This is for Jerry Brown, whose post to the Due South Discussion List in February 1997 regarding the personality trait apparently shared by Lord Lovat (born Simon Fraser), and RCMP Constable Benton Fraser first sparked my interest in writing this story; for Angela, who wanted lots of angst and blood (preferably Ben Fraser's!); for Elaine and T'Mar, who wanted Sex and More Sex; and for Kalliste, who wanted mysticism and magic. Here, then, with sex, gore, and angst galore, with time travel and a touch of Celtic twilight, is...

(Excerpt from Fraser's journal)

The Canadian Consulate
Chicago, Illinois
Monday, 15 September 1997
10:30 p.m.

Tonight I begin keeping a journal of my own. My father's journals have ceased to exist: like almost everything else I possessed, they were destroyed by the fire that--

--but I'm getting ahead of myself. What I should do, really, is to set down everything that happened, in the order that it happened. Perhaps then I'll see a pattern emerging, for at the moment there is only one question reeling through my brain--am I insane or are they?

Even before the telephone call from Ray at the end of my vacation, I'd had a feeling that all was not quite as it should be between the two of us. But by the time I finished briefing the Inspector at the outpost in the wilds of Canada, I was tired, missing my partner, and ready to go home.

So when the junior RCMP member came into the room to tell me there was a call from Chicago, I was eager to take it, even though it meant climbing up to the top of a telephone pole, since the call was coming to a remote RCMP detachment in the Northwest Territories. My thighs ached by the time I reached the top, but I didn't care: I would have scaled heights greater than that to hear my beloved's voice. For that was my first thought--that he'd called me, all this distance away, because he missed me. He didn't have to, I thought as I braced my legs around the pole and lifted the receiver, but I'm glad he did. So very glad. And then I knew a moment of doubt. Suppose it wasn't Ray? Suppose it was Inspector Thatcher from the Consulate?

That's why I had a question in my voice when I spoke into the receiver. "Hello, Ray?"

"Hey, Benny, how's the vacation going?"

It was Ray, all right. I tried not to look as pleased as I felt, in case the sharp-eyed junior member below should see my expression. "It's everything a Mountie could ask for, Ray," I said, as casually as I could. "Lots of fresh air, plenty of exercise. How are things in Chicago?"

"Ah, you know, Benny, Chicago's Chicago. Listen, I'm just calling to let you know that I may not be there at the train to pick you up."

I was disappointed that his would not be the first face I saw as I got off the train in Chicago, but no doubt Ray had his reasons. I hastened to reassure him. "That's no hardship, Ray. I have legs, I can walk."

"I know you have legs, Benny, that's not the point." Ray said, sounding irritated. "I'm just calling to let you know that..." He paused. Then, "You may be on your own for a while."

His manner was such that I began to feel the first stirrings of alarm. "Is something wrong, Ray?"

"No," Ray said, sounding even more irritated if possible, "why would anything be wrong? I'm just calling to let you know that I'd like to be there to pick you up, but if I'm not it's not because I didn't wanna be there, it's because something came up."

Ray has a volatile temperament, but he's mellowed considerably since we first met. He explained to me once that he used to feel tense and uncertain all the time, at what the next week, the next day, even the next moment would bring. Since we've been lovers--and that has been a year now--he has relaxed. He no longer flies off the handle at every little thing I say, because he no longer needs to be defensive all the time. During this conversation he had started sounding more and more like the Ray I met when I first came to Chicago on the track of my father's killer. There was something he wasn't saying, and I was getting the impression that whatever it was, it wasn't good. "You're sure everything's all right?"

His soft, exasperated laugh reassured me but he began talking very fast, as if he wanted to end this conversation and get off the telephone. "Look, Benny, I don't know if they have a similar thing in Canada, but down here in America we've got this thing called friendship? And this is something that a friend would do, like for example, if one friend calls another friend because he's supposed to meet him at a certain time and a certain place, and he can't be there, he usually calls him to let him know?"

The slightly sarcastic tone was a cover-up. He was hiding something from me. "So everything is...all right, then," I said, but I could not keep the doubt out of my voice.

"Yeah, Benny...everything is all right." This time his voice was lower, and he spoke more slowly, so that the name "Benny" was like a caress.

"Well, that's good to hear, Ray."

Ray's tone changed, became brisk. "It's good to hear your voice. Listen, um, I want you to have a safe trip. And I will be in touch."

"All right, Ray," I said, feeling nonplussed. He was changing moods faster than the weather on an April afternoon at the Arctic Circle.

"You understand that, uh, I will be in touch?"

"As a friend?"

"Yeah, Benny, as a friend." From the smile in his voice I could almost visualize the smile on his face and suddenly my heart ached for a sight of Ray in the flesh. In the year just past we'd never been apart for as much as a whole week. I was just gathering breath to tell him how much I wanted to see him again when he broke the connection.

Twenty-six hundred kilometers away, at Fort Resolution in the Northwest Territories, I stared at the receiver in confusion. It wasn't like Ray to be so abrupt, not with me, not any more. When we first met, yes: on occasion he had been quite rude, even obnoxious, but I simply ignored it. I knew that that smart-alec persona wasn't the real Ray. And my forbearance paid off, because--once over his bad temper--he always came back to himself, to the kind, sweet, funny man I had been falling in love with ever since we met.

What did Ray mean by the "something" that might come up? Even if something prevented Ray from picking me up at the train station, he'd make a point of being reunited with me as soon as possible. Some instinct told me that all was not well, urged me homeward.

Home to Chicago, for that was how I saw it now. Home was where Ray was.

There was nothing more I could learn at the top of the telephone pole, so I climbed down, called Dief to my side, and began the first stage of my long journey, traveling due south.

On the train to Chicago, I spent my time staring absently out the window as the scenes of the country of my birth flashed by, and puzzling over the telephone call.

I hadn't expected to hear from Ray at all, as I was only going to be away for a week. The fact that I was taking my vacation without him was strange to begin with: I hadn't wanted to leave him behind in Chicago, but Ray insisted.

"Look, Benny, if you don't go you'll lose a week's leave. That's not fair, when you've put in so many hours of work at the Consulate. You deserve to go. Go on, I'll be all right."

"But it won't be any pleasure at all to go away without you," I said, raising myself on my arm to look at Ray, lying beside me in the narrow bed. "Are you sure you can't get away? Couldn't someone else take over your cases for a few days?"

Ray looked up at me, green eyes luminous, and put up a hand to caress my face. "Nah, Benny, I have to stay. Got some things to take care of. But one day soon we'll go on a vacation together, a real one, okay?"

"Yes, Ray, of course we will."

At first I was a little miffed that he wouldn't tell me about the things he had "to take care of," but I brushed these thoughts aside. After all, the man wasn't my Siamese twin: he was allowed a few thoughts of his own, even a few secrets. So I went home to Canada and promptly fell into an adventure, chasing a litterer across seventeen hundred kilometers of wild territory near the Slave River. The chase kept me too busy to miss Ray and the little sleep I had was deep, instant, and dreamless. By the time I caught the suspect and handed him over to the inspector at the RCMP detachment at Fort Resolution, I was badly in need of a bath and a shave; my vacation was nearly over, and at the very end of it had come Ray's mysterious communication. I went over and over all the evidence I had: Ray's refusal to accompany me north, his cryptic manner on the telephone--nothing made sense, so I gave it up. Arranging myself as comfortably as I could, I fell asleep in the carriage and woke up as the train was approaching Chicago. Home at last. . . home to Ray.

Dief sat down in the middle of the road, intimating that he was too exhausted to walk any further.

"Come on, Dief," I said, as near to impatience as I ever allow myself to be with my wolf. "All we have to do is turn the corner, and--"

I turned the corner and stopped, thunderstruck.

My apartment building was gone. The whole building was gutted, nothing but a burned-out shell. Stunned, I walked past the few emergency vehicles on the scene--this must have happened just a couple of hours ago--and stepped into the still-smoking rubble. My mind reeled, almost unable to comprehend this disaster.

Gone, everything. The apartment that I was so delighted to find when I first came to Chicago, despite Ray's groans of protest and his later sneers. The fact that I could walk to work in seven minutes had meant a great deal to me in those days. It was a poor apartment in a slum neighborhood, but I liked my neighbors: Mr. Mustafi, Mrs. Gamez, and all the rest of them. During my second year of residence Ray and I helped to save the building from being taken over by its heartless owner, who wanted to turn the site it occupied into a luxury condominium and my neighbors and me out into the street.

I walked around the rubble thoughtfully, looking at it, automatically noting details. But that was just with the surface layer of my mind--deep down I was saying farewell to a good many memories. This, after all, was the apartment where I'd played host to young Willie Lambert, who used to look after Dief when I first came to town; and my boyhood friend, Mark Smithbauer, the hockey player; not to mention Eric the Inuit hunter and half a Tsimshian village over the years. This was the apartment where I had loved and lost Victoria, the place where my father's ghost had materialized to give me quite unnecessary advice as to how to conduct my life, the apartment which even Inspector Thatcher had once seen fit to visit. And this, of course, was the apartment where Ray and I had eaten pizza, quarreled, and finally declared our love for each other. Gone, all gone.

Oh, certainly the memories will stay with me until the day I die, but the loss of the physical links to those memories hurts. I've never attached much importance to material things, but all the bits and pieces I'd collected were symbols of the new life I'd built for myself in this Chicago exile. The bed where Ray and I had so often made love (and which he had complained about every time, because it was so narrow and uncomfortable), my spare dress uniform, my few clothes, my mess kit had all been consumed in the fire, as had the chest in which I'd kept my father's .38 revolver and his journals. I felt deeply thankful that I'd read all the journals, knew them almost by heart; that was something no fire could destroy.

I spied a gleam of aluminum, reached down, picked it up: Dief's feeding dish. It alone seemed to be whole. Turning to scan the rubble for any other signs of property that might have escaped the fire, I spied a broken perfume atomizer. I picked it up, sniffed it, and detected the scent of ambergris, a substance derived from whales and one frequently used in perfume manufacture. Since I had never owned such an object, what was it doing in the ruins of my apartment?

