See Part One for Disclaimers

Jonathan had a fine view of the preparations for returning Dr. Rand to his mortal coil.  Or, rather, Jonathan's mortal coil.  He kept working on the straps that held him.  No luck.  The woman had apparently had a great deal of experience in binding people who did not wish to be bound.

He was sweating, cold droplets that gathered on his chest to run off his sides suddenly.  He tried to shut out the skull, the array of incomprehensible machinery, the cold stone beneath him.  He closed his eyes and calmed his breathing.  He centered on his own heartbeat, like a drum beating a too fast tempo within him.  He slowed the beat until it was closer to normal.

Jab.

He stiffened, but kept his eyes closed.  A needle in his arm, prodding, searching for a vein.  He opened his eyes.  Needle, vein, tubing -- he traced the tubing back to a saline solution bag full of something that looked suspiciously like adulterated saline.  His arm was cold, the joint bordering on aching.  He tried to shift against the stone.  His arm was numb.  That nasty cold thing settled in his belly and started jabbing with frozen talons.  Maybe calm was not the ticket out of here.

Maybe he didn't have a choice.  He felt his body start to fall away.  Whatever was in that bag was having an anesthetic effect on everything but is mind.  He tried to find a way to fight the spreading numbness.  His vision clouded.  Damn.  He was losing this fight and it was one he couldn't survive losing.  He grabbed for something to use as a focus to fight the drugs.  Hikari.  Aki.  Uke.  The two women's faces blurred in his mind.

Hikari.  The boy he had never seen.  He focused on his mental picture of what the boy would look like.  He saw black hair, fine bone structure, almond eyes like his mother's in a round, childish face.  He focused on the strength he needed to keep that child safe from the Black Dragons.

Slap.  His head rocked to the left.  He snapped back to glare at the woman.

She laughed at him.  "Poor Jonathan Raven.  Tonight you become a legend."  Her eyes traveled to the skull, the sullen light within it pulsating in time to his heartbeat.  "Tonight, Dr. Rand comes home."

His lips pulled back from his teeth in a silent snarl.  His fists clenched.  He wanted to wipe that smirk off her beautiful face and then wipe her face off on something hard and unyielding.  Another face imposed itself between them.  Blue black hair, green eyes, mystery and illusion, and caring.

"You're not half the woman  she is, and you never will be," he said softly, for her ears alone.

He expected her to strike him again.  She almost did, then changed her mind and ran her hand over his chest, down past his waist and came to rest on his crotch.  "I don't have to be.  This will serve me well when David is within.  She will have cold comfort, again.  And I will have what I deserve."

"And that is?" he asked with a bravado he was far from feeling.

"A warm, living man who loves me."

"Isn't that -- incest?" he asked curiously.

She did slap him then.  He felt his lips crush against his teeth and split.  He could taste his own blood.  But he could feel, in spite of the drugs she had administered.  It hurt, but it was real.

She hauled her hand back to strike again.  The ghost caught her wrist and hurled her away from the man and the rock.  She scrambled to her feet, angry words in Russian rising to her lips, then stopped.

"Rand."

"Yes.  You were saying?"

"Nothing.  He was -"

"Insulting?" He moved toward her, ran a hand under her chin and lifted her face to his.  "Or truthful?  You are, after all, my daughter -- in a sense."  He was enjoying taunting her, as he always did.  He leaned forward, almost close enough to kiss, but not quite.  "Do you truly think I will deal with you that way?" he whispered and released her.

He turned to Jonathan.  "My.  You do seem to arouse the female.  Curious.  I suppose I shall have to investigate this effect more fully once I am -- reborn."  He checked the solution in the bag.  "Ah.  Good.  Almost done.  Soon, Mr. Raven, you will have no more worries."

Jonathan closed his eyes and let the world slip away.  If he was lucky, Ski and Cheri would get to him.  If not -- Maybe the Black Dragons would give up on Hikari once his father was dead.  A niggling little thought sat in the back of his mind pointing out that the Dragon's wouldn't know he was dead.  They'd keep going after the body they thought was Jonathan Raven.  A small satisfied smile curved his lips as he drifted deeper down among the things at the bottom of his mind.

Darkness.  He was standing in a puddle of something the consistency of half gelled jello.  It felt the way jello looked in that particular state.  He tried to move forward.  It was an effort.  He wondered absently what had gotten into the room that felt like this.  And whether there was a light available to find out what it was.  And exactly  where it, and he, was.

Someone struck a match.  A pale, warm glow in the dark.  It went out.  A gravely voice cussed softly.  Scratch.  Spark.  Another match.  A candle wick flared as it caught fire.  The match went out.  Dimly, he could see someone holding the candle.

