Carolyn MacCullough - Always a Witch

Always a Witch

Carolyn MacCullough

Table of Contents

Clarion Books
215 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10003

Copyright 2011 by Carolyn MacCullough

All rights reserved.

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book,
write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company,
215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Clarion Books is an imprint of
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

www.hmhbooks.com

The text was set in Horley Old Style MT Light.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacCullough, Carolyn.
Always a witch / by Carolyn MacCullough.
p. cm.
Summary: Haunted by her grandmother's prophecy that she will
soon be forced to make a terrible decision, witch Tamsin Greene risks
everything to travel back in time to 1887 New York to confront the
enemy that wants to destroy her family.
ISBN 978-0-547-22485-5
[1. WitchesFiction. 2. Time travelFiction. 3. AbilityFiction. 4. Good and evil
Fiction. 5. New York (N.Y.)History18651898Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M1389Al 2011
[Fic]dc22
2011008148

Manufactured in the United States of America
DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
4500297831

Acknowledgments

A big thank-you to my family and friends for putting up with me during the writing of this book. Thank you to Alyssa Eisner Henkin, whose enthusiasm and guidance on this project was very much appreciated! And finally, I was lucky enough to have not one but two very wonderful editors for this book. Thank you to Jennifer wingertzahn for getting the ball rolling, and thank you to Daniel Nayeri, who picked up so seamlessly where she left off.

Prologue

I WAS BORN ON THE NIGHT of Samhain. Others might call it Halloween. Born into a family of witches who all carry various Talents. Others might call it magic.

Except for me.

I alone in my family seemed to have no Talent. No gift to shape me or to grant me a place in my family's circle around the altar to the four elements. All I had was the prophecy that my grandmother made to my mother in the first hour of my life. " Your daughter will be one of the most powerful we have ever seen in this family. She will be a beacon for us all. "

And then for reasons still unknown, my grandmother spent the next seventeen years making sure I doubted that prophecy at every turn. It took the return of an old family enemy, two episodes of time travel, and one very dangerous love spell that nearly killed my sister before I learned three things. First, I can stop anyone from using their Talent to harm me. Second, I can absorb a person's Talent if they attempt to use it against me three times. Third, I apparently have a choice ahead of me. A choice that will explain the mysterious workings of my grandmother's mind and why she raised me in complete denial of my Talent. A choice that's vaguely hinted at in my family's book. A choice that will fulfill the prophecy my grandmother made all those years ago.

Or destroy my family forever.

A choice that will be so terrible to contemplate that I'd just rather not encounter it at all.

One

" I LOOK AWFUL," I SAY , staring at myself in front of the dressing room mirror. The dress I have just struggled into hangs like a shapeless tent down to my ankles. Okay, actually, it clings to the top half of me a little too tightly before suddenly dropping off into the aforementioned shapeless tent. And it's gray. Not silver, not opalescent mist, as the tag promises. Gray. Concrete gray.

My best friend, Agatha, scrunches her eyebrows together over her bright green eyeglasses as she examines me from all angles. "You do look awful. Perfectly awful, in fact," she finally confirms.

I stick my tongue out at her. Agatha loves the word perfectly just a little too much. "Yeah, well, that was probably Rowena's intention all along," I mutter, struggling to find the zipper. The overhead lights of the narrow boutique are suddenly too hot and glaring.

"Here," Agatha says, and with swift fingers she yanks the zipper down.

With a sigh of relief, I slip back into my jeans and flowered T-shirt, then step into my fringed wedges that I found in my favorite thrift store last week. I can't resist them, even though my ankles start to throb after more than five minutes of wearing them.

"Why can't you wear your rose dress?" Agatha asks again as she arranges the hated gray tent back on its hanger. Rowena had pronounced it "ethereal" when she had been in the city a few weeks earlier and had left me three messages on my cell to come to the store "at once." However, I never picked up the phone. Caller ID is one of the best inventions out there.

"Because Rowena wants silver. And what Rowena wants, Rowena gets."

"Bridezilla, huh?"

"She gives new meaning to that term." I refasten my pink barrettes to the side of my head; useless, I know, since they'll be falling out in about three minutes. My curly hair defies all devices invented to contain it.

"Too bad," Agatha says as we exit the dressing room. "That rose dress is so pretty and you never get to wear it."

"Yeah," I say, keeping my expression noncommittal, while inwardly feeling the familiar pang. Oh, how I wish I could tell Agatha that I already did wear it. I wore it when Gabriel and I Traveled back to 1939 to a garden party in my family's mansion on Washington Square Park in New York City. But if I told her that, I'd have to tell her who I really am. what I really am. And the truth is, I don't know who or what I really am. For most of my life I thought I was ordinary. The black sheep who got stuck in a very extra ordinary family. Not until I left my hometown of Hedgerow and came to boarding school in Manhattan did I learn not to mind that so much. For the first time in my life, I was surrounded by people who had no idea that just enough powdered mandrake root mixed with wine can make a man want to kiss you. But too much can make that same man want to kill you. It felt good to be among people who thought I was just like them. It felt normal. I felt normal. I felt like one of them.

And now that feeling is gone. And I can't decide if I'm happy or sad about that.

I gaze at Agatha for a moment and contemplate how to tell her that I don't really have a hippie crunchy granola kind of family, as she likes to think. Instead, I have a family of witches who actively practice their Talents but who still manage to live relatively obscure lives. I have a mother and grandmother who offer love spells, sleep spells, and spells for luck, good fortune, and health to the town residents who come knocking on the back door after night falls when they can't be seen by their neighbors. I have a father who controls the weather. A sister who can compel anyone to do anything just by mesmerizing them with the sound of her voice. My grandmother's sister who can freeze someone where he stands just by touching his forehead. A boyfriend who can find anything and anyone that's missing. A whole bunch of other people I've been taught to call "uncle" or "aunt" or "cousin" who are all Talented in one way or another.

If I told Agatha any of that, she'd look at me like I was speaking in tongues. If I showed her that I could shoot fire from my hands or freeze people into statues with one tap of my finger, she'd think I was a freakshow.

Or worse, she'd be afraid of me.

Agatha's one of the first and relatively few people who made me feel normal in my life. Back when I thought I didn't have a Talent at all, when I first came to boarding school in Manhattan, it was okay omitting certain things about my family life. It was okay to blur the line between the truth and a lie. But now that I've discovered I do have a Talent after all, it feels harder.

"So what are you going to do?" Agatha asks, breaking into my headlong rush of thoughts.