Xavier glared at him as if Scott was somehow insulting him. “Not long. But I would never endanger the children, Scott. I can’t believe you’d even think that.”

“Oh, I don’t know, maybe because everybody’s been lying to me. Funny how that can get to you.”

His look remained unrelenting, and somewhere in the back of his mind, Scott started to feel bad. But not so bad that he wanted to take it back. “I admit we haven’t been completely honest with you, but these have been trying times.”

He scoffed, crossing his arms tightly over his chest. “No kidding.”

"Is this what you're really angry about?"

"Don't try that with me. I thought I was important here."

"You are."

"Oh really? Well, how am I supposed to be when no one will tell me the truth?"

Xavier closed his eyes as he sighed, as if just having this discussion was physically taxing. "Things have been ... so wrong. It's not an excuse, it's just a fact. I never wanted any of you to feel like you didn't matter."

Scott felt sick with anger, but not all of it was directed at the Professor. Some of it was directed at the absent Logan, at himself -

- (at Jean) -

- at Bob, and at the horrible twist of fate that threw them all together. He turned away, about to leave, but he froze with his hand on the doorknob, tired of storming out of places like a drama queen.

This used to be his home. He wanted it to be his home again; he wanted it back. He leaned his forehead against the door, and said, "I want her back. The way she was, not ..." He didn't even know what to call her, so he didn't say anything.

"So do I," Xavier commiserated, a twinge of sorrow in his voice. "All we can hope is that she comes to her senses, and comes back to us."

Scott blinked back tears as he left Xavier's office, heading to the private retreat that was his garage.

He had been around here long enough to know the impossible when he heard it.

****

In a situation like this, it made you wonder why God hated you so much, if you were a religious sort of person.

Reg Hobart wasn't, and yet as he sat in the cab of a freezing tow truck, the thermos of hot coffee held between his knees slowly growing cold, his breath turning to frost on the inside of the windshield, he still felt like he had been condemned to hell.

It was all his fault too. There were some poachers out here, illegally trapping an endangered species of wolf, and after coming across a bloody leg in a bear trap (and the corpse of the poor animal frozen stiff not far away), he was determined to get these redneck, booger picking morons himself. This was his case, and he would close it.

He realized the fact that his dog, Lobo, looked a lot like one of these wolves probably just fueled his anger. But some of it was a strange indignation he never realized he possessed until now. In a way, he could understand Humans taking things out on one another; it seemed like a curse of the species. But picking on something like an animal - and wolf or not, it was defenseless against one of those steel jawed traps (who wasn't?) - seemed completely indefensible.

From what he'd been able to tell, they laid the traps at night, and came to check them early in the morning, always using the cover of darkness and inhumanity of the hours to make a relatively clean break for it. But tonight he was staying up, and he was going to nail those suckers as soon as they showed to put their traps in. Still, had he picked the wrong night for it?

That storm was coming in, slowly but deliberately, like a lion stalking its prey. What little sun there was had been swallowed by clouds the color of wrought iron, and the temperature hadn't so much dropped as plummeted. You live in the mountains long enough, you knew when a bad was going to hit - you could feel it in your bones - and he could feel it now. He could no longer feel his balls, shriveled up to the size of currents, and that was yet another sign that if he was smart, he'd end his poacher stake out now, and come back another night.

But there was another reason why he was here, and the reason that Sarge Whitewolf had okayed it in the first place: John Doe. The body was found at Briar's Corner, which was just around the hard bend of the road; it was one of the poacher's known hot spots. Coincidence? Perhaps, but perhaps there was a falling out among the group that led to murder, or someone witnessed something they shouldn't, and they panicked. Either way, it wasn't a logical leap to think that someone capable of mutilating animals for an illegal profit would be above killing a fellow Human, under certain circumstances. Reg honestly believed that most people would kill under certain circumstances, but some people were simply more inclined to. And he felt the poachers were among the more steeply inclined.