"Hello?"

The figure turned swiftly, dropping the candle.  The light went out.  "Damn, you give a fella a turn."

"Ski?"

Hiccup.  Jerk.  "How -- how'd you -- know my name?"

"It's me, Ski.  Jonathan."

"Jonathan?  I don't know no Jonathan."

He could hear the man scuffing around in the dark trying to find the candle.  An exclamation of triumph.  Scritch.  Spark.  Flame.  He lit the candle again.  He was squatting on the ledge about six feet from Jonathan.

"Ski, it's me," he said gently.

The man peered at him.  He could smell alcohol now.  This wasn't Ski as he was now, this was Ski when he found him years ago.

"Ski, it's Jonathan Raven."

"Raven?  I knew a Raven once.  He's dead.  My fault.  Damn.  Good feller, but cold.  Damn cold."

Jonathan tried to move forward, toward Ski, toward the light.  Ski was beginning to shamble away from him, still muttering to himself about the mission he'd abandoned.

"Ski!"

The man turned sharply.

"I need your help.  Please."  The familiar face, so close, so far away.  If he could just reach him.  He struggled to just inch forward against whatever held him.

Ski came back to the edge of the ledge, looking at him curiously.  "You look like him, kinda."

"Give me a hand out of here, and we'll discuss it."

"I dunno."  He peered down into the darkness that held Jonathan.  "What's down there?"  He held the candle down and out to see if he could shed some light.

Jonathan looked down and knew he shouldn't have done so.  Blood.  Faces, white in death.  Reproachful looks.  He was knee deep in a pit of bodies and blood and regrets.  He closed his eyes.  He couldn't look down, or back.  Not until he was clear.  He looked up at Ski who was shaking his head and backing away from the edge of the ledge.

"Don't look like I can help you, son.  Don't look like it at all."  His head lowered as he turned away.

"Ski!  You've already helped!"  He tried to keep the desperation from his voice.  "I just need a little more.  Just a little -- pull.  Please."

Ski turned back, squared his shoulders and nodded.  He set the candle carefully down and knelt at the edge, reaching out as far as he could without toppling into the pit himself.  Their fingers were inches away from each other.  Jonathan leaned forward, reaching out for the human contact he needed, craved and feared.  He stretched as far as he could.  They touched ------

Jonathan Raven screamed as metal tendrils plunged into his flesh.  Dr. Rand's machine was ready.

Pain became a constant.  Even inside his head, Jonathan couldn't escape the punishment his flesh was taking as Tanya and Dr. Rand prepared him for the change.  Memories flashed around him and were stripped away by a psychic wind.  Ski vanished.  Everything vanished.  He lost every memory he could summon, and some that seemed to come from the formless void that was encroaching on him.  He screamed in rage, in anger, in torment.  And then there was silence.

The pain was gone.  He was warm.  Comfortable.  Sleepy, even.  He blinked, opened his eyes for a moment and let the lids fall again.  Then his eyes slammed open and he stared in fear and horror.  He was outside himself somewhere.  He could see his body on that stone slab.  Tanya was -- coaxing -- metal tendrils out of his flesh, crooning to the machine from which they came.  One by one they pulled away.  The punctures healed instantly.

He was dreaming, he had to be dreaming.  Please let him be dreaming.

He watched as she withdrew the needle from his arm.  She undid the straps holding him down.  He watched as he sat up.  If this was astral, he was in trouble.

"How do you feel?"

The body moved cautiously, feeling its way.  Dr. David Gabriel Rand had been without a true physical form for almost three decades, since he had first faced Cheri Yuconovich in the early 1970's and been accidentally melded with his computer.  He had been trying to create an artificial intelligence, a machine with the capability of thought.  He had become a part of that machine.  Had he not already been more than human, as he thought of it, he would never have survived.  (Had he not been insane and lacking in normal human emotions, as Cheri and her partners thought of it, he would never have survived.)

He felt lungs functioning in his chest, he felt cool where his skin was bare, he looked at Tanya Kropotkin with eyes that no long burned with fires of supernatural origin.

Tanya couldn't take her eyes off of him.  He was breathtaking.  He had always been impressive, but ethereal.  This solid body was interesting, intriguing.  She waited.

"You have done well," he told her.  Jonathan closed his eyes as if in pain at the sound of his own voice distorted by wherever he was now.  "Yes.  Very well."  Technically, Jonathan Raven was not just decades younger than Dr. Rand, his body was almost fifteen years younger than Rand had been when he died.  And this was a very, very fit and healthy body.

He marveled at the musculature.  He stretched and reached and wondered just who this man was that he kept himself so fit.  He looked around at the skull and smiled.  Then he wobbled.  He felt disconnected, woozy.  He sat down on the stone.

