Written in the Stars

by Sherrill Bodine

  I know not when or how, yet I have foreseen he shall be vanquished for eternity. It is our destiny to oppose him and I know it is mine in this lifetime to defeat his purpose and keep my promises to Will.

  Stephen, his chubby fingers fisted in anger, looks to me with his father’s eyes. “I will help you, Mother. I can fight for you.”

  I fall to my knees, gathering my tiny daughter Serena and Stephen to my breasts. “As always, we shall protect one another. Our love will make us strong. Always.”

  As it is true that you and I who are one shall meet and fight for what is written in our stars.

  Through the veil of time I have seen you who comes after me, and I have seen Carlyle beside you. He shall menace you with his evil. You must defy him and overcome his power. Believe this, for it will be true.

  PART II: Crescent Key, Florida-Present Day

  Chapter Nine

  Deep beneath the water’s surface, a diver gives up fighting the current and allows it to pull him where it will, faster and faster toward the depths of the ocean’s floor. Then the invisible force frees him, and he hangs suspended over what looks like a dark shadow.

  Could this be it?

  His pulse speeds up. A shark circles below, and where there is one shark, there are many. But the lure is too strong to resist. Energized by instinct, he ignores the predator, kicks his flippers hard, and torpedoes closer.

  As he spirals downward, the darkness starts to take shape, and he recognizes the culmination of his dreams—the hulk of the wreck he’s been seeking.

  Elated, he heads straight for it, and once there, skims along the rotting bones of what had once been a powerful British galleon. What is left of the warship lies scattered along the seafloor like a child’s building blocks.

  He looks about. The area is clear. The shark seems to have gone on to better hunting grounds. He skims a lone canon half-buried in the sand, then rounds what is left of the hull. Centuries of storms and tides have spread the remains, so he widens his search, circling the disjointed skeleton.

  Suddenly his headlamp picks up a flicker of color yards from the main wreckage. Part of the mother lode? Could it be? His stomach knots, and he can hardly breathe. Drawn like a moth to a flame, he plunges toward the potential treasure.

  Even as he reaches for what looks like a gold crescent encrusted with emeralds, another diver shoots out of nowhere, hand driving into the still-buried mother lode and coming up out of the sand with a bejeweled gold dagger.

  He strikes out…

  …the intended target the first diver’s air hose.

  Cordelia Ward awakened in a cold sweat, her wrist throbbing with heat, the yacht rocking gently beneath her.

  Even as she twisted the Posey ring—now too tight—around her forefinger, praying to affect the outcome of the nightmare, she knew better. Precognitive dreams signaled by her birthmark had begun haunting her since her sixteenth summer, when a nightmare foretold the coming hurricane that scattered not only the mother lode of a shipwreck, but the lifelong aspirations of her museum-curator parents.

  Her birthmark always burned, her ring always tightened, each time a dream opened the future to her.

  Not so for an ordinary dream.

  Fully awake now, too disturbed by the dream-vision to go back to sleep, she rose from her bunk, padded to one of the portholes and looked out over the water. The Evening Star was anchored in a cove for the night, their salvage boat a quarter mile down the coast. She looked out to sea, far out in the direction they would take in the morning. Lines of foam, generated by gentle waves, were encrusted in silver-blue moonlight.

  The Celestine was out there somewhere under the transparent surface. Waiting. For her.

  So, who were the divers she’d seen in the dream? Treasure hunters?

  They were always something to fear for a marine archeologist about to make an important find. And she knew that find was imminent. Pirates could take everything right from under her nose if she didn’t publicly claim the find first. Born to wealth, Cordelia didn’t care about the money. The find itself, and what it meant to her family, was important to her.

  She was really and truly awake, the night before perhaps the most important dive of her life. She glanced at the treasure box holding Elizabeth’s journal but didn’t have the emotional stamina to tackle new entries right now. Instead, she sat at her desk, turned on her laptop and sought the local news that had been televised earlier. If nothing else, she could get a confirmation that tomorrow’s weather would hold.