The tow truck had been abandoned here for two days, so he was pretty sure the poachers would think nothing of it. (The owner of it, Tim Rose, had thrown a rod, and was waiting for another tow truck to come in and tow it to his garage - to add to the wonderful irony, he found it difficult to find another tow truck to do it.) But that meant he had to sit here without heat, and with just the smallest "viewport" in the heavily iced windshield and side windows. He'd had worse, honestly - did he not brag to the others about growing up in the Yukon, and say anyone who couldn't stand zero degree temperatures was a pussy? He wondered if they ever figured out that his father was a structural engineer who built a house so energy efficient that there wasn't even a breeze under the door or near the windows, ever, not even when blizzards raged outside. And Reg never ventured out when it was that bloody cold. He wasn't a liar, though; he just edited the truth a bit. (He did not like to ! think that that would make him an excellent politician, but every now and then it did occur to him.)

The dark clouds were throwing off his sense of time, but he was pretty sure they'd be around soon. Still, he probably had time for a piss, which was a good thing, as he desperately needed one.

The door creaked when he opened it, and he could hear newly formed ice cracking in the hinges. And even though he was freezing his ass off inside the truck, the wind hit him like a slap across the face with a frozen oar - shit, how he hated mountain winters. But to ever admit it was to pretty much admit he was the pussy he’d always talked about, and that was never going to happen.

The sound seemed to echo through the rolling hills of white, and he knew it couldn’t have been as loud as it seemed to his ears. Still, if an avalanche occurred, he wouldn’t have been surprised.

This section of the pass was essentially a valley, wedged between slopes covered with thick clutches of limber and white bark pines, with mountain hemlocks, silver fir, and subalpine larch added for variety, all looking sugar frosted and as pretty as a Christmas card. It was easy to tell which trees the animals were using for food, as their footprints made slight paths in the slowly growing snow. It wasn’t a wildly accessible area off the pass, so it was ideal for animals and poachers alike, seeking the same type of privacy. In fact, you could do just about anything here short of cannibalism, and it was unlikely anyone would know before the spring thaw. And even then, it was a crapshoot.

He quickly got out of view of the truck, his breath exploding into hard white clouds before him as he struggled through the hard, knee deep snow to a relatively close red cedar, which he tried to hide behind as he took a piss. Christ, it was an act of faith to bare even a part of his dick in this weather, and there was something rather unsettling about the way his piss steamed like it was molten, the snow melting like it had been hit with lava, ice crackling like flames.

The last weather report he heard said it was minus seventeen degrees Celsius out here. Did he dare believe that? Wouldn’t he have been frostbitten to the core, in spite of all the heavy weather clothes he was wearing? Maybe there was no minus; maybe they meant seventeen degrees Fahrenheit. Not all that much better, but theoretically manageable.

He had put away his poor freezing dick and zipped up - a hard task with all these clothes on - when he realized he heard a noise. He went perfectly still, and strained to hear where it was coming from.

It sounded like it was somewhere up the slope, somewhere in the stand of trees ahead, but not getting close. An animal maybe, on a parallel course. But the noise was a pretty serious, regular crunching, the ice and snow cracking under heavy steps, and a shock of fear went through him as he thought “bear”. No matter that he had never seen a bear in these parts, or that it was winter and they’d be hibernating anyways; it was just one of those worse case scenarios that always happened when you weren’t expecting it.

Thanks to the lowering clouds and the approach of night, illumination was dim, but it was times like these that light seemed to radiate off the snow itself, reflecting stored light like a solar battery. It was like night in the winter was never completely dark, just an indigo that seemed eerie, a calm before a storm that never came. And it was in that blue light he saw something moving through the trees far up the slope, cutting off towards the left, not heading towards him or even looking in his direction - a man.

