“Vanth,” Angel shouted, not sure she even spoke the language. “We need information from him! Don’t take him ye-”

But there was a high pitched scream, the whine of an earth boring drill magnified ten thousand times, and hit him like a brick wall. He screamed and dropped to his knees, grabbing his head as the sound seemed to pierce his skull like a sword. The sound reverberated through his brain like shrapnel, tearing through soft tissue like fluff, and he wondered if the keys had failed.

Then it was over. The sound and light retreated suddenly and at once, as if a door had been slammed shut, and he opened his eyes, surprised to find he was still alive. (Okay, he wasn’t - in a manner of speaking alive.)

The keys did work - Wesley was still alive, as were the Sisters (again, in a manner of speaking), although the Renat they continued to hold was slumped down towards the floor, stone dead. Spike, who as ghost needed no protection from Vanth (damn), blinked in an exaggerated fashion, and exclaimed, “What the fuck was that?!”

The Sisters let go of the Renat’s arms, and he collapsed completely to the floor. “Well-”

“-that’s-”

“-that.”

Angel stood up, trying to pretend he’d never been on the floor at all, and threw up his hands in disgust. “Now we’ll never know who took him or why.” He didn’t need to search the house to know everyone within its walls was dead - he could smell it.

That was one of the more puzzling things about the Bible - there were many, of course, but the most curious was the idea that any god unhappy with people would shower them with toads or locusts or some such crap. That would only occur if the gods were bored; otherwise, you cheese them off, you’re one dead motherfucker. No plague of boils for you, just pushing up daisies.

“I’m not so sure about that,” Yasha said, coming into the front room. A wisp of a spider web lingered in her hair like the final strand of a rotted wedding veil, but that was probably all she found in the basement - unless they had torture apparatus too. “I heard him screaming. He said they wanted his blood?”

“Which makes no sense,” Angel replied, a sort of yes. “Even vampires wouldn’t have much use for his blood. Beyond drinking it.”

“You’re thinking of him only in the sense of being a mutant,” she countered coolly, as if this was an abstract intellectual debate. “He’s also an avatar.”

Silence descending was supposed to be gentle, a gap of noise. Oddly enough, it now felt like a heavy weight slamming down on all of them.

“Of course,” Wesley gasped, finally breaking the choking silence. “As an avatar, his blood is a commodity - that’s why they took some.”

“Avatar?” Spike scoffed. “Who? Chops? Oh please, who could he be the avatar for - Tony Orlando?”

Everyone ignored him, if they weren’t trying to puzzle out his meaning. Since when was Tony Orlando a god?

“This does nothing to narrow the suspects,” Wesley said, happily ignoring Spike. “Avatar blood is powerful, and usually stands in for god blood, which is as rare as an attractive slime demon. But considering its power, it can only be used in rituals calling for something drastic or cataclysmic.”

“We have to find Bob,” Angel insisted. “He can find his own avatar, and he can fucking protect him, which he should’ve been doing all along.”

Yasha scoffed. “Oh yes, Logan is going to accept being watched and coddled all the time.”

He glared at her, but he knew she had a point. Of course he’d balk at that; he had a hard time coping with a simple team dynamic.

“If-”

“-you-”

“-think Logan’s-”

“-stubborn, try -”

“-and find a-”

“-god who doesn’t-”

“-want to be found,” the Sisters chimed in, brushing Renat scales off their hands (in tandem, of course).

It was then Angel realized that the Sisters must have known Bob was a god all along - but did they share that information? No, not at all, they just sided with the power that could conceivably kill them with a word. Angelus’s “girls” were nothing if not bright. It may have seemed like they were two people sharing a single brain, but really they were two brains merged into one, giving them an insight superior to a puny being with a single, normal sized brain. “You have no idea where he is?”

“If-”

“-he-”

“-wanted to-”

“-be found-”

“-it would be-”

“-easy to do.”

“So we’re back to square one, finding out where they took Logan,” Angel sighed in frustration, running a hand nervously through his hair. “Are you sure we can’t run a locator spell?”

Wesley shrugged helplessly. “We could, but if he’s shrouded in black magic, it will take time.”

“Time he doesn’t have.”

Wes grimaced. “I imagine.”

“So, what, they’re going to use his blood to bring up yet another big bad?” Spike interjected, sounding bored. He actually started searching his pockets for cigarettes, and then it must have dawned on him that the dead didn’t smoke. Well, not if they were ghosts. “So? We stick a holy fork in it, it’s done, we go waste even more of our time filing paternity suits against cluster demons.” He then scoffed. “Well, you idiots will. Me, I got better things to do.”

