Logan was surprised that they didn’t have to drive up there; Truman arranged a private plane. It just made him more suspicious, even though the plane itself was an older model and not in that good of shape. But he suspected Truman could afford better, he just kept it for himself, for his own personal use. They were just peons, thugs, and they couldn’t expect any better.

He mostly slept, or at least tried to sleep, so he didn’t have to talk to Curly. He was one of those thick necked mouth breathers who only watched hockey games for the fights, and whose idea of culture was lite beer and cheese that didn’t come from a spray can. He also had a tendency to smell of body odor and stale beer and cigarettes, no matter how much deodorant he doused himself with. He also smelled vaguely of gun oil, although Logan didn’t want to imagine where he was hiding the damned thing.

After arriving, another goon - unnamed, although Curly called him Chuck - drove them out to the loading dock where they’d be supervising the “delivery” until it could get loaded up and taken out. To where Logan didn’t know, and he didn’t ask. He didn’t think he’d get an answer anyways; Curly was wholly untroubled by conscience or thought.

It was Alaska, and even though it was technically spring, it was fucking cold. Not Yukon “balls shrivel up to little raisins” cold, but “nipples constantly so hard it’s painful” cold, which was bad enough. He was relatively warm in his flannel shirt and fleece lined bomber jacket, but every time the wind came up he could feel the cold bite into his skin, the chill like infinitesimal razor blades. The sun was fighting with a growing cloud cover, so it would randomly appear, beams of light stabbing down from above until you could feel yourself thawing, and then it would disappear, be swallowed by fleecy grey clouds, and the cold would sink its claws into you with what seemed to be an excess vengeance. It smelled like rain, but in a while; for now, it was just coming in.

The whole drive there was in the kind of silence of men who didn’t need to talk to each other, mainly because they didn’t care what anyone else had to say. He had time to wonder how he’d ever come to be associated with men like this, then remembered he was a criminal. So why didn’t he feel like he belonged here? Maybe he was just a snob.

It seemed about ten degrees colder at the docks, the wind off the water full of the promise of ice, and from what Logan could tell, the shipment was in a green metal cargo container, about the size of a small RV. The foreman of this particular operation was in Truman’s pocket, so his containers had a habit of dropping out or being “misplaced”, so in at least a very technical sense, they were never here.

The container was in one of the covered buildings that served as protection from the weather. They were the size of small warehouses, unheated, with only a few fluorescent lights providing light that was both dim and cold. You could see your breath pluming out as you exhaled, translucent fog, and he found himself watching the patterns it made as they walked through the room, swirling into vague and almost taunting shapes until being torn apart by a cross breeze.

This “warehouse” contained a couple of different shipping containers, as well as a couple of crates and some safety equipment, spare detritus of the dockside, including a massive coil of rope that looked like it could be used to lasso and restrain a whole herd of angry moose. The containers were set up so there was a twisting path to follow, and at the end of one turn was a small folding card table and a couple of folding chairs. Chuck left them as Curly broke out a pack of cards. “You play poker?” he asked.

He shrugged, looking around. “So what now?”

“We wait.”

“That’s it?”

It was Curly’s turn to shrug as he shuffled the cards. “It ain’t a hard job.”

Clearly not; none of the jobs Truman gave them could be considered hard. “We alone?” he asked as cover as he looked around, disappearing around a curve as he pretended to be edgy. He knew they were alone; he couldn’t smell or hear anyone else, but he wanted to give himself an excuse.

“Yep. ‘Sposed to be.”

He found the container that was Truman’s, green with the right matching numbers, and he approached it slowly, wondering if he’d be able to smell the contents. It looked air tight, and there was no telling how thick the metal was. He touched the cool metal, wondering what was underneath it (and if there was any way he could open it without Curly being the wiser), when he caught a faint scent that made him freeze.

“Logan?” Curly asked, sounding suspicious that he’d wandered off.

He didn’t understand it … or did he? Did it make sense? He wasn’t sure it did, but there was no way it could be anything else.

He smelled fear.

11

It was in a bleak industrial area just outside of Oakland, a former gravel pit turned scrubland, ringed by a chain link fence topped by razor wire, covered with signs in English and Spanish warning that trespassers would be prosecuted - although the Spanish ones added that they’d also be shot. Did that mean only people who spoke Spanish got shot, or were they the only ones given a warning? Either way, it didn’t seem fair.

