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"The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman."
William Shakespeare in King
Lear, act 3, sc. 4. Spoken by Edmund the Bastard.
“Easy there, Old Man. Those babies are delicate,” Richie Ryan, newly returned to Seacouver from California, howled at the tall, slender moving assistant.“About as delicate as baby elephants, Kid,” Adam snorted back.Damn, but these motorcycles of Ryan’s were nearly as heavy as saidpachyderms.
The U-Haul was empty except for these last two items, RichardRyan’s racing bikes. He was, while not a “kid,” a very young man, andwith a very young man’s fancy, he had named his “babies,” “Pride” and “Joy,” respectively. At the moment, Adam Piersen, whose usual activities were somewhat less energy-intensive, was wrestling withPride.
An apt occupation, given Adam’s basic attitudes.
When Richie waltzed up the three-stair stoop and held the door to his new apartment open, Adam stopped, propped Pride at the base of the trailer ramp, and placed both his hands in fists on his hips. “Oh, you can’t be serious, Kid!”
Nearly an hour later and after an intense discussion that raised bluefog in the air round them, ancient curses that had not graced any livingears in many centuries, they agreed on putting the bikes back in theU-Haul. Then they both got into the truck in angry silence and proceeded off to find a secure garage, which the “Old Man” had reluctantly agreed to pay for.
Eyes above them in the abandoned warehouse wrinkled in amusement and pulled the cool, smooth gun stock down from a pale cheek. “Ah, yes. Mr. Ryan, you are everything we could have imagined. I should expect there are not many who could get Old Methos to pick up the tab. Excellent.”
All of this was said with a sizzling spit and whisper which the youngman would not have taken as complimentary at all. The great mawopened silently taking in an enormous gulp of air in a sort of yawningdisplay. A quick tongue licked over the shiny forefangs. “Later, Master Ryan.”
Then the dragon claws of the black tattoo curled down over the chill, dead eyes, and a snore replaced the hissing whisper. The bright orange eyes of the tattoo shone out in the dusty darkness, waiting for the Ryan boy to return.
Ram drifted through her considerable and varied thoughts, staying just out of the reach of wakefulness and its attendant agonies, minor, to be sure, but bothersome nonetheless.Just outside the circle of her deliberate semi-consciousness, in the world of real objects, an essence wafted under her nose. It was the quilt she’d taken from MacLeod’s loft, strong with his scent. The aroma rebuilt him within the cocoon of her imaginings and she held the image at arm’s length, evaluating every emotion, one-by-one and setting each aside where it belonged in the order of her disciplined dreaming.
She could have hated him for any number of reasons: the rape, endangering her life, the burden of the child, the battering, the mean trick of drugging her into helplessness...
But Ram held no such hatreds for any of these. All of it was an entirely unfortunate situation, just as Adam’s conception had been. The consequences might be fatal or natal or both. She was content to wait, to do what she could to improve the situation, to prepare those whom she would doubtless leave and those to whom she would leave the child. Ram was not frightened, for herself, but she was anxious for the child who had come into being so unexpectedly, so violently.
But she did hate Duncan. She seethed with the edgy bitter rage. It curled her slender fingers into claws and set her teeth edge-to-edge. She hated him because he had taken her to the brink. Duncan had set temptation before her, a fascination almost irresistible.
And she had waited the whole long night, warring against the lure of his easy death and her restitution. Ram had held the blade over his neck so many times she’d lost the count. Each time she had found a way to honor her vow to him in the face of his outrageous betrayal.
So it had gone until morning.
She hated him for having put her through that.
But she hated herself more that her slavishness to her sense of honor, of duty, had--as it always had, as it ever would--held sway over her own self, her life, her comfort. She was profoundly disappointed with herself. For all the diligent work of the past half year, she had learned only how to pretend and had made no change at all. She was still a slave, still inhuman, still unreal in the world of Man.
It wasn’t MacLeod’s fault that this was so. He had simply made it clear by the counterpoint of his actions. He had changed, had stepped forward into a place where she would never go. There would be hell to pay. It would cost him everything and it would take every bit of his expansive strengths and talents to prevail.
But Ram did not doubt he would prevail. Any more than she doubted she would help him do so, if for no other reason, then as tribute to all the other slaves who would never be free, to all the other mythics and heroes who would ever remain unreal in the world of Man.
Richard Ryan, aka “kid,” and Adam Piersen, aka “old man,” returned from the garage in much better spirits thanks to a conciliatory stop at Joe’s. Joe wasn’t in, but Michael his second-in-command in all things alcoholic, was more than up to the official libation of making the peace between the two part-time moving men.It took Richie a while to find the keys to his new place and let them both inside.
The dead eyes watched them disappear behind the brick red door and then descended again behind the sill. “Welcome home, Richard. Welcome, home,” the rasp sounded not at all welcoming and not a little irate.
Richie started into the nearest box, pulling out kitchen ware and stacking it on the floor, scattering styrofoam popcorn hither and yon.
“No, that’s not ....” Adam gathered up the dinnerware, cleared a counter and began running some water in the sink. “Here, let me do this.”
“Ah, hah,” Richie exclaimed. “Here you go.” He handed up a half-empty bottle of liquid detergent.
“Thanks ever so,” Adam warbled, “You are too thoughtful.”
“Adam?” such was the tenor of the single word that the entire room went suddenly quiet and electric.
Adam’s red flags waved in the wind. Something was terribly wrong here. He would have to be careful. “Yes?” he answered evenly.
“Are you gay?”
Adam who was usually very good at the art of the quick and cutting comeback found himself at a loss for either a word, or even a way to begin. “What makes you ask that?” He took the gambit of desperation: always answer a question with a question when all else fails.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Richie shrugged and went right on unpacking, never looking up. “It just seems like...” he shook his head, “I just wondered.”
Adam stepped way back from his immediate tendency towards the indignant and the defensive posture. Once he was free from these two blinding powers he saw what was clearly there before him. “Do you want to tell me what happened in California, and why you came back here in the middle of the racing season?”
“No,” Richie replied, obviously changing his mind. “Tell me what’s been going on here.”
“Well, this looks like it’s going to take all afternoon,” Adam looked around at the head-high stacks of boxes, “I guess I have time to fill you in.”
Adam started with the last time Richie had seen MacLeod, half a year earlier when they’d stayed at the island on a vacation of sorts. Adam had arrived in Seacouver and Ram shortly thereafter with the sword...
The sun was descending and they had to turn on the lights before Adam finished his tale. Richie did his best not to interrupt, but the entire story was so unbelievable, he had to stop the Old Man from time to time to make sure he really understood what Adam was saying.
Then there was no conversation at all as the two men went out for dinner and a few more drinks to wash down the impossible events that had transpired in Richie’s absence. They returned to the apartment and the same watchful dragon’s invisible stare.
Adam threw his long frame on the couch and began to doze.
“You’re not asleep yet, are you?” Richie asked.
“No,” Adam lied, immediately reminded of the earlier odd question. If Richie were in need of an eminent gris, then God knew, he was the gris-est. “You want to talk?”
