As a long claw swept down towards his face, he popped his claws and met it half way, slicing clean through a muscular arm as thick as a tree branch. There was a high pitched scream as blackish red blood splattered all over, and it seemed like a million different clawed and serrated limbs swarmed him, radiant with divine energy. He just kept slashing wildly, kicking out at anything, trying to make himself some room to move. “Back the fuck off,” he roared, as talons ripped the skin on his back, and needle teeth bit through his calf. “I’m only here to talk, you fuckheads!”

His rage made blue creep into the edges of his vision, and the mongrel horde actually recoiled, giving him some room to breathe. He wanted to believe it was all the damage he had physically inflicted, but he knew that wasn’t it - he’d done something with his Bob energy. What he had no idea, but it got their attention. “Will you just listen to me?! Yeah, I’m like one o’ you, so we can fight if you want! I don’t give a fuck!”

The vulture like child of Kali swooped down at him, screeching like a banshee and flexing its huge talons, but he just pulled Yasha’s sword out of its sheathe and threw it, nailing it through the chest. It dropped to the floor like a sack of power tools, and the rest of the crowd seemed to get even angrier. The feline freak lunged at him, and someone tackled him from behind, grabbing him around the knees. It was good strategy to make him a Logan sandwich, but he’d be fucked if it actually worked.

He stabbed out as he went down, ripping through the feline thing’s face, but he had to retract his claws so he could catch himself without accidentally cutting his own face to hell. The thing around his legs clamored up his back, razor sharp claws tearing up his skin as it climbed him, and as soon as he felt its hot breath working its way towards his neck, he threw back an elbow and hit something hard enough that he felt blood as hot as coffee splash his back and scald him.

Okay, that was it.

He focused his rage in his mind and roared, jumping to his feet and turning into a kick that just about caved the lupine’s skull in. He spun back on the advancing horde, seen through a curious filter of red and blue, and shouted, “Get back!”

Again, something happened, but this time he felt it leave him like a shockwave, and several of the Vilkacis’ fell backwards, others behind them stumbling as the circle of freaks around him widened somewhat. And they were freaks - he saw vaguely humanoid forms that were reptilian and feline, amphibious and canine, avian and insect, sometimes all in the same being at once: these were shapeshifters of a higher order. They were not limited to a single form at once, or constrained by the laws of physics. They were shedding power that now had a raw and fiery cast, and felt like sandpaper scraping against all his senses. He thought about protecting himself with Bob’s energy, using it like a shield, and it seemed to lessen somewhat. Psychosomatic, or was he finally starting to get the hang of these damn powers?

“What misbegotten offspring are you?” A woman’s voice demanded.

Logan looked up to see a woman in a throne made of rock, about forty feet off the ground. She looked like she was wearing not precisely clothes but gold paint, and on her head was piled about a half dozen snakes all coiled up and very still. Maybe it was a crown of some sort, or maybe it was her; her eyes were gold and slit pupiled, and it was impossible to tell from this distance if she was half reptile or what. He just assumed from her high placement and the natural arrogance in her voice and posture that she was the big cheese around here. “I’m no one’s offspring,” he replied angrily, before he realized exactly what he was saying. Oh well - in a way, it was true. “I’m the avatar of the Drai’shajan, and I demand a chance to speak!”

The restless and angry crowd murmured and scoffed, while others gasped. The woman above barely even deigned to cock her head to the side. “The Fallen One? Has he passed?”

He knew she meant died. Curious how quaint she made it, though. “Well, he’s passed his powers on to me, hasn’t he?” There was no better way to duck an issue than to answer a question with another question.

It was almost impossible how much contempt she managed to get into a single glance. “I have no desire to listen to the nattering of some Fallen also ran - ”

“This concerns Kali.”

More gasps, but mostly of disbelief. The woman glared down at him, inner eyelids nictitating shut. “What of her?”

“She’s back, and I thought you might want to get in on the ass kicking.”

“Back? On this plane?”

“No, the fourteenth dimension,” he snapped, rolling his eyes. “Jesus.”

“You’re lying,” she replied simply. “We’d have known if she came back.”

“How?”

That made her arch an eyebrow at him, and he thought he saw her hair shift, as if making itself more comfortable. “Do we answer to you?”

“Check whatever it is you check again. It’s changed. Or do you really think I had nothing better to do with my day than come here and slice up you jerk offs?”

That made the crowd rumble in disapproval, and Logan realized the people whose limbs (or other bits) he had sliced off were growing them back again, slowly but obviously. So was that a trick among the semi-evil? Good thing he learned that now.

