Was it a cop? He tried to parse the scents in the air, but the death and blood was just too thick, too new. He couldn’t get past it.

So he proceeded inside with caution, trying not to make any noise at all, and trying to pinpoint the location of the other person before he ran into him. Not that he was worried he couldn’t handle him - yeah, right - it was just he didn’t need an active APB out on him right now. That was always kind of a bummer.

The person must have been in the murder room, but what would a cop be doing in there alone? It was highly unlikely, but who else would be here? Whoever they were, they had locked the door behind them. Now he was starting to get the feeling he wasn’t the only illegal trespasser on site.

He popped the claws on one hand before approaching the murder room, the smell of blood nearly making him dizzy, and suddenly he heard a voice, as deep and creaky as a rusty door hinge, say, “Are you one of the guardians?”

He froze, hoping that the voice was addressing someone else, but no, they knew he was here and were talking to him. Oh fuck it. He stepped into the open doorway, braced for an attack, and faced the speaker.

Logan had had no expectations about what he was going to see, but he was still surprised. Even after he had focused on it, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing. It looked like a four foot pile of spaghetti, or maybe worms, as they seemed to be moving independently of the main pile. That sound of shifting clothes was actually its tentacles - or appendages, whatever the hell those noodle strands were - slithering against the leather walls. It was a demon, but even though it looked like a mound of pasta, it smelled like blood. But how the fuck was it talking? It didn’t have a face. It had no obvious mouth or eyes or ears; it had nothing. It was a pile of noodles, or maybe stretched out maggots. Either way, this was fucking disgusting. “No. What the fuck are you?”

The pile of noodles just shifted wetly, and Logan wondered if he could even hurt this thing. How did you hurt noodles? Put bad sauce on them, he supposed. Did he have time to nip out and grab a can of store brand Alfredo sauce? “Yes, you’re a guardian. I see your hand.”

He glanced down, and figured it meant his claws. He retracted them, because, again, how did you hurt noodles? (Overcooking?) “I’m a mutant, not … whatever.”

“You’re protecting him.”

“Who?” It made a gurgling noise. Was that a word? In what language? “Did you say something, or did you burp?”

The pile of noodles didn’t answer that question. “It’s too late; the process has started. The first sacrifices were made, and the rest are under way.”

“Where? Who’s doing this? You working with them?”

It made a kind of wet noise, somewhere between a cough and a flush. “What business would the Brotherhood of Vestus have with me?”

“The Olive Garden wasn’t open?” He rubbed his eyes, wondering why there had to be cryptic demons. Couldn’t there be overly specific demons, just for a change?

“I didn’t understand that.”

“Forget it. Who are you, what are you doing here?”

“I am -” Again with the wet noises, like soup sloshing in a pot. “I’ve been sent as a warning. She’s crazy; we fear she will do more damage than can be anticipated.”

“Who’s crazy? Kayla?” That was the only “she” he knew about in this context.

“You’ll know her. She knows you.”

“Who? I don’t know Kayla.” Did he? The world just couldn’t be that small. (And Canada wasn’t that small.) Although he was going to have to ask Kier if he had a picture of Kayla for him to look at, just to make sure.

“Follow the bodies. You’ll find what you’re looking for.” And then the pile of pasta seemed to slump down and disappear, like he was phasing through the floor. But he was just gone; a disappearing pasta pile. He didn’t leave a noodle behind. What the fuck was up with that?

He checked out the room, but the Cyrillic had been smudged, it was just a smear of dried blood on the wall. Who had rubbed it out? The spaghetti monster? It had been there, right? He hadn’t imagined it, had he?

Logan felt slightly dizzy. Had that fucker did something to him? Or was the scent of death getting to him? He didn’t know, but he suddenly felt the need to get out of here. He did, and paused in the back of the alley to catch his breath and try and clear his sinuses of the death smell. It was difficult, but then again it usually was.