“Yeah,” Richie replied settling on the floor, gathering his knees in the circle of his arms. “What do you think about what Mac did?”
“It wasn’t a matter of thinking, really,” Adam rolled over on his side and propped up on an elbow. “Richie, the last time I saw MacLeod I beat him to death with my fists.”
Richie flashed his familiar grin and rested his chin on his knees, “My, oh my. Lancelot and the Round Table gang have all gone and tarnished their armor. And I was worried about how I’d break my news to the Seacouver Boy Scout Troop.”
Adam sighted down his patrician beak. It was an all-too-familiar tale. He supposed that most of them, even MacLeod, had had some similar incident in his past. “You had an affair with a man while you were in California and you’re wondering now if that means you’re gay.”
Richie’s blue eyes went wide. “The Watchers?”
“No, no. I swear. I just guessed that’s all, Richard. Your odd question earlier about if I was gay. The way it happens to us all when we are young.”
“It does?”
For all he was the consummate “street kid,” Richie could be charmingly innocent about some things. “Yes, everyone goes through some time in their lives when they experiment with all sorts of different experiences. It’s how we learn who we are, Richard. There’s nothing wrong with that. It means we are alive,” Adam paused wondering if he were hitting just the right combination of disconnection and concern. “After that,” he sighed, “It means... whatever it means.”
Richie tilted his head and met his gaze. “Really?”
“Absolutely,” Adam replied without dropping a beat. Oh, this was certainly one of those times he was grateful to be so old that he could hardly remember being this young and uncertain.
“Something happened when we were out on the island, me and Mac,” Richie started. “Well, nothing actually happened...just...I started to...have thoughts, dreams...” the young Immortal grimaced and dug his forehead into the backs of his knees.
“It’s always so hard to know what love means.” That was surely true enough, general enough. Adam knew he was treading on a quickening beach at the dark of the moon. “It takes a long time to sort out gratitude and comradeship and admiration and lust and desire and all those other friendly feelings we have to the ones who brighten our lives.”
“You love him too,” Richie sat up straight and accused the Old Man.
We’re sinking here, Adam thought. “Well, you wouldn’t have thought so three nights ago.”
“He’s all right isn’t he?” Richie asked, suddenly aware he’d taken that for granted. “You didn’t...”
“Take his head? No, of course not!”
“You do love him.”
“Stop saying that!”
Richie stretched out his legs and leaned back on his hands. “That’s why I had to leave. I just had to sort things out. It was making me crazy. Then I met this Immortal in California. He’d come to one of my races. We went drinking after, and...”
“I get the picture, Richie,” Adam had heard the “boy, was I drunk last night” scenario often enough, to quote it verbatim...and he had himself quoted it verbatim on the few occasions he had actually been that drunk.
“I don’t know...” Richie bit his lower lip, “I thought it was what I wanted. He reminded me a lot of Mac...hell, maybe I thought Mac would be jealous, maybe I really am gay, maybe...”
“Maybe it just was, and that’s what it means,” Adam offered to share his own answer to such mysteries.
“Maybe...” Richie’s voice echoed off the hard surfaces of the carpetless, drapeless apartment. “But when I decided it wasn’t my thing, when I told him we should stop seeing each other....he went nuts! He tried to take me like he owned me! God, I had to kill him to get away!” Richie’s voice has risen an octave and his face flushed red beneath the freckles.
Adam repressed an urge to go to the boy and comfort him, thinking it would probably be no comfort at all, that it would be a while before Richie could tolerate a man’s embrace again, no matter how innocent the intent. “I am sorry, Richard. I can see why you left.”
“He said he would come after me,” Richie continued in a fear-haunted whisper. “He said if it took forever, he would have my head. He’s tall and he’s strong and he’s much better with a sword than I’ll ever be. I’m toast!”
“Welcome to the Seventh Ring,” Adam said rising to raid the new frig and coming back with two beers. They were not nearly inebriated enough to suit.
“What?”
“Oh, Duncan’s on about Danté's Inferno these days. Seventh Ring is where the violent go.”
“Yeah,” Richie took the beer.
“So who is this bounder?” Adam asked.
“Feliz Mondragon,” Richie replied, “he’s a....”
“I know him,” Adam interrupted. “An exceptional fighter. You do know how to pick them, Richie. Well, if the Knacker don’t get ya, then...”
“You mean the serial killer?” Richie asked. Seemed the news had reached as far as LaLa land.
“Yes, ducks, he has a taste for Immortal out-of-towners. Seems your the next venison on the menu,” Adam stared down at his palms.
“Damn!” Richie was up on his feet in an instant. “That’s why they sent you to baby-sit me!”
“Guilty,” Adam replied.
Richie offered his hand towards the Old Man. “Thanks.”
Adam Piersen said, “You’re welcome,” and tried hard to sound like he really meant it.
The dragon face watched them turn off the lights and then settled in to sleep again. “Any day now, Master Richard, any day now.”
Ram was healing. Between the canned beans and the pop and the long sleeps everything was settling back to more familiar rhythms. Her mind was settling back into the familiar patterns of her lost station. It mattered not that every last one of her subjects had turned their backs on her, Ram was still a King and would be so always. The Five Millennia Rule--as she had begun to think of it--had carved itself indelibly upon her being.Ram knew she would have to stop wasting time on regret. She could not change herself. She could not change the past.
And much more of this self-indulgent moodiness would have her heading down to Last Gate like her husband and all the husbands, and the sons, and the daughters, and the last of any real future the Danaans might have owned.
But before Ram set the last of her sadness aside, she gifted herself the dream of a memory of the last day she had lived in the real world of Man.
“Luz,” Ram called to the statuesque, auburn-maned woman at the market-front fruit stand. “I really need to get going. I want to stop by Joe’s before eight, and it’s almost six now.”
They’d been all day shopping and lunching and beauty-shopping--no, Ramikins, stylist, hair styling salon--and all manner of blatant consumerism. Except for a bit of a row at the clothiers when Luz wanted Ram to go for a less subtle, more exotic outfit and she’d had to settle for the thirteen- buttons getup, or was it fifteen? Anyway, Ram had held out for the front button sweater, front button double stone washed jeans in the brightest cobalt. It would be stunning, if a little less sexy, than the dress Luz had voted for. They had made up over a long lunch at some tea shop on the east side, La Salle-- something. Ram could not remember, which was unusual, but understandable, given the depth of her distraction.
Luz finished with the flushed grocery clerk and handed the bag of apples off to Ram.
“Why do I suddenly feel like Snow White?” Ram laughed.
“You haven’t been snow white for about six months now,” Luz replied in a throaty, warm purr. She turned away from Ram and started down the street towards the car. “I’m sorry it’s over,” she said so softly and sadly Ram rushed to catch up.
“What do you mean?” she asked as she came even with the lushness of Sweet Lucille.
“You hired me to get you ready for this night, Ram,” Luz stopped suddenly and Ram walked past her. “You will not need my services anymore.”
