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

by Jude Deveraux

  Darci had had a lifetime of people who loved to start arguments so she wasn’t about to take his bait and defend herself, or even explain. “If all you want me to do is wait in a hotel room, why did you hire me in the first place?”

  Adam picked up his water glass and drank deeply.

  Darci narrowed her eyes at him in speculation. “Are you being so nice to me because you plan to sacrifice me to these witches?”

  At that Adam nearly choked, and his water spewed all over Darci. She didn’t move, but he grabbed a handful of napkins from the dispenser and reached across the table to blot water off her chest, but then he thought better of that idea and handed the wad of napkins to her. She wiped her chin, then tossed the napkins onto the table.

  “I’m on to something, aren’t I?” she said, her voice barely above a whisper, her eyes never leaving his. “You’re going to do something about witchcraft this afternoon, aren’t you?”

  “What I do with my time is none of your concern,” he said, leaning so far toward her that his head almost touched hers.

  “You hired me as your personal assistant, so if you’re going to do something personal, then I’m going to assist you.”

  “You got the ‘hired’ part right,” he said, glaring at her. “I hired you, which means that you go where I want when I want and—”

  “You two wanta give me some room?” Sally asked. She was standing at the end of the table, big platters and a basket of food on her arms.

  “That was fast,” Adam said as he sat back on his seat. “We gotta couple of fire-breathing dragons back there. Makes everything cook faster.”

  As she set the plates before them, Adam glared at Darci to let her know that it was her big mouth that was causing this ridicule. But Darci’s eyes were on the plates of food.

  “I doubled everything,” Sally said to Adam. “I’ve seen her appetite so I thought you’d need the extra. And I know that if you can spend what you did today at the Dress Place, you can afford it.” With that, she left the table.

  “Everyone knows everything about us,” Adam muttered as he picked up his knife and fork, and by the time he’d cut his first bite, Darci had eaten half her platter full of steak, potatoes, green beans, and coleslaw. There was a basket full of slices of pumpkin bread and two tubs of butter, and another platter contained cranberry tarts and slices of acorn squash dripping butter and brown sugar.

  “It was my minor, wasn’t it?” Darci said, her mouth full.

  “Your what?”

  “My college minor. You hired me because of my college minor, didn’t you?”

  Adam blinked at her in consternation for a moment before he resumed eating. “Yeah, sure, you’re right. That’s exactly why I hired you. That was a great course of study. It was...?” He put a huge piece of steak in his mouth, then waved his hand for her to talk while he chewed.

  “Witchcraft.”

  “What?” Adam said, then made himself continue chewing calmly. He was going to murder that psychic Helen! Is this what she meant when she’d said that Darci wasn’t what she seemed? “You took college courses in witchcraft?” He hadn’t known schools offered such courses.

  Darci was looking at him in speculation. “You don’t remember reading that on my application, do you? So if that’s not why you hired me, then why did you?”

  “I’m sure it was your True Persuasion,” he said, smiling. Lifting his hand, he spread his fingers, then made a pulling motion, as though he were a sorcerer casting a spell on her. “You persuaded me to hire you.”

  Darci didn’t smile. “You called before I had time to apply my True Persuasion to getting the job. When you called my aunt, I was sitting on a park bench eating bananas. Are you going to tell me the truth or not?”

  “What do you know about the truth?”

  “I know that you didn’t read my application so you must have another reason for hiring me.”

  “Of course I read your application. I just forgot the details for a moment, that’s all. I think this coleslaw might be the best I’ve ever had. What do you think? Or what did you think?” he added when he saw her empty plate.

  “You’re here to search for a witches’ coven, you’ve hired an assistant who minored in witchcraft, but you ‘forgot’ what she studied. ‘Forgot.’ ‘For a moment.’”

  “So what did you study about witchcraft in college?” he asked, smiling. “By correspondence, that is? And where did you buy your newt’s eyes in Putnam?”

  “At Putnam Drugs, of course,” she shot back at him, not smiling. “So when do we start searching for witches?”

  “You’re not going with me,” Adam said, his mouth set in a hard line. “I work alone.”

  “I see. And what will you do when a witch puts a zenobyre spell on you?”

  “A what?” he asked as he reached for a slice of pumpkin bread, then waited for Darci to take one. He ate his plain while she put a layer of butter on top of hers.

  “A halting spell,” she said. “It won’t let you escape.”

  “That’s bunk. No one on earth can do that.”

  “Of course not. The continued failure of witchcraft is why the practice has persisted over the centuries.”

  Adam pushed a cranberry tart around on his plate. Maybe this is the real reason he’d been told by the psychic to hire her, he thought. Maybe she did know something.

  He looked up at her. “You don’t have anything appropriate to wear for where I’m going.”

  “Under the underwear you wouldn’t touch is a black Lycra leotard. It’s called a cat suit.” Smiling, Darci ate the last piece of pumpkin bread in two bites. “You think they have any dessert today?”

  5

  “SO HOW DO I LOOK?” Darci asked as she emerged from her bedroom wearing the one-piece stretchy black cat suit.