The woman with the crown of snakes made a vague hand gesture, like a model showing off the dimensions of a new freezer, and said somewhat listlessly, “What does the oracle say?”

He had no idea if that was a person or a thing, but he waited, eying the horde still surrounding him. Maybe two dozen and some change, all morphed into their freaky deaky forms, with glowing eyes and brighter energy auras, all of them looking at him like he was dinner on the hoof. A friend of the winged thing pulled the sword out of her chest, an her wings fluttered weakly as she started to recover. Should he wait to ask for his sword back?

Finally, a voice echoed from the back of the cave, “The hairs are black. She has returned.”

Everyone sucked in a hard gasp as if punched in the gut. (The hairs were black? Hairs of what? Did he even want to know?) The snake woman looked down at him sharply, as if this was somehow his fault, and asked, “Where is she?”

He shrugged with his bloody hands, so she could see the gesture from up there. “We’re tryin’ to narrow it down. She can throw up some powerful screens.”

She snorted in disgust, looking away at the mongrel horde. “Amateurs. We can find her; she is of us.”

“So why isn’t she here?” He knew asking such a thing would infuriate the crowd, and it did. They hissed like a massive agglomeration of enraged cats, and he saw the raising of spikes, the unfurling of wings, and the wet slap of slithering tentacles on stone.

The snake woman glowered down at him, but her people remained where they were, snarling yet at bay. “She is a coward. It is none of your concern, cretin.”

Now he was a cretin? He felt like he was moving up in the world. “If you wanna work with us, I suggest you put a kibosh on the name-callin’.”

“Work with you? We don’t need you.”

Wow - these guys were even more arrogant than Magneto and the Organization combined. “Oh yeah? What do you think Kali will do when she picks up on your energy? Well, she’s a coward, so that’s an easy guess, isn’t it?”

There was no way for the crowd to actually get more hostile, and yet it did; he could feel they hate like a physical thing, the pricking of a thousand needles. The snake woman continued her glare, but it was losing some of its luster. “Very well. Who is it that you work for?”

Man - he wished he had a good answer for that.

19

He let the phone ring a dozen times, and never picked it up. When it started ringing again, Cole forced himself to pick it up, even though he knew no good could come of whatever was on the end of the line.

“Yeah?” He croaked, his throat feeling dry. He had tired of trying to see patterns in the water stains on the ceiling of his cheap motel room, but they all looked like distorted faces; screaming, crying, yelling, melting. He wondered if they were damned souls burnt into the very woodwork, or just an oblique sort of warning.

“Wolverine has been spotted in London,” the woman who called herself Wu said. She never had told him her real name, had she? Maybe she didn’t have one - he had no idea if she was actually human or not. “Are you ready to travel?”

He sighed, closing his eyes so he didn’t have to look at the stains of faces above him. “I - I don’t think I can do this anymore.”

“Your siege on the mansion was mostly a success -”

“I didn’t realize … the guise they take. And it was so strong. It really hurt me. I just stopped bleeding a couple of hours ago.” He was still a little weak, which was why he was laying down. It was a good thing he really didn’t need blood to survive, not with the cherubim in his system, but still it was disturbing to see your own blood - sparkling and alive with the residue of cherubim - cascading out of you, gushing out of your body like it actually had somewhere else to go.

She sighed heavily, as if he was being unreasonable. “Cole, you were warned they were tricky, as well as powerful.”

“Yeah, but … a kid? It looked like a kid.”

“Most of them there look like kids. It’s disguised as a private school.”

“I know, but …” He didn’t even know how to explain it. On the surface, part of him was unnerved by nearly being defeated by what appeared to be a kid, while another part of him was unsettled by having to actually hurt the kid, no matter what the fuck he actually was. Wolverine was one thing - he deserved whatever he got. But who had that kid been? Had he ever existed? Or was he never anything but a well constructed demon god guise? He wished he knew for sure, one way or another. “I just don’t think I can take on Wolverine. I think I underestimated the other side.”

There was a brief pause before she replied in a voice silky with menace, “It’s too late to be a chickenshit, Cole. We offered you salvation in exchange for your service, and you haven’t lived up to your end of the bargain yet. Backing out is not an option.”

“Yeah, but -”

“Would you like the cherubim to be stronger?”

He wasn’t completely sure what she was saying there. “Huh?”

“We can give them a boost, so when you’re afraid, they can take over. Would you like that?”

He had to think about it a moment. It sounded kind of good, removing all responsibility from him. But did he really want something else taking over his body, even if it was the cherubim? “Do I have a choice?” He wondered.

