“Try not to get killed,” Angel suggested, trying to formulate a plan of action.

Kier scoffed. “Brilliant plan, Napoleon. I never could’ve thought of that one.”

Angel shot him a harsh glare as he suddenly realized, “They can be cut.” The award with the blood on it; it was dripping off the sharp edge. “Do you have a knife?”

“No. You?”

“No. But I have a stake.”

Kier made a noise that was almost a laugh. “I don’t think they can be dusted.”

“No, but it’s the closest thing to a blade we have.” As the Charunai neared, he waited until it raised its hammer before jumping to his feet, ducking under the arc of the swing, and popping the spring loaded stake out from his sleeve. He rammed the stake in the Charunai’s chest several times, the stake punching deep and bring up swells of sky blue blood (he was right), and it grunted in annoyance before shoving him away so hard that Angel thought there’d be a hand shaped bruise on his chest. He’d hurt it, but he was nowhere disabling or killing it, as the hammer swinging towards him seemed to indicate. He ducked the hammer and jumped straight towards the Charunai, driving the stake right through the center of its forehead.

It took all his strength, and the stake shattered along with bits of the Charunai’s skull, but it teetered back, losing its balance as Angel hit the ground and rolled aside, hoping to avoid the Charunai and its hammer.

Kier had a stake with him - of course he did; he was fairly sure Naomi was the only one of the team who left home without one - and he followed his lead with the second one, stabbing him repeatedly in the stomach and torso with the stake, avoiding the hammer. But he couldn’t avoid the forearm of the Charunai, which smashed him up against the wall with bone shattering force, making Kier lose his hold on the stake. It hit the floor with a clatter, rolling away, but the first Charunai had toppled into the second one now, buying him time.

It was the opening Angel had been waiting for. He grabbed Kier’s arm, yanking him out of harm’s way, and started back down the sewer tunnel, the way they had come. “We’re leaving?” Kier wheezed. He sounded pretty badly hurt, even though he had avoided the hammer.

“We need more information - and more weapons.” He’d barely even knocked the thing off balance, even with a stake through the skull. He had no idea what it would take to kill them, but it was undoubtedly more than they had. Also, the way the Hellmouth shifted so suddenly - from not being there to suddenly being right there and gaping wide open - bothered him a great deal.

Something was very wrong with all of this. And it might just be more than they could possibly handle.

10

Logan paid a visit to the local library while waiting for Tony get back to him, mainly to see what other information he could glean on his own.

He looked up all the news stories on the headless, handless bodies, and scanned just about every article there was. The facts seemed to be the same, paltry and less than illuminating, and Leung had an unlisted number, although there was a Martin Leung in downtown Vancouver who didn’t (he was a ninety year old man, though, so probably not the one he was looking for).

Just on a lark, he decided to look up all women with the name Cressida on the Vancouver phone book webpage, but even while he set the search engine loose, he knew none would be her. She probably didn’t have a home, and if she did, it was at a motel - and like him, she would pay all in cash, and probably switch locations after a week (or even less). He searched for no-tell motels around the Chinatown area - many of which he already knew from experience (he once spent four days in a real shitty dive called the Calico, where the exterior halls reeked of piss, and he could hear through paper thin walls people fucking. The hooker that used the room next door to his never varied her “oh god, oh yes, oh god” script no matter how many clients she had that day. He seriously considered asking her to vary her routine if only not to drive him crazy). There were so many motels that it would probably take him the better part of a week to search them all, during which time she could mov! e several times over. Hell, maybe she was as paranoid as he was in his early years, and lived in a truck; he’d never find her.

He checked his email, only to find that Marc’s sole new email to him consisted of two sentences: ‘Nothing yet. Still looking.’

Since he was here and had nothing better to do for the moment, he started searching in the newspaper archive’s search engine for Carter Wilson. The only things that came up were articles involving people with Carter or Wilson as their first or last names, but nothing together. He searched Martin Leung, and came up with articles on the two trials he’d been involved with, both of which ended with him being acquitted on all charges (one was on racketeering charges; another was on immigration violations, as he was supposedly involved with a smuggling ring - if Leung was genuinely innocent on either charge, Logan felt monkeys would fly out of his butt and form a kick line). Ellison wasn’t lying about him being a “Teflon don”, but he already knew that.

