DISCLAIMERS: The MacLeods don't belong to me (oh, would that they did...). Neither does Methos, Juan Ramirez, Richie Ryan, etc. I am borrowing them on the gracious sufferance of Panzer/Davis-Widen-et al, for an act of purely profit-less pleasure. No copyright infringments or hurt feelings are intended.

Elena Duran belongs to Vivian Moreau. Everybody else I made up. I don't really believe in intellectual property, but if you want to use them to some nefarious ends, please drop me an email and let me know.

CAUTIONS: some PG-13 violence, specific content labeled in the individual sections.

CANON: From early childhood on, I've never been much at coloring within the lines. This is set loosely in the series universe, but Connor MacLeod figures prominently here, and I make no attempt to address anything but the first movie (in my mind, there can be only one...) in terms of his character timeline.

Emma Cuzo appears in two previous fanfic stories by Vivian Moreau, ELENA IN NEW YORK and ELENA IN ARGENTINA (she and I have a time-share arrangement with each other?s characters). Those stories aren't required for reading this one, but you should read them anyway because they?re great.

GRATITUDE AND OTHER RANDOM INFORMATION: For Vivian Moreau, thanks are not adequate. Suffice it to say, without her constant encouragement, comments, conversation, and occasional butt-kicking, most of this story would never have been written. Thanks and first-born children are also due to Laura, Chris, Melody, Rudy, Sandy and Monica for reading and commenting on various drafts. If you find anything entertaining, well-written, consistent or correctly-spelled in this story, I am afraid you will have to blame them. Finally, for list old-timers, you?re not hallucinating. Five parts of this story did appear on the list a year ago in an earlier form (it?s finished, it really is, I swear...). Most of it is revised.

Prologue: In a New York Minute

AUGUST 25, 1997

NEW YORK CITY

3:13 PM

She hadn't been there a minute ago. But she was there now.

Connor MacLeod turned to face the immortal standing in the alley behind him. She was dressed for the heat, for the burning asphalt and blistering blacktop of the city in late summer: a grey cotton tank-top, loose cotton pants, immaculate blue canvas sneakers, round mirrored sunglasses. She was short: about 5'2" or 5'3". She was sturdy: he could see the firm line of muscle in her tanned shoulders and arms.

And she was utterly gorgeous. She was the kind of blonde that no amount of money and peroxide could fake, her hair a hundred subtly different shades of yellow and gold. She had the kind of cheekbones that little boys longed to kiss before bed, and a dark dusky mouth that opened like a flower, beckoning you to bury yourself in its soft contours, its promise of sweetness.

Under different circumstances, Connor might've wondered about her eyes, and the mystery that might lie behind those sunglasses. But he was a little distracted by the glare of the August sun, its yellow light bouncing off her upraised sword.

"Are you ready to fight, MacLeod?"

He scratched his head, furrowed his brows. "Is there some reason why I should want to?"

"I have reason enough for both of us."

"Do I know you?"

She smiled. It was an exquisite smile, even with its murderous edge. "Let's keep the mystery, shall we? More fun that way."

"You know, it's a little early, but we could have dinner instead," Connor said, smiling back, his best smile, the one that never failed him. "I know a place--"

She shook her head, as she cut him off: "How very gracious of you. But I don?t think so."

Well, it almost never failed him.

He sighed, and shrugged off his duster, drawing his sword as his coat fell to the ground: "Have it your way."

And so it began...

It was stalemate full of motion. They seemed evenly matched. In fact, fighting this woman was like fighting a mirror. A smaller, shorter mirror, but still an uncanny reflection. Her style, her stances, her reactions, the way she thought with her body. It was if...

No. Connor rejected the thought out of hand.

Know thy enemy, know thyself. She preferred classical moves, like him; she was fast and aggressive, like him. So he began to toss in new and non-European techniques; he shaped his defenses and attacks to slow her down, throw off her rhythm, use her own aggression against her.

It began to work. She seemed to grow more and more frustrated, flustered. She wasn?t the sort of woman who was used to losing, Connor guessed. She was the sort of fencer who probably finished off most of her opponents in less than a minute.

The heat was incredible; the air shimmered with humidity and sunlight. Both of them were panting, drenched in sweat. And while they thrusted and parried, Connor kept trying to recognize this woman, to place her face, guess her identity. A friend or lover of an enemy? After 480-odd years, there were too many possibilties; he couldn't narrow it down.

She was getting tired, Connor perceived. And impatient.

Leaping, she brought her sword down and across, aiming for a quick and brutal slash to his chest.

But he brought his sword up and under hers, directing the blow away from him, driving it into the ground, trapping her sword under his. He looked her in the face, saw her mouth open slightly, a rounded gap of surprise. And suddenly shards and scraps of memory flashed in his mind, one after another, like bursts of light. In less than a second he raced through a dozen different memories. He remembered holding her, making love to her. He felt her hands around his waist, as they escaped Jerusalem on horseback, the city burning behind them. He felt her tears slide across his face, as they both mourned a fallen friend.

He'd seen her-- but not through his own eyes. He'd touched her-- but not with his own hands. He'd known her, loved her...but not him...not Connor...he'd...

Oh, God.

He released her sword and backed away from her, staring. Someone had been her lover, someone he had killed. And the memories, usually buried so deep, beyond retrieval, were surfacing. Connor had had this problem a couple times before, ever since...ever since the Kurgan.

But never during a fight.

He shook his head, tried to clear his mind. Whoever had loved her-- that man was dead. Connor was alive. And he intended to stay that way.

She came at him again, a horizontal swing, right at the neck, a good one, firm and fast. But he ducked, grabbed her arm as she swung, and threw her against the west wall of the alley. Her sword fell from her hand.

She started to drop forward, trying to retrieve it, but he pushed her and she fell backwards, off balance. Before she could get out of the way, he flipped his sword around, and brought the hilt crashing down on her leg, hearing her knee-cap shatter and her voice crack with a shrill wordless cry of pain, at exactly the same time. Then he turned and kicked her sword down the alley, out of her reach.

Weaponless and immobilized, she looked up at him, defeated. "I see I have failed," she observed calmly. "Very well. When someone finally sends you to hell, MacLeod, I'll be waiting for a re-match."

Connor nodded. A variation on the usual last words. He didn't ask her why she'd fought him; those fragments of memory had been answer enough. Looking at her, he felt a brief pang of regret at destroying something so beautiful-- but her beauty was no reason to spare her. She was an immortal, they all lived and died by the same Rules. No exceptions, no exemptions, no special priviledges for being unusually pretty.

Time for the usual cliches. He raised his sword. "There can be..."

(...She is clinging to him as he packs his bags, whispering in his ear, a dozen different enticements, a dozen different reasons why he shouldn't go. Her eyes are red, and on the verge of watering over. He hasn't seen her weep in over a hundred years, and he's never seen her like this, so desperate, so irrational, so clinging... ..."Don't go," she pleads. "I have a terrible feeling about this...

"...This is mad, he thinks. This woman is a warrior, not a weak and simpering girl. She must be getting her monthlies, he decides. A particularly bad one. Lots of blood. It's weakening her brain. Like leeches. How women endured it-- he'd never understood......He clutches her by the shoulders, then gently places one fist under her chin, raising her face to meet his. "Enough of this!" he chides her. "You only want me--you don't really need me. And that boy does. He's barely survived so far. And if Rebecca and Ceirdwyn are right, he doesn't even know what he is--"...)

Connor shook his head, dazed, his arms still raised, his sword suspended mid-air. "There can be..." he repeated blankly.

(..."Then let Rebecca or Ceirdwyn take care of him!" she cries. ..."He's too wild, they say. He won't listen to a woman. No," he shakes his head, "I have to do this." He slides his sword into his belt, slings his bags over his shoulders, and heads for the door. She follows him, and before he steps outside he scoops her up in his arms, one last kiss, one last embrace. "Beloved..." he whispers. Her hair falls to her waist, a tapestry of gold, and for a moment he almost weakens, he almost stays. But only for a moment. "I'll see you soon," he promises, before he strides away...)

Connor lowered his sword. The voices. The memories. Her lover's memories. They were engulfing him.

"I have heard many things about you, MacLeod," the woman called up from his feet. "But no one ever told me that you stuttered."

He raised his sword again. He had to finish her off before she healed. But he grasped the hilt of his sword with both hands, knowing that he couldn't.

He couldn't behead her.

With a desperate surge of strength he brought the sword down, but not across her neck, driving it into her chest instead, piercing bone, lung, heart. Her eyes flashed with surprise, then grew dull; she died almost instantly.

Connor turned on his heel and walked away, away from her, as far and as fast as possible. He found himself doing something he hadn't done in years: he headed for the nearest church...

Seeking refuge...

MANHATTAN, HUDSON STREET

5:30 PM

He'd spent more than an hour in the church, calming himself down. He had even prayed, although to Whom he wasn?t sure. It had taken only a few minutes for the strange feelings, the memories, to fade completely, leaving him alone in the familiar clutter of his own head, his own thoughts, his own memories. Still he'd stayed longer, staring at the candles, meditating, waiting until he was sure he was ready to leave, ready to head home.

He?d call Ceirdwyn, he decided. She'd know this mystery woman, she'd know whose memories were leaking into his consciousness. But the memories themselves, pushing them back under, shoving them down into his unconscious and locking the door...that was up to him. He'd have to...

As he turned down Hudson Street, he heard the sirens...

Two squad-cars, both parked on the sidewalk with typical abandon, one ambulance, and one mountain bike, bent and twisted into a cubist sculpture. He spotted Rachel, sitting on the steps of the store, staring blankly into the street, as an officer muttered and gesticulated over her, as if he were performing some magical rite. They were loading a stretcher into the ambulance, a body covered head to toe in a sheet.

A dead body.

He walked over to Rachel and the cop. "Rachel--what happened?"

The cop looked up, obviously affronted that any mere civilian would interrupt him as he interrogated his witness. "Who the hell are you?"

God, he hated cops. Connor rapped his fist on the shop window. "I own this place."

The officer pulled his ballpoint out of his mouth and pointed it at Connor. "Oh-- you're Nash? So the dead kid was your employee..."

The dead kid, Connor thought numbly. Oh, great.

Rachel was looking up at him. "I tried to call you," she said softly.

Of course she did. "I turned the phone off," he answered. "I had a problem--couldn't be disturbed."

She nodded, understanding what he meant.

But the cop broke in, eager to have his audience back. "Hey--you gotta make a statement," he said to Connor. "Now."

Connor shook his head. "Later."

But now the cop was squinting at him, looking for an opportunity to throw some blue-clad weight around. "Hey Nash--like Russell Nash?? Didn't we have a problem with you, buddy, a few years back?"

He'd had enough. He pulled a business card out of his wallet and shoved it in the officer's face. "You wanna talk to me? You call my lawyer." Then Connor grabbed Rachel by the arm and pulled her aside. "What happened?" he demanded.

"It was a hit and run. She was getting on her bike to go home, and they drove up onto the sidewalk, plowed into her, and drove away. It was all so fast, no one saw anything-- no faces, no license plate..." Rachel pointed to a pool of red on the sidewalk, in front of the store. "She just lay there, bleeding. We waited ten minutes for the ambulance." She shook her head, helplessly. "She died before they came."

She was clearly on the verge of tears, and Connor put his arm around her, propped her up, stroked her hair. "Shh..." he whispered in her ear. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry you were here alone."

"You told me...so I thought...I thought she'd just..."

"No," he shook his head. "It's different the first time." He took her hand and they slipped around to the back of the store, away from the police and the throng of voyeurs clustered on the other side of the street. As they went in through the back door, he asked, "And her parents?"

"I called her mother at work. She was here, but then someone took her to the police station, to fill out some form. Something to do with the death certificate."

Officially dead.

He led Rachel up to the loft, where he began shoving jeans, a t-shirt, and a pair of sneakers into a gym bag.

"What are you doing?"

He tossed an empty duffel bag and a set of keys to her. "Going to the morgue." He pointed at the keys: "Those should open her room in the dormitory. I want you to go over there, and fill that bag with clothes. Practical clothes. And if you see any photos of her family-- take them too. She'll want them someday."

"But..." He had warned Rachel two years ago, that this would probably happen. But now that it actually had, she seemed unable to take it in, to wrap her mind around it.

"Rachel," he said sharply, as he headed down the stairs, two steps at a time. "You have to go there now. They're going to notify the school, if they haven't already." He heard the click of heels as she followed him, slowly, hesitantly. Reluctant to stroll into this new reality.

He waited at the foot of the stairs for her, walked her out to her car. "Cheer up," he said, smiling at her, as he helped her into the driver's seat and closed the door. "You'll see her again tonight. I promise."

"Let me guess," she said dryly, her lips pressed together in a teasing smile, "It's a kind of magic..." He shrugged and turned away, towards his car. "She's not going to fall for that one, you know," Rachel called as she rolled up her window.

Part One: Take a stab in the dark

NOVEMBER 19, 1998

A FOREST FOUR HOURS OUTSIDE PARIS

"...I have ridden a dragon, she thought. She whispered, "I have murdered a man..." She corrected herself: "Maybe murdered several." Distressingly little to it when you were on the murdering side-- though this pain was a reminder, how chancy it was, in such business, that one didn't end up on the other..."

--Samuel Delany

MIDNIGHT

She ran, the rough fiber of branches scratching, the soft leaves brushing, her arms, her face. She ran, insects clinging to her skin, and the smell of rotting pine and oak clinging to her nostrils. She ran, skipping over rocks and roots, dodging fallen logs. Her dark-adapted eyes darted in cycles between the trees around her to the trail on the ground.

Every cell in her body was alert, listening. For a sound that wasn't a sound, for a blow that wasn't physical. For a sense, a presence, of a danger that carried a sword.

But there was nothing, she realized, her pace slowing but not stopping. Whoever it was, they were gone.

For the moment.

Her eyes grazed the sky. France. A forest. A full moon. It might have been a scene from one of the piles of paperback fantasy novels she had consumed between bouts of calculus and chemistry her freshman year of college. Except in the novel she wouldn?t be alone-- some young wizard or ranger (dark-haired, preferably...and tall, lanky-- you know, like Aragorn...) would be running alongside her. And they wouldn't be running, they'd have horses. Magical steeds, of course. She wouldn't be an American orphan with an assumed name, a fake passport, no car and no money. She?d be an exiled Celtic princess, seeking to recover her country and lead her people in battle against the Dreaded Enemy. And she would be running from something romantic, medieval--a dragon or an evil mage. Not someone who probably wore a trenchcoat and carried a beeper or a cellular phone in their pocket. Who'd been shadowing her-- not one forest paths-- but on streets and subways for the past two weeks.

Oh well. So much for fiction.

She ran on and on, ignoring her aching calves and a throat raw from panting. But finally she stopped to rest, checking the glowing green faces of her odometer and compass. She'd gone 10 kilometers. Seven more to the highway. Her legs were throbbing, and she was sweaty, cold, and trembling from fatigue. She could sleep now, or continue and collapse.

She climbed an ancient elm and stuffed most of her gear in a hollow branch. She jumped down with an old sword and a trench coat which had been doubling regularly as a sleeping bag. She crawled underneath a shelf of tangled pine branches from two trees which had grown together. She pulled the coat over her like a blanket, and set the sword at her side, clutching the hilt with both fists, like a child clinging to the neck of a teddy bear.

Sleep surprised her, dragging her down into dreamlessness before she could close her eyes.

2:30 A.M.

She woke up just as suddenly. Her eyes snapped open as a dull roaring split wide the dark silence in her head. She glanced around wildly, disoriented for a moment. And then she remembered where she was. And recognized the sickening sensation that woke her.

Her shadow was back.

God, not again.

