3

Jocko’s Taco looked like it used to house a more mundane, sedate building, maybe a Hallmark or a small clothing boutique.  In a concrete block style building that looked pretty damn depressing.  The lower level was all Jocko’s, which seemed to have as its advertising mascot a chihuahua in a serape and a sombrero. Were they saying that was in the tacos?  Kinda smelled like it.

The second story of the building, though, had heavy blinds covering its windows, and not a single picture
of a chihuahua. When the wind shifted and blew the grease smell away from him, Logan thought he caught the scent of celery.  Poor Rags - you think he could afford something a little better.  It was probably a minor miracle that he didn’t reek of grease and jalapenos most of the time.

Even before he rounded the corner, the smell of the dumpster and the grease trap hit him like a fist, and he had to take a moment to adjust.  Damn - meat products and heat waves didn’t mix, not at all.  Once he was roughly certain his nose had adjusted, he went completely around the back and found the rear stairs leading up to the second level.  The stairs shook as he went up them, and he suddenly wondered if they could hold his weight. Oh well - that’s what his claws were for; if he fell, he’d just screw up their façade. No big deal.

He made it to the door and knocked, hoping the flimsy thing wouldn’t fly apart beneath his fist. “Rags, it’s me,” he shouted, hoping he wouldn’t think he was under siege and call the wrath of the Gorgons down on whoever was outside.

He listened closely, and thought he heard a groan far beyond the door. “Come in then - and tone it the bloody fuck down, would you?”

He tried the door, and yeah, it was unlocked.  But the smell of the dumpsters probably deterred any criminal who thought this was an easy mark.

He shoved it open and stepped inside the dark, slightly stuffy space that was Rags’ “loft” apartment (and clearly used to be an office space). An air conditioner rattled in the side window like it was about to shake itself apart, but still didn’t cut the heat that much, and did nothing to disperse the smell, which was a rather odious combination of vomit, stale beer, and various bodily emissions he really didn’t want to think about.

There wasn’t much in the way of furniture.  A bed and box spring on the floor, across from a television on a stand, a dresser and some random nightstands, a cupboard and some small appliances on the far side of the room.  The T.V. was on, showing what looked like Farscape repeats, but the volume was off, and there was a clump of blankets and sheets on the unmade bed.

No, wait, it wasn’t just blankets - it was Rags laying in a sprawled heap, tangled in his own bedding. “Wha’ d’ya want?” He groaned into the mattress, not bothering to look at him or move in any way at all.

Logan looked down at him, crossing his arms over his chest but not wasting the energy it took to scowl. “Really tied one on last night, huh?”

He made a noise that could have been a yes or a no, or in fact an insult; it was just a random collection of muffled syllables.

“Should I call 911 for you or something?”

He let out a negative sounding groan, and snaked his arm out of the sheets, waving it in a manner that was probably dismissive. (Or indicated he was drowning.)  He turned over on his side, so at least he wasn’t speaking into the mattress. “’m okay, jus’ tired. Got in late.”

“Uh huh.” Rags’ skin had a decidedly disturbing yellow tone to it, like maybe his liver had decided to shut down, but he was a demon, and his eyes were yellow. Wasn’t his blood yellow too?  It was probably just that Rags was flushed.

“Wha’ d’ya want?” Rags asked again, sounding more annoyed this time.

He scoffed, shaking his head in disgust. “You were gonna find out where Arcanum was for me, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.” He opened his eyes a little, and glanced up at him, squinting like he was the sun. “I couldn’t.”

“What?”

“I tried, right? But I was told I ‘ave to know people - the right people - to even know where it is.  An’ apparently I don’t.  But Thrak said ‘e’d try.”

“Thrak?”

“’e may know some of th’ right people.”

“How?”

“..’e’s connected.”

Logan threw his hands up in the air, giving up. “I’d ask for my money back, but I’m sure you've already drank it.”

“..’ey! I said I’d try! I never guaranteed results.”

“Thanks a lot,” he sighed, glad that he had a back up lead at least.  He turned to leave, and Rags added, “If ya need ‘elp wif anythin’, y’know, you can always call me.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he replied, keeping his back to him so Rags didn’t see him roll his eyes.

