Legacy of the Watchers Series Boxed Set: Books 1-3

by Nancy Madore

  You can handle her, Beth insisted inwardly.

  When the woman reached the bed she stopped. Her head spun to the left and then to the right. Beth remained perfectly still, hardly daring to breathe. The woman lifted the blankets very gingerly but, of course, she found an empty bed. She turned toward the closets, putting her back to Beth.

  Very slowly, Beth rose up from behind the bed and aimed her gun.

  “Drop the knife,” she said.

  The woman’s head whirled around and, for an instant, Beth felt that same terror that came over her in the cemetery. She obstinately willed it away.

  “Now!” she demanded. “Or I will shoot you in the gut and watch you die a slow, miserable death.”

  The woman paused only a half a minute before dropping the knife. It was a heavy artillery knife—the kind used for hunting—and Beth shuddered again. Who the hell was this woman?

  “Now step back,” said Beth, “away from the bed. That’s it. A little further. Now sit down on the floor and keep both your hands where I can see them.”

  The woman did exactly as Beth instructed, so Beth slowly made her way around the bed and, without taking her eyes off her prisoner for a second, flipped a switch on the wall. The room was instantly flooded with light.

  Beth sucked in her breath. There, sitting on the floor in the middle of her and Wayne’s bedroom, was the most beautiful woman Beth had ever seen. Her hair was as black as night and her large green eyes were lined with thick, dark lashes. She was dressed from head to toe in form-fitting black, displaying a figure that was enviable. Everything about her was exquisitely feminine—everything, that is, except her expression. Her eyes were fixed on the gun in Beth’s hand, and for a minute, it almost seemed as if she were assessing the risk should she challenge Beth! But apparently she decided against it. Her shoulders dropped the tiniest bit and her eyes grudgingly rose to meet those of her captor. Beth almost gasped at the fury she saw there, but she took a step backwards instead. She was once again reminded of that horrible cry in the cemetery.

  Pulling herself together, Beth leveled her gun at the woman’s chest.

  “Start talking,” she said.

  Chapter 29

  A moment ago, the dark-haired woman had the look of a cornered cat preparing to strike, but suddenly she seemed as harmless as a dove. She studied Beth with something like interest.

  “I underestimated you,” she said, and it almost sounded like admiration in her voice. “I’m used to dealing with men…who are much more predictable.”

  “Men like my husband?” Beth couldn’t help asking.

  “No,” replied the woman coolly. “But then…your husband wasn’t like other men.”

  This casual remark about Wayne enraged Beth like nothing else could’ve done. She raised her gun so that it was pointed at the woman’s face.

  “How did you know my husband?” she asked through gritted teeth.

  Anger flashed in the woman’s eyes, but it disappeared so quickly that Beth wondered if she had only imagined it.

  “You didn’t trust your husband,” the woman observed casually. “Now that is interesting.”

  The last thing Beth wanted to do was to jump to the bait, but she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “Why is that interesting?” she asked, feeling foolish.

  “Because he adored you,” the woman replied in a derisive tone. It was clear that her remark was intended to hurt Beth, not to reassure her. She succeeded.

  Beth blinked back her tears. “Is that why he was leaving me?”

  “He didn’t want to leave you,” snapped the woman. “He had no choice!”

  Something in the way she said it brought Beth up short. It was almost as if she were mocking Beth’s position as the jealous wife.

  And suddenly Beth didn’t think Wayne was having an affair with this woman.

  “How did you know my husband?” she demanded again.

  “He was helping me.”

  “Helping you…how?” asked Beth.

  “He was helping me to find someone,” said the woman, and something flickered in her eyes that once again reminded Beth of that horrible cry in the cemetery.

  “I don’t understand,” said Beth. “Who were you looking for…and how was my husband able to help you?”

  “It’s hard to explain,” said the woman. “They were old friends.”

  Beth thought of the picture. “And the ring?” she prompted. “What is it?”

  “It’s nothing to you,” said the woman. “It has no value to anyone but me.”

  “So why was Wayne going after it?” asked Beth.

  “I told you already…he was helping me! Look, all I want from you is that ring. I don’t want to hurt you—”

  “Is that why you brought your hunting knife?” asked Beth. When the woman didn’t reply to this Beth re-pointed her gun—“Tell me what’s so important about the ring!” she demanded.

  “It’s a…key of sorts,” said the woman. “It will help me find the person I’m looking for. That’s all it’s good for.”

  “How will it help you?” asked Beth.

  “It’s hard to explain,” said the woman. “And you would never believe me anyway.”

  “What happened to Wayne?” asked Beth. “Did you kill him?”

  “No,” said the woman. “The people he worked for did.”

  “How?” asked Beth.

  “I don’t know,” said the woman.

  “This isn’t adding up,” said Beth. “I’m calling the police.” Keeping her eyes—and her gun—on the woman, she reached for her phone.

  “Your husband isn’t dead,” said the woman.

  Beth froze. “What?”

  The woman’s eyes never wavered. “Your husband is not dead,” she reiterated.

  “I saw his body with my own eyes,” said Beth.

