3

Out of the corner of his eye, Logan saw Wes look sharply at the man, his eyes suddenly bright and curious. “Scott? Really?”

The man didn’t look at Wesley; he never looked away from Logan’s eyes, which he scrutinized with a laser like intensity. “Tell me. Did Bob get rid of him? What happened to Jean?”

Oh god. Logan shook his head, wondering what he was going to tell him … and wondering anew if Camaxtli did have anything to do with what happened to Jean. Everything Xavier told him about Jean having a split personality that Xavier himself made to protect Jean from her own darker impulses never quite made sense to him. First of all, he had no idea Xavier was such a manipulative bastard, and secondly that he thought he would just accept Jean’s mental rearrangement. Him - the guy’s whose brain had been so fucked over time and again by telepaths that not only did he have Swiss cheese memories, but he sometimes doubted he had a genuine personality, just a random collection of bits he never quite lost from all those other implanted personalities. Yeah, he'd totally understand him rearranging Jean's mind for her "own good". Absolutely.

The third funny thing about it all was Jean's "second personality" wasn't a personality at all - she just alternated between pointlessly furious and almost catatonically bored. It was like there was some kind of neuronal misfiring, a disconnect between power and intention. He knew from experience that when you got god power, especially when you didn't expect it, you could have a hard time channeling it. It was overwhelming, mainly because it was something that no mortal being was ever meant to handle.

But ... the last time Camaxtli was around, the Powers That Be supposedly took him out. And Jean and Camaxtli had a long time getting used to each other, so they worked together quite well - Jean and Cammy had been tight. Then again, to totally remove Cammy's power from his avatar - Jean - Bob assumed that the PTB's would kill Jean. Not out of malice or even punishment, but because separating the two was nearly impossible. Still, Jean showed up alive ... but changed. Could they have accidentally done that to her, trying to save her from Camaxtli but destroying her in the process? Or had some of Cammy's tainted power lain dormant in Jean and escaped the notice of the PTB's, coming back furious in Jean, but damaged in a fundamental way?

He just didn't know. He suspected, mainly because what Xavier said and what Jean did made no sense at all. She had been acting more like Cammy with amnesia than any form of herself. And Logan felt he should know since he'd had the misfortune to come face to face with Cammy in the past. He was also fairly certain that even though he thought it was Jean, it was actually Cammy he slept with in the mindscape that time. Didn't really make him feel good about himself, but what were people but playthings for the gods?

Finally, Logan told Scott, "Jean's dead."

He blinked, took a step back, but wasn't really all that shocked. What did he think would happen if she was controlled by Cammy? "Are you sure? How?"

Now here was the really bad part. "I killed her."

Scott punched him in the face. He just hauled off and hit him with one of this guy's small but meaty fists. Logan let him do it, because he felt like he deserved it. Wes gasped, and exclaimed, "What the hell are you doing?"

Scott reeled back, grabbing his fist, and yelled, "Fuck!" He shook his hand several times, moving the fingers as if trying to determine if any were broken or not.

Logan straightened, working the kinks out of his neck, and carped, "I thought I told you never to hit bone."

"I think I just glanced off one," Scott replied, his voice pained.

Wes looked between them in disbelief. "Is this normal for you two, taking shots at each other?"

Logan shrugged. "Pretty much."

Scott composed himself, apparently determining that nothing was broken, although tears still welled in his now deep brown eyes. "How the hell could you kill her, Logan? I thought you ... she was your friend, damn it! When I wanted to give up on you she never did!"

"If she was still harboring Camaxtli, he did what he was designed to do," Wes said, his voice slightly chilly.

Both he and Scott looked at Wes with varying degrees of surprise. "What?" Logan asked first.

"I know it looked like an accident," Wes told him, not without pity. "But do you really think Bob ever does anything accidentally? He made you his avatar for a reason. You were his perfect agent to take out Camaxtli's avatar if and when the time came. With Bob's power and your healing factor, Camaxtli couldn't stop you. He couldn't burn you enough to make you go away, and some part of Jean would probably hold him back in any case. Weapon X programmed you to be an assassin, Logan, a perfect killing machine, and although you broke your programming, you still have that in you. Don't you assess every new threat with "How can I best kill this"? I bet you do it unconsciously, it's been so engrained in you. And Bob knew that. He used that to his best advantage. He might be one of the good guys - in a technical sense if not a literal one - but to gods we are just temporary placeholders, mortal creatures that disappear in a blink of their lifespan. You were his best chance, and he! took it. Maybe that's why you can't get a hold of him, Logan - he doesn't want to face your wrath."

