There was silence. Her voice barely above a whisper, Alex said, “I’m going, Cade. Back to Montana.” Cade was flabbergasted.
“So what, you dreamed that she told you to split, and you … believe it? You’re joking, right? You’ve been here a year. You’ve got a new family, friends, school. And I know it’s not about me, but I just got here, Alex. I thought we had something.”
We do have something! she wanted to scream. Only sometimes, something isn’t enough.
She looked up at him and immediately wanted to cry. His blue eyes were searching her face, trying to figure out whether she was serious or playing him. Either way, he looked wounded.
There was one thing she had to know. “Were you planning to stay, after the summer? Would your dad even let you?”
Now he looked away, stared blindly at Luke McDonald’s wall of framed credentials and pics of the corporate vice president posing with celebs. “Honestly, Allie?” Cade nervously rubbed his palms together. “I don’t know. I figured it was a bridge I’d cross when we got there.” He turned back to her and asked hopefully, “Are we there yet?”
“So you didn’t register for school or anything?” she persisted.
Cade began pacing the office. “Alex, whether I stay or not shouldn’t have anything to do with you leaving. I mean, going off because of some dream … Do you even know how crazy that sounds?”
Act One: Alex goes nuts in Mariner’s Park, confusing Michaelina’s ragging for Cade’s thoughts. Act Two: Alex goes mental again, believing her dead mother is issuing life-changing orders.
“I know,” she acknowledged, “but it might be soon. I might be going soon.”
She was unprepared for his next comment, for the connection he made. “That girl, Michaelina — she have anything to do with this sudden urge to skip town?”
“Why would you think that?” Alex asked.
He shrugged. “Dunno. Just a hunch.” Cade cupped her chin. “Listen. I trust my instincts. And my instincts tell me that girl is not to be trusted.”
Alex turned her head, forcing him to drop his hand. “She’s the first friend I’ve had on my own since coming to live here.”
He was hurt. “What about me?”
She could have gone in to work. If she’d gone straight there from Cade’s office, she wouldn’t have been that late. Alex went home instead. Contacting Cam could not wait any longer. Telepathy hadn’t worked, so Alex went for a method that had. She and Cam knew Ileana’s e-mail address. Alex would send a message through her.
She flipped on Cam’s computer, went online, and noticed something odd. The monitor displayed the last address Cam had used and the list of messages she’d sent and received before jetting off to Coventry.
It wasn’t the regular [email protected]. Her sister had a secret account.
It took less than a minute for Alex to wonder if she should honor Cam’s privacy or click open her twin’s recent e-mails.
Snooper won, hands down.
The password was a no-brainer. Same one Cam used on her normal account. But the list of senders on [email protected] was anything but. Alex hacked in righteously.
The e-mails, all from one person, didn’t surprise her, they made her sad. Then angry. How easy was it to see that Shane had been duping her sister? The whole bit about ‘I need you, come back to Coventry.’ Scam city! The boy was still bad to the bone.
For a nano, Alex hit the cynical brakes. Possible she was overreacting? Too much in touch with her inner Ileana, the wary witch who trusted no one? Possible that Shane honestly wanted to reform, truly needed a Camdose to do it?
Nah.
Anyone who wasn’t Cam could see what a pack of lies he’d perpetrated.
That’s when Alex and the truth collided, head-on.
Anyone who wasn’t Alex could see that Michaelina had told her the same exact help-me-reform story. It was too, too obvious. Even Cade, nonwarlock, nonbeliever, knew a fraud when he saw one.
Cam had been gullible-girl? So had she. Which led Alex to the next connection. Whatever danger Cam had been in, he was behind it. Shane. What kind of peril was Michaelina leading her into?
Alex wasn’t about to wait to find out. Right now, she had to reach her sister. Montana could wait. Cam could not. And then the phone rang.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CAM’S REVENGE
Face-time with Uncle Thantos had left Cam reeling, emotionally KO-ed.
