"Go on," Henry heard Liam say, "I'll have tea waiting when you get back, Jo."
He heard the pain in Liam's voice and looked up to see Liam with his hand pressed to his head. In stamping out the fires, Henry had circled behind the swing set and now stood with Liam between him and the others. The last of the setting sun glimmered off the balding spot on top of the priest's head, and only then did Henry notice the blood that matted Liam's hair and spread in a damp patch over his collar and down his arm. In the shadow under the curve of the slide lay a baseball bat. Henry couldn't see it well enough to do more than recognize what it was, but he knew that it would also have blood on it. No one would question a young boy with a baseball bat, and Henry easily imagined Kenny using that trust to get close enough to Liam to bludgeon him unconscious.
Since Liam's survival wasn't in question—anymore—Henry crawled under the slide to retrieve the weapon before it slipped their minds completely. The less evidence laying around, the better.
Back at the apartment, he'd barely had time to grab a quick shower and pull on some clothes before he and Jo ran out the door again. He certainly hadn't had the time to attend properly to his grooming, which led to him now having an untucked shirt, unbuttoned cuffs, and a towel still around his neck from drying off his hair. Almost too late, he found the blood on the ground where Liam must have fallen, only barely managing to keep his shirttails from dragging through it. The stain was substantial, and Henry inspected it, then looked back up at his friend. Injuries healed quickly, he knew, but how long did it take for blood loss to resolve itself? And how much blood had Liam lost?
"Why don't you get Richie out of here?" Liam suggested.
It was an innocuous sentence, but Henry caught the timbre of someone trying to disguise his own needs so that someone worse off could receive faster aid. He'd heard it from soldiers while they tried to keep their guts from falling out and sailors with hasty tourniquets around the stumps of severed limbs, which made him attuned to what it meant. Quickly, he used the bat to stir dry woodchips over the the wet ones, doing his best to conceal that piece of evidence too, before crossing to his friend's side.
"You're injured," Henry stated. "Let me take a look." He approached carefully, not wanting to startle him. A head injury bad enough to knock a man out could mean a concussion, unpredictable movements, confusion, or any number of other problems, and Henry simply didn't know how that might manifest in a person over two hundred years old.
"No need." Liam touched the wound, at first tentative and then more probing. "It's healing. Another hour or so and I won't even have a headache."
"An hour?" Henry frowned; that seemed long. So many questions he didn't have the answer to and had been denied the chance to study.
A month or so after they'd met, Henry had taken Richie down to his work room to show him his research. As expected, the chalkboard on which Henry recorded his recent deaths had caught Richie's eye and he'd walked straight over to read it.
"Reappearance Table," Richie said, "August 25, 1990. January 7, 1992. October 30, 1993." His eye skipped to the newest entry. "October 17, 2015." He gave a shudder in memory of why that entry existed. "Geez, I try not to think about how I've died, and you have it so you can't forget." Pivoting slowly, he took in the rest of the lab and all the memento mori Henry had on display. "What's all this for?"
"It's part of my research on my condition. Determining an originating cause of the immortality is important, of course, though I find I'm much more intrigued with the nature of my deaths and awakenings, starting with isolating and understanding how my body and possessions vanish in their entirety, and how it is that my body reappears, whole and unharmed, some distance away and always in water."
Henry stopped for a moment, brow creasing in thought. "And now I realize these phenomena are more unique than I had supposed. Your experiences of death and awakening don't compare at all." Richie had shoved his hands in his pockets and was now flicking his gaze intermittently over Henry's shoulder, as if waiting for a chance to take his exit. "Aren't you curious what makes you immortal or how you return to life after being killed?"
"I know what makes me Immortal." The statement was dismissive, as if Henry should have already known he's say that. Richie turned as Henry straightened up to full attention, and a certain gleam must have come to Henry's eye despite himself because Richie threw up his hands. "No, oh no. Uh-uh. I am not letting you turn me into your guinea pig
"Consider what we could learn by combining the data from both of our types of immortality," Henry protested. "Your ability to heal from even the most grievous wounds at a speed that does not exist elsewhere in nature, my ability to rejuvenate injury-free, both of our stases in aging — think what this could mean for the medical community!"
Richie glanced at the lab table that dominated the center of the room. His body tensed and he took a small step back. It was the first time Henry had seen such unguarded fear on the young man's face.
"Uh-uh," Richie repeated, louder. "I know too many other Immortals who've ended up on the wrong end of someone's research project. I'm fine with answering questions, but that's where it ends. Mortals are just gonna have to keep on living and dying without knowing that there's other options."
Henry drew in a breath, preparing a counter-argument, then let it out again when he saw the resolve in Richie's eyes. As much as willful ignorance offended him, he could also understand the self-protection that drove it. Too often, enthusiastic medical researchers crossed into committing flat out torture. Henry would not be one of them. He was no Mengele, either, and he'd do well to take care never to become like him.
"Very well," he conceded. "And, my apologies. I did not mean to suggest anything that would cause you permanent harm, be it psychological, if not physical."
He could afford to be patient. Eventually, Richie would come around. Or Liam would. Or, perhaps, he could talk Matt into undergoing some tests. After all, they had nothing but time.
On the playground, the sun had finally finished setting, leaving the space in the gossamer darkness caused by the city's abundant light pollution. It was dark enough, however, to encourage Henry to shiver from the drop of temperature and to lower his volume as he spoke.
"You need to sit down," he suggested. "Let's get you off your feet."
