There was a moment there when he thought he wasn’t going to make it, and he was falling through the air towards the roof below, not sure he was going to hit his target - had gravity kicked in too soon? - but he did manage to just land on the edge of Far East, and he tucked and rolled so he came to his feet more solidly on the roof, the shock of impact still vibrating through his legs.

He thought he saw movement over the distant, darkened rooftops, so he crouched down and froze, hoping he wasn’t spotted, but as far as he could tell, his quarry never stopped or looked. There was probably so much noise that his landing was lost in the general din. He judged the distance between Far East and the next building, decided the gap was even shorter than the one he’d already jumped across, and ran for the edge of the roof, once again waiting until the last minute to launch himself off of it.

This time he made the roof with room to spare, and didn’t bother with the dramatic but occasionally necessary tuck and roll. On the one had, he felt like an idiot with all this running and jumping, but on the other hand, it was good to actually be doing something that burned up some adrenaline, that woke him up.

The buildings were close together, making the next couple of rooftop jumps easy; too easy. He got complacent, and lost track of his quarry … or perhaps not. Perhaps they knew they were being pursued all along. All he knew was he jumped to the roof of a darkened building, and just as his feet slapped down on the edge, something came up and smashed him in the face. He didn’t know what it was, it came out of nowhere way too fast for him to react, and it felt like a shovel impacting him full in the face.

He reeled back, and fell off the edge of the roof.

But he was only dazed, and instantly popped his claws and jammed them into the wall as he felt himself falling. He continued to fall, tearing through the wall like paper, until he jammed his second claw in and planted his foot hard against the wall, like a rock climber recovering his stance.

The hit wasn’t the only thing he absorbed. He smelled the person that hit him, and he knew it. It didn’t make sense, but then again, it should have. Timebomb came back, didn’t he? They had a spare copy standing by. Why not her too?

A living chain came snaking down towards him, lashing around his neck, but now he had both feet against the wall and was able to pull out a claw and slash it in half, then again, making it fall towards the ground. He saw a blur above him, grabbed it blindly, and threw it towards the ground. “Damn it, Cressida, it’s me,” he snapped, belatedly wondering if the clone would know him in any respect.

So what did this mean? She was working for the Triad now? Why? Or was this simple coincidence? Was she out here for the Organization? He didn’t really believe in coincidence, so it was hard to swallow.

He could hear her reforming liquidly on the ground below, and knew what an exhausting, pointless fight it would be between them. Neither of them would be able to hurt the other for very long - he healed, and she could go liquid. That was the definition of a stalemate.

Looking behind him, he saw a fire escape on the building behind him, about two stories down. Could he make it? Well, there was only one way to find out. He dug his claws in the wall and positioned himself, feet braced against the wall, and as soon as he felt ready, muscles tensing like springs, he shoved off the wall, retracting his claws, and turned in mid-air, unable to actually see anything. He’d either hit it or he wouldn’t.

His luck was holding tonight. He came down on the fire escape with a loud clang, just missing the railing (and wouldn’t that have been painful), and while the shock of impact ran through his legs, he managed a near perfect landing.

He looked at where he had been on the wall over there, and wondered how the fuck he’d just done this. This was just another scary reminder that his body remembered things his mind did not.

Below him was the squelching “boots in mud” sound of Cressida pulling herself together, and he shouted, “Cressy, it’s me, Logan.” Belatedly, he added, “Wolverine.”

Down below in the alley, she was forming herself into a tall Asian man who would have given Yao Ming a run for his shoe endorsements. “I don’t know who the fuck you are, freak,” she spat, her voice a nearly perfect mimic of Chow Yun Fat’s. “And what kinda name’s Wolverine anyways?”

“What kinda name is Chameleon?” he shot back.

She tensed, and he knew she finally made the connection. But how much did she actually understand? “I’m not going back.”

“Neither am I. I ain’t with them anymore. What I wanna know is how you ended up with the Triad.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Why were you following me?”

“I saw you leave Far East. I think we both know what kinda place that is. And let’s face it, doll, you can do a lotta damage. You could chop people up like a blender if you wanted to.”

She backed up to the wall across the way, shape shifting fluidly, almost becoming a shadow. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She seemed to flow across the wall, sliding across the corner as smoothly as headlight beams.

He could follow her for a while by scent, he knew that, even though a crowded city increased the difficulty level of it. But what would really bugger him up was the fact that she could become inanimate objects; she could become any damn thing any damn where. Hell, she could remain water and flow into a sewer grate to escape him. He would have preferred Mystique. Yeah, she was a complete psycho bitch, but at least she was stuck in a bipedal form.

