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Chapter One: Cry Havoc
"I've been thinking," Adam Piersen observed from flat on his back in the window seat of Duncan MacLeod's sunny study.
Across the room at his large desk, the Highlander looked up through his bushy dark eyebrows from the mountain of bills and reports and post-wedding paperwork, still undone, now four weeks past the fact. "Should I be calling out the guard, or will a simple post to The Crown Authority do for now? I can ring up the Nobel Committee as soon as I'm done with some of these bills," he suggested to his new husband. Well, officially new, in actuality they'd been together--but for one rough spot--ever since his son's, Sean MacLeod's, birth, two decades ago.
When Adam did not answer, Duncan prompted, "You were thinking--?"
"Oh, yes--" Adam rolled languorously to his side and propped his head up on his lean arm and long fingers. "We've grown soft, Highlander. Soft and out of practice in the manly art."
Duncan chewed on the end of his pen and then counted, absent-mindedly, on his fingers, then entered the sum. "Well, I'll grant we've yet to try your chandelier trick," Duncan counted again and put the next sum in the ledger. He knew there were machines for this, but it was a good discipline, and so much had changed in his life of late, he wanted to keep some things as they were. "But I thought whatever that was this morning was fairly well done," he thought a moment and nodded his head, "Well done, indeed."
Adam smiled his signature, close-mouthed, crooked grin. "The fact remains, Darling. We are a pitiful excuse for warriorhood. No wonder Sean took off yesterday and left that scathing note. We've done nothing but loll around here, and his bride's been kidnapped, for God's Sake!"
Duncan put his pen down. "We have done everything possible. We have five separate rescue parties combing the woods, we're monitoring any sightings of that trailer Malak stole. Sooner or later, we will find Mary. It isn't as if Malak is going to hurt her. He adores her."
Adam sighed too loudly, "That's what I'm afraid of, Duncan. After four weeks," he shook his head, his brunette tresses were bleached at the ends from the auburn rinse. The tedious procedure to make him a long haired redhead had rendered his own hair frizzy and frail. The extensions had helped him remain hidden in plain sight in Overlook while he waited to return to Sean's wedding--and his own. The weaves were gone, but he was letting what remained grow out because Duncan had asked him to.
"I think," Duncan began, "that we all know this is better for Mary, and we all fear that Mary will see that too. Sean is too young for her, Adam. My own son, bless his bouncy self, will have to wait a bit to catch and keep a one like Mary Lindsey Palmer."
"I don't agree at all!" Adam was suddenly so irate he actually sat up. "We've just gotten to be a lazy couple of old guys, and we're looking for any excuse not to put ourselves--"
The desk phone rang. God Bless Pacific Rim Bell, Duncan thought. He picked up the receiver, "Duncan MacLeod here," he said. "And a good afternoon to you too, Son. Where--?"
The cellular phone went off. It was also lying on the desk next to the house phone. Duncan stared at it. Adam stared too, but didn't move.
Duncan picked up the cellular and tossed it, a la Hail Mary, to the sedentary Eldest Immortal. Adam made a face, picked the phone out of the air and pulled out the antenna. "Adam Piersen. This is--?"
"Where are you?" Duncan returned to his own call. "Yes, I can get a trailer and bring it up. Tell me where, after the right on the second logging trail."
"We did miss you at the wedding," Adam said, "Duncan seemed to think you were coming in that night, but things got so, um, complicated, I confess we never--. What? Oh, no. What happened?"
"You want to tell me what happened, Son?" Duncan said at his end of the room. "Oh, of course! Why didn't we think of that? No, Sean, we were never in cahoots with Malak. How can you say that?"
"We are so sorry, Richie," Adam said from his vantage at the window, "How is she? No! Wait, I'll ask Duncan." Adam cradled the phone against his chest, "Duncan?"
Duncan put his palm up. "Then what happened?"
"Duncan!" Adam repeated.
"Wait a minute, Sean. Your brother is interrupting," Duncan turned the receiver down, "What?"
"We need to find Malak right away," Adam said, "There's an emergency!"
"If you will be still a minute," Duncan answered sharply, "I'm talking to the man who found him yesterday." The MacLeod patriarch returned to the discussion with his son and heir, "So is Malak with you?"
"I don't know, Richie," Adam filled in his side of the four-way, "Duncan thinks Sean has found Malak--yesterday?" He looked over at Duncan, but the Highlander had turned his back against any further interruptions. "So what kind of symptoms is Alexa having? Oh, dear. Wait just a little bit more and he'll be back to us. Yes, I can fly down tonight if I take a chopper out of Overlook to San Fran."
After a long pause, Duncan closed his eyes and bent over his lap, "Are you sure? Did you look for a body? No, no propane explosions don't leave--. Well," he caught his breath, "Is Mary all right? Really? Oh, Sean, I am so sorry. You know she is welcome in our family, and her babe as well when it comes. Is she--. I see. Yes, I suppose that is to be expected. Keep her warm, please reassure her that our thoughts are with her and our love. And you too, Sean. If I burn up the road, I can get there by sunset, four hours, max. Sean, I know this feels impossible right now, but we can come through this." Duncan hung up the phone and jumped up from his desk chair, rifling through the top drawer, pulling out papers and plastic, and a phone book.
"Duncan?" Adam apologized again to Richie Ryan, on hold with a madwoman in Alameda, New Mexico.
Duncan swiped the air with his hand, a silent "shut up." He dialed up a number for rentals in Overlook and made arrangements for a truck and a trailer.
Adam shrugged and rose to intercept the Highlander as he made for the door. "Hello, Earth to Celtic Wardog," he said as lightly as he could. "Where is Malak?"
"Kingdom Come," Duncan dodged, trying to get by the Old Man, "for all I know, Adam."
"Duncan!" Adam spun him around, "This is important!"
"Believe me, Adam," Duncan pulled away, "Not as important as this is."
"Richie, you remember Richie? There was a dreadful accident a week before our wedding--"
"Sean asked Joe to think where Ram was and, of course, Dawson knew all along. He just hadn't--"
"--Sean's wedding, David Kuehl and his two sons went over a cliff in their rig--"
"Sean found them yesterday eve. He sanctified the cabin where they were staying and caught Malak inside--"
"They were all killed."
"Malak was killed."
"Alexa has gone quite mad with grief, but it also seems the dragon's blood covenant is wearing off and she's trying to chew Richie to death, when she isn't experimenting with all manner of suicide techniques."
"Mary is mad with grief and pregnant. She won't eat or speak or--"
Both men paused suddenly, finally listening to what the other had been saying. Then, in unison, they said, "We have to find Ram."
If this wasn't Chaos' demesne, then nothing was, short of Hell Itself.
Been there, done that, Duncan thought. Then he said aloud, "Why do we think she could have survived Malak's destruction?"
Adam pulled on his coat and handed Duncan his katana.
"You dressed the blade?" Duncan remarked gratefully.
"There will be all kinds of time for due appreciation later," Adam dug in the deep pockets of his coat and handed Duncan a set of keys, map, and a deed.
"And this would be?" Duncan eyed the objects.
"A place to bring Mary back to," Adam replied, halfway out the door, "Think of it as a honeymoon gift for your son."
"Why?" Duncan asked, putting the papers and the keys into his own pocket. "I thought they would be staying here? Are you kicking them out?"
Adam made a snorting sound and tipped his head back on his long neck. "No, Darling, Mary will have ascended. She's a dragon, remember? Can't step on Holy Ground? Got it?"
Duncan gazed back around the room, trying to gather his wits. Adam hooked his elbow and pulled him out of the room, all the while explaining the situation to Richie and promising to be there before sunrise.
Adam leaned against the old stone wall of the ancient monastery and waited for the lift, "You asked why we both think my mother still lives?"
"I seem to recall--" Duncan mentally ticked off what else they could be doing to make some sense out of this mess.
"It's because we have to," Adam replied.
They slid into the van which Thomas Cross had loaned them for the wedding, with a promise he'd put them up at his estate north of Couver when they drove it back.
"I'll go to the site and look for anything that might tell us one way or the other," Duncan keyed off the bridge gate lock and backed out of the driveway. "How are you going to get Alexa back here?"
"You forget Dr. Benjamin's magic medications, the cabin on the island, bed, ropes," Adam panted and fanned his face with his fingers. "Ah, the good old days!"
"We weren't even an item then," Duncan argued.
"An item?" Adam pounced, "I seem to recall someone accusing me of doing unspeakable deeds to them whilst they were drugged and helpless."
"You are right about one thing, though," Duncan did have a way of leveling Adam's wit with a single blow.
"Do tell," Adam chuckled.
"We have been too isolated for too long. I haven't even thought about Richie these past two decades."
"Didn't work out with the Unsers," Adam reported, "He had too much edge. Kept blowing up cars, Couldn't seem to find that mortal discretion so necessary in such endeavors. Ironic, really. Another irony: he fell in love with our little Alexa--an easy, easy thing to do--" Adam swallowed. Alexa had left him because he couldn't give her children. Mary probably felt the same about Sean. Now, David Kuehl, Alexa's husband, was dead, and her children, Richie was left with a shell of the woman. Poor Alexa. "What if we can't find Ram to renew the covenant? What will we do with Alexa then?"
"Duuuh," Duncan said laughing, "Who just told me Mary was a dragon?"
"Oh, right," Adam shook his head. "Two grown men with not half a wit between them."
