Mercy (The Guardians Series 1)

by Wendy Saunders

  ‘I still haven’t figured out how to stop it from doing that,’ she replied ruefully, ‘it’s like it wants to please me.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ he murmured.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he shook his head.

  ‘You know you really don’t have to tell me,’ Olivia absently picked at the label of her beer bottle.

  ‘Yes I do,’ he replied, ‘you need to be able to trust me and you can’t do that if you are constantly questioning my motives. I don’t want you to feel as if you can’t be truthful with me for fear of my reaction.’

  ‘I guess you might have a point,’ she took a thoughtful sip; ‘I have to admit I am curious. I specialise in New England history and the witch trials in particular.’

  ‘Then you must already know some of my story,’ he frowned, unsure as to how history would have portrayed him.

  ‘That’s the weird part,’ Olivia answered, ‘you aren’t mentioned at all. The first time I came across your name it was in Hester’s journal. I had to do some serious digging into the court records and the only information I could find was the official notification by the court of your appointment as Witchfinder, along with your brother and father.’

  At the mention of his family his expression darkened.

  ‘You mentioned in your journal someone named Temperance,’ she tilted her head curiously.

  ‘I thought you said you didn’t read it?’

  ‘I didn’t, I just glanced through the last entry and that was before I met you.’

  ‘She was my younger sister,’ he replied after a moment, a small smile graced his lips as his eyes became distant, lost in memories. ‘Tempy was such a sweet little thing, she was a late child. I was twelve years old when she was born, it was a difficult birth, my mother didn’t survive, for a while it seemed like Temperance wouldn’t either. She was so tiny, so fragile.’

  ‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ Olivia murmured.

  ‘She would have been happy to give her life for her child, for any of her children,’ he replied softly, ‘she loved us.’

  Theo moved closer and took a seat on the rug with the fire crackling at his back, taking a pull of his beer as he organised his thoughts.

  ‘Temperance was a sickly child, prone to ailments but though her body was weak she was so full of life and so funny. There was not a day when she did not make Logan and I laugh.’

  ‘You must have loved her very much.’

  ‘We doted on her,’ he smiled staring at the bottle in his hand, ‘and she ruled us like a little queen.’

  ‘What about your father?’

  ‘My father,’ he frowned, ‘was a difficult man; we owned a farm on the outskirts of Salem village. After my mother died, he was never quite the same; he was hard to live with before but after he was even worse. He liked to find his solace at the bottom of a bottle of strong spirits.’

  ‘So you were left to take care of a baby when you were only twelve years old?’

  ‘She was a good baby, she almost never cried,’ he shrugged. ‘As soon as Logan and I were old enough the running of the farm largely fell to us. Logan always hated it, hated being a farmer, he always wanted something more, something better.’

  ‘But not you?’

  ‘It was my home,’ he smiled, ‘I was content, until Temperance reached her ninth birthday and I realised she had dreams like mine. She would see things before they happened.’

  ‘Precognition,’ Olivia nodded, ‘it’s a very common gift, it can range from having a vague feeling of something good or bad happening to full visions.’

  ‘You accept it so easily,’ he replied in wonder, ‘but where I came from something like that would mean only one thing, that you were in league with the devil. I taught Temperance to hide her ability from others as I had learned to hide mine. A fever had gripped Salem, accusations of witchcraft were everywhere, and no one was safe. I tried to keep us isolated at the farm so we would not be discovered; so many had already been sent to the gallows. But then everything changed, Temperance fell ill with a fever.’

  ‘She died?’ Olivia asked softly.

  Theo nodded the pain still as fresh as the day it happened.

  ‘Logan changed after that, his grief was so raw so angry. Losing her was like losing our mother all over again. Neither of us were there, we’d had to leave her at home with our father while we went to trade at market. It was late in the year and we were caught in a sudden storm. We were days late and by the time we returned home she was already gone. I blamed myself for leaving her, Logan blamed the world. Not long after her death he began to associate with a young cleric named Nathaniel Boothe. It was he who first suggested to Logan that Temperance’s illness was not of natural causes. Of course Logan didn’t take much convincing, he was just looking for someone or something to blame for the loss of our sister.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of a Nathaniel Boothe,’ Olivia replied in confusion.

