Europe, 1655
Strong hands closed over her shoulders, shaking her awake. Elena Durikken blinked her eyes open, but the darkness remained thick, impenetrable.
“Child, awaken. Quickly.”
“Mama?” She blinked again, bringing a shadow into focus. A shadow with long curly hair. “Mama.”
“Rise up. Hurry. You have to go.” Her mother’s hands dragged back the blankets, letting the cold air steal across Elena’s skin.
“Go? Where are we going?” She couldn’t remember being awake in such blackness before. Usually a fire flickered in the hearth, the dying embers casting a glow over their small home. Or her mother burned candles, chanting to herself as she fixed her potions from the dried herbs and flowers strung from the rafters.
“Only you, child. You must go alone.” Mama’s words, the final way she spoke, chilled Elena more than the cold night air.
“Mama...” Tears stung her eyes and ran down her face.
“There’s no time. They will come soon. For me. And if you are still here, they will take you, too.”
“Mama, you are scaring me.” It was not the first time. She had scared Elena many times before, with the things she saw, the things she knew were coming before they ever happened.
Like the fire.
“Is this...is this because of the fire, Mama?”
Mama didn’t answer, just pulled a cape over Elena’s head, lifting the hood over her hair. Then she slid Elena’s feet into her boots, lacing them up as if she were a small dependent child, not a thirteen-year-old girl she was sending alone into the night. Mama pressed the neck of a satchel against Elena’s palm. “Ration the food and water. Keep to the woods, child. Run. Keep running...”
“How can they blame you for the fire?” she cried. “You warned them.”
Even before the sky had darkened or the wind had picked up, her mother had told them the storm was coming. That the lightning would strike in the night, while the women slept. And that they would die in a horrible fire. Mama had seen it all happen...
Elena didn’t know how her mother’s visions worked, but she knew that Mama was always right. More tears fell from her eyes. “You asked them to leave.”
But the woman of the house, along with her sister-in-law, whose family was staying with her, had thought that with the men away for work, Mama was tricking them. That she, a desperate woman raising a child alone, would rob their deserted house. She’d been trying to save their lives.
Mama shook her head, her hair swirling around her shoulders. “The villagers think I cast a spell. That I brought the lightning.”
Elena had heard the frightened murmurs and seen the downward glances as her mother walked through the village. Everyone thought her a witch because of the potions she made. But when the townspeople were sick, they came to Mama for help even though they feared her. How could they think she would do them harm? “No, Mama...”
“No. The only spell cast is upon me, child. These visions I see, I have no control over them,” she said. “And I have no control over what will happen now. I need you to go. To run. And keep running, Elena. Never stop. Or they will catch you.”
Elena threw her arms around her mother’s neck, more scared than she had ever been. Even though she heard no one, saw no light in the blackness outside her window, she knew her mama was right. They were coming for her. The men who’d returned, who’d found their wives, sisters and daughters dead, burned.
“Come with me, Mama,” Elena beseeched her, holding tight.
“No, child. ’Tis too late for me to fight my fate, but you can. You can run.” She closed her arms around Elena, clutching her tight for just a moment before thrusting her away. “Now go!”
Tears blinded Elena as much as the darkness. She’d just turned toward the ladder leading down from the loft when Mama caught her hand, squeezing Elena’s fingers around the soft velvet satchel. “Do not lose the charms.”
Elena’s heart contracted. “You gave me the charms?”
“They will keep you safe.”
“How?” Elena asked in a breathless whisper.
“They hold great power, child.”
“You need them.” Elena did not know from where they had come, but Mama had never removed the three charms from the leather thong tied around her wrist. Until now.
Mama shook her head. “I cannot keep them. They are yours, to pass to your children. To remember who and what we are.”
Witches.
Mama did not say it, but Elena knew. She shivered.
“Go now, child,” Mama urged. “Go before it is too late for us both.” She expelled a ragged breath of air, then pleaded, “Do not forget...”
Elena hugged her mother again, pressing her face tight against her, breathing in the scent of lavender and sandalwood incense. The paradox that was her mama, the scent by which she would always remember her. “I will never forget. Never!”
“I know, child. You have it, too. The curse. The gift. Whatever it be.”
“No, Mama...” She didn’t want to be what her mother was; she didn’t want to be a witch.
“You have it, too,” Mama insisted. “I see the power you have, much stronger than any of mine. He would see it as well, and want to destroy you.” Before Elena could ask of whom her mother spoke, the woman pushed her away, her voice quavering with urgency as she shouted, “You have to go!”
Elena fumbled with the satchel as she scrambled down the ladder, running as much from her mother’s words as her warning. She didn’t want the curse, whatever the mystical power was. She didn’t want to flee, either. But her mama’s fear stole into her heart, forcing her to run.
Keep to the woods.
She did, cringing as twigs and underbrush snapped beneath the worn soles of her old boots. She ran for so long that her lungs burned and sweat dried on her skin, both heating and chilling her. She’d gone a long way before turning and looking back toward her house.
