Read T*Witches: The Witch Hunters Online
Authors: Randi Reisfeld,H.B. Gilmour
T*Witches: The Witch Hunters (4 page)
“Word up, woman,” Dylan responded, grinning wide. “So what’s Cade say? When’s he getting here? Like, where is he now?”
“In England,” Alex answered, as Dylan moseyed over casually and checked out her computer screen. She didn’t add: “I think.” Because it was more than that.…
Cade was in England. In London, to be exact. In a hotel room …
Alex
sensed
it. Knew it.
It was as if Dylan’s question had flipped a switch. The moment she tried to answer it, this totally weird thing had happened behind her eyelids. Continents had scrawled by in a blur. Anonymous places and people. Their noise, at first a jumble of sounds, languages, and accents, slowed. Then the scrawling, which had been accompanied by a rising ticking noise, suddenly stopped. She couldn’t see anything. She just knew.
“He’s on his way,” she told Dylan, both shocked and excited.
It was Dylan’s turn to blink. “You didn’t open your e-mail yet. How do you know that?”
Alex looked at the screen. Dyl was right. The screen saver was still on.
She took a breath, sucking air for time. “’Cause I’m a witch,” she teased.
He frowned at her, not liking or buying the answer.
“It was in his last e-mail,” she lied.
“Better watch out, witchy sistah, the Witch Hunter’s gonna get ya.” Dylan struck another chord, then set down his guitar. “If you’re so witchy-girl cool, why don’t you track that maniac who attacked Brice Stanley the other night?”
Lightbulb. Track. The word popped out of Dyl’s sarcastic challenge. Tracker, Alex thought. Dave was talking about Sensitives and Protectors. But Karsh had been a tracker. The highest level a warlock or witch could attain.
Another word came to her. This one Dylan hadn’t spoken. Didn’t know.
Artemis. It was her birth name. What she’d been called as an infant, what she was known as on Coventry.
She’d read about Artemis in mythology books. Artemis, the huntress. Twin of Apollo, the sun god.
Surely, one of a huntress’s skills was tracking.
Now she remembered. At the premiere. She’d known the Witch Hunter had slipped away from them.
She’d seen his dark car doing 80, taking a corner at mach speed, escaping —
She’d known where he was then. Could she find him now? Could she locate him the way she’d just located Cade? Could she harness this unpredictable new power budding inside her? Could she track and nail the Witch Hunter?
At lunch, the twins usually sat at different tables. Cam hung with her Six Pack squad; Alex ate with Dylan and the slacker-boarder-rapper crew. They were halfway through lunch when the message came.
Cam got it garbled, muffled, nothing but a menacing murmur.
She quickly looked over at Alex — before the migraine came. Her head got suddenly heavy, as it did when she felt a vision coming on, but she could still focus. What she saw was her sister glaring around the cafeteria, trying to find the culprit who had just threatened them.
What did you hear?
Cam desperately telegraphed Alex.
Hold on. Wait,
her twin sent back, her gray eyes still searching the funky premises. The art-class friendship and diversity murals, stainless steel steam tables, and wall of corporately sponsored soda and snack vending machines.
Cam decided to scope out the lunchroom, too. And saw nothing special. Just the usual suspects slouching in molded plastic chairs, chowing tray cuisine at neon-bright tables, their humongous backpacks at their heels. And the teachers, of course, laid back against the walls or cruising the aisles like prison trustees on a cushy assignment. And, alone at a table in the corner, the school’s rarely spotted new maintenance man, Mr. Golem.
A commotion at her table called Cam’s attention home. Bree was pushing away from the table, screeching, “Don’t shpritz my cashmere!” Hand over her mouth, Kristen was cracking up. Beth was gathering napkins, trying to mop up the mess on the table. And Amanda was gently patting Sukari’s back. The girl had choked on her soft drink and was coughing and spraying carbonated slush from her nose.
Cam’s mind was becoming cloudy. Willing herself to stay alert, she turned back to Alex, a couple of tables away.
You did hear something, didn’t you?
she asked again.
It was him.
Her sister finally, silently spilled it.
Scythe sucker, the freak from the premiere.
The Witch Hunter?
Cam asked.
Or someone who shares his anti-us obsession.
“Oh, no, I think he saw you!”
For a moment, Cam thought the last line came from Alex. But it was Amanda. When Cam turned to her questioningly, Amanda laughed. “Sukari’s crushed out on Mr. Spenser. All he has to do is glance her way and she can’t remember which way is swallow and which way is spew.”
Mr. Spenser was the AP science teacher. And Sukari was acing his advanced placement course.
“’Manda!” It was Sukari, somewhat recovered but still dabbing at her nose with a Beth-given napkin. “It has nothing to do with crushes. The guy is old enough to be my father. He’s just… I don’t know. Intense. I get nervous around him is all.”
