Logan sat up, peeling himself off the settee, aware that Ruby would gut him as soon as she saw how much he’d bled on her furniture, and was so unsettled by his dream that it took him a moment to realize he could see again. His vision was a little cloudy at the edges, but it was a huge improvement over not being able to see anything at all.

It was just a nightmare, right?  Yeah, of course it was.  That’s why he had a deeply uneasy feeling in his stomach, a pervasive sense of doom like a bad taste in his mouth.  Shit.

How much did a long-distance call to the States cost?  He had no idea, so he just pulled out what cash he had and left it on a side table as he found Ruby’s phone and punched in Xavier’s number.  Even while waiting for someone to pick up, he felt like a complete moron.

Outside the sky was just starting to lighten, the sun not quite up yet but certainly on its way, and he wondered if Ruby was still in wolf form.  Not that it really mattered; he was just curious how that whole werewolf thing was supposed to work.  And, frankly, he would rather deal with a pissed-off wolf than Ruby in her Human form.

Finally the phone was answered, and Xavier said, “Xavier’s Instit -” Just by his sudden, thick pause, he knew he’d been made. “Logan,” he said, his voice instantly and amazingly frosty.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Can you save being pissed off at me for a minute?  This is kinda important.”

“Oh?  Do you need more children to help you attack the Organization?”

Ouch.  Sure, he might come off like a mutant version of Gandhi, but Xavier could be as mean anyone when he put his mind to it. “Hey, it wasn’t - oh, fuck it.  Look, I think you’re in danger over there. Or maybe Scott is. I couldn’t tell.”

“What do you mean?” His voice had thawed a little, but not by much.

“Well, I think somebody sent me a warning, but I’m not sure who.  Still, it felt pretty real.”

Xavier seemed to mull that over, and unlike Scott, he didn’t immediately dismiss him. “What kind of danger?”

“That’s just it.  I’m not sure. I- …” he trailed off, having a problem just considering the possibility. Voicing it seemed too difficult.  He had to have the wrong interpretation there, didn’t he?  It had to have been metaphorical, a symbolic representation of something beyond him.  It wasn't literal. (Was it?)

Xavier must have picked up on his trepidation over the phone, as he asked, with a hushed sort of urgency, “What is it, Logan?”

He couldn’t say it.  How could he say this?  It felt like a betrayal, or perhaps slander, but there was no way around it. As much as he wanted to deny it, his instinct for self-preservation wouldn’t let him. “Jean.”

“Jean?” Xavier repeated, as shocked as he felt.  After a moment, he asked, “When did you talk to her last?”

“Uh, god, I don’t remember. It must’ve been … wait, it was last time I was here. When she helped us kill Kali.” When he'd figured out that Jean had betrayed them - no, him - and never said a word about it. Was that why he hadn’t heard from her since?

“What aren’t you telling me?”

That was the drawback of talking to a telepath - they always knew when you were hiding something.  Oh, hell; he’d already slurred Jeannie by suggesting she was a threat.  He could hardly make this worse. “She- … I think she helped release Kali in the first place.”

“The god who almost killed Bob?”

“Yeah. I mean, she must have changed her mind about it, ‘cause she helped me kill her, but they seemed to know each other.  She never mentioned that to me.”

Xavier was quiet for several seconds, and he could feel the tension bleeding over the open line. “She must have changed her mind about killing you.”

“What?”

“If Bob died before you, you’d inherit his powers, yes?  To get rid of Bob, they’d have to get  rid of you as well, correct?”

Holy shit - that hadn’t occurred to him before.  Still, Jean wouldn’t hurt him … but she wasn’t just Jean anymore, was she?  “Maybe I’m not her favorite person in the world, but how could she -”

“We’re acting on the assumption it’s Jean we’re dealing with. Are we sure about that?  Jean wasn’t the type to hurt anyone, and certainly not to unleash a psychopathic god on the world. You’ve talked to her more than any of us. Are you certain it’s her?”

The million dollar question, and one he wasn’t totally comfortable thinking about. Logan twisted the phone cord around his forearm, until it was tight enough to leave a mark against his skin.  Like most things, it faded quickly. “I … she’s still in there somewhere.  Something of her is there, it must be, otherwise she would have gone through with it.”

“I agree. But just the fact that she considered it, that she helped instigate it in the first place, indicates there can’t be much of the old Jean left.”

“So what are you saying?  She’s fading away?  She’s going nuts?  Why would she kill Scott when she couldn’t kill me?”

Judging from the new, dramatic pause, he had stunned him. “Kill Scott?  What are you talking about?  Is that what you saw?”

