Witching Moon (21 page)

So here she was, in the spot where she'd had that first frightening psychic experience. Because she was all grown up, she knew what to call it. And she finally understood that repressing part of herself over the years had taken its toll. It had made her closed-up. Made her play it safe.

Now, whatever the cost, she had to embrace her own uniqueness. And since this was where she'd first shut away part of her personality, this was where she'd come to bring it into focus.

The trouble was, she wasn't really sure how to invite it back.

She made a frustrated sound. Then she thought of the pain that had drilled into her head when she'd stepped into the street before the truck came rushing toward her.

She remembered the intensity of the headache. And she didn't want to feel it again. But maybe she had to. Leaning back, she closed her eyes and focused on the sensation of a blast from a ray gun drilling into her head.

As she tried to open herself to whatever would come next, a terrible sense of guilt clutched at her. She had been taught that this was wrong. And she had tried her best to do whatever would gain Mommy and Daddy's approval. It was hard not to feel like she was betraying them.

“No!” she said aloud. She wasn't betraying them. She was an adult, and she was reaching for her true heritage.

She'd pleased her parents with her denial. She had tried to be normal. For a while it seemed to have worked. She'd been successful in school. She'd made a life for herself. But she'd never really gotten close to anyone.

Then she had come to Wayland, Georgia, and everything had changed. And she realized she had never felt normal. Not deep down.

She squeezed her eyes more tightly shut, trying to open herself to what she had always known was forbidden. It had happened in Wayland without her permission. It could happen here just as well. It had to happen here.

Need was greater than fear. She wasn't sure what she was doing, except that she was reaching out with some kind of mental hook and pulling something dangerous toward her.

And suddenly, her consciousness was no longer in the garden. She was somewhere else. In a child's narrow bed. In the dark. In a nightmare.

She didn't want to be there! Not there. And she tried with desperation born of fear to escape from the terrifying place where she found herself.

BUT IT WAS
too late for Sara to flee. She was trapped in a nightmare. In the cabin at the edge of the swamp. The same cabin, but different.

In the front room, she could hear Daddy and Momma talking. Not the Daddy and Momma who lived in the house in Wilmington, North Carolina. The other Momma and Daddy.

She wasn't Sara. She was Victoria, and she started to swing her small legs over the side of the bed. Then she heard something scary in the sound of Daddy's voice—and his words.

“Come on, we have to leave. We don't have much time.”

As one of Daddy's arms tightened around her, he reached for Momma with the other. “Come on. Let me get you away from here, before it's too late.”

Outside, above the babble of voices, she heard a man shout, “Come out and show yourself—you damn witch.”

“Yeah, you can't hide from us,” another man joined in. “You and the rest of your damn tribe.”

“No. I'm not one of them,” Momma screamed from the front room.

“Don't lie to us,” the man who had spoken first shouted.

Others joined the chorus. “Come out before we burn you out.”

Victoria buried her face against her father's shoulder, her free hand clutching Mr. Rabbit.

Daddy started to go after Momma in the front room, but before he reached her, the window beside the door shattered, sending glass spraying across the wood floor.

Momma screamed. Then a strong, dangerous smell filled the air. All at once, Victoria could hear a strange roaring noise.

“Save her! Save her!” Momma screamed.

Her father cursed, trying to get to the front of the house. But the heat beat him back. Turning with Victoria in his arms, he sprinted across the bedroom, then bent to push up the window sash.

“Daddy! I'm scared, Daddy,” she whimpered, trying to breathe through the cloud of smoke choking her nose and throat.

“It's okay. Everything will be okay,” he said between coughs. “I'll get you out of here.”

After lowering her out the window, he quickly followed. With his body bent over hers, he ran into the darkness of the swamp, carrying her past the old crooked tree where she'd liked to play.

Behind her Victoria heard a sound like thunder. Raising her head, she saw the whole house explode into flames.

“Momma! Where's Momma?”

 

SARA'S
eyes blinked open. Her breath was coming in painful gasps. Her heart was threatening to explode.

She folded her arms across her chest, trying to ward off the sudden chill that gripped her body.