“He is kind of intense,” Amanda said, eyeing the teacher in question … or rather, his back as he ambled out of the lunchroom.
“Well, he’s no Brice Stanley.” Bree had been bringing all convo back to the premiere since the gala event.
“Excuse me, can I talk to you for a minute?” Alex’s sudden appearance at the Six Pack table and the impatient tone of her voice was an instant conversation killer.
“How’d you tear yourself away from slacker central?” Kristen ventured.
Alex silenced her with a look. “Camryn,” she said.
Cam, for once, was happy to get away from the Six Pack dish. She got up and followed Alex over to the vending machines.
“Can you believe it?” Cam said. “He’s here! The Witch Hunter is
in our school
.”
And I heard him. I heard something,
Cam thought, but wasn’t sure.
Alex had read her mind — much more clearly than Cam had been able to read the Witch Hunter’s.
“Did you also smell him? I did,” Alex asserted, “and either his scent and sending range are awesome or he was somewhere around the cafeteria.”
Shocked and trembling, Cam asked again, “What did he say?”
“He said,” Alex answered, “‘I see the three of you. I know who you are. I know
what
you are. And soon, everyone will know.’”
“The three of us?” Cam said. “Who is he talking about?”
“Yo,” Alex shot back. “It’s not just who he’s talking about. It’s who’s doing the talking.”
The girl had summoned him. Summoned Thantos DuBaer. Arrogant little guttersnipe, the hulking warlock thought, as he trudged beside the choppy waters of Lake Superior. Listening for her footsteps, he heard only the
whish
and
shush
of waves lapping Coventry’s rocky shore.
He was in a hurry. Eager to leave the island and rush to the CompUMag plant in Massachusetts. How strange, he pondered, that there should have been a factory there all these years, a DuBaer-owned facility just miles from Marble Bay, where one of his nieces had lived for the past fifteen years and the other had come to more recently.
Had he spent more time at the CompUMag factory in Massachusetts this year, instead of his plants in Montana
and California, he would have been within striking distance of the troublesome twins.
Well, he intended to make up for that oversight. As soon as the wretched little witch arrived to tell him what was so urgent.
Sersee Tremaine — he could not remember what her name had been when she arrived on the island. Or how old she had been. Eight, he thought, or nine at the most. She had come alone — angry, arrogant, a child who had turned against her Protector on the mainland and bragged about escaping from him.
How she had survived, Thantos couldn’t imagine. But he knew that the wild young thing and her cohorts made their home in the woods and caves of Coventry. That she was said to be extremely skilled at the craft, had spied on enough ceremonies and initiation rites to have picked up powerful secrets and dangerous magic.
He knew all this because, not long ago, the girl had expressed interest in becoming one of his fledglings.
The lakeside wind pelted Thantos’s cheeks, ripped through his dark curls and thick black beard. Expressed interest? The irritated warlock shook his head. That hardly described the campaign she had waged to capture his interest. And she had. The headstrong ragamuffin had intrigued him. But ultimately he had found her too rash
and undisciplined, entirely too self-centered, to serve any master but her own bloated ego.
“Lord Thantos.”
He looked up, annoyed at having to shield his eyes from stinging sunlight in order to search the cliff for her.
“I’m here.” A slender figure in a flapping cape waved at him. “I’ll be right down.” Exasperated, he noted the trick. Through instinct or purpose, the arrogant little witch had found a way to snatch a trivial advantage, to have him blinded by sunlight, to literally stand above him. He had been right to be wary of her.
“I have a gift for you,” she promised, as she scrambled, goat-sure, down the face of the cliff. “I’m glad you came. And you will be, too. It will be worth your … inconvenience.”
Was she mocking him? Thantos searched the girl’s eyes, purple as mountain asters. They were intentionally hooded. She had put up a screen to protect herself from inspection. Her thoughts, scrambled, closed to him, were as guarded as her gaze.
He could, of course, break through her safeguards. He was a tracker, after all. But the effort would be too time-and-energy consuming. Blast her. What was this … gift… that she had used to lure him?
“Why, it’s right here, Lordship.”
She was smiling coyly. Pleased to prove how adept she was at reading
his
thoughts. Thantos closed his mind to her — and reached for the book she had brought him.
“What is this?” he asked, noting the title —
Forgiveness or Vengeance.
But when he opened the book, he found, in its hollowed-out space, a sheaf of handwritten pages.
“The old warlock’s last words,” Sersee answered. “I think you’ll find them interesting. I did. And surely Ileana must have. She is, after all,” the little witch added, smiling insolently, “your
daughter
.”
