"Falling Angels"

Author: Notmanos

E-mail: notmanos at yahoo dot com

Rating: R

Disclaimer: The characters of Angel are owned by 20th Century Fox and Mutant Enemy; the
character of Wolverine is also owned by 20th Century Fox and Marvel Comics. No copyright
infringement intended. I'm not making any money off of this, but if you'd like to be a patron of the
arts, I won't object. ;-) Oh, and Bob is *my* character - keep your hands off!

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10

        They were expecting him, that was a given. So Logan insisted on going in alone at first.

Club Exstacy was no longer where it was supposed to be; it was a construction site now, a small rectangular framework of girders springing up from a cement foundation, a boxy building to be, maybe a few weeks from completion. Of course there were no workers here now, and even though he could smell people, he knew they weren’t the guys laying the foundation. They probably didn’t smell like gun oil.

The sky was a pale gray, the color of concrete, as the dying sun reflected off the bottom of clouds as thick as cotton wool. It felt like they were due for an electrical storm, and he was sort of hoping it would come in now. Chaos was always good; it made him feel at home.

Someone had set fake “road work” cordons up at the head of the street, which was probably why the entire block was deserted. He got an amusing mental image of one of the snipers dressed in the orange vest and yellow hard hat of street workers, waving his stop sign and telling everyone to take an alternate route. Of course, they’d probably need to be a sniper to avoid being shot at by angry drivers.

He walked down the center of the empty street, holding his arms open at his side. They had a clear shot if they wanted to a waste an adamantium bullet, but he didn’t think it would go down that way. They knew it was a waste of a good bullet. “Come on,” he shouted, listening to his voice rebound off the buildings. “ We gonna do this thing or what?”

He heard the rustle of cloth, of people shifting slightly even though they continued to hold their positions. They were obviously holding to radio silence - smart where he was concerned - but irrelevant, as he now knew where they all were.

There were twelve of them - one on every available roof, staking out sniper positions, meaning five were up above. The remaining seven were spread out between alleys and concealed in shadows of the construction site, effectively surrounding anyone who came down the street, making it a sniper’s corridor that would be nearly impossible to move through unscathed. He had to give them credit for that; that was excellent planning.

“That’s far enough, Wolverine,” a man’s voice insisted, coming from the construction site. He stopped where he was, and let the man come out.

He was a tall, dark haired guy, probably in his early thirties, fairly well built and wearing the now ubiquitous black body armor. He was not aiming a weapon at him, and that made Logan instantly suspicious - he must have had some mutant power that he thought could sustain him in any physical conflict. “Where are the discs?” He demanded. “And where are the others? Surprise is impossible.”

He nodded. “I know.” Now here was the gamble. “Where’s Xia?”

The man’s handsome face seemed to briefly spasm, a tic of shock, and his blue-green eyes narrowed suspiciously. “What did you say?”

“Yer not deaf. You heard me. I know she was on the scene earlier. Is she here now?”

“No.”

“You’re lying.” He could smell his nervousness, his fear. He didn’t want her talking to him - why?

He heard the rustle off to the left, before she said, “I’m right here, Logan.”

He glanced over to see her looking as she had before, in Brendan’s memory. Still clad in body armor, her short black hair combed back severely, highlighting her almond shaped hazel eyes and her dark red slash of a mouth. He felt the same cold shock of recognition in his belly that he got when he saw her in Brendan’s thoughts. She seemed to look at him with a great deal of sadness. “Do you remember me, Logan?” She asked.

“Don’t talk to him,” the man snapped.

Logan opened his mouth to speak, then closed it. After a moment, he tried again. “I don’t know. Did you know me?”

“The discs, Wolverine,” the man insisted obnoxiously.

But she ignored him too. She didn’t have any weapons either. “I did.”

“What - who was I?”

*Logan* he heard Xavier say in his head. *Something’s wrong. I can’t read her*

*Get out of my fucking head and mind your own business* he thought angrily.

“You were my hero,” she replied.

He thought for a moment she was mocking him, but no, she wasn’t. He was so confused he didn’t know how he should react or what he should say. “Xia, don’t do this,” the man told her angrily. “He’s nothing anymore, a fragment of a Human being. His brains are fucking scrambled eggs - he’s a complete head case.”

“Don’t you talk about him that way,” she snapped, glaring at him. “What happened wasn’t his fault.”

