He felt himself plummeting towards the ground far below and closed his internal eyes, reaching out to Argus with his mind, calling him to save his faithful servant -

- and felt himself back on solid ground.  Argus had come through for him!  So it was a test …

But then he found himself staring into a pair of bright blue eyes.

“Now, really - did you actually think you were gonna get away that easy?” The man said, a sarcastic, chiding edge to his voice.

Greg looked around in disbelief.  He had never even left the roof.

His useless brothers were still prostrate, while the heretic had been joined by the Asian woman (she was a vampire - her aura was dead) and the hairy man, who still looked familiar.  Did the vampire kind of look familiar too?  Having them stand side by side brought on some serious déjà vu.  They both glared at him with a hate that suggested familiarity, while the heretic simply crossed his arms over his chest and looked as if he was bored. “I think Greg has picked the hard way,” the Aussie said. “What shall we do?”

The hairy man cracked his knuckles, and it sounded … odd somehow; not like bones cracking, but something metallic. “Can I make a suggestion?” Greg tried to move back, or away, or at all, but found he was frozen to spot.  The only thing he could manage to do was blink.

That was when he realized his crisis of faith was only just beginning.

15

If you stood in exactly the right spot in the front hall, you could look out two windows on opposite sides
of the house.

Out one window, it was obviously day, the winds so violent they were causing the trees to writhe as if in pain, thrashing back and forth across the backdrop of the violently mauve sky. But the other window, the one of the right hand side, showed a calm night with a gentle drizzle pattering against the windowpane.  It was really fucking freaky - like being caught between worlds...which was probably the case.

The kids were restless. In the beginning, they'd paced the halls a bit, but then they realized they might be in for the long haul, so they went back to the lounge and tried to watch television.  The reception was still gone, so they'd opted to watch a DVD instead.  It worked for a few minutes (Did Xavier know they had the Aqua Teen Hunger Force DVD?  It was shit funny, but, cartoon or not, it was meant for adults), and Marcus found himself lingering in the lounge doorway (he loved that episode…), watching it too instead
of being on guard like he should have been.

The DVD picture suddenly fuzzed out, jumping from the somewhat crudely animated cartoon to … what the hell was that?  He tilted his head, and figured it was some kind of sci-fi show; it looked like a guy in elaborate makeup, with a flat, reptilian face and large silver eyes. “Did Bob go already?” Snake face asked.

All three of the kids yelped in shock, Brendan bounding to his feet while Bobby hopped behind the couch. Marc pulled out a gun and approached the set warily, snake face watching him without expression. “And you are?” Marc wondered.  Bobby had his hands up, as if ready to freeze the set, and Brendan had gone all teal and spiky.  Rogue was just sitting upright on the couch, looking as if she was trying to remember if she had seen him before or not.

“Degei,” the man on the set replied. “The Fijian serpent god, guardian of the realms of the dead.  He may have mentioned me.”

The three of them exchanged glances. Was this guy for real?  “Uh, not recently,” Marc finally told him.

The snake faced guy nodded, as if that was reasonable. “I just got his message through my babies.  I’m willing to help.”

“Your babies?” Rogue asked.

“Snakes.”

“Sure, that would make sense,” Brendan agreed, in a way suggesting he was on the verge of hysteria.

“Do you need help?” Degei asked. “I could send some of my children to guard-”

“No, thanks, we’re cool,” Bobby said quickly.  Didn’t like snakes, huh?  Well, some of them could be pretty nasty.

“Okay. Good luck to you, then.” Degei’s face then disappeared, replaced by the scene interrupted, involving Meatwad and his “Jiggling Billy” doll.

Okay - who had said this couldn’t get more surreal?  Did anyone, or had he just thought it?  Either way, it had just gotten so weird Marc was pretty sure he would welcome a zombie attack right now.

Rogue paused the DVD, and asked, “Did that just happen? Did a Fijian snake god just talk to us through the T.V., or am I just having a psychotic breakdown?”

“No, we all saw it,” Marc assured her. “Unless it was a shared hallucination.”

Brendan sat back down beside Rogue, but hadn’t reverted from his demon form yet; he was still too freaked out to go back to Human. “Did anyone even know there were Fijian gods?”

