7

According to both Degei and Giles’s books, Erlik was more than simply bad news. It was basically time to send out the lifeboats if they had any, which they didn’t. Angel wished, not for the first time, that they had some.

Erlik was the long time prisoner of Ulgan, a creator god, as he didn’t trust Erlik to be loose since he was the embodiment of evil and all, and had also killed his trusted messenger for no reason other than he was there. Degei didn’t know how to kill him, and wasn’t sure if he could be killed - there was some debate about whether or not Elrik was an elemental god, and the books were no help at all. There was also no descriptions of his power, and even Degei wasn’t completely sure. According to him, he was pretty sure he could manipulate souls and possibly “mold the earth”, but beyond that Degei had no firsthand knowledge of his powers, or even second or third hand. Erlik had been “inactive” for a millennia or so.

Wesley had joined them by this time, having left Scott with Helga and the Ressiks at the bar. So they had their wrecking crew, they just had to figure out how best to use them. Logan wondered if Degei couldn’t just take Erlik down, but Degei said it depended on what forms he could take. If he was corporeal, sure his snakes could kill him (the way Degei said this, it was implicit that his snakes could kill everything with a physical form - Angel noticed Xander shudder), but if Erlik could be active in a semi-corporeal or totally non-corporeal state, there was a problem. This wasn’t his realm or one of the higher or lower realms; this was earth. And for some reason, that put a stricture on Degei’s snakes.

If Bob were here, it wasn’t a problem - all implications were this was considered “his” realm, so whatever state Erlik was in, he was gone. But Bob wasn’t here, and they couldn’t call him. So they had to find a new way to deal with this.

It was Wesley who spoke first. “The Book of Tarlak.”

The name rang bells for Angel, but he couldn’t immediately place it. Giles did, though, by the horrified look on his face. “I’m not sure we’re quite that desperate yet.”

“Ain’t that Terry Pratchett’s new novel?” Ana asked sarcastically.

Everyone ignored her. She was no Xander. “What’s that? It sounds familiar,” Angel said.

Giles gave him a wary look, like he wasn’t sure he should tell him, but Wesley answered him. “It’s a book full of spells of dark magic. Most are considered taboo, as close to illegal as spells can get.”

Giles was shaking his head. “Even if we knew where a copy was -”

“I do,” Wesley interrupted. “Wolfram and Hart has several copies in their library. I’ll just go grab one. I’m a ghost now; there’s not much they can do to stop me.”

“We’re not using it,” Giles insisted.

“I’ll take the burden of the spell,” Wesley countered smoothly, not in the least deterred by Giles’s obstinacy. “I’m already dead. I can’t be hurt much more.”

“Yes you can,” Giles shot back.

“No I can’t.”

Matt nudged Marc, and whispered. “Are they always like this?” Marc just shrugged.

“Let the dead guy do what he wants,” Logan interrupted. He then cast a slightly sheepish glance at Wesley, and said, “No offense.”

“None taken.”

“Wesley,” Giles said sternly, in full Watcher lecture mode. “You know very well that being dead doesn’t preclude worse things happening to you.”

Wesley sighed wearily, as if already tired of this argument. “Rupert, do you know what I remember after being killed? Nothing. Nothing until I appeared back on the street in an intangible form. I’m not in the happy afterlife promised us dedicated Watchers; I’m not even in a demon’s thrall in some dark dimension. I ceased to exist. I was nothing. Do you really think I give a flying bloody fuck what happens to my immortal soul now? Heaven doesn’t want me and hell won’t have me. It doesn’t matter what I do right now, because the end result will be the same. I’ll be turned away from all gates; I’ve done too much bad to be allowed a seat at the good table, but I’ve done too much good for the bad to trust me. No matter what I do, I will cease to exist as soon as this is over. I might as well give everyone a good reason for avoiding me.” Wesley stared at Giles defiantly, and Giles met it with a stony look that gave nothing away.

