T*Witches: Destiny's Twins (3 page)

Thantos had known all along that they, not he, had been chosen to lead their family. They and only they, two bright, still vulnerable young witches, fledglings, stood in the way of his grasping what he believed,
wanted
to believe, belonged to him — the wealth and power of the DuBaer dynasty.

He also knew, as did everyone on the island, that once the twins were initiated, their destiny — and his — would be sealed.

“Maybe he’s just been unlucky so far,” she told Rhianna, knowing how unlikely that sounded.

As they always did when her feathers were ruffled, the Exalted Elder’s wings suddenly unfurled. The
whoosh
of wind, a sound like the slap of sails filling in a squall, made Ileana jump back.

“First of all,” Rhianna sternly lectured, “we do not believe in luck! We create our own good fate through right choices and actions.”

It was all Ileana could do not to roll her eyes at the old saying.

“Yes, it was your grandfather Nathaniel’s wish, and your guardian Karsh’s mission, to place the girls where they might do the most good — at the helm of your extremely powerful and, may I say, increasingly troublesome family. They have but to pass their Initiation — which you and their mother assured me they will do with flying colors — to take their rightful place in our community.”

“Of course they’ll pass,” Ileana blurted. “But why should they be subjected to different and more difficult tests than other fledglings?”

“Because I say so,” Rhianna declared, leading Ileana to the door. “And I, not you, Ileana DuBaer, am their Initiation Master — exactly as Lord Karsh intended for me to be.”

CHAPTER FIVE

THE THIRD TWIN

“Do you think we were triplets?” Cam asked skeptically.

Alex shook her head. “No way. Everyone on Coventry, including our mother,” she pointed out, “says we were twins. No mention of a third party.”

Someone was playing them. Someone witchy. They’d been talking about it all weekend, trying to figure it out. Now, standing in front of Cam’s school locker Monday afternoon, the debate continued.

“Could it be a clone then?” Cam said. They’d gotten that far in their thinking. “Someone going around trying to make me believe she’s you — and then impersonating me when you and I are not in the same room. But how?”

“And who? And why?” Alex added. “And what am I supposed to have done today?”

The twins had called a tentative truce Sunday night so they could check out some of the reading material they’d rescued from the green garbage bag — which Alex had insisted she’d never seen before. She also, she’d claimed, had no intention of quitting, of ducking out on their Initiation, no matter what Cam had hallucinated.

“You insulted Bree at lunch,” Cam reported. “She was bragging about how valuable her advice was to her father and how he’d hired this studly star for his new movie just ’cause Bree told him to.”

“And I ruined her life how?” Alex waited for the explanation.

“You said, ‘Get over yourself, Pinocchio — your surgically improved nose is growing. Your dad couldn’t care less what you think.’”

“Ugh, that’s ugly,” Alex agreed. “And ‘you’ did your usual diss on my outfit.” She struck a pose, showing off the flannel shirt covering her sleeveless black tee, scruffy jeans, and scuffed Doc Marten boots. “You called me a goth cow, which I thought was way much and so out of date.”

“Okay, let’s review,” Cam proposed, lowering her voice as a crew of noisy juniors swept past. “We can’t be in two places at once —”

“Unless,” Alex mused, “we stumbled into some kind of spell. You know, like, said the wrong thing without realizing it or handled a weird combo of crystals and herbs —”

“We checked the books,” Cam reminded her. “There wasn’t one spell in them that could have given us personality transplants.”

Cam shook her head. “I mean, I know for absolute certain that I never put a spell on Cade. Please. That is so ridiculous. I mean, you saw me in the lunchroom, right? When would I have had time to get all next to him and then put him in a trance? Wasn’t me,” she asserted, pulling her art portfolio out of her locker. In about fifteen minutes, they
would
be in two places at once — they’d be in two different classrooms.

“Yes, and …?” Alex prompted, having picked up on Cam’s thought.

“The thing, the clone, whatever it is, only attacks us when we’re separated,” Cam explained. “Which we will be again the minute you’re in chem lab and I’m in Mrs. Wagner’s art class … unless —” Her striking gray eyes lit with sudden inspiration. “Unless we hang together —”

“Right.” Alex made a face. “I’ll just cut lab and show up unexpectedly for art with you. And my excuse will be?”

“No, no. We can’t stay together physically. But what if —” Cam was on it — “we keep in touch telepathically,
check in every couple of minutes?” Even though she wasn’t a fabulous mind reader, Cam had been able to tune in to her sister’s thoughts for a while now.

