Someone hit him with a taser - he could taste the electricity in his mouth, feel it coursing through his skeleton - but it wasn't enough; the charge needed to be greater to overcome the rush of adrenaline (or his healing factor; he honestly wasn't sure which). He got hit from behind, so it was easy to simply turn around, bringing the sword around with him, and he sliced the man who tased him, nearly taking his arm clean off. The sword sliced the air with a rush of wind, a sound like the air itself parting before it. It was a beautiful sword. It'd be a shame to break it.

Someone shot him at point blank range, aiming for his head but hitting his neck instead, and blood spewed out the wound even as he chopped the gun (and several of his fingers) out of his hand. The man screamed and fell back, and Logan kept fighting the few remaining upright men, even as dizziness started to overcome him, even as he skidded in his own blood. He was healing of course, he could feel the warmth boiling at the site of the wound, but it was actually a major artery he'd hit. Every second the wound took to close was another second's worth of blood lost.

Finally he was done, and leaned against the dumpster, panting, blood pouring down his arm from his neck and other people's blood dribbling down the silvered blade of the sword. There were men all over the alley floor, bleeding and groaning (if they were capable of noise at all), and he realized that there were more than a dozen - more reinforcements must have come in during the fight.

After what seemed like an eternity, the wound on his neck closed, the blood remaining inside his body, and a second later he grabbed a coat from the body of the nearest man - it wasn't too bloody - using it to wipe the blood off his hand, neck, and jacket, and off the blade of the sword. He knew he couldn't take the sword with him, but maybe he could hide it and come back for it afterward. Honestly, he had no idea why he wanted to keep it, but he felt he should.

He hid the sword inside a huge ornamental planter in front of the condo, where another ornamental tree struggled to survive in this paved wasteland. The haft of the sword was hidden by a spray of greenery, the blade sunk so deep in the soil that hardly any appeared above it.

The condo had a security system where you had to be buzzed in by someone, so he randomly buzzed a couple units with the deliberately unhelpful, "Dude, it's me; let me in," until someone did indeed buzz him in. He could have simply sliced open the locks and walked in, but that probably would have set off an alarm, and besides, this was actually easier. Security like this was only as tight as the people in charge of it, and most people just weren't that paranoid. (Lucky them.)

They'd said they were ready for him. So why weren't they? Maybe they thought the paralyzer alone would do it, perhaps combined with a shot to the head. It might put him down for a minute, tops, but not long. Was it an idle threat to scare him away? If they knew him like they claimed, they'd have known he didn't scare away; threatening to hurt him just piqued his curiosity. He was almost dying to know if they could.

The elevator up to Leung's place was as quiet and smooth as a German sports car, the lift air conditioned to almost within an inch of its life and smelling faintly of lemon cleanser. This was more proof the rich were indeed different, and he had to squelch an obnoxious smart ass urge to pee in the corner. Hey, if poorer people had to tolerate elevators that smelled like piss, why not the rich?

Leung had a huge floor basically all to himself, so the elevator opened on a very narrow corridor that led to a single door. The door was steel core, solid, built to take battering rams and a fusillade of bullets. But built to take him? No fucking way.

Again, there was no need for finesse, but in this case there was no way to do it anyways. He popped a single claw and ran it in the credit card thin gap between the door and the jamb, slicing through locks as easily as if they were made of silk. Crumbs of metal hit the floor, but only made the faintest of noises in the outside hall - the inside was so richly carpeted that there was no noise of impact whatsoever.

After that, it was a simple thing to simply push the door open. It swung open on a large living room with a beige and brass color scheme, light from the windows pouring in and making the beige carpet look like a layer of sand. There was a large sectional sofa in buttery leather, currently empty, facing a plasma screen t.v. embedded in the wall, which was currently off and simply glowing in the light. What if Leung wasn't home? He supposed he could wait for him, and wouldn't that be fun? Maybe he'd bring a whole bunch of bodyguards with him. He'd enjoy getting blood all over his expensive place, although he doubted that Leung would live long enough to really be tortured by it. ( A pity, but hey, that's the way things worked.)

Once he was inside, he realized there was an incongruous smell, one that seemed to be coming from a closed room he assumed was the bedroom. The closer he got, the more the smell started to overwhelm him, and ten feet from the door he had to stop and take breaths through his mouth, fighting a rising tide of nausea, as his eyes burned. It felt like he was inhaling glass shards.

