Forever... by Jude Deveraux
“Where are the others?” he asked.
“Safe for now.” Walking close to him, she held out a little stick that he hadn’t seen, and she ran it down his rib cage. When she reached the place that was injured, she gave a little push.
Adam almost blacked out from the pain, but he willed himself to stay alert. “Where are they?” he asked again.
The woman, this “Sally,” turned her back on him and walked away. There was a heavy oak table in the middle of the room, and she put her little stick on it. Adam could see that the thing was steel, and, like the dagger, it had markings on it. What manner of evil object was it? What had she used the thing for in the past?
“Did you know that I raised your sister as my own daughter?” she asked. “She never wanted for anything. She had the best that this worthless world could offer.”
“Except freedom,” Adam said, then cursed himself for being so stupid as to antagonize her.
“True,” Sally said, turning to smile at him. “She didn’t have that. And she had no men. Did you know that you and that other one are the first men she’s seen up close? But it doesn’t matter now. She’ll be punished, just as she knew she would be. She knows she’s not to defy me.”
“How can you hurt someone who’s been like a daughter to you?” Adam said, trying hard to think of something to say to reach her. “You must love her very much.”
Sally seemed to consider that. “No, I don’t think I do. But then, she’s never loved me. If I told you what I’ve had to do to make her behave. . . . Well, perhaps I’ll wait and show you. Yes, I’ll let you see what I do to your sister.” For a moment she cocked her head as though listening to something. “Now I must go. Something has come up.”
“Darci’s mother,” Adam said, wanting to say or do anything to gain some time.
“Yes,” Sally said, giving a little smile. “She says she is the source of her daughter’s power, but she will not demonstrate it until I release the daughter. She is, of course, lying, but I must be sure. In another two hours it will be midnight and I must finish with this little witch who came with you. She—”
“No,” Adam whispered, then his head came up. “Look, I’m rich. My family is very, very wealthy. We can pay you anything you want. You’d never have to work again. You could live in luxury and—”
He broke off because Sally was laughing at him. “Rich? You have no idea what wealth is. I could buy your entire family with the cash in my wallet. No, power is everything. Did you know that I can take her power from her and keep it for myself? I have a way. If the power she has doesn’t leave the earth, then I can take it. You see, that’s the key. I’ve read all the books that that man Taylor Raeburne wrote. Did he tell you that if the chain is broken, if there isn’t a direct descendant, then the power goes to the person who takes it? At least that’s the legend. I do hope it’s true, because I plan to find out tonight.”
With that she walked out of the room and shut the heavy oak door behind her. And when she’d gone, Adam let out a cry of agony that nearly brought the ceiling down on him. He pulled on the chains until his wrists and ankles were bleeding.
Adam? he heard, and calmed himself so he could listen to Darci’s voice inside his head.
Adam, are you there? I wish I knew. Are you still alive? Can you forgive me for walking out without telling you?
“Yes, oh, yes, Darci, my love,” Adam said. “I forgive you anything and everything. Don’t think about it. Just get out of wherever you are.”
Did you see who she was? Darci sent to him. Remember that I told you that she reminded me of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”?
“Yes,” Adam whispered as tears began to flow down his cheeks.
I’m in a room underground, and they’ve put me in a white gown. I look like I’m ready to go dancing and chanting around Stonehenge.
Pulling against his chains with all his might, Adam smiled through the tears that were flowing freely now. Jokes, Darci always could make jokes.
But I guess I’m in white because I’m a virgin. But I’m that way only in my body, she sent to him. I can attest that my mind isn’t virginal. Oh, Adam, are you there? Can you hear me? She hasn’t killed you, has she?
“No, my love, I’m here. I’m near you,” he shouted as he pulled frantically on the chains.
I’m not going to think that anything bad has happened to you. You’re going to burst into this room at any moment and save me. You’ll be like one of your medieval ancestors and rescue the fair maiden, won’t you, my love?
