Boticelli...Map of the Inferno

       Patricia Jeffreys (just call me “Pats”) unlocked the door to the musty top floor of the old industrial building. She held it open for her client, snugging tight against the frame lest he touch her by accident.

       You meet all kinds in real estate, she thought. But this one was an A-number-one candidate for first place in the Walking Weird competition, at the nationals level for sure.

       The man slithered around the room, searching each nook, running his grey, cadaverous fingers over every filthy surface. This guy gave the middle-years property agent with the all-too-blond coif a serious case of what her father used to call the “willies.” From the buzz-cut stubble of black hair against grey scalp, to the old- fashioned mirror lens aviator shades, he was one uniquely unpleasant customer. Who else, she reasoned, though, would be even slightly interested in this dilapidated piece of masonry and cobwebs? And the man, for all he dressed like a dockworker, had a great deal of money, all of it cash.

       Could be, probably was, a drug dealer or worse, but Pats had to move this sodden old elephant and she couldn’t be choosy. She chose not to think about it. Hell, he could be some kind of cult guru, she thought, studying once again the single stunning feature of this grey-skinned freak: a brilliantly-done tattoo which took up half of his face. It was in deepest black, not the indigo of most such, a dragon seated on his left temple with a forepaw resting on his left eyebrow...

       Where a left eyebrow would have been, but except for the scalp stubble, his face was hairless as a skull.

       The dragon’s bright orange eyes (the only color this geek owned) shone out from the intricate dragon Masque which spanned a third of Mr. James’ broad forehead and the Celtic knots of the dragon’s tail draped in a hypnotic tangle down his left cheek and down the side of his neck disappearing under his T-shirt and going God knows where after that. Pats shuddered. She’d had a vision of the man naked and that endless tail...

       It was to barf. Definitely.

       He wasn’t very tall, this Mr. James--oh, yeah, sure, that was his name--not much taller than herself, but that somehow made him all the more sinister. He would be coming in for the low blow even if he were ten feet tall.

       “You were saying something about ‘going condo’?” the thin, pale man spoke in a gravelly whisper of a ten-pack a day smoker or a consumptive.

        “Why, yes, Mr. James,” Pats crossed the room and opened a window. A billow of dust blew in over the sill and she coughed. “For the discriminating buyer it should make a fine investment.”

       And what were those enormous Samsonite briefcases for? No, she didn’t even want to go there. Why had she agreed to come alone with this geek? Like she wasn’t the most junior member of the real estate firm and lucky to have any job at all so soon after the divorce.

       “It will do.”

       Mr. Whoever-this-was had crept up so suddenly and silently, Pats jumped.

       “Here,” he held out an impressive wad of hundred dollar bills. “This should see to it.”

       “Well,” the real estate agent was flustered and afraid with only the open window and a ten-floor drop at her back. “There’s escrow and closing and loan arrangements...” Pats straightened her navy blue power suit, now dusted with a week’s worth of Seacouver dirt.

       Mr. James began to bow his head forward slowly lowering the aviator mirror shades. A few more degrees and she would be looking into his naked eyes. “Take care of it,” he whispered.

       And if she knew nothing else, Pats knew those two eyes were nothing she ever wanted to see. It was enough to confront the dragon’s two glowing eyes and her own fright reflected in his shades.

       “Yesss,” Pats squeaked and lifted her properties guide up in front of her face, scrambling sideways away from her precarious position between the window and the demon trying to make a break for the door. “I can do that and then, there will be papers to sign and...”

       “Don’t come back,” the strangled throat wheezed out its warning.

       “No, Mr. James,” she was all too happy to comply.

       “Send another,” he hissed.

       “Yes, Mr. James,” Pats breathed more easily as she reached the door. Where was her composure? What the hell did he think...? “You’ll need some furnishings and I can...”

       “Get out!”

       Patricia Jeffreys, real estate agent, rushed home to bed with a headache that felt for all the world as if a dragon’s talons had skewered her skull. It would be the next morning before she remembered where she’d left her car. She made one of the senior agents go get it. Nothing in the whole wide world was ever going to make her go back there.

       From the tenth floor vantage, the dragonfaced customer watched the agent’s frantic departure and chuckled quietly, deep in his gullet, producing a sound far from ordinary laughter, closer to a sizzle. He set one of the cases near the window on its side and, kneeling, keyed the locks. Opening the lid, he removed the stock, barrel, and scope, assembling them in a slow, deliberate fashion, a smooth, disinterested action born of long experience.

       Midway through leveling the scope, the dragon straightened up on his knees and peered over the sill of the still open window. He disengaged the scope and used it to check out the sidewalk on the far side of the street. A U Haul had pulled up to the curb of the opposite building and two men were busy backing out motorcycles and various housewares and furniture. One man was tall, lank, early thirties, brunette. He moved like a thoroughly disinterested lion who has just fed well.

       The other was more thickly built, muscled like a light-weight prize fighter, with sandy hair, almost red, mid-twenties, if that old.

       “Richard Ryan,” the dragon face wheezed. He set down the scope and with a single, fluid motion, he swung the rifle up, slapped the stock against his cheek, sighting on the young man and his motorcycles across the street. “We meet at last.”

.

       Ram formed her lean frame in some more comfortable position against the rough surface of the stone wall. Her portion of the Seventh Ring was empty and lightless, above the level of the town, at one and the same time, an eyrie and a cave.

       She was thoroughly miserable. Had it not been for her intense sabbatical of the past half year, she would not have known what to do with the disagreeable sensations which assaulted her from all sides. But Ram had been diligent in her study of selfishness and she knew the appropriate response, if only as a concept.

       Self-pity, that was the answer for this dreadful turn of events. Ram had approached the territory with a certain timidity at first, but by now, two days after the treachery at Duncan’s loft, she was wallowing in the ego-centric mire like a hog after a spring rain.

       Ram might even have delighted in feeling so sorry for herself, except for the fact that she had about lost patience with the continued painfulness of every movement...that and the certainty she wouldn’t feel any better in the near future.

       There had even been several dire hours the first night when she thought the swelling in her throat was going to strangle her and that would be that. But she’d found some ice and fought the overpowering urge to sleep and her breathing had eased by dawn.

       And just so long as she did not lie down, the swelling was manageable, though she still could hardly speak above a whisper and it was quite uncomfortable even to breathe. Poor Duncan, he hadn’t meant to crush her throat. His broad, strong hands had just been too close to her neck when the Quickening took him.

       Any more, she brooded, than he meant to bruise me stem to stern. She shifted away from the wall and wrapped the quilt--the one item she had stolen from the loft--around her shoulders. If she could just find that one position--

       Damn! As she lifted her left shoulder to snuggle under the quilt, the trapezius on that side tied up in an excruciating, unremitting knot that tore the air through her strafed throat in a wheezing parody of a scream. She pitched forward on the dusty floor, cursing and weeping.

       And when she’d had enough of that, she pushed back up and started kneading the knot out of her shoulder, ignoring the purple-going-green bruise that covered the area she’d banged repeatedly against the hard wood flooring of Duncan’s loft.

       It isn’t fair, she thought in the language of the self-serving pity, but she was losing her taste for it even now. It isn’t fair when Duncan will be right as rain, was right as rain, day before yesterday, and I shall still be crippling around here for a week, minimum.

       Well, she sighed carefully, at least I am not looking at waiting for any fractures to heal...three to six weeks, she recalled, that was the usual time frame for mortals to heal bone injuries. No major lacerations, she continued her inventory of gratitudes, just that damnable...

       She couldn’t lie down or she’d suffocate.

       She couldn’t sit effectively, at least not square upright. Well, the tear would heal in a week and it wasn’t at all serious, just incredibly tender.

       I can begin hunting again in a week, but not before, she reasoned. Nothing to do but wait for this slower regeneration to take its course. Mortals had medicaments to treat such, ease the pain, prevent infection. Ram wished she’d paid more attention to Sister Boedwyer’s lengthy treatises on vet medicine, but the subject did not interest her much.

