finally, when I was almost weeping with frustration, Hunter slowed the circle and brought the song to an end. “Don’t break the circle,” he told us. “But everyone sit down.”
We sat in place, our legs crossed.
“That was really good, everyone,” Hunter said. His face glowed, his features relaxed in a way that I rarely saw, as if the circle was the place he felt most comfortable. It upset me that he could feel so at ease here in my coven while I, for the first time, felt like an outsider. He looked at each one of us in turn and then asked, “Do you want to share your thoughts?”
Ethan said, “That was . . . intense. The Wicca books talk about the Wheel of the Year. This time I felt like I could sort of . . . feel all of us traveling on it, our whole lives.”
“Yeah,” Matt said. “It was like I was both in this room and out there in the ravine.”
“Me too.” Robbie looked awestruck. “I felt like I was the wind in the trees.”
Hunter looked at Sharon. “I didn’t get anything cosmic,” she admitted, sounding embarrassed. “I just felt how much my family cares about me. It was like I got this blast of mother-father love that I haven’t been paying attention to lately.”
Hunter smiled. “What makes you think that isn’t cosmic?”
Robbie said, “What about you, Jenna?”
Jenna laughed softly. “I had a vision of myself being really strong. ”
It was my turn next, and I was dreading it. What had gone wrong? I wondered. Maybe Hunter was just the wrong person for me to be working with. Now I was going to have to say I hadn’t felt anything, and everyone was going to wonder what was wrong with me, if I could only reach my power with Cal. I took a deep breath, trying to calm down.
“All right, then.” Hunter got to his feet. “That was good work, everyone. Let’s call it a night and meet again on Saturday.”
I looked up, startled. He had skipped me!
When he walked over to blow out the altar candles, I followed him. “Do I not count?” I asked in a low voice. “Doesn’t it matter what I felt?”
He glanced at me in surprise. “I could tell you didn’t connect,” he replied softly. “I thought you’d rather not talk about it. I’m sorry if I made the wrong assumption.”
I couldn’t think of a reply to that. It was the right assumption, in fact. It just bothered me, the way he could read me. I found it incredibly disconcerting.
He turned back to the others. “On Saturday we’ll work with the pentagram,” he said. “Read up on it and spend some time visualizing it. See what it tells you.”
I thought of Cal’s pentacle necklace, and a shudder went through me.
“We can meet at my house,” Jenna volunteered.
“Perfect,” Hunter said. “Thank you all.”
I knew I should seize the moment and tell him I needed to speak to him privately, but I just couldn’t do it. I felt too off balance, too out of sorts. Before I’d made up my mind to do anything, Robbie came up and handed me my coat.
“So do you have a good book about pentagrams?” he asked as we walked out toward the cars.
“No,” I said tiredly. “I don’t seem to have anything right now.”
7
Intruder
I sat in Das Boot on Wednesday morning, thinking again about last night’s circle. The truth was, part of me loved being the star pupil, the one who had off-the-charts power. In our coven, right from the start, I’d been the gifted one. It had made me feel special for the first time in my life. Was that over, too?
“Morgan?” a muffled voice called. “Morgan!”
I blinked and glanced up. My friend Tamara Pritchett was tapping on the window, her breath coming out in white puffs. “You’re going to be late,” she said as I rolled down the window. “Didn’t you hear the bell?”
“Um . . . ,” I mumbled. “Sorry. I was just thinking.”
We walked to class together, and all the way there I was aware of the curious looks Tamara kept giving me. By now everyone knew that Cal was gone,
Michelle Betham
Peter Handke
Cynthia Eden
Patrick Horne
Steven R. Burke
Nicola May
Shana Galen
Andrew Lane
Peggy Dulle
Elin Hilderbrand