The demon looked down at the hole in his chest, seemingly stunned that he had been hurt. Good. “You have adamantium,” it said. How did it know that? When it looked up, something like pain flashed through its dark eyes, and it looked like a boy. A Human, a real one, not a demon simulacrum.

But it passed quickly. Suddenly his eyes were hard again, flinty, and while he put a hand over the bloody hole in his chest, he said, voice low and mean, “You’re one of them, aren’t you? You’re after Logan.”

He felt a cold shock of fear through his heart. How did he know? How did it know?!

Cole started backing away, not daring to turn his back on such a thing, and even though it was bleeding enough to splatter it on the floor, it kept coming for him. It couldn’t be Human; not even close. “I don’t want to kill you,” Cole said, and it sounded like he was pleading. He supposed he was, and hated himself for it. But why didn’t this damn thing just stay down?

The demon’s eyes flicked towards his adamantium hand and back up to his face, and he sneered, coming forward even as he almost slipped in his own blood. The strength in his eyes looked like it was fading, and yet he was still coming towards him, his expression a frozen mask of searing hate. Cole could hear his heart pounding in his ears, fluttering in his chest like a trapped bird, and he realized he was not prepared for all the demons. Not yet, and maybe he just wasn’t ready to face the Wolverine either. If he couldn’t get through the lackeys, what hope did he have?

“He’s going to kill you,” the demon said. “I’ll make sure of it.” The demon then swung his arm, and Cole jumped back, just to make sure he was out of range. The demon shattered a Delft blue painted urn on a side table, and while Cole stared in fascination at how the shards of ceramic seemed to just bounce off his skin without penetrating it, he didn’t realize the demon had picked up a large shard of it until it lunged at him.

He brought up his hand, but not fast enough. The demon rammed the sharp ceramic fragment into his cheek and ripped down, tearing open his face from eye socket to jawbone. As he screamed in shock (was that pain?! They said he wouldn’t feel it again!) and punched the thing in the chest again (surely stabbing it) before shoving it away, he could feel as well as see his blood spurt out and hit the wall, and he knew the demon had cut something major in his face. The cherubim would fix it, he knew it would, but why would it do something like this? Did it think it would kill him?

No, he said the Wolverine would kill him … so why … and then he knew, with a sick dread twisting through his stomach. His blood, the blood of the divine, was now splashed all over the foyer and the hall, the orphaned cherubim glittering in the sticky redness like distant stars ...

Scent. The scent of him, his blood, was seeping into the walls like a sponge. Oh no - he had been warned about that.

The demon dropped to his knees, finally hurt or perhaps just unable to stay on its feet due to the blood, but It was grinning evilly at him, eyes agleam with some kind of triumph. “You’re dead,” it gloated. “You’re dead!”

Did it know they were all dead? Or was it just telling him the Wolverine would kill him? He didn’t know, and he didn’t care - it was all bad, all wrong.

Cole turned and ran out of that hellhole, not caring that he was still bleeding copiously, leaving a trail that shimmered in his wake.

He wasn’t ready for this. He wasn’t ready to overthrow a demon god. They were just going to have to give him more help - or more power.

If they could take his pain away, why couldn’t they take the fear?

5

Logan stared at the sink full of bloody water, and wondered how often he had seen this. He suddenly thought of the Shakespeare line, what was it exactly? Something about “Who knew the old man had so much blood in him”. Who knew he had so much blood in him? God he was tired. And stoned - very, very stoned. How long until this anodyne stuff wore off?

It seemed to be, very slowly. He could at least walk to the bathroom with little help - he just had to lean against the wall every couple of feet - and sit down once he made it to the bathroom, his body still but his head feeling like it was taking a ride on a turntable.

He managed to wash the blood off his chest and face, and changed into the jeans Marc gave him (and they were almost too big for him; they hung loose on his hips, and were on the verge of becoming those low riding pants that some teenage boys wore, a “fashion” that drove him fucking crazy. He felt like pantsing them all - what could they do? Chase him?

His head occasionally swam around the room before coming back to rest on his shoulders, so he kept movements slow and to a minimum, although it didn’t help much. He still felt very good about everything, even though it took him maybe thirty minutes to wash the blood off his torso with a towel. The t-shirt fit at least - but, seriously, did it have to be advertising something called “The Tiki Lounge”?

He was going to wipe the blood out of his hair, but fuck it. After draining the sink of bloody water, he stuck his head in it and turned on the taps. The funny thing is, just bending down he felt like he was still falling even though he knew he wasn’t, and when the water hit his scalp, it sent goosebumps rippling down his skin. It felt impossibly good, almost sensual, which disturbed him as much as humanly possible under the drugs. Was anodyne like ecstasy too? Not that he knew anything about that drug, but still, could be.

