Charlton glared at them, but the assembled fighters just looked confused. “This is off limits to bloodsuckers,” he snarled. “Get the fuck out of here.”

The Sisters just grinned. “Not -”

“- until -”

“- we eat.”

“Logan, get rid of them,” Charlton said, with a wave of his hand.

How perfectly ironic. Maybe the Sisters wouldn’t kill him; maybe they’d just knock him out, and when he woke up, he’d be free of this bastard.

He dropped the lead case, which hit the boardwalk hard, and started stalking towards the Sisters, neither of whom moved. They just stood there, grinning at him, as he stalked towards them, feeling his arm raise. It took a moment for his claws to spring, though, as if Charlton was unsure of the mechanism.

Suddenly he heard shouting in Latin - Latin with an English accent. Giles had joined the party, and just in the nick of time.

Logan vaguely understood the words, even though many syllables were torn away by the wind. He seemed to be shouting something along the lines of “Release the dark” something or other (beast? No, that couldn’t possibly be right, not from Giles), and he felt something smash against his back, spreading warm liquid across his spine. He froze, feeling a tingling across his skin, something just short of itching, and he realized that he was getting feeling back in his limbs.

Charlton shouted something in Latin, and he saw a flash of yellow light out of the corner of his eye. Logan could turn his head now, enough to see that it was a big old battle of the spell casters. Charlton was holding up a hand, somehow supporting a virtually invisible field (you could see just a hint of yellow energy flickering at its edge) that curved around in front of him like a life sized shield. But Giles was holding up an invisible field of his own, and something else as well. In his right hand, he was holding what looked like a small crystal orb, that seemed to be glowing with a cycling greenish light. It was unclear who was on the offensive and who was on the defensive.

“What the hell is this?” the lead Ressik shouted, clearly not sure what to do. Did they fight the thing coming out of the hole in the sky, or these mad bastards on the pier?

Logan cleared his throat to make sure he could talk again, and then shouted, “It’s a trap! He set you up! You’re a sacrifice to his god!” Actually, he was guessing that last bit - he had no idea what they were being sacrificed for, or to whom.

“You -”

“- have -”

“- a choice -”

“- get eaten -”

“- by Ker, or -”

“- get killed by -”

“- us before she can -”

“- eat you. Clock’s ticking.” As if to emphasize this message, the Sisters pulled weapons out of their coats. One had a very large, nasty looking machete, and the other pulled out a length of chain, which had on the end of it a wicked looking spiked ball. As if the Weirds weren’t intimidating enough on their own.

The group looked between them, and the growing hole in the sky, which was now about the size of an ironing board, and slowly growing larger. It was still impossible to tell what was beyond the opening.

Finally, the Ressik grunted and turned away. “Fuck this noise. I ain’t bein’ paid enough to deal with this shit.” He stalked off, and most of the fighters, deeply confused, followed, mainly because they didn’t know what else to do, and some were giving the Sisters nervous looks. Perhaps they knew who they were.

But the fact that his personal army was abandoning him only meant he had fewer people to defend him. He still had bodyguards that weren’t going anywhere, because their livelihood depended on him surviving this. So the Sisters went after them with gusto, hacking and slashing away with giddy grins before the men could draw stakes or guns.

As soon as he had the ability, Logan reached down to grab the case with the Erebus stone, but it was too late. Somehow, it was inside the protective shield with Charlton. So he braced himself, popped his claws, and lunged at the bastard, going for his head. He wasn’t going to dick around with a sorcerer.

Sadly, Charlton was prepared, and his shield apparently extended all the way around him, as he hit something invisible, but as hard as a brick wall and springy as rubber. It sent him flying backwards, until he collided with a wall, that broke apart beneath his weight. But at least it didn’t send him flying straight through it.

As he sat on the dock, feeling like a dick, while debris continued to rain down on him and get torn away by the wind, he saw that one of the Frenik bodyguards was pulling a flask out of his pocket. Shit - that was probably holy water and not booze.

So he jumped to his feet and rushed the Frenik, driving one of his claws deep into his midsection (probably not a killing blow - they were as hard to kill as their Ressik cousins, right?) as he tackled him and shoved him back. The holy water splashed him, not the Sisters, and he wondered why he didn’t burn. By all rights, he should; he was as much a killer as they were.

