Triple Moon Read online

  She left him standing stock-still by the side of the road. She had made sure he wouldn’t move a muscle for five minutes and that his memory of the encounter would be as fuzzy as a fading dream.

  Sorry, Dad.

  Why be mortally weak when she was immortally gifted?

  She was the daughter of Thor, after all.

  2

  FANCY

  As she made out with Leo Fairbanks in the back of an Uber limousine, Molly Overbrook not so surreptitiously checked her phone over his muscular shoulder. Her feed was flying with the jet-set frenzy that always marked the beginning of the summer season. Her friends were posting from private seaplanes as they hopped between St. Maarten and St. Barths, from yachts in Newport and from villas on Lake Como and the Côte d’Azur. Each image sent a current of jealousy coursing through Molly’s gorgeous frame. She hated her “friends.”

  Molly was not headed anywhere remotely cool. Quite the contrary, she was on her way to the sleepiest town on the Eastern Seaboard. To babysit. And to get lectured by some old lady friend of Daddy’s named Ingrid Beauchamp about how not to abuse her magic.

  Whatever. She had never felt quite this indignant before. Life was totally unfair.

  The most galling picture on her feed showed a clique of bikini-clad vampires from Duchesne, a rival Upper East Side prep school to Headingley, where she and Mardi had just finished a disastrous but wickedly amusing sophomore year. The Duchesne vamps were arrayed on a white-sand Caribbean beach, brandishing exotic cocktails, each of their bodies a gleaming perfection. Vampires could eat whatever they wanted and not put on an ounce. The famous Blue Blood metabolism. A bunch of social X-rays. Not so with witches. A witch could get as flabby as a mortal if she let herself go. There was no justice on this Earth.

  Molly unlocked her glossy lips from Leo’s mouth and sighed.

  “What?” Leo pulled a few inches away and looked into her dark eyes. He was the hottest guy of a certain set in all of New York City, on his way to his summer home in East Hampton.

  When she and Mardi had a fight this morning about Mardi’s insisting on driving to North Hampton in that ridiculous old car, which had no trunk—i.e., no room for Molly’s three giant Louis Vuitton suitcases—Molly went into one of her huffs and tapped out an order for an Uber limo. After, she texted Leo and offered to drop him off at his house on Lily Pond Lane en route, ostensibly so he wouldn’t have to take the train but mostly because the idea of being alone with her thoughts in a car for three hours was unbearable.

  Of course, Leo, varsity tennis champion at Headingley, jumped at the chance. With her luxuriant dark mane, mesmerizing dark eyes, willowy curves, vertiginous cleavage, and impeccable style, no one could resist her. And she and Leo had been dating on and off all spring, although her interest was waning pretty hard.

  Boys were like shoes. Once you owned them and had worn them out once or twice so that all your friends had seen them and done their oohing and aahing, the high was pretty much over. Leo was smoking cute, but he was last season’s catch. You might hold on to a guy like him for a while just because he was high quality. But, once the thrill of the conquest was gone, it was time to go shopping again. You’re never that psyched about a pair of scuffed shoes, now, are you?

  At this image of worn-out shoes, Molly crinkled her upturned button nose. She would never understand how her sister wore those ratty, smelly used clothes. What was Mardi trying to prove?

  As if summoned by the negative thought, a post from Mardi popped onto Molly’s screen, a shot of Mardi’s pucker in that cherry-red lipstick she liked, along with a strap of that leopard-print bra she’d filched from some skanky old flame of Dad’s. So gross. Mardi had written a whiny comment asking her low-life crowd not to forget her over the summer. Pathetic. By the end of the summer, most of Mardi’s so-called friends would have overdosed or been shipped off to rehab. There would be no one left to remember her anyway.

  Despite her irritation, Molly couldn’t help but feel a little bit comforted by the sight of the phantom rose gold ring drifting over her sister’s mouth, the ring that she alone could see. The twins shared a secret language that might come in handy in the boonies of the East End. At some point, they just might need to shore each other up.

