Cam remembered how exciting it had been, the thrilling jolt, the raw adrenaline rush of focusing all her energy and skill on helping someone in trouble. How much more could she do, she and Alex, when their knowledge of the craft and the amazing powers they were born with got kicked up a notch?
She might not need her powers to be enhanced, but did she want them to be? Enough to study this hard and face —
“Every witch and warlock on the island judging us?” her sister anticipated the question.
Cam smiled and shrugged. “I think I can handle it. How ’bout you?”
“I’m on,” Alex agreed as they walked along the tree-lined street to their house. Fallen leaves crunched underfoot, but the sugar maple, against which Dylan’s bike was leaning, was still aflame.
Cam stopped at the front door as another memory surfaced for her. This one wasn’t about anyone else — except Alex. She remembered how frightening and lonely it had been to feel like a freak. To have no one to talk to about the strange things she seemed capable of. The Mutant of Marble Bay, she’d sometimes thought of herself.
“Yo, and I was the Crow Creek Crazy.” Alex invaded her sister’s mind again. “What’s your point?”
“That we’re family, not weird and alone,” Cam said.
“Gotcha. We’re weird and together.”
“Totally.” Cam laughed and then speculated, “And if we were separated again, I bet we’d go right back to feeling alone and out of place everywhere.”
“Except on Coventry,” Alex reminded her twin — and herself. “Which, by the way, is where our clone comes from,” she added. “Today, in lab, I remembered the smell — jimsonweed and nettles. I remember it from there — from Crailmore, I think.”
“Crailmore?” Her hand reaching for the brass doorknob, Cam stopped, interested. “Okay, who do we know who hangs out at the ancestral fortress besides Thantos and our mom?”
“The Furies,” Alex answered, naming the trio of treacherous witches they’d tangled with before. “Sersee, Michaelina, and Epie, but last time we saw them they were not fans of Uncle T. And Shane, of course — who changes his story every five minutes about whose side he’s on.”
“He is a sleaze, sad but true,” Cam lamented. She opened the door. “Then there are Uncle T’s servants: the guy with the ponytail who was copying Karsh’s journal for him, and his trusty fledgling Amaryllis —”
Alex cut through the speculation. “Look, the fact that our demon look-alike has never shown up when we’re together gives us a way to flush the monster out. But where and when?”
“How ’bout our room? Tonight?” Sick and tired of being toyed with, Cam was suddenly psyched.
“Kind of ambitious.” Alex followed her into the house.
“No, no. Come on. We can do it,” Cam assured her sister.
“Yo, Cam-petition, check your cheerleading at the door,” Alex advised. “This is not a game of soccer we’re talking about —”
“Exactly!” Cam responded, her gray eyes already glimmering with gung-ho zeal. “It’s an emergency! I don’t know about you, but I can’t deal with deception, keep up with schoolwork, and study for Initiation all at the same time —”
“Is that you?” Emily called from the kitchen. She was rarely home this early. “Don’t come in,” she ordered, sounding both alarmed and elated. “I’ll be right out.”
Alex and Cam looked at each other. “We’ve got to let her know we know about the sweet sixteen,” Cam whispered.
Alex vetoed the suggestion with a shake of her head. “We’re going upstairs,” she called to Emily. “Catch ya later.”
Cam scampered up the stairs behind her twin. “Well, something’s gotta go!” she hissed, back on track. “I vote that it’s our third ‘twin.’”
CHAPTER SIX
A SIMPLE PLAN
Alex gave in. Much as she hated to admit it, Cam’s enthusiasm was contagious as the flu.
The plan they came up with was simple. They’d pull one of their traditional clashes. Then, as if disgusted, one of them would stomp out of their room, loudly slamming the door. The other would stay alone as bait. “Like a big, juicy, stinky hunk of cheese waiting for a rat,” was how Alex delicately put it.
“And that would be me,” Cam said, shaking her head at her sister’s imagery.
“Who said?” Alex wanted to know.
“Who usually stomps out of our room, loudly slamming the door?” Cam asked.
