Disclaimer: I do not own any of the Highlander characters "du jour", which include Methos, Duncan, Joe, Richie and the caravan of fun. I do not make any money. All those lovely characters belong to Davis/Panzer, and their little throng of people. Coo coo ca choo.

This is part of Tongues of Angels, a semi-slash serial I have decided to put out. The events described by Sher Mackenzie about her Watcher days can be found in the novella Masters at Deception, but are not necessary tools of understanding here.

Thank you to Alice, a wonderful beta....and to Dana, who wants to see all the feedback on this one. If I get any. No one reads me anymore...::sob sob:: Thanks to Tianyu, the inept beta, who argued for fifteen minutes about heat generators.

WARNINGS: This serial contains some slash references, extreme macabre violence, and rather unreasonable language. If you don't like swear words and the famous four letter "c" word, please be warned.

__________________

Tongues of Angels

by Amand-r __________________

You come out at night. that's when the energy comes And the dark side's light, and the vampires roam You strut your rasta wear and your suicide poem And a cross from a faith that died before Jesus came You're building a mystery. --Sarah McLachlan, "Building A Mystery"

PART TWO: SOHTEM

103001.22:34

Methos is gone. I should have expected it. I should have predicted it.

Some things are too good to waste, and all of those are too good to last. I know this better than anyone.

I returned home to find all of his stuff just....gone. Like he'd planned it. And the stupid thing is, I didn't even see this one coming.

I called Joe, and he's just as shocked as I am. I have a few ideas where he might be. I could go after him. I could find him. I bet he went to Santorini. It's cold here, and the islands are warm. I bet he did....

********

LONDON, 2012:

Natasha's mother had always wanted to name her daughter something else. She had known from the moment that the midwife had smacked the child's bottom and her little Tasha had let loose a wail that was fit to rouse her ancestors, that Natasha was not the name for this child. This child, she saw, from the cooing face in the nursery, or the bubbling smile she donned three days after she was born, had never known sorrow. This child was balanced. And more importantly, this child would do great, great things. This child would unearth the sun.

She died when Natasha was six.

She never got to find out how wrong she was.

And so, Natasha sat in her little cubicle in the middle of Watcher Central, London Division, hammering away at the mystery journal with the tenacity and intent of the builders of the tower of Babel. She referenced Adam Pierson. She looked up every Methos file available, then everything on MacLeod from 1973 onward. She charted their timelines and sightings on a graph to show intersections in location. She set three research drones to work gathering any information the earth had to hold on the word Pantheona. She read every dictionary to decipher it; she took classes in ancient Greek to translate the older Chronicles. She visited professors in Borneo and Athens to grill them about the ancient word.

No one had ever heard of it. It wasn't a name, it wasn't a mystery religion, it wasn't a god or goddess. It wasn't even an old eclectic wine vintage from the Peloponnese, as the office betting pool had decided. In fact, the office pool had now decided that Pantheona was some personal thing, much like Kane's Rosebud.

And so, on this rainy, dreary, and overall depressing Tuesday a half hour before tea, Natasha was on her way out the door to the local pub to meet her fiancée when she was stopped by a frantic researcher who couldn't seem to put one word in front of the next. His confusion extended to his feet, as he staggered with her back to the study, where several other watchers had already gathered around the tome in the dim light of the preservation room.

Tasha felt the moisture seep into her skin, and wondered why they had to keep the room so cold. Surely, this kind of environment wasn't good for anyone's health...

"We found Pantheona," he said to her softly, his voice belying the excitement of his announcement, or perhaps he felt the need to lower his voice in the presence of so many books.

The current occupants of the room felt no need to silence themselves; two men and three women screamed at each other over the wide expanse of the tables. Natasha isolated voices and attempted to turn down the volume in her head.

"It can't possibly be from the same Chronicle; there are no missing pages!" Jean, one of the head antiquities researchers argued, flipping notebooks open and shut. He traced the pages of a dusty text with light fingers, bending down so close his breath might curdle the fragile pages. "I catalogued the continuity of the pages myself."

