Hope Triumphant II: Sister
by Parda, March 2004
Chapter 4
(World population: 6.65 billion)
Glory Days
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Autumn 2006
The Highlands of Scotland
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Once back home in the Highlands, Alex and her family settled into the routine of work and school. A letter from Cass was waiting. "Hong Kong proved profitable, and the Mediterranean cruise is great. Elena and I now have all-around tans." Connor lifted an eyebrow at that, and Alex quickly moved on to the next part of the letter. "Cass says after the cruise is over she's going to spend a few days in Rome; then she's meeting Amanda in Athens on the seventeenth of October." Letters and postcards started arriving every few days, from different places every time. Sara and Colin kept track of Cassandra's travels with colored pins on a map, and they raided Alex's history books to read about places like Jerash and Antioch.
Sara read one of the letters aloud after dinner one night. "Cassandra says that Amanda won the belly-dancing contest in the restaurant. She was on top of a table."
"Who else was in the contest?" Colin wanted to know.
"Just Cassandra," Sara answered, and this time Connor lifted both eyebrows.
"Was she on a table, too?" Colin asked.
"No," Sara said, disappointed. "Just the floor. Cass says she's going to practice, though, so next time she can win." Sara looked up from the letter, excited now. "I'm going to ask her to teach me!" Alex decided to ask Cass to teach her, too.
It was early November when Cass wrote to say the joint tour was over. Amanda was going to Alexandria to view a new museum exhibit, and Cass was heading off to Crete. "View," Connor repeated with a disbelieving snort. "Case the joint, more likely." He sat down on the edge of the bed to take off his socks. "Those two lasted longer than I thought they would."
"Three weeks traveling together is quite a feat," Alex agreed. "But Cass and Amanda are both reasonable adults." Connor gave another snort, this one of heartfelt derision. "What?" Alex demanded. "Did you really think they'd kill each other?"
Connor paused on his way to the bathroom, his voice serious but his eyes amused. "How do you know they didn't?"
Alex didn't know, and when Cass returned to the Highlands in mid-December, Alex didn't ask. "Let's go skiing, just the two of us!" Cass suggested, and on a beautifully cold day the week before Christmas, she and Alex hit the slopes.
"Still up for changing the world, Alex?" Cass asked as the two women stood on the top of another high mountain.
"Sure," Alex said. She took a deep breath of the crisp air and looked up at the flawless blue sky, miraculously clear of clouds. "But after we're done skiing, OK?"
"OK," Cass agreed, and with a tug on her dark green hat and an adjustment of Alex's sunglasses, they were off. Alex headed for the moguls for her warm-up run, weaving among the hillocks and taking to the air now and again. Cass chose a smoother path off to the side. After three more runs, Alex tried to convince Cass to give the more challenging routes on the Back Corrie a try.
"Perhaps tomorrow," Cass said. "I'm still getting warmed up."
"Oh, come on," Alex urged. "The weather might be bad tomorrow, and it's glorious today. Besides, what's the worst that can happen? You'll break a leg and have to wait five minutes for it to heal?"
That did it. Cass stood there with her mouth open, then smiled even as she shook her head and sighed. "Right," she admitted, and they headed for the lift that would carry them to the back side of the mountain.
"How'd the recruiting go?" Alex said as they waited in line.
"Excellent," Cass replied. "When I was in Crete, I met some women on a Goddess tour, and last week in Barcelona I talked to an artist. Elena Duran said she'd bankroll at least one movie, an action/adventure film about a freedom fighter named Dona Encarnacion. I also want movies about Joan of Arc, Boudicca, Frances Harper, Nellie Bly, Helen of Troy … So many women's stories have never been told, and our culture desperately needs heroines."
"We'll start our own film company, maybe even make some money at it." Alex twisted the tip of her pole deeper into the snow. "And Amanda? How did you two get along on your Mediterranean tour?"
"Oh, Amanda!" Cass said with a laughing shake of her head, in just the same way Rachel would say, "Oh, Brenda!" whenever there was mention of Connor's second wife.
No one had ever—or would ever—describe Alex in that way, she knew.