But then, all evidence indicated that God had stopped caring about her a long time ago.

Nonetheless she found herself sending heavenward one quick and silent plea: Oh Blessed Mary, please. Whoever it is, don?t let it be Him.

Sword in hand, she crawled into the clearing, then stood. It was still dark. How long had she slept? How did they track her? She heard footsteps several meters away, on her left. The white noise in her head had died down. She guessed that her stomach was still churning from fear.

The footsteps came closer, then veered away. A wild hope surged in her head. Maybe she could hide--stay absolutely still and they would miss her in the darkness. Then reason interrupted. This wasn't a city street, where she could disappear into a crowd. As long as her presence could be sensed, whoever it was would look for her. She could make a run for it, or stay and fight. Either way, she would reveal herself. Either way she could end up dead.

Her hands sweating, she clutched her sword tighter. She listened to the footsteps, circling. Should she call out and end this particular game of hide-and-seek? He had taught her to analyze the strategy in every possible action. What advantage would she gain by finding-- instead of waiting to be found?

She saw motion in the moonlight, and realized in a second the question was pointless. They had seen her as well. She tried to ignore her pounding heart, and clenched her shaking free hand into a fist. She stared at the approaching figure, vague and sexless in the moonlight.

As they came closer, she saw starlight reflected in the blade of a drawn sword, but still no face.

The figure spoke, "So you are Emma Cuzo, student of MacLeod." It was a woman's voice, resonant but bitter. French. Completely unfamiliar. "How out of character for him. Tell me, does the Highlander know what sort of monster he has fostered and trained?"

Questions exploded in her head. Who is she? How does she know who I am? Why is she doing this?

She tried to forget her fear. She answered, trying to sound more composed than she felt. "Madame, look: I don't know who you are, or why you?ve been following me. But I do know...I mean, I'm pretty sure..." Emma paused. I hope, she thought. I pray. I keep telling myself that... "...I'm pretty sure I'm not a monster. So, please. Just tell me how you know who I am. Tell me what I did to anger you. Maybe...maybe I can undo it. Please, Madame." Please, she thought, observing mechanically that she was one step away from simply begging for her life.

Emma watched the woman's eyes emerge from the shadows. They flickered over her own face for a moment, as if examining her answer and then dismissing it.

"Undo what you've done? Do you think this is a comedy? A little joke?" She shook her head. "What an innocent voice. And even in darkness, I can see that it's a very pretty face. They must have mislead MacLeod, that voice and face. Luckily, I am not so susceptible."

She lunged, and Emma backed away, bumping into a tree. The woman laughed, her voice rising with a sarcastic lilt, "So, young one. Do we fear the consequences of our choices?"

"What choices? What did I do?" The woman lunged again, and she defended weakly. "Look," she said desperately, "Please. I don't know who you are, and I don't want to fight you."

Just barely, she could see the other woman smiling, painfully. "Yes, I see that now, that despite your words to the contrary, you don't want to fight..."

The woman's voice faded out, as Emma felt a feeling of vertigo, a feeling of her consciousness cracking. The terror dissolved. She felt as if she had slid sideways, out of her body, and lay watching herself, meters away.

...The woman was saying, "...but it's too late, Emma. For what you've done. Besides, as MacLeod must have told you, there can be only one."

Standing in some no-place beyond fear and pain, Emma watched herself--like a distant stranger-- quickly parry the woman's thrust, shrug and say, "So they keep telling me."

3:00 A.M.

As the first sparks of the quickening stung her body, she felt her consciousness ripped away from peaceful, distant numbness-- the safe elsewhere of watching instead of being-- and thrown back inside her own body. Her muscles and nerves were exploding, her mind reeling, from the violent infusions of power, feeling, and sensation from the body of the beheaded woman.

When the transmission subsided, she found herself face down in the dirt. She pulled herself up and looked down at the corpse. She?d killed again. The second time. And beyond the matter of sheer survival, she had no more understanding of why than she had had the first time.

She threw herself at the body, ripping through coat pockets, digging her hands in the woman's pants, even her bra. Why, she thought, why? Tell me why; tell me something. Tell me anything.

She found a wallet with ID, credit cards, film stubs, pocket photos, currency. Her flashlight was dead; to read them, she?d have to wait for sunlight.

And then she'd find--what? The last in a long line of aliases? Paper and plastic scraps of a carefully constructed identity and life, a life summarily ended. A life she had summarily ended.

Her stomach lurched and her eyes began to burn.

Then it came. The waves of guilt. The revulsion. This strange new feeling of being trapped forever in an endless, sickening "game."

No. She wouldn?t think about it. She couldn't. She didn't have time.

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, and fetched her things from the tree, slipping her sword into a hidden scabbard and shoving the wallet into the bottom of her knapsack. She looked at her watch-- but found only a strip of pale, bloodied skin on her wrist where it had been.

Shit. She rummaged around on the ground for a few moments. Then she gave it up. She had to put serious space between herself and this body before daylight. Shouldering her bags, watch-less, one quickening older and feeling no wiser, she began the long trek to the other side of the woods.

5:45 A.M.

Emma reached the highway before dawn. She'd been hiking along the side for half an hour when a truck pulled over. Looking hesitantly in the passenger window, Emma felt a rush of relief when she saw a young African woman sitting behind the wheel. She asked the driver in her best college French if she was driving to Paris. The woman gazed thoughtfully at Emma's wrinkled clothes, the smudges of soil on her face, the tiny twig she had missed, finger-combing her hair. Then she nodded, and told her to climb in.

The driver showed no interest in conversation. Slumped against the passenger seat, her cheek and brow prone against the cracked, sun-bleached vinyl, Emma stared numbly through the window at the passing series of towns and farms.

When she was like this, quiet, empty and passive, she could begin to isolate a lurking sensation, a vague awareness, ever-present but normally hidden in the everyday jumble of thought and feeling. She sensed it along the mind's perimeter, feeling for its borders, probing its texture, its' content. What she touched brought disorientation and a sense of being trapped. She was looking too closely at something too large. She came closer, she stepped back, but it never came into focus. Her eyes were too small. It was too big. And she was caught in it, tied to it. A puppet tangled in its own strings. And the knots grew tighter, as if someone were pulling them.

And then the feeling was jerked away from her, as if she'd come too close.

Wired on a sickening mixture of quickening and sleeplessness, she brooded all the way to Paris.

Part 2: The Body

NOVEMBER 19, 1998

SAME DAY, SAME FOREST

4:12 A.M.

The body was missing a few, small, things. A wallet. A watch. Her wedding ring.

But then, maybe she had taken the watch and ring off herself, before. Some considered it rude to your opponent and an hindrance to yourself to wear jewelry in general and rings in particular.

And Connor MacLeod had never known a watch to be anything but worthless after it was exposed to a quickening.

The body was missing one, big, thing. A head.

And that, Connor was absolutely sure, Odile hadn't removed herself.

He studied the stump of the bisected neck, and guessed the type of blade and angle used to make the cut. He saw the fresh sneaker-prints in the dirt--narrow, shallow, the steps shorter and more tightly spaced than a man?s--pointing off in the direction of the highway. He knelt and felt the faint imprint of something like a sleeping body pressed into a mass of pine needles. Mixed with the smell of pine sap and decay, there was sweat and the scent of lavender and myrrh. Fragments of evidence, an inconclusive mosaic, the makings of an unpleasant picture.

He was too late; it had already happened.

He scoured the ground with the beam of his flashlight, until he found Odile's head. The cheeks were still tight with fury, the mouth wide with surprise at being bested by a 22 year-old. Cradling it in one arm, he closed the eyes.

"May your passage be swift and smooth," he whispered into her deaf ear, "to wherever it is we all go, after this."

There was nothing else he could do for her now; he was too late, and she was already dead. He took off her coat and wrapped the head up inside it; he tossed the body, so rigid and heavy with the motionlessness of death, over his shoulder, fireman's style, ready to carry them the handful of kilometers to Odile's driverless car, left sitting in the middle of the dirt and gravel utility road with the lights still on. A symptom of the recklessness that went with rage, undoing Odile in one unraveled moment of emotion; more than a hundred and fifty years of vigilance, Connor thought numbly, erased in one evening.

As he took his first step the beam of his flashlight struck an object on the ground, small and shiny. He slid the body off his shoulder and bent to pick it up. A cheap plastic watch-- not at all Odile's style. The clasp was broken, the casing cracked, the squared black numbers stuck and flashing at 2:59 am. He?d missed them by little more than an hour. Seventy-three minutes ago he might've saved two lives. Now he wondered if he could still save one.

The flat metal disk on the back of the watch was smeared with dirt and blood; pressing it to his nostrils, he breathed in myrrh and lavender.

Drenched in the gasoline siphoned from its tank, Odile's black Mercedes became her funeral pyre. He walked backward toward his own car, his face to the flames.

He felt an urge, almost a need, to run back into the trees, and track the girl down. To catch her from behind, to yank her by the hair, to spin her around, to pin her with a stare, to ask, slowly, carefully, biting off every word: "What the hell do you think you're doing?"

But Connor MacLeod made it a rule to always trust his instincts, and never his desires.

And she had more than an hour's head start; the last thing he wanted was to be in the neighborhood when Odile's body was found. And he could guess her next move: The girl would panic--thinking of nothing but getting away from the body. At home in cities--big cities--and just barely competent at surviving in the woods, she?d take the first lift she could find to Paris, and try to lose herself there, one face among millions. He'd find her there, lurking on a sidewalk, or crossing the street.

Just like before.

Smelling of myrrh and lavender.

Back in his car, clutching the key like a stiletto, he stabbed the ignition and started the car.

Then he felt the buzz.

In his coat pocket.

Sighing, he pulled out the cell phone, as he pulled the car, and headed north. "Rachel?"

"She is the only woman you expect to call you?" the voice was old and familiar, one he still replayed sometimes in his memories. "A pity. So much time you've had, and so few lovers."

"Henriette."

"Connor."

"How did you get this number?"

"A long story, and rather boring. Many words, little blood, and no sex at all."

"See if I ever read Proust aloud to you again."

She chuckled darkly. "My dear, that was different. There was plenty of sex in that."

He shifted impatiently in his seat. She could have chosen any day, any decade, to scrape her long dark fingernails down his soul, and pick at the scars she'd given him. But of course she would decide to call tonight. "Henriette, what do you want?"

"Straight to the point. Waste no time and trust no one. I see you haven't changed."

"We rarely do. For instance, your timing is as lousy as ever."

"Am I keeping you from something?" her voice dripped with concern. "A head to take, or some damsel in distress, maybe? In fact, I can think of one in particular, one of us: she was last seen--"

"Henriette," he interrupted--quickly, harshly. "Spare me your talent for disinformation."

"Ah, yes. Now I can hear the edge in his voice." He heard a long, all-too-obviously pleasurable sigh. "You know, Connor, you were always attractive when impatient. But you were most beautiful when furious. Do you remember the time we sparred at midnight in the courtyard of the Chateau D'Orleans, how we fell to our knees at exactly the same time? Your eyes were so dark and so cold, like a window of ice letting in the night. I kissed the stab wound in your shoulder as you came inside me, and I could taste your skin, blood, sweat, and the fire of your quickening, mending the wound as I pressed my mouth against it. Nothing in the world ever tasted like that, Connor. It was like licking lightening dissolved in rain."

He remembered. That moment and all the ones that came after. And he realized there was only one reason why she would call him. "Who's after you? Who is it that you don?t think you can handle?"

"No one's after me," she sounded surprised. "I called you for..."

"For what?" he demanded.

She took a breath. Long enough and deep enough for the sound to slide down some fiber-optic wire and bounce off a satellite. "For closure. I found Kempe."

Kempe, he thought dully. Not this. Not now. "I thought he was dead."

"No."

"You killed him?"

"No." He could hear her voice change; becoming thick and rigid, engorged with anger. And he felt a flash of dread. "I'm fighting him tomorrow--I mean today. This morning."

"Henriette!" he found himself shouting into the phone, as he swung his car off the utility road and onto the highway. "Listen to me. Don?t do it--don't fight him."

"How dare you? She was my child!"

"She was a foundling," he shot back heartlessly. "We don?t have children, Henriette; we have choices. She was a calculated risk."

"She was a child! An innocent, an infant. My daughter. And he destroyed her before she could learn to walk."

"I know," he said quietly, regretting his brutality. And knowing he knew no other way to be. "But fight him now, and he'll probably destroy you too."

"Tell me, Connor, how can I lose? He's a coward who feeds on the quickenings of children."

"He's beheaded his share of adults." He thought of Odile; the red and orange light of the fire was still a distant glow in the rear-view mirror. "Henriette, it's been two hundred years and you're still seething. Your rage will be his weapon; it'll make you careless, blind you to the obvious. And you know that."

"I can't let him go," she whispered. "I don't know when I'll find him again. I can't walk away from a chance to take his head. I couldn't live with myself."

Connor listened to the desperation in her voice, the overwhelming need. Not just a need for retribution. A need to cut a cancer out of the flesh of her world. A spot of sickness left festering for centuries. "Go through with this, and you might not live at all."

"MacLeod, you are not my mother."

"I'm barely your friend. But you called because you want me to talk you out of this."

"No--"

"Henriette, I'm coming to Paris. Wait a few days. If you can't walk away, then let me fight him."

"No." Her voice was cold now, controlled. "I think we can both agree, that when it comes to this, you've done enough already."

"Henriette!" There was the click, then the tone. "Always wanting the last word," he whispered into the dead phone. Then he dropped it on the empty seat beside him. He looked at the time: it was five in the morning.

Connor MacLeod had learned a long time ago to keep his friends at a safe distance and his enemies within striking range. He made his home in a city of 8 million souls; he preferred the bustle of a busy street, the chaos and noise of a crowd. Surrounded by people, preferably by strangers, he felt most comfortable-- that is, he felt most alone.

By himself in a car, speeding down an almost deserted highway during the quiet before dawn, he felt creeping, suffocating presence of memories. Memories of those he'd loved and couldn't save. Memories of those who'd loved him--always an invitation to disappointment, to failure, to betrayal. And memories of the all the feelings--the dangerous luxuries he no longer allowed himself.

With his foot on the pedal, even and unyielding, hurling down AR #104 at 160 km/hr, he wondered clinically if he could remember what it felt like to cry.

It was so strange; he could remember everything else.

The sky was growing lighter as it seemed to speed past him. His eyes shifted back and forth from the center of the road to the shoulder, looking for something, not finding it. An apparition or a body, walking along the road, a girl with a backpack, her clothes mussed and torn, her flesh trembling with the energy of a fresh quickening. A girl looking for a ride to Paris. A girl whose skin was streaked with myrrh and lavender.

Part 3: Sins of the Father

1980

STATEN ISLAND

"It has been customary in our culture to say that every child needs a father, which is only partly true...Every child should have a good father..."

--Barbara Walker

She sits on his lap, her legs seeming as small and stubby as her crayons propped atop his thick, powerful thighs. She points her toes, but they still don't touch his knees.

Daddy.

He opens the Times. The enormous sheets of newsprint open like sails. Emma is enclosed inside his arms, inside the pages, safe and ecstatic inside this tent of big warm flesh and soft inky paper.

He points to words, and she sounds them out.

Pre-si-dent.

Em-bar-go.

Re-el-ec-tie-on.

"Re-el-lect-shun," he corrects her. She makes a few mistakes. But their game goes so slow, and she wants to go faster. Word, word, word. She wants entire sentences.

"Four years old," her mother whispers into the telephone, "And Jack has her reading from the paper."

He kisses the top of her head, and she feels the bristle of his Saturday beard. "My little princess," he says. "She's going to be so smart. Those young princes won't stand a chance."

