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Chapter Two: A Splendid Discontent
The splendid discontent of God With chaos, made the world...
And from the discontent of man The world's best progress springs..........................................................................................................Ella Wheeler Wilcox (1855-1919)
This day began to end, as the many summer days before it, with the tide's ponderous incoming and the surrender of sultry waves to the serious business of the chill and heartless deeps.
A curious flotsam had washed up--or, more correctly, thudded down on--the pale beach. It was a ten ton massive metal box, buried to its axles in the soft sand, just high enough on the beach to escape the stealthy waves. As the sky flushed and flamed, the windows of the enormous semi began to light, one-by-one, as the "boys" gathered in their new "clubhouse" which Thomas Cross had flown in--first, by troop transport, and then, by an oversight of enthusiasm--all the way from Seacouver to this silver strand.
Thomas bustled around the galley, cleaning the last of the breakage from his wild ride down the rocky cliff. There was surprisingly little damage, all things considered. The rig's elaborate customization had followed the blueprints of a seaworthy--if not airworthy--yacht, everything shipshape and secure.
Too bad life could not be brought to heel as easily, Thomas mused, reviewing the agenda for this evening's meeting. He supposed the most they could do was clarify the problem. There was little chance they could come to a solution.
"Tom!" a cheery voice called from the doorway and the MacLeod heir bounced in.
"Sean!" Thomas returned the greeting. "You're a little early. Meeting's not till eight."
"I know, Tom," Sean handed over a sheaf of official looking papers. "I tried to do this over the phone, but I finally gave up and drove into Overlook."
Thomas Cross cocked his mahogany visage, "Huh?"
"Well, they've decided you are renting this stretch of beach, by the week," Sean began.
Thomas picked up the papers and started rifling through. His jaw dropped. "Five hundred bucks a week?"
"Well," Sean shook his dark curls, "It was that or a littering fine of five thousand a day until you cleaned this semi off the beach. I have some estimates," he peeked over the top edge of the pages in Cross' hands and he pointed, "there, on the bottom."
"Jeezus!" Cross swore, "I didn't pay that much for the rig!"
"There are two very good construction engineers staying at the Overlook Arms and they said, short of two double rotor Army MAST transports, the only way they could see getting this ten ton--"
"Twelve," Cross corrected him.
"Whatever," Sean growled, "The only possible solution was to disassemble the thing and haul it up the cliff in manageable pieces."
Thomas smacked the wall with his dust rag.
Sean just shrugged, "I did the best I could, Thomas. It was like engineering a bloody miracle just to get the neighbors to allow the rental alternative and that's only till the end of the month."
"There's a new one on its way now," Thomas sighed. "Should be here in a few days. It's my own damn fault, after all. Grant said I shouldn't try to drive it down to the bungalow. He doesn't say, 'I told you so,' but he might as well. You know that imperious Butler to the World tone he affects. He just gazed down the cliff after I'd climbed back up the path to call about the new one. He just harumphs as only he can. 'Will that be all, Sir?' he cracks. He's never going to let me forget this."
Sean started laughing. Thomas' imitation of the implacable Grant was too near perfection to do otherwise.
"And where are my manners?" Thomas continued, "Thank you. Thank you very much, Sean. I wouldn't even have thought of making any arrangements at all. I was far too busy making sure the gas lines were all intact and that the whole rig wasn't going up like a Roman candle. How incredibly gracious that was for you to have thought of the details!"
Sean tucked his head and grinned. "Thank you for noticing," he said as if no one had taken much notice, good or bad, of him lately.
Thomas showed him around the soon to be gutted "clubhouse" of his own design. Three bedrooms a sauna and a lovely bathroom with tub--no stand-up-in-the-closet-and-pretend-it's-a-shower outfit here--filled the back half of the enormous trailer and a lovely rumpus, meeting, living, carousing room filled the front, replete with chairs and sofas and drop-down tables, a small, but lively, library collection, and every computer gadget known to this first step into the twenty-first century.
At the very front, set off from the living room by a bar, was a complete kitchen, Grant's contribution to the building plans. Thomas offered Sean a barstool and started getting out the ingredients for Margaritas, the Triple Sec and cognac and--he had a most peculiar recipe for the green slush, but no one ever, ever complained.
"Mmmm," Sean took a tentative sip. "That's very good," he commented, thinking to himself that something that color, somewhere between brown and neon green, should by all rights be pure poison. "Ummm, Tom?"
"Yes," the spry little black man settled across the bar on his elbows--Grant had designed a riser step behind the bar to accommodate Thomas' diminutive frame. "You just tell it to the barkeep, my boy. The Tender is in."
"Well," Sean tried to think exactly what he wanted to say. "I don't want to be the center of this meeting."
Thomas' eyebrow arced, "Come again?"
Sean sighed and started again, "I want you to tell me the truth, the whole truth. I want to know it all. I don't want there to be strangled silences or warning coughs, or--"
Thomas nodded and licked the salt off the side of his glass, "I see what you mean. You want to be a little more specific, Sean. We've only got an hour."
"Everyone knows more about me than I do. I am Immortal now. I am an adult. I am married--well, technically, anyway. I'm tired of being left out of my own history. Start with my mom, Thomas. Tell me the truth."
Thomas took a long drink while Sean chewed on a lime wedge and waited.
"Why don't you tell me about that woman who was standing by you as I took this rig airborn," Thomas refilled his goblet.
"You saw her?" Sean was truly amazed.
"Hey," Thomas chuckled, "When you think you're about to leave the world for good, everything gets very vivid. Tell me about her. Who is she?"
Sean thought a moment, his bright blue eyes screwed nearly shut with the effort. "Nooo!" he said finally, choking on the lime. "Nooo!" he repeated. "Not the bag lady!" Sean picked up his drink and upended it over his head, shaking the ice chips out of his hair like a wet dog getting dry. "Noooooooo!" he howled.
"I knew your mother, Sean," Thomas pulled out three bar rags, one for Sean, one for the bar, one for the floor. "Her hair was shorter then, and she was not so skinny, nor so haggard, but that was your mother. I knew her very well,"he repeated.
"I assume you don't mean that in the biblical sense," Sean scraped at his face with the towel and his rage. Getting no answer, he peeked over the top of the terry. "Thomas?"
"How much truth can you--or my linoleum, for that matter--take, when the first little snippet sets you off like that, Sean?"
Sean tried to remember everything he knew about Shannon. Hardly anything at all, except that she was such a tender listener, such a willing and cheerful companion. Not his mother at all. Thomas was having him on. "That wasn't funny, Thomas."
"I am absolutely serious, Sean."
"But she doesn't look anything like me, Thomas," Sean was never above grasping for the least straw, despite his avowed search for the truth.
"Hmmm," Thomas murmured, tapping his chin with his index finger, "Now, who does she remind me of. Surely someone I know."
"Oh, stop. Shannon doesn't look anything like anybody else," Sean crossed his arms and stood his ever-diminishing ground.
Thomas tucked his head down and pursed his full lips against the laughter that lingered there. "Imagine if her hair were really short," he began.
Sean formed an image in his mind. She was even uglier without all that tangly mane frame she sported, braids and tendrils and--. He repictured her as shorn. Yuckk.
"Okay," Thomas continued, "Now think how she would look if she were a half-foot taller--"
"Yes," Sean was beginning to regret his plan to speak with Cross before the meeting.
"And a man," Thomas suggested.
"Dahm!" Sean gasped out his nickname for his brother. "You're right. She is the spitting image of Adam. Wait--what is she doing here? I thought she was dead."
"I would never presume to speak for your mother's intentions, Sean, but I am sure she wanted to meet and speak with you, without your knowing who she was. I should think, in light of recent events--"
"Malak!" Sean spat out the malediction. "He thinks he is going to hide from me by turning into my mother. He's stalking us, waiting for his chance to steal Mary again."
