"The Oak and the Ash" (2/9) by Parda August 2004 CHAPTER 2 - MEMORIES When Dr. Alexandra Elise Johnson (respected archeologist, equestrienne, and star pitcher for the high school softball state championship team two years in a row) had married Connor MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod (antique dealer, eccentric recluse, and oh, by the way, a 476-year-old Immortal who was in the habit of living, eating, and sleeping with his sword), she had known it wouldn't be easy. But she hadn't imagined it would be quite so hard. Not that they didn't have a good marriage, and a good life, all in all. Connor was rich--very rich. Filthy rich, as some liked to say. Compound interest and long-term investments can do that for a person who lives for hundreds of years. Alex was rich, too, in her own right. Connor had given her a fortune when they had gotten engaged. The money helped, no point in pretending that it didn't. The majority of fights in a marriage are about money, and Alex and Connor never fought about that at all. They owned an entire building in New York City, a farm in the Highlands of Scotland, a townhouse in Edinburgh, vacation cottages and condos here and there. Factories, computer companies, whisky distilleries (an excellent long-term investment, Connor liked to say, with other returns than money), race-horses, orange groves, mushroom farms, shipyards--Connor knew the value of diversifying. All that money paid for weekend trips to New York and Paris, month-long vacations in the Mediterranean or New England or Australia, lovely jewelry (gold and sapphires to match Alex's hair and eyes), a stable of horses (long-legged beauties who whickered in welcome and nuzzled for apples), and gifts and flowers and clothes. Household help was a given; Alex hadn't had to scrub a toilet in years, though she still did on occasion, just to remind herself of who she really was and what she'd been: a normal middle-class girl. Oh, they squabbled about some things, neatness for one. "It's a good thing you're an archeologist," Connor would often say, surveying the piles of papers and mounds of books in her office, "or you'd never find anything in this mess. You must like to dig." Which, of course, she did. They argued about his sexism and outmoded ways of looking at the world. "Protectiveness," Connor liked to call it. "Caution. Chivalry. Common sense." And sometimes (often) it was, but Alex chafed under his autocratic highhandedness just the same. So he swore at her for being stubborn, and she yelled at him for being arrogant, but they both did it out of love, and they both knew it, so they tolerated each other better than they might have done. They had children, lovely children. John, a fine son from one of Connor's earlier marriages (Alex was Connor's third wife, which was in itself a challenge, living with--competing with--ghosts by night and by day). Twins of their own, a girl and a boy. Sara Heather, bright-eyed and stubborn, chattering and observant, dancing her way through life. Colin Duncan, persistent and quiet, slower than his sister perhaps, deeper anyway. Love, yes, they had that aplenty. Alex loved Connor deeply, and she knew without a doubt that he loved her, adored her, would die--or kill--to protect her. She knew that too, without a doubt. She'd seen the blood on his sword, and on him. She'd welcomed him home after a kill, after he'd fought to the death and won. She had held him in her arms after he'd beheaded a body and then ripped out a soul, knowing this man who killed so often and so easily would never hurt her. She'd taken him to bed, or rather she had let him take her, for it was all taking and no giving at times such as those, when he still trembled with the energy arcing through his body, when he fought his way back to life after a fight to the death, when he was just so fucking glad to be alive and to be loved, and to be able to love in return. Later, after he'd slept, after the blood was washed away, she knew he'd be again the tender and generous lover she loved so well. And all of that was fine. The problem, Alex had slowly come to believe, was Cassandra, who had come into their lives one warm summer day, two years after Alex and Connor had married, when Alex had been pregnant with the twins, and John was a boy of not-quite-thirteen. Cassandra the Immortal, the Witch of Donan Woods, a prophetess of old, ancient and beautiful and fey. Cassandra, Connor's teacher and former lover. Aunt Cass, friend and mentor to their children. Cass, Alex's best friend. "Let's go dancing!" Cass would say. Or, "Let's go to a movie! Let's go shopping! Let's go!" and Alex would go, gladly, to the clubs and shops and museums, to the movies and concerts and plays ... laughing, playing with the children, making unbelievably bad puns, staying up all night talking and getting tipsy on wine. They went