Wesley’s hand might not have been technically corporeal, but it still looked like it was burning where he grabbed Erlik, and he was shouting something, words with too many consonants and syllables. Giles was shouting them as well, and he appeared to step out of thin air as his invisibility spell dropped away. Wesley then yanked Erlik forward as his intangible form appeared to rear out of the corpse, breaking off from it in some bizarre humanoid form of cellular division, as Erlik was dragged into the corpse. But as Wesley stepped back, Erlik didn’t emerge.

“Now,” Wesley shouted, getting some distance from the body now trapping Erlik. Ghost or not, he was holding his burned hand to his chest like it hurt.

A half dozen throwing knives came out of nowhere and stuck in the corpse’s back, while a crossbow arrow thunked into its chest from the front. The corpse staggered under impact and shock, and as its mouth opened, a couple of flies drifted lazily out. “What sorcery is this?” Erlik croaked from inside his fleshie prison.

Logan charged out from his hiding place as Angel emerged from the wreckage, pulling out a second sword, and Helga came out with her flamethrower. A shot rang out, and half of Elrik’s new head exploded in a cloud of gore, leaving him with a large, ragged hole where his right temple used to be. It would have been an instant kill shot on anyone but a god.

Degei had stepped back to make room for the dismemberment. “The Humans are a lot more resourceful than you’ve credited them with. You’re not the first god they’ve killed.”

As if to emphasize that fact, Marc put another round in Erlik, this time blowing a grapefruit sized hole in the middle of his torso, kill shot number two. Bren put another crossbow bolt through his throat, and a knife embedded itself in the back of his skull. As Logan and Angel approached him - Logan in front, Angel from behind - Erlik made a negative noise and roared, “I am still your better! You cannot harm me!”

Even though there was no way he could have seen behind himself now, he reached behind him and grabbed the sword as Angel attempted to plunge it into the small of his back. Logan had pulled back his fist to take off his head, but before he could even complete the punch, Erlik rammed the corpse’s hand into his chest. It hurt like hell, and he probably meant to grab his heart, but funnily enough he heard the corpse’s fingers snap against his adamantium coated ribs. “What is this?” Erlik shouted angrily, like he’d just coated his bones in metal to piss him off. Hand still in his chest, Erlik flicked him away like an insect, and he slammed into the booth he’d been hiding behind. With all the metal in him, it didn’t so much collapse as vaporize.

Logan’s chest burned where Erlik had ripped a hole in it, and black spots danced before his eyes. He’d had worse injuries, but possibly because it was inflicted by a god of evil, his consciousness wavered. He heard Giles yell, “He has to be totally destroyed! He can regenerate from a big enough part!” There were two gunshots in close succession, and Erlik made another noise of disbelief and disgust. There was a fwoosh that could only have been the flamethrower, followed by a scream not so much of pain but of rage.

Logan suddenly felt energy fill him, blue light filling his vision and coursing through his veins like liquefied sunlight, and he was momentarily confused. Bob hadn’t left any power in him; he’d removed it all like he asked. Son of a bitch - the bastard was watching. Bob had been monitoring the situation through him all this time. “You sneaky fucker,” he growled, as he climbed out of the wreckage. The noxious smell of burnt, dead flesh made him recoil instinctively, but he forced himself onward.

Erlik had been well baked, his body perforated with about a dozen holes, and as Logan watched Angel hacked off one of his arms with his sword. Erlik screamed and grabbed Angel by the throat with his remaining hand, kicking the sword out of his grip. Logan charged Erlik, popping his claws as Erlik turned to face him, and he rammed them both through the corpse’s face, yanking them apart, sending two halves of his head flying in different directions. The body remained standing, though.

“Yeouch,” Xander commented. “I don’t think that’s what they mean by a facelift.”

Logan then sliced his neck off, sending the remaining lower half of his face flying, and then chopped off his other arm. Still, the corpse remained standing. “Stand back,” Helga ordered. “Let us finish up.”