  She fiddled with the ring on her finger, the physical model for the image that drifted secretly across the twins’ posts. The ring was warm and luminous, its diamond-shaped grooves pleasantly worn, like a kind old woman’s face. She and Mardi passed the ring back and forth between the middle fingers of their right hands. The exchange was almost unconscious and totally peaceful. In every other aspect of their lives, from who got the most cereal in her breakfast bowl to who got to control the playlist at a party to which girl got more of Daddy’s attention, the twins were viciously competitive. “It’s not fair!” was their constant refrain. But when it came to the ring, which they had shared for as long as they could remember, there was simply no issue. It drifted between them. And they had a tacit understanding that one of them would keep it at all times.

  Frustrated with Molly’s distraction, Leo checked out her phone too. “Wow,” he said. “Is that Mardi? She looks hot!”

  Spiked with jealousy, Molly pulled him closer and kissed him harder.

  “Whoa.” He laughed, enjoying her passion after such a tepid make-out session earlier. “I’ve never seen you take anything so personally.”

  Molly refrained from replying, locking him in a rage-infused kiss instead. She jammed her tongue down his throat and kept it there until the limo pulled up in front of his family’s ten-million-dollar vine-covered house.

  Feeling confident that she had erased any impression her sister might have made on her boyfriend, Molly waved him off. He stumbled onto his vast lawn, racket bag slung over his shoulder, and in an instant, he crumpled under the bag’s weight. She watched, cackling to herself as he squirmed in a helpless puddle, gradually going still. Someone would find him in a few hours and assume he was wickedly hungover. He would remember nothing.

  Causing silly boys to black out was a favorite sport of Molly’s.

  As the limo glided back toward the Montauk Highway, she put her headphones on and scrolled through for her go-to song. Over the blasting music, she yelled to the driver that she hoped he knew where they were going, because she herself had no idea of East End geography. All she had was an address.

  He said the GPS wasn’t showing him the place exactly, but he was sure they would find it.

  She shrugged. She wasn’t in any hurry to greet her oppressive fate.

  Why was Daddy doing this to them? Why was he so intimidated by the White Council? If the Council wanted to punish her and Mardi, they would have done so already. But Daddy was convinced that, this time, after the havoc they had wreaked on Headingley Prep and the wild accusations flying in all directions, things would be different. If Molly and Mardi didn’t shape up and start to use their magic “responsibly”—yawn—Daddy feared they would be hurled into Limbo or some such ridiculous thing. But he was wasting his time worrying. And, worse, he was wasting their precious summer by banishing them to North Hampton, because she and her sister were never going to change their ways. No one could make them. There was no point in trying.

  Molly belted along with Iggy Azalea as the green of the Montauk Highway started to give way to the gold of undulating sand dunes. She scrolled down her posts, looking to see if anyone had “liked” the photo she had taken earlier, when it had occurred to her that she should put up something tragic and artistic about her upcoming fate, a tableau of nature to be followed by radio silence. Make them wonder.

  She’d told the driver to pull over for a minute, teetered out onto a dune in her stilettos and snapped a shot of a seagull. She hoped Bret Farley would be intrigued, but so far there was no indication he had seen it—no “likes” no “favorites.”

  Why did she care whether or not Bret saw her post? S
he repressed an image of his ice-blond hair, blue eyes, and sharp cheekbones, wanting to banish him from her mind like last year’s platform shoes. But his memory was haunting her—perhaps because he was the one that got away? Bretland Farley was the ultimate pair of designer stilettos that were all sold out in her size.

  For a while she pouted in silence. Then she put her headphones back on.

  As the limo eased into a sudden bank of fog, the bright day grew misty and strange, and Molly grew uneasy about what lay before her.

  “Are we almost there?” she whined.

  She couldn’t hear the answer to her question because her ears were suddenly ringing with a full orchestral sound. It was a total rush. She recognized it as the theme music for some famous movie that Daddy was into. Apocalypse something. While the orchestra galloped forward, louder and louder, she envisioned helicopters and exploding bombs. She was carried away from the moment in a thrilling fever vision.

