It took him a moment to get it, but he did - Liam "Neeson".

He swore, as soon as this was over, he was going to kill Bob.

If Bob wasn't, in fact, leading him into some sort of trap. Bob refused to travel in the sewers with him ("And get muck on my two hundred dollar leather pants?" He exclaimed. Which was rather dubious coming from a guy who wired a vampire overseas a million dollars without batting an eye), preferring to risk the insanity in the streets. "Besides," he claimed. "A two pronged attack is always best: you get 'em below, I'll get 'em above."

The worst part was the others agreed with him ("Those are fabulous pants," Cordy had chimed in. This led to a conversation about 'linings' between them that Angel had to cut short). He didn't know if Bob had them under his thrall his or not, they looked all right, but he was strong enough to make the line very thin.

So Angel waited in the sewer beneath Wolfram and Hart, peeling off his coverall and tossing it aside into the foul smelling gunk, revealing the security guard uniform he hadn't wanted anyone to see him in. Unbeknownst to the rest of them, he'd left a change of clothing in the basement, so no one would ever see him in the bloody thing.

Okay, maybe he was still a little ticked that they thought he looked like one of Wolfram and Hart's rent-a-cops. But he didn't! He didn't care that he couldn't see his own damn reflection, he just knew he didn't.

The uniform was almost too good-not only did it fit well, he had one of those weird stake things that looked like a baton, a functioning taser, a loaded gun, and a two way radio clipped to his belt. Bob had Lia bring him a radio too, so they could communicate inside the building, and claimed they were set to a frequency the guards in the building didn't use ,but how could they know for sure?

He couldn't shake the feeling this was a trap. He did not, could not, would not trust Bob. After all, he had brought Bellara here in the first place.

He didn't intend to use the radio at all inside the building if he could at all avoid it, and in case he needed to, he had worked out a code phrase with Bob-if he ever radioed in 'The twelfth floor is clear,' that meant run like hell. Bob said he was cool with that.

Angel jumped slightly as the radio on his belt coughed static, a noise that seemed to echo down the dark and fetid tunnels of the sewer.

"In place, Neeson?" Bob asked, and Angel could hear the smile in his voice.

Angel unclipped the radio from his belt, and after thumbing on the send button, growled, "Don't think you're not paying for that, Bob."

"Oh, come on now-Neeson's a cool actor. You could have done a hell of a lot worse."

Angel almost asked how, but decided he didn't want to know.""Where are you?"

"In front of the Wolfcram and Fart sign. What a big phallic building they have. You think they have some inadequacy issues?" In some sick way, Bob sounded as if he was actually enjoying himself.

"You are talking on a two way radio right in front of their building?" For a man who was supposedly older than him, he was acting quite stupid.

"They can't see me-or hear me, for that matter."

"All of them?" He asked doubtfully.

"Of course, mate: subliminal suggestion. I sent to everyone around here that I can't help or effect their careers in any way, and bam! Instant Bob blindness. I've almost been walked into twice."

Angel wished he had been gifted with 'instant Bob blindness'. He wished he had never seen or heard of Maximum Bob Oberon, past, present, and definitely future. If they had a future.

He rubbed his forehead, almost positive he was getting a genuine headache (with the name Bob written all over it),as Bob added, "Ready to go up into the den of thieves, Ali Baba?"

Angel could not believe it-the bastard really was enjoying himself. "You first. If I don't hear any alarms within a minute, I'll come up."

Bob sighed quite loudly. "You know mate, your suspicion is getting quite old. If you were up here right now I swear I'd hit you with the Club of Hjers. And believe me, you wouldn't like it much."

The 'Club of Hjers'? That almost sounded familiar, but not quite.

"But, if you were up here, you'd be a steamin' pile of ash. It's a gorgeous day-too bad you have to miss out," Bob continued, sounding more amused than irritated.