Oh, right, he hadn’t mentioned that little factoid yet. “Yeah, but she'd already killed most of the school, I think. If it was her. It was kinda abstract, so I don’t know if it was really her. Kinda hope not.”

Xavier sighed impatiently. “This isn’t helping.”

“Hey, I know!  It was just … it was weird, okay?  More feeling than coherence.  I dunno, maybe calling like this was a mistake.”

“If you think it was a warning, I’m inclined to believe you,” he sighed, surprising Logan with that level of trust.  But then again, he did have ties of some kind to this weird otherworld, the one that took place in plain sight and was almost never noticed by anyone.  Magic was a nicer explanation than deliberate ignorance, but the facts seemed to support the latter.  Xavier just had to trust that, with these ties, Logan could tell a genuine alarm from a simple nightmare - and since most of  his nightmares involved mutilation or a dead wife, it was a good bet this was something else. ”Was this a message from Jean?”

A simple, basic question, but Logan found it  mildly shocking, mainly because he hadn’t considered it.  And now that he was thinking about it, the shock seemed to get worse. “No, I don’t think it was.  I mean, I don’t know who it was from, but it wasn’t from her.  I know her by now, I would have known it was her the moment I came in.  Damn, I’m not sure who it was. I’d know Bob too, and when he crashes my dreams, he makes a big entrance.  Maybe it’s related to what I’m doing here.”

“What are you doing there?”

“Some demon shit.” He suddenly wondered if the comment “You can only save one of them” didn’t refer to people, but locations.  Here and there, London and Xavier’s.  Was there a connection?  “Just .. you might wanna warn Scott, but don’t tell him about the Jean thing.  I don’t know how he’d handle that.”

“If Jean is a threat to him or the school, he has to be told.”

“I know, but how do you think that will go down?”

“It’s not going down well with me at the moment,” Xavier countered, but with a sense of weariness.  He must have already figured out that the “old” Jean, the purely Human one, was gone.  This was a new Jean, one they didn’t quite know, and perhaps simply couldn’t know. He recalled her “happy place”, a garden reduced to an overgrown, threatening alien jungle, the most visible sign of her mental deterioration.  Did he actually think that she could handle that much power and not be driven mad by it?  He remembered - vaguely - the time he'd clued in to Bob’s power, and was rendered comatose by it.  How could you know all those things, feel and hear so much, have so much power in the palm of your hand, and not be driven instantly bugfuck nuts?  Did he really think that because it was Jean, because she seemed to be the most genuinely un-fucked up person he’d ever met, she could handle it better?

(It begged the question why Bob wasn’t insane, but it was quite possible he was - it’s just that he was Bob, and insanity probably looked good on him, like most things did. Always looking good was probably a god thing, but, again, it depended on your definition of good.)

Xavier sighed again, and he thought he could hear him drumming his fingers on his desk. “When he gets back, I’ll find a way to break it to him.”

“Gets back? Where is he?”

“Honestly?  I’m not sure. He’s been restless since returning from Mirror Lake.”

“Restless?  Like what - like me?”

“I wasn’t going to say that … but yes, actually, now that you mention it.  He seems to be full of rage, but I’m not sure at what.”

“The Organization?  Me?”

“Yes, both.  And himself, perhaps even others.”

“Any reason why? ‘Cause the Sisters took some people out?  Because they and Helga had to rescue us?”

“I have no idea. He won’t talk much about it, and currently he seems angry at me.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m here and you’re not.” There was a bit of an ironic edge in his voice when he said it, but Logan wondered how honest Xavier was actually being with him. Scott may have been a Boy Scout, and he may have been insanely devoted to Xavier, but he was still Human, as was Xavier - shit came up between people, they didn’t always see eye to eye.  Or visor to eye, as the case may be. “We’re not finished with the Mirror Lake situation, you know.”

“I know. But both Saddiq and Rogue are old enough to make their own decisions, and they’ve already been through some dangerous shit.”

“So that’s a reason to put them back in it?”

“No, but they’re not naïve. They can decide for themselves and they can take care of themselves.  Hell, I trust Saddiq to protect the whole fucking school.  He‘s good, you know?”

“Yes, he is, but -”

“Chuck, I mean good, “ he interrupted impatiently. “He was born and bred to fight, and he’s better than most of what the Organization has at their command. Since he almost killed their guy, they have to know that. He had to personally pay them a visit and draw a line, or they would have come back for him. Do you understand?”

“Do you understand that you and Scott could have gotten them killed?  Honestly Logan, could you have lived with yourself if that happened?”