Walking back to the bar, he called Giles and informed him of this new stuff, and asked if he knew what the hell the pasta demon was. Sadly, Giles just sounded puzzled, but he promised he’d look it up, along with the Brotherhood of Vestus. He had no news for him yet about the whole “ascendant“ thing, but he was liking the sound of all of this less and less. He could join the club.

He was about a block from the bar when he caught a whiff of something demonic lurking in another alley he passed. He stopped and glanced in, and saw a Ressik (or maybe a Frenik - they generally looked and smelled the same, especially if they smoked a lot, and this one did). His huge tangerine sized yellow eyes fixed on him as the demon took a drag off his cigarette. “You really are one hairy dude,” it said, and bizarrely it had a faint Spanish accent.

“Jealous?” It wasn’t like his breed of demon had any hair.

It scowled, quite an unpleasant look on its face, and then Logan heard the burst before the bullet hit him in the back of the head, as hard and heavy as a cannonball.

Instantly he saw stars as his skull seemed to vibrate with the impact, and he dropped to his knees, and possibly to his face - he actually wasn’t sure. Explosive round? Maybe. He was just accustomed to getting shot in the face; getting shot in the back of the head was a kind of new one on him.

His vision had blacked out, but he didn’t lose consciousness; it was a close thing though. He sensed the demon behind him, but before he could make his stunned body react, he felt a knife stab through his neck, and the shock of pain moved through him and made him taste electricity in his mouth. He slumped to the asphalt then, but he barely felt the impact. He tried to move, and he couldn’t. “How long does it take you to regrow a severed spine?” The demon asked, putting the knife back beneath his jacket. “I guess we’ll see, eh ese?”

He heard the rumble of an engine, a van pulling up, and Logan felt the demon pull his limp arms behind his back and put plastic cuffs on his hands as the van doors opened and other demons came out and grabbed him. They hauled him up inexpertly, almost dropping him, and one of them bitched, “Fuck, he’s heavier than he looks.”

“He’s full of metal, remember? That‘s why his head didn‘t explode like a cantaloupe.”

“Still … fuck.”

They tossed him unceremoniously in the back, and he landed face down, hard enough that it almost broke his nose. So this was a set up? By whom? How the hell did they know it was him that would respond to this?

Wow - and he thought he had a bad feeling about this already.

*****

Kier wondered where Logan was, and suddenly realized he didn’t have a watch. He looked around the bar, but there was no obvious clock. Damn it!

“How long has Logan been gone?” He asked Rags.

Rags looked at the empty beer glasses in front of him, and shrugged. “About three and a half beers.”

“And how long is that?”

Again, Rags shrugged. “I dunno. If it’s ten minutes per beer …”

“Fuck it.” He got to his feet and went up to the bar, bringing back his own beer glass. It was virtually untouched; he wasn’t a big beer drinker, even when he was Human. He’d been more of a Cosmopolitan and vodka and cranberry juice person, or as one of his boyfriends said, he drank “girl drinks”. Since this was a grotty dive of a bar, their idea of exotic was rotgut, whiskey strong enough to peel paint off the walls, and he had a feeling if he asked for a vodka and cranberry the cry of “Faggot!” would echo through the bar, and he’d be forced to beat the shit out of all of them. While he enjoyed that idea, he probably shouldn’t reveal his vampire status until sunset. But it would be nice to know when sunset was.

The bartender eyed him warily. He had been eying them warily since they showed up, as he didn’t trust Rags’ story about when they showed up, but he didn’t know what the alternate explanation was. “Wanna ‘nother?”

“No. What time is it?”

The bartender glanced at his watch. “Two thirty eight.”

“Thank you.” He returned to the table where Rags was getting slowly stewed, and although he was just sitting there, he looked like he was wavering a bit. “Logan’s been gone too long,” he told Rags as he slid back into the booth. “We need to get out of here.”

“ An’ go where?”

That was a very good question. Was that gay bar open now? At least he’d know where he was in the city then. “I don’t know. We gotta access the sewer tunnels so I can get around until sunset.”