My late father's ghost suddenly appeared, as it often does in moments of great stress: why is he so much more solicitous of my emotional well-being in death than he ever was in life? During the conversation that followed he told me something I'd never known before: that the cabin my parents had lived in when they first married had burned down, and that while they were building a new one, they'd lived in an igloo. It was there, my father's ghost informed me, that I had been conceived.

I'm never sure whether it's really him or my own unconscious projection that I'm talking to: all I know is that the ghost's friendly presence does comfort me, although there are times when his appearances and remarks are inconvenient, to put it mildly.

But ghostly comfort wasn't enough: now, more than ever, I needed the comfort that only Ray could provide. Perhaps he'd have heard something about the fire, perhaps he'd even investigated it himself. And surely he would let me stay with him, at the Vecchio family homestead: his family knew of our relationship, although we had been careful not to be openly affectionate with each other in their presence. In my apartment, of course, we could give full vent to the expression of our feelings and often did: in fact, for the last six months he had been spending most of his nights, as well as his evenings, with me.

I couldn't wait to get to the 27th District Station to ask him about it. Casting one last glance at the wet, smoking wreck of what had lately been my home, I summoned Dief and set out again.

It was all I could do to keep a smile off my face as I carried my bedroll, backpack, and duffle bag into the station house; once inside, I naturally removed my Stetson as well, so I had yet another object to juggle. I couldn't wait to surprise Ray at his desk: pushing through the swing doors into the squad room, I called out "Ray!", and made a beeline for his desk, which stood in a corner--

--and which was empty. Oh, dear. Perhaps he was still tied up with whatever it was that had kept him from meeting me at the train station. Determined to find him, I questioned Detective Huey, Elaine, and even Lieutenant Welsh as to Ray's whereabouts. Welsh did seem to want to tell me something ("Constable, we need to talk..."), but had to hurry off to a conference with someone from the Internal Revenue Service. Finally, on being told Ray was at his desk, I went back to the squad room and this time the desk was occupied. He was bending over it with his back to me when I walked in.

"Ray!" I said, and hurried forward. But the man who turned around at the sound of my voice was a stranger.

Stranger still was his behavior. At the sight of me, a smile broke over his face. "Fraser!" he said, coming up to me and slapping me on the back. "Buddy!"

This was the second shock I'd received in an hour, and I was beginning to feel punch-drunk. "I'm terribly sorry--I don't want to be rude, but I never forget a face and I am very sure that you and I have never met."

The man kept insisting that he was indeed Ray Vecchio, Detective First Grade, and even flashed his police ID at me to prove it. He was slim, tough and wiry like the real Ray, but there the resemblance ended. My Ray was tall, elegant, dressed in Armani: this man wore the used-up look of a streetwise urchin, and his clothes were the kind my Ray wouldn't wear to a costume ball: jeans and a short-sleeved shirt rolled up almost to his shoulders. My brain was clicking over at warp speed: my Ray was nowhere to be seen, this blond impostor apparently had assumed his identity, and--I began to realize to my horror--had apparently hypnotized several, if not all, of Ray's colleagues into believing his story.

He didn't fool me for a second, but suddenly, after the telephone call from the institution for the criminally insane, there was no time to argue. The impostor and I had a job to do, and with the real Ray Vecchio's house in danger of burning down, we had to get out there fast to save it.

It's now the end of the day, a day during which I've come to realize that everyone I know, including my own supervisor, Inspector Margaret Thatcher, and Ray's sister Francesca, are among those hypnotized. Thankfully, joining the Stranger in pursuing the performance arsonist and arresting her kept me too busy to analyze my innermost feelings, but beneath the surface my brain was ticking over with the precision of a finely tuned engine: I am Benton Fraser, RCMP Constable attached as Deputy Liaison Officer to the Canadian Consulate in Chicago. My wolf, Diefenbaker, is here beside me. I have full possession of my faculties. The man I am partnering today is not Ray Vecchio and yet everyone, even Ray's own sister, is insisting that he is. There is something afoot here, I don't know what, but I don't like it. And where is Ray? What's happened to him? Is he--

I could not, even in my mind, nor can I now, in this journal, articulate that awful, that final, word. Ray cannot be...deceased. If he were, I would know. Somehow, I would know, and I don't know any such thing at the moment.

There is much more to tell, but it's past midnight and I'm losing the struggle to stay awake. Dief in fact is snoring in the corner even as I write. Inspector Thatcher has very kindly allowed me to sleep here in my office at the Consulate, so now I need to stretch out on my bedroll and seek the welcome solace of sleep. It's been a very long day.

The Canadian Consulate
Chicago, Illinois
Tuesday, 16 September 1997
6:30 a.m.

As I will not be required to report for work for another hour, I will now endeavor to set down the rest of what transpired yesterday, in an effort to see whether I can make any sense of it.

At odd moments during the day I conducted an impromptu investigation to prove that the impostor was not, in fact, Ray Vecchio: to wit, I measured his nose, took his fingerprints, noted his shoe size, and took an impression of his teeth. However, when I (rather impolitely, I'm afraid) pushed my way into Lieutenant Welsh's office to confront him with the evidence, his reaction bordered on sarcasm.

"Constable, you have an uncanny power of observation. Of course he's not Ray Vecchio." Beckoning me closer, he whispered that Ray was a secret mission, the instigation of which came from "way up the ladder." Ray has, in fact, gone under deep cover with the Mob.

So that explained the mystery. I did not want to think of the implications just yet, because I urgently needed to ask a question. "Lieutenant, have you by any chance heard from Ray?"

"No, no, no," Welsh said hastily, "and I don't expect to." My heart sank, but I left his office somewhat consoled by the fact that I did not, after all, have a hole in my bag of marbles. I wasn't hallucinating, and the people around me had not been brainwashed, after all. They were simply going along with the ruse.

Still, my feet seemed leaden as I made my way once again to the squad room. With Ray--my Ray, the real Ray--gone, my life was over. At least, until he came back.

Then something happened that made the very blood in my veins leap for joy. In the squad room I again encountered the impostor at Ray's desk. He turned to me and said, "Here, this is for you."

He handed me a postcard, which depicted a scene that tugged at my heartstrings. It showed a snowy scene from Canada, a frozen lake surrounded by mountains under a cold sky. I turned the card over. On it, scrawled in large block capitals, was the message: "Cold out here. Heat me up."

Something clicked in my mind, made me reach for a match, which I lighted and held under the snow scene. The picture vanished, to be a replaced by a photograph--oh, God!--of Ray, wearing a brightly colored shirt, smiling as he leaned against me, standing stiffly in my dress reds. Words cannot describe the happiness that swept through me at this communication from I knew-not-where.

He loves me! He loves me still! Both the visible and the implied messages are reassuring. He hasn't forgotten me, he thinks of me, he sent me this card despite the danger to his life.

The Other Ray was watching me, evidently noting my change of expression. "Something I should worry about?"

"No," I answered, not taking my eyes from the postcard, "everything is all right. Everything is actually fine."

I banished the all-pervading happiness to a corner of my mind, wanting to keep it for later, to take out and examine when I was alone. But in the meantime, the intensity of my feelings had to be expressed somehow: I felt so happy that I wanted to make someone else happy too, and who better than this lonely, vulnerable-looking, Ray-Who-Was-Not-Ray? I sensed a great hunger for friendship in him, and after all, we'd been through quite a lot that day--even though I'd spent most of our time together wondering who the hell he was. It's not his fault that he's not the real Ray, my lover. So I looked at him and said, "Would you like to go get something to eat with me?"

The man looked incredulous at first, then a smile spread over his face. "Sure," he said. "I'll just--give me a minute to just put away these files. I'll meet you out at the car."

It was a pleasant enough meal, although he was still very much guarded in his manner last night. In time, I'll get him to tell me his real name. For now, I suppose I must call him Ray, even though it stabs me through the heart to do it. The Inuit believe that to speak a man's name is to conjure his spirit, and to me there is only, there can be only, one Ray Vecchio.

6:30 p.m.

It's now after work on Tuesday. Inspector Thatcher asked me to update one of our office databases after I finished writing my report on yesterday's activities, so I spent most of the day doing that. It was boring, repetitive work, which gave me plenty of time to think things over, and to search for the answer to one, overriding question:

Why?

Why did Ray disappear? No one is ever forced to undertake an assignment as dangerous as this one, so Ray must have volunteered to go undercover with the Mob. Why?

At one point, between the time I left the Lieutenant's office and entered the squad room, I wondered if Ray wanted to end our relationship, and this was his way of doing it. But I soon dismissed this thought. If he really wanted to end it, all he would have had to do is tell me: I would have been crushed, but I would have gone my own way and not bothered him again. Besides, the postcard put paid to that theory: Ray could only have endangered his cover by sending that card, and he had chosen to send it anyway. In so doing he let me know, in the only way he could, that he misses me and loves me still.

Is Ray trying to prove something--for example, that he too is brave and daring, capable of performing noteworthy deeds in the line of duty as a police officer? I know that the public reaction to the Bolt affair, in which both print and television media seemed to focus on me alone, upset Ray a great deal. In fact, I believe that he was very hurt (and rightly so) at being ignored. It was owing just as much to his efforts as my own--and, of course, Sergeant Frobisher's and Inspector Thatcher's--that we were able to foil the Bolts' nefarious plot to blow up Chicago and arrest first Randal Bolt, and later his brother Francis, and put them behind bars.

Is he--God forgive me for even writing this down--jealous of the attention I seem to attract without even wanting to? It is an unworthy thought and I blush to even think it about my friend, my lover. But Ray is no saint (nor am I, come to that), and his human frailties only make him more lovable in my eyes. If I could go back and rewrite the past--if I could so arrange things that Ray would have been the one to get all the publicity in l'affaire Bolt--would he be here with me still? Was it his need to prove himself in the eyes of the world that took him away from me?

