Broom’s puzzled irritation turned to amusement. “Oh really? As bluff’s go, this is quite lame.”

Angel went flying past, as Faith continued to use him like a volleyball, and Broom ducked slightly, even though his protective field was still in place. “Please, Angel, don’t play with your food,” he said with a weary sigh. “I mean really.”

That’s when they all heard the weirdest thing - singing.

Broom looked surprised, and turned towards the noise, which seemed to be coming from … Logan?

His arms moved, and he sat up, singing, “And I’ve been putting out fire with gasoline.” Except there were several things wrong with him. Having a good singing voice was one thing, although it was quite possible he’d always had one - had anyone ever heard him sing? But the Australian accent was new. As was the blue in his eyes. The pupils weren’t blue; his eyes were completely, bleeding neon into the air, veins in his face pulsing with electric blue energy. They were snaking up from his neck, veins like indigo cords branching out from his gaping throat slashes, which had mostly healed over, except there was an outline of the wound glowing a radiant blue.

“Get him baby,” Helga muttered, almost laughing.

So that was it. It wasn’t that Logan and Helga had a trap, it was Logan that had the trap inside him.

The trap was Bob, and he’d been sprung.

Faith and Angel had stopped fighting, both shocked, but Angel looked positively gobsmacked as the mistake he had made had finally dawned on him. Logan was the avatar, and Bob wasn’t back yet. “Oh shit,” he gasped, ignoring the fact that Faith had him by the throat and had her fist pulled back. Faith seemed to be ignoring that too.

Broom simply looked stunned. He obviously didn’t know about the Logan/Bob connection, and it was more than likely he didn’t know anything about Bob at all. If he did, he would have teleported himself the hell out of here - he was an excellent sorcerer, perhaps one of the most powerful Giles had personally ever encountered. But now he was facing a god, and he didn’t have a prayer. (No pun intended.)

Broom raised his hand, apparently throwing out a spell of force, but Bob/Logan simply waved his hand dismissively, and whatever the spell had been, it was harmlessly repelled. Logan started walking towards him, and Broom instinctively started backing up. “What the hell are you?” he asked, mostly intrigued but somewhat irritated.

But Bob didn’t answer. He was stalking towards him, head down as he smoothly rolled his shoulders and moved in a strangely panther like way, purely Logan, but the blue energy of Bob was bleeding from his eyes and leaking from what little was left of his grave throat wound. There was no doubt who was in charge, but Bob must have adapted to using Logan’s body in ways that couldn’t be imagined. Bob stopped as a Qutrub crunched and clicked under his foot, and he looked around the bank, seeing them all for the first time.

“You’re dead,” he said almost casually, kicking the Qutrub closest to him across the room.

It wasn’t just that one that curled up like massive potato bugs, carapaces cracking like thin ice; it was all of them, some falling off the ceiling and walls where they had climbed for a safer vantage point. There was no sense of a moving wave, or a sudden but modulated shift - they all simply curled up and died in the same exact moment. Bob looked back at Broom, who had paled considerably, his smugness giving way to confusion and fear. He must have known now he was so far out of his depth he was drowning. “You never should have messed with a chosen of the Powers, mate. There ain’t a word for how big a fuck up that is.”

Giles wasn’t sure if he was referring to Angel or Logan - or both.

Bob then shook his head, slowly but menacingly. “No, don’t even consider it, Milos. It won’t work.”

His eyes widened, shocked that Bob had apparently read his mind as well as called him by his real name. “You - you -” he paused, looking around desperately for escape. But Angel made no move to escape from Faith or go protect his master now. He may have forgotten that Logan was Bob’s avatar and Bob wasn’t back in the flesh yet, but he knew there was nothing he could do, even in his superior vampire form, to hurt Bob.

Broom - Milos - exhaled as if he’d been punched, the hopelessness of the situation sinking in. “The fallen angel,” he muttered under his breath. “He burns.”

