Written in the Stars (9 page)

Dunham Castle, 1603

From the moment I met Will, I could not see life without him by my side. Now I see
the future in the smile of our beautiful daughter, Serena, and in the wide, wise eyes
of the son of my heart, Stephen. With them by my side, I do not fear that we are besieged.

Carlyle and his mercenaries are encamped on the plain outside our walls. The duke
came to me at dawn but it was not necessary. Rumormongers say there is a woman with
him and a boy-child she names his heir.

The duke has aged before my eyes, growing grayer and more lined since our sweet Laurel
has grown weaker despite all Charles Grey can do to heal her. I sense his strength
of purpose seeping away. The children and I will nurse his invisible wounds to keep
him whole.

He awaits my counsel. Carlyle demands an audience and I tremble at the thought of
once again confronting the instrument of my torment. Yet my powers tell me that he
fears me. I know this meeting shall be our last until I witness the moment of his
death.

A part of me seeks vengeance now, longing to wield cold steel with the strength of
my sorrow. I settle my thoughts on Carlyle and whisper a challenge to the wind which
blows between our camps.

I know not when or how, yet I have foreseen he shall be vanquished for eternity. It
is our destiny to oppose him and I know it is mine in this lifetime to defeat his
purpose and keep my promises to Will.

Stephen, his chubby fingers fisted in anger, looks to me with his father’s eyes. “I
will help you, Mother. I can fight for you.”

I fall to my knees, gathering my tiny daughter Serena and Stephen to my breasts. “As
always, we shall protect one another. Our love will make us strong. Always.”

As it is true that you and I who are one shall meet and fight for what is written
in our stars.

Through the veil of time I have seen you who comes after me, and I have seen Carlyle
beside you. He shall menace you with his evil. You must defy him and overcome his
power. Believe this, for it will be true.

PART II: Crescent Key, Florida
-
Present Day

Chapter Nine

Deep beneath the water’s surface, a diver gives up fighting the current and allows
it to pull him where it will, faster and faster toward the depths of the ocean’s floor.
Then the invisible force frees him, and he hangs suspended over what looks like a
dark shadow.

Could this be it?

His pulse speeds up. A shark circles below, and where there is one shark, there are
many. But the lure is too strong to resist. Energized by instinct, he ignores the
predator, kicks his flippers hard, and torpedoes closer.

As he spirals downward, the darkness starts to take shape, and he recognizes the culmination
of his dreams—the hulk of the wreck he’s been seeking.

Elated, he heads straight for it, and once there, skims along the rotting bones of
what had once been a powerful British galleon. What is left of the warship lies scattered
along the seafloor like a child’s building blocks.

He looks about. The area is clear. The shark seems to have gone on to better hunting
grounds. He skims a lone canon half-buried in the sand, then rounds what is left of
the hull. Centuries of storms and tides have spread the remains, so he widens his
search, circling the disjointed skeleton.

Suddenly his headlamp picks up a flicker of color yards from the main wreckage. Part
of the mother lode? Could it be? His stomach knots, and he can hardly breathe. Drawn
like a moth to a flame, he plunges toward the potential treasure.

Even as he reaches for what looks like a gold crescent encrusted with emeralds, another
diver shoots out of nowhere, hand driving into the still-buried mother lode and coming
up out of the sand with a bejeweled gold dagger.

He strikes out…

…the intended target the first diver’s air hose.

Cordelia Ward awakened in a cold sweat, her wrist throbbing with heat, the yacht rocking
gently beneath her.

Even as she twisted the Posey ring—now too tight—around her forefinger, praying to
affect the outcome of the nightmare, she knew better. Precognitive dreams signaled
by her birthmark had begun haunting her since her sixteenth summer, when a nightmare
foretold the coming hurricane that scattered not only the mother lode of a shipwreck,
but the lifelong aspirations of her museum-curator parents.

Her birthmark always burned, her ring always tightened, each time a dream opened the
future to her.

Not so for an ordinary dream.

Fully awake now, too disturbed by the dream-vision to go back to sleep, she rose from
her bunk, padded to one of the portholes and looked out over the water. The Evening
Star was anchored in a cove for the night, their salvage boat a quarter mile down
the coast. She looked out to sea, far out in the direction they would take in the
morning. Lines of foam, generated by gentle waves, were encrusted in silver-blue moonlight.

