A promise for all time, p.1
A Promise For All Time, page 1
A Promise For All Time
For All Time, Book 1
by
Paula Quinn
© Copyright 2024 by Paula Quinn
Text by Paula Quinn
Cover by Dar Albert
Dragonblade Publishing, Inc. is an imprint of Kathryn Le Veque Novels, Inc.
P.O. Box 23
Moreno Valley, CA 92556
ceo@dragonbladepublishing.com
Produced in the United States of America
First Edition April 2024
Kindle Edition
Reproduction of any kind except where it pertains to short quotes in relation to advertising or promotion is strictly prohibited.
All Rights Reserved.
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
License Notes:
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Additional Dragonblade books by Author Paula Quinn
For All Time Series
A Promise For All Time (Book 1)
Hearts of the Conquest Series
The Passionate Heart (Book 1)
The Unchained Heart (Book 2)
The Promised Heart (Book 3)
Echoes in Time Series
Echo of Roses (Book 1)
Echoes of Abandon (Book 2)
The Warrior’s Echo (Book 3)
Echo of a Forbidden Kiss (Novella)
Rulers of the Sky Series
Scorched (Book 1)
Ember (Book 2)
White Hot (Book 3)
Hearts of the Highlands Series
Heart of Ashes (Book 1)
Heart of Shadows (Book 2)
Heart of Stone (Book 3)
Lion Heart (Book 4)
Tempest Heart (Book 5)
Forbidden Heart (Book 6)
Heart of Thanks (Novella)
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Publisher’s Note
Additional Dragonblade books by Author Paula Quinn
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
About the Author
Prologue
Ashmore Castle
Dorchester
Dorset, England 1641
Lady Catherine Ashmore, Duchess of Dorset, cried out in her seventh hour of labor, a long time considering it was her seventh child. It would be another son. Tessa Blagden, the Ashmore’s longtime family nurse, knew it would be. She was there to end the babe’s life and destroy the power of the weapon the boy, if he lived, would use to kill thousands of people. This child’s lifeblood was all that could cleanse and destroy the nine-inch ruby dagger hidden somewhere in the duchess’s chambers. Tessa had to drive it into the babe’s heart before being discovered. Only when the babe was dead, would everything be set right, the evil wrought by the dagger rescinded, and its dark creator destroyed. For Tessa, it was all more personal. If she succeeded, she would be reunited with her family.
After another four hours, everyone in the birthing room knew something was wrong. The midwives, experienced as they were, could do nothing against the curse that was this child. His mother would suffer for delivering him. But she wasn’t innocent. Indeed, she was an unholy priestess of the demon Raxxix. She performed ritual sacrifices at night without her husband’s knowledge. To see the duke’s gain—which would benefit her, she used the ruby dagger to slaughter six families, all in a failed attempt to find a prophesied child who had been destined to kill the babe about to arrive in the world. As payment for her temporary power, the duchess had given up the body of her seventh son, not dead, but given to Raxxix as a vessel of evil to wield the full power of the ruby dagger against hundreds of thousands in his wars.
Tessa prepared more poison tonic for the duchess while she cried out in labor and fed it to her. But the older nurse felt no pity for her mistress. For this was the wretched woman who’d intended to kill a seventh family, or more specifically, Tessa’s beloved daughter and granddaughter, the prophesied child. Tessa had learned about the pact between the duchess and the demon eight years ago, and more importantly, she’d learned about the ruby dagger. Like the rest of the women in her family, Tessa was gifted with special powers of the psychic and corporeal. In her case, it was clairvoyance and future time-travel. Her sister Elizabeth could also communicate with animals, a handy gift when a feathered friend could perch outside a window and listen to the duchess’s plan to kill Tessa’s granddaughter when she was found. Tessa had taken measures to make certain her granddaughter was never found by taking her and the child’s mother to the future.
And now that Tessa had removed the prophesied child able to kill the seventh son, the task fell to her. She only had one chance while the babe was weak for she wasn’t the one born to do it. Later she wouldn’t be strong enough to kill a man with a dagger that was crafted to obey him, not destroy him.
With another great push and a guttural scream, as if she were using her last breath to tear the babe from her body, Catherine Ashmore bore down and cast him out. Exhausted, she refused to look at him but ordered that he be taken away. “Everyone, get out!” Lady Ashmore commanded. “Bring me clean clothes and my beautician!”
The babe was quickly wrapped and handed over to Tessa, his trusted nurse. While everyone else fled, Tessa, with the babe in her arms, strode to an ash wardrobe and flung open the door. From her bed, Catherine Ashmore struggled to sit up, to breathe.