       Not then, anyway. How could she have foreseen this turn, though? With the Diminishment, she had been reduced to an Immortal.

       With the conception, Ram had lost the last of her power, given over to the child and to its sire, reducing her to the piteous state of Mortal.

       Oh, hell, she stretched her back, careful not to incite the left shoulder again. How do the beastes do it? A sudden insight dawned. Poor Joe, he hurt all the time. Ah, something of use, something she could focus upon outside this ring.

       Ram would follow the Watcher’s example. After all, she thought, I am still whole, more or less, I will soon heal.

       I will eventually be out of this pain.

       Most of it.

       For now.

       She even felt better enough to consider the terrors which lay ahead and begin to plan her attack.

       But not before one last wave of the self-pitying gloom rolled over her with all the force of anguish.

       They sent six sons against me and six times they failed.

       But this time they have succeeded in destroying me.

       And the best I can hope for is that the child will survive my demise.

       The thought of her son carried her forward to the edge of the Ring, away from the pain and the desolation and the defeat...

       Into the chill lightening of moonset, the deep indigo of pre-dawn.

---

       Deep into the second night after the debacle at his loft, Duncan sat in a far, dark corner, his long black locks in matted drapes over both his bowed shoulders. His portion of the Seventh Ring had a neon sign outside the door with a friend’s name thereon, “Joe’s.”

       It was that same friend who had awakened him the morning after his atrocious transgression. The same friend he had followed back to this wombish tavern, wherein he had gotten thoroughly drunk...

       ...and wherein he had remained so for the intervening two days.

       He looked like the wake of God’s Own Wrath.

       He felt worse.

       Joe Dawson had puttered around him like an overly concerned auntie, trying to talk him out of yet another shot, yet another bottle, trying to get him to eat, or rest. The Watcher had tried gently and then more firmly to ask Duncan some questions about the night, now two nights, before.

       All those questions for which the Highlander had no answers and all the answers he was loathe to reveal because they would lay him out naked in this hellish ring and he was all too defenseless and too miserable as it was.

       So he sat behind a far, dark table, leaning on his elbows. The fine and fair physiognomy he’d owned in the time before this descent had gone to black-ringed eyes and haunted, grey features reminiscent of an elder patriarch or an apostle at the dinner just after Yeshua had announced his imminent departure.

      Joe had begun watering Duncan’s drinks, had begun considering a chaser a la the good Finn, Mickey. But when he went into the drawer where he kept the chloral hydrate tabs for emergencies like this, he couldn’t seem to find them. Something truly awful had happened to Mac, and it involved Ram, and that was all he knew.
.................

---

       Adam Piersen, Ph.D., research drone, resident cynical bastard, and general trouble- shooter pushed his six-three, and then some, frame through the bar door, a large duffel bag in either hand and his whole person, including clothes and hair, rumpled by a day and a half’s sojourn, plane-to-plane, from halfway round the planet. He had that slept-in, slept-on, look of the airways traveler after one too many stop-overs and missed connections. The right bag hit the floor, thud, full of books. The left bag hit next, chunk, his sword and clothes. “Well,” he slipped out of his coat and let it drop over the left bag, advancing on the bar and the weary tender behind. “I came straight from the airport.”

       Adam waited while Joe rustled up some coffee and a sandwich. “I started off as soon as you called, but...” he shrugged. “Not a good time of year to be booking standby, especially when you’re starting at the rural Archives in Lyon. Damn!” he took a luxuriously long sip of the warm brew. Joe made the best coffee. “What the hell is going on, Joe? Another Knacker? Something with Ram?”

       Joe mumbled something and lifted his chin toward the corner where the Highlander sat brooding his sullen black withdrawal, so drawn inward that Adam had not perceived his presence before now.

       Adam took in the change in MacLeod. There was a gaunt transformation of the face, partly the sorrow- bruised sockets, partly the downward cant of every facial plane, misery, and drunkenness, and the slope of the over-burdened shoulders. There was also the sodden aspect which Adam perceived even through the darkness of the predawn barroom--an affect of defensive shame, something Adam knew all too well.

       Something Adam had never seen in MacLeod before the Dark Quickening and Sean Burn’s murder. It had disappeared in the exoneration of the healing pool, but here was that “Don’t consider me,” look again, brooding like a storm on the Scot’s brutal visage. Adam called out, “Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod. How goes it with ye?”

       Duncan lifted one black eyebrow and stared angrily at Adam. Lifting his glass as if in a toast, he gave forth with one spectacular belch.

       Adam nodded his head, “And the top of the morn to yew also, Lad.” Turning to Joe he asked, “And how long has he been like this?”

       Joe shook his head, “I don’t know exactly, but as I figure, it happened sometime the night before I called you.”

       “WHAT happened,” Adam picked up the shot Joe had poured for him.

       “Man, I don’t know,” Joe poured himself a shot, the nameless, everyday whiskey he kept for the refills. This was not a time for the good stuff somehow.

       “Maybe it’s time to...” Adam let the words drift quietly over the bar and he lowered his tone, “You know, the special ‘beddie-bye’ vintage from the Clan MacFinn.”

       Joe shrugged, “Somebody’s taken it. There’s none left. And I can’t get another script from Ann until the morning. I waited. Just didn’t want to get her involved.”

      “Yeah,” Adam tossed back the last of the shot and set his glass forward for another. “Why don’t we start with what you know and then we’ll go shake down the drunk for the rest, eh.”

       Joe ambled out from behind the bar and settled his weary frame in a chair. “Well, buddy, you know about the sixth Knacker victim?”

       “The woman? Yes.”

       “There was a scare when we thought it might be Ram.”

       “Yeah, I know, Joe. James told me.”

       Joe Dawson took another sip and launched into his version of events. He explained to Adam about the lame plan to lure Ram in, claiming he was ill and camped out at the dojo.

       “And why exactly did you do this?” Adam interrupted.

       “Okay, so maybe it wasn’t thought out...you know, she would come to see me, how I was getting along and instead there would be Mac to discuss her moving in with one of us until the Knacker business was solved.”

       “Which you took to mean you?” Adam asked.

       “What?”

       “That Ram would stay with you.”

       “Oh. Yeah. Of course,” Joe looked up quizzically at the young/old man propped against the bar, still on his feet, refusing to sit down. Probably done enough sitting for a week, Joe thought. Butt’s probably numb. A condition Joe might have wished for all the standing he’d been doing and the biting pain of sitting up with Mac for too long.

       Joe didn’t really get Adam’s question. Who else would Ram stay with?

       Adam, on the other hand, looked down at the silver-bearded Watcher and thought, “Oh, Brother have you got a bad case now.”

       Joe continued on about how Ram had seen through the plot and come first to the bar to speak with Joe who was baby-sitting Ann’s child, Mary. He described the transformation of her six month retreat.

       Joe described the conversation, her clothing, the unbuttoned top two of her sweater, the way she had played with Mary and stayed nearly two hours drinking and making small talk. Then she finally left for the dojo to sate her curiosity about Duncan’s motivation to trap her with Joe as bait.

       As Joe wove through the seemingly inconsequential doings of three nights before, Adam just watched and wondered how the blues man could be so oblivious to what seemed so damnably obvious. Ram had made a move on him, had given him more than enough time to decide his answer.

       And poor old Joe hadn’t even heard the question. Adam sighed inwardly. Ah, just as well. The five thousand year old Immortal could not begin to imagine the barkeep as “Mother’s Significant Other,” or, God forbid, “Dad.”

       “That’s the last I saw of her, Adam,” Joe wanted nothing more than to toss himself into his soft bed and leave this wretched business behind him. “The next morning, two hours before the lunch crowd, I called MacLeod to see when Ram would be moving in. I’d had the spare room upstairs redone and I wanted to be sure everything was ready in time.”

       For no conscious reason, Adam felt close to tears for this simple, gentle man. He could only see a dreadful path ahead of the Watcher. Ram would destroy him and never mean to. And under this self-delusion of pity, Adam harbored a profound indignation, totally at odds with his sense of himself, which said bluntly, albeit silently, “Who the hell does this legless sod think he is?”

