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Chapter Four: Morning Becomes Alexa
Mary Palmer MacLeod bustled round the tiny kitchen of the seaside bungalow which her dear Uncle Adam had given them as a wedding present. It was still warm with the early dawn's bright rays and redolent in the bread smells of the late night revels with "the girls." She was just about finished setting her kitchen "back to rights," when her groom rolled in and sat himself contritely at the tiny table.
She thought initially to ignore him, taking a seriously long time draining the sink and polishing its porcelain, and then setting the plates and pans away in her lovely cupboards with the blue-bordered liner paper. And all the while, Mary could not help but note how exceedingly charming the MacLeod heir was, how very fine and fair. Even the ravages of the night before--when too much drink and too little supper had conspired to poison him--only served to tousle the edges of his pleasing demeanor, half-Adam, half-Duncan, half-elf, half...
Dear friend, she thought, as she gave up her pretense at disdain and sat opposite from him at the table. Oh, dear, dear, she smiled to keep from laughing, he is still a bit drunk, or he wouldn't have to work so hard at sitting up straight.
"Good morning, Sean," Mary said softly. She wiped her hands dry on the front of her apron and reached over to rest her fingers lightly on the large "puppy paws" of her lawfully-wedded.
"Is it?" Sean's voice was still hoarse from being sick all night. A somber darkness set his features in high relief against the sunny motes of morning at this back. He seemed every inch the dour clansman, lost in some humour, black as the back of the void.
"You must be hungry," Mary suggested, tracing the cuff of his father's raw silk charcoal shirt.
"I wouldn't think I'd ever be hungry again," Sean shook his head. "But it seems I am."
With a light, quick pat, Mary rose and announced she would begin breakfast for them both. Sadly, she mused, there was much broken between them, but not the prodigious fast, if nuptials were indeed the feast which wedded bliss might have set before them.
Mary set out the frying pan and the eggs. Sean brought her the blue-glazed pottery pitcher, filled with milk, and then retreated back to his seat at the table when she insisted she could do this by herself.
The rest of the house was still sleeping, an entire chorus of divers sighs and sonorous exhalations. Sean whispered something.
"I'm sorry, Sean," Mary lifted the edges of a perfect omelet in the making. "I didn't hear you."
"I said, 'How was your visit with Malak?'" Sean repeated in a slightly louder whisper, though it was clear the sleeping house had little to do with the stricture in his throat which kept his volume so subdued.
"Oh," Mary replied. "You know."
"Yes and no," Sean rubbed his swollen eyes with the ends of his long fingers. "Grant said you went to the Halls of the Dead to--um, to commune with Master Malak."
Mary kept her back to the young MacLeod heir. Her lips pursed together and her eyes squinted, pressed tight by equal parts mirth and sadness. "He is my true betrothed, Sean. I cannot help that."
"I don't see where help had anything to do with it," Sean said so forcefully that it started him coughing and hacking.
Mary folded the omelet over in thirds and sprinkled the top with fresh parsley, the last of the indoor spice garden which would soon need reseeding and tending--if she were planning on staying. Mary slid the omelet out onto the serving plate and brought it to the table with a basket of bread and sweet butter. She showed Sean where the jams were kept--he did have the most amazing sweet tooth--and then they both sat down for their first honeymoon breakfast together.
"This doesn't have to be all bad," she offered when the silence became too weighty.
Sean's fork dropped down on his plate with a clink, and he just stared at Mary as if she were suddenly given the gift of tongues--and he wasn't.
"Well, all right," Mary cut another slice of the fresh bread. "Maybe it is that bad, but can't we make some good thing out of it?"
Sean said nothing. His slacked-open mouth snapped shut and the prow of his incredible beak narrowed down as the pale nostrils flushed and flared. He lifted the napkin, Mary had insisted, from his lap and slapped it down on the table next to his plate.
Mary sighed, "Then again--."
Sean took two tours round the tiny room, before deciding not to leave after all. His ire dissipated with the motion, and Mary's stealing bits off his plate, brought him back to the table.
"You're just bound and determined to torment me, aren't you," he managed to growl between bites and swats at her invading fork maneuvers.
"I do my best, Lord," Mary laughed.
"You do too well, Lady," Sean swallowed carefully, "Too well, by half," he said with hardly any sense of jesting in his sober tones.
"Oh, Sean," Mary's heart melted for him. "I am so--"
Sean's palm lifted up. "Talk about something else, Mary. I can't stand to feel this sad any more."
With that he swallowed the last bit of breakfast, as surprised, as he was relieved, that it stayed put. Then he rose and cleared the table and started the dishes, bidding Mary to remain seated, considering her "delicate" condition. The way he said it made the condition sound like it might be leprosy and not gravidity, but he meant to be gracious, even if he felt, and sounded, irate.
"So," Mary tried a different tack. "You finally met your mother, Sean. What did you think?"
Sean propped himself forward on his long arms and his head bobbed down as he tried not to choke on his laughter. It was several moments before he could even answer. "Well," he said finally, "she surely is ugly."
"Sean Benjamin MacLeod!" Mary scolded.
Sean turned around slowly. "And scary. Geez, you should have seen her go after Dahm. I thought she was going to kill him."
"Oh, dear," Mary gasped, "They fought?"
"Like tigers," Sean said, his voice full of fear and admiration. "It was terrifying. And as near as I could tell, though I wouldn't swear to accuracy, I, I think Dahm started it, but that harpy surely finished it. Dahm staggered by me, weeping, as if I weren't there. That ugly dog crushed him, and I would have gone to his defense, but Grant held me back. Damn her. How could she have been so cruel, so merciless, so, so--" Sean steadied his breath, "So monstrous, Mary. She is a monster, Mary. Not like Malak, at least he is recognizable as, as--humane. This shrike is, is--" Sean despised his propensity to stammer, his verbal equivalent "bouncing," of which everyone made such fun. "She is no more like me or like Dahm than a serpent is like a dove."
"Sean!" Mary was so taken aback by his reaction, she did not know what to worry about first, for clearly there were so many complications here. "She is your mother, Sean. She sacrificed to--"
Sean's shoulders slumped. "I don't blame you for refusing me, Mary. Even Malak is better than that, that thing I saw last night. God knows what you would be brooding if we had lain together."
"Oh, Sean," Mary stood and started towards him.
Sean drew back against the counter. "No. No," he repeated, turning his back to her. "There is too much in me that is evil, Mary. Too much that is monstrous. Pop and Dahm have tamed me, raised me as if I were a true, dear pup, when I am in fact a ravening wolf child."
Mary ignored his command to the contrary. She wrapped her arms around him and wept into the back of his neck.
Sean froze, stiff and unmoved. "I will see to your needs, Mary. I do have a trust which is mine now. I will be leaving with Thomas Cross a little later today. I have begun annulment proceedings. After the baby is born, you can decide what--"
"Oh, shut up," Mary sobbed behind him. "Just turn around and hold me. I'm so afraid I can hardly breathe."