“I love you, Luz,” Ram said openly, bravely. “Whatever happens between Mr. Dawson and myself has nothing to do with that.”
“You just think you love me, Ram. It is a common thing. It will pass. With psychiatrists, it’s called...”
“Transference,” Ram finished the thought. “I cannot attest to my own sanity. Who knows, I’m probably crazy as a loon. Nevertheless, I love you--whether you believe it or not, whether you...” she left unstated her growing certainty that Sweet Lucille did not reciprocate the affection.
Sweet Lucille closed her gold-brown eyes. “You don’t even know me, Ram. Do you know, for instance, that I live near here?”
Ram looked around in surprise. This was the million-dollar condo, skyline deluxe part of Seacouver.
“Did you merely assume I lived on the street?” the hard edge scarred Luz’s usually lovely tones.
“I always picture you as dwelling high above the world in a cavern ledge of slate and obsidian carved out of the living rock,” Ram began.
Oh, girlfriend, Luz addressed herself silently, don’t you cry. Whatever you do, you promised you would not weep today, you would not let her know.
“I see you in my mind, coming out to the cliff’s edge just beyond the cavern’s mouth,” Ram continued as if she were transported in vision. “It is early eve and the sun is just setting. the light is brilliant and piercing. You are standing there in the light...”
How does she know these things? Luz felt her spine tingle all the way up to her scalp.
“You are holding a large crystal globe and you are gathering the rays. They shine up in your face and light your eyes, as if with tears they are become crystal also. I see you in the robes of Luci-fera,” she spoke the name with the accent on the second syllable, making it unrecognizable, “the Mother of Light.”
When Sweet Lucille found the breath to speak, she said only, “Come with me. I need you to do something.”
Ram followed quietly, down the block, into the great stone mountain of a building where Luz dwelt. Everywhere servants in all manners of uniforms held doors and asked after Luz and even greeted Ram. There was a long ride up the lift which opened to Luz’s magic numbers onto the large front room of her penthouse.
Ram set down their packages and went to join Luz in the center of the room. The ceiling was two stories above them and everywhere there hung transparent drapes, ceiling to floor which made the entire room seem to be set in a bright and airy cloud. The tall windows looked east on a twin building with mirrored walls.
Luz pointed to an alcove before the western windows walled off in more pale drapes of rainbow transparencies. Beyond these were glass shelves laden with natural crystals and beautiful lead crystal ware. These were all lit like an art gallery display.
Ram let her eyes play over the collection finally resting on a nest of crystals wherein rested a perfect crystal sphere, the one she had seen in Luz’s hands. Luz faded back to the entryway and turned off the crystal gallery lights.
Ram shrugged. Show's over. She turned to leave.
“I want you to say ‘no’ if you do not wish to do this,” Luz started softly. “But I have seen you in a certain way, here in my home, there,” she pointed to the crystal collection. “Just there near the crystal nest, in front of the window, just as the sun sets. I would like you to walk over there and stand facing the window and then when I say, could you turn just a little and look back at me over your left shoulder.”
Sweet Lucille did not ask the rest. She really did not dare. This was the first thing she had ever asked of Ram that did not involve business and it made her far more nervous than Ram’s earlier declaration of love.
This was something Luz wanted, purely and simply, without transaction, something vivid to remember this woman by.Not that she would ever forget her in any case.
Ram had not moved from her place in the center of the room. They were running out of time. The moment Luz had envisioned all these months would be lost if Ram hesitated any longer. It didn’t have to be perfect. Luz couldn’t make herself ask for all of it. Please, was all she thought, just do it, I can’t explain why. I can’t explain why...
....because I don’t understand it myself.
Without turning around, Ram slipped out of her clothes and walked slowly towards the window and the crystal shelves.
God bless you, Ram. Luz reflexively lapsed into her former role as teacher. She thought they’d done a good job. Ram would never be voluptuous but she’d gained enough weight to sport just a hint of sacral dimples at the base of the symmetrical, well-muscled back. Her frame followed a more functional aesthetic, but it was none-the-less beautiful. Ram reached the crystals and nearly disappeared in the shadows beyond the drapes. She stood by the sphere and waited as Luz had asked, staring out the window.
Without realizing it, Luz’s hands had drifted up to her throat in anticipation.
Ram shifted, growing bored. Her attention was drawn to the sphere which she had mistakenly thought to be perfect. At its heart there was a tiny carved wyvern wheeling through the crystalline air of its prison. It was a disturbing metaphor. Ram could not help thinking how you couldn’t free the dragon because it was part an parcel of the sphere. Shattering one would destroy the other.
Her attention wandered away, out the window to the mirrored building opposite and she saw what Luz had been waiting for. The spot where she stood was perfectly placed to catch...
The setting sun reached the critical angle and struck the opposite building, spanning the distance instantaneously and illuminating the crystals and Ram in a heart-wrenching brilliance.
Luz could not speak. The scene struck her as surely as it struck her dumb. But she needed no words. Ram, right on cue, turned just three- quarter back and slowly gazed round over her left shoulder in perfect profile. Then she stood there still as the crystals, lit with the sky’s fire and the crystals’ full prisms, draped in the light and the fine dust like so many stars in the air around her, her dark curls all haloes and auras.
Luz was sure her heart had quit beating. Her imaginings had fallen far short of this and she was glad to have over-stepped her bounds just this once. This would be an image to take to her grave.
“Luz?” Ram called quietly. When she got no answer, she continued. “I do not wish to interrupt this, but if it’s all right...” Still there was no answer. “The light is almost gone. I want to show you something before it goes.”
Luz would have cried out for her to stop, would have begged or pleaded, but there was no air inside her, only a great pit of longing, an ache of impossible dimension, an unanswerable and powerful compulsion...
Ram’s long fingers lifted into the air like the pinions of a raptorous bird spread wide in full yarak. The light rays assorted themselves between those fingers forming slender bands of luminous colors, flame in the higher bands to indigo and violet in the lower. Then her fingers began to move the light, weaving the strands together in a lustrous lace of Celtic knots and other intricate patterns.
Then the patterns acquired form and moved of their own volition.
Luz felt her chest heaving beneath the crushing and unbearable beauty. She hardly felt her knees buckle or the floor rise up to meet her. She only knew that there were dragons and wingéd lions, great seraphs and cherubim, mighty Thrones and lesser angels filling her home to the high roof and sending her out across the dissipation of ultimate rapture.
“Luz,” the tenderness in the voice called her back from the wild, wide ocean.Luz slowly opened her eyes to find herself in her own bed in Ram’s arms.
“You will be all right, Luz,” Ram touched a cool washcloth gently against her cheek. “Just take it slowly.”
Sweet Lucille sat up and the world spun, but Ram’s strong arms were there steadying the earth and fixing Luz back in her proper place thereon. “What did you do? What happened?”
“I am so sorry,” Ram was saying. Luz noted that she had not even left to get dressed.
“I never meant to hurt...it’s just...Oh, Luci-fera, I thought you were the strongest...”