Logan easily cut through the locks holding the gate shut, and he and Helga were well inside the perimeter, in view of the huge metal warehouse on the near end of the horizon, when someone finally showed up. It was a guy in a cowboy hat aiming a high powered rifle at them, shouting at them to stop. Hel, being Hel, threw her sledgehammer at him.

Maybe it wouldn’t have been so bad if she just lobbed it at him, but she hurled it with force - like it was the Olympic hammer toss - and the noise it made when it hit him square in the chest was sickening. He went down hard, his rifle flying out of his hands, and he made a horrible gurgling sound, legs kicking out, before he died. What a horrible way to die - sledgehammer in the chest. Goddamn. If he’d known she was going to do that, he’d have just stabbed him in the aorta; that was a really quick death.

When Hel retrieved her sledgehammer, she picked up his rifle too. After asking if he wanted it, she shouldered it and they continued on, Hel twirling her hammer like a baton. Finally a jeep full of guys came up, trying to cut them off from the warehouse, but Logan sprung his claws and leapt at them before the jeep had come to a full halt, as he figured Helga wasn’t going to wait. (He was right - out of the corner of his eye, he saw the sledgehammer zipping by before colliding with some poor son-of-a-bitch who caught it full on.)

They barely slowed them down, and only got off a couple of wild shots that never got anywhere near them. Logan sliced through the locks holding the doors shut and kicked them open, startling everyone inside. He started shouting in Spanish that they were free now but they had to leave this instant. Once the guards started attacking them, the screaming and the running started, and they began bolting for the door.

He wanted to get the guards who started shooting first, as a bad shot or ricochet could hurt Helga or some of the civilians, but by going after them, claws extended, he scared a hell of a lot more people.

Strike that - women. They were all women, ranging in age from perhaps sixty to as young as ten, in a stifling metal structure that had no (or precious little) air conditioning, and long tables where some seamstresses worked by hand, while older machines sat near the back, reeking of too much machine oil that kept their old parts just barely functioning. He would have been outraged if his anger wasn’t already pushed to its limits already. He jumped into the men, slashing guns and flesh alike, and didn’t stop until the scent of gunpowder stopped stinging his nose.

He and Hel had little trouble with the gunmen, and Hel quickly got to work on demolishing the place, smashing tables and starting to cave in non-supporting walls. When his temper subsided enough to allow him to speak without growling, he asked if anyone knew where Esmerelda Soto was. Okay, maybe he yelled it - it didn’t matter. He was a guy with his knives in his hands, now splattered with blood and tagged by a bullet or two. You didn’t need to be psychically gifted to guess they wouldn’t actually tell him, afraid he was going to hurt her.

He found the “manager” of the place cowering in the back, clutching a weapon he must not have been able to shoot since he hadn’t even taken the safety off. Logan just ripped the gun out of his hand since there was no way he could use it, and the guy, a stout, pudgy man who looked like a used car salesman, asked what he wanted. He started offering him money, so Logan slammed his claw through the wall beside his head, making him cringe so much it looked like he was trying to pull inside himself. He wanted to kill the exploitative bastard, but he wasn’t fighting back - he wasn’t even trying - and the smell of his fear was so pungent it was making his eyes water.

So he asked him if he was right or left handed. He had to shout the question at him again to get an answer, and when he finally sputtered “Right,” Logan retracted all but one claw and stabbed him through the deltoid nerve cluster of his left arm. He squeaked, too scared to actually scream, and he informed him he’d never be able to use that arm again. It was a reminder that he should stay the fuck out of the human slavery business, and if ever found out he was back in it, he wouldn’t get a warning; he wouldn’t see him, hear him, or sense him. He would simply come for him, and he would be dead. Logan told him this holding out the single bloody claw, and he couldn’t take his eyes off of it. He was pretty sure the guy would try and enter the witness protection program if he could; he’d probably drop off the face of the world and never be seen by anyone again, which suited Logan just fine.

He didn’t ask about The Matador, because he knew he wasn’t here. He didn’t get his hands dirty with either day to day stuff or enforcement of his guidelines - that’s what other people were for. And he knew, because he used to be one of them.

