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Chapter One: The Inquisitor
Duncan MacLeod of the Clan--"and so forth and so on"--as his consort was so fond of saying, lay very still, though he had moved instantly from sleeping to waking, from somnolence to vigilance.
Adam's fault, really. The Old Man was awake, so Duncan was awake. It was one of those affects of--of whatever had happened between them--whatever had happened to create the abject absence of "between" between them.
No, Duncan thought, just let it be. No good to get a headache trying to plumb the mysteries so early in the day, and even before coffee, for heaven's sake. More simply, then: when Adam was awake, Duncan was awake. The Scot wondered idly about some day in the distant future that might find them a world apart, through necessity or simple circumstance, when one of them would have to become nocturnal. Perhaps that would work. Duncan was not so overly fond of the night, and Adam was in his element when night fell, all shadows and flickerings, false lights and dark excitements.
Then why, Duncan wondered, was the Old Man awake now?
Oh, he thought in the next instant, Stupid question.
Adam's moth-wing touch grazed over his chest and followed a sinuous course along the line of Duncan's left collar bone. He willed himself to a deeper stillness, knowing all the while that Adam knew perfectly well that he was awake. They still both pretended that nothing had changed between them, still went through the motions of being two separate beings, when that was hardly true any more. It was just easier to continue pretending, even when they were away from the rest of "the clan" who might be disturbed by how very different things were now.
Especially since they were, neither of them, certain what the exact measure of that difference entailed yet.
Duncan heard a lowing grumble build at the base of his throat where Adam's tongue teased into the well of his sternal notch. The Highlander considered he had waited the appropriate time, and began to "wake," mumbling little incoherent greetings and idle wonderings about "pony rides" so early in the morning.
"Which would make any sense," Adam's sunny baritone rumbled down the length of Duncan's torso as the lean frame laid itself over him like the silencer cloth at a finely set table. "Any sense at all, if it weren't already noon, Sleepy."
Duncan lifted his head and sketched a playful nip near the Old Man's wonderfully ample nose. "Which makes you--? Sneezy?"
Adam folded his arms over Duncan's chest and leaned forward to nibble on the Scot's lower lip. "Well, I'm for sure not Snow White." He insinuated his lean knees between Duncan's muscled thighs and snuggled into the flat stomach.
Duncan heaved the lank Immortal up a few inches and readjusted him down in a more comfortable arrangement. "Good morning," he said.
"Afternoon to yourself as well, Lord of the Manor," Adam murmured back, already moving again, like a silken wave, down Duncan's chest, chattering away in a lover's conversation of nips and nibbles, kisses and sucklings, and lightly blown zephyrs of titillating arousal.
Duncan breathed slowly in through his nose and then his next expiration escaped in a noisy, extravagant sigh, as the cool, soft lips began another discussion with his erection.
"All right, Demon," Duncan said finally, when he could wait no longer. "Pony rides it is, then."
"And I thought you'd never ask," Adam laughed breathlessly. He straddled the Scot's waist and settled over him in one liquid descent which made Duncan squeak out loud in a most unseemly fashion.
"Damn!" Duncan squinted his eyes shut and cast about for some control. He settled more comfortably under Adam's spare weight and searched for the rhythm which had come to pass between them, a sort of tidal rolling, a wave against some starry shore. There.
He was suddenly struck by a memory of Tessa, gleefully running up the stairs at the gallery, and he in heated pursuit. He caught her at the door to their bedroom, lifted her up in his arms and tossed her, giggling wickedly, onto the bed. Then they...
Duncan's eyes shot open. He felt a full blushing wave rise along his jaw and up to his forehead.
Adam's gild and green gaze sparkled down on him. The Old Man was not embarrassed at all, though his angular features were fuzzed with a certain perplexity. His head shook back and forth as he chewed his lower lip. Then the graceful shoulders lifted in a surrender to all things inevitable and he dismounted the Scot and pushed over to the side of the bed, where he dangled his legs and stared out of the sunny loft windows, silent as a grave.
Duncan grabbed a corner of the sheet, dabbing distractedly, and wondering how they'd ended up in the loft, and what this was all about, and what had gotten into Adam, and...
When it became clear that his wits could not find any sensible order by themselves, Duncan levered up and crawled over to sit silently by the Old Man, waiting for Adam to put any of this into words, into reason. Ironic, that this Son of Chaos should be his only hope for order.
"I am afraid that the Good Lord, BB-Rex, was all too right," Adam said cryptically.
"Who?" Duncan asked, trying not to stare at Adam.
"The much-regaled nubian potentate of the last millennium, the lyric bard of all things woeful," Adam continued.
The headache that Duncan had tried so hard to avoid earlier threatened ever nearer. "What?"
"The owner of the original namesake of our dear Seacouver First Lady," Adam burbled on.
Duncan thought a moment. No, this was going to be one of those "Adam explanations" that left you screaming, if you let it. He wasn't going to fall for this. He meant Mrs. Dawson, that much the Scot understood, but all the rest was mud. Sweet Lucille, as much a riddle as Adam might ever hope to contrive, and none of her magic diminished, even in revelation. Namesake? Hmmm? "How did we end up here?" Duncan interrupted the Old Man's arcane dissertation.
Adam stopped and turned slowly sideways towards him. "Oh, all right," he answered something that hadn't even been said. "It's going to be that way, is it? Then the answer is: we left Cross Estate yesterday morning, the day after Christmas--at the damnable crack of dawn, I might add--and set off for Old 'Couver by the Bay to look for our son. Then we ended up here very late last night, got unforgivably drunk, pursued a somewhat lack-luster roll in the sheets, and popped straight-way into a coma a deux."
Duncan's full lips widened slowly into a smile. " 'Our son.' I like the sound of that."
"Well, all right," Adam amended. "Your son and my brother, though, truth be told I raised the lad nearly all by myself, with hardly any help from your quarter, Father."
Duncan's smile broadened and he laughed silently. "Now, now, Mother, don't fuss."
"Well," Adam traced the palm of his left hand with the long fingers of his right. "I seem to have been saying the same thing to you, all day yesterday, when you were going off on some paternal obsession or another."
"I do not 'go off,' " Duncan snorted.
"My mistake, then," Adam sighed. "Lunch?" he suggested.
"Sure," the Scot agreed. "Right after you tell me what's going on here.
"...and spare me the bit about the black slaver with the titular name," he added.
Adam stared. "Oh. Oh, all right. Hmmm, where to begin--" Adam flopped onto his back and propped his arms behind his head. "You know that Quickening thing when we finally got back together--."