“Point taken. I’ll vanish,” Alex agreed.
Alex would then slip through Dylan’s room into the bathroom that linked his space with theirs. She would lie low there and listen for the clone to show up pretending to be her. Cam would be the bait, Alex the trap. At a signal from Cam, she’d pounce.
Then both of them would be in the room together.
With their third “twin.”
The creature couldn’t pretend to be Alex with the real Alex standing right there.
The intruder would have to come clean.
Simple.
But not easy.
For starters, Alex and Cam would have to keep in touch telepathically — piece of cake — but this time they’d have to do it without allowing the witchy stranger to pick up their thoughts. It was obvious he or she had done just that while the girls tried to communicate in school.
“Did you ever try to send a vision?” Alex asked hopefully. With her amazing eyesight, Cam was a whiz at seeing things nobody else could see. Things that were too far away, both in distance and time. Tuning in to the future was just one of her specialties. “You know, like you could think of an image and then concentrate really hard on sending it to me.”
Cam seemed puzzled. “Like scanning and e-mailing a photo?”
“Sorta. Think it, then forward it.” Alex clarified.
Cam wasn’t exactly experienced with calling up visions on demand. They usually took her by surprise, their arrival signaled by dizziness and a splitting headache. But she guessed it was worth a try. Closing her eyes tightly, she tried to see into the dark.
There was nothing but the usual blackness broken by flashes and dots of meaningless light. She opened her eyes and shook her head.
Alex sighed, discouraged. A second later, she snapped her fingers and said, “Got it!”
Cam looked skeptical.
“No, really,” Alex assured her. “I did it today. The copycat was pretending to be you in chem lab and I muted my thoughts by imagining an iron door clanging shut on them. It’d be a cinch for you to do — picturing stuff is your thing.”
“Scrambling our thoughts is not the hard part,” Cam pointed out. “It’s how to keep them from being intercepted by the clone.”
“I know, I know. But wait. Just listen.” Alex was flying by the seat of her pants, but flying nonetheless. “We can imagine the iron door, okay? But with a peephole in it! You know, the kind that you can open and close. Then, when we want to talk to each other, we imagine opening the little flap and kind of sneak our thoughts through.”
Cam rolled her eyes.
“Dude, it’s the best we’ve come up with so far. Try it. Close your eyes and picture a big, bad, two-ton iron door. Only with a little eye-level opening in it. Oh, yeah, and just to add that mojo edge, let’s hold on to our charms.”
Closing her eyes, Cam grasped her amulet and did as she was told.
“Okay, now think something.” Alex ordered. “Let’s see if I can ‘hear’ it.”
Cam’s face pruned with concentration, then she laughed.
“What?!” Alex demanded. “Whatever you find so amusing, I don’t get it. So the door thing actually works, right?” Cam nodded, and Alex said, “Now the hard part. Try the peephole.”
In her mind’s eye, Cam imagined herself pushing the flap aside and peering through the thick door. To her astonishment, what she saw on the other side of the peephole was Alex!
Is it working? she heard her sister ask.
If you can hear this, it is, Cam thought. Grinning,
she eyed Alex’s newly dyed, gelled-back, pitch-black locks gleefully and sent again the message her sister had missed before.
“I did not use shoe polish on my hair!” Alex exploded, psyched despite herself. “And I do not look like a helmet head!”
Cam’s eyes flew open. “I think it might work!” she said.
So when replica girl shows up,” Alex proposed, “you can call me through the peephole. I’ll rush in. Then we can … what?” she wondered aloud. “Do the Transformer!” she announced a second later, congratulating herself on the idea. “Excellent. We can do the Transformation spell in reverse, change the clone back into whoever or whatever she really is!”
“Alex,” Cam began, “I hate to rain on your brainstorm —”
“No, no. This’ll be great,” her sister informed her, busily rummaging through their Coventry books in search of, Cam assumed, The Morphing and Transformation Handbook. “Okay,” Alex said, having found the weighty volume and riffled through its pages. “Here it is. This’ll be the bomb.”
