4

Kneeling on the floor, Logan caught a whiff of an odd scent: it was tea, blood, wormwood, and honey mixed together. He traced it to a small wooden cup tipped on its side, most of the liquid soaked into the carpet in a big dark blot, but there was still a bit in it, so he scooped the cup up and flicked the liquid on his face. “Giles, what the fuck were you doing?”

The liquid did the trick. His head jerked away from it, and he finally opened his eyes. Once he was able to focus, he said, “Bugger.”

“What the fuck man? I thought you were scrying or something.”

Giles sat up, wiping the flecks of liquid from his face and grimacing at the blood coming from his nose. “I did that the first time. They were expecting that.”

“So what the hell were you doin’?”

“I was talking to a … friend of mine in another dimension. He owed me a favor, and I figured he could find out who was using dark magic in the area.”

“Besides you?”

He sighed, and seemed to take a moment to make sure that they were alone in the room, and that his head was still attached to his body. “Has anyone ever told you you have a very British sense of sarcasm?”

“I’m Canadian; it’s considered British with a hick accent.”

“I had no idea.”

Logan sat back on his haunches, not ready to let this go. “I know that’s a protection circle, and any spell using blood is a powerful one. So spill already. I know you were talking with a demon.”

Giles gave him a look that seemed caught somewhere between disbelief and disappointment. “I was trying to borrow his eyes.”

Logan mulled that for a moment, if only to make sure he’d heard him right. “Did you take a shot to the head? That didn’t make sense.”

Giles shifted so he was sitting slumped against the desk. He seemed okay, but clearly whatever happened had taken the wind out of his sails. “It does with this type of demon. We were unable to reach a suitable compromise.”

“Meaning it attacked you.”

“It tried. The circle held.”

“You still got hurt.”

“It tried very hard.”

“So where does that leave us? Square one?”

“No. I tricked it into telling me what I wanted to know. They’re somewhere near the Canal Street Station.”

“Subway tunnel?” Although it sounded like a question, it really wasn’t one. “That’s why it tried to hurt you so badly, huh?”

“Nobody likes a smart ass. Help me up, would you?”

“Sure.” Logan got up and reached a hand down, which Giles took gingerly, and he hauled him up to his feet. He held on a moment to let him steady himself, and Giles pretended he didn’t. As soon as he seemed ready, Logan asked, “So how we gonna do this? Reconnaissance?”

“That would be the first step. We need to know how many people we’re facing and who we’re going up against. But the problem is reconnaissance will be dangerous. They’ll expect me to attempt to do it remotely through a spell, so doing it in person will be a surprise, but that will present its own perils.”

“We keep it short and sweet,” Logan said. “I’ll do it.”

Giles shook his head. “Not alone. They’re using dark magic, and there may be traps even you can’t detect. I’ll go with you. In fact, that girl, the intangible one, she might be useful as well.”

Logan wasn’t thrilled about it, but he knew he had a point. A girl who could walk through walls without tripping a single alarm was born for reconnaissance. “Yeah, maybe. She seemed immune to that guy on the street too.”

“If he’s a decent spellcaster, that won’t hold,” Giles warned him. “He wasn’t expecting her to become intangible. Next time, he might be ready.”

“Shit.”

“Is she able to fight her way out, if worse comes to worst?”

Giles didn’t mean just fight, he didn’t mean punch a few people. He meant kill; he knew it from the way he was looking at him. It wasn’t something they actually had to discuss - they could both kill, they both had. Giles may have looked benign, and oftentimes was, but he did have a surprising badass streak about him that caught most people off guard. “She can fight, but I don’t think she has it in her to go all the way. She’s a sweet kid.”

Giles straightened his glasses and looked away, lips thinning to a hard line. “I don’t need to tell you that’s not especially helpful.”

“No, you don’t.” But as he thought about it for a moment, he realized there might be a way to even it up. “What if we made it a quartet? I know someone who has no qualms about hurting people. We’ll keep ‘em in reserve.”

Giles’ look softened slightly. “A back up weapon?”

“Exactly.”

The Watcher nodded in agreement. “Good. You don’t happen to still have those fetishes Bob gave you, do you?”

When he said fetish his mind went to a very strange place, but he quickly remembered its other meaning. “You mean the necklaces Ganesha blessed? I think I got a couple stashed away in a drawer.”

“Good, get them. I have a feeling we’re going to need all the help we can get.”

Wow, that was so not very promising.

****

Logan returned to his room to grab the necklaces, and as always when handling the simple leather cords with the little ceramic elephant pendants, he felt as silly as hell. He didn’t know if they’d even work in a case like this. According to Bob, they “repelled entropy”, which supposedly improved luck, but as far as he knew it only worked against gods who specialized in randomness. How it worked in a real life situation he had no idea.

On his way back to Storm’s office, he stopped to knock on a certain door. After a moment, John opened it. “Yeah? Are you gonna make me wear an ankle bracelet now?”

