecies. Read it. Learn it. It'll answer some of the questions I don't have time for. You'll find your way . . ."

"Grandma! Grandma,
please . . ."

Her grandmother's eyes were still open, but they were changing, filming over, as if they didn't see her anymore. "I don't mind going now that I've told the story . . . but there's something else. Something you need to know . . ."