"We have a job to do-this isn't a goddamn lark, Bob," Angel spat into the radio. "Maybe you've never taken them on before, but I have, and they are not the pushovers they seem to be. So stop bullshitting and get in there."

"Touchy, touchy! The sewer must really stink," Bob replied, still not sounding all that serious. "Good luck, Neeson-we who are about to die salute you!" And with that, Bob cut the transmission.

Angel clipped the radio back on his belt, shaking his head.

If this wasn't a trap, Bob was just going to get them both killed.

Angel was starting to think that just might be a blessing.

******************

As Bob clipped the radio back onto the waistband of his leather pants, he couldn't help but shake his head. Poor Angel-over two hundred years old, and he still hadn't learned to lighten up a bit. He learned that when he was in his early hundreds: to paraphrase Gunn, it was a 'no brainer' - if you had eternity to kill, you might as well get some enjoyment out of it.

But vampires were stiffs, in more ways than one; they couldn't help it. Nature of the beast, soul or no soul.

He walked right up to the glass front doors of Wolfram and Hart, and as a man in a business suit walked past him, nearly bowling him over as he yakked on a cell phone about the 'Sakuro presentation', Bob noted aloud, "Isn't it funny how hundreds-maybe thousands-of people in the city have been mindfucked, and yet everyone here is fine?"

The man looked around briefly, sure he heard something but unsure where from, and by the way he shook his cell phone before gluing it back to his ear and continuing his conversation, he obvious thought it was just interference.

Of course it was no coincidence they were all clear. It was part of the plan-but what in the bloody hell was the plan? Bellara would ultimately screw them; and Woolsham and Tart had to know that. So that had to be factored in-Bellara was a temporary patch for...what?

Walking into the spacious, tiled lobby, bustling with all sorts of expensive legal activity, it brought to mind an old Nirvana song he couldn't help but sing under his breath as he approached the security guards behind their high, officious looking desk. "If you ever anything, please don't hesitate to ask someone else first..."

The security guard pair was an older guy with white hair who actually couldn't have been past his mid-forties, and looked pretty fit (Bob idly wondered what had turned his hair so milky white),while the other younger man had dark brown skin and muscles that strained at the fabric of his tight blue uniform; he could have been a bodybuilder on the side, and Bob was willing to bet he could twist the head off a vampire if he got a hold of one.

Since the career subliminal suggestion would never work on them-if they really gave a fuck about a career, they wouldn't be rent-a-cops, especially in a joint like this-they looked up as he approached, and he shot them his most charming smile as he whipped off his sunglasses. "Howdy, mates," he said with false joviality, catching them both with his eyes and fogging their minds in less than a heartbeat. It wasn't difficult - neither of these guys were exactly Stephen Hawking. He then lowered his voice to a barely audible murmur as he told them, "Now, you don't know I'm here, and you've never seen me before in your lives. Right?"

They both nodded dumbly, the white haired guard (although his name patch read 'Harris', Bob actually saw in his train wreck of a mind his real name was Alfred Perlmutter, and he was a felon; a murderer, in fact. But Lootham and Part knew that-they hired him anyways. Very cute) settling back in his chair, as he was starting to get up when Bob reached inside his mind and caught him. "Now, without alerting anyone else, you're going to deactivate all the alarms in the building, and the security cameras in the lower levels are going to go to shit and not record much more than blank walls. Got it, chaps?"

Again they nodded, and Harris/Perlmutter reached for the bank of controls on his left, while the other guard, Cameron (a college footballer trying to make money on the side-cripes, did he pick the wrong place), reached for some on his right. "You'll never notice they've been fucked with, and you'll never remember doing it. Give me a minute, and go back to having a normal day. Bye."

He tucked his sunglasses in his pocket as he walked away, past the desk and into the larger, darker heart of the building. He was still radiating his suggestion that he was nothing-it was amazing how easy it was to slip under a lawyer's radar, especially if they were ruthlessly ambitious, and that categorized everybody here-although when the nearest elevator opened, there were secretaries and paralegals in it, neither of which were known for their ambition, so he announced loudly, "I'm not here."