“What happened?” He repeated, wondering if there’d be some clarification.

She turned her strangely kind eyes on him, and he suddenly felt … what? He wasn’t really sure, except he trusted her; he knew that much. “Stryker. He was a butcher. We’re glad he’s dead.”

The man didn’t contradict her, although he seemed to be radiating waves of hate towards him. “Why did you let him do that to me?” He asked, although he wasn’t sure which one of them he was addressing.

“I didn’t know,” the woman claimed. “I was a moron. I suppose that Control had an excuse, that he thought it best for some self-serving reason, but that fuck’s dead too. I’m not sorry about that either.”

*Logan - * Xavier began.

*I said shut up* he roared inside his own head. Xavier fell silent, so he must have been paying attention this time.

“The discs,” the man snapped. “Do you have them or not?”

“No,” he shot back. “We don’t. When we got there all we found was the hard copies. Don’t you think I’d have ripped through a disc if we found one, and hunted down your scrawny asses? They were gone when we got there, and I think I finally figured out who took them.”

“Who?” Xia asked. The man was glaring hatefully at him, sure he was lying.

“Mystique.”

The man snorted derisively, but Xia studied him for a moment. “The shapeshifter who broke into Oyama’s office?”

Who the hell was Oyama? But rather than ask that, he pressed on. “I figure she beat us there - I smelled her there, but I thought it was from earlier; the place just reeked of panic at the time - and took the discs, but left the hard copies ‘cause they were irrelevant, just printed out crap on the discs. I figure that’s why missed out on a lot of important files - my files - because they were on the discs and not printed out.”

The man snorted derisively. “You think your records still exis -”

“I thought Mystique was working with you people.”

It was his turn to scoff. “Hardly. That bitch only works for Magneto - if for him.”

“And you expect us to believe that?” The man said, sneering.

“Quiet, Tom,” she said. Tom? Obviously not his code name. “You can look me in the eye and honestly say you don’t have the discs, Logan?”

“Yes, I can. We don’t have them, we’ve never had them. Don‘t you think we‘d have acted on them if we did?”

He held her gaze for a long time, even while Tom impatiently shifted his weight from foot to foot, and finally she nodded. “You don’t have them.”

“You can’t believe - ” Tom began petulantly, but Logan was aware that things were about to go completely wrong, and it had nothing to do with him.

He heard the thud of bodies on the roofs, the “whoomp” of Rags ( who would apparently do just about anything for a hundred bucks and a good word put in with Bob ) teleporting these guys to unpleasant places, and he knew by the way Tom’s eyes widened he’d heard something too. “Stop!” Logan shouted, thinking the very same thing. Maybe he shouldn’t have told Xavier to leave him the fuck alone. “The fight’s off!”

But obviously the right people weren’t hearing him, as a shot rang out from several of the places where there were still snipers conscious - and one of them was obviously Scorpion, as a bullet whizzed by him, headed for Tom.

It never hit its target. Xia stepped in front of her, almost shimmering slightly, like a wave of heat in the desert, and the bullet just seemed to bounce off an invisible wall and ricochet away.

Tom, beyond her, was still furious. He let out a roar of rage, and Xia, still shimmering slightly, turned and shouted, “No, don’t!”

But it was too late there too. His eyes had turned white, much like Storm’s, and he raised his clenched fists …

… and the ground beneath their feet started tearing part.

The asphalt was suddenly made of spider web cracks, emanating from where Tom and Xia were standing, and Logan would almost swear he could feel the pavement squirm beneath his feet like a living thing as the road started to tear itself in two, shaking the ground so badly that not only could he barely keep his balance, but he could hear bolts and screws being shaken out of metal girders. Glass panes were starting to explode as if shot, vomiting glass all over the crumbling street. Apparently demons weren’t the only ones who could cause earthquakes.

“Stop it!” He shouted, but he was pretty sure earthquake boy couldn’t hear him, not over all this noise. So he tackled the psychotic earthmover boy, and as they hit the ground the tremors seemed to lessen in intensity. He pulled back his arm to punch him - he wanted to see him cause earthquakes while unconscious - but that was when something hit him in the side of the head. It wasn’t just a fist, but something that almost felt electric; it stung like a motherfucker, and made his vision white out for a second. When his vision returned to normal, he was on his side on the street, which was rapidly fracturing beneath him, like a thin sheet of ice. Xia was standing over him, looking pained and sad, her hand clenched into a fist that continued to shimmer. What the hell was her power?

