Brent scowled at him. “You broke into my house.” Ah, so he picked that one. “How did you find out where I lived anyways?”

“Friends in high places.” He appreciated the irony of that statement, even if Brent didn’t. “The report
make any sense to you?”

“Not really. Who makes natural darts like that?”

He shrugged. “Doesn’t matter. I got him.”

Brent looked at him sharply. “What do you mean you got him?”

He raised a sardonic eyebrow at him. “Really want me to spell that out for ya?”

The bartender finally wandered over, and asked if he wanted something. She was one of those great bartenders you only found in dives like these. Her hair was a frizzy brownish-red nightmare that looked like some kind of invasive shrub had taken root in her scalp, while she had a black eye patch over her right eye, and her left eye was so hard and expressionless, it might as well have been glass. Her face was so stark and angular it could have been a mask carved from teak, and yet she wore a crocheted sweater - once white perhaps, now an ivory shading towards yellow - that showed way too much tit. Should have been enjoyable, but was actually somewhat nauseating. Brent seemed briefly stunned, although surely he had arrested worse. “Uh, yeah, I’ll have what he’s having.”

She made a derisive noise and went to get his beer, limping slightly. (Part of him was just dying to know her story.) Brent fidgeted uncomfortably on his stool. And admitted, in a whisper, “I’m not sure I wanna know, ya know? It makes me an accessory after the fact.”

“And before - don’t forget that.”

He glowered at him as the woman limped back and thudded the bottle down before Brent. She limped away as some foamed burbled up the neck and started leaking down the sides. “So, yer a law breaking virgin, huh?” Logan continued, looking down at his beer. “Good for you. Most cops don’t last so long without cutting a corner somewhere.”

“Not all cops are crooked.”

“I didn’t say crooked, but you’re right. They’re not and you’re not.”

He took a swig of his foamy beer, then asked darkly, “So if I’m not crooked, what am I?”

“Reasonable.” He snorted in disbelief, but Logan went on. “The regular justice system could not have handled this guy; you never could have arrested him.”

“Why? Because he was military-industrial complex? Because he didn’t exist?”

“Yeah, and ‘cause those darts were a part of ‘im. How do you guys fight that?”

Brent stared at him again. “What do you mean those darts were “a part of him”?”

He sighed and rolled his eyes. Did he need to draw a map here? “He was a mutant.”

Brent’s stare took on a hollow quality, a sort of frantic calculation behind his eyes. “He was? Is that’s
why the dart was so weird?”

“Yep.”

“But then …” he petered off, his look becoming far more suspicious. “How could you get him?  I mean, I don’t want details, but -”

“How did I take care of Stoff’s gang sixteen years ago? Come on, you must have figured it out.” He
stared at him, and finally he did get it, eyes widening slightly, posture stiffening.

“You’re one of them.”

Logan frowned at him. “Yeah, say it like I’m a criminal.”

“I didn’t mean it that way. Huh. I guess that explains everything, huh? The not freezing to death, the not aging … so, what’s your power exactly? You’re indestructible?”

It was amazing how many people guessed something along that line. “I’m perfectly destructible. I just
heal fast.”

“That really doesn’t sound impressive, you know.”

It was Logan’s turn to glare at him. “What?"

"No offense, I just mean you hear stories about guys that breathe fire and shoot death rays, and you just ... heal. It's hardly ... ya know ... awe inspiring. No offense."

"Whenever someone feels the need to repeat "no offense", they know its offensive."

Brent didn't deny that. "So the guy that killed Lily ... he shot poison quills? Like a porcupine?"

"No. Porcupines don't shoot their quills - that's a myth - and they're not poisoned. And this guy shot them out from beneath his fingernails only, as far as I could tell."

"Oww." Brent grimaced in distaste. "So how did you ..."

"I thought you didn't want details."

"I don't. I just wondered how you got past that."

Logan sighed, and took a gulp of his beer before responding. "I didn't. My unimpressive healing factor renders me immune to all toxins as soon as I've been exposed to them once. I deliberately stabbed
myself with the dart that killed Lily to immunize myself."

