They fought like people possessed, theoretically if not precisely. They swarmed up and down the staircase, where they were all sandwiched in, but Giles was able to bark out a spell that repelled the group swarming down the stairs back up, and Naomi shot out enough electricity to drive those coming up the stairwell back down. It gave them a moment of breathing space but no more before they came at them again, hands like claws, grasping and rending, snapping at them with their teeth, trying to hurt them by any means necessary. It was pure insanity, but clearly they meant to hurt them, to kill them, and Angel made a decision.

“Hit ‘em with all you got,” he shouted, pulling out his sword. “Stay alive!”

As much as he could tell, they were mindless drones, vessels for something else, something that seemed to attack their eyes. He couldn’t hear their hearts beating, in spite of the blood dripping from their faces.

While he still used his sword to simply hack and wound, kicking and punching them down wherever possible, Helga, at the other end of the stairs, was simply chopping open heads and necks with her machete, occasionally snagging a person with her tail and tossing them over the side, down the stairwell. Sid was right behind her, breaking legs with well placed kicks, snapping necks with single twists. He told the ones with broken legs to stay down and stop resisting further, but it didn’t seem like they were listening to him.

Some of the people on the upper floors had weapons, although makeshift ones: baseball bats, kitchen knives, even a golf club or two. He had little problem disarming them, but someone buried a butcher knife deep into his upper arm, and someone else hit him hard on the back of the head with a baseball bat before Giles chopped it out of the owner’s hand with his sword. Stumbling from the blow, a man grabbed Angel and bit him hard enough on the shoulder to break the skin, tear his shirt. He screamed and hit him on the top of the head with the haft of the sword, making him fall away. Holy shit, what was wrong with these people?

He fought his way down the hall, heading towards the constant buzzing of the dimensional rift, and blood splashed on his face as he slashed through the angry, eyeless mob. He licked his lips, realized he was hungry, but better yet, he wanted to paint this hall with their miserable blood. These stupid fucks, didn’t they realize they were trying to save their souls if it was too late to save their lives? And everyone else’s lives too. They were idiots! Fucking idiots who deserved to die, who deserved to get their souls eaten by some damn demon lord who didn’t have the sense to open up a rift in a good location.

He loathed them more than almost anything in his life, and that was saying something. He wanted them to burn, he wanted to rip them apart with his bare hands and bathe in their blood. He wanted to -

He stopped where he was, trying to get a grip on the sudden, inexplicable rage that seemed to pound through his head, a hate that made his injuries throb. Hate.

Angel backed up towards the stairwell, shouldering his way through the people, who continued to try and hurt him by any means available. He slashed weakly with his sword, just enough to clear a space, and shouted to the others, “The closer we get, the more it taints us! Giles, we need a spell -”

Giles wheeled towards him, and he saw his face for only a moment before his sword arced down towards him. It was contorted in rage, lips skinned back to the teeth, his face splattered with blood and his sword dripping with gore. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t have to.

Angel knew it was too late as the sword cut through the air.

5

Marc found a nice, hidden place to park and they walked in, careful to be quiet and stay out of the open. Lafayette’s house was smaller and more non-descript than he had thought it would be, just a split level painted marine blue with white trim, the roof quaintly shingled and peaked, a perfect expanse of lawn broken up only by small islands of shrubs and trees, explosions of flowers adding color to the otherwise unrelenting green. He expected the dog to start barking as they crossed the lawn, but he didn’t hear it. It wasn’t outside either.

Something about this scenario struck him as wrong, so he wasn’t overly surprised when the front door opened as they neared the porch. Although Marc’s hand went instantly to his gun, Lafayette was just leaning in the open doorway, either drunkenly or wearily (perhaps both), in khakis and a button down white shirt open at the collar, showing a bit of the undershirt he wore beneath. “Somehow I expected something flashier,” Lafayette said. His right hand was empty; in his left, he held a half empty glass of scotch.

He exchanged a wary look with Marc. He hadn’t sensed or smelled anyone, and certainly Marc hadn’t seen one. If it was a trap, it was a damn good one. “You’ve been expecting me,” Logan said. It may have sounded like a question, but it wasn’t.

Lafayette shrugged. “They wanted me to leave, but, you know, fuck it. I don’t like cutting and running. Don’t worry, it’s not a trap - I’m not even supposed to be here. Want a drink?”

He didn’t seem to be lying, but then again, he seemed to be a little drunk. That could make judging veracity difficult, because a drunk always thought they were being honest. “Who’s they?”

He snorted a weak laugh. “Oh, come on - do you even have to ask?” He left the door open as he retreated farther into his house.

