"Monique!" Clia shouted, in case the gentle jingling of the brass chimes over the door wasn't enough to alert the owner she had company. "Hey, put down the eclairs! I got a big ugly mutant here!"

"Ugly? I thought you said - "

"Well your attitude is ugly," she interrupted.

He stared at her. He could have said he was just down in a sewer - a really smelly sewer - where a bunch of people got killed, just so a bunch of sicko Humans could trap the town in a funnel, or whatever the hell it was, and he had been there with a woman who could have stopped it but didn't, and she dared to call his attitude ugly? But he didn't bother, because indignation - no matter how righteous- was always wasted on Belials.

God, he was insane. Why the fuck had he slept with her? Assuming he had - really, he had no idea, and that just made it worse.

"You shout too much," a Quebec accented voice called from the back.

"She loves the sound of her own voice," Logan snapped, casting a sour frown in Clia's direction.

But she didn't notice - she was peering in one of the glass cases, looking at a line up of eclairs on French lace doilies, all topped with huge dollops of whipped cream that still managed to support Maraschino cherries without falling over. How they managed he had no idea. "Of course I do, honey - I'm a Belial."

"I ain't tellin' ya again: that doesn't cut it with me."

"She's an irresponsible girl who likes to blame everything but herself for her failings," the woman who must have been Monique said, coming out of the back. She looked like a grandmotherly sort in a flour dusted apron, with a white chef's hat lolling on her head like a collapsed soufflé, but the closer you got, the more you realized something was off. Maybe it was the fact that her skin was actually covered in scales, and the hair peeking from beneath the hat was a virulent, neon sort of green. Her eyes looked clouded over with cataracts too, her pupils and irises just shadows beneath the white haze, but he knew she was looking straight at him. It was some time before he guessed they were semi - translucent inner eyelids. "Is there something I can help you with?"

"I want an eclair. And what do you call those things near the back?" Clia said.

"What the hell's a reality barrier?" He asked, throwing his hands up in exasperation. Did she have ADHD, was that her problem? Or did Clia really not care about the shit going down out there?

"It is a barrier that keeps us separated from reality as we know it," Monique replied, then said to Clia, "You haven't paid me for the torte you had last time."

"Oh, come on," she replied. "You know I'm good for it."

"Okay, I got that," Logan replied testily. "Out of reality, fine. What the fuck does that mean in layman's terms? Is there a way through it?"

"Not without collapsing it."

"How do you collapse it?"

Monique shrugged. "Kill the thing keeping it in place, I suppose."

"What thing is keeping it in place?"

She rolled her shoulders again, and only this time did Logan notice that, under her white baker's smock, her shoulder seemed to have an extra joint. "I don't know. I suppose you'd have to ask the warlock who put it up."

"It wasn't a warlock, it was a stupid cult," Clia said, digging in the front pocket of her baggy jeans. She pulled out a badly wrinkled ten and threw it on the counter. "Can I have an eclair now?"

Monique frowned at the money, and then gave Clia a stern, maternal sort of glance. "Do you know your underwear is showing?"

Clia shrugged. "Oughta. You know how expensive it was?"

Monique's frown became even sterner, lips thinning to a very grim slit. "How do you know it was a cult, Clia?"

"She was there," Logan said, not sure she would tell the truth. She was Belial, after all.

"I wasn't," she lied, but after Monique crossed her arms over her chest, her posture alone saying " Try and pull the other one", Clia rolled her eyes and threw her hands up in the air. "Look, Keenan invited me to this thing, all right? As soon as I found out it was some lame sacrifice thing, I left!"

"Lame sacrifice thing?! Girl, you had to know that was some bad mojo!"

"But they were limp dicked asshole geek Humans - how the fuck was I supposed to know they'd accidentally get it right?"

"That is no excuse! You should have done something!"

"What? Say "stop this" and get ignored by the creeps in their white bathrobes? Or maybe get myself served up on a platter to their whatever the hell?"

Logan scoffed. "Like they wouldn't spit you out."