The Frenik seemed to shrug the knives in his gut off and punched him hard in the side of the head, an action that did rattle his skull a bit, and made the Frenik curse rather loudly, stumbling back and shaking his hand. “Fuck! I heard you Humans were blockheads, but that’s ridiculous.”

There was a dull, almost pneumatic “thoom”, and a large copper bolt embedded itself in the Frenik’s forehead. “I’d tell you to keep your day job, but I’d rather just kill you,” Helga admitted, as the Frenik keeled over, instantly dead. Right, copper killed them too.

Helga was holding a small crossbow, and she loaded up another copper coated bolt as he watched. “Wouldn’t you have rather had a good shag?”

“I’m hopin’ the rain check’s still on.”

“Be a good boy, and we’ll see.”

He was so distracted that he didn’t notice the Frenik who had broken away from the Sisters’ thorough slaughter until he tackled him, and sent them both falling over the edge of the boardwalk and into the water.

As if impact wasn’t bad enough, the water was bizarrely cold for Southern California, enough to make it feel like his heart had stopped for a moment. But as they fell, the Frenik seemed unaffected by the cold, and drove what felt like a knife deep in his gut, twisting as he did so. The pain on top of the cold enraged him, and he simply slashed out and cut through his head. Maybe a Frenik could survive a simple decapitation, but could he survive his head being cut into three separate pieces? He bet not.

The body still held on, but he kicked it away and surfaced, gasping for air, his gut burning as the healing factor was greeted by the additional pain of salt water in an open wound. Fuck, that hurt. He was sorry that the bastard still wasn’t alive; he’d kill him again just for that.

From the sound of it, fighting continued above, and the rift was opening wider, the winds howling like angry ghosts. He swam to the closest pylon and started climbing up, not using his claws because the wood wasn’t thick enough, and probably couldn’t take it.

He reached the edge of the boardwalk and pulled himself up, his gut wound briefly opening wider, making him snarl from the shock of pain. The pier was pretty much cleared now, the Sisters were kicking the bodies off the edge and into the water, while Helga seemed to be enjoying kicking the shit out of a remaining bodyguard. She could have killed him - she had copper - but clearly she just wanted to work some anger out first. So did he, now that he thought about it.

He was climbing to his feet as Charlton’s cavalry arrived, a steroided out Frenik with a whole bunch of bodyguards, both demon and Human, about a dozen overall. Helga put a bolt through the Frenik she’d been playing with and looked at them. The Sisters were finished dumping bodies overboard and stared at them; Brendan, now holding the machete, stared at them, as did Naomi, whose right hand was glowing with energy, while blue-white sparks of energy dripped off her arm like sweat. Since his shirt was a torn, bloody, sodden mess (oh, was he glad it wasn’t his), he tore it all off so they could see the wound on his abdomen sealing up, and he popped his claws, just to give ‘em a look.

The group stood there staring back at all of them for about a minute. They all stared at each other quietly, waiting for someone to make the first move.

The cavalry dropped their weapons and ran.

They just watched them go, and Logan got the sense they were all vaguely disappointed. “They don’t make bodyguards like they used to, do they?” Helga sighed.

“I wish I could rip off my shirt and just scare people away,” Brendan said. “I need to get to the gym.”

“You need to get a healin’ factor too,” Logan pointed out. Man, he was itching for a good fight; he hadn’t had one yet. If only he could gut that Charlton bastard.

“Man -”

“- boobs -”

“- are pretty -”

“- frightening,” the Sisters offered helpfully.

“Yeah, well, that ain’t gonna get me laid either,” Brendan replied tartly.

He helped Helga toss the dead Frenik in the water, and saw that Giles was using various spells to try and bust through Charlton’s shielding spell, but so far all it did was cause some mystical pyrotechnics. Still, Logan figured out what the plan was. The best Giles could do was force a stalemate - and that was the point. He was backing him across the boardwalk in increments, towards that nice, growing gap in the sky. And now there was no sacrifices … except for them.

He sidled up to Helga, who was looking up at the black hole in the sky (it was about big enough to drive a Buick through it now), and asked, “What are we gonna do when it comes through?”

