The Twin Prophecies: Origins

The Twin Prophecies: Origins

By

Nina Perez

Copyright ©2014 JK Press

All Rights Reserved

Published by JK Press at Smashwords

To my husband and children for their support and endless patience.

For Meghan.

Table of Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Epilogue

About the Author

Chapter One

Violet Ross pressed her shoulders into the plush leather upholstery of the BMW’s back seat. Her right hand gripped the passenger side door handle as if she were ready to tug it forward and bolt from the car at any moment. Best to do it now, she thought, while the car is parked. Violet looked out the window, grateful that the glass was tinted so no one would be able to see inside the vehicle. Not that it mattered; the public library’s parking lot was empty.

I don’t want to die like this, she said.

Shut up, Jack Morrow snapped in reply. He didn’t bother to turn around from the driver’s seat, opting instead to meet Violet’s gaze in the rearview mirror to deliver the dirty look. Their relationship was as close – and at times as complicated – as any brother/sister relationship could be, but Violet and Jack were not siblings. Not exactly.

Violet, show Jack the same courtesy he extended to you when it was your turn, please. Dr. Tesla, their guardian, did turn in the passenger seat, peering at Violet over the top of his glasses, his mouth set in a straight line. Violet knew the look all too well; she was getting on his nerves.

As a child psychologist Dr. Tesla was used to dealing with troubled, sarcastic teens, but spending the past few weeks teaching his two fifteen-year-old charges how to drive was taking its toll. The gray streaks in his brown hair had doubled since Violet and Jack had come to live with him four months ago, but it seemed the majority of it had appeared when he’d taken on the additional role of driving instructor.

Okay, let’s try one more parallel park and then we’ll call it an evening. Dr. Tesla pointed at the two library vans used to deliver books to the elderly on the weekends, parked ahead of them and to their right, and indicated that Jack should try to park in the space between them.

Violet released her hold on the door and noticed Jack had relaxed his on the steering wheel. He wasn’t bad at parallel parking. In fact, he was doing much better than Violet at almost all aspects of driving, but she felt it was her semi-sisterly duty to give him a hard time whenever possible. Also, she knew she was actually doing Jack a favor with her teasing. If he focused on how annoying she was, he had little time to devote to his apprehension of being behind the wheel. Almost one year ago Jack’s best friend, Bobby Matthews, had stolen the keys to his father’s car and gotten into a terrible accident. He was now paralyzed from the waist down with little chance that he’d ever walk again.

Their driving lessons had begun on deserted back roads but, whenever he’d pick up speed or take a sharp turn, Jack became nervous and unfocused. He’d make simple mistakes then over-correct, causing the car to jerk to sudden stops or veer out of the lane. Things were smoother after Dr. Tesla suggested a change in location, but occasionally Jack’s mind would wander and Violet could see in his eyes he’d gone back to that place – back to the moment before Bobby had gotten into the car, when Jack had touched his friend and had a vision of the future accident. Confused and scared, Jack had refused to get into the vehicle and carried a terrible guilt for months.

Violet pulled him back from that place the only way she knew how: chiding and sarcasm. Those were her gifts. Well, not her only gifts. Violet also had a power: She could feel the emotions of others, but, more than that, she could get inside their heads, hear their thoughts, and see their surroundings. Dr. Tesla taught them how to control their abilities but, sometimes, when her emotions ran high or she was under pressure, Violet found herself tapping into the nearest person, overcome with their feelings.

It happened to Jack as well. One afternoon he became so addled yellow light flowed from his hands, washing over the steering wheel and nearly covering the whole dashboard. Jack could heal injuries with his hands and, even though his power didn’t work on inanimate objects, being flustered had caused it to emerge. It was exactly what Dr. Tesla feared would happen, which was why he used his position as a psychologist to convince their high school he should be their driving instructor. Dr. Tesla cited emotional distress over Jack and Violet both losing their parents in the same car accident just a few months prior.

Jack parked between the two vans with ease, ignoring Violet’s smirk when he turned to look over his right shoulder. He knew what she was doing and couldn’t get too mad at her, because it worked. Concentrating on not hitting the vans and shutting Violet up left no time to think about Bobby or their parents’ accident. Or other things.

Well done. Dr. Tesla smiled approvingly. I think that’s all for this evening. He pushed open the passenger door, signaling he and Jack would switch places so he could drive them home.

*

Home was large and made of gray stone with black shutters, and it sat at the end of a very long, winding gravel driveway. The woods around it were so thick; you couldn’t see the other houses on either side. It was probably the last place you’d expect a child psychologist to live, but something about the house gave off an air of mystery to the few visitors it had, and it was precisely the type of house you’d imagine a warlock would live—which was perfect since that’s exactly what Dr. Tesla was. Not that most people believed in witches, warlocks, or teens with the power to heal, see the future, and feel other people’s emotions. It was Dr. Tesla’s job to make sure they didn’t find out about them or the others. Especially the others.