"No," Cross said slowly, indicating Sean should move to the couch while he finished cleaning the Margarita off the front of the bar. "The Father of All Horses is dead, Sean. You have killed him. He will never walk the Earth again."
"This is what you're going to pitch me as the truth? Do I look like I'm feeble minded?" Sean slumped down on one of the couches. "Pullease!"
Thomas rinsed out the bar rag. "Why do you say that?"
"Because if I had really managed to kill your precious Father of All Horses, your beloved Malak," Sean stretched out and yawned, "You would not be so friendly, Thomas. I am certain you would have taken my head by now. That, or sent one of your Facets to do so, just as soon as you learned I trapped Malak in his cabin retreat and consecrated him to Kingdom Come, so I could rescue my bride."
"Father knew he was going to die," Thomas said quietly.
Sean thought how very odd it sounded for this wealthy little black man to refer to Malak as "Father." Malak was possibly the blondest being in all the world. Was or is. That was the question.
"It is not your fault that you were chosen to play Fate's Hand," Thomas finished. "I do not charge you with a murder that was fashioned five millennia ago, and for which, he had prepared himself all his long and lovely life."
"Yeah. Right," Sean stretched his back and tucked his hands under his neck. "Maybe he did and maybe he didn't, and maybe he is my mother and maybe all of this is just some kind of maddening game you all play with me," he groaned, "And maybe there is no use to even asking any more. Maybe no one remembers what is true after all this time."
Thomas Cross came over to the couch and lowered himself to the floor near Sean's head. "You are not ready to know all of this. You don't want to know. I tell you the truth and all you have for me is argument and derision. Why do you wish to waste your time this way?"
Sean rolled over on his side to face Master Cross. "You are right, of course. If I promise to be still and just to listen, will you tell me about my mother? Please?"
HorseMaster Cross was never very far from his beautiful herd of horses it seemed. Here was just such a green stud colt, nervous and fractious, but willing at heart and more than ready to begin the schooling disciplines. "Sean?" Thomas ran his hand softly over the MacLeod heir's dark tresses.
"Yes, Master Cross," Sean answered respectfully.
"Be my student," Thomas proposed.
Sean sat up suddenly and looked down on Thomas. "In the manner that my brother, Adam, was a student of yours for a time?" he asked, suspiciously.
"Your brother has discussed that with you?" Thomas tipped his head up and caught Sean's gaze in his own.
"It's what he doesn't say which intrigues me most," Sean countered.
"Well," Thomas sighed, "I suppose we could include that in the curriculum if you wish. I meant that we might pursue the attainment of discipline, by which your awesome powers could find their true expression, in grace and wisdom."
"Something you find sadly lacking in my character at present," Sean recited what he'd come to refer to as Adam's Complaint, in that his brother, Dahm, was wont to so complain, nearly every day of late.
"If I thought it lacking, then I would not have made the offer," Thomas commented. "You have it in you to be the equal of your brother and your father, but not in this fashion, Sean. They have been too good to you for too long and even you know this. Their love has given you a foundation for which there is no equal, and all your instincts are the best, but you have now to leave them and begin your own life," Thomas paused, "Every baby bird must fly, Sean. I have offered you an apprenticeship. You may take the next two days to decide whether you will accept the offer or no."
"I can't go off on a field trip now, Thomas," Sean leaned over his knees, "I'm a married man, for God's Sake! I can't go traipsing hither and yon on a whim any more."
Thomas was never so reminded of how sheltered Sean's life had been as when the young man's language reverted by a century or two, to follow the speaking patterns of his older brother. "Even you don't believe that by now, Sean. Mary is lost to you. She was promised to another before either she or you were born, long before. It is time to move away from this tragedy of Fate and into the portion of your life which is truly yours."
"You don't think my mother will come back and cure Mary's madness?" Sean began to chew on his full lower lip.
"I think she will, Sean," Thomas patted the young man's knee. "It won't change anything even if she does. Mary will simply be able to more coherently reject you."
Sean picked the HorseMaster's dark hand off his thigh and handed it back to him. "That's a comforting thought, you mean old black man."
"Nobody said they came for comfort," Thomas parried. "They said, as I recall, they came for the truth."
"The truth, then," Sean settled back on the couch and waited for Thomas Cross to rise from the floor and sit beside him. "The Truth," Sean repeated, wondering why he should suddenly be so obsessed with a desire for this, when any number of delightful lies had been more than satisfactory up until now.
A very long time ago--and I'm not sure how long ago, so don't interrupt, Sean. You promised. Hmmm, yes, around five thousand and some odd hundred years ago, five brothers were born to The People. They call themselves this. We call them a whole host of things, depending on what form they are in when encountered. Being shape-changers, they are every sort of fabulous beaste, from angel to dragon to demon to--well, you get the idea.
Two of the Five Princes, the brothers, you know and have met. One is Dr. Palmer, Mary's father, the other is--how did you call her?--the Beach Bag Lady, your mother. Well, no, that is not exactly so. Ram, which is the name I knew her by, tried mightily to explain this to me, but I am not entirely understanding of the concept even now. The other Prince was Malak. He was a Dragon Regal and a Champion of The People in their wars between the Tribes of Men. He was also heir to the Throne, and became, in time, King.
Malak, like all his race, was mostly in male form, very like a human man, but there were times he could manifest as a woman. The name of that woman is Setan'm--an earlier name, meaning Chaos. As that woman, he gave birth to your brother, and again, as that woman, he gave birth, five thousand years later, to you. The rest of the time, in between, he has been Malak, and as such trained Adam, a long time ago, and myself, a century ago. The trauma of Adam's conception had the effect of splitting Malak between the two aspects of his personality, so that in his mind (and Ram's, as well) he and Ram are two entirely different beings. He walked the world over five thousand years. She has walked the world little more than half a century. Malak was born to engender, with Mary, the new race of dragons. Ram was little more than a consequence of that Destiny, at least at first. Her separate identity, in Malak's way of thinking, let him continue his faith, his continence. Ram had the sex, bore the children, took the blame, and Malak drove her away from him so far, she became a separate entity, instead of just another aspect of his personality.
And now that Malak is dead, Ram is all that remains of the Father of All Horses.
"Am I in this story at all?" Sean wandered to the bar and poured them two more of the Napoleon Margarittes, or whatever they were.
"I was just getting to that, Sean," Thomas apologized.
"Well, am I to be a chapter, or only just an obscure footnote?" Sean returned to the couch and pulled down an armrest/table between them.
"I would say that was entirely up to you, Sean," Thomas took his goblet back from Sean. "I have offered my services."
Sean toasted him.
About a year before you were born, Ram came to Seacouver from Paris where she had been working as a research and computer drone in Watchers' HQ Central. Adam had run into her on the Methos Project, but I suppose it had just been too long, or the memories were too painful--in any case, he did not recognize her.
She came to Seacouver to meet Joe Dawson, because she had fallen in love with him. Don't interrupt. I'll never get this straight if I have to stop. Just listen. Where was I? Yes, Ram came to Seacouver to meet Joe. She had fallen for him over the phone through her work with computer support at HQ. I suppose she thought if she met him in person, that would cure her of the infatuation, but of course meeting Joe only made it worse.
There was a challenge, or some other incident which revealed Ram to be something far more than a secretary from HQ, though she was clearly no Immortal. There was that nasty business with the Knacker--no, that was later. Let me see--
Ram came to Seacouver. She was killed a few days later. She fled after she revived. Joe sent the Watchers looking for her on a global search. Your father found her back in Seacouver. I am unclear exactly what happened to her in the interim--something to do with The People making her relinquish the Throne and her Crown and her Immortality. In any case, she returned to Seacouver where she got a job and an apartment and kept to herself for the next half year.
