16

It was really interesting to have most of your body burnt away.

Bob had lost pieces of his body before, but never to lava. It wasn’t necessarily an experience he wanted to repeat, but it seared away flesh and nerves so fast he barely had time to register any pain at all. He was still a presence though, still together in an energy sense, and not effected by the lava.

But even his energy self, the core of his being, could feel the poison of Seth’s energy, even as it dispersed in Dave, even as Dave seemed to contract in both a physical and energy sense. Dave made to hit him, throw him off with a tendril of lava, but Bob’s physical self was already gone, and his energy passed through him harmlessly. Bob withdrew anyways, as Seth’s energy was starting to eat through him, poison him simply by proximity. “Fourteen cannibal kings, wondering blithely what the dinner bell will bring,” he sang softly to himself.

“What have you done to me?!” Dave roared, but it was such a silly question. He must have known, just like he must have known he was as good as dead.

Dave began to lose control of his form almost instantly, and the Senior Partner, who had started backing up the second Bob plunged his arm into Dave’s midsection, disappeared around the corner. A good thing too, since Dave’s energy and remaining lava expanded out like a belching fireball, destroying his own corridor of gemstones and gold. Bob struggled to keep cohesive as the bit of energy that was Seth chewed through him. Wow - even in your energy form alone, you could hurt. He wasn’t never certain about that.

Suddenly an invisible wall appeared between him and Dave, as slick as glass, and he realized he wasn’t alone. “I should have known you wouldn’t take no for an answer,” he said/sent, as familiar energy began to mingle with his, burning Seth’s energy away harmlessly.

“I just knew you’d fuck things up,” Bas sent, with world weary tolerance. “You kind of do that.”

“I shouldn’t have chosen a male form,” he offered, not sure she’d get the joke. “Men do that a lot. It’s a weakness of the gender.”

“I thought that was just a weakness of you,” she replied, not unkindly. Dave’s remaining, tainted energy poured against the wall, but all for naught - Bastet’s energy was strong enough to withstand Dave and Seth harmlessly.

Bas’s energy combined with his, sending away all pain and banishing all the damage done by Seth, and he almost felt a bit guilty with this nearly sexual energy mingling going on as Dave seemed to die in spectacular flaming agony. But Dave brought this on himself; if he hadn’t decided to come out of retirement now, he could have tortured miserable souls to his heart’s content in perfect peace.

But what really bothered Bob was the possibility that he had been marred forever as a god killer, that the Powers That Be had found a new job for him: fixing their mistakes. That had better not be true.

Especially since he was bound to be tops on the list.

*****

Although Nurse Dragonheart could vomit a continuous stream of flames for a good six feet, she was still just a tad short of their position. Which was good, because even though the flames were a foot or two away, the heat was so intense Bren was relatively sure his eyebrows were burning off.

Naomi reacted first. One hand still against the wall, she held out the other and shot a continuous lightning bolt of electricity at the nurse demon, which caught her hard and sent her flailing backwards, temporarily cutting off the stream of flames. Giles then shouted some kind of spell, and tossed his knapsack full of spell crap at him, which Bren barely caught before it hit the floor. "It's a Morpyrous demon," he said, by way of explanation. "It can assume a humanoid form for hours at a time, but to use its flame abilities it has to revert at least partially to its true form."

At least he knew what the fuck it was. "How do we kill it?"

"It's not that hard; broken neck, decapitation, severe brain injury, severing of the main artery in its stomach. The usual."

Only Giles and his plummy accent could make "the usual" sound anything but sarcastic. "So why'd you toss me the bag?"

Giles shouted something else and raised his hand at the demon as it regained its feet and vomited more flames at them, but this time it seemed to hit an invisible field - the spell Giles had just thrown. From the way Giles was grimacing, it might not hold for long. "There's a holy water bomb in there. How's your throwing arm?"

Oh yes, one of his holy water bombs - Bren was proud to say he invented those. Little glass balls like Christmas bobbles, only stoppered and filled with holy water, usually the stuff he got from the Church of the Stone Temple. A good hard throw would shatter it on its victim, and shower them with water. But he made them for vampires, which he couldn't help but think as he found the smooth glass globe and pulled it out. "I don't know. What d'ya need?"

"Throw it in its mouth. It should shut down the fire production for a minute or two."

