Disclaimer: All concepts and characters belong to L.J. Smith and are used here for non-profit entertainment without permission.

Rating: R (Sex, violence, language)

Spoilers: Technically, this story takes place before The Secret Circle trilogy. While it doesn't spoil anything outright, it does hint about the story. However, it will be easier to follow if you've read SC.

In the Calm Before the Storm

Preface

It’s funny how my perceptions of things have changed with time. How I see my life, my past, my self even, change as slowly as a flower blooming. I can’t see the difference, but I know it’s there, gently over-taking me.

A lot of people think Cassie was the cause of the change. A catalyst, Diana once called her, for all of us. And she was, in a way. She tore the circle open, dragged Faye off her pedestal, broke the binds holding our priest and priestess together, and I know she scared the hell out of me. But even without her, something would have given eventually. It was like during that time, that month or so before she arrived, there was something on the air. I would wake up to a summer morning drenched in heat and stillness, and laying beneath the quiet would be a subtle rustle, a giggle from one of the Fates, just to let me know that I hadn’t gotten out of their grasps yet.

A lot of people also think that before Cassie there was no magic. True, the doors to the supernatural flew open to us once she arrived, and have done so on even greater proportions ever since, but then, most people don’t know the whole story. There was magic before Cassie. There was magic, and anger....and Faye.

Part One

They were playing one of their games. Not the Pizza Man one Cassie described when she wrote down her adventures in The Secret Circle, one of the other ones. Faye had a whole batch of them, and she was never at a loss for making up a new one on the spur of the moment.

I don’t remember a whole lot about what happened before I fell asleep. There’s really too much unconsciousness in the beginning of this story for it to be completely coherent, but the times I do remember are clear. We were at Faye’s house, Deborah and me, and Susan was there. The Hendersons dropped by briefly and presented Faye with a small barrel of some unnamed alcohol that tasted like a mixture of Jim Bean and Wild Turkey. People had been invited, outsiders, most of whom I didn’t recognize. That probably meant Faye had brought people in from out of town. She must have decided to play the "Average girl Sue," routine tonight.

I stretched out on the couch in the living room, kicked some guy in the ass when he asked me to move my legs so he could sit down, and lay one arm over my eyes. Meatloaf was playing in my ear and riding over the bubbles of conversation. I wondered how long it would be before Diana showed up to find out what the hell Faye was doing.

I dozed on and off until midnight, dreaming distantly of an empty field where nothing grew. It was a disturbing image, and one that was still bothering me when I awoke to the sound giggling.

I rolled over and found the room full of so much candle light it may as well have been daylight. Ten or twelve people were crouched around a blanket stretched out on the floor, where an inert body lay with arms crossed over her chest.

Jesus christ, I thought, aren’t we just a little too old for this?

Faye was sitting near the girl’s head; she caught my eye and gave me that smile of hers, the one that said, Look at me, I’m toying with these imbeciles. Ain’t it fun?

I didn’t smile back, but I noticed what she was wearing. It was a dress I hadn’t seen before, something in silk that wrapped around her and was belt at the waist, a cross between a 70's dress and a bathrobe. The silk was an amber color that brought out her eyes to incredible advantage. A pendant, tear-drop cut moonstone on a silk string, hung low on her chest.

There was a scent in the air I couldn’t place. Maybe it was just the combined smells of booze, pot, incense and perfumed candles, but I couldn’t help wondering if Faye hadn’t slipped something else in somewhere. It was a vague thought, I didn’t even really consider it until the hallucinations started.

They were chanting. "Light as a feather, stiff as a bored." Someone giggled, which started up a chain reaction, there was a general call for order from Faye, a short bitching, and then a return to chanting. I lay my face against the warm leather of the couch and went back to sleep.

This may be unusual, but I can never remember waking up. I can recall what was happening when I returned to consciousness, but I can’t recall exactly how I felt, and I couldn’t tell you the time even if I had a watch built into my wrist. This night, I became gradually aware of what was happening sometime after the game ended but before the real fun began.

There was a lot of screaming for a while, some crying ensued, and then some huge guy who I mistook for Hulk Hogan offered to take the bimbo home. The tv came, the insanity and let’s-scare-ourselves games ended, and I found that the living room had turned into the hub of a giant slumber party.

I stumbled out the back door and into Faye’s garden. A huge brick privacy fence enclosed the yard, which had been professionally designed with fountains and pathways and mini bushes. A gazebo sat in one corner, a pool and hammock were settled in the other. Trellises covered in thick vines had been strategically placed so that both spots were alcoved and mostly private.

I wandered to the hammock and lay down, but sleep had left me. Through the merging branches to the two trees that held the hammock up, I could see the stars. It was the night of the new moon, and bone-pale clouds scampered across a dark sky. My body was aching and hot, sweat dampening the hair at my neck and temples. I let one hand hang off the hammock and reached out for the surface of a mirror-pond within the alcove.

My last year of high school would begin in a few weeks. I wasn’t looking forward to it, but I was glad to be almost finished. The University of Maine had already accepted me to their engineering program for a year from now, and I believed that once I was away from the Circle and Deborah’s parents, everything that had been bothering me would be gone, too.

We all knew I had no place in the Circle, that I was about as magical as a Coke can, that I only went to Circle meetings because the blond goddess in charge was so damn hard to resist. Other than that, I had no thoughts of elements, corners, invocations. I was an atheist, a bitter one at that, and the sooner I got away from pretending to be some kind of wanna-be witch, the better.

Maybe it’s become clear to you by now: I didn’t believe that the magic existed.

Part Two

I lay in the hammock under a moonless sky and stared at my reflection in a man-made pool. My head hurt from the thick incense I’d breathed inside the house, the scent of which still floated around me.

Inside was Faye’s party, strangers from a nearby town who had no idea they were being toyed with, tricked, manipulated. I could have gone inside and told them all that they’d been drugged, found a phone and dialed the cops, or walked the half dozen houses to Diana’s and told her what Faye was up to. But I didn’t move. I stayed where I was, collapsed, exhausted, racked with insomnia in a hammock sheltered by ivy-laden trellises.

I didn’t help the strangers because I was in worse shape than they were. Maybe not at that moment, but in general. I had a year before my schooling at U of M started, a year in which I would be living under Deborah’s roof with Deborah’s parents. We didn’t get along. They absolutely hated me. I absolutely hated them. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it through a year with this kind of continuing pressure on my self-control.

Faye appeared out of nowhere, sliding into the alcove with all the grace of a fairy dropping to the ground. Her hair was drawn up onto her head and held with a large metal circlet, something I hadn’t seen before, and the strange silk robe-dress had slipped off one shoulder. There was always a touch of acting involved in our interactions, both of us bluffing as hard as we could for no real reason.

"What are you doing out here?" she asked, and there was a dangerous sweetness in her voice.

"Thinking, what are you doing?"

"Looking for you?"

"Aren’t your worried that your pets might piss on the carpet while you’re gone?"

She laughed, deep and throaty, and took a step closer. "Why don’t you come inside and we’ll play with them? There’s a cute little redhead you could have."

"No, thanks," I replied, barely even having heard her.

She ran her finger tips over the knee of my jeans. "You sure?"

"I’m sure."

Faye sighed and sat down beside the pond. She touched her finger gingerly to the water’s surface, watched the ripples spread with some satisfaction, and glanced back at me. With the devious Mary Poppins-ness gone from her voice, she said seriously, "What are you doing here, Nick?"

"Thinking, I told you."

"About what?"

I shrugged. "Stuff."

She turned onto her knees and held her hand an inch or so over my chest. I couldn’t help rolling my eyes; Faye pretended not to notice.

"You’re mad again," she announced a moment later, letting her hand drop to my chest. "Mostly frustrated."

"Don’t expect me to believe you got that out of witchcraft, Faye, everybody knows I hate it here."

"Yeah, that’s true."

She tapped her fingers rhythmically against my t-shirt, staring off into space. A smile touched her lips suddenly.

"I did something," she said in a low whisper that just oozed conspiracy. "Want to hear about it?"

I didn’t care one way or the other, but I said, "Sure," because I knew it was what she wanted to hear.

"I did a summoning spell," she told me, "just before the last full moon."

"Who were you trying to summon?"

"No one in particular. Just some one to liven things up around here. Someone to step on Diana’s toes for me."

I looked away from her and returned to examining the moonless sky. No one in particular, of course not. That way, when no one showed up, she could say, "Well, there was that substitute teacher here last week, that must have been him." Indefinite and easily interpretable to fit any situation. Weren’t all the spells her stupid Circle cast created the same way?

"You think it won’t work," Faye said, watching me.

"I never said that."

"You didn’t have to. Tell me something, Nick: do you really believe in anything?"

I ignored her. I had no answer. I didn’t believe in God, or a higher power, or that some ancient and outdated earth spirit was going to bring Faye a Renfield.

She folded her arms over my chest and rested her chin on them. "I’ve never heard of anyone with as much natural power and easy opportunity to use it as you being such an utter disbeliever."

"Forgive me if I’m not as gullible as your puppies," I growled.

"And witty to top it off." She chuckled, then softened. "Must be lonely, Nick, having no one disbelieving with you."

To the average American eves-dropper she sounded gentle and sad, but even when her voice turned all earnest and buttery,–no, especially when her voice was earnest and buttery–I knew who she was and what she was about.

I turned my head to look her straight in the eye. "What the hell do you want already, Faye?" I demanded.

She smiled again, and leaned forward enough to kiss me. Faye has an incredible mouth, I have to give her that. She has complete control over the tiniest muscles, and some kind of psychic gift that lets her sense exactly what the other person wants. Her hands cupped my face, her tongue probed my mouth with an angle on molestation, and her breath tasted like red wine.

When she pulled away, I said, "Is that why you came out here?" and was surprised to hear my voice utterly unfazed. Maybe I wasn’t surprised; after a time, one comes to expect such behavior from Faye.

"Of course." She rose up from her knees as easily as if she had wings and climbed slowly on top of me. The silk skirt of her dress rode up over her knees. "Do you really think I’m that stupidly spontaneous?"

Her thighs pressed warmly against mine. "I didn’t think you were that cheap."

She chuckled, more of a low growl than a sound of amusement. "Ah, but nothing ever comes cheap with you, does it, Nick?" She leaned down, letting her breasts rub against my chest.

"I don’t even know what the hell that’s supposed to mean."

Her lips dangled above mine, waiting to strike. She smiled and ran one hand over the crotch of my jeans. "Does it matter?"

In case Diana should ever read this, I’ll spare you the details. They aren’t really important anyway, exactly what she did, exactly what I kissed, how long things lasted. There’s an energy sex with Faye has that doesn’t require any kind of intellectual thought or rational evaluation. It had some other meaning, something inside each of us that was touched and effected, but was still ours alone. I touched her and yet I didn’t; the intimacy meant nothing. No shame at wanting, no embarrassment at nakedness. Things were intense and a little feral, as if we were both trying to screw away some inner demon, drown it in spit and sweat. We weren’t there to play games.

Afterward, she lay on top of me in a boneless heap. Somehow we had managed to stay in the hammock, but the rope diamonds were cutting into my butt and I was relieved when she got up. Still nude, she walked lightly to the pool and crouched down beside it. Jerry Sienfeld once said that crouching was "bad naked," but he had obviously never met Faye. She looked beautiful and other worldly, and her hair sparkled with golden glints in the dim starlight.

She splashed some cold water on her face and chest, then breathed a deep sigh and looked upward. "It’s getting colder out," she said simply, and reached for her dress. She pulled it on like a robe, tied the belt in front, and started back into the garden. Halfway there she stopped, chuckled, and plucked a foil condom wrapper out of the grass. "I’ll see you around, Nick."

That was all. No parting kiss, no summative statement, no explanation. She just walked back into her house.

I lay alone in the hammock, the sweat on my body rapidly turning cold in the quick night air, my heart thudding from exertion, my eyes searching an empty sky for the moon.

Part Three

I was underneath my car, trying to figure out where the oil was leaking from, when the garage door connecting to the house opened and closed. A moment later, someone kicked me.

"What the hell was that about?" Deborah demanded. I groaned and tried to roll out from under the car, only to find that my shirt cuff had gotten caught on something behind the carburetor.

"What was what about?" I grumbled, and she kicked me again.

"Don’t give me that. You slept with Faye?"

"No, we never slept."

She kicked me a third time; I really needed to learn how to keep my mouth shut. "You screwed her, I don’t believe it."

"Actually," I replied, jerking my sleeve so hard it tore, "it was more like she screwed me."

"Shut up, Nick."

I climbed out from under the car to find her pacing, boots clicking against the concrete floor. I sighed. Deb was my friend, possibly the only real friend I’d ever had, and for all that we were both into emotional repression, we were close. And as little as I cared to admit it, her obvious disgust bothered me.

