fic: Wotan's Day 10/16
Title: Wotan's Day
Fandoms: Highlander, X-files, Invisible Man
Rating:NC-17 overall, NC-17 this chapter.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.
Background:The year is 2023. Methos, the oldest of the Immortals in Highlander, was living as a corporate lawyer in Denver. Alexander Krycek, the double-dealing ratboy of the X-Files, was living there as an art dealer, running a gallery in Aurora, Colorado. Mulder was retired, somewhere suburban. Conspiracies and secret organizations begin to collide.
Summary: People start to dieget killed. What, you thought this was a nice story?
Chapter 1
(Chapters link sequentially from there.)
Chapter 9 (posted late)
Chapter 10
There wasn't any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous... fatal, in the end.
Door into Summer
Mulder didn't like the day of downtime, and he didn't like the fact that Nield was not answering her phone. He drove with Johnson in a rented jeep provided by some of her tribe, as she still called them. They were moving in now, armed with bombs and other incendiary devices procured in part by Krycek.
There was no stealth in their approach, but they were relying on Corrivubias' intelligence that the clones formed their own guard, with only the Syndicate's trainers to supervise them. Johnson looked up from the terrain map Marita had provided. "Here," she said, pointing off to the right. "Park there. This is the rendezvous. The others should be here within the hour."
He pulled up on a flat place between ridges, one rising ahead of them, and one falling toward a valley below. Four other vehicles followed, parking beneath the scrubby, tough-looking pines. MacLeod walked over to him as soon as he emerged. "Let me lead this. I have a bit more military experience than you."
"I thought that was the plan."
"Yes, but you've been demonstrating a remarkable tendency to take over, or at best ignore others' suggestions."
It wasn't anything Mulder hadn't heard before. "In two days you learned that?"
"I figured it out in the first thirty minutes," MacLeod said, surveying the surrounding area, "but it wasn't polite to say so."
Mulder had no answer for him, and MacLeod wouldn't have listened anyway. They turned to watch two more Jeeps pull up. MacLeod walked over to where Johnson waited for the new arrivals, and Mulder followed.
He watched more members of Johnson's tribe emerge from the cars, and observed their reactions to MacLeod. The first impression Johnson had given him held true--they looked at him and whispered as if he were a rock star, a video idol. Mulder leaned over to Johnson. "So, this tribe of yours has a thing for Immortals."
"You could say that."
"You're the people who clean up after their challenges."
She did not turn to look at him. "You could say that."
"Fans of death duels, or something?"
At that, Johnson closed her eyes for a moment, ignoring his scorn, then stepped to greet the newcomers.
MacLeod turned his head to look at Mulder over his shoulder. "She won't violate her oath, and I won't either, but you're wrong."
"She's a DCI officer. Where are her loyalties?"
"They rarely conflict, I'm sure." MacLeod turned away, looking up the trail toward their destination, frowning.
"Something wrong?"
"I want to scout the entrance before the rest of the group arrives."
"Mind if I come with you?"
"Were you trained by Lakota Sioux trackers?"
"Not exactly."
"Then wait here."
MacLeod took off for the ridge, his duster flapping behind him. Mulder watched him move, watched the modern urbanity fall from his shoulders. He breathed in camphor and dust, the air dry and foreign in his lungs. Suddenly Mulder felt out of place in his suit and overcoat, clothing that had always served as armor and mask.
"Where's he going?" The voice spoke with a German accent.
Mulder turned at the voice to see a middle-aged man, blond and thin. "Scouting," he answered.
"Yes. He is reported to be good at that."
"Indian trained."
"Oh, certainly. You have read his chronicles?"
Mulder shook his head. "No, he just told me."
"He is a remarkable man by all accounts. Honorable in the face of much that is evil."
"Yeah, cutting the heads off people strikes me as honorable."
"Oh, you are not one of us?" Mulder shook his head. The man continued, "I think you misunderstand. That is what they do. He is known for taking out the bad ones."
"I see." Mulder looked back in the direction MacLeod had gone, and was surprised to see the man running back at full speed.
"It's a trap!"
The next moments were like a bad movie, with two dozen soldiers topping the ridge a few seconds after MacLeod, all in slow motion.
Mulder could hear Johnson behind him, yelling at the latest arrivals to get in their cars and to go.
Mulder turned, trying to pick out the Jeep he came in, the one he had keys to start, but in the dust from other wheels and the melee of running people, he wasn't sure.
The German man took his arm, leading him at a run toward a car where they could take cover. Mulder could see the muzzles of guns sticking up over the hood, ready to fire on the oncoming soldiers.
Gun fire, automatic weapons, began behind him.
And his chest exploded.
He saw the spray of blood, and only with the delayed sense of impact, of pain did he realize that the blood was his own. His first thought was that Dana was going to kill him. His second thought was to wonder where the white light was. There was supposed to be a white light.
~~~~~
"Sasha," I said. "Or do I call you Alex?"
He looked up from his woolgathering. "Who do you want me to be?"
There was no right answer to that question.
I straightened suddenly at the sense of another Immortal, the third time that day. I looked around, but it faded.
We stood on the outdoor balcony of a two-story shopping plaza filled mostly with art galleries. People milled about in the afternoon sun. We had stopped at a jeweler to buy rings to mark the marriage, our one-day honeymoon ending last night with a knife in my heart and Sasha crying in insensible joy as I came back to life.
Those tears were the only things I believed. Few of the vows did I expect him to keep. He would not be faithful, and he would not need to keep me in sickness. "With all that I am and with all that I have, I honor you," we had said. That was all I asked.
I returned to his question. "Be you," I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. Affection between us was expressed less than it had been between Matty and Sasha. The gesture would have been nothing on Tuesday. Today it had weight. "The paper we signed says I married Alexander Krycek, who is so much more than Sasha Lisitsa the art dealer." I looked at his profile and rubbed the back of my fingers down his jaw. "I married all of you."
At that, he looked at me. "It was your idea. Remember that."
"You could have said no."
His eyes softened. "No, I couldn't."
"I'll call you whatever you like," I said. "Just be my husband." It was not a baseless plea. I had a suspicion of his plans, but it never hurt to try to derail that kind of train. We had said words and signed papers but the day before yesterday, yet already I could feel him withdraw.
