THE WITCH IS BACK (A Life's a Witch book)

THE WITCH IS BACK--Chapter One

Chapter One

As the door slammed on the women's fate, my eyes flew open with a start. I searched the room in a panicky attempt to figure out where I was. At the same time, I willed my hands to move, still feeling the weight of the shackles on my wrists. Relief washed over me as I was able to bring them up to my face and brush away the hair that was matted to my forehead.

It was just another dream.

Oh, who was I kidding? By now I knew enough to understand that the dreams I had were more like memories from the past-my ancestor's past to be more accurate. And as often as I'd had these little trips down memory lane, I still couldn't get used to the feeling of betrayal and fear that they left me saddled with. This, along with the fact that all the horrific things that Iwas seeing had actually happened-that my great-grandmother several times over, Bridget Bishop, had been the first person hanged during the Salem witch trials-and well, you can see why I couldn't count on getting acceptable beauty sleep.

Luckily, there was a spell for that.

Lately though, my dreams had branched out to include the lives of others accused during the trials. Sarah Good and Tituba, especially, had become regulars in my flashbacks, and disturbing as it was, I was beginning to feel connected to them in a way that only someone who'd lived through that awful time period could. Most people had to search ancestry.com to discover what was on their family trees. My relatives were hung from ours.

"Had!" a voice called, breaking through my thoughts and bringing me back to reality. "Breakfast in ten and then we'll go for that run?"

A glance over at my bedside clock showed that it was just a little past 8 a.m. I sighed heavily.

So much for sleeping in during the summer.

"Okay, Dad!" I shouted back. "I'll be there in a minute!"

As much as I longed to pull the covers over my head and goback to sleep, I flung them back dramatically and shimmied my way off the bed until my feet hit the floor. I couldn't exactly back out of our morning workout, since I'd been the one to suggest it the night before.

Ever since Mom had died at the hands of the evil coven, the Parrishables, I'd been putting more of an effort into spending time with my dad whenever possible. For a while, I'd thought I'd lost both of my parents in the fire that had killed most ofthe adults in the Cleri. But then Dad had shown up, untouched and alive. Not that Samuel Parris hadn't tried to do away with him, too. He'd just been luckier than Mom and the others when the Parrishables had finally hunted him down.

The Parrishables.

The dark coven run by Salem native and overall bad guy, Samuel Parris, tried to destroy the Cleri several months before, hoping that it would make them the ultimate superpower when it came to the magical world. And they'd almost succeeded. Until they'd come up against the younger members of our coven. That's where they'd messed up.

Much to my shock, it turned out that the Parrishables were actually after me. Apparently I'm some kind of magical powerhouse. I'd always known that my casting skills were superior to those of the rest of my coven, but until I'd gone up against Samuel, I hadn't realized the extent of my abilities. Once armed with that knowledge, we became an unstoppable force.

In the end, it had taken all of the twitches (our term for teenwitch) in the Cleri-including our relatives who had already passed on-to defeat an evil that had begun in Salem.

Which brought me back to my dream. Memory. Whatever.

Yawning in protest, I walked into my bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. "Ugh," I mumbled, squeezing my eyesshut against what I saw. Then, without another peek, I said, "Renewbus freshimo perfecto."