For a long time he and Scott just stared at Wes, transparent at the edges but otherwise unflappable, and his words cut. Logan heard him, didn't want to believe him ... and yet, he knew already, didn't he? Camaxtli had all but warned him that eventually it would come down to him and Jean, one of them killing the other. Jean blinked; Logan didn't. And the reason he didn't blink was because, love or not, of the pair of them, he was the more genuinely ruthless of the two. Jean channeled the more dangerous god, but Bob had found the more dangerous Human. Bob won.

"Son of a bitch," Logan cursed, feeling bile rise in his throat. The bastard - the motherfucking bastard! No wonder he was hiding in a nether-dimension. He probably knew this was going to happen, and he let it.

"I never trusted that bastard," Scott pointed out. "I always knew he was evil."

"He's not evil," Wes replied, surprisingly. "He's a god. Their concept of morality is quite different from ours."

"You're a god apologist now?" Logan asked him coldly.

Wes let out a breathless, sarcastic little laugh. "Hardly. I'm not excusing what he's done. It's just, to him, this was the lesser of two evils."

"Usin' me to kill a friend was a lesser evil?"

Wes shrugged. "Lesser than the destruction of the entire Human race, yes."

Okay, put that way, it suddenly didn't sound that bad.

No, no, Bob was not getting off the hook for this. If even half of what Wes said was true, then ... well, he didn't know what he was going to do. What could he do to Bob? Something. Bob had enemies, some very powerful ones. Maybe he could cut a deal.

What was he thinking? You couldn't cut a deal with any god - you couldn't trust those fuckers any farther than you could chuck their corporeal forms. What he needed to do was somehow get Bob exorcised from him for good.

"Is this Camaxtli's revenge?" Scott asked, gesturing to himself, and all the dead around them.

Logan shared a curious glance with Wes. Hadn't Camaxtli been a death god, amongst other things? And according to what Bob had said in the past, death gods technically couldn't die - not permanently, at any rate. Still, you'd think if the Powers That Be took him out, this would be over.

But it wasn't the first time.

"I think it would more likely be a friend of Camaxtli's than Camaxtli him or herself," Wes finally replied, correctly busting up the gender terms - gods technically didn't have a gender. "But it's worth investigating. Camaxtli's chosen forms of revenge usually involve famine and fire."

"Oh cute. Well, this is the fire season, isn't it?"

Scott snorted disdainfully. "It's Southern California. Isn't it always the fire season?"

Good point. Logan rubbed his eyes wearily, and asked Wes, “What kind of friends did Camaxtli have, exactly? I thought everyone was scared of him. Or her, whatever.”

Wes nodded. “He/she was not a popular, benevolent god, even amongst god-kind, so yes, there wasn’t a huge fan club. But there were a few who decided it was better to have the evil bastard on their side rather than against them.”

“So he was the Magneto of gods?” Scott asked sarcastically.

Wes gave him a blank look. “Magneto?”

“The evil mutant guy I mentioned earlier,” Logan reminded him.

“Oh, right. It’s easier for me to keep track of demons and gods than mutants. My training, I suppose.”

Logan wanted to say that they also made a bit more sense - in a bizarre, chaotic sort of way - but that was besides the point, so he didn’t mention it. They brought Scott up to speed on what they were doing, trying to get to the bottom of all of this and headed for The Way Station.

He had yet to tell Scott that Xavier was also dead. He wondered if they’d run into him before he could break it to him, and hoped not, because he wondered if he’d kill Xavier again himself. But if this was all Camaxtli’s doing, it wasn’t Xavier’s fault, so he couldn’t be mad at him. Well, that mad at him. God, this was confusing.

Logan led the way inside the bar, the silence and abandoned peace of the outer glamour giving way to the overwhelming smell of booze, sweat, and demons, and the noise of The Hold Steady’s “Cattle and The Creeping Things” blasting from the jukebox. He wondered if the jukebox had lost its empathic abilities, but then the song came to the line “ - half of them were visions -”, and he figured the thing was just being coy. The place was dark and surprisingly crowded, but there was an electric current of anxiety running through the room - the demon community really didn’t like this development. As they entered, a reptilian type of demon who was a sunburned shade of pink started waving his big paws and shouted, “No screwed up dead, no ghosts, no Humans! Get the fuck out -”

Logan held up his fist and popped his claws. The demon, who was approaching them, stopped in his tracks. “ Welcome to the bar,” he said, and spun on his heels and quickly disappeared into the crowd.

