14. The Challenge Box (2002)
Reach inside and choose your challenge,
Find the path that you must travel.
What trials have you to overcome?
What mysteries shall you unravel?
As their year-and-a-day draws to an end, Annie, Kate, and Cooper must face individual challenges designed to test their fitness for initiation, causing Kate to debate whether or not she will choose to commit to the Wiccan path.
The book starts with Kate, Cooper, and Annie's final challenges. They are asked to pull a sheet of paper out of the box and complete the challenge on it. Based on how well they complete their challenges decides whether or not they will be invited to the initation.
In other happenings, Annie and Cooper go to New Orleans, while Kate stays behind working on her make-up science project with the unbearable Sherrie. When Annie and Cooper get back they are all prepared for their final class at Crones Circle. Cooper is extremely confident they will all be witches next year and their circle will not be broken.
After presenting their challenges and how they completed or had not completed them they are asked one at a time to proceed into the back room where Archer will tell them whether or not they are asked to the initation. As Cooper, Annie, and Kate walk in confident they will become witches together, they are faced with the cruel reality that one in their circle might not be ready to be a witch.
Of her circle, Kate has always struggled the most in learning the ways of the Craft. As her Wiccan initiation approaches, a final challenge threatens to overcome her at last.