"Saint Michael, the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our defense against the wickedness and snares of the devil . . . by the power of God, trust into Hell Satan and the other evil spirits who prowl about the world for the ruin of our souls. Amen." - Pope Leo XIII, 1810-1903

Chapter One: Methos in the Age of Uncertainty

"If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts, but if he will be content to begin with doubts, he shall end in certainties." - Francis Bacon, 1561-1626

Richie Ryan had been dead for exactly three weeks and Methos still had no idea why.

He had no idea where Duncan MacLeod was, either.

The Highlander had stumbled away from Richie's body heartbroken by his own act. His stroke, *his* sword, had taken Richie's head. Had Richie struggled? Had he helplessly pitted his strength against Duncan, knowing in those last desperate seconds that he had no hopes of defeating his own teacher? Only Duncan knew, and he was gone. He hadn't returned to the barge that night. He hadn't returned since, as far as Methos knew. He might not even still be in Paris.

He might not even still be alive.

In the condition he'd wandered off in, minus the sword that had been his trusted companion for centuries, Duncan would have been easy kill for any passing Immortal. He might have even offered himself up, just as he'd offered himself to Methos. If a Valhalla of some sort did exist, maybe his tortured warrior soul already graced it, and Methos could give up his frustrated attempts at finding some semblance of reason for this whole mess.

Demons. Zoroastrian myths. Alleged millennial battles between good and evil, as if being an Immortal itself wasn't enough of a daily struggle. All based on the frantic last words and cumulative life's work of a British archeologist named Jason Landry who, it seemed with each new shred of evidence, had been a lunatic or charlatan or both. Somehow Landry had convinced Duncan that an ancient Persian demon on a thousand-year schedule had returned to earth to conquer the world and that only the Highlander could stop him.

Rubbish. Mistranslated and misinterpreted rubbish, propped up by shoddy, self-serving scholarship. Even his own assistant, a small and bitter man named Carl Portram, repudiated Landry's work. They'd met him at the memorial service for Allison Landry, who'd been killed in a tragic fire the day after her grandfather's fatal stroke. Methos and Joe had attended hoping to find out something, anything, that would help decipher the whole mess.

"The man spent his whole life perpetuating ghost stories!" Portram had sneered. "If it wasn't his bloody demons, it was haunted castles or possessed housewives from Birmingham. Reincarnated Egyptian gods in Islington. Let him corner you at a party for more than five minutes and you'd walk away with your head filled with warnings about the end of the world and the reign of evil to come. Haven't you read his books?"

Methos replied, "I thought he had just the one. 'The Mythology of Heroes.'"

"That one hardly made a pound. He earned his true bread and butter under pseudonyms."

Landry's secret works turned out to be dozens of cheap, lurid paperbacks sold in convenience stores and airports. Most were about the occult, but some were badly plotted mysteries or torrid romances. He'd eked out enough money from them to sustain a moderate household, a good thing since no reputable university or institution would hire him for research or teaching. Portram arranged for the publisher to send Methos a boxful. The ancient Immortal found them so utterly appalling most ended up in the fireplace that night.

"Do you believe in a reign of evil to come?" Methos asked at the memorial service.

"I believe in rising unemployment rates to come," Portram answered moodily. "My *own.*"

Archeology had been Landry's profession, demonology his obsession. He'd done extensive research about the farflung cults of the archfiend Mara, documented ancient legends of the desert demon Aza'zel, and traced dozens of drawings of Vrtra, the great and evil celestial serpent. In his final decades the archeologist had turned his back on Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism only to look toward Zoroastrian, Islamic, Egyptian and Aztec myths instead - a complicated, recursive, unsustainable mish-mash of clashing beliefs, a cacophony of human fears, needs and desires.

Despite his utter disdain of Landry's so-called research, Methos nevertheless dedicated himself to studying the man's final journal. Morbid curiosity drove him if nothing else. Duncan had seen something in there or heard something from Landry that made him surrender his own beliefs in an ordered, rational, demon-less universe. What in the brittle and dusty pages could have inspired him to hallucinations, erratic behavior and the slaughter of his own beloved student?

"Are you sure I can't help?" Joe asked, a shadow in the gloom of late afternoon. He stood in the library doorway, leaning heavily on his cane. A wet breeze pushed at the windows of Methos' rented apartment on one of the oldest, quietest streets of Sacre Couer.

Methos rubbed the bridge of his nose, trying to ease the squeezing headache that had plagued him all day. "Not unless you can read ancient Pahlavi," he snapped.

Joe retreated silently, his cane clicking on the hard wooden floors.

Methos instantly regretted his words. He snapped his pencil in two and leaned back in his chair, shivering with the cold of spring. Joe didn't deserve to be the brunt of his frustration. The Watcher had come to Paris to unearth and escort his evil brother-in-law's remains back to the States. He'd witnessed Duncan's deteriorating sanity and stayed because friendship demanded it, but neither Joe nor Methos had envisioned the consequence of not acting soon enough or fast enough to stop the Highlander.

The consequence being, of course, Richie. Beheaded at the tender age of twenty three. He'd had just four years of Immortality. Methos' five thousand years seemed like a gross overindulgence in comparison. But regret didn't justify mistreating Joe. Methos left his library and went in search of his mortal friend. He found him in the sitting room by the empty fireplace, slumped in a red velvet chair with his hand over his face.

"I'm sorry," Methos said. "I shouldn't have snapped."

Joe shook his head but didn't answer. Aside from Allison Landry's funeral and a brief, extraordinarily painful trip to pack up the few personal effects at Richie's flat, he'd confined himself to the five rooms of Methos' apartment. He conducted some Watcher business by laptop, but mostly sat quietly each day making entries in a thick journal and drinking bourbon. Sometimes he carried around the only paperback they'd found at Richie's place, a thumbworn copy of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance." He'd taken Richie's death and Duncan's disappearance far worse than Methos expected, and had lost most of his vitality and resilience to listlessness and depression.

"Joe," Methos said, "we need to talk."

A heavy sigh. "So talk. Tell me what happened. Tell me about Mac's demon."

Methos shook his head. "There are no demons. None that exist outside our own heads, at least."

"Three weeks of being holed up in that library and that's your big conclusion?"

"That's my conclusion."

"What about all the Zoroastrian crap?"

"It's not 'crap,'" Methos retorted. "It's as valid a world religion as any other system of beliefs. It just doesn't explain what happened to MacLeod."

"Landry said it was a demon."

Methos bit down on the urge to retort sarcastically about Jason Landry. "Zoroaster was a prophet and a priest of ancient Persia. He transformed a religion of bloodthirsty cults and violent gods and gave them one god alone. He taught that man himself charted the moral course of his own life, that he could chose between good and evil and pay by either going to heaven or hell. All very valuable and worthwhile ideas - "

"So where do the demons come in?" Joe interrupted.

"They don't. Not at first. Zoroastrianism in its original form has no demons. It's based on truth or lies, light or dark, order or chaos, good or evil. Men and women choose between them. At the very essence of Zoroaster's teaching is the freedom and responsibility of choice."

Joe objected, "But if some ancient prophecy says Mac has to face some demon, that he's the only one in the world who can defeat him, then where's the choice in that?"

"There's not very much at all."

The mortal shook his head, confusion crossing his weathered features. "But what about the demons? What about the thousand- year cycle of evil?"

"I told you before. Millennial fears are commonplace in many cultures. After Zoroaster died, his disciples changed the teachings. Conquerors came, as conquerors do - the Macedonians, the Arabs, the Turks. The religion changed to meet the needs of each successive generation and ruler. The same thing happened to Judaism, Buddhism, Catholicism. A movement in Persia did start adding in demons and such. The world got divided into periods of three thousands years. Saviors are supposed to come, born of fifteen year old maidens. I don't see any of those around, do you?"

"You don't think Zoroastrianism has anything to do with this mess, do you?"

"Zoroastrianism is just one of a thousand religions in the history of the world, each of which encompasses hundreds of sects, cults, or off-shoots. It stole from other religions, and other religions stole from it. If Zoroastrian demons do exist, does that mean its god Ahura Mazda does too? If Ahura Mazda exists, what about everyone else's God? Everyone else's idea of heaven and hell, afterlife, redemption, morality? Everyone else is wrong? Or in some crazy, mixed-up, incomprehensible way is everyone right, and the cosmos is a carnival fairground where every game of faith is played out in unison?"

"Where were you?"

"What?"

"When Zoroaster was converting the masses, you were how old? Two thousand? Three? Wasn't Persia your old stomping ground?"

Methos reluctantly replied, "Yes."

"And?" Joe's voice was relentless.

"And . . . I had other things on my mind than religion."

Like murder. Rape. Torture. Mass destruction. Duncan might have killed his own student, but Methos had done far, far worse in his days. And Joe knew it. The two men sat in silence for a moment. A car honked in the street below, and somewhere in the building a door closed. "What about the videotape we saw?" Joe finally asked.

Carl Portram had provided them with a videotape allegedly recorded in an Iraqui tomb. Landry specifically stated the "demon" was coming, and the spear in the carved statue's hand had disappeared with a glow of light. Landry's assistant Foster had been found crumpled in the tomb with the same spear thrust through his heart. It had taken nearly six months for Landry to clear himself with the police, who'd finally ruled the death an accident for reasons Methos himself didn't fully understand but which probably involved bribery.

"I think it was a publicity stunt gone wrong," Methos answered frankly. "Landry needed the attention. He needed backing. He must have rigged some kind of special effect."

Joe lifted his chin. "Fine. You don't believe in Zoroastrian demons. You think the videotape is a fake. Allison Landry is incinerated in a suspicious fire, and maybe that's just a coincidence. But what about Richie's body? It disappeared!"

Methos' chest tightened. "I told you. I found drops of blood leading out of the racetrack. Someone carried the body away."

"But no one Immortal, right? You would have sensed him."

"Maybe it was a Watcher."

"What would a Watcher want with Richie's corpse?"

"What would anyone?" Methos demanded, the questions finally wearing down at his nerves. "What do you want me to tell you?"

"I want you to tell me what the hell is going on!"

"I've never seen a demon. I don't believe in them. I'm not going to take the teachings of a religion half my age as a guide, and I'm not putting any faith into the so-called research of Jason Landry."

Joe shook his head. "We're no better off now than we were three weeks ago."

"Your people are the ones who can't even find MacLeod!"

"We're trying! No one can find him. For all I know, he could be at the North Pole!"

They glared at each other for a full sixty seconds. Joe blinked first, and ran a hand over his face. "We shouldn't be taking this out on each other," he said.

"I know," Methos said. "I'm sorry."

"So there's no such thing as demons. Mac's just nuts, gone off the deep end. How do we help him? How do we stop him from killing more innocent people?"

"Either someone cures him, or someone kills him."

Joe's gaze narrowed. "Which someone are you?"

Methos didn't answer.

Chapter Two: The Hour of Lead

"This is the Hour of Lead Remembered, if outlived As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow First -Chill-then Stupor- then the letting go - " - Emily Dickenson, 1830-1886

Tromsdalen, Norway

Sigrid Hamsun knelt in the last pew of the Arctic Cathedral, her eyes fixed on the rapture and glory of the Second Coming. She felt herself falling into the vista of jewel-colored stained glass as surely and deeply as if diving into a clear blue lake in summer. Sometimes, if she tried very hard, she could hear the angels singing Hallelujah as they descended from heaven in love and glory. All she could hear this late afternoon was the whispered murmuring of two women several pews ahead, the soft scratch of the custodian's broom on the floor, and a few passing cars outside. The Cathedral had been built in the shape of a Sami tent, and the soaring concrete and glass of the peaks above her head made her feel as vast and cold as the tundra beyond the city limits. The hard sleet battering down on the windows didn't cheer her heart. She'd have a hard walk home, and her thin coat wouldn't offer much protection. Part of her penance, she supposed, and turned her thoughts from selfish considerations to greater contemplation of the Lord.

Often she would come and sit in the Cathedral for hours, looking for families with babies or little girls and imagining herself holding Hanne again. They'd buried her in Sigrid's favorite dress, the pink fleece one with lace on the wrists and collar. Roald had put her brown bear in the coffin as well. Sigrid would study the babies she saw and mentally criticize their outfits. How could that mother put her daughter in such a frumpy green dress? The shoes on another looked dirty and scuffed. Sometimes milk or food stained the little girls' faces, and messy hair needed cutting or proper braiding.

Sigrid always held her tongue, determined not to hurt anyone's feelings, but didn't mothers understand how babies had to be kept sweet and tidy at all times? Because one morning they would be gone, ripped away to the Lord's call, and only memories and empty cradles would remain.

A high, crystal-clear note sang through the air. A warm spot began glowing in Sigrid's chest. The organist had come to practice. She sometimes did, this late in the day, when most everyone else had gone home. Sigrid listened as the organist slowly fingered up and down the scales on the massive brass and copper instrument. The music drifted through the Cathedral, each note like a bright butterfly let loose beneath the eaves. The sleet tapered off against the windows and the gloom of dusk pressed harder against the glass, calling for her to hurry home before total darkness fell.

Still, she disciplined herself against rushing through her prayers. Entreaties to the Lord had to be said with proper reverence and patience. She prayed for Hanne's spirit, first and foremost. She prayed for Mrs. Eriksen, who lived by herself on Sigrid's tiny lane and whose illnesses grew worse each day. She prayed for Sonya, the nurse in Dr. Stoltenberg's office, who had a found a lump in her right breast. She even prayed for Roald, despite all he'd done, because her sins had been much, much worse than his.

She wished she could stay all night, warmed by the Second Coming, but the evening bells had started ringing and her stomach growled with a reminder she'd barely eaten all day. Sigrid gathered her gloves, purse and paper sack and slipped toward the exit. At the door she swept her shoulder-length blonde hair under a wool hat and wrapped a scarf around her neck. She would be glad when summer came. People liked to joke that Tromso had ten months of winter and two months of lousy skiing, but in another month or so the Midnight Sun would appear and bathe the city in light twenty-four hours a day until the end of July. Having survived the darkest ravages of winter, with no sunrise from November until January, she very much looked forward to the prospect of continuous light.

The cold, wet air outside slapped her in the face and she ducked her head against the wind. Cars passed by, their lights glaring in the gloom. They streamed over the suspension bridge and fjord toward the center of Tromso. Sigrid paused for a moment to look toward the city. Briefly, involuntarily, she remembered fragments of her earlier life. Studying education at the university, drinking bottomless cups of Mack Ale with her friends at the Railway Pub, meeting Roald the first day of her senior classes. Only four years had passed since graduation, but that old life seemed as far and distant as an old dream. She was twenty six years old and felt seventy.

Sigrid turned away from the steel bridge and started up the steep hills of Tromsdalen. She'd at least worn sensible boots. She held the grocery bag tightly, trying to shelter the vulnerable tomatoes and lettuce from the cold. She would go home to her tiny kitchen, fix herself soup and salad for dinner, and do the homework Dr. Stoltenberg had assigned her. She owed a letter to Ian in Maillog, one of the few people who hadn't cut themselves from her life. Perhaps later she would treat herself to a long hot bath and cozy up in bed with a good book. She'd recently thought about getting a kitten, although a pet of any kind seemed like an awesome responsibility and too big a step to take so soon.

The clapboard houses of the neighborhood grew closer together, warmly glowing behind drawn curtains. She could easily imagine families clustered together at the table, saying grace, digging into dinner. The parents would swap stories about their day, and the children would bicker and poke at each other while demanding attention for themselves. Loneliness swept over her and she hurried her steps, eager to be away from painful reminders of the life she'd lost.

The street twisted toward a narrow footbridge over a steep gully. The last lamp before the bridge had burned out, and in the gathering darkness the expanse seemed almost sinister. Sigrid shifted her sack to one arm and clutched the wooden railing to guard against slipperiness. Quite unexpectedly she thought about the Three Billy Goats Gruff, one of the fairy tales in a beautiful book Roald's parents had given Hanne at birth. Sigrid had read her baby the sweeter tales, but shied away from the violent story of the three innocent goats and the troll scheming to devour them. She wondered now if a troll might be waiting for her under the bridge, his eyes glowing red, his hands rubbing together in fiendish delight.

Sigrid paused at the beginning of the wooden planks. Against her will her gaze dropped to the bottom of the rocky gully and the narrow vein of black water rushing under the bridge. Roald didn't believe in trolls. He didn't believe in anything that would mar his perfect life. She wondered where he was that very minute. In his university office, grading papers with his infamous red pen? Or meeting with a bright young student, discussing her academic future? Perhaps he would take her to a harmless dinner at the Peppermollen Mat, with its gay 1890's atmosphere and excellent house specialty of reindeer tongue in white-wine sauce. Afterward he might persuade her to drive up to the planetarium to view the Northern Lights. And after that, a cocktail or two at his apartment, a sweet seduction of wine, music and Roald's infallible charm that would culminate in twisted sheets and sensual delight.

And if the student became pregnant? Would he marry her too? Or had he learned his lesson with Sigrid?

Her grip on the rail tightened. She could almost smell the troll, with his ragged hair, foul breath and steaming nostrils. That sound - sliding rocks? Trolls had very long arms. He could very easily reach up and grab her ankle as she passed. Sigrid considered backtracking, taking the long way around to her house, but her aching feet, the heavy grocery bag and sheer common sense told her not to be ridiculous. She didn't believe in trolls.

Sigrid walked across the bridge. The rushing water seemed to increase in volume but she ignored the change and kept her eyes fixed firmly on the opposite side. She had reached the halfway mark when the soaked paper bag split in her arms. Three tomatoes rolled across the worn planks and the head of lettuce bounced toward the edge. She dropped the bag with its remaining boxes and cans and scrambled for the produce. She banged her head against a post and sat with a thump, the lettuce held loosely but triumphantly in one hand.

"Stupid girl," she told herself.

She sat for a moment at the bridge's edge, rubbing her sore head. She remembered the troll, and reprimanded herself for foolishness. Trolls did not exist. But even if they did, no steaming, hissing, ugly one had taken up residence under the bridge. She poked her head over the side to peer down and prove it.

A man standing beneath the bridge blinked up at her, his face clouded with confusion. He had short dark hair, an unkempt beard and wild eyes. Beneath the dirt and grime he was the most handsome man she'd ever seen, and also the most haunted.

"Is this Nordkapp?" he asked in English, the words slurred with exhaustion, and sagged in a faint into the stream.

Chapter Three: The Witch

"Every old woman with a wrinkled face, a furr'd brow, a hairy lip, a gobber tooth, a squint eye, a squeaking voice, or a scolding tongue . . . a dog or cat by her side, is not only suspected but pronounced for a witch." - John Gaule, Vicar of Great Stoughton, England, 1646

Methos sensed the presence of another Immortal the minute he and Joe walked into the bistro shaking water from their coats and umbrellas. Outside, a chill rain drizzled down on pedestrians. It had taken all of Methos' persuasive abilities to roust Joe from the apartment to go get a late afternoon snack. The first blast of air and warmth from inside the bistro brought tantalizing aromas of fresh breads and hot coffee and the preternatural awareness of another of Methos' kind. He slowed to a stop but made no obviously panicky moves such as reaching for his sword. Joe didn't realize he was stopping and bounced off him, nearly losing his balance.

"Watch it," he growled.

Methos didn't answer, but put a warning hand on Joe's arm to stop further complaint. He scanned the interior and found the other Immortal sitting by the windows, gazing at him with perfect equanimity. She appeared to be forty years old, plain and ordinary, with graying brown hair and a weathered face. Her clothes had come not from any fashionable shop but instead some dreary department store - a white blouse, gray sweater, gray wool skirt with the hem falling out, scuffed Oxfords. Functional and ordinary. Around her neck she wore a red ankh, which marked her as one of Maud's witches.

She met his gaze squarely and then turned her attention to her tea. Methos debated turning around and leaving the bistro that very moment. He had no intention of getting caught up in any of Maud's schemes. But wary curiosity won out over prudence.

"Order me a cappuccino, will you?" he asked Joe, without taking his eyes off the woman. "And one of those chocolate croissants."

Joe muttered, "Anything else, my lord?" but turned obediently to the counter.

Methos weaved his way past empty tables and chairs until he reached her side. "Well, well," he said, trying hard to sound pleasant. "To what do I owe this honor?"

"You don't believe in coincidence." A statement, not a question. Her accent marked her as American in origin, from somewhere in the Midwest. She looked out at the street, the rain, the dark umbrellas beneath the gray sky.

"Not when your group is involved."

"Please sit down, Mr. Pierson."

Methos deliberately moved the chair a few inches back from the table and sat.

"My name is Christine Lord," she continued.

"That's rather obvious symbolism, don't you think?"

"I'm here about the case of Richie Ryan."

