“Understand it’s nothing personal,” Leung continued, sounding amused. “It was great that you got the Yakuza to take out Manniwa, although I kind of liked the dickhead. He was running the Yakuza around here into the ground, and that was pretty fun to watch.”

“Who are you?” he asked, pretty sure the guy wouldn’t give him an answer.

“Martin Leung, hard working, persecuted Chinese businessman. I tell you, racism is alive and well, no matter what people say. Well, I suppose you’d know that one, although they call it specism or some other bullshit name.”

“That’s a false identity. Why are you running the Triad? Why does the Organization want a line into the Triad?”

“Why did you go soft, Logan? You could have owned the world if you really wanted to. Everyone would be afraid of you, not just think of you as a has-been burn-out working for some bullshit rich guy.”

He grunted in ill humor. Talking was good; he couldn’t see, he couldn’t smell, but he could locate exact position if he listened hard enough, and he was. He could hear the breathing of two others in the room, farther away, probably his protective thugs. There was a third man with labored breathing who had already left the room, and he figured that was the guy with broken ribs. He wasn’t going to be good in a fight right now. “So this is your big strategy? Attack my ego? Let me guess: money. This is a money thing, a way to gets lots of revenue into the Org’s coffers without attracting undue attention. That’s why you can’t be prosecuted - they step in to make sure that you don’t go down for anything. You can do whatever the fuck you want, ‘cause you know you’re gonna get away with it. Is that why you’re choppin’ up those people?”

“You shouldn’t think, Logan; thinking never was your strong suit.”

He was right though. He must have been; he could hear the amusement in his voice turn brittle. Leung was an excellent, well documented cover identity, one that could pass all sorts of muster, even legal ones. Maybe Leung was a real guy, one that this Leung replaced. There were mutants with abilities that rendered plastic surgery into a quaint idea. “Why are you using Chameleon? What do you have on her?”

Leung chuckled, but it was cold. “You figured that one out as well? I truly am impressed. Have you had help?”

“Actually, I ran into him leaving the club,” a man said. Suddenly there was a wet noise, a sound like someone punching meat, and Leung gasped in shock even before the body hit the floor.

“Cressida?” Logan asked, sure he knew the noise of her transformation and that of a person who suddenly got on the wrong side of her.

“You’re not invulnerable to bullets,” Leung growled - he was surely talking to Cressida.

“You gotta hit me first,” she said, her voice transforming from a man’s to a woman’s in mid-sentence.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Leung demanded.

“Did you think I was your pet because I liked it?” she hissed bitterly. “Did you think I was that stupid?” After a pause, she added, “Be ready.”

“Be ready for what?” Leung asked, sounding irritated.

But Logan got it: she was talking to him.

“I’m not letting you sell him to Samsonov. He’s not a product you can auction off; he’s a person.”

Leung scoffed. “Oh please; he’s nothing but an animal. And neither are you.” Logan didn’t need to see to know Leung was going to shoot, but Cressy clearly knew that too, because even as the gunshot rang out, there was almost instantly a sound of impact, the air rushing out from Leung in an “oof”. He then fell against Logan, the gun clattering across the floor.

It was so ludicrously simple it was almost funny. He simply wrapped one of his legs around Leung’s neck, scissoring the man between them, jamming the inside of his knee just below his ear, squeezed, and twisted. Leung briefly grabbed his leg, tried to move one, but then his neck shattered with a sickening crack. He shuddered once, then went limp. Logan released his hold, and Leung slid to the floor.

Animal or not, he could still kick his ass, even with his hands tied.

“It’s just me,” Cressida said, before slicing through his handcuffs. As soon as she did, he grabbed the hood and yanked it off, glad to breathe in air not strained through someone’s dirty laundry bag.

Cressida stood back from him, her right arm totally transformed into a machete from fingertips to elbow, although the rest of her looked like an almost generic woman, with caramel colored skin and short black hair, her eyes the color of concrete. They just stood there staring at each other, and Logan realized they were both sizing each other up, waiting for the other to make the first move. Were they going to take each other apart? Did they have to?

Logan decided to stand down.  She had clearly endangered herself just to free him - that meant something, even if she didn’t know who in the hell he was.  Maybe Cressida always had a heroic streak, no matter which one she was.  “Was I even half right?” he asked, nodding down toward Leung’s body.