She’d heard, without processing, everything he’d gone on about:
The stellar job he’d done running the family business, building it into the dynasty Aron would have wanted. How Thantos had abided by his brother’s wishes for DuBaer Industries to be a force for good in the world. Did she know, by the way, it was he who had supplied every citizen on Coventry with a computer? The largesse of Thantos DuBaer, according to Thantos DuBaer, was unrivaled.
It could be bigger, better, more powerful, he humbly suggested, if Miranda were to marry him. And Camryn would agree to live with them, to be a family.
“Alex,” Cam had said tonelessly. “You forgot Alex.”
“Yes, of course Alex,” the black-bearded tracker had agreed impatiently. “It goes without saying.”
Trying to deal with her uncle’s info overload, Cam had stumbled out of the salon, barely noticing Ileana furtively waiting outside. She felt rather than heard Ileana promise, “We’re getting Alex. She’ll be here soon. Be patient. Wait until Miranda and I have had a chance to tell you — to show you — what you need to know.”
Ileana had pressed a coin into her hand. Cam didn’t look at it. She went to splash cold water on her face. It wasn’t until she reached to turn on the faucet that the round gold piece tumbled from her fist. She recognized the image stamped into it. The crowned bear was the DuBaer family crest. And she knew, intuitively, that the amulet was as powerful as the sun charm her father had fashioned for her.
Cam skipped dinner that night. She had no appetite. It was all she could do to drag herself to the computer in the Crailmore library. Logging onto e-mail, she typed a short and urgent message: Alex, I need you.
Then she’d gone to Aron’s boyhood room and fallen into a deep, dreamless sleep.
She didn’t hear Shane’s telepathic message. She didn’t know that he’d tried to see her and been turned away by one of Crailmore’s staff. The first she knew of his visit was a message on her breakfast tray the next morning.
I have to talk to you. It’s urgent. Meet me outside the gates. I will wait all day if I have to.
Cam pushed the tray away, fighting the urge to fall back to sleep. TMI. Too much information. It was important, she knew, to think through what she’d been told. But where to begin?
Thantos’s shocking admission that he loved Miranda? And that he wanted Cam’s … what? Her blessing? Her consent? Her help in bringing them together?
Or was it his casual admission that he could control the twins’ lives? Exhibit A: Thantos had masterminded the meeting of Bree and Miranda.
And what of Cam’s near-death experience in the quicksand? How had Thantos managed to show up in the nick of time and become her avenging hero?
It was some time after noon when she finally got dressed. Crailmore seemed to be empty but for the servants. There was no return e-mail from Alex in the library. There was no sign of her mother or her uncle anywhere. Ileana, she assumed, had probably returned to her cottage.
Cam thought briefly about going there. She was at the door, ready to leave Crailmore, when a thought halted her progress. What if …?
What if anything Thantos said had even a grain of truth to it? Ileana’s hatred of him eliminated her as an impartial sounding board.
“You can tell me. I would listen,” a voice said.
Cam looked up abruptly. She’d walked out the door and was approaching the gates of the estate and there was Shane. True to his word, puppy-dog eyes full of remorse, he was waiting for her.
“No,” she started.
He put up his hands in
a gesture that was half surrender and half a plea for her to stop. “Please. I have to talk to you. It’s about yesterday —”
“You mean the yesterday when you told me how safe I’d be or the yesterday when you didn’t make a move to save me?”
He hung his head, looking appealingly defeated. “You’ll never believe me, I know. But it was Sersee —”
Feeling almost ashamed of her gullibility and of her untamed heart, Cam swung back one of the tall gates and allowed Shane to enter the grounds — which was where she intended to stay, no matter what he might say this time.
“What was Sersee?” she prodded him. It appalled her to realize that while she no longer trusted Shane she was still attracted to the treacherous warlock.
He leaped at the chance to explain. “It took me half the night, but I finally got her under a powerful truth-telling spell, and she spilled it all.”
A sickening feeling, familiar now, came over Cam. Before Shane spoke, she knew what he was going to tell her. She saw it happening. But this vision was oddly blurred, as if washed over with a gray haze.
