Naomi had looked up towards the naked light bulbs suspended from the raftered ceiling, then said, "Are we expecting company?"

He looked up, then around, seeing nothing. "What - "

She was gone, just like that. He got to his feet warily, now aware he did sense something, but it wasn't Heydon. It was familiar, yet he couldn't place it...

...until Xavier and Jean suddenly appeared in the cage, standing right in front of him.

More shocking than the fact that they were in here - desperately out of place, Jean in her L.A. outfit sans windbreaker, Xavier in his impeccably tailored silver grey suit - was the fact that Xavier was no longer paraplegic; he was standing, the wheelchair nowhere in sight. He thought this was another hallucination, except he could sense their presence, smell them, and knew they were actually here.

"Logan," Jean said, and hugged him, sighing in relief. He exhaled in relief as well, holding her tight, enjoying her warmth and her familiar smell. There was a moment when they may have kissed, but because Xavier was here it passed very quickly, unremarked upon.

"It got me in my sleep," he explained, feeling ashamed at be grabbed, even if it was by a demon. "By the time I realized he was there, he had me."

"How are you?" Xavier asked, and something in his ice blue eyes said that he knew that was a silly question.

"Still alive, for now," he said, as Jean slipped out of his arms and stepped back, taking her place beside Xavier. "You shouldn't be here."

"We have to find you," Jean said, and her eyes seemed to slide down his face, unable to meet his eyes for the moment. She didn't want Xavier to pick any of this up. "He took you from the mansion."

"Can you tell us anything about the demon?" Xavier asked, all business. Logan had a feeling he'd picked up on all the sub-text Jean wanted him to miss, but he was pretending he hadn't, respecting their privacy.

"His name's Heydon, he's an arrogant and powerful fuck, and he has total control of me. I've been trapped inside my mind ever since, and it's starting to drive me crazy. Well, crazier."

"Did he construct this cage?" Xavier asked, glancing around.

Logan almost laughed, but he shook his head instead. "Part of my past - Laughlin City. I'm always in one cage or another."
"Do you know where he's taken you? What he's planning?" The Professor continued.
Logan shook his head again. "He did let me see through his - my - eyes for a moment. I couldn't even feel my body."

"Did you see anything that would tell you where you are?" Xavier urged. He was getting the impression that time was of the essence, and Logan was willing to believe that was true.

"No. It was a sunny day in Any Big City, USA. Man, in Europe, you always know where you are - London, Dublin, and Paris look nothing like each other. But things are so homogeneous in the States ... " he paused, and scoured his brief memories for anything that could indicate place. "Wait a minute - cars on the street." He closed his eyes and tried to recall them, driving past, people's lives going on as always while his was hijacked, ripped out from under him like a flimsy carpet. Logan got it. "Cali plates," he said, opening his eyes. "I'm in California."

Xavier smiled at him proudly, as if he was both impressed and yet knew he could do it. "Excellent. I should be able to pinpoint your location."

Even Jean gave him a faint , encouraging smile , but she looked so worried he thought she might actually be ill. He knew the feeling.

"Bob is going to get you out of this," she said, trying to be reassuring.

He appreciated it, even if she seemed to find it hard not to cry. "He'd better. If it's anything, I seem to be getting stronger the more time passes."

"How so?" Xavier asked.

"I can't really explain it. Things just feel more real now; I have a sense of self, I'm starting to feel things. I don't know if I could control my - " he gestured to the cage around them. " - my mindscape, but maybe. I think my body is trying to reject him."

"Like a foreign organism,"  Jean said admiringly, eyes brightening in slim hope.

He nodded, and Xavier asked, "Do you think it will work?"

Logan shook his head, wishing he could be optimistic, but it seemed to be against something in his genetic make up. "No. But maybe it's a tiny weakness that could be exploited."

Xavier nodded, obviously considering his words. "I will pass that on."

"Pass on what?" A familiar, sanguine voice said behind him.

Logan knew who it was without looking; the impeccable Heydon, leering at them, oozing smugness like a slime trail. Jean's and Xavier's eyes darted towards him, and that gave Logan the exact location of his target.
He spun on his heels with a scream of rage, leaping at Heydon and popping his claws in mid air, intending to hurt him if nothing else.

But Logan felt like a lightning bolt of ice hit him, shattering his skull and traveling straight down his spine, alternately burning and freezing the vertebrae as it traveled, making him taste copper.

"Logan!" Jean shouted, as he hit the floor of the cage face first, a bone shattering landing that made him really feel his phantom body now, taste blood.

