It was a funny thing, having a sharp sense of smell.  Along with the dozens of people - mostly men - in the hallway before them, he smelled quite clearly, over the scents of varying aftershaves, tobacco, chewing gum, deodorant, and hair products, a spike of fear; adrenaline like sour apples, sharp and slightly metallic.

The soldiers knew something was wrong.  They wouldn’t even have a chance to get out of the elevator first.

“Now,” Logan hissed, raising his hand to Scott’s visor as he raised his head.  Scott would normally have done the whole visor thing himself, but his hands were cuffed behind him, at least for the moment.

Scott looked up, and Logan pressed the button.

He was only supposed to hold it down for two seconds, as Scott felt that was enough, but Logan wasn’t so sure about that.  Still, a wide beam shot out from the visor and sent a great deal of the soldiers flying on impact, with only those hugging the walls remaining on their feet, and Marc began shooting as those still standing started to fire.

Scott broke his hands free of the cuffs, so Logan lunged for the nearest soldiers, grabbing the raised sidearm of one as he kicked the other in the stomach.  Someone was shouting into their radio for immediate “quarantine” as Marc continued to fire his gun while easing out into the corridor, Scott sniping a few here and there with his optic blasts.  Rogue was out now too, punching the ones he had shoved aside, and the double team seemed to be working pretty well.  She didn’t have much of Logan's strength, if any at all, but at least she knew the weak spots to go for on each and every Human.  Srina must have been out there as well, as every now and again there was a thud, and someone went down hard, their assailant  nowhere to be seen.

More soldiers entered the fray, but by this time the elevator car’s ceiling seemed to have caved in, and down jumped the Sisters, followed by Helga and Saddiq, and all dove into the scrum with an enthusiasm that was vaguely disturbing.  The funny thing was, the four of them did make excellent backup, as they were demonstrating textbook fighting techniques for anyone watching.  Saddiq easily took on two men taller and far heavier, his well-honed skills making him a much more potent opponent than they were prepared for, as well as the fact that Saddiq seemed to fight with no emotion whatsoever, like he was a pure combat machine.  Helga was almost the opposite, as she poured the same passion she had more for most things into her fighting, tearing into people like  they were bread and she was starving, and no one was prepared for the things she could do with that tail of hers.  Furthermore, the Sisters were not only amazingly coordinated, but a combination of Helga’s and Saddiq’s style, as they reveled in the bloodlust, while taking people out with cold calculation.

Logan knew he’d taken at least one slug in the side (no big deal; it had passed through him without hitting anything major), and had a minor stab wound in the back, but they were already healing.  Scott was limping - maybe he’d taken a ricochet in the leg - but otherwise seemed fine, and had reached the end of the corridor, where he blew open a locked door and took out a few soldiers behind it.  Considering how outnumbered and outgunned they technically were, they were doing astonishingly well.  Unless they had something a hell of a lot better waiting for them on the fourth level, this was going to be a cakewalk.

“Is this all you got?” Marc shouted.  He was bleeding too, from an unclear source, but didn’t seem too put out by it.  He grabbed a soldier who was starting to get up and instantly paralyzed him, making him drop back to the floor like a sack of cement. “C’mon!  Don’t pussy out on us now!”

The Sisters looked up, presumably at opposite cameras hidden in the wall, and echoed the sentiment. “We’re-”

“-hungry.”

The Sisters had no blood on them, save for other people’s, and they couldn’t have looked more cheerful if they'd tried.  If only the watchers on the floor could have known how dangerous and chilling that actually was.

It was then that Logan heard a hum.

It was an odd noise, deep and thrumming, and he shushed the others so he could hear it better, get a directional fix.  Rogue must have gotten some of his hearing too, because she soon asked, “What’s that?”

“It’s-”

“-everywhere.”

The Sisters were right, it was; it was coming through the walls. “Back, get back!” he shouted, not sure what was coming or how to stop it.  Maybe they’d be safe in the elevator car until they -

A bright light, like a pulse from the heart of the sun, suddenly burst from all around them, and Logan felt it, deep within his brain, like a heated ice pick punching through his cerebellum. And then he felt nothing at all.

11

Angel came to with the taste of blood and dirt in his mouth, a terrible - and terribly familiar - thing. He ached all over, and from the grating feeling deep inside, he was sure he’d broken several bones, especially in his ribcage. Thankfully he was dead, and theoretically it shouldn’t bother him at all.