“I need to know where they are to ‘port us there, and I don’t.”

“Well, go look.” There was no reason he couldn’t go out in daylight, was there?

Rags sighed heavily and shoved himself out of his seat, taking a moment to steady himself before attempting to walk. Okay, this was bad - Logan was missing, Rags was completely wasted, he wasn’t certain exactly where in Toronto he was (these seedier areas were definitely Logan‘s territory), and it was hours before sundown. It was too early to say it was all going wrong, but he got a sense it was. Where the hell was Logan? It shouldn’t have taken him that long to check out the club … unless he found something. But wouldn’t he come back and tell them what it was? Unless he had an opportunity to get into a fight, then maybe not. Shit!

He was starting to wonder if Rags had passed out on the sidewalk when a man with a paunch and thinning, brittle brown hair, wearing a slightly stained Leafs t-shirt, suddenly loomed beside his table, a half empty beer mug in his hand. “I know you, don’t I?”

Kier looked up and shook his head. “Oh god no. Sorry.”

“Naw, I do,” he insisted, almost sloshing his drink. “You were in, uh, that movie!”

Oh god, not a “fan”, not now.

“You were Benjy, right, in Final Threat? Fuck, I loved that film!”

“You may be the only one,” he replied, smiling without humor or warmth.

The guy was either too tipsy or too dense to get the “go away” vibes he was giving off. He scoffed, and said, “Sheeyeah, right - it’s always out at the video store. The end, where they try and blow up the CN Tower? That was so fucking awesome! So what was it like to work with … uh, Tom whatshisface?”

“A real pleasure.” And that wasn’t even sarcastic - he did give pretty good blow jobs, even if it had to be in a men’s room.

“Oh, and Tara Matthews! What a piece of ass. Y’really nailed her?”

“No, I didn’t. We were just friends.“ Tara was the actress who played “Benjy’s” slutty girlfriend, who was nineteen and yet already had a major boob job - funny how that worked. She seemed a little ditzy but okay, although they did have a make out scene and he had to grope her, and her breast felt as hard as rock. She said that sometimes implants were that way, and he asked her if she could deflect bullets, which she found hilarious. But he was serious; that’s how hard it felt. Tits of steel.

“Oh man, I’d ‘ve done her in a hot second.”

He almost had to bite his tongue to keep from replying, “Only in your dreams.” Her type was apparently young musicians with obvious drug problems, not 40 year old drunken pervs with man boobs.

Finally Rags came back, and almost walked into the guy. “’Scuse me, miss,” Rags slurred, and it was hard for Kier not to laugh. Did he do that on purpose? “I fink I know where we can go. C’mon.” Rags then staggered back towards the men’s room, and Kier figured he meant for him to follow.

“Nice to meet you, but if you’ll excuse me, my agent needs to talk to me,” he lied, standing up.

The guy looked after Rags, somewhat confused. “That was your agent? Boy, he’s loaded.”

“No kidding.”

He went into the bathroom, which was as grotty as the rest of the bar, and thanks to his vampire sense of smell, he was nearly overwhelmed with the rank scent of piss and urinal cakes. It made his eyes start to water, and he was glad he didn’t have much of a gag reflex. “Did you find the sewer tunnels?”

“I found a sewer grate,” Rags slurred, and grabbed his arm. He said the teleport words, but he slurred them so badly the first time it didn’t work. He did it again, enunciating more clearly, and they were torn out of the bathroom and tossed into a darker, even worse smelling place. It wasn’t quite as bad as the first time, but his stomach and head both felt like they were roiling, and he had to lean against the wall for a minute to keep his balance. Was drunk teleporting somehow worse, or was that his imagination?

“Where are we in relation to the bar?” He asked.

Rags stared at him blankly - or perhaps he did. He was still wearing his sunglasses in spite of the pitch blackness. “Underneath it, mate.”