She had been there. Been right in the middle of it. And now she knew what had happened.

She had lived in the cabin at the edge of the swamp long ago. With Momma. And a mob of townspeople had killed her mother. Townspeople from Wayland. There was no shred of doubt in her mind about what had happened. In the waking nightmare, she'd seen the old bent tree. The same tree that was still there.

The woman who had been killed in the little cabin, Jenna Foster, had been her mother. The witch had been her mother!

And what did that make her?

She squeezed her eyes closed, trying to drive away the answer. But it had lodged in her brain like shards of glass.

The scared little girl part of her wanted to escape—into madness, if that was her only option. But the woman she had made herself into—the scientist—stood back and approached the subject with cool logic.

She might have died in that cabin. But she had survived. And now, twenty-five years later, someone had brought her back to Wayland. To the scene of the crime.

But she was in Wilmington now. At her adopted mother's house. And she had to find out what Barbara Weston knew about it. Because there were details the little girl would never be able to learn unless someone could fill in more of the puzzle pieces.

On shaky legs she went back to the house to confront the woman she had called mother for most of her life.

Mom was sitting on the living room sofa, a magazine spread on her lap, but she wasn't reading. She was pleating the edge of a page in her fingers.

As soon as Sara entered the room, her mother's gray head came up. Her gaze was questioning and troubled.

Sara stood in the doorway, unsure of what to say. She'd come charging into the house, bent on confrontation. But now she saw how small and old her mother looked. Her face was pale, and her lips trembled as she stared at her daughter.

Sara crossed the room and sat down on the couch. “It's okay, Mom,” she murmured.

To her horror, tears welled in the older woman's eyes.

The hard shell Sara had tried to erect around her heart instantly melted. “Mom…don't…” Sara whispered. “What's wrong?”

Her mother brushed the back of her hand under her eyes. “I knew…when you came home…when…when I saw the look on your face.”

“What look?”

“Determined.” She sighed. “That determination you taught yourself.”

“Did I?”

“Yes. Then when you started asking about your background, I got scared.”

“It's been on my mind a lot lately.”

Her mother's head bobbed. “I told Raymond this would happen!”

“What?”

“That it would all come back to haunt us eventually.” Her mother swallowed hard. “When you first came to us, I wanted you to…to be yourself. He thought that you'd be happier if you forgot about your past. If you were like all the other little children.”

“Oh!” She'd never realized that her parents hadn't agreed on how to bring her up.

“I promised him I'd keep the secret.”

Sara felt shivers slither over her skin. “What secret?”

“About your mother.”

“I know who she was. She was a woman named Jenna Foster, wasn't she? And I was her little girl, Victoria.”

Mrs. Weston moaned softly. “Was that her name? We never knew.”

Sara nodded, trying to put herself in her parents' situation all those years ago. She covered her mother's wrinkled hand with her own. “I had a good childhood. But…I can't function as an adult like this. I have to know what you can tell me. Did you know I came from Wayland?”

“Wayland? Where you have that research job?”

“Yes.”

Her mother made a small, distressed sound. “We never knew the town where you lived. We only knew it was somewhere south of here.”

“How did you know that?”

“Because the money always came from down south.”

Sara's eyes widened. “What money?”

“He would send us money orders. From different banks and from different towns.”

“Who?”

“Your real father.”

“You knew my father? How did you adopt me?”

Her mother stared across the room, her gaze unfocused. “We were too old to get a child through an agency. So we put an advertisement in several newspapers saying that we wanted to provide a loving home for a baby or a toddler. For months we didn't get any response, and we were thinking it wouldn't work. Then we got a phone call asking if we wanted a little girl. Of course we did. A man arranged to meet us down at the Big Boy restaurant. He had you with him. We had lunch and talked. Then the next day he came to our house. You were so quiet. You stayed right by his side all the time. It seemed like you were in shock.”

Sara nodded, picturing the little girl who had just lived through a terrible experience. At the same time, she tried to imagine the situation. Raymond and Barbara Weston had taken in a child they didn't know. A child who was obviously traumatized.