He looked back down at the street below. "It'll be easier on everyone if you call me Krycek."
"Especially for this, for what we have to do," I agreed. It was like setting a switch in my brain. Sasha, the aging scamp with a streak of danger was gone, replaced by Krycek, the experienced agent with a streak of the Devil. I felt comfortable with him, and I wanted to be open, to trust him. "Anything else you've been hiding from me besides your name, husband?"
"Your friend's probably heading into a trap."
I felt a cold fury, felt walls snap into place. "And why did you neglect to tell us?"
He shrugged, heading toward the stairs. "Your friend is Immortal. He'll survive. If I know Mulder, he'll improvise. It'll be fine."
I looked down and fingered my ring, cursing myself for a fool. "And the rest? Johnson? The other Watchers?"
He stopped and turned. "What are Watchers, Matt?"
I had slipped. "Johnson's tribe. They watch Immortals, keep records."
"Clean up bodies?" he asked as if it the idea would answer a long-standing puzzle.
"Sometimes."
"What else are you holding out on me, husband?"
His words stung more than they should have, but I said, calmly, "No more than you." I had married all of him, but I knew in that moment that he had not let himself marry me.
His face was a mask, and I walked past him, brushing his shoulder, the gesture more male ranking behavior that affection. I did not look to see if he followed.
Gantt was waiting for us at his rental car. "Gentlemen," he said. "I got some information about Mund's Canyon, where Kaos hangs out. It's private land with a guarded gate, but there's a back way in."
"Good."
"Also was interested to learn that the local New Agers don't mix much with his group. In fact, they don't like him much. He's bad for business. One woman who said she did Reiki said that Kaos's aura or whatever scared her."
"Did she say what he looked like?" Krycek asked.
"The aura or the guy? She said the guy looked like an ex-Marine or something."
"So he's using his own shape," Krycek said.
"Yep," said Gantt, "but we can't count on it. Let's go."
We stowed our gear in the trunk, which was already loaded with the supplies Krycek and I had requested, and got in the car. I needed superior firepower before I would go into a compound that had Immortals. I let Krycek take shotgun, and Gantt drove us up the road. We talked at first, but the plan, in reality, was little more than Get Close and Kill Him.
The thoughts had no purpose, so I let myself spin out tactical scenarios in my head. I wasn't sure how to handle the Immortals that were there. I focused on one objective. I wanted Kaos dead because he was so direct a threat that hiding in Tibet would not let me avoid it. I shuddered at the idea of someone rending my Quickening. I pulled out my phone and sent a text message to MacLeod, warning him that it might be a trap. I didn't trust Krycek enough to let him know what I was doing. I sent the same message to Mulder's number, then Johnson's.
After that, I watched the landscape as we drove, the roads becoming less well-maintained as we got into the area around the canyon. Last time we were here, Sasha and I had only explored the Red Rocks area to the south. The country north was rough, tough trees in sandy soil for the most part. I let myself think as we drove, and began to place barriers in my head. If I was wrong, if at the end of this we had some happily ever after, then I could let them go. For now, survival came first, and I went to the coldest parts of my brain.
Finally, Gantt pulled off the road, such as it was, and said, "We'll do better on foot from here."
We assembled at the trunk of the car and got out our gear. I shrugged on a camelback pouch of water. Gantt looked at me. "Dying of thirst is my least favorite thing, so I tend to be paranoid when I head into back country. Beats the hell out of a goat skin any day." I neglected to mention it was lined with a PlaSteel/Kevlar weave, and thus bullet- and almost blade-proof. I put on my coat, and sheathed both Ivanhoes, metal and PlaSteel, in my coat. Gantt suited up in DCI combat gear, with vests and glasses. Krycek took off his leather jacket and shirt, and changed from his social arm to one that had tools instead of fingers, then tested them. I had never seen him use any of his alternate arms before, and found the whirring noises to be slightly disconcerting. Then there was a 'shnnng' sound, and a six-inch spike emerged from where his middle finger should have been.
Gantt had been trying to watch without staring, but at the sight of the spike, he startled. "Is that what I think it is?"
Krycek smiled at him.
Gantt did not like the expression. "Anything else you holding out on us, Krycek?"
"Of course. Never show your whole hand, isn't that right, Matt?"
I ignored his attempt to revive Matty and Sasha's sarcastic style and said in a flat voice, "Your puns are always bad."
Gantt glanced over at me, taking stock of the tension in the air and deciding in a second's time to stay out of anything between husband and… husband. Even after half a decade of nation-wide legal marriage for all in the US, there were still people who weren't easy with the idea.
"Something I need to do first." I pulled out my phone. There were no responses to my text messages, so I called MacLeod, stepping several feet away from Sasha and Gantt. I got no answer. I tried Mulder next. Same thing.
I checked the time. They were not due to move in for another hour, and the silence meant nothing good. "Try calling Johnson," I said to Gantt.
He opened his phone, and several moments later shook his head.
"That's it," I said. "I'm not going in."
Krycek looked at me. "I didn't think you'd spook easy."
"I didn't live this long by doing stupid things."
He smirked. "You married me, didn't you?"
I had the Ivanhoe, the steel one, out faster than he could blink, point pressing his neck. "Have you told Agent Gantt here that you let his partner walk into a trap?"
"What?" Gantt closed the trunk with more force than necessary.
Krycek started to shrug, and checked it when it made the point of my sword dig in. "Corrivubias plays both sides for her own ends. She always has. Mulder knows that."
"Why would she set us up?"
"For whatever she conceives as the greater good."
"What about this part, about getting Kaos?" I asked, the sword not wavering.
"She doesn't think we can do it. She doesn't know about this," Krycek said, giving us the lethal finger from his prosthetic, the mechanical sound adding to the menace. He tapped it on the Ivanhoe, the soft ting adding to the surrealism. "She's knows you're Immortal, and she knows I'll survive. She may be hoping to have us captured so she can learn more."
"What about Gantt?" I asked, pulling my sword back from his neck.
"Collateral damage, probably. Sorry."
"She doesn't know me," Gantt said.
"Neither do we," I said, but something in his manner gave me confidence that he could handle himself.
We stood for a moment at impasse. "Let's go in," Krycek said. "Best case scenario, we take him out."
"Worst case, we're all killed."
"You're Immortal," he said, checking his gun and not looking at me. "What are you worried about?"