Brent moved so far back on his stool Logan was surprised he didn't fall off. "What the fuck...?  How did you know that wouldn't kill you?"

He shrugged. "I didn't. But odds were it wouldn't; I don't get that lucky."

Brent shook his head, staring at his beer like it was a rabid squirrel, aware that if he turned that look on him, Logan would punch him. "Son of a bitch. You're fucking nuts, you know that?"

"Says kamikaze peanut guy."

"At least I don't stab myself with deadly poisons." He scratched his forearm almost savagely, and Logan decided it was a nervous tic, something to keep his hands busy, much like the peanuts had been. He suddenly wondered if Brent was a little obsessive-compulsive - it would explain his extremely tidy house, which was a rarity with a bachelor. After a moment, he asked quietly, "So do you know why this mutant did what he did? Was he working with Stoff?"

This was why he was a cop - he always needed motive. Logan wondered how he handled the impulsive, random crimes, the ones done free of compelling reason. But maybe if he was OCD, he could sympathize with that more than most. "No. Remember that army supply warehouse those boneheads hit? They stole armaments from a secret organization, which was why the army never gave you an itemized list of what was taken: they didn't know, and those who did wouldn't tell. The mutant worked for that group. See, they believed Stoff's group stole something that was being smuggled through, but by the time they realized that he was in prison. So they waited for him to come out, and when he did, their telepath saw me in his memories -"

"Wait a minute. Telepath?"

"There's lots of 'em, some more powerful than others. But don't worry about it; odds are they won't fuck with you, and if they did, you'd never know." Brent gave him a look that suggested he found that less than comforting, but Logan plowed on. "Anyways, the teep got the wrong end of the stick from Stoff's recall - he thought I was working with Lily. And since I'm one of the group's dirty little secrets, they didn't like the idea of a civilian - especially a cop - knowing too much about me. So they killed her, and waited for me to come back, so the telepath could tear apart my head and see what I knew about this missing item."

Brent's eyebrows furrowed as he pondered all of this. "So the telepath tore up your head?"

"No. See, there are defenses you can use against a telepath, and I used one. Before you ask, let's just say I know a powerful telepath who left a little booby trap in my head for anyone tryin' to make unauthorized access. Can't explain it better than that, so just leave it. The irony here is that I had no fucking idea about the item at all until they mentioned it."

"So what is it? Why the secrecy?"

"'Cause I don't want 'em comin' after you either. Trust me, yer better off not knowing."

"I'll be the judge of that."

Logan snickered. "No you won't. Yer gonna have to trust me here, Brent. There's a lot of shit goin' on that you have no idea about, shit that would keep you up at night, shit that would turn you into the Canadian equivalent of Fox Mulder. But here's the difference between television and reality: as soon as you tried to get on their case, you would be dead. You would not see it coming; they might make it look like a drug overdose, like with Stoff, or a random, motiveless crime, like with Lily.  Don't believe me?  Then why haven't you found the bodies yet?"

He stared at him, wide eyed. "What bodies?"

"The quill guy, the telepath, the fake doctor who accidentally got on the wrong end of a quill. See, they abducted me from a public street in a fake ambulance - didn't know that, did ya? - and I left them in an abandoned lot on the outskirts of Abbotsford ... but they're not there anymore, dollars to doughnuts. I bet even all those quills I threw in the field are gone. They clean up their messes; they cover their tracks. That's why your John Doe must have been with Stoff's gang, 'cause if he was one of theirs, they'd have collected him before you found 'im."

It took a minute for it all to sink in, and the horror didn't leave his face. “You're serious. But ... that's impossible. Things like that don't exist in real life. There are regulations -"

"They play by their own rules; they exist outside of everyone, and are subject to no laws but their own. I'm not sure they even have a real name. I know it sounds paranoid, and you don't have to believe me, but there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than dreamt of in your philosophy."

He raised an eyebrow at him. "You're quoting Shakespeare now?"