Lafayette’s name just turned up a rote puff piece on the Joint Task Force, and he decided to enter Stryker’s name on a whim as his cell phone rang. It was Tagawa, with Leung’s address. Logan scribbled it on a piece of paper, barely glancing at the results on screen. Only after he’d hung up did he look up and see he was simply mentioned as a “visiting Army officer” at a base commission, with some Canadian and American soldiers standing behind him at attention. Some of the soldiers were in the photo, although most were cropped. He glared at his smug, fat face, and wished he could kill him a second time, as he noticed the slightly blurred face of one of the soldiers just visible over Stryker’s left shoulder. He noticed him because he’d just seen in his face in a previous newspaper article.

Leung.

After a moment when he was sure he was seeing things, he went back through the information in the newspaper articles on Leung. If he’d been in the military, they’d have mentioned it, and no one did. Neither did Ellison, and since Ellison was under the impression he was some kind of military black ops guy, he’d have probably mentioned it.

What the hell did this mean: Leung had changed his name/assumed the identity of someone else? Leung was connected in some fashion to the Organization … or used to be? He couldn’t quite make sense of that, although the more he turned it around in his head, the more he realized it wasn’t a stretch for someone in the Organization to branch out into organized crime. Was that how Cressy had come into this?

He did a search for the military base named in the article, but it seemed like a legitimate military base, with too much press coverage to be affiliated with the Organization. They needed the dark to operate in, much like cockroaches.

He had a lot of questions for Martin, but he suddenly wondered if he’d be able to get any answers.

****

It was Kier’s turn to hold his ribs and be in pain, but Angel got no enjoyment out of it. Not only did it feel like his spleen and his stomach were trying to pull themselves back together deep inside himself, but just telling the story of their near defeat was humiliating in itself.

Giles felt he made the right call on the Charunai. The only way they could be hurt was by being cut - for some reason, nothing else worked against them, from fire to bullets to being attacked with a sledgehammer - but the problem was if it wasn’t an instant killing blow (difficult even under the best of circumstances), they’d be right back after you, and perfectly fine.

And this was totally unconnected to the fact that, much like their indestructible sewer monster, they weren’t supposed to exist in this dimension. They were indeed guardians of the underworld, and only guarded; they had no design beyond that, which also explained why they were built like tanks.

Giles had a theory about that odd “Hellmouth” they encountered, though. “It’s probably not a proper Hellmouth, but a transitory gateway,” he explained. “If someone does a Hellmouth ritual improperly - or any kind of dimensional gateway ritual improperly - it can be unstable and unstuck in one of any number of ways: by location, and within time.”

“Unstuck in time?” Bren exclaimed in disbelief. His black eye had mostly healed by now, with only a bit of puffiness and slightly yellowed skin lingering behind. “Isn’t that the plot of “Slaughterhouse Five”?”

Kier gave him a pained but curious look. “A horror movie?”

Even Xander gave Kier a scornful look, and when Xander got a reference to a book that you didn’t get, you were a sad state of affairs. (Himbo indeed.) “Time is a dimension,” Giles explained, ignoring Kier’s dumb ass comment. “It would explain why it appeared so suddenly - it’s only physically here at certain times. There’s probably a rhyme and reason to it, but we’d need to study it for a while to discern it.”

“Can we close it?” Angel wondered.

The fact that Giles didn’t answer immediately was troubling. “If I can figure out what spell was used, I believe so.”

“How do we do that?” Xander asked. Again, when had he employed him?

Giles grimaced and glanced towards the shuttered blinds over the front window. “We don’t, I do. And I’m not really sure.”

Angel suddenly got a strange sensation, a feeling of power that made his eye twitch, and the office door swung open. “Ta da!” Bob announced grandly, with a flourish of his hands. He then bowed deeply, as if acknowledging the applause of a grateful audience. “I am back from deepest, darkest discorporation, to tell you not to book a vacation there.” He straightened up, his golden brown hair flopping into his electric cobalt eyes, and a big grin split his improbably handsome face. “G’day Bruces. So Lia told me you called, but she couldn’t be assed to care about what you had to say. Need my help with anything?”