The thought made him angry enough that he started carving out sections of the wall with his bare claws.

****

The reek of fear was so strong it triggered an adrenaline surge in him, his body unconsciously responding to other people’s terror. He pressed his nose up to a seam and took a deep breath - yes, it was coming from inside the container. Not only that, but he was smelling despair and unwashed bodies, the body odor almost welcome next to the terrible scent of so much sorrow and so much terror.

He was parsing the scents as his heart pounded in his ears - women? They were all women; he wasn’t smelling any men, and there might be as many as a dozen different women in there - and he did the first thing it occurred to him to do, which was pop his claws and plunge them through the door, cutting through the locks and the welds that sealed the container. He heard what sounded like a shriek inside, so muffled as to be almost inaudible. He was so caught up in it he didn’t realize that Curly had snuck up on him until he felt the barrel of the gun against his head. “What the fuck d’ya think you’re do -” he paused, and Logan smelled a spike of fear from him as he realized that Logan wasn’t holding a knife, but had them inside his hand.

He meant to turn, popping his other claws to disarm Curly (in more ways than one), but Curly pulled the trigger before he could move, his hatred of mutants making him react instantaneously. He heard the explosive pop, felt the burn of the cordite on his skin as what felt like an anvil slammed into the back of his skull, and he blacked out. He came to on the cold concrete floor, head still burning with healing, and he figured he hadn’t been out long, maybe a minute tops. He had no idea what to base that on of course, except his head was still ringing, he was still healing, and Curly was making weak gurgling sounds on the floor behind him.

He looked at him for several seconds before he figured out exactly what he was looking at, his reeling mind trying to make sense of what seemed like senseless images. Blood was spewing from where about half his right hand used to be, and his face was a crimson and black mask, partially burned by gunpowder and partially cloaked by blood, shards of black metal embedded in his bleeding face and throat, one eye completely blasted to jelly. He was twitching slightly, air bubbles seemingly forming in the blood streaming from his throat, and he didn’t need to smell the death reek to know he was a goner.

What must have happened: Curly shot him point blank in the back of the head, a method cops generally dubbed “execution style”. The problem? It really was point blank, and when the bullet hit his metal skull - which obviously it did - it ricocheted. But with nowhere to go in such a confined area, it ricocheted right back into the gun, making it explode like a tiny fragmenting grenade. It must have been almost instantaneous; Curly probably had no idea what the fuck had just happened, and never would. But by deciding to kill him, he had killed himself.

Now that was instant karma.

It was still a heavy blow, though, and he was riding the waves of dizziness the best he could as he pulled himself back up to his feet, using the container to help him, and finished cutting out an opening in the container. By the time he had grabbed the metal piece and pulled it out, he was merely light-headed and feeling slightly bruised. Curly had a small flashlight in his coat pocket, he had seen it, so he went back to him - he had finally stopped twitching now, the blood flow slowed to a trickle - and he pulled the little Mag-Light out of his pocket and turned it on. Then he realized how gruesome the scene was with Curly laying mutilated in a wide puddle of blood, and pulled a blanket off a near by crate, covering his body with it. “I’m not going to harm you,” he said, hoping his tone was soothing. He could only hear himself from a distance, as his eardrums hadn’t fully healed from the explosion that must have knocked out at least one of them.

Aiming the flashlight in the hole, he was met by pale, wide eyed faces that flinched from the sudden light. They weren’t women - they were girls. The oldest was maybe around seventeen, the youngest maybe thirteen, and there were fourteen in there, with about four draped on the floor of the container as if unconscious from lack of air. They were shivering, both from cold and from fear. “If you’re gonna leave, we need to do it now,” he told them, gesturing for them to leave. Did they speak English? Oh shit, what if they didn’t?

None of the women seemed eager to move or say anything, but finally one of them came forward, a slim, sloe eyed girl with stringy, slightly dirty brown hair, maybe all of sixteen. “We just want to go home. Just let us go, we won’t tell anyone -”

“I’m not one of them,” he interrupted, and realized two things almost simultaneously. The girl was speaking Russian - but he understood it. Not only did he understand it, but he was speaking Russian right back at her, which was confirmed by her surprise. Since when did he know Russian? He‘d swear he‘d never even heard it before this very moment. “If you wanna get outta here, we gotta do it now. Someone’s bound to show up soon, so let’s go.”