"--and we almost died," Duncan interjected, trying to speed the explanation up a bit.
"Not 'almost,' Duncan Darling. Not almost anything at all. We did die." Adam rolled onto his side and faced the Scot.
"Well," Duncan twisted around towards him. "We are not dead now, Dahhhrling."
"True," Adam mused, beginning to smooth out the counterpane as if it were an occupation of intense complexity.
"Look," Duncan stood up and stretched his back. "If the pace doesn't plan on picking up any time soon, I am going to take a shower."
"You do know I'm an old man, Duncan?"
"More so all the time, Adam," Duncan cast back over his shoulder, halfway to the bathroom door. "Why don't you just type out an essay and post it to me. Probably wouldn't take half as long."
"We will never make love to each other as we did before," Adam spurted out.
Which had the effect of turning the Highlander around and dragging him back to the bed. "Excuse me?"
"For being so rude? Maybe. I'll think about it." Adam pushed up to sitting, arranging the bedding around him as if it were regal caparisons.
"Adam!" Duncan rubbed his temples.
"You heard me," Adam said nonchalantly, never looking up. "We won't be having any more of that delightfully bestial rutting we've come to know and love, what Lucille calls 'wild monkey sex.' "
"You're saying you don't love me any more?" Duncan surprised himself that he had the breath to say this.
"Oh, pullease!" Adam bolted forward and wrapped the Highlander in yards and yards of earnest arms. "It is only because you can't desire something you have."
"Whaaat!" Duncan fairly shrieked.
"It's hard to explain, Duncan," Adam pressed himself against the Scot's broad back and ran his fingers through the ebon tangles. "Do you desire yourself?"
"Why would I do that?" Duncan's head drooped forward between his shoulders.
"I mean, you love yourself, right?"
Duncan nodded.
"And you--" Adam paused. The only appropriate word was so ugly sounding, he didn't want to use it. He settled finally for, "You do sometimes pleasure yourself, right?"
Duncan's head snapped up and around. He glared at the Old Man over his left shoulder.
Adam reconsidered his more tasteful word choice in favor of clarity. "Masturbation, Duncan."
"I thought that's what you meant," Duncan grumbled. "But what do you mean?"
"I'm not sure," Adam confessed. "I know what has happened. I just don't know how to explain it. Try this: you were envisioning a particularly wonderful romp you had with Tessa, yes?"
"I'm sorry, Adam," Duncan moaned. "I was tired and my mind wandered..."
"Don't be sorry, Duncan," Adam interrupted. "I wasn't thinking of you either."
"And that's supposed to be comforting, Adam?"
"I thought about--well, what I usually think about when I'm--Damn, I wish there were another word for this!-- when I'm masturbating." Adam unfolded himself from the Highlander.
"You're just pissed at me," Duncan pronounced, convinced this was the only explanation that made any sense at all.
"No I'm not."
"I don't want to talk about this any more," Duncan closed the discussion and resumed his interrupted trip to the shower, where he stood beneath the bright, prickly spray until he was wrinkled and soaked and mindless.
When he finally emerged, Adam tossed him some jeans and a sweater without comment and returned to the small table in the sunny kitchen end of the loft.
"You cleaned up," Duncan complimented the Elder Immortal effusively, to no avail. "Made the bed and put away the laundry and--"
Nope, no reaction. If Adam had told the truth before, then he was surely pissed now.
"Listen," Duncan continued on, jauntily, sitting himself down across from Adam and digging into the potato salad. "This looks wonderful."
The Highland stepson made it through half a ham sandwich before the silence undid him. "All right, Adam," he surrendered. "Let's have it. What's wrong with us?"
Adam swallowed and looked up slowly. "Did you say something?"
"I said--"
"I heard you, Duncan. Look, I really--I'm not even sure if I am sad about this. I think I'm more amused--."
"Wait, don't tell me. It's one of those irony things."
"Exactly," Adam answered brightly. "What my mother calls 'Dragon's Iron.' "
Duncan drew up tall in his seat and put the second half of his sandwich down noisily.
"I know, I know," Adam's long fingers went through an intricate dance of placation. "I know we aren't supposed to mention that person--terms of the preterition and all."
Duncan's smoky glare squinted so tightly his nose wrinkled up.
"The banishment," Adam hurried to explain. "That Celtic, you-are-dead-you-piece-of-shit thing you did on Christmas Day. Anyway, it is ironic in the extreme that we should have finally gotten so close to one another as to be--"
"What!" Duncan barked. "What!"
Adam's hands drifted, palms up, in front of him. "We are always making love to one another now. We are always joined together, Duncan. In the end, we are One."
"Oh," Duncan formed the sound over a very long exhalation. "So now, if we go through the motions of--"
"Yes," Adam said delightedly, "it is just going through the motions. An essential part of lust is the end of separation, if only for an instant, the resolution of a persistent loneliness."
"There is no desperation between us any more," Duncan's tones seemed to wander inward. "No uncertainty, no, no--"
"No," Adam agreed.
They sat without words over the half-finished lunch for a long time, each of them feeling for the margins of this new reality.
Then Adam piped up about it being his turn in the shower, if there was any water left after Duncan's deluge.
"No more sex then," Duncan said, trying to make the statement a little less weighty than it felt.
"Oh, heavens, no!" Adam stood up and started clearing the table. "I never said that!"
"But didn't you just say--?" Duncan wondered if he had any aspirin squirreled about somewhere in the loft. "What?"
Adam turned off the tap and slipped the dishes, splunk, into the sink. "In fact, I was meaning to ask you if you would mind--that is, if it would be all right for Thomas and me to--."
Duncan shifted around in his chair and his hands smoothed down the canvas of his jeans, striving not to make fists of themselves. "No," Duncan said with as much lightness as he could muster. "That would be fine."
"Oh, good," Adam wiped his hands on the kitchen towel and strode past Duncan on his way to the shower.
"It would give me a chance to take Grant up on his offer," Duncan added in a low tone, just audible above Adam's footsteps.
Right foot, left foot...
"Grant?" Adam swiveled around and peered at the Highlander down the prow of his magnificent beak. "And you?"
"Oh," Duncan grinned. "Did you say something?"
"No, no, nothing at all," Adam made himself turn around and continue on to the bathroom.
He almost made it.
Behind him, Duncan MacLeod slumped down in his chair and fixed an image of Adam's square, pale bottom at the center of his consciousness. Duncan remembered all the times before and his flesh took up the memory with a vengeance, hissing his breath in between his teeth. He let the throbbing thundering sensation sparkle over him one moment longer and then he threw out his arms in Adam's direction.
