Fourteen year old Annie screamed and bolted upright in bed.  Breathing was difficult, heavy.  The dream was still etched vividly in her brain.  The intensity of it had caused her to perspire in her sleep, soaking her dragon print pajamas and gluing the long locks of her auburn hair to the back of her neck and her pajama top.
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Fist tightly clenched around the piece of paper toweling that she was holding, she shut her eyes and whispered aloud, “Please don’t be broken.”  When she opened her eyes, much to her delight, the glass was resting in one piece in the sink.
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“Oh, for Pete’s sake! Where did you go?”  Annie was excited, scared, confused and – curious.  “Oooookay.  That was fun.  Well, Fido, it seems that the Manor isn’t the only place that’s haunted around here.  I think we have ourselves a genuine ghost. 
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“Pardon me?” Without missing a beat, an enraged Xera picked up a knife from the table and threw it hard, hitting Sweetcakes directly in the stomach.  Sweetcakes clutched her stomach and looked up at Xera with great surprise.  “Hey!  What are you doing?”  She pulled the knife out and stuck her finger through the hole that it left.  “You made a hole in me,” she complained.  She offered the knife back to Xera and the hole in her stomach disappeared.
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Zolton was still snickering at his own bad jokes.  “Worthless, Goddess of bad spells.”  Then he started laughing so hard that he could hardly breathe, so he just lay there, wiping away his tears and gasping for breath.  “Oh,” he finally said.  “That was a good one.”
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Annie screamed as she was dragged face first to the tile floor.  In a daze from the fall, she lifted her head and found herself staring directly into the eyes of the beast.  She screamed, only stopping when she realized that the eyes were in a detached head, severed by the falling gate. 
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Annie heard someone scream.  She was horrified to discover that it was her! 
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Don’t you think that my father would have said something to me if I was a witch?  I’ve been reading about witches for years.  It never came up.  Not once.”
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“Wow.  I didn’t know I could do this,” she yelled exuberantly, twisting and turning in the air.  “Yahoo!”  Annie landed on her feet on the ground below.
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Annie stood up. She nodded her head.   “Right, I get it.  Let me guess.  Same color, same size.  This is the cat I rescued, but my guess is that she must have a lot more than nine lives!  I love this dream!”
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For whatever reason that was floating around in the silly gnome’s head, Zolton decided this would be a great time to sing.  From inside of his cage, he belted out, “Who’s afraid of the big bad gypsy, the big bad wolf, the big bad gypsy?  Who’s afraid of the big bad gypsy?  Tra la la la...”
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“She does experiments on people?”  Annie asked incredulously, shouting just a bit so she could be heard.  Then she had an awful thought.  “You are people, aren’t you?” 
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“Don’t you understand?” she screamed into the air?  “I’m trapped here and I can’t help you.”  She sobbed.  “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.  I can’t help save our home.  I can’t help you fight against Xera.” 
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Xera held her pointy finger and her thumb out in front of her like an artist lining up a subject and then she slowly started closing her fingers, squeezing an unseen item between them.  The lava, with Armana inside of it, grew smaller and more constricting with each squeeze of Xera’s fingers, until it was the size of a baseball. 
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Annie nudged her grandmother and winked at her.  “Now that I’ve finally arrived to help, it’s time to kick some butt.  Move over, Granny.  You make the magic and I’ll make the moves.” 
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