Forever... by Jude Deveraux
When the door opened, Taylor let out his breath. With a glance up at the tree toward Darci, he wished he could share a shout of triumph with her. But he couldn’t. Turning back, he watched Adam disappear into the house.
“I can’t see him!” came Darci’s cry down from the tree, and Taylor could hear the agony in her voice. What was going on inside the house?
Taylor wanted to reassure her, but he couldn’t. He wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right, but he couldn’t. Over the years he’d seen more horror than anyone should have to see in a lifetime so he knew, better than they did, what could happen.
All they could do now was wait. Who was inside the house? Was someone waiting in ambush for Adam? The witch had bungled her first attempt to imprison Adam so many years ago, but Taylor doubted that she’d miss her second chance. She wasn’t going to lose him a second time.
It took all Taylor’s self-control to calm down and make himself wait. And wait. Time passed. He couldn’t tell if it was minutes or hours. He watched the house until his eyes ached. Up in the tree, Darci was silent.
Suddenly, Taylor’s head came up. Something was wrong. He knew it. Something had gone wrong. Adam was taking too long. But there was something else wrong, too, something that he couldn’t identify, but he could feel it.
He readjusted the goggles and looked about the house and grounds. Nothing. He could see nothing wrong.
“What is it?” Darci whispered down to him, feeling her father’s rapidly growing fear.
Taylor put up his hand for her to be quiet. There was nothing that he could see, but the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. Quietly, he walked down the hillside toward the house. He couldn’t see the beams, and if Darci saw him get too close to one, she couldn’t warn him with her mind as she did with Adam. All she could do would be to shout at him, and he knew that might create a commotion that they couldn’t afford. They couldn’t risk anything while Adam was in the house.
“There!” Taylor said aloud when he saw it. It was so dark that he hadn’t seen anything at first. Yes, the witch had been expecting them. And, yes, she had known what they were going to do. Very, very slowly, coming down over the windows and the doors were steel bars. Their slow descent was to prevent whoever was watching from noticing the bars and shouting a warning, either by voice or thought. The woman must have known that someone would be watching and that their attention would be on those red beams of light and the unlocked front door.
“Darci!” Taylor said as loudly as he dared. “The windows! Look at the windows!”
At that moment a cool burst of wind sent thousands of autumn leaves cascading down. “What?” Darci asked, not able to hear him.
“The windows!” he said again. “Look at the windows. Get Adam out of there now!”
When Darci was finally able to hear her father, she looked back at the windows, and saw that the bars were already halfway down. The bars were moving so slowly that she couldn’t actually see them moving. No wonder the movement hadn’t caught her eye! Out! Out! Out! Out! she screamed to Adam as loud as she could, but when she saw no movement inside the house, she sat upright.
In her panic, she had forgotten that she was in a tree and that just above her was another branch. Darci’s head slammed into the branch, and for a moment she looked at the world going round and round. In the next second, she fell back down onto the branch, her cheek smacking hard into the rough bark.
“Oh, God,” Taylor said, having seen everything from below. Think! he commanded himself. It was up to him now, so what could he do? All the gates coming down were now so low that with another inch or so and Adam would not be able to escape the house. If Taylor could run across the beams, if he could wedge something strong under a window, if he could—
In the next moment, Taylor was running down the hill and thanking God that they had decided to bring his Range Rover instead of Adam’s cheap rental car. The Range Rover was an odd vehicle. It was a draft horse compared to the racehorses that most cars on the road were. The Range Rover was slow and sluggish; it was a pain to try to drive on highways. It was big and cumbersome and as heavy as a dump truck. Its true four-wheel-drive gearing made it difficult to turn even with power steering, and at stop lights, a child on a tricycle could probably speed away faster.
But what was magnificent about the Range Rover was that it could climb a glass mountain. A wet one. Taylor had traveled with his Rover into the backwoods of Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, and there was nowhere the vehicle couldn’t go. It could go straight up, over rocks, across dry gullies. It could ford rivers deep enough to run a boat on. It could cross logs that had fallen across steep mountain roads. As long as the Rover had one wheel touching the ground, it would go.
But right now, what Taylor needed most was the weight of the Rover. It was a heavy, heavy car. Thousands of pounds of steel, with a motor that would keep on going no matter what.
Grabbing the keys out of his pocket as he ran, Taylor leaped up into the seat of his red Range Rover, started the engine, and put it in low gear. He’d owned three Range Rovers in fifteen years, and no matter that he’d climbed mountains with them, he had never, ever put the car in its low gear, the one that the Range Rover people said he might need for “really tough terrain.”
“How about a really tough house?” he said aloud as he put the big car in low and hit the gas. Range Rovers never leaped, no more than a bull elephant ever needed to leap. When there was that much torque and pulling power in a vehicle, it didn’t need to leap.
The driveway to the house was about a quarter of a mile down the road; they had stayed away from the front entrance, but Taylor didn’t want the driveway. He turned the dial for the headlamps, pushed the button for the flashing emergency lights, then started up the hill that lay between him and the house where Adam was slowly becoming imprisoned.