“Luci--? I am not the one who is Lucifer. And what other names have you, Satan?”
A wounded expression crossed Ram’s face. “That was also my name, yes.”
“And you have come to claim my soul? But why give me rapture first?”
Ram rose and left to get dressed. When Luz’s head cleared she followed fearfully into the main room, but all was as it had been, except it was dark, now the sun was gone.
“I hate to ask, but I do need you to stay at my apartment one more night so I may visit Joe,” Ram did not look up as she finished with her shoes. “Do you think you’re up to it, Your Majesty?”
The joke name they had shared between them about “then that must make me the Queen of England,” from their first day together, rang tinny now, bereft of the warmer tones and meanings.
And Luz answered with the cold distance she always recruited in situations like this, “It’s your dime, Ms. Seaton.”
Ram rolled over in her sleep, hit a sore spot on her shoulder and sat bolt upright. Her waking thoughts finished the dream and its doleful lesson. Joe had pretty much the same reaction. Every time she came close, he froze, or used little Mary as a foil. She finally gave up and went over to see what Duncan was up to and...She had been cast out into the world of the elementals, the winds, the seas, the earths, the flames, each in their turn, Adam and Joe, and Lucille and Duncan. Ram was the fifth element, ether, the quintessence. And the problem, she thought, is this:
The first four are real and of substance, but I exist only as I affect the others.
In and of myself, I am nothing.
And my pretense at being substantial, nothing short of ridiculous.
At Watcher Central, as Duncan had begun to think of his loft apartment, things were heating up. Watcher Network had decided the Knacker had lunar compulsions, having cross-referenced the moon cycles, tide reports...Whatever...
Duncan went about the business of the dojo and stepped over the Watchers camped round his digs like so many homesteaders. Despite the fact his grocery bill had quadrupled, he never could find anything decent to eat. So he’d taken to popping downtown to Joe’s and grabbing a bite, and too much to drink.
Joe wasn’t there, of course. He was back at Duncan’s pouring over the many notebooks Adam had found in Lyons. It didn’t matter much to the Highlander. What would he say to Joe anyway? He was sure Joe had nothing nice to say to him.
Adam was off keeping tabs on Richie.
Duncan was surely not going to be striking up a conversation with the Old Man anytime in the next two or three centuries. Nor probably with Richie either if Adam had his way.
In a dark corner of Joe’s, over a ham sandwich and his third Guinness, MacLeod had an epiphany of sorts. Not a major revelation, this, more a curious, sudden understanding. This was how Ram must feel, he thought. With no one of her people by her, except that their backs were turned towards her and their ears deafened by proclamation.
That must be why she is so controlled (when sober) when she walks among us, why she is always so careful in her conversation, why she always seems more to observe and not to join in. She has been set apart for some infraction of her code, her Order...
And she cannot find her way back in again. Not that Adam would be any help as guide, he hardly touched down to earth bi-annually, less frequently since the tragedy with Alexa. Nor, Joe, giving up everything to get her back and then not knowing what to do with her when he had her. And I, thought Duncan, have given Ram all the proof she needed to stay outside forever. What a miserable excuse for friends we have all been. Why wouldn’t she go fleeing to the hills at every opportunity. It was a wonder, a measure of her bravery, or just sheer stubbornness, that Ram ever returned to them at all.
Or ever would again.
“Mac?” an unexpected, if familiar, smoky voice called behind him.
Duncan rose from his chair and turned around towards Dawson, “Joe!” The hearty good cheer in his voice surprised even himself. The sudden flood of relief made him realize just how lorn and low he’d been these past days.
“Yeah,” Dawson sighed dismissively and sat down, “we need to talk.”
Duncan retook his chair. Dawson needed him for something and that was all. No reconciliation, this, only the pragmatism of some urgent necessity. “What do you need?”
If not forgiven, at least he could be useful...another lurch of empathy for Adam’s strange mother caught Duncan’s breath.
“We think the Knacker is going to strike tonight,” Joe began. His tired eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond his left knee, where his left knee used to be. “We are going to need some help.”
“My help?”
“Yes, God Damn it!”
“No.”
Joe Dawson, Northwest Territories Director, turned his eyes slowly up to fix them on MacLeod. “No?”
Duncan leaned forward until their faces nearly touched. Dawson neither moved nor blinked. “First, you tell me what you need to make this right, and then tell me you forgive me, and THEN, we will talk about my help against the Knacker.”
“There isn’t anything awful enough I can think of to...” Joe’s smoke blew away beneath the spitting growl which emerged clear up from the very bottom of his rage-filled pit.
“Wound me, burn me, bury me...?” Duncan offered a plentiful list of helpful ideas.
Some of them made Dawson turn pale and gag, “Stop!” he gasped. “What are you doing!”
“I’m fighting my way back inside,” Duncan said. “Too damn cold out here.”
Joe’s craggy face fought to retain its glorious indignation, but the features cracked at the edges and the steely eyes began to melt. He bowed his head so their foreheads just touched. “I’m sorry, Mac. I’m so sorry.”
While Duncan had expected a great many things, this reaction was not one of them. He drew back, “What are YOU doing?”
Dawson shook his head slowly and dabbed at his eyes with his knuckles. “It was all my fault. I sent her to you. I just couldn’t...I was too uncomfortable and she just wouldn’t leave and I told her you needed to see her, that it was an emergency. I’m so sorry, so sorry...”
“You didn’t do anything, Dawson,” Duncan draped a light, tentative arm over Dawson’s shoulders. “She didn’t give you a chance to say yay or nay, any more than I gave her that chance. You did what you did... which was to push her away. I did what I did. We can neither of us take it back. We are wounded as surely as Ram.”
“And we can find no healing if it is not in each other,” Duncan leaned in and whispered this last, more of a question than he had intended it to be.
Dawson put his hand over Duncan’s and bit his lower lip, regaining an inner balance, “Thank you, buddy. You are right, but,” Joe took a deep breath in and let it leak slowly out again, “You’ll just have to understand if I have a sudden urge to come up aside your head.”
“Hey,” Duncan said through the first smile he’d had in days. He pulled his arm off Joe’s shoulders and put both hands, palms up in front of him, “Give it your best shot.”
Half an hour later, Duncan would become conscious enough to remind himself not to make that offer again to a man who spent most of his days, for all intents and purposes, walking on his arms. He would also be reminded that bartenders are notoriously apt at the maneuver known as “cold cocking.”
Adam reclined on Richie’s ratty couch oiling his sword and humming to himself, laying out the plan, plans, for the night’s coming attraction. It wasn’t lunch yet and Richie had been in the bathroom all morning long it seemed, whistling the same tune, over and over, that Adam found himself humming now.“So,” Richie called cheerfully coming into the room. “What’s on the agenda for this afternoon, Nanny?”
Adam was not pleased with the familiarity. “Nothing planned. You?”
“Maybe some practice? Or you afraid you’ll get your sword mussed up.”
Adam put the rag away. “Do I detect a note of peevishness, Master Richard?”