"Badly. I think I muffed it."

Brent scratched his head now, with the same avid ferocity that he had showed to his forearm. "But didn't you imply you're connected to them somehow? So why haven't they cleaned you up?"

He smirked, swirling around the dregs of his beer at the bottom of the bottle. "Believe me, they've tried, and I expect them to keep trying. But the problem is, sometimes when you build a better monster, control and containment is impossible."

"Build? What is that supposed to mean?"

He shook his head. "Nothing; hard to explain. I have a question for you, Brent - what happened to the personal effects of Stoff's gang?"

He looked completely taken aback and knocked loopy by the sudden subject change. He could see, behind his eyes, his mind working frantically to make a connection between these two disparate topics. “What?"

"Ya know, the stuff found on their bodies at the time of death, clothes and shit. What happened to it?"

He blinked rapidly, trying hard to get back on track and retain his cop implacability. "Well, if the family asks for them back we return them after their use as evidence is gone, but I don't think that occurred in those cases - most of the clothes were too bloody, or started to mildew after being wet from snow and then sealed in evidence bags.”

“Do ya use paper bags to prevent that?”

Brent’s cold eyed stare was back again. “They were so wet they kept soaking through the paper. How
the hell did you know that?”

“Cop show,” he lied with a shrug. He didn’t actually know how he knew that. “So what did you do with ‘em?”

“Incinerated them. What else would we do with them? It‘s not like we could have cleaned them and sent them to a thrift shop.”

Could that have been the ultimate fate of the Org’s first edition nanites? “Did you ever seen anything like a vial, maybe yea big?” He measured out, with his thumb and forefinger, the rough size of a third of a pen.

Brent stared at him like he was insane (again). “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

“Just curious.” What could have happened to the damn thing? “You’re not gonna use this as an excuse to quit the force, are ya?”

The deer in the headlights look was back again, and Logan took a perverse glee in constantly keeping him conversationally unbalanced. It meant he was always in control. “Excuse me?  Did I say I was quitting?”

“Nah, but I know when a guy is having an attack of the guilts. Good cops outta stay in - we need you. And don‘t say yer not a good cop anymore, ‘cause you are. Normal cops tried to bring this guy in, the morgue would be overflowin‘.”

“And you’re only alive because you’re hard to kill.” He said it in a dull, desultory fashion, as if he was still trying to wrap his mind around all of this.

“Right. Consider me a mutant version of a cop. Or at least I sometimes end up policin’ my own.”

Brent’s scrutiny was palpable. “And with nothing but a rapid healing ability? You’re really telling me that’s all there is to you?”

“Yep,” he lied, looking down at his knuckles against the backdrop of the dark wood. Wow, this was the week for uncomfortable memories, wasn’t it?

***

He smelled them the instant he left the bar: cigarette smoke, stale beer, body odor and a kind of random loathing.

“See, that’s the jackass I was talkin’ ‘bout,” the guy said. He was a man who seemed tall yet stocky,
like he was twelve foot of guy squashed into six feet of available body, with a bald head as inexplicably wrinkled as an ugli fruit, and two tiny dark eyes that seemed to actually recede into his face. Five other guys seemed to grow out of the darkness of the poorly lit parking lot, most of them thick, plaid clad, and drunk. Some had axe handles, others baseball bats; all but ugli fruit was armed. “Ugly motherfucker,
ain’t he?”

Logan figured that was probably a compliment coming from someone as butt ugly as him. “You want more, is that it?” He had reluctantly got in between ugli when he was basically assaulting a barmaid, who was barely legal and had no hope of defending herself. After the scuffling almost knocked his beer over, he got up and punched the guy in the back of the head, just hard enough to drop him to his knees. By that time the cook came out of the back, and dragged the guy outside, telling him he was not only banned for life, but if he saw him on the road when he was going home, he just might swerve to hit him. The cook called him something, didn’t he? Jimmy?

Jimmy (?) sneered at him. “You’ll pay for that, shithead.”