Adam went down like a stringless puppet, jerking to the floor and doubling over, gasping and laughing and moaning, all at once.
Duncan maintained a polite, if not discrete, inattention as he finished cleaning up the lunch things. After a few moments, he strolled over to the linen chest, pulled out a towel and went over to Adam, still on the floor, but propped against the wall near the bathroom, in something like a seated posture, or melted version thereof.
"Here," Duncan offered him the towel.
Adam snatched it from him. "Look," he said, still short of breath. "It's not like you have to take me to dinner, or engage in some prolonged ritual foreplay, or--"
Duncan leaned over. "English, Adam."
"A little warning would be nice," Adam gave up trying to do anything with the towel. His pants were inundated. He walked his hands up the wall, dragging himself to standing.
Duncan leaned forward and fenced him between two brawny arms. "And the 'BB Royal One' you mentioned earlier?"
Adam smiled so widely that his upper lip--none-too-wide to begin with--disappeared completely. "Oh, that--."
"Yes?" Duncan waited.
"I believe Master King was sorely misinformed," Adam answered.
Duncan stepped back and let Adam finally finish his much-delayed trek to the bathroom.
The subject about whether they would be dating other folk never came up again.
Which, despite all logic to the contrary, was just the maneuver that granted her entrance into the dark little bar off River Road. The lock yielded to her fury and the door creaked inward.
There was no, "Hello, the bar!" to proceed her into the place. No use, really. No one home. Facet Dragon was up at the Master Cross' vast estates, doing guard duty, horse chores, and awaiting Mary MacLeod's coming confinement, as they all were. Everyone so busy, Margaret thought glumly. Merry Christmas a day late, Margaret, My Dear. Merry Christmas a dollar short.
The story, if there ever was one, of my entire life, she completed the thought.
And no one to even care about poor little Molly Facet, gone God knew where, this past week, nor no one to help Margaret search every Couver nook, every Couver cranny. Margaret plopped her tote sack onto the bar, shook the snow out of her hair, and leaned over to grab a mug, scoop up some ice, and spritz some soda over the top. Too much salt to be healthy, but who could say she hadn't sweated her weight's worth and then some, tromping around this miserable berg, even if it was winter.
What had she to worry about health anymore, anyway? She was Immortal by the blood of the dragon. She would probably die of something, some time, but it surely wouldn't be fluid retention or high blood pressure.
Wouldn't be from drinking too much either, darn it. None of the Facets could get drunk, a peculiar side effect of their covenant with Chaos. She only hoped the sobriety would be compensated by Molly's safe return to them, or this Immortality thing would soon become burdensome in the extreme. If ever there was a time to get rip-roaring, this was it. Margaret was weary with worrying, even more so than she was with the wandering, up hilltop, down byway, upstairs, downstairs...
Great! Something was wrong with the lift again. They really should get a new one installed, one of those air woosh, hydraulic things. There just hadn't been any time when they could afford to shut down the bar for a month--the time required. Business at Leather Bar Lite, as Master Cross called it, was just too booming. Shutting it down a single week for the holidays had taken something of a major proclamation. Okay. Up the stairs.
"Downstairs, upstairs," Margaret intoned over and over, and then once more as she entered the dark room off the metal walkway on the second floor where she stayed with Molly.
"And in M'Lady's chambers," a sonorous and well-deep voice finished for her.
Margaret jumped back, but strong hands held her and the belltone voice droned a melody which made her want to follow, even if she did not understand a single word.
The next time Margaret surfaced into the world, she was seated on the side of her bed, a small table pulled up close, set with tea and pastries and tiny sandwiches no bigger than a deck of cards. Between hungry munchings, she managed to mumble something about going out again soon.
"I don't think so, Margaret."
"You don't think so," Margaret parodied the steady, mellifluous tones. "Well then, you have another--."
The woman, she of the tea tray and musical throat, stepped forward, out of the shielding shadows.
"Oh, Lord Ram!" Margaret tumbled off the bed and her knees found the floor.
"Oh, do get up, Margaret." Ram leaned down and offered a slender hand to assist her back onto the bed and another, with a linen napkin, to wipe the sandwich crumbs off her slacked mouth.
"What are you doing here?" Margaret asked when her wits reordered enough to do so.
Ram refilled Margaret's cup and poured one for herself. "I used to live here when I was Set Dawson," she said, sitting down beside the Facet. "I confess I never arrayed the place in such a lovely fashion, though. I'm afraid I spent most of my time down the hall, in Joe's room."
"Dragon lives there now," Margaret tried not to cringe away from the real dragon who had gifted her so many wonderful changes in her life.
"And just look at this lovely quilt, and all the sumptuous plants and paintings, and these pillows and furs..."
On and on she went about this and that little detail, the antique furnishings, the new rocking chair, the hand-woven throws, the subtle colors of earth and sea which Dear Molly had brought into being from what had originally been little more than a store room.
"And where is our little Molly?" Ram interrupted herself mid-stream, just at the moment when Margaret's thoughts turned that way.
"She ran away after that fight you had at The Towers," Margaret did not mean to lie, exactly, nor did she, exactly.
"Yes, and went to hide out on MacLeod's island in the bay, at his cabin there. I know that," Ram waited for Margaret's mouth to close.
"What I want to know, Margaret," Ram continued, "is where she is now. Why did she leave the cabin, and when?"
"I went there last week, Ram," Margaret ducked her head. She had not meant to be secretive about this, but she didn't know whether she could trust this strange woman. "Forgive me, Ram. I--well, it seemed for a while as if you might have kidnapped her. We weren't sure..."
"We?" Ram settled back on her elbows, stroking the soft quilt and fiddling with one of the knots.
Margaret took a deep breath and decided honesty was the only solution to this. "You must know that HorseMaster Thomas thinks you mean to rule the world."
Ram's arms flew up and she plopped down on her back, drawing her feet up and kicking, all the while laughing like a deranged and very wicked child. She sighed finally, "Oh, Margaret, oh, dear...my, my, my." She cleared her throat and sat up again in some similarity to composure. With all the restraint she could muster, Ram said, "He thinks this, does he? And why would that be?"
"Because you are so powerful, Ram," Margaret answered. She couldn't seem to stop trembling. "He says it is only a matter of time before you lose patience with us and, and...'Come into your kingdom,' he says."
