T*Witches: Double Jeopardy Read online

  Their uncle was studying them now, his black-bearded face frowning.

  Despite her outburst, Alex was shaking. Remembering the dizziness his glare could cause, Cam had lowered her eyes. She would not look directly at him.

  He shook his head. “Amazing,” he muttered, then sighed, sounding almost melancholy. “Do you have any idea how much you resemble your father?”

  The father you murdered? Cam thought but dared not say.

  Of course, Thantos heard her anyway.

  “I see you’re not up on the news,” he roared, cured of his sentimental moment. “I’ve been exonerated. Cleared of all charges.” He stood and began to stomp back and forth before them. “Oh, dear,” he said sarcastically in a wheedling voice, “have Karsh and Ileana kept you in the dark? Failed to fill you in on the happenings that made history on Coventry Island last week? Check with your guardians. I had nothing to do with Aron’s death. I did, however, have much to do with your mother’s survival —”

  “We know where she is,” Alex blurted.

  “You had her locked away in an institution,” Cam accused.

  For a time they had believed Miranda was dead. Once they suspected she was alive, they began to search for her. Recently, a truly bizarre set of circumstances had proved that their mother was living hidden away in an institution — the exact same exclusive clinic to which Cam’s friend Brianna had been sent.

  Bree’s e-mails about a fellow patient who was looking after her — a beautiful woman who wore her long auburn hair in a single braid, had eyes the same silver-gray color as the twins’, and wore a necklace similar to the precious ones Cam and Alex’s birth father had made for them — led to a phone call from the birth mother they’d never met. It was during that brief call that Miranda had promised to visit them soon.

  Thantos stopped pacing and whirled on them. “I did what was best for your mother.”

  “You locked her away,” Cam persisted.

  “But we found her,” Alex boasted.

  “Not without my help.” Now it was Thantos’s turn to gloat. “Who do you think chose the clinic your friend was in — the place where young Brianna just happened to meet a lovely, lonely woman with a necklace much like your own?”

  Shocked, Cam and Alex looked at each other. “No,” Cam declared.

  “Don’t believe him,” Alex advised. “You couldn’t have arranged that. You’re not that powerful,” she challenged her uncle.

  He was angry, weary, frustrated. “Foolish fledglings!” With a wave of his hand, his nieces flew backward, landing against Cam’s bed. “Sit down!” Thantos ordered.

  Eyes wide, hearts racing again, they did.

  From beneath his velvet cape, the hulking tracker drew a leather pouch and took a number of objects from it. Among them, Cam saw the translucent pink glow of rose quartz. And Alex smelled mint and the subtle balm of chamomile.

  “Is that all Ileana and old Karsh have taught you?” Thantos asked disdainfully. He opened his huge hand. “What of moonstone, agate geode, or iron pyrite? And this root, have you learned what mandrake is for? Or how to release the power of valerian?”

  On Cam’s dresser sat one of the scented candles her friend Amanda had given her. “Light it!” their uncle ordered. Cam’s eyes flew open and focused on the candle. A familiar heat rose inside her, nipped at her eyes, first sharpening her sight and then, as the candlewick blazed, blurring it with tears.

  Alex watched, fascinated, hypnotized, as the warlock tossed bits of mandrake root and valerian into the flame.

  “What do you see?” he asked in a voice soft and dark as his black velvet cape.

  In the dancing firelight, they saw — Cam, who was used to visions, and Alex, who had never experienced one — they saw Dylan!

  Helpless. Terrified. Trapped.

  He was inside a dark iron box, stumbling amid empty cartons, bubble wrap, and packing crates, a trash-smeared container smaller than a room, larger than a coffin. Dylan was trying to scale its rubbish-greased sides when a roar caught his attention — and theirs. As he looked up, Cam and Alex could see through his eyes a mechanical mouth opening, its jaws lined with steel teeth.

  The roar grew in intensity until Alex had to clamp her hands over her aching ears. And as the clanking howl increased, the steel mouth widened and lowered as if it would crush the entire iron box in which Dylan was caught.