skiing together, too, and Alex pushed Cass to try the more difficult slopes. "Perhaps tomorrow," Cass said. "I'm still getting warmed up." "Oh, come on," Alex urged. "The weather might be bad tomorrow, and it's glorious today. Besides, what's the worst that can happen? You'll break a leg and have to wait five minutes for it to heal?" That did it. Cass stood there with her mouth open, then smiled even as she shook her head and sighed. "Right." They took the T-lift to the other side of the hill. "Oh my," Cass breathed when they stood at the crest, looking down over the white expanse, broken here and there with great, jagged ridges of gray and black rock. Alex grinned. "We could have started all the way at the top," she said, motioning to the trails still higher up the hill. Cass gave her a dirty look, and Alex said, unrepentant, "It's the only the first bit that's tricky. It gets easier." "You mean it goes from Very Difficult to Difficult," Cass corrected. "I can read the signs." "You can do it," Alex said cheerfully, and with a quick shove of her poles, she was off, knees bent and arms tucked for even greater speed, skimming over the snow, flying sometimes, exulting in the combination of glorious freedom and demanding control. Alex waited at the bottom. Cass arrived some minutes later, covered with spangles of snow. Her sunglasses seemed a little bent. "Fun?" Alex inquired brightly. "Oh, yes," Cass agreed, brushing off her legs and then ruefully regarding her knee. "I think it was only a sprain." She looked up at Alex and grinned. "But you were right. It was fun. I'm ready for more!" They skied at a more sedate pace to a different chair lift, and went back to the top again. The wind blew cold, fresh and exhilarating. Alex reached into her parka pocket and pulled out a Chap Stick to moisten her lips. She offered it to Cass, who shook her head and kept studying the terrain. "This one isn't so bad," Cass said, sounding relieved. "It's only difficult, instead of very." Alex pointed to the right. "How about Allison's Route, between those rocks?" "How about it?" Cass muttered, not sounding very happy now. "Wimp," Alex declared. Cass gave her another dirty look. "I'll race you," she challenged. Alex smiled. Cassandra might be undeniably gorgeous, psychically gifted, musically talented, and eternally Immortal, but Alex could beat her any day on skis, and Alex enjoyed that for all it was worth. "Sure," she said and counted, "One, two, three!" and was off. Alex won the race, and every other race that afternoon, too. It was a wonderful day, and they had many other wonderful times through the years. So many years. "Have you ever considered a rinse, Madame?" Henri had asked her at the salon, when Alex had taken Sara (who was twelve and wanted to be twenty) there for a fancy haircut. Henri had lifted Alex's once-gold hair in his fingers. "A rinse will even out the white and the gray." She'd said no, but a year and a half later, after she'd watched Cass braiding her long auburn tresses, Alex had gone back and said yes. She never told Connor of her twice-monthly visits to the salon, even though he colored his own hair gray. Her hair looked dull silver now. She wasn't sure what it color it really was underneath all the dye. She wasn't sure who she was. "You tell your daughter to marry that boyfriend of hers," the waitress instructed Alex while they watched Connor help Sara with her coat on the other side of the room. "Not many young men have such nice manners today. I saw him pull out that chair out for you. Why, even when you and I were young, there weren't many gentlemen like that about." "No," Alex murmured, looking at the other woman. "Patricia" her nametag read, a plump woman in the blue uniform of the establishment. Her kind and faded blue eyes had crow's feet at the corners, and deeper wrinkles chased around her mouth--a cheerful, engaging face under short-cropped gray hair. A grandmotherly type, Alex would have said, and thought no more, but "you and I" Patricia had said, and neither of them was young anymore. "Do you have children?" Alex asked. Patricia smiled happily, revealing bright white teeth much too regular to be real. "Three, and two granddaughters and then a grandson on the way. My oldest boy is thirty-seven now. Do you have grandchildren?" "Oh, no," Alex replied quickly, in some surprise. "Sara's not quite eighteen." "And she's your oldest?" Patricia asked, equally taken aback, then added with another smile, "There now. I guess not everybody starts as young as I did, getting married at twenty and having my first within the year." Fifty-eight, Alex calculated. This grandmotherly woman was fifty-eight, six years older than herself. "Ready, Mom?" Sara called from across the room, and Connor was waiting, too. Alex smiled automatically at the waitress and said goodbye. That evening, on the walk home through