The group wasn’t so drunk that they didn’t attack him en masse, weapons swinging. Logan caught two and ripped them away, but a third caught him hard in the gut, and a fourth snapped in half as soon as it hit his kneecap. The pain doubled him over - for some reason, gut hits hurt more than almost any other (except the balls, but that went without saying) - and Jimmy launched an upper cut that hit him in the jaw. There was a loud crack, but it was Jimmy who howled. “Holy fuck!”

Logan rammed one of the bats back into the gut of its owner, while someone kicked him in the back of the leg, and another person just barely missed ramming an axe handle into his balls. Logan was so angry his vision was literally turning red, and he had the sudden thought: “If you do this, you can put an end to it all now.” It was in his arms, a muscle was just starting to twitch, and he gave him with an adrenaline surge, clenching his fists to ram one in Jimmy’s ugly face -

- and with a sharp, terrible pain, something shot out between his fingers.

They all froze, as if all trapped in the same paralysis of disbelief, and Logan stared in perplexed horror at what had come out of him, and was still indeed in him.

Three metal blades, maybe nine inches long, the tips just barely dotted with his own blood. (But in his mind’s eye he had a sudden flash of them covered in blood, dripping with it, bits of flesh so thin they were almost translucent hanging off the middle of the blades -)

“What the fuck?!” One of the logger types exclaimed, breaking the spell. His axe handle clattered on the pavement, and with the hypnosis broken, all the men began to back away. “What the fuck are you supposed to be?!”

But Logan didn’t care about them anymore; he was barely even aware of them. They seemed to receded into the distance as he focused on these nightmarish things growing out of his flesh. The fear and revulsion he felt was almost nauseating, overwhelming. So this was what they’d done to his hands; this was the terror he couldn’t name.

The rednecks ran off, but he noticed only as an afterthought. He looked at his other hand, and wondering if the same thing would happen, clenched his fist and concentrated. Three more blades shot out of that hand, in a bright burst of pain as it sliced cleanly through his flesh. He could remember it too, covered in blood, the smell of carnage and death filling his nostrils, burning flesh and blood, sweat and fear.

(They had done this to him. They had mutilated him;  made him a killer.)

Staring at his claws, seeing the dim reflection of his own face in its cool, reflective surfaces, Logan let out
a gut wrenching scream that he could feel tearing at the inside of his throat, scouring his vocal cords raw.

He had been wrong. He wasn’t an animal at all.

He was a monster.

14

By the time he'd dragged his ass back to Yasha’s, he couldn’t believe how tired his body was, while his mind was still somewhat frantic, mentally chasing its own tail.  He had so much to think about, he wasn’t sure what to focus on first.

Should he worry about the nanites? Most likely, they were toasted along with their bloody clothes. So
that was the end of that.

(Could he really believe it was that simple?  There could be another explanation, couldn’t there be?)

Only back in her apartment did he remember why he’d come here in the first place: to clear out Yasha’s stuff. But as he threw himself down on her bed, he realized he wasn’t ready to do that just yet. He could still smell her in the pillows, and sense her in the closed atmosphere of this glorified loft. It wasn’t like vampires exactly “settled down” anyways, was it? The rent was probably paid on this place for a while. He could make sure her knives and swords got a good home, which is what he promised her in the first place, but maybe he could keep the place for a while as a retreat of his own. Somewhere to go when he couldn’t take the mansion anymore. He didn’t think she would mind.

He kept remembering the dream he had while asleep at Tagawa’s - was that a message from her?  Some kind of bizarre, weird ass message? How could it have been? A bunch of dead people sitting around a table … dead people …

He slept fitfully, never quite long enough to dream. It was like his mind refused to settle down long enough to take a (theoretical) breath. He would wake up every forty minutes or so, long enough to watch a slice
of light bleeding through the imperfectly shut curtains crawling up the wall, growing brighter as it went. Eventually it settled on the Magritte print on the far wall, the mountain that became a huge, sweeping bird. He supposed he could keep that - he liked Magritte - but something about that bird shape struck him as eerie. He still didn’t know why.

