Spellbound , livre ebook

Xlibris AU - T.M. Navarro

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

182 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

When Sylvia Carson is sent off to her reclusive, absent–for– 20-years, outcast aunt, she expects her summer to be boring, devoid of fun or adventure and haunted by the stories her family has told her over the years about the woman who took off at 18 and never came back. The last thing she expects is to be introduced to a world of magic, monsters and danger, where one mistake could cost her the world. Coincidentally, Sylvia has already made that mistake.

Oops.

Sujets

Fiction

Fantasy

Informations

Publié par	Xlibris AU
Date de parution	18 août 2022
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781669887591
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

SPELLBOUND
T.M. Navarro

Copyright © 2022 by T.M. Navarro.
Library of Congress Control Number:
2022905853
ISBN:
Hardcover
978-1-6698-8761-4

Softcover
978-1-6698-8760-7

eBook
978-1-6698-8759-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/20/2022

Xlibris
AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)
AU Local: (02) 8310 8187 (+61 2 8310 8187 from outside Australia)
www.Xlibris.com.au
839120
CONTENTS
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Epilogue
Glossary
CHAPTER 1
When my parents told me they were sending me off to my aunt’s, there wasn’t really room for complaint or protest. I could whine all that I wanted, but at the end of the day, I’d still be dragged into the car and buckled in with my luggage.
My aunt was many things, one of them being the most popular topic of family gossip. Aunt Jacinta was an outcast, they said. She apparently always had been. Mum told me that she used to hide at family gatherings with a book tucked up under her arm. Now, she was hidden away somewhere in a tiny house in the country with a big stash of money in a fat bank account everybody wanted the details of.
Apart from being rich and quiet, it was said that somewhere along the way, Aunt Jacinta had learned to be cruel. Hated children, cooked them alive for dinner, and saved the leftovers for breakfast. So, understandably, it was rather disturbing that my parents were sending me to her for the holidays.
Obviously, they didn’t want me back.
But, in all honesty, I didn’t have much of an opinion on going to Aunt Jacinta’s. It was an opportunity to pursue the truth. I didn’t think there was much ‘truth’ to find at the house of a socially-awkward recluse with a suspicious stack of money she probably got off knitting ugly Christmas sweaters, but who knows? Maybe they were really cool sweaters. Maybe she’d teach me how to make them, and I’d forget all about Mum and Dad going on a holiday without me.
Sure, it stung.
Like, a lot.
But who would want to go on a $13,000 cruise that had penguin sightings scheduled into every second day? Not me. Clearly.
Living with a cruel, children-eating loner for two months was going to be spent as the most exciting part of my life. I had nothing to worry about.
Nothing at all.
‘ When will you stop sulking, Sylvia?’ Mum looked back at me from the passenger seat, flipping a page from the sightseeing pamphlet detailing the holiday they were abandoning me for. She noticed how I was looking at it and did her best to hide it under her leg, like I hadn’t been reading over her shoulder for the past half an hour.
I wasn’t sulking. I had no idea what she was talking about.
‘Leave her be,’ Dad mumbled, his eyes straying from the road. ‘She hasn’t seen Jacinta since . . . uh . . .’
‘Never,’ I supplied. ‘I’ve never met her. And you’re sending me there?’
‘Attitude,’ Mum warned. She turned back to the front, shaking her head. ‘She’s not as bad as everybody says.’
‘They haven’t said anything nice,’ I grumbled.
Maybe I was sulking. Just a bit. But I didn’t know Aunt Jacinta, and I wasn’t being dramatic. Literally nobody did. She was basically a stranger who somehow found her way into my family’s conversations. Mum, her sister , didn’t even remember her birthday or how many had passed since she’d last seen her.
Aunt Jacinta was an enigma, and no part of me wanted to change that.
‘That doesn’t mean there’s nothing nice,’ Mum amended. ‘I remember . . .’
Dad looked at her when she didn’t finish, and I shoved my face into the space between their seats. I lifted both brows. ‘Well?’