  Then it was if her soul had been deposited on the other side of a dream. The sky was bright again, everything was calm, and Iggy was rapping again, boasting about how fabulous she was. Molly knew the feeling.

  “We made it,” the driver chirped with palpable relief as they passed a WELCOME TO NORTH HAMPTON sign.

  They drove through peaceful fields of corn and potatoes, a peach orchard. There were quaint farmhouses that probably weren’t air-conditioned, a shabby bar called the North Inn, and some beachside restaurants advertising local fare on chalkboards. There was no frozen yogurt, no Starbucks. Molly looked desperately along the road for any brand names she might recognize. At this point, she would have settled for a Duane Reade pharmacy. But there was nothing. She was going to wither and die here.

  Her feed had stopped. It was just as Ingrid had warned in her email: North Hampton was not wired for social networking—no Facebook, no Tumblr, no Twitter, no Snapchat, nada. You could text and email here, but that was about it. When you came to North Hampton, your whole being was immersed in the actual place, rather than scattered throughout cyberspace. “In some ways,” Ingrid had written, “North Hampton is outside of time. It is the perfect place to reflect.”

  At the very moment that Molly’s limo pulled up to a beachfront colonial house, freshly painted robin’s egg blue, with a saltbox roof and white gables, Mardi’s idiotic Ferrari screeched to halt in the unpaved driveway. Molly waited for the dust to settle before she nodded to her driver to open her door. She didn’t want to ruin her Prada shift. She couldn’t imagine that this town boasted a decent dry cleaner.

  Molly surveyed the front yard: a swing set, a dome-shaped jungle gym, and a huge vegetable patch. Then she turned her eyes to her sister.

  The twins emerged tentatively from their respective vehicles.

  “Nice ride,” they sneered at each other in unison.

  3

  AMERICAN PIE

  Something about the little family that rushed out of the pretty gabled house in welcome made Mardi wistful, but only for a second. She quickly remembered she had no desire to be here, and no desire to like these people she was stuck with.

  She recognized Ingrid, a.k.a. Erda, from old pictures of Dad’s, since witches don’t age unless they choose to (they had that on the vampires at least). She was fair and slender in a flour-dusted red apron tied over a blue eyelet sundress. Her blond hair was swooped into a loose bun.

  Ingrid’s daughter, who looked just like her except for two missing front teeth, was also wearing a red apron. In her case, though, the flour was everywhere. The poor kid’s hair was practically white.

  The mortal next to Ingrid had to be her husband, Matt Noble. He was very fit, handsome, with salt-and-pepper hair and chin stubble. He held a squirming towheaded baby who was wearing nothing but an unbleached diaper. When the baby started to fuss, Matt began to curl him up and down like a barbell, eliciting delighted squeals.

  Mardi forced a smile. Playing house with a mortal might be fun for a few years. But eventually, Ingrid was going to watch him age, drool, and die, Mardi said to herself, with the wicked sensation she derived from seeing insects splatter on her windshield. Beneath her evil glee she felt an undercurrent of sadness.

  “Welcome to the East End!” Ingrid hugged each girl, while Matt stopped his antics with the kid long enough to reach out and shake their hands.

  “I bet you can tell that Jo and I have been baking.” Ingrid gestured happily to the little girl’s flour-covered hair. “We’ve just put two pies in the oven. I hope you like pie.”

  Mardi nodded slowly. “Sure, I like pie.” She had never met anyone who actually baked. Or cooked for themselves, for that matter.

  Ingrid seemed to know what the girl was thinking.

  “You probably don’t get to do a lot of cooking with your father in New York, what with all the restaurants he likes to go to.”

  “I don’t think Dad knows how to turn on the stove in our kitchen. We either go out, eat cereal, or get takeout.”

  “You won’t find any takeout in this house,” Matt chimed in. “My mother-in-law, Joanna Beauchamp, who is still in charge of the place even from beyond the grave, wouldn’t hear of it.”

  Ingrid laughed and squeezed his arm. “My mother equated eating takeout with being depressed,” she said, quickly adding, “But, of course, everyone has a different perspective—and different circumstances.” Obviously, she didn’t want to seem critical of the twins’ bachelor lifestyle right off the bat. “Come in. Come in.”