Pricilla Silsbee, the head of the internship division and aspiring head mistress of the London Academy, rubbed the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger. "Well that explains a lot then."

Jean colored a brilliant shade of red, and it wasn't all from his quiet drinking sessions in the back of the library. He slammed the book shut. "Do you have something to imply, bitch, or are you just assuming that everyone is as incompetent as you are?"

"I'm not the one who's screaming about--"

Natasha waved her hands in the air and brought them slamming down onto the table. "Ladies! Gentlemen!" Five pairs of middle-aged eyes rolled in their sockets to take her in, all twenty-three years of her. Natasha felt as if those eyes had stripped her age away, and scrambled for an assertive edge. She rammed one hand into her pocket to keep it from shaking. Why had she been so driven to research this? And who in their right mind had approved it?

Instead, she steeled her mind and gritted her teeth. "What do you have?"

Jean volunteered the information slowly, as if the words had been lassoed and yanked out of him struggling. "We found Pantheona."

"Tell me," Natasha ordered. It wasn't very effective, but it did start the ball rolling. Everyone in this room could have been her superior. It wasn't her fault her father was the head of the European branch. Okay, maybe it was.

"Pantheona," began Gerald Forman, a balding man with a sallow face from too much time inside. "Is not the original name. We knew that the Pantheon was the set of deities in the Greco Roman world. This is not what Pantheona refers to."

He flipped the pages in the text he was examining, and slid the book down the long table to rest in front of Natasha. "Pantheona is the Roman bastardization of Pythiona, it seems, from this medieval text. It's an old Methosian Chronicle."

Natasha leaned in closer to the yellowed pages. "How do you know?"

Gerald shrugged. "The Latin mentions her in passing. 'I hope to God that Panthyona is still gone. There were gusts of her on the wind this spring, and I felt myself slipping towards her again. Gusts of her, of Panthyona.' And then there is this--"

Gerald lifted up the flap of the book and withdrew an old woodcutters print block. Natasha took it in her hands and held it to the light.

It had never been used. But the markings on it were undeniable scrolled words that read 'Panthyona'. She felt her hands tremble, and she almost lost the grip she had on the wood.

"But what does it mean?" she whispered. No one seemed to want to answer her. Natasha squinted in the dim room.

Panthyona was embraced on both sides by lighting. She was just a woman, twining around a tree. Her fingers clutched at the low branches, almost as if she would uproot it with her bare hands. She wore a simple tunic stola combination, her hair roiling in masses of curls. Whoever had done this carving had taken a lot of pains to make sure that her hair was immaculately done. A large snake enveloped her, around her waist, tail falling down the leg and stretching up with its head into the leaves of the trees themselves.

Natasha let her finger fall into the grooves on either side of the snake and trace them up into the foliage.

"They say that Hera had a tree of forbidden knowledge, and that around this tree curled the serpent Ladon," Jean whispered, rubbing his eyes.

"Like that Biblical tree of good and evil," finished Gerald. "Panthyona, could be translated into 'pythiona', or snake."

Pantheona, god. Pythiona, snake. Which one was it? And who would name a child after such creatures?

"What else?" Natasha asked quietly. Thoughts were half formed in her head, like the soft-shell of a premature egg, not really strong enough to hold anything in.

"Nothing. Fragile guesses. The new spelling allows us more freedom in searching, but other than that reference, there is nothing." Pricilla gathered the Chronicle in her hands, and took the woodcutting away from Natasha. She gave it up grudgingly.

"Well, keep working then," Natasha murmured. "Go see if they can date this in the lab." Pricilla glowered at her with the look of one who wished that random violence could be condoned by society. "I'll be back when I find out something. Jean, go get the other volumes from the basement."

Jean turned to leave, and she called after him. "And get Joe Dawson's number."

Jean froze and turned to her. "Dawson? You're sure?" When Natasha only began to buckle her coat, he continued, waving his hands to express his agitation. "Dawson is an invalid, and a drunk. I bet he's senile, for God's sake, what is he, seventy?"

