He picked up the envelope, and noticed it was a piece of postal mail, with a British postmark. There was no return address on it, save for the words ‘Underground, Mayfair’. He knew the latter was a section of London, but ‘underground’? Certainly not a reference to the London subway system. But what was it referring to?

He carefully opened the envelope, expecting something nasty to fall out, but all there was was a single sheet of paper, stationary matching the blue marble patterned envelope. Written in dark ink - no, blood - in a delicate hand, were the words, “We’re in. We’ll be ready, just give the word.” There was no name on it, just the single initial “H” scratched at the bottom in the same light pseudo-calligraphy. And why the hell was it written in Human blood?

It took him a moment, but he thought he understood. This referred, in some capacity, to Yasha’s secret war against the “Three Dragons”. It was some demon group in London signing on to the cause, probably because they were a mob themselves, and feared getting muscled out of business.

Terrific. He just found warriors for his cause.

He stuffed the letter in his jeans pocket, and then went to search her weapons cabinet. He didn’t actually have to search, though - it had to be among her swords, and as soon as he opened the main cabinet, he was sure he saw it, dead center in the rack holding her major swords up in a vertical position.

It was nearly three feet long, from tip to haft, subtly curved, in a hard leather, beetle black sheath that matched the color of the leather wrapped haft. He slid out the blade like it was slick, and there, embossed in silver at the base of the blade, was a curving snake - exactly like the tattoo she had on her back. Her mark. This was exactly what he was looking for.

Before he put it back into its sheathe, he tested the sword, feeling the weight of it in his hand. It was heavier than your average sword, but perfectly balanced, and sliced through the air like throwing knife, with a soft ‘whoosh’. He bet it was sharp enough to cut through steel. It was a beautiful sword, and he had an urge to use it, even though he would hate to taint such a perfect blade with blood. Then again, it probably already had been stained with blood, many times. She kept it in top condition, though.

Realizing he had some time to kill, he decided it was high time he came up with an actual plan before Ammy and Helga actually called him on it.

Damn it, it was always something.

13

General Nathaniel Black walked down the sterile hall while he wondered why he’d bothered to come into work today. He had nothing pressing on his agenda - all the papers had been shredded, all the bodies buried, all the merchandise in order. But you did have to punch in sometimes, didn’t you? Just to keep up morale.

But he didn’t plan to stay long. As it was, he wasn’t completely sure he had erased all his jump drives, and you only needed to fuck up on one to have it come back and bite you on the ass.

He put his briefcase on his barren desk, and went around to unlock the drawers, humming tunelessly to himself. What was this stupid song stuck in his head? He wasn’t sure at all, and yet it was starting to drive him bananas.

He sat down in his plush chair as he opened the bottom drawer, and pulled out a small clutch of jump drives, depositing them on his blotter before he went for the bulk eraser.

But as he briefly raised his head, he caught someone in the corner of his vision.

He turned, startled, to see a man in a wheelchair sitting in the far corner - a man who hadn’t been there when he came in. And didn’t he look just a little familiar?

“Do you think it would do you any good?” The man asked, his voice betraying a highly cultured New England accent.

Black’s hand froze as he reached for his sidearm. The man had pale blue-gray eyes and a bald pate that reflected a bit of the low lighting, almost making it look like he had a subtle glow around his head. He knew that wasn’t true, but it was still eerie. He sat there serenely, hands folded on his lap, dressed in a neatly tailored dark suit, and if it wasn’t for the hard look in his eyes, you could easily think he was simply here for a meeting. “How did you -”

“Let’s not play this game,” Xavier said. “You know who I am, and you know going for a gun isn’t going to happen. And do you think you can call for help if I’ve gotten this far?”

He didn’t want to admit that he had a point. He felt frozen to his chair, but whether that was Xavier’s doing or just his own shock he couldn’t say. “Wh-what do you want?”

“I want you to call off your dogs. I know you have connections to the Organization, and you must know they’re moving against us once again - Logan in particular. One of the children was hurt very badly in your latest assault. If the cold blooded murder of Leonie had not been enough by you …” He trailed off, grimacing in disgust. “I’d appeal to your sense of decency, but obviously you people don’t have any. I dislike violence, but I won’t see any more children hurt. Is that clear?”

“Is that a threat of some sort?”

He gave him a tight smile that never met his eyes, shaking his head as if disappointed. “I’m not Logan; I’d never kill you, and we both know it. But to think I’m helpless is idiotic. Why else did you plan this attack when I was away? You didn’t want to risk a telepathic interception.”

“Look, I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he replied, and heard an odd noise emanating from his desk. Looking down, he found himself writing on a piece of paper.