“You were taking a chance on adopting me, weren't you?”

“We didn't think about it that way. You were so sweet. So fragile. And we just gave our hearts to you.”

Sara squeezed her mother's hand. “And I gave my heart to you.”

“When you went off to the bathroom, he told us there had been some trouble, that your mother had died. The man said he was your father, and he couldn't take care of you. And he wanted to find a good home for you with people who would love you. He made it a condition of the adoption that we not know his name. The legal details were handled by a lawyer.”

Sara tried to process everything she'd heard. “If you didn't know where I came from and you didn't know the identity of my father—how did you know about the murder?”

“You had nightmares. You told us about the night your mother was killed.”

Sara gasped. “It came from me?”

“Yes. And we would comfort you and tell you the best thing was to forget all about it. And we thought the bad stuff had gone away. But I was always afraid that it would somehow come back.”

Sara looked down at her and her mother's joined hands. “I understand,” she murmured.

“Do you forgive me?”

“Yes,” she said, then reached to hug the woman who had raised her with love, a simple woman who, understandably, hadn't wanted to deal with a child with psychic powers.

They sat together on the sofa for a long time. Then Sara stirred herself. She had to get back to Wayland. But first she had to make sure that Mom was okay.

“So, are we going to make those chocolate chip cookies?” she asked.

“Oh yes!” her mother answered, relief flooding her voice.

 

BY
four in the afternoon, Sara was too keyed up to stay any longer. So she hugged her mother good-bye and started back to Wayland to face her past and to face Adam. Making love to him had been like nothing she had ever expected to experience in her life. It had been like something out of a romance novel. Like a man and a woman finding their soul mates.

Yet how could a man be soul mate with a witch?

Her hands clamped around the steering wheel. Part of her wished that she had never come back to Wayland, because coming home had awakened that deep, buried component of her psyche. The part she had always feared. Yet if she hadn't come back to the town where she was born, she never would have met Adam.

But she was the wrong woman for him. Her mother had been a witch. She was a witch. And being with a witch could be dangerous for so many reasons.

She wanted to turn the car in the other direction and flee. But she couldn't make herself do it.

Her mind was a disordered jumble as she drove through the late afternoon and into the night. So many pieces of her personal puzzle had fallen into place. She had been having psychic experiences ever since she'd arrived at that damn cabin. But they didn't just come from the cabin. They came from within her. And some of them had to do with Adam.

“Oh Lord, Adam. I'm sorry,” she said into the darkness of the car.

Adam had told her about the witches. He'd told her that their children had come back to town to get even.

Witches with an evil purpose.

Her mind made another jump. They had attacked her. She knew that now. They had sent pain shooting into her head, then warned her that a truck was speeding toward her. So what had they been doing, testing her because they knew she was like them?

A cold chill traveled from her hairline down her spine.

Why had they hurt her? Was she some kind of threat to them? And what about her own psychic power? The power she could feel developing within herself. She didn't think she would use it to hurt Adam or anyone else. But how could she know for sure?

There was so much to think about. Herself. Adam. And her natural father.

He had saved her from the fire. But he had given her up. Then he had sent money to the Westons.

“So who are you, Daddy dearest?” she asked into the closed compartment of the car. “Are you still in Wayland? Are you even still alive? Did you somehow arrange for me to come back to the little cabin beside the swamp?”

That certainly seemed like a radical step. And if he'd done it, what did he hope to gain?

As she drove on through the darkness, her mind spun back to her interview with Austen Barnette. He owned the cabin. He'd had it rebuilt. He was connected to her past. Did that mean he was connected to her? Was
he
her father?

She kept thinking about him as she drove south. But as she drew closer to Nature's Refuge, her thoughts went back to Adam.

She longed to see him, yet she was afraid, too. Thinking about him made her heart pound and her mouth go dry. Then all at once, she realized that wasn't the only reason she felt like her nerves were rising to the surface of her skin.

She tried to analyze the sensation.

Maybe it came from her witch's instinct.

She shuddered. Something was going to happen. Something vibrating in the background of her mind. Something bad.