He shoved himself up to his knees with a pained groan, and said, “I’m surprised you’re not complaining already, Spike.” Spike was good at complaining, and had been doing it almost non-stop since he'd nearly gotten himself eviscerated by that big raptor looking thing on the lowlands.  The wounds hadn’t completely healed yet either, and he supposed Spike knew himself that he was going to be a goner sooner rather than later; vampires couldn’t get gangrene, but the blood of the demon/dinosaur thing was unpalatable, and there was no way for him to replenish all the blood seeping out the still open wound.  He was getting weaker on a daily basis, and Illyria was eager to leave him behind, as he was slowing them down.  That had caused a lot of nasty arguments between her and Spike, culminating in Spike calling her a “nasty slag”, and Illyria threatening to pound him into dinosaur shit.  As far as Angel was concerned, they could both stay behind and curse each other out to their hearts content but, if he was to be perfectly honest with himself, only Illyria was going to go the distance - she was a former Old One, after all, and even in her slightly weakened state (she’d have destroyed her human shell if they hadn’t weakened her), she was more than a match for the Senior Partners. If they ever bothered to show their faces, or whatever they had to show for them.

Truth be told, he was doing little better than Spike. Mainly he was just banged up - broken bones, bruises, internal injuries - but he had some shallow scars on his arm, chest, and face that had just started scabbing over. And he didn’t get scabs - he was a vampire!  It was either this dimension - and all hell dimensions had their own rules - or the guard demons were toxic in  some way, exuding a poison that compromised his ability to heal, and the worse the injury, the harder it was.  He just hurt all over, and while he knew he could keep going (he’d lived with pain before; much worse than this), he honestly didn’t know for how much longer. One good claw slash or bite, and he would be in Spike’s position, dying slowly and rather pointlessly, ebbing away.

The toxin - or whatever it was - didn’t affect Illyria, and why would it?  She was a god - kind of; mostly - and they were just demons, which was the difference between a housecat and sabertooth tiger.  That should have comforted him, that long after he and Spike were dead she’d continue roaming the wastes, demolishing everything in her path, but he couldn’t forget that technically she was an evil god.  She'd decided to buddy up with them only because she hated being a pawn (which is what the Senior Partners had basically made her), and initially she'd felt actual grief over Wesley’s death.  But memories of her “human” existence were fading, and he had a feeling that the Partners might be able to make her a deal. After all, right now she was only in this for the bloodshed and the violence; she’d already said, more than once, that she wished she could kill something with more intelligence.

Trying to catch his breath, spitting dirt and blood out of his mouth, he realized that no one had responded to him. “Guys?” He looked around, and saw that he was alone in a very dark cavern. Looking up, he saw a hole in the granite ceiling, at least sixty feet above his head.  Even if he was at full strength, he’d never be able to make a jump of that height.  But shouldn’t the hole have been bigger?  Didn’t the ground collapse underneath them all?

Maybe it had, and yet they all ended up in different places anyway.  Different dimensions, different rules. “Guys,” he shouted, climbing painfully to his feet. The stone walls felt slick, as if covered with a thin layer of slime. “Spike, Illyria - can you hear me?” He paused, waiting for a reply or at least a noise, but it never came. “I’m in here!” He figured Illyria would be punching her way through walls soon enough, and he didn’t want to get flattened inadvertently.

He saw his sword was still with him - it had embedded itself blade first in the dirt - and he pulled it out, which was harder than it should have been. He was hurting a lot worse than he was willing to admit, but he wasn’t going to give up just yet. They had to show themselves sometime - in theory - and he had a feeling they were close, even though he wasn’t aware of the passage of time here. Day and night seemed strangely arbitrary, with no balance between them; he had given up trying to count the days, although, if you were to count by sunsets, it had been five days or so. His body was insisting it had been months.

He seemed trapped in the cave at first glance, but then he noticed a small seam of pale light bleeding from the parallel to him, so he hefted the sword, resting the blade flat against his shoulder, and carefully edged closer, half expecting the wall to burst in on him.  It didn’t, and as he touched the strangely warm stone, it flaked off in his hands, and collapsed like it was made from sand.

