“Mi casa es su casa,” Alex said.
“You all right?” Dave searched her face for signs of bruising.
“I’ll …” She almost said, “live,” but choked on it. Alex quickly averted her eyes so Dave wouldn’t suspect she was about to lose it.
“Cam in there?” he asked, nodding toward the open door of the bathroom.
“Daddy …” Still wrapped in her robe, Cam suddenly ran over and pressed her face against his shirtfront. Dave wrapped bearlike arms around his daughter and patted her back as he used to when she was little. That’s when Cam broke down.
“He’s dead, Daddy,” she wailed. “Karsh is … he … got killed.” She pulled away and looked into her dad’s eyes. “Karsh, who gave me to you —”
Dave swallowed hard. He’d realized the girls were upset, emotional — but after what the cops and Dylan had just told him, he figured it was all about their daring rescue. He’d come upstairs, in fact, to tell the girls that thanks to Cam’s 911, the perv had been picked up and would soon be behind bars for a long time. He’d come to congratulate them. It hadn’t occurred to him he’d be comforting them. Feeling his own grief about the strange but kindly man who’d entrusted the baby Cam to him would have to come later.
Now he patted Cam’s back and gently said, “Oh, baby, this is your first brush with death. I’m so sorry.” He reached out to include Alex in his embrace. To his surprise, she actually allowed him to put an arm around her shoulder.
It wasn’t until later, after all the phone calls — from Dave’s and Emily’s friends, from Cam’s and Alex’s pals, from the newspaper wanting an interview with Dylan (which Dave nixed) — that Cam and Alex were finally ready to talk.
“It’s our fault, Cam.” Alex fell onto her bed, where Miranda’s quilt still lay. Her voice full of remorse, she tried to explain what she’d heard the spirits tell her. She said she should have told Cam, told someone…. Maybe then, Karsh wouldn’t be dead.
Cam was so not buying it. It wasn’t about dodging blame, she insisted as she paced the room, shaking her head. “Als? I don’t know much about what’s happened, or why. But in my bones I know this. We didn’t kill Karsh. It was his time. He knew it; Ileana knew it. We’d have known it, too, if we’d grown up on Coventry; we’d have recognized the burial robe. But we heard what he was saying and the way he was talking.
“Karsh was our tracker, the man who kept us from going crazy when we were kids. He was a wise, brilliant, kindly human being who just happened to be a powerful warlock. The Karsh we knew would have chosen to go out this way, shielding Ileana, protecting us.”
Alex’s tears fell on Miranda’s quilt.
Cam planted herself on her bed, drew her knees to her chest, and rocked back and forth. For a while, she was quiet. Then she whispered, “Alex? I’m freaked. Thantos — and now those hideously creepy cousins — they’re so not done with us. Please don’t think I’m selfish, but I’m really scared. Who’s going to protect us? Who’ll be our guardian?”
With a defiant swipe, Alex blotted her eyes on the quilt. She inhaled its sweet fragrances and lifted her chin. “I will.”
“Will what?” Cam stared at her twin.
“I’ll be your guardian, your protector — and you’ll be mine,” Alex declared.
“Can we do that? Protect ourselves?” Cam wrinkled her forehead.
“The other choice would be?” Alex began to feel stronger, surer of herself. She leaped off her bed and jumped so hard onto Cam’s that her sister bounced.
“Here’s the sitch, Sista T’Witch,” Alex teased. “In this corner, we’ve got one glitzy but grieving guardian-goddess. In the other? A messed-up mom. Baddies of all ages and abilities — plenty we probably haven’t even had the pleasure of meeting yet — are after us. And remember,” she said more seriously now, “what Karsh said, about there being a curse.”
“A curse and a hope,” Cam remembered. “Ileana’s destiny and ours are tied to it.”
“Like it or not, want it or not.” Alex tilted her head toward Cam. “It’s up to us now.”
Cam tilted hers so that it touched Alex’s. “And we are so up for it. All of it.”
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
H.B. Gilmour is the author of numerous best-selling books for adults and young readers, including the Clueless movie novelization and series; Pretty in Pink, a University of Iowa Best Book for Young Readers; and Godzilla, a Nickelodeon Kids Choice nominee. She also cowrote the award-winning screenplay Tag.
H.B. lives in upstate New York with her husband, John Johann, and their misunderstood dog, Fred, one of the family’s five pit bulls, three cats, two snakes (a boa constrictor and a python), and five extremely bright, animal-loving children.
Randi Reisfeld has written many best-sellers, such as the Clueless series (which she wrote with H.B.); the Moesha series; and biographies of Prince William, New Kids on the Block, and Hanson. Her Scholastic paperback Got Issues Much? was named an ALA Best Book for Reluctant Readers in 1999.
Randi has always been fascinated with the randomness of life … About how any of our lives can simply “turn on a dime” and instantly (snap!) be forever changed. About the power each one of us has deep inside, if only we knew how to access it. About how any of us would react if, out of the blue, we came face-to-face with our exact double.
From those random fascinations, T’witches was born.
Oh, and BTW: She has no twin (that she knows of) but an extremely cool family and cadre of BFFs to whom she is totally devoted.
T*Witches: Double Jeopardy Page 12