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

him. For a fleeting moment, Alex saw the girl’s true face. And then it changed. It became hers! And Cam’s. It was their bogus twin.
    With great effort, Alex lifted her head and willed her eyes to open. Her skull was pounding. Her body was racked with chills. She knew the symptoms. She had seen Cam go through them often enough. But this time she was the one who’d had the vision. And it hadn’t been a prophecy of the future. It was a picture from the very recent past.
    “Yo, what’s up?” Dylan was watching her, his eyes wide with fear and confusion. “Dude, what’s happening to you?”
    Alex’s moon charm was red hot now. Suddenly, she heard Cam’s silent cry:
Alex, where are you? I need help!
    “Alex,” Dylan called to her, “say something. You’re freaking me.”
    She hated to do it, but she had to.
    Without herbs, without crystals, with nothing but her skill, her knowledge of the craft, and the amulet her father had forged for her, she recited the Lethe incantation.
    A moment before Dylan fell into stupefied forgetfulness, she whispered to him, “Your paper rules, bro. Rest easy.”
    *        *        *
    “It’s Amaryllis!” Alex called, crashing into the bedroom she shared with her sister.
    She’d half expected to find Cam in big trouble — singed by the Coventry witch’s fiery gaze. But her twin was all right. It was the girl who looked exactly like Alex, down to the sheen of her black-dyed hair, who appeared to be in harm’s way.
    Wisps of smoke rose from the imposter’s jeans and sweatshirt. Her face was smeared with soot as if she’d just crawled out of a chimney.
    Clutching a smoldering book — Ileana’s spell book! — Cam was glaring at the disheveled “Alex.”
    “It’s really Amaryllis,” Alex gushed. “I recognized her smell and then I saw her face. Cam, I had a vision!”
    “Oh, really?” Cam asked, ticked that her twin had taken so long to pop in. “And who are you?”
    “Me?” Alex said defensively. “Yo, I’m your sister, your one and only twin. And she’s Uncle T’s tool, Amaryllis.”
    “Prove it!” the smoke-damaged clone hollered from the floor.
    Alex gave the girl a dirty look, then showed her sister her moon charm. “Camryn, it’s me,” she said, exasperated.
    “Camryn, it’s me!” her clone quickly echoed, scrambling to her feet. Mimicking Alex’s frustrated cry, she pretended to grasp something at her throat.
    But she was holding nothing. And Cam and Alex both knew it.
    “Where were you?!” Cam demanded. “I’ve been trying to break through that dumbest-idea-of-the-decade ‘door’ of yours for five minutes!” The moment she said it, Cam realized her mistake. She’d forgotten to grasp her sun charm until the last minute.
    “Well, I’m here now,” Alex was saying, “and so is Uncle Thantos’s latest messenger — emphasis on ‘mess.’ She was supposed to torch our books and make you think I was doing it. He wanted to turn us against each other again —”
    “Give me news, not history,” Cam responded. “She started the fire, but I got it to ricochet, to blaze backward. I can’t believe he’s still pulling the same old tricks. Trying to split us up. He’s tried it how many times now? Three just with Shane —”
    “See, you can’t blame me then, can you?” Amaryllis, still in her charred Alex incarnation, argued shrewdly. “I mean, I’m only one of his lackeys, just like Shane.”
    “I am so not interested in Shane Wright,” Cam said too quickly.
    Just as quickly, Amaryllis’s eyes, still flashing between gray and brown, lit up with new mischief.
    “Shane A. Wright? Good thing, too. Since the buff boy is so not interested in
you.
Never was,” Alex’s replicadeclared. “It was me — I mean, Alex — all the time. You’re too spoiled and perfect. So the good girl. And talk about clueless! You bought everything Shane said. I guess you never got it, I mean how Alex was always more his type —”
    “Just