He thought of reaching for his gun, in case it was one of the poachers, but he knew there was something wrong with the guy, even though he could only see him as a dark profile. The clothes he was wearing seemed too light, too weather inappropriate,

And he was moving fairly quietly and rapidly in spite of the snow. And what had he done with his hair? Talk about an overdoes of product - abuse of mousse.

Something about him looked familiar, in a strange sort of way, and he waited until he could no longer see the guy before moving himself, slogging back to the truck. Wincing as the door creaked and the sound seemed to echo, he reached for the flyer

Monie had thrown at him before he left. There was a resemblance between this guy and the one he saw in the trees.

He reached for his radio, and decided to call it in. He may have just seen her man.

9

And he thought Yasha’s place had a fabulous view.

He didn’t think it was a good idea for a limo associated with Tagawa to pull up in front of a place where he was staying, so he just accompanied him back to his place; Tagawa didn’t mind. In fact, he found a beer in his fridge to give him while he went off to make some calls, leaving Logan alone to marvel over what a hell of a living room he had.

It was twice as large as the mansion’s lounge, maybe two and a half times the size, with hardwood floors covered with ornate and plush “Oriental” rugs scattered about, set off by a huge large screen television
and entertainment system that put Marc’s system to shame. There was a painting over the tan suede
sofa, an unusual print of Joan Miro’s “Personages In The Night Guided” and he wondered two things simultaneously: did anyone ever make a print of that, and how the hell did he know the name of the painting? He looked closer, trying to see if there was a Miro signature … and then wondered how the
fuck would he know what it looked like? So he stopped, and added it to the growing pile of things that bothered him about himself.

All of this was dwarfed by the window wall overlooking not just the harbor, but a slice of the Vancouver skyline. The buildings were lit up, jewel like in the night, not yet as garish or manifold as New York or even Baltimore. Right now, slightly above it all, it seemed like pitch perfect urban skyline, lights reflected on the dark water like stars. In a way, it reminded him of the view of Sydney from Bob’s house, and made him wonder what it was about rich old guys and breathtaking views? Wasn’t the cliché that only women cared about views? Although he knew Bob would happily accommodate any woman, he had a feeling that view was specifically his, and Tagawa had no female in his life beyond staff; just by smell, he knew he lived alone. He suspected he was gay, but did it matter? If he was, he was very discreet about it, but he would expect nothing less from a man whose culture frowned on such a thing.

Logan stared at the city for a long time, at the movement of the dark water against distant shores, and could hear Tagawa in a room below (he had a “private office” below what he considered “the main house”) talking to someone on the phone, trying to arrange a quick yet thorough analysis of something
 “in the strictest confidence”. Was money power, or was power its own thing? How did you tell?

He sat down on his sofa (which felt even nicer than it looked - damn, he had never sat on a sofa this nice; even the suede smell was pleasant) and took gulps of his beer, trying not to listen to Tony’s conversation. It wasn’t hard once he started disappearing inside his own head.

This didn’t make sense, and yet he felt there was a connection factor to the things that didn’t make sense. But what? Okay, so they single out Lily, but Stoff was dead … so what if it wasn’t Stoff? What if he and Ellison had it all wrong? What if the killer wanted them to think it was Stoff as misdirection? But who the hell could it be? Stoff was the only connecting factor between him and Lilly. Unless someone else got away, someone they didn’t know, but never forgot them. Maybe they also engineered Stoff’s demise too.

Just thinking about it made his head hurt. He pressed the still cold can to his forehead and tried very hard to remember the crucial detail he knew he must have been forgetting. If it wasn’t that, what else could it be?

****

If Hobart was right, there was only one place Logan could be headed - the Hansen cabin. Old Man Hansen only used it in the summer, and his was the last cabin before the tree line. There were probably a few shotgun shacks and shanties, but none that would give much in the way of shelter.