"Cry havoc," Duncan said to no one in particular as they screeched down the winding road to Overlook.
Adam knew exactly what he meant. He'd been feeling the coming war all day now.
And all that he knew for sure was...
They weren't ready.
Adam drove the rental over the Coors bridge, cursing at himself for missing the turn and going a good fifteen miles out of the way, the wrong way. He wasn't going to beat the sunrise after all. Nope, there it came, rosy and happy up over the Sandias, the ass end of the Rockies. Sand and little gnarly pines and salt cedars down by the Rio Grande and more sand, and then some more...
And most of it felt as if it had accumulated under his eyelids and was flaying the surface of his corneas with every blink. Red-eye special was right. Why were his incredible recuperative powers never in evidence for the simple things? Adam wondered, and Why, Oh, Why, can't there be an Immortal weaponry transport pass for airlines? Really, it wasn't as if he intended to behead civilians or Quicken a plane in flight. Of course he'd forgotten the antique transport papers for sale and so forth. Thank God his sword looked more like a piece of jewelry than a true implement of destruction.
There, Adam thought, as he gunned the missing engine--kapukatuh--at the four way stoplight, There was the Alameda Bridge Road he should have taken. Which meant he was about two miles from his destination. He pulled off into the mini-mall and bought gas and a cup of something that used to be coffee, but was now every bit as medicinal as Adam needed it to be.
Adam sat for a while with the door open, giving his long legs a rest from their confinement. He tried to think about the last time he'd seen Richard Ryan, Duncan's former apprentice, the streetwise urchin whom the Highlander had thought he'd killed during the Millennial Siege. He couldn't get a clear impression except for the red hair and the quick mouth and those motorcycles Adam had talked him out of parking in the living room. And Alexa, the last time he saw her he was crazy with thinking his mother had just died delivering Sean. That wouldn't be something she wanted to recall, probably her single instance of infidelity to the man whom Alexa now mourned with her two precious sons.
He went over in his mind the facts of the accident. At least it would seem that he cared about the fate of these three mortals whom he had never met and who had gotten the best of the woman whom he married and whom he had loved. Alexa needed his help now. His own regrets or bitterness or whatever this was smoldering in his belly would just have to wait for another time. They were returning from a delivery with a double rig, going west through the mountain pass. Adam looked over at the mountains to the east. He was too far north to see the pass. Some idiot had pulled out in front of them on a downhill grade and David Kuehl had taken the rig and his two sons down into the canyon floor, to their deaths in fire and glory and, hopefully, not a lot of suffering for so great a sacrifice, if there was any Mercy in the world.
Adam pulled in his legs and sucked down the last of the coffee. He had changed so much since he last knew these people. He never would have considered Mercy at work in the world before. It just would never have occurred to him.
Duncan MacLeod had introduced him to Mercy and that had made all the difference. Well, if ever there was a time he needed Duncan's smoky, smooth ways with a worry, this was that time.
But he had the Highlander with him, just as surely as if...
Adam just hoped the part of himself which went with Duncan--north for the horses and his son and the ruined bride--would serve in that good cause as well.
The mare stayed quietly by Duncan and tended the dazed bride, snuffling softly along her shoulder, rubbing her legs with a gentle caress of her large, velvet muzzle. She reached up and bumped the side of Duncan's face. He turned to look at the mare but she was already directing their gaze over to the fight at the trailer. Duncan answered her disgruntled snort.
Duncan MacLeod stood at the edge of the dirt road with his new daughter-in-law draped over his arms. Thirty feet away, a melee continued on in the sunset, dusting the air with motes and curses and shrill neighs--with the odd, assorted thud and crunch as one or the other of the combatants made a point about the opposite course each had set. The point of order revolved around the bright red rented horse trailer and its suitability for conveyance. Sean took the pro side of the very physical conversation. Monstro's grandson took the con. And neither seemed apt to resolve the dispute. They were as evenly matched in temperament as they were in brains, and neither prone to find a reasonable approach to the impasse. So Sean swore and wheedled and whined and shouted and pulled and smacked, and the large black Friesian frothed up in grey suds down his flanks, the stallion's mane turning into sodden, ropy dreadlocks, slapping his fury and flying up behind him like a host of serpents.
"I know, I know," Duncan commiserated with the mare, "Sons can be such a trial at times, but they must be what they must be."
The mare, mother to the recalcitrant stud, did not actually say, "Tell me about it," but she might as well have done. Duncan laughed softly, rousing the woman in his arms.
"Make them stop," Mary murmured weakly. "All the anger," she said it as if the blows they exchanged were landing on her personally, "Make it stop," she pleaded again.
The mare nuzzled her cheek and Duncan told the two "boys" to knock it off and go walk around the forest till their tempers cooled. Then the mare sniffed at Duncan's mouth and stared him straight in the eyes, her coal black orbs connecting with his smoky, lidded windows.
"I agree, Old Girl," Duncan said, running his lips lightly along the edge of her nostril. "I'll go get us some late tea set up."
He carried Mary over to the truck and laid her on the seat, sideways, propped with a rolled blanket in semi-seated against the far door. He didn't bother to explain or even to talk to her. Mary's plea had been the first intelligible words out of her mouth since he'd arrived an hour before. She seemed able to connect at the level of sight and touch, but sound somehow distressed her, even kind tones. Duncan just patted her lightly on the ankle and left the near door open while he went to get the grain for the mare.
The grand destrier followed closely after, supervising his opening of the trailer compartment, the pouring of the grain in the bucket. She helped substantially and graciously by emptying a portion of the grain before he had to carry it all the way to the back of the trailer and in, to place it in the feed shelf, half on each side of the central partition. Then Duncan held the door for her. She'd decided on the left. In she lumbered, in no hurry or distress at all, and waited while he secured the door behind her and went round to open the window in front.
The mare took a few more bites, stuck her nose out the window and rang the dinner bell. Duncan rushed back to open the right door wide.
And here came the stallion, bugling and dragging poor Sean as if he were a pull toy duck--and quacking similarly, as it turned out. Duncan had to actually remind his son to let the horse's lead go, so he could load into the trailer.
Sean sat down, exhausted, on the pine needles and stared stupidly as his father closed the door behind the stud, who couldn't get into the trailer fast enough. "How?" he said finally.
"You've had a rough day," Duncan sat down beside him. "You would have thought of it yourself. Or the mare would have told you. Being his mother, I expect she knows him better than we do."
Sean stared skeptically at his dad. He shook his head. "When did you start talking to animals, Pop?"
"It's not the talking that's important, Sean," Duncan leaned his elbows on his knees, being careful not to stare at Sean, who was obviously miserable beyond belief. "It's the listening that counts."
"Another bon mot from Samurai Scotsman?" Sean snapped back.
Duncan took a deep, slow breath, "I suppose."
"You gonna drive the rig, Pop?"
"No," Duncan said evenly, "I'm going to drive my T-bird. You will drive the horses and Mary back to town. Which reminds me--" He reached in his pocket and brought out the papers and the keys to the new house, "It's a lovely little two bedroom bungalow on the beach north of Overlook. So Adam says. You should be very comfortable there."
"I can't just come home?" Sean asked so pitifully, Duncan wanted to hug him.
"Of course you can," Duncan replied, "But the monastery is Holy Ground and Mary is now a full fledged dragon, if I understand these things correctly."
"Oh," the air went out of Sean in a long rush, "Oh," he said again, "Oh, God! I might have killed her! I didn't even think! Dear Lord!"
"Yes, you might have done," Duncan agreed. "We have probably done you no favors, Sean, and I apologize."
"For not finding Mary sooner?" Sean jumped on what he took to be a sign of weakness on his father's part. He was still so undone by all of this that none of his instincts stood him well.
"For treating you too tenderly, Sean," Duncan corrected him. "For spoiling you rotten, in fact."
Sean cleared his throat and spit. "Well, you're forgiven, certainly. And I might as well start this stupid trek back to town. Six hours I make it, and Mary screaming the whole way. Wonderful."
"Stop trying to speak with her," Duncan suggested, getting up and dusting off his britches, "Stop trying to get her to tell you it's all right, when it clearly isn't. Tell her you are no threat to her and her child, then shut up and listen. Wait for her to touch you, to talk to you, Sean. Make yourself unimportant and you will stop scaring her so."
Duncan watched his son nearly bite through his bottom lip.
"It's so, so--" Sean struggled up and stomped towards the truck. He stopped, shuddered all over, and then walked quietly to the cab. He reached down to move Mary's legs over so he could get behind the wheel. She watched his every move suspiciously, but she did not scream again.
Duncan came over, closed the mare's window and then walked forward to close Sean's the door. Leaning on the window jamb, he said goodbye and promised to catch up with them at the beach house.
"Pop?"
"Yes," Duncan answered in a whisper. Mary was starting to fall asleep.
"Was it this hard for you and Mom?"
Duncan put his broad, burly hand over his mouth and nodded. "Worse," he said.
Sean's brows arched up.
"We'll talk about it when I get home, Son."
Duncan watched the rig pull carefully down the logging road. Sean would struggle with this, but he would make it through. It wouldn't be pretty, but he could do it. Duncan wondered if Sean were ever going to meet his mom, or even if that would be a good thing. Obviously Sean had not put it together that Malak and Ram were the same being--or as close to the same, in Danaan terms. That was the next order of business: to find out if Malak were truly gone or just scattered about the landscape as he had been twenty years before when he saved Mary's life, going down under the blades of a dozen Immortals.
