Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil, Love and Hope

by Jude Deveraux

  Adam took a deep breath. “But the tea hadn’t hurt me much because there was thick scar tissue across that area of my chest.”

  “From the ‘oozing sore,’” Taylor said softly.

  “Yes. It was a scar I’d had as long as I could remember, and I’d thought little about it. My cousin Sarah said she guessed that I’d fallen against some rocks, but she didn’t know for sure. Since there was a big chunk of my life that I didn’t remember, the scar seemed the least of it. It was tight, and sometimes when I moved my arm over my head, it would pull a bit, but I never really paid any attention to it.”

  “Until that day,” Taylor said.

  “Right,” Adam answered. “On that day, one of my cousins, who was a year younger than me and so didn’t remember anything about the kidnaping, said it was an ugly scar and I ought to get a plastic surgeon to fix it. Then her brother, who is six years older than I am, said, ‘Maybe he should see what’s under it.’”

  “The brand,” Darci said. “It had been hidden by the scar tissue.”

  “Yes. As soon as my cousin said that, his mother told him to go into the house and get her a sweater even though it was eighty-five degrees in the shade.”

  “Did you ask your cousin what he meant by that?”

  No. I could see by his mother’s face that she didn’t want to talk about the kidnaping and what had happened. I’ve always felt sorry for her because she tried really hard to make me part of her family, but she couldn’t. I know she blamed herself for....”

  “For your sadness?” Darci asked.

  “Yes. My sadness and my feeling that I never belonged.”

  “So what did you do?” Taylor asked.

  “The next day I left and flew to New York, where I consulted a plastic surgeon. I told him I wanted the scar tissue removed carefully because there was something under there that I wanted to see. It was more than a brand. The skin”—he sounded as though he was talking of someone other than himself—”had been deeply cut first, and the branding iron had a black pigment on it. When the scar tissue was cut away, the black design could be seen clearly.”

  “And that’s when you realized that there was more to this than you’d been told,” Taylor said, sitting back in the chair and looking at Adam in speculation.

  “Yes. First I started searching for the information the ‘normal’ way. I went to private detectives, and I even got into the FBI files, but there was nothing there. Finally, when I’d exhausted every other route, I went to see a psychic. But all she said was that my parents were dead and that their death was surrounded with evil. It was very annoying to hear such silliness. I wanted to know who, how, and most of all, why.

  “Why were my parents killed before a ransom could be paid? My father started liquidating stocks the moment he heard I was missing. But nothing was paid. What happened to their plane? Thousands of questions ran through my mind.

  “But the psychics I consulted had no answers for me, and I was left feeling more frustrated than I’d been before I went to them.

  “I had decided not to see any more psychics when one of them called me and said that Helen Gabriel wanted to talk to me. Since I’d never heard of the woman, the name meant nothing to me, but the psychic on the phone said that I had to call Helen. As far as I could get out of her, this Helen Gabriel was a psychic’s psychic.”

  “Real as opposed to hype,” Taylor said from experience.

  “Yes,” Adam answered.”It seemed that this woman didn’t take on clients. I mean, you can’t make an appointment to see her. You have to be invited to go to a session with her.” Adam looked at Taylor. “You’ve met people like her?”

  Taylor smiled and looked as though he was considering whether or not he should tell what he knew. “There are twelve women . . .” he said softly.

  “Who can change the world with their minds,” Darci said, her eyes alive with excitement. “Avatars.”

  When Taylor smiled at his daughter, there was such love—and pride—on his face that Darci blushed with pleasure. “Later, when this is over, I want you to tell me about your marvelous education that has allowed you to know such an obscure piece of information as that one.”

  Extremely pleased, Darci looked at Adam, who had an I-told-you-so look on his face. He’d said her father would see that she was educated.

  “So what did Helen tell you?” Taylor asked, and from the way he said the name, Adam was sure that Taylor knew of the woman.

