“Now that we’re done with the arse sniffing,” a copper Ressik snarled, flicking his cigarette butt to the jogging path. “Can we get on with it?”

Ruby scowled at them. “What the hell are they doing here?”

“They owe Hashim a favor,” Logan offered with a shrug.

Giles looked towards him sharply. “Hashim? As in ‘Hashim the Hun’?”

Logan didn’t know how to answer that. “ The Hun?”

“One and the same,” Ruby agreed. “He’s pretty much in charge of the entire London demon mob. Ruthless bastard.”

“Oi, watch it,” Euan interjected.

Giles gave him a deadly serious look, eyes steely behind plastic lenses. “How exactly do you know him?”

“Just through Lady Blood.” Even as he said it, he knew it was the absolute wrong thing to say.

His eyes widened, but just briefly, his British reserve version of a poker face slamming right back down after a single moment. “Lady Blood? This just gets better and better.”

He shook his head, and wondered how much he could actually say in front of Hashim’s men. This would be tricky. “Uh … look, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’m not some kinda vampire groupie, it’s just … complicated.”

“Who gives a fuck?” Ruby interrupted, cutting to the chase. Although Giles grimaced sourly, Logan was relived that her impatience got him off the hook. “Look, Rupert, we have to get this sodding ritual under way, before the moon is fully risen.”

Giles sighed heavily, and she held out a black satchel that he took without bothering to look , walking over to a near by bench. “Whoa, wait,” Meldane said, glancing between them nervously. “Ritual? What ritual?”

Ruby pulled out a cigarette pack of her own, but crushed it in annoyance and shoved it in her coat pocket, her sharp movements causing her amulet to glint in the dim light. “Do you really think any of us could stand a chance against this wizard, whoever the fuck he or she is, not to mention Anzu? We needed to even the odds.”

“Protection spell?”

She snorted derisively and shook her head. “Like that alone would be enough? We’re doing the conventus spiritus spell.”

There were probably a couple ways that could be translated, but his mind interpreted it as “assembly of spirits”, which sounded kind of weird, but not earth shaking. Still, the reactions of everyone else seemed to indicate otherwise. Meldane looked utterly gob smacked, there were hostile rumblings from the vampires, and the copper Ressik exclaimed angrily, “No fucking way! We didn’t agree to that!”

Ruby was prepared for that, or least was always steely in the face of opposition. “Then get the fuck out of here, you bleeding coward. I didn’t ask you to be here in the first place.”

The Ressik’s spine stiffened, and the scales on his neck and face flared slightly, making him look that much wider. “What did you just call me, cow?”

“Hey, everybody, shut the fuck up,” Logan snapped, giving the Ressik a hard and challenging stare. As soon as he was confident it understood he’d kick his ass if he continued, he looked to Ruby. “What is this thing exactly, this ‘union of spirits‘?”

She raised an eyebrow imperiously. “You speak Latin? Aren’t we ‘Mister Smarter Than We Look’?”

“Save the insults for later. What’s up with this?”

“It’s a type of binding spell,” Giles said. He had been calmly pulling things out of the bag and putting them on the bench, pretty much ignoring everyone. He’d laid out several stinky things, herbs and whatever in small plastic bags, but what Logan noticed was the big ass knife with the ornate etching on the seven inch silver blade. “Since alone we’re no match for whoever is doing this, this ritual will combine all our energies into a single reservoir that we can all share. An attack on one of us is an attack on all; it won’t be as easy.”

“But does that mean that if one of us gets taken down, we all suffer for it?”

“No. Energy isn’t destroyed.”

“We get sucked into the fucking collective,” the Ressik growled. “When the spell is done, you guys get the energy, or it dissipates or some such shit, whatever, but I don’t like the idea of giving up Ul’vaHal for you freaks.”

He was sure the Ressik had said an actual word, but it sounded a bit like he was hocking a loogie. “..Uvula?”

“Ul’vaHal,” Giles replied with a bored sigh. “The Ressik concept of reincarnation.”

He had no idea they believed in anything, not to even mention reincarnation. “You guys Buddhist or Hindu?” he wondered. The Ressiks glared at him with their huge, saucer sized yellow eyes, growling ever so slightly. Okay, so not big on mammal religions.

“We need to select the anchors,” Ruby interjected impatiently, crossing her arms over her chest. Her hostile glance seemed to encompass them all, as if they were all making her late for a dinner date.

“I’ll be mystic,” Giles said, tucking the presumably empty bag beneath the bench. “We’ll need to select a physical.”

“Oh no,” Ruby instantly responded. “No offense, Rupert, but I’m younger, and lest you forget, werewolf? Even in my Human form, I can take a lot more than you can.”