"Fuck you, claw guy!"

"Hey!"

Monique let out a high pitched noise, a sound like a tea kettle whistling in the super sonic range, and both he and Clia cringed, although only Logan covered his ears. Once they had both shut up, Monique looked between them, her protective inner eyelid open, allowing them to see her round black irises and oval blue pupils. "That is enough from you, girl. You should have done something, but you didn't. If this man wants to bring down the wall, then the least you can do is help him try and correct this problem."

"What makes you think - " Clia began, but Monique didn't let her finish.

"Don't you dare try and pull that "stupid" act on me. I am your grandmother and I know damn well how bright you are. Think of it as atonement, Clia; think of it as a way to get back into the family. Fix this. Or no one will ever bail you out of anything again."

Grandmother? But Monique wasn't a Belial ... was Clia only part Belial?

Clia seemed to pout, folding her arms tightly over her chest. "If this is serious mojo, Gran, how in the hell do you expect me and this lame ass Human to do anything but be cannon fodder?"

"Lame ass?" He repeated sourly, dropping his hands to his sides. Those were fighting words, although frankly any words were fighting words right now - she was really bugging the hell out of him.

"Your gift, which you have always misused, is that you are very clever, girl. Clever and blessed with the charm of the Belials. With your guile and this man's abilities, there's no reason why you couldn't bring an end to this."

Clia scoffed, and gestured to him dismissively. "What abilities? Yeah, he's a mutant with claws and a 'tude that could curdle milk, but he's still Human - he'll go down with the rest of 'em."

"He's been touched by the supernatural. Haven't you?"

Logan was mildly surprised to find Monique addressing him. They were talking like he had suddenly become invisible or something. "No. I mean ... what do ya mean by touched?"

"Gran," Clia wheedled, in a voice that made her sound like a petulant teenager.

But Monique, lowering her inner eyelids, would have none of it. Despite the name of her shop, he found he liked her better than Clia right now. "Do it. I will help you if I can, but I am a two hundred year old woman and my joints hurt whenever it rains. It's up to you, Clia, whether you like it or not."

Two hundred years old?

Clia groaned like she'd been asked to take out the garbage, letting her chin drop to her chest, and finally sighed, "All right. But if I get killed you explain it to Mom."

"Done. Now what would you like? You look hungry."

Again, he was taken aback to find Monique looking through cloudy lids at him. "Huh? Thanks, but I'm good."

"No you're not. I heard your stomach growl."

"It must have been hers."

She shook her head and smiled in small, grandmotherly sort of way, as she slid open the rear of one of the cases, and pulled out an eclair for Clia. "Look, thanks, but you really haven't told me anything," Logan continued, eager to get to some sort of point. This conversation had veered all over the place, and yet never into the alleys he needed. "It keeps reality out - why? For what purpose?"  

Monique handed Clia the absurdly ornate dessert over the counter, and only afterwards bothered to answer him. "Probably to bring forth a demon that can't survive - as of yet - in this reality. Croissant?"

"No. So, if it can't survive here, what's the point?"

"Within this bubble of unreality, it can acclimate, feed and grow stronger, or expand its influence, make the unreality grow. Cruller?"

"No. " Now her maternal insistence on food was annoying him. "Why is this unreality a problem? Reality kinda sucks, lady, if you haven't noticed."

"Well, you must understand that by the time it is strong enough to control the unreality bubble, they will control reality as we know it. And one has to assume that isn't good. Cream cake?"

"Knock it off with the food already!" He roared, and then took a deep breath, pinching his eyelids shut with his fingers. As soon as he was sure he could control himself, he asked, in a low grumble: "So a big bad controls things, is that it? And I assume it eats us all or makes everyone its lap dancers or something?"

"Something like that. You're too skinny - you should eat something."

He ignored that, because otherwise he would explode. "Is there any way at all to contact anyone outside the barrier?"

"No. We no longer exist in reality, and reality no longer exists for us. What about a kaiser roll?"