He sat down on the fire escape and rested his head in his hands, thinking. He was actually glad Cressida was alive, but it wasn't the Cressida he knew - this was a clone, an other, who didn't know him from anyone else, and was probably brought up being brainwashed by the Organization. The fact that she escaped from them was amazing, but she had probably brought with her the only skill set the organization taught its pet mutants: how to kill.

And he knew that because that was all he was good for too.

He sat there for a long time, listening to the sounds of Chinatown, smelling its scents, wondering if he could kill her.

****

He had no idea what time it was when he made his way back to Faith's apartment. The moon, three quarters full, shined through a thin velvet scrim of clouds, and he remembered suddenly what it looked like from a higher altitude; how the moon sometimes looked close enough to touch, how it reflected the sun's light so brightly it was like a spotlight. He could remember his breath curling up in front of him like wisps of steam, the cold, clean air abrasive in his throat, the moon bobbing above the tree line like a lighthouse beacon in the dark. He was not one hundred percent certain where that memory came from.

Faith had been sleeping when he came back, although she wasn't so tired she couldn't be a little pissed at him. "You couldn't call and tell me you hadn't been blown to smithereens again?" she exclaimed, rubbing sleep from her eyes. Her hair was mussed in a way that still managed to be almost unbearably sexy, although she was just wearing a bleach stained tank top and boxer shorts with the Peanut's Woodstock all over them in a repeating pattern with small purple flowers. This was proof she could make anything look good.

He told her the truth, that he wanted to call but wasn't sure what he would say. He also told her that he had warned the Yakuza off - or so he'd hoped. Tomorrow would tell.

She gave him a suspicious look as she climbed back into bed. "What's gonna happen tomorrow?"

"I don't know," he admitted. "But I'll know a response when I see it."

She was getting used to him being cryptic, or maybe she was just too tired to pursue it. She gave him a slightly cross look before sighing wearily and ducking back under the covers. "I'll wear Kevlar just in case," she muttered, settling into her pillow.

She was asleep by the time he undressed and got into bed beside her, finding himself tired and yet too conflicted to actually sleep. He stared up at the ceiling for a long time, trying to will himself into not dreaming; he didn't want to ruin Faith's first night in Vancouver by having another screaming nightmare. He'd already ruined her day with an assassination attempt. God, he was a high maintenance boyfriend, wasn't he? That was disappointing.

He had no idea when he fell asleep; his mind seemed to have been running on its own track, keeping him awake for a long time. He just knew he was dreaming when he found himself sleeping beside Mariko, his body curved around hers, protecting her like body armor. He wished he could; she seemed so small and so delicate nestled against his body, so in need of protection. He wished he could surround her like a suit of armor, pull her inside him and protect her from the slings and arrows of the world, but he knew that wouldn't work. Besides, she was the type of woman who would resent being protected, coddled; isn’t that part of what he loved about her?

But he knew now it would make no difference whatsoever. He knew the outcome of this. Romeo and Juliet never had a happy ending, and no matter how you tried to rig the story, it would always come out more or less the same.

His arm was around her stomach, but she pulled it up towards her face, kissing his palm as he smelled her silky, clean hair. "Everything has to end," she murmured, letting his hand brush her cheek. She turned her face towards his, and when she did, her hair became red, flowing like a river of lava, and suddenly he was looking at Jean staring up at him with eyes like Camaxtli’s fire.

He woke up to find it was morning, light pouring into the apartment through its vast windows, painting the ceiling the color of marigolds. Faith was already up and gone, her side of the bed lukewarm at best, and he could hear the idiot mutter of the t.v. through the walls. He’d come to the conclusion that Jean in his dreams was acting as his conscience, but her appearance here he didn’t quite understand. Unless it was related to Cressy somehow.

He got up, showered leisurely, and got dressed in a haphazard way, just finding a pair of jeans that would fit him in one of her dresser drawers, and finding a t-shirt he could wear in the closet. He could smell the take out food before he even entered the living room, and wondered who delivered Chinese this early in the morning.

"I was wondering if I should get you up or not," she said, chewing another forkful of chow mein. "Tony's got something going on at some software place today, and I was going with him. Wanna tag along?"

He shook his head, walking to the fridge to see what was in it. Well, it looked like Tony had gotten his "personal shopper" to stock it up. There was beer in here, along with just about everything else you could want. There were organic apples in the crisper, so he stole one along with a bottle of beer. "I probably gotta follow up on some stuff from last night," he said, deliberately being vague.