The Celestine was out there somewhere under the transparent surface. Waiting. For
her.

So, who were the divers she’d seen in the dream? Treasure hunters?

They were always something to fear for a marine archeologist about to make an important
find. And she knew that find was imminent. Pirates could take everything right from
under her nose if she didn’t publicly claim the find first. Born to wealth, Cordelia
didn’t care about the money. The find itself, and what it meant to her family, was
important to her.

She was really and truly awake, the night before perhaps the most important dive of
her life. She glanced at the treasure box holding Elizabeth’s journal but didn’t have
the emotional stamina to tackle new entries right now. Instead, she sat at her desk,
turned on her laptop and sought the local news that had been televised earlier. If
nothing else, she could get a confirmation that tomorrow’s weather would hold.

She barely listened to stories about national politics or the state financial crisis
or a local car accident. But her attention was riveted to the screen and a graphic
that was a sketch of a centuries-old three-masted ship with the words Sunken Treasure
scrawled below it across the screen. The graphic cut to an attractive, dark-haired
reporter standing at the water’s edge.

“A native of this part of the state, Morgan Murphy has been plying these waters nearly
his whole life. Tomorrow, he starts a new hunt for sunken treasure.”

Gasping, Cordelia turned up the volume as the camera pulled out to include the subject
of the piece—a thirtysomething-year-old male, long hair whipping around rugged features,
open cotton shirt revealing ripped musculature.

“Morgan, what makes you think there’s treasure in these waters?”

“I know there’s treasure, Reya. I can smell it.”

He displayed a set of perfect white teeth, his grin seemingly aimed straight at Cordelia.
She clenched her jaw in response.

The reporter laughed. “Is that how you make your finds?”

“I have my methods.”

“Which include?”

“Months of research before setting out, of course.”

“So what exactly are you hoping to find this time, Morgan?”

“A ship that sank in these waters in 1605.The Celestine.”

Cordelia’s head went light and her pulse thundered. How was this possible? That now
of all times, the man some called a pirate was after the same find as she? And months
of research? Her father had spent years tracking the Celestine!

Her mind was whirling so that she barely heard the rest of the piece, and when the
reporter said, “Reya Delgado reporting from Crescent Key,” Cordelia slammed the laptop’s
lid closed.

A noise above the cabin—the soft padding of bare feet on deck—told her that she wasn’t
the only one awake. Recognizing the light steps, she threw on a long-sleeved cotton
shirt over the shorts and tank top that were her sleepwear, crossed through the galley,
and took the steps that led her outside.

Her mother, Madelyn, stood at the rail, her moon-silvered blond hair fluttering around
her face and shoulders. Thinking to tell her mother about the interview with the treasure
hunter that had set her off-kilter, she hesitated.

“Something wrong, Mom?”

“Same as always. I long for your father.”

“Me, too.”

Knowing this was the wrong time—her mother would learn of their competitor soon enough—Cordelia
leaned on the rail next to her mother and said nothing. Who knew where Murphy would
start his hunt, anyway? He’d probably gotten wind of some bit of information and was
charging after it. That didn’t mean he would find the real site. Her site.

“Clive should be here for this,” her mother said wistfully. “After losing De Oro Del
Casco, he spent his life researching the Celestine.”

De Oro Del Casco being the remains of the sunken Spanish galleon lost in the hurricane
as her precognitive dream had foretold. Though she knew she hadn’t made it happen,
Cordelia couldn’t help but feel some residual guilt.

She slipped her arm around her mother’s waist. “It’s because Dad did all that research
that I was able to put together his notes and maps and find the Celestine for him.
And for you.”

At least she hoped she would beat Murphy to it.

Her mother hugged her tightly, and Cordelia pressed her cheek to her mother’s forehead.
Finding love the way her parents had seemed an abstract concept to her. She’d thought
that maybe she was in love before but never long enough to be tested. Something inexplicable
had always pulled her apart from the object of her affection.