And if Malak were gone, then what of Ram? Had the edict that she never die been breached? Was that, in fact, a good thing, if it were true? Ram saw the edict as a curse. Would she even want to live with half of her persona gone? Was that even possible?
Duncan felt a dull headache building behind his right ear and he reminded himself to stop grinding his teeth. Then he saw the poor T and his jaw clenched in a rigor of rage. Good thing Sean was down the road far enough he did not hear his Pop claim to the Heavens Themselves that never in the entire history of all the sons in all the world was there such a jackal as this sorry pup.
...or flowery Gaelic colloquialisms which translated roughly into the same idea.
"Hello," Adam spoke into the cellular phone from his car, parked a block down the street from the Kuehl household in Alameda. "Sean? Is that you?"
Adam listened closely to Sean's recounting of his trip back with Mary. He thanked his brother for getting the house--it was beautiful. Adam heard the heart-wrenching sadness behind even Sean's description of the house--as if Sean thought nothing would ever be beautiful again.
"I will be there in a few days, Brother," Adam said finally when he couldn't stand to listen to Sean's trying to be brave anymore, "Put Strike on for me, will you?"
"Strike?" Adam shifted the phone to his other ear and loosened the crick in his neck. "Thanks for setting up and whatever else--No, no, I will be back in two, three days, at the most. Then we can decide whether to ask for Grace's help in this. I'll talk with Joe Dawson, if you will fill in Master Cross, and we'll just let things sort themselves out for a bit, and give MacLeod time to join you. How bad is Mary?"
Strike, trained--as were all Cross' employees--up to paramedic licensing, gave a lean, exact report that didn't actually sound too bad...tragic, but not fatal. While Adam had not thought to do so, Strike had also brought along a nurse and another female paramedic, the two other Facets whose names no one could ever recall. Mary would not be outnumbered by men. Adam wondered to himself how he could have become so dismissive of gender, but then, it really wasn't surprising, after all.
Adam punched off the phone after thanking Strike again and reminding him to contact the search parties and have Dawson go inform Dr. Lindsey in person. Anne had returned to Couver with Judge Stone, awaiting Mary's discovery.
He restarted the rental car and drove down the lane and into the driveway. Richie met him at the door, bleary eyed and sun burnt, all freckles and sun bleached hair. Adam hugged him without thinking. He felt the young man--well, he was now a half-century young--squeeze back tentatively.
Adam retreated a bit. "You look like it's been rough, Richie," he commented.
Richie picked up Adam's bags from the walk where he'd dropped them for the hug. "Yeah, well, nobody said it would be easy. And, uh, if you don't mind, nobody calls me 'Richie' anymore, Dr. Piersen."
"Oh, tell me they don't call you 'Dick,' or 'Red,' or--. What do they call you now?"
"Richard," Richard said, shifting everything over to his left side and opening the door with his right. "Please be real quiet, okay? Just got her to sleep."
Adam noticed the healing wounds running up and down Richard's right forearm as it peaked out from the long-sleeved shirt. Richard looked like he'd been wrestling with hungry wolves, or some more ravenous species. Adam followed him into the kitchen where Richard poured him some coffee, handed him a plate of warm fry bread and honey, and then they retired to the open central patio within the walls but outside again in the dry warm early morning.
"By the fountain," Richard spoke more normally after the kitchen door was closed behind him.
Adam knew only too well what that was all about.
"I am so sorry about what happened, Richard," Adam sipped the coffee and tried to initiate some conversation. Richard was obviously wasted and weary, but it was just as obvious he needed to talk. "Yeah," Richard agreed, "Life's a bitch and then you get run off the road and burned alive, just fifteen minutes from home."
"You were there?" Adam hadn't considered this.
"No," Richard smiled wickedly, "Noooo, no. I was boffing David's dear wife when the sheriff arrived with the news." The red-blond curls, matted with sweat and too little rest, fluttered as Richard shook his head and grimaced. "She had to pretend I wasn't here until the officer left, had to take it all alone, answer stupid questions..." He took a long sip of his coffee, licked his lips and chewed savagely down on the lower one.
"Then she started screaming and tearing around like an animal, Adam," Richard had run out of words, run out of explanations, run out of the energy it might take to make any sense of this at all. "Tell me what this dragon thing is, Adam. Why?"
"You do know Alexa wasn't really married to David Kuehl?" Adam thought he would try to lessen some of Richard's guilt.
"Huh?"
"Legally, since we never divorced," Adam explained, "Alexa is still married to me."
"Oh, Jeezus!" Richard cursed, "That's why you've come! To take her back now that Kuehl's out of the picture."
"No, no," Adam extended his hand, but Richard wasn't interested. "No, Richard, I just meant that the heart follows its own ethic and you are not to blame."
Richard measured him carefully over the rim of his coffee mug. "Why should I believe you?" he asked after a long silence.
"Because I am married to someone else now, for one," Adam said in an almost jovial fashion, despite his intention to keep with the somber nature of the conversation.
"Hey," Richie's more familiar open smile appeared across the ravaged face of the young man, "All right! I'll bet she's a one, too, by that silly grin on your face, Adam."
Adam coughed suddenly, "Oh, she is that, Richard," he cleared his throat, "Every bit and then some."
Adam put his mug down on the fountain ledge and stood to stretch. "You asked about the blood covenant. What do you know about it and I'll fill in what I know and maybe we can find a way out of this mess."
Richard poured the honey over a piece of fry bread and then rolled it up, "Oh, um, Joe Dawson wrote Alexa, asking her about the particulars of her, um," he chewed and swallowed. "Of her remission. He asked what she knew about how Ram did it, what the exact, well, you know, how it was done and then there was a long description from a Thomas Cross about a group--the Facets, who had been made Immortal also. Then there was this thing about--what you said--about renewal. That was four years ago and Alexa started to have nightmares about her never having been--um, well, renewed, whatever that means. She hasn't seen Ram since she was here, pregnant with Sean."
"Really?" Adam began to smell a very familiar--and familial--rat in the works.
"Yeah," Richard finished the fry bread and set up another, rinsing his sticky fingers in the fountain's pool. "I think Alexa supposed Ram was sneaking the renewal in somehow, in something she ate or drank or--" Richard took another bite and shrugged.
"Or there isn't any such thing as renewal," Adam finished.
"But she's--" Richard glanced over towards the thick drapes which hung at the master bedroom's door to the patio. "She's doing all the things Dawson said would happen if there was no renewal to the, the blood thing."
"Because Joe listed them out for her so tidily," Adam explained. "Richard, don't you see? Alexa has been devastated by this loss--the more so, since--" he decided saying the obvious was not necessary, "It remains that this obsession with renewal has supplanted her impossible grief and will continue to do so until we can climb inside this with her and crowd her out."
"But couldn't Ram just tell Alexa?" Richie offered him the last fry bread round. Adam refused.
"I don't know that Ram is still alive," Adam said. The words seemed so impossible they hardly had any meaning.
"But, but you said Sean had found Malak, but--," Richard finished his coffee and picked up Adam's mug and the empty plate. "Wait. Let me get us refills and check on Alexa and then you can explain to me about Set and Ram and Malak and Marak and--that stuff."
Adam was glad for the time to think about his answer. There really wasn't an easy answer to the Danaans. He tried to remember all the things he'd read in Ram's journals and the things which Malak had let slip during Adam's long apprenticeship as Methos. Another world, another life, many other lives, ago.
"She's still sleeping quietly," Richard announced his return, handing over another cup of coffee. "Okay, tell me about these people. I just don't get it--any of it."
Adam had brought over a wooden lawn chair with a deep cushion and laid out in a more congenial half-recline for which his long back was already being suitably grateful. It was his most effective thinking position, if Duncan weren't around to distract him.
"As I put it together," Adam began, "A long, long time ago--"
"In a galaxy, far, far away," Richard supplied.
Adam chuckled, "You're right, of course, it all sounds like monsters and fairy tales. But, you know, they are probably the reason that monsters and fairy tales sound the way that they do."
"Huh?"
"Never mind. I have the same problem with this, but if you are answering the question about where do the Immortals come from, then the answer is that they are hybrids of humans and Danaans. Of human men and Danaan women, that is. Like many hybrids, we are sterile."
Richard started to interrupt with all the things he knew which did not follow what Adam was saying, but Adam continued anyway, "Let me just talk about the usual situation first, then we'll talk about the exceptions, otherwise none of this is going to make sense. The main problem is, the more sense it makes, the less believable it becomes."
Richard thought about this a moment and then moved closer to listen.
"The Danaans are--how to say this?--more Immortal than we are. They can lose their heads and still live. Very few things can kill them. The only thing I know for sure will do so is that they lose their will to live. No, I can't say it any plainer, except--no, I could only speculate. They are so strange. They cannot stand on Holy Ground without grave consequences, and I don't know why this is. Maybe because of the energy with which faith imbues a Holy Place, but they are set off by traditional rituals of consecration. They can be hurt and killed, just as we can be, and in some ways they heal more slowly, but they can heal from almost every injury, no matter how severe, as long as their wills are intact."
"So how come they're all dead now?" Richard asked.
"I tricked them into giving up their lives at a point when their will to go on living was low enough to let them be tricked," Adam had thought about this a great deal over the intervening years. He had come to be certain that the Danaan extinction was more due to their hopelessness than to his skillful forgery of his mother's journal about the Gate, a mythical transport into another plane, which the Danae had long sought, as if it were their grail.
