Casting Magic Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

The smile on my face left as we turned the corner away from the holiday festivities of the DiPaolo-Kelly home. I love Thanksgiving. It was such a warm and homey holiday. Well, for other people it was. As my driver accelerated the car my stomach twisted itself in knots. I really didn’t want to go home. What was the point? No one would be there anyway.

I brushed a hand over my head in a vain attempt to control my overzealous curls, but they just weren’t havin’ any of that. My hair had a mind of its own. I used to wear it long and pulled back in a super tight, thick braid every single day of grade school.

That was my mom’s rule. She was a little strict about appearance. But once I entered high school, I had a revelation. My head, my hair, my rules. I went to a salon that was owned by a close friend of the family and had her chop it off. Every year I did the same thing, right before school started in September I cut it just above my shoulders.

Of course when Sherry styled it, it looked awesome! On days when I tried to style my hair, it sort of just curled all over the place. I usually threw on a wide headband to keep it out of my face, especially in school. I’m a junior this year. I go to Sacred Heart Preparatory School in Northern, New Jersey. It’s a Catholic high school, but it’s co-ed, thank the goddess!

Oh yeah, I’m a Witch. I come from a long line of Witches. We are called the Coven Realta. Loosely translated it means Coven of Light or Starlight. We are small and we follow both Wiccan and Asatru practices, though a lot of what we do is not public knowledge. I am not sure of my powers yet, I’m still young and not everyone has a talent or gift for magic.

Lately, I’ve been more and more afraid that I might fall into that category. Theunmagicked in our Coven are treated the same as everyone. I’m lucky in that aspect. I’ve heard of Covens who banish their unmagicked or worse, kill them. But those are just stories, I think.

Anyway, we of the Coven Realta are supposed to be in touch with the natural rhythm of the life cycles of all living things, plant animal and mineral. Nurturers, gardeners, healers, that type of thing. But not me. I've always been more comfortable behind a keyboard than at the other end of a shovel or rake.

I’ve been trying to figure out just what I am good at these past few months with help of course. You see, Sherry isn’t just my stylist, she is my mentor. She used my dad’s firm a few years back to help out with some legal documents. She came to our house once to sign papers when I was about eight. That’s when we first met. She took me under her wing and I was forever grateful.

My father is a very successful businessman. What it is that he does exactly, I am not really sure. His firm dabbles in law, accounting, real estate, public relations, and just about everything there is. His company is called Tanner Global Enterprises, or TGE for short. He has offices in a huge high rise in Manhattan. I don’t get to see him very much, but we have a good relationship.

I know he is a gifted Witch and I am really hoping that I take after him. We have a huge orchard of apple and pear trees behind our home that he tends. His success in business is directly related to those trees. The way I understand it is this, a healthy orchard for my father, means a healthy company. Cool, right?

Anyway, whatever relationship I have with my dad, it is the total opposite with my mom. She is not very gifted in magic. I was seven the first time I understood that she used flirtation and desire to get what she wanted. I thought she must be so powerful to get so many people to treat her like a princess, but as I got older I understood it a little better. She never seems to enjoy our Solstice gatherings or any of our Coven’s celebrations. She is sort of vain and silly I guess. All I know is I never seem to please her.

She is tall and thin, willowy I guess. She has lovely straight blonde hair, big blue eyes and a pouty mouth. She looks like a supermodel. I look nothing like her. My father isn’t so bad either. He is also tall and thin, with jet black hair and dark eyes. He’s really handsome, but more importantly he is sweet and loving. Mom, not so much.

I don’t know who I look like. Maybe some forgotten aunt or uncle? Oh, well.After the fiasco that was my six week stint at fat camp the past summer I have learned to accept myself for who I am. I am 5’5” tall (or short depending on my mood), I weigh 145 pounds, and you got it, I am a ginger. A serious one.

My hair is bright red, not auburn or mahogany, I am talking bright, orangey red. It is super curly and, you guessed it, it gets super frizzy in the rain. My skin is very pale and I have a splattering of freckles over my nose and shoulders though they have gotten a lot lighter since I was a kid. The ones on my face are hardly visible especially after I put on some make-up.

I do have pretty nice eyes. They are hazel, not quite blue but not quite green, and I swear I once saw them turn violet when I was angry at my mom. That’s good news for a Witch. That usually meant a Witch’s powers were coming. I can’t wait for mine. Maybe then Mom will be proud of me. But even if she isn’t, it will still be cool.

Anyway, my mind drifted back to the small party I had just left. My best friend Grazi looked like she had just been through something rough. I could tell she wanted to talk, but we had secrets between us. She didn’t know I was a Witch and I didn’t tell her I knew she was a Werewolf.

