DISCLAIMER: Highlander and its canon characters are the property of Davis/Panzer Productions; no copyright infringement is intended.

Note: This fic contains spoilers for Highlander: Endgame (the version released to theaters), and provides my answers to some nagging questions. It recognizes as canon only what we actually saw onscreen - not, for example, character biographies given at the film's website. I'm accepting Christopher Lambert's claim that the year of Connor's disappearance was meant to be 1992, the film's present 2002.

I'll also say now that according to textbooks I've read, it is permissible to use a first-person narrator who's destined to die in the end...

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"You, you, and you," Jacob ordered, "each bring three of the heads."

My stomach turned over, but I didn't think of refusing. I made myself walk toward the blood-soaked bodies. Unlike most permanently dead Immortals, these did have heads - severed from the trunks, but held in place by helmets bolted to their metal reclining frames.

Winston moved faster, wearing his usual broad smile. He was a thrill seeker, gung-ho for any new experience.

But Carlos scowled and asked, "Why?"

I stopped in my tracks.

I knew he didn't mean, "Why the three of us?" Winston, a dark-skinned Jamaican; him, a cocky brother from Watts; and me, Manny, a pot-luck racial mix who claimed to be Sioux. We always got the crappy assignments - that was just the way things were. We understood Jin Ke was special, two thousand years old, not one of Jacob Kell's students. And Cracker Bob was - well, he was white, and for all his showoffy ways and seventy-plus years, still a naive kid. For both those reasons, Jacob treated him like the son he'd never had. Our tough luck.

Right now, after the monster Quickenings he'd received, Jacob was barely able to stand. And we couldn't risk hanging around much longer. So if he was going to walk out of the place, Jin Ke and Bob would both have to support him.

That much was clear. What wasn't so obvious was why he wanted the heads.

I wouldn't have dared to ask. But Carlos had been asking a lot of questions lately. He was bright, maybe too bright for his own good.

Jacob didn't have the energy to give him a hard time. He said in a low voice, "MacLeod will take off when he gets free of that last restraint. The Watchers will be one body short, and I don't want them to know which one. So you'll have to scatter some of them on the floor."

Carlos wasn't satisfied. He glanced over at Connor MacLeod, the only Immortal still alive on one of those reclining frames. We'd uncuffed MacLeod's hands and feet, but the helmet kept him trapped. Its bolts had been loosened by the jarring Quickenings, and he was pawing weakly at them, moaning. Tears ran down what we could see of his face, under the thing that looked like it should have been a visor, but was really solid iron. He couldn't see us.

Carlos said, "What makes you think he'll leave? He wanted to be here. He may just wait for some Watcher dudes to show up, drug him an' make him comfy again."

"No, he won't. He won't trust anyone after this - not the Watchers, not the idea of the Sanctuary. And he'll want to find and kill us." Jacob smirked. "Don't worry. He won't be able to."

"I ain't worried," Carlos growled. "Do you want we should cut the dead men's hands off an' bring them too, on account o' fingerprints?"

He may have meant that as sarcasm, but Jacob took it seriously. After some thought he said, "No. Good idea, but the Watchers won't have prints on file. It's not part of their tradition."

Winston walked by just then, with a ghoulish grin on his face. He held three heads at arm's length, by their long hair. Blood was streaming from them, and the stench made even Jacob gag.

Carlos and I collected the other six. I got stuck with the one head of a black guy. His nappy hair, crushed by his helmet, was no good as a handle. There was no chance of his body being mistaken for any of the others, but I decided not to risk riling Jacob by pointing that out.

Had to carry the damn thing cradled in my arms. And when I finally got rid of it, stashed with the rest in the trunk of Jacob's car, I threw up.

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It wasn't like me to be squeamish.

I'd learned to kill in 'Nam, never had a problem with it. I figured the U.S. Government had sent me there, much against my will, to kill people they believed were Commies or Commie sympathizers. The more I killed, the sooner I'd be able to go home. All I cared about was making it back to the States in one piece.

When my platoon got hit by grenades, and I came to without a scratch and was the only survivor, I figured I was lucky. Everyone else thought so too.

The first time.

When the same thing happened with a second platoon and then a third, I became very unpopular. My mates thought that if I wasn't actually some kind of traitor, I was a bad-luck charm for an outfit.

My fourth "close call" was different. That time I'd felt a half-dozen bullets rip into me. When I revived, I saw my fatigues had the holes to prove it. But once again, there was no trace of a wound.

And I wasn't the sole survivor. There were wounded GIs everywhere I turned, groaning, calling for help. I was sure some of them had seen me take the hit.

I didn't know what I was, except that I sure wasn't normal. I was already beginning to suspect that I'd died and come back to life - not once, but four times! How could I possibly explain that?

I didn't try. I left the wounded to fend for themselves, walked into the jungle, and never looked back.