  She barely listened to stories about national politics or the state financial crisis or a local car accident. But her attention was riveted to the screen and a graphic that was a sketch of a centuries-old three-masted ship with the words Sunken Treasure scrawled below it across the screen. The graphic cut to an attractive, dark-haired reporter standing at the water’s edge.

  “A native of this part of the state, Morgan Murphy has been plying these waters nearly his whole life. Tomorrow, he starts a new hunt for sunken treasure.”

  Gasping, Cordelia turned up the volume as the camera pulled out to include the subject of the piece—a thirtysomething-year-old male, long hair whipping around rugged features, open cotton shirt revealing ripped musculature.

  “Morgan, what makes you think there’s treasure in these waters?”

  “I know there’s treasure, Reya. I can smell it.”

  He displayed a set of perfect white teeth, his grin seemingly aimed straight at Cordelia. She clenched her jaw in response.

  The reporter laughed. “Is that how you make your finds?”

  “I have my methods.”

  “Which include?”

  “Months of research before setting out, of course.”

  “So what exactly are you hoping to find this time, Morgan?”

  “A ship that sank in these waters in 1605.The Celestine.”

  Cordelia’s head went light and her pulse thundered. How was this possible? That now of all times, the man some called a pirate was after the same find as she? And months of research? Her father had spent years tracking the Celestine!

  Her mind was whirling so that she barely heard the rest of the piece, and when the reporter said, “Reya Delgado reporting from Crescent Key,” Cordelia slammed the laptop’s lid closed.

  A noise above the cabin—the soft padding of bare feet on deck—told her that she wasn’t the only one awake. Recognizing the light steps, she threw on a long-sleeved cotton shirt over the shorts and tank top that were her sleepwear, crossed through the galley, and took the steps that led her outside.

  Her mother, Madelyn, stood at the rail, her moon-silvered blond hair fluttering around her face and shoulders. Thinking to tell her mother about the interview with the treasure hunter that had set her off-kilter, she hesitated.

  “Something wrong, Mom?”

  “Same as always. I long for your father.”

  “Me, too.”

  Knowing this was the wrong time—her mother would learn of their competitor soon enough—Cordelia leaned on the rail next to her mother and said nothing. Who knew where Murphy would start his hunt, anyway? He’d probably gotten wind of some bit of information and was charging after it. That didn’t mean he would find the real site. Her site.

  “Clive should be here for this,” her mother said wistfully. “After losing De Oro Del Casco, he spent his life researching the Celestine.”

  De Oro Del Casco being the remains of the sunken Spanish galleon lost in the hurricane as her precognitive dream had foretold. Though she knew she hadn’t made it happen, Cordelia couldn’t help but feel some residual guilt.

  She slipped her arm around her mother’s waist. “It’s because Dad did all that research that I was able to put together his notes and maps and find the Celestine for him. And for you.”

  At
least she hoped she would beat Murphy to it.

  Her mother hugged her tightly, and Cordelia pressed her cheek to her mother’s forehead. Finding love the way her parents had seemed an abstract concept to her. She’d thought that maybe she was in love before but never long enough to be tested. Something inexplicable had always pulled her apart from the object of her affection.

  Unfortunately, always obsessed with finding treasure that would validate him as a museum curator, Clive Ward had also taken off on other, less researched, hunts. He’d gone on his last hunt the previous summer. Despite a brewing storm, Dad had chanced the dive never to resurface. Days of searching for his body had been for nothing.

  Cordelia liked to think that her father was simply swimming with the sharks forever.

  Thankfully, she still had her mother here with her. She clung to the knowledge that they were so close. Not all mothers and daughters shared what they had. Cordelia pulled away and smiled. Though Mom’s heart-shaped face had softened and light lines crinkled around her blue eyes when she smiled in return, she was still the most beautiful woman Cordelia knew. People said they looked alike. Cordelia thought people were simply being kind.