Still, it was nice to pretend for a little while that I was just a normal kid celebrating the holidays. When I got into the car Daddy had hired to drive me around I almost forgot for a moment that I would be going back to a big empty house. It was Thanksgiving, Daddy had to work and Mom was never big on the holidays. That’s one reason why I went to celebrate with Grazi.

Her grandmother made a truly incredible meal. I never tasted home cooked food like that before. My parents rarely eat with me and when they do we are at a restaurant. During the week I usually just order take out. I’ve tried my hand at cooking before. It was so not my thing. I truly suck at it.

Anyway, we sang happy birthday, ate a delicious cake made entirely out of cream puffs, and afterwards we even played board games, like a real family. I didn’t want it to end, but Grazi looked beat. I could tell by the vibes she was giving off that she was in pain and needed to heal. I gave her a gentle hug before I left. I really wanted to tell her the truth already. I just had to figure out how.

You see Werewolves, especially Hounds of God, tended to be tight-asses. They followed a crap load of rules and didn’t like outsiders. American Packs sometimes worked with white Witches, but European Packs had a hard time with all Witches. Especially the Hounds, who worked for the Catholic Church. They tended to group all Witches together in one clump as evil. Talk about unfair! Hmph.

So I was sitting in the backseat of the Lincoln Town Car and was enjoying the cream puff Nonna had insisted I take home with me when the car swerved dramatically to the right. I dropped my iPhone, cream puff, and bottled water and held on for all I was worth. When we came to a stop it was sudden and hard. My seatbelt pulled tight around my stomach and thighs. That was definitely going to leave bruise! What the heck did we hit? A bull?

I was breathing hard and scared as heck and that was before the door closest to me was ripped off its hinges by a force so powerful it melted the remaining metal. I gasped and struggled to get the seatbelt off when a figure appeared right in front of me. I couldn’t tell what it was. The seatbelt wouldn’t budge! The figure was dark and misshapen with hollow sockets instead of eyes. I opened my mouth and did the only thing an almost seventeen year old Witch could do. I closed my eyes and screamed.

The thing reached a clawed hand towards me then a second later he was lifted and thrown through the air. He screeched unintelligibly and landed with a thud a few feet from the car. That’s when I saw him. He had long hair for a guy. It reached the top of his shoulders. It was dark and curly and looked perfect against the olive toned complexion of his skin. He wore a black leather coat, tight pants, and black combat boots.

He turned to face the thing that had ripped off my door. They moved out of my line of vision and I renewed my struggle against the seatbelt. The car was pushed up against the guardrail of Changebridge Road, which incidentally was just ten minutes away from my house. I wished I could get out of the car and run, but I couldn’t budge. I heard a zap and a thud, they were fighting! An honest to goddess battle right in front of me and I was missing half of it.

The creature landed with a crash a few feet in front of me and I watched in horror as he removed the offending weapon from his rib cage and stood up as if nothing had happened. The dark stranger adjusted his stance and removed a large and wicked looking knife from his boot. It was an Athame. The black handle disappeared in his hand, but the blade shone bright in the moonlight. It was marked with several symbols, wards and protection spells for its bearer. It was a beautiful piece.

For a second I felt like I was in WolfMoon, the online game for supernatural beings which I had been playing for years. Normals played it too, they just didn’t realize things like Witches, Demons, Werewolves, Goblins, Vampires, Fairies and Trolls were real. I couldn’t really understand why they thought we were all fake, I mean did they honestly imagine regular people could dream this stuff up? Pllleeease.

“Watch out!” I yelled as the thing charged, teeth bared and claws extended. It seemed to radiate heat from its insides. The place where it had been hit oozed a lava-like blood that hissed and melted the snow on the ground as soon as it hit.

The stranger in black lifted his left hand and muttered a string of phrases, but I was too far away to make them out. Cold white light spurted from his hand and the eyeless figure stopped in his tracks. He started to spurt and shake and right before my eyes he vanished in a cloud of dark smoke and ash. I had never seen anything like it. That type of weaponized magic was unknown to me. Sherry and my dad were businesspeople, not warriors. It was scary and beautiful to watch. I was intrigued in spite of my natural instinct to get the heck out of there.

The darkness on the road was broken only by the headlights of the town car. It was so cold I could see my breath. But the cold didn’t seem to affect the dude who just vanquished the thing that tried to attack me. My life had just become a graphic novel. I didn’t know whether to be psyched as any fan-girl would be, or to cry. I really wished I had stayed at Grazi’s for that extra up of cocoa. Damn it!

Clearly the stranger in black was there to help me, right? But I didn’t know for sure. What if he was some kind of demon half-breed looking for a love slave! Like, really Angela, get a grip! And if he wanted a love slave, he could totally have me, I mean he was that hot. No, but seriously, I was freaking myself out for no reason.

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