Although he wanted to keep dicing him until he could be used in a salad, he got a hold of his anger and stepped back, so Naomi, Angel, and Xander could continue chopping him down. Helga baked some pieces with her flamethrower, while Kier minced some others. Erlik hadn’t made a noise since Logan had bifurcated his head, and he wasn’t making any more now.

Angel eventually came up to him, and said, “Do you know your eyes are glowing blue?”

“I guessed,” he admitted, since he was still seeing the world through a blue filter. He looked down at his chest wound, but saw it was already healed. Not really a shock. Logan still had his claws out, and he thought they had a slight blue aura about them, but he honestly couldn’t tell since he was seeing everything blue. He retracted them, though, because he didn’t need them anymore.

“I thought Bob took all his power out of you.”

“So did I.”

Angel raised an eyebrow at that. “I’m talking to you now, right?”

“I ain’t Bob,” he reassured him, as Helga burned Erlik’s body to ashy remnants. The bones wouldn’t burn, but Kier, Sid, and Giles stamped on them, reducing them to shards.

“But he knows.”

“He must, the fucker.”

Logan finally noticed Scott standing near Giles, holding one of the guns the Ressiks had been using. It was possible that he put a shot or two in Erlik; he’d probably joined the fight when he was down. Matt and Marc had appeared, both holding weapons, but they were aimed down at the pier. “Good job, kid,” Logan said. It took him a moment to realize he’d said it in Swiss German.

Matt looked at him, startled. “Uh, thank you.”

“The X-Men could teach you how to channel that power,” Scott added, forever doing recruitment pitches.

Matt shrugged. “I think I’m too old for school.”

“Is he really dead?” Xander asked, hefting his axe to his shoulder. Considering that all that was left of Erlik was a charcoal smear and shattered bones, you’d think the answer was obvious.

Degei nodded in that odd way of his. “In a sense. He’s back in Ulgan’s realm, and I image Ulgan will not be pleased.”

“We’re still here,” Wesley said, jerking his head in Scott’s direction. “Why is that?”

“It took a lot of power to open the realms of the dead. The effects should fade within hours.”

“Oh thank Medusa I didn’t have to use this thing,” Bren said, adjusting the mirror shield on his back. “I really wasn’t sure I could, and holy shit! Logan, are you Bob?”

Now everybody was looking at him, and he groaned at the attention. “No, I’m me, it’s just Bob gave me a power up after Elrik tried to rip my heart out. I think he’s been eavesdropping this entire time, the sneaky fuck.”

“Isn’t that just like Bob, to hide until the last possible second and then show up,” Wesley said, shaking his head. It looked like his right hand had been burned off, the arm ended in a charred stump, but how was that possible? He was a ghost. Then again, grabbing a god probably did have some consequences, even to the spectral.

“He’s gotta drama queen thing goin’ on,” Logan agreed.

“Tell me about it,” Helga concurred, shaking a few drops of fuel from the ignition hose of her flamethrower.

There was an odd noise, like a rattlesnake constantly getting stuck mid rattle, and they all slowly realized that it was Degei laughing. When they were all staring at him, Degei looked at Logan and said, “Leave it to Bob to select an avatar as impudent as he is.”

“I am not impudent,” Logan objected. Suddenly everyone was staring at him with great dubiousness. “What? I wouldn’t use that word.”

“So we saved the world?” Matt asked, sounding a little puzzled.

“Yep, that’s it,” Xander said cheerfully. “Once you reduce the bad guy to pate, you usually call it a win. There are exceptions, of course, but if you can scrape ‘em off your shoes, it’s all good.”

Matt now looked puzzled, and glanced at Marc for help. “He’s pretending to be blasé about it,” Marc told him. “But I think god killin’ never gets old.”

“Hey, this isn’t the first god I’ve killed,” Xander insisted. After a look from Giles, he added, “Helped kill.”

“It’s hardly our first either,” Logan said, nodding to both Angel and Helga. “Makes you wonder what’d happen if the gods got word we were all bona fide god killers.”

“They’d kill you all in your sleep,” Degei said. After a moment, he added, “Don’t worry, I won’t tell them.”

