Always

by Jude Deveraux

  Darci Montgomery was stretched out on the blue damask bedspread, reading a People magazine and eating from a ten-pound box of Godiva chocolates.

  “You—” he said aloud, jaw clenched and pointing toward the door. “You can’t—” He was so angry he couldn’t get the words out.

  I can’t what? she asked and Jack knew she was talking to him without words.

  In spite of all the testing Greg had done yesterday, Jack refused to believe that he and Darci could…could…

  She smiled at him. “Someone had to clean and cook and I’m not good at either one. Besides, those two kids had refused to allow anyone to clean their rooms. They even had some rather nasty substances hidden inside books. I can’t bear desecration of books, can you?”

  “You have no right—” Jack said, then stopped. As he walked to the window, he willed himself to be calm. He needed to get himself under control so they could find his father and get out of here, get away from each other.

  “She’s afraid you’re going to fall in love with me.”

  Jack’s shoulders dropped. “You want to quit that crap? There’s no one around me. No one—” He broke off. He’d been through this all day yesterday. Turning, he looked at her, thinking that she looked very good on that bed. The next second, he felt a pain in his head and he rubbed his temple.

  Darci held up a piece of candy and studied it. “I think she’s afraid that I’ll take you away from her. No, send her away from you. She thinks I have the ability to send her away, but your anger keeps me from doing it. Does that make sense?”

  Jack didn’t answer. “Have you found my father?”

  “He’s all right. I can feel his spirit in this house. He’s a very powerful man. Like you. You two are a lot alike.”

  “If you’re trying to enrage me, it’s already been done.”

  “Yes. Your aura is a deep, dark red. Rather like the eyes of a bull in a cartoon.”

  Her attitude made Jack so angry that he took a step toward her.

  Darci dropped the candy and sat up on the bed, her eyes wide in alarm.

  Jack had never hurt a woman, but the fear he saw in this woman’s eyes made him feel good. Disgusted with himself, he stepped back. “Look, I think the best thing for us to do is to find my father, then separate.”

  “Yes,” Darci said, moving to sit at the side of the bed and Jack stepped farther away from her. Whatever she was feeling from him had wiped the smile off her face. “Your father left here of his own accord, but I’m not sure he can get away to come home.”

  “All I need is for you to tell me who and where and I’ll do the rest. What do you need? A piece of his hair?”

  “I’m not—” Darci began, then when she looked at Jack’s eyes, she stopped and took a breath.

  Jack could see that she was afraid of him and for a moment he smiled. Obviously she had no power over him. She couldn’t hypnotize him into cleaning and cooking—or into doing her bidding.

  Darci stood up, straightened her shoulders, and looked hard at Jack, and for a few moments he felt calmer. But in the next second the rage was back.

  “You’re going to kill him!” Darci said aloud, looking at the space above Jack’s head. “I don’t want him! I’m not your enemy!”

  If possible, the anger inside Jack grew. To control himself, he walked to the door and went into the hall. He was calm until Darci stood before him. He could feel his hands shape themselves into circles the exact size of her neck, and he saw her look down at his hands in fear.

  Darci took a step backward. “There’s a room in this house, a secret room, where some objects are hidden.”

  “I know of no secret room.” Jack stepped toward her. He could almost feel her neck under his hands.

  In the next second, Darci was running down the hall. She was small and light and quick. By the time he got down the stairs, he saw just her foot as she disappeared into his father’s bedroom. Inside the room, she was running her hands along the bookcase and she glanced fearfully at Jack as she searched for something.

  Jack was sure there was nothing there. As a kid he and Greg had explored the big old house endlessly. The bedroom of his often-absent father had been Jack’s favorite area as it had been the most forbidden.

  When Darci found a button and pushed it—then the bookcase swung back—Jack was stunned. He watched her walk into the dark space behind the bookcase and disappear.

  Inside him came a voice that he’d heard before in his life, a woman’s voice. He’d never told Greg about the voice he sometimes heard, had never openly admitted it to himself. He’d always thought of it as the “devil’s voice.” Now that voice was telling him to shut the bookcase and lock it into place. With Darci inside the room.

