“Dude, I was just thinking about you!” Grinning broadly, Dylan looked up from his computer. “Saved me a trip. I was gonna ask you to check out my paper.”
“Sure, sure,” she stalled for time. “I’ve just gotta —” She glanced longingly at the bathroom door. “Um, wash up. You know, my hands are all… meat-loafy.” That was all she could come up with.
Meat-loafy?! Even if she hadn’t heard what Dylan was thinking, she could see it on his face. He thought she’d bugged.
“Yo,” he said aloud, “you weren’t eating with your hands. Anyway, what’s wrong with the door on your side?”
“Lock blew off,” she blurted. “I mean, the doorknob’s stuck.”
“Whatever.” He couldn’t care less. He had his own agenda. “Come on, Alex. It’ll take a second. Just read this thing, okay?”
“I…” She cocked her head and listened for Cam’s call, for any sign that it was time for her to rush back into their room.
Nothing.
Which figured.
She’d split only ten seconds ago.
The disguised clone thing that was trying to separate them probably needed a minute or two to regroup, to think of clever new nasties to turn them against each other.
“Okay. Just for a minute, though. I’ve got stuff of my own to do. So your paper?” Alex asked, ambling over to Dylan. “What’s it on?”
* * *
It took all of ten seconds for Cam to feel the icy wind stream under the doorjamb. Shuddering, she forced herself to walk casually to her bed where the Coventry textbooks they’d used before dinner were collected. Her intention was to scoop them up and get them out of sight before Alex’s clone entered — just in case the imp, who’d tossed the precious books into a trash bag last time, decided to do more damage to them.
She wasn’t quick enough.
Her arms were full of books when the bogus twin burst into the room looking frighteningly Alex-like with a major grump on.
Cam stared hard at the girl, trying to find a crack, some flaw, a detail that was off, something to convince her it wasn’t her twin she was facing.
“Yo, A-plus overachiever girl, what’d I tell you about messing with my books?”
If Cam hadn’t known better, she’d have sworn it was her sister. The clone had Alex’s snide-a-tude down pat.
“Bulletin, Als.” Cam’s voice sounded shaky even to her. “They’re my books, too. Anyway, you’re not going to need them, so what’s your point?”
“My point is I want them.” The creature, her nails the exact puke-green shade as Alex’s, reached for the books.
“For what?” Cam challenged, pulling them out of range.
“I’ve gotta brush up on a couple of spells.” The clone grinned maliciously. “I promised Cade I’d show him some real witchy tricks.”
“No way,” Cam shouted as if the real Alex had proposed something so dumb and dangerous. “You’re not doing magick for Cade or anyone else we know —”
“Oh, I forgot,” the imp said venomously, taking a step forward, her hands clawing for the books. “You and Cade are so cozy now that of course you’d know what would amuse him and what wouldn’t —”
“It has nothing to do with Cade!” Cam insisted, hugging the pile of books and turning her back on the Alex imitator. Speaking of, where was her sister?
“Want to see some real magick?” the intruder asked.
Cam sent a telepathic SOS through the imaginary peephole. Now, Alex. Shake it. She’s here!
Meanwhile, make-believe Alex’s hands ripped a book from the stack Cam was holding. It was The Little Book of Spells, the one their guardian wanted them to memorize.
The grinning imposter opened the book and stared intently at one of its pages. An edge of the brittle paper began to crinkle and then blacken. Cam heard an almost imperceptible sound, a crackling that gave way to a curl of smoke. The mischievous sprite was burning Ileana’s book!
Panicked, Cam tried to grab it back. Alex, get in here, now! she telegraphed.
Checking the imposter to see if she’d intercepted the call, Cam found herself staring into the girl’s Alex-gray eyes.
No one she’d ever met anywhere, not even on Coventry, had those exact same eyes. Their birth mother Miranda’s eyes and their cousin Ileana’s were gray — but not the exact shade and intensity of Cam’s. Or Alex’s.
Lying eyes, Cam thought. And all at once, she knew what to do.