Why, for God's sake, didn't he tell me about this beforehand? Why did he let me find out this way? Because he knew I would try to stop him? I feel betrayed--he should have told me about this, he shouldn't have kept it from me! Why, Ray, why?

Ray, Ray, I thought you were the most wonderful person in the world, but that wasn't enough for you.

In that telephone call he said, "You may be on your own for a while." But Lt. Welsh said he would be gone for up to six months, maybe even a year.

Ray, how am I to live without you for a year?

(End of excerpt from Fraser's journal)

It was disorienting, to say the least. In one week his entire life had changed: he was homeless, minus nearly all his possessions, and worst of all, bereft of his lover and partner. Such momentous changes were too profound, as well as too sudden, to assimilate all at once.

Only by concentrating on the moment, on getting from one minute to the next without screaming out his pain to the entire universe, could Constable Benton Fraser, RCMP, Deputy Liaison Officer at the Canadian Consulate in Chicago, keep a firm grip on his sanity.

He did not want to think too much, for that way lay madness: if he allowed himself to dwell on his losses, a whole lifetime of losses--his mother, his grandparents, his father, his first love, his career as a field officer in the country of his birth, and now his new love, not to mention his modest home and few poor belongings--he would be driven to stand bareheaded in the marketplace, rending his clothes and covering himself with ashes like the penitents of old. What had he done, what crime had he, Benton Fraser, committed against God or humankind, that he should be punished so cruelly?

"Maybe something good will come of this," his father's ghost had remarked, looking at the devastation the fire had wrought on his son's apartment building. "It did for me." By which he meant, Fraser inferred, that the fire that had forced him and Caroline Fraser to live in an igloo while their new cabin was under construction, had led to the conception of the child who would bear the name Benton Fraser.

But what good could possibly come of this?

It wasn't fair! But life was not fair, as his father's ghost had once reminded him. There was nothing he could do but take the blows of Fate on the chin. He must go on doing his duty, and doing it, if possible, with grace and without self-pity.

Self-pity was the most unattractive of all personality traits. He disliked it in wolves, he disliked it in partners, and above all he disliked it in himself. What would his lover think of him if he knew that he, Fraser, was giving way to such a despised emotion? He could not bear to contemplate it. He must conduct himself in such fashion that if Ray were somewhere, hidden from view but able to observe Fraser in his daily round, he would be proud of him.

It was as if Ray had died and taken part of Fraser with him. Every minute of every day Fraser ached for his friend, his partner, his lover. From the moment he opened his eyes in the morning to the time he went on duty, he missed Ray. But in late afternoon the pain intensified, for that was when he was used to going to the 27th District Station to give Ray a hand with his police investigations. The busywork of helping Ray's replacement dulled the pain to a steady throb until late in the evening, at which time it intensified to an ache that stabbed his heart and made his eyes fill, made him catch his breath in his throat when he remembered how it used to be.

Ray, slipping up behind him when he was washing dishes after supper, whispering "Isn't it time for young Mounties to be in bed?"

Ray bending just a little--he was an inch taller than Fraser when the Mountie was out of uniform--to press his lips against Fraser's, and then the moment when Fraser would surrender, letting his lips part to receive Ray's tongue, so warm and eager, so expert at filling him with desire that his knees trembled and only Ray's hands, hot even through the fabric covering Fraser's backside, held him upright.

He could remember, oh he could remember it all, Ray's soft whisper in his ear, "Benny, Benny, my love," and the rub of Ray's face, bristly with late-evening stubble, against his own; the slight fluttering in his stomach, knowing that soon he and Ray would be making love and then there would be an embarras de richesse, a delirious mixture of the feel of oiled flesh, sweat-slick hair, and sticky semen, the smell of lips chapped from too much kissing, the musky scent of their mutual arousal, the acrid tang of their combined sweat.

At night, in his dreams, he could have Ray again, but then, driven by desire and frustration, he would wake up to find himself alone still, the sheets rucked about him and his own ejaculate cooling on his skin. And then it would begin again, another sunrise, another twenty-four hours to live through somehow, another day without Ray.

Was it his own stubbornness, he wondered, that made him determined that no one would forget the real Ray? To save his lover, he was obliged to go along with the deception that the police officer who was impersonating Ray was the real Ray Vecchio. Grimly, he resolved to play his part to the hilt and that was why, one week after he came back to Chicago to find his lover gone, he entered the police station carrying a large cabbage in one hand and a plastic bag containing water and a small, live trout in the other. It was the real Ray's birthday, and since he had celebrated it every year of their friendship, then this year would be no exception.

(Excerpt from Fraser's journal)

Monday, 22 September 1997

His name, I now know, is Stanley Ray Kowalski: he goes by "Ray"--and always has. Today I spent time in a memorial vault in a cemetery with him, on a stakeout: nothing to do with police work, this was a private mission of his own. Ray K.'s manner was so strange that I could sense that the man was hurting; that someone or something had left him raw and bleeding.

He told me all about it, and in the midst of his recounting he did something that reminded me so much of my Ray that it was like a fresh stab of pain, and I could hardly answer him. All of a sudden, Ray K. asked, "Do you find me attractive?" For one fleeting second I wondered if he were "coming on" to me, as the saying goes, but then I realized that the man honestly wanted my opinion. It reminded me of the time when Ray was talking about hair, what different hairstyles meant, and so on. He called my hair a pelt, I remember. Ray was self-conscious about his looks, especially about his lack of hair, until we became intimate. I assured him so often that I thought he was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen that I think he eventually came to believe it...ah, Ray, Ray! Why did you leave me? I want you back. I'm nothing but a husk without you.

Lieutenant Welsh reminded me today of the danger Ray is in. He said if word got out about who Ray really is on the six o'clock news, he'd be dead by the time the eleven o'clock news came on. The Mob murders as casually as it breathes. If the Mafia suspect even for a second that he's really a police officer, he will have only minutes to live.

I'm sitting here in my office, almost in the dark except for the lamp that sits on my desk, spilling light over the pages of this journal as I write. For honor, for glory...that's why Ray undertook this dangerous mission. He wants to prove himself in the eyes of the world. But he doesn't have to prove himself to me. Surely, surely...he knows that.

(End of excerpt from Fraser's journal.)

He was used to going to bed early, getting up early--to living the life, almost, of a soldier. And that indeed was how he regarded himself, as a soldier in the war against crime. But whereas in days gone by he had fallen asleep easily, peacefully, now that Ray had disappeared, sleep would not come. The days slid by busily enough: between his work at the Consulate and his liaison work with Ray K. he could get through the days, provided he was careful not to let his mind wander, but the nights were stale and flat with no love to leaven them. Like a sunless world, his world, without Ray, lacked not only love, but warmth.

For it was true that Ray's warm Italian personality had done much to mitigate the strain of Celtic melancholy in Fraser. In some personalities that melancholy manifested itself in devotion to the bottle: in himself it showed in a peculiar bleakness of spirit. Ray's enjoyment of the everyday pleasures of life--the savory delight of a well-made minestrone, the comfort of a bed rather than a bedroll, the feel of fine silk against his skin--tempered Fraser's acceptance of discomfort as the natural order of things.

Acceptance of the realities of life, however harsh they might be, was bred into the Scots. Their very architecture testified to that bleak acceptance. It showed in their whitewashed cottages, doors and windows starkly rimmed in black, crouching low against the granite landscape, braced against the weather. None of the pretty touches of English cottages here--no softening trails of ivy climbing over honey-colored stone, no gaily painted shutters flanking window boxes spilling over with bright flowers. No, the Scottish croft was stark and bare, with nothing left hostage to blow away in the winter gales.

The blood of his Scottish ancestors, who had endured a bleak life in a poor country, that ran in his veins equipped him to cope with the harsh environment of snowy wastelands, the spareness of a life stripped to essentials: the sinews of a caribou twisted into rope, of walrus-ivory carved into toys for children, of seal oil burned to give light in houses made of snow.

On this chilly night in late September Fraser's mind refused to shut down, and he tossed restlessly on the bedroll he had spread out on the floor of his office. It was hard to be alone and comfortless when he had been used to the drowsy bliss of nights passed with his lover. Often and often, even in the depths of sleep, he'd flung an arm around Ray's chest in the middle of the night, fitting himself to the cop's warm back like bowls nesting inside each other.

Now he rolled from his side onto his back, feeling the tension ease as his muscles made contact with the bedroll. In the darkness, staring up at the ceiling he couldn't see, Fraser remembered the evolution of their relationship as lovers: at first, a welter of limbs while they were learning each other, so clumsy that even in the midst of passion they had given way to laughter; later, their movements becoming as smoothly orchestrated as a ballet. Always the same sequence, yet different every time.

Ray, ah, Ray, if you were here...

If it were true that speaking a man's name conjured up his essence, then he would conjure his Ray here and now. First, the glorious shape of him, tall, slim, elegant to his very bones, full of barely suppressed energy--above all, full of life, loud, assertive, in-your-face life. Next, the details: the green eyes, dancing with mischief, the noble nose, the full mouth--a mouth that looked, and was, voluptuous, with lips that were surprisingly soft. Proceeding south, the next detail was the delicious line of dark hair that grew almost in a cross-shape on Ray's chest, with only the topmost part of the cross missing...the flat, almost concave abdomen...the thighs at once slim and strong. And then, that region of dark delight, Ray's cock, wine-dark, steel-hard and throbbing, and his balls, hot and full and heavy, taut-to-bursting, like plums too full of sweet juice.

If he were here, my Ray, I would inhale his scent, that man-smell of musk and cologne and spice...I would feast my eyes on the olive hue of his skin, taste the warmth of his mouth, I would drink his essence, my hot Mediterranean lover, my soul's mate.

He and Ray were ice and fire, and was it not true that fire always melted ice? Cool, taciturn Celt, and fiery voluble Italian, he was North to Ray's South.

O, for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene,
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim
And purple-stained mouth;
That I might drink and leave the world unseen,
And with thee fade away into the forest dim.