Methos allowed no emotion to cross his face. But Joe, approaching with receipts in hand, heard and honed in on her words instantly.

"Richie? What about him?"

"We should go," Methos said, abruptly rising, but Joe blocked his way.

"What about Richie?" he insisted.

Methos mentally sighed. He knew that whatever this Christine Lord had to say, it wouldn't be good. It would probably involve some degree of danger to Methos' own person, and result in more heartbreak. Emissaries from Illas Cies never brought good news, and never left without exacting a payment for their services. He pulled up a chair for Joe to join them and sat heavily.

"Mr. Dawson," she said, and offered her hand. "Christine Lord."

"Ma'am," Joe said politely, but his eyes remained suspicious. "What about Richie?"

"His death. Duncan MacLeod took his head four weeks ago."

"Ridiculous," Joe said.

"You don't have to lie to protect the Highlander, Mr. Dawson. Besides, lying is a sin, and I'd appreciate it if you refrained from sinning in my presence."

Joe's jaw tightened. He looked at Methos. "Who is she?"

"One of my kind," Methos said, "with delusions of grandeur."

A very faint smile touched the woman's face. "So you'd like to believe."

"I don't understand," Joe said.

"She's come from Galicia."

For a moment Joe looked blank. Methos could see his mortal friend shifting mental gears, trying to link those few words to something significant in the Immortal world. Immortals from Galicia, the westernmost region of Spain. The end of the world to Europeans just a few centuries previous, an old Roman settlement, the site of a spectacular and bloody invasion by the Turks back in the early seventeenth century. Joe's specialty might have been the American regions, the Northwest in particular, but he knew his Immortal history and legends.

His eyes lit up.

"The Marian cult of Galicia," he said. "It's supposed to be a myth."

"The Marian witches," Methos corrected. "Their word, not mine."

Christine sipped demurely from her teacup. "Words can be useful weapons."

"Is it true - " Joe started to ask, but stopped himself.

"That we don't carry swords?" Christine finished for him.

Joe's gaze narrowed. "I hadn't heard anything about reading minds."

"You could have been asking me if we really turn men into toads, or make the sun rain gold, but if I were a Watcher such as yourself I'd be much more interested if it was true we didn't carry swords. Yes, it's true."

"It's foolish," Methos said. The waitress arrived bearing their coffee and croissants. Christine glanced disapprovingly at her short skirt and heavy make-up, but said nothing. Joe made an obvious attempt to refrain from more questions about the Marian witches and instead returned to her opening parlay.

"What about Richie?" he asked.

"It's been said there might be talk of a demon involved."

"Said by whom?" Methos asked. He didn't expect to learn much, but decided to try anyway. "The only ones there were Joe and I, and we haven't said anything to anyone. He didn't even put it in his report."

Christine sipped at her tea and didn't answer.

"Did Duncan tell you?" Joe persisted. "You found him?"

"We have no idea where the Highlander is. But he is in grave peril, just as you both are."

Methos warned, "Not you, too. I swear if you start talking about Zoroastrian demons I'll walk right out without a backwards look."

Her eyebrows rose. "I doubt that. As it so happens, I'm not very much interested in Zoroastrianism myself. Although the part about the Amesha Spentas is interesting in a trivial sort of way."

"What are Amesha Spentas?" Joe asked.

"Beneficent Immortals," Christine answered.

Joe frowned. "You didn't mention anything about Beneficent Immortals," he said to Methos.

"Because there are only six of them, and I couldn't think of six of us divine enough to fit the bill," Methos said dismissively. "What kind of 'grave peril' are you worried about?"

"Something has been unleashed. Dark and deceitful, and loose among us. It's not just a threat to your Highlander, but to all Immortals. It must be stopped."

"What is it?" Joe asked. "Do you know?"

"She knows," Christine answered.

"No," Methos said quickly and firmly. "We're not going to Galicia with you. If Maud genuinely believes there's some kind of supernatural evil among us and wants to help, tell her to leave the island and do so."

Christine's gaze narrowed. "You tell her. You're her husband."

Joe choked on his coffee. Methos favored Christine with a sour look and pounded his mortal friend on the back. "Husband?" Joe sputtered.

"It was a long time ago. And it's over."

"You swore an oath," Christine reminded him.

"I was drunk," Methos returned tartly, "and she tricked me. Then she tried to kill me."

"Still," Christine said, and this time Methos heard an amused note in her voice. She aligned her cup and spoon and folded her napkin into a precise triangle. "She's asked for you to come. And Mr. Dawson. She has something for you both."

"I don't want anything from her," Methos said. He stood up. If he didn't leave immediately, if he didn't escape her clutches while he could, he would probably die regretting it.

"What does she have?" Joe asked.

"Richie Ryan's body," she answered.

Chapter Four: Duncan at the Table

"Evil is unspectacular and always human, And shares our bed and eats at our own table." -W.H. Auden, 1907-1973

Sigrid recoiled so quickly she hit her head for the second time. The sharp knock made her swear vehemently and in a decidedly un-Christianlike fashion. She pulled herself upright, swayed for just a moment, and sprinted to the edge of the bridge. She made her way down a treacherous, narrow dirt path to the streambed. The man lay unmoving, half-in and half-out of the water. His soiled clothes reeked as she crouched over him. Sigrid pinched his cheeks and his head lolled in her direction. His eyes fluttered open.

"Is this Nordkapp?" he asked again, his voice hoarse, his eyes filled with grief.

"No," she said. She hadn't used English in several years, but the words came back to her in a halting fashion. "Why do you want to go to Nordkapp?"

He mumbled, "Have to go there . . . have to build a guillotine . . . "

"I see," she said. She didn't know how to translate "guillotine" but put the matter off for the moment. He didn't smell of liquor or marijuana, although she couldn't rule out any other drugs. "Nordkapp is very far from here. You won't get there in your condition."

"Have to try," he said, and attempted to stand. He made it to his knees, then up to his feet. He swayed dangerously, about to crash back down again, and Sigrid propped his arm over her shoulder. For a moment fear flashed through her - he would murder her, he would rape her - but she remembered Luke's tale of the Good Samaritan and took comfort in the secret plans of God.

"Come with me," she said. "You need rest and warmth."

He weakly tried to push her away. "I'm dangerous," he protested.

"Nonsense. You're cold and wet, and you'll die if you stay out here."

"Can't die. I'm Immortal."

"Of course you are. Come on. Be careful here, it's steep."

She struggled to get him up the bank and to the road. He helped but only marginally, and his weight hurt her shoulders and arms. At last they stood at the top. Sigrid gathered her wet vegetables, stuffed them inside the pathetic remains of the sack, and shoved the bundle inside her coat. The man stood unsteadily on his own feet and watched her with dull, lifeless eyes.

"Tessa?" he asked when she took his hand.

"Sigrid," she returned.

"I thought you were dead."

"No one here is dead," she said. "Come this way."

As she pulled him through the gloom and down her lane she wondered who she should call. Not the police. The events of the winter had taught her a deep and abiding mistrust of anyone in uniform. Dr. Stoltenberg, perhaps. He might chide her for taking a stranger home with her, but he would know what to do. She reached her tiny house and pulled the key from her purse. Inside the small entranceway she stripped off her coat, hat and gloves, and pulled off the man's trenchcoat.

"What's your name?" she asked, but he didn't answer.

She sat him at her table and put water on to boil. The kitchen came equipped with an old wooden stove and she lit a match to the newspaper and kindling she had put in there that morning. The first few flames felt good to her cold face and hands. Sigrid picked up the phone and dialed Dr. Stoltenberg's answering service. She left her name and number and the message to call as soon as he could.

She poured the stranger a cup of hot tea and forced the cup into his icy hands. For the first time in several minutes his gaze lifted and focused on her.

"I can't stay," he said.

"I didn't invite you to," she returned. "Just drink this, it's hot. I'll see if I have any clothes your size."

Roald had been smaller than the stranger, and he'd taken his clothes and belongings with him when he'd sold their house near Sandnessund Bridge. With little hope she rummaged quickly through the very back of the closet and found a box that had gone astray in the move. Inside was one of Roald's sweaters, a few framed photographs, and a pair of Hanne's booties. The booties made her breath catch in her throat. She touched them carefully, reverently. She smelled them. They still smelled like her baby - the sweet fragrance of powder and new skin, the aroma all infants carried. Tears threatened to come to her eyes, and she shoved the booties back into the box. She took the sweater and a pair of her old black sweatpants to the stranger.

"These will have to do until we can wash and dry your own clothes," she said. "You can change in the bathroom."

He fingered the clothes in bewilderment, but obeyed her directive. It took him several minutes to change, and she began to fear he'd killed himself with a slice or two of her razor. When he reappeared in the ridiculously small sweatpants and roomy sweater she saw that he'd taken the time to wash grime from his face, although his hair and beard remained matted and filthy beyond quick repair.

"There's soup on the table," she said. "Some leftover baked cod and lefse, too. Eat up."

He sat down, stared at the food, and slowly picked up his fork. He ate as if the experience was new to him, biting and chewing hesitantly. Sigrid watched him for a few minutes. She'd never invited a man into this house. Uncomfortably aware of how small the room was, she took his dirty clothes back to the bathroom, ran the tub with hot water, and threw in the filthy material. She didn't have a laundry machine, and the Tromsdalen laundromat would already have closed for the evening.

When she returned to the kitchen she found he'd eaten every single bite and was on the verge of falling asleep upright.

"Come. Lay down on the sofa," she said.

He went quietly and obediently. She wondered if he was accustomed to taking orders, or if whatever trauma had happened to him had left him acquiescent and incapable of independent thought. He was six inches longer than the sofa, and his feet hung off the end. She draped several blankets on his shivering body and turned up the thermostat on the oil furnace.

"Tessa?" he asked. "I'm cold."

"I know," she murmured, and sat on the coffee table beside him. Was Tessa his wife, his lover, his daughter? He only seemed five or ten years older than she was. "You'll be warmer soon, I promise."

"Stay with me," he begged, groping for her hand to hold. "I couldn't stand it if you went away again."

"I'm not going anywhere," she promised.

He felt asleep, his chest rising and falling in a steady fashion. Sigrid remained by his side for several minutes, studying his features. She gently disengaged his heavy hand and tucked it under the blankets. Humming to herself for the first time in several months, she cleaned the kitchen and returned to the bathroom to scrub the stranger's clothes clean. Flakes of dirt clogged the tub drain. She did the best job she could and hung the trousers and sweater on the radiator to dry. She turned off most of the lights, but left one small lamp illuminated in the corner of the living room in case her guest woke in disorientation. Sigrid made one last trip to the kitchen for a glass of water and a steak knife. Silly, she told herself, but the wooden handle felt comforting in her grip.

She'd just settled into her own bed when Dr. Stoltenberg called.

"I'm sorry I couldn't call earlier, but I had a crisis at the hospital," he said. "Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Sigrid said. "I'm sorry I disturbed you. I shouldn't have called."

"Nonsense. What happened?"

"It's just that . . . " Sigrid said. She changed her mind mid- sentence. "It's just that I had a bad day, and didn't feel well."

"Did you hear Hanne crying again?"

"No." She hadn't heard her baby's phantom cries in months, which had to be a sign of progress. "Really, doctor, I'm sorry to have bothered you."

"If you're sure you're fine . . . "

"Positive. I'll see you on Tuesday, I promise."

"Have a good night, Sigrid," the doctor said, and hung up.

Sigrid pondered her decision to withhold the stranger's presence from her doctor. Surely it would make more sense for someone to know about him, just in case something happened. But she didn't know anyone else who would care. In the end she snuggled down to sleep, the kitchen knife stowed safely under her pillow.

***

For the first time in a long time, no nightmares plagued Duncan's sleep. No horrific memories of the demon taunting him from behind the masks of Richie, Kronos, Horton. No remembered swings at ghostly visages, no torturous recall of that last look on Richie's face before Duncan took off his head. Just a heavy, warm sleep, so thick that when he woke it took several minutes for him to drag up enough energy to open his eyes. He lay on a small sofa in an unfamiliar living room. The wall clock read five thirty, and darknesss pressed in against the windows. He fuzzily remembered walking down the highway and wandering down a hill. Maybe something about a stream. A bridge? A woman who looked like Tessa? He couldn't clearly say.

He untangled himself from the pile of blankets and sat up. Where had his clothes come from? He scratched at the itchy sweater and fingered a hole in the thigh of the sweatpants. He felt hollow from head to toe. Hunger had become an unfamiliar feeling in the previous weeks, as his starving body shut down even that awareness. Duncan padded around the small house in his bare feet, discovering first the kitchen, then the bathroom. His clothes hung on the radiator, damp but drying. Reassured by their presence, he used the toilet but didn't flush. He didn't want to wake any other occupants of the house -

Assuming, of course, that the house had other occupants.

Other *live* occupants.

Duncan stood in the hallway, every inch of his body crawling with icy spiders. Dear God, no. He couldn't have killed some mortal for shelter and food, could he? Desperately he tried to remember what had happened. He'd been on the highway, hitchhiking. Rain, gloom, cold. No cars would stop for him. He'd wandered off the road, seeking shelter on a hillside, and from there followed a winding stream. He vaguely recalled a blonde woman who reminded him a little of Tessa and an even more uncertain memory of letting her lead him to this place.

He nearly banged his head against the wall in frustration. Stupid, stupid, stupid. He couldn't allow himself to be near mortals for very long. Who knew when the demon might reappear to wreak more havoc and destruction? Duncan hadn't seen his torturer since that awful night in Paris, but at least three times since his flight from the racetrack he'd felt an overwhelmingly evil presence at hand, accompanied by the stench of dead and rotting flesh.

He'd left Paris immediately after murdering Richie. Torn by grief and shock so deep he could barely breathe, he'd stumbled his way toward the docks and found a ship's captain who would hire him on without a passport, merchant marine papers or even a wallet. The small freighter carried some illicit cargo, drugs or weapons or both, but Duncan didn't care. He'd slept on the deck and spoken as little as possible for two weeks. Two of the more foolish crew members had come after him in the dark, intent on rape or possibly murder. He'd broken the first man's shoulder and arm, and given the second a ringing concussion. He could justify his actions in the name of self-defense but in his heart he feared he'd become a monster, capable of the most vile and violent acts.

He'd disembarked the freighter in Oslo. The first night in the city, trying to sleep while huddled in alley garbage, he'd felt the demon's presence as clearly as if it had appeared in full shape and form. He immediately fled the city toward the mountains and hills of the interior. Twice more the demon came, outside Lillehammer and again on the highway outside Trondheim. Duncan had only been to Norway once before, but some mysterious inner instinct drove him ever northward in his attempt to escape the horrible apparition. >From a scrap of newspaper blown on the side of the highway he learned about Nordkapp, or the North Cape, the most northern point of the European continent. The name seemed to fill some aching void in his chest and he felt at ease for the first time in days. He would go to Nordkapp, build himself a guillotine, and rig his own death so his decapitated body rolled off the famed cliffs into the churning Arctic Ocean.

Maybe not the best plan he'd ever made, but at least he had a goal.

Duncan opened the refrigerator and scanned the scanty contents inside. Lettuce, tomato, cheese, crackers. Mustard and relish. Half a litre of milk. The cupboards produced canned soup, cookies, spaghetti and a half loaf of bread. Hunger drove him to devour the bread, slice by slice, as he stood by the sink. He had a few kroners left over from the wages he'd earned on the freighter, and would leave them with his host. He wanted to be on the road before she rose. The squeaking of a door down the hall told him he'd dawdled too long.

"Hello?" he called out. He didn't want to startle her. She appeared in the doorway, the young and pretty blonde he vaguely remembered. Her expression looked lost, and she held a kitchen knife in her hand.

"Where is she?" the woman demanded.

"Who?"

"My daughter!" The woman advanced on him with the knife. "What have you done with my baby?"

Chapter Five: Journey, Part One

"An involuntary return to the point of departure is, without doubt, the most disturbing of all journeys." - Iain Sinclair, b. 1943, British author

Joe downloaded and stuffed as much research into his carry-on bag as space would allow. He didn't want to lug his laptop to Spain but needed to prep himself as much as possible before they reached the coastal area known Rias Baxas. Christine Lord had gone ahead of them but promised to have a driver at Peinador National Airport in the city of Vigo when their morning flight landed. Methos packed his bags as if journeying to his own funeral and refused to give Joe any information about his alleged wife Maud. Once the plane leveled off at thirty thousand feet, Joe opened his bag and started leafing through printouts. He scanned the biographies of four different Immortal woman who'd used aliases including Maud, but none cross-referenced to Methos, Galicia or Marian cults.

"Whoever your wife is, she's kept a low profile," Joe remarked as their plane cruised over the glittering Bay of Biscay.

Methos shrugged down deeper into his chair, adjusted his headphones and fixed his gaze firmly on the in-flight movie.

Joe had better luck reading up on Mariology. As a good if somewhat lapsed Catholic boy he knew all the routine stuff about the mother of Jesus Christ. He even kept a small statue of her on his bedroom dresser. His mother had given it to him just days before her death. Joe had never realized the existence of multiple Christian sects devoted to Mary worship. Veneration of the Virgin had built in the centuries after Jesus' death, peaked between the tenth and fifteen centuries and then fallen under attack during the Reformation. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had seen renewed interested, with shrines and pilgrimages in her name, but the twentieth had at least two popes calling for a respectful reassessment of Marian worship.

She got too big for their britches, Joe thought.

The link between Mariology and a number of female Immortals had been first noted in 1850 by an enterprising young Watcher named Maurice Tourniers. Tourniers' third assignment, a French peasant housewife with little to no swordfighting skills, had disappeared in Galicia without a trace. He ascribed her vanishing act to an unwitnessed fight with another Immortal but couldn't help noting in his file that at least three other Immortal women in the previous three centuries had disappeared in the same area.

Joe would have said obviously some local Immortal was preying on young females of his kind, but Tourniers did more research and discovered some interesting links. Rebecca Horne, a known Mariologist, had kept a house in Rias Baxas since at least 1380. Amanda Dariuex, one of Rebecca's students, had been sighted in and around Vigo no less than five times in a hundred year period. Kristin Gilles regularly sent money to a small convent near the village of Cangas - easy enough to track, since her banker was also her Watcher. Even Felicia Martins had been tracked to Rias Baxas area before being lost for two years. She'd reappeared as a bitter enemy of Rebecca Horne's and the two women had dueled twice without resolution before Rebecca's death in 1993.

For twenty years Tourniers correlated information on the Rias Baxas area with the activity of a small band of Immortal woman. He also documented superstitious folklore about Galician women. They had a reputation as mystics up and down the coastline and could allegedly work magic regarding love, fertility and health. Several had been burned alive as witches during the seventeen hundreds. At some point in his research, Tourniers had linked the Immortal women who visited Rias Baxas with rumors of witchcraft and pagan worship.

Marian witches. Joe didn't understand what they possibly had to do with Jason Landry's Zoroastrian demon. He certainly didn't understand why they would have Richie's body. The only Marian that Richie had ever probably heard of was the one that stuck around making googly-eyes with Robin Hood. A small, fond smile touched his lips at the thought, but anticipation of seeing Richie's corpse dug at whatever thin scabs had formed over his grief in the previous weeks and his smile disappeared.

The Watcher pulled himself from his thoughts to find Methos looking in disapproval at the sheets in his lap.

"The answer doesn't have anything to do with the Virgin Mary," Methos said.

"But they're a Marian cult. You called them that yourself."

"Because Mariology is a convenient cover. Don't get me wrong - some of them, the younger ones, probably venerate her sincerely. As for the rest . . . well, let's just say that in the face of a hostile church in Rome and a little phase known as the Inquisition, it was much, much safer to hide their true worship under the cover of the Virgin."

"What do you mean?" Joe asked. "Who do they worship if not Mary?"

Methos pursed his lips and turned back to the screen, as if he'd said too much already.

"Look," Joe growled. "I know you like playing the part of the mysterious professor. I know you hoard knowledge sometimes like Scrooge and his shillings on Christmas Eve. But your little omniscient games are getting a little old. Either tell me what you know or don't bring up the subject, okay?"

Methos glared at him. "Tell you what I know? It would take *centuries* to tell you what I know."

"Rub it in, why don't you?"

Methos' eyes narrowed, as if he was contemplating throwing Joe out the nearest airplane hatch. He turned his attention back to the movie. Joe rustled his papers in as annoying a fashion as possible. Methos folded his arms. Joe played with his seatback table, pushing it up and dropping it several times in a row until the most ancient man in the world reached over and snapped it shut firmly.

"Goddesses," he ground out.

"Goddesses?"

