T*Witches: Destiny's Twins by Randi Reisfeld, H.B. Gilmour

tried together. They’d used it to instill trust in someone too frightened to tell the truth. Whether or not this Alex-looking creature was frightened, she
was
lying; she was hiding something. Cam glanced around the room. There was no time for her to gather the right herbs — burdock, chamomile, or lemon balm, she remembered. There was no time to dig in her jewelry basket for the rose quartz crystal that had once belonged to Karsh. There was no time to wait for Alex.
    “Oh, sun that brings us light and cheer, shine through me now to banish fear,”
she began the incantation. “
Free
—” She was supposed to use the person’sname here, but she didn’t know who stood before her. “
Free this fraud
,” she decided,
“from doubt and blame, win her trust and lift her shame.”
    Nothing happened. Counterfeit Alex stood gaping at Cam.
    “Okay.” Cam took a breath.
Reveal, schlemiel, conceal …
She had it.
“Let me see through what she would conceal. Show me what she won’t reveal. Put an end to this crazy game, that I may know who she is and why she came!”
    This time, the moment Cam stopped, the clone tried to cover her face. But it was too late. Cam saw her eyes, watched their color fade, their shape change.
    Alex’s eyes, identical to Cam’s, were large and deep-set. The pretender’s seemed shrunken suddenly, their vivid gray giving way to dull brown.
    And the clothes her so-called sister was wearing were changing, too. Within the outline of Alex’s body, a dark velvet robe appeared and disappeared. Like an object floating under a storm-tossed sea, the robe emerged, then sank beneath the jeans and T-shirt the clone had copied.
    It was an optical illusion, Cam realized, one that she could only have witnessed with the help of the Truth spell. Amazing! She’d found a way to transform a human being without actually physically changing her. Alex’sduplicate wasn’t morphing. Thanks to the spell, Cam’s view of her was! She was “seeing through” the impostor’s disguise.
    “I can do more than fry a book, sister,” the strangely altered girl threatened. “Watch this!”
    But Cam’s powerful eyesight kicked into high gear, paralyzing her for a moment.
    Instead of snatching back the precious book, from which a thin stream of smoke was rising, her attention was now riveted on the intruder’s face.
    Not
on
her face exactly, more like under it.
    Stunned, she began to recognize the girl’s subtly submerged features.…
    Instinctively, Cam gripped her sun charm.
    Alex gasped.
    Dylan leaped up from his chair. “What?!” he asked, shaken.
    She didn’t answer. Her entire being was on alert. Listening.
    The sound she heard was demanding, angry, distant. At first it droned like an enormous agitated bee from very far away.
    Alex grew dizzy. Her head ached; her eyes closed. She began to make out words.
    Sow confusion. Reap dissension. Tear them apart. Make each hate you — and thus each other.
    The voice was deep, perversely delighted, and familiar.
    It belonged to …?
    Alex’s hand moved to her moon charm. It had begun to grow warm. She felt the gold amulet stir against her palm, felt it push forward as if drawn by a magnet.
    Thantos!
    She saw him. In the blackness behind her eyelids, she saw the hulking, bearded tracker talking to a robed young witch. The girl, whose hair was hidden by the hood of her cloak, was staring at him raptly. Alex could not see her face. But she could see her uncle’s — spiteful, gleeful, malicious, determined. He was issuing orders.
    He was commanding his underling … an apprentice witch who smelled of jimsonweed and nettle …
    All at once, Alex knew who the girl was. Remembered her. Realized that Thantos, a tracker capable of transmutation, of changing human beings, was casting a spell over the creature.
    He was ordering his treacherous servant to chip away at the twins, rip them apart, undermine them bit by bit.
    Thantos took the urchin’s shoulders and turned heraway from