Where the paper had come from - or the pen in his hand - he had no idea. Nor did he have any idea why he kept scrawling, over and over again, in increasingly messy ways, 'Stop it'. He tried to stop doing it, as the paper itself seemed to command, but could not; his body didn't seem to be paying attention to any of his wishes. He grabbed his wrist with his free hand, but he kept on writing, like his right hand was possessed or something.

And in its way, it was. But not in a typical manner. He glared at the man in the wheelchair, and snapped, "Stop this!"

"I want you to understand who you're dealing with. I won't kill any of you, not in a typical manner. But just think what I could do to you instead." He paused, to let that message sink in, and then added, with a very dark look in his eye, "You think Logan's amnesia is bad? Wait until I'm through with all of you."

Black opened his mouth, but then closed it, as he realized he didn't know what to say. His right hand was now writing on his desk, in jagged, large strokes like the visual equivilent of a scream, 'Stop it'. He decided to change tactics and rip the pen out of his hand, but it took a moment, as his fingers seemed locked around it, as if in rigor mortis.

When he finally got the pen free, his hand went limp, and Black looked up angrily, snarling, "Look you -"

Xavier was gone.

In fact, didn't the room seem a lot more brightly lit now? As he looked around warily, he noticed that there was nothing written on his deak, that there was no piece of paper, no words. There was a pen though, the very one he had ripped out of his own rebelling hand. Where had that come from?

He reached for the emergency button, to alert security of an intruder on the premisis ... but stopped before he reached it. Xavier had never even been here, had he? It was all in his mind. And that was the problem, wasn't it?

A small shiver snaked down his spine as he realized just how vulnerable he was, and how Xavier could have done anything to him.

And he would have never known.

14

So, he had a plan when Ammy brought him back from Vancouver. Not a great plan, as she was very quick to point out (good old Ammy, pissing on everybody's parade), but since no one had a better one at the moment, they decided to go with it.

And, since they were going to England, at least initially, he added, "We should probably take Wes with us."

Helga gave him a mildly startled look. "Why?"

"He's gotta have family there, someone who ... somebody who'd want to see him treated properly, for once." Just remembering he was dead brought back that cold, hollow ache in his gut, a combination of sorrow and rage that was one of his more constant companions.

Ammy looked between them, obviously confused. "Hold up. Wes, the pommy bastard?"

Helga grimaced, and told her, "He's dead. He got killed last night in the ... ruckus." Well, what else could you call it? Apocalypse lite?

To Logan's great shock, something like pity flashed across Ammy's face, and she had the grace to glance away, flushing pale blue in brief embarrassment. "Ah, fuckin' ay, I didn't know. Sorry. For a ... for a pom, y'know, he wasn't that bad."

That was probably as close to a heartfelt apology as you could get from Ammy, so he accepted it with a terse nod, and forged ahead, deciding he didn't want to think about Wes's death. The ache in his gut was already unbearable. It was awful to think that he never really thought about him as a genuine friend, but he was, he helped him a lot, and he never knew why. Why did Wesley seem to instantly like him? Why did he go out of his way to help him? Because that's what he and Angel did? They helped people - whether they really wanted it or not, whether they knew it or not. God, he was so much a better man than he was, but which of them was still sucking air? It only proved the cliché about the good dying young. Well, young-ish.

Logan cleared his throat, and said, "So, England?"

Hel nodded, running a hand through her spiky green hair, trying to pretend there wasn't a sudden, awkward pall. "Yeah, give me fifteen minutes to pack up weapons and shit. And I can go to the hospital -"

"No, it's my turn," he told her, meaning it. Hel had seen that Wesley's body wasn't just thrown on the pile, another anonymous corpse in a secret war that few knew about. It was now his turn to see Wes the rest of the way home. It was the least he owed him. She seemed to understand that, and simply nodded.

“Which hospital is this?” Ammy asked.

Hel waved her hand, as if swatting at an invisible fly, and said, “Saint Demonica. Lorne brought him there in hopes the resident shamans could bring him back, but he was both too Human and too dead. I said he was an Oberon to keep him from being taken to the kitchen.”

Oh fuck - she wasn’t kidding about that? Well, to look at it from a certain angle, it was a form of recycling,

“Great - then my appearance will seem logical.”

He raised an eyebrow at the blue haired witch. “What?”

She rolled her eyes like a snotty teenager, and said sternly, “Look, you wanna drag a corpse through the streets? I think not. I’ll teleport ya there, we’ll grab the p- Wesley, and then I’ll zap you with him over to England. I’ll then get Hel here and we’ll join ya.”

In theory it was a good plan, but there were a few flaws. “Uh, wait a minute here. First of all, I can’t just show up in the middle of a roundabout with a corpse, even a native son, and secondly, I have no idea who Wesley’s relatives are. I bet I could find ‘em, given time - in spite of his attempts to soften it, he had a pretty specific regional accent - but I ain’t sure how much time I have.”