“Of course you do, Cole. But we can’t have you failing us.”

The only way to interpret that was to assume that if he fucked up once more, there would be no more choice involved - they would do it, and he’d be stuck. So maybe he should exercise some free will while he had the chance. “Fine. How do we do this thing?”

“Just stand by. We’ll have our teleported bring you back here before sending you on to England. You’ll feel born again.” She snickered at her own joke.

“Anything’s better than feeling dead again,” he replied, although he wondered if that was true.  He was starting to think that maybe he’d never felt truly alive at all.

****

The minute he was brought back to England by Amaranth, Logan discovered he had teleported right into the middle of an argument.
“ - if we did that!” Ammy shouted at Camilla. “No fuckin’ way!”

They had moved their base of operations to a very musty smelling, dark library that Camilla had said was a secret off-site one kept by the Watcher’s Council, and little used since most of the Council had died and taken the information of its existence with it.  The caretaker of the arcane library was a ghost, one Anna Harkness, and Logan had thought it was a joke until he actually sensed her, and saw her shifting books around on a high shelf.  Well, he couldn’t 'see' her, exactly, but the Bob energy allowed him to see a kind of loose energy trail that may have been her.  She didn’t have a scent, although he thought he got a faint whiff of crushed violets when she was near.  Mostly, she just set off his sixth sense of proximity; someone in the room he couldn’t quite see or smell.  It was more annoying than creepy after awhile.

He tried to slink down the narrow aisle of slowly crumbling books, but Ammy exclaimed, “What the fuck happened to you?”

“The Vilkacis, I imagine,” Camilla commented dryly.

“You didn’t kill them all, did’ja?” Helga asked.  While Ammy and Camilla (Cammy?) were standing across from each other, Hel was sitting at a small table in the center of what could be considered a nook where several aisles converged.  She was reading a book with a Latin title, that translated out to, “So, You’ve Decided To Become A Demon Hunter”.

He faced the women with a sour grimace, and told them. “No.  But they’re sure a belligerent bunch, aren’t they?” Looking down at himself, he realized his shirt was just shredded, and there were several ugly gashes in his jeans, the edges of the rips dark with blood.  He really needed to invest in Kevlar clothing before taking on more demon/god things - this was getting ridiculous.

“Actually, that’s putting it mildly,” Cammy agreed, in that slightly patronizing, upper class Brit way of hers.  You could make a blueblood
a vampire, but apparently you couldn’t make the 'blueblood' go away. “But they have agreed to work with us?”

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t trust ‘em as far as I could make their heads fly.”

Ammy snorted in that dismissive, angry way of hers.  What a pair of generals: the upper class vampire Watcher and the punk Australian witch.  He could just smell the pending brawl. “They’re of god blood - of course you can’t trust ‘em.”

That made Cammy arch a perfectly shaped brow. “Does that include you, dearie?”

“As far as yer concerned, yeah.”

Hel cleared her throat, gaining all their attention. “Hey, don’t destroy the perfectly good myth that all women work together, okay?  Not in front of the male.” Hel then shifted her gaze to him.  “Aren’t you even gonna ask what this is about?”

“Hell, no.  I don’t get in the middle of women fighting; it’s a good way to die.”

Camilla crossed her arms over her chest, and turned her frosty gaze on him. “Well , isn’t that remarkably sexist?”

“Is it?  You’re a vampire, and she’s a witch.  I’m outgunned.”

“Not exactly,” Helga interjected. “You got Bob energy crawling all over you.”  He looked down at himself, to see if that was literal or not.  It wasn’t, but maybe it had been before he looked. “Hon, I can sense it; it wasn’t visible - I’ve been with Bob long enough that I can feel it.”

“Is that why he makes me want to cringe?” Camilla asked. “I thought it was just him.”

He scowled at her, then held his arms out, as if in surrender.  “Fine, darlin’.  Would you just like to get the sexual tension outta the way? ‘Cause I’ve had it dragged out on me before, and it didn’t end well.  Just let me get cleaned up, and you can ride me like a cowgirl, okay?”

Helga burst out laughing, and even Ammy turned away, biting her lower lip. Camilla’s face paled as her face set in a hideously angry mask, her eyes almost glowing with it.  It also looked like her browed furrowed, her skin rippling, like she was about to vamp out.  “You disgusting America pig -”

“Hey, Canadian pig, okay?  Or should I say “eh”?”