He was half way out the door when Rags added, “Somebody’s lookin’ fer ya.”

He froze, replaying his slurred word in his head, just to make sure he'd heard him right. “What?”

“Buncha ugly-ass Ressiks were askin’ about a ‘uman wif metal claws; called 'im the “Decapitator”. 
Seems somebody’s put a major price on yer ‘ead.”

Logan wished he was surprised, but he wasn’t.  So he didn’t need to make a big scene to get the notice
of the Three Dragons, did he?  Great.  “Did you say anything?”

It was Rags’s turn to scoff, but the effort made him cough, and Logan thought he might puke.  Somehow, he didn’t. “Fuck no.  I ‘ate bloody Ressicks anyways, but there’s no way in ‘ell I wanna piece-a you.”

Well, at least part of his brain was functioning, in spite of the alcohol poisoning. “Where was this?”

Rags made a noise somewhere between clearing his nose and a goose honk. “Fuck me if I know.
Coupla bars … can’t really remember.”

Geeze, he wondered why. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll find ‘em, or they’ll find me.  It’ll prob’ly end up the same either way.”

“Be careful.  It’s no fun ‘avin' the demon underground gunnin’ fer ya.”

He shrugged. “Ain’t the first time.”

“Yeah, but now they know what they’re dealin’ wif, right?  They know you.  Expect ‘em to be ready for ya this time.”

“I always am.” But that was sort of a lie, wasn’t it?  He liked to think he was, but he had to admit to himself that sometimes they caught him short.  Still, he was ready.  The Yakuza, Triad, and Demons had had time to compare notes, and must have figured out by now that the first two had nothing that could actually kill him, and yet the third group had probably not revealed their true nature to their brand new pals.  They were the ones he had to worry about - as did the Yakuza and Triad, but they didn’t know it. And Logan honestly wasn’t inclined to tell them.

If they had all gotten together to compare notes, they had to know more about him than he was comfortable with. If they knew about his Yashida past, and the helicopter in Hong Kong, they must have known he had claws, they must have known he could heal from however many bullets they could pump into him. So they’d have to come up with an alternate strategy, something big, something custom-made
and nasty just for him.

Fine - let them come; let them throw everything they had or could scrounge up at him. The best they could hope to do was slow him down.

4

Mesa Rojas, Mexico

He hated being so low on the totem pole that they sent him out on missions like this.

At first, the free trip to Mexico sounded great, but then he learned what his mission would be. What, no one needed whores or drugs from Tijuana?  Oh, how he longed for the simple, good old days.

This city was abandoned, although that was a recent development. It was blamed on a chemical spill, or fighting bleeding over from the troubled Chiapas region, but one look at the corpse propped up on the road sign - with its body skewered on the post and its head, eyeless and baked by the relentless sun, nailed on top of the blood speckled placard indicating the road was out - and he knew, as that movie put
it so succinctly, this was no fucking boating accident. This entire tiny village, this damned, sun-baked shit pile, had been killed by vampires.

No, not vampires - vampire.  One.  The one he was supposed to somehow convince to come back to Los Angeles with him.

Why the upper echelon was spending so much time on this hunt was beyond him. They were bringing in headhunters in a hurry, heavy hitters, the cream of the crop of demon killers who were simply too good - and too gleeful - at their job to be called simply hit men. (If they were in fact men.) Why the Three Dragons, the most vicious criminal organization currently in existence, needed even more killers was totally beyond him. Yeorg had said some rival group - he never said which one - had hired a hit man of their own, some kind of legendary assassin with a personal grudge against most if not all of the Dragons themselves. They wanted him not simply killed, but obliterated; nothing short of vaporized would do. The kicker was he wasn’t demon, like you would think, but mutant, and the Human quadrant of the Dragons were absolutely shitting their pants over it. He took out some people in Hong Kong, apparently - rumor had it a helicopter gunship even. The Demon part was unhappy w! ith the idea of him because he had some connection to demons, but it wasn’t clear what exactly … or at least, no one was talking. But Yeorg told him that the guy had killed lots of demons too, and not just your typical undead or squishy slime demons either; he had friends in powerful places, and it showed.