It was then that everything stopped. Not just the earthquake, but everything else; Tom froze in the middle of getting to his feet. All of them had ceased to move, save for him and Xia, who looked towards the head of the street. Logan followed her gaze, and saw Xavier parked at the head of the road, which was now split down the middle with a four foot wide rift. Xavier was just beyond it, and probably wasn’t going to risk getting any closer. Wrinkles gathered in the corners of his eyes, like “holding” all these minds pained him. “What was the point of all this?” Xavier asked her. “All this destruction and pain for computer discs?”

Xia returned his gaze defiantly. “You’d better let my people go, Xavier. You can’t control my mind, and there hasn’t been a weapon invented that can punch through my forcefield.”

Forcefield? So that was her power. And that was what was keeping Xavier from getting to her mind? Weird. “We didn’t come here to fight,” Xavier replied, although it was a lie. “You hurt my people and threatened children for something we do not have.”

“We never would have hurt your children,” she snapped. Logan believed her, but figured she was just speaking for herself. “Desperate times call for desperate measures.”

Logan climbed to his feet, feeling strangely torn. He felt like he knew Xia better than Xavier, but he didn’t know her at all.

“You couldn’t just ask?” Xavier replied icily.

“You don’t understand what’s at stake.”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Her lips thinned to a grim line, and for some reason she glanced at him before replying to Xavier. What was it between him and this woman? “Stryker apparently had a back up plan if his secret “dark Cerebro” plan didn’t work. All we know about it is its name - Armageddon - and that it exists in secret, hidden files on those discs - and they are the only copies. We need it back before the mundanes find it; we need to destroy it.”

“Mundanes?” Xavier repeated archly, obviously disapproving of the term. “ Do you really expect me to believe you would destroy it?”

Her look turned molten. “Unlike the mundane Organization, we would.”

“Wait a minute,” Logan interjected. “The mundane Organization? Aren’t you all the same one?”

Her look softened when she looked at him. “No, not anymore. When we found out what Stryker was up to - after the fact - we broke off from them. You may not know this, Xavier,” she turned her gaze back to him, and it hardened instantaneously. “But the mundane only Organization still exists - you didn’t destroy it, just drove it deeper underground. It is still operating under the mandate of destroying mutants, and now we are fighting them. We no longer have to pretend we’re working with them, but we no longer have a government mandate either - we are their prime targets.”

“So now you’re engaged in a war with each other,” Xavier said, and he sounded bored by the very notion. “That is a shame, but we want no part of it.”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Logan said, not sure he heard him right. “They got something like that dark Cerebro shit on stand by. Tell me if I’m wrong, but didn’t that almost kill all mutants everywhere? Shouldn’t we be tracking this down?”

Xavier’s eyes were cool and distant. “You’re assuming she’s being completely honest with us.”

“I am,” she insisted angrily. “I’m surprised you’d be prejudiced against your own people.”

“I’m surprised you’d shoot your own people,” Xavier threw back.

“Oh yeah, fucking wonderful, a pissing contest,” Logan spat, disgusted with both of them, all of them. “Mystique prob’ly has the discs, Chuck. Do you know what will happen if she finds those files? We have to find her before she can.”

Xavier gave him a look that was somehow both angry and patronizing at the same time. “I have been searching for all of them, Logan. Erik has been very careful to shelter them.”

“This is such bullshit,” Logan replied, feeling the heat of anger make his face flush. He’d never claim what they did to Scott and Storm was right ( well, maybe Scott ), but just to ignore this because you hated the people and their ideology seemed counter to everything Xavier supposedly preached.

“If their intentions were so benign, they could have asked, not resorted to attempted murder.” Xavier said.

“If we intended to kill them, they would be dead,” Xia replied matter of factly. “I didn’t support that line of action, but I was overruled.”

“How lovely for you,” Xavier said, with great sarcasm. “Since we do not have your discs, or interest in your private war, I assume we’re free to leave, and that you will leave us alone.”

Xia matched Xavier’s disdainful glare with one of her own. “Your people are at stake, Xavier, and you don’t care, do you? Is it because your friend may hold the cards?”

“This conversation is over,” he replied with asperity, steering his wheelchair around a gap in the broken road and turning his back on her. “I will release your people as soon as we’ve left. I assume you won’t be overruled in the decision to come after us.”