Lily didn’t bother to take the road, especially since it was starting to snow. It was the dry, granular style that didn’t even have aesthetic appeal, and would pile up a lot quicker than you‘d expect. The wind was starting to kick up too, occasionally making the snow come in horizontal, making her glad she wore her ski goggles. But even keeping it out of her eyes didn’t improve visibility one iota; she could barely see the black silhouettes of trees before she was right on top of them, and hit some of the slopes hard enough that she went briefly airborne. It was kind of fun, but also dangerous - if she wiped out and broke a leg now, she doubted anyone would find her before she died of exposure or shock.

Eventually, when she figured out her location, she turned off the snowmobile and decided to hoof the rest of the way to the cabin; the trees were too thick now, and with her ability to see the trees severely limited, she would probably crash before she reached Hansen’s place.

She wrapped her scarf tightly around her neck, tucking the ends inside her parka, and decided to leave her goggles on, at least until she reached the cabin. Even though she was covered head to toe, only her cheeks exposed to the elements, they already felt frozen solid. What a brutal night to be outside.

She slogged through the snow, sometimes having to lift her own leg up to get it out, and grumbled to herself. It could never be unseasonably warm, could it? No, it always had to be unseasonably cold. It almost made you wish that global warming would hurry the hell up.

A walk that would have taken five minutes took at least ten, and she nearly walked straight into three trees before she made out the dark , looming shape that could only be the Hansen cabin. “Logan!” She shouted, but she could barely hear herself as the wind kicked up and tore away her voice, the snow hitting her face with the force of pebbles. Fuck! She should be at home, in front of a warm fire, getting really tanked up on brandy. That reminded her she should tell Reg to pack it in. She knew he wanted to catch those poachers very badly - and she wanted to nail those fuckos to the wall too - but even if they were moronic enough to come out in a storm like this, it wasn’t worth Reg freezing off his trigger finger off. He could come back and get them another night.

She pounded on the door with her thickly gloved hand, shouting, “Logan, you know it’s me!  I’m alone, and I just want to talk. I’m comin’ in, okay?” She waited for a reply, and didn’t hear any (she couldn’t hear anything beyond the hollowing of the wind), so she pushed the door open. She meant to do it gently, but the wind gave it a brutal shove, and it slammed back violently.

It was hard to see - he had no candles or lanterns lit - so she took out her flashlight and turned it on (which was difficult to do with these gloves), and even though she had it aimed down at the floor, she still saw him wince when it came on. He was sitting beside the pot bellied stove in the corner (of course there was no fire in it), arms wrapped around himself, knees brought up to his chest, trying to make himself as small and warm as possible, and trying equally to pretend he wasn’t shivering. His bloodless lips kind of gave him away.

His eyes were equally tired and resentful. “Are you ever gonna leave me alone?”

She was too busy closing the door against the wind to give him a sarcastic look. “That’s a mighty fine thank you.”

"Thank you."  He sighed. “I wanna be left alone.”

“Well, Garbo, have you taken a look outside?” She asked, turning to face him and putting her back against the door. "You are alone."  She kept the flashlight aimed down at the wooden floor. Some of the light glinted off the nails in the loose floorboards, and she wondered when the floor had gotten so warped. “Look, I have an offer for ya. I gotta friend who runs a ski lodge, and he will put you up in one of the empty rooms until the storm is over. You’ll get a nice bed, a warm bath, and food’s on the house - well, him, if he knows what’s good for him. There’s no strings attached at all; I would just feel better knowing me and my guys aren’t gonna find you as a corpsicle once the front passes.” She didn’t add that it would also give them more time to figure out who the hell he was, and hoped he hadn’t figured that part out for himself.

He continued to eye her warily, and she got a feeling, whoever he was, he had been hurt a lot. (Enough to strike out at someone else?) “The cold can’t kill me. It just makes me wish I was dead.” He said it like he believed it.

“It could kill anyone. I feel like I’m dyin’ now.”

“Then go. I‘m good.”