He tried to shove himself up, but couldn't. He couldn't move his arms or his legs.

Logan was paralyzed.

***

Charles Xavier had lived a long time, and seen and experienced a lot of things, and he knew evil could stretch the gamut from simple ignorance to overblown, despotic nihilism. He also knew you could not make a judgment on it by first sight.

But he still felt confident that they were facing a thing of pure evil.

Heydon looked like a stockbroker he once met, the kind that was born into privilege, went to a tony school like Princeton or Harvard, and while they worked constantly and had a prissy, controlling streak, had never really done any real work at all; the type of person who had never suffered pain, struggled through hard times, or labored for anything, and couldn't imagine doing it. Why would they have to? Life was theirs for the taking. Anyone's life, in fact.

Xavier couldn't read him. Unlike a wall of black glass, his mind was like sharp static, a background buzz like a hive of angry bees, and his smile was a leer of pure, self - satisfied arrogance. He glanced down at the fallen Logan like he was a particularly ugly insect that had fallen in his path, and then stepped casually around him, a man deftly avoiding an inconvenient pile of dog shit on the sidewalk. His eyes were perfectly empty, misty grey and two dimensional, looking as if they might be more at home on a cartoon than a person.

"Leave them alone," Logan growled, his words so full of hate it was almost palpable in the squalid little cage. He'd always found it sad that Logan allowed himself to be exploited for money, in circumstances like this, but he had to acknowledge there was little else he could do. Dangerous people wanted him, and Logan was too wary of people to ever settle in one place for too long.

Logan's muscles corded like cables beneath his skin, veins bulged, and it looked like he was fighting an invisible enemy that was keeping him pinned down to the floor. A quick glimpse of his angry, panicked thoughts revealed that Heydon had paralyzed him, leaving him unable to move his limbs.

Heydon chuckled, but stared at them, not even glancing back at Logan. "Or what? You'll flop me to death, mutie?" He and Jean both took an involuntary step back as his eyes bored into them in an almost physical sense. It didn't matter that they couldn't read him; his hunger was palpable, evil and more depraved than either of them could have ever imagined. He thought he understood why Bob thought it was so important that they stop him.

Jean held up a hand in his direction, and Heydon stopped short. Behind him, Logan had used the muscles of his shoulders and torso to shove himself up on his side; there was a small smear of blood on his face from his split lips and broken nose, and it didn't look like they were healing, probably because Heydon wasn't letting it happen. But Logan didn't look pained more than utterly furious, and he could feel the heat from his thoughts as if they were molten. Xavier found Logan's anger obscurely fascinating, as he had never met anyone whose rage was almost a second personality, a deadly state of mind that could run away with the otherwise dominant personality. It confirmed that Logan's life had been full of trauma, even if he could only remember the recent bits of it.

Xavier wondered if Heydon knew exactly what he was stirring up here.

Heydon grinned coldly, showing toothpaste ad perfect teeth, whiter than white and harder than marble."A 'kinetic. Ooh, I haven't had one of those in a long time."

Jean was suddenly thrown back violently, slamming so hard into the chain link fence that it bowed and almost collapsed under her weight. She slid down to the floor, looking dazed, and he smacked his lips lasciviously. "You'll be a tasty one, red."

"You want me, you stupid motherfucker!" Logan roared, veins standing out in relief on his neck, his skin flushing dark in rage. It looked like he was bleeding more from his nose and mouth, as if adrenaline was thinning his blood, but even as it began to puddle on the floor beneath his head he paid it no mind at all. In this pure state of anger, he was beyond pain - Heydon had hurt Jean, and now Logan was viciously homicidal. If he could move, he wouldn't just kill Heydon; he would tear him up until nothing was left, until his remains could only be scooped up by a shovel. "Come on, take me! Come on, you cowardly fuck! Maybe it'll be a fair fight now!"

That made Heydon chuckle again, shake his head as if Logan was just a misbehaving child. "Can you believe the arrogance of this beast?"

"Even afraid to face me when I'm down?!" Logan shouted, obviously trying to bait Heydon into attacking him. As always, Logan's courage was suicidal and astounding.

"Be quiet," Heydon said, with a dismissive gesture, and from the way Logan's mouth opened and suddenly shut, Heydon had now robbed him of the ability to speak. He was crippling him by increments, and enjoying it. But muscles jumped beneath the skin of Logan's jaw like angry snakes trying to burst through the flesh, and the hate in his eyes was hard to look upon : if looks could kill, there'd be nothing left of Heydon except a smell of burned meat, and a very small char mark on the floor.

