T*Witches: Split Decision

by Reisfeld, Randi

  All in all, Alex decided, the mainland wanna-be looked like a cross between Nightmare Barbie and a hip-hop L’il Mike.

  Fists on her hips, Michaelina pouted. “Who died and left you trend queen?”

  Alex shoved her hands in her jean pockets and tried to stifle a laugh. “To answer your original question, if you’re trying to fit in, that would be a resounding no.”

  “Who said anything about fitting in? I asked if I could pass for a mainlander. I copied your look.”

  “You didn’t copy me, you did a hostile takeover. And BTW, I don’t have ‘a look.’ ” Alex retorted.

  “Are you always this grumpy in the morning?” Michaelina turned away sullenly. “There are charms to banish the morning grouchies, you know.”

  “Are there any to banish you?” Alex parried.

  Michaelina’s shoulders slumped as she faced Alex again. “I thought you’d be flattered,” she muttered. “I was trying to be like you, not follow the crowd.”

  “Point taken,” Alex conceded. “We can work with it.”

  The micro-witch brightened. “Come in. Check out my new place.”

  Alex trailed Mike into her digs, which were oddly tepee-shaped. Daylight filtered bleakly through the only window, a slanted skylight desperately seeking a scrubbing. “It already feels like home,” Michaelina proudly announced.

  “So, homes.” Alex purposely accented the word. “What are you really doing here? On the mainland, in this —”

  “Hovel?” Michaelina guessed.

  “You could put it that way,” Alex responded.

  “I never expected you, you of all witches, to diss my digs,” Mike challenged. “You’ve changed. A lot. When did you get all trendoid?”

  On the bus ride over, Alex decided, not caring whether the petite witch picked up the thought. She’d been shocked at the nabe where Mike had chosen to live. Who knew this area existed just outside the pristine Marble Bay, Mass? She was shocked, too, at her own squeamishness as the bus rolled by block after block of burned-out, boarded-up stores, rickety, run-down houses, abandoned cars, and graffiti-sprayed buildings and fences —

  “Oh, and that tin-trap of a trailer you grew up in was pure luxury, right?”

  Alex was taken aback. Had she ever discussed her pre-Marble Bay life with Michaelina? The canny young witch had done her fact-checking. But why?

  “We all have ‘before’ lives, don’t we?” She was smiling when Alex looked at her. “Mine would make your hair stand up — if it wasn’t already spiked to the max. Truce, okay? Can I get you something?”

  Alex followed the girl to the farthest corner of the narrow room — and felt as though she’d been kicked in the chest. The kitchen setup — a two-burner stove on a peeling wooden counter and a dismal mini-fridge — was almost identical to the one she’d grown up with in Montana. With Sara.

  “This is a dump,” Alex struck out, ignoring the lump in her throat. “But at least it’s aboveground. As opposed to your old address.”

  “Ooooh, low blow.” Michaelina pretended to be hurt.

  The caves of Coventry Island, underground and undetected, had been the Furies’ cold, barren hideout.

  “The truth, Michaelina,” Alex demanded. “Give it up —”

  The petite urchin ignored her, opened the half-fridge, and stepped back so that Alex could look inside. “Uh-oh, empty.”

  But it wasn’t empty. On the refrigerator shelf stood a jar of peanut butter, one pocked tomato, and a wilted head of lettuce. Exactly what had been in the fridge the day Alex realized that Sara was very, very ill. The same day she had first glimpsed Cam … Could it possibly be a coincidence? Coincidence or —

  “Conspiracy?” Mike chuckled cheerfully. “Get real, Alex. You think I toted this in?” The pixie swung the fridge door shut. “What say we hike down to the deli and grab us a couple of lattes?”

  Alex didn’t have to be asked twice. “No more lies,” she demanded after they’d traipsed down the wobbly stairs and hit daylight. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

  “What’s the use? You won’t believe me. You still don’t trust me,” the diminutive girl answered, taking two steps to keep up with every one of Alex’s. “I came because I thought you were cool. And I wanted to see where and how you lived. And because there’s nothing to keep me on Coventry anymore. After you and your sister skipped out, the gang sorta broke up. Epie’s doing a bid in juvie. Shane’s gone straight. And Sersee’s licking her wounds —”

  “And you?” Alex persisted.