“Hello! The Transformer doesn’t work on human beings. It’s like a really basic morph,” Cam reminded her sister, remembering that they had used the spell once before — to change a frog Sersee had turned into a stick of wood back to its native form. “Only trackers can transmutate people. We can only renovate ‘less evolved’ things.”
Alex recognized the procedure in the book. Cam was right. “What’s ‘less evolved’ than the loser who’s stalking us?” Alex challenged, undaunted. “Come on, it’ll be a breeze. We already know the incantation. Let’s try it.”
Cam saw the mad glint in her sister’s exceptional gray eyes.
She wasn’t feeling too centered herself. Stress and lack of sleep had taken their toll. She was starting to feel nearly giddy.
“Try it on what?” Cam gave in. Checking out the room for something harmless, she spotted a pencil. “How about this?”
“Too easy,” Alex decreed. “Let’s push the envelope. Try it on something … um, slightly more evolved,” she suggested, grinning.
“And that would be?” Cam tossed the pencil back onto her desk.
“You,” her sister decided.
“Not even!” Cam spun to face her twin.
“I won’t mess you up. I’ll just, like, change your hair color or something easy like that. If it works, game over; the good guys win. If not, what have we got to lose?” Alex explained. “You’re the one who said it doesn’t work on human beings, remember? Yo, just stand still a second.”
“Not a shot,” Cam declared. “In the lab rat runoffs, I vote for you. You stand still and I’ll cast the spell. How’d you like to trade in your grunge wear for a ruffles-and-chiffon frilly-blond, princess look?”
“About as much as you’d like spiky green streaks,” Alex retorted, wild-eyed and wired. “Let’s do it on each other!”
Bubbling suddenly with punch-drunk laughter, they ran to opposite ends of the room, eyed each other, sent the message Go!, and recited the Transformation incantation.
Nothing happened.
For a moment.
Then Alex began to get hot and incredibly itchy. She scratched her arms and then her waist and watched with her mouth open as Cam exploded in ugly red welts.
Catching a glimpse of her hives in the mirror, Cam shrieked at the top of her lungs, “Now are you satisfied?!”
“Okay, we messed up,” Alex admitted, scratching behind her ear. “We’ll try something else.”
They never lost sight of each other at dinner. And the sight was better than they’d thought it would be.
Reversing the Transformer had proved fairly easy. Cam’s hives had subsided, leaving her looking minorly bumpy, flushed but functional. Alex had a few itchy patches remaining.
The only one to comment on the aftermath of the spell was Dylan. “Dudes, ’sup with the rashes?” he asked, midway through the meat loaf.
Cam blurted the first thing that came to mind. “Leaf fight,” she announced.
Bewildered, everyone stared at her, waiting.
“We were horsing around, throwing leaves at each other. Must’ve been poison ivy in the mix,” Alex bailed her out. “Pass the veggies. Please.”
Dylan left the table early. He had an English paper due in the morning. Emily was in an unusually cheerful mood. “Hypothetically,” she said as Cam and Alex cleared their plates, “if, say, Beth or Bree were having a birthday party, where do you think the best place to hold it would be?”
Cam glanced at Alex. Don’t do it, Alex warned her. Don’t tell her you already know.
Like just forget about honesty, right? Cam shot back. Anyway, I was just going to say, “Well, if it was my party…”
“What’s wrong with having it at home?” Dave dove in.
Oh, for goodness’ sake, who asked you? The agitated thought Alex picked up was Emily’s.
“Of course, what do I know?” Dave allowed, drawing back as if he, too, had read his wife’s mind. He didn’t have to. Emily’s eyes flashed at him.
“You’ve probably got homework to do,” he said to the twins. “Why don’t you go on upstairs now. We can do the dishes.”
“On the birthday bash front,” Cam burst out, “I’d opt for a more exotic locale.”
Alex grabbed her arm. “It’s too bad it’s not our party,” she said, dragging her sister out of the kitchen. “Leaf fight?!” she asked as soon as they were in the hall.
