3

Logan lucked out by eventually coming across a tool shed, where he was able to weaken the cuffs by rubbing the plastic ties across the blade of a saw until he could simply pull them apart. He cut his hands and wrists a couple of times, but he healed, so it was no big deal. But the guy whose shed this was might wonder where the drops of blood came from.

He was outside Toronto proper, but not too far. He still had his cell, so he tried to call Rags, but his cell phone wasn’t on. He didn’t know Kier’s number, if he had a cell phone. Did vampires have them as a rule?

He hated to do it, but damn it, he needed to get back to the city as fast as possible. He broke into a ludicrously expensive car and hotwired it in his own special way (some Yuppie would have his Lexus insured up the ass, which is why he didn’t feel bad stealing it), taking off for the city once more.

Had Kier betrayed him? It wouldn’t be the first time he’d sold someone out - he came in as a mole, after all. Still, this seemed needlessly elaborate, and it didn’t quite explain the spaghetti monster. But then again, he wasn’t sure anything would explain the spaghetti monster. That was a new one on him, and previously he’d have claimed he’d seen just about everything. He tried calling Giles, but his number was busy, so he figured he was still working on things.

He abandoned the Lexus two blocks from the bar and went back on foot, but Rags and Kier were gone, and the bartender had no idea when they left, not to mention where they went. He took a gamble that they ‘ported out to the sewers (the sun was still out, somewhere beyond all those steel wool clouds) and found a way in through a manhole cover in the street behind the bar. It was hard to pick up a scent in a sewer, unless you were after something that smelled like shit, but Rags smelled so strongly of booze and fresh celery (all Persaids smelled like celery - why he had no idea) that he could pick him up. Oh sure, the trail was amazingly faint beside the overwhelming reek of Human waste, but it was there.

He followed it for about a mile, following the twist and turns of the underground system, but the trail got stronger the closer he got. “Rags!” He bellowed, really putting his diaphragm into the shout. He bet they could hear him topside. “Kier! Where the fuck are you guys?!” He continued on for a few hundred meters, but as he turned another corner, scaring a sewer rat the size of a dachshund, Rags and Kier popped into existence about twenty feet away from him.

Kier instantly ripped his arm away and staggered against the wall as if about to fall on his face. “I told you I could walk,” he complained.

Rags seemed to ignore him. “So where’ve you been?”

“Got kidnapped by Ressiks. Or maybe Freniks, I’m not sure. They look alike. They were ready for me; they knew who I was.”

“What?” Kier seemed surprised, and it was genuine; even down here, Logan was close enough that he could have smelled a lie. “How the hell could they have known that?”

“Kid, you tell me. I got no clue.”

“Maybe t’ey gotta steer,” Rags slurred.

Logan stared at him, sure he hadn’t heard him right, but what else could that word have been? “A steer?”

“No, not a steer, a sheer,” Rags insisted.

He glanced at Kier, who shook his head. He wasn’t sure what he was saying either. How many beers had Rags had? Was he gone that long? Rags pointed at his sunglasses (why did he still have them on?) and said, “A sheer, y’know? A person who shees fings.”

He finally got it. “Are you saying a seer?”

Rags clicked his tongue, looked up at the ceiling, and then almost fell over. Logan reflexively reached out and steadied him. “Yes, I’m sayin’ sleer. Jesus, don’t y’guys speak English?”

Kier rolled his eyes, and Logan sympathized. He’d left him to deal with Rags, who had clearly been pounding back the alcohol at an alarming rate, and the fact that he had become even more incoherent than usual was just icing on the cake. “If they have a seer, we’re screwed,” Kier pointed out. “Especially if they know we’re coming for them.”

“Here’s the question - who the fuck is them? I thought we were after vampires, but now it seems we’ve got spaghetti monsters and Ressiks in the mix.”

Kier stared at him in disbelief. “Spaghetti monster?”

“Ressiks are mercs - anyone can ‘ire ‘em if you got th’ dough,” Rags countered. It was a good point.

He caught them up to speed on what little he’d learned, and what he had encountered. Logan had been hoping that things would make more sense once he said them out loud, that pieces he hadn’t really noticed would click into place, but it didn’t. It remained baffling, and more than a little irritating.

They had been set up. But who had done it and why remained unknown. And that was the biggest pisser of all.

****

It took a while, but Willow not only got him into the protected part of the website, but also found him a translation program. The problem was, the translation program wasn’t quite up to the job.

