"Let me set the stage," Cassie said, "and take you back to the start of my last year of high school, just before Gwen and I first met..."
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Ophilia Villa, Willow Creek, 2000
I wouldn't say I thought my life was ordinary. As a moody teen, I was averse to "ordinary" on a basic level. Besides, as the daughter of a wealthy old family, ordinary wasn't really in the cards for me anyway.
The Goth family has lived in Willow Creek for about as long as there has been a Willow Creek to live in. Ophilia Villa, our family house... I guess mansion is more accurate... is one of the oldest in the town. We're an old money family, and most of the money is in real estate. They say that the Landgraabs might have built most of Willow Creek, but the Goths owned the ground they built on.
My dad, Mortimer, was perfectly content to leave the management of the family real estate empire to the legion of lawyers and accountants who were equally content to run it for him. He focused on his writing. His books, mostly dark fantasy stories involving witches, ghosts and wicked kings, had been generally well received by both critics and readers.
Still, I know he was shocked when he found himself suddenly catapulted into fame. A movie producer had gotten ahold of his first best-seller - The Raven Headmistress - and turned it into a blockbuster. Dad was even more surprised when the studio announced plans to film the other two books in the Raven Academy trilogy... especially since he hadn't written them yet.
So he was pretty focused on churning out two sequels and dealing with the movie people.
I wasn't getting along Bella, my mom... stepmom, as I insisted on pointing out to her at every opportunity... very well in those days. Looking back, I think it started as mostly the usual tension between a teenager and parent. That wasn't helped by the late hours and frequent travel required by her job, which we all thought involved sales for a company called TransWorld. I was convinced she was up to something nefarious.
That fact that I was right... well, we'll get to that.
Then, of course, there was Alexander... my annoying, geeky, too-smart-for-own-good little brother.
It's funny really. For all that I insisted on calling Bella my stepmother, I never once thought of Alexander, her son, as anything other than my brother. He might have been an annoying geek, but he was my annoying geek and heaven help anyone - other than me - who gave him grief.
I think the only person in the house I got along easily with was Edwards, our butler. He was an orderly and hard-working man, from a local family that was probably as old as the Goths, just without our money. I remember, he made the most amazing shrimp gumbo.
I think I got my love of cooking from him.
Of course, I was going to school which was remarkably ordinary as I'm sure... No, right, of course. I'm the only person at this table who had anything like an ordinary high school experience.
Well, I can assure you, my high school was fairly ordinary... a large, ugly building decorated with "inspiration" posters and filled with burned out instructors and a horde of hormonal teens forced into colorless, soulless uniforms.
I dedicated a lot of time to my music. When I was feeling bad, which was fairly often in those days, I would go to the music room and play.
Dad always encouraged me. He could see that I loved music, like he loved writing. I think he could see that I could be a musician someday, but he didn't pressure me. He wanted me to find joy in it.
Now, one thing you must understand, to really understand this story, is that in those days I had no idea that I had been born a witch. There were family stories that some of our ancestors had been witches... and I honestly did believe them... but it never occurred to me that I might be one. I thought that magic was something lost to the world sometime in the past.
The closest I came to real magic were the seances my dad and I would conduct, reaching out and hoping to contact the spirit world. My dad was actually a very talented medium, and he always said I had a knack for contacting the spirits.
We didn't really talk about it, but I know we were both hoping for a message from my mom. My birth mother, Victoria, had died in a car accident when I was little. I know he thought about her still. She was, after all, the inspiration for the main character in his Raven Academy stories.
So, there you have it... young Cassandra Goth, budding musician and moody teen... completely unaware that someone was about to enter her life and change everything.
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