After a moment, she glanced down at him, still taking another step back, her machete arm slowly morphing into an actual arm. “You were. This is a front, although the Triad are unaware of it.”

“Of course they aren‘t. They’d never have put up with it if they knew.” He saw the dead body of one of the guards across the room, a huge hole in his broad torso; Cressy must have been the second thug, in the guise of someone else. They were in a large, dark, and empty underground parking garage, with the car he had been in the trunk of the only car currently here. There was a large metal shipping crate, though, which must have been what he had been nailed to. The air was so stale he assumed this was a closed garage, or one that hadn’t been used in a long time.

“They were Organization,” she said suddenly, and it took him a moment to realize she was referring to the headless mystery corpses. “Leung was big on punishing minor infractions like major offenses, and the Organization wanted to make sure they couldn‘t be identified by outside sources. I was sent here as a kind of … parole, I guess. I was playing along until I could get the molecular tracer out of me.”

“Did you?”

“Yeah, finally. Look, you need to get out of here; I don’t know where Samsonov is.”

“Who is he?”

“He’s essentially the Russian mafia at this point. He used to be Organization, but he’s such a powerful telepath and such a psychopath they just let him go. Believe me, you don’t want to be here when he arrives.” Cressida’s fluctuating mutation made her immune to telepaths, but she must have known he wasn’t.

“What about y-” he began, but suddenly it felt like his throat was seized by an invisible hand, and it felt like a cold bolt of electricity sizzled down his spine.

It was too late - Samsonov was here.

He felt the grip on his mind, and quickly called up a memory sure to horrify and unbalance a telepath. He remembered being in that tank of green, chemical tasting fluid, and how it felt when the scalpels cut into his flesh, turning the water dark with his own blood, feeling the muscle pulled back from his bones like he was a side of beef and being sliced up for the butcher’s display case. Sinews stretched, twisted, broke; the pain was so great, so maddening, he didn’t know why he wasn’t unconscious; instead he was sliding towards insanity, a comforting abyss where pain wouldn’t matter. Nothing would matter anymore. He shuddered reliving it, screaming in his mind as he heard the whine of the bone saws, muffled only slightly by the water cushioning his ears …

And he heard a laugh deep inside his mind. Samsonov wasn’t horrified - he was enjoying it. He was a psychopath, but more than that, he was a sadist - he enjoyed other people’s pain. Shit.

He felt disconnected from his own body, and when he opened his eyes, it wasn’t him doing it; he was a passenger in his own body, a sensation as familiar as it was terrifying. And he saw himself pop his claws and stab them deep into Cressida’s torso.

13

Bren kept repeating in his mind ‘focus on the battle, focus on the battle’, but it was excruciatingly hard.

It sounded like the entire sewer was being dismantled around them, the Charunai using both their hammers and Bob to break down the walls, and they could feel the tremors in the floor. Bren wondered if they were going to die in a cave in before they could perform the ritual.

And how much more damage could Bob take? Logan probably would have been unconscious by now, the need to heal too great to ignore. But Bob was apparently not as reliant on his physical body as others, and while he didn’t have a rapid feeling factor, he did heal faster than your average demon. So maybe he was about equivalent to Logan there, his “take it or leave it” status with a physical form giving him the edge.

But did he have the endurance that Logan had? He seemingly could fight forever without apparently wearing down, but he had no idea if Bob had the same level of endurance. Presumably because he could take or leave his physicality, he had the same level of endurance, but what if he didn’t? He’d be pretty much a washrag now, pounded as flat as a chicken breast in a Weight Watcher’s recipe. As soon as Bob could take no more, the Charunai would be on them, and how many were there now - a dozen? More?

No - he couldn’t think about that. Focus on the battle at hand, and the war will take care of itself.

