Wesley, standing off to the side, crossed his arms over his chest. “Does he mean permanently or temporarily?”

Angel simply asked, “Why?”

“Because it’s a bit too sunny out there for you; you can’t come with us, unless you stay in the sewer.”

Shit - he hated it when Wes made a point he simply couldn’t argue with. “I can’t just stay here,” he protested, but he doubted he’d be of any use in the sewer, unless they could chase Azi Dahaka down there. Would he even fit?

“You can do us some good,” Bob argued. “I need you to find where Ananga is hiding. He has part of my energy signature - my Powers energy signature - and if you can isolate him, that would be great. We need to hit him before he attacks us, or anyone else. Oh, and this.” He dug in his pants pocket, and pulled out a scrap of torn paper, now smeared with his blue blood. “You need to call this man. Tell him Bob is calling in his favor, and if he doesn’t get his ass over here, it’ll be on his doorstep sooner than he thinks.”

Angel studied the paper scrap warily. It was a British telephone number, London area if he wasn’t mistaken. “Who is this?”

“A sorcerer, an insanely powerful one. We could use his help. Now, the sword?”

“You really haven’t told me why you want it.”

He sighed impatiently, fixing him with a look that suggested he was being dense on purpose. “They want it. I want to make sure they can’t get it.”

“The Senior Partners? Isn’t this small potatoes?”

“It’ a god killer. Wouldn’t you want it if they had it?”

Wesley let out a small grunt of humor. “He has you there.”

Angel retrieved the sword in its special scabbard, and felt the energy bleeding through the leather. It was getting more powerful; it was getting harder to hide. He had a feeling that he would regret it, but he held out the sword towards Bob, haft first. “Are you going to destroy it?”

Bob shook his head, taking the sword with the reverence it deserved. “I don’t even know how to do that. I’m going to give it to a god who can protect it, and would never have any desire to use it. The Partners might be able to track it down, but they probably won’t risk entering the dimension.”

“Degei,” Wesley said, nodding in approval. “He’s clearly a rather amenable god, but he’s still a death god. That is not one you want as an enemy. And since death is his domain, the sword will mean nothing to him.”

All good points; Wesley was probably right. But Bob gave him a funny look, and asked, “What do you keep looking at?”

That caught him off guard. “What?”

“You keep looking off towards the side like you’re consulting someone. Is there a ghost in here I‘m not picking up?”

He could hardly believe it. What did he tell him - the truth? Yeah, why not? “It’s a hallucination of Wesley.”

Bob simply looked at him, and then looked towards where Wesley stood. “Heya, mate. Good to have you around.” Bob then turned, throwing the scabbard over his back, and walked out the door as if this had been a normal exchange.

Angel could only nod in agreement. Bob was just too accustomed to madness to be totally sane.

*****

Logan figured there had been too many times in his life when he wished the earth would open him up and swallow him whole. He almost regretted the feeling right now, even as he though he could feel the earth slipping from beneath his feet.

Abrams grimaced as he looked down at his coffee, swallowing back most of a cough. It was a deep rumbling cough, the type that sounded like a small earthquake, and Logan figured the cancer had spread from his liver. He probably didn't have a whole lot of time left, no matter how solid his frame looked. "I'm afraid I didn't really know her. You liked to keep your work life and your private life totally separate; I'm not sure your wife even knew exactly what you did, beyond working for the government. I just know a bunch of second hand stuff. Her name was Genevieve - you called her Genie - she was a French-Canadian half-breed, Cree, but supposedly she was gorgeous. The joke was why she was with a mutt like you, which was what you would claim when you'd talk about her. You lived in Quebec, although I'm not sure what town. I don't ... I'm sorry, I can't remember the name of your son. I'm not sure I ever knew it."

Genie? Like he sometimes slipped and called Jean "Jeanie"? Christ. Maybe he did remember her more than he ever realized. "How did they die?"

Abrams' posture seemed to tense, like he was expecting the question but still didn't like it. "Car accident. Supposedly they spun out on an icy road, went over an embankment. But you ... you insisted they were killed. You insisted that someone killed your family to get to you, and you wanted the Organization to investigate it."

