Total pages in book: 78
Estimated words: 73252 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 73252 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 366(@200wpm)___ 293(@250wpm)___ 244(@300wpm)
The next several months of notes follow the same pattern.
Claire is sad.
Quiet.
But agreeable.
She never causes trouble.
Never steps out of line.
And her story never changes. The therapist repeatedly notes suspicion that Claire has been told what to say. As the months go on, I can tell the therapist starts to genuinely care about her. The notes become a little less clinical. A little more personal. She never directly says it, but the implication is obvious. She thinks it’s heartbreaking that Claire has been labeled such a difficult child when nothing in her behavior supports it.
Because of that label, no one even considers her for adoption.
“She was fifteen the first time she ran away,” I say, finding the note.
“She didn’t get very far. But she told the therapist she had a dream that her mother had the same name she did and told her to go home.”
“Do you think that could actually be true?” Mabel asks.
“Yeah.” I keep reading. “Even if Claire hadn’t figured out how to tap into her own power yet, spirits visiting through dreams is absolutely possible.”
The therapist had apparently checked the address Claire gave her. It belonged to the Bellamy family. The same family who had given her up through a closed adoption. The final note from that session says the therapist intended to ask Claire the next day how she knew the address. I flip to the next page.
“She says the information came to her in a dream,” I read. “That her mother wants her to go home. That her family has something to tell her.”
My stomach twists.
“The therapist reminds Claire that she was given up in a closed adoption and repeatedly questions how she could possibly know anything about her biological family.”
I keep reading.
“Claire became tearful and appeared genuinely distressed at being accused of lying.” The next couple months don’t give us much. Claire seems to fall into a depressive state. Barely speaking. Barely eating. Eventually, she’s put on a heavy dose of antidepressants.
My heart aches for her.
Did she always sense that there was something different about her? Something that made her feel like she didn’t belong with everyone else? I always felt that way. Though, in my defense, I was actively treated like I was different. I flip forward several more months.
Then stop.
A few weeks after Claire’s sixteenth birthday, the therapist documents what she calls several “unexplained incidents.” I know exactly what that means. Claire was using magic. Accidentally. Magic she didn’t even know she possessed. Around her seventeenth birthday, she tried to run away twice. She had an after-school job and was caught trying to buy a bus ticket to Connecticut.
“What’s in Ohio?” I ask, looking at my brothers wondering how Claire ended up there.
“I don’t know,” Antonio says. “Maybe a lab. A safe house. Or maybe they just picked somewhere random enough that no one would look too closely.”
“Yeah. That would make sense.”
I keep going through the notes. Nothing else stands out until the night Claire disappeared three weeks ago. She slipped out after dark. And just like the police report said, there was an issue with both the power and the backup generator for almost ten minutes. The note says Claire used the blackout to conceal her escape.
I stare at the words.
“What if she didn’t cause the blackout?”
Everyone looks at me.
“What if someone else did?” The thought settles heavily in my stomach. “Did Claire actually run away?” I swallow. “Or was she taken?” My phone rings.
The sound startles me enough that I jerk my head up.
“It’s Marie.” I answer and immediately put her on speaker. “Hey. Please tell me you found something.”
“Oh, honey,” Marie says. There’s something in her voice that makes my stomach drop. “I found some things. You might want to sit down for this.”
Chapter
Twenty-Two
“Is it that bad?” I rush out, my heart pounding in my chest.
“Not that good,” Marie replies. “And if I’m not on speakerphone now, you might want to put me on.”
“Oh, you are,” I say. “We’re all over here dying.”
“After you told me the demon’s name,” she begins, “I started digging. And honestly, it surprised me how little I could find on him.” I lean forward. “It bothered me. You know that feeling when something isn’t quite right and you can’t let it go?”
“Yeah. I’ve had that feeling many times.”
“Sometimes I don’t know what’s intuition and what’s just an OCD obsession,” she says. I understand that better than probably anyone else in this room. Trying to figure out the difference between anxiety and intuition has always been a challenge for me. “But I couldn’t let it go,” Marie continues. “I knew I was missing something.” She pauses. “Well, I found something.”
I suck in a breath and scoot toward the edge of the couch, lacing my fingers together as I wait for her to keep going.
“I was digging through the archives, looking through records of notable witches and warlocks throughout history. We used to teach a defensive magic course years ago, so I had to go through thousands of professors’ journals.”