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In the years that followed, I roamed the world - became a robber, a smuggler, a soldier of fortune. I learned new and interesting ways to kill. And I killed more than my share. But in the mercenary wars, I figured the morality of what we were doing was for someone else to judge. The people I took out on my own were thugs who would just as readily have killed me.

Every so often I'd run into a guy whose nearness caused a strange sensation in my head. They always seemed to have a reaction to me, too. I guessed that whatever I was, they were the same.

Most of them sized me up, apparently decided I looked dangerous, and left me alone. But a few came after me with swords. Two even issued polite challenges, like duelists out of the nineteenth century. I defended myself with my martial arts skills, and always came out on top - guess I surprised my opponents even more than they did me. But I knew I was leaving them only temporarily "dead."

I couldn't understand why they wanted to fight at all, let alone with swords. They'd slashed me a few times, and the cuts had healed as quickly as any other wound. Still, I was interested in a variety of weapons. So I stole a "dead" opponent's blade, and treated myself to a crash course in Hollywood swashbucklers.

As time went on, I made the happy discovery that I didn't age. So when I knew I looked too young to be a Vietnam-era deserter, I drifted back to the States.

And there, in 1988, I met Jacob.

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Jacob Kell was like me, of course. But he had the body of a man in his forties. Ordinary-looking, didn't strike me as much of a threat. I figured my reflexes were sure to be faster than his.

And I was proud of my new, self-taught swordfighting skills. So I decided this was the time to try them out, do battle using only the sword.

Bad mistake.

In less than a minute Jacob had me flat on my back, his sword at my throat. Then he began quietly laughing. "Just as I thought. You're not afraid. You don't even know how you can be killed, do you?"

Lucky for me, Jacob wasn't headhunting that day. He was looking for a student.

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In time I learned he had a knack for spotting new, untaught or poorly taught Immortals. And he was always on the lookout for students. He liked having anywhere from three to a half dozen, and he kept them around till they somehow got separated from the group and lost their heads. The ones still alive would never learn just who had offed one of our friends.

We were grateful to Jacob. He told us what we were, Immortals with a capital I. He explained that there was a way we could be killed permanently, by beheading, and that others of our kind would be eager to kill us for our Quickenings. He helped us become fairly good swordsmen. I'd been using a sword whose size and weight were all wrong for me, and Jacob straightened me out.

He never discussed some things the other students whispered about - the Game, the Gathering, the Prize. Guess he didn't want us to think that down the road, he might be willing to kill us.

But he taught us what a Quickening is, and made it clear that receiving one is no fun. I recall his exact words. "You take a terrible pounding, physical and mental. Sometimes you have to fight to hang onto your identity. An Immortal is as weak as a baby for up to a half hour afterward."

So why was it desirable? Exact words again. "When you've had time to absorb the Quickening, it makes you stronger. You have all the power of the Immortal you killed, the ones he killed, the ones they killed." We couldn't miss the greedy glint in his eyes when he talked about it.

We didn't fear him, though, because he'd explained how important students are to a strong Immortal. We were bound to him for life, he said, his life or ours. It was our job to beat up on his enemies, double- and triple-team them, wear them down. Then Jacob would come in with his sword and fight them one-on-one. He claimed that kind of fighting was fair - we were just making things a little easier for him, in fights he could have won anyway. In return, we were under his protection, safe from harm, not forced to take any of those brutal Quickenings ourselves. He always stressed that there was safety in numbers.

Jacob wasn't a stickler for etiquette. We heard that some Immortals wouldn't consider ganging up on an opponent, catching him unarmed or weakened by a Quickening. Our teacher scoffed at such notions.

But there was one concern he didn't sneer at.

On my first day with him he said gruffly, "We don't kill on holy ground. Not even mortals, on anyone's holy ground.

"I suggest you remember that."

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Every student of Jacob's found out he had hangups about religion, and also about Connor MacLeod. At times he insisted he was a Catholic priest, just as validly ordained as the Pope in Rome. But other times he admitted he couldn't possibly be a priest in good standing, because MacLeod had driven him to take up the sword. He was now a "priest of hate." And it was all MacLeod's fault.

MacLeod, he said, had murdered his father in 1555. Not his biological father - none of us knew who our real parents were. But a priest named Rainey had raised Jacob, and MacLeod had killed this unarmed holy man. Jacob, also a priest by that time, had betrayed everything he believed in when he grabbed a sword and went after MacLeod. And MacLeod had dealt him his first death, run him through and left him there. MacLeod was still a fairly new Immortal himself, and hadn't realized what Jacob was. At least Jacob was sure - in our day - that if he'd known, he would have taken the extra minute to behead him. Why leave a potential enemy alive?

The young Jacob had honestly believed MacLeod was a demon, or had made a pact with demons. When he came back to life, he was denounced and driven from their village, same as MacLeod. But with no one to teach him about Immortals, he still believed MacLeod was a demon, and had made him one of the undying ones for spite. He hated MacLeod and wanted revenge, but was afraid to do anything because he thought MacLeod had magical powers he didn't have. When he finally learned the truth, he was furious that he'd wasted a chance to hurt MacLeod by murdering his mortal wife. She'd died of old age after a fifty-year marriage, and Jacob never got over that missed opportunity.