Emma's already read about princes, and princesses, in her fairy-tale book, and she has a vague idea from conversations with Chester on the playground about what generally happens between them. It doesn't strike her as at all desirable. "I don't want a prince," she earnestly informs her father. "I want to stay here with you."

He doesn't answer her. Emma has to turn her whole body to see her father's face, and she doesn't understand what she sees there. His expression is sad and strange, his eyes focus on an object far-away, where Emma can't see, past the walls and windows of the TV room. She can?t see what he sees--she's helpless to understand these adults, with their big bodies and their special powers--and it scares her. "Daddy," she pleads in a whisper, "don't ever leave me."

He nuzzles her cheek, and points to another word.

Pre-lim-in-ary.

1981

STATEN ISLAND

Daddy comes home at 6:30. An hour after Electric Company. Half an hour after Emma sets the table and finishes her chores. She can tell time, on her Cinderella watch. She sleeps with it on, and each morning she clocks the sunrise, noting with fear that the sun seems to come later each morning. What if it decided one morning, not to come at all?

She decides not to ask her parents. She doesn't want to worry them.

Her watch says 8:00.

But Daddy hasn't come home.

Dinner sits unserved on the dinner table, cooling.

Her mother stands at the front window and looks out, her face growing colder and more and more still.

Freezing.

Emma doesn't know much. She doesn't know how to write in cursive. And she tries to remember the names of all the moons of Jupiter: Io, Europa...well, she tries, but she forgets.

She does know that her father has disappeared. She knows her mother won't come out of the bedroom. And now her grandmother approaches her, her shoulders bent and her lips stiff, like she's weighted with words yet to be said. And Emma waits, waits to be told.

"Honey, your daddy's gone away, on a long long trip."

"Where?"

"Far-away."

"How far-away? On the other side of the ocean? Like to France? Or China?"

"Even farther than China."

"Well, when's he coming back? Will he bring me a present?"

"We don?t know...when he's coming back."

"Why not? Can't he tell you? Doesn't he want to? Doesn't he want to come back? Doesn't he want to see us again?"

Silence. And then, "Oh, little one, Of course he wants to see you again." But Emma hears her grandmother's voice, contradicting her grandmother's words. And she realizes for the first time that grown-ups lie.

"Emma, it's just that...he had to go away. Don't ever blame him for that. He couldn't help it..."

"Oh, ma chere, I'm sure he wanted to stay..."

The house smells hot and damp, the scent of hot casseroles and piles of wet wool overcoats.

Emma pretends to play with her Barbies. Blond Barbie. Afro-Barbie. Skipper. Ken. She puts Ken in a shoebox, and pushes it, hard. It slides across the kitchen floor. Ken is going on a trip. Far-away. Farther than China.

She listens to the voices. All the grown-ups, wandering through the house, grim and solemn like nuns in their thick black clothes, whispering and whispering, making clouds of words that float above her head as she and the Barbies sprawl alone and quiet on the floor.

"Father Hanlon says the church won't bury him..."

"It's like I always said, Jack was unstable. Brilliant-- but unstable."

"They're keeping the memorial service small. Claire's leaving the little girl with a babysitter"

"What did they tell her, the little girl?"

"God only knows..."

"Poor Claire..."

"Poor everyone."

Emma wants to learn to use the dictionary. She marvels at the bigness of this book, its hard, gold-lettered spine and its thin pages, like her grandmother's bible. All these words, so important. The school librarian leans over her, all powdery skin and lavender smell. They practice looking up words, she and Mrs. Spinelli: boat, lion, sunspot, China. Emma copies down each of the words, and their definitions.

Emma knows what words she wants to look up next, but she doesn't know how to spell them. She asks Mrs. Spinelli. She sees how the librarian's eyes widen, how the woman pulls slightly away, as Emma carefully pronounces the words.

A-dopt-shun.

Su-i-cide.

The thick metal chains of the swing are so cold, Emma can feel the freeze through her mittens. But she keeps swinging, letting her snow-boots dangle on each downward arc, her toes brushing the scant layer of the winter's first snow. She swings alone, watching the other kids huddle and sprint around the jungle-gym, the four-square court.

"I want that swing. You've been hogging it all recess." Meghan was the prettiest girl in kindergarten: blond braids, pink cheeks, a snotty voice and sadistic eyes. Emma had learned to stay out of her way.

"Meghan, you can have one of the other swings. Those two are empty."

"Those have snow on them."

"Duh, Meghan. Brush the snow off."

"Don't act so stuck-up, Emma. You don?t even have a daddy anymore."

"You?re a liar." "You?re the liar. Nobody likes you. And nobody liked your daddy. That's why he's dead."

"He's not dead." In a panic, the words gushed out of Emma's mouth. "He went away on a trip. For a while."

"He killed himself. People who kill themself go to hell. Your daddy went to hell."

Chester walks up to the swing-set, and stands beside Meghan. "Shut up, Meghan. Nobody cares what you say," he tells her. Emma watches them, Meghan?s skin turning red in the cold, Chester's brown skin looking so dark against his white ski-jacket.

"Nobody likes you either, Chester-Molester." But Chester just looms over her, the tallest, fastest boy in three grades, and Meghan starts to back away. Then she turns and runs.

Emma and Chester just look at each other, Chester standing, Emma rocking listlessly in the swing. She wanted to hit Meghan. She wants to cry. Her grandmother tells her that big girls work hard at school, that big girls help their mother and don't bother the grown-ups, that big girls never get in trouble and that they don't ever cry.

Emma has to be a big girl from now on, her grandmother tells her.

The bell rings. From every direction kids hurdle themselves toward the line forming at the playground doors. She and Chester walk slowly toward them.

"Do you think people go to hell?" she asks him. His black eyes look back at her, thoughtful and intent. Chester is the smartest, biggest, bravest boy she knows; she loves to watch him in reading class, his head bobbing as he reads the words, his long arms raising to answer all the hardest questions.

"Mama says hell is something the preachers made up. They made it up to scare people."

She nods.

"Do you want to come over after school?" he asks her.

She nods...

OCTOBER, 1995

MANHATTAN, HUDSON STREET

11:45 P.M.

"Jewel-box" she typed in the entry field. Then punched in the description: "Teak. Gold-inlay. 10 cm. x 10 cm x 15cm" Period: "18th C., early." Country of Origin: "India, Manipur Province."Craftsman/school: "Vajpey style." Price at acquisition: "$400." Estimated value: "$850."

Emma Cuzo sighed, and looked at the stack of files next to the terminal. 63 down, two hundred to go. If Dr. Rojek hired her next semester as her research assistant, maybe she'd quit this job. A fondness for Ms. Ellenstein and a lush, unrequited crush on Russell, the Indiana Jones ofeighteenth-century silver, still didn't compensate for this kind of boredom.

She reached down and dug through her backpack. She flipped past the problem set she still hadn?t finished, grabbing the thick flat mailer stuffed with Chester's ten-page letter and the first two chapters of his latest untitled opus, "The Story of Elijah, a young African-American gay athlete at Harvard, coming of age in the era of AIDS." Not at all auto-biographical, of course. Oh yeah. She started reading where she left off, at the first dog-eared page of chapter two:

"Elijah and Terry meet at the eyes, where they always meet. Dark amber intersects with blue, two streams of reflected light, crossing cultures, crossing continents. Two gazes, each piercing the irises of the other. Gazes suspended in the space between them, a barren, forbidden space, its borders set by wars of prejudice and the violence of history. Borders asking to be violated, a space longing to be filled, with hands gripping hips, with one mouth reaching for another, with the brown skin of one man brushing against the white skin of another."

Creak. The sudden shift of feet, Feet right beside her.

Emma's eyes leapt off the page; she spun in the computer chair. A hand reached out and gripped the arm of the chair. For a second, all motion stops. It?s Russell. Jesus Christ. He was forever appearing and disappearing, no warning, no noise. "How do you do that?" she demanded.

"Do what?" he asked innocently. She peered at his face, shadowed and yellow in the desk-light, the only light in the darkened store. He looked amused. He knew exactly what she meant. "I saw the light on," he said, casually. "I didn't know who it was."

She gestured at the files, at the computer screen, now covered with floating toasters instead of columns of data. "I was, ya know, working on the catalog project. I thought tonight would be a good night, to get alot of..."

He stepped behind her, leaned over her shoulder. "Hm," he murmured. " 'Dark amber intersects with blue, two streams of reflected light, crossing cultures, crossing continents', " he read aloud, " 'Two gazes, each piercing the irises of the other.' Very, um...poetic."

Emma covered the pages with her hands. "I was taking a break," she said defensively, feeling like she needed to protect Chester from this man.

"Ms. Cuzo," he said brusquely, his tone suddenly shifting, "It's almost midnight. How long were you planning to stay here? How were you expecting to get safely home?"

She shrugged and turned back to the computer. Nash was talking to the girl who'd deliberately gotten herself locked in the library all night. "As long as it takes. I walk home at night all the time. Besides," she rattled the little tube of mace on her key-chain, "I've got this."

He ripped it out of her hand dismissively: "You think this is going to protect you?" He shook his head. "I forget that all nineteen-year olds think they're immortal."

Like you're so old, she thought, piqued at his tone, his casual and authoritative violation of her space. Emma looked at his raincoat, buttoned and tied, and decided to change the subject. "So what's up Mr. Nash? You going out?"

"No," he tossed her keychain back on the desk. "Coming in."

She found her eyes trailing down to the floor. Nash was always wearing decrepit jeans and sneakers with these new trench coats. Emma had no idea where he?d picked up this particular fashion stutter, but she wondered from time to time if it might be treatable. Tonight he was wearing the same disreputable white leather basket-ball shoes that Rachel had--in an apocalyptic struggle of taste against comfort-- tried to throw out last week.

Emma had ignored their little battle. All she knew was that those two had as bizarre a secretary-boss relationship as Emma had ever seen in all her summers of office-work.

He must have walked through the park, she thought; she noticed fresh mud smeared over the scuffed white, and...but, that was strange. Splatters of red on his shoes. Like blood. But--it must be the light. But his jeans...

She felt his eyes burning into her head, compelling her to look up, away from his clothes, up at him. "Emma," he said, "You hungry?"

"No. Yes. What?"

"Why don't you come with me and we'll go grab a bite somewhere? Then I can drive you home. But I have to shower first. I'll be back down in fifteen minutes."

"No," she said, with more force than maybe necessary. The longer Russell stood there, the more she realized that there was an agitated, hypervigilant feel to his mood--a familiar mood, and one that always unnerved her. "You know, thanks, Mr. Nash," she said, the red stains on his shoes all but forgotten, "but you go ahead. I really want to get this done."

He leaned forward, and lifted the keyboard from the desk. With a couple of strokes exiting the program, then gently dropping his fist on the "off" button of the CPU. "Read your manuscript. I'll be down in fifteen mintues."

Exactly fifteen minutes later, just as Terry finally made a pass at Elijah, a move fraught with sexual and racial politics, and vivid sensory images of slavery and infancy, Russell appeared as promised. His wet hair combed back from his forehead; his jeans immaculate, bleached one shade lighter than the morning sky and not a spot of mud--or anything else-- on them. He was wearing boots. And a long leather jacket that she had never seen before.

"You ready? Come on." He waved impatiently at her to come with him, but Emma stopped, the feeling coming to her with a rush that there was something she should have noticed, that something had just happened, something she needed to remember, something she should understand.

"Emma?" he called. "The night is getting old." She looked over at him, a body that somehow she knew was in motion even when it was at rest, and she sighed, knowing that the moment was lost, that whatever it was, she'd missed it.

With a vague feeling of failure she zipped Chester's story back into her backpack and obediently followed Nash out the back of the store.

She had picked the IHOP, but Russell seemed satisfied, settling comfortably amid the fake pine paneling and lipstick-red vinyl, putting away sausage and buckwheat pancakes at a calm and steady pace, as she picked at her hash-browns and sipped the coffee, dark and corrossive, allegedy decaf.

"So, you like this place?" he asked her, his eyes following her fork, as it flattened and scraped her potatoes into intricate, crop-circle-like formations. "Or did you just choose it at random?"

"I--" she stopped and looked at him, trying to sort out the explosions of impulses that she always seemed to feel around him: the inexplicable longing for closeness, the wild urge to confide to him the things she never told to anyone, sometimes not even to herself, the simultaneous bursts of distrust, the warnings of danger...

Most confusing of all, the feeling that there was another person, latent inside her, whom Russell was silently calling to, whenever he was around her.

"We used to go to a place just like this, when I was little," she started again. "Every week, on Sunday afternoons, after Mass. Before my dad died. After he died, we didn't go out anywhere for awhile. There wasn't the money. And then when mom remarried-- Well, then I was older. Everything was different."

"Must've been hard, losing your father so early." He observed with simplicity, but she heard underlying questions: how hard was it? What kind of man was he? What did he mean to you?

"Yeah I guess," she said, meaning: "don't ask me, I don't know. I don't want to know. I've gone this long just fine without figuring it out." "I was a kid."

"Yeah," he said, with a tinge of humor, "I'm aware of that."

"I don't remember much," she mumbled, as she scooped up forkfulls of her potatoes, flipping them over soft-side up.

Faster than reflexes, he suddenly reached across the table and grabbed her hand with his, the fork still protruding from their two-layered fist. "Stop that," he ordered. "If you're not going to eat them, give them to me."

She dropped the fork and shoved the plate toward him with her other hand. But once he had liberated the hash-browns from her automatic operations of torture and disfigurement, he didn't seem so interested in them as food. And he didn?t drop her hand, either; he held onto it, his skin warm and dry, his fingers calloused and strong. "I've seen children lose their parents before. It turns their world inside out. Kids are tough. Tougher than adults. They almost always pull it back, rightside out. From a distance most of the time you'd never know." He turned her hand over, palm up, "but look close and you can see the seams," he said, tracing her life-line with his index finger, "where they had to sew the universe back together."

She sighed. She was not going to tell him. And why was he asking, anyway?

Just who was he to care?

"Mr Nash," she calmly began: It's no big deal, she would tell him. Long time ago, totally over it. Did the therapist-thing in junior high, worked it all out. Mom remarried, step-dad is mostly harmless, and the grandmother is stupendous. Can still kick a soccer ball all the way across a regulation-size field, taught me to fish and climb trees. She was always around. Who needs a father, anyway? And did I ever tell you that she did intelligence work in World War II? Sent secret messages, fired a gun, even parachuted once from a plane? She was French, and sixteen and...

"Russell," she heard herself say, her voice arid and toneless, "He didn't just die. He killed himself. Parked on the east side of the reservoir one night after work, and swallowed a revolver." Stunned at her own confession, she waited for the reaction. Waited for the revulsion and fear to pass across his face. Waited for him to drop her hand and pull away, as if what happened to her family might be contagious, still lingering years later in her breath and the pores of her skin.

His fingers tightened around hers. He leaned forward across the table. "And he left you alone, you and your mother. To survive. To deal with the grief and the shame. To wonder what could be so terrible, that he couldn't live and face it. To wonder if you had done something, to drive him away. To hate him for leaving you, and then to feel all the guilt for that hatred."

"I don't hate him," she said, and wondered why Russell doesn't look convinced. "He's dead. What's there to hate?"

"You think because he's dead, he's gone? Out of your life, faraway..."

Far-away, She heard an echo in her mind. Farther than China. Her hand tightened reflexively around his, her nails scraping against the back of his hand.

"They lied to me. They told me he'd gone away, left on a trip. I was five. It was in the paper, and the kids knew at school, my mother was prone in the bedroom on valium for three weeks and there were all these old ladies in black coming to the house--but somehow they thought I wouldn't figure it out."

"They weren't brave enough to tell you."

