See Chapter One For Disclaimers

Chapter Four

Breaking and entering.  Derek wondered just exactly what he thought he was up to as he held the pen-mag light for Cheri.  She took just under 15 seconds to circumvent the security system on the door and another 10 or so to open the locks.  What the hell had he gotten into?

Swiftly and silently, they entered the museum.  The item they sought was in a South American display.  With appalling ease, they found the room and entered it.  The item was displayed under glass with it's own lighting system.  And it's own very tricky alarm system.  Derek watched his companion move with grace and certainty.  It was obvious she had traveled this route before, if not in this museum, under similar circumstances.  She motioned him forward.

If he was expecting laser lights and high tech protections, he was doomed to disappointment.  Aside from motion and sound sensors which were quickly dispatched, and video cameras at odd intervals, the room was relatively unprotected.  Cheri had reached the display case and had an unreadable look on her face when the lights went on.

"Ah, Kropotkin," Yvygney's voice sounded behind them.  "I really  must thank you for doing the honors.  Did you think I would not be watching?"

Cheri turned and looked at him, her face so still, so stone like.  It gave Yvygney a pause even as his men moved forward.  "You have no idea what you are dealing with here," she said quietly.

One of the men shoved Derek out of the way and reached for Cheri. Her movement was almost too swift to be seen.  There was a crack and the man's face went white under his tan.  She released him.  He nearly went to his knees as the bones in his forearm, just above the wrist, grated against each other.

"That is enough of that."  There was a gun in Yvygney's hand now.  A big gun.  The muzzle shifted from Cheri to Derek as the man pulled the trigger.

Derek started to move as the gun did, but faster than a speeding bullet had been left off his resume.  He felt the projectile hit him high in the chest, picking him up off his feet and throwing him back against the wall.  He managed to miss both of the display cabinets he could have hit.  That was something.

For a moment, all he felt was stunned.  Then the pain hit. His breathing became difficult. A part of his mind catalogued the blood, the beginnings of a gurgle when he breathed, the probability that the lung would collapse before it filled with blood.  The rest of his attention was taken up watching the two remaining body guards remove the glass case.  They did so with a delicacy that was difficult to believe in such large men.

They set the glass aside, turned back and one of them reached for the dully gleaming object. It was about half again the size of a football, shaped in roughly the same manner, although not as tightly pulled together at the ends.  The metal gleamed with a color somewhere between brass and bronze.  He could faintly make out what looked like incised writing of some sort.

One of them reached for it.

"Don't touch it."

Yvygney looked at the woman curiously.  He split his attention between the lusting look he gave the object and the "what does she know" one he was giving Cheri.  Then he laughed.  Of course, she was attempting to scare him off.  Foolish woman.  He nodded and the man reached out a large, warm hand to pick up the item.

In the fractions of seconds between his nod and the first contact of skin with the object, Cheri moved.  She whirled, knocking aside the man on her side of the display pylon and reaching to stop the other from touching.  She was hundredths of a second too late.  She knocked his hand aside as his warmth triggered the mechanism within.

"Damn."

A section of the item, about three quarters of its length and half its depth, shifted, lifted.  Derek could sense power, but no form.  He could feel it in his bones and he felt afraid.  Cheri's hair lifted as though on a wind and she moved to intercept whatever was being freed.  She was too late for the man who had touched the object.  Dry bones inside a suit collapsed onto the floor.

Cheri looked as though she had been hit by some force, bent over, curling in on herself.  Then she straightened, as though the movement was not quite natural.  Possession.  No.  Derek wanted to howl his anger and sorrow to the stars.  Instead he lay and strove to keep breathing against the pain, against the sensation of sucking fluid that was overtaking him.

Slowly, she came fully erect.  The fluid, dangerous movements were gone.  With eyes of pure black, she stared at the other body guard as he fumbled for his gun.  For a moment, she held his eyes.  The movement that reached for him was oddly inhuman, disjointed.  Dry bones hit the floor.

"That is quite enough," Yvygney told her in a strained voice.  The gun was trained on Derek, the hand that held it quite steady.