She was sitting at the large black glass table and he joined her, glancing at the take out boxes as he ate the apple. Maybe he could do with some General Tso's this early in the morning. One of the neat things about Faith was she was a bachelor's dream: she considered cold pizza breakfast and a big bowl of Sugar Pops dinner. Long ago she learned that you could eat whatever the hell whenever you wanted.

"Can I ask what, or are you gonna be all Mister X on me?"

"Mister X?"

"Should I have said Cigarette Smoking Man?"

"Ah." Now he got the reference. And this was definitely an organic apple, he could still taste a bit of dirt on it. But that actually made it that much more authentic, so it didn't bother him at all. "Probably. Don't worry, it doesn't involve the Yakuza. I'm just gonna try and look up an old friend." Not a lie, and yet he knew he was kidding himself. He couldn't look up Cressida; she could be anyone, anything. She was too good, and the Organization had taught them both too well.

She lifted an eyebrow suspiciously, although the faintest curve of her lips told him she was kidding. "A former girlfriend perhaps? Should I be jealous?"

He snorted a laugh, finishing off the apple and tossing the core in the empty chow mein box. "If it'll keep you happy, sure."

"That doesn't keep me happy," she teased, briefly running her foot up his leg.

He lifted his eyebrow up in a questioning manner, finding it difficult not to smile. “You got some time before you hafta go?”

She glanced back at the clock - a square of gold backed clear acrylic, very art deco - and cursed. “No. In fact, I should have left five minutes ago. Damn it.” She put down the take out carton she was picking at and stood up, leaning over the table to give him a quick kiss (she tasted like lemon chicken). “Can you throw these in the fridge for me?”

“Sure.” He took a pull off his beer, which really didn’t go with an apple, but who cared? As Faith put on her jacket, he noticed a folded up newspaper on the table and reached for it.

“I found that outside the door this morning,” she told him, pulling her hair out from her collar. “I guess Tagawa has me signed up for a newspaper subscription. Too bad I only read the comics, huh?”

“It’s probably for the best. Most news is too damn depressing.” He unfolded the paper and glanced at the thrilling headlines, which were enough to bore you to tears or make you want to slit your wrists, depending on how you took things, when he noticed a story about the murder of a “local businessman” with “suspected ties to organized crime” found dead in his home, shot “execution style” in the back of his head on his living room carpet. The man’s name: Richard “Richie” Manniwa. As of press time, the police had no suspects.

Maybe Tagawa hadn’t gotten Faith a newspaper subscription.

He made a noise low in his throat, and as Faith put on her sunglasses, she asked, “What?”

“I got my response.” He refolded the paper and put it down. He’d given Honda the choice of giving him Manniwa or taking care of him himself, and clearly he thought doing it “in house” was the better deal. Actually, considering what a screw up Richie sounded like, it was probably the opportunity they’d been waiting for to remove the asshole. This was also a white flag, the local Yakuza’s bid for peace - he got his pound of flesh. Now he was expected to back off. He would, as long as they did - and frankly sacrificing Manniwa on the altar of good intentions was a solid act of retreat. They wanted so little to do with him that they were willing to kill their leader - gem that he was - to appease him. And Ellison didn’t believe the Yakuza were scared of him?

Even with her wraparound shades on, he could tell she was giving him a funny look. “Sweetie, you’re fabulous, but sometimes you’re one freaky dude.”

That made him smirk. “You don’t even know the half of it, darlin’.”

She let out an exaggerated, exasperated sigh and left, giving her hair an extra flip just for good measure, and he chuckled before getting up and going over to the phone. The remote was on the kitchen counter beside it, and he used it to turn off the set as he punched up Tony’s number.

Right now he couldn’t do anything about Cressida. But he still could find out all he ever needed to know about Martin Leung.

9

On so many levels, this felt wrong, but there was no way to help it.

Angel knew he was too well known among the demon population of L.A., especially the vampires, to do something like investigate among them. But Kier wasn’t notorious yet, and his affiliation with a “bite club” gave him lots of connections. To be brutally honest, Kier was probably the closest thing to a himbo he had ever met, and it was just a bit scary.

But he waited in the sewer (the dry areas, of course; they were careful to avoid all the wettest parts) while Kier hit up his buddies and casual acquaintances for possible information on a new Hellmouth. Demons should be naturally drawn to it, especially vampires, so if anyone would know, it would be them. He called the Way Station before he left, but sadly Lia answered, and she pretty much hung up on him just because she didn’t like him, and was probably still a bit pissed off at him about the time the bar door got broken. Maybe by the time they got back, Helga would be on duty.