"And they told you to take Ram to Holy Ground?" Richard shook his head, "Why didn't that kill her?"
"I can only think it was because she was mortal at the time, Richard. It's the only thing that makes sense."
Richard sighed and dug his knuckles into his temples. "Okay, so tell me about how many angels does it take to dance on the head of a pin?"
Adam chuckled at the quodlibet, an apt question, really, initially concerning the substantiality of angels. He took a deep breath. Here goes. "A Danaan is a shape changer of no particular gender. He is born as a merchild, in groups of five, as quintuplets. As he matures, he transforms into a body which looks like a human. That is the lowest form he attains, except for the merchild. I say 'he' because they are all males to begin with and for most of them, for most of their lives. When they reach full maturity, they are able to change into several levels of what humans know as the various fabulous creatures of legends and myths and religions."
Richard tucked his chin down in clear incomprehension.
"Okay," Adam backtracked, "Say I am a hooved form. When I grow up, I can become a horse, a horse with an alicorn, a winged horse, so forth. As I understand it, the more limbs, the higher the form, and each of the five kinds of dragons can do five changes each."
"What?" Richie checked the bedroom door. Still quiet.
"Once more, then," Adam tried again, "I am a horse drake. I can be as you see me now."
Richard nodded.
"Or I can just transform from the waist down," Adam continued.
"Don't you wish," Richard laughed. "Doesn't your wife, though. Oh, I see, like a satyr."
"Yes," Adam flushed briefly, Richard's imagery being just a little too imaginative. "Or I could grow another pair of arms and make webbed wings--"
"Like a demon," Richard was beginning to follow, "And the more you change, the less human, the higher the level of horse dragon you are until you are all dragon, or in your case, a Pegasus."
"Full dragor manifest, yes, Richard."
"So? Five kinds?" Richard asked.
"Yes, um," Adam had to think a moment, "The Thrones are highest. They are winged serpents, dragon-dragons. Then the Arcs, the seraphs, those are canine and leonine and ursine types: gryffins and sphinxes and such, bears too. And the horse dragons, Pendrakes, I think, hmm, the Dominions, Demesnes. Then the Virtues, the Lithdrakes, bird drakes like Simurghs, Amphisbaena--"
Richard lost track.
"Phoenix," Adam found a more familiar term, more Western. "And lastly the Powers, the sea serpents."
Richard reviewed what he had heard and checked the watch on his left wrist. He nodded, "Okay, we have about an hour before the pills are going to wear off. Keep going."
So, he'd been forced to drug her. Definitely not good. Adam found his way back to the conversation even while he mentally assorted the inventory of medications he'd brought with him, along with the fake MD identification, in case of a search. "Well, it's all moot, of course, since there is only one Throne left in the entire world, but when they still lived, there was one form all the Danae attained, mostly for worship and ritual, I think. Back to the horse example, if I don't change anything else at all, but just grow a second pair of arms and make bird, instead of bat, wings."
"Angels!" Richard exclaimed, "And that's how angels and dragons are the same thing!"
Under his weariness, Richard was still the enthusiastic street puppy, eager to know and to learn everything he didn't know. Adam smiled and patted him on the knee. "Good, very good."
Richard took a breath and asked, "Okay, now tell me about this gender thing."
Adam decided he would drop himself as example to this next lesson. "When a Danaan wishes to reproduce, he turns into a female and gets impregnated by another Danaan."
"Eooowww," Richard grimaced. "So, Ram is just Malak in drag?"
Adam choked again and set his coffee down. "No. It isn't like that at all."
"Well? How is it?"
"I can't say I understand entirely, Richard, but it's more like two people in one body. One of them awake and one of them asleep. All Danaans are like that," Adam explained.
"So wait a minute," Richard interrupted, "You said Sean found Malak. So you have only to wake up Ram, tell her to get down here and snap Alexa out of this."
Adam sighed, "That would be true, Richard. Except that it seems very likely that Sean has not only found Malak, but killed him."
"Oh, God," Richard whispered, "Then there are no dragons left and Alexa--What are we going to do?"
"Find another way to talk her out of this," Adam replied with as much certainty as he could muster. He did not think it wise to involve Richard in their pipe dream that Ram might have survived Malak's demise. Nor did he want to try to explain about the second "sleeper" that had hitched a ride back from death with Ram, Marak the Bear. God only knew where he had ended up.
"That's enough," Richard said, "Any more of this and my head's gonna split wide open."
"Okay," Adam agreed. "Let's talk about something else."
Richard thought a moment. He didn't want to talk about Alexa or the death of the three Kuehls or what in hell they were going to do about any of this. "So, I heard you and Mac and Sean have been living a wild bachelors' life north of Big Sur in a remodeled nunnery."
"Well, I don't know how wild it is," Adam answered.
"Oh, come on now. You can tell me," Richard leaned in close. "You gotta admit those California women got something special, oh, yes."
Adam couldn't imagine how he'd gotten himself so near a corner so fast. "Really."
"Your old lady's a West Coast chick?" Richard asked.
"No," Adam began to squirm.
"Tourist?"
"What?" Adam pushed up out of the lounge chair and paced away across the patio to study the garden, withering with inattention and the dry heat of the summers here.
"You don't have to tell me anything about your wife, if you don't want to, Adam," Richard said, trying to understand the Eldest Immortal's sudden uneasiness. Maybe because of Alexa and how that made him a bigamist. Adam was always so straight-laced, even if sloppily so.
Adam turned back with a deliberation that made Richard take a defensive stance as surely as if he'd been challenged. "What is it, Adam?"
"I know you have a lot to think about, Richard," Adam crossed his long arms over his chest. "And I am not sure this is the time to tell you, but I can't just slide by this for the next few days, as I had intended to do."
"Yes?" Richard stood his ground as the Old Man approached.
"I am not married to a woman, Richard," Adam said.
"Hey," Richard shrugged, "That's all right by me, Adam. God knows I've tread those waters myself. Hell, that's why I came back to Seacouver, the last time we spent any time together. But you remember that. Hell, I even had a crush on Mac for a while. God," Richard shook his head and laughed, just remembering his past, "I mean--how's that for unbelievable? At least I never actually came on to him. He might have really taken my head, instead of whoever that was at the old speedway that night."
"So," Richard continued, "Who's the lucky fellow? Anybody I know?"
"Duncan MacLeod," Adam said.
"Yes? What about Mac?" Richard asked.
"The answer to your question," Adam said evenly.
Richard felt as if some essential cog had slipped and he was off-timed in the discussion somehow. He searched their words for a meaning. "Wait a minute," he said finally, "You and Mac--you--Really?"
"Yes, Richard, really," Adam said slowly, "the past two decades."
"Man, oh, man," Richard just stared, stunned, "Man! You and Mac. Really. Geez!"
Adam tried to maintain his dignity, waiting for the younger Immortal to stop emphasizing this very uncomfortable moment.
"Damn! You and Mac!"
Adam stood stock still and said nothing more.
"Phewww! I can't believe it! Well, I'd heard the rumors of course, but, damn!" Richard's diatribe was running out of steam. "Are you, um, are you two--is it good for you?"
It was Adam's turn to be stunned. He wasn't the only one who had changed. "It is not without it's complications--," Adam heard himself trying to maintain objectivity, all the while he felt that stupid grin, crawling over his features.
"Yeah," Richard came over and hugged him, then set him back at arm's length, "I can see how awful it is for you......Not!" He bobbed his head, getting used to the idea, "Yeah, makes sense. I'm a little jealous of course--"
"Well, Richard," a more familiar devilish smirk replaced the stupid grin as Adam zinged one over the plate, "It isn't as if I were sleeping with your wife."
She looked to Sean as if she had a terminal illness, a translucent and temporary flare of extremity or a falsely powerful surge of life's ending. He had to admit she was magnificent, but she was not his little Mary. She didn't even smell the same.
Sean tried to keep his wits about him all the six and a half hours it took to get to Adam's gift house on the beach north of Overlook. It looked to be a thirty- minute drive to the Fortress, what he called his home, the old monastery in the seacliff. He could be visiting home as often as he liked. Somehow that seemed very important just now. Mary had become nearly unrecognizable to him. Sean got used to the fact she wouldn't speak with him, but he would never get used to how little she looked like jolly Mary Palmer, his longtime friend and new bride. She looked like a crazy person, eyes red with weeping, swollen lids over a fevered, unfocused stare, with hardly a blink to break the view. Her beautiful red curls were coiled around her pale face like dead ivy on a winter tree.
When Sean pulled the trailer up into the drive of the "honeymoon" cottage, bungaloid-by-the-sea affair, Strike walked out and welcomed them, two women following in his wake. These latter walked round to the passenger side and lifted Mary out of the truck in a two-woman chair carry and took her into the house without any fuss at all.
Sean had wondered how he was going to get close enough to Mary to even hold her without getting all black and blue again from her very stubborn heels and fists.
Sean struggled stiffly out of the truck while Strike went back to throw the horses some more hay and promise he would be driving them to a very nice boarding stable in Overlook, just as soon as MacLeod, the Younger, was settled in.
"Yeah," Sean sighed, "go on and take them to Overlook. I'm going for a walk on the beach."
Striker bowed his head, "I imagine you have much that troubles you, Mr. MacLeod. Perhaps we could sit down together when I return." He eyed the younger MacLeod up and down. "Just promise me you won't ruin the rest of my life by doing anything foolish to your own."
