Scott just stared at her, once again appalled, but this time at her gall. “How stupid do you think I am? Newsflash, Control - my parents died in a plane crash. Are you going to try and convince me he shot them down with a surface to air missile?”

“He hardly needed to if he sabotaged the plane, Cyclops.”  She closed the file and slid it beneath a pile of papers, letting the far corner stick out.

“It was mechanical failure. It happened to a lot of those model Cessna’s;  there were three others that year, in fact.  Are you going to tell me Logan hunted out other Cessnas of the same make, and did the exact same thing to them for cover?”  He chuckled and shook his head. “Pathetic.  If you’re going to try and bullshit me, do me the favor of doing your homework first.”  As he had. When he was a teenager - before his mutation had erupted - he'd pored obsessively over the details of his parents death; there was nothing he didn’t know about it. She had picked the wrong topic to try and exploit.

Her gaze remained cool, and she folded her hands together neatly on her desktop. “And who issues those safety statistics?”

It took him a moment, but he could see where she was going with this. The government issued those facts, meaning they'd made it up as a general cover.  He shook his head again, and the side of his clunky safety goggles hit the headrest of his chair.  Wasn’t that interesting?  “Making up easily verifiable data to cover a single act of sabotage?  This isn’t the X-Files; I’m not buying it.”

“I understand your not -”

“No, lady, you listen to me. The entire Organization is full of shit, and like cheap fertilizer, you can’t wait to spread it around. I don’t think you even remember how to speak the truth anymore, if you were ever able to. I will never believe a single thing that falls out of your mouth.  My parents died in a stupid plane crash; no one caused it, it just happened. They weren’t mutants either, just a charter pilot and a pediatrician, and there’s no bullshit story large enough to explain why the Organization would be so interested in them as to send Logan to Anchorage to sabotage a puddle jumper.” He realized he was issuing a diatribe, his voice going up in volume, but he decided he was perfectly okay with losing some of his temper right now. “If the point is to make me hate him, well hey - I’m never going to like the guy. But if he did something bad to me and mine while working for you … guess what, so did I.  And I guess that makes it all your fault.”

She waited a long moment, then asked, “Are you done?”

“Are you?” He shot back.

Just from the look in her eyes, he knew he was in for something major - maybe she’d even leave the safety of her desk and come over to hit him - but suddenly she cocked her head, as if she heard something he didn’t.  She brought a hand to her right ear, abruptly bringing up a thin black object which she attached to it, lowering it down until it was almost level with her mouth. She had an earpiece radio in her ear, and now she could communicate with them instead of passively listening. “What is it?” She snapped, turning her attention back to her paperwork.

Since her focus was elsewhere, Scott turned his head, judging how much clearance he had.  The goggles were especially heavy in the front - could he work with that?  He had to crane his neck until he could feel the muscles straining, but he was able to touch the headrest of the chair, wedge the side of his goggles between it and his face. Was that enough?  Could he get any leverage from this angle without snapping his own neck?

He kept an eye on her as she said curtly, “He could have deactivated his transponder and gone out for a smoke. If you find him, you have my permission to shoot him.”  She angrily flicked back the mike portion of the device, keeping it attached but inactive, and Scott was already staring at her, feigning boredom. Her face became one of studied neutrality, and she folded her hands again, although he now got the impression she was doing that simply because she didn’t know what else to do with her hands. “So, I don't suppose there's any chance you’ll tell me if you came with back up?”

Someone was loose.  Or something.

He couldn’t suppress his smile. “What would you do if I said it was Bob?”

She glanced down at her paperwork. “Bob?  Oh, you mean the reality warper?” She kept her expression perfectly neutral, but he saw a muscle in her jaw twitch.

“Is that what you call him?  Hmm.”

She gave him a dirty look for that, and he tried very hard to cover the fact that he was enjoying it. “What does he call his mutation?”

“He doesn’t call it anything. It’s just what he does.”

“What do you call it?”

“Nothing. Why would I?  I don’t even like him.”

“In that case, perhaps you wouldn’t mind filling out our information on him.”

This was just too damn good.  She had her poker face on, but Bob had been the right name to drop, as he had clearly unnerved her.  She pulled out a sheet of paper, saying, “Our information about him is highly limited. What we were able to confirm is that he appears to be an Australian in his late twenties to early thirties, who has a projected power level of ten, which is unheard of, especially in a reality warper. His powers would verge on god-like if this intel is accurate.”

“Wow, you nailed it. I’m impressed.”

Her dark brows knit together in consternation. “You’re saying he’s a level ten?”

“I’m saying you probably don’t have a scale that could measure him. But feel free to try and capture him at any time; in fact, you should really make that your top priority.  Forget us; just think what you could do if you had Bob.”