Giles shook his head and turned to face her, looking surprisingly weary. “But I can actually use the energy, Ruby; you yourself admitted that you don’t have the level of spellcasting skills to do it. I’ll be fine. I’ve spent half my life fighting nasty things, and I‘m not dead yet.”

“Uh, what the fuck are you guys going on about?” Logan wondered aloud, wandering over toward them so they’d be unable to ignore him. If they still insisted upon doing so, he figured he could start invading their personal space.

Ruby’s gaze cut like a knife, as always, but Giles, perhaps because he was tired, was kinder. “The spell uses people within the group as ‘anchors’ to help contain the energy and leave it controllable, otherwise it would overwhelm everyone and be useless. A mystical anchor helps control it on the higher planes, and can use it on that level. A physical would bind it to the earth plane in a similar manner.”

“Ah.” He nodded like he got it, but he really didn’t; he wasn’t sure it mattered though. “So what does a physical anchor have to do?”

Giles shrugged. “Stay alive is the glib answer. But -”

“Fine, I'll be an anchor. I’m heavy anyway.”

Ruby wandered away to monitor a potential fight, as some of the vampires were giving the Ressiks shit, and if someone didn’t intervene, the Ressiks were likely to start dismembering them. Not that Ruby or any of the rest of them cared, but they still might need them for the fight.  There was never enough cannon fodder. Giles gave him a look that could only be described as deadpan, and asked, “What is your mutation exactly? I remember you said it was physical. Are you stronger than average?”

“Kinda, yeah, but mainly I just heal fast.”

“Heal fast? How so?”

“Well, I know it doesn’t sound that impressive, but if you don’t kill me instantly, odds are you won’t get a second chance. I’ve been shot, stabbed, bled out, drowned, electrocuted, defenestrated, poisoned, run over, gassed, dropped from a helicopter, blown up -”

There was no poker face now. Giles looked ever so slightly horrified, eyes wide and mouth gaping, making the fine lines on his face stand out in relief. Why did people always have that reaction? “You’re serious?”

“Unfortunately, yeah. I also have, er, claws, if that matters at all.”

“Claws?”

He held up his fist and demonstrated, popping a set of claws for him. Like most people tended to do, Giles jumped and took a step back as the blades sprung out from his hand, but he looked at them with open and blatant curiosity, reaching out to gingerly touch one before abruptly pausing, aware he hadn’t been given permission to do so. “They’re metal?”

“My whole skeleton’s laced with it. Don’t ask, it’s a long story, but I wasn’t born that way.”

His gaze was intensely quizzical but, as he'd been told, he didn’t ask. “Can I inquire what type of metal it is?”

“Adamantium. It can cut through anything.”

He nodded, seemingly impressed, and said, “Yes, I think you’d make an excellent anchor.”

He wasn’t surprised. He’d always felt a bit like an anchor.

Ruby’s terse nature put an end to the Ressiks concerns, mainly by pointing out they didn’t have to worry about Ul’vaHal if they didn’t die, so there was no way they could leave unless they wanted to look like complete fucking cowards. It didn’t endear Ruby to the Ressiks, but Ruby traditionally didn’t endear herself to anything, and the Ressiks didn’t like mammals unless they were appetizers.

As soon as the in fighting was lowered to a simmer, Giles and Ruby started on the spell. It seemed to involve many chanted words in Latin and words in a language he didn’t recognize at all, and they laid out patterns in a mixture of stinky herbs on the ground. Giles motioned him over as he smeared some antiseptic smelling salve on his hands. He offered him a dollop of some of the eucalyptus and alum reeking goop, but Logan shook his head, asking “What’s that? Part of the ritual?”

“No, it just numbs your hand.”

He noticed now that Ruby had the wicked looking knife in her hand, and was coming right toward them. Oh boy, this was going to hurt, wasn’t it?  “It's okay - I don’t need it.  Pain will get my adrenaline goin’, and I need that for the fight.”

That made Giles raise an eyebrow. “Now isn’t the time for machismo.”

“It's nott. Believe me, I’ve had much worse.” He thought; he hoped.  He still had no idea what Ruby was going to do with that knife, but part of him thought that ignorance was indeed bliss.

“All right. Give me your hand.”

That made Logan smirk, in spite of himself. “Ain’t cha at least gonna buy me dinner first?”

How many times in his life had he seen the exact same withering look that he was now getting from Giles? Was he really that much of an ass, or did people just have no sense of humor at all?

Still, he did as he was told, and held out his right hand, palm up. Giles covered it with his own left hand, palm down, and Ruby said something in that guttural, incomprehensible language before plunging the knife straight through their hands. In spite of the numbing goop, Giles sucked in a hard breath, and even Logan gritted his teeth, although he had indeed had worse. Still, it fucking hurt.

Ruby said a couple more words, leaving the dagger in their hands, and collected the blood  that dribbled off the blade in a tiny cup that included even more stinking herbs and something that smelled like charred bones. After a couple more syllables and several seconds, Ruby withdrew the cup and yanked the dagger out. Holy fuck, that hurt too.