Suddenly they were all looking through him, as if he were invisible, because to their minds he was. And it was really the mind that saw, not the eye: Belials learned that early on. Well, the smart ones at least.

And the evil radiating from this place was extraordinary: it was like background radiation you didn't notice until you had a lethal exposure, and all your teeth fell out. There were some psychic demons here too-he could feel the tendrils of their questing thoughts as they tried to find the psychic disturbance in the building, but they were weak and easily 'blinded' to him. Still, this could be only the first line of defense: the big guns might be holding back until they were needed, and in that case he might eventually get into trouble. Yet there was nothing he couldn't handle now, and he was going to run with that for as long as he could.

But if they wanted a fight, he'd give them-no one fucked with Maximum Bob.

A female lawyer in an improbably short skirt and high heels walked past him, nearly running into his shoulder as she charged off in a blasted hurry, but he reached out and stopped her with his mind. "Turn to me," he told her, and with a little mental resistance (easily crushed),she did.

She was pretty in a patrician and somewhat severe way, but not his type at all, even before he realized she was as cold as ice inside; a real backstabbing, savagely ambitious, power hungry bitch.

She'd go far here.

"So tell me, Lilah," he said, as that was her name. "Who's in on the Bellara case, and what floor are they on?"

Poor Lilah Morgan, unable to resist, named the few names she knew, including one that came with a lot of bitterness and hate attached to it. Office politics-what fun.

As soon as he had what he wanted, he let her go and sent her on her bitter and twisted way, then joined those that were unable to see him in the elevator.

He wondered if Angel was doing as well as he was.

**********

Hearing no alerts-and getting tired of waiting in the sewer tunnels-Angel had entered the sub-basement of Wolfram and Hart, and tried as hard as he could to look inconspicuous, like a security guard on his rounds. If they had rounds: now that he thought about it, he wasn't completely sure.

But so far he hadn't encountered anyone directly, except for a secretary coming out of an elevator. Although startled, he simply gave her a nod and continued on his way, and she gave him a polite and genuinely uncomfortable smile before going on her way. He saw no recognition and smelled no fear, so he assumed he had managed to squeak by with the ruse, and so far, real security guards hadn't been sent after him. So far so good?

But he still really didn't like this. Not one bit.

He was now in the 'regular' basement area, which seemed to be an endless maze of brightly lit, sterile corridors, with a beige and white color scheme that seemed to reflect the occasional banality of evil.

Before he came around yet another corner, he heard voices. Lots of voices, some familiar. So he held back and peered tentatively around the corner, in time to see the bald head of a tall man that could only be Nathan Reed coming out of a room on the right hand side, followed by two burly (and genuine?) security guards, an extremely tall demon hidden inside a flowing red cloak (seven feet tall if he was an inch-and he smelled kind of dry, like baked concrete on a sweltering day. It was a tauntingly familiar scent, but right now he couldn't quite place it),and an older man dressed in black, who seemed to radiate power like light from the sun. A wizard or a warlock, and a very powerful one at that; he could sense the force of the magic around him, and it made him instinctively want to cringe. What demon had he aligned himself with to get so strong-the seven foot red guy?

The weirdest thing of all was they were speaking in a language Angel didn't recognize or understand, although he guessed it was a demon dialect of some sort. Whatever they were saying-Reed, the demon, the warlock-they didn't want the security guards to understand it.

He waited until they had left the corridor, disappearing around the far corner - presumably headed for the bank of elevators - before cautiously heading for the room they had just left. He was within a foot of the door when his stomach clenched in hunger-he smelled blood.

Lots of blood.

Losing any sense of caution, he rushed to the room and braced for a fight as the stainless steel door slid aside...

...and found himself staring at an empty chamber.