“Where?” she asked.

That was a good question. What the fuck was he doing? And what the fuck were they doing in there anyways? “Uh, to the cops. We passed a police station down the road. They’ll help you.” Or so he hoped. Even though Lilly had probably saved him, he instinctively distrusted cops, or anyone in a uniform for that matter. He just assumed that trusting them was setting yourself up for betrayal, although he had no idea why. Still, he assumed the cops weren’t on Truman’s payroll, simply because they’d be here helping out if they were; there’d be no need to avoid them.

The girl was reluctant to trust him, which pissed him off a bit, and then she saw the body on the floor. Yes, the blanket covered Curly, but his blood was still visible, soaking into the edges of the blanket and turning it black. At her look, he grimaced, and told her, “He tried to kill me for opening the container.” He realized there was some implication in that he had killed him first, but he didn’t know how to explain that Curly had killed himself by shooting him in the head (of which there was no sign).

The girl considered that, still shivering violently in what looked like someone else’s clothes, and asked, “Was he one of them?”

There was no need to specify the “them”, especially since he started it. He just nodded.

She scowled down at his body, with a surprising amount of hate. “Good.”

The girl - whose name was apparently Natalya, from what one of the other girls called her - helped him get the rest of the girls out of there, and kept them more or less an intact unit. Every group had at least one person who was the “alpha”, the fighter or unofficially designated leader, and Natalya was clearly it. He was glad, because that made things easier.

He still had no idea what he was doing or why he was doing it. Maybe he was still reacting to their fear.

They were reluctant to get in the back of the truck that he and Curly had been left with, but there was no way for everyone to fit up front. It seems they were reluctant because after almost a month stuck in a cargo hold, they’d now spent the better part of a day stuck in a cargo container with a single air vent. Why? Natalya sat up front with him as he drove away from the dockside, wondering when another of Truman’s men would find Curly’s body, and she told him. And something worse than his worst fears were confirmed.

Some of the girls were promised jobs in America, others were kidnapped or - Jesus - sold (sometimes by their own families). They were told on the cargo ship that they’d be “working off” the cost of their passage, but the work sounded like prostitution, and some of the men on the ship had “hurt” them - she was vague, and Logan was glad, because he could guess her meaning, and he felt so angry and so ill he thought he might have an aneurysm or vomit (or both simultaneously).

Sex slavery. God damn it, Truman sold people. No, not just people - kids. Kids were where the money was at; if you wanted a twenty five year old hooker, you could find one in any major city. But to find a fresh thirteen year old who didn’t want to be there, but had no choice because she spoke no English and everyone she knew lived in another country …

He was going to kill him. He was going to go back to Truman’s office and kill him in pieces, so he could watch himself getting killed. This was slavery, and he had made him a part of it.

(Bullshit! His own unwillingness to ask questions had made him a part of this! He was as dirty as Curly, or anyone else who knew what was actually going on. If he hadn’t been a criminal before, he was now, and he was one of the most despicable kind. A Human trafficker.)

There was a crack, and he realized that he had gripped the steering wheel so hard in his anger that he just broke part of it. It still worked though, so he figured he should consider himself lucky. Natalya was staring at him, startled, and he felt compelled to tell her something so she didn’t think he was just going to take them somewhere and bury them in a shallow grave. “I know the man behind this,” he told her. “I’m gonna kill him.”

She searched his face, as if trying to figure out if he was telling her the truth or not, then must have decided he was and nodded, looking out the window. “Where are we?”

“Alaska.”

She nodded again. “No wonder it’s so cold.”