If he hadn’t missed her shift entirely, that was. He could feel the sun coming up, even underground, and it made his skin crawl. That and the sense he was being watched. It was a false sense, purely paranoid and psychosomatic, but he couldn’t help it. They had an invincible demon they couldn’t kill, and who could be killing unknown numbers of demons down here. The only comfort he could take was it had no taste for vampires and their dead flesh, which had a tendency to burst into dust once it actually killed them. But it could still kill them if it so desired, just not eat them.

Finally Kier came down the ladder that led up to an old tenement above, now a building that was home to more demons than people. “Good news,” he said, before jumping down the last few rungs. “A nest went to a vamp rave the other night, and -”

“Vamp rave?” he interrupted.

Kier stared at him with those guileless blue eyes, like he couldn’t believe it was a foreign term to him. “It’s just a normal rave, but vampires crash it, usually a couple hours after the festivities have gotten under way, so that the people are so stoned by the time they get there that they don’t realize there’s vampires among them, or that the person they were just dancing with is dead on the floor. Also, the vamps get high on E in the ravers blood, so it’s seen as a win-win sort of thing.”

Angel glared at him. “You seem to know a lot about it.”

He held up his hands and backed up a step. “Hey, I just know guys that do it. I’ve never done it. Are you kidding me? I had a bad experience with E when I was a Human. Or maybe it was special K; I’m not really sure. Anyways, after I did it, I woke up the next day to find myself in bed with a transvestite and a three hundred and eighty pound weightlifter named Tiny. So no, I’m not doing that again.”

A himbo; definitely a himbo. Should he tell Bren, or did he already know?

“Okay, anyways, these guys hit a rave a couple of nights ago, and they got this really weird feeling, like they were being pulled somewhere.”

“Where?”

Kier pointed over his shoulder, down the dark tunnel of a passageway that led farther into the center of the city, towards that famous beast known as Hollywood. “Lebowski said if we kept going this way, we’d feel it ourselves.”

“Lebowski?”

“Yeah, the Big Lebowski. He’s a surfer vamp who looks just like Jeff Bridges did in that movie, y’know?”

He used to think it was a special code between Kier and Bren, but maybe Kier actually talked this way. This experience was getting freakier by the second. “No, I don’t.”

Kier seemed genuinely surprised. “Really? Oh man, you have to see it. It’s really funny.”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Angel spun and started walking that way, if only to get away from Kier. Kier followed close behind, seemingly not offended by his quick exit. Actors really did have thick skin.

They’d gone a hundred feet down a dark tunnel that smelled of a strange mildewy dryness, like it had been little used beyond being a demon transit system for some time, and Angel was still waiting to feel that familiar tug, the one that told him he was getting close to a place that sent the vampire in him soaring. Nothing yet. “So did they follow it?” he wondered.

“What, the guys? Yeah, but then it stopped.”

“Stopped?” That didn’t sound right.

“Yeah. They thought the big blue demons had something to do with it, but they wouldn’t say, and they got kind of pissy, so they just went over ground to the party.”

Angel paused and looked back at Kier, who stopped fast enough not to run into him. “Big blue demons?”

Kier shrugged, spreading his hands wide. “That’s what he said. Lebowski couldn’t describe them beyond that. He’s not what you’d call overly articulate.”

“Really?” he replied, not bothering to keep the sarcasm from his voice. Blue demons. What demons were blue? Brachens were kind of bluish, but they weren’t evil demons, and they were normal Human size. There were some kinds of “albino” Belials who appeared bluish due to their blood showing through their skin, but again, Human sized, and also more scheming than truly evil; they were more in the annoying pest category, with some of the more ambitious ones edging up to malicious pest - when your sole power was the ability to lie persuasively, you had a tendency to have henchmen do your dirty work for you. (The Belials who got old enough to be truly dangerous were few and far between, thankfully. Even if Bob wasn’t a Power on top of everything else, one of him in the world was probably one too many.)