His eyes were flat and wide, in a way that reminded her of an owl. He was half sane, like a gut shot man could be half dead, only in this case it was impossible to say what would save him or what would damn him. Sanity didn’t bleed. ‘Fucking hell man,’ she thought. ‘What is your story? How did you turn out like this?’ ”I’m not leaving without you,” she said, as the wind moaned through the cracks in the wood. Sounded like banshees.

He blinked rapidly, and she could his pupils, in the dim light cast off the floor, had narrowed to impossibly thin pinpricks. Hadn’t they been almost all black, so wide there was almost no iris, when she came in? Now that she thought about it, his eyes weren’t right. Yes, pupils contracted or dilated in response to light or dark, but that dramatically? Cats' eyes did, but he was a bit too big to be a cat...and if his eyes became chatoyant, she just might shoot him.

(Oh great - here she was, a de facto chief, and she had a case of the willies. Soon she was going to become one of those “Sasquatch does exist” nuts who always scoured the forests for oversized footprints and bear scat. This was not the fucking X-Files, and he was not some big fucking cat man - he was probably the crazed vet they talked about back at the station.)

“I ain’t gonna hurt the guy,” he protested. “I’m just stayin’ here ‘til the worst of it blows over, and then I’ll be on my way.”

Now she was sure she missed something. “Hurt what guy?”

“The owner.”

She held her hands apart in a kind of shrug. “Why should I worry about that? He doesn’t come here in winter.”

He gave her that blank look yet again, like he was staring out through the wood of the door behind her. “He was here recently. Or somebody was.”

She raised her eyebrows, looking around the cabin with her flashlight. There was nothing here, besides the potbellied stove - Hansen was one of the crazed, self-sufficient type who still managed to bring a horse trailer full of crap with him when he came up here, and took it out with him when he left. The stove must have been too heavy to carry. “Why do you say that?”

Logan hesitated, as if he realized he’d just said the wrong thing, but didn’t know how to get out of it now. “I can smell ‘em.”

He was serious. She paused, took a deep breath, and got a lungful of nothing but the sharp sense of cold. What the hell was she doing? “What do you mean you smell them?” Wasn’t there a paranoia disorder of some sort that manifested in sensory delusions? It was clear he was paranoid - perhaps it wasn’t harmless old kook crazy, but deeply deranged crazy.

(Or he was a cat man, with a cougar’s sense of smell.)

She played the flashlight over the floor again, and once more nails caught the light. They were sticking out of a floorboard in the rough center of the room, one with a warped edge - the only one with an edge like that. “He put something under there,” Logan said, nodding his head at the floorboard.

She felt a sharp burn of acid in her stomach, yet paradoxically felt colder at the same time. “Who did? The man you smell?” He could be talking about himself this way, a second personality. And considering how cold it was, he could be talking about a body; if he killed them elsewhere, there’d be no smell, simply because it was too much like a meat locker for decaying to begin.

He didn’t answer, and while she approached the warped board, keeping her flashlight beam firmly on it, she kept the corner of her eye fixed on him. Maybe she had completely misjudged him; maybe he was the killer they were looking for.

She knelt carefully, placing the flashlight down on the floor beside her, and grabbed the warped board. The nails were banged in haphazardly, a half assed job that suggested whoever did it wasn’t expecting it
to be discovered by anyone else. (And who would? Up here, in the middle of nowhere, in the dead of winter? After all, you could kill a man, leave him by the side of the road, and get away clean.) Once she pried the slat up, she immediately noticed it was far too narrow unless the body had been expertly dismembered, but the beam of light, full of dancing dust motes, caught what looked like a bag wrapped
in cellophane.

With anxiety still burning in her gut, she picked up the package, which was the size of a very large brick, although not quite as heavy. Through layers and layers of tightly sealed plastic, she saw … well, what? It was white.

“It doesn’t smell right,” Logan offered, his low voice in the quiet dark almost making her jump. (Bad, Catman, bad!) “It smells like … plants, and chemicals.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” She snapped, sniffing the plastic. It smelled like plastic, although there was an undertone of … what, ammonia? Something sharp and yes, chemical.