Sean slipped around in the circle of her arms and lifted her up in his, holding and rocking her as if she were a tiny child. "Oh, I am so stupid, Mary. You are my own sweet sister, and what a bothersome brother I have turned out to be. I love you, Mary...in any way, in every way. Just say that you do not hate me for being such a thick-headed dolt. There's nothing to fear, Little Mary. I'm here. I will be here. I am always here..."
Mary nestled her wet cheek into the hollow where his neck joined his shoulder. "Take care of me, Sean. Be my Knight."
And Sean felt, in that instant, more wed to this woman than he had at the moment of their vows.
Casting about for a more comfortable position ended up dumping the Highlander, thud, on the living room floor, after a brief cushion shot to the edge of the coffee table. "Shabakinath!" he growled huskily, or something very like.
"And top of the morning to yourself," an excessively bright baritone rang in the Scot's poor skull like a pantheon of demented bells, all brass.
Duncan's arms stopped waving and grabbing for purchase and he clapped his broad hands over his ears, trapping wads of dark, gaelic curls against the sides of his head. "Have mercy," he whispered the plea.
"Oh, my," the baritone chided heartlessly, though in a much softer tone, "Are we a bit indisposed, then?"
"If one can say the three-days'-dead are so," Duncan mumbled obscurely.
"I take it the meeting did not go well," the damnably perky tune warbled on, setting up harmonics that rumbled down the back of Duncan's neck.
"Meeting?" Duncan levered himself up, ever so carefully, onto the couch where he sat very still while the room stopped sloshing like a skiff with a shallow keel. "What meeting?" The Highlander settled his forehead into his palms and watched the shower of lights and colors going off behind his closed lids, keeping time to the rhythm of his heart.
"Here," the pesky voice buzzed nearer Duncan's sensitive ears. He felt the rim of a glass graze his lower lip.
The Highlander took a deep swig.
"No, no," screeched the voice. "Spit, dammit! Spit! It's mouthwash!"
Duncan was only too happy to comply. Even this deep in his cups, or hangover, or whatever, his aim was unerring. It was almost worth opening his eyes to smile upon the spritzed visage of his self-appointed nurse. "Good morning, Adam," Duncan said, trying not to squint against the shards of rosy morning light. "So nice of you to wake me."
"So," Adam dabbed at the front of the ruined, pale moss, raw silk--
"Hey!" Duncan yelled, then shuddered at the way his own noise shook the base of his skull. "That's my new shirt! Doesn't fit you at all!"
"Lovely color, though," Adam kicked the coffee table out of the way and crouched down in front of his besotted spouse. "At least it was. Here," he handed over a plastic bag of pink crushed ice, two of them, in fact.
"And these would be?" Duncan tried to focus on the several dozen bags and hands that suddenly trailed past his face.
"Sweet Mother Lucille's Magic Elixir for what ails you," Adam replied, closing the Scot's swollen lids with the tips of his fingers and placing one ice pack over the fevered face and brow. "Lean back. There. Now, when the first bag has started to melt, you open and drink it. Most efficacious stuff that."
"How did I get up here?" Duncan melted with the pack as Adam walked behind the couch and his fine fingers started working out the knots in the Highlander's bull neck.
"You know where you are, then?" Adam mused, "Well, that's an improvement."
"Meeting," Duncan fought to order his wits, to clear the fog. "Hmmm," He readjusted his neck to the left, so Adam could work on the right trap. "You said something about a meeting?"
"Well," Adam's fingers traced down the trapezius and scrunched into the right deltoid, dropping Duncan's shoulder in a paresis of pure pleasure. "Then I guess you don't remember the part about the chandelier, either," he sighed sadly.
Duncan let the words wander around his aching head for a few more moments before he slid the ice pack to the top of his head and peered over his shoulder at the Old Man. "I suppose I deserved that," he said. "What happened? Really, now, don't......Oh, my God! The meeting! Did we come up with anything? Oh, damnation! Mary, Alexa--"
"Easy there," Adam admonished as he grabbed for the errant celtic fosterling. "Duncan, Duncan. It's all right! Everything is all right!"
Duncan had managed to gain his feet--just barely--and there he tottered as Adam bounded over the couch back in time to catch him and set him back down on the couch.
"You know," Duncan reset his bearings and accepted a drink from the apricot daiquiri, or whatever fruit something liquor which comprised Lucille's morning after medicament. It really wasn't bad. Adam set the second pack on his temple and combed the long fingers through Duncan's matted locks, sorting his face out of the weeds.
"You know," Duncan began again, "You could speak a little less loudly, Old Man. You're going to wake the whole house. Tell me again. Everything is all right. We fixed it?"
A broad smile washed over Adam's face, "Well, I won't say you didn't suffer for the cause, but in the end, it was the Magic Broom herself whisked away the difficulties."
Duncan took a thoughtful sip from the melted pack.
"I could get you a glass for that," Adam offered, glancing towards the kitchen, "but then, I think Sean and Mary need some time to talk."
"Wait," Duncan cursed his sluggard's pace in the conversation. "Ram was here? She cured them both?"
"So it would seem," Adam's jovial tones dropped into a minor key. "Don't ask me how."
"While I was," Duncan tried to remember, "Yes, down at the meeting in Cross' trailer. You and Sean came back up here and--" He shook his head, trying to delve into the fuzzy collection of imagery which seemed to follow shortly after Adam and his brother had left. "You know, I think maybe Cross slipped something into my drink..."
Adam collapsed back, laughing hysterically. "Oh, bless me, but you are the image of your son. I mean, the two of you, drunken sons of the Isle, with the Critter--or is that Creature--well in tow long before the night grew old."
"What?" Duncan hated Adam's getting loquacious on him, especially now when each necessary word was bloody painful.
"Sean was spewing all the way home. Sick as a poisoned toad, he was so drunk," Adam explained. "You, on the other hand, downed a pint of some very fine whiskey which Cross had brought along--just to taste, mind you--and passed out cold in the middle of the floor, in the middle of the semi, in the middle of the meeting. The HorseMaster Cross joined you there shortly and Striker and Stoner trudged up the hill to get Grant's and my assistance because a storm was rolling in and they feared the trailer might get swamped if the wind blew the tide higher."
Duncan's face screwed up in self-disgust. Some help he had been.
"Grant carried you up the path and I carried Cross with Striker's help, since my ribs hadn't entirely healed up yet," Adam finished.
"Healed?" Duncan asked.
"Mother," Adam said the word as if it were explanation for any number of questions--as, indeed, it was.
Duncan shrugged. "I thought you might have broken them on the chandelier trick," he said dryly.
Adam took the second pack back and had a sip. "In my dreams," he said. "Which reminds me--"
Oh, shit, Duncan thought to himself, hearing a certain tone in Adam's pretended lightness. Now I'm in for it. "Yes?"
Adam stood up and stretched.
Really in for it.
"I have been considering--" Adam wiped his left palm with the long, elegant fingers of his right hand.
Call the Guinness New Millennium World Records Association.
