Highlander: The Measure of a Man by Nancy Holder

Author:Nancy Holder [Holder, Nancy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780446565622
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2009-09-26T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

“A flower falls, even though we love it; and a weed grows, even though we do not love it.”

—Zen saying

There’s no time for us.

She was running to him, her mouth a scream, her eyes depthless pools of fear. Running and shouting his name, but the sound that shattered his heart was the report of a gun.

“Tessa,” MacLeod whispered, and woke himself up. He lay in a sweat in his hotel room, the sheets thrown off, the air chilly on his bare skin.

His cheeks were wet with tears.

He sat up and wiped his face with shaking hands. How many dawns before this nightmare left him?

He knew the answer he wanted: Never. As long as she came to him in his dreams, bad or good, she would never really be gone.

As long as she never left, he could go on.

Tessa, his mortal lover for thirteen years. Tessa, an artist, a generous, creative and lovely woman, who had been killed by a random act of violence: a junkie’s bullet, when he had spent countless sleepless nights worrying that an Immortal would end her life to get at him.

“When I die,” she had once said, very seriously, “you must love again.”

He had believed then that he would.

There had been others.

But to love someone again as he had loved Tessa? He wasn’t sure that was possible.

There’s no time for us, because time has lost its meaning. Time is a mortal concept.

He looked in the window and saw a ghost. Perhaps the ghost of the man he once had been, facing one lifetime of passion, of despair, and of hope.

Ah, yes, hope.

He lay back down.

“Good night, bonnie Tess,” he whispered, and closed his eyes.

She ran toward him, her mouth a scream.

Who dares to love forever?

The man was kind to her.

He took Sammi Jo to his mansion above the bay and told a woman to give her something to eat and to put her in bed. There were all kind of people there, and it wasn’t ‘til much later that Sammi Jo learned that most of them would never die. Thanks to the man, whom she called Nicky, they were what you called Immortal.

And, thanks to him, she would be, too.

But in the beginning, she didn’t know that. She only knew that Nicky had a lot of money, and friends in high places, as they said, and that speaking of high, they smoked a lot of grass in Nicky’s fine, big house.

They dropped a lot of acid.

And in the swirling, happy visions of iridescent sounds and chiming colors, he fed her pills like grapes, his face the sun and the center of her universe. Held in arms both strong and gentle, her face showered with kisses, new clothes and shoes heaped around her bed.

He gave her books, fully expecting she was smart enough to understand them. He talked to her like she had a brain.

He did not treat her like a dog.

But she would have lain down at his feet like one if he’d ever snapped his fingers and told her to.

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