“I can’t believe I’m going to say this,” Giles said before pausing to take a deep, steeling breath. After he exhaled, he continued, “I’m glad you’re here.”

Bob clutched his chest over his heart, staggering and leaning against the doorframe as if he had a genuine heart attack. “Good lord - I’m in the wrong universe!” He then assumed his usual casual posture, grinning his smart ass grin, waiting to hear the rest of it. He was wearing his usual leather pants and biker boots (although these were generously adorned with chains), and his t-shirt this time was worn and dun brown, with “Sanitized For You Protection” emblazoned across the chest in thin black letters.

Bob eventually came in and flopped down on the couch beside Xander as they told him about the sewer monster and the disappearing Hellmouth. Xander looked a bit uncomfortable having Bob so close to him, and Angel wondered if it had to do with him giving him back his eye. It wasn’t that he wasn’t grateful; he was, and that was the problem. How grateful he was made him feel deeply embarrassed, and he didn’t know how to look Bob in the eye, or treat him the same way he had before. Who had said you should never look your god in the eye? He couldn’t remember, but as advice went, it was excellent.

Bob simply listened as Giles filled him in on what was going on, quirking a gold eyebrow but remaining otherwise expressionless, until he was done speaking. Then he clapped his hands together, smiled, and exclaimed, “Well mate, we’re totally fucked.”

Bren stared at him in slack jawed shock. “You can’t help us?”

‘No, I can, but there’s a coupla problems,” Bob admitted, running a hand through his hair. “Ain’t anything I can do about the eac uisge. It’s a bestial type of demon, meaning it has no higher brain I can effect; it’s a creature of pure instinct. I can’t make it do squat. The Hellmouth I may be able to help you with, at least if you need to find it, as I’m pretty sensitive to dimensional rifts - if it’s about to show up, I’ll know first.”

“What about the Charunai?” Angel prompted.

Bob winced, tilting his head to one side. “Well, the thing about guardian demons … do you know what they’re guarding?”

“A gateway.”

“Yeah, mate, but what are they guarding it from?”

What was Bob getting at? He glared at him, wondering why he had to play mind games now. “Trespassers, interlopers.”

Bob scoffed. “Yeah, right - people are just linin’ up to jump into a hell dimension, huh? Trespassers would die if they got through, and if they were demonic enough to survive the transition, they actually wouldn’t mind bein’ there, nor would the master of the realm mind hostin’ ‘em. No, guardian demons are made to guard against threats that could genuinely hurt the master of the realm.”

Giles made a slightly breathless noise, like he’d just been punched, and he leaned against the bookcase, eyes cast down at the carpet. “Gods. They guard against gods.”

“Bingo! Give the man a stuffed pink monkey. I can’t effect Charunai either. And here’s a fun fact I bet you don’t know about ‘em - if one dies, another pops up to take its place, as long as its portal is open.”

“There’s no way to beat them?” Angel asked, wondering if things could possibly get worse. Wasn’t Bob supposed to be the demonic equivalent of a “Get out of jail free” card? He was supposed to be a deus ex machina, and it seemed disillusioning that he wasn’t.

“Technically, no. But I bet I can keep ‘em distracted while you guys try and close the portal. I’m a genuine threat, and they will be more interested in stopping me than in stopping you, and I’ll give ‘em good reason to do it. All you gotta do is figure out what spell was fucked up that allowed the portal to get all itchy in the first place.” He paused briefly, clearly thinking about it. “I bet the key’s with the Minawarans. Why would the Charunai hurt them? They’re insects - quite literally, in fact. The Charunai never should’ve given them a second glance. Why did they?”

That was a good question, and one Angel had been pondering since he and Kier came back from the sewers. The Minawarans were harmless in a general sense, and against Charunai, even a nuclear weapon wouldn’t level the playing field for them. So why? “Perhaps they had something dangerous,” Angel speculated aloud,

“Dangerous?” Bren repeated, trying hard to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “What could they have that would be dangerous to the Charunai?”

Suddenly Giles gasped and wheeled around, searching the bookshelf almost frantically. “The Michaellan Codex,”

“What?” Xander asked, finally speaking up for the first time since Bob had arrived. He still wouldn’t look at him.

