Swordbearer

By Vega

Standard Disclaimers apply

Part 19: "...Worse Than Death"

November 1st, 2006 – 4:13am

If there's anything that's worse than dying, it's the coming back.

At first it's the tickle at the bottom of you mind, like a thought or a sound you think you acknowledge in your sleep. Only you're dead.

Thoughts return first, usually something to the effect of: "Dying, dying, ouch, ouch, ouch!"

Which is usually swiftly followed by: "Oh, wait. That's done. Already died. Oh, oh damn. And here's ... the ... pain!"

A wave of burning electric agony bursts downward from your head, arcing across numbed and cold nerve endings, shocking them back to life. The pain makes your internal organs squeeze. Your stomach heaves. Your heart twists and jumps – once, twice, and suddenly it's beating again.

The congealed blood in your veins is forcibly jiggled, shoved, moving half-hard through tubes of unprepared tissue. It takes several thumping, fist-like beats for you blood to heat enough to liquefy again, and those first seconds are an anguish of shifting shards under your skin.

The chill of the grave is shoved off your flesh by the burning fire of your engines re-starting, prickling the skin and raising tight, itchy goosebumps.

The last thing to happen is the desperate inflation of the lungs, clearing out the stagnant air of what may have remained of your death-groan. The air hurts, slamming into the brittle dead tissue, jolting it back into pink operation. This results in the characteristic gasping first breath of reviving Immortals.

The pain of revival is usually so intense that it arches the back and rolls the eyes of anyone reawakening.

The only think that I've experienced that hurts worse than either dying or reviving is the Quickening.

Truly, I don't get Phoey. Why would anyone in their sane minds want to go through this?

Being Immortal was highly overrated.

Garret had thoughtfully provided a dust bin.

I gasped, sat up, and puked my guts out.

When I had finished spewing sour food and the lingering traces of poison into the garbage, I lay back down. I pressed one hand over my mouth, wiping away any lingering traces of vomit, and one hand on my forehead, willing the coolness of my formerly dead skin to fight off the sudden burn of illness.

I groaned.

It made me feel marginally better, so I groaned again, louder.

"Here," Garret said.

I cracked an eye. He was hovering above me, holding a paper cup of water. I sat up again, carefully, and gratefully took it, sipping slowly. He looked about as bad as I felt, skin pale still but a high flush of adrenaline sitting like a flag across his cheeks and nose.

He looked half scared to death.

I wondered briefly if the fear was from watching me die, or from having turned somebody's hand into so much hamburger.

The remembered image of Grey Suit's jumbled appendage made my still-delicate stomach do flip-flops and I shoved the mental image aside.

Garret moved the dustbin into the hall, then came back into the room and sat on the ratty couch beside me.

"Why are we in the history lounge?" I asked around slow, swishing swallows.

"Easiest place to move you with a couch."

"And the cops?"

"Gone already. You've been down for about five hours."

"Loverly."

"I gave them my statement. Didn't tell them the bit where I shot him, though. They want you to go down to the station when you feel well enough."

"I'm surprised they didn't drag my corpse down there and wait for me to wake up themselves."

He shrugged. "They tried. I told them I was your Watcher and I would take care of you instead. Cops tend to do whatever I say when an Immortal's involved and I flash my tattoo."

I raised an eyebrow at him. "Anything?"

"Oh, yeah," he said, scratching said tattoo nervously. "The number of parking tickets I've been able to get out of is astonishing."

"Fink." I looked around at all the greenery. In the quiet hours of the early morning, the History lounge seemed ...sad. Lonely and worn down. There were only the two of us in it, and the plants, and it felt too empty. I was used to four or five heatedly debating students in here at any one time, trying to keep their voices down for the sake of a napper. "... where's Adam?"

Garret sighed heavily and ran a hand through his hair, displacing his dark curls. "Still missing."

"Anyone go after them?"

"I told the cops which way they went. Best I could do."

"... think he's dead?"

" ... maybe."

I set aside the empty paper cup, wiped my mouth again, and startled to unbuckle my hip sheath. It was digging. My sword was sitting on the scuffed coffee table. Grey Suit's blood had dried into a crusty, rust-coloured stain on the tip. Garret hadn't cleaned it off.

"So," I said conversationally, "that's another doozy of a secret." My tone was light, but there was a vibrating undertone of fury.

Now that the pain had passed and the jumble of my last pre-death memories had stopped swirling around like drunken leprechauns and started to settle, I remembered what Grey Suit had been screaming about.

