Shelter from the Storm Chapter 9
All standard disclaimers apply. This story is mine, as are the characters of Leyza Berard, Ray Garcia, Phillippe and Marie Vachon, Francine, Solange Laperrier and Jeremy Cole. Please do not borrow them without asking.
The Highlander concepts and the characters of Duncan MacLeod, Joe Dawson and May Ling Shen are not. They belong to Gregory Widen, Davis/Panzer, Rysher, Gaumont and probably a few others I've forgotten. I've dared to use them without permission, and hope they'll forgive the transgression, because this story is merely a labor of love. I'm not making a cent from it.
The return to life struck Leyza hard, like a power punch to the solar plexus. When she opened her eyes, she was startled to find another pair of eyes looking back at her - pale blue eyes with a touch of hazel, not six inches from her own.
The owner of the eyes scrambled back away from her as she gasped to fill her lungs with air.
"Oh, man, lady," he said, his eyes growing wide as the hunter's moon above. "Y-you were dead!"
Leyza felt around her, searching for her sword, as she struggled against the intense pain in her back and tried to sit up. "You'd like that wouldn't you," she snarled, thinking he was one of the gang come back to rob her. Just as her fingers touched the hilt of her sword, a coughing spasm hit.
The young man narrowed his eyes as he considered her comment. "No, way," he said, shaking his head with vehemence. "I heard the commotion and I thought I could help ... but, but ... y-you were dead ... you had no pulse, no heartbeat, nothin'."
He didn't look like any of the gang members who had attacked her, and he was wearing a frayed cloth jacket instead of a leather one. Though his face bore traces of a recent battle - a trickle of blood under his nose and a bruise beginning to blossom near his right eye - Leyza decided he meant her no harm, still she kept her sword by her side.
"Do I look dead?" she asked. Her breathing eased, her heartbeat returned to normal, and the pain in her back ebbed as the wound healed.
The young man scuttled back a bit more as she finally managed to sit. She reached into her coat to check for her wallet. It was still there. She let out a long breath with a sigh of relief - at least she wouldn't have to gather a fresh set of identification. That was always such a bother when your ID was forged in the first place.
From a safe distance, the youth studied her - at least Leyza assumed he'd decided the space between them was safe, since he didn't run away.
"I work in the ER at Columbia Presbyterian," he said, slowly. "I'm only an orderly, but I see dead people all the time. You were definitely dead."
"Thank you for the diagnosis, Dr. Kildare," Leyza said with a weak smile. "But I'm not dead."
She took a deep breath and watched him as she tried to think of a plausible explanation. Just the way he was looking at her told her that he wasn't going off without one. One last spasm shook her, and she began coughing again.
Her Good Samaritan grew bolder. He crept closer, then knelt at her side, and patted her on the back
"I'm okay ... falling just knocked the wind out of me," Leyza lied. She eased away from his ministrations, hoping he hadn't seen the damage the knife must have done to her coat.
But she was too late. When he pulled his hand away, his fingers were covered with blood - her blood.
"Oh, shit lady," he exclaimed. "There's blood - you're hurt bad." He scrambled to his feet. "I gotta call an ambulance."
"I don't need an ambulance," she insisted, then she grabbed at his ankle to stop him.
He knelt beside her again. "You do. You need a doctor ... you're bleeding and probably in shock," he said, gently taking her hand off his ankle. He removed his jacket, wadded it up into a pillow, then he pushed on her shoulder. "Lay down ... and don't move ... I'll be right back."
Leyza shrugged his hand off. "No doctors," she said. "It's just a scratch. I'm fine." Keeping her sword hidden in the folds of her coat, she stood. "See? Right as rain."
The young man glanced down at the blood on his hands, then up at the evidence to the contrary standing before him. He shook his head. "No way," he said, slowly, then he held his hand up for her to see. "It's not possible ... all this blood ... and you were dead."
While he was glancing down at his hand once more, Leyza tucked her sword away. She pulled a handkerchief out of her pocket, then handed it to him. "Here," she said.
When he didn't move, she reached out, took his hand in hers, then wiped the blood off it. "I'm not dead," she said. "But if you hadn't come along when you did, I might have been."
A lie, but maybe not. She didn't know what would have happened to her if the punk had cut her throat deeply - even if he'd left her head attached to her body. Possibly a very long temporary death or a nasty scar at the very least. But she was glad she didn't have to find out. Not first hand anyway.