Giles and Angel had drawn a circle with some kind of smudged charcoal about six feet from the dimensional portal, and they all stood in it, doing their thing. Giles was reciting a spell in some obscure language that Bren couldn’t understand; Xander was holding the stinky incense (and occasionally glancing nervously down the sewer tunnel, and Bren figured he was worried about the sewer coming down on them too); at some point in the incomprehensible spell, Angel scattered some small bones outside the circle, a combination of human and demon bones (and Bren was afraid to ask where they had gotten those, although they looked boiled and not at all fresh, which was somewhat reassuring); Kier was pacing several feet away from the circle, looking at them and back at the fight in the tunnels with equal measures of wariness; and Bren was simply standing between Angel and Xander in the circle, his adamantium knife out and poised over the palm of his left hand, waiting to get the hi! gh sign to cut himself and bleed on stuff. It was a dubious distinction.

Angel’s yellow eyes kept locking longingly on the portal, and it seemed an effort of will to tear his eyes away, and glancing back at Kier proved he found it difficult to look away from it as well. Bren felt no longing to jump into the portal, but his type of demon was different, and wasn’t as enraptured by this type of dimension. To a vampire, that was a hell dimension that was heaven, while to others it was hell. There were dimensions that could be considered heaven that would be hell to other people and demons; it all depended. Bob had said something about it all being “personal”, but he assumed that only applied to actual people. Demons seemed to have single track minds, or at least that seemed true of vampires.

The ground was starting to shake on a regular basis, and he wasn’t sure if it was the spell, the continued use of Bob as a volleyball by the Charunai, or some combination thereof. As it was, the spell was starting to have some effect; the portal was a shimmering disc that looked into a stark, evil world, but now it was starting to oscillate, and the disc was becoming oblong, seemingly fraying at the edges. Giles was starting to shout a single phrase over and over again - it was very butch; it sounded really commanding - and he looked at him, eyes flashing an urgent message, and Bren slashed the knife across his palm, glad his Brachen side was out so no one would notice him wince. He let the blood well on his palm for a second before turning it over and slapping at the air, splattering his blood on the floor, on the bones, and possibly inside the portal (he actually couldn’t tell).

But the way the portal flared, he was willing to bet his blood did hit it, and as Giles continued his macho shouting at the devil, the ground was shaking worse; so much worse that cracks started to appear in the walls around them, and small bits of concrete started flaking off. Both he and Xander exchanged a slightly panicked look, a quiet “So, we’re going to die” sort of glance, and Bren was quietly amazed that they were both so calm about it. Maybe they were just too blasé.

The portal now started to yawn, and it seemed to growing larger and closer, but Angel shouted, “Stay in the circle!” It was a trick? An optical illusion? Or were they truly screwed? He wished he knew, but he could hardly hear Giles shouting anymore, and he could feel the blistering hot winds of the other world threatening to scald them and blow them out of the circle. It was so close Bren just found it more satisfactory to close his eyes and hold onto his knife like a lifeline, squeezing his other fist shut in hopes of staunching the blood.

He tensed, waiting, but suddenly all the noise built to a crescendo and then completely disappeared, almost like a negative rush of noise. He opened his eyes with some reluctance, afraid he was now deaf, but he discovered that no, it was the portal that was gone, leaving them in a dark, cracking sewer tunnel. Giles staggered back and started to fall, although Angel caught him and held him up. “Thanks,” he said breathlessly, his face frighteningly pale and glistening with sweat. “That took more power than I anticipated.”

“Why?” Angel wondered. He was back in his Human face.

“I don’t think the being on the other side was ready for it to close.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Xander noted. He tossed the remains of his incense down on the floor and ground it out with his foot, like it was a cigarette.

“I don’t believe it was,” Giles replied. He remained master of the understatement.

Kier, also in his Human face, came up to him, holding out a bandana, which Bren took with a grateful nod and wrapped around his cut hand, tying it around the wound. He tucked the adamantium knife into the waistband of his pants. “I really thought we were fucked there.”

“We almost were,” Giles said, and he sounded confused. That was never a promising sign.

Angel looked around them, at the sewer tunnel spider webbed with fine cracks, and while it wasn’t actively crumbling, it didn’t look all that structurally sound. “We should get out of here.”

No one disagreed.

As they started down the hall, Angel helping Giles (since he so clearly needed it - was he going to be all right?) as Xander flanked them and Kier led the way, Angel asked, “Bren, you want to go get Bob?”

“Sure.” Why him? Well, Xander was out of the question - he was clearly awkward around Bob - and Kier was a little intimidated by him, so that pretty much just left him.