He pulled up just down the street from the police station, which was a squat brick building that shared space with what passed for the fire station out here. He couldn’t go in with them, and told Natalya so, although he left out the fact that he thought he might be wanted by police somewhere. She was so apparently cold her lips looked bloodless, not so much pink as nearly white, so he took off his coat and gave it to her. She seemed reluctant to take it, but as soon as she did take it she put on the coat eagerly, zipping it up and enjoying his body heat. Since she didn’t speak English and none of the other girls did either, he found a scrap of paper in the glove box and wrote a note for her to give to the officers, basically saying they’d been brought here against their will in a cargo container, and were officially requesting help in escaping from the men who had kidnapped them. He knew the cops would be so confused and appalled by the letter they’d check it out, and the! possibility that it was a joke would dissolve as soon as they found Curly’s body. (Would forensics ever figure out the precise sequence of events that led to his gun blowing up in his hand? He doubted it severely. He wondered what they would eventually decide the official cause of it was. Probably some kind of catastrophic mechanical malfunction, one of those once in a lifetime things.)

“I’m so sorry,” he told her, knowing it meant nothing, knowing it wasn’t enough. How could it be? I’m sorry that many of your countrywomen were probably enslaved, and because I tried not to think about where the money was coming from, I kind of helped. But at least I freed you.

She looked at him, and her eyes had a kind of hollow bleakness, part exhaustion and part long term trauma. The fact that she was still functioning with such calm was a testament to her strength and to the numbing effects of shock. “Why? You don’t need to be. Thank you.”

He shook his head, hating himself as much as he hated Truman. “Please don’t.”

She nodded and got out of the truck, tucking the note in the pocket of his jacket (now hers), and started getting the other girls out of the back. He waited until Natalya had herded them into the police station before he started up the truck and drove away.

He was headed to the airport. Truman would probably hear about this before he could reach Vancouver, but hopefully he wouldn’t flee anywhere new. Because he was going to kill him, and the sleazy bastard was going to die if he had to hunt him down to the ends of the earth.

He had no idea what he was going to do with himself, though. Maybe he’d figure that out as soon as he dealt with Truman.

12

Xander did protest about being sent out on a “chore”, but Bren did use what Logan said, about him considering this payback for helping with Berto, and he relented. But he went out the door grumbling , “I always get to stake out the damn evil lawyers …”

Giles had figured out a way that they could help Broom without necessarily wasting a lot of time on it. If they put a sacred circle of salt around Broom’s house, and he stayed inside it, the Qutrub would be unable to breach it. It would force the demon away for another time, and they’d be able to hunt it down the next night - with hopefully a well and intact Angel. Which was a problem that still needed solving.

If Giles knew more about what was going on with Angel, he hadn’t said yet, but if his increasing anxiety was any indication, he was holding out on them. The last time he’d come out of the office, it was only to ask if Logan had called back to say whether he was coming back here or meeting them on site … assuming Wolfram and Hart honestly did what Logan expected them to do, and they could guess where they were headed with any degree of accuracy. Of course Logan hadn’t called; it had been almost an hour since he had. In the meantime, Faith had called, also looking for Logan (what he wouldn’t give to be that popular - but then again, if he had to work out all the time to match his pecs, maybe he’d pass), and she sounded so happy he couldn’t tell her what was going on with Angel. She told him she had indeed gotten the job, and it was “amazing”, and for him to let Logan know that tonight they were celebrating.

So, he filled out a post-it reading ‘Logan - buy rip proof clothes, and hide them.’ There was no point in him wearing them, since he got the feeling Faith’s idea of celebrating was probably illegal in most Southern states. For all the horrible shit he’d been through, Logan was a lucky son of a bitch sometimes.

Naomi had run off to the corner store to buy the salt for the sacred circle (they were a bag short), so he was alone in the office, watching the late rays of sun slant against the far wall. Usually the blinds were always shut out of deference for Angel, but now there was no need, and besides, if Angel broke his bonds and rushed out here he’d get instantly burned back into his office, the nearest available darkness. Bren tried for a third time to contact Broom, but all he had gotten so far was a bland voice mail system where it gave a phone number without a name. It was his number though, so he told him they thought they had a solution to his “problem” (he was vague in case someone else read his messages) and to call them back as soon as he could. So he was waiting on phone calls from two men who never seemed to answer their phones. Lovely. He now knew how struggling actors and jilted women felt.

