Forever... Read online

  When the door opened, Taylor let out his breath. With a glance up at the tree toward Darci, he wished he could share a shout of triumph with her. But he couldn’t. Turning back, he watched Adam disappear into the house.

  “I can’t see him!” came Darci’s cry down from the tree, and Taylor could hear the agony in her voice. What was going on inside the house?

  Taylor wanted to reassure her, but he couldn’t. He wanted to tell her that everything was going to be all right, but he couldn’t. Over the years he’d seen more horror than anyone should have to see in a lifetime so he knew, better than they did, what could happen.

  All they could do now was wait. Who was inside the house? Was someone waiting in ambush for Adam? The witch had bungled her first attempt to imprison Adam so many years ago, but Taylor doubted that she’d miss her second chance. She wasn’t going to lose him a second time.

  It took all Taylor’s self-control to calm down and make himself wait. And wait. Time passed. He couldn’t tell if it was minutes or hours. He watched the house until his eyes ached. Up in the tree, Darci was silent.

  Suddenly, Taylor’s head came up. Something was wrong. He knew it. Something had gone wrong. Adam was taking too long. But there was something else wrong, too, something that he couldn’t identify, but he could feel it.

  He readjusted the goggles and looked about the house and grounds. Nothing. He could see nothing wrong.

  “What is it?” Darci whispered down to him, feeling her father’s rapidly growing fear.

  Taylor put up his hand for her to be quiet. There was nothing that he could see, but the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. Quietly, he walked down the hillside toward the house. He couldn’t see the beams, and if Darci saw him get too close to one, she couldn’t warn him with her mind as she did with Adam. All she could do would be to shout at him, and he knew that might create a commotion that they couldn’t afford. They couldn’t risk anything while Adam was in the house.

  “There!” Taylor said aloud when he saw it. It was so dark that he hadn’t seen anything at first. Yes, the witch had been expecting them. And, yes, she had known what they were going to do. Very, very slowly, coming down over the windows and the doors were steel bars. Their slow descent was to prevent whoever was watching from noticing the bars and shouting a warning, either by voice or thought. The woman must have known that someone would be watching and that their attention would be on those red beams of light and the unlocked front door.

  “Darci!” Taylor said as loudly as he dared. “The windows! Look at the windows!”

  At that moment a cool burst of wind sent thousands of autumn leaves cascading down. “What?” Darci asked, not able to hear him.

  “The windows!” he said again. “Look at the windows. Get Adam out of there now!”

  When Darci was finally able to hear her father, she looked back at the windows, and saw that the bars were already halfway down. The bars were moving so slowly that she couldn’t actually see them moving. No wonder the movement hadn’t caught her eye! Out! Out! Out! Out! she screamed to Adam as loud as she could, but when she saw no movement inside the house, she sat upright.

  In her panic, she had forgotten that she was in a tree and that just above her was another branch. Darci’s head slammed into the branch, and for a moment she looked at the world going round and round. In the next second, she fell back down onto the branch, her cheek smacking hard into the rough bark.

  “Oh, God,” Taylor said, having seen everything from below. Think! he commanded himself. It was up to him now, so what could he do? All the gates coming down were now so low that with another inch or so and Adam would not be able to escape the house. If Taylor could run across the beams, if he could wedge something strong under a window, if he could—

  In the next moment, Taylor was running down the hill and thanking God that they had decided to bring his Range Rover instead of Adam’s cheap rental car. The Range Rover was an odd vehicle. It was a draft horse compared to the racehorses that most cars on the road were. The Range Rover was slow and sluggish; it was a pain to try to drive on highways. It was big and cumbersome and as heavy as a dump truck. Its true four-wheel-drive gearing made it difficult to turn even with power steering, and at stop lights, a child on a tricycle could probably speed away faster.

  But what was magnificent about the Range Rover was that it could climb a glass mountain. A wet one. Taylor had traveled with his Rover into the backwoods of Virginia, North Carolina, and Kentucky, and there was nowhere the vehicle couldn’t go. It could go straight up, over rocks, across dry gullies. It could ford rivers deep enough to run a boat on. It could cross logs that had fallen across steep mountain roads. As long as the Rover had one wheel touching the ground, it would go.

  But right now, what Taylor needed most was the weight of the Rover. It was a heavy, heavy car. Thousands of pounds of steel, with a motor that would keep on going no matter what.

  Grabbing the keys out of his pocket as he ran, Taylor leaped up into the seat of his red Range Rover, started the engine, and put it in low gear. He’d owned three Range Rovers in fifteen years, and no matter that he’d climbed mountains with them, he had never, ever put the car in its low gear, the one that the Range Rover people said he might need for “really tough terrain.”

  “How about a really tough house?” he said aloud as he put the big car in low and hit the gas. Range Rovers never leaped, no more than a bull elephant ever needed to leap. When there was that much torque and pulling power in a vehicle, it didn’t need to leap.

  The driveway to the house was about a quarter of a mile down the road; they had stayed away from the front entrance, but Taylor didn’t want the driveway. He turned the dial for the headlamps, pushed the button for the flashing emergency lights, then started up the hill that lay between him and the house where Adam was slowly becoming imprisoned.

  Easily, the Range Rover went up the hill, and when Taylor topped it, he knew that if he was going to make a hole in that house, a hole that would have no steel cage in front of it, he had to hit the wall hard. When he came over the top of the hill, the Rover was on two wheels, and it hit the ground at the bottom of the hill so hard that Taylor went flying upward, but, thankfully, he was short enough that his legs were under the steering wheel and that kept him from slamming into the roof.

  The moment Taylor had started down the side of the hill, he prepared himself to hear the screech of alarms going off when he hit the laser beams. But there was no sound. Either they were phony or Adam had somehow disconnected them once he’d entered the house.

  But Taylor had no time to think because he was fast approaching the house—and he tried to prepare himself for the coming impact. He knew he wouldn’t be able to get out of the car before the collision. If he let up on the gas, the Rover would stop in its place and he’d not make an escape hole for Adam. In his headlights, he could see that the steel bars were now only inches from the windowsills. Adam was trapped inside!

  Taylor went through the side of the house, the big car tearing a hole all the way through it, and try as he might to keep his head upright, when he hit the staircase at the far side of the room and stopped, Taylor’s head hit the steering wheel and the blow knocked him unconscious.

  Adam had been standing at the top of the staircase when the car hit it. Over his right shoulder was slung the wrist-and-ankle-bound body of the young woman he believed was his sister. Over his left shoulder was a leather pouch that contained an old, beat-up, and very ordinary looking mirror.

  The impact of the car coming through the wall of the house, then hitting the staircase, knocked Adam off his feet. He did the best he could to protect the woman he held as he went down, but he still heard her muffled, “Uff!” when Taylor and the car slammed into the staircase and the two of them hit the floor.

  Adam didn’t know what was wrong. He’d heard Darci yell that he was to get out, but at that moment, he couldn’t leave because he hadn’t finished securing the woman.