There was almost something hypnotic about the way the energy pulsed in Bob’s eyes, making his irises look like they were counting out the beat of his heart. Kier knew he should be scared, and he kind of was, and yet there was a kind of inevitably about this. At least if Bob killed him, it would be quick.

“I’m not gonna kill you today, even though you slaughtered those people,” he growled, as if reading his mind. (He probably was.) “But I want you to know why. Brendan is your salvation - do you understand? The fact that you love him is the only reason you’re not a pile of ash right now.”

“Got it,” he croaked, nodding as best he could.

Bob let him go, but it seemed to be difficult on his part. He was glowering at him like he still hadn’t decided not to mangle him a little bit just to make himself feel better. “I really don’t care about your games with Wolfram and Hart either, just don’t get Bren mixed up in them. Understand me?”

Without Bob’s hand crushing his throat, he found it easier to nod. “I don’t want to hurt him.”

“I know. If I thought you did, you’d be gone.”

At least he didn’t fuck around; that was always to be admired. “If you want, I can tell you -”

“Wolfram and Hart are arrogant assholes, but they’re not total plonks. They factor betrayal into everything they do, always leaving a safety margin. They will never tell you anything that could really hurt them if it got into the wrong hands. So I’m not interested in playing the “mole” game with you, or the bullshit game with them. And before you ask, I’m not inclined to save your ass either.”

Kier nodded, understanding, not happy about it, but what could he do? He knew better than to fight Bob, or even argue with him; he was pretty sure his palm had left a hand shaped burn on his throat.

“There’s a way to earn it, though,” Bob told him, with some reluctance. “You come clean with Angel about all of this, and feed the Wolfram and Hart info - as dubious as it is - to him.”

“He’ll kill me.”

“I’ll be there so he won’t. But understand, if Wolfram and Hart hurt anyone in this group, it’ll suck to be you. You get me?”

“Yeah.” It already sucked to be him; he couldn’t imagine how this conversation could go well, especially with Brendan. Was he ever going to forgive him for this? It would only confirm that all along he was right not to trust him.

Of course that was absolutely true. But he still didn’t like it.

****

When Doyle woke up on a cold concrete floor with a splitting headache, he wondered where he’d passed out before realizing he hadn’t been out drinking the night before. It took him about a minute to realize that A) this wasn’t his body and B) he’d apparently - or at least his new body had - been kidnapped.

Okay, yeah, that was a major league fuck up.

After a moment he pushed himself up to his knees, and waited for his head to stop swimming before he looked around his cell. As cells went, it was rather unfriendly: unpainted cinderblock all the way, with a small toilet in the corner and bolt holes in the wall where a bed probably used to be but was for some reason removed, so all he could do was sit on the floor. “Gee, thanks guys,” he snapped, looking up at the ceiling and the single steel door that led out. There was a light fixture on the ceiling, but it wasn’t on. “So who the fuck are you? What d’ya want?”

He waited for a reply, rubbing his head, but there was no response. Did he really expect one? Well, it would have been polite.

He wanted to Brachen out, see if he could smell any trace of demons or something supernatural, but then he remembered he couldn’t do that anymore. Right, plain vanilla Human. Not really useful in situations like this.

“Hey, could you get me some aspirin or somethin’?” he complained to the walls. “My head’s killing me.”

Of course there was no response. But he began to wonder if this was a cellblock, if there people beyond the walls, just as confused and stuck as him. Maybe this was some kind of operation; oh hell, for all he knew, this was a demon butcher shop, and they were all in the coolers until someone ordered “filet of Human”. So it was up to him to figure a way out of here, wasn’t it? Save everyone else he could until Angel could ride to the rescue.

Damn it. He really wasn’t cut out for this hero shit. His only honest attempt at it killed him in the first place.

So Bob brought him back for this, huh? Fun city. See if he was gonna get him a “thank you” gift now.

****

Giles wondered if this was how Frankenstein’s monster felt.

He regained consciousness strapped down to a gurney by his wrists, ankles, and waist, with a light suspended over him, so the rest of the room was cast in thick shadows. It was cool and he thought he heard echoes, like the rest of the room was empty, but he wasn’t sure. Still, he heard at least one person walking around in the dark, but no matter how he turned his head he couldn’t make out anything in the gloom.

Giles was a little startled that there was something around his mouth that felt solid, not like metal but very close - what the hell was it? It was as good as a gag, actually better - it locked his jaw, kept him from opening it wide enough to make an intelligible noise.

“Sorry about that, old man,” a male voice said, floating out of the darkness. “But we’d heard you might have some abilities, and we wanted to make sure that wasn’t the case before putting you in a cell.”

Abilities? What could that mean? And what kind of abilities would facilitate gagging someone? What, was he going to cast a spell to make all their bits shrivel up and fall off?

