Double Eclipse Read online

  “Shhh! They’re about to start the trophy presentation.”

  Serena accepted her runner-up trophy first. She was gracious in defeat, but you could tell she was pissed. That’s what I love about Serena. She always keeps it classy, but she doesn’t pretend she’s happy about losing. “I’ll see you at Wimbledon,” she finished up, and though she was ostensibly speaking to the audience, it was pretty clear she was really calling out Janet.

  “Ladies and gentleman,” the announcer boomed, “your French Open women’s champion, Janet Steele!”

  Thunderous applause shook the stadium as Janet bounded onstage. Though she’d played a grueling three-hour-plus tennis match, she looked like she’d just stepped out of the salon. She’d pulled her long dark hair out of its braid during the commercial break, and it fell in cascading waves around the tight white jacket she’d zipped over the top part of her tennis dress to hide the sweat stains. Her smile was blinding, her skin flawless, and only the tiniest shine on the top of her lip gave any sign of all the effort she’d expended.

  “Janet, you first won this tournament an amazing eighteen years ago,” the announcer said, pausing to acknowledge the crowd’s applause. “At the time, people were talking about you being one of the great champions of all time. But instead of defending your title, you left the game and disappeared for nearly two decades. But now you’re back and playing the best tennis of your life. You won three slams last year, and you’re halfway to a Grand Slam this year. Tell us what’s going through your mind.”

  Janet waited for the applause to die down. It took nearly a minute, and she milked every second of it with that hundred-million-dollar smile.

  “Oh, my God, it’s amazing,” she said when it was finally quiet enough for her to talk. Her Australian accent was sharp and sporty and not at all posh, which humanized her perfect looks. “I never thought I’d be standing here again after all these years. When I retired back in ’97, I thought it was for good. But life has a way of surprising you, and I guess tennis wasn’t done with me.”

  “Looking forward to Wimbledon next month, what kind of shape do you think you’ll be in by then?”

  Janet smiled and did a little twirl, letting her skirt flip up in the back, “I think I’m in pretty great shape right now.” She laughed. The crowd roared with approval, and it was another minute before she could talk again.

  “But seriously,” she said, “I do have to watch my schedule now. I can’t play week in and week out like I did when I was seventeen or eighteen. That’s why I’ve decided to play a limited schedule between now and the US Open.”

  “But you’ll play Wimbledon, of course?” the announcer asked.

  In answer, Janet gave the camera her best “say what?” smirk. The audience went wild.

  When the applause finally died down, she said, “I’ll play Wimbledon definitely, but other than that, I’m going to spend most of the summer relaxing and training at a little house I bought on the East End of Long Island. My daughters are there, and I want to spend more time with them.”

  There was the sound of something hitting the floor. I realized it was my glass. Fortunately, it was empty, and the carpet kept it from breaking.

  “Did she just say—” Mardi began.

  “Shhh! She’s still talking!” I shushed.

  Actually, the announcer was talking. There was a stunned look on his face as he echoed Mardi’s question. “Did you say—daughters?”

  Janet’s smile was beaming. “That’s right. I have two gorgeous teenage daughters whom I haven’t seen in far too long.” She turned from the announcer and looked directly into the camera.

  “Molly and Mardi Overbrook, Mummy’s on her way. We’re going to spend the summer together in the East End.”

  Just then, Ingrid came around the counter with a tray of tea.

  “I made iced instead of hot,” she said. “I hope that’s—”

  She broke off as she saw the stunned looks on all of our faces.

  “Did I miss something?”

  4

  WOMANIZER, WOMANIZER

  Mardi-Overbrook-Journal.docx

  Molly and I looked at each other in silence for what seemed like an eternity. Then we were both on our feet screaming.

  “Our mother?” Molly screamed at Freya. “Janet Steele is OUR MOTHER?”

  “Did you know?” I screamed at Ingrid. “Have you been hiding it from us all these years?”

  Ingrid looked desperately at Freya, who suddenly found the top of her left thigh really interesting.