Although he hated to leave Logan like this, he knew it was time to cut the connection, and tried to pull himself and Jean back to their bodies, but was unsuccessful - the dark presence of Heydon had closed in on them like like this cage, only the walls were psychic and very thick. He was already far too powerful, and Xavier was sure Bob had no idea, although he must have been fearing just this.

Heydon gave him a slippery smile, as if they were compatriots. "You know, for all his cockiness, the boy's a mess. Stupid too - knowing what he knows about his healing abilities, he has still tried to kill himself! The last time was a couple of months before you found him - did you know? Clawed himself in the heart. Bled all over, ruined his clothes, knocked himself out for a bit, but that was all. Next day, he was back drinking in seedy bars, picking fights, making himself feel better by beating the shit out of loggers and sleeping with whatever burned out tart gave him the eye. Some hero he is, huh?"

Xavier spent the time Heydon was blathering probing the darkness surrounding them telepathically. There was no reading Heydon's mind, no, but he was deciding on a focused attack. On the floor, Logan had managed to squirm around more in Heydon's direction. Continuing to piss him off, even in his compromised state, was not wise. Heydon was in his body, and still he knew nothing about him. He was an idiot - an extremely powerful idiot, the very worst kind.

He went back and helped Jean up to her feet. She looked more stunned - by what Heydon had done, by what he was saying about Logan - than hurt, although a small trickle of blood was starting to drip from one nostril.
"Hey, chrome dome, aren't you listening?"

Xavier turned and faced Heydon with the cool disdain he deserved. "I don't appreciate you hurting my people."

Heydon let out a startled blurt of a laugh. "Oh, don't you? Well, what exactly can you do about it, Jean - Luc?"

"There are more powers than yours," he told him, then let him have it.

Not everyone understood that telepathy could be used as a weapon. Admittedly, only powerful telepaths could, and there was some hesitation to use it as such - to completely flood a person's mind with stimuli, to overload synapses and clog neurons - was to risk popping the brain cells like popcorn, to cause a potentially fatal aneurysm or burst blood vessel, but this was a demon, and, more to the point, he really didn't give a damn if he did. Maybe some of Logan's toxic rage was imbuing itself in the atmosphere.

Heydon staggered under the sudden, unexpected assault, and Jean, realizing what he was doing, closed her eyes against the pain and joined in. Their thoughts intertwined, a telepathic missile shot straight at the demon at the speed of thought.

He fell to his knees, then all fours, and looked up at them with blood more orange than red gushing from both nostrils. "Oh, that's good. That's good, bitch. You're gonna make a hell of a meal, baldy."

It was then they felt the dark walls of Heydon's thoughts collapse in on them, feeling like a genuine, crushing psychic pressure that threatened to flatten them both, sending deep shockwaves of a pain as indescribable as it was devastating through both of them. Jean let out a small cry under the strain, but managed to use her telekinesis to try and shore up their defenses, throw his mind back, but Xavier could feel that it wasn't working. The pain knifed through his brain and surged down his spine, trailing down into the legs he could only feel here, in mindscapes. He was now sorry he could as his nerve endings seemed to catch fire, flaring the pain throughout his entire body.

But the attack must have freed up Logan somewhat, because he lunged - knees working, arms still out of commission - and used the only weapon he had left: he sunk his teeth into Heydon's throat.

Heydon let out a genuine scream of surprise and pain, and shoved Logan away as he pulled back - not a good move. Logan had really sunk his teeth in, biting straight through, and when he shoved him away, Logan ripped a good chunk of flesh out of the side of his neck. Blood spurted from the wound as Heydon fell back on his ass, clamping a hand over the raw gash, where they could see black muscle like knots of thin wires nestled among bones as grey as a London fog. "Animal! Fucking animal!" He snapped at Logan, looking dazed, flat eyes glassy and confused. He hadn't thought Logan would do that (who did). Blood continued fountaining from the wound, leaking through his skeletally thin fingers, and they could feel Heydon's psychic walls crack, if only for a moment - shock - not pain, not anything else - was reverberating through his system, but even as they felt the crack, they could sense surging waves of anger coming up from below, like a volcano seconds away from eruption.

Logan, thrown into a slumped sitting position against the far side of the cage, paralyzed anew, had orange blood on his mouth, chin, and chest, mingling with his darker red blood. He was either still bleeding from his nose, or Heydon's hit had aggravated the injury. He must have known, or also sensed the weakening of his psychic walls, because he screamed at them, "Get out of here!"