“There’s no such thing as a quiet entrance with you, is there?” Scott commented, although it had a slightly sardonic edge to it.

They made their way towards the bar, the crowd parting for them (although Wesley went ahead and walked through any demon that wouldn’t move aside for him), but before they reached it, a familiar female voice exclaimed, “I was wondering when the hell you were showing up!”

Helga cut through the crowd much easier than they had, mainly because she ran the bar and owned a flamethrower (she wasn’t currently carrying it, but everyone knew about it), and the shotgun beneath the bar had her name on it. She looked good, although she’d had her naturally green hair cut into a sleek bob, and along with her jeans she wore a t-shirt for the band Ghostland Observatory, suggesting she was finding some Bob like humor in all of this. She seemed only mildly surprised to see the ghost Wesley. “So you didn’t get a body, huh?”

“Apparently not. I’m not sure what the determining factor on that was.”

She looked at Logan, and asked, “Who’s your friend?”

“He’s not my friend, he’s Scott.” Did that come out right? Oh, the hell with it.

She looked at him in obvious surprise. “Really? You in there, tight ass?”

“Don’t call me tight ass!”

“Yeah, that’s him,“ she said, nodding. Scott wasn’t amused, but Logan caught Wesley smirking before he quickly looked away. “So how the hell did you get here? Weren’t you killed in Canada?”

“That’s partly why we came here,” Wesley interjected, taking over the conversation. “There’s even more inexplicable things going on here than simply the resurrecting of the dead. We were hoping you might be able to help us.”

Helga cocked her head curiously and put a hand on her hip. “How? I have no fuckin’ clue what’s going on out there.”

“We were hoping you could contact Bob for us,” Wesley told her.

That made her chuckle darkly. “No can do. He’s been incommunicado for a while. Occasionally I get postcards from him, letting me know he’s okay, just embroiled in some complicated god drama.”

Wesley looked at her askance. “Postcards?”

“Seriously. They just materialize at random times, and have weird pictures on the front. I got a “Greetings From Atlantis” one last time.”

“What kind of god drama is he dealing with?” Wes wondered. “Could it have bled into this dimension?”

She considered that for a very long moment, eyes focused on nothing in particular. “Huh. I wonder. Come on, let’s see what he talked about that I skimmed.” With that she turned on her heels, and stalked towards the back offices. They followed her, as the invitation was implicit, and the crowd was far more accommodating to them now that they knew they were with her. They went into Bob’s office, and Logan closed the door on M83 singing about a ghost screaming your name.

The quiet was sudden and strange, but otherwise pleasant. The place was just the same as it had always been, a dusty room with lots of exposed wood, one used more for storage than anything else. Cases of beer sat against the side walls, vying for space with cases marked with biohazard symbols and rather dubious legends, such as “Contents: Two hundred hand grenades”. Helga opened the top drawer of the old wooden desk that Bob used for his own, and after a moment’s rummaging pulled out a stack of postcards held together by a rubber band. There were maybe two dozen in all. “Let’s get sifting,” she said, pulling off the rubber band and tossing the stack in the middle of the desk. “Ignore the mushy stuff.”

It was discovered that Wes could manipulate objects if he concentrated, and as long as they were as meager as a postcard. And the postcards were odd, portraying mythical kingdoms and occasionally Bob in loud surfer shorts (or, in one disturbing case, a florescent orange Speedo) showing off the place like a model, hands held like he was presenting the place as a prize. He appeared to be growing his hair out again.

Logan wondered if he or Jean would be mentioned, but they never were. Was he avoiding the topic? Logan wasn’t sure if he should be angry or just fucking disappointed. Wasn’t this typical somehow?

“Here’s something,” Wes said, holding up a card that read “I caught Humans in the Crab Kingdom”. “He says that Dysnomia picked a fine time to reappear and be a pain in the ass.”

“Dysnomia?” Scott asked.

