by Rebecca York
She wasn’t Sara. She was Victoria, and she started to swing her small legs over the side of the bed. Then she heard something scary in the sound of Daddy’s voice—and his words.
“Come on, we have to leave. We don’t have much time.”
As one of Daddy’s arms tightened around her, he reached for Momma with the other. “Come on. Let me get you away from here, before it’s too late.”
Outside, above the babble of voices, she heard a man shout, “Come out and show yourself—you damn witch.”
“Yeah, you can’t hide from us,” another man joined in. “You and the rest of your damn tribe.”
“No. I’m not one of them,” Momma screamed from the front room.
“Don’t lie to us,” the man who had spoken first shouted.
Others joined the chorus. “Come out before we burn you out.”
Victoria buried her face against her father’s shoulder, her free hand clutching Mr. Rabbit.
Daddy started to go after Momma in the front room, but before he reached her, the window beside the door shattered, sending glass spraying across the wood floor.
Momma screamed. Then a strong, dangerous smell filled the air. All at once, Victoria could hear a strange roaring noise.
“Save her! Save her!” Momma screamed.
Her father cursed, trying to get to the front of the house. But the heat beat him back. Turning with Victoria in his arms, he sprinted across the bedroom, then bent to push up the window sash.
“Daddy! I’m scared, Daddy,” she whimpered, trying to breathe through the cloud of smoke choking her nose and throat.
“It’s okay. Everything will be okay,” he said between coughs. “I’ll get you out of here.”
After lowering her out the window, he quickly followed. With his body bent over hers, he ran into the darkness of the swamp, carrying her past the old crooked tree where she’d liked to play.
Behind her Victoria heard a sound like thunder. Raising her head, she saw the whole house explode into flames.
“Momma! Where’s Momma?”
SARA’S eyes blinked open. Her breath was coming in painful gasps. Her heart was threatening to explode.
She folded her arms across her chest, trying to ward off the sudden chill that gripped her body.
She had been there. Been right in the middle of it. And now she knew what had happened.
She had lived in the cabin at the edge of the swamp long ago. With Momma. And a mob of townspeople had killed her mother. Townspeople from Wayland. There was no shred of doubt in her mind about what had happened. In the waking nightmare, she’d seen the old bent tree. The same tree that was still there.
The woman who had been killed in the little cabin, Jenna Foster, had been her mother. The witch had been her mother!
And what did that make her?
She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to drive away the answer. But it had lodged in her brain like shards of glass.
The scared little girl part of her wanted to escape—into madness, if that was her only option. But the woman she had made herself into—the scientist—stood back and approached the subject with cool logic.
She might have died in that cabin. But she had survived. And now, twenty-five years later, someone had brought her back to Wayland. To the scene of the crime.
But she was in Wilmington now. At her adopted mother’s house. And she had to find out what Barbara Weston knew about it. Because there were details the little girl would never be able to learn unless someone could fill in more of the puzzle pieces.
On shaky legs she went back to the house to confront the woman she had called mother for most of her life.
Mom was sitting on the living room sofa, a magazine spread on her lap, but she wasn’t reading. She was pleating the edge of a page in her fingers.
As soon as Sara entered the room, her mother’s gray head came up. Her gaze was questioning and troubled.
Sara stood in the doorway, unsure of what to say. She’d come charging into the house, bent on confrontation. But now she saw how small and old her mother looked. Her face was pale, and her lips trembled as she stared at her daughter.
Sara crossed the room and sat down on the couch. “It’s okay, Mom,” she murmured.
To her horror, tears welled in the older woman’s eyes.
The hard shell Sara had tried to erect around her heart instantly melted. “Mom…don’t…” Sara whispered. “What’s wrong?”
Her mother brushed the back of her hand under her eyes. “I knew…when you came home…when…when I saw the look on your face.”
“What look?”
“Determined.” She sighed. “That determination you taught yourself.”
“Did I?”
“Yes. Then when you started asking about your background, I got scared.”
“It’s been on my mind a lot lately.”
Her mother’s head bobbed. “I told Raymond this would happen!”
“What?”
“That it would all come back to haunt us eventually.” Her mother swallowed hard. “When you first came to us, I wanted you to…to be yourself. He thought that you’d be happier if you forgot about your past. If you were like all the other little children.”
“Oh!” She’d never realized that her parents hadn’t agreed on how to bring her up.
“I promised him I’d keep the secret.”
Sara felt shivers slither over her skin. “What secret?”
“About your mother.”
“I know who she was. She was a woman named Jenna Foster, wasn’t she? And I was her little girl, Victoria.”
Mrs. Weston moaned softly. “Was that her name? We never knew.”
Sara nodded, trying to put herself in her parents’ situation all those years ago. She covered her mother’s wrinkled hand with her own. “I had a good childhood. But…I can’t function as an adult like this. I have to know what you can tell me. Did you know I came from Wayland?”
“Wayland? Where you have that research job?”
