10

“You know Arba?” Ate asked him in obvious disbelief. She was glaring at him in a manner best described as hateful.

“Know is too strong a term,” Giles admitted. “He just ..didn’t kill me once when he could have.”

“So you owe him.”

“No … let’s just say we didn’t kill each other when we could have, and leave it at that.”

Somehow he didn’t think she would, as much as he wanted her to. Arba was now squinting down at Oz, who was hunched up and snarling at him, fur raised like he’d just been shocked by static electricity. “Now look here, pooch, I didn’t invite you. Don’t go getting uppity with me.”

“He’s with me,” Giles shouted at him. “Don’t hurt him!”

Arba looked at him askance, the black holes of his eyes narrowing in obvious disbelief. “You travel with werewolves now?” A new growling noise caught Arba’s attention, but this time it wasn’t Oz, but Logan, who had currently run out of demons to fight and had just noticed Arba. “You can’t even be thinking about it, little man. I’ll crush you like a grape.” But Logan was still growling at him, claws held out and dripping a toxic mix of blood. His size apparently didn’t matter; he smelled wrong, therefore was a decent target. Not for the first time, Giles wondered what you had to do to a man to make him that unconcerned about his own well being. Then again, it was always difficult, through normal means, to make a man do something he was predisposed not to do.  Perhaps Weapon X had simply found a way to exploit and enhance Logan’s own natural self-destructive tendencies and use them to their advantage. It also made him wonder if he was ever going to tell Logan that the Watchers knew about the Organization and some even knew a bit about Weapon X, but no one was overly concerned since demons were in no way involved, at least not to their knowledge. It set such an ugly, but predictable, precedent: people could do whatever ugly thing they wanted to other people, as long as they were all Human. Far be it from them to, oh, help fellow Humans being tortured by their fellow man. Thinking about things like this, he wondered why he'd rejoined. But at least Watchers weren’t alone in this type of callous behavior.

Arba wasn’t scared by Logan’s refusal to be scared of him, but he was puzzled. “What the fuck is this thing anyway? You make yourself a robot, Rupert?”

“He’s Human, and he’s with me too. Don’t hurt him. If you can at all, avoid it.”

Logan was growling through the entire conversation, glaring at him with those astonishingly empty - yet angry - eyes. Arba continued squinting down at him like he was an absolutely fascinating shell he found on the beach. “He’s actually thinking of attacking me, isn’t he? Is he brain damaged?”

“No, he’s just not in his right mind at the moment.” Noticing the sneaky smirk on Arba’s face, he quickly added, “Don’t tease him. Yes, you’re bigger and stronger than he is, but he could actually do a lot of damage to you.”

That earned a scoff, which sounded like rocks sliding down a mountainside. “This little flea?”

“He was made to kill. If you have a weakness, he will do his damnedest to find it before you kill him.”

“And he’s an avatar,” Ate added. Giles quickly shot her a scolding look. So much for that ace in the hole.

“This thing? Who the fuck’s he an avatar for?”

Stuck, he had no choice. He could lie, but Arba was very good at ferreting out lies. “Bob.”

For a long moment there was nothing but the sound of Logan and Oz both growling, along with some groans from wounded demons who wanted to get up, but didn’t want to get bit or stabbed again. Arba’s ears drooped slightly. “Bob. Sunovabitch, will the Powers never leave me alone?”

“They have nothing to do with this.” Well, not as far as Giles knew.

Arba scowled down at him. “Right. Bob’s avatar just happens to be here.”

“Actually, yes. Since when does Bob work directly for the Powers? You know he’s as rogue as you are.”

The nephilim grunted in disgust. “He’s still one of them. You can’t trust them.”

The nephilim were one of the few breeds of demon mentioned in the Bible and the Dead Sea Scrolls, although they got what they were wrong (but that wasn’t a shock - much of what was in both of them were wrong, to the point that many Watchers wondered if they weren’t demon plants of some sort). Supposedly the nephilim were the offspring of angels and Humans, but since what were thought of as angels were really just another kind of demon, the offspring shouldn’t be as grotesque as they were. No, the truth of the nephilim was more surprising: they were the offspring of divine beings and demons. Now supposedly one type of divine being was responsible for the entire nephilim race (which was admittedly small), but no one was actually sure who, because they wouldn’t cop to it. Rumor - and Arba - had it that the Powers were responsible, whilst others thought that one of the more legendarily randy gods (Zeus, Odin, Aphrodite) was responsible. The truth is, no one knew and would probably never know, as no god would ever admit to creating such a bastard race that seemed to exist only to trouble and harass divine beings.  The nephilim as a whole - all ten of them - had chips on their shoulder the size of your average boulder.  They got none of the divine powers, but they seemed to get all of the inhumanity. They were incredibly dangerous.

