Chapter One

Rhiannon Godfrey turned up the volume on her iPod, blocking out her mother’s annoying attempts to get inside her head.

Starla Godfrey was nothing if not persistent.

The noise was like the buzzing of a bee trapped between a screen and a window; buzz, buzz buzzing until finally she just couldn’t stand it anymore.

Rhiannon yanked off her headphones and yelled, “Helllooo?  Dr. Richards told you to respect my boundaries.”

Her mother turned around from the front passenger seat of the car.  “Yes, well, Dr. Richards hasn’t been trying to get your attention for the past thirty minutes.”

Rhiannon rolled her eyes.  “I was listening to my music.”  She exhaled, certain that she had the worst possible life in the entire world.  Maybe even the universe.  “What do you want?”

“That’s enough, Rhee.”

She glared at the back of her father’s head, his dark hair barely visible over the back of the driver’s seat.  Was she telepathically strong enough to make him turn the car around and head back to Vegas?

He stiffened, met her gaze in the rearview mirror and said sternly, “Knock it off, Rhiannon.”

She plopped back in her seat.  It had been worth a try.

Her mother asked, “Is it too much for you to look out the window?  To take joy in your surroundings?”

“Yeah!  It is too much.  This isn’t vacation, we aren’t exactly touring the seven flippin’ wonders of the world.  You are ruining my life!  Moving me to Crystal Lake, Washington, home of the Dairy Cow.”

Her mom pressed her lips tightly together, and Rhiannon could practically hear her mother’s silent prayer to the Goddess for patience.  But unlike Starla, Rhee just didn’t go barging around in people’s heads, uninvited.

“We researched Crystal Lake.  It is small, homey, and perfect for us to get back to our roots.”

Crossing her arms, Rhee replied in what she thought was a calm and reasonable voice,  “Mom.  I want to go back to the Institute.  To my friends.  You’re the one who is excited about fresh eggs straight from a chicken’s butt, which is so completely gross that I am never eating eggs again.  It was your stupid idea to move us all the way from civilization to open a New Age shop in an old barn, where the good citizens of Crystal Lake are probably going to burn us all at the stake for witchcraft.”

“Rhee!”

Rhiannon stopped bobbing her foot against the back of her dad’s seat.  When Miles raised his voice, he meant business.  But she had so much more to say!  Like how unfair this move was, and how rotten living in the country was going to be.  She was a city girl!

She swallowed past the lump in her throat as she thought of the Institute lounge where she, Tanya, and Matthew liked to spend their afternoons.  Her eyes burned with stupid tears but she blinked them away furiously.  There was no way she was crying, again, in front of her parents.

“Stop staring at me, Mom.”  Rhee tilted her chin defiantly in the air.

Sympathy and concern floated toward her from the front seat of the car like a too-sweet perfume, making her squirm with guilt.  Okay, so maybe she had been a little mean.

But she wasn’t gonna apologize!  Everything she’d said was true.

Her mother murmured, “This move was for the good of the family, which you are a part of.  It isn’t like you to sulk and pout, Rhiannon.  We are going forward, you should have your arms outstretched to embrace the future.  I know that you will miss your friends, but you’ll make new ones.”

Rhee flinched.  She didn’t want new friends, it had been hard enough making the old ones.  Her mom so didn’t get it.

“You’re going to go to a real school, high school!  No more exhausting research experiments, no more CAT scans, flashcards, or electrodes.  You won’t have to travel and get food poisoning, like that time you went to France.  C’mon, honey, doesn’t that excite you at all?”

She gulped.  Her stomach clenched and she felt like she was gonna hurl, and it had nothing to do with food poisoning.  She liked the Institute, loved Dr. Richards and Mrs. Edwards, who had helped her deal with her stupid psychic abilities.  And she’d had two super great friends.  Matthew, who actually lived at the Institute of Parapsychology, and Tanya, who was fourteen just like her, and came in the afternoons.

“I want to be home-schooled.  I can take on-line pre-college courses.”

Her mom shook her head and said in an unusually firm tone,  “We’ve read your chart.  The planets are aligned for change.  Your soul needs to be around other kids your own age, regular people, Rhee, in order to realize its full potential.”

She stared at her mom, thinking hard of her first day of kindergarten, the first time she’d realized she was practically an alien.  She hadn’t known that amusing her new classmates with floating pencils would send her nice teacher, Miss Hutchinson, into a tizzy, making her scream and faint, which then made all the other bratty kids start crying, and wham -- she’d been sent home, labeled a freak.  No, she thought as her stomach twisted again, the idea of school didn’t excite her.

It made her sick.

Her mom frowned, having picked up Rhee’s vision loud and clear.  “It won’t be that way.  You’re older now, it will be better this time.”  Her mom’s voice sounded sad, which pleased Rhiannon to no end.  Why should she be the only one suffering here?

Closing her eyes, she knew she didn’t need to be a freakin’ mind reader to know that her mom blamed herself for sending Rhiannon to Dr. Richards all those years ago.  Starla hadn’t counted on her daughter preferring logical science as an explanation for her strange and sometimes uncontrollable abilities.

Not when she, a second generation Wiccan, put all her faith in miracles and magick.