“Yes.”
Her mother made a small, distressed sound. “We never knew the town where you lived. We only knew it was somewhere south of here.”
“How did you know that?”
“Because the money always came from down south.”
Sara’s eyes widened. “What money?”
“He would send us money orders. From different banks and from different towns.”
“Who?”
“Your real father.”
“You knew my father? How did you adopt me?”
Her mother stared across the room, her gaze unfocused. “We were too old to get a child through an agency. So we put an advertisement in several newspapers saying that we wanted to provide a loving home for a baby or a toddler. For months we didn’t get any response, and we were thinking it wouldn’t work. Then we got a phone call asking if we wanted a little girl. Of course we did. A man arranged to meet us down at the Big Boy restaurant. He had you with him. We had lunch and talked. Then the next day he came to our house. You were so quiet. You stayed right by his side all the time. It seemed like you were in shock.”
Sara nodded, picturing the little girl who had just lived through a terrible experience. At the same time, she tried to imagine the situation. Raymond and Barbara Weston had taken in a child they didn’t know. A child who was obviously traumatized.
“You were taking a chance on adopting me, weren’t you?”
“We didn’t think about it that way. You were so sweet. So fragile. And we just gave our hearts to you.”
Sara squeezed her mother’s hand. “And I gave my heart to you.”
“When you went off to the bathroom, he told us there had been some trouble, that your mother had died. The man said he was your father, and he couldn’t take care of you. And he wanted to find a good home for you with people who would love you. He made it a condition of the adoption that we not know his name. The legal details were handled by a lawyer.”
Sara tried
to process everything she’d heard. “If you didn’t know where I came from and you didn’t know the identity of my father—how did you know about the murder?”
“You had nightmares. You told us about the night your mother was killed.”
Sara gasped. “It came from me?”
“Yes. And we would comfort you and tell you the best thing was to forget all about it. And we thought the bad stuff had gone away. But I was always afraid that it would somehow come back.”
Sara looked down at her and her mother’s joined hands. “I understand,” she murmured.
“Do you forgive me?”
“Yes,” she said, then reached to hug the woman who had raised her with love, a simple woman who, understandably, hadn’t wanted to deal with a child with psychic powers.
They sat together on the sofa for a long time. Then Sara stirred herself. She had to get back to Wayland. But first she had to make sure that Mom was okay.
“So, are we going to make those chocolate chip cookies?” she asked.
“Oh yes!” her mother answered, relief flooding her voice.
BY four in the afternoon, Sara was too keyed up to stay any longer. So she hugged her mother good-bye and started back to Wayland to face her past and to face Adam. Making love to him had been like nothing she had ever expected to experience in her life. It had been like something out of a romance novel. Like a man and a woman finding their soul mates.
Yet how could a man be soul mate with a witch?
Her hands clamped around the steering wheel. Part of her wished that she had never come back to Wayland, because coming home had awakened that deep, buried component of her psyche. The part she had always feared. Yet if she hadn’t come back to the town where she was born, she never would have met Adam.
But she was the wrong woman for him. Her mother had been a witch. She was a witch. And being with a witch could be dangerous for so many reasons.
She wanted to turn the car in the other direction and flee. But she couldn’t make herself do it.
Her mind was a disordered jumble as she drove through the late afternoon and into the night. So many pieces of her personal puzzle had fallen into place. She had been having psychic experiences ever since she’d arrived at that damn cabin. But they didn’t just come from the cabin. They came from within her. And some of them had to do with Adam.
“Oh Lord, Adam. I’m sorry,” she said into the darkness of the car.
Adam had told her about the witches. He’d told her that their children had come back to town to get even.
Witches with an evil purpose.
Her mind made another jump. They had attacked her. She knew that now. They had sent pain shooting into her head, then warned her that a truck was speeding toward her. So what had they been doing, testing her because they knew she was like them?
A cold chill traveled from her hairline down her spine.
Why had they hurt her? Was she some kind of threat to them? And what about her own psychic power? The power she could feel developing within herself. She didn’t think she would use it to hurt Adam or anyone else. But how could she know for sure?
There was so much to think about. Herself. Adam. And her natural father.
He had saved her from the fire. But he had given her up. Then he had sent money to the Westons.
“So who are you, Daddy dearest?” she asked into the closed compartment of the car. “Are you still in Wayland? Are you even still alive? Did you somehow arrange for me to come back to the little cabin beside the swamp?”
That certainly seemed like a radical step. And if he’d done it, what did he hope to gain?
As she drove on through the darkness, her mind spun back to her interview with Austen Barnette. He owned the cabin. He’d had it rebuilt. He was connected to her past. Did that mean he was connected to her? Was he her father?
She kept thinking about him as she drove south. But as she drew closer to Nature’s Refuge, her thoughts went back to Adam.
She longed to see him, yet she was afraid, too. Thinking about him made her heart pound and her mouth go dry. Then all at once, she realized that wasn’t the only reason she felt like her nerves were rising to the surface of her skin.
