13

Angel heard birds singing like they were perched on his head. Of course they weren't, but damn, did they have to be so loud?

It was another day in Los Angeles – bright, sunny, the smog at tolerable levels for the moment – and Angel did all the usual things: showered, shaved, made coffee, wondered why he felt so funny. Something was wrong, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what.

Hmm. Maybe that was a common problem when you were an occult detective. It wasn't like there was a support group he could ask.

He cringed at the bright sunlight, a holdover from his vampire days. You'd think he'd be used to it by now, it wasn't like he gave it up yesterday, but after a couple hundred years of avoiding sunlight, it had become a knee jerk response. It'd probably take a couple of decades to unlearn the reflex.

Traffic was typical – awful – and even though he left early, he was almost late. And coming into his own office, how embarrassing. “Geeze, boss man, we didn't know if you were gonna bother to show up today,” Bren announced, looking up from his computer.

“If you're hung over, I got a great cure,” Doyle said, standing by the coffee maker and sipping from a mug. He actually did look a bit hung over, but that wasn't unusual.

“Thanks, but it was just traffic. Got a remedy for that?”

He thought about it a moment. “Maybe. I know a guy who knows a guy that supposedly can eat metal. The only problem is I don't think he likes fiberglass.”

“Thanks, I'll keep that in mind. What's on the agenda for today?”

“We're headed down to Resida this afternoon to check out a haunted house – a real one, bleeding walls and everything, sounds cool – and then we have a client, Tim Callahan, coming in later who says the new people that moved into his rental home are vampires. Since we're gonna be down in Resida, you want to do the interview on that, Doyle?”

He looked at Bren in surprise before looking back at Angel. “He gets to assign stuff now?”

“Who's the Gorgon's Chosen?” Bren replied, with a sarcastic archness.

Since they were both half Brachen demon, they liked to get into these fake pissing contests, like they were in a war for office supremacy. It was generally amusing until it got annoying, then it was a pain in the ass. But overall it was good, as Doyle had taken to treating Bren like a little brother he watched out for, although oftentimes it was Bren looking out for Doyle.

“Unless you want to come with us to blood house,” Wesley said, coming into the lobby from his office, holding a book. “I'm sure Brendan could stay here and do the interview.”

Doyle thought that over with a scowl. “Well, I guess I could stay here ...”

Bren grinned. “You don't wanna visit the last house on the left? I'm truly shocked.”

Doyle gave him the V salute, an offensive gesture in every European country (why it had never meant the same thing in America he had no idea), but Bren had been around long enough to know what it meant, and all he did was smile and blow him a kiss.

Angel had just poured himself a cup of coffee, wondering what was bothering him about all of this, when the office door opened and a familiar voice crowed, “Hey party people, what's shaking?” It was Kier, Bren's actor boyfriend, looking tanned, sculpted, and otherwise fabulous in tight jeans, a red muscle shirt that showed off both his tan and his well toned arms, and sunglasses that hid his arctic blue eyes until he lifted them up to his lightened hair. He leaned over the desk and gave Bren a quick kiss as Doyle said sarcastically, “Get a room.”

“We're going to a bleeding house,” Bren told Kier excitedly.

“Cool.”

“How's Cordy?” Angel wondered.

Cordelia was actually responsible for Kier and Bren knowing each other. Kier landed a part on the soap opera Cordy was currently working on, and at a party she casually introduced them, although she confided to Angel later on she wanted them to hook up as she thought they were perfect for each other, but she knew Bren balked at blind dates since his last disastrous one (when he almost got sacrificed by that Shoggoth demon). Cordy proved to be a good judge of character, because even though Kier was a bit of a flake, Bren was deliriously happy with him, and had just moved into his West Hollywood apartment. Angel had helped him move, and Bren still owed him for that.

“She's cool,” Kier reported, apparently unaware he had just used the word “cool” twice in a mere three words. “She's got this big story arc coming up, so I've been runnin' lines with her. Not that I'm in the scenes, of course; my job is just to be the half naked hot, stupid guy.”

“Which is precisely what I love about you,” Bren said. Kier gave him a playful slap on the shoulder for that.

This was all very sweet. So why did it feel wrong?

He wandered off to his office, followed by Wesley, who was saying, “I'm thinking we're dealing with a Fortharai demon in Resida.”

“Not a poltergeist?”

“Poltergeists really don't do blood, no matter what horror movies say. Violence, yes, but manifestations of blood? Not their style. But I believe the Fortharai may be doing this because the home is built on one of their burial grounds.”

Angel considered this as he sat behind his heavy, high polished wooden desk. It was a real beauty, and he was inordinately proud of it. “Not an Indian burial ground sort of deal, is it?”

“No. The Fortharai eat their dead. So my guess is they want the occupants to leave so they can tear up the grounds and have a feast.”

“Lovely. I don't suppose we can tell them to take their show on the road?”