       “Anyway,” Joe was saying, “I called and called and no one answered at the dojo. So I went over...”

       “And--?”

       Joe had come on a scene worthy of Alighieri himself. Food and clothes strewn about, a twenty meter scorch mark in the center of the loft apartment which was reflected in similar fire damage on the curtains and the bedclothes. Couch, table, and chairs were upended and tossed to the periphery. And at ground zero, Duncan was sprawled out on the floor, dead to the world, partway covered in a soft blanket and smeared with blood across his midsection.

       Joe had managed to wake him enough to get him into the bath to wash while he made coffee, but the Highlander offered no explanation, spoke not a word, in fact. Nor had he since. There were no headless bodies in the apartment, negating the first guess that a Quickening Major had taken place in the loft. If Ram had been there, there was no sign of her now.

       After Mac’s bath and midway through the coffee, Dawson had spied something out of place on Duncan’s wide bed, an island of order in the sea of scattered, scorched linen.

       “There was a towel on the bed,” Joe scratched at his beard with his knuckles. “And on the towel two swords.”

       Adam pushed away from the bar, grabbed a chair, twirled it around backwards in front of the Watcher and straddled it, leaning forward to listen more carefully. “Two swords,” he prompted.

       “Yes,” Joe said, remembering this was the moment he had started to worry about Ram. “One of them was Ram’s. In its sheath, with a note attached. This note.” Dawson dug in his back pocket and handed a small piece of paper to Adam.

       “Cuneiform,” said Adam. “This will take me a bit. He returned to the bar and pulled a notebook out of his inside jacket pocket. “Go on, I can still listen while I’m at this.”

       “The other sword was the katana, also in its sheath. Mac picked it up and it came apart--” Adam spun round.

       “--it was broken off three inches beyond the hilt and then replaced in the sheath. Mac went ballistic, not with words, just with--” Joe paused, “animal sounds, like roaring.”

       “I can imagine,” Adam commented, though he couldn’t quite. That sword had been part of him for a very long time. If Ram had done this--and Adam did not doubt this was her work--then Duncan must have done something truly awful. She might as well have castrated him, it was that serious a gesture.

       Adam returned to the translation of Ram’s arcane missive.

       “Course, when things calmed down a bit and I got a better look at the sword, I saw it was one of the display pieces from the downstairs gym. I told Mac the broken sword wasn’t his--and, sure enough, his katana was still under the bed where he always kept it.”

       Adam finished the note. “I’ll bet that was a relief.”

       Joe took a deep breath, “Well, you’d think...but it only made him worse. Adam, he broke down and cried. Man,” Dawson shook his head, “that was the scariest thing I think I ever saw.”

       Joe looked up at Adam, “Is that done yet? What does it say?”

       “Well, I could get technical and--” Joe’s look sped the Immortal on, “mainly it says ‘goodbye’,” Adam leaned forward and patted Joe’s back. “I think it’s time we had a talk with our disheveled Gaelic cousin in the corner. Something is definitely not right here.”

.

Tutti son pien di spirti maladetti; ma perché poi ti basti pur la vista, intendi come e perché son costretti.

Those circles are all full of cursed spirits; so that your seeing of them may suffice, learn now the how and why of their confinement

       "Well, now," Adam sauntered over to the Highlander, invading the dim and foreboding aura that surrounded Duncan like a shroud. “What goes on here, friend?”

       “Yer no friend of mine,” Duncan grumbled, lifting a bone dry glass.

       “That’s where you are wrong, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod,” Adam produced the Jameson’s he’d pilfered from Joe’s private stock. He waved the amber nectar past Duncan’s dark gaze and the Scot swiped a broad palm after the treasure.

       “We’ve slowed down a bit,” Adam remarked as he hugged the bottle close to his chest as yet untouched by the Highlander. “Tell you what. A bargain?”

       He had innocently picked just the wrong thing to say.

       Duncan spun sideways and spewed violently on the floor.

       Joe, hovering in the background decided to stay well out of this.

       Adam set the bottle on the table and left momentarily, trying not to gag himself. He returned with a clean wet rag for Duncan’s face.

       “Steady on, Duncan,” he tried to sound encouraging as his friend came back to a more even keel.
“Tell me,” he started again, “what demon is wracking your soul these days? What in the name of the First Fire is going on here?”

       “I kin nay tell yew,” Duncan grumbled and gagged again, but his stomach was empty.

       Adam helped him up and they moved to another table, closer to the blue glow of the indirect bar backlight. “You can tell me anything, Duncan. I am really and truly your friend,” Adam emphasized just in case the Highlander had forgotten in the midst of this drunken funk.

       “She’s yer mother, God Damn It!” Duncan nearly whined.

       “And I am myself beginning to feel much the same way about the situation, Friend,” Adam agreed. “Be that as it may, what’s the harridan been up to of late?”

       Duncan collapsed forward over his knees, but he wasn’t sick this time. Merely sick of heart, sick of soul. “I do not know how I could have done such a thing. How I could have...”

       Adam’s weariness shortened his patience and temper. He grabbed Duncan’s wide shoulders, “Pull it together, Man. What...Happened?”

       Duncan shook his tangle locks.

       “Look, you’re frightening me,” Adam thought his admission might prompt one of Duncan’s own. “It is obvious something horrible has occurred and my imagination is outdistancing my nerve with every passing second. Please, Duncan, tell me what happened.”

       From beneath the dark cave of Duncan’s long hair a quiet, almost unfamiliar voice said simply, “I raped your mother.”

       Adam staggered backward, laughing. “You never!”

       Behind him there was a report like a shot as the glass in Joe’s hand shattered.

       Adam went for another wet rag, saw to getting the shard out of Dawson’s wounded hand, and all the while he was trying to get Duncan to explain what the hell he meant. “Look, I don’t know what you think happened, Duncan MacLeod, but I can bet you large sums that you did not have sex with Ram.”

       Duncan stared open-mouthed at the elder Immortal. “It is hard enough to admit it, Adam. Yer surely nay gonna make me prove it!”

       “Why don’t you just tell us what happened,” Joe said glumly, “and we can try to make some sense of it.”
Adam had opened up a slight doorway out and despite Duncan’s intentions to be truthful about his violation of the woman, he wanted too desperately to have the reality of that night denied. “Why do yew think it can’t have happened?” He wanted Adam to forgive him the incident, so much the better if he could just make it go away entirely.

       “Because she is no one’s idiot and that would have been far too dangerous,” Adam answered finishing the makeshift bandage for Joe.

       “Why’s that?” Joe asked as if he wanted to know any of this.

       “Well, with the Diminishment...” Adam paused and turned towards the Highlander, “give me some specifics about what...”

       Duncan tilted his head in disbelief, “I put my left hand on her...” he motioned before him in the air.

       Adam’s disgust registered openly on his expressive features, “Not that specific!”

       “Well,” Duncan’s long sigh was eerily like a death rattle, “What SPECIFICALLY do you want to know?”

       “Like did anything out of the ordinary...”

       “Adam!” Joe thought he was going to be spewing himself soon.

       “You mean the Quickening?” Duncan supplied.

       The tone and color drained suddenly out of Adam’s face, “Oh....” was all he said and then he went digging into his pockets for the cuneiform note. “Of course, the scorching. What an idiot I am!”

       Several times through the note and then he said, “There’s nothing here except she gives her sword to Joe. Not a good sign. And she gives her love to me--an especially not good sign.”

       Adam ran his sensitive fingers through his short hair, “Why the hell would she do something so stupid? Why did she agree?”

       Duncan’s blood-shot brown eyes rolled heavenward, seven rings above, where the sun still shone, like a drowning victim with his last look at the surface. Adam was going to make him say it aloud again. “I forced her. She did not agree.”

       “But she’s too smart, too clever to have...”

       “I drugged her with some of Joe’s chloral hydrate in her wine. She really dinna have much say in the matter.”

       Adam’s gold eyes widened. “Oh, damn!”