She knew she’d gone too far, too deep into the woods to see it clearly with her eyes. So, like Mama, she must have seen it with her mind. The fire.
Burning.
The woman in the middle of it, screaming, crying out for God to forgive them. Pain tore at Elena, burning, crippling. She dropped to her knees, wrapping her arms around her middle, trying to hold in the agony. Trying to shut out the image in her head. She crouched there for a long while, her mama’s screams ringing in her ears.
Behind her, brush rustled, the blackness shattered by the glow of a lantern. Oh, God, they’d found her already.
The glow fell across her face and that of the boy who held the lantern. Thomas McGregor. He wasn’t much older than she, but he’d gone to work with his father and uncles, leaving his mother, sisters, aunt and cousins behind...to burn alive.
As they’d burned her mother. “No...”
“I was sent to find you. To bring you back,” he said, his voice choked as tears ran down his face. Tears for his family or for her?
Her mother had seen this, had tried to fight this fate for her daughter, the same fate that had just taken her life.
“You hate me?” she asked.
He shook his head, and something flickered in his eyes with the lantern light. Something she had seen before when she’d caught him staring at her. “No, Elena.”
“But you wish me harm? I had nothing to do with your loss.” Nor did her mother, but they had killed her. Smoke swept into the woods, too far from the fire to be real, and in the middle of the haze hovered a woman. Elena’s mother.
“I have to bring you back,” Thomas said, his hand trembling as he reached for her, his fingers closing over her arm.
The charms will keep you safe.
Had her mother’s ghost spoken or was it only Elena’s memory? Regardless, she reached in the pocket of her cape and held the satchel tight. Heat emanated through the thick velvet, warming her palm. As if she’d stepped into Thomas’s mind, she read his thoughts and saw the daydreams he had had of the two of them. “Thomas, you do not wish me harm.”
“But Papa...”
Other memories played through Elena’s mind, her mother’s memories. She shuddered, reeling under the impact of knowledge she was too young to understand. “Your papa is a bad man,” she whispered. “Come with me, Thomas. We will run together.”
He shook his head. “He would find us. He would kill us both.”
Because of what she’d seen, she knew he spoke the truth. Eli McGregor would kill anyone who got between him and what he wanted.
“Thomas, please...”
His fingers tightened on her arm as if he were about to drag her off. Elena clutched the satchel so close the jagged little metal pieces cut her palm through the velvet.
He sighed as if a great battle waged inside him. “I cannot give you to him. Go, Elena. You are lost to me.” But when she turned to leave, he caught her hand as her mother had, shaking as he pressed something against her bloody palm. “Take my mother’s locket.”
To remember him? To remember what his family had done to hers? She would want no reminders. But her fingers closed over the metal, warm from the heat of his skin. She couldn’t refuse. Not when he had spared her life.
“Use it for barter, if need be, to get as far away from here as you can. My father has sworn vengeance on all your mother’s relatives and descendants. He says he will let no witch live.”
“I am not a witch.” She whispered the lie, closing her eyes to the luminous image of her mother’s ghost.
“He will kill you,” Thomas whispered back.
She knew he spoke the truth. Like her mother, she could now see her fate. But unlike her mother, she wouldn’t wait for Eli McGregor to come for her. She turned to leave again, then twirled back, moved closer to Thomas and pressed her lips against his cheek, cold and wet from his tears.
“Godspeed, Elena,” he said as she stepped out of the circle of light from his lantern, letting the darkness and smoke swallow her as she ran.
This time she wouldn’t stop... She wouldn’t stop until she’d gotten as far away as she could. And even then, she wouldn’t ever stop running...
From who and what she was.
Armaya, Michigan, 1986
The candlelight flickered as the wind danced through the open windows of the camper, carrying with it the scent of lavender and sandalwood incense. Myra Cooper dragged in the first breath she’d taken since she’d begun telling her family’s legend; it caught in her lungs, burning, as she studied her daughters’ beautiful faces.
Irina snuggled between her bigger sisters, her big dark eyes luminous in the candlelight. She heard everything but, at four, was too young to understand.
Elena, named for that long-ago ancestor, tightened her arm protectively around her sister’s narrow shoulders. Her hair was pale and straight, a contrast to Myra’s and Irina’s dark curls. Her eyes were a vivid icy blue that saw everything. But at twelve, she was too old to believe.
Ariel kept an arm around her sister, too, while her gaze was intent on Myra’s face as she waited for more of the story. The candlelight reflected in her auburn hair like flames, and her green eyes glowed. She listened. But Myra worried that she did not hear.
She worried that none of them understood that they were gifted with special abilities. The girls had never spoken of them to her or one another, but maybe that was better. Maybe they would be safer if they denied their heritage. Yet they couldn’t deny what they didn’t know; that was why she had shared the legend. She wanted them to know their fate so they could run from it before they were destroyed.
“We are Durikken women,” she told her daughters, “like that first Elena.”
“You named me after her,” her eldest said, not questioning. She already knew.
Myra nodded. “And I’m named for her mother.” And sometimes, when she believed in reincarnation, she was sure she was that woman, with her memories as well as her special abilities.