  “WILL SOMEBODY PLEASE SAY SOMETHING?” Molly and I screamed at the same time.

  Somebody did: Janet Steele.

  “I’m really looking forward to getting to know my girls better this summer.”

  Suddenly, I felt a vibration in my pocket. I pulled my phone out and saw that my feeds were blowing up:

  OMG UR MOM!!!!

  JANET STEELE???? SRSLY????

  DID U KNOW? Y DIDN’T U SAY SMTHNG?

  AMAZEBALLS!!!! A-MAZE-BALLS!!!!

  Molly had her phone out too, and judging from the way she kept scrolling down—and down, and down, and down—she was being bombarded with tweets, texts, IMs, and notifications from Instagram, Tumblr, Vine, Facebook, and Witchipoo, the by-invitation-only site for teenage witches, vampires, and other magical creatures.

  Freya cleared her throat. “Well, I guess the secret’s out.”

  “Freya, wait,” Ingrid said. “It’s not our place. Troy told us he would talk to the girls when the time was right.”

  “Daddy knew?” Molly said.

  I looked over at my twin. Molly has a genius IQ, but sometimes she can be a little spacey.

  “Yes, Molly,” I said. “Dad knew who he had sex with eighteen years ago.”

  Molly rolled her eyes. “I know that, dummy. But she could’ve gotten pregnant and not told him.”

  I rolled my eyes back at her. “And then what? She mailed us to Dad after we were born?”

  “Actually,” Ingrid said, “she couldn’t have kept it secret. When one of our kind reproduces, we just . . . know.”

  “What, like a sixth sense or something?” I asked.

  “In our case it’s more like a sixteenth sense,” Freya answered. “But yeah.”

  Molly was shaking her head, dumbfounded. “So Daddy knew that Janet Steele was our mom all this time and kept it from us?”

  “Your dad had his reasons. Being the offspring of the god of thunder comes with a little baggage, you know.”

  Suddenly, my phone and Molly’s rang at the same time.

  “Speak of the devil,” Molly said, holding her phone up.

  A picture of Troy Overbrook—a.k.a. the god of thunder, a.k.a. Thor, a.k.a. our deep-in-the-doghouse dad—shone out from the screen. Molly had snapped the picture at an Italian restaurant one night when we’d gotten Dad a little drunk and dared him to stuff thirty breadsticks in his mouth.

  The same picture was lit up on my screen as well. Even with his pale lips distended around what looked like a bundle of firewood, you could still see what a lady-killer he was.

  Poor Janet, I thought. She never stood a chance.

  “He must’ve conferenced us,” I said. “Are you ready for this, sis?”

  Molly smiled grimly. “The real question is: is Daddy ready?”

  We both pressed our talk buttons at the same time.

  “Girls!” Dad said jovially, as though he was calling to wish us happy birthday.

  “Um, no,” I said.

  “Girls—”

  “I think she means ‘Hel no,’” Molly said.

  “Girls—”

  “As in, ‘Hel no, you don’t get to be all “girls!” right now.’”

  “Girls—”

  “As in, ‘Hel no, you’ve got some explaining to do, Troy Overbrook.’”


  “Girls—”

  “Because if this is true, then it’s the lowest, meanest, dirtiest trick you’ve ever pulled!” I went on. “And on your own daughters too.”

  “GIRLS!”

  Dad’s voice was so loud it hurt my ear, and I had to jerk the phone away from my head.

  “Great Odin,” I heard him sigh. “I feel like I’ve just been double-teamed!”

  “Well, you deserve it,” Molly said. “I can’t believe you kept this from us!”

  Dad didn’t say anything for a moment. You could practically hear him thinking. “This really isn’t the kind of thing you talk about on the phone,” he said finally. “Especially not a cell phone. But I’m in a helicopter right now. It’s taking me to the seaplane. I’ll be in North Hampton soon. Can you wait till then?”

  “No!” Molly said sharply.

  “But I guess we’ll have to,” I added glumly. I have to admit, I was impressed that he’d chartered a helicopter and a seaplane to travel a hundred miles. Short of whipping out his hammer and flying—which we had no proof he could actually do—it really was the fastest way for him to get here.