"It didn’t mean a thing," I told her, and she paused to glare at me.

"How many girls have you slept with, Nick?"

I shrugged. "Eight or nine, I don’t know. Why?"

"And Faye makes ten." She started pacing again.

"Nine or ten. But I don’t see what that has to do with it."

She was wearing torn jeans that showed off her buns of steel and had her hair yanked back in a painful-looking bun. I suppose from a guy’s perspective she looked great–well, more than suppose–but just then all I could see was the net of hard lines that had formed around her mouth.

"Deb-"

She turned and cut me off before I could even get the rest of her name out. "You know, I’m not trying to go into one of those rants about morality and love and the sanctity of life, I’m not Diana or anything, but this is really the pits, Nick. What you did with Faye was flat out male sluttiness, okay? It was gross. I’m not an angel or anything, I’ve done my share of shit, but I never slept with somebody on a whim like that."

"I told you," I started, "it didn’t mean anything-"

"Yeah, so you said. But it’s like licking a popsicle, you think one lick isn’t going to make any difference. And then you think another won’t make a different, so you do it again, and pretty soon you’re down to the goddamn wooden stick-"

I tried to lean back on my hands and hit my head on the car’s fender. "I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you," I said. "This is total crap, after that night you got stoned and did that weirdo-"

"That was two years ago, Nick," she snapped. "Has it happened since? Has anything even remotely similar happened since? No, I learned my lesson. Some things have to be kept at least slightly special, or you end up cold even when you’re laying underneath her."

She slammed the door on her way out.

I wandered down to number 13 that afternoon. I didn’t believe in the vibes the others were always talking about, but something about the lot bothered me. With the mood I was in, the atmosphere was perfect.

I lay out under the sun and closed my eyes, letting my head rest on a block of concrete. I’d woken up that morning only to find that my neck was as starch-stiff and my lips were rubbed raw. Plus, there was a scratch running along the back of one shoulder that opened in the shower and soaked a towel with blood. Faye’s nails had to be fake.

I let the sun beat down onto me and told myself Deborah was wrong. She was soft in the heart, always had been when you got right down to it. One of those bleeding-heart romantics who can’t help but believe. Faye and I....we were different. We understood that sometimes flesh is just flesh.

But if flesh was just flesh, why had I paused before throwing my shirt in the hamper to press her residual scent against my face?

"This is insane," I said aloud, and forced myself to sit up. "We’re talking about Faye here."

It was simple desperation, I decided finally, on my way into town to pick up some muffler coils. Staying here, doing nothing, going nowhere, waiting for one more year to pass–it was taking its toll on me, and I was lashing out. I smoked a cigarette and made a mental note to get myself back under control. Having Deb pissed at me wasn’t going to make life any easier.

Part Four

There was a circle meeting that night, the occasion I cannot remember. We assembled on the beach, Kori drifting along our edges until Diana told her she’d have to go home, a candle resting in Adam’s place. The night was clear and hot, and my throat was scratchy. I sat on a rock as far away as I could possibly get and flicked my lighter over and over while Melanie went about casting the circle and calling the drawbridges or whatever they called them in those days.

It was comical; I had to keep from laughing. I mean, this was the nineteen nineties, and here we were out in the middle of the night, Susan wearing little more than a slip, Laurel wandering around the circle waving a bundle of dried leaves on fire, Chris reading some invocation off a recipe card Diana had made him. I actually had to keep one hand over my mouth to hide a smile when they started the damn communion.

"May this cake and ale become a symbol of our unity with Divine will," Diana announced, holding a plate of salteens and a glass pitcher of RC Cola. "What we put into it, may we so bring back into ourselves and our lives."

She handed the plate and pitcher to Melanie, who cuddled it against her chest like a wet kitten and said, "Wisdom," then added the traditional German blessing that had become her trademark, "Segnen uns."

The platter and pitcher made its way around the circle.

"Humor." Chris.

"Safety in traveling." Diana.

"Happiness." Doug.

"Growth." Laurel.

"Beauty." Suzan.

"Money." Sean.

Faye, who normally threw herself into these affairs, was wearing simple jeans and a t-shirt and sitting very quietly. She was probably hung over, I decided, studying the circles under her eyes.

Her long fingers wrapped tightly around the pitcher and she opened her mouth, then stopped. Laurel leaned forward just slightly, as if curious, and then Faye said, "Strength," and handed the pitcher and plate over to Deborah.

Deb glared at me while the word formed on her lips. "Conscience," she said, and handed the platter to Faye.

I didn’t give a damn under normal circumstances, but it bothered me that she was bring our friendship into this mockery of a game. Although what bothered me more was what slipped out of my mouth. "Forgiveness," I said, and everybody looked at me. A tiny smile formed at the corner of Deb’s mouth and she put her head down. I handed the pitcher back to Diana and lit another cigarette like nothing had happened.

Diana passed it through the flame of Adam’s taper, apparently saying this would allow him to absorb the energy they were putting into it even though he was far away. Then she passed the tray around again and we each took a cracker while Suzan poured small goblets of RC. My throat was still scratchy and I tossed back the cola without even thinking, only remembering that I was supposed to wait for the rest of the group when Diana told us to raise our glasses.

"What we have given, we shall receive. So mote it be."

"So mote it be," everyone repeated, and I stumbled to follow the words. There was a moment of silence as every ingested their crackers and coke, and then Diana dusted the crumbs off her hands and stood up to close the circle.

Deborah and I wandered home together a few hours later. There was still a hint of smile on her face, nothing noticeable if you didn’t know her as well at I did.

"That was good," she told me. "What you did."

"Yeah, well." I flicked my lighter. I shrugged.

She nodded as if I had explained myself. Maybe I had. She knew if I apologized, it would be just to get her off my back, but the fact that I had done it in front of the circle said I was willing to put myself on the line I was so sorry. Actually, it was just a more elaborate version of the Get-her-off-my-back-scheme.

"Did you bitch Faye out, too?"

"Didn’t have to, she’s acting strange. I don’t think it has to do with you, just other stuff. She always gets weird around the new moon."

"You think that’s what happened last night? New moon PSM?"

"Maybe." We reached the front lawn and started to go our separate ways, her into the house and me toward the back steps that lead to my cramped room above the garage. "Either way, Nick," she said, pausing, "it was a good thing."

I smiled in spite of myself. She was unusually affectionate this evening. "Only for you, Deb," I told her, and headed around the side of the house.

In my room I found a book laying on the bed, Wicca: A Guide for the Solitary Practitioner. I blew a cloud of smoke into the air and shook my head. Wonderful. Deborah thought she could drag me into it if I didn’t have to be with the group. She thought I was a believer with a pride problem. Christ.

I chucked the book under the bed and pushed a rotting curtain away from the window. Our street was long and dark, and I watched a cat stumble across the pavement, no doubt looking for her home. Faye knew Kavina was mostly blind, she shouldn’t have let the stupid beast out of the house.

Kavina wandered back and forth across the road for at least an hour; she was still there when I finished fixing my alarm clock and was getting ready for bed. I watched her for a few minutes and then groaned and went outside to get her. She was a pretty calico, with spots of gray on her face, but she hissed when I picked her up.

"Shut up, you," I said, and stuffed her inside a pillow case before she could sink her claws into my arm.

Faye’s house was only a few minutes away. I knocked softly on the front door, decided she wasn’t awake, and stuffed Kavina into the plastic mailbox. While I was debating whether or not to try to get her out of the pillowcase–since I had borrowed it from my aunt, that was a valid issue–when Faye came down the street and tapped my shoulder.

I jumped. Kavina had been mewing so loudly I hadn’t heard Faye come up behind me. "What?" I demanded.

She lifted her eye brows and glanced at the pillowcase. "Is that my cat you’re delivering?"

"Yeah." I pulled Kavina out and shook her onto the lawn, where she continued mewing pitifully until Faye picked her up and cuddled her. "You shouldn’t let her out of the house," I said. "Deb’s gonna hit her on the bike one of these days."

"Sophie let her out," Faye replied, gesturing with a tilt of her head to the house where her step-mother was sleeping. "I’ve told her not to, because I don’t want Kavina to hide the kittens when they come, but she doesn’t listen to me."

"Your cat got knocked up?" I said, and she gave me that funny golden glance again.

"Not exactly in those words," she replied, and started walking up the driveway. "Thanks for bringing her back," she called, and went inside.

I grabbed the pillowcase and headed home.

Part Five

Kavina’s kittens were born the next morning, or rather, later that night. I didn’t hear of it until three days afterward, when Deb crashed on her bike and asked me to take a look at it. Chris and Doug helped us drag it into the garage, squishing it between my car and the tottering wooden shelves, and I wondered what exactly she had hit. As in, maybe it had been an elephant.

It was dark by the time I had finished doing what I could with the supplies I had handy. I caught Deborah on her way out of the house, and she asked me to talk while we walked because she was late getting to Faye’s.

"How bad?" she asked grimly.

"You want the good news or the bad news first?"

"Bad."

"The bad news is, you trashed it."

"Shit. What’s the good news?"

"I can’t think of any. It’s a mess. Your whole wiring system is blown, the brake is just gone, and I think you’re going to need new wheels. Not just tires, whole wheels. What the hell did you do to it?"

She rolled her eyes skyward. "Sean told me he had ridden his uncle’s before, and...."

I tried not to break out laughing and failed. "You let Sean take your bike out? Why didn’t you just give it to some carnival as one of those fifty-cents-a-smash games?"

"Oh shut up," she said. "Can you fix it?"

"Probably. I’m going to need parts, and parts don’t come cheap."

She sighed. "Would it be cheaper to just buy a new bike?"

"Considering I’m not going to charge you for the work, somehow I doubt it."

Deborah and I had an agreement; she let me cop her homework, I did whatever the bike needed for free. The deal was mostly in her favor, but I was so desperate to mess with anything automotive in the hopes that it would be my ticket out of Salem that it seemed more than fair to me.

"Okay then," she agreed. "Make me up a list of what you need."

A voice called my name from behind, and I turned around. Kori Henderson, little and pretty and pointless, was running toward us. "Wait up!" she cried, dashing down the street. She stopped just short of slamming into me, and her chest was heaving so hard I wondered if she wasn’t going to snap her training bra.

"Hi Nick," she said, beaming at me. She barely even noticed Deb, who was discretely hiding her smile.

I gave half a nod, wondering what it would take to discourage this girl. I pulled my cigarettes out of my back pocket and lit up.

"Oh, can I have one?" Kori asked. Her eyes were all bright and round.

There’s something horribly sad about people who want so badly to belong that they’ll do anything. I ruined my lungs because I was self-destructive; Kori tried to ruin hers to fit in. I told her no and walked away. She scampered after me.

"Are you going to the baptism?" she asked, bubbling with excitement.

"The what?"

"Faye’s having a naming ceremony for the kittens," Deborah explained as she caught up with us.

"You are coming, aren’t you?"

"I don’t think so."

Kori tried to act like it was no big deal while hiding the panic that showed plainly on her face. "It’ll be my first real ceremony, you know," she said. "I’ll really be one of you after tonight."

I stopped walking so that I could turn and glare at her. "One of what?" I demanded, feeling the heat rise in my neck. "One of the goddamn wannabe witches? So you can act all cool and aloft and pretend you’re special? Let me tell you something, Kori. Tonight won’t change you. It won’t make you popular or pretty or smarter. You'll still be Doug and Chris's equally stupid kid sister who wears too much make-up and dresses like a hooker, and everybody will still think you're a pathetic example of what happens when kids are dressed in Gap clothes. It’ll just be one more stupid game to take up your time. Don’t get it into your head that it’s anything more."

I turned away and started back down the street the way I had come, but not before I saw her eyes fill with tears. Deborah’s hand clenched around my arm before I was past the Henderson’s house and she squeezed it hard enough to pop blood vessels. I could barely control myself as I spun around, let alone be centered enough to avoid Deb’s fist as it flew into my face. I managed to snag her shirt as I tumbled back and we both fell to the pavement in the heap of struggling, flailing limbs.

Her eyes had turned black and blood shot in a moment’s time. Don’t ask me how, I still don’t understand the strength that she drew on then, but she pinned me easily and put my cigarette out on my shirt sleeve, millimeters away from my skin. I groaned out loud as her knee drove into my groin. "I don’t know what’s wrong with you lately," she hissed, "but knock it off. Yeah, so Kori couldn’t cast a circle if she was standing in a hula hoop, but you’re an asshole and I don’t see how one is better than the other. So get your act together or just stay the hell away from us."

She climbed off me, dusted her hands on her pants, and turned away. I got up onto my elbows and called after her, "Exactly where do you get off pretending to be Diana and telling me what to do?"