  He was inside a Dumpster, Cam realized. The noise was the ruckus of a big garbage truck backing up … about to seize the trash, and Dylan, from the Dumpster … into its iron-clawed maw.

  “No!” Cam shouted. “Stop!”

  With the hiss of a giant snake, the candle flame went out.

  Thantos smiled at them. “It was only a thought.”

  Cam had experienced such “thoughts” before, only she knew them as premonitions, visions of what was to come.

  “No,” Alex whispered to her. “Don’t worry. Dylan’s not trapped in that disgusting contraption. He’s safe. He’s in his room. I saw him a minute ago.”

  “She’s right,” their uncle said. “It was a mere exercise … a demonstration. But accidents do happen —”

  “Why are you here?” Alex asked. “What do you want?”

  “Only to help you,” Thantos answered, sounding improbably gentle and sincere. “To help you and Miranda. I know how eager you are to meet her at last, to look upon your true mother and see a part of yourselves. I know you have been waiting for her to call you again. But she can’t. She won’t. She will not call or come to you unless I bring her.”

  “When?” Cam asked.

  “It’s been fifteen years,” Alex murmured. “How much longer are you going to keep her locked away, hidden —”

  “You mean,” Thantos said, “how much longer will you have to wait? Not long.” He smiled. “A bit longer than your friends at the pizza shop have been waiting for you —”

  “Whoops,” Cam yipped, as if waking from a dream. “We’re supposed to be at PITS —”

  Alex glared at her. “How can you think about that at a time like this? Don’t you want to see her?”

  “Of course,” Cam told her sister. “More than anything.”

  They heard Thantos chuckle and turned toward him. Where the hulking tracker had stood, now only a coil of dark smoke drifted, and a distant, retreating voice announced: “As my mother, your grandmother Leila, used to say, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  WHO ARE YOU?

  Be careful what you wish for …

  Ileana sat on the cool sand, facing the ocean. Her tangled hair and solemn face were damp with sea spray carried on the evening breeze. Her eyes were sad, unfocused. But Leila’s words sang in her head like vengeful children, taunting her.

  Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah! Be careful what you wish for!

  Ileana had gotten everything she’d wished for. Always.

  It had been a hallmark of her personality. Willful, bossy, beautiful, and bright, the vain young witch had never been one to wait her turn.

  She had prided herself on making things happen.

  She had wished for Truth and Justice. And she had made this happen — this lonely, gloomy exile.

  The joke was on her.

  Truth: A long-standing wrong had been righted.

  A murderer had been exposed and punished.

  The dark cloud of doubt that had hung over Coventry Island for fifteen years had finally been lifted.

  Single-handedly, Ileana had done what no one else had been able to do.

  Only somewhere on the road to Justice, Ileana had been robbed.

  Some would call it comeuppance.

  The haughty me-first witch with the superiority complex had been kicked off her high horse. Tumbled. Humbled. No one would recognize her now — neither her fervent enemies nor those who professed to love her.

  Here in this tropical paradise, Ileana was ghostly pale from days spent in a darkened bungalow. Her normally vibrant gray eyes were clouded, her lustr
ous pale hair tangled and matted.

  What did it matter that others would not know her? She didn’t recognize herself.

  Amnesia? If only she had it. Alone on the beach, Ileana shook her head.

  Her problem was that she could remember. All of it.

  As Leila had prophesied, what she had wished for — and passionately believed in — had turned on her viciously. Betrayed her, like so many of those she’d trusted.

  She had believed herself to be an orphan, lucky enough to have been reared by Lord Karsh, the good and powerful old warlock who’d taught her everything she knew about the craft, about life. Except the one thing she’d wished for — the name of her father.

  Now she knew it.

  She’d wished for a soul mate and believed she’d found one in Brice Stanley, a world-renowned movie star and secret warlock who, Ileana had been confident, loved her.

  But Brice had testified on behalf of Thantos DuBaer — Ileana’s sworn enemy.

  What she believed, with every bone and breath in her body, was that Thantos DuBaer was a murderer, the vicious killer who had slaughtered the twins’ father — and possibly their mother — and had been trying for years to snare her young charges, Camryn and Alexandra.