"Hardly," Natasha spat back. "He's the one who was friends with Methos. He's the one who had the journal." She stuffed her hands into her pockets and clenched them into fists. "I'll call Dawson; until then, keep digging."

Before she could damage her image as a superior any more, she turned and walked as quickly as she could out of the room down the hall and all the way to the pub, as if distance made her older, taller, prouder. She near- trotted all the way to the bar, to the arms of her non-Watcher boyfriend, fiancée. Peter never asked her about work. Peter had never even heard of Pantheona. And that was sounding blissful right about now.

********

Gerald stared at Jean over the research table. The other Watcher was faced away from him, and all he could see were the graying curls at the nape of the man's neck. He watched Jean look around him, then unscrew the cap from a small metal flask and take a deep long pull.

It was no secret that Jean was drinking on the job. Gerald had known for years. He had even covered for Jean's incompetence three or four times. Despite all this, Jean was still hailed as one of the most brilliant researchers in the Watchers today. In fact, Gerald had written his final observational thesis when Jean had passed out from too many scotches at the bar. This paper had won him the coveted antiquities research grant. It was a top-level job with a huge salary, and no work.

It should have been Gerald's job.

Gerald felt his face grow hot as he watched Jean take another pull from the flask, then start to pick his nose. It should have been Gerald's job. It had been Gerald who had found this new Chronicle.

He didn't even know he'd been clutching the Chronicle until the leather cover crinkled in his hands. He glanced down at it dumbly, then opened it and stared at the woodcutting.

Pantheona smiled at him. She was so pretty. He watched the lightning captivate her and the serpent roll around her waist, like Ladon around Hera's forbidden tree.

Jean made a noise deep in his throat. Then he spat phlegm into the wastepaper basket at his feet. Pricilla Silsbee's heels echoed on the other side of the room.

Gerald hated Pricilla with a passion. She was a gorgeous cunt, yes, but she would never give him the time of day, would she? What about the other little bitch in here, the active watcher, she was too young for him, and he was no sugar daddy. Isn't that what she had told him when he had asked her out?

Gerald watched Jean's head nod into sleep.

He was still watching the back of that head when he brought the axe cleanly down into Jean's skull.

********

THREE DAYS LATER, MONTANA:

Sher wiped her forehead and dug into the boxes that had been dropped from the air express. The crate had landed sometime that morning while she had been in with Pantheona, and it had been like Christmas when she had encountered it on the way back to the house. Christmas, minus the wrapping and the big floppy red bow. Her excitement was not diminished by the plain brown crate's appearance.

Sher had opened the large crate with a crowbar and loaded all the sealed packages on a sled to drag back to the house. A good horse would have come in hand right about then. Sher had cast rueful eyes back at the red barn, and remembered her last horse, her baby....perhaps not.

It took her three loads to get everything back into the house. Once they were in, she had dismantled the crate and planned to use it for house repairs. She stowed the crowbar back into its locked strongbox and hung up her coat. The firewood was dangerously low. Sher could freeze to death, and it wasn't permanent, but she had already done that a few times this year. Hopefully they had sent the axe.

Sher picked through the foodstuffs. Spam...dried beans and other preservable foods....more Spam. Ugh, she hated Spam. Oooh, oranges, bless Joe. There was a box of Godiva chocolates and a small tin of cocoa. And a nice pound of bacon that made Sher's arteries harden even as she stared at it. Nestled in the middle of it all were a bundle of letters, and her mail from her house in Paris.

They did send her an axe, as requested, a small two handed one. Fire fucking engine red. //Whee.//

Fifteen boxes of hollow tip nine-millimeter rounds and four boxes of rifle cartridges. Sher stuffed them in a drawer and locked it.

He'd sent her movies too: An old VHS copy of "An Affair to Remember", and "Beverly Hills Cop." Joe was nothing if not a sick fuck. Sher tossed them in with the others he had sent her, like "The Last Unicorn" and "The Full Monty".

