Richie sped through the streets, sticking as much as he could to the side roads. The later evening hour meant that the peak of rush hour traffic had passed, which only meant that he had fewer horns blaring in his ear as he cut off the drivers who were in his way and blew through one, two, three red lights in quick succession. The best part about being Immortal was that he didn't have to give a damn about traffic safety. All he had to do was stay alive; anything else would heal or could be replaced.

Most of his concentration was on navigating the obstacle course that was the New York City streets, leaving only a small part of his attention left for replaying the panicked phone call he'd received from Jo. The key word in the call, the one she dropped without fully realizing its importance, bounced through his head with each bump he drove over: Kenny.

While Richie had known Kenny was in town - the Watcher's report had confirmed that - he hadn't known that Jo and Henry had gotten caught up with him. Jo had never mentioned having any leads on the Drake case, so Richie has assumed there weren't any, once he had been cleared from the suspect list. To Jo, Kenny had been a protected witness, which required confidentiality on his whereabouts. She'd only been doing her job, and Richie couldn't blame her for that. He couldn't. No matter how much a part of him wanted to.

Because she'd found out the hard way what happened to people who made the mistake of trusting the little monster.

She told Richie in a rush of words how Kenny had ambushed them, killed Henry, tried to kill her.

"Where is he now?" Richie asked, cutting to the most important question, and biting back the curse words that wanted to punctuate the question. He was talking to Jo and he knew Henry was standing in the background dripping water on the floor. If Kenny was an immediate threat, one of those details wouldn't be true.

"He got away," Jo confirmed. "He could be anywhere. Can you find him?"

Richie raked his fingers through his hair and turned in a useless circle in the middle of his living room floor. "How do you expect me to do that?"

"You said you can sense—"

He waved a hand she couldn't see, interrupting before she could get any further with her misconception. "It doesn't work like that." Two days of driving up and down the streets in hopes of locating Kenny by accident had pounded that point home. "Where would he go?" He was trying not to yell; she was trying not to yell. Henry was speaking quickly and indecipherably in the background because he was also not-yelling. Kenny couldn't have gotten very far. "Come on, think! He's got—what?—twenty minutes lead time?"

Jo went silent for a long, long minute while Richie uselessly crossed to his window and looked out, confirming that Kenny wasn't standing on the street below. He wouldn't be; he didn't know where Richie lived. It was unlikely that he knew Richie was even in town, unless Jo had told him and she wouldn't have had any reason to do that.

"Liam," Jo said suddenly. The name fell from her mouth in a rush of exhalation. "We took him to Liam's church."

Richie squeezed his eyes shut, composing himself. He had to believe that all her actions were well-meaning, but this…if Jo's decisions got Liam killed, Richie was going to make her tell Amanda herself, and damn the consequences. "I'll meet you there," he said, and ended the call.

Methos finally looked up from his laptop as Richie stalked back across the room to collect his coat and sword. Even with his earbuds in, he couldn't have missed Richie's side of the conversation.

"Found 'im. I'm going hunting," Richie said. It was the only explanation worth giving. "Don't wait up."

Revving the motor, he swerved around a car that was double parked, then flipped the finger over his shoulder at the owner, who was standing on the sidewalk chatting with someone. They were lucky that he was in too much a rush to note the license plates, or he'd pass those on to Amanda, too. After her sticky fingers were done with them, the assholes would've never had another car to double park again.

Finally the church came into sight and Richie allowed the bike to slow. Kenny wouldn't be there; he was as helpless on Holy Ground as the rest of them. To kill him, Kenny would first have to lure Liam off the grounds.

Or meet him off the grounds.

His eye jumped to the schoolyard gate, which stood open. At this time of night?

Vaguely he remembered Liam mentioning Wednesday night catechism classes. He'd brought them up as if he thought Richie would be interested, and Richie had laughed and tried to play the idea off. Liam might have found a way to reconcile what he was with what he believed, but that was a box Richie didn't want to open.

The angle of the setting sun on the gate door cast a shadow across the entrance that made it impossible to see inside, so Richie jumped the curb and dumped the bike against the outer wall. Grabbing his sword, he raced onto the grounds. His steps thudded across the asphalt.