"I figured it out. But I pretended I didn't, never said a thing. They packed up his things, no one ever spoke his name, and I never got the chance to..."

Nash's face hadn't changed expression, but his eyes strayed from her face to their hands, where her thumbnail had dug a moon-shaped crevice beneath his knuckle, spurting drops of blood.

"Oh my God," mortified, she jerked her hand away. "I'm so sorry!"

He was already wrapping napkins around his hand at lightning speed. "Don't worry about it." He stood and grabbed his jacket.

Panicked, "Look, Mr. Nash, I didn't mean to, I mean, I can?t believe I, I mean, oh my God..."

"Look, Emma, I'm just going to the Men?s Room, okay? It's just a scratch." But his left hand was wrapped protectively around his right, covering the napkins and the cut, as if it was something far more serious. "I'm just going to...clean this up, and put a bandage on it. I have some in my coat."

She heard him mutter under his breath: "I better have some in my coat."

"You carry first-aid supplies in your jacket?"

He raised one eyebrow. "I'm a boy scout." Then he looked down at his hand, and back up at her, and for a moment he seemed to hesitate, a strange indecipherable thought passing across his eyes. "Emma..."

"What?" She heard something in his tone, she saw something in his face. And she felt herself grow quiet and intent, listening, waiting. Waiting to be told. Something essential, something she'd sensed all along. Something she should know.

The thought, whatever it was, vanished, and he shook his head. "Nothing. I'll be right back." He turned and sauntered past a table of taxi-drivers, toward the restroom. A muddle of thoughts and feelings, all nameless and unwanted, Emma watched his retreating figure, anxiously chewing her thumbnail, not noticing the taste of his blood.

Part 4: Small worlds and sudden aquaintances

NOVEMBER 19, 1998

PARIS

MIDMORNING, SAME DAY

Richie Ryan pulled his baseball cap down low on his forehead and pressed his John Lennon sunglasses hard against the bridge of his nose. Ouch. He wondered if he would feel less conspicuous if he hadn?t just listened to Mac lecture him for an hour on how utterly and absolutely conspicuous he was.

Coming to Paris hadn't seemed like such a stupid idea on the plane. Of course, that?s probably what Kennedy had thought riding in that convertible through Dallas. When he bought the ticket, his justifications had seemed airtight. The small film company into which he had smooth talked himself a part-time job needed someone to scout locations in Paris; he knew the city better than anyone else in the office; the ticket was free; he would only be there a week, and if he avoided the questiioning cycle circuit, who would notice one more young, gorgeous, strawberry-blond, red-blooded, American male?

Granted, he was one American who was supposed to be dead.

But, hey, it was only a week.

Twenty minutes after landing in Paris, he had literally bumped into Mac, going through customs. One glance at the look of seething exasperation on MacLeod's face, and his invincible wall of rationalizations crumbled into dust.

Now, three hours later, he was walking next to Mac through the middle of Paris--wishing he could melt away into the sidewalk. Anything to dodge the knowledge that he had disappointed MacLeod.

Again.

They walked in silence. Mac, in his anger, had seemed bent upon ignoring Richie, and Richie was happy to be ignored. He himself was absorbed in developing escape routes. Whatever plans MacLeod had in Paris, he didn't have the time--this time--to tag along. He really was here on business. And he had alot of ground to cover in a week.

A sudden vision punctured his self-absorption: a gothic shelter of thick brown stones, an image of Tessa, in jacket and gloves, her wise blue eyes tolerantly rolling, and a lean Jesuit in a rough brown cassock offering an endless stream of fatherly advice. He took off his sunglasses and rubbed his jet-lagged eyes. There it stood, a few hundred yards away: Darius' church.

His senses suddenly opened to outside stimulation, he looked over at MacLeod. Who was standing there, motionless, a strange and awful look on his face.

"Mac," he said, poking him gently. "You gotta go in there for something?"

MacLeod didn't answer. He didn't do anything at all. Usually the archetype of agility and decision, he just stood there, frozen. With a creeping sense of deja` vu, Richie wished he had been paying attention. He wished he knew why they were here. And he wished he knew a cure for a grief with layers centuries-thick.

But he hadn't, he didn't, and so he simply turned to Mac, hoping against all odds that his dismal twenty-nothing understanding could offer something to a guy who?d seen Shakespeare stage a play. "Mac," he asked quietly, "Are you here for sightseeing, therapy, or some new abstract form of S&M?"

MacLeod rewarded his attempt with eye contact and a small smile, but no answer. Richie tried again. "Mac, if you got an errand to be run in there, I could do it, you know. Just one of my myriad duties, as your devoted assistant and book-keeper. And I could meet you later, at the cafe on St. Michel."

MacLeod closed his eyes. Richie watched as MacLeod's entire body seemed to inwardly tense, the pain and paralysis seeming to surge, and then fade away. That familiar MacLeod aura of control rippled back into place as he opened his eyes.

Richie wondered when he would get Mac to teach him that trick.

Mac shook his head, "No. I have to go in. I have an appointment with the prelate. They found some more of Darius' things. And it's something I need to do. Myself."

As they both stepped toward the church, the thunder started crackling in Richie's head. That old black nausea started rising in his chest. Mac's eyes met his own.

God, not again.

MacLeod shrugged, and Richie saw something almost like amusement dancing in his brown eyes. "Well. Churches have always been popular places," he told Richie. "Holy Ground never seems to go out of style."

Richie felt really strongly that it was his turn to stand stock-still, but Mac was throwing a fatherly arm around his shoulders and propelling him forward. "Come on," he said to Richie, "There's no time to waste--I'm already late." Smiling, MacLeod unsheathed the full-force of that scary Scottish charisma, sharpened for any situation: "And we have an acquaintance to make."

As MacLeod forcibly strolled him into the church, Richie wondered what he'd just got himself into. This time.

They found her in the gloom of the chapel, kneeling before a shrine to the Virgin. She was looking around the chapel desperately, like a child scanning the shadows for monsters. Her eyes searching every door, window, and cleft in the walls, she seemed to have forgotten the candle she had been lighting.

Two of her fingers were resting in the flame.

It must have been his imagination--considering the distance and the darkness. But, looking at her hand, Richie thought he could see the skin blistering.

As she saw them, just shadows backlit by the sunlight streaming through the chapel door, Richie felt that flash of empathic communication, that mutual burst of recognition. Of the quickening, recognizing itself. At the same moment, her face convulsed with pain; eyes widening, crying out, she pulled her hand away from the candle.

With the scream, Richie ran. Within a few seconds he was only a few feet away from the kneeling girl--burnt hand cradled against her bony chest, dirty tangled hair falling in her face, thin shoulders shaking and teeth drawing blood from cracked red lips-looking as medieval as the art-work all around her.

"Nous sommes voici sur terre sacree," she said. ("We are on Holy Ground.")

How MacLeod could tell a native English-speaker from a few French syllables, Richie just couldn't fathom. But Mac answered her in English: "We're not here for you. We were just visiting the church." MacLeod's eyes scanned the chapel, finding the door which once led to Darius' quarters, and then returning to her. "An old friend once lived here. That's all."

MacLeod smiled at her, looking into her frightened face with compassion and curiosity. He stepped toward her. She tried to back away from him, but stumbled, falling to the stone floor. Mac walked over and knelt down beside her.

In a low voice, the cadence gentle and calming, he said to her, "I remember being your age, you know. Desperate and on the run. Afraid I wouldn't live to see the next year, or the next day. Certain that the next sword I saw would be the one that took my head. But I survived. And so can you." He offered her his hand. She accepted it warily, as she rose to her feet.

Richie shifted his weight from foot to foot, feeling a little restless. He'd seen MacLeod's social-worker-act before--after all, despite his best efforts, he was still a client.

Not that he objected to Mac taking on a new charity case--from what he could see of her in the gloom, she looked like she could use a MacLeod or two on her side. Not that he didn't mind. Hey, she had his sympathy--he knew what it was like to be the new kid with the big knife to your neck. And any time MacLeod spent helping her would automatically decrease the time Mac spent riding his case.

By a direct one-to-one ratio.

But call it intuition--or maybe even learning from experience-- Richie was having one of those telepathic twinges telling him that he would get dragged somehow into MacLeod's latest exercise in altruism.

She was standing, and seeming a little calmer. Looking down at her hand, already healed from the burn, she began to apologize to MacLeod in very American English.

It wasn't what she said, but how she said it that stunned him. That voice: stripped of its pretense to a French accent, it was rough-edged and deep, its TV-perfect pronunciation marred by an occasional New York vowel.

No. It couldn't be.

Richie studied her face, fitting its contours to a remembered image. He made the connection, but he couldn't accept it. Not the girl he'd met a few months ago in Prague--sleek, confident, composed--no, she wasn't possibly this ragged kid with red-rimmed eyes from a losing streak of sleepless nights.

He was staring at her un-self-consciously now, trying by sheer force of will to bend the truth back into a different shape. He stared at her as if he'd been told that if he stared long enough and hard enough, her face would change into a stranger's. He stared at her with such intensity and absorption, he didn't even notice that she had turned away from MacLeod and was staring back at him.

"Richie?" she asked, hesitantly.

"Clara," he said, with a sinking feeling.

Part 5: Shadows in the Rain

NOVEMBER 19, 1998

PARIS

"...Hang yourself, you will regret it; do not hang yourself, and you will also regret that; hang yourself or do not hang yourself, you will regret both...This, gentlemen, is the sum and substance of all philosophy..."

--Soren Kierkegaard

LATE AFTERNOON, SOMEPLACE DAMP

It was going to rain. His eyes never rose to the sky, to see the massing clouds. His eyes never strayed from their object, a body in motion, four limbs, a torso, a sword, a head.

It was going to rain. At the very edges of his attention, his senses perceived the shifting details of the world around him: the fading light, the direction and force of the wind, the smell and charge of the air, the subtle sounds of insects and animals scurrying for cover.

It was going to rain, he knew. The way he knew where his fingertips ended and the hilt began. The way he knew North without landmarks or stars. The way he knew from posture and the direction of a glance that the man he circled was about to lunge leftward, slashing--as Connor MacLeod lightly stepped aside, leaving only his sword to greet the miscalculating body of his opponent, the force of the man's own momentum running him through--only the wind.

(...the way he knows this morning that Henriette is dead. Before he dashes into her flat, the door broken and hanging by its hinges, before he finds her head, the lips parted and shellacked with blood. Before he remembers, a few moments later, just for the briefest second, what it feels like to cry...)

He withdrew the blade, the mirror-like sheen of the steel stained with blood and tissue. Almost dismayed by the ease of it, watching his opponent crumple, the erect muscled body of a moment before now a dying heap on the ground. The eyes were still alive, though. And focused on him, brilliant with the intensity of a light bent on burning itself out.

(...If he turned and walked away, those eyes would close, the lungs would empty and the heart would stop. Then the wounded flesh would suddenly knit itself together, as if it had never been rent; a spark would course through the still body, starting the heart; the mouth would fly open, drinking in air...)

He stayed; he stood right where he was.

He looked down. Lank dark hair framed the man's twenty-three year old face. Falling into his seven hundred year old eyes.

"What are you waiting for, MacLeod?" Kempe asked, his voice thick and dull, clogged with the blood that had begun to gush from his mouth.

An image formed in his mind, the face of a small child, black eyes pitted like a minefield, pink baby-flesh shuddering as the presence of an adult immortal racked her senses. The tiny mouth forming garbled syllables--her mind stunted with terror and neglect. A child deliberately made immortal before her time. For amusement. For pleasure. For the unique and addictive thrill of completely controlling and possessing another, of twisting and mangling their personhood at will and whim.

"You know, Edmund--I just don't know," he said calmly, shrugging. The sword seemed almost to drive itself through Kempe's neck.

As the quickening ripped into him, burning through his skin, he felt a scattering of rain-drops fall on his face.

It had rained like the storm before the second coming, the night he'd found her.

(...slipping away from Kempe's estate through the servants' cottages. Walking all the miles on the peasant-paths from Northshire to Lynn, carrying her, cradled in his arms, wrapped in his wool coat. Such a little thing, still trembling, no matter how warmly he wrapped her, no matter how carefully he sheltered her from the rain. His own arms bare wet goose-flesh; his feet drenched and numb.

After an age and a day they reach the house he keeps in Lynn. Rocking her before the fire, feeding her some bread he'd soaked in hot milk and whiskey and singing to her scraps and bits of songs he'd learned, years before, listening to Heather. Until finally, still in his arms, she drifts away into the sea-deep sleep of a child. He waits-- watching her tiny eyelids flutter--the sign, midwife Wallace had once told him, that the soul has wandered off to watch the night's entertainment in the theater of dreams....When she dreams her last dream, her breath growing slower and her eyes again still, he balances her small body on his lap with one arm. With the other he beheads her. ...the quickening is mild and brief, but he finds himself overwhelmed, paralyzed. Unable to let go of the headless body he's rocking in his arms, unable to drag his eyes away from the small head no longer rolling on the stone floor. It's eyes closed and its tiny features placid, like the painted faces of porcelain dolls he'd once seen in London...)

Then suddenly the memory was distorted--still looking at that face, but now very much attached to its body--the childish features neither peaceful nor afraid, but corrupted and coy, gazing at him seductively, greedily beckoning to him...

No. Not his memory. Kempe's memory. Kempe's cruel and fatal fantasy.

"It's over now," Connor whispered to himself. As if he were still holding her. As if she could hear him.

Jittery and restless, he roamed the side-streets, going nowhere in particular, striding just a few paces short of a run. Alien thoughts and feelings flashing on the surface of his consciousness, his muscles charged with an irritating energy, feeling at moments as if he were about to crawl right out of his skin. Walking and walking, as his body and soul wrestled with the essence of another. Strength, mind and will all transmuted into a powerful, foreign, and repulsive stream of energy. And it fought viciously--even after it had been assimilated--to remain intact, to keep from being dissolved and incorporated into the new self which had absorbed it.

The light drizzle graduated to a steady deluge. The downpour plastered his wet and sandy hair to his scalp; a persistent stream of rain began to run almost continually off his steep forehead and down his nose like a gutterspout.

He didn't notice.

He'd gone blocks and blocks when he found himself facing an imposing marble wall at the end of a cul-de-sac. He leaned against the wall and closed his eyes, the wet stone hard, cool and soothing against his tense flesh. "Not having the best morning, are you Connor?" he asked himself wryly.

(...The fire crackles in the stone hearth. In the bedroom Heather sleeps, her firm curves artfully avoiding the worst lumps in the mattress. Leaving them for him, of course...

...The old man still sits at the table, staring into the hearth, smoking pensively. Ramirez never seemed to sleep, as if he?d done all the dreaming he needed, centuries ago...He bends over the fire for a moment, stirring the embers. Then he sits across from the old man, waiting...

..."Days pass into weeks, the centuries merge into millennia," Ramirez begins, his voice low and resonant. A raised eyebrow and an ironic smile suddenly grabs Connor's attention. "Not that you'd know anything about that, would you, clansman?" the old man shakes his head, the fire-light casting flashes of gold on his white hair. "No-- None of it's real for you yet. It never is--not for the first few decades.

"At first there seems to be no difference between you and the mortals. You both fall in love, grieve for your dead, and try to stay alive. But with time--"..."--with time the differences will become clear. Mortals act without ever living with their actions--a blink and their time is over. Their memories are short and faint and if a deed still rankles and resists forgetting then they spit it out to a priest, and the guilt passes through them like dirty water, never to be felt again......"But we aren't so lucky. No, you'll carry your deeds with you all your life, MacLeod. Every detail of the moment as sharp and clear as day. The memories branded in your brain...and the guilt carved into your heart..."

...The calm smile on the old man's face, the even tone of his voice, confused Connor. What were all these impassioned speeches, these pretty words, supposed to mean to him?

