“You’re insane, blood bag,” the woman spat, cocking the gun. “Coming here to kill us in our own home -”

“He’s got brass balls the size of the Elgin Marbles,” the man agreed and, this time, he emerged from the shadows, coming up behind the woman. He was a tall, broad shouldered black man with a faint Cockney accent, even though he had what looked like traditional tribal scarring on his cheeks and across his nose.   He was not in vamp face, but he was clearly a vampire - and clearly the man in charge.  “Which explains why Blood would use him.”  He deftly plucked the gun from the woman’s hand, much to her obvious shock.

“You’re 'H', I assume?”

“Hashim Hassan. I presume you’ve heard of me.”

“Oh sure,” Logan lied, hoping he didn’t put him to the test on it.

“You know, your blood smells … unusual,” he said, tucking the gun in the back of his pants. The woman stood off to the side, crossing her arms over her chest and looking righteously pissed, and light glinted off a gold band on her finger. A wedding ring? It looked like it - and it looked like a match for the one Hashim was wearing. A married vampire couple? Well, why the hell not? “Did Blood send you alone?”

“No -”

“- she -”

“- did not -”

“- so back -”

“- off. You break -”

“- him, you bought -”

“- him.” The Sisters said, coming down the stairs.

There was a noise like a collective gasp, and even Hashim took a couple of steps back, as if serious bad news had just entered the room. Well, it had, so that made sense. “You work with Blood now?” H asked warily.

“We -”

“- work -”

“- for whoever -”

“ - we want -”

“- whenever we want.”

“Which goes for me as well,” Helga said, following them down. “But I know my rep doesn’t precede me, so you don’t have any idea who the fuck I am.”

“We’re here to fight, not chat,” Ammy snapped, bringing up the rear.

Logan could feel the Sisters standing right behind him, flanking him,
...so close they were making his flesh crawl.  But, on the positive side, this made the other vampires back up a bit more.   Was there no one who wasn’t afraid of them?  (Well, they should be, but still … )

“No wonder you weren’t afraid,” Hashim commented dryly.  Logan could now see all the vampires in the room -  there were maybe about two dozen, all different races and ages (though mostly in the late teens to mid-twenties), and most were out of vampire face now, possibly in a show of submission to the Sisters.

Logan sheathed the sword and swung it around to his back once more. “I wouldn’t have been anyway.”

Hashim’s nostrils flared, and his eyes seemed to settle on Ammy.  From the look on his face, he knew she didn’t smell right, but he also knew better than to comment on it.  “Blood has our allegiance, which you obviously know.  So why are you here?  Are the Three Dragons making
a move on London?”

“In a way.  They've enlisted major help, and it looks like we may have to meet them head-on.”

“Major help?” The Pakistani woman echoed suspiciously.  Out of vamp face, she was kind of pretty.  “Like who?”

“Kali.”

This resulted in an exchange of several puzzled looks between the vampire clan, and finally the oldest vampire of the lot, an elegant looking brunette in her late thirties or early forties, with her swept
up in a demur knot, asked, “Do you mean the Hindu goddess?”

Logan nodded. “One and the same.”

“Holy shit,” a young Asian male vampire exclaimed.   He sounded so Scottish he could have been related to Billy Connolly.

The woman who could have been Hashim’s wife shook her head in disbelief. “We’re so fucked.  Why would they do that?”

“Everything can be beaten,” Hashim noted serenely.  Logan was almost starting to like him. “If it exists, it can be killed.  The question is how. And I believe that falls into your court, Camilla.”

The older woman nodded, revealing herself as Camilla. “I suppose.” She had a clipped, upper class accent that pretty much screamed Oxford.

Logan raised an eyebrow. “Why does it fall to you?”

She raised her eyebrow almost mockingly. “Because I used to be a Watcher, that’s why.  I guess I picked a good time to get turned, considering that the Council is dead now.”

Picked?  Was she saying she chose to be a vampire?  He almost asked, but decided that was far off the subject.  But it did explain why a nearly middle-aged vamp was hanging around with a bunch of blood sucking teeny boppers - she was probably the brains of the operation.  “There has to be some kinda demon that can at least remain unaffected by her powers. Like, what about Berserkers?”