  “At first, she was a disappointment because she told me that she wasn’t sure what had happened to my family. But then she threw me for a loop because she said that one of my family was still alive.”

  “I bet that made you crazy,” Taylor said. “Oh, yes. I wanted to hire mercenaries and attack whoever was still holding one of my parents, but I didn’t know where to start looking or whom to attack. And that’s when Helen told me that there was only one way on earth for me to find out the truth about the past. She said there was a woman in Camwell, Connecticut, who had in her possession a magic mirror. When she told me that, I nearly walked out. I’ve always been a realist. Even as a kid I hated those stories of magic this and magic that.”

  “That’s true,” Darci said, smiling. “He knows nothing about fairy tales.”

  “I think Helen read my mind, because she then said there was some magic that was real. She told me that the mirror had once belonged to Nostradamus. Truthfully, I couldn’t believe what she was telling me. But she said that if I could get that mirror, then it could be seen what had happened to my family. I want you to notice that she always said ‘family,’ and not ‘parents.’ I didn’t realize this until later.”

  “And the mirror is where Darci came into it, right?” Taylor asked.

  Adam couldn’t look directly at Darci because he didn’t want her to hear what else he’d been told. When he did finally speak, his voice was barely above a whisper. “I was told that I could steal the mirror, but that only a virgin past two-and-twenty could see the visions in it. If I didn’t have the virgin, the mirror would only be an old piece of glass. So she told me to put an ad in the New York Times and I’d find the virgin who could read the mirror.”

  “You mean that not one of those women you interviewed was...?”Darci said.

  “Not one of them,”Adam answered, smiling at Darci, but he wasn’t about to tell her that she was the oddity, not them.

  “Amazing,” she said.

  Adam turned to look at her. “Not that I’m complaining, but why haven’t you...? You know?”

  Darci shrugged. “I’ve never met anyone who even tempted me,” she said honestly. What she didn’t say, either aloud or in her mind, was, “until I met you.”

  “Then why are you engaged to marry Putnam?” Adam said with more anger than he meant to display.

  “Oh,” Darci said. “That’s business.”

  “What kind of business makes you engaged to a—?”

  “How did you find out you had a sister?” Taylor cut in. He didn’t like the anger, and he didn’t want them to lose track of Adam’s story. There would be time to tell about Darci’s problems in Putnam later. Since what Adam knew might be able to help them tonight, his story was more important.

  Reluctantly, Adam quit questioning Darci. “As I said, I didn’t notice that Helen kept saying ‘family’ instead of ‘parents,’ but then one day she mentioned ‘the three of them.’ I asked her if she meant me as the third person. Helen looked surprised and said, ‘No, I mean your sister.’ I thought she’d lost her mind. It took me a while to get it out of her that, to her, just because the girl was a fetus when the kidnaping took place, didn’t mean that the child wasn’t viable. And it still angers me that no one in my family bothered to tell me that my mother was pregnant when I was kidnaped.”

  Adam took a breath. “And that leads us to today.” For the last few minutes, he hadn’t looked at Darci, as he was afraid that what he was telling them would again make her angry. He’d hired her under a pretext, saying he wanted a p
ersonal assistant, but instead, he’d involved her in something where people were murdered. He’d hired her because of her “qualification,” her virginity.

  Darci knew what he was thinking, and she knew why he wouldn’t look at her. “And people have accused me of being a liar,” she said under her breath; then, before he could reply, she said, “Do you think that grocery store is open yet? Bo and I are starving.”

  At that Boadicea sat up in bed and looked at Darci with an odd expression. “‘Bo,’” she whispered. “This is what is called a nickname?”

  She’s seen less of the world than I have, Darci sent to Adam, wonder in her statement.

  “I think your father wants to show her the world,” Adam said into Darci’s ear, then nodded toward Taylor, who was leaning over Boadicea solicitously. Her hands were no longer tied, and she was looking at Taylor with wide eyes, eyes that seemed to say that she’d follow him anywhere.

