“I'm not what you expected?’ Xavier asked, sounding slightly amused.

“Uh, no, it’s just that I didn’t realize that Amaranth was bringing us here.” He shot her a dirty look that only seemed to make her smile.

(Oh god, he hoped Xavier wasn’t a relative of Elizabeth Xavier!  Shit!)

“According to Wesley, you’re not a typical vampire, which is good.  I still have some great reservations about Yasha, but from what I’ve seen of you in Wesley’s mind, you seem genuine.”

“Yasha’s here?” He knew she had left abruptly, probably to see Logan, but she was hardly the most forthcoming person in the world.  In fact, that made her the perfect match for the equally taciturn Logan.

“Not at the moment.” Just from the way he said it, he knew Xavier would prefer it if she never came back. Well, he couldn’t blame him; you never knew what duplicity a vampire was capable of until they had an all access pass to your house.  And Xavier, as a telepath, may have felt an instinctive mistrust of a being whose mind he couldn’t read; it was probably like being robbed of a crucial sense.

“There’s a spell that can revoke all previous vampire invitations into a house,” he told him, in case he had reservations about inviting him in as well. “Wes could probably do it for you once we’re done here.”

“And what - I couldn’t?” Amaranth said sharply.

Angel sighed heavily.  There was no way to win, with her, was there?  “Yeah, her too.”

“Yes, I think that might be a good idea,” Xavier agreed.

“Did Bob tell you what was going on?” He asked.  He could've asked Amaranth, but you know what?  No fucking way. Better to be in the dark.

Thin lines appeared at the corner of Xavier’s eyes as he scowled faintly. “Not exactly.  Something about a 'chaos wave', which the few news reports I have been able to pick up have confirmed.  Well, not in so many words, but chaos is as good a word for it as anything else.”

“The media’s not covering it?” Although that was hard to believe, in one sense it wasn’t.  Humans had an amazing capacity to ignore what they didn’t wish to understand or deal with.  Why else did most people believe vampires were a myth?

“No, they were, but it seems none of the broadcast services are transmitting anymore.  Before they went off the air, things were … falling apart with distressing rapidity.”

It was like a tidal wave, and they were just ahead of the curve.  Bob was a surfer, right?  He probably liked the dizzying rush of catching a wave large enough and powerful enough to crush not only him, but everything in its path.  Angel hoped Bob didn’t get too carried away with his love of last minute dramatic saves.

“Come inside, before the sun comes up completely,” Xavier said, and Amaranth stepped aside so he could wheel himself back. “I’ll introduce you to the others.”

“Others?” He replied, feeling that sudden awkwardness again.  This was a mutant school, right?  He hadn’t really met many mutants.

He wondered what they’d think of him.

7

 
He was having the best dream ever. Oh sure, it got a zero for sheer predictability, but it was still all good. Creativity wasn’t necessarily everything.

Girls in skimpy animal print bikinis fanned him and shaded him with their massive breasts as he laid on a sunny golden beach, drinking a really cold - and really good - Long Island ice tea and fed him frozen bits of turkey jerky.  It was truly paradise.

One of them started to run her hand back and forth in his hair, and it felt better than he would’ve imagined, despite the fact that whoever she was, she had very cold hands …

Rags jolted awake, sitting up before he'd even opened his eyes, body ready to go into fight or flight - okay, just flight - mode.  But even as his heart beat a frantic tattoo in his chest, everything around him looked normal.  And smelled vaguely of tacos.

He didn’t live in a standard apartment; not by L.A. standards anyway.  It was a one and half room (half being the bathroom) squat of a former fly-by-night (literally) travel office that was right over a Jocko’s Taco. There was also a “massage therapist” around the back, and a small yoga studio in a teeny parking lot behind them. The massage therapist was too freaked out by him to take his money, which was a real bummer. If anyone asked, he was running an internet start up, and that appeased them more often than not.  If they ventured to ask what he was selling, he’d tell them his own garden statuary, and offer to bring over one of his lawn gnomes for them to see.  That usually shut everyone up - no one wanted to see your lawn gnome, especially if you were going to try and pawn it off on them.

