The Hexed. Heather Graham

of the Puritans who had first settled in the state—it was natural that people here took a wicked long time to progress.

      He played football, and he was good. Six-one, strong and sleek and quick, he had set his mind on being the best quarterback possible, and it looked as if he was going to have his choice of scholarships. But that meant hanging in and hanging tough with football and his grades. He was lucky, too. Well, lucky in a way. He had leading-man looks, and when the school drama club was doing The Crucible, he was cast as John Proctor. He would give all of it up, though, to have his dad back.

      On Friday nights when training was over, he met up with friends and they went to a movie or sat around a coffeehouse, or occasionally went into Boston for a concert. It was the same group of friends he’d hung out with forever. Haley Marshall, who he’d more or less gone out with until they’d recently called it quits; Jack Grail, lineman; Vince Steward, guard; Renee Radcliff, captain of the cheerleading squad—and Melissa.

      They’d known one another since they were kids.

      Peabody was fairly small. Population just about fifty thousand, give or take a thousand or two. The town had once been part of Salem, but it had become a separate entity as time went by and the world grew. But there was more out there, and he intended to see it.

      He was good, and he wanted to make the pros. If he didn’t make the pros, he wanted to join the FBI. While his mother could trace her family back to the damned Mayflower, his father had hailed from Texas, where he’d been a sheriff. Late in life he’d fallen in love with Rocky’s mom, so he’d been almost seventy a year ago when he’d died of a heart attack. The pain still assailed Rocky often, but he was grateful for his father. It had been better to have him for sixteen years than anyone else for a lifetime.

      And he was definitely going to be a lawman, with or without a football career first. FBI. An agent had come to town when he’d been ten and spoken to an assembly, and he’d known since then that was what he wanted to be.

      The sound of Melissa’s voice rose, interrupting his restless thoughts.

      “Rocky!”

      There was a sudden banging at his bedroom window. He started and sat up, staring. Melissa was there, her face white. He couldn’t hear her anymore, but when her lips formed a word he knew what she was saying.

      Rocky.

      His name, nothing more.

      He heard more banging and realized it was coming from the front door. He leaped out of bed and checked the clock. It was still early, just after 8:00 p.m.

      He looked back to his bedroom window, but no one was there.

      Too many teen slasher movies, he decided. They were fun, though. The girls crawled all over you after a slasher movie, and Haley, completely at home with her sexuality, had been no exception, for which his raging hormones would be eternally grateful. But she had realized he was really planning on leaving, while she just wanted to get married and have babies, so now when the movie ended she was all over Vince or Jack as she tried to figure out who was the best candidate for marriage and settling down.

      He didn’t care—he knew he wasn’t what Haley wanted. He just didn’t like it that now Melissa Wilson, apparently with Haley’s blessing, was yearning after him all the time.

      It was odd, he thought. If it was slasher movies that unnerved him, it should have been some kind of a homicidal monster at his window. A killer in a human skin mask or something. Instead, he saw the face of Melissa Wilson. She was five-three and a hundred pounds, tops. Not too scary.

      Whatever. She was gone. And the banging at the front door continued. He got up and went to see what was going on.

      It was Vince. “Hey, man,” his friend demanded, “your mom’s working late?”

      His mother was a “vice president” at a small ad agency. In reality she was a glorified assistant with a title instead of a decent salary.

      “Yeah,” he told Vince. “They’re shooting that Welcome to Salem ad tonight—in Peabody.”

      “Close enough, I guess. I got a couple of beers. Come on out—we’ll hang in the truck, and that way we can toss ’em quick if she shows up,” Vince said.

      Rocky shook his head. “My mom can smell beer a mile away.”

      “Chicken!”

      “Yeah, well, that and our English test is tomorrow, and I have to ace it,” Rocky said.

      “Wow. Some wild and crazy hotshot you are,” Vince said.

      Rocky shrugged. “You said you’re going to community college until you figure out what you want to do. Well, I know what I want.”

      “NYU or Harvard,” Vince said, grinning. “Maybe Yale.”

      “Notre Dame. But, hey, I’ll sit in the back of the truck and watch you down a few.”

      Vince shrugged. “Suit yourself.” Vince was huge. Six-four, close to three hundred pounds. He was great to have on the football field. He might have taken it somewhere—he just didn’t have the ambition.

      “I don’t get you, buddy,” Vince said, opening the back of his Ford pickup and crawling into the bed.

      As he did so, another car drove up. It was an ancient Toyota. Best Jack could buy, and then only with his dad’s help.

      “Hey!” Jack called. He wasn’t as big as Vince; he was lean, with wiry muscles.

      “Come and join us—back of the pickup,” Vince said as Jack got out and greeted them with a grin. “Haley hasn’t got you cornered?”

      “Don’t know what’s up. I think the girls were going shopping. Now hand me a beer.”

      “See, Rocky? That’s what boys do when the girls aren’t around—they drink beer and watch football,” Vince said.

      “There aren’t any games on,” Rocky reminded him.

      “Okay, so we settle for drinking beer,” Vince said.

      “School night,” Rocky said. “And I have plans to get out of this town.”

      Vince looked at Jack and Rocky, grinning. “Rocky, you got it all wrong. Peabody is a great place. Close to the action in Boston when you want action. Away from people when you don’t want a crowd.”

      Jack laughed. “I think you’re talking about the wheat fields of Kansas or something. We have neighbors almost on top of us.”

      Vince popped a beer and lay back on one of the plastic cushions he kept in the truck for “entertaining,” as he called it, looking up at the sky. “Yeah, in some places you got old Victorian on top of old Victorian. But there’s still some wooded land available. And reasonably priced, too. I get some trust money when I graduate, and I’m buying land.”

      “To do what?” Rocky asked.

      “I don’t know yet—I just know I’m buying it.”

      “Yeah, well, I don’t have any trust money coming,” Rocky told him. He crawled up into the bed of the truck, but he didn’t lie back.

      “Witch’s moon,” Jack said.

      It was huge and full, Rocky noticed. The local Wiccans were probably all out forming circles or whatever it was they did.

      “Werewolves a-howling,” Vince said, laughing.

      Rocky frowned, listening intently. Just as Vince had spoken, he could have sworn that he did hear something. Not a howl, exactly. More like a sob.

      “What was that?” he murmured.

      “You hear a werewolf?” Vince laughed.

      “No,” Rocky said, glancing at Vince and rolling his eyes. “But something. Shut up and listen.”

      Melissa. Melissa Wilson. She was