"Oh, boy." I sighed.

"Take a moment to think about what it is you need to reveal about yourself, and then go collect something to symbolize it. Quickly. We must complete our ritual and set the spell this night, before it passes midnight and a new day begins." Shaunee was the first of us to get up. She looked determined as she hurried off the bus. Damien followed her. Then Stevie Rae. Then Erin. I had a sudden thought, and dug through my purse. In the bottom of it, with the used Kleenexes, topless ChapStick, and purse crud, I found it. Satisfied, I looked up to see Stark, Darius, Rephaim, and Aphrodite all gawking at me.

"Do you need help figuring out this assignment?" Aphrodite said, only semi-sarcastically.

"Zoey already has what she needs with her," Thanatos said.

"Yeah. She's right. I do." I had the very immature urge to stick my tongue out at Aphrodite, which I didn't do (of course). Instead I settled for crossing my arms and looking smug.

We didn't have long to wait for my circle to come back. Stevie Rae was first. She looked unusually frowny. She wasn't carrying anything, but when she sat down I saw her rest her hand over one of her front jeans pockets, as if she was protecting something there.

Damien left with his man purse and came back with it. He gave Thanatos an overly perky smile and said, "Mission accomplished!" Shaunee came back next. She didn't say anything. She just went back to her seat and resumed staring out the window.

Erin finally came back. She was carrying a little thermal sack. The kind high-end grocers (like Petty's at Utica Square) give you to carry home ice cream and frozen stuff. "What?" She snapped at us. "I'm back. We're ready. Let's go." Thanatos quelled Erin's outburst with one hard look, which sent the half of an ex-Twin skulking to the back of the bus. Then she told Darius, "Take us to the lavender farm of Sylvia Redbird." Darius pulled the short bus out of the House of Night campus. I expected Thanatos to sit down (uh, like a normal teacher) and bounce along with the rest of us. Instead she took a firm hold of the handicapped (sigh) rail with one hand, and with the other she reached into her super-loaded spell work basket and pulled out a big bundle of something that looked like a bunch of weeds that had clusters of little white flowers just like I'd seen at the side of the road and in Oklahoma fields and ditches about a thousand times.

"As you all know, we are going to perform a reveal ritual, and I am going to cast a spell invoking death that will, hopefully, ill uminate images from the past, specifically those of Zoey's mother's murder. It is a difficult ritual and a complex spell." Thanatos had been speaking to all of us, but now she turned her attention to Stevie Rae. "As I mentioned before, earth is the key to unlocking this spell. The success of the vision rests on the power of your connection to the earth, as well as the commitment of the circle to bringing alive the images of the events of the past."

"I'm real connected to earth. Promise," Stevie Rae said.

Thanatos's lips tilted up. "That is an excellent beginning."

"I think my circle is real committed to this ritual, too," I said.

I heard my friends around me echoing my words with yeses and uh-huhs.

"What's with the weeds?" Aphrodite asked.

Thanatos shook one plant free of the others and held it up so we could see it. Like I'd thought to begin with, it was just a plain old weed that had a bunch of ordinary, but kinda pretty, white flowers clustered at the end of it, a little like baby's breath.

"This is not a weed. It is a wonderful wild flower called angelica. Its properties are unusually strong and pure. It is a flower of communication.

When used in spell work its nature is to reveal what is hidden to the conscious eye. During tonight's ritual you, my young Red High Priestess, are going to wear a crown woven by your friends of this magickal flower."

"Ooooh! That's super cool!"

Thanatos handed the bundle of wildflowers to Stevie Rae. "Pass these out. The rest of you braid the plants you get together into a circle. Stevie Rae will stack the circles on her head before the ritual."

"Braid?" Stark muttered.

Stevie Rae dropped a bunch of flowers in our laps. I raised my brows at Stark. "Yep," I said. "Braid. Death orders it."

"Well, in that case..." He sighed and started to awkwardly braid the long stems together.

While we all braided (even Rephaim, who actually seemed to have some kind of weird gift with knotwork and ended up doing a cool intricate braid and helping Stark with the mess he was working on) Thanatos walked up and down the aisle of the bus and talked to us. It was weirdly like being in a mobile classroom.