"...Yes, carrying your mistakes for centuries. The weight on your shoulders, the sharp edges of regret like thorns digging into your flesh. They'll cling to you, and you'll feel them with every step you take. For hundreds of years you'll carry them--" the old man stops and draws deeply on his pipe, exhaling the smoke in fetid curls that seemed aimed for Connor's offended face..."Unless, my young friend, you have the good fortune to learn from them...")

Connor committed a map of Paris to his memory every two or three years. He always knew where he was, even if he had paid little attention to getting there. Shelter was not far from here. A warm, dry apartment. Expensively furnished, an exquisite view. A kettle on the burner and scotch waiting to be poured. Dry clothes: clean, pressed and hanging in the closet.

Heat, light and comfort just a few blocks away.

He stayed right where he was, standing in the rain, bare-headed and drenched, staring into the empty street through a dark gray curtain of falling water, stretching from the pavement to the sky. Trying not to think of anything. Feeling the strange nuances of someone else's power and knowledge merging with his own, slipping into cracks and spaces of his body and mind, displacing buried memories, shoving forgotten feelings of his own out into the open.

Or feelings he just wished he could forget..

("...they'll cling to you, and you'll feel them, every step you take...every detail of the moment as sharp and clear as day...")

He'd never been sure of the little girl's name. Henriette-- Henriette had always just called her Ma fille-- my girl, my daughter. Kempe had called her, "The Doll," thinking her his own perverse play-thing.

He had been too late. To late to stop Kempe from giving her immortality. From destroying her womanhood, from killing her future. Too late to do anything but end her suffering in the only way he could imagine.

He had done the right thing, Connor still believed. There was no life he or Henriette or anyone else could have offered her. Trapped in a child's body, at best living as someone's burden, buried in the bitter memories of her violation, of her irreparable mutilation.

She had been one of his many lessons in learning that you could do the right thing--and still regret it.

That little girl's face, so small and desperate and vulnerable. So much...so much like another face 300 years later, pleading for protection...A face still waiting anxiously for him, somewhere in Manhattan, the lines of late middle-age only a thin veil over the face of the little girl she had been when he'd first seen her.

Rachel.

And what sort of life has she had, thanks to his heroic act of rescue? Tied to a man who can no longer be her father and who will not be her lover...who should have sent her away years ago, before it was too late...pushed her out into world, where she might have fallen in love, married, had children...

But instead he held onto her at arm's length, binding her by his secrets, by his cold intimacy...unable to bring her closer, unable to let her go, paralyzed by his own...

...loneliness.

("...For hundreds of years you'll carry them... Unless, my young friend, you have the good fortune to learn from them...")

He reached into his pocket, feeling a folded piece of paper, and a broken watch. Here he was in Paris, trying to remedy another mistake, another aborted act of love, another rescue gone wrong. Once again, in as many hours, probably too late.

About to do the right thing--and probably regret it.

Connor MacLeod closed his eyes and began walking away, afraid of other memories lurking in the rain...

Part 6: Pillow Talk

OCTOBER 30, 1997

A CABIN IN THE WOODS SOMEWHERE IN CONNECTICUT

"...A powerful tendency to aggressiveness is always present beside a powerful love..."

--Sigmund Freud, "Femininity."

NIGHT

Emma went for the flashlight, he went for the candles. As if it weren't obvious who had born in which century. Peering out the window at the oscillating sheets of black rain, she said, "I'll go out there. Maybe I can restart the generator."

Bent over a stack of kindling, Connor shook his head. "I don't think so. You're staying here and helping me build this fire."

She sighed, her mouth tightened, her eyes narrowed. All the familiar signs preceding an outburst. He braced himself for the storm indoors.

"Look--" she snapped. "You've seen me fix the generator before, and believe it or not, I've been camping, with my grandmother, in worse storms than this. Maybe I'm not 500 years old; but I'm not a kid."

He shrugged, and motioned toward the door. She pulled on her coat, picked up the toolbox, and opened the door.

He couldn't believe it; not again.

Blood was thicker than water, he knew. Her skull, he believed at times, was thicker than any substance previously known to man.

Connor jumped up, grabbed her arm, and jerked her back inside. He picked up the practice katana, blade to the floor, and held the handle to her face.

Mentally, he was counting back from ten.

In Chinese.

"Look--" he snapped. "I know that the shed is only 40 yards away. But any moment that your sword is more than a foot away from your hand is a moment that could cost you your life. Never leave a room without it." He sighed, "We've been through this."

Emma took the sword from him without a word. Walking out of the house and into the storm, she slammed the door.

He had finished building the fire when Emma came back inside, sheepish and soaked. She told him exactly what he already knew: The wind had blown the connection wires between the generator and the house. There was no fixing it until the storm had passed.

"The heating system is electrical," he said. "And it'll be cold tonight." Connor glanced at her sullen face. "Very cold. So we're both sleeping here, where the fire is. You get the blankets; I'll pull my mattress down here."

"And we're both going to sleep on it?"

He bit his lip, suppressing the temptation to tell her to go to hell, to tell her: Kid, If I'd wanted that from you, you would've known about it a long time ago; I didn't drag you up to the woods so I could get laid.

"Why not? You prefer the floor?" He blinked coyly, daring her to push the point.

She didn't. Letting out a theatrical sigh, she turned down the hallway, toward the linen closet.

Whatever, he thought, watching her go.

They'd settled down, swaddled in 19th Century comforters and 20th century sleeping bags. But they were both restless. Maybe it was the storm. Finally Emma stopped pretending to sleep.

"Russ-- MacLeod..."

He opened his eyes.

Obviously taking this for a sign that he was awake, she asked, "The immortal who found you, and taught you, who was he? He?" She hesitated, "Or she? What were they like?" she looked at him, propped-up on her elbows, deep-eyed and expectant, a child waiting for a bedtime story. The overture surprised him. The sound of her voice-- unguarded, almost intimate.

She hadn't spoken this way since he'd pulled her out of the morgue.

He turned towards her, and watched the mottled light of the fire play across her face for a moment before he answered. "He," he said. "He called himself Ramirez. A Spaniard, from Charles' court. But that just was his name and country of the moment. He claimed he was Egyptian. Born two--" Connor stopped, doing the math. "--almost three thousand years ago."

Ramirez was dead, and the dead were stuck, frozen in time. Summon the memories and Connor could so easily get stuck with him, in the 16th Century, forgetting that more than 400 years had passed. "He never told me what they'd called him in Egypt. There were alot of things he didn't tell me. I guess he didn't have time--"

"Connor," She interrupted, "Did you like him?"

Hearing her use his first name startled him. Since she'd learned he wasn't really 'Russell Nash' she'd rarely addressed him by name at all, and then only as "MacLeod". But the nakedness of her question surprised him more. He sat up and looked at her. "Did I like him? Did you like me, when I found you?"

She looked surprised that he would ask--that he would want to know the answer. Emma searched his face as if she were looking for something in particular, like a town on a map, some safe haven. "No," she said.

Appearing to find courage in the truth, she continued. "No, I didn't like you. You were... You scared me." She took a deep breath, as if needing strength for the next words. "You still do."

"And you still don't like me, do you?"

She met his eyes for a moment. "I--" Her voice trailed off.

Connor laughed softly; he ignored the drop of bitterness trickling down the back of his throat. "I can recognize a "No" when I hear one."

She sat up, clutching her knees, her head bent into her arms, as if she wanted to fold herself up into a single smooth surface, with no exits and no entrances. Her hair tumbled over her face and knees, an inpenetrable curtain of coarse red stuff. For a second she was silent, closed-up inside herself.

And safe from him, he supposed.

Then a whisper slipped through.

"I liked you once." she said softly, a faceless voice issuing from a tangle of hair and limbs. "Who I thought you were, then. I liked him."

Reaching over, he pulled her hair back, lifted her head from its cradle of elbows and fists, and raised her face to his. "Who you thought I was? Who was that? Go on," he said, releasing her head from his hands. "I'm listening."

He looked into her face, watching and waiting.

Her usual sullen expression, the one she'd worn everyday like a piece of armor, had fallen away. Now her face was stripped. Emotions flickered across it, deep and undefined. Feelings too close to the truth.

"Russell," Emma said softly. "I thought you were Russell. My summer-job savior. Prince among guys. Well, maybe "prince" was pushing the envelope a little bit--he was a little weird, maybe a little too edgy and enigmatic. He sure kept strange hours and his life seemed packed with things that were just barely legal--if at all--but who cared? I trusted him anyway. At first.

"At first I thought he was perfect. Appearing in my life outta nowhere, coming through for me at every turn. Giving me a job when I was running out of money and too proud to go back home. Bailing me out when Lucy and I got busted for tagging billboards. Feeding me at one a.m. when the library closed, listening with rapt attention as I babbled about O-chem."

She paused, her voice wry. "At first, he was too good to be true. But then, that was the problem, wasn't it? A man too good to be true is always hiding something. Something huge."

Connor stared at her face, tense, drawn inward, creased with a half-smile, ironic and bitter. Conscious of his stare, she pulled her eyes away from him--to the floor, to the fire, to anywhere else. "But even that I had all figured out--I thought he was working for the mob. Money laundering. All those antiques he never seemed to sell, and all those times he came in in the middle of the night, looking like someone had roughed him up. And all the strange and sinister people, all the weird incidents, all that stuff with Elena Duran..."

"The mob..." he repeated, thinking about it. "Not flattering. But not a bad guess..."

"Oh no!" she broke in bluntly. "Not bad! It was of course completely wrong....But then how could I ever guess what he was hiding? This whole other person. You. And I'll always remember that first second in the morgue, prying my eyes open, clawing the sheet off my head and taking in that first awful breath of Betadine and formaldehyde. Seeing the bodies all around me and the tag on my toe. And finding you there, standing over me, wearing Russell's face. But not Russell at all, and I knew that in an instant. And everything else, you know, was just an aftershock compared with that first moment. Of seeing you, the person you really were. And seeing the sheer scale of how I'd been lied to. Seeing that my life was over."

Her voice was hoarse. She might have been crying, he couldn't tell. She had turned over, turned her face away from him.

"Even at the time I knew it was stupid, but I'd felt close to you. To him. I trusted him. I felt connected to him...I felt...wanted... Christ, I was such an idiot."

"We had a connection, Emma. That was never a lie." Staring at her back, Connor had to fight the urge to put his hands on her shoulders, to stroke her hair. He wasn't sure how it would be interpreted. Or maybe he wasn't sure how it was intended. "I wasn't pretending; I wasn't lying; I showed you and told you everything I could. Everything that was safe. You think I should've told you? About immortality? You think you would've believed me?"

She turned back and faced him, her cheeks damp, her eyes red and distant. But she didn't answer his question.

"That would be another "No", " he said.

Sighing loudly, she flopped back down on the mattress and rolled over, away from him.

"Is this really about me? About what I did or didn?t tell you?"

Silence.

Connor could hear her breathing, shallow and rough, each breath a jagged, wordless accusation. "Okay. I get it. I've seen it on your face everyday since I brought you here. You think you don't want any of this. You don't want this immortality, you don't want to fight, you don't want a new name and a new country every thirty or forty years. And why would you want any of this? Hey, you're not stupid-- you can spot a raw deal when you're getting one...

"Except that nobody's offering you a deal. This is what you are. Immortal. Hate it all you want. Hate me instead, because that's easier."

That got her attention, and suddenly turned toward him, her eyes on him, focused and intent. "Pretend all you want. But we both know the truth. Yeah. I've seen that on your face, too: in your eyes. I've seen the flash of recognition when we've talked about the quickening, like you?ve always known it was inside you. I've seen it in your body, the sense of naturalness, when you hold a sword."

He coughed up a harsh, humorless laugh. "Yeah, I'm not stupid either. I can see her, the woman, the immortal, you could become. And she's not my invention. She's in here," he said, leaning over her, tracing the line of her sternum with his finger, watching her jaw tighten and feeling her muscles clench as he touched her, "inside you. She's always been there. Waiting for you to find her."

Emma said nothing, her lips pressed tightly together, her body stiffening as he touched her, her eyes two darting objects engaged in evasive maneuvers, looking everywhere to avoid looking at him. Her body so tight, so tense, as if the slightest hint of openness, of relaxation, might dissolve the boundaries between them, break down all the fragile fences she'd erected to keep him out, all the arguments she'd made to persuade herself that she was nothing like him. But the more lines she drew, the more he had to cross them. One way or another he had to reach her-- or everything would be for nothing.

"Look, Emma. We're born human; we become immortal. And it's not easy. We give up alot. We give up who we were, all our mortal hopes and dreams. When Ramirez found me--I hated him for it. I didn't understand what he was giving me. I only understood all the things he took away."

"You know, you surprised me a little: You work so hard, you learn fast. Whatever I show you, you give your mind and body to it. All the way." He looked at her--what was the point? She wasn't listening. And he felt his frustration with her growing past his ability to control it. He wanted her attention, he wanted her to hear him, he wanted her to stop this stupid war. Before they passed the point where he could still help her, before she got herself killed. Or became the kind of person that had to be killed. "But your heart always resists," he muttered, "doesn't it?"

Cupping his hands around her face, he pulled her gaze toward him until her eyes met his. "So, what is it? You feel like you're striking a blow for your lost humanity every time you start an argument?"

Finally unable to look away, to refuse to answer, she simply said: "I don't know."

Holding her head more tightly, he pulled her close to him, until their eyes were only inches away and his breath brushed against her face. "Not knowing isn't good enough, Emma. I'm a dangerous enemy. Don't make me yours."

She was shaking.

He was scaring her. He wanted to stop, but he couldn't. He had spent two months of overlooking her hostility, of holding back the force of his anger.

"I don't want you to be my enemy," she whispered.

"Then stop fighting me--I am trying to help you."

Words, words, words. He was talking so much. It was giving him a headache. Talking and talking, and never getting through. She was a closed circuit, a phone off the hook. "Learn who you are--and accept her. If you don't, you will turn the potential inside you against yourself. Or other people. And if you do the latter, I will come after you."

He realized he had been holding her so tightly that bruises were forming on her neck. He relaxed his hands. But she didn't move. She simply stared at him. The absurdity of situation struck him. To an outsider, they would look like lovers, lying in front of the fire, their bodies just inches apart. But he felt as if he was crossing thousands of miles, trying to reach her.

He said quietly, "I miss our friendship too. But you are the one who won't meet me half-way."

Turning away, Connor closed his eyes.

For hours, the rain pummeled the earth. Neither of them slept.

Part 7: Gimme Shelter

NOVEMBER 19, 1998

PARIS, A STRANGELY FAMILIAR BARGE ON THE SEINE...

EVENING

Emma Cuzo started the shower. She stood by the toilet, fully clothed, just watching the hot water rain down into the stall. She glanced around the tiny room, a small cube of brown tile and varnished dark wood. It was simple and spare. A bar of soap and an old-fashioned straight razor by the sink. A towel hanging on the door-hook and a single toothbrush hanging in a slot by the mirror. No pictures or knick-knacks, no seashell-shaped soaps and embroidered hand-towels, no treasure-boxes stuffed with earings and chains, no colorful array of bottles and pots filled with lotions, perfumes, and all the other magic substances women smear on their bodies and faces. The room belonged to a man.

A man who lived alone.

A man she didn't know--even if Richie Ryan did. A man who was immortal. A man who was quite possibly dangerous. God, what was she doing? Why did she let them bring her here?

She didn't know.

(..."Not knowing isn't good enough, Emma...")

She picked up the straight razor, her fingertips tracing the patterns engraved on its jade handle. She stared in the mirror, watching her reflection slowly cloud over with shower-steam.

