Spell Bound (teaser)

Spell Bound (teaser)

My mother thought I was cursed when I was born.

I can hardly blame her, I suppose. It must have been very disconcerting to bring your new daughter home from the hospital, only to have her burst into flames in the crib. And, once you’d screamed panic-stricken for your husband...to have the fire vanish with the baby completely unharmed. That wasn’t the only incident, either.

Strange fires would appear during toddler tantrums, disappearing as quickly as they’d come. Mom would have thought she was crazy, except that others could see the fires, too, and the damage they caused remained. My sister Brae was terrified more than once by an errant fireball during one of our fights. She was only a year older than I was, but the closeness in our ages only served to make us argue more.

The doctor said that my magic had just manifested a little earlier than most kids’ and that was why it took such an odd form. Doctors like to find explanations for things. When they can’t, they’ll just make up something that sounds plausible. The doctor was full of crap, but I didn’t know that at the age of three. My mother, who was certainly old enough to know better, chose to believe what was logical and comforting.

“Ælika’s magic is more advanced than that of most gifted children at her age,” he reassured her, massacring the pronunciation of my name. He patted me on the head and handed me a lollipop. I glared at him. He didn’t like me, I could tell.

While the doctor spewed more medical-ese at my parents, I amused myself by slowly burning the wrapper off, but I did it surreptitiously.

If my mother had any lingering doubts about the explanation for why her child could start a fire by staring at her palm, she allowed herself to be persuaded by my father, who didn’t believe that anything that couldn’t be found in a footnoted report archived in the Library of Congress existed.

“Æli’s a prodigy,” he told her happily. “She can work spells that no other child could control at her age.”
Brae, who didn’t like the fact that she was being upstaged, gave me a dirty look. Until I’d come along, she was the darling magical child, all set to carry on the Ariadne family legacy of wizardry.

I had magic, all right, but it wasn’t like the kind my parents or Brae had. Normal magicians read a spell out of a book, unless they had it memorized or were that rare person who could write their own. Normal magicians used incantations and herbs and spell circles on the floor. Normal magicians didn’t set the curtains on fire just by imagining it.
I knew from a very early age that I wasn’t normal. And I knew, even as a toddler, that the fire was not something that should be talked about. Not ever.