Being a High Priest in what was considered a “fringe religion” didn’t exactly pay a hell of a lot.  Obviously you had to impose your beliefs on people and potentially abuse your followers to be considered a major player, and how bloody depressing was that?  Medusa wasn’t like that.  She was benevolent; she and her sisters had been tragic victims of Humans rewriting history, and then drowning it in myth.  Wrong wrong wrong.

His room was really pathetic. He had a mattress on the floor, the blankets currently kicked aside into a massive ball, and the portable television was also on the floor, against the parallel wall, flickering images of Humans acting out various absurd things. His mouth tasted like a day-old gym sock, and he was starting to get a familiar dull pounding behind his eyes. Another hangover; another night of too many Long Island iced teas. He was depressed and he knew it, but he didn’t really know what to do about it.  It wasn’t like there was a therapist out there who specialized in Persaid demons.

He vaguely remembered stumbling home last night, after Lia had kicked him out.  Now why did she kick him out this time?  Oh shit, was Thrakazogg involved?

Oh bloody fucking hell. Thrakazogg and a karaoke machine. How drunk was he?  It was well known
that Thrakky was banned from all karaoke bars in the entire L.A. basin because of his singing - he’d hospitalized twenty six people with his painful caterwauling, and possibly killed three.  He didn’t have complete memories, just flashes of images: something about Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” and Rags being a back up singer.  Thank the Gorgons Lia chucked them out on their asses before Thrak could hurt anyone with his high notes. He was really gonna have to grovel with Lia this time.  He’d be lucky to be let in to The Way Station again before Solstice.

Briefly he wondered if the sound was out on his set, before remembering he'd wanked to one of those soft core movies they always showed on Cinemax at one in the morning before he went to sleep.  He had to turn the sound off, as there was no way he could have a decent wank if he heard those people speak. The fact that they actually tried to have plots was sad enough on its own; but the dialogue was so impossibly, ridiculously bad he always busted up laughing if he heard some. And because they weren’t hard core porn, they had more of it - more talking, more pretending the whole point of this wasn’t just watching good looking people shag like mad for eighty of the picture’s ninety minutes. Then he’d start pitying the actors whose job prospects were so bad they actually jumped at making that chunk of nudie cheese, and nothing made the old tadger call it a night quite like pity.  As it was nowadays, he could only watch them drunk, when his attention span and ability to comprehend things was extremely limited.  He’d only tried to look at hard core stuff once, and almost instantly gave up - it was disgusting.  Sometimes Human bodies could be so bleeding disgusting.  At least the soft cores never showed you too much.

The blinds covering the front window were slightly open, and he could see it was still dark out (save for
the bright lights in the Jocko's lot), so he must not have gotten a lot of sleep.  What woke him up?  Did the manager slam the door too hard when he showed up for work downstairs?

Then it slowly dawned on Rags's hangover-addled brain that someone was still running their hand through his hair.

He looked slowly over his shoulder, and for a single moment he was relieved it was indeed a woman. Then recognition clicked, and he screamed and lurched back, throwing himself off the bed and began pulling himself rapidly away by his hands, butt sliding across the floor.

"Hello-"

"-Rags," the Weird Sisters said.  One was sitting down on either side of his mattress.  They were fully dressed, so that was a plus. Well, if you considered outfits consisting of gold and black metallic mesh tops, purple paisley print pants, and heavy brown waffle stomper boots better than nudity; only on an obese and extremely hairy man would nudity be the worse of the two evils.

"Augh wha," he said, and even he didn't know what he meant.  Well, it wasn't his fault, was it?  Yes, maybe his blood was too acidic to ever be palatable to a vampire, but the Sisters still freaked him out.  At least they were equal opportunity freakers; they freaked everyone out, including other vampires.  They just weren't right (and he wasn't only talking about their dubious fashion sense).

