Authors: Michael Alan Nelson
Hexed
Published 2015 by Pyr®, an imprint of Prometheus Books
Hexed: The Sisters of Witchdown
. Copyright © 2015 by Boom Entertainment, Inc., and Michael Alan Nelson. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopyÂing, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the Internet or a website without prior written permission of Boom Entertainment, Inc., and the publisher, exÂcept in the case of brief quotations emÂbodied in critical articles and reviews.
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:
Nelson, Michael Alan.
Hexed : the sisters of Witchdown / by Michael Alan Nelson.
pages cm
ISBN 978-1-63388-056-6 (paperback) â ISBN 978-1-63388-057-3 (e-book)
I. Title.
PZ7.1.N45Hex 2015
[Fic]âdc23
2014049178
Printed in the United States of America
Contents
PROLOGUE
Gina jumped when the phone rang. The cordless receiver was on her vanity, almost lost among the dozens of lotions and makeup cases scattered across its surface. She wanted to get up off the floor and answer, but she couldn't make herself move. She just pulled her knees tight to her chest and watched the phone's orange light blink with every ring.
It was David. It had to be. He would have found out by now and would be trying to call her. She wanted to talk to him more than anything, but there was no way she was going to pick up the phone. It was sitting right beneath the large mirror, and there was nothing in the world that could make Gina stand in front of a mirror.
Not after tonight.
The ringing suddenly stopped. Everything dissolved into a muffled silence, as if someone had put a pillow over the world. She couldn't even hear the soft rustle of her bedroom curtains swaying in the autumn breeze. The only thing she could hear was the sound of her own heart pounding inside her chest.
She jumped again when she felt the sudden jolt of her cell phone vibrating in her jeans pocket. She pulled it out and nearly dropped it in her hurry to answer.
“H-h-hello?”
“Gina? Gina, what the hell is going on? Olivia called and said you freaked!”
“David . . . I'm so scared.” Gina's voice started to crack. She had been able to keep herself from crying ever since she left the old Worcester House, but once she heard David's voice, her resolve vanished.
“Okay, calm down, sweetie, and just tell me what happened.”
Gina wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. “It's real, David. All of it. I thought it would be fun, you know, just scaring each other, but . . .”
David was quiet for a moment before he spoke. “But . . . what?”
“I saw her. It was my turn alone in the room and . . .”
“Gina, you're imagining things. Or one of the girls was playing a trick on you.”
“It wasn't a trick!” She didn't like yelling at David. His ex-girlfriend had always yelled at him, and she didn't want to be anything like her. So Gina took a deep breath and calmly said, “All the other girls were in the study with the book. I was the only one in the bedroom. She was there. I saw her. And when I saw her, I ran.”
“It could have been your own reflection.”
“No, David, Iâ”
“Gina, listen to me.” His voice changed. He spoke more slowly, his tone deeper and more like an adult's. He talked like this whenever he wanted to take charge of a conversation. Even his teachers would sit quietly and listen when David used “the Voice.” It was one of the things that Gina most admired about him. But she didn't admire it so much now that he was using it on her.
“There are no such things as ghosts. Or witches, or ghouls, or things that go bump in the night. They don't exist. Whatever you saw wasn't real. Either you imagined it or your brain misinterpreted something completely rational. Your mind will definitely play tricks on you if you're scared. And the Worcester House is a scary place at night. Okay?”
Everything he said made perfect sense. The sensible part of Gina's mind understood that. But Gina knew that it wasn't her imagination getting the better of her. She didn't just see the woman in the mirror. The woman in the mirror saw
her
.
“Where are you now?”
“Home. I ran straight here.”
David gave a soft chuckle before he said, “Do you want me to sneak over?”
“Yes, but you can't. It's too late and my dad will be home anyâ”
As if on cue, Gina heard the front door open. “Gina? Are you here, kiddo?” her dad called from downstairs.
“David, I have to go. Dad's home.”