So what was the end result of using anodyne? Okay, massively addictive (and he could honestly tell why it would be), but what was the demon/magical end of the bargain? What was the desired end product of getting people hooked on this? Did Marc have any left? Maybe he could give it to Angel, have his lab people examine it.

“You still alive in there?” Marc shouted.

“If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t tell ya,” Logan shouted back, standing carefully (again, even though he knew he’d stopped, he felt like he’d kept going over backwards), and then towel drying his hair carefully. That too felt better than it should have, so he soon gave it up, tossing the faintly bloody towel in the corner along with the rest of the bloody towels, and ventured out of the cubicle like bathroom.

Logan had to grab on to the edges of the door to keep his balance, and eventually just threw himself in the nearest chair rather than deal with the continued trouble of perambulating. Marc was casually slumped in a near by chair, apparently waiting for him to do just that. “Congrats,” he said. “You don’t look like a murder victim anymore.”

What on Earth did you say to that? Rather than respond to that, he simply asked, “Do I look as stoned as I feel?”

“Hell yeah. All you need is a hacky sack, and you could be a guy outside any Phish concert anywhere.”

“Shit.”

“But hey, you can focus … kinda. That’s an improvement.”

He shrugged. “I guess so. Look, we shouldn’t land in Vancouver -”

“We ain’t gonna. I already talked to Yukio, and she’s gonna bring us down at an airstrip in Burnaby, a secondary location. I wanted us to land even farther away from our primary site, like Edmonton, but she said we didn’t have the fuel to go the distance. So Burnaby it is. Good enough?”

Logan started to nod, but then so did the room, so he stopped. “Figured we might have a Yakuza greeting party?”

“Yep. You know, your life may have actually become much harder now.”

“Hard to imagine, isn’t it? But yeah, I guessed that too.” He dry washed his face - weird, because it was still kind of wet - and took a deep breath. “At least the Yakuza seems to be the same bunch of pussies they always were.”

Marc chuckled, shaking his head but still giving him an approving smile. “Yer fucking nuts, man.”

“And that’s why you like me.”

“Well, it makes you interesting.” He shifted in his seat, and his whole demeanor changed, becoming more somber. “What’s up with Bob?”

“The usual. Attacked by a mad god, and out of commission. Hel’s trying to figure out how to bring him out of it, and track the bitch down. She doesn’t want me in until she’s got some major back up.”

“Why’d this god attack Bob? Didn‘t like his hair?”

“Maybe. Hel thinks this god might be an ex-wife.”

“Oh fucking ouch! That’s gonna be a pain in the ass. Domestic disputes are the worst.”

“Tell me about it.” Logan pressed his fingertips against his eyelids, and watched the colors pulse in time with his heartbeat. It was a pleasant light show.

“By the way, while you’re still stoned, you might want to talk to Tony.”

“Ah. Bad news?”

“Maybe.”

“Okay.” he stopped watching the light show, took another deep breath, and braced himself to stand up. He was ready to do this - yes, yes he was. “Uh, little help?”

“Sure,” Marc replied easily, getting up with no problem at all. Fucking show off.

He hoped that things were going better for Helga.

6

When they ‘ported in, Helga wasn’t sure they were in the right place at first.

The hospital in L.A. - jokingly referred to as Saint Demonica in the demon community - was unlike a Human hospital in the fact that it was generally quiet and orderly, with the air scrubbers working overtime to keep the smells of everyone else from being overwhelming. But she and Rags, with the comatose Bob propped up between them, had ‘ported into pure chaos.

Dozens upon dozens of gurneys clogged the main corridor, full of different kinds of demons, ranging from a badly beaten vampire who appeared to be missing several teeth and an arm, to a slime demon bleeding all over the tiled floor, and everything in between. There were few gurneys with completely sheeted forms on them, corpses that someone had at least bothered to conceal. Nurses, doctors, healing demons, witches and warlocks all jostled between rooms and the emergency operating/spellcasting theater, just avoiding collision with each other and their patients, and Rags asked, “Is it always like thif? I’ve ‘eard it’s pretty calm…”

“No, something’s wrong.” She saw a white coat moving out of the corner of her eye, and luckily it was someone she recognized. “Keelin!”

Doctor Keelin O’Connor was a genuine emergency room doctor from Dublin who had the unfortunate luck of working on a patient whom everyone thought was just a violent drunk, but turned out to be a werewolf. Even though he was in Human form, he bit her hard enough on the arm to break the skin - and the next full moon, she found out she was a lycanthrope as well. Nothing ruins your medical career quite like that, so she had to leave Dublin, and, as luck would have it, she ended up in Los Angeles, where a friend was able to clue her in about St. Demonica. She was now chief of staff here.