However, most of the time, Myra believed in nothing; it hurt too much to accept her reality. But tonight she had to be responsible. She had one last chance to protect her children; she’d already failed them in so many ways. They didn’t have to live the hardscrabble life she had. They didn’t have to be what she was—a woman whose fears had driven her to desperation.
“Our last name is Cooper,” Elena reminded her.
“Papa’s name,” she said, referring to her own father. None of their fathers had given his child his name, either because the man had refused or she hadn’t told him he was a father. “We are Durikken, and Durikken women are special. They know things are going to happen before they do.”
Pain lanced through Myra, stealing her breath as images rolled through her mind like a black-and-white movie. She couldn’t keep running and she couldn’t make them keep running, either.
She forced herself to continue. “They see things or people that no one else can see. This ability, like the charms on my bracelet—” she raised her arm, the silver jewelry absorbing the firelight as it dangled from her wrist “—has been passed from generation to generation.”
But Myra was more powerful than her sisters, had inherited more abilities as a woman and a witch. That was why she had been given the bracelet—because her mother had known she would be the only one of her three daughters to continue the Durikken legacy.
Myra’s fingers trembled as she unclasped the bracelet. She’d never taken it off, not once since her mother had put it on her wrist, until tonight. Her daughters had admired it many times, running their fingers over the crude pewter charms, and she knew which was each one’s favorite.
Elena had always admired the star, the sharp tips now dulled with age. Irina loved the crescent moon, easily transformed—like Irina’s moods—from a smile to a frown, depending on the angle from which it dangled. Ariel favored the sun, its rays circling a small smooth disk. Despite its age, this charm seemed to shine brighter than the others. Like Ariel.
Even now, in the dingy little camper, an aura surrounded the child, glowing around her head as spirits hovered close. Did Ariel know what her gift was? Did either of her sisters? Her daughters needed Myra’s guidance so they could understand and use their abilities. They were too young to be without their mother, but she couldn’t put them at risk. All Myra could hope was that the charms would keep them safe.
Myra knelt before her children where they huddled in their little makeshift bed in the back of the pickup camper, their home for their sporadic travels. This was all she’d been able to give them. Until now. Until she’d shared the legend.
Now she’d given them their heritage, and with the help of the charms, they would remember it always. No matter how much time passed. No matter how much they might want to forget or ignore it.
She reached for Elena’s hand first. It was nearly as big as hers, strong and capable, like the girl. She could handle anything...Myra hoped. She dropped the star into Elena’s palm and closed her fingers over the pewter charm. The girl’s blue gaze caught hers, held. No questions filled her eyes, only knowledge. She’d already seen too much in visions like her mother’s. The girl had never admitted it, but Myra knew.
She then reached for the smallest—and weakest—hand, Irina’s. Myra worried most about this child. She’d had so little time with her. She closed Irina’s hand around the moon. Hang on tight, child. She didn’t say it aloud. For Irina she didn’t need to—the child could hear unspoken thoughts.
Myra swallowed down a sob before reaching for Ariel. But the girl’s hand was outstretched already. She was open and trusting, and because of that might be hurt the worst.
“Don’t lose these,” she beseeched them. Without the protection of the little pewter charms, none of them would be strong enough to survive.
“We won’t, Mama,” Elena answered for herself and her younger sisters as she attached her charm to her bracelet and helped Irina with hers.
Despite her trembling fingers, Myra secured the sun charm on Ariel’s bracelet, but when she pulled back, the girl caught her hand. “Mama?”
“Yes, child?”
“You called it a curse...this special ability,” Ariel reminded her, her voice tremulous. She had been listening.
Myra nodded. “Yes, it is a curse, my sweetheart. People don’t understand. They thought our ancestors were witches who cast evil spells.”
And they had been witches, but ones who’d tried to help and heal. Her family had never been about evil; that was what had pursued them and persecuted them through the ages.
“But that was long ago,” Elena said, ever practical. “People don’t believe in witches anymore.”
Myra knew better than to warn them, to make them aware of the dangers. She’d shown them the locket earlier, the one nestled between her breasts, the metal cold against her skin. It was the one Thomas had pressed upon Elena all those years ago. Inside were faded pictures, drawn by Thomas’s young hand, of his sisters, who had died in the fire. Their deaths could have been prevented if only they’d listened and fought their fate. “Some still believe.”
“Mama, I’m cursed?” Ariel asked, her turquoise eyes wide with fear. Her hand shook as she clutched the sun.
No more than I. Myra had lost so much in her life. Her one great love—Elena’s father. And now...
“Mama, there are lights coming across the field!” Ariel whispered, as if thinking that if she spoke softly they wouldn’t find her. Maybe she didn’t hear as much as her sisters, but she understood.
Myra didn’t glance out the window. She’d already seen the lights coming, in a vision, and so she’d hidden the camper in the middle of a cornfield. But still they’d found her; they’d found them. She stared at her children, memorizing their faces, praying for their futures. Each would know a great love as she had, and all she could hope was that theirs lasted. That they fought against their fate, against the evil stalking them, as she would have fought had she been stronger.