"Amanda certainly likes to have fun," Cass continued, still smiling at the mention of the twelve-hundred-year-old Immortal whom Alex had heard described by various people as a thief, an amazing and admirable woman, a snarkety queen of snippiness, and a mischievous imp with the morals of an unspayed cat.
"Is she too flighty?" Alex asked, watching as the pair of teenage boys in front of them hopped onto a lift chair.
"No," Cass said, considering now. "No, there's depth there, and dependability."
Alex lifted an eyebrow. "Connor doesn't think so."
The boys were up and away, setting their chair to swaying with shouts of glee, and Cass was cheerful too as she said, "Being underestimated can be a great advantage."
Alex and Cass moved into place, waiting until their chair arrived and caught them at thigh level. It swung them back with a jerk then lifted them smoothly into the sky. They wiggled backwards until they could lean against the seatback. "Did you tell Amanda what we're planning to do?" Alex asked, knocking the snow off one of her skis with the other.
"Just hints, plus reason to come back for more." Cass pulled her hat down more snugly over her ears. "Like most of us, she's lonely and looking for a sense of purpose. She'll ask soon enough."
Alex nodded and huddled into her parka. The wind was bitter up here, exposed as they were. "And what shall we tell her then?"
"Some, not all. She's signed on with the Malin brothers as a fashion consultant, which we'll need, and her other talents are certainly useful, too, but she's too close to Methos to bring her in all the way."
"And Elena?"
Cass shook her head. "Also too close to Methos. It's not that I don't trust Elena and Amanda," Cass explained, "but keeping secrets from Methos isn't easy, and even though Elena's married now, she and Amanda both spend time with him."
"Keeping secrets from anyone isn't easy," Alex pointed out.
"You're right. We should do this on a need-to-know basis. Not everyone needs the big picture."
"Do you really think Methos would interfere?"
The line of her jaw tightened, and she stared unseeing at the chair ahead of them. "I'm not taking that chance."
Alex sighed in exasperation. "Cass—"
"Yes, all right, I'm paranoid about him," Cass admitted, turning to face Alex so abruptly that the chair swayed, and Alex clutched at the cold metal arm. "I don't want him near me," Cass said, as she had said often before, then added in satisfaction, "I think I neutralized that threat of Methos on the cruise."
"He was on the cruise?"
Cass nodded. "Quite a coincidence, isn't it?"
"I thought you didn't believe in coincidences."
"I don't."
Alex twisted in her seat to face Cass. "What did you mean 'neutralize'? You didn't take his head, did you?"
"No." She heaved a theatrically mournful sigh. "Not that time either." She smiled ruefully. "I don't want his head, Alex. Having his Quickening inside me would give me nightmares, and I've had quite enough of those. He and I came to a truce. I told him I needed more time away from him, and he agreed. He won't come near me for a decade or so, and I certainly won't go near him."
"Do you keep track of where he is?"
"Always," she drawled. "I feel safer that way. He's been in Berlin these last two months; I ordered my Watcher to keep me informed."
"The Voice comes in handy, doesn't it?" Alex observed.
"Very," Cass said, and now her tone was dry. "I'm sure Methos has his own methods to keep track of me, and probably other people, as well."
Alex wouldn't want Methos to keep track of her.
"Methos will find out what we're doing eventually," Cass said. "I know that. Probably, he'll shrug and go away, perhaps he'll try to stop us, perhaps he might even offer to help. By then, I hope I'll be able to deal with him, but for now …"
"Fine," Alex agreed, not seeing any reason to push, not in this, and anyway, they had reached the end of the line. She and Cass wiggled forward to the edge of the seat and lifted the tips of their skis. "Here we go!" Alex called, and the two of them hopped off the chair. They banked to the left to get out of the way of the next pair of skiers, then lined up side by side on the steep slope, skis turned sideways to hold them in place.
"Oh my," Cass breathed when they stood at the crest, looking down over the white expanse, broken here and there with great, jagged ridges of gray and black rock.
Alex grinned. "We could have started all the way at the top," she said, motioning to the trails still higher up the hill. Cass gave her a dirty look, and Alex said, unrepentant, "It's the only the first bit that's tricky. It gets easier."
