Excerpt:
Chapter 1
Sunday night and I was
learning to turn a summoning spell. Though I'd spent most of my life being home
schooled, I had a feeling this was not a normal family activity for other
fifteen year old girls.
"Gran, when I
told you I wanted a cell phone, this wasn't what I had in mind," I said.
Gran picked through a
handful of wheatberries, looking for just the right one to add to her pot. We
stood at opposites sides of the round table with a copper pot in front of each
of us and a host of ingredients filling the table between.
"Cell phones
don't work for members of the magical community," she said.
"What community?
It's just you and me."
Dumping ingredients
into a pot had nothing on the convenience of electronic communication. Kids at
school were constantly using theirs to call each other, text, watch videos. But
not me. I wasn't allowed to have one. I had to learn the "old ways."
Gran sighed, and I
knew by the way her lips were pursed that she didn't intend to elaborate. She'd
been trying to get me to learn spells every night for weeks now. I'd finally
caved in hopes she would back off, but that plan hadn't worked out quite like
I'd hoped.
"I have to go to
the library tonight," I said. I dumped a handful of crispy dried lavender
flowers—for devotion so the line of communication would stay clear— into my
pot.
In another time we
might have been called witches. But now that term was considered derogatory. We
were spell-turners. Well, Gran was. I wouldn't be a full spell-turner until I
turned sixteen and came into my full powers. In all my fifteen years, in all
the time I'd spent in Halifax and my current residence in Ottawa, I'd never met
another turner, not another magical creature of any kind, until the day my
mother died.
If there was a magical
community out there, I wouldn't know it.
I hadn't been out of
the apartment except to go to school in six weeks. I needed to get away, to
hang with some friends— even just for a little while.
"We have books
here," Gran replied in a stern tone. This was an old argument.
She was right— we had
books here. Every wall of the living room was filled to the ceiling with
shelves, every shelf filled with books. All had belonged to my mother.
Without coming right
out to say so, Gran was subtly reminding me of the reason I was confined to the
apartment. My mother had been killed by a black-spell sorcerer— that is, a
sorcerer who chooses to use death to fortify his spells. For some reason Gran
thought he would come after me. But I wasn't a full turner yet. I had only
partial powers. Until my sixteenth birthday, every spell I turned would
dissipate the moment it came together. "Learning powers," Gran called
them. "Just enough juice to see what you're doing, but not so much as to
harm yourself or anyone else."
She seemed convinced I
had these learning powers, but for some reason my spells never seemed to turn
out right no matter how carefully I followed her instructions. And that was bad
news. Even though they didn't want me to know, I'd heard my mother and Gran
fighting about me. Gran thought I was either a late blooming white turner or a
null— a turner's daughter born without powers. My mother refused to believe I
was a null. So Gran was on a mission to prove one way or another I had learning
powers or I was deliberately faking not having them out of extreme laziness.
"Your mother was
a good white turner," Gran said. "She loved turning spells with me
when she was your age. Couldn't get enough of it."
Her mention of my
mother hit me square in the gut.
"Didn't she like
to do anything else? Anything normal?"
Gran pinched her lips
together again. She didn't like to speak about my mother beyond her gifted
spelling abilities.
I directed the
conversation back to the topic at hand.
"I really need
the books at the library," I said. I followed her actions and, using a
wooden spoon, swirled in two cups of diluted bay leaf extract for strength. I
turned the spell clockwise, same as she did. We were on opposite sides of the
small round kitchen table, so I had to think for a minute which way to turn my
spoon.
"Why?" Gran
asked suspiciously, narrowing her eyes. Everything was suspicious to Gran.
I barely kept myself
from rolling my eyes. "I have homework."
"What
homework?"
"What do you
mean? I go to high school now. I get homework." I used to be
home-schooled. Right up until 52 days ago when I lost my mother. Then Gran had
to take over as my teacher. She used to be able to teach my lessons for the few
months of the year when I went to live with her in Halifax, but now that I was
in grade ten, my studies had advanced to the point where she didn't understand
anything in my textbooks. So she marched me down to the nearest high school.
She would have signed me up right then, but they were closed for winter
holidays. Imagine that.
"The new semester
starts tomorrow, February second, according to the literature I received from
the school," she pointed out.
Crap. "I'm
catching up from last semester," I said, carefully examining a handful of
calendula. I felt more than saw Gran carefully examining me.
"Who's the
boy?" she asked.
"There's no
boy," I answered quickly. Too quickly. Double crap.
"I
might not know much about quadriplegic equations or—"
"Quadratic
equations," I corrected.
"Or, what goes
into a good Theseus statement, but—"
"Thesis
statement. Theseus killed the Minotaur."
"But," she
said again with emphasis, ignoring my corrections, "I know my
granddaughter."
This time I did roll
my eyes. "Whatever."
His name was Rory
Macdonald. But I wasn't about to tell Gran that. I met him in the principal's
office on the morning of my first day. It was his first day, too. A drunk
driver had killed his parents and now he was living with his aunt. I met him
again later in the day at the guidance counsellor's office. A special grief
counsellor had been brought in to meet with us. Neither of us wanted to meet
with her, but nobody asked us. His aunt was almost as controlling as my Gran.
