My (Not So) Charmed Life

Surprise!

Check the end of the chapter for a teaser of the next chapter! :)

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I stared into the darkness, but no matter how hard my eyes worked, I couldn't make out a thing. But even though my eyes were just about useless right now, I was thankful for my ears, because the tip-tap of water against glass was the only sound around me. I closed my eyes and tried to teleport out of there, but it was no use. It seemed like a barrier had been placed around me so that I couldn’t use my magic.

Finally, a figure appeared out of thin air, blending into the darkness with their black cloak. I thought back to Harry Potter and the dementors, and began to shiver at the idea of never being happy again.

The figure made their way towards me and I wriggled back away from them in fear. But whereas the figure had been a few feet away a moment ago, he disappeared and then reappeared with his face just inches from my own.

A sliver of light from the window allowed me a glimpse of my captor's face and I gasped in shock. No, no it couldn't be....

"Sammy?"

He chuckled, sending a chill down my spine. I had never heard such a humorless laugh before in my life.

“Little Liza, we meet again. I guess this time, I’m the one with all of the power,” he said, smiling at my terror.

Sammy Grant had been my best friend in elementary school. We had done everything together. When I was seven and took the training wheels off of my bike, he did too, out of solidarity. We had both crashed and gotten scrapes, but we had laughed it off because we were so excited that we had managed to get halfway down the block. When he told me that he was moving in seventh grade, I cried for a whole week.

I didn’t know what I was going to do without Sammy, and when he packed up his house and drove away two weeks after giving me the news, it had felt like my whole world was crashing down around me. I had never even found out where they were moving to.

I stared up at him in confusion. This was not the same Sammy that had left me. Whereas he used to have light brown shaggy hair that was always in need of a cut, he now had dark brown hair, cropped close to his skull in a buzz cut. His always smiling eyes looked emotionless and his mouth that had smiled at me countless times was turned up in an angry sneer.

“What happened to you?” I whispered. He laughed again, this time sounding as though he actually found my question humorous.

“Nothing happened. This was always me. You think that I didn’t know that you were a witch? You always acted so superior to me, as though you knew things that I didn’t. Well, guess what? I was always a wizard, and now, I work for the Malos. Didn’t see that coming, did you?” I backed up until my back hit the concrete wall.

“Y-you knew?”

“Of course, I knew. You thought that you were so goddamn clever and brilliant and special, but I was just as good. No, scratch that. I was, I am, better than you. And I’ll prove it. Today, I will deliver you to the Malos and become the hero that I always was,” he said.

You know how in every single good-guy bad-guy movie, the villain always makes a ridiculously long speech? If I hadn’t been so terrified of Sammy, I’d be laughing right now, because that was exactly what he just did.

He pulled out a thin piece of wood and drew shapes that I didn’t recognize on the ground of the building. Wherever his stick touched, the floor would glow red, and when he finally finished, he stood back to admire his work. Before I could understand what he was trying to do, the floor rumbled beneath us, and the shadow of a hooded figure rose from the middle of the weird red drawings.