"Things-"

"-are-"

"-happening. Bad-"

"-things."

Rags had come up against the wall, so he could retreat no further.  The blue light of the television reflected in their odd eyes like strobes, and there never was a way to read those bloody empty smiles of theirs. "Wh-what?" He finally asked, forming a coherent word.  Good for him. "Where? I didn't do anyfing."  His heart was pounding way too fast, and bile burned at the base of his throat.  No one with a hangover should allowed to be scared.

"We-"

"-know-"

"-you didn't."

"If you-"

"-did, you'd be-"

"-dead."

Was that supposed to be reassuring?  "I think I'm going to be sick," he admitted, although he was too weak to get up off the floor. They may not have drank his blood, but he felt robbed of whatever strength he had.  Maybe that was the worst part of the Sisters: just the idea of them could make you shit yourself.

"Whatever."

"Once-"

"-you're done-"

"-clean up-"

"-fast. It's time-"

"-for the Church-"

"-of the Stone Temple-"

"-to save the world."

It took him a moment to absorb what they were saying - at the best of times he found their ceaseless back and forth hard to follow, but with a raging hangover, forget it.  When it finally did sink in, he couldn't believe it. "What?"

Did they just say what he thought they said?

8

He wasn't sure if the meeting was more awkward for him, or for the other mutants who started trickling in afterwards.  Angel got a sense that there was a lot of subtext he was missing here.

Storm (had to love these code names) treated him somewhat coolly, but civilly, all things considered; she didn't like vampires either. Well, hell, who did?  He couldn't precisely blame anyone for not liking the species - he didn't either.  It was just an awful twist of fate that he was one to begin with.

One of the kids at the school was half Brachen, a kid named Brendan who insisted on being "in on this - I help, right?"  Reminded him a little of Doyle - okay, a really young, sober, red-eyed Doyle - and for that reason alone he instantly liked him.  The kid eyed him warily, and asked, "Demon?"

Angel just nodded. "Vampire."

"Good one?"

"Yeah."

"Okay."

And that was the entirety of their exchange so far.  Another reason to like him.

A girl called Rogue, with a white streak in her hair, kept staring at him, but whenever he glanced in her direction she looked away.  He was having a hard time interpreting that look - hate or attraction?  All he knew was when her lanky boyfriend (?) caught it, he gave Angel a really hateful glare.  Maybe she just liked the coat.  It was a really killer coat - good quality leather and everything.  Nothing but the best when you were working for evil overlords.

Wesley had no problem circulating, but then again he wouldn't.  He seemed to get on really well with the kids as well as the adults, but he used to be a Watcher: he had trained most of his life to train Slayers to go into battles that would surely be the death of them at one time or another. He hadn't been very good at that when he was a Watcher, but now that he was out and his position was somewhat obsolete, he showed he had a knack for at least certain aspects of it.  Talk about irony.

Angel heard voices in the hall, recognized Storm being angry at something (or someone), and the familiar figure of Marcus came into the front lobby, trailed by an extremely lank and big eyed mutant he had never seen before. "Oh wow, Angel," Marc exclaimed, so far the only person who sounded happy to see him. "They drag you into this too?"

"In a manner of speaking.  How did you know?"

"Bob called me, said something about the world ending.  Is it?"

That was a poser. "It's ... a possibility."

Marc gestured to the tall, big eyed man behind him, and said, “Angel, this is Clive, called Spider.  Spider, this is Angel. He’s a vampire, but he’s inexplicably on our side.”

Spider held out an extremely long, pale hand, and Angel shook it warily.  He was expecting to get stabbed by cilia, but no, that didn’t happen. Why did they call him Spider?  His tarantula eyes? “Nice to meet you.”

“Ta mate, you too. Cold hand.”