Richie plopped down in an equally ratty chair. A cloud of dust jumped into the air as he slapped the padded raggedy arms. “Bored,” he snorted. “Absolutely, seriously bored.”
“Do I look like a cruise director?” Adam had more than enough on his plate for this day. He didn’t want to worry the Ryan boy though. “What did you have in mind?”
“Well, it’s nearly a dozen hours till the concert. Why don’t we wander over to Joe’s.”
“Closed for repairs,” Adam replaced his sword in its sheath thinking how many times he had done so in the past, always wondering how many more times until he wasn’t there to clean it any more. Joe’s was closed. But not for repairs.
“Damn!” Richie banged his head against the back of the chair. “Well, how about we drop by the dojo, and...”
“No,” Adam replied a bit too quickly, a lot too loudly.
“You guys can’t stay mad at each other forever,” Richie stood up and stretched, “and I need to do something or I’m going to rot.”
“Sooner or later, we are all mortal enemies, Richard. That’s the way it is with us.” No one could do slightly tragic nobility like the Old Man.
Richie was not buying today. “Bullshit!” Richie had a marvelous way of saying the word as if it were monosyllabic, as if he were blowing his insubstantial nose.
“Well, whatever kind of excrement it is, it is true.” Adam was not giving in so easily, though he had himself had similar thoughts on the subject this past fortnight of staying with the red-headed wunderkind of Duncan’s tutoring. Watcher Dawson was bringing the Highlander into their confidence for tonight. They would need all the help they could get if they were going to catch the Knacker and keep the Ryan boy this side of Last Gate. The moon was waxing three-quarters this night, gibbous, which seemed to be the killer’s preference, Richard was the only newly-arrived Immortal in Seacouver. They would all be doing their best to keep Ryan from being the next body in the trees, the next head on its way to Paris in an ice chest. The young man had really nothing at all to be bored about.
“Well,” Richie said, grabbing his jacket. “I’m outta here.”
Adam rose pulling on his greatcoat, shifting the sword to the back.
“Oh, man!” Richie whined. “Look, I need to, um, well, I’ve got two very special tickets here, and I’m out to find the lucky lady who wants to go with me to the Stones’ concert tooooonite.” He did a white-boy imitation of a homeboy strut, chin action and all. “So,” he tilted his head towards Adam, “you can see why I need a little elbow room. You know what I mean...”
Adam opened the door, “After you.”
“See, now maybe you didn’t...”
“I got it, Richard, but you are not going alone.”
“Well,” Richie affected an obsequious grin, “I don’t intend to be alone very long.”
“I am totally impressed,” Adam did his imitation of Richie--which was getting far too accurate to suit him, “with your testosterone level, but you are NOT going out alone.”
“What concert?” he added.
“Where have you been, Old Man? The Rolling Stones. You’ve heard of them?”
“Before my time.”
“Yeah, sure, like anything is. They’re giving a charity concert--save the ducks, or something--in Stanley, man. It’s the hottest thing to hit Seacouver since the Knacker.”
Adam cringed visibly. “You’re not going anywhere, Richard. Not tonight.”
“Shiiiit!” Richie added back all the syllables he had left out in the more formal version of the curse. “You just don’t....Do you know what it took to get these!” he waved the precious tickets under Adam’s substantial nose. “I’m goin’, just try and stop me!”
Richie didn’t even hear the sword leave its scabbard. The edge teased his throat.
“Nanny says ‘no,’” Adam’s voice had tightened into a formidable hiss.
“You son of a bitch!” Richie spit.
“Sounds like you’ve met Mom,” Adam quipped.
“Do it,” Richie dared him.
“I can kill you on the hour, every hour as long as it takes to keep you here. Do you understand?”
Richie looked down sheepishly, “Yeah, I’m sorry. I’m just going a little stir crazy.” He extended his hand.
Adam lowered his sword and put his hand out to the young man.
An hour later he was recovered enough to remind himself it was never a good idea to shake hands with someone who knew karate as well as Richard Ryan.
“Oh, damnation!” Joe put his hand over the receiver. He turned towards MacLeod instinctively, then thought better of it, punched in a number on the cell phone, “Crane, get over to Richie’s. Now! He’s slipped Adam and gone missing. Pick up Piersen and we’ll meet at the loft.”“Well,” he addressed the Highlander, “sooner or later you guys...”
“No, no...” MacLeod shook his head in agreement. “You’re right,” Duncan rubbed his chin, “who knows, maybe he won’t beat me to death again.”
The inspiration whistled through Dawson’s teeth, “Yeah, that looked pretty bad.”
“You shoulda seen it from the inside.”
“Well, it will take Crane at least an hour to get to Adam and back to the dojo. Which leaves us some time to go over things, catch you up...”
Dawson raced briefly over the books Adam had brought back from Lyons. He had backtracked through some of the records Ram had dismissed as inauthentic, in the time before they had discovered her true identity. From these he had followed a trail to one of the many archival trash heaps scattered over Europe where the Watchers kept the things they had collected which didn’t seem to fit anywhere else. In Lyon he had found Ram’s written notebooks in an obscure shorthand of an even more arcane language which he finally deciphered and discovered to be the Danaan version of a Watchers’ Chronicle. She’d been watching the watchers, as it were, making reports to the Danaans on the half-bred sons, their demises, victories, as well as the Watchers themselves, going back centuries. It seemed Ram had been watching them for a very long time, far longer than the past decade when she had actually come to work for them.
There had been a great deal more, diaries Ram kept about herself and the Danaan people. These Dawson did not mention. Within them lay more than any of them wanted to know about these strange beings in general, or even Ram, in particular. Most particularly, the reason why Adam was convinced Ram would die with this pregnancy. Joe had himself only enough time to skim through some of Adam’s hand-scrawled translations. He would wait until a better time to go through them with Duncan.
They had more than enough for tonight. All the profiler data indicated that Richie was the target and tonight was the night. They still didn’t know who exactly this demon was, but they did know more about him than they had.
He was a hunter. No big revelation there. He was in a profession that required a great deal of methodical, analytical repetitive talents. This they had gleaned from his incredibly devious methods of mailing the heads without having them traced back to him. He wrote in a broad, machine-quality handwriting, two different handwritings, which they took to mean he was ambidextrous. Adam had suggested they start looking for a disgruntled postal employee, but no one except the old Immortal thought it was funny. More likely, the Knacker was a Watcher, or he was a hacker who had somehow gained entry into their network.
Or he was an Immortal. No one thought this likely as there had been no Quickenings witnessed, and such things were not subtle.
Placement had seemed random at first, but if they took the first and the fifth killing out of the data, it had become clear that there was a geographic circle being formed and the Knacker was due back in Stanley Park.
“But the Stone’s concert,” Duncan interrupted.
“Yeah,” Joe shrugged. “That’s raised hell with surveillance, but we’re working around the roadies and Crane’s been running interference with the park security.
“That’s where we’re going to find Richie!” Duncan knew his student could not resist such a gold-plated opportunity to meet the fairer sex. Given his current situation, he could only envy the young man the simplicity of such an encounter.
