T*Witches: Kindred Spirits (3 page)

Cam needed to keep moving to keep that thought away. She went back to her search-and-rescue mission using her extraordinary eyesight to find and retrieve anything that might be valuable to Ileana. Underneath an especially dense pile of wreckage, she telescoped in on a painting. The canvas had been viciously slashed; still, you could tell it was a portrait of Karsh. The wise and loving warlock who’d been a grandfather to them: his smile kindly, his eyes twinkling — so alive! For some stupid reason, the portrait suddenly became too heavy for Cam and slipped out of her hands.

Alex picked it up. “It’s not just that he’s gone, is it?” Alex said intuitively. “You’re freaked about the funeral.”

Cam shook her head, denying it.

“Like Jason said, you stink at lying. Give it up, Barnes,” Alex coaxed.

“I’ve never been to a funeral before.” There, she’d said out loud what she’d refused to even silently admit to herself.

A surprising wave of tenderness washed over Alex. She knew just then how far she’d come. Or maybe it was
being here on Coventry. But instead of her normal reaction, “Oh, poor, pampered, sheltered you,” she heard herself comforting Cam. “It’ll be all right. We’ll be there together. Just squeeze my hand if you get scared. I’ll protect you.”

Alex broke Cam’s melancholy mood. “Oh, you will? Who’ll protect you? Let’s see, due to death, devastation, and loss of powers, the usual suspects — Karsh, Ileana, and our long-lost mama, Miranda — seem to be unavailable.”

Alex lifted her chin proudly. “I’m tough, I don’t need protection.”

There were noises outside the cottage, footsteps on the cobblestone path, and they both jumped!

Sensing danger, Cam focused her powerful eyes on the door. She’d stun whoever it was, blind the intruder. Alex telekinetically sent a broken chair leg into her extended arm. Holding it high, she so hoped it was Tsuris and Vey, just stupid enough to return to the scene of the grime-crime. This time, the T’Witches were ready.

CHAPTER THREE

A WALK IN THE WOODS

“You look shocked to see me,” the visitor exclaimed, taking in Alex’s defensive posture and Cam’s electrically alert eyes.

Disappointed but relieved, Alex put her weapon down and telegraphed Cam,
That’s the second time today someone’s said that to you
.

“Really? Someone else surprised you first?” His half-smile, half-smirk threw Cam for a loop.

Shane … Shane Wright? Warlock, mind reader, ultimate fly-guy. Once, they’d despised and distrusted him. He’d come to them as Thantos’s messenger, but during the course of his mission had done a lifesaving 180 and fought against their villainous uncle.

“How’d you know we were here?” Cam stammered, hoping he couldn’t hear her heart thudding. She’d forgotten how magnetic the tanned, tawny boy was.

He grinned and ran his fingers through his wavy hair, grown longer and a lot lighter since she’d last seen him; streaked with blond, it now brushed his shoulders. “Everyone on the island knows who you are and that you’re back.”

We are
, Alex agreed silently.

Not for good
, Cam thought at the exact same moment.

Shane raised an eyebrow, amused. “Look-alikes don’t think alike.”

The twins frowned at each other. Then Alex turned her wary gaze on Shane. “So what are you, the warlock welcome wagon?” She was no fan of his and didn’t really care if he knew it. Just because he’d refused to kill when Thantos ordered him to, didn’t mean they could trust him.

“Busted,” he conceded good-naturedly. “On what you said,
and
what you were thinking. I did come to welcome you, and I hope you’ll both come to trust me.”

“Sweet.” Alex let the sarcasm drip. “Only, bad timing of epic proportions. Check it out.” She motioned to the debris-strewn room. “A wreck-o-rama.”

“Courtesy of Morons, Inc.,” Cam added dryly. “Also known as our cousins, Tsuris and Vey.

“Fredo’s sons did this?” Shane seemed to notice the mess for the first time. He frowned and shook his head sympathetically. I can help you clean it up, if you want,” he offered.

“No. We should do this ourselves. Ileana’s our cousin.”

Cam couldn’t hide her disappointment. Alex was dismissing him. He’d been here all of three minutes.

Alex softened. “Look, do your welcome thing for Cam. Let me deal with this.”

“You sure?” Cam and Shane asked at the same time.

Hoping they didn’t lock pinkies or do something equally cheesy, Alex dismissed them. “Go. Just be back soon.”

With mixed emotions, Cam followed Shane outside.