"I'm going to take a page out of Father Malak's book," Adam glance up from his hands and down on the stupefied Scot.
The MacLeod chieftan had had enough. He rolled his hands before him, indicating Adam should just get to it.
"Celibacy," Adam said quietly.
Duncan had to think a moment. "All right."
"You see I--what?"
Duncan rubbed his temples and yawned. "I said 'all right.' Whatever you want. It's really my own damn fault, after all."
"What?" Adam pulled the coffee table back to its place before the couch and sat down.
"I know I pushed you too hard. I wanted too much, too fast," Duncan shook his head and yawned again, stretching the kinks out of his broad back. "It's just that, except for the delightful little turkey interlude, we've hardly shaken hands since the wedding. So maybe the wallow under the house wasn't such a good idea, or that moonlight bit on the beach, but--" Duncan stopped and just shrugged. "Sometime you just go with a feeling. Sometimes it's wrong. I'm sorry."
"No," Adam stammered, "no, no, your feelings are sublime. It's just something I learned from my mother last night. It seems that back when she killed me, I, I--"
Duncan nodded. "You raped her."
"You knew?" Adam leaned forward. "How?"
Duncan raised his hands, palms to the ceiling. "I guess because it sounded so like one of her lies. How the story kept changing, closer and closer to the truth each time around. It would have to be something like that to make her kill you. Ram loves you more than any other being in Creation, Adam. Not more than I do, of course," he added.
"You knew that too?" Adam whispered, astonished.
Duncan reached forward and brushed Adam's nose. "Hey, what's not to love."
Adam shook his head. "I'll never call you Warmeat again."
Duncan rubbed his eyes. He started to feel Lucille's magic put him to rights.
"That will make leaving easier," Adam continued, "to know I can always return."
Duncan shot bolt upright and dove straight into Adam's midsection, throwing him over the coffee table and flat onto the floor, with the Highlander on top of him.
"Feeling better," Adam managed somehow to keep his dignity, flat on his back with the more than ten-stone weight of Scots dolmen straddling his middle. "Was it something I said."
"You are not leaving, Adam," Duncan said in a most ominously cheery tone. Simply a statement of fact, neither dare, nor threat, nor plea.
"But I just told you--," Adam sputtered.
"Yer nay gettin out of yer vows so easy," Duncan grinned. It was not a pleasant expression. "Love, honor, and cherish...unto death."
"But--"
"Nothing was said about warming the sheets, nothing about just so long as the lust lasts, not one thing about--Well, it's not about any of that anyway. If you want to leave again, Adam, then you'll have to do it by dying. Nothing short of that will make me lose you again. And you do that, Old Man, I'll be right after you, just as soon as I can lose my own head."
The effect on the Oldest Immortal was stunning. His acute wit went whispering away on a wild white wind. He sought to remember the first time he had met this man, how he had felt, what he had thought, whether he could ever have guessed where he would be in the future, where that would lead. Here, Adam thought, here and now. He remembered Duncan had refused to take his life, had to all intents and purposes, given him his life back. Who was Adam to deny him the ownership which Duncan proclaimed so certainly? In the long dead past of what seemed now another Adam, another Methos, he had known slavery, had been enslaved. This was something else entirely.
Adam could not even think of an answer, because there was only one answer, and that so obvious, even the question was an absurdity of the first order. "What could I have been thinking," he said at last. "Perhaps I was a bit hasty about the chastity thing after all."
"No," Duncan slipped off him. "That would still be all right. Not much different than a lot of old married couples." He laughed lightly. "We are certainly the oldest."
Adam pushed himself up on his elbows. "If not the oddest."
The front door slammed open and an out-of-breath, out-of sorts Richard Ryan stormed into the room. "Oh, excuuuuuse me," he hissed.
Adam scrambled up from the floor while Duncan steadied his skull against the door reverberations which, even now were still bouncing between his ears, straight through the bedrock of his brains.
"Richard," Adam whispered. "Where have you been?"
"What do you mean, 'Where have I been?' Didn't Striker tell you he sent me down to Overlook to pick up the ponies?"
"No, Richard," Adam shook his head and glanced back across the living room through the kitchen door. Empty. "Can I get you some coffee?"
"No," Richard shook his head. "That stallion is going to kick the trailer apart. I really need Striker out here to help--he can't still be asleep. It's nearly seven."
"Everybody's still asleep," Adam replied nudging him towards the kitchen. "Come get some coffee and biscuits and I'll go see to the horses."
"You?"
Adam's pale eyes tipped towards heaven, "Oh, I am a person of many hidden talents, Richard."
"Oh, now that I can believe," Richard paused at the kitchen door and stared back at the hungover Scot. "Looks like you've pretty much worn out old Mac there."
"I think it was the chandelier trick," Adam said in the same way that he next asked if Richard took sugar and cream in his coffee.
Richard Ryan could hardly stop choking long enough to answer.
His second cup, the former Seacouver street urchin was still chuckling.
"You're in a good mood," Duncan joined him in the kitchen. "Adam?"
"Out tending the livestock," Richard poured Mac a coffee.
"What livestock?" Duncan wished he would sober up a little more briskly. He was more than a little weary of being so far behind the curve.
"Oh, Striker said I wasn't being of any use moping around here, so I should go to Overlook and pick up the horses and then he and I would take them back up north to Seacouver and see about picking up the new semi to transport the--uh, patients," Richard paused. "It's so, so--God, if I could be sick for her, I would."
Duncan's thoughts trudged awkwardly behind Richard's commentary. What horses? What new semi? What?
"I spent the night with Dr. Anne," Richard changed subjects suddenly. "She says, 'Hi.'"
"Excuse me?" Duncan had just put together that the horses must be the two Malak stole that they'd boarded in Overlook while tending to more immediate concerns. "Anne? What?"
"Just kidding," Richard chuckled and poured them both another cup. "Good biscuits." He slathered another with strawberry jam. "Just had dinner together, s'all. I was the perfect gentleman."
"Oh," Duncan said between sips, as if he did understand.
"What the hell is going on out there!" Striker stumbled into the kitchen.
Duncan winced. "Why is everybody screeching this morning?"
"What?" Richard looked up at the shirtless, sleep-rumpled Facet.
"Can't you hear that?" Striker turned on his heels and headed through the living room towards the front door.
Kachunka, kachunka, kathud---BOOM!
This they heard.
"Horse," Duncan suggested.
"Oh, shit, shit, shit," Richard agreed, jumping up and dashing after Striker. "Adam said he could take care of it."
Duncan was reminded suddenly what happened the last time Adam had been near a horse, several decades ago. People had died. He moved his sodden and unwilling frame after Richard.
Thomas Cross and Grant appeared at the hallway arch and followed the Highlander onto the field.
The noise had stopped. Duncan hoped that was a good sign.
But it wasn't.