During that time, Ram hired Kyle's mother, Lucille, to teach her, um, the gentle art. Sex, Sean. This is in complete confidence, you understand. Even Kyle doesn't know this, but his mother used to be a--well, a courtesan would be the most apt term. After a time, Ram plied her intentions on Joe Dawson, but our dear Smoky Joe refused her. She left the bar half drunk and finished the job at your father's loft apartment, where he consummated their acquaintance, and you were conceived.
There was some problem with the pregnancy, with all the children born to The People who were sired by mortals and Immortals--something to do with easy miscarriage, or death or--I'm not sure. In any case, there was an accident, her car hit a school bus on her way into town to deliver you and she was burned and crushed. They managed to save you, to deliver you by C-section, but Ram arrested and they pronounced her dead. You were given into your father's custody and taken to Paris to live with your brother, Adam.
"Why didn't she come for me after she was better?" Sean asked.
"She didn't exactly get better, Sean. She barely survived and with so much brain damage after the coma passed, that she had continual seizures and no memory of her own name, let alone of her life before the accident, nor of you. All she really remembered, evidently, was that she loved Joe Dawson."
"But why didn't Pops go back for her?" Sean returned to the bar to pour the last of the slush, now mostly melted, but still very, very good.
"Nobody but Lucille and Joe knew Ram was still alive--and Dr. Lindsey and Dr. Mark, of course. Otherwise, Joe kept absolutely mum about the woman he'd married in the hospital and brought home with him to wait tables and light his life," Thomas wondered if he shouldn't make another batch of drinks before the others arrived for the meeting.
"So when did they find out that Ram was still alive?" Sean handed him a piece of paper and a pencil. "Write down the mix and I'll make the next batch," he offered.
"You're a good boy, Sean. You'll make a pleasant change from my other students," Thomas complimented him.
"I haven't said 'yes' yet," Sean shot back.
"You will, Sean. Of that, I have no doubt," Thomas momentarily regretted the warm buzz. It wouldn't do to be drunk at the meeting. Then again--
"So then what happened?" Sean had long since lost the train of this discourse. He had a vague notion that he'd been unwanted, abandoned, partly out of circumstance, partly out of indifference. He wasn't too sure he needed, or wanted, to know more.
"Your brother, Adam, made a deal with The People, the Danae, which ended up with Ram restored to her original state and all of The People gone from the Earth."
"That can't be right," Sean brought the new mix back for Cross' approval. "Mark Palmer has been alive for as long as I can remember."
"No, he hasn't," Thomas nodded and took a longer sip.
"Oh, come on," Sean put the blender back on the bar. "I've seen him, talked with him--"
"That was your mother, Sean," Thomas sighed. "Hmmm. Did I leave out the part about going to Hell and the Knacker and how Ram took your father to Last Gate to bring Sean Burns back from the dead, or how the Danae were set free and Marak remained behind to watch over his daughter by borrowing Malak's and Ram's flesh? Did I--?"
"Stop!" Sean howled, "Just stop!"
"That's probably enough truth for now, Sean. We'll go through it more slowly and I'll show you my files when you come home with me for your apprenticeship," Thomas wondered if he shouldn't turn on the oven and warm up dinner.
"You want this at low for about ten?" Sean asked, reaching for the range console before Cross could ask.
"Yes, that's a good idea," Thomas shrugged. He could get used to this.
"And I didn't say I'd be your student, Horse," Sean rustled around, seeing to the last of the preparations.
"You didn't have to," Thomas smiled. Thank you, Father, for sending me this one.
"...verily wise Zeus carried off golden-haired and pour drink for gods in the house of Zeus..."
Ganymedes because of his beauty,
to be amongest the deathless ones
(The Homeric Hymns, To Aphrodite, 202-205).
Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod pulled a T-shirt over his wet hair and relinquished his turn in the single bathroom of his son's honeymoon cottage. The two-bedroom wedding present from Sean's half-brother, Adam Piersen, was packed, floor to ceiling, with all the varied and various attendants of the two madwomen domiciled there now.Duncan was lucky to get fifteen minutes in the facilities for a quick shave and shower before Grant was pounding, however respectfully, at the door, reminding him the time was up. The Highland foster son made his way to the kitchen, where one of the two lady facets, Dragon's ladies, built sandwiches for supper.
"Can I help you with this?" Duncan draped his towel over one of the kitchen chairs, shook out his sopping curls and bound them up in a leather tie, shiny black tendrils on the white field of his T-shirt back. "Um, Molly, isn't it?"
Molly was so shy that any direct confrontation, good, ill, or neutral, set her to blushing, which she did now, chin tucked and hands shaking. She nodded her answer.
Duncan put his attention on the mayonnaise jar and retrieved a wide knife from the cutlery drawer. He began slathering the white goo onto the sandwich tops, lined neatly above the bottoms. "I have meant to thank you for all your care and hard work with Mary," Duncan said with as little emotional loading as he could manage, seemingly speaking to the bread.
"You're welcome," the short brunette with the wide shoulders ducked her head and whispered.
"How is Dragon these days?" Duncan started folding the tops over on the sandwich row, cutting them diagonally. He meant to put little Molly at ease with some small talk, but he'd obviously missed his mark quite widely.
Molly bent over, choking.
Oh, dear, Duncan chided himself. He patted Molly on the back and waited for her breath to return. "Sorry," he said. What an idiot he was! Molly and Dragon were lovers. He might have guessed this. You can take the boy down from the Highlands, but you can't shake the heather outta his hair. "Why don't you go rest, Molly, and I'll finish here. What are we doing? Taking half down to the meeting and the rest stay here? Okay. I'll bring some of Thomas' stew back up after the meeting."
Duncan tried to hold up both sides of the conversation as little Molly bobbed and ducked her way out the kitchen door. The M's, Duncan thought, Molly, the shy one, and, and--Margaret, yes, Margaret, the outgoing M. Of all the Facets, these two women, for some reason, were hard to remember by name, other than as Dragon's Ladies. Dragon and Strike and Grant, and, of course, Judge Stoner, now back in Seacouver with Dr. Anne, Mary's mother. The Dawsons, Duncan divided the sandwiches as he reviewed the honorary Immortals, the blood-covenant children of Ram, Joe and Lucille, then the M's and Dragon, Strike, Grant, Stoner, but not Anne Lindsey.
That was the mystery of mysteries, "Why not Anne?"
There was something about Dragon's Blood and Crystal Covenants which yet remained obscure, for while the rest of the Facets had not aged the intervening two decades, Anne was now fifty, every bit of it and then some. Just the right age for Judge Anthony Stoner, but not for long. In ten years she would be the age he looked now, and would look for the rest of his days. Anne had consumed the same blood, but she was not a Facet. No one knew why.
Of the Facets, four had come to Overlook Beach to help with the madwomen. Duncan shook his head. He always forgot that Adam's former wife, Alexa Kuehl, was also a Facet--the first, in fact. Five Facets in Overlook, the rest remaining in Seacouver: Strike and Grant, Molly and Margaret, and poor, demented Alexa, in some hideous withdrawal for want of renewing the Covenant with the Dragon.
Five Facets and Five Immortals, Duncan mused, setting half the sandwiches back in the frig, pulling out a beer, and settling down at the little white antique kitchen table to wrap the rest. The fingers of the two hands, right and left, the dexter and the sinister, the--No, that wasn't right, or dexterous, either one.
He'd left out the second madwomen, Mary, Anne's pregnant daughter, and his own daughter-in-law, in law and little else, it seemed. Mary was--?