Logan scowled at him. “I told you not to open the door to anyone but me and Storm.”

“Hey, I knew it was you,” he protested. “No one else knocks on the door like they’re gonna bust it down.”

Logan didn’t believe that, but he didn’t feel he had the time to argue with him. “Whatever; don’t do it again. Right now I need you to follow my orders precisely - we’re goin’ on a field trip.”

“Oh joy,” he replied sarcastically, throwing himself back down on the bed, slamming his back up against the headboard. An iPod sat on the bedside table, something tinny drifting out of its earbuds. Logan knew he could identify it if he concentrated on it, but he didn’t give a shit. “Where we goin’, the cardboard box factory?”

“Recon assignment. I need you to hang back and wait while Giles, Kitty, and I check out some unused subway tunnels.”

John gave him a funny look. “Are you serious?” He then scoffed. “What am I sayin’? You’re hardly Jon Stewart, are you? Why the hell are we checkin’ out tunnels?”

“To find someone.” He wasn’t going to tell him any more than he needed to know.

John frowned and then rolled his eyes, getting that fact loud and clear. “Fine, keep it a surprise. But why the hell am I supposed to hang back?”

“You’re insurance.”

John cocked his head, eying him suspiciously. “Insurance?”

“In case we get up to our necks in shit.”

It took him a moment, but understanding dawned in his eyes. “Y’mean ..?”

Logan nodded. “If I give you the high sign, then burn baby, burn.”

Something dark and unpleasant sparkled deep in his eyes. It was eagerness. “You really mean it?”

“I give you the sign, you burn that motherfucker down.”

He hopped to his feet, suddenly quite chipper. “Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about. If you were here when I got to the mansion in the first place, I’d have never left.”

Logan gave him an unimpressed look. Bob changed him from a bad guy to a good guy, but the fundamental problem of Pyro was still there. Bob did a surgical strike when he should have done a full out lobotomy. (But the same could be argued about him, he supposed.) “Got everything you need?”

He flipped the Zippo up in the air and caught it with a well practiced, casual gesture. “Oh yeah. Let’s roll.”

He had a feeling he would regret this. But he was a natural balance for Kitty. She really didn’t want to hurt anything, and Pyro clearly got a kick out of hurting people.

Yeah, he was either going to be a problem now or later. He just didn’t know what he was going to do with him.

****

Before they left, Giles explained the purpose of the mission as best he could, leaving out some key details, such as looking for a black magician and magical booby traps, as those would be harder to explain than they were actually worth. Getting Pyro to put on the necklace - “What the fuck’s with this dorky thing?” - was hard enough.

Giles teleported them to a side street about a block away from the subway station, and it was empty at the time of arrival, which was a good thing. Kitty and John both needed a moment to recover from the teleporting lag, although John took it harder than Kitty. If he was going to complain about everything, Logan was going to knock him out and leave him on a subway platform.

They went down in the subway, which wasn’t too busy, but in New York that didn’t mean a whole hell of a lot. He and Giles had already worked out their pattern of attack before bringing the kids into this: Giles would cast subtle spells, trying to figure out where the magic was, and Logan would rely on his more conventional senses to pick it up … if he could. The problem - and it was a huge one - was his senses could get easily overwhelmed in something like a subway. Too many people crammed into too small a space, leaving questionable hygiene in their wake. It was the equivalent of walking into a sewer for him. But on the plus side, he’d gotten kind of used to that, so he figured he’d adapt.

The smells and sounds hit him like a baseball bat to the face, but after a couple of minutes, once they got past the turnstiles and into the subway station proper, he was accustomed to it, and started parsing smells as best he could.

Because he was concentrating so hard on the smells, he inadvertently had his game face on, and he only realized this because the otherwise oblivious New Yorkers, who had no problem plowing or bumping into Giles, Kitty, or John, seemed to go out of their way to make sure they didn’t bump into him. Even hardened, cynical New Yorkers sensed the danger of him, and avoided him like the alcoholic guy who smelled strongly of his own piss. It was probably the company he deserved to be in.

By the time they reached the main platform, Giles leaned over and whispered, “I’m picking up magic within the tunnel itself.”

“Seriously?” Well, that made sense. They would hardly be casting spells and sacrificing goats in front of the D train. Eventually, someone would notice and complain. “As soon as the train goes by I’ll duck in and have a look.”

“Duck in where?” Kitty whispered.

Logan pointed down the subway tunnel. She looked down it with a scowl, as if trying to make out something in the darkness, and then asked, “You want to go now?”

“You’re intangible, not invisible,” Logan reminded her. “Let’s just wait a couple minutes. The train’s comin’.”

“How do you know that?” John asked.

“I can hear it.”

He scoffed, and Kitty looked uncomfortable. She knew he was back and back on their side, but she didn’t look thrilled by the prospect. “The fuck you can. Those things are louder than shit, and I don’t hear it.”