"Don’t mess with me, Nick, I swear I’ll hurt you."

I ended up back in the garage with the bike. I worked for three straight hours in an obsessed frenzy, and it didn’t matter that the bike I was fixing belonged to the one responsible for my anger. I took pieces off, dug through every scrap box I had, hammered out kinks, even managed to do a little welding.

She didn’t have any right to act all self-righteous. She made fun of Kori more than I did. And the way she had attacked me tonight–what was that about?

Around three in the morning, my uncle, Alex, came into the garage and said it was time to put the tools away for the night. I told him I was working and I’d put up when I was finished. He said I was making a racket and keeping everyone up. I told him he should have thought of that before he agreed to take me in. In minutes, our dialogue exploded into a full-fledged argument.

"Dammit, Nick, don’t do this again," he fumed, and I brought a hammer down on a piece of scrap pipe hard enough to shake the walls.

"Do you want me to kick you out?" he hollered. "Are you just pushing the limits to see how far I’ll let it go?"

"I know how far you’ll let it go," I replied. "As far as I want. God knows you’ve never stood up for yourself before."

His face turned all red and he balled his fist, but somehow I doubted he was a good a punch as his daughter.

"Have you ever even sent a dish back at a restaurant?" I went on. "Of course not, you let your wife’s third and fourth mouths do that sort of thing."

Aunt Grace appeared in the doorway that connected the house and the garage, wearing a fuzzy bathrobe. "What are you yelling about?" she rasped in her perpetual smoker’s cough.

The walls pressed in around me; I was already crouched between the bike and the car. "Nothing," I told her, and got up.

"Where are you going?" she choked as I threw up the garage door and started out into the street. "Nickolas! Where do you think you’re going? Get back here!"

I ignored her and headed for the beach, only to realize as soon as I reached the bluff that Melanie, Suzan, and Laurel were having a bonfire of some kind. The last thing I needed was to get trapped in another soap opera ceremony. I avoided the beach path and headed deeper into the woods instead.

A sliver of moon was shining down, like shrapnel from a torn nail, but it was enough that I could make out the path my feet were following. My blood pounded in my ears like venom and the wind stung my skin, and I saw the clouds beginning to close over my head. I wanted to hurt something, anything, to vanish, to run away. Pathetic, perhaps, but there are times when desperation takes over and we’re willing to do anything to avoid real life. This was one of those moments.

Suddenly the trees cleared and I found myself wandering among the slender and graceful marble headstones of the graveyard. I touched one with the name Andrew Armstrong on it, wondered if my great-grandfather had ever considered abandoning his life, and continued moving. The names were all familiar, and as I slipped further and further into the yard, the dates became more and more recent until I found myself standing at the double grave where my parents were buried.

It should have been spiritual, standing above their bodies, but it wasn’t. I felt no connection, no love emanated from their long-still hearts. I heard no voices. I closed my eyes and took a ragged breath, trying to get my clenching muscles under control, and when I could see again, what caught my attention was a movement at the back of the cemetery, where the cleared yard met with the forest again.

Without questioning, I made my way between the monuments until I was close enough to see the figure clearly. When I did, I unconsciously took a step back.

It was Faye, sitting by a hole in the ground, crying.

Part Six

She had a spade gripped loosely in one hand, and a lumpy garbage bag sat on the ground beside her. Faye was pretty when she cried, with none of the red-face, running-nose, clenched-muscle grimaces most girls wear. The only difference in her expression was subtle under the tears–her eyes were no longer narrowed.

I sat down a few feet away, never having considered what I was doing or why I was doing it. Faye’s head was resting on her drawn-up knees, face turned to look at me. "Go away," she said simply.

"What are you burying?"

"What do you care?"

"I don’t."

"Of course you don’t." She held in a deep breath for a few second as if gathering herself under control and only began crying harder when she exhaled.

I watched her the way a scientist watches a hormone-injected monkey, noting the silver streamers the tears left as they ran down her cheeks. Neither one of us said anything for a long time, while Faye pressed her face into her knees and tried to stop crying and I stared at the garbage bag and wondered what was inside.

Finally she climbed to her knees, still choking on tears, and dug her spade into the ground. Chunks of dirt flew–not coincidentally–in my direction as she dug. The clouds closed over our heads, as thick and black as anything and everything we were both feeling just then, and Faye’s face became a series of white and black ridges held together by shadow. Her eyes continued to leak; she couldn’t seem to stop crying no matter how hard she tried, and the salt drops fell into the depths of the hole.

When it was two feet deep, she tossed her spade down and reached into the bag. Out came a stiff lump of fur which I momentarily recognized to be the blind cat I’d carried home a few nights earlier.

"What happened to her?" I asked as Faye settled Kavina in the ground.

Even through her tears, she knew how to send an icy glare. "Nothing, she just likes dirt. How should I know, she was old, she died. Everything dies."

"Like parents." I didn’t think before I said it, it just popped out. Maybe it was the fight with Alex, my surrogate but never genuine father, maybe it was the bouquets of fresh wild-flowers laid over Grant Chamberlain’s grave I’d passed on my way.

Faye looked at me and then looked away. She continued to cry while she worked, nestling Kavina into her home for the rest of eternity, removing from a small leather bag a shaker of salt and stoppered-bottle of water. A few things went into the grave with the cat, a cloth mouse toy, her collar, and then Faye reached for her spade again and filled the hole. When that was done, she put a carefully removed circle of grass over the grave, the way children replace the tops of pumpkins after they’ve been carved.

Another miracle from the bag, a long, flat rock with "Kavina" carved on top. Faye nestled it into the grass, kissed it, and climbed to her feet. I stood up with her and we began the long walk back through the cemetery.

She stopped at her mother’s grave and sat down. Her forehead against the tombstone, she said to me, "God, Nick, what are you waiting for?"

I didn’t respond, thinking. I walked a few feet away, to the double grave where my parents are buried and leaned down to trace the names in the headstones. I have no memories of either of them, no photographs. Grace threw all their clothes and most of their possessions away. My mother’s diary is written in Viking runic symbols, and I’ve never been able to bare the thought of Melanie reading it before I do during the translation.

"Is that what you’re doing here?" Faye asked, coming up behind me. Her words sneered. "You’re just some boy orphan looking for his mommy and daddy?"

I straightened, put a hand to my cramping back. Thunder rumbled and I waited for the lightening. Seven seconds, seven miles away.

"What are you doing here, Faye?" I asked in reply. "Apologizing?"

"To who?"

"Your father."

He had died two weeks earlier, in the house, alone with Faye. Diana had been utterly mortified, Deb had been impressed, I had been annoyed. All it symbolized was one more power struggle between Faye and Diana that I didn’t need.

Faye’s hands drew into tight balls by her sides as I continued speaking. "I’ve got to tell you, though, I think it’s going to take more than a couple of dead flowers to make up for killing him."

Lightening flashed, and it didn’t come from the sky. She was all counter-attack, not even a moment’s thought lost in defense. "As if you have a right to talk? How can you understand the emotional implications of murder when you can’t feel? Deborah told me that the first words out of your mouth when your parents died were, Where’s my juice? but I didn’t really believe her until now."

I couldn’t help smiling. "Oh," I said sarcastically, "that really stung, Faye. You’re right, it’s much worse to be parentless and self-consumed than it is to be a manipulative, vindictive bitch who wants her allowance raised so badly she’s willing to commit patricide."

I waited for the blow, physical, verbal, or otherwise, but it never came. Faye opened her mouth, closed it, put her head down, and let her knees buckle underneath her. She curled up in the shadow of Diana’s mother’s grave and began sobbing.

I stepped back as if hit anyway, felt that moment of nothingness only people waiting to hit the ground after a fall and those in cardiac arrest must experience, the horror of irrevocable movement. Her shoulders shook under the light gray sweater she was wearing, so modest and un-Faye, and she dug her hands into her unbrushed hair.

Why hadn’t I noticed it the moment I saw her? Faye wasn’t just crying for her dead cat, something was broken. I’d never thought she cared much for her father–or him for her–but maybe I had been mistaken. Something was very wrong, for her to have broken down in front of me at the slightest push.

"Faye?" I heard myself ask. A scenario flashed in my head, of a phone call that came in the middle of the baptism saying Adam was dead and Faye rushing out here to cry where no one would see her. But that was impossible, Deb would have told me.

At the sound of her name, Faye shook her head and lifted her face to me. I had missed, as well, the raw vulnerability in her eyes, the tight lines drawn around her mouth. "Are you happy?" she asked on a broken voice. "You hurt me. Be glad and leave me alone."

"What’s wrong with you?" I couldn’t help asking, but the words were all wrong. Some people are incapable of just saying what they mean; it inevitably comes out as a threat or an insult. I am one of those.

"What’s wrong with me?" she cried. "Do you think you’re the only one who hates it here? Are you that fucking self-centered that it never occurred to you that maybe other people aren’t exactly happy living in a dipshit town like this one? You think that just because you’re in on the fact that it sucks here, you get to treat the rest of us like dirt? What did Kori ever do to you, aside from having a huge crush on you? She’s not the one responsible, nobody’s responsible, but you act like it’s everybody else’s fault. Well it’s not, get it? If you want out, you get out, but don’t blame us for what you don’t have the guts to do."

She voice broke again and she went on with less venom, "You’re parents are dead. So are mine, but I got the chance to love my father before I lost him, and it hurts a hundred times worse. I live with a woman who hates me and isn’t afraid to show it, I’m stuck in a school with the social life of a sewing circle, and I get to have limits set on how I practice my own religion because Diana’s a girl scout and I’m not. Don’t bitch at me about life, Nick. Just don’t even go there."

Then she was crying again, and it hit me all in a rush. All her words, all the pent-up anger. I didn’t care about the specifics, school or Diana, not even in my own life. What struck me was that we felt the same way, utterly. She was as alone here as I was, only she controlled it a thousand times better.

I touched her arm and she slapped me without looking up. I touched it again as the thunder rolled above, and the lightening lit her turned face up like glazed porcelain. I could barely hear myself say, "I’m sorry."

It was the first time I can recall every having said those words and meaning them. I’d said them before because they were required, because it would aid my escape to sound repentant, because I knew it was expected, but that was the first time I said it because I felt regret.

Faye looked at me, searched my face for signs of mockery and spoke as simultaneous bouts of lightening and thunder burst above us and the ground shook. I couldn’t make out her words and she repeated herself. "I don’t understand," she said.

"Don’t understand what?"

"How you can be so cold all the time and then suddenly change your mind."

The rain started like the rattle of a snake before it strikes, and I felt the first warm drops hit my back. I went through a couple of responses before shrugging and saying, "I’m moody."

She didn’t laugh or smile, just kept studying me. My hand was still resting on her arm again, and I could feel the pulse pounding under her skin. "I know how it is," she said. "To be all alone here and have every one fighting every move you make. I live that just as much as you do."

I nodded, unable to reply.

"Does not being alone make it any easier?" she asked. Her tone was almost musing, yet desperate. "Is this just some by-product of teenage emotion? It’s so damn scary sometimes, to know that I’ve got half the circle against me and my father won’t be coming home tonight. Charlie has surrounded the base. I have nothing to fall back on."

She was babbling, and the tears kept coming even as the rain cried for her. Her hands trembled, gesturing like frightened doves, and the hysteria was rising quickly enough that it convinced me to do something decent.

I hugged her.

There was a moment when she pulled away, a moment before she collapsed into me.

With anyone else–with Suzan or Laurel, if this could possibly have happened with one of them–they would have wanted to talk. But Faye knew, Faye understood the rules about talking. Spoken words are real, hang in the air, linger above us like faded perfume and echo in our dreams. Saying it aloud is irrevocable, whereas touch can can forgotten or repressed, or written off as casual drunkenness.

She lifted her face, met my eyes in understanding a moment before letting her lips slide against mine. You know, I thought. You’re as crazy desperate as I am, aren’t you?

I’d like to tell you that this time it made more sense. And it did, in a way. I was keeping my promise to Deb; this meant something. Touch can heal the broken heart, if it comes at the right time and from the right person. The act of giving and receiving reminds us that everything–even and perhaps especially pleasure and pain–passes.

But in truth, it was completely irrational, and the fact that neither of us complained or pulled away doesn’t change that. Purposely, we didn’t question, and we didn’t stop, and we didn’t worry about what would come tomorrow. We hadn’t come out here prepared for this with any kind of modern pharmaceuticals, and the gravestones provided no cover from the rain.

The first time, there had been horrible posing. We had been acting, mixing raunch and sarcasm with our sentiment to avoid giving anything of ourselves. Now I froze when I realized that some faint sound had made it out of my throat, only to feel Faye’s arms tighten around me and the back of her hand drift soothingly over my cheek. I fought the urge to pull away and found myself caught up in this release.