It was like a woman had spilled an entire bottle of perfume somewhere near the doorway; Joy he thought it was called. Anyway, it was overpowering his senses, he could taste it in his mouth like bile, and his first instinct was to run away from it. He hated perfumes at the best of times - even lightly applied they were usually too much for his sense of smell - but so lavishly slathered on like this it was pure torture. In fact, there was no way in hell a woman would wear that much perfume - she’d have had to have bathed in it. There’s no way someone could be wearing it, in fact; it must have been simply spilled, a whole bottle emptied out on the carpet.

And that’s when it hit him. The goon had said they were ready for him, but he really wasn’t speaking for the men downstairs - he was speaking for the ones up here. The ones downstairs were simply there to test him, to see if he could get past them. The ones up here were the ones who were actually ready for him. Well, fuck it if he was going to get taken down by perfume.

Breathing through his mouth in spite of the horrible taste of perfume clinging to his mouth, coating his throat, he kicked the door open, and was met by a barrage of rounds - not bullets but drug tipped darts. He slashed some out of the air but several hit his chest and throat, even as he dived into the shooting men and ripped through them, shredding body armor and skin.

Until every nerve ending in his body began to burn.

A man in the back, hidden by his body armor, pulled off his full face helmet, revealing himself as Leung, as Logan tried to bull through the drug in his system. But the use of his legs was gone, and he hit the floor as the pain began to scream through him. It felt like his throat was locking up, his windpipe swelling shut, as he continued to futilely try and fight it, black spots appearing in his vision.

“Isn’t it painful?” Leung asked, giving him a cold, savage grin. “It’s a new neurotoxin that was just developed by the Taiwanese last year. So new I had a feeling even your legendary drug immunity wouldn’t be able to handle it. I certainly hope it doesn’t kill you … even though, really, it should.”

Logan tasted blood in his mouth, fresh gouts with the bitter taste of poison, and felt it foaming from his lips, his muscles spasming and feeling like they were turning to stone as his lungs shriveled and screamed for air. He was seriously going to kill this bastard. He was going to take his time, and do it with a fucking cheese grater.

But the best thing, he decided before he passed out, was at least he couldn’t smell that fucking perfume anymore.

****

Bren knew he should be comforted by having Bob around, and yet the spell of him, of his charisma and sheer power, wasn’t working like it usually did. Maybe because Bob had already admitted he couldn’t do much against the Charunai, or anything against the eac … Nessie, the sewer monster. (Eidetic memory or not, he couldn’t quite wrap his tongue around the name of that demon without sounding like he was coughing up a hairball.)

He looked through the weapons cabinet for reassurance, and even though Bob said they weren’t going to have to fight, he found a Walther PPK in the locked lower drawer and took it out, making sure it was loaded before securing it in a shoulder holster and putting it on. Altogether he had an adamantium knife, the gun, and his usual stake, and they made him feel better, even though he knew from what Kier and Angel told him that if they engaged the Charunai, it’d be just as good as pelting them with paperclips. Oh well, he couldn’t imagine dying without fighting it every step of the way.

They were ready to go, Giles and Angel had the magic stuff, and for some reason Xander wanted to come along, although no one thought that was a good idea. Bren had just grabbed his coat and slipped it on when Bob came into the “armory”. “Finally gonna get a weapon?” he wondered.

Bob smirked, shaking his head. Bren would have sworn he was still wearing the same brown t-shirt as before, but now it read, in thick red letters ‘I came here to kick ass and chew bubble gum - and I’m all out of bubble gum’ . “Naw, I’m good. I was just wonderin’ why you were trailin’ around the big guilt thing. Don’t.”

He looked at him, eyes narrowing in distaste, but he couldn’t really tell Bob off, could he? Well, he could, but it’d do him no damn good at all; it’d probably roll off him like water on a duck. “Look, it’s bad enough that Angel and Logan can read me like a book -”

“You feel bad ‘cause you think you’re usin’ him,” Bob interrupted, sliding his hands into the front pocket of his snazzy leather pants. Bren always wanted to give leather pants a shot, but they seemed too expensive, and frankly, just a bit too gay. He was out, sure, but he was hardly the flaming type.

He knew he was talking about Kier. “Don’t. I don’t wanna -”

“Do you think he loves you?”

That made him laugh. “No.”

“Do you think that’s what he wants from you?”

“Hell no.”

“So why feel bad that you don’t love him? I think you both know the game here. He tried to use you, now you’re using him. Fair’s fair. Even Kier has no problem with that. He’s a vampire; using is what he does to survive.”

