This obsession with MacLeod had led to his discovering what he claimed was a major threat to us: a secret society of mortals called the Watchers. He'd learned of their existence in the early twentieth century, when he hired a private eye to shadow MacLeod, and the gumshoe reported someone else was tailing him as well. I know now that the Watchers claim their mission is to chronicle the lives of Immortals. But Jacob said we should think of all of them as our enemies. Some wanted to kill all Immortals, and others had special Immortal friends that they helped by giving them information about the rest of us. We never went out of our way to hunt Watchers. But we were always on the alert for them, and any who tried to spy on our little group ended up dead. *** In 1990, without knowing it, the Watchers did Jacob a big favor. He'd been stalking the Chinese Immortal Jin Ke for weeks. We all knew he wanted the guy's Quickening, but he never admitted it. I think he was afraid that even all of us together wouldn't be able to take Jin. Sure, Jacob could have shot him from a rooftop, but he would have lost face. There was no way we would have believed his "just making it easier" line that time. Jin Ke was a legend, and no one imagined Jacob was his equal. He was close to forgetting about Jin when he spotted someone else closing in on his quarry. A gang of mortal thugs--men he recognized as Watchers. They definitely had murder on their minds. And Jin, who didn't even know the organization existed, was a sitting duck. They brought him down with a tranquilizer dart. But when he was lying there barely conscious, about to lose his head, Jacob swooped in to the rescue. One of the Watchers fired a dart into Jacob. But then all his students came charging out of an alley, and they took one look at us and fled. Jacob managed to say, "Kill one! Quietly!" So Cracker Bob did. Ran him down, tackled him, then got up and clubbed him to death. Turned out Jacob had wanted a dead body so he could show Jin the Watcher tattoo. I think those Watchers were renegades. But renegade or not, they'd tried to murder Jin. Jacob had risked his life to save him, *and* given him information that could help him stay alive. The result? As a matter of honor, Jin said his life belonged to the man who'd saved it. He swore eternal loyalty to Jacob, joined our group--and from that day on he was our secret weapon. But in all our years together, I can't remember, once, having seen him smile. *** It was Jin who told me more about holy ground. I'd gotten the impression Jacob didn't want to talk about it --and it was never a good idea to press him. I wasn't even sure that taboo wasn't a personal quirk of his. So I asked Jin, and he confirmed that it had to be honored. Places of worship, monasteries, convents, cemeteries-- even the sacred sites of the ancients, if we could identify them--were strictly off limits. "We don't know what would happen if someone broke that rule," Jin explained. "But Immortals have believed for thousands of years that at the very least, a Quickening would kill the person receiving it and anyone else nearby. Many think the damage would be greater than that--destruction of an entire city, maybe, with all its people. "There's a legend that a holy ground Quickening caused the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii. No one knows for sure. But to be on the safe side, we don't even kill *mortals* on holy ground." *** We gained another unusual recruit in the spring of '92. One of those mortal private eyes Jacob hired to spy on Connor MacLeod saw him argue with a beautiful woman in a restaurant. Jacob decided to check her out, and got close enough to realize she was Immortal. She'd sensed him too, so he approached her and struck up a conversation. He learned the woman, Kate Devaney, hated Connor's onetime student *Duncan* MacLeod almost as much as he did Connor. Back in 1720, Duncan--without having told her she was a pre-Immortal, without a word of warning--had stabbed her through the heart on their wedding night. She'd never forgiven him; Connor had been trying without success to talk her out of her grudge. Even centuries after her breakup with Duncan, Kate had the notion that if he hadn't done what he did, she would have been able to bear children--to a mortal father--and might never have become Immortal. And she still believed she would have preferred to grow old and die, permanently, with a mortal husband. Her ideas were flat-out wrong, but Jacob wasn't about to correct her. When we students heard about this Duncan MacLeod, we wondered why he hadn't stayed with Connor all his life, as we were expected to do with Jacob. Jacob had an answer--that Connor wasn't worthy of a student's loyalty. He said Duncan had probably found out he'd murdered a priest. Thinking of religion...within weeks, Kate vowed allegiance not only to Jacob, but to his "church of hate." When she changed her name to Faith, that was the one she meant. Faith hadn't seen much of Connor MacLeod over the years, but she was able to tell Jacob his most closely guarded secrets: how deeply he cared for both Duncan and his own adopted daughter, Rachel. Jacob had still been afraid of Connor in the early seventeenth century. He'd learned after the fact that Connor had been Duncan's teacher, but assumed he'd later lost interest in him. As for Rachel, Connor had given out the story that he'd inherited a dead girlfriend's child and been stuck with her. Jacob had bought into that, because he had no use for kids himself. And she'd been raised as Rachel Wallingford. It was Faith who told Jacob that Connor's business partner Rachel Ellenstein--her original family name--was the same person, and that Connor loved her and always had.