9

There was movement on the far side of the street, a pile of dead (?) ghouls suddenly moving, but while Logan tensed, Bob said, “Don't worry, you know him.”

With a grunt of effort, the ghoul was shifted aside, and Saddiq was revealed beneath the pile of bodies. He was covered with blood, all of it someone else's. “I keep forgetting I can get knocked out,” Saddiq admitted sheepishly, as Logan helped him to his feet. Bren wished he had that problem; he never forgot he could get knocked out, 'cause he got knocked out all the time. He figured he and Giles should have a head injury support group.

“Where is everybody?” Logan and Saddiq asked each other at roughly the same time. Then they frowned at each other.

“Okay,” Bob said. “They all disappeared whilst you were at the bottom of a ghoul dog pile. Where were they when you saw them last?”

“Over there,” Saddiq said, pointing towards the far end of the street, where there was a large pile of ghoul bodies around an empty patch of asphalt. That made sense – they picked their area to make a stand and defended it.

“What's the last thing you remember?” Bob asked.

Saddiq wiped blood off his face, and retrieved one of his swords, which was sticking out of the center of one of the closest bodies. “Being picked up and thrown into a brick wall.”

“From the others,” Bob clarified.

He had to think about it a moment. “Gunshots. Marc was shouting to someone – Xander? Mat? Giles? - that they were getting too close. He was offering to cover them ...” he paused, staring off into space. “I don't remember what happened after that.”

“Bob, is that you?” A very faint voice called out, seemingly from below the street. It was Angel, still in the sewers. As they headed that way, his phone hummed in his pocket, and Bren answered it to find Kier on the other end of the line – Bob had left him back at the bar too. He asked what was happening, and he filled him in on the whole lot of nothing. It took ten seconds.

“If Marc was offerin' to cover 'em, he had an escape route, or at least thought he did,” Logan grumbled. As the rest of the them climbed down into the sewer, Logan remained sniffing the air above ground, trying to get a directional fix. From the way the frown gouged deeper into his face, he wasn't picking it up. And he was getting moodier by the second. What bug was up his butt? He was starting to radiate his most poisonous attitude, the one that said he was about to snap, and Bren was tempted to hide behind Rogue. (Yeah, he might snap, but he probably wouldn't lash out at her.) For once, he was happy to duck into the sewer.

There were many dead ghouls here as well, just adding to the wonderful smell. Angel was slightly less bloodier than Saddiq, but his coat was torn, one sleeve hanging by less than a dozen threads, and his arm was bleeding from a wound the looked suspiciously like a bite mark. A ghoul tried to eat a vampire? Well, why not? They ate zombies. Bob had said they were cannibals – they ate fellow demons along with your average human schmuck.

“What happened up there?” Angel asked, his gaze laser focused on Saddiq.

“As I was telling them, I don't know,” he said, almost sounding frustrated. And from robo-assassin Sid (as he and Rogue sometimes referred to him in e-mails), that was the equivalent of a normal person throwing a chair through a window, or Logan taking out half of the Eastern seaboard.

Angel's recount shed no new light on the matter, but unlike Sid he was conscious and aware the moment things went wrong. “The shooting stopped,” Angel said. “I thought maybe Marc had paused to reload, but it went on way too long. He has reloading down to a science; he can do it under two seconds and barely miss a beat. I thought maybe they got overrun, but someone would have screamed. Could Giles have cast a spell?”

“To do what? Teleport them away?” Bob shook his head. “I didn't get a sense of that kind of magic.”

“So where are they?”

“Nobody takes Marc without a fight,” Logan said. He was on the ladder leading down into the sewer, but remained near the top, looking down on all of them. “Unless they get him before he can.”

Bob looked up at him, his expression oddly blank. “You have an intuition you'd like to share?”

“Yama.”

That made Angel raise an eyebrow. “What?”

“Why would he take them?” Bob asked.”To what end?”

