“We’re leaving early Sunday morning,” Alex told him.
“Good,” he said. “You don’t want to be around here Sunday afternoon.”
“Ev, why? What happens then?”
He looked up at her and grinned sadly. “You’re back East. That’s what happens.”
“No, what happens here? School starts on Monday, doesn’t it? Evan, what’s going to happen the day before school starts again?”
“I’m going to miss you, Als.” He inhaled, then blew out a big breath. “Okay, she’s cooled off enough now. Hop in. Let’s hit that tin toilet you used to call home — and flush out your bad stepdad.”
When they got to Alex and Sara’s old place, Evan decided he’d stay outside and keep an eye out for anyone who showed up.
“Okay thanks,” Alex told Evan. “If you see anything suspicious, lean on that horn, okay?”
“You got it,” Ev promised.
“So, did he open up?” Cam whispered as she and Alex slogged through knee-high snow toward the ramshackle mobile home.
“Yes and no,” Alex answered. “He talked. He really seemed to want to. But not about what’s actually going down. Except that it’s slated for Sunday afternoon, the day before school starts.”
“And right after we’re gone,” Cam said.
The trailer door was padlocked. As they drew closer, Cam saw that the bolt was hanging open. Someone had broken into the place. Alex removed the lock and slowly pulled open the door. The squeal of metal echoed through the silent woods.
Cam grabbed her sister’s hand. Alex gasped and turned toward her. “What?!” she whispered. “What did you see?”
“Nothing. I just want us to go inside together.”
“Okay, then, let’s go —” Alex found the cement block that had served as a step up to the trailer buried in snow. She and Cam kicked it clean, then, holding hands, stepped up and through the door.
It was dark and cold inside. The thick, dusty old wooden blinds were shut. Icy air and flakes of snow blew through the cramped kitchen area. Before Alex’s eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, Cam pointed to the hole in the floor through which the snowflakes were swirling. For a moment, the cold air held down a strange and awful odor coming from the rear of the trailer.
Alex smelled it first. Gagging, she reached for the cord and flipped open the blinds. There were rags and newspapers piled up in the kitchen and an oily puddle on the floor, kerosene or turpentine, something that smelled like fuel. That was the first smell that assailed them. The second was stronger and far worse.
“Oh, no,” Cam said. Wrinkling her nose at the pungent stench, she pointed toward what had once been Alex’s room. “There’s something over there. On the floor.”
Alex followed her sister’s gaze. The accordion-pleated door to her room was pulled back. An odd form, oblong and twisted, lay halfway in the room and halfway out in the narrow hallway. It looked like a rolled-up rug or a mound of rags. But Alex knew: It was a body.
Cam took a step forward and tripped over something in her path. Alex caught her as she stumbled forward, almost tumbling onto the smelly heap. Cam screamed, startling Alex, who shrieked, too.
Shaking, they both looked down at once and saw a boot — a pointy-toed boot with a two-inch heel. With trembling fingers, Alex lifted it up, just as Cam stared at the ghastly warped bundle on the floor.
She could see through the wrapping. Her knees went weak. She grabbed Alex’s arm to keep from buckling. “It’s … a person … a man,” Cam croaked, her mouth dry, her stomach starting to heave.
Alex’s heart was pumping so hard and fast she could hardly hear herself speak. “Is it him?” she asked. “Is it Ike?” And as Cam covered her mouth to keep from hurling, Alex remembered that her twin had no idea what Isaac Fielding looked like.
Alex couldn’t see through the soiled, smelly rags. It was their shape that told her a body was hidden within them. And the odor that poured from the filthy package … the smell… It wasn’t Ike’s. Ike’s stench was the stale sour odor of all-night poker games, of sweat, fear, and mucky ashtrays in airless rooms.
This odor, this awful stinging smell was familiar and rank as spoiled cheese. It was huge … and not human.
Cam’s eyes were tearing, her chest was heaving. “Als,” she managed to whisper, “let’s get out of here.”
“ASAP,” her sister agreed. Shrieking, they rushed for the door and, holding hands, leaped through it into the snow.