Finally, at the bottom of one of the boxes, a small envelope addressed to her, but not ever mailed. Sher turned it over in her hands. No return address. But the writing was unmistakably notorious. She ripped it open with still numb fingers, absently throwing a log on the fire and settling down on the bearskin rug that Methos had sent her the first time he had learned what she had been up to.

Methos had the handwriting of a serial killer. She smiled.

"Scheherazade--

"I would say that I hope this finds you well, but perhaps you would laugh. I know that Duncan is safe in your hands, and I know that you will be of the most cautious nature in his presence.

"Understand that what happened was in no way, shape or form my fault. Understand that I couldn't see it coming. Excuses, excuses, I suppose. I have not deserted you, but--"

Sher tossed the letter in the fire. She didn't need this crap from him. "Oh sohtem," she murmured under her breath. These days he was 'sohtem'; she couldn't help herself.

She had to do something about the lack of firewood, and sometime in the next day or so, or she was going to freeze to death. That wouldn't be fun. Sher packed away the perishables and shrugged on her coat. She snagged the axe from the dining room table and finished suiting up.

The weather was an even freezing outside. Better than last winter, but then, last winter, they had said in the news, had been one of the worst. Sher only knew this because Joe had sent her a newspaper clipping. How sad that she was so isolated.

//The cold keeps him immobile,// she reminded herself. //Remember, the cold is important.//

Sher hadn't planned on such a terrible winter. But the snow had come in September this year, and she had started to run really low in December. Sher hadn't had ductwork installed in the house because of the pointless waste of a heat generator. She decided it would be better to spend energy on security and electricity. And while it did mean that heated showers were an impossibility, she would rather sacrifice a shower spray if it meant that the doors would hold, and she would not be torn limb from limb in the middle of the winter. Generators only held so much power, and no one was coming out here to change them until March.

The cords she had had delivered in the summer weren't going to be enough, and so Sher had decided it would be prudent to have an axe handy. Despite her loathing to have any sort of edge near Pantheona, she was going to have to do something. March was a long way away, and she would probably need heat well into April.

Pantheona was doing relatively well. In the summer, Sher might have him transferred to something less...restrictive. They were having longer conversations, and sometimes even, it seemed as if Duncan was peeking out from under the heavy cowl of the creature. Then again....

Sher selected a tree, a small one, but she only had a small axe. It was noon. She wouldn't get much done anyway. It was not good to be out after dark. Sher hated the dark with a passion, a trait that had started recently. There were wolves out here, and her guns weren't good against something that moved that fast. She heard their baying in the night.

They had told her not to believe anything the creature said. They had told her that Pantheona would try anything to get out. Sher believed them. But sometimes when she stared at those velvet brown eyes, she saw MacLeod, and her first instinct was to utter the clearances out.

And to see him free and hale, she might very well risk being torn apart.

"There was a frog once," Sher muttered in the woods, as she swung the axe into the side of the tree. "He was just sitting on the side of the pond, minding his own business, doing froggy stuff." She pulled the axe out of the tree and swung again. "And along came this scorpion, and he went up to the frog and said 'Hey, could you let me hop on your back and catch a ride across the pond?'"

Sher smiled and dug the axe deeper. "The frog said 'If I let you ride on me, then you'll sting me with your tail, and I'll die.'" She sighed. "But the scorpion said, 'No, if I were to sting you, you would die and I would drown. That wouldn't make any sense.'

"The frog thought this logical, and decided to do it. The scorpion hopped on his back and he started swimming off into the water." Sher giggled. "But about halfway across, the frog felt this sting in his back, and started to feel numb. ' You stung me! You said you wouldn't!' And the scorpion said--"

"'You knew what I was when you let me on your back,'" finished another voice. Sher swung around and threw the axe, drawing her .38 out of her coat pocket as she turned.

The axe went wide and buried itself in a tree, and Cassandra turned to stare at it for a second. Sher breathed out a sigh of relief, and lowered the weapon, replacing the safety and shoving it in her pocket. Cassandra turned back to look at her. Her face was tanned against the snow, framed by the fur-lined collar and hood of a long insulated parka.

