1
The headaches had started the week after her fifteenth birthday. Caitlin McAllister remembered the day very clearly because she’d dozed off while watching TV, and then had a horrible nightmare about some tourist taking a turn too quickly off Main Street and ending up at the wrong end of Boyd Willis’s driveway, the car a wreck, and the garage door and the tourist not in much better shape. It wasn’t really that strange, after all, since it wasn’t the first time a tourist had taken a header into Boyd’s garage. Except…
…it hadn’t been a dream.
At first Caitlin had shrugged off the incident, telling herself that she’d probably overheard her mother talking about it on the phone with one of the other clan witches, and only thought she’d dreamed the whole thing, but that wasn’t what had really happened. She’d fallen asleep during a repeat of Charmed, which was on at four, and the accident occurred at four-fifteen. And the gossip about the accident hadn’t started making the rounds until at least a half hour after that. Caitlin had sat on the living room couch, staring blankly at the television, while her mother was on the phone with Rachel McAllister, the two of them were agreeing that something had to be done about the situation with Boyd’s property.
That “something” turned out to be Margot Emory casting the strongest spell of illusion she could on Boyd’s driveway, making it look as if a stone wall stretched across the opening. There weren’t any more incidents with wayward tourists after that.
But Caitlin knew something else was wrong, because her head was pounding after she woke up from that not-dream, and the headache didn’t go away until sometime the next day. And then, about a week later, she wasn’t even dreaming, but gazing moodily out the window during her geometry class, and she saw one of the oily rags Micah Landon had lying around his studio burst into flame, burning down half the room before the volunteer fire department swung into action and put it out. Everyone believed the fire was Micah’s fault, since he often walked around with his head in the clouds instead of attending to practical matters, such as making sure those turpentine-soaked rags had been stored properly. That might have been true, but the really scary thing about the incident was that Caitlin had witnessed the whole scene in her head approximately fifteen minutes or so before it happened.
That vision…or whatever it was…resulted in another headache.
She knew she should tell someone, but the mere notion of revealing that she’d begun to see things that came true scared her far more than the visions themselves. The McAllister clan had been without a seer for some time, and they needed one desperately, what with the threat of the Wilcox clan always hanging out there on the horizon, like the smoke of a far-off grass fire. It was Caitlin’s responsibility to let her parents and the elders know that the McAllisters finally had the seer they so desperately needed.
Except…a clan seer couldn’t call her — or his, although seers tended to be female — life her own. People always wanting to know what the future held, the elders always bringing her in for consultations…Caitlin knew she wanted none of it. Her power had revealed itself very late; most witches in her clan began to show signs of their latent abilities sometime around ten or eleven, but here she was, fifteen and being confronted by something she most decidedly did not want.
And so, even though she knew it was wrong, she hid what was going on, dosing the headaches with aspirin or ibuprofen or whatever happened to be in the house at the time, and by around a year or so later, they mostly disappeared. Not altogether; if something big was happening and she had a vision about it, her head would pound for a day or so afterward. When Great-Aunt Ruby died, Caitlin had stayed home sick from school for a day, the pain was so bad, and when Damon Wilcox kidnapped Angela McAllister, the new prima…well, that was the worst, Caitlin’s head aching so much she almost threw up. Or maybe the real cause of the nausea was simply guilt at her own cowardice. Maybe if she’d spoken up, she could have rallied the clan in time to stop the kidnapping. True, she hadn’t known exactly what was going to happen, only that it was something very bad. Again there had been that sensation of something oppressive looming over the tiny hillside town of Jerome, like a thunderstorm with such extreme low pressure that it felt as if it was sucking all the air out of your lungs, crushing down on your sternum. A feeling that something terrible was approaching, although she couldn’t tell what it might be. That was probably Damon’s own power at work, concealing his actions. He’d been so very powerful. Surely no one could have expected her own puny abilities to pierce the dark veil of magic he’d wrapped around himself.