Inhibitions, once broken, cannot be reclaimed for at least a few hours, and that one thing was good.

In the wee hours, in the time before dawn when the night is darkest, we gathered our clothes and climbed to our feet. We were pruney from the rain, cold and soaked to the bone, and Faye’s teeth chattered as we stumbled, mostly blind, back through the woods. She took me to her house, led me there without looking at me, and up in her room we climbed back out of the sticky second skins. Faye dug around in her closet and came away with a man’s t-shirt, which smelled faintly of Sea Breeze, and then put on a silk slip frayed around the edges. We didn’t speak, we avoided eye contact. The bed was bare, so I spread a blanket from the floor over it. Faye shook her head at my silent offer of a pillow; she hesitated before stepping toward the bed.

I picked up another blanket and wrapped it around her shoulders the way I imagined her father had wrapped her up after a bath when she was tiny. She felt tiny to me then, trembling the way she was. Her hand slipped out from the folds of the blanket and touched mine. Our frozen fingers wrapped together and she sat down on the edge of the bed. I sat stiffly down beside her and she reached for another blanket to put over my lap. We eased onto our backs and curled up together.

There was sweetness in holding her; for all my chill and her sultry decadence, we were both wretchedly fallible human beings. She cried a little more against my shoulder before we fell asleep.

Virginity, like everything else, is in the eye of the beholder. My first encounter with sex left me bitter and alone, as did those eight or nine after her. Flesh and desire are not enough, they cannot rip through us the way intimacy can. Even if it’s for the first time.

Part Seven

It was intense, it was painful, it was necessary.

I woke up close to noon, every muscle on fire and my nose horribly stuffed. The bed was empty and the sunlight hurt my eyes as I sat up. Faye was gone, no note. The clock had started beeping; I guess she wanted to make sure I was gone before she got home.

I couldn’t blame her. There’s a certain shame in honesty.

My clothes, washed, dried, and folded, sat on the seat of Faye’s desk chair. I eased into them and felt a cold spot in my chest, at the bottom of my lungs each time I breathed. The room felt grossly hot, metallic shapes danced in the air. I opened the closet to put the shirt away and found a cardboard box of clothes, apparently her father’s. While I was leaning down, I lost my balance and tumbled into the box headfirst.

"This is fun," I grumbled, and went out into the hall.

Which is when I noticed the moaning.

It was coming from the door at the end of the hall, and I limped over to listen better. "Let me out," a woman was moaning. "God, let me outtttt!"

Sounded like Sophie, Faye’s step-mother. I was about to reach for the door knob when I noticed a note taped to the wall.

"Nick," it read. "‘Ma’ had a mental break, she’s all drugged up, don’t let her out."

That’s a little strange, I thought. Shouldn’t she be in a hospital?

Well, never mind. What Faye did with her step-mother was her business. I trudged down the stairs on leaden feet and stopped in the kitchen for a glass of water to wet my sandpaper throat.

My hand was shaking, I noticed as I set down the plastic cup, feeling only slightly better. The kitchen was a mess, the likes of which even my room had never seen. Trash spilled over the garbage can to fill a full corner of the floor, dishes were piled up on every counter top. A milkshake–?–had been spilled under the table and never cleaned, now it was growing mold, and the place stank powerfully of rot.

"Jesus," I muttered. "Didn’t your father ever teach you to pick up your toys?"

The living room looked just as bad, except that a portion of the carpet was scorched right down to the floorboards. A curtain was lying in shreds on the couch, and the tv’s screen had been shattered, apparently by a thrown candle. A bundle of stinking green leaves were spread out over the video collection.

I shook my head and found the front door. Under normal circumstances I would have stayed to snoop around a bit, but my pulse was doing that throbbing thing that becomes so painful after a few minutes.

On the front steps I was accosted by a lanky, red-haired woman who under normal circumstances I might have found attractive but in this condition appeared to me as a Silly Putty version of Agent Scully. "What are you doing here?" she snapped at me.

I squinted through the sunlight at her. "Huh?"

"What are you doing in my house?"

I turned slightly to glance at the house, to make sure I had woken up in the right one. (Which would have explained a lot.) "You don’t live there," I told her.

She appeared flustered for a second, before saying, "Of course I do. I’m here taking care of the Chamberlain girl."

Chuckling, I told her, "You’re off your gourd, but if you want to mother Faye, more power too you, lady."

"I meant her mother."

I stumbled down the steps, almost tumbling into a flower bed that had been ripped apart long before I got there. "Sophie’s not her mother."

"Oh she’s not, is she?" the woman demanded haughtily. "Who does the cleaning and the cooking?"

I laughed again and found my way down the driveway. I was trying to cleverly phrase, "Faye is Rosemary’s baby," but the words never came.

I drifted home in a haze, walked into the living room where Aunt Grace was clipping coupons and Uncle Alex was reading the newspaper, then threw up into an antique vase and passed out. Grace decided I was hung-over, hauled me into the bathtub and turned on the cold water, and slapped me a few times before Alex told her to quit hitting a sick boy so that he could take my temperature.

The hospital staff called it the "Chernobyl flu," and the title is much more clever than the actual illness, the schematics of which include little more than sleeping, throwing up, allowing yourself a tiny cup of water, and throwing that up ten minutes later.

They hauled me home, stuck me above the garage, and I stayed there for a week. Deb forgave me–what she was angry about in the first place I couldn’t even recall–and brought over most of the circle for some elaborate healing ritual. They burned white candles that stank of vanilla and waved what I thought were birch whips around, and then they filled my bed with jelly jars of dirt. Most of those got kicked out and broke open on the floor, which bothered Laurel a lot more than it bothered me. The incense made me sick to my stomach, and when Diana brought out a tea she swore would break my fever, I told her to....ah, swim in it.

And after all this misery, they had the audacity to tell me it was my fault I wasn’t getting any better, because I had to believe in the spell for it to work.

Finally they left me alone with Deborah and my medicine. Deb had a better idea about how to aid in my recovery: she read Stephen King aloud to me as I drifted in and out of sleep. I never told her, of course, but it was a comfort to wake up and hear her ironic, often tart voice floating through the room.

The illness gave me time to think, time I sorely needed. What had happened with Faye–it couldn’t happen again. Not just with Faye, but with anybody. I did not, did not want to be so exposed again. Never mind that it had turned out all right, that I had found for a few minutes something I needed even more than penicillin. Just because the ice held in February, that doesn’t mean you go skating in late spring.

She never came with the others to cast their spells, she didn’t call. Deborah, if she suspected anything, never spoke up. It was as if Faye and I both knew better than to try, understood wordlessly the boundaries of our relationship. Maybe it was the chill that had permeated Faye’s room when I woke up that morning, or maybe it was just that we had both known from the first touch that if we did this, it would have to be locked away afterward. For all her apparent strength, Faye is worse at showing emotion than I am.

I lay in bed, listening to Gardener and Bobbi dig up the space ship, and tried to put Faye behind me. Although I never said anything as poetic as, "I must live a life of single blessedness," the thought was the same: as long as I stayed away from that kind of intimacy, I’d be okay.

Part Eight

They coerced me into going to the next circle meeting, which coincided with my recovery. I struggled for the first time in a week to stand in the shower long enough to wash, to dress, and to wander down to the beach.

The circle meeting went as planned. Diana read a sappy letter from Adam, Laurel and Suzan talked about all the stuff they’d done to heal me, Melanie tried to start a discussion of the theory of mental healing verses magickal healing and the connections between the two, but nobody else is quite that deep, and I fell asleep against a rock.

By the time I woke up, the meeting was over and they were all milling around drinking the god-awful tea and talking about the leaves changing color and the affect of changing seasons on dreams. I noticed Faye wearing a black leather thing that didn’t look appropriate but certainly gave me a nice view, and closed my eyes again. I didn’t analyze what my knee-jerk reaction meant; I was too tired to try for the hard thoughts.

"Nick?" There was a tap on my shoulder and I found one of the Henderson brothers kneeling in front of me. Chris, it took me a moment. As funny as this might sound, I still have trouble telling them apart sometimes.

"Yeah?"

"Can I talk to you for a second?"

I blinked and dug in my pocket for my cigarettes. I hadn’t had one since before I got sick. "Um, okay."

"Not here, can we go down the beach a little?"

He helped me to my feet and we started down the sand. I felt weak but better, and the cigarette certainly took the edge off my mood. The sky was clear, and the wind did smell nice, although not nice enough that I was going to admit it was affecting my dreams.

"What’s up?" I asked.

"Can we keep this between you and me?" he asked. "I mean, will you promise not to tell anyone? Like not even Doug?"

Somehow I doubted anything in his life was as important a secret as he seemed to think it was, but I told him I’d keep his confidence.

"Okay, thanks man. Before we came down here for the meeting, I was messing around with everybody over at Diana’s, packing stuff up and baking cookies and all that shit. And while I was in the kitchen grinding up some stuff for Laurel, Faye came in and grabbed my butt. Not just like slapping it, I mean she grabbed it with two hands and held on. So I’m all like, Uh, what are you doing? And she’s like, Nothing, but she was grinning. So then we–well, I’m not gonna get into details, but we were really lucky no one walked in. And before we left, she’s like, Come over to my house tonight after the circle meeting."

As he spoke, I became very aware of myself. Of my tread, of how to keep it even, of how not to let on that I was affected in any way. I smoked my cigarette and walked and listened, and then I said with admirable nonchalance, "So what’s the problem?"

"Well, I mean, hey, she’s a babe. Did you see that thing she has on tonight? Suzan had to get her into it with pliers. And you know I’d love to get a piece of that, I mean, who wouldn’t? But I don’t want to piss Doug off at me."

"What’s Doug got to do with it?"

"Oh, that’s right man, you’ve been sick. I guess you haven’t heard. Faye’s been all over Doug for the last couple days, like hot and heavy in the streets–Hey, are you okay?"

I had managed to inhale my cigarette, something no smoker past his first pack ever does. I gagged and spit it out on the sand, coughing and spitting like a rabid dog. I crouched down in the water, shaking off Chris’s hand, and lowered my tongue into the ocean. The chill took the sting off the burn.

"Are you sure you’re okay?" Christ asked as I stood up. "I saw a girl set her whole mouth on fire doing that once. She’d been drinking moonshine, and–"

I cut him off. "Yeah, fun. Look, I’ve got to go find Deb and get home. Bye."

"Okay, but first, should I do it?"

"Do what?"

His grin was nasty at the corners. "Faye," he said.

I stared at him for a moment and replied, "No. He’s your brother, Chris, that’s wrong."

Chris’s face fell as I walked back toward the bonfire.

"Has Faye said anything about what happened to her father?" I asked Deborah as she helped me up the bluff path.

"No, but she kind of keeps to herself. It’s probably bothering her and she just doesn’t want to show it."

"Has she told you what happened that night?"

Deborah eyed me. "You don’t believe the story she gave the police?"

"That her Harvard law schooled, PhD holding father stuck a metal knife into a toaster trying to get out a piece of bread and didn’t bother unplugging it first? Not really."

We reached the asphalt and I sighed with relief to be back on flat ground. A week in bed will do funny things to your legs.

"She hasn’t said anything to me," Deborah said finally. "But she’s been weird since it happened."

"Is weird equivalent with slutty in your mind?"

"It’s a subcategory," she agreed. "You, if you weren’t my cousin, I could kind of understand. But Doug?"

"And now Chris."

"Huh?"

I told her about the conversation Chris and I had had on the beach. "Ugh," she said. "If she goes after Sean...I don’t want to think about it."

"But she hasn’t said anything to you at all?"

"Nope. If you’re really interested, you know what we could do–" She stopped.

"What?" I prompted.

"Never mind. I’ve got to talk to Melanie about it first."

"What," turned out to be more goddamn witchcraft. I was laying on my bed the next afternoon, finishing Tommyknockers, when Deborah knocked and came in with Melanie.

"You still want to know what happened to Grant?" Deb asked, swinging her leg over a chair. Melanie sat against the edge of the desk with more poise.

"I wouldn’t use the word ‘want,’" I told her. "Want implies that I actually care–"

"Right, blah blah blah. Okay, look, I know you aren’t into the whole magic scene, but Melanie and I have been talking about spirit channeling a lot lately, and when you said you wanted to know what had happened, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to try a raising."

"To what?" I demanded.

"We want to channel the spirit of Faye’s father and ask him to tell us what happened," Melanie explained simply.

I stared at them for a few seconds and then exploded, "Are you both deranged? Hasn’t it occurred to either of you that this is all horseshit? Magic doesn’t exist! Get it? It’s all in your heads!"

Deborah ground her teeth in an effort not to yell back. "It’s fine for you to think that, but you’re wrong. If you would just give it the benefit of the doubt and let the facts show themselves, you might not be such a skeptic."

