Ominous

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2011 by Alloy Entertainment and Kieran Viola All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

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Produced by Alloy Entertainment 151 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

Typography by Liz Dresner
The text of this book was set in Filosofia.
Manufactured in the United States of America
2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2010935877
ISBN 978-1-4169-8472-6
ISBN 978-1-4424-1288-0 (eBook)

For Mom, who’s my biggest fan

I couldn’t move. Outside Billings Chapel, the wind howled. The ancient floorboards overhead creaked and groaned. My bones were like ice. I stared down at the title of the book in front of me, hardly able to absorb what I was seeing.

THE BOOK OF SPELLS.

This could not be real. I wasn’t actually standing in the basement of a centuries-old chapel faced with a dusty, leather-bound spell book. I felt like I’d just stepped into a Nancy Drew novel and taken over as the heroine. Tentatively, I reached out to touch the cover, but before I could, the book was snatched away.

“You
have
to be kidding me,” Noelle Lange blurted out, holding up the heavy book. Her dark, windblown hair was fanned out over her shoulders and her face was red with fury. “This is why she sent us here? A
spell book
?”

My heart caught as she waved the antique tome around like it was
no more valuable than an out-of-print dictionary. “Noelle—”

“You know what I’m going to do with this, Grandmother?” she shouted at the book. “I am going to track you down wherever you are right now and smack you upside the head with it!”

“Noelle, just … calm down. Don’t go psycho on me now.”

She hesitated but threw the book back down onto the podium, tossing up a cloud of dust that filled my nostrils. I coughed painfully.

“Oh,
I’m
the psycho?” Noelle said sarcastically, yanking her cashmere scarf from her neck with shaking hands. “Right. Because
I’m
the one who sent us out here in the middle of the night in a snowstorm to find an old book!”

She threw the scarf over the back of a chair and unbuttoned her wool coat. Apparently her anger was making her hot.

I walked over to the podium and opened the book, and all the air went out of my lungs. There, in handwriting I’d recognize anywhere, were the words
Property of the Billings Literary Society
.

Elizabeth Williams had been a student at the Billings School for Girls back in 1915. I had spent so much time poring over her writings in the Billings Literary Society book, I could probably copy her script by now. I felt like I’d gotten to know her since reorganizing her secret society at Easton Academy. I knew what colors she liked to wear, how she was fiercely loyal to her friends, how she loved living away from home. But now I felt as if I didn’t know her at all. Because nowhere in the BLS book had she ever mentioned a word about spells, or witchcraft, or this huge volume we’d just discovered. Not one single word.

Noelle stormed over to my side and nudged me out of the way. She opened the book to the center—to a page titled “The Purity Spell”—then quickly flipped the pages forward and back.

“What’re you doing?” I asked.

“Checking to see if it’s one of those hide-a-key book things,” she said. “You know, with a big chunk cut out to hide something that actually matters?” She heaved a sigh and slammed the book closed. “Nope. Nothing. Unbelievable.”

She started across the room, grabbing her scarf again as she went, coiling the ends around both hands and pulling it taut. “You coming?”