Bob could make everything sound reasonable, but wasn’t that scary in itself? “Can you, uh …”

Bob cocked his head, as if listening to his thoughts, his blue eyes bright with curiosity. He was so handsome it was difficult not to fall in instant lust with him, and yet the more you got to know him, the more you fell under the sway of his tremendous, supernatural charisma, the more you began to get just a little frightened. He was gorgeous, he was sweet, he gave off the aura of an angel that you’d love to snuggle, and yet there was an undercurrent that if he suddenly decided to be mercurial, he could obliterate you with a single word. He was so potentially dangerous it sometime seemed like he was the world’s sweetest poison. “You want me to hit him with some mojo, huh? Change him?”

Put so baldly, he realized what a shitty thing it was to even suggest. He felt he had to explain himself. “He’s going to turn on us someday, isn’t he? I mean, he probably won’t be able to help it …”

“Probably. It’s in a vampires nature, and I suspect that it’s in Kier’s nature as well. He was shallow and self-oriented before his transformation. But you want me to change that.”

“No! I mean … well …I’m not sure exactly.”

Bob’s smile was strangely kind, and he got the weird feeling that he was going to ruffle his hair. (He didn’t, but he was sure Bob meant to.) “All evidence to the contrary, I believe in free will, and Kier’s redemption won’t mean shit if he doesn’t come by it honestly. He has a choice. If he makes the wrong one, it’ll be the death of him. Hopefully he’s smart enough to figure that one out.” Bob then walked to the door, and held it open. “C’mon kiddo, everybody’s ready to get this show on the road.”

Had Bob just said that Kier would die if he tried to screw them over? Was that a threat, or a statement of fact? Bob’s face - handsome, cheerful, watchful - was almost impossible to read. You knew what he wanted you to know, and no more.

It was so weird to have someone make you feel so safe and so scared at the very same time. Perhaps he should just be happy that Bob was on their side, and leave it at that.

They didn’t need to waste time with getting to the site or risking an encounter with Nessie, as Bob simply teleported them there en masse, about two tunnels down from where Angel said the portal was. It was considered a good distance, one that would allow them to make sure the portal was there and let them figure out where the Charunai were in relation to it. As it turned out, their luck remained on the wonky side. “There’s no portal,” Bob reported, not even bothering to look around the bend in the corner.

Giles did, just to make sure, as Xander said, “Oh great. When the hell is it gonna show up again?”

“Fairly soon, actually,” Bob assured him. “I can feel it building.”

“Good,” Kier said, running his hand through his hair nervously. “I really don’t wanna hang around here longer than we hafta.”

Was he that scared of Nessie, or the Charunai? Or was he just afraid of not being able to get the stink out of his clothes? Could have gone either way.

Giles went over things once more, so everyone knew exactly what they were supposed to do and when. He, Angel, and Xander all had a role to play in the closing of the portal along with Giles, while Kier would simply be standing guard. They each had a part to play, but Bren knew he had a key one - his blood would play a big part in the ritual. Apparently Human/demon blood was both powerful and a time saving shortcut; that was one of the reasons why he had an adamantium knife (the other being in case some Charunai slipped past Bob, as unlikely as that was).

“Here we go,” Bob suddenly said, and then began counting down. “Five … four … three … two …” he then pointed down the tunnel, as if cuing someone.

Bren felt it hit him then; a powerful, palpable sense of power and pure evil, one that brought out his Brachen side unbidden. “Holy shit,“ he muttered. Angel wasn’t kidding about the feeling just falling on you, pulling at you like invisible hands. Both Angel and Kier had their vamp faces on, probably just as unbidden as his.

“Give me a minute to garner their full attention,” Bob said. “Then just walk on by. They won’t notice you.”

“And you can guarantee that?” Kier asked nervously. Yeah, he didn’t want to face the Charunai again.

Bob turned the full wattage of his brilliant grin on them, something in his eyes both amused and coldly calculating. “Oh yeah. They won’t believe the shit that’s about to come down on them.”

Bren almost felt bad for them.

Bob didn’t so much walk down the tunnel as saunter, clearly unconcerned, and he made no attempt to sneak up on them. He started singing at the top of his lungs, his voice echoing down the tunnels. “The fallen are the virtuous among us, walk among us. If you judge us, we’re all damned.”

Bob was barely half way down the first tunnel when Bren caught his first glimpse of the Charunai, responding to Bob’s loud incursion with a frightening rapidity. They were big, ugly, and blue all right, and those big stone hammers they carried would have been funny if they didn’t look like they could squash an elephant flat. The clutch of horns that seemed to grow out of the top of their heads looked like a punk cut in a strange sort of way. A punk cut that could fatally pierce organs if they head butted you. The two Charunai stood at the mouth of the tunnel that Bob was sauntering towards, their hammers crossed - a major way of saying “get the fuck back before we turn you into hummus”.

