The Clockwise Spell

Chapter 1

 Books and movies have it all wrong.

You see, the hero is always a vampire, werewolf, normal human, super human… well you get the idea, right? But here’s the thing – they aren’t the heroes.

We are.

Witches and warlocks are.

Witches and warlocks are usually just the sidekicks who are limited to certain spells, right? Wrong. We are powerful. Beyond powerful. You know those old, ancient (and probably pretty weird and creepy too) drawings that you see depicting gods and goddesses? Those are usually us. We have the power, the ability, to change everything around us with the whisper of a thought, the snap of a finger.

My story began a week before school started. Of course, it began way before that, but I’ll get into those details later.

I was new to Salem, having living in a small town, Timson, which was on the opposite side of Oregon, for my entire life. We – meaning my sister and my dad and I – moved during the summer, because my widowed dad, a real estate agent, landed an “amazing job!” in Salem. An ‘amazing job!’ that resulted in me leaving all my friends and the only place I knew as home. I even missed my school.

How pathetic is that?

I mentioned it to my dad once, just to see what his reaction was. He stopped inhaling his breakfast long enough to give a big hearty laugh and pat me on the back, his green eyes twinkling. “You need to make some friends, Sapphire.”

I crossed my arms grumpily as he kissed my head and grabbed his workbag and started to head out the door, calling behind him. “Go to a party or something!”

He flashed me another one of his signature smiles that I got from him – the one that always made teachers watch me closely because they thought I would be ‘that troubled kid’. Never mind that I was. However, today, I just scowled.

“You have to know people to go to parties!” I shoot after him as he closes the door, the blinds rattling as the door hit the frame. I could hear his laughter from behind the door. My dad’s fairly easygoing. He doesn’t really care what I do, as long as I don’t do anything like drugs or end up in jail. So far, so good.

I glared at the door a second longer before trudging upstairs to my sister’s room. The wooden stairs creaked underneath me and I suppressed a yell. The house we had in Timson had been practically brand-new, while this one was probably built around, oh I don’t know, two hundred years ago.

It was a nice house, I suppose, if you like creepy dark places with dark wooden staircases and worn down yet plush carpets. All of the rooms had fireplaces, and the windows were those old stain glass types that had no screen and welcomed mosquitos in on a daily basis.

I’m sure we wouldn’t have been able to afford it, except the owner had been desperate to sell it. No one would buy it because, despite it’s beauty, it was without a doubt a fixer upper.

The steady drip-drip of water into a bucket in my room made that perfectly clear. And it wasn’t even raining half the time. I was beginning to think that the rain just puddled on the roof and dripped into my room as slowly as possible, just to annoy me. Like it was Mother Nature’s way of saying, “You think you might eventually like this place? Haha, think again!”

My sister Rosaline was fifteen, one year younger than me, and she has found the move harder, as in refused-to-talk-to-dad-for-nine-whole-days-after-he-announced-we-were-going-to-move harder. So, for her sake and her sake alone, I keep trying to put a good spin on it. Don’t ask me why. Maybe it was a big sister thing. Anyways, I sounded like an idiot, but it helped Rosie to some extent so I kept with it.