"Whole lot of other Immortals, armed with these," I said, hefting the sword. "I'm leaving."
As I turned to the car, I noticed a cloud of dust indicating another vehicle, a heavy one, moving fast. We moved into position without speaking, Gantt behind the car, and Krycek and I in the trees on either side of the road. I moved out so that we could box whoever it was, and I was fairly certain Krycek had the same thought. Maybe. The possibilities for additional betrayal were endless.
A tan van, dented and rusted, which meant it wasn't from this desert, pulled up behind Gantt's rental.
I heard the door open. I was on the passenger side of the van, but I recognized the voice. "I'm looking for Mr. Bierce." Bobby Hobbes.
"Who wants him?" Gantt said, making sure Hobbes could see the barrel of his gun.
"I work for him. Who are you?"
"I'm a federal agent."
"It's all right, Gantt," I said, coming out of the trees and around the van.
Hobbes eyebrows scrunched together as if he were trying not to laugh. "You look different, Mr. Bierce."
I nodded, wearing the regal lawyer face over my shaved head and lip piercings. "You look alive, Mr. Hobbes." I did not comment on his loud Hawaiian shirt.
He shrugged, a bit abashed, although I'm never one to fault a person for surviving unless I'm the one that tried to kill them. "That truth serum is powerful stuff," he said, "and it came to me in perfect clarity that wrecking your car was a piss-ant version of the blaze of glory."
"I can't argue with that," I said, and clapped him on the shoulder.
"Why don't you introduce me to your friend over there?"
Gantt came from behind the rental to join us, and I made the introductions. My husband was conspicuous by his absence. I walked toward the trees, and behind me I heard Hobbes regaling Gantt of how his secret agency had covers under innocuous governmental divisions, like Fish and Game. I tuned them out, and looked for Krycek.
"Let's not play coy," I called toward the woods.
"Hello, lover."
"Hello, you double dealing son of a bitch," I answered, as he stepped from behind a tree.
"Sorry your married me?"
I shook my head. "Not yet. I've been worse."
That earned me a look. "Just how old are you, Matt?"
"I'm not sure." His expression said he did not believe me. "It's true. I'm just some guy who's been around for a long time."
He let it go. "So who's the agent who says he works for you?"
"Former agent," I corrected, looking around us, listening hard.. "I met him when he was driving for the old man who kidnapped me. I told you about him. Bobby Hobbes."
"Oh, right. Let's see why he showed up."
I put my arm over his shoulder and turned back to Gantt and Hobbes. "C'mon, lover."
"All right, you-- What do you call someone who says he's worse than a double dealing son of a bitch?"
I could hear the smirk without looking, so I stopped and turned, my hand sliding across his neck to the other shoulder and looked at him, echoing the word back to him again, though it was not one we had commonly used. "Lover, don't fuck with me." I knew how to command, to convince that a world of threat lay behind a simple phrase. I channeled that experience into my expression. I meant it.
He smiled in a way meant to be disarming, soothing, and said something he'd never said to me before. "I love you."
"I figured that out a while ago." It was true, but it didn't mean anything. As manipulation attempts go, it was a weak one. I squeezed him hard, and ran my hand over the joint between the prosthesis and skin, barely present under the leather jacket, but like the princess and the pea, I could feel it. I turned back to Gantt and Hobbes, using gentle touches to propel Krycek to move with me.
"You're kidding," Hobbes was saying. "Back in my day the GSA rules would never have allowed that." Gantt looked up as we approached, and Hobbes followed his eyes. "So that's the man of fame and legend himself. Alexander Krycek."
I glanced at Krycek. The expression that flitted across his face held amusement, pride, and a certain charming chagrin before it settled into purposeful annoyance. "It's all true," he said. "Even the parts when I did something nice."
"I must have missed those, my friend."
Krycek tensed under my hand, although no sign of it reached his face. He said, "A prophet is never honored in his own time, tovarisch."
"Yes, well," I said, "we were just leaving. At least, I was."
"Why is that, Mr. Bierce?"
I unsheathed the swords and began to take off my coat. It was autumn, but it was still too warm for the camelback and a coat if we weren't moving out. "We are too few, without a good plan, walking into a possible trap."
Hobbes smiled. "What if someone were able to go in and disarm the trap?"
I stopped before the coat cleared my shoulders. "How?"
"Remember my invisible friend?"
Krycek snorted. "Aren't you a little old for that?"
I held up a hand to still the brat. "You said he was dead."
"Yes, but in one of his rare lucid moments before they killed him, he gave me a token of his esteem. A gallon of it, in fact."
Hobbes walked around to the back of the van and opened the doors. The truck was packed with blue plastic drums. "Are those what I think they are?" Krycek asked.
"Yes, and let me tell you I was a little nervous driving on these back roads, given the shock sensitivity of this stuff. But that's just a little extra something."
Gantt had followed us around. "You're calling a truck bomb just a little extra something?"
Hobbes produced a gallon jug of opaque plastic. "My partner Fawkes had a gland put in his head in a government experiment."
"That's nice," said Krycek. "Are you going to give us all milk and cookies while you tell this story?"
Hobbes and I both glared at him. Hobbes opened the jug and stuck in the end of his finger. When he pulled it out, it was gone. His finger simply ended, no nail, no healed-over stump. As he moved it around I could tell that whatever was in that jug bent the light somehow, because when he pointed straight at my eyes, I could see the rest of his hand, but the entire forefinger, not just the end, seemed... invisible.
"Quicksilver," Hobbes said, looking at his hand. "Fawkes, my partner, he sweated out a gallon of this stuff and told me to save it for a rainy day,"
"It's not raining," I said gently. I had some idea what this meant to him, and I wanted to honor his choice without embarrassing him.
"What do you want? It's a desert." He shook his hand. A silver mist shimmered in the air, and the fingertip was visible again. "It's been over twenty-five years." Hobbes looked at me, glanced at Gantt and Krycek, and then back to me. "It ain't gonna matter if it rains or not if we don't stop what's going on here."
"And just what is going on here?" I asked. Under the truth serum, Hobbes had only been able to tell me about the old men, the aliens, and the clones. I wondered what else he had learned.