His students couldn't quite understand why he didn't kill MacLeod - by fair means or foul - and put an end to it. But he wanted to torture the guy by hounding him through the centuries, murdering all his loved ones, with his victim never able to figure out who was doing it.

Someone - probably Carlos - once asked him the common sense question, "What if some other Immortal takes his head, and cheats you out of your final revenge?"

Jacob got really mad. He didn't want to consider that.

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This obsession with MacLeod had led to his discovering what he claimed was a major threat to us: a secret society of mortals called the Watchers. He'd learned of their existence in the early twentieth century, when he hired a private eye to shadow MacLeod, and the gumshoe reported someone else was tailing him as well.

I know now that the Watchers claim their mission is to chronicle the lives of Immortals. But Jacob said we should think of all of them as our enemies. Some wanted to kill all Immortals, and others had special Immortal friends that they helped by giving them information about the rest of us.

We never went out of our way to hunt Watchers. But we were always on the alert for them, and any who tried to spy on our little group ended up dead.

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In 1990, without knowing it, the Watchers did Jacob a big favor.

He'd been stalking the Chinese Immortal Jin Ke for weeks. We all knew he wanted the guy's Quickening, but he never admitted it. I think he was afraid that even all of us together wouldn't be able to take Jin. Sure, Jacob could have shot him from a rooftop, but he would have lost face. There was no way we would have believed his "just making it easier" line that time. Jin Ke was a legend, and no one imagined Jacob was his equal.

He was close to forgetting about Jin when he spotted someone else closing in on his quarry. A gang of mortal thugs - men he recognized as Watchers. They definitely had murder on their minds. And Jin, who didn't even know the organization existed, was a sitting duck. They brought him down with a tranquilizer dart. But when he was lying there barely conscious, about to lose his head, Jacob swooped in to the rescue.

One of the Watchers fired a dart into Jacob. But then all his students came charging out of an alley, and they took one look at us and fled.

Jacob managed to say, "Kill one! Quietly!" So Cracker Bob did. Ran him down, tackled him, then got up and clubbed him to death.

Turned out Jacob had wanted a dead body so he could show Jin the Watcher tattoo. I think those Watchers were renegades. But renegade or not, they'd tried to murder Jin. Jacob had risked his life to save him, and given him information that could help him stay alive.

The result? As a matter of honor, Jin said his life belonged to the man who'd saved it. He swore eternal loyalty to Jacob, joined our group - and from that day on he was our secret weapon.

But in all our years together, I can't remember, once, having seen him smile.

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It was Jin who told me more about holy ground. I'd gotten the impression Jacob didn't want to talk about it - and it was never a good idea to press him. I wasn't even sure that taboo wasn't a personal quirk of his. So I asked Jin, and he confirmed that it had to be honored. Places of worship, monasteries, convents, cemeteries - even the sacred sites of the ancients, if we could identify them - were strictly off limits.

"We don't know what would happen if someone broke that rule," Jin explained. "But Immortals have believed for thousands of years that at the very least, a Quickening would kill the person receiving it and anyone else nearby. Many think the damage would be greater than that - destruction of an entire city, maybe, with all its people.

"There's a legend that a holy ground Quickening caused the volcanic eruption that buried Pompeii. No one knows for sure. But to be on the safe side, we don't even kill mortals on holy ground."

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We gained another unusual recruit in the spring of '92. One of those mortal private eyes Jacob hired to spy on Connor MacLeod saw him argue with a beautiful woman in a restaurant. Jacob decided to check her out, and got close enough to realize she was Immortal. She'd sensed him too, so he approached her and struck up a conversation.

He learned the woman, Kate Devaney, hated Connor's onetime student Duncan MacLeod almost as much as he did Connor. Back in 1715, Duncan - without having told her she was a pre-Immortal, without a word of warning - had stabbed her through the heart on their wedding night. She'd never forgiven him; Connor had been trying without success to talk her out of her grudge.

Even centuries after her breakup with Duncan, Kate had the notion that if he hadn't done what he did, she would have been able to bear children - to a mortal father - and might never have become Immortal. And she still believed she would have preferred to grow old and die, permanently, with a mortal husband. Her ideas were flat-out wrong, but Jacob wasn't about to correct her.

When we students heard about this Duncan MacLeod, we wondered why he hadn't stayed with Connor all his life, as we were expected to do with Jacob. Jacob had an answer - that Connor wasn't worthy of a student's loyalty. He said Duncan had probably found out he'd murdered a priest.

Thinking of religion...within weeks, Kate vowed allegiance not only to Jacob, but to his "church of hate." When she changed her name to Faith, that was the one she meant.