Her tumble backward into the pond had been no accident, he explained. It had been a trap set by Sersee. Of course the evil and envious witch knew about the quicksand. Last night she’d bragged to Shane that when she separated Cam from him, when she’d insisted on talking to Cam privately, she had used a potent spell to ease Cam’s distrust and play on her fair-mindedness. She’d forced “the clueless mainlander” to give her the benefit of the doubt. And then had drawn Cam like a magnet into the fatal scheme.
At the same time, Shane insisted, Sersee had put a paralyzing spell on him so that he could not interfere with her deadly plan. And she claimed to have dosed the others, including her poor apprentice, Epie, with a mixture of herbs to confuse and confound them.
But Sersee hadn’t counted on Thantos.
Through the strange grayish wash, Cam saw them together — the huge and horribly grinning tracker and the cowering young witch.
Why had the most self-centered warlock on Coventry come to her rescue?
Shane reminded her: “You called out for someone who loves you.”
Cam’s jaw dropped. In her wildest dreams she would not have put Thantos on that list.
“I have an idea.” His remorseful eyes glinted suddenly with mischief. “You could get revenge on her. You’re a powerful witch. You owe it to her — after all she’s done.”
Cam shook her head, shook off the strange vision she’d experienced. A powerful witch? Not without Alex.
Shane read her mind and kissed her forehead. “Your sister isn’t here, but I am,” he whispered, “and I’d love to get revenge on Sersee. She made me helpless, unable to save you. I hate her for that.”
The words revenge and hate jumped out at Cam, as if he’d boldfaced them. “No,” she said softly. “That’s not what our powers are for. You know that.”
“Sersee tried to kill you, Cam. Twice now. She lied to you, betrayed you, stabbed you in the back. Besides,” he prattled on before she could stop him, “what I have in mind won’t end her life. She might not want to live, but she will.”
* * *
Cam had mulled over Shane’s plan from the time he’d gone to fetch Sersee until this very minute when she could hear the bell on the front gate ringing, indicating that her guests had arrived.
She had changed her mind a hundred times while waiting for them. One moment she’d judged the warlock’s idea wrong and unworthy, and the next, she’d thought of it with a strange rush of energy — uncomfortable but exciting; a force that didn’t come from her sun charm or her noble heritage but was fueled by a vengeful glee.
Still undecided, Cam opened the door to allow Shane and Sersee in. One look at the raven-haired witch’s haughty scowl did the trick. Two could play mind games, she resolved. Mind and body games …
The decision to go along with Shane’s idea left her feeling weird. Though her heart was pumping wildly, she experienced no fear. Her very nerves tingled with excitement and anticipation. And her mind seemed amazingly clear. She is prideful and must be taught her place, it insisted.
“Welcome to Crailmore,” Cam heard herself say, as if from a distance. She was smiling, she knew, but the mad pulsing in her veins distracted her. She was suddenly eager, edgy, almost angry, as if her boiling blood were pumping pure adrenaline.
“Don’t expect an apology,” Sersee snarled, sweeping past her.
With clenched fists, Cam turned to study the shameless witch. Something was off about her. She was swathed in her trademark violet cape, but she seemed tired. In fact, Cam realized Sersee’s eyes looked … brown?
“New contacts?” she asked, really curious.
Sersee tried to stop her hand flying to her mouth, but didn’t quite make it. Cam wasn’t supposed to have seen that. I forgot to take them out! She wasn’t supposed to have heard that, either. But she did.
Quickly changing the subject, the unusually forgetful witch spun to face her. “You’ve made a speedy recovery. That’s —”
“— disappointing?” Cam cut in.
Sersee scrunched her forehead. “You can’t possibly think I wanted to see you harmed.”
Not harmed, just dead, Cam thought, escorting Shane and Sersee through the great hall and up the tower stairs. They ended up in Aron’s room — as planned.
Sersee was wandering around, picking things up, looking contemptuously at Aron’s awards and certificates.
“My father wasn’t just powerful,” Cam said, “he was also very bright… yet humble, I’m told.”