"You are tense," she told the other woman. Sher rolled her eyes and smiled. Cassandra shrugged her pack on her shoulders and held out her open arms. Sher ignored these in favor of chasing the axe. She yanked it out of the tree and slammed it back into the tree she was working on. With any luck, she might finish some of this by nightfall.

"You didn't feel me coming," Cassandra murmured softly. Her voice echoed, everything else deadened by the snowfall. She sat on another fallen log and lowered her pack to the ground.

Sher snorted softly. "You know why," she whispered, breathing labored. Maybe if she looked really busy, this talk could be delayed.

"Yes," the other Immortal replied. "Pantheona is dulling your senses." When Sher chose not to reply, she sighed. "You are brave to take on this...mission."

Sher stopped and dropped the axe. She panted, watching Cassandra's face school itself into one of elderly patronization. "You know what?" she asked the woman. "You said to let him rot. Let them both rot."

Cassandra shook he head. "I said to let Methos rot. I did not mean that about Duncan. Look what he did to Duncan--"

"You can't know that," Sher parried. "You don't know, and neither do I." She picked up the axe again and slammed it into the tree trunk. She hoped Cassandra thought about her own neck while watching that swift motion. "Are you staying?"

"Briefly, yes."

She stopped to watch as Cassandra picked up her pack and waited. "If you want to keep warm tonight, you'll leave me alone then. Get rid of the sword. I don't care where you put it, but get rid of any blades." She fished the gun out of her pocket and handed it to the other woman. "Here, use this." Cassandra made a face at the gun. "Lose the sword. If he makes it out, the sword is the last thing you'll want. He'll get too close. The gun is better."

"I don't--" Cassandra began.

"Hey, stick that sword up your ass and tie it in a bow. You're a guest in my house, and if he gets out, I won't even have to think about punishing you, because we'll both be dead, understand?" Sher punctuated her point by slamming the axe home next to the other woman's pack.

There was a tense moment, as if Cassandra was going to contest again. Sher counted the seconds off in her head.... one thousand, two thousand.....

"All right." Well, that was easy. The beeper Sher kept in her inner coat pocket went off. Sher swore and dug it out, pulling her mitten off her hand. Cassandra stared at her missing finger, eyes wide.

"Tessa, report." Sher glanced at the clouds billowing in. This looked bad. She was no judge of weather, but she was recognizing snow clouds when she saw them lately.

"Restraints, broken," came the hollow reply.

Sher cocked her head. "Understood. Lockdown doors 3A through 15D. Report at fifteen hundred."

"Compliance."

Sher tucked the axe under her arm, and replaced her mitten. It was lunchtime. She shoved the beeper in her coat, and started back to the house. Cassandra picked up her pack and followed her towards the small cottage.

"What happened to your finger?" she asked Sher quietly.

"He ate it."

********

PARIS:

Joe Dawson regarded himself as a patient man. He also regarded himself a stupid man. "Oh Methos, Methos," he mused as he turned the pages in a journal older then himself. Funny how this journal was written by a man younger than him. Well, respectively.

How hard it was to repeatedly remind himself not to damn the man's name. How hard these days to get through the day wondering if anyone would ever be closer to realization. Someone on this earth should have been able to stand up and say 'I have the answer.'

Until then, Joe turned the pages and wondered.

The journal was an intricate thing, marked with scrolling in the margins, so very different from the simple Latin of the text. Methos had made so many notations in the corners of the text that they had all but disappeared in time and water damage. Some corners had crumbled away to nothing.

There was no answer in the small journal, and Joe knew that. All the books that were worth anything were in the possession of the one who wrote them, and the most important ones, at that, were probably lost forever, at the bottom of the sea, or reincarnated as petunias or trees growing in the rich soil by numerous rivers and streams.

Natasha Billings had sent him an email, and the fed ex package had come today. He leafed through the journal, wondering why she even bothered to ask his opinion. It was no secret to the Watchers that the past ten years of his life had been spent in utter silence on the subject of Duncan MacLeod. But the new ruling heads had decided not to press him. Funny how one administration could be nothing like the previous one.