The words filtered into his mind as if they had been waiting somewhere, ready. Had the poet Keats then, known the lure of the South, the heat of an Italian lover? If Ray were here, Fraser too would fade away into the forest dim, there to make love with Ray on a carpet of fallen pine needles, sharp-fragranced and soft, a bed provided by the gods.

What if Ray were here, giving him that heavy-lidded look that seemed to say Ray knew him better than Fraser knew himself, that look that made Fraser's stomach flutter with excitement and his cock stir with burgeoning lust? Ray's eyes would hold Fraser's eyes prisoner as he moved closer and closer, and then he would swoop, with hawk-like suddenness, to claim a kiss. And Fraser, faint with longing, would part his lips to allow Ray's tongue entry into his mouth, and then his mind would dissolve as Ray's hands roamed over his bare back, cupping the globes of his buttocks and squeezing them, pressing one knee rhythmically against Fraser's cock until Fraser moaned with frustration and desire.

And that would be only part of it, because Ray would whisper into Fraser's ears the whole time, sometimes endearments, sometimes teasing warnings of what he planned to do in the next second, the next minute.

So successful was Fraser's conjuring that his body arched to meet his imaginary lover's and he could not prevent a pent-up moan of longing from escaping his lips. "Ray...oh, Ray!"

And as if the name had evoked the presence, Fraser suddenly saw Ray in the room with him. Like lights and shadows playing across a blank movie screen, gradually assuming recognizable form, the picture before Fraser's eyes gradually took shape.

At first he saw a quarter-moon, hanging low in a clear sunset sky over a mountain range; then that scene receded into the background as a man carrying a briefcase emerged from an apartment building. The man in Fraser's vision walked right toward him, and Fraser saw that it was Ray, slim and elegant in an Armani suit of supple, dark silk. Ray turned left and began walking toward a parking lot next to the building, where vapor lights on tall poles flicked on one by one as dusk darkened to nightfall. Just as Ray was about to insert a key into the door lock of a conventional, light-colored sedan, another car moved into view. The long snout of an automatic appeared in the window, the rat-tatta-tat of gunfire rang out, and Ray fell against the car, his blood smearing the metal surface as he slid down against it to fall backward onto the asphalt.

"No!" Fraser's anguished cry reverberated through the darkness of his office, causing Dief wake instantly and bark in alarm. Fraser wrapped his arms around himself, shuddering at the picture that seared his mind's eye, that of Ray leaving a wide swath of blood on the door of the car as he slid down it.

Dief whuffed softly in the darkness. Fraser heard the shuffle of paws on the carpet and felt a cold nose burrowing into his neck.

"Go back to sleep, Diefenbaker. I had a nightmare."

But it was no nightmare: the blood of the Frasers carried with it the ability to "see" visions. It explained, for example, why he could see, and even hold conversations with, his father's ghost. The Frasers had always had The Sight, although it skipped a generation: that was why Bob Fraser had had no premonition of the sudden death that awaited him in a snowy valley in his fifty-fourth year. Young Ben Fraser had grown up knowing he had The Sight, as his father's father called it, and was mortally afraid of it. There were things he preferred not to See.

His possession of The Sight was why, he alone of the police officers who interrogated Garrett, had believed the frightened little homeless man who said he had visions. Ray had been skeptical, of course, but Fraser had reminded him of the line from Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." On another occasion The Sight had shown him a vision in the sweat lodge with Eric, the Tsimshian hunter, and given Fraser a clue as to the identity of the Raven, the Trickster who mocked the efforts of the law to catch him.

God, oh, God! Now The Sight had shown him a vision of the future and that future held Ray's execution. Who or what had blown Ray's cover? Who had ordered his death? And--how could he, Fraser, stop it?

After a virtually sleepless night, Fraser dragged himself through work the next day, haunted by the awful vision he had seen the night before. Every time the vision of Ray's death flashed on his inward eye he felt incipient tears stinging his eyes and despair closing his throat. He felt almost suffocated, he was so afraid to breathe, afraid that every breath would end in a sob. At last his day's work was done and he could shut himself in his office, head aching, with a cup of camomile tea in his hand and Dief's head on his knee, to think.

Ray dead: oh, no, the world was not imaginable without Ray. Ray's demise would drain Fraser's world of joy as swiftly as the setting sun drained color from the sky. Ray was only in his mid-thirties, like Fraser himself: he should live long, know the satisfaction of work well done in the career he loved, enjoy all that life had to offer, with his friends, family, and lover around him and die at last in bed when he was old.

When he had loved and lost Victoria, in his early twenties, Fraser's emotional responses had shut down, gone into cold storage as it were. But that had been a boyish, idealistic love. It was nothing like the love he knew now with Ray. True, the near-death experience he and Victoria had endured in the blizzard had infused their brief relationship with an intensity rarely found in a love affair of one week: and losing her had hurt, yes, but it was nothing like the loss he would experience if Ray were to disappear permanently from his life. With Victoria, there had been no gradual approach to a partnership that ripened into friendship and then, unbelievably, into something beyond that. With her there had been no day-to-day camaraderie as there had been with Ray, when for two years the pair of them chased thieves through Chicago, staked out potential murderers; fell into lakes, out of planes, and finally, into love.

When Victoria had first come into his life, he had been little more than a boy; when she came back ten years later, he was a man; a man in serious danger of shutting down all his emotional responses until he was little more than an automaton. Ray had saved him from that. It was when Ray had sprung a wrongly accused Fraser from prison by standing bail for him, confessing that he had mortgaged his house to do so, that Fraser realized that Ray was in love with him. People didn't do such serious, potentially life-changing actions for mere friends or buddies: they did things like that for those who meant more to them than anything on this earth. Ray had done that for him, while Fraser, lured by Victoria's siren song, had rushed to what had nearly been his doom.

Fraser set the empty teacup neatly on his desk and shook his head to clear it of painful memories. That was in the past. Regret it bitterly as he might, he could do nothing to change it. But he might be able to change the future.

If he could find Ray in time. But how? Even Lieutenant Welsh didn't know where he was. There was no one he could ask. Ray K. would not have been told anything, although there was no harm in asking him, just to be sure.

If only The Sight would show him exactly where Ray was, give him some kind of clue to go on! But such visions didn't often come out of the blue: even last night's vision had been conjured out of loneliness, intense longing for his lover, and sexual frustration. He would have to do something else to trigger whatever invisible mechanism it was that made him able to See.

If he could go to his Center he might be able to have another vision. He'd been there before, but it had been an awe-ful experience, not one to be undertaken lightly. His Center was in a jagged mountain peak, so tall and thin it looked like a spike of rock soaring heavenward. No airplane could approach that terrible mountain, for there was no landing strip. No helicopter could hover there near those steep sides, with the dangerous down-drafts that swirled around them, nor could any hot-air balloon brave the treacherous windcurrents around that jagged peak. No, there was only one way to get there.

By magic.

Fraser locked the door of his office at the Consulate, although at this hour it was hardly likely that he would be disturbed. He had already put on his red longjohns; now he lay down on his bedroll and pulled a blanket over him. Dief lay nearby, woofing occasionally as he chased fat Chicago dream-squirrels through a park in his sleep.

Fraser breathed in, counted to eight, then held the breath for another count of eight. Then he exhaled, again to the count of eight, and held the exhale to the count of eight once more. A few repetitions of this exercise would induce the alpha waves in his brain that would enable him to go through the mist-gates.

Suddenly, in his mind's eye, the path appeared. He stepped onto it and followed it downward, through the red mist that swirled around him, obscuring everything but the path beneath his feet. The red mist changed to orange mist, then to yellow, and still his feet followed the path down, down, down...yellow mist changed to green, and then to blue. The path had never seemed so long before--or was it that he had forgotten just how long this journey took? Indigo mists swirled and danced before him. He was getting very close now.

The mists changed color from indigo to violet, and then he was there, at the mist-gates. They were massive, of wrought-iron lace, but he could see through them to the cool green gardens on the other side. The gates opened at the touch of his forefinger, for they knew his fingerprint. He walked through the gardens, wishing he could stay there in the manicured perfection of carefully tended hedges, immaculate flowerbeds, neatly trimmed lawns. The lawn ended at the edge of a cliff and from it Fraser gazed across at the Otherworld. There it was, just as he remembered, a lofty crag jutting toward the sky, its grayness posing a stark contrast to the garden in which he stood.

No bridge, no way to cross that chasm, except...

Fraser took three steps, magical steps, that lifted him into the center of the mountain. There, carved from granite, was a chair: his Center. He sat down in it and closed his eyes.

Help me, he whispered, to whatever unseen force might be present. And then he waited.

His boots crunched over damp sand, stained with puddles of something that looked like...oh, God, it was. He could smell the coppery tang of the blood as it soaked into the beach. Around him lay bodies face down, arms outflung, rifles fallen from dead hands. Overhead, German fighter planes droned through the storm clouds of an early morning sky, and smoke drifted through the air. Ceaseless noise around him: the shouts of men, the thump of exploding mortar shells, the moans of the dying, and...something else.

The thin, eerie wail of bagpipes sounded faintly over the crashing of the surf. Turning, Fraser's startled eyes rested on the men tumbling out of the landing craft, smart in their green berets, rifles in their hands, wading ashore past the piper who stood, waist-deep in the surf, fingers moving expertly over the chanter as he blew into the mouthpiece of his bagpipes.

"Give us ' Highland Laddie,' man!" ordered one of the men emerging from the surf. As he came closer, a tall, elegant figure carrying a rifle, Fraser saw that the smile on his face was that of a daredevil, and as he stepped on to the beach Fraser drew in his breath, for he knew who this was.

