Spellbinding

by Maya Gold

  For my magical niece Emily

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Epilogue

  Preview: Unbroken

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE GIRLS SHRIEK AND WRITHE ON THE floor of the meetinghouse, tearing their hair, their white aprons. Their screams are unearthly, like night sounds of prey as an owl swoops down, talons ripping through flesh as it carries some helpless thing off to its death. But the girls are alive, fully alive, and whatever is tearing at them can’t be seen.

  The room is shadowy, lit by firelight and guttering candles. Hard wooden benches, a sour odor of fear. The men wear dark clothing. They mutter and frown, passing judgment.

  A woman leaps to her feet, wild-eyed. “She put a curse on my daughter!” she cries.

  She’s pointing directly at me.

  The ground seems to shift underneath my feet. There’s a swirling through darkness, and suddenly I am outdoors. Dusty planks turn into mud, rutted by wagon wheels, littered with straw. My wrists chafe in ropes. My hair has been hacked off with shears, and my scalp feels raw and exposed. I’m ashamed of the way I must look, like a badly peeled egg. Torches flicker around me as townspeople poke me with sticks, kick at my hobbled ankles. When I lift my head, they draw back in fear. I hear the words “evil,” “accursed.” I hear someone hiss, “Die, witch!” They are talking about me, spreading lies.

  The mob jostles me toward a stone bridge, where a creek widens into a pond. Its edges are muddy, surrounded by cattails and slime. I think of the things that might live in there — muskrats, water snakes, frogs — and my skin crawls. “Let us prove her guilt. Throw her in!” cries a man, and the crowd takes up the chant. “Throw her in, throw her in!”

  The torchlight distorts their faces. They look like masks, angry and brutal. Only one person stands apart — a young man. In the slash of light flickering over his handsome face, I notice that one of his striking green eyes is split by a wedge of bright blue. He’s looking right at me, and for a second I feel I can hear his unspoken thoughts.

  We shall be together. No fear.

  And then everything’s water. I’m thrown through the surface. My body is surrounded by dark, icy water, above and below me. It soaks my heavy skirts, pulling me under. With hands and feet bound, I flail and thrash as the cold liquid fills my mouth and throat, sucking me down to the bottom. To death.

  My eyes are wide open. Above me, a black fringe of treetops rims the night sky. Is the boy with the green-and-blue eyes still up there somewhere? His words echo inside my head. We shall be together. How? How can I not fear? Help me, I think. Whoever you are, come and get me.

  My lungs burn. My limbs feel so heavy. I stare up at the full moon through water, deep water, struggling to reach him, unable to breathe….

  I BOLT UPRIGHT, WIDE-EYED AND GASPING. I try to shake that vision out of my head. I’m not at the bottom of a dark pond, unable to get to the surface, lungs ready to burst. I’m on a bright yellow school bus, which has just parked outside my other nightmare, Ipswich High School. This is real life, hello.

  But I’ve still got goose bumps. I can’t believe I fell asleep on the bus and had one of those dreams. It’s bad enough waking up from a nightmare in my own bedroom, with birds doing their morning warbles and sun pouring over the little-girl wallpaper I can’t bear to change because my mom picked it out. But freaking out on the school bus? Not cool.

  I glance around, feeling self-conscious. Luckily, my bus is half-empty this year, so no one sits next to me, ever. And the few kids around me are too busy grabbing their backpacks to notice I just woke up looking like some sort of special effect.

  Breathe, Abby. I pick up my shoulder bag, straighten my books into a neat stack, and head down the aisle to the door. My head’s pounding as if I’m a bass drum, instead of a high school junior with too much on her mind (says my dad), with tension headaches (says the school nurse), or just born to be weird (says me).

  Weird isn’t even the word. Being weird takes confidence. Makayla Graf, the art student with turquoise-streaked hair and six cartilage posts in one ear, is weird. So is Samson Hobby, the Goth boy who wears a black skirt with his biker boots. They stand out in a crowd, and everybody at Ipswich High knows who they are. I’m just background. A frizzy blonde head sticking up in the tall-kid back row of class photos, a name on school newsletter lists: Abigail Silva, National Honor Society. Abigail Silva, Science Fair silver medalist.