They followed, not convinced that it was all that safe, but they’d come this far, so how could they turn back now?

The inside of Lafayette’s house looked like the kind of home you’d find in an upscale catalogue for furnishings, not cluttered but certainly expensively tasteful, with white walls and pale blue accents as background for surfaces of ash blond wood. The living room, with its homey overstuffed sofa and ships in bottles on the mantelpiece, looked as if it had been professionally cleaned recently. He probably had a maid.

Lafayette flopped on the sofa, and gestured with his drink. “Help yourself to the bar. Or anything, really. I don’t care.”

Marc looked around the room suspiciously, glancing through the archways, while Logan just sat on a cushion stuffed wicker chair across from the sofa, and glared at Lafayette. “You knew. Why lie to me?”

“I didn’t lie -”

“Don’t bullshit me.”

“I told you what I could tell you. You have to understand that I’m not really a part of this, I just know what I’ve heard or been told.”

“Of course, you were following orders, the excuse of the chickenshit,” he sneered. “Did the Organization send me after Black Fire?”

“I think it was a mutual desire.”

He grunted. “You all wanted to use me.”

Lafayette took a swig of his drink, nearly draining the glass. “You have skills, Logan, ones that are harder to find than you’d think.”

He heard Marc doing a sweep of the house, walking around, checking out closets and other rooms, searching for people who may have been hiding. But if his sense of smell could be trusted, the maid was the only other person Lafayette had had in his house for a while. “Yeah, I know, my fucking healing factor. Do you know what Control did to me?”

“Your healing factor was only one mark in your favor,” he claimed, slumping further into the couch. “And by Control I guess you mean Carter. I know some of what he did to you, but not all. We drifted away, and he got … militant.”

“That’s not the point. The point is you knew more about me than you ever let on.”

He looked at him wearily, the alcohol aging him, making him look just this side of broken. “I know you served your country with distinction, Logan. I also know you were royally screwed over by said country. “

“Why?”

Lafayette finished off his drink before he answered, putting his empty glass on his blond wood coffee table, which had been sanded and polished to such a high gloss it almost looked like amber. “Carter liked to claim that there would be a mutant arms race, that as mutants grew to be more known outside of the scientific communities, countries would stockpile them like weapons. He wanted to make sure the countries of the West had the biggest and best stock standing by to take out anything someone in Russia or Saudi Arabia or Nicaragua could amass. He convinced a lot of the right people.”

“We’re not weapons - we’re people.”

“Yes, I know. But he preferred to think of you as weapons. It made it easier to excuse whatever was done to your kind, because it wasn’t hurting a person, it was simply honing a weapon that could tip the balance of power, keep democracy thriving for future generations. You were one of the first mutants he knew of, and you were a natural. There were people in the Canadian government who were more than happy to have you turned over to them. “

Logan wished he was surprised to hear that, but he wasn’t. Betrayal was a constant in his life. “Why?”

“Well, there was the mutant business, but only a handful of people knew about that. The truth was, you made people nervous. You were highly decorated, and you were great at your job; you were everything they could have asked for in an operative. You could improvise even under high stress situations, and you got the job done, no matter how bad it went. You usually found some way to see things through. Which was fine on its own … but you were quiet, you kept to yourself, you didn’t complain a lot, but you weren’t very forthcoming either. You survived a lot of things you shouldn’t have, and only the chosen few who knew you were a mutant knew why. “

“What an interesting turn of phrase,” Marc said, returning to the living room. He had a gun out, but it was aimed down at the floor, an implied threat as opposed to a direct one. “You survived a lot of things you shouldn’t have. Some people wanted him dead, didn’t they?”

Lafayette’s eyes lazily met Marc’s, and Logan wondered how long he’d been waiting for them, drinking his scotch. He seemed to weigh his potential responses carefully before committing to any of them. “It’s quite possible. When you’re a professional troubleshooter who’s long lived, you learn much, some things that certain people want to make sure is never public knowledge.”

Marc leaned on the back of his chair and gave him a faint smack on the shoulder. “How about that, bud? They had to fuck with your head ‘cause you knew too much. Now you can brag to the Boy Scout.”

He knew Marc was just trying to be funny, but there was no humor in this that Logan could see. “Tell me everything you know about me.”

Lafayette shrugged helplessly. “I don’t know that much about you, Logan. I’m not in the Organization, I just know what they’ve told me and what I’ve heard from second hand sources. I just know you were an agent for the government for many years, in many capacities, and you were considered to be very good, although perhaps a tad … unstable.”