  The house was more spacious and hip inside than one would expect. Walls had been knocked down to create an open kitchen and living space. The wide-planked wooden floors were painted white. The furniture was midcentury modern mixed in with some Italian leather pieces and a smattering of well-chosen antiques. Windows had been enlarged to create great pools of light.

  Mardi, who had been envisioning an overstuffed French Provençal nightmare, was palpably relieved. Glancing at Molly, she could tell her twin felt the same.

  Matt noticed them looking appreciatively around and explained that his architect brother had helped them remodel the place when they moved in ten years ago.

  “And the spirit of Joanna Beauchamp didn’t mind all the changes?” Mardi quipped.

  Not at all, Matt said. Joanna herself had been a compulsive remodeler and redecorator. She believed houses were alive and should always be evolving. It was only where home cooking was concerned that she was a deep traditionalist.

  Speaking of which, thought Mardi, the pies were starting to smell amazing.

  Matt offered to take Jo and Henry on a walk to give Ingrid and the girls some time to get to know one another.

  As soon as he and the kids were gone, Ingrid shifted her tone slightly, becoming more serious, piercing almost. Before the twins knew it, they were sitting side by side on a white leather sectional, holding glasses of herbal iced tea full of lemon wedges. Ingrid faced them, ramrod straight, on a chocolate-brown ottoman.

  “Girls,” Ingrid began, “your father sent you to me because he is worried about you. Thor—I mean Troy—is one of my oldest friends, we’ve known each other for years, give or take a century here and there—and I’ve promised him I would try to help you learn to use your magic.”

  Molly interrupted her, “What I don’t get is why Daddy doesn’t want to deal with us himself. What’s he doing that’s so important that he has to, literally, farm us out? Commercial real estate deals in Brooklyn?”

  Mardi glared at Molly, willing her to shut up. It would be so much smarter in this situation to fly under the radar than to be confrontational. This wasn’t some mortal moron they were dealing with. This witch was as powerful as they were, if not more.

  Ingrid seemed unfazed by the interruption. “Troy tells me you are completely out of control, that you are hexing and wreaking havoc out in the open all over New York City, and that there was even a certain fatal situation among your c
lassmates. I understand the White Council is threatening to send you to the Underworld, pending the results of the mortal police investigation. If anything like the Salem witch trials occurs in Midgard again, we could all be punished.” She let that sink in. Mardi squirmed and felt Molly doing the same next to her.

  Mardi didn’t want to think about what had happened just a few weeks ago. The accident on the night of that half-remembered party at Bret’s. The fatal one that Ingrid had just mentioned.

  “Listen, the Council could reimpose the Restriction of Magical Powers that we suffered under for centuries before it was lifted only ten years ago. Every one of us could be condemned to a life in the shadows. And you two could be banished forever to the Kingdom of the Dead. Am I making my point?”

  The girls looked at her blankly.

  Ingrid sighed. “Your father warned me that none of this seems to trouble either of you. Can one of you at least tell me what’s been going on? What happened with those kids who fell onto the subway tracks? Please tell me that wasn’t you.”

  “Of course not!” cried Mardi.

  “It wasn’t our fault!” whined Molly.

  “Molly, let me explain!”

  “No, wait, Mardi, I’m talking!”

  “Girls”—Ingrid remained calm—“may I remind you that you are sixteen years old? You’re bickering like toddlers.”

  Molly smirked. “Point taken. Mardi, why don’t you do the honors?”

  Mardi was suddenly furious. As soon as Molly didn’t want to be the one explaining, then neither did she. She realized she had been tricked, left holding the burning potato.

  “Fine, whatever,” Mardi snapped. “It’s true we maybe have a little too much fun with our powers sometimes. But we had nothing to do with what happened to Parker and Sam. We were at the same party on the Upper East Side, at Bret Farley’s, but . . .”

  The problem was that, while both twins clamored instinctively to have the last word, neither one of them could remember what actually happened the night Parker Fales and Samantha Hill fell onto the tracks in front of an oncoming 6 train.