After a moment of silence, Naomi said, “You’re both forgetting the most important thing here - these spells, will they help us against Erlik?”

Wesley nodded. “They should, if we use the right one. There’s one that might be able to trap him in a corporeal form, at least temporarily.”

“And if he’s in a body, we can kill him,” Logan said, just to fill in any of those who didn’t get it.

“We’ll only get one shot at it,” Angel reminded them. “If we’re going to do this, we need to be sure it’ll work.”

“It’ll work,” Wesley insisted. “Wolfram and Hart did their best to hide that spell. They wouldn’t if it was a waste of time.”

Unless it was a trap, but Wesley believed it wasn’t, and that was good enough for Angel. He owed Wesley that if nothing else. Giles looked at him, but seemed to understand that he was siding with Wesley here, and there was no talking him out of it.

“Before we make any plan, we have to have a way to find Erlik and draw him out,” Marc said, jumping in with the casualness of someone who always worked here. Not that Angel minded - right now, they needed all the help they could get.

“Gods know gods,” Degei said. “If I make my presence known, he should come.”

“Why?” Bren asked. “To ask you to lunch?”

Facetiousness aside, it was a good question.

“To ask me why I’m here,” Degei responded blandly. “To try and kill me if I get in his way.”

Xander scoffed faintly. “So why do you want to make your presence known to him again?”

“He can’t really kill me,” Degei replied. “I’m a god of the death realm. He’ll simply try.”

“Why can’t we contact this Ulgan?” Sid wondered.

“You don’t contact a creator god. If they want to talk to you, they’ll let you know.” Degei told him, as if that was the most obvious thing in the world. It occurred to Angel that Bob probably would have barged in on him anyways, as he wasn’t known for obeying rules, but Degei just wasn’t that rude. As death gods went, he seemed surprisingly nice.

They had to plan this carefully if this was to work, but ironically, there were a thousand things they didn’t know. Nearly all of them knew from experience that there was no way to successfully plan around the unknown, but they had to try. They couldn’t let evil continue to stalk the city unfettered, and they still weren’t sure what all these wandering dead could possibly mean except perhaps a ready army whenever Elrik decided to strike.

Was he ready to die again? Angel wasn’t honestly sure, but he supposed he’d better get ready for the possibility.

****

Once again, Logan felt like he was in a horror movie. This was yet another great set.

Amongst the piers that made Santa Monica semi-famous was one still hosting a run down carnival, even though both the pier and the carnival had been shut down for almost a year. According to Bren, someone died on a ride, and the whole thing was shut down due to safety issues, but the business responsible for setting it up had already fled the state, so the carnival remained where it was, rotting like a neglected tooth. It seemed like a natural place for a personification of evil.

That wasn’t why they were here, though. Degei thought it best they do this as far from the majority of dead people and “open earth” as possible. Angel suggested the piers, and Bren remembered the old carnival, and they all figured that was an apt place for everything to go down.

The problem was fighting a god could get them all killed the millisecond they showed up. The answer was getting under the aegis of a god, so they had some protection, but the problem was who would be willing to do such a large number at the last moment. Degei said he’d be willing to have them all under his aegis, and it didn’t matter that he was on this plane at the same time. He promised to kick them back the very second they died, although he admitted if a vampire got dusted or decapitated, that would be extremely difficult and perhaps not possible. So Angel and Kier were on notice that under Degei’s good graces or not, they had to be even more careful than the rest of them.

The plan they pieced together had lots of holes in it, but it was unavoidable. There was so much they didn’t know that it was a complete pain in the ass. At least Logan was used to going in partially blind; Angel seemed accustomed to it too.

Giles and Wesley went off to work on the spells, although Giles still didn’t seem happy about it. But Wesley seemed to have won the argument, which made Logan wonder why Watchers were promised some happy ever after afterlife. Did it ever work? There was some type of “Watchers go to heaven” belief system? Didn’t they - of all people - know better? Maybe even amongst the people who should have known better, hope sprung eternal.