Jack and Violet had only seen him practice magic twice. Once, soon after they’d come to live with him and he tried to explain how transformative magic—turning an object into another object—worked, and a few weeks later when he’d shot balls of fire from his hands in an attempt to save their lives. Thankfully, he succeeded. Given how powerful they’d come to learn he was, the children were surprised he didn’t use magic more often…like now, when he stood in the middle of the kitchen, looking at the stainless steel appliances and granite counter tops in confusion. Dr. Tesla looked as if he’d like nothing more than to conjure up a proper dinner.

Jack put him out of his misery. There’s leftover pizza in the fridge.

Dr. Tesla sighed in appreciation. Very well. He removed his glasses with one hand, rubbed his eyes with the other, and then returned the glasses to his face. If you children need me, I’ll be in my office. He was gone from the kitchen so quickly that, if they hadn’t known any better, Jack and Violet would have thought he’d used magic.

While Jack got out plates and prepared to nuke pizza slices in the microwave, Violet began chopping up a head of lettuce and two small tomatoes for a simple salad. They worked in silence, but both were thinking the same thing: They missed Ms. Sweet. In fact, the salad was in her honor. If she knew we’d had pizza two nights in a row with no vegetables, Violet thought, she’d have a fit.

Ms. Sweet was their housekeeper and cook. She was also a powerful fairy with wings that extended as least three feet on each side. Violet had never seen them, but Jack had and said they were impressive. Real fairies weren’t like they were depicted in Disney movies; they were fallen angels who looked like regular people until they revealed their wings. And, like Ms. Sweet, they were capable of magic.

Ms. Sweet had been gone for weeks, investigating the origins of a dagger and bowl used in a ritual meant to kill Jack and Violet. They had no idea where she was exactly because Dr. Tesla wouldn’t tell them. She was on, as she would put it, Trust business. Dr. Tesla was the head of The Trust, the governing body of The Alliance, a coalition of supernatural beings, like Dr. Tesla and Ms. Sweet, whose sole purpose was to protect the secret that they existed.

They still didn’t speak as they ate. The quiet of the kitchen was another reminder that Ms. Sweet was gone. When she was home, there was conversation at meals and always the scent of something baking in the oven—the next morning’s muffins or tomorrow night’s dessert. They didn’t have to talk to know the other was worried. Violet noticed Jack running his fingers through his chocolate brown hair, flicking the strands that sometimes fell to his eyes—a sure tell that something was on his mind. In turn, Jack had glanced at Violet a few times, spotting tension in her jaw. He knew that she was pressing her teeth together, something she did when she was stressed.

They cleaned up their dinner dishes and headed to the second floor. At the top of the stairs, before they parted ways, Jack said, She’s fine, you know. She’s with Kalina.

Violet offered up a half smile and looked into his brown eyes. She knew Jack believed what he’d said, despite his fears. I know, she said. See you in the morning. Violet walked to her room, aware that Jack was watching her the whole time.

*

A stack of textbooks greeted Violet as soon as she walked into the room. They were scattered all over her bed so that she had to push several aside before plopping down on it. She stared up at the ceiling, trying not to think about Ms. Sweet or Kalina and where they were or what they were doing. Instead, she tried focusing on how much studying she had to get done. She was fairly confident she could handle most of her assignments, but there was a history exam at the end of the week that would definitely require some extra effort. This, of course, brought her thoughts back to Kalina.

Kalina was Violet’s tutor, hired by her parents before they died to help Violet with her classes. Violet was dyslexic and, while subjects like math and science weren’t a huge challenge for her, something like history with its many dates and locations sometimes overwhelmed her. Kalina was great with history. Probably, Violet figured, because she had lived through a lot of it. She didn’t know how old Kalina was exactly, but if she had to guess she’d say a hundred years old. At least.

Too tired to shower and suddenly unmotivated to study, Violet changed into her pajamas, pushed her schoolbooks onto the floor, and crawled under the blanket. It was early for bed, but it was already dark out and Violet was exhausted. Her eyelids felt too heavy to keep open, so she didn’t even try. She closed her eyes, and her last coherent thought before drifting to sleep was that Ms. Sweet, as powerful as she was, would definitely be okay. She had to be. She was traveling with a vampire.

*

Jack entered the living room and quietly closed the door behind him. He knew Violet was sleeping and had heard Dr. Tesla retire an hour before. Without turning on any lights he made his way over to the coffee table and retrieved the special glasses from inside the table’s secret compartment. Using a remote, he triggered the flat screen television mounted above the fireplace to move forward and expand until it was taking up almost the full wall upon which it sat. He pressed several buttons and the screen illuminated with an image of Jack entering a house without knocking. In the living room, Jack put the glasses on. Within seconds he was in the scene on the television, watching himself cautiously enter a small foyer.