Ram coughed again. It was a desolate and imperfect cover to the moan it meant to hide. "I am in my kingdom, Margaret. Wonderful place, this. Hell. You must come and visit sometime. But this other--Why and what would I rule?"
"Well, us, of course," Margaret answered. "People, Mankind--you know, humans."
"Why would I want to do that, Margaret?"
"Why?"
"Yes, Margaret. Why?" Ram waited, but when silence remained her only answer, she elaborated, "Do you ever visit Thomas' fine barn?"
"What? Oh, yes, often, Ram." Margaret finished the last sandwich and dusted the crumbs off the white dressing gown. Ram must have changed her out of the snow gear. "Why do you ask?"
"Would you want to declare yourself ruler of the barn? Of the horses in the barn, I mean?"
"That doesn't make any sense, Ram. They wouldn't know what that meant, in any case, and I would only be a horse king in my own mind. It wouldn't mean they would stop stepping on my toes when I didn't pay attention. It would also mean I would have to spend all my time feeding and grooming and taking care..." Margaret's example made itself understood.
"Yes, Margaret," Ram agreed. "A lot of trouble, to be sure. Better just to visit the barn than to rule it. Sometimes just visiting is worth your life." She laughed again, but this time it was a gentle burbling sound with no cough to amend it. "And if the horses are truly special...
"So where is Molly?" Ram returned to the original question.
"I went to the island," Margaret said, suddenly at ease in the new perspective of dragonhood which Ram had laid before her--a little sad, to be sure, but no longer afraid. "I went to the island to bring the groceries and the place was torn apart, everything ransacked, and Molly gone. It was clear there had been a fight, there was blood, there...was..."
Then, much to Margaret's complete surprise and dismay, she broke completely down. All these days of searching, staying strong, not letting her fear get the best of her--and now she dissolved completely in gulps and runny nose and shuddering wails.
"I guess I'm one of those horses that's a pain to take care of," she sniffed and drew back out of Ram's steady arms.
"Not at all, Margaret," Ram reached forward and stroked Margaret's snow-kinked dark curls. "You are rather one of those splendid fillies that never shows they are hurt, that never knows when to rest an injury, or hold back when discretion might be the better part. You have a splendor of heart which is a joy. I am relieved you found a moment to be wise and let your sadness out."
Margaret wished she could feel anything but uncomfortable under this sudden swell of praise. "Well, none of this is going to do Molly any good. We followed the trail back to Seacouver and that's where we lost it. She is here somewhere. If she lives."
"I am sure she is well, Margaret," Ram's tones had returned to the melody which had originally announced her presence here. "Sleep now, Margaret. I will take the watch..."
Margaret felt the pillow against her cheek before she realized she had reclined. The song rolled on, the words falling like the snow outside, mantling the world in a cloak of white.
"I am your mantle and your shield. Your concerns are mine own, and that which you seek, shall I find, e'en to the Grail Itself."
"Margaret is sleeping?" Sean asked, leaning over Joe's polished wood bartop and playing substitute barkeep.
Ram slid sideways onto a barstool, slapped her slim palm down on the bar, and waited for the Keeper to tend to his business. "Yes, she was very tired looking for Molly."
"No luck I take it," Sean thought a moment, running his sensitive fingers over the rainbow crystals of the divers distilled decoctions. He shook his head, reached for a lower shelf and retrieved a less-luminous bottle of dark amber with the quaint old name of Bailey's. This he poured into some newly-brewed coffee and topped with mounds of whipped cream and just the tiniest sprinkle of cinnamon, setting it before his single, and singular, customer.
"They seem sure Molly is here in Seacouver, but the old bay town is a largish place, Sean. Thank you. Just perfect," she commented as she sipped, nose-deep in the mocha brew. "You aren't supposed to be talking to me, you know--not to mention serving me sustenance."
"I told him to stuff his banishment and I left," Sean fussed nervously, polishing the brass taps, wiping his hands, trying not to think about how very impressive his mother was, even clad in old jeans and ratty black sweater. He was sure the swath he cut in his own gear, designer slacks and Erin sweater, was much less memorable, though infinitely more expensive.
Ram reached over the bar and offered her hand to shake. "Well, Sean. I can't say that was wisely done, but it surely was brave. It seems I have another reason to thank you."
"Yeah, well--," Sean took her hand and shook it briefly. He didn't want to touch her longer. The sensation was too intense, too--something. "I couldn't be all that brave if the first thing I did was to find my mommy."
"You mommy doesn't mind at all, Son." The word sounded so familiar, as if Ram said it often and not at all as if she were just trying it out now for the first time.
"Maybe I could help you find Molly," he offered.
"Maybe you could, at that," Ram slipped off the stool and toasted him with her Bailey's. "Bring yourself another one of these and we'll go a-questing on Facet Dragon's Magic Screeing Device."
"His puter slate," Sean corrected her, though it did sound more adventuresome the other way. "Back in the office," he tilted his head towards Joe's old office, beyond the far end of the bar.
"I know the way, Sean," Ram smiled. "I used to be Mistress of this temple, once upon a time."
For all that it had been two full decades since Joe Dawson had lived and worried, slept and administered in this tiny room off the bar, it still bore his mark and his way, with as much splendid stubbornness as he did. Twenty years gone by and only a little dust on both to mark the time. To be sure, Joe was now Mayor of Seacouver--so long, in fact, that he would have to soon retire, or declare himself Emperor. He only visited the bar infrequently and discretely now, doing the odd set with his old buddies, singing the blues of his former mortal self.
Joe had long since relinquished his position as Northwest Territories' Watcher Chief. In fairness, he was more Immortal than Mortal these days, bathed as he was by the blood of the dragon. His fellow Facets had assorted themselves as bridges between the Watchers and the Immortals and the one remaining dragon. HorseMaster Cross was now Chief of the entire network, though the Paris contingent was continually arguing that their history gave them a precedent to rule. Still, only Cross knew the machinery of their complex archives. Without Cross, they would rule, all right, but it would be over a warehouse of blank pages. So they had come to an aggravated, if serviceable, peace, and the network of Watchers had become an exceedingly complex enclave of Watcher and Immortal and Facet, overseen by the tiny black man with the patience of a mountain.
Thomas Cross' second in the network now owned the Mayor's bar. So had things come fully 'round, Watcher to Watcher, and the true dragon in the machine who had turned the cogs and gears, sat now on the old blues singer's desk and watched her Immortal son play with Facet Dragon's gigantic slate, trying to make it grant him entrance.
"Ram, stop that!" Sean snapped, grabbing his mother's tapping foot with his hand.