Well, no, it wasn't completely empty. Along with the cloying scent of blood, there was an undertone of sulfur and charred flesh, burnt hair and slagged metal, although no sign of these was apparently visible, save for some black char marks on the floor of the small, featureless stainless steel room.

A small strip of fluorescents overhead caused light to bounce off every surface, making his eyes hurt just to look inside for too long, but even as his eyes started to water, he was able to discern a pattern in the char marks: a broken circle, maybe seven feet across, and an upside down pentagram, along with clots of black things that could only be charred fur.

The blood he smelled was both Hellhound and Human.

Human sacrifice...and Hellhound sacrifice? Or did they have a Hellhound kill a Human, and then kill the Hellhound ritualistically? Either way, they had gotten rid of the evidence; he could still feel the residual magicks crawling along his skin like insects.

Bastards-they just murdered someone, and he had missed it by minutes.

But what was this about? What could the ritual have been? The fact that it involved copious amounts of blood was a definite sign of evil-no blood rite, especially culminating in murder, was ever good. But the murder of two separate species? That was a new one on him. Unless the murder of the Hellhound had been incidental-they couldn't contain it, so down it went.

Then where was the body? And where was that sulfur smell coming from?

And how did this connect to Bellara-or did it at all?

He was still standing in the doorway, pondering the possibilities, when a voice said in the hallway behind him, "What the hell are you doing here?"

9

Angel decided that the man, judging from the sound of his voice, was too far away to lash out at, and he sounded more annoyed than enraged, as well as unfamiliar. So he turned around carefully, poised to defend himself from any thrust stake or other kind of weapon.

He found himself facing a pasty man in his early thirties, clad in a blue and black security guard uniform. Judging from the patch on his uniform shirt, he was named Hardwell.

"Well-didn't you hear the alert?" Hardwell insisted, his washed out hazel eyes flashing with irritation.

He thought he was a fellow security guard. That was a relief-a slightly insulting relief, but still..."No. My radio's not working properly." He said, trying to sound as convincing as possible. How did security guards sound?

Hardwell rolled his eyes in disbelief, and Angel was willing to bet he was thinking 'newbies'. "You should have mentioned that to the supervisor and got a new one. Come on, we'll get you one on the way."

"On the way where?"

Hardwell glared at him, like he was the world's biggest idiot. "It's a blue alert-we're to start at the lobby and work our way up. You do remember what a blue alert is, don't you?"

"Not as such." How big a turnover did the security department of Wolfram and Hart have if the man thought nothing of issuing orders to a guard he'd never seen before? Actually it made sense; they probably had shorter life spans than the red shirted crewmen on old Star Trek episodes.

Hardwell frowned, although the skin of his narrow oval face barely moved at all. "The top floor reports a psychic disturbance in the building, but those big brained weirdos haven't been able to pinpoint the source, so we have to do a hard target sweep."

"What are we looking for?" Of course, Angel knew-they were looking for Bob-he just wondered how much they knew.

Hardwell shrugged. "Someone or something out of place. Which could be anything in this goddamn building. You'd think those big brains those Scanners have would be more than just big fleshy hats, but I guess not."

Scanners was a nickname for a type of demon that had tremendous psychic abilities and little else; they didn't even have eyes, at least as human knew them. But Hardwell was right-they were ugly, with their heads resembling nothing so much as a big, misshapen brain full of tumescent knots. For good reason, they didn't get out a lot.

But this was bad news. Surely they'd have one Scanner on the top floor who could be an adequate match for Bob.

"Well, come on-we ain't got all day," Hardwell carped. If he noticed the scent of blood, or the strange markings on the floor in the room behind him, he didn't mention it.

Angel nodded and followed Hardwell to the nearest elevator. As they waited for one to come down, Hardwell gave him a good once over, and said, "Neeson? Any relation to the actor guy?"

