T*Witches: Destiny's Twins Read Online Free PDF Page B

are you doing here? How’d you get out of art?” Alex asked, looking around for Mr. Calio, the chem teacher. He was working with a couple of kids at the other end of the room.
    “Oh, Alex, I’m so sorry —” Cam bit her lip, looked away, then turned bravely back to her sister. “It’s awful. But you’ve got to know. I just went to my locker to get my portfolio —”
    “Another portfolio?” Alex asked. “What happened to the one you had before?”
    Cam blinked at her. “It doesn’t matter. There was a note in my locker. From Cade. I don’t know how to tell you this —”
    Alex’s heart flopped, fell like a busted elevator plummeting down a chute. “What?” she said.
    “It’s over. He wants to break up with you, but he’s afraid that you’ll totally tank. He’s really a nice guy, Als. He’s just not all that wild about you anymore.”
    It wasn’t Cam.
    Just five minutes ago at her locker, Cam had been wearing her sun necklace. This … this creature … wasn’t. And her gray eyes were cold, colder than Cam’s had ever been. And again there was the scent of nettles and jimsonweed. A fragrance Alex remembered, she was sure now, from her last trip to Coventry.
    She wasn’t that experienced with scrambling her thoughts, but she closed her eyes and pictured an iron door and willed it to slam shut over her brain.
    Score one for intuition! The scheme must’ve worked. The Cam clone before her, pretending concern but really gloating, seemed to think that Alex had bought her story.
    “Dude, I can’t believe it,” Alex said, glad that theodor of the girl, or whatever it was, had set her eyes stinging again. A few tears would go a long way toward convincing the pretender of Alex’s misery — which had obviously been sham Cam’s goal.
    “Are you mad at me for telling you?” the phony asked, not able to hide the hope in her voice. “I mean, just ’cause Cade chose to confide in me.…”
    Whatever this Cam-copying creep was after, Alex was over it. She wanted to get rid of the counterfeit and check in with her real twin. Who knew what miserable hoax the two-faced twerp might’ve pulled on Cam?
    But Alex played along. “Yeah. I’m mad at you, okay? I’m so mad that I’m —”
    “Not going to Coventry, right?” The clone pulled a dejected face, but her eyes were alive with expectation. “You don’t even want to be initiated, do you?”
    Bingo! That took care of
why.
Someone didn’t want Alex taking her witch vows. All she and Cam had to figure out now was
who
and
how.
    “Yo, dude, you have so got my number,” Alex told the girl who would be Cam. “I wouldn’t set foot on Coventry now if… if… if some enchanted nut ball begged me to!”
    Her make-believe “twin” looked confused.
    “No Initiation, no way!” Alex insisted. “Now
hasta la vista,
babe, before Mr. Calio catches you here.”
    *        *        *
    “Well, that really worked,” Cam groused when they met on the front steps of the school. “I heard you for a minute, then there was nothing but static. I almost ran out of class to find out what happened.”
    “But you didn’t because?”
    “You know,” she accused. “You sent that snotty note saying I was a lousy mind reader and you didn’t need my help.”
    “Cami, that wasn’t me. I didn’t send any note.”
    “Excuse me. I think I know your handwriting,” Cam insisted. But after a beat, she added in a whisper, “It was her, wasn’t it?”
    Alex nodded. “Our new ‘twin.’ The deal is she’s here to turn us against each other,” she continued, heading down the walk to the street, “and, more important, to keep us — or maybe just me — from going through with our Initiation. I’m sure of it. Now who would want to keep us from going back to Coventry?”
    Cam didn’t have to think about it. “First guess? Uncle T. Although I can’t imagine him turning himself into one of us. He’s way too arrogant —”
    “But he wouldn’t think