Hel was laughing helplessly now, and slammed the book shut, letting it fall on the table with a small thud.  Ammy had now clapped a hand over her mouth and turned away completely, but he could still hear her trying hard to stifle her giggles.  Cammy looked between the women, giving them a caustic glance, but neither noticed or cared.  She finally glared at him, jaw so taut he thought it might snap.  “I’m glad you got your cheap little joke.  But I will not be spoken to in that manner ever again, do you understand?  Or I’ll turn you into a bloody fucking sheep.”

He just shrugged. “Yeah sure, whatever.  So what the hell were you two arguing about anyway?”  Then he added, as an afterthought, “Eh?”

That set Helga off again, and she laughed so hard she almost choked. Camilla split her acrid gaze between them, her mouth thinning to a grim line, before she said, “My idea to call in a powerful god was dismissed casually by nincompoops who want to die.”

Ammy wheeled on her, no longer in good humor.  “ Listen you, if we try an’ call Yurugy, we’ll probably die anyways.  Or are you that thick?”

Camilla turned her ire on Ammy, sparing him and Hel.  “He is strong enough to take out Kali -”

“He’s a fucking unpredictable arsehole who will do whatever he feels like doing!  He is a hybrid chaos-death god!  He can’t be bound!”

“There’s a way to bind everything-”

“Not death gods, not chaos gods!  Jesus, what kinda Watcher were you?!”

Logan slunk over to the table where Helga was wiping tears out of her eyes, as Cammy and Ammy continued shouting at each other.  He had already tuned it out, as he didn’t know who this god was, but he (it?) sounded bad, and he was willing to trust Ammy’s judgment. Not only did he know her (whereas he didn’t know Camilla), but Ammy was by nature pretty fucking fearless - if she was balking at something, she must have had a pretty damn good reason.  “What’s your take on this?”  He whispered to Helga.

She gave him one of her famously sly, bad girl smiles, and whispered back, “I’ll ride you like a cowgirl.”

He smirked, trying not to laugh, even though he knew she was probably serious.  “And you’ll use your tail as a whip, right?”

“Only if you ask nicely.”

He pretended to tug on the collar of his shirt (it was pretty well shredded by now), and cleared his throat as the power struggle between Ammy and Cammy devolved into name calling. “Well, maybe later.  I meant about this callin’ on other gods.”

“Ahh, that.  I’m gonna try and get in touch with Moros, see if he can spot me again.  As for the rest of them …” She sighed wearily, running a hand through her fine green hair.  “Well, if we could summon Nehebkau, we might have a way to beat Kali down.”

“Nehebko?  That’s a new one on me.  What’s he do?”

“Actually it, it’s genderless.  Neheb is a snake demon god guardian of the underworld.”

“Not another death god.”

“No - it’s the guard of important beings in the underworld.  It doesn’t cause death:  Neheb is the god of infinite time.”

Oh man, he hated trying to keep track of all these gods.  “The god of time?”

She moved her head to the side in a half-shrug. “Kinda.  It’s really hard
to explain, and none of the books I’ve found so far have been remotely helpful.  But it can make death its bitch.   And Kali is the god of dissolution and destruction, right?  What is entropy but the inevitable movement of time?  Neheb could freeze Kali right up and rob her of her most vital powers … I think.”

“You think?”

She held up the musty old book she had been reading. “Mythology has fucked everything up; Bob taught me that if nothing else.  There’s often a grain of truth somewhere, but often you’re not even lucky to get that.  I’m going on some of what Bob mentioned once, mostly.”

“Shit.”

“Tell me about it.”

“So why don’t you tell Princess Margaret and Major Malfunction over there about this Neheb character?”

Her shoulders sagged, and he knew bad news was imminent. “Only a god can contact Neheb.  And I’m not completely sure how.”

“So we’re back to square one.” He rubbed his eyes, and tried to think of a loophole, something they may have missed. “Could the children of Kali contact it?”

“They’re demi-gods.  Not strong enough.”

“Can you ask Moros if you get ahold of him?”

She stared at him. “Moros - god of destiny and doom. The patron saint of clinical depressives and the suicidal. He barely even gets out of fucking bed, Logan - and he’s a god!  He’s not going to respond to requests that require any effort on his part.”

“What about me?  Can I do it?”

She considered that a moment, but shook her head, looking disappointed.  “You don’t have enough power. You’re not a full avatar.”

“Shit.” That figured.  It would have been too easy if he could have done it.  Then it suddenly dawned on him, “Hey - I think I know someone who could help us.”

She glanced up at him expectantly. “Who?  Did Bob give you an address book along with his powers?”

“I wish.” In fact, it might be easier than what he had planned.  But oh well, no one said life was supposed to be easy, right?  Especially when it was filled with nothing but gods and monsters.