Although that struck Giles as a rather odd thing non-sequitur, Bob scoffed. “How could you have been so fucking daft? Dru was trying to warn you. She has psychic flashes, remember? She may be as mad as a croc in a well, but she ain’t dumb. Why do you think she’s avoiding Los Angeles? Angel?” Bob’s disdainful snicker said it all.

Milos sucked in a hard breath and raised his hand sharply, clearly about to throw a spell towards them, not Bob, but as fast as he was, he wasn’t fast enough. Bob said in his odd voice (Logan’s voice, but with his thick Australian accent and even thicker, slightly inhuman timbre), “Your powers have abandoned you, Milos. The magic has fled. It doesn’t protect you anymore.”

Milos completed the spell, but nothing happened, and his eyes were suddenly gray-blue, oddly Human. But the most startling change was in his face - he aged forty years in the blink of an eye. His hair drained of almost all color, shifting from dun brown to gunmetal gray, while his taut skin dried and became creased, wrinkles forming in the wells of his cheeks and lines pinching his eyes, while sudden arthritis twisted his fingers and gnarled his joints. “No!” he screamed in horror, watching the flesh of his hands become as thin as onion skin. The thing about black magic, about using it as powerfully and skillfully as Milos had, was it drained the user of energy so much faster than any other kind of magic. It was extremely powerful, but as such it needed extra energy, and the energy always came from the user. He must have found some mystical way to diffuse the impact, but now Bob had ripped it away from him, and the magic was taking its price.

His eyes seemed to glow with the panic of a trapped rat. He stared at Bob wild eyed, on the verge of madness as his body decayed all around him, and shouted, “You don’t know who I am! I will be the king! You can’t do this to me!”

Bob paused, but Giles saw the muscles in Logan’s arms twitch, gathering for movement, but it wasn’t physical. “I’m Bob,” he told him, the nonchalance cut with a slight undertone of brutal coldness. “I can do whatever the fuck I want.” Bob raised his hand, and Milos went flying out the doors with such force that both of them ripped off their hinges and went with him, the glass not shattering but vaporizing into a fine dust on impact as Milos went flailing out into the night. Bob then rather sarcastically waived him goodbye.

He then sighed, and turned towards them. “Yer all good, yeah?” It sounded like a question, but considering how good he suddenly felt, Giles realized it was just an unspecified “push“.

Helga jumped up to her feet and grabbed him in a gesture that was half-hug and half-tackle. “Don’t think this makes up for not being back yet,” she scolded, then gave him a passionate kiss.

After several seconds, Faith cleared her throat. Helga didn’t look at her, just waived in a way that meant “just a second”, and after several more, finally broke away. Bob - who had reverted to Logan’s regular eyes, more or less (they looked Human, but the pupils were a serious neon cobalt) - took a step back, and said, “If you punch me, you’re actually punchin’ him.”

“I’ll save it for you,” she said, but it sounded like a threat.

“Angel?” Faith asked.

Bob glanced at her just as Angel broke free from Faith’s grip and bolted for the hole in the wall where the doors used to be. “Freeze,” Bob commanded, and Angel did, having only traveled about a meter towards the gap. “Goodnight.” Angel seemed to sway before he collapsed, but he hit the floor rather inelegantly, sprawling over dead Qutrubs and the once more dead bodies of their Human hosts.

“You couldn’t just shift him back?” Faith wondered suspiciously.

“I can, but I have other stuff to take care of first.” He pointed towards the hole in the wall, and there were grunts and thuds somewhere out in the night, along with the sound of crackling radio static.

The Sisters had come to join him, no longer trapped since the sorcerer who had made the circle was no more, and said, “We -”

“- can -”

“- help.”

“Thank you ladies, but I got this one covered,” Bob told them, already heading outside.

“How’d you know that would happen?” Mordred asked Helga suspiciously.

She stared at him like he was an idiot. “He’s Bob’s avatar on Earth while he’s in Powers That Be limbo. Bob wasn’t gonna let him die.”

“Oh shit, Logan knew that too,” Faith said with a sigh, running a hand through her hair. “I mean, from what happened when …” she gestured vaguely and trailed off. Giles wondered if they were ever going to hear the rest of that story. “Did he - does that mean he was tryin’ to get Angel or Broom to kill him?”

