13

Maybe it wouldn’t be all that helpful, but sometimes you just had to go with what you knew.

John flicked on his lighter and hit Arba full in the face with a flamethrower blast of fire. He let out a startled, pain filled yelp, and staggered back as John continued to bathe him in fire. Arba’s shirt burst into flame, suggesting it was polyester or something quite like it.

He sputtered and reeled as his skin crisped and a smell not unlike burning sausage filled the hallway, but sadly it wasn’t enough. Arba used the wall to stagger forward, forcing his way through the flames towards him. He might have been trying to talk, but his throat was burnt enough that all he could do was making grisly grunting noises. John kept pouring on the fire, but he kept forcing himself onward, in spite of the flames. Yeah, he was fucked.

John thought he saw movement behind Arba, but it was just a flicker, a brief glint of silver … silver?

He stopped the flamethrower action just in time, as Logan rammed his claws into Arba’s back and ripped towards the opposite wall, spraying his strangely purplish blood across the rock like splattered grape juice. Arba dropped to his knees, letting out a stifled grunt that was equal parts pain and surprise. “Oz, get him out of here,” Logan said, slashing Arba’s head in half - well, three even sections. Kinda half.

But even though you could see his brains (or whatever he had for brains) oozing out, Arba grabbed Logan and threw him into the rocks, hard enough that he made a sizable indent in it, and rocks cracked and broke, crumbling like dead skin. Logan slid down to the floor, struggling to breathe, blood pouring out of his nose and mouth. You couldn’t break his bones, but you could stomp him into a fine paste around the bones.

Arba’s head was sealing itself; his skin had almost all grown back. He had Logan’s healing factor times twenty thousand. But even as the black smears of his eyes settled on him, Logan sprung up from the ground and drove two of his claws straight into those eyes. Arba let out a strangled cry, and a virtually naked Oz skirted the two bloody, brawling figures and grabbed his arm as he headed the opposite way down the hall.

John pulled his arm out of his grip, but went along with him. “What happened to your clothes?”

He shrugged. “Wolves don’t wear pants.”

That was the oddest phrase that had ever been said to him, but he couldn’t argue with it, as it was true. Before disappearing around the turn, they both glanced back at the continued, awful meaty thuds as Arba continued to pound Logan into ground chuck. A smart person would have played dead and stop aggravating the super powered freak, but Logan didn’t know when to quit. Logan was on his back on the floor, getting pounded, but even as Logan spit blood, he gripped Arba’s head with his feet, and with a loud crack he snapped the zombie’s neck. (How fucking cool was that?! Why didn’t Logan ever teach them to do that?! Where did you learn that?) The funny thing was, it didn’t stop him beating on him, but because Arba’s head was now at a weird angle, he was missing, his piledriver fists missing Logan’s head and smashing down into the rock, leaving pothole sized divots. Logan kicked him in the chest and tossed him off, but he wasn’t moving fast. Then again, he seemed to be bleeding from every orifice. How he was conscious and capable of movement was anybody’s guess.

“He is way more intense than YouTube led me to believe,” Oz said.

John snorted, although it was hard to say it was a laugh. He didn’t feel much like laughing right now. “He’s fucking nuts.”

“Sometimes that helps,” Oz admitted. John couldn’t argue with that. Although he wondered how long it would be before Arba beat Logan into hummus and came after them. A minute at most? He had a good healing factor, but Arba had the obvious edge, and seemed ten thousand times stronger than Juggernaut. Also, judging from the fact that his head was cut in pieces and his neck snapped and it didn’t slow him down, he couldn’t be killed either. They were so fucked. What were they going to do?

Oz stopped suddenly, and turned to face him. “Where are we going?”

“Fuck if I know. Away from the freakazoid, I guess.”

His brow furrowed as he frowned. Wow, he had lots of piercing and tattoos, didn’t he? It went with the green Mohawk, he supposed. “Where’s Giles?”

“I have no fucking clue. He did some kinda teleport thing and took everyone away, although I guess not Arba. Don’t know why.”

Oz looked down at the floor as he thought, and out of the corner of his eye, John noticed what looked like a flattened brown splotch with huge eyes on slender stalks squelching down the wall. He got ready to flame on - what the fuck was that?! - when Oz said, “Whoomp, this is John. John, Whoomp.”

“Whoomp?” Was he serious?

“Does the claw man like pain?” the Whoomp thing said. How John had no idea. Where was its mouth?

“I don’t think so. It’s just part of the superhero gig.” Oz finally looked back up at him. “Aren’t we supposed to be looking for a Slayer?”

“You mean that girl? Yeah, but I have no idea where we start.”