"Foolish?" Sean asked.
"Don't be taking any long swims to Scotland while I'm gone," Strike articulated more clearly, "Don't make Master Cross mad at me for leaving you alone--even if it was to bed down the horses."
"Oh," Sean replied. "Oh," he said as the meaning seeped in. He must look fairly despairing for Striker to worry like this. "No, Strikes, not to worry. I'm just confused and tired and unhappy. I am not suicidal. I swear," he put his hand on his heart, "that I will behave myself while you're gone. I'll even go into town with you, if you're that worried."
Just the offer seemed to do the trick. Strike slapped his shoulder and slid into the cab.
Sean walked down to the beach along a stony path lined with the occasional twisted cypress. Man, Dahm had spared no expense. This was a pricey section of beach front property. Just the sort of place to bring the new bride and carry her over the doorstep. Only in his case, it took too paramedics, and neither of them even men, thank you, very much. Shit.
Well, there would be other times to enjoy the incredible scenery--if Mary snapped out of this before Fall made the water too cold for swimming. Sean rolled up his coat collar. Almost dusk, the wind chilled the air substantially and the incoming afternoon ocean had yet to rewarm the beach air. Sean kicked off his shoes anyway, shivering a little as he did so.
Here at least he was the Master of his Domain, if only because there was no elder, nor howling wife, nor...
"Hey!" Sean yelled at the trespasser, "You, yes, you, this is a private beach! You'll have to leave!"
The--Sean squinted against the lowering sun--yes, a woman, or maybe a boy with long hair. "Are you deaf or just dumb?"
Sean sprinted down the beach toward the--yes, woman--person who had invaded this last place where he might have had a little time to himself just to feel sorry for himself if nothing else.
"Hey!" he yelled again. She still hadn't moved a muscle. As he approached, Sean felt his rage rising, as it found a target. Righteous indignation was a wonderful thing when you'd been half-sick with anger for a month and only a bitter victory to show for it.
"Hey, yourself," she greeted him as Sean came close enough to see she was much older than himself.
"This is a--" he began to read the law as to property.
"Private beach," she said, "Yes, I heard you. I think the whales migrating fifty miles west of here heard you." She pointed a long finger towards a Georgian architectural monstrosity farther south down the beach.
Sean almost bought that she might live there. "Wait a minute!" He looked her up and down. No, no way in hell she came from that manse. Ripped jeans and a T-shirt that was no longer white, but used to be, a long time ago. And if she were a princess from that place, then her plastic surgeon should be hung up by his thumbs for the rotten job he'd done on her phenomenal beak.
Sean just shook his head, "You'll have to leave. Now!" he added for emphasis.
"Under the press from you and what army?" she smiled.
She wasn't so homely when she smiled, Sean thought. "I don't want to fight you about this, but you aren't supposed to be here and that's final."
"Well, I'm not bothering you," she said quietly, "Which is more than I can say about the reverse. And how do I know you have any right to be here? I don't see any papers?"
"Read 'em and weep," Sean still had the deed in his pocket. He flashed these under her ample nose.
Which only resulted in making her laugh. "That will teach me to assume anything--um--Sean MacLeod," she read his name off the deed.
He jerked it back and stuffed it in his pocket. "And your name?"
"I don't have a deed," she chuckled, "My name is Shannon. I'm obviously too old to be a runaway, so that makes me either a bag lady, a bum, or an ex-hooker." She extended her hand to him. "And what do you do to afford such a wonderful house?"
Sean ignored the offer to shake, "How do you know about my house?"
"It was empty until that blond fellow came in and turned the utilities back on yesterday. Well, almost empty. I found it an excellent den," she smiled again. "I was sorry to leave. I think you will like it a lot."
"Damn!" Sean spit. "You broke in?"
"I didn't break anything," Shannon replied indignantly. "I just came to an understanding with your lock."
Sean's blue eyes narrowed, stormy as the sea at her back, now building sizable breakers that would soon have them both retreating higher on the beach.
"Look at me," Shannon whined, "Do I look like I stole anything valuable? Okay, these jeans are so many sizes too large, I could lose an elephant in them, but except for me, they're empty. I swear."
Something about the way she said this made him wonder about her ex-hooker remark. "All right," Sean started walking away from the incoming tide, "Just go away and don't come back and I won't report you to the authorities."
Damn! Sean cursed to himself, What does a guy have to do to get a little time to himself, a little peace and--
"I said--!" Sean jerked around to find she'd followed him up the beach.
"I hear what you say," Shannon complained, "But you keep saying nothing at all."
Sean plopped down at the edge of the beach, just where the rocks started, and set his shoes beside him, digging his toes in the sand. Shannon plopped down beside him.
They both spent the next long minutes staring out to sea and willing each other out of existence.
When that didn't work, Shannon tried starting a conversation. "Where are you from, Sean?"
Sean didn't answer. He lifted his left hand in a mock attempt at swatting her, like a fly.
Shannon grabbed his wrist and remarked on his ring. "Oh, you're married! How wonderful! Is this your first house with your wife?"
It was an odd way to ask the question. "Yes, my wife and I have just moved in today."
"Oh," Shannon nodded her head, "She likes the place. You don't."
"What? No. Why would you say that, Shannon?"
She was clearly delighted that he had finally spoken her name. "Married couple, first night, beautiful new house...and you here, all alone, in the worst of tempers, walking the beach. I thought maybe you had a fight over the house. More serious, huh?"
"What?"
"The fight was more serious, then," Shannon repeated.
"There was no fight, and I am none of your business, Shannon," he hadn't meant to say her name again.
"The way you shout and bounce, I thought you wanted to be everybody's business," Shannon replied.
"I don't bounce," Sean argued.
"I never saw anybody bounce on sand before," Shannon rested her sharp chin on the tattered knees of her jeans. Her dusty brown hair, streaked with sunburning, blew back in tendrils from her face, a curious set of curves against such carved straight lines of cheek and jaw.
Sean wondered if she were ill, or if her extreme thinness were a consequence of poor nutrition only. Maybe she hadn't eaten since she'd been forced out of his house. "You could stop at the house and get something to eat before you leave, Shannon."
"That is kind, but I think your bride might not understand," Shannon shook her head.
"Trust me," Sean sighed, "She won't even know you are there."
Shannon looked straight at him. Her eyes were the color of the coming dusk and the wind-bothered waves, more mirrors than their own color, whatever that was. "Your wife is ill?"
"Sort of," Sean thought about getting up and leaving, but he wasn't ready to enter his own house. Not yet. "There was an incident at the wedding..."
"Oh," Shannon cooed, "You were that enormous 'do' last month at the abbey." She gazed down at her palms. "I must have mislaid my invitation or I surely would have come. Oh," she exclaimed. "You found your kidnapped Missus! Is she all right?"
Sean supposed the story of a bride being kidnapped from the chapel, amidst sword fighting and charging steed, by a brilliant blonde stranger, would certainly have made the rounds in the community, even if half the population in the area hadn't been out all month looking for said bride.
"Yes, I found her. And, no, she isn't," Sean rubbed the back of his very stiff neck and stretched his back.
"Nailed her, did he?" Shannon moved his fingers away as she knelt behind him and started kneading out the knots in his neck.
Oh, yes, Sean thought, definitely ex-hooker. "I don't see where that's--"
"Yeah, yeah--any of my business. Was it rape? Or did she want that?"
"Who would want--?"
"Being carried away from all the tedium of a wedding into the wild blue yonder?" Shannon finished for him with a breathiness that made Sean want just exactly that as well. "Is she pregnant?"
"Yes," Sean felt his last reserve melting away beneath her hands. "She says so, anyway."
"So the marriage may be annulled and she may go back to her Knight?" Shannon began to work her fingers gently through his tangled dark curls.
"He's dead," Sean heard himself mumbling.
"You took her back as romantically as she was taken, then?" Shannon said, but her voice seemed to float towards him from a great distance.
"Mary doesn't see it that way," his answer traveled into that distance and disappeared.
Shannon laughed lightly, "Well, there's always tomorrow, Sean. Maybe she will change her mind."
"It's over, Shannon," Sean opened his eyes. The words stunned him, both that he had said them and that he had heard the truth in them, even as he spoke. "Mary belongs to someone--to something else now. She will never be mine."
Then Sean leaned his head back to look up at Shannon. She slid her hands over his shoulders and down to his heart, and then she kissed him lightly on his forehead. "I am sorry for you, Sean. Love is so hard to lose."
The thought of this homeless, destitute, maybe ex-hooker, feeling sorry for him and his plight was so unfair, it brought tears to his eyes...
Followed closely by gulping, then sobbing, then wailing...
And when Sean came back to his senses, spit the sand out of his mouth, and rolled out of the pit he had made, thrashing in the sand, it was nearly dark. He'd finally done the one thing he'd set out to do when first he spied her standing before the breakers.
Sean had scared Shannon off the beach.
"No, Alexa doesn't have any allergies I know of," Richard answered tentatively. "I don't know, damn. The pills I scored are working just fine, I don't think--"
"What's that?" Richard Ryan asked, looking askance at the largish syringe Adam was filling from three different vials. "Any allergies?" Adam asked, thunking the syringe's side until all the bubbles moved up towards the needle, where he could spritz them out. "Richard? Has she got any allergies?"
"You're not a doctor," Richard protested.
"Only because they wouldn't renew my license for a second hundred years," Adam laughed. "Well?"