It was a fallacy to think that one person - or even a group of unarmed people, of any size - could bring down something like the Dragons. Maybe in a stupid action film, or a movie of the week, but in real life it didn’t happen. And, to be completely honest, the Demons would have been happy to have this guy - what was his name? Yashida; something Yashida, so, obviously Japanese (and a relative of that Yakuza guy Yashida? No wonder he had a grudge…) - kill as many Triad and Yakuza as he could hit. The problem, as always, was structural.

Take out a thousand flunkies, a million lower level players, barely made men, and no one would notice or care. The one great thing about cities was they pumped out cannon fodder by the truckload. The problem was this guy had a history of going after the top figures; he took the cliché “kill the head and the body will die” quite literally. He would cut through a thousand flunkies if he had to, but he would target the big bosses like a heat seeking missile. He didn’t want the secretary - he wanted the CEO and the CFO. And right now, the alliance was still new, and in spite of heavy crackdowns and suppression, there was rumbling in the ranks of the Triad and Yakuza. They didn’t much care working with one another, or with
a third party that they were so dependant on for product. If this rogue Yashida guy killed the right upper echelon person, he would create a very brief power vacuum in that leg of the Dragon - but nature abhorred a vacuum, did it not? It would be fill! ed, but in time? Before word got out, and the ones just below him in the chain of command started fighting among themselves to ascend to the top spot? If this “ronin” was smart, if he played his cards right, he could destabilize one leg with the right kill, and the destabilization could spread to the other Human leg. The Triad and Yakuza were already making secret contingency plans, ways to screw each other over on the assumption the other would betray them, which was all part of the master plan - the Yakuza and Triad were supposed to kill each other off, and the Demons would pick their corpses clean. It was all planned.

Just not yet. It was too soon, and Anodyne was only just introduced to the market. Not enough people had been infected, it hadn’t become firmly entrenched yet. No matter what he did, the Demons were fine - he couldn’t destabilize them. but the Humans - as usual - were the weak links in the chain. They could easily be infiltrated and taken over, so none of the Humans beneath them in the Triad and Yakuza would realize they weren’t Human anymore, and then the Three Dragons could solidify their power base. No one would even be able to conceive of opposing them, and certainly Ronin Yashida couldn’t kill them. But it all dropped to that niggling little fact “when things were ready” - they weren’t ready yet, and no mere Human could be allowed to fuck it up.

Of course, Arbogast didn’t understand how a Human could fuck it up in the first place.  This wasn’t “Kill Bill” or some such bullshit like that, and no Human - no matter their mutant ability or connections - should be even considered a reasonable threat for the most minor of lackey.  In fact, they were just damn fun to kill, mainly because most operated under the delusion that they were at the top of the food chain.  They were not a challenge, not even the demon hunters, although they could be tricky.  So why was this guy causing a group case of the wibbles?  So he was some kind of assassin who had carved a bloody chunk out of the Japanese underworld - so fucking what?  They were Human, and you could kill ‘em by sneezing on them.  Nothing special there.  And he should have been no problem for the lamest Brachen demon,
even if his “mutant power” was boiling people’s brains inside their skulls from fifty feet out, and his “connections” were with Osiris himself.  So why all this trou! ble for a fleshie dickhead?  It seemed like overkill on several levels.

Especially considering the group that had already assembled in Los Angeles. Did they really need a blood-sucker? Vampires could kill - he couldn’t deny them that, even though they were generally half-breeds for whom betrayal was as natural as breathing for living people - but they had an obvious built in weakness with that whole “killed by sunlight” thing. Still, as he walked through the ragged shanty town that was the remains of Mesa Rojas, overwhelmed by the stench of baked, decomposed flesh and the incessant buzz of feasting insects, he supposed that they had a good reason for sending him here.