"I did some digging," he said. "The Syndicate has been bussing clones out here to this compound. They leave here and go to a staging area in the hills up north. When they come back to the holding area, they are very hard to kill. Like you. I saw you take that bullet, and I saw you pick up your bags like nothing had happened."
"Do you know how they're doing it?" I asked.
"My sources get a little hazy at this point, and there's an argument about whether it's some new alien technology or not." He squinted at me, and came to a conclusion. "You know. You know what's going on in there."
I shrugged. "We have some information."
"No," he said, shaking his head. "If you want to use this," he hefted the jug, "then you tell me everything."
It was a good bargain. "I'm Immortal," I said. "There are a number of us, and we have an alarming tendency to kill one another. The best way to kill us is to take our heads. When we do that, the power of the other Immortal comes into us. We call it the Quickening."
"It's quite a light show," Gantt said.
I looked over at him, then at Krycek, who had an odd expression on his face. At my look he shrugged and said, "It took you seven years to tell me, and now you blab it to every ex-federal agent?"
"It's a calculated risk." I turned back to Hobbes. "There's a man in the compound who is not human. I don't know how he does it, but my information is that he can take apart an Immortal's Quickening, our power, which grows with every head we take, and put it into the clones."
"How not human is this guy?"
Krycek answered. "He's an alien bounty hunter."
Hobbes closed his eyes. "Oh, crap."
"Heard of them?"
"The guys who can shape shift and who are super strong and heal easily? The ones you can only kill with an alien manufactured spike to the neck? Nah. Never heard of them." He put the jug down and patted the top. "Boy, are you lucky I showed up with this."
"And this," I said, patting the van with its explosive cargo.
"Plus Krycek can give him the lethal flip-off," said Gantt.
We all looked at Krycek, and he demonstrated the spike for Hobbes.
"You stole one?" Gantt asked.
"I didn't steal it," Krycek grinned, and the spike disappeared with the soft shnng sound.
We began to plan then, studying the maps Hobbes brought and the one given by Corrivubias. Gantt impressed me with his professionalism. A lesser agent would have not been able to put aside the news that his partner was in trouble, and then stick to the job. He did not entirely control his expression when he looked at Krycek. When this was over, Gantt would be looking for answers, and possibly for blood.
Kaos' place was a very large house with two floors, basement, and two outbuildings. The Immortals stayed in the main house, with the other cultists in a dormitory-style guesthouse, at least according to Corrivubias. The new plan was a variation on the old one, but with more firepower and a better element of surprise. Gantt would go in covered in Quicksilver, invisible, and would relay information before cutting power to the house and grounds, dispatching any guards. Hobbes would take the truck bomb in, and aim it at the largest concentration of Immortals, which we assumed would be the house. I would stay back with Krycek. If the bomb decapitated any Immortals, I did not want to be near enough to be knocked back by a Quickening. We would come in after, find Kaos, and I would cover Krycek while he killed him.
Simple enough.
In my mind, I anticipated all the ways it could go wrong.
Hobbes and Gantt drove ahead in the van, and Krycek and I followed on foot. The compound was another mile down the dirt track, and we figured it would be close to an hour until the truck blew. I made one more attempt to contact MacLeod, Mulder, and Johnson, and left no messages. After that, Krycek and I walked, not speaking. He took my hand after a few minutes, and after a few minutes more he stopped and brought my palm to his lips. He kissed it, then ran his tongue in a tight circle. Keyed up as I was, I responded by pulling my hand away, yet moaning deep in my throat.
"Mixed messages," he said.
"It's hardly the time," I began.
"Now. God, now, please. I don't know how this is going to go down, and I want--"
"What, Alexander? What do you want?" I must admit I enjoyed the feeling of tenderness mixed with suspicion. I let him hear both.
"You." His eyes were hot, needy. "I want to suck you off, taste you on my tongue, drink you down, go in there with you in me." His voice held passion and fear. I believed nothing.
Without a word, I dragged him off the trail, leaned against a thick tree, and opened the buttons of my jeans. Then, with matching heat in my voice I said, "Now. Make it fast."
He dropped to one knee, pulled out my cock and breathed on it before taking it in to his mouth, sucking it to hardness. He was good at this, and he knew my sensitivities, backing off and letting me watch his tongue wrap and swirl and lick flat. He reached up and grabbed my sweater and the T-shirt underneath, using the cloth to rub roughly over my chest, catching my nipple now and then, all the more effective for being unpredictable. My cock felt cool where his tongue had been, and I could feel it moving as if chasing for more sensation.
Then he went to work, bringing me off from that foundation and over the edge with his mouth and his hand on my body, his thumb on the pressure point of my inner thigh, his fingers pulling my balls back, then palming them forward with fingertips brushing deeper, sensitive places. I came fast and hard, and he was good as his word, milking me with his mouth and tongue, sucking down everything I could give him so hard that it hurt, and the hurt was good.
When I opened my eyes, he rose, smirked and said, "I don't think they heard you in Scottsdale."
"O. D. Very funny." It was an old joke. He hated that I could be so quiet, but I'd had decades of practice. Now that the cat was out of the bag about my Immortality, I could make the jokes I'd always held back. "An active sex life in a monastery demands that the Vow of Silence be strictly kept."
"You were a monk?"
"Not a good one," I said, fastening my jeans. "Shall I demonstrate what else I learned in the cloisters?"
He leaned against the tree, and he let me undo his button and fly while I kissed him. He was already erect, but I dropped to my knees and spent a moment teasing him with my lips, bringing him to that state of iron hardness that he would lose capacity to achieve in a decade or two. I ran my fingers through the gray of his pubic hair, nipped my way down the underside of his cock and sucked in his balls the way he once liked it.
"Harder," he whispered. "Use your teeth."
I pulled loose skin into my mouth and caught it in my molars, jacking him with my hand. I sucked him in and scraped my teeth over the head of his cock. I dropped the knife into my hand and traced the point over his thighs while I worked him.
"Oh, God, Matt." Krycek grabbed the back of my head with his right hand, and I let him fuck my mouth until he flooded my tongue with the acrid taste of butter from the desert.
I had not seen him come so hard and so long in quite some time. I pulled back when his last aftershock was done, and mouthed the head of his cock using teeth and tongue, and he gasped in the too-intense pleasure as the spike from his prosthetic hand pierced my jugular vein.
Damn. I hadn't expected him to kill me for another hour or two.
