T*Witches: Split Decision by H.B. Gilmour, Randi Reisfeld Page A

the Barneses’ roof and rules. So what if she hadn’t started dressing like Cam and her crew. Was that all that remained of her fierce independent spirit? Had she really, as Michaelina mocked, strayed so far from her roots? From the person Sara had brought her up to be?
    If Sara Fielding could see her now, what would she think of Alex?
    “There’s the witch!” Wide-eyed and trembling, the three boys were staring at her. “She’s the one from the beach. Let’s get outta here!” they cried over their shoulders as they hightailed it up the street.
    “What was that?” Michaelina wanted to know.
    Alex tried to shrug nonchalantly. “How should I know?” she replied, to keep herself from saying what she knew to be true.
Even they think I’m my sister.

CHAPTER SEVEN
    THE SECRET PASSAGE
    The hidden door behind the dresser in Thantos’s childhood bedroom beckoned Cam. Despite the excitement of her amazing day with Shane, something drew her back here. She needed to find out where the strange hatch led — before she could decide if it was worth mentioning to Miranda.
    Pleading exhaustion, she’d gone to bed early. In the middle of the night, when she was certain her mother was asleep, she made for Thantos’s room, careful to move the dresser out of the way slowly and quietly.
    The small door was unlocked and swung open easily. It opened into a murky tunnel, which Cam followed to a stone stairway. It led into the caves of CoventryIsland. She’d been there before, lured by Sersee. She wasn’t scared, though, as she descended the stairs, which twisted and spiraled. The creepy quotient was definitely daunting. She’d bet Thantos used this secret chamber to torment his terrified brother Fredo.
    At the bottom of the stairwell, Cam found herself in a high-ceilinged, circular cavern. Like rays from a black sun, five tunnels led off in different directions. As she stood in the center of the dark vault, a strange feeling came over her.
    It was neither a vision nor a premonition coming on. She did not grow dizzy or hear the loud buzzing that usually heralded her prophecies. She simply knew something suddenly that she had no rational way of knowing.
    There was a book.
    She hadn’t read it but somehow knew a portion of its contents. The book told of what lay beneath the soil of Coventry, what — and who — she might encounter should she journey farther, deeper into this part of the fabled caves. What kinds of inhabitants, more dangerous than the Furies, might be found. Here spirits of the dead roamed, and others, deranged souls who struck out blindly at any who dared enter. These wretched apparitions could materialize at any bend in the tunnel.
    This came to her as fact without fear. Cam felt a sense of calm and peace. She’d be protected here. Shedidn’t know why, or how, or from what exactly, but whatever had lured her here this time, that same powerful magick would not allow harm to come to her. She stood very still in the middle of the circular chamber and waited for her senses to guide her.
    Her hearing, never as astute as Alex’s, was the first sense awakened. She heard scratching sounds coming from one of the tunnels. She listened intently. A steady, monotonous scraping, like fingernails on a chalkboard, raised goose bumps on her arms and turned her stomach.
    Yet she forged forward.
    Her eyes, beacons in the dark, were on high beam. So she saw him well before he saw or sensed her. A spindly man, his cloaked back to her, was bent in concentration over a stone outcropping, a table of sorts formed by a ledge in the wall. His frayed cape had probably once been a burgundy color. Now it was threadbare and as sleek with grease as his long, stringy, dark hair, which was tied back in a rattail.
    This was no apparition, no haunted spirit. What, then? Who would sit in the icy bowels of Crailmore and what was he doing?
    Afraid only of startling him, she advanced slowly and stealthily.
    As she drew closer, she realized what he