All Inclusive

Months ago, when the Circle had decided that they needed the Master tools in order to strengthen their magic and come into their full strength, Adam had fully supported the decision and even volunteered to use his summer break to search them out. If he’d known then what he knew now, if he’d known that the crystal skull that resonated with so much power Adam could sense it buried beneath the sand was so tied to Black John that it brought him back, he never would have agreed to go. There was such a thing as too much power, after all, and that skull had been too much even for a full coven and the delicate rituals that Melanie and Diana had devised to cleanse it. Even now, searching for the real Master tools, Adam didn’t know if it was such a good idea. What if they found them and Black John took them or, worse, manipulated Cassie or Faye into using them against the Circle and the rest of New Salem?

There wasn’t enough time to think it through for Adam’s tastes but he trusted Cassie and trusted her visions: even the original Circle had looked to Cassie’s family as the strongest of the twelve. But was trust enough? Was it enough to know how things would play out once they put forth change and altered the future? Adam couldn’t say.

What he could say, though, was that they needed to act fast. Faye was working with Black John to bring the Circle down and there was a storm brewing offshore that would wipe New Salem off the map and take a good chunk of the rest of New England with it. Black John had already killed four people, five if Cassie’s mother didn’t shake off the funk she’d been in since he came back and Adam knew it would only get worse if they didn’t do something. It was on Cassie’s suggestion that they went back to Number Twelve and started digging behind the fireplace. She looked shaken and rightly so; her grandmother had died here, her mother had been scared catatonic here…it was a lot for anyone to handle. Adam wanted to reach out and touch her, comfort her, but they’d made a promise that he wasn’t willing to break, not even in a situation like this.

Adam could feel the hum of power, true power, the second Cassie lifted the box from the fireplace. It was old, solid and when she lifted the lid, he could see the gleam of the real Master tools, not the replicas Diana had used as coven leader. The silver cuff looked heavy, the diadem sparkled like a crown of stars and the garter was made of leather that was miraculously still supple after hundreds of years.

It wasn’t his right to touch them, he knew, but Adam couldn’t help but reach out for the garter and graze his fingers against an object so old and so powerful that maybe, just maybe, they’d stand a chance against Black John and his dark magic. The power that whooshed from the artifact knocked him back and when he came to, there was the grit of sand against his skin and in his mouth. Sand? He’d been blown all the way out of the house, down the cliffs and onto the beach? It was one hell of an artifact, then, and cemented his belief that Cassie had been right about locating the Master tools; no fake would have had that much stored power without some kind of ritual to sustain it.

The power was too much for him and while it was probably dangerous to leave right at this moment, he told the others he needed to get air and would check outside to make sure nobody had come upon the burned-out house. It wouldn’t necessarily hurt to do a perimeter check, especially considering just how dangerous things could become if someone got their hands on the Master tools and intended to use them for evil and he stepped out of the half-burned door with closed eyes, taking in a deep breath in order to calm himself. He didn’t expect much, considering how the ocean was roiling and unsettling him; having Water as a chosen element was more of a liability at the moment than an asset.

But things didn’t seem right. He opened his eyes and saw plush carpeting and the trappings of a hotel, not the eerie and unsettled calm of Crowhaven Road before a killer storm. Confused, Adam turned back to the door and turned the knob, frowning when it appeared to be stuck. That didn’t make any sense, he’d just come through it, hadn’t he? He tried again, bracing himself as he tugged the door and while it yanked open, there was nothing but a storage closet and not the exit back to his own world.

Of all the times to discover new magic, this wasn’t it, and Adam muttered under his breath in frustration as he tried closing the door and reopening it, yielding the same result. The Circle needed him as much as anyone else - a Circle of eleven was crippled and unprepared to face Black John’s threat and it was only twelve, a full Circle, that even stood a chance. There was no way that he could be here instead of there unless...unless it was by design. If Black John wanted to disrupt their power base, he’d done it, and now he had an even bigger advantage than before.

Adam dragged a hand through his hair and took a deep breath, taking inventory of what he had at the moment to start making his way back. This was a kind of magic he wasn’t familiar with, some sort of magic that transported a person across vast distances, and unraveling the exact spell that was used would take time that he simply didn’t have. He kicked the door one last time in frustration and took a little satisfaction in the way the wood cracked beneath his boot but it didn’t really damage the door or make it give way to a path home.

Really, all it served to do was make him concentrate on the pain in his foot instead of the dire situation he’d found himself in and Adam wasn’t necessarily sure that was any better. He was of the very-uninformed opinion that it was not.