Helga brushed her hands off on the thighs of her jeans, and gave Faith a strangely weary, maternal look. “Oh honey, this is Logan we’re talking about. Of course he did.”

****

Xander tried to struggle, tried to squirm out of the soldier’s grip, but it was impossible. The Jonathan like soldier on the ground next to him had no luck either. He had time to wonder if this was going to hurt - and how could it not? - and also wonder if there’d be anyone who could save him once he was infested, when a couple things happened simultaneously.

The street lights suddenly came on en masse, temporarily blinding everyone, and the radios of the soldiers all came to life with loud bursts of static. It was briefly disorienting, and seemed to buy them a second, as Xander realized that whatever spell had been suppressing the electricity (in anticipation of Naomi?) had been broken. Several seconds later, there was a strange noise, loud and dull, a solid thud, and then there was a much louder crash as something came down hard on the hood of Wolfram and Hart’s assault vehicle, breaking the windshield with an explosive noise of denting metal and breaking glass. “Holy shit!” someone exclaimed.

The Qutrubs advancing towards them hesitated, and even the possessed soldiers looked towards the bank nervously. What the hell was going on in there?

He heard a vaguely familiar voice say, “You’re gone,” and suddenly the Qutrubs curled up and died like he’d hoped they would. But the possessed soldier seemed to die too and fell right on top of him, a heavy dead weight. He made a noise of disgust and kicked him off, scrambling back to his feet in case the Qutrubs weren’t really all dead.

But it seems they were, and the soldiers looked as puzzled about it as he felt. Someone walked out of the darkness, and the soldiers dropped their knives and swung up their guns - this thing was a biped - but he casually said, “Your guns are snakes.”

Some men yelped in shock while others actually did scream in terror as … their guns remained guns, but they dropped them and scrambled up on top of parked cars or back into the truck like they really did think they were reptiles, and that included the Jonathan like one, who shrieked and ran like a kindergartener. Xander clicked his tongue and shook his head. “What the hell’s your problem?”

“They saw their guns become snakes,” the guy said, and now Xander could see him. It was Logan … but it wasn’t. His eyes were doing the blue glowy thing that Bob’s eyes were doing the first time he’d met him. Also, Logan had never had an accent before, save for an extremely vague Canadian one.

“I didn’t see that.”

“You weren’t holding a gun.”

Oh, okay. That made sense … kinda. “So, uh, are you Bob? What happened to Logan?”

“He’s taking a time out. He thought it was best I handle this.”

“Ah. Umm, what?”

“Evil sorcerer, blah blah blah.”

“Oh man, that again? Why don’t those guys get a hobby or something? I mean, beyond ending the world or whatever the fuck their deal is. We all got picked on in high school; they need to take some Prozac and move on.”

Logan/Bob seemed to be looking around, and finally looked back at him. “You came alone?”

“Yeah. Stakeouts usually aren’t done in groups.”

He smirked and shook his head. “Are you really brave or intensely stupid?”

Xander shrugged. “You don’t wanna know how many times I’ve been asked that question. I’ve decided that stupid is really the only honest answer.”

“Hey, it could be worse.”

“Oh yeah? Like what? I’d live in an overpriced loft with a semi-feral cat and a sinkful of dirty dishes? Oh, wait , I do.” He rolled his eyes at himself and sighed, going back to retrieve his nail gun.

He didn’t hear him, he simply grabbed the nail gun and straightened up, and suddenly Logan/Bob was there, looking at him with those eerie glowing eyes. He couldn’t help but step back, but he managed to swallow the startled shriek. “Uh, can I help you?”

“No, but I think I can help you.” He reached out and touched the side of his face, and Xander tried to jump back, but found himself oddly rooted to the spot. He tried to speak, but his vocal cords were just a frozen as everything else. The side of his face felt uncomfortably warm, and then he withdrew his hand, leaving him feeling suddenly off balance. “Try not to lose it this time, okay?” Bob/Logan said, turning and walking back towards the bank.

