Waking the Witch

WAKING THE WITCH



Prologue

For the first time since Claire Kennedy died, there wasn’t a deputy guarding the site of her murder.

Kayla peered out from behind the boarded up beauty salon. Seeing no one, she hoisted her backpack and set out, kicking stones, her gaze fixed on the ground. She was careful to walk slowly. If you ran, grown-ups paid attention. Kayla hated it when they paid attention. She liked being invisible.

Until her mom died, murdered with her best friend in this same building, Kayla had always been invisible. But now it wasn’t just the other kids who whispered behind her back, calling her weird or, in grown-up language “an odd little thing.” Grown-ups did, too. It wouldn’t help if they found her sneaking into the place where her mom had died.

Kayla knew the rear door would be locked. Kayla had lock picks from her Junior Detective kit, but they were just toys. Kayla didn’t need toys. She knew a way in, though. A boarded up window on the first floor with a gap big enough to for a nine-year-old to squeeze through. Concrete blocks scattered behind the building made a good stepladder.

She pushed her backpack in first. It hit the floor with thump.

As she hoisted herself through the window, she avoided the broken glass she’d cut herself on last time. Grandma had flipped out and taken her to the clinic. Grandma was like that. She worried a lot. After Mom died, Kayla thought Grandma would have less to worry about. No such luck.

She dropped to the floor and rummaged in her backpack for her flashlight. Plastic, of course. She’d considered asking Grandma for a real one for her birthday, but hadn’t figured out yet how to explain why she needed it.

Kayla shone the flashlight around. Empty. No, that was the wrong word. The building was only empty of people. Abandoned.

There was tons of crap here, all of it dirty and old and broken, but Kayla barely needed the flashlight to get where she was going. She’d been here five times since her mom had died. She’d recorded every visit in her notebook. There hadn’t been much to see, though. By the time she thought of coming, the police had cleared the place out.

This time it would be different. If Claire Kennedy had been killed here, there had to be a connection to her mother’s murder. There just had to be.

She opened the basement door and shone her light down into blackness. She went down one step, then stopped, working up her nerve as she always did before shutting the door and letting the darkness of the basement envelope her, her plastic flashlight barely strong enough to cast a distant circle of light.

Halfway down the stairs she heard the thump of a door shutting above. A deputy back on duty? That was okay. He’d peek inside the main floor, assure himself all was clear, then go back to sit outside in his pickup. Kayla knew the routine.

Excerpted from WAKING THE WITCH by Kelley Armstrong. Copyright © 2010 by Kelley Armstrong.