  “Me?” Mike shrugged. “Okay, coming clean? Nobody wanted me there. Not Sersee or Shane or even my own family — what was left of it.”

  “Meaning?”

  “I’m an orphan. Or I might as well be. My moms split when me and my sibs were babies. My pops tossed me out when I was ten. Said I reminded him of Delta, that was my mother’s name. Said I was nothing but trouble and never would be anything else.” Michaelina looked away, but not so fast that Alex couldn’t see the girl’s nose getting red and her eyes misting with tears.

  “So you came because —” Alex had a sudden thought. “Do you think your mom is on the mainland? Is that why you’re really here?”

  Michaelina was honestly perplexed. “Uh, no. Why would I do that? I like my freedom. A mommy figure isn’t what I’m looking for. Okay, my turn,” she piped up, completely over her emotional moment. “I get to ask you a question.”

  “Knock yourself out.” Alex surrendered, her gray eyes sweeping the street, looking for whatever trouble might be brewing in this trouble-prone stretch of town.

  “When you did sell out?”

  The question startled her.

  “When did you become conformo?” the pixie went on. “You grew up in a poor neighborhood, but you hate this one. You’re all scared of it. You’re laughing at the way I’m dressed, just the way people used to laugh at you. You put up this front of being indie girl, but you don’t even want to believe I’m here on my own, doing things my way.”

  Alex fished for something to say. All that came out was, “How are you affording this? Where’s the coin coming from?”

  “I borrowed some,” Michaelina said carefully. “And I put a tiny spell on the landlord to make him think I’d be good for it. Besides, I thought I’d do the righteous mainland thing and get a job. Unless you disapprove of that, too? I mean, the Barnes are probably sharing the bling-bling with you.”

  Alex’s back went up. She’d refused to take any more money from Cam’s folks than she absolutely had to — even if they were now her legal guardians. No designer duds, no cool computer, new CDs, not even a magazine subscription. Her most prized possession was a guitar, Dylan’s old one. Even her bike had been Cam’s castoff.

  Apparently Mike hadn’t read her mind. Or wasn’t interested in her defensiveness. “So when did it happen? When did you become your sister on the inside, too, instead of your own person?”

  Alex’s attention was suddenly diverted by a clamorous metallic sound. Three little boys were coming toward them. They were kicking a can. Their bantering voices, which she heard from far off, sounded oddly familiar, though she knew she’d never seen the boys before.

  Michaelina was oblivious to the trio. “You know I’m right,” she insisted. “You used to be a free spirit —”

  The voices. They belonged to the kids who had been playing with fireworks on the Fourth. They were the boys she’d helped Cam save.

  “When did you get sucked into playing the game by someone else’s rules?” Mike nattered on. “When did you stop being you?”

  Alex heard the question. She turned away from the ragamuffins and tried to scramble her thoughts so that Michaelina wouldn’t know she’d hit a nerve.

  Despite her insistence on not owing anyone anything, in the past year she’d gotten used to living well — under the Barneses’ roof and rules. So what if she hadn’t started dressing like Cam and her crew. Was that all that remained of her fierce independent spirit? Had she re
ally, as Michaelina mocked, strayed so far from her roots? From the person Sara had brought her up to be?

  If Sara Fielding could see her now, what would she think of Alex?

  “There’s the witch!” Wide-eyed and trembling, the three boys were staring at her. “She’s the one from the beach. Let’s get outta here!” they cried over their shoulders as they hightailed it up the street.

  “What was that?” Michaelina wanted to know.

  Alex tried to shrug nonchalantly. “How should I know?” she replied, to keep herself from saying what she knew to be true. Even they think I’m my sister.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE SECRET PASSAGE

  The hidden door behind the dresser in Thantos’s childhood bedroom beckoned Cam. Despite the excitement of her amazing day with Shane, something drew her back here. She needed to find out where the strange hatch led — before she could decide if it was worth mentioning to Miranda.