Kier took the water globe from his hand. "Sounds like a job for me," Kier said, and aimed only briefly before lobbing it straight into the flames coming from the nurse's distended jaws. It was a beautiful direct hit - how the globe hadn’t melted in that fiery furnace of the demon’s flames he had no idea - and the flames died suddenly, as the nurse demon gulped and … well, she didn’t choke, just spluttered a bit, like she’d swallowed a fly.

Giles pulled out the sword he had sheathed on his back, but he’d barely cleared the sheath by the time Bren pulled his gun, took aim, and fired. The first only hit the she demon in the shoulder, but he corrected for the slight pull to the left, and the second shot entered the center of her face and blew out the back of her skull in a sudden spurt of blood and brain matter. Her blood was greenish black. Eww.

Giles stared at him as the demon’s body keeled over and hit the floor with a sickening squishy thud. “I could have handled it.”

He shrugged. “Yeah, but you said severe brain injury. That’ll do, right?”

Giles took another glance at the dead demon, and the brains splattered all over the end of the hallway. (They had black brains? Double eww.) After a moment, he nodded. “Yes, yes … I’m pretty sure that did it.”

“So that’s it?” Naomi asked, sounding surprised. “This seems way too simple.”

“It was supposed to be, more or less,” Giles admitted, resheathing his sword. “That’s why we were sent here.”

“Really?” Bren replied, wondering if he should be offended by that or not. “So we got the easy job?”

“Well … not so much easy as easier,” Giles clarified. “By comparison.”

That was probably true, but it didn’t make him feel much better.

He wondered how the others were doing, and if things were going as well for them.

*****

The opening honestly didn’t look big enough, but they started coming through anyways.

The first ones through were spiky, vaguely troll like demons stepping through the burgeoning Hellmouth, but they didn’t get very far, as Marcus walked over, and said, “Welcome to America, where we have more weapons than sense.” He then proceeded to shoot them at nearly point blank range, but not with one of his guns - he’d recovered the only single gun with enchanted bullets that had remained intact after Logan’s rampage, and it punched through them like small missiles, splattering demon blood and bits over the waiting army on the other side of the opening.

Helga joined him with her own gun - no enchanted bullets - but they both unloaded inside the Hellmouth, filling the room with the stench of cordite. Eventually they ran out of ammo, but by that time the Hellmouth did something odd: it seemed to contract, and then the swirling energy disc that made up its most visible part seem to switch the direction it was moving in. Did Willow do that? Someone else? (They were all working in tandem, so it was hard to say.)

There was really no way of telling, and there was no time for it. They must have known their time for usefulness was coming to a close, so they started slipping through the rip anyways, demons with multiple jaws and tentacles for limbs, all after one thing: Xander/Willow. Clearly they had determined that she/he was the biggest threat to them, so the others moved to protect her/him. Marcus pulled a nasty looking knife and took off his gloves, apparently willing to find out if his own personal poison would work on demons, while Helga pulled out her machete and started chopping anything that moved, and Saddiq stuck with hand to hand, but since his skin was unbreakable that made things no easier for the demons.

Angel had his sword, which he barely had time to pull out before a tentacle snaked around his leg, attempting to pull him down. He hacked its tentacle off, but then he was blindsided by another tentacle, sending him crashing into the far wall. Then a humanoid demon came at him, a two headed thing with brick red scales and an inexplicable muff of black fur around its necks, and he let it impale himself on his sword. Then he ripped it out the side, splattering its sizzling guts on the carpet (they were acidic, eating through the floor), and saw his sword was sizzling too, melting. Shit!

He tossed it away and gave the next demon that tried to grab him a backhand fist to the face, before turning into a kick which he accidentally put through the chest of a demon who looked like the offspring of an avocado and a porcupine. (How was he supposed to know it was hollow?) A tentacle slapped out his leg from under him and sent him falling on his ass, but when the tentacle came back the second time, he grabbed the melting remains of his sword and used the sizzling haft to nail the damn thing to the floor. Its owner screamed - from where he wasn’t perfectly certain - and he jumped up to his feet in time to grab a demon that somehow got past Saddiq and snapped its neck like it was made of cartilage.

The building was now shaking, like they were having an earthquake, and fragments of the ceiling were salting down on them as Willow/Xander was shouting the last of the spell above the din, and the demons seemed to get frantic. There was no time for anything fancy - Helga chopped them in half, Marcus gutted them or dropped them by touching them (some were susceptible to his toxin; some were not), Saddiq snapped their necks and backs like they were made of rattan, and Angel simply put his fist through their faces … if they had faces. If they didn’t, he just hit the most likely looking part of their anatomy.