Wiping Immortals off the face of the planet. Genocide. Full-scale, indiscriminate. And he wanted Garret to help him.

"We're not going to get into this shit again, are we?" Garret groaned. "I'm not like him and I never wanted to be and I didn't think you needed to know 'cause I didn't think he'd ever do anything as jack-assed as this, okay? He used to be just a talker. Now he's turned into a do-er, and I just didn't expect it."

"Okay, okay," I said. "Just... we gotta find him. We gotta find Adam."

"The cops are looking."

"That's not good enough!"

The ringing shout started me, and I was the one who'd said it. I wanted Adam back and I wanted him back now. Safe. Head still attached.

"What, Abby! Are you gonna charge in there like a knight and rescue your lover? He'll have others. If not Professor Martin, the at least other Watchers who've joined his side. People who know how to kill you for real."

I stood, brushing the pavement dust and grit off my clothes irritably. "Everyone in the world knows how to kill me, now," I spat. "Thanks to you guys. Fucking blood – it'll never come out of this shirt."

"Get it dry cleaned," Garret snapped. He stood, too, and grabbed my hands to stop my picking at the rusty dots. He folded them in his own. "Let the police handle this, Abby."

"Don't you feel any responsibility for it?" I asked, and the churning soup of guilt and betrayal and hot fury that had taken up residence in my gut since I'd first seen Garret's tattoo was boiling.

I was so angry.

But I was so sick of being angry. Especially at Garret. I wanted my best friend back. It didn't mean I felt any less deceived by his failure to tell me that he was my Watcher – it just meant that I had sucked up my hurt pride and realized that I had no reason to hate Garret specifically, though I could still take issue with the Peeping Tom Sickos.

Garret was a Watcher, but that wasn't the be–all-and-end-all of his personality, his existence. The real Garret, I thought, was the person he had been before October 17th. That Garret, my friend, hadn't been a lie. He was still allergic to cats, still hated romantic comedies, still licked the icing out of the centre of the Oreos before eating the cookies. Still wore the same stupid graphic print tee-shirts and still let his eyes follow after a particularly nice female ass.

And I still cared for Adam, didn't I? Even though Adam had been a Watcher in his mortal life. I could still care for Garret, if I let myself. As a friend.

Which, of course, opened up all other sorts of doors, and led to various melanges of complications.

I groaned and rubbed the bridge of my nose, pinching between my eyes. The nice thing about being Immortal that headaches were mercifully brief. Garret was watching me. He still hadn't answered.

"Well," I asked. "Don't you think this is partially your fault?"

"What?" Garret asked, aghast. "You're blaming me?"

"Partially," I said. "You could have warned us this guy was in town. You should have, as a Watcher."

"I didn't know. It's not like he dropped by to hand me his schedule for the next two weeks. You're being unfair."

"He came after us because of you – he wanted to get at you."

Garret recaptured my hands. "He went after you because he wanted to provoke me into joining him. With you gone, I'd have no reason to stay outside of his cause. He thinks that we're lovers, that you're what keeps me from being his groupie. Failing that, he aims to kill me. Adam was sucked into this because he was with you, so you are just as responsible for his death as I am. If he dies."

I pouted. I wanted to argue. I wanted to shout at Garret just for the sake of shouting at him. But we had done that enough in the past few weeks. Besides, he had a point. Fucker. "I hate it when you're right."

I let him lead me back to the couch. Garret wrapped his arms around my shoulders and I accepted the comforting hug.

"I am not going to sit here and do nothing, you know," I said.

"I know," he whispered to the top of my head. "But, I'm going to share my doozy secret now."

"Great. So who's the psycho?"

Garret sighed heavily again. "Back at the academy, he was my field instructor."

"Field Instructor?"

"The guy who taught me how to put the 'Peeping' in 'Peeping Tom Sicko'. You know, how to tail without being seen, keeping accurate time records, stuff like that. He was a good guy."

"Our definitions of 'good' must be wildly different." He playfully smacked the top of my head. "Ow, okay. So what happened?"

"His wife died. She was gunned down in the courtyard of the European Headquarters, in Paris. She was the head of one of the Continental Field Divisions."

I frowned. "Gunned down? Why?"

I felt Garret shrug again. I reached out and picked at the dried blood splotches on his jeans. "The Immortal who did it wanted to wipe out all the Watchers because some renegades had killed his Immortal wife. This guy did it because he thought all Immortals were perversions of nature."