“He’s dead,” Marc said casually, pulling a pack of cigarettes out of the back pocket of his jeans. “All vamps are technically dead.”

Storm stuck her head inside the door, and snapped, “Smoke in here and I will make it rain on you.”

He put the pack away with a sigh, as Spider got over his brief shock, and told Angel, “Oh.  Sorry about that.”

Angel could only shrug. ”Not your fault.”

Marc threw himself on the one empty sofa, and sighed like a martyr.  Storm had gone, but not before shooting Marc a look that just may have blistered the paint. “She doesn’t like you?” Not really a question, he was just curious about the animosity.  After all,  Marcus wasn’t a vampire.

Marc shrugged. “She thinks I’m an arrogant bastard.”

“Are you?” Honestly, Angel hardly knew him at all.  Arrogant may have occurred as a descriptive, but not before hotheaded and rash.

“It’s a poor dog who doesn’t wag his own tail.”

That was one way to look at it.  One weird-ass way, but still valid.

“Do you have any idea who else they’re rounding up?” Marc asked him, as Spider perched nervously on the arm of the couch.  He had rather gangly limbs, almost too long for his own body.  Again, Angel wondered if it was rude to ask a mutant what they could do.  What was the protocol there?

“Uh, Xavier said Bob had gone off to get Logan.”

“Yeah, I figured as much. They’re pretty much the pair, aren’t they?”

“What?” He knew Logan had associated much more with Bob since he'd introduced them (a move he now deeply, deeply regretted), but never to the level implied.  He still couldn’t quite believe Logan was anyone’s avatar, let alone Bob’s.  That was so wrong it seemed like a violation of the laws of nature.

“Attached at the hip. But, hey, they make a very good team.  Although … Bob doesn’t really need back up, does he?”

“Yeah, he is pretty powerful,” Spider agreed, nodding.

He had met Bob too?

“Well, the gang’s all here, aren’t they?” A man said from the doorway.  Angel didn’t recognize him - he was a tall, black haired man with clear blue eyes, handsome in a classic sense, with a broad chest and lean legs that suggested he worked out quite a bit. “Is Cressida pretending to be an end table so she can spring out and make us piss ourselves?”

It was Spider who shook his head. “She’s dead, Quake.  But she died fighting, and took all the bastards with her.”

The man Spider had called Quake looked somber, but nodded in grim resolve. “Sounds like her.”

A petite, delicately pretty Chinese woman suddenly came up to Quake, and leaned into him as he put an arm around her. “Oh, poor Cressida,” she said. “Was there a funeral?  Why weren’t we told?”

“There wasn’t -” Brendan began, and then instantly stopped, turning away as he turned a pale shade of red.

“There wasn’t a funeral,” Rogue finished, stepping in for him. “There wasn’t … we couldn’t have one, exactly.”

Angel filled in what both of them didn’t say: “There wasn’t enough of her left.”  From the various grimaces, everyone else had guessed that.  Angel also noted that Quake and the woman were wearing matching gold rings - husband and wife.  He wondered if that was significant.

“Well, she was never big on sentiment anyways,” the woman said, as the two of them came into the lobby. “She told me once she didn’t want to be buried, just sort of scattered about the houses of people she didn’t like.”

Spider snickered. “Sounds like Chameleon, all right.” The man and woman looked at Angel, and Spider said, “Oh, uh, Tom, Xia...this is Angel.  Angel, that’s Tom, also called Quake, and Xia, also called Atomic.”

Some mutants had the coolest nicknames. “Quake?  You start earthquakes?”

With a slightly sardonic smirk, he said, “Yep. The Earth is mine; I can make her turn to jelly.”

“If only that power worked on women,” Xia teased, giving him a playful poke in the stomach.  He chuckled in good humor, and gave her a quick kiss on the forehead.

“Does that mean you have some kind of radiation power?” Rogue’s boyfriend asked Xia - obviously he didn’t know her either.