       Joe rested his forehead on the table. Not only had he played the key role in getting her to Duncan’s in the first place, it was his drugs that trapped her there, for Duncan’s nefarious intentions. In the space of a very few moments, Joe and the entire bar had slipped intact into the Seventh Ring, where the suffering of the damned is everywhere apparent.

       And Joe was dimly aware of the throes of the violent who dwell at the Seventh Level. Adam dashed by him, a blur of furious ire and homicidal rage. He tackled Duncan, throwing the Highlander and his chair over back- ward, pummeling the poor Scot’s face into a bloody pulp beneath his unrelenting fists.

       Duncan did nothing in his own defense.

       Adam finally tired and rose off Duncan’s chest, kicking the Highlander's corpse away from him. “You sorry bastard!” he hissed through a throat choked in anger and tears, “You have killed her!”

       “The child she carries will be the death of her, you...!” he caught mid-sob, unable to find a word sufficient to this ravage of the soul, both his mother’s and his own.

       And it had only taken him two short days to go from his glorious discoveries in Lyons to join the rest of them in the Ring.

---

.

       Duncan woke up in his sun-warmed loft, sunk deep in the quilts, and oblivious to his surroundings. His silent sentinel had packed up for the duration and gone off to the seashore. Having stepped outside the bounds of his warrior’s honor, he’d lost his way ‘round the pristine course of his lesser daily activities...

       That, and he’d been drunk for days which made “sleeping in” the only reasonable course to take. He’d been transported down and down and down further still, to the top ring of the Greater Hell, the seventh ring. What reason did he have to rise early?

       Except that the other little demons here were buzzing about, dusting and cleaning and ringing their damn bells. Speaking in tones loud enough to disturb but not loud enough to comprehend. So, when the full smell of new coffee wafted over the Highlander, he gave up trying to sleep, and shuffled out of bed, dragging the top quilt over his shoulders like a chieftain’s cloak, mumbling ancient Gaelic curses to the other hellish gnomes as he made his way to the bathroom and a shower.

       He emerged to find there weren’t nearly so many demons as he had imagined. Just the two: Daemon Lt. Crane and Daemon Joseph Dawson. They sat at his table with a bank of cellular phones arranged by pitch of bell--Joe was, after all, a blue’s man--and a sizable collection of laptop computers, one of them Duncan’s, all of them hooked into his phone line. He’d have to break into one of the Swiss accounts for this month’s phone bill.They paid him no attention whatsoever. Nice guests, Duncan thought as he made his way to the life- giving brew bubbling quietly in the coffee-maker. He could never seem to make it work right, but Dawson had the touch. A few sips and Duncan was ready to rejoin the living.

       He settled in at the table. “Good morning, gentlemen,” Duncan began, “Watchers’ Convention a little early this year?”

       Both men turned slowly in unison towards him and glared a silent warning louder than a roar. Duncan was impressed.

       Crane returned to his conversation with Dawson, “Okay, I think we’ve got Ryan covered for the moment. Piersen’s over at his flat helping him move in. Adam’s a flake, but he’s excellent in a crisis, and probably the most clever field operative we have in the immediate area.”

       Duncan paused mid-sip, “Adam is in California?”

       Dawson shook his head, “Here,” he answered brusquely and returned to typing several messages on the different laptops and sending them off into the ether. He turned one screen around so Crane could start reading part of the return message, all graphs and stats by the look of it.

       Duncan tried not to pout as he finished his coffee. This was his house, damnation! And he was tired of explaining all those extended long-distance Paris calls to his accountant. The fellow already had a merciless running gag about Duncan’s phone-in bordello. “What is Adam doing in California?” he tried again.
Dawson stopped typing, pursed his lips, and breathed out noisily through his nose. He pushed back from the table and addressed the Highlander directly.

       “Mr. MacLeod,” Joe began.

       Duncan’s eyebrows shot up. What is this? Mr.?

       “Why don’t you wake up a bit more,” Joe’s tones were tempered, but just barely. “And when you catch the bus, we’ll get back to you.”

       MacLeod’s jaw dropped. Rude! He rose out of his chair and grabbed Joe by the shoulders.

       “Let’s just sit down why don’t we?” Crane’s light-hearted, dinner-party demeanor was accentuated by the barrel of his service revolver planted firmly against Duncan’s left temple.

       “No problem,” Duncan’s hands lifted and he backed into his seat. “All I want to know is...”

       Lt. Crane reholstered the weapon beneath his left arm and motioned for Duncan to follow him to the other end of the loft.

       He’s got it adjusted too far behind him, MacLeod thought, too slow a position. Well, fast enough though, he admitted. “What...?”

       Crane put his palm up, “I’m not supposed to do this, but in the interests of keeping the peace...”

       MacLeod opened his mouthed.

       “Shut up!” Crane’s whisper sizzled through the mote-spangled rays of the morning sun.

       Shut up? Duncan bit his lower lip and crossed his arms lest they fly of their own accord to throttle this insolent...

       “Sorry, sorry,” Crane’s apology was for form only. “Just listen! Richard Ryan arrived this morning.”

       “Richie’s not due till the end of the week.”

       “MacLeod, it IS the end of the week. You’ve been...” he let the thought drift away unfinished. “Adam Piersen, I believe you know him, one of the Paris researchers, is keeping watch over Ryan.”

       “Watch? Why the hell...?”

       “He is the next.”

       “Next what, Lieutenant?”

       “We’ve run extensive projections, exhaustive profiler data, and our best information about unidentified or lost Watchers and Immortals, through the Watcher Network systems. We still aren’t any closer to determining the identity of the Knacker, but we can tell within ninety-two percent certainty, who the next victim will be...”

       MacLeod dove under his bed. His katana was gone!

       “About that,” Crane said uncomfortably, “Joe had us move it downstairs until we determined, that is, you were very, um...indisposed,”

       MacLeod levered up to standing and advanced on the Watcher Crane.

       “Out of sorts?” Crane offered. Duncan stared at him stupidly and kept coming. What exactly had Joe said? Crane back-peddled, his right hand already at his waist and headed for his left armpit. Oh, yeah.... “Joe said you had your head so far up your ass you couldn’t see daylight at high noon in the Sahara and it wasn’t a good idea to arm you until it was...”

       “I get the idea,” Duncan said quietly. The fuzz inside his head began to clear as Crane continued.

       “Look, I’ve worked with Joe Dawson more than a decade, and I can tell you, I’ve never seen him so angry. Don’t let that ‘Creole shrimp wouldn’t melt in my good-old-boy mouth’ routine fool you..”

       Not that it ever had, Duncan thought.

       “...but he’s just about reached critical mass between the next Knacker attack and that,” Crane found he’d been staring at the very spot in the floor where...He jerked his gaze away,” and that business between you and Ram at the beginning of the week.”

       MacLeod’s features narrowed, the dark eyes smoldering. “How do you know about that?”

       “Look,” Crane jabbed his index finger into Duncan’s chest.

       Duncan just stared down in disbelief that this mortal should presume...

       “You’re just very lucky that Joe did tell me about it. Or you’d be down at the station trying to come up with a reason why we shouldn’t jail your ass!”

       MacLeod’s eyes widened. He was just going to have to kill this little piece of shit. Squash him like a bug.

       “And if you don’t behave,” Crane was blindly mistaken about his advantage. He tipped his chin up to point at the center of the loft. “We moved the rug over the stain after we cleaned up, but there’s still plenty of blood soaked into the planks to keep you out of circulation and in the courts for a while.”

       “What do you mean ‘blood’?” Duncan was aghast.

       Crane was no poker player. His gaze drew down suddenly to Duncan’s midsection and a little lower.

       MacLeod resisted the urge to cross his hands over his crotch, feeling naked even beneath the thick canvas of his jeans. Now, he thought, now would be a good time to kill this bastard.

       “We thought,” Crane finally woke up to his imminent danger so near the Immortal, and started backing up, fast, his mouth working mindlessly, trying to be truthful and tasteful at one and the same time. “Some incompatibility of ...um...stature, perhaps that you were just a little too well...”

       “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing,” Crane turned on his heels and fled back to his master, Dawson, still hard at work coordinating the twin projects of finding the Knacker and Ram.