  “I’ll have to tell her about men,” Darci said in disgust.

  “And what do you know?” Adam asked. It was odd, but he suddenly felt lighter—and even happier—than he had in years. He’d just told his hideous life story, and no one was feeling sorry for him. No one was looking at him with eyes that said, Pooooooor Adam. Poor, kidnaped, orphaned Adam. If he hadn’t run away from his mother when he was a toddler, his parents would be alive today. No, instead, in this room were three other people with backgrounds as harrowing as his own.

  Darci had been left by her beautiful mother to be raised by anyone who’d take her in. And she’d spent her life hiding her extraordinary power.

  Adam didn’t want to think about how Taylor had felt when he was told that he was infertile. His mother had pounded it into his head that it was up to him to pass on the family “gift,” but he had failed. He’d spent his life trying to make up for breaking the line of inheritance.

  Then Adam looked at this woman who was his sister, and he couldn’t imagine what her life of imprisonment had been like, really and truly couldn’t imagine it.

  It was selfish of him, he admitted, but being with these people made him feel good. When he was with these people, he wasn’t the black sheep. He was one of them, part of them.

  “Did you hear me?” Adam asked. “What do you know about men?”

  Darci looked at him in puzzlement. Was he serious? Or was he teasing her? With Adam and his unfathomable sense of humor, it was impossible to tell.

  “Hmm?” Adam asked; then he started walking toward Darci, a menacing look on his face.

  Instinctively, she backed up. “I don’t know anything—” In the next moment, she let out a squeal as Adam grabbed her about the waist, picked her up, and dropped her onto the bed. Looming over her like some great monster, he bent over her, his hands made into claws.

  And he began to tickle her.

  At first Darci didn’t know what was going on, because no one in her entire life had tickled her. She had been a solemn child, and no one had bothered to get past her solemnity in an effort to make her laugh.

  But Adam did, and within minutes he had Darci rolling about on the bed screaming with laughter. “And what are you going to tell my sister about men?” he asked her.

  “That they are good and wonderful,” Darci said, drawing up her knees into her chest and squealing.

  “And kind and loving?” Adam asked, his hands running all over her ribs.

  “Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes,” she said.

  “All right, then,” Adam said seriously, stepping back from her. “I think we’ve cleared that up.”

  Boadicea, who, until now, had kept apart from the others, was now standing at the foot of the bed and watching this spectacle with the fascination of an anthropologist observing natives in their natural habitat. “Interesting,” she said when Adam quit tickling Darci. “But now perhaps we can get food,” she said as she turned away toward the door.

  Mrs. Spock, Darci sent to Adam, making him laugh out loud as they all went toward the door. He took off his sweatshirt and slipped it on over her cat suit. “If you think that you’re going out in public looking like that, you have another think coming,” he said.

  “And what is wrong with what I have on?” she said over her shoulder as they left the motel room.

  “Nothing is wrong with the garment,” Adam said. “It’s what’s inside that bothers me.”

  “Really . . . ?”Darci said, smiling at him. “Bet you can’t catch me,” she tossed at him as she began running, making Adam’s heart nearly stop as she ran across the busy highway.

  Inside the little grocery store, all of them had a good time watching Boadicea’s awe at what she saw. And each of them tried to imagine what it would have been like to have never seen a grocery. Each of them wanted to ask her questions, but when they did, all Boadicea would say is, “Not yet. Now is not the time to tell of me.” Already, they could see that she was an odd combination of extreme innocence and great age. She annoyed Adam, and fascinated Darci. Only Taylor seemed to accept her just as she was, asking nothing more of her than what she wanted to give.

  In spite of their troubles and in spite of what they would be facing tonight—or maybe because of it—they were a happy, laughing group as they bought bags and bags of food, food that they knew they’d never eat. Whatever happened tonight, they wouldn’t return to this place.