“Ask ‘em at Hendon’s.”

It was his turn to glare at her. Ammy usually just glared at everyone, so he hoped she enjoyed this glimpse of her own expression. “What the fuck is Hendon’s?”

“Oh,” Helga suddenly exclaimed. “That’s that place, isn’t it?” Logan switched his glare to her, but Helga was nice enough to elaborate. “Hendon’s is this funeral home that caters to members of the Watcher’s Council. I mean, yeah, Wes was sacked, but he’ll still be in their database. And since he died fighting evil, they won’t turn him away.”

“Considering most of the Council’s dead, there isn’t a hierarchy to complain about impropriety either,” Ammy added, as if that was a good thing. Maybe it was, he really didn’t know. It made him suddenly wonder if Ruby, that unpleasant Watcher “friend” of Bob’s (and part time werewolf) was still alive. If she wasn’t, he wasn’t sure if he should be sad or elated.

Logan shifted the sword until it rested on his back (he found a strap he connected to the sheath, for easy carrying), and folded his arms across his chest. “I’m not gonna be able to talk you outta this, am I?”

Ammy glared back at him with her electric sapphire eyes. “I’m goin’.”

He knew there was no point in arguing with her, unless you enjoyed beating your own brains out on a brick wall. And since he wasn’t in the mood for that, he let it go. “Fine. Can we get going then?”

“Hold your bloody horses, Wombat.”

“Call me that again, and I’ll never call you anything but Rhododendron.”

They both glared at each other, and Logan just knew this whole trip was going to be as much fun as inserting adamantium slivers under his fingernails. More reason to get it over with as quickly as possible.

He wondered if they could set this aside long enough to get Wesley home.

*****

When he woke up, Dell had no idea where he was, or why the taste of vomit was so strong in his mouth. He tried to push himself up from his position, face down on a dirty wooden floor, in a pool of something cold and slimy, but he had neither the coordination or strength to do it. He waited a minute, and tried again.

This time he managed to shove himself up, arms trembling like they might collapse at any moment, and he saw he’d been laying in a puddle of his own vomit. (Well, he hoped it was his own vomit … ) It was mostly liquid though, and was now little more than a large black spot on the floor, cold and slick, but nothing substantial; in hours, it would be dried to nothing but an old stain.

He sat back on his haunches, wiping the saliva off his face, and wondered if people were supposed to feel this way - light and insubstantial, like a garbage bag full of balsa wood and dead leaves, his brain as liquid as ice cream left out in the California sun. Pain kept him tied to earth, subject to gravity, reminded him he was still substantial: all his joints ached, as if they were slowly rusting away, and his stomach was a solid, gnawing wound. Maybe eating would help - he couldn’t remember the last time he ate anything. But it didn’t matter; food brought him no pleasure, and often it was hard to keep down anyways. Food made him feel leaden, more tightly beholden to the earth. The only thing worth anything was the drugs; the drugs made the pain go away.

If he allowed himself to think about it, he wondered if he was an “After-School Special” waiting to happen, and would laugh with a sound like a rusty car door. A stupid, average suburban kid, from a home equal parts pedestrian and shitty, and how he decided to take off after stealing a couple of hundred bucks from his old man’s wallet, which the old man was planning to spend on a new boat or some such shit. Fucking Yuppie; people were starving in the streets and he was buying fucking Hummers and plasma screen televisions, the good corporate sheep. And Dell knew all about starving in the streets, because he was one of them.

He couldn’t remember when the drugs came into it, although he supposed it was shortly after that visit to the free clinic. That hadn’t been his idea, but one of the few friends he’d made out here had worried about him sleeping all the time and sometimes passing out like a narcoleptic. He could remember the Hispanic doctor with the ‘70’s porn star mustache looking at him gravely, and saying something about certain things in his bloodstream - what was it, antibodies, leucocytes, some big word shit like that? He wanted to see if he could find him room in an emergency room, have more tests run, as he seemed to think he might have something serious. The word leukemia was floated.

Almost made him laugh, really. He once had a sister, who died before he was born, and that’s what she died of - leukemia. Could it run in a family? They were told no, but maybe. Then again, his dad was a regular Homer fucking Simpson, he worked in a nuclear plant, so maybe he just had diseased, mutant sperm that reared up in his fucked up kids as genetic defects.

Dell agreed to come back, took some multi-vitamins the doc gave him, and walked out, never to return. Either he was ill or he wasn’t; from what he understood, hospitals never really helped anyone, did they? It just prolonged the inevitable. And he didn’t want to die increments at a time in a hospital, stuck to machines, like he could remember his grandmother doing. He decided to take his chances in the world.