The boot flew from Alex’s hand and plunked into a powdery drift in the woods. Cam started toward it but Alex stopped her. “Leave it,” she said. “I know whose it is.”
“Thantos?” Cam asked, shivering. “Or … the smell, that disgusting stink … was it Fredo’s boot?”
“It’s Ike’s,” Alex said, nausea welling in her throat. “It was his boot. Let’s call the police.”
“No way,” Evan balked, when they climbed back into his pickup. “No cops. I’ve got enough problems —”
While the pickup flew over bumps and bounced through road craters, and Alex held her stomach and tried to keep her hotcakes down, Cam pulled out her cell phone and dialed 911. She barely had time to blurt out what they’d found in the trailer, when Evan reached across, took the phone, and clicked it off.
“They’re going to want to know how you got out here, and you’re going to say me, and they’re going to come around asking a bunch of questions I haven’t got answers to —”
Despite Cam’s demands and Alex’s coaxing, Evan wouldn’t stop, talk, or return the cell phone until they got to Mrs. Bass’s house. Then he let them out, tossed the slim-line to Cam, and sped away.
The house was empty. Mrs. Bass wasn’t home from work yet. “The smell,” Alex said, curling up on the living room sofa and pulling a pillow against her. “I know it’s gross, but I kind of recognized it.” Chilled — as much from the stench and sights in the trailer as from the cold — she kept her jacket on.
Shivering, Cam plopped down into the armchair. “The only one I ever met who smelled that rank was Uncle Fredo,” she said, glancing wishfully at the fireplace. If there had been wood in it, she thought, she might have tried to light it with a look. “You know, when he turned himself into that reeking, eight-hundred-pound lizard.”
“Fredo.” Alex made a face. “Another nut on our dysfunctional family tree.”
“Another psycho uncle,” Cam agreed.
The only good thing about the skinny, goat-bearded warlock — which was who Fredo actually was when he wasn’t doing his lizard thing — was that he was as dim as a refrigerator bulb.
“So,” Alex asked, “do you think Uncle Fredo’s on the scene again — morphed into a lifeless bundle of rags?”
“Well, his smell is,” Cam responded. “Are you sure that boot I tripped over belonged to your faux father?”
“Gotta say” — Alex hugged the pillow more tightly — “that my first thought was Thantos.”
“Mine, too,” Cam agreed. “But the boot’s too small.”
“Correctamundo,” Alex tried to joke, then felt her nausea rising again. “So then I thought maybe some homeless person or one of Ev’s new crew had broken into the place,” she continued more somberly.
“Only Evan’s pals wear snakeskin boots, no?” Cam’s eyes were tearing. She wiped them away.
“Yes. But when I really got a look at the skuzzy thing, at the worn high heels, it came down to just one self-centered bloodsucker —”
“Icky Ike?”
Alex nodded. “It was his boot, for sure —”
And disgusting, Cam thought. The boot was peeling and smelly and old and the heel was worn down. And the trailer — how could anyone have lived in a place like that? How could her own sister, her twin, have spent fifteen minutes in that tin coffin, let alone fourteen years?
“— but not necessarily his body,” Alex was saying. “Anyone could have wandered into that place.”
“That place,” Cam echoed, distracted by a heinous p
ossibility. What if she had been the twin given to Sara, and Alex had been brought to Dave and Emily? Could she have survived? Would she even have wanted to?
“Doubtful, your lowness,” Alex said angrily.
“You were listening in?” Cam accused.
They were glaring at each other when the front door opened, and Mrs. Bass called out to them. She sounded unusually breathless.
With effort, they turned from each other. “We’re right here,” Alex answered, standing. But the librarian bustled in before the twins could go out to meet her.
“Sit down,” she said, pulling off her ski cap and shaking the snow from it into the empty fireplace. “Please,” she added. “I mean, you don’t have to sit down, I just thought you might want to, Alex.”
Cam knew what Mrs. Bass was going to say. She looked at her sister, then back at Mrs. Bass.
“There’s a dead man in your trailer,” the librarian blurted out. “Oh, that is not how I planned to break the news. Someone called the police today and gave them an anonymous tip. A woman or a girl, the new sheriff said. Anyway, he went out to the trailer and found him. A dead man. Just dead. No blood, no signs of a struggle, no weapons —”
“When will they be able to identify who it is? Was there anything … distinctive about him?” Cam asked.