  Because they were laughing so much and only interested in each other, they didn’t see the old woman come out of the back of the store and look at them. And if they had seen her, they wouldn’t have thought much about her. Not even Darci would have felt the evil of the woman, for the old woman had long ago learned to block the vibrations she emitted. To nearly everyone on the planet, she looked like just an ordinary old person. No one noticed when she slipped back behind a curtain. No one saw her pick up a telephone and call a number known to only three other people in the world.

  And no one heard her say, “They are here.”

  17

  THEY SPREAD THE FOOD out on the bed nearest the door. Adam and Darci sat close together, cross-legged on the bed, while Taylor pulled up a chair to the bed. Boadicea sat apart from them on a chair a few feet away. But after a few minutes, Taylor moved his chair so that he and Boadicea were seated across from each other, eating together at a narrow table set under the window.

  As Darci sat on the bed, her legs curled under her, eating and feeding Adam bits of food, she thought that she’d never been happier in her life. Now Adam’s eyes were teasing her and hinting at wonderful things to come. And Darci kept thinking about last night as she lay snuggled close to him, his arms around her.

  Never in her life had she dreamed of finding someone like this man, she thought. This man was someone who would, could, love her forever and always, as she’d always dreamed of. Now, sitting here with him, she thought of the life she’d thought she was going to have when she’d arrived in New York; in spite of what she’d tried to make Adam believe, she hadn’t been a very happy person. The people in Putnam hadn’t seen Darci’s future as bad—but she had.

  But now, maybe, because she’d answered an ad in a newspaper, her life was going to change. Forever.

  “You’re looking at me strangely,” Adam said. “Trying to decide which side I’m really on?”

  As always, she didn’t laugh at his attempt at humor, but instead, she just looked at him. She studied his dark hair and blue eyes, looked at that cleft in his chin. To her, he was such a beautiful, beautiful man. She had had more actual fun since she’d met him than she’d had in all the rest of her life put together. He was generous and kind and—

  “Hey!” Adam said softly, “stop looking at me like that. You’re making me think very naughty things.” He was tearing off a piece of bread from the loaf (she’d already discovered that Adam hated bread that had already been sliced, so she’d asked at the grocery if they had a loaf that wasn’t sliced). “I was wondering if I could persuade you to. . . .” Adam hesitated.

  “Have sex with you before tonight so I’d lose
my virginity and not be able to read the mirror?” she asked, eyes alight with hope.

  For a moment Adam seemed to consider that. “Even if you couldn’t read the mirror, you’d still have your power, and you are the person who was seen in the mirror. It’s you she thinks will be her downfall.”

  “So you’re saying that we might as well wait until we have the real mirror before we....”

  “Yeah,” Adam said, then gave her a look through his lashes. “Besides, I like to take my time.”

  “That sounds—” She cut herself off because she thought she heard a noise outside. Turning sharply, she looked at the big window, which had a curtain drawn across it.

  When she saw Darci’s face, Boadicea dropped the food in her hand and jumped up to look out the window. “There is no one,” she said, but she was looking at Darci very hard.

  “Maybe it was a car,” Darci said softly.

  “Speaking of which,” Taylor said, looking at Adam. “Do you have any idea how we’re going to get back to Camwell tonight? I don’t think my Rover’s going to make it.”

  Adam didn’t want to think of tonight. He wanted to leave both women where they were safe. He wanted to—

  “And do we go into this unarmed?” Taylor asked.

  “Adam has a gun that he took from a man who tried to kidnap us,” Darci said. “Where did you put it?”

  For a moment Adam was silent. He knew he could trust Darci and Taylor, but he didn’t know about Boadicea. Yes, she was his sister, and, yes, she acted as if she was on their side. But, still, he wasn’t certain this woman could be trusted. His eyes locked with hers. She could have told the others that Adam had entered her room with a gun in his hands, but she didn’t. And Adam didn’t tell them that the pistol was now on the window ledge behind the curtain where he could grab it easily.