Always

by Jude Deveraux

  Darci started to leave, but she stopped and smiled at the child. “When you grow up, you’re going to look just like me, and you’re going to marry a man named Adam who loves you very much. You’ll have three adorable children and a very happy life. But, Diana?”

  “Yes?”

  “Make sure he stays out of the tunnels.”

  “What tunnels?”

  “You’ll find them someday. All in all, it might be best if he stays away from Fontinbloom Nokes. Can you remember that name?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Will I see you again?”

  “I don’t think so, but, yes, maybe someday I’ll meet you in Camwell when I’m there with Jack. If I do, I want you to remember that two people need to die.”

  The child stepped back from Darci, clutching her doll tightly to her chest. “Die?”

  “Yes,” Darci said, smiling, “but it’s all right. Remember all that I’ve told you. Can you do that?”

  “Yes,” the child said. “I will remember this always.”

  “Good, now I must go. Have a happy life, Diana.” With that, Darci stepped back through the circle and into the room.

  For a while she leaned against the paneling and willed her heart to calm down. Had she done the right thing?

  The enormity of what she’d just done frightened her. She had just changed history! But then, as Jack pointed out, maybe she’d changed history for the better.

  Turning, she started back to the circle, but on impulse she looked at the folder of papers. It was back now, so that meant that Tom had lived to put Simone’s papers in the box. Holding her breath, Darci opened the folder, flipped through the photocopies, read one, then closed it, smiling.

  “Yes!” she said as she danced around the room.

  Simone had enclosed a birth announcement for the third child of Adam and Diana Drayton. There was nothing about Adam having died in the tunnels.

  Suddenly, she wanted to talk to Jack. She started to go into the bedroom to call him, but she had no idea where he’d been taken. Turning back, she went to the circle. “Show me where Jack is now,” she said. Instantly, she saw a bed in a pretty room that could be identified as a hospital room only because of the machines in the corner.

  Jack was lying on the bed, one arm behind his head, and staring up at the ceiling. Darci stepped halfway through the circle.

  “Holy—” Jack began when he saw her—or saw half of her. She was standing beside his bed, but her left arm and leg weren’t there. “You did it without me, didn’t you?”

  “Please don’t be angry. I promise I’ll share everything with you when you get out of here.”

  “If I ever leave, that is. Where’s the rest of you?”

  “In the room in your father’s bedroom.”

  “And to think that not long ago I didn’t believe in such things as you.”

  “Things?” she asked, her voice rising.

  “Don’t try that on me. You know what I mean.”

  “I want to know what you mean by saying that you might never leave here. I’ll go back and get the Touch of God.”

  “No!” he said before she could disappear, then he lowered his voice. “You know how you said that you felt that I needed to come here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were right. I met Lavender.”

  “You what?”

  “She’s my father’s private physician. My old man has great taste, doesn’t he?”

  “That’s wonderful,” Darci said. “Truly wonderful.”

  He was still looking at her half-in, half-out stance. “What happens if you leave that…that whatever-it-is…fully?”

  “I don’t know. I’m afraid that it’ll close up and I’ll not be able to get back.”

  “Try it here. If it disappears, you’ll be in this century and all that will happen is that you’ll have to hear me tell you in detail about how wonderful Lavey is, although her name here is Lillian.”

  “Pretty awful punishment,” Darci said seriously.

  Jack made a lightning fast movement, grabbed her arm, and pulled her out of the circle.

  “What have you done?” Darci stared in horror as the circle disappeared. “Now I’ll have to find a car and drive all the way back to your father’s house. I’ll—Someone’s coming.”

  “Think they’ll be able to see you?” Jack asked.

  In the next minute, the door opened and in walked Dr. Shepard. Darci, standing to the side of the door, knew right away that the woman was Lavender. Same spirit; same aura. She’d changed a bit over the hundred-plus years since her Victorian life, but basically she was the same.

  “Feeling better?” the doctor asked Jack.

  “Not much,” he answered, lying back on the bed as though in great agony.

  “Sorry to hear that.” She marked something on his chart, then walked behind him to fluff his pillows. When she saw Darci, she jumped. “How did you get in here? There’s a guard outside. I’ll have his hide for this, and Mr. Hallbrooke will fire him.”

  “No,” Jack said, putting his hand on her arm. Darci saw the sparks in the touch from across the room. “It’s all right. Please don’t tell my father. Darci’s so small that she slipped past the man when he blinked.”

  Darci concentrated and tried to make the woman believe him. She wanted to so it was easy to persuade her. She wanted to do whatever Jack wanted, Darci thought. But right now, Darci wanted to see if she could get back to the circle. She had other things she wanted to do in history. Concentrating, she sent the thought to the doctor that she had to leave the room immediately. Abruptly, the doctor left.

  “Why’d you do that?” Jack asked. “I wanted her to get to know you.”

  “The real me or the made-up me?”

  “I want her to hear every detail of a lie that you and I make up.” He was grinning. “It’s her, isn’t it?”

  “Oh yes, and she’s as mad about you now as she was then. Jack?”

  “Yeah?”

  “What do you remember about Adam Drayton?”

