T*Witches: Double Jeopardy Read Free Page B

had been exposed and punished.
    The dark cloud of doubt that had hung over Coventry Island for fifteen years had finally been lifted.
    Single-handedly, Ileana had done what no one else had been able to do.
    Only somewhere on the road to Justice, Ileana had been robbed.
    Some would call it comeuppance.
    The haughty me-first witch with the superiority complex had been kicked off her high horse. Tumbled. Humbled. No one would recognize her now — neither her fervent enemies nor those who professed to love her.
    Here in this tropical paradise, Ileana was ghostly pale from days spent in a darkened bungalow. Her normally vibrant gray eyes were clouded, her lustrous pale hair tangled and matted.
    What did it matter that others would not know her? She didn’t recognize herself.
    Amnesia? If only she had it. Alone on the beach, Ileana shook her head.
    Her problem was that she
could
remember. All of it.
    As Leila had prophesied, what she had wished for — and passionately believed in — had turned on her viciously. Betrayed her, like so many of those she’d trusted.
    She had believed herself to be an orphan, lucky enough to have been reared by Lord Karsh, the good and powerful old warlock who’d taught her everything she knew about the craft, about life. Except the one thing she’d wished for — the name of her father.
    Now she knew it.
    She’d wished for a soul mate and believed she’d found one in Brice Stanley, a world-renowned movie star and secret warlock who, Ileana had been confident, loved her.
    But Brice had testified on behalf of Thantos DuBaer — Ileana’s sworn enemy.
    What she believed, with every bone and breath in her body, was that Thantos DuBaer was a murderer, the vicious killer who had slaughtered the twins’ father — and possibly their mother — and had been trying for years to snare her young charges, Camryn and Alexandra.
    So passionately had Ileana wished to expose Thantos, to bring him to justice, that she had done the nearly impossible.
    She had summoned the restless spirit of Leila, the deceased matriarch of the DuBaer clan, mother ofThantos, his miserable sibling Fredo, and their murdered brother, Aron.
    Surely their mother knew the truth.
    Ileana had wished for Leila to settle the matter of who had killed gentle Lord Aron. Again, her wish had come true.
    Leila had identified Fredo as the fiend, proving Ileana wrong and turning the monstrous Lord Thantos into a slandered hero.
    And Fredo, spiteful, cruel, inept, with no sense of right and wrong, had shouted out the final truth. That Thantos, the warlock Ileana had despised all her life and had tried desperately to bring down, was her father.
    The lazy waves now washed over the dejected young witch’s sandaled feet. She should get up, Ileana realized. The evening was turning cold. The tide was coming in. She should get up. But why, for what?
    As if in answer, raucous laughter drifted to her from down the beach. If there was anything she didn’t want to hear right now it was laughter and young voices, loud, elated, and carefree.
    Ileana dragged herself to her feet. Standing on the same lonely strip of beach she’d paced for the past several nights, she gazed out at the ocean. As foamy water lapped the hem of her turquoise caftan, she noticed a piece of driftwood bobbing on the water. It was directionless,unanchored, tossed this way and that at nature’s whim.
    A perfect metaphor, Ileana thought. In it, she recognized her new self.
    The partying grew louder, wilder. She would have liked to ignore it, but she couldn’t. Along with the wind-carried noise came a feeling of looming danger. The awareness broke through her self-absorbed funk, and she tried to zoom-lens in on the bash down the beach.
    Had she gotten sand in her eyes? Had staring out at the ocean dulled her sight? She saw a shaft of leaping orange light but couldn’t make out exactly what it was.
    For a moment, she thought: So what? Who cares?
    Her sense of jeopardy, of children in