This opened the door to everyone discussing their powers, which was a bit of a relief.  Xia apparently could generate an impenetrable force field (that must have come in handy);  Spider had powers over gravity, which he demonstrated by jumping up from the couch and landing on the ceiling feet first, standing there and looking down at them as if the house had flipped over (creepy - he knew demons who could do things like that; even vampires could, to a small degree, defy gravity a bit, but not as constantly and consistently as Spider);  Marcus impressed the new couple with his “package deal” powers (they didn’t know him);  Rogue could “borrow” other people’s powers, which she followed up with a warning that they never touch her bare skin unless they wanted a bad shock (that sounded fun); Bobby, her boyfriend, had ice-creating abilities, which he proved by holding his hand down on the coffee table and creating a small but impressively detailed ice pyramid.  When the conversational round-robin came to Brendan, he grimaced painfully and shook his head. “I don’t have anything cool.  I just turn green and get spiky. Woo hoo.”

Rogue put a (covered) arm around his shoulder, and gave him a friendly shake as she said, “That isn’t true! He’s really strong, and hard to hurt.  Also, he remembers everything in perfect detail, which is actually kind of creepy at times.”

“No one ever said I had a good mutation,” he replied wryly, a small blush creeping up his neck.  Maybe he needed to take Marc’s dog advice.

“It’s great for tests,” Bobby said, also trying to encourage him.  Human-demon hybrids seemed inevitably ashamed of their demon half.  Angel wondered if that was because it was a Human dominated world, or because of the bad reputations demons inevitably had.  (Although mostly fair, it wasn’t completely fair - certainly not for peaceable Brachen demons.)

Brendan shrugged a single shoulder before nodding. “Okay, yeah, it’s good for that.”

When eyes fell on Wesley, who was looking at an old scroll Amaranth gave him before disappearing to who knows where, he simply shook his head. “I’m just a plain old mundane Human;  I’m afraid I’m not bringing anything physical to the table.”

“He’s a demon hunter who’s fought supernatural threats for most of his life,” Angel said, not ready to have Wesley completely disparage himself out of existence. “He reads all the arcane dialects you can think of, as well as ones you’ve never heard of, he can cast spells, and he can also kick ass when he has to. Don’t let his reserve fool you.”

“You can cast spells?” Rogue asked him, clearly impressed. “Does that mean you’re a wizard or something?”

Wes scowled at her, but it died quickly. “No, hardly; I’m not in the Guild.  I really don’t do it that often. At best, I’m a spellcaster, nothing more. Amaranth is the real witch here.”

“Guild?” Marc asked, latching on to the actual point. “There’s a Wizard’s Guild?”

“Who is Amaranth?” Xia asked.

“And why call her a witch?” Tom wondered.

“I mean an actual witch,” Wes explained patiently. Angel just knew by the look on his face he was thinking ‘Newbies’. “She can cast powerful and complex spells as well as control energies I have no hope of channeling on my own.  I’m just the auxiliary back up.”

“They exist too?” Xia exclaimed, only slightly surprised. “Man, this world gets weirder every day.”

“Well, the apocalypse is upon us,” Marc said, shifting restlessly on the couch. “You gotta expect things
are gonna get weirder from now on.”

He had a point.  In fact, Angel knew from past near-apocalypses that was always true.  He thought about bringing that up, but ultimately decided it would just raise more questions he didn’t feel like answering.

Angel suddenly realized the newcomers were staring at him, and Tom asked, “You a demon hunter too?”

Oh god; he always hated these moments. “Uh, no … I’m a vampire.”  They both raised an eyebrow at
him in perfect synchronicity. “But I’m not a bad guy, okay?”

“So are the vampire legends true or what?” Tom continued. “Can you turn into a bat?”

Angel glared at him, aware the supernatural was probably new to him and it wasn’t his fault, but there wasn’t a single stereotype he hated more than that one. “No, I can’t.  I can’t change shape, I don’t have
to sleep in a coffin, and garlic doesn’t bother me all that much.  I mean, if it did, I could never be downwind from Spago‘s.”