  “He was a great guy, with a pretty little wife who looks a lot like you. Don’t you remember them?”

  “Yes, I do, but I was wondering if you did. How did he die?”

  “I have no idea. Simone sent us the clipping about their third child, but nothing else about the man. What are you up to? You aren’t going to change them, are you? I remember that you liked Drayton a bit too much.”

  “Maybe I did,” Darci said, looking at the wall where she’d come in. She saw no sign of the circle that had brought her there. “Open!” she said, never expecting to see anything, but the circle opened immediately.

  “Think I could go with you?” Jack asked, his eyes longing for adventure.

  Darci could tell that he wasn’t nearly as ill as he was pretending to be. “I don’t know. Come here,” she commanded the circle and it moved closer to them. “Truly wonderful, isn’t it?”

  “I haven’t decided yet. If I can use it, I’ll love it, if not, I’m going to give you a lecture on how dangerous that thing could be.”

  Darci laughed. “Try it and see what happens.”

  Looking as though he was about to stick his hand into a fire, Jack reached out toward the circle. When his hand disappeared, he drew back quickly.

  “Exactly what I did,” she said. “Now try your face.”

  “Why not? Now that I know Dad can buy me a new one, I feel safe.” Jack put his face through the circle for a second, then drew back. “How do I see things? All I see now is the hidden room.”

  “Tell it what you want to see.”

  “Lavender,” he said quickly. “Show me Lavender on the day we met.” He put his face through, then withdrew it. “Nothing. You try it.”

  Darci asked to see Lavender on the day she met Jack and when she looked, that’s what she saw. “Looks like it’s only me who has the power and the control,” Darci said cheerfully.

  “That’s not fair. I’ve been in on this from the beginning. I’ve—Where
are you going?”

  “Back. I have a date with a witch.” In the next moment she was gone and Jack lay back against the bed, thinking about what he’d just seen and heard, and wondering why she’d asked him about Adam and Diana Drayton.

  For a moment he felt bereft because he knew that the closeness that had been between him and Darci was gone. He knew that he was now going to become like Lincoln Aimes, a man she said she “adored,” but didn’t seem to have a lot of contact with.

  As Jack lay there and thought, he knew that his life had been changed by Darci. He knew that he’d never be able to return to his undercover work. Too many people had seen him with this face and knew that he was Hallbrooke’s son.

  But deeper than that, Jack knew that he didn’t want to return to what he’d once done. Now he wanted to…He knew that he wanted to marry Lavender and have a bunch of kids, but what else did he want to do? Work with Darci, he thought. Maybe with her talents and his father’s money, they could do something together in the future.

  Smiling, he closed his eyes, and after a while he went to sleep.

  Upstairs, in a room sectioned off from the attic, the security man pulled the CD from the machine and hurried down the stairs to where Mr. Hallbrooke had set up an office.

  “Yes?” Mr. Hallbrooke asked.

  “Sir, I think you should see this.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the video from the surveillance camera in your son’s room. There’s something odd on it.”

  “Such as?”

  “A young woman came to see him, but she didn’t use the door. She came out of the air, and for a while only half of her was in the room.”

  “I think you’re wrong,” Mr. Hallbrooke said, taking the CD from the man. “You saw nothing, did you?”

  “No sir, not a thing.”

  “Good,” Mr. Hallbrooke said, dismissing the man.

  He put the CD into a machine and settled back to watch.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  THE FIRST THING DARCI DID WHEN SHE GOT BACK was to remove the jewel from the base. Within seconds it cooled off, and the big circle closed. For what she planned to try next she wanted all her strength, and for her mind to be at its peak.

  Once she’d disabled everything, she left the room, closing the door securely, and went to the kitchen to find something to eat. An hour later, she climbed into Mr. Hallbrooke’s bed. She set the alarm for ten minutes to midnight, then went to sleep instantly.

  Hours later, she awoke a few minutes before the alarm went off, and began to prepare herself for what she was going to try to do.

  She was going to try to use the past to save her husband. If she couldn’t get him out of wherever he was now, then she was going to do what she could to prevent his being in such a place.

  But how did she do that without taking herself out of Adam’s life was her dilemma.

  By the time she’d showered and dressed and was ready to go back into the hidden room, she’d decided that she’d do whatever it took to save the man she loved.

  She carried a chair into the room, put the jewel back into the base, and commanded the circle to open.

  “What if Adam were not kidnapped?” she asked first.

  When she first saw her husband, alive and well, her heart seemed to leap into her throat. But then she relaxed and smiled. Part of her had feared that all she’d been through since she’d seen him would have dulled her feelings for him. After all, she’d spent time with an actor who was considered one of the most beautiful people on earth, and then there was Jack. She’d watched in two centuries how women’s eyes followed him. His charisma had caused a woman to kill for him, then attach her spirit to his for over a hundred years.

  But when she saw Adam again, it was as though they’d never been apart. He couldn’t see her, but she could see and feel him. He wore that same look that said he was responsible for all the world’s problems—and that was the look that made her sit up straighter. If he wasn’t kidnapped as a child, then shouldn’t the adult Adam be happier?