  So passionately had Ileana wished to expose Thantos, to bring him to justice, that she had done the nearly impossible.

  She had summoned the restless spirit of Leila, the deceased matriarch of the DuBaer clan, mother of Thantos, his miserable sibling Fredo, and their murdered brother, Aron.

  Surely their mother knew the truth.

  Ileana had wished for Leila to settle the matter of who had killed gentle Lord Aron. Again, her wish had come true.

  Leila had identified Fredo as the fiend, proving Ileana wrong and turning the monstrous Lord Thantos into a slandered hero.

  And Fredo, spiteful, cruel, inept, with no sense of right and wrong, had shouted out the final truth. That Thantos, the warlock Ileana had despised all her life and had tried desperately to bring down, was her father.

  The lazy waves now washed over the dejected young witch’s sandaled feet. She should get up, Ileana realized. The evening was turning cold. The tide was coming in. She should get up. But why, for what?

  As if in answer, raucous laughter drifted to her from down the beach. If there was anything she didn’t want to hear right now it was laughter and young voices, loud, elated, and carefree.

  Ileana dragged herself to her feet. Standing on the same lonely strip of beach she’d paced for the past several nights, she gazed out at the ocean. As foamy water lapped the hem of her turquoise caftan, she noticed a piece of driftwood bobbing on the water. It was directionless, unanchored, tossed this way and that at nature’s whim.

  A perfect metaphor, Ileana thought. In it, she recognized her new self.

  The partying grew louder, wilder. She would have liked to ignore it, but she couldn’t. Along with the wind-carried noise came a feeling of looming danger. The awareness broke through her self-absorbed funk, and she tried to zoom-lens in on the bash down the beach.

  Had she gotten sand in her eyes? Had staring out at the ocean dulled her sight? She saw a shaft of leaping orange light but couldn’t make out exactly what it was.

  For a moment, she thought: So what? Who cares?

  Her sense of jeopardy, of children in trouble, grew. Despite her cynicism, Ileana found herself drawn to the unknown trouble. She tried to lift off, to levitate, and catch an airstream that would transport her to the mishap at once. Instead, her wet feet churned clumsily through the sand.

  What she finally saw was a group of teenagers, some lounging on blankets, others kicking up sand, chasing one another around the flaring light of a large campfire.

  A campfire, Ileana noticed from some yards away, that was being fed and spread by the wind. Hissing red embers shot into the air, landing on blankets that were much too close to the fire. Some of the laughing children stamped on the hot coals with their bare feet, smothering wayward flames.

  But two youngsters sat on an old bedspread with their backs to the light, unaware that the flames had begun to lick the dry chenille edges of their blanket.

  Ileana called out to the couple and, when they didn’t hear her, she sent them a psychic 911, ordering them to get up, get off and away from the blanket. But they seemed not to have gotten the message.

  Finally, when she was within earshot of them, Ileana cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted, “Fire!”

  The moment the shocked duo heard her, they rose and ran. Ileana focused on the now-flaming blanket. Telekinesis, the ability to move things through mental concentration — one of Alex’s precocious gifts — was old magick to Ileana. She pictured the flaming bedspread lifting off the sand, drifting up, and plunging into the ocean.

  She was about to turn aside and go on her self-satisfied way when she realized with horror that the blanket hadn’t moved.

  But the fire had. Hot embers were spattering the clothing of several children. There was smoke coming off the rolled-up cuff of one boy’s khaki pants; soon his trousers would be aflame. And the flames would spread. Six teenagers, the same age as Cam and Alex, Ileana realized, might be burned.

  Quickly, she began to perform a spell. The words sounded hollow to her. The crystal in her hand remained lifelessly cold, the herbs in her pouch dry as dust. Suddenly, Ileana had an idea of what was happening and gasped in terror.

  In a flash, she remembered when she was a child, about the age of these rash teens, only a year younger than Camryn and Alexandra were now.

  She remembered how Miranda, their mother, had lost her husband and been consumed by a grief so terrible that it had muted her magical powers.

  Was that what was happening to Ileana? Were all the awful truths she’d learned too fast breaking her spirit and stealing her skills?