Logan wondered if he ever believed in happily ever after. He thought that maybe he really wanted to believe in reincarnation, but only that he wanted to because Mariko believed it (or he thought she did - he had no clear memories, just vague feelings). Because she thought it was a nifty idea, he wanted to think that too. He wasn’t sure he ever did, though; he just nailed down the “wanting to” part.

They cut Ana loose. She was a pain in the ass who didn’t want to take part in any fight, and they didn’t know what she could do anyways, so if she wanted to risk getting torn apart by zombies, that was her choice. Logan actually wondered if Angel and Giles were the target of the attack anyways. If Elrik had any sense, he’d know he’d want them out of the way - they were the best chance to stop him in lieu of Bob. It was simply good strategy to take out the biggest threat before starting … whatever it was you were starting. That’s where Magneto fucked up last time, which Logan attributed to creeping old age. It happened to everybody, even freaked out old megalomaniacs.

In all honesty, they could have cut loose everyone except him, Marc, Bren, Kier, Helga, Angel, Wesley, and Giles, because no one else could possibly contribute much to the fight. (Degei and the Ressiks were in their own separate categories.) But Matt wasn’t straying far from Marc, even though he wasn’t sure what the fuck was going on, and Sid, Scott, and Naomi weren’t going to sit this out, even if their abilities here were limited. Xander was completely fucking useless, but insisted on sticking around anyways. Did the guy have a death wish? He wasn’t a mutant or a demon, he wasn’t even a gifted physical fighter - he had fuck all. All he brought to the table was snark. Seriously, he should have taken Ana out for coffee. Those two were just made for each other.

They had to wait for sundown for the fight, of course, but the non-vampiric amongst them - everybody but Angel and Kier - were able to get out there early and find their places. The sky was a bloody orange over the eerily calm grey-blue water of the Pacific, the pollution that made Los Angeles’s air so distasteful to breathe giving beautiful rich colors to the dying light. It made the seedy carnival and the water swollen, rotting planks of the run down pier look all the more eerie, all the more like the set of some B horror movie that wanted to - literally, in all ways - out gross all horror films of the previous year. There was a huge Ferris wheel that had been locked down and several outbuildings that must have once been food and game kiosks, and quite fittingly, there was a long, low slung building that still had vestiges of its haunted house sign. Logan had to cut through a chain link fence and a chain and padlock to get them inside, which took him all of five seconds! .

“God, I hope there’s no dead clowns here,” Xander said quietly, as if this were a cemetery and not just an abandoned carnival. “Live ones are bad enough.”

“I think we got bigger problems than It,” Marc noted, shifting the rifle off his shoulder.

“It?” Matt wondered, looking around. “What it?”

“Stephen King reference, babe,” Marc replied casually.

“Oh.” Just from the look on his face, he guessed Matt hadn’t read a lot of Stephen King.

“Even I got that reference,” Xander told him. “Man, didn’t they run the miniseries in Sweden?”

“Switzerland.”

Xander made a face and waved his hand dismissively. “Whatever. Cold place with lots of blond people.”

“I think you just described Minnesota,” Naomi told him.

Xander rolled his eyes and sighed, giving up on the argument.

They all broke up, wandering off to different parts of the carnival. That was the other reason this pier was chosen over all others: places to get lost.

Gods could not technically be ambushed by lesser beings; they were far too aware of lessers in their midsts. But Degei felt he could swamp Erlik’s senses with his power, hiding them until they attacked. How Degei planned to swamp him he didn’t say. His ‘mark’ on them, the one that made them operatives under his aegis, were amongst the most simple and easily done Logan had ever seen. It was a serpentine mark, almost an S but with about three more bends in it, and Degei made it appear on them simply by touching them. There was a warm sensation, but it quickly passed. Logan had his mark on his forehead, so Helga didn’t feel so alone with Moros’s mark on her forehead - nearly everyone else had the marks on their arms or hands, save for Marc, who decided to be “total bad ass” and had Degei mark his neck.