Some detached portion of Derek's brain noted the steadiness of the hand, the huge hole in the end of the barrel through which his death would surely pass in a few moments.  It seemed both fitting and completely unbelievable that he would die so easily and for something so beyond his experience.  He looked at Cheri's face as she pivoted to look a the source of the sound.  He knew that this was how she had heard Yvygney.  He knew also that whatever inhabited the body he had loved, it was not remotely human or a part of the forces of evil he fought.  What lived within now was alien, remote, inhuman, incapable of understanding Yvygney's words or actions.

Silence.  He could heard the blood in his lung gurgle.  He could hear the big man's breathing.  He could . . . he could not hear Cheri's breathing.  She wasn't breathing.  The body swayed.  A sudden heaving intake of breath broke the silence. A first one, a second one, a third and the rhythm of breathing began to settle into a normal, if too deep, cadence.

Yvygney, incapable of understanding what he saw, continued to hold Derek hostage for the behavior of something that did not know the man.  "Put it back," he told the woman before him.

How long since she had blinked?  Derek was watching her face bemusedly.  He had forgotten the gun.  Yvygney could only shorten his journey now.  He had already begun to slip toward the other side.  A part of him wanted to fight.  A part was tired, too tired to care whether he survived or not.  Yet he wanted desperately to know if Cheri would join him or not.  And he couldn't tell.  Not yet.

Cheri took a step forward, her head cocking over to the right at an odd angle.  Yvygney, the glimmer of understanding beginning to sparkle around the edges of his mind, looked at her and tried to make a point.  The gun boomed again.

Derek jerked as a second slug entered his body, lower down this time, a belly wound.  He almost laughed.  The shock had numbed him again.  A deadly, painful wound, but not as swiftly deadly as the one in his lung.  Fool.

And Cheri stepped forward again.  Her right hand shot out and touched Yvygney's face.  His mouth dropped open soundlessly as his flesh shriveled, vanished.  A third pile of bones joined the first two.

Silence.  Derek struggled to keep breathing.  It was a tortured sound in the silence.  Oh, God.  Those eyes.  Black holes in a face he almost could not recognize.  He swallowed convulsively, tasting blood.  He lay there, looking into those alien eyes, knowing they were the last thing he would see.

Jerkily, she shifted her weight so that she could move toward him.  She started forward and stopped.  He sensed a titanic struggle of some sort.  Was Cheri still in there?  The head cocked to the other side, staring at him.  She stepped forward, then knelt beside him, still looking, staring.  She reached toward him and stopped just short of actually touching him.

Sights and sounds, sensory input his brain was having a hard time categorizing, he cried out in awe and terror.  He wanted to cover his eyes, but he wasn't seeing with any physical sense and he knew it.  He stood in a void surrounded by . . . by . . . and it was gone.  He had seen through alien senses into the vastness of space.  What little color had been left in his face drained away as he tried not to shatter into tiny psychological fragments in the face of what he had seen . . . felt --  known -- in the face of the horrible isolation the being now before him knew.

She stood up and turned back to the object. The entity within seemed to be getting a better grasp of how to move.  Slender fingers made awkward with unfamiliarity touched the surface of the object, faltered for a moment, then moved to touch certain characters on the surface with absolute certainty.

Seconds passed.  Eternity loomed.  The object was gone and Cheri sagged forward, grabbing the display pylon for support.  Her breathing came in great ragged gasps.  She looked around, tears running down her cheeks.

"Not again.  Dammit.  Not again."

Derek choked on his own blood, coughing up red clots and fighting to catch his breath again.

Cheri whirled to look.  Alive.  But not for long.  She skidded to rest on her knees beside him, gentle fingers checking his wounds.  She could see death in his face.  Too much blood loss.

She took his hands in hers.  They were already cool to the touch.  "Derek."  He pulled his gaze back to her face.  She was perceptibly thinner, gaunt looking, her eyes huge and green in a pallid face.  He tried to smile.  He shifted his head slightly to acknowledge her.

"You're dying.  I know, statement of the obvious.  Look at me."  The last was sharp, pulling his attention fully onto her.  "Are you ready?  Have you done what you must?  I know, sounds like a stupid question, but I need an answer.  Are you done?"  The fire in his eyes, the anger that burned deep within him at losing his life this way, answered her.  She took a shaky breath.  "OK.  Do you want to live?"