  Using all his willpower, Jack blocked the voice from his mind and walked toward the bookcase.

  “You don’t have a match, do you?” Darci asked from the darkness. “I think there are some candles here.”

  “Why don’t you use your mind to light the place up?”

  “Why don’t you ask your girlfriend to show herself? Maybe she could produce an eerie green light.”

  For an instant, Jack felt like leaping toward Darci’s voice, but he controlled the urge. Feeling along the wall, he felt a light switch and flicked it. When the lights came on, he saw Darci staring straight ahead. Jack started to comment on her inability to find a light switch, but then he looked at what she was staring at.

  They were in a small room with no windows, the plastered walls painted a dark red. Three walls were blank, but the fourth had a single shelf at waist level with a painting above it. It was a gruesome painting, old and cracked, of a man being tortured, sightless hands placing branding irons on his body. A saint perhaps.

  As though she were mesmerized, Darci walked toward the shelf. It was a four-inch-thick piece of wood, pure white and sanded smooth. On the shelf were four objects. There was a little blue glass ball on a marble base, a small ivory statue, what looked to be a precious stone the size and shape of an egg, and a small silver box.

  Jack watched in silence as Darci walked toward the box. She didn’t touch it, just stared at it, then, slowly, she reached up to her neck and pulled a green cord from inside her shirt. On the end of the cord was the key she’d had on her key ring. She was going to try to unlock the little box.

  Jack didn’t know what happened next, but one moment he was watching her and the next moment he could feel his hands around her throat. The only thing he wanted in the world was to kill her.

  Chapter Five

  “FEELING BETTER?” DARCI ASKED AS SHE PLACED the cool washcloth on Jack’s forehead.

  Looking up, he saw the coffered ceiling of his father’s bedroom, and he realized he was lying on his father’s bed. He tried to get up, but dizziness made him lie back down.

  “Ssssh,” Darci said. “You need to rest. Besides, I’ve given you a tranquilizer.”

  “A tranquilizer?” he asked, feeling too befuddled to understand the term. There were bruises on her neck.

  “Yes. Your family has an arsenal of drugs so I dissolved three little pink pills in a glass of water and got it down you.”

  She said all this happily, as though it was an everyday occurrence to give someone pills to knock them out. She removed the cloth from his head, then dipped it into a basin of cold water. When she turned back, she winced from pain in her neck.

  “Tell me what happened,” he whispered.

  “Later. You should sleep now. Those pills—”

  He caught her wrist in his hand. “Tell me. I tried to—”

  “Kill me,” she said. “No, you didn’t, but she did. She seems to know something that I don’t, which I think means that she knows I know how to get rid of her. I just wish I did know. I mean, know what I know that I don’t know that I know.”

  “That’s clear,” Jack said and was pleased when he saw Darci smile.

  “When you’re in this half-drugged state, she can’t make you angry. She needs you alive a
nd awake.”

  “How…?” Jack asked, reaching up to touch a bruise on Darci’s neck.

  She looked away, her face turning pink. “You don’t want to know.”

  “Yes, I do.” He gave her a crooked grin. “You better tell me now. If I sleep this off I’ll wake up hating you, then I won’t listen.”

  Darci smiled. “Too true. Okay, I guess it’s that old adage of evil fighting evil. I can’t deal with a spirit that has as much hatred as the one around you does, but I know someone who can deal with her.” She looked at the far side of the room.

  Puzzled, Jack tried to figure out what she was trying to say. “I see. Spirit versus spirit. You called in someone. Who? Jack the Ripper?”

  “Worse. Devlin.”

  “Never heard of him.”

  “Lucky you. He’s a spirit I met…”

  “At a cocktail party?”

  “More or less,” Darci said, smiling. “I’m not sure what he is, what he does, or even which side he’s on, but I know he hovers around me. When you—she—attacked me, I called on Devlin. I knew he was stronger than she is.”

  “She,” Jack said, closing his eyes for a moment. “It’s always her.”