She just stood there next to the camper, in the middle of the cornfield, as the child protective services, who’d already declared her unfit, took her children away. The girls screamed and reached for her, tears cascading down their beautiful faces like rain against windows.
This wasn’t Myra’s final fate; her death would come much later. But as her heart bled and her soul withered, this was the night she really died.
But the authorities didn’t take them all. Her hands clasped her swollen belly. Soon she would have another little girl. This child would need her even more than the others, for she would have more abilities than they had. She would be more powerful a witch even than Myra. But yet she would be even more cursed. The witch hunt would end for the others. But for her fourth child, whom she would call Maria, the witch hunt would never end...
Chapter 1
Energy flowed from the cards up the tips of Maria Cooper’s tingling fingers. Warmth spread through her as the energy enveloped her. This will be a clear reading...
She had been blocking her special abilities for so long that she’d worried she might have lost them. But maybe that wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. In the past they had proved more destructive than special—more curse than gift.
“What do you see?” the young woman asked, her voice quavering with excitement.
“I haven’t turned the first card,” Maria pointed out. Only the Significator, the fair-haired Queen of Cups, lay faceup on the table between them. The card didn’t represent the young woman’s physical appearance—not since the girl had dyed her hair black, tattooed a crow on her face and renamed herself Raven. But the card represented the wistfulness of the young woman’s nature, so Maria had chosen it for her.
“But you see stuff—that’s what people say about you,” the girl continued. “That’s why I wanted to learn from you—how to read the cards and how to make the potions and amulets. I know that you have a real gift.”
A gift. Or a curse? She used to think it was the first and had grown up embracing her heritage. But then everything had gone so wrong, and she had begun to believe what others had—that she was cursed. That was why she had refused the girl’s previous requests to learn to read. Maria had taught her about the crystals and herbs she sold in her shop but she’d resisted the cards—afraid of what she herself might see.
“I have it, too,” Raven confided. “I get that sense of déjà vu all the time. I know I’ve already dreamed what’s happening. I saw it...like you see stuff.”
I hope you don’t see the stuff I’ve seen...
“That’s why I want to learn tarot,” the girl said. “Because I know I’ll be good at it.”
Raven had been saying the same thing ever since she had first started hanging around the Magik Shoppe. The twenty-two-year-old had spent so much time there that Maria had finally given her a job, and now she had given in on teaching her tarot. She hoped like hell that she didn’t come to regret caving in to the girl’s pleas.
Maybe Raven had a gift. Or maybe, like so many others, she only wished she did because she had glamorized the supernatural ability into something that it wasn’t. Into something powerful, when having these abilities actually made Maria feel powerless, helpless to stop what she might see.
“Thank you,” Raven said, “for helping me.”
I hope it helps and doesn’t hurt...
“To teach you how to read the cards, I have to show you how I do a reading,” Maria said. That was how her mother had taught her, having Maria watch her do readings for other people. But Mama hadn’t always told the truth of the cards. Instead of telling people what she saw, she had told them what they’d wanted to see.
The old gypsy proverb that her mother had always recited echoed in Maria’s head. There are such things as false truths and honest lies.
But there was no one but she and Raven in the old barn on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula that Maria had converted into her shop. She had only the girl’s cards to read. And she had already told Raven the meaning of each card, so she wouldn’t be able to lie to her—even if it would be the kinder thing to do.
This is a mistake...
Her fingers stilled against the deck, which was the size of a paperback novel. She preferred the big cards because of the greater detail. She had always used them, ever since she had first started reading—at the age of four. She had read cards before she’d been able to read words.
“I’ve been working here almost since you opened a few months ago, but I’ve never seen you do a reading,” Raven remarked.
And she shouldn’t be doing one now. She shouldn’t risk it...but it had been so long. She had missed it. Surely it couldn’t happen again. The cards wouldn’t come up the way they had before...
“I haven’t done one in a while,” she admitted. But she hadn’t lost the ability. Energy continued to tingle up Maria’s fingertips, spreading into her arms and chest. Before the girl could ask her why she hadn’t, Maria shuffled the cards again and eased one off the top of the deck. “This first card will represent your environment.”
Maria turned over the card atop the Significator, and dread knotted her stomach as she stared down at it. The moon shone down upon snarling dogs and a deadly scorpion.
A gasp slipped through the girl’s painted black lips. “That’s not good.”
Maria’s temple throbbed, and her pulse beat heavily in her throat. “No. The moon represents hidden enemies. Danger.”
The girl’s eyes, heavily lined with black, widened with fear. “You’re saying I’m in danger.”
Not again...
“That’s what that means, right?” Raven persisted, her voice rising into hysteria.
Since Maria had already taught the girl the meaning of each card, she couldn’t deny what Raven already knew. So she nodded. “Danger. Deceit. A dark aura...”
Maria saw it now, enveloping Raven like a starless night sky—cold and eerie, untold dangers hiding in the darkness. Goose bumps lifted on her skin beneath her heavy knit sweater, and she shivered.
