Her eyes, the same charcoal-rimmed gray he’d looked into so many times before, searched his. Her hair, tied back in a long braid, was a gray-flecked version of the chestnut color he remembered.
But it was only when she reached out, touched his arm, and whispered his name softly, did Karsh know this was no dream, no vision of the future or apparition from the past. Here and now, alive and real, stood Miranda DuBaer. Long missing, feared dead. Found.
Karsh couldn’t find his voice. In the same moment, they stepped toward each other and embraced. Karsh closed his eyes and, pressing her to his cheek, inhaled deeply. Sweet lavender, crisp rosemary, the fresh scent of young pine trees. His eyes welled with tears. “Oh, child,” he whispered. “Dear Miranda.”
“This room looks exactly as I remember it.” Miranda settled on Karsh’s comfortable but threadbare sofa and looked around. “As if time stood still …”
Karsh sat next to her and took her still-smooth hands in his lined, weathered ones. “As if,” he echoed, staring in a disbelief that was slowly warming to pure delight.
“What’s happened to you?” Miranda asked, gently touching the purpling bruise on the side of his head.
Karsh flinched.
“It must be recent,” Miranda noted, “and still painful.”
The spot where his head had hit the slate when Tsuris shoved him down was swollen and tender. Karsh suspected it was the cause of the sporadic blurriness and loss of concentration he was having. Normally, he’d have gone to the clinic, but he hadn’t wanted to waste the time.
“It’s only a bruise,” Karsh said. “There are other, more important wounds to heal.”
Miranda’s eyes glinted with excitement as she answered Karsh’s unspoken question. “I’ve seen them. My babies. Apolla and Artemis.”
A warm smile lit Karsh’s face. “Then you’ve seen how wonderfully, how beautifully they’re turning out.” Immediately, he regretted saying that. What if Miranda misunderstood? If she took it to mean they’d done fine without her?
“I don’t think that,” she responded, reading his mind again — one of the few skills she seemed not to have lost. “I’m proud of them and so very grateful for all you’ve done. It couldn’t have been easy.”
Karsh was about to explain that Ileana deserved much credit, but just then Miranda cocked her head in a way that instantly took him back. She’d always been a bit mischievous. “I’d bet Artemis — Alexandra — is a handful.”
“Takes after her mother,” Karsh rejoined. And then he couldn’t stop himself. “Dear Miranda. What happened? We thought you were dead!”
“There were times, days, months when I wished for that,” Miranda admitted. “My Aron murdered, our children gone …”
Karsh lifted her chin. “How much do you remember?”
“Not much. The joy of the twins’ birth — and then you coming in and telling me Aron was gone.”
“Nothing else?” Karsh queried.
“I think Fredo spoke to me after you left. It’s been so long now. I don’t know what I remember and what I’ve been told.” She looked up at him pleadingly. “Tell me.”
Karsh sighed. “You asked me to take the babies. You were wild with grief and fear. You wanted a moment alone. I didn’t think it wise in your distraught state but I left nevertheless. When I returned, you were gone, Miranda. Just gone. We found safe havens for the twins and then searched everywhere, the whole of Coventry, for you. Days turned to weeks, weeks to months …” He trailed off.
“I wish I could fill in the blanks for you, but I can’t,” Miranda admitted.
“But at some point,” he pressed, “you knew you had a home, a family. Why didn’t you contact us? So many years …”
Her eyes filled with tears. She shook her head helplessly. “So much to explain, my old friend. And so much to learn. Do we have time?”
She had always been extraordinarily intuitive, Karsh thought. He sprang from the couch. “You must be hungry. I’ll find some food, brew some tea.” He turned from her so that his face wouldn’t betray him. “Dear Miranda,” he promised, “we have as much time as we need.”
And so they talked. Earnestly, wholeheartedly, regretful of the years lost, joyful at the new day that had come. Long into the afternoon they talked.
Although Thantos had told her some, Miranda wanted to hear from the trusted elder, the oldest survivor of the Antayus clan, how her babies really were. Karsh guided her through the years she’d missed, detailing with pride all the twins had accomplished, all the potential they displayed. He was most proud of the people they were becoming: vital, strong, funny, loving, loyal, and dedicated to helping those in need of their gifts.