"They worship goddesses. Inanna, Nut, Isis, Ishtar, Asherah, Gaia, Demeter, Cybele, Kuan-yin, Izanami, Tonatsi, Kali. Any female deity imaginable. Worship them, keep their memories alive, encourage academic studies, secretly fund art and writing and exhibits - they're the oldest feminist group in the world. Gloria Steinem is utterly inconsequential when stacked up against this group."

"But Mary isn't a goddess."

"Mary is the mother of a god and that's no small thing. The Virgin is a classic archetype in dozens of religions. In any case, she's the curtain behind which they hide. The church of Rome could overlook a few women here and there venerating the Holy Mother, but they wouldn't have been so tolerant of a bunch of women offering up blood sacrifices for an Aztec goddess of death."

Joe regarded his friend with a new perspective. "You're afraid of them, aren't you?"

"Nonsense."

"You're afraid of your ex-wife and these ancient feminists."

"The altitude has affected your brain," Methos retorted. He reclined his chair and pulled his blanket up to his chin.

"About the witches part . . . is that just a label, or do they have some kind of special powers?"

"No one has special powers."

"Not even Cassandra?" he couldn't help but blurt out. Methos grimaced in response and closed his eyes. He hadn't mentioned his former slave and fellow Immortal since that day outside Paris when she'd spared his life upon Duncan's orders. Joe knew Duncan believed in Cassandra, in her prophecies and special abilities. But Methos . . . Joe wondered not for the first time why it was easier for Methos to believe in objects such as the Methuselah Stone and Holy Spring than in people or demons.

Joe decided to change the subject. "What's she like? This Maud woman."

"I couldn't say. People change. I haven't seen her in a very long time."

"But - "

"Leave it alone, Joe," Methos said sharply.

Joe looked out the window. He couldn't be expected to keep silent, not with Richie dead and Mac missing and no good reason why. Ancient goddesses, mysterious convents, secret histories. The hidden intrigue and romance of it all had always been beyond his mortal grasp. Keeping the company of Immortals had made him feel dwarfed and puny at times, with his mere fifty years stacked up against the centuries or millennia of their lives, but never before had he felt so left out of the events swirling around him. Never before had he felt so isolated and insignificant.

"Joe."

"Yeah?" He didn't look away from the blue sky and thin wisps of white clouds.

"I'm sorry. If you're going to be part of this, you should know. It's just not an easy story to tell."

Joe turned around. "Start at the beginning."

So Methos did. He spoke in a low voice almost inaudible over the engines at times, and the story took about an hour. When he was done, Joe understood his friend's reluctance to return to Galicia and almost even sympathized with him.

***

Bright sunshine and a cool breeze slapped Joe in the face the minute they stepped out of the airport in Vigo. At the curb directly ahead of them stood a short, elderly Italian man with dark hair and leathery skin. He wore a grimy white shirt, black pants and black sandals. The yellow Mercedes cab beside him with the engine hacking out exhaust had seen its better days back in the sixties or seventies. The man held a cardboard sign bearing Greek letters.

Methos had already stopped. He frowned at the sign. "Ha ha."

"What does it say?"

"It's ancient Greek." Methos carried their bags toward the cab.

"But what does it mean?" Joe asked, following.

Methos didn't answer. The driver smiled when he saw them approach. He opened up the trunk and Methos slung their bags in the back. The man bowed his head and murmured something in what sounded like Portuguese but was probably the native language, Galician. Methos brushed past him to slide into the back seat.

"He's having a bad day," Joe explained to the driver. The man had to be seventy or eighty years old and made Joe feel like a youngster.

"Or the bad day is having him," the man shot back cheerfully in heavily accented English. "My name is Antone. I'm to take you to Illas Cies."

"Illas Cies, huh?" Joe asked. He'd never heard of the place. "What's the sign say?"

Antone held up the cardboard and peered at the letters as if seeing them for the first time. "Disbeliever."

Joe climbed into the back with Methos. Antone took his place behind the steering wheel and gingerly pulled out into traffic. Cars swerved around him and honked as he edged the car to twenty miles an hour and kept it there. He held the steering wheel tightly in both hands and hunched over it, peering at the road as if he'd lost his glasses. Joe did not feel reassured but decided to keep his doubts to himself. Methos, still in a bad mood, said nothing as he watched the airport and city traffic slide by their dusty windows. The car shuddered and shook, ready to fall to pieces in the middle of the road.

"What's Illas Cies?" Joe asked.

"Island!" Antone answered, raising his voice above the engine's rattles and clangs.

"Island? How are we going to get to an island?"

"Boat!"

"Boat," Joe murmured. He fished for a seatbelt, but only came up with a threadbare strap and a broken, rusty buckle. Gunfire rang out around them and he instinctively ducked before recognizing the backfire of the engine.

"You'd think all those feminists of yours could buy a decent cab," Joe said to Methos, who didn't deign to respond.

Antone took them around Vigo, Spain's largest fishing port, and headed north. At the first glimmer of the ocean Joe's breath caught in his throat. The vast, royal blue water stretched as far as his eye could see past a malt-colored beach and granite cliffs. The cab crept out onto a vast suspension bridge that reminded Joe of the Golden Gate and deposited them in Cangas. Antone left the highway and headed down a very bumpy dirt road. Two miles later they stopped at a quiet, tranquil and secluded cove ringed by trees.

"Praia Santa Marta," Antone announced and turned off the ignition. The engine rattled and wheezed for a moment before dying in the stillness of the afternoon.

Joe climbed out gratefully. Sand stretched from the road to the surf, thick and treacherous beneath his artificial legs. An ancient wooden pier with missing floorboards and rotting posts jutted out into the bay. An abandoned rowboat lay on its side nearby, bleached by the sun and sprouting young, fragile yellow and blue flowers of spring. Two shacks comprised the only other signs of civilization. The first rented out sailboats and the second served food and Coca-Cola. A young dark-skinned man wearing a huge straw hat stood midway between them, ready to service his new customers with either option.

"Lunchtime," Methos said, with the attitude of someone heading for his own execution. He headed straight for the second shack. Joe followed carefully, afraid of loosing his balance in the sand. By the time he caught up with the five-thousand-year-old Immortal, Methos had already ordered food for the both of them.

Joe settled onto a wooden stool at the cracked, peeling counter. He didn't need much of an imagination to pretend he'd landed in Barbados, with steel drum music and conch shells as the only missing details. He looked around for Antone, but the driver had somehow managed to disappear. Lunch appeared in rapid fashion and Joe poked at the gray, shiny food with apprehension.

"What is it?" he asked.

"Choko," Methos supplied, digging into his own serving.

"I repeat - what is it?"

"Fresh squid. In its own ink. It's quite delicious."

Joe poked at the former sea creature experimentally. He dared one bite and found the choko rubbery but tasty. Methos had ordered Albarino wine to accompany the food and the young beach entrepreneur kept refilling their glasses out of a dirty bottle kept under the counter. By the time Joe finished with the squid and wine he felt decidedly light-headed, in dire need of a nap. He could lay right down in the warm sand, with the sun on his face and the lap of the ocean to soothe him to sleep -

"Boat!" someone called from the waterline. Joe blinked in disbelief. Antone had reappeared at the helm of a sturdy white rowboat at the side of the dilapidated pier. Methos and Joe's bags sat piled in the bow. The old man had rolled up his sleeves to handle the wooden oars and sweat stained his worn shirt as he fought to keep the boat from going out with the tide.

"Good grief," Joe muttered. "He's going to give himself a heart attack."

"Wouldn't matter." Methos put his sunglasses back on. He could have been a famous film star trying to act incognito on the beach at Cannes, and Joe was rapidly getting sick of his attitude problem.

"Huh? Why not?" Joe stood up. The sand spun a little beneath him and he gripped the counter for assistance, but he did it so cleverly and suavely he knew no one noticed.

"Guess." Methos started toward the pier.

Joe blinked after him in confusion. Guess? Why wouldn't it matter if Antone had a heart attack . . . "You're kidding!" he called out. Damn if Antone wasn't the oldest-looking Immortal Joe had ever seen.

Chapter Six: Journey, Part Two

"Every journey into the past is complicated by delusions, false memories, false namings of real events." - Adrienne Rich, b. 1929, U.S. poet

Duncan backed up against the kitchen counter and held out a placating hand. "Easy," he soothed. "I mean you no harm."

Sigrid waved the knife. "Where's my baby?"

"There's no baby here," he said. "It's just us."

She stared at him in disbelief. She tried to speak, but no words came out. The knife dropped to her side and Duncan moved gently and carefully to pry it from her loose fingers. Her skin felt cool and soft to his touch.

"It's just us," he repeated.

Sigrid sat down heavily at the table, one hand covering her face. Duncan put the knife in the sink and put the kettle on to boil. He wondered fleetingly what exactly the woman's problem might be before firmly deciding he wanted no part of it. He had enough troubles of his own and the sooner he left, the better. But he didn't have to be rude.

"Here," he said, when the tea was done.

She blinked at him. "I'm sorry. You must think I'm insane."

"No, I don't."

"I must have been dreaming. I heard my baby crying." She wrapped both hands around the cup and bent over it as if seeking warmth. "She died last winter."

"I'm sorry." But the words came perfunctorily at best. If he let himself feel her grief, he'd end up taking a swan dive back into his own.

"What's your name?" Sigrid asked.

He shook his head. "It's better if you don't know. I have to leave now anyway."

He went to the bathroom and started pulling on his damp clothes. They wouldn't be comfortable, but he wouldn't permanently die from either pneumonia or exposure no matter how hard he tried. He heard her moving in her own bedroom and when she came out she had changed her long nightgown for a thick beige sweater, blue jeans and socks.

"You can't go in those," she protested.

"It doesn't matter. Thank you for your hospitality. Please let me repay you - " Duncan started to dig out his remaining kroners, but her hand stopped him.

"I didn't do it for money," she said, a little sharply. "You need help."

"Not the kind you can give." Duncan found his jacket in the hallway. Old habit made him reach to pat the reassuring bulge in the lining, but his katana was gone. He'd left it by Richie's body. Pain knifed through him at the remembered image and he sat down heavily on the hall bench to tug on his boots.

"You said you were going to Nordkapp," she said from the doorway, her arms crossed against the early morning chill. "Do you even know how to get there?"

"Just go north."

"I know someone who has a car - "

"No," he said. "I said thank you, but no. No more help."

"It's because you think I'm crazy."

Duncan looked up at her. Beneath blonde hair still disheveled from sleep she wore a fierce, stubborn look that reminded him of Tessa.

"No," he said. "I don't think you're crazy. I think I am."

He left the house and started down the dark lane. Cold bit at his face and hands and cut through his damp pants. He ignored the sensation as he turned onto the main road. Dawn streaked the eastern sky through a thatch of trees. He heard footsteps hurrying behind him. Maybe if he ignored her, she'd go away.

"Wait!" she cried out. "Take this!"

Duncan turned and swung around. If he couldn't dissuade her kindly with words he'd do it harshly with threats. The danger he presented justified any cruelty in pushing her away. The small bundle in her bare hands caught his eye, though, and he hesitated long enough to identify crackers and cheese wrapped in a dishcloth.

"For the road," she said. She had no coat, and had already started to shiver in the freezing air.

He met her clear, gray-eyed gaze and found himself at a loss for words or action.

"I can't . . . " he started helplessly, but before he could finish an old familiar feeling washed through his body, a shivering, shimmering wave of recognition.

A man who looked no older than Richie stood at the corner not twenty feet away. A large German Shepard strained at the leash wound around his left hand. The man raised his head and fixed unerringly on Duncan. Duncan had met only two other Immortals since crossing to Norway, and both times he maneuvered out of range without having them find and fight him.

This man smiled with a predatory look in his eyes and reached inside his long coat.

Duncan lifted his hands. "I mean no harm. I'm not armed."

"Not my fault," the man said. A rapier not unlike the one Duncan had given to Richie appeared in the stranger's hand and Sigrid gave out a tiny cry of alarm.

"Tell your girlfriend to run and play," the stranger said, "or else her blood will spill in the snow too."

"Here?" Duncan asked, gesturing at the quiet houses. "In front of all the neighbors?"

The man jerked his head toward the thick pine trees at the end of the street. "In the woods. Move it."

"Not a chance," Duncan said. Although part of him wouldn't mind dying at all - wasn't that the whole reason for going to Nordkapp? - another part resented the idea of being decapitated by an arrogant bastard such as this one. He also had Sigrid to protect, like it or not. He refused to have another death on his conscience, even if he lasted only a few seconds more than she did.

The man approached with the rapier at length. "I said move it!"

"I'll get the police," Sigrid announced bravely. She started to move, but the German Shepard lunged forward and growled at her with bared fangs.

"You don't want her here," Duncan reminded his challenger.

"I changed my mind," the man said. "I'll be happy to keep her as a prize."

With that last boast he thrust forward, hoping perhaps to catch Duncan in the chest, but Duncan dropped to the ground and shot his leg out in a side kick that shattered the man's knee. The man cried out and his rapier fell with a soft thump to the snow. The German Shepard barked, backed away, and then nuzzled his master's side with a whine. The Immortal slapped him away. Duncan scooped up the fallen rapier and automatically raised it in an arc over his head. The blade presented a dark swatch against the lightening sky.

"Kill me," the man in the snow hissed. "There can be only one."

Duncan's shoulder muscles froze. He knew what he had to do. Despite everything, he still believed in the principles that had guided his Immortal life - no fighting on Holy Ground, no fighting two against one, There Can Be Only One.

The man raised his head defiantly. "If you don't do it, I'll come after you again. I'll come after her. She'll be all alone at home one night and wake up to find me in her bedroom, opening her nightgown - "

For a moment Duncan sympathized with the revulsion Anne Lindsey must have felt for his lifestyle. To all outward appearances, he was a normal man of the twentieth century, wrestling like everyone else with questions of love, life, finances, stress. Yet at any minute a morning's walk could turn into a deadly confrontation based on a conflict no Immortal pretended to understand, resulting in death, blood, lost lovers, genuine grief and loss. He'd killed better men than the one now lying prostrate at his feet, and he'd killed worse. Because of what they were, not who. The tenets of the Game hadn't changed since the racetrack in Paris.

But he had.

He couldn't kill again. Not with Richie's final expression seared into his retinas, and the horror of that awful, shocking, irrevocable sword stroke.

Duncan flung the weapon down a slope and into the snow. He grabbed Sigrid by the arm and started pulling her away.

"I'll come after you! I'll kill you!" The words came out in hateful chunks.

Memories of Annie Devlin's threats toward Richie rang in Duncan's head, but he didn't stop. Sigrid asked, "Who is that man? Why did he want to hurt you?"

"The reasons don't matter," Duncan said. On the other hand, he'd just left alive a very real danger, one which imminently threatened her safety and well-being. He made a snap decision that he hoped he wouldn't regret. "You said you know where you can get a car to get us to Nordkapp?"

She nodded.

He took a deep breath. "Then let's go."

****

Methos sat morosely in the boat bringing him back to Illas Cies. Joe lay sprawled and snoring in the bow, sleeping off too much wine at lunch. Methos resisted the urge to help Antone with the oars. Let the other Immortal row them across the calm cove. He would have no part of it. He didn't want to return in the first place and only the cruel, tantalizing lure of Richie Ryan's corpse had brought him this far. As the boat rounded the cove and brought them to open ocean an emerald island appeared in the distance, looking deceptively beautiful and tranquil under the clear blue sky.

Tranquil. Yes, he would give the island that much. In his later years there it had been very tranquil. He would wander at will through the old ruins that appeared at mysterious intervals in the forest, spending the sun-soaked days in inner contemplation. The Celts had found Illas Cies hundreds of years before Zoroaster had been born in Persia, a trivial fact he'd have to tell Joe at some point. Methos would sleep beneath the oak and eucalyptus trees and dream of a world no longer drenched in blood and hate. He might go days without seeing Columba, Maud, or any of the other priestesses who lived on the hill. One morning he'd climbed back up to the plaza and found the gate locked against him. The time had come for him to leave. Antone had rowed him back to Vigo and set him loose in an empire threatened by the Visigoths and Huns who would later bring down Rome herself. Being thrust back into the same old tired violence seemed blatantly unfair but cruelly fitting.

Columba. She could have stayed alive on the island forever. No one would have touched her on Holy Ground. But he'd chanced across Rebecca Horne one day outside Leonardo daVinci's workshop and she'd told him, sorrowfully, that Columba had risen silently one rainy winter morning, kissed Maud on the lips before all the priestesses, climbed into a boat that had appeared mysteriously at shore and rowed herself away into the drifting fog. Minutes later her Quickening had lit up the western sky in a dazzling show of light. The priestesses of Illas Cies insisted she had somehow given herself up to the Mother Goddess and Methos never had found it in his heart to disagree.

He'd told Joe much of the story on the plane, although some details would always and forever remain between him and Columba's spirit. He'd landed in the Roman province of Tarraconensis as one of Nero's mercenaries around 65 A.D. Still reeling from the break- up of the Four Horsemen - a break-up he'd engineered, for his own survival - he'd sought refuge in an occupation that still let him kill and pillage. Hatred burned in him like the mightiest of bonfires and everything he touched turned black with rot. In a village on the coast he and his company met a company of beautiful women. The youngest, little more than a child, had dark hair and sweet lips. She also carried about her the faint, elusive hum of a pre-Immortal. Methos had taken that as a good omen. She'd sat in Methos' lap and they'd both gotten good and roaring drunk. He suspected later that his wine had contained more than just alcohol. They'd announced themselves as man and wife to the rest of the troop and stumbled off to the barn to consummate their relationship.

He'd woken naked in the straw, still pleasantly warm and sticky from their love-making, to find her standing over him about to plunge a pitchfork into his chest. He'd fended her off only to have one of her friends stab him in the back. He'd come back to life in a barren stone cell consisting of a crude pallet, stone table and floor- to-ceiling iron bars. The bars had no door or gate, which worried him. An open window in the eastern wall let in sunshine and a salty breeze and offered a stunning view of the ocean and forest below. He would have gladly traded the vista for a crowbar.

An Immortal woman sat on the floor immediately outside his cell, her white hair fixed in a long braid down her back. She looked fifty or so years old, and sun and wind had weathered her face. Her eyes shone with the same intense blue as the Mediterranean in summer.

"The goddesses sent you to us," she said.

Methos spat at the idea of goddesses. He pulled himself up to his feet and stalked to the bars.

"Free me," he snarled, "or I'll show you how many ways there are for you to die."

She shook her head.

His hands shot through the bars, snatched her by the collar of her blue robe and yanked her forward full-force. Her face and skull cracked against the bars. When her fellow priestesses came a few minutes later, he pushed the limp body toward them.

"Take her," he growled. "Tell her not to come back speaking of goddesses."

Despite his order she did come back, the next day. She sat a few feet from the bars, in deference to the lesson he'd taught, but seemed otherwise undaunted.

"You were sent for us to rehabilitate," she said.

Methos had spent half the night examining every detail of the bars. With a tool of some sort, he could dig around the mortar. It might take a few years, but he could do it. The thought of her or anyone else rehabilitating him made him laugh.

"You don't know what I've done," he mocked her. "You might not think it's such an easy task."

Her gaze didn't waver. "I know what you've done. Murder. Rape. Torture. Mayhem. A thousand years of killing children and mothers, fathers and brothers. You are perhaps the most evil man who's ever walked the face of this planet."

"You honor me," Methos said, sketching a bow. "That's quite a title."

"You'll give it up here, I promise. You're going on a journey, Methos of Sumer."

Icy fingers crawled up his back. He had told no one his real name in at least a century. And how had she known about his time with Kronos and the others? "A journey where?" he snapped.

"To truth and love. You'll renounce your ways and embrace a truer path, no matter how long it takes. And I will help you."

Methos didn't like the confidence in her voice, but he let no trace of worry cross his face. He could outsmart her. He could outwit her. She was a weak and worthless woman and he, after all, had been one of the Four Horsemen.

But in the end, Columba proved right. Under a steady diet of bread and water, under her persistent tutelage, under the constellations that spun through the seasonal skies outside his window, he grew to renounce his evil ways and find a heart in his chest that could beat in appreciation of love and wisdom, not hate and fear.

And it only took two hundred years of being locked in the damn cell, on the island exactly before them as Antone rowed their boat to the white and sandy shore.

Chapter Seven: Journey, Part Three

"Journeys end in lovers meeting." - William Shakespeare, Twelfth Night, act 2 sc 3

Joe dreamed of his own legs. His own sturdy, flesh-and-bone legs, the way they'd been before Vietnam, when he'd been able to run and jump and do everything everyone else could. He dreamed of walking up a hill on those strong legs. Dirt tickled between toes that had been lost to him over twenty five years earlier. Ferns scratched lightly at his shins. He had the sneaking suspicion he might be naked, but couldn't make himself look down to check. He walked up the hill to a stone courtyard and a temple with heavy oak doors. The doors hung open, with blackness beyond their threshold. A black stallion stood in the middle of the courtyard, staring at Joe as if challenging him.