The nearest places were the lip of the slide or the swings, though neither seemed either comfortable or stable enough for what Liam needed. Stabilizing Liam with a hand on his elbow, Henry began to lead him off the playground toward the benches near the basketball court—the ones on the far side of Kenny's body. They moved slowly, Liam shuffling feet that were too heavy to pick up, kicking a trail through the broken glass. That was the only thing that kept Henry from falling over when Liam abruptly let go and slipped to his knees.
They'd reached Kenny's head, which had rolled so one cheek was pressed to the asphalt. At the angle it lay, with the shadows falling as they did, the head looked at first glance like a misshapen ball. The part of Henry that wanted to believe it hadn't witnessed a brutal public execution tried to convince him that a ball was all the head could be, while his more experienced side chided him for even daring to entertain such naivete.
Liam had no such stumbling block. "I have to take care of him, first," he stated. "Just because his physical Immortality has ended doesn't his spiritual one should be neglected." Shifting the head so that it was facing up, Liam closed the boy's eyes, bowed his own head in a brief prayer, then traced a cross on the pale forehead. The reverence of the moment had Henry folding his fingers together, despite not being religious. No one else would be mourning this death.
A death that could, so easily, have been Liam's instead.
Not for the first time it truly struck Henry how different his immortality was from his friends'. They could die, and knew it. His time with them could be just as limited as with Jo. He would have to be more diligent about not taking their presence in his life for granted, and about doing more to overtly acknowledge the importance they played in his life.
When Liam pulled back, they both saw the red smear on Kenny's forehead and the clear fingerprint it contained. Neither of them had thought to have Liam wipe his hands off.
A strangled noise escaped from Liam that grated against the silence of the evening. It took Henry a moment to identify the sound as laughter.
From his kneeling position, Liam looked up at Henry, his face catching and reflecting the moonlight that dared come into the yard. "Remember how it was before fingerprints were discovered? A person could take his family to a crime scene the way modern people go to the movies. No one gave any thought to touching the evidence or taking a scrap of clothing or a lock of hair for a souvenir. Now you have to be so careful. Touch nothing, take nothing." He looked up at Henry. The shadows under his eyes were heavier than usual. "Were you as incredulous as I was when the newspapers first tried to explain how these marks on our bodies could be used for identification?" He waggled his bloody fingers at Henry, his chest heaving with now-noiseless laughter. "I think my body disposal practices are badly out-of-date."
He was in shock, Henry recognized, and if he didn't snap out of it, the inevitable person who came to investigate the fireworks display was going to find them both in a very compromising position. The only thing that had so far prevented it was Henry's foresight in closing the front gate. "Yes, yes, fingerprints were quite the discovery. Even I mistook them for weak replacement for phrenology for some time, though part of that lies in the fault of the explanations for how they were to be used. Can you stand?"
The answer to that was yes. Liam rose to his feet with Henry's hand again on his elbow to guide him. "Head wounds," Liam offered, by way of explanation, as he swayed, still letting out intermittent bursts of laughter. "Been a long time since I was killed." He winced, crushing his eyes shut. "I'd forgotten how horrible revival is."
"You died?" Henry's grip tightening involuntarily, and he offered a correction of what happened. "He killed you? But that… can't be within the rules, can it?"
Liam reached up as if to probe his injury, then dropped his hand. "Some might argue that it was a clever work-around." He glanced toward the school, the building now resting alone and quiet in the darkness. "Holy Ground has limits to the refuge it offers." His sigh came out a last mangled piece of laughter.
"But, death would have rendered you completely helpless," Henry continued. "You wouldn't have been able to fight back."
Liam stopped his shuffle toward the slide and pulled away from Henry far enough to take in the hastily donned clothing and still-damp hair, noting consciously what he had no doubt seen from the moment he caught sight of Henry. Glancing down at the head, he commented, "Well, weren't you busy?" Back to Henry, he said, "I don't believe the lad was interested in his victims being able to fight back. It seems he took the time to kill both of us." He rolled his lips together, prepping to ask the harder, inevitable question. "Who else?"
"Jo," Henry answered. They both glanced toward the gate, recognizing that Jo had left under her own power. "A couple days rest and she'll be fine. He also attacked his social worker after she picked him up today." Henry hefted the bat that he carried in his other hand, considering. No one had told Jo the nature of the attack, which led him to think he now held the weapon from that assault, too. "Probably with this. The doctors are…optimistic…about her making a full recovery. In time."
"That's some good news. He was able to kill me with only one blow, and I never saw it coming."
It was hard to believe that a person Kenny's size could inflict that kind of damage; it took a lot of strength to bludgeon someone to death. Or a lot of determination. The more Henry learned, the more he saw how much desperation drove Kenny's actions. Rhonda was trying to get Kenny back in the System, a place he couldn't risk being. He'd come after Henry and Jo because they knew his secret. But, why would he return here to kill Liam? That was a lot of circling the city for a person who should have been trying to flee it.
"I don't understand why; you're not in the Game. He knew that."
"It's a matter of perspective, now isn't it?" Liam countered. He tugged the towel from Henry's shoulders and knelt down to gather Kenny's head in it. Henry flinched—it was one of his good towels, made of thick Egyptian cotton, cream colored, a delight to dry off with after a cold drenching in the East River. And now it had become a funeral shroud for someone who'd done precious little to warrant any other kind of comfort. "I'm Immortal. That's all he cared about." More quietly, he added, "He won't be the last one, either." As he straightened up, and had to grab Henry's arm to keep from losing his balance, it became clear that Liam was still in no shape to do the job he needed to do.
In an evening with so many extremes—so much violence and death, and also some of the most profound examples of friendship and love Henry had ever seen—he had reached a kind of emotional numbness. In the morning he might regret what he was about to do. Right now, it needed to be done.
"Let me help," he said. "I'll carry the body, if you'll show me where to take it."