“We need to talk. Can you call your people off?”

“My people?”

“The demons aren’t working for you?”

He looked around skeptically at the piles of bodies, some of which he had accidentally squished himself. “They’d have to be alive to work, don’t you think?”

“Don’t be sarcastic.”

“These guys are leasers; they’re just using the space.”

“I’ve been drugged, haven’t I?” Pyro asked, rubbing his eyes. “Is a giant pinhead actually talking to us?”

Giles ignored him, because Arba had just said something key... “Leasers?  You’re renting out your realm?”

The giant shrugged uncomfortably. “Not rent, exactly. These guys just needed a dimension close to the Earth one, and they’ll owe me big time. If this whole thing pays off, they said I can be the first to take advantage of it.”

Vague, but definitely menacing. He really didn’t like the sound of this. “What do you mean?”

“We can talk, but call off your dogs before I squish them,” Arba said, pointing down at Oz and Logan.

Giles glanced back at Ate. “Can you put Oz to sleep? And I mean actual sleep, not kill.”

At the addition of “not kill”, she scowled sourly. “Of course I can. But why not kill him? He’s a damned creature anyway. It’s a mercy killing.”

“He’s a Human being, in spite of what he appears to be. And once he sleeps, he’ll revert back to that form.”

“What about your crazy friend there?”

Giles simply cast a minor “clarity” spell on Logan, figuring that all he needed was a sudden, clear awareness of where he was to shock him back to full consciousness. It must have worked because, after a moment, he stopped growling and shook his head, his hand instinctively reaching for the gaping wound on the side of his face, which was starting to heal but still had a long way to go. “What the fuck ..?” he grumbled. His fingers traced the outline of the hole, and then, looking around, he noticed the grotesque giant in front of him. He took a step back, brow furrowing in confusion, but he didn’t retract his claws, and aware of Arba’s scrutiny, he narrowed his eyes in response, asking, “You wanna rumble, Godzilla?”

Arba laughed, a booming noise like a cannon that made them all cringe a little. “You still wanna fight me, midget? You don’t got the sense of a drunken stoat, do ya?”

“Giles?” Logan asked. And while it didn’t sound like it, Logan was asking him if he should go ahead and attack the giant. If only most Slayers were so conscientious. He both admired and feared Logan’s causal disregard for his own well-being.

“It’s okay, Logan. I know him. In a manner of speaking.”

Ate had her coven cast the spell on Oz and the werewolf toppled over on its side, so deeply asleep that each heaving breath sounded a bit like a snore. None of the demons capable of movement were attacking, probably because Arba was on the scene, and if he couldn’t handle it, then the  problem just couldn’t be handled. Since a détente seemed to have been reached, Giles asked, with renewed forcefulness in his voice, “Arba, what is going on?”

Since Logan had started drifting back toward the coven, Arba had turned his hard, dark gaze their way. Giles almost wished he would go back to looking at them sidelong again. “Are you so out of touch you’re unaware of the chaos, Rupert?”

“What chaos?”

“The underworld’s been in turmoil for some time. It seems someone let all the Slayers out at once - were you even aware that was a possibility? - and the balance has been thrown outta whack. It’s gotten messy, to the point where someone decided to just sort it all out.”

Giles felt a deep twinge in his gut that he hadn’t felt for years. In a strange way, it was comforting to know he was still capable of feeling stark terror. “Sort it all out? Who decided to do this, and how?”

Arba got this unsettlingly smug smirk on his face. “Who do you think? You think that a buncha Humans actually did this? Really? This took an awful lot of power. You guys just don’t have that much. This was an upstairs decision.”

Giles felt his stomach go into freefall as Logan shook his head and made a noise of disgust. “I’ve had enough of fucking gods.”

The nephilim grinned savagely, showing teeth large enough to impale them all. “Know what else, Rupert? We were waiting for you. To reverse the whole damn mess, we needed a Slayer, and someone who was near ground zero of the whole thing. Nice of you to volunteer.”

“What the hell does any of this mean?” Pyro asked, exasperated. “I think I understood every third word, and it still didn’t make sense.”

“It means this is a trap, kid,” Logan growled, glaring at Arba, fists clenched hard at his side. He looked like he was ready to attack, in spite of the size difference, but then it seemed like many more demons showed up, both on the ground and on the cliff where they had once been standing. Maybe fifty or so altogether, of various types, so he couldn’t guess what god might have been involved in this.

“You led us into a trap?” Ate roared, giving him an angry shove from behind. He stumbled, but managed to stop himself before he crashed into one of the coven. “You idiot! I’m gonna kill you!”

Giles looked around, and admitted, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to get in line.”

Oh well. At least they’d find out who the mastermind behind all of this was. It was the only benefit in being taken prisoner.