The missing years were harder for Miranda to explain. She’d been told she’d gone mad, then catatonic, fallen into a kind of coma —
“Told by whom?” Karsh asked, then felt ill, uneasy, because he realized it was Thantos who’d informed — or misinformed — her. “So he knew, all this time, you were alive.”
“He told me the babies were gone,” Miranda continued.
“He said they were dead?” Now Karsh was truly incredulous. “How dare —”
“He didn’t use that word.” She shook her head. “He said they’d been stolen, taken away. He said he would find them if it was the last thing he ever did.”
Truer than she knew, thought Karsh bitterly.
“When the years went by and there was no sign of them, I accepted … the inevitable,” Miranda continued. “I had many breakdowns. I lost all of my powers — some never returned.”
The look on Miranda’s face stopped Karsh from telling her the harsh truth. He turned away to make it more difficult for her to break into his thoughts — which were that Thantos, whom she clearly trusted, had lied to her and kept up the ruse for fifteen years.
Oh, Thantos had been trying to find the twins, all right. To trick them, lure them into believing in his righteousness, to turn them away from all their father had believed and stood for.
Miranda had been the bait.
Ileana believed that if Thantos did not succeed in swaying his nieces, making them trust and follow him, that, sooner or later, he would have them killed. Karsh had not been so sure. He was now.
But this was not the time to confide his fears to Miranda. Not while she was still weak, unsure of herself, and without the powerful magick that had been her birthright. For now, Karsh decided, it was better for her to believe what she’d been told all these years.
He fished for something positive to say. He took her hands and looked into her eyes. “You return at the right moment, Miranda. Your children will soon be preparing for their initiation. They need a true mother now.”
Miranda shook her head sadly. “No. I’m not ready. I can’t.”
“Your powers will return,” Karsh promised. “Count on it.”
“Until they do —” She lifted her chin in the same defiant way Alexandra often did. “I deem myself an unfit mother. Until they can trust me — and I can trust myself. So I ask you to keep protecting them, to continue as their guardian.”
Karsh pursed his lips. Well, there was one thing he could be honest about. “It isn’t I who have protected them. That job was given to —”
The door banged open, interrupting him. “Faithless, feeble old fool!” Her cape flaring, her face red with rage, she charged wildly into his cottage. “Karsh!” she shouted. “My home has been trashed! Why weren’t you checking on it? How could you let this happen?”
Karsh turned to Miranda. “May I introduce your daughters’ true guardian, Ileana.”
For the first time since she’d swung in, Ileana saw who was there. She stunned herself by falling to her knees. “Miranda?” the hot-tempered young witch gasped. Then she lost sight of the spectral woman as tears, the first she’d shed since the trial, surfaced like a curtain of mist, blurring everything.
CHAPTER TWELVE
DYLAN’S STING
“Okay, let’s review. What do we know?�
� Alex asked, pacing their room. She stole a glance at her downcast sister, who was leaning against the dresser staring glumly at the earring in her hand.
“We’re on our own,” Cam said, without looking up. “Bad enough Karsh and Ileana have blown us off. But Miranda —” Cam hadn’t been able to get the brief visit from their mother out of her mind. It was ever present. No matter what urgent thoughts she was focused on, Miranda waited just behind them. “I mean, she was nothing like I imagined.”
“Oh, give her a break,” Alex counseled, trying to hide her own disappointment and, to tell the truth, a weird kind of satisfaction — because Miranda, beautiful and fragile as she was, offered no contest for Alex’s love of Sara. “So she was a little spaced. Who wouldn’t be after fifteen years with no one to talk to but the sickos of Rolling Hills —”
“And Uncle Thantos,” Cam reminded her, unconsciously tugging the faded quilt more tightly around her shoulders.
“Okay, so where were we?” Alex got back to topic A: “Dylan’s gone. But he lost — or possibly left behind on purpose — one of his earrings.”
“Wake up and smell the Dumpster,” Cam grumbled. “There was nothing ‘on purpose’ about it. A trail of bread crumbs would’ve been more helpful.”
