The Guardians Complete Series 1 Box Set: Contains Mercy, The Ferryman, Crossroads, Witchfinder, Infernum

by Wendy Saunders

  ‘I appreciate that it has been a difficult day, but we really do need to ask you some questions. If you would be more comfortable we could interview you at your home instead of the station.’

  ‘I’m not too comfortable having cops in my house after the way I have been treated lately.’

  ‘I understand, but if it helps it will just be me and of course you are welcome to have your lawyer present,’ he glanced at Erica. ‘I can promise you that you will be treated with the utmost respect and consideration.’

  ‘Fine,’ Olivia blew out the breath she’d been holding.

  ‘Thank you,’ he nodded as he stood. ‘I’ll drive you home personally.’

  ‘I’ll let Jake and Theo know to meet us back at your place,’ Erica pulled her phone out of her purse.

  ‘Ladies,’ Mac indicated for them to follow him.

  They barely made it down the corridor to the stairwell, when a younger officer that Olivia had never seen before, rushed toward them calling for Mac.

  ‘Captain Macallister,’ he breathed heavily.

  ‘Yes?’ he stopped and turned towards him.

  ‘Sir, I was sent to find you. You’re needed immediately.’

  ‘Why? What is it?’

  ‘Sir,’ he glanced warily at the two women behind him, his voice dropping low, ‘they’ve found another body.’

  ‘God,’ he blew out a breath. ‘Alright I’ll be right there.’

  The younger man scurried off and Mac turned back to Olivia and Erica, his expression contrite.

  ‘I am sorry Olivia,’ he shook his head, ‘I’m afraid I need to deal with this situation. Perhaps I could come by later if that is convenient for you?’

  ‘Sure,’ she nodded.

  ‘I’ll have one of the other deputies drive you home.’

  ‘That won’t be necessary,’ Olivia replied, ‘I’ll get a cab.’

  ‘No please,’ Mac answered, ‘I insist. If you would just follow the stairs down to the parking garage, someone will be with you in a moment.’

  She watched Mac disappear down the corridor while Erica tried Jake’s number again.

  ‘There’s still no answer,’ she frowned.

  ‘Jake’s probably still driving,’ Olivia told her as they headed down the stairs. ‘Why don’t you try Theo’s number instead.’

  Once they arrived at the parking lot they were shown to one of the unlocked cars and told someone would be with them shortly. Olivia settled into the back and dropped her head back against the seat. Her stomach growled loudly and she could have killed for a decent coffee.

  ‘Damn it,’ Erica swore softly.

  ‘Still no answer?’

  ‘No signal down here,’ Erica murmured holding her phone up at a different angle. ‘I’m just going to head outside and try again, I’ll be back in a moment.’

  ‘I’ll be right here,’ Olivia yawned, pulling the blanket tighter around her shoulders against the chill and with a deep sigh she closed her eyes.

  Chief Walcott tugged viciously against the handcuffs anchoring him to the heavy table. His gaze was dark and narrow as he surveyed the room, his jaw ticking in tightly clenched fury. How dare they? Handcuffing him like some common criminal. Arresting him? Who the hell did they think they were? He couldn’t believe they would just release Olivia West. Why could they not see what she was? He couldn’t trust them, none of them. He was obviously on his own and if the law wasn’t going to back him…well then, he would just have to take matters into his own hands.

  The door clicked open quietly and Deputy Carl stepped through, holding a paper cup. Behind him he could hear some sort of commotion and a great deal of activity.

  ‘I brought you a coffee Chief.’

  ‘What’s going on Carl?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m not sure I’m supposed to say anything,’ he paused in the doorway frowning.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ he replied forcing down the anger and assuming a more congenial expression.

  ‘Well,’ Carl replied reluctantly, ‘I guess there’s no harm.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘They found another body in the woods.’

  His heart jolted in his chest and his jaw clenched tightly. If they had just listened to him in the first place this would have never happened.

  ‘How?’ he asked, dreading the answer, ‘how did he die?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure,’ he shook his head, ‘but word is it looks like his brain was removed.’

  A buzzing began in his ears and his heart began to pound in his chest. For a second, he was transported back to 1994 and looking down at the mangled corpse of the man he loved, a man with his brain missing from his skull.

  ‘I mean, what’s the world coming to,’ Carl continued. ‘Who the hell would do such a gruesome thing and why?’

  Chief Walcott barely heard him. His gaze narrowed and a thin veil descended over his eyes, his breath coming in sharp gasps.

  ‘Chief?’ Carl placed the cup down on the table, ‘Chief are you okay? You don’t look good.’

  ‘Can’t breathe,’ he wheezed slumping forward. ‘My chest…’

  Carl rushed forward, unhooking the keys from his belt and reaching for the handcuffs.

  ‘Hold on Chief,’ he unlocked the cuffs, freeing his hands.

  As the cuffs clattered harmlessly against the table he reached for the Chief, intending to loosen his collar, but suddenly he felt a hand wrap around the back of his neck and the next thing he knew his face was smashed hard against the table, then blackness enveloped him.

  Chief Walcott stood slowly and watched the unconscious man slump to the floor. Stepping calmly over him, he pulled Carl’s weapon from its holster, checking it was loaded before he tucked it into the back of his pants. Opening the door slowly with a quiet click, he glanced out into the corridor, and once he was certain the way was clear, he slipped silently from the room.

  Olivia was just drifting off when a sudden scuffling noise startled her. Sitting up abruptly, she leaned out of the car.

  ‘Hello?’

  Her voice echoed in the silence.

  She stepped out of the car and slowly looked around the parking garage.

  ‘Hello?’ she repeated.

  Unable to see or hear anything suspicious she shrugged and turned back toward the car. Suddenly, she felt herself being shoved forward and unable to stop her momentum she felt her forehead crack sharply against the edge of the open door. Everything thing began to spin and she felt herself pitch forward into blackness.

  ‘I still couldn’t get hold of either of them, I don’t know why they bother having phones if they’re not going to answer them.’

  Erica stalked back to the car, staring at her phone as she finished sending a text. Aware that Olivia hadn’t answered her, she looked up to see Olivia’s limp form being bundled into the back of the car.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ she dropped her phone and purse, and ran forward.

  Chief Walcott turned toward her his teeth bared in an angry snarl. Grabbing her roughly he threw 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 tires and head straight for her. Rolling out of the way, she turned and watched as the car crashed through the barrier and disappeared.

  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 realized 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 into 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 toward the window.

  As she got closer she caught a glimpse of brightly colored 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 colored glass bottles suspended from a tree. She’d seen something similar, 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 now 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, she realized 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. Snapping her head sharply to the side 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 slowly around her chair, 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 whispered, ‘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.

  Shit, 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 toward 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 file 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?’