She shook her head. “No, Kali is extremely powerful, and Berserkers are just as vulnerable as everything else.”  She stared up at the ceiling in thought, arms crossed over her chest, as she worked over possibilities. Logan watched a muscle in her jaw twitch, as if this scenario was so bad she was about to vamp out in abject fear.

“Well, on the positive side, at least we know what it takes to scare Berserkers,” Hel commented.

“I can scare Berserkers,” Logan pointed out.

“Only if they know you've killed some.  And even then, they’re so stupid they wouldn’t believe you had.”

Logan found himself the focus of several startled, scrutinizing glances. “You’ve killed a Berserker?” Hashim asked, keeping his tone neutral.

“A couple, actually.  Who’s counting?”

“Bollocks,” another female vampire said.

But Logan held Hashim’s challenging gaze, and finally the vampire blinked first. “No, Tessa, I think he’s being truthful, believe it or not.”

“That’s not possible.  How could a Human kill a Berserker?”

“How could a Human be Blood’s envoy?” Hashim replied, appraising him with new respect. “You can smell his blood; he’s clearly not an average sheep.”

“He might be more likable if he was,” Ammy grumbled under her breath.

“The children,” Camilla suddenly interjected, apropos of seemingly nothing. “The children of Kali.  She’s one of those gods whose offspring have an immunity running through their bloodline. Still, I would say we’d need to make contact with a demon god of equal or greater power if we didn’t want Kali to swat us down like flies.”

“She’ll handle the god stuff for us,” Logan said, pointing at Amaranth behind him, although he hadn’t bothered to look.  It was possible he
was just pointing at the wall.  “But who are these children of Kali?  Where can we find them?  And will they want to beat down their matriarch?”

Camilla pushed her hand through her hair, almost dislodging her up-do, but not quite.  It looked like she was accustomed to having glasses to straighten, but being a vampire had made them unnecessary. (Well, how many near sighted vampires were there?)  “The children of Kali have historically been rejected by the divine as worse than half-breeds - they have no love for the god partially responsible for spawning them.  That will not be a problem.”

It was the way she paused, the trepidation on her face, that made him ask, “What will be a problem?”

The Scottish vampire asked her quietly, “Who’re these “children of Kali” anyways?  I’ve never ‘eard of ‘em.”

She sighed, which was pretty impressive considering vampires didn’t breathe, and answered her vampire companion’s question first.   “I believe they’re known as the Vilkacis.”

A shockwave of horrified reactions seemed to ripple throughout he room, and Logan heard even Helga gasp behind him.  “What?” he asked, directing the question at anyone who would answer it.  “Who are these things?  They don't sound familiar...”

“Be glad,” Watcher vamp told him, adopting a tone of voice he’d heard Wes use before.  They must have been taught that in Watcher school. “They’re a vicious type of shape-shifter.  Unlike werewolves, they can control their transformations, and they are in full control of their faculties … to a certain degree.  It’s said that their evil god nature is more prevalent in their assumed form, though.”

“Shape-shifters?” Logan made a dismissive noise.  “I ain’t gotta problem handling shape-shifters.  Or werewolves either.”

“Trust me, young man, werewolves could only wish they were that … powerful.  These are beings of a divine bloodline, remember.   And a rather unstable bloodline at that.”

“Yeah, well, I gotta divinity card I can play.  So what’s the big deal?  We tell ‘em their mean old grandmother is back and ripe for an ass kicking. That shouldn’t -”

“The Vilkacis are extraordinarily arrogant,” Camilla interrupted, looking down her nose at him like he was an impudent student. “They don’t mix with lessers, which is everyone who isn’t them.   And on top of that, they’re extraordinarily violent.  Consider, for a moment, the irony of a vampire saying that.  They live shut away from everyone and everything except when they emerge to feed or fight, and they don‘t take kindly to outsiders.”

Logan shrugged. “So?  We’ll just bust down the door and make ‘em listen.”

But Camilla was already shaking her head, long before he finished his sentence. “They won’t listen; that’s not their way.”

“Well, then what is their way?”

She threw her hands up in frustration. “Maybe ritual combat.  But we won’t last two seconds against demi-gods, thank you very much.”

“Not without a little divine intervention of our own,” Helga pointed out.

“Leave that to me,” Logan insisted. “I'll make 'em listen.”