  Mom’s smile faded, and she turned back to the sea. Her mother had been devastated by the loss of her husband. She’d given up her position at the museum. Had given up her social activities. Had given up her life. She’d become a recluse.

  Without a center, Madelyn Ward had lost the will to go on.

  Determined to restore that to her mother, Cordelia had lured her from grief-filled days to go hunting one last time, with the promise of completing her father’s legacy. And, for the memory of her beloved Clive, Mom had agreed.

  “I think we should both get some sleep,” Cordelia said.

  Mom nodded. “We go to the site tomorrow.”

  “And maybe find some artifacts.”

  They hugged again and went down to their separate cabins, but Cordelia didn’t immediately go to her bunk. The image of Morgan Murphy crowded her brain waves. Needing to distract herself from thinking about a potentially dreadful twist to the hunt, she opened the treasure box, slipped Elizabeth’s journal from where it had hidden for four hundred years. She was halfway through Elizabeth’s story. The more she read, the closer she felt to the most fearless woman she wished she somehow could have known.

  Dunham Castle, 1601

  My torment has deepened until it has become a part of me, making dark all my days. I see the same anguish in the duke’s eyes, so like Will’s and in my gentle Laurel’s stricken face. I fear for her weakening body and soul. Even to her I cannot tell my secret. That I carry her beloved Will’s child within my womb. None must know the truth until the time is right.

  Now the time has come for me to face Carlyle with my rage and my power. He shall know my wrath and more which shall follow him through eternity.

  Her eyes filling with tears at the double tragedy—Elizabeth losing the man she loved and then having to marry his murderer—Cordelia read until her eyes grew heavy and she could read no more. The birthmark on her wrist still throbbed slightly as she carefully placed the journal on a shelf next to her bunk and turned off the light. Every time she felt the weight of the journal in her hands, she felt Elizabeth come alive, almost as if her birthmark claimed them as being one somehow.

  Staring at the moon that hung outside her porthole, she turned the Posey ring that had once belonged to each of the women in her family through the past four centuries, and thought of her inheritance.

  A ring…

  …a legend of love that spanned the ages…

  …and a sometimes scary legacy connected to the birthmark on her wrist…

  Tomorrow, they would sail to the location where she had pinned the wreck site. She would take the first dive.

  She would beat the pirate to the site and stake her claim.

  This could be a win-win situation if she found the mother lode. Her father’s reputation would be restored, reviving her mother’s will to live a full life—someone had to curate the find, after all, and why not Dr. Madelyn Ward?—and Cordelia’s own future as a marine archeologist would be secured.

  She wanted to someday be admired by a hoped-for daughter, to possess the same fearlessness of her ancestress Elizabeth.

  What would she add to the box?

  Hopefully something from the Celestine.

  Hopefully this time her psychic instinct had been wrong…

  Light and darkness often went hand in hand, as she well knew.

  Darkness in the human form of a modern-day pirate had just complicated the hunt. The light was the treasure, but would she beat him to it? And then there was the jewel-encrusted dagger—both a prize from the Celestine and a weapon of evil.

  Would another diver really be murdered for this mother lode?

  Her birthmark said yes. She rubbed it as if she could soothe it away, as if she could change its mind, but it wouldn’t yield. It burned hotter with her disturbed thoughts. Her ring grew so tight, she finally unseated it and then stared at the tiny treasure circling the tip of her finger.

  Would Morgan Murphy do anything to secure the prize, no matter how depraved?

  Not if she could help it.

  Cordelia didn’t want her success to come at the cost of a life.

  But how could she prevent the tragedy she’d seen in her dream world?

  Chapter Ten

  The dream and the video interview haunted Cordelia the next morning as she prepared for the dive. Mom was in such a cheerful, hopeful mood that she kept all her worries to herself.

  Immediately after breakfast, they put up sail and moved out, the salvage vessel, Foley’s Treasure, following. She’d met Innis Foley during her hurricane summer. He’d been her first crush. It was somehow prophetic that they would unearth this find together. She’d hired him and his company on the spot when he’d sought her out after hearing rumors of her proposed expedition. With her father’s maps to find the approximate location, they would use the ship’s magnetometer to pinpoint the area with metal readings from the wreck’s canons.