Chapter 11
Fandoms: Highlander, X-files, Invisible Man
Rating:NC-17 overall, NC-17 this chapter.
Disclaimer: Don't own 'em.
Background:The year is 2023. Methos, the oldest of the Immortals in Highlander, was living as a corporate lawyer in Denver. Alexander Krycek, the double-dealing ratboy of the X-Files, was living there as an art dealer, running a gallery in Aurora, Colorado. Mulder was retired, somewhere suburban. Conspiracies and secret organizations begin to collide.
Summary: People start to dieget killed. What, you thought this was a nice story?
Chapter 1
(Chapters link sequentially from there.)
Chapter 9 (posted late)
Chapter 10
There wasn't any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous... fatal, in the end.
Door into Summer
Mulder didn't like the day of downtime, and he didn't like the fact that Nield was not answering her phone. He drove with Johnson in a rented jeep provided by some of her tribe, as she still called them. They were moving in now, armed with bombs and other incendiary devices procured in part by Krycek.
There was no stealth in their approach, but they were relying on Corrivubias' intelligence that the clones formed their own guard, with only the Syndicate's trainers to supervise them. Johnson looked up from the terrain map Marita had provided. "Here," she said, pointing off to the right. "Park there. This is the rendezvous. The others should be here within the hour."
He pulled up on a flat place between ridges, one rising ahead of them, and one falling toward a valley below. Four other vehicles followed, parking beneath the scrubby, tough-looking pines. MacLeod walked over to him as soon as he emerged. "Let me lead this. I have a bit more military experience than you."
"I thought that was the plan."
"Yes, but you've been demonstrating a remarkable tendency to take over, or at best ignore others' suggestions."
It wasn't anything Mulder hadn't heard before. "In two days you learned that?"
"I figured it out in the first thirty minutes," MacLeod said, surveying the surrounding area, "but it wasn't polite to say so."
Mulder had no answer for him, and MacLeod wouldn't have listened anyway. They turned to watch two more Jeeps pull up. MacLeod walked over to where Johnson waited for the new arrivals, and Mulder followed.
He watched more members of Johnson's tribe emerge from the cars, and observed their reactions to MacLeod. The first impression Johnson had given him held true--they looked at him and whispered as if he were a rock star, a video idol. Mulder leaned over to Johnson. "So, this tribe of yours has a thing for Immortals."
"You could say that."
"You're the people who clean up after their challenges."
She did not turn to look at him. "You could say that."
"Fans of death duels, or something?"
At that, Johnson closed her eyes for a moment, ignoring his scorn, then stepped to greet the newcomers.
MacLeod turned his head to look at Mulder over his shoulder. "She won't violate her oath, and I won't either, but you're wrong."
"She's a DCI officer. Where are her loyalties?"
"They rarely conflict, I'm sure." MacLeod turned away, looking up the trail toward their destination, frowning.
"Something wrong?"
"I want to scout the entrance before the rest of the group arrives."
"Mind if I come with you?"
"Were you trained by Lakota Sioux trackers?"
"Not exactly."
"Then wait here."
MacLeod took off for the ridge, his duster flapping behind him. Mulder watched him move, watched the modern urbanity fall from his shoulders. He breathed in camphor and dust, the air dry and foreign in his lungs. Suddenly Mulder felt out of place in his suit and overcoat, clothing that had always served as armor and mask.
"Where's he going?" The voice spoke with a German accent.
Mulder turned at the voice to see a middle-aged man, blond and thin. "Scouting," he answered.
"Yes. He is reported to be good at that."
"Indian trained."
"Oh, certainly. You have read his chronicles?"
Mulder shook his head. "No, he just told me."
"He is a remarkable man by all accounts. Honorable in the face of much that is evil."
"Yeah, cutting the heads off people strikes me as honorable."
"Oh, you are not one of us?" Mulder shook his head. The man continued, "I think you misunderstand. That is what they do. He is known for taking out the bad ones."
"I see." Mulder looked back in the direction MacLeod had gone, and was surprised to see the man running back at full speed.
"It's a trap!"
The next moments were like a bad movie, with two dozen soldiers topping the ridge a few seconds after MacLeod, all in slow motion.
Mulder could hear Johnson behind him, yelling at the latest arrivals to get in their cars and to go.
Mulder turned, trying to pick out the Jeep he came in, the one he had keys to start, but in the dust from other wheels and the melee of running people, he wasn't sure.
The German man took his arm, leading him at a run toward a car where they could take cover. Mulder could see the muzzles of guns sticking up over the hood, ready to fire on the oncoming soldiers.
Gun fire, automatic weapons, began behind him.
And his chest exploded.
He saw the spray of blood, and only with the delayed sense of impact, of pain did he realize that the blood was his own. His first thought was that Dana was going to kill him. His second thought was to wonder where the white light was. There was supposed to be a white light.
~~~~~
"Sasha," I said. "Or do I call you Alex?"
He looked up from his woolgathering. "Who do you want me to be?"
There was no right answer to that question.
I straightened suddenly at the sense of another Immortal, the third time that day. I looked around, but it faded.
We stood on the outdoor balcony of a two-story shopping plaza filled mostly with art galleries. People milled about in the afternoon sun. We had stopped at a jeweler to buy rings to mark the marriage, our one-day honeymoon ending last night with a knife in my heart and Sasha crying in insensible joy as I came back to life.
Those tears were the only things I believed. Few of the vows did I expect him to keep. He would not be faithful, and he would not need to keep me in sickness. "With all that I am and with all that I have, I honor you," we had said. That was all I asked.
I returned to his question. "Be you," I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. Affection between us was expressed less than it had been between Matty and Sasha. The gesture would have been nothing on Tuesday. Today it had weight. "The paper we signed says I married Alexander Krycek, who is so much more than Sasha Lisitsa the art dealer." I looked at his profile and rubbed the back of my fingers down his jaw. "I married all of you."
At that, he looked at me. "It was your idea. Remember that."
"You could have said no."
His eyes softened. "No, I couldn't."
"I'll call you whatever you like," I said. "Just be my husband." It was not a baseless plea. I had a suspicion of his plans, but it never hurt to try to derail that kind of train. We had said words and signed papers but the day before yesterday, yet already I could feel him withdraw.
He looked back down at the street below. "It'll be easier on everyone if you call me Krycek."