It made him wonder which one of those he was, and if the difference even mattered anymore.

20

It took him five minutes to realize he had made a mistake.

He had gulped down two beers from his six pack, and cracked open a third, glancing out the window in the wall.  Of course, it was impossible to see anything through it right now, as it was clogged with overgrown plants, vines that grew up the window to make a natural screen, barely letting in glimpses of gnarled tree limbs as thick as his torso.  It was a slice of an overgrown tropical jungle with a hard to define sinister aspect, and just because he really didn’t want to wait outside in it, he decided to wait in the foyer that led out to the garden.  Well, it did in the real world, in the real Xavier’s mansion; here it was a dead end of glass and slate tiles, a place that may have looked nice in sunlight, but looked eerie and empty through its dark filter of green.

Adding to it, he was sitting on a decorative wrought iron and mahogany bench, that was lovely to look at, but made your butt go numb in about thirty seconds flat.  Logan tried to imagine it as more comfortable, but he was having mixed results with that.

He was trying to impose himself on another mindscape, create a middle ground, and he wasn’t sure what the fuck he was doing, or why he thought he’d be successful.  This was all very new to him, and to be quite honest, he was just a little frightened about doing it.  Not that she frightened him … well, maybe a little.  They hadn't parted on the best of terms last time, had they?  He almost couldn’t remember. The meetings blurred, became dream-like in their evanescence, leaving only a vague emotional residue in their wake.

He sat forward, resting his elbows on his knees, beer can held loosely in his hand, and looked down at the tiles.  These were granite, so there were no patterns to see, no shapes to keep visual interest, and his mind began to wander.  He wondered how Marcus was doing with Tagawa and that whole situation, and then he thought he heard “Creeping Death”, Marc’s self-professed theme song (was Metallica informed of this?) in the back of his mind.  It occurred to him that it would be more appropriate a theme song for the Vilkacis, if they ever stuck their heads out of their cave.  Did they creep?  They flew, slithered, and tackled, so why not creep?  It probably wasn’t a huge stretch.

Just as he was wondering if he should dig out some of his cash when he was in the real world again and go buy some biker leathers (well, not Kevlar, but certainly something more up to handling demon rage; god rage probably not, but what could stand up to that?), he sensed a presence in his pocket mindscape.

“You’re giving off such a Bob signature I almost didn’t come,” Jean said, coming around to sit down beside him.  It was a small bench, so she sat close enough to him that their legs almost touched, and he could feel the heat coming off of her.  But it wasn’t exactly heat - it was power. He knew instantly she was more powerful than he was, but he could sense gaps in her defenses, chinks in her armor, weaknesses he could exploit if he had to.

(What?  Why was he thinking of her in a tactical manner?  Jean wasn’t his enemy....was she?)

“Yeah, well, I’m jazzed up on his power;  I’ve unleashed my inner Bob. How else could I do this?” He held out his open beer can towards her in tacit invitation, but she shook her head, although she graced him with a small smile.  Her irises were still rings of fire, and he wondered if his eyes looked like that right now, only blue as opposed to red.

“Is he dead?  Did he pass his power on to you?”

“No.  Do you know what’s happened to him?”

“I’ve heard some talk … he’s been taken out, but that’s all I’ve heard.”

“Yeah, he’s stuck in limbo.  I bet you were broken up about it.”

“Oh, very much so.  I must have laughed for ten minutes.”

Well, no surprise there; Jean had never liked Bob.  “That’s kinda why  I’m here.”

She raised an eyebrow at that, and stared at him as if he’d just grown an extra head through his shoulder, her lips twisting as she tried to keep a disbelieving smile off her face.  “You aren’t seriously going to ask me to help Bob, are you?”

“No, I’m asking you to help me.”

“But help you help Bob...right?  I’m not a fool, Logan.”

He scowled at her, wondering why she couldn’t put aside her distrust for a full five minutes but, then, did it matter?  Now was the time for the 'big guns' emotional manipulation.  “I need your help, Jean.  You should know that the bitch who did this to Bob is gonna be comin’ after me next, to make sure Bob is off that plane for some time.  I know what I need to do, but I’m not strong enough to do it alone.  If I ever meant anything to you at all, Jeannie, help me.”

The first thing her expression betrayed was anger, as she had to know he was attempting to be manipulative, but then something like guilt seeped in, and the two emotions seemed to be at war on her face.  He simply sat quietly, waiting to see which side would win, and hoping he hadn’t made the biggest mistake of his life.  So far.