8

“Give us a wall of fire, now!” Logan shouted to Pyro, as several things happened at once.

Someone female up ahead of them screamed, “Fuck!” very loudly, and several spells, bursts of bright energy, lit up the tunnel before Pyro could even flick his lighter a second time. Logan grabbed Oz by the arm and yanked him back, putting himself in front of him, but Oz had a stake out already. Before he could ask where he got it, Oz said, “I always carry one into dark places.” That was smart.

Pyro was able to create a scrim of flame - not a proper wall - but it was enough to repel the vampires, who had a tendency to go up like gasoline soaked torches near open flame. The red eyed demons weren’t impressed, though, and why would they be? They looked like some odd cross between Humans and stick insects, with a generous dollop of rocks and bark thrown in. They had the basic humanoid bodies - two legs, two arms, one head - but they looked wrong in several fundamental ways. The fingers were thin and long, with multiple knuckles that didn’t exist on a normal hand; their fingers looked like long, skeletal twigs, while their necks were more like tree trunks, thick and rigid, growing into a head like the top of a shield, a flat skull suddenly ending at a sharp point. You wouldn’t want to be head butted by them. They moved like they had extra joints in their hips and legs as well, yet in a jerky, sudden manner, like a skittering spider, with an armored carapace that looked like slate. They were creepy, ugly things, even by demon standards.

“What the hell are those?” Logan shouted to Giles.

Giles was a little busy casting a spell, but after a moment he said, “They look like Mrkans.”

“What are they? What the fuck’s their weakness?”

“They’re demonic parasites. They’re hard to kill.”

“Great.” Logan had actually guessed that last part himself. They didn’t seem afraid of the flames either, unlike the vampires. He whispered to Oz, “You get the vamps, I’ll get the ticks.” The guy just nodded, gripping the stake tightly.

“I can’t hold up this big a burst for long,” Pyro carped.

“Then drop it and take them on individually, just don’t let one grab you. Get your back to the wall so they can’t jump ya.” Logan saw the ticks lurching their way and charged out to meet them, claws popped and slicing the air like scythes. He cut into them, chopping off whatever presented itself, but it was like cutting through thick concrete, and it did little to cut their forward momentum, even when he took off their heads. He started aiming for midsections and legs, hoping to slow them down.

He went into automatic mode, the place in his mind where he did nothing but stand back and watch as his body did what it had been hardwired to do: fight. It was all reflex, all muscle memory; anything that came near him was hit, kicked, slashed, and dismembered. He cut a swath through the ugly things as they chittered and hissed like oversized cockroaches, the vampires deciding to leave him alone for the moment. Which should have been a clue, and by the time the thinking part of his brain kicked back in, he was half doused in brownish-black blood that smelled of leaf mold and bile, his body warm and alive with healing as his system took on Mrkan bites and scratches.

A quick glance around showed that Pyro was fine and being pretty much ignored - Mrkans might not have cared much about flames, but no one liked getting a flamethrower in the face - Giles was in the middle of a scrum but seemed okay, if the thin but visible bubble of energy around him was any indication. But Oz was gone.

Logan tromped through Mrkan body parts, many of which twitched and writhed in muddy pools of blood, as if desperate to crawl back to their masters and rejoin the body, and noticed a rather large pile of vampires down at the farther end of the tunnel. Did they have Oz? Safe bet. He charged towards them, slicing through the armored insectoid demons as he ran past and through them. Some attacked, but most tried to avoid him. Still, one grabbed for his legs as he cut another in half, and Logan hit the ground, splashing in more rank blood. It crawled up him like a beetle, chittering excitedly, but he slashed back blindly, ripping something on it, and then rolled over onto his back, assuming it wouldn’t follow. It didn’t. It loomed over him like a deformed tree monster, red eyes burning like coals and wound like mouth agape, and he let it dive down on him as he held up his hand. And the stupid thing impaled itself on his claws. At least this confirmed that the Mrkans, no matter how grotesque they appeared to be, were about as smart as your average table lamp.

He used his feet to push the body up and off his claws, tossing it aside as he rolled back up to his feet, prepared to break up the vampire dog pile, but he paused as a chilling noise suddenly filled the tunnel. It wasn’t the insect clicks of the Mrkans, nor the throaty growls of the vampires, but a deep, canine howl.