Faith hadn't seen much of Connor MacLeod over the years, but she was able to tell Jacob his most closely guarded secrets: how deeply he cared for both Duncan and his own adopted daughter, Rachel. Jacob had still been afraid of Connor in the early seventeenth century. He'd learned after the fact that Connor had been Duncan's teacher, but assumed he'd later lost interest in him. As for Rachel, Connor had given out the story that he'd inherited a dead girlfriend's child and been stuck with her. Jacob had bought into that, because he had no use for kids himself. And she'd been raised as Rachel Wallingford. It was Faith who told Jacob that Connor's business partner Rachel Ellenstein - her original family name - was the same person, and that Connor loved her and always had.

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And so, in October '92, Jin and I had our first up-close-and-personal experience with Jacob's vendetta. He didn't tell Faith till the deed was done.

All of us - even Faith - knew that in '87, he'd used a stolen car to run down and kill Connor MacLeod's latest wife. He'd deliberately done it when MacLeod was close enough to sense him as he whizzed by.

But it was one thing to hear about that from Cracker Bob, another to listen to Jacob gloat as he put together a bomb that would blow up MacLeod's New York antique shop and kill the man's daughter. This time, he said, it wouldn't matter whether MacLeod was nearby, because there would be no way he could imagine the death was accidental. And yet he'd never guess who was behind it, because he thought Jacob had died in 1555.

The perfect crime.

I think I managed not to look as sick as Jin Ke did.

Jacob put the plan on hold, temporarily, when he learned Duncan had come to New York to look into some investment possibilities. He thought about killing both Connor's loved ones on the same day. But he finally decided to let the younger MacLeod live, so he'd be sure of having another way to hurt Connor in the future.

We had observed that Rachel always began her lunch break a half hour before MacLeod and came back ahead of him, to cut the time the shop would have to be closed. That changed on the first of the three days Duncan was in town - they all ate together. But then they went back to the normal schedule, the only difference being that the two MacLeods met for lunch.

When the shop was only going to be closed for an hour or so, they didn't bother activating the alarm. And we'd discovered the lock was a kind that could easily be forced. Once upon a time, Hudson had been a street where no one would risk a break-in in broad daylight; MacLeod hadn't noticed how much it had changed.

Jacob's plan was to sneak in during the lunch hour and connect his explosive device to their phone. After that, any answered call would set off the bomb. But he said Rachel had to get the call before MacLeod came back, so there wouldn't be any chance of the blast taking his head off.

There weren't many cell phones around in 1992 - Jacob didn't have one. He did have a car phone. He could have made that call from the car, parked across the street.

But he wanted to test Jin Ke. So he insisted Jin, Bob and I be in the car, clear around the corner, while he lurked near the antique shop with a two-way radio. When he alerted us Rachel was there, Jin had to make the call. If he couldn't do it, if Bob or I had to, Bob would have told Jacob.

Jin made the call.

Even at the distance we were, the explosion shattered the windshield.

We were cleaning up broken glass - and our own blood - when Jacob joined us, looking exultant. By a wonderful stroke of luck, he said, Connor had been approaching the shop when the bomb went off. It had blown him off his feet. But he hadn't been knocked out, and Jacob had been able to hear his anguished screams for Rachel.

Once again, Connor had been close enough to sense his adversary - maybe even catch a glimpse of his retreating back.

And once again, he wouldn't have a clue who it was.

I never talk much, so I don't think Jacob noticed Bob was the only one jabbering happily with him as we drove away.

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That night, we all heard Faith's reaction. "You said you were going to frame Rachel for fraud!" she raged. To the rest of us, she said bitterly, "He told me he'd make it look as if she'd bilked customers by delivering phony antiques and reselling the real ones, without Connor's knowledge. He swore he wouldn't kill her. A woman I'd met and liked!"

But she'd been willing to send a woman she liked to prison on a trumped-up charge? And possibly turn Connor against her, which might have been even more painful?

Jacob laughed at her. "I thought you'd want deniability. Are you really unhappy about it? I'm sure you'd feel differently if I'd killed Duncan's mortal lover. Would you like me to kill her for you?"

"N-no. No!" I could see this was the first she'd heard of a lover, and she was fighting the urge to ask him to tell her more. Whether or not there really was one, he was toying with her.

He snickered and turned away. "That's up to you, but don't say I never offered."

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A few days later, I happened to be with Cracker Bob - the usual recipient of Jacob's confidences. And Jacob told us Faith had finally broken down and asked for details.

"I told her Duncan's living with a beautiful blonde," he said. "Calls her the great love of his life. And they've been together twelve years, so he must have leveled with her about his Immortality.

"Faith brooded a while, then said she did want me to kill the woman.

"But I told her that was a one-time offer. If she wants Tessa Noel dead now, she'll have to do it herself.

"If she has the guts."

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By then Jacob's good humor was a thing of the past. Right after the bombing, Connor MacLeod disappeared. For the first time in three hundred years, Jacob lost track of him. And that was when everything began spinning out of control.

The police didn't mount much of a search. They soon decided MacLeod wasn't a suspect in the murder, and there was no evidence he himself had met with foul play.