“She’s the goddess of willful lawlessness, supposedly Eris’s daughter, but you have to take all myths with a grain of salt.”

“Eris’s daughter?” Logan repeated, scowling. “Fuck, Eris is bad news. Bob seemed to indicate she was the strongest of the non-collective gods. However that works.”

Wes nodded in agreement. “That’s what I’ve picked up. Hard to believe, too, since she’s considered so minor in the pantheon, but once again, Humans get it wrong. I suppose it goes back to the really powerful beings don’t brag about how powerful they are.”

“But lawlessness doesn’t translate to ghosts and dead people,” Scott interjected.

Wes grimaced ruefully. “No, it doesn’t.”

Logan tossed the postcards he had back down on the desk. “So this is a waste of time?”

“Not necessarily,” Wes immediately replied. “Eris is the goddess of discord. This is certainly discordant.”

“But if she’s doing this, we’re fucked,” Helga said. “No one can go against her.”

“She isn’t a death goddess, though, is she?” Logan asked Wes. “You’d think that would play some part in this.”

“Well … a being as powerful as her doesn’t necessarily have to play by the same rules as everyone else.”

“Or she could have help,” Helga suggested. “As prickly as she is, she has allies more than friends, but if she says frog they’ll sure as hell jump.”

“Do you know who her allies are?” Wes asked her curiously.

She rubbed the back of her neck as she thought, frowning at the list unspooling in her own head. “I’m no expert, but maybe I can contact someone who is.”

“Who?” Scott asked.

“Moros,” she replied. “Might need your help, Wes, if you think you can handle physical objects.”

Wes seemed stunned by the mention of the terminally depressed god of doom, but after a moment he nodded. “I can try.”

Logan eyed her dubiously. “Doesn’t Bob usually have to contact him? I didn’t think he got up to answer direct summons anymore.”

“Usually no, but he knows me now, since I’ve worked under his aegis enough. He’s afraid if he doesn’t answer I might hurt him.”

Wes gave her a look that suggested he thought she was kidding - or hoped she was - while Logan just nodded. “He knows you remarkably well.”

“I think Bob may have talked me up a bit,” she admitted, rubbing the back of her neck like she was tired. “A little too much, actually. But if it gets him to pick up the goddamn phone, I don’t care.”

“So where does this leave us?” Scott asked, sounding frustrated, his rigid posture and the fact that he seemed to have no idea what to do with his hands giving away his anxiety. Logan noticed that the guy whose body Scott was inhabiting had a pair of flaming dice tattooed on the inside of his left wrist. Had Scott noticed that yet? And since it was such an odd place for a tattoo, he wondered if this corpse had tattoos all up and down his arms. Scott returned as the Tattooed Man? That was fucking hilarious. “Hoping this god responds to us and has the answers we want?”

Helga arched a perfectly green eyebrow at him. “Yeah, basically. You got a better idea?”

Scott threw out his hands, opened his mouth to say something, and closed it. Then he tried to speak again, and got it right this time. “What if Jean comes back? What if she’s back already?”

“What, you afraid she’s gonna go bugfuck again?” She replied, somewhat callously. “She won’t come back with her powers, unless she comes back in a mutant corpse, and then she’d have their powers. But I don’t know if it works like that.”

“But what if she still has some of Camaxtli’s energy in her?” Scott argued. His face was flushing dark with blood, and Logan wasn’t sure if he was angry or sorrowful or a combination of the two.

They hadn’t discussed the Camaxtli theory with her, so she looked a bit surprised … and yet, not nearly as surprised as Logan would have thought. Did she suspect? “Then we’re fucked, honey. Let’s just hope the cheese fell off her cracker, shall we?”

Helga’s natural brusqueness was clearly hitting all the wrong buttons in Scott, who was on the verge of an emotional meltdown anyway, and Logan could tell he was going to lose it. So he quickly interjected, “We’re overlooking the most obvious solution, y’know.”

They all looked at him in varying degrees of disbelief. “Oh, really?” Wes asked, with just a hint of lacerating British sarcasm. (They could use their accent like a weapon, like no other people on the planet.) “And what is that?”

“I’m Bob’s avatar, right?  So all I need to do is get his attention.”

Helga gave him a warning glance. She'd probably guessed where he was going, and didn’t like it. “You don’t mean -”

“Yeah darlin’, I do,” he interrupted. “Kill me.”