Come to think of it, that was a great idea. Was there a spell like that he could just fire off as soon as they got this gag off him?

Giles tried to squint into the darkness as he turned his head, trying hard to make out something about his surroundings, but it was impossible; these people set it up perfectly. They knew exactly what they were doing when they set this up, and that alone was a chilling thought. These were professionals, then, not some of the run of the mill slapdash demon group. Besides, lots of demons did have unfortunate aromas, and he just wasn’t picking up a single trace of that. He was catching the faint whiff of medicinal smells, which wasn’t terribly encouraging.

“But the tests confirm you’re not a mutant,” the mystery man continued. Mutant? Oh dear … “And you’re plain old Human all right, so I guess it was just rumors, huh? Nasty things, rumors. You can never tell the real from the fake without a closer look.”

So they kidnapped him thinking he might be a mutant? Why would that matter? Well, it would if they were going to contain him somehow; they’d have to know what he could do if they wanted to counteract it. But who would want to kidnap him if he was a mutant?

Wasn’t that obvious? The only group he knew about that might do such a thing was that anti-mutant government group that Logan was supposedly affiliated with, the one that presumably “brainwashed” him. They didn’t sound like the type of people you wanted to be in the custody of for any length of time.

He wanted to ask what the hell the meaning of all of this was, but he couldn’t talk. So all he could do was listen as the mystery man walked the room in darkness, making disingenuous apologies. “We’ll let you go as soon as we can, Mr. Giles. We’re not bad people really - you have to understand that our hand has been forced. Desperate times, desperate measures, that sort of thing. We’d never hurt a Human, you understand; we protect Humans. That’s our job.”

Actually he was thinking self-indulgent twaddle was this man’s particular job, but sadly he couldn’t tell him that. How could knocking someone out and kidnapping them ever be considered not hurting them? Pillocks.

The guy continued talking, but he was no longer listening. He was running through the spells he knew in his head, wondering which one he should throw as soon as they took this damn gag off him.

****

Logan waited for Bob to come back in to Bren’s room before he made a phone call - he didn’t want to be distracted in case the succubus came back - as he decided it was probably time to rally the troops.

Marc was staying at the Westport Hotel, but he hadn’t known his room number or phone number, so Logan was forced to call the hotel and ask to be connected to “Carstairs Mahoney”. Bob gave him a funny look at hearing that name, and then was unable to hold it and just laughed. As soon as the hotel’s receptionist put him on hold, he said, “It ain’t my fault. Marc likes stupid names.”

“I gotta ask him if I can borrow that one,” Bob said, shaking his head. “That’s fabulous.”

“You can be Rutiger,” he offered. Bob and Marcus being poorly named Irish brothers actually sounded like a match made in comedy heaven. There was a sit-com waiting to happen, although one potentially raunchy enough to merit an NC-17 rating.

Marc’s room phone rang … and rang and rang. Once it passed the dozen mark, he scowled at his cell phone like it would do any good. Bob had stopped laughing. “What’s wrong?”

“He’s not answering.” He shut off his phone, and asked, “Should I be worried?”

Bob grimaced in thought. “Try some others first. I mean, this is Marc we’re talking about. He could be out pulling a girl. Or a guy. He’s not really picky, is he?”

True enough. So he called Angel’s place, and him he got; he woke him up. He filled him in on what was going on, and Angel said he’d be there as soon as possible. Logan then called Xander’s place, and got no answer. The same thing happened with Giles - no answer. He called Naomi, and was quietly grateful when she answered, voice groggy with sleep. At Bob’s urging, he put in a call to Scott’s cell, but he didn’t answer. Calling where Saddiq was staying lately only got him shunted to an answering machine, where Saddiq had left a wonderfully terse message: “If you know who I am, leave a message.”

“Could the succubus have gotten to anyone else?” Logan asked, his gut churning. All incommunicado: Marcus, Xander (Doyle), Giles, Saddiq, Scott. That was too many people to be mere coincidence, and Scott not picking up was really odd, because god knew that Mr. Anal never missed a phone call.

Bob shrugged with his hands. “I assume it’s gotten to a lot of people, but there’s no rhyme or reason to a succubus. They just attack whoever comes along. They don’t deliberately target people … unless …” Bob’s eyes suddenly widened, and he barked, “Kier, get in here!”

The vampire obeyed so instantly Logan wondered if he was just waiting outside the door. Maybe it was just a hard push. “Angel and Naomi are on their way here. Guard Brendan ‘til they get here, and let them know we’ll be back as soon as possible.”

Kier nodded obediently, with such passivity Logan again wondered if Bob had him totally under his control; he seemed to be acting oddly subdued. He’d never been crazy about the pretty vampire, but now that he’d saved the kid from two separate threats, his opinion of him had been adjusted upward. Maybe he wasn’t so bad after all; not if he killed a bunch of Organization fuckwads.