The Truth spell was one of the first she and Alex had tried together. They’d used it to instill trust in someone too frightened to tell the truth. Whether or not this Alex-looking creature was frightened, she was lying; she was hiding something. Cam glanced around the room. There was no time for her to gather the right herbs — burdock, chamomile, or lemon balm, she remembered. There was no time to dig in her jewelry basket for the rose quartz crystal that had once belonged to Karsh. There was no time to wait for Alex.
“Oh, sun that brings us light and cheer, shine through me now to banish fear,” she began the incantation. “Free —” She was supposed to use the person’s name here, but she didn’t know who stood before her. “Free this fraud,” she decided, “from doubt and blame, win her trust and lift her shame.”
Nothing happened. Counterfeit Alex stood gaping at Cam.
“Okay.” Cam took a breath. Reveal, schlemiel, conceal … She had it. “Let me see through what she would conceal. Show me what she won’t reveal. Put an end to this crazy game, that I may know who she is and why she came!”
This time, the moment Cam stopped, the clone tried to cover her face. But it was too late. Cam saw her eyes, watched their color fade, their shape change.
Alex’s eyes, identical to Cam’s, were large and deep-set. The pretender’s seemed shrunken suddenly, their vivid gray giving way to dull brown.
And the clothes her so-called sister was wearing were changing, too. Within the outline of Alex’s body, a dark velvet robe appeared and disappeared. Like an object floating under a storm-tossed sea, the robe emerged, then sank beneath the jeans and T-shirt the clone had copied.
It was an optical illusion, Cam realized, one that she could only have witnessed with the help of the Truth spell. Amazing! She’d found a way to transform a human being without actually physically changing her. Alex’s duplicate wasn’t morphing. Thanks to the spell, Cam’s view of her was! She was “seeing through” the impostor’s disguise.
“I can do more than fry a book, sister,” the strangely altered girl threatened. “Watch this!”
But Cam’s powerful eyesight kicked into high gear, paralyzing her for a moment.
Instead of snatching back the precious book, from which a thin stream of smoke was rising, her attention was now riveted on the intruder’s face.
Not on her face exactly, more like under it.
Stunned, she began to recognize the girl’s subtly submerged features.…
Instinctively, Cam gripped her sun charm.
Alex gasped.
Dylan leaped up from his chair. “What?!” he asked, shaken.
She didn’t answer. Her entire being was on alert. Listening.
The sound she heard was demanding, angry, distant. At first it droned like an enormous agitated bee from very far away.
Alex grew dizzy. Her head ached; her eyes closed. She began to make out words.
Sow confusion. Reap dissension. Tear them apart. Make each hate you — and thus each other.
The voice was deep, perversely delighted, and familiar.
It belonged to …?
Alex’s hand moved to her moon charm. It had begun to grow warm. She felt the gold amulet stir against her palm, felt it push forward as if drawn by a magnet.
Thantos!
She saw him. In the blackness behind her eyelids, she saw the hulking, bearded tracker talking to a robed young witch. The girl, whose hair was hidden by the hood of her cloak, was staring at him raptly. Alex could not see her face. But she could see her uncle’s — spiteful, gleeful, mal
icious, determined. He was issuing orders.
He was commanding his underling … an apprentice witch who smelled of jimsonweed and nettle …
All at once, Alex knew who the girl was. Remembered her. Realized that Thantos, a tracker capable of transmutation, of changing human beings, was casting a spell over the creature.
He was ordering his treacherous servant to chip away at the twins, rip them apart, undermine them bit by bit.
Thantos took the urchin’s shoulders and turned her away from him. For a fleeting moment, Alex saw the girl’s true face. And then it changed. It became hers! And Cam’s. It was their bogus twin.
With great effort, Alex lifted her head and willed her eyes to open. Her skull was pounding. Her body was racked with chills. She knew the symptoms. She had seen Cam go through them often enough. But this time she was the one who’d had the vision. And it hadn’t been a prophecy of the future. It was a picture from the very recent past.
“Yo, what’s up?” Dylan was watching her, his eyes wide with fear and confusion. “Dude, what’s happening to you?”
Alex’s moon charm was red hot now. Suddenly, she heard Cam’s silent cry: Alex, where are you? I need help!
“Alex,” Dylan called to her, “say something. You’re freaking me.”
She hated to do it, but she had to.