Even though he'd just had a sip of his tea, his mouth went totally dry, and he could hear his hear pounding in his ears. "Did they?"

Abrams shrugged one shoulder. "There was a cursory investigation - the type made when anyone connected to the Organization died - but it concluded it was simply a tragic accident. You went ... it wasn't good enough for you. You insisted there was foul play, and accused the Organization of covering it up. Then you insisted they did it, and promised to kill whoever was responsible for it. You ... you really went down hill fast. You clearly weren't sleeping well, and you grew ever more paranoid and agitated. So that when one day you weren't there, and we were told you'd been hospitalized for "nervous exhaustion", it made sense."

He knew where this was going, didn't he? He gripped the edge of the table, because if he gripped his glass it would have made tea explode all over the table. "When I came back, I was different, wasn't I?"

He swallowed hard and nodded, not meeting his eyes. "You were like an automaton. You'd gone from grief stricken to completely blank; it was like you didn't feel anything at all. For a while I was able to convince myself that it was just a continued reaction to your grief, that you went completely the other way and just shut down completely, but there were ... other things that just didn't add up. Sometimes recent missions would be mentioned, and you'd bluff your way through reminisces, but it slowly became obvious you didn't remember a mission you completed four months previously. If someone did mention Genie - which we were explicitly told not to do - the name didn't seem to mean anything to you." He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "You have to understand that, at the time, I had no idea that telepaths even existed. I mean, I'd heard of mutants, sure, but that still seemed to exist totally within the realm of science fiction, you know? And while I thought Stryker was! an asshole, I had no idea how ruthless he'd actually become, or how much he actually wanted to hurt you. I just thought he was a dick."

"Did he have them killed?" He didn't care what happened to him; he already knew Stryker probably had one of his pets fuck with his head, and him "going off the deep end" was just the opportunity Stryker needed to talk his boss into doing it. He just needed to know if he had actually had his wife and son murdered.

Abrams glanced down at his cup again, then looked away, the muscles in his jaw working like he was chewing something tough. Finally, he said, "I can't say with one hundred percent certainty. But after I quit the Organization and came back to Canadian Intelligence, I decided to look through the files, because by then ... I knew what he really was, and I knew what had happened to you. You weren't even close to the same man I had known - they had broken down your mind, tried to rebuild it, and the walls and mortar just kept crumbling. The more they did it, the worse it became. It looked ... there were some oddities that couldn't be adequately explained. A second set of tire treads, for example, even though it was called a one car accident; the fact that Genevieve had blood on her hands that wasn't hers or her son's; the windshield looking like it had been broken from the outside in, even though the car never did reach the trees at the bottom of the incline. Yes, Logan, I thi! nk you were right - I think your family was killed, and I wouldn't be surprised if Stryker was somehow behind it."

He closed his eyes and exhaled a deep breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding until now. It should have made him angry, but it didn't. Stryker was dead; Stryker deserved to be dead. "There's one more thing," Abrams interjected.

He opened his eyes and looked at him levelly, feeling an otherworldly calm that he knew could become deadly any second now. "Yeah?"

“After you were hospitalized, I heard second hand reports that Stryker’s right hand man at the time, an officer named Vines, had been killed by some guy after leaving a bar. But looking over the few existing records, it seems he was killed the night before your hospitalization, and not several days after, as we had heard. Also, the killing was a lot stranger than anyone let on. Apparently he was using the bathroom at the bar, and after he hadn’t come out for about ten minutes, his drinking buddy started to get concerned and went in after him. He found him slumped dead sitting in a toilet stall, with a single slender stab wound that was so surgically precise it caused almost instantaneous death. That was weird enough, but the second weird thing was there had been no struggle at all - and Vines was one of Stryker’s personal enforcers. He was a big guy who liked to fight. No one saw anything, no one heard anything, and there was no physical evidence left at the scene.! ”

Did he know? Logan wondered if Abrams knew what he knew - he killed him. Slender stab wound - like, say, a claw? And Logan knew he knew anatomy well enough to kill someone without any fuss at all. He didn’t want to know it, but he did, just like he knew where to hit someone for maximum effect, how to temporarily or permanently disable his opponent. Apparently that information was okay to retain in Stryker’s book. “Do you think he was involved in the death of my family?”