"Deb, it’s not real." I shook my head and rolled to the wall, bringing the book back up to my face. "Look, you two can go play with your candles, but leave me out of it."

There was a pause, which stretched until I felt compelled to say, "Is there a problem?"

"We sort of need your help," Melanie admitted. I rolled back and glared at her, and she rushed on, "There are two kinds of magic workers, sources and handlers. Sources are like Faye, they can spit fire but they have bad aim. In other words, they can conjure up power, but they can’t control it once it’s there. Handlers do the opposite. They take pre-existing power and manipulate it. To a certain extent, everyone is both. We can each call power to us and direct it. But for a bigger spell like this one, that needs a lot of power sent very specifically, we need distinct strengths. Deb and I are both sources, so we need a handler in order call a specific spirit." She finished lamely, "Which would be you."

Deborah was watching me carefully, waiting for a reaction. "That’s real nice lore," I said snidely. "Maybe you can turn it into a role-playing game or something, but I’m not interested."

"I’ve seen you do it," Melanie went on. "At the circle meeting last night even. There was smoke blowing on you, and you frowned and sent it away."

"Study the weather patterns, winds shift all the time."

"How about last month, when you did that thing with the vase?"

"I didn’t do dick with the vase, Suzan ducked."

"You moved it."

I rolled my eyes. "Here’s what you’re saying: I saw a vase fall, summoned up my psychic powers, and used them to change the trajectory of the vase as it plummeted toward the ground, defying both logic and gravity, so that it wouldn’t hit Suzan, who could use a whop on the head to begin with."

Melanie sighed. "Don’t you see? You use magic all the time, you just aren’t aware of it. That’s how naturally it comes to you. If you would just admit that you have the ability and harness it, you’d be incredible."

I kept shaking my head, the color rising in my neck. I wanted to punch something. After all, I’d done everything asked of me, I went to the meetings, I kept my mouth shut, I ate the damn cookie. This was too much.

"I’ll make you a deal," Deborah said in a low voice, looking intently at me. "You come tonight to the graveyard tonight and help us out. No mocking, no eye rolling, and you have to try. Not just slouch through it, but actually try. And if nothing happens and you don’t feel a thing, fine. You never have to come to the circle again as far as I’m concerned. And if I think you aren’t really trying, deal’s off. Fair?"

A chance to get out? Sure, I’d take it. I shook her hand. "Fair."

She and Melanie got up, and I leaned back with my book in hand. As Deborah reached the door, she paused and looked back. "Aren’t you curious about what will happen if you do feel something?"

I gave her a hard look and said flatly, "No."

Part Nine

We set out that night just before eleven, back to the fated graveyard with a sack full of wax balls and tinkling metal chunks hung from a metal circlet that Melanie insisted were chimes. I was still worn out, and so anxious to get into bed that I was willing to go along with almost anything Deborah wanted, even if it was polite composure and repression of disdainful facial expressions.

It didn’t mean I believed.

When Suzan decided to be brilliant in the ninth grade–a phase I would have been all too glad to miss–she took psychology at a nearby junior college, and she once informed me that my life would be a lot happier if I’d smile. "A smile is something that happens when you’re happy, so if you force a smile, you’ll be telling yourself that you’re happy, and it will make you happier."

I’m still not sold on smile therapy, but I’ll admit that following Deb’s instructions without mocking them had an effect on me. I stood where she planted me and let my eyes focus on the dozen flickering candles that encircled us, and I had the strange feeling of warmth running over my body like hot water. My eyes closed and I tilted my head back a little.

I can do this for half an hour or so, I thought. That ought to be long enough for them to finish whatever it is they’re doing.

Melanie cast the circle, in German of course. She’d learned it in order to read her dozen-greats grandmother’s book of shadows, and now considered it a spiritual speak closer to her heart. She had encouraged me to take Russian, saying that if I felt I could speak to the powers that be in a fashion no one else could possibly over-hear, I would feel less self-conscious about doing it.

God, is there anyone in the circle who hasn’t tried to turn me into a good little Wiccan?

I barely heard the casting words, was more enveloped in a hazy cloud. Deborah was to my left, Grant Chamberlain’s headstone to the right, Melanie across from me. I swayed slightly, straightened myself, opened my eyes to a puddle-reflection glance at the world.

"We come together tonight to call the ghost of Grant Bernard Chamberlain," Deb intoned, and my dinner started to come up. My stomach clenched and I cursed myself for having attempted solid foods so soon. If I threw up during the ceremony, Deborah was going to say I hadn’t taken it seriously.

Tell that to my gastrointestinal system, I thought menacingly, and tried to keep from hunching over. A sweat broke out on my forehead while Deborah went on. "I call on Fire; relight his spirit."

Something rolled over inside my torso and I hiccuped. Melanie and Deborah both glanced at me and I gave an apologetic wave of the hand. "Excuse me," I whispered.

Deb rolled her eyes, annoyed with me, and said in that same I-want-to-be-Charlton-Heston voice, "I call on Air; give him voice."

My blood started to pound. A fever, I thought. I shouldn’t be out in a damp graveyard right after the flu. This is insane, I’m in the same place I was when I first got sick.

"I call on Water; dampen his throat that he might speak."

Some wind skittered over my forehead, turning the sweat that had collected there to ice. I exhaled compulsively, coughed, and tried to step back only to find a barrier of some sort behind me.

"I call on Earth; release him."

My knees buckled and I waited to throw up. Deborah and Melanie both had their eyes closed; neither one had noticed me falling to the ground. My hands dug into the grass and I realized they were glowing.

"Nothing’s happening," Deborah said.

Melanie opened her eyes and let out a series of curse words I’ve rarely heard from her. "Jesus," was Deb’s only comment. They were both staring at me.

"Chicken wings. I’m going to throw up pretty soon," I informed them. "Should I do it outside your circle?"

Melanie’s response was to toss her head back and yell some German at the moon, then wait for an answer. "Well?" Deborah asked.

"I don’t know," Melanie said. "I’ve never heard of somebody...glowing like he’s doing."

I was indeed glowing. It was a purple light that seemed to come from under my skin, muted as if by the flesh it was passing through. My eyes had turned to headlights, shooting a violet ray of light where ever I looked.

Until Melanie said it, I had thought the glowing was a hallucinatory result of the fever I absolutely had to be running. Apparently not.

The moment was one of those vitally important ones that never happen like they do in the movies. The wind, while blowing, wasn’t howling, no clouds blocked the moon, and there was no feeling of impending doom. I just had a stomach ache, and Melanie thought it was something else, and we were bickering about it the same way we would have at a restaurant.

Yet because it was real, it was infinitely worse. I played the Nothing’s-going-on card for all it was worth, and found that I couldn’t control what I had called.

"Wait," Melanie said suddenly. "I’ve got it. He’s a channel, right? A handler. We called up a shit-load of power, and since he’d stopped blocking, he absorbed it. Probably all of it."

I groaned as the cramp in my stomach tightened. "Don’t blow this out of proportion, okay? It’s just a flu thing, I shouldn’t have eaten dinner."

"You didn’t glow when you had the flu, Nick," Deborah told me. Her voice was breathless and awe-struck, and it annoyed the hell out of me that she was just assuming this was part of her damn game. I’d get a lot more out of two tablespoons of Pepto than I would one of her incantations.

The arms I was kneeling on were trembling like sticks in the wind, and the landscape started spinning again. Only this time I thought I saw people standing under a tree, under the tree where Faye had buried her cat. It took a few seconds for me to recognize them, the woman lanky and dark, the man tightly drawn in and faintly hostile.

They were my parents.

"Something’s wrong," I said. This wasn’t happening.

"No shit," Deb replied.

Melanie was taking quick, short breaths and waving her hands. "Okay, okay, let me think. Nick, you’ve swallowed way too much power here. You’ve got to release it, but it’s better if you don’t let it go all at once."

My head, an iron lump atop my straw stick neck, fell forward and I stared at the ground. Gently, the dried grass blurred and faded until I could see past it, into the dirt, through the dirt, inside the coffin.

I stared at Grant Chamberlain’s face and choked. My lungs vanished, my throat closed. For the first few seconds I didn’t even bother trying to breathe, just fell into a stupor. Grant’s face was sallow and damp, the stitching holding his lips shut had torn and his mouth gaped open at me.

His eyes opened. They were like Faye’s, honey and amber, lust and power, sunset and dawn. I started coughing, clutching at my throat and trying to get away, but I couldn’t tear my from him. His eyes weren’t just open, they were looking at me, seeing me, following my movements. He saw me as clearly as I saw him.

I fell onto my back, gasping and thumping the ground, but I couldn’t get his face out from in front of me. I felt Deborah and Melanie grab hold of my arms, and Melanie’s frantic voice, "Just let it all go, Nick! Just release it already!"

It was that feeling of suffocation that comes at the ending of a hard vomit, that moment of utter horror when you think, I can’t breathe. I just can’t breathe and I’m never going to breathe again.

I don’t know what happened after that. I saw Grant’s eyes, felt the light jump from me to him, saw it fill the black depths of his pupils and something shot out, both at and away from me. Something in the grave exploded.

Part Ten

I lost consciousness for a moment, just long enough to be bothered by waking. My head was throbbing, my eyes burned, and I had been throw ten feet from the side of the grave into a huge angel headstone.

My vision darted to the tree, but my parents were gone.

"Nick," Deb was saying, her hand on my cheek, my skin stinging and hot with blood from her slap. "He’s breathing," she said, but Melanie wasn’t looking at us.

"It worked," she said quietly, and Deborah turned in her crouch to see the grave.

Forget everything you’ve seen on tv about ghosts. They don’t flicker, they don’t phase in and out, and they don’t morph out of a ball of smoke. They don’t wear clothes, either.

What stood in front of Grant Chamberlain’s headstone was more like an anatomical doll used in med school, the kind with clear skin and internal organs and eyes that roll around. The guts were lumps of intertwined meat, and the hair was brittle and stiff. Only this doll belonged in a freak-show more than a medical school, because it wasn’t just one ghost.

It was two. Inhabiting one body.

How can I possibly describe the sight? They weren’t attached at the hip like Siamese twins, or overlapping, they were....scientifically speaking, they were occupying the same space. Their naked bloated bodies moved as one.

I guess that why everyone’s so afraid of ghosts. They do the impossible.

One of the faces, which were easing in and out of each other and mixing with an uncanny grace, I recognized as Grant. The other I couldn’t place, except to believe that I had seen it before.

Melanie recovered first, stepped forth onto the grave itself, and said, "I am Melanie. We have called you here in peace and wish you no harm. We only want information."

When in doubt, go for diplomacy, I thought as I tried to sit up and failed. My head smacked against the angel’s heels again and black spots dotted the air.

"I remember you," Grant said. He sounded slightly annoyed, which surprised us all.

"I don’t," the second one said. "Who is she?"

"One of my daughter’s friends."

"So you know who I am?" Melanie asked, and Grant snapped, "Dying didn’t make me stupid, you know."

Melanie glanced at me and Deborah. We both shrugged.

"I think there’s been a mistake," Melanie said. "We only meant to call Mr. Chamberlain, but maybe the spell was too strong and we–"

"Oh hush," Grant said. "The spell worked fine. Alain and I both inhabit this grave."

"My grave, too," Alain added. "It’s over on the mainland, if you want to check it out."

"How is that possible?" Melanie asked.

"Actually," Alain put in, "she did switch us, but you’ve never been one for details, Chamberlain."

"Shut up."

I coughed and used the angel to help me sit up. Deborah gave me a hand and slyly reached for her athame. That’s one of the reasons I like Deb, she always knows when to reach for a weapon.

"She switched you?" Melanie was asking. "How?"

"With magic, how else?"

Alain explained. "She called me to come over for dinner, and when I got there she locked my girlfriend in a closet with her step mother and tied me up in a chair. Then she did a spell to switch our bodies, but at the last minute Belle and Sally–"

"Sophie," Grant interjected.

"–broke out of the closet and rushed her."

"Then what happened?" Melanie asked.

"Beats me. There was a big light and the place just exploded. Next thing I know I’m the better half of this old fart."

"Why, I outta–" Grant snarled.

Have you ever seen two ghosts try to strangle each other while inhabiting the same space? It’s amusing at first, and then it’s just creepy, watching them grab their own necks with each other’s hands.

The blade in Deborah’s fist flashed in the candle light, but she didn’t try to intervene. I don’t think knifing ghosts works, anyway.

"Wait," Melanie said, "stop it!" They slowly eased off each other, then did a circling thing that didn’t help my sea-sick stomach.

"If you switched bodies with Alain," Melanie asked, "why are you still here?"