Thantos bit back the desire to immobilize the impudent urchin with a glare. He focused on the pages instead. And there they were, in Karsh’s crabby scrawl, his father Nathaniel’s words:
From this day forward, only women will decide the fate of the DuBaer dynasty. Tell my sons that none of them will rule, none will lead. I am the last patriarch. But they will provide leaders
—
their wives and daughters.…
“Fascinating, isn’t it?”
“Quiet!” Thantos roared.
Sersee’s slender shoulders hunched immediately. She spun away, covering her face with the hem of her billowing cape as if expecting the powerful tracker to try to
catch her eye, to call up a spell that would silence her permanently. Or worse.
“Why did you bring me this … this senile old warlock’s fantasy?! What did you expect to gain?”
The cape still covering her face, Sersee’s voice was muffled. “Only your … regard, Lordship. I wished only to prove my worth to you.”
“You want my regard, yet you cower before me, you don’t trust me,” Thantos shouted at her.
Sersee turned cautiously. Warily, she let down her cape. Still more guardedly, she looked directly at the mighty tracker.
Thantos smiled. And stared into the young witch’s remarkable violet eyes. And with a wave of his hand, paralyzed her.
“Can’t sleep?” Cam asked. She didn’t look over at Alex’s bed. She didn’t have to. Even if the full moon outside their window hadn’t lit their room like a 100-watt bulb, her twin had been grunting and shifting and muttering for what seemed like an hour.
“Understatement alert,” Alex answered, mimicking one of the Six Pack’s favorite sayings. “Is it Mr. Golem in the basement with a hood or Mrs. Hammond’s secretary in the principal’s office with a detention slip?”
“You’re obsessing about the Witch Hunter?” Cam sat up.
“Same as you,” Alex snapped back, kicking off the covers
and sitting up, too. Having read her twin’s mind, she added, “Why? Did you think Cade was my only obsession?”
“Guilty.” They faced each other in the moonlit room. “At lunch. He said three again, Als.”
“I’m the one who heard him,” her sister reminded her. “Three. That’s you, me, and someone else. Let’s do the math. The Witch Hunter said ‘three of you’ at the premiere, and ‘three of you’ in the cafeteria. Who’s been with us both times?”
“The Six Pack?!” Cam said incredulously.
“That’s right,” Alex answered. “One of your crew — who, as far as I can tell, are exceptional only in how boringly ordinary they are. Can you imagine Beth casting spells or Bree having a premonition about anything other than when shoes go on sale at The Bootery?”
“This is insane,” Cam said. “Are you really saying that one of my friends is a
witch?
”
Alex thought for a second. “Well, the Witch Hunter got us and Brice right. So obviously he knows something we don’t.”
That shut Cam up. “How about Amanda?” she finally asked. “She’s always been totally open to mystical possibilities —”
“And you know that because she wears sandals, toe rings, and Indian print skirts?”
“That’s not fair,” Cam protested. “’Manda’s extremely empathetic. She’s deeply intuitive about other people’s pain and distress —”
“So is the pet psychic,” Alex pointed out.
“Are you through?”
“And she does it without crystals, candles, and incense,” her sister added. “Okay. Now I’m through.”
“Sukari’s out of the question. She’s a rabid realist, a skeptical show-me girl,” Cam announced, beginning to feel sleepy. “That leaves … Kristen? Could she be a witch?” she asked doubtfully.
Alex shook her head. “Only if it would impress Bree. Cam —” She turned serious. “How could he know about us unless he’s a witch — or a warlock — himself? And if he is, why is he on this rampage against, you know, his own kind?”
Cam had been mulling that over. Her talk with Dave had reminded her of what Brice Stanley had said about the man — that he probably had some advanced degree of intuition or ESP.…
Alex picked up on her twin’s thoughts immediately. “You’re saying he’s not a dues-paying, initiated member of the witches union?”
“I didn’t
say
anything,” Cam reminded her, annoyed. “If you’d use your mind for something other than eaves-dropping
on mine, you might come up with some other possibility.”
“Why bother?” Alex was too intrigued to argue. “Come on, spill. If he isn’t a warlock or a full-fledged fledgling, then what? You think he’s a Sensitive?”
“A Sensitive or — ” What had Dave called it? Cam stretched drowsily. “A failed Protector. Someone who was supposed to support and take care of a young witch or warlock but hadn’t or couldn’t.”
“A failed Protector?” Alex shivered, which let her know that Cam, with Dave’s help, was onto something. “I’ll tell you what I can’t stand,” she announced. “In addition to not knowing who or what this guy is, I can’t stand not knowing
where
he is! The whole idea that he’s creeping around the school, hanging out in the lunchroom —”
“Als, did you see Mr. Golem, you know, the maintenance guy or whatever? There’s something creepy about him. Did you see him in the lunchroom today?”