“I have no idea. But if it was you that killed him, I’m gonna say yeah. And it probably scared Stryker, because if you were personally hunting down anyone that had anything to do with their deaths -”

“He was on the list.”

“Undoubtedly. So you ended up hospitalized and … well, mind wiped is the term for it, I guess.” He scratched his bald scalp, hard enough to leave a ghostly red line that lingered for several seconds. “If there were any records for you, I’d have brought you copies. But the Organization, once Control took the helm, made sure that no one had any kind of paper trail in the outside world. So thank god for misfiling.” He reached into his coat pocket, and suddenly Marc said in his ear, “Do I drop him?”

Logan took a quick sniff, then shook his head. He wasn’t going for a gun or anything that he could smell. As Abrams looked back at him, he caught the tail end of the head shake, and he glanced nervously out of the corners of his eyes as he put a folded square of paper on the table and began smoothing it out. “I should warn you before I reach into my pocket, huh?”

“Only if you don’t want my friend to splatter your brains all over the asphalt.”

That made him look up sharply. “Splatter? Like a gun?”

Logan gave him a terse nod. “I ain’t fuckin’ around with the Organization anymore. If they’d have shown up, the streets would be red with blood in under a minute. My friend doesn’t like ‘em either.”

“Assassins?”

“Merc.”

“Same difference.” As soon as he smoothed out the paper as much as he was going to, he slid it across the table to him. It was a copy of a form, one that seemed to have all the stats for a man who claimed to be named Alexander Camus Logan (good god, he‘d given himself Albert Camus‘s surname as his middle name, which must have been an ironic comment. But he couldn‘t figure out where the Alexander had come from), who also gave his birth date as July 14^th (Bastille Day - was that a joke?), who had the same height and general coloring as him (although the eye color was listed as green, which only seemed to be true every now and again - he was convinced they’d so fucked up his own basic chemistry that they were to blame for his eye color inconstancy), although he was about a hundred pounds lighter - the bonus of not being full of metal. It also said his blood type was O negative, which he didn’t know. So he was a “universal donor“? It was a shame his genes weren’t. !

“That’s who you were when I knew you. You were always changing your name, I guess, but Logan seems to be a constant, whether it’s a first name or last. If a record ever existed for your real name, I don’t know it. But then again, the only reason this one even exists is because some bonehead filed it under A for Alexander instead of L for Logan.”

Logan read the form, which was merely factual, and he knew full of shit. Oh, not the basics - height, weight, blood type - but the smaller details, from name and place of birth (here listed as Blairmore, Alberta - pretty well known as a virtual ghost town, and probably another one of his personal jokes) to birth date - was just fiction, him spinning a life for himself out of whole cloth. He’d given his parents the rather generic names of John and Sarah (Black) Logan, both deceased. There, listed as next of kin, was the name Genevieve Theriault Logan. It gave him a sour taste in his mouth as he wadded up the piece of paper into a tiny ball. So he was a widower twice over, was he? He really was the kiss of death, and the promise of a violent demise to anyone who got to close to him. Maybe he could find a way to live with that if the name just conjured up a face.

“I’m sorry I couldn’t bring you anything more substantial.”

“Doesn’t matter. I just don’t get why Stryker decided he had to destroy me ‘cause I saved his miserable life.”

That made Abrams grimace in sympathy. “No, it doesn’t make sense, does it? He was being tortured for information from what I understand, and you come in and paint their brains all over the wall. You’d think he would have been grateful and kissed your ass every day for the rest of his life, but I guess you were the final straw that broke his back. He was constantly trying to live up to the reputation of his war hero father, and live down the scuttlebutt that he was just there ‘cause he was daddy’s little boy. Then the Russians ambush him - which wasn’t his fault - and capture him, which would have been bad enough alone. But the same thing had to happen to you, and not only do most of your men survive and complete the mission, but then you come in alone to save him. If you were trying to make him look like an incompetent waste of space, you couldn’t have done a better job. He had a fragile ego, and it just shattered. The only way he could build it up was by inflicti! ng pain and humiliation on someone else - and you didn’t know it, but you’d accidentally volunteered.”