Angel knew by now that you couldn’t expect any kind of logic in a Senior Partners’ dimension, but he was still surprised to see that the cave wall had fallen away to reveal a lavish and opulent banquet room.  The floor looked as if was made with gemstones; polished slabs of rubies and emeralds, sapphires and diamonds, topaz and onyx, set flush with one another, making an oversized mosaic that almost looked like stained glass. The banquet table that was the centerpiece of the room was a long, slender piece of polished mahogany that, judging by the number of chairs, could seat at least a hundred.  A large crystal chandelier hung over it all, made with hundreds of crystal prisms in the shapes of tears, reflecting light from some unclear source, fracturing it into a thousand tiny rainbows before they touched upon the gemstone floor.

A red velvet runner led up three wide stairs, and ultimately to a dais where a throne made entirely of human bones covered in gold sat empty, skeletal hands holding up a red velvet cushion for some evil bastard’s prodigious ass.  Round rubies and sapphires filled the eye sockets of the skulls that lined the top of the throne, while the baby skulls that made up the end of the arm rests (were those real arms?) had glittering bits of amethysts shoved in the holes.

The room was cold, the air oddly clean, and something was making the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. A feeling of power and … what?  He had no idea, but it made the vampire in him want to cower.

Angel suddenly knew he had been brought here.  Someone was tired of him. “Where are you?”  He demanded, lowering his sword.  His voice echoed slightly, but he realized that was just an illusion. “What have you done -”

Movement at the corner of his eye made him pivot on his heels, aiming the sword at a man across the room, who also held a sword, and looked like death warmed over, and  it suddenly struck him that the man looked familiar.

Oh, it was him, wasn’t it?

The far side of the room were covered in floor-to-ceiling mirrors, reflecting himself multiple times, cut into shards, and he couldn't help staring at the image for a moment.  His hair stuck out at several odd angles, matted with blood, and his shirt was in tatters, held together with a few stubborn strands of thread and bloodstains, with the left leg of his pants was barely hanging on, a huge slash exposing the flesh of his knee. Where was his coat?  Didn’t he used to have a long, leather coat?

He stared at his dirt and blood smeared face for a moment, not sure he even wanted to admit recognition, and then mentally ordered himself to snap out of it.  Allowing him to see his reflection was probably a distraction, a way to throw him off.  He forced himself to turn away, and made himself finish his demand. “Where are they? What have you done to them?  If you’ve hurt them -”

That got a response. “You’ll what?  Kill me like you were planning to in the first place?  I’m perfectly petrified.”

He looked around, but he was still alone in here, visually at any rate. “You must be; you’re not here.”

“You’re not looking hard enough.”

He continued to look around, and then he saw him; he was in the mirror on the far side, a natty looking man with white hair and black eyes, wearing a double breasted tweed suit that was straddling the line between debonair and stuffy.  In fact, he looked oddly like Peter Cook, which made him pause.  Had Peter Cook been evil?  He couldn’t remember....

Angel lifted his sword, prepared to throw it, but he instantly froze - it was like he’d been grabbed in an invisible fist. He was glad he didn’t have to breathe, because the pressure on his chest was incredible; he could feel his broken ribs grinding together like worry beads.

The Senior Partner chuckled, but without any warmth. “Did you really think you could even touch me in my own domain, insect? What is it with you little nothings, thinking you can take on the great machines? Because you have a head full of righteous anger, and are dwelling on the side of angels - no pun intended - you think that’s enough? Are you honestly that stupid, or just misguided optimists?”

“I’ve made it this far,” Angel hissed through gritted teeth.  It was the closest he could come to talking with an invisible rhino standing on his chest.

The Senior walked straight out of the mirror and across the dais, leaving a static reflection behind. “And why do you think that is?”

“I don’t care. What have you done to Spike and Illyria?”

He scoffed, taking a seat on his throne of bones. “My dear boy, you should be old enough and wise enough to understand that when you lead your people on a suicide mission, you can’t suddenly be concerned about their well being.”

“Answer the question.”

“Why should I? You haven’t answered mine. But I’ll do that for you. You’ve gotten this far because you have some of our blood, some of the Powers' power, if you will, and because I was curious to see how long you and the two misfits you brought with you could actually last.  The three of you made a great reality show, let me tell you.”