With tears on his face, Adam tore at the chains until the cuffs had cut into his flesh. “No, no, no,” was all that he could say.
Adam! Darci sent to him. I hear them. They’re coming. Oh, God, stay with me. Adam, I’m afraid. I want to— They’re here! The door is opening. Oh, Adam, I love you. I love you with all my heart. I will love you always and forever. Whatever happens to me, I will love you forever. Remember that. Forever. I—
“Nooooooooooooo,” Adam screamed and tore at the chains until there was no skin left on his ankles or wrists. But no matter how much he pulled, he couldn’t get away.
When Adam awoke, he had a headache to end all headaches. Groggy, disoriented, he moved his hand to run it over his face.
“You okay?” an unfamiliar voice asked.
Adam had to work to sit up. His ribs hurt like hell and now his head was splitting; his ankles and wrists were raw and bloody. “Yeah,” he managed to say, then looked into the deep blue eyes of a kid. A big kid. He was looking at a very large young man who had the freckled face and stick-up blond hair of a mischievous boy, but the body of a line-backer. “Who are you?” Adam rasped out, his hand on the back of his neck.
“Putnam,” the young man said.
Adam’s eyes opened wider. “You—” he began, then lunged at him. With all that Darci had told him about the Putnams—father, son, town—Adam wanted to destroy the lot of them.
“Hold on there, old man,” the boy said, putting his hand on Adam’s shoulder. “You’re in no shape to be wrestlin’ anybody.”
“I’ll show you—” Adam began as he pushed himself away from the wall.
“Your energy would be better spent elsewhere,” came his sister’s voice, and Adam had to bend sharply to look around Putnam. Boadicea and Taylor were sitting on the floor on the other side of the room.
Adam knew she was right. Slowly, testing to see how badly he was injured, he pushed himself up along the wall until he was standing.”Where are we? What happened?” he asked, looking around.
They were in a large, underground room that seemed to have no outlet. The room had dirt walls, but since it was egg-shaped, with a domed ceiling, they wouldn’t be able to climb up the walls. Only when he looked upward did he see that far above their heads was an opening with an iron grate over it. When he looked back down, he saw that the room was bare, with just its dirt walls and floor. Boadicea was sitting on the floor, close beside Taylor, and he had the mirror on his lap.
“What are you doing here?” Adam said, looking back at Putnam.
“Jerlene wanted to come save her daughter so I came with her. Darci and I are gonna get married.”
“Over my dead body,” Adam said.
“According to the mirror,” Taylor said dryly, “that is exactly what’s going to happen.”
Adam ran his hand over his face and tried to calm down.”I was chained to a wall. I saw the witch. And I heard Darci. But then I blacked out. What happened next?”
“You were thrown through that hole,” Putnam said, looking up. “And I caught you. I’m not sure, but I think we’re supposed to stay in here until we die.”
“Nice thought,” Adam said, turning his ankles and wrists to see how much damage had been done. He could still stand, still walk. “So how do we get out?”
“We make ourselves into a ladder,” Boadicea said, looking upward, then back down at Putnam. “I believe he can hold all of us.”
“Sure can,” Putnam said,
Adam turned to Taylor, who was gazing into the mirror in fascination. “Why didn’t you see that we’d be captured? And why wasn’t that mirror taken from you?”
Before he could answer, Boadicea said, “Because he did not ask the right questions, and I do not think she knows we have the mirror.”
“What is that thing?” Putnam asked.
“It’s a mirror that shows the future,” Adam said.
“Cool. Can it tell us if we can get out?”
“Can we—” Taylor said, but Boadicea cut him off.
“It can hear your thoughts. Think your question and it will show what it wants to show you.” There was bitterness in her voice and the tone of a woman who had had a great deal of experience with the magic mirror.
“Yes, we can get out,” Taylor said softly.
“Can we save Darci?” Adam asked.
