Always Read online

  And the children wouldn’t be such oddities as they are now, she thought, and this would be good. As for her father, if Darci changed history, he’d never know what he’d missed. It would be like Jack not remembering that he’d never met Diana Drayton.

  She took a breath and looked back at the circle. Adam was at home now, staring out the window at his wife, with her blonde hair floating about her shoulders as she tossed a stick to a dog. “No time travel,” Darci said. “No witches. No FBI showing up at two in the morning saying that a child had been kidnapped and asking, ‘Can Darci help?’ No raising anyone from the dead. Just normal.”

  Darci decided to carry out her plan for the witch, and she’d leave Adam to this new future. She’d let him be happy. She’d let him have the wonderful life that he deserved.

  As for her, she could divorce Putnam. She could pop back in time and tell herself—or write herself a note, maybe—and…

  She looked back at Adam as he stood by the window. She’d seen him look exactly like that a thousand times, and she’d used her mind to calm him down, to make him at peace with himself. But what did he have to be sad about now? she thought. He had everything, so why was he looking as he had when he’d been carrying around the burden of a destroyed family?

  “Show me what’s inside his head,” she said softly. “Show me what’s really, really inside him.”

  For a moment Darci became dizzy, and in the next moment, she could hear the thoughts of Adam Montgomery.

  He was looking at his beautiful wife, but he felt only fondness for her. What’s wrong with me, he asked himself. I have it all. I have everything. But why do I want more?

  Darci saw him turn away from the window. What do I want, he asked himself.

  He ran his hand over his face and she saw him give a little smile. I want what so many of my ancestors seemed to have. I want a love that overpowers me, engulfs me.

  “Enough,” Darci said softly, and the circle closed. She got up, poured herself some juice, and thought about what she’d just heard. This Adam hadn’t been kidnapped, yet he was still an outsider, still different from the other people in his family.

  “And so am I,” Darci said. “I’m about as different as you can get.”

  She sat back down on the chair, stared at the droplet that was the circle, and said, “What would happen if I were to go back in time to before Adam was married? What if I went to his university? Would he notice me?”

  The circle opened, but all she saw was the glassy, wavering surface. There were no images. She stood up and put her face into the circle, but still there was nothing to see.

  She collapsed back against the chair and knew without a doubt that this emptiness was yet another test of her. She wasn’t going to be told whether or not she could make Adam love her again. When they’d met they’d been put together in extraordinary circumstances and had been forced to work together. At first there had been no physical attraction from him to her, and he’d even laughed at Darci’s passes at him.

  “I don’t know if I can do it,” she said. “How can I compete with all those long-legged girls who grew up in country clubs? Adam and his family are…” She couldn’t finish as she put her face into her hands.

  It was while she was trying to decide if she could bear to see Adam and be rejected that she thought, I can try. I can just, plain old-fashioned try. If I lose, then…

  After she’d made her decision, she desperately wanted to see her daughter and niece. Using the circle, she went to them, and saw that they weren’t in the least surprised to see her stepping out of a horizontal pool next to their swing set. Darci romped and played with them for an hour, then knew she needed to go. She needed to do what could be done to bring Adam back to all of them.

  As she prepared to leave, she couldn’t keep from crying and hugging and kissing them, all the while thinking that she might never see them again. If she didn’t connect with Adam, neither of them would be born.

  At last, she got back into the circle and returned to the hidden room. Using every bit of concentration she could muster, she put aside her personal fears and began her task.

  First, the witch. She needed to change that woman’s life.

  The plan that had taken Darci so long to come up with was actually very simple. All she did was make the witch ask questions that the mirror had kept her from asking.

  First, she made the witch ask the right question so that she saw that if she slept with a man, she would lose her ability to foresee the future.

  The second question had taken more work. Darci had had to ask to see what it was that the woman really wanted in life. Darci would have guessed that she wanted power, but, no, the woman had wanted to be respected. She’d thought that money would get her respect, then that evil power would make her respected, but both had failed.

  Darci made the woman ask the mirror what would happen if she used the mirror for something besides making money. It took Darci a while to get the witch to ask the right questions, but she’d been able to use her True Persuasion to put the thoughts into the woman’s head.

  In the end, what the woman did was write books about what she saw. Unlike her stepsister, she had no desire to share anything about the source of her knowledge, so she kept the mirror a secret all her life. She told people that she’d been born with paranormal ability, and as a result, she became a renown psychic. Presidents and kings called her in secret and asked for her predictions.

  The witch became a celebrity, and her elevated status kept her happy. She especially loved to play up her virginity, and she was credited with cutting down teen promiscuity by twenty-five percent.

  However, without gaining any evil power, she was not able to unnaturally prolong her life. She was to die when Darci was only six years old.

  What happened to the mirror after the woman’s death was ugly. It fell into the hands of three of the woman’s caretakers and they used it for evil.

  Darci made the woman ask the mirror about her own death so that she saw when it was going to happen and what would become of the mirror. It would be found out that she’d killed her stepsister to get the mirror, and that would be all that people remembered of her. Her hard-won respectability would be gone. Darci showed the woman where to hide the mirror two days before her death. She also told the woman to take a supply of Jerusalem salt and some dried raspberries with her, and showed her what was to be done with them.

  Smiling, Darci leaned back in her chair. She felt she’d accomplished a lot in a short time. It had taken hours to make sure that the woman’s not becoming a witch wouldn’t hurt the world. She had murdered a lot of people. It was horrible to think of, but would any of those murdered people live to be worse than the witch? “Show me all,” she’d commanded, then felt sick at the sheer number of faces that flashed by her. She looked at auras, watching for irregularities and muddy colors. She was happy to see that several of the people contributed significantly, whereas the others just lived ordinary lives.

  Her next task was to return to her hometown of Putnam, Kentucky. This was hard for Darci and at first all she wanted to do was pop back to the old stone building where she’d had the witch hide the mirror and the little man in his cage. But Darci knew she was being cowardly. Instead, she made herself go back to her own room in the run-down house where she’d lived with her mother—or, more rightly, lived by herself since her mother had rarely been there.

  Closing her eyes, Darci stepped halfway into the circle, then visualized where she wanted to go, and took a step forward. When she opened her eyes, she was in her bedroom in Putnam, and, immediately, sensations overwhelmed her.

  The room itself was ugly, with peeling wallpaper and a bed frame and mattress that someone had thrown out. She and her mother had lived on what her mother could make in one cheap job after another. Almost always, her mother had quit because the boss expected everything from her. Sex had never been enough. Men had wanted to possess Jerlene Monroe—and they still did, which was the secret of her c