"Nice horse," Joe murmured.

The animal snorted at him almost derisively, then turned in a circle and became Richie.

"I've been waiting for you," Richie said, smiling. "Come on, Joe. This is the place."

He turned and walked into the temple. The blackness swallowed him whole. Joe started to follow, but his legs had turned to plastic and steel and helplessly he realized he couldn't move -

"Joe. Wake up, we're here."

The temple and courtyard vanished. Joe blinked, shielding his eyes against the painful glare of the sun. Wine had left his mouth sour and thick. His head pounded. He stretched his legs and found himself deeply, unaccountably saddened to hear the click of prostheses instead of the creak of joints.

"Here where?" he asked, letting Methos help him out of the boat and onto a sandy beach.

"Illas Cies," Methos said.

"Oh." Joe glanced up and down the pristine shoreline. Not that Methos had exactly said so, but he'd somehow expected to see troops of beautiful women in togas strolling all over the place. "Where is everyone?"

"They're waiting for you," Antone pointed. "Up there."

Joe glanced toward the trees and saw a small path cut through the dense forest.

"I remember the way," Methos said tightly, but made no move.

The ocean lapped at the shore and a breeze ruffled the branches of the trees. Joe could hear birds and see flashes of color high above. If he listened hard enough he thought he heard music, a low and long-forgotten melody of his youth. Ridiculous.

Joe said, "Let's go before I get sunstroke, okay?"

He started through the sand with difficulty. The white mounds shifted treacherously under his artificial feet and shoes. Methos caught up to him and offered a steadying hand at his elbow, but said nothing. The dirt path through the forest was narrow but well- trod, and Joe found the way easier. The steepness became daunting, however, as they climbed further upward. Birds flitted overhead, and twice Joe caught sight of the large shapes moving in the woods.

"Wild horses," Methos said. "They're all over the island."

Halfway up the hill they found a tiny church dedicated to Mary, the Holy Mother. Methos said it had been built after he left the island, as part of the cover story that protected the priestesses during the Catholic Expansion and Inquisition. They stopped inside its cool darkness for a few minutes so Joe could rest. Someone had left a jug of cold spring water by the door for them to drink and he gulped gratefully.

"You really think they have Richie's body?" he asked Methos, who roamed the inside of the church looking at the simple pews and altar. Methos nodded. Joe continued, "Why would they have it?"

"A bargaining chip, perhaps. A way to get something they need."

"They're that manipulative?"

Methos sat down beside Joe but took his sweet time answering. They were on Illas Cies now, with ears and eyes everywhere. "They have goals and needs. This island protects them, but limits them as well. Their refusal to carry swords or fight other Immortals means they risk death every time they leave."

"Your wife . . . the one who tricked you - she tried to kill you."

"She was a mortal, then. One of Columba's recruits. Don't mistake their vow not to play in the Game with a refusal to protect themselves by other means, Joe. In any case, Maud died of an infection a few weeks after my imprisonment and came to live here permanently. When Columba left, Maud became the High Priestess."

He kept his own opinion of that quiet. Maud might have been beautiful, but she'd been so very, very young. He supposed in the fifteen hundred years or so since their last sight of each other she might have grown, but he still considered her nothing more than a child.

"Come on," he said, helping Joe up. "It's not much further."

Twenty minutes later they reached the top of the path and the stone courtyard Methos remembered too well. Long before Rome and Nero and Methos, the priestesses had hauled granite out from the coastline cliffs and constructed an intricate plaza of ancient design. Joe stopped at the edge of it and sucked in a sharp breath.

"What's wrong?" Methos asked.

Joe eyed the stones in bewilderment. "I dreamed about this place."

"You couldn't have."

"I did."

Methos frowned and turned away from his friend. The stone had cracked in places over the centuries and grass grew through numerous gaps. The priestesses had become inattentive. Columba would never have allowed it. The old oak doors of the temple stood open, another detail he found disturbing. The door were meant to be kept closed, a symbolic defense against the madness and ignorance of the outside world. As he and Joe crossed the plaza Methos braced himself for the feeling of eyes watching, but no such sensation came to him. Only hollow emptiness, with not even a breeze to break the sun's glare.

The presence of another Immortal ripped across his awareness. Christine Lord appeared in the doorway ahead, dressed in a white robe with an ankh around her neck. The gray drabness that had shrouded her in the Paris bistro had dissipated, although she still held her shoulders tensely and wore a tight expression on her face.

"You came," she said.

"Was there a doubt?" Methos asked.

She tilted her head slightly. "Some."

She stepped aside and let them enter. When Methos' eyes adjusted to the dimness he saw the first hall had changed little. Ancient female figures of stone, bone, antler and tusk stood guard, gazing out from the depths of antiquity. Joe stopped in front of one especially powerful sculpture, a six-foot tall stone woman with a fierce face and pregnant belly.

"How old?" he asked.

Christine said, "Thirty thousand years. Archeologists found it one level above Neanderthal relics in France."

"A fertility goddess?" Joe pressed.

She moved to stand at his side and gaze at the ancient stone image. "Fertility isn't the only phenomena for which female images stand. She could represent maturation, menstruation, copulation. Rebirth. The milk of life. Who can say?"

In Columba's day, priestesses would never have acted like tour guides. Methos made note of Christine's special attention to Joe, but couldn't decide whether laziness or some other factor motivated her.

"Where's Maud?" he asked, and he didn't care if he sounded rude.

"In her hall," Christine replied smoothly. "Waiting for you. I'll take care of Mr. Dawson."

Joe's gaze met his, and the Watcher gave a tiny nod.

Methos left them with their ancient carvings and wound his way through the inner sanctums. He saw no other women. Where could everyone be? On the day he'd left the island, no fewer than three hundred priestesses populated the temple. Immortals mostly, gathered from all over the world, their cumulative age staggering. He refused to believe the group had fallen to this disrepair and emptiness. Change affected everyone and everything, but he'd always believed the island would stay the same. The long passage of blue tiles that led to Columba's Hall - no, Maud's Hall - seemed at once familiar and a vague detail out of someone else's life, someone else's dream.

No bells rang from the towers. Funny, but he'd always thought the bells would never silence either. The memory of their ringing had helped him through some of the darkest days of his life since he'd left.

Quiet. Empty. Ghostly echoes, fallen shadows.

He felt Immortal presences and entered the Hall. The domed ceiling of stained glass looked cracked. The tapestries on the wall hung heavy with dust. The frayed carpet that led to Columba's old wooden throne had been cleaned and sewn, but he could see the flagstone floor through bare spots. Twelve priestesses in white flanked the throne, but Maud herself stood off to the side with her back to him as she studied a statue of the ancient Persian goddess Inanna.

"Welcome back," she said, in her low and clear voice, but did not turn around.

Methos stopped several feet behind her. "I wish I could say it's good to be back, but the circumstances prevent me."

Not too bad, he thought. His voice hadn't shook much, and he actually managed to sound calm.

Maud clapped her hands and the priestesses dispersed, gliding silently away as if ghostly sentinels who'd never really been there in the first place.

"Is that the extent of your order these days?" he asked.

"Yes."

He couldn't reply to that. He remembered what had been, and how the island had fallen.

"Don't be sad for us," she said. "It was bound to happen sooner or later."

"I'm not sad," he said, which was true. He'd never cared for their habit of sequestering themselves and trying to defy the Game. But rare sentimentality had caught up to him and he couldn't push down the swell of nostalgia.

"You miss what was," she guessed.

"It doesn't matter. Why did you summon me here?"

"I summoned no one."

"Blackmail, then. Ransom for Ryan's corpse."

"You can take his body this minute, if you'd like. Christine will bring you to him. Carry him away and bury him as you like. Or you can listen to me."

A bird flapped through the broken windows above. A white dove. He hadn't seen one in years.

"I'm listening."

"There's an evil loose in the world, Methos. A force that has waited millennia for release. It found your friend Duncan MacLeod and is using him to get to the one responsible for its imprisonment in Persia so many years ago."

"A force?" he said. "Don't even begin to tell me you believe in Zoroastrian demons."

"Of course not." She remained gazing up at Inanna, her back to him. "Demons exist only because we need to explain away the bad things that happen in our lives. Zoroastrianism is a belief system like any other - interesting in concept, flawed in execution. What Jason Landry set loose from that tomb is much more simple and dangerous and affects us all. Your friend MacLeod is only a tool it is using to get to the one it hates the most."

"And who would that be?" he asked.

"Cassandra the Hittite."

"Cassandra?" he choked out. "Why her?"

"Because she killed him in the first place."

"Killed who?" Methos demanded. Weariness, frustration and the apparent fall of the priestesses and their powers gave him the boldness to step forward and grasp her arm. "I'm already tired of games. Tell me what's going on."

He spun her around. She looked as beautiful as she had the day he'd first met her on the shore. Dark hair, sweet lips. Her cheeks still held the dewy roundness of youth. A few new lines creased her brow, results of stress not aging, but in most every other aspect she resembled the sixteen-year old he'd taken in the hay that summer day so long ago.

Except for the tiny, jarring detail that her eyes had been cut out of her head, and in their place sat two polished black ovals of stone.

Chapter Eight: Defining the Wickedness

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are capable of every wickedness." - Joseph Conrad, 1857-1924

Methos had been gone for a long time. Too long, perhaps. Joe wandered through the temple's first hall, surrounded and dwarfed by the stone and wood women. Some stood tall and thin, with features of snakes or birds. Others appeared to squat, with huge breasts and buttocks hanging in space. Many had precise notches in them which could have been calendars for periods of menstruation or might have once held jewelry. Most of the statues, Christine said, carried on traditions of earlier myths and symbols, some more than ten thousand years old. She also told him that Neolithic goddess worship had transformed through the centuries to fit the needs of men and women as societies became more agricultural and urbanized. He had no idea what that meant but nodded anyway.

With each of Joe's questions Christine grew more vague and succinct, almost as if she were listening to a conversation in some other room. At one point she excused herself.

"I'll be back shortly," she promised. "I'll take you and Methos to your room."

"Are we staying?" Joe asked.

"Where else would you go?"

Joe watched her recede into the shadows. His thighs and hips ached above the prostheses. He stretched his back a little and looked for a bench. No benches, no chairs, just the slightly dusty floor. Christine hadn't told him he couldn't wander around, so he ventured down a side passage in search of somewhere to sit down for just a little bit. The maze of the halls, rooms and passages lay barren and still, cool in the afternoon heat. His cane clicked on the floor. He saw no one. He had no idea where he was going. He found a long passage of tall, intricately molded bronze doors and tried each as he passed, but all were locked until the very last one.

The door swung open on silent hinges, offering him darkness and the smell of eucalyptus. The air seemed colder just over the threshold, and goosebumps rose on the back of his neck. He gingerly took two steps forward and stopped. He gave serious consideration to going back and waiting for Christine. But something inside pulled at him, as tangible as a hand tugging at his breastbone, and he took another step into the blackness.

Not entirely black. As his eyes adjusted he saw a cone of diffused sunlight spilling from the ceiling at the far end of the very large room. The light fell onto someone lying on a four-foot-high granite altar. Odd place for someone to nap. Joe didn't want to walk toward the light, toward the figure, but his cane and artificial legs carried him forward anyway. Air squeezed out of his lungs as grieving recognition set in.

"Hey, Rich," he said softly, his voice breaking.

Richie Ryan lay flat on his back, arms at his side, naked and utterly still. A handful of red rose petals covered his groin, as if modesty mattered. A garland of eucalyptus leaves circled around his neck, hiding the fatal separation, and above the wreath his head had been precisely set as if it had never left his body. The expression on his face seemed serene and calm. He could have just been sleeping. Joe had seen any number of dead bodies in his time, in all manners of decay and rot, but despite the fact he'd been dead for more than three weeks, Richie looked fine. He looked more than fine. He had traces of color in his cheeks, and if Joe studied his friend's chest hard enough, he seemed to be breathing -

Joe stumbled back a step. No. Richie was *not* breathing. Duncan had chopped off his head and taken his Quickening. The Highlander's grief and the scorch marks on the racetrack walls had proven that. The women of Illas Cies had somehow preserved the body, but Richie was not alive.

He dared himself to prove it. To touch Richie's arm. Would the flesh be soft and warm, the skin of a live human being? Or cold and marble-like, creepy to the touch?

Joe didn't move.

His gaze went to Richie's face. In life, he'd rarely looked that peaceful. Richie had been young, energetic, enthusiastic, impetuous, sometimes temperamental, always quick to fall in and out of love. After Joe had sold his bookstore and bought the bar, Richie had come by often for advice, a sympathetic ear, a few bucks on loan. He'd burst in with one crazy scheme after the other, about music or racing or getting rich quick, and Joe would offer a patient ear. Duncan had often been too busy with his own problems to listen to Richie, and after Tessa Noel's death the kid really didn't have anyone else.

He remembered when the young Immortal had gotten it into his head that Joe should cut his own album, but Joe didn't want money or fame for his music. Richie had persisted for weeks on that issue, using a combination of charm and wheedling that almost drove Joe to the point of signing just to get the kid out of his hair. Then Duncan had taken a Dark Quickening, tried to kill Richie for not the first but the second time, and Richie had left town on a rampage of his own.

Joe wondered, not for the first time, what it must have been like for Richie to grow up in foster homes and orphanages without any anchors to the world. How it must have been, to be nineteen years old, get killed and come back to life only to be hunted, year after year, by murderous others of his own kind for no good reason at all.

He hated being a Watcher. Hated knowing about the secret deaths that went on every day across the globe, as swords swung in alleys and Immortal bodies went to trash dumps, riverbeds, unmarked graves in forgotten forests. The Watchers collected data - for what? Their own rules prevented them from helping. He'd broken the interference policy time and time again, and almost died for it, but nothing changed. There Could Be Only One. Richie had died, who next? Duncan? Methos? Connor? He couldn't bear the thought.

He couldn't go back. Not to that pain. It would be the second time he quit the Watchers, and the very last. He would not, *could* not, deal with the death and sorrow anymore.

"I'm sorry," he said to Richie's corpse. The words vented only a little of the tight, hollow feeling in Joe's stomach and chest. He should have helped Richie more often. Helped him be less dependent on Duncan MacLeod. Persuaded him to keep his distance from the Highlander when Duncan had started his crazy talk of demons.

Too late. Too many regrets.

Joe leaned forward and touched Richie's arm. Not warm and soft. Not cold and marble-like. Somewhere in the middle, perhaps, enough to further confuse him.

He looked at Richie's face.

Richie's eyes opened.

Joe reeled back, tripped and fell into darkness.

***

Methos stared at Maud, unable to comprehend for a moment what she'd done to herself. The mutilation stunned him. The rocks in her sockets would prevent her eyes from regrowing, but she could remove them if she chose. Which meant she chose to be blind. Which led him to believe that she'd done it to herself.

"Yes," she said, as if reading his thoughts. "I cut them out."

The power of speech returned to him. "Why?"

"So that I could see."

He shook his head. She smiled faintly and observed, "You'd like to think I'm still a child. That I don't know what I'm doing."

"I don't know what to think." Which was the truth, however rare. Methos felt his hands clench at his sides and forced the fingers to uncurl. "This is not the island I left."

Her smile faded. "No. But it's the island I rule. We've had difficult times of late. Each year finds fewer and fewer female Immortals playing in the Game. Fewer and fewer who remember or care about the goddesses."

Methos didn't like the hidden curve in her conversation. Soon enough she'd probably be trying to persuade him to stay, to help revitalize Illas Cies. He had better things to do, or so he would claim. "What does Cassandra have to do with all this?" he demanded. "Or Jason Landry? You said he set loose something from that tomb in Iraq - some 'evil force.' It all sounds ridiculous."

"Because you want it to sound that way. You've always had trouble making the world fit your expectations, haven't you?"

An unfair thrust of an old weapon. He clenched his jaw but stayed silent.

"Jason Landry did in fact meet something in that tomb. He subconsciously put it into a framework he could understand - an interpretation that made sense to him. Just as we all do, with the events of our lives. We attribute good fortune to the deities or superstitions of our culture. We see events and call them miracles or coincidences, based on our beliefs. Jason Landry saw something and called it a Zoroastrian demon. He made it fit into his mental framework. You and I don't need a label like that."

"Why not?"

"Because we know where unclaimed Quickenings go."

Methos stiffened. Unclaimed Quickenings. Immortals decapitated by mortals. If no other Immortal stood in range, the Quickenings poured out silent and unobserved, invisible fog, and lay latent and dormant until the end of the Gathering. He often imagined Paris thick with them from the French Revolution, the legacy of a dozen Immortals lost to the frenzy of bloodthirsty crowds while others fled to the provinces or other kingdoms.

"We don't know," Methos corrected her quickly. "We believe. But that's just folklore, myths passed down by the oldest of our kind. No one's ever proved it to be true. But even if it's true, why or how could one be imprisoned in an Iraqui tomb?"

"Not just an Iraqui tomb. Iraqui Holy Ground."

Holy Ground. An unclaimed Quickening on Holy Ground. He thought of Darius, who'd been murdered in his own church by rogue Watchers.

"You think it would stay there? Trapped somehow?"

"Exactly."

"And do what . . . take on a life of its own?"

"A Quickening is energy. It contains the power, memories and sometimes the personality of the Immortal who lost her or his head. Is it possible that a Quickening trapped on Holy Ground for three thousand years might be able to take on a consciousness, will and intelligence of its own?"

Methos' gaze narrowed. "Are you saying Jason Landry's demon is the residue of an Immortal killed in that tomb three thousand years ago? Someone Cassandra killed?"

Before she could answer one of her priestesses came in, her face tight with concern. "It's Mr. Dawson," she said. "He's injured."

Methos didn't even think to offer Maud a guiding hand as he hastily followed the priestess to a temple chamber. When he thought to check, he found her trailing twenty paces behind, slow but not helpless in her blinded state. Joe sat on the stone floor beside an altar with a statue on it. Christine Lord knelt beside him, pressing a cloth to the back of his head.

"I'm fine!" Joe insisted grumpily. "I'm telling you, his eyes opened!"

"Whose eyes?" Methos asked, swiftly examining the bump on the back of the mortal's head.

"Richie's!"

An icy snake curled around the base of Methos' spine and began a slow, insidious crawl up his back. Satisfied that Joe was nothing more than a little groggy, he stood and went to the altar. He'd mistaken Richie's body for a statue. The young Immortal's corpse lay silent and unmoving, lax in death.

"Joe, his eyes could not have opened," Methos said. "He's dead."

"I know what I saw," Joe snapped. "You don't have to believe me, but I still know what I saw."

Methos studied the corpse intently. He'd gotten over any fear or qualms about dead bodies thousands of years earlier. The biological shell left behind had nothing left of Richie's life or personality in it, but he did offer a silent, respectful acknowledgment of Duncan's former student. He could see no decomposition. No rotting. No smell of embalming fluid or preservative seeped from his pores. How very odd.

Methos flicked his gaze toward Maud, who stood silently in the doorway with her hands clasped behind her back. No help or hindrance would be forthcoming from her. He looked at Christine Lord, whose eyes challenged him to prove the truth to himself. Methos turned his attention to the garland wreath around Richie's neck and slowly, gently lifted it up.

Duncan's blade had neatly and irrevocably severed Richie's head from the rest of his body. Immortals did not get any deader than that.

Chapter Nine: Destiny

"He that is born to be hanged shall never be drowned." - 14th century French proverb

Rain and fog caught up to them outside Alta as Duncan drove north on the E6 highway. Visibility extended no further than a hundred feet in front of the Volkswagen they'd borrowed from a man Sigrid knew from the university. The trip from Tromso to Alta had taken five hours. He and Sigrid had spent it mostly in silence, each locked in their own private world. They still had another three hours to go, plus a ferry ride, and then the final short distance to Nordkapp. He only hoped the weather would hold long enough for them to reach the tip of Norway before dark.

Every few minutes the idea would come that he should leave Sigrid in some town for her own safety and well-being. After all, she didn't want to see him kill himself. She might even interfere. At the same time the last shreds of honor he possessed insisted he somehow take care of her and protect her from the Immortal he'd left behind alive in her neighborhood. He had vague thoughts of sending her to New York to see Connor, and maybe his kinsman could arrange something for her. On the other hand, he had no idea if she owned a passport or had money to get to America. Maybe he could write out a telegram for her to send, and Connor would respond.

The thought of disappointing Connor by killing himself bothered Duncan, but that tiny nagging guilt wasn't enough to dissuade him. Something else gnawed at him, though, something a friend had once said about his future, and no matter how hard he tried he couldn't put the words out of his head.