Then Jacob made a big mistake. He probably could have discovered the truth long before he did if he'd used old-fashioned methods. But he decided his best bet was to hack into the Watchers' computer files.

There he learned that MacLeod's Watcher, a woman named Dana Brook, had told her superiors she didn't know what had become of him. She and other members of the organization were discussing three ideas. One was that a depressed MacLeod had picked a fight with some unknown Immortal, let down his guard, and allowed his foe to take his head. Another, that he'd persuaded Duncan to take it. But the argument against both those theories was that the other Immortal's Watcher - assuming he had one, and Duncan certainly did - should have seen and reported it.

The third possibility was that he'd gone into seclusion, perhaps in a monastery. That was what Jacob wanted to believe - that his victim was still alive.

Duncan took over payment of property taxes on the ruined antique shop, suggesting he too was at least clinging to hope. But his Watcher wasn't aware of any contact between the MacLeods.

Even knowing for sure Connor was alive would have been small consolation for Jacob. If he was in a monastery, it could be any one of thousands...and there was no way to hurt him. In a cloister, he wouldn't even hear of an enemy's killing Duncan.

Jacob could only seethe in impotent fury.

His moods grew darker.

And we saw him become more and more unbalanced during his decade-long search for Connor MacLeod.

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We spent those years spying on Duncan - mostly just tapping his phone, and hacking into both his e-mail and his Watcher's Chronicle - and investigating the backgrounds of monks. Thousands of individual monks. That chore could drive anyone nuts...and our leader had been none too stable to begin with.

He made me nervous when he started talking about a way to get around the holy ground prohibition. If he identified the monastery, he said, he'd hire a mortal to set it afire - forcing the monks to flee. He didn't spell out what he'd do after that.

I found myself hoping he never would identify it.

By October 2002, Jacob was at the snapping point. That was when he did what he should - from his point of view - have done in the first place.

He snatched Dana Brook and used truth serum on her.

The results were startling. It turned out Brook's online chats with her bosses about MacLeod's mysterious disappearance had been bull - on her side. She'd known where he was all along.

Connor MacLeod had been one of the handful of Immortals who knew about the Watchers. Jacob didn't ask how he'd learned about them, or when. What mattered was that in '92, he knew about the organization and was acquainted with Dana Brook. She spoke to him after Rachel's death, and he said he was going into a monastery. He meant to let Duncan leave New York without telling him anything, then send a letter to his Seacouver address, explaining his plans and asking Duncan to leave him in peace.

But an hour later, Brook received a phone call from a man named Matthew Hale. After going through some rigmarole to convince her he was a high-ranking Watcher, Hale inquired how MacLeod was coping with his daughter's death. When she told him, he told her about the top-secret Sanctuary - and ordered her to recruit MacLeod. Brook didn't like the idea, but Hale made it clear she had no choice.

Even knowing the potency of the truth serum, Jacob and the rest of us found the story hard to believe. Brook said the Sanctuary had existed for a thousand years - been moved from France, during World War II, to a site near New York. A former Capuchin monastery, though the "monks" there now were really an elite corps of Watchers.

The few Immortals who'd gone into it were guaranteed safety on holy ground. And more than that, in an underground bunker - which meant that no one but the Watchers could be routed by fire. The Immortals were lovingly cared for, but kept drugged and restrained. The idea was that if the Gathering was a real possibility, and posed a threat to mortals, no Immortal would ever become the last survivor and win the Prize.

Volunteering to be a captive zombie seemed like the stuff of nightmares. Staying alive had always been my top priority, but what kind of life was that?

Still, Connor MacLeod had jumped at the chance. On reflection, I thought I understood why. Since he didn't know Jacob was alive, he must have despaired of ever identifying his enemy. With Rachel gone, Duncan was the one person left that he cared for - and the best way to protect him was to go into hiding, in this most secure of retreats. Safer even than a monastery, because so few people knew of its existence.

If he had chosen instead to die, an enemy who'd learned beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was dead might have turned on Duncan out of sheer frustration. Besides, by going into the Sanctuary, Connor could tell himself he was making a sacrifice for a noble ideal.

So he did it, but mailed his original letter to Duncan. He told Duncan he was going into a monastery headed by an Immortal they both knew, a Brother Paul. Duncan didn't worry about him until almost two years later - when he spoke to Paul and learned Connor had made an inquiry, but never followed up on it.

By then Duncan had become friendly with his own Watcher, Joe Dawson. He asked Dawson if the Watchers had any information on Connor, and Dawson told him - truthfully - that to the best of his knowledge, they didn't.

Brook said Duncan was still in the dark, but not unduly alarmed. According to Dawson, he thought Connor had deliberately thrown him off the track by mentioning one monastery, then gone into another.

After we learned all that, I was sure Jacob would kill Dana Brook. He surprised me - released her unharmed. Then he explained that her disappearance would have aroused suspicion. As it was, we were in no danger. No Watcher would dare tell her superiors she'd been kidnapped and had revealed secrets.