“It was a book I found hidden in the Minawarans nest,” Giles explained, finding the battered old leather volume and pulling it out. He quickly began rifling through its pages, looking for something. “It has spells for opening dimensional portals.”

“Oh, those greedy buggers,” Bob said, getting Giles’s point. “ They opened the portal, or tried. What, our trash isn’t good enough for ‘em, they gotta get more?”

“Are you serious?” Kier asked, eyes wide in surprise. “Ted didn’t seem that stupid.”

“Greed makes idiots of the best of men,” Bob told him, and it sounded like he was speaking from experience.

So even though Bob had claimed to be almost useless here, he had seemed to turn the tide for them. Giles scanned the pages, and figured out what the most likely spell they tried was, meaning they could actually formulate a plan of action. Giles needed a few items, though, so Giles left with a grateful Xander in tow to hit the nearest magic supply store and pick up the items he didn’t have.

Bren was wondering what they’d need in the form of the weapons, but Bob seemed very dismissive of it, saying they could carry weapons if it made them feel better, but they probably wouldn’t need to use them. “Don’t you need some?” Bren pointed out. Bren was so accustomed to Bob he couldn’t be awed by him, which Angel always found heartening. “Or do you have your own machetes?”

Bob gave him that rangy grin, his eyes sparkling with mirth. “Well, I am an arms dealer, it’d be funny if I didn’t have my own weapons. But I ain’t gonna need ‘em, ‘cause I got a weapon right here.” He tapped his temple with his forefinger.

Angel scowled. “I thought you had no effect on them.”

“I don’t. But see, I’m sending Logan to keep them occupied. The Charunai wanna fight? Oh brother, they’re gettin’ a fight like they won’t believe.”

He exchanged a puzzled look with Bren before glancing back at him. “Bob, Logan’s in Vancouver.”

He nodded as if that was self-evident. “Yep, but he’s my avatar.”

“So? Does that give you the right to just yank him from wherever he is and make him do something for you?”

Bob chuckled. “Ang, you’re not gettin’ it. Logan got some stuff from me ‘cause we shared a body and mind, right? You think that’s a one way street?”

He crossed his arms over his chest, suddenly getting what he was saying. “You got something from Logan?”

“Too right. Logan, bless his hirsute heart, can fight like a motherfucking nightmare. Now me, I’m just a passable street brawler; I learned to use my fists well enough to survive the East End and Botany Bay, but never more than that. No need really. After being in Logan’s mind and seeing all he knows about fighting - including stuff he doesn’t realize he knows or remembers - I’m scared of him. He could be a guardian demon if he was, y’know, a demon.” Suddenly he mimicked Logan’s voice with eerie perfection. “I can beat every son of a bitch in this joint.” Bob then grinned, showing off his white teeth, before reverting to his regular voice. “Makes me feel kinda invincible.”

“Aren’t you already invincible?” Bren pointed out.

“Naw mate, I’m just hard to kill. But I never felt like I could take on an army in hand to hand combat.” Bob smiled again, but this time there was something sly and sharp about his grin, something dangerous. “Now I’m just dyin’ to try.”

Suddenly it occurred to Angel that maybe Bob learning from Logan wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

11

English Bay was actually a fairly well to do urban neighborhood fronting a stretch of beach, not too far from Stanley Park. There weren’t many private homes, but lots of apartment and condos, and none of them cheap. You usually paid dearly for a view of the water, even in a place like Vancouver, where it rained so much you sometimes felt you were already underwater. It was one of those weird things that never made a whole lot of sense.

Logan felt a bit out of place wandering the streets in his battered leather jacket and worn jeans, but not too many people gave him a second glance, probably thinking he was an arty hipster wannabe who was about ten years out of date. “Slumming” never completely went out of style.

Leung lived in an expensive condo, a gleaming silver and glass building taller than any other, which was saying a lot in this area. So many phallic jokes came to mind he smirked as he reeled them off in his head. The developers were missing out on a gold mine here. Who wouldn’t want to move to Big Dick Bay? Seriously, there’d be waiting lists to move in, no matter how expensive it was.