Ram, seated cross-legged on top of the antique desk she and Joe had bought in the days when she had been Set Dawson, pulled up from her slouch and squiggled her toes beneath Sean's too-firm grasp. He released her with a disgusted snort as she leaned forward and planted a big wet one right between his eyes.
"Yuckk," Sean wiped his forehead. "You could help me and stop being such a distraction."
"I could," Ram replied playfully. "I could help you with your task there. I'm not so sure about this other thing, though."
"What other thing?" Sean pushed Joe's chair back from Joe's desk and the obstinate slate thereon.
"You do know our people have an entirely different approach to your dilemma?" Ram mused.
Sean levered out of the chair and rubbed his numb backside. "And that would be?"
"Your frustrations in all things temporal, and most things sexual," she replied evenly. "Your very bad case of horns is getting in the way of everything else in your life."
"Given my life of late," Sean grimaced, "I could only wish that were the case, Ram." He paused two breaths and then added, "You're not coming on to me?"
Ram smiled at the now archaic expression. "Evidently not," she said.
"I've seen you beat up my brother," Sean referred to the last time he'd seen Adam and Ram in a particularly awful brawl at his honeymoon house on the beach which had shortly thereafter gone up in flames.
"I could promise not to hurt you," Ram teased, not willing, just yet, to let such a fine jest pass silently away.
"You aren't serious," Sean called her bluff.
Ram breathed in slowly, "No. No, Sean, I am not. I merely thought to lighten your mood. Here--" She reached over and touched the edge of the slate, her hands, so like Brother Adam's, dancing over the lightwells like faerie wings. For which attention, Facet Dragon's large slate lit up like Imolc and began chattering away in digital discussions of every Watcher secret known to the world...and unknown.
"How--?" Sean settled back into the chair and scooted it closer.
"Master Cross is very fine at these things, Sean, but you forgot who put the commands in the system to begin with."
"Oh," Sean screwed up his face as her reminder connected a great many things which he had tried to keep separate from each other.
"Sorry, Sean." She slithered off the desk and went to pacing, in a slow and sinuous glide, around the confines of her ex-husband's former office, the place where he'd spent so many hours agonizing over the unpaid bills and the ever-threatening bankruptcy and ruin--or so Joe had thought from the perspective of his, then, Mortality.
Sean tried to let the Watcher stats claim his attention, but now that they were his, he wanted some other questions answered, not these. "Don't you ever wish you were normal?"
The odd question floated around the room. a curious little light in a great sea of darkness.
Ram, previously Sean Seaton, Watcher drone, and before that, Throne Lord Ithuriel Malak, and sometimes just Satan'm, let the little question stew a bit before she addressed its point of origin. "You are unhappy with your life?"
"Me?" Sean's face opened in a bouncy, "aha!" expression, and he punched a reference on the screen and began his descent into the heart of their cybersearch. "Oh, I'm just ducky, Mum."
Ram looked as if she were trying to decide if ducky were a good or a bad thing. "What is wrong?"
"Don't you ever wish you were more ordinary--that Destiny did not bite your ass every time you turned around, Ram?" Sean never looked up from the screen. He'd reached a dead end, so he started backing up and looking for another path.
"I am ordinary," Ram replied in all seriousness.
Sean burst into a fit of hilarity and fell out of Joe's old chair, smack onto the floor, under the desk, where Set used to hide when she was afraid.
"Oh, give me that!" Ram snatched the large flat screen off the desk and settled herself onto the old leather couch across from the desk on the door-wall of the office. She reclined curled up against one of the over-stuffed arms and propped the slate up on her thighs, running the margins of the screen with a deft and speedy non-chalance that made her look as if she were petting the thing, rather than running calculations, programming threads like a demented virtual spider. "Yes," she said, just as Sean came crawling around the side of the desk to stare at her.
"I have it," Ram announced, clicking the screen back to "sleep" mode and rising to replace Dragon Facet's expensive toy on the desk.
"Just like that?" Sean pushed back onto his heels and cocked his head.
"I am, after all," Ram reached out her hand to help him up. "Not at all ordinary, Son. I won't waste my time pretending any more. Why should I expend the energy? Let's go. I know where Molly is. I am not sure why she is there, but it will be easy enough to ask when we arrive."
Sean was up in a bounce, out of the office, and across the empty bar. He picked up his coat from its waiting place on the floor, and zipped out the door, one arm in a sleeve and the other casting about behind him trying to find its place out of the gentle night storm.
At the end of the block, Sean MacLeod stopped. His hand found entrance to the second sleeve and he heaved on the coat and began to button it absently. The light fall of snow swirled in the circle of the street light, little flurries of softness and white, not at all unlike the current condition of his own wits.
A mistake. He had made a mistake, Sean thought. He had come too far too fast and had lost all sense of direction. He had rushed past the goal so rapidly that the point--some important point, or other--had been missed entirely.
Damn!
"I've made a mistake," Sean announced as he returned to the cobalt neon of Joe's bar. He dumped his coat back on the floor and closed the door behind him, rubbing his arms and blowing out little billowing clouds with every exhalation.
"You could have a point there," Ram said around bites of leftover roast beef sandwich from a dark booth in the far corner. "Have some dinner and we'll talk," she offered.
Sean stumbled his way back to the booth and slid in opposite his mother. He played distractedly with the plate of sandwiches she set before him, picking off the crusts, shredding the meat, now and again chewing on a morsel and then spitting it back out. All the while, his mind chewed on what was happening here as he tried to find an anchor in the present.
Ram ate quietly and did not stare at him. She had turned sideways in the booth seat, with her bare feet drawn in close, her plate on her lap as she gazed silently over the eerie cobalt gloom and the forest of upside-down chairs.
"I guess," Sean said finally, "that all of this has struck me harder than I knew."
"Really?" Ram cocked her head his direction, but the argent eyes stayed off him.
Sean's eyes narrowed as he tried to measure her seriousness. "Yes," he said, taking his first real bite of supper. "You saw me rush out of here like a madman."
"I did," Ram still looked away, but her tapered fingers floated unerringly across the distance between them, touched his wrist lightly and then drifted back to her lap.
"I wish we had some sand to build a castle," he said, laughing. "Then you could give me one of those beach lessons again and I could find some, some clarity."
"Is that what those were?" Ram chuckled warmly. "You do have a facility for putting things away from each other in tidy boxes, though."
A beach lesson, by the sounds of it, was about to commence. Sean tried to think what she could mean. He couldn't.
He said so.
