Subj: Dark Shadows: Mirror/Mirror, Part 1
Date: 11/19/98 10:53:21 AM Central Standard Time
From: DSRules

"David!" Marissa threw her arms around her stepson, lifting him up and spinning around. "Come here and see! The buds have opened!"

She placed the 12 year old boy on the ground, grabbed his hand, and took off at a run, dragging him behind her.

They entered the greenhouse, breathing heavily. "Look!" Marissa positively glowed as she pointed toward the plant on the table.

"Look at what?" David wasn't sure why she was so excited.

"Look at that color!" He could tell she was talking about the flower on the plant.

"It's yellow."

"Yes! Isn't that fantastic!"

"Umm. . . . Sure."

"Don't you get it? I've finally perfected a yellow African violet! Now I can create orange, and all sorts of shades of red. . . . I've got to get a patent on this. I'll have to call Tony." She picked up the phone from the work table.

David knew that his stepmother had been working on something here in the greenhouse. He just never dreamed that she was trying to create a yellow flower.

Marissa had just hung up from talking with her brother, the lawyer. "Your dad's going to be so happy when I tell him. He knows how long I've been working on this!"

"When is Dad calling, anyway?"

She sobered up at the mention that Quentin wasn't going to come home, as long as he was on this business trip that had taken him away three months earlier. "The usual time, I expect."

* * * * *

Quentin pulled the cell phone out of the drawer and looked at it. He sighed and replaced it. He stood up and paced around the room, slamming his fist into the wall. "Damn it!" he swore. He didn't know how much more of this he could take.

A matter of seconds later, Barnabas came into the room. "Are you all right, Quentin?" he asked, being sure to keep his distance from his cousin.

"I'm fine. As fine as I can be - cooped up in here."

"I wish there was something I could do for you."

"Three months! Three fucking months like this. A prisoner on my own estate. I'm sure my grandfather wouldn't have left the business to me if he'd known that I was going to abandon it like this."

"You've hardly abandoned it, Quentin. You're still doing as much work as you can, and it turns out that Carolyn is quite the capable businesswoman. She did, after all, head off that strike last month."

Quentin smiled. "You're very persuasive, Barnabas. Yes, I suspect that my cousin will do very nicely at Collins Enterprises. Who knows? I may even leave the company to her, rather than to David. I love my son, but sometimes he really reminds me of. . ." Quentin's voice faded, thinking of his first wife.

His marriage to Vicki Stockbridge Collins had been a tempestuous, passionate one. However, most of that passion had been anger. She had returned, three months ago, promising that she had changed, and that she was ready to be a wife and mother.

He had mourned their failed marriage for two years after she left him with a toddler to take care of. But then Marissa came into his life, and everything changed. When he met her, he felt that he'd found a part of himself that was missing. She was the only mother that David had known, and that hadn't changed when the twins, Kate and Toby, joined their family three years later. Quentin had everything he could want, and so all of Vicki's promises hadn't mattered one bit to him.

"Don't let the door hit you on the way out," he said snidely as he dismissed her.

Little had he known, then, that his ex-wife had certain. . . talents. One of them was an aptitude for magic.

"You'll regret losing me, Quentin," were Vicki's last words to him before she left his sight.