They said she was “special”, different from your average vampire, and he supposed she was. But did they mean the “short bus” kind of special? At first he thought the bones were randomly scattered, picked clean by insects and animals where they had fallen, but as he wandered the dusty, broken streets, he started to see a pattern. The skulls were put on high places - mailboxes, porches, roofs, window ledges - and facing outward, as if keeping an (non-existent) eye on things. Or keeping watch?  Hands and arm bones were not actually scattered on the street, but arranged in some kind of abstract patterns, skeletal fingers pointing at one another in silent accusation, fine bones steepling and entwining as if the bodies were waiting for someone to come along and pick them up. He found rib cages stacked like some kind of odd architectural brick, a partially constructed bridge to nowhere.  Vampires could be pretty twisted, but this seemed uniquely creative and grotesque. He watched snakes slither through the ribs as scorpions skittered into the shadows of the sternum, and he almost shuddered - maybe that’s what it was for: some kind of scavenger terrarium.

The centerpiece of the town was a huge, old fashioned church, with a tarnished bell at the top of the steeple, and a stone well in the center of its courtyard. The well’s wooden bucket had a head in it, still in possession of most of its flesh, but the eyes were gone, and maggots, plump and pink, squirmed in the empty sockets. He’d been warned she had a “taste” for eyeballs.

From what he could see, the windows of the church were blocked with something black, and the broken glass of what must have once been a stained glass window lay in fragments near the wooden doors like the shattered remnants of a rainbow. Would a vampire set up its home in a church? Yeah, why the hell not? They could be perverse half breeds, and this one seemed to be particularly twisted.

He paused to spit out the grit and molecules of decomposed flesh in his mouth, gathered his courage, and went forward.

He was Belial, so he had no fear of vampires; his blood was too bitter for their taste, as they often informed him with great disgust.  But in spite of the fact that he was sweating like a fucking pig and feeling like he was being slowly roasted like a potato in an oven, he shivered as he shoved open the door and stepped inside the darkened church.

Candles burned on the altar, giving a paltry illumination as he opened the door and let in the tainted air from outside. It was stuffy here, but not as bad as out there. As soon as his eyes adjusted, he noticed a couple of startling things. The statue of some saint or another - or perhaps it was even Jesus; he could never keep track of whom the Humans were worshipping this century - had been given a Human scalp with fine, long black hair (the blood dried to a brown crust on his face, making it look as if he had rusted), and a “stole” of one very long intestine, looped around the neck like a strand of pearls. Piled at the statue’s feet were some of the eyeballs of the townspeople, but no more than maybe eight of them.  And in the pews were dolls - dolls of all type, from porcelain to rustic ones made of stuffed straw, plastic Barbies in various states of dress and slumping rag dolls. Stuffed animals also filled some of the seats, mostly varieties of bears and rabbits, with the bears seeming particularly odd this far into Mexico.  The head of the priest glared at him from the top of a candelabra, and while his eyes were - of course - gone, he still wore his collar, and a small candle burned on his bare scalp, like he was a pumpkin and this was Halloween.

“Oh goody,” a strangely light, childlike female voice said somewhere ahead of him. “I’m getting tired of these toys. They’re disobedient, and they call me naughty names.” A plastic doll went flying past and crashed into the aisle behind him, squeaking a raspy, mechanical “Mama” as it hit the ground.

“Okay,” he muttered under his breath, wondering if this was some kind of joke they were playing on him. He cleared his throat, and began to say, “Are you-”

But she didn’t let him finish. “Liar liar, pants on fire,” she chanted in a sing-song voice, not so much emerging from behind the pulpit as spinning out from behind it, dancing to her own song.  She wore a long dress of dark blue silk edged with black lace - was it really a nightgown? - and it seemed to bell out just as much as her long black hair as she spun around.  But she was even more pale than your average vampire; she was so white she seemed almost translucent, her flesh as lambent as the surface of the moon. “You’re a liar demon. You taste like nettles.”