As Bob walked towards him, he asked, “What do you think’s going on?”

Bob shrugged in a way that suggested he was hiding something. “I’m not sure. I want to confirm something before I speculate.”

“Give me a hint at least,” he prompted. But Bob clearly wasn’t in a cooperate mood, as he simply grabbed his arm, and reality twisted away once more, shoving them out in Xander’s bullet spackled apartment. The curtain billowed as a warm Santa Ana moved through the city, and Logan scowled. “I told ya to block the window,” he snapped, looking around for Doyle. But this was a loft, and since he wasn’t in the bathroom, there was nowhere else for him to be.

“The window’s fine, mate,” Bob said dismissively, turning and leaving the apartment.

“What d’ya mean it’s fine? No it’s -” But Logan glanced back, and saw that it was back in one piece, no longer scattered in a thousand glistening shards on the carpet. “Okay, that’s creepy.”

He followed Bob out into the corridor, and they did a quick search of the apartment building itself, which yielded no Doyle at all. The bad feeling in his gut got worse, although Bob was able to look on the bright side. “If he got up and walked to a bar, there’s no way in hell the succubus got him.”

“You think the succubus could be targeting us?”

Bob clearly hesitated, scratching his head as he considered his response. His t-shirt now read “My Other Body Is A Cadillac” . “That was my theory, but Doyle being up and about kind of kills it.”

“Is a succubus that smart?”

“On its own? Not really, but it can be commanded like many lower order demons. I thought maybe somebody was taking this opportunity to take us out of play, but I might just be getting paranoid in my old age.” He grabbed his arm once more, and teleported them to The X-Jet, where Scott presumably was.

They popped back into reality in the cockpit, which was empty, and showed that the jet was still hidden inside a hangar. “I thought he’d be heading back to New York by now,” Logan admitted, heading towards the back of the plane.

“He wants to convince Saddiq to go with him,” Bob told him, following him for once. “He thinks he might be in danger out here, especially hanging out with you and your friends. Besides, he doesn’t want to lose him like he lost Bren.”

Logan snorted derisively. “Lost him? He’s an adult now; he made a decision to go his own way. I kinda thought that was the whole point of the school, y’know, teach ‘em, train ‘em, get ‘em the hell out of there and into their own lives. “

“Ideally, but there’s that whole X-Men team thing, you know.”

“And he wants Saddiq on it.”

“Wouldn’t you?”

Okay, that was a fair point. You had to admire a kid who was already a nearly unbeatable opponent at fourteen years of age, although if you thought how he got that way - indoctrination, conditioning from birth, et cetera - it was horribly sad. Saddiq really wasn’t even built to handle the real, mundane world; he was only built to fight and die for a ruler who no longer “owned” him. Logan felt a kinship with the kid - he could be his own son, pretty much - but he supposed he probably did need the school, if only to teach him how to get along in ways that didn’t mean kicking someone’s ass.

In the back of the jet they found Scott sprawled on a cot, arm dangling down on the floor. Logan whistled sharply and slapped his hand loudly on the bulkhead. “Get up, Summers - we’ve got a problem.”

But Scott didn’t move; he didn’t even twitch.

“Oh shit,” Bob said, squeezing past him and moving to Scott’s side. He crouched down, feeling his neck for a pulse, and Logan saw that Scott’s arm had a weird red blotch on it … kind of like the weird red blotch that Bren had on his chest. Oh fuck.

“Scott, look at me,” Bob ordered, taking his face in his hands. Scott still had his visor on, so it was impossible to say if that happened, but Logan guessed not simply because Scott didn’t move a muscle. “Scott, can you hear me?”

“He’s alive, right?” Logan asked, although he wasn’t sure why, because if Scott was dead he’d have smelled it the instant he entered the cabin.

“Just barely. He’s nearly been drained dry,” Bob reported. “He’s in a deep coma; I’m not reaching him. We need to get him to the hospital.”

“Can they help him if you can’t?”

Bob shrugged. “They can keep him alive until maybe I can reach him.”

“Does this mean the succubus is targeting us?”

Bob looked up at him with something akin to regret. “I’m gonna go out on a limb and say yeah.”

Terrific. He wondered if the fact that a succubus was attacking them and the Organization had suddenly resurfaced was just a terrible coincidence, or a new front in an old war.

6

Saddiq walked into the office of Angel Investigations, and was surprised to find the office totally empty. The blinds on the front window were partially open, illuminating the dance of dust motes in slender rays of sunlight. “Hello?” he said, wondering if they were all grouped in the back offices.

But there was no response as he shut the door, and the sound was oddly final, like a tomb sealing behind him. The air in the office was stale and uncomfortably warm as no one had been here to turn the air conditioner on, so he did it, glancing at the answering machine to see if there were any messages. There weren’t.

