Outside NYPD 11th Precinct
11th Street, New York, NY
Monday, July 23, 2001
11:13 am

Even though she was already inside, he still moved in the shadows. He always did. Always a discreet distance from her. Never seen or heard. Unless he wanted to be. That, and the few times the Witchblade had alerted her to his presence before he could employ his disappearing act. Sometimes he wondered if he could do it completely. Disappear. There were so few traces of him in the world as it was. What would happen if he erased them? Would Irons still be able to find him? Still have a hold over him?

But he couldn't even try. Even if it was somehow possible to break Irons' hold on him, break away from all his Black Dragon training, manipulation and conditioning, what was the point? He didn't even know if his name was his own.

Christian, my baby. He could hear the softly husky female voice every time he closed his eyes. His mother. It was how he knew that Irons' lie that he came from genetic manipulation of Elizabeth Bronte's stem cells was, in fact, a lie. The voice in his head belonged to his mother, and she sounded nothing like Elizabeth. Try as he might he could never remember anything else. Not a scent, not a single image of the woman who might have loved him.

The little boy inside him tipped his felt cowboy hat at a rakish angle and stated matter-of-factly, "Mothers always love their children".

But the adult part of him, the larger part for too many years now, sneered cynically. He had seen the world. Seen parents abandon and even kill their own children, seen women rip unborn babies from their own wombs simply because they didn't want the responsibility. He had never lain with a woman. The very thought that it might result in his child being destroyed without his knowledge more than successfully curbed his baser instincts. Not that he thought he deserved to bring a child into the world, he had taken too many lives out of it to be worthy of that. But he admitted, only to himself, that the thought was a pleasant one.

He climbed up to his usual perch and sat down. He could see both entrances to the 11th Precinct from his spot, the fire escape of the warehouse across the street from the precinct. He settled back against the rung above and behind the one he was sitting on.

She would be in there for hours. Dante had been giving her more and more paper work, the amount seeming to increase exponentially every time she used the Witchblade to solve a case. Not for the first time he wondered. Could he handle the Witchblade? Irons had never allowed him to even touch the priceless treasure. If he had it on, even for a second, he would use it to find out the truth. About himself. Where he came from. If his parents were alive.

So many times he had thought about searching for them. But where could he even start? He had studied with and surpassed masters of so many subjects, yet he knew nothing that truly mattered. His name. His past. His family. Where he was from. Even his birthday was a mystery. He always assumed he was around 8 when Irons had sent him to Europe, which would make him 31 now. 23 years lost. And that wasn't counting the years before then that he simply couldn't remember.

Even if he somehow managed to escape from his life as Irons' assassin-on-a-leash, he would still have nothing that mattered. Perhaps eventually, when Irons had Sara Pezzini and the Witchblade under his control, he would be free to go. Maybe Irons would even tell him everything he knew about his past. Maybe when he knew his past, he could look for a future. His thoughts wandered back a few minutes. Would he be able to find a woman willing and able to put up with his quirks? Would he have a child, or maybe even more than one?

The muscles in his face felt funny for a moment and he realized it was because he had just smiled. Shocked, he blinked and looked down. He couldn't recall the last time he had truly smiled. It certainly must have been before he had known Irons. He had smirked often enough, but a real smile, no. Tilting his head back, he closed his eyes and concentrated on what his child might look like.

Hope and tenderness clawed their way up from the deepest part of him, the part no one could touch, not even Irons, and he smiled once again. But an image of a child of his refused to surface. Perhaps it was because he had no idea what the child's mother would look like. Perhaps it was because he would never have a child.

All too soon, reality intruded and he stared down at the precinct's parking lot. Something was wrong, but he couldn't tell what quite yet. The hairs on the back of his neck stood up and Sara walked into the parking lot, already putting on her motorcycle helmet. This was unexpected. He jumped over the side of the fire escape and landed three stories down on the sidewalk softly, silently. He watched from across the street as she pulled up behind a squad car that was waiting for a break in traffic. He was just about to go to his car when a movement at the back of the police lot caught his eye.

A dark sedan was aiming for Sara's Buell full speed. She was about to be crushed and she didn't even seem to hear the car. Just as his own reflexes kicked in and he began to run toward Sara, hoping to alert her to the imminent danger behind her, a blur shaped roughly like a person dashed through the parking lot into the path of the oncoming car.

The person's speed was so great that he wondered if he would be able to keep up in a race. What in the name of all that is unholy is going on? No one is faster than the Black Dragons! And none of the remaining three are in the city. The figure stopped directly in front of the oncoming vehicle, and she braced herself.