Her would-be-rescuer took the handkerchief, then continued to wipe the blood from his hands. Leyza clutched his upper arm, then tightened her grasp.
"Most people would have run the other way," she said. "I want to thank you for stopping to help. What's your name?"
"Raymond," he said, finally looking up at her with a thousand questions adding a gleam of curiosity to his eyes. "Raymond Garcia."
"Well, I don't know about you, Raymond, but I need a drink and I'm starving, too. Will you join me so we can talk about a proper reward?" She took his arm, then began guiding him to the street.
"I wasn't lookin' for no reward, miss," he said. "I was just tryin' to help ... you know?"
His voice had a soft dream-like quality and Leyza could well imagine what kind of thoughts were running through his mind. She'd bet it wasn't every day, he saw a dead person come back to life. And she had no doubt that he was convinced she had been dead.
"Don't be silly," she insisted. "Good deeds always deserve a reward, and please ... call me Leyza."
"I don't-" he began, then he let out a gasp. "Oh shit, man!" He broke free of her hold on his arm, then he ran to the front of the lot.
Leyza followed, and she quickly realized what had caused him such great distress.
A large black portfolio of the kind artists carry, lay open in the dirt. This one was old, scuffed up and had a broken zipper. Several of the sketches and drawings it contained had been caught by the wind. They twirled on strong currents of air, then danced away across the lot. Raymond dropped to his knees to close the case, then he began snatching at the artwork that had blown away.
"When they was runnin' away," he said, while she rushed to join him. "They knocked me down. We had a little scuffle." He grinned as he made punching motions with his fists. "Then I saw you layin' there, and I ... I didn't think."
"You could have been hurt," she said, remembering the blood on his nose and the bruise on his eye ... and the knives all the gang members had carried.
She picked up two of the sketches, then noticed an abstract done in acrylics on canvas board that had slipped from the case. She held it in the pale pool of light the street lamp cast at the edge of the lot, and studied it.
The work was raw and unpolished, but it had an energy and power that took her breath away. Though the execution was rough, his use of color gave it an ethereal quality that lifted it way above the banal dabblings of many unschooled artists. And she was certain that Raymond Garcia had little or no formal training. She could see it in the innocent exuberance of his work.
As she examined it with a practiced eye, she could discern faces among the swirling swaths of color - faces of street people drawn in an elongated style. They looked like wraiths escaping from some confinement at the left side of the picture.
A hand moved into her line of vision - Ray's hand grasping the upper edge of the canvas board. "I call it Freedom," he said softly.
She let him take the board, then she picked up another. The image he had created here seethed with anger, rage and wild jagged splashes of red, yellow and orange. She wondered what event in his life might have inspired it.
"There's this dude - Picasso," he said. "I saw his stuff in the museum ... just blew me away, you know. Sometimes, I try to do stuff like his."
Leyza chuckled softly. Ray might not have the vocabulary to describe his idol, but the rapturous look on his face spoke volumes. Clearly he'd found a hero worth worshipping. "Have you had any lessons?" she asked.
A frown crimped his brow, as he stuffed the sketches and the two paintings back into the case. "Lessons?" he said. "Whatchu mean lessons?"
"Art lessons," she answered.
His soft laugh contained little humor. "Not many art teachers hangin' around the projects."
"Well, I meant in school," Leyza said.
"I don't have much use for school," he mumbled. "Teachers always buggin' you about homework and shit. 'Sides, I gotta work to help my mother."
"Come, on," she said, taking his arm once more. "Let's get something to eat, and I'll tell you all about the reward, I have in mind."
* * * *Leyza stood at the window of her quarters and watched her students mill around in the rubble of the burned wing. The rising sun bathed the sad scene with golden light and thin rays of hope. As she leaned her forehead against the glass, she saw Ray cross the courtyard to join the others, and the tension, that had gripped her since he walked away from her earlier, drained. He wouldn't go after Jeremy Cole - not today anyway. They would talk again, and she would convince him to leave it alone as she'd convinced him to come with her to France over 30 years ago.
Though sorely tempted by her offer and clearly intrigued by the mystery of her return to life, he refused at first. He had to care for his mother, he'd insisted.