Besides being buff beyond belief, the young warlock, who she’d first met in Marble Bay, was a bridge between her two worlds. Who better to help her
bond
a little with her … uh … native place? To feel whatever Alex was obviously feeling about Coventry. All she’d felt so far was the urge to leave. Then Shane walked in.

“I really did want to be the first to welcome you,” Shane said as they headed into the woods that surrounded Ileana’s cottage.

Cam tried but could not wipe the smile off her face or settle the flipping thing her stomach, acting independently,
had decided to do. There’d been a magnetic attraction between them from the moment they’d met months ago in Marble Bay. She’d never been able to shake the feeling. The way he was staring at her now was so not helping.

An uninvited thought drifted by, and she tried to brush it away. Jason. Sweet, caring, and daring, the hometown boy she’d left behind would do anything for her. Had she ever felt this way around him?

Shane did the half-smile thing at her. Had he heard that thought? When she felt his arm rest lightly across her shoulders, it was, she told herself, a comforting, friendly embrace — nothing more. She didn’t pull away, just savored being with him as they followed a path through the forest.

“Where are we going?” she asked. “Do you live near here?”

He shrugged and looked away. “I used to live about a mile and a half away. My family still does.”

“You moved out?” she guessed.

“I got kicked out.”

“Really?” What could Shane have done to get himself expelled from home?

“Difference of beliefs.” He answered her unspoken question with jarring swiftness. “They brought me up to believe as they do and didn’t like it so much when I began
to question their, uh, loyalties.” He tried to sound like it wasn’t a big deal, but Cam suspected otherwise.

“Was it about Thantos?” she ventured.

“They’re faithful to Lord Thantos. They think I’m not.”

“Is that how things are divided here?” she blurted without thinking. “You’re either with Thantos or against him? Can one person be that influential? I mean, he’s not the president or anything.”

Shane swung around to face her. “You have to understand, Cam. The DuBaer family is royalty here. For better or worse, they’re powerful and influential. So, sure, people have strong feelings about them. But like anywhere else, there’s the usual stuff that divides people: jealousy, greed, even love.”

A strange feeling of uneasiness swept over Cam. “So where do you live now? Other side of the tracks or something?”

Had Shane squirmed or was she imagining it? “I’m bunking with a friend,” he murmured, looking a lot like he wanted to change the subject.

He didn’t have to. The subject changed itself.

There was no breeze, yet Cam shivered suddenly. The hairs on the back of her neck rose. This was not a premonition nor a vision. But her senses became razor-sharp. She felt like prey in the woods. She knew …

They were being watched.

She swiftly checked over her shoulder, but before she could focus through the screen of branches, leaves, and thick bushes, Shane asked, “What’s wrong?”

Cam was embarrassed. It would seem so weird, so … babyish.
Someone’s here. Someone’s watching us
. “Uh, nothing.” She quickly switched gears. “Tell me about the island.”

The watchers waited in the woods. Waited for Apolla and Artemis, for Camryn and Alexandra. The twins had to be careful. Careful where they wandered and with whom.

Oh, really? And how would you know?
Ileana asked herself cynically.

She’d witnessed it, but had been helpless, unable to save Karsh from death. Nor, for the first time, could she help her young charges that awful day in the Salem Woods.

But that wasn’t why she’d been brought to her knees, devastated and debilitated.

Just before Karsh died, she’d gotten what she’d wished for all her life: to know who her real father was. Karsh had promised to tell her one day. Before he could, she’d found out. The one person on Earth she hated more
than anyone, her sworn enemy, the vile Lord Thantos. He was her father.

That was the moment Ileana had lost it, ceased being herself.

To say the least.

She seemed to have lost the supernatural skills and hypersharp senses that had made her an outstanding witch.

So it was very likely that the feeling she had, that Cam — or Alex — was wandering into dangerous territory, was totally wrong. Meaningless. A fear fueled by guilt.

Ileana should have been the one showing the twins around Coventry. She was, after all, their guardian. She should have been introducing Cam and Alex to those who’d heard of but never met, them: to the Exalted Elders of the Unity Council, to Karsh’s many friends and grateful fledglings, to the island’s best and brightest youngsters …

Instead, she paced the slate floor of Karsh’s cottage, tracing with the soles of her feet the grooves the old man’s tread had worn into the stones. Her orange tabby cat, Boris, lay in the corner, watching her.