Another mystery. She was as woefully quiet as Alexa was wildly demonstrative. Everything in Alexa's room was torn or broken. Everything in Mary's room was undisturbed, pristine, as if she were only a haunt or wight and of no actual substance at all. Dragon or Immortal, or something else altogether, Mary was first and last, sadness itself.
Which brought the count to five Immortals, six Facets, and one incredibly ill sort-of-a-dragon's- child. They needed the one surviving true Dragon Lord to complete the dozen. Eleven, the number of promise, Duncan mused, thirteen, the number of tragedy and sorry sacrifices. They needed Ram for a great many things, but making the dozen would do for a start.
Kathunnk! The kitchen's wall shuddered.
Oh, delightful! Duncan thought. Alexa's awake again.
Grant stormed into the kitchen and made straight for the refrigerator in the far wall near the porch door. He pulled open the door, shuffled through the crisper and retrieved vials and syringes. Then the taciturn second of the redoubtable HorseMaster Cross turned and blew out of the room as stormily as he had entered.
Yes, Alexa was definitely up. Duncan's eyes followed the path of Grant's wake. The Highlander wondered briefly if he should go help. No, surely they would call if they needed him. Duncan wasn't particularly anxious to watch the terrible doings with the second madwoman. It made his skin tingle and crawl most unpleasantly to see the slight, sweet woman/child, Alexa, turned into a carnivorous beastie. All the more disturbing was Adam's reaction to this morbid metamorphosis of his former beloved wife.
No, Duncan could forego this and hardly feel guilty at all. He had helped tend Mary this past sad week, taken the watch when the others were tired. No, Alexa the Vampire was all Adam's and Richie's business, and none of his own.
Adam and Richie had been wrestling with Alexa ever since they arrived yesterday--or, no the day before. She was entirely mad, raving and dangerous, and surprisingly strong. She'd killed Adam twice in the past twenty-four hours. Either Alexa was growing stronger, or Adam was tiring, not that it mattered, really. They'd drawn some blood from Mary that first day and given it to Alexa. Nothing had changed. It didn't work. Unless Ram showed up, and soon, their grits--as Lucille Dawson would say--were cooked.
Mary was--how did they term that?--ah, yes, folding in on herself: Involutional Melancholia. She was turning farther and farther away from the world and anyone else who lived there. Malak's death had completely undone her. Duncan tried to remember how devastated he had been himself after Tessa's death. He couldn't really blame her. Mary had been with her beloved a single turn of the moon before Sean had trapped and killed him. Now she carried Malak's child, or so she said. Duncan hoped it was true, that there would be some life abourning within her, even as all else came down around her in ashes.
Duncan finished stacking the wrapped sandwiches and hunted out the back door on the porch for a suitable cardboard box. Leaned up against the clapboard wall, was a framed picture, starting to warp in the salt sea air of the screened back room. Duncan turned the frame around. It must have been a wedding gift from Thomas Cross, moved here with the rest of Mary's and Sean's things in the time after Mary's abduction. Evidently there had been no place suitable inside to hang it, and in the crisis no thought had been taken to be more careful of such a valuable piece.
Duncan brought it into the kitchen and set it up on the small table while he packed the sandwiches into the box he'd retrieved. The painting was of a Greco-Roman myth--Ganymedes, he thought. Appropriate, being it was a traditional story depiction of rapture, Zeus carrying away the beautiful Trojan son to be an Immortal in Olympus, a cup-bearer. But, no, the standing figure was more likely Apollo, yes, of course, the lyre across his back bespoke this, and the fallen youth, perhaps Hyacinth, killed by the sun god with an accidental throw. A splendid and sensuous picture, really, very Thomas Cross in taste.
Duncan was suddenly reminded how little he and Adam had held each other since the ill-fated wedding, six weeks earlier. Before the wedding, Adam had run away for a time. Duncan still wasn't quite sure why, though it was certainly his own fault the Old Man had left. After Adam returned, they were so busy trying to find Sean's kidnapped bride--, then the news about Alexa's malady had taken Adam to Albuquerque--, then Mary's retrieval from the north country cabin, and Malak's death.
Connor had only remained through the first foray into the woods after Malak and Mary. He just hadn't returned to the "base camp" at the old monastery which Duncan called home these past two decades. Not surprising the Elder MacLeod had vanished. It was really more surprising that he had showed up among the living in the first place. That he had blessed Duncan and Adam's union, was still unbelievable to the Younger Highlander. Of course, that was little comfort, given Duncan and Adam had been less married this past month than they had been for the many years preceding.
Once again, for yet another time without number, Duncan felt his whole being begin to ache for Adam, the Oldest Immortal, his partner in parenting and loving, in drunkenness and quiet sobriety, in good times and bad--
Kathunk!
Alexa still awake? Duncan shrugged. He heard Adam bark an order at Grant, then the long legs stomped their way to the bathroom and the door slammed shut two rooms over. Duncan checked the wall clock. Seven-thirty, nearly time for the meeting down at the beached van. Adam had been back for two days now and they had not so much as touched hands.
Maybe the Old Man was toying with the idea of going back to his ex-wife, Alexa, now she was a widow. No, Richie--Richard, Duncan corrected himself, Richard, Richard--Ryan would never step aside for Adam. It was all too clear that the youngest Immortal--after Sean--was smitten with Alexa and lost to her, heart and soul. Even in her current bestial state, Richard's whole demeanor around her was so tender, Duncan could hardly bear to watch.
And Richard might just say the same about me, Duncan mused. His own face displayed the fuzziness of gaze, the subtle soft droop of lip and flare of nostril, the shiny eyes and hesitation of breath, that spoke silently of a sad, if patient, longing.
Adam Piersen stood beneath the warm liquid shards of the shower and tried to focus on something far from the cacophany of cuts and scrapes and bites and tears. Singly, each wounding was minor, but their combined miseries and emotional toll acted in congress to overwhelm the Old Man. Adam was beginning to find Alexa's suffering intolerable. Either Mary was not enough dragon for her blood to cure Alexa's madness, or the Covenant had nothing at all to do with this, beyond implanting the idea in Alexa's mind that not renewing the blood oath would render her as she was now, a voracious, blood-hungry, man-killing beast.
Adam turned around and let the needles sparkle over his long back and aching shoulders. They could not go on like this. Alexa was becoming ever more resistant to larger and larger doses of sedative. They would soon reach the point where the line between quieting her and killing her vanished.
Adam slapped and pawed his scalp in a parody of shampooing his hair. The soapy wave slid over his high forehead and parted at the bridge of his patrician nose, running into his unblinking eyes. He tipped his head backward and surrendered to the falling water, trying to rebuild an image of how Alexa had been, in a time before this when she was only dying in the mortal sense and the only purpose of each day was to wish for one more.
This was the price Alexa had paid for two brief decades of normalcy, husband and sons. He wondered if in some more lucent corner of her mind she regretted her decision to become immortal. Her family was gone now, killed in a senseless accident. She had learned the first separation of the Immortals, that first sensation of stillness peculiar to them all. Adam thought of it as vertigo, the feeling that nothing around him was stable or steady, but rather rushing by him at dizzying speed. From time-to-time he would follow after a particular speeding object, only to lose it finally, inevitably. Then he would be standing alone again as all the world sped by, hurrying mindlessly towards the dark.
And some dim days like these--. Adam stepped out of the shower and scraped himself off with a towel. Some days it would be only too easy just to loose the moorings and let the tide, the torrential current, take him away to that sweet and dreamless dark at the end of the way.
Adam shook off the lowering depression and exhaustion and trundled off towards the kitchen. MacLeod was nowhere in evidence, so Adam pulled out two six-packs from the icebox, set them in the cardboard box beside the sandwiches and lifted the box under his arm, making for the porch door and the evening meeting. Ryan and Striker met him at the outer screen door.