Taylor looked for a moment, then said, “No. We cannot. The witch is too powerful for us. All of us will be killed.”
“Where is Darci?” Adam asked yet again.
“She is....”Taylor looked into the mirror. “She is asleep. She’s. . . .” He looked at Boadicea. “Now she’s strapped to the altar. Before, it was empty, but now....”He took a deep reath. “Now Darci’s on that stone altar.”
“Where’s Jerlene?” Putnam asked. “Can she save Darci?”
“How could she save her if we can’t?” Adam asked.
“She was gonna offer herself in Darci’s place,” Putnam said.
19
“OKAY, EVERYONE KNOWS what to do?” Adam asked and the other three people nodded. “You think you can hold us, kid?”
“Sure, old man,” Putnam said pointedly.
Adam ignored the gibe as he looked at Taylor. “There’s no lock on the grill in the ceiling?”
“No,” Taylor said, looking into the mirror. “There wouldn’t need to be that high up.”
“We do this slowly,” Boadicea said. “Taylor’s arm. . . .”When she said this, she looked at Taylor and there passed between them a wave of feeling almost like an electrical current.
Smiling slightly, Taylor nodded in response. “Yes, slowly. We don’t need more injuries. Adam is....”He trailed off, not wanting to say how awful Adam looked, with his bleeding ankles and wrists. Taylor turned to Putnam.”Are you ready?”
“Yeah, sure,” the young man said, positioning himself directly under the grate. Cupping his hands, he looked at Adam.
Slowly, Adam moved to climb onto Putnam’s shoulders. He moved cautiously, fearful of putting one of his cracked ribs through a lung, and the places where the iron cuffs had cut into him hurt like hell.
“How did you hear of this?” Taylor asked Putnam as he helped Adam up. The boy was as solid as if he were a boulder.
“Darci’s aunt Thelma called to brag that Darci had finally asked who her father was. Thelma’s ugly, and sick with jealousy over Jerlene. I guess Jerlene always knew who Darci’s father was because she called your office and they said you were researchin’ in Camwell, Connecticut. So Jerlene came and got me and we drove all night to get here.”
Putnam cupped his hands for Taylor to climb up. He was going to have to go up Putnam, then up Adam.
“I don’t understand,” Taylor said, wanting to talk to take his mind off the pain in his arm. He didn’t think it was broken, but it was badly sprained.”I was under the impression that Darci’s mother didn’t know who fathered her child.”
“That’s what Thelma told everybody. She hates her sister real bad. On the way here, Jerlene told me the truth. She stole some papers out of your car, so she knew who you were.”
“So why didn’t she contact me when she found out she was pregnant?” Taylor asked. Truthfully, he had no idea what he would have done if a girl he hardly knew had told him she was carrying his child, but at least he would have known about his daughter all these years.
Putnam winced a bit when Adam’s foot dug into his shoulder, but he didn’t falter with the extra weight of Taylor. “Jerlene planned to have the kid, get her figure back, then show up at your house with a cute kid. But you got married.” Putnam sounded as though he couldn’t understand why Jerlene had ever wanted him.
“So Jerlene said she’d wait a couple of years until you got over the honeymoon part of your marriage, then she’d take Darci to meet you. But by the time Darci was four, she was already real weird, and Jerlene had read one of your books so she knew your whole family was a bunch of freaks. No offense. So Jerlene didn’t let you know you had a daughter because she said she wanted her kid to grow up normal.”
“Normal!” Adam said as he positioned Taylor on his shoulders. “Darci’s been passed from one person to the next, while her mother went from man to man. What’s ‘normal’ about that?”
If Putnam could have, he would have shrugged. “Yeah. Well. Jerlene ain’t gonna win no prizes for bein’ a good mother. Stayin’ beautiful takes all her time. But she’s real good at that beauty stuff.”
“She—”Adam began, anger in his voice.
Taylor cut him off, as he steadied himself on Adam’s shoulders. “So why is Jerlene here now?”
