Fountain of Secrets (The Relic Seekers)

by Clenney, Anita

  A monk sat beside her, holding her hand. His body blocked the woman’s face. He leaned over and wiped her forehead. “You should have let me know sooner. I just got your letter.”

  “I wanted to. But it was a mistake between us, and they would have cast you out.”

  “It wasn’t a mistake. I love you. I would have taken care of you and the baby.” He touched the woman’s belly. “You should have waited for me to come to you. It’s dangerous to travel in your condition.”

  “It’s more dangerous there.” She gripped his hand. “He’s trying to kill me.”

  The man’s shoulders stiffened. “Kill you? What do you mean?”

  “There have been two attempts already, accidents that weren’t accidents. And someone is following me. I know it’s him.”

  “Did he follow you here?” The man’s voice sounded breathless with fear.

  “I don’t think so. I didn’t know where else to go, and I had to let you know about the baby in case you didn’t get my letter. In case he… in case he succeeds. You have to take care of her, find a home for her.”

  “It’s a girl?”

  “Yes.”

  He touched the woman’s belly. “I’ll protect you. You and the baby.”

  “I don’t deserve your help, not after what I did. I’m sorry I betrayed you. He used me to get to you.”

  “That’s what he does. Don’t worry about him now. We have to get you to the hospital. You’re bleeding.”

  Red stains were spreading underneath her. She was hemorrhaging. If she didn’t get to the hospital soon, she would die.

  “Get to the hospital,” Kendall said, forgetting that she was talking to the past. She couldn’t see their faces. She wanted to move but was afraid the vision would fade.

  “There’s no time,” the woman said.

  “No, we can get help.”

  She cried out in pain and clasped her hands over her stomach. “It’s too late.” Her hands moved from her stomach to grasp the man’s hands. “Please, take care of the baby. Promise me you’ll take care of her.”

  “I promise.” His voice was rough as if he were crying. He leaned down and put his face against her stomach. His shoulders were shaking. She cried out again and he lifted his head. “I’m going to get Marco.”

  He knew Marco? But of course, the scene was happening here, and Marco said there had been a woman here once, but they didn’t speak of her. Why? Who was she?

  The man stood, turning slightly, and Kendall saw his face for the first time.

  Her father.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE SHOCK HAD just registered when the woman’s face came into view. Her features were twisted with pain, but Kendall recognized the woman from the one grainy photo she possessed. Her mother. Kendall’s legs shook as she started toward the bed. She stretched out her hand and the vision faded.

  “No.” She grabbed the footboard, but the bed looked just the same as it had when she and Jake escaped the castle. Messy covers, but no woman giving birth. No mother. No father. “Come back.” Kendall crawled on the bed and grabbed fistfuls of covers, trying to reconnect with the vision. Still nothing. She touched every part of the bed, and when that didn’t work, she lay on the bed in the same spot her mother had lain twenty-eight years ago. She forced her heartbeat to calm and took slow, steady breaths. Still nothing. “Please come back. Please. I need to know what happened.”

  “Kendall?”

  She sat up and saw Jake in the doorway.

  “What are you doing? Are you crying?” Jake strode to the bed and sat, assuming much the same position that her father had when he’d sat by her mother. He brushed a damp cheek. “What happened?”

  “I had a vision.”

  He looked apprehensive. “Want to talk about it?”

  “I saw my dad. And my mother.”

  “Here?”

  “The woman who gave birth in here was my mother.”

  Both eyebrows shot up. “You saw her.”

  She nodded. “I was born in this bed. My God, I killed my mother.”

  “What was your mom doing here? Women weren’t allowed. What was your father doing here for that matter? You said he was an archaeologist. Was he working here?”

  “He was dressed like a monk, and he said he was going to get Marco. I think my father was one of the Protettori.”

  “Damn.”

  “The scrap of paper we found underneath the desk was a letter she had written to tell him about the baby.” About Kendall. “But she was afraid she would be killed before he got it.”

  “Killed?”

  Kendall told Jake everything she had seen in the vision. “Who would try to kill a pregnant woman?” she asked.

  “A jealous husband. Maybe she was married and he found out she was pregnant by someone else.”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll never know.”

  “What do you know about your mother?”

  “My dad said she died when I was young. He didn’t talk about it much. I was curious, but he seemed so bothered when I asked, I stopped asking. I can’t believe he hid all this from me.”

  He slid his hand underneath hers and linked their fingers. “You were a little girl. How could he have told you? We’ll ask Marco when we get back. Maybe he’ll have some answers.” His eyes were dark as they studied her face. “You look wiped out.”

  She nodded. That was one of the worst things about visions. They sucked the life right out of her. She wanted to lean against him and rest, and after a second’s hesitation, she did. She laid her head against his chest and closed her eyes. With each beat of his heart, she felt herself regaining strength. He was strong. Protective. A good man, despite that sarcastic, rebellious armor he wore to keep people at the distance he wanted. His arms moved around her back, his head resting against hers. Sometimes she just wanted to be normal, to know only what everyone else knew, the things normal eyes saw and normal ears heard.