  “Okay, then. I’ll see you shortly. And, girls,” he added, “don’t take this out on your aunts, please. They had nothing to do with this.”

  “Fat chance,” Molly said even as the line went dead.

  “Right?” I agreed. I turned to Freya and Ingrid. “Spill.”

  5

  TELL IT LIKE IT IS

  From the Diary of Molly Overbrook

  Ingrid and Freya stared at each other for so long that I found myself wondering if they were just using telepathy to silently work out a plan. Witches were crafty like that. Then I realized they were just stalling.

  “You guys—” I began.

  “Okay, okay,” Freya cut me off.

  “Freya,” Ingrid snapped in her worried-mother voice, “it’s not our place.”

  “Troy’s on his way here anyway. The secret’s out. And it’s not like we can tell them much anyway.” Freya turned to us. “We don’t know that much about Janet either.”

  “He basically told us nothing, just that she left when we were little,” I said, “so I think maybe you know a little more than we do.”

  “So it’s true?” Mardi said. “Janet Steele really is . . . our mother?”

  Mardi paused before she said our mother, like having a mother was something she’d never considered before. And I felt the same way. We were curious, of course, but we’d lived our whole lives without her. Dad once called her a “giantess” (which made sense, now that I knew how tall she was), and Trent Gardiner had suggested to Mardi that our mother was one of the three Rhinemaidens, the guardians of the Rhinegold made famous in Wagner’s Ring cycle. But when your long-gone mother is described as a fairy tale, it makes it harder to believe in her, not easier, and Mardi and I had long since concluded that we’d never know her. For years, I’d been telling myself that I didn’t have any feelings for this woman whom I’d never met, but now, as I looked expectantly at Ingrid and Freya, I knew I’d been kidding myself. What can I say? Even goddesses need a mom.

  “Well?” I prompted.

  Finally, Ingrid sighed and slumped in defeat. “It’s true. Janet Steele is your mother.”

  Mardi’s whoop made the wineglasses rattle on their wire rack. We jumped up and threw our arms around each other and danced around the living room, heedless of Ingrid’s beautiful antiques.

  “I don’t know if I’d get so excited,” Freya said when we’d finally quieted down. “There’s a reason Troy didn’t want Janet in your life, after all.”

  “Wait, it was Troy who kept us from our mother?” I asked.

  “He always said she abandoned us,” Mardi threw in. “He was lying about that too?”

  Ingrid frowned at Freya. “See, this is why I said we should wait till Troy gets here.” She turned to us. “As Freya mentioned, Janet was a bit of a wild girl.”

  “She was so young when she had us,” I said. “It makes sense that she was still figuring things out.” I grinned. “So she was more than Dad could handle, huh?”

  “In a matter of speaking,” Freya said, shrugging.

  “I thought we were done with the vague thing,” Mardi said. “What did Mom do that was so bad that Dad had to cut her out of our lives?”

  “See, that’s the thing, Mardi,” Ingrid said. “We don’t know.”

  Ingrid is good at a lot of things, like gardening and baking and helping a couple conceive by intricately knotting together two pieces of their hair, but lying is not one of them. I stared her down until she had to look away. She only lasted about five seconds.

  “Seriously?” I said. “‘We don’t know’? You expect us to believe that?”

  “It’s true,” Freya insisted about as convincingly as Ingrid. “Troy never told us. But he made it seem pretty serious. Something to do with—”

  She stopped short.

  “To do with what?” I insisted.

  “Don’t torture us!” Mardi said.

  Freya sighed helplessly.

  “It had something to do with you girls.”

  “Well, duh,” Mardi said sarcastically. “Care to be more specific?”

  Now it was Ingrid’s turn to sigh. “You were never supposed to be born.”

  “What?” Mardi and I both exclaimed.

  Ingrid made a face like she’d rather be eating worms or walking on hot coals than talking to us about this.