“What? What the fuck did you do to me?” he asked, wondering why he was dizzy and the world looked funny. It seemed to be the same, but something wasn’t right. It was -

Oh shit no.

He touched his face tentatively, in case he was hallucinating or only believing something that Bob wanted him to believe, but he could feel it, the movement beneath the eyelid, the warmth along with the solidity. And when he half closed the lid, the world winked out on one side. No, it wasn’t possible … was it? It must have been; he was a god, right? They could do these sorts of things.

The world felt funny beneath his feet, but he managed to reach his car, where he crumpled, crouching down to hide the fact that he had just burst into tears. He wasn’t even sure why he was crying, but he still couldn’t stop.

His eye was back. Bob had given him back his missing eye.

17

They went back to the office, because that seemed to be for the best, although Bob barely asked them before teleporting them all en masse.

As soon as they were back, Angel laying on the carpet (still out cold), Mordred exclaimed, “What the bloody fuck was that all about?”

Bob was still inhabiting Logan, but now that he wasn’t in fight mode, it was obvious it was Bob in Logan’s skin. He walked differently for one - even when he wasn’t in stalking mode, Logan had the loose but ready gait of a boxer - and his expression was oddly cheerful, almost always on the verge of a smile, a state also reflected in his voice. It was jarring, but Giles wasn’t sure if it was jarring because it was clearly Bob, or because it suddenly became obvious that Logan almost never smiled and rarely broke out of his personal cloud of gloom. Bob sat on the edge of Brendan’s desk and said, with mock good cheer, “Oh boy, the exposition part! I love these.”

Sarcasm aside, he did get quickly get to the point. Miles Broom was actually a man named Milos Eldritch, a sorcerer who was about a hundred and fifty years old, and had cheated both magic and time as long as he possibly could. He happened upon a plan that he thought would allow him to cheat death and become the most powerful black magician ever to exist: become a vampire. But an ordinary bloodsucker wasn’t for him, so he found a way that would allow him to bring back the Master’s bloodline, and the special something that allowed him to become the “ultimate” vampire. The problem was, he could only do it though Angel, and the intent was Angel would turn him, but in doing so, Milos would become the new Master. “That doesn’t make sense,” Mordred pointed out. “As plans go, that really sucks. ‘Cause wouldn’t Angel be the new Master?”

“Oh well, he was planning on killing Angel as soon as he was done with him. Black magician and all - he was gonna put a fatal whammy on his ass. Then he’d be the only hot shot with the uber-powers.”

“So what exactly did he do to Angel?” Faith asked, nervously running a hand through her hair. If he was reading her correctly, Bob being in Logan was unsettling to her. He could sympathize.

“Call it a very specific genetic variation amongst vampires. The Order of Aurelius was special, they were fiercer and meaner than your typical vamps, and it was literally in the blood; training had little to do with it. But the variation became diluted the more vamps were made, the more the blood was mixed, and it eventually died off. It exists in Angel, but was more or less dormant, until Milos found the right spell to not just activate it but enhance it, and it overwhelmed Angel easily. There are just some biological imperatives you can’t ignore.”

“But you can change him back, right?” Faith asked.

Bob looked down at Angel with a curious expression, one that was hard to read. But Giles wasn’t sure he trusted it. “With the magician behind it dead, it should be very easy.” He suddenly cocked his head to the side, as if listening to something in another room.

“Is something wrong?” Giles wondered.

“He’s -”

“- talking -”

“- to Logan,” the Sisters volunteered.

Giles would have asked how they knew that, but he was almost afraid to know.

Faith shifted uncomfortably. “He’s here? I mean … well shit, what do I mean?”

“He’s conscious,” Bob said. “He just gave me control, that’s all.”

Faith stared at him. Well, at them. Damn this was confusing. “So it was on purpose?”

Bob shrugged with his hands, letting them fall back to his legs. “He’s sorry, but he felt he had no other choice but to tag me in.”