“All right, babe. But listen, there's no need to be scared. I would never let anything hurt my girl. Promise.”
Gina couldn't help but smile.
“I'll see you at school,” David said. “Love you.”
“I love you, too.” Gina put her phone back in her pocket and forced herself to stand.
The door to her bedroom opened, and her father stepped in. He was an impressively large man. He had to duck his head to get under the door frame, and his massive arms were about to split the sleeves of his police uniform. When he saw Gina, he asked, “Gina? You've got every light on in the house. And aren't you supposed to be staying at Carly's tonight?”
Gina desperately tried to think of something to say but couldn't. Instead, she ran forward and threw her arms around him.
“Hey, hey . . . what's going on?” He looked down at her and lifted her chin. “You've been crying. Did something happen?”
If she told him that she and her friends had sneaked into the abandoned Worcester House, she'd be grounded for life. But Gina knew he wouldn't stop hounding her until he knew what was bothering her so badly. The cop in him could never let anything go unsolved.
“We . . . we were watching horror movies, and I . . . I got scared and came home.” She wasn't lying about being scared, only the reason for it. But her dad could always tell when she was lying just by looking into her eyes, so she buried her face in his chest and squeezed harder.
Her dad patted her back. “Aren't you a little old to be getting that scared from movies?”
“I just wanted to come home where it's safe.” Her dad may have been a cop and bigger than anyone she knew, but she felt safer around David. David had a way of making Gina feel safe without making her feel like a scared kid. But right now, she was happy to just have someone home.
“Gina . . .”
Gina looked up, expecting to see her dad smiling down at her. Instead, he was looking off in the corner. His brows were furrowed, and his mouth pinched to one side of his face. “Is there someone else in the room with you?”
Gina went cold. Her dad gently moved her behind him with one hand while putting his other hand on his gun. “Gina, if you have a boy in here, you best tell me now.”
“N-n-no . . . there's no one. Why, what did you see? Dad, what did you see?”
Her dad moved across the room toward her closet in the corner. “I thought I saw . . . something. Just stay there.” He opened the closet door with a sudden pull that made Gina take a step back. But there were only clothes inside.
“Hmmm . . . I could have sworn I saw something.”
Gina could feel the cold grip of fear squeezing her again. But her dad was here. And he was a cop. A large one, at that. So she was safe. But if she truly believed that, why was she still so scared?
Movement caught the corner of her eye. She turned involuntarily and found herself staring straight at her vanity mirror. She could see her own reflection, the tangle of her frazzled hair, the tear-smeared eyeliner down her cheeks. For a moment, Gina was appalled at her appearance. But her disgust turned to horror when she saw the other figure reflected in the mirror.
It was the woman.
Gina wanted to scream, to run, but she couldn't move. The woman in the mirror held her gaze with wild, unblinking eyes. Through her terror, Gina tried to make sense of what was happening. From the reflection, the woman should have been standing right in front of her, but there was no one there. The woman existed only in the mirror.
She was impossibly thin and so pale that Gina could see tiny black veins spidering underneath her skin. The woman's hair was gray and gnarled like a dirty mop left to dry in the sun, and her tattered dress looked even more ancient than she did. But the most unsettling thing of all was her smile. She had a mouth filled with bone-white needles.
Gina could see her dad still nosing around her closet out of the corner of her eye. She tried calling out to him but could only manage a tiny squeak. The woman grew larger in the reflection, as if she were stepping closer to the mirror.
“. . . Dad?”
“Sorry, kiddo,” he said from the closet. “I guess I forget to leave my police instincts back at the office. I didn't mean to scare you.”
Her dad popped his head out of the closet. “It's okay, you can relax. There's no one here.” He took a step toward her but stopped. From where he was standing, he couldn't see into the mirror, but the look on her face must have frozen him in his tracks. “Gina, honey, what's wrong?” Just at the edge of her vision, she could see her dad moving toward her. But even though he was only a few feet away, somehow she knew he wouldn't make it in time.