“Priestess,” Tessa said, finding an onyx box. She opened it, and wrapped her hand around the ruby dagger, pulling it from its place. “You’ll be dead before you draw ten more breaths.” She held up the dagger. “You thought yourself clever? I saw you when you hid it.”
Catherine Ashmore’s eyes grew black with fury while she struggled to cry out, but her breathless cries were drowned out by her son’s crying. “You thought to kill my granddaughter. Now I will kill your son.” She watched the babe’s mother spit up blood, the poison tonic finally taking its effect, and then stop moving. Without a trace of guilt and with babe in hand, she laid him on the bed and closed her eyes. Could she do it?
She heard someone enter the chambers. She snatched up the baby in her arms, and hurried to see who it was, hoping to persuade them tell them to leave the duchess to rest. When she saw the babe’s father, Lord Edmund, she bit her lip and smiled.
“You have another son, my lord,” Tessa told him softly when he reached out for him. She watched him coo and kiss his son’s tiny face.
“He’s more than just another son, Tessa,” the duke told her with the hint of a smile very few ever saw. “He’s my newest son, Josiah. Important in his own right.”
His father had no idea what his son would become if he wasn’t stopped. Better he never be told.
“How is my wife?”
“She’s resting,” Tessa told him calmly. “She wishes to be alone. This was a difficult birth for her.” She reached out to take the babe with a pleasant smile. “I must see to him, my lord.” She waited for him to leave, eager for this gruesome business to be over.
She returned to the bedroom and set the babe down again. She told herself she wouldn’t look at him. She thought of his name. Josiah—God supports. Surely his mother hadn’t chosen his name. He made a little sound and against her better judgment, Tessa looked down.
He was beautiful with a pale complexion and particularly crims
She unwrapped him and stared at his tiny, bare chest.
With shaky hands, she held up the dagger and closed her eyes. She had to remember that it was this babe’s life or her granddaughter’s, including all the others he would be responsible for killing. She tried to steady her hands. Already she could feel the blade’s pull to the one for whom it was created. She brought the scarlet dagger down. A strong, unearthly force stopped it before the tip of the blade entered the babe’s body. Tessa expected the resistance. If her goal was to kill the boy, evil would try to protect him until he did Raxxix’s will.
She pushed. The blade descended. Tessa closed her eyes, not wanting to see. She felt a terrible pressure on her back and looked over her shoulder. The duke stood behind her, his long blade disappearing into her back and breaking through her belly. She stared down in stunned disbelief, then fell to her knees, the ruby dagger slipping from her fingers—dripping with blood that was not her own, and then disappeared with her.
Chapter One
Manhattan, NY
2022
“My allergies are all about to kick in.” Mercy Blagden fanned away dust motes and traces of cobwebs before her face and was thankful, at least, for the daylight streaming in through the cracks of the boarded up windows. Still, she needed the light from her phone to help her see her way around the abandoned orphanage in Bloomingburg, New York, where she had grown up.
For a moment Mercy let the memories of her childhood in this place wash over her. They were neither good, nor bad memories. They simply were. Just like her. In the columned light she could see Sister Joseph Ann sitting in a chair reading from a book to the twelve children who lived there. Smells that were no longer real filled Mercy’s nostrils: fresh bread, old books, Sister Dominique’s special mac and cheese, the scent of fresh roses coming from Sister Tess’s habit when she returned from one of her visits to her family in England. Mercy could hear the sound of children’s laughter running around the spacious old Victorian house as if they were there now.
“I wish I had known some of them better,” she told the echoes around her. She didn’t imagine anyone could hear her. She was alone, after all. She wasn’t daft. “What do the doctors know about me?” she asked. “Nothing is right.”
She wasn’t sure sometimes if she was speaking to herself or someone who wasn’t there, but should be. Like a twin who tragically died at birth, someone she should be sharing her life with. It was a habit that had made her life very difficult since she was four. But, as she had told countless therapists over the years, she’d rather talk to herself than to anyone else.
She remembered herself going up these same stairs to her room to be alone. She didn’t like most of the other children. They teased her about the ugly scar marring her face from her temple to under her lower lip, given to her by the thief who had broken into their NYC apartment when she was three and killed her mother and stabbed Mercy in her big-girl bed. Later, she became quiet and secretive around others, untrusting and detached. She became her own best friend, pointing things out out loud, audibly answering questions she’d asked herself in her mind, even giggling on a few occasions as if she heard jokes privy to her ears alone. Her “personality disorder” kept her from getting adopted.