Some of their blood?  Oh, right, he'd drank a little blood of a Senior’s minion before he left Earth.  He had no idea it was still extant after all this time. So...he had the power of the Powers, though?  That was news to him. But if he had some of their power, why wasn’t he able to make it work for him?  “I will kill you.”

He gave him a small, patronizing smile. “No, you won’t.”

Angel was thrown to his knees, the gemstones hard enough to send electric shocks of pain through his body (as if he needed any more). The sword dropped from his hand as it felt like his fingers snapped, the bones spontaneously cracking under strain, and he swallowed a scream along with a fresh gout of blood in his mouth. His pain was almost radiant, heating cold flesh and imbuing itself into the floor, as it felt like something hit him in the back and sent him sprawling face first.

“I could crush you like an ant, you know,” the anti-Cook said conversationally. “You’re just lucky we’re not done with you yet.”

He spit out blood, not sure where it was coming from, and was chagrined that it was making him hungry. He hadn’t eaten since he’d left Earth - none of the beings here had palatable blood - and he was starving, so much so that he’d started to dream longingly of rats. “What -” He could barely talk; it felt like someone was stepping on his throat. “What do you mean?”

“You owe us, Angel. Did you think you did enough to live up to your part of the bargain?  Not even close. And add to that the inconvenience you caused us. Illyria is by all right one of ours, and we’ll get her back easily enough - or she will die, simple as that - but you took out our Los Angeles station.  Tsk tsk, bad dog, and all that rot.  But you will help us rebuild … or should I say Angelus will?  Because you sold us your soul, Angel, and we intend to collect.”

His head was throbbing so much he felt like he had a pulse. “No,” he croaked, trying to push himself up to his knees. But he couldn’t do it, the pressure pushing him down was too great, and he was too weak.

“Oh, come now! It’s just us supernatural beings here, no Humans to con. We both know that when a vampire possesses a Human, it doesn’t come with a personality; vampires are rather dreary, single minded things. A vampire takes on and enhances the core personality, makes the essence come to the surface without such deceits as restraint -”

“No,” he insisted, struggling hard to push himself up.  Muscles were tearing and tendons were shrieking, but he didn’t care. He couldn’t listen to this anymore, he couldn’t -

- just do nothing while this thing stole his soul.

“- a soul is, at best, a leash on a dog; but the dog was there before the leash.  You know that by now.  You know who and what you were -”

“No.”

“- and what you always have been, before, during, and after.  Liam O’Connor, you were never anything but a selfish, venal, manipulative sadist -”

“No.”

“- cruel in your heart long before the demon ever brought it out. You think you can lie to me?  I’m a god - I’m your god - and I know everything there is to know about your kind.  I know the black recesses of your mind, the icy canyons of your dead heart … and you were a dead thing long before a vampire ever took you.”

“No!” He screamed, finally shoving himself up to his feet, ready to charge the stairs and rip that fucker’s throat out -

- and he was shocked cold by the presence of dozens of people around him, between him and the Senior Partner. Not dozens; hundreds, possibly thousands, all familiar.

The people he had killed.

Humans and demons alike, the people he had vamped, the ones he'd fed from, the ones he'd killed simply for the unholy hell of it; the ones he had killed as an evil vampire and as a tormented one, the ones who had simply died for having been around him.  There were so many the room had now widened itself to accommodate them all, and if he had any breath, he’d have lost it.  He heard a strange noise, a kind of swallowed moan, and only realized after the fact it had come from him.  Children - oh god, had he actually killed that many children? - stood on the steps, otherwise so small as to get swallowed up by the massive crowd, the sea of faces, the ocean of names and beings long forgotten, half remembered, or nameless; a flood of doomed and damned souls. He thought he might actually collapse, he felt gut-shot looking at their pleading eyes, their faces neutral or sad, fearful or angry, and when two of them abruptly grabbed his arms - ironically Wesley and Doyle, arguably his closest friends of recent years, both struck down horribly while working with him - he was almost grateful that he didn’t have to keep supporting himself.

He found himself searching the faces, putting names to them all.  His parents over there, his sister on the stairs, Jenny, Cordelia, and Fred behind him, Gunn and Lindsay backing up Wesley, Darla and Dru standing beside the throne, Dru’s sisters and the rest of her family near the base of the stairs, several squadrons of vampires he had made or used as minions but had never really learned the names of or had simply forgotten, slayers he had killed in his time … oh, god - it was too much.

