Her Curse

Chapter 1: Clary

 Today started like most others, waking in a cold sweat from a dream about a woman in the forest. A witch named Beatrix Cabot, that had taken her own life to escape being squashed to death between two stones back in colonial Massachusetts. The first time that Clary had had this dream, she felt a connection to the woman and went to the Salem Witches Museum and looked at the list of names of the women that were condemned as witches and either burned at the stake, drowned, pressed between stones, or stoned to death. Beatrix was on the list. The dreams had started when she turned eighteen, and have been becoming increasingly frequent the closer she gets to her twentieth birthday. Getting up, she walked to the bathroom, flicked on the light, and began running the hot water for a shower. She was lucky to have one of the few original dorm rooms with the bathrooms attached. She was self-conscious around other people and wanted the privacy of her own bathroom. Looking in the mirror, Clary sighed. Her hair was a mess, and her normally bright green eyes, looked dull and dark with the bags that now rested beneath them. She had a heart shaped face and a small button nose, and full, pouty lips. Splashing cold water on her face, she walked to her room and gathered stuff for her shower. Once she had finished, she got out, dressed in a pair of tight fitting, light-colored skinny jeans, mix matched socks, a black tank top and her favorite, forest green hoodie that her mom bought her for her birthday last year. It was a little baggy and longer than normal hoodies, as it came down mid-thigh. She had thick, shoulder-length chestnut brown hair, that she brushed and threw into a ponytail when she got out of the shower. Clary was not overweight, though you could describe her as curvy. She was 5’7” and weighed about 170 pounds. She did not bother putting on makeup. She had long, beautiful eye lashes, and flawless skin. She did not need all the make-up that other girls were wearing. It was days like today that she was glad she lived on campus, with no roommates. It was the last day of finals before summer break and she was already running late. She grabbed her cell phone and laptop and stuffed it into her backpack and threw on her black ankle boots, and grabbed an apple out of her mini fridge and ran out of her dorm, towards the lecture hall for her first test. She ate the apple while she was running to catch her first test, if she did not get there on time, her stickler of a professor would shut the door, locking any late comers out, and causing them to fail their finals. She reached the doors just as Professor Clemens was about to shut them. “Wait, wait, wait, wait!” She shouted, tossing her apple into the nearest garbage can and sliding in the doors just before they slammed closed on her. “Close call, Ms. Carrington, you nearly failed.” Professor Clemens said, walking past Clary without so much as a side glance. Clary rolled her eyes. Professor Heidi Clemens was a jerk, failing any one for anything, almost like she got off on ruining the lives of university students. She was about 5’10”, skinny, long legs, long dark hair, and light blue eyes. Her nose was slightly pointed, but not unattractively so. She could have been a model if she did not enjoy torturing her students so much. Clary walked to the desk in the middle of the room and collected her test, then took her usual seat at the back of the lecture hall. She had no problems hearing Professor Clemens or seeing the board, and no one else sat back here, so she enjoyed the solitude it brought her. This was her calculus exam, and though she loved math, she could not wait to be done with this class. “Okay everyone, you have two hours to complete the test. I will have them graded by the end of the day, and I will email your finishing grades by the end of the day tomorrow. GO!” She said, and started a timer that she had sitting on her desk. Clary did not need the entire two hours for the test, but she had nowhere else to be, as this was her last test, and then she would be going back to her parents' house in Salem. She was attending the University of Maine, and she was a sophomore and had not yet selected a major to focus on, right now she just wanted to get her core classes out of the way. At the two-hour mark, the ungodly sound of Professor Clemens alarm blared throughout the lecture hall, making Clary jump. “If your exam had an ‘A’ in the top right-hand corner, place it in the left basket, exams with a ‘B’ go in the middle basket, and exams with a ‘C’ go in the right basket, they are labeled. Once you put your test in the correct basket, you are free to leave. Have a good summer and congratulations everyone.” Professor Clemens told the class and there was instantly a rush of people fighting to get to the front of the room to turn in their exams and leave. Clary waited a couple of minutes for the crowd to die down, and when there were only a few more people turning in their exams, she brought hers up. Her exam had a ‘B’, so she turned it into the middle basket and turned around to leave, lifting her backpack over her shoulder as she did so. “Clary, a moment, please.” Professor Clemens called to her from behind the large mahogany desk the baskets were on. “Yes ma’am” Clary asked, turning around, internally sighing. “You did very well this semester, to be honest, you did not even need to take the exam to pass.” She said, smiling up at Clary from her seat. This mildly annoyed Clary. “You were by far my brightest student, and I wish you well on your endeavors, if you need a referral for any majors you may want to take, you can come to me.” She said, further confusing Clary. “Th... thank you...” Clary stumbled over her words a bit. This woman was a math demon all semester, and now she was being nice. Weird. “OH, and Clary, be careful this summer.” She said, now looking down at a book. “OK.” Clary said, and walked out of the lecture hall.  

   It was nearly noon when Clary got back to her dorm room. She got to the hall and saw that her door was open. “What the hell?” She thought. As she approached, she noticed that, not only was her door open, someone had completely ransacked her room. Not wanting to touch anything, she went back out into the hall and called the RA for her building. Five minutes later the RA arrived and took a look inside the room. “What happened?” He asked. Clary wanted to smack him. His name was Zachary Feldman, and he was an absolute moron. “Zach, clearly, someone broke into my dorm room and ransacked it, I am calling the police.” Clary said, rolling her eyes at the oblivious man in front of her. As she called the cops, Zachary walked into the room, looking around. “Do NOT touch anything, Zach!” She warned him. She informed the officer as to what had happened and they arrived twenty minutes later. “Glad it wasn’t an emergency.” Clary thought bitterly. After about an hour, the police left. They had dusted for prints, then asked her to go through the room and see if anything was missing. Oddly enough, the only thing missing was a dream journal she kept, and she informed them. They all but laughed at her and told her since nothing of value was missing that there was nothing they could do. Feeling sickened, she called her mother and told her about what had happened. After being interrogated by her mother, Clary hung up the phone and cleaned her room. While she was cleaning, she found a piece of paper with a partial logo at the top. It looked familiar but she couldn’t quite place it, but was sure that it was not something that she had had, and was sure that neither the police nor Zach had dropped either. She slid the strip of paper behind her phone in the phone case and finished straightening up her room. After she had finished it was nearly supper time, so she grabbed her, now repacked, suitcase and her car keys. She left the dorm room, making sure that she locked it and walked to the parking lot to her car. She had worked all through high school to be able to afford her own car. It was a 2018 Hyundai accent, four doors and a light gold, tan, silver color. It was a strange, and uncommon color and she loved it. The interior was black and tan, and she kept it as clean as she could, cleaning it every weekend, she even had air fresheners that made it smell like it was still a brand-new car. After she loaded her backpack and suitcase into the trunk, and she got in the driver's seat. Before pulling off, she hooked up her cell phone to the blue tooth and started her playlist on random. The song ‘Subject A’ by The Killing Moon started to play. As she backed out, she got a weird tingling feeling down her spine, like someone was watching her, looking into the back-up camera, she swore she could see a man with long blonde hair and dark eyes watching her from behind another vehicle. Shaking off the creepy feeling that she had seen him somewhere before, she put the car in drive and began her four-hour drive back home to Salem.