Logan started to shred the form into pieces, tearing it apart with his fingers. There was no damning information on it, but it just seemed like the thing to do anyways. “I shoulda let the Russians kill him.”

Abrams’s lips twisted in a painful smile, as he almost laughed, but quickly squashed it. “In hindsight, that may have been the best thing for everyone. But that wasn’t the type of man you were.”

After he’d turned the paper into a tiny mound of confetti, he turned a hard gaze on the old man. “How’s your conscience doin’? Clear yet?”

That made him wince and sag back in the chair as if he’d punched him. “No, Logan, and it’s never gonna be clear, but I wanted to try. There’s nothing I can do to make up for everything that was done to you; I don’t think there’s anything anyone could do that would ever be enough. The sins against you are too egregious and too great.”

Was he trying to sympathize with him? Show him he shared his pain? All it made Logan do was want to kick him through the window of the café, impale him on a table leg. If he wanted absolution, he wasn’t going to give it to him. There had been too many years and too many crimes; to realize in hindsight you let your buddies torture and maim a mutie because it gave them their jollies and now feel bad about it was sad at best, and monstrous at worst. Deathbed conversions did not impress him - as far as he was concerned they were made by cowards afraid to face their own mortality. The genuinely contrite didn’t wait until death was knocking on their door to ask forgiveness. “That’s lovely. Are we fucking done here?”

A breeze kick up, one with a chilling bite, and it blew the pile of confetti off the table and onto the pavement, and early snow flurry as a cloud glided over the sun. Abrams watched it with troubled eyes, then, after a long moment, turned his gaze back towards him. “No, not yet. I must admit that something came up before I came here. I still have connections in Canadian Intelligence, friends and simply people who owe me favors, and I was hoping to get you retroactively reimbursed for your service to this country. You were a -”

“You think I give a shit about money?” he interrupted angrily. “Do you think there’s enough money in the entire fucking world to make me forget about the pain of being vivisected?”

He cringed momentarily, his ashen skin looking like parchment on his slowly collapsing face. “It wasn’t my intention to buy you off. They owe you, and I only wanted them to pay you your due. The fact that you went by multiple identities and your records are mostly destroyed was a big problem, but more people knew about you than you might imagine. To a good chunk of the brass, you were a well guarded but still open secret. They wanted to keep you, to help you hide your identity, because you were such a valuable asset. When everything went tits up, they could send you in, and everyone would breathe a collective sigh of relief, because they knew you’d find a way to get it done. You were a troubleshooter, persistent to the point of pathology; you just didn’t give up.”

“And that’s why they had to make me a brain dead zombie, blah blah blah. Enough blowing sunshine up my skirt.”

“I’m not doing that. I’m telling you how it was. And why it is …” he trailed off into a frustrated sigh, squeezing his eyes shut and rubbing the space between his eyes like he had a sudden headache. “This wasn’t my intention, I hope you know that. Ask your Professor - he’s a telepath, right? I’m sure he must have read me or something.”

“Whatever the hell you’re leading up to, just spit it out.” Although he didn’t show any sign of it, Logan had just braced himself to kick the table over and send Abrams flying backwards. Here was where the set up was; here was where the lie would show itself.

It took the old man a minute to gather his forces, and possibly his courage. Finally, he opened his eyes and put his hands on the table, interlacing his bony fingers with great care, like the joints hurt. “They want you to come back, Logan. They have a mission for you.”

10

Until this moment, Faith hadn’t realized how good she actually had it. No matter that she had no wheels (and no hope of getting any in the near future), had a ton of laundry waiting for her at home in her shitty little loft, and hadn’t gotten laid in a month - it all seemed positively golden next to what Angel had. Back in a cramped, dark office - did he live there? She forgot to ask - and teamed up with some relatively untested newbies who probably needed all the help they could get.