The school building was darkened, shades pulled on the windows. Any students were long gone—fortunately. Only the propped open door indicated that someone might still be in the building.

He couldn't feel anyone. No Immortal presence rang across his consciousness, which either meant he was in the wrong place...

Or he was too late.

His sweep of the building and grounds halted at the playground and a misshapen lump that lay on the far side.

Richie saw shoes, gray corduroy slacks, the tail of a white dress shirt, and then the faded blue plastic of the spiral slide. The breeze brought the copper tang of blood to him, a clash with the normal scents of sun-baked asphalt and wood. Panic seized his heart as he lurched toward the body.

"Liam," he gasped. "No!"

The air didn't taste of a Quickening, so Richie cautiously let himself hope, approaching slowly for a clearer look while on guard for whomever had killed his friend. "Come on, man," he cajoled. "You can be dead as long as you're not, you know, dead."

Richie had learned a long time ago that prayers didn't work—not for him, anyway. They didn't make bad foster placements any easier to deal with, nor did they make good foster placements last. He went to church when he was told to, but he'd always had the feeling that the priest's homilies were meant for that other kid, the one with the two parents and enough money for clothes that didn't come from rummage sales. Prayers didn't work for him, but they had to work for the priest.

As he rounded the slide, he decided that if prayer did work, he'd just called in every marker he had ever accumulated. Liam was obviously dead, lying in a pool of blood that was too heavy to soak into the treated woodchips. He lay with one arm twisted beneath his body and the other stretched over his head. But, though bashed in, his head was right where it was supposed to be. A discarded baseball bat lay nearby. Liam was going to be fine.

The rush of Immortal presence swept over him, and Richie stood up, looking toward the school's main door, which also stood open. A giant smear of blood trailed from the door, across the concrete, and then disappeared against the blackness of the asphalt.

A second later, Kenny walked out of the building with a machete that was too big for him gripped in both hands. Blood stained the front of his hoodie, and sweat darkened the pits. He was out of breath. As he came through, he kicked the doorstop out of the way, letting the door swing shut behind him. Aside from a brief falter as he stepped into range, he showed no concern for the Immortal he felt. Undoubtedly, he assumed it was Liam, newly revived and still healing. An Immortal in that state would present no challenge at all - just the way Kenny liked it. Kenny had ambushed and incapacitated him inside, then dragged Liam off Holy Ground to finish the job.

Expression set, Richie stepped forward into the open space of the basketball court where he so often went one-on-one with Liam in a friendly match. "If you're going to play the Game," he announced, "then get out here and play it the right way." The security lights shone yellow circles on the ground and Richie moved instinctively to stand in one, sword raised, stance set. There'd be nothing friendly about what came next and he didn't want Kenny to make any mistake about what that was.

Kenny was taller than Richie remembered. Harder looking, too. Until he recognized the person waiting for him. "Richie!" he yelped, and seemed to shrink back into his clothes. In only a couple heartbeats, he once again became the frightened child he wore as his armor. His blue eyes widened and his lip began to quiver. "You can't kill me; I'm only a kid." He sounded like he was about to cry.

Richie snorted. "I fell for that when I was a kid. I may not have gotten older, but I have grown up a little. You're not getting away this time." He rolled his eyes to himself; Immortal trash-talk didn't have a lot of artistic merit.

Kenny sidled back, scrabbling for the door handle. They both knew that if he could retreat into the school building, he could disappear in the darkened hallways and escape out of one of the other doors. Otherwise, his only escape option was to step out of the entrance alcove and try to run around the building. Richie's longer stride and better fitness meant that Kenny wouldn't get very far. Too late, Kenny released his mistake: When it had closed behind him, the door also locked. He yanked on the handle, rattling it uselessly, then slid his eyes toward Liam, the one who would have the key.

"He wasn't a threat to you," Richie stated. "Liam was out of the Game. If you'd asked instead of attacking him, he could have helped you, given you a safe place to stay for a couple years."