Unfortunately, always obsessed with finding treasure that would validate him as a
museum curator, Clive Ward had also taken off on other, less researched, hunts. He’d
gone on his last hunt the previous summer. Despite a brewing storm, Dad had chanced
the dive never to resurface. Days of searching for his body had been for nothing.

Cordelia liked to think that her father was simply swimming with the sharks forever.

Thankfully, she still had her mother here with her. She clung to the knowledge that
they were so close. Not all mothers and daughters shared what they had. Cordelia pulled
away and smiled. Though Mom’s heart-shaped face had softened and light lines crinkled
around her blue eyes when she smiled in return, she was still the most beautiful woman
Cordelia knew. People said they looked alike. Cordelia thought people were simply
being kind.

Mom’s smile faded, and she turned back to the sea. Her mother had been devastated
by the loss of her husband. She’d given up her position at the museum. Had given up
her social activities. Had given up her life. She’d become a recluse.

Without a center, Madelyn Ward had lost the will to go on.

Determined to restore that to her mother, Cordelia had lured her from grief-filled
days to go hunting one last time, with the promise of completing her father’s legacy.
And, for the memory of her beloved Clive, Mom had agreed.

“I think we should both get some sleep,” Cordelia said.

Mom nodded. “We go to the site tomorrow.”

“And maybe find some artifacts.”

They hugged again and went down to their separate cabins, but Cordelia didn’t immediately
go to her bunk. The image of Morgan Murphy crowded her brain waves. Needing to distract
herself from thinking about a potentially dreadful twist to the hunt, she opened the
treasure box, slipped Elizabeth’s journal from where it had hidden for four hundred
years. She was halfway through Elizabeth’s story. The more she read, the closer she
felt to the most fearless woman she wished she somehow could have known.

Dunham Castle, 1601

My torment has deepened until it has become a part of me, making dark all my days.
I see the same anguish in the duke’s eyes, so like Will’s and in my gentle Laurel’s
stricken face. I fear for her weakening body and soul. Even to her I cannot tell my
secret. That I carry her beloved Will’s child within my womb. None must know the truth
until the time is right.

Now the time has come for me to face Carlyle with my rage and my power. He shall know
my wrath and more which shall follow him through eternity.

Her eyes filling with tears at the double tragedy—Elizabeth losing the man she loved
and then having to marry his murderer—Cordelia read until her eyes grew heavy and
she could read no more. The birthmark on her wrist still throbbed slightly as she
carefully placed the journal on a shelf next to her bunk and turned off the light.
Every time she felt the weight of the journal in her hands, she felt Elizabeth come
alive, almost as if her birthmark claimed them as being one somehow.

Staring at the moon that hung outside her porthole, she turned the Posey ring that
had once belonged to each of the women in her family through the past four centuries,
and thought of her inheritance.

A ring…

…a legend of love that spanned the ages…

…and a sometimes scary legacy connected to the birthmark on her wrist…

Tomorrow, they would sail to the location where she had pinned the wreck site. She
would take the first dive.

She would beat the pirate to the site and stake her claim.

This could be a win-win situation if she found the mother lode. Her father’s reputation
would be restored, reviving her mother’s will to live a full life—someone had to curate
the find, after all, and why not Dr. Madelyn Ward?—and Cordelia’s own future as a
marine archeologist would be secured.

She wanted to someday be admired by a hoped-for daughter, to possess the same fearlessness
of her ancestress Elizabeth.

What would she add to the box?

Hopefully something from the Celestine.

Hopefully this time her psychic instinct had been wrong…

Light and darkness often went hand in hand, as she well knew.

Darkness in the human form of a modern-day pirate had just complicated the hunt. The
light was the treasure, but would she beat him to it? And then there was the jewel-encrusted
dagger—both a prize from the Celestine and a weapon of evil.

Would another diver really be murdered for this mother lode?

Her birthmark said yes. She rubbed it as if she could soothe it away, as if she could
change its mind, but it wouldn’t yield. It burned hotter with her disturbed thoughts.
Her ring grew so tight, she finally unseated it and then stared at the tiny treasure
circling the tip of her finger.

Would Morgan Murphy do anything to secure the prize, no matter how depraved?

Not if she could help it.

Cordelia didn’t want her success to come at the cost of a life.

But how could she prevent the tragedy she’d seen in her dream world?