the frigid winter air, Alex watched her daughter and her man. Sara was cheerful, laughing, full of life and promises, butterfly-bright and free, still resting on the cocoon of childhood, yet poised to fly, eager and almost ready to test her strength on the winds of the world. Connor strode next to her proudly, her arm tucked around his, his head bent slightly to listen to her plans. Alex walked on Connor's other side, her arm also entwined, the quiet strength of her husband familiar and reassuring and real. But other women walked inside her--lived inside her--the prospective mother-in-law, the grandmother, the great-grandmother ... the little old lady hobbling along, toothless, incontinent, and bald. She was pregnant with death. Death lived inside Sara, too, and inside Sara's children, and inside Sara's children's children, all as-yet-unborn. The fatal parasite was passed from generation to generation, a long-dormant egg, a writhing white maggot that devoured you alive from the inside, leaching color from your hair, boring into your bones and sucking the marrow, oozing into your teeth and eyes and ears, growing until your withered sack of skin split open in an eruption of decay, growing until you gave birth to death on your own deathday. Alex knew the useless husk of her body would be properly buried and truly mourned. Connor loved her, would always love her, as he would always love Heather and Brenda, his other two wives. But eventually Connor would move on, would have to move on, and he would walk with a different young beauty by his side, again and again and again. Yet Cassandra was waiting. Cassandra would be there. And that was good, Alex reminded herself--tried to convince herself--as they walked down the hill to their home. Connor shouldn't be alone, not through all the long years of immortality. She shouldn't be selfish. Duncan and Cassandra would be there for Connor, and Alex didn't want Connor to be alone. They would help him, heal him ... Love him. Someday, Cassandra and Connor would be lovers again. Alex knew it, was certain of it. She'd known it for years. Maybe not for decades to come, maybe not for centuries, but Cassandra could wait. No maggot of death lived inside her. Cassandra was immortal. She could wait forever. A thought came winging, sudden and vicious, and Alex welcomed it home: Didn't Cassandra ever get impatient, waiting around for the mortal lovers to die and get the fuck out of her way? Sara asked a question, and Alex peered around Connor at their beautiful, young daughter. "What did you say?" Alex asked, and both Sara and Connor laughed aloud. "Oh, Mom," Sara said, still giggling. "We were just talking about Aunt Rachel's hearing aid, and how nice it is that she doesn't say 'What did you say?' all the time anymore." ~~~~~ A few days later, Sara asked to borrow one of Alex's dresses for the annual New Year's party at their Edinburgh home, and Alex agreed. Sara looked exquisite in Alex's aqua ball gown, better than Alex ever had. The velvet emphasized the smoothness of Sara's skin, and the color brought out the turquoise of Sara's eyes. "Can I borrow jewelry, too?" Sara asked eagerly, and Alex stood back with a smile and got out of the way. "Connor and Sara dance well together, don't they?" Cassandra observed on New Year's Eve. Alex nodded absently, watching her husband whirl her daughter around the room. "They make a handsome couple," Alex agreed. Sara's dress was a vibrant swirl of aqua against the black of Connor's tuxedo. She'd let her honey-brown hair grow past her shoulders again, and she was wearing it in a sophisticated French twist that made her look unnervingly mature. Duncan's wife, Susan, had chosen to pull back her still-red curls with a dark green ribbon, but the girlish style couldn't change the fact that Susan was forty-three years old, anymore than Alex's strict (obsessive) regimen of exercise, diet, skin care, and regular visits to the salon could hide--or change--the fact that she had just turned fifty-two ... and was growing older every day. Cass tapped her lightly on the hand, and Alex turned in surprise. "What did you say?" Alex asked, because Cass was obviously waiting for something. "I asked if there were more people here this year," Cass repeated patiently, and as she turned to indicate the dancers, she casually tossed the shining cascade of her waist-length hair off one bare shoulder. Her gown of deep green silk was shot through with copper and bronze and gold, and Cassandra shimmered as she moved, butterfly beautiful, eternally young. "It seems like quite a crowd." "Yes, I think so," Alex replied vaguely and turned away from the immortal woman. Sara and Connor did indeed waltz well together, a lovely couple, a beautiful young woman in a young man's arms. Alex wanted to look away, but couldn't. Over the years, she had become used to hating Cassandra, now