“Now boys, you’d best let me pass,” Bob said amiably. “I don’t wanna hurt you. I’m just here for your lord and master, whoever he is. This is my town, and I don’t appreciate the incursion.” The Charunai didn’t even blink; they could have been statues. Bob paused as if hesitating. “Huh. You gonna make me pull out the big guns, huh? You should know I know this guy who has a lot of problems, but he’s got two things goin’ for him: he can fight, and he will fight anything. And he has these cool accessories …” Bob held his arms out to the side, and judging from the postures of everyone around him, no one knew what Bob was doing at first. It almost looked like he was bleeding from the hands, but it was just cobalt blue energy gathering there, growing out from his hands like … claws.

Oh shit, Bob had just given himself energy replicas of Logan’s claws.

“He can do that?” Kier asked, shocked. “I didn’t know he could do that!” Angel looked at Giles, who shook his head faintly - none of them had known Bob could do that.

Bob held them up as if admiring his own handiwork, his veins standing out in relief on his arms and neck, snakes of blue energy barely contained beneath his skin, while the energy now filled his eye sockets and bled out into the air. You could feel the sudden increase of power like static electricity, and even the Charunai responded to it, uncrossing their hammers and advancing on Bob. It wasn’t the claws or his insouciance more than it was all that power he was suddenly giving off that made him the major threat - in fact, the only genuine threat to them. No wonder Bob was certain they wouldn’t pay any attention to the rest of them.

“Go away now and I won’t hurt you,” Bob said, but at the end of the statement his voice turned slightly gravelly. It was half of what Angel called his “god” voice - a voice that seemed to curl your nerve endings, made your ears throb and your knees want to buckle - and half Logan’s voice.

One of the Charunai answered him by swinging the hammer towards him. Bob simply jumped back, and let the hammer slam down onto the floor where he had been. It hit so hard Bren could have sworn he felt the sewer floor shake, and the cement cracked, spider-webbing out from the impact point. “Okay, but I warned ya,” Bob said, and then moved suddenly, stepping up on the hammer and slashing out, cutting right through the Charunai’s face, splattering its sky blue blood on the far wall.

The demon was stunned - were its eyes gone? - and staggered back, letting go of its hammer, while his pal swung his own hammer, aiming for Bob’s head. Bob ducked and brought his claw around in a sharp arc, severing the hammer head from the handle. It flew away with such force the hammer head buried itself six inches in the wall, and before the demon could realize what had just happened, Bob jumped up and essentially drop kicked the Charunai in the face, turning in mid-air and landing on his feet in a crouch before them. “Seriously, is that all you’ve got?” he taunted. “’Cause I’m gonna hafta tell your boss you guys suck.”

Out of nowhere, a Charunai blinked into existence besides Bob, and since it was in mid-swing when it seemed to materialize, its hammer slammed into Bob so hard it sent him flying through the far wall, leaving a Bob shaped hole in the concrete as it threw him into the neighboring tunnel. Bren winced, and was sure he was … okay, maybe not dead, but definitely badly mashed, and yet the concrete hadn’t stopped falling from the hole when blue energy claws sprung through the wall and cut a wider gap, allowing Bob to dive through the new hole and bury both his claws in the Charunai’s chest. It grunted, maybe in pain or shock (or both), and suddenly there was a fourth Charunai there, grabbing for Bob, who used his claws to cut its grasping arm off. Bob had a split lip that was oozing blue blood down his chin, and tears in his skin on his face and arms, but they were leaking energy as much as blood. It was eerie and unsettling, doubly so since he was grinning in that strange, angr! y way that Logan sometimes did, a leer that verged on madness, his teeth now blue with blood. “Come on you pussies!” he crowed. “Tryin’ to tickle me to death?”

Yet another Charunai appeared from thin air, but Bob had somehow anticipated him, lunging at him and burying his claws in his face, his momentum sending the pair of them through the gap in the sewer wall as a couple of hammers came down on the concrete where he’d been a millisecond before. The Charunai burst through the wall and followed him into the second tunnel, leaving the way clear - for the moment.