  Pleading exhaustion, she’d gone to bed early. In the middle of the night, when she was certain her mother was asleep, she made for Thantos’s room, careful to move the dresser out of the way slowly and quietly.

  The small door was unlocked and swung open easily. It opened into a murky tunnel, which Cam followed to a stone stairway. It led into the caves of Coventry Island. She’d been there before, lured by Sersee. She wasn’t scared, though, as she descended the stairs, which twisted and spiraled. The creepy quotient was definitely daunting. She’d bet Thantos used this secret chamber to torment his terrified brother Fredo.

  At the bottom of the stairwell, Cam found herself in a high-ceilinged, circular cavern. Like rays from a black sun, five tunnels led off in different directions. As she stood in the center of the dark vault, a strange feeling came over her.

  It was neither a vision nor a premonition coming on. She did not grow dizzy or hear the loud buzzing that usually heralded her prophecies. She simply knew something suddenly that she had no rational way of knowing.

  There was a book.

  She hadn’t read it but somehow knew a portion of its contents. The book told of what lay beneath the soil of Coventry, what — and who — she might encounter should she journey farther, deeper into this part of the fabled caves. What kinds of inhabitants, more dangerous than the Furies, might be found. Here spirits of the dead roamed, and others, deranged souls who struck out blindly at any who dared enter. These wretched apparitions could materialize at any bend in the tunnel.

  This came to her as fact without fear. Cam felt a sense of calm and peace. She’d be protected here. She didn’t know why, or how, or from what exactly, but whatever had lured her here this time, that same powerful magick would not allow harm to come to her. She stood very still in the middle of the circular chamber and waited for her senses to guide her.

  Her hearing, never as astute as Alex’s, was the first sense awakened. She heard scratching sounds coming from one of the tunnels. She listened intently. A steady, monotonous scraping, like fingernails on a chalkboard, raised goose bumps on her arms and turned her stomach.

  Yet she forged forward.

  Her eyes, beacons in the dark, were on high beam. So she saw him well before he saw or sensed her. A spindly man, his cloaked back to her, was bent in concentration over a stone outcropping, a table of sorts formed by a ledge in the wall. His frayed cape had probably once been a burgundy color. Now it was threadbare and as sleek with grease as his long, stringy, dark hair, which was tied back in a rattail.

  This was no apparition, no haunted spirit. What, then? Who would sit in the icy bowels of Crailmore and what was he doing?

  Afraid only of startling him, she advanced slowly and stealthily.

  As she drew closer, she realized what he was doing and what she had heard. With a quill pen, the hunched wretch was laboriously scrawling a message on stiff parchment. Grungy and fragile as he looked, his hand was steady on the page. A pile of already completed sheets sat at his right hand. Was he composing a book? Was it the book she’d seen in her vision this morning, the book she’d thought of a moment ago?

  She was only a few feet away. Surely he would sense her presence soon. She expected him to whirl around, a withered soul, some nutcase whose lair she’d invaded. When he did spin to face her, she saw not the face of a hapless aged hermit. Smooth and unlined, this was a warlock about Shane’s age. His icy expression could have been carved from the very stone he was using as a table.

  She noticed, too, his hair was cropped short on top. Cam had an insane urge to tell him the mullet look was so over — but fear, the first she’d felt since sneaking through the odd door in Thantos’s room, stopped her cold.

  She found her voice. “Who … what are you … doing?”

  The rattailed warlock did not respond. His gaze locked on Cam, pinned her with his inky eyes.

  She swallowed, trying to show no fear. But just then her sun charm grew hot against her chest, so hot she thought it might burn her. When she tried to lift it, she got an electric shock.

  She knew now to retreat, to run. This same force that had pulled her down into this cave was pushing her out. She heeded the warning at the exact same moment the warlock reached out to grab her. Something gleamed from the collar of his grimy shirt. As Cam raced away, she realized what she had seen. A horseshoe-shaped crystal hanging from a gold chain.

  It was identical to the amulet Shane had been wearing.

  “No way!” Shane assured her the next day. He’d come again to Crailmore to see her, to spend the afternoon together. “You think Epona is some descendant of an evil equine empire? A symbol of death?”