  Abby Silva: invisible.

  If I had to pick a distinguishing mark, something to make me not boringly normal, it wouldn’t be nightmares and spike headaches. But ever since I turned sixteen, I’ve been having them more and more often. It scares me. I’m starting to worry I might be bipolar, or heading toward some kind of breakdown. It feels like my skin isn’t doing its job, like too much sensation gets in all the time. Everything scrapes on my senses like sandpaper. Maybe this is the flip side of being invisible: Nobody sees me, but I notice everything.

  The parking lot looks like a mass migration of kids, all carrying backpacks and wearing some variation of jeans and T-shirts. It reminds me of a film they showed us in freshman biology, about salmon moving upstream to spawn. The stream widens out as I get through the tunnel of buses and reach the section where kids with cars park.

  There’s nothing on earth I want more than a car of my own. A car is like oxygen. It means freedom, autonomy, getting to go where you want, when you want. I’ve had my driver’s permit for six long months, and I’m finally taking my road test tomorrow. My friend Rachel Mendoza is driving me to the test site. Rachel’s a senior, and she got her license last year. In fact, there she is now, getting out of her sensible navy blue Volvo.

  That car is so Rachel. Rachel’s parents both play in the Boston Symphony. She got her glossy black hair from her Venezuelan-born father, her wide-set gray eyes from her Irish-American mother, and her musical talent from both — she plays the cello beautifully. She’s polite, hardworking, and totally brilliant — she’s been tutoring me after school for my trigonometry class. All in all, she’s the kind of girl that makes parents say to their kids, “Why can’t you be more like Rachel?”

  Rachel is currently the only person in Ipswich, Massachusetts, who actually goes out of her way to hang out with me. I’m not one of those misfit, avoid-at-all-costs kids, but there’s been a big hole in my social life ever since my best friend Valerie moved to Sarasota last summer. Valerie and I texted and Skyped nonstop for the first few months, but then Valerie found other friends, then another best friend, and I felt — well, sort of abandoned. Till Rachel. She’s going to Vassar in the fall, and I don’t know how I’m going to get through my last year of high school without her.

  I wave, heading toward her. Rachel gives me a little hug and smile that almost erases the leftover dread from my drowning nightmare. “Hey, love those earrings,” she says.

  My hands go to my earlobes. What did I put on in the pre-school bus rush? Oh, right. The turquoise dangles Rachel gave me for my sixteenth birthday, after her family went to Santa Fe on vacation.

  “Good taste,” I say, grinning.

  Rachel opens the Volvo’s back door, expertly angling her cello case out of the tight space between seats. />
  “Hold Igor a minute?” she asks, and I take the heavy black case, stepping backward and out of her way. Rachel likes giving names to inanimate objects. Her car is named Gimli, and her laptop, for reasons known only to Rachel, is Rubybegonia. Her cello is Igor.

  Standing upright, the cello case does look a bit like a misshapen human. I drape a protective arm over its neck. As Rachel shrugs into her backpack straps, a car zooms up behind us. It’s one I’d know anywhere: Travis Brown’s Alfa Romeo. My whole face gets warm in an instant, and I dip my head so I won’t look like a moron.

  What is it that makes Travis shine like the sun? He’s had that effect on me ever since we were little. I’ll never forget him tying my sneakers for me on the elementary school playground, when I couldn’t remember that frog-jumps-into-a-pond trick to save my life. Travis taught me the make-two-loops shortcut his big brother showed him, and I’ve tied my shoes that way ever since. He was a whole grade older, which seems like a lifetime in little-kid years, and my very first crush. Let’s face it, I’ve never completely outgrown said crush, even though Travis is the textbook definition of “out of my league.”