Logan gave Bob a surprisingly nasty look. “Yer the god. You tell me.”

“He wouldn't take them. Kill them maybe, but not take. There's no point in that.”

“Yeah, 'cause gods never do anything pointless or inexplicable,” Logan replied sourly.

“I'll give you that. But he wouldn't bother, Logan. Trust me.”

“Why should I?”

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Rogue snapped, glaring at Logan. “Why are you gettin' up his ass? He's trying to help.”

Bren had held his phone out so Kier could hear the conversation, but he now heard him saying something, his voice a tinny whisper, like an angry gnat. He brought the phone up to his ear and asked, “What?”

“Has anyone tried to call anybody?” Kier repeated. “You know, ring their cells?”

Oh holy fuck. Why hadn't he thought of that? So he interrupted the argument to share the idea, and they all called someone different.

This was a great idea for the length of time it took to make the calls, and then receive the same automated message that the phones they were calling were not currently in service. So they were all somewhere where their phones weren't working. That wasn't good.

Bob dry washed his face, and admitted, “This isn't right. Something else is going on here besides Yama.”

“Prove it.”

“I will. Now are you gonna stop being a dickhead?”

Angel looked between Logan and Bob, as uncomfortable and startled as the rest of them. “Guys, we need to focus on finding them, not fighting between ourselves. Isn't the end of the world enough problems for one day?”

“Well, if you wanna be technical, the world isn't ending, it's just being overrun with dead people,” Bob told him.

Wasn't that bad enough? But Bren wasn't sure. Because if there was something going on with Logan, maybe that was even worse.

Marcus going missing was really the final straw.

Oh, he was done with Bob and all his shit before it, but Marc going missing was just a step too far. Did that asshole Yama take them hostage? Fuck, maybe he turned him into a pigeons. Gods could do shit like that, right? He was done, fucking done. He wasn't losing another friend to some stupid, endless battle that really had nothing to do with them.

Logan knew he probably should have stayed back and helped Angel and Saddiq, who were doing their best to piece together what may have happened in that odd gap between the others being there and then suddenly disappearing, but Logan knew a wild goose chase when he fell over one. Bob was gone, doing whatever it was he was bothering to do (ostensibly trying to track them down, but did he believe that?) and Logan was happy to stomp off, seemingly in a huff. Or at least that's what Rogue believed, and he was content to let her, because at least that guaranteed she wouldn't follow him.

When he was sure he was clear of the others, he phoned the Sisters, who told him where to meet them. It turned out to be a little place in the warehouse district, not too far from Bob's warehouse loft place (although not close enough for it to be a concern). He smelled blood before sliding open the metal door that functioned as a back entrance, and he found a warehouse about the size of your average split level, dark as night and reeking strongly of old blood. Animal blood by the smell; mostly cows, but there were many chickens and pigs that had been here as well, some lambs, a goat or two. He knew it was an old slaughterhouse or meat packing plant before he found the sisters waiting for him in the remains of an old, unplugged walk in freezer. “Appropriate -”

“- no?”

“What's with all the theater?” he snapped, but he belatedly realized he shouldn't have bothered asking. They were crazy and perverse, a devastating combination, especially in a couple of the undead.

They grinned at him vacuously, their eyes glittering in the jittery light of the candles. They'd set the place like a stage, an altar, with candles in a rough circle and axis formation. A pentagram? Maybe. It was hard to tell. There was something drawn on the floor, but the light was too inconstant for him to focus on it right now. He knew it was drawn in ash, blood (human – where they got it from he wasn't going to ask), chalk, salt, and cinnamon (that was the truly inexplicable element), and spread out across most of the freezer floor. The Sisters were standing near the back, clear of the circle. “Contacting -”

“- Yama -”

“- isn't easy -”

“- his realm -”

“- is beyond easy -”

“- access, there's a -”

“- strict protocol to contacting -”

“- him, and even if -”

“- we're precise, he could still -”

“- kill us all. He's not -”

“- one of the fluffy muffin gods.”