Easily, the Range Rover went up the hill, and when Taylor topped it, he knew that if he was going to make a hole in that house, a hole that would have no steel cage in front of it, he had to hit the wall hard. When he came over the top of the hill, the Rover was on two wheels, and it hit the ground at the bottom of the hill so hard that Taylor went flying upward, but, thankfully, he was short enough that his legs were under the steering wheel and that kept him from slamming into the roof.
The moment Taylor had started down the side of the hill, he prepared himself to hear the screech of alarms going off when he hit the laser beams. But there was no sound. Either they were phony or Adam had somehow disconnected them once he’d entered the house.
But Taylor had no time to think because he was fast approaching the house—and he tried to prepare himself for the coming impact. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get out of the car before the collision. If he let up on the gas, the Rover would stop in its place and he’d not make an escape hole for Adam. In his headlights, he could see that the steel bars were now only inches from the windowsills. Adam was trapped inside!
Taylor went through the side of the house, the big car tearing a hole all the way through it, and try as he might to keep his head upright, when he hit the staircase at the far side of the room and stopped, Taylor’s head hit the steering wheel and the blow knocked him unconscious.
Adam had been standing at the top of the staircase when the car hit it. Over his right shoulder was slung the wrist-and-ankle-bound body of the young woman he believed was his sister. Over his left shoulder was a leather pouch that contained an old, beat-up, and very ordinary looking mirror.
The impact of the car coming through the wall of the house, then hitting the staircase, knocked Adam off his feet. He did the best he could to protect the woman he held as he went down, but he still heard her muffled, “Uff!” when Taylor and the car slammed into the staircase and the two of them hit the floor.
Adam didn’t know what was wrong. He’d heard Darci yell that he was to get out, but at that moment, he couldn’t leave because he hadn’t finished securing the woman.
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But he saw no one, heard no one. After a moment of standing still and listening, he stepped out of the little entrance hall and looked into the room to his right. He was looking for would-be attackers, but he couldn’t contain his curiosity about the interior of the house. How did a woman of such evil live?
Adam had grown up in a house full of museum-quality antiques, but, even so, that house had been a home. But, right away, Adam saw that this house was not a home. The contents of the living room had been bought off a showroom floor and set inside the house without much concern for homeyness. There was no lived-in look about the room; there were no personal artifacts, no photos on the mantel, no pictures on the walls that seemed in any way personal.
In spite of himself, Adam shivered at the sight of the room. There was something eerie about the place, even though there was nothing overtly sinister within sight.
With his gun still held out, he moved to the dining room. It was the same: nothing personal, nothing that looked as though it had ever been used by any human. Was the house a front for the woman? Did she live elsewhere in a house that was protected by walls and gates? Was this house a decoy to lure Darci to her?
For a moment, Adam felt panic rise in him. He’d left Darci alone, with only Taylor for protection. At that thought, his panic grew stronger. What did he really know about Taylor? The man had written many books on the occult. Maybe he knew so much because he was inside the system. Maybe he—
Adam had to take some deep breaths to calm himself, or he’d never be able to accomplish what he’d set out to do. For all that he’d talked about the mirror, his true purpose was to get the woman at the top of the house and get the hell out of there.
There was a kitchen at the back of the house, and Adam took a moment to fling a couple of cabinets open. Empty.
If this house was a front, if it was unused, then why had Darci said it was “full of evil”?
Quietly, his shoes making no sound on the hardwood floor, Adam made his way upstairs. The woman was on the top. Was that where the traps lay? Is that where the evil that Darci had sensed was hiding?
At the top of the stairs, Adam halted. Down the hallway were four closed doors. Should he continue up the next flight of stairs and ignore the doors? Would an army jump out from behind the doors as soon as he started up?
Slowly, silently, he crept down the hall toward the first door and opened it, pushing the door all the way back to the wall. It was a bedroom, again an impersonal place, its contents bought in their entirety from a furniture store’s showroom. The curtains didn’t fit the windows, and there’d been no attempt to make them fit. The chest of drawers was too big for the room and overlapped a window. Again, there was not so much as a hairbrush in the room.
The next room was a bathroom, with white tile and white towels that looked as though they’d never been used.
Another bedroom followed, but this room was different. It had nothing personal in it, nor did the adjoining bathroom, but it did look as though it had been used. The bedspread, a plain white cotton one, looked as though it had been washed many times. The furniture was that fake-antique stuff that manufacturers did so well, but it had a glossy look to it that no true antique ever had. After making a quick reconnaissance about the room, Adam left it.
The next door was to a room that made Adam’s stomach turn over. It had a single iron bed in it, like a child’s bed. There was a desk and a few bookcases against the walls. It might have been a normal room except for the walls. The one over the bed was painted with a picture of the tower from the tarot deck—the shape that had been branded on his chest, the shape that could be formed from the moles on Darci’s hand.
On the facing walls were arrangements of weapons in patterns, something that had obviously been copied from similar collections he’d seen in medieval castles in Europe.