“Wait a minute.” It was loud in the subway, with unintelligible announcements, people shouting at each other and into their cell phones (sometimes both), with others listening to music from radios or iPods that seemed oddly projective, although the sounds echoed and caromed strangely off curved and flat tiled surfaces. In fact, Logan was kind of glad that explosions and gunshots and various battlefields had allowed him to get somewhat inured to noise, because that’s how bad it was.

Finally the distant, hollow roar of the subway started coming down the tunnel, the vibrations coming through the platform, and Giles asked, “You really heard it that far away?”

“It was mainly smell,” he admitted. When the air started to take on a heavier concentration of oil and fuel, something was coming, and if it wasn’t a subway train, it was one fucking big truck with a really funny engine.

For about ten minutes, it was chaos and confusion and the height of noise and smell and jostling (although, again, he was deliberately avoided more than anyone else) as people got off the train and got on it, and once the train took off again, it was still noisy and weird for about two minutes. Then the crowd thinned out, the smells thinned (much less, but hey), and fewer witnesses were hanging around to watch them. He shared a glance with Giles, who simply nodded, and then they walked to the end of the platform closest to the tunnel.

Logan jumped down first, and the others followed in rough order, and while people saw them do this, no one saw them who actually gave a shit. That was one of the good things about New York City general indifference - just because they saw you do it and knew it was wrong didn’t automatically translate into them giving a shit. That was no longer just a New York thing, though; that attitude was starting to spread around the world.

Almost as soon as he passed into the tunnel, his skin started to crawl, and he smelled something … off. It was the usual expected stuff - rat droppings, human piss, lots of oil and spray paint, cockroaches, garbage, spilled malt liquor - but then there was something else, an undertone of blood and hemlock and sulfur. “You gettin’ this?” Logan muttered.

Giles nodded, and made a small gesture with his hand that indicated he was spellcasting. “Yeah. There’s been extensive casting in this area.” And by casting he was sure he didn’t mean fishing.

“So what are we looking for exactly?” Pyro asked, flicking his lighter on and off, a flare of light with a metallic click both proceeding and following it. Logan wondered where his wrist igniters were, and assumed they broke or simply got lost along the way. “Evidence that that chick has been here or something?” Kitty had caught him up on the Paloma story before they teleported here. She may have not been crazy about having him here, but she was nothing if not fair. Which was why Logan doubted she had it in her to kill.

“They’re hiding out around here somewhere,” Logan said, keeping his voice low. “Would you quit it with the lighter? You’re fucking up my night vision.”

“You have night vision? I thought that was Marcus and that weird SoCal Angel guy.”

Logan stopped and turned to glare at him, and John almost walked right into him. “You’d have night vision too if you quit flipping on that fucking lighter.”

He growled it out a bit angrier than necessary, and he knew it because John took an instant step back, and Logan picked up a sour whiff of fear. “Yeah, okay. No need to be so crabby about it.” It was a good thing he was still scared of him, or he’d have no control over him at all.

“Oh no,” Giles whispered, so softly Logan barely heard it.

He turned back towards him quickly, keeping his voice at the same pitch. “What?”

“I think someone’s opened up a dimensional rift down here.” Giles was holding something in his hand that was glowing faintly yellow. Logan only knew it was from Giles’s bag of Watcher tricks.

“Dimensional rift? What kind of dimension are we talking about here?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t imagine it would be a good one. Also, whoever they have is much more powerful than I thought.”

“Don’t tell me you’re outmatched.”

“I think I might be.” He tucked the glowing rock back in his pocket, and said, “I hate to say it, but I think a hasty retreat is called for.”

“Fuck, I hate those.”

“What’s this Star Trek bullshit?” John asked.

“What do you mean dimension?” Kitty asked nervously. “Is this another god thing?”

“What d’ya mean god thing?” John instantly replied. “What, did an evangelist take her?”

Giles said something, but Logan didn’t catch it, because he was suddenly distracted by a smell. It was sudden, sharp, and horrible, like rotting meat left under a heat lamp and pissed on by a thousand cats. He wince and his eyes watered as bile started crawling up his throat.

“Logan, what is it?” Giles asked, grabbing his arm. How could they not smell that?

But then they must have, as someone - Kitty or John, he couldn’t actually tell - made a gagging noise, and Giles let him go to clamp a hand over his nose and mouth.

Logan swallowed back the bile and started to get inured to the smell, so his eyes stopped watering. He straightened up, and thought he saw the darkness start to shift before he heard a growl that was so deep it sounded like an avalanche, and he felt the ground beneath their feet tremble in response. Oh shit.

“What the hell was that?” John asked, his voice finally pitched at a whisper.

“Run,” Logan told them, popping his claws and taking a step forward, hoping the thing wasn’t as big as he thought he was.

Because if he was right, it was taking up most of the tunnel. And he suspected it wasn’t even all here yet.