When Tessa is taken by a band of Survivalists who live off the land in the vastness of the Pacific Northwest, MacLeod must call on all of his own skills, honed a hundred and fifty years earlier, when he roamed this same mountain fastness. The leader of these modern day mountain men, Caleb (who is revealed to be an Immortal), falls in love with Tessa, and in the end he and MacLeod battle to the death, axe against sword, against the primitive backdrop of the timeless wilderness.

Warning comes from MacLeod's old friend Darius, a monk over 2000 years old, that Grayson, Darius' one-time protege, is now stalking Darius' other students -- among them, possibly, MacLeod. Grayson, disillusioned that his former comrade-in-arms has become a man of peace, is killing Darius' mortal students in order to draw the monk off holy ground and into combat. MacLeod must protect peace activist Victor Paulus, another of Darius' students, from Grayson's plot to assassinate him. Later he joins Richie and Tessa in France where they will live while Tessa takes up her new job as curator of a traveling collection.

A mysterious death at the Paris Opera re-acquaints Duncan MacLeod with one of the strangest Immortals he has met in his many travels over the centuries. Ursa is a hulking giant -- more beast than man -- who Duncan rescued from persecution centuries ago, delivering him to sanctuary in an abbey. The abbey has long since been destroyed and Ursa now lives under Paris. He has become enamored of a past-her-prime opera singer who tries to use Ursa's innocent soul to murder her rival.

Determined to investigate the death of his old friend Darius, MacLeod follows a lead back to his old stomping grounds in the Pacific Northwest. He meets Joe Dawson, a bookstore owner with a secret; he soon learns that Dawson is a high-ranking member of an ancient secret organization known as The Watchers, who observe and record the lives of the Immortals, passing their archives down from generation to generation. Unbeknownst to Dawson, his brother-in-law, James Horton (the man who killed Darius), has been recruiting Watchers to kill Immortals. We are left with the knowledge that other renegade Watchers may be waiting to try for MacLeod's head.