Forever: A Novel of Good and Evil Love and Hope Read online

  Taylor stood there watching them in speculation; then, after a moment, he walked about the guest house. When he saw that the clothes of both of them were hanging in one closet and that they were obviously sleeping in the same room together, he picked up the phone, called the desk, and told them to repack his luggage and move his bags into the Cardinal House. With Taylor’s voice and his air of authority, the young man who answered the phone didn’t say that repacking and moving was not a normal service of the hotel. All the young man said was, “Yes, sir. I’ll see that it’s done.”

  Thirty minutes later, Taylor answered the knock on the door and admitted what looked to be every staff member at the Grove into the guest house. Each person was carrying a suitcase or a cardboard box or an odd-shaped case.

  “What in the world—” Adam began as he watched the parade.

  “I decided to stay here—in this house,” Taylor said pointedly, looking hard at Adam. “The staff will need to be tipped, and I’m sure you can afford it better than I can.”

  Adam started to speak, but, instead, he opened his wallet and passed out several bills to the waiting staff. “Like father, like daughter,” he said under his breath. The staff left smiling. “You want to tell me what this is about?” Adam asked as he turned back to Taylor.

  Taylor sat down on a chair across from the sofa. “I didn’t have much time to plan so I brought everything that I thought we’d need. Tonight we have to try to get the mirror. Tomorrow is the thirty-first, so—”

  “Hallowe’en,” Darci said. She was sitting on one end of the sofa, Adam at the other end. She realized that she’d paid no attention to the date.

  “Yes, exactly,” Taylor said. “If we wait until tomorrow, it will be too late, if she keeps her power past tonight, her power will double. She will use children in the ritual,” he said softly. “But I don’t know where she keeps the mirror. She—”

  “The boss?” Darci asked, trying not to think about what her father had just said. “That’s what we’ve heard her called.”

  “And when was that?” Taylor asked, then put up his hand. “No, don’t tell me. There’s no time. She won’t be expecting us tonight. I’m sure she’s seen Darci in the mirror, so she—”

  “Me?” Darci asked. “Why me?”

  “You can read it,” Taylor said before Adam could speak.

  “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” Darci said bitterly. “I was hired because I’m a ...a....Wait a minute! If this witch is reading the mirror, then does that mean that she’s never ...?”

  “That puzzles me,” Taylor said softly. “Has she made herself a nun to the mirror? Or is it just a legend that only a virgin can read it?”

  “This doesn’t make sense. Nostradamus was certainly no virgin. He had a couple of wives and children,” Darci said. “So why does the reader have to be . . . chaste?” She swallowed, too well remembering all the times she’d talked to Adam about sex. Yet he’d known all along that she knew nothing. How he must have been laughing at her!

  “But then maybe the mirror was made for him,” Adam said softly, and the way he said it made Darci turn to him sharply.

  “What else are you hiding?” she asked. “Besides hideous scars and knowledge of a person’s most intimate secrets?”

  Adam took a deep breath. “There’s a possibility that my sister is the one reading the mirror,” he said. “My mother was pregnant when she ...when she disappeared. I’ve been told that three people were on the plane that my parents disappeared in and that one of them is still alive. My sister would be about thirty-two now.”

  At this revelation, all Darci could do was stare at Adam. No wonder he was so fierce about finding this mirror. If he found the mirror, maybe he’d find his sister. Maybe he’d find a woman who had been held captive her entire life.

  “Ah,” Taylor said. “This makes things even more imperative.” He was looking from Darci to Adam and saw the way they were gazing at each other. Taylor’s mind was moving quickly. Because of his ancestresses, he had dedicated his life to the study of some of the ugliness that was going on in the world. Twice he’d been able to infiltrate covens and bring them down. But each time, the things that he had seen had sickened him.

  When Adam Montgomery had called early this morning, Taylor hadn’t given himself time to feel the joy of finding out that he had a daughter—a daughter who had the power that had been in his family throughout remembered time. Instead, he’d flown into a frenzy of activity. He’d grabbed his case files on Camwell—boxes of them—all while dictating to his longtime assistant, Mrs. Wilson.

  It was she who remembered the rumor about the mirror. Taylor had heard about the mirror years before from a student of his whose sister had joined the cult. In an attempt to get her sibling to join the coven, stupidly, the girl had told her of the mirror. “It’s going to let us conquer the world,” the sister had said. “She has an old-maid virgin—she has to be a virgin—who can see the past and the future in the thing.”

  These few sentences had been told to Taylor, and he’d spent as much time as he could finding out what the girl had meant, but he could find out little.

  He had been on his way here to Camwell when Mrs. Wilson had called to tell him what she’d found out about Adam Montgomery and what had happened to him when he was a child.

  Mrs. Wilson said, “And here’s an interesting fact: This man’s mother was pregnant when she disappeared.” It had taken Taylor several moments to put two and two together. “Old-maid virgin,” the girl had said. “How old would her child be now?” Taylor said into the speaker phone. Mrs. Wilson was prepared for the question; they had worked together for many years. “The child would be about thirty-two now.”

  Taylor’d had to take a few moments to calm himself. No matter how much he heard about the evil on earth, he was never quite prepared when he heard more. Had the girl been raised in captivity? Been raised so she could read a magic mirror?

  By the time Taylor reached Camwell, he had several pieces of information, but he wasn’t sure how they all fit together. He wouldn’t reveal the information under torture, but he was often consulted by the FBI when there was a possibility of so-called witchcraft in a case. Because of this connection, Mrs. Wilson had been able to find out about the shape of the brand the doctors had seen on the chest of a small boy found wandering in the woods years ago. Taylor even knew that the FBI—with the approval of Adam’s guardians—had ordered the doctor to repair the wound in a way that scar tissue would cover the brand. Adam’s guardians didn’t want him to have a visual reminder of what he’d been through.

  And Taylor had been called into the case when the first young woman had disappeared near Camwell years before. He was the one who’d figured out about the moles when the second woman disappeared.

  But it was only while driving in the car today that Taylor had made a guess—a guess based on years of research and experience—about the shape on Darci’s hand and the brand that had been put on Adam’s chest when he was a child.

  So now Taylor knew more than he wanted to. This “boss,” this evil woman who had kidnaped an unborn baby and held the child for thirty-two years, was now after Taylor’s beautiful—and very precious—daughter.

  Taylor had heard an abbreviated version of what this Adam Montgomery had been through, but was Adam truly prepared for what might be ahead for him?

  Was Adam ready for what he might find? Was Darci, who seemed to be the personification of innocence, ready for what she might see?

  Part of Taylor wanted to spend time talking to them, warning these two innocents. He wanted to talk to Adam about that young woman who had been held prisoner all her life. Would she be worth saving?

  But Taylor didn’t have time to give a lecture on philosophy, or to recount the horror he’d seen in his lifetime of fighting these evil people. And he didn’t have time for squeamishness. If they were going to do it, then it had to be done now. If they didn’t try, or if they tried and failed, then, tomorrow, yet another person—or persons