As Duncan's bleary eyes accommodated to the morning light, he sited on a knot of people crouched beside the red rental trailer--what was left of it--at the end of the drive. The horses were loose and--
Drunk or sober, nothing would have slowed Duncan's rush to the battered carcass at the center of the grouping. He pushed Mary aside and crouched down by Sean who was moaning his brother's name, like a mantra, over and over again. Damn.
"Sorry," Adam had barely enough breath left to speak. One of the horses, probably the feisty stud--though Duncan would not have put it past the mare either, if she were duly perturbed--had gone right over the top of the slender Immortal and crushed his chest. He would soon be dead. It would not last forever, Duncan reasoned with himself, but the chilling thud near his heart was not improved for the knowing.
Duncan carefully gathered the Old Man into his arms and waited. Adam closed his eyes and settled against the broad barrel of the Highlander's chest. Duncan could feel him stop fighting, could feel the subtle surrender as Adam let go of life, a testament to his trust that Duncan would watch over him and keep him safe.
When Adam was gone, Duncan lifted him up and bore him back to the house at the head of a pathetic parade: Mary and Sean, both of them sobbing, Cross and Grant and Striker, the last apologizing as fast as he could breathe, but not quite fast enough that both his superiors didn't cuff him, more than once each, for being so abjectly stupid and careless.
Richard stayed behind. He couldn't really do anything right. Ram was wrong. He wasn't a hero, he wasn't anyone's salvation, not even his own. She'd come all the way to Overlook, deep into the night, to help him load the horses. She'd ridden nearly all the way back with him, calming the horses whenever they stopped. And all the way back from Overlook, she promised to him that the most important two weeks of his life lay just ahead, that he would have to be at his very best, or all would be lost. Ram had told him that he alone could make Alexa stop wanting to die, and that Richard had only a fortnight left to do it in.
Alexa was going to die. Richard sagged against the warped and ripped panels of the trailer. He couldn't even get the horses down the road five miles in one piece by himself. Ram had left him at the last intersection before this driveway to Sean's bungalow. Doubtless she couldn't bear to see him fail so miserably.
Richard gave up feeling sorry for himself and went to retrieve the ponies. They'd torn up the gravel of the drive along a line which led towards the cliff edge behind the house. Hell, maybe he'd even gotten the horses killed. It really would not have surprised him.
Man, oh, man, Richard moaned silently, again and again, with each step towards the back of the house and whatever he would find there. As bad as the day had gone already, with the sun just coming up, nothing, absolutely nothing would have surprised him.
Or so he thought.
As he rounded the clapboard corner, he was surprised.
Alexa stood there in the new sun, her tiny hand wrapped around the large, dark muzzle of the stallion, scolding him softly about his bad showing this morning, and when was he going to remember his manners, after all. It was not as if he were a green colt, and this sort of nonsense would just never do.All of the light melody was counterpointed at intervals by the mare's snorts and nickers, in between cropping mouthfuls of the last summer's grass.
"What an absolute fuss you've made," Alexa crooned on, eye-to-eye with the remorseful behemoth.
"Alexa?" Richard moved cautiously towards her.
"Oh, Richard," Alexa glanced warningly at the stud and he walked quietly away to graze with his mother. She sighed. "Sorry I didn't wake up sooner. What a mess!"
"Are you all right?" Richard could hardly believe how alive she was, how she could hold that much power, and light, and in her sweet, diminutive frame. God, but she was gorgeous.
"We should rent another trailer and take them home, Richard," Alexa brushed her copper blond hair behind her shoulders. "They've not been too happy at the boarding stables."
"They told you?" Richard tried to joke, but his throat ached with the sight of her. Every surface of his hide wanted to touch her, but her new incandescence made him hesitate.
"Who else?" she answered, sounding as if this were obvious. "Maybe Thomas would let us buy them." She started back towards the house.
Richard stared at the horses and then rushed to catch up with her. "What are you talking about?"
"The horses, Richard. We should take them home with us," Alexa said as he drew even with her.
"I can't take care of them, Alexa. You saw what happened this morning," Richard nearly whined. Hadn't she been paying attention?
"Who said you'd have to take care of them?" Alexa halted and turned towards him, tilting her head. "And besides, the mare really likes you."
"Well, that won't matter after you're gone," Richard dug in and met the battle here, unexpectedly, in the back yard of someone else's lost marriage. Please God, let me be right, let me just get this one thing right, and I will never ask for anything again, so long as I live.
"Oh," Alexa grew suddenly silent and the light went out of her face.
God, oh, God. Richard held his breath.
"He knew," she said in a very small voice. "He knew and he forgave us both. He worried about us both in those last moments. He didn't feel the fire. The boys were already dead. He let himself feel how very much they meant to him and how grateful he was not to survive them. He--" she meant to say it all without breaking, but that was beyond her. Alexa dabbed at her eyes. "He always knew I didn't love him, but he loved me and he loved our sons, and he was happy with just that, he thought our life, his life, had been full and wonderful, and he hoped I would find--. I would--"
Richard pulled her tight against him. "Please don't die," he said. It was so lame, his heart tore as he said it.
Deep in his arms, buried in her hair and his own tears, her voice drifted up into the ice of the morning sea breezes.
"Okay."
Out of what crypt they crawl, I cannot tell,
But every night I see the rubbery things,
Black, horned, and slender, with membranous wings,
They come in legions on the north wind's swell
With obscene clutch that titillates and stings,Snatching me off on monstrous voyagings
To grey worlds hidden deep in nightmare's well.
Over the jagged peaks of Thok they sweep,
Heedless of all the cries I try to make,
And down the nether pits to that foul lakeWhere the puffed shoggoths splash in doubtful sleep.
But ho! If only they would make some sound,
Or wear a face where faces should be found!
--from Fungi From Yuggoth & Other Poems,by H.P. Lovecraft
Molly and Margaret emerged from Mary's bedroom, still covered in flour, still half asleep. They were met by Adam's impromptu funeral procession, tramping solemnly through the front door. Without actually waking, the two Facets shifted into emergency mode and soon had the Oldest Immortal bedded down in Mary's room, new linen, basins of warm, scented water, mountains of towels and bandages, soon followed by warm, mulled cider and coffee, sweet cream and berries for all of Adam's anxious attendees.
When it became clear the Old Man would be gone for a while, Grant and Thomas went to see to the horses. Striker was sent down to the beach to assess the storm damage on the semi. Molly and Margaret retired to the kitchen, and Mary leaned against Sean at the doorway to her former sick room, just watching wistfully.
"You going to be okay, Pop?" Sean called softly, his arm fitting easily around his cousin's waist.
Duncan shook his head, more as a sigil of confusion, than as a negative.
Sean sighed, "I've just never seen him dead before. It's so awful."
"Neither have I, Son," Duncan reached out his hand and pressed the palm lightly against Adam's sundered ribs, trying to feel them coming into line, coming back to normal, coming back. "And, yes, it is awful."
"But," Sean argued, "When Dahm drove the barge into Notre Dame--"
That was a family tale, oft repeated, approaching the status of mythic lai.