"Especially for this, for what we have to do," I agreed. It was like setting a switch in my brain. Sasha, the aging scamp with a streak of danger was gone, replaced by Krycek, the experienced agent with a streak of the Devil. I felt comfortable with him, and I wanted to be open, to trust him. "Anything else you've been hiding from me besides your name, husband?"
"Your friend's probably heading into a trap."
I felt a cold fury, felt walls snap into place. "And why did you neglect to tell us?"
He shrugged, heading toward the stairs. "Your friend is Immortal. He'll survive. If I know Mulder, he'll improvise. It'll be fine."
I looked down and fingered my ring, cursing myself for a fool. "And the rest? Johnson? The other Watchers?"
He stopped and turned. "What are Watchers, Matt?"
I had slipped. "Johnson's tribe. They watch Immortals, keep records."
"Clean up bodies?" he asked as if it the idea would answer a long-standing puzzle.
"Sometimes."
"What else are you holding out on me, husband?"
His words stung more than they should have, but I said, calmly, "No more than you." I had married all of him, but I knew in that moment that he had not let himself marry me.
His face was a mask, and I walked past him, brushing his shoulder, the gesture more male ranking behavior that affection. I did not look to see if he followed.
Gantt was waiting for us at his rental car. "Gentlemen," he said. "I got some information about Mund's Canyon, where Kaos hangs out. It's private land with a guarded gate, but there's a back way in."
"Good."
"Also was interested to learn that the local New Agers don't mix much with his group. In fact, they don't like him much. He's bad for business. One woman who said she did Reiki said that Kaos's aura or whatever scared her."
"Did she say what he looked like?" Krycek asked.
"The aura or the guy? She said the guy looked like an ex-Marine or something."
"So he's using his own shape," Krycek said.
"Yep," said Gantt, "but we can't count on it. Let's go."
We stowed our gear in the trunk, which was already loaded with the supplies Krycek and I had requested, and got in the car. I needed superior firepower before I would go into a compound that had Immortals. I let Krycek take shotgun, and Gantt drove us up the road. We talked at first, but the plan, in reality, was little more than Get Close and Kill Him.
The thoughts had no purpose, so I let myself spin out tactical scenarios in my head. I wasn't sure how to handle the Immortals that were there. I focused on one objective. I wanted Kaos dead because he was so direct a threat that hiding in Tibet would not let me avoid it. I shuddered at the idea of someone rending my Quickening. I pulled out my phone and sent a text message to MacLeod, warning him that it might be a trap. I didn't trust Krycek enough to let him know what I was doing. I sent the same message to Mulder's number, then Johnson's.
After that, I watched the landscape as we drove, the roads becoming less well-maintained as we got into the area around the canyon. Last time we were here, Sasha and I had only explored the Red Rocks area to the south. The country north was rough, tough trees in sandy soil for the most part. I let myself think as we drove, and began to place barriers in my head. If I was wrong, if at the end of this we had some happily ever after, then I could let them go. For now, survival came first, and I went to the coldest parts of my brain.
Finally, Gantt pulled off the road, such as it was, and said, "We'll do better on foot from here."
We assembled at the trunk of the car and got out our gear. I shrugged on a camelback pouch of water. Gantt looked at me. "Dying of thirst is my least favorite thing, so I tend to be paranoid when I head into back country. Beats the hell out of a goat skin any day." I neglected to mention it was lined with a PlaSteel/Kevlar weave, and thus bullet- and almost blade-proof. I put on my coat, and sheathed both Ivanhoes, metal and PlaSteel, in my coat. Gantt suited up in DCI combat gear, with vests and glasses. Krycek took off his leather jacket and shirt, and changed from his social arm to one that had tools instead of fingers, then tested them. I had never seen him use any of his alternate arms before, and found the whirring noises to be slightly disconcerting. Then there was a 'shnnng' sound, and a six-inch spike emerged from where his middle finger should have been.
Gantt had been trying to watch without staring, but at the sight of the spike, he startled. "Is that what I think it is?"
Krycek smiled at him.
Gantt did not like the expression. "Anything else you holding out on us, Krycek?"
"Of course. Never show your whole hand, isn't that right, Matt?"
I ignored his attempt to revive Matty and Sasha's sarcastic style and said in a flat voice, "Your puns are always bad."
Gantt glanced over at me, taking stock of the tension in the air and deciding in a second's time to stay out of anything between husband and… husband. Even after half a decade of nation-wide legal marriage for all in the US, there were still people who weren't easy with the idea.
"Something I need to do first." I pulled out my phone. There were no responses to my text messages, so I called MacLeod, stepping several feet away from Sasha and Gantt. I got no answer. I tried Mulder next. Same thing.
I checked the time. They were not due to move in for another hour, and the silence meant nothing good. "Try calling Johnson," I said to Gantt.
He opened his phone, and several moments later shook his head.
"That's it," I said. "I'm not going in."
Krycek looked at me. "I didn't think you'd spook easy."
"I didn't live this long by doing stupid things."
He smirked. "You married me, didn't you?"
I had the Ivanhoe, the steel one, out faster than he could blink, point pressing his neck. "Have you told Agent Gantt here that you let his partner walk into a trap?"
"What?" Gantt closed the trunk with more force than necessary.
Krycek started to shrug, and checked it when it made the point of my sword dig in. "Corrivubias plays both sides for her own ends. She always has. Mulder knows that."
"Why would she set us up?"
"For whatever she conceives as the greater good."
"What about this part, about getting Kaos?" I asked, the sword not wavering.
"She doesn't think we can do it. She doesn't know about this," Krycek said, giving us the lethal finger from his prosthetic, the mechanical sound adding to the menace. He tapped it on the Ivanhoe, the soft ting adding to the surrealism. "She's knows you're Immortal, and she knows I'll survive. She may be hoping to have us captured so she can learn more."
"What about Gantt?" I asked, pulling my sword back from his neck.
"Collateral damage, probably. Sorry."
"She doesn't know me," Gantt said.
"Neither do we," I said, but something in his manner gave me confidence that he could handle himself.
We stood for a moment at impasse. "Let's go in," Krycek said. "Best case scenario, we take him out."
"Worst case, we're all killed."
"You're Immortal," he said, checking his gun and not looking at me. "What are you worried about?"