"Thank you, but if you offer me another baked good, I think I'm gonna start breakin' things." He sighed, then dared to open his eyes. His threat didn't seem to bother Monique one iota. "I don't suppose there's a demon or a witch around here that could contact a Drai' shajan in spite of that, is there?"

Her lidded eyes widened in surprise. "A Drai'shajan?" It was hard to read the inflection in her voice, so he wasn't sure if she was surprised he knew the Drai'shajan, or didn't know what a Drai'shajan was ( she could join the club there ).

"Just a guy I know, Bob. He could probably collapse this thing in a second."

"Bob?" Clia asked around a mouthful of eclair. She had a spot of whipped cream on the tip of her nose, but hadn't noticed. "Maximum Bob?"

He looked at her sharply. "You know him?" That might explain everything.

"Know him? Fuck, he's like a ... a rock star in Belial circles! Man! Are you shitting me? How in the hell do you know him?!"

"We met once. Can I contact him?"

Monique shook her head. "Not when reality is out of synch, no."

"Shit."

"So what's he like?" Clia asked, and when he raised an eyebrow at her, she elaborated: "Bob."

He rolled his eyes, and turned towards the door, way past done here. Maybe he could catch a scent of one of the Humans he smelled down in the sewer, track them down and put them into a cooperative, tell all mood.  "He's slightly less annoying than you," Logan snapped, leaving her behind.

He never thought he'd say that to anyone. Bob was a hard act to follow.

8

They were all assembled in Xavier's study, as was per usual when Bob had bad news to break, with Scott, Jean, and Storm all sharing the big leather couch, Xavier behind his desk, and Bob standing in Logan's usual position by the door. Rogue was curled up in the corner armchair, wondering which of them was the most freaked out by this.

She was most freaked out that this seemed to make Bob tense. If Bob was ever tense, then you knew you were royally fucked.

"Like Arakis?" Storm agreed. As always, she was struggling - in vain - to find a bright side.

Bob, leaning against the door jamb with his muscly arms crossed over his chest ( wow - how had she not noticed those before? ), shook his head, the same tight lipped look on his face that he'd had since they left the club. "No. A higher plane one."

"A higher plane one that rips people's guts out?" Scott replied incredulously. "What the hell's the difference?"

"In all honesty, it's mostly semantics. The so called "higher planes" are dimensions that are difficult to reach; by extension, hell dimensions aren't that hard to reach, and there's a buttload of them. The higher realms are rare, and harder to get into than Spago's on Oscar night."

Scott sighed and ran his hands through his hair, getting a look on his face that one of the foreign students described as "dyspeptic". Sadly, she'd had to look that up. "Fine, whatever. Do you know what's doing this?"

"Yes, I do. Fenrir."

They were all quiet for a moment. Bob had said the name like they were supposed to know who that was, but from the puzzled looks they were giving each other, no one did. But the Professor leaned forward, resting his elbows on his desk and steepling his hands beneath his chin, and she knew if anyone had a clue, it was him. "Also known as Fenris?"

Jean sat forward, a startled look on her face, and she looked sharply at Bob. The name meant nothing to the rest of them, but she knew it somehow. "The giant wolf? Loki's son?"

"You're saying it's a wolf?" Scott asked, with a disgusted snort. Rogue was surprised Bob hadn't hauled off and zapped
him, or whatever it was he did exactly. He always doubted whatever Bob said, and treated him like he was a joke at best and evil at worst. Bob must have had a hell of a lot more patience than she did.

"No. Mythology says Fenrir is a gigantic wolf."

"Who swallows the world and brings about Ragnarok, the death of the gods," Jean explained, looking between all of them. Since when was she so well versed on mythology?

"Yeah. But keep in my mind mythology usually gets only a fact or two right - consider them the tabloids of the ages."

"So not a big wolf?" Rogue asked, just for confirmation.

Bob nodded. "Not a big wolf. He likes wolves, though, and allows a part of himself to often take the shape of a wolf. It was probably in that form he tore those people's guts out."