Marching toward him across the sand was Lord Lovat, twenty-fourth Chief of the Clan Fraser, leader of the Special Service Brigade commandos now following him out of the sea. Born Simon Fraser, he was known as "Shimi"--a diminutive of the ancient Gaelic name Macsimi, meaning "son of Simon"--to his friends, even after he assumed the Lovat name and title on the death of his father. Yes, this was the commando leader whose exploits on D-Day--June 6, 1944--in relieving General Gale and his troops at the Orne and Caen bridges were to become the stuff of legend. This was Lovat, whom Winston Churchill was one day to describe as "the handsomest man ever to cut a throat."

And this was Sword Beach on the morning of the Normandy invasion; the blood soaking into the sand under Fraser's feet was that of the dead and dying men of the Second East York regiment.

Three feet away, Lord Lovat halted and stared at Fraser. Following the direction of his gaze, Fraser looked down at himself and saw that he was wearing his dress reds. Cautiously, he lifted his hand, touched the brim of his Stetson in a salute, which Lovat returned.

"A Mountie! What the devil--?" Lovat almost barked, and somehow, despite the shell bursts that sent the sand exploding upward in sudden showers around them, despite the thin scream of bullets rending the air, despite the roar of flames from the abandoned tanks as they caught fire on the beach, it seemed perfectly normal that Lovat should stop to ask such a question.

"Constable Benton Fraser, Royal Canadian Mounted Police, at your service, sir," Fraser said.

"Yes, I can see you have the Fraser looks." Lovat surveyed him thoughtfully for a moment. "You're from...Otherwhere, aren't you?"

"Yes, sir. From the future."

"Ah. Don't tell me what's going to happen about all this--" Lovat gestured with his rifle. "I don't want to know."

"You can rely on me, sir."

Lovat tucked the rifle between his chest and arm, and looked at him hard. "What are you doing here?"

"I need help, Brigadier. My best friend is in danger. I have The Sight, which you know yourself, sir, is a family characteristic--"

Lovat nodded. The Scots were a race apart, always had been; and surely never in the history of the world had so small a country--even in Benton Fraser's time the population numbered a mere five million--exercised such a disproportionate influence on literature and folklore. The blood of the Scots in general and the Frasers in particular carried the strain of mysticism handed down from Celtic ancestors who had lit the great beacon-fires of Samhain, November first, that blazed from hilltop to hilltop in the autumn darkness of the Misty Isles. Samhain was the time when the door opened to the Otherworld, when those still alive received messages from those gone before, when divination was practiced and the future glimpsed through mirror-smooth dark waters.

"--and it showed me my friend, about to be murdered. I have to find him and save him, but I have no idea where he is. He's a police officer on a dangerous mission, doing undercover work."

"He must be a very close friend indeed, for you to hazard such a journey as this."

"Yes, he is."

The cool blue eyes studied him briefly; then a small smile appeared below the Lovat moustache. "Understood."

"Can you help me, sir?"

"Don't worry, lad. You have the blood of the Frasers, you'll find a way. Good luck."

Lord Lovat blinked as if momentarily disoriented, and Fraser felt himself fading from the scene. He knew that in Lord Lovat's reality, their conversation would have lasted a fraction of a second; what to Fraser had seemed the passage of many minutes was a blink of the eye to his distant relative.

The scene before him vanished, and Fraser found himself once more seated in his Center. Exhausted by the strain of his journey, it was all he could do to find his way back through the mist-gates to normal consciousness. And hardly had he arrived back in his own time when sleep took him, mercifully, away.

The next morning Fraser checked the calendar. The new moon was a week away, which meant--if The Sight had shown him a true vision of the future--that the quarter moon would appear three days later. In the next few days, as he and Ray K. worked on the cases that came their way--cases that ranged from the merely routine to those that could be described by no other word than bizarre--Fraser spent his spare moments pondering the meaning of his encounter with Lord Lovat in the Otherworld.

"You have the blood of the Frasers, you'll find a way."

What had Lovat meant by that? Had he meant that the ability to "see,"conferred by his Fraser blood, would show Fraser the way? But The Sight was unreliable in its appearances, as Otherworld phenomena so often were--the appearances of his father's ghost being a prime example. Sometimes Robert Fraser's ghost appeared to Fraser with insights that the younger man welcomed. Just as often, the ghost's appearances were ill-timed, even annoying, although Benton Fraser would never have said so: politeness was bred into him to the point where he was unwilling to hurt the feelings of even the ectoplasmic.

Throughout history, the men of Fraser blood had been noted both for their bravery and their leadership qualities. Had Lord Lovat, born Simon Fraser, meant that Benton Fraser should emulate his own absolute disregard of the bullets flying around him on that beach in Normandy more than fifty years ago? The day after his trance-journey, Fraser found a spare hour to read the accounts of Lovat's exploits on D-Day in the public library. Shimi Fraser, it seemed, had told his men that the war was no different from an exercise: with the utmost calm, he gave his commandos their orders while striding through a hail of German gunfire. And even when mortar-bombs burst beside him, he stood rock-still, showing no fear, while lesser men jumped in fright.

Recalling Lovat's knowing smile when Fraser had told him that Ray was his close friend, he wondered if Lovat had thought less of him loving a male--considered him to be less than a man. But what did it mean, to be a man? What made a man a man? His physical attributes, his hormones, his instincts?

In physiology, height, breadth, strength, build, and features, he, Benton Fraser, was indisputably male. There could be no argument on that score.

Did a man's characteristics, his behavior, his habits make him masculine, as opposed to merely male? What was the true nature of man--to protect the innocent, defend the weak, uphold the law under which he lived? To live with honor and without fear, to treat women with gentleness, the elderly with respect, the derelict with compassion?

Was a man by nature boisterous, violent, promiscuous, profane?

Since the 1960's the stereotype of manhood had been that of a macho male, the James Bond super-spy. Bond, who drank and gambled and swore, who killed his enemies without even a flicker of distaste, much less remorse, who regarded women as prey to be taken quickly, and quickly left.

Did Fraser's refusal to conform to that stereotype make him less of a man? Was not a true man one who felt reverence for all living things, killing only for food, never for sport? One who used violence only in defense of those he was sworn to protect, never in arrogance? One who was strong in body, mind, and soul: strong enough to plow, plant, build a house, earn a living, fight a war; strong enough to keep his emotions in check when they threatened to obscure his judgment or interfere with the task at hand; strong enough to defend the principles of truth, justice, and compassion by which he lived his life?

Was not he, Benton Fraser, as brave, as loyal, as true as it was possible for a man to be? The only difference between himself and any other man was that Fraser, bisexual in the tradition of the Celtic warriors of old, had chosen another man for his lifemate, and therefore could not reproduce. Did that make him less of a man?

If he could find Ray in time to save him, he would never let him go again. Whatever it took to keep his lover by his side, he would do. Ray's undercover assignment would be over, anyway, once the Mob had ordered his execution, and the Mafia would do that only if Ray's cover was blown. He wanted a life with Ray; wanted, in fact, what amounted to a marriage with him, if Ray would agree to it, and that would mean he could never enjoy one of the most fundamental rights of man--the right to sire children.

Something in him whispered that he owed allegiance to the blood of the Frasers, that it was his duty to marry, reproduce, and thereby ensure continuity of the Fraser line. But no: once before he had put duty before happiness, and the results had been disastrous. He would not make that mistake again.

He must find Ray and save him. There was no "if" about it--he must.

Fraser studied the postcard on the desk in front of him. The picture of a smiling Ray and himself in dress reds, looking serious, made him sigh with mingled regret and longing at the reminder of happier days. Turning it over, he read the message once more.

Cold out here. Heat me up.

"Cold out here." Where was "out"? Americans habitually said up north, back east, down south, so "out" implied west. What was west from Chicago? California, of course; Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Nevada. Was the Mob in any of those places? Possibly California; surely not in sparsely populated states like Montana and Wyoming. Colorado? Utah? Nevada?

Fraser caught his breath. Nevada to most of the world meant one thing: Las Vegas. And the Mob was certainly involved with the casinos that constituted Las Vegas' major industry. Excited, he marshaled the facts he knew about Nevada: gambling, dry climate, Sierra Nevada mountains, wide open spaces outside Las Vegas and Reno.

"Heat me up." That had meant put a flame to the card, of course, to burn away the top image so that the picture underneath was revealed, but suppose there was another meaning? "Heat me up" could either mean that Ray was in a place that was cold--which was hardly likely, at this time of year in Las Vegas--or that he was "cold" in an emotional sense, meaning alone, without the warmth of human contact provided by friends, family.

Or his lover. At the thought of Ray, alone and cold, undercover in the midst of ruthless thugs who killed their fellow beings as casually as they swatted flies, Fraser shivered. And the thought of Ray lying cold and alone under six feet of earth was even worse.

(Excerpt from Fraser's journal)

Thursday, 30 October 1997
The Canadian Consulate
10:00 p.m.

Ray K., as Lieutenant Welsh and the ghost of my late father have told me--more than once, I might add--is a good man. He proved that tonight when he told me what Pike told him during that wild taxi ride.

What a piece of luck! I now know what name Ray is using and where he is. Pike told Ray K. that Ray is pretending to be Armando "The Bookman" Langostini, and he is in Las Vegas, just as I half-suspected. That's a start, although finding him is going to be difficult. For how can I, as a police officer with no jurisdiction in this country, go to the Las Vegas police and say, "I've had a vision of my former partner being killed in a Mob execution. Can you help me find him in time to save his life?"

They'd laugh me right out of the building. And if I were to explain that Ray is under deep cover with the Mob, I could bring serious consequences on myself, possibly even on the whole 27th District of the Chicago Police Department, and cause Ray to be executed immediately.

As little as I know about the Mafia, I do know one thing: wherever Ray is living, his apartment is probably not being rented under the name he's currently using. It's possible that the car he's driving may be registered to Armando Langostini--but not likely. One doesn't have to own a car in order to drive it. So even if I could get help from the Las Vegas police, all they could do is check for an Armando Langostini in the driver's license registry and possibly supply an address to go with the name. But even then, what if the address on the driver's license was simply a convenience address, and Ray really lives elsewhere?

Should I simply trust to The Sight, and try to find an apartment building that looks like the one It showed me?