“Turn over the next card,” the girl urged. “That’s what’s coming up—that’s what’s going to be my obstacle, right?”
Maria shook her head. She wouldn’t do it; she wouldn’t turn that card. “No. We need to stop. We can’t continue.” She shouldn’t have even begun; she shouldn’t have risked the cards coming up the way they had before. But it had been more than a year...
She had thought that she might have reversed the curse, that her fortunes might have finally changed. She’d been using the crystals, herbs and incense that she used for healing to treat herself.
“Turn the card!” The girl’s voice had gone shrill, and her face flushed with anger despite her pale pancake makeup. “Turn it!”
“No.” Her heart beating fast, she could feel the girl’s panic and fear as if it were her own. But she also felt her desperation and determination.
“I have to know!” Raven shouted.
Maybe she did. Maybe they both needed to know. Maria’s fingers trembled as she fumbled with the next card. Then she flipped it over to reveal the skeleton knight.
Raven screamed. “That’s the death card.”
“It has other meanings,” Maria reminded her. “You’ve been studying the tarot with me. You know that it might just mean the end of something.”
“What is it the end of? You see more than the cards. You see the future.”
As Maria stared across the table at the young woman, an image flashed through her mind. The girl—her face pale not with makeup but with death—her fearful eyes closed forever.
Raven demanded, “What is my future?”
You won’t have one.
“I don’t see anything,” Maria claimed.
“You’re lying!”
Maybe the girl actually had a gift—because Maria was a very good liar. Like reading the cards, she had learned at a very young age how to lie from her mother. “Raven...”
“You were looking at me, but you weren’t really looking at me. You saw something. Tell me what you saw!”
“Raven...”
“Oh, God, it’s bad.” The girl’s breath shuddered out, and tears welled in her eyes. “It’s really bad.”
“It doesn’t have to be,” Maria assured her. “We can stop it from happening. I’ll make you an amulet of special herbs and crystals...” And maybe this time it would work.
The girl shook her head, and her tears spilled over, running down her face in black streaks of eyeliner. “Even you can’t change the future!” She jumped up with such force she knocked over her chair.
Maria jumped up, too, and grabbed the girl’s arms. “Don’t panic.” But she felt it—the fear that had her heart hammering in her chest and her breathing coming fast and shallow in her lungs.
“Stay here,” she implored the girl. “Stay with me, and I’ll make sure nothing happens to you.”
Blind with terror, Raven clawed at Maria’s hands and jerked free of her grasp. Then she shoved Maria away from her, sending her stumbling back from the table.
“No. It’s you,” the girl said, her eyes reflecting horror. “I’ve seen it—the dark aura around you.”
That was what Maria had been trying to remove. But she had failed. As Raven had said, even she couldn’t change the future—no matter how hard she tried.
“It’s you!” Raven shouted, her voice rising as she continued her accusation. “You’re the moon!”
She hurled the table at Maria, knocking it over like the chair. The cards scattered across the old brick pavers of the barn.
Raven was right: even she, with all the knowledge of her witch ancestor, could not change what she had seen of the future. Like that witch ancestor, who had burned at the stake centuries ago, Maria was helpless to fight the evil that followed her no matter how far and how fast she had tried to outrun it.
The girl turned now and ran for the door, leaving it gaping open behind her as she fled. Just like Maria, Raven wouldn’t be able to escape her fate: death.
* * *
The night breeze drifted through the bedroom window and across the bed, cooling Seth Hughes’s naked skin and rousing him from sleep. He didn’t know how long he’d been out. But it couldn’t have been long, because his heart pounded hard yet, his chest rising and falling with harsh breaths. The breeze stirred a scent from his tangled sheets, of sandalwood and lavender, sweat and sex.
He splayed his hands, reaching across the bed. But she was gone even though he could still feel her in his arms and how he’d felt buried deep inside her body. He could taste her yet on his lips and on his tongue.
With a ragged sigh, he opened his eyes and peered around the room. Moonlight, slanting through the blinds at the window, streaked across the bed and across the naked woman sitting on the foot of it, turned away from him. She leaned forward, and her long black curls skimmed over her shoulders, leaving her back completely bare but for a silver chain and the trio of tattoos a few inches below the chain that circled her neck. There was a sun, a star and a crescent moon.
“I thought you’d left,” he murmured, his voice rough with sleep and the desire that surged through him again. She was so damned beautiful with that sexy gypsy hair and all that honey-toned skin.
“I couldn’t just leave,” she replied as she rose from the bed.
Not after what they’d done? His pulse leaped as the desire surged harder, making him hard. Making love with her had been the most powerful experience of his life. And even though he wasn’t certain he could survive it, it was an experience he wanted again. And again...
“I’m glad,” he said.
She shook her head. “You won’t be.”
“Maria?” he asked, wondering about her ominous tone.
“You’re going to be dead.” Finally, she turned toward him, and the moonlight glinted off the barrel of the gun she held. He glanced toward the bedside table, where the small holster he clamped to the back of his belt lay empty. She held his gun.