"Alexa sleeping?" Adam asked Richard.
Richard nodded wearily and took the box from Adam. "Mac says something's wrong with one of the pipes under the house," Ryan indicated the crawl space and the lattice-work panel tipped against the back porch skirt. "He's been under there, puttering around for the past half-hour. Do you think you could give him a hand, Adam?"
Adam nodded reluctantly. "Go on down. Tell Master Cross not to hold up the meeting on our account. We'll be along. Here," he grabbed two beers and popped the top off one.
Damnation, Adam thought, maybe if I just wait a little longer, Duncan will be done with crawling around under the house and--.
But the beer was soon empty and still no Duncan, as the late summer sunset began to light the evening tide and flame the storm clouds far to the west. Adam sighed, put the second beer down on the ground near the lattice panel, and lowered himself to his flat belly to crawl under the house.
"Duncan?" he called out. No answer. Adam crouched down in a low hands and knees creep trying not to think about the denizens of this dark place, earthworms and such. "Duncan!" Deeper under the house he went, almost to the center, with only the single sunset shaft of dusty light far behind his right shoulder at the entry to this crawlspace.
Yuckk! Adam's slender fingers squished into mud. The leaking pipe no doubt. "Duncan, God Damn It!" Adam grimaced and wiped his palm on his formerly clean sweater. He laid his hand back down and then jerked as a feathery, fleeting something whispered across the top of his hand.
Spider, Adam thought for an instant, but he had grown too familiar with his lover's touch, in all its permutations and variations. "Duncan," Adam's warm baritone sounded his affection and relief round the darkness. "What are you doing down here?"
"Leaky pipe," the Highland brogue rolled, disembodied, out of the black shadows in this man-made cavern. "Why did you squeak just then?"
"I thought you were a spider," Adam answered, reaching out towards the voice. Ah, the Scot had had the good sense to take off his shirt. Adam regretted not leaving his sweater behind. His sensitive fingers slid down the muscled planes of Duncan's broad back. If it's spiders you want to play at, then. He intended to tease his lover, to tickle the small of his back beneath the jeans, but he was already down below the round of Duncan's square buttock before he realized there was no denim, only mud and skin.
...and a throaty hum that came from one, or both, of their throats.
"You have to be careful about spiders," Duncan was murmuring.
This was so out of character for the Scot, Adam thought, so charming, so childish. Had Duncan just been waiting down here, stark naked in the dark and the mud, waiting?
"Careful," Adam echoed.
"Oh, yes," Duncan continued. "They can climb in under your clothes and give you such a bite."
Adam's supporting arm was suddenly pulled out from under him and he landed, shoulder-to-back, in the mud, his sweater wadded halfway up his torso. The wet mud against his skin, the heady smells of the incoming tide, and the dusky shaft of light from the distant entry, all conspired to weave Adam a vision of some submarinal cave, wombish and wanton.
And this playful Gaelic stepson, a bronze mer-creature, a lustful denizen of these lush and rapturous depths, set Adam's hide to electric, sparkling sensations of delightful near-agonies. He wriggled out of his sweater and jeans as if he were molting, a great sea-snake with bright new scales flashing in the darkness.
Adam was so used to Duncan's empathy and carefulness that he almost forgot they were, in part, a construct of his own predilections. This was ironic in the extreme, given his ulterior proclivities for masochism. But with his spouse, Adam was always quick to amend and deter Duncan's more bestial nature with a word of wit, a sarcastic denigration, a light remark, that drove the Scot ever back to the realm of the civilized.
This moment, however, Adam answered the questing touches with all the silent encouragement that was in his lanky flesh, yes, and yes, and yes, until the the hands ceased their asking and the lips ceased their questionings, and all the subsequent adjacencies became more and more demanding, ordering, mastering...
...frightening.
Adam was reminded how very large and powerful his friend, his lover, was, how wide and warm, fevered almost, and mindless in his passion. Too fast, Adam thought, as the hands spun and slammed him, face-down, in the mud. His cheek pressed deeply into the moist, loamish layers of old sandy dirt. He might have relished being an object of such profound desire, but this, like everything else, was rushing, rushing by him like a cursed wind, while he remained, sodden, motionless, anchored by his age upon age, leaden and burdened with so many years, they could not be counted.
Over the vision of underwater greens, foamy, blue-white curtains, Adam saw this clapboard bungaloid above them grow old and termite-ridden, descending to the very dust and mulch which even now filled his mouth as he felt Duncan's rock-hard thighs brush over the back of his long legs and...
Too fast. Adam hurried to respond, to relax, but he was so far off the pace, so separate, he could not accomodate the Highlander's prodigious girth and the stinging tear echoed up Adam's long, supple back and set his teeth on edge. He buried his face in the mud and tried to be as silent as he was still. Adam chided himself, his own fault, really. No pleasurable wave, this, just slamming, chest and face, into the ground, truly rutting, like some onerous beastly pursuit bourne out of necessity alone.
The pain increased, and without any reciprocal stirring to mask it, Adam was hard-pressed not to throw the Scot off him. As it was, he decided on a course he had never pursued before, not in the more than two decades they had been together. With deliberation and infinite skill, Adam lifted up on his elbows, moaning quietly, artfully. He pressed Duncan up against the supporting joists of the house, took three ragged gasps, and then tensed his muscles down the length of his back, squeezing hard against his lover's flesh, in ripples of deliberate deception. Then he collapsed forward into the muddy floor of the crawl space as he felt Duncan's own, authentic release.
And in the eye of Adam's old mind there appeared a vision of the house into dust, this cliff into dirt, the entire coast beneath the briny, green waves, the sun setting over windless water, with nothing at all remaining of this moment, and himself, standing like a rock, absent even a memory of this time, this fragile instant speeding by his stillness, his separation, his unbearable loneliness.
The exhaustion, or the sadness, or something stronger than either, stunned Adam as surely as a greater Quickening. He saw the Highlander slipping away from him, speeding away into the past with all the rest of his life, abandoning him to the damnable stillness.
"Adam?" Adam craned his neck around over his left shoulder, "Yes?"
"Why?"
The Eldest Immortal rolled slowly onto his back, sliding beneath the salt-slicked, furry surface of the Scot's broad chest. "Why?" he stalled. Surely Duncan could not suspect. Adam's belly was all over mud and he was no longer hard. There would be no way to discern his deception.
Duncan leaned over him, the shaft of light striking a single tear in the smoke matrix of the amber eye.
It was not an unfamiliar sensation. Adam had known the feeling with many before this strapping young Immortal. The difference now, the heart-wrenching, breath-stopping difference was that, for the first time, in all the time which Adam owned, someone had stopped...
...and turned...
...and come back to him.
Adam waited with Duncan in the dark beneath the house, in the stillness together. He stayed there forever, with the one other in all of creation who would be there always. Far off he could almost hear the Great Spheres that spun the future come to a grinding halt. He could almost see them there, frozen in the dark depths of that dear amber eye, as he was himself frozen in the single, crystalline tear.
The instant, and the eternity it encompassed, washed over Adam's awareness in an oddly raw and tender wave. He bore it as long as he could and then he threw his wit between them, or he surely would have lost himself, utterly and gladly.
"I take it you missed me, then," Adam said lightly, re-establishing the edges of self and other.
Duncan laughed sadly, acquiescing to Adam's withdrawal, but he obviously wasn't ready to let go altogether, for he said, "You know the Gnostic Mysteries?"
Adam laughed and pulled out from under the Scot. "I seem to remember writing them. Some cave in Nag Hammadi--."
"Oh, stop," Duncan handed over Adam's jeans. "I meant the passage about two lying down together but only one lies there."
Adam nodded quietly. "Where the Two come together, There will be Only One."