"Aren't you cold?" Sigrid asked, an hour after they'd left Alta. The heater that had coughed and wheezed for most of the morning seemed to have died and gone to mechanical heaven. Sigrid sat in the passenger seat burrowed into her coat.

"No," Duncan answered truthfully.

"Ernst has to have some blankets in here somewhere," she said, and undid her seatbelt in order to lean over into the back. If he braked hard enough, she would go sailing through the windshield. The thought disturbed him and he turned his gaze back to the highway.

"Found them!" she said, pulling two thick green quilts from under a box on the floor. "No self-respecting Norwegian travels without blankets. Or so they say. I'm not Norwegian enough to know."

Duncan had only been half-listening. "What?"

"My mother was British. My father came from Oslo. They met on an environmental research project sponsored by the University of Glasgow just outside Maillog. You're Scottish, aren't you? I recognize the accent. I was born there, but we moved to Tromso when I was little."

He nodded absently. His friend's prediction ran in his head, over and over, and he gripped the steering wheel tighter in his hands. Sigrid fell silent, watching the rain and increasingly bleak countryside. Duncan wished she would talk and distract him from the voices in his head, but at the same time he was glad for the quiet and chance to think. As they got further north he felt his brain beginning to creep out of the numb place in which it had hidden for weeks. He felt as though he was waking up, shaking off a bad dream. He supposed the clarity came from being so close to his goal, so close to the end, but the clearness brought a distinct discomfort, the itchy sensation that he'd forgotten something important.

He thought about the mysteries of prophecies. His name had been in Landry's book as the savior who had to fight the demon. Did that mean his destiny had protected him all through the centuries? He could never have lost his head, no matter what, because of his destiny? He found the idea hard to believe and not very comforting. He preferred to think his survival had been a matter of hard work and talent, not the outcome of hieroglyphics written in an ancient tomb.

Jason Landry. His appearance by the Seine that night had launched Duncan into a terrifying vortex of visions, illusions and mistakes. His death, along with the memories of the old hermit in the cave who'd been Duncan's first Quickening and the appearances of Horton and Kronos, had all fed back into Cassandra's predictions about a Highland child born on the winter solstice. But hers was not the prophecy running in his head on the drive to Nordkapp.

No, the words belong to Jim Coltec. His friend the Hayoka, who had taken evil into himself for the good of the world before succumbing to it himself in a Dark Quickening. That same accumulated evil had afflicted Duncan, too, before Methos helped rid him of it.

He wondered, idly, if a door forced open could ever fully be closed again.

"Are you hungry?" Sigrid asked, again fishing in the back for the small sack of snacks she'd bought in Alta. "You didn't eat much at that rest stop."

He could snap her neck very easily. Leave her by the side of the road. No one would catch up to him until it was too late. Duncan sucked in a sharp breath. What the hell kind of monster was he, to be thinking such horrible thoughts? These murderous impulses had not plagued him until he met her, when some dangerous part of his mind must have woken, demanding to be heard.

He'd said to Jim, "You became what you fought."

And Jim had answered, "As we all will become, in time."

Duncan cast his mind back to the racetrack in Paris. He'd taken Richie's Quickening. He could never forget that. But at what point exactly had he given up any hope of avenging his student's death? Not against himself, but against the forces that had driven him to it?

Sigrid flopped down in her seat, pushing her blonde hair from her face. "There's cheese back there if you want some," she said. "Tuna, too. And some dried beef jerky."

"No thanks," he said, and managed to sound as sane as anyone else in the car.

When had he lost his will to live? And how the hell did he hope to build a guillotine in the middle of the tundra and send himself falling into the ocean? If his destiny really was immutable, then he wouldn't succeed no matter how hard he tried.

If Jim's prophecy was true, he'd become the evil that he'd fought.

He'd become the demon himself.

He turned the idea over and over in his head, expecting to feel some sort of horror, but long past that point already. He didn't know if evil could be spread person to person, but maybe Landry had passed it to him that night on the Seine. Maybe Duncan had passed some of it to Allison, enough that she died because of it. With the Dark Quickening he'd been submerged by evil, overwhelmed with abhorrent impulses. After Landry he'd found himself the target of apparitions that hadn't stopped until he'd killed Richie and launched himself on this road north.

Slit her throat, part of him said. Take her, rip her legs apart, spear her with yourself, and slit her throat.

"Do you have a pen?" he asked.

"I'm sure there's one here somewhere." Sigrid rummaged in the glove compartment, tossing aside maps and coffee-stained napkins, and fished out a cheap plastic pen to hand over.

"Thanks," he said. "You're right, I am a little hungry. Can you get me some of that beef jerky?"

She climbed over the back. When he was sure she wasn't looking, he drove the pen into his left knee, hard enough that red agony bolted down his shin and made his toes curl up. He stifled a grunt of pain. When Sigrid turned back around she gave him a strip of jerky, and he bit down on it so hard his teeth rang.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"Fine," he replied tersely.

The pain gave him a focal point. Something to concentrate on to distract him from images of killing his passenger. Half of him muttered murderous impulses while the other half resisted. He didn't know how long he could hold on against himself. Which was the surer bet - tossing her out into the tundra and leaving her stranded dozens of miles from the nearest settlement, or trusting that he wouldn't hurt her before they reached Nordkapp? Something important lay in wait there, something his inner half wanted. Something so valuable it didn't want Sigrid to come and had killed Richie to keep the younger Immortal from accompanying him . . .

Was that it? Was that why Richie had died?

Nordkapp. The answer waited for him there. All he had to do was get them there alive.

***

Sigrid grew increasingly nervous with each passing kilometer. Accompanying Duncan to Nordkapp did not seem like such a good idea after all. She should have been warned by the way he'd raised that sword over the stranger's head back in her neighborhood, ready to cut off his head. She'd known since their first meeting on the bridge that he was in pain, and pain drove people to extremes. In Alta she thought about leaving him, but Duncan looked so lost, so forlorn, that she didn't have the heart for it. Besides, she told herself, she was the Good Samaritan. And in ways she didn't completely understand, Duncan badly needed whatever help she could give him.

After lunch, though, the handsome man had changed. The lost look had shifted into a tense irritation. His knuckles shone white as he clenched the steering wheel, and when he spoke the words came out clipped, clear, almost angry. She didn't think she'd done anything to make him mad, but mad he seemed. Sigrid concentrated on the landscape and tried not to provoke him further. The weather cleared somewhat outside Kistrand. She caught sight of reindeer and their Sami herders. She had never been so far north before. Her breath fogged up the passenger side window and she traced designs in the moisture.

"What's a guillotine?" she asked.

He glanced her way. "What?"

"Guillotine. You said that word last night, but I don't know what it means."

He stayed silent for a full moment before replying, "It's a machine. It cuts things. Don't ask any more."

In Kafjord they barely made it onto the day's last ferry to Honningsvag. The trip would take about an hour. Glad to be out of the confines of the car, Sigrid bought herself a large cup of coffee and went to the glass-enclosed lounge to watch the bay slip by beneath the ship's hull. Duncan had disappeared. Concerned, she finally went looking for him and found him in a small snack room doing an odd series of bends, stretches and lunges.

"Kata," he said when he was done. His cheeks looked flushed and sweat gleamed on his face. "I'm out of practice."

"You hurt yourself," she observed, eyeing blood on his left knee.

"No," he said. "Just a scratch. It's nothing."

"Something's bothering you. Tell me what it is and I can try to help you."

"I can't," he said. He scooped up his jacket from a plastic chair and went outside to the open deck After a moment she followed. The cold and salty breeze stung her face and eyes, and the stink of burning diesel fuel filled her nose. Honningsvag lay a few miles ahead, a cluster of fifty or so buildings around a small bay. Duncan stood at the railing, gazing at the village. Sigrid gingerly touched his arm.

"What's in Nordkapp?" she asked. "Do you know?"

Slowly he shook his head.

Sigrid took a deep breath. She supposed he was crazy, and had been since collapsing beneath the bridge. "Are you going there to kill yourself?"

He turned to her.

"It's a French word, isn't it? The guillotine. For chopping off heads. I finally remembered." When he didn't answer she said, "Whatever you did, it's not worth killing yourself over."

"I'm not going to kill myself," he said. "I thought I was, but I'm not."

"I'm glad."

"It's not safe," he blurted out. "To be with me or near me. A friend of mine already died because of it. Go back while you can."

"No," she said.

"Why?"

Sigrid turned her face to the bitter wind. "Because it's not safe to be with me, either, sometimes. I figure we're meant for each other that way. Wherever you're going, I have to go there too. Don't ask me to explain it. I don't understand myself. But I have to go."

"I don't know what's going to happen when we get there," he admitted, fear in his voice.

"I don't know either." She held out her hand. After a moment he took it, her soft skin against his calluses, her small fingers entwined in his large ones. Without any more words they stood at the railing as the ferry docked. The stretch from Honningsvag to Nordkapp ran only thirty kilometers, and they made good time in the falling dusk. Sigrid found nothing but treeless tundra and sparse dwarf plants to look at outside, and concentrated instead on Duncan.

He began to frighten her again. His left leg tapped incessantly on the floorboard near the brake pedal and a muscle over his right eye twitched with tension. He wouldn't look at her or answer her questions. He sped through the gloom like a man possessed, his driving fast and confident. She gripped her door handle and tried not to panic.

"You should slow down," she offered.

"Shut up."

She pulled herself closer to her side of the car.

Nine hours after they'd left Tromso they reached Norway's official northernmost point, and not a moment too soon as far as Sigrid was concerned. Duncan pulled the car into the parking lot of the North Cape Hall, which had been blasted and built in the interior of the plateau. Sigrid could see warm yellow lights spilling from the windows of the panoramic restaurant. She reached for her door handle, intent on at least getting out of the car, but Duncan reached over and slapped her hand away.

"Don't leave yet," he said, his face inches from hers, his breath hot on her cheeks. "We haven't even started having fun yet."

His mouth came down to press against hers. His tongue forced its way into her mouth, bruising her lips. She bit down hard on it, and he jerked back. He slapped her with his open hand. Her head rocked backward with the blow and blood filled her nose.

"Bitch," he gasped. "You'll pay for that. I'll make you beg and scream and pray for mercy. But it won't come. Do you hear me? It won't come!"

She tried for the door again, but he pushed himself down on her. Sigrid's right hand groped for the tilt control of the chair and pulled the lever. They dropped backwards so that his weight pressed down even heavier, but the flattened position gave her access to the bag on the back seat floorboards. She had bought bottled root beer back in Alta and a bottle opener as well. As Duncan pawed at her breasts and sucked on her neck her left hand groped for the bag. Cheese. Tuna. Beef jerky. Glass bottles.

And there, at the bottom, the smooth metal of the opener.

She had no hopes of stabbing him in the back with it - the sharp edge couldn't go very far. But he had a softer, more vulnerable point where the base of his skull met his spine. Sobbing for breath, fighting not to panic, she brought the opener around with all the force she could muster in her arm and plunged it into that one spot.

Duncan screamed and arched against her. She pushed his weight off and scrambled for the door. She fell out hard, scraping her knees on the asphalt of the parking lot.

"Come back!" Duncan cried out. "Come back, baby-killer!"

The words blasted as deep into Sigrid as bullets would have. Nevertheless she found enough strength to get past the agony and climb to her feet. She started running for the restaurant. She could hear Duncan lurching after her. His fingers grazed the back of her sweater and she screamed. A figure reared up in front of her in the darkness, a tall woman with long dark hair.

"Help me!" Sigrid pleaded. "He's crazy!"

"He won't hurt you," the woman said, and pulled a sword from her long coat. "My name is Cassandra. I'm the one he's after."

Chapter Ten: The Actors

"Remember that you are an actor in a drama, of such a part as it may please the master to assign you, for a long time or for a little as he may choose." - Epictetus (c. 55- c.135 B.C.)

Dusk settled over the island like a canopy of blue and gold. Methos and Joe had been provided a sparsely furnished room on the second floor. An open window looked down to the temple courtyard, and the evening breeze wafting through it smelled of salt and pine. Christine had brought them a rather unappetizing dinner of cold lentil soup and hard bread. The remains sat on the tray by the door. Joe had refused herbal medicine for his headache but agreed to lie down for a little while. Methos sat on his own bed, absently whittling at a broken twig he'd found earlier on their way from the beach.

"I can't help thinking about Richie," Joe said.

"Joe, his eyes couldn't have possibly opened."

"Not that. I don't expect you to believe me about that, though it's true. I keep thinking about him lying there like a statue, all preserved. How can that be? Did they embalm him?"

"I don't know."

"Even embalmed bodies don't look like he does. It's unnatural."

"Sometimes I think this whole island is unnatural," Methos admitted. He didn't like the idea of Richie's corpse caught in some kind of bizarre stasis, either. Immortals buried alive or otherwise entombed entered into such a state, but Richie had been decapitated. No Quickening remained in his body for healing or preservation. Maud and her women must have done something to him, but Methos couldn't imagine what or why.

He told Joe about Maud's theory of an unclaimed Quickening on Holy Ground. Joe saw through the hole in that theory immediately.

"If Cassandra had killed another Immortal on Holy Ground, she would have taken the Quickening."

"Assuming."

"Assuming what?"

"That she was Immortal when she did it. What if she was mortal?"

Joe scratched his chin. "Why would she have taken an Immortal's head?"

Methos didn't answer immediately. He didn't like thinking about Cassandra. He didn't like thinking about the man he'd been when he'd captured her, raped her, enslaved her. Each time he ventured into his own dark past he trod as lightly as possible, fearful of waking his ancient bloodlust and hatred. Columba had assured him that it wouldn't happen, that he had cleansed and absolved himself, but what did she know? She'd rowed away on a boat and given herself to the Mother Goddess, or so they said.

"Methos?" Joe asked suspiciously. "Are you hoarding information again?"

"What do you know about Cassandra's past?"

"Only what she or MacLeod told me. Her database entry is mostly empty. She was a foundling like the rest of you, adopted by a nomadic tribe, grew up helping the tribe's healer. Your average Bronze Age gal until you and your buddies showed up."

"She didn't tell you how, bored with the nomadic life, she left her tribe for a few years and went to live in the ancient city of Kuzhizar?"

"No."

"She didn't tell you how, poor and starving, she fell in with a band of notorious robbers and cutthroats, the scourge of the kingdom?"

"No," Joe said.

"Selective memory, I suppose. We all suffer from it."

"So what happened?"

"She left them, eventually. I'm not sure why or under what circumstances. She returned repentantly to her tribe and they agreed to take her back."

"So she wasn't actually an innocent little village girl when you carried her off?"

"Hardly." He didn't need to detail Cassandra's sexual history, and it certainly didn't matter, but she'd been far from innocent that first night in his bed. He'd taken her by brute strength. She'd whimpered and cried, playing for sympathy. When that got her nowhere she revealed herself as rather skilled in the art of pleasuring a man with hands, mouth and other openings. It wasn't the first time she'd traded sex for survival, and he suspected she still did it.

After working through her initial shock of being held prisoner, Cassandra had vied quite adeptly for the silent, unspoken and competitive job as his personal slave. Other women fought for the privilege of serving him, hoping perhaps that he would shelter them from the more obvious cruelties bestowed by his comrades. Foolish girls. They never stood a chance with him or Cassandra, although he enjoyed setting them up against each other. He remembered sitting in his tent one day, laughing so hard tears came as Cassandra viciously beat a girl who'd been impertinent enough to offer Methos wine after a hard ride. The slaves had their own pecking order, their own petty hierarchy and rivalries, and Cassandra had clawed her way right into Methos' tent and defended the spot for more than a year.

He'd grown too accustomed to her. Too complacent. Somehow, he must have fallen into her trap himself, although he couldn't remember how or why. He did shelter her, did protect her, at least in a limited fashion. Until one day Kronos had been too persistent to dissuade, too suspicious to placate. Losing her to him brought a genuine regret, as if he'd lost his favorite horse. He'd watched her escape that night with mixed emotions. She wouldn't last long in the Game, but perhaps she'd earned the opportunity to die free. Or as free as possible for any woman in those ages.

Joe asked, "The place where Landry uncovered that tomb - is it built on the remains of Kuzhizar?"

"I believe so."

"So you think Cassandra might have killed an Immortal there, without knowing who or what he was, and that's what Landry let loose?"

"I think it's what Maud believes," Methos replied.

"That would explain why it hates her. Imagine being a disembodied Quickening stuck in a tomb for a few thousand years."

"You're assuming the Quickening retains the knowledge and willpower of the person who lost it."

Joe propped himself up on one elbow. "You're the expert, why don't you tell me?"

Expert. Methos nearly laughed. He'd taken thousands of Quickenings, but each was distinct and different. Some brought shifting kaleidoscope images of his opponent's life. Others brought floods of hatred and terror, love and lust. He didn't consciously remember anyone else's life. But he couldn't swear that those thousands of men and women incorporated into his body had left him unswayed or unchanged. He knew more about physics than he knew about Quickenings, and physics had always been his very worst subject.

Joe's voice broke into his thoughts. "Of course, there's always the easier explanation - that big old nasty Zoroastrian demon."

The words marked Joe's first attempt at humor in weeks, and Methos appreciated the effort.

"There's always that," he agreed, and they let the subject drop for the time being.

***

Sigrid scrambled backward, away from Cassandra and her glittering weapon. One sword that morning, another now at night. When exactly had the world turned into a place where people carried deadly medieval weapons under their coats? Guns she could understand, but not swords. Cassandra advanced warily on the open passenger door of the Citroen. Duncan groped for the bottle opener jutting from his neck and yanked it loose with a curse.

"Get out of the car," Cassandra ordered.

"Or you'll do what?" he demanded with a bitter laugh. "Are you going to kill me? Cut off my head right here?"

"You came here to take *my* head, didn't you, Duncan? Or should I say Fashid? The High Priestess of Illas Cies told me you were coming."

Sigrid climbed to her feet. The smartest thing for her to do would be run to the restaurant, find someone to help. Someone who didn't talk about cutting off heads. A nice Sami tour guide, perhaps, or the restaurant manager. But her feet wouldn't move, and she could only stand by helplessly watching the drama unfold before her.

Duncan's eyes narrowed as he staggered out of the car and steadied his balance. He spread his hands in a placating way, but his voice lost none of its mockery. "I'm Duncan MacLeod, remember? Your Highland child of the winter solstice."

Cassandra kept a wary distance between them. "I know who you are and what you are. An abomination."

Duncan stepped forward. Cassandra edged back. Sigrid didn't take that as a positive sign.

"I'm what you made me," he said. "Cowardly girl. You killed me in the tomb and brought my head to the emperor's men for a reward. For a little silver."

"I didn't know you were Immortal," she said. "I didn't know that I would be Immortal one day too. I had no idea what happened when one of our kind lost his head on Holy Ground and no one took the Quickening. I don't expect you to believe that, but it's the truth."

"Truth?" he asked, smirking. "I don't care about the truth. I'm Ahriman, spirit of the lie."

"So you made Jason Landry believe. So you tried to make Duncan believe."

"Ah, yes. Duncan MacLeod of the clan MacLeod." He stepped forward again, and again Cassandra retreated. "Can you believe the ego of the man? He truly believed it was possible that he, of all the people on the earth, could be the one chosen savior of mankind."

"It wasn't ego," Cassandra said sharply. "It was what you made him believe."

Sigrid didn't understand. Why were the two of them discussing Duncan in the third person?

Duncan laughed. "Not hard to do, and in fact quite entertaining. I made him believe his first Quickening came from a crazy hermit in a cave. Used your prophecy to plant more doubts. Tricked him into getting rid of his own student, that meddlesome little boy, and used that guilt to drive him here toward you."

"Why Duncan?"

"Because he was vulnerable. Because I could get in. Landry was a useless old conveyance for me. MacLeod is a different matter altogether. In the language of contemporary transportation, a . . . thoroughbred? A . . . Mercedes Benz? That he knew of you - and had your current address - was an unexpected and quite pleasurable bonus."

He stepped forward again.

Cassandra stepped back.

"So," he said, "do you think I've explained enough? Because now you're coming with me. We have a destiny to keep. You have debts to repay. I'll only make you suffer for a few thousand years, I promise. A few thousand years of pain and isolation, like the ones you inflicted on me."

He opened his coat and pulled free his own sword. Sigrid recognized it as the one he'd taken from the man in Tromsdalen that morning. He must have circled back to get it while she grabbed a coat and some food from her house. She didn't know anything about swordfighting but he was bigger than Cassandra, more finely muscled, and probably could beat her easily.

Which probably explained why the dark-haired woman pulled a gun from her pocket and shot Duncan five times in the chest. The muted sounds brought blossoms of blood to Duncan's chest and an expression of hatred to his face. He staggered back against the car and slid down to the ground with blood and foam at his mouth, then gave a shuddered jerk and died.