What was sickening about the room was that Adam knew in his heart that this was a child’s room. And he had no doubt that it was the room his sister had been raised in.
Adam made a quick run through the adjoining bathroom, glanced at the sterile place, then left as quickly as he could. His mind was racing, full of what he’d just seen, and full of what Taylor had asked him. Could his sister have joined forces with the woman who was the head of this evil coven?
For all that Adam desperately wanted to get his sister away from this place, he knew that he couldn’t trust her from the start. He’d have to make her prove herself to him. He couldn’t—
As Adam put his foot on the bottom stair step in preparation for going up, he suddenly stopped. He’d seen something that was itching at the back of his mind. What was it? For a moment he closed his eyes and let the visions of what he’d just seen run through his mind. What had he seen? Something was wrong; something was out of place. Where? he shouted inside his head. What was wrong?
He couldn’t figure it out, but when he put his foot on the second step, he knew. Everything in the house, except for the weapons on the walls, was new and impersonal. There wasn’t an antique or even anything old anywhere. Many things had been cut and grooved and speckled by the manufacturers to try to imitate antiques, but Adam knew they were fakes.
But not all of them, he thought, then turned and nearly ran down the hall to the bedroom with the white bedspread. On the far wall were three pictures, each of them those ubiquitous Redouté roses that designers so loved. But as Adam paused in the doorway and looked at the pictures, he knew that the frame on the end wasn’t a fake antique; it was real. All the artificial aging in the world couldn’t make wood look like that.
In one leap, Adam was across the bed and he’d grabbed the picture off the wall. As soon as he held it, he knew he was right: It was an antique, at least fifteenth century, was his guess. With hands that were close to trembling, he turned the picture over and tapped the back of it. The glass fell out into his hand, the print of the roses attached to it.
When Adam turned the frame over, he saw that he was holding a mirror—and when he looked into it, he could see nothing.
He had no time to congratulate himself on his cleverness, but he stuck the frame with its mirror inside his sweatshirt, tied the waistband of his pants tight around it, then practically ran up the stairs.
There was only one door at the top of the stairs, and he knew that she waited inside for him. With a weapon? he wondered. Would he open the door and be felled by a shotgun? Or a crossbow?
He flung open the door as he hid to one side, then waited, but there was no sound from inside. Cautiously, he put his head around the door frame.
She was sitting in a chair, facing the doorway, and for all the world, she looked as though she were waiting for him. The chair was one of those wicker ones, with a tall, round back that made it look like a throne.
He would have recognized her anywhere. She had the look of his family, with her green eyes and cleft chin. Her hair was pulled back into a loose braid that hung over one shoulder, across her chest, and onto her lap, making him wonder if her hair had ever been cut.
For a moment he leaned back against the wall. Now was not the time to let sentimentality rule him. This woman might be related to him by blood, but she had been raised in a way that he didn’t want to think about it. It had to have affected her.
With the pistol held at arm’s length, Adam entered the room, keeping her under surveillance at all times.
There was little expression on her handsome face. She just looked up at him as though she knew what was in his mind. No, Adam thought, she looked at him as though she knew what he was about to do. When she silently held out her hands toward him, her wrists held together, he had a momentary f
He didn’t waste more time thinking about how or what she knew. There were several silk scarves draped over the arm of the big chair. After slipping the gun into his pants’ pocket, he quickly used the scarves to tie her hands and wrists. She did not speak to him, and he was glad for that.
It was while he was tying her ankles that he heard Darci screaming inside his head that he had to get out now! What had she felt? he wondered. Or seen? Was it that she felt danger coming from this woman?
Quickly, Adam tied a scarf over the woman’s mouth; he couldn’t risk her giving a warning to whoever might be hiding and waiting for him.
But it was when he had her bound and gagged that he turned and saw a small wicker desk and stool against the wall. On the desk was a small mirror in a frame. The frame was gold—real gold, he could see that—and it was set with uncut diamonds, rubies, and emeralds. He knew that the frame was worth many hundreds of thousands of dollars, at least, if not more.
Adam wanted no such gaudy prize as this, but he knew that it had been placed there for his benefit. But by whom? If it had been put there by this woman, his sister, had she done it with the intent of tricking him? If so, then he was right not to trust her.
With a little smile at her, a smile that he hoped would make her think he believed he’d just found the real mirror, he picked it up and looked into it. But he could see nothing whatever.
“Which proves that I’m not a virgin,” he said aloud, then he heard a sound from the woman from behind her gag. He must be going mad, he thought, because it had almost sounded like a laugh. Couldn’t be, he thought. Not a laugh at one of his jokes.
But Adam had no more time to dawdle. In what he was sure was preparation for his taking of the mirror, there was a leather satchel draped from a hook on the wall. Grabbing the bag, Adam dropped the gold-framed mirror into it; then, with his back turned to her, he surreptitiously removed the other mirror from under his shirt and dropped it also into the bag. When the satchel was on one shoulder, he bent and slung the woman over his other shoulder—no mean feat, considering that she was nearly as tall as he was.