Ileana’s once flawlessly shimmering hair was still a mass of knotted curls. She hadn’t rinsed the rust-colored
spots from the blue gown she’d worn for far too long. The blotches were bloodstains. Karsh’s.

Her bare feet were rough and dusty. She had cleansed them in soothing herbal baths but had no desire to choose or don a pair of proper shoes. In addition to the loss of her ability to cast spells, transmutate, transport herself, and sense trouble, Ileana seemed to have forgotten how to take care of herself. She’d accomplished nothing since returning to the island with her guardian’s body.

Back and forth before Karsh’s desk she strode, staring at the book
Forgiveness or Vengeance
. Carefully, she avoided glancing at the tall chair behind the desk. She could imagine the disappointed look the old warlock would be giving her if he were still here, if he were sitting in that carved wooden monstrosity, his bony fingers folded in a tent before him.

He would have suggested in his commanding way that Ileana ought to have made time to show the twins around the island.

Ordinarily, she would have.

But nothing was ordinary anymore.

Karsh, who’d been the only parent she’d ever known, was dead.

The twins’ mother, Miranda, had returned to Coventry after an absence of fourteen years.

And the sickening revelation about Thantos … she would not go to that place.

From the desktop, the grieving witch again lifted the book in which Karsh’s journal was hidden. It took all her energy to carry it as far as his armchair, less than a foot away.

On his deathbed, Karsh had spoken of a curse. Ileana had begun to wonder whether it might have something to do with a mysterious sleeping sickness. Every time the pale witch picked up
Forgiveness or Vengeance
, her arms felt leaden. When she tried to read his words, her eyelids grew unbearably heavy. Though she fought to stay awake, sleep always won. Thus she’d examined only two paragraphs of the story Karsh had urged her with his dying breath to read:

Ileana, precious goddess, guardian of Apolla and Artemis, my future has been shown to me and time is short. Therefore, I write this in haste. But, be assured, I am driven by love and truth, not fear
.

By now, of course, you know that Lord Thantos DuBaer is your father and that Aron and Miranda’s twins are your cousins. You and they share the greatness and danger of being DuBaers. What you do not know is that you carry, as well, the blood of another noble line, the Antayus clan
.

* * *

This was the passage that always confused and tired Ileana. How could she be an Antayus? Impossible.

She knew that Karsh — respected mentor, mighty tracker, renowned and beloved warlock — was of the Antayus clan. But as Karsh himself confirmed in his journal, Ileana’s vile father was a DuBaer. Her mother’s maiden name was Beatrice Hazlitt.

And Hazlitt, as everyone knew, was neither a noteworthy nor noble name. In fact, it was Beatrice’s lack of fine lineage that had turned Thantos’s mother, Leila, against her.

If her father was a proud DuBaer and her mother a lowly Hazlitt, how then could Ileana carry the blood of the mighty Antayus clan?

Ileana sank back into Karsh’s worn leather armchair. His sweet peppermint-and-thyme scent still clung to it. She longed to read more of the journal, to fulfill Karsh’s dying request. But again, her weary eyes began to shut.

“Help me, Karsh,” Ileana whispered as her closed lids locked out the little daylight left in the room.

Help me, Karsh
.

She had whispered, spoken, even shouted those words for as long as she could remember. It was a habit not easily broken. Not even by Karsh’s death, it seemed.
Against the black screen of her closed eyelids, colors began to swirl. Red, orange, purple. A sunset sky. Seen through strange black stripes … thick poles of wrought iron blackened by age … the bars of a prison window! Ileana was wracked with a deep, deadly coldness, the bone-chilling damp of a musty jail cell. The sunset she saw through the high prison window, she suddenly understood, was the last she would ever see. Whoever she was, wherever she was, she was doomed. Her execution would take place at sunrise.

Ileana fought to awaken, but something held her back, held her down. She was shackled to the stone floor. Heavy chains cut into her ankles and wrists.

“Confess!” a shrill voice demanded. “Repent!” a merciless one ordered. “I accuse Abigail Antayus,” a third called out. A girl’s voice, this last one, a mere child. “She’s the one who enchanted me!”

Ileana woke with a start. Drenched in perspiration, her heart palpitating wildly, she sat up abruptly in Karsh’s chair and tried to shake the terrifying nightmare from her mind. Her hand had fallen asleep. It tingled with pins and needles. She tried to lift it from the open book on her lap. Looking down upon it, she saw in Karsh’s precise, cramped handwriting the sentence:
It began in Salem in 1692 …