Highlander - Donna Lettow [116]
Reaching the stem, Avram stood his ground, sword ready, waiting for MacLeod’s attack. He was winded, on the defensive, and the edge of the barge, where the dark Seine beckoned to shield his escape, was tantalizingly close. But he was not going to take the coward’s way out—one way or the other, they were going to finish this.
Grimly, MacLeod came at him, to the head, to the gut, to the shoulder. Even Avram’s quickness was not enough, and he took a painful slice across the collarbone. He howled with the pain and tried to dart away, but MacLeod was right on him.
As MacLeod swung again, Avram ducked to a crouch and came up under the larger man’s guard. He shouldered MacLeod into the side of the pilothouse, and the sword went flying from MacLeod’s hand.
Avram pressed in closer, going for the kill. An instant later he found himself on his ass, swordless, the katana to his neck. In one seamless move, MacLeod had caught the katana midair with his healed right arm and pulled Avram’s feet from under him with a sweep of his leg.
“Duncan!” Avram gasped, and the plea in his voice made MacLeod stay his hand. Avram held him with his eyes for a long moment. Then he folded his hands in front of him and closed his eyes in prayer. “Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, King of the universe, Whose judgments are true.” Then, with a sigh, he tilted back his head, exposing his throat.
MacLeod could feel the tears rise up in his throat. “Shalom, Avram. Peace.” The keen edge of the katana sliced cleanly.
Avram’s body fell to the deck of the barge, and, a moment later, the katana followed, as if its owner could no longer bear to hold the weapon that had slain his former comrade. The gentle breeze along the Seine stirred into a wind that caused currents of fog to dance around the barge.
The shattered vessel that was Avram gave up its Quickening like wisps of smoke which curled into the air, intertwining with the dancing fog. Suddenly, the wind became a gale, the dance a frenzy, as the Quickening writhed in the whirl-wind, then sought shelter in Duncan MacLeod.
Its touch was the touch of liquid fire that seeped through his pores and overwhelmed his soul, stripping away all that he was, all that he is, all that he would be, and leaving in its place an acute, never-ending loneliness that filled him up until he could hold no more. He fell to his knees from the ache and a deep moan, torn from the very fiber of his being, escaped from his throat.
Shafts of lightning exploded from Avram’s body, shattering the windows of the pilothouse, scarring the deck and the sides of the barge with their intensity before snaring MacLeod in their web. Power shot through him unrestrained, and the moan became a scream as cosmic fire sparked his nerves, his cells, his very atoms.
Through the pain, through the loneliness and the despair that held him prisoner, he reached into the maelstrom within his essence and grasped the memories churning there, desperate for identity. Lightning pierced the physical form once called MacLeod, sending it writhing to the deck of the barge, but he was Avram, son of Mordecai the Pharisee, and he was marrying the most beautiful woman in Judea. He lifted Deborah’s veil and looked into her chestnut eyes, and they were the lifeless eyes of Debra Campbell and he was Duncan MacLeod of the Clan MacLeod and his world was coming to an end at the base of a cliff in the Highlands of Scotland. Tongues of fire shot from the bilge pipes quenched with a hiss in the waters of the Seine and he was assailed by the smell of burning wood and burning flesh and he was Avram the schoolteacher fighting on alone in the village that had died around him as the Cossack’s horse rode him down and he rode and he rode on the heels of that butcher, Kern, who’d destroyed his family, and he vowed someday MacLeod of the Lakota would have his revenge.
He roared, a wild howl filled with anguish and sorrow, and he reached for heaven as if he could almost touch it, first one hand, then both. Almost, but not quite.
Suddenly, the lightning