Either the language was poorly rendered or the program was poorly done, but only partial paragraphs came out, most cut with good portions of gibberish. But from what Giles could discern, “Ascendant” was the name of some program instigated by a group of Watchers in Russia in the late 1800’s. It was decided (by whom?) that Slayers simply weren’t enough in the unending fight against evil, especially when it came to vampires. So Ascendant was considered a possible answer by utilizing the pseudo-science of eugenics and something else. There were a couple of references to something called “the elixir”, but it wasn’t explicitly discussed - or at least not in any passages that weren’t complete gibberish. But even in this scattershot, bare bones rendition, Giles found it utterly appalling. The Watchers indulged in eugenics and experimenting on Humans - unsuspecting Humans at that? Horrid. No wonder they locked that information away. There were indications the program had been “ter! minated”, but the use of that specific term sent a shiver down his spine. Had they killed all their experimental subjects? That was something demons would do, not Humans (or at least one would hope). He knew that many Watchers embraced the idea of committing a few “lesser” evils in the course of defeating greater evil, but it had never set well with Giles - even though he had committed a few in the past - and it still didn’t. He did what he felt he had to do at the time, but no more. This program, even if it was instigated by a renegade group of Watchers, was abominable, and he wasn’t even sure of all the details.

But why were there a bunch of vampires who presumably knew about this, for one, and second of all, why were they bringing it up now? Ascendant had been dead since the early days of the 1900’s - it was a failed, hideous bit of Human experimentation, buried deep in the Watchers archives, so deep he could barely find it.

But these were vampires they were dealing with. One of them could have been alive (so to speak) back in those days and been aware of what those Watchers were doing or trying to do. But that didn’t explain why they were bringing this up now. The Watchers were down and pretty much out. Oh sure, the survivors had decided to rebuild and had regrouped in Australia, the continent with the largest group of surviving Watchers to begin with (proving that the constant joke around British HQ that the “hardest” Watchers were in Australia and China respectively was apparently not a joke at all), but the Watchers had been decimated; it was a wounded entity now. And with all potential Slayers now active, that should have more than evened the playing field between good and evil.

Yet it hadn’t. All it had done was confuse the issue. And shouldn’t that have been expected? Unlike Humans, demons didn’t actually evolve; they were very static entities, which was what pretty much doomed them, but they could adapt if they were clever or desperate or something of both. Many demons seem to have adapted, or at least curried the favor of stronger, more vicious beings.

All of this was making his head ache and his stomach burn. In hopes of avoiding an ulcer, he changed his focus to discovering this “pasta demon” Logan had mentioned. Eventually he dug up an obscure being known as a Tali demon. It was supposedly a type of messenger between the higher and lower realms, a type of collective entity that was made up of several different pieces that existed in several different places simultaneously, and was often described as looking like a tangle of string or a pile of worms. But they didn’t exist naturally here or anywhere, so how did Logan come across one? It wasn’t like he was favored by the gods, who’d throw a warning into his path if he needed it.

Oh wait, he was the favored of one god - Bob. Could he have sent the Tali to him? Or could one of Bob’s friends done so? Hell, even one of his enemies could have sent the Tali on, just to confuse some issues.

He called Logan to let him know what he’d dug up, but the first time he didn’t get through. The second time he did, but the connection was so poor it seemed like he was shouting into a tin can. “I’m in a sewer,” Logan explained.

Giles almost asked if he meant that figuratively or literally, but decided it was best not to know.

He briefed him on what little he had, but the Ascendant information, as meager as it was, interested him more than he expected. “Wait - were the Watchers experimenting on mutants?”

That possibility hadn’t even occurred to him. “I don’t think so. They weren’t aware of their existence then; I’m not sure anyone was.”

“But they were trying to create or at least utilize people who could fight the demons, right? Mutants would be great for that. Well, some of ‘em.”

“Perhaps. But all I have here is incomplete sentences on inhuman experiments, and something called an “elixir”, which isn’t clarified in the least.”

“Do you still have the untranslated pages?”

“I saved them, yes.”

“Why don’t you email them to me? I’ll see if I can read ‘em.”

He wasn’t sure if Logan was disparaging his ability to translate pages of incomprehensible text or not. “I’m not sure it’s even in a proper language.”

“I don’t care. I can give it a shot. What do we got to lose at this point?”

That was fair enough. After writing down Logan’s rather silly email address, Logan asked, “Is there any protection at all against a seer or a psychic?”

“It would depend on the type you were dealing with. Most often the answer is no.”

“Most often? There are exceptions?”

Giles sighed, pinching his eyes shut. He hated talking in vague generalities. “A few. Is Rags there with you?” He thought he heard Cockney complaining in the background, and Rags’s voice was hard to mistake for anyone else’s.

“Sadly.”

