12

Fighting side by side, Angel allowed himself to feel a moment of nostalgia. This could have been ten years ago in Sunnydale, with Buffy and him staking vampires in a graveyard. Then Bren yelped as he was taken down by a zombie, and Kier shouted, “Get your hands offa him, bitch,” and he was back in the now.

Buffy gave him a sidelong glance, and said, “I can't believe your group is weirder than mine.”

“I live in L.A. - weird is normal.”

She had no choice but to shrug – could she contradict that? - and then Keely went down in a scrum of vampire bodies with a shriek, and they attempted to fight their way towards her, which was harder than it should have been. A couple of vampires exploded into dust before them, and voices said, “Started -”

“- the -”

“- party without -”

“- us?”

Angel had never been so happy to see the shiny, empty eyes of the Sisters before in his life. (Well, maybe that one time in Prague, but he'd been Angelus then.) “Save the Slayer,” he said, pointing at the heap where Keely was.

Buffy stared at him. “More friends of yours?”

“Not exactly, but they're on our side. Don't kill them!” That was an order for the standing Slayers, and an order for the Sisters. He didn't know if any of them women would actually heed it.

He heard the shrieks of vampires exploding into dust, and saw a flash of silver before the head fell off one and it exploded as well. Faith said, before Angel could, “Well it's about damn time you showed up.”

Logan shrugged and decapitated a zombie, all at the same time. “Got delayed.” He smelled of blood. That was typical of Logan, but he didn't look like he'd ever been hurt (his shirt wasn't torn, and he was lucky to make it through a fight with an intact shirt), and for some reason it game him a bad feeling. Why?

Did he also smell of smoke? Weird.

“Routine twelve,” Faith said, and Logan, after dusting another vampire, bent over quickly as if reaching for something on the ground, and Faith launched herself towards him in a run. She jumped on his back and then off, launching herself high over the crowd of vampires, raising her stake and coming down hard, landing on the head of one and driving him down as she put the stake through the chest of another. Logan, meanwhile, had already straightened up and taken care of a vampire and a zombie.

“They've fought before,” Buffy noted, surprised.

“They've done more than that,” Angel said, and almost instantly regretted opening his mouth.

She gave him a surprised glance, looking between them before exclaiming, “Damn. I knew Faith had a thing for older guys, but wow.” After a moment, she added, “He does have a great ass, though.”

“Hey, fighting here.”

Suddenly a very familiar voice started singing, “It's midnight at the drowning pool, and I'm glad that you're here -” Bob appeared near the edge of the ring of fire, and instinctively all the vampires and zombies moved away like they didn't for the fire. “Angel, Kier, Sisters, this doesn't apply to you. But let there be sunlight!”

Nothing actually happened, except all the vampires cringed and burst into flames, as if they really had been caught in the open during high noon. Until this moment, Angel had no idea Bob could kill vampires by simply making them believe something. But a god's voice compelled beyond reason.

Buffy jumped back with a “Whoa!” as her stake almost caught fire. “How the hell did he do that?” Now that the crowd had thinned out enough to see him, she said, “Holy shit, he's gorgeous. You didn't mention that.”

“He's a sex god,” Willow pointed out, materializing beside her. “He wouldn't be ugly.”

Fair point.

Bob was grinning like he'd heard the compliment – and in all likelihood, he had. "Hey zombies," he said, holding out his hand before making a fist and pulling it back towards him, like he'd grabbed a moth in mid air. "Got your brains."

All the zombies stopped dead (no pun intended) and keeled over, dead for good this time. Buffy looked at it all in wide eyed surprised. "Wow. Why do you even bother fighting if you got this guy?"

"He's not always here," Logan grumbled, and his voice had a surprisingly cold aspect to it. Did he and Bob have another falling out? He couldn't imagine how hard it was to be Bob's avatar and all the bullshit that entailed, but he'd never heard Logan sound so coldly towards him. It was like he was the Organization or something. Angel tried to catch his eye, but he looked away.

"I'm a busy man," Bob admitted cheerfully, then added, "Okay, technically I'm not a man. But you know what I mean."

"Not a man?" Buffy repeated, looking him over. Her eyes were clearly saying "Yes you are".

"Gods don't really have genders. We're both and neither."

"Huh?"

"Exactly." He gave her his best shit eating grin, and then added, "Heya Will, how's the magic?"

"Good," she replied, almost relieved. "Except ... I can't find Giles. Think you can?"

Now Bob frowned. "What d'ya mean?"

"He disappeared, along with Marcus and Xander and everybody else who went out onto the street, save for Angel, who was in the sewer, and Sid, who was buried under a pile of bad guys. I tried a locator spell, but nothing turned up."

Bob looked genuinely concerned, and it was then that Angel noticed Bob's t-shirt. It said, in thick block letters, 'Play along'. It said that for perhaps a second before reverting back to 'Walk behind me - we'll start a parade!' What the hell was that? Did anyone else see it? He looked around, but couldn't tell.