He closed his eyes, shook his head, and said, “I know what you’re doing, and it’s not going to work.  They aren’t here, they aren’t real -”

“Oh, we’re real all right,” Doyle said, his voice pitch perfect enough to make his stomach clench. “This evil bastard was nice enough to let us come back, so we could thank ye for everythin’ you’ve ever done for us.”

They aren’t real, Angel mentally told himself. They’re simulacrums; he’s preying on your guilt.  He knew this, he believed it.  So why wasn’t it working?

“You have nothing to say to us?” Wesley asked archly.

“I knew he was death the first time I saw him,” Dru said, but her voice was oddly fragile, without its singsong cadence; it was the voice of Dru as a Human, before … before he had killed her. “But they didn’t believe me. They never believed me when I told them what I saw, not until it was too late.”

“I’m - I’m sorry,” he whispered, afraid to open his eyes and see all their faces.  God, there were so many. He had no idea …

“You’re sorry?” Wesley repeated in disbelief. “You slaughtered us all, and you’re sorry?”

He didn’t know who threw the first punch.  All he knew was that it was followed by a cascade of blows, punches and kicks, as the Human tide turned on him in rage.  He knew he should fight back, try and get some breathing room, but there were so many he was lost instantly, and besides, he wasn’t sure he had the will to fight them. Hadn’t he hurt them enough already?  (But they weren’t real! They couldn’t be real!)

When he felt the tears start rolling down his cheeks, he convinced himself they were from pain alone.

When he felt something odd on his face, he knew that their plan had gone horribly wrong.

The last thing he remembered was … oh yeah, the noise and that flash of light.  His leg still ached, and Scott wasn’t sure if he had been shot there or stabbed or just hurt by a piece of flying debris; he didn’t bother to look, figuring he’d do better by going forward without pausing to see how bad it actually was.  Denial probably wasn’t a good thing to utilize in a fight, but sometimes you were better off not knowing if your leg was hanging on by a strand or not.

He opened his eyes to discover he was no longer wearing his visor, but goggles not unlike the ones he slept in, only bulkier.  He was also strapped into what seemed to be a dentist’s chair, slightly modified.  His wrists were held down to the arm of the chair by hard plastic straps, possibly variations of the plastic cuffs cops sometimes used, and although his legs were free, the chair itself was bolted down to the floor. There seemed to be some sort of apparatus over his head, machinery hanging down from the ceiling, but the room was poorly lit and it was mostly behind him, so he couldn’t really see what it was.  He honestly hoped it was a dentist’s drill.

What he could see was a metal desk in front of him, the best lit thing in the room, behind which sat an Asian woman doing - of all things - paperwork. She was reasonably young, maybe early thirties, her black hair razor cut to a length so short it was nearly a buzz cut, but she was still an attractive woman, in a severe sort of way. She barely glanced up at him before resuming scribbling on forms. “I really thought you were smarter than this, Cyclops.”

“You’d be surprised what someone can talk you into. And don’t call me that.” His right leg still throbbed pretty steadily in a location just north of the knee, but much of the blood on his leg felt cold and itchy, so he assumed that was a good sign. “Where are the others?”

“That depends,” she said cryptically, and then finally deigned to look up from her paperwork. “You knew there were hypersonic tones that could render a person unconscious, yes?  We’ve been experimenting with special frequency light pulses that seem to overload the optic nerves and cause the brain to … well, shut down, for lack of a better term.  To be safe, we used both.  We didn’t know if the goggles you two wore would cut down on the effects of the light or not, and besides, it was rather amusing to hit Wolverine with both.”

‘You two’?  She must have been referring to Marcus as well, and he hated the idea of ever being lumped in with him. “Why?”

“Imagine it: a hypersonic frequency will render a normal person instantly unconscious.  Just think what it can do to a man with above-average senses.” She chuckled to herself as she turned her attention back to her paperwork. “Wolverine had a seizure, and we’re certain we shattered at least one of his eardrums. Oh, he’ll heal, but he’s down for a while.  Let‘s see the son of a bitch adapt to that.”

Scott was honestly appalled, not so much at what they'd done to Logan as the fact that she seemed to genuinely be enjoying it. If she'd looked up she would have seen his sneer, but she wasn’t paying attention to him. “Who the hell are you?”

