T*Witches: Double Jeopardy Read Free Page A

given her. “Light it!” their uncle ordered. Cam’s eyes flew open and focused on the candle. A familiar heat rose inside her, nipped at her eyes, first sharpening her sight and then, as the candlewick blazed, blurring it with tears.
    Alex watched, fascinated, hypnotized, as the warlock tossed bits of mandrake root and valerian into the flame.
    “What do you see?” he asked in a voice soft and dark as his black velvet cape.
    In the dancing firelight, they saw — Cam, who was used to visions, and Alex, who had never experienced one — they saw
Dylan
!
    Helpless. Terrified. Trapped.
    He was inside a dark iron box, stumbling amid empty cartons, bubble wrap, and packing crates, a trash-smeared container smaller than a room, larger than a coffin. Dylan was trying to scale its rubbish-greased sideswhen a roar caught his attention — and theirs. As he looked up, Cam and Alex could see through his eyes a mechanical mouth opening, its jaws lined with steel teeth.
    The roar grew in intensity until Alex had to clamp her hands over her aching ears. And as the clanking howl increased, the steel mouth widened and lowered as if it would crush the entire iron box in which Dylan was caught.
    He was inside a Dumpster, Cam realized. The noise was the ruckus of a big garbage truck backing up … about to seize the trash, and Dylan, from the Dumpster … into its iron-clawed maw.
    “No!” Cam shouted. “Stop!”
    With the hiss of a giant snake, the candle flame went out.
    Thantos smiled at them. “It was only a thought.”
    Cam had experienced such “thoughts” before, only she knew them as premonitions, visions of what was to come.
    “No,” Alex whispered to her. “Don’t worry. Dylan’s not trapped in that disgusting contraption. He’s safe. He’s in his room. I saw him a minute ago.”
    “She’s right,” their uncle said. “It was a mere exercise … a demonstration. But accidents do happen —”
    “Why are you here?” Alex asked. “What do you want?”
    “Only to help you,” Thantos answered, sounding improbably gentle and sincere. “To help you and Miranda. I know how eager you are to meet her at last, to look upon your true mother and see a part of yourselves. I know you have been waiting for her to call you again. But she can’t. She won’t. She will not call or come to you unless I bring her.”
    “When?” Cam asked.
    “It’s been fifteen years,” Alex murmured. “How much longer are you going to keep her locked away, hidden —”
    “You mean,” Thantos said, “how much longer will you have to wait? Not long.” He smiled. “A bit longer than your friends at the pizza shop have been waiting for you —”
    “Whoops,” Cam yipped, as if waking from a dream. “We’re supposed to be at PITS —”
    Alex glared at her. “How can you think about that at a time like this? Don’t you want to see her?”
    “Of course,” Cam told her sister. “More than anything.”
    They heard Thantos chuckle and turned toward him. Where the hulking tracker had stood, now only a coil of dark smoke drifted, and a distant, retreating voice announced: “As my mother, your grandmother Leila, used to say, ‘Be careful what you wish for.’”

CHAPTER FOUR
    WHO ARE YOU?
    Be careful what you wish for
…
    Ileana sat on the cool sand, facing the ocean. Her tangled hair and solemn face were damp with sea spray carried on the evening breeze. Her eyes were sad, unfocused. But Leila’s words sang in her head like vengeful children, taunting her.
    Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah! Be careful what you wish for!
    Ileana had gotten everything she’d wished for. Always.
    It had been a hallmark of her personality. Willful, bossy, beautiful, and bright, the vain young witch had never been one to wait her turn.
    She had prided herself on making things happen.
    She had wished for Truth and Justice. And she had made
this
happen — this lonely, gloomy exile.
    The joke was on her.
    Truth: A long-standing wrong had been righted.
    A murderer