  “Normally when you’re a god at Thor’s level, you get to decide when and if you’re going to have children. But Janet tricked him somehow. I don’t think even he knows how she did it. If he does, he never told us.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  “Are you saying that our own dad didn’t want us?”

  “No, of course not, honey,” Freya said. “Your dad loves you very much. You were just . . . unplanned, that’s all.”

  Mardi looked at me. “Can you believe this? We’re the result of some magical version of a condom breaking.”

  A little smirk flickered over her face, and despite myself, I chuckled.

  “We’re Mommy and Daddy’s cosmic accidents,” I said, getting up to go and grabbing my sweater.

  “Don’t say that!” Ingrid protested. “You two are practically miracles!”

  “Yeah, well, these two miracles are gonna go confront their father and find out what’s really going on. C’mon, Mardi.”

  “Way ahead of you,” Mardi said, reaching for her leather jacket and her keys, and together we stormed out of the house.

  Mardi followed me outside to her car, a vintage 1972 Ferrari convertible whose top was always down (Mardi had cast a rain-repelling hex over the vehicle, which shielded it from unexpected rainstorms). I opened the door and folded myself into the low-slung passenger’s seat while Mardi hopped over the closed driver’s side door like one of the Dukes of Hazzard and slid her feet beneath the steering wheel. A moment later, the car’s old-fashioned engine growled to life and we were peeling out of Ingrid’s driveway, a shower of pebbles spraying across her lawn.

  “Mardi, come on!” I pleaded. “Just because you’re mad at Ingrid doesn’t mean you have to ruin her front yard.”

  Mardi grinned over at me. “Oh, don’t be such a Goody Two-shoes. This is just the way I drive.”

  She shifted—up or down, I have no idea; driving is something I prefer to leave to chauffeurs—and the car squealed onto the asphalt. My head slammed back into the headrest as Mardi accelerated. Fortunately her weather hex deflected most of the wind as well, so all my hair did was bounce a little in the breeze. Believe me when I tell you that there’s no crisis so dire that you have to turn an eighty-dollar blowout into a rat’s nest.

  “What is it with gods and secrets?” I screamed, since the engine in my siste
r’s vintage automobile didn’t come with a muffler. “I mean, what’s the point in being immortal if you have to hide everything like a common crook?”

  “I know,” Mardi shouted back. “Sometimes I feel like we’re on a cosmic reality show, and somewhere just out of view there’s a director giving instructions for everyone to mess with the Overbrook girls—who, apparently, shouldn’t even exist anyway.”

  I shuddered. “What do you think Ingrid meant by that?”

  “Who knows? Maybe nothing—she is the goddess of the hearth, after all. She takes things like sex and birth way too seriously.”

  “True. But whatever went down when we were born had to have been pretty serious. I mean, Troy can be a little authoritarian sometimes, but there’s no way he would have kept our mother from us unless she’d done something terrible.”

  Mardi nodded. “Do you think she’s really mortal? Or do you think maybe she’s like us?”

  “She has to be mortal, right? I mean, if nothing else, there’s the tennis thing. The Council’s super strict when it comes to supernatural beings using their powers to make money. No sports, no gambling, no spell casting during business deals—nothing that would draw attention to our kind and risk another Inquisition or witch hunt. But . . . how could a mortal trick Thor into getting her pregnant?”

  Mardi shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time humans have tricked our kind. Immortality doesn’t seem to make the gods any smarter than humans, after all. Just longer-living. But, hey, now that I think about it, Trent said once that she was a Rhinemaiden. Aren’t they immortal?”

  “I don’t think so. I think they’re specially selected humans, like the Romans’ vestal virgins.”

  “But why use mortals to guard something so precious?” Mardi countered. “Wouldn’t you want the most powerful god you could get?”

  “Gods can’t do everything, or we’d have done away with humans centuries ago. Maybe guarding the Rhinegold is one of those tasks only humans can do.”

  “Gods, I hate this!” Mardi said, slamming her fist on the steering wheel and sounding the horn, which sent a flock of seagulls squawking into the sky. “Troy better have some answers, or he’s going to discover just what it means to have the goddess of rage as his daughter.”