"Don’t even try to answer that," Alain told Grant. "You’ll just confuse them." He turned his eyes through Grant’s to look at Melanie. "We aren’t entirely switched. We’re combined in each other, but I really decide what happens. Like when you called him out of the grave, I was the one who made us rise."

"So Grant didn’t want to?"

"Grant wanted to, but I did it."

Melanie, utterly confused, gave up. She just said, "Okay, get back in your graves. I mean, grave. Just get out of here."

They ignored her, and Deborah called forcefully, "With the power of Fire I scorch thy image."

The ghosts glanced at her and Grant’s mouth formed a distinctive F shape, followed by a K.

"With Wind I blow away your ashes, with Water I cleanse away your presence. I condemn you to the Earth. Into the earth! Back to your grave!"

As thought a black hole had opened in the ground below them, the ghosts were sucked downward and vanished.

I lay in a heap of bones on the ground, pathetically weak, while Deborah said a few quick words and dissolved the circle. Melanie gave a sigh and sat down hard as Deb whispered "I release you," over each candle, blowing it out with the words.

When the magic was entirely broken, when all ropes of power had untied themselves from my intestines, she crouched down next to me and pushed the hair off my damp forehead with a clammy hand. "Are you okay?" she asked.

I was shivering. Or trembling, although I prefer to think of it as shivering. "Fucked if I know," I told her, and a little smile came to her lips.

"You were incredible. I knew you could do it, Nick. I knew that if you just stopped trying to be cold and let it touch you, that it would explode like this."

"I didn’t do anything."

She laughed, a high-pitched, adrenalin-powered laugh. "Are you joking?" she cried, standing up and spreading her arms. "Who do you think did this? It wasn’t Melanie, and it sure wasn’t me. Damn, I’ve never even seen Faye pull a stunt like that, for all her fire-spitting skills."

"I didn’t do anything," I said again.

"You can stop denying it now," Melanie told me, without any of Deborah’s hyped happiness. "I mean, there’s no point after tonight. I saw what I saw, and you moved that energy. From where ever it came from to yourself, into the grave."

"You directed it," Deb went on. "You handled it. It was beautiful, it was perfect!"

I swung an arm around the angel’s waist and climbed unsteadily to my feet. "I’m going home," I said, taking a few baby steps toward the woods. Little jolts of electricity kept running down my arms; I wondered if I might be having a heart attack.

Deborah said that if I waited a minute for her to clean up, she’d help me back, but I didn’t wait. I stumbled on my polio-legs all the way down the woodland path, past the ocean, and across the street to Deb’s house. I climbed the stairs, resting twice before I reached the top, and locked the door. My clothes were soaked in a substance I could not identify, although it smelled like dew or maybe sugar water. I peeled them off and climbed into a pair of briefs, then fell into bed, still shivering.

Deborah knocked on the door a while later, but I didn’t answer. I pulled the winter comforter out from under the bed and kicked my legs against the sheets, but I couldn’t seem to get warm. My ears and nose stung with cold, my hands were too stiff to close.

Moonlight poured in through the window onto my face, and I scrambled out of the light. It burned like dry ice.

I didn’t think about what had happened. I didn’t let any of it get inside me, or change anything. I didn’t think of my parents, of what the ghost/s had told me, of what it had felt like to loose myself in Grant Chamberlain’s topaz eyes.

No, my thoughts were infinitely worse. In the empty, frigid silence, I let the memories of Faye’s arms come around me, her heat rest against me, and her lips kiss the cold off my face.

Part Eleven

The First Dream

I lay in bed for an hour the next morning to see if anything had changed. My throat and stomach were sore, and I had a throbbing headache, but nothing else seemed out of place.

I got out of bed, took a hot shower that felt like a dream of heaven, and ate a breakfast of dry toast in the garage, where I began the process of putting Deborah’s bike back together.

As I worked, I couldn’t help thinking. All right, so something happened. So they called something up. That doesn’t mean you had anything to do with it.

There was no longer any question or doubt. The damn magic had to exist, because what I saw hadn’t been a light show, and there were too many other witnesses for it to have been a fever-induced hallucination. As much as the acceptance hurt, as much as I winced and had to go other the scene again and again, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew what had happened.

So Melanie and Deb were witches. Big deal. It still had nothing to do with me.

Right.

They came by around three in the afternoon. I was, as always, covered in grease and dirt and comfortably drifting through my world of spokes and gaskets, and didn’t particularly enjoy the interruption.

"We’ve figured it out," Melanie said, brushing off the steps that lead to the house door and sitting down.

"Figured out what?" I replied, and went to work tightening a screw.

Deborah leaned against the doorway and smiled lazily at me. I lifted my eyebrows but she didn’t respond.

Melanie was obviously high on knowledge, her hands were jumping like hot wires while she spoke. "Why Faye tried to switch them. Grant Chamberlain was in serious trouble with the IRS, they were investigating him for all sorts of tax frauds. Huge amounts of money. You probably read it in the paper."

I hadn’t, I try to avoid the outside world and that includes its news.

"I Faye grabbed him and his partner in the firm, who the IRS thought was innocent, and she tried to switch them. That way Alain Marksovsky would go to jail in place of her father, and Grant would be inside him. But obviously something went wrong, since they’re both dead."

The implications of accepting magic as a fact hit me then. If this wasn’t just a game, then all that crap I had been ignoring for the last seventeen years might be possible. You could switch peoples’ bodies. You could move things. You could seriously fuck up peoples’ lives.

It hit me like a blow to the stomach. I actually fell back onto my ass, stripping the screw I was tightening as I jerked it.

"I think we should go to Diana," Melanie said.

I immediately snapped, "No."

"Why not?"

"It’s over, there’s no point in bringing it up."

"Have you seen the way she’s been acting lately? Faye’s out of control."

I glared at her, and she visibly inched back on the cement step. "If you had accidently killed a family member, wouldn’t you be a little upset? So she’s dealing in her own way, who cares? Leave her alone."

We argued a few minutes longer, I won, they left. I put my tools away and went inside to clean up. Hot water was running over my hands when I thought of something.

Ma had a mental break, she’s all drugged up, don’t let her out.

"Holy shit," I said, staring at myself in the mirror.

I kept my suspicions to myself, choosing not to make any accusations until I was sure. But the thought of it stayed with me all afternoon, and that night the dreams started.

There’s a certain chill in the air, the kind that strokes down your back like the Reaper’s massage and draws the muscles in your fingers tight. The graveyard is still and silent, frozen. Clouds half cover a full moon but no wind comes to move them away, and the dew ceases to roll down the blades of grass. A rabbit at the edge of the forest stands motionless, one paw raised, pink nose eternally scrunched as if sniffing.

The Second Dream

I didn’t try to understand the dream. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. I didn’t see Faye all that day, rarely venturing outside the garage except to hit town for supplies, and Deborah seemed to sense that I needed some time to myself.

The thing was, I knew I had woken up in time. Before whatever it was had happened. I had escaped.

But dreams are funny things. Like illnesses, unless you confront them, they can destroy you. And by the end of the day, I knew this one would be coming back that night.

Back in the graveyard. Don’t speak, don’t move, don’t disrupt the silence. Faye’s with me, standing in her glass cage. It’s shaped like a clown, with big feet and big hair and a huge nose, but clear. Her hair is hers again, falling in satin layers over her shoulders, and she beats on the glass from the inside. Someone has put the clown atop the pedestal where the cement angel used to sit, and thrown a set of rosary beads around the clown’s neck.

"Not yours," she says.

The Third Dream

I woke up on the floor. God only knows how I got there, if I rolled or walked, but I was in a pile of damp blankets on the dirty floor when I finally opened my eyes to the real world.

A long, ragged moan came out of me as I crawled out of the sheets. I was aching and terrified, and the sense of threat was so great that I actually dug my BB gun out of the closet and loaded it. With one hand, I spread the blanket back out on the bed while the other hand gripped the gun. I locked the window, put a chair under the door, and eased down onto the bed with my back to the corner. I promised myself I wouldn’t fall asleep until dawn had come and Deb had woken up. She would have something–a spell or an amulet or even one of those wretched teas–that would make this stop.

Of course, I was asleep in minutes.

The graveyard is, as always, impossibly still. Moonlight hits my hair in cold waves, rushes down over my shoulders in a breath of ice. I look around, for a clue, for my mother, and can find neither one.

Part Fourteen

"Nick!"

I opened my eyes, felt myself pulled physically from far away, and found myself staring into Deborah’s face. She was flushed and tousled, and trying to pull the BB gun out of my hands.

"Are you okay?" she asked desperately, tossing the gun onto the carpet.

"What happened?" I asked as an almost over-whelming feeling of seasickness hit me.

"You blew a hole through the wall," Aunt Grace hacked from behind Deborah. Alex was standing in the doorway, where a broken chair had been smashed during the attempt to get in.

"It’s okay, I’ll take care of it," Deb told them. I stared blindly at her, too numb to speak. "Just go back to bed. Nick will fix the wall in the morning."

"He damn well better," Grace coughed as she shuffled out. Alex just gave me a suspicious look over his shoulder as he left, and I knew I would be getting the drugs-are-bad speech again the next day.

Deborah tried to put her arms around me and I pushed her away, getting up and crossing the room to the window. She had to understand that conjuring ghosts together didn’t constitute bonding time. "You’re covered in sweat," she said, "I think you’re getting sick again."

"No." I touched the window pane and ley my hand slide down it in sweat-greased trails. "It was just a bad dream."

My eyes strayed to the desk, where a lighter, pen, and paper sat. Deborah came to stand next to me and brushed aside the curtain so that she could see out. "There was the sound of glass breaking out there a few minutes ago, I guess Chris and Doug are finally having it out over Faye." I could feel her eyes boring into me. "Maybe there’s residual power left over in you from the other night. It could be causing dreams, I guess." She rubbed her head wearily and with frustration. "You’re not helping me any here, Nick."

I glanced at her. Her hair was a riotous mess of dark curls that only helped sharpen the expression on her face. "Nothing has changed," I told her.

"Not if you don’t let it," she agreed. "But what happened the other night wasn’t a dream, and it wasn’t drug-induced. It happened." She shrugged. "Maybe that’s something you need to deal with on your own. You know where to find me if you change our mind." As she started off toward the door, she added, "Of course, a lot of people think that covens are really just old fashion support groups for witches trying to figure out what the hell’s going on..."

I ignored her.

By sunrise, I thought I had sorted it out. Everything has been so confused, so convoluted and multi-dimensional. I had taken a breath and not known if it was mine or Faye’s, our thoughts mixed like tomato juice and vodka. I wrote everything down on a page, crossed lines out, rearranged the list, and ended up with a possible explanation of the entire thing.

We had switched bodies, plain and simple. Only it wasn’t simple at all, it wasn’t like that horrible movie Freaky Friday where the mom and daughter make clean switches into each other. I had acted out Faye’s emotions in my own way, and she had done the same with mine.

It’s as complicated as it sounds. I’ll try to explain it more clearly for the sake of this narrative.

I controlled Faye’s body. When I focused her eyes on the photograph of Grant, she had felt pain, loss, anger. Faye’s reaction to those feelings is to block them, pretend they don’t exist. She’d leave the picture out no matter how much it hurt, because if she put it away, for sure someone would notice and think, Oh, Faye’s going through a rough time.

My reaction, of course, would be to throw the damn thing out.

Since I was in control, we reacted to her emotions my way. She felt the pain, I shoved the picture in a drawer. When she panicked because I was inside her and could see every crevice of her mind, I was the one who responded, and in my way. Faye would never smash a window if angry, she’d think of some more subtle revenge.

The truth was, I hadn’t minded her intrusion after a moment’s hesitation. As strange as it was, and as hard to admit later, I craved it. Not just her body, although that was certainly an added bonus, but to let myself open absolutely to her. My gallery of memories were hers to examine, even the most sensitive. It was, without a doubt, my most vulnerable moment.

Her response had been hard to gauge, between her panic and all the breaking glass, and the general confusion. Then the gun went off, Aunt Grace busted the door down, and we snapped out of each other.

As the sun started to come up, and the chill from night’s end dissipated, I eased back down onto my bed. Things were getting messy. Faye and I both knew better than to get seriously involved, yet here I was, risking my heart for her during psychic escapades we both appeared powerless to control. I drew the sheet up around my shoulders and let my head touch the pillow, but I couldn’t relax. What if it happened again? What if this time I went longer, and we witnessed irrevocably portions of the soul better left hidden?

Finally, exhaustion took over and I tumbled into a restless sleep fraught with shapeless dreams of shame and dread.

Late that afternoon, I walked down the street as if I were in an alternate dimension and strolling. Faye’s bedroom window was covered in cardboard and masking tape, and the red-haired woman I had seen before was carefully sweeping glass off the driveway, muttering curses under her breath.