Without herbs, without crystals, with nothing but her skill, her knowledge of the craft, and the amulet her father had forged for her, she recited the Lethe incantation.
A moment before Dylan fell into stupefied forgetfulness, she whispered to him, “Your paper rules, bro. Rest easy.”
* * *
“It’s Amaryllis!” Alex called, crashing into the bedroom she shared with her sister.
She’d half expected to find Cam in big trouble — singed by the Coventry witch’s fiery gaze. But her twin was all right. It was the girl who looked exactly like Alex, down to the sheen of her black-dyed hair, who appeared to be in harm’s way.
Wisps of smoke rose from the imposter’s jeans and sweatshirt. Her face was smeared with soot as if she’d just crawled out of a chimney.
Clutching a smoldering book — Ileana’s spell book! — Cam was glaring at the disheveled “Alex.”
“It’s really Amaryllis,” Alex gushed. “I recognized her smell and then I saw her face. Cam, I had a vision!”
“Oh, really?” Cam asked, ticked that her twin had taken so long to pop in. “And who are you?”
“Me?” Alex said defensively. “Yo, I’m your sister, your one and only twin. And she’s Uncle T’s tool, Amaryllis.”
“Prove it!” the smoke-damaged clone hollered from the floor.
Alex gave the girl a dirty look, then showed her sister her moon charm. “Camryn, it’s me,” she said, exasperated.
“Camryn, it’s me!” her clone quickly echoed, scrambling to her feet. Mimicking Alex’s frustrated cry, she pretended to grasp something at her throat.
But she was holding nothing. And Cam and Alex both knew it.
“Where were you?!” Cam demanded. “I’ve been trying to break through that dumbest-idea-of-the-decade ‘door’ of yours for five minutes!” The moment she said it, Cam realized her mistake. She’d forgotten to grasp her sun charm until the last minute.
“Well, I’m here now,” Alex was saying, “and so is Uncle Thantos’s latest messenger — emphasis on ‘mess.’ She was supposed to torch our books and make you think I was doing it. He wanted to turn us against each other again —”
“Give me news, not history,” Cam responded. “She started the fire, but I got it to ricochet, to blaze backward. I can’t believe he’s still pulling the same old tricks. Trying to split us up. He’s tried it how many times now? Three just with Shane —”
“See, you can’t blame me then, can you?” Amaryllis, still in her charred Alex incarnation, argued shrewdly. “I mean, I’m only one of his lackeys, just like Shane.”
“I am so not interested in Shane Wright,” Cam said too quickly.
Just as quickly, Amaryllis’s eyes, still flashing between gray and brown, lit up with new mischief.
“Shane A. Wright? Good thing, too. Since the buff boy is so not interested in you. Never was,” Alex’s replica declared. “It was me — I mean, Alex — all the time. You’re too spoiled and perfect. So the good girl. And talk about clueless! You bought everything Shane said. I guess you never got it, I mean how Alex was always more his type —”
“Just like Cade’s all crushed on Cam, right?” Alex challenged the malicious girl. “I’d say ‘nice try,’ but ‘pathetic last attempt’ is more like it.”
But Amaryllis had hit her target — Cam’s heart. Alex had heard her sister’s gasp, saw her quick tears spring up.
“Don’t go there. She’s lying,” Alex warned Cam, forgetting to send rather than say the message. “She’s just doing what Thantos trained her to do —”
“Sure I am,” Amaryllis insisted. “And I’ll use anything to do it — even the truth! Which reminds me, Camryn — remember Jason, the boy who would be boyfriend, your true-blue high school biscuit who’s at college now? He’s not all that wild about you anymore, either —”
“Shut up,” Alex ordered.
“Or what? You’ll use your famous telekinetic beam to bean me … with, say —” The girl surveyed the room. Her eyes lighted on the massive Morphing and Transformation Handbook on Cam’s bed. “— that book. Go on. Use your supposedly awesome glare for something other than gaping at me. Let’s see you make that sucker rise up and strike me!”
“Don’t!” Cam shouted, grabbing Alex’s shirttail as she spun toward the bed. “She’s just trying to get you to do something hateful. Something to mess up our viewing!”