“That’s what I’m afraid of, Mac,” Joe picked up his cane and started for the door. “I hope we find him before the Knacker does.”
Then again, thought Duncan, as he locked the bar behind them, maybe there is no such thing as the simple encounter anymore.
“Well, well, well,” a wheeze drifted out of the alley behind the bar as the two men got into Joe’s car. “Seems like the vultures are flocking early this season.” The dragon-face squinted as he moved forward in the sun to watch the car drive out of sight. It made the dragon-face look as if the tattoo’s talons were piercing his eyes.
The north peninsula stretch of Seacouver, Stanley Park, was packed to the max. A living breathing throng, a host, a multitude had gathered to be--for the moment--another entity entire, a multi-leggity beastie, bent on doing way more than just go bump in the night, thought that would surely be on the agenda.Richard Ryan flashed his ticket at one of the many fence gates, enteringPandemonium ala Stones, or the electric expectation thereof. Everywhere,rent-a-cops in various shades of blue and drab and plain-clothes with the inevitable brogans and white socks. Everyone of the part-timer pigs had his finger in his ear, trying to catch the pages and announcements above the roar of the beastie.
And the concert was still at least an hour off. The beastie had yet to find its true depth, range, and volume. Richie drank in the sounds, the smells, the crush of people like a man who had been bereft of such for a very long time. He was new to being Immortal, just barely out of his adolescence, and, dammit, two weeks was a long time. Not that he threw caution to the cannabis-laced wind. He still reminded himself about the Knacker and his risk for being victim number seven, but the truth of the killings was too atrocious, too hideous to really register within any reality in the mind of the young man.
Richard, man-about-town, on-the-prowl, bigtime bucks in my pocket, Ryan,Richie mused to himself. “Oh, yes,” he announced to everyone and no one inparticular. He kept an inner ear tuned to that other “sound” which only dogs and Immortals could “hear,” the hum and buzz of another Immortal. It was not the fanciful slasher he feared so much as a certain tall, lanky Old Man whom he’d thrashed earlier that day and who would probably reciprocate in spades given half the chance.
“Hullo,” he let the last syllable drag out appreciatively in honor of the goddess who had stepped across his path, nearly tripping him.
“Hullo, yourself,” gold brown eyes peeked up at him from under auburn bangs. Her tones drifted him backward to any Mae West movie he’d ever seen.
Silently, he quoted, “Ahhh, ya got me.” Aloud he said, “Can I help you?” Not that this incredibly lush lovely looked like she needed anyone’s help, but Richie had sold the second ticket for a bundle and he was in a most charitable mood.
She stared at him blankly and then blinked. “I’m headed backstage,” her voice carried over the background beastie noise though it never lost its honeyed, come-hither quality, “Do you want to come with?”
“Do I?” Richie reverted to about a ten-year-old looking at a bag of candy. He ducked his head and cursed his enthusiasm. But when he looked up she was still there, still smiling. She thought his outburst was cute. Oh, oh, oh.....Yessss!“My name is Richard Ryan,” he offered his hand.
“I know,” she replied, “My name is Sweet Lucille.”
Yesss, oh, yes! “And what do people call you?”
Her laughter was light as spring snow on the mountains, though clearly as distant and cold. “One of life’s rare delights,” she replied.
“I’ll give you the down-and-dirty quick tour, MacLeod,” Crane began asDuncan wandered around the enormous van which on the outside looked like yetanother News Station setup, but was in reality the borrowed central station for the Watchers’ park surveillance this night. “We’ve got cameras in all four quadrants of the concert area--one each, we really don’t expect he’ll hit in a crowd. Not his style to be that visible. The rest of the twenty we’ve got spotted on the far side of the pond and in the zoo area, with one...” he clicked on the larger central screen. It was the one High Res system they had to work with and they’d spotted it up on a slight rise above the sloping gardens on the far side of Stanley’s little lake.”“Stats show he’ll strike below this hill, probably near one of those elms,because...” Crane thought better of being too specific. “For obvious reasons, wewon’t go into. Oh, and here,” he handed MacLeod a security badge and somepaperwork to put in his billfold. “You’re on your own if you get patted down andthey find a sword on you. No way to make that look like part of the concert.”
“And God bless the Society for Creative Anachronism,” Duncan remarked.He’d used the noble club’s name on more than one occasion to explain the bladewhich belonged in another age. Anyone who knew would catch on right away that this was not the sort of thing one got through the mail from Atlanta Cutlery, but hardly anyone ever knew. “So, who’s in the park that we know of?”
“We know of Richard Ryan...”
“Where?” Duncan spun Crane around.
Crane disentangled himself from the Highlander’s rough hold.“Easy...everything’s under control...”
Duncan leaned in.
“He’s gone backstage with Sweet Lucille. Room 2114 on the second sub-level beneath the stage, just beyond the VIP room,” Crane squeaked. “Wait! That won’t get you in. Here!” he took off his own badge and gave it to MacLeod. “I mean it is The Stones, after all.”
“Right,” growled Duncan blowing by Joe who had been busy finding a spot to park the car. “Good luck,” he called after MacLeod’s disappearing back. “What....?”
“As soon as he heard Richie was here....”
Joe nodded, “I got it. Well, run me through the updates.” He settled himself down in a spanking new office chair all chrome and cranberry upholstery with rollers and swivels and it even rocked. He felt like Goldilocks in the baby bear’s chair. Just right.
Crane proceeded to report the layout of the cameras, where their men were placed, all with ear remotes and lapel mikes. He dialed in each camera in turn, started the tapes, and showed off the jewel of the system, the High Res, zooming it in to demonstrate its powerful range. “I can pretty much get right on top of any straight-sight area in the entire park.”
“Just so long as you’re not boot-legging a video of the concert,” Adam entered carrying a thick legal piece to cease and desist, or some such. “I signed it in triplicate, so I’m in for it if you do any on-the-side taping, got it?”
“Like I’d have the time,” Crane snorted. He handed Adam a badge withoutlooking up. One-by- one he cued and adjusted the cameras and their sweep angles. One-by-one, he and Dawson ran the final checks with the park Watchers.
Adam picked up a headset and started at the back of Crane’s list. At the third checkpoint, north of the lake, he jerked at the report, “I read,” he replied. “Fade back to your secondary and notify positions 30 and 22. Out.”
“We got problems, gentlemen,” Adam leaned between them and readjusted one of the monitors, angling its camera north. “Damn!”
Outside the van a great roar went up and the beastie began to gather to the scent...a local DJ announcing all the “We are grateful to the Chamber...” missives which were drowned by the beastie’s great thirst for the main course and the bump in the night.
Adam and Crane dove for the volume controls. They were going to be running this operation deaf when the amps powered up on stage. Yeah, Crane thought, Stone deaf. “What’s up, Adam,” he asked as the ringing left his ears.
Adam addressed Joe as senior member on the team. “Something we hadn’texpected, Joe. Mondragon’s on the north perimeter, moving toward the bridge.”