Bobby realized he looked silly using the couch as a shield now, so he climbed back over the sofa, on the other side of Rogue, and replied, “Not by name, but you gotta assume they have some. Nearly everybody does, right?”

It was in the sudden silence that Marc noticed something. He heard the wind howling on one side of the house, the rain peppering the roof on the other side, and … a dry crackling noise.  Not like fire, but like someone crushing twigs in their fist. What the hell was that?

As he turned to try and locate the noise, he saw Wesley coming up the hall, a curious look on his face. “We picked up a massive energy surge up here …”

The ‘we’ he was referring to must have been him and Amaranth. “Degei the serpent god just paid us a visit through the boob tube - he was wondering if Bob was still around.”

Wesley only looked mildly surprised. “Degei?  Really?  Did he leave some snakes behind?”

Obviously he knew who Degei was.  Lucky him - he was the only one.  “He offered, but we turned it down.”

The Brit nodded. “Fair enough.  He might send some anyways.”

“He might?” Bobby asked, trying to conceal his anxiety at the prospect.

“What’s that noise?” Brendan asked, standing up again and looking around.

“What noise?” Rogue asked, and then they all fell silent, listening attentively.

There it was again - crunch crunch crunch, like someone far away walking in Mini-Wheats.  Even Wesley cocked his head curiously, and looked around, as if trying to figure out if the noise was coming from up above them.

Bren suddenly stood up on the sofa. “It’s in this room.”

It was then that the noise suddenly stopped.  Did it know it had been sussed?

Suddenly there was a huge cracking noise, like those big old Shredded Wheat brillo pads giving way,
and a huge swarm of black things suddenly flooded in from a new, horizontal hole in the outer wall, just beneath the far window.

Rogue screamed and jumped up on the couch beside Brendan, as the wave of black things resolved into … rats. Dozens upon dozens of huge black rodents - about the size of guinea pigs, with strangely glowing yellow eyes - swarming across the floor, claws clicking against the hardwood surface as they rushed them in wave after wave, like a sewer had backed up and this was a fucking grain warehouse.

Marc pulled his guns (out of the corner of his eye, he saw Wes had pulled his as well), and just as he took aim, Bobby - who had joined Bren and Rogue standing on the sofa - shot out two parallel streams of ice, seemingly from his hands. The rats froze and Bobby poured it on, making a huge rat ice floe, a thick floor of vermin-sicles, and for good measure iced over the hole they chewed through the wall. They couldn’t move to chew through the ice.

“That was very good,” Wesley said.  If the guy was anymore deadpan, he’d be comatose.

Rogue sighed, holding on to his upper arm with both of her gloved hands. “Thank you.”

“I hate rats too,” Bobby said, still looking wide-eyed with fear.

“If that was panic, panic more often,” Marc told him, not ready to admit he was a bit freaked out.  These weren’t just big fucking sewer rats - although they were; the biggest he had ever seen - but their eyes were fucking glowing!  Demonic rats?

“If you'd let Degei send some of his children, they could’ve eaten the rats,” Wes pointed out, and Marc scowled at him until he looked away.  Maybe that was true, but it wasn’t fucking helpful right now.

“Why would a bunch of rats attack us?” Brendan asked, looking around at the frozen rodents with a grimace of revulsion.  Seemed no one here was a fan of big-ass rats.

“They could be harbingers, or foot soldiers,” Wesley suggested.

“Rats are soldiers?” Bren asked dubiously.  He was the first one to step off the couch, but looked ready
to hop back on at the first sign of rat movement.

“These were clearly not ordinary rats,” Wes said, pointing out the patently obvious. “It could be that they were the first wave, testing on our defenses.”

“Shit,” Marc cursed, looking down both ends of the hall.  He was right; they could have been simply cannon fodder, a distraction from the real attack.

“I assume the doors have been barricaded?” Wes asked him.

“Triple locked, braced with furniture, and whatever weird ass spell you threw on them,” he replied. “But
all its gonna do is warn us when they come, isn’t it?”

Wesley grimaced and half shrugged, hating to admit it. "Most likely. We could be attacked by things that don't need to use a door.  Such as these."

"Let's get moving people," he told the kids, feeling weird calling the kids "people".  They were, but just weren't the kind he was used to addressing. "Everyone needs to get on point now.  You have your assigned area of the house - get there."