“It was the best I could do,” Cam fired back, breaking free of Alex’s grasp. “Which was way better than stupefied silence followed by the witty poison ivy add-on.”
They didn’t have to fake a fight. Cam was steaming when they got to their room.
“By the way, what I say or do about my birthday party is none of your business,” she growled. “You don’t care what kind of bender they throw. You’re not even gonna show, right?”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” Alex asserted. “Can’t you see how psyched Emily is about this? You want to deflate her totally? Why don’t you just throw a spell on her? You could do what you did to Sersee. Only instead of blowing her up, you could puncture Emily’s balloon and leave her a shriveled mess.”
“Ooh, I’m so bad,” Cam said sarcastically, but her sister’s reference to the dirty trick she’d played on the Coventry witch had hit its mark.
A minute’s “fun” had cost Cam hours of regret. She’d been talked into behaving vengefully, cruelly. She’d used, or rather, abused her gifts to cause someone else pain.
An’ it harm none, had been their father Aron’s motto. That all things may grow to their most bountiful goodness, was the Coventry creed. In that one act of reckless revenge, she’d trashed both beliefs.
She and Shane had cast the spell on Sersee — who undoubtedly deserved it. And they’d watched with glee as the vain witch swelled to revolting proportions. The worst moment? When Amaryllis had entered with a wheelbarrow to cart out the bloated, humiliated girl.
It was almost fitting, Cam thought now, that Amaryllis, one of Thantos’s sordid servants, had later joined forces with Sersee to try to destroy Cam and Alex.
Amaryllis. Cam shuddered, remembering how the girl had kept watching her, studying her every move and gesture.
Amaryllis? Alex had picked up on the name. She cocked her head and tried to coax out a thought that lurked at the back of her brain. It refused to budge, leaving her with only a vague uneasiness.
“Enough!” she called a halt to Cam’s reminiscences. “Climb off the pity pot, Cam-ille, and grab your sun charm.”
It was time to set the copycat trap. Alex envisioned the steel door and, holding on to her moon charm, sent a message through the peephole to Cam. Let’s get it on. Time to smoke out the lone clone.
It’s not going to be all that hard to act like I can’t stand you, Cam sniped silently.
Just do the door, her twin ordered telepathically.
Cam took a deep breath, shut her eyes, and pictured an iron barrier protecting her thou
ghts. Dutifully, she drilled the peephole through it. Can you read me now? she sent.
Like a trashy novel, Alex hurled back. How ’bout you?
Obnoxiously loud and clear! Okay, let’s go audio.
Alex was ready. “You know, you’re a spoiled brat,” she loudly declared for whoever might be listening.
“You mean someone used to the good life,” Cam replied in her most believably snotty voice, “as opposed to trailer trash from Montana? Oops. I didn’t mean ‘trailer’ — no, I forgot, it’s called a ‘modular dwelling,’ isn’t it?”
“Baap!” Alex imitated a buzzer going off. “Big-time compassion lapse. That’s about thirty points shaved off your Initiation total. Don’t play me, Cam, I’m feeling extremely hair-trigger.”
“What do you care how many points I win or lose, you’re not even going to be initiated! As for hair-trigger?” Cam sneered, “you should’ve pulled the trigger on that ’do —”
“Don’t go there,” Alex warned.
“Speaking of go, why don’t you?” her sister suggested. “Just ’cause you’re flaking doesn’t mean I’m not going to be initiated —”
“And make mainland honor role, too?” Alex mocked in her most viciously superior tone.
“Totally. Which means I’ve got tons of studying to do. So buh-bye, little Miss Fledgling Forever. Don’t you have elsewhere to be?”
“Anywhere you’re not!” Alex shot back, clomping loudly to the door. With her hand on the knob, she paused to mouth, “Good luck” to her sister, then left, slamming the door behind her.
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE UNDOING
How totally out of it were they? Alex wondered the minute she burst into Dylan’s room and found him sitting at his computer.
They hadn’t figured on his being there! Hadn’t thought twice about it when the bro excused himself to do homework.
Where did they think he’d be?
T*Witches: Destiny's Twins Page 4