“Mondragon? How did he get into town without...” Crane shook his head.
Joe just sat there in his very comfortable chair, refusing to waste his energy in any amount of pre-anxiety anxiety. Just listening and thinking.
“Looks like he came in with the roadies. Call up the backstage...”
Crane was ahead of him. “Richie ran into him backstage and took off for the far side of the lake. They haven’t seen Duncan yet. Lucille gave up on the plan and hasn’t been seen out of the VIP room since. And no one’s seen anything remotely suspicious for Knacker potential, except for the fact all the fans look like axe murderers. Maybe Piersen could give us a ‘radar assist?’”
Both men stared at Crane.
“Well, I may have been distracted when Lucille came to talk with us coupleweeks back, but I wasn’t deaf, “ he turned away from them and fiddled with thevolume board again. “Showtime,” he announced.
A wave of impossible volume shook the van as the beastie keened with itsthousands of throats and hearts and pounding feet, clapping hands.
“Crane!” Dawson roared.
“If he’s Ram’s son, then he’s Immortal. I don’t have any proof, but I can guess which Immortal he is given his ‘research’ interests.”
Crane turned cautiously around to find both men leaning over him likescavenger birds. “Well, jeez! I’m not going to say anything. I just thought Adam, or whoever this is could help us by spotting general locations of any Immortals in the park.”
Dawson looked over at Adam, “Can you?”
“Well, it’s not like we’ve got flashing signs,” Adam complained.
“What can you do?” Joe pressed again.
“I can give myself a headache the size of Mt. Rushmore,” Adam protested. He thought a moment, sighed, then said, “Hell, I’ll give it a try.”
The Eldest Immortal leaned back against the far wall and crossed his arms. He closed his eyes and settled his shoulders. His artist’s hands, the impossibly long and sensitive fingers, felt for the directions as he searched inside for the Quickening Minor, the signature of the Immortals by which they recognized each other. It was far from exact as a locator, direction and identity being nearly impossible to determine. But Adam was good at this. Hadn’t his mother spent long days trying to teach him this and many of the other skills the Danaans took for granted.
“Okay,” he said finally, rubbing the bridge of his nose, between his eyes. “I read it like this: Richie is on the far side of the pond. Crane, start searching for him with the High Res, a little to the north, about half-way up the hill.”
“Mondragon is tracking Richie about a hundred yards back, still at the bridge, trying to locate him. Duncan is gaining on the bridge, but he’s not going to catch Mondragon if Feliz starts off again anytime soon.”
Adam withdrew again, chin down, eyes closed, “Damnation,” he came upshaking his head. “There are two more Immortals in the park, also on the far side of the pond just south of Richie’s position. No, an Immortal and a Pre-Immie, I thought I was mistaken, that they were an echo, they’re so quiet, they seem far away, but from the changing angles, they are together and they should meet Richie before.....” Adam’s bright eyes ringed suddenly white and the Old Man, not known to be at all religious, made supplication to a Greater Power, “Sweet Jesus in Heaven!” he howled.
And then he exploded out the van door into an almost palpable wall of MickJagger doing “Tumbling Dice” with all the amps on full.
Women think I'm tasty,
but they're always tryin' to waste me
and make me burn the candle right down,
but baby, baby,
I don't need no jewels in my crown.The music was so loud it rattled Adam’s jaw and started his sword vibratingagainst his back under the coat. He leaned forward slightly as he ran, picked upsome mud as he reached the pond and plugged his ears. Then he stood on the bank and refigured the placement of the men on the field, the combatants. To his dismay, he was too late. They were already met upon that field and it would doubtless be all but finished before he made it across the pond. Still, he tore off his coat, secured the scabbard by its straps across his shoulder, and dove in, swimming silently and swiftly for the opposite bank, scattering the already nervous water foul who’d been rattled by the din.
Adam reached the other side and scrambled, clawing and slipping, up the bank. He searched the moon- brushed darkness for the men he knew were there, seeing nothing. He reached his hand up to dig out the mud in his ears, just as a flash of light blazed off to his left, tiny like an elven flare...
Before he could wonder, before he could even get his finger to his ear, something struck him with incredible force, dead-center just above his eyebrows and threw him back, dead, into the water.
The ducks lifted off the pond and flapped away. Above the deafening music they had heard a more familiar, more threatening sound, the crack of a large caliber rifle.
Always in a hurry,
I never stop to worry,
don't you see the time flashin' by.
Honey, got no money,
I'm all sixes and sevens and nines.“Okay,” Crane said breathy with adrenaline. “I’ve got Richie, right whereAdam said he would be. Here, you take 5 and 18 and start bringing their scan arcs south and west respectively and see if you can pick up Duncan or Mondragon. I’ll start scanning south with the High Res from Richie’s position and see if I can pick up the other two. Two different handwritings! Damn! Why didn’t we think of a team?”
Joe rolled over to the control bank and started typing in parameters, adjusting five degrees at a time, waiting for the cycle, then adjusting again. Nothing but a lot of dark park. Gibbous moon or no. “Do we have any night gear for these toys?” he asked Crane.
“Oh, God, of course,” Crane rolled backward, swiveled and keyed in theinfra-red systems. “Which cameras do you want the filters on?”
“All the east pond ones’ll do,” Joe waited, moving his two cameras back to the beginning of their sweeps. “Any way we can turn that music down while we’re at it?” He was not a Stones fan, not at this volume, anyway.
“The volumes off completely. That’s what we’re getting through the walls.Okay, cameras are switched over. How’s that?” Crane rolled back to working with the High Res, now glowing in grim shades of green.
“Much better,” Joe said, locking the camera in on Mondragon. “There you are, you bastard.” Dawson keyed in three of the park Watchers. They couldn’t hear a word he was saying. Damn! They’d have to get the message through after the song was done, after the applause, and before the lead-in to the next song picked up enough volume to drown them out again.
Well, Joe was a blues man. He might not know R&R, but he sure knew timing. He listened to the song, two more verses and a long lead-out, about two minutes, plus or minus a bit of instrumental virtuosity. Maybe three minutes. He looked back at the monitor. Richie came into view, sword drawn.
It would be over in three minutes. It very well might be over in two.
Dawson leaned left to inform Crane only to see that the Lieutenant already had the challenge up on the High Res monitor. “We can’t do anything,” Crane intoned as if it were liturgical truth. We’ll contact the park operatives to gather at a safe distance and then take him after the Quickening.”
“You think Mondragon is the Knacker?” Joe never thought for a moment either that Richie would prevail.
“He doesn’t fit the profile and his Watcher reports,” he produced a fax from same Watcher, “that he hasn’t left California for the past ten months. “But the computer said he would be here and it said he would be here tonight. And here he is.”
Joe shook his head. “And the other two?”
“Adam must have been right when he said they were echoes. Anyway he’s still on this side of the pond, so he must think he made a mistake.”
Dawson stared at Crane as if he’d grown horns and scales.