  Adam was annoyed, feeling that he’d been manipulated by two women, first the psychic, and now this scrap of a girl. He’d thought about trying to slip away from Darci, but he had no doubt that she’d do something like call the local police to search for him. And they’d already been told that the local police turned a blind eye to what was going on in Camwell. I’m going to send her home tomorrow, he thought. It was the only way. Later, when he needed her, he could get her to return.

  With a ferocious frown, Adam turned to look at Darci; then his mouth fell open. The clothes he’d seen her in previously had been too big and so down-at-the-heels that he’d not seen much else except her clothes. But now she was wearing a one-piece leotard that was as tight as her skin. She was curvy. No, she was very, very curvy, with round thighs, a little rear end that curved outward, a tiny waist, and small, round breasts.

  “You look like my ten-year-old cousin,” he said as he turned away from her.

  “Girl or boy?” There was a full-length mirror on the back of the door to the little coat closet in the living room, and she was twirling in front of it, looking at herself. Not bad, she thought. Not much up top, but the rest of her seemed to be in the right places.

  “What?” Adam snapped.

  “Is your ten-year-old cousin a girl or boy?”

  “Girl.”

  “You know, I think the Andersons’ boy is about twelve. Think he’d like me?”

  Adam laughed. “Come on, let’s go. If you can stop admiring yourself, that is.”

  “I can if you can,” Darci said brightly, and Adam snorted in answer to that as he handed her one of his jackets to put on over her cat suit.

  “If we see anyone, just act as though we’re out for a walk. And please do me a favor and don’t announce to anyone where we’re going.”

  “Since I have no idea, I can’t tell anyone anything, now can I?” she said as she walked out the door before him, then followed him once they were outside.”Left,” she said a moment later. “Sally said to go out the back door then turn left to reach the path.”

  “Right,” Adam said as he turned. “And it’s too bad you don’t know where we’re going.”

  She smiled at
the back of him as she followed him down the path, and she buried her face in his coat, rubbing her cheek against the soft wool. The jacket smelled of him. He was the most generous man she’d ever met in her life, she thought, as she remembered all the beautiful clothes he’d bought for her.

  The path was almost obscured by the deep pile of multicolored leaves that had fallen from the canopy of trees overhead. After several minutes of walking, Adam stopped before a row of small buildings that had been restored.

  “Slave quarters,” Darci whispered, then quieted at a look from Adam. He didn’t say anything, but he made a gesture with his hand that she knew meant for her to stay where she was while he went into one of the cabins. After three minutes had passed and he still hadn’t returned, she went in after him. She was just in time to see his foot disappear behind a hidden door. If she’d obeyed him, he would have gone without her, she thought. But she caught the door and slipped into the darkness behind him.

  He had a flashlight, a tiny thing that threw little light on the stairs that led down into darkness. At the bottom of the stairs, he moved the light about. Before them was a tunnel scooped out of the black Connecticut earth that was filled with thousands of rocks, some of them sticking out of the walls. Every few feet the tunnel was shored up with heavy beams and posts. The tunnel curved to the right about a yard ahead, so they couldn’t see very far ahead of them. “Leave your coat,” he whispered. “You might need to move quickly, and it’ll hamper you.”

  She slipped out of the warm coat, handed it to him, and he stashed both his and hers out of sight under the wooden stairs. Then Adam started to walk down the tunnel, Darci close behind him.

  She didn’t want to admit that she was nervous about doing this. What she wanted to do was sing and dance loudly, anything to break the ominous silence. She tried hard to think about the men and women, probably slaves, who had carved this tunnel out of the rock-filled earth. “They were carving a passage to freedom,” she whispered up to Adam. “What do you think they used for digging? Clamshells? Or their bare hands?”

  “Quiet!” he said over his shoulder.

  As Darci looked at the dark walls, she was sure that she could hear mice scampering about. Or maybe it was rats. Every one of Edgar Allan Poe’s stories seemed to fill her mind. She was so close behind Adam that her nose kept bumping into his back. “No,” she whispered, trying to distract herself.”I’m sure they used their own chains to scrape and claw the pathway to the freedom of their very souls.”

  Halting, Adam turned and she could see by his flashlight his fierce look of warning for her to be quiet.

  Darci clutched Adam’s belt, and her silence lasted about two minutes. As the tunnel began to widen, she started thinking about its present use. “But maybe the witches did this. They must have worked in the black of night, under a cover too secretive even for lanterns, as they carved out this tunnel with axe and adze.”

  Suddenly Adam stopped short, making Darci slam into the back of him. “Ow!” she said, rubbing her nose. There was light around them now, not enough to read by, but enough to see Adam’s face.

  “Stay here!” he ordered. “And not a word out of you.”

  Darci nodded, but she took a step when he did.

  He stopped again. “You want me to find some of those slave chains and a hook?” he whispered down to her.

  She didn’t think he’d do something like that, but then, one time her cousin Virgil had. . . . She nodded up at Adam, then watched as he disappeared around a curve in the tunnel.

  He was gone probably for only a few seconds, but to Darci it seemed like eons. When at last he came back around the corner, he was smiling at her in an odd way. “What?” she asked, rubbing her nose.