And Xavier didn't need to be told twice.

**

Heydon was now glaring at him, grey eyes turning orange, and while blood continued to seep from the hole in his throat, it was no longer spewing out like water from a broken pipe. "You fucking savage," he growled, his voice inhuman, stripped of its suave guise and cadence.

"You bet, asshole," he growled back, letting the hate flow out towards him like a wave. If that bastard had hurt Jean, he was going to torture him before he killed him, rip his fucking arms off and make him watch. "If I'm goin', I'm takin' you with me. Any way I have to."

Heydon's eyes narrowed to deadly slits. "Don't flatter yourself, Nomad. You will never get the chance."

It was then that it felt like a bomb exploded inside his brain - a supernova of white hot pain that traveled through his body and seemingly out of it, bursting open his skin like he was an overcooked sausage, splitting the seam of flesh and muscle and pulverizing him from the inside out.

It seemed to last an eternity, turning him inside out millimeter by millimeter, and he probably screamed, but he heard nothing but a keening white noise, the sound of synapses frying, burning out, dying by the hundreds of thousands.

When the darkness finally came, it was a relief, and he didn't care if this meant he was dead.

Scott had to stand up straight, as his shoulder was starting to hurt, and as he stretched his arms, he thought he finally saw Jean move.

And start falling right over the edge.

"Jeannie!" He shouted, and raced for her as she let go of Xavier's shoulders and seemed to waver on her feet, then crumple, as if fainting. He didn't think he'd reach her in time, but he grabbed her by the hips just before she completely fell over. "Jean, honey," he said, pulling her up to her feet on the catwalk. Her body was limp, her head lolling to the  side, and for one brief moment he thought she was dead. But no, she was warm, she was still breathing, just unconscious.

Xavier was taking the Cerebro headpiece off with slow deliberation, and Scott was pretty sure he saw his hands shaking.

"What happened?" Bob asked, voice echoing through the room. He had come closer, but was still back from the entrance.

Jean seemed to jolt in his arms, her hands instantly going to his, but then she looked around frantically and seemed to realize where she was, and who was holding her. "Scott," she said, with obvious relief. She turned and put her arms around him, hugging him tightly, burying her face in his neck. Her face was ghostly pale, and he wasn't completely sure, but he thought he saw some blood in her nose. She was shuddering, and while he didn't think she was crying, tears were still coming out of her eyes; he could feel them trickling down his neck, seeping through his shirt. She hadn't held him this tight in a long time.

"He's already too powerful," Xavier said, his voice as steady and dignified as always. "He almost killed us."

"What?" Scott asked, squeezing Jean a little tighter.

"Shit," Bob breathed, sounding more surprised than anything else. "How did you get away?"

Xavier maneuvered the wheelchair around slowly in the limited space, and it was then Scott could see he was almost as pale as Jean, and there was a thin trickle of blood leaking from one of his nostrils. He must have noticed it, because he reached inside his jacket pocket, pulled out a white cloth handkerchief, and held it up to his nose. "Logan. He distracted him so we could get away. He probably saved our lives."

At the mention of Logan's name, Jean shuddered more violently, and he wasn't sure if that was a coincidence or not.

"He's still that strong?" Bob asked.

Xavier shook his head, so delicately it was hard to tell it was a gesture. "The demon underestimated him. He won't again."

"We left him there," Jean said, pulling back from him slightly. She looked between Xavier and Bob, tear streaks on her ashen face, hazel eyes bright with some terrible knowing. "We left him with that ..." She couldn't even think of a name for it.

Xavier's lips thinned to a grim line. "I know. We had no choice. He knew that."

"What happened?" Scott asked. He hoped Jean would share it with him, but on the other hand, he hoped she didn't. He had never seen them so shaken.

Jean shook her head, and rested it against his shoulder again. "It was horrible. He's so powerful, and ... "

"Evil," Xavier supplied, with absolutely no irony at all.

Bob sighed loudly, sounding frustrated. "Shit. Maybe he stocked up before taking Logan over, just for insurance. Goddamn it."

"What happened, Jean?" Scott whispered in her ear. He had to know, no matter how bad it was.

She pulled back and looked at him, lips twisting as she considered sharing it with him. "It's bad."

"I can take it." He hoped that was true.

She studied his face for a moment, mentally debating with herself, and then said, "Okay. Brace yourself."

He then had it, a flood of images fed straight into his brain, running at twice the speed of real time, although to him it unfolded like a dream, and therefore didn't seem strange at all.