Hashim cocked his head, studying him intently.  Clearly he couldn’t decide if this human was insane or just completely stupid.  “How, pray tell?”

Logan met his gaze straight on, and wasn’t able to keep the smirk off his face. “They’ve never met a Human ‘til they’ve met me.”

And if it was a fight they wanted, boy, he'd give 'em the fight of their lives.

17

Hashim began to assemble the rest of his people, while Ammy and Hel got to work on contacting any gods who would bother to talk to them, with a reluctant Camilla tagging along.  Logan, for his part, sought out a Buddhist temple.

He found a nice one in Northeast London, small but humble as opposed to ramshackle, and after a polite greeting to one of the monks in the main sanctuary, he wandered back to their garden.

It was small by necessity, with English trees and plants dominating what was supposed to be a Japanese style garden, with a wooden bench near a gravel path that encircled a small pond.  The delicate sounds of running water, wind through the trees, and bird song blocked out the majority of the traffic noise on the streets beyond.

The bench wasn’t wildly comfortable, but he sat down on it, folding his legs up into a lotus position and resting his hands on his knees, classic meditation style.  It was amazing how easy it was for him to do this; it was like he had always known how, even though he couldn’t remember learning.  Oh hell, what could he remember learning?

He had given some thought to what Yasha had said, about Bob probably leaving him some “key” to his power, but what could it be?  Knowing Bob and his dubious sense of humor, it would have to be something Bob wanted him to do, something Logan wouldn’t necessarily be inclined to do.  Although that honestly left a lot of things open, his first thought was Bob would probably be pleased if he just chilled out or got introspective - and he had his answer.

To meditate properly you had to completely clear your mind, which really wasn’t that easy to do, but there was a trick to it of sorts.   He concentrated on his breathing, which he slowed gradually - in through the nose, out through the mouth, in and out, serene and autonomic.  He could feel his heartbeat vibrating his entire body like a drum.   He was silence, he was the wind, he was inexorable and inevitable, like the tide.

(It was hard to believe some of this shit, but he turned his brain - and logic - off as best he could.)

He was nothingness, his heartbeat and respiration were like the ticking of a clock, and he did his best to ignore the sunlight attempting to bleed through his eyelids and concentrated on the inner darkness.

As time didn’t exist in a void, he had no idea how long it took, or how long he was exploring the Zen idea of nothingness. But eventually there was a sudden transition - darkness to whiteness, a place of endless light.

Snow?  Yes, it was snow reflecting sunlight in a rolling field of snowdrifts, with skeletal black trees ringing the near horizon, frosted with ice.  Against the far horizon, mountains loomed like massive monoliths.  Even though he was ankle deep in snow, he wasn’t cold; what little chill he felt was undoubtedly psychosomatic.

“See, I knew you’d find me eventually,” Bob said cheerfully.   He was standing beneath a snow-frosted Ponderosa pine, leaning against the trunk, dressed incongruously in his warm weather gear of leather pants and a blue muscle shirt that featured a silkscreen of the movie poster for “Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” on the front.

“You couldn’t just tell me there was a secret decoder ring involved?” Logan snapped, scowling at him and their surroundings. “Why snow?”

Bob shrugged, shoving himself away from the tree.  “You’ve always seemed like a tundra kinda guy to me.  It’s one of the hardest places to fight, you know?  In snow.  ‘Cause everything shows, every footstep, every displacement, and if you aren’t as albino as a brand new urinal, you’ll stick out like a sore thumb.  Takes a special kinda guy to actually excel in an environment this hostile.”

Logan raised an eyebrow at this, wondering what point he was going to eventually get to, but his anger was aborted when he realized he was overlooking a pretty major issue. “Are you actually *here*?  Are you - I mean, am I talking to you?”

“Yes and no.  You’re talking to what I left behind.  Consider me a built-in program guide.”  The Bob “program” then grimaced.  “Shit’s hit the fan again, hasn’t it?”

“Big time.”

“Yeah, see, that’s why I left you this.  Figured you might have need of it someday.”

“Okay, so how do I make it work exactly?  What exactly can I do with it, beyond making telepaths' brains drip out their ears?”

The Bob simulacrum swept his hand out towards the icy field, and suddenly a small pond appeared, as blue as Bob’s blood.  “Well, if we had time, I could teach you how to do a lot of the neat stuff I can do,  but we don’t have time, do we?”