"You mean it goes from Very Difficult to Difficult," Cass corrected. "I can read the signs."
"You can do it," Alex said cheerfully, and with a quick shove of her poles, she was off, knees bent and arms tucked for even greater speed, skimming over the snow, flying sometimes, exulting in the combination of glorious freedom and demanding control.
Alex waited at the bottom. Cass arrived some minutes later, covered with spangles of snow. Her sunglasses seemed a little bent. "Fun?" Alex inquired brightly.
"Oh, yes," Cass agreed, brushing off her legs and then ruefully regarding her knee. "I think it was only a sprain." She looked up at Alex and grinned. "But you were right. It was fun. I'm ready for more!"
They skied at a more sedate pace to a different chair lift, and once they were riding up the hill again, Alex went back to their project. "We need a name, Cass. I'm tired of thinking of it as 'the project,' and it will turn into a corporation, eventually."
"With different divisions," Cass agreed. "Medical research, public relations, media, orphanages, schools, women's shelters, city planning, architecture firms, the music industry, political lobbies, hospitals …"
"Phoenix Corporation," Alex said suddenly. "It's perfect."
Cass's eyebrows went up, high enough to be seen above her sunglasses. "Because it's the name of my cat?"
"Don't be silly," Alex said reprovingly. "You didn't name your cat Phoenix just because she was orange. It's the whole 'rising from the ashes and rebirth' motif. Of course, we'd have to spell it differently. I'm sure Phoenix is taken."
"Phi, the Greek letter," Cass said.
"I thought that was pronounced 'fie,' not 'fee.'"
"Either way. Fee, fie—"
"Fo, fum," Alex finished with a grin.
"Please," Cass groaned. "Fee works for me. Anyway, in mathematics, phi is the limit of the ratio of sequential terms in the Fibonacci numbers, equal to approximately 1.618, the Golden Mean."
Alex stared at her. "Where on earth do you get these things?"
Cass shrugged. "I read a lot."
Alex did, too, just not things like that. "The second syllable can be Nyx, the goddess of night," she suggested, because at least she knew her mythology.
"The Golden Mean of Night," Cass said. "Light and darkness, life and death. Phinyx Corporation."
"Or maybe the Phinyx Foundation, so it sounds more like a charitable organization," Alex said.
"Yes." Cass nodded slowly. "I like it."
"Good. Let's hope no one else has taken the name yet."
"Do you know anything about starting an international corporation?"
"Not really, but Connor does. I've talked to him about the project already, and he said he can put us in touch with the people we need, lawyers and financial advisors and such."
"We still have a lot of recruiting to do," Cass said. "Some of my former students from Rousby Hall are good prospects; they're bright, well-connected, and several of them are quite wealthy."
"That would be nice," Alex said. Right now, she was the only venture capitalist investing in Phinyx, and she wouldn't mind some help.
"We'll look for other sources of capital," Cass reassured her. "I'm going to call Jennifer this week and ask her if she'd like to work with us."
"Your therapist?" Alex asked, making sure, because Cass had mentioned her therapist by name only a few times, even though Cass been going to her for nearly ten years.
Cass nodded. "She's a wise woman. She helped me quite a bit." Cass grinned suddenly. "But then, I needed quite a bit of help."
Alex couldn't argue with that. Cass had been a mess a decade ago: oversensitive, defensive, obsessive, compulsive, self-destructive, and a host of other words ending in "ive." Jennifer—and Cass!—had done an amazing job in turning Cass around. "We'll need a whole staff of therapists and psychologists," Alex said. "We also need much better techniques in healing mental problems. Psychology is still an art, the way basic medicine used to be a few centuries ago. It needs to be a science."
"You're right. The Phinyx Foundation will have to give out research grants. We can't stay only in Europe, either. We need to go to other continents, include other cultures …"
Alex nodded, her fingers tapping impatiently on her knee. There were so many things they needed to do.
"This will be a slow beginning, Alex," Cass reminded her.