You’d think a gun would be useless, but Helga had some enchanted bullets that she gave Marc. He only had six, but he figured a million wouldn’t be enough if they didn’t do any major damage. Helga wasn’t sure what kind of damage they would do to Elrik; she figured they’d hurt him, but beyond that she couldn’t confirm a kill, except perhaps in a corporeal form. She had brought her flamethrower, which had interesting supernatural marks on the tank. Did it make it supernatural fire, or was that Stansin graffiti?

Nearly everyone else had physical weapons that might not do any good at all, but gave them something to hold and reassure themselves with. Bren wore the mirror shield on his back and carried a crossbow; Naomi carried a sword; Xander had a long handled axe; Matt was carrying one of Marc’s high powered pistols; Sid had a bandolier of throwing knives across his chest, and a much larger hunting knife in a sheath tied to his left upper thigh. (And Sid could throw a knife with fucking scary accuracy - he’d seen it. It was yet another obscure talent taught to the Royal Guards of Rahjan.) Wesley and Giles weren’t with them yet, but it was unlikely they’d have weapons since they were using magic as their weapon, and Scott and the Ressiks hadn’t arrived yet - they’d beat them here - but he doubted Scott would have a weapon, unless one of the Ressiks trusted him with a spare gun. Logan assumed both Angel and Kier would have swords, because that seemed to be a vampire type of weapon.! Logan had none, unless you counted his claws, which he did, and which he always had with him.

As for Degei, well, he was their big gun, so he hardly needed anything. Except maybe pants. Admittedly, because he was made of snakes and only took on an approximation of a humanoid form, his naked form was as flat and featureless as a Barbie or Ken doll, but that in itself was kind of disturbing. At least Bob wore pants (or shorts, or, if worse came to worst, a Speedo, but he usually made some concession to Human modesty).

Logan stayed with Degei until the god found the approximate center of the carnival, an open expanse with abandoned game booths on one side and the rusted old Ferris wheel on the other. Logan ducked behind a booth, and watched as Degei hummed to himself, a noise like a chorus of electrical wires, slowly morphing into a chorus of snake’s hisses. He spread his arms out slowly, lifting his flat face to the crimson rays of the setting sun, and Logan saw his skin looked like it was boiling.

No, wrong - not boiling; moving. Degei’s skin was undulating like a sail in the breeze, and it was as mesmerizing as it was disgusting. He wondered if anyone else could see this, and guessed not, because they were so spread out along the pier, and he was Degei’s only constant companion. It was because he was Bob’s avatar that Degei seemed to trust him, and Logan didn’t fool himself into thinking it was anything but that.

The hum/hiss reached a crescendo that Logan could feel reverberating along his bones, and then Degei seemed to explode in a thousand snakes, all of them flying outward and landing on the pier, thudding down on top of booths and stands like living rain, and none seemed the least bit hurt by this ordeal. Logan thought he saw some of them on the Ferris wheel too, but they must have been insanely large for him to see them from this distance.

A red striped black garter snake seemed to take up a wary position in front of him, looking out at the pier as if prepared to defend him against a threat, and Logan guessed this was how he was overwhelming Elrik’s senses while also making himself known. There were thousands upon thousands of avatar snakes here; it was the god equivalent of turning the amplifiers up to eleven. This would be like a brick upside his head.

The sky had darkened, the wind off the water turning slightly cold, when Logan first heard the noise.

He thought it was all these snakes again, but the noise was too high pitched, a drone without variation. It became sharp and high, and his first thought was a swarm of bees. But as the moving black funnel cloud swept down on the pier, Logan realized they were flies; nearly a million flies, formed into a large, dark mass that soon became a vague humanoid shape on the pier.

“Does this mean he’s the actual lord of the flies?” Logan whispered to the snake. It just looked at him with its ink dot eye, giving him no response at all.

What? It was a legitimate question. It felt like something they should have known going in.