“That’s why I brought the Sisters and Helga. With them there, it wasn’t -”

“But after what happened to -” Xavier stopped short, but it wasn’t in time.  Logan knew what he was about to say: Leonie.  It was like a punch in the gut, and he felt suddenly very sick, and very angry.  If this hadn’t been Ruby’s phone, he would have snapped it in half.

“Don’t you dare,” he snarled, gritting his teeth to keep from saying something even worse.

“I’m sorry,” Xavier began hastily. “I didn’t mean -”

“I can’t talk about this,” he said, and slammed down the receiver, restraining himself from throwing the entire phone across the fucking room.  Logically, he knew Xavier wasn’t a vindictive man (why was Magneto still alive if he was?) or a hurtful one (again, Magneto), that this was just something that slipped out in the heat of the moment. Those things happened; he could deal with that. But it was way too fucking soon, and him bringing her up - or at least attempting to - was like a handful of salt being rubbed into a sucking chest wound.

Now he was fully awake, and fully pissed off, the pervasive sense of doom gone like a cheap beer, and Logan knew he had to get out of here. His skin itched with dried blood, both his and the Vilkacis, but he knew Ruby would quite possibly disembowel him with a fork if he used her shower. And, on top of that, his clothes were a bloodied, tattered mess; somehow, he bet Ruby had nothing in his size. Then there was Srina, who hadn’t heard from him since he’d gone out last night.  Damn.  He had to go home and take his ass-kicking like a man. And then, hopefully, get that shower.

He decided to leave Ruby a note, as that was the polite thing to do. So he wrote something short and to the point on the back of a piece of junk mail, leaving it on the table with the “protective circle” on it, so she couldn’t miss it. ‘Ruby - I know about the fucking couch, all right? I’ll buy you a new one as long as the world doesn’t end or get sucked into another dimension, or whatever the hell.  Amulet is on the kitchen table. - Logan.  P.S.: You’re welcome.’

He knew very well she could decide to kill him, but hell, she’d probably decide that on the basis of the couch alone. He didn’t have much to lose by being a dick.

By the time he'd left her cottage, the sky was a pale blue, and while the sun wasn't quite up yet, all the lingering traces of night had fled, leaving nothing but a chill behind.  He then realized he should have called a cab, as he had a bloody long walk ahead of him, but then he knew that this was better.  He needed to get out some energy, and walking a couple of miles would burn it off nicely. Wait, walk?  Fuck that.  He broke into a run - not a jog, not like those Yuppies who clogged the bike paths in their fifty dollar running gear. Oh no, a full on “Jason’s after me with a chainsaw” run.  He was angry, he could feel it like shrapnel lodged in his chest, and if he didn’t get some of it out somehow, he didn’t know what was going to happen, but it wouldn’t be good.  So he decided to see how fast he could run, how long he could tear through the London countryside before he absolutely had to stop and let his healing factor have a  longer go at him.

It felt good for the first mile or so; it felt like he could outrun all this shit, everything he didn’t want to think about. He didn’t think at all, just tried to go Zen, concentrate on his breathing, the beating of his heart and the sound of his feet hitting the ground. Hardly being aware of it, he changed his gait so his footfalls were instantly quieter, and once again he wondered how he knew to do that, where he'd learned that.  His lungs began to burn from lack of adequate oxygen and the back of his legs began to burn from the strain, but he could take it; the burn was almost the same as the healing factor that kicked in to fix the problem.  He was good, he was fine.

No, no he wasn’t.

He reached a small town, or what passed for one in this pathetic little burgh where Ruby lived, and paused against a street light to catch his breath, to let the flush of his healing abilities wash over him, and he felt a sudden clot in his throat that was hard to swallow down.  He closed his eyes against sudden tears, wishing he had something to punch.  He hated this.  He didn’t want this responsibility; any of it.  He couldn’t even take care of himself, or at least not well. He didn’t want to be responsible for anyone else’s well being, be it kids or the entire fucking world.  He wanted to get swallowed up by a huge black hole, where he could live in complete peace, where no one could ever find him.

He was a complete fucking coward.  Did anyone know that?  Had they figured it out yet?  Hell, how many times had he lost his mind?  How many times could it break and be fully reconstructed?  Could it break, even once?  He didn’t know, and he didn’t really want to know anymore.  It would probably be better for everyone if he completely dropped out; it would undoubtedly be safer. Who did he think he was kidding, pretending he could have a “normal” life?  He was an unstable “weapon“, one that could go off at any time, and if Xavier didn’t feel so fucking sorry for him - or so in need of a “weapon” of his own - he would have taken Scott’s advice and never allowed him within three hundred feet of the school again.

