T*Witches: Double Jeopardy by H.B. Gilmour, Randi Reisfeld Page B

she too late? Had her brother already been mashed by the iron jaws of the truck? Was Dyl fill — as in landfill?
    Cam climbed into the Dumpster and scrambled to retrieve her brother’s earring.
    “Are you okay? He’s not in there, is he?” Jason called breathlessly. He’d run over the moment she’d disappeared from sight. “Camryn, answer me!”
    “No, he’s not here,” she said, climbing out, holding up the tiny gold earring, “but he was.”
    *   *   *
    Jason dropped her off at home.
    Alex was in the kitchen, preparing a cup of tea. “For Emily,” she explained. “She’s a mess. So,” she asked anxiously, “anything?”
    Cam noticed Miranda’s quilt slung like a shawl over Alex’s shoulders. “It just feels good,” her sister dismissed her questioning glance. “I didn’t get much out of Kenya. She was, like, radically unhinged. And then I said the magic word
computer
and —
poof!
— she took off. Cam, what happened? What’s the matter?”
    Cam held out Dylan’s earring.
    Alex threw down the tea bag she’d been dunking and hurried to her twin. “Where did you get that?”
    “It was in the Dumpster, Als.” Cam was shaking. “The Dumpster Thantos showed us.”
    Alex took off the fragrant, faded quilt and wrapped Cam in it. “Let’s go upstairs,” she said softly but firmly. There was no thought of sharing this stunning info with parents or police. The news, Alex pointed out, was way beyond weird and would require even weirder explanations. Plus, Cam believed, the less Dave and Emily knew about the twins’ witchy powers, the safer her adoptive ’rents would be.
    All they had to do was find and rescue Dylan before it was too late.
    If it wasn’t too late already.
    “We need help. We’ve got to find Dylan,” Cam said, climbing the stairs, feeling slightly warmer and less frantic huddled in the quilt. “Got any ideas?”
    “Nine-one-one Karsh and Ileana again. Give them another heads-up,” Alex suggested. “Call in the Coventry cavalry.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    WHAT A FOOL BELIEVES
    There was so much to put down. His bony knees knocked against the top drawer of his desk. Karsh hunched over and wrote fiercely, attacking his notebook as if he had to hold it down, force the words into it before it sprang shut. He wrote and wrote in his cramped, precise script, filling up pages as quickly as he could.
    Putting it all down on paper, or parchment in his case, was Karsh’s backup plan.
    The family secrets he had to reveal, he had hoped to do in person. He didn’t want Ileana to discover them as harshly as she’d discovered that Thantos was her father. The pages Karsh was filling would affect the rest of herlife — and Camryn’s and Alexandra’s. They contained nothing less than their destiny.
    But was recording the past more urgent than the present? Camryn and Alexandra had called out for help.
    He had heard them, of course, but could not go to them — not now, not with so little time left. He might, however, be able to locate Dylan for them through the use of his stones. Reluctantly, he set down his pen and gathered his magick stones.
    The old warlock was dismayed to find only four of the sacred five left. Intuitively, he realized that Tsuris had stolen one — the African tigereye, which might still have Ileana’s imprint on it. He shuddered to think what the ruffian sons of Fredo might do to her.
    Hastily, Karsh assembled the remaining rocks — substituting a large raw topaz for the lost stone — and sought Dylan.
    He found the blond boy wandering alone, limping, and lost in the woods. Although his head still ached from where it had hit the slate floor, Karsh forced himself to focus on the flora and fauna around the injured child. Then, by a process of elimination, and consulting his botanical books, he narrowed the area to New England and determined, as much by instinct as geography, that it was near Salem, graveyard of so many of their ancestors.
    Karsh shivered as he thought