“Then why don’t you ever leave me alone?” Angel pointed out, somewhat peevishly.

Spike gave him a hard, teeth baring grin. “ ‘Cause I like buggin’ the shit out of you.”

Well, at least he was honest.

“If it were only that simple,” Wesley interjected, getting them back on track. “Avatar blood wouldn’t be used for a standard raising. It would have to be something … big. Something needing a lot of power to breech the barrier between here and wherever it is.”

“Something a lot more hard than your bargain basement Hell god,” Yasha agreed.

“That’s-”

“-it,” the Sisters suddenly said.

They all stared at them. “What’s it?” Angel asked. “Hell god?”

“How-”

“-do-”

“-you birth-”

“-a god-”

“-but with the-”

“-blood of another?”

“Are you saying they’ll use him to bring a god back?” Angel then looked to Wes, trusting his answer more.

Wesley stared back at him starkly, eyes suddenly hollow with terrible knowledge. “That’s more than possible. And a god who requires blood to return -”

“-isn’t a friendly one,” Yasha finished for him. Angel wondered how she knew that, but now was not the time to wonder where Lady Blood acquired her knowledge of the arcane - after all, hadn’t she wiped out the Templars? She probably peeked at a record or two.

“It’s begun,” Wes said quietly, repeating what the Renat had told them. But Wesley said it in a breathless whisper, understanding now the true threat behind those words. “We’re already too late, Angel. Logan must have been the last part of the plan. They’ve already started the ceremony.”

“Shit,” the Sisters said in unison.

That summed it up nicely.

Where the fuck was Bob when they needed him?

17

Duncan shifted in his chair for what seemed to be the tenth time in as many seconds, so impatient and uncomfortable he was almost vibrating with it. Niemi was slumped comfortably in her chair, looking barely awake, as casual as Duncan was intense. But then again, she was always that way; when you knew you were the strongest person in the building - any building, ever - it probably gave you lots of confidence.

He eyed Duncan with some amusement, and asked, “Was that triple espresso wise?”

Duncan, also known as Duncan Langois, also known as code name Ballistic, scowled at him, but quickly looked away. Even though he’d slacked off on his usual weight training routine, and stopped frosting his hair (why had he ever done that?), he was still a big, broad shouldered man, just now with a slender body that didn’t quite match his beefy, diamond shaped face. He was not the most attractive man in the world, but he was by no means homely. But ever since Montana, he seemed depressed, cut down a peg, which was devastating for a narcissist such as Duncan. “That was supposed to be the ploy to get Wolverine’s attention - why the fuck was he there?”

Ah, the second ego blow - being handled so easily by Wolverine and Cyclops. But that wasn’t all, was it? No; no matter how well he was paying him, Duncan had been looking forward to the money, and to the esteem he’d lost at Shadowcaster. No matter that there was no way he had a chance against Pretty Boy (the only available name for Wolverine’s reality warping friend - the intelligence profile’s only description of him was “Handsome, Australian, unnaturally blue eyes” - that was it. Nothing else could be confirmed or verified) - no narcissist believed themselves to be vulnerable to anyone, even if it was to the most potentially Alpha mutant in existence. He also felt Cyclops was a one trick pony (true - but what a trick), and was additionally humiliated by being unable to keep it up - so to speak - longer than him. And again, they lost all that easy money.

But they would have been completely fucked if he hadn’t sent Afterthought as a back up. Watching with the rest of the crowd, instructed not to aid in any way, simply help extract them if necessary, she imposed anxiety on one of the rookie cops, making him fire a barrage of tear gas that aided their escape, and helped keep Logan from pursuit. He trusted Niemi not to give the game away, but if Wolverine got the better of Duncan, he didn’t trust him not to say something importune, if only to lord something over Wolverine.

He was forced to shake his head. “Unknown. But at least we confirmed he’s back with Xavier’s people.”

“Was,” Niemi needlessly corrected. She’d never settled on a code name she liked - there really weren’t a lot of super strong women outside freak shows, and the modern day equivalent of freak shows, Ms. Olympia contests. Niemi Guerra didn’t even look strong; she was a flat chested string bean, who only needed horn rimmed glasses and Spock ears to complete her slightly nebbish-y appearance. You’d never think she could pick up an SUV as easily as a Styrofoam cup.

She was a relatively recent recruit to the program, and not typical by any means. She was from a good, upper class home, private schooled, and her parents - both doctors - made sure she wasn’t discriminated against because she was a mutant. It was a shame that she was a sociopath by nature. No amount of money or schooling could give empathy to a person who simply was born without it. That proved it happened in any family, no matter how good.