“No, I mean are we parallel to it, or in line with it? Are we on its left or right?”

He continued to stare in his direction. “We’re under it.”

Or Christ, this was impossible!

He sincerely hoped that Logan wasn’t in trouble, because he wouldn’t be rescued any time soon.

****

Like a severed spine wasn’t bad enough, he had to listen to the two demons discuss fashion. Fashion!

They were apparently talking over a fashion magazine that one of them had. Logan could hear them flip the pages as they discussed whether pleats were a good thing or not, if yellow could really be a flattering color, if a sane humanoid would ever wear a skort. Was this part of the torture? Was this an insidious new method of making him crack? If it was … it was working. He’d rather they were burning his skin off with a welding torch. In fact, he was about to request it.

But things were changing. Shortly after he was thrown in the back of the van, he started to feel sharp shocks of pain along his spine, little lightning bolts of pain behind his eyes that increased in intensity as time went on, and eventually he felt every single pothole in the road that they hit - and this part of Toronto was extremely bumpy. But pain was a good thing; pain meant the nerves had grown back. The fire that was burning up the back of his legs meant that his spine had reconnected, and he could move whenever he wanted.

He couldn’t break the plastic cuffs; they were just too strong, and the way his hands were turned he couldn’t cut them with his claws. But they didn’t bind his ankles, so he could still get on his feet, and he knew that was a fatal mistake. He could take them down with only his feet if he had to; he’d been forced to fight without his hands before. Still, if they’d been ready for him before, were they ready for that contingency too?

Then there was his own personal debate about what he wanted to do. Should he let them take him to wherever they were taking him, just to find out what the fuck was going on, or should he escape beforehand? Finding out who was behind this bullshit and why they wanted him (and how they knew he was coming) was a priority, but if they were ready to contain him it wouldn’t matter what he discovered - he’d have knowledge, but he’d be trapped and unable to communicate that with anyone. What good was the information if he was trapped in an adamantium casket at the bottom of a lake?

Besides, the guys who wanted him never stopped. They just kept coming, no matter how often he escaped or carved them up like holiday turkeys. They were single minded in being complete assholes, and as such, at least the second meeting might be on more even ground. He‘d be ready for them too. Also, he wasn’t sure he could stand to hear another argument about which was the better color, magenta or plum. (Everybody knew it was plum.)

Logan waited until they hit another bump (he didn’t have to wait long) and then rolled over on his back as if simply the jolting of the van had done it, and the two demons barely noticed. Logan arched his back and jumped up to his feet, and suddenly the demons noticed him. The one with the magazine dropped it and they both jumped to their feet, reaching for weapons, and Logan spun into a snap kick that caught the one closest to him in the side of the head. He put full force into the kick, and it sent the demon slamming into his friend, but they hit another bump and the resulting movement sent Logan falling on his ass even as the two guards hit the side of the van and went down.

He rolled over on his chest, using his shoulders to shove himself up to his knees, and then lunged at the doors. They were locked so securely they held and he felt the impact shudder through his skeleton, but then he stepped back - vaguely aware that the one of the demons was struggling back up to his feet - and ran at the doors, hitting them shoulder first.

Finally the lock gave way and he went flying out the back of the van, but he realized almost immediately they were now on a busy freeway, and the traffic was heavy. Oh shit.

He didn’t even hit the asphalt before an SUV plowed right into him. He hit the hood, crumpling it like it was made of aluminum, and he went flying head first through the windshield which shattered explosively, attempting to tuck into a ball to avoid hitting and killing the driver (although if there was a passenger, he was deeply sorry, because there was no way to stop himself). He thought he heard the scream of the driver as he hit the passenger seat and broke it, flying straight into the back seat, where something metal broke beneath him but still seemed to hold, as he’d lost enough momentum not to go flying straight through the back. The car slewed violently to the side and was jolted again as someone else crashed into it, and all the windows that he hadn’t broken shattered as the SUV spun around sharply, coming to a precarious stop, rocking on its tire.