“Get behind me,” Angel announced.

Logan turned to see him at the opposite end of the boardwalk from the great big swirly thing, standing with his hands behind his back, looking grimly between Giles and the hole in the sky. They did as he said, because what else could they do, and as Logan approached, he frowned and asked, “You do own a shirt, right?”

He glared at him, but saw the sparkle in his dark eyes that suggested it was a joke. Rather than acknowledge he had a point, he asked, “So what, does that thing up there hate dead things?”

“Not exactly. I have a secret weapon.”

“Which is?”

“Patience.”

Somehow, Logan doubted that was the weapon, and figured he was just telling him to shut his piehole. He was wearing a sword sheath on his back, but there was no way he was gonna scare a big ugly something away with a bloody sword, so ...

Wait a minute. It smelled wrong. It had a rather sour, moldy taint, a scent he could only describe as corruption. It made the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, and he had the overwhelming desire to either destroy it or preferably, avoid it. Not be near it, not touch it - best of all, not be in the same state with it. What the hell was that?

He didn't have a lot of time to ponder, as something came through the abyss like a butterfly breaking out of its cocoon. Dark wings unfolded, blotting out half the sky, while the thing let out a screech that was mostly in the sub-audible range; you could feel it more than hear it, the rapid vibration of a dental drill jammed into your ear drum. Everybody winced, while Logan was sure one of his ear drums had burst - which was all right really, as that lessened the pain considerably. Sometimes hearing better than anyone was just asking for trouble.

The ... what the hell was it? It was maybe thirty feet long from wing tip to wing tip, with a serpentine body that was maybe only twenty feet long. It was the color of dried blood that had oxidized, and had a head shaped like a spear, sharply triangular with three compound eyes lined up in a single vertical row, while its mouth split into two triangular pieces. It had no obvious nose, and the talons that unfurled from the lower half of its body were more like tentacles than legs. There was almost something translucent about it too, as if it were made of smoke. If it had a smell, it was a replication of the scent of gases escaping from the cut open stomach of a Human corpse.

Giles quickly retreated, keeping his shielding spell up, and Charlton finally realized it was out, and he was closest to it. He quickly tried to conjure something up and threw it at the thing, but the orb of energy just seemed to slide right through it, as if it was indeed smoke, and it swooped down towards him, a prehistoric predator closing in on a meal.

Logan knew he would have preferred gutting the bastard, but seeing the smoky, translucent beak stab through Charlton's midsection while its tentacle talons grabbed his body and lifted it into the air was gratifying. He writhed and shouted something that might have been the beginning of a spell while the beast pulled him off its beak and popped him whole into its mouth. "Like any spell would be effective on Ker," Giles noted scornfully. He was sweating and breathing hard, like fighting Charlton to a mystical stalemate had taken it out of him. Maybe it had - he had no idea how magic worked. "There's no magic in its kingdom, precisely because it doesn't work."

Angel pulled out the sword, the one that smelled strongly of corrosion, corruption, and consumptive hunger, and held it up as the beast turned its dark gaze on them. "Do you really want a piece of this?" He asked, as the thing - Ker? - seemed to recoil in horror. It could smell that too, huh?

Angel started to advance, the blade of the sword gleaming like quicksilver, and Ker started to retreat, back towards its hole. That's when Logan saw that the case, the one containing the sliver, was still laying on the boardwalk, precisely where it had been when Charlton had been protecting it.

He was still hearing out of just the one ear, although his other was rapidly healing. Still, he wasn't sure anyone said anything as he went to retrieve the case, and wondered what he should do with it. Should he try his claws on it, or was it pointless? Toss it in the water, let it get covered up by dumped garbage and treated sewage? Let Angel chop it up with his bad ass evil sword?

That was when he realized what Giles had said, and suddenly had a much better idea.

He grabbed the case, picking it up and doing his best to ignore the feeling that his skin was being pulled off, and started to follow Angel and the recoiling Ker.

And that's when he saw Mariko standing at the end of the pier.

She was standing beneath that dimensional open wound, seemingly unaffected by the winds or the spasming gravitational energy, looking serene and almost forlorn. She wore black silk pants and a deep aquamarine silk shirt, her black hair framing her delicate face. She looked beautiful enough to make his heart hurt, leave him feeling winded. He just stared for a moment, not sure what was going on.