“Sounds like a plan,” Alex said, “especially since the bell’s about to ring.”

A few minutes later, standing at one of the sinks in the chemistry lab, Alex heard Cam ask,
Having a good time, Madame Curie?

Excellent,
Alex sent back.
Wearing rubber gloves and safety goggles really does it for me. How ’bout you?

There was no answer.

Cam,
Alex tried again.
You okay?… Hello, can you hear me?… Cam, what’s up?… Come on, you’re freaking me.

“Hello, I’m right here,” an impatient voice said. Alex looked up to see her sister glaring at her across the lab table. The moment she caught Alex’s eye, her expression changed to one of terrible pity.

“What are you doing here? How’d you get out of art?” Alex asked, looking around for Mr. Calio, the chem teacher. He was working with a couple of kids at the other end of the room.

“Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry —” Cam bit her lip, looked away, then turned bravely back to her sister. “It’s awful. But you’ve got to know. I just went to my locker to get my portfolio —”

“Another portfolio?” Alex asked. “What happened to the one you had before?”

Cam blinked at her. “It doesn’t matter. There was a note in my locker. From Cade. I don’t know how to tell you this —”

Alex’s heart flopped, fell like a busted elevator plummeting down a chute. “What?” she said.

“It’s over. He wants to break up with you, but he’s afraid that you’ll totally tank. He’s really a nice guy, Als. He’s just not all that wild about you anymore.”

It wasn’t Cam.

Just five minutes ago at her locker, Cam had been wearing her sun necklace. This … this creature … wasn’t. And her gray eyes were cold, colder than Cam’s had ever been. And again there was the scent of nettles and jimsonweed. A fragrance Alex remembered, she was sure now, from her last trip to Coventry.

She wasn’t that experienced with scrambling her thoughts, but she closed her eyes and pictured an iron door and willed it to slam shut over her brain.

Score one for intuition! The scheme must’ve worked. The Cam clone before her, pretending concern but really gloating, seemed to think that Alex had bought her story.

“Dude, I can’t believe it,” Alex said, glad that the
odor of the girl, or whatever it was, had set her eyes stinging again. A few tears would go a long way toward convincing the pretender of Alex’s misery — which had obviously been sham Cam’s goal.

“Are you mad at me for telling you?” the phony asked, not able to hide the hope in her voice. “I mean, just ’cause Cade chose to confide in me.…”

Whatever this Cam-copying creep was after, Alex was over it. She wanted to get rid of the counterfeit and check in with her real twin. Who knew what miserable hoax the two-faced twerp might’ve pulled on Cam?

But Alex played along. “Yeah. I’m mad at you, okay? I’m so mad that I’m —”

“Not going to Coventry, right?” The clone pulled a dejected face, but her eyes were alive with expectation. “You don’t even want to be initiated, do you?”

Bingo! That took care of
why.
Someone didn’t want Alex taking her witch vows. All she and Cam had to figure out now was
who
and
how.

“Yo, dude, you have so got my number,” Alex told the girl who would be Cam. “I wouldn’t set foot on Coventry now if… if… if some enchanted nut ball begged me to!”

Her make-believe “twin” looked confused.

“No Initiation, no way!” Alex insisted. “Now
hasta la vista,
babe, before Mr. Calio catches you here.”

*        *        *

“Well, that really worked,” Cam groused when they met on the front steps of the school. “I heard you for a minute, then there was nothing but static. I almost ran out of class to find out what happened.”

“But you didn’t because?”

“You know,” she accused. “You sent that snotty note saying I was a lousy mind reader and you didn’t need my help.”

“Cami, that wasn’t me. I didn’t send any note.”

“Excuse me. I think I know your handwriting,” Cam insisted. But after a beat, she added in a whisper, “It was her, wasn’t it?”

Alex nodded. “Our new ‘twin.’ The deal is she’s here to turn us against each other,” she continued, heading down the walk to the street, “and, more important, to keep us — or maybe just me — from going through with our Initiation. I’m sure of it. Now who would want to keep us from going back to Coventry?”

Cam didn’t have to think about it. “First guess? Uncle T. Although I can’t imagine him turning himself into one of us. He’s way too arrogant —”

“But he wouldn’t think twice about sending someone else to do his dirty work. It’s practically become a habit with him,” Alex pointed out. “Bottom line, the
ringer doesn’t want one or both of us to show for our Initiation.”

“You know, Als,” Cam said hesitantly, “sometimes I’m not sure I want to go through with it, anyway. … I mean, what’s really in it for us?”

Alex stared hard at her sister — if it
was
her sister, she thought.