Keelin was short and not quite stocky, but she had a sturdy figure that pretty much meant that she’d never get that spot on a t.v. doctor show. Her reddish brown hair was cut in a short, practical style that kept it out of her face, but inadvertently emphasized her large, sapphire blue eyes. Helga had never seen her wearing any make up, yet she always seemed like a handsome woman who hardly needed it. In fact, sensible was the key word for Keelin, who seemed completely out of place in the wacky, impractical supernatural world: she was even wearing sensible flats, sensible navy slacks, and a sensible black blouse. Her white doctor’s smock was covered with the blood of at least half a dozen different demons, and some of the black blood was smeared on her delicately pointed chin. She was snapping on a pair of new, unbloodied latex glove. “Oh, Helga, what - oh good lord, what happened to Bob? Did he get in on this?”

“Get in on what? Did we miss another apocalypse?”

She shrugged a single shoulder, almost nodding. “From what I’ve heard, Angel is wiping out the Senior Partner’s support base, in a very personal and direct manor.”

“Oh, Christ on a cracker,” Rags gasped, looking around in as much shock as yellow crystal eyes could reflect.

“He’s dead,” Helga said, pointing out a undeniable fact. She was still surprised - that was absolute end game. The Senior Partners wouldn’t let Angel get away with something like that; he had signed his own death warrant. Unless the Powers That Be directly stepped in - highly unlikely to extremely impossible - Angel would not live to see another sundown. But he probably knew that too.

“Not quite yet,” Keelin replied, jerking her head towards the traffic jam of gurneys.

Rags’s jaw dropped as if unhinging it. “He did all of thif himself?”

“Personally? Probably not. He has friends, and all of this has been sending general panic throughout the demon community. People think it might be the end of the world, so they think it’s the perfect time to settle personal grudges.”

“Oh great. It’s a nightmare out there, isn’t it?”

Keelin’s pale lips thinned to a grim line, and she nodded, wiping the blood off her chin with the back of a gloved hand. “Only Berserkers and people of Bob’s power level could venture out there safely. But now even he …” As she visually examined Bob, it was her turn to gasp. “Gods, is that the mark of Typhon?”

Helga looked at Bob’s mark again, trying to figure how she saw the word typhon in it. “Is that what it is? You recognize it?”

“From old Watchers journals, yeah.”

“What’s it do?”

“It traps energy beings in their current forms. It keeps them from shifting, or leaving, or using their power in any manner. Gods and demons alike.” She carefully opened Bob’s shirt, what she could peel away from the burned in mark, and seemed to search him for any other apparent injuries. “Is this all that was done to him?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, let’s get him on a gurney. The witches will have to work on this, but I warn ya, it’s almost impossible to remove, save for the person who inflicted it. It takes an incredible amount of dark power to even wield the brand.”

Keelin commandeered an empty gurney being shoved past by a Belial demon, who gave her a dirty look for taking it from him, but then he saw it was Bob and wisely backed off. Belials had no leaders - they were all fucking self-involved liars, so there was no way they could be a cohesive unit in any sense of the term - but Bob was very close to being the de facto leader of the Belials. When Bob boasted that he was the “King of All Liars”, he was only partially joking - if he sent out word for the Belials to assemble, they would, because being on Bob’s good side was exactly where they all wanted to be. (Did that give her an idea? Maybe … )

Once they had him laid out, she asked Keelin, “If we kill the thing that put this mark on him, would the mark disappear?”

She had to consider that a moment, but eventually nodded. “I’d think so. Whoever’s controlling this would be the power source.”

“Good.” Now she just had to figure out how to kill this bitch, and Bob would be okay. Did she have any favors she could call in? Could she use Bob’s connections?

“Dakarai,” Keelin said, calling over a witch in a purple silk turban, done up in an African style. She was wearing a brightly colored sarong in an almost matching shade of lilac, and she wore many necklaces, all of them fetishes of some sort: a scapula in a small velvet bag; a withered crow’s talon; a protective amulet made of black tourmaline, and another of quartz; a pendant made of mummified mandrake root (a piece that didn’t look so phallic); and a thumb sized Grimmon sprite’s skull on a black cord. She clattered as she walked, like a drawer full of loose knickknacks. “Take Bob here to an intensive spell room, and see if we have anything on getting rid of Typhon’s mark.”