"I know." She also knew she wouldn't live to see the work completed, anymore than she would live to see the seedlings she had planted on some of those far-off slopes grow into mighty trees. But someday, the great Caledonian forest would exist again, and someday was good enough for her. It had to be.
The chair dipped lower, and Cass and Alex disembarked again, skiing over to the top of the run. The wind blew cold, fresh and exhilarating. Alex reached into her parka pocket and pulled out a Chap Stick to moisten her lips. She offered it to Cass, who shook her head and kept studying the terrain. "This isn't so bad," Cass said, sounding relieved.
"It's only difficult, instead of very." Alex pointed to the right. "How about Allison's Route, between those rocks?"
"How about it?" Cass muttered, not sounding very happy now.
"Wimp," Alex declared.
Cass gave her another dirty look. "I'll race you," she challenged.
Alex smiled. Cassandra might be undeniably gorgeous, psychically gifted, musically talented, and eternally Immortal, but Alex could beat her any day on skis, and Alex enjoyed that for all it was worth. "Sure," she said and counted, "One, two, three!" and was off. Alex won the race, and every other race that afternoon, too. It was a glorious day.
Avenging Angel
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Winter and Spring 2008
The Highlands of Scotland
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All in all, the first few years of Phinyx were great, too—or at least better than what came after. Though there were problems from time to time. In the long rainy winter of Colin and Sara's eleventh year, a serial rapist stalked the hills near the MacLeods' home.
"I never thought it would happen here," Alex said to Connor one morning after breakfast, while she leaned her head against his shoulder and tried to relax in the comfort of his arms. "New York, London, L.A., yes, even smaller cities—Cass said she heard about a serial rapist down in Brighton about ten years ago—but here? In the Highlands?"
"All it takes is one maniac, Alex," her husband replied.
"I know," she said, but she didn't want to know. She didn't want the imagined circle of protection she had drawn around her children to be shattered, popped as easily as a soap bubble when it touches a single blade of grass. She didn't want to know that the circle had never really existed at all. When she'd been growing up she'd heard about rapists, murderers, and thieves, but they had been city problems or rare events in other towns. Now her children were growing up with a rapist-murderer in the neighborhood, and hearing about biological warfare, chemical attacks, and bombs on the news every day.
"What do we do about him?" Alex asked Cass the next Saturday afternoon, as they sat in the dining room with cups of tea.
Cass shook her head. "Not you. Me."
"I am not a child, Cass," Alex said impatiently.
"No, but you do have children, Alex," Cass replied. "And a husband. They need you. You can't take the chance of something going wrong."
Alex set her spoon on the table with a clang. "I'm not helpless."
Cass lifted an eyebrow. "Neither am I."
Of course not. Cass had a sword. She had chopped off Immortals' heads—seven of them, to be precise. She had killed people in various other ways—Alex wasn't sure how many, and she didn't want to ask. Cassandra also had the Voice. She could make the rapist sit up and beg, or roll over and die.
"He doesn't take heads," Cass pointed out. "Whatever happens, I'll survive." She pushed back her chair. "I think I'll go for a stroll."
Sara had come into the room in time to hear those last words. "By yourself?" Sara asked, and Cass nodded and stood. "But, Cassandra," Sara said in horror, "Dad says any woman alone is a walking target."
"And every man alive is a loaded weapon," she retorted, sharp and swift, and Sara physically shrank back from Cass's rage. Alex gave Cass a hard stare. Sara didn't need this, especially not now.
Cass shut her eyes and took a deep breath then sat back down on her chair. "I'm sorry, Sara." Her eyes sought Alex's forgiveness, too. "You see, it's happened to me before."
"Oh," Sara said, and the word was still and small.
"I didn't stop it then. I'm going to stop it now."
"How?" Sara asked.
"I'm not a target. I'm the bait." Cassandra's eyes glowed green. "And the trap."