What other choice do I have?

Somehow, I have to find Ray and save him from being murdered, and I have to do it with no gun, no car, and no backup. There have been occasions in the past when I faced down men with guns and talked my way out of the situation. But if there is one characteristic of Mafia slayings, it's this: they don't hold conversations with their victims first. They simply walk or drive up to the person they want to kill, and fire. So even if I arrive at the scene in time to prevent the shooting, I won't be able to do it by appealing to their better nature, as I've done in the past, or by distracting them with conversation until Ray can get his gun out.

If only I knew what that encounter in my trance journey really meant! Lord Lovat, my distant relative, told me, "You have the blood of the Frasers. You'll find a way."

He must have been a fine man when he was alive. And in spite of his blue blood, he wasn't at all standoffish, even allowing for the fact that our meeting took place on the astral plane. Apparently his friends called him by his childhood nickname, Shimi, even after he became Lord Lovat and a brigadier. Shimi Fraser...

...got it! I have the link, the clue! Now I know how to save Ray, once I find him. If The Sight showed me an accurate scene from the future, my plan will work. I must leave Diefenbaker behind in Chicago, however. I'll ask Willie Lambert to look after him while I'm away.

Ray, my Ray, wherever you are, I'm coming to you, never fear. You've proven your love for me. Now let me prove mine for you.

(End of excerpt from Fraser's journal)

Inspector Thatcher was, oddly, understanding when he requested leave. Perhaps she had grown to expect eccentric behavior from her Deputy Liaison Officer; or perhaps she had already suspected what Fraser now revealed to her for the first time, the true nature of his relationship with Ray.

"Go," she said. "You're requesting three days of vacation time. You have a right to use the hours you've accrued before the end of the year, and what you choose to do on your own time is no business of mine. Although," she added, "if your plan fails, and you jeopardize Detective Vecchio's mission as a result, you know that I'll deny any knowledge of your plans."

"Understood, ma'am," Fraser said, trying to hide his relief that she wasn't trying to talk him out of going to Las Vegas.

Meg Thatcher, his superior officer at the Canadian Consulate in Chicago, and so beautiful that it was sometimes difficult to remember that she was a senior member of the RCMP, looked at him again, consideringly; he wondered if she was thinking of what might have been. At one time he'd harbored a strange, almost unnatural passion for her, a passion born of conflict, for whenever they encountered each other she had disciplined him severely. Not until they faced death together on two different occasions had her antipathy toward him turned into its opposite--into romantic attachment.

He might have loved her, might even have married her had he not discovered in time that his affections lay elsewhere. It was during the Bolt trial that he'd discovered that fact: that previously unsuspected, life-changing, irresistibly delightful, fact.

For a moment he wondered if there were still time to seek a relationship with Meg Thatcher, one that would culminate in marriage and the possible begetting of offspring so that the Fraser name would continue. To be sure, he would be miserable without Ray, his true love; only a sense of duty would impel him to ask for Meg's hand.

But he pulled himself up sharply. Suppose there were a Fraser-Thatcher marriage; they might have daughters, who would be of the blood Fraser, but who would very likely change their names when they married. Or he and Meg might have no children at all. Or there might (chilling thought) be a son who would never live to grow up, because of accident or illness.

In a hundred years, the decision he had made today would not matter one way or the other. But he was alive now, and his own happiness was important to him. There had been a time when he'd imagined love, companionship, and domestic happiness to be out of his reach, but that was before he'd met Ray.

"Thank you for being so understanding, ma'am. I'll make a full report when I return."

"Well..." She'd looked away while he was speaking but now she met his gaze with seeming equanimity. He admired her for that. "I hope you'll be very happy. And good luck to both of you."

"Thank you kindly, ma'am." He turned to go, but she called him back.

"Fraser."

"Ma'am?"

She toyed with her desk calendar, flipping the pages back and forth. "You know," she said at last, looking at him again, "I always thought you would have made a good father."

He could feel the corners of his mouth lifting in a smile, swift and unbidden. He bowed and turned once more to leave the room, the bitter sweetness of the moment causing a pang. He would have made a good father, that was true. He would not have repeated the mistakes made by his own father.

But that possibility was now like dandelion-fluff scattered to the wind: on the path he had chosen, he might spend his seed every night inside his lover's body for the rest of their lives, but never would it find fertile ground.

Fraser stopped the motorcycle, surveyed the apartment building, the strip of grass that separated the building grounds from the asphalt expanse of the parking lot on the left, and looked up at the tall pole lights whose tops curved forward, so that from this perspective they looked like giant shepherd's crooks. At the edge of the parking lot was a scattering of trees, and beyond them he could see the bare brown peaks of the Sierra Nevada parading across the horizon. Yes, this was the place. No other apartment building he'd visited fitted the vision The Sight had shown him in every particular.

Dusk was falling, and one look at the sky told him that darkness was minutes away. It had taken him all day to find this place, so there was no time to lose.

Again, he checked the equipment he had brought with him: the rope, coiled around his chest under his plaid shirt, with the grappling hook hanging from one end; the canister, securely fastened inside his leather jacket; the cassette recorder with the tape, likewise. He parked the motorcycle in a spot where it would be unlikely to attract attention, and considered which light pole he would climb. Turning toward the entrance of the parking lot, he did a few rapid calculations as to the direction the car would take when it arrived, and the position in which Ray would be likely to present a target.

Now.

He uncoiled the rope, stood back to gauge the trajectory of the throw, then threw the end with the grappling hook at the join where the metal curve met the pole. It caught and held. Grasping the rope, he climbed up it until he could brace his legs around the top of the pole; then he drew the canister out of his jacket, made it ready.

His heart was racing, but he willed himself to calmness. Darkness came quickly, and he had just time to glimpse the quarter-moon over the distant mountains from his vantage point high above the ground.

He scanned the scene in front of him, eyes swiveling from the left, where Ray would come out of the apartment house, to the right, where the car would enter the parking lot.

Two sounds attracted his attention, made his heart hammer so hard against his ribs he wondered that the world at large could not hear it. To his left, the sound of an apartment door swinging shut, to his right the noise of an engine approaching.

Now!

He threw the smoke bomb at the asphalt below, hard, and as the smoke billowed out of it, he grasped the rope and launched himself into space, feet together. The man entering the parking lot gave a cry as Fraser's feet knocked him down, and the two of them rolled on the ground.

"RAY, GUN! DOWN!"

Fraser struggled to his knees, pulled out the cassette recorder, punched the "Play" button. At once the wail of a police siren rose and fell through the air as the car approached. He turned to crawl toward Ray, he could hear the man cocking his revolver, but the next sound he heard was the ratta-tat-tat of the automatic weapon firing, the roar of the engine as the car accelerated away, then he felt the blinding, white-hot pain through his shoulder. He fell forward onto the asphalt.

"FRASIER! Christ, it's you! Frasier, oh, Christ!"

He could smell blood in the air, that peculiar, metallic tang he knew so well. Was he back on Sword Beach then with the rest of the men, was he one of the East Yorks dying on the sand? Was that the cold gray water of the English Channel lapping over his feet as he lay face down on the beach, one arm stretching toward the rifle that had fallen from his hand, because he felt cold, so cold despite the white-hot flame of pain in his shoulder, and he was breathing smoke, and there were screams coming from somewhere...funny, they sounded like his lover, but it couldn't be Ray, Ray wasn't born yet....

"Benny! Benny, come back! Christ, don't leave me, Benny! Don't die!"

But the cold water wanted him, wanted to take him back into its own salty cleanness, to the Otherworld, so that he would be one with it. And the smell of blood was hot and strong, he could feel it spurting out of him in time to his pulse, and soon he began to drift, like foam on the surface of the sea. Was that something warm touching his face? It felt like a kiss, yes, like one of Ray's kisses in the days when they'd loved each other. Someone was screaming, "Benny, Benny, come back!" and the voice was full of sobs, but then darkness claimed him and took him away.

He'd been here before, hadn't he? Dimly, he was aware of muted voices, the smell of ether, the hum of air conditioning. He felt stiffness, soreness, in his upper body and through his closed eyelids he was aware of light.

He opened his eyes to find a pair of bloodshot green eyes looking at him. Ray was on his knees beside the hospital bed, hands clutching a necklace of wooden beads, fingers half-way through the act of telling a rosary.

"Welcome back, Benny." The voice was not even a whisper, it was the rasp of someone who had cried all night long.

Fraser closed his eyes for a second, surrendering to the unspeakable joy of seeing his lover in the flesh once more. He felt himself beginning to drift away again: the drugs they must have put into him were fogging his brain, but he knew there was something important that he had to ask. He struggled to find the words. "What...what happened?"

Ray smiled at him. It was the most beautiful sight Fraser had ever seen. Never mind the bloodshot eyes, the tear-tracks down the unshaven cheeks, never mind the mouth that trembled as its owner tried to compose himself: Ray was here beside him, and no angel in the world could have appeared more glorious at that moment.

"You got shot, Benny. But you're going to be fine."

He closed his eyes again, aware that he was losing the battle to stay conscious, but there was something else he had to communicate. What was it? Blast it all, it was the question that had raged through his mind for weeks, months: what was it? Must ask it. Had to know, must find out in case he went to the place from which there was no return.

He opened his eyes again, looked straight into Ray's eyes. "You..." he began, and oh, God, he was losing it again, losing the thread. No, it was coming back to him, he knew what he wanted to say. "You..." Was that really his voice? It was so weak that he could barely hear it.

Ray bent forward, and even through the fog in his brain Fraser could smell his breath, harsh with bad coffee and sleeplessness. "Yes, Benny? What are you trying to say?"

"You...left me, Ray."

And then he slid back into unconsciousness.

He opened his eyes and again they came to rest on Ray, but a Ray who looked very different from before. This time he was shaved, rested, well-dressed, and smiling.

"Good morning, Benny."

"Ray...good morning. Is it morning?"