She flipped a sheet over, adding it to a small but growing pile on the right side of her desk. “Just call me Control.”

“Wasn’t there a guy with that name?”

“It’s not so much a name as it is a title.”

“So you’re the new terror czar, is that it?”

She looked up at him and smiled, but it was a cold, almost leering grin that wouldn’t have been out of place on a Sister. “You brought some very interesting specimens with you this time.  That boy was incredibly impressive; he could have been one of ours.  His skin appears impenetrable, so am I right in assuming he’s one of the genetic constructs of Eden Biotechnics?”

If there was an implied threat there it was oblique, but just the fact that she was speaking about Saddiq was bad enough. “You hurt those kids and I will kill you.”

Her smile grew wider, more patronizing. “You don’t kill, Cyclops. Well, not without a lot of prodding.”

He felt a cold shock through his system, an unwelcome reminder of what they'd made him do the last time they'd gotten a hold of him, and he hated her; he loathed her with such a fiery passion he thought if he could get loose, he would gladly throttle her with his bare hands.  But he told himself she was trying to make him upset, trying to unbalance him, and he couldn’t let her.  If he was going to help the others at all, he had to keep his cool, not be manipulated by this cold blooded bitch.  He swallowed his rage, and said, as emotionlessly as possible, “So where are the telepaths?  I don’t feel brainwashed yet.”

She studied him, her brown eyes betraying a hint of amusement, and then said, “Those twin girls are interesting too. Very impressive fighters - martial artists, I‘m guessing.  Are they telepathic? What is the nature of their mutation?  They seem to register as dead.  Were you aware of this?”

“They weren’t dead when we came here.” The Sisters!  Didn’t Angel manage to break Logan out of an Organization base once? Maybe that’s why Logan had wanted to bring them - in case the shit really hit the fan, they still had vampires on the inside, wild cards.  Maybe he should have given Logan more credit.

Control was not answering a single one of his questions. Clearly she wanted to fuck with his head; he refused to give her the satisfaction. She’d had enough watching Logan writhe in pain. “And an invisible person!  Thank you so much for that. We used to have one, you know, but he disappeared on us.  It sounds like a joke, but bless him, he was always a coward, and when the opportunity came to leave, he took it.  And it really is hard to find an invisible man in a crowd.”

“So this is this portion of the proceedings where you just talk at me, huh?  Torture by boredom?  Why don’t you just turn on C-Span?  I guarantee I’ll be foaming at the mouth within an hour.”

She gazed at him steadily, that small smile firmly locked in place. “You think I don’t know you’re terrified? There’s no need for false bravado, Cyclops.  It’s just us.”

“And why is that?  Because Logan’s too injured to be much fun?”

“Interesting. Even you believe you should be playing second fiddle to him?”

“That’s not what -” He stopped himself, but not in time.  Shit, he'd just stumbled into one of her traps. Maybe he could still work his way out of it.

Her smiled became tighter, self-satisfied. “What do you think you know about Wolverine?  I’m curious.”

“You people played Operation - The Home Game - on him, and he’s an asshole.”

“You left off the part about him being a killer, Cyclops. Unlike you, he never needed brainwashing for that.”

“Whatever.  Is there a point to this?”

“Yes, a rather important one.” She searched on her desk for something, finally pulling out a plain manila folder. “You’ve been sleeping with the enemy - metaphorically speaking - all this time.  Doesn’t it bother you?”

“You’re my enemy, and we’ve only just met.” He tried his wrist restraints, but they were far too tight.  He wondered if there was another way out of this. How well had they covered all their bases?

“You know Wolverine specifically hunted your kind, but are you aware he destroyed your life long before you met him?”

He stared back at her through the reddish haze of the goggles, wondering why the damn things were so bulky. Were they that worried his beams would break them? “We all know he’s a homewrecker, but I think you’re overstating the case.”

“Am I really?  Poor Cyclops, orphaned  so young.”  She opened the folder, holding  it out toward him, and his heart skipped a beat as he saw, paper clipped to the inside of it were two big black and white head-shots of his parents, looking frighteningly young.  “Christopher Summers and Doctor Allison Hammond-Summers.”  She let him look at the photos for a minute, then closed the file.  He kept his face neutral, hating her more than he thought was humanly possible. “Are you aware Wolverine killed them both?”