Six weeks, two rapes, and one murder later, the man was finally caught. Connor told Alex what he'd heard in town that evening at the karate dojo. "He was a delivery man who didn't live around here, which is why the police missed him with the gene-printing. But he turned himself in. Said an angel in white with fiery hair told him to." Connor told her a few other things, too, and the next morning after breakfast, Alex drove to Rousby Hall to have a talk with the Witch of Donan Woods. Cass saw her drive up and walked across the grassy quadrangle to Alex's car. In the light from the morning sun, Cass's long hair shimmered red and gold atop her white wool cloak, an angel in white, an ancient witch with fiery hair.
"What did you do to him?" Alex demanded as soon as Cass got close enough to hear.
Two passing students slowed to listen, their eyes avid and their ears sharp. Cass waved them off to class, watched them go, then shrugged. "I told him to stop."
Alex knew that already. She started walking, away from the stone-walled school buildings and down the hill. Cass caught up to her, and they walked in silence across an athletic field toward the grove of oak trees ahead. The spring breeze carried the scent of new grass. "What else did you do?" Alex asked when she and Cass were halfway across the field.
"I told him he had sinned, against the women, against himself, and against God, and he should look in his heart to know what he should do."
Apparently, he'd known the Bible by heart. Alex quoted from the book of Matthew: "If thy hand offend thee, cut it off."
Cass added the next verse. "And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out."
Except it wasn't his eye he'd been plucking at, and it wasn't his hand he'd been trying to remove. "Constable Barnes said he was 'picking' at himself," Connor had reported while he and Alex had been getting ready for bed the night before.
"You mean …"
Connor had shrugged, but his mouth had been a thin tight line. "Yeah." He'd tossed his shirt across the room into the laundry basket. "There are quicker ways to castrate yourself."
"I heard they had to put him in a strait-jacket," Alex told Cass. "Then they had to sedate him to keep him from beating his brains out against a wall." Cassandra made a small "hmph" of surprise, but her stride didn't falter, and Alex kept going, too. "How long are you going to leave him like that?" she demanded.
"'Leave him'?" Cass repeated. "Alex, I didn't put him there. I never told him to do that. He's done it to himself." She walked around a patch of mud. "I'll go talk to him and tell him to stop."
"And that's it."
"What do want me to do, Alex? Apologize to him? Feel sorry for him because he's spent two days feeling guilty? Over the last two years, he's raped ten women and murdered five." She looked away, swallowing as if there were something disgusting on her tongue. "He told me about them all."
Alex didn't feel all that sorry for him, either, but it wasn't only the rapist's mental health she was worried about. "Are you avenging those women, or yourself?"
Cass stopped walking. "It's not about revenge."
"Isn't it?"
"No. It's about stopping it from happening again. It seems this one has a conscience; there's hope for him." She sounded almost pleased.
"And if there wasn't?"
"What do farmers do with a dog that's taken to killing sheep?"
Often, they shot it, sometimes with savage hatred, sometimes with relentless pity. But sometimes … "They send the dog to a place without sheep."
"And what place is without women?"
"Jail."
"Ah yes. Jail. If he's caught, and if he's convicted, then he might go to jail, maybe even have counseling, and then … you know what? They let him go. Do you know what the repeat offense rate is for serial rapists?"
Too high.
"Do you know how many are out there?" Cass asked next. "How many serial rapists have you heard about, just in your lifetime, just in your corner of the world?"
Too many. But— "This one," Cassandra had said. What about the other one? Or other ones? "What happened to that serial rapist in Brighton ten years ago, Cassandra?" Alex asked. Cass stared back and didn't answer, but Alex immediately recognized the flat cold stare of a killer. She'd seen it often enough at home. "Is this what you plan to teach in the schools we start?" Alex demanded. "And is this your solution to rape? Death or insanity for the rapist?"
After a moment, Cass closed her eyes briefly and sighed. "You're right, Alex. Death isn't a good solution, and insanity certainly doesn't help. Eventually, I hope we can have the facilities world-wide to cure this problem, to help them and to keep everyone else safe. Eventually, I hope we won't see this behavior at all. But right now—"
"Right now," Alex interrupted dryly, "this is war."
"No," she said slowly, shaking her head. "It's triage. We're trying to heal society, not conquer it. It's like in MASH, the TV show about the doctors in the Korean War, remember?"
Alex nodded; she'd grown up watching that show.