Mum rolled her eyes. ‘Well, I’m old. I don’t remember much.’ Her hand closed over my face and pushed me back into my seat.
I crossed my arms, hiding a smug smirk behind an innocent grin. ‘Forty isn’t that old, Mum,’ I pointed out.
She rolled her eyes. ‘I age faster than most. You made all my hair turn grey.’
‘Good thing you’re going on a cruise then,’ I grumbled.
She ignored me. Of course she did.
Dad looked back at me and offered a sympathetic smile. ‘I wish we could take you with us, kiddo.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
Dad paused and grimaced. ‘I don’t really have an excuse for you.’
‘You don’t have to make one,’ Mum said, glaring. ‘We’re going on a holiday because we can, and maybe if we like it, we’ll go again with you.’
‘When I’m 40?’ I scoffed. ‘$13,000 doesn’t take a day to make. I know that much. By the time I’m going, it’ll be by my own money.’
‘Maybe you can ask your aunt, then.’ A smile teased at the corners of her lips. ‘Since she’s doing so well.’
I gasped. ‘Mum!’
She snickered to herself and turned away. She was joking, right?
She was joking.
Maybe.
I wasn’t even sure what Aunt Jacinta looked like. She could be a grumpy, frowning hag who snored louder than a dog at night. She could be a twig with an evil cackle and oven mitts .
I wasn’t sure what was so scary about oven mitts, but I knew I wouldn’t want them on Aunt Jacinta. She probably baked children with them every day. Even if she didn’t really eat kids, I wasn’t counting on anything I didn’t know for a fact.
Maybe it wasn’t even kids whom she preferred. Maybe she’d evolved and found a way to enjoy a buffet of moody teenaged brats who got left behind when their parents ditched them for a fancy cruise.
A shiver coursed down my spine.
‘What’s she like, Mum?’
Mum pursed her lips. ‘There’s only so much I can tell you. I don’t know if she’s changed since I’d last seen her.’
‘What do you remember?’
‘She was shy,’ Mum described, ‘and didn’t have any friends back in school.’
Great. I felt so much better now that I knew something that I’d been told hundreds of times before.
‘And she was weird,’ Mum added, tipping her head back in thought. ‘But she was so . . . so . . . vibrant. ’
‘Colourful?’
‘That too.’ Mum laughed. ‘Her fashion sense was… questionable. She was a bit of an ugly duckling.’
I tried to picture a girl hiding between the shelves of a library, dressed in opposing colours that both attracted unwelcome stares and chased them away.
‘Is she . . . still an ugly duckling?’
‘I don’t know.’ Mum shrugged. ‘She took off when she turned 18.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Pretty much.’ She sighed. ‘It was so sudden. I kept up with her social media, but then that was gone too. It was like she vanished. She texted me her new number though. You know the story.’
I did, sort of. Mum did her best to call her every month, but it wasn’t like Aunt Jacinta ever answered. After a few short exchanges over text every other birthday or Christmas, Mum had given up and left the talking up to her.
I still didn’t understand why, out of all our relatives, it had to be Aunt Jacinta they were sending me off to. Her lack of communication was one excellent example out of hundreds why it was a terrible idea, but arguing with any of them would get me nowhere but another yelling fit from Mum.
‘I still don’t know what she’s like,’ I said. ‘I literally don’t know what I’m up against.’
‘You’re not going to fight her.’ Dad laughed. ‘You’re just going to spend your holidays there. And maybe you can figure that out for us.’
‘Exactly,’ Mum agreed. ‘Anything I have to tell you won’t match up to how she is in the flesh.’
‘So you don’t have anything else for me,’ I persisted, ‘even though you lived in the same house as her for half your life.’
‘Nothing you don’t know already.’ Mum frowned. ‘Well, I guess she was kind. I’d always try to fight with her, but if I wanted something from her, she’d just give it to me.’
‘Mum,’ I said, ‘I don’t think that’s ‘kind’. I think that’s just being a pushover.’
‘There you go then.’
I let an irritated breath pass through my lips and leaned my forehead against the window. What did that even mean?
Ugh, whatever.
Sighing, I resigned myself to my fate, leaning my temple against the window. I watched the city dwindle into towers of trees and stretches of grassland and toyed with my phone until my service dropped.
There was no going back now. I was going to live with a woman with no