Chief Walcott turned towards her his teeth bared and grabbed her upper arms throwing her out of the way. She crashed into one of the metal pillars and fell to the ground. Pushing herself shakily to her knees she glanced up in time to see the car peel out of the parking space in a loud squeal of tyres and head straight for her. Rolling out of the way she turned and watched as the car crashed through the barrier and disappeared.
Chapter 24.
Olivia opened her eyes slowly, trying to ignore the painful throbbing of her forehead where she was sure there would be an ugly welt forming. Gradually she became aware she was in a sitting position and unable to move her arms and legs. Looking down she realised her ankles and wrists were bound to a wooden chair with duct tape.
‘Great,’ she breathed heavily, apparently her day could get worse, much worse.
Glancing around the room she could see she was in some kind of cabin. There was not much more to it than a small kitchen area furnished with a wood burning stove, which was already alight and kicking out some heat into the small room. Tucked in the corner she noticed a single metal bed and a scruffy cushioned chair. Despite the fact the furniture was old and sparse it was obviously well cared for, from the worn handmade quilt on the bed to the freshly scrubbed floor, making Olivia wonder where the hell she was.
She heard a curious tinkling sound coming from outside the window and stretched as far as she could; trying to see what was making the noise, hoping to make out her surroundings. She bounced gently, trying to scoot the chair across the wooden floor towards the window. As she got closer she caught a glimpse of brightly coloured glass. Frowning in confusion she painstakingly inched the chair closer. Now she could see what was making the noise, it was dozens and dozens of brightly coloured glass bottles suspended from a tree. She’d seen something similar before when she’d visited New Orleans just after graduating college. Unless she was mistaken that was a bottle tree, the bottles were used to catch evil spirits and hold them until the rising sun came up and destroyed them. But that was old world magic, brought over on the slave ships from Africa and it was very unusual to see them this far North.
Before she could contemplate it further the door opened and she swung her head around. Her eyes widened as Chief Walcott stepped into the room in a draught of cold air. He was carrying a small black zipped bag and as his gaze met hers it burned icily.
‘Where are we?’ Olivia asked.
For a moment he continued to stare at her.
‘A cabin on the opposite side of the lake to where your house is located,’ he answered finally, ‘no one will find you here.’
‘Why did you bring me here?’
He stalked around her and placed the bag down on a small wooden table. Although she couldn’t see what he was doing she heard him unzip the bag. Her heart kicked up a notch, knowing she was in very real danger; he was a man running out of options. No one believed him and he was facing criminal charges of his own, including kidnapping if he returned. She knew he had nothing left to lose. There was only one way out of this situation, she was going to have to risk using her magic in front of him.
Slowly and carefully she reached inside herself for the heat, allowing the fire to flow through her veins down her arms to pool at her wrists. She needed to melt the duct tape but she was going to have to do it without him noticing. The heat banded around her wrists and ankles simultaneously as she slowly began to raise the temperature of the tape. But as the faint scent of melting plastic reached her nostrils she realised she was going to have to work faster. She increased the heat and gave an experimental tug hoping the tape would snap but it was still holding firm.
Suddenly she felt him grab her hair and snap her head to the side sharply, as he plunged a needle into her neck.
She gasped in pain and shock as he released her, her head falling forward, suddenly very heavy.
‘Oh no you don’t Olivia,’ he whispered into her ear, ‘did you really think I didn’t know what you are or what you are capable of?’
‘What did you do to me?’ her words came out slurred and sounded foreign to her ears.
‘I just gave you a little something to help you relax.’ He smiled for the first time since she’d met him but instead of being reassuring it was cold and malicious. ‘The less you are able to focus, the less likely you are to be able to use magic.’
‘Magic? Are you crazy?’ she looked up at him as the room swam in and out of focus, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’
He stalked around her chair slowly, making focusing on him even harder.
‘Olivia, let’s be honest here as there are only the two of us, I knew your father for a very long time. We weren’t just best friends we were brothers.’