Cassandra stood in place for a full sixty seconds, the gun with its silencer hanging at her side.

"Help me get him into the car," she finally said. "Before it's too late and he returns to life."

Sigrid had never seen anyone killed before. She still didn't understand what had just happened, and the other woman frightened her. But mindful of the gun in Cassandra's hand she helped shove Duncan's body into the backseat. Cassandra crouched over the still form, touched Duncan's face gently and started shaking. Only then did Sigrid realize how frightened she was, and how well she'd been hiding it.

Sigrid put her hand on Cassandra's shoulder and patted it. "You did what you had to," she said awkwardly. "He would have killed you."

Cassandra straightened and wiped her eyes clear of tears. "I don't expect you to understand any of this, and I'm sorry you're involved. You mustn't tell anyone what you saw. You have to go."

Sigrid said, "Tell me first about the prophecy."

"What?"

"The prophecy he spoke of - the Highland child, the winter solstice - what was that about?"

Cassandra looked to Duncan. "It doesn't concern you."

"Please. It might be important."

The dark-haired woman looked too tired to argue. "An evil one will come, to vanquish all before him," she said, her voice flat and spiritless. "Only a Highland child born on the winter solstice who has seen both darkness and light can stop him."

"But that's me," Sigrid said.

Chapter Eleven: On His Knees

"And Satan trembles when he sees, The weakest saint upon his knees." - William Cowper, 1731-1800

In his dream, Joe stood on the beach of Illas Cies in the bright light of day. The heat beat down on his shoulders and face. His flesh- and-blood toes curled into the wet sand as an incoming wave washed up around his legs, salty and cool. Trees bowed in the wind toward him, and a wild black stallion pawed the sand not ten feet away.

"Have her bring them to me," a woman said from behind him.

Joe turned. On his own two legs. Without the need for a cane or plastic limbs.

"What?" he asked.

The woman standing before him had long white hair flowing down past her shoulder blades. His own age or perhaps a little older, she wore a long golden gown and a wreath of roses on her head. Lines of somberness crossed her face. "Have her bring the children of the winter solstice to me."

"But who are you?" Joe asked.

"Trust her, Joe," a familiar voice said. He turned again and saw that the black horse had transformed into Richie. The kid looked alive and well, with a trace of a smile on his face. "It's the only chance."

"Richie?" Joe asked, stepping forward, but the sun grew too bright for him to see. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, the beach, the woman and Richie had all disappeared, taking his legs with them.

***

Antone appeared at dawn the next morning. Methos had woken earlier by some faint sound and had spent the last several minutes standing at the window and gazing at the forest when he saw the other Immortal cross the courtyard. Antone walked swiftly and purposefully toward Maud's Hall. Joe lay snoring in his bed, one hand hanging down by the prostheses lined up neatly on the floor. Methos slipped on his shoes and made it downstairs in time to catch the last of the other male Immortal's words.

"She said she'd be bringing the girl with them."

"Which girl?" Methos asked.

Antone turned around. Maud remained sitting on her throne, her hands tightly gripping the worn wood. Her dark hair hung loose and uncombed and her nightgown had wrinkles. She must have just risen. She looked very young and naive, frozen at the end of childhood.

"Cassandra killed Duncan last night. She's bringing his body here, along with the girl who'd been his companion," she said.

"Killed?" Methos asked, a lump in his throat.

"Not permanently."

"Why kill him at all? And why bring them here?"

"He's possessed, apparently. By the unclaimed Quickening that Jason Landry set loose from that tomb. As for bringing them here - well, where else in the world? No place is safe. We must contain the evil as best possible and defeat it."

The lump in Methos' throat eased only to be replaced by a cold feeling in his gut. He'd seen Duncan possessed by the Dark Quickening. Sean Burns had lost his head in that affair, and numerous mortals had been hurt. Only a climactic confrontation in an ancient holy spring had cleansed Duncan, and last time Methos checked, the spring had gone dry.

"Do you know how to defeat it? How to set Duncan free?" Methos asked.

Her shoulders dipped in defeat as she shook her head.

"Taking his head is not an option, either. That unclaimed Quickening could take over his next host as well. It wouldn't be safe for any of us to try."

"I must discuss this with the others," Maud announced. She rose unsteadily. "When will they arrive?"

Antone said it might take a day or two, depending on how fast and discreetly Cassandra could travel. Methos understood. In the old days, lugging a dead body across most of the European continent would hardly have raised an eyebrow. In the modern world, Cassandra would have to circumvent borders and customs agents. Charter planes were scarce at the northern tip of Norway, but she might be able to book something in Oslo for the trip to Spain.

Maud left. Antone departed as well, probably bound for the beach and his blasted rowboat. Methos went back to his room and found Joe stirring in bed.

"Joe? Are you awake?"

"I dreamed of a woman," Joe blurted out. He looked up groggily from his pillow. "A woman with white hair on the beach where we first landed. Richie was there, too."

Methos supposed many women in the world had white hair, but only one had ever ruled the island. As far as he knew, no portraits or statues of Columba dotted the temple grounds, and he hadn't described her to his mortal friend. He remembered how Joe had claimed to have dreamed about the temple before ever seeing it.

He sat down on the other side of the room and asked, casually, "What did they say?"

"She said to bring her the children of the winter solstice, and Richie said to trust her."

Methos' eyebrows raised. "Which children?"

"I don't know."

"Cassandra's prophecy spoke of only one child," Methos reminded him. "MacLeod fit the description."

"I don't know," Joe repeated. He leveraged himself up and abruptly stopped short, his face going pale.

"What's the matter?"

Joe's voice came out hoarse with equal parts awe and surprise. "There's sand in my bed."

Sure enough, a handful of grains marked the white sheets beneath Joe's stumps.

"I don't understand," Joe said.

Methos had no explanations for him. No plausible theories about how sand could have gotten in his bed. So instead he changed the subject. "There's been some news," he said, and explained about Cassandra and Duncan.

"Let me get this straight. You can't behead him, and you don't know how to cure him. What's the alternative? Lock him up for a couple hundred years, like they did to you?"

Methos shook his head. "Whatever my sins were, I was rational and sane when Columba imprisoned me."

"I don't know about that. I don't know if man who killed thousands of people and enjoyed it could be called sane."

Methos glanced at him sharply. Joe's face remained composed and serious. "Fine," he said coldly. "Not sane. But not "possessed." I'm not sure you can talk much sense into what's taken over MacLeod."

"What if we do what the woman in my dream said? She specifically said to 'have her bring' the children. Which 'her'? Maud?"

Methos didn't like the idea of planning by visions. But he agreed that at least Joe should tell Maud about his dreams. Let her decide whether or not to discount them. After scrounging up a breakfast for themselves, the two men went in search of the priestesses. They found no one anywhere on the grounds. The entire place echoed with emptiness. Methos set off on a search around the island. Joe knew he'd only slow down the ancient Immortal and decided to stay behind.

After Methos left, Joe remembered he wasn't really alone and went to visit Richie. The cold and dark hall with its solitary shaft of sunlight hadn't changed. The young Immortal's body looked exactly as Joe had last seen it, suspended in some mysterious state. Although the very act made him squirm with discomfort, he lifted the garland and made sure again. Richie's head still lay separated from his neck.

Joe sighed.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I don't know what's going on. I don't know what part I play in all this. All I ever wanted to do was be a good Watcher. Then I wanted to be a good friend, to Mac and to you. Did I go wrong someplace and not even know it?"

Richie didn't answer. He would never answer again.

"You asked me once to borrow money for a sword. I said I couldn't get involved. How stupid was that? I've been involved in your life since I first saw you break into the MacLeod's store. Pretty slick little thief, weren't you? But you picked the wrong place that night."

He managed to smile at the memory of the kid climbing in the window wearing a bandanna on his head, dressed in that awful green vinyl jacket Tessa had finally managed to lose at the cleaner's.

"It wasn't the wrong place," he decided aloud. "It was the right place for you. Whatever happened later, you meant the world to MacLeod. And I know he and Tessa meant just as much to you."

The one thing that had comforted him the previous few weeks had been the image of Richie hanging out in heaven with Tessa. His Quickening had gone to MacLeod, but what about his actual soul? Maybe Immortals received only the afterimages of their victim's life, like old sepia photographs, carried on that blast of energy. The case of the unclaimed Quickening might be different because no other Immortal had been there to receive it - the energy and memories had poured out and been contained, and taken on a life of their own.

Over beers one night in the bar, Richie had confessed to Joe one of his deepest fears - that when he finally lost his head, his personality would be trapped in his opponent's head. And when that opponent lost his or her head, they'd roll over into the next victor. And so on, and so on, until he was one of thousands of crowded personalities in the same body.

"That would really suck," Richie had said.

Neither Methos or Duncan had been able to reassure him. No one knew. So until Joe found evidence otherwise, he would believe that Richie was in fact in heaven, with Tessa at his side, maybe watching videos and eating popcorn at that very minute.

Then why was Richie making guest appearances in his dreams? Why did his body look simultaneously alive and dead? And why had the priestesses of Illas Cies brought him here?

"I never had a son," Joe said, putting his hand on Richie's arm. "At least, not to my knowledge. But if I had, I would have wanted him to be like you."

He considered that thought for a moment.

"Well, maybe not as impetuous," Joe added. "And damn it, I would have taught him how to duck faster."

Shit. There he was, tearing up again like some pathetic old man. Maybe he wasn't crying for Richie, but for himself. For his own mortality. For his own inability to make things right. A hand came to rest on his arm, and he blinked at the blurry image of Christine Lord.

Bitterness twisted up through his chest. "Why did you bring him here?"

"Six months ago, Maud started dreaming of a great evil among us. The goddesses came to her and told her to blind herself so that she could see better. Over and over she envisioned a horrific fire claiming a young woman's life. Over and over she saw Richie's death, even though she didn't know who he was at the time. She put all of our orders on alert and told them to report any suspicious activities.

"Last month, one of our teachers in a Marion convent and girls' school in Paris was killed in a fire. The Mother Superior saw you, Methos and Richie at the teacher's building the next morning. She recognized Richie as the young man Maud had dreamed about. She followed you to the barge, saw the very end of the Quickening, and stole Richie's body for us to be delivered here."

Joe's hand tightened on his cane. "Allison Landry was a teacher at one of your convents?"

"She taught math and science."

"And her Mother Superior just happened to know what a Quickening was?"

"We have agents in all of our orders," Christine said. "They help keep an eye out for foundlings and new Immortals who need guidance in the Game. I was a nun in an order in Chicago during the Prohibition when I died in the crossfire of fighting gangs. My Mother Superior knew exactly what to do with me."

Joe suddenly had a vivid, unwelcome memory of his own childhood education. The nuns had rapped his small fingers with hard rulers to improve his handwriting, and threatened him with Hell if he didn't stop talking in the lunchroom. The idea of nuns across America acting as Watchers made him feel slightly territorial.

"But what does Richie have to do with this?" Joe demanded. "He just got in the way, didn't he? He doesn't deserve to be put on display and decorated like some kind of Thanksgiving turkey."

Christine gently put her hand on Richie's curly hair. Joe resisted the urge to remove it. She said, "He has more to do with this than either of us can imagine. The goddesses have picked him for something special. Do you know when his birthday is?"

Joe frowned. "He has two birthdays, actually. He thought it was September 20th. But when he caught a glimpse of his orphanage records, it turned out someone had transcribed an error. His real birthday is September 29th."

"Michaelmas," she said.

"What?"

"September 29th is the traditional feast of Saint Michael the Archangel. He's the leader of the heavenly armies against the forces of darkness and the prince of guardian angels. His feast coincides with the harvest in Western Europe, which itself is linked to cycles of birth and death and re-birth."

"Pure coincidence," Joe said bitterly. "It doesn't mean anything. Why can't you leave Richie to rest in peace?"

She lifted her hand. "He is resting. But not at peace. He can't rest until this evil is vanquished."

Joe palmed his eyes. "I don't understand."

"Do you want to help him?"

"Do I *what*? Lady, I wouldn't be here if I didn't want to help him or MacLeod!"

"Then it's time for you to make a decision, Joe."

The graveness of her tone sent prickly hairs up the back of his neck. "Decide what?"

"Is vanquishing this evil force worth your life? Is raising the dead and protecting the living?"

Joe's gaze shifted from her face to Richie's lax features and back again.

"Will you die for your friends, Joe?" she asked.

Chapter Twelve: Joe's Sacrifice

"He who never sacrificed a present to a future good or a personal to a general one can speak of happiness only as the blind do of colors." - Olympia Brown, U.S. minister and suffragist (1835-1900)

Methos found no one on his trip around the island. Just trees and birds, the wild horses and patches of poison ivy. The bay glittered like an ocean of liquid blue diamonds. The sun beat down out of a clear sky, burning his face for a few minutes at a time before Immortal healing reasserted itself. He had the sneaky suspicion the priestesses had conspired to distract him from something. Or someone. Tired and thirsty, he returned to the temple to find Joe had already had an audience with Maud and her priestesses.

"I told her my dream. She said nothing. Then they kicked me out," Joe said.

Methos detected a strained note in his friend's voice. Had something else transpired, something about which Joe didn't want to speak? He shrugged off his paranoia and instead attributed the tone to Duncan and Cassandra's impending arrival. He felt distinctly uneasy himself. He hadn't seen Cassandra since the day she'd spared his life. Too many unresolved issues still raged between them, wounds that had festered in her for millennia.

As the day dragged on, Joe disappeared with Christine Lord. Methos didn't like the idea of Joe spending too much time with her. She was one of Maud's women, and for that reason alone could not be trusted. Besides, her vow to the church probably ruled out any true or lasting relationship, and Methos didn't want to see Joe get hurt. Maud stayed behind closed doors, conferring with her priestesses. He would have thought she'd want his advice or consultation - despite everything, he *was* the world's longest living Immortal, even if he was a man - but no one came to ask him for his opinion. He wound up spending most of the day wandering around the temple, matching his memories with the present-day reality and avoiding the one place that still remained the most vivid in his head.

Twice he found himself at the foot of the stairs to the cell that had been his. Twice he turned away. He had nothing to see there, no reason whatsoever to visit. During his two hundred years of imprisonment he'd measured every distance possible and memorized even the tiniest cracks in the stones. He'd paced around and around his pallet for thousands of miles. He'd dug at the mortar with his own fingers, literally wearing them down to the bone every day, only to find the iron bars apparently went clear down to the foundation of the building. He'd grappled with the bars themselves, shouting obscenities. They had never broken beneath his anger. Neither had Columba.

"I hate you," he told her, again and again.

"You hate yourself."

"I hate you *more.*"

"Perhaps," she conceded.

The third time he found himself at the bottom of the stairs, he took a deep breath and told himself to stop being silly. He would not allow a mere place to influence his actions or feelings. Purposefully he climbed upward. The wooden door at the top hung open a few inches. When he pulled it open the handle nearly broke off in his hand. Inside lay a short hall of ten paces, and then the place he'd been forced to call home.

The hall hadn't changed. He had stared at it from his side of the bars for years, tormented by the path to freedom. The back of the door remained the same as well - weathered oak with iron bands. The wooden rafters looked older and riddled with dry rot, but they still held up the stone ceiling. A thick layer of dust covered the floor, undisturbed by any footprints.

But the cell was gone.

No bars blocked off the end of the passage. He couldn't even see the holes where the bars had once been. Someone must have removed them and filled in the empty spaces with mortar. His pallet and stone table had disappeared. The window stood in the same exact place, but he didn't go near it out of an irrational fear that stepping into the confines of the old cell would somehow magically transport him back there.

The tiny scratch marks he'd chalked along the wall at floor-level to mark each passing day had faded.

All seventy three thousand of them.

He'd spent seventy three thousand days imprisoned in this space and transformed himself from a warrior barbarian to a repentant scholar. Not by choice, not at first, but he had changed. Cassandra's enemy was the man who had been taken to the cell. Joe and Duncan's friend was the man who had left it. Cassandra didn't see the difference, perhaps because then she would have to acknowledge the dichotomy within herself as well.

Cassandra didn't matter, but Duncan and whatever he carried inside him did. So did burying Richie Ryan and getting off Illas Cies.

He left the cell with no questions answered, no restlessness eased.

He couldn't shake the feeling that plans were being built around him, conspiracies of which he had no part. His suspicions were confirmed when one of the priestesses brought only one tray of dinner to the room and Joe failed to appear. He pressed her ruthlessly, but she would only say Joe was sitting a vigil with Christine and praying for guidance. Methos had an easier time imagining Joe getting drunk with a bottle of Jack Daniels than sitting any kind of prayer vigil. He asked to see Maud, but she was not available.

"I can find her if I want to," Methos warned the priestess, whose name he did not know. "We all know that."

"She said to be patient. It will all be over soon."

Not a very reassuring thought, that. Methos finally fell asleep only to be plagued by nightmares. Blood and pain rode crimson horses into his dreams, and he saw Columba fall beneath Kronos' blows. Cassandra donned a black robe and pronounced herself the goddess of death. Duncan slew a thousand men, laughing and swinging his sword until blood drenched his clothes, his skin, his hair. Quickenings illuminated the sky like the lightning of an apocalyptic storm. The Horsemen's tents fell and became the temple, and Maud offered Joe up to the goddesses by methodically dissecting him, limb from limb.

He bolted upright from that last image, drenched in sweat, and found himself in Maud's arms.

"Sssh," she soothed. "You were having a nightmare."

She sat on the edge of his bed, illuminated by the moonlight, dressed in a gown of purest white, the stones blank and smooth above her cheeks.

"They're here," she said.

"Who?" Methos asked, shuddering in her embrace. She smelled of roses and pine, and her hands traced gentle circles on his back as he fought to regain some semblance of control.

"Cassandra. Duncan MacLeod. And a mortal young lady named Sigrid Hamsun, born on the winter solstice in 1972, in Maillog, Scotland. In the Highlands."

The children of the winter solstice. Duncan and Sigrid. The dream of the Highlander slaying all those men returned to Methos, making him cold from toe to scalp.

Maud held him for a moment longer before pulling back. "They're all on the beach, waiting for us. Will you come? Will you walk with me as my husband?"

He searched her young face for any signs of ridicule.

"You can't possibly still consider me your husband," he said.

Maud kissed him chastely on the lips. "You swore a vow," she reminded him somberly. She stood and offered her hand. He accepted the help and stood beside her.

"Do you know what will happen?" he asked.

"I know only what the goddesses allow me," she answered. "Right now, I see nothing."

Hand in hand they left the temple and walked down the hill toward the beach. He never liked to think of himself as a romantic, but sensations swept over him with a mysterious and warming glow. Stars glittered in the eastern sky, just beginning to fade beneath a faint glow working up from the horizon. Trees bowed and swayed, rustling assurances. A black stallion on the path before them stared at Methos before snorting and galloping off into the brush.

"Where will we take him?" Methos asked.

"To Columba," she said, and her hand tightened in his, a barrier against any further questions.

Methos heard Duncan long before he caught sight of the bonfire at the shoreline. The Highlander lay in the sand, wrapped with chains, his body shaking with fury as he fought the iron embrace and swore oaths in several different languages. Froth speckled his lips and the veins in his neck bulged like thick ropes.

"Be careful," Maud warned. "I think it can jump from one person to the other if it wants to, if it can find the proper door."

A door. Like Jason Landry's fascination with all things demonic, and Duncan's lingering damage after the Dark Quickening.

But it wasn't the sight of Duncan in the sand that brought Methos to a screeching halt. Nor the sight of Cassandra beside a mortal blonde woman. On one side of the bonfire a wooden platform held the corpse of Richie Ryan, still decorated with garland and rose petals, bizarre but acceptable. A different tableau altogether on the other side of the bonfire slammed into his awareness.

"No!" he said, and lunged forward.

Maud blocked his way. "He agreed. The goddesses demand payment if you want their help."

"I did agree," Joe said.

The mortal stood in the sand, tied spread-eagle to a massive wooden X. The position would have been stressful on anyone, but the strain had to be especially hard for Joe with his weight bearing down so awkwardly on his stumps and prostheses. He looked tired and in pain, as if he'd been in place for hours, and his clothes had been replaced by a white gown that clung to sweaty patches on his shoulders and ribs.

Christine Lord stood beside him, murmuring prayers over a large dagger in her hands.

"Absolutely not!" Methos said vehemently. "I won't let this happen."

"Not your choice, my friend," Joe quipped, with a fond glint in his eye. He made an obvious effort to sound upbeat. "The goddesses demand a sacrifice for their help. I've never been a sacrifice before. It probably won't be much fun, but I hope the end result is worth it."