"He's fighting me," he croaked.

Tanya caught him as he half vacated the body.  She laid the body back on the slab, quickly restraining it just in case Jonathan managed to get back into it.  She took a quick look at the instructions for the use of the skull.

There was a crash from somewhere out of sight.




Cheri, touching the skull, had directed Ski where to go.  It had seemed like hours upon hours passed while she patiently unraveled her visions and collected an astonishing headache.  It was truly little more than half an hour between the time she tried to hand Ski the keys to her bike and the time she told him to park.  Half an hour can get you amazing places in Hawaii.

She stared at the small cave opening with eyes that looked huge and hollow in her face.  She let go of the skull.  "It's here.  The other one is here.  We have to hurry."

"I hate to argue with you, but are you sure?"

"I'm sure.  He's in danger.  He's in grave danger.  We have to get him out of here.  If Rand gets a hold on him -- we'll never be rid of him."  Not that I've ever exactly managed to get rid of him yet anyway, she told herself.

She felt like she'd been beaten with sticks as she climbed out of the car.  She left the other skull sitting in the car in its velvet sack.  From here, it was just the usual, fight your way in, rescue the victim and fight your way out.  She stalked into the cavern, Ski, guns in both hands, right behind her.

There wasn't a guard.  That disturbed Cheri's peace of mind.  She walked into the cave, listening for anything to tell her where to go.  There was a faint flicker of light off to the right.  She went toward it.  Candles.  Torches.  How melodramatically appropriate.  She stepped into the second cavern.  It was beautiful.  And in the center of it was Tanya Kropotkin bending over a still form on what looked for all the world like an altar.

"Kropotkin!" she yelled and fired.  She was not going to give that bitch a chance this time.

Tanya ducked and spun, diving behind the stone, scrabbling for the gun she wasn't carrying.  "Shit!"

Cheri stalked across the open cavern floor, skirting small stalagmites and ignoring Tanya's abilities with a gun.  She thought Tanya would have fired by now if she was capable of doing so.

Tanya, thinking quickly, dove out from behind the stone and headed for the nearest stalagmite that would conceal her.  Someone opened fire on her.  She made it to shelter without a nick or a hole.  She heaved a sigh of relief over that and stood very, very still.

"Did you get her?"

"Don't think so.  You get Jonathan, I'll take care of her."

"Sounds good to me."  She started undoing the straps holding the man she had come to rescue.  "It's me.  How are you doing?"

She was concerned when he didn't immediately answer.  He slid off the stone, facing the skull.  She couldn't see the pleased look on his face.  He stretched as he imagined the true owner of this magnificent body would do.

"Jonathan?" she asked hesitantly.   No.  Please.  Please.  Please.  Please, don't let him have won.  Please don't let it be  him.  I don't want to kill him.  I don't want to --

He turned toward her, his eyes warm and dark, he opened his arms to her.  She went around the stone, practically falling into his arms, a sob of relief escaping her.  She was so tired, and he felt so right in her arms.  He stood there holding her, smiling, hellfire dancing in the velvet dark of his eyes.

Inside the skull, a tiny figure battered against the crystal walls.  He glared out at the man and woman he could see.  There had to be a way to let her know, to tell her he was trapped in here while the spirit of Dr. David Gabriel Rand was now in possession of his body.  He slumped to his knees.  There was no way to let her know.  No way at all.

He was motionless as Ski picked up the skull and slid it into a velvet bag as dark as the pit of despair looming open before Jonathan Raven.  What would they do with the skulls now that they thought they had rescued him?  What indeed?

Tanya Kropotkin, watching from a safe vantage point, having eluded Ski's efforts to locate her, frowned at the embrace.  An unaccustomed rage rose up within her.  That bitch.  That unmitigated bitch.  Never satisfied with what she had, always wanting more.  Wanting what Tanya had.  Wanting -- wanting --

Blinding pain assaulted her senses as she had a very short vision of a small, dark haired body being brought into a gas-lit living room.  The girl was wet through, her pale skin wrinkled with immersion.  Tanya felt her heart stop, grow cold.  So.  One of them carried the taint.  And then the pain overwhelmed her and she fell into the dark.

Derek Rayne stepped into the sunshine of a warm Hawaiian day from the air conditioned frigidity of the flight from San Francisco.  He located a taxi and gave an address.  Within an hour, he was stepping out of the taxi, gazing at the graceful combination of Japanese and Hawaiian architecture that was Jonathan Raven's home.

He could sense the incredible power that had been used here.  But where was the practitioner?  Where was the man who had called the Legacy?  And where were the Shikitami Skulls?

fin
(to be continued soon)

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