Alex cast a we-are-so-not-amused glance Cam’s way as she paced past her twin for the second time. “Anyway, you found his earring … behind The Candle Connection. And that’s all we’ve got to go on. No notes, phone calls, e-mails, or psychic carrier pigeons to announce his whereabouts.”
“Only that creepy horror story Uncle Edgar Allan Thantos spun for us.” Camryn closed her fist over the precious earring that she used to give her brother grief about. Now she wished she could take it back. Every teasing, taunting, nasty thing she’d ever said to him she’d take back in a flash if he’d just get his skinny, snow-boarding booty home in one piece.
“Oh, and don’t forget bush girl — Kenya Carson,” Alex remembered. “Did I tell you how fast she split after I mentioned hearing a computer?”
Cam caught a scent of licorice, of anise, one of the herbs Miranda had long ago sewn into the quilt. “Inspiration!” Cam snapped her fingers, unaware of the subtle energies the anise had awakened in her. “Als,” she asked, “didn’t you say Dyl was e-mailing someone when you walked into his room yesterday?”
“Guy named KC,” Alex confirmed.
“Guy?” Cam raised an eyebrow skeptically.
Alex got it. “KC. Kenya Carson!” She slapped her forehead. “Hello, seen my brain? It’s never around when I need it.”
They rushed toward the connecting bathroom in such sync that they jammed shoulders at the door. “After you,” Cam sneered, stepping out of the way. “Did you get to read anything beside those initials? Like what he was saying to her?”
“No, but who says it’s too late?” Out of habit, Alex knocked on the door to Dylan’s cave.
“Not me,” Cam insisted, a sly smile enlivening her defeated face. “Hack much?”
“How hard could it be?” Alex answered, busting into Dyl’s room. “If your everyday dorks, nerds, and hacker-heads can do it, should be a cinch for a couple of determined T’Witches.”
It would have been a cinch for anyone. Dylan had left his computer on. His password was stored. When they clicked on his Internet program, all they had to do was hit SIGN ON and there was his e-mail. The message he’d been writing when Alex walked in on him was at the top of his “Sent Mail” file. Addressed to KC, it read: RideBoy fell for it. I’m meeting him tonight. Same time, same place you did.
Under “Old Mail,” they found Kenya’s reply: Dyl, don’t go. Please. He’s psycho.
“That nails it,” Alex said, an hour later, when they’d backtracked through Dylan’s e-mails and found nothing else to or from KC or about RideBoy. “Time to talk to Kenya.”
“But will she talk to us?” Cam asked. “I mean, didn’t she do a disappearing act last time you tried?”
“Well, yeah.” Alex thought about it.
“I know who she’d talk to,” Cam blurted after rubbing her itchy nose on Miranda’s quilt.
“Let me guess.” Alex’s grin was mischievous and triumphant. “Dylan,” she said.
Kenya showed up on the button. Fifteen minutes after the dismissal bell rang, anxiously glancing over her shoulder, she climbed the bleachers behind the school and sat down facing the track. As she’d been told to, the nervous girl pulled a book out of her backpack and stared down at it, as if intently reading.
“Hey.” A moment later, Alex sat down beside her.
Kenya looked up, surprised, disappointed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m … Could you squat somewhere else? I’m meeting somebody.”
“He’s not coming.” Cam, holding a silver-and-black thermal coffee mug, joined them.
“He’s not coming because he’s gone missing,” Alex elaborated, “and you’re probably one of the few people who knows where and why.”
“But isn’t he back?” Kenya asked earnestly. “I mean, I got an e-mail from him last night —” Then she caught Cam’s eye. “It wasn’t from Dyl, was it?” she asked unhappily.
Cam shook her head. “No, we sent it. We’re trying to find him, Kenya.”
“So am I!” the girl wailed miserably.
“Cool,” said Alex. “Then we’re all working together. Who’s RideBoy?”
Kenya’s bruised brown face went ashen. Instantly, tears flooded her eyes.
Alex handed her a handkerchief. Kenya shook it open and a piece of rock, translucent and faceted like a jewel, fell into her lap. “What’s that?” Kenya picked it up and examined it.