"The doctors had dozens of patients, with more coming in every hour. They didn't have time to do complicated repair jobs on crushed limbs, so sometimes they'd amputate. Sometimes, they'd let one person die so they could keep four or five others alive."
"I know about triage; my mother's a nurse," Alex reminded her. "I understand the necessity of it, Cass, but one person can't be judge and jury and executioner. Sooner or later, they go too far. We need—you especially need—checks and balances, other people's opinions, a rule of law. You know that."
Cass turned and began walking across the field, heading for the oak trees again. Acorns rolled under their feet as they approached the largest of the trees, and Cass laid one hand on the trunk and closed her eyes. "Yes," she admitted finally, looking at Alex again. "I do know that."
Alex let out a silent sigh, relieved that she wouldn't have to ask Connor to step in, as he'd offered to do. Insisted, actually, but Alex had convinced him to give her a chance to talk to Cass first.
"The council of nine, perhaps?" Cass suggested, her fanciful name for the board of directors they planned to have for Phinyx in a few years.
"I think it would be better to rely on a court of law."
"Checks and balances," Cass repeated.
"Exactly. We do have laws now, Cass," Alex reminded her. "And police and judges and jails."
Cass clicked her teeth in irritation. "For all the good they do."
"They do some good, and as things change, they'll do more. As for right now …"
"I'll go to the prison today," Cass promised.
"Good." Alex laid her hand on Cass's arm. "Don't take all this onto yourself, Cass. You're not alone now."
"No," Cass said, with a slow smile that blossomed into beauty. "I'm not. And soon, there will be more of us." She leaned her head back and looked up to the thousands of leaves overhead, still reddish tinted from springtime. "Many more."
Alex nodded and they started walking again, back up the hill. "So," Alex said, when they'd almost returned to her car, "what's next?"
"We've almost done with planning the women's shelter. We need to choose a building site."
"Near Fort William would be good," Alex said. "It's a good-size town, centrally located."
"I was thinking Edinburgh," Cass said.
It was Alex who stopped this time. "I thought you were going to be working at the shelter."
"I am." Alex shook her head in confusion, and Cass explained, "Alex, I've been in the Highlands for over eleven years. I can't stay much longer; people are starting to talk."
"Right." Alex looked across the grassy year, where her gaze was caught by the bright yellow of roses climbing up a trellised wall. During her fourteen years in the Highlands, she had planted over a thousand daffodils around her home. In the spring her yard shimmered with rivers of yellow, gold, orange, and white.
"Has Connor said anything about moving?" Cass asked.
"No." But there had been comments on Connor's youthful appearance now and again; Alex just hadn't wanted to hear. Cass was right; it was time to move on, maybe next year when the kids were done with primary school. They would have to leave the daffodils behind. "Edinburgh, then," Alex agreed, opening her car door. "I'll talk to Connor today. And you?"
"I'll go to the prison," Cass promised again.
"Good."
After lunch, Cassandra went to the prison, smiled sweetly at the guards, and asked to be left alone with the prisoner. They did as she asked, of course. The Voice left them no choice, or rather, she had left them no choice. Cassandra didn't worry about that; it was a minor compliance, soon forgotten and of no import, benign. Now to remove a malignancy of the soul.
The rapist had made horrific choices in the past, and because she had gotten involved, it was her responsibility to ensure he had choices for his future. Their talk left them both sweating and in tears, but after two hours Cassandra left him sleeping peacefully on his bunk in the cell. The official justice system had him now, and it was out of her hands. She returned home, showered and scrubbed herself thoroughly, then went running across the hills, still awash in the man's ferocious anguish and bewildered rage, so exactly like her own, not so long ago.
When her run was over, she scrubbed herself clean again and then bathed, a long soaking in a very hot tub, lying back with her eyes closed and letting everything float away. That helped. Cassandra ate a light dinner then sat staring at a candle flame with Phoenix purring on her lap. She stroked the soft fur and remembered once more a lesson she had learned and then forgotten somewhere during the years: It was simpler to kill than it was to heal.
But it wasn't easier, not as time went on.