We didn't have plans
for tonight, so I didn't have to worry about calling him to cancel. He'd
mentioned he'd found this place, where he liked to go on Sunday nights to play
bass guitar for a band. I'd only hoped to stop in and hear him play.
"You may invite
him to come here," Gran said, ignoring my denials. She released three
drops of cedar oil, for dedication, into the liquid swirls in her pot.
"But you won't be going out."
I bit back a scream.
It used to be my mother and Gran had no trouble keeping friends out of my life,
what with shipping me off to Halifax twice a year and homeschooling me. I never
got to go to birthday parties, Halloween parties, camping trips or any other
fun thing that normal girls did.
"Friendship is
dangerous," Gran would say. My mother would agree. She would even agree when
they were having that big fight that lasted for weeks.
I tried a new angle.
"I need to use the computers at the library."
"What do you need
those confounded contraptions for?" she asked. Her tone was one of
surprise, even though this wasn't the first time we'd talked about my needing a
computer for schoolwork. She just didn't get the concept of computers. Ever.
I listed the reasons
on my fingers. "Research, report presentation, statistical analysis—"
"Hmph. In my day
we had to do all of that by hand." She peered down her nose at the runny
swirls in my pot. While mine was little more than a pathetic soup stock, hers
had taken on shimmering hues of purple and green. I didn't have to see her face
to know she was disappointed.
Still, I pressed my
case. "Look, it's not a big deal. I can take care of myself."
"Hmph." She
tapped the wooden spoon on the pot rim.
"Please? Can I go
for an hour?" Oh, man. That sounded so desperate.
"No," she
said simply, placing her spoon on the table next to her pot. She carried the
empty vials to the sink and turned on the hot water.
"Gran—" I
cried.
"I cannot permit
it, Melantha. If you do not go outside this apartment with me, then you do not
go outside this apartment at all."
I rolled my eyes and
groaned. "You are completely impossible!"
If my words stung even
the slightest, she didn't show it. She carried on with washing the dishes.
"I'm sorry, Melantha. But I promised your mother."
"Promised her
what? Promised you would keep me a prisoner and never talk about her?"
I slumped into a chair
with my arms crossed. This was hopeless. Gran was super stubborn. I needed a
new approach.
Temporarily abandoning
my potion, I snagged the tea towel on the way to the sink. Unexpected
helpfulness always put Gran in a good mood. I hoped it would be good enough to
let me out.
She cleared her
throat. "Your potion is incomplete."
"My potion is
nothing but water with twigs and leaves in it." I noticed she didn't tell
me not to dry the dishes. Nor did she tell me to start over and make the potion
again. We'd been down that road before. It always resulted in the same thing:
failure. Whatever it took to make a potion, I didn't have it. My mother and
Gran had been convinced my spells would come together the closer I got to my
sixteenth birthday, but so far they always amounted to nothing.
"Did you project
your light into it?" she asked in that snippy tone that said she already
knew the answer.
"Yes." I
hated it when she said "light" instead of "magic".
"And?" Gran
prompted.
"And what?
Nothing happened." I shrugged. I felt my power, my magic. It flowed
through me, the same as blood and oxygen flowed through me. It was there. I
could feel it the entire time we put together these spells. But magic also
dredged up too many memories of my mother. And there wasn't much light there
when I thought about how she died. It was more like a choking sensation. I
hated that feeling.
"You're not
trying hard enough," Gran said. That was what she always said. I didn't
answer. There was no point. She'd already made up her mind.
Maybe the truth was, I
could have tried harder, but turning spells just felt wrong. If my mother had
been killed by bullets, would I still be expected to attend target practice?
"I don't
understand what's so bad about having friends," I said, plucking a soapy
plate from the drain board.
She shut off the
water. "You know the reason. They can be used against you. And you against
them. It's better for everyone if you just don't have them to begin with."
Yeah, I'd heard that
part before. It was stupid. For some reason my mother and Gran thought I would
be kidnapped and held for ransom. I couldn't understand why. We didn't have
anything of value. It wasn't like we were millionaires.
So who were they
protecting me from?
"As for going out
alone," Gran continued as she washed a pot, "there are many kinds of
evil out there. You are not safe on your own."
"But I won't be
on my own. I'll be with friends!"
"Together you'll
be on your own."
"But that makes
no sense at all!"
An eerie wind howled
outside the windows. If the weather was getting worse, I was sure to lose this
argument. I crossed the apartment to the living room windows and used the tea
towel to clear away the condensation on the cold glass. Snowflakes swirled
under the streetlights below. Even the weather wanted to keep me inside.
There was a sharp
knock at the door. I met Gran's gaze. She appeared as surprised as I was, but
where I welcomed any and every visitor, I knew she would send away whoever was
on the other side of that door. By the expression on her face, she suspected
I'd invited a friend over without permission. I hadn't, but knowing Gran, that
wouldn't make a difference.
I dove for the door,
but Gran beat me to it. She leaned cautiously up to the peephole.
"Open up,
Alberta. I'm here to speak to the girl." It was a man's voice— muffled,
old and tired. The voice of someone older than Gran, someone ancient.
The girl? I hoped for
his sake, he wasn't referring to me. There was something familiar about the
voice, something that sent a nervous sense of foreboding all the way down to my
toes. This was one visitor I didn't want to see.
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