Finally he gave up on sleep. He got up and took a long, hot shower, aware a cold one might wake him up more, but he was in no mood for it. Afterwards, he looked in her medicine cabinet, and took out one of the pill bottles.

Had he had this pain killer in his life? He didn’t know, and he really didn’t care. Part of him wanted to try it and see; part of him wanted to just feel pleasantly numb for a while. He failed so many people in his life, himself included, and sometimes he wondered why he bothered to get up. Of course, he knew why he did - he was too stubborn (too stupid?) not to. Besides, you had to live to spite, didn’t you? The Organization was still out there, and they hadn’t given up; he couldn’t afford to either. If he could do nothing else, he had to outlive them.

Still, he popped the childproof cap off, and was suddenly overcome by an odd smell. Were pills supposed to smell like that?

He poured one out into his palm and examined it. It was a regular looking gelatin coated capsule, half blue and half white, but it still smelled strongly of … herbs; plants. Something like wolf’s bane and rosemary, mandrake with a hint of garlic and … something else.

He put the bottle down on the edge of the sink, and broke open the capsule in the palm of his hand. A fine, mostly white powder spilled out, smelling even more strongly of herbals, and … magic? He was pretty sure he’d smelled at least something similar around Amaranth before. So not really tranquilizers, but something mystical?  Literally magic pills? What for?

He popped all the caps on all the bottles, and while the scents varied slightly, they were all pretty much the same - not as advertised. Also, none of the bottles were full; most had only six or seven pills in them, if that.

What the hell was this about?  Would Bob know?  Wes?

The funny thing is, he felt almost proprietary about Yasha now, and he didn’t want to tell either of them. There had to be some way he could find out on his own. “Darlin’, what were you up to?” He asked aloud, as he emptied all the pills into a single bottle (they were all different colors - he could tell them apart if he absolutely had to). He wondered if there was any connection between these and that million yen note she was sent. Maybe this was the real problem with dating a member of the supernatural - they could get up
to such weird shit, and never leave you an explanatory note. Unless that dream was some kind of explanation. ( “The thing that is not is your second one.”)

No - that still made no sense.

He decided he should probably get out of Vancouver, as he didn’t want to be anywhere the Organization thought he was, but something about the dead stuck in his mind and wouldn’t let go.

As soon as he figured out why, he called Tagawa.

****

Since he called before lunch time, Tony politely invited him over to lunch, and since Logan intended to impinge on his charity once more, he couldn’t see refusing.

Still, he waited until they were about half way through the meal before he made his odd request. Tony was as gracious as he always was, but couldn’t help but ask, with a smile, “You lead a very colorful life, don’t you?”

There was no answer to that beyond yes.

Shortly afterwards, he headed out with the equipment that Tony had his “men” bring over, and the computer printed out list of the names of Stoff’s gang, and where they were buried.

As luck would have it, they were all buried in British Columbia, although scattered among four different cemeteries across the province. He decided to go in no order, save for nearest ones first, and Tony was kind enough to let him borrow one of his cars, as there was no way he could balance this equipment on
the back of the motorcycle.

The first three were absolute busts, and he felt good about the sun setting, as he'd felt like a complete goober in that last cemetery - there was a burial in progress, and he got lots of weird looks from the mourners. Couldn’t they give him a little credit for going out of his way to avoid them?

He had to drive highway five up to Kamloops, and by the time he found the cemetery he was looking for - difficult, because it was not only on the outskirts, but was so overgrown and obviously neglected that at first he wrote it off as an abandoned scrubland.

The sun had set completely by the time he found a place to park, and as soon as his eyes adjusted to the low purple light, he easily scaled the split rail fence that passed for “security” on one side. Most of the graves had been invaded by invasive weeds that grew over markers and tombstones, if indeed they were even there. Many of the graves had been vandalized, headstones taken as ghoulish ornaments by goths or demon worshippers or perhaps just plain old obsessive or necrophiliacs. He really didn’t understand those who worshipped, feared, or fetishized death: not only was it over-rated, but sometimes - apparently - it wasn’t permanent. Far from it.