"Don't be a fool, Joe," Duncan growled from the sand. "You don't think a little human sacrifice will deter me, do you? I had *fun* burning that young lady to ashes. Your sacrifice means nothing. Goddesses don't exist. Only I exist."

Cassandra pulled a dagger from her cloak and plunged it into Duncan's chest. He slumped into death, his body twitching for several seconds longer than it should have.

She said, "Whatever you plan on doing, we'd better do it soon."

Methos could not bear to see Joe tied up as he was, so obviously delusional if he thought his death would save anyone. No matter what the priestesses of Illas Cies claimed, the chances of true goddesses existing was no more or less than those of Zoroastrian demons. Beatific visions and dreams were one thing, human sacrifice quite another.

He took Maud by the shoulders and shook her. "Let him go! He's not part of this."

"The decision has been made," Maud said, breaking from his grip. "Will you deny him the freedom of choice?"

"Yes," Methos snarled.

"Methos," Joe said. "Don't worry about me. Take care of Mac and Richie, okay?"

"Don't do this," Methos said to Maud. "I'm begging you."

She didn't answer. He gazed at each of the others in turn and found the same implacable expression on the faces of the priestesses and Cassandra. Sigrid Hamsun stood with her hand pressed against her mouth, but he knew she could do little to stop this horrifying night from unfolding. He considering killing them all to save Joe, but what good would that do? Joe would never forgive him and Duncan would still be possessed. Assuming he could defeat over a dozen Immortal women at once, Cassandra among them.

"Joseph," Methos said, one last plea. He had so much left to tell Joe. About the Watchers, about himself, even about the early days of the blues. All the information he'd been hoarding out of habit, not malice.

"Go with them," Joe said. "Get out of here. You all have a job to do."

Methos watched numbly as Antone brought two long rowboats in from the black water of the ocean to the sand. Maud, Sigrid and Antone climbed into one. The priestesses dumped Duncan into the other. Maud directed Methos to get into the boat with the Highlander in it. For a moment he held back, stubbornly resistant, but in the end he climbed in. Cassandra climbed in a moment later, her face tight with tension, hatred pouring out of her.

Methos ignored her expression and started rowing. He followed Antone as they turned a course west, away from the rising sun, away from the women on the beach and Joe Dawson stretched wide on the hard wood. With every single stroke he had to fight the urge to turn back, to free Joe from this insane scheme, to fight against the fate that had come this morning for them all.

He looked back only once, but couldn't even raise a hand in farewell.

Joe didn't watch the boats go. His arms and stumps ached fiercely from the suspension of his own weight. A dull headache pounded behind his eyes, and he felt hollow and dry with thirst and hunger. The muscles in his back spasmed, not for the first time, and he felt Christine's soothing hand on his brow.

"Not much longer, now," she promised.

"I don't remember anything about blood sacrifices in the Bible," he said.

"Not in the New Testament, at least."

A joke. Well, it was good to know someone could joke at a time like this, even though Joe had no humor left in his own body. "Well, can't you just hurry up and get it done with now?"

"Timing is everything," she said. "This is the path you chose, Joseph Michael Dawson. Do you want to change your mind?"

He gazed after the boats, then to Richie's body on the wooden altar.

"No," he said. "This is what I choose. Are you the one who's going to kill me?"

"No. But I'll be with you when it happens," she promised.

All he could do was wait for his own death.

***

Sigrid knew she was off the coast of Spain. She knew it was close to dawn, and only about thirty six hours had passed since she'd met the troll hiding beneath the bridge near her house. No, not the troll. Duncan. And whatever he carried around inside him. Many facts and details had blurred in her head, the result of fatigue and shock, but she knew two important things. Number one, she met the qualifications of the prophecy the woman Cassandra had quoted.

And number two, the boat carrying her west was bringing her to her baby.

How she knew that second item, she couldn't say. But her breasts felt heavy and about to leak milk at any second. She'd been smelling Hanne ever since they left Norway, her nose full of the same sweet powdery aroma of infants that had lingered in her daughter's forgotten sock. And she could hear her baby's giggles beneath the stroke of oars, beneath the murmur of the ocean as the boat slipped through it.

"Sigrid," said the teenaged girl on the bench behind her.

"Yes?" she asked, turning around.

"My name is Maud. I dreamed of you."

Sigrid looked away from the horrible sight of stones stuck in the girl's eye sockets. Who had done that to her? The thought of being in Maud's dreams unnerved her. "You don't even know me."

"The goddesses showed you to me. They said you lost something. What did you lose?"

The girl was blind. It couldn't be rude to turn one's back on a blind person, could it? Because that was exactly what Sigrid wanted to do - turn her back and pretend the question had never been asked. The girl looked too young to understand pain. To understand tragedy and loss.

"Sigrid, what did you lose?"

"My baby," she said, hanging her head.

"How?"

"I . . . put her down for her nap . . . for just a little nap . . . " Sigrid stopped, unwilling to go on. She couldn't say it. The boat bobbed up and down, and she felt tears begin to swell in her eyes. Maud reached out, groped for her hand and squeezed tight.

"Tell me," she said.

"She didn't wake up," Sigrid said.

Maud said nothing. The eastern sky grew golden behind her.

"They said I did it. That I put a pillow over her face to make her stop crying because of . . . postpartum depression. They put me in the hospital and while I was there, my husband filed for divorce and sold our house. I lost everything I ever had, but the only thing that matters is my baby."

"Did you do it, Sigrid?" Maud asked gently. "Did you put the pillow over her face?"

Sigrid covered her eyes with her hands. "It was a mistake," she said, as something hard and clenched in her chest released its awful pressure.

I know," Maud soothed. "We all make mistakes."

"But I . . . killed my own child."

"You're not the only one."

Maud looked over in the direction of the other boat. Sigrid didn't know how she could pinpoint it in her darkness, but she did. Sigrid followed her blind gaze to see Cassandra and Methos and the tip of Duncan's head.

"Did Duncan kill someone too?" she asked, wiping the tears from her face.

"Yes."

"Who? His son?"

Maud didn't answer. Instead she cocked her head, as if listening to something. Her hand tightened on Sigrid's.

"Antone, stop the boat. Do you two hear that? I hear music. I hear flutes."

The man immediately pulled his oars from the water. The boat continued to glide on the calm ocean and slowed to stop. Sigrid stopped crying. She listened but heard only the lap of water against the boat's wooden hull and gentle whoosh of low waves. The rim of the sun broke the horizon, a line of golden fire that slipped higher and higher. Sigrid saw awe dawn on Maud's face and listened harder, listened with all her heart. Nothing.

"I don't - " she started to whisper, afraid to break some magic spell, but then she heard something other than flutes.

From beneath the waves, the singing of angels.

Chapter Thirteen: Toward the Abyss

"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you." - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

Methos rowed west under Cassandra's hateful glare. Since Maud had mentioned doors, he hadn't been able to get them out of his mind. He remembered the doors of the Alexandria library and how they'd gleamed golden at dawn each morning as he waited on the steps for the esteemed librarians to arrive. The doors of the Globe Theatre, great wooden slabs that had burned down along with the rest of the place. The doors to the dojo and to Joe's place, to Alexa's house and Duncan's barge. Doors of many sizes, shapes, colors, textures, materials. Some open, some closed. Some easily breached, others virtually impenetrable.

Duncan remained dead at the bottom of the boat, chained and laying in an inch or so of accumulated water. Cassandra sat on her bench glaring at Methos with hostility that emanated out of her like comic book death rays, impossible to ignore or defuse.

"Say it," Methos ordered.

"Say what?" she returned, her voice icy-cold.

"Whatever's so obviously on your mind."

"I should have killed you in Bordeaux. I should never have listened to Duncan and spared your life."

"Then you'd be rowing yourself right now."

Her tone became even more ominous.. "You think it's funny?"

"No." Methos lifted the oars from the water and met her gaze directly. "What happened between us was never funny."

"You thought so at the time. You rarely laughed, but you always manage to look amused at my . . . situation."

Methos didn't deny it.

"You were a monster, do you know that?"

"Yes."

"You still are. Monsters don't change."

"Then I suppose there's no hope for MacLeod," he said, more sharply than he'd intended, and started rowing again.

Cassandra's gaze dropped to Duncan's body. "None of this is his fault."

"Whose fault is it?"

"Fashid."

"Is that his name?"

"It was," she said.

"And you killed him on Holy Ground."

"I didn't know the rules at the time. I wasn't even Immortal."

"Did you know he would be coming for you?"

"I don't have to answer your questions."

"True," Methos agreed.

After a moment's consideration she said, "When Maud found out Allison Landry's grandfather had opened that tomb in Iraq, she had the confessionals researched and found the connection to me."

Methos should have guessed that. Cassandra had spent some years on the island sometime in the Dark Ages after the fall of Rome. Not many years, perhaps not even enough. She must have renounced her crimes to the priestesses just as he had. It had taken several decades for Methos to recall and record the details for Columba. He had slaughtered so many that he couldn't remember them all. He'd raped mothers, then burned their children alive and used their infants for target practice in front of them. To be truthful, he should have been tortured and killed as he had done to others, in as heinous ways as imaginable.

But that was not his punishment. His punishment had started with seventy three thousand days in jail and the burden of living with his crimes for the rest of his life.

He wondered exactly why she had killed Fashid, but it didn't really matter. "Do you think MacLeod can be saved?" he asked instead.

Cassandra looked away to where the horizon met the ocean. "I trust Maud."

More than he could say, actually. "And you're willing to let them slaughter Joe Dawson because of that trust?"

"Joe made his own choice."

"Choice!" he snapped. "They've probably brainwashed him into thinking somehow his sacrifice will save MacLeod, or bring back the dead - "

Methos stopped himself. He'd seen the words "The dead shall rise!" written more than once in Landry's journals.

Nonsense. The dead did not rise.

"Joe is doing what he believes will help. Aren't we all?" Cassandra asked.

The other boat, a hundred or so feet in front of them, glided to a stop on the smooth ocean. Methos lifted the oars again. He saw no reason to have stopped out here, in the middle of nowhere, but perhaps that was to be expected. Maud had said they were going to Columba. Had she lost her head here? Not to the goddesses, as Maud and the others believed, but to a more conventional opponent? Personally, he'd always suspected Antone. Columba must have grown weary of life and arranged for him to relieve her of her head. She could have faked her death, he supposed, but she carried no sword and would fight no other Immortals in the Game, and someone's Quickening had been visible back on the Illas Cies.

"Do you hear that?" Cassandra asked, cocking her head. "I hear drums. The drums of my tribe."

Methos listened. He heard no drums. Instead he heard a faint ringing, like the bells that had called Plato's students together each morning. The water lapping at the boat's wood quickened and seemed to rush away. He peered over the side, amazed to see the ocean level dropping. Something scraped at the bottom of the hull and he imagined for a moment that they'd hit a sandbank. The vessel rocked to the side as it lifted higher and higher. He could see the other boat doing the same, and a stretch of ocean floor building a path between them as the water drained away.

An island rose beneath them, glittering with stranded starfish and wet sand, dotted by ancient Celtic pillars and decorated in delicate strands of seaweed.

***

"Nice trick," Methos called out to Maud as he climbed out of his boat. "Last time I saw it used, Moses separated the Red Sea."

He was being facetious, of course. He had no other weapon but deprecation to use against an island that had risen so unexpectedly and improbably from the ocean. A blue and white fish flopped in distress at his feet, and he tossed it back into the water a dozen feet behind him. The island's elevation was just a few inches or so above sea level, and it stretched east and north for no more than a hundred feet in either direction. A little island, then. Improbable all the same.

Maud walked to the center of the land, her robe billowing in the breeze, no uncertainty in her step despite her blindness. A dark carpet of sand, pebbles and wilting ocean fauna ran beneath her bare feet. She stopped beside a coppery green statue of a woman with one hand lifted to the sky. The woman's face looked west, toward the horizon, wearing an expression of subtle longing.

"What is this place?" Cassandra asked, stepping from the boat.

"This is one of the oldest Holy Grounds in the world, an ancient and sacred site," Maud said solemnly. "It's a place for endings and beginnings."

"Can't we just dispense with the cryptic answers?" Methos sighed.

"Silence!" she ordered. "Bring the Highlander to me."

Methos quieted, unwilling to risk antagonizing her at this crucial juncture. Antone came to his side and they lifted Duncan from the rowboat. Between them they carried the large man to Maud and deposited him on the ground before the statue.

Maud said, "Secure him to the statue. Make sure he can't escape."

Cassandra brought forward the key to Duncan's shackles. After just a few minutes of work he sat chained to the base, still dead, his body wrapped tight. Cassandra and Antone stepped back from their work. Moved perhaps by her own instincts and compassion, Sigrid knelt by the trussed form and cupped Duncan's face.

"He's so cold," she murmured.

"Listen to me carefully," Maud said. "The presence inside him is nothing more than an extra Quickening, taking up residence where it doesn't belong. It's hateful and strong, but not invincible. When it's free it can create illusions and cause changes to the material world. It's not free now, not while it's still in Duncan MacLeod, but it can move into any of us, if it can find a way in. You must guard yourself. You mustn't accept anything it shows you or says to you as true."

Methos had an image of round-robin possession - first MacLeod, then maybe him, on to Maud and Cassandra and Antone, an endless loop of body-jumping.

"How do we kill it?" he asked.

Maud's chin lifted. "We don't."

"It needs to be destroyed!"

"Your detractors once said the same thing about you," Maud reminded him. "We must beg the goddesses for their intervention and mercy. Now, take the dagger out of his chest."

Methos hesitated. First he wondered how she knew, in her blindness, what Cassandra had driven into Duncan and where. And then he wondered if she had even the slightest bit of common sense in her. If the demon lay trapped in Duncan's body, then maybe just letting Duncan stay dead was the best possible solution. It certainly didn't sound as if she had a more concrete plan other than putting their fate in the hands of unseen, unproven deities.

He thought of Joe, ready to sacrifice himself on the basis of faith and trust. He tried to find it within himself to believe this girl he'd once met, wooed and bedded in a roadside tavern in old Galicia. How could she possibly know what she was doing?

He'd told Joe that he couldn't believe in Zoroastrian demons because the religion itself was only half his age. Had pride blinded him to any particles of wisdom carried by the young - not necessarily in the case of petty, two-bit demon millennial myths, but in other areas instead?

Reluctantly he moved to remove the weapon but Sigrid did it first, carefully gripping the handle with both hands and withdrawing it with a tiny grunt of effort. She placed it in Maud's outstretched hands. Maud turned and murmured a prayer in ancient Greek before thrusting the weapon and Duncan's Immortal blood up into the statue. The knife slid into the statue as if it were made of butter. Methos took an involuntary step backward as a dull red glow suffused the figure from head to toe. A shaft of blood-red light burst from the statue's head, shooting up into the dawn sky like a beacon to heaven.

"What the - " he stared to say, but no further words would come.

Five miles east, on the shores of Illas Cies, Joe Dawson saw a column of red rise into the sky. All but two of the priestesses fell to their knees. One of the youngest-looking women approached, took the dagger from Christine and kissed its handle. Christine's fingers found Joe's right hand and gripped it tightly as she moved to stand almost directly in front of him. Her eyes brimmed with wetness.

"Do you offer yourself up?" she asked. "Do you trust me?"

He didn't look at Richie's body, or the red light, or even the priestess about to stab him. He looked only at Christine. His sore and aching body pulsed with the need for release, for abandon, for an end to the long and arduous wait. He would go with that red light, he knew. He would ride it to heaven or wherever goddesses resided.

"What the hell," Joe muttered. He took a deep breath. "Yes. I offer myself up."

The knife slid into him, a sharp but not unbearable pain, and he died almost instantly.

***

The Highlander gave a gasp as life returned to his body. He struggled against his chains for a moment before sagging back to gaze at Methos with a confused, wounded expression. Raggedly he asked, "Methos? What's happening? Where are we?"

He looked like the warrior Methos had grown to like and even respect, although he'd been careful about revealing the latter to the man. He looked as though he'd fought an exhausting battle in the recent past and had yet to fully recover. He looked harmless, although Methos certainly didn't believe that.

"It's a long story," he said. "And it's not over yet."

The column of red light continued to pour upward. Far to the east, another column appeared, this one blue. Methos' breath caught in his chest. If the blue came from Illas Cies, it might be.. . . he savagely forced that thought out of his head. He could not grieve for Joe just yet. The time for pain, recrimination and guilt would come later, another deep-seated regret to add to his repertoire.

The columns of red and blue began to bend toward each other. Beneath their arcs the ocean churned in a wild, beautiful frenzy. Dolphins flung themselves out of the water, jabbering in excitement. The bells of Plato's temple rang louder for Methos and joined with the bells of Rome at the birth of emperors, of Paris at the end of the Great War, of London on quiet Sunday mornings -

"The singing," Sigrid said, her voice an awed whisper. "It's so beautiful."

"There's no singing," Antone said, the first words Methos had heard from him all morning. "I hear the horns of the palace."

The blue and red reached each other, forming a shimmering rainbow of light that stretched across the sky like an untraveled road.

"The other . . . " Duncan managed from where he sat. "It's not ..."

"Not what?" Maud asked sharply, and Methos turned to see alarm written across her face.

"In me anymore," Duncan finished

Cassandra's sword arced toward Methos faster than he could escape. Too late he realized her door had been open all these years, waiting for madness to come knocking.

Metal bit into him sharply and he doubled over in agony.

Chapter Fourteen: The End of Pain

"There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes." - Milan Kundera (b. 1929), "The Unbearable Lightness of Being"

Duncan remembered fighting with Cassandra in Norway. He hadn't been in control of his actions. He hadn't been able to stop himself. The other, whatever it was, had assumed full possession. Cassandra had shot him, and he'd awoken next on the dark shores of some island. The other still had him in its icy grip and had spoken hatefully with his voice before a dagger ended breath, energy, life. But one image remained with Duncan in the darkness that followed, a vision on which to focus.

Joe. In danger.

They hadn't always enjoyed the best of relationships. The needs that occasionally brought them together to battle evil Immortals couldn't always overcome mutual suspicion or wariness. Duncan hated the idea of strangers following Immortals around and recording the details of their lives and deaths. Joe found Immortals mysterious, powerful and dangerous, sometimes impossible to understand. Conflicts of ideas and beliefs led to friction, estrangements, reconciliations. But no matter what, Duncan had never wanted to put Joe in danger. To risk his very mortal life as a side note in the Game.

Richie had been Immortal. He'd understood the rules and risks, even if he had yet to discipline himself to them. Joe was an entirely different matter, and seeing him bound on that beach like some primitive sacrifice gave Duncan a reason to fight.

In the dark limbo of death, he pushed and pushed and pushed at the thing in his mind, shoving it toward an imaginary door.

It didn't belong in him. He could remember, now, the minute it had tried to move in - by the Seine, with Jason Landry spilling frantic words of demons and prophecies. Some instinctive part of Duncan had resisted, and the thing hovering around Landry moved on. It tried to move in again at the morgue and the barge, but didn't succeed until . . .

Until. . .

Until it had tricked him into taking Richie's head. In the shattering moments of the Quickening the *thing* had slipped into Duncan's head along with Richie's memory and energy. It had filled him completely, a power surge like no other, and because of it some of Richie's Quickening had fed back into the young man's body, leaving the transfer incomplete.

The other had driven him north, toward Norway. Toward Cassandra. He understood it now, saw its twisted shape, felt its icy presence.

He shoved and shoved, forcing it from his mind. Memory and illusion mixed, confusing him - had Allison and Richie really died? His first Quickening had not really been in a cave with a hermit, had it? He forced aside the images and concentrated only on the cold, alien sensation of another presence. Something shifted in his chest and he opened his eyes to a bright blue sky, a stretch of wet land, Methos staring down at him.

The cold fled, vanishing as if it had never truly been.

Columns of light arched across the sky, the most beautiful sight Duncan had ever seen, and distracted him from the sight of Cassandra unsheathing her sword and swinging it toward Methos' middle. She could have gone for his head quite easily, and successfully taken it off in a split-second, but his Quickening was not her goal. Not yet. Blood blossomed on the ancient Immortal's clothes as her blade nearly cleaved him in two beneath his ribs. He folded to the ground, intestines bursting from his gut, twitching in horrible agony but not dead.

"Back!" Cassandra shouted, her sword coming to rest at Methos' neck as Antone moved forward. He stopped. Methos groaned horribly, blood bubbling out of his mouth. Trapped in chains at the base of the statue, Duncan could physically do nothing to stop her.

"Cassandra!" he shouted. "Stop it!"

She laughed. "Not twice, Duncan. You can't beg for intervention twice. His head is mine, as it always should have been."

"Yours or Fashid's?" Maud asked, her voice shaking. "With whom are we speaking?"

