Spellbound: The Awakening of Aislin Collins Read Online Free PDF Page A

at… ME? My eyes widened. The
onlookers started surrounding me and I could feel the heat of the
torches on my skin as they closed in. I stood frozen with fear as
his spell started working on me again. I felt paralyzed and
powerless against him.
    “Bring her to me,” the leader ordered as he
jumped off the platform, away from the great flames that shot up
into the dark sky. The woman had stopped screaming now. In the back
of my mind, I assumed she was dead. Taken hopefully by the smoke
and not the flames, but I did not know. I could hear his heavy
boots crunching on the pebbles and earth below his feet as the
crowed parted to let him reach me without interference.
    “You escaped me once Aislin. It won’t happen
again,” he said when he was merely meters away. I looked around,
determined to escape, but I found nowhere to flee. Then I heard a
voice strong and forceful in my right ear.
    “Aislin you must wake up! Break the spell,
wake up!” he screamed at me.
    I sat straight up in bed, sweat covered my
entire body and my heart was beating as though it would explode. I
rubbed my eyes and sat in silence, encircled by the darkness of
early morning. It was my protector, the stranger who saved me at
the port had saved me again, but how I did not know. The other man,
the Grey Man, was still after me and he had found a way to invade
my dreams. I had nowhere to hide anymore.
    I wrapped my quilt around me and walked over
to the window, staring out into the darkness. I saw nothing. I half
expected to see the Grey Man staring up at me, ready to finally
finish me, but my eyes were greeted with the dimness of the last
moments before dawn.
    As I was turning from the window to dress
for the day, I noticed something catch the light of my candle. I
looked on the ledge of my windowsill and saw something lying
outside the glass. I slowly opened the pane and reached carefully
through the little crack.
    My hand landed on an object, small and soft.
I pulled it in and shut the window tight. I held the item to the
light of the candle. It was the garnet necklace, on the silk cord,
that I had been holding at the port.

CHAPTER FOUR
October 23rd 1734
     
    My mother and I spent the entire day placing
protection charms around the house, my father’s shop, the stable
and all our animals. We then spent the remainder of the evening
looking through the book in search of answers for what I had
encountered. We established that a dark spell had been used against
me and that its conjurer was a powerful wizard, but we could not
find a motive for such an act. We found numerous creatures that
possessed the ability to move with great speed and possessed great
strength but none in the shape of a man and none that could walk in
the light of day. Why had I been targeted and who was this Grey
Man?
    By the time my father came home, we were
both exhausted and my mother barely got the floorboard in the
kitchen back in place before he walked into the room.
    My father looked fatigued. Deep lines and
dark circles rimmed his tired, bright blue eyes and his graying
hair was messy from a long day’s work. He walked over and kissed me
on my forehead, “Are you feeling better?” He was a man of medium
build, but his long hours spent hunched over the parchment made him
slump slightly forward, giving him the appearance of being much
shorter than he actually was.
    “Aye,” I replied while smiling up at
him.
    I could see great concern in his tired eyes
and I felt his anxiety as though it was my own. Then again, I had
many reasons to feel anxious.

CHAPTER FIVE
October 25th 1734
    Mid morning
     
    I was home alone. Mother had gone to the port
to buy the fabric that I did not have time to get when Abigail and
I had gone before. The house was quiet and she had left me to
continue my search through the book. My cat lay curled up around my
feet as I sat in the chair near the window of the sitting room
flipping through the pages and trying to connect numerous spells
and