“Yeah, I got that. Is there any other way to do this?”

“No,” they answered in stereo.

“That's what I thought. So let's do this.” He stripped off his coat and tossed it in an empty corner, then pulled off his shirt to a chorus of appreciative and deeply creepy “oohs” from the Sisters. He scowled at them, but they just smiled back, like they always did. He approached the circle carefully, not smudging any of the lines or knocking over any candles, and sat down cross legged in the center. One of the Sisters handed him a knife, which was ornate and clearly ceremonial, with a bunch of fake (?) gems lined up along the hilt in an erratic zig zag pattern, and the blade curved until it was nearly a semi-circle, ending in a wickedly sharp point.

He nodded to let them know he was ready, and they began chanting something in a language he didn't understand – probably a demon tongue – and started throwing charred bones (Human) ground into ash around the circle while Logan slashed a wrist with the knife and let the blood pool on the floor, holding the tip of the knife in his flesh.

Communicating with Yama was all about the blood ritual apparently, and the more death the better, so that's where the charred bones came in. Where the cinnamon fit into this tableau he had no idea, but he trusted the Sisters when they said they knew the ritual of contacting him.

Was this a mistake? Probably. But he was sick of it all, and the deaths had to stop. He had a feeling Bob would actually understand this, but there was no way in fucking hell he was going to discuss it. Bob had his time, he'd had a good run, and he was never much of a god to begin with. Sometimes you had to know when to hang it up, when you were doing more harm than good. He wondered who would pull the trigger for him, and wondered if he could do it himself.

The flesh healed, and actually it attempted to heal around the tip of the knife, making him have to move it and rip open his skin. He wasn't sure if he had enough blood on the floor. People usually bled more without healing factors. He almost asked the Sisters how much he was supposed to bleed, except they were chanting and he was pretty sure he couldn't (or at least shouldn't) interrupt them.

This went on for maybe five minutes that seemed like a century. He watched the shadows on the wall, flickering shapes created by the candle flames, and knew the smoke and blood was getting to him when the shadows seemed to move independently of the flames. The wall directly across from him, for example. It looked like a shadow had clung to the very top of the wall and was now oozing down, like paint, like blood ...

... wait, down? How did the shadow of a stationary candle move persistently downwards? He was wondering if it was blood loss when the world seemed to shift sideways, and he found himself somewhere else.

There was no actual transition; he was just in one place, and then he was in another. The Sisters were gone, the knife was gone, the old slaughterhouse was gone. He was no longer sitting either.

Best he could tell, he was inside an active volcano, with rock walls on all sides of him reaching up and away, tapering into a point high above him, the rock as black as pitch. There was a reddish glow somewhere beneath him, but it couldn't have been lava, as he'd have been burnt to a crisp. Still, he did smell his own skin baking, and he was hot enough that he'd have moved away if that had been an option. But it wasn't an option, as he was impaled on what he assumed to be some kind of spears. There was one going through each ankle, through each wrist, and one sticking out of the center of his body, just above the solar plexus. They hurt, but they hurt so much they almost canceled each other out; the pain was so great his pain receptors had pretty much shut down. And considering he felt every bit of liquid adamantium poured into his body, that was an impressive amount of pain. He was pinned inside a volcanic crater like a mounted rare butterfly in an entomologist's collection.

Maybe this was a cartoon version of a volcano; maybe Yama was giving him what a Human thought the inside of a volcano looked like. It wasn't above gods to sculpt their realms to fit perceptions. Except Logan knew this wasn't what the inside of a volcano looked like. A mind game?

A disembodied voice, deep, sepulchral, and vaguely Satanic, suddenly boomed, “Give me one reason why I shouldn't kill you now.”

He was tempted to reply, 'Yama I presume,' but he had a feeling that would get him very dead very fast.

Then again, what wouldn't?