“He’ll be back,” he said confidently, sinking back into his plush desk chair, stretching his legs out under the desk. “We’ll give him a week, and if there’s no contact by then, will make him come back.”

Duncan cocked his head to the side, gazing at him like a parrot. He was almost as smart as one too. “Hit the mansion? Grab a kid?”

“Kill someone?” Niemi contributed. She said it with the slightest air of hopefulness.

He sighed, wondering if they’d ever seem like anything but children to him, in spite of their ages. “We don’t want to force a confrontation with him, do we? Nor do we want him to discover us or our surveillance. There are other ways to flush Wolverine out of hiding. His error was finally emerging from the shadows - in the light, he is controllable, and therefore weak. Before, he was protected by his nothingness; now, he has something to lose. Much to lose.”

They both gave him thousand yard stares, not understanding in the least, but they still betrayed their personalities - Duncan’s frosty blue eyes were like perfect mirrors, flat and empty, while Niemi’s hazel eyes were hard and cold. Duncan just didn’t follow it; Niemi didn’t understand why he didn’t have Wolverine killed.

But neither of them - even Duncan, who'd been with the Organization for years - really grasped what was going on here, or why Wolverine remained important.

He was not the most powerful mutant around, not by a long shot, but he was the most persistent, and the most perfectly trained. He'd made his name as a weapon of mass slaughter, but there were any dozens of mutants who could do that; that wasn't that special. It was what they didn't know that made him special.

He was the perfect assassin.

And in the classical sense - the sniper from the rooftop, the face in the crowd that just threw away a fast food bag containing two pounds of Semtex and a timer fifty seconds away from detonation into the garbage can on the corner of a crowded street. He was the man you never saw, the man who killed quietly and melted away before you even realized what had happened. In spite of his berserker reputation, he had a true gift for stealth. He could follow a scent for miles, so why hurry? He knew he could always find his prey when he wanted to, and he never had to make a scene about it unless he wanted to.

Perhaps his most impressive kill was on a crowded car in the Paris Metro. Shouldering through the crowd, seemingly on his way out, he simply pressed his hand against the back of his target, extended a single claw, punched through the victim's aorta, and then retracted the claws and shoved through the crowd so fast he was actually a meter or so away before the victim collapsed. Everyone thought it was a heart attack - the gendarmes only realized he'd been stabbed when the blood started pouring out his back, and that was only due to gravity, as he was dead well before the subway even came to a stop.

And what a puzzling crime. No one saw a knife, a struggle, anyone near him who wasn't a random commuter. Even if Wolverine hadn't disappeared into the throng, if they'd have frisked him just at random because he was on the train, they'd never have found a weapon. He didn't need a weapon - he was one.

God, he was good. Infiltration, stalking, surveillance, reading a scene with a clarity that a social scientist and psychologist alike would envy - he was truly gifted. He could make a kill a work of art; there were more unsolved homicides that Wolverine was responsible for than he would ever know. When he wanted to be stealthy, there was no one better. How else had he been able to avoid their detection and actually be believed to be dead for fifteen years? You couldn't teach something like that; it was inborn, ingrained. He was a predator, plain and simple; the two hundred pound tiger that still managed to elude you at every turn.

Which was why he never understood all the other "tinkering" Stryker wanted to do with him. But Stryker had a very unhealthy obsession with him. At first, he thought it was simply repressed sexuality - he couldn't admit to himself he just really wanted to fuck Wolverine, but it may have been another psychological problem at the root of it all: he wanted his son to be like Wolverine, if he had to be a mutie at all. Someone useful and controllable, not the train wreck that his son actually was. There may have been more; huge chunks of Stryker's records had been wiped out, and there were rumors in the upper echelon that he once fucked up major on a mission, and the only thing that managed to save it was ... you guessed it, Wolverine. Perhaps the humiliation led him to devote all that time and energy in humiliating and subjugating Wolverine. No one - especially a mutie - showed him up.

But Stryker was flatline now, and thank god - he'd have had to take that crazy fuck out himself if Wolverine finally hadn't punched his ticket. How they had let him take over the Organization he would never know, except that he had a gift for being a slimy little weasel. He had never mastered the art of sucking up, and in the short run he had paid for it.

Yet, in the long run, the Organization was all his now. Well, in one sense.