“Unstable?” he demanded. But in retrospect Logan didn’t know why, because he really didn’t want to know.

Lafayette seemed reluctant to tell him. “You didn’t always follow orders to the exact word. It was rumored - rumored mind you; I have no idea if this was true - that you once shot one of your own men because he did something you didn’t like. He said he was just following protocol, but you claimed it was torture, and some people said you just had personal issues with the man. Either way, it was a blemish on your record. That of course doesn’t exist anymore, so there’s no way to verify it in any way.”

“If he shot a guy, he had a damn good reason for it,” Marc insisted angrily. Logan wished he had that much confidence in himself.

Lafayette nodded, but it seemed to be a placating gesture. He was probably more wary of Marc because he didn’t know what to expect from him; he was a wild card, and worse yet, a wild card with a gun. “I would never presume to say otherwise. I did try and find some information that might be helpful to you, but I didn’t have a lot of luck. I did find this, though. “ He dug in his pants pocket, and Logan felt Marc tense behind him, surely ready to wing him if he tried anything. But all he pulled out of his pocket was a large pink sticky note, and he leaned across the elegant coffee table to hand it to him. “There’s every indication he knew you back then. Maybe he can give you something I can’t.”

Logan took the sticky and scanned it, expecting the blandness he got. It was simply a name that meant nothing to him - Steven Samms - and an address that put him in an obscure corner of Maine. “Who the hell is this?”

“He’s the only other living member of some op called Operation: Nightfall in the ‘40’s. A cooperate intelligence effort between several countries that’s rumored to be where the idea of the Organization was born.”

“The ‘40’s?” Marc repeated, sounding surprised. “Whoa, ain’t that a blast from the past?”

“You were an exceptional agent, and you proved you still are with that Black Fire nonsense,” Lafayette went on, his vowels slurring slightly at the edges. “I just wanted you to come back and work for us, for J2, that’s all. I had no sinister intent, Logan. I just thought you belonged home, with your country, with your true people - the espionage community. So you‘re a mutant. So fucking what? It‘s politicians who get worked up about shit like that.”

Logan was hardly hearing him, as he had recognized the name Nightfall: World War Two. He was sure that everyone involved in it, besides him, was dead by now.

He suddenly wondered if the dream he’d had was, in a strange way, prophetic.

****

Angel got his sword up as Giles’s blade came slashing down, and only because he had a speed above Human was he able to deflect it. Just barely, actually - the tip of Giles’s sword cut a slice down his cheek, just underneath his left eye. He felt the sword slice his skin, skid across bone.

He stumbled back, trying to parry Giles’s sword out of his hand, but he was unable to do it. Crazed hatred had given Giles almost supernatural strength, and his eyes seemed to blaze with rage. He brought his sword up again for another hack, but Angel had had enough time to recover, and met his slash with one of his own, the sound of steel meeting steel ringing through the hall. “Jesus, Giles, think!” he snapped. “It’s this place! The madness, it’s contagious! The closer we get to it -”

“Do you think I’ve ever forgiven you, you monster?” he snarled, his slashes making up in speed for what they lacked in finesse.

The closer Angel got to the rift, the more the hate rose up in him, volcanic and nearly impossible to ignore. With Giles’s moves becoming so sloppy, it was easy for him to see how he could kill him, slice him open like melon, chop his head off in a single smooth blow. And the farther he was forced back, the more overwhelming these thoughts became, the more hard to resist.

Finally he kicked Giles in the stomach, making him stumble back, and he slashed the sword close enough to him to rip his shirt across the sleeve - if Giles had been a half an inch closer, he’d have hacked his arm off. And worse yet, Angel was sure he wouldn’t have felt bad about it. “Would you fucking listen to me, you washed up old hack! We have to get outta here before we all kill each other!”

Giles seemed to recover his breath, but he was just raising his arm to take up the fight again when Xander shoved him brutally aside. “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he demanded, clearly aghast.

You knew things were really fucked up when Xander seemed to be the sane one. Angel continued wrestling down his inexplicable rage, glad for the moment’s peace, when Xander glared at him with open, raw rage. “He’s too good of a swordfighter to kill that way,” Xander said, pulling out his gun.

Oh shit.

He was caught off guard and distracted, so Xander was able to fire before Angel slapped the gun out of his hand, and he took the bullet almost point blank in the chest. It was like getting hit with a sledgehammer, the impact reverberating through his as it shattered bones and tore through muscles before exiting out his back, and while there was no way in hell it would kill him, it fucking hurt, and Angel staggered back, grabbing the gaping hole in his chest. He just had to have his gun loaded with hollow points, didn’t he?