For a moment she thought she heard an aching note of loss in his voice but then it was gone.
‘I knew all his secrets,’ he continued, still circling the chair, making her head spin, ‘and he knew mine.’
He stopped abruptly and stepped in closer.
‘Did you really think your mother and father were the only ones descended from powerful witching families?’ He leaned in, his breath gusting against her ear, ‘didn’t you ever stop to ask yourself how I managed to cross your protective wards to arrest you in the first place?’
Her head snapped up to meet his eyes. That thought hadn’t occurred to her yet, everything had happened so fast that she hadn’t had time to process it all.
‘How?’ she whispered.
He pulled a small flannel bag from under his shirt collar; it hung from his neck on a leather thong and smelled of herbs.
‘It’s a Mojo bag,’ he answered her unspoken question.
‘But you’re not a witch,’ she shook her head, ‘I would have known.’
‘So arrogant,’ he sneered, ‘just like your father.’
Her head dropped again, it was getting heavier as the drug took effect.
‘I may not have the kind of power you and your parents were born with, but I did have a grandmother who taught me a lot. This was her cabin, she came here from Louisiana. I was fair skinned like my father but I was raised to know her secrets.’
‘Hoodoo?’ Olivia gasped, ‘She was a hoodoo woman?’
‘She was drawn to the power of this place like so many before her. It was here she met my grandfather and took the name Walcott but she never forgot her roots or the Bayou she came from.’
He wandered over to the window and glanced out, lost in thought.
‘We used to come here every summer, Jimmy and I, Charlie too and Isabel. My grandmother was long gone, but we would bed down here on the floor in our sleeping bags. We’d swim in the lake and have cookouts under the stars,’ he murmured, ‘it felt like it would last forever.’
She tried to cast her mind back, it was fuzzy and slow but she recalled the picture she had seen on the mantle in Mrs Talbot’s house, a picture taken by her mother of the three men standing happily, with arms around each other, outside this very cabin in front of the lake.
‘Hurting me won’t bring him back,’ she answered slowly, speech was becoming harder.
‘What the hell do you think you know?’ he growled stalking back to her and grabbing her face roughly, his fingers pinching so tightly they left marks on the skin of her jaw.
‘I know you loved him, Jimmy.’
‘You don’t get to speak his name,’ his shouted in her face, his eyes wild; ‘you don’t ever get to speak his name. I know what you did to him they found his body today.’
‘Today?’ she struggled to understand through the fog in her mind, ‘James died over twenty years ago I was only eight years old.’
He gripped her face tighter causing her to wince. He was obviously confused. If the body they found today was the fourth victim and it followed the same pattern as the original murders, it meant that whoever the victim was he would have been killed in the same manner as James Talbot. James was the fourth victim from the ‘94 murders. Sh
it, this was obviously what pushed Walcott out of any sense of reality. After spending two decades mourning a man he couldn’t openly love and believing the man he had called brother was the killer, the discovery of this last body had pushed him over the edge. She knew he was even more dangerous now.
‘What are you planning to do?’ she whispered, ‘why did you bring me here?’
She heard the metallic click of a gun being cocked and her gut clenched. She felt the cold metal press against her cheek.
‘You do know your father has been watching you don’t you?’ he breathed against the side of her face his voice low. ‘By now he’ll know I have you. Jimmy and Isabel are dead; he’s the only other person besides me that knows about this place. It won’t take him long to figure it out, he always was the clever one.’
‘This is about my dad?’ She blinked trying to clear her thoughts but it was like trying to wade through syrup, ‘I’m bait?’
‘It’s about both of you paying for what you have done,’ he hissed. ‘I can’t trust the system to work so I have to take matters into my own hands. Once your father gets here I am going to kill him and then…’ she felt the barrel press against the back of her skull, ‘then I am going to put a bullet in your head.’
‘Where the hell is she?’ Theo paced the floor in frustration.