The Organization didn't really exist anymore. The one in place had expelled all the mutants, which made no fucking sense at all - Humans alone hunting mutants? Yeah, right, that was going to work. And they'd made things worse by killing the weak ones, the dumb ones, the shallow end of the gene pool - the stronger, smarter mutants had survived, gotten out, and if these fools knew anything about evolution (had they not grasped Darwinism?), they'd know they were just encouraging the future production of stronger, more lethal mutants. That would backfire in a spectacular fashion.

Well, if not for him.

The Human branch, whatever they called it, was of no concern to him. It had no connection to this, this shadow operation, so deeper than black ops there was no appropriate name to give it. He was slowly recruiting mutants to fill in the gaps, help bring things under control, but nothing so ham fisted as brain washing and mind control. There were other ways to make people work for you; better ways.

The task he'd given Ballistic (what a silly name - how Ballistic was firing concussive blasts from your hands? But it was Stryker who insisted on always referring to the muties by their stupid code names - "A non-Human creature doesn't deserve a Human name.") and Niemi was a simple one - blatant daylight attacks, highlighting their mutant abilities. In spite of the change in his appearance, he was sure Logan would recognize Ballistic, and be one of the first to pursue them. It was an operation known in the biz as a "quail flush" - find your target by making him show himself. It worked, but far sooner than intended - who knew Logan (and Cyclops) would be right there, at the scene of the first hit? As far as Ballistic was concerned, that was bad timing.

But he considered it very good luck indeed. With little muss and fuss, they had flushed Logan out almost immediately. The fact that he still hung around Xavier’s on a semi-regular basis was a good sign. He was not disappearing, not like he usually did - not like he could. An enemy in a known location was one less enemy to worry about.

“I don’t get this,” Niemi admitted. “If you don’t wanna attack the guy, why are we watching him?”

He smiled at her, almost envying her simplistic outlook on life. With her it was always kiss or kill, right this second; patience, waiting for something, was an almost foreign concept. “In due time. You’ll have to trust me, I’m afraid.”

“Didn’t he used to be good?” She asked, now starting to sound irritated, like a cranky three year old. “I heard he went nuts or somethin’.”

“He was okay,” Duncan offered, somewhat dismissively. “But he wasn’t as great as some make him out to be. I worked with him once - he was a mess.”

Niemi eyed him suspiciously, as she had every right to, as Duncan had technically never worked with Logan. A failed candidate for the “Weapon X” modification program, he was once part of a back up team supporting Logan’s team on a mission, during Logan‘s last official days with the Organization. It was quite possible he barked an order at Duncan once the teams converged, but they’d spent no meaningful time together. He could have been a mess, though; Logan’s telepathic conditioning was falling apart at the time, and everything they didn’t want seeping through into his consciousness was starting to get through again. And those dominoes of fate all fell into place - he was sent for “reconditioning” up at Alkali Lake, and somehow he got loose; this time, the methods weren’t good enough to hold him back, and he went on a murderous rampage, leading to the destruction of the base, and his eventual believed death. Even obsessed Stryker came to believe it eventually, assuming no one could escape the detection of the Organization (and specifically him) for that long.

But that was the flaw in Stryker’s reasoning. He insisted on thinking Logan was an animal, when in fact he was far more deadly as a cyborg, something he resembled in his cooler, deadlier states; not a living thing at all, but a pure machine, a machine specifically built to survive at any cost. Disappearance was the most primitive - and effective - mode of survival.

The massacre at Alkali Lake was all Stryker’s fault anyhow, even though no one would admit it. He was in the rare position to have heard some of the final audio transmissions out of Alkali Lake, before they were destroyed - they were trashed not only because they were of no use or ornament, but many people simply couldn’t stomach the last few seconds, where you could actually hear the sound of flesh tearing, and a wet noise generally assumed to be organs falling out near the microphone.

Stryker pushed too far; Logan just snapped. That wasn’t Logan as animal, but Logan as a man, completely fucking insane - his mind shattered into a billion different fragments of personalities and memories and thoughts and “voices”, a man who could not reconcile being ten thousand different people at once. He tried to layer on one too many things, fucked over Logan’s brain until it was little more than oatmeal sloshing inside his skull. Stryker didn’t coax out the perfect animal, but the perfect psychopath. What animal was more deadlier than man? Had that never gotten through William’s thick skull?

He never believed he was dead. He believed that Logan, insane as he was, had gone to ground, and would be easy to track simply by following the trail of dead he would leave in his wake. But that’s where Logan had the last laugh, and the “impossible man” did one more impossible thing: he got over it.