  It isn’t so much that he’s gorgeous, though he certainly is — tall and well built, with a confident bounce in his stride, sky blue eyes, and a grin that would melt an ice-cream cone. It’s more that he seems so at home in his skin, like he’s never wasted a second wondering what anyone thinks about him. He just glides through his life, winning track meets and soccer games, making friends, having fun. It’s all good. He’s not stupid or smug, he’s just happy to be who he is.

  Well, who wouldn’t be happy to be Travis Brown? Even his car is cool. It’s a low-slung red convertible, perfect for two. And of course there are two people in it: Travis, looking dashing in his vintage Ray-Bans and blue Polo shirt, and Megan Keith. Megan might also look appealing to a stranger who didn’t know that beneath that long chestnut hair, natural tan, and perfect beach body beats the heart of a poisonous snake.

  How can Travis go out with her? I wonder for the umpteenth time. Travis is the hottest guy in the school, who could literally have anybody he wanted, and that’s who he picked? It makes perfect sense on one level — Megan’s the reigning queen of the popular crowd. And I’ve seen her on the boardwalk in the summer — she certainly knows how to rock a bikini. But isn’t there more to life than eye candy? Even if you’re a guy?

  I hear myself sighing and send out a swift mental kick. If there’s any cliché I do not want to be, it’s the geek mooning over the popular boy. With the popular girlfriend. It’s just too pathetic.

  All this runs through my head as I’m standing there like the proverbial deer caught in headlights, one arm still draped around Igor.

  Travis brakes, smiling as he waits for me to move out of the way. Megan smirks at the cello case.

  “Oooh. Is that your boyfriend?” she asks, her voice dripping with fake sweetness.

  My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. I could die of embarrassment.

  “Oh, get over yourself,” Rachel says to Megan, grabbing Igor from me and striding past Travis’s car. Somehow my feet come unstuck from the pavement, and I slink after her, hoping my ponytail frizz doesn’t look like a haystack.

  “Ugh.” Rachel shudders as Travis parks his car. “She is odious.”

  Yes, she is. And incredibly lucky. I’d give anything to be sitting where she is right now.

  But I’ve never told Rachel about my secret crush. Valerie got it — we used to spend hours dissecting my interactions with Travis. But Rachel has no use for popular jocks, so I just agree with her put-down of Megan.

  “Exactly the word I was looking for,” I tell her. “Thank you.”

  “De nada,” says Rachel. As we go inside, I sneak a look over my shoulder at Travis and Megan. My ears are still flaming.

  Our school’s pretty big, so I don’t cross paths with Travis all morning. But somehow — just luck of the draw — I run into Megan outside my US History class. She’s sweeping down the hall with her equally toxic friends, Amber and Sloane. Amber is a bland-faced strawberry blonde, and Sloane is thin, dark, and petite, like a mean little weasel. She actually looks like a weasel, with her sharp, beady eyes and permanent sneer. Neither Amber nor Sloane is what you’d call a beauty, and sometimes I wonder if Megan chose her sidekicks like bad bridesmaids’ dresses, to ensure that she gets all the spotlight.

  Megan whispers something to Amber and Sloane, and I hear the word cello. Great.

  She apparently told them I’m dating a musical instrument or something, because they crack up like hyenas as soon as they see me, pretending to saw violins. What are they, third graders? But I don’t say a thing. Rachel is braver than I am — I never want to go toe-to-toe with the queens of mean. I bite my lip, heading for class.

  “What’s the matter?” Sloane demands, stepping right in front of me. “Don’t you think Megan’s funny? I think she’s funny, don’t you, Amber?”

  “Megan’s hysterical,” Amber agrees, ever the suck-up.

  “Or maybe you don’t think she’s funny ’cause you like her boyfriend,” says Sloane, her tone taking on a more threatening edge.

  I can feel myself blushing, the heat rising into the tips of my ears. How do they know? Do they know? Maybe they just assume everybody likes Travis.

  I open my mouth to deny it, but Megan tosses her head. “Don’t waste your energy, Sloane. As if Travis would possibly look twice at her.” She gives me a phony smile, lazily flicking her fingers. “Buh-bye.” And they’re gone.