  Death hauling sun god’s chariot, Cam thought.

  That’d be her. Or her namesake.

  A book she’d found this morning in Crailmore’s huge library confirmed Miranda’s memory of the legend of Epona. How much of it did Shane know? Why would he tease her, or test her about ancient symbols of evil?

  Until she had answers, Cam had decided, she would not let her feelings blind her.

  She could do this now, because her senses were sharper here. Her ability to hear things from far away, while still not in Alex’s league, had improved. Here on Coventry, she was more attuned, in tune, with her biological heritage. More like, she thought with a start, the girl she was born to be.

  That’s what she’d been thinking as she walked beside Shane along the cobblestone path leading away from Crailmore. Despite last night’s encounter with the weirdo in the cave, she was feeling strong again, secure, empowered.

  Which was why the sudden dizziness took her by surprise. She reached out to Shane as everything blurred. But he was a step ahead of her and she couldn’t get to him in time. The premonition hit with such force, her knees buckled. She doubled over and fell to the ground.

  And then she was drowning. And screaming. Help! Help! But no one could hear her. She had no voice.

  I can’t breathe! I can’t…

  Flailing, kicking, clawing her way out… someone had to help her! She was being sucked under too fast. Something was closing in on her. Water? It was cold, wet, coarse — and it filled her mouth, suffocating her with grainy mouthfuls … of sand? She tried to spit it out, shake it off. Climb out, put one hand over the next. Pull yourself up, was all she could think. But there was nothing to grab onto. She had no footing. She was going down. Pulled down. To her grave.

  No! No! I’m not ready to die — help! Somebody help! Alex …!

  She was ready to give in, couldn’t fight anymore. Then a pair of giant hands grasped her rib cage and pulled her up and out.

  “You’re okay! You’re okay!” She heard Shane, but he was far away, alarmed. “Come out of it, Cam! That’s it, open your eyes —”

  She was on the ground, on the moss-covered cobblestones. Hyperventilating. Her head was pounding, and Shane was kneeling beside her, scanning her eyes.

  Shaking, sweating, Cam clutched his arms.

  “What happened?” he asked. “Are you sick?”

  “I had …” Somet
hing stopped Cam from finishing the sentence. He hadn’t recognized what was happening to her. Maybe that was as it should be — and stay. Info best kept to herself. For now. “I got dizzy,” she said.

  “You’re still shaking,” he noted. “Sure you’re all right?”

  She was, but for how long? There hadn’t been a single time in all her life that her premonitions hadn’t come true. This had been her first of her own death.

  She wanted Alex. She needed her sister. Now.

  “Come on,” Shane was saying gently as he helped her to her feet. “Let’s go to the Village Plaza. I’ll get you some herbal tea. If you don’t feel better, I’ll bring you back home.”

  She almost protested. She almost said, No, I’ll go back now. If she couldn’t be with Alex, she wanted to be with Miranda. Maybe she should tell her mother about these last two visions — and last night’s discovery. But Shane was urging her forward, smiling at her, telling her he’d be there to catch her if she got dizzy again.

  And though she’d vowed to be cautious this time, she believed him.

  The Village Plaza was the center of town, usually bustling with witches and warlocks of all generations. Ringed by dozens of inviting shops, open-air markets, and cafés with outdoor tables shaded by big, colorful umbrellas, it reminded Cam of a peaceful artists’ colony — one that hadn’t yet been cheesed up with chain stores and T-shirt souvenirs. Triangular flags and window boxes overflowing with flowers upped the fairy-tale feel of the place.

  “Let’s go get that tea.” Shane led her to a café called the Rive Gauche. “And maybe something sweet to go with it. Could I talk you into that?”

  Okay, so maybe it was coincidence, but Cam thought… not.

  The Rive Gauche Café had only one group of customers clustered around a large outdoor table. There were five of them about Cam’s age, and one was awfully familiar. Accent on awful.

  And sarcastic. “To what do we owe a visit by the DuBaer heiress? The princess of power … she who could kill with her eyes but would do no harm and spare even her enemies?”