"People always say that!" Kenny retorted. "And they never mean it." Decision made for him, he advanced out of the alcove, angling toward Liam's body and never taking his eyes off Richie's sword. "You all want to kill me." He said it as if he saw no difference between Liam's motivations and Richie's. "There's no such thing as a safe place, not when you look like me." Eyes narrowing, he added, "And there's no such thing as being out of the Game."

With a nod, Richie conceded that. For some of them, there wasn't. Those who tried usually found themselves pulled back in eventually, like he had. Liam had managed to stay out for over two hundred years, and look what happened—the Game came for him in the form of a ten year old boy. "Yeah, well, you had your chance. Then you came to this town which, lemme tell you, was the stupidest thing you could have done. You showed up, made trouble where there didn't have to be any, tried to kill my friends…" Thank god Henry was immortal and Jo was trained to protect herself.

A rush of presence swept down his spine and a moment later he heard the gasp of air being sucked back into lungs that hadn't needed it. Liam was back.

Trying to act before Liam regained his equilibrium, Kenny bolted for him.

In two strides, Richie intercepted Kenny's path and brought his sword down in a slash that started at Kenny's left shoulder and cut down to his right hip. His t-shirt sliced open, the edges immediately wicking up the blood that welled from the gash. Too late, Kenny brought his sword up to parry the attack. The sword flashed in the light as the momentum of its swing overbalanced the injured boy. "He's not big enough and he'll never be strong enough," Mac had said. Kenny stumbled out of reach, but not before Richie felt a twinge of guilt at initiating such an unequal Challenge, though at least it was a Challenge. Liam hadn't been given that courtesy.

"Leave him out of this," Richie ordered. "This fight is between you and me."

Behind him, he heard footsteps and the scrape of the metal front gate as it swung closed. He spared a glance over his shoulder to confirm that the interlopers were Jo and Henry. He hadn't wanted them to see this—not tonight, not ever. But he was too far in it to stop. Letting Kenny go now would only reschedule this fight for some future date, and extend the trail of bodies that led up to it.

Kenny took advantage of Richie's distraction to strike at Richie's knees. Richie got his own sword down in time to block the attack, and the two blades clashed with a shower of sparks.

"What was that?" Henry asked, as if unaware that now was a good time for him to keep his mouth shut.

At the sound of his voice, Kenny paled and stumbled once more. "What are you doing here? You shouldn't be here." He looked at Richie. "What are they doing here?"

"It's like seeing a ghost, isn't it?" Richie taunted. "Guess you picked the wrong people to mess with this time."

"They can't interfere!" Toward Jo and Henry, he repeated, "You can't interfere. It's against the rules." Kenny's next swing went wide and Richie avoided it simply by twisting his body out of the way. Eight hundred years on his side and Kenny barely knew how to fight. With a shorter sword or more chance to mentally prepare, he might have stood a chance. As he had neither, the duel was fair only in technicality.

"Now you're worried about the rules? Hey, Kenny, guess what? There's a more important rule here." Normally he wouldn't say it. With Jo and Henry listening, he felt the need to. He was burning his life here, but he couldn't leave them thinking that what they were seeing was his grip, he pulled the sword back to give it more room to gather speed, and then he spoke: "There can be only one."

The final strike cleaved Kenny's sword in two and kept going through the skin, muscle, tendons, and bones of Kenny's neck.

The momentum carried Richie around so that he was facing his witnesses. Henry and Jo stood with their hands clasped, leaning into each other. Matching expressions of shock stained their faces. Jo started to jolt forward and Henry pulled her back. She tried again and managed to yank Henry along with her. "You—" she started.

"Stay back," Richie spoke around the energy that was building in the air and sending static across his skin. "Liam, get them back."

Liam had managed to stand up, but wasn't yet up to doing more than leaning against the slide while he gathered his strength, one hand pressed to his bloodied head. "You saved my life," he said. "I owe you."

Richie managed a wan smile, and then the first security light exploded in a shower of glass. Streaks of electric current shot across the metal chains of the swings and along the base of the merry-go-round, wending around until they homed in on him.

A bolt hit him and cracked his mind open. Eight centuries of desperation and fear poured in while his body jerked under its own onslaught. He'd won the fight, and now Kenny got to exact his last revenge.