  It’s at moments like this when the prospect of summer vacation, just two months away, seems like heaven on earth.

  Breathe, Abby. Breathe.

  My US History class is taught by the toughest teacher in the whole school, Ms. Baptiste. She’s African-American, and she brings fresh perspectives to studying the Civil War for what feels like the fiftieth time since first grade. We just had a unit test on Reconstruction, and as she clicks down the aisle in her purple pumps, handing back graded papers, I can hear students groan all around me.

  “Everyone’s brain must have been circling the maypole on this one,” she says, handing me a paper with a B minus in red. My stomach sinks. “So I’m going to give you an extra assignment for Monday,” Ms. Baptiste goes on. “I want everyone to bring in a detailed family tree. Trace your ancestors back to the first person who set foot on American soil.”

  Is she serious? Why is she loading us down with more homework when we’re already swamped?

  Branko Jankovic grins and says, “Cake.” Both his parents were born in Slovenia.

  But Samson Hobby frowns. “What’s this got to do with the Civil War?”

  Good question, I think, but as usual I keep my mouth shut.

  “Plenty,” says Ms. Baptiste. “One of your ancestors might have owned one of mine. History is a living thing, people. It’s not just a bunch of dusty old dates. It’s your own skin and blood.”

  She passes out sheets with a family tree template and a list of genealogy websites and resources. This actually could be exciting — I know my dad’s family (my Silva side) hails from Portugal, but I don’t know very much about my mom’s side, other than the fact that they’ve been in America since the 1600s. Normally, I’d look forward to doing some digging into the past. But the thought of more pressure on top of my driving test gives me a headache.

  “Let’s take a good look at the mix in this classroom,” Ms. Baptiste adds. “I bet we’ll find plenty of history.”

  “And this is due Monday?” asks Samson, tossing his dyed blond dreadlocks indignantly. “That’s, like, no notice!”

  Kate Reeder and some of the other kids mumble agreement, but Ms. Baptiste doesn’t back down. She says, “Deal with it.”

  I have to look after my kid brother, Matt, and his soccer-team buddy Kevin on Friday night, since Dad’s on the evening shift at his computer store.

  After I’ve loaded both boys up with mac and cheese (made from a package; I can’t
convince Kevin my homemade is better), I head up to my bedroom and go online. I figure I’d better get the genealogy project started tonight. I’m planning on making a PowerPoint for my presentation, which hopefully won’t take too much time.

  I start by typing in my grandparents’ names to the genealogy sites Ms. Baptiste suggested. Tracking down ancestors is a little like surfing through Facebook friends: You type in one name, and a whole list comes up, and you click on the next, and the next, working your way back through the generations. It’s kind of addictive — in fact, it almost feels like the video game I can hear Matt and Kevin playing downstairs. Minus the sound effects and the shouting, of course. I track down the Portuguese Silvas in no time, and then get to work on Mom’s side of the family.

  This takes a little more doing, because they’ve been here for centuries. Luckily, some distant cousin I’ve never met has already posted a family tree tracing her ancestry back to Ethan Dale, a foot soldier in the Revolution. That’s kind of cool. But she couldn’t get any further, and neither can I. Closing my eyes, I try to summon up anything Mom might have told me about her family when I did a project about the Pilgrims in fifth grade. That was right before she got sick.

  Suddenly, I remember Mom saying that her uncle Ben was named after a cabin boy ancestor with the unforgettable name of Benevolence Fletcher.

  I grin and type in FLETCHER, BENEVOLENCE. After a couple blind alleys, his name pops up on a ship’s registry from 1636. Bingo! I feel a flicker of excitement. Benevolence landed in Plymouth, where he married a woman named Mercy Gilbert.

  Mercy and Benevolence, whoa. What did they name their kids?

  All too soon, I find out. Caleb, Jeremiah, Miles, William, Annabel, Silas, and Prudence. I let out a sigh. That’s a lot of descendants to trace. But it turns out that four of them died in childhood — life must have been hard in colonial times — and Silas never married. So the missing ancestor must be either Prudence or William.