Finally Willow got through the last of the spell, and there was an odd noise, like an explosion played backwards: a sudden, hard noise that died away into nothingness. Along with it, the demons disappeared, leaving behind nothing but their blood.

The Hellmouth was gone.

The earthquake stopped, and Xander/Willow dropped to his knees, head hanging down, hands hanging limping at his side.

Angel did a visual survey of the room, but it looked like everyone survived it. Both Helga and Marcus looked bloody and bruised, and some demon had managed to break Saddiq’s skin and leave claw marks across his face in three deep furrows across his cheek, but everyone was relatively intact and still on their feet. Well, save for Xander.

He walked over to him, but before he could touch him, Xander looked up, sweat drenched hair hanging down and obscuring his eyes, and Willow said, “Whoa. That was … heavy.”

“You okay?”

“I’m fine, but I think Xander’s a little … I think he’s out.”

“Out?” Angel replied, not sure what to make of that.

“Out cold. I had to channel a wicked amount of energy, and I don’t think he was ready for it. He told me to do it anyways, but it’s weird to be suddenly alone.” She attempted to stand, but Xander had clearly been in control of his body most of the time, and she nearly fell on her (his) face before she got to his (her) feet. Angel grabbed Xander’s arm and hauled him to his feet, holding his arm until she steadied. She nodded a thanks, blowing the bangs out of Xander’s eyes.

“What’s the odds this place is structurally sound?” Marc asked, looking up at the cracked ceiling.

“I wouldn’t accept any odds,” Helga said. “Most buildings aren’t built to take dimensional rifts. I suggest we haul ass before we’re buried neck deep in drywall and support beams.”

Marc nodded, holding his left arm like he’d hurt it. “Seconded.”

There was no need for a discussion at all - they left, and tried hard not to slip on the blood coating the hallway as they made their way to the stairwell. The silence was absolute, and genuinely eerie. Save for them, there was no one left alive in this entire apartment complex.

Looking down at the sixth floor riser, he could see Scott still sitting at the head of the sixth floor staircase, but on the riser, beside a rather big hole in the wall that wasn’t there before, was Logan, laying face down in a pool of blood. “What the hell happened?” Marcus exclaimed, racing down the stairs to Logan.

“That big blue demon came back up,” Scott explained, turning towards their voices while keeping his eyes tightly closed. “Logan came up after it. We got it outside, but Logan collapsed out right afterwards. I guess it must have hurt him pretty badly.”

Marcus turned Logan over, and gasped in horror. “His eye’s gone!”

“What?” Scott asked.

“His left eye socket is nothing but a bloody mess,” Marc reported, putting his hand lightly on his throat. “He’s got a pulse, but it ain’t good. I think he’s still bleeding.”

Willow, still standing beside Angel in case she needed help keeping Xander’s body upright, put a hand to her mouth. “Oh god, the poor man.”

“Shouldn’t he have mostly healed by now?” Scott asked, sounding confused.

“The enchanted bullets could’ve really hurt him,” Helga said, her tail twitching as she stood almost protectively over Logan. Between her and Marc, Angel was pretty sure that any big bad that got the idea to go after Logan right this second probably wouldn’t live long enough to realize it had made a huge mistake.

Marc looked up at Helga, and while Angel couldn’t see his eyes through his goggles, just the way he scowled transmitted reams of information. “Could it have punched through his adamantium?”

She shrugged helplessly with her hands, looking disgusted for having to do it. “I have no fucking clue. Can he heal from that if it did?”

Now it was Marcus’s turn to shrug and shake his head. That was an unknown - an unknown that could be making Logan suffer pretty badly.

Willow looked down the stairwell, clearly more confident in her ability to maneuver Xander’s body solo, and just the way she stared at the sixth floor stairs, Angel figure she’d spotted the trail of blood that marked Logan’s upward passage. He’d been bleeding all the way up; he’d never stopped. “I can’t say I know him,” she said tentatively. “But if he gets shot up, falls seven stories down, and yet manages to get up, climb seven flights of stairs, fight a demon and win, I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say he’s not going to die that easily.”

An excellent point, and definitely a valid one, but no one was quite ready to be optimistic yet.

Marc picked up Logan, throwing him over his shoulder, and Saddiq helped Scott up and started leading him down the stairs, his own bullet wound temporarily forgotten.

They’d won the war, but the battle wasn’t over yet. They still had to get out of this building alive, before it collapsed on their heads.

Hadn’t they earned something a little simpler, a little easier? Angel felt like they had, but he knew nothing was ever that easy.