Helga grabbed Bob’s hand and kissed it, and leaned down and whispered in his ear, “Hang in there. We’re gonna get you out of this, and we’re gonna kick that bitch’s ass. Talk to me if you can.” She then kissed him on his forehead and backed up, letting Dakarai take the gurney away.

“I’ll let you know if we make any progress,” Keelin promised her, and walked away as a fellow doctor and Hannock demon gestured violently for her to come over and help him with an eviscerated Fell demon.

“Bloody hell. I don’t think now’s the time to be L.A.,” Rags muttered.

“You should be safe in your church,” she replied sharply. Considering he had the Gorgons on his side, why did he have to be so fucking cowardly? Suddenly that reminded her, “Oh shit - Brendan.” They’d left him at the Church of The Stone Temple, which was a renovated underground spot, inside a small network of abandoned water pipes that had been laid way back in the 1900’s, for reasons now lost to time. But if you followed one of the pipes, it would take you directly to the L.A. “river”.

Rags yellow eyes sparkled in the florescent lights, and she would swear sometimes she could see all the way back to his brain. “As long as he didn’t leave, he should be safe. The Sifters don’t abandon.”

She knew he meant the Gorgons, but she found herself wondering where the Weird Sisters were. Did Angel ask for their help? It would be a suicide mission, but that would actually be a plus to the perverse little Weirds, and while Angel would be loath to ask for their assistance, they would be an undeniable asset. In fact, they could have filled this hospital all by themselves. If Angel didn’t have them playing clean up, maybe she could recruit them to help her; they loved Bob, and they’d do anything for him. “Get to the church,” she told him. “Make sure Brendan’s there, and everybody’s okay. I’ll call you when I know more about what’s goin’ on.”

“If th’ world’s actually ending, you’ll give us a head’s up?”

“Better believe it.”

“Thanks. Good luck.” And with a murmur and a burst of silver glitter, Rags was gone.

She weaved her way through gurneys, trying to figure out if she should set out for the bar, Bob’s loft in the industrial district, or just make calls from the lobby. She wasn’t afraid of venturing out - she wasn’t afraid of no demons, or even fucking pissed off Senior Partners (they’d be more interested in Angel and his people anyways) - when she heard a strange noise in the overcrowded lobby. Someone singing?

“-gimme shelter, or I’m gonna fade away -” Someone sang very softly under their breath, and she traced it to a man in a very loud suit, not so much sitting in one of the hard plastic chairs as doubled over in it. He was resting his elbows on his knees, and was looking down at the floor, hands over his ears, as if trying to block out reality itself. If the loud suit and the singing were clue, the small red horns on his head were. “Lorne?” She asked, making a beeline for him.

He didn’t hear her; he was singing to himself and rocking slightly, and she wondered if he was hurt. She stopped in front of him, and said, slightly louder, “Lorne.”

Finally the green scaled Anagogic demon looked up, and he seemed slightly dazed. “Hel, honeybunch, why are you here?” His eyes were red - well, they were always red, but redder than normal, as if he was hung over, or maybe had been crying. The latter was more probable right now. “Oh no, did you and Bob get in on this?”

“Bob got taken out back in Sydney, trapped by the mark of Typhon, and I’m beginning to think the timing isn’t coincidence. How are you? Are you hurt? Where’s everyone else?” She scanned the lobby for familiar faces - Angel, Wesley, Spike, Gunn - and saw no one. But she noticed that, up close, Lorne smelled very faintly of cordite.

“They’re not here. I … I couldn’t take it anymore,” he admitted, sounding as defeated as he looked. “I … I killed a man.”

“I’ve killed lots.”

“Yeah, sweet pea, but I’m not cut out for it. I’m a lover, not a fighter.” He chuckled slightly, but it was very weak, forced. “I really don’t know where the others are. Still fighting, I guess - Los Angeles is still here. Maybe they won. If anyone could, it would be Angel.”

“You hurt?” She was starting to think he was in shock. That cordite smell - had he been shot? He looked a little bruised, but he was not overtly bleeding.

“No, not really. I found … I brought him here -” He nodded his head towards a gurney, where a figure laid completely covered by a bloodstained sheet. “ - I know he’s not a demon, but I thought if anyone could help him or bring him back, it would be them.” He closed his eyes, and lowered his head, as if saying a silent prayer. “But they’re too overloaded, and it was too late anyways. Somebody has to stay with him, though. He shouldn’t be an anonymous corpse, thrown in the incinerator.”

“What?” She turned and walked over to the gurney, noting the large red splotch of blood at abdominal level. Gut shot? She then pulled back the top of the sheet, and looked down into the face of a familiar man, now a familiar corpse.