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Jacob was calmer than I'd expected. That made me uneasy.

Connor MacLeod had thwarted him...hadn't he? He was safe on holy ground, with no possibility of his hearing about anything Jacob did. If he'd been in a monastery, he might eventually have left - probably sooner rather than later, because a man with no real vocation would have been bored out of his skull. But there was no chance of his leaving the Sanctuary. Whether the Watchers would have held him against his will was a moot point; Immortals there couldn't change their minds, because they were never fully conscious.

Jin began trying to convince Jacob he had actually won. Driven MacLeod to condemn himself to a living death.

But Jacob wasn't listening. When Jin had been talking for ten minutes, he cut in and said simply, "We're going to raid the Sanctuary."

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At that moment, I think Jin came close to walking out.

But Jacob quickly assured us there'd be no killing on holy ground. Jin was the only one of his followers he'd expect to fight at all, and even he would just have to knock out some Watchers. Jacob guessed there wouldn't be many of the phony monks, since their sole duty was to care for comatose Immortals. But they would be heavily armed.

His plan was that Cracker Bob, newer students Carlos and Winston, and I would charge up to the place on motorcycles, acting like Hell's Angels gone mad. We'd scare the Watchers into not just "killing" us, but using up most of their ammo on men who hadn't touched them.

Then Jin Ke, who even I admitted was our best martial artist, would come riding up. He'd actually fight, and disable - temporarily - as many opponents as he could. Probably, he too would eventually be "killed."

Even if the Watchers suspected what we were, they'd feel a false sense of security after defeating Jin. But while they were distracted, Jacob would have sneaked onto the scene, disguised as another "monk." He'd take out - again, temporarily - the ones who were still standing, before they had time to remove our heads.

And then? Jacob said we'd find MacLeod and the other drugged Immortals, truss them up, and drag as many as we could off holy ground. When MacLeod came to, we'd force him to watch while we executed the others - telling him it was because of him, his fault. He'd be crushed. And Jacob, wearing a monk's hood, would still be able to conceal his identity.

For all the plan's cruelty, it sounded safe enough for us.

Carlos and Winston hadn't been around in '92.

Cracker Bob believed every word that came out of his leader's mouth.

I couldn't read Jin Ke.

But I kept remembering Jacob's lie to Faith about Rachel Ellenstein...

Then I told myself not to worry. What he said he meant to do seemed - not reasonable, but workable.

And it was, after all, he himself who'd taught me never to kill on holy ground.

Sure.

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We rode out to attack the Sanctuary on the tenth anniversary of MacLeod's disappearance. October in the Catskills - I've heard it can be beautiful. But on that day a choking fog hung everywhere. What foliage we saw was dull, dead brown...the color of monks' robes.

A maze of dusty back roads brought us to our destination: a crumbling pile of dirty gray stone, its main entrance marked by flickering torches. It wouldn't have looked out of place in the Middle Ages.

An abode of ghosts.

But there was nothing ghostly about its Watcher guardians. When we went into our bikers-from-hell routine, a half-dozen of them rushed to defend the place, whipping astonishingly big guns out from under those robes. As expected, they were more than ready to kill - and overkill. They riddled me with bullets at close range. When I came to, I felt like a pincushion.

But I didn't have much time to feel sorry for myself. Bob was standing over me, saying in a scared voice, "All these Watchers are dead."

Jin hadn't revived yet, but we didn't need to be told he wasn't the culprit.

Winston was sure Jacob had continued on into the monastery. We stood around debating whether the outdoors - where he'd killed the Watchers - really was holy ground, or only inside.

A very sober Jin Ke joined us. He said that based on his two thousand years' experience, all a monastery's property had to be considered sacred. And that held true even if it was no longer a real monastery. All that mattered - as with the holy places of ancient cultures - was that we had a way of knowing it had once been a site devoted to prayer or meditation.

"So there's no shit goes down if you kill mortals on holy ground." Carlos sounded as if he was filing away the information, but would have preferred not to know.

"If Jacob's really all right in there," Jin said grimly.

None of us wanted to follow Jacob into that building. But crossing him didn't seem like a particularly good idea, either.

So when Jin strode toward the door, we were all at his heels.

x

x

x

As we prowled through empty, gloomy corridors, I felt the spirits of real Capuchins hovering all around us. I could almost hear their angry murmurs. And I didn't know who made me more nervous, the dead, or those mysterious undead somewhere below.

We descended two flights of rickety stairs without sensing other Immortals.

Then, in the dim light, Winston almost fell through an open trapdoor. Jin caught him in the nick of time. But we figured Jacob had left it open for us, so we all scrambled through it and down a seemingly endless ladder.

We emerged in a tunnel hewn out of solid rock, lit by more of those spooky torches.

And at last we sensed the others. There was no doubt which way we should go.

Even so, we walked for what seemed like five minutes. Then the tunnel opened out, and we found ourselves in a vast, eerie cavern where every footfall produced an echo. It was lit by electricity, but the lights weren't much more than bare bulbs, strung haphazardly along the rough ceiling.