‘Mr Beckett,’ Mac held up his hands, ‘if you’ll just calm down.’
‘No he won’t calm down,’ Jake had been kneeling down in front of Erica holding an ice pack to her knee, but now he stood. ‘He has every right to be mad.’ He turned towards Mac, ‘with all due respect if the Mayor had been doing her job and reined that madman in sooner, Walcott wouldn’t have had the chance to take her. Now they could be anywhere. You said it yourself; he took Carl’s weapon, for all we know she could already be dead and he’s dumped her body somewhere.’
Theo roared in fury and punched the nearest filing cabinet leaving a deep dent in the metal.
Mac raised his brows in surprise turning to Jake.
‘Don’t look at me,’ he replied coolly, ‘I’m not going to rein him in; if that was me I’d already be choking the life out of that moron Carl for uncuffing the bastard in the first place.’
‘Look,’ he held his hands up trying to pacify Theo, ‘he took your woman, I get it. Under the same circumstances I’d feel the same way but just think for a second. If he wanted her dead, he’d have simply killed her in the parking garage and left her body there. He took her because he needs her for some reason which means there’s a good chance she’s still alive.’
‘He has a point,’ Jake turned to Theo, ‘Walcott’s obsessed with her father and we know for a fact Charles Connell has been watching her, what’s the betting Walcott knows it too.’
‘What?’ Mac replied looking between Theo and Jake. ‘Look I know you’ve got no reason to trust me but I want her back safe as much as you do and I can’t do that if I don’t have all the information, so for God’s sake someone fill me in will you.’
‘Why?’
‘Why do I want you to fill me in?’
‘Why do you want her back safe?’ Theo asked, her dark eyes blazing.
‘Because I was there,’ he sighed, ‘the night her father fled with her to Philadelphia, I was one of the officers on duty that night. I was the one who held her while she watched her father being taken away in cuffs, ranting about demons and devil’s traps.’
Theo and Jake exchanged a sharp look.
‘She was this tiny beautiful dark haired child, with sad eyes the colour of single malt whiskey, clutching onto her dog as if her life depended on it, her clothes covered in her mother’s blood.’ Mac shook his head, ‘she got to me. I used to check in on her while she was in Philly, when she was moved by child services I lost her for a while but I picked her up again when she turned eleven. By then she didn’t remember me, so I kept my distance but I kept tabs on her to make sure she was okay until she turned eighteen. Even though she doesn’t know it I look in on her every couple of years. If I’d known what was going on since she came back to Mercy you can bet your ass I would have done something about that lunatic Walcott long before now.’
Theo glanced at Jake who nodded in silent agreement.
‘Thomas Walcott and Charles Connell used to be best friends back in the day,’ Jake told him. ‘They came up through school together with another guy by the name of James Talbot.’
‘James Talbot?’ Mac frowned, ‘wasn’t he one of the victims from the ‘94 murders.’
‘Yes he was,’ Jake replied in surprise, ‘anyway the three of them were tight like brothers, well except for Walcott and Talbot, they had a relationship of a different nature.’
Mac stared at Jake.
‘They were lovers,’ Theo answered for him, seeing how hard it was to tell another's personal secret, despite everything Walcott had done.
‘I see,’ Mac murmured.
‘Olivia’s dad was the only other person that knew about them and after James Talbot was killed Walcott was convinced Connell was the murderer and that the killings only stopped because of his arrest.’ Jake continued. ‘Walcott knew Connell for years, he can read the man and if he’s going after the man he believed killed his lover…’
‘He’s using Olivia as bait,’ Mac agreed, ‘he will have figured out Connell is watching her, the question is where would he take her?’
‘We need to run all his addresses, any properties he owns or is connected to,’ Jake nodded.
‘Okay, let’s move we don’t know how much time we’ve got.’