"She ain't got nobody else," Ray had told her while he wolfed down a mass of scrambled eggs and a stack of pancakes nearly as tall as a skyscraper, then washed it down with a river of coffee.
"Her parents were Russian immigrants and they were really pissed when she married a Puerto Rican. They ain't talked to her in years. Then my old man split when my brother Denis pulled a knife on him to keep the bastard from beating her."
Denis had been his only brother, Ray had explained, and older by three years. He'd bowed his head, and his voice had cracked when he also told her that Denis had died of a drug overdose when he was fifteen.
Leyza had gone with him to talk to his mother - a kind woman with weary blue eyes who worked too hard and worried too much about her son - then she'd brought both of them with her to France.
Though Ray Garcia's paintings now sported six figure price tags, he'd remained at the school. Some years ago he'd assumed most of the administrative duties which allowed Leyza time to do what she loved - time to pass on the skills she'd learned through nearly 2000 years of practice.
For her there was no question - she would repair the damage Jeremy Cole had wrought. She would forgive the senseless act and his hunger for revenge. And she would try to forgive herself, as well, for killing Solange.
* * * *For the next three nights Duncan walked to the bridge. He worried and paced as he waited in vain, then he went to the bakery at the usual time hoping that Leyza had been in touch with Phillippe and Marie, but the Vachons had not heard from her either.
The first two nights he dropped by, Phillippe and Marie seemed unconcerned. They plied him with coffee and croissants while they reasoned away Leyza's absence with suppositions that she'd been called away on business. Or that she'd come down with a cold or the flu. All logical assumptions, if you had no knowledge of Immortals.
But for Duncan, fear and a lurking dread that another Immortal was involved nibbled around the edges of all that logic. He couldn't shake it.
Last night, he'd noted a trace of unease glimmering in Marie's soft grey eyes. Even as she murmured reassurances, he'd heard a faint disquiet in her voice. "Have you called the police?" she asked as she set a cup of coffee before him.
He shook his head. "I really don't have anything to tell them," he said with a rueful smile.
What could he tell them? That he'd met an attractive woman on the Pont St. Louis in the middle of the night? That they'd talked for hours about art, philosophy and music? That they'd discussed the ebb and flow of Immortality and the burdens it brought - but that they hadn't exchanged phone numbers or addresses? No - the police would want hard facts, and he had none to offer.
"How about the hospitals?" Phillippe asked, calmly exploring all avenues.
"I made a few calls," Duncan lied. "She's not in any of the hospitals."
"Well, there you see," Marie said, patting his hand. Her smile was reassuring, but her eyes still carried a shimmer of concern. "Then it must be business of some sort."
As he returned to the barge, Duncan let his frustration and concern for Leyza fall back on himself. He shouldn't have been so casual about their relationship - but it had fit his needs. No strings, no obligations - just two people meeting in the night like passing trains.
The eddy of lethargy that he'd been caught in since defeating Ahriman prevented him from seeking more than the comfortable companionship he'd found with her. It had been so easy to simply accept whatever tidbits fell from the table of life - so easy to drift along in Leyza's quiet stream.
He clenched his fists and jammed them deep into his coat pockets as he crossed the quay. The Duncan MacLeod he'd been in the past would never have let an intriguing possibility slip out of his grasp. He would have seized it with both hands and embraced it. He would have explored it to its farthest horizon.
A storm of frustration raged within him as the Duncan of old clashed with the Duncan he had become. His footfalls echoed, thumping in a doleful drumbeat as he stomped up the gangway intent on--
Then he stopped. Intent on what? He had no plan. No course of action. Nothing to do but wait. Nowhere to go but to that damned bridge every night. Nothing but a great maw of passivity sucking him down.
He slammed the side of his fist into the wall of the wheelhouse. A sharp snap of pain shot up his wrist. The throbbing ache shouted, dumb thing to do. Punishing his hand was certainly no solution to his problem. Then reason rushed to his rescue, and he began to laugh.
He lifted his arms into the air and whirled around. To the casual observer he would seem quite mad, but he didn't care. He could feel again!
Granted, the emotion was anger - not the best one to start with. But anything was better than the noose of numbness that had nearly strangled him. He sat down on the cabin roof to catch his breath and think. He couldn't let these reborn emotions control him - he would have to take charge and channel them into constructive action. He needed a plan.