Adam recapped the needle and waved it towards Richard, "You want some first?"
It surprised the Old Man, knowing Richie's aversion to needles, that the young Immortal actually took a moment and considered it, before saying, "Ah, no. No.""Okay, Richard," Adam stretched his long back and turned his attention towards the closed door of the master bedroom. "Anything you want to tell me before I get reacquainted with the Missus?"
"Be careful?" Richard shrugged. "She's really strong and there is never any warning."
Adam listened and nodded, moving effortlessly into Consulting Physician mode. Putting away the hypo, he draped his long fingers round the knob and turned. "Alexa?" he called out softly, "It's Adam, Alexa. Richard told me you were feeling under the weather. What seems to be the problem, Dearest?"
There was a rumble in the pipes at the back wall. Adam stood still, near the door, and let his eyes grow accustomed to odd lighting of the featureless empty room, stroked in thin sunlines, from the louvered blinds, against dim dusty blackness. His pale eyes were not very good in low light. More of a cruel-adapted eye than dark-, he thought wryly.
Richard did not follow but Adam could still feel the young man's tension even as he left him to foray further into the sun-ribboned room. As Adam passed into one of the sunmote curtains, he was momentarily blinded again. "Alexa?" he strained to hear the slightest sound, but there was only the rumbling in the pipes and Richard's quickened breath, back at the entry.
Too late he recognized the rumble for what it was, growling. Alexa charged him out of the darkness, throwing Adam to his back on the hard floor and tearing his wrist with her teeth. And all the while no sound save the purring, guttural pipe rumble noise, coming from somewhere deep in her belly, like some hungry great cat wandering, sun-mottled, beneath a lush alien canopy.
Adam was too surprised, too stunned, to make complaint. Alexa had torn into his left wrist so hard, she'd nearly broken the radius. He gathered his wits against the wave-upon-wave of sting and throb and, despite his best of intentions, sheer exuberant lust. Perhaps it was true what they said about every cloud. Adam pushed up to sitting, extending his left arm, so as not to disturb Alexa's grizzly feeding. She crouched over his hand like an ardent postulant, making a demented picture of Renaissance shades in the chiaroscuro lighting of the empty room. Still beautiful, he thought, reaching over her back to grasp her waist and pull her into his lap, still attached to his wrist, drinking greedily and growling.
He pressed her against him, slender back against his wide chest, with his left arm curved around in front of her fair face. "Richard?" he said softly, evenly, rocking the woman as if she were a demented child. "The dose is correctly measured. All you have to do is take off the needle cap, plunge it deep into the top of her thigh. It's in my right pocket." Adam readjusted his position a bit, so Richard could get to the hypo.
"I can't," Richard answered from the door.
Adam felt his chest begin to burn and he breathed faster, but he heard the far away gurgle with each inspiration--also not pipes, but in his case, oncoming cardiac failure. "You have to, Richard. I am going to be dead soon. I can't let go of her to get to the syringe. I'd say about two, three more minutes. She's opened a sizable artery in my wrist."
There was no answer. Adam fought for breath and consciousness. Were it not for the particular circumstances, the people involved, sensibilities, and so forth, Adam would have enjoyed this immensely. He tried hard to keep his baser inclinations at bay. Finally, the flow did not extend to his wrist any longer, and Alexa moved her feast farther up his arm. Searching for the source, he thought idly. Then he felt her twist around in his slack arms, felt her teeth at his throat and Adam thanked the principles of hydraulics that he was too bled to respond more blatantly. Nearly suffocated from the fluid filling his lungs and deserting his failing heart, Adam threw back his head and surrendered himself entirely.
"Oh, Bruuther!"
Adam lurched awake to the sound of Richard's laughing at him.
"Are you one sick puppy or what?"
"Hmmmph?" Adam managed to ask between gasps. When his breathing had slowed enough to allow it, Richard poured what felt like several gallons of nasty-tasting sports' drink down Adam's gullet.
"Better?" Richard took a pause in the water brigade.
"Uh," Adam saw the glass coming at him again, "Yes," he said more clearly. "Fine, that's fine."
Richard set the glass down. "I got the shot in her all right. Worked like a charm. Thank you, " he added stiffly.
Adam levered up to sitting before Richard could stop him. The room flipped sideways and Adam let out a howl. The sudden pain in his neck was incredible.
Richard reached forward and righted Adam's head on his shoulders, "Don't be thrashing around, Adam."
Oh, that felt better. What the hell? Adam put his hands up to either side of his head and propped it for himself. "What?"
"She chewed through the strap muscle on the left side," Richard explained, "Until that reattaches, you're uh--" Richard flopped his head over on his right shoulder to demonstrate.
"Damn!" Adam said carefully. He couldn't get over the distinct impression that his head was about to roll off and go skipping across the floor.
Richard held another glass of ade to Adam's parched lips. "Come on, you need it," he said as if he'd had way too much practice taking care of the injured.
Adam complied, holding his head on the whole while.
"When that," Richard indicated Adam's neck, "gets healed, I got a bath waiting for you."
Adam carefully tilted his head down and surveyed the mess on his front. Shit! Hydraulics or no, not all the soppy devastation was blood. Hence, he supposed, the comment about sick puppies. "I'm sorry, Richard," was all he could think to say as he rotated his head slowly back up to even.
"Well," Richard laughed, "I won't say it didn't piss me off. But then I got to thinking-- there had to be some pleasure in all this pain." Richard shook his head, "No. To tell the truth, I had to go outside and puke. That's why I didn't get her knocked out before she killed you. Damn!" Another round of amazement and laughter followed.
Adam would have shrugged, but he didn't dare.
Richard pulled a chair over and sat down in front of Adam, putting his hands on the Elder Immortal's knees. He adjusted his gaze until their eyes were even. "It was--" he searched for a way to explain, "I was so caught up in how sensual you both were--how amazing--wow---" he took a deep breath, "I just got hard watching you, the way you move or, I don't know, the way she was draped in your arms, but like she was raping you at the same time. It was all so violent, so--" he slowed his breathing again, "lusty, animal, nasty--I don't know. How sick is that?"
"And the weirdest thing," Richard added, his gaze slipping away from Adam's, "When you said you and Mac were, well, that you and he were together. Don't take me wrong, Adam, but I couldn't for the life of me think what he saw in you. Shiiiiit," Richard's head lifted. "I sure do now."
Adam held onto his head more tightly. He could hardly wait until his neck healed and they could really get down to planning Alexa's transport to Overlook, nearer to Ram, or at least to Mary. "I'm spoken for," he said, dry as the back end of a prairie dog, or so Lucille always claimed.
Richard laughed so hard, he fell off the chair.
Anne, seated to his right, in the top-down rental, staring straight ahead at nothing at all, was no longer Mrs. Palmer. Dr. Mark Palmer, father of Mary, had died. Anne had divorced the Chief of Couver General nearly twenty years earlier, so his recent passing hardly widowed her, but she seemed to be grieving nonetheless. Anne should have been a Facet, but something had gone awry. The dragon's blood that had granted Stoner, and the other Facets, Immortality had not done so for Anne.
Anne looked every day of her fifty-some years, the more so for her grief, anxiety, or whatever burdened her this particular day.
Stoner looked every day of his sixty-some years, except that he was possibly the most buff--he wondered if anyone still used that term--sixty-year-old anyone was likely to meet. Except for the fact he was nearly ninety. He had meant to speak to Anne about this much earlier in their relationship, but she somehow always managed to change the subject. The woman was wonderful in so many unexpected ways, but she didn't have any tolerance for--what had she called it? Ah, yes: Long-leggity beasties and things that go bump in the night.
"Did you want to stop, Anne?" Stoner laid his hand tentatively on her near thigh.
Anne sighed, lifted his hand back up to the steering wheel and said, "Let's just get there."
Stoner could not speed up, though. Thomas Cross, the Immortal Master of the Facets--proclaimed so in a drunken night of revelry long ago--was following them in a van the size of Pittsburgh and couldn't negotiate the hilly coastline road with any speed at all. Thomas wasn't sure about the directions to Sean's seaside bungalow and Stoner didn't want to lose him.
"Thomas said that Mary was healthy, Anne. She's only been back a week. I'm sure Mary will come around as soon as she spends some time with her family and the people she loves," Stoner tried not to sound so lame. He was a jurist, for God's sake. Words were his weapons, his stock in trade, but this slender little woman with the salt and pepper mane seemed to tie his tongue in Gordian knots. Stoner felt for her situation: a reunion with her estranged daughter in time for a lovely wedding that ended in swordplay and the kidnapping of the bride. Stoner had taken Anne back to Seacouver with him because she couldn't take the day-after-day waiting and suffering about her daughter's welfare.
An unusual beginning, he thought, to what has been a most pleasing affair, and then some. Away from the tragedy of her daughter's disappearance, away from the burdensome requirements of her position as Chief of Pathology at St. Mary's NHS Trust at Paddington, a large teaching hospital in the heart of London, Anne was a different woman entirely. Stoner wanted to think his own skill as attentive and tender lover had anything to do with Anne's transformation from prim, fast-track demon old-maid to the soft, laughing, twinkle-eyed lady. The lady--Stoner had to admit--he was falling for, in a most serious way, which didn't seem to bother him a bit.