That was a good thing about a hard run that he realized only in retrospect: hard gasps sounded like sobs.

He was pulling himself together, tamping down his self-loathing so Srina wouldn’t pick up on it, when he heard the thrum of a familiar motor coming up the street.  He wiped the sweat from his face with his forearm as a candy-apple red Jaguar pulled up to the curb, and the passenger door popped open. “There you are,” Meldane’s voice drifted out. “Get in. We’re on.”

Logan glanced in, wondering if the guy knew how much he was pushing his luck right now.  He was actually younger than he'd expected, maybe early thirties, with shoulder-length brown hair and a square jaw, his Roman nose and sunken brown eyes not making him classically handsome, but there was little disputing there was something visually striking about him.  He kind of looked like that guy from La Femme Nikita. “We, kemosabe?  On what, exactly?”

“There’s trouble, it’s a little too sunny for the others, and I need some muscle.” Meldane squinted at him, and noted, “Your eyes look good.  How’d you do that?”

“I was born this way.” He hated the presumption that he’d just jump in the passenger seat because he said so, but then again, the idea of going to work as “muscle” was tempting.  The run hadn’t been quite enough. He needed action and exertion; he needed not to have to think.  Thinking, for him, never ended well. “What’s the problem?”

“I’ll fill you in on the way. We really need to get going.”

Logan made a show of thinking about it, then sighed and rolled his eyes, getting into his car. He almost felt like a male prostitute, and the idea of demanding cash up front came and went quickly, as he was pretty sure Meldane wouldn’t get the joke.

As soon as he slammed the door shut, Meldane did an illegal U-turn and headed back down the way he had come. “So how bad is this?” He wondered, actually afraid of the answer.

Meldane shrugged a single shoulder, eyes focused tightly on the road ahead. “On a scale of one to four? Defcon three.”

“So, could be worse?”

“Oh sure. Everything can be worse.”

Great. He just got in a car with a French pessimist.

Come to think of it, this was probably the most normal thing he’d done in a long time.

5

Since he couldn’t ignore the incoming comm signal forever, Scott simply disconnected a circuit, killing the entire thing. If the Professor really wanted to get in touch with him, he could use his telepathy, but he knew the distance would make it increasingly less worthwhile.  He was pretty sure he’d just entered California airspace.

Sneaking out a jet was near impossible, although not totally without precedent.  He just needed to make sure Xavier wasn’t around when he did it, and since he'd had things to attend to in town, Scott just waited until he and Piotr left before returning to get it.  He didn’t care if the kids reported it, as Xavier would just be able to look at the hangar and see that a plane was missing; it wouldn’t matter once he was away.

Of course, taking the jet was the easy part. The hard part was going to be finding a place to land it in Los Angeles, although there was probably an angle there he could work, considering how well he could lie. He could just say it was an experimental aircraft for a film, and bluff his way into getting a small, private airport to let him use a hangar.  How long he could keep that bluff going he had no idea, but he was hoping he wouldn’t have to do it for long.  Maybe he couldn’t find it in a phone book, but he could find the Way Station in person, and then see if the thing Forajo had pawned off on him really worked as advertised. For the money he'd paid, it damn well better.

He started shedding speed and dropping altitude, and as he broke through what could only be a very high layer of smog, he could see Los Angeles just below him on the horizon. It was night, and so the city wasn’t so much lit up as burning with lights, a truly gaudy sight that must have been visible from space. Arteries of lights led to and trained off from a central nexus of illumination, a tentacled mass of light that threatened to hurt his eyes through his visor.

Maybe it was the fact that he was at a slower speed, or lower altitude, but he could hear his cell phone in his coat pocket start to ring. Luckily, he had shed his coat and tossed it in the back cabin, so he felt no compelling need to answer it, and the incessant ringing didn’t bother him.  He figured it was Xavier, still trying to talk to him, or the telemarketers were just a more adaptable and vicious breed in this part of California.

He put the jet on auto-pilot for now, as he wouldn’t be on an approach vector until he settled on which small airstrip would be most convenient and best suit his purposes, and called up the nearby airports on the computer screen off to his left. There were more than he expected, but it was L.A., and it seemed to have a little too much of everything.  Including gods and demons.

For a moment, he wondered if he really knew what he was doing. Could he trust dreams?  Did he dare?  If someone with the power to project thoughts into his head knew about his relationship with Jean, and the horribly complex mess with Bob and Camaxtli, they could be constructing all those dreams. But there were a lot of ‘if”s in that scenario, the least of which was a psychic projector who managed to work around Xavier without him noticing, but that was so unlikely it was virtually impossible.  Besides, if Jean really was in danger and he did nothing to help her, he couldn’t live with himself.