Was this cocaine or China white? Either a meth-amphetamine derivative or heroin, this brick - cut or not - would be worth a small fortune on the market. And there were three other bricks just like the one in her hands beneath the loose floorboard of Hansen’s cabin.

She glared at him, about to ask if this was his confession, him throwing himself on her mercy by turning over the drugs, but there was nothing like that in his expression - he honestly had no idea what it was. He looked like a cold, lost little boy, completely out of his element, dropped into a world he had yet to understand. Just to test a theory, she asked, “Do you know if this is heroin or coke?”

His blank stare didn’t waver one iota. She might as well have been speaking Greek - he had no idea what she was asking him. “Huh?”

She had no way to carry this down, so she put the brick back in its hidey hole, and tried to put the board back as best she could. “Do you know how long ago this guy was here?”

Logan shrugged a single shoulder. “A day, maybe two.”

She was aware she was taking a crazy man’s word on it, but right now he was the closest thing she had to a witness. And now the murder of John Doe made sense - drug traffickers. They were hiding a stash up here - god knew why, but presumably these were small timers - and maybe they fought over it, or whatever the hell, but someone ended up dead because of it. And the prize they fought over had been stashed under the Hansen’s cabin, probably mistaken for abandoned. “I need to call this in,” she told him. “Can you do me a favor?”

He continued to eye her warily, like she was the completely insane one here. And maybe she was for asking this of him. “What?”

“Guard the cabin until I get back?” She was just going down to the road to pull Reg off his poacher duty - if in fact he was still there. If not, she’d just have to call in and wait for Nick to rouse Brent and Monie out of their beds. They needed to confiscate the drugs and set up a stake out immediately. She checked her cell phone again, but she still couldn’t get a signal ; the storm picked a great fucking time to move in.

“Why?”

If she had any doubts about his innocence, she no longer did - there‘s no way he could have faked the clueless irritation in his voice. “Because I don’t want anyone removing that stuff without my say so. It’s illegal, and I think it’s the motive that busts a unsolved case wide open. I’m not gonna be gone long. Can you do this for me, Logan?”

He still didn’t understand this; she could see it in his eyes. But after a long moment, he nodded almost timidly. “Yeah, but … hurry back. I don’ like people.”

‘So what does that make me?’ she thought, but didn’t say. Maybe it just meant he didn’t like her either. Tolerated her in brief spurts, but otherwise hated her as much as the next person. “Shouldn’t be gone long,” she reassured him, turning off her flashlight and pocketing it. “Back in a jiff.”

A gust of wind came up and almost smashed the door into her face as she left, but she managed to stop it and preserve a modicum of dignity as she slogged through the snow , back to her snowmobile. She nearly got decked by a swaying tree branch, but managed to avoid running into trees otherwise. The snowmobile seemed reluctant to start, as if it just realized how fucking cold it actually was, but she got it going and headed down towards the road, where she knew Reg was staked out in the Rose’s Towing truck. As thickly covered by snow as it was, it almost looked like a mastodon hidden within arctic permafrost. The fact that she could hardly see half a meter in front of her face also helped solidify that impression.

“Reg?” She shouted, as she slewed the snowmobile to a stop beside his truck. But why did she bother to talk when she could barely hear herself think in this howling storm? Also, he might have packed it in and left already, like a sensible person would. But how sensible was Reg, in the big scheme of things?

She couldn’t see through the frosted windows, so she opened the driver’s door, which seemed to creak and groan loudly under the strain, and said once more, “Reg-”

But the rest of her inquiry died in her throat, as she smelled something metallic and meaty, and all too familiar for her taste.

Reg was splayed out on the front seat of the truck, blood splattered on the passenger side window making it look black. And she didn’t even hear the bullet fired at her until it hit her in the back.