He had shards of glass poking him in the back, the face, the arms, and he ached a bit from general impact, but he was already healing. He looked up to see the driver, a middle aged Asian woman in a very expensive looking business suit, was staring back at him in wide eyed shock, minor glass cuts leaving small, slightly bloody slits on her face. “Sorry about the car,” he told her.

She continued to stare at him like a bunny in the headlights. “How the hell are you still alive?”

Was there ever a really good answer to that question? “Lady, I ask myself that every day,” he told her, not sure if the van he’d been thrown in had pulled off to the shoulder ahead of them or not. He twisted in the broken seat, kicked out, and slammed open the rear door nearest to him. “Hope you got good insurance.” He slid out and bolted for the tree choked scrubland on this side of the freeway, figuring it would be an easy place to get lost and figure out where the hell he was.

But how was he going to get the plastic cuffs off? Shit, it was always something.

****

As much as he hated the internet, Giles had to grudgingly admit that it did make some research easier, especially since so many Watchers had scanned crumbling old volumes of text to try and preserve them from physical decay, theft, or destruction. The new council in Australia had a huge internet library, although they probably would have been angry had they known he had access to it. (He still had some friends among the Watchers, although most wouldn’t admit it.)

The Brotherhood of Vestus brought up a text from an old Watcher’s journal in St. Petersburgh’s, Russia, circa the late 1800’s. It was apparently some kind of vampire death cult, who believed in some kind of vampire “god” coming back to the Earthly plane to lead vampires into an all out victory over humanity. But the god wasn’t one of the vampire gods that he knew about, or even the supposed “father” of all vampires; it wasn’t even the Master. It was an unspecified vampire “spirit” that somehow existed unfettered and was simply looking for the right vessel to contain it. The Watcher in question, a man who only identified himself as Petrov, said it was difficult to get any information about this simply because other vampires and most demons were terrified of the Brotherhood. They seemed to follow an aesthetic that made them a bit more stronger and more vicious than your average vampire, and they were waiting for specific omens that would point either towards the perfect ves! sel or the day of this uber-vampire’s “rebirth”, and the last entry in Petrov’s journal said he intended to uncover what they were, so if this was a real threat they’d be prepared. An addendum noted that Petrov disappeared shortly after that journal entry, and was presumed killed by the Brotherhood.

Yet another note said that the Brotherhood was wiped out in 1901 Mongolia, when an unspecified warlock (probably a Watcher) turned a bunch of Berserkers loose on them. They hadn’t been heard of since.

Until now, of course. So did one survive somehow, or did a bunch of other vampires simply take up their odd cause? The latter was more likely than the former, but it still seemed strange.

He entered the word “Ascendant” into the search function, and was treated to dozens upon dozens of pages, all of them apparently using the word in an astrological or supernatural context that seemed perfectly disconnected from what he needed. He was fairly certain that couldn’t be a reference to astrology, not unless the vampires used Human entrails as divination method.

At the end of the huge volume of pages, there was an entry written in Cyrillic - or at least what looked like Cyrillic; it could have been a symbolic demon language that was very close to it - and he clicked on the link.

The page suddenly went blank, the screen blacking out as if the computer had just died, and then a pop up box appeared, asking for the “password”. Password? What the hell was this? Nothing on this site - which was naturally protected and encrypted anyways - was locked by password protection. There was also a small timer counting down in the upper right corner, giving him ten seconds to enter the password. When it went to zero, the screen blanked again, and kicked him back to the opening library page.

How strange was that? Since when did they restrict access to fellow Watchers? (They had no way of knowing he wasn’t actually one anymore - that was the good thing about friends in high places.) That struck him has all kinds of wrong, but it was hardly the first time, was it?

He only had to think about it a moment before he picked up the phone and called Willow - as far as he knew, she was still as tech savvy as always, and if she couldn’t get him into the page, she probably knew someone who could.

What were the Watchers hiding?