It Begins

Understandably, Holly was barely able to concentrate on work when she returned to the office. Her colleagues had been surprised when she came back from her lunch break with such a dramatic new look.

It wasn't inconceivable that she could have visited the hair salon in the couple of hours she was away from her desk, just out of character.

Nobody had ever known Holly without the long black hair that had been styled in the same natural way it had fallen since she was a little girl. The general consensus seemed to be that her new hairstyle suited her, and gave her a more mature and sophisticated appearance. But for her it would always be the look her master had chosen for her and she naturally resented it.

There was no doubt Holly's gamble on choosing an older, almost father like figure to reveal her curse to had backfired spectacularly. The only consolation she could think of was that he would probably die decades before she did. But that didn't help her much over the next twenty to thirty years. And what if he passed with her under a command to be invisible and forgotten? It would be impossible to reverse.

Unlike her sister, who Holly suspected had hatched her plan to tell a platonic friend about her curse several years ago so she didn't have to think too much about it, Holly had researched the Petersen hex painstakingly over the years. She had devoured everything she could find online, spoken to her mother and other older relatives and even visited the local library to search for any historical clues as to what may have happened in the past on the microfiche machine there. She was aware of small loopholes that she might be able to exploit here and there if given the opportunity, but understood she was largely powerless, particularly up against someone as smart as Professor Jarvis.

She had always known that by far her best option had been to say nothing to anyone and hope her curse was never discovered and triggered. There had been a decent chance of that, until Maisie told her friend, by which point it was only a matter of time before other people who knew Holly found out. She didn't blame her younger sibling for that though. Maisie had been at a very formative age when the worst of what had happened to Aunt Carly had been going down, and it wasn't surprising it had affected her badly. Maisie's intense fear of her curse being discovered accidentally had driven her to try and take control of the situation, at least as far as she could.

"Are you coming to the pub after work? A few of us are going for a drink?" Janet asked Holly at around 5 pm, after what had been a highly unproductive afternoon for the latter.

"I'd love to, but I'm meeting someone" she answered, honestly but with some fairly major details omitted, as she packed away her things and left.

As she checked into the modest hotel room that would now be her home, Holly wondered how she was supposed to live like this. There was a plain, decent sized bed, a TV with all the regular live channels she would expect, a functional en suite bathroom and a small and vastly overpriced mini bar. There was also a menu on a nearby desk that she could order room service from, but it wasn't cheap and she could hardly afford to live off that when she was already paying daily for a hotel room on top of her rent, the contract for which still had months to run. She would have to eat well on her lunch hours, as well as visiting the store then and picking up food that she could eat at the hotel, stuff that didn't need heating.

She sat on the bed and switched on a news channel, though what happened in the rest of the world was barely relevant to her now as this room, and what went on in it, increasingly became her entire existence. Her phone buzzed. It was a message from Professor Jarvis.

"Holly, leave the door unlocked and undress. I want you standing naked by the bed ready for me when I arrive in twenty minutes or so"

Text commands counted, Holly knew that. She sighed to herself, took the door off the latch and removed everything she had been wearing.

Then she just stood there in the nude, waiting to discover what was going to happen to her next.