Bad Spelling
an excerpt

Chapter 1

Katya lit the five candles and set them precisely in the points of the pentagram. She picked up Teddy the bunny and set him down in the middle of the five-pointed star with a carrot under his nose so he’d stay put.

“Stay right there, Teddy. You know the drill,” she whispered to the little brown rabbit and gave him a final pat on the head. He twitched his nose twice and began gnawing on the carrot.

She consulted the Magical Book of Spelling again to make sure she had the incantation just right. Tranformation was a simple spell. Any junior witch should have it mastered. Unfortunately for Katya, at hadn’t performed the spell correctly even once. At sixteen, she should be graduating, not still trying to complete kiddie spells.

She walked around the pentagram, stopping at each point to mumble the correct spell line for it. Reaching the original point, she pronounced the final spell with a dramatic sweep of her arms.

Teddy looked up at her from his froggy, bulging eyes and Katya groaned. The rabbit had transmutated into a part frog, part-rabbit. Green and slimy, that was the good part. The pink nose and long ears pronounced yet one more instance of bad spelling.

Katya flopped down in a chair and stared at the frog-bunny. What had she goofed up this time. She suspected she had mixed up the vowels on two of the rune words. Bad spelling, indeed. She wondered why she couldn’t get the simplest things write. Sighing, she opened the spell book and went over it one more time. Ah, yes, she’d mistaken ك for ك. She stared at the runic symbols, trying to discern the difference.

She dropped the book on her lap and grimaced. They looked alike to her. Runic was a stupid alphabet, she thought for the thousandth time. Every glyph looked exactly like some other glyph. But all her friends and even her stupid brother managed just fine. Maybe her brother’s name held some magic. Rune was a great warlock name, while her own name didn’t imply witch in the slightest.

Speaking of Rune, her handsome baby brother walked through the door just then. Literally, walked through the door.

“I wish you’d just open the door like everybody else,” she grumped at Rune, who smiled at his older sister exposing his longer than normal incisors.

“Hey, Katya, if you’ve got it, then flaunt it.”

“Yeah, yeah. But I don’t think you’re so smart to show off your evil half,” she said, trying to find some way to put down her good-looking and talented brother. Lucky for him that his vampire half had magical talents, too. Katya’s all-too-human father, Boris, had no talent other than getting lost hunting walruses and stumbling on Kvitøya Island.