"Whole lot of other Immortals, armed with these," I said, hefting the sword. "I'm leaving."
As I turned to the car, I noticed a cloud of dust indicating another vehicle, a heavy one, moving fast. We moved into position without speaking, Gantt behind the car, and Krycek and I in the trees on either side of the road. I moved out so that we could box whoever it was, and I was fairly certain Krycek had the same thought. Maybe. The possibilities for additional betrayal were endless.
A tan van, dented and rusted, which meant it wasn't from this desert, pulled up behind Gantt's rental.
I heard the door open. I was on the passenger side of the van, but I recognized the voice. "I'm looking for Mr. Bierce." Bobby Hobbes.
"Who wants him?" Gantt said, making sure Hobbes could see the barrel of his gun.
"I work for him. Who are you?"
"I'm a federal agent."
"It's all right, Gantt," I said, coming out of the trees and around the van.
Hobbes eyebrows scrunched together as if he were trying not to laugh. "You look different, Mr. Bierce."
I nodded, wearing the regal lawyer face over my shaved head and lip piercings. "You look alive, Mr. Hobbes." I did not comment on his loud Hawaiian shirt.
He shrugged, a bit abashed, although I'm never one to fault a person for surviving unless I'm the one that tried to kill them. "That truth serum is powerful stuff," he said, "and it came to me in perfect clarity that wrecking your car was a piss-ant version of the blaze of glory."
"I can't argue with that," I said, and clapped him on the shoulder.
"Why don't you introduce me to your friend over there?"
Gantt came from behind the rental to join us, and I made the introductions. My husband was conspicuous by his absence. I walked toward the trees, and behind me I heard Hobbes regaling Gantt of how his secret agency had covers under innocuous governmental divisions, like Fish and Game. I tuned them out, and looked for Krycek.
"Let's not play coy," I called toward the woods.
"Hello, lover."
"Hello, you double dealing son of a bitch," I answered, as he stepped from behind a tree.
"Sorry your married me?"
I shook my head. "Not yet. I've been worse."
That earned me a look. "Just how old are you, Matt?"
"I'm not sure." His expression said he did not believe me. "It's true. I'm just some guy who's been around for a long time."
He let it go. "So who's the agent who says he works for you?"
"Former agent," I corrected, looking around us, listening hard.. "I met him when he was driving for the old man who kidnapped me. I told you about him. Bobby Hobbes."
"Oh, right. Let's see why he showed up."
I put my arm over his shoulder and turned back to Gantt and Hobbes. "C'mon, lover."
"All right, you-- What do you call someone who says he's worse than a double dealing son of a bitch?"
I could hear the smirk without looking, so I stopped and turned, my hand sliding across his neck to the other shoulder and looked at him, echoing the word back to him again, though it was not one we had commonly used. "Lover, don't fuck with me." I knew how to command, to convince that a world of threat lay behind a simple phrase. I channeled that experience into my expression. I meant it.
He smiled in a way meant to be disarming, soothing, and said something he'd never said to me before. "I love you."
"I figured that out a while ago." It was true, but it didn't mean anything. As manipulation attempts go, it was a weak one. I squeezed him hard, and ran my hand over the joint between the prosthesis and skin, barely present under the leather jacket, but like the princess and the pea, I could feel it. I turned back to Gantt and Hobbes, using gentle touches to propel Krycek to move with me.
"You're kidding," Hobbes was saying. "Back in my day the GSA rules would never have allowed that." Gantt looked up as we approached, and Hobbes followed his eyes. "So that's the man of fame and legend himself. Alexander Krycek."
I glanced at Krycek. The expression that flitted across his face held amusement, pride, and a certain charming chagrin before it settled into purposeful annoyance. "It's all true," he said. "Even the parts when I did something nice."
"I must have missed those, my friend."
Krycek tensed under my hand, although no sign of it reached his face. He said, "A prophet is never honored in his own time, tovarisch."
"Yes, well," I said, "we were just leaving. At least, I was."
"Why is that, Mr. Bierce?"
I unsheathed the swords and began to take off my coat. It was autumn, but it was still too warm for the camelback and a coat if we weren't moving out. "We are too few, without a good plan, walking into a possible trap."
Hobbes smiled. "What if someone were able to go in and disarm the trap?"
I stopped before the coat cleared my shoulders. "How?"
"Remember my invisible friend?"
Krycek snorted. "Aren't you a little old for that?"
I held up a hand to still the brat. "You said he was dead."
"Yes, but in one of his rare lucid moments before they killed him, he gave me a token of his esteem. A gallon of it, in fact."
Hobbes walked around to the back of the van and opened the doors. The truck was packed with blue plastic drums. "Are those what I think they are?" Krycek asked.
"Yes, and let me tell you I was a little nervous driving on these back roads, given the shock sensitivity of this stuff. But that's just a little extra something."
Gantt had followed us around. "You're calling a truck bomb just a little extra something?"
Hobbes produced a gallon jug of opaque plastic. "My partner Fawkes had a gland put in his head in a government experiment."
"That's nice," said Krycek. "Are you going to give us all milk and cookies while you tell this story?"
Hobbes and I both glared at him. Hobbes opened the jug and stuck in the end of his finger. When he pulled it out, it was gone. His finger simply ended, no nail, no healed-over stump. As he moved it around I could tell that whatever was in that jug bent the light somehow, because when he pointed straight at my eyes, I could see the rest of his hand, but the entire forefinger, not just the end, seemed... invisible.
"Quicksilver," Hobbes said, looking at his hand. "Fawkes, my partner, he sweated out a gallon of this stuff and told me to save it for a rainy day,"
"It's not raining," I said gently. I had some idea what this meant to him, and I wanted to honor his choice without embarrassing him.
"What do you want? It's a desert." He shook his hand. A silver mist shimmered in the air, and the fingertip was visible again. "It's been over twenty-five years." Hobbes looked at me, glanced at Gantt and Krycek, and then back to me. "It ain't gonna matter if it rains or not if we don't stop what's going on here."
"And just what is going on here?" I asked. Under the truth serum, Hobbes had only been able to tell me about the old men, the aliens, and the clones. I wondered what else he had learned.
"I did some digging," he said. "The Syndicate has been bussing clones out here to this compound. They leave here and go to a staging area in the hills up north. When they come back to the holding area, they are very hard to kill. Like you. I saw you take that bullet, and I saw you pick up your bags like nothing had happened."