The Sisters suddenly stood in front of Bob, and said, "We're -"

"- sorry -"

"- Bob."

"Sorry about what?"

Logan suddenly lunged towards Bob's back, and just as Angel's mind conjured the unbelievable thought, Logan's claws sliced right through Bob's neck, decapitating him. "That," the Sisters said in unison, stepping back to make room for his falling body.

Almost everyone was too shocked to do anything, it was totally fucking unbelievable, but Sid, as always, was on the move, sword raised as he charged towards Logan. It was the Sisters who intervened before he could meet almost certain death at Logan's claws, one grabbing his arm while the other drop kicked him in the chest, sending him flying backwards.

"Kid, it had to be done," Logan said, and as he looked at them, his eyes filled with blue light. Oh no.

"What the fuck?!" Faith exclaimed angrily. "Why the hell did you -"

He held up a hand, and Faith fell silent, although judging from her pissed off expression, not of her own accord. Angel realized he couldn't move, and from the alarmed look Buffy was giving him, she couldn't either. No one could. Willow was opening her mouth and closing it, trying to speak but unable to. Logan's first act with Bob's power was to shut them down. But what did the Sisters have to do with this? They were helping him, and it didn't seem forced.

"Sorry," Logan said, and it was his voice, but laced with power, almost thrumming with it, making an itchy feeling appear beneath all their skins. He was now limned with blue light, and he started to hover oh so slightly off the ground, the blue enveloping him like a shroud. "But I had to do it. This is over."

And only when everything whited out did Angel realize he meant the entire world.

****

So, woods. How did you wake up from almost certain death and find yourself in the woods?

The thing is, Xander was so accustomed to weird shit, this didn't bother him, and the fact that it didn't bother him bothered him. Figure that one out.

He still had the gun Marc gave him, and with a lack of anything better to do, he counted the remaining bullets. Fifteen. Which was good to know in case he ran into something that could be shot, but failing that, he could shoot himself fifteen times, and wasn't that a comfort. He thought that might actually be a more likely scenario.

Very briefly in his life, he was a Boy Scout. He lasted, what, one day? He honestly couldn't see wearing a kerchief ever in his life, and short pants? What were they, Brownies? Actually, he had a sneaking suspicion that Brownies got to do the fun stuff, so he walked out. He never did join the Brownies, but he'd never figured out how to anyways. He felt that maybe if he stuck around, maybe he'd know how to navigate the woods, figure out where he was.

What he did have was the Discovery Channel, though, and he knew moss grew on the North sides of trees (right? Maybe that was it ..). So he started looking around the tree trunks for moss. By the twelfth tree he gave up. No moss anywhere. "Well, fuck this," Xander said aloud, and just headed off in a random direction.

For woods, they were very well lit and clean. Almost amazingly so, as if Humans had never been here. He'd walked for maybe two hundred yards before he stopped dead, and exclaimed to no one, "Oh, fuck me. I'm dead, aren't I? I'm dead and this is hell."

"It'd be my hell, not yours," Helga grumbled, emerging from the woods on the opposite side. "Unless you hate forests too."

"Hel!" He'd never been so happy to see a green skinned woman in his life. Well, maybe that one that slept with Captain Kirk, but she was just wearing body paint and it wasn't the same. "Wow, does that mean we've all been teleported to Middle Earth?"

"I dunno, you're the first person I've found." She scowled, and looked up at the sky. Xander followed, seeing slices of blue between the thick interlaced canopy of tree branches. "Can't find my flamethrower. Somebody's gonna pay for that."

"I have my gun," he offered, although a flamethrower would have been more effective on underbrush. "Say, what are we looking for?"

"The sun. You see it?"

"Umm, no. But we probably can't see it from here," he admitted, attempting to look through the branches. He never knew where to look for the sun in the sky, but he wasn't about to admit it.

Helga grunted non-noncommittally, her tail twitching with impatience, then said, “I don't think there's a sun.”

Xander scoffed, assuming she was joking, but after a moment he realized she wasn't. “Are you serious? Of course there's a sun! Look how bright it is.”

“The sky's lit up like there should be a sun, but there isn't one.”

He shook his head vehemently, although he wasn't sure why. Was that any weirder than anything else he'd ever encountered? “That's not even possible.”

“Yeah, it is. It means we're in a god realm.”

“What?” Suddenly he felt his stomach twist and knot, and he realized he probably needed to see a doctor about his acid reflux problem. Constant jolts of fear and anxiety played hell on a system. “Who ... Yama?”

She shrugged, looking around the forest as if it might morph into something more lethal. It hadn't ... yet. “Could be, but if it was, why aren't we dead yet?” Before Xander could even venture a guess – oh, he hated guesses like this – she scowled at her own question, and started walking off into the trees. “Unless he's keeping us for some other reason.”

“What other reason?” he asked, quickly scrambling to follow her. Did he even want to know the answer to that question?

He didn't know where she thought she was going either, but he felt that didn't matter so much. At least if he was going to die, he wasn't going to die alone.