“No,” Crane’s laugh died in his throat. The two Immortals, Richard Ryan and Feliz Mondragon, had crossed swords and begun. Already the young student of Duncan MacLeod was backing away, down the slope. The worst possible positioning. “I put a tracer in his pocket,” Crane pointed to a map of the park where a single green light blinked on the west pond bank. Several dozen red blinkers indicated the other Watchers scattered over the park. Most of them concentrated in the south, but moving north towards the two fighting men’s position.
“They must have heard some...” Joe began.
“No,” Crane pointed to the bank above them, running a digital number, right screen towards left, running continuously across the face of the rectangular screen. “I sent out a silent alarm with the coordinates. And that second number indicates they are to standby until ordered forward.”
“That’s when we’ll need some quiet to get through more complicatedinstructions,” Crane added. “Oh, oh...”
Dawson’s attention shot back to the High Res screen. Richie had lost his sword and the brigand had hamstrung him, bringing him to the ground on his knees and hands. It was over. No more Richard. No more redhead blasting through the door at the bar with some high flown scheme or too much sheer exuberance to bear. Joe stopped breathing.
So did Crane. Time seemed suspended in the green, glowing image ofMondragon, sword high in the air above Richie’s naked neck. Richie on all fours, gasping with the pain of his wounded legs and the fear of his coming death.
And somewhere, Joe thought, in this dim night, Duncan witnesses this with us, close enough to intervene, bound by honor not to do so.
“Hey!” Crane blurted ou, pointing to the magnified view from the downslope camera which was centered on Mondragon's face. “What is that?”
Joe looked. Mondragon had a smudge in the middle of his forehead. Everything else was unchanged. Then the smudge, overlying the place where the third eye was said to reside, began to weep.
Black tears in the green filter. Blood.
Feliz Mondragon never changed expression, death had taken him so fast. He toppled over backward, the sword falling behind him from the suddenly lifeless hand.
“Dammit, Crane,” Joe fussed over the camera control bank. “Move that fancy Kodak up over the top of Richie and get a look at who shot Mondragon!”
Crane started dialing up the angle on the equipment, working back from where Mondragon had been looking. Not fifty yards downslope, not a hundred, there...
One hundred twenty yards down the slope stood the marksman, now aiminglaterally along the lake’s edge. There was a brief flash at the barrel’s end as Crane dialed up the zoom to max.
The audience beastie’s applause was dying down and the bass and drums were gearing up. Dawson got on the headphone, “All positions, hold! Sniper at...” he turned to Crane who wrote down the coordinates from the reading on the zoom.
The music began to drive in a sinister, compelling rhythm, more multipleexplosions than beat. Out the window, in the periphery of his gaze Joe caught the flames rising from the stage. He could almost smell the frenzy of the crowd as they recognized whatever this next song was...
Please allow me to introduce myself I'm a man of wealth and taste.
Crane jolted back from the monitor as if it were attacking him, “What the fuck is that!”
I've been around for long, long years, stolen many man's soul and faith.
An apparition appeared there before them. A demonic creature with dead eyes. There was a strange tattoo along the left side of the hairless skull. In the dim light it seemed a spider or a lizard, dark and covering the forehead brow to brow and down the left cheek and neck.
“That’s the Knacker,” Joe said more to himself than to Crane. What other conclusion was there?
“Damn!” Because his actions were so outrageously heinous, Crane had somehow pictured a non- descript, bookish type, not this monster who loomed grey and black and green before him.
The Knacker moved out of range, slinking fast and liquid, close to the ground, up the hill towards Richie and Mondragon.
“Damnation, Duncan,” Dawson worked with two of the northern cameras.“Where are you?” Just a bank of elms and firs and no Duncan.
Crane moved the High Res into focus near Ryan. Up the hill, Richie rolled onto his back and levered up on his elbows to thank his rescuer. He just made it up to sitting when a bullet smashed his forehead and sent him back to lying down again.
“Dawson!” Crane whined, as if this were his boss’s doing, or as if his boss could do anything about it. “The Knacker’s taken out Richie and...”
The demon stopped suddenly, turned left, aimed into the treeline and firedagain. Probably Duncan, Dawson thought. He counted on his fingers with his thumb. “Crane? Can we get them to rush this fiend now?”
“It will take some time to key in the silent...”
“Forget it. He probably has other weapons on him. It’s just that single action bolt only carries four cartridges, and he’s spent them and doesn’t seem to be reloading.”
Crane was impressed. “What do we do now?”
“Key in the ‘charge’ signal on the alarm, but don’t send it until I give the signal,” Dawson looked back at the screen. “And I suggest when you’re finished with that, well, go outside and get some fresh air until I call you.” He watched the Knacker pull out a skinning knife, sharp as the tooth of a serpent, slender and barely ten inches of shiny surgical steel. This was going to be ugly.
“Geez, Joe, what kind of a...oh, my god...” Crane just finished the code when he glanced up and was stunned, literally by the scene playing itself out on the monitor.
The Knacker was sure of his work, quick, if not clean. Sitting down atMondragon’s head, he curled his right leg beneath the neck, arching the headbackward into his lap. He bent his left knee and placed his left foot on Mondragon’s left shoulder. Left hand under the chin, the Knacker pulled up, exposing his area of entry and he sliced efficiently across the straps the thyroid, into the trachea, and across both carotid and jugular pairs. Without a pause, he moved his left hand down into the wound and retracted the flap upward opening a surface to the cervical vertebrae. He sliced through the anterior ligaments and tendons, loosening the spine.
Crane held it together fairly well through all of this grizzly bit of butchery, but his stomach lurched and he dove for the door when the Knacker finished. Moving his right foot up to the right shoulder, the Knacker twisted his left hand into Mondragon’s hair and pushed the shoulders away with his feet, loosening and then disarticulating the spine. Then he reached forward and sliced one last time through the spinal chord, falling back as the back skin of the neck ripped free.
Dawson howled at Crane to send the order and one hand over his mouth, hestruggled back in and punched the send with his fist. Then he retreated outsideagain, heaving so hard he was sure he’d see his shoes come up in the next load.
The song built for a big finish to the first set...
Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name.
But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game.Special effects set off a line of explosions left to right across the stage, high shooting flames and lazer lacework firing over the audience, strobing the night with their artifice and illuminating the big beastie’s ardor with wonder and light.
But as the last explosion detonated, another began across the lake, great arcs of sparkling, sparking energy, a pure storm of intense detonations that sent an electric charge over the skins of the concert assembly...
And stirred a keening roar from the beastie’s throat that drowned the agonized howling of the dragon face on the far shore.
Crane watched the fireworks of the Quickening die down and saw his men rush the area. They had him, it. An Immortal from Hell. He went in to report to Dawson, but Joe met him at the door, coat in hand. “They’re taking him to the armory. We’ll meet them there after we’ve seen to Duncan, and Richie, and Adam, wherever he ended up in all of this.
“But didn’t you like the concert?” Crane joked feebly.
“Nah,” Joe said never cracking a smile, “I’m more of a Dead Head, myself.”
Crane followed behind trying not to laugh for fear he’d start spewing again.