Oh good, yet another thing to worry about.

There was some discussion about whether they should hose off Erlik's remains or not, and Kier tried to convince Bren they should go check out the Ferris wheel while they were still here, which kept up until Bren threatened to stake him, and seemingly everything was back to normal.

But it wasn't, not really. Bob had some questions to answer, but sadly he wasn't here to do it. So he had to go to him, and there was only one way he knew how to do that.

Once they got back to the office, he told Angel what he needed, and he let him have his office. It was certainly dark enough, and while Angel's couch wasn't wildly comfortable, it'd do. Logan closed his eyes and focused on all this blue, seeing it as a trail, something that could lead him back to its source.

He had no idea how long it took, how long he followed the energy, but there was a disorienting sensation of falling, and then suddenly he was standiing on the deck of a patio overlooking Sydney Harbor. It was a nice day, the sky a clear, high blue, the water a darker shade, seabirds wheeling over head. "Wanna beer, or is that a silly question?" Bob asked.

He turned to find him sitting on the edge of a picnic table, wearing loud, palm tree patterned surfer shorts and a loose blue tank top. He looked completely relaxed and tanned, his hair longer and streaked through with sunny blond highlights.

Logan didn't think, he just acted; the only way he could ever beat telepaths and guys like Bob was by acting without thinking. Luckily he'd had loads of practice at this.

He lunged across the distance between them and grabbed Bob by the throat, slamming him up against the glass screen door seperating the patio from the rest of the house. Much to his annoyance, Bob didn't look surprised or irritated; in fact, he seemed to have been expecting it.

"Is there a problem?" he asked, still casual.

Logan growled, resisting the urge to put him through the door. The worst part of all of this was he knew Bob was letting him do this - at any time, he could put a stop to this. But he was essentially humoring him at this point, and that just made him angrier. "You coldn't tell us you were in on this?"

"I sent messages, mate!" he protested. "Is it my fault you missed 'em?"

"How did you send messages?"

"My usual way."

He was about to ask for further clarification and see if he could indeed put Bob through the door, when Logan suddenly got it: music. "The jukebox," he groaned.

"There ya go. You really think it's random?"

"How the fuck were we supposed to make sense of that?" He complained. "Could you pick more obscure and weird songs?"

"But that was it! The weird songs were a dead giveaway. Who has Mr. Bungle on a jukebox? And not just any song of theirs either." He then quoted a bit. "'May your sky roll up like a scroll, may your seas fill with blood'. I was trying to pump up the team."

Logan shook his head and reluctantly let go of his throat. Again, it didn't matter, because he couldn't hurt him anyways. “This is insane. Where the fuck are you?"

"Still in Bast's dimension. I guess you heard about the god dust up from Moros, right? We're gettin' it calmed down; the power hungry always bite off more than they can chew. Problem is, from your perspective, time runs pretty slow here. As far as I'm concerned, it's been weeks."

"It's been almost a year!"

"Yeah, I gathered that." He then took a swig of his beer, and Logan belatedly realized he'd never lost it, not even when he grabbed him by the throat. That was a little disheartening. “Want one?” He held up the beer can and swirled the liquid within; Logan could hear the beer sloshing against the sides.

Logan collapsed back on the table’s built in bench seat. “Yeah, why the hell not?” Not surprisingly, he found a beer can sitting on the table, not far from his elbow. He grabbed it and cracked it open, taking a healthy swig. It tasted very good, but then it should have. “So why not tell us you were watching us?”

Bob sat on the opposite side of the table and shrugged. “Erlik coulda read it in your mind, and I didn’t want to spoil the surprise. Boy, when he figured out you were my avatar, he knew he was fucked.”

“He’s not coming back.”

“Hell no. Not unless Ulgan wants me invading his dimension, and trust me, he doesn’t.”

Logan took another drink of his beer, and wondered if he could do this. He had no choice really - he had to know. “Did you know about Jean?”

He shook his head. “No, I swear I didn’t. I didn’t even know she was alive.”