"Whoever said this was going to be easy?" Cassandra murmured. Phoenix looked up with unblinking eyes and meowed. Cassandra blew out the candle, and she and Phoenix went to bed.
Under Color of Authority
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Autumn 2009
Edinburgh, Scotland
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Cass had been right; more people came, although at first Alex had difficulty in finding even one. "How do we convince people to join us?" Alex asked, after a disappointing talk with a teacher about school reform.
"We don't," Cass replied. "We join with them."
"Ah," Alex said, seeing it now. "We find out what their interests are, and, if they agree with our goals, we encourage them."
"Exactly. There are those who like to join, of course, to be the followers in a group, and we do need them, but in these early days we're looking for leaders, and leaders do best if they're working towards their own goals. They don't need to know there's a larger plan."
"But we will tell them."
"Oh, some of them, yes."
"But not Amanda or Elena," Alex said.
Cass shrugged one shoulder. "Not yet."
Because of Methos, Alex knew. "Don't wait too long, Cass," she warned. "People don't like to feel used."
Cass looked up at that then nodded. "I know."
"You should."
Alex's next conversation went better, and over the next few years Phinyx Foundation grew and diversified, sponsoring women's shelters and counseling services (Jennifer had said no, but other people joined), lecture tours, self-defense classes, films (the movie about Nelly Bly even won an award), and a research center for birth control (Alex had asked her friend Grace, another Immortal, to be in charge of that). They made contacts in advertising, fashion design (Amanda helped there), schools, the Vatican, Greenpeace, newspapers, Red Hatted women of a certain age, the International Monetary Fund, hospitals … even in the Watchers, an ancient organization that tracked the Immortal players of the Game.
"Cass, is that wise?" Alex asked, stopping with her running shoe only half-tied. An autumn wind snaked over the garden wall, and Alex shivered a little. The wind wasn't as strong here in Edinburgh as it was in the Highlands (she and Connor and the twins had moved to their townhouse that summer; Cassandra had moved the year before), but it was still damp and chill. Alex pushed her hair away from her eyes. "The Watchers take oaths. They're practically fanatics. They shoot people who break their rules. Connor told me they put Joe Dawson in front of a firing squad for helping Duncan."
Cass waved that away before she started swinging her arms in large circles, her fingers almost grazing the branches of the old apple tree. "That was thirteen years ago; the Watchers aren't as rigid now. I understand Dawson has made some changes in their training policies since he joined the council as Tribune of the Guild."
"What a title," Alex said with a shake of her head. "It must have been centuries since they were organized as a guild."
"Watchers are keen on tradition," Cass replied. "And with reason. People like to do things the way things have always been done."
"That's both a weakness and a strength," Alex pointed out.
"Very true. We should remember that." Her arms went the other direction as she went back to the earlier topic. "Dawson was hardly discreet; Demiko knows how to be. And so do I. I'm Pauline Johnson to her, she has no idea that I'm Immortal."
"Won't she figure that out when she sees a picture of you in their records?"
"No," Cassandra said with a smile, that smile Alex hated, the small smirk of conscious power with the hint of cruelty in the eyes. Connor did it, too, but only rarely, only sometimes. He wasn't really like that. Alex had to believe that was true.
"She's agreed to let me hide her memories," Cassandra said. "They won't be able to get anything out of her, I promise you that."
That Voice again. Alex never wanted Cass to use the Voice on her. She finished tying her shoe.
"And besides," Cass went on, "Demiko isn't a field agent; she's in research. She won't have to do anything, just pass along information to us or make a few suggestions here and there."
"Passing information to you is aiding an Immortal and interfering in the Game. That's exactly what Dawson got in trouble for."
Cass waved that away too. "I'm not interested in the Game." She leaned over to touch her toes.
"Oh, like the Watchers will believe that." Alex set both hands against the side of the house and stretched her calves, first the right, then the left. "You're going to ask her to keep track of Methos for you, aren't you?"