I sat up and rubbed my temples. "Whoa, okay. Pause. Let me get this straight..." I began ticking things off on my fingers to try to get them straight. "Psycho wants to kill all Immortals because his wife was killed by an Immortal who killed a bunch of Watchers because a different bunch of Watchers beheaded his wife, cause they thought Immortals suck."

"Yup."

"Dude," I said, letting my hands drop to my lap. "That's twisted."

"Horton was the stat of a lot of bad things," Garrett admitted.

"Ah. Horton. So that's what Adam was talking about. He knew." I scratched my cheek. "So, where do you enter into this equation?"

Garret sat back and ruffled the hair on the back of his neck, a nervous habit of his that I hadn't seen him do since the Vikings final exams in second year. "Well, my Prof went nuts. Started to recruit noobs from his classes, people off the street, zealots, anything and everyone he could turn to his cause. He did a lot of blowing hot air, never got more than four or five people at a time, and he lost them fairly quick, too, so I never worried about him."

"Didn't the higher-ups do something?"

"They fired him."

I snorted. "Hardly conducive to preventing a war between us."

He made a face. "They had a lot to deal with at the time. There was the fallout from loosing all the Field Heads, and they had to switch around all the headquarters and move the libraries and stuff. Not long after that, Meyers happened."

"Huh. So, psycho tried to convert you?"

"Unsuccessfully. I told him to shove it, and transferred to the Canadian Branch to get away from his hoopla. Then I took a field assignment as far away from him as I could get."

"Which was?"

The corner of his mouth quirked up. "You."

That word hung in the air between us for a long moment.

I broke it with a hushed whisper. "Where will he have taken Adam?"

Garret shook his head slightly. "Abby..."

"I owe it to him, Garret. I can't leave him. Adam is in danger because of me. He's my boyfriend. God, Garret, he's so young. I don't even know if he can fight. He doesn't deserve to die for this, and certainly not at only seventy years old."

Garret hadn't liked when I'd said the word 'boyfriend'. His face got all twisty and sour.

"Garret, you know I'm right. Let's just... put what's between us aside right now."

"Yes. Right," he said between his teeth. "Aside."

He dug into his blazer pocket and retrieved one of the bulges. It was his cell phone. I assumed the other was the revolver. He flipped it open and punched a few buttons, then showed me the screen.

On it was a single text message. "ST. CATHARINES FORMAL COMBAT AREA. NOW. LET'S FINISH THIS." The time-stamp said 12:07.

I stood up.

"You are an unbelievable bastard," I hissed, scrambling to put my hip sheath back on.

"I didn't want you to go," he said plaintively. He rose too, slowly. "I was going to call the cops, tell them, when you left. I don't want you to die, Abby."

"So you'd let Adam die instead!" I slid my rapier home and it clicked into place with an annoyed snap. "That is so shallow!"

"Abby--!"

I turned to him, my face a grim mask of stony resolve. "I am going. Period."

Garret reached behind the couch and pulled out Adam's abused Ivanhoe. "Fine," he said. "But not alone. He texted me, anyway."

I frowned. "How did he get your cell number?"

"Watcher's database."

I scoffed. Then I eyed the Garret's grip on the hilt of the sword. His thumb would be broken if he ever actually tried to slash at someone that way. "Do you even know how to use that thing?"

He allowed himself a nervous grin. "Pointy end goes into the other guy?"

I snorted. "Antonio you are not."

He reached into his other pocket and withdrew the gun.

"That's better," I said. "Let's go kick some ass." I turned towards the door.

"Abby," he said, looking as if he wanted to grab me, but wasn't sure how to do it with two fistfuls of weapon. "I ... no matter what happens... if you end up with Adam or... or dead, or I die, or... or whatever... I still love you."

I shifted uncomfortably, not sure how to respond to this. "Garret--"

"I just wanted to say it," he interrupted hastily.

"Um. Okay."

"Okay."

We stared at each other for a second.

Then as one we left.

..and how absurd is it that we had to call a taxi to take us to our potentially gristly deaths?

Well, it's not like either Garret or I had cars. And the busses didn't run past 11:45pm.

Damn busses.

If I had chosen the University of Toronto instead of Brock, we could have taken a bus.

The cab driver gave our determined glares a fisheyed glance and wisely decided to say nothing. He probably thought we were two Immortals who wanted to duke it out but were stingy enough to want to share cabfare.

Hn.

And in the back of my mind, I wondered what Donnell would have to say about all of this.

Nothing, probably.

Donnell was dead.