There was a ding of a bell, and the elevator doors started to slide open. "Funny you should mention that," Angel said, and threw a hard elbow that caught Hardwell just behind his right ear. Hardwell's eyes rolled up inside his head and his whole body crashed to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been viciously yanked away. The elevator was empty, like Angel had counted on, so he picked up Hardwell’s unconscious body and slung him inside, reaching around briefly to hit the button for the highest floor accessible without a key.

As soon as the doors started to close, Angel grabbed his radio from his belt, and thumbed it on. As much as he hated to say it, he muttered, with some disappointment, "The twelfth floor is clear."

******************

When his radio crackled to life, some of his fellow elevator passengers looked around, confused, so as he reached for it, Bob said, "Muzak.“ It just proved what sadistic, evil bastards Woolsham and Lark were by having muzak in their lifts. And now these poor bastards were going to mistake his conversation for even more muzak-it almost seemed too cruel.

"The twelfth floor is clear," Angel hissed, his voice punctuated with static.

"Fuck you," Bob snapped, thumbing it on. "I'm onto something, and I ain't leaving until I get at least one guy scoped out here."

"You've been discovered. Bob," Angel continued, speaking so low Bob almost had to hold the radio up to his ear like a cell phone. Obviously he had no confidence they weren't being intercepted, but even then, what good would whispering do? "They have Scanners on the top floor who know you are here and have instituted a security alert. Time to bail."

"Have they pinpointed my location?" He wondered, as the lift came to a stop on the floor Lilah had told him about. To be fair, Scanners were bad news, as vindictive as they were ugly, but he could take most of them. If they ganged up on him, it would be a problem.

"Well, no. But it's only a matter of time. Don't be an idiot."

Bob let the two women exiting on this floor leave before he did, following close behind so no one noticed the door being open longer than necessary, and as he came out on the bright, sunlight bathed floor, he came almost face to face with a security guard, who did see him, as he hadn't been present for his 'I'm not here' suggestion.

As the big, pug faced man stalked towards him, Bob looked him straight in the eye and said, "Goodnight."

The man's eyes suddenly closed and he collapsed bonelessly to the floor, drawing sudden gasps and flurries of movements from the people who saw him crash. It hadn't been hard to push his mind into sleep-he was exhausted. They probably thought he'd had a heart attack: he hoped they remembered to check for a pulse before they pulled out the defibrillator paddles, because that would be really unpleasant.

"Ignore me," he said to the secretaries pushing past him, as Angel asked, "What's going on?"

"Nothing much. I've got my target in sight. Give me five minutes, and then I'll get out of here."

He passed by a receptionist who suddenly looked up, confused, and asked a colleague by the water cooler, "Do you hear muzak?"

Oh yeah, that was just too cruel.

He was starting to feel a bud of pain deep inside his mind; he knew that soon it would blossom into a raging pain that would tear through his brain like a buzzsaw. He'd never psychically blinded this many people before at once, and it was starting to get a little taxing. He could feel the itch of sweat trickling down his back, between his shoulder blades and down his spine, and he had to pour more and more of his energies into avoid the psychic dragnet of the Scanners. Angel was right, they really should go now, but he couldn't leave when he was so close. He'd pay for it later in pain, but that was what booze was for.

"Bob, we have to leave now," Angel said, with the stern patience of a parent correcting a hyperactive child.

"Go-I'll meet you back at the Hyperion." He said, deciding he'd had enough-he wasn't going to be spoken down to by a vampire who was not only younger than him, but had no idea what he could really do.

"What? No, I'm not leaving without-"Angel started, but Bob turned his radio off and clipped it back onto his waistband, no longer interested in what he had to say. He'd just get this done, and argue with him later.

The sunwashed corridor seemed to be full of subtle clues to an internal hierarchy-your importance was measured by whether you had a wooden office door or a glass one, and the size of your secretary's desk-if indeed you rated having a secretary.