“Whoops. How’d that get in there? It’s my lucky crystal,” Als said. “Hang on to it if you want to.”
“Awesome.” Kenya clutched the stone, staring at it as if hypnotized. She gasped, startled, when Cam offered her the coffee mug. “It’s cocoa,” Cam said. “Comfort bev. Go on, have some.”
Kenya sniffed at the cup, then took a sip. Her tear-glossed eyes lit with pleasure. “Dag, that flows,” she commented. “It’s got this weird little kick to it.”
“It’s all herbal,” Cam assured her, drawing out her sun charm.
The “cocoa” and the crystal were having their effect on Kenya. “You guys have any idea what a gnarly champ your bro is?” she raved. “I don’t mean just huckin’ in the park or, like, boosting in the pipes, I mean, you know, in life totally —”
Zipping her half-moon charm back and forth on her necklace, Alex cautioned, “Yo, don’t freak, Kens. Cam and I have this little … um, ritual thing we like to do —”
“Actually,” Cam jumped in, “it’s just reciting a … you know, a —”
“Poem,” Alex helpfully blurted. “It’s called the Truth Inducer.”
“O sun that gives us light and cheer,” Cam chanted, “shine through me now to banish fear —”
“Free KC from doubt and blame. Let us win her trust,” Alex said, feeling the heat of her charm ripple through her fingertips, “and lift her shame.”
“Dag,” Kenya said, impressed. Then she started to tremble. “He’s a man, this skanky, like, bald, potbellied creep — not a boy. There’s no boy about him. He knows the words, though. Like RideBoy? Ride’s a board brand. So I thought he was a kid, like me, like Dyl,” she babbled suddenly. “He said he was sixteen!”
Dizzyingly fast, through floods of tears, Kenya’s story came out. She’d met a guy who was supposed to be young and snowboard savvy in a chat room on the Net. They wrote back and forth for a couple of weeks, and he said he wanted to meet her.
She knew it was whack to go somewhere private, alone, so she’d insisted on the mall — and he’d agreed, but said it had to be, like, really early on Sunday, ’cause he worked three jobs — one started at six-thirty in the morning and one ended after midnight, and he said he had this weekend gig, and blah, blah, blah.
So they set up to meet at seven-thirty Sunday morning at the big mall outside o
f Salem.
She was waiting behind The Candle Connection, where he supposedly worked. And this van he said he’d be driving, this creepy rusty red van, pulled up, and she walked over and this man, this totally old, ugly grown-up, with this funky red knit cap and a disgusting cigarette stink reeking off him, got out and started talking to her.
It took her a minute to get that he was the freak who’d been e-mailing her. He wanted her to get into his van, take a ride with him. And when she said, “No way,” he grabbed her arm and tried to shove her into the van. She was hollering, “Let go! Get off of me, you perv!”
And it was Sunday morning. The parking lot was totally empty. No one heard her.
Except him, of course. And he was really twisting her arm hard, so she started really screaming and hammering him. So he threw her down. Hard. He was all, like, “Forget you.” But she’d chipped her tooth and gotten all scraped up and she was bleeding. And he just looked at her. And then he got into his van and took off.
She called Dylan from a pay phone. And he called Robbie Meeks, who had his beginner’s license, and they drove over and got her. She told them she’d been trying out some new tricks in the parking lot and had wiped out and that some kids had swiped her board.
Robbie bought it. Dylan didn’t.
He kept asking her what really happened. Like, for days he was on her about it and finally she told him. And he got so boiling mad he went berserk, but she made him promise not to call the cops or anything; her parents would’ve killed her. So Dylan decided to handle it himself. He was going to trap RideBoy, set up a sting, a scam to get the creep to meet him.
“I tried to stop him,” Kenya cried. “Honest. I tried every day and when he told me it was on, that he had a date to meet the scuzzbucket, I really freaked. I begged him not to. I even went over to your house,” she reminded Alex, “but by then, you know, he was gone and the cops were there. And when you said something about a computer, I swear, I thought Dylan had told you what happened. And I was, like, mad at him and scared for him and I didn’t know what to do, so I just split.”
T*Witches: Double Jeopardy Page 6