So far he had done fine. Oh sure, the days had slid by in a drug induced haze, with lucid moments where he felt a thousand years old, hollowed out and drained dry. He didn’t know where he was most of the time, although he was pretty sure he was still in California. But all shooting galleries looked the same, just like all crack houses looked the same, and all abandoned buildings looked the same. He didn’t know what day it was, what month - maybe the year changed, he didn’t even know. Did it matter? Just like whether he had eaten recently or not, it was all becoming completely irrelevant.

He used the broken metal frame of what probably used to be a bed to stand up, and staggered to the bathroom … or what passed for a bathroom in this ruined shell of a house. There was a still a toilet, but broken; you couldn’t flush it. That didn’t stop people from using it, and piss, shit, and blood covered the floor, overflowing from the bowl. The smell was nauseating, but no worse than the taste of vomit in his mouth.

He turned the taps on, not sure if they worked, and got a single trickle of semi-rusty cold water in the chipped, stained sink. He let the water run until it was as clear as it would get, then cupped his hand beneath the stream until he collected as much as he could. He poured the water in his mouth, gargling slightly, and spit into the lime and rust stained basin, aware he was replacing the taste of sickness with the taste of metal and chlorine.

As soon as he had gotten rid of it as much as possible, he lifted his stained t-shirt, and checked to make sure it was still there. It was. The pink.

Actually, that was a nickname that probably wouldn’t take, as it sounded too gay. It was a new drug, called ano, that a friend of his who was a runner for a dealer in Chinatown gave him a few samples of. He was supposed to spread it around, get his fellow junkies aware of the new drug in town, but he really didn’t spread it around all that much. He did it himself - a lot. This stuff was fucking nirvana.

He had a single hit left, and he taped it to his chest, so in case he passed out and people went through his pockets and possibly stole his shoes, they wouldn’t find it. It looked like a blotter of acid - a tiny piece of paper, smaller than a thumbnail, white, with the drug infused in the pink heart shaped illustration in the center.

He ripped the tape off his chest - the tearing away of a few stray chest hairs was a pain that was mild in comparison with all his other pains - and slipped the shard of paper onto his tongue. The drug went to work almost immediately, even before the rice paper dissolved on his tongue.

It was like a pulse of heaven straight into his blood, silky and warm, making tiny white stars burst into life behind his eyes. He could feel his body itself soften, the balsa wood of his bones becoming chenille, dried leaves instantly turning to compost, something moist and granular. He started drifting back towards the empty room where he had previously collapsed, not wishing to end up face first in someone else’s waste.

Maybe he made it there before collapsing, he really wasn’t sure. He felt like he was hovering off the ground, and never was sure if he was standing up or laying down. Ano was great - the pink took him out of himself, made him feel like a true child of the universe. And he hadn’t yet built up a tolerance, like he feared he might.

Then something funny started to happen.

His vision seemed to be clouding up, and he wondered if there was a fire, but he didn’t smell smoke. Occluded white light, as soft as clouds, filled his vision, and then it cleared, a black slit forming like the pupil of a snake’s eye.

Something started to emerge from that gap. Something … bright and beautiful. It was something like an angel emerging from the dark, naked from the waist up, a beautiful woman with full breasts and a shining mane of white hair, like a drift of snow, falling over one shoulder. Her skin was white and smooth as marble, her eyes glowing orbs of pink energy that gave off an comforting energy like the morning sun. It looked like her body was scaled from the waist down - a mermaid? A snake woman? He didn’t know, but her scales were iridescent emerald green with hints of sapphire, and moved sinuously, like a river on its way to the ocean.

“Dell,” she said, her voice like a whisper of wind through the eaves. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

He wasn’t sure he had a voice, but he thought he heard himself say, “You have?”

“Yes, forever, my love.” She touched his face with one white, slender hand, and he shivered, as cold seemed to knife through him. But even in its wake, the pain of it mixed with a tantalizing aftertaste of pleasure. “But you have to invite me in.”

“What?”

“The barrier that separates our worlds keep me from reaching you, unless you wish it away,” she explained, running her icy fingers down his throat. “Invite me through, let me cross over into your world. I will make the pain go away.” He thought he could see figures in the clouds, other snake women like this one, beautiful angels without wings, as the painful pleasure of her chill shuddered through him. Even closing his eyes, he could still see her, his savior. He thought his life was a waste, empty of meaning, but now he realized that maybe he had one. Maybe he was the conduit of angels.

“I invite you,” he said, aware it was clunky, but not sure how else to say it. “Come to me.”

“Thank you, love,” she said, smiling in a way that it seemed to threaten to split her entire face open, revealing teeth like steel needles. “You won’t live to regret this.” What an odd way to put it. What was that supposed to mean?

And that was the last thought that Dell Crowley ever had.