He frowned at her.  What was she offering?  How?  Medical help?

Another breath, her eyes dropped and came back to him.  "I can save you.  No loss of your soul, just a . . . peculiarity of genetics.  You  do want to live?"  His eyes answered her as his voice could not.

Swiftly, with hands that shook from weariness, she pulled a small pocket knife out of her pocket.  He tried to move, to speak, to stop her from slicing open her wrist in three neat parallel slices.  Her blood dripped onto him, onto his wounds.  He tried to shake his head, to deny . . . yet there was a fascination to the sight.  Her blood seemed some how thicker than normal, dripping and oozing instead of flowing in swift bright streams as he had expected.  Gently, she worked her blood into his, into his wounds.

She bound up her wrist and looked into his eyes again, a lost soul in a found body?  Something flickered in her eyes, a tear slid down her cheek.  "Oh, almost forgot.  This is gonna hurt."

Understatement.  Fire and ice washed over and through him, agony unknown and unrememberable touched every cell in his body as her blood worked to repair the damage done.  He could feel her hand in his, faintly aware that his grip must be crushing her hand.  He curved inward on himself.  He could  feel torn skin, ripped muscle, smashed bone and organs pulling together, growing . . . the very cells were coming together to heal.  He vomited blood, clearing his stomach and his lung.  He screamed and passed out.

Security and local police poured into the building.  They found Cheri, a blood soaked bandage around her arm, holding Derek and rocking him slightly.  She was hysterical.  Eventually the local authorities pieced together a story of hostages and terror

They took both survivors to the local hospital for patching up and monitoring.  Alex and Nick found Derek in the hospital.  They met some resistance at the front desk when they inquired about him.  A slightly built woman with long black hair and wide green eyes came over to find out what the problem was.

"It's all right," she told the desk clerk softly, flashing some sort of official ID at her.  "We're expecting them.  You must be Alex and Nick."

"Yes.  Derek . . ."

"He'll be fine.  He's been shot, but the wounds are relatively minor.  There may be some trauma induced amnesia around the incident itself.  It's a frequent side effect of being shot . . . especially when you aren't expecting it.  There will be some questions when he's recovered enough to answer them, but I suspect the local police will release him on his own recognizance. He was very helpful in stopping a major robbery at the museum."  She stopped outside a door leading to a private room.  She nodded to the policeman on guard beside the door.

"Nick Boyle.  Alex Moreau," she introduced them to the guard.  "They work with Mr. Rayne.  They are to be allowed access to the  patient."

"Yes, Ma'am."  He nodded at the two, giving Alex a long appreciative look that made her color rise slightly.  He stood, opened the door and nodded again as they entered.

Derek looked pale against the white sheets.  He was attached to a great deal of monitoring equipment, all of which was indicating that he was as healthy as could be expected.  They sat down to wait.  Cheri withdrew.  She took one last look at Derek before she left.  Given the trauma of the wounding and the almost equal trauma of the partial healing induced by her gift, she was certain he would lose the memory of the couple of days they had spent together.  On one level, she wished she could lose the memory.  Then again, life was full of bittersweet memories.  Being loved was only one of them.

Derek ran a hand over his chest, knowing that the scarring was minimal, hardly there at all.  His doctors had been amazed at his speed of recovery, at his resilience, at the healing he had done.  He had never questioned it.  Being part of the Legacy tended to cause one to accept the unnatural, the supernatural, the preternatural . . . even on such a mundane level.

Now, he wanted to know more.  Yet she had left him.  He frowned at the sky outside.  She hadn't waited around to see if . . . No.  She had known he would survive.  She had given him life via the blood she had given him.  She was something . . . probably not human.  He would have to see what Alex had turned up in her search.  He was certain there was a clue there.  He did not want to face her until he had something to go on, something to guide his decisions other than the ache in his heart.

Yes.  He would ask Alex.  And he would visit the art exhibit once he was armed with the information he needed.  For now, there were other items that required his attention.

the end

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