"Sophie?" I asked, and she glanced up.

"What?" she replied, and then a sudden stricken expression crossed her face.

Before she could say anything, I chuckled and told her, "Oh, sorry, I thought you were Sophie. I’m Nick Armstrong, a friend of Faye’s."

I held out my hand, aware of how un-Nick I was acting. Sophie, of course, knew, too, but if she had let on that she knew, then she would have to admit she was Sophie.

"I’m Belle Gersteene," she said, and I smiled.

"Nice to meet you, Belle. Are you working here? I know Faye’s been saying she might hire a maid since Sophie’s ill."

She tried to hide her annoyance and failed. Boy, Sophie sucked at pretending to be anybody else. She swept the glass with Belle’s hands, and spoke with Belle’s voice, and looked at me through Belle’s green-hazel eyes, but she was still at least partially Sophie.

I understood how it work. Belle’s heart, Sophie’s mind. Alain said Faye had locked the women in a closet, and that they had broken out at the last minute. They must have rushed Faye, gotten caught up in whatever magic she was conjuring, and been accidently switched. The intrusion may also have resulted in Grant and Alain’s deaths.

Deborah was right, I didn’t really know enough about this stuff to be sure of what had happened. But I knew that Sophie was in Belle, and Belle was in Sophie, the symptoms of which had probably caused Sophie’s body to be diagnosed with a mental break. I had never liked Sophie; somehow it did not surprise me that she would lock Belle up to keep her from spoiling this new-found advantage. Although I still wasn’t sure what the appeal of acting out some one else’s emotions was. It had been damn confusing during those few minutes I had switched with Faye.

My theory explained Faye’s behavior as well. She has a complex–don’t we all?–a need to be powerful. If her life got to be too much, didn’t it make sense to go on a guy-streak where she could feel in control? Chris, Doug, even me, we were all just equipment she used to restore her sense of self-confidence.

The one question I didn’t have answered was what she was going to do next. Would she try to switch Sophie and Belle back? Was that what Sophie wanted? And if she had the spell, why hadn’t she used it already?

"I’m not the maid," Sophie told me with Belle’s lips. "I’m just a friend of the family’s, and I wanted to see how Faye-I mean, Sophie is doing."

Hmm. So Sophie was coming over here to check up on Faye. More and more I was getting the feeling that Sophie was the one running the show here. Belle’s body was twenty years younger than her own, fit and very pretty. Why wouldn’t she want to stay in it?

I decided that I had three options. One, I could do nothing. Nothing at all. Two, I could go to Diana and tell her everything. Three, I could talk to Faye.

Of course, there was really only one option.

"Is Faye around?" I asked.

"She’s inside." As I started up the front steps she quickly tacked on, "But I think she’s doing school work, maybe you should come back later."

I glanced over my shoulder at her as I opened the front door. "We aren’t in school," I told her. "It’s summer."

She got that stricken expression again.

The house was in even worse shape than before. I’d never seen anything like this, not even in the Animal House movie. There was just shit everywhere.

The hallway was almost impassable, it was so stuffed with trash. Paper towels stained every color of the rainbow littered the stairs, where something very bad smelling had been spilt. More carpet had been torn up, there were holes in the walls much larger than the ones I had blown this morning with my BB gun. Shattered glass covered every surface, and when I managed to get upstairs, I found that the bathroom toilet had overflowed and no one had bothered to stop it. None of the lights worked, and the place clearly wasn’t being air-conditioned. The heat was stifling and gross, and it was obvious that the late Kavina’s kittens had not been introduced to the concept of a litter box.

Why the hell was Sophie worrying about a little broken glass in the driveway when she had this to contend with? Why was she so worried about keeping up appearances?

The shower curtain in the bathroom had been torn down. It was burnt. A bar of soap had melted on the window sill. A shampoo bottle, apparently stepped on, leaked its sticky-sweet contents onto a pile of clothes. Also burnt.

And what in god’s name was that smell?

The thin wooden door to Sophie’s bedroom had been replaced with what appeared to be a steel bank vault door. It had a wheel to spin, it had a combination dial, it had a huge metal bar built into the wall.

I swore under my breath and heard something break in Faye’s room. Stumbling toward the door, I put my hand to the wall for support and felt the plaster crumble. When I had regained my balance, I examined it more closely and saw that the walls were soaking wet. From the inside.

"Faye?" I demanded as I clamored into her room. "What the fuck are you doing?"

The first thing I noticed was the costume. It was the one she usually wore to circle meetings, an old red shift that would eventually be replaced by a black one for reasons I am about to disclose. It had been ripped in a dozen places, as if slashed by tiger claws, and the tears were all singed around the edges. One strap was torn, and the slit in the side was running almost up to her arm pits.

"Nick," she said in genuine surprise. Her eyes darted frantically around the room, checking, I suppose, to see if there was any possible way she could hide the mess. There wasn’t. "Hi," she finished lamely.

I found a patch of crumpled but apparently unsoiled papers to put one foot down on and a sweater for the other and met her eyes. "Let’s get straight to the point. I know all about how your father died. And Alain, and how you switched the others."

Her eyes went wide, and I noticed they were greener than usual. Must be that the toxic gases floating around were having an effect. "You do? How?"

"It’s a long story, and it doesn’t matter much. Faye, what’s going on here?" I gestured to her desk, which was covered in the burnt remnants of a Junior Scientist Chemistry kit.

"But if you know about Alain, you must know I’m not-" She stopped.

"Not what?" I asked.

One hand knotted itself in her hair and she wiped some soot off her cheek with the other. She looked so fragile, so delicate. "I’m not guilty," she said. "I didn’t kill my father."

I remembered my harsh words in the graveyard and felt like a jerk. Not only had she been dealing with accidently killing her father, but she’d switched her step-mother’s body with another woman’s. "Yeah, I know." I wanted to apologize but the words wouldn’t come out.

She sat down on the edge of the bed, in a pile of muddy sheets. "What do you want?" she asked, and a hint of her former chilliness reestablished itself. I couldn’t decide whether to be hurt or relieved.

"I want to know what’s going on," I replied. "This place is a wreck. I don’t even know how you can stay here, and I want to know what Sophie’s plan is."

"Sophie’s plan?"

"Is she going to keep Belle’s body?"

Faye thought for a moment, considering me with her eyes. "She wants me to get rid of Belle for her. Use a spell to make her disappear."

"Kill her, you mean."

"No, then there’s a body. She wants it all to vanish."

"Then why all the mess?"

"I don’t know a spell to make someone vanish. I figured I could just strangle her and then dissolve her body with some chemicals."

"Hence the Junior Science kit." I noticed a carton of yogurt rotting on the dresser top. "Did you really have to make this much of a mess doing it?"

She shrugged. "Sophie can clean it up." She stood up slowly, as if stiff. "Are you going to tell Diana?"

"About what?"

"What I’m going to do to Belle."

I looked at her again, took in the tattered outfit, the deep shadows around her eyes, the bruise on her temple. Faye didn’t give easily, she almost never backed down.

"Did Sophie threaten you?"

She didn’t answer. It was enough.

As much as every kid doesn’t want to believe it, as much as every witch wants to feel invincible, Faye was not an idiot. Sophie could make life hard if she wanted to.

"Can’t you switch them back?"

"It didn’t work last time."

"What went wrong?"

She shrugged. "I was startled, I was nervous. The power was too much for me to handle, it got all out of control and everything just exploded. I don’t think I can do that spell again."

There was a little quiver to her voice, something wrong that she wasn’t telling me. "Faye?"

A forced smile rose on her lips. "Nick?"

"There are a dozen ways out of this, why aren’t you taking one of them? If you declare Sophie’s body legally insane, Diana’s father will get custody of you, right? Sophie won’t be able to do anything about it, since Belle isn’t a blood relative. Or why not get Deb and Melanie to try the switching spell?" I added with only faint bitterness, "They seem to have a hand for these things."

She stared at the floor, and I felt myself frown until my jaw clenched. "Faye, what the hell is going on?"

She lifted her face, stepped almost gracefully over the piles of junk and trash on the floor, and reached for my hand. Her skin was cold, and her lip had begun to tremble.

"I’m scared," she whispered.

She lied.

I could tell instantly. This was one of Faye’s acts, one of her manipulations, an attempt to make the conversation go her way. I felt the anger rise up in me like the gases collecting before they explode into a star and I shook her hand away. After everything I had shown her...

"Don’t play with me," I snapped. Something small and cold shot out of me, I saw Faye flinch as if from an invisible blow. "Don’t you dare."

She turned away and I plowed right through the mountain in my haste to get out of the house.

Part Fifteen

My emotional defenses had been breached. It was just like that hole in the dike, at first the kid held it shut with his finger and only a little water got in, and pretty soon even his whole goddamn torso couldn’t keep the flood out.

Well, I wasn’t quite to the torso level yet, but I wasn’t doing great. Deborah found me on the beach just after sunset, hurtling rocks into the ocean as if trying to kill Goliath with one of them.

"Hey," she said, and plunked down in the sand. "Who shat on your parade?"

I found a round gray rock fully the size of my fist and swung it with all my might. "Now’s not the time, Deb."

In a phoney philosophical voice, she mused, "When is the time, but now? Can time ever truly be measured except in the moment? And does this moment, the one we all inhabit, then truly represent the entire measure of time, from the days of the monkey men to-"

"What do you want?" I snapped.

She shrugged and let a handful of sand run between her fingers. "Just to see if you’re okay."

"I’m fine. And why the hell are you so concerned about my well-being all of a sudden?"

I had run out of rocks in the immediate vicinity and was too lazy to walk down shore and find others. I collapsed onto the sand next to Deborah and reached for my cigarettes.

"Why the hell shouldn’t I be concerned about your well-being?" she replied. "You’re both family and friend."

"Is there a reason you’re being so goddamn poetic tonight?"

She shrugged and rubbed my shoulder lightly.

I didn’t push it. I didn’t really care. Something was bothering me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

There was too much mess in Faye’s house. Not even zoo animals are that filthy. And why would Sophie want to get rid of her old body entirely? I could understand why she wanted to keep Belle’s, but there were a dozen ways to do that without killing Belle.

I thought on Belle for a moment. Even if she was as strong-willed as Faye, it would be impossible to escape a vaulted room, especially if she was still being drugged. Not to mention that she must be dammed confused by what was going on to begin with.

But there was still a missing piece here. What was it....

"So you know I’m not..."

Not guilty, she’d said.

But there had been hesitation.

Like it wasn’t what she had been about to say.

"So you know I’m not..."

Not Faye?

"Oh jesus," I breathed, and that tiny exhalation seemed to empty my entire body of air. "Oh bloody hell."

Maybe it wasn’t true. Faye had to be Faye, I would have noticed earlier, I would have realized that she was being strange–

Nick, has she been anything but strange the past month?

"What’s wrong?" Deb was asking. Her hand was on my arm again, and I shook it off as I climbed to unsteady feet.

"Get help," I told her. "Go now, get anybody you can and take them to Faye’s house. I’ll meet you there."

I turned and started running, my shoes sinking deep into the sand and eating away precious seconds, and Deb called after me but I ignored her.

I had been ignoring so much during the past four weeks.

The graveyard should have told me everything. As much as it sounds beautiful, as much as I needed it, as much as it came from the pages of the world’s best romance novel, what happened hadn’t been in Faye’s code of conduct. She’d been crying for christ’s sakes.

Arrogance or hope had blinded me. I’d believed it was possible for us to break through all out inhibitions if we did it together, mercilessly and sweetly.

It wasn’t possible for Faye. It was possible for Belle.

And apparently, it was possible for me.

I shoved that thought aside and concentrated on getting through the woods without falling down. Everything was clicking now. Sophie wanted her body killed because Faye was inside it, and as long as Faye was alive, she could theoretically find a way to cast the reversal spell. Faye was that kind of girl. Belle was the one who had destroyed the house, in her hopeless attempts to figure out magic and chemistry and how to alchemize the two together. She’d probably killed Kavina in the process.

My feet hit the pavement of Crowhaven Road in a mad dash. I wasn’t fully recovered, my lungs were still on the small size, and I thought I might hyperventilate before I got to Faye’s house. Either that or my knees would buckle. I was a really pathetic hero.

I had to stop halfway through the street and crouch down to accommodate the cramp in my side. My hand knotted into a fist against the asphalt, which was hot as it gave up the last of the day’s heat. Words flashed in my mind suddenly, something I’d heard Deborah murmur while we were trapped in a cave last year.

Strength of stone, be in my bone.

Just that. Half a spell perhaps, half a calling. It didn’t matter. If I was going to get Faye out of this, I needed it. I reached out, threw away everything I had forced myself to believe, and simply knew that the power was there if I wanted it. My stomach twisted again, and this time I knew better than to suspect chicken wings.