Sister Tess seemed to take a special interest in Mercy’s well-being. When she wasn’t off visiting other orphanages, she was extra kind to Mercy, giving her extra helpings of food—though Mercy didn’t eat it most of the time, and chocolate—when it was forbidden except for one’s birthday. When Mercy was twelve, Sister Tess mentioned that she had changed from being an extraverted toddler, even after she lost her mother and was stabbed, to a child who barely spoke and rarely smiled when she was around others. The doctors all blamed the trauma of violence for her disorder. But even though she didn’t know about what happened to Mercy in the attic, Sister Tess believed something else had caused the change in her.
Mercy believed it too. Her light had all but died a year after the trauma of getting stabbed in the face. Oddly, her first memory was from the age of four, when, after going to the attic alone and discovering a dusty chest of drawers, she’d reached into the third drawer and was bitten hard enough to make her bleed. She’d never investigated what had put a little hole in her. She had never told anyone, and she’d never gone back up to the attic.
Now, twenty years later, she found herself climbing the stairs to that same place, to the same chest of drawers still intact and covered in cobwebs. She was drawn to the third drawer the same way she’d been drawn to it long ago.
She knew that she’d changed when she was four. Why? She’d spent years in therapy trying to figure it out. Did it have to do with a bug? What had drawn her back here?
Cautiously, she opened the drawer and shined her light inside. There was a pile of folded white fabric, silk maybe. “No dead bug.” Slowly, she pinched a bit of the silk and gave it a soft shake. Something slipped out.
In the light of her phone, Mercy saw a red shard of glass. Upon closer inspection, she realized it was a jagged dagger. This must be what had cut her finger. How long had it been here, hidden away, untouched for years but for a curious four-year-old finger? The dagger looked ritualistic. She giggled at her mad thought that it had stolen her soul, then stopped smiling when something moved along its surface. “Is that blood? How creepy is this?” She took it closer to a window and held it up to the sunlight. There were facets of crimson and fire that made her blood want to answer some forbidden call. She saw it again. A shadow stained upon the ruby moved, as if it was still made of liquid, from the tip down to the blade. It dripped down onto her fingers as they held the dagger, and seeped into her skin. Mercy let out a little gasp and then her eyes rolled into the back of her head as darkness took her as she sank to the floor. The once silent attic sat empty yet again, but this time it wasn’t just its newest occupant that had disappeared, but so had the illustrious dagger that had long called this place its home.
*
Dorchester, England
1661
Mercy felt something hit her in the shoulder hard enough to make her cry out.
“Get to your feet and explain what you’re doing in my barn!” an unfamiliar male voice demanded.
Beneath her face, the scratchy hay made her itch. Behind her chickens clucked and a pig squealed. Wait. Wait.
“Am I dreaming?” she wondered but then quickly dismissed it as she didn’t usually feel her heart pounding against her ribs, ready to erupt from her chest. She felt something in her hand. The ruby dagger. She tucked it into her back pocket and pulled her T-shirt down over it. When the owner of the barn tried to kick her again, Mercy slapped his boot away. She’d been bullied in school. She wasn’t about to be bullied by some old farmer. “Where am I?” she said out loud. “How did I end up in a barn?” She pushed her hair over the left side of her face, then looked up at the middle aged man and asked him.
“Are we close to the abandoned orphanage?”
Instead of answering her, the oaf pulled her to her feet by the arm. When he set eyes on her T-shirt, shorts and bare legs, he nearly choked on his own breath.
“What happened to your clothes?”
“I’m wearing them,” she told him in a scolding voice. He was one of those old fashioned grandpa types.
His gaze was just as offended when it met hers. “Stay here,” he commanded. Before she could reply, he turned in his dusty boots and left the barn.
She stared after him, at the door. What should she do? Leave! Leave now! She hurried forward. The door opened and the farmer appeared and stared down at her. “Put these on. I have guests. I won’t have you shame me by having them think I would hire someone like you. You better not be a wretched Blagden or I’ll skin you alive myself.” He shoved a pile of scratchy clothes at her and left her alone again.
“What the heck is wrong with that guy?” She stared at the door again. “Have I been abducted by some serial killer?” Her co-worker, Sandy, had warned her not to go to the abandoned orphanage alone. How much trouble was she in? She looked toward the window. It was beginning to get dark. This was Upstate NY, not the city. There’d be no lights soon except from the stars.
