Spellbound

“Why can’t I get you out of my head?” I whispered to myself. “I wish I just knew what your deal was.”

I leaned against a lamppost, trying to steady my breath and my thoughts. The light above me flickered, catching my attention. I looked straight up into the light. It burned very brightly for a moment—as if it were on a dimmer switch that was suddenly put on full blast. I heard a crackling noise, and nervously stepped away from the lamppost—just as the light inside burst, shards of glass clinking against the frosted glass case….

“Spellbound by Cara Lynn Shultz is my kind of enchanted read. Magic ingredients for teen read perfection: a spunky Buffy-licious witch, a good dose of mayhem, and Brendan! When’s the next one?”

—Nancy Holder, New York Times bestselling author of Crusade and the Wicked series

“With its magic ingredients of witty banter, a BFF-worthy heroine, Hot Boys and a super-spooky mystery, Spellbound held me in its thrall from beginning to end!”

—Rachel Hawkins, author of the Hex Hall series

“Spellbound by Cara Shultz is a rapturous story that adeptly marries the classic fairy tale with the modern experience of the Facebook world. Shultz’s debut novel has the potential to do for witches what Stephenie Meyer did for vampires with her Twilight Saga series.”

—Trent Vanegas, Pink Is the New Blog

www.miraink.co.uk

For Grandma. I love you.

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Acknowledgments

It’s always embarrassing to have someone take you to school. Your dad, your mom, anyone with her hair in rollers.

But for my first day as a junior at my new school—a ridiculously expensive private school on New York’s Upper East Side—I was being walked to school by my baby cousin. A freshman.

It really wasn’t that terrible. Even though we grew up apart, Ashley and I were email buddies. She was a sweetheart, there was no doubt of that, but if my knowledge of the inner workings of my familiar old New Jersey public school, Keansburg High, meant anything, I knew that juniors did not hang out with the lower classes. It was like hanging out with a bunch of vegetarians and wearing a bacon necklace.

Talk about unwelcome.

But it was important to my aunt Christine that I got to school early and she was afraid I’d get lost. My great-aunt had taken me in over the summer, and I’d learned quickly that when she got an idea into her head, you were better off just going along with it. I didn’t want to argue with her—I owed her everything. My life, really. She’d been asking me to live with her ever since my mom died a year and a half ago, leaving me with Henry, my stepfather whose blood-alcohol content hovered somewhere between “wasted” and “how is he even alive?” But after he nearly killed me last June with his particular style of driving (i.e., blasted), I stopped resisting Christine’s offer.

Going from my aunt’s place at Park and Sixty-eighth Street to the school at Park and Eighty-sixth Street is fairly basic: walk eighteen blocks left. But since she had been pretty cool about everything—stepping in, giving me a place to stay and leaving me with a “You’ll talk to me if you need to” instead of hovering over me—I didn’t press it.

Ashley was a bundle of excitement as soon as she stepped inside the door of Christine’s three-bedroom co-op, her pink cheeks flushed, red curls pushed back by a black-ribbon headband. She’s several inches shorter than me—I wouldn’t put her past five feet. And that’s giving a generous allowance to her curls.

“Hi Emma! Yay, first day! Are you excited? Do you like your uniform?” I smiled back. Her joy was infectious. You couldn’t help but like Ashley—the girl never said a mean thing in all of her fourteen years. Then a black thought crept its way in: What if no one did like Ashley, and that was why she was so happy to have an ally? What kind of evil place was Vincent Academy, where someone could dislike a sweet little munchkin like Ashley? Calm down, Emma, you’re going to give yourself a panic attack.

My smile got weaker, and I smoothed out my long-sleeved white Oxford shirt and black, blue and green Scotch plaid skirt that mirrored her outfit.

“You tell me, how do I look?” I asked her.

“You look fine,” she chirped. “But why the long sleeves? It’s soooo hot out. It’s going to be like, seventy billion degrees today! Don’t you have any short slee—”

Ashley looked at the ground and blushed, her red cheeks now matching her flame-colored hair.

“Sorry, I forgot about the scar.”