As he racked his brain for big blue demons, a name he hadn’t heard for ages surfaced in his mind: Charunai. A very long time ago, he encountered one near a dimensional portal in Eidfjord, Norway, where Angelus ended up after fleeing a little trouble on the Russian/Finnish border. (Another angry mob, another day.) Apparently some black magician and his misguided cult tried to open a gateway to another dimension to raise their demon lord - Cthulu for all he knew; Angelus didn’t actually care about the particulars - and something went horribly wrong, as these things were wont to do when amateurs were involved. The smell of blood and the pull of that power called to him, but he was disappointed by what he found: lots of dead bodies (and in Norway at that time of year, blood turned cold fast), a rapidly destabilizing portal - there hadn’t been enough blood to keep it open - and a single big blue demon standing near the portal, scowling at everything and cradling what looked li! ke a comically oversized stone hammer. When it looked at him, he pointed the hammer at him and said in a voice like fingernails on slate: “Come no farther, parasite.” If he had been asked, he would have put it at nearly eight feet tall and nearly half as wide across the shoulders, with what looked like a nest of bony protrusions sticking up from the top of its scalp. It was as ugly as fuck and smelled like rotting seaweed, and while Angelus hated being threatened, he really didn’t like the smell of the thing, or that damn hammer it was holding; the head of it was nearly the size of his torso. If it was even half as heavy as it looked, it probably could do an earthshaking amount of damage. It ducked into the portal before it collapsed, making Angelus figure it was some sort of enraged guardian. A couple of days later he killed a Watcher and flipped through his journals until he found the damn thing, just out of curiosity. The Watcher’s journal said it was a Charunai, ! although it was a bit unclear if they were “children” of Charun or sim ply a breed of followers; either way, they were vicious killers with affinity for finishing off their victims with those big stone hammers. It was said they were guardians of the underworld, but it didn’t specify which one (like there was only one! Sheesh ..). They were definitely blue, though; the color of the garish turquoise eye shadow you sometimes found in drugstores.

It was then Angel had a sudden epiphany: blue skin … blue blood? Sky blue blood? Suddenly he was sensing a connection. The why and the how of it were simply missing. And that’s when he felt the pull.

It was as sudden and strong as a heart attack. One second it hadn’t been there, and then the next second it was. Kier even paused and did his best Keanu Reeves impression. “Whoa.”

“You felt it too, huh?”

“Where the fuck did that come from?”

Angel could only shake his head. The feeling, that tug of power, was straight up ahead, and yet it never should have worked like that. There was no way a Hellmouth could disappear and reappear … right? Maybe he should have brought Giles along anyways; it just seemed safer if the undead guys who made poor appetizers scouted the territory first.

They crept ahead carefully, sticking to the shadows that clung to the cold cement walls like the residue of Human waste. Around what appeared to be a large U- bend was a flickering light, rippling like a pond after a stone had been thrown, and as they peered around the bend, the call of it, the pure evil malevolence of it, struck them like a blow to the face. He didn’t need to feel his fang rip into his bottom lip to know his vampire side - both their vampire sides - were out, responding to the sheer power of it.

There was a portal; a shimmering hole in reality that seemed to open up into an unclear place that was both equal parts red and black, a place where the landscape seemed amorphous and constantly shifting, a river of blood and a land of broken backs. But there were no Charunai standing by, so maybe he had been wrong about that. He was actually relieved about that.

It lasted one second.

“Move!” Kier shouted, suddenly shoving him forward at the same time. Angel heard the thud behind him, a blow so massive the concrete shattered beneath it like spun glass, and he pivoted to see that he hadn’t been wrong about the Charunai - he’d simply been wrong about where they were.

There were two of them that he could see, seemingly identical twins. Nearly eight feet of pure blue ugly, with massively muscular bodies that could have been carved from granite, and a forest of yellowed ivory horns rising from their heads, about a dozen or so and eight inches long, they looked thick and sharp enough to be teeth. They wore wide sashes around their waists that looked like Human skin. It could have been; all he knew was they’d kill anything they perceived as a threat, and their idea of “threat” was extremely broad.

Angel grabbed the hammer before the steroided Smurf could pull it out of the wall, and backhanded him across the face, trying to rip the hammer out of his grasp. Maybe the shock of pain that rode down his arm like lightning should have been a tip, but the Charunai was unfazed, and he simply kicked him in the stomach. It was an organ crushing blow that sent him flying away, hitting the wall before falling to the cement a mere foot from the portal. This close, he could smell roasting flesh and boiling blood, and while he wanted to get as far from it as he could, another part of him wanted to dive right in. It was a Human version of hell; it was the vampire idea of heaven.

Kier was having no success with his Charunai. He tried to get fancy, kicking his guy in the face, but the Charunai simply grabbed him by the leg and flung him away like a rag doll. He landed with a dull thud, in a crumpled heap a few inches away from him.

Angel coughed up a mouthful of blood, and then asked, “You okay?”

Kier groaned. “I think he broke something.”

“I think they plan to break more.”

Kier looked up, and saw the twin mountains of Charunai demons advancing on the pair of them, lipless mouths locked in rictus grins as they hefted their impossibly large and heavy hammers, clearly savoring the approaching moment where they’d smash them both into a fine paste. “Uh, boss, if you’ve gotta plan, I’d love to hear it.”

Funny - Angel was just thinking the same thing.