"Who do you think?" Cassandra returned mockingly. "I'm here, with her. I can feel her squirming in this head. I can hear her screaming for your help. But she invited me in, you know, without ever even knowing it. All that hatred she never put down about what Methos and others had done to her. How long can one person hate without becoming what they loathe?"

Duncan knew Cassandra had never forgiven Methos. He had worried about her those nights they'd shared a bed in Bucharest and Bordeaux, because she allowed ancient crimes and trespasses to dominate her present-day emotions and actions. She had never been able to let go of what had happened to her at the hands of the Horsemen. Perhaps she hadn't even truly tried. Methos' cries on the ground distracted him terribly, but he forced his attention to her face and some semblance of strength into his voice.

"She won't let you stay forever," Duncan said. "She'll find a way to push you out, like I did."

"Then I'll find another," Cassandra taunted. "There will always be others. So many Immortals caught in hatred and greed, in the Game no one understands. They'll let me in, and I'll use them as I used you. How will you stop me?"

"You'll stop yourself," Sigrid said, in a voice that was not her own.

Duncan's head whipped around to look at the mortal woman. She stood a few feet from Maud, her hair streaming down her back, her skin luminous and golden-white. Her eyes glowed green. She wore an expression of radiant warmth, and Duncan thought she looked like an angel.

"Tricks," Cassandra sneered. "I can do tricks too."

"No tricks," Sigrid said serenely. "Only what you so desire."

Cassandra tossed back her dark hair. "Blood?" she asked, mocking her with a bright note of hope. "Anguish? Torment and death?"

Sigrid spread her hands wide. "So much pain already. So many years, locked in darkness. No one understands, do they? No one knows what it was like to be trapped underground for a million days. No light, no people, no warmth. Only the dead for company. Only cold to accompany each eternal minute."

"Who are you?" Cassandra demanded.

"Those who were called," Sigrid answered. Behind her, the rainbow glittered and shimmered in the air. A blue and gray whale breached the surface of the ocean with a joyous keening cry and slammed back down in a massive displacement of water and wave. Methos stopped making noise and fell still. Maud went to her knees and bowed her head. Duncan tried to pull free of his chains, but the iron links remained locked solid.

"I have no need for you," Cassandra said, and this time Duncan swore he heard an element of fear in her voice.

"I came to offer relief," Sigrid replied. "An end to the suffering. You'll never find it here. Not in a thousand unwilling or willing hosts. Not in a world locked in battle with itself. Give up your hatred and embrace forgiveness."

"I don't need forgiveness!" Cassandra shouted.

"You need to give it and receive it both." Sigrid moved forward. Cassandra pivoted, the sword still at Methos' neck, but made no move to take his head. Sigrid went to her, hands spread wide, utterly peaceful.

"Let us help you," she said. "Let us free you. The process won't be easy. But it will be far easier than the method you're using now."

Was she talking to Fashid or Cassandra? Both? The idea of being free from pain appealed to Duncan himself. No more guilt over Richie, over Tessa, over a hundred deaths he might have been able to prevent if he'd been faster, stronger, smarter. No late nights of self recrimination as he mentally leafed through the bitter pages of his life. No more flashes of self loathing over what he'd done under the Dark Quickening. Just peace of mind, relief from burden, his heart and soul able to rest easy for the first time in a long, long time.

"Will you come?" Sigrid asked softly, cupping Cassandra's face, and luminescence spread from her hands into the other woman's head.

Cassandra's grip on the sword loosened. Her gaze became softer, her eyes more vulnerable. "No more pain?" she asked hoarsely.

"None," Sigrid promised.

A moment hung between heartbeats. Duncan saw the subtle shift in Cassandra's stance and cold flooded through him like an icy river.

"No!" he shouted.

Too late. Cassandra's sword thrust up into Sigrid as malicious joy reclaimed her features.

"I *like* pain," she hissed. "I won't go with you."

Sigrid sagged to her knees, hands clutching her fatal wound. Despair filled Duncan. They had lost. Inexorably, irrevocably lost. The pain would continue now, grow far and wide, spread across the land like a blight, and none of them would be able to stop it. Jason Landry's terror had been justified. Landry, Allison and Richie had all died for nothing.

Tears of bitter defeat filled his eyes.

Sigrid lifted her head and spoke, a thousand voices issuing from her mouth.

"If you won't come voluntarily," she said. "We'll make you."

The sky turned black.

***

Methos knelt in his old cell, staring at the floor where the bars had been. He couldn't tell where the mortar had been filled in. He couldn't uncover one single shred of evidence that the bars had ever existed. Blood stained the floor between his knees but he could spare no time to find his wound or staunch the flow. He had to know the answer.

"Were they real?" he asked, lifting his head. "Did they ever exist?"

Columba put her hand on his head. "We make our own prisons," she said. She looked vibrantly alive to him, with pink cheeks and bright eyes. Her white hair hung in soft curls. He'd never seen it that way.

"Are you dead?" he asked.

"We never die," she answered. "Go back to your friends. They need you. You need them."

He opened his eyes and found himself on the island in the midst of a hurricane. Rain whipped down out of a black sky. Wind tore at his clothes, his hair, his skin. A great howl filled his ears, the sound of nature unleashing itself, and in horror he realized the ocean had come up to reclaim its lost land. He staggered to his feet with water already at his ankles, and in the few seconds it took to orient himself by flashes of lightning the sea rose to his shins.

"Grab the boats!" Maud yelled above the storm.

One had already drifted away on the rising water. Methos lunged for the second and caught the wood with his fingernails. He dragged it back against the immense push and pull of current and helped Maud climb in. Antone jumped in beside her. Cassandra and Sigrid were nowhere to be seen. Methos looked for Duncan and saw the struggling Highlander still chained to the statue in imminent danger of drowning. He fought his way to the Highlander's side. He didn't have the key to the manacles, but he had his sword. Three solid thwacks split the primary chain at a weak link and likewise broke his sword. He tossed the useless halves aside and wrenched Duncan free from the tangle of iron. Duncan coughed and sputtered and clung to him for support.

The water at their chests now, Methos pulled Duncan toward the boat. Antone tried rowing toward them, but the current spun the vessel away. Methos felt very tired, so tired he could just give himself up to the waves and cold, but in some tiny part of his brain he could hear Columba urging him to fight and survive. Waves crashed over his head and choked their way down his throat. Blindly he felt something hard graze his fingertips. He caught the tip of Antone's offered oar and let himself be pulled closer. Hands reached down for him and someone lifted him to safety. Duncan landed beside him a minute later, and the two men lay huddled and drained at the bow as the storm raged around them.

The boat lifted up and crashed down on the high waves, so fast and hard Methos couldn't understand how the hull could possibly hold together. Water broke over the sides, gallons and gallons of it, and Methos and Duncan set to work trying to bail it out with their hands. A useless, futile endeavor. A great sheet of lightning lit up the sky from horizon to horizon, a hot blue-white illumination of pure power, and out of the sea not far away exploded a blue-red Quickening that set Methos' hair standing on end. The Quickening arched up and curved back to earth, toward Illas Cies.

Before he could see what happened next, the boat broke apart. Wood snapped with sounds like thunder. Planks slammed into him and water flooded his mouth, nose, chest, lungs. He plunged down into a watery abyss, giving himself up gratefully to the cold and dark -

"Methos? Methos, wake up. It's time to get up now, all of you."

He knew that voice. Joe. Had the priestesses spared his life after all? He felt almost but not quite curious enough to open his eyes. He much preferred to lay quietly in the warm sand, sun hot on his face, the sound of the surf washing in and out with calming regularity.

"Maybe we should just let them all sleep," another voice suggested.

*That* voice, and the promise it held, made Methos snap his eyes open and bolt upright.

"Whoa!" Joe said, catching him by the shoulders. "It's okay. Calm down."

Methos squinted against the sun in disbelief. The rowboat sat a few feet away, intact and whole, half on the sand and half in the water. Maud, Antone and Duncan lay nearby, stretched out on the sand, as peaceful as if sleeping. The sky couldn't have been clearer, and he saw absolutely no evidence the storm had ever existed.

"Methos? You okay?" Joe asked.

Methos looked past Joe's concerned face and focused on the owner of the second voice. The very live owner, a young man with blue eyes and shot blond hair who no longer carried about him the aura of Immortality. He had borrowed someone's robe for clothing and a white scar that would never fade marked his throat.

"Richie?" he asked, his voice betraying his disbelief.

The young man shrugged and smiled uneasily. "Don't ask me to explain anything. Last thing I remember, I was following Mac to a racetrack in Paris. It seems like I've missed a few things."

Methos chuckled. "A few," he admitted, relief making him nearly dizzy. He sagged back into the sand with a sigh. So it had worked. They had lost Cassandra and that mortal woman, but all in all whatever magic the priestesses and their goddesses had wrought had indeed been successful. He supposed he was going to have to re-adjust his entire way of thinking. Not at the moment, perhaps - he still felt tired, and could do with a hearty meal - but in the near future, no doubt.

The future came much quicker than he expected when Joe grinned and said, "There's something else you should know."

The Watcher stood up.

On his own two legs.

Chapter Fifteen: The Singing of Angels

"The Angels were all singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two." - Lord Byron, 1788-1824

Three days later

Duncan sat on a beach dune in the afternoon sun, smiling at the two figures dashing up and down the beach not far away. Never in his wildest dreams had he imagined a day when he would see Joe Dawson and Richie Ryan playing tag football on an island off the coast of Spain. That he would see Joe able to run and Richie alive again. The ocean glittered and rolled beyond the white sand, with a band of seagulls whirling over the surf, and for the first time in a long time he felt a measure of peace within himself.

"You look like a man who's made a decision," Methos said. He stood at the edge of the forest, hands in his pockets, his white shirt fluttering in the breeze. Dirt covered his bare toes.

"I have," Duncan answered, shielding his eyes against the sun to squint at his friend.

Methos came and sat next to him in the sand. "You're staying," he guessed.

"Yes. For awhile. I think it will be good for me."

"Worked for me."

Duncan's smile faded. "It didn't work for Cassandra, did it? She spent years here, and still walked away full of hatred."

Methos shrugged. "There's a difference between people who can't give up hatred and those who choose not to. There are extremely few of the former, and far too many of the latter. You're not full of hatred. You just need . . . someone to talk to, perhaps."

Duncan would not be deterred. "That unclaimed Quickening . . . . . it didn't do anything worse than you did in your heyday, did it?"

Methos glanced at Duncan. The Highlander looked troubled. "No," the world's oldest Immortal confirmed. "Compared to me, it did very little. But it made you kill Richie. It killed Allison and her grandfather. Given enough time, who knows what it could have accomplished?"

Duncan didn't answer right away. Richie grabbed the coconut and ran toward Joe's goal. The older man tackled him and they went down to the ground in a tumble of limbs. Duncan winced.

"They're going to hurt themselves," he said.

Methos smiled. "Doubtful. They're too tough."

"You really think so?"

"Don't you? One's been brought back from the dead and the other . . . ."

"Can't ever leave," Duncan finished.

Methos fell silent. He remembered Joe's explanation of the events that had transpired on Illas Cies. The Watcher had died. He was sure of it. Blackness and emptiness had taken him, only to be interrupted by a blast of red and blue light and the vision of a woman who he swore was the Virgin Mary. She'd told him the offer of his life was enough payment for her intervention, and that he could have it back. Along with a gift for his sacrifice, a choice all his for the taking. He could have his flesh and blood legs, but he could never leave the island.

Or his life and no legs, free to roam the world.

Methos could not say which path he would have chosen. Which prison - the island or prostheses. Joe had made his decision. "Hell," he'd said, "Who knows how long I have left? How long any of us do? There's work that needs to be done here. And I can do it."

Work such as helping the dwindling number of priestesses keep up the temple, grounds and gardens. Such as painting the small church on the hillside for a certain Immortal nun. Methos still wondered where Joe expected that particular relationship to go, but he looked forward to hearing news every now and then. As for Maud and the other priestesses, they had been only grudgingly accepting of Joe's vision. They didn't seem happy to hear they'd have a mortal man in their midst for the forseeable future, and Joe would have his work cut out making a home for himself.

Methos himself had no inclination to stay on Illas Cies, although Maud had hinted that he would be welcome for a short time. She'd removed the stones from her sockets and let her blue-green eyes grow back. They gave her pleasingly plump face an even younger look which only strengthened his resolve to leave. The sight of her, sixteen years old forever, reminded him too much of who he'd been when he drunkenly, jokingly married her in that roadside pub and bedded her in the hay. A mercenary full of hatred, still a Horsemen in every way but name. He suspected Maud knew as much and was grateful she didn't push the issue.

But Joe would be staying. Had to. His choice. And Duncan too. Which left the question of where Richie would go. The young man would never need to raise a sword again. He'd cut himself experimentally, a tiny slice with a knife, and the wound hadn't healed. He didn't even give off a pre-Immortal hum. He was free to lead a normal life, or as normal a life as any young adult who'd spent the previous four years killing, running, hiding and training.

Richie's death had left him remarkably unchanged. He hadn't returned with any stunning insight into the human condition, or miraculous visions, or anything other than his normal good nature and wisecracks. He claimed not to remember anything about the racetrack. He accepted the fact he'd been dead, but refused to believe Duncan had been his killer even when Methos and Joe confirmed the story.

"No way," he insisted. "It would never happen. I've learned the hard way not to walk up to you when you're not yourself."

"Maybe you thought you were seeing something else," Joe suggested.

"I don't believe it."

Duncan himself would never forget that shocking second when his katana had cut through Richie's neck. Or the moment when he'd woken on the beach and found Richie sitting beside him, shaking his arm.

"You're not real," Duncan had whispered, his voice hoarse with disbelief, his eyes stinging.

"Of course I am," Richie answered with a wide grin. "Could a hallucination tickle you like this?"

Richie's fingers dug into the side of Duncan's ribs and began a fiendish dance. Still disoriented by memories of trickery and deceit, Duncan yelped in alarm. He threw himself at the evil force that so dared to mock him with Richie's image and Methos and Joe scrambled to pull him free. They sat on his back and legs for at least ten minutes, explaining Richie was in fact real, while the young man in question scowled and rubbed at his throat.

"So this is how you show how much you missed me, huh?" Richie grumbled.

New guilt and giddy relief had made Duncan weep. Right there on the beach, surrounded by his best friends. Methos and Joe released him and Richie wrapped him in tight hug, making circles on his back and rocking him slightly. "It's okay," Richie had said, at least a dozen times in a row. "It's all over now."

Even now, three days later, Duncan had trouble believing that. So many weeks of horror, gone as if they'd never existed. Except for Jason and Allison Landry, Sigrid Hamsun and Cassandra, the whole affair could have been one long and frightful hallucination.

"Why did they bring him back?" he asked Methos now.

"Richie?"

"Yes."

Methos' gaze tracked the young man running up and down the beach. "I'm not sure they did. His body was caught in some kind of stasis when his Quickening couldn't complete. That's what you said. Maybe when Cassandra's Quickening was loosed, along with that unclaimed one . . . I don't know. Maybe enough power fed back into him to bring him back to life, but not enough to keep him Immortal."

"Nice theory, but we would have received the Quickenings first. We were closer."

"Perhaps. I'll tell you one thing, though. If the goddesses brought him back, it won't be without a price. They always demand a price. Someday, somewhere, they'll call upon him to pay up."

"That's not a pleasant thought, Methos."

"It's not meant to be. Did you ask him about Ann Arbor?"

"No. Not yet."

"The offer's still open," Methos said. "Anyway, I'm going off to find some lunch. Are you hungry?"

"No thanks."

Methos headed for the path back to the temple. The tag football game had ended on the beach with both Richie and Joe in depleted heaps, relaxing in the sand and sunshine. Duncan walked their way and caught the tail end of a murmured conversation.

"You'd feel bad if I had a heart attack," Joe threatened.

"You'd feel bad if I broke my neck."

"Smart ass kid. Just remember, now you don't pull the magic healing act."

"Yeah," Richie shot back. "But at least in a few years I won't get carded in bars anymore." The young man shifted as Duncan's shadow fell over him. "Hey, Mac. Did you see me crush him, five to one?"

"In your dreams," Joe muttered.

"From where I sat, the game was a tie," Duncan said. He offered Richie a hand and helped him up.

Joe got himself to his feet and brushed sand from his shorts and knees. He said, "You know, I don't remember my legs being so hairy. Or skinny."

"Complaining already?" Duncan teased.

"Never!" Joe said instantly. "Just wondering, that's all. Come on, let's go swimming."

"The water's too cold," Richie complained.

"Wimp," Joe snickered. He peeled off his shirt, tossed it to the sand and headed for the surf. He looked more energetic, more alive, than Duncan had ever seen him - as if the weight of decades had disappeared along with his plastic limbs. He flung himself into the oncoming waves, ducked underwater, surfaced with a laugh.

Up on the beach, Richie shook his head. "It's like he's eighteen years old," he said fondly. "I can't believe he's going to stay here the rest of his life."

"His choice," Duncan said.

"What's yours?" Blue eyes turned to him quizzically.

"I'd like to stay. Not for the rest of my life, but for awhile."

Richie nodded, his expression somber and a little sad. "That's probably a good idea. You need the rest, Mac. It's been a hard couple of years for you, hasn't it? Ever since Tessa died."

"There have been ups and downs," Duncan confessed. "But you were always an 'up,' Rich. You're the one person I've needed most to keep me going."

Richie looked pleased at the thought. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Duncan answered. He impulsively put his hand across Richie's shoulders and squeezed his protege to his side. Richie turned and embraced him, quick and hard, and then ducked away with a flush to his cheeks.

"I'm glad I'm not dead," he said. "It would really suck, wouldn't it?"

"It already did." Memories of grief threatened to choke Duncan's throat. He turned his attention back to Joe, who swam and frolicked in the waves like a dolphin. "Have you given any thought as to what you want to do, where you want to go?"

Richie dug into the sand with the toes of his right foot. "Umm . . . no. Not really. Long term planning has never been one of my priorities, you know?"

"Methos would like for you to go with him. He turned down an invitation to join the staff of the philosophy department at the University of Michigan earlier this year. He thinks he can get the job back. You could kick back and relax or maybe even enroll in some classes."

Richie rolled his eyes. "I don't need an Immortal babysitter anymore, Mac. Or . . . do I? Is there something you're not telling me?"

Duncan heard doubt and vulnerability in Richie's voice. "No," he said quickly, soothingly. Whatever Methos' suspicions were about the goddesses later demanding payment, Richie didn't need to be burdened with them. "Everything's fine."

"So I don't even have to practice kata anymore if I don't want to, right?"

"I thought you liked kata."

"I like kick-boxing better."

Duncan smiled. "Methos isn't volunteering to be your babysitter. Just your friend."

"I don't know if I'm ready for college, Mac."

"Sure you are. Think of the parties. Think of the women."

Richie perked up. "Well, that's true. Do I have to decide right this minute?"

"Of course not."

"Mac! Richie!" Joe yelled exuberantly. "Come on in! It's great!"

He did a hand-stand in the ocean and wagged his feet at them. Duncan and Richie laughed and ambled down to the waterline to watch him play in the waves. The ocean broke over their bare feet, cold and salty and swirling with light. Out of the corner of his eye Duncan saw two woman watching them, and turned expecting to see Maud and Christine.

Instead he saw Sigrid, standing in the sun beside a woman with long white hair. The older woman seemed vaguely familiar to Duncan, although he couldn't say how he knew her. Her calm, serene expression reminded him in some ways of Maud. Sigrid smiled widely and turned so he could see the beautiful baby sleeping soundly in her arms.

"My daughter!" she cried, her voice like chimes on the wind.

Water drenched Duncan and he whirled, sputtering, to find Joe splashing him with both hands. "Come on in, Mac," Joe urged, a devilish glint in his eyes, and he and Richie tossed the Highlander into the ocean fully-clothed.

Duncan surfaced a few seconds later, spitting out a mouthful of seawater. "You're going to regret that," he warned ominously. "Both of you."

"We're scared," Joe said, mocking him.

Duncan wiped his eyes clear and glanced toward the beach. Sigrid, her baby and the white-haired woman had disappeared. Perhaps they'd never even been there in the first place.

"Get him, Richie," Joe ordered, and two bodies tackled him. Duncan easily squirmed out from under them. He dragged Joe underwater and rubbed seaweed into his hair, then caught Richie before he could swim away and did the same. He burst back to the surface laughing. The cold, refreshing water held him and healed him, and he felt more buoyant and alive than he had in years.

"We're outclassed," Richie announced when he came up for air.

"Always were," Joe agreed with a grin.

The three friends kicked back on the rolling waves, content to float in peace under the deep blue sky and let the ocean carry them back to shore.

THE END