She glowered at him, aware he was encouraging her to basically commit suicide, and then she turned her head sharply to one side, listening to something on her earpiece, and flicked the mike back into place. “What?”

He couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation, but just her tone of voice told him that the shit had hit the fan. And wasn’t that just a damn shame?

****

Of course that was true of any mutant, but with some it was far more subtle than others, and that was the case here. Except, of course, they were identical twins, which was always freaky in and of itself;  the mutancy was just another factor, like having hives on top of your boils.

Kiernan scratched his head, looking at the twin girls strapped down side by side on the gurneys, and said, "I really think they're dead, Greg."

Amundson made a rude noise with his lips, continuing to gaze at the monitors on the far side of the room, as if they were going to tell him something worthwhile any second now. "Robinson said it's part of their mutation. They mask their vital signs from scanners."

“But, uh, they have no pulse, they're as cold as ice, and they don't look like they're breathing." And he'd been staring at their chests for a full ten minutes; if there had been movement, he was sure he would have seen it.

“Can't fall for that."

“Fall for that?" he repeated in disbelief. "What, you think they're holding their breath?"

“We've had reports of dead mutants before who didn't turn out to be dead. Wolverine, for example."

“He was lost in an explosion. He wasn't lying on a table not breathing. Want me to go get his vital sign readings and bring them back?"

“Whatever floats your boat. We're supposed to keep an eye on 'em, and that's what we're gonna do."

Kiernan shook his head and sighed, glancing back at the twins. They were very young, sixteen maybe, with skin so pale it was almost luminous, making their chestnut hair look warm and vibrant by contrast.  Their lips were oddly pale though, weren't they?  Not quite blue, but a bloodless pink that was quite nearly an off shade of white. They looked not just dead but frozen solid, and he knew just by trying to get a pulse earlier that their skin felt almost frostbitten with cold. Nothing still alive could be that cold.

A burst of static from the comm made him jump, and he turned back just as he heard a voice start to say, "We n-" before being swallowed by a harsh crackle of static.

Amundson frowned, and hit the call button. "Swenson, is that you? What is it?"

He waited, but there was nothing but static as a response. Amundson quickly shifted frequencies, and said, "Mitchell, this Amundson down in 4-Delta.  I think Swenson's having radio problems."

“Gotcha," Mitchell drawled, not sounding overly concerned.  After a moment, he said, "Huh."

Kiernan's stomach suddenly clenched.  Hearing a "Huh" around here was never good. "What?"  Amundson wondered.

“His transponder's not working either."

Oh yeah, that wasn't good. Amundson unconsciously put a hand on his sidearm as he asked, "Where was he?"

“4-Omicron. Look, you wanna go check it out?  I'll inform Control."

“I'm on it." He broke the connection and started heading for the door.

“Wait," Kiernan exclaimed, making him pause. "You're not gonna just leave me here with ... them, are you?"

Amundson gave him a harsh look that threatened to burn its way through the back of his skull. "Holy shit, man. You're afraid of a couple of girls?" His grin was leering and savage.

“N-no, it's just that -"

But Amundson didn't give him time to explain.  He shook his head and turned away, running his new key card through the slot to open the door.

He had just started through the door when something looped around his neck, and jerked it to one side, snapping it with a sickening, violent crack.

Kiernan reached for his sidearm as an arm blocked the door to keep it from closing, but as his hand found the butt of his pistol, an ice cold - and far too strong - hand covered his.

He could feel them behind him, radiating chill like a freezer, and it was all he could do to keep from pissing his pants. “Nice-”

“-restraints-” they said, one in one ear and the other in the other.

“-but not -”

“-nearly good-”

“-enough.”

The green woman outside the door forced her way inside the room, and just as he remembered his radio, he saw it was being held before in him in a small, pale hand.  One of the twins then made a fist, crushing the radio into a fine metallic powder with virtually supernatural strength, and he thought he might faint.

“They always forget to restrain the tail,” the green woman said, possibly to the twins.  He noticed she was holding one of their guns in her left hand, but she wasn’t aiming it at him.

“Humans-”

“-what-”

“-can you-”

“-do?” There was a brief pause before they continued. “Besides-”

“-eating-”

“-them.”

That was a joke, right?

The green woman just rolled her shoulders, a half-hearted shrug, as she turned her attention to the monitors and the control panel. “Don’t eat ‘im just yet, we may need him.”

“Spoil-”

“-sport.” They seemed genuinely disappointed.  He didn’t know how much longer he was going to be able to control his bladder.

There was something disgusting in the way the green woman twitched her tail like a cat; hell, it was disgusting she even had a tail at all.  But as he felt the cold, insanely strong hands of the girls on his shoulders, he felt oddly grateful that she was here, even though she had just killed Greg, because he had the sinking feeling the girls would really enjoy killing him as soon as they had the chance.  Frankly, better Greg than him.

