The house was well appointed and scrupulously neat, but Logan could smell the former presence of another person. Not part of the cleaning crew - a man who had lived here long enough that even a total housecleaning couldn't eradicate all traces of him. He suddenly wondered if it had been Casey.

Both he and Marcus did a tour of the house in the dark, using their senses to figure out if they were being observed. They found three bugs, which they quietly collected and put gently in an outside garbage can. Well, if they had destroyed them, they would know, and they weren't ready to tip their hand yet.

As soon as they were sure the coast was clear, they went out the back door and headed out on foot towards the most likely area of Plano da Noite - towards the oil derricks.

Once again they avoided the main roads and stuck to walking over fields of wild grasses and between clutches of wild palms, although they were aware of more people out and about - just not near them. With their senses, it was easy to avoid everyone.

In truth, Logan was tired. He was pretty sure it was a combination of time zone swapping and the fact that he hadn't slept very much over the last few days - well, sleep was for suckers. He figured he had a good twenty hours before he became completely incoherent.

They were Northwest of the main oil field, out of plain view of the graveyard workers, and partially screened by long, slender trees that almost looked like poplars but couldn't possibly be. They were crossing a grassy flat, and the strangest feeling came over Logan. His skin felt like it was tingling but not in a good way; like pins and needles when a "sleeping" limb wakes up. But he'd never had a sleeping limb ...

They were being watched.

He stopped, and Marcus noticed and turned immediately. "What is it?" He whispered quietly. In the harsh, flat light from the quarter moon, he did look alien, like a creature stuffed unwillingly into a Human skin.

"Somethin' isn't right here," he said quietly, looking around. The drills continued their ca-chunk ca-chunk, the minute vibrations of the actions making the ground quiver faintly beneath their feet, and he sniffed the air warily. Nothing but the scents of the distant men ( discussing what one had for dinner; another pair discussing a strip club in Panama where you could buy the women for the price of a cup of coffee; another discussing the work schedule with the supervisor ) and them, nothing else ... except what was that?

It was a faint scent, nearly buried by the smell of sweat and oil, coffee and turned earth. It was both sickly sweet and stale, like rotted flesh in an abandoned mausoleum. His claws were itching to spring from his hands. He continued looking around, and Marc joined him. "I ain't getting anything unusual," he offered.

"I am," Logan insisted.

"What?"

"It's just a feeling."

"A feeling of what?"

"It's - " He had started towards the stand of trees on the far left, but stopped as he spied a figure watching them from behind a slender palm.

Jean.

His heart stopped, and it felt like his blood had turned to ice water. Her hazel eyes met his and she smiled slyly, her hair looking like a fiery crimson in the moonlight; it seemed to flow around her head like she was still under water. Her face had a pale luminosity that made him think of mythical ghosts ... they were mythical, right?

When he could speak, he said to Marc, "Tell me you see her."

His head snapped sharply in the direction he was staring at, and Marcus said, "Who? Where is she?"

Jean's smile grew wider, more malevolent, and Logan knew what was wrong here - no smell. He couldn't smell her, and Marcus couldn't see her - she wasn't here at all.

So what the hell was?

She seemed to slip behind the tree, trailing a gloved hand along the grey bark, and he shouted, "No you don't!" He snapped out of his paralysis and started to run, but stopped short as Marcus cried out in pain behind him.

"Fuck!" Marcus snapped, closing his eyes tight and ducking his head as he staggered back. He brought up his hands, and both had guns in them, but his eyes remained shut. "Where's it coming from, Logan?"

"What?"

"The spotlight," he said, grimacing in pain, swinging his guns around to bear on something that wasn't there.

"Spotlight?" The penny finally dropped, and he realized why he saw Jean without smelling her, and why Marc thought he was being assailed by a spotlight that didn't exist - something was fucking with their heads. None of this was real. "There's no spotlight, Marc."

"Fuck you! There is so! What are ya, blind all of a sudden?"

"It's just me," he assured him as he walked over. He pulled the sunglasses out of Marc's shirt pocket and slid them on over his eyes. "Okay, see for yourself."