Giles instantly pulled away and wedged his hand beneath his arm, clearly in pain but trying very hard not to react to it. Logan's hand hurt, but it was soon lost in a flush of heat as the healing began. He shook it a bit, even though that never did any good. Ruby approached them, using a little twig of witch hazel to stir the blood mixture together, and said, “Pucker up.” He didn’t, and she used the end of the twig to smear a bit of it on his forehead, which he imagined she meant to do in the first place. She made a show of scrutinizing him before saying, “A little eyeliner, and you might pass for Human.”

He gave her the finger, as that seemed the most concise response, but he used the wrong hand, his right, which he only realized after she stared at it. The wound was mostly closed up, he could feel the edges of his skin knitting themselves together, an unconformable sensation like a million insects crawling beneath skin, burrowing into his muscles and sliding into his bloodstream. To his horror, they were all staring at his hand, crowding around to see what the hell was going on, and he quickly withdrew his hand and hid it behind his back. Too late, it seemed. “Now tha’s just creepy,” vampire Scott said from the peanut gallery.

How bad did you have to be for a fucking vampire to call you creepy?

Giles got a smear on his forehead too, and wrapped a scarf around his hand to staunch the bleeding, a scarf oddly enough contributed by a pretty young vampire who called herself Adrenochrome, or Drena for short. She looked like she just dropped out of the Matrix auditions, clad in a tight black vinyl jumpsuit and improbable knee high black leather boots with about a hundred decorative buckles on them, short hair slicked back and dyed a rather violent shade of electric blue, and she was wearing black wraparound sunglasses at night. Could she be more obviously a vampire? Well, maybe she thought people would assume she was a Goth or a club kid. She seemed real cozy with Euan, and to say they made an odd couple was a bit of an understatement.

The groups separated into three, with the Ressiks refusing to be part of a group that wasn’t made up of them alone, and they moved out towards the old Watcher’s headquarters, each approaching it from a different direction. Since they were the anchors, Giles and he were in the same group, along with Euan, Drena, Meldane, a vamp he’d seen at Hashim’s old nest (Violetta), three others he didn’t know (but generally resembled soccer hooligans), and a weird, sullen vampire everybody just called ‘Shadow’.

There were traffic noises and street noises, the typical sounds of a London evening, until they were a block and a half away from the target - then it got eerily quiet, like a lead shield had slammed down around them. “Oh, how fuckin’ weird is this?” Euan said. “I ain’t pickin’ up anything with a heartbeat around ‘ere. Well, ‘cept you three.”

“I hope we’re not too late,” Giles muttered under his breath, shoving his wounded hand in his pocket. He was wearing a Burberry style trenchcoat, which - while stylish - seemed impractical, as it was a stuffy night, hardly cooler than the daytime. But by the way it seemed to hang heavy on the right side, Logan assumed he had a weapon or something hidden under it.

“Can you really stand up to this thing?” Logan asked. “I mean, I’m gettin’ the impression this guy - gal, whatever - is pretty good at throwing magic around.”

He watched Giles’s jaw tense, and he just knew bad news was coming. “Honestly?  Probably not.  But I’m just bait. I’ll draw them out, and make them expose themselves.”

“And then what? We attack?”

At least that got a chuckle out of him. “God, no. I know a very powerful witch, who should be remote viewing us right about now. As soon as he or she attacks me, they’ll reveal both their strength and their weakness, and she should be able to neutralize them, or at least slow them down.  It will be up to us then to … finish the job.”

“Assuming you’re not dead.”

He rolled a shoulder half-heartedly, and Logan realized he either didn’t care, or was so accustomed to such dire predicaments he couldn’t even work up a decent emotional response anymore. “I figured my time was up a long time ago, Logan.  I just seem to have been extraordinarily lucky.  I’m willing to see if my luck holds a bit longer.”

They were just a single corner away when the group broke up one more time, the vampires disappearing into alleys or going up to the roofs of buildings that looked out on that block, and at Giles’s urging, Logan went with them, and ended up sharing a roof with Violetta and Shadow. They both looked at him funny when he climbed over the edge of the roof, and he hissed a quiet but sharp, “What?”

Violetta answered, but he wasn’t surprised about that. A clear eyed brunette who gave off the aura of a high priced lawyer, at least she was willing to talk. Shadow not only didn’t seem to talk, it didn’t seem he had any expression beyond “sulk”. “We’re not used to Humans being able to do that.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he just shrugged and joined them crouching at the far edge of the roof.

The construction site seemed to be lit from within, the opaque tarps glowing white, but they still couldn’t see a damn thing inside. But Euan had been right a block ago: there was no one anywhere. This part of London was a ghost town, and it made his skin crawl. Of course it was wrong, and of course it was bad, but what could they do about it now?