"But they didn't find me until he'd revived, Son," Duncan replied, but his smoky, bleary stare never left Adam's still, pale face. "I never saw him dead."
"We're all going to die, aren't we?" Sean said, sounding as if he were twelve again, before his voice lowered. Even to the Immortals, it seemed, eventually came the same revelation that haunted those who lived less long.
"Not today," Mary said softly, having already stepped beyond them both towards that Last Gate, "Not tomorrow," she added, having made her peace with her destination, "Nor probably the day after," she finished, sharing with them the way of the present in the face of the future.
"You are too wise for one so young, Mary," Duncan complimented her. He reached up to Adam's doughy, cold forehead, more like clay than flesh, and brushed the hair back from his brow.
"This is too, too--" Sean backed through the doorway, releasing Mary.
"What is it, Son?" Duncan tore his gaze away from Adam.
"Oh," Sean thought it might be better not to say anything at all, but he had yet to learn Master Cross' first lesson in restraint, "Both of you just waiting for your dead loves. One to come back to the living, one to--" He turned to stare at Mary. "And no one waiting for me," he ended, sadly.
"That is not true, Sean," Mary stared blindly, beyond the abyss between the now and the ever-after. "Such a woman waits for you as has never been, nor ever will be again."
"It's okay, Mary," Sean snorted, "I'm old enough not to need fairy tales."
Mary took his wrist and planted his hand on her belly. "Well, you better apologize to her and right this minute, or she'll have your liver for breakfast."
Sean jerked his hand back. "Oh, you're too funny."
"You won't think so two decades from now, when every time you even think of her, you will begin to look like that," Mary pointed across the room to where the Highlander hovered over the still body, an image of abject devotion and patient love.
"I'll never look that stupid," Sean chuckled, knowing his dad was too involved at that moment to even know they were still at the open door.
"Well, then," Mary ushered him into the hallway, "believe anything you like, Little Cousin, but don't believe you will be alone, because there is someone waits for you, if you will only be patient."
Sean couldn't say why his throat ached just then, or why his eyes suddenly filled, or why he said what he did, but then there were so many things about himself he'd yet to ken completely.
He said, "Whatever she is, or will be, Mary, she won't be you."
Mary was grateful that Striker chose just that moment to stride down the hallway, intense and out-of-breath, looking for Grant and Cross.
Stoner emerged from the bathroom looking remarkably hale and hearty. "Well," he greeted them, "How's everyone doing this fine morn? Mary? You're up."
Striker looked at Sean. Sean looked at Mary.
Mary stepped forward and escorted the Judge to the kitchen where she could properly catch him up on the current doings.
Sean followed Striker outside.
They found Grant and Cross in the garage with Richard and Alexa, bedding down the horses, as if nothing had happened.
"So, Striker," Cross greeted him and nodded at Sean. "What's the report? How did the semi make it through the storm last night?"
Striker dissembled, "Well, there's good news and bad news, Sir."
Grant turned his gaze slowly towards his brother Facet. The giant's mien was as unreadable as windless water.
Richard and Alexa were busy breaking up the straw bales and bedding down the garage and speaking to each other, wordlessly, looking, Sean noted, every bit as stupid as his dad had.
"You want me to flip a coin," Cross began, "or shall I just let you choose the order?"
Striker cleared his throat and began, "Good news first, then."
A moment of silence followed and then the laser glare of the tiny black man's amber eyes spurred Striker forward.
"You can cancel that work crew that was going to dismantle the semi," Striker said.
Cross scowled.
"It, it is gone, Sir. Must have washed out into the bay."
Grant folded his arms over his impressive chest.
"I swear to God, Master," Striker lost it entirely, "I was up and down that beach ten times, if once. It just fucking isn't there! Well, it was a really big storm! It was so dark there for awhile, it was like the story about how the Raven ate the moon."
Cross lifted his palm and Striker immediately calmed down and came to his senses.
"I know it's impossible, but the trailer, the engine, everything--gone," Striker said more normally.
"You mean that big metal monstrosity that's parked up at the head of the drive?" Richard looked up at them. "I had a hell of a time getting around it to get the horse trailer down to the house.
Cross looked up at Grant. The giant stepped sideways and waved graciously toward the garage door, indicating Thomas should lead.
So out they went, Sean and Striker, Thomas and Grant, to investigate. Crunch, crunch, up the drive towards the paved road above them on the second level of the cliffside.
"Look, what it is," Sean heard Cross saying to Grant, "What it must be, is that the new semi has arrived a week early and they couldn't rouse anybody at the house, so they just left it here and got a ride into town, and it's still too early to call yet and tell me it's arrived."
Grant handed him the phone.
Cross keyed in some numbers. No answer. Too early yet. Grant took the phone back.
"Well, what do you think it is then?" Cross' question got no answer at all from his taciturn sidekick.
"See, what did I tell you," Cross announced as they crested the ridge and came in sight of the semi. The storm had muddied it some, but it was otherwise--
"Oh, I don't like that design," Cross complained. "I didn't order that! Damn! Who told them I wanted a row of black ovals down the side."
Grant's granite visage sagged just the tiniest degree. He took a step back and leaned down to check the axle and the wheels. Standing back up again, he shook his head and glanced up at the sun-blushed clouds above them.
"Look," HorseMaster Cross exclaimed, "They've even left us a note under the wiper blade."
Striker didn't need to be hit over the head--any more. He rushed over, climbed up the bumper and retrieved the small scrap of yellow notebook paper. He handed it down to Sean who dutifully brought it back to Cross.
Grant reached forward and took the note before Thomas had a chance to read it.
The three men watched as the giant Facet read the note, once, then twice, then one more time over, all to himself. Then he handed the note back to Cross.
Then Grant's face cracked in two, roughly near the area of his mouth and he laughed in much the same way as a lion does just after the kill is accomplished and the meal secure, more a predatory, than a truly happy sound.
The three of them stared at him, aghast. Grant never laughed.
"I can't stand it!" Sean snatched the note back and read aloud.
I fear you have seen me at a disadvantage, gentlemen.
I would not want to leave you with the wrong impression.
"But what does it mean?" Striker echoed his Master's thought.Sean grinned and walked over to the side of the semi, near one of the oval "dots" Cross had complained about. He shoved his fist into the impression, up to his elbow.
Thomas counted, one, two, three, four--He put his hands out in front of him, spread his fingers and rotated them down. His mahogany features gained a definite ashen hue as he multiplied the size and factored in the trailer tonnage. "No," he said.
"But what is it?" Striker asked again.
"Do you want me to call a flat bed up from Overlook to haul this away, Sir?" Grant stopped laughing and remembered his more usual decorum.
"Yes, Grant," Thomas said vacantly, "I think that would be in order."
They began to walk back down the drive, Striker scurrying behind.
Sean kicked the nearest tire and the whole vehicle creaked and sagged. Sean backed away cautiously and ran to catch up with Striker.
"It's a curious calculation, Grant," Cross mused.
"Yes, it is," Grant agreed.