Marcus reluctantly opened his eyes, still squinting slightly, and then took a good look around, lowering his weapons. "Where'd it go?"

"Wherever she went," he groused, then added, "At least we found it."

"Found what?"

"The Plain of Night," Logan told him, glancing around warily. He got no sense of anything around them, but he could still feel it watching them just the same. He hadn't even felt the intrusion in his mind, and that really disturbed him. In fact, he was starting to feel really pissed off, because he'd been through this seeing the dead thing before, back in Saint Michel. But this was different somehow, wasn't it?  "Come on, we'd better get out of here while we still can."

"Huh? How do you know?" Marcus had slipped one gun back into its hidden holster, but he still kept one out just in case.

" 'Cause night is when the monsters walk, right?"

Marcus lowered his glasses to the bridge of his nose and gazed at him like he was waiting for the punchline.

But since Logan wasn't joking, he was going to be waiting for a long time.

8

He'd been right, as it didn't take Logan long to get a signal. He had to go out back, though, as for some reason he couldn't make a connection inside the house. So he sat on the cement patio, leaning back against the house in Meadow Lane, and made his calls. It was a warm enough night that Marcus kept the back door open, and was busy making himself a snack in the kitchen - of course it was stocked with food, basically all Western. "Yee haw, we have us the American food of choice," Marcus had exclaimed, then tossed a can of Cheez Whiz at him. Logan did the only thing you could do with a can of spray cheese - he threw it in the garbage can, careful not to smash the bugs. By all rights he should have flushed the crap, but the can was too big to fit down the toilet.

He couldn't find Helga. He got the answering machine in Sydney ( she had never taken Bob's message off the machine ), and when he called the Way Station he got a grouchy ( meaning normal ) Lia, who told him Helga was taking care of some "Bob business" in Myanmar, and no she had no idea how to get ahold of her, nor was she her answering service.

Logan was ready to pound the phone to bits on the patio - he could hardly call Xavier and say, "Hey Chuck, I'm down in this place called Santo Marco, and I think it's demon infested. Little help?" - when he thought of someone he hadn't thought of in a very long time. He wondered if he still remembered the number?

As it turned out, he didn't. But a call to California information got him a number he could use, and he punched it up, only worrying about the time difference when the phone started to ring. Still, he did most of his business at night, right?

After three rings, the phone was picked up. "Hello?" A British man said, his voice slightly muddled with sleep. Maybe this was his night off or something.

"Wesley?" He replied, aware it was him but feeling suddenly awkward about it. When was the last time he saw him? He hoped they parted on okay terms; he'd have hated it if his last hope hung up on him.

"Who is this?" He sounded slightly more awake, and on alert - he recognized his voice, but couldn't place it.

"Logan. I was, uh - "

"Wolverine," he said. "Yes, the mutant, I remember." The mutant? Like there was only one of  them?  "Good lord, I didn't think we'd ever hear from you again."

Marcus had met Wesley Wyndham-Price, of course - in fact he was there when the Shrike controlled Wes punctured his lungs with a shotgun blast, and Wes somehow put the pedal to the metal and outraced an explosive shockwave, saving all their asses. Still, Marc had referred to him as the "poncy British guy". Wesley probably would have loved that. "Yeah, well ... I've been meanin' to drop a postcard."

Wesley let out a humorous scoff, and from the faint sounds of shifting he was sitting up. "I understand. Saving the world is time consuming."

"Isn't it though?"

"What can I do for you, Logan?"

He'd already guessed why he was calling now. Well, the Watchers were supposed to be pretty smart, right? "Look, I'm down in this place called Santo Marco - "

"Central America," Wes interrupted, if only to let him know he was on the same page.

"Right. Well, Marc and I - Scorpion, you remember him?"

He paused for a moment. "Short tempered mutant with infrared sight, enhanced strength, and poison in his fingers?"

Short tempered - that was such a lovely upper class British way to put it. He probably described him the same way. "Yeah. We came down here 'cause we suspected there was some weird anti-mutant shit going on, but it might even be more complicated than that."