“Oooh, hit a sore spot there,” Marc commented. When Angel shot him a dirty look, he only gave him one of his patented shit eating grins. Smart ass.

“So what do you bring to the table?” Tom asked, not ready to give it up.

“Vampires are really strong,” Brendan said, answering for him.  Maybe it was a bit of demon solidarity. “They’re also really fast, and hard to kill or disable for any length of time.  They have enhanced speed, senses, and agility. Is that the list?”

Belatedly, he realized Brendan was addressing him. “Yeah, that about covers it.”

Tom considered that for a moment. “That’s pretty good.  But do you actually drink people’s blood?”

“Generally, vampires do that, yes.  But I haven’t had Human blood in years.”

After a moment of awkwardness, Rogue said, “Wait.  If vampires drink blood, but you haven’t drunk
from people for a while, what’re you-”

“Honey,” Marc interrupted her, sitting forward so he could look in her direction. “If you really don’t want to know the answer to a question, don’t ask it.”

Rogue frowned at him for interrupting her, but after thinking about it for a moment, she clearly decided she really didn’t want to know. Angel was secretly glad.

The silence seemed heavy, filled only by what now seemed to be the ominous ticking of a clock on the mantel and the crinkle of parchment as Wesley continued trying to read the scroll.  Finally, Xia asked, “Is Logan here?”

“Bob’s bringing him in,” Spider said, casually enough that the couple must have known who he was referring to.  They all knew Bob?

“Good,” she replied, and quickly amended, “He’s always good at these sorts of things.”

Apocalypses?  Angel suddenly wondered if she was an ex of Logan’s - why else that self-conscious addendum?  Did the hubby know, and did he not like that?  He assumed that Bob wouldn’t assemble a team that had the potential of falling to betrayal over something as petty as jealousy, but Humans - be they mutant or not - were inherently unpredictable (no matter what Angelus believed).

It was then that Amaranth suddenly popped up in the middle of the room. “Oi, whoever’s not busy playing class reunion, I need some muscle outside.”

Angel couldn’t smell her, and she appeared slightly translucent around the edges - not her real self, just a psychic projection. “Why?” He asked first.

“Something giving off buttloads of dark power is coming this way, pronto.  I want someone to go tell me what it is - I’m busy here, ya know.”

No one knew what Amaranth was doing;  if Wesley knew, he hadn’t shared.

“I’ll go,”Marc said with a sigh, jumping eagerly to his feet. “Waitin’ around is for the birds.”

“I’ll come with you,” Angel quickly said.

“You can’t,” Wes interjected, gesturing at the heavy closed drapes. “It’s light out.  I’ll go with you Marcus. Have a weapon for me?”

Without even looking, Marc pulled a gun out of the back of his pocket and tossed it to him.  As Wesley caught it easily, Marc pulled a gun out of his coat pocket for himself.

“How will we know big buttload evil when we see it?” Marc asked the Amaranth projection.

She scoffed. “It’ll probably be the only thing out there, dipshit.  Christ.”  And with a roll of her theoretical eyes, she winked out of existence.

Marc must have been used to her, because he didn’t care. Without a word, he and Wes went out towards the front, and then Xia said, “I’d better go with them.  You never know when a Human shield will come in handy.” She gave her husband a quick peck on the cheek and slid out of his arms, moving to follow them.

Angel hated feeling useless, but he knew he couldn’t even peek out a window to see what was going on. He was starting to feel something - like a tiny, almost negligible tic somewhere inside his brain, a bizarre feeling that was slowly growing in intensity, like a larva growing and trying to eat its way out of the confines of his skull. Amaranth wasn’t kidding when she said something with lots of dark power was on its way; this was unlike anything he’d ever felt before.

Angel wondered if the battle had finally been joined, and if Bob had made contingencies to deal with such a thing?