“To save her daughter,” Putnam said, as though he should have known that. “Just because Jerlene never wanted to be around a strange little kid like Darci don’t mean she don’t love her. Darci is her own flesh and blood. Jerlene said she figured that if you found out you had a daughter you’d turn her into a witch like your other relatives. So when she heard Darci was here and you were here and this was a town full of witches, it didn’t take a genius to put it all together.”
Putnam looked at Boadicea, standing before him, waiting to climb up the human ladder to the top. “Who are you?”
“It’s too long a story to go into now,” Adam said. Before they’d started forming this ladder, Taylor had consulted the mirror and found out that the only way they could defeat the witch was with Darci’s help. But Taylor had seen that Darci had been drugged into a deep sleep so she couldn’t use her power. “How do we wake Darci?” he murmured as he helped his sister climb up him and onto Taylor. He was trying to concentrate on what he was doing, but at the same time he knew that once they got out, there would be many problems to overcome.
“Stimulants,” Taylor said. “If we had stimulants, we could wake her.”
“You mean like diet pills?” Putnam asked, and his voice was strained from the weight he was holding up. “Jerlene’s bag . . . filled with diet pills,” he said. “Break them. Put in Darci’s mouth.”
“But they might react with whatever she’s been given to put her asleep,” Adam said. He was now holding both Taylor and Boadicea.
“You have . . . better idea?” Putnam said, then the next moment, Boadicea reached the top, pushed open the grate, and lifted herself up.
And once she was outside in the cool night air, Boadicea saw about a dozen men, crouched low, running across the fields, and she knew in her heart that these were the men Adam had called. She had seen these men in the mirror long ago. She took a chance and shouted the one word that she knew would get their attention, “Montgomery!”
20
One Year Later
ADAM LOOKED AT HIS newborn daughter and couldn’t help wondering what her future would be. She had a mother with an ability that hadn’t yet been explored fully. Her grandfather, with his ability to see the future in a magic mirror, said that one never knew how much a child in his family had inherited until she was an adult. Now Adam wondered if his daughter was going to be as powerful as her mother, or if....
Gently putting the baby back in her cradle, he stepped across the room to the other cradle. His sister and Taylor had produced a baby girl, and he wondered what powers that child had inherited.
When Taylor had been told that his wife was expecting a baby, he’d not believed it. Patiently, he’d explained to the doctor about his injury. “The ducts are fused shut,” Taylor had told the man. The doctor had smiled
Now, as Adam looked at the cradles holding the precious babies, he thought back to that night a year ago.
It had been his cousin Michael Taggert who’d lowered the rope and helped Taylor, Adam, and Putnam out of the Cell of Death, as they later learned the room was called. As requested, his cousin had arrived with many men and an arsenal of weapons, but not a shot had been fired because, by the time they got there, it was all over.
Based on the descriptions Taylor had given her, Boadicea knew exactly where Darci was being held, and she took off running before the others were out of the deep cell. Michael had sent two of their cousins to follow her while he stayed behind to help the others.
Adam began running as soon as he was up, and he’d caught up with his sister by the time she reached the chamber. It had taken all of them to break open the huge steel-covered doors at the end of the corridor.
And when the doors were open, Michael had tried to keep Adam from seeing what was in the room, because the absolute silence from within made him sure that there was no one left alive. But Adam broke away from them and slowly entered the room. Darci had walked into that room alone, and so would he.
To his left was a partition—some ancient thing covered with signs and symbols—that created a hallway. With his left hand on the hideous wall, although he hated to feel the indentations of the markings, he paused as his eyes adjusted to the dim light in the room.
Near the doorway was a cage, about four feet high and six feet square, and in it were half a dozen children, all toddlers, the oldest not more than four.
Blinking, Adam stared at the cage, not fully understanding why the children were there, and for a moment he thought they were dead. They were heaped on top of each other, arms and legs askew.