"Supernaturally complicated?"

"I think so." He told him what happened on the "Plain of Night" - him seeing a dead woman while Marc was incapacitated by a spotlight that existed only in his head - and while Wesley listened without comment, he heard him turning through the pages of a book rapidly.

Finally, Wes said, "Did you - "

But Logan knew what he was going to ask. "Didn't see anything else, hear anything, or smell anything ... exactly."

"Exactly?"

"There was a slight odor of decay, but I think it belongs to the area, not to the thing. Whatever it was."

Another pause, longer this time, the riffling of pages more pronounced. "Now, while he's never been known to be active in the area, there's a demon by the name of Sygratha who - "

"Ain't him."

"How do you know?"

"'Cause I killed him when he tried to manifest himself in a town called Saint Michel earlier this year." Actually, he didn't die, he just went back to his "in-between" phase or place or whatever the fuck it was - he never did try and make sense of it. There were just some things you didn't need to know.

"Killed the person he was bound to?"

"It was too late for that. I blew him to kibbles and bits with dynamite."

"That would do it," Wes agreed. He paused, and there was more page flipping. "Do you know if there was anything  that happened that may have caused this event? It's quite possible demons have always been there, but it's also possible there was a triggering event."

He thought about it a moment, and then realized, "The drilling."

"What?"

"They tried to drill for oil there. But something - I don't know what - went wrong."

"And now Ethan Casey doesn't exist," Marcus pointed out, sitting in the open doorway. He was eating a sandwich that was excessively crunchy: it smelled like vegetables, mustard, and bread alone.

He added the puzzle of Casey to the pile for Wes to consider, and glanced up at the sky. The same velvet black as before, with the same diamond chips of stars, but it seemed more distant here, colder - a sky that was no more than a ventilated coffin lid.

"That entire area is something of a mystical hot spot," Wesley finally told him. "Several civilizations down there constantly evoked otherworldly forces."

"Like Camaxtli?" It suddenly occurred to him that Central America was kind of his home spot, wasn't it? If he/she/it could be said to have one. Was that just a coincidence?

"Excellent example - Camaxtli was worshipped as a god among the Mayans, the Aztecs, and the Chichimec."

"The Chichi who?"

"They are a somewhat obscure tribe. A rather disagreeable sort of god no matter the people who worshipped it, but that seems to be generally true of all gods of fate - they're rarely depicted as warm and cuddly." Wesley paused, then asked, somewhat suspiciously, "How do you know of Camaxtli?"

"Bob told me about him."

"Oh, I see." He sounded surprised that Bob knew of Camaxtli as well. Logan wondered what he would think if he told him "Cammy" seemed to be a personal friend of his. "Have you talked to Bob about this?"

"I've tried, but he's still in another dimension." Marcus gave him a strange look out of the corner of his eye.

Wesley made a faint noise of disapproval. "Hell of a time for a vacation."

He must not have known about that whole Kumiho mess - but then again, who did? Logan wasn't about to tell him now. But it suddenly occurred to him - Jean had liked sharing Camaxtli's power. She'd told him that, hadn't she, when she asked him what it was like having Bob's power. She enjoyed the rush of it, the intoxication of so much power, and she had been looking for someone who knew the feeling. Sadly, he hadn't - he didn't like the feeling of being so out of control, although he understood how it could be something of a high.

Did that mean something? Had part of Jean stayed with Camaxtli, and vice versa? ( Did that explain her power surge? ) Had she appeared simply to torment him ... or had she been trying to warn him? After all, Marc was hurt - but he hadn't been.

"Have any idea what we're facing here?" He asked Wes, getting back to the point before his imagination carried him away.

"Well, the problem is there's so many possibilities. If they did inadvertently unearth a sacred burial mound, say, or a consecrated artifact, there's no telling what kind of evil they could have unleashed."

"Just like a horror movie?"

"No, worse - these things rarely wrap up in under two hours."