“Aren’t you the clever twin?” Amaryllis mocked. “Grab a crayon and take notes, Alex. You’re kinda slow compared to Cam. She is so the pop princess. And so boringly always right. Oh, by the way, princess, your mom is definitely planning an at-home get-together for your birthday. A totally ho-hum dillyo. Ten people for supper. Supper!” She turned to Alex. “Guess that means you’ll be celebrating your sixteenth with the celebrated Six Pack. Oh, yeah, and Em’s doing the cooking! Isn’t that too cool? You’re in for a treat, one of her inedible barf-inducing specials! Guess the post-dinner festivities will be a spew fest. A fabulous night to remember.”
“No way!” Cam shouted. Then added less surely, “She wouldn’t.”
Alex turned toward the bed again as if she were going to telepathically hoist and lob the book across the room at the troublemaker. To add authenticity to the threat, she focused on the thick volume forcing it to fly up into her hand.
“Stop!” Amaryllis hollered. And when Alex faced her, the girl stuck out her Alex chin and said, “I mean, it’s your Initiation month. Vengefulness, unjust punishment, bullying a lesser witch — which I am; I’m not even scheduled for Initiation yet — all that is totally frowned upon. Big time. It’ll cost you major stones. You don’t want to foul up your viewing by doing anything sleazy to me.”
“Cam might not,” Alex said, letting the handbook drop and hoping the door to her thoughts was still locked, “but since I’m not going back to Coventry, I’ve got nothing to lose, have I?”
Her impersonator studied her, trying to make out whether she was serious or not. And then, as clearly as if she’d spoken them aloud, Amaryllis’s thoughts became transparent to Alex.
If Alex was telling the truth, then at least part of her mission was successful, the clone mused. She’d kept one twin from being initiated!
But would that be enough? Would it satisfy her demanding master?
It had to, Alex heard the girl tell herself. Hadn’t Lord Thantos said that stopping one of them would cut their skill and strength in half?
Despite the bluster, Amaryllis had begun to tremble.
As she heard the witch’s desperate thoughts and read the fear in her eyes, Alex’s anger began to cool. In its place came an unexpected pang of regret. She felt — wh
at was it?
Shame.
The emotion floored her, flooded her. She felt ashamed at having fooled the frightened clone into believing that she was going to skip out on her Initiation. Amaryllis was counting on it, hoping that it would appease their vicious uncle.
Wisdom, intuition, trust, courage, and honesty. The virtues on which she and Cam were being judged came back to her. She’d definitely lapsed on honesty. And probably trust. And what kind of courage did it take to taunt a terrified servant?
She was about to confess the lie to Amaryllis when the arrogant young witch dismissed her with a wave of her hand and a smile of pure malice. “Good idea. Skip the trip. Totally nothing to lose,” she assured Alex.
And then, as if she’d suddenly realized that Alex could read her thoughts, Amaryllis quickly scrambled them — and moved on to the next ploy.
“You know why Cade pretends to care about you? Because he pities you! Like, who wouldn’t? Talk about a raw deal. While Cam was being fed with a silver spoon, you were pitifully scraping peanut butter out of a jar. She got to keep both of her adoptive parents — and you got to be an orphan! And weren’t you the manipulating babe to spill all that to Cade?” The vixen turned to Cam. “She totally smeared you!”
Alex shook her head. “Not,” she told her sister. “The snake’s just doing her job.”
“Right you are.” Amaryllis jumped on it. “This con wasn’t my idea. It’s strictly a family affair. I’m just your uncle’s gofer. Just trying to do him a favor. Don’t murder the messenger, okay?”
Cam ignored her. “This is too weird,” she told her sister. “How do we get her out of that whack getup?”
“What are you saying?” Alex wanted to know. “She looks like me. What’s whack about that?”
“Okay, not whack, just confusing,” Cam back-pedaled. “I keep flashing between what she really looks like and this creepy version of you.”
“Wire your uncle,” Amaryllis suggested sarcastically. “He did this, he can undo it. And believe me, it was no day at the beach being either of you.” She held up her hands, making talking gestures with them, opening and closing her fingers like bird beaks. “Bicker, bicker, bicker,” she said.
T*Witches: Destiny's Twins Page 5