“No.  As soon as Ammy throws a location spell, I have to go fight a bunch of vicious demi-gods who can’t be trusted to be honorable enough not to try an’ kill me even if I do follow the laws of their
people.”

Bob gave him one of his famous shit-eating grins. “There’s little honor among gods, mate.  I thought you knew that by now.”

“I’m learnin’.  So what do I need to know?”  He edged forward to get a better look at the pond, but remained wary, because his sense of smell seemed to pretty much be malfunctioning in this “mindscape”; all he smelled was snow, so he wasn’t sure if it was actual blood or not.

Bob pointed at the pool of blue, and said, “This is representative of the power I left in you.  Let it in.”

“Huh?”

“I kept it separate from you, ‘cause even a little power can overwhelm if you’re not ready for it.  But if you accept it fully, you can bring down the walls yourself.”

Logan glared at him. “I have no fucking idea what you’re talking about.”

Bob sighed and shook his head, giving him a small, melancholy smile. “Would it help to point out, since we’re in your sub-conscious, that almost everything here is metaphorical?”

“Oh yeah.” He supposed that made a bit more sense.  Logan sighed and approached the pool with reluctance, but if it was a metaphor, it wasn’t for blood - it was power, energy, oddly quiescent, but still nothing more than that.  He knelt down, and reached toward it, braced to feel … well, something; a jolt, static electricity, something.  But when he touched it, he felt nothing but surface tension.  It was plain water?

Well, of course it was water.  This was metaphor city, and being energy would have been too straightforward.  It was cool water too, as cold as melted ice, and still that unrealistic blue, even when he cupped some in the palm in his hand.  “There’s gotta be more of a trick to it than just simply letting it in,” Logan grumbled, staring into the water in his hand.

“The power works solely by intuition, which is a bloody good thing, as I’d never have learned to use it otherwise.  Now this is just a little bit of my powers, so you ain’t gonna be able to teleport or warp reality, but you should be able to hold your own against a bunch of punk ass demi-gods.”

“Well...here goes nothin’,” he said, then drank the water in his hand.  It was cold and sent a shiver down his spine, but that was it.  Seriously? He wasn’t going to have to drink the entire pond, was he?

Then, he felt it.

It was like his nerves were fuses, and they'd all been lit.  He could feel them surging to life, from the anahata chakra center and then outward, but while it was startling, powerful and almost hot, it wasn’t even close to painful.  If anything, it was … not quite pleasurable, but close; it made him feel instantly lighter, full of light.  Full of energy, as a matter of fact.

“It’s a trip, ain’t it?” Bob said, grinning like the Cheshire Cat.

Before he could respond, Logan opened his eyes and found himself back in the real world, which had changed irrevocably.

Scratch that.  It hadn’t changed...he had.

He looked at his hands, almost expecting to see blue energy pulsing beneath his skin, haloed around his fingers, but he didn’t.  Still, he could almost see through his own flesh, see the energy pulsing through his veins, piggybacking on his blood.  And he knew, if he concentrated, he could see through everything, the trees, the grass, the sky, and see its constituent energy, its true life blood.  He felt strong enough to punch through a mountain.

Good.  That meant the battle was already half won.

18

There was a place in southeast Kazakhstan, in the western part of the Tian Shan mountain range, where people never ventured.  Even when it was a part of the Soviet Union, the Russians never went there either.

It wasn’t that it was far up in the mountains - no, it was well below
the snow line, which in relatively dry Kazakhstan was above eleven thousand feet.  It was a relatively remote area, though, one that could only be reached via a series of wildly diverging paths and extremely rugged terrain, although that had never stopped nomads or surveyors, or the miners who ripped minerals out of the rock.  Rather, superstition had existed for presumably thousand of years that this particular area was cursed; that people who ventured into it were never seen again, or, if they did come back, were never the same again.  Their minds were somehow damaged; they came back raving lunatics, and never lived for long afterward.  In fact, they often went missing, and it was believed they were carried off in the night, or perhaps consumed by the demons that infected their soul.  No one went there, and supposedly some of the people who lived near the mountains used it as a threat against their children, to behave or they would send them there, never to return.

