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Alex was heading north. This country hadn't changed since he was young: the swamp, the forest, the mice and birds. It was like he was a child again.
His feet were bleeding, but he didn't dare take his boots off. He wasn't sure he would ever put them back on.
He was stopped for the night. His arm smelled like cooked meat. He pillowed his head on his remaining arm and stared into his small campfire, trying to rest enough to continue, trying to heal enough to live.
What he really wanted was to rest his head in Grandmother's lap; to hear Grandfather sing old songs as he carved faces into the backs of their dining room chairs. But Christ--that home was five hundred years gone. Grandmother was dead. Grandfather was continents away. He was ridiculous.
But surely if his grandfather held him and told him everything was all right--then it would be?
No. He wasn't a child, and things would never be all right.
He shut his eyes against the smoke. He was scorched. His eyes were dry.
When he opened his eyes, a man sat on a stone across the fire. His face was in shadow, but his eyes glowed bright blue. "You smell like food," the man said.
Alex didn't answer. He had his knife in his hand.
"But you smell like magic as well," the man said. He leaned forward, over the fire, and when he put his hand down, it was the paw of a wolf. "What are you?" the wolf's mouth asked.
"I am one who never dies." Alex sat up, staring into the wolf's eyes.
"Yet you bleed."
"A great evil lives in the woods to the south," Alex said. "It hurt me, but it could not kill me."
"What do you desire?" asked the wolf.
"To go home."
The wolf nosed at his face, his throat, his arm. "Come with me. See Her."
Alex followed the wolf to a tall rock, atop which a bonfire roared. Twelve wolves guarded the steps up the side of the rock. Four had eyes red as fire; four had eyes pure white like the stars; four had eyes so black they made holes in the night. They gathered around the blue-eyed wolf, licking at his mouth; he vomited up chunks of meat and they tore into it.
The wolf stood upright and became a man. Alex expected to see the tied and embroidered clothing of his childhood, but the man wore a long leather duster and blue jeans instead. "Come," he said. "See our grandmother."
She was a bone-thin old woman rocking in a chair beside the great bonfire. She wore a colorful shawl, glittering with buttons and charms, over a gray wool trench coat and a large black skirt. She stirred a cauldron hanging inside the bonfire, but she did not burn. "He wants to go home," the man said.
"There's a price," she said. Firelight glinted off her iron teeth.
"What is the price?" asked Alex.
"Love. It's there in your pocket."
Alex reached into his pocket and found a button: a small green button that had fallen off Mulder's coat in the cell. He'd kept it; he didn't know why.
Or, he did know; he didn't know why he felt that way. "If I give this to you, I'll stop loving him?"
"Yes," she said.
"I give it willingly." He dropped the button into her withered palm.
She took a needle and thread from her lap and stitched the button to her shawl. "Drink, child," she said, and reached into the fire to take a steel ladle from the iron cauldron.
She held the ladle to his lips and it was cold; it held pure water. He drank, and he fell down dead.
Alex revived as she was carrying him into a tall iron mortar. She set him on the rim, perched on the other side and picked up a yard-long clay pestle. "You have no home," she said. "You have had many, but now you have none."
"Yes..." Cold threads were woven through his veins. Frost was gathering in the places where he touched the iron. "Take me to Peter's city, please, ancient mother."
She gave him a broom made of green birch twigs. "Sweep as we fly, child. Sweep away our traces from the sky." She pushed off the rock, sending a shower of sparks behind them, and Alex swept them away as best he could.
They flew faster than the wind. Alex looked down, through the sparks, and saw the glitter of rivers, the soft midnight green of forests, and every so often the glow of a town. As they approached St. Petersburg, the glow overtook the forest, until there was nothing but brick and asphalt.
She set down on a flat-roofed building. "What did I drink, ancient mother?" Alex asked.
"The waters of death," she answered. "For your kind, it creates life."
He climbed out of the mortar and stumbled to his knees. She took off again, sweeping the pestle against the air, brushing away the sparks with the broom. He watched as she vanished into the northern skies.
He touched the stump of his arm and found that it was healed clean and smooth as an egg. His feet, as well; they didn't hurt, not even the low pain he was accustomed to every day. His lifelong wound, healed by the waters of death.
There was nothing to do until sunrise, so he curled up against the lip of the roof. He wondered if his arm would grow back in time. Perhaps with more heads, more power--more death.
He was so very weak. He needed strength. His grandfather was the strongest Immortal he knew... he could kill him.
And he could kill him; Grandfather would let him walk straight into his arms with the knife in his hands. He didn't know why he hadn't thought of that one before.
He watched the sun rise, considering his next move.
THE END.
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