“Well, actually,” Doris Bass remembered, “Sheriff Carson said the man had an odd patch of greenish eczema on one arm. And his nails — on that arm — were, well, long and yellow, like talons, he said. Isn’t that curious?”
OMG, it was Fredo! Cam said telepathically to Alex. The smell, the claws, the green lizard skin …
You think he was waiting for us at the trailer? That he knew we’d show up there? Alex silently responded.
Could be, her sister said.
And then what, when we didn’t get there early enough, he died of disappointment? Maybe it was Ike.…
Mrs. Bass looked from one to the other of them, her eyes scrunched up inquiringly. “You’re very quiet,” she noted. “I didn’t mean to horrify you. I… well, actually, I thought you might have a guess about who’d break into the trailer. I actually thought it might be Isaac Fielding — but a man that vain would never let himself go like that.”
“Not a clue,” Alex said quickly.
“Nu-uh,” Cam agreed.
She noticed their jackets, the puddle forming around Cam’s boots. “I came home as soon as I could,” she said. “Did you … get over to … the cemetery?”
“We did,” Cam said.
“Actually, we —” Alex began, trying to get past the idea that their toxic uncle Fredo was dead … dead in the trailer where Alex and her mother had lived. It didn’t make sense. But nothing much made sense anymore — not since she and Cam had hooked up. Could Fredo have gone to the trailer to wait for them? But how had he died? And what was Ike Fielding’s boot doing in there? Ike couldn’t possibly have killed Fredo.
“Evan came by, we went to the cemetery and then up to the stream,” Cam covered for her suddenly silent sister.
“Sara’s stream?” Mrs. Bass sighed. “She loved that place ever since we were girls. Used to go up there to ‘think’ … meditate, they call it now. Sara heard voices up there —”
That got Alex’s attention. “Get out,” she exclaimed, falling back into Crow Creek slang, into Lucinda-speak. “I mean,” she said, when Mrs. Bass looked at her oddly, “did she really or are you teasing us?”
“The truth? No one believed her but me. I knew she didn’t lie. And I knew she wasn’t crazy — even if she did fall for that fast-talking, strutting little bantam, Isaac. Biggest mistake of her life.” Mrs. Bass shook her head sympathetically.
“The voices,” Cam prompted.
“Yes, well, that stream, that area, was supposed to be sacred to the Crow Indians —”
“What language did they speak?” Alex asked.
“Siouan, I believe,” Mrs. Bass answered, studying Alex curiously. “It’s the language of the Hidatsa Crow of South Dakota. As for the stream, it’s said that a revered shaman died there. A shaman is a healer; white people called them medicine men.…”
Doris Bass had gone full-tilt librarian on them. “Did Sara understand Siouan?” Cam interrupted.
“I don’t think so, but I don’t actually know. There was so much about Sara I didn’t truly know. For instance, she was psychic, I guess you could say. Very, very intuitive. She used to dabble in the paranormal. Was quite good at it, too. Which I didn’t know about until we were out of college. She lost interest in it after she adopted you — oh!” Mrs. Bass suddenly remembered, “Not only is the stream a sacred Indian site, it’s also the place where Sara received you, Alex — from a white-haired man she’d met at a magic convention.”
Alex and Cam gasped in tandem. The white-haired man was Karsh.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE DARK SIDE OF
COVENTRY
The northern tip of Coventry Island was craggy with cliffs. Here, trees were twisted by the wind and weathered by the great lake. At the highest point of this bleak land stood Crailmore, a deserted fortress built during a time of deadly witch-hunts.
The ancestral estate of the DuBaer family — who claimed kinship to Cleopatra’s physician, Merlin, Incan high priests, Polynesian chieftains, native shamans, and scores of feared and revered gurus, seers, sibyls, healers, clairvoyants, mystics, and diviners — Crailmore was where Thantos stayed (some would say “hid”) when he visited his island birthplace. And it was here that his hotheaded brother, Fredo, lived.
