• Prologue


    Aradia was always the odd one out in her family. She was the only girl out of three brothers and the youngest; the only with glasses; the only with dark hair out of blondes; the only with purple eyes so dark they looked brown in a sea of greens and blues and hazels. She was the only one that didn’t have friends and who didn’t play sports and who actually enjoyed school. The only one who hated living in that crowded and hot city called London, where the only scraps of green she could find were tamed.
    I realize you are probably sick by now of hearing exactly how odd our little girl is, but if you could bear with me for just another moment, I have one last oddity that separates Aradia from her family:

    She was also the only one that could do magic.

    Of course, she didn’t know that interesting little fact. If she did, that would take all the fun out of it. What good is a known secret?
    Unfortunately, that is the limit to the secrets about her that she didn’t know. She already knew that she was strange and she already knew that she didn’t quite fit with her mother’s image of the perfect family. The other thing she knew wasn’t a secret: unusual and, therefore, scary things often happened around Aradia, which earned her the nickname Jinx. Things always broke and went wrong wherever she happened to be.
    To prove that point, allow me to tell you a snippet from when Aradia was working in chemistry class. The teacher passed around small chunks of cesium to each of the lab partners, and five minutes after receiving hers, Aradia’s elbow knocked over her open water bottle – the contents of which poured onto the chunk. Naturally, there was a small explosion, as cesium is very unstable. It burned Aradia’s little finger to her elbow and left an angry pink scar that was warm to the touch. Nobody else was hurt, unless you counted the table, which they had to replace, but they all acted as though she had purposely tried to murder the class.
    It didn’t help that stuff like that continued to happen. The lights in the classroom would flicker off when she passed in a bad mood. Vases that her mother placed perfectly around the house would burst. More than once, it began to rain when she was crying.
    Everyone noticed this, and avoided her because of it. Nobody wanted anything to do with her and her oddities, even her family. I believe I mentioned that she didn’t fit her mother’s image of the perfect family; the woman despised her for that and subsequently rejected Aradia. She wanted a smart and beautiful daughter, with charm and social graces. Instead she got the unusual-looking and awkward creature that I’ve been talking about.
    Aradia’s father was a very kind person, though. He was into nature and often took Aradia on hikes in the forest, which she enjoyed. He taught her all about the different animals and plants – the uses of different parts of them, which ones were dangerous, which she could safely eat. He showed her the beauty of music and how deep the human mind can go. He helped her explore the world through books, and guided her through many adventures with his voice. He let her swing from his arms like he was a tree, ride his back as though he were a horse, and tickled her until she couldn’t breathe from laughing.
    He also left when she was seven.
    Maybe that isn’t the best way to say it: he went missing when she was seven. Aradia’s father had gone for a night hike with a handful of his friends. Apparently, they got lost. All of his friends found the trail and came back safely, but he never did. In the morning, the police searched the area, but found no sign of him.
    When she lost her father, Aradia lost her smile.