There was movement behind the tarp, something that couldn’t be ascribed to the meager breeze, and a man came out holding what looked like a small club - an unlit torch? The man looked like he was well into middle age, with drastically thinning brown hair with a few wisps of gray, but he wore tailored pants and a buttoned down blue shirt that was buttoned up all the way, in spite of the temperature, although his sleeves were rolled up. Still, his wardrobe, right down to what looked like expensive Italian loafers, was as inappropriate as Giles’s … and similar?  Oh no.

He looked about Giles’s height too, although he had about thirty pounds on him, and his face was starting to fill out in a way that suggested he’d have a nice set of jowls in a couple years’ time. The man seemed to be searching in his pocket for a lighter, but then he stopped and looked around warily, as if he’d heard something. If so, he had better hearing than Logan himself did.

“Ned?” Giles said, his quiet voice still shocking in the stillness.

The man with the unlit torch looked at him sharply, everything in his body posture tensing for attack, but then he relaxed as soon as he saw Giles walking down the center of the inexplicably empty street all alone. “Bloody hell - Rupert? What are you doing here?”

“I could ask you the same thing,” he replied coolly, still walking toward him. Logan tried to will him to stop, to keep his distance, but that never seemed to work. “I thought you went to Malta.”

Ned shrugged, holding the unlit torch at his side. It would probably be a good weapon if it came to that. “For a while. But I got bored. What about you?  I heard you’ve been hiding out in the Cotswolds. Did guilt finally get the better of you?”

Even from his high vantage point, he could see Giles’s shoulders stiffen. “What does that mean?”

He scoffed. “You know damn well what I mean. You got out, and so many others died, so many friends, colleagues, and idiot buggers you couldn’t stand. The latter must have been a relief, I suspect.”

“I take no pleasure in anyone’s death.”

Even against the night sky, where light pollution from the city knocked out most of the stars, Logan saw dark shapes circling far above them, nightmarish shapes that glided silently, but looked as large as pterodactyls: the Vilkacis, finally arrived.  They must have followed his scent, or had been tracking them from above all along. You could never trust a demigod, but at least they had showed up. Of course, he had no guarantee they wouldn’t rip them all to pieces once they were done with Anzu, but they’d burn that bridge if they got there.

“Who is this guy?” Violetta whispered. “I thought we didn’t know who we were up against.”

“We didn’t. But maybe he did.”

Ned was ignoring Giles, looking around him into the dark. “Still with that loser brigade?  Those sad little children you sacrificed your career and reputation for?”

“They have their own lives.  So do I. What are you doing here?”

From his high vantage point, Logan could see the change in Ned’s expression and posture, a smug smirk appearing on his plump face. “Cut the crap, Rupert. You know, don’t you?  Why the hell else would you have left your cozy hideaway in the countryside?  Do you actually think you - and whoever you brought with you - can stop me?”

“Stop you from doing what? I have no idea what half-assed plan you have in mind. Are you going to try and raise them, is that it?  Restore them?”

Violetta leaned into him, her hair tickling his ear. “What are they talking about?”

“I dunno.” But that was something of a lie, as he was starting to put it together.  Ned was a former Watcher, just like Giles, and they didn’t have the best of relationships when they were working ostensibly together. (Giles had been at HQ the day it blew up?  Funny, he'd never mentioned that.)

Ned laughed, but it was a cold and hard thing. “Raise those bastards?  Oh please. Waste all this time and energy for them? Don’t even joke.”

“So why all the death, Ned? What is this about?”

“What is this about? My dear Rupert, it was all about drawing you out, or at least some other bunch of do-gooders or angry vampires. Didn’t matter, as long as they have some kind of blood in their veins. It will all work.” Logan could see Ned’s eyes were changing; it looked like they were filming over black, his pupils being eclipsed. The breeze had started to pick up, but it seemed to be swirling around Ned, kicking up a dust devil. “Do I really have to tell you the plot?  Are you that senile now?  We were raised and trained to fight a never-ending war, and what happened?  We scattered, we lost focus, we allowed ourselves to be decimated by an enemy that has scattered and is far more mobile and insidious than we will ever be. We need a target, a focal point, a place where we evil concentrates so we can do our duties and destroy it. And that’s why I’m a better Watcher than you will ever be.  I care enough about my people and my world to do the right thing and sacrifice myself for a greater good.”

“A demon magnet?” Giles said, his voice growing louder and angrier in response to the rising wind. He didn’t seem frightened yet, just disgusted. “Are you insane? You’re talking about opening a Hellmouth, aren’t you?”

Ned just grinned, the energy he was giving off as charged as static electricity, even from this distance. Here was their sorcerer. “And the blood of you and your cohorts are the final ingredient.  At least you can be useful in death.”