  “Yes. Devlin pulled her back and that made you quit…”

  “Trying to choke you to death?”

  “It wasn’t you. None of this hatred has been from you. It’s all her.”

  “Tell her to go away.”

  “That’s exactly what Devlin said. ‘Break the connection and send her away’ is what he said I should do. But I said I was afraid that she was powerful enough to take you away with her.”

  “Did you fight her? Who won? Am I dead now?” For a second, Jack’s eyes widened. “Did I kill you?”

  Darci put her hand on his chest. “Nope. Two alives and two deads in this room.”

  “I guess you can see both of them.”

  “I can see Devlin. You can, too, if you want to. He’s—”

  “No thank you,” Jack said quickly.

  Darci sighed. “You’re right. Linc hated seeing him.”

  “Lincoln Aimes? The actor?”

  Darci nodded. “My good friend. Anyway, Devlin trapped the woman for a while so I can talk to you. I drugged your body so you’d be calm and not call to her.”

  “ ‘Call’ to her?”

  “Yes, there’s a strong pull from you to her—I think. Devlin said we should ask the woman what she wants.”

  His mind fuzzy, Jack blinked at Darci for a moment. “Not a séance! Please tell me you don’t want me to hold hands and hear knocking and—”

  “Not at all. Devlin said he could put the woman’s spirit into a body and hold it there for about thirty minutes. If we do that, maybe we can get her to talk.”

  “And tell us why she hates me?”

  “To tell us why she wants to kill any woman who gets near you. I think maybe she loved you once and you betrayed her.”

  Jack blinked at her. “Are you talking about reincarnation?”

  “ ’Fraid so.”

  “Do you have any more of those little pills?”

  “Fresh out,” Darci said, smiling. “I wish we could call Linc, but he’s working on a movie in Turkey. He’d be able to tell you that spirits aren’t so bad.”

  “What’s this guy Devlin look like? If he’s such a big deal spirit, maybe she’ll fall in love with him and leave me alone.”

  Darci stared at Jack with wide eyes. “That’s not a bad idea. Maybe—” She looked up at the headboard. “Devlin says no.”

  Jack refused to acknowledge the fact that he could feel the bed move with the force of the no’s. “Whose body would she be put into?” he asked at last.

  “The girl. Your cousin, I believe.”

  “Chrissy? She’s a child. She’s just seventeen.”

  “She has a thirty-five-year-old lover who’s ready to kill to get his hands on your father’s money. He’ll marry Chrissy if we don’t find your father, and we can’t find him without your help, but you can’t help because you have some angry woman hanging over you, telling you to kill any woman you’re attracted to. And you’re to kill me because maybe I know how to send her back to wherever she came from, except that I don’t really know how.”

  “Couldn’t this Devlin send her back?”

  “Probably,” Darci said, grimacing, “but he won’t. He wants me…no, he wants the both of us to…” She paused. “Truthfully, I think Devlin’s up to something very bad, but I have no idea what he’s up to this time.”

  Slowly, Jack sat up in bed. He didn’t tell Darci but his body had had a lot of drugs shot into it over the years, so he’d built up a tolerance. What were a few tranquilizers? “So when do we do this spirit transfer?”

  “I guess we can do it at any time,” Darci said slowly, looking at the bedside table.

  Jack followed her eyes and saw the box that had been in the secret room. The bookcase was back in place now. He picked up the box and looked at it, aware that Darci was holding her breath as she watched him.

  The box was about six inches long, three inches deep and thick. Not big, but it was heavy, as though it held something substantial. The outside seemed to be of silver, old and tarnished, and hammered into a design of raised curls and waves. He’d never seen a design like it. “Victorian Aztec” came to his mind. “Have you opened it yet?” he asked, turning it around in his hands.

  “No,” Darci whispered.

  He held it out to her and, tentatively, she took it. She held it as though it were rare and precious and fragile.

  “Try it,” he said. “Try your key.”

  “No, not yet.” Reluctantly, she put the box back on the table, then looked at him. “There’s something inside it and I think my key opens the box. It’s just that I’m not sure I want to release what’s inside.”