"What wing spread do you think? To get up here from a dead stop on the beach below?" Thomas queried.
"At least an old 747," Grant guessed. "If not that air bus you hired to bring it to Overlook in the first place, but that's not accounting for a vertical lift, in a storm."
"Well," Thomas curved his fingers again, "If one finger is the dimension of an arm--"
"But, of course a claw is more slender than a finger, Sir," Grant offered.
"Yes, there is that," Thomas' thoughts drifted down the path ahead of them. "Still, the size must be--"
"Unimaginable," Grant supplied.
"Indeed," Thomas nodded, grateful to lay the image to rest for the moment. "Exactly."
Sean caught up with Striker just about the time the Facet's brains connected.
"Impression," Striker choked as he laughed, "Oh, my."
Sean elbowed him sharply in the ribs. "You wouldn't think it was so funny if it was your mother."
But Striker only laughed harder.
Ram settled further back in the cave--more crack--in the uppermost tier of cliffgranite, overlooking the sealine drive and the bungaloid dwelling Adam had purchased for his half-brother, Sean. She laughed to herself. They had found the semi and her message. More to the point, they had gotten the message.Be afraid of me, she thought. I am tired of your many batterings and misunderstandings.
Just you wait, you bitchgod of disorder...
See my splendor beneath these common trappings of pretended humanity.
You have no idea what battering lies in wait...
Be minded of the mighty Host, even though I alone remain.
There won't be enough left of you to sweep into the dustbin...
Now we lie in darkness, but once we were proudly heralded and worshipped in the Light.
Not one slimy scale left on your entire molty lizard back...
Remember the Angels and mourn their passing. Remember.
Just you wait, you salacious salamander. Just you wait until my son finds out what you have done to me.
Heh, heh, hey. Just you wait.
He had been so surprised to see Connor at the wedding. Well, there were many surprising elements of that event, his own marriage to Adam not the least of these. Come back, Adam, Duncan sighed silently. It is so hard to see you hurt, so impossible to see you dead, if only for the moment.
Duncan had pulled a chair up to the head of what had been Mary's sick bed. They'd moved it away from the wall and taken down the headstead to make it easier to care for her. Now Adam--or, rather Adam's last known place of residence--lay still and cold, battered and dead and, past the initial cleanup, no trouble at all to tend to. Except for the curious troubling which it dealt the Highlander's heart, and that was considerable. He wasn't ready to think about Adam's dying. He probably never would be.
Duncan caught himself wishing that of the two of them, he hoped he died first. Damnation, what a coward's prayer that was! Where was the warrior, the champion that had been made of his flesh, his life, long before his birth? How many more losses must Adam have suffered? Duncan wondered how the Old Man could stand to touch people anymore. Connor, not much older than Duncan himself, could no longer feel any comfort in the company of his kin. When, Duncan wondered, would he become like his father, so much less alive than dead?
In those first days of their friendship, Duncan had often mused about which of them would survive the final challenge of the Gathering, if it came to that. Except that Fitzcairn was too delightful and Darius too holy and Connor and his other teachers too honored, male Immortals were for killing. Duncan had loved his share of mortal women, all of them fine and fair...
...and gone now.
He would never have guessed his longest committed relationship would be with another male Immortal, but so it was, so it would be, even if Adam had left today, as he'd threatened to do. Their time together in the Abby with Sean, represented the longest, most peaceful, most...
Duncan had not had the luxury, nor the time, before now, to consider that all of that was finally over now. Their family was finished. That was likely the reason Adam's death had so undone him. It marked, like a milestone, a point on that pathway which had no turning back. Adam probably sensed this as well--or at least he would, if he would only revive. Perhaps, Duncan argued with himself, the loss, the change, the impending chaos engendered his sudden possessiveness as well as Adam's subtle withdrawal. Ironic to the nines, then, that this should all have come about just at the moment they had officially promised themselves to each other forever.
Maybe he should let the Old Man go, after all. Maybe there was some bravery within him, as yet untapped, that would allow him to love Adam enough to set him free.
No, Duncan worked the thought over and over. No, not any more than he could cut off his hand. He would still live, but he would be so crippled, it wouldn't be worth it. And it would so weaken him, he would be easy to kill. Time and tide had swept them all out of the deep, safe ocean of Sean's childhood and back into the world again. All the subtleties and graces of that gentler time would have to be stowed away.
Duncan wallowed in the depths of his self-chastisement. You have grown soft and soppy and self-important. You've grown used to too much tenderness. The edge, that hungry, gnawing readiness is gone from you, and you are some sorry excuse for a warrior.
Long, light fingers slipped into the fist his right hand had become and Duncan jolted back alert.
"Are you all right?" Adam rasped, tilting his head to stare at the Scot upside down.
"Yes," Duncan answered carefully, "Yourself?" He found he couldn't look at Adam just then. He wanted the man too much, needed too much.
"I don't think I ever saw," Adam stopped suddenly and slowed his breathing to prevent the sudden urge to cough against his healing rib cage. "I never saw you so afraid, Duncan. What is it?"
Duncan stared across the room. How could he answer, when he did not understand it himself?
Adam was still in too much pain for elegant explanations, so he tried to keep it simple, "I love you," he said. The cough threatened again, but he fought it back. "And what do we do, now the chick's flown the nest?"
"I don't know," Duncan ran the back of his knuckles nervously against Adam's shoulder. "Why is everything so different now?"
"It isn't, it--"
The coughing would not be kept at bay any longer. Adam convulsed in paroxysms of hacking and howling.
And when it was all done, Adam found himself swaddled in the brawny arms of the Scot, cursing in an early Sumerian dialect, mixed with much more modern, though equally colorful, Anglo Saxon terms of disgruntlement.
"Easy, easy," Duncan admonished, trying to ignore the new bruises blossoming over Adam's chest where he'd torn himself hacking.
Adam's cursing deteriorated into screaming exhalations as the pain in his sundered chest began to defeat him. Each inhalation was a ghastly wheeze, each exhalation a moaning howl.
And all Duncan could do was hold him and feel miserable and curse himself for his helplessness, his uselessness, in the face of Adam's torment. Duncan began to wonder where he'd left his sword and whether it wouldn't just be easier for the Old Man to die again and come back later when his ribcage was a more going, less excrutiating, proposition.
And that was the measure of his unfitness, Duncan thought. He didn't even know where his katana was. Didn't even--.
Damn! Duncan felt his adrenaline rise, his flesh cool, and the fire begin to build in his core, just as if he were about to go into battle. A fine tremor ran along his arms, and the muscles of his shoulders braced tight and solid. He began to feel Adam's buzz, the aura that announced one Immortal gladiator to another, building behind his ears and setting his teeth on edge.
Some distant, indistinct memory sounded beneath Adam's deep, thrumming signature.
“Relax, Duncan,” the soft tones echoed in his weary, anxious brain. He could almost hear Ram's husky whisper by his right ear, just as he had that day in the alley, after he'd taken Carlisle's head. “Wait for it. Let this be the first head you take, not the several hundredth one you’ve wasted.”