"True. And usually there's a lack of starlets in skimpy underwear." Now Marcus was really staring at him. He mouthed silently: "Can I have one?"

Wesley sighed, but wistfully. "It would certainly make the job more interesting. Look, I know this is probably not going to happen, but until I figure out what may be down there, I think you should leave the area. I don't think the world could handle you possessed by an evil being."

"Been there, done that," he said, rubbing his eyes. Before Wes could ask, he said, "It was a drama getting in here, and I doubt gettin' out will be much easier. Besides, we still haven't figured out what's happened to the mutants."

"And you're a stubborn bastard."

"Goes without saying."

"Give me your number - I'll call you as soon as I find something." Logan dutifully read off the cell's number, and he could hear Wes scribbling it down on a piece of paper. Once that was done, Wes told him with a sort of world weariness, as if he knew he really wouldn't heed a damn thing he said, "Be very careful, Logan. I know you feel very blasé about dealing with the supernatural, but there are some things that even those of us trained to deal with it can't handle."

"If it gets too heavy, we'll go," he told him, partially meaning it.

"Please do," Wes replied, although it didn't sound like he had much faith in that.

As soon as Logan hung up, Marc said, "I ain't going anywhere."

"Neither am I. But I had to give him something."

"So what's this about Bob bein' in a different dimension? Is that a death euphemism I've never heard before?"

"No. There are other dimensions - I've seen some, thanks to Bob givin' me a backstage pass - and Bob's chilling in one. To make a long story short, he fought a god and got hurt, and he's recuperating in a dimension that's a little more friendly. One that I assume doesn't require him to maintain a physical form."

Marcus raised his eyebrows at that. "Bob doesn't have a physical form?"

"Well, I think it's optional."

"And he's fought a god?"

"A couple, actually."

"What do gods look like?"

Logan shrugged, handing him back the phone. "They all look different. Some are ugly frog guys, some look like extras from "The Life of Brian", some are snake women, some look like gigantic squids, some look like fiery angels, and some ... well, some look like Bob."

Marcus put the phone down between them on the patio, and held his sandwich off to one side. "You're sayin' Bob's a god?"

"He's never exactly admitted it, but he's gotta be."

"So Bob's a pseudonym?"

"Has to be - who ever heard a god named Bob?"

Marcus nodded in agreement. "Any guesses on who he might really be?"

Logan threw his hands up in a gesture that was part surrender and part dismissive. "No clue. I don't know my gods that well."

"Well, this ain't a cakewalk for me either. I'm an atheist, and you're asking me to embrace polytheism."

"I wasn't exactly into this shit," he informed him. "And I think most of the major religions would be destroyed if word got out."

"I don't know. If there has to be a god, why not Bob? He's pretty cool. Also, total hottie."

Logan snorted humorously. "I'm sure he'd appreciate that." From here, he could see that Marc's sandwich was mostly the contents of the vacuum packed salad mix in the fridge. He then remembered what he had seen - or not seen - in Marc's refrigerator back in Baltimore, and said, "You're a vegetarian?"

"Finally caught up, Sherlock?" He replied sarcastically, taking another bite of his sandwich. After chewing for a moment, he said, "I'm not militant about it - if the only thing to eat is red meat, I'll eat it. But I don't like it."

"Fair enough."

They listened to the distance noises of the oil derricks - well, Logan did - and the more noisy sounds of Marc eating his sandwich, and the cool breeze that sporadically picked up, although now it struck Logan as eerie somehow; a chill in search of a spine.

"So what do we do now?" Marcus finally asked.

"Wait for Wes to call back, I guess," he admitted, a bit at a loss himself. "And be ready, in case that thing comes for us."

"How do you prepare for the unknown?"

Logan could only shrug. "I've been asking myself that same question for the last fifteen years."

And he never had found a happy medium, had he? One of these days, he was bound to get it right.

9

At first, Logan thought it was the oil rigs. Something woke him up, something set off his trouble radar, and he sat up in bed, getting instantly to his feet.