“You don’t want to do this,” he said, holding his hand out for the weapon. But as he reached for it, it fired. The gunshot shattered the quiet of the night and...
* * *
The peal of his cell phone pulled him, fighting and kicking, from the grasp of the dark dream. Seth awoke clutching his heart, which pounded out a frantic rhythm. Pulling his hand away, he expected it to be covered with blood. His blood.
But his palm was dry. The room was too dark for him to see anything but the blinking light on his phone. No moonlight shone through the worn blinds at the window of the motel room. The only scent was dust and the grease from the burger and fries he’d brought back from the diner down the street.
“It was just a dream,” Seth said, but no relief eased the tension from his shoulders or loosened the knot in his gut. Nothing was ever just a dream with him.
Drawing a breath into his strained lungs, he reached for the persistently ringing phone. His holstered gun sat on the nightstand next to the cell. His fingers skimmed over the cold barrel before he grabbed up the phone.
Just a dream...
“Hughes,” he said gruffly into the phone.
“Agent Hughes?”
“Yes.”
“You were right!” The girl’s voice cracked with fear as it rose with hysteria. “It’s her! She’s here.”
“Maria Cooper?”
“I lied to you when you were here earlier. I didn’t believe what you said about her, but you’re right. You’re right about everything!” A sob rattled the phone. “I never should have trusted her. Now I’m in danger.”
“Where are you?” An image flashed into his mind of the young woman with the bird tattooed on her face. “Raven?”
“I’m at the Magik Shoppe,” she replied.
The old round red barn was hardly a store. But that was another reason he’d known it was her shop even though he hadn’t found her there, just the girl.
“Why?” he asked. He had no doubt that she was right; she was in danger. So why was she at the barn?
“I came back here to get you proof that she’s the one,” Raven said. “I found it. I have the evidence you need. But you have to come quickly!”
He kicked back the tangled sheets. “I’m coming.”
“How far away are you?”
“I stayed in town.” Although calling Copper Creek, Michigan, a town was stretching the description since it had only a gas station, a diner, a bar and this one ramshackle motel. Despite the girl’s denial, he had known the shop belonged to Maria Cooper. Finally, he’d come across one of her witchcraft stores before it—and she—was gone.
He’d stayed in Copper Creek with the intent to keep returning to the store until he caught her there. Hell, if not for the long drive up north having worn him out, he would have staked out the place until she came back. But if he had fallen asleep and she’d discovered him, the least she would have done was run again.
Maybe he should have risked staying; at least he would have been closer when Raven called and he wouldn’t have to traverse the winding, rutted gravel road in the dead of night. “I’ll be right there.”
“You’re going to be too late...”
Oh, shit. The girl must have warned her boss about him. Maria Cooper was already on the run again. “Stay there. And keep her there if you can.”
Another sob rattled the phone. “No. I don’t want her to find me. I don’t want her to kill me, too.”
Seth reached for his gun again. Maybe it would be fired tonight. “I’ll protect you,” he promised. “I won’t let her hurt you. Just wait for me.”
Her breath hitched, and he could almost see her nodding in acquiescence. “Please hurry. She read my cards. She told me I’m going to die.”
He shuddered. Every time Maria Cooper had read someone’s future, they had wound up not having one anymore. They’d wound up dead.
Just as he had in his dream...
* * *
“She’s dead,” Ariel Cooper-Koster said. Goose bumps of dread and cold lifted on her skin as she stood outside in the night breeze.
“You’ve seen her ghost, then,” Elena Cooper-Dolce replied, her pale blond hair glowing in the lights spilling out of the stately house in front of which they stood. There was no surprise in Elena’s voice. As she’d previously admitted to Ariel, she had already witnessed their youngest sister’s murder in a vision.
Ariel stared at the ghost of a woman with big brown eyes and long curly dark hair. Caught between two worlds, her image wavered in and out of a cloud of sandalwood-and-lavender-scented smoke.
“I haven’t seen her yet,” she admitted. “But Mama’s back...” And she hadn’t seen her in years. “She wouldn’t have left her if Maria were still alive.” After child protective services had taken Ariel, Elena and Irina from their mother, they had been separated and hadn’t been reunited until twenty years later. Once they had all found each other and saved themselves from the evil force stalking them, their mother’s ghost had left them. She had stayed with the daughter who’d needed her most—the one who’d been alone. Maria, whom her sisters hadn’t even known existed until those twenty years had passed. It was Irina who’d figured out that her roommate, at the time their mother had died, was actually their sister. But once they’d learned of her existence, they hadn’t been able to find her.
Elena shuddered. “I hope you’re wrong. For her sake and for Irina’s.”
“She can’t know,” Ariel agreed. Their younger sister was in a fragile state; eight months pregnant with twins, she had been confined to bed rest and absolutely no stress.
“She does,” a raspy male voice said as Ty McIntyre opened his front door to his sisters-in-law. He was a muscular man with dark hair, dark blue eyes and a jagged scar running through one eyebrow.
