Entangled (Spellbound #1)

Chapter 10

Gray's feet smacked the pavement. She didn't stop running until she'd reached home. She couldn't even think straight enough to remember she was invisible until she reached for the light switch in the kitchen. Gray filled herself in as though she were an Etch A Sketch. The spell was a quick scribble in her head.

Gray pulled the newspaper out of its plastic cover and spread it over the countertop.

The date read: Friday, April 1, 2011.

At least it was the correct year.

Gray flipped through, looking for any headlines that might stand out. Nothing out of the ordinary. Her stomach growled. God, she felt like she hadn't eaten in ages.

Time warp! she thought suddenly, then dismissed it as quickly. That didn't explain any of the anomalies going on at school.

Gray went to her room and began opening drawers. Aside from the tidiness, everything was still there—unlike her locker. Gray paced the room. She walked through Charlene's room next. She'd only caught a fleeting glance of her sister's domain that morning. Everything was exactly as she remembered it. Charlene hadn't even bothered taking down the pictures of herself and Blake framing the edges of her wall mirror.

Going through her mother's room caused a moment's hesitation, but Gray needed answers. She skipped the dresser and went straight to her mom's desk. For all her exterior organization, Mom's interior spaces were a mess. The top drawer was filled with recipes she'd ripped out of magazines, receipts, greeting cards, pens, paperclips, and rubber bands. Gray opened the next drawer. This one looked neat at first. Mom had lined up her stapler, tape, and calculator, but in the space behind those items were more scraps. The third drawer was deeper. Mom's dream journals and spell books were tossed inside along with her French-, German-, and Norwegian-English dictionaries.

Gray pushed the drawers shut and began grabbing things off the desk. She held Mom's glass cubed paperweight. She'd seen her holding it often enough while working on translations, but the only reading Gray picked up was a faraway, foreign chattering. The weight clunked on the desk as Gray abandoned it for Mom's nightstand. When she yanked open the top drawer she inhaled sharply. The drawer was just as disorganized as the ones in the desk, but instead of recipes and receipts, this one was filled with photographs of Gray.

Gray reached in and wrapped her fingers around a pile of photos. She began flipping through, letting the images drop one by one on top of her mom's bed. It was a mix of toddler and grade school pictures. Charlene was in a couple of them. From the looks of it, Mom had cherry-picked the ones where she and Charlene were holding hands or smiling at the same time.

There were more photos in the nightstand and a piece of newspaper folded in half. Gray unfolded it. There she was in black and white. They'd printed her sophomore yearbook picture. It appeared just below the article's headline:

Teenager, 17, found dead at family home

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Graylee Perez, 17, was found dead at her family home, in Kent, Wash., on February 9.

Her body was discovered in her bed by her identical twin sister when she failed to wake on Wednesday morning. It is not yet known how she died.

Paramedics were called to the scene at 6:45 a.m., but they could not save her.

The article fluttered to the ground.

Gray grabbed the remaining photos and scraps from the drawer and dumped them onto her mom's bed. She sifted through the pile, but there weren't any more news articles.

Gray clicked her laptop open inside her room and jabbed the power key with her thumb. Before she began a search of her mysterious death, Gray went to her Facebook page out of habit. Her eyes scanned her wall.