A woman! Maybe there had been a female division of the Black Dragons that Irons had never told him about. He wasn't exactly kept well-informed about Irons' various projects, unless he had to clean up the outcome. The car raced at the woman at fifty miles an hour and Nottingham forced himself not to turn away from the gory scene that was sure to follow.

He was suitably impressed when the woman slammed her hands, which were covered by something that was a shiny gray color, on the edge of the hood of the car and dug her heels in. She was obviously wearing some kind of metal soles, because sparks flew from the contact between her feet and the ground. She threw her head back, evidently in concentration, and a few feet later the car's tires popped and the engine whined to a stop. She had to be a Black Dragon. No one else could do what she had just done. It made sense that there would have been a female division, Irons thought women were easier to control. His master thought that was why the Witchblade chose women. Not because they were more "elemental" as he had once told Sara, but because they could be easily manipulated.

The woman half-collapsed on the hood of the car. A man got out and took off running. The woman heaved herself up and took off after him, following him into an alley behind the precinct. Nottingham took off after them both. The man seemed to have more than normal abilities too, but Nottingham had a feeling that he would catch up with them. The man wasn't as fast as the woman, and she was slower since stopping the car. He didn't stop to wonder why neither Sara nor the squad car in front of her had noticed the drama that had played out behind them, nearly into them.

As he neared the alley, Nottingham slowed to a walk and crept to peer, hidden, around the corner of the building. He watched as the woman, who now had bare feet and hands, grabbed the back of the man's coat and proceeded to slam him bodily into the wall. For a fleeting instant, Nottingham wished it were him. Where had that come from? She had a nice body, what he could see of it beneath the bulky sweats she was wearing, but so what. Plenty of women had nice bodies. Sara was certainly well put together, but despite the fact that he liked to torment her by teasing her, he had never wished she would press her body against his.

"What the hell did you think you were doing?"

The woman had spoken, and Nottingham was inordinately pleased that her voice was soft, husky and somehow musical all at the same time.

"I was trying to fix the problem, Li..."

The woman clamped a hand over the man's mouth. She took a step back from him and hissed, "Don't. You are to call me Mac while we're here, you got that, Marcus?"

Marcus had the audacity to glare at her.

"It's not as if just hearing your name is going to let her know who you are. And even if it did, I'm not going to be talking to her."

"Just do as I say! The only reason you're here is because you said you'd help me. And as for fixing the problem, how is killing my mother going to fix anything?"

Her mother? Who was this Mac person and why did she think Sara Pezzini was her mother? Insanity was one of the side effects of the Black Dragon drugs, but thinking someone who was only a few years older than you was capable of having given birth to you went a little beyond megalomania.

Marcus raised his voice back, "If she dies now, you'll never be born, the destruction of the world won't go down and everything will be the way it should be."

That explained it. She was from the future. Nottingham had no trouble believing it, after all, he had seen, experienced and done stranger things. He had long thought that time travel was possible. But how would preventing the young woman's birth save the world from destruction? It would be a shame if she didn't exist. Then Nottingham shook his head at his own thoughts. By the time she was old enough for him, he'd be much too old for her. Not to mention the fact that Sara Pezzini would never let him anywhere near a child of hers.

Mac paced back and forth a few steps and shook her head.

"We are not going to kill my mother. It's bad enough that Irons killed my father and took me away from her as soon as I was born. Even Nottingham died defending them. There was too much death the first time around, I want things to be different."

Nottingham blinked at hearing of his own death defending Sara Pezzini and her future husband. But who was Mac's father? Conchobar was dead, had been for almost six months. If he were Mac's father, Sara would have been showing for awhile already. Then it hit him - Mac - McCartey! The surfer was Mac's father. Nottingham knew the blonde man liked Sara, but he had thought Sara only viewed Jake as something similar to a kid brother. It just went to show how little he knew of love.

"She spent what was left of her life trying to at least see me once, which she never did. She suffered for most of her life before I happened! And then when she tried to break into the Centre to save me she was killed and the Witchblade fell into the wrong hands and everything went to hell. And you want to kill her? I don't think so. Killing Irons maybe, but not my mother."

Marcus made a dismissive noise in his throat. "No one has the power to kill Irons, not even you. That we know of anyway. Besides, how would you get past Nottingham? Supposedly, he was better than the rest of us put together. And if we kill her, she won't have you and we can enjoy the month we have here."

Mac made a sound like a growl and clamped her hand around Marcus' throat, lifting him a few inches off the ground. Very slow and with deadly calm, she told him, "Go near my mother again and you'll wish it was you that will no longer exist in a month's time."

She released Marcus, whose face had turned blue, and turned away from him. The man slumped to the floor and took a few gasping breaths before pushing off the ground and walking down to the other end of the alley and disappearing. Mac continued to hang her head for a few minutes, facing away from the corner where Nottingham remained, silently waiting.