We hardly noticed that. All our attention was drawn to our fellow Immortals. Those who had a right to be there...and the one who did not.

x

x

x

That first glimpse of the Sanctuary dwellers made my blood run cold. I hadn't known what to expect, but the reality was more ghastly than my worst imaginings.

Dana Brook had been unsure how many there were. I counted ten. All men, I decided, though the absence of noticeable breasts was the main clue. They wore near-identical brown jumpsuits.

They were reclining, strapped to metal frames arranged in a semicircle. Conscious, they couldn't have been comfortable. But I knew they were never conscious.

When the Sanctuary was moved from Europe, maybe? Had the old Immortals been wakened and told what was going on, or transported in their sleep? If some had been confined for a thousand years, they wouldn't have known what "America" was.

One thing for sure - in their drugged stupor, they were conditioned to accept a background sensation of other Immortals. The arrival of several more didn't rouse them.

Their wrists and ankles were cuffed, helmets bolted down, faces mostly concealed. Some of them had shockingly long hair, beards, and even fingernails; others did not. I guessed that had less to do with age than with the whims of their caregivers. What other outlet for creativity did the Watchers have?

Each of those grotesque beds was surrounded by a tangle of IV tubing. I gagged at the thought of healthy men being kept alive by intravenous feeding - sedated, stoned. A travesty of hospital care.

The full horror of it was driven home when I saw muscles twitching spasmodically, just like those of real coma patients. I had to look away.

But the only other place to look was at Jacob, and he disturbed me even more.

x

x

x

Jacob was openly gloating, mocking the foolish Immortals who'd chosen this retreat. Sneering at their helplessness.

I hoped desperately that he'd go back to his plan, take them far away before he killed them. It was Quickenings on holy ground that were the real danger...

He wouldn't risk his life and all of ours, would he?

Cracker Bob slunk half behind Carlos and rested his chin on his shoulder. A scared kid hiding behind an adult.

I think that was when I knew what was going to happen.

"Which one is Connor MacLeod?" Jacob demanded of no one in particular. He loosened some of the bolts on the helmet nearest him, and raised the visor.

The man's eyes fluttered open in shock, then closed again. Still only half-conscious, he moaned a protest against the light. He didn't sense danger, didn't struggle against his restraints.

Jacob's sword clove through his neck.

Dying, he made a sound that was half-gasp, half-gurgle.

Every conscious Immortal - except Jacob - let out some kind of cry.

And that was enough to revive one of the trapped victims. We saw his fists clench and his body stiffen, heard his tortured growl.

The one who'd been in the Sanctuary the shortest time, who hadn't drifted as far from reality as his companions...Connor MacLeod.

Jacob gave an exultant whoop. And then he moved faster than I thought possible. Before he could be struck by the Quickening, he raced down the row of defenseless men, severing more heads that couldn't fall. Eight of them! He skipped only MacLeod - who was, by that time, blood-spattered and screaming.

I heard myself cursing those idiot Watchers. Why hadn't they used helmets that protected the vulnerable necks?

What would have happened if Jacob had been forced to spend five minutes removing armor before he could make his first kill? Would we have found our courage, overpowered and stopped him?

I'll never know.

My gaze was riveted on him until Bob, moaning, clutched me and made me look back at the first victim.

The dead body was convulsing, as trapped Quickening lightning started to ooze from the bloody cut that ringed its neck. The bolts attached to helmet and cuffs began a chorus of angry rattles.

Other corpses - one, two, three - reached the same stage. And suddenly, shrapnel-like bolts were flying in all directions. I dove for cover as one of them ripped my cheek open. But only some had popped out; none of the dead were freed, and they continued their mindless jiggling.

Then came bolts of another kind - savage lightning that rent the bodies as it erupted and streaked toward Jacob. Its crackling strands collided, ricocheted, grazed and burned every one of us before finding their mark.

But somehow, when their combined force tore into him, he kept his feet. He was the only one who did.

x

x

x

The cavern shook with the force of an earthquake. The lights overhead exploded and showered us with glass; ominous rumbles came from further above.

As the lightning abated I lay still in the rubble, not daring to breathe. I fully expected the ceiling and the entire monastery to fall on us.

But gradually, the tremors stopped. That underground shelter had been meant to withstand nuclear war, and even the Quickenings of nine men - on holy ground - couldn't bring it down. In the pitch blackness, I heard someone or something scuttle toward the tunnel. And after an eternity Jin was back with torches, announcing in a fairly steady voice that our escape route was intact.

I realized I wasn't about to die. But then I faced another fear. The wounds I'd suffered - the cut cheek, the lightning burns - weren't healing as quickly as usual. What if...what if they never healed?

Fortunately, the healing began before I could start blubbering.

As for Jacob, he hadn't suffered a single burn; he was weak but euphoric.