Duncan remembered how Ram had made him feel what Carlisle felt: reft of his body, still alive, but dying. Duncan grimly held himself to that dark vision and felt the Quickening leave him, felt his life draining away, felt less and less of anything at all.
In the fading periphery of his attention, there was noise and light, gale wind and star storm, but within there was only blessed stillness.
And at the center of that stillness...
Only Adam.
Little Molly picked herself up off the kitchen floor, blinking her eyes and trying to gain her bearings on the edge between smoke and floor. She scrambled forward, hoping she remembered rightly where Margaret had been standing--near the sink--when the explosion hit. Her sense of direction had not deserted her despite the hard slam she had taken following the detonation. Rousing her sister Facet, Molly groped her way through the splintered cupboards and broken dinnerware to an enormous hole in the porch wall where the stove had exited the building.
Tugging on Margaret's torn shirt, she led them onto what was left of the back porch and into the helpful arms of Thomas Cross and his gigantic partner.
"What happened?" Thomas asked. He and Grant had rushed from the garage after the first report, sending Richard and Alexa into the back yard with the two horses, away from the beginnings of a sizeable fire in the master bedroom of the bungalow.
Molly was too excited to speak, nor would she have known what to say. Margaret was still too dazed to be coherent, or even to stand without help.
Thomas ushered them off and entered through the rent in the kitchen wall. "Stoner!" he called out. "Adam!"
"Duncan!" he called again, but there was no answer save the escalating roar from the bedroom hallway. The fire had built so fast, Thomas could not get three strides down the hall for the intense heat that met him and the howling gale that drove him back on his heels and strafed his face like a blast furnace.
Twice more, he tried to advance down the hallway, calling their names, but then his smoke-strafed throat began to close down, threatening to choke him.
"Come on, HorseMaster Cross," Sean dragged the black man out of the hall and into the living room before hoisting him, most disrespectfully, over his shoulder and bearing him out of the fire, onto the front lawn and into Mary's care.
"We can't get in, Mary," Sean said with as much control as he could muster. "Pop and Dahm won't answer. They're trapped in the bedroom, at the origin of the blast. You don't think they--they couldn't have had a fight? They wouldn't--?"
"Not unless you can behead someone with your bare hands," Thomas croaked. "Both their swords are up the road in the semi."
"But you're right, Sean," Mary wrung out the towel in the horse bucket she'd brought from the garage. She handed a cooler rag back to Thomas for his poor face, now black as soot for more reasons than his birthright. "You're right," Mary mused, "It is a Quickening, Sean," her head tilted upward, over the sagging roof where a column of eery blue energy, brighter than the sun, was rising to the heavens. But why doesn't it stop? The whole house will be cinders soon."
"I don't--," Sean shook his head, "I just don't know. Just don't--"
"Diminishment," a deep, rolling bass proclaimed.
"What?" Thomas jerked back from Mary as if she were possessed.
"Oh!" Sean sank down by his wife, "It's Marak! Marak, help us! We don't know what has happened. We don't know what to do!"
Mary lifted the second damp rag to her face reflexively and tried to focus. "What happened?"
"Marak was trying to tell us something, Mary," Sean threw a protective arm around her. "But all he said was 'Diminishment.'"
Mary shook her head. "It's the same thing that happened when Malak died. Oh, Sean! We're going to lose them! What could have happened?"
Judge Stone strolled around the house at the edge of the smoke, "Oh, there you are. That makes Molly and Margaret and Grant in the back yard." He glanced down the road and continued his tally, "Richard and Alexa, and then you three, here. So. It's only Adam and Mac who are still unaccounted for." He glanced up at the light column which had not weakened since its first appearance. "Well, maybe accounted for, but not immediately present," he amended. "I've tried getting access at several places where the wall is down, but the fire is too far gone. Grant already called the Overlook Fire Department. They should be here directly. Master Thomas, what can we do to stop this?"
"You got any ideas, Stoner?" Thomas whispered with what was left of his voice.
Stoner looked at the ground and brought all his former judicial presence to bear. He did this like a motionless dance, a silent chant, a way to settle his thoughts and show himself the light beyond life's dark glass. He readied himself for revelation, but it was not forthcoming, so he moved to his backup position. First revelation, and then if that doesn't work, straight to the ridiculous.
"When the going gets tough," Stoner pronounced in deep, round tones.
The pause aimed their concentration his direction.
"When the going gets tough, the tough call their Mommy," he spoke the jest so seriously, no one got it.
At first.
"Of course!" Sean gasped. "But how?"
The elder jurist lifted his shoulders. "Thomas asked for ideas. Implementation is, I believe, your department, Mr. MacLeod."
"I don't even know where she is!" Sean whined.
"Yes, you do," Mary corrected him. "The same way you knew where I was all those years."
"Oh," Sean murmurred. "But that just happened. I don't even know how. I don't--"
"Shhh," Mary laid her cheek against his chest. "Think about the dragon, think about--"
"Oh, yucck," Sean complained. He hated that dream worst of all. But Adam was dying or already dead, and Pop with him. If he had to go to the dragon, then that's where he would go. He closed his eyes and did what Mary called "stepping off the world," and there was the thing, floating like a larval bat in the center of an endless chasm, some demented angel of the bottomless pit.
"You, hey! You there!" Sean called out to the loathsome thing. "You! Hey! My father is dying! My brother is dying! Help them!"
The dingy grey rolls of pulpish flesh undulated slowly round, sculling with the frayed and ragged wings against the foul updraft of the dank pit. Sean could not tell if it were facing him or not. The end which moved towards him was as featureless as the one which followed.
Then, as he watched, shaking from his scalp to his heels, the flesh began to tear or rip, a bloodless wound, across the knobish blunted end of its formlessness. Sean saw the rent widen until it ran across the entire diameter, then it suddenly tore open, revealing a single, blind eye, a great onyx orb of mindlessness and mayhem, taking all the light, reflecting nothing back except the single image of himself, tiny and helpless, one step from the verge.
The very next thing Sean knew, he was stacked, like cordwood, beneath a warm, slightly singed wool blanket, next to his bother Dahm. Across the lawn, everyone else was gathered around Pop. Sean struggled up to sitting and jostled his brother. "Dahm, wake up!"
Adam stirred and moaned. "Stop," he mumbled, "Make it stop."
"Come on, Adam," Sean pulled at the blanket. "Oh. I'll get you something to wear," he surveyed the burned house. "Somewhere. Here," Sean stripped off his T-shirt and handed it over.
Adam stared at the T as if he didn't quite know either what it was, or what it was for.
"Maybe something is left in the closets," Sean noted that the column of light was gone and the fire had burned down to crackles and sizzles and smoke. Some of the inner walls seemed to be intact. Poor Mary, he thought. This would be the second time she'd lost everything to a fire. Sean had been responsible for the first. God only knew what had caused this one.