Should he believe him? Bob seemed to be as on the level as he ever got, but he still didn’t trust him. How could he? He was the self-confessed god of lies and liars; it was his bread and butter. “Was Camaxtli still in her?”

Bob sighed heavily and glanced out at the big hulking Pope’s hat of the Sydney Opera House. Technically the view was all wrong, but it could be since this was just a mindscape. Anything was possible here. “I wouldn’t think so. When the Powers That Be decide to get rid of you, you’re usually gone. But … he was a sneaky bastard. If anyone could have found a way around it, it would be him.”

“So he could have?”

Bob nodded wearily. “He could have, but most likely in a vestigial form.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning it would be power without form, with nothing in the form of intelligence. It would be scattered, inchoate.”

“Brain dead power?”

“Not quite, but it’d have little remembrance of its former self.”

He nodded, easily seeing how that could explain Jean when she came back. “Is that what happened? Was it actually Jean that came back, or Camaxtli?”

Bob took another drink of his beer, clearly stalling. “Honestly? I don’t know. You’d have to tell me.”

“If she was really Camaxtli, I couldn’t have -” he trailed off, not sure he wanted to say it.

As it was, he didn’t have to; Bob knew what he meant. “Yes you could have, mate. Power without proper channeling is meaningless. Besides, I didn’t exactly take all my power out of you - okay, so I lied, you can’t tell me you’re shocked - and you keep knocking Jean outta the equation. She might have been overwhelmed by Cammy’s energy, but it doesn’t mean she was completely burned through. She may have wanted the power initially, but no one ever realizes the price you pay for it. I mean, did no one pay attention to the Twilight Zone? The warnings were out there if she only listened.”

Bob was basically saying that Jean saw dying as a way out. It didn’t make him feel better. “But if she had some god energy in her, she’s not really dead, is she? It doesn’t matter if I had some of your energy or not, I’m not a god, and I couldn’t have done it permanently. Right?”

He grimaced and sloshed his beer around the can again, and if Logan heard it right, the liquid level hadn’t dropped one iota. “That’s actually kinda hard to say. Camaxtli has no dimension to return to; it collapsed in itself and no longer exists.”

“But Jean’s dimension still exists.”

“That it does. But if Cammy gets too high profile, the Powers will notice, and he can’t want that, no matter how brain damaged his power is.”

“So she could still be alive, but we may never know.”

“Correct. Cammy could hide, and he/she still has friends in higher and lower places.”

Logan sighed and hid his face in his hands, so Bob couldn’t see his expression. Since he was probably reading his mind, he didn’t know why he bothered. “I don’t wanna keep killin’ her. I don’t give a fuck that I’m your avatar, I’m not doin’ that again.”

“I totally understand.” He paused briefly, letting Logan have a moment, then said, “I hate to do this to ya, mate, but we may have another crisis in the works.”

Logan dry washed his face, scrubbing away an errant tear, and faced Bob again, scowling. “What the fuck now?”

“It’s Bren.”

That honestly shocked him. “What? What about him?”

“He’s on the verge of being the first Human - okay, half-Human, but it’s a minor distinction - chosen of the Gorgons, and that’s a big fucking deal.”

“Since when? And what do you mean “chosen”?”

Bob sighed and sat back, his expression unusually serious. He wasn’t kidding. “See, that’s been the brilliance of Rags. He’s a Persaid, so he’s automatically dismissed as harmless and negligible by everyone, and he’s also a tragic alcoholic, so that just adds to his dismissed status. But he is actually the chosen of the Gorgons, which means he actually has great power at his disposal. He’s never been the type to use it, though, because he understands that you don’t take something like that casually. You know his tattoos?”

“The black vines crawling up his arms? Yeah.”

“Those aren’t tattoos. Those are marks.”

Logan was about to point out that tattoos were marks, or at least a form of them, but Bob was too grim for him to be a smart ass. “Marks of what?”

“It’s a promise in flesh, left by the Gorgons on their chosen. It means “Touch, harm, defile this, answer to the Gorgons”. No sane being wants that, because holy fucking sheep shit, those gals mean it. They’re about the only non-absentee gods left, whether people realize it or not. And they’re Elite too; they can kill other gods.”