“Do I?” He replied, not sure what to do now. She gave him a coquettish smile with her blood engorged lips, but he found himself instinctively repelled. Was she attractive?  Of course she was, beautiful in an old-fashioned sort of way. But her pale blue eyes were as flat and shiny as new pennies, and he knew she was the living(?) embodiment of the phrase “The lights are on, but nobody’s home”.  Oh, she was “special”, all right; she was the freakin' star of the “Spot the Looney” competition.

She giggled, looking at him like he was a chunk of raw, bloody meat, and she was a starving tiger. “Are you scared, love? There’s no need to be scared of little old me.  I prefer green eyes.” She jumped down, into the aisle, and even though he knew vamps didn’t like Belial blood, he didn’t feel that comforted. This bitch was fucking nuts. Was that why they wanted her?

He swallowed hard, and tried to fall back on his prepared script. “Are you Drusilla?”

She held her own hands over her eyes, like a child playing hide and seek. He thought her long fingernails were painted red, and they were, but painted red with blood slowly turning brown. “Do you think I am?”

“Heh. Umm, y’know, I kinda had to walk in a long way on foot, as the road really is out along -”

She gasped as if he’d said something shocking, and lifted her hands away. They didn’t so much drop to her side as flutter. “You are a mouthpiece; you speak for the big bad men.”

He’d started to back away as she seemed to glide towards him, as if the ground was ice, but this made him pause. “ What?”

She gave him a smile that was at once vacant and predatory, her eyes sparkling with gleeful malice. “They think I’m a scullery maid?  That I will clean up for them if they give me all the eyeballs and pretty dollies that I want?”

He was almost shitting himself now. He’d never been so fucking scared of a vampire in his life. And why? She was a very slender thing; he could easily break her in half over his knee … or at least he thought he could. Perhaps that was a blind, a deceptive covering like camouflage; you thought she was weak, so you attacked - and she ripped your fucking throat out before you were even aware she had moved. “H-how did you-”

“Oh no, you want the spiky one,” she said, laughing. It seemed both triumphant and mocking. “He’s like us, but he’s not like us. The moth who dreams he’s a butterfly. His blood sings and rages. Have you heard it?”

“What the fuck are you talking about?” He blurted, wondering if this was all a practical joke set up by Yeorg.

“He has a nasty scratch, grrr,” she said, making a scratching motion in the air, her hand formed like a claw. “Fingers like thorns. He would be handsome if he didn’t have so many edges.”

“Lady, look - do you know the Dragons want to hire you or not?”  He was two seconds away from bolting out the door. At least it was day time - as long as he could make it to the door, he would be okay.

She cocked her head to the side like a bird, and started swaying to music only she could hear. “You want his soul, but I want his blood. You think it will be easy to take. You don’t know him …”

“Yes or no?”

She looked at him from beneath her dark brows, that wicked smile growing across her pale face like a bloodstain. It was easy to imagine her biting the heads off small children, chewing on doves like finger foods. He had thought she must have taken a day or two to rip through this town, but now that he’d met her, he figured it was probably more like two hours, tops. She must have run through these people like a chainsaw - they probably never knew what hit them. “They don’t know the battle has been joined, do they?”

“What? They? Who’s “they”?”

But she didn’t elaborate. He wasn’t even completely sure she’d heard him. She was swaying a little more now, like that beat had sped up, and he got the chilling feeling she was staring right through him like a ghost. “Oh, the pretty blood … it runs like a river…”

He looked behind him, almost expecting to see a pool of blood, but oddly enough, the aisle was pretty clean. “What are you talking about?”

She seemed to see him again so suddenly he almost jumped. What the hell was that, a fugue state? “It looks like my birthday party. Can I have his blood?” She bit her thumb like a nervous little girl, only she actually drew blood; he saw a thin rill of crimson lugubriously oozing its way down her palm.

He felt slightly nauseous. “You can have all the blood you want.”

Her smile became sly, wicked, almost wry. “That’s what you think. Wait ‘til you see what happens.”

“Meaning what? What’s going to happen?”

She wagged a single finger at him, turning away towards the altar. “Naughty naughty. Good boys don’t peek.”

Jesus fucking Christ - why did the Dragons want this loony toon?

Sometimes, he really regretted not becoming an insurance salesman.