Spellcaster (Spellcaster #1) Read Free

was going to make you guys breakfast. To celebrate the big day.”
    “Nobody celebrates the first day of school,” Cole said as he took his seat, tiny sneakered feet now dangling above the wood floor. He was in such a good mood—so confident and easygoing—and Nadia and her father exchanged a look. Cole was finally doing better; maybe the fresh start was working precisely like they’d hoped.
    “Making breakfast is no big deal,” Nadia said. “Anyway, I’m a better cook than you, and you know it.”
    Dad nodded, acknowledging this, as he took his seat. “But how else am I going to learn?”
    Cooking wasn’t a chore for her; it was a hobby, even a passion. She’d filled some of the hours that had once gone to her witchcraft lessons with studying cookbooks and experimenting. Still—one way or the other, she wouldn’t be at home full-time after graduation, so maybe she ought to teach him a few things, just to make sure they wouldn’t starve. “I’ll give you lessons. Wait and see.”
    Although Dad looked like he wanted to protest, he’d also caught sight of the bacon she’d put on the table. Distraction provided; discussion over.
    The kitchen in their new house was one of the few things about it Nadia didn’t like. In their Chicago condominium, they’d had the best and brightest appliances her father’s big law-firm salary could buy, and oceans of counter space. Here, everything was old-fashioned and a little shabby. But what she disliked in the kitchen was precisely what made the rest of the house so awesome. It was an old Victorian, two stories not counting the large attic she’d claimed as her private space—the perfect hiding place for her Book of Shadows and the supplies for her magic. She’d expected Cole to pitch a fit, but he was so thrilled by having a real, true backyard of his own that he showed no signs of coming indoors of his own free will ever again. The oaken plank floors creaked comfortingly, and a stained-glass window let cranberry-tinted light into the stairwell. If it was all slightly run-down, it was also beautiful—and as big a change from their high-rise condo as she could imagine.
    Nadia didn’t want any reminders of their life before. She wanted to seal her family into a place where nothing could hurt them—not memory, not her mother, not whatever weird magic was at work in this town. This house seemed to provide a chance, and she knew just enough of the Craft to help that along.
    So she’d whispered the spells, encircled it with the best protection she knew. She’d slipped out in the night to bury moonstones next to the steps; she’d begun the work of painting the attic ceiling blue. To make it cute , she’d told her dad. The real power of that particular shade, what it meant for a home to be protected from above—those were things he never had to know.
    Great , Nadia thought as she stared at her new high school, Isaac P. Rodman High. Just great .
    Just the fact that it was a high school was bad enough. On top of that, it was a new school for her senior year. She’d accepted they needed the move, but that didn’t mean she was looking forward to navigating completely new people and teachers and cliques for the nine and a half months before she’d graduate and be free again. Her new school was far smaller than the one she’d attended in Chicago, but in some ways that was more intimidating, not less. Everyone here knew one another, and probably had for their whole lives. That made her the odd one out.
    But beyond that, there was something else. Something shivering just beneath the surface—once again, something magical, though it was different from anything else she’d ever known. Precisely how it was different, she couldn’t say, but this energy was familiar and unfamiliar at once. Nadia could feel it coursing all around her, that static-electricity thing all over again.
    This was … a complication.
    What is going on here? It’s not like someone is using magic near