“Let’s go,” Angel said, leading the way down the tunnel. They tried to avoid the splattered blood as best they could, but there was much more than Bren had initially thought. As they walked past the hole, he glanced in and could barely see Bob for the scrum of angry, bloody Charunai and their swinging hammers. Bren suddenly remembered that night Logan fought the Octavian match against all those demons once they let everybody out in hopes of killing him. There were so many of them Bren was sure that Logan was dead, he was drowning in a sea of demons, but Logan practiced what he preached. He always said you shouldn’t worry about sheer numbers, that you simply focused on the battle before you, and if you fought enough battles, the war would take care of itself. He proved that by somehow killing enough of his attackers to gain a little room to move (although he’d seen him do it, Bren was certain he couldn’t break anything’s neck with his feet, as he still wasn’t sure how tha! t worked in spite of having watched it happen), and then he gained more and more, until he was the last man standing. Okay, not so much standing as leaning against the wall, trying not to pass out. But it still counted.

Bob wouldn’t get that chance. The more he fought, the more Charunai there were, until they would win by simply suffocating him with their numbers if nothing else. So they probably had to hurry up and close the portal before Bob’s body was smashed into chunky salsa, and he was left discorporated again.

But no pressure, right?

12

He came to in the trunk of a car, his hands cuffed behind his back and his ankles cuffed as well, a bag that smelled as if it had once held someone’s dirty laundry over his head.

Cute - the Beirut special.

Since he was folded up in an awkward way, it wasn’t any problem to twist himself further and pop a claw, using it to cut the chain around his ankles. He couldn’t get the chain around his wrists, but that was okay - he’d do that later. He’d have loved to have gotten the bag off - not only did it smell, but he wanted to spit out a mouthful of sour blood left over from his dose of the neurotoxin.  Unfortunately, the bag was apparently cinched around his neck; another small torture from Leung. Still, it could have been worse - it could have been doused in perfume.

The car he was in was not moving, and he could hear people talking outside it, just beyond the frame. Was one of the voices Leung? He was pretty sure it was - it sounded like he was negotiating a price for something. Him? Oh, probably. The guy had probably never met a deal he didn’t try and warp in his favor.

He heard footsteps approaching and the electronic bleep of an infrared mechanism, and the trunk sprung open, letting in cool but slightly stale air. He heard two men approach, grabbing for him, their bodies displacing air, and even though he couldn’t see them or smell them (the damn bag), he rolled over and kicked out, getting one man in the chest so hard he felt ribs crack beneath his boot heels.

But the second man hit him with a super charged paralyzer, one that pumped so many volts into him his back arched involuntarily and he had to swallow a scream. “I warned you,” Leung said mockingly, as the guy with the paralyzer grabbed Logan by the arm and dragged him out of the trunk, letting his temporarily limp body hit the ground like a sack of shit. “Even half dead, Wolverine fights. It may be futile, but it’s all he knows.”

“Eat me, you piece of shit,” he muttered as best he could. He had to fight his locked up vocal cords to do it, and it came out as sort of a slurred grumble. Still, from the way Leung smugly chuckled, he’d heard him.

The goon who had him dragged him to what felt like a metal slab, and as Logan’s muscles finally stopped spasming and he started to get feeling (and control) back to his body, the thug used something that sounded like a ratchet gun to secure his handcuffs over his head, nailed to the top of the metal plank. He could still move his feet, but that wasn’t a terrific help at the moment - after he secured him to the plank, he walked away.

“I have to give you credit, Wolverine,” Leung said (and from the sound of his voice, he was a good distance away). “I really didn’t expect you to find me and come after me so soon. You figured out things much faster than I anticipated. Good for you. I guess you’re not as dumb as you look.”

“You’re Organization,” he said, his voice starting to come back.

“I’m organized, yes. That’s why they call us organized crime, right?”

“Stop fucking around. What are you planning to do with me?”

Leung was deliberately silent for a long time, before finally saying, “I don’t know why they bothered with you for so long. A good telepath should be able to program you in no time flat, but you’re so fucking unstable. Isn’t that funny? You’d be a brainwashed zombie forever, except for the fact that you have a tendency towards breakdowns, and that mental instability saved you. It’s almost like your mental weakness was a defense mechanism - you could only be reprogrammed for so long before it all started to fall apart. Aren’t you the least bit curious as to how long a really good telepathic rogering would last? If the slate was totally wiped clean? Aren’t you curious?”

His stomach burned. He was probably just taunting him, and yet … what if he wasn’t? “The Organization won’t deal. They’ll kill you and take me back regardless.”

“Oh, I’m sure. But you’re much too valuable to sell back to them. I have other plans for you.”