It saddened him to see her changing back the closer they came to the beach house where Mary and Sean MacLeod were to have spent a blissful honeymoon together. Now it served as something of a lying-in hospital, if Stoner understood the term correctly. Mary, mad as a spring hare, and a ruined Facet, the first, Alexa Kuehl occupied the two bedrooms. Everyone else, Adam Piersen, Duncan MacLeod, Richard Ryan, and Sean MacLeod were bunking out on the living room floor. Well, three Immortals out of four, anyway. Sean seemed to have moved down to the beach below the house and was camping out on the sand most days.
Strike, another Facet, was also there, along with the two women Facets of their odd little group, Margaret, the nurse, and Molly the silent, shy brains of the group. Both of them lived with Dragon, the fifth facet who had bought Joe Dawson's bar. Dragon had stayed back in Seacouver, smart chap, to see to the more ordinary, less exciting chores. The two women had been at the seaside house for a week now, helping tend the two madwomen who had taken up residence there.
Everyone would be glad to see the behemoth of a cross-country condo which Cross had flown in in the belly of a troop transport, the largest bird Overlook Airport had ever seen. Four bedrooms, bath, bar, every little thing you could ask for. No more sleeping on the floor for the madwomen caretaker staff, and the semi would make a decent rolling hospital to get the women back to Seacouver, which evidently was the current plan, now that Ram could not be found...or was dead...or whatever. Stoner did not understand most of what had occurred after the wedding. He was sure there would be plenty of folk around to explain it to him, or all the questions he had left over after the Grand Meeting scheduled for this evening. Oh, joy.
"What do you want, Anne?" Stoner tried once again to chip through the ice.
Dr. Lindsey looked over at him as if he were the stupidest, most insensitive being on the planet. "Over. I want it to be over."
Grant, the sixth Facet, climbed down from the semi and shook his head, "I am sorry Master Cross, but we cannot make it down this side road with this rig."
"Oh, Grant," the short black man who looked like a bantam weight prize fighter strolled around the front of the cab and came to stand by the tall, taciturn, Addam's character, who was his love, life, and general keeper of whatever dignity either of them ever managed. "Where is your sense of adventure?"
"I wouldn't be surprised if I left it back on that flying warehouse, Sir," Grant grumbled in the lowest register imaginable. Grant had not fared well on the three-hour flight from Seacouver.
"Oh, be serious, will you? You haven't spewed for the past two hours," Thomas spoke consolingly, "I am sure your delicate tummy is settled by now." He patted the granite-hard six pack.
"I am going to walk down to the house," Grant declared, "And you can do whatever you wish. You will anyway." With a prim snort that did not fit his chiseled features at all, Grant strode off down the narrow lane towards the roiling, crashing sea, and the madwomen mess they'd come to clean up.
Thomas Cross, HorseMaster and Immortal, Dragon Malak's best student--well, if one did not count Adam Piersen--stepped up to the cab and swung in. He patted the dashboard encouragingly, just as if it were one of his many fine horses. Then he spit on his palms and rubbed them together, a feverish glint, a Mister Toad and the motor car look, sparkled in his dark, gold eyes...
...and he fired the monster up.
There is a clan, a massive family, and they rule the forces of nature and humanity. They spin the atoms, they spark the lightning, and they set in motion the urges and aversions of the heart and mind. Memorize their stories, their tales of whimsy, war and wild abandon, and listen carefully to their casual conversations. These are the formulas that govern the course of the world and guide the mortals rushing through it.
Sean scrambled down the stony little path to the beach. He tucked the latest quotation about Immortals into his shirt pocket and mentally chided himself for letting his project run so far behind. He had meant to have this all finished before his wedding, but then, that was an entire lifetime ago, before he'd become an Immortal himself, and the collection of all references to Immortality and Immortals in the literary databanks of the world had to take a back seat to the modern doings of said Immortals.
They had brought a second of the walking wounded to the house that Adam had bought Sean for his wedding bower. Asylum, maybe, but it was as far away from a romantic cottage as Sean's marriage was from a real union. He couldn't stand to remain in the place that might have seen him snuggled beside the woman to whom his heart belonged. Such an enormous pain could never be rightly appreciated, he reasoned. So Sean simply chose not to. Dahm and Pop and the Facets were more than enough troops to see to the mad ladies' requirements. Thomas Cross and the rest of the Facets, except for the Dawsons, would arrive later this day and take the women north.
Then, Sean descended to the beach and took off his shoes, then they will clear out of my house and perhaps I will ask Shannon to move back in. She could help me clean the place and she was such splendid company. Sean was sure he would never be entertaining any future thoughts of bliss, wedded or informal, for that matter. This current version had thoroughly soured him on the whole idea of men and women getting together in the Grand Congress. Why bother in any case? It was not as if he'd ever be having offspring.
But Shannon, thief, ex-hooker, whatever she was, would make a fine friend, a low-keyed companion, which was about all Sean's poor nerves could tolerate at this point. He even liked the fights they had, not withstanding he'd yet to win a single round.
Sean walked down the beach, scrunching the warm sand between his toes, letting the sea winds tousle his dark curls, while all the woe up on the hill drifted away from him. He didn't see Shannon anywhere on the beach, but that did not surprise him. She was always popping up, seemingly from the thin air, when you would have sworn no one was about. This afternoon, however, she did not appear as Sean settled down on the warm sand and stared at the hypnotic rhythms of the waves. At some point, Sean fell asleep.
The incoming tide woke him rudely. Sean kicked reflexively at the waves and levered up to crane his neck right, then left. Cursing at his soppy jeans, he trudge up higher on the beach. Maybe Shannon had moved on. The notion disturbed him immensely, all the more because it hadn't occurred to him before. Why did he expect she would always be here to listen to his many complaints, to counsel and laugh and play?
Sean hadn't known her more than a week. Why did he feel as if Shannon were a lifelong friend? Why did he think she would stay forever? A homeless elder ex-hooker, or whatever she was, was hardly the wellspring of such unwarranted expectations. Sean walked around the cove to the rocky outcrop which jutted into the breakers like a stone warship. As he got closer to the point, he saw something lying on one of the higher crags. Sean climbed up to what would have been the forecastle. He picked up the tattered cloth which had been folded in a pile at the verge of the foredeck.
Her jeans--the ones she had stolen, more likely, out of someone's trash--and her ratty T-shirt draped over Sean's hands as he struggled to press down the first thought flying into his mind.
There was a reason Shannon hadn't appeared this day. What had Striker called it?--The Long Swim to China. Sean collapsed down on the rocky cliff and tried to forgive himself for being so wrapped in his own concerns, that he had never considered her pain. Homeless, hopeless, alone--how could he have dismissed her extreme deprivations as simply artistic or romantic invention.
Sean stood up, searched the empty, sun-dazzled waves, and trudged back down to the beach, Shannon's clothes in his arms as if they were a warrior's body being carried off the field of battle. It seemed he was doomed to see everything wither and die around him. The gods, or Fate, or some other merciless force was bent on reaving Sean of even the slightest pleasure in any of his own kind. Back on the beach, he shaded his eyes against the sand glare and peered up the hill to the madhouse. No, he definitely couldn't return there. No one would understand. What would he say? There was a derelict on the beach who meant a great deal to me, but she's gone now.
Of course, it wasn't his fault. He had asked her to come up to the house for something to eat. He had come down faithfully each day and stayed with her, poured out his heart, and made sand castles and swam in the surf together. He'd been a sorry friend, though, not to have seen Shannon was so close to ending it all. Now that he thought of it, though, there were signs he had missed, or merely chosen not to see.
Shannon's even, quiet listening, he could see now, was probably depression. Her apparent fearlessness and unconcern about all the trivial things, food, shelter, and such, he saw now as her acceptance in the final days of her life. He had missed it all, every bit of it. Sean sat down in the sand near the tide's edge and slowly refolded the rags which had been the sum total of all her wordly goods.
She had died alone, but he was damned if she would go unmourned.
"I admit they're a fashion tragedy, Sean--"
Sean jerked around to find her, standing stark naked, behind him.
"But I wouldn't think tears were in order."
Sean opened his mouth to explain, but he only wept louder. Until Shannon plopped down beside him and took him in her arms, folding him solidly against her. His tears and his breath stopped in unison and every part of him responded to the proximity of all that undiluted flesh. Slim and spare and hard as Shannon's frame was, it seemed suddenly lush and soft against him, even through his own clothes.
Sean slipped his hand behind her head and tugged the wet, salty braid gently until her face angled up toward him on the elegant neck. How could he ever have thought she was old or plain? Without even thinking to do so, he found his mouth had settled against the plush cushion of her lower lip, teasing and suckling lightly there, while the hand round her braid cupped the back of Shannon's head and trapped her against him, as he probed gently against teeth and farther within the warm darkness, whence all the wise words had come to comfort and advise and cheer him in these dim days.
Shannon leaned back finally and broke the gentle join between them. "Perhaps I took unfair advantage of you in a time of torment, Sean," she suggested, though her breathy delivery would indicate she felt no remorse for doing so.
Of course she didn't want him, Sean thought dismally. Who would? "I thought you had laid your clothes on the rocks and jumped off to drown your sorrows. I thought you were dead, Shannon."
"Maybe we could continue this conversation after you give me back my clothes," Shannon chuckled.
Sean became aware he was holding the jeans and T in a death's grip on his lap, and that he'd been staring shamelessly at Shannon since she'd pulled back from him. "Yes," he said finally, "Yes, um, here--" Sean held out her clothes and she took them, pulling on the Tshirt first, then laying back to pull up the incredibly baggy old jeans.