  Still smiling in that odd way, Adam stepped back to let her go down the tunnel ahead of him. His flashlight was off, but there was enough light for her to see the way. After about ten yards, the tunnel opened up into a big underground room that was ringed with electric lights and to one side was one of those little earthmovers that all of Darci’s male (and some of her female) relatives so passionately wanted: a Bobcat. No clamshells, no chains had been used to dig this tunnel. Instead, it had been dug out with a modern machine.

  She looked around the rest of the big, empty room. There were no chairs, no furniture, just the Bobcat, and, oddly enough, against the opposite wall were a couple of vending machines. The far wall had three big black holes in it, three doorways into other underground passages.

  So now Darci understood his odd look. It was nothing but a smirking, laughing-at-the-silly-female look—a look she decided to ignore.

  But she could also see that Adam was as shocked as she was at the obvious size of this coven. That a room the size of this one could have been dug, the dirt discarded somewhere, meant that many, many people were involved in this.

  Once again, Darci wanted to turn tail and run, but instead, she forced herself to pretend to be brave. She wasn’t going to say or do anything that would make Adam think about sending her away.

  With a smile of her own and a devil-may-care set to her shoulders, Darci walked toward the vending machines. “Do you have any change?”

  “No, I do not have any—” he said, then broke off because they both had heard a noise. One second Darci was standing in front of a vending machine and the next she’d been pulled through the air to land in a crouching position behind the Bobcat—and Adam had wrapped his body protectively around hers. Her back was pressed against his chest and all Darci could think about was his heart beating against the back of her. For a moment she closed her eyes and thought that if she died right at this moment, she would die happy.

  But all too soon a black cat came strolling into the room, looked around, then walked out the way they’d entered.

  Darci could feel Adam’s body relax, and she knew that the moment of intimate physical contact was about to end. But before he fully took his arms from around her, she stood up. “I’ve never been so frightened in my life,” she said as she swayed on her feet. She put the back of her hand to her forehead. “I feel soooo. . . . Oh, my goodness,” she said, then her knees buckled under her.

  But Adam stepped aside just as Darci fell—which caused her to land hard on her derriere.

  “People who faint usually turn white beforehand,” he said, looking down at her. “They do not go bright pink with excitement.”

  “I’ll try to remember that,” she said as she rubbed her bruised posterior, refusing to look up at Adam. She didn’t want to see that smirk again.

  When Darci got up, she saw that Adam was studying the three openings to the other tunnels. Looking like a scout for a posse, he had one knee on the floor, the other supporting his elbow as he examined the floor for tracks and any markings that might tell him which way to go. To find whatever it was he was looking for, Darci thought with a grimace because he hadn’t told her anything. Yet, she thought. He hadn’t told her anything yet.

  Again, she walked over to the vending machines. Her fear, the activity, and the nearness of Adam had combined to make her very hungry. In fact, she thought that if she didn’t have some chocolate and have it now, she just might die. “Are you sure you don’t have any change?”

  “Is it possible for you not to eat for ten minutes?” Adam said, not looking up from the tunnel floor. He was examining the second opening now.

  Darci looked from him to the vending machine then back again. She knew that it was daylight outside, and what self-respecting witch practiced during the day? And of course Adam knew this, too, or he wouldn’t have been snooping around here now. All in all, she thought it was highly unlikely that they’d encounter anyone down here at this time of day.

  With that in mind, she walked around to the back of the candy machine and gave it three sharp kicks in exactly the spot that her cousin Virgil had shown her. Unfortunately, her kicks and the resulting thud of the dropping candy bars made quite a noise inside the underground room.

  “What the hell?” Adam sai
d as he jumped up just in time to see half a dozen candy bars slide into the trough on the front of the machine.

  “I knew I shouldn’t have let you come with me,” Adam said as he grabbed Darci’s arm and started pulling her away from the machine.

  But Darci’s other arm was inside the trough, her hand latched onto three candy bars that were stuck up inside the machine, so she let out a yelp of pain.

  Instantly, Adam released her arm. “Go!” he hissed at her through clenched teeth as he pointed toward the third tunnel opening.

  Darci grabbed the candy bars and cradled them to her as she ran toward the opening. The fact that no one had appeared to investigate the noise made her relax. She was sure that no one else was in the tunnels. But then, maybe Adam had heard something that she hadn’t.

  Obeying Adam’s order, she hurried down the tunnel, with him close behind her, but when one of the candy bars dropped, she stopped to pick it up. When she rose, she saw that Adam was glaring at her in a way she understood too well: Angry Male.

  She gave him a tentative smile, but his face didn’t soften. Instead, he raised his flashlight and pointed silently toward the blackness ahead of them, and Darci started walking.

  But it wasn’t easy to walk on the uneven dirt floor while carrying nine candy bars. Also, the tennis shoes she’d bought that morning in the shop were a tiny bit too big, so they were slipping up and down on her heels. Between the candy and the shoes, she again fell behind him, but, as quietly as she could, she hurried forward until she was beside him.

  “Could I put some of these in your pockets?” she whispered up at him.

  “No,” Adam said curtly.

  “But cat suits don’t have pockets,” Darci said, her voice coming out as a whine.