Not Giles of course; Giles was cool. Well, for a stiff old British guy. He didn’t have too much of the Watcher superiority complex, so that was always a mark in his favor, and he could fight, so that was good. But what about these others - Naomi the electric chick, who was apparently some kind of mutant with amnesia, and Bren, the eager little demon kid who probably had more enthusiasm than ability - since when were Brachens big warrior demons? They were stronger than your average bear, but they were also peaceful and isolationists who didn’t like all that fighting stuff (which she knew from having that fling with that Brachen guy a couple years ago. He could talk a lot better than he could do anything else.)

Xander was not part of the group, just a temporary tag along, and thank the gods for that. He was just a guy, and while he too had the desire, the flesh was weak, and he would always be unable to keep up should the battle turn nasty. Not his fault - it was just the way the genetic and supernatural lottery played out. At least he seemed to know that now.

This Bob guy she didn’t quite get. While he and Angel were flapping their gums in Angel’s office, Bren caught her up on who he was: Belial demon/fallen god, although more fallen and less god lately for reasons unexplained. Also Australian, an arms dealer with a lot of pull, and a noted eccentric, which was a really bad sign. If you could actually be weird enough to stand out in Hollywood and get yourself tagged an “eccentric”, you must have been pretty fucked up. And judging from the tattoos he’d carved on his own body, he earned it.

Shame too. He was kind of cute - past the blood and graffiti. Those pants really showed off his ass, and if hers looked that good, she’d have always worn leather pants too.

Because it was scalding daylight out, Bob was leading this charge, although only leading it in the sense that he was showing them a shortcut that would get them straight into the heart of the Paradigm Studios back lot. He said he had a plan, although he only discussed it with Giles, and Giles honestly looked stunned by it, like it was so bad he couldn’t believe Bob would even suggest it. Giles told them Bob wanted to “split up the heads”, meaning they’d break into groups to take on the heads of this Ali Baba or whatever, as it had three. Xander got a confirmation that they didn’t breathe fire (that he knew of), and said that he wanted to break up the teams thusly: her, Naomi, and Xander (!) on one side, and Giles and Bren on the other. Bob insisted he was going to take on the “central head” alone, and when Faith told him he was asking to get killed, he pointed out the weapons he had at his disposal: Angel’s big ass wicked death sword, slung on his back, and the amulet of! Taliesin, which was a big reddish gem set inside a silver wrist cuff that almost looked like a broken restraining device. It was “activated” by a spell in Latin, but so far it hadn’t done anything but glow. Bob said it needed a “push” to really get going, but he didn’t explain what he meant by that, or what it was actually supposed to do.

When they got to the end of the disused sewer tunnel that they used to cut under Paradigm, Faith already knew they were in for a rumble, as she could hear thuds and screams even from under the street. “Why am I here again?” Xander asked, gripping the two handed battle axe he’d grabbed from Giles back at the office.

“Because you didn’t want to stay behind with Angel,” Bob replied, climbing up and out into the sunlight and the chorus of blood curdling screams.

“Oh, right. This is bound to be much more fun.”

Faith followed Bob up, and her eyes had to take a moment not only to adjust to the sunlight once more, but also to the sight in front of her.

The Azi thing did indeed have three heads, spade shaped and covered in silver- brown scales that could have been a squashed form of chain mail. It also had a snake like body, which was roughly thirty feet in length from nose (if it had one) to tip, and each of their mouths were not only bristling with teeth like stalactites, but when they yawned open, they were large enough to swallow a tourist tram - which it looked like head number three had just done. It flattened a studio warehouse with a flick of its thick tail, knocking down the corrugated walls like they were made of balsa, and all six of its glowing yellow eyes fixed on them, and it let out a hiss that sounded like the roar of an angry lion, bathing them in the rank, fetid blood smell of its breath. It wasn’t the ugliest demon she had ever faced - not by far - but it was easily the biggest.

“You know, this is the worst possible time to realize I make really poor life decisions,” Xander said, his eyes as wide as saucers as he gazed up at the thing.