And who was this man? Richie's friend? His teacher? Why hadn't she caught his name in the church? How old was he? And what if he knew...

(..."I'm a dangerous enemy, Emma. Don't make me yours...")

...Connor?

She tossed her head, trying to shake his voice away. She had to think. She had to plan. Figure out her next move. There was, she thought, a radical difference between playing a game and being played in a game. The problem with "The Game" was that was never clear which was happening. But she knew what it felt like. It felt like she couldn't see the board or the pieces because she was on the board and she was a piece. And all she could see through her pawn's-eyes was the shadowed border of the square on which she stood. And she strained and strained to see past it, to the next square, the nearest piece, her next move.

The shower was still running. Shit. As if she'd forgotten what she was doing, standing in here. She passed her hand under the stream of water. Scalding hot. Close enough to perfect. She grabbed her sweatshirt by the hem and jerked it up, over her head, suddenly seeing...

(...a drop of blood fall on blue paint, marring the reflection of moonlight and streetlamps...)

No. Not now. She didn't remember. She wouldn't. She pulled the sweat-shirt all the way off and tossed it in the corner. And then the t-shirt underneath. But suddenly clumsy, fumbling with her bra, she felt against her neck, her head...

(...his coarse, unshaven skin; his breath, sickly and warm...)

No, no, no. Her hands dropped to her jeans, trying the zipper. But she couldn't shake the whispering in her ear, the voice-- deep, slavic and sinister-- whispering...

(..."Perhaps I'll let you live..." he's whispering, his breath hot against her neck, smothering. One of his hands is crushing hers against the roof of the old VW, her head hanging in a void of broken glass, dangling into the broken passenger window through which he?d smashed her head a moment before.

With his other hand he's stroking her--but not with his fingers, not with his flesh: he?s brushing her body with the dull edge of his sword. Her sword is yards, miles, light-years away--she imagines it spinning through black space, still following the trajectory it took when it flew from her hand....and now he's running the edge of the sword along her neck, against the back of her head. She can barely breathe: her nose, mouth are clotted with blood. But his breath is everywhere: covering her face like a film, a seeping veil of bodily scent and slimy heat.

...now she feels the steel against her cheek, the metal freezing and burning: "After all--your head is such a little thing. But perhaps I should leave you something to remember me by--you see, it's quite strange, my dear..." he's saying, his weight crushing her body, swallowing it up, "...but a bullet, a blow, even fire to the face, and in a few hours your features would be as whole and pretty as they are right now. But there is something about the cut of the blade--the edge of the knife--that our flesh distinguishes from all else--recognizing it, calling to it. Whenever the blade meets the neck, the head-- the flesh remembers. It scars--waiting for the time when it will be cut again. Forever..."

...she feels a stream of her own urine-- hot and humiliating-- running down her leg...he slides the flat of the blade across her forehead, but she can't feel it, she's sinking away, sinking into the blackness. "Yes, I think I will do some...re-decorating. Something to show when you go crawling back to that impotent Scotsman, so he can look at your mutilated face and remember all his women whom Ishmael Rogovin has defiled. Oh MacLeod," he chuckles,"you just can't protect them, can you?"

..time is disappearing, moments stretching and shrinking. All she knows is now her jeans are falling...Oh God...His--that thing--thick and stone--hard, stabbing into her, ripping her open, as if she were an empty bag, hanging open, dry and torn, there is nothing left inside of her. No inside...

...from far-away, from someplace else, she's watching. Floating somewhere outside time, she sees the car, sees something lying inches from her hand, a thick shard of glass. Dagger sized...she does it in less than a second, but it takes hours. Hooking her foot around his ankle, slamming her weight backwards, pushing, pushing, down, away, twisting, she pins his arms against the asphalt, knocking his sword away, crashing his fists into the gravel. Scooping the shard in her other hand as they fall, she bears her body down as hard as she can against his--She is gravity--pressing, pinning...

...as she twists she slams the shard against his neck. It goes part-way through...just barely over the beating of her heart she hears him screaming with half a vocal cord.

...she pounds and pounds, like a woman crushing corn into meal, like a woman pounding wet clothes against the rocks. She pounds and pounds the shard against his neck, hacking through tendons, through vessels, through bone and nerve, again and again, his body writhing, his mouth still moving, the edge of the glass slicing her palm, his blood mixing with hers...she keeps pounding the wet empty air as his head finally rolls away...)

No. She wasn't going to remember...

The water was almost burning, but she didn't remember stepping into the shower, leaning against the tile stall, still half-clothed.

Anymore than she remembered that quickening--her first.

She bowed her head underneath the hot stream of water, drenching her hair, the water falling into her eyes, blinding...

What she did remember was sometime--moments or hours later, rocking back and forth, his body yards away. A huddled ball of muscle and tears, muttering to herself words she didn't understand. Clutching her legs, trying to stop them from shaking, soaked in urine, her thighs caked with semen and blood, bare and freezing in the cool Czech air.

What she did remember was Connor telling her that the quickening brought only power and strength--no permanent memories, no lasting emotions, no conscious knowledge.

(Maybe he hadn't known. Maybe he wasn't brave enough to tell her. Or maybe it was just another one of Russell's big lies.)

Anyway, what she did remember was looking up, into the streetlight, and suddenly remembering through his eyes: seeing her bloodied body, feeling it flatten against the car, tasting her shame and disgust, smelling her fear.

What she still remembered (despite every effort to block it out, despite the wall she built and re-built everyday--with taller and thicker bricks each time-- between herself and her feelings, her memories...) was her rape.

From her rapist's point of view, sometimes...

She peeled off her remaining clothes, already wet from the shower. Hung them over the door. For half an hour she scrubbed and scrubbed, rubbing soap over every inch of her body.

As if it were her body.

As if she would ever be clean.

Duncan glanced at the hallway, toward the sound of running water. He looked at his watch, suppressing a smile. Still in the shower, fifty minutes later. She should meet Amanda. They had at least two things in common: immortality and a belief that time stopped once they passed through the magic portals of the bathroom.

Richie had left. He'd slapped Duncan on the shoulder: "You'll watch her, won't'cha Mac? 'Cause I gotta go, you know. Do some stuff." Obviously desperate, almost crawling out of his skin to get away.

From him? Or the girl?

Richie wouldn't say a word about her. But she seemed to spread uneasiness around. They'd obviously met before--she and Richie. And been on friendly terms...

Lovers?

She might be attractive enough, underneath all that dirt. But neither of them were volunteering anything. And something was clearly wrong: her appearance, her attitude. At once terrified and hostile. Brooding and evasive when he asked her anything about herself, answering his questions with questions...

He looked down at the stack of papers in front of him. For the last half-hour he'd been skimming pages of financial statements, portfolio analyses, auction catalogues, and found that he couldn't remember a thing he'd read. His attention seemed bent on wandering.

His eyes paced the room, finally falling on the girl's things, a small dirty pile shoved into the corner of the room. No, he told himself.

(..."I didn't have a teacher," she bites her lip, refuses to meet his eye. ...

"Oh, come on," Duncan objects. He wasn't born yesterday. Or the day before yesterday, either. "Who told you about beheadings and the Game? About the quickening? About what you are? There must have been someone. It didn't all just come to you in a dream, did it?"...)

He picked up the paper, began reading the headlines. Within a minute he found his gaze pulled back to that corner. She'd laid her coat, carefully folded, on top of her pack. Folded and draped a particular way, as if something of a specific shape and length had been placed inside.

(..."You don't trust me, do you?" she counters, at once defiant and painfully, acutely afraid...

"Trust is a two-way street," Duncan answers, desperately wanting to help her, but refusing to dance this dance by himself.)

He got up from the desk.

(..."Well, Socrates, since I'm obviously seeking understanding, tell me why would an immortal take me in and teach me? What advantage would they gain? Why would they want to?"

..."Well, Phaedrus," Duncan smiles, thinking: Right. You haven't had a teacher. Come on, kid, tell me another one. "Try pity. Charity. Fair play. Friendship. Connection.")

As he picked-up her trench he felt immediately the long leather sheath sewn into the lining.

(...But her head is shaking, and her eyes are bleak, and Duncan wonders what horror story lies behind the tiny tremors in her fingers and the evasions spilling from her lips: "I could accept that answer if we were talking about Mother Teresa. But we're discussing immortals--whatever that really means...And as far as I can tell from others I've met, that isn't how the relationship works. We don't do things for each other; we do things to each other. My need is your advantage. Not your responsibility."

...And what, Duncan wonders, did one of us do to you? "But we all need connections," he counters, with an argument engraved upon his heart. "Ties to others. To share and pass on the knowledge and understanding we've gained. To show someone the kindness someone showed once to us. We're not so different from mortals in that way. We don't have families the way they do-- we don't pass on our genes or our names. But we form other bonds. Comrade to comrade. Mentor to student. And they mean as much to us as the ties of blood mean to them. We don't simply destroy each other. We reach out to our own kind. I find it hard to believe that nobody reached out to you.")>

He listened for a moment, checking to see if the shower were still running. Then with a single fluid motion he reached into the lining of the coat and withdrew its' contents.

He looked at it carefully, the nondescript flash of metal and light of any sword unsheathed becoming detailed and specific. A Viking sword, a millenium-old blade of folded steel, a slight bit smaller and lighter than traditional Viking designs. From the ornamentation and inscription on the hilt, one could ascertain that the sword was forged specially for a shield-maiden of royal descent. One could-- that is--if one so needed.

Duncan, however, had seen this sword before. Several times before.

The last time had been a decade ago, in Manhattan. He had taken it out of its display case and had held it just for a moment. For old time's sake. To draw forth a few memories, memories he had wanted to sort through; to sate that endless urge to distinguish the Duncan present from the Duncan past.

It was the same sword, he thought, weighing it in his palm. At once the same sword, and a different one. Duncan's hands were practiced instruments of perception. With the faint brushing of a finger-tip they could read layers of invisible information, recalling years of silent history from the curve of a lover's rib or the terrain of her spine. They were as intimate with steel as they were with flesh; in his hands a sword would whisper all the memories of its metal, revealing its personality, its past, recognizing a previous acquaintance...

This sword remembered him, but it had changed. In Manhattan, as always before, it had felt vacant and blank, unmarked by use-- despite its age. A weapon frozen in its infancy for centuries. But not anymore. Now it resonated with a certain character. Holding it in his hand, he felt the difference: this was no longer the sword which had spent centuries hanging decoratively on walls and in cases. This was a weapon that had been used to kill, which had been touched and cleaned and carried everyday, a weapon which had had the sparks of a quickening travel along the length of its blade, a sword which had bonded to the flesh of its owner.

Had someone taken her in? Trained her, taught her who she was, what she shared in, the skills she needed to survive? Yes, the sword answered. But that answer left more questions in its wake than Duncan could ever have anticipated. And dredged up memories that Duncan would rather forget.

Part 8: Girl Trouble

1628

THE WILD REGION BETWEEN SCOTLAND AND ENGLAND, KNOWN AS "THE BORDERS"

Her laugh, drifting backward, tinkling like a tiny greased bell, was annoying him. Everything was annoying him. The pebbles on the path, the hole in his boot, the summer heat, the late afternoon sky's impudent shade of blue.

The horse in front of him was annoying him. For one thing, she was riding it--straddled behind Connor, clutching at his waist like a papist grasping at a relic.

And Duncan was walking.

He watched as she hung onto Connor, whispering ceaselessly into his ear and giggling. Listened as Connor laughed with her. His kinsman?s mind, Duncan thought, must have suddenly rotted--broken down and drenched by a storm of empty girlish prattle.

"How much longer is it to the inn?" he interrupted them, when he could stand it no longer.

Connor looked back. "Not much longer."

Margaret turned, still giggling. "Poor Duncan. All that walking. The life of a warrior must be very hard indeed."

Duncan just glared in return. Lowlands brat. Go on, he thought, laugh; knowing that her turn was coming. She'd soon see how hard the life of a warrior was, starting out with padded hips and uncalloused hands.

Connor whispered something to her, and the giggling abruptly stopped. Margaret tossed her head back and dropped a sullen glance at Duncan's feet, then looked away, too fast for him to catch her eyes.

Duncan found himself suppressing a smile. Suddenly the pebbles on the path seemed much less irritating. And the hole in his boot didn't trouble him nearly so much. Peering up beyond the canopy of branches and leaves, he noticed the clear exquisite color of the sky...

At the inn, in their room, Margaret flung herself on the only bed, pointedly drew a book from her pack, and made a great show of reading it, something she knew Duncan could not do. He stood at the foot of the bed, watching her eyes move left to right, her lips shaping words silently. He stood there, making a great effort to seem sinister and looming, feeling his nostrils flare with something more primal than hate.

Margaret ignored him.

Connor tugged him gently by the shoulder. "Duncan. I need help with the horse."

Not looking up, he resisted the pull of his clansman, and stubbornly replied, "I thought one us was to be watching her. Keeping her safe."

"We're the only immortals here. She's safe enough. Come on."

Reluctantly, Duncan let himself be led out of the room and down to the stables. He noticed, as they're leaving, that not once did Margaret look up.

Connor pulled a small piece of honeycomb, wrapped in leaves and hay, out of his pocket and fed it Riob, who whinnied plaintively at her master, then took the treat as her due. "Why do you hate her so much?" he asked Duncan. "She's just a girl."

Duncan shook his head and looked at the floor. "There's nothing wrong with the horse," he observed. Connor didn?t answer. "And she's not just a girl--" Duncan found himself suddenly objecting, "--she's one of us."

"True," Connor admitted, as he scratched Riob's ears. "But for now, she's still just a girl. Later, she'll change. We all do."

Duncan said nothing.

Finally Connor sighed. "We'll reach Rebecca's tommorrow. We'll leave her there, to be trained, and you need never see her again."

Duncan could hear the compromise, the coaxing--so alien and unfamiliar--in Connor's voice. But somehow it wasn't enough. "I expected you'd be teaching me to be a great fighter," he spluttered childishly. "Not to be a governess. Coddling a girl across the countryside. It's women's work!"

Duncan didn't see the fist coming. He barely felt himself fall to the ground, the air sudddenly dancing with colors and shapes, blood

dribbling from his nose into his mouth. He felt, but didn't see, Connor leaning over him, whispering harshly. "By the names of the damned, Duncan. I brought you along because I need you. But If you'd rather, you can start the walk back to Inverness tonight. No sense in my counting on a man who thinks only of himself."

Connor straightened himself up and walked away from him, leaving Duncan moaning and rolling in horse-dung and hay.

Duncan could just barely hear the parting shot: "...and I took you for a MacLeod..."

"Wait!" he cried. "Connor, wait!"

A massive arm pulled him up, drug him across the stable, and pushed his head down into the water trough. Duncan jerked his head back up, drenched to the neck, gasping.

"There," Connor said quietly. "Better?"

Duncan nodded, still coughing up water.

"Can I count on you?"

"Always," Duncan said, as soberly as he could, with blood and water dripping down his face. "I swear."

"There is a man near here. A man I have to meet, tonight. While I?m gone, take care of Margaret. Never let her out of your sight."

The words just tumbled out of Duncan?s mouth, so desperate, so eager, to win back Connor's trust. "I promise, Connor, I'll keep her safe. I won?t leave her side. I swear as a kinsman, on my mother?s soul."

Connor merely nodded. "I want to show you something." He led Duncan back to Riob's stall, pulled a loose board out of the wall, and retrieved an object, long and narrow and wrapped in homespun. As he unwrapped it, he held up the lantern so that Duncan could see.

It was a sword, one of the strangest and most beautiful Duncan has ever seen. Small chunks of yellow stone glowed, embedded in the hilt, and inside the largest piece, Duncan could see a tiny insect, suspended in flight. Around the stones were carvings, sinuous patterns and lines, unlike anything Duncan has seen before.