Mordred made a noise that was almost a scoff. He pulled a lighter and a Galois out of his pocket, and Giles leaned over and ripped it out from his fingers before he had a chance to light it. He’d already told him there was no smoking in this office. That and he hated the smell of these damn things - he might as well just toke on dirty socks. Mordred flashed him a brief, evil scowl, but then turned his attention back to Bob. “Yes, but getting your throat slashed seemed a bit over-dramatic.”

Bob gave him a lopsided grin that was truly weird to see on Logan’s face. “D’ya really want to know his reply to that?”

The office door swung open, and a rather harried looking Bren and Naomi stared at them, glancing at them all in turn. “What the hell’s been going on?” Bren asked, almost shouting in his frustration.

At least Bob would get more of a chance to work out his expositional skills.

*****

There were no words for how weird this was.

It wasn’t like he was a passenger in his own head, although he was. Bob had tarted things up a bit, with his usual sense of humor, meaning of course he was lucky he wasn’t there. Logan had regained consciousness in the seat of an old fashioned movie theater, the upholstery a burgundy colored velvet as soft as fur. He was pretty sure that no theater like this had ever existed in life, or if it had, it must have been some time ago. He’d never seen a theater with seats this big or plush, aisles so wide, and the screen was almost drive in movie high and wide, although there was a cathedral ceiling far above with stained glass inserts glowing with a life of their own. He assumed the stained glass would have some kind of joke in them, Bob in full asshole mode, but as far as he could see, the stained glass only depicted still lifes: bowls of fruit, a pitcher and a basin. If there was a joke there, Logan wasn’t sure he got it.

On the screen was what Bob was currently seeing through his eyes. He came around while they were still at the bank, but he’d missed Broom’s death, which he was deeply sad about, and he was too logy to do much but watch as Bob killed the rest of the Qutrubs by suggestion alone, and gave Xander back his eye. The poor guy looked so stunned he thought he might faint, but then again, how did you handle a lost appendage suddenly showing up again? Logan felt that of all people he should know, but it wasn’t something he wanted to think about.

Faith wasn’t handling this bit well, was she? He knew from before that the idea that he was temporarily sharing his body with an energy being freaked her out a little. Now that was back, full force, and it probably hadn’t helped that he let Angel seemingly kill him to get Bob’s attention. The whole thing about getting Bob’s attention was his fault anyways - if he had accepted his power, he would have been able to use it. Or at least Bob would be that much closer to the surface, he’d be hanging around at least enough that Logan could have “Hey, kick his ass” without much bother. But no, he was a coward and he couldn’t deal with it, so he was out of options.

“You are not a coward,” Bob said, suddenly sitting in the seat beside him, munching popcorn from a big red and white paper bag. “Let’s not start that nonsense again.” He held the bag out towards him. “Popcorn?”

Logan frowned at him, and wanted to ask how he could be here and talking to the others at the same time, but Bob - of course - anticipated the question. “Multi-tasking, mate. I’m no more really here than you are.”

“You enjoy being freaky, don’t you?”

“No more than you.”

He reached over and grabbed a handful of popcorn as Bob studied Angel. “Give him the choice,” Logan told him.

Bob looked over at him curiously. “What do you mean?”

“Take out the overwhelming bits, the stuff that gave him a dickhead personality, but leave the rest, and ask him if he wants to keep it once he’s in his right mind again. If it’s really his by right, he should have the ability to keep it if he wants.”

“Hmm. But, y’know, he really doesn’t need it. He’s older than most vampires, and Angelus was a bad motherfucker. Most of the vamps out there don’t stand a chance against him, even in a group.”

“It’s not vampires I’m thinking of.”

“Oh, I see. Other demon types.”

“And Wolfram and Hart. Just think how surprised they’ll be when Angel turns out to be better than they thought.”

“You just want to fuck with their heads.”

“You don’t?”

Bob conceded that with a shrug. “Okay, yeah. Love to do that. You did a good job with that by the way. It’s funny how they still threaten you with guns when they gotta know that’s a stop-gap solution at best.”

“Explosive rounds will keep me down for a while, especially a lot of ‘em.”

“Not with me around.”