Scott's brow furrowed around his black and red visor. "He's a shapeshifter?"

"Sort of. He's more of a projectionist: psychically manifesting parts of himself in the physical world."

Scott spoke for all of them. "Huh?"

"Understand we're dealing with a god here - they can do shit physical realm dwellers can't. And Fenrir always took a great deal of pride in bilocating himself."

Bilocating? Oh man, did the Professor have a dictionary around here?

"He can be in two places at once?" Jean asked. Is that what it meant?

"In a very limited sense. He can bifurcate ... well, actually, more than bi. More like multicate - which I know isn't a word - but only within a limited sphere of influence. About a city block, I'd say."

"You've dealt with him before," the Professor said, fixing him with his pale blue eyes. It wasn't a question.

For the first time since she'd known him, Bob looked uncomfortable. He shifted position, a muscle in his jaw twitching as he dug his hands in the front pocket of his leather pants. "Once. It should have been the last time too."

"Will your knife work on him? Like it did on Heydon?" Scott asked, hands clenching nervously in his lap.

Bob shook his head.  "Only works on demons. As I said, Fenrir isn't one."

"So why is he killing these people?" Storm asked.

"And why is he after us?" Scott added.

"Have you ever heard of people sacrificing to gods? I think Fenrir is taking his own - he has a penchant for livers. That's why there's never any guts at the scene."

He was eating them? Rogue covered her mouth with her hand. Oh god, she was going to be sick.

"I thought the people did it, not the gods," Storm asked, brows drawing down in confusion.

"If Fenrir doesn't get, he takes."

"But he's after us for what reason?" Scott urged impatiently.

Bob sighed, sagging back against the wall heavily. "He's not after you. He's after me."

Everyone exchanged confused glances before Scott admitted, "I don't understand. He's been killing people in spots we are known to frequent before we get there, not spots you are known to frequent."

"But he must know I have been associated with you. These killings were in hopes of making you contact me. Mission accomplished."

Scott seemed to stiffen, as if someone had hit the "stick up his butt" switch. "Does that mean he's coming here? We - "

"If he had really wanted to kill you, he'd have completely obliterated the lot of you, and none of your powers would have done any good - you can't fight a god. Especially one as powerful and psychotic as Fenrir. You have never been the real target, just a way of gaining my attention."

"Why would he want to do that?" Scott wondered, the suspicion so obvious in his voice he may as well have just called him a fucking liar outright.

He sighed heavily, shoulders slumping as if in defeat. "I'll try and make a long story short. Fenrir had a chip on his shoulder when he was exiled; he probably has a globe sized one now."

"Exiled?" The Professor asked.

"Fenrir was one of those rare creations - a god far more powerful than his parents, Loki."

"You mean his father," Jean corrected.

"No, his parents. See, assigning genders to most higher beings is silly. If they have a gender - which is extremely rare - they can change it at will. And Fenrir was a case of parthenogenesis."

Oh great, another word she had to look up. From the way Scott scowled at the carpet, and shrugged helplessly when Storm gave him a quizzical look, he had no idea what it meant either. But of course Doctor Jean seemed to know what it meant. "So Fenrir is a natural clone of Loki?"

"No. That's only true of parthenogenesis on the physical plane. Fenrir is completely different from Loki; the fact that he can change his shape to a minor degree, and is part flame, probably helped."

"Does that mean you're not really a guy?" Rogue wondered, giving him a curious smirk. She didn't believe that - save for Logan, she'd never met a more manly type of guy than Bob.

Bob gave her a grin and a wink. "I am, except during leap years."

"Can we get back to topic here?" Scott asked peevishly. "So Fenrir is stronger than Loki. What can he do, and why was he exiled?"

"Fenrir can, as I said, bilocate; psychically project different aspects of himself into a corporeal form; paralyze people with his thoughts; teleport; alter form; alter some of the energies of the earthly realm; control fire."

"Big deal - John can control fire," Rogue muttered, trying very hard to pretend this wasn't freaking her out. Of course it was, but she wasn't about to be the first to show it.