“Hello, it’s me,” Cam shot back, waving her hands in front of Alex’s face. “Cam I am, Cam I am — I do not like always being in a jam!”

“Cute.” Alex was convinced. Their unknown nemesis didn’t have much of a sense of humor. They’d passed PITS, their favorite pizza hangout, and the CD superstore Music & More, and were walking up the hill toward home. “Well,” she began, responding to Cam’s query, “first of all, they say our magick’ll get much stronger —”

“Do we need it to be?” Cam asked.

Abruptly she flashed back to how she’d saved her best friend Beth’s life. And halted a trio of preteen troublemakers playing with firecrackers from blowing their hands off. And, yes, it was clear that the stronger her powers were, the easier it would be to play Wonder Cam, showing up for kids who needed help.

“But you said before, maybe this … thing … wants to stop just you — or me. Why would that —” Before she
finished the question, Cam knew the answer: She hadn’t rescued the pyromaniac brat pack alone last summer. She, in person, and Alex from a distance together had conjured up the spell that saved the kids. And together they’d once stopped a calamity at a Ferris wheel. The common adverb?
Together.

Cam remembered how exciting it had been, the thrilling jolt, the raw adrenaline rush of focusing all her energy and skill on helping someone in trouble. How much more could she do, she and Alex, when their knowledge of the craft and the amazing powers they were born with got kicked up a notch?

She might not need her powers to be enhanced, but did she want them to be? Enough to study this hard and face —

“Every witch and warlock on the island judging us?” her sister anticipated the question.

Cam smiled and shrugged. “I think I can handle it. How ’bout you?”

“I’m on,” Alex agreed as they walked along the tree-lined street to their house. Fallen leaves crunched underfoot, but the sugar maple, against which Dylan’s bike was leaning, was still aflame.

Cam stopped at the front door as another memory surfaced for her. This one wasn’t about anyone else — except Alex. She remembered how frightening and lonely it
had been to feel like a freak. To have no one to talk to about the strange things she seemed capable of. The Mutant of Marble Bay, she’d sometimes thought of herself.

“Yo, and I was the Crow Creek Crazy.” Alex invaded her sister’s mind again. “What’s your point?”

“That we’re family, not weird and alone,” Cam said.

“Gotcha. We’re weird and together.”

“Totally.” Cam laughed and then speculated, “And if we were separated again, I bet we’d go right back to feeling alone and out of place everywhere.”

“Except on Coventry,” Alex reminded her twin — and herself. “Which, by the way, is where our clone comes from,” she added. “Today, in lab, I remembered the smell — jimsonweed and nettles. I remember it from there — from Crailmore, I think.”

“Crailmore?” Her hand reaching for the brass doorknob, Cam stopped, interested. “Okay, who do we know who hangs out at the ancestral fortress besides Thantos and our mom?”

“The Furies,” Alex answered, naming the trio of treacherous witches they’d tangled with before. “Sersee, Michaelina, and Epie, but last time we saw them they were not fans of Uncle T. And Shane, of course — who changes his story every five minutes about whose side he’s on.”

“He is a sleaze, sad but true,” Cam lamented. She
opened the door. “Then there are Uncle T’s servants: the guy with the ponytail who was copying Karsh’s journal for him, and his trusty fledgling Amaryllis —”

Alex cut through the speculation. “Look, the fact that our demon look-alike has never shown up when we’re together gives us a way to flush the monster out. But where and when?”

“How ’bout our room? Tonight?” Sick and tired of being toyed with, Cam was suddenly psyched.

“Kind of ambitious.” Alex followed her into the house.

“No, no. Come on. We can do it,” Cam assured her sister.

“Yo, Cam-petition, check your cheerleading at the door,” Alex advised. “This is not a game of soccer we’re talking about —”

“Exactly!” Cam responded, her gray eyes already glimmering with gung-ho zeal. “It’s an emergency! I don’t know about you, but I can’t deal with deception, keep up with schoolwork, and study for Initiation all at the same time —”

“Is that you?” Emily called from the kitchen. She was rarely home this early. “Don’t come in,” she ordered, sounding both alarmed and elated. “I’ll be right out.”

Alex and Cam looked at each other. “We’ve got to let
her know we know about the sweet sixteen,” Cam whispered.

Alex vetoed the suggestion with a shake of her head. “We’re going upstairs,” she called to Emily. “Catch ya later.”

Cam scampered up the stairs behind her twin. “Well, something’s gotta go!” she hissed, back on track. “I vote that it’s our third ‘twin.’”