“Maria is not dead,” Ty said as he gestured them inside the two-story foyer of his grand house. “She knows what the two of you are thinking, though. She hears you.”
Ariel’s face heated, and Elena’s flushed bright red in the glow of the chandelier hanging over their heads. “Of course...” Irina could hear the thoughts of others—especially those with whom she was connected. “We can’t block her like she can...”
“Maria isn’t blocking her right now,” he said, and a muscle twitched along his clenched jaw.
“But you wish she was,” Elena said as she reached out and squeezed his arm, offering support and comfort.
“Maria can’t block her when she’s really upset,” he said. “When she’s really scared. Her emotions are so strong that Irina feels them, too.”
Ariel’s heart rate quickened. “Maria is upset and scared?”
Maybe that was why Mama had come back to her—to get her other children to help her youngest. While Ariel had always been able to see ghosts, she couldn’t always hear them. She had struggled the most with her mother’s ghost—probably because of all the emotions her mother’s appearance always summoned in Ariel. The pain and regret and resentment.
Ty grimly nodded. “That’s why I asked you both to come over tonight,” he said. “Irina wants me to go find Maria.”
“You’ve been looking for her for eight years,” Ariel said with frustration and resignation. “We all have.” And with the six of them working together, they had more resources than most—financially and supernaturally.
“So you’re giving up?” It wasn’t Ty asking; it was Irina, standing precariously at the top of the stairwell—her legs wobbling.
Ty vaulted up the steps and caught his wife up in his arms, lifting her as easily as if she were one of their seven-year-old twins. “You’re not supposed to be out of bed.”
“I could hear you all,” she said. But probably only in her mind, since they hadn’t awakened either one of the twins.
Ariel and Elena hurried up the stairs and followed Ty down the hall as he carried Irina back to their bedroom. “We didn’t mean to upset you,” Ariel said.
“We came to help,” Elena said, her usually soft voice heavy with guilt and regret.
Ty gently settled his wife back onto their king-size bed. Irina sat up against the pillows and stared at them all, her brown eyes even darker with hurt and accusation.
She looked so much like the ghost of their mother—so much like the picture she’d shown them of their sister Maria. The three of them looked like gypsies—like witches—while Ariel and Elena didn’t look related to any of them or even to each other. But their abilities united them—the Durikken blood that flowed in all their veins. Or had once flowed in their mother’s...
She hovered near Irina. Maybe she had come back because Irina needed her more than Maria did.
“We’re going to find her,” Irina insisted.
Or maybe Maria would find them—after she died.
“Ty will bring her back.”
It might not be possible. All they had found of their mother’s remains had been her ashes.
“She’s not dead,” Irina said. “I can sense her feelings. I can hear her thoughts. She’s anxious and scared. And very much alive.”
For now. But if she was anxious and scared, she must be in the danger that Elena kept envisioning. And none of those visions had ended well for Maria...
* * *
She was gone. Maria couldn’t even feel her anymore. There had been so much panic and fear and now...
Nothing. Maybe she was just too far away. Maybe she wasn’t dead...
The wipers swished the streaks of rain from Maria’s windshield, but still she could barely see—the headlamps of her old pickup truck were not strong enough to penetrate the thick black curtain of night in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. The tires bounced over the ruts of the drive leading to Maria’s little round barn at the end of the gravel lane. No cars were parked next to the shop.
Maria should have known that the girl wouldn’t come back here. But she’d checked for Raven’s car at the motel in town where the girl had been staying since her move to Copper Creek. She had also checked at the house of the guy Raven sometimes dated. But his windows had been dark, the driveway empty of any cars—even his.
Maybe they’d left together. Maybe he could protect the girl since she didn’t trust Maria to do that.
I don’t blame her, though. I don’t trust myself.
That was why she rarely stayed anywhere for long—why she kept running, as Mama had always been running. It was why Maria tried to not get too close to anyone or let anyone get too close to her...
She never should have hired the young woman, and she definitely never should have agreed to teach Raven to read. Her fingertips tingling from the energy from the cards, Maria regretted ever touching them again. Why hadn’t she left them behind...as she had so much else in her life?
Like Raven, she needed to run now. The girl had been right about the aura of darkness hovering over Maria. But besides the cards, Maria had left something else behind in the shop—something that she couldn’t leave without. Her fingers trembled as she lifted her hand to her bare neck. During her scuffle with Raven, the chain must have broken.
Her lungs burned as she breathed hard, fighting the panic at the thought of what she’d lost. It had to be here. It couldn’t be gone...
The hinges of the old pickup truck squeaked in protest as she flung open the driver’s door. She jerked the keys from the ignition and tried to determine by touch which one would open the door to the shop. But as she stumbled in the dark, across the gravel, she noticed the faint glow spilling out of the barn—through the open door. She had locked it behind herself when she’d left to search for Raven. And the only other person with a key to it was her employee.
“Raven!” she called out as she hurried through the door. “I’m so glad you came back!”