Grant left the knot around Duncan and started for them with some clothes draped over his forearm. Doubtless the laundry which was drying on the back yard line, Sean thought. Probably all that's left.
The giant knelt down by Adam and wrestled him into a too-large pair of jeans, some of Duncan's. The Elder Immortal fussed and complained, but he seemed too unfocused to mount anything like his usually witty defense and his entire lank frame seemed boneless, he was so weak.
"Lord Ram says you are to come," Grant conveyed what sounded like royal edict. "She needs you to describe what happened."
"Tell the 'Lord' she can go suck eggs for all I care," Adam replied. "Stop that! I can get dressed myself." Which was not even close to the truth.
"Forebear, Sir," Grant always had a way with reminding his betters of their manners. "Mr. MacLeod cannot be roused and she fears he is dying, but none of us can discover why or how to stop it."
To Adam's credit, he did try to rouse and rise, and he didn't even complain--very much--when Grant lifted him like a baby and toted him across the lawn to the worried knot of Facets, Immortals, and warhorses, gathered round the Highlander's limp form, like a modern day version of Death of the King.
Grant set Adam down on the grass and returned to tending his Master's poor sooty face.
Adam leaned towards his spouse who was lying, senseless, his head and shoulders propped on Ram's bony lap. It irked him to see the mirror of his own hands stroking their way through the tangle of the long dark curls. He reached out, trying to still the tremor which ran the entire yard of his long arm.
"No," Ram pushed his hand away. "You better not touch him, Adam. Just sit still and answer some questions for me."
Adam cradled his arm close to his chest as if she had slugged him, though her touch had been light, if determined. "Speak on," he said, propping himself against the nearest solid object, in this case, Judge Stoner.
"All I know thus far," Ram began a summary of the reportage they'd been all too anxious to give-- and all at once. "You were hurt by one of the horses. Killed. Duncan was alone with you in Mary's room, waiting for you to revive. Then the house blew up, ignited, and an energy well built above the roof. Grant and I went in for the two of you after I strangled the well. You have recovered a bit and there is no sign of your original injury, but Duncan will not wake. Worse, he seems to be failing."
"No!" Adam lurched forward, only to meet Ram's fist so hard against his sternum, it stopped his breath.
"I wouldn't try to touch him, Adam," Ram spoke in a steady, almost conversational, tone, "I thought I made that clear before."
"Well, we'll just see what he has to say about that when he awakes," Adam rubbed his chest, wondering that she hadn't re-fractured his ribs.
"I can't make sense of this, Adam," Ram said quietly, "Be angry with me later. Help me now, or he may never wake. Tell me everything you remember."
Adam felt his entire carcass go numb and slack. She was just trying to scare him, to make him obey her by threatening the Scot. All right, then, if that was the game. "I came back in Mary's bed. He was leaning over me. He looked frightened somehow. I think I told him so, told him that I had never seen him so afraid. He didn't seem to hear me. He wouldn't look at me. Duncan was, was lost in some intense preoccupation. Then I started choking and--" Adam rubbed his chest again, "I hurt my ribs coughing. Duncan held me and I could hear him speaking, but I just--there was a lot of pain--I just couldn't make out what he was saying. Then--" Adam paused, trying to remember, but what he did recall really didn't make any sense.
Ram's pale eyes narrowed. "And you felt like you were meeting challenge. You felt the blood lust rise and Duncan's aura grew intense, and then--?"
"Yes," Adam whispered, amazed, "Yes, exactly. Then--" both his elegant hands flew up before his face and cradled his mouth as his head rocked back and forth, then he pulled them down to his lap, "I know this didn't happen, but it seemed as if I took his head."
The lines and planes of Ram's peculiar face, so like Adam's, went hard as carved stone. "But it just isn't possible," she said to no one. Her slender fingers ran gently over Duncan's broad brow. "He wasn't even injured. There would be no way he could enter into Diminishment without approaching extremity. What could possibly be sufficient mortification to--"
"Mother," Adam interrupted.
Ram looked up from Duncan.
"English, Mother. Clear, plain--."
"Oh," Ram brought her concentration back to the present. "There is an abiding will to survive, Adam. It is a fundamental truth of all things which live. The power, the essence of that life, remains bound to each living thing, up until the end, until death. With Immortals, this is no different. They give up their power only when they lose their lives. This is the Quickening Major.
"But there is also the Quickening Minor, what you call the buzz, the subliminal signature of the Immortals which is, in truth, a Diminishment Minor, in that it is a, a 'leak' of that essential power and will which is the force of life.
"With infinite skill, endless practice, and no little talent, some Danae can shape the nature of Diminishment, to give this power to another--in healing, for the most part," Ram took a slow deep breath, "but the Diminishment can be used in a more sinister fashion, as a way to be wounded, or punished, or killed. Malak is dead by this fashion. The Danae are likewise done."
"Duncan gave me his, his life?" Adam asked.
"So it would seem. A good portion of it, yes," Ram's elegant hands whispered over the serene features of the Highland stepson, draped across her thighs. "Perhaps too much to allow him to go on living."
"But how could he have been hurt so badly that he let go of his life?" Adam asked.
"Precisely the question," Ram said, "I have no answer. But that is surely what happened, even if we cannot determine how. Duncan has suffered so terribly that he has been thrown into an unremitting Diminishment, which will surely kill him."
"Give my life to him," Adam said. "Take my head. Some magic broom thing, or another. You can save him. You have to. You have--." His mouth went numb with terror and the world dissipated in shards of hums and sparkles as Adam slumped against the judge, his eyes pulsing upward under the pale brown lashes.
Beneath the mantle of his faint, Adam busily summoned the dark imageries of his perversion, calling up those moments when the agony had driven him out of himself. Adam willed himself to linger there, dissociated from his flesh, in that peculiar sensation he thought of as flying.
All that I am, Duncan, the words drifted up and wound lazily around his disembodied awareness like ribbons of wind and light. All that I am. It is yours. I am yours. Where the two shall lie down...
Let there be only one.
All of his life had been moving to this moment, Adam thought. The melody of his musings, the ribbons, curved into each other, his words weaving back into rapturous spirals and knots, shimmering tapestries of brightest dawn, as if he were wrapping himself like a present to honor the day of birth.
Be glad, Highlander.
Live and grow stronger.
Adam felt himself expanding on the quiet sussuration of the breeze and the brilliant pulsations of light. Far behind him Ram was howling angry, anxious commands and Thomas' giant rushed to drag his carcass away, but Adam was so distant, so completely at peace, that he only wished they could know, as he knew, that none of their concerns had any meaning at all.
All those petty distractions made up the artificial divisions which they perceived as Life, and Adam, who had stood apart so long, could sympathize with their misplaced fears at some level. He couldn't really feel them any more, though. He felt nothing at all, except a tenderness towards them all, a prayer of sorts, that they might know what he knew now.
Adam felt all the ribbons, the banners of light and color, expand and unwind in joyous abandon.
And his last thought was to bless Horse for having taught him the art of perfect surrender.