He walked ahead and followed the huge holes in the tunnel walls until he found the smelly, rubble strewn side tunnel where Bob lay on the floor face down, like a hit and run victim, a tiny puddle of blue blood around him. According to Bob, the Charunai would disappear as soon as the portal closed, as they were tied to the portal, but he looked around just in case, confirming that the room was empty of big blue demons before continuing inside. “Bob?” he asked curiously, his voice echoing slightly. “You alive?”

Bob lifted his hand and raised a single finger, a “wait” gesture. After several seconds, he lifted his head, which was well slicked in blue blood, and definitely a bit mashed, his lips torn and his nose slightly askew. “That’s the most fun I’m never ever gonna have again,” he said, his voice strangely weak, his nose shifting as it seemed to remake itself after being broken. Although it now looked perfectly fine, there was still blood trickling from his nostrils. “I don’t know how Logan does it.”

“He seems to have a high pain tolerance,” Bren guessed. He approached Bob carefully, trying not to slip in his blood. “Can I, uh, help you up?”

“Naw, mate, I got it.” He pushed himself up to his knees and sat like that for a moment, wiping blood off his face and trying to gather his wits together. There was the sound of a bone cracking, and Bren realized with a sudden swell of nausea that Bob’s left arm had been broken, and had just reset itself. It looked like his skin was boiling under his torn clothes as broken bones suddenly reset themselves all over his body with a crackling noise like an inferno, and he saw that Bob’s brown t-shirt now had a single word on it in bright white letters: Ouch. Yeah, that encapsulated things quite well, although he was wondering how the hell he was doing that. “What was the hold up in closin’ the portal?”

It took him a minute to process the question, simply because he was so horrified by what he was seeing. “Umm, Giles said the thing on the other side didn’t want it to close.”

Bob grimaced, running a newly healed hand through his hair, which was now blue streaked with blood and looked ironically punky. “Well, that’s gonna be a problem.”

“What do you mean? We got it closed.”

“For now. But if there’s a demon lord interested in having a gateway here … well, shit, he’s gonna try to open one again. And believe me, if he - or she - opens it from his side, it’s gonna be a thousand times more difficult to close.”

Gods, it was always something wasn’t it? “So what’re we going to do?”

“What can we do? Wait for them to make their move, and act accordingly. I can use my resources, figure out who might be interested in having direct access to the Earth plane, but I don’t know if I’ll get the info before he tries to punch through.”

“What happens then? I mean, if he or she or it does punch through?”

He shrugged, finally climbing to his feet. His bones had clearly healed, but he was still moving slowly, as if the pain hadn’t quite gone away. Maybe he was still healing internally - how could you tell? “We’ll probably have a new Hellmouth. But at least it’ll keep you guys in business, huh?”

He stared at him coldly. He knew Bob was trying to make a joke of it, but he wasn’t laughing.

There was suddenly a loud “thud”, making the walls shake, and the thudding continued in a regular rhythm, growing louder and closer, shaking cement dust down on them from the cracked ceiling. Bren looked around, panicked, and pointed out, “I thought you said the Charunai would disappear with the portal.”

“They did. That’s something else.”

“What the fuck now?” he exclaimed in angry frustration. That demon lord couldn’t have opened a Hellmouth already, could they have?

Bob went out through the hole in the wall and Bren followed, grabbing his knife up one more. Maybe it couldn’t do shit, but it made him feel better.

Bob stopped so suddenly that Bren nearly walked into his broad, bloody back, and Bren glanced warily over Bob’s shoulder as the Drai’shajan exclaimed, “Fuck me sideways.”

Bren felt his heart plummet to his stomach as the large, glistening serpentine body of the eac uisge filled the access tunnel before them, its narrow, viper shaped head raising as it opened its fanged mouth and bellowed a noise like the fluttering of a million raven’s wings. It was an odd noise, and yet impossibly eerie, sending a cold shock through him that threatened to shrivel his balls into raisins.

“How dead are we?” he whispered to Bob. Like that thing could understand English.

“I wouldn’t make dinner plans,” Bob replied, as Nessie seemed to look straight down at them, its three eyes glowing like aliens suns.

Yeah, that’s what he thought. Why did he even ask questions he didn’t want to know the answers to?