Now there were two Jacks in the foyer: Jack from the present, dressed in the sweatpants and tee shirt he’d put on after dinner, and Jack from the night he and Violet almost died. Present Jack, though still wearing the tinted, blue-lit glasses back in Dr. Tesla’s living room where his body truly was, was not wearing the glasses in the virtual reality. He looked almost identical to himself that night weeks ago, except then he wore jeans and leather jacket over two layered tee shirts. And then, he had only a small idea of the danger he was walking into.

He’d been coming back to this place every night for the past few weeks, yet he still couldn’t get over how real everything looked and felt. Why shouldn’t they? This is made up of my memories. Present Jack walked over to the door by the kitchen’s entrance. He knew it led down to the basement and that was where he, from that night, would end up.

Sure enough, within moments he watched as a red-haired woman emerged from the living room, surprising Jack as she held up a hand in his direction. The air between her hand and his chest rippled like still water disturbed by a thrown stone. Once the ripples reached his chest, Jack watched as his body tensed and then crumpled to the floor, unconscious. Present Jack stepped aside as she opened the door to the basement, even though the door would have just passed through him. It was funny how that worked. The people and things in the memory could not touch or harm him, but if he so chose he could touch items and move them around and they’d feel as real as they would outside the virtual reality. But whatever he did, whatever he moved, would not change the events from happening as they had weeks ago. For instance, if present Jack now closed the basement door, it would not stop the red-haired woman from kicking his prone body through it and down the stairs.

Jack swiped a hand through the air and the images around him swirled. He’d done this so many times he no longer had to close his eyes to keep from getting dizzy. The glasses he wore in the living room gave him the ability to speed up, slow down, or pause the scene around him. Slowly everything came into focus and he now stood in a dark, cold basement.

He walked over to the wall where he and Violet were pinned, struggling against invisible magic bindings. The woman paced in front of them, taunting them. Jack couldn’t hear what she was saying because he’d chosen to do without the audio this time, but he’d witnessed this so many times he knew what she was saying by heart. She bragged about killing their parents and pretending to be two people at once, each a friend to his and Violet’s families.

Her real name was Grace Bale, but she’d been in Jack’s life as his mother’s boss, Sylvia Decklan. Violet had known her as the caring next-door neighbor, Ms. Harkin. Jack and Violet had been strangers then, with no idea that their parents had been keeping a dark secret. They were fully aware that the world was filled with supernaturals and had agreed to have the souls of evil twins, a witch and warlock, inserted into their unborn children, Jack and Violet, believing it was the only way to stop the twins from fulfilling a prophecy in which they’d destroy the world. Grace had been the twins’ mother and had waited fifteen years to get her revenge.

Jack walked across the room to where two people were each lying strapped to gurneys. The spell Dr. Tesla and the other members of The Trust had used to extract the Bale twins’ souls had left them in a sort of magical coma. Now, Lincoln and Ashlyn looked as if they were merely sleeping. In all the times Jack had revisited this scene, he’d been so focused on Grace that he’d never bothered with the twins.

They were older than Jack and Violet. They were in their twenties when their souls were taken, but the magical stasis had kept them from aging. Ashlyn looked like a sleeping princess in a fairy tale, but Jack had heard stories of what she was capable of when she was alive, and he knew she was definitely no princess. Something about her, though, reminded him of Violet, which he knew was insane. Dr. Tesla had assured them that though they had the twins’ souls it had nothing to do with how he and Violet looked, behaved, or felt—except, of course, that wasn’t entirely true, because receiving those souls was how they’d inherited their powers.

Yet when he looked at Ashlyn with her long, dark, curly hair, pale skin, and red mouth, some part of his brain registered Violet. Even though they looked nothing alike—Violet’s brown skin was a mixture of her mother, who’d been black, and her father, who was white. And Violet’s raven hair wasn’t curly, but wavy. Jack looked at Lincoln and, though he was also lying with his eyes closed, Jack only saw him as he’d appeared to Jack in a vision: sneering, cocky, and downright scary. Dr. Tesla wasn’t able to explain how the twins could appear to Jack and Violet in dreams and visions. Jack was grateful it had only happened once.

Across the room Grace was slicing Violet’s stomach with a dagger and watching as her blood began to fill a bowl. Jack knew there was nothing he could do, and he felt as helpless as he had that night. After a few moments Grace was thrown backwards and landed at Jack’s feet, on the floor between the two gurneys. There was a blue wall of light separating her from Jack and Violet, who had both fallen to the floor. The blue light represented the defense spell he and Violet had chanted, the one that had broken Grace’s magic and released them from the wall. Before Grace could cast another spell, a flash of red light slammed into her and this time, she fell on