“Humble?” Sersee spun toward her and laughed. “He had every right to be, I’m sure. But powerful? I don’t think so. Your revered father was, after all, murdered by his own brother, the weakest link in the DuBaer chain. Fredo was renowned as a certifiable moron.”
“You don’t think very much of humility, do you, Sersee?” Shane asked, smiling slyly.
“I don’t think of it at all,” she replied. “Humble pie is so not my dish.”
“What is, then?” Cam demanded with the odd new fury building in her. “Conceit, smugness, arrogance?”
“All well earned,” Sersee declared. “Where is your uncle? I didn’t come all this way to visit with you.”
“Your pride, Sersee,” Cam observed, sticking to the script, “is as blown up, hollow, and full of hot air as a balloon.”
Sersee’s violet eyes — hidden behind the strange, sparrow-brown lenses — narrowed menacingly.
If Cam hadn’t known what Shane was about to do — and if she weren’t feeling so keyed up and capable … of anything — she might have been intimidated. As it was, she almost pitied the Coventry cur. Almost, but not quite.
Shane came at Sersee from behind, tossing just a pinch of skullcap over her head. They wanted her still, not asleep. As the seeds rained down on the startled witch’s ebony curls, Shane took Cam’s hand. Together, they recited the incantation he had taught her.
You of no empathy, lacking in kindness,
Must see yourself clearly, to cure you of blindness.
Like a prideful balloon, be puffed up, we bequeath you,
Till you lose your scorn for those you deem “beneath you.”
It was like watching a parade float being blown up.
Sersee’s cape began to billow, wider and wider to accommodate her sudden horizontal growth spurt. Soon she looked like a waddling sphere. She didn’t have to speak. Her horrified expression said it all. The fear and panic were as real and deep as anything Cam had seen or experienced, including her own near drowning.
Despite the warped exhilaration coursing through her, Cam was about to ask Shane to change Sersee back. But then the ever-expanding witch spat bitterly, “I wish you had died in that quicksand! I curse Thantos for rescuing you!”
“My, what a huge ego, and so overblown,” Cam retorted, as she had practiced saying. “I’ll get some transportation to take you home.”
On cue, Amaryllis entered the
room with a wheelbarrow.
“Up you go,” Cam declared as she, Shane, and Amaryllis hoisted the supersized Sersee into the wagon. The sight of the jumbo Fury shaking with rage, sending layers of jellylike flesh quivering over the sides of the barrow, was supposed to be funny. At least Rowan and Serle seemed to think so when Shane invited the guffawing duo to wheel Sersee home.
The only one missing from the party was Epie. Had the girl been afraid to face Cam again after her treachery at the pond? Cam was about to ask Shane about it, when he stopped her with a triumphant hug. “Didn’t I tell you revenge would be sweet?”
Mean-spirited laughter bubbled up inside her. It left an acid burn in her gut, an ulcer of spite. Sweet. Right, she thought. Sickeningly so.
And yet, watching the pain in Sersee’s eyes when her so-called friends wheeled her down the path, a pitiful laughingstock, Cam did not feel sympathy or regret. She felt… powerful.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
SPLIT DECISION
After Shane left, Cam lay trembling for a long time on Aron’s big bed. The boiling exhilaration that had fueled her horrible behavior was seeping out of her — replaced by even hotter shame. No matter what the willful witch had done, what she’d done to Sersee was still wrong. Simple as that.
She couldn’t bear to be in her father’s room, to disgrace it with her presence. Disgust filled the vacuum her soul sickness left. Never would she have believed herself capable of such cruelty. She had crossed a line, passed over … to the dark side.
Cam felt an urgent need to be cleansed, to acknowledge what she had done, to tell on herself. She was still shaking as she got up. Her appalled brain searched for someone she could confess to and beg forgiveness from.
Not Miranda, not Ileana. She was too ashamed. Certainly not Thantos, who she suspected would be more pleased than revolted by what she’d done.
Who, then?
Karsh, of course —
Cam’s momentary elation disappeared as she remembered that her steadfast friend was gone.
T*Witches: Split Decision Page 10