Then he saw that movement in her eyes, some greater darkness behind her black pupils, and understood that these people didn't want him to do it. They wanted him to put it down, and leave it to Angel - leave it here. That was all he had to do; put it down and walk away. And he would have Mariko back.

Why didn't he believe that? Why did he somehow think it wasn't that simple? She was there, she was right there ... of course it had to be that simple! It wasn't even a big deal, was it? Angel would destroy the thing, and they'd never have to worry about it again.

Right?

Angel swung the sword at Ker a couple of times, and the blade seemed to break the air viciously, as if it was actually killing the very molecules in the atmosphere, not so much splitting the atoms as obliterating them. Ker retreated back inside its hole, the wings folding in last, and with the ritual uncompleted or broken, it looked like the dimensional rift had already been shrinking, closing in on itself. It did so rapidly now that Ker was back inside.

Logan closed his eyes, gritted his teeth, and made himself throw the case. “I’m so sorry baby,” he whispered.

There wasn't so much a noise once the rift closed itself, more of a feeling of pressure lightened, like the atmosphere had been changing around them without their knowledge. Logan’s ears popped, but he wasn’t sure if that was related to his healing ear drum or not.

“What the hell did you do that for?” Giles shouted angrily.

He opened his eyes, relatively sure he wasn’t going to cry, and Mariko - along with the hole in the sky - was gone. The fact that it wasn’t really her was cold comfort indeed. “You said there was no magic in that world, yeah? So they can’t open it, right?”

Giles stared at him in a mixture of befuddlement and anger, and Angel came up beside him, asking, “Is that true?” He sheathed the sword, and the itchy feeling on the back of his neck ceased.

Giles had to think about it a moment, but finally he admitted, “Uh … yes. Why didn’t I think of that before? Magic and Ker energy is needed to free the stone, but in the Ker controlled dimension, they have all the power. It will just be a harmless stone there.”

“And we don’t have to worry about someone comin’ around and picking up the pieces,” Logan pointed out, wiping salt water off his face. Surely that was why his eyes were tearing up - yes, that was it.

Giles was looking at him funny, and so was Helga. “You thought was a possibility?”

Now Angel was looking at him funny. Ah shit, what was he going to say? ‘They offered me my wife back. All I had to do was pretend that I didn’t know what they were gonna do.’ “Don’t a bunch of stupid, evil fucks always resurrect this kinda thing? This way, it’s not even our problem anymore, and somehow I don’t think Rodan there will have a hard time defending it.”

They nodded, as if that was completely logical, but Angel kept giving him a funny look that he was beginning to find deeply irritating. What, he couldn’t come up with a brilliant plan on his own? “Good show,” Giles said, almost reluctantly, as he mopped sweat off his forehead with an actual cloth handkerchief. He had no idea anyone even made those anymore. “Angel, we’d better get you and … them inside. The sun’s sure to return soon, and we don’t need you bursting into flame.”

“Shake -”

“- or -”

“- bake.”

Giles gave the Sisters a look that was so suspicious that it seemed to amuse them. “Since when do they have a sense of humor?”

Angel shrugged. “Angelus thought they were hilarious.”

“Yes, well, we know what his sense of humor was like.”

“Nailing -”

“- priests -”

“- to privy -”

“- walls with -”

“- sharpened crucifixes.”

Naomi stared at Angel in disbelief. “You never actually did that, did you?”

Angel shifted uncomfortably, crossing his arms over his chest. “Not me … exactly.”

There was no time to discuss it, not out here, as Logan could feel the heat returning, and the sky was starting to lighten bit by bit. It would be sunny in no time.

Logan hung back, feeling like he had a block of dry ice in his gut, and his muscles were twitching with restlessness. He needed a mean, dirty fight, and he needed it now, before he just started screaming and smashing things. He could give an excuse and head off to Chinatown. They probably would remember him, especially if some of the Yakuza dregs were hanging around. He knew where to look for them; he knew how to make them remember him. He aggressively wiped water from his stinging eyes with his forearm.

Angel hung back too, and asked, in a hushed tone, “What did you see?”

He looked at him askance from the corner of his eye. “What d’ya mean?”