I stood up, cramp gone, lungs expanded, legs fortified, and dashed for Faye’s house. As I got closer, I noticed that there was a candle burning in Sophie’s bedroom window.

Part Sixteen

The power was still out, and the stench was even worse than before. I found three kittens at my feet as I entered the front hall, all mewing pitifully as they scrambled toward the door. "Don’t leave the yard," I told them as I moved past and into the garbage.

The living room looked like that living trash pile from Fraggle Rock as I stumbled past it. In the dark, my feet landed on all sorts of things. Some of them squished and released scents, some of them shattered. I made it to the stairs and grabbed hold of the banister. Above, I could see light pouring out of Sophie’s bedroom and into the hallway.

Another kitten. This one was trapped in some kind of box, and it began mewing hysterically as I approached. To shut it up, I opened the box and stuck it in my shirt pocket. The stairs seemed to get steeper as I went up them, and the light swarmed thicker around my head. The kitten began purring.

The vault door was open and I could see the bedroom. At the top of the stairs I paused to glance around and look for a weapon. A two-by-four was peeking out of the junk, and it felt good in my hands. Just a little shorter than a baseball bat, torn at one end.

There was a dampness against my chest and I realized that the kitten had been soaking wet when I picked it up. Smelled like gasoline.

Inching down the hall, I listened carefully to the voices in Sophie’s room. Shadows walked around the walls, waving their arms and sprinkling things. Beside the door, I stopped and waited. I needed to know what has happening inside.

"I call on East," Faye’s voice was saying. "And the power of water and the color purple."

I smiled very faintly. Even I knew which corners went with which elements. Not to mention that she was walking the wrong way.

A little shiver passed through me. How much of this stuff had I picked up over the years?

Belle–in Faye’s body–had stopped walking and had her back to me. Sophie–in Belle’s body–came to stand next to her. I ducked my head into the doorway just long enough to take in the scene.

There was a circle laid out on the floor with flour and marked with candles in eight places. Words had been written on the floor in white and red chalk, and wax dripped everywhere. At the center was a wooden pentagram, which explained the two-by-fours laying around. Sophie’s body had been strapped to this, wrists, ankles and head attached to each point, and at the base was a metal contraption I wasn’t sure the purpose of.

Sophie didn’t look great, her hair was a nest of oil and her face had that pallid coloring of someone on lots of strong drugs. There was blood on her forehead, blood on her arms, blood on her knees.

And there was Faye inside her.

Beside the wheel, at the south end of the circle, was a door with a frame. It was like the sample doors they have at Home Depot, just standing free and opening to another door. A pentagram had been burned into the wood, along with a rune I didn’t recognize.

Belle took a chime and struck it extremely hard, causing a vibration that rang in my ears for several seconds. She chanted something in Latin, so full of fumbles that it took me several seconds to recognize the Lord’s Prayer backwards. Diana had never used it, I don’t even think she knew it, and from the note book page in Belle’s hand, I got the felling she had been forced to copy and rewrite it herself.

Sophie reached out and gave the pentagram a shove, and it began turning quickly, apparently spinning in a circle on the base. Faye groaned and opened her eyes and I ducked back into the hallway.

There were two objectives in mind. First, knock Belle and Sophie out. Then, transfer everybody back into their proper bodies. Which I wasn’t sure how to do. But Melanie could figure it out, I was almost sure of that. All right, new plan. Knock Belle and Sophie out and wait for the Circle to show up.

I took a deep breath and jumped through the vault door, length of wood held over my head. A painful ripple passed over my skin as I invaded the circle. Belle spun around and I clobbered her, one neat smack to Faye’s pretty head and she went down like a sack of bricks. My foot landed in the flour on the floor and I slid, banging my knee on the pentagram and receiving a nasty shock in the process.

On the floor, I saw Sophie lift her foot and bring it down toward my head. I rolled under the pentagram and realized I had somehow lost my two-by-four. The kitten was crying, I think I had rolled over on it. The pentagram was still spinning; I hit my head on it as I tried to get up. The world blackened momentarily as I waited for the first wave of pain to pass, and I heard Belle’s voice say, "I call on the demon Ose in my hour of need. Open your vortex and accept this sacrifice laid before you."

"Oh fuck," I whispered as the knots started forming in my stomach. Where the hell had Sophie come up with the know-how to call demons?

"You’ve given us your blessing, now accept our gift."

Something soft was smacked against the door from the other side, and I saw Sophie take a huge brass key off a nearby table. "I conjure you, O Ose, by sword, by key, and by the three Holy Names, Albrot, Abracadabra, Jeova! Be thou my fortress and defense against all enemies, visible and invisible, in every magical work."

I scrambled out from under the pentagram and got to my knees. "Faye?" I asked, reaching for the belt that bound her right wrist.

Sophie’s eyes rolled toward me, and I thought I could see Faye in the older woman’s expression. "Forget me," she said weakly. "You’ve got to stop her."

"By the Holy Name Saday, which is great in power, and by these other names, Cadoe, Cados, Cados, Adonay, Eloy, Zena, Oth, Ochimanuel, the first and the last-"

I ripped at the belt and saw that Sophie was now beating the wooden door with her key. "She doesn’t know what she’s doing," I told Faye.

"It doesn’t matter, she’ll still call him." Faye’s voice was so scratchy that it hurt to hear, but she kept on going in a frantic tone. "I did. You’ve got to keep him out of here, Nick."

I managed to work her wrist free and started on her ankle. "She can’t call him if she doesn’t know what she’s doing, right?"

"Yes she can-"

"Wisdom, Way, Life, Virtue, Chief, Mouth, Speech, Splendour, Light, Sun, Fountain, Glory, Mountain, Cine, Gate, Stone, Staff, Priest, Immortal, Messiah, Sword, do thou rule in all my affairs and prevail in those things which appose me. Amen!"

I doubled over as a cramp hit me. "Stop her!" Faye cried, and Sophie turned the door knob.

I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. My experience in magic was entirely non-participantal, yet here I was trying to stop a spell. I did the most obvious thing, I jumped up and knocked Sophie over.

But the door was already open.

The candles went out in a rush and I felt my guts churn. There was no sound but I heard something hiss in my ear. Sophie screamed and Faye moaned. The room filled with blackness and finger nails dug into my arm.

"Stop her," Faye said again.

The power came on in a rush of electrical buzz. Lights sprang on everywhere, the hair blow-dryer started up in the bathroom, along with an electrical razor, the television, the radio, and the clock alarms. The room flushed with hot air that stank of animal and I shoved Sophie onto the floor.

"O Ose," she called. "Take this sacrifice I have laid before you!"

Faye was struggling with her still bound hand, and downstairs I heard the front door open. The Circle, thank god they were finally here. A minute or two left to stall.

"What do I do?" I asked Faye.

She shook her head, opened her mouth, and I felt something huge hit the back of my head. The vault door slammed shut as I hit the floor.

Part Seventeen

Another temporary black-out. I opened my eyes enough to see Sophie’s room blazing with light, and Belle wielding my two-by-four. "I beseech Thee," Sophie was calling. "O Grand Ose, Adonay, Eloim, Ariel, and Jehovan, to be propitious unto me, and to endow this Wand which I am cutting with the power and virtue of the rods of Jocab, of Mese and of the mighty Joshua!"

The room swam with power, heat making the air vibrate like the space above an open grill. I could feel it in my hands and my stomach, like ropes being tightened around me. Whatever it was Sophie needed to preform her spell, it was here, and it was ready.

"Take this sacrifice into your world!" Sophie called, and I saw that the doorway was shimmering. Through the wooden frame I could see nothing but blackness and the milky shine of glass.

I don’t believe in any of this, I thought desperately, as if that would make it all vanish. Magic, are you joking?

Faye had passed out. I closed my eyes against the impossibility of the whole situation and heard the Circle beating against the vault door, which had been closed and locked from the inside. My head throbbed and colors danced before my eyes.

"Nick," my mother said. "Don’t open your eyes."

"Get out of here," I told her.

"You can save her."

"Not without sacrificing myself. You told me that."

"And you told me that you had to. You have the power to save her. If you want it."

"I don’t."

"Nick." There was a smile in her voice, and the faint scent of perfume wafted off her fingers as they brushed over my cheek. "I didn’t give you this for nothing."

I opened my eyes and saw Sophie with Faye’s athame in her hand. She was about to bring it down on Faye’s chest, still screaming incoherently about the power of Moses.

I gave in. Completely. Every disbelief, every wise crack, every disbelieving smile melted out of me and I let it all fill me. The simple wonder of a night sky, the wrenching crash of the ocean, the circle barriers I had crashed through a hundred times. Blood rushed, a wild hunt was begun inside me, and I looked back over my shoulder at ten thousand years of circles, of the blood that had divided a million times to finally taint my own. I could feel the ages stretching out and reaching forward, from the dawn of the ages to my parents, every spell, every chant, every invocation to the lightening gods. The power from the graveyard pounded through my stomach, and I thought of Melanie’s words. "Just let it go, Nick."

I did. There were a number of screams. I blacked out again, and I fell down for a long time.

Part Eighteen

"Nick," my mother was saying again. Her hands were on my shoulders, my face, touching a cold, damp cloth to my forehead. I smiled and felt the blood trickle out of my eyes.

"I did it," I told her. "Everything you asked."

"Nick?"

It wasn’t my mother. It was Deb, and she sounded scared. "He’s probably got a concussion," Melanie said from further away.

The disappointment was almost sweet. I winced and opened my eyes, then found myself turning away from the bright lights. The entire Circle was crowded into the room, bustling around, picking things up. There was movement and noise all around, someone was crying and I could hear Chris Henderson saying, "Damn man, look at the bathroom. There’s shit all over the place!"

Melanie told me not to sit up, then asked me to move my toes and fingers. I complied without protest and watched Diana helping Faye’s body onto the bed.

"Sophie?" I said and from out of nowhere, the kitten I had saved from drowning in gasoline exploded into the air. It attacked me with claws outstretched, sinking what beginnings of teeth it had into my face.

Deborah grabbed it and it clamped its jaws on her finger tips. "Sophie’s over there," she told me as she wrestled the kitten.

I glanced in the direction she indicated and saw Faye’s step-mother staring blankly into space. She slowly lifted one arm, the hand drawn into a limp fist, and said, "Meow?"

I started laughing. I started and I couldn’t stop for a long time. Melanie kept asking me what had happened, but all I could do was laugh until she threatened to call an ambulance and Suzan threw a glass of cold water in my face. I had the whole Circle annoyed with me.

Faye was all right. Weak and disoriented, but back to her normal bitchy self in a matter of hours. Belle just kept crying and finally drove home, swearing never to speak of this to anyone. Sophie went to the hospital in an ambulance, to the psychiatric ward, where she remains to this day. The kitten was given to the Humane Society.

The Circle spent the night at Faye’s house, putting the place back together. I was out of it, drifting in and out of sleep, talking to myself and the walls. Faye and I sat at opposite ends of the couch and watched everybody clean. How we told the story, or even if we managed to tell the whole thing, I’m still not sure. Apparently everyone had their curiosity satisfied. Well, except for me.

I bumped into Faye a few days before school was set to start. We were in the graveyard again, she was asleep beneath her father’s headstone and I was leaving rocks on top of my parents.

I stood a few feet away and watched her, the way she curled into the plaid blanket she had stretched out. I ran a hand through my hair and looked up at the clouds passing through the sky. The sun was setting, and it seemed earlier than usual. The days were already getting shorter.

I had one more year to spend in Salem, then I was off to UM. A few weeks ago I had expected the year to last forever, to be torture as I waited and waited. But something had changed inside me, simply broken and fallen away, and I got the feeling that it was only the beginning. My mother hadn’t meant sacrificing myself in the literal sense; but I would still never be the same.

So the magic was real. That I could deal with. This new softness in my heart, well...that was going to take longer.

Change takes time. It hurts like hell, too, and the more it hurts the bigger the change. I left Faye still sleeping in the graveyard, knowing that she wasn’t ready, that I had made a leap forward to places where she couldn’t yet follow.

Those of you who have read Cassie’s account of the next few months know what happened afterward. I’ve read the fan mail, I’ve heard the musings about why her gentle chipping at my shell was so affective. But as I said at the beginning, we give Cassie far too much credit. My identity crisis started long before she hit town.

As for Faye....ah, Faye. She took her own path, as she always had before and I dearly hope always will. We never talk about what happened, and she looks at me with eyes that are purposefully empty. I forgive her. I even thank her, for what she showed me. And if she ever needs anyone to help her tear down the walls that surround Fortress Faye, you know I’ll be glad to give her a hand.

The End

October 25, 1998