  She investigated further, going back years. She had to look away when she saw that Adam’s parents had been taken by the witch, because who she’d really wanted was Boadicea.

  No, Darci thought, she couldn’t just stop Adam’s kidnapping. She had to go farther back.

  The mirror, Darci thought. It had all started with finding the Mirror of Nostradamus. The witch’s sister had found the mirror in a shop in Paris and the witch had killed her to get it.

  What if Darci kept the sister from finding the mirror? Smiling, she asked to see that. But when she saw a world destroyed in a nuclear war, she decided not to go that route. “What in the world happened?” she whispered. “Who found the mirror and what was done with it?”

  The circle started to show her, but she waved her hand. She didn’t have the time or the stomach to watch that.

  No, the sister had to find the mirror. “What if the witch didn’t take it from her?” Darci asked and was shown that the sister, with good intentions, began to predict people’s futures. But she was a kind and generous person who wanted to share with others, so she told people about the mirror. Within weeks, evil people had taken over and had formed a cult meant to dupe people out of their money.

  “No,” Darci said. She felt bad about it, but the sister had to die.

  Frustrated, Darci leaned back in her chair. It couldn’t be that the best way would be for the witch to kidnap Adam and Bo, could it? “No! Of course not!”

  “Back,” Darci said. “I want to go back. I want to see the history of the mirror.” What she was shown wasn’t good, and she wasn’t surprised to see that the mirror had grown fed up with being used for nothing but money. “Where is a mountain of gold?” it was asked.

  “Where are the riches?” “When will it be safe to rob that house?”

  It was also shocking to see how the mirror had tricked people. It never lied, not directly, anyway, but it told what it wanted to. Bo had said that long ago. She knew the mirror well and had had to learn how to ask the right questions.

  “So why was it in that antiques shop?” she wondered. “Who did the mirror want to find it?”

  The circle cleared, then Darci saw herself holding the mirror.

  She waved her hand. No, she thought. It was too much. She had enough power now and could do more than she’d ever wanted to. If she could get her husband back, all she wanted to do was…

  She didn’t finish her thought because she knew that she was lying if she said that all she wanted to do was live with him and their family. She knew that in the years since Adam had been taken from her, she’d changed drastically. A few days with no power had been enough to make her appreciate what she’d been given.

  Darci looked back at the circle and told it to show her the witch after she took the mirror. She’d killed her sister and had to run away to hide. For years she was content. Like all the others, she’d used the mirror to make money.

  “Odd that the mirror allowed her to do that,” Darci said aloud. But then came the day when the witch gave herself to a young man under a flowering pear tree, and with the loss of her virginity, she was no longer able to read the mirror.

  The loss of her only “friend” in her life, the mirror, had nearly driven the woman insane. After that…Darci didn’t want to look at what had happened after that, as the woman tried to find someone who could read the mirror.

  “So that’s how the mirror tricked her,” Darci said. The mirror hadn’t shown her that if she went to bed with a young man she’d never be able to see the future again. “Mean little thing!” Darci said.

  “What would happen if she saw in the mirror that to lose her virginity meant she’d lose her ability to see the future?”

  The circle showed an old, rich, miserable woman.

  “Miserable because she never had a man?” Darci asked. “I don’t think so! She just needs something to do besides make money.” What if…? Darci thought, then asked some more questions
, watched, asked more, then watched more. Yes, she thought, it might work.

  For three hours, Darci worked. She asked questions and moved things around until she figured out a way to keep the woman from making herself into a witch.

  The problem was, how would all this affect Adam Montgomery?

  Darci took a break, then trembling in fear of what she would see, she asked what would happen if she did change the witch. Where would Adam and his family be?

  When the circle began to change, Darci put her hands over her face, afraid to see what was going to come up. She’d met Adam through the witch and what had been done to his family. To take away the witch meant taking away Darci.

  Slowly, she raised her head and looked. She saw that Adam was a professor at a big university—and he was married. Darci watched as a young woman came up to him, kissed his cheek, and asked what he wanted for dinner that night. She was from his own class, someone like him.

  Darci had to swallow hard. Their children, Adam’s and hers, didn’t exist, would never exist in exactly the same form. And her father would never meet Adam’s sister, much less marry her and have a child.

  “And what about me?” Darci whispered. What would happen to her if she didn’t meet Adam and marry him?

  The circle changed and she saw herself married to Putnam, the rich boy from her hometown who’d begged her to marry him. He’d said he’d pay off all the debts of the townspeople if she’d marry him. Without Adam to save her, she married Putnam.

  “And my daughter and niece?” she asked. She saw that both spirits would be put into the bodies of children born to her and Putnam. The girls would have different bodies and…and less power, she saw. It seemed that an ancestor in the Montgomery family had had Second Sight and that gene had united with the genes in Darci’s father’s family to form two extraordinary children.

  For a moment Darci put her hands over her face and her eyes filled with hot tears. Adam was happy, she thought, and wasn’t that what she’d always wanted for him? He was married to a tall, skinny, blueblood of a woman who probably rode horses all day long. “Someone like him,” she whispered. “Not a freak like me.”