Near the end of the floor, off in its own side hallway, he came to a spacious front office, with fake ficus trees dotting the corners, and a young man in an expensive suit standing before a large oaken secretary's desk.

He turned to look at Bob as he came in, and a quick read of his mind revealed he was exactly the man he wanted to see.

"Hi, Mr. McDonald, sorry I'm late," he said, feeling the sudden resistance in the man's mind as he caught his blue eyes in his. He knew who he was as soon as he saw the eyes, but by then it was too late.

His secretary, a young woman with dark brown hair and a secret crush on her boss, leaned off to the side, so she could see past McDonald. "Do you have an appointment, sir?" She asked officiously.

Bob glanced at her, and said, "Sleep well."

She collapsed face first onto the appointment register on her desk, as fear screamed through Lindsey McDonald's mind-he knew he was caught, trapped like a rat, and there was no way out of it.

('Just like Marla...')

He caught that thought skittering through his panicky mind. Who was Marla?

"Why don't we discuss this in your office?" He said jovially ,although it was not a suggestion: it was an order, and Lindsey had no choice but to obey.

But, because it was his office, Bob let him go inside first.

10

Things had settled down enough that the next thump against the glass almost made Cordelia jump out of her skin.

Looking up from the dry and dusty tome in her hands, she saw the guy now pounding on the door was bigger than the last one, and this one also had a metal pipe, which looked like part of gutter downspout.

He slammed the pipe against the door of the Hyperion a second time, and she thought she heard a crack by the time Gunn unlocked the door and threw it open.

Pipe man had pulled back for another swing, but Gunn stopped its downward arc by grabbing it with his left hand, and giving the man a sharp, hard right jab to the face. Gunn ripped the pipe away as he staggered backwards, blood spurting from his newly broken nose, and then Gunn planted a firm kick in his midsection, sending him sprawling out onto the walk. "Tell your friends there's more where that came from," Gunn snapped angrily, slamming the door and locking it again.

As he tossed the pipe aside, letting it roll across the floor until it came to rest beside the tire iron Bob had taken away from the mechanic earlier, he asked Wesley, "Tell me again why I can't scare these zombies off by putting a ring of fire around this place?"

Wesley looked up from his position behind the front desk, where he was trying to read two books at once, and scowled at Gunn, a little worry line bridging the gap between his eyebrows. "They're not zombies, Gunn. They've just been...taken over, for lack of a better term. Besides, I doubt fire would work: they have no qualms about getting hurt."

"Yeah, and so far they're not organized," she pointed out, her heart now back into a normal rhythm.

"Yet," Gunn added, staring at her, and she knew, while he was being paranoid, he was also probably right.

By the way Wesley slammed one of his books shut in frustration, he knew that too. "We can't kill them, Gunn. They're human beings."

"I'm on board with that. But what if they decide to attack the hotel as a group-we're not supposed to defend ourselves then?" He continued angrily, switching his dark glare back to Wes.

Wes glared back as best he could. "Of course we defend ourselves, but we don't kill." He pointlessly adjusted his glasses, and glanced up at the clock. "Shouldn't they have been back by now?"

"Rampaging hordes of brainless people is hell on the traffic," Gunn said sarcastically, picking up his book from the chair where he had left it. He didn't sit down more than he threw himself down, clearly frustrated and wound up like a spring. "We should have gone with them."

"They didn't need us," Wesley countered, but she could tell from the icy edge to his voice he didn't like it either. "We're safer here until we know what's going on, until we know where Bellara's main locus is."

"Which could be never if they were captured or killed." Gunn shot back.

"Angel can take care of himself; so can Bob."

"And Bob is a slimy, lyin' Belial demon. One of his people is scrambling the brains of the populace, if you haven't noticed. We're trusting him why?"

Before Wesley could make any sort of angry or pseudo-witty rejoinder, Cordelia exclaimed, "Enough!"