"Those are runes," Connor told him, running his fingers reverently down the hilt. "It was made by Vikings, for a shieldmaiden. It's small for a man, but I thought it would suit Margaret." He handed it to Duncan. "If I don't come back tonight, give it to her. Then saddle Riob and get the both of you to Northumberland, to Rebecca's, as fast as you can. Once you get there you'll be safe. She lives on holy ground. And she'll shelter you."

The meaning of Connor's words began to sink in. And Duncan felt a small spark of fear. "Who is this man you're meeting, Connor? Have I heard of him?"

Connor looked at Duncan for a moment, then shook his head. "I hope you never have to." He turned away, walking outside, toward the night.

"Connor!" Duncan called. "We didn't say goodbye."

Connor MacLeod looked back at his protege for a moment, and smiled, with the assurance of a lion and the warmth of thousand suns. But he didn't stop walking.

IN THE ALE-ROOM OF THE INN

LATER THAT NIGHT

The girl was strong, far stronger than Duncan had ever suspected. And she struggled and writhed every step of the way, as Duncan drug her away from the cluster of leering men on the other side of the room. Finally far away enough, he tossed her on an empty bench.

"How dare you!" she fumed.

"How dare I?" Duncan asked incredulously. "Have you no shame? Mincing and flirting with common strangers? Do you care nothing for your honor? For your maidenhood?"

"My maidenhood?" she spat contemptuously. "Listen to me carefully, Duncan. My maidenhood is buried beneath six feet of soil along with a coffin full of rocks, in St. Andrew's church-yard. What matter if someone thinks me a virgin or a whore? There's no dowry, no marriage for me. My father and my kin think that I am dead. And regardless, no mortal man will keep a woman very long, if she cannot give him an heir."

Duncan had no answer for her; he suspected that she was right. And for the first time, he sensed that there was more in her head than just giggling and preening. "It matters what you think of yourself, Margaret," he told her gently, trying to catch her eyes. "And I don't believe that you really think those men worthy of you."

The look she gave him was a new one, lacking all the usual traces of mockery or snobbishness. Instead he saw her eyes glitter with both hope and disappointment, all together in one moment, like two glass annealed, glass made not from sand or shell, but from the substance of dried tears. Then she looked away, wordlessly.

"Here," he said gruffly, handing her a plate. "Eat the cheese. All that ale will give you a belly-ache."

Connor hadn't returned, and Duncan was beginning to worry. Although he could see that Margaret was beginning to tire, the thought of returning to their empty room made him ill. He wasn't ready to face the night's vigil, to wait sleeplessly by the window, for the light before sunrise or for Connor, certain of the coming of one and not of the other.

A moment later he felt it; Margaret's eyes shot searchingly at his own. "Connor," he said quietly.

But the blond man who entered the room was most definitely not Connor. Wearing a thick reddish beard and a strange fur hat, he circled the room, his eyes darting in every direction, until they met Duncan's. Then he cut a line straight to their table. Duncan rose and put his hand to his sword. "Get away Margaret," he hissed. "Go to the ale-wife and ask her to hide you in the kitchen."

Margaret began to back away, but slowly, too slowly, as if her limbs were stiff and frozen by fear.

"I'm Duncan MacLeod," he said to the man. "Of the clan MacLeod. And I think we best take this outside."

The man looked at him and smiled. Then plopped himself down on the bench beside Duncan and whistled at the serving wench. "My name," he said, his voice thick and foreign, "is Rogovin. Of Moscow. And I would prefer to remain indoors, where I might find a drink and place to lay my head." He glanced at the scabbard, still holding Duncan's broadsword. "You can take your hand from your hip, my friend. And call your girl back. I have no wish fight you."

LATER

"Fancy her do you?" Rogovin slyly winked at the serving-wench, whose brown curls and ample bosom seemed more appealing by the minute.

Duncan tried to shake his head, but it came out a nod--no surprise, his skull was spinning in his skin, his eyes could barely agree on a common direction. He'd no idea how many pints he'd had, not to mention the flask of clear liquor Rogovin had offered him. It had tasted like ice-water, threaded with fire. Duncan could've drank a bucketfull. "No," he protested. "I can't...I...Margaret."

"Ah yes, the girl. She's gone upstairs. Sleeping. Quiet and safe. Now look at her!" Rogovin insisted, pointing to the woman. "She fancies you too."

She smiled, and Duncan found her curving lips--all six of them--very alluring. Rogovin's voice, a sinuous whisper, was drifting in his ear: "my young friend, I warn you, mortal beauty is but the dazzling flower of a moment--a man must seize it as he sees it, for it fades all too fast..."

"I promised Connor," Duncan protested weakly. But Connor seemed far away, and the woman's flesh was so close, brushing against his arms, his face, smelling like roses and fresh rain.

"Ah, yes, Connor MacLeod. Your mentor. A good man, although why he left you here, acting as a wet-nurse instead of the warrior you are, I haven't the first notion."

Yes, why did he, Duncan wondered woundedly, the conversation in the stables forgotten. He values me not: he thinks me a child, not a man.

"My dear man, because I care for your happiness, I will strike a bargain with you. I will watch the girl, protect her, while you suck the nectar from this sweet blossom."

"I--" but she had taken Duncan by the hand, begun to lead him away, and he followed, mesmerized. And though he noticed Rogovin's hand brushing briefly against hers, the sparkle of gold passing from one palm to another, he found himself unable to care.

MUCH LATER

Duncan awoke to the sound of thunder, the black behind his eyelids pierced with bright snaking flashes of light. A storm.

But as he lazily opened his eyes, he realized that he heard no rain. It was still dark, and blades of hay stuck to his face--he was in the stable, with Kathleen. Warm, sweet, delicious Kathleen. He wanted to fling his arm out and over, to embrace that soft bundle of heat and curves lying next to him. But he realized two things: his wrists were bound together and hooked to the wall, and he was lying on the ground, naked and quite alone.

Margaret.

Connor.

Panic sobered him like a faceful of melted snow. He hollered and screamed, scaring the horses and finally waking the stable-boy, who had been sleeping like the dead two stalls away. By the time he'd gotten himself untied, found his shirt, his sword, and pulled his kilt up from his ankles, the light and noise had long since stopped. And Duncan realized he could sense no other immortals. Not Rogovin, not Margaret.

Margaret.

(..."While I'm gone, take care of Margaret. Never let her out of your sight."...)

He ran to the inn, still belting his kilt.

The door to their room was open. The innkeeper stood outside, in the hall, his eyes closed, his mouth ajar, clutching a candle and crossing himself.

The innkeeper's response was no surprise; inside the room was hell itself.

There was no Margaret, only bits of her. Lying everywhere. In the center of the room, on the floor, a lantern left deliberately lit, illuminating her naked armless torso and her gagged head, lying side by side, like pieces of a broken statue.

Duncan knelt by the bedpan, filled with fingers and blood, and vomitted. Then he realized that the churning in his stomach was more than nausea. There was a sword at his hand. The Shieldmaiden's sword. The sword Connor had meant for Margaret.

He picked it up, and stood, feeling the floor unsteady beneath his feet. First he heard the quick and heavy fall of footsteps, running up the stairs...

Then he heard Connor's voice, calling his name. And Margaret's...

"Get yourself together. We?re riding."

"We have one horse."

"I had words with the stable-boy. We have two."

"Words?"

"Among other things."

"But it's still night. But...we can't...we can't just leave her...we can't just leave her here." Duncan looked around the room. There was so much blood, there had been so much blood, in one small girl.

He'd been in battle. He'd killed before. He'd seen things. But nothing like this. This was unspeakable.

This was his fault.

And Duncan wondered blankly, where the water came from, the water running down his face. "

Duncan, she's dead. Come on."

If Connor hadn't treated him like a man, it was because he wasn't one. Not to be counted upon. Not be trusted. Not a man.

"Duncan! The hanging won't kill us, but the drawing and quartering will. Now come-- I've talked to the innkeeper; I've paid for the priviledge of getting away."

Duncan gazed at the cloth stuffed in Margaret's mouth. It was tartan. Duncan wondered if she'd tried to scream. If she'd wondered why Duncan never came, never heard her.

"Duncan!"

Fists, grabbing his face, shaking his head.

Connor's face, close to his own. "We're going. Now!"

They left the inn, Duncan following Connor, running randomly, blind, clinging to Margaret's sword.

They had ridden for hours, from night into day into night again. Out of the Borders and into the Lowlands. Connor seemed to know every pass and every path, every root and rock that might trip the horses, every sudden sharp turn and every broken bridge.

The moon had begun to droop down into the west when Connor slowed his horse and led them to a spot off the path, near a stream. Connor was grim and speechless, but could convey enough with a couple of gestures and a look: Duncan understood he was to drink, eat the stale cheese in his pack, take care of any other needs, and be ready, when the horses were, to ride again.

Wading into the water with his horse, Duncan caught his reflection by starlight in the stream. He felt so much older, as if he'd aged twenty years in two nights. But his face looked the same, unlined, unchanged, not even tired. He looked at the sword hanging from his pack. Taking it out, he summoned some courage, and turned toward Connor.

"Was Rebecca awaiting us?" he asked, with a knot in his stomach and a lump in his throat.

"Yes," Connor answered, behind a mouthful of dried meat.

"What will she think, when we don't come?"

Connor shrugged. "I'll send word when I've a chance to," he said diffidently.

"Connor-- the man, the man you were supposed to meet-- did you find him?"

For the first time that night, Connor looked up and at Duncan, squarely in the eyes. For a long time Connor just looked, no words escaping from his tight, closed lips. "No," he said finally, never taking his eyes off Duncan.

"What was his name?" Duncan heard his own voice whisper in his mind. But he didn't ask; he already knew. He thought about Connor's torn and blood-stained clothes.

Connor didn't find the man he'd been looking for. But someone had been waiting for Connor, someone else. And Duncan remembered a flash of gold, passing from one palm to another.

Finally he turned the hilt of The Shieldmaiden's sword toward Connor, "Here," Duncan said desperately, "I kept it-- Margaret's sword."

Connor took the sword from him, his eyes black and deep, like looking into nothingness. "Margaret who?" he asked hoarsely. Then he turned away.

Connor kept the sword, "The Shieldmaiden," as it came to be called. But he never mentioned Margaret again.

And neither did Duncan.

Part 9: Scenes from a Barge

NOVEMBER 19, 1998

PARIS, DUNCAN'S BARGE

"...Look at me without you, I'm quite proud of myself: I feel reckless, clumsy. Like I'm making a mistake. A really big mistake..." --Everything But the Girl

9:03 P.M.

The water singed her eyes, plugged her nostrils. Emma Cuzo didn't care. She stood under the shower, wishing she could scrub away a couple layers of herself with the bar of soap and washcloth in her hands.

But it seemed all she could wash away was dirt and dead skin.

She lingered, her skin puckering and turning pink, long past the point of physically clean. The door locked, the water pouring down around her, holding herself inside a curtain of steam, she felt...almost safe.

(...He's talking, and talking, so many ugly words, impossible sentences from a typically quiet man, but she's not listening. She can't; she won't.

"...each fight is to the death," Connor says. "That's one of the Rules..."

...Words, words, words...

...She tries to get up, get away from him, but he grabs her arms and holds her in the chair. His grip is crushing and relentless, the pressure of his fingers penetrates to her bones...

"Emma...Emma!" he barks. "Listen to me. You're only safe on holy ground--a church, temple, cemetery--anybody's holy ground, any culture, any god. You'll know it when you're on it, you'll feel it-- you'll feel safe.

"...Anywhere else is fair Game...")

This was anywhere else, she thought, sliding her soapy fingers down the wet tiles. This bathroom, the street outside, the train-station, the Eiffel Tower, a playground or a hospital, a library or a school. Everywhere was anywhere else. The whole world was the danger zone.

It was a slow revelation, that had simmered for months then one day came to a boil. For a long time, Prague had seemed safe to her. Anywhere seemed safe to her; anywhere that Connor wasn't. And she'd slipped away from him; she'd slipped through a crack between her old life and her new one, between mortality and this so-called immortality, until finally her life after death, the time she'd spent with Connor, seemed vague, indistinct, like the memory of a dream. She'd drifted through Prague, working, pretending, stubbornly not remembering who she'd been, or what Connor had said she had become. Her sword was that past?s only artifact, the only evidence of it happening. She would leave it under her bed, out of arm's reach, half the time.

It had been sheer luck that she'd been carrying it with her, the night Rogovin had attacked her, raped her. Her first fight, her first "challenge," as Connor would say. Not that it had been much use--she was so stunned, so out of practice. Though she had beheaded him--by what an atheist would call a fluke and her Catholic grandmother would proclaim a miracle--her illusion of safety, her pretense of being normal and nobody, had shattered in a million pieces, lying palpably at her feet, a heap of jagged shards.

After that she'd been lost. Without a compass, without Connor. She had walked in a daze from Rogovin's body to the nearest train station, using the sink in a public restroom to wash the blood out of her clothes. She had taken the first train out of town, leaving behind her job, her handful of acquaintances, her apartment and everything in it, carrying only the clothes on her back, the sword in her coat, the cash and plastic in her pocket.

After that, she'd never stayed in any one place longer than a couple of weeks. She'd go to a city, the bigger, the better, get a cheap room, fake papers, look for work. But it would always happen, usually sooner than later; she'd sense the presence of another immortal, and then she would run, not walk, back to her room, collect her stuff, and catch the first train to the next anywhere else.

Usually the hyperventilating, the staccato pulse, the goosebumps would all die down after half an hour on the train.

She'd found herself eating and sleeping very little, thinking and remembering as much as she could. In every spare moment, she found herself holding that sword, practicing all the moves she could remember, making some up when she couldn't. She?d slashed busted boxspings and nicked paint-peeled walls all across Western Europe.

In Prague, her sleep had been heavy and dreamless, her head thick and dense under the constant pressure to forget. Now her sleep was light and often crammed with visions. Mostly nightmares--but when she wasn't being beheaded by strangers or buried alive by her relatives-- she would dream about Connor, leaning against a swing-set in Central Park, inviting her to spar, as if he had volunteered to finish training her in her dreams.

She'd realized two weeks ago in Amsterdam, that she was running out of money...

It was the same time, same place, that her shadow appeared, the persistent presence of an immortal, following her from town to town, disappearing and reappearing too fast to be anyone else. An immortal whose face never emerged from the dark corners and the crowds, until last night...

Emma had survived, but had no clue why this woman had stalked her and fought her. Had she been Rogovin's lover, wife, best friend? Bent on avenging his death?

Oh, man...

Emma's mind jerked back violently from the possibilty that another woman could've loved him, a rapist, a sadist. But she was all out of other ideas. And this one had an appealing simplicity, a finality to it. An end to the story, that left Emma still standing.

She stood between the sink and the shower, toweling herself off and surveying her clothes, all drenched to the threads. As she hung her jeans over the towel-rack to dry, she felt a fat lump in the pocket, and remembered the woman's wallet.

She dug it out greedily. It might have some answers...or at least some cash. If Connor was any indication, these older immortals tended to be pretty liquid.

The contents were wet, the leather ruined. In the photo-slips she found an ID. The name was Odile Weil, the date of birth obviously fake, the photo of a round-faced woman with straight-forward features, neither extraordinary nor unattractive, heavy brown hair, big hazel eyes. There was a single snapshot, a picture of a handsome middle-aged man, definitely not Rogovin, wearing a lab coat and thick black glasses. On the back someone had written in blue ballpoint: "Caspar, 12 Juin 1988."

She rifled through a thousand-odd francs, left them in the wallet. Tucked inside the currency, a tightly folded wad of yellow paper, paper-clipped to a business-card. She took it out.