He knocked on Angel’s office door before peering inside, but no one was here. Did he get this totally wrong? He thought they were all meeting here later. Maybe he was just too early.

That wasn’t his fault; he just wasn’t tired and couldn’t sleep. Although Bob had made the injury disappear, he could still remember the sensation of the bullet passing through him arm, and damn, he didn’t like it. Being stabbed by that Cole guy was worse, of course - there was something about a blade sliding beneath your skin and into your body that felt almost unbearably intimate - but being vulnerable to anything continued to be an unwelcome new sensation. He kept expecting to get berated for it, he could almost hear the lecture from his commander chiding him for being so sloppy and poor at his job, except he didn’t have a commander anymore. Scott wouldn’t lecture him on getting shot, and certainly Logan wouldn’t either - how many of those same bullets had Logan taken going up the stairs? Part of him wanted to ask Logan, if he could get a moment alone with him, how that felt, and how he could do that. If he encountered bullets that could pass through his skin once more,! he wanted to be able to face them without fear, charge into them without hesitation, end the threat before it could do him much more damage.

But he had a sneaking suspicion Logan wouldn’t teach him how to do this. If anything, he could imagine him saying “If it gets through your skin, sit the fuck out of the fight.” Which was good advice, but was it always practical? No, he didn’t have a healing factor, but a good soldier always had to be prepared to die in defending their cause. To which he could hear Scott saying “You’re not a soldier.”

It wasn’t that simple, was it? Was any of it that simple? He’d been trying very hard to figure out what he wanted from life, but truth be told, he just didn’t know. He didn’t want to admit to anyone that he felt hollow without a command, without a purpose; he felt utterly adrift. He also felt like he really wasn’t an actual person at all, but a poor simulacrum of one. They built him correctly in a physical sense, but they screwed up in the intangibles.

While he was staying at that beach house, he’d go over to the public beach on the other side and watch people sunbathing, swimming, surfing, seemingly having a good time, and he wondered how they did it, how they felt that way. He wasn’t sure he ever really felt anything. He’d also look at the girls in their bikinis and the boys in shorts and surfer’s bodysuits and wait to feel attraction to one of them, any of them, but it never happened. Wasn’t it supposed to? All the movies and t.v. shows he’d seen seemed to indicate that people his age should be lusting after each other with abandon, and certainly everyone else seemed to be in complex romantic entanglements: Logan had Faith, but occasionally shared Helga with Bob, who seemed to also be dating Naomi, Logan’s former girlfriend, whom Xander apparently had a crush on, while Bren was hooked up with Kier, although he seemed to still have a big time crush on Logan and possibly Bob as well, and Scott still seemed to be! pining for Jean, who was dead. Only Angel and Giles seemed free of this particular soap opera, but he had a feeling that, if asked, they would like to have been included somehow. Nobody liked to be alone.

Well, in theory. Was there something wrong with him that he preferred to be alone? He wasn’t sure who to ask. He supposed Bob would be the best, especially if he was truly divine. A god would be able to tell you what was wrong with you, wouldn’t they?

He drifted down towards the “war room” where they kept the weaponry, almost curious if they had guns with enchanted bullets. Maybe not; there was some indication that those were difficult to both make and find. He’d just entered the room and turned on the light when he heard a noise from the front office - the door closing? He turned around and headed back.

“Hello?” he said, hoping it was Bob. With no one else here, it was an opportune time to talk.

He had just entered Angel’s office when the second door burst open … and there was no one there. But he thought he saw … something. It was like movement, but there was nothing solid attached to it, so he didn’t see how that could be.

In that moment, he reflected on his training. Not the Rhajan training, but his training at the school, where Logan actually covered attacks from people you couldn’t see. (Admittedly, at the time he thought it was rather far fetched, but all training had some use. No knowledge was superfluous knowledge.) His advice was pragmatic: you had other senses - use them. And if worse came to worst, you still had options: if you thought you could take the hit, do it, as that would let you know where and how close your attacker was to you, you’d just have to act fast to capitalize on it. Or you could just hit out and hope for the best. The only other advice he could give was try and make the assailant visible by any means necessary as soon as possible, rob them of their edge.

He felt vibrations through the floor as the thing - and it must have been heavy - charged towards him, and he thought he saw a blur in the air like a heat shimmer, something that wasn’t quite there but didn’t make sense, and he did the only thing he could do: he kicked out, and hoped for the best.

He actually hit something, his foot impacting with something that felt like a cement wall, as something hit him square in the chest and sent him flying backwards through the connecting door, which splintered into kindling around his unbreakable skin. He hit the floor hard, the air leaving his lungs in a rush, but even as spots danced before his eyes, he saw that blur of movement unattached to anything, and wondered what the hell he was going to do now.