The equipment that Tony had helped him secure looked basically like a metal detector with a rather large display screen at the top, but it wasn’t a metal detector - it was a “digital imaging scanner”, capable of giving pretty faithful recreation of things as deep as eight feet underground. It also was able to analyze what it picked up, so it could tell you what was wood, what was rock, what was dirt, and what was … “other”. By now, Logan had grown accustomed to the screen depictions of decayed bodies, usually little more than a collection of dried bones with rotting cloth as a binder. (Polyester just didn’t die.)

After ten minutes of tripping over brambles and clearing away nettles and thistles in an attempt to find the grave of Cole Mullaney, he was aware he was being watched, and the shift of the briskly cold wind identified his stalker. “Hon, if yer looking for a drive-through meal, you might wanna hunt elsewhere. I’m even more unappetizing than I look.”

The vampire stepped out from behind the shelter of the trunk of a Ponderosa pine, and snapped, “Human, what the fuck d’ya think you’re doin’?  Isn’t grave robbing passé?”

She was an interesting vampire. An attractive young black woman who couldn’t have been older than twenty two, she had a well shaped afro reminiscent of the type Pam Grier sometimes sported in the ‘70’s, and managed to carry it off well, pairing it with long, dangling earrings that resembled chandeliers. She wore a pink “Hello Kitty” t-shirt that was at least two sizes too small, letting her show off a taut, slender belly that wasn’t precisely flat, and in her pierced navel she wore a deep red jewel that could have been a ruby. Her black pants were hip huggers, her shoes red Converse sneakers (sensible-better for creeping around graveyards, certainly), and her coat was red vinyl, perhaps an attempt to match the shoes. Her lips were painted a red so deep it was almost black. He bet she was really pretty when she was alive; she wasn’t bad now.

“I ain’t grave robbin’ - I’m looking for a dead guy.”

“With a metal detector?”

“It’s not a metal detector, it’s a scanner. It just happens to look like a metal detector.”

“That’s a good one. D’ya think I’m a moron?”

“Listen to it! Does that sound right to you?” It let out a constant, low pitched hum, like a high tension wire with electricity coursing through it at the speed of light; Logan was roughly sure metal detectors made a slightly different sound.

The vamp cocked her head, listening with a scowl twisting her full lips. “Yeah, well … maybe ya souped
 it up.”

He scoffed. “For what purpose?”

She shrugged, making her earrings swing like pendulums. “How the fuck am I supposed to know? You guys are weird.”

“Look who’s talking.”

“How the hell do you know what I was anyways? You a Watcher or something?”

“Naw. Know Lady Blood?”

She pondered that a moment. “Heard of her.”

“I’m her boyfriend.” Just saying that made him feel weird - him someone’s boyfriend? Especially of an undead woman caught in a god dimension like a fly in a spider web. Colorful really wasn’t the word for
his life; it didn’t even begin to cover it.

She snorted derisively. “Yeah, sure! Why the hell would she go for warm meat?”

“You know what they say - once you go warm, you never go back.” If someone had said that to him, he would have punched them. He really needed new material.

He found a crumbling marker, partially overgrown with blackberry vines, but he could see enough of the name to recognize the surname Mullaney. He hadn’t seen any others around here, so this had to be what he was looking for. He hit the switch for active scan, and waited while the machine went through its cycle, moving the circular end part over the grave in a slow, even motion. “So, vampy, what can you tell me about the risings around here?”

“What?”

“Do a lot of dead people walk out of this cemetery? I mean, if anyone would know, I’d think it would be you.” It was easy to talk to try and cover up a sense of personal shame. What if this was all for nothing? What if he was wrong about the fate of the nanites? What if they simply burned up with everything else?

But what if they didn’t? Could he really take the chance of the Organization not figuring out how stupid some people - especially druggies - could be?