She tried to analyze the sensation.
Maybe it came from her witch’s instinct.
She shuddered. Something was going to happen. Something vibrating in the background of her mind. Something bad.
Pain shot through her head. The same kind of pain she’d felt just before Adam had snatched her out of the way of the pickup truck.
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
SARA’S HEART LEAPED into her throat as a car shot straight toward her out of the darkness, its lights off, and she knew it wasn’t some driver losing control. Last time the witches had been playing game with her. But this was no game. This was for real. They were trying to kill her. Fear might have paralyzed her. But anger and determination were stronger. She was damned if she was going to let herself get run off the road along a deserted stretch of highway. She wasn’t going to have a fatal accident here. She was going to see Adam again. She had to see Adam again!
Without conscious thought, her mind called out to him, even as she yanked the wheel to the right.
Luckily she had already slowed her speed. Still she whizzed along the shoulder, bumping over potholes, grazing tree trunks, hearing metal tear off of poor old Miss Hester as she pressed on the brake. She threw up her arm to shield her face as the car bashed into a tree branch, then lurched to a halt against the trunk of another tree.
The impact sent her flying forward. Then the seat belt caught and pulled her back again.
She sat behind the wheel, dazed, struggling to drag in a full breath, thankful that nothing worse had happened. Looking over her shoulder, she tried to find the car that had come out of the darkness and crossed the double yellow line, barreling toward her. But it was gone.
With a shaking hand, she unbuckled the seat belt and leaned back against the headrest, trying to bring her emotions under control. Miss Hester’s engine had stopped, and she doubted it would start again. And even if it would, driving would probably not be such a great idea.
The danger was over. It should be over. But it didn’t feel that way. Through the windshield, she peered into the darkness. Too bad she didn’t have a cell phone, because she was alone on this deserted stretch of rural highway, and there was no one to help her.
But she was pretty sure she was only a quarter of a mile from Nature’s Refuge. That would be an easy walk.
Her fingers closed around the door handle, but some deeply felt instinct kept her from getting out of the car.
Out in the darkness, she felt eyes were watching her. And she knew who they were.
The bad witches. The ones who wanted to hurt her, and she didn’t even know why.
Her chest tightened with apprehension, and she reached to snap the door locks shut. But how much protection would that be?
Oh God, Adam. Adam, help me, her mind screamed—although she didn’t know where he was or what he could do.
But he had pulled her out of the street the first time the witches had attacked her. And she clung to that memory, clung even harder as another terrible pain arrowed into her head.
They were doing it. She felt them, even though she could see nothing as she stared into the darkness. Mist rose from the surface of the road now. It spread beyond the blacktop, obliterating underbrush and tree trunks, turning the landscape into a strange, forbidding place. A place of terror and black magic where anything could happen.
Through the car windows, she strained to see into the darkness and caught a flicker of movement, forms gliding through the trees. People. Like apparitions in a horror movie.
They were coming toward her slowly, slowly, ghosts moving through a graveyard, the horror movie effect magnified by their black-hooded cloaks. But it wasn’t their physical bodies that threatened her.
Ahead of them, they were sending a wave of pain tha
t filled her brain, swamped her senses.
Her hands clenched. The pressure inside her skull was too much. She was going to die. Right here in the car along this fog-shrouded stretch of road. And everybody would think that the auto accident had killed her.
That thought brought a wave of anger pounding through her. Those bastards! They had made her crash. But they weren’t going to kill her.
She roused herself. Leaning forward, she sent back her own wave of energy, instinctively fighting the pack of witches with their own paranormal weapon. She saw them pause, saw their hooded heads turn toward one another. One woman raised a hand toward her face.
Sara had momentarily stopped them. But her feeble weapon wasn’t enough. The coven started moving forward again, and Sara felt an invisible noose was closing around her neck, choking off her breath.
She struggled to send another energy burst. And she managed some kind of power surge. But it was like trying to put out a forest fire with a garden hose.
She was still choking, still gasping. Still on the verge of passing out, when suddenly the pressure lifted. She struggled for breath, sitting forward and peering out of the windshield, trying to figure out what had happened.
Through the fog she saw a gray shape charging at the black-hooded figures. An animal. She saw it leap on one and then another, knocking them down, sending high-pitched screams through the group as they flailed at the marauder with their arms and kicked at it with their legs.
The animal looked like a large dog. Or a wolf.
And in that moment of recognition, she knew she had seen that wolf before. In a daydream. A daydream that had overtaken her after she had arrived in Wayland. She’d been standing at the kitchen sink. And her mind had gone back in time. She’d stepped into her mother’s life. She knew that now.
But it hadn’t just been her mother. The wolf had been there, too. Warning her of danger.
She was pulled back to the present by the screams of the witches echoing through the night as they scattered into the swamp. She watched the wolf chase one of the men, nipping at his legs, almost knocking him to the ground.