He leaned against the railing, trying to will himself to drop his sword so he didn’t run that fucking bastard Xander through with it, when Giles blindsided Xander with a punch. “He’s mine, you stupid wanker. Go back to your parent‘s basement - this is a job for a man.”

Xander staggered back a couple of steps, but Giles just didn’t have enough behind the punch to phase him. He swiveled his head around to glare at Giles, his eyes narrowing to slits. “You ruined my life, you wasted old man. I know why the Watchers fucking fired your ass.” He threw a punch that Giles saw coming and blocked with a forearm, but that was just a ruse, and he quickly delivered a rabbit punch to Giles’s gut with a low, hard left. Giles instantly doubled over, and Xander drove his knee right into his face, sending him sprawling. But as soon as Xander turned towards Angel, hands balled into fist, Giles kicked out from his position on the floor and caught Xander in the side of the knee, making him stumble and fall on his ass.

Angel couldn’t help but notice that now that they were fighting each other, the tenants had backed off and seemed to be watching them, as if they had suddenly become their entertainment.

He could see that Helga and Sid had moved down to the lower riser, where they were being swamped by possessed people, and yet still fighting a pathway clear; being farther away, and also being people wholly dedicated to destruction, the urge to turn on each other hadn’t yet occurred to them yet, and probably wouldn‘t the farther away they got. The funny thing was, if Angel had been asked ahead of time who was most likely to survive a massacre, Hel and Sid would have been the pair he’d have bet on. Naomi had been nailed by a flying object, judging from the gash on her forehead and the fact that she was sitting down on the stairs, but Bren and Kier were protecting her from either side, and neither had moved far enough up the staircase to have been affected. So it only affected those that were on the same floor as the rift. It was probably significant, but Angel wasn’t sure why at the moment.

The wound in his chest and back wasn’t healing, it was simply throbbing like a phantom heart, and it was really pissing him off. Giles and Xander were still brawling - Giles accused Xander of never being anything but a loser, and Xander accused him of “warping” Willow - and Angel took the opportunity to cold cock Xander with a swift right upper cut. “Shoot me, will you,” he growled, and before Xander could slump to the floor he grabbed him and shoved him down the stairs. He collided with Bren, who fell over Naomi and stumbled into Kier, and they all ended up in a big heap near the bottom. He had no idea if they were all hurt or not.

Giles was on the floor, bleeding from the mouth and growing a nasty looking shiner, and his eyes had a half-conscious glaze that killed some of the rage. Xander may have been only a Human and a pretty piss poor one at that, but he did work as a construction worker, so he had functioning muscle, and he was decades younger than poor Rupert. Experience wasn’t going to save him from an angry young man. Or an angry old vampire.

Angel angled the tip of his sword right underneath Giles’s tender chin, resting it against his jugular vein. Giles froze, aware of how bad that was. “If you were any kind of spell slinger at all, you could have saved your own life,” he spat derisively. Old fool - this was all his fault. If he had just been better, a true wizard, maybe he wouldn’t have had to die like this. But no, he had to be a failure …

“You’re dead,” a voice suddenly shouted, and Angel felt a shiver of power run through him. He looked over his shoulder to see all the possessed people on the riser below, the ones Helga and Sid had been plowing their way through like humanoid bulldozers, all collapse, felled like stalks of wheat before a scythe. Bob was among them now, blue blood streaking his face, his eyes glowing with that energy too painful to look at.

Some of the spectators who’d been watching Xander and Giles fight collapsed, caught by that energy that Angel had felt graze him, but not all of them. Bob would have had to get closer, expend more energy to get them, and they retreated into the shadows to avoid his gaze.

“To me!” Bob exclaimed, although it wasn’t actually a statement. It was a command, in that voice that was purely inhuman, the one he could feel move through him like a lightning bolt, and before he even knew what he was doing, he had helped Giles to his feet and started down the stairs, towards Bob. He didn’t actually want to go, his mind was rebelling, but Angel’s body wasn’t listening to him anymore - it was obeying the command of a god, one that simply couldn’t be ignored, one he wasn’t strong enough to fight.

There was a vibration moving through the building, a pounding, and Angel belatedly realized it was the Charunai racing up the stairs, his weight and force shaking the entire stairwell, as Bob must have decided escaping was a better option than fighting. After all, if he killed him, he’d have simply created two Charunai to deal with.

They all responded, all grouping on the lower riser, all bloodied and beaten but at least still alive, and the Charunai was closing in on them. Angel had time to wonder what Bob’s plan was when the world seemed to turn inside out, and they were all thrown into utter darkness.