Olivia swam through layers of fogginess trying to regain consciousness; her vision swam in and out of focus as she lifted her head with a tremendous effort. She could hear a clicking sound. Looking across the cramped room she could vaguely make out Walcott sitting on the bed waiting, impatiently cocking and uncocking the hammer on his gun. He looked up in surprise as he caught Olivia looking at him through slightly unfocused eyes. He stood abruptly and headed back towards the table behind her where the small half filled vial and syringe lay.
‘I would have thought you’d have been out for longer,’ he murmured, almost to himself, ‘I thought I’d given you enough, maybe you need a bigger dose.’
Something about what he said triggered a thought; the drug was spread throughout her body via her blood. She already knew her body ran at a higher average temperature due to her magic, so what if that was why the dose was wearing off so quickly. If she could focus enough to use her magic she could raise her body temperature higher, forcing her heart to work faster. If she could speed up her metabolism, burning the drug out of her system quicker, she might stand a chance.
‘No,’ she slurred as he once again grabbed her hair and yanked her head to the side ready to plunge the needle into her neck, and she turned and sunk her teeth viciously into his hand, drawing blood.
‘You bitch,’ he hissed pulling back his fist and punching her in anger.
Olivia felt rather than heard the cracking sound her cheekbone made and could almost see her cheek swelling from the corner of her eye.
He grabbed her hair, yanking her back harder than before and stabbed the needle into her neck causing her to cry out in pain.
‘Nothing,’ Jake smashed his hand against the desk in frustration as his search came up empty again.
‘What,’ Theo stopped pacing.
‘We’ve run every search we can think of but he only has one address listed and we’ve already got a team over there waiting in case he shows. But he’s not stupid enough to turn up at his own house.
‘Have you tried his Grandmama’s place?’ Ada Bradley wandered in and dropped a tray of coffees onto the desk, ‘I seem to recall her having a cabin out on the lake somewhere.’
Jake looked up at the elderly desk clerk and sighed.
‘We’ve already checked there’s nothing listed under Walcott.’
‘This was before she married the Chief’s Granddaddy, she wa
s a Creole, her name was Bachelier back then.’
Jake tapped a few more keys and still came up blank.
‘There’s nothing under Clare Bachelier,’ he shook his head.
‘Well no there wouldn’t be, her name was Clea Bachelier. Chief’s granddaddy made her change it when they got married, he thought Clare was more appropriate.’
Jake tapped a few more keys and fist pumped the air.
‘Mrs Bradley I could kiss you,’ he jumped up and grabbed his Jacket. ‘The Bachelier place is on the North-West bank of the Lake, I’ve got the address.’
‘Let’s go then,’ Mac nodded and both he and Theo followed Jake from the room.
Olivia tried to raise her head but it just bobbed on her neck as her eyes rolled back. She fought to stay awake but he must have given her a pretty big dose of whatever was in that vial. She could feel herself slipping and she knew she didn’t have long. The sudden smell of the forest filled her nostrils and she breathed deeply, it was a sharp clean smell, like the scent of the trees after a heavy rain. For a brief second the fog in her mind lifted and she felt someone lean in close and whisper in her ear.
‘You know what you have to do.’
Just as quickly as it had come the feeling and the voice was gone. The heaviness returned and her heart pumped sluggishly. She did know what she needed to do; she had to burn the drug out of her blood. Even now she could feel it pumping through her veins like poison. Allowing her eyes to close she reached down to where her magic pulsed. It beat within her breast like a tiny second heart, pulsing with heat and light. She reached for it but it seemed to be surrounded by a dark wraith-like smog.
She reached for it again but the darkness enveloped the bright strands of gold and red. Anger began to burn inside her and the more she fed her fury, the brighter her fire pulsed. She focused on the pain, the unfairness, everything that had happened to her since she’d come back to Mercy and the ball of light grew. She grasped onto it with everything she had and the ball burst into bright flames. Strands of yellow, gold and red snaked through her veins like tentacles, burning the blackness as it went.
Mercy (The Guardians Series 1) Page 40