"Yes. You've been here six nights already, so this is the beginning of your seventh day here. This is a safe house that's been equipped as a nursing home. You're not the first guy to be brought here in this condition and kept under guard."

Fraser's eyes took in the room with its equipment, rested on the IV still implanted in one hand. His other hand crept up, in gingerly fashion, to touch the bandage on his right shoulder.

"I'm taking you home tomorrow, Benny."

Fraser raised his eyes to meet Ray's. "I have no home, Ray."

His lover grimaced. "I know. I'm sorry about your apartment house, Benny. When I called Welsh the other night he told me how it burned down. I asked him to call Dragon L--Inspector Thatcher to tell her what happened."

"What did happen, Ray?"

"You ruined my new tie. You owe me, Frasier."

Ray grinned, and Fraser could see that the weak joke was covering a valiant effort to conquer the tears that must be lurking very close under Ray's seeming composure.

"How...did I do that?"

"I used it as a tourniquet to stop you from bleeding. The bullets nicked your brachial artery, the doctor said. Christ, Benny, you scared the hell out of me, you lost so much blood. You were covered with it, I was covered with it, then we put you in the ambulance and the ambulance guys were covered with it."

"Oh, dear."

"'S' okay, Benny. I don't give a damn about the tie, as long as you're safe."

"How's Dief?"

"Inspector Thatcher's got him with her, looking after him. He stays at the Consulate during the day and goes home with her at night. She said to tell you not to worry."

Fraser sighed with relief. "So when are we going back to Chicago?'

"Tomorrow morning. The doctor who did the surgery on you says you can travel with your arm in a sling, as long as you have painkillers, and as long as we put you to bed when we get home. My home," Ray said, and there was that about his tone which brooked no argument.

"I can't impose on you, Ray."

"Yes, you can. Ma already has the guest room set up for you. The doc says you'll need physical therapy for two-three weeks for the arm, and then you can go back to work at the Consulate, as long as it's light duty."

"Well, thank you kindly, Ray."

Fraser attempted a smile, but the pain that prevented him from echoing the expression of love on Ray's face originated not in his injured shoulder, but in his heart.

"Benny..."

"Yes?" Ray drew a breath, as if gathering his thoughts to speak, but then he seemed to change his mind. "In case you're wondering, my mission is over. My cover's blown. That's why the wiseguys decided to kill me. Apparently some relative of Langostini's showed up at the casino one night, saw me, and knew immediately I wasn't his cousin. I thought it was funny that they wanted me to come to a meeting so early in the evening--I was on my way to meet the guys at the casino when you swung out of nowhere and knocked me down. You saved my life, Benny. What beats me is, how the hell did you know it was going to happen?"

"Oh, ah..." Fraser gestured self-deprecatingly. "It's a long story."

"Tell me." Ray's eyes stayed on Fraser's face. "I got time."

Over half an hour, with several pauses and sips of water proffered by a solicitous Ray, Fraser told the story of his vision and subsequent trance journey.

"Okay, Benny, it's a weird story, but no weirder than usual--for you. But how did you get the idea to do what you did? What was the clue you found in your trance journey?"

"Oh," Fraser said. "I was thinking of Shimi Fraser, the man I met, and the words echoed in my mind...only, when I pictured the words, they appeared as "Shimmy, Fraser"--you know, like shimmying up that long light pole over the parking lot. The element of surprise, from the smoke bomb, and the element of preventing the crime from happening in the first place, were the only options I had, considering the constraints I have as a member of a foreign police force."

Ray chuckled. "Only you, Benny. Only you would have thought of it. And only you would have risked your life to save mine. I'm forever in your debt."

He leaned over to brush his lips against Fraser's forehead in a quick kiss. Fraser felt himself blushing, but he kept resolutely to the topic under discussion. "What will you do now?"

Ray shrugged. "I've already been debriefed by my contacts here. Tomorrow we fly back to Chicago under armed police escort, I park you at the house, I go through some more debriefing, then I take a couple of weeks off and go back to work."

"Ray?"

Ray's eyebrows lifted. He seemed wary as he returned Fraser's intense gaze.

"You still haven't said why you did it."

"Why I did what?"

"You left me. You didn't even tell me--"

Ray stepped forward and put his hand over Fraser's mouth. "We'll talk about that, Benny-love. But not here, and not now, okay? There's a special agent outside the door, and he's not there for decoration. I'll tell you everything--once we're back in Chicago."

Chicago in mid-October was much more bearable than Chicago in the summer. The crisp mornings, the crunch of leaves underfoot, the fragrance of woodsmoke in the air, were invigorating, and the cold wind blowing off the lake made coming inside to the oregano-smelling warmth of the Vecchio kitchen even more welcoming than he'd remembered.

"You'll be sleeping alone for awhile, Benny," Ray murmured sotto voce as he helped Fraser up the stairs the first evening of their return. "If you shared my room, I wouldn't be able to keep my hands--or anything else--off you."

Fraser laughed, but he felt relieved. He was tired, stiff, and sore; and there was still something to be settled between himself and Ray--the sooner, the better. So he retired to the Vecchio guest room alone except for Dief, who curled up on the braided rug beside the bed, and slept the deep sleep of the convalescent. But the next day, a Saturday, brought what he so passionately desired, the chance to confront his lover.

"Why?" he asked without preamble, as soon as they were alone in the house. It was early afternoon: Francesca was out shopping, Maria had taken the kids to a movie, Mrs. Vecchio had gone to visit a neighbor, and Tony, wonder of wonders, was working at his new job as a checker at the grocery store.

"Why what?" Ray was sitting across from him, mug of coffee in hand, at the kitchen table.

"You know very well. Why did you disappear so suddenly? Why did you take that assignment? And why didn't you tell me about it?"

"Whew!" Ray blew out his breath explosively. "One thing at a time, Benny. Why did I disappear so suddenly, and why didn't I tell you about it--Benny, it was top, top secret. I couldn't tell you, even though I would have given anything if I could have. As to why it was so sudden--Armando Langostini got killed in a car crash in the desert. As soon as the Powers found out about it, they dropped me into his place--into his life. I was his double, apparently--although I didn't fool Armando's cousin for a second, as it turned out. But the resemblance was close enough to fool most people."

"You haven't answered the most important question." Fraser spoke softly, but his eyes bored right through Ray.

"Ah, yes. Why did I do it." Ray sighed, looked at his coffee cup, looked up at Fraser. "Because I wanted you to be proud of me."

"But I already was proud of you." Fraser gestured helplessly. "You didn't have to take on such a dangerous mission just to make me proud of you!"

"All right, then." Ray's eyes met Fraser's unwavering gaze. "Truthfully--I wanted some of what you've got."

"And what have I got, Ray?"

"What haven't you got is more like it, Benny! You've got everything. You're drop-dead gorgeous, people stare at you when you walk by, did you know that? Specially when you wear the dress reds. You're a walking encyclopedia, an ace detective, strong, brave, you name it! People interview you, they try to get you to give 'em sound bites for the TV news, they write articles about you for the Chicago Guardian. I wanted some of that. I admit it."

"Ray." Fraser stared at his lover. "As you point out, I have been blessed with good health, intelligence, energy, a certain amount of physical strength, an aptitude for police work--everything, you say. Everything except love."

Ray bit his lip, but he was silent as Fraser continued.

"My mother died when I was six. My grandparents are gone, my father was murdered three years ago. I have no brothers, no sisters, hardly any living relatives except some distant cousins. I would give anything to have a home and a family, like you, Ray. You have looks, intelligence, health, and an aptitude for police work, and you have the blessing of a mother, sisters, a brother, nieces and nephews."

"Ah, Benny!" Ray reached across the table and covered Fraser's hand with his own. "You've got me, and if you've got me, you've got my family. It's a package deal."

"Thank you, Ray. And of course, I have Diefenbaker. He would be very upset if he knew I'd left him out."

"Good thing he's deaf." Ray smiled, then half-rose, leaned across the table to brush Fraser's lips with his own. "God, I can't wait until you're feeling better. I could--oh, what I'm going to do to you when you're well enough..."

Fraser felt his face grow hot as Ray gave him the look he remembered so well. But he was too weak, yet, to have any strength for lovemaking. Even sitting up for more than an hour tired him.

The days that followed saw the gradual mending of his shoulder. Ray insisted that Ma Vecchio feed Fraser beef broth and dishes heavy on meat. "You need to get that Mountie blood back to being rich and red, Benny," he would say as he handed Fraser yet another plate heaped with stew or pot roast.

And the cure worked, for the food, the rest, the physical therapy he began after he'd been in the Vecchio household for a week, combined to restore him to something like his previous state of health.

"Still need the pain pills, Benny?" Ray asked him one day when they'd been back in Chicago for two weeks.

"Not much any more, thank you," Fraser answered as he straightened up from brushing Dief's coat. "Dief, will you stop sulking? Just because you had to stay here in Chicago while everyone else went to Winnetka for Cousin Teresa's wedding--"

"Not everyone," Ray said. "Frannie went into work today at the station. She really loves her job."

"She does seem to be spending a lot of time there," Fraser agreed. "Her devotion to her duties as a Civilian Aide is very impressive, Ray. I admire her for studying psychology in night classes so she can be better at her work."

"Yeah, Frannie's got the right stuff. Want to take Dief for a walk, Benny?'

"I'd love to."

Five minutes later the three were heading out in Ray's latest Riviera, acquired just days ago from a vintage car aficionado in Wisconsin, toward the nearest green space. This was a small park a few blocks from the Vecchio house, where Dief could run in a small thicket of woods and the humans could walk along the footpaths.

The wind ruffled Fraser's hair as he walked along, and he felt the sting of it through his jacket. He turned to look at Ray, who was hatless, face glowing pink with the cold, green eyes alight.

"You look happy," Fraser said.

"I am, Benny. You know why? Today is the first day you haven't needed to use the sling. You must be on the mend for sure."

"It takes about six weeks for the human body to repair itself, and three weeks have passed since..."