A confrontation between him and Bob had been a long time coming.  At least now maybe he could meet him on an even footing, or die trying.

****

Noticing that Meldane was giving him a funny look out of the corner of his eye, Logan asked, “What?”

“You didn’t clean up from last night, did you?  You still smell like Vilkacis.”

“I haven’t had a chance, have I?” He really didn’t like the accusing tone in his voice, which always sounded a bit worse with a French accent. “What the hell kind of name is Meldane, anyway?”

From the way he shifted in the driver’s seat, he hadn’t liked his tone any better. “A stage name, short and catchy.”

“Ain’t that catchy.”

He scowled, but Logan wasn’t sure if it was for the traffic or him.  Probably fifty-fifty. “It’s better than Mordred.”

He scoffed. “Mordred? What, is that your real name?” Meldane’s scowl deepened, and he didn’t dare look at him, which was pretty much an affirmative. “Holy shit.  How much did your mother hate you?”

“Look, I don’t make fun of your name, do I?  Just drop it.”

Logan smirked, aware that even “Wolverine” was better than Mordred. That sounded like the name of a villain from a bad Disney film, even though he knew the truth was even worse: the incestuous, evil bastard child of King Arthur, right?  No wonder he'd taken up with magic; it was probably the only way to keep from getting the shit beaten out of him every day in school. “Your mother wasn’t named Morgan le Fay, was she?”

As they cut down a side road, Meldane had to slow the car to a crawl to avoid hitting people who ran towards and past them, with only the newly frightened bothering to scream. ”I thought you said this was a Defcon three,” Logan snapped, opening his car door as soon as the crush of people would allow. Meldane had no choice but to park there anyway, as there was no way they were going to get any further without plowing people down like tenpins.

“On my scale, Defcon four is the actual end of the world.”

“Oh, great.” As soon as he was out of the car, he grabbed a random person, and asked, “What’s going on?”

The person - a young woman who was either trying to look like a pop star or a hooker - stared at him with wide, pale eyes, and said, “There’s a monster tearin’ up the street!  I think it’s eatin’ people!” She pulled out of his grasp and ran for it, and he turned to stare at Meldane over the hood of the car.

“You couldn’t mention a people-eating monster?”

But Meldane just turned away nonchalantly and waved his hand, making the people mysteriously part and make a path for him.  Logan still had to struggle against the crowd, but luckily he was pretty good at that.

As soon as he joined Meldane just outside the mouth of the side street, away from the rest of the fleeing crowd, the magician asked, “Ever heard of a Golgoth demon?”

“No. Why?”

“Now you have.”

He gestured down the street, toward what sounded like the rending of metal and shattering of glass, and Logan was looking at the biggest demon he had ever seen, outside of that big-ass snake thing that had tried to eat him near Angel’s old hotel.

It was maybe twelve feet tall and ten feet from tusk to tail, looking for all the world like an unfortunate mating between a warthog and Godzilla. It seemed to walk on all fours, but only the back legs had hooves; the front legs ended in scaled, thick hands, that he watched tear the roof off a building like it was made of Popsicle sticks.  It shoved a handful of roofing material in its wide, tusked mouth, and chewed it like cud. Its hide was black, and shimmered slightly in the rising dawn, made of scales so fine it could have been chainmail. Behind it, Logan could see holes in the street that its hooves had made, making him wonder how fucking heavy it actually was.

“Uh, what’s the game here?” He asked, as it snuffled parked cars, looking for all the world as if it was grazing. “How do you kill these things?”

“I don’t want you to kill it,” Meldane informed quietly. “I need a chunk of its flesh and blood.”

He glared at him anew. “Say that again?”

“Golgoths are helpers; familiars to very powerful spell casters.  If I can bind it to me, I can make it tell me who brought it forth - the person who must be behind all of this mess - and then we can make it lead us to him. The solution to our problems are right here, but only if I can get its blood.  Nothing less than blood magic will work here.”

“You couldn’t get a sword and hack some off yourself?”

Meldane gave him a smug smirk, like he was a complete idiot who just asked how people didn’t float off the face of the Earth. “Their skin is made of an iron composite; it’s almost impossible to cut.  But Hashim said something about you have a special metal in your body?”

Oh, goddamn it. Even from beyond the grave, Stryker was still making his life a very special living hell.  He shook his head and looked at the Golgoth, who was peacefully biting the roof off an SUV, its drool so hot it actually fell to the asphalt steaming. “I’m never forgiving any of you for this,” he snarled, stalking toward the beast and popping his claws.