"Yes," Cass said. "And other Immortals, too." She crossed her ankles and placed her palms flat on the ground, holding the position for a count of fifteen before she looked up from under her curtain of hair. "I have to avoid them, Alex. I can't absorb Quickenings; I hear their voices inside my head for years." She straightened and dusted off her hands then joined Alex at the wall. "But keeping track of Immortals isn't the only thing Watchers do. Think of all the history they've accumulated over the last three or four thousand years. If we could tap into that, not just the Chronicles of the Immortals, but the history, the details of the way they lived their lives, the names of their towns, their religions, their politics …"
"Yes," Alex murmured, imagining the wealth of information there, the primary sources from around the world and across the ages. That would be worth preserving. "Does Demiko know the risks if she's found out?"
"She knows," Cass said, taking it seriously now. "She thinks the risks of discovery are slight, and she believes what we're trying to do is worth it."
Alex stretched from side to side, then did a few toe-touches herself. "I guess we have been working on putting key people in other corporations instead of us having to build everything from the ground up."
"Exactly," Cass agreed. "This is a great opportunity for us. The Watchers have an extensive intelligence network and operatives all over the planet. We need networks of our own, of course, but we can also tap into theirs, maybe even borrow some of their organizational techniques."
"We're going to be a lot like the Watchers, aren't we?" Alex said. "We'll have corporations fronting for a world-wide organization, dedicated to a secret purpose that stretches over the millennia."
Cass nodded. "We'll just have to make our oaths more binding than theirs, and I know several ways to do that." She smiled. Alex looked away. Cass tightened her ponytail with a quick twist of one hand and asked, "Ready to run?"
"Sure," Alex said, although she wouldn't have minded more time to stretch. She wasn't as limber as she used to be.
She wasn't as young as she used to be, either, and her children weren't children anymore; they were teens—and they had more than just the normal stormy angst of adolescence to weather. Psychic dreams arrived in the spring of Colin and Sara's thirteenth year. That wasn't a surprise; Cassandra had warned Alex and Connor years before.
"I think Sara and Colin have psychic powers," Cassandra had said in the farmhouse kitchen on the twins' seventh birthday, a cold and snowy day.
A muttered oath was Connor's first response; Alex felt an urge to giggle, and then an urge to cry. She did neither. "Right," Connor said next, sarcasm dripping from all four syllables he managed to pull out of that one word.
Cass wasn't laughing. "There's something there, Connor. I can sense it." Connor shook his head and leaned backwards in his chair, denying it all without words. "Sara can hear the heartbeat of a tree," Cass said next, and that froze him, shook him—frightened him a little, maybe. Alex saw it in the stillness of his hands and the tense line of his jaw.
"And Colin?" Alex asked, already starting to believe, because, after all, she'd married an Immortal, and they had a witch sitting in their kitchen right now. Duncan had defeated a Zoroastrian demon, and Alex herself had had a run-in with an immortal sorcerer named Kane. After all of that, what was a little psychic power among friends?
"Not yet. Maybe never." Cass paused, gathering her words. "Sara's a chattering brook, bright on the surface, quick and flowing. Colin's quieter, more like still water. But he's deeper, perhaps even stronger in the end. If the power wakens."
"It might not," Connor said, seizing on that.
"It might not," Cass agreed, but with no belief behind the words, and sure enough, the power came. Alex watched as Cassandra, once the Witch of Donan Woods and now a witch of everywhere, led Sara and Colin into places Alex could never go.
"What are you teaching them?" Alex asked, soon after the dreams began.
"How to listen, both to themselves and to others. How to remember. How to name. How to see the connections among all things." Cass shrugged. "It sounds vague, I know. The training techniques at this stage aren't specific, because we can't know what final form the power will take for them. The techniques simply teach the mind discipline, which is always useful, come what may."
"They're growing up so fast," Alex said, trying to remember where the years had gone. "I just … I want Colin and Sara to be happy."
"And safe and warm and loved, I know," Cass quietly finished for her. "That's a mother's job."
Alex had always prided herself on doing a good job, and she knew there was more to it than that. "So is letting go."
"When it's time," Cass agreed.
And time always moved on.
Continued in Chapter 5 "Armageddon"
wherein Joe meets with the Watcher Tribunes and Methos decides to move on