  “That wasn’t him,” insisted the woman.

  In spite of her misgivings, Beth could feel hope curling up within her.

  “Who was it then?” she demanded.

  The woman sighed. “This is going to be hard for you to believe,” she said, “but the man you knew as Wayne Timmons was…someone else.”

  A short, bitter laugh escaped Beth’s lips. “What?”

  “I’m talking about the person inside Wayne Timmons,” she said. “It’s Wayne’s soul that knew the soul I’m looking for. They knew each other in another life. That’s why he was helping me find him.”

  Under any other circumstances, Beth would’ve been torn between laughing in the woman’s face and shooting her right there on the spot. But something in the woman’s manner—and, probably, in Beth’s current state of mind, as well—made her want to hear what the woman had to say.

  “So you’re…like, looking for a ghost,” said Beth sarcastically.

  “I’m telling you the truth,” said the woman. “Some souls—not all, but some—come back here again and again. Your husband is one of them. And so is the soul I’m looking for.”

  Beth snorted. “Sounds like an episode of Doctor Who,” she said.

  “What?” asked the woman.

  “Doctor Who,” repeated Beth. “You know; the time traveler who keeps coming back in new bodies?” The expression on the woman’s face was one of utter confusion. “You’ve never heard of Doctor Who?”

  “No,” said the woman. “But…if you already know someone like this, then you know what I’m saying is true.”

  Beth laughed. “Are you crazy? Doctor Who is a fictional character on a television show!”

  “Oh,” said the woman. “Well…then I suppose I am crazy, because I believe that the ring you took from the cemetery will lead me to the soul I am looking for. What do you want for it? I’ll pay any price you ask.”

  Beth studied the woman thoughtfully. She certainly didn’t look crazy. “Will the ring lead me to Wayne’s soul too?” she asked.

  “Not that ring,” said the woman. “But the soul I’m looking for will know where your husband’s ring is.”

&nbs
p; Beth couldn’t believe that she was even listening to this nonsense. And yet, what choice did she have? This woman was her only connection to Wayne. If she called the police now, they would take her away and Beth would never find out what happened to him.

  This woman is just playing you, she thought. Nothing she’s saying makes any sense.

  The woman started to get up.

  “Don’t get up!” said Beth. The woman hesitated. “I mean it!” she yelled, suddenly angry. “Now you better say one god-damned thing that makes sense or I’m gonna shoot.”

  “I can’t help that the truth doesn’t always make sense,” reasoned the woman. “But what other explanation could there be? Why else would I go to all this trouble for a worthless ring?”

  “Maybe it’s some kind of micro-chip,” said Beth, “containing top secret information that was stolen from T.D.M.R.” This suggestion didn’t produce so much as a flicker of recognition in the woman’s expression, indicating that she either had no idea what Beth was talking about or she was very good at hiding her emotions.

  “I’ve come a very long way to free the soul that’s in that ring,” she said. “I would think that you would want to do the same for your husband. If it were the other way around, I know he would’ve done everything in his power to help you.”

  Something deep within Beth stirred again at the thought of Wayne—or Wayne’s soul, rather—stranded out there somewhere, waiting to be released from a ring.

  “We’re all they have,” said the woman with feeling. “No one else knows that they’re trapped inside the rings.”

  Like a genie in a bottle. The very idea was preposterous.

  Too preposterous to make up?

  “That ring wasn’t yours to take,” continued the woman. “But I’m willing to pay you for it anyway.”

  “I don’t need your money,” said Beth.

  “The soul in that ring will know where to find your husband,” insisted the woman.

  “How do you know that?” asked Beth.

  “Because your husband knew where to find him,” she said. “They must have made some kind of pact to free one another from the rings in the event of their deaths.”

  If the worst happens, visit Brisbin at the Highgate Cemetery, wrote someone who had identified himself (or herself) as ‘A.’ The worst—which most certainly could be death—must have happened to ‘A,’ who never guessed that the same would happen to Wayne before he got the chance to free his friend.

  “What is the name of the soul you’re seeking?” asked Beth.

  The woman hesitated a moment before answering. “As…mund,” she said, stumbling over the name.

  But all Beth noticed was that the name began with an ‘A.’

  Could this woman’s claims be true? Could there really be people out there whose souls never leave this earth? That would certainly explain ghosts—assuming that ghosts needed any further explanation than that the people who believed in them were crazy.

  But even if these souls did exist, how could Beth be sure that Wayne’s was one of them? The woman might just be saying that to con Beth into giving her Asmund’s ring. And could Beth really blame her? Wouldn’t she do the same thing if she were in the woman’s place?

  One thought kept reasserting itself: Wayne might still be alive! Well…not Wayne, exactly, but his soul. It was hard to conceive. But the mere possibility made Beth more determined than ever to learn the truth.

  “Get up,” she said, gesturing with her gun. The woman immediately complied. It was Beth who hesitated. So many questions were running through her mind. “I just don’t see how Wayne…I mean…his body was such a mess.”