“I do.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring. (He had a gold stud on the side of his nose. That stayed in when he wolfed out? Weird.) He opened his eyes and pointed further down the canyon. “She’s that way.”

“You have super smelling too?”

Oz shrugged. “Probably not as good as Logan’s, but down here, when the Humans are just us? Yeah, I’m brilliant. This way.”

Oz just walked off, Whoomp (that couldn’t have been his name) slinking along the wall like some kind of living road kill pancake, and John realized he had little choice but to follow. Unless he wanted to go back towards the wet thuds of Logan being beaten to a Slurpee like consistency.

It was a really awful time to remember why he never liked being a hero.

****

Giles heard the arguing before he gained enough consciousness to open his eyes, although only one voice was raised. The other was low and deadly, the timbre of voice one used before slaughtering someone with a piece of hardware. No wonder the other sounded so desperate.

At first he thought he was blind, as he saw nothing but white, but his eyes adjusted and he remembered that this was how this “room” was: a white on white space that echoed eternity in its unbounded, bright nothingness.

Raijin was in what could have been the center of the room, looking like a regular person in a grey designer suit. Which was why it was funny he was arguing so desperately with what looked like a nine year old girl in a frilly velvet party dress. Except the girl had black eyes, and an expression of infinite coldness that suggested her youthful countenance was the most bald faced lie ever perpetrated.

Teleporting them all to the Senior Partners’ dimensional intersection - in other words, the top floor of one of Wolfram and Harts’ skyscrapers - was actually a last resort, plan C, but as soon as he realized they were dealing with Raijin, it became the best option.

The Senior Partners were all about loyalty. Why else did they make their minions stay with them even beyond death? As far as they were concerned, once you picked a side, you stuck with it for good.

Raijin started bad, and then switched sides. No matter that he switched sides back, the Senior Partners would see him as fickle and weak. And they really didn’t like weak.

“Oh, so you’re still alive?” Ate said to him. Giles moved his eyes enough to see she was sitting on the floor close to him. His eyes were all he could move. He felt like a broken doll, loose limbed and full of sawdust that threatened to shift every time he sucked in a breath.

“For the moment.”

“I thought you gave up black magic, Ripper.”

“It has its uses every now and then.”

“You know what you’ve done to yourself, right?”

“I assumed I wasn’t leaving this place alive,” he told her. He knew the Senior Partners wouldn’t be pleased with him crashing their dimensional nexus, setting aside the fact that he’d been working with Angel against them. He kind of doubted they were members of his fan club.

“Good assumption. Although it would have been nice for you to mention this was a suicide mission.”

“I thought you preferred a surprise.” After a brief pause, he asked, “So you and Raijin were involved?”

“Uch. Don’t ask. It was eons ago.”

They could hear that Raijin and the Senior Partners’ representative were arguing, but they couldn’t hear the actual words. Giles imagined that the Senior Partners were keeping them from overhearing anything potentially useful. Although the little girl didn’t move and didn’t raise her voice above the sinister monotone, she was clearly winning this argument. Raijin was still arguing loudly, desperately, but he must have known it was a lost cause. He could pledge fidelity to them, but since he had a history of shifting whenever it behooved him, they’d never believe him.

“Where’s everyone else?” Giles was sure he’d brought everyone in the room, save for John, with him.

Ate shrugged, staring so intently at Raijin and the little girl it looked like she was trying to lip read. “They disappeared shortly after we got here. I guess the Partners tossed them out. But why keep us? Okay, you I can see keeping, they probably want to disembowel you with paperclips, but why me?”

“I don’t know.” So did they kill them or send them back? They might kill lesser demons, just because, but it was more than likely they sent Arba back - he was the god equivalent of a leper. They wouldn’t even dirty their hands killing him.

A problem, but not a huge one. Giles was counting on Logan to simply assume leadership and finish the mission. No, he couldn’t kill Arba and he probably knew it, but that wouldn’t stop him from fighting him, even if Arba did kill him. Logan was a born kamikaze; he would take the hit for the team. It probably wouldn’t occur to him not to. On the good side of that, it was unlikely Arba could permanently kill Logan. Either his bizarrely resilient healing factor would kick him back into life, or Bob would show up and - to quote Xander - open up a can of godly whoop ass on Arba. Giles hoped for the latter, simply because it would spare Logan some pain. But he knew he couldn’t count on that.

Even though Raijin and the little girl were still arguing, the little girl appeared before them, an exact mirror image twin. “You don’t give up, do you?” she said, her voice multilayered and menacing.

Giles glanced at her unfathomably dark eyes, and admitted, “It’s a character flaw.”

“We know,” she said, and then she smiled, a sickly, menacing rictus grin that made him feel cold to the very pit of his soul. “We’ve been counting on it.”