       The Highlander wandered back to the coffee giving the lieutenant a wide berth. Pervert! Duncan knew he would never hurt a woman. The idea! What shoddy, dishonorable place did this Crane crawl out of? Another cup of coffee and Duncan’s wits began to sort through the confusion.

       And anyway, Ram was an Immortal, if no longer a Danaan, her regenerative abilities would have made any appreciable blood loss impossible even if what Crane suggested had occurred. Which, of course, it couldn’t have.

       Because Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod was an honorable warrior. He did not injure the weak and helpless. He did not brutalize women.

       Then again, Duncan poured another cup, he wasn’t a rapist either.

       But so he had done, no matter the reason.

       Could this other be true as well? This thought shook him, mostly because it suggested the next permu- tation in logical progression which was: and if this is true I am NOT an honorable warrior, NOT Duncan MacLeod...I am NOT anything.

       Except the father of a son gone missing, stolen by his mother and vanished from the known world. This steadied him and focused his attention to at least one of the projects on the Watchers’ plate. He went to sit quietly with the trolls and the goats beneath the seventh bridge where they worked, unceasingly, their wizard ways, where their bent frames and gnarled gnomish hands cast forth their nets in darkness.

---

       Evidently, Dawson had gotten to a point where there was nothing to do but wait. He pushed back from the table, grabbed his cane, and made his way to the couch and a softer place to light.

       “Crane,” Joe called past Duncan as if he weren’t there. “Can I suppose you’re gonna explain just how you messed up so bad on this assignment?”

       Crane’s shoulders lifted and he breathed in slowly for what seemed like a very long time. “You can suppose.”

       “Crane!” Dawson sounded way less shrimp Creole and way more Seacouver crab.

       “She had someone,” oh, dear, Crane had hoped to avoid this part, but of course that was impossible. He did the best he could. What a mess this was, and all the more so because Northwest Territories Chief Dawson was so taken with the strange woman. And even messier because Crane himself had shot and killed her. Once. And this nasty business with Duncan...

       “We’re waiting, Crane,” Dawson pushed back into a more comfortable position. He had a curious notion that his prosthetics had melted onto him and would have to eventually be removed surgically.

       “A woman came to visit her twice weekly, regular as clockwork.”

       “And....?”

       “And, I asked her about it...” Crane continued.

       “We’re not supposed to talk to the Subjects!” Dawson shot back.

       Crane stared, dumbfounded, first at Dawson, then at MacLeod, then back to Dawson again.

       Dawson pursed his lips and shook his head, “Just get on with it!”

       “Ram explained why the woman was coming to visit her. It was a little unusual, I’ll admit, but it really didn’t...” Crane took another breath and fought to remember he was also a policeman, someone of authority, and armed as well. “It wasn’t any of my business. It didn’t interfere with my surveillance. I didn’t pry any further.”

       “And this was the woman you found in Ram’s apartment when I called you and told you she was missing and you wouldn’t stop going on about how she’d never left her rooms all night.”

       Crane nodded, “Yes. Evidently, what I thought was this woman leaving Ram’s apartment in the late evening was really Ram herself. They were trading places twice a week.”

       “Why?” Duncan asked.

       One of the half-dozen cell phones rang.

       “Navy blue, second from the end,” Dawson said without looking up.

       Crane retrieved said device and, sure enough... “You got in touch,” he was saying.

       Duncan’s phone rang and one of the laptops checked off its line mid-download. Mac went to answer it. No one was on the line. Then he switched it over to the house line, “MacLeod here.”

       “We owe her what?” Crane croaked, “You can’t be serious!”

       “No,” said Duncan on the other line, “I don’t know anyone...wait.” He sheltered the receiver in his broad palm. “Crane.”

       “...but that’s a thousand a day! Wait. What?” Crane answered.

       “Are you expecting a...” Duncan paused, “Young woman by the name of Lucille?”

       “Lucille What?” Dawson asked. It was the first less-than-angry thing he’d said to the Highlander all morning.

        Duncan took that as a good sign. He got back on the phone, “Listen, Al, can you fix her some coffee... we’re sorting things out...Oh, I see...”

        The lift had already engaged.

        “I think that’s her last name,” Crane answered Dawson’s earlier question.

        “And her first name?” Dawson struggled up from the couch. He wasn’t in the mood for company, but it seemed Al had already sent Ram’s house-sitter up and she might have some useful information. “I didn’t catch that.”

       “Sweet,” Crane repeated. “Her first name is Sweet.”

       MacLeod’s lips parted in a full, bare smile. “Sweet Lucille? A hooker?”

       “And then some,” Crane bowed his head and blushed.

       Oh, Duncan thought, lighter of heart than he’d been in many days, there is one advantage in the Seventh Circle:

       You do meet the most interesting people.

---

       The lift arrived at the top floor and Duncan walked over to open the door for the aforementioned Ms. Lucille. The lift was empty. Duncan turned sideways and glanced back towards Dawson and Lt. Crane, a quizzical look on his face.

       In the next instant, he gave out with a surprised grunt and jumped forward.

       Oh, Lord have mercy, Joe Dawson thought as Sweet Lucille poured herself in a slow lateral roll out from behind the lift frame side. Passing Duncan’s turned back, she ran a pristine, manicured hand down the round of his left gluteal and squeezed, ever so lightly, eliciting the grunt and the jump.

      Oh, Dear, Dear Lord, Joe felt himself immediately transported back into a creaky, film noire setting. And this all-too-luscious babe of babes with her headlights on bright had his entire gum shoe attention.

       She did not so much walk as course, lazily, like a river down the bayou, a rippling wave beneath the moonlight. The deep gold-brown eyes, half-lidded in their amusement, took in first Crane, breathless and flushed, then Duncan, skulking back to the table by an alternate route, and lastly they rested on Dawson where they settled so intensely, so invitingly, that his mouth went dry and he snaked his tongue over the chip in his front tooth.

       Mercy, mercy. Sweet Lucille.

       She had on a sleeveless beige jersey dress that would have been understated and tailored if it could have found a single straight line to follow on her entire lush frame, but that was impossible. So the V-neck sur- rendered to a deep scoop over the incredible breasts and the tiny waist dipped in above a flare of hip which reminded one of purebred racing horses, great wild mares with deep pelvises, and legs that went on forever.
“Some of my friends,” she began in a lyrical, laughing melody.

       About a second soprano, Joe thought, with just one whiskey too many down her throat, lending a bedroom character to her notes, a waking up late on Sunday morning after a roaring good Saturday night sound.

       God in Heaven, just shoot me now, Crane thought as he prayed to the Divinity that he did not have to rise from his chair, or God forbid, walk, anytime soon.

       “Some of my friends call me Sweet,” she said, tilting her long neck sideways and caressing her bare shoulder with a sweep of her long auburn waves. “For their own various reasons, I suppose.”

       She glided around to face Crane, her devastating rump level with Duncan’s face as she purposefully turned her back to the Highlander. “Some of my friends,” she placed her hand on top of Crane’s and he swallowed hard, trying to look detached. “Some of my friends call me Luz.”

       She pronounced this “loose.”

      “And we can all suppose why THAT is,” Duncan retorted behind her.

       Without seeming to change anything in the continually moving rhythm of her distracting sway, Luz’s left elbow connected explosively with MacLeod’s nose and sent him head-over-heels, over the back of his chair, thud, to the floor. Blood streamed from beneath his two large hands which were busy repositioning the wounded member more towards the center of his face. Tears streamed involuntarily from his eyes.

       And neither of the other two men made any move to help him or even ask after his welfare. Both were damning themselves for not having the gonads to have done that very thing themselves long before now.

       God have mercy.

       Luz glided around slowly and looked down at the Scot. Her voice changed neither in pitch or volume, and its very lack of ire made it all the more impressive. “That’s not the half of what you deserve, you unmitigated prick!”

       Lord help them. She was smart, too.

       “I told her she should have done something else entirely with your sword. I know I would have.”

       Crane grimaced and his hand slipped off the table and found his lap.