  “He’ll have a new body,” said the woman. “Look, Mrs. Timmons, I can’t explain it all in a minute, but I promise you, we can both have our loved ones back again.” And then she smiled. She looked the way Beth always wanted to look—glamorous, confident and beautiful.

  “You were going to kill me in my sleep,” Beth reminded her.

  “I was prepared to do whatever I had to do to get the ring,” she admitted.

  It was the first thing the woman said that Beth actually believed. But it proved that Beth couldn’t trust her. Yet neither could she just let the woman go. She had to keep her here until she found out what happened to Wayne. And there was a part of her—strange as it seemed—that wanted to believe what the woman was telling her.

  What if it was true?

  “I’ll take you to the ring,” said Beth. She gestured the way with her gun. “You go first.”

  The woman hesitated only a second or two before moving in the direction that Beth indicated.

  “Through that doorway and down the stairs,” Beth told her.

  This is an intruder in my home, she reasoned against the pangs of conscience she was having. If it hadn’t been for that step, I’d probably be dead right now.

  It was true. This wasn’t just grief anymore. Beth’s life was in danger. If she allowed this woman to walk out that door without first learning the truth, she would spend the rest of her life oscillating between looking over her shoulder and wondering what happened to Wayne.

  The woman was remarkably calm as she descended the stairs into the cellar, and Beth couldn’t help being impressed. There was none of the hysteria or pleading she would’ve expected from such an overtly feminine creature. Yet it seemed as if the woman knew that Beth wasn’t taking her to the ring.

  There,” said Beth, following from a distance of about three or four feet. “Behind that work bench there’s a hidden door with a latch.”

  As the woman was examining the hidden panel, Beth slowly crept closer—with heart pounding—and slammed the butt of her gun into the back of the woman’s head. The woman dropped like a rock.

  Suddenly Beth was afraid.

  Oh dear God—I’ve killed her!

  Beth placed two fingers on the woman’s wrist and released a loud sigh of relief. There was a pulse. The woman was alive.

  Beth could still stop this. She could call the police and tell them she struck an intruder in the dark.

  Except that she couldn’t. To do so would jeopardize her future—and possibly Wayne’s.

  Ignoring the continued objections from her conscience, Beth scanned the cellar for something she could use to restrain the woman. Her eyes fell on a chain that Wayne used for towing his snow mobile.

  Don’t do this.

  Beth bent over and picked up the chain.

  Chapter 30

  Manhattan, New York

  Nadia lay awake, listening to the sound of Will’s steady breathing as he slept. Was it her imagination, or was there something different about him tonight? Perhaps it wasn’t Will who was different, but Nadia. Or maybe it was just her guilty conscience, reading things into every word and action that weren’t really there.

  Even their lovemaking had seemed different. Will was more passionate than she had ever seen him before—which, in turn, had made Nadia more passionate.

  Or was it the other way around? She couldn’t say for sure. She recalled that they had barely made it into her apartment before they were pulling at each other’s clothes. He had torn her blouse in his urgency to get it off of her. And her skin still burned where his rough, bristly kisses had seared it. His characteristically slow and gentle manner in the bedroom had been replaced with a reckless abandon that bordered on violence. It was almost as if he were trying to punish her.

  Or get her to confess.

  Nadia rejected these notions. It was her guilty conscience that was making her think these things. And yet, there was no denying that something was different about tonight. Was it Nadia that had brought about the change, or was it Will?

  In fact, it did seem as if some alteration had taken place within Nadia in the last twenty-four hours. Despite the long, emotionally draining day, she had never felt so alive. It was almost as if all of the grief, fear and pain were suddenly working with her, giving her the courage to explore those things that went beyond her understand
ing. She had decided to accept the reality of what was happening around her, instead of living in a dream world. She no longer had the ‘perfect’ life but she had discovered something even better. She was a survivor. She would make the best of whatever this life brought her, good or bad.

  It would take courage. Nadia thought of the many disaster victims she had worked with over the years, who had actually turned their crises into opportunities. She’d always admired these rare and wonderful people and, on some level, she believed that she was like them. But she had never been tested before. Until recently, her life had been a fairy tale. Compared to a great number of people in the world, it still was. She had a lot to be thankful for.

  She was now facing her first real personal crisis, but it wasn’t a struggle to survive—not physically, at least. Her demon was not a tsunami or a lack of medical supplies. It was corruption.

  But hadn’t corruption been there all along? In the course of her work, hadn’t she seen, first-hand, what corrupt businesses and governments were willing to do to people in order to enhance their own power? Hadn’t she witnessed starvation, abuse, and unconscionable indifference? Why hadn’t this represented a personal crisis for her before?

  She knew why, of course. It was because all those terrible things were happening somewhere else. She was outraged, naturally, but what could one do? The victims themselves seemed at least partially responsible for letting it happen. Their lifestyle, their beliefs…it was hard to identify with people who behaved so differently from her. They were not like Americans. And one could argue that that was part of their problem, because Americans were more civilized, more educated—more everything that was good. They were superior.

  The word had just popped into her head. It was an unwelcome word. Mortified to have even thought of it, Nadia made an attempt to push it out of her mind. Then she stopped herself.