Healing from insanity, especially an induced case like his, was unheard of. Oh sure, with years of therapy and drugs, maybe you could get out into normal society again, but insanity wasn’t like a broken arm - it didn’t set and heal over a short period of time. And yet, Logan managed just that. In retrospect, it was perfectly logical - no insane animal could survive, it was counterproductive. So, in the name of survival, he shed it like a winter coat. Oh, to be built for pure survival like Wolverine obviously was. What a thing that would be.

“So what’s the drill now?” Niemi asked. She couldn’t sound more bored if she tried.

“We give him a week,” he told her. “If he doesn’t reappear, we can put something else in motion.”

“More hits?” Duncan asked, perking up.

He sighed and leaned back, glancing up at the bars the sunlight made on the ceiling as it cut through the blinds. They wouldn’t understand, nor would he expect them to. “No. Why use a sledgehammer when a scalpel will do?”

Judging from the blank stares, they didn’t get it. The people he had to work with.

That’s why it would be such a joy to work with Wolverine again.

 18

The ocean was as calm and dark as a pool of ink, mirroring the black, starless sky. The crescent moon seemed to float placidly on its surface, like a lost signal flare. This was a beautiful place; a shame it felt so wrong.

The locals called this area - encompassing this slice of beach and swath of jagged cliffs - Mar de Almas, or “Sea of Souls”, and believed it to be haunted, which was why it was a rare part of the Northeastern Mexican coast line that was almost wholly undeveloped. Tourist havens bracketed this area miles away, but nothing came near here.

The official reason given was the treacherous nature of the otherwise beautiful sea. Shoals and reefs rose out of the water in great proliferation the closer you came to shore, the moldering bones of dead leviathans, only to be unexpectedly swallowed whole by the water, making them even more treacherous for being hidden beneath the skin of the ocean.

The cliffs that rose on the opposite side were steep and full of scree, worn down by a salty sea and fearsome wind, making the narrow sliver of beach almost inaccessible, at least by standard means. It didn’t seem worth the bother and peril of reaching it.

Once again, superstition was used as a protective measure. There were no ghosts here, no lost souls of drowned sailors wandering the cliffs where they had hoped to reach haven and met death instead. The topography of the place said only one thing to Bob - fortress. A natural one, fortified by nature herself, hard to reach and impossible to penetrate without attracting notice.

The reason it felt wrong here - the reason the locals decided to call it “haunted”, groping for something to explain the odd feeling that lingered in the air like a subliminal bad smell - was that this place, long ago, had been consecrated in the name of several gods. Mostly Aztec, Incan, and Mayan in nature (if they were ever known at all), this was their mortal plane enclave, away from the mortal pets that so amused them for a little while, until ennui, restlessness, and in fighting led them to abandon this plane (if, indeed, they were still alive or around in any capacity - in fighting between gods could be an extremely nasty thing).

To be consecrated in their name, there was no “holy water”, no chants, no liturgical dance (and thank any god for that) - what there was was blood. Rivers of it, oceans, that stained the sand crimson and left striations of rusty brown on the cliff faces, making them look like layers of rock instead of the ghost of slaughters past.

Camaxtli pulled great strength from this area; he fed on blood, on the lingering stain of violent death, and there were about thirty five specific sites in Mexico and Central America that continued to feed him, even though sacrifices hadn’t been made in his name for a long time. Once a place was consecrated in his name, it was hard to undo, and who would bother?

Bob made a mental note to hit the spots and undo them as soon as he had the time.

It also helped that the Silencias had obviously constructed a powerful repellant spell, covering this area for a mile in all directions, something that made you skin crawl for no reason and made you want to run away in panic, even though there was no obvious threat. Even the animals had fled.

Bob didn’t want to break the spell; it was good that the civilians were gone. Also, to shatter it would undoubtedly attract their attention, and while he knew he’d never be able to get a true drop on them, Bob didn’t want them to know he was here as long as possible. So he was a rock in the river of this caustic spell, letting it flow around him without touching.

As a reflexive response, he could feel his own power coming out, oozing out through his pores, giving the world a bright azure hue. He had to keep a tight rein on it, as too much power would attract their attention immediately. He wasn’t ready for that, not yet.

They were deep inside a cave in the cliffs, not visible to the naked eye, as was the guard left on duty. But he was looking out towards the horizon, apparently expecting one of the sea gods - traditional opponents of Itchy - to try and disrupt the festivities. Yet that made Bob suspicious - surely Cammy had warned them of him.

He wondered what kind of trap Cammy was expecting to spring on him. Oh well, he had no plans for tonight.