Logan felt her eyes on him before he glanced at her, and her look was back to the previous one, wistfully sad. “Keep fighting the good fight, Logan,” she said, as if this was the last time she’d ever see him. She put her hand on his arm, and he could feel the field of energy still around her, but this time it didn’t sting. It was just a gentle touch, friendly, but very quick, as she pulled her hand away rapidly, as if he had burned her. “I’m glad … I’m glad you made it out.”

He stared at her curiously, even as she turned away. “Do you want out?” He wondered.

She paused near the figure of Tom, but did not look back at him. “No. I made my choice fifteen years ago. I’m still not sure if it was the right one, but I live with my decisions. You taught me that much.”

He continued to stare at her, wanting to say something, to ask so many questions … but they all seemed to tangle in his brain, a mental traffic jam, and he couldn’t separate a single thing out. She could be playing him; it was certainly possible. But he didn’t believe she was. Why didn’t he believe it?

Logan left, because he didn’t know what else to do. But a part of him didn’t want to.

11

        Bob appeared on the black beach, underneath the lime green sky, and was not surprised to find Cammy waiting there for him. He was sitting on a blanket that looked like the bloody side of a carved skin, eating what looked like an apple … except apples didn’t usually bleed when you bit into them. He was wearing nothing but black shorts, showing off a lean and bronzed body, and when blood dribbled down his chin, it was instantly absorbed by his skin. “So, are you gonna try and kill me yet?”

He sighed and looked out at the clear purple ocean. It was beautiful, even if it did clash with his sky. “I’ve came to make a deal with you.”

A black and white shell scuttled by on its eight slender legs, and Cammy chewed thoughtfully as he considered it, letting the excess blood drip on his bare leg. “Bob, the god of strangely high moral principals for a hedonist, stooping to make a deal with me? I am shocked, I tell you, shocked.” He grinned savagely at him, displaying his bloody teeth.

Bob scowled down at him, wanting very badly to smash his face in. “Are you going to act like a complete fuckhead, or are we gonna talk?”

“You have nothing I want,” he said dismissively, turning his bloody gaze out on the ocean once more. Something gleamed under the surface half a mile out.

“Except, of course, your continued existence.”

Cammy chuckled. “You won’t kill me, Bob. That’s the sad thing about you. You won’t do it in cold blood, even if you know they’re going to destroy everything.”

“I want to guarantee the safety of Jean Grey.”

That made him chuckle even more. “You and your pets … ”

“Where is she, Cammy? What did you do to her?”

And it was just then that they both felt it, the brief inversion of a segment of reality, and there, standing on the other side of Cammy, right across from Bob, was Eris.

Cammy jumped to his feat, and Bob could feel his sudden spike of fear. “What are you doing here?”

Eris’s star field eyes gazed at Cammy impassively, like he was an insect lower. “Taking care of a problem.”

Bob knew, the instant before she did it, what she was going to do. “No!” He shouted, and called up his powers, ready to throw them all at Eris, but it was far too late.

Cammy didn’t even have time to scream as he simply flew apart, like an exploded digital photograph; reduced to small pixels that just flew away from impact point at the speed of light, then collapsed back into itself, becoming a pinpoint black hole before disappearing into nothing at all. The remains of the bloody apple fell to the blanket and rolled into the surf, leaving a slime trail of crimson.

“What have you done?!” He shouted, so enraged he could feel the power tingling in his fingertips, and saw the world through a filter of blue.

Her look remained irritatingly bored, as if she hadn’t just killed Camaxtli. “You said he was a threat, and it was obvious you weren’t god enough to do what needed to be done.”

“You - Jean!” He knew being apoplectic completely crooked his ability to articulate, but right now he didn’t give a fuck. He wanted to punt her royal ass to the next dimension over, but they both knew, at worse, he could maybe sting her a bit - she owned his ass. “Do you realized what you may have just done?!”

“Killed an insect? About ten thousand died between when I showed up and now. Who notices one more?”

He couldn’t even begin to answer that, as he knew he’d just start spitting out Sumerian cuss words. The world was pulsing blue now, and he could feel the excess energy making his hair stand on end. “He may have had a sympathetic link with her - you may have shunted his energy onto the Earthly plane!”

“The Earthly plane is your problem, not mine,” she said airily, with a dismissive wave of her hand. “It’s not like anyone even goes there anymore.”