The journal was useless. A piece of crap with two lines of Panthyona bullshit. Panthyona, Pythyona, did it fucking matter? Natasha had sent a voluminous package about Ladon, and Hera. He didn't even look at it. One thing did interest him, though. She sent a few dates in a margin. He highlighted them with red ink:

2200-2000 BCE Barbaric invaders; fortresses on hilltops 2000-1600 BCE Knossos 1200 Myceneans conquer Troy

Joe couldn't care less about Pantheona. He knew what she was. He didn't care how she got there. Methos was what he was looking for. Everything that started with Methos could end with him.

He closed his eyes for a second, then stared at the woodcutting. It was still stained brown from the...incident...at Headquarters. He wondered at the significance again.

Gerald Forman, upstanding member of the Watcher's research division, had used a fire axe to slaughter Jean De Sauvee, and Pricilla Silsbee had gouged out the eyes of the other researcher, a young girl named Lisa Kindell, before she severed the girl's spine with a paper cutter. Then they had turned on each other. Gerald had won, because he had had the axe. He had dismembered her, and was found unconscious on top of the woman's torso, naked, still inside her.

Joe wrinkled his nose and declined the shot the bartender had offered him. Natasha had said that Gerald had been in complete shock, and after the first few mutterings of innocence, he had accompanied police to the local prison holding, where he had promptly hung himself. She had also said that the only other researcher in the room, Simone Blanchard, had been sent to the lab with the woodcutting. When she had returned two hours later, she had dropped the cutting on Lisa's head.

"That's en-ter-tain-ment," Joe sang to the tune of an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. He unceremoniously dumped the journal, papers and letters into the nifty airmail box and shoved it away from himself. It could have been worse; his daughter had wanted in on the Pantheona project. She could have been in there.

Natasha was an overzealous girl whose parents just happened to be the right people. The disappearance of Duncan MacLeod was the biggest mystery of the past decade. Natasha's discovery of the old journal on Joe's desk had led to a darker place. She was convinced that Methos could be traced through this Pantheona. She was also convinced that Methos had taken Duncan's head. Joe let her believe all of it. It was sad how everyone talked of Mac in the past tense. Even he did it now days.

He pulled the small white envelope out of his pocket and opened the flap one more time. He unfolded the letter again, and perused Sher's words.

"Joe---She's talking. Get him here."

Sher had always been verbose, and this was unlike her. He was afraid of what they would find if he managed to get Methos there. He had called Amanda three months ago, but the woman had never returned his calls. Cassandra had left for the states a few weeks ago. She should have gotten there by this time.

Joe pushed away the rest of his bourbon, and closed his eyes, resting his head on the counter. He drifted off to sleep, and dreamed of better days.

SANTORINI, DECEMBER, 2001:

Joe stepped into the darkened room, and waited. There was no one there.

"Mac? Methos?" He knew that they had taken a little cottage on the island. This was the only one that was inhabited in the middle of the winter. But the lights were out. The windows were boarded, but the front door had been unlocked. Joe had decided to go in, since it had started to storm, and his little vespa driver had left him here for fear of being caught in the storm.

Duncan had told him that this would be the place. Santorini. Yes.

Joe ran headfirst into a wall, and used it to find a table. He found a lamp in the darkness, and flipped the switch. Light flooded the room and bathed everything in dark brown. The bed was overturned, and the chairs in splinters. The table runner underneath him was stiff with dried blood. Joe knew old blood when he saw it. The air had lost that metallic smell, but splatters of it still clung to the wall in almost clumps. Someone had bled. Messily. A lot.

There was a shuffle down the hallway, and he slid the short sword out of his cane. The cane had been a present from Methos last Christmas. He hadn't even thought to bring his gun.

"Methos? Duncan?"

A figure shambled into the light. A female figure. She was naked, still clothed in the scant dirt that had stuck to her in her ascent. Her forearms were caked with grime and blood. Her hair was plastered to her head in places and wispy free in others. But she was otherwise hale and unharmed.

Alexa stared at him with her wide doe eyes and held out her hands.

"Give us a kiss."

end part two