“We could, but I suggest we bring machetes as back up.”

“Good idea.”

Wesley turned to go, but then he paused and pulled out a envelope from the back of his book. “Right, I almost forgot. This was under the door when I came in this morning. It doesn't smell like blood, isn't ticking, and doesn't appear to have any magic on it, so I assume it's safe.”

He put it on the desk. It had simply “Angel” on it in a plain black font, and felt so light it could have been empty. He grimace at it, and said, “Thanks. It's good to see you, Wesley.”

Wesley glanced back at him from the doorway, brow furrowing in consternation. “What do you mean? I'm here every day.”

“Yeah. I ... um, I'm having a really weird day today. Ignore me.”

“Shouldn't have gone out drinking with Doyle.”

“Oh hell, I left him and Rags at midnight. You need demon kidneys to keep up with those two.” Those two could empty a bar between them. How they did it and didn't die of alcohol poisoning was positively supernatural.

Wesley was gone by the time he opened the envelope, and a single slip of paper fell out. He felt a sudden, inexplicable sense of anxiety as he picked it up and read the short message typed on the paper. It read simply: Play along.

What? What the hell kind of message was that? Play along with what?

He figured it for an obscure prank and had wadded the piece of paper into a ball when he suddenly remembered someone wearing a shirt with Play Along written on it. An almost ethereally handsome man with electric blue eyes ...

... and then he remembered everything.

It was like a lightning bolt hit him straight in the cortex; his brain felt like it was going to explode with all the information - contradictory, overstuffed, wrong – that suddenly flooded in. He grabbed his skull to keep it from rupturing, and flung himself back so violently he almost fell out of his chair, only the wall keeping him upright. His blood pounded in his ears, and the pain was beyond description, until the electric sizzle of it seemed to die as quickly as it began.

And yet, his head still hurt, throbbing and buzzing with everything that was wrong, with one life laid over another.

Holy shit – no wonder he kept thinking something was wrong. Everything was wrong. Wes, Cordy, Doyle, Kier, they were all supposed to be dead. (Okay, Kier was supposed to be a vampire, but that was just dead with an asterisk beside it.) He himself wasn't supposed to be a Human, he was supposed to still be a vampire. And Bob -

• who was Bob?

Now he remembered. The man with the violent blue eyes, the fallen god – he was supposed to be running that demon bar downtown, The Way Station, only Helga was running it, the hitwoman Stansin demon who was an unlikely friend of Rags'. Bob ... Bob was never here. In this reality, he didn't exist. How could that be? Gods transcended reality, so -

• Logan. Shit, Logan was his avatar; Logan had his powers.

Now his head really started to hurt. Logan was a mutant, a reality warper of a high order ... but that wasn't true. He was a mutant, yes, but that was a god power, not a mutant power. He was friends with Xavier and those mutants who ran that school up in New York (Bren had been there originally), but he wasn't supposed to be there as a sponsor. Logan had been a teacher there once, he had been in the X-Men, he ... he was Wolverine. He was – he used to be, he was supposed to be – an ex-assassin, a man with metal claws, extensive combat knowledge, and a healing factor that put vampires to shame. He was supposed to be Wolverine, a name that caused a crackling fear in the mutant underground, except Wolverine had never existed here. There wasn't a mutant underground either, as mutants were an accepted group in society. There wasn't, to his knowledge, an Organization either.

Logan had rewritten his entire reality. He was a powerful but relatively benign recluse living in Tokyo with his wife. But how had Logan kept Bob's powers for so long? Gods could only die under certain circumstances. He should have regenerated and reappeared long before now ...

Except he remembered Logan killing Bob's body, and apologizing for it. He'd done a deal to keep Bob's power in him, to keep Bob in a limbo state. Who would be powerful enough to do that? And why would Logan do that in the first place? Betrayal wasn't in his nature, and he'd had Bob's powers before, but resisted the temptation to use them to his own ends. Why now? Why had he had taken a gamble with god powers? Those always came back to bite you on the ass.

Oh no. Yama. Logan had done a deal with Yama.

Angel slumped over his desk, head still in his hands, wondering what he should do. Yes, this was a good life – a great life; all his dead friends weren't dead anymore – but it was wrong, it was a false reality. And while he was always skeptical of Bob and his true intentions, his non-existence could only bring trouble. How many lives had been irrevocably altered or even denied because Logan had wiped the slate? How many people were still alive who honestly shouldn't be? He was probably damaging the very fabric of reality itself, but that kind of damage was hard to gauge until it was so bad almost nothing could be done about it.

But that wasn't the worst part. The worst part was what could Yama possibly get from this deal? He would be getting something – no death god did you favors for free, and the lack of Bob couldn't have been enough. Something must have been in this for him.

The irony was that he didn't care much about the prospect of facing off with a death god. But facing off with Logan? How the hell was he going to do that?