  “How are your nerves?” he asked, his golden-brown gaze searching her face as they donned their vests and tanks.

  Taking a look around, she didn’t see another dive boat on the horizon. Murphy would go to the wrong site. She had nothing to worry about.

  Even so, she admitted, “My stomach is whirling a little more than normal. What if I’ve made a mistake? Or what if someone has actually beaten us to the find? Or what if the manifest was wrong and there is no real treasure aboard the Celestine?”

  Which would devastate her mother if there was nothing to curate. If Cordelia was so inclined, she could always join another search.

  Laughing, Innis slid a hand along her face and gazed deep into her eyes. A wave of copper-brown hair spilled over his forehead. “This is it, love. Believe in what you know. Don’t ever doubt yourself.”

  A thrill shooting through her, Cordelia grinned at Innis. He’d given her exactly what she’d needed to regain her confidence.

  “And if you are in want of extra luck,” came a woman’s accented voice as the Haitian cook joined them, “then take this with you.”

  Cordelia glanced at the feathered object in Brigitte’s hand. The too-thin cook, whose long hair was braided and beaded in tiny rows, and her giant of a husband, Leandre, Innis’s first mate, were island superstitious.

  “I appreciate your making that for me, Brigitte, but taking it on the dive would no doubt ruin the pretty feathers.”

  The woman’s dark features pulled as tight as her voice. “Up to you, cher.”

  “Take it,” Innis urged as he secured the vest’s straps over a chest that rippled with well-defined muscle.

  “Of course.” Though she didn’t believe in the magic of Voodoo fetishes, she
didn’t want to offend the woman. Besides, knowing they had competition for the treasure, she figured she could use all the luck she could get. Taking the little feathered object, she smiled. “Thank you for your good wishes.”

  Brigitte’s lips curved. “You are welcome.”

  Cordelia slipped the fetish in her mesh ditty bag that was attached to her weight belt and took a moment as she always did before a dive to pray that she and her partner would remain safe throughout. Though the salvage vessel had a full crew including several divers, she was scheduled to take the first dive only with Innis.

  With her dream beginning to replicate before her eyes, Cordelia could hardly breathe despite the full tank strapped to her back. She hung over the bones of the wreck, gaze darting around as if she would pin some knife-wielding villain in the shadows. All she saw were several nurse sharks, usually harmless, but enough to make the skin along her spine crawl even after the predators disappeared into the deep. A yank on her arm startled her, and she gazed into Innis’s mask. He tilted his head toward the hull, and she followed. Taking a closer look at the area beneath her, she realized things looked quite different than they had in the dream world. The area hadn’t been touched by human endeavor, at least not for nearly a century. Of course, her dream had shown her a site that had been worked on, which would happen when they used the magazine attached to the salvage ship to blow away sand.

  In the meantime, she and Innis were merely making a discovery dive. Innis used an underwater camera to snap digital photographs that they could share with the crew before other divers came down that afternoon and started setting up a grid.

  That might change the direction of her dream. There had been no grid in her vision. Perhaps, once her crew had set it up, that would negate the danger. Deep in her heart, she knew she was simply being hopeful. Her precognitive dreams weren’t that specific to detail. The intent was what mattered.

  Shoving away dark thoughts, she lost herself in the joy of the find, going down to the seafloor every so often to brush away sand from some object. Uncovering a canon with eroded lettering on its base, she could barely make out the name. Celestine. She had found it! Her pulse sped up, and she frantically searched for another canon. This was it, then, the culmination of her father’s research. The high point of her own career. She became so focused that, as she backed up, she was startled again when Innis grabbed her, signaled her to stop, and pointed to something directly behind her. Realizing the birthmark on her wrist was burning, and her Posey ring tightening to warn her of danger, she carefully turned to look, and her heart began to thunder.