“I do!” Not the response he wanted to give, but he settled for it.

“You always were behind the times, Bob,” she said, then added archly, “You’re welcome.” She then teleported out of there, leaving him alone on the empty beach.

Since this was Cammy’s creation, it would soon cease to exist. Already the horizon looked a little fuzzy, like it was starting to erode under the pressure of the new reality. Bob closed his eyes and tried to swallow his rage, but he couldn’t.

Fuck, he was an idiot. He should have known how mercurial Eris was; he should have known, if she decided he was telling the truth, that she wouldn’t wait to be defensive. Shit, shit, shit!

Had he killed her? Or had he done even worse than that?

He let out a scream of rage that had enough power behind it to shatter the world. Luckily, it didn’t matter anymore.

12

        Logan mentally cursed himself out as a moron for the fifth or sixth time - he’d actually lost count - but after his third circling of the block, he went into the diner.

It was a particularly greasy spoon that called itself the Night Owl diner, and since it was a quarter to two in the morning - right before the bars closed - there were only three people inside, not counting the waitress sitting at the end of the counter, reading a paperback thriller, or the counter woman talking with the cook in the back. He bet things got hopping when the bars closed, and the drinkers decided they needed coffee ( caffeine didn’t sober up anyone; it just made you a more alert drunk ) or a big stack of pancakes. He bet those were fun to throw back up.

There was a single booth in the back not exposed to any of the large windows ( covered on the inside by security grating ), that gave you coverage of the entire room. Of course Xia was sitting there, warming her hands on a cup of coffee that looked untouched. She had abandoned her obviously needless body armor ( it was probably a regulations thing that she wore it at all ) for more casual clothes, attempting to blend in with the “mundanes”. She wasn’t perfectly successful - she managed to look elegant and aloof, even in a jeans jacket and a Bill The Cat t-shirt.

As he slid into the seat opposite her, he had a sudden sense of déjà vu, like he’d been here before, sitting across from at a tiny, worn table in a sad restaurant, but he couldn’t quite place it. It was a sensation detached, with no further data to tie to it. It was just as likely as it was unlikely; it could have simply been simply something he wanted to believe.

“Quake boy isn’t here?” He asked, although he already knew he couldn’t be. He had circled this block, twice on foot and once on the roofs, just looking for surveillance of any sort. He was such a paranoid bastard he sometimes shamed himself. He was just glad no one saw him do it.

She looked mildly surprised. “How do you know his code name?”

“Huh?”

Her lips curved up into a fragile smile. “You didn’t know that was his code name.”

“Quake?”

“Yeah.”

“Appropriate.” Just out of curiosity, he asked, “How much damage could he do?”

She shifted in her seat, as if this was an uncomfortable topic. “He can hit ten on the Richter scale.”

“Whoa.” That was “everything falls to fucking pieces” top of the scale. “Has he ever, you know, taken out a city?”

She glanced down at her untouched cup of coffee, and he realized with just a bit of surprise that yes, he had. “Once, down in South America a couple of years ago. Not one of our proudest moments.”

That was an interesting choice of pronoun. “He’s your partner?”

She nodded. “And a bit more.” She clinked her gold band wedding ring on the chipped porcelain coffee mug.

“That’s gotta be an interesting home life.” He had said it as a joke, but he knew it had fallen flat the second it left his mouth. He decided to stick to a safer - and more relevant - topic. “Why did you want to meet me?”

The ride back to Xavier’s after the aborted confrontation was amazingly tense. Marcus really resented Xavier “grabbing” his mind - he’d had a thing about telepaths since Shrike ( couldn’t blame him there ), and Bob didn’t count, because Bob was Bob. That didn’t make a lot of sense to people who didn’t know Bob, but hell, it barely made sense to them, and they knew him. Logan resented Xavier just dismissing the claims of those people because they were bad guys - okay, yeah, the shooting and the threatening of the school was way out of line, but that’s what they dealt in, violence. And they thought Mystique was “still” working with them, and Magneto’s former friendship with Xavier was well known with everyone. Xavier was ticked off with him about even “buying it for a second”, and actually had the gall to chide him, like he was one of the kids. “You should know better than that,” he had scolded him. “You, of all people, should know the level of manipulation they’re capable of.”

He had shot back angrily. “Oh, you mean the stuff they did to me? The stuff you conveniently forgot to tell me about?”