When the green woman turned to face him, he remembered once seeing a green woman on Star Trek as a kid. That one had no tail, and seemed sexy and docile. Would it have killed her to be docile? “Wanna live, soldier boy?” She asked.

He swallowed hard, nodded vigorously.  He knew he was never supposed to capitulate to mutants, but he had a sneaking feeling these weren’t mutants but things classified in the secret files as ‘NMHOU’, or ‘non-mutant humanoids otherwise unspecified’.  No one talked about those much, and few people believed it, because if they weren’t mutants, what the fuck were they?

“You’re gonna tell me where everyone else is being held.”

He shook his head desperately, and said, “I don’t know exact locations.  They don’t tell us in case … well, in case of things like this.”

The green woman scowled at him, her dark green eyes burning like suns, and asked, “Is he telling the truth?”

“Yes-”

“-he’s-”

“-terrified.”

Her tail continued to twitch behind her, and it made him nervous. She'd broken Greg’s neck with her tail, didn’t she?  So it was more like a lemur’s or a possum’s tail than a cat’s; she could actually use it for things. “Fine. Where’s the camera control room for these levels?”

“What?”

The grip of cold hands on his shoulders tightened. “We-”

“-know-”

“-you heard.”

He swallowed hard, feeling a panic attack coming on, blooming in his chest like a slow motion shockwave. “D-down the h-hall, 4-zeta. On the right.”

She scratched her head, staring straight through him as she mulled that over. “If main power is cut, what’s the time lag between it and the emergency generators kicking in?”

Was he selling them all out? He imagined he was, but right now there were only three of them loose, and three beings weren’t enough to take over a base as populated and prepared as this.  Mitchell must have alerted the whole building by now.  He just had to stall until help arrived. “Uh, about t-twenty seconds.”

Her eyes flicked to the girls behind him. “Can you get into the control room and neutralize whoever’s there in twenty seconds?”

“We-”

“-could-”

“-do it-”

“- in ten.”

“Don’t get cocky.” The green woman suddenly grabbed him by the collar of his uniform jacket, and her grip was like iron. “Now, boy-o, you’re gonna help me cut the power.”

He licked his dry lips, and asked, with more courage than he certainly felt, “What if I don’t?”

She nodded her head in the direction of the twins. “I let them play with you.”

“Yes-”

“-please.”

He didn’t think he was ever going to have a twins fantasy ever again in his entire life, assuming he lived through the next several minutes.

13

Logic would dictate that once you got to a certain pain threshold, you would lose consciousness.  But logic, as it turned out, was just another liar.

Angel felt bruised inside and out, stomped flat, a loose bag of flesh full of broken glass. He’d been gagging on his own blood for the last few minutes - if only minutes had passed. He didn’t know; it could have been years. Time was already fucked up in this place, anyway.

Several members of the angry mob picked him up and lifted him over their heads, like he was a body surfer in a mosh pit. But they didn’t pass him around, they just held him up, and he knew why: they were showing the Senior Partner their handy work.  He would have moved, fought back or tried to slip out of their grasp, but it hurt to just exist at this point.

“What a whipped dog you are,” the Partner scoffed dismissively. “You're not even putting up a fight.”

He tried to laugh, but the best he could do was cough up a little blood. “No good to you then, am I?”

“Not with a guilt complex, no. But that can be fixed.”

He could still feel tears on his face, but now they were liberally diluted with blood, and pain was probably the reason his eyes were still watering this time. “If you know me like you claim to, you’d realize why you never want a pit bull like Angelus working for you. He will screw you over and sell you out the first chance he gets. If he can’t run the show, he will ruin it.  He is egotistical and mephistophelean - you know, your usual charmer, just of like your kind.”

“Which you should know, since it’s your true face.”

Angel closed his eyes and swallowed back another gout of blood, but he hurt so much he couldn’t possibly hurt any more. “No.”

“What was that you gurgled?”

“I said no.” He opened his eyes again, a spark of anger giving him the courage to do at least that. “I have met men with souls who do evils anyway - I have even killed some. A soul is not enough. When I was Human, I wouldn’t have won any prizes as a humanitarian, but I didn’t go out of my way to hurt anyone; it never occurred to me to kill someone because I was bored.”

“No, you got drunk and whored around, pausing for fist fights and vomiting.”

“None of which makes me a killer. A flawed Human being, a disappointment to my family, even a waste of space?  Sure. But not that. Being a loser is not the same as being a butcher, and it never will be. What do you want me to say? That I was a lousy Human being, that I was a fuck up before the term was even invented, that if I was born some two centuries later I would have been just another frat boy at some Midwestern party college?  Fine, yes - I deserved to lose my humanity because I was such a poor excuse for a Human. But I was never a born killer, and I will not take the blame for the actions of this bastard demon inside of me, who deserves all the shit you can throw at him.”