Uh-oh. The wolf was out.

Vampires went flying as the wolf started biting and clawing at everything around it, and while some tried to grab him and hold on to him, it didn’t work. He thrashed and bit, and the vampires couldn’t really hit an angry werewolf hard enough to stun it. Maybe if it wasn’t so mad.

“What the hell?!” Pyro exclaimed, as the wolf finally showed itself, snarling and howling. It was a Human sized beast, only a wolf in a mutant, slightly demonic sense; its head was too big, for example, as was its muzzle full of razor teeth. Also, it looked like it had a green stripe on the front of its head, sort of like Oz’s landing strip Mohawk, but partially obscured in clumps of brown fur.

“Don’t hurt him,” Giles shouted, probably to the witches as well as John. “It’s Oz!”

“He turns into a wolf?” Pyro replied. “Well - why the fuck didn’t he do it earlier?!”

Technically, that would have been a good question if he was a mutant and not a werewolf in some kind of self-imposed twelve step recovery program. Logan really didn’t feel like trying to explain it to him, and there was no time to anyways. The vampires who hadn’t lost a limb to the werewolf fled deeper into the tunnel, and Oz wolf followed like an attack dog on a rampage, which summed it up pretty well actually. Without the vampire back up, the surviving and still intact Mrkans - not many; maybe half a dozen - retreated back into the darkness around them, some clinging to the walls like spiders, only their red eyes glaring down at them giving them away.

Pyro looked around dubiously. “So they call off their attack just like that?”

Giles went over and picked up the short sword that Oz had lost in his transformation sequence. He was scuffing the ground a bit, trying to find the crossbow, but having no luck. “They don’t attack opponents that can kill them. They prey on things weaker than them.”

“They just attacked us! We aren’t weaker than them.”

“We were when we were surrounded by vampires.” Howls and screams and snarls echoed down from deeper in the tunnel, and even in the dim light, Logan saw the look Giles was giving him, and nodded an acknowledgement.  Logan was the only one who was immune to lycanthropy - either his healing factor repelled it, or Bob would remove it; either way, he was good - so he’d be in charge of subduing or dealing with Oz.  And that was going to be a huge problem, as they hadn't brought along the horse tranquilizers.  Did Giles know any sleep spells that worked on werewolves?  Maybe Ate and her pretentious witch brigade did. Logan hoped so, because he might have to crack Oz wolf’s skull to knock him out if the vampires had no luck.

He led the way farther into the tunnel, with Giles right behind him and Pyro taking up the rear, suspiciously eyeing the remaining Mrkans until they were out of their sight. Logan was glad the noises of a fight remained up ahead, because right now his nose was full of the smell of Mrkan blood, which was still dripping from his clothes. Wow, was he glad he had a superior gag reflex.

But the noises seemed to fade a bit, as he heard a hum.  It was almost an electrical hum, but very high pitched - he almost felt it more than heard it. “You guys picking this up?”

“What?” Giles and Pyro asked, but not in unison. That was actually a relief, because if it had been in unison, that would have been freaky.

“It’s a hum … it’s really loud now.” It was; he thought he could feel it making his back teeth vibrate. “You’re not hearing this?”

“Ah shit man, now is not the time for a psychotic break,” Pyro cracked. “Well, a more psychotic break.”

Logan looked back and glared at him, letting him know that if he was in punching distance, he’d have smacked his ass back to the subway platform.

“Our hearing isn’t as developed as yours, Logan. You’ll have to tell us.” Giles said, a not so subtle reminder that he could hear better than your average bear. Shit. He'd kind of forgot, actually, which was a bit stupid, but he'd never claimed to be a genius. Besides, this noise was so loud it was hard to believe no one else could hear it.

“It’s a hum. It’s like a sub-sonic drill, only there’s no modulation. It’s one pitch.”

“Okay, I understood two words of that,” Pyro said.

“A hum,” Giles repeated, ignoring him.  It was always a wise decision to ignore Pyro when you could. “It’s getting louder?”

“Oh yeah, it’s almost painful now, it’s -” Logan stopped, and Giles almost ran into his back. “Okay, now it’s gone.”

“That was really helpful,” Pyro complained.  He was always complaining.  How had Magneto stood him for so long?