The silver eyes cast around slowly like a warning sea light coming to rest on him. "You have been raised with more love than anyone could desire. Your father and your brother adore you and have never given you any reason to doubt that you were the dearest thing in all the world--in all of creation, for that matter. This has made you strong in ways that will become evident as time goes on. But it has also made you weak," Ram paused a brief instant, gauged his reaction, and then hastened to add, "in a small way, Sean. May you always be so weak."
"I don't--" Sean shook his head and picked up another piece of roast beef, dipping it into horseradish sauce that would have etched the mirror behind the bar, it was so strong.
"You don't know what to do with your hate, Sean," Ram said. "You have to hide it away, here and there, until you lose your perspective altogether. Now it has come out to the one person in the world you most love. You just don't know where you go from here. You hate me. You hate your brother. You hate your wife. You hate your father..." she took a long breath in and let him make the next step, sans bounce, in his inevitable journey into manhood.
"I hate myself," Sean said sadly. "That's what you're trying to say, isn't it?"
"No," Ram's hands found his and folded over them, a corded stack of slender fingers, his and hers. "Not at all, Sean. I am trying to say it is easy to love when there is no reason to hate, but that easy love is childhood's way, and another must come and take its place. If you can only love because you refuse to see, then very soon you will be blind."
Sean thought about this for a moment. "So, before we embark on this adventure to rescue Molly," he said, "I should probably open my eyes?"
Ram said nothing, only nodded her head solemnly and her face beamed with the childhood love...
...the one that knows no hate.
...the easy love.
They had not built castles this night, nor left meandering footsteps upon the shore, but the progress of their discussion--or, rather, of Sean's discussion, and Ram's ardent listening--was marked round the tiny bar. Here the chairs were arrayed on the floor, taken down from their night-time nests atop the tables, there a blanket on the linoleum floor still held crumbs and a single spot of raspberry sauce from a delicious bit of picnic dessert, and farther into the dark shadows, along the far wall, some graffiti they had composed was now etched into the enormous pipe beside the empty stage.
They had toasted each new venue with this or that fermented bit of brew. Tequila and limes and a large salt shaker were enlisted now where they'd settled, for the moment, at the bar, with Ram playing tender and Sean, customer, still talking, still opening his eyes to the patterns of his life the past year.
He leaned, not quite sober enough to maintain plumb, against the polished bartop and surveyed the blue shadowed landscape of his rantings, ravings, and revelations.
There, where the bentwood chairs now kept their own counsel, Sean had finally let all the misery of his misbegotten wedding out, for once and all. The woman he had loved since childhood, Mary Palmer, stolen from the midst of the ceremony by the awesome alter ego of his own mother, King Malak, bright, shining angel, dreadnought and dragon. Worse than that, Sean himself had been killed in the altercation. First Death had been awful for him, but in all the disruption which followed, he'd never had time to even experience his many misgivings, let alone give them the anxious respect they were due. Worst of all, nobody took him seriously. No one really commiserated in his loss, or even gave it much credence. He might have been a doting student with a crush on his tutor. No one thought he honestly loved this woman and wanted to make his life with her.
They hadn't really said anything so blatant, but Sean was convinced they were all a little perturbed that he should have taken matters into his own hands and killed the Danaan usurper. Still, even HorseMaster Cross did not hold him ultimately responsible. Sean was seen as an implement of Destiny only and nothing more.
"I feel like I'm a ghost!" he had wailed. "I don't make a difference to anyone!"
"Well, you surely made a difference to me, Sean," Ram's words had poured over the back of his neck as he bowed over, his forehead rocking over the table top. "You have sundered a Danaan Regal. Something never done before, nor probably since, in all the histories of time itself."
"You must hate me for that," Sean lifted his head up slowly and twisted in his chair to see her standing behind him, her lithe frame unbending.
"I can't say I am happy you chose to hurt me that way, Sean. I am much diminished by what you did." Her sober words held no ire whatsoever. "But you have freed Malak from my hell and sent him to wait for Mary at Last Gate, where he is finally at peace. For that, I bless you, Child. You are the son which Cronos foretold when he cursed me, but he never meant you to be the sublime blessing which you are, even if you do not know it yet."
"Cronos?" Sean asked.
"An old friend of your Brother Dahm's," Ram replied evenly. "We had a discussion about his treatment of my son, after which he vowed to sire a son upon me who would destroy me. Which was such a superbly ironic threat, at the time, that I could hardly breathe, I was laughing so hard. I hadn't, of course, taken into account the possibility of transmigration in the Quickening Major, or--"
"I have destroyed you, Ram?"
"Well, you did blow me all to hell, as Madame Lucille would say, Sean. When I came to, Malak was gone from me. Yes, I would say that qualified."
"I am sorry," Sean remembered is frustration at the inept apology.
"You are forgiven," Ram had placed her palm upon his head and Sean had felt the full baptism of that forgiveness.
"I don't think Mary will ever forgive me," he had moaned.
"You may be right," Ram murmured.
"Maybe after the baby is born?" he remembered asking hopefully. Maybe all this nonsense about dying and joining Malak would evaporate in the bright warmth of motherhood. Maybe they would have a future together after all. He would love her child no less for the fact it was Malak's and not his own. Or children--she did seem certain it would be a multiple birth.
Sean sipped the warm coffee and watched his mother washing their many glasses, shot and wine and mugs, in the silky suds at the bar sink. Ram was wonderful to watch. She had such an elegant economy of motion in everything she did, but every movement was carried to its completion, so that she never seemed to either hurry, or hesitate.
While I, Sean thought, can't seem to go forward any direction fast enough to keep from bouncing. He would never have admitted this out loud. He always swore he never bounced, even though everyone else took it for his trademark exuberance. Maybe when he was older--then again he wouldn't ever be any older, not really. He took another sip, eased around on his stool and propped his back against the bar as Ram strolled over towards the blanket, descended in a fluid curtsey of sorts, and began to gather the picnic ware.
There, on the floor, stuffed full of torts, we talked about all my jealousy for my father and my brother, he thought, once again ashamed he should have such feelings for people he loved so much. He should be happy they were together again after their enforced separation. Hell, he should be happy they still lived, when coming together again was supposed to have been fatal.
Sean remembered how he had wept and wept until he thought his eyes would melt from all the salt.
"I thought they were lost to me forever," he had wailed. "And now that I know they will live, how can I be anything but grateful? But I'm not, damn it! They are so full of each other now, there will never be any room for me, just like there's no room for me between Mary and Malak. Here I am, an Immortal, a Prince of the Universe, with no place to go, no one who even needs me. Worse, I'm in the way. I'm the one who should die, not Mary! I'm the one no one will miss!"
