Chapter 26
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 that 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 a 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.
Even though 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 on a draft 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?” she asked stiffly.
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.
“Oh no you don’t, Olivia,” he whispered into her ear. “Did you really think I don’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. 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 me, 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 mantel in Mrs. Talbot’s house, a picture taken by her mother of the three men standing happily, 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,” he 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, making her 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, as he’d been the fourth victim from the original 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 that the man he had called brother was the killer, the discovery of this last body had pushed him over the edge. 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, and he’s the only other person besides me who 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 growled as he 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 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.