  He held her for several minutes, until the shock of her vision faded. His fingers moved lower, rubbing small relaxing circles over her spine, and she wished she could forget about the past and questions without answers. She wanted to feel the things a man and a woman who were hugging on a bed might feel. She wanted to feel him, all of him, outside, inside. Without really thinking it through, she lifted her face and touched her lips to his. “Thank you,” she whispered against his mouth.

  He put a hand behind her head, holding her close when she would have moved away. “For what?”

  “For being a friend.”

  “What if I want to be more?” he asked, his mouth hovering over hers. Then he lowered his head. His mouth was hot, and she grabbed him and held on. The feel, the smell, the taste of him was almost overwhelming. After a minute, she pushed away to grab a breath and clear her senses, but he didn’t let up. One hand ran down her back and moved along her hip to her thigh.

  She gave up on breathing and gripped the back of his head, pulling him closer. “Take your clothes off,” she said.

  He lifted his head and gave her a smoldering look. “You’re sure?”

  She was tired of being careful. Tired of being alone. “I’m sure.”

  He let out a possessive growl and kissed her harder. Then he cursed and pulled away. “Damn.”

  She felt cold after being in his arms. He wasn’t getting undressed.

  He sighed, a sound of disgust.

  “You don’t want me?”

  “Damn straight I want you, but you’ve had a hell of a shock.”

  “You’re afraid I’m just caught up in my emotions.”

  “Are you?” He sounded uncertain.

  “I don’t think so.” But her voice sounded as uncertain as his had.

  He put a hand on either side of her face and whispered, “You are going to come to my bed, but I want you to know exactly what you’re doing when it happens.” He pulled her into his arms and held her for a moment. She could feel the indecision and frustration running through him. In that moment, whate
ver it was that she felt for him grew, and she knew she could easily fall in love with him.

  He leaned back and brushed the hair off her face. His fingers weren’t soft, but they were surprisingly gentle. “You need rest.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you going back to your room now?” He still looked like he half regretted his chivalrous actions.

  “I think I’ll sleep here and see if I get any more answers.”

  “Want company?” He said it without a leer, without a smile, and she knew that he would have lain next to her, even held her, and not asked for anything more. Jake Stone was a man of many sides.

  “Thank you, but I’ll be fine.” And Jake was probably right about her being emotional, because suddenly she felt too tired to move, much less make love.

  One of the guards appeared at the door with a message from Nathan to call him. They had apparently linked with a satellite that enabled cell phone reception at the castle.

  “I’ll call him,” Jake said. “You rest.”

  The guard gave Kendall and Jake a strange look before he left. Jake followed him. Kendall slipped off her shoes and lay down on the bed where she had been born. Sleep was impossible. The vision replayed over and over in her head, and when it stopped, she tossed and turned, trying to put together the pieces of her past. Her father had told her that her mother died when she was young. She knew it had been when she was very young. She hadn’t realized it had been in childbirth. Why hadn’t he told her?

  For God’s sake, Kendall. She died giving birth to you. He was probably worried that you’d think it was your fault she died. Wasn’t it?

  Now she was burning to know more… who her mother was, where she lived, how she’d met her father, if there was a family out there she didn’t know. Why someone had tried to kill her.

  When Kendall finally fell asleep, her dreams were just as confusing as her thoughts. Images of the bloody childbirth and her father. Then she dreamed about the plane crash that had killed her father, Adam, and Uncle John. She hadn’t been there, but she’d imagined it in her dreams a million times. Or seen it. She didn’t know. But it seemed so real, she felt the heat of the flames. When she woke, she felt as if she were on fire.

  She sat up, heart thudding so hard the bed seemed to shake. Then she saw that she wasn’t alone. Someone stood at the foot of the bed. “Jake?” Had he come to check on her? When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, she saw the robe. The ghost was back. This time he stood looking at the desk where she’d found the hidden letter. His hands were folded in front of him. He looked up and she saw his profile, and she knew why he’d seemed familiar. Why he was attached to this room. Why she had needed to be there in the chapel to protect Jake and Nathan from being killed when Edward died.

  The ghost was her father.

  “Daddy.”

  He turned and looked at her. She saw a faint hint of her father’s eyes, his strong nose and angled cheekbones, his mouth set tight in concentration as it had been when he studied his latest find. There was an intensity about him when he was focused on his work, but that intensity could just as easily turn to a smile whenever she was near.

  He moved closer to the bed, staring at Kendall. But she knew he wasn’t looking at her. He was seeing the bloody bed where his lover had died. Her hands reached out for him, but he turned and walked into the same wall he had vanished through the last time.

  Kendall threw back the covers and slipped on her Nikes. She grabbed her flashlight and pressed the catch in the wall that opened to the secret passageway. “Wait,” she called. She glimpsed his robes and scrambled to keep up. He followed the same path as before, and she wondered if he even knew she was there or was just repeating the same pattern over and over. She stepped out of the tree that connected the secret passageway and the graveyard.

  It took her a few seconds to find him. He stood outside the fence near the two square stones where she’d seen him on her first visit to the castle. He stayed longer this time, staring down at the stones. It wasn’t until she had stepped within reach of the gravestones that he faded away. Was he trying to tell her something? Was it possible that the Fountain of Youth was hidden here? Hiding treasure in graves and tombs was common in many civilizations. Was her father’s spirit still trying to help her find relics, just like the two of them had done when she was a kid? Or was this just a memory she had glimpsed?