“I saw your face before you threw it. You … it looked like you’d seen a ghost.”

He didn’t know what to tell him. The truth seemed too hard, too impossible to say. It lodged in his throat like a bone, and he knew he’d never get it out. Eventually, he just said, “I just saw what I wanted to see.”

But Angel wouldn’t let it go. “What was it?”

What could he say? “A life.” A life he once had, and would never have again, for as long as he lived.

However fucking long that would turn out to be.

19

He stopped briefly to dry off and get a shirt, and then broke into Bob’s garage and jacked a motorcycle. He had a couple, and he selected a big, nice looking Harley, black with chrome accents. Somehow, Logan felt he was anticipated. Maybe it was the fact that the bike not only had a full tank of gas, but the keys were taped to the throttle, with a small note saying : ‘Wreck this and I’ll give the Sisters your phone number.’ Bob just lived to be an ass, didn’t he? Even when he wasn’t here.

Logan had turned off his mind completely. He didn’t think about what had happened, about the blank and unfamiliar look Naomi gave him, about Mariko’s pleading stare. He couldn’t think; if he thought, he would go mad. All he needed was a few drinks and to drown himself in futile, empty violence. At least he would forget for a while.

He found a very sleazy bar in Chinatown that went by the name “Rakudo”, “paradise” in Japanese, which seemed especially funny since it was a dumpy dive bar with bad lighting and too much wood paneling. It smelled like bad sake, cigarettes, and those damned dried soy snacks. This was a place where tourists never ventured, and bad Japanese pop songs played on an unseen stereo. Logan sat boldly at the bar, garnering stares from the all Asian (and all male), and ordered the best Japanese beer they had on tap (which was actually not even close to the best). He even lit up a cigar, since they smoked in here, and he returned their stares with a sort of empty hostility. It was a tacit invitation for someone to start something - anything. Although he got some ugly glances in return, no one bit, no one took the bait.

A man seated at a back table whispered something to a young man who looked like a menial worker, and he nodded before quickly disappearing into the back. He was going to go tell the local Yakuza rep - whoever that unlucky son of a bitch was - that a guy matching the description of Logan Yashida was back in town. There were only a few questions: how long would it take the hit squad to get here, and would they come in, or would they wait for him outside? If he told them he’d just helped save the universe today, would they decide not to shoot him, and just knife him instead?

It suddenly occurred to him that he’d totally forgotten all about Lotus Wing. He was supposed to see her, wasn’t he? What did she want? He supposed he’d actually have to see her to find out, but he wasn’t especially eager to invite more trouble into his life. He’d had more than his share.

He was on his second beer when he felt something like a shift in the air, a small and sudden breeze that make the gray smoke in the air curl in on itself, like a tidal undertow. Logan figured the Yakuza squad was coming in from the back, and glanced up to see if they’d open fire in a bar, when he saw something that he didn’t expect to see.

Spike.

He was now standing at the back of the room, his skin so pallid and his hair so shockingly bleach blond that he stood out from the shadows surrounding him. His black on black clothes enhanced the effect; he could have been a ghost, manifesting in pieces before fading away. He made sure he had seen him before turning away and disappearing again, turning away into totally darkness.

Logan got up, deeply confused, and gulped down his beer before following him. Wasn’t he lost in the same dimension as Angel? So he was back too? Angel hadn’t mentioned that. Then again, he might not know such a thing.

The back of the bar was basically a narrow corridor containing restrooms, but at the far end was an emergency exit that could only be opened from the inside. So Spike couldn’t have come in through it. What had he done, climb in through the bathroom window? It seemed unlikely that he would have been in this armpit of a bar.

The exit opened on a service alley filled with the overflowing dumpsters of neighboring restaurants and karaoke bars. As he stepped out, he saw the hands reaching for him, but he let them grab him. Why not? What else did he have to do?

Spike grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed him into the brick wall beside the door. “How could you bloody do that? I always knew you were a stupid berk, but that was the most idiotic thing I’ve ever seen - and I’ve hung with teenagers!”

Logan ripped his hands off of him, and snapped, “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“We needed that,” he replied cryptically, a strange darkness moving across his eyes like storm clouds scudding over the moon.