Logan wondered if the very name of the range, Tian Shan, was a hint.
In Chinese, it translated to “celestial mountains”.  Perhaps something meant to be taken literally was assumed to be figurative.  It bothered him that he was starting to take the world more literally now.

But the moment he had entered the small cleft of the valley, he felt
it. The energy here was...weird, like high voltage wires spitting their radiance into the ether, the molecules clotting together into a form of energy almost tangible enough to feel pressing up against you.   It wasn’t just the hairs on his arms that stood on end, but his skin almost thrummed with the power.  He could taste it in the air, along with the dust and grit a hard wind kicked up, as if just for him.

It was night, the sky above the gash in the mountains a deep blue-black, the stars like fragments of glass shattered against the firmament, and Logan could stare up far enough that he felt like he was falling into it - even while he knew now that for all its seeming eternity, it was hollow, a fragment of a blanket that spread throughout this universe and beyond, into other realities, other universes, everywhere else but here.

Oh fuck, these powers would give him a headache if he wasn't careful.

Ahead of him should have been a huge rock wall, reaching to eighty feet in height, sheer enough that climbing was impossible, with enough jagged scree in the valley that it made even the thought of an attempt a death sentence.  And while the wall was there, he could see something like a halo of energy, pinkish-white, like blood diluted in milk, echoing
its shape.   A harder stare revealed it to be some kind of spell, as see-through to him now as a bad hologram.  There were noises as well,  from inside the … what, cavern?  He could see that the illusion hid the open entrance to what looked like some grand hall, although whatever furniture and creatures were there had been reduced to shadowy globs in the light of strange green orbs that clung to the high walls like moss.

He didn’t know how to undo the spell, so he didn’t bother to try.  But he did know he could walk through it, despite the coalescing of energy, becoming a force trying to actively push him back.  Luckily, whatever powers Bob had left him were much stronger than this spell, and he walked on, feeling Bob’s energy like a fever, his skin warm and his eyes burning.

He walked through the wall, and it felt like walking through dry,
partially set cement.  When he came out on the other side - the inside - absolutely none the worse for wear,  the boisterous noises that had been thundering through the hall stopped so abruptly it was like someone had turned off the switch.  He felt dozens upon dozens of eyes on him, and he realized that he had walked in on some kind of party - long tables were set with various foods; some human, many actually human pieces (oh yum), and wooden benches ringed the wall as floor pillows were strewn over the stone floor in anticipation of the orgy to come.  The partygoers looked Human, although his nose instantly rejected the theory, and with the new power coursing through his
veins, he could see that they all seemed to bleed that same color of pinkish-white energy as the exterior glamour had.

The silence was equally stunned and hostile.  He scanned the room for any sign of a leader, saing “I’ve come to speak with you about K - ”

And that was as far as he got before the crowd seemed to roar as a single entity, their rage buffeting him like a psychic gale, and sudden activity happened on either side him that pulled his attention in several directs at once.

Four of these 'people' stood up - three men so muscular they could have been bodybuilders, one woman who was muscled but far sleeker than her male counterparts - and started to approach him, walking much like he walked: shoulders back, head down, eyes forward.  In other words, they didn’t so much walk as stalk.

And as they did, they transformed.

It was so rapid, Mystique would have been impressed, although the fact that actual physical bones could be heard snapping may have turned her off.  He heard skin tearing as their muscles suddenly swelled, and their skin seemed to disappear, submerge beneath fine, small black and brown scales or beneath a smooth alabaster like marble.  They each transformed uniquely, into something different from their counterparts, but it all occurred in the span of a single step.

One man’s head looked like it had turned inside out as a new head quickly emerged, something like a huge crocodile with a large mouth full of slender teeth that glowed pinkish-white, while the woman suddenly grew talons as large as grizzly bear paws and launched into the air as razor tipped wings sprung from her back, splattering blood on the stone.  The other man had become vaguely lupine, with a muzzle
full of jagged stone shards for teeth, while the last morphed into a more feline entity, with a slit opening on his naked torso - no, not a slit, but a second hungry mouth.  And as Logan did his best to keep an eye on all of them, more of the children of Kali got up and started to move in.  Far too many, suffocating him with their hot and malevolent energy;  it slammed against the Bob energy surrounding him like a tidal wave against a sea wall, and he wasn’t sure it would hold.

Okay - this wasn’t good.