Everyone was off the couch, but still looking back warily, as if daring the rats to bust through their ice prison and come after them.

"I guess you're good, Bobby," Marc commented. "Any of you others want a weapon?"

"I'm a suck ass shot," Bren said sheepishly. "I could barely hit a target from six feet away. Logan promised me he'd teach me how to aim the next time he had a chance."

"I don't like guns," Rogue said. "And I think that soldier I absorbed is totally gone.  I don't even remember his name."

"But you've absorbed Logan, right?  Any of him still around?"

"Oh yeah, I almost killed him." Just a matter of fact statement; nothing she was particularly proud of. "He's got this little partition in my mind ... I don't think he's ever going away.  The Ressik seems to be lingering too, but I swear I didn't kill him."

"Logan can shoot a gun," Marc pointed out. "He's not a bad shot either."

Rogue brought a hand to her head as she thought, wincing as if going into the Logan "partition" was a painful thing to do. Knowing him, it probably was. "Oh yeah," she finally said. "But I still don't like guns."

Marc nodded towards the frozen sea of vermin. "Wanna absorb a big giant demon rat instead?"

She hardly needed to think about it. "Nothing with a big kick," she answered, holding out her hand.

Marc did a mental inventory of the weapons he was currently packing, and went for the one strapped in a holster near his left ankle. "This one barely has any recoil at all," he said, pulling out the .9 millimeter. "It's no good at a distance for that reason, but it's full of fragmenting bullets, so almost any shot you land should slow your target down." He handed the blued-steel gun to her butt first, but she still seemed wary to take it. When she finally did, he added, "You really don't want to kill something, go for an extremity shot - arms, legs. Unlikely to kill even with fragmenters, but still pretty debilitating.  Especially leg shots."  Okay, so he was lying, somewhat. With fragmenters, almost any reasonably good shot, especially to the body, was a potential kill.  Even if one of the fragments didn't slice through an artery or ricochet through a vital organ, the damage was usually so massive, fatal shock was almost inevitable if help wasn't fast in coming. But she wasn't tapping into enough of Logan to be able to kill an enemy indiscriminately - although he believed she'd probably have no trouble blowing away the possessed rat trying to eat off her face.

Wes gave him a sidelong glance, like he knew he was fudging (So, the Brit knew his weapons, did he?  How?  Marc knew for a fact they didn't like guns in Britain ... maybe poor Wes had been in America too long), but he decided to play along, as it was ultimately for the best. "I have to get back downstairs," he said, obviously hesitant.

"Go, we'll handle it from here." Or, at least, he hoped they could.

But they was famous last words. Because, at exactly that moment, there was a huge, explosive "Crack!" from the back of the house, sending a shudder through the floor as if an entire wall had collapsed. This was followed by a screeching, deep-throated roar that made them all wince and cover their ears as the sound seemed to vibrate deep inside their chests.

That was no Human plane noise.  And it was something big too; fucking huge.

When they could hear again, Marcus heard Wesley, his eyes as wide as silver dollars, gasp. "Dear lord: Beserkers."

Well, that didn't sound good.

***

They materialized in pitch blackness.

"I think I'm blind," Piotr said, somewhere Southeast of him. “I can’t see anything.”

"You're not the only one," Clive said, off to his Northwest.

"It's night," Storm said, due South of him. "But there's no stars."

No stars, no moon, no ambient light from other sources.  This wasn't Angel's only clue that things were wrong. "It's not night," he said, trying to see the blade of the axe he knew he was holding.  As a vampire, he knew he had superior night vision, it just seemed slow in coming here. "It's darkness."

"And you're not splitting semantical hairs?" Clive asked.

Angel started to shake his head, then realized that Spider couldn’t see him - not yet, anyways.  “No. Vampire - creature of the night, remember?  That’s not just mythic ego inflating bullshit.  I know night when I’m in it, and this isn’t it.  This is just the absence of light.” The air felt weird too; thick and cloying, like they'd entered an attic that had been locked up for years.  His eyes were starting to adjust, and he
was starting to see …. shapes, slightly darker than the rest of the blackness.  None of the shapes were currently moving, but they didn’t look promising either.

“And night isn’t the absence of light?” Piotr asked him, sounding doubtful.