"Do you know how they're doing it?" I asked.
"My sources get a little hazy at this point, and there's an argument about whether it's some new alien technology or not." He squinted at me, and came to a conclusion. "You know. You know what's going on in there."
I shrugged. "We have some information."
"No," he said, shaking his head. "If you want to use this," he hefted the jug, "then you tell me everything."
It was a good bargain. "I'm Immortal," I said. "There are a number of us, and we have an alarming tendency to kill one another. The best way to kill us is to take our heads. When we do that, the power of the other Immortal comes into us. We call it the Quickening."
"It's quite a light show," Gantt said.
I looked over at him, then at Krycek, who had an odd expression on his face. At my look he shrugged and said, "It took you seven years to tell me, and now you blab it to every ex-federal agent?"
"It's a calculated risk." I turned back to Hobbes. "There's a man in the compound who is not human. I don't know how he does it, but my information is that he can take apart an Immortal's Quickening, our power, which grows with every head we take, and put it into the clones."
"How not human is this guy?"
Krycek answered. "He's an alien bounty hunter."
Hobbes closed his eyes. "Oh, crap."
"Heard of them?"
"The guys who can shape shift and who are super strong and heal easily? The ones you can only kill with an alien manufactured spike to the neck? Nah. Never heard of them." He put the jug down and patted the top. "Boy, are you lucky I showed up with this."
"And this," I said, patting the van with its explosive cargo.
"Plus Krycek can give him the lethal flip-off," said Gantt.
We all looked at Krycek, and he demonstrated the spike for Hobbes.
"You stole one?" Gantt asked.
"I didn't steal it," Krycek grinned, and the spike disappeared with the soft shnng sound.
We began to plan then, studying the maps Hobbes brought and the one given by Corrivubias. Gantt impressed me with his professionalism. A lesser agent would have not been able to put aside the news that his partner was in trouble, and then stick to the job. He did not entirely control his expression when he looked at Krycek. When this was over, Gantt would be looking for answers, and possibly for blood.
Kaos' place was a very large house with two floors, basement, and two outbuildings. The Immortals stayed in the main house, with the other cultists in a dormitory-style guesthouse, at least according to Corrivubias. The new plan was a variation on the old one, but with more firepower and a better element of surprise. Gantt would go in covered in Quicksilver, invisible, and would relay information before cutting power to the house and grounds, dispatching any guards. Hobbes would take the truck bomb in, and aim it at the largest concentration of Immortals, which we assumed would be the house. I would stay back with Krycek. If the bomb decapitated any Immortals, I did not want to be near enough to be knocked back by a Quickening. We would come in after, find Kaos, and I would cover Krycek while he killed him.
Simple enough.
In my mind, I anticipated all the ways it could go wrong.
Hobbes and Gantt drove ahead in the van, and Krycek and I followed on foot. The compound was another mile down the dirt track, and we figured it would be close to an hour until the truck blew. I made one more attempt to contact MacLeod, Mulder, and Johnson, and left no messages. After that, Krycek and I walked, not speaking. He took my hand after a few minutes, and after a few minutes more he stopped and brought my palm to his lips. He kissed it, then ran his tongue in a tight circle. Keyed up as I was, I responded by pulling my hand away, yet moaning deep in my throat.
"Mixed messages," he said.
"It's hardly the time," I began.
"Now. God, now, please. I don't know how this is going to go down, and I want--"
"What, Alexander? What do you want?" I must admit I enjoyed the feeling of tenderness mixed with suspicion. I let him hear both.
"You." His eyes were hot, needy. "I want to suck you off, taste you on my tongue, drink you down, go in there with you in me." His voice held passion and fear. I believed nothing.
Without a word, I dragged him off the trail, leaned against a thick tree, and opened the buttons of my jeans. Then, with matching heat in my voice I said, "Now. Make it fast."
He dropped to one knee, pulled out my cock and breathed on it before taking it in to his mouth, sucking it to hardness. He was good at this, and he knew my sensitivities, backing off and letting me watch his tongue wrap and swirl and lick flat. He reached up and grabbed my sweater and the T-shirt underneath, using the cloth to rub roughly over my chest, catching my nipple now and then, all the more effective for being unpredictable. My cock felt cool where his tongue had been, and I could feel it moving as if chasing for more sensation.
Then he went to work, bringing me off from that foundation and over the edge with his mouth and his hand on my body, his thumb on the pressure point of my inner thigh, his fingers pulling my balls back, then palming them forward with fingertips brushing deeper, sensitive places. I came fast and hard, and he was good as his word, milking me with his mouth and tongue, sucking down everything I could give him so hard that it hurt, and the hurt was good.
When I opened my eyes, he rose, smirked and said, "I don't think they heard you in Scottsdale."
"O. D. Very funny." It was an old joke. He hated that I could be so quiet, but I'd had decades of practice. Now that the cat was out of the bag about my Immortality, I could make the jokes I'd always held back. "An active sex life in a monastery demands that the Vow of Silence be strictly kept."
"You were a monk?"
"Not a good one," I said, fastening my jeans. "Shall I demonstrate what else I learned in the cloisters?"
He leaned against the tree, and he let me undo his button and fly while I kissed him. He was already erect, but I dropped to my knees and spent a moment teasing him with my lips, bringing him to that state of iron hardness that he would lose capacity to achieve in a decade or two. I ran my fingers through the gray of his pubic hair, nipped my way down the underside of his cock and sucked in his balls the way he once liked it.
"Harder," he whispered. "Use your teeth."
I pulled loose skin into my mouth and caught it in my molars, jacking him with my hand. I sucked him in and scraped my teeth over the head of his cock. I dropped the knife into my hand and traced the point over his thighs while I worked him.
"Oh, God, Matt." Krycek grabbed the back of my head with his right hand, and I let him fuck my mouth until he flooded my tongue with the acrid taste of butter from the desert.
I had not seen him come so hard and so long in quite some time. I pulled back when his last aftershock was done, and mouthed the head of his cock using teeth and tongue, and he gasped in the too-intense pleasure as the spike from his prosthetic hand pierced my jugular vein.
Damn. I hadn't expected him to kill me for another hour or two.
Chapter 11