Duncan pulled on his own jeans. "We came pretty close, Old Man."
Adam reached out blindly in the darkness, his sensitive fingers traveling over the features he had come to know as well as his own--in some ways they were his own. "Someday, Duncan," he said, wanting to tell this man everything that had transpired so soundlessly between them, and knowing there was no need. "Someday," he repeated.
There was nothing more to say.
Grant stood by the back porch of Sean's beach home and cleared his throat twice. Then he informed any interested parties who might be somewhere within the sound of his voice that there was soap and warm water and towels and sweat togs, two sets, waiting by the back door just in case they might come in handy for whatever reason. He also added that any laundry might be left at the back door if the need should arise and that the three Facets, himself and Molly and Margaret, would not be wandering around the area for the next half hour, just in case any such discretions might be in order.
Lastly, he called out the time--it was nearly half-past eight--and then he walked back into the kitchen where his supper waited.
Grant finished his two sandwiches and single beer, then he cleaned the kitchen. Peeking discretely out the porch door, he noticed the towels and some incredibly muddy jeans now lay in a pile where the warm water and soap and sweat suits had been placed. They wouldn't be too late for the meeting after all, Grant thought. Everyone, except for himself and the two lady Facets and the two madwomen, were now down at the beach in the enormous van Thomas had somehow ridden off the side of the cliff. Grant shook his head and sighed. Sometimes he wondered about his master's sanity.
Well, he would surely have to hose the mud clods off those jeans before he even thought about bringing them in and tossing them in the washer. He set the last dish back in the cupboard, wiped his hands on the kitchen towel, folded it neatly, and headed out the back door for the porch and his next chore.
The jeans were gone.
Grant picked up the towels and tossed them in the rain barrel at the back door, with the wash cloths. He was so sure he'd seen the two pairs of jeans with the rest, but perhaps it had been a trick of the light, an affect of the sundown and incoming storm shadows.
Nearly two decades had run their courses since he'd last seen Sean's and Adam's very strange mother. That had been a distinctly unsettling and unforgettable morning, however long ago. Then, she had towered over him, a great gild wyvern, and then bowed down to him, through the mote and light curtains of the Drieg Tower rose window. Now, she stood, slender and ordinary, pulling on his spare shirt and a sopping wet pair of jeans, in the rose light of day's end, streaming through the high porch windows. Then she had given his heart lifetime upon lifetime to follow his lover down eternity's row. Now she stopped that heart briefly, merely by her return.
The mud from the towels had marked his shirt. Grant snorted his disgruntlement, slipped off the shirt and stepped back into the screened porch, reaching for the spare that he'd hung by the door that morning. Taking care of Alexa had turned laundry into a bi-daily affair. The shirt was gone.
Either he was already too exhausted and his mind was failing, Grant wondered, or there was a mischievous ghost come a-haunting. As if this poor, sad place weren't haunted enough by the living. No matter. He turned the corner around the end of the porch and headed for the narrow hallway which led to the washroom.
"Good evening," say Ram softly.
Poor Grant, usually so businesslike and reserved, might have fared better running into a ghost. As it was he staggered against the old clapboards that had used to be the northwest wall of the house before the porch was added.
"Are you all right?" her husky voice stirred the dust like stars around her face. "I'm sorry about Adam's jeans," she indicated the legs, torn off short, "but his legs are just too long. I hope it's okay to borrow the shirt. I just didn't have anything to wear."
"Please, Lord," Grant found his feet and bowed his head. "Don't apologize. We are honored. I can get you some--"
"No," the stone angles of her odd face softened into a smile, "This will do fine." She buttoned up the white Oxford shirt. "And I am no one's Lord, Grant. Ram will do just fine." She walked up to the tall Facet and patted him on his bare chest.
The feel of her long, light fingers, so like Dr. Piersen's, across his skin, set Grant to shivering and Ram laughed softly, passing by him on her way to the kitchen.
"Something warm to drink would be nice," Ram commented as she sat down at the kitchen table and waited for Grant to settle back into his more familiar butler's butler role.
Grant nodded and mumbled, putting the kettle on the stove and excusing himself briefly. He dashed into the living room and then down the hallway which separated the two bedrooms. Through the partially opened door to his left, he could see Mary lying still as death in the master bedroom with Margaret and Mary asleep with her, Margaret on the edge of the bed and Molly, seated on the floor with her forearms propped up on the quilted counterpane and her head nestled into her arms.
The door to his right was bolted with a thick four-by-eight wooden bar set across two iron hasps. All was quiet beyond the door, though. Alexa was still asleep.
At the end of the hallway, Grant retrieved a new set of sweats from the linen closet, the ones they'd brought for Alexa. They couldn't make her wear them, though. Well, at least now they would be of some use, if not for Alexa. A little small, but they would be an improvement over the wet, torn jeans.
"Here," he offered the clothes to Ram as he entered the kitchen again. "These are dry and new."
Ram nodded her appreciation, took the the bottoms and skinned out of the wet denim while Grant made the tea. She shook her head when Grant held up four boxes of different teas for her to choose. "Oh, no, Grant," she chuckled, "I would never presume to second-guess your superb taste. You decide."
"Oh, yes," she did a slow turn, "these are much more comfortable. Thank you," she added. "But you can't have your shirt back," she pulled up one of the lapels over her prominent nose, "I do like the way you smell."
Grant's broad back flushed, but he did not reply. He had forgotten how uncertain everything was where this being was concerned, how exciting and scary, and wonderful, all at the same time. He brought the tea to the table.
Ram took one of the wedding china cups, running her long fingers around the rim while she waited for the tea to steep.
"I could fill you in," Grant offered, bringing the honey and some biscuits to the table, and sitting down across from her.
Ram shook her head. Her dark curls were now grown out to a lush, wavy mane, sun-bleached and salt-dried, as if she'd been swimming all summer long. "Just tell me what's wrong with Alexa."
"You don't know?" Grant had started to pour, but he put the kettle back down on the trivet and stared at her. "Dear Lord, Ram. If you don't know, we are all in a pickle."
"Well, Master Gherkin, that would appear to be the case, then," Ram took the kettle and poured for them both. "Chamomille, as I suspected--perfect."
The pale petals floated like a watery garden in the delicate porcelain of poor Mary's wedding fare.
"She has not renewed the Blood Covenant with you, or with Malak, or with Marak, either, in your--uh," Grant paused, not knowing exactly how to refer to what happened when Ram was not Ram, but another, "Absence."
"What renewal?" Ram asked.
"The thousand days," Grant said, with a great deal more anxiety slipping out than he might have wished.
"The--" Ram stared at him, "Oooh, that fib I told Joe. How does she even know about that?"
"Fib," Grant's modulated tones climbed markedly and began to disintegrate, "Fib!"
Ram looked up calmly as the enormous mountain of a man-servant rose over her. "Oh, sit down, will you. It is well known that I am the Prince of Lies. Surely you were not fooled by so transparent a deception."
"Prince of--? What are you talking about?" Grant did not sit down again. He did not dare.
"They haven't told you my real name by now?" Ram sipped her tea and bit into a dry biscuit.
"Your real--?"
"Wait, don't tell me," Ram sipped again and washed down the biscuit. "Your real name is Echo."
"What?" Grant felt the room begin to spin.
"Don't hurt yourself trying to get a sense of humour at this late date," Ram commented lightly, but unkindly. "Just show me to Alexa and let's see if we can't fix this." She drained her cup and set it back on the table, rising from the chair and waiting for Grant to come unstuck from his paralysis of confusion.
Grant led her through the living room and down the hall. Ram glanced into Mary's room and then stationed herself at Alexa's door, eyeing the substantial bar of wood. "I'm ready when you are," she said to Grant.