"Can he create it?"

She had him there.

"What does alter some energies of the earthly realms mean exactly?" Jean wondered.

"Alter molecules, play with gravity - "

"Gravity?" Storm repeated, shocked. "Are you saying he can control the basic laws of physics?"

"Sort of, all but entropy. Didn't get his parent's abilities there. Oh, and you can't look at him, not directly."

"Why? What would happen?" Scott asked.

"Nothing. I just mean you can't - it's too painful for Humans to look upon him. Some demons too. That must have been what you picked up on, Rogue - Ressiks are one of the breeds that can't look at him, and have a pretty good, long sense memory."

"Why would Fenrir want you?" Jean asked.

Bob grimaced and leaned his right shoulder against the door jamb, once again shifting uncomfortably, like his boots hurt. But Rogue was willing to bet that wasn't it. "What you have to understand is this: Fenrir was crazy and homicidal for a long time, but because he was so powerful - and the son of Loki - his activities against lower plane beings was generally ignored. But one day he crossed the line that higher beings supposedly do not cross - he killed one of his own."

"Loki?" Scott guessed.

"A Higher Being," the Professor said, correcting him. Again, not a guess, although it should have been.

Bob nodded. "One of the so called Powers That Be. And if he killed it in a grudge or a fight, it might have been forgiven, but he killed it just for the sheer hell of proving he could. That was unforgivable. So a bunch of higher beings - including a grudging Loki - got together and sealed Fenrir in a closed dimension, from where he couldn't escape without an awful lot of outside help. And since Fenrir had no friends, it was as good as sealing him in a lead casket and dropping him in the Marianas Trench."

"But he got out," Scott needlessly pointed out. Yet he was frowning at Bob like it was his fault.

"With some very powerful help. I couldn't think of who'd want to release him, except someone who really hated me, and had power but lacked guts."

"Does that narrow it down at all?" Scott carped, but after Jean frowned at him, he got back on topic. "What I don't get - besides all the rest of it - is why Fenrir wants you."

"He hates me. The feeling's mutual."

"But why. Beside the obvious." Jean gave Scott a rather soft elbow in the shoulder for that comment.

Bob sighed and grimaced violently, crossing his arms over his chest one more time, like he didn't know what to do with them. What was making him so nervous?

"You were one of them," the Professor gasped, staring at Bob in awe. "You helped lock him away."

Bob shrugged a single shoulder, and tried to appear as nonchalant as possible under the circumstances. "Someone had to do it. Frankly I thought banishment was too lenient for that psycho. I set the trap for him - he came for me. We had a minor slugfest - so to speak - before he got sucked into the dimension. I'm sure he's got a bug up his butt about that."

"You went toe to toe with Fenrir?" Jean asked, equally horrified and impressed.

"Oh my god," Scott exclaimed breathlessly, slumping back on the couch. "You are a god."

Everyone but Scott - who seemed to find something fascinating on the carpet to look at - stared at Bob. Was he a god, seriously? She didn't think any of them looked like him ... and were there any Australian ones? Okay, history and mythology weren't her strong suits, but she didn't think so. And since when did any of them wear leather pants, and t - shirts with one of those sadomasochist leather face masks depicted on them? No, he couldn't be ...

... could he?

"No, I'm just a good Samaritan," Bob protested. "As I said, someone had to do it. And for the record, he very nearly kicked my ass. If we had been at it for a while, he very well could have killed me. Why do you think he wants a rematch?"

"I think I've lost my religion," Scott muttered, dry washing his face.

"But I swear he was around before you showed up," Rogue pointed out, nervously tugging at the end of her glove. Shit - if he was a god, she'd tried to hit him! Holy fuck! "If he wanted to throw down, why didn't he do it then?"

"Because he has more in mind than simply kicking my behind, darlin'."

The Professor folded his hands on his always supernaturally neat desk, and dared to ask: "What?"

Bob shook his head and threw his hands up helplessly. "I have no idea, Chuck. But I think I'm gonna find out soon enough."