She recognized the business card. Her heart skipped a beat. She slid her finger over the tiny raised lettering: 'Nash Antiques'. On the back, the same hand, this time in black: "C. MacLeod" and a phone number Emma remembered.

(..."So you are Emma Cuzo, student of MacLeod. How out of character for him. Tell me, does the Highlander know what sort of monster he has fostered and trained?"...)

The yellow wad was a sheet of legal paper. She unfolded it with a sense of dread, wondering if she really wanted to know, suspecting that she didn't.

It was a letter, dated yesterday. Handwritten. She recognized the handwriting.

She leaned over the toilet and retched. But there was almost nothing in her stomach, and she felt only a thin burning stream of mucous and juice rushing up her throat.

It was her own.

Duncan looked down at the sword in his hands.

Margaret. Each time the memory was awakened, it was still fresh, visceral. Heat flushed his face, for a moment he felt the same shame, the same ragged, wordless disbelief.

Then it passed. He saw everything again, but this time small and indistinct, a moment among thousands, seen in perspective, from a distance. 350 years of distance.

He thought about the girl in his bathroom. Richie had called her Clara. Clara Spiegel. But each time he stuck the name to the face, it refused to fit. And now that his mind had linked her to Connor, another name surfaced, a name he'd heard, a girl he?d never met.

Emma Cuzo.

Emma read the letter, a second time, a third. She didn't recognize a single word. Unfamiliar line after unfamiliar line, all in her handwriting. It was like looking in a mirror, and seeing someone else?s face:

"Dear Ms. Weil:

Don't get me wrong; don't think I enjoy any of this. More than anything, I wish it could be different. I wish there were some other way. But it's necessary-- just like He told me that swords were neccesary, that the Rules were necessary, that it is essential to understand that in the end, there can be only one.

He-- I mean, Connor MacLeod. I guess I should introduce myself-- I'm Emma Cuzo. The woman who just murdered your husband. He died quickly-- I tried not to be unnecessarily cruel. Though I understand so clearly now that we are a race of killers, I see no point in taking pleasure in it. In what is necessary.

I used to live in a world filled with order and light. Filled with family and friends, with meaning and hope. A place where people were born and where they died-- and where they lived, loved and tried to make things better in between.

Then I met Connor MacLeod.

And I now live in a world where light is the occasional exception to darkness, a world without kin or country where lovers and friends are nothing more than ephemeral lies, where immortals are born and die--and live, if you want to call it that, by nothing more than an inexorable drive to kill or be killed in between. He made me part of this world, the only world I have left. And I've sworn to become a fitting inhabitant of this empty place. I will take from him what he has taken from me. I will fight his friends. I will kill the ones they love, the ones he loves, until he is all alone. Like me. I will be passing through Sarreville on my way to Autoroute 4 tonight. See if you can find me. I'll be waiting. E.C."

"Caspar, 12 Juin 1988."

Weil died believing Emma had murdered her husband. Murdered in cold blood, as a gambit, the opening move in a sick game.

Oh God. It was definitely somebody's sick game, but she was a piece, not a player. She was the marionette. Someone else was manning the strings.

Emma sank to the floor. She looked at the business card. The number on the back wasn't a voice line, it was MacLeod's private fax number. In a flash she knew several things. Odile Weil hadn't been the immortal who had been following her for two weeks. Whoever had followed her, whoever he was, he had written this letter. And a copy of this letter had been faxed to Connor; Connor had seen it, she just knew it--it was a gut truth.

And now Connor would be coming for her. Coming after her.

My God. She had to get out of here; she had to get out of Paris, out of France--she had to get off this continent. She could feel her heart beginning to pound; she closed her eyes, took a deep breath, counted backward from ten. Calm. She had to be calm. She looked again at Odile?s wallet--a thousand Francs. Maybe enough for a one-way ticket to somewhere.

She touched her damp T-shirt. All her other clothes were in her pack, in the other room, with Richie's sexy but nosy friend--what was his name--Max? Yeah, "Max". She was sure that's what she'd heard...

She spotted the bathrobe hanging on the door, and put it on. She'd get her clothes, tell "Max" that she'd just remembered someone she had to see, and make her exodus to Orly. And pray all the while that her shadow--and Connor--couldn't track her to parts unknown.

As she put her hand to the door, she looked over--Christ--the shower. She'd left it running. She walked back across the tiny space and turned off the water.

The shower stopped. Duncan looked up, the sword in one hand, the phone in the other, about to hit the automatic dial button, preset to a Manhattan number. He put down the phone, picked up the girl's coat, and started to slide the sword back into the lining. But she was already out of the bathroom, bounding toward him, her wet hair spilling onto his bathrobe.

"Hey, Max! I got water on my clothes, so I borrowed your--" she stopped, looking at Duncan, looking at her sword in his hand, looking back at him. "What are you doing?" she asked finally, her voice low and flat, her face closed and wary.

Duncan didn't say anything for a moment. Then he slid the sword back out of the coat, and held it up the lamplight. "You know Emma, this is quite a famous sword--at least in some circles," he said, watching her and the incandescent glimmer on the blade, both at the same time. "That is your name, isn't it?" he asked casually, raising his eyebrows, curling his lips into a smile. "Emma? Emma Cuzo?"

Her eyes were locked to his; her face didn't change expression. But he saw her shoulders stiffen, her chest rising and falling faster than a moment before. "It's called "The Shieldmaiden"," he continued, glancing back at the sword. "It's very old. I've known several dealers and collectors who've tried to purchase it over the years, but the owner always refuses to sell. I guess he's gotten attached to it; which should be no surprise, he's had it for 350 years."

As he looked at her, she took a backward step, away from him, as if he were menacing her with a mere glance. "Max," she whispered, "I thought Richie called you "Max". But that wasn't right. He called you "Mac"," she said, almost choking on the "c" sound. "Like short for Mackintosh. Or MacLeod."

Duncan thought he could hear her heart beating, slamming itself hysterically against her ribs, like a trapped bird.

"As in, 'Duncan MacLeod.'"

"When did Connor give you the sword?"

"I--" she faltered, and Duncan stepped forward, seeing her knees droop, thinking she might faint.

"That' your name, isn' it?" he asked her. "Emma? Emma Cuzo?"

She held her face rigid, expressionless; she tried to hold her body still. But her mind was turning somersaults: he' recognized the sword, he' recognized her.

He knew Connor.

He was talking, talking about the sword. And she was looking, looking at him. Looking at this "Max". And suddenly she fit the face to a memory:

(...a perfect October day, the sky crayon blue, the air biting, the leaves turning. It's her day off; but she's dropping by the store, by Nash Antiques, because it's payday--if she shows up in person, Rachel will pay her in cash. Under the table.

...She turns on Hudson Street and strolls by the window. Inside she sees a man-- tall, lean, dark hair curling to his shoulders. An incredible face. Lines and angles that should be kneaded into clay, chisled into marble. But it's marred-- the mouth lined with exhaustion, the eyes bloodshot, the cheeks hollowed. And Russell's touching him, holding him by the shoulders, giving him a look that Emma has never seen before. Not on Russell's face, anyway.

...She remembers yesterday's gossip, extracted from Ms. Ellenstein: the woman, Elena, the "friend of a friend of Russell's," missing, disappeared. And Duncan MacLeod, the "friend of Russell's," still here, still searching.

...She puts her hand on the door, about to step inside. But something makes her hesitate, and she looks up, into Russell's eyes. And suddenly she finds herself turning back to the street, finds herself walking away...)

Duncan MacLeod. How could she have been so stupid?

"...It's called "The Shieldmaiden"," he said. "It's very old..."

Think. She had to think. There were two possible exits from the Barge. Getting to either meant going through MacLeod. There was the window in the bathroom behind her, but it didn't open and even if she broke it, it was too small to crawl through. She had to get out of there. And she could think of only one other option.

"Max," she whispered, "I thought Richie called you "Max". But that wasn't right. He called you "Mac". Like short for Mackintosh. Or MacLeod. As in, 'Duncan MacLeod.' "

"When did Connor give you the sword?" he asked her.

"I--" She let her voice trail off, and she made herself sag, dropping into his arms as he stepped forward to catch her, the hilt of her sword still in his hand. She pressed her face against his shoulder, and she started to cry.

She collapsed; he barely caught her before she became a puddle of flesh and tears on the floor. He looked at her face, wrecked and thin--who knew when her last meal had been? "Come with me to the kitchen," he urged. "You ought to eat something."

"No--" she shook her head violently. "No..."

He walked her to the couch and he sat them both down, holding her head and shoulders as they spasmed with sobs. "What happened?"

"Oh God," she said, frantically. "I don't know, I don't know. Connor-- I--" her lungs dragged down a breath and she started again, making an obvious effort to go slow, to be clear. "We got separated. There were these men, and he told me to run, and I've been running since. I didn't know what to do, where to go..." She touched her sword, laid at Duncan's side. "He was just showing me how to use this-- I kept thinking he'd find me, but I was afraid to wait, I didn't know who to trust, I..."

"Emma, when did this happen?"

She was shaking her head, shaking her whole body, as if her body was being twisted and squeezed, to produce all these tears. She went on, as if she hadn't heard him, "And there was this-- this man-- Rogovin, oh my God." She stopped, as if that single horror were too much, it stuck in her throat, holding back all words.

Rogovin, Duncan thought, a sense of heaviness settling in him, the crushing weight of memory, like gravity, forever pressing down. He tried to look at Emma, and see her, see her face, not Margaret's-- but it was impossible.

Emma was only the latest in a line of victims, in an unending chain of innocence betrayed. And who knew how far the line went back? To the beginning of time, to the beginning of the line drawn between the weak and the strong? The names and faces changed, but the story never did.

"Rogovin was after you?" Duncan asked, needing to know, not wanting to hear.

She covered her face with her hands. "Oh God...I can't..."

"It's okay."

"I can't talk about it...I can't."

"Shh..." he whispered, rocking her. "You're safe now..."

"I can't stand thinking about it-- tell me about something, about something else." She reached over and gripped "The Shieldmaiden", sliding it across his lap. "Tell me about the sword--is it really old? Does it have a story? I was going to ask Connor, but I--" She stopped, the tears overtaking her again, and rested her head on his chest.

Does it have a story? Duncan thought about Margaret. No, not that one. That story was best not told.

"It's at least a thousand years old," he said. "It was forged by an immortal, a Viking named Ranulf. He made it for his bride, a mortal. But he never gave it to her--she was murdered by a rival the night before their wedding. The Picts and the Vikings fought a lot-- murdered and married each other. I suppose that's how the sword got to Scotland."

He picked up her fingers, and slid them along the hilt. "Those carvings are runes. The first line, the bigger one, tells you who made the sword, and who he made it for. The second line, the smaller one, is an invocation, a battle-spell."

"A battle-spell?"

Duncan nodded. "It asks the Freya, Queen of the Valkyries, to protect the woman who wields this weapon."

She shook her head. "Do you think battle-spells expire, you know, like warranties? I mean, it sure hasn't worked for me."

Duncan found himself smiling at the damp mess collapsed against his chest. "Don?t be so sure--you're still alive."

Reverently, she wrapped her fingers around the hilt, rubbing them against the runes, the embedded chips of amber. "Well, it's a beautiful thing," she said, "but it's a sad story."

Duncan looked at her--her eyes were dry now, though her face was still streaked with tears--then he looked down at the floor. "It's a weapon, Emma. All stories about weapons are sad for somebody."

"You're probably right," she said softly.

Suddenly Duncan realized that the point of the blade was against his skin, felt a sharpness moving fast, too fast, piercing his flesh, up through his ribs, into his...

He gripped her shoulders, his knees sprung against her hips, pushing her off him, trying to twist and wrench her arms from the sword. Even wounded, he was so, so strong...she clung to the hilt with everything she had, she clutched and pushed, but with every fraction of a second as they struggled, she knew with more and more certainty, that her grip was weakening, that she was losing...and if she failed now, she was dead for sure.

Embraced in a killer's clutch, two bodies and one sword, they tossed and wriggled on the couch. Trying to stay on top, trying to resist, bracing her leg against his groin, she ground her knee into the zipper of jeans purely by accident. Or by an act of God.

His eyes widened apparently at this new flash of pain, and for a moment he loosened his grip. And Emma dropped, fell on the hilt of the sword, pressing her whole body, all her weight into her hands, into the sword, driving the blade through his chest, into his heart.

She felt his fingers weaken and fall away. She stared at his face, just a inch away from her own, right beneath her. She watched his skin grow whiter, she watched his expression contort, all those achingly exquisite lines and angles knocked askew. Some distant part of her brain, some break-away republic, noticed that a man's face in the spasms of dying roughly resembled a man's face in the spasms of passion. All the guys she'd known, anyway...

His lips were moving, voiceless syllables. Finally, a few sounds escaped: "We don't do things for each other..." he quoted faintly. His head flopped to the side.

Her cheek on his, she felt his breathing stop, she saw his eyes go blank and unblinking. She stayed there on top of him for a second, afraid it was a trick, afraid in another second his eyes would fly open and he'd knock her across the room. She pulled one of her hands away from the sword and fingered his carotid. No pulse. "I'm sorry," she whispered, "I'm really, really sorry, but I just need you to be dead for a few minutes."

(...They're standing outside in the snow, at the door of the cabin, standing outside because she won't go inside, because she doesn't want to go anywhere, be anywhere, alone with him. She looks down at the snow where they're standing, so white and clean. She thinks about the snow several yards away, stained a bright, jewel-like red.

She thinks about the body and the head they've just buried, six feet beneath the snow. She wants to sink into the white, empty snow, and melt away like water, disappear. But she can't disappear; he'll never let her....He's leaning toward her, pushing his face into hers. She can feel the roughness of Connor's cold unshaven skin, she can smell the scotch on his frozen breath. "You think it's easy to kill?" he asks her. "If I thought you had another choice--do you think I wouldn't give it to you?"...)

She pushed herself off Duncan's body. Left her sword still sprouting in his chest, insurance against an early resurrection. Stripped off the bathrobe, the white terry-cloth smeared with blood, feeling weirdly self-conscious as she stood naked before Duncan MacLeod's open but unseeing eyes.

Clothes. She dressed quickly, re-packed her bag, put on her coat. The letter. The money. She raced back to the bathroom and retrieved Odile's wallet. From his kitchen she grabbed half a baguette, ripping off pieces and stuffing them in her mouth as she walked back over to her bags and Duncan's body. Sitting back down beside him, she gingerly leaned over and slid her hand under his ass, into his back-pocket.

Bingo. She pulled out his wallet and shoved it into her pocket. When you're running for your life, she told herself, you can never have too much of other people's money. "I know this looks bad," she apologized to Duncan's deaf ears, "but I really need this. And I'll try to pay you back sometime, maybe..." she sighed, "...if I live long enough..."

She stood, her bag over one shoulder, the bread stuffed in her coat pocket. She paused for a second, gazing at Duncan MacLeod, nothing less than beautiful even in the stiff and unseemly posture of death. She thought about Connor, his looks positively lumpen in comparision, and felt a sudden sick nostalgia, a suicidal longing to see him again. To trade one more look at his face for the almost certain loss of her head.

Skip it girl, she told herself. Save the ruminations and regrets for that long afternoon when you're drinking on the beach in Baja. Now just do it and get the hell out of here.

Emma leaned over the body of Duncan MacLeod, and with one fast wrench, drew her sword out of his heart. She was already running as she slipped the sword--blood and all--back into her coat, racing up the stairs, across the deck of the barge, making a long running jump from the bow onto the quai. She landed on both feet on grass and concrete; her eyes darting to the left and the right, she slipped away, into the crowded Parisian night.