They entered the room together, Grant closing the door behind them. The place was dark, the window broken behind it's hastily fitted boards, admitting only meager shafts of the dying day's light. The dim forms indicated that except for a bed, roughly in the middle of the room, the place was empty as a monk's cell.
"Alex?" Ram called out, "Alexita?"
Grant reached up high on the wall where they'd rewired the light switch and threw the room into a glare of bare bulb and devastation. Not much of the bed was left, just the wooden frame and a worn mattress, its ticking ripped and spilling dusty bunting down its length. Grant's gaze searched around the room, but Ram's grey eyes never left the bed.
In the next instant, Alexa dove across the bed and straight for Ram, bowling her over backward to the bare hardwood floor.
"Alexa," Ram sounded incredibly friendly and casual from flat on her back beneath the feline fury of the crazy woman who had replaced Adam's quiet little former wife. "It's been a long--Hey! Ouch! Stop That!"
There was a resounding, explosive smack as Ram's palm connected with Alexa's pale cheek.
"What the hell are you doing!" Ram pushed the woman off her and sat up. "Get a grip!"
"Hunger," Alexa moaned in tones to freeze the warmest blood.
Grant flattened against the wall near the door. It never occurred to him to interfere. He wouldn't have given much for his chances against either of them, in any case.
"Hunger, my ass," Ram shot back, "What is with you, Alexa? Stop that!" she pulled her arm back from the salivating crazy person.
"Covenant," Alexa hissed, "Renewal."
"Alexa, stop this!" Ram put her hands on Alexa's shoulders and shook gently. "There is no such thing as renewal, or whatever. You are alive. You will remain alive. There is nothing to fear. Nothing."
Alexa stopped growling and writhing. "Really?"
"Yes, Alexa," Ram pulled her close in a hug, "Really and truly."
Alexa collapsed against Ram, sobbing and gulping and shaking. Ram began rocking her reflexively.
"Oh, this is terrible," Alexa exclaimed suddenly. "I can't stand this!" she shrieked and bolted for the opposite wall, hitting it full force and falling, stunned, to the floor.
Ram looked up at Grant. His great hands lifted, palm up, in a gigantic shrug.
Ram levered herself up from the floor and walked over to sit down beside Alexa at the far wall. "You want to tell me what this is all about, or do I get to muss you up?"
Alexa laughed weakly, then broke down sobbing again. "Wasn't there," she gasped, "Wasn't there, wasn't there. I lied. I said I had to finish the pottery and that I would go on the next run, next run. Burned alive!" the shrill scream made the whole room seem to tremble, "They burned alive! Burned alive! I wasn't there, wasn't there, wasn't--"
Ram looked over at Grant again.
Grant pushed himself away from the wall and went to sit opposite from the two women, on the edge of the teeth-marked, tattered bed. He folded his large hands into a semblance of calm as he explained. "The Kuehls, father and sons, were driving back to Albuquerque when their rig was run off the road--in the canyon just before they got to town. The semi blew up when it landed. All three were killed."
"Shit!" Ram said, with so much anger even Alexa quieted down. "God Damn It! All that work and sacrifice! All that you did to make a family, Alexa. Damnation! Both the boys! Oh, God, Dear God!"
Ram beat the floor with her fists and shook her head sadly. "I am so sorry, Alexa. I should have been there. I could have done something--something. Damn! How you must regret giving up Love for such a tragedy as this. I am so sorry. Adam must just be beside himself."
"No," Alexa said.
"No regrets?" Ram asked.
"I didn't give up Love, Ram," Alexa gulped, but her tears were done for the moment and a deeper woe had steadied her somehow. "That's why I didn't die with them, why they were alone, why they burned to death, screaming for me--and I wasn't there, wasn't there."
"And Adam?" Ram asked.
Alexa shook her wild blond tangles, "We have both found other hearts, other comfort."
"Oh?" Ram reached to hold the woman, but Alexa stiffened and she withdrew. Ram took off Grant's shirt and handed it over to her, trading nakedness, as it were, though clearly Alexa was more naked than by her absent clothes alone.
"Richard and I were making love the moment they died," Alexa droned, in poisonous notes of self-hatred. "I never even thought of them. I wished them away in that moment," Alexa's tiny hands clasped over her heart and a soft moan escaped her as she closed her eyes against what seemed to be a physical pain. "I was in rapture when they were in agony."
"But you don't know that," Ram offered, "As you have said, you weren't there."
Alexa was silent for a long while. She pulled on the shirt and struggled with the buttons, her hands trembling like palsy. "I have tried to die, Ram. I want to, but I can't seem to find a way. Can you help me?"
Ram drew back and stared. "You want me to kill you? You, Alexa, the same sweet soul who begged me, against all my warnings, against all my better senses, you who begged me to help you live, no matter what the cost? Alexa, you are asking me this, to do this terrible thing?"
"I am asking," Alexa lifted her head and faced Ram's obvious wrath and scorn.
"Why?" Ram's hands wove the words before her in the darkness. "Because this Richard will die as all mortals will--Richard? You mean Richie Ryan?"
Alexa nodded.
"I don't believe you could be that selfish, you pig!" Ram spit out the words.
"What?" Alexa croaked feebly.
"Just to suage some perverted sense of guilt on your part, you would break his heart, when all he did was love you, Alexa?"
"I wasn't there--" Alexa groaned, "I wasn't there--."
"Oh, get over it!" Ram said meanly. "Do this for me, Ram. Do that for me, Ram. Save my life, Ram. Break your own son's heart, Ram. Lie to Adam for me, will you be dear, Ram? Ooops, changed my mind, Ram. Make me dead, Ram. Oh, and if it's not too, might I just have a coupla pints of your blood on the way out, Ram?" Ram rubbed her arm where Alexa had bitten her quite deeply.
"I wasn't there!" Alexa howled, some small measure of anger beginning to dilute her grief.
"Oh, fine!" Ram roared, "I will murder you, if for no other reason than to spare us all any more of your whining. But this time, Alexita, my little dove, there will be a price. No more Ram freebies. You understand? I said--"
Alexa nodded.
"Well, then stop blubbering and answer," Ram insisted.
"Yes," Alexa answered. "Anything."
"Well, in this case," Ram continued. "Two anythings. Yes?"
"Yes."
"The first is: Not today. I won't do it today. I won't do it tomorrow. Two weeks, Alexa, in two weeks you ask me again and I'll take you out before you finish the request. All right? That two weeks you use to explain to Richie why you are leaving him. You talk to him. You listen to him. You hear everything he says, everything. Understand?"
"Yes, Ram," Alexa seemed to have returned to herself entirely. She had stopped shaking and her voice had settled into a more familiar range.
Grant was entirely surprised to see how pretty this woman was without the madness tearing her features apart. With insanity's disfigurements erased, he could understand how Dr. Piersen would have married this one. She was graced with such a sweetness and gentleness of spirit.
"Have you a hairbrush, Grant?" Ram asked.
Grant went across the hall and borrowed one of Mary's, being careful not to wake to two Facets, Dragon's Ladies. When he returned, it was to find Alexa, sound asleep on the bed, her head in Ram's lap. Ram took the brush and began sorting through the filthy tangles.
"What was it?" Grant whispered.
"What?" Ram's gaze stayed on the sleeping woman.
"The second condition," Grant explained quietly.
"Oh," Ram tilted her head and closed her eyes. "I will tell you, but then you must be quiet, or leave. This will take all my attention."
Grant waited for her to explain.
"She wasn't there," Ram said distantly. "She wasn't there."
Grant waited again, watching Ram brushing Alexa's hair and descending herself into some sort of trance, or ultimate concentration.
Then, in the oppressive stillness of the wrecked room, Ram's deep tones pronounced, "She is there now."