The Partner applauded lazily, imperiously arching an eyebrow. “Bravo. What do they say on those dreadful American talk shows? ‘You go, girl’.  Hate to break it to you, Liam, but you don’t exist anymore. You’re aware of that, aren’t you?”

“Why do you think I changed my name?”

“Ah, I see. Neither Liam nor Angelus, just Angel. Not very inventive.”

“It’s good enough.”

“Yes, but you see the flaw, don’t you? You’re a hybrid. The demon can survive without you, but you can’t survive without it. Without the demon, you’re half a being.”

“I’ll live.”

“Will you? You’re not even alive now.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Do I?  I’m not so sure about that.” He sighed dramatically, adding, “I hope this little glimmer of self-awareness has been cathartic for you, bec -” He abruptly snapped his head toward the distance, and snarled, “What the hell is that?”

Previously nonexistent doors of the banquet hall burst open, and Angel heard without seeing (he couldn’t see anything from this angle) several things whoosh through the air, followed by several dull thuds - something slamming hard into meat.

Chaos ensued, much screaming, and the Partner yelled, in a basso profundo so deep it would have made James Earl Jones weep like a little girl, “How dare you violate my space!”

The noises didn’t stop, and the crowd finally dropped him unceremoniously.  Hitting the gemstone floor the second time, he saw stars and wondered if the Partner had put in this floor specifically just to make it extra unpleasant for anyone who happened to fall.

When he could see again, Angel noticed, even from his awkward angle, that several of the people around him had suddenly dissolved into black mist, curls of smoke-like energy that wafted up that dissipated in the atmosphere. He was watching as Doyle took a silver disc in the chest, and exploded into black.

“Who the hell are you?” the Partner snapped, sounding offended.

“I’m Lady Blood,” came the surprising reply. “On the Earth plane, I’m the vampire equivalent of a rock star - I’m surprised you don’t know me.” He could see her now, through, the haze of black smoke. She wore a black leather cat suit, something that wouldn’t have been out of place in Emma Peel’s closet, and had both bandoleers full of throwing stars crisscrossed over her torso, and sabers in gleaming scabbards on both hips, with the hilt of a much bigger sword sticking out over her left shoulder. “Ammit sends her love.” With that, she lobbed a handful of throwing stars in his direction.

“You fucking bitch.” The stars seemed to dissolve as soon as they came within a foot of him, but Yasha continued darting around the room like a deranged mouse, tossing out throwing stars with enviable accuracy and thinning out the dead of his mind at a rapid pace.  Ammit was the death goddess that Yasha had ended up with, he remembered that, and he knew she must have done something to the weapons she was using (then again, the dead were her charges; perhaps she was simply calling them home) to make them so instantly effective. “Tell Ammit to go to her brother’s hell.”

The Partner waved his hand and Yasha crumpled as if hit, sliding across the floor until she collided with him, an instant and unwelcome new pain. Angel didn’t understand why she would be helping him, why Ammit would even care, unless she had a grudge against the Partners (it was possible - gods had many levels of soap operas going on, and it was a full time job trying to keep track of them all), or … maybe someone else had asked her to get involved.

Yasha rolled over with a groan, blood dribbling from the corner of her mouth, but he realized up close he could smell god on her. Not just Ammit, although it was more than probable that was the odd dead leaf and ozone smell emanating from her; but he could also smell Bob on her, a scent like blood and clean water. She looked him straight in the eye, and he heard a clink, her knives bumping against the jeweled floor, but also something hot fell against his arm, smoldering like an ember. “In the heart,” she whispered under her breath. “All the way through; it won’t work otherwise.”

Before he could ask, she jumped back up to her feet and pulled out her sword, continuing the assault against the remaining specters, who were helpless against her; she cut them down like reeds.  Angel surreptitiously palmed the long, slender knife she’d given him, sliding it up his sleeve in spite of the fact that it burned his skin. It was more than simply blessed; something about this knife was almost unbearably toxic, like the heart of the sun had been encased inside the metal.

“Get the hell out of my world,” the Partner roared.

“Eat me, ugly,” she replied, throwing one of her sabers.  It punched through his throat, a direct hit.

But it did no appreciable damage. His black eyes roiled with fury, and he pulled the sword out of his throat, the skin sealing over instantaneously, not even losing a drop of blood.  It must have been an expression of his fury, because the saber burst into black flame, dissolving like wood. “Die,” he roared.

His rage was unfocused, and everything between him and Yasha burst into black particulates, while Yasha herself went up in a hot, brief black flame; not even dust was left behind as it consumed her whole.

The Partner turned his burning eyes on him. “Do you have something you want to try, Angel?”