“It’s more.”

“There’s atmosphere here, one that I can use,” Storm commented, as the wind picked up.  Instead of freshening the air, it just pushed around the staleness.

“Good,” Spider said. “Maybe you can throw some light on the situation.”

“I intend to,” she replied, and he could sense the wind kicking up a little harder.  Lightning flickered between clouds, he saw the tendrils of energy reflecting off the blade of his axe, but it barely penetrated
the raging gloom for even a millisecond; the darkness seemed to heal over it, like a living thing. And that’s when Angel realized something he should have known right from the start.

He stepped ten paces away from the other, and started chopping at the ground with the axe. Slicing through the air, he brought the blade down solidly into the ground beneath their feet, each blow making a hollow thunk, like he was stabbing a thick, heavy melon with a hunting knife.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Clive wondered, sounding annoyed. “It is you doing that, yes?”

“Yes,” Angel replied, never stopping his random chopping at the ground.  More flashes of lightning briefly illuminated him for the others.

“So what the fuck are you doing?”

“What I am doing, Clive, is attacking the darkness,” he panted, hefting the blade and describing a circle in the air before bringing the axe down again.

What had Bob said?  Gods created their own realms - but they didn’t just create them.  Quite often, the gods were the dimensions: they were quite literally part and parcel of the realm in which they dwelled. The internal made external, and vice versa.  He couldn’t kill whoever this was this way - or at least he didn’t think so - but damn it, he could get their fucking attention.

After all, this wasn’t a normal axe, was it?

“Is this some kind of vampire spaz-out?” Spider continued, sounding more and more sarcastic.

It was then that the darkness started to bleed away from the cracks he had made.  It was odd, like a photo reverse of the dying process, the black pulling away and leaving a void of color, not unlike bleached bones. In the air, filaments of gray energy crackled from the “slices” he had made, causing the darkness to retreat in odd, diseased patches. But at least now they had something to see by.

“Well, fuck me,” Spider muttered, stunned. “It worked.”

“Believe it or not, I know what I’m doing.” He buried the blade in the ground once more, now able to see it was a melted, grainy substance, not unlike granular cement.  But before he could yank the axe from it, something like a massive electrical shock traveled through it, and Angel only felt the sharp, hot burst of energy before being thrown back violently through the air, flying like he was made of paper.  He collided hard with someone and they both went down in a heap, the energy still coursing through his body and leaving him temporarily paralyzed.

“Dead thing,” a deep and deeply inhuman disembodied voice boomed. “Who allowed you to pollute my realm?!”

As soon as he could talk, Angel admitted, “Okay, sometimes I don’t know what I’m doing.” He saw silver out of the corner of his eye, and as feeling started to come back to the rest of his body, he realized Piotr had gone metal and sort of caught him, or at least broke the worst of his fall.  At least he knew metal guy wasn’t hurt.

As the sky and the ground continued to bleed light around them, the darkness coalesced into a rough approximation of a face above them.  Sharply diamond-shaped, and maybe twenty feet high and fifteen feet across, it was a face with empty eye sockets, no nose, and a mouth only visible when it “spoke”, a gash of sky. “Who are you to attack Kalfu?” It demanded.

“Who are you to attack us?” Storm shot back.

Piotr said quietly to Spider, “For a moment, I swear he said tofu.” Which certainly would have been
scary enough.

But Kalfu?  It took him a moment, but he had a vague recollection … oh, shit.  The only Kalfu he knew of was the Voudon (voodoo) spirit of the night, and the source of “all darkness”. Very little was known about the “real” Kalfu, but by all accounts, the mythological assertion that he was very dangerous was dead on the mark.  Shit, why hadn’t Wesley come with them?  He had no idea how to defeat Kalfu, if indeed Kalfu could be defeated. Would supernaturally enhanced mutant powers and Bob’s axe be enough?  Or would they simply be killing time until something more powerful showed up?

Wisps of darkness fluttered on top of Kalfu’s theoretical face like smoke from unseen chimneys. “Pathetic little Humans.  Your realm was mine once; I’m simply reclaiming it.”

“It isn’t yours to reclaim,” Storm continued, obviously having no qualms about arguing with the big giant head.  But then again, dollars to doughnuts, she had no idea who Kalfu was or what he could do. “Withdraw, and we will leave.  But if you don’t, you will be destroyed.”