"Since the worst moment of my life, when I didn't know how badly you were wounded." Ray glanced around quickly. The only people in view were some children playing basketball on a concrete slab a few hundred yards away. He took Fraser's hand in his and brought it to his lips. "God, Benny, for a while there, I was afraid you were dead."

"You kept your head though, Ray--you applied a tourniquet, called the ambulance on your cell phone--"

"Actually, the first person I called was my contact. He was the one who called the ambulance. It wasn't a public vehicle, you understand--it belonged to the, uh, the organization I was working for undercover. My contact and I were in a police car escorting your ambulance all the way to the safe house."

"Ah." The wind off the lake gusted through the park, blowing Fraser's leather jacket open, chilling him so that he wrapped his arms around himself and shivered. He looked at Ray. "It's cold out here. Heat me up."

Ray looked at him a long moment, then his mouth curved. "With pleasure, Benny. Come on, let's go home. We'll have the house to ourselves."

"Francesca?"

"Will not be home until quite late in the evening. I, um, asked some people to keep her busy at the station, doing research in the computer files."

Fraser could not restrain a smile. "You wicked older brother! Poor Francesca."

"Come along, Benny," Ray said, and his voice held what was almost a purr. "I'll show you just how wicked I can be."

Fraser looked into his lover's eyes and felt a flutter of excitement somewhere in the region of his stomach. It was going to happen, and soon. After all this time, this long, desolate, barren time, he and Ray would be making love again in Ray's bed.

Dragging his eyes away from Ray's--how he wanted to climb into those green depths and stay there--Fraser turned to fasten Dief's leash to his collar as the wolf bounded up to them, panting with satisfaction after his run.

The old house had never seemed so quiet, so warm, or so welcoming half an hour later, as the two men dutifully wiped their feet on the mat and went inside. Dief wandered down the hall to the living room, where a fire was burning in the woodstove, and lay down next to it.

"Benny," Ray said, reaching for him, not even waiting until they got their jackets off.

Ah, the strong arms that drew him close, the hard chest through the fine wool of the sweater he wore, the delicious softness of that wide, beautiful mouth on his own. Fraser sighed and wrapped his arms around Ray; Ray's hands drifted down Fraser's back to below his belt and began to caress the mounds of Fraser's buttocks through his jeans.

Ray's tongue was inside his mouth, it was hot, it was so hot and sweet Fraser thought he might dissolve; he could feel his cock stirring as Ray went on exploring with his hands. When at last they pulled apart, Ray whispered, "Benny, Benny, you're so thin. You used to feel so solid in my arms, and now you're just a wraith."

Fraser opened his eyes reluctantly. "Give me time, I'll put on weight. How can I not, when you stuff me full of food all day long?"

"I'm gonna stuff you with something else now," Ray growled in his ear. "Come on, let's go upstairs."

Fraser giggled, he couldn't help it; Ray was being patriarchal and Italian, and something in Fraser, some Celtic strain of perversity, perhaps, reveled in it. In his own way Ray was as territorial as Dief: Fraser knew that the Italian wanted to reclaim him as a lover, to "mark" him as it were, so that potential poachers would be warned away. They went up the stairs clinging to each other, kissing as they gained every other tread, so that their journey upward took much longer than usual. At the door of Ray's room, Ray paused, looked at Fraser, and said, "For two cents, I'd carry you over the threshold."

Hypnotized by the intensity of his lover's gaze, Fraser stared back at Ray, felt in the pocket of his jeans, brought out his hand with two pennies cupped in his palm.

With a mock-solemn bow, Ray pocketed them, then hefted Fraser into his arms and staggered into the room.

"I take that back," he said between gasps. "You may be thinner but you still weigh heavy--there!"

On the bed, Fraser sank back onto the pillows, met his lover's eyes, and smiled. Ray, half-way in the act of unbuttoning his shirt, groaned. "Oh, God, what you do to me when you smile like that...I'm already tighter than a bow-string, and you're going to make me shoot a quiver-load before it's time, Benny..."

Fraser held out his arms and Ray sank into them, on top of him; he felt the bed sag in the middle under his and Ray's combined weight. Heaven, this was, to feel that lean body against his own, and the warm, clean-shaven face rubbing against his cheeks, the tongue sliding into his mouth again while Ray's hand caressed Fraser's cock, already hard under his jeans.

"I missed you so, Benny," Ray said, releasing Fraser's kiss-swollen mouth at last. "During the day I had to be Armando, so I couldn't even let myself think about you. But at night, Benny, in my dreams...we were together again, doing this."

Fraser moaned. Need and longing were making him desperate; he wriggled out of Ray's embrace to sit up and divest himself of sweater and undershirt. Then he began to unbutton the rest of Ray's shirt.

Half-way through the act, as his fingers rested against Ray's chest, the reality of having his lover back again overwhelmed him and he stopped, shut his eyes, transfixed by the wonder of it. Then he felt Ray's hands covering his own hands, still spread flat against the silk that covered Ray's chest.

"My love," Ray breathed. "My Benny, heart of my heart, love of my life."

With a thrill, Fraser recognized that tone of voice: Ray used it only with him, and only in their most private moments. Opening his eyes again, he slid off the bed in one graceful movement, shed the rest of his clothes, lay down on the bed once more. Ray matched Fraser movement for movement, then covered Fraser's body with his own.

"Let's begin at the beginning, Benny," Ray said, and Fraser yielded to his lover, stroking Ray's back and peach-round buttocks in long, slow sweeps as Ray kissed his way from Fraser's mouth to the pulse in his throat and then down to his right nipple.

"Oh!" He'd almost forgotten what that felt like, almost not-remembered how the pathways of nerve endings made his nipple harden with exquisite sensation under Ray's tongue; that made his cock grow so hard that it began to drip, as sap drips from a maple tree at sugar time.

The fire inside his groin was burning more and more fiercely, consuming him. "Aaah," he breathed, and brushed the top of Ray's fuzz-soft head with his lips.

"Stay still, babe," Ray whispered, and then he kissed his way down Fraser's chest, prolonging the moment before taking him in the complete possession that Fraser's body was screaming for.

"Please, Ray, ah, please..." He could hardly get the words out, he was so frantic with need, would Ray never grant him the completion he craved?

A slight shifting of Ray's weight away from him, as Ray reached beneath the pillow to extract the condom and the lube; the passage of sixty agonizing, interminable seconds until he felt Ray's finger working the cool lubricant gel into his ass.

"Benny, babe," Ray crooned in Fraser's ear, and then, in tune with the long, slow strokes of first one finger, then two, Fraser arched his back and moaned. "Ray, Ray, now, please, now!"

"I won't keep you waiting another second, babe," Ray whispered, and then Fraser felt the inevitable interval of pain, bright hot pain that flared briefly as Ray entered him and then gave way to slow, hot, delicious strokes of Ray's cock that transformed the thin sap dripping from his own cock into something as thick and warm as maple syrup.

He dug his fingers into Ray's shoulders and moved in unison with his lover until their ecstasy rose in waves, like surf pounding a beach, and their cries blended as the afternoon darkened outside. Afterwards they collapsed into each other's arms, eyes closed, passion spent, while the hot thick syrup of their coming dried on their skin.

Fraser raised himself on his elbow, looked into his lover's eyes. "Never leave me, Ray."

And Ray, looking up at him, swore fealty. "Dammit, Benny, I'll never leave you again, never."

Another kiss, this time to seal their commitment to each other, then Fraser yawned. "If you wouldn't be offended, Ray, I'd like to sleep for a little while."

"No problem," Ray said, and yawned too. "I'll join you."

Downstairs a door slammed and a loud feminine voice could be heard asking where everyone was. "Yoo hoo! Anybody home?"

"Frannie," Ray said with a groan. "Home hours before she's supposed to be! Well, one thing this has settled, Benny--we're getting a place of our own. Will you marry me?"

"Yes, Ray."

"When?"

"Tomorrow, today, whenever you say."

The voice floated nearer as Frannie began to climb the stairs. "Ray, I know you're up there! The computer system went down at work, so Welsh said I might as well go home early."

"Go to sleep, babe. I'll get dressed, go downstairs, and ask Frannie to be my best man at our wedding."

(Excerpt from Fraser's journal)

12375 Wilderness Drive
Chicago, Illinois
Thanksgiving Day, 1997

Two weeks ago we moved into a house of our own, with a large fenced back yard for Dief. He even has his own room--the mud room that leads to the utility room is quiet, and sufficiently heated so that he's quite happy to stay there when we're at work. Ray has his old job back, although he's a grade higher now, which helps our financial situation.

So Ray and I are together again, committed to our future as a couple, which means that the price I'm paying for my current happiness is the knowledge that I am the last of the Yukon Frasers. There will be no son of my line to follow me and inherit this journal--to read it, and perhaps be helped by it, as I was helped by the journals my father left me. If this testament survives into another age, it will have to speak for itself--the last, the only, memorial to those of the blood of the Frasers.

On Wednesday, 5 February 1997, Jerry Brown wrote to the Due South Discussion List: Just an item of interest. . . .I was helping a student yesterday and ran across the following item in the Maclean's for 27 March 1995 page 11:

"Died: Second World War hero & 24th head of the Highland Fraser clan Lord Simon Lovat, 83, at his Balbair House, 15 km west of Inverness. His refusal to take cover as he led his commando brigade during the D-Day invasion, with a piper at his side, was recreated in the epic movie The Longest Day (1962) & won him the British Distinguished Service Order and Military Cross. Winston Churchill described him as 'the handsomest man who ever cut a throat.'"

Apparently, the ability to totally disregard one's own safety in order to do one's duty is a Fraser clan trait.

An interesting tidbit, all in all.

(Ms.) Jerry brownj@mail.fvsc.peachnet.edu

*Copyright February 1998 by Rupert Rouge on all original story content. Not meant to infringe on copyrights held by Alliance Communications, or any other copyright holders for DUE SOUTH. Please do not reproduce for anything other than personal reading use without written consent of the author. Comments welcome at RupertR@hotmail.com.