Although the fortress could house an army, Thantos’s followers — the torchbearers who had joined his angry search for his infant nieces fifteen years before — had all but deserted him. Only a handful remained, a horde of fortune-seeking fledglings, young witches and warlocks hoping to prove their daring in his reckless service. The young warlock Shane had trained here, until he’d become infatuated with one of Thantos’s young nieces.
Today, however, at Thantos’s command, the brothers were alone. Fredo, tugging at the wisps of hair sprouting from his pointed chin, cowered nervously in the armchair beside the fireplace — which held more cobwebs than wood. Towering above Fredo, the robustly black-bearded Thantos ground his teeth, trying to control his anger. “Three times you have failed me,” he hissed. “I sent you to lure Aron’s daughters — to attract them, entice them. And what did you do?”
Fredo shrugged sullenly.
“I asked you a question!” Thantos roared, lifting the silver cane he’d been using since the accident. Then he cleared his throat, even more enraged now that he’d lost his temper. “You turned yourself into a stinking lizard.”
“The odor isn’t my fault,” Fredo argued. “It was your bright idea. And I wish you’d remove the smell spell.” He giggled suddenly, pleased with himself. “That’s pretty funny — smell spell.”
Thantos made a disgusted face. His hands reached forward automatically, as if he was going to grab his brother’s skinny neck. Instead, he turned away, his velvet cape flaring, and began to hobble back and forth in front of Fredo. His good foot, in its hobnail boot, and his cane clacked heavily on the stone floor of the great room.
“The odor was your punishment for failing me the first time. I will undo it when you bring me Artemis and Apolla — ”
“Who?” Fredo asked.
“Alexandra and Camryn, dunce! You are an embarrassment. Which is why I order you never again to shape-shift into that demented lizard —”
“It wasn’t my fault I fell on you. It was an accident. And your hip is practically all healed —”
“Fredo,” Thantos whispered dangerously, “listen to me. I taught you how to shape-shift. Without me — despite the reknown of our family — you’d still be a lowly apprentice trying to pass your warlock initiation rites. I taught you and now I have taken back my gift! Do you hear me? Never, never again are you to unfurl those dragon wings or wrap yourself in that putrid, scaly skin — ”
“I didn
’t!” Fredo cried. “I did what you said. I found him in the trailer. And I didn’t transform myself —”
“If ever you disobey this command, you are finished, my brother —”
Fredo gulped. “Finished?”
“I must have obedience,” Thantos ranted, slashing the air with his cane. “Total, unquestioning obedience. This is a time of exceptional opportunity. You will not destroy it for me. Karsh is ill. I saw it when we held him hostage. He can’t last long. And his charming companion, Ileana, a beauty like her mother —”
“And talented, like her father.” Fredo smiled his yellow-toothed smile.
Thantos aimed a silencing glare at him. “Once the elder is gone, she will do my bidding —”
“You know what I don’t get?” Fredo ventured carelessly. “What the big deal is about these twins. I mean, if you wanted kids, you could have had more of your own.” He ducked as Thantos’s cane soared toward his head. “Okay, okay,” Fredo whined, his hands protectively raised. “Sorry I mentioned it!”
Thantos composed himself. Leaning against the fireplace mantle, he looked up at the full-length portrait of his mother, once the most powerful leader of the Coventry clan. She had urged him to marry but had ridiculed his choice — Beatrice, an extraordinary girl from an ordinary family. That was the problem. As bright and beautiful as Beatrice was, her roots were undistinguished. Except for one ancestor who, scheduled to be burned at the stake, had cast a spell on her executioner who then refused to light the fire; and another who’d survived the dunking chair in Salem and lived to a ripe old age as one of the first women doctors in New England — there was barely an important witch amongst them.
But Thantos had been young and besotted and on the rebound. His one true love, after all, had married another. So he allowed himself to be smitten by the girl’s golden good looks and by her strangely aristocratic, at times even arrogant, manner. He approved of the way she valued herself — as though not having a grand and powerful bloodline was more a flaw of fate than a fault of hers. And so he’d married her against his mother’s caution — and lived to regret it when she died in childbirth a year later.
T*Witches: Dead Wrong Page 5