Now that was a really scary thought.

9

Unable to get any channels on the television, he lolled on his fold out couch, the can of beer growing warm in his hand, and asked, " So when do I get all powerful already?"

A voice came back to him, as raspy as if it had been put through a shredder, and as quiet as if it was oozing through the wall. "I thought you wanted eternal life."

"That too. What good is immortality if you can't have fun?" Kevin stared up at the stucco ceiling, where the triangular peaks always reminded him of vanilla frosting on a cake, although the oval water stain spreading out from the vicinity of the broken light fixture shattered that illusion. He found himself watching a small black spider spin a web in the far corner, just over his stereo, and knew that no man who had created unreality should be this fucking bored. Where was his harem, for Christ's sake?! "Nothing's happening, man. Something's supposed to happen."

"It is happening," the semi - corporeal demon lord that called itself Sygratha hissed insistently. He was more a suggestion of a thing than an actual thing at the moment - a constant moving shadow in the corner of his eye. "The food is getting restless."

"And the cheese is angry," he replied, laughing at his own joke. He used to be nothing more than a sporadically employed auto mechanic ( most bosses seemed to have a stick up their asses about getting to work on time ) before he discovered the book of Sygratha one day, out in the woods beside a stream - and a dead body, but that was probably coincidental.

He never bought into all that occult shit ( and not from lack of trying - his parents were Catholic ), and while it seemed as silly as hell, one night while very drunk he decided to try and initiate contact with Sygratha. You could have knocked him over with a Nerf ball when it actually worked.

Well, the book did give explicit, well diagramed ritual instructions ( even if some of the written instructions were in a language he'd never seen before, and no one he knew could recognize ), so none of it was difficult. The hardest thing was finding assistants ( okay, cult members ) to assist him. He'd never led a cult before, and it was a real trip - he could see getting addicted to it.

It was a shame the members didn't realize they'd be Sygratha's first appetizers. Hell, Sygratha was only promising power and eternal life to him - was it his fault if the stupid shits thought they were getting a cut of the deal too?

Well, okay, maybe he implied they would. But who didn't stretch the truth a little?

"I mean the other Humans," Sygratha hissed, sounding even more testy than usual.

"I know what you meant," he snapped, idly scratching his balls. God, he was bored. Bored and out of beer. "Can't I have a little unreality here? Can you make all the women in town hot for my bod? That's be cool."

"Until I feed my abilities to manipulate this plane are limited."

"So feed already."

" I am working on it," it hissed, and for a moment sounded like his ex - girlfriend. "The dead are walking."

At this surprising news, Kevin roused himself long enough to sit up and gaze out the small window that was ground level, basically overlooking the sidewalk outside his building. There were a couple of cars on the street, a couple people walking past on the sidewalk and the one across the street, but none of them looked like zombies. "Bullshit. I don't see no dead guys."

"It's the dead that haunt them, the ghosts in their mind. The despair will drive them to me."

Kevin snorted derisively and collapsed back on his lumpy couch, careful not to spill his beer."Why don't you just go eat 'em yourself?"

"I am not yet strong enough to seek them out; I am non - corporeal." If a partially existent demon could be said to sound pissy, Sygratha did.

Kevin sighed heavily, throwing an arm over his brow, and started to play an old game - trying to see patterns and faces in the frozen icing waves of the ceiling.

Man, this shit should pay off soon. He'd have hated to raise some demon lord for absolutely nothing.

****

According to an only slightly vandalized carved wooden sign, this was the "Golden Acres Planned Community Development", a very P.C. way of saying : "Trailer park - COPS filmed on location nightly."

Okay, that was a stereotype. But fuck if this place didn't ooze depression like a bad smell. Postage stamp yards separated single wide tin cracker boxes and larger, bread box like double wides, all ranging in states of repair, from sparkling clean to one collapsed stair away from being condemned by the province.

"You date some classy people," Logan noted, as he drove the bike at a crawl through the narrow, potholed road that cut through the center of Golden Acres.