Xavier had fixed him with his cold eyes, and said, “Don’t be childish.”

That was it. That had been the final fucking straw.

Marcus offered to give him a lift out of there, because he was “so getting the fuck out of Dodge”, and even offered him a place to stay, but Logan had to turn him down. He didn’t feel like being around anybody, not even as a good a friend as Marc was; he didn’t think it was a wise idea for him to be around people for a while. He just intended to change his clothes and go ( he told Xavier to go fuck himself when he decided they should “talk” ), and he was about to leave when he got the phone call. From a pay phone, the message was simple, anonymous, and to the point. “Logan, if you want to talk, I’ll be at the Night Owl Café at one forty am tonight. I’ll be alone, and hope you will be too.” He had recognized her voice, and knew it could very well be a trap. But he didn’t tell Xavier, or anyone else for that matter. This was his thing to sort out, and he would do it by himself. When others got involved, it always ended up very badly.

He’d been sitting in a bar down the street for the last few hours, being partially deafened by a bad blues rock band and having his taste buds deadened by what passed for popular American beers, and trying to decide what precisely was bothering him. Xia got to him; she got to him hard, and he wasn’t sure why. Stryker had gotten to him too, but that was totally different. He may have not known him, but there was a sense of pain, hate, and fear attached to his name. With Xia, all he got was a curious sense of … responsibility, like he should be protecting her. But why the fuck would a woman with an indestructible forcefield need protecting?

When he became convinced that she had come in alone, and that there were no “blinds” set up, waiting to ambush him, he came in. But he also knew that, if his adamantium claws couldn’t cut through it ( and she didn’t seem worried about that, did she? In fact, he had finally decided what that look was on her face, when she knocked him off Tom. It was a “please don’t make me hurt you” look, one he had never seen before ), he’d be completely fucked if she decided to attack him. His only hope would be in wearing her out, so she’d drop her forcefield for a second; even half a second would have done.

But, much to his surprise, he found himself not wanting to hurt her either.

“I just wanted to see you,” she said, without much strength. She wouldn’t meet his eyes, and seemed embarrassed. “I mean, I never believed you were dead when they said you were - I didn’t think you could ever be killed - but … I don’t know. The years went by, and it was like you’d dropped off the face of the earth. I guess I prepared myself for the possibility that you were dead. I was relieved to hear you were still around, but I guess I didn’t actually believe it until I saw you in the flesh. It’s funny how the mind works, isn’t it?”

“Is that a joke?”

She looked up, and the shock on her face was genuine. “No. Oh god, I didn’t mean it that way.”

He wanted to be angry; he didn’t want to believe her. But for some reason, he was having a hard time doing it. “How do you know me? Who was I?”

“You were Logan. You were the man who saved my life, by rescuing me from a place in China where they were training mutants to become soldiers.”

“The mutant cold war.” That was how he’d help bring the thing that became Reaper into the country, wasn’t it? Stupid ass countries trying to make their own mutant weapons. Well, it looked like Canada had inadvertently won that one. “But I was … I was a killer, wasn’t I?”

She looked down again, shook her head, as the waitress finally spun on her stool towards them. “Hey hon, can I get you something?” The waitress asked, snapping her chewing gum loudly. He could smell the Dexedrine she was absolutely flying on; probably helped keep her going on these late night shifts.

“No, thanks,” he snapped hastily, and then asked Xia emphatically, “Tell me the truth. I was an assassin, wasn’t I?” Only after he spoke did he realize he’d just said it in Cantonese.

She ran a hand through her close cropped hair, messing it up, and he could see fine lines in the corners of her eyes, dark circles beneath, hints of age that struck him as anomalous. If he did remember her, he remembered her younger. But how much younger? She looked to be only in her twenties now, although something behind her eyes told him she was older. “In a way, we all were,” she finally said, also replying in Cantonese. “But you were the first man I ever trusted, and you never gave me a reason to doubt you. You still haven’t.”

This wasn’t what he was expecting. He had braced himself for the worst, to be told he was the bloodthirsty animal Stryker had implied he was, and getting this was somehow more jarring. “Was I … was I Stryker’s lackey? What did I do for him?” He couldn’t shake the fear that he was his personal attack dog, and it was slightly unsettling that that bothered him more than the assassin bit.

He wondered what that said about him, then decided he didn’t want to know.