and again, sometimes in dull resentment, sometimes with piercing pain. Alex wasn't used to hating her own daughter in exactly the same way. "Alex?" Cass asked, sounding concerned. "I'm not feeling very good, Cass," Alex announced abruptly. "I'm going upstairs." Ten minutes later, Connor came into their sitting room, and Alex immediately closed the family photo album she was holding on her lap. "She told you to come looking for me, didn't she?" Alex asked him, and Connor shrugged, a full-body movement for him, involving his shoulders and his eyebrows and the corner of his mouth, an endearing and familiar mannerism, his silent and more subdued version of the snort of reluctant admission. Cassandra had named those snorts of his over four centuries ago, when she and Connor had been lovers--the first time they had been lovers. How long would it take, Alex wondered, for Cassandra to make her move once the mortal wife was dead? A century? A decade? A month? Connor sat beside her on the couch, and Alex set the book--and the feelings--aside. Connor loved her now. That was all that mattered. He would never betray her, never leave her, and Cass would never do anything to come between them. Alex knew that. Cass was her friend. And Sara was simply growing up, as all young women grow up. It couldn't--shouldn't!--be stopped. Stop being selfish and paranoid, Alex told herself sternly. Stop this right now. "Cassandra said you weren't feeling good," Connor said in concern. "I'm just a little tired, Connor. A bit of a headache." She smiled at him. "It's a big party. Too much noise." His hand slipped under her hair to gently massage the back of her neck, and Alex relaxed under his touch and closed her eyes. "Does that help?" he asked softly, and the quiet rumble of his voice was yet another endearing and familiar part of the man she loved. "Mmm-mm," she murmured, leaning forward and bowing her head to give him more room. He used both hands now, the cushions of the couch moving under them as he shifted his weight to get behind her. The tips of his fingers grazed the sensitive places behind her ears, and Alex exhaled softly as shivers of warmth cascaded down her spine. Connor kissed the nape of her neck, and that felt even better, but Alex pulled away. "We have a house full of guests, Connor," she reminded him. "I told Duncan to take over the host's duties," Connor said easily. "They won't miss us." His hands slid down to her shoulders, his fingertips just reaching the neckline of her gown, right above the top curve of her breasts, and he kissed the back of her neck again. Alex placed her hands on top of his, stopping them, and Connor stopped as well. "Right," he said, after a moment. "You have a headache." "I'm sorry," Alex said. "I know that sounds so--" "It's OK," Connor said, leaning back and pulling her with him, and Alex relaxed completely in the comforting circle of his arms, her head on his shoulder, her legs intertwined with his. They lay there, not speaking, content to listen to the familiar sounds of breath and heartbeat. "I love you," she told him, and it was more true now than it had ever been before. His arms tightened in a hug, and he kissed the top of her hair. "I love you, too, Alex," he said simply. That was all, and it was everything. She blinked back fiercely hot tears and kissed his hand. Then she closed her eyes again, content and at peace. Ten minutes later came chanting from downstairs: "Ten, nine, eight ..." She rolled over to face her husband, and she kissed his eyes on the counts of four and three, and his nose on the count of two. She kissed his mouth as the crowd on the floor beneath them shouted, "One!" and erupted into cheers of "Happy New Year!" Then a frenzy of horn-blowing and foot-stomping shook the house. Their kiss lasted until the tumult below had died down, and the bagpipes had started in on Ould Lang Syne. "Maybe you should get headaches more often," Connor said, when she finally pulled away. "You're good medicine," she told him, licking her lips and tasting the whisky from his. "Tasty." "Does that mean I go down smooth?" he asked. "Smooth and easy," she agreed, leaning forward to kiss him again. Connor held her off him, his hands firm around her upper arms. "If you're not feeling good, Alex ..." "I'm fine, Connor," she insisted, and she was--now. "It was just too much noise, that's all. Besides," she said as she moved against him, ever so slowly, her leg between his, her breasts against his chest, "I think it's time you unwrapped your birthday present." Connor's hands moved lower, down her back and then lower still, pulling her against him until Alex couldn't move slowly anymore. "Silk dress this year, isn't it?" he asked, as he gathered the fabric in his hands. "Mmm-mm," she managed, and then Connor kissed her, and Alex felt wonderful, everywhere. ~~~~~ (continued in part 3)