“You?”

“If I’m stupid enough to piss ‘em off, yeah. But Euryale has a bit of a crush on me, so I figure I’m safe as long as I don’t marry her. So you get what I’m sayin’ here? They’re wicked powerful; their chosen will be wicked powerful.”

“But it’s Rags. How does the kid come into this?” In one sense, the idea of Rags wielding massive power was hilarious, because yes, he was the demon version of Charles Bukowski, only without a writing career and with an impenetrable Cockney accent, as well as a best bud who was a pile of sentient slime. But then again, after the whole thing in Toronto, he could kind of see Rags being powerful; the vampires couldn’t even touch him. They were scared of him once they realized he wasn’t just a Persaid demon - fuck, Dru was scared of him, and that said volumes. So he was a powerful man with no ambition, or conversely, a man who actually understood that power was to be used judiciously, not thrown around in apocalyptic fits (perhaps Magneto and Jean/Camaxtli could have learned something from him).

“I think Rags knows he just can’t keep this up; his lifestyle isn’t conducive to his health, to say the least.”

“Having an IV full of Long Island ice tea’ll do that to a person.”

“Won’t it just?” Bob ran a hand through his hair, and yet it didn’t appear to be messed up. “So Bren’s in line, and that’s just bad news.”

“For Bren?”

“Yes, but probably not the way you’re thinking. He won’t get Jean power levels or anything; it doesn’t work like that. He won’t change … technically.”

“He’ll just have gods on his shoulders.”

“Too right. He’ll be protected, and he can call down the moon. And there are some people who ain’t gonna like that, especially if it’s a Human who gets that.”

Logan had a pleasant mental image of some slimy, intolerant televangelist being confronted by mutant Bren, his female gods, and his gay vampire lover, but as nice an idea as that was, that wasn’t what Bob meant. If only he did. “Are we talking other gods? Demons?”

“The Senior Partners.”

“Wolfram and Hart?” He had to admit, he was pretty confused here. “I don’t get it. They don’t give a shit about Rags.”

“Because he’s a Persaid demon, and he lives over a taco stand. They don’t take him seriously, even though they know they should. Bren will be a different story, and he’s working with Angel. Now the stakes have turned unbelievably ugly. They’ll feel hard pressed to make sure Bren is out of the way.”

“So what do we do? Ask Rags to pick someone else?”

“Rags didn’t pick him.”

Oh damn it. And it made so much sense to think that Rags had picked him in an effort to give him a weapon he could use against Kier if someone figured out a way to replace his vampire with Vestus. “You couldn’t ask the Gorgons to find someone else?”

Bob raised an eyebrow at him. “Uh huh. How successful have you been in telling very dangerous women that they can’t have what they want?”

He grunted an acknowledgement. That usually didn’t work. “So what do we do? Tell Rags to speed up his training?”

Bob shook his head. “As I said, power without proper channeling is useless. Rags will teach Bren what he can do before he lets him have the power; I trust him to do that, and we shouldn’t force it. Besides, becoming the chosen doesn’t mean he can’t be killed; all it means is his death will be instantly avenged.”

“So the Sisters get Biblical on the assassin’s asses? Why would anyone be suicidal enough to risk that?”

“Because a god or demon could convince them they need to, or some shit like that. Look at Wolfram and Hart - they have entire floors made up of nothing but cannon fodder. And if these people are at all smart, they’ll use middle men, so the Gorgons never trace it back to them. Even the Senior Partners don’t wanna start shit with them.”

Logan scratched his head. “So Bren’s a target?”

“Absolutely. You need to talk to him and talk to Angel. We need to start planning, and we need to do it now. A Human being the chosen of the Gorgons is a provocative act. Not to the Gorgons, mind you, they don’t think anything about it, but then again, they’ve always had one eye on humanity. It’s humanity that’s forgotten them, not vice versa.”

“Yeah, okay, that’s what I’m not getting: a Human chosen bein’ a big deal. Why?”