Giles nodded, a strange look on his face. What did he know that he wasn’t sharing? He didn’t say, he just dipped his head and seemed to indicate that he should continue forward, so Logan did, wondering if he didn’t want to say whatever it was he’d figured out in front of Pyro.

Although the stink of Mrkan blood remained cloying and ever-present, the textures of the smells began to change, they were more layered, odd smells he had no name for. People, demons, vampires, werewolf … and what the hell else? There was something else, but he was too stuffed up with Mrkan blood to tell. It was wrong, though.

They rounded a curve of the tunnel, and Logan discovered just how wrong everything was.

They should have entered another tunnel branch, something lined with subway tracks and reeking of urine from the homeless drinkers who managed to slip past authorities and dwell in the shadow of the line, but what they ended up on was the lip of a cliff, looking down at a huge subterranean cavern full of demons currently fighting. It looked like the Oz wolf was down there, shaking something to pieces within its jaws, and probably the vampires, although any familiar ones were lost in the scrum. The witches were down there, huddled in a group, making a protective circle of linked hands and bodies around Ate, who was throwing some major spell and generally yelling at the demons that they were all a bunch of “fucking morons”. The rock cliffs around them were a sort of Sedona desert reddish orange, although the cliff they were standing on was clay colored. Logan estimated the drop to be thirty five feet straight down.

Pyro looked down at the turbulent sea of fighting bodies, and exclaimed, “Holy crap, have we entered Zion?”

Once again, they all ignored him. It was for the best, as Logan was pretty sure that reference went right over his head. “We’ve entered another dimension, haven’t we?”

Giles nodded tersely, his jaw growing tense. “The rift’s expanding. The noise you heard was the tear in the dimensions.”

“Dimensional shit again?” Pyro asked. “Look, are you telling me we’re in a different world now?”

“Yes,” Giles replied wearily, giving up on keeping any of this from him.

Pyro, still looking down at the bloody demon fight below, nodded. “Does this mean there’s another me here?”

“Let’s hope not,” Giles replied dryly. He then turned back to Logan. “The smart thing to do would be to retrieve Oz and get out of here, but it will also be exceedingly difficult.”

“We can’t let this rift keep expanding, either way.”

“Agreed. But I’m not sure what’s causing it, making shutting it down that much harder.”

“We just find the doohickey doing this, and break it,” Pyro said. “Logan’s good at breaking doohickeys.”

What, he thought a time machine or something was behind this?  Well, fine, let him think that.  It was probably a little more palatable than the truth: evil demons and/or sorcerers, perhaps both. “It might be more complicated than that,” Giles said diplomatically.

“What’s the point of this anyway?” Logan asked, as the entire scenario was now really bugging him.  “What does Paloma have to do with any of this?”

“That’s a very good question. I was just starting to wonder that myself.”

“Up there!” A gruff voice shouted, with all the texture of sandpaper. They looked down to see a stone pillar in the center of the fighting crowd - strike that. The stone pillar was actually a demon who looked to be carved from red rock himself, all spikes and ridges, for whom ugly was far too mild a term. “He’s here! Get him!”

It was impossible to say who the demon was pointing at. Logan? Giles? He was fairly certain Pyro could be ruled out. Something shot out from the roiling crowd like a guided missile, black and angular, and Logan only got the impression of large dark wings unfurling before he launched himself at it, meeting it as it crowned the edge of the cliff, and they collided with the force of speeding cars. The shock registered through his system and his consciousness wavered, but his automatic responses were still functioning, and he drove his claws into a surface like jagged glass and hung on for dear life. The thing screamed, a high pitched cry not unlike a dental drill, and it soared up towards the ceiling of the cavern, trying to shed him like a unwanted passenger (which is what he was).

Logan felt his nose burning, healing from impact damage (did he break it? Probably, judging by the crackling), and saw that the thing was made up of palm sized black scales that were as sharp as glass, that cut him every time he moved. It had a triangular shaped head that ended in a beak that was as long and sharp as a knitting needle made from obsidian. If it had eyes, he couldn’t see them from this angle.

He held on tight with his legs and jabbed one of his claws into what he assumed to be its midsection, making it bleed something as green as antifreeze, and then it started diving down towards the crowd at a speed that was probably equivalent to sixty miles an hour or so. The crowd and the rocky ground they were standing on were coming up fast.

Oh yeah, this was going to hurt.