And Logan’s words kept ringing in his ears: “No bait is ever gonna tell you somethin’ of real value.” Of course Logan could just be saying that, he could be guessing, it wasn’t like he knew all about it; it wasn’t like people had thrown “bait” at him before. It wasn’t like he was experienced with both sex and deception; it wasn’t like Mystique tried to seduce him or something …

Oh fuck. He was an idiot. Logan was one hundred percent right, and Bren knew he should just start banging his head on his desk now. This thing with Kier would never add up to anything except an occasional good time. Kier could be neck deep in what was happening to Angel, and he would never know.

He thought he heard a noise in Angel’s office - it was so quiet he could hear people cursing in three different languages in the streets below - and he went to investigate. Giles might not appreciate it, but he was dead bored anyways, and it was better than contemplating the depths of his own idiocy. He had all night to do that.

“Anything I can help -” he began, opening the door. But he paused as he saw a weird tableau before his eyes.

Angel was awake, still bound and sitting on the floor, but his eyes were yellow and glowing, glaring with hate at a standing Giles, whose back was to Bren. The noise Bren must have heard was the book falling from Giles’s hands, as it laid open at his feet. There was something odd about his posture, so stiff and still, that Bren walked around him, and that’s when he felt it.

It was impossible for him to say what exactly it was, but it made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, and totally unbidden, his demon side came out - his skin became leathery and Brachen blue-green, the red spikes coming out so suddenly he felt like a porcupine. Giles’ eyes were wide and staring, not looking at Angel more than looking through him. Bren changed his gaze to Angel, and realized that he was doing something to him - but how? What the fuck was he doing, and why did it make the demon in him literally jump out of its skin?

“Stop it,” Bren demanded, stomping towards Angel. He could actually feel something; it was like walking into an invisible stream of energy. Angel was staring right through him, as if trying to make a hole through his torso. It pissed him off, mainly because it scared him so much. No vampire could do this - this definitely wasn’t Angel. This just might be the thing that killed Angel. “I said stop it!” he roared, and back handed Angel - or the thing in him - across the face.

That seemed to break the spell, or whatever it was. That feeling of walking into resistance faded, and he heard Giles curse softly behind him. But Angel - no, the Angel thing - looked up at him with his glowing yellow eyes, and he snickered, an ugly, mocking kind of sound. “Oh, little half-breed. Isn’t there a toilet somewhere you could be cleaning?”

He thought Angel was supposed to be asleep for the next few hours. Why wasn’t he? Giles didn’t screw up spells. “Shut the fuck up. Just what were you playing at?”

Angel leered up at him, showing fangs that seemed too white and too long. His forehead remained smooth and Human, and the effect was at once incredibly attractive and utterly horrifying. There was nothing right about him now. “You’re going to die, you know. You and all your pathetic little friends.”

“Yeah yeah, I’ve heard it before. Get a new script.”

“They all hated you,” he continued, and at first he had no idea what he was talking about. “The little muties were afraid of you. The half-blood demon, the freak amongst the freaks. Logan doesn’t even like you, he just feels sorry for you. He knows you’ll be dead before too long, just like your junkie whore of a mother -”

He punched him square in the jaw. He knew this … thing was just taunting him, but bringing up his mother wasn’t something he could abide right now. “I told you to shut the fuck up,” he growled, grabbing him by the collar and shaking him for emphasis.

But Angel laughed. It was a horrible sound, even more disdainful than the previous snicker, and the look on his face, one of glorious triumph, made anger flare in his belly. “Is that the best you can do, you little faggot?”

He didn’t hold back this time - he punched him once more in the side of the face, and kept punching until he smelled blood and heard something crack in Angel’s face. He knew he should stop, but he was furious at this … thing, whatever it was; he hated that it had taken the place of one of the better men he had ever known. Giles grabbed his arms and pulled him back, telling him, “It’s all right, Brendan, I’m okay, he’s just trying to manipulate you -”

“Bring him back, you fucker!” he shouted, spitting down at the thing that wasn’t Angel anymore. “Bring Angel back!”

But the thing rolled its head around slowly - maybe he had hurt it a little - and glared up at him with open contempt. Even though blood was trickling down his chin from his split lip, the thing that was no longer Angel smiled in a cold, savage way. “I’m going to rip your beating heart out of your chest and eat it. You’ll probably be alive long enough to see it.” And with that threat, he arched his back and jumped up to his feet, tearing the ropes from his body at the very same time.

Oh shit.