Grant would have asked what that meant, but when he turned back from checking the door to the hall, he found he was no longer in Alexa's room. Instead of the worn bed, he was now seated on the side of the tub in the bathroom down the hall. The water was running, the soapy foam building in aromatic waves of steam and peach. He checked the temperature--just warm enough--and put the top back on the bath salts. Turning off the water, Grant found he'd retrieved the lounging suit Adam had brought with the rest of Alexa's things. It lay folded on the floor with the fresh, soft towels.
Grant could dimly remember a dialogue, a conversation of many parts like the reading of a play script in the dark, or a vid show with audio only and just lights to amuse the eye while the words wove around the shadows and built their own resonant imagery. No, that wasn't it at all. He must have slept while Ram worked her magic with Alexa. She must have sent him here to draw the bath.
Or, perhaps he had brought himself here, to do something he knew and escape something that was too foreign, too much Chaos, for him to bear. No, this would never do. Grant rose from the tub and made his way back to the dark room. Ram was still seated on the bed. Alexa began to rouse.
"It's all right, Al," Ram's deep voice reached out in the darkness, the new night, and steadied the entire room, including the taciturn giant who stood, propped against the door, watching.
"I understand," Alexa said hoarsely, struggling to rise. "You will not forget your promise?"
"Just so long as you don't forget the conditions," Ram replied sternly.
Alexa dug the palms of her tiny, pale hands into her eyes. "You think Richard will change my mind, Ram. I know your devious ways."
"Devious or no, Al," Ram sighed, "I do keep my word when I make it. Just don't ask me anything about this for the next two weeks and I promise not to give you such a smack."
"Agreed," Alexa laughed lightly. "What do I do now?"
"Well," Ram yawned and stretched her long back. "First, you go take a bath and put on that lovely jump suit, the lime thing with the zipper up the front, and then you come back here and help Molly and Margaret put this room to rights."
Alexa surveyed the damage and nodded.
"If you don't dawdle," Ram continued, "Then you should be done about the time Richie gets back from the meeting, and I'm sure you can plan the rest from there on."
Alexa smiled sweetly and her head bowed in mock embarrassment. "Oh, yes. I'm sure I will think of something."
Despite Grant's sense of propriety, which was considerable, he lunged forward, grabbed Ram by her slender shoulders and spun her around, "Um, Lord, you intend--?"
Ram's smile took on a distinctly viperous quality--Grant expected at any moment to see her tongue emerging, split and dripping. She stared at his right hand and then at his left, calmly, but clearly not amused. Then she turned her gaze upward towards his insolent face and asked, without words, just what the hell he thought he was doing.
"Something distresses you, Grant," Ram said, with such studied sweetness, Grant could hardly keep his hold for his trembling. "Did it occur to you just now that I might do something harmful to your young Mistress?"
Grant lifted off his massive hands. "In point of fact, Lord, I was more concerned just then that you would do something harmful to me. But, yes, I do not know how, or what, you did with Alexa to have cured her so suddenly and easily. You cannot, however, be so harsh with little Mary, Lord," he pleaded. "She is with child, Lord, and her constitution is very fragile."
Ram leaned back against the wall, folded her thin arms over her chest and grinned even more widely. "Your compassion is exquisite, Grant," she said, but it didn't sound at all like a compliment. Ram grabbed his right wrist and placed his palm over her left breast, beneath her long hair--she'd yet to replace the shirt she'd given Alexa. "What do you feel?" she asked lightly, but it was clear the question was in all seriousness.
Grant tried to think what he felt, cool, smooth skin, the soft round of her breast and pectoral, the tiny nub of her nipple--oh, he might have thrashed himself for his stupidity. "Your heart," he said softly, "I feel your heart beating."
"Then you do admit I have one," Ram said, giving him back his hand. She paused two beats and then said, "Don't question my actions, Grant. I am as impeccable in my judgments as you are in yours, even if that is never immediately apparent. Wake the two women, Molly and Margaret," she added. "And get them started on that mess in Alexa's bedroom."
Grant, thoroughly chastised, did as he was told, and when he returned to Mary's bedroom, it was to find Ram seated on her bed, speaking to a dead man.
"Well, you certainly took you sweet ass time getting here, Chaos," the voice spoke through Mary's lips, but it was not Mary's voice, neither in tone, nor tenor, nor pace. Mary spoke in her father's voice, the good Doctor Mark Palmer, now deceased. Sean's new bride lay still and quiet. Except for the alien vocalizations, she might have been in coma, or even dead.
"Forgive me, Bear," Ram spoke the name by which they had all come to know the Seraphim, Marak. "But there were other--" her voice sighed the end of the thought away to nothing. "I am here now, Bear, and I will stay so long as you remain civil, and not one moment longer."
"Conceded," the deep voice surrendered its gruff harmonics. "Can you do something about this, Chaos? Can you do something about this chaos, Chaos?" he laughed, playing with the words.
"Perhaps," Ram ignored the jest, "You might begin by explaining what you are doing here? That is, how are you still extant, when you were going to be reborn, and should even now be a fishling dragonet swimming a warm, wombish ocean."
"And don't I just wish, Brother Ram, but such was not to be. I seem to have been within your dear flesh too long, not to have done exactly the same with Mary. My soul yet wanders the world though my own fine form has long since gone to dust," Mark said this a little sadly, with no humility whatsoever.
"Well," Ram seemed momentarily at a loss for words, or at least profoundly distracted. "I am sorry, Brother Marak. If I could return you to this sorry frame, I surely would. I am a bit bleak and certainly most empty, since you and Malak have departed. In any case," she physically echoed the dismissal of a deeper emotion, shaking her head and shoulders. "In any case, I need you to sleep now, Brother, so I may deal with Mary's dilemma."
Grant watched the spare, somber woman lean forward and kiss Mary's forehead lightly. Saying farewell to her brother, Mark, no doubt. "That was how Dr. Palmer called my master and ordered all the construction at the Cross Estates."
Ram's silver eyes turned their attention towards Grant, leaned against the doorjamb, unaware that he had spoken aloud. "Come again?"
"Oh," Grant cleared his throat, "I merely referred to--. Well, Mark, Dr. Palmer, called Tom, um, Master Cross, at the beginning of the week, and he talked for an hour and then--" Grant cleared his throat again. "The upshot being that there is now an army of bulldozers roaming the Estates, under Dragon and Allen's direction, and five different construction companies laying in a--, a--, well, all I can think it will be is some enormous water park, complete with rivers and waterfalls, grottos and underground lakes and an enormous wave pool. We had to board all the horses out to neighbors while they are digging up the pasture and pouring cement and--. You get the picture. I thought at first we were selling the Estates to some recreation park developers, but Tom says no. And there's this odd little fellow who comes out every day from the University, testing the soil and mixing these great vats of brine and taking acid readings and oxygen readings and..." Grant shook his head. "Master is amassing this gigantic library of books about tropical fishes and saltwater aquariums and the Monterey Bay Aquaria folk were up last weekend working with the lucite archways and--. Do you know what they are doing, Ram?"
Ram's sere expression melted into gladness. "Yes," she whispered. "I do indeed."
Grant knew very well that this obstreporous, lanky Dragon Lord was the mother of both Dr. Piersen and Sean MacLeod, but he had never before been able to see the slightest hint of the maternal in her, or even picture such a thing, in his wildest imaginings, but now he saw the eery and sacred luminence of mother loving shine up in her face like a sunrise, completely reworking her features. The grey eyes went soft and foggy for a moment. Her shoulders rounded forward and her elongated hands softened and curved.
Then she turned back towards Mary, combed her fingers into the pale curls at the sick woman's temples and the entire master bedroom seemed to move out of time into a supernatural stillness, all silent expectation and aching ever afters.