“Bloody lovely,” Spider grumbled under his breath. “We get the mutant leader with the” bombastic speech” gene.”

Angel climbed to his feet, still unsteady but feeling better than before, and gave Piotr a hand up.  He was
at least as heavy as Logan when he was in steel mode.

The ground seemed to tremble beneath their feet, accompanied by the sound of an avalanche, rocks roaring down a distant hillside.  It took Angel a moment to understand Kalfu was laughing at them. “You threaten me, in my realm?  With nothing but a blade that stings and a dead thing? You are more than welcome to face me, pitiful creatures - as soon as you make it through my army.”

“What army?” Piotr asked, looking around the slowly growing circle of light.

It was then that shapes began to form in the remaining darkness; of the darkness, humanoid shapes created of the same shadows that had been Kalfu’s representative face.  Dozens that kept growing, shadows splitting like amoebas, clones of clones of clones, until they were surrounded by a quickly encroaching army of shadow soldiers.  The entire realm had altered itself into opponents.  They were outnumbered a hundred to one.

“Oh fuck,” Spider said, taking it all in with a slack jaw.

Yeah, that about summed it up.

16

Like Bobby hated rats and snakes, Wesley hated Berserkers.

It wasn’t just that he’d had nothing but bad experiences with them, although that was true (could there be
a more naturally homicidal demon breed?): on top of that, they were ugly as sin, hard to kill, and had all the personality of a starving badger on crank, after a three day coffee and acid binge. There was simply
no reasoning with them, and while you attempted to do so, they pulled out your intestines and ate them, keeping you alive long enough to ask you where you kept the salsa.

The heavy thudding footfalls and sounds of smashing quickly followed the first Berserkers' dramatic entrance through the Southern side of the mansion, and even as he shouted to the charging Marcus, “Back of the neck!  The only way to kill them is to drive something into the spot where their spinal column meets their brainstem!” Wes was startled to hear a voice in his mind, so much so that he jumped.

*What’s going on?* Xavier’s ‘voice’ demanded. *Is everyone all right?*

There was no point in asking Xavier for his help here; the physical structure of Berserker brains was so different than any other humanoids, telepathy had never, to his knowledge, worked. * For the moment. Tell Amaranth if she can’t be distracted long enough to transport our Berserker friends to the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, then the least she can do is zap me a weapon up here.  Machete, heavy-duty crossbow, spear gun, javelin, sword, I don’t care, just something I can stab them with.* He still had the gun Marcus had given him earlier, but considering how thick-skinned Berserkers were (quite literally - they had about four layers of tough, overlapping scales), he’d have to get to point blank range if he wanted to even try and get a killing shot. Which meant hop up on their back and pump round after round into their neck, and hope none took a queer ricochet and blew his own head off.  He was neither as suicidal or basically indestructible as Angel or Logan (the only two people he knew who had ever successfully killed Berserkers - which probably meant Berserkers really hated their friends), so
unless a golden opportunity actually presented itself, he couldn’t see ever doing that.

His heart was trip-hammering in his chest, and for the first time in awhile he had the sour taste of fear in the back of his throat. What kind of “demon hunter” was he when one of their breed caused an acute attack of phobia?  But then again, what kind of Human would he be if he didn’t get scared sometimes?  Everyone did, even in a profession such as this; you simply had to learn to work past it - and fast.

“What the hell is a Berserker?” Brendan asked. All the kids were now out in the hall, looking towards the back of the mansion with trepidation and curious dread. “And don’t tell me it’s a Viking warrior wearing a bearskin, ‘cause that screaming doesn’t sound Norse to me.”

“It is a demon 'worse case scenario',” Wes told them.  He didn’t want to scare them any further, but they deserved the truth. “They are big, fast killing machines that are virtually indestructible. “

They all jumped as gunfire soon exploded down the corridor, and the annoyed roar of an insulted Berserker made the windows rattle in their frames. The trio of teens had paled, even Brendan, who was a lighter shade of green. “Except, uh … back of the neck, right?” Brendan squeaked, terror making his voice crack.