She reached in her pocket for the amulet of dried alyssum, rosemary and ivy, and anise and caraway seeds, eucalyptus and huckleberry leaves, and a thistle blossom. She’d cinched the sachet with a leather thong on which she’d fastened a jet stone, a piece of obsidian and a tiger’s eye. “I made something for you—something to keep you safe.”
Then her eyes adjusted to the faint candlelight, which wavered back and forth—not because the flames flickered but because a shadow swung back and forth in front of them. Like the herbs, Raven hung from the rafters.
Maria was too late. Again.
Or was she? She glanced around, searching the shadows for another image—an orb or mist, some field of energy that indicated Raven’s ghost. But nothing manifested from the shadows.
And the girl’s body swung yet. “You’re still alive. Stay with me. I’ll help you.” But how?
Panic pressed on Maria’s lungs, stealing her breath. She righted a chair and clamored on top of it, but then jumped down again when she realized she had nothing to cut the rope that wound tight around the girl’s throat. She fumbled for a knife and scrambled onto the chair again. Summoning all her strength, she hacked at the rope until the girl fell, her body hitting the worn wood floor with a soft thud.
“Please be alive,” Maria murmured as she scrambled down beside her. She’d seen others do CPR on television, so she tried breathing into Raven’s mouth and pushing on her chest. But the girl didn’t breathe. She didn’t move. Probably because Maria didn’t know what she was doing. She knew how to heal with herbs and crystals, though. But she had never pulled anyone back from the brink of death before. What could she use? What would it take?
She ran back to the table where she cut herbs and grabbed up some dried hyssop and licorice. Both were used to treat asthma because of their anti-inflammatory powers. Maybe they could reduce the swelling in the girl’s throat. She added some tincture of arnica that was used for bruising. Her hands shook as she mixed it together. Then she hurried back to where the girl lay limply on the floor of the old barn.
She pressed the mixture to the girl’s swollen throat and slipped some between her open lips. Then she chanted a prayer, begging the higher power to heal the wounded, to reverse her cruel fate.
“Raven?” She leaned over the girl, listening for breathing. No air emanated from the girl’s black-painted lips as her mouth lay open. Maria looked to her chest to see if any breaths lifted it, but a shadow fell across the room—blocking the light from the candles.
“Don’t move!” a deep voice ordered.
Maria glanced up at the hulking shadow blocking the door. Only his eyes glinted in the dark—and the metal of the gun he held. Was he who had done this to Raven? Who had killed all of the other ones?
She tightened her grip on the handle of the knife and slid it beneath the folds of her long skirt. If he came close enough...
“What the hell,” he murmured, his voice a low rumble in his muscular chest. He glanced from her to the body on the floor. His brow furrowed in concern and confusion as he stared down at Raven. “What did you do to her?”
Maybe he wasn’t the one who had hurt the girl.
“I tried to help her,” she told him. But her herbs weren’t working. “Please, do something! Save her!”
The man knelt beside Raven, and his fingers probed her wrist. “She’s dead.”
“No, not yet.” If Raven were dead, Maria would have seen her ghost because she always saw the souls of the recently departed. And sometimes of the not-so-recently departed. “She needs a doctor.”
He shook his head.
“Why won’t you help her?” The answer was obvious. He had tried killing the girl; he had no intention of saving her. Or of letting Maria live...
If she had any hope of surviving—and getting help for Raven—she had to act. Just as she had swung the knife at the rope noose with all of her strength, she pulled it from beneath her skirt and swung it at the man leaning over Raven’s body. She didn’t want to kill him; she just wanted to hurt him badly enough that he dropped the gun.
But as she neared his body, her momentum slowed—and she hesitated before burying the blade. She closed her eyes and pushed the knife down, then gasped as strong fingers locked around her wrist. Something cold and shaped like a circle pressed against her chin.
She drew in an unsteady breath, and the gun barrel pinched her skin. Maybe she should have read her own cards. Maybe then she would have seen this—would have seen this man. She opened her eyes to study him because his was the last face she would probably ever see.
He stared at her, his grayish-blue eyes as cold and hard as his gun. The candlelight flickered, picking up red glints in his thick brown hair. Even kneeling on the floor, he towered over her, broad shouldered and square jawed.
She tugged at her wrist, but his grasp tightened. And the knife dropped from her numb fingers onto the floor. “Let go of me...”
His mouth curved into a faint grin. “I’ve spent too long tracking you down to let you get away now.”
Her heart slammed against her ribs. He was the one. The person who’d been hunting her for all these years and had taken all those other lives...
A gasp broke the eerie silence of the room. But it hadn’t slipped through her lips. Or his.
She glanced down at Raven as the girl’s eyes fluttered open and she stared up at them, her eyes wide with shock and horror. The girl had survived a hanging—maybe because of Maria’s healing, maybe because she was stronger than she looked. But Maria doubted Raven was strong enough to survive whatever else the man had planned for her. For them.
She should have driven the knife deep in his chest while she’d had the chance. So that she wouldn’t die as the others had—as Raven nearly had.
Like a witch...
Copyright © 2015 by Lisa Childs-Theeuwes