  Panicked screams pierced the night as the fire continued its deadly, scorching spread. A girl swatted at her sarong, trying to beat out the flames. But it wasn’t enough.

  Ileana tried again. Telekinesis, spells, psychic messages, levitation. Nothing. She was helpless in the face of real danger. She could not do the most important thing she was sworn to do as a witch. She could not help.

  The young girl was screaming.

  “Get down!” Ileana shouted at her. “Roll in the sand. Wade into the surf. Hurry!”

  She could not count on her voice rising above the noise of the ocean and the panicked shouts, so she ran from one child to another, pulling them down, pushing them toward the water.

  While they shrieked and rolled and splashed and turned a disaster into an adventure, Ileana stood, stunned, staring at the campfire.

  Her powers, her gifts, all that made her an enviable witch had been swept away.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A PREMONITION

  Spindly and tall, his muscles taut, Karsh clasped both hands tightly around the broom handle. He swung it like a golf pro, confident, steady, accurate. Swoosh! Cobwebs disintegrated. Dust balls scattered like mice fleeing a cat. And wasn’t he, he thought happily as he took another swipe across the wooden floor, quite the cat. What did the kids say? The hep cat, the cool cat? What might young Camryn and Alex say? Something like that. He grinned.

  The recent trial, at which he’d represented the people of Coventry Island, had rejuvenated him. For the first time in a long time, Karsh felt truly invigorated, back to health, in top form. He scanned the sitting room of his cozy Coventry Island cottage, anxious to give it a thorough cleaning. He flexed a bicep. Like the broom he gripped securely, there was nothing he couldn’t handle.

  Unexpectedly, Karsh caught a glimpse of himself in the now-gleaming polished wood floor. He laughed. His reflection mocked his feelings of vitality. He looked like a wrinkled old man, with nappy white hair, skin so crinkly and papery thin as to nearly be translucent, ancient eyes hooded and dimmed by age. Well, what was that other expression? Can’t judge a book by its cover?

  His blue eyes danced as he crossed
the room to his wall of bookcases, crammed with dozens of volumes. The cracked spines had names such as The Universal Craft Guide, Herbs of Coventry Island, Forgiveness or Vengeance: Righting Ancient Wrongs, Spells to Conjure With….

  The handsome leather-bound books might deceive the unschooled, but any wise witch would realize the pages held incantations, tenets of herbal science, laws of tracking, of transmutating — all practices of the craft. Some books had been hollowed out so sacred amulets could be stored safely inside them.

  For instance, the one titled Sticks and Stones was really a velvet-lined box filled with unpolished gems, mineral-laden amulets, and ancient crystals. Few would know that among the geological trinkets were five sacred stones, gathered from five hallowed sites: ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Machu Picchu, the caves of Coventry Island, and Salem, Massachusetts.

  There were other kinds of volumes as well, books that told of ancient curses, of how to do harm. Karsh had often thought of disposing of those permanently. But he could not. Yet.

  There were photos interspersed with the books. Snapshots of his family, now all long gone, and portraits of friends — mostly of the fledglings he’d taught through the years. He picked up one of Ileana, his most volatile charge, and shook his head sadly. What she must be going through now!

  He gently removed the photo from its glassed-in frame. Hidden behind it was a picture Karsh could neither bring himself to toss out nor look at. He picked it up and stared at it. Taken long ago, it was a snapshot of a young warlock standing tall, smiling broadly, his chest puffed out. The young Karsh’s arm was casually flung around the shoulder of another man, this one also young, a bit shorter and broader, and also grinning.

  Nathaniel DuBaer. His long-dead best friend. They’d been so full of hope in those days, firmly believing that the best of life was there for the taking. That they were invincible. But fate had other plans.

  Glass shattered, splintering all over his freshly swept floor. Karsh would realize later that the framed photograph had slipped out of his hands and crashed to the floor. As he’d been staring at it, a familiar sensation swept over him. No matter how many times it happened, he still feared it: the icy chill that swirled about him, the constriction of his throat, the beads of sweat forming on his forehead. As always, Karsh’s ears rang loudly, obliterating any other sound. His eyes stung, his vision blurred, then sharpened.