There were two bedrooms in the house, and of course Marcus staked out the biggest one for himself, but he hadn't actually cared - he didn't like to sleep, and he hoped they weren't here long enough for them to get used to it. He had also intended to keep his clothes on, but it was so warm, in spite of the air conditioner humming in the living room, that he'd stripped down to his boxers and slept on top of the covers. Well, for a while.

It was when he stood he felt the tremble in the ground, beneath the thin napped grey carpet, and he realized it couldn't have been from the drilling rigs. He hadn't felt it before, and it wasn't like the derricks were mobile.

Something was under the floorboards, under the ground, and from the rapid increase in the trembling, it was coming up fast. He didn't think there was time to warn Marcus - in fact, he knew there wasn't. He could hear them now, the ground breaking up under their assault.

"Here they come!" He shouted, as the floor exploded upward right in front of him.

What emerged were tentacles or possibly highly mobile snakes - as thick as boas but even longer. He popped his claws and severed the first four before they could reach him, but more exploded through the floor behind him and wrapped themselves around his neck and legs.

They were covered in sharp scales, like a shark, but the scales were even keener, and sliced his skin like razor blades wherever they made contact. As he struggled and slashed out blindly, they tore his skin, cut it to ribbons, and he felt the terrible burn of healing as he struggled to cut himself free and breathe again.

He got free, but not for long. He cut through another half dozen tentacles, splattering blue-black blood on the whitewashed walls as the muscular appendages twitched and flailed on the broken floor. It wasn't like they had been cut of from their host body more than they had been simply blinded, unable to focus on their target anymore.

Two emerged from behind him simultaneously and grabbed his ankles, yanking him down and into a sea of writhing, slicing tentacles. He closed his eyes in time for a tentacle to wrap around his face and cut his eyelids open - he had the disconcerting sensation of being able to see through them before his healing factor sealed them shut once more. The fetid scent of them, of decomposing flesh and fermenting blood, clogged his nostrils and threatened to take away his breath.

Now the tentacles had been joined by skeletal hands, some with rotten flesh sloughing off as they grabbed him, as their sharp bones broke through his skin and sank into his muscles. The pain was intense and terrible, but a great help, as it fueled his rage as they started to drag him under the dirt.

With a noise that was half snarl, half yell, he fought back, slashing wildly, kicking out with his feet and lashing out with elbows, crushing bones and slicing through skin as hard as diamond as he struggled back up to the surface. It was like they were trying to drown him in a sea of corroding, gangrenous flesh.

Even though he felt the skin of his legs tear off like nylon, he pulled himself back up to floor level, surprised that he had been yanked that deep in the first place. He dug a claw into the intact floor and tried to pull himself up on to it when he felt the teeth sink into his back.

It was near his kidneys, in fact, just over his hip and slightly right of his spine. The teeth, the needle teeth that felt like shivs, bit deep and pulled, like it was yanking flesh off a chicken leg. He could help but scream as it tore away a huge chunk of his skin and muscle, but it gave him extra incentive to pull himself out of the pit.

He managed to drag himself across the floor, away from the sudden sinkhole, and he saw maybe a dozen tentacles now reaching out of it, flailing like angry snakes, the skeletal hands and arms groping blindly at the edges for just a little more malleable flesh.

"Marcus!" He shouted, hoping he'd get a reply. He'd been half expecting to hear gunshots, and the lack of that noise bothered him. "Marc! Are you - "

Something exploded through the floor of the doorway, and this time it was the head and neck of a giant serpent with gleaming silver scales, glowing red eyes, and a mouth wide enough to swallow his entire body. Its foot long teeth were blood red, and he wondered if that was the thing that took a bite out of him. As Logan climbed to his feet, it opened its maw and hissed at him. "Oh, shut the fuck up," he spat, and slashed out at its face. He cut its lower jaw off, and as it reared back, he cut through its thick neck and lopped its head off.