She said it loud enough that it seemed to reverberate through the lobby, but at least it got their attention. Looking between them, she said, "I hate to break up this testosterone spewing session, but this isn't helping. Now I have wasted almost forty minutes looking through a book whose stinky smell is starting to give me a headache, and I'm not going to sit here and listen to you two have some sort of pissing contest. You want to fight? Take it outside."

And she meant it too: she was ready to pick up her axe-which had yet to leave her side-and see what kind of damage the blunt end could do.

Gunn looked down at the floor, muttering something that could have been an apology, and Wesley mumbled, "Of course, you're quite right."

They went back to their books, but she was far from happy.

She was getting a headache-she could feel it as a dull ache in the center of her forehead, but compared to the headaches she got during and after a vision, this was almost pleasant. Still, she couldn't remember the last time she had a non-vision related headache; probably some time before she started having visions.

In a way, it seemed almost quaint.

She settled deeper against the back of the couch, and tried to focus her attention back on the densely written pages of her current book, but her eyes seemed to glide over the black ink, and she was retaining nothing. It occurred to her she was tired, but there was no way in hell she'd be able to sleep.

This seemed like pointless busy work-why didn't she get a vision about all this? Were the Powers That Be on vacation? They picked a hell of a time for it.

Of course, maybe they weren't; maybe Bob had been telling the truth, and she was 'blocked' somehow.

Naaah.

She tried to surreptitiously glance at the clock, and wasn't really sure if Angel and Bob were late, or Wesley was just being a nervous Nellie. But she did know one thing.

That audition had just gone straight down the toilet.

**************

Angel gave the radio one more try before he decided Bob had indeed shut it off.

If they lived through this, he was going to kill him.

He considered going up and getting him, but there were several flaws with that plan. Namely, he'd probably be recognized quite quickly, security guard uniform or not; and if they had their blinds open, he was toast-literally. And he had no idea where exactly he was, either, and this was a huge building; a maze within a maze.

How could he have ever trusted a Belial,e ven partially, for one second? He had to be insane.

But while he still had the time, he decided to check out that room once more.

It wasn't hard to find; he backtracked by scent alone. Angel was surprised all the vampires in the building weren't lured here by the smell; it was like putting chum in the water to bring in sharks.

The room was unchanged, which he more or less expected, but this time he went in, not content to leave having done nothing more than a visual search.

It was another waste of time. The marks were the same, made from fire not charcoal, the burnt clumps of fur definitely Hellhound, the smell of blood cloying even though there wasn't a single drop of it to be found anywhere in the stainless steel chamber. But as he was leaving, he thought he spied a small, vague outline on the floor, and crouched down for a better look.

It was a scale. Translucent and almost paper thin, it was a sloughed off scale, the kind reptilian demons sometimes shed-residue from the seven foot tall hulk? Had to be.

It was hard to pick up and examine, crumbling to dust in his fingers, but it was sharply triangular, about two inches across at its widest point, tapering down to only a few centimeters at its tip. But if it was anything more than a shed piece of skin, it could have been sharp enough to cut.

Even as the scale fell apart, he realized it was all familiar-scaled skin, towering height, smell of concrete-but it was eluding him; it was like a word on the tip of his tongue he couldn't spit out. From the way his stomach continued to clench in utter dread, he knew things had just gotten more complicated.

He heard footsteps in the hallway, and waited until they walked passed and passed out of range of his hearing before he got up and went to the door, brushing the dust of the scale off his hands, and opened it, peering out cautiously.

The corridor appeared clear, but he knew his time had run out.

He thought about trying the radio again, but the hell with Bob-if he insisted on being a stubborn bastard who refused to do things according to plan, he could get himself caught or killed. He never should have trusted him in the first place.

As he started down the halls towards the sub-basement levels (and subsequently the sewer access point),
a knot of three security guards appeared at the mouth of the corridor before him, all built like vending machines: broad, tall, and hard as metal.