T*Witches: The Witch Hunters Read Online Free PDF

down to dinner.
    “No.” Cam did denial at first, then changed it to “Sort of. A little of both, I guess. Dad —” She had an idea. “When you say you can sense it, you know, ‘feel’ that something’s wrong, what do you mean? Do you mean like a regular person? Or do you still have that … ‘mojo’ Karsh spotted in you?”
    “Karsh.” Dave sat back down at the table and waved for Cam to join him. “Is that what’s going on? You miss him, don’t you? You and Alex haven’t been the same since you came back from his funeral, from Coventry.”
    Dave alone in Cam’s mainland family knew of their visit to their island birthplace. He alone knew — had known — the beloved old warlock who had saved their lives as infants. Karsh himself had chosen Dave to be Cam’s protector.
    “Did anything happen there that you didn’t tell me?” Dave asked now. “Something troubling?”
    “Why?” Cam challenged. “What do you feel? Can you see things that aren’t here and now? Can you hear what I’m thinking?”
    Dave’s mustache flagged. Then he understood what his child was asking and it returned to its normal optimistic upswing. “Okay, let’s talk,” he agreed.
    Gratefully, Cam sat down across from him.
    “When I first met Karsh, I was getting pretty good at knowing — knowing, sensing, not actually hearing,” he clarified, “what people thought. I was … highly intuitive, I guess. Karsh called me a Sensitive. Of course, when I showed him what I could do, which was embarrassingly amateurish, very basic — I mean I could make assumptions about people based on … feelings I got about them, vibes — Karsh laughed.
    “You remember that laugh of his?” Dave asked his daughter. “Never mocking. Always with you, not at you, always on your side. I met him at a paranormal conference, you know, a sort of convention of geeks interested in extrasensory perception, psychic healing, using one’s mind to accomplish amazing feats — things most people think of either as magic or madness —”
    “And you got to talking …” Cam knew the storyand tried to move Dave along. “And he really liked you and thought you’d make a perfect dad — ”
    “A perfect
Protector
,” Dave corrected her. “A Protector is a person of high intuition and intelligence — hey, I’m quoting Karsh here,” he added modestly. “A Sensitive with a strongly developed capacity for loyalty, love, and support. Being called Dad is all gravy. As for perfect, there’s no such animal, honey. Protectors, like everyone else in the world, are human and, therefore, flawed. In fact, before I agreed to take you, Karsh told me stories about failed Protectors. People who were given fledgling witches and warlocks to rear but couldn’t handle it. Either because they were too weak or their charges were too strong.”
    This was a piece of the story — a dark, chilling part — Cam hadn’t heard before. “But you wanted to be a Protector, anyway?”
    “It wasn’t that so much.… That first meeting with Karsh happened a couple of years before your mom and I got married. We met again, at another conference, some years later. By then Emily and I had tried and failed to have a child of our own. Of course I mentioned it to him. There was nothing I couldn’t talk to him about. I don’t remember anything else about that meeting. Except…” Dave seemed to recall it now. “I think he asked whether I’d be willing to forgo, to give up or lose my own growingabilities in order to nurture another person’s — a being whose potential far outshone my own, possibly a child’s.
    “I said I thought so. I mean, I was just dabbling. I was using telekinesis and ESP as party tricks to entertain friends. Karsh seemed to be asking whether I’d trade that in to help someone who’d use his or her skills for more important reasons. To do good things, to help others. To help, I think he said, the universe and everything in it. Something like that. It