       “But she said the symbolism would suffice to convey her displeasure with you.” Luz shook her head slowly and turned smoothly back towards Dawson, all the while speaking to MacLeod as if he were a guest ghost at a seance. “I told her a brute with your proclivities was not likely to grasp the subtle gesture, and that...well, there were a lot of anatomical references that followed with which I shall not bore you.”

       “And you,” Luz leaned forward towards Joe who had only enough presence of mind to make himself keep looking up at her eyes. “I have wanted to meet you for a very long time. Oh, Papa Bear, you really are something.”

       She accented this honey-laden line by cupping his jaw in her cool soft palm. Looking him up and down, Luz said simply, “Oh, yes, I do see. Yes, indeed.”

       “We need to ask you some questions about Ram,” Joe heard himself saying.

       “Of course you do,” she continued her incoming wave until her nose almost touched his. He could smell her perfume, the mint of her toothpaste, the light slick of lip gloss in a berry flavor resting on the pillow of her lips like the plastic covers in his mom’s parlor, only far more inviting. She smelled tasty. His mouth and nose filled with the whole experience, the idea, of her.

       Oh, he knew why they called her “Sweet.” And they probably meant it with all the same respect they implied when they called a prizefighter “Sugar.”

       Amen, amen.

       Christ have mercy.

       Sweet Lucille.

       Still on his back on the floor, his nose bleeding over his mouth and down his chin, Duncan righted his chair. “Thank you,” Luz said flatly, as in “it’s about time someone remembered to offer a working girl a chair.” She reached behind her and pulled the chair forward to the table and drifted down into it like a swan coming to rest at the lake’s edge.

       She arranged both her beautiful hands on the table before her and picked up Joe’s enchantment where she had last left off. “I first met Ram about six months ago,” she began.” Whereupon she transported them each into a realm the three men would never, in full faculty, have condoned entering together.

      But it was part of Luz's stunning qualities, her innate charisms, that she took each of them singly, privately past the conventions of the ordinary.

       Duncan heard, or tried to hear, all the reasons why Ram was at least partly to blame for what had happened. Why her flaunting of propriety made her somehow essentially evil.

       Crane heard his favorite fantasy played out before him in thrilling clarity.

       Joe, surprising even himself, heard exactly what Luz said, and understood all too clearly another facet of the tragedy. The portion which he had always owned, all unknowing.

---

       Luz recalled the first day she had gone to see Ram about a job. It was an afternoon gig, twice weekly, with the occasional overnight stay. She would have declined. Hell, she’d set her price so high she was sure they’d decline.

       None such. This old lady was one rich bitch. What would be the harm just to check it out? It sounded a simple enough arrangement and Ram had come highly recommended, by one of Luz’s customers. He was one of Luz’s favorite customers, in fact, Dr. Adam Piersen, who did not visit Seacouver nearly often enough to suit her. It seemed his mother, Sean Seaton, had moved in on the west side and she was the one who’d requested her son find her a “woman of experience, a courtesan.”

       Luz had at least liked the sound of that. She always thought of herself as a talent in the wrong time. Historically, she would have made out like a bandit. Currently, though she tried to keep up her studies, her intellectual and cultural endeavors, still most of her companions did not appreciate most of her abilities. She did her best to educate her regulars, a highly-placed elite and eclectic group, but most of them thought of her as comfortable, classy furniture, or a special, though expensive, recreation.

       Perhaps this elder woman would have an appreciation for the finer things, one of which most assuredly, was Luz. Perhaps she was an aficionado of opera or symphony, the ballet, or the other arts. She had worked in Paris in some sort of research Adam had said...perhaps literary critique would be more to her liking. Luz had envisioned long and profound discussions of the great works, the major poets...

       Well, at least she has a classy maid, Luz thought as a thin fortyish woman in mid-length navy blue skirt, pale Oxford shirt, sensible shoes, answered the door. “You must be Ms. Lucille,” the woman announced, running her slender fingers through short brown curls.

       “Yes, I am,” Luz stepped into the simple apartment, furnished austerely like the inside of an art gallery with each single piece claiming its own independence in the airy light of the high windows.

       “Can I get you some tea,” the woman asked showing Luz to the couch before the pale green drapes. They billowed gently before the slightly lifted window and cast a rolling, under-water lighting to the comfortable, if spare corner group of over-stuffed arm chair, deep leather couch and mahogany table.

       “No, thank you,” Luz settled onto the couch. It was just soft, just firm enough, for any number of activities that came instantly to mind. “I’m in a bit of a hurry. Could you tell me when Mrs. Seaton is planning to be here for the interview.”

        The woman laughed softly and lowered herself into the deep cushions of the arm chair. “Now will be fine, Ms. Lucille.”

       “You don’t look old enough to be Dr. Piersen’s mother.”

       “I am a great deal older than I appear,” the woman said automatically, as if she had answered it all too often and it was no longer even a compliment. “And I prefer to be called ‘Ram’.”

       Now that Luz was corrected in her first mistaken assumption she was more careful in her assessment of this woman. Her ability to read people was her stock and trade. She would not be fooled again. “You are used to being in authority,” Luz said simply, watching the affirming reaction in her client’s eyes. Oh, this one is a Mama Bear, big time, she thought. Ram had been in power so long she no longer had the affectations one usually associates with persons of high position.

       “I suppose we could begin with why I asked Adam to request your presence here today. I have,” Ram paused, a little discomfited by the subject.

       Luz never missed a beat. “You have a request of a personal nature,” she supplied, “something a little too intimate to lead into a conversation with what is to all intents and purposes, a stranger.”

       Ram’s eyes narrowed and it was clear she also had misjudged Luz, for here she was clearly changing her assessment. “If this doesn’t work out, would you consider being my Field Marshall?”

       Luz stared, “What is that?”

       “When one is anticipating an especially difficult campaign, the very best, the most able generals, are the ones you call to your side and empower as Field Marshalls. These are your strongest and most cunning allies.”

       Luz smiled, “I always though I would make a good Privy Counsel or Confessor.”

       Ram laughed and offered her hand. “Done.”

       “Well, Lord,” Luz said, thoroughly enjoying this elaborate play. “What is your pleasure this day?”

       “Just exactly that, as it happens...What do you...How are you called?”

       “Luz,” she replied slipping sideways on the couch closer to where it abutted one arm of Ram’s chair. “What will I be visiting you twice a week and sometimes overnight for?”

       “The agreed upon price,” Ram replied. “I thought Adam had discussed that with you already.”

       Again, Luz heard the sound of the landowner condescending to the peasants, kindly, but condescending nonetheless. “And what will I be doing for this agreed-upon price?”

       “Oh,” Ram shrugged, “I misunderstood. Well...”

       Luz noted that the woman had stalled again and that she had yet to really sit in the big comfortable chair so much as perch at the edge as if she would jump up at any moment. “I always find truth and directness to be a little difficult at first, but really the only answer to the uncomfortable situations. Believe me, Ram, I have heard it all. Nothing you could say would shock or in any way disturb me. Why am I here?”

       “All right then,” Ram grinned. “I had an unpleasant experience with Adam’s conception and I have not had any inclination to pursue such activities since that time.”

       Luz found her credulity strained, not nearly so much as later, when she learned the real truth.

       “Until now,” Ram continued. Her patrician features softened. “Ten years ago I fancied I had fallen in love with a voice on the phone here in Seacouver. I was half-way round the world in Paris at the time, busy with my own concerns, I had no time for such silly cravings.”

       “But there came a time, recently, when my presence was required here. So in the course of my travels I came to meet the voice, thinking that in the flesh I would be disappointed enough to lose the foolish distraction that had haunted me nearly a decade.”

       “And when you finally met him...?” Luz had to admit she liked this woman already, but something too sinister rested just below the serenity and control of the surface, or seemed to. It made her wary.

       “Oh, I fell hopelessly in love with him of course,” Ram answered, laughing gently at herself. “Everything about him appealed to, to...” her slender, pale hands with the impossibly long fingers stretched out in the sea green light as if she were swimming through her words. “I felt all those things I’d only read about: the aching, the hunger, the...” The fingers closed in sudden fists. “Oooh, I just want to...”