Oh, but he'd been wallowing in such righteous self-pity then. Ram had let him go on just so long before she shut him down cold with some argument or another. He really didn't remember exactly. After all, he hadn't needed logic at that point so much as somebody to tell him they loved him...
...to tell him that bouncy or no, grown up or child, he was still worth loving.
That Ram had done with a casual elegance that brought to mind the Good King, the Blessed Sovereign that all the freemen yearn for when the duties of independence weigh too heavily upon their shoulders. She never reminded him of a mother, even if she did look a lot like his "real" mother, Dahm. In any case, just her hold around his shoulders had settled him down and whispered the way his brother held him and his father, and how they would always hold him, even if he were half a world away.
Then, Sean remembered, he had wept for the son he would never have, the one he would never hold.
And then, Sean drained his cup, I simply set down my grief, or I was done with it, or it was just over, really over, and not just my pretending everything was all right. He turned, leaned over the bar, and dropped his cup into the sudsy sink. My eyes are open now. My eyes are open.
"Really?" Ram patted his backside lasciviously as he lay sprawled over the bar.
"Dammit, Ram!" Sean struggled around to grab her, but she was already on the other side of the bar, doing the last of the dishes.
"You could put the chairs back," Ram suggested, speaking over Sean's disgruntled sputterings.
Sean complied, grumbling all the while, but grateful to be doing something useful nonetheless.
Ram disappeared through the large red door behind the bar, into the kitchen. She started humming some ancient tune that Sean did not know at first. Then commenced the staccato "Gloria, gloria," and he recognized one of Dahm's favorite masses, the Gloria, of course, by Vivaldi. He joined in, missing his old soprano, with the rest of his childhood, set upon some archive's shelf, visited less frequently each passing year, he supposed. In any case, the new baritone served quite well.
Several rousing "amens" later, Ram appeared with--
"More food?" Sean asked.
Ram indicated he should follow her to one of the booths where she unloaded the tray: more coffee, eggs, toast, jams, sausages.
"It is dawn, Son," Ram handed him the tray and slid into her side of the booth. "We've talked all night and it will soon be time to leave. I thought breakfast was appropriate."
Sean set the tray aside, propped between the legs of a nearby upside-down chair. "Morning? Already?"
"You had a lot to discuss," Ram buttered a toast and sorted through the jams. "Not the sort of thing which goes by quickly. You have done well." She toasted him with the toast and dug into the apricot jelly with a tiny spoon.
Sean spread some strawberry preserves on his sausages and proceeded to feast.
"I have questions," he said some time later.
Ram put her cup down, placed both her palms on the table and sat up straighter. "Yes?"
"I actually never got a chance to say how I'm angry at you," Sean began.
Ram shook her head, visibly relaxing. She rose, retrieved the tray, and began clearing the table.
"Ram!" Sean complained.
"I'm listening," Ram said quietly, "but I don't hear anything, Son."
"Well, I am angry," Sean wondered how he could so readily descend to the tones of a petulant child. "You never came to see me...Oh, well I suppose you were busy being Mary's father and Malak and...Well, you could have written to me." It wasn't much of a complaint.
"In addition to the fact I wasn't in the world to do so, Sean, I really can't imagine what I would have said."
She was probably right, Sean thought, but surely there was some--"You lied to me about who you were. This summer, on the beach, when we first met, you--"
Ram walked back towards the kitchen. "If you had been ready to know me, Sean, then you would have recognized me. It's not like I don't have the 'family crest.' " She paused and shot him a profile.
They all had that nose, Sean thought, Dahm and Ram and himself, truth be told, though he always maintained his was smaller.
"Hey!" Sean caught up with her in the kitchen behind the bar. "I didn't mean--"
She handed him the soap and left to get the rest of the dishes.
When Ram returned, Sean's thoughts were more in order.
"I didn't disobey the banning just to get back at my father, Ram," he began as she scraped the dishes and floated them into the warm water. "I'll wash this round," he announced.
Ram smiled and whisked up the towel, whipping it into a tight cord between her hands.
"Don't you dare," Sean said, never looking up. The command in his voice had returned from somewhere. It frightened him a little.
Ram draped the towel innocently over her shoulder and waited for Sean to wash and rinse.
"I know you love Pops," he announced.
Ram smiled again, but a certain peculiar innocence began to insert itself at the edges of her lush grin.
"I am the proof of that if nothing else," he stacked the plates in the rack and spritzed off the suds.
There was almost no pause when Ram agreed softly and started drying the dishes.
"And it's not really your fault that you cheated to kill Connor," he continued on, dunking the glasses.
"Really? And how is that?" Ram turned back from the tall steel cabinets that housed the dishes for the bar.
"Oh, we all know you did some magic broom thing to make Grandpa's sword break," Sean explained.
"Did I now?" Ram reached for the next plate.
Sean noted again the clean, flowing grace with which she did everything, even the dishes.
"Yes, Dahm says you are such a bad swordsman, there would be no other way for you to win. He doesn't fault you for surviving any way that you could. I know you must have been so afraid, and Malak had just died. You couldn't help it, Ram."
Ram didn't really trip or stagger, but something happened with the flow of her passage from sink to cupboard, some unevenness of gait or purpose. Still, her voice never quavered. "You are too kind, Son. Your compassion does you justice."
"I think you must have been afraid like that when you left Pops," Sean continued. "That must have been why you didn't marry him before I was born, or after, when you had recovered from the accident. You couldn't magic broom your way out of that one, so you just ran away."
"You are doubtless correct about that, Sean," Ram replied.
Splash! Sean dumped the rest of the dinnerware into the drink. "God Damn It, Ram! Don't you even care what I think?"
"Of course I do, Sean. Don't shout. You'll wake Margaret and she will want to come with us."
"I've just called you a coward--several times over--a dishonorable warrior, a perfidious heart. Don't you care, Ram?"
"Well, the particulars are a little off the mark, Sean, but the essence is true enough. In addition to being not at all ordinary, I am likewise not at all good. You do well to know that, even if your reasons are not well-founded."
Which statement had the effect of silencing the bouncy MacLeod heir for all of three minutes.
"Were you and Sean Byrnes lovers?" Sean asked suddenly, over the gloop, gloop of the emptying steel sink.
Crash went the silverware that Ram was porting to the drawers in the opposite counter.
She dropped to her knees, cursing in Aramaic. "Why did you ask that, Sean?"