  ‘Then there seems to be several gaps in your history,’ Theo frowned. ‘I never trusted Nathaniel; there was just something about him that made me wary. He was always there in the background, whispering, always whispering in someone’s ear, like a snake. He had too much influence over Logan, it was his suggestion that Logan be appointed in the capacity of Witchfinder and he fuelled his rage and his hate at every opportunity. I tried to reach him, but with every day that passed he became less my brother and more a tool of Nathaniel’s righteous campaign against the devil.’

  ‘So how did you end up as a Witchfinder?

  ‘It was Logan’s idea or Nathaniel’s I don’t know which. I thought that if I was with him I could exercise some kind of restraint; maybe I could make him see reason. He had my father appointed too, although I don’t know why. My father permanently resided at the bottom of a bottle and died within weeks of his appointment by the court. That just left my brother and I, he was all I had. I thought that if I could just reach him, if I could make him deal with his grief and the only way he would let me get close to him, was if he believed I shared his convictions, if I took the vow.’

  ‘You did it to save your brother,’

  ‘For all the good it did me,’ Theo shook his head miserably, ‘he was too far gone. If it hadn’t been for Nathaniel I might have been able to reach him but it was almost as if Nathaniel had him in his thrall.’

  ‘What happened Theo?’ she asked softly.

  ‘Terrible things,’ he closed his eyes as if to shut out the horrors he had witnessed. His jaw tensed, ‘during the time I spent in Salem Town as a Witchfinder, the things I saw, the things I did, I will never forgive myself for. It was then I realised I could not save my brother from himself but if I was ever going to be able to live with myself I had to walk away. I left Salem and returned to our farm where I remained until the night he sent Bridget and Hester West to be held prisoner in our barn.’

  ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘That’s what I asked when they were brought to me. When I asked why they hadn’t been sent to the prison with the other accused I was told Nathaniel himself wanted to question them. That in itself was strange, Nathaniel never directly involved himself. He preferred to remain in the background manipulating others. But I just couldn’t understand what they could possibly know, they were children after all and barely as old as Temperance had been. I asked the children outright if they knew what Nathaniel could possibly want with them and Hester told me that they had killed her mother. That Nathaniel wanted something from them and he believed they knew where it was.’

  ‘What was it that he was looking for?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Theo shrugged, ‘but Hester referred to it as Infernum.’

  ‘Infernum?’

  ‘Have you heard of it?’ Theo asked curiously, ‘Do you know what it is?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ Olivia’s brow folded in thought, ‘I’ve never heard of it, I mean Infernum is the Latin word for Hell but I’ve never
heard of it referred to as an object. Maybe there’s something in Hester’s journal. I haven’t finished reading them all yet.’

  ‘So what about you?’ Theo took a pull of his beer which was now flat and warm.

  ‘What about me?’ Olivia repeated with a sigh, ‘well I’m assuming you’ve heard some gossip about my family. In this town it would be hard not to.’

  ‘I am not interested in gossip,’ he replied, ‘only the truth.

  ‘We were happy once,’ Olivia stared into the flames, ‘I lived in town with my mother and father in a little house with a blue front door. I had a dog named Truman. My Nana Alice lived in this house with her twin sister Aunt Evie, we’d come to visit and I’d play in the woods with my dog and Jake and Louisa. My father was a teacher and my mother; well she was just my mom. We were a normal family; at least I thought we were.’

  She shook her head lightly, not wanting to relive the memories that kept churning over and over in her mind like an old film reel, only the pictures; the memories were distorted, fleeting. She found the more she tried to hold onto them the more the details kept slipping away. All she could remember was her grandmother dead on the floor in a pool of blood and her father as he sank the knife into her mother’s chest, and then fire... so much fire.