Logan standing half naked in a cage seemed strange, but the demon - Heydon - seemed even stranger when he appeared. If he was slightly shorter, had brown hair as opposed to blond, and had about twenty pounds more on his frame, he would have looked exactly like a State social worker he'd once known in his young foster home days. That instantly made him hate him.

Then he hurt Jean. The pain translated into dark and bright spots in his vision, a knife blade sliding along his cranium, and while that made his blood boil, things began to degenerate, get worse. Logan had shouted obscenities until Heydon shut him up, and Scott wished he had that power.He was aware that Logan was out, and Xavier was fighting back, dropping Heydon, and Jean joined him, but he was also aware of something that didn't translate at all, or it was something that Jean had refused to send him; he only knew that there was a darkness closing in around her, around them. Then Logan did something beyond disgusting - god, did he really rip out Heydon's throat with his teeth? It looked like it, and Scott was appalled at the barbaric violence of the act, the sheer animalistic brutality of it. How low could one person sink?

But it got them out. Maybe it was a brilliant tactical move on Logan's part.

He knew that Jean had tried to edit it out, but he still got a sense of her concern for Logan, overwhelming and painful, and he knew she had edited something out at the very start, when they first saw Logan. He didn't know what - could have been anything from a hug to a kiss. He hated both, but if he had to choose, he'd choose the hug.

Did she love him? He didn't think so, but he didn't really know anymore. He could only take comfort in the fact that by ripping out Heydon's throat with his teeth, Logan had scared the shit out of her.

In the meantime, Xavier must have told Bob what had happened, or he had gleaned it some other way while Scott had been drifting in Jean's memories, because as he came back, he heard Bob saying, " - won't kill him. Not yet."

"What do you mean not yet?" Jean asked, pulling away from him. She seemed to have recovered somewhat, at least enough that she wasn't shaking anymore.

"He's gonna wanna torture him first," Bob pointed out, grimacing in sympathy. "In Heydon's view, Logan humiliated him. He should have been beaten down, paralyzed, barely hanging on and already too crazy to be useful. He was prepared for his body to rally - that's why he wanted it - but he probably hadn't counted on his will being a component in the healing factor. He will go out of his way to hurt him and hurt him badly, and for some time. Animals like people need to know their place ... in an Auhminra's estimation, of course."

Jean hissed a sigh through clenched teeth, violently wiping the tear tracks away from her face. "We need to go get him. Professor, did you pinpoint his location?"

"Not nearly enough," Xavier admitted ruefully. "Southern California is all I can say."

"I'll find him," Bob replied confidently. "See, Heydon fucked up there. Not only do I have a home and family there, but Logan has a rep in the demon community."

"What kind of rep?" Scott wondered. Maybe they thought he was one of their kind.

"He killed a Berserker with his bare hands, and has dispatched quite a few vampires that way as well. They're so fucking freaked out by him he might as well be the Slayer. If he's anywhere in SoCal, the demon underground will be abuzz about it. And that's not even counting the fact that most demons can sense other demons, even if they're hidden inside Human bodies."

"Vampires?" Scott said in open disbelief. "You're saying they exist? And what the hell's a Berserker?"

"I take it you don't mean an old Viking warrior," Xavier said, with a faint but wry smile.

Bob shook his head. "Berserkers are huge, homicidal demon killing machines. Remember what the creature in the Alien movies looked like? Sort of like that, only with eyes, and no acid blood or tail. Really hard to kill, extremely bad news, as mean as they are ugly - everybody hates and fears them. And from what Angel told me, the first time Logan met one, he took it out, no contest, in under two minutes. That's gonna impress even the most jaded demon."

"He never mentioned that," Jean said. "He's never mentioned vampires either."

"He's mentioned Angel though, right?"

"Not really ... " she then got a curious look on her face. "Are you implying something?"

"What's a Slayer?" Scott asked.

"I think Logan's so disbelieving of all this shit himself he's decided to leave you out of it, and that's fine," Bob said, not answering either question. "Just trust me when I say if he's in California, all the demons will know of it. Let's just hope he stays there for now."

"Why?" Jean asked, and Scott heard the defiance in her voice.

Bob held up his cell phone, and waggled it like it was supposed to mean something. "I got a call from Ammy. She's had no luck tracking  down the Auhminra, but a locator spell turned up Miranda and Zayrith friend. They're on an island in the Pacific."

"What island?" Xavier asked.

Bob grinned, but it seemed painful more amused as he put the cell phone back in his pocket. "Well, see, that's the funny bit. It doesn't exist, or at least it hasn't existed before. Of course, now it does."