       Still waters, Luz reminded herself even as she drew back a little. “Yes?”

       “I believe the expression is, ‘fuck his brains out,’ though for the life of me I can never quite follow why that should have the meaning it does.”

      Several minutes passed before Luz could catch her breath and speak again, “Oh, Ramikins,” Luz held her sides, “you are to die from.”

      Ram left to gather the tea things while Luz struggled back to composure. Piece of cake, she thought. This woman just needs a little insight into her own pleasure and then she needs a little luck. This phone person had better be her worth or she will run over the top of him in every way.

      This is going to be fun, outrageous price and all. Thank you, Dr. Piersen.

       Having sketched in her curriculum, Luz began on some background over tea. “Maybe we could start by talking a little about Mr. Piersen,” Luz suggested.

       Ram, back on the edge of the chair, tilted her head.

       “Adam’s father.”

       Ram drew up very tall and breathed in slowly. She was obviously going over all the possible ways to answer the question without saying anything substantial.

       That’s a habit we’ll have to work on, Luz thought. It’s wasteful and unproductive. “Rules, Ram. We are going to have to set some rules.”

       “All right.”

       “You hired me at an exorbitant price...”

       “I’m told you’re the best.”

       “Whatever,” Luz put her hand up to refuse what would have been her fifth dark-chocolate almond cookie. “As I was saying, you hired me. It does not serve you to second-guess your original decision, which is that I know what I am doing and you need to follow my instruction or fire me.”

       “All right,” Ram replied a little tentatively. “It makes sense.”

       “Well, then. I ask the questions. You give me truthful answers or you say you don’t want to answer. Stop trying to shape your answers in the best possible light.”

       “Agreed.”

       “Well?”

       Ram almost started the same process again, but with a visible struggle, she curbed her tendency, “I do not know who Adam’s father is.”

       Luz shook her head, “Ramikins!”

       Ram closed her green eyes. “I was lost. I stumbled upon an encampment of five brothers and asked for directions. Over the next week they gave me a great many things, including Adam, but directions were not any of these, and most of what I got was quite unpleasant.”

       Luz leaned towards Ram placing a hand on the chair arm, offering proximity without the hazard of contact. This was a Mama Bear of the First Order.

       “I am trusting you not to tell Adam this, ever.” Of her own accord, Ram placed her hand over Luz’s and brought her face close. “No one else knows this but you. No one must ever know it.”

       “Because it shames you?” Luz pushed gently.

       Ram stared, “Oh, of course not. I did nothing dishonorable, and to have Adam I would have done and endured many things worse than that. Adam would be profoundly hurt if he knew how he began.”

       “Does he look like them?” Luz pushed again.

       “What?” Ram thought a moment. “I see what you mean, but no, I do not see them when I look at him. I never actually thought about it before. I must have been more affected than I admit. Little wonder that I have never sought another until now, or that I would be so uncertain as to require hiring a teacher.”

       Luz thought that was sufficient insight for the moment. No good to think too much. Not at first, anyway. She pushed the tea tray out of the way and sat on the mahogany table across from Ram, their knees just touching. The maneuver forced Ram back into the depths of the chair just to maintain her inordinately large comfortable distance. “I think we’ve talked enough,” Luz rested her fingers lightly on Ram’s knees just beneath the skirt’s hem. “Kiss me,” Luz said softly.

       Ram leaned forward cautiously. “I don’t know how, Luz.”

       Luz lifted her hands from Ram’s knees and wove her fingers into the short, dark curls just above her ears. She tilted Ram’s face slightly sideways and pulled her down to press their mouths together in a chaste caress of infinite tenderness.

       Or so Luz thought.

       Ram jerked backward. “Don’t hold me,” she barked. “I cannot abide being bound or held.”

       “Okay, Ramikins.”

       “And stop calling me that!”

       “Okay, Ram,” Luz said more forcefully. She walked over to her purse, retrieved a brush, and walked behind Ram’s chair. “You hired me to push you to those places you cannot go alone. If you want to stop, we can take this up another time.”

       Ram leaned against the chair’s deep back with just her head above the edge. “No, get on with it,” she said with a sublime resignation.

       Luz began to brush her hair. Only that. Ram’s muscles started to unknot and her neck loosened as she snuggled more deeply into the thick padding of the moss grey chair, her arms draped over the rests. Ram’s breathing deepened and she began to fade into the netherworld just this side of sleep and dreams. At some point the brush was replaced by Luz’s fingers tingling through Ram’s scalp and smoothing the muscles in her neck.

       Luz was excellent at her craft, and while this was an unusual client, the skills required were not so different as in many other cases. The trick, though Luz never really thought of it as such--she rather preferred magic as the operative term--was to very gradually take Ram into arousal without actually waking her up enough to scare her. This required an exquisite touch and Luz was more than equal to the task.

       Except for the fact of her earlier brutalization, Ram’s own native passion should serve them both well, Luz thought. She was in excellent health and shape for her age, or any age, except for being a little on the lean side as if she did not bother to care for herself much, in any way, including food. Well, they would change that. They would go shopping. That nice little deli down the block and the health food store six streets over, and the tea shop at the corner of..

       And all the while Luz made her plans for Ram’s new life, she passed one threshold after the next, the sleeping woman rolling beneath her talented touch like a contented house cat before the fire. Down the buttons of her blouse, light as a zephyr and beneath, to the small firm breasts which lifted into Luz’s practiced ministrations and Ram began to awake from more than slumber. Her head drew back and she began to moan as Luz peeled the shirt aside and the wind from the window cooled the surface of the naked skin there.

       Without a sound, Luz rounded the chair, knelt beside the arm. Leaning over she gently nuzzled the nearest breast. Ram stretched and rolled, as Luz had expected, towards the nuzzling. Luz began to suckle and Ram went utterly limp. This is probably the only sensual pleasure she knows by first hand experience, Luz thought. She slept with her infant, as many mothers do, so the babes may nurse through the night. Thank you again, Adam, she thought, for you have left us a path to take your mother back from the violence of your conception. Continuing round the chair, Luz ended between Ram’s knees, where she paused a moment to consider whether they should stop here and take the gains the day had given, or proceed. Ram would go forward, if she could, Luz reasoned. Forward, then.

       Luz slipped her hands beneath the skirt and found the top of her--they would be cotton, definitely have to go shopping--underwear and pulled them gently down the length of her thighs, over her knees and off. Ram began to stir. She was already somewhat askew in the chair. Luz lifted one knee up and hooked it over the arm. Then she bent towards the inside of the thigh at that knee and planted a soft kiss there. Ram’s whole body reacted. The green eyes opened slightly but their gaze was unfocused and a deep, sighing moan escaped the loose, parted lips as Luz worked her sensitive fingers closer and closer to Ram’s slumbering center, now waking.

       Luz wanted to be very careful. There would doubtless be scarring from such an extended period of abuse, even so long ago. There would be anatomical alterations, a difference in the way the regenerated nerves would respond and she had no intention of ruining this first session with any pain or...

       Luz's hands pulled back as if they had touched fire.

       The sudden absence of sensation was in itself enough to bring Ram to climax which she proceeded through somewhat noisily, being entirely surprised by the unfamiliar sensation. One more deep breath and Ram heaved upright in the chair and blinked her eyes into focus. “Luz?”

       Sweet Lucille was in a thoroughly daunting rage, speaking to herself in a low throaty tone, much like a running growl. She neither looked up nor stopped gathering her things together.

       Ram levered up slowly, trying to clear her head. No matter what she tried she couldn’t stop grinning. “Luz, I am sorry. I couldn’t ...” she rubbed her temples, “I am not even sure what I did wrong. Tell me!”

       Luz was nearly to the front door, but she stopped and wheeled, “This was Adam’s idea. Right?”

       Ram was at a loss as to what had made Luz so mad and the heady afterglow was still addling her senses. “What is wrong?”