He nodded, hoping he was giving them a reassuring look.  It was hard to tell, since, in his own mind, he was hiding beneath a table. “Exactly. They also don’t like fire, although I’ve never heard of it killing them.”

“Fire?” Rogue repeated, staring at him like he was crazy. “So whatta we do?  Make torches?”

At that moment, a crossbow full of titanium arrows and a gleaming scimitar popped into existence at his feet. *Hurry up* Amaranth sent, in her inevitably rude way.  Still, she sounded quite distracted, and faint, especially compared to Xavier‘s previous transmission. *We’re running out of time.*

*I’m well aware of that*  The scimitar had a leather strap on the handle, so he slipped that over his wrist while he picked up the crossbow and made sure it was ready to fire.  Of course it was; at least she'd had time to do that much.

As soon as he had done that, two things happened almost simultaneously.  Marcus came flying through the hallway, slamming up against the far wall not twenty feet away, his shirt ripped open and his chest bleeding copiously. Wes couldn’t tell on sight if he was conscious or not, but if he was bleeding, he was still alive.

Then the front door exploded open behind them, making Rogue scream, as another Berserker thundered in. The seven foot, oversized nightmare paused to roar, opening its too large, lantern fish jaw wide, and no matter how scared he was, he acted on reflex - he fired an arrow down its throat.

It wasn’t going to kill it, or even slow it down, but it was an annoyance that made it pause, and attempt to pluck the arrow out with its long, claw like fingers. As that happened, Bobby raised an ice wall between them and the Berserker. It was a nice idea, but the Berk (ha!) would bust through it in a second, as soon as it wasn’t preoccupied. What they needed was a wall of fire.

Damn it - he should have requested a flamethrower. But then he may have burned the entire house down.

The Berserker that had taken a slice out of Marcus started pounding down the opposite end of the hall towards them, shouting in its gravelly, harsh voice, “Human meat, this is your doing!  You will pay for
what you’ve done!”

What the hell was it talking about?  It looked like it was bleeding thick black fluid from several perforations in its chest and face - Marc must have gotten some shots home - and he could smell the burning rubber  and stagnant water odor of its blood, but it wasn’t even slowing it down.

“Is there any point in shooting it?” Rogue asked, her gun out, her hand shaking.

“Why didn’t anyone say they look like Aliens?” Brendan mumbled, sounding distressed at the prospect.

“Not really,” Wesley admitted, as its huge red eyes locked onto them.  It growled, a sound like rocks sluicing down a metal chute, and Wesley told her, “I need cover.  Go for the eyes.”

She nodded, and aimed and shot at its large eyes as he hit the wall and tried to get around the thing before it noticed him. But it wasn’t good enough, as it slammed a hand against the wall barely two feet ahead of him, leaving a huge gaping hole and sending wood and plaster fragments flying into his face.  He shot an arrow into its throat - from the wet sound and the angry snarl, it hit home - but before it could pick him up and toss him aside like a rag doll, Bobby froze over its eyeball, covering them with a thick crust of ice.

Not only its eyes, but its whole head, a growing film of ice that threatened to cover its entire body.

For a millisecond.

Then it shook its massive frame, and the ice sloughed off like dead skin, flaking off like it had never been more than a fragile crust.

Wesley slung the crossbow onto his back and held the scimitar ready, trying to make an end run to get behind the thing, but he never made it.  He saw black out of the corner of his eye, and felt impact, like a dump truck had slammed into him at seventy miles an hour.

He knew he’d blacked out going through the wall, and come to on the floor of an adjoining room, but not very long afterwards, because pieces of the wall were still falling down.

There was still shooting out in the hall, and Rogue was shouting something to someone when there was another boom, followed by the sound of something solid hitting the floor. He was willing to bet the ice
wall had just fallen.

Wesley forced himself to his feet, staggering and almost passing out, blood rushing from his head and his vision pixilating as he looked around for the crossbow.  Oh well, at least the scimitar was still attached to his wrist.  His chest ached, and he was pretty sure he had at least a couple of busted ribs.

Blood dripped into his eye from a gash on his scalp as the floor shook with the tremendous thudding footsteps of two Berserkers moving in for the kill on the kids.  Maybe, if he was lucky, he could take
out one - he couldn’t imagine the scenario where he could take out two.

Could things get any worse?