Heirloom Magic: Every Witch Way Read Free Page B

least a gallon of tears today, and she was feeling
dehydrated and out of sorts. A tiredness engulfed her, and she decided to
forget everything tonight and sleep on it.
    She stopped and
made sure to lock both the front and back doors on her way upstairs—this might
be a sleepy small town, but she was from Chicago—and in Chicago you don’t mess
around, or you get mugged.
    Harper crept past
her grandmother’s closed bedroom door; she had never been allowed in there when
she was a child. It still felt taboo, but Harper comforted herself that it was
probably okay for her to go in there now since her gran had left her the house.
She wasn’t ready for that yet anyway, not by a long shot. Harper found her way
to the small guest room at the end of the hall. It was the room she’d always
stayed in when she came for a visit. The room was comforting in its familiarity,
and Harper sank down onto the small single bed, without bothering to remove her
dress, and fell asleep.
    It didn’t feel
like very much time had passed at all when Harper was awakened in the middle of
the night by a noise.
    She sat up in the
pitch black room, straining her ears to figure out what exactly had woke her
up. Her heart began to pound when she heard it again. It was a pretty ominous
sound as far as middle-of-the-night noises go.
    A steady pounding, thunk, thunk, thunk , reverberated from somewhere down below, and it was
definitely coming from inside the house.
    “That better not
be you, Gran,” Harper muttered as she threw back the blanket and stood up
trembling. The weight of knowing there was nobody here to go check it out, except
herself, settled firmly around her shoulders. She hadn’t survived all these
years in Chicago just to get murdered in this little Podunk town her first
night back!
     

Chapter Two  
    Harper dug through the hallway closet as quietly as she could. She knew
her gran had been a pack rat and kept all her childhood stuff, and one summer
she’d been a proud member of the ‘Bantam Bama Batters.’ Finally, her shaking
fingers landed on the pink baseball bat with the Barbie stickers that nine-year-old
Harper had loved. It wasn’t the most lethal looking thing, but it was all she
had. So help her, she would break someone’s skull open if they tried any funny
business!
    The noise came
again, making Harper jump. The stairs creaked loudly under her feet and she
quickly jumped down to the next step, praying it would be quieter. This was
becoming the start to every bad slasher movie she’d ever seen! Harper reached
the bottom of the stairs without further incident and rushed forward to check
the front door; it was still locked. She moved silently through the dark house
and tried the back door and then all the windows. Nothing had been disturbed or
left open. The sound came again, a scraping noise and then a heavy thump.
Harper was finally able to pinpoint the source…
    …the basement. Wonderful. Harper stared at the heavy oak door that led downstairs and listened to the
thumping again. There was another noise now, a scuffling of sorts, like
something digging in dry earth. Harper pulled her phone out of her bra and
stared at it, not sure if she should call the sheriff. She bit her lip and
agonized for a long moment before deciding not. One summer she and Gran had
been awakened by a similar noise, and Gran had gone to investigate and reported
that it’d been a possum that had gotten into the basement and had been knocking
things over.
    Harper would feel
like an utter fool if she called the sheriff and made a huge kerfuffle over a
possum. Besides, wouldn’t a burglar take more care to be quiet? None of the
doors or windows had been disturbed… She bit her lip in uncertainty before deciding
that it must be a possum. She stared at the door before chickening out. If she
had to confront a possum, there was no way she was going to do it in the middle
of the night.
    Harper dragged out
a chair from the kitchen, just in case, and wedged