       “You said you wouldn’t lie,” Luz spat, “Jesus, how could I have believed such an obvious fabrication: five brothers on a week’s gang bang in the woods...” Something else occurred to her, “AND you said you were Adam’s mother. And have you any other smoke to blow up my ass?” Luz’s tones turned vicious, “It is, after all, your dime. And I, only a whore!”

        Ram’s hands went palms-up in supplication. “I never lied to you!”

       That was just too much for Sweet Lucille. She stormed towards Ram like a high wind at sea. “And just how stupid do you think I am. You’ve no C-section scar. So I say you never delivered Adam Piersen.”

       “Unless of course, you pulled him out of your ear!” she added. “You can pretend to many things, Ram, but if you’re not a virgin then I’m the Queen of England!”

       “What I can’t understand is why you went to all the bother to...”

       “Luz,” Ram said quietly. She had somehow gotten around behind Luz during the last tirade. She held Luz in an inescapable embrace. “I need to show you something...”

       “I’ve seen quite enough, thank...!”

       “Shhhhhh,” Ram whispered into her left ear. “If I told you the truth, you would think me a liar or worse, insane. But I will show it to you if you will be still for a moment.”

       Luz was no match for this bitch, though she outweighed her by quite a bit. She agreed.

       “Don’t turn around just yet,” Ram said. “You have to promise me that you will do nothing, absolutely nothing, except breathe, for the next five minutes, no matter what you see, or what you think you see, no matter what happens, or seems to happen.”

       Luz was getting tired of being jerked around. “All right!” she spit.

       “Then turn around, Luz.”

       Sweet Lucille turned around in time to see Ram drive a long carving knife straight into her own heart and fall dead at her feet shortly thereafter.

       Luz did as she had promised, though the part about breathing was a little harder than it had sounded. She had to continuously remind herself. At that it was more a miserable batch of catch-up gasping, than real breathing.

       And all the while, dead as stone, Ram lay at her feet.

       Still with the grin on her grey, cold lips.

---

        As Sweet Lucille related Ram’s story she rose and floated around the table, settling behind Lt. Crane. She used him casually as a demonstration model of sorts, running her hands through his hair, kneading his neck muscles gone limp as spaghetti. She ran her hands over his chest, fussing with his coat, and all the while she seemed oblivious to her affect on the young policeman.

        When she got to the part about Ram’s left thigh and lightly rested her impeccable fingers on Crane’s lap, the poor man emitted a peculiar noise, partway between a squeak and a whimper, and he melted out of his chair and disappeared under the table, panting.

        Duncan’s attempt to stop laughing was less than successful. The sound bubbled over from the kitchen section of the loft where he attended to his own, less pleasant, wounding by the redoubtable Ms. Lucille.
Joe Dawson could not help laughing himself, but the understanding that he had missed the opportunity of a lifetime tempered his laughter with the dim harmonics of regret.

        Crane rolled out from under the table and dragged himself off to MacLeod’s bathroom, slamming the door loudly as if this would gain him back some measure of dignity.

       “You are incredible,” Joe complimented Luz who had decided to come play on his side of the table now that Crane had run from the field.

        “Those come off?” she indicated his legs in the same light direct manner as Ram had done that first night they walked together, half a year ago.

       “Yeah,” Joe replied. He watched the wheels turn behind the golden eyes. The fact of his prosthetics seemed to intrigue her. Luz was not at all distressed by his mutilation. Rather, she seemed to be fascinated.
There was a deep, sweet sigh, then she lifted her pale, soft shoulders, “Ram would kill me for sure if I...” She just let all the possibilities drift away.

       “If you what?” Duncan destroyed the delightful train of thought which had floated Joe the same direction as all those unspoken possibilities. The Highlander had finally finished with his nose and was back for more.

      “Pleasant as this little conversation is...”

       “For some of us,” he chided Dawson directly and glanced briefly at the still-closed bathroom door where Crane had disappeared. “However, this is getting us nowhere nearer finding Ram.”

       “Oh you are really too much, you bounder!” she wheeled and Duncan took a prudent step backward. “You, you...” she spit out the words. “You have no idea what Ram has done for you. What it has cost her. How close you came to...”

       With a sound like an expiring steam kettle, Luz plopped down in Crane’s chair and folded her arms over her delightfully ample cantilever. Duncan leaned forward to speak, but Dawson reached up and silenced him with a hand on his forearm.

       When some of her composure returned, Luz spoke again. “Think on this, you Scottish scoundrel...” she paused and retraced her thoughts to an earlier point. “Ram came by the apartment the morning after you ravaged her.”

       It was hardly that, Duncan protested silently.

       “She was bruised and swollen over the entire left side of her face, her eye swollen shut, and hardly able to breathe, her throat was so badly crushed.”

       MacLeod knew she was lying. Ram would have healed long before morning. He pulled a chair up to the table and sat down with Dawson on his sword side and Lucille on his shield. Possibly the poorest tactical position he had ever walked into sober. “You are lying.”

       Luz paid him no attention at all and Dawson only glared a dismissive expression as Ms. Sweet continued, “God is my witness, I have no idea how she made it home. She could hardly move, she was so bruised and battered, shoulder to knee. I got her into a warm tub and between that and some ice for her face and neck, Ram was eventually able to talk well enough to explain what happened.”

       “She explained that she’d drunk a bit too much at Joe’s and the wine when she got here tipped her over the edge into drunkenness,” the golden eyes pinned Duncan, “You gave her something, didn’t you?”
 

       “Yes,” Duncan replied. “But you’re still lying.”

       “Ram glossed over the particulars as she usually does, but I took it from the way it was written all over her body, that there’d been a replay of the five-brothers episode,” Luz gave MacLeod such a look as would have killed a mortal being. “I couldn’t understand why she was still carrying her injuries when it took her less time than that to recover from being dead.”

       “And that’s why I know you are lying,” Duncan accused for the third time.

       Luz simply paused, waiting for the Highlander to stop making those meaningless sounds, then she continued, “Ram explained she had lost the last of her power with the creation of the child she carried. A boy, she says. As if the world could bear another of your ilk.”

       Luz laughed then, but it was a demonic melody, sinister in its minor key. “Yet another raptorous brute, too heavy, too big, too clumsy...too STUPID, too...”

       “...too mean. I told her to kill it, that I could take her that very day to a lovely little clinic east of here...”

       Duncan’s dark eyes widened and a fear gripped him so tightly round his heart he could not breathe.

       “She wouldn’t of course.”

       Duncan’s chest relaxed and the sweet morning air rushed in. Maybe this hooker-with-the-heart-of-steel was telling the truth after all.

       And at the height of her advantage, Luz broke down and wept.

       “I don’t expect you to understand this,” she said trying to keep the silken voice steady through her distress, “but I have to say it anyway, because Ram never will, because it should be said so that someone will know and will remember what was done for you, Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod...”

       “So that you will know what was given you that night. You will never be so blessed again.”

       “You were asleep, exhausted and beaten by the power you and your son had stolen. Her last. Ram was beaten by your weight and the floor and the savagery with which you took her during the Quickening. She was torn and weak from bleeding.”

       “All she had to do was take your head while you lay helpless...”

       Duncan’s jaw slacked. Ram would never have...

       “That was all she needed to regain her power and secure her new son’s future and escape the agony. But she told me she had made you a promise to guard you in weakness...” Luz paused and sobbed softly. Then some inner steel sparked.

       “She sat with you, her sword in her hand, thinking she might just die because she could hardly breathe! She stood as your guardian the whole long night, watching that you were safe while you slept, watching, that none other could assail you!”

       “And it is all the more sad, Dear Duncan...”

       The way Luz said it made him hate his name.

      “All the more sad because you made an identical promise to her.”

       He felt the words as if she were impaling him on them.

       “And she trusted you to keep your promise.”

       She was killing him with her words.

       “And now she is dying because she is too weak to carry your son.”

       He was dead and in hell.

       And nothing he could do would buy him a sorry second of indulgence.

       There was nowhere Duncan could turn, outward or inward, for a whisper of forgiveness, or a moment of deliverance.

---