  Kendall looked at the two lonely graves. She assumed they were graves. There weren’t any markings on the stones, but she had sensed a funeral procession when she touched one of the stones the last time she was here. It would make sense if his body had been buried here, but it couldn’t be her father’s grave. There hadn’t been a body to bury. None of the bodies from the crash had been found. Her father, Adam, Uncle John.

  The authorities had told Aunt Edna that the flames would have destroyed everything but the bones, which wild animals must have carried off. The crash had occurred on a private airstrip in a wooded, isolated area in Italy, and the wreckage hadn’t been discovered for three days. Kendall had searched for the records as an adult, needing to see the place herself, but she couldn’t find any mention of a specific location of the crash. Aunt Edna claimed she’d forgotten, but Kendall suspected she was trying to protect her. Her aunt had seen how devastated Kendall had been as a child. The grief she’d suffered. Aunt Edna had put up a memorial in a cemetery within walking distance to her house so that Kendall could visit whenever she missed her father. She had gone there often, leaning against the headstone, knowing he wasn’t there, wondering why she had lived when everyone she loved had died.

  A few times, Aunt Edna had driven her to the graveyard in Great Falls, where Adam and his father were memorialized. Kendall had sat by Adam’s empty grave and talked to him, pretending he could hear her.

  Graves, sometimes she hated them. Kendall looked down at the headstones at her feet. They could have been here a thousand years, or a dozen. She slowly put one hand on each of them and waited to see if anything came. She felt a suffocating sense of sadness and loss, and glimpsed a cloudy image of a woman’s face ravaged by pain and grief. The same woman in the tower bed. Kendall knew then it wasn’t just the woman’s sadness and loss she felt. It was her own. This was her mother’s grave. Had her father buried her there? He must have. And the other grave, who was buried in it? A thought struck her, so alarming she gasped, but something moved closer to the castle, and she hurried to see if it was her father’s ghost or just one of the guards.

  She followed the movement and saw the garden with the maze where Jake had first gone with Raphael, scouting out a way to get inside the castle. She’d never had a chance to explore here. The place looked haunted in the moonlight. A perfect place for a ghost. Topiaries stood at the entrance of the garden. A vine-covered wall surrounded it, isolating it from the rest of the castle grounds. There were a variety of trees and bushes, and a fountain stood near the maze, like the one in the entrance of the castle. Fountain? It couldn’t be that simple. Moonlight reflected off the water spouting from the fountain and falling into the pond at the base. It was stone, old, like everything here. Kendall dipped her finger in the water and touched the stone.

  She felt herself flying through a dark place, then a hard jolt and she was back at the fountain.

  What was that?

  She heard a noise and thought the whispers had returned. Then she realized the sound came from the rustling leaves of the maze. Turning, Kendall saw the hem of a robe disappear inside. “Wait.” She dried her fingers on her pajamas as she hurried after him. Shining her light, she stepped inside the entrance to the maze. It was five feet wide, and even though the top was open and she could see the night sky, she felt spooked. But she wasn’t going to give up. She needed to talk to her father. He had all the answers to her past.

  The maze continued for several yards before making another turn. The turns came quickly after that, and in minutes, she realized she was lost. She hurried down another narrow passage, her light da
rting over foliaged walls as she searched for her ghost.

  The feel of the maze changed. Kendall felt heavy, as if she were trudging through water. Her head started spinning and memories flashed through her mind. She saw Jake the first time she’d met him, then Nathan, Jake, and herself in the inn after Nathan had broken in. Then she saw Nathan the first day she’d met him. She remembered the unguarded look on his face when she’d found his missing relic at the museum. A look of shock and pain. His expression had haunted her. She’d never understood why.

  The memories kept coming, each older than the previous one. She saw herself before she met Nathan, saw her aunt Edna rummaging in her antique shop, and then Kendall was on a cliff in Egypt with Adam. The heaviness lifted and she felt as if she were floating.

  She heard a noise behind her and turned, almost expecting to see Adam. A man wearing a dark garment stood behind her. “Daddy?” Then he tilted his head, studying her, and she saw the writing on one side of his face.

  She gasped in shock. “You!”

  She took a step backward and fell through the air. She reached out but nothing was there.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  KENDALL OPENED HER eyes and saw nothing but blackness. No moon or stars overhead. She didn’t feel injured or bruised, just shaken and disoriented, as if she’d been taken apart and put back together again. She rolled over, thinking she must have fallen facedown, but the moon wasn’t there either. She wasn’t in the maze. Her fingers registered a hard cold surface. Stone. She was lying on some kind of stone. She’d fallen through another hole. Jake would never let her forget this.

  She felt a lump underneath her leg and found her flashlight, still on. Swinging the light around her, she saw that she was in some kind of tunnel or cave. Her brain felt like thick syrup. It took a full minute before she could stand, and even then she felt like her legs would collapse. She must have hit her head. Maybe she had a concussion.