The body retracted through the floor even as the head toppled aside, and he limped out into the living room. "Marcus!" His right leg, the one that had the skin peeled off like an onion, was burning hideously, he could still feel blood running down his thigh as his skin desperately tried to grow back over exposed muscle and fat.  Every step was like walking on shrapnel, but he had to make sure that Marc was okay. If  he was dead, if he had died too -

He froze in his tracks as he saw a figure standing by the window. "Marc?" He asked, but even as he said it he knew he was wrong. It didn't smell like Marc, but it didn't smell like the things back there either. It smelled like -

"Jean," he said, wishing he was surprised.

She stepped into a convenient shaft of moonlight slanting in through the glass, and its silvery glow made it look as if her hair was a halo of fire. Her eyes looked looked like they had a red afterimage, barely submerged beneath the hazel. "You're hurt."

"And you're dead," he said, limping towards her, raising a still sprung claw. He was furious at this thing - whatever it was - wearing her form, stealing her scent from the storehouse of his memories, and he wasn't going to put up with it.

It knew what he was thinking. He'd barely gotten a foot closer when it raised its hand towards him, palm out, and Logan froze in his tracks, caught in an invisible forcefield. Now it was mimicking her abilities, the rotten bastard."I know what you're thinking, Logan," she said. "You're wrong."

"That I'm gonna kill you, you stupid piece of shit?" He growled. "No, I'm right."

"I'm not who you think I am."

"You're a demonic fuck. And if you hurt Marcus - "

"He's fine, for now. But he won't be - and neither will you - if you don't leave now." She said, in a voice more mildly chiding than truly threatening. "This place is poison, and the longer you're here the more you will be tainted."

"If you want us to leave just say it. Or make the walls bleed, Amityville Horror shit, but don't be a pussy about it," he growled. "And don't wear her face."

Her gaze was impassive. "I never realized I could hurt you so much."

He refused to wince and give this thing the satisfaction. "Stop it. Show me who you really are. What, are you scared?"

She studied him a moment, cocking her head to the side like he'd once seen Jean do, and he loathed it. As soon as he could move he was going to rip it to pieces. "Bob told you there was no afterlife, not for people like us. But he also told you about the law of thermodynamics - that energy is never destroyed, simply transformed. Would it be so hard for you to believe I've transformed?"

"You wanna kill me? Kill me! Don't feed me this bullshit."

Her look became sad, a shade south of wistful. "It wasn't your fault."

"What the fuck do you want from me?" It was hard to spit the words out. He was so angry he was shaking; there was  so much adrenaline in his system he could no longer feel the pain of healing from a thousand different cuts.

"I'm trying to warn you. This is a gateway, and it grows more unstable all the time. They don't know - they don't understand what they're dealing with - but you know, don't you? Exposure to Bob - you can feel it more acutely than they can. You can see it - "

"See what?" Good god, save him from chatty demons and their fucking cryptic speeches.

"Evil."

"I'm lookin' at it now."

Her lips curved up in the faintest of smiles. "Perhaps you are."

He still couldn't move, but now she was coming towards him, and the demon even had her walk down. The fucking bastard. "You know what scared me the most about you?" The demon pretending to be Jean said. "You didn't hold back. It seems stupid now - I finally let go, stopped holding back. I had no idea it was so exhilarating." She stopped in front of him, close enough that he could smell nothing but her, and she rested her forehead against his. He wanted to headbutt her/it, but he couldn't. He considered using his teeth, but no, he couldn't even do that. He was still frozen, as useless as a statue, and the frustration of it made him want to explode. He felt something wet trailing down his cheek, and he hoped it was blood. "It makes me wonder what else I missed." She pulled back slightly, and took his face in her hands. "Oh Logan, I'm so sorry." She kissed the tear running down his face.

"I'm gonna kill you," he snarled, swallowing back a lump in his throat. Hate and sorrow were getting mixed together, and threatening to both overwhelm him. It was her scent, her touch; he couldn't deal with it and the hated thing cowering behind her memories. "Wearing her face won't save you." But it might make him hesitate for one crucial moment - and sometimes one moment was all it took.

"Are you really strong enough to kill the thing you love, Logan?" She stared at him, and her expression transformed to wonderment. "My god. You already have."