“He’s a High Priest of the Gorgons, is he not? He should be able to put up a protection spell around you. It might not shield you from all psychics, but it could blind you to some.” Giles listened as Logan relayed this information to Rags, and the connection was so bad that Rags’ voice was just a blurry connection of random noises … or was that the connection? Was he extremely intoxicated? Because he was British, and yet he was fairly certain he’d never heard a Cockney accent quite that thick before. It was like paste, something sludgy and cloying to the ears, and nearly as garbled as the Ascendant files.

He nearly asked him if he needed help, but ultimately didn’t, because something told him he would regret it almost instantly. Working with Logan would have been bad enough; working with Logan and Rags together would have been a bit too much.

4

It took Rags approximately twenty minutes to think up a workable spell, and another twenty minutes for him to cast it, as he stumbled over several words, mangling them to the point of nonsense. Seemingly; even at the best of times, it was hard to tell with Rags. They just had to take his word on it that he got the spell right, as nothing happened, but Rags insisted something had occurred.

Kier’s phone (yes, he had one) had a GPS in it, and using that Logan figured out where the hell they were. They kept to the sewers, though, and Logan got close enough that he risked climbing up to the surface. It was still raining, still grey, but he didn’t see or smell any demons in the immediate vicinity, and he went ahead into the public library.

It was very uncrowded, for which he was grateful, as he wasn’t sure he didn’t still smell of sewer. It was a fairly new complex, he could still smell the paint and carpet glue, with a high ceiling and skylights that showed how oppressive the sky was outside. The books were in shelves set up like hedgerows, leading into the back of the building, but off to the far left was a small nest of tables set up with public access computers. A couple were occupied, but most weren’t.

Damn it was peaceful in here. He was so glad he came up with some bullshit reason for Rags to stay in the sewers with Kier, because frankly, the guy needed to sober up a bit. Also, probably take a shower. His strong smelled helped him track them through the sewers, but it had now ended its usefulness.

He logged into his email account, and after deleting what seemed to be three years worth of spam, he found the files Giles sent him. Logan stared at them for the longest time, recognizing them … and yet not quite. It was like a highly stylized form of old Cyrillic, almost a cipher … and yet the more he stared at it, the more it started clicking into place in his mind. Did he almost recognize this? He was nearly getting a sense of déjà vu here, but as with many things, he didn’t know why. It was like his mind was blind to everything but the merest glimmer of light.

Giles was right about Ascendant being a eugenics program, a way to breed new warriors for the fighting evil cause, but here’s what he missed. The “elixir”? It referred to “demon aspects” - the idea was to essentially inoculate people with weak traces of demon elements in the hope that they or their descendants would manifest demon aspects without being demonic or truly influenced by the demonic. Apparently this ended up in lots of death; lots and lots of death. Survivors were often left sick and weak, diminished in some capacity, making the whole experiment seem like an extended exercise in both futility and cruelty.

But they kept going. Of course they did, because otherwise their legacy as total rat bastards would have been pissed away. But nothing much ever came of it, although they felt they had some success with a couple of subjects, namely because they weren’t dead or confined to a sick bed. They weren’t well, though; they certainly had no “aspect of the demon” about them. It could only be considered a victory in that they were still breathing somewhat regularly.

Finally someone came to their senses and put an end to the program, but it wasn’t clear what they meant by “end”. Oh sure, they stopped injecting suspecting and unsuspecting people with shit, but did they kill off any subject that managed to survive? There were implications in “total sterilization”, but nothing explicit. So they were okay with conducting and recording inhuman medical experiments, but not mercy killings? Those were some fucked up morals. They could have worked for the Organization.

Now the documents were so easy to read he had no idea why he couldn’t read them in the first place. There was a mention of some vampires becoming aware of the experiments and resenting it to a high degree, to the point that they were killing off anyone that had anything to do with Ascendant. But they ran into a problem - it seems that a couple were killed off by an unknown assailant, in a way consistent with a Slayer. Except there were no Slayers in Russia at the time; the Slayer was supposedly in India at this time. Now there were concerns that there were other demons watching and waiting to see the result of the Ascendant trials, which bothered the Watchers a great deal. After all, if demons liked it, could it be any good? They were the “enemy”, after all.

He heard screams at the front of the library, and suddenly an explosive barrage of gunfire that inspired more screaming and ducking under tables as a Ressik in a neat, dark Prada suit came in, holding up a rather large automatic rifle. “Everybody be cool! We just want the hairy guy, and then we’ll be on our way.” Behind him, a small army of fellow Ressiks filed afterwards, fanning out into the library.

“Oh, great spell Rags,” he cursed under his breath, wondering where to make his stand.