  ‘I woke up, they were fighting, my mom and dad, their voices carried up the stairs and the noise woke me up. I wasn’t sure what was happening at first, they never raised their voices to me or each other. I was so confused by it that I crept out of bed and snuck down the stairs to see what was happening. Nana was already dead, mom and dad where fighting, there was a knife.’

  ‘He killed her?’ Theo spoke softly.

  She nodded slowly.

  ‘Then he burned the house to the ground and took me and fled.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Theo breathed.

  ‘We were on the run for days, weeks maybe I don’t know. My memories are… fragmented.’ She shook her head, ‘anyway the police finally caught up with us in Philadelphia and my dad was arrested.’

  ‘What about you?’ Theo frowned.

  ‘Child services were called in, my only other living relative my aunt Evie was asked if she would take custody of me.’

  ‘So you went to live with her?’

  ‘No,’ Olivia replied flatly, ‘she didn’t want me.’

  ‘What?’ Theo answered in shock, ‘but she was your family, it was her duty to care for you.’

  ‘Theo, you can’t make someone care out of duty, besides I wouldn’t have wanted her to. At least she was honest, I knew where I stood and I guess I can understand to a certain extent. I was a constant reminder of everything she’d lost and of the man who taken it from her.’

  ‘How old were you?’ he demanded.

  ‘Eight.’

  ‘For god’s sake Olivia, you were a child,’ He replied angrily, ‘don’t give me “you understand.” I don’t understand how a woman can blame a child for the sins of her father, she was not worthy of you.’

  ‘Maybe, but it doesn’t change anything,’

  ‘What happened after she refused you?’

  ‘I was put into the foster care system.’

  ‘An orphanage?’

  ‘Kind of,’ she shrugged, ‘I bounced back and forth between a few different families but as I got older I knew they got more and more uncomfortable about having me around. So I ended up more or less permanently in a group home with all the other troubled kids no one wants to adopt.’

  ‘Olivia,’ he struggled to find the right words.

  She shrugged.

  ‘I got over it a long time ago; you can’t blame those people, after all no one wants to adopt the child of a murderer.’ She smiled, ‘makes people very nervous.’

  ‘How can you smile about it?’

  ‘There’s no point in being bitter because no one wanted me. I realised pretty early on, no one was coming to save me and if I wanted to make something of my life I was going to have to save myself. So I studied hard, fortunately school was always easy for me and I got into college on a full scholarship.’

  ‘So you’ve always been alone.’

  ‘Not completely,’ she replied, ‘in college I met Mags, Margaret Hale. She was a guest lecturer and we just kind of hit it off. She’s much older than me and she seemed to fill all those spaces that were missing, she became my family. It was her that encouraged me to study the history of witchcraft and then New England history. She also helped me get my first couple of books published. Now I write historical reference books for a living.’

  ‘You’re amazing.’

  ‘No I’m not,’ she replied quietly, ‘I just learned to survive.’

  ‘There are many that would not have done even that.’

  ‘Then I pity them,’ she shrugged, ‘life is a gift, you have to make the most of it.’

  ‘I’ll drink to that,’ Theo grinned.

  A sudden pounding at the door had Olivia rolling her eyes and yanking the throw off her legs.

  ‘I can’t believe I thought moving here would mean peace and quiet.’

  Theo climbed to his feet and followed her from the room; it was getting late and was already dark outside. He watched as she peered through the peep hole and sighed.

  ‘Jake,’ she greeted him warily as she opened the door, ‘you don’t look happy, why do I get the feeling you’re about to give me more bad news?’

  ‘Olive,’ he nodded as he stepped through the door, closing it behind him, ‘Theo.’

  ‘What’s going on Jake?’ Olivia frowned.

  He removed his hat and adjusted his gun belt uncomfortably, clasping a manila folder in one hand.

  ‘There’s been another disappearance,’ he replied, ‘just a kid this time, not long turned nineteen.’

  ‘How long has he been missing?’

  ‘Three days.’

  ‘Three days?’ Olivia repeated, ‘why are we only hearing about this now?’