Alex leaned forward expectantly. “Why? Did you get a vibe from him?”
Cam shrugged and fell back onto her bed. “No,” she said, snuggling back under her soft summer blanket. “No vibe. Nothing. It was just a thought.”
“How ’bout tomorrow we sneak down to Mr.
Golem’s office in the basement and scope it out,” Alex suggested.
It was lunchtime. There’d been a Golem sighting in the cafeteria again — complete with Bree pointing and whispering, “Yeuw, he reminds me of the nutcase at the premiere.” And Beth’s blasé response, “
Everything
reminds you of the premiere.”
With less than twenty minutes before classes began again, and who knew how long before Golem himself decided to return to his den in the bowels of Marble Bay High, the twins jumped at the op to check out the maintenance man’s home base.
Knowing they had to work quickly, they crept down the fire stairs, Cam noting the big ax hanging next to the foam canister on the first landing, Alex sniffing the cool, dank air hoping to pick up the putrid scent of the Witch Hunter.
The school basement was a maze of rooms. But only one door had a hand-lettered sign on it that read
KEEP OUT.
That was the one Alex pushed open after a quick nod from Cam.
Golem’s habitat reminded Alex of a cave. And since the most memorable cave she’d ever been in was the one on Coventry Island where she, Cam, and Jason had been held captive, the place gave her the heebie-jeebies.
Cam, whom Alex would have bet would be even more spooked poking around the school’s subterranean depths, seemed oblivious to the fact that they were underground.
To be fair, Golem’s domain was much nicer and totally better kept than the dungeon where Sersee and her pals played.
There was nothing visibly strange on the maintenance man’s desk or on the thick wooden table above which his tools were neatly arrayed.
Using one of his ladders, Alex checked out the tops of what seemed like miles of insulated pipe hanging from his workshop ceiling. Cam helped herself to gloves from a box of carefully matched pairs and snooped under, around, and over discarded water heaters, old circuit breaker boxes, and what looked like an enormous cold and rusty furnace.
All the while, the twins agreed, there was no real juice in the place, no heat, no telltale vibe that sent shivers down their spines or raised hackles on the backs of their necks.
They had only a few minutes left. While Cam went through the contents of a metal file cabinet, Alex examined an old wooden cupboard filled with folded rags, cans of turpentine, brushes of every size, and gallons of the puke-green paint that covered the basement walls.
And there was a pint of brilliant red paint, too, sitting in a small, spilled puddle — which Alex discovered was wet when she stupidly tested it with her fingertips.
Through the pale fumes of paint and turpentine, the rotten-egg smell came to her. And then her hyper hearing picked up a door creaking at the top of the stairwell and Mr. Golem’s shuffling tread.
The next thing she knew, Cam had seized her hand and pulled her out of the workshop. In the basement corridor, they faced a warren of doors, almost all padlocked. Twirling helplessly, trying to find a place to hide, Cam spotted one that was open a crack.
They charged through the door a second before Golem reached the landing.
The room was pitch-black. The windows had been painted over. And the toxic-dump stench was stronger here than in the maintenance man’s headquarters. The smell was more about the Witch Hunter than the unwashed dampness of a cellar.
“What can you see?” Alex asked, trusting Cam’s super-sight to scope out the tiny room they’d escaped into.
“I think we’re in … like, a broom closet,” Cam ventured. “I mean, I don’t see any actual brooms, but there are … shovels and … crowbars, I think. And, like, random tools lying around.”
“But what smells?” Alex pressed. “Are there rags
around or, like, a stinky mop? Something — anything — odor could cling to?”
Cam looked around, sniffed the fetid air of the closet, but couldn’t smell what Alex did.
“Over there. In that corner.” Taking her twin by the shoulders, Alex turned her toward the place the stench was strongest. “Can you see anything in that corner?”
“Yes!” Cam yipped. “There’s a bag on the floor. A big canvas bag, almost like a duffel, but with brown leather trim and handles —”
A blinding light lit the dark room. Cam put her hands over her eyes. Alex winced at the electric brilliance. Suddenly, their hiding place was bright as day.
“What are you doing in here?!” Mr. Golem demanded, a giant searchlight in his hand. He seemed as startled to see them as they were to see him. “You kids are not allowed down here. No kids allowed. You could get hurt. Or worse.” He spotted the red paint on Alex’s hand and became wildly agitated. “You were messing with my things, weren’t you?! You should never have come down here —”
They didn’t apologize; they didn’t even bother to make up an excuse. The adrenaline pumping in their chests suddenly hit their feet and they bolted, half expecting to feel Golem’s thick hands trying to hold them back.