"Sometimes I remember," Sean made no move to help her gather the cutlery. Instead, he stoppered the sink and began to make a new batch of suds to rewash the silverware. "Little things, flashes of moments. I seem to feel I used to love you. That is why I asked. I know Sean Byrnes is inside me like Malak was with you, or I am him, what he would have been if Dahm and Pops had raised him, maybe what he was when he was young. I don't know. It's just a feeling I have when I am around you. That I used to love you, so I thought to ask is all. Did you know him? When he was alive, I mean." Sean tried to reach inside for more of the sensation, but it eluded him.
"Yes, I did," Ram answered with an unaccustomed clarity, setting the tableware into the sink. "I used to visit him at his home outside of Kensington when I worked with the Watchers. That would have been, oh," Ram started washing the forks and stacking them, one at a time, then the spoons, leaving the knives for last. "Thirty years ago now."
"You were friends?" Sean asked, wondering how he could be so mistaken about such a strong feeling.
"I was a patient," Ram sighed.
"A what?"
"I hired Dr. Byrnes to be my analyst, Sean." Ram played with the serrated knives a moment and then laid them reverently beside the less dangerous dinner things in the drying rack.
"Why, Ram?"
"That would come under the auspices of doctor-patient privilege," Ram snapped. "Or, the more familiar, 'none of your damn business, Sean!"
"So I finally did find a crack in that chrome, Mumsy Dear," Sean bounced round the kitchen, making little clicking sounds on the terra cotta tiles. "And," he couldn't keep himself from adding, "whatever you felt about the good doctor, Deeeeear Mommaaaaa, he was more than a little smitten with you. Sean and Ramsie sittin' on a tree--" he launched into a giggling tease.
Ram went into a dead-silent fume as she went again to put away the last of the breakfast things and finish cleaning up.
Sean's teasing finally played itself out against the indomitable crag of Ram's ire. "Why would you need a psychiatrist, Ram? I don't mean the particulars," he hastened to add.
"I can't believe you haven't noticed how very ill I am," Ram replied.
"Ill? How could you possibly be ill?" Sean was intrigued. He had more or less taken Ram's strength as a given.
"It is far too complex to explain in the time we have left, Sean. Perhaps another day." Ram wiped her hands and put away the towel. "Right now, we've a rescue to launch."
They exited the kitchen and reentered the bar which was always cast in night colors, no matter that it was now dawn outside. Ram retrieved their coats from the pile by the door. She cocked her head as the weight of the coat measured itself in her hand. "Where is your sword, Sean?"
Sean started to laugh, but the set of Ram's features silenced him. Playtime was over. "I don't have one," he answered.
Ram's long arms folded over her flat chest and she tilted her head up, casting a glower down the length of her impressive beak.
"Look," Sean squeaked, suddenly feeling all of ten years old. "See, here," he looped his finger under the chain at his neck, lifting out the tiny gold sword Adam had given him for Christmas. "I will have Adam's sword some day."
"I left you a sword," Ram said, each word edged in its own rolled steel. "And gauntlets, as well, that should have fit you when you were twelve and ready to start training."
"I didn't want to," Sean explained. "Pops tried to get me interested, but I couldn't see the point," he laughed tentatively, at the stupid pun. The expression on Ram's face was all the while becoming less and less human, more and more terrifying.
"I wouldn't know what to do with a sword if I had one, Ram. Hey, you don't have a sword. From what Dahm and Pops say, you are hardly better than I am," he couldn't make his mouth stop swallowing his foot whole.
"You will just have to go to the dojo," Ram pulled a small piece of paper out of the back pocket of her old jeans and scribbled a number thereon with the stub of an old-fashioned graphite. "Here is the lock combination. Don't wake your parents. There are any number of swords on the first floor, but I'd advise you to pick one of the ones off the office wall. They are sharpened. Pick one that likes your hand."
Sean took the paper and tried to close his mouth. He hadn't even been to the dojo since Pops had bought it back and refurbished it as a gym again. He'd only driven by a few times when he'd come up to Seacouver to spend summers with Kyle Dawson, the Mayor's son.
"You have two hours," Ram added.
"Until what, Ram?" Sean wondered what she thought he was going to do with a sword even if he did manage to steal one from under his father's cute little nose.
"Until you meet me for the rescue," Ram answered. "By the vow I made when I buried your Grandfather, I cannot wield a weapon for one season more. You will have to do the serious fighting, if it comes to that."
"You mean Molly? Where is she? How do you know? What?" Sean wondered if it were only the sleep he was missing from the preceding night, or whether he had lost his wits entirely.
"I ran the Chaos program," Ram answered, reaching for the door handle and opening the thick door onto the new morning.
"Huh?"
"You know how random factors develop a lovely pattern, an order out of chaos, if you will," she continued on.
Sean stared stupidly.
"Fractals?" Ram offered.
Something finally connected, but it didn't help. "And--"
"I asked my system to look for that sort of thing, a chaotic pattern. It found an interesting one, all right. I won't burden you with the particulars, but the short of it is this: many times a Watcher will be transferred from an Immortal who dies, or disappears, or moves away, to a new one, and usually that involves finding another Immortal who has moved into the Watcher's local geographical area, and when that Immortal is the same one, time after time, and no one can explain exactly what happened to the missing Immortal," Ram paused to breathe. "And when that new Immortal, the same one each time, is making his way, first across Europe, and then, across North America, in a straight line, over the past decade, towards Seacouver, with missing Immortals in his wake, and new Watchers' being assigned at the frequency of five times a year, then a--. You're not following this are you, Sean?"
Sean shook his head, slowly, back and forth.
"There is an Immortal who is hunting your father, who knows your father from an incident over twenty years ago. He doesn't seem to know he is an Immortal, not what that really means anyway. He doesn't own a sword either and has never met a challenge. Except that he died in a hospital after a gunshot, the Watchers would not have identified him as an Immortal at all. Still, Immortals go missing, and then he shows up in the area and is assigned a new Watcher. He is down in the wharf area now, two blocks down from Master Cross' infamous Drieg Tower Bar, the tall grey building at the corner. He has rented that old cannery, ostensibly to refurbish as a library or some such.
"That is where Molly is being held now. He purposely left a trail all the way back to Seacouver, but something happened in the city that confounded the clues he wished us to find, the ones that would cause your father to look up a list of new leases and find the familiar name," she paused.
"So Molly is the cheese," Sean made the connection. "And my father--"
"The rat!" Ram finished with entirely too much emphasis.
