Witch's Awakening Read Free Page B

in White meant. It certainly didn’t follow the pattern set since 1757, when the first Connelly witch had been taken.
    Familiar anger sparked through Brenna. All these years, and no one found a way to break this curse. They weren’t even clear on why it had started. It was ridiculous. So many skilled witches should have found a way. She had grown up knowing the legend and knowing that she, Eva Grace and Fiona, along with Maggie and Lauren, stood a good chance of dying young. What she didn’t understand was why they needed to accept their fate.
    The five of them were the Connelly females of their generation. Everyone else in their twenties and thirties was male. The men were never touched, but Maggie and her brother had daughters. Brenna couldn’t bear to think that any of those young girls facing an attack like they witnessed today.
    Brenna strode into the dining room. Behind her were her two cousins and two aunts. Three older women were seated at one end of the long, oak table. Sarah had changed into her usual flowing tunic and jeans, while her two sisters were conservatively dressed in pastel pantsuits. All of them had thick, silvery hair, a common trait among aging Connellys. Unlike Sarah’s long tresses, however, Doris and Frances favored short coifs sprayed into rigid helmets by New Mourne’s most revered beauty salon. Brenna often thought her elder aunts resembled pious churchwomen more than witches.
    All three women were studying a large open book—
The Connelly Book of Magic
. It included history, spells and magic. At least four inches thick, the book’s heavy, old pages were stuffed with loose papers, yellowed photographs and handwritten notes. It was bound in ancient, scrolled leather and laced together with faded ribbons. According to family legend, the cover was cracked from an indiscriminate use of witch water a century ago, and the book itself was known to speak.
    Brenna tried many times without success to get a peek inside it. She wished the pages would talk now and explain today’s events. “You have to fix this, once and for all,” Brenna told her grandmother and the elder aunts.
    Great-Aunt Doris, Lauren’s grandmother, who had turned seventy-eight just weeks ago, glared at her. “You don’t help anything with your attitude, missy. We’re as upset and as mystified by this as you.”
    â€œIt’s no one’s fault,” added Frances, who was Doris’s twin and older by three minutes. “We’ll not have you blaming your grandmother.”
    â€œShe can blame me if she wants,” Sarah retorted, her green eyes sharp in her pale face.
    Protests and agreements broke out, with elders, aunts and cousins trying to talk at once.
    Sarah pushed to her feet and shushed them. “I’ll not have this,” she said, earning Brenna’s grudging respect by the way she took command of the room. “Sit down and talk reasonable or get out.”
    Though younger than her sisters by eleven years, Sarah assumed leadership of her family by virtue of her powers. Like Brenna, she drew her strength from nature and cast spells that controlled wind, rain and fire since early childhood. Doris and Frances were given more to charms and potions, and had ceded authority to their younger sister without protest.
    At eighteen, Sarah shocked the entire family and the county by taking up with the son of a group known as gypsies. Her young man disappeared when she became pregnant. Though the rest of the family married and were quite traditional, they closed protective ranks around Sarah. She had twin daughters that she raised in this very house.
    Her grandmother led an adventurous life without ever leaving her home, Brenna reflected as her relatives settled around the table. In the 60s Sarah embraced the concept of communal living, and the Connelly farm opened to young people seeking peace and enlightenment from living off the land. The commune folded