"You were never a hooker," Sean commented when her attention returned to him.
"I don't remember saying I was," Shannon answered, moving back to sit by him, their sides touching.
"Oh," Sean couldn't quite remember that first conversation. There had been so many since, even if this were only the seventh day they had met. "I thought you had. Anyway, you are not some beach bag lady either."
"You are too kind, Lord," Shannon laughed and leaned hard against him, nearly pushing him over sideways.
"What are you?" Sean pushed back and she went tumbling over, laughing with glee.
"You would not believe me if I told you, Sean," Shannon said when her breath returned. "I'm fairly certain even I don't know for sure. What are you?"
"I am an Immortal," Sean said without stopping to think about the consequences of revealing this.
"Well, good for you, Sean," Shannon clearly did not believe him. "Doesn't that make you afraid?"
"That I will not grow old and die? No, Shannon, doesn't bother me a bit."
"Oh," Shannon chewed on her lower lip, "Then you haven't been Immortal long enough to consider what it will be like when the sun goes nova and the earth dies?"
The notion struck some internal dire dread, centered in the marrow of his bones, not just the words, but her breezy delivery, chilled him suddenly. "No," he said, though he couldn't say it was an answer, as much as it was a denial.
"I won't be alive then, Shannon," Sean said.
"Oh, then you lied," Shannon tested the sand between her fingers. Too wet. She moved up the beach a bit and found the sand just right.
Sean joined her. He knew the basic pattern well, though no two castles they built were ever the same. He began with the moat and then enlarged it twice before Shannon nodded her approval. It was going to be a very large castle, he thought. The biggest they had done so far.
"Why did you say I lied?" Sean asked when Shannon returned with popsicle sticks and beach wood and rocks, their tools for sculpting the sand.
"You can't be Immortal if you won't be alive then," Shannon started with the central Keep, a gigantic aedifice if the base were any indication.
"Pop says there's a difference between being Immortal and being Eternal. Only God is Eternal, Shannon."
"And you have this on good authority?"
"Yeah, Shannon. God told me himself," Sean chuckled.
"Then I take it you never spoke to Her?" Shannon jibed.
"Very funny. What is that?" Sean watched as Shannon began the third layer of the Keep.
"A ziggurat," Shannon replied, "Let's see, mmmm, Marduk's Tower, it was called. Here in the exact heart of Babylon."
"Oh, I see," Sean nodded, "A tower of Babel."
Shannon thought a moment, "Yes, exactly."
"And is that the theme of today's discussion, then," Sean asked.
"This isn't a lesson, for God's sake, Sean. It's only a castle of sand. Everything doesn't have to have symbolic import. Some things are only pleasure and play, after all."
"I'm so sure," Sean snorted. "If that is so, then what do you want to talk about today?"
"Everything, anything," Shannon replied. "All the rest of anything else you want to know. I wasn't gone today, Sean, but I will be gone tomorrow."
"You're not--?" Sean worried again about Shannon's intentions.
"Of course not," Shannon said sadly, "No, that can never happen, never. How will I know how the world ends?"
Some terrible change happened in her voice as if she did indeed expect to witness this event first hand, as if she were not very happy about the situation. Perhaps this was the source of her madness, Sean thought. Maybe Shannon believes herself Immortal, or worse, Eternal. It was all a lie, really, not just Shannon's madness, but Mary's and Alexa's as well, his own craziness also--all of it just lies and lying and the truth crashing down on them all to show them a bleak reality they could none of them deny.
"Lies," Sean said aloud.
"For instance?" Shannon was so good at guiding him where he wanted to go.
"My mother," Sean let the words float up and escape, even the ones he did not understand.
"Your mother lied?" Shannon started the fifth layer of the tower.
"No. I don't know," Sean amended, "Maybe she did. I was thinking about how everyone has lied to me about her."
"She doesn't have a name?" Shannon showed Sean where the courses and bridges should go and then returned to working on the tower, now a yard tall.
"Of course she had a name!"
"And?"
Sean thought about this as he braced and arched branches over the moat where the main bridge would be. "I don't know actually. When she worked with the Watchers, she went under the name of, hmm, Seaton, I think--yes, Sean Seaton. Oh," Sean paused, "I am named for her. Why didn't they tell me? I am named for my mother...or at least one of her aliases."
"Pardon?"
"I think they also called her Ram," Sean tried to think what her other names were.
"Because she was stubborn as a he-goat?" Shannon suggested.
"No," Sean grimaced at the slur, "because of her abilities with computers. You know the old designation for memory storage?"
Shannon nodded her head, but Sean doubted she knew whereof he spoke.
"When she was married to my Uncle Joe, she went by the name of Set Dawson," Sean added. No one had ever explained that to him. It was something he found squirreling around in Pop's and Dahm's private papers, something he loved to do better than any other diversion.
"And when she was married to your Pop?" Shannon began working on the terraces, planting sea grass and tiny trees.
"Well, that's when the lying starts big time," Sean started working on the secondary structures and fountains. "The old story, the one they always told me from as far back as I can remember, went something like: your father met this woman who worked with your brother and they got married and she was in an awful car accident and was killed, but you were saved. She loved you very much, yadayadayada, you get the picture."
Shannon crowned the tower with a tiny amethyst crystal and began to set shells as ornaments round the terrace walls. She just waited for Sean to come back to the conversation about lying.
"But no Sean, or Set, or anyone at all married Pop, ever, as far as the records say," Sean continued. "When I suggested I was a bastard, Pop came as close to walloping me as I am ever likely to get. I guess because he is a bastard and touchy on the subject. Pop said I wasn't and that was pretty much that. Dahm on the other hand went into this long philosophical discourse about legitimacy and--oh, I don't know, it was all I could do to keep from yawning in his face. Dahm's like that. If you ask him a question that is out of hand or rude, he will make you sorry you asked, by giving you such a thorough answer you can't make head or tails of it, and he can literally go on for hours, until you're screaming for mercy."
Shannon shook with her laughter, "I think I like your Dahm. Just wicked enough."
"And then some," Sean agreed. "Anyway, where was I? Oh, yes, they all maintained my mother was dead, that she had been dead from the moment of my birth."
"And she's alive?" Shannon began to carve in the archways and the doors.
"Yes, I think so," Sean hadn't really decided what he thought, "Well, it's just that after all this time--"
"Yes?"
"You know we talked about this Malak character?" Sean began again.
"The dragon? Yes. The one who stole your wife?" Shannon really sounded as if she believed his far-flung tales. More than that, she seemed to respect them, even if she didn't believe.
"Yes," Sean wondered she hadn't written him off as a crazy person, but Shannon never ridiculed, never discouraged. "Just as soon as I told them I was going to kill Malak when I found him, everybody changed their story and insisted that this Malak and my mother were one and the same person."
"Hmmm," Shannon contemplated what he'd said, "The two assertions do seem mutually exclusive."
"That's how I see it!" Sean agreed exuberantly, "Either they lied then or now, for their own purposes, and nothing to do with my feelings at all."
"So it isn't the lying after all," Shannon said quietly.
"Huh?"
"What hurts is they turned away from you in this, that they showed you their backs. They told you by their actions there were some things they would not share with you, no matter how much they loved you."
Sean listened to her assessment and agreed grudgingly. "How can I trust them at all!"
"You can't," Shannon answered, unexpectedly. "You can never trust anyone. Surely you've learned this much in your short life, Sean."
"Oh," Sean slumped back on the sand. "Really? No one?"
"You could try trusting yourself," Shannon continued, "but that isn't really a sure bet either."
"What a ghastly thing to say!" Sean yelled. "What about love? What about all the tender, giving little moments when you know there is heaven in the world and God in the hearts of those you love? What about loyalty and fealty and honor? What about--?"
"What about the Sons of God who lived within this splendid tower with its gracious fountains and gardens, its glorious gates and dwellings, its alabaster walls?" Shannon stepped back from the wonderful sand castle, the biggest and most beautiful they had ever built together. "What about a race whose every purpose was the Word of God, and whose only occupation was to record and protect and preserve all His Holy Works? What is the way of everything, Sean?"
As if she had called the tides, a large wave crashed over Sean, drenching him and driving him onto his back. He fought up, sputtering and cursing.
Shannon was gone.
Marduk's tower and the moat and all the rest were gone.
Only the shiny, slick sand remained, reflecting the clouds in a distant sky.
Sean might have contemplated some profound truth then, but a loud noise snapped his attention back up towards his house. Over the top edge of the small path, that he had taken down to the beach each day, came a behemoth of a truck, bumping and smoking, and then flying through the air, straight towards him.
Sean took to his heels and the semi landed, upright, axel deep, in the sand where he'd been standing. He watched in amazement as Thomas Cross opened the door and stepped out as if nothing had happened.
"Hullo, there," Thomas called cheerily. "It's so nice to see you, Sean." The short black man extended his arms for a hug.
Sean walked over warily and hugged him, surprised nothing in the small, muscular frame was busted. "It's nice to see you too, HorseMaster Cross."
Sean eyed the truck, "Interesting parking maneuver, that."
"Well, you know," Cross replied with a smile, "I was going to park it behind the house, but then I saw this inviting piece of beach, and--"
Sean started walking away, "Got away from you, did it?"
"Like a Percheron with a bee up its ass," Cross replied, in an equestrian version of Lucille's most quotable quotes.