I hoped he'd regain his strength quickly, so we could get the hell out of there. MacLeod was sobbing, and I had a hunch I'd hear his sobs in my dreams.

x

x

x

That flimsy ladder hadn't survived. But we couldn't have climbed it anyway, with Jacob needing help and some of us carrying severed heads. And I wouldn't have bet on the stability of the monastery stairs, or the building itself. So we explored tunnel branches till we found one that brought us out on the hillside, hundreds of yards below.

Clean, fresh air was a blessed relief...but too little, too late. Like I said, I dumped my load in the car trunk and then dumped another load. It wasn't just because of the heads. It was the culmination of hours of stress and terror and plain old disgust.

All Jacob's followers were in shock. He'd taken Quickenings on holy ground, and shown that nothing bad would happen as a result. That was a stunning revelation. But it didn't change the fact that he'd risked all our lives.

Now he announced that he didn't feel able to drive, so Jin would have to. "We should leave one motorcycle in any case," he said smugly. "For MacLeod."

Turned out Jin's bike had been pretty much blown to smithereens. But all the others were usable. We left one, and Bob and Carlos doubled up.

As we headed back to New York, the little procession following Jacob's car wobbled all over the road.

x

x

x

Under the circumstances, our New York hideout gave me a worse than usual case of the creeps. We were squatting in an unfinished, abandoned "cathedral" - the brainchild of a TV preacher who'd been exposed as a con man. He'd never planned to complete construction. Most contributions to his high-profile Building Fund had gone instead to pay for his yacht and private jet.

The structure wasn't really safe for human occupancy; only Jacob had explored beyond the small area he'd pronounced sound and secretly furnished. He'd chosen it as a residence because Immortals unfamiliar with the city would take it to be holy ground. I knew it wasn't; it had never been consecrated or used for services. But it looked enough like the real thing to be a constant reminder of Jacob's sacrilege.

Maybe that was why someone - Carlos, of course - worked up the nerve to confront him. "Why'd you do what you did today? Why'd you risk gettin' us killed?"

I winced. The real reason seemed obvious. The frustration of the past ten years had been more than Jacob could handle. When he had a chance to vent his rage on the Watchers, and then on MacLeod, he'd lost all semblance of self-control.

But he'd never admit that.

"I had to kill those Watchers," he said, "because the place was larger than I expected. I knew we'd need time to find the Immortals, and they would have gotten reinforcements before we were ready to leave.

"And the Immortals? I changed my plan when I saw how many there were. Too many to take them all with us - but few enough that I could behead all but MacLeod before I was hit by the first Quickening."

"But it was holy ground!" Carlos exploded.

"I was once a priest," Jacob spat out. "A man of God...lost forever because MacLeod's wickedness drove me to take up the sword.

"And now he dared to exploit the trappings of religion! To hide in the bowels of a monastery, guarded by sham clergy armed with machine guns. It was they who profaned holy ground, not I."

Profaned it? Arguably, both sides had done that. But the Watchers had only resorted to violence to defend their helpless charges. Even if they shot first, we'd been the real aggressors.

And Jacob had committed mass murder.

x

x

x

Carlos turned away, muttering under his breath.

But then Jacob said something else. In a tight voice that was barely more than a whisper, he continued, "I'd killed on holy ground once before..."

Carlos was back like a shot, and we all clustered around.

Jacob stood gazing out what should have been a stained glass window - but in fact had no glass at all - at the pollution-clogged East River. "You see," he went on in an eerie monotone, "I never had a teacher. It was pure luck that I survived as an Immortal. Before I could be drawn into a fight, I witnessed one - that was how I learned about beheadings and Quickenings.

"After that I expected every Immortal I met to want my Quickening. But I didn't know how to use a sword. And I'd been driven out of my village - where I'd never known any life but the priesthood. Didn't know how to farm, didn't have a trade.

"So I turned to robbery. What else was there? And I surrounded myself with mortal criminals. When I sensed other Immortals I had my henchmen disable them, and I took their heads. Murdered them."

He'd never opened up like this before - not even, I could see, to Cracker Bob. We hung on every word.

"With time," he told us, "I became a better fighter. And I absorbed some knowledge I needed from Quickenings. But what you pick up that way, mostly, are things the Immortal you've killed was consciously thinking about, not background knowledge.

"I only learned about the holy ground taboo when I killed a man in a cemetery. He was thinking about it, but I thought he was fleeing out of panic. His Quickening told me what I'd done."

Then he shrugged. In something closer to his usual contemptuous tone, he added, "Until today, I wasn't sure whether there's never a penalty for killing on holy ground, or I'd been excused that once because I'd done it in ignorance. Now we know."

x

x

x

He was silent so long that everyone but me drifted away.

And he forgot I was there. I'm sure he was talking to himself - and that murky river - when he said, "If I'd known from the start that holy ground was a refuge all Immortals honored, I would have gone into a monastery and stayed there. Happily! The sins of my youth could have been forgiven - even my trying to kill MacLeod.

"But by the time I found out, it was too late."