Brendan and Naomi came in, joining the fun, and that reminded Logan of something. (And this popcorn was oddly good, but then again, it was Bob’s creation, so it would be.) “Bren’s got something’ goin’ on with him.”

“What?”

“I dunno. I was gonna loosen his tongue with beer, but I bet you could save me the bother.”

“What am I, your dancing monkey?” he protested, and suddenly he had a big drink cup in his hand, one with a picture of Bob’s smiling face on the side, with the legend “Dance Monkey” on it in big yellow letters. Good lord, he was so trippy sometimes, who needed LSD? After taking a sip of his drink (did it smell like beer? Yes, it did), he said, “He’s dating a vampire.”

“What the fuck..? I thought he hated vampires!”

“He does, but this one’s cute - he’s Kier, the guy he met at Syn - and he got the sense that he was working for someone, trying to infiltrate the group to get an inside shot at Angel. So he was working on the theory of keeping your enemies closer.”

He groaned in disappointment. “No wonder he reacted so funny when I told him it was stupid to sleep with the enemy.”

“Yeah, he’s beginning to think he fucked up royal.”

Logan sighed, grabbing Bob’s beer and having a sip himself. Yes, it was beer, a dark, bitter kind that had a major kick to it. “I guess I’ll go talk to Kier, see what he’s actually up to.”

“Oh, let’s do it together,” Bob said, snatching his cup of beer back. While the cup still had his picture on it, the legend beneath his smiling face now read ‘For all your eavesdropping needs’. “I can get him to spill his guts without all the mishegosh and drama. Then we can decide what we’re gonna do with him. Speaking of which - the Matador.”

He looked at him sharply, totally ignoring the screen. “No. Don’t even -”

“Mate, it’s a two way street. You share my memories, and I share yours. I already know what this is about. We all fuck up - ask Angel about that. I forgive you, if that means anything.”

He punched him square in the face. Since this was a mindscape it wouldn’t hurt him, and he probably let him do it, which just made him resent him more. Bob just looked at him, totally uninjured and unfazed. (But on the cup, his picture now sported a black eye. What the fuck was it? “The Drink Cup of Dorian Grey”?) “Feel better?” Bob wondered.

“No. Can I do it twenty more times?”

Bob wagged a finger at him. “Now now, we have stuff to do. The fun can come later.”

“I don’t need your fucking forgiveness. It doesn’t change a fucking thing.”

“No. But I’m trying to encourage you to forgive yourself.”

He slumped back into his seat, staring up at the screen and scowling at it in the imperfect dark. It was a probably a good thing that Bob was technically - save for a couple of instances - beyond killing, because he was really tempted to just go all out on his ass, turn him into ground chuck and a collection of bloody stumps. “It ain’t gonna happen. I got too much blood on my hands, I’ve done too much …” he petered off, figuring that if Bob did have his memories, he already knew.

“You realize you’re talking to a Power, right? You’re gonna have to work for a few centuries to get even close to the blood we got on our hands. That’s the thing about being a god: no one can out kill you.”

“And that’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No; it’s just a statement of fact. I just think it’s interesting how you’ve made yourself the self-appointed magnet of bad karma for the people around you.”

He didn’t know what he meant at first, but then he did. He meant how he decided if there was any killing that needed to be done by the X-Men or by kids like Bren, he’d do it before anyone else had to. “Killing changes you - okay, maybe not gods, but us regular people. You think it doesn’t or it won’t, but it does. And I’m already so warped, one more life on my conscience isn’t gonna make a damn bit of difference.”

Bob made a strange noise - a combination between a hum and a grunt - and put his feet up on the back of the chair in front of him. “Interesting. That’s what I like so much about you, Logan - you’re such an unpredictable guy. You think you’re irredeemable, and yet you keep striving to do the right thing anyways. Shouldn’t you be, by logic, a bad guy?”

He shrugged, and shot back, “Shouldn’t you?”

Bob looked at him with a brilliant, big smile, showing off his sparkling white teeth. “Who said I wasn’t?”

The worst part was, he wasn’t a hundred percent sure he was joking.