  “Pandora, huh?”

  “Exactly. Only no one has warned me not to open it.”

  “Can you ask this Devlin?”

  Darci snorted. “If the box were full of forked-tailed demons, he’d probably encourage me to open it.” She looked at Jack hard. “Maybe while you’re calm from the pills we should try to transfer her spirit into a body and get her to talk. Once we get her out of the way, maybe we can find your father. I’d really like to know where he got the objects in that room. All of them have power, but the box is…”

  “The killer?”

  “More or less,” she said, smiling at Jack. “Greg told me you were actually a nice man, but—”

  She halted when the room began to fill with blue smoke. “Uh-oh. Devlin’s getting restless. She’s getting harder to hold.”

  Jack was watching the smoke around him, refusing to glance upward to the space where Darci kept looking. If there was a ghost up there, he didn’t want to see him—it. “Let’s do it,” Jack said. “Let’s talk to her and see what she wants.”

  Darci turned toward the bedroom door and stared at it hard.

  As Jack watched her, he wondered what the truth was about Darci’s husband and sister-in-law. Yesterday, he’d felt as though he knew what the truth was, but now he wondered…

  He rubbed his hand over his face. It seemed as though he were two people, one who was consumed with hatred, and the other who could think rationally. Part of him was sure there was no such a thing as a psychic, but another part of him had seen some unbelievable things in the last few days.

  When the bedroom door opened and in walked his seventeen-year-old cousin, Jack wasn’t surprised. Chrissy had dyed her sandy hair black and made it stand up on end. She had a nose ring, an eyebrow ring, and five studs in each ear. Her clothes were all black, with hundreds of steel rivets. Incongruously, she was wearing pink rubber gloves for housecleaning.

  “I don’t want her hurt,” Darci said in a warning voice.

  Jack couldn’t keep himself from glancing at the bookcase. There, vaguely outlined, was the shape of a man. He seemed to be wearing an Elizabethan ruff and he looked distinctly like Shakespeare.
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  “You wish you were so talented,” Darci snapped at the shape.

  Jack watched the shape change, still transparent, but now it turned into…a fish?

  “He thinks he’s funny,” Darci said to Jack. “Ignore him.” She looked at the shape on the bookcase that was now changing itself into a peacock. “You’re not scaring anyone, so stop it. Could you do the transfer, please?”

  Chrissy was now sitting on a chair, her eyes glassy and unfocused.

  Jack couldn’t take his eyes off the shape on the bookcase as he watched it change into a magician. Devlin removed his tall hat, reached into it, and pulled out a rabbit, which he then placed onto Chrissy’s lap. Jack drew back when the rabbit seemed to jump straight into Chrissy’s stomach.

  “You’re a real pest,” Darci said under her breath, “and I’m going to tell Henry on you.”

  In the next moment, Chrissy’s face changed. “Oh!” she said in a soft voice, then looked down at herself. What she saw didn’t seem to please her because the next “Oh!” was of horror. She removed the gloves with distaste.

  “What has been done to me?” Chrissy asked as she got up from the chair and went to the mirror over the big mahogany dresser. “How awful,” she said, tears in her voice as she looked at her reflection.

  Jack moved to sit beside Darci, watching in silence as Chrissy began to remove all the studs from her head. His father’s hairbrush was on the dresser and she used that to try and smooth her hair down.

  It was as though Chrissy was unaware of anyone else in the room, but after a few minutes she looked at Jack in the mirror and smiled. “You said you’d love me no matter how I looked. I think I’m now testing that love.”

  When Jack said nothing, Darci nudged him with her elbow. “You do love her, don’t you?” she whispered.

  “With all my heart,” he said out loud.

  Turning, Chrissy looked at Jack. Even though he was sitting next to Darci, Chrissy never looked at her. Her eyes were only on Jack. “My darling,” Chrissy said and went to Jack, her arms outstretched.

  To Darci’s disbelief, Jack held her away. Was he going to ruin their only chance to find out about this woman who haunted him?