He realized he’d picked up a couple of tails as he walked down a sidewalk lined with slender shade trees, their silver-green leaves seemingly shimmering in the breeze off the water. He unobtrusively glanced back while pretending to glance at his watch and ogle a young girl who sauntered by in a skirt so short he could see the heart tattoo on the inside of her right thigh. (He could also see all the goose bumps on her exposed flesh, and wondered anew why people suffered for fashion. Who actually gave a shit?)

His tails were both big men, but to his surprise only one was Chinese; the other was white. Was this proof of some kind of Organization? Or was the guy simply hired muscle, cannon fodder, a first line of defense meant to test how strong the threat was? He supposed there was only one way to find out.

There was an alleyway between Leung’s shiny, dildo shaped condo and another apartment building, although it was like no alley he was familiar with. For one thing it was wide enough to drive a car through quite comfortably, and it looked like someone had swept (!) the damn thing. There was a dumpster, but it looked clean, didn’t reek like most did, and had a lock to prevent dumpster diving. The rich really were different, and sometimes they were just fucking creepy.

Would the men follow him? Well, they were committed, so they had to do something that stupid if that was their job. He leaned against the wall beside the dumpster and waited. When the men appeared at the mouth of the alley, looking in cautiously, he stepped from behind it, head cocked to the side in an unanswered question.

“When did you make us?” the Chinese guy asked, reaching into his pocket. The white guy had a gun with a silencer out already, but what the Chinese guy pulled out was a taser … or a paralyzer?

Logan shrugged. “Does it matter?”

He shook his head wearily. “We know who you are, we’re ready for you. We’ll take you in undamaged if you just come along quietly. Otherwise we’re gonna hafta fuck you up.”

Logan chuckled, aware there were men coming in from behind him. As soon as he ducked into the alley they probably figured they were made, and made a call to bring in the back up to cut him off. Behind him, he actually heard the metallic “shhh” of a sword being slid out of its scabbard, and he realized they were going to attack him with every weapon they could find, everything but the kitchen sink (and only because those were awkward to handle). “You Org?” he asked, just curious, not expecting an answer.

This time it was the white guy who looked at him funny, pale blue eyes narrowing in distaste as he aimed his handgun at his head. “I don’t know what the fuck you just said, but I don’t like it.”

The instant his finger squeezed the trigger, Logan ducked, and the bullet just missed him and slammed into one of the men behind him with a meaty noise, followed almost instantly by a surprised “Uh”. Logan didn’t waste time, nor did he bother to even look at the two men who had tailed him into the alley. He sprung his claws and dove into the crowd of men behind him, not bothering with finesse. He tore through flesh blindly, shattering any physical weapon that fell into his eye line, and figured there were at least a dozen men.

Someone wielded a spiked chain that wrapped around his arm, digging in metal teeth, as the swordsman finally showed and chopped down on his other arm. It sliced through his skin and muscles so sharply and sweetly it barely hurt until it hit adamantium bone, although by that time Logan had grabbed the chain and ripped it out of its owner’s hand, and brought the end of the chain slashing across the swordsman’s face.

He made a sick noise as the chain’s teeth cut his eyes, and Logan grabbed the sword with his chain wrapped hand and yanked it out of his left shoulder. He grunted in pain as he did it, the metal teeth now biting deep into his palm, and lashed the sword out in a wide arc, catching several men in a single blow. He kicked one in the leg with bone shattering force, breaking the limb with an audible crack, and elbowed another coming up behind him in the face, shattering his nose and splattering warm blood on the back of his neck. He wrapped the spike chain around the neck of the man trying to taser him and kicked him away, then used the sword to slice the hand of another gunman.

It was weird, but he liked the feel of the sword in his hand. It was a decent one, of a good weight and balance, and something in the back of his mind knew this; he knew how to use a sword, how the blade was simply an extension of the arm, and it made him feel oddly calm and centered. He didn’t precisely know why, but holding the sword made him feel different. Human?

Maybe; maybe not. But now he found himself wondering if using a sword would trigger more concrete memories, perhaps even good ones, which would be novel.

With a roar that was equal parts anger and triumph, he charged into the remaining crowd of men, sword flashing in the pale sun, and wondered how many he’d have to cut through before he got his answers.