  ‘Because he was supposed to go visit a friend in Salem, he never made it there, but his parents thought he was in Salem and his friend figured he changed his mind when he was a no show. It was simply a case of miscommunication. It was only when he was due back earlier today and never showed that the parents called the friend and realised he was missing.’

  ‘Damn it,’ Olivia whispered, ‘when the hell is the Chief going to figure out it’s not me and actually start looking for the killer? How many more people have to get hurt first?’

  ‘There’s more,’ Jake told her reluctantly.

  ‘Of course there is,’ she sighed. ‘Well lay it on me; short of getting abducted myself I don’t think my day can get much worse.’

  ‘Do you use the Gas’n’Go about a mile from here?’

  ‘Yes,’ she nodded, ‘I’ve used it a couple of times since I got here. It’s the one nearest my house, why?’

  ‘The kid that went missing is Lucas Campbell, he works there,’

  Her eyes went distant as she thought back to the last time she was there.

  ‘Tall kid, dark hair?’

  ‘That’s him,’ Jake confirmed.

  ‘Well that’s just great,’ her heart sank, ‘that’ll just give Chief Walcott more ammunition.’

  ‘He was last seen three days ago when he finished out his shift. He was supposed to head out to the friends straight from work. The Chief wouldn’t let me anywhere near Brody’s crime scene so I was the one who took the call about Lucas when it came in. I headed out to the Gas’n’Go as it was the last place he was seen, and pulled the surveillance tapes. I pulled this from the camera; the footage was from the beginning of Lucas’s shift.’

  He handed Olivia the folder and watched silently as she flipped it open. Her mouth tightened. She looked down at the grainy surveillance photo and recognised the pale haired man loitering in one of the aisles, staring at the cashier.

  ‘Who is he?’ Theo asked leaning over Olivia’s shoulder and studying the picture.
r />   ‘We don’t know yet,’ Jake replied as she handed him back the folder.

  ‘He was at the pub the night Adam disappeared, and then I saw him again in town. He was watching me and then Chief Walcott showed me pictures of him with my father outside Morley Ridge Psychiatric facility. We think he’s the one who helped my father escape.’

  ‘Do you think he is responsible for the murders?’ Theo asked.

  ‘I think it’s entirely too close for comfort, the Gas’n’Go is only a mile and a half from where Brody’s body was found and half a mile from Olivia’s house. Not only that he seems to have taken an unhealthy interest in Olivia personally and we know he is working with her father.’

  ‘You think my father is involved in the murders don’t you?’ Olivia asked quietly.

  ‘It’s a strong possibility,’ Jake admitted reluctantly; ‘I wish I could get my hands on the original files from the ‘94 murders.’

  ‘To see if my dad is involved in those murders too?’ she snapped.

  ‘Olive,’ Jake replied softly, ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’

  ‘I’m not upset,’ she replied coolly, ‘but I am tired. You can give Theo a ride back to your place as you’re here.’

  ‘Olivia you can’t stay here by yourself,’ Jake replied.

  ‘The hell I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid Olivia, there have now been two murders near to your property and God forbid possibly a third and the main suspect is stalking you.’

  ‘I don’t care I’m not leaving.’

  She knew she was been irrational and rude but she couldn’t seem to help the words tumbling from her mouth. The stress of the last weeks was finally catching up with her and she’d had enough. She couldn’t make them understand why she couldn’t leave the house, when she couldn’t even explain it herself. All she knew was she was bound to the house, to the land. She could almost feel the threads winding around her ankles, sinking into her bones, and plunging down into the earth like the roots of a tree. She had to stay and she was sick to death of arguing about it. It was like everything was closing in on her, she didn’t want to discuss the murders or her father or any of it. She wanted everyone to go away and leave her alone so she could catch her breath. She could feel the panic mixed with the anger and hurt inside her, turning into a writhing churning mass, like a new born world spinning into existence from primordial chaos. Made of heat and light, she knew if she let go it would consume her. She had to keep a tight leash on it but her grip was already slipping.