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without speaking. For most of my life, my relationship with my mother had been tense. She hardly spoke to me, forever quiet and reserved. Keeping me at arm’s length. As a child, it had left me dazed and shattered, like the victim of a car wreck.
    Looking at Jillian’s dazzling features was like staring at the sun too long. Jillian was blond, with a pale, elfin face and hazel eyes that changed colors with her mood. She reminded me of an expensive porcelain doll placed on a high shelf. A beautiful, unattainable object you couldn’t touch, only gaze upon with longing.
    If anyone had bothered to notice me, they would only see a scared fifteen-year-old girl with eyes of sable ringed by kohl liner and black hair that fell to her waist. They wouldn’t see someone struggling to remain sane. Only an empty space where a real girl used to live.
    Back home, I went straight to my room. I hesitated in the doorway. Narrowed my gaze and searched the darkest places for any sign of movement or evil.
    Nothing unordinary. Nothing scary waiting for me.
    The first thing I did was change the light bulbs. With the lights on, my gaze took in the cluttered space; the black-painted wall behind my bed that was covered with random poems, song lyrics, and cutouts from magazines of models and fashion; the iron-frame bed with a pink comforter that matched the curtains; and the IKEA dresser and desk in neutral pine. My space. My room. I yawned and plopped sideways on the bed. My swinging heel hit something solid. The trunk.
    Some of my mother’s family, the Broussards, had kept grimoires. I hunched down and dragged the small trunk my aunt Lauren had given me on my tenth birthday. At the time, I had wanted dolls, not an old trunk full of diaries, a witch ball, and a dagger.
    At the time, she’d mentioned some stupid prophecy about the Thirteenth Daughter and my destiny. An old legend that foretold the coming of a girl who would break the town curse and conquer some big bad evil. It had been a lot to digest at that age.
    Hell, it’s still hard for me to believe. Prophecies aren’t real…are they?

    I unlocked the trunk with the key I’d stashed in my nightstand drawer and removed the tomes, stroking the leather covers. The small journals resembled black prayer books with fine silk markers. I placed them on the bed. Then I sat and lifted one carefully, almost reverently, flipping through the pages, reading the tiny, handwritten scrawl. The black ink had been dry for decades on the heavy parchment; the pages that smelled like incense, sweet honey, and roses. It was in these books that I’d learned how to create a wall of light to use as a protection spell.
    We had a fascinating family history, full of sorrow, romance, black magick—and murder. Some of the books said the magick had been in my family for hundreds of years—since the late 1600s. My ancestors escaped the violent witch-hunts in England and France by coming to America in the middle of the 17 th century. Rumor had it that they had brought the magick with them to Whispering Pines. Started over here. Away from persecution and prying eyes. They had tapped into the arcane power confined within Mother Nature and prospered. Their religion had become a mix of Christianity and Wicca.
    With a shiver of vivid recollection, I thought of the children in grammar school who had taunted me. Magick. Witchcraft. Curses. Some of their ancestors had been among the founding fathers, too, those families who’d run away from the taunts had heaped upon them. But I’d been treated differently. Singled out. As if somehow those kids knew I saw paranormals.  
    Now that Trent Donovan and his dad had returned, they’d be under the same speculation as my ancestor Anabelle Broussard had been under the day she’d returned from her honeymoon without the groom. Like my other ancestors, Anabelle had kept a grimoire too. Her book contained spells and instructions for magickal rituals. Like how to project a protective