2

Logan had wracked his brain, and just couldn’t figure it out. He saw Xavier die. How could he be alive?

Bob had a theory - he was a powerful telepath, so maybe he just did a brain swap with someone. Which sounded really, incredibly far fetched, but so did someone recovering from death, which he himself had done a couple of times. Could Xavier do that? If so, whose brain did he replace? And why hadn’t he contacted the school to say he was still alive?

He hadn’t, as far as he could tell. Storm hadn’t mentioned it, and you’d think she would have. Neither had Piotr or Kitty - and he heard from Kitty a lot. She had taken to emailing him weekly, mainly on bullshit he didn’t care about going on at the school. He had no idea why he was on her email list, but Bob had a theory on that too. He was of the opinion that most of the kids at the school were terrified of him, and yet idolized him in what he referred to as the “Han Solo syndrome”, because “no one ever wants to be Luke Skywalker; they always want to be the outlaw hero”. Which kind of pissed him off, mainly because he didn’t like any theory that included “Star Wars” in it. Thanks but no thanks.

When he accidentally located him, he was in England. So he emailed Srina and asked her to keep her ears and eyes open for a new strong telepath in the area, since she seemed to have an “in” within the British mutant community. She said she would, but he hadn’t heard back from her yet, making him a little nervous. What if she tried to get close to him? What if he decided to erase himself straight from her memory? Normally he’d say Xavier wouldn’t do that, but now he didn’t know what he was capable of. People could surprise you, and not always in a good way.

Damn it. He should have known better than to contact her. She was always a bit reckless … which, frankly, was apparently how he liked his women. Women who weren’t reckless wouldn’t take a chance on him. But she’d push, get in closer, try to figure out who the new teep on the block was. Maybe he should have emailed Hashim, who was at least a vampire and totally immune to telepaths, but they weren’t on great terms now, and where did you email a vampire gang lord? They were hard to Google.

Well, there was Ruby, wasn’t there? She used to work in MI-5’s mutant crime division, right? She probably still had friends there, and they’d know if a new telepath entered the scene. Maybe he’d ask Giles to talk to her about it, because he doubted she’d take his call. How did a werewolf ever get brave enough to bite her? That must have been one ballsy werewolf. She was one scary lady.

He checked the time on the laptop’s screen, and wondered if Giles was asleep yet - or up yet. Could go either way. After having been up so long while trying to protect Bren from pissed off gods, he’d went to bed and slept for nearly two days straight - he almost never did that except when he was severely injured and his body needed a load of recovery time. But now that he’d gotten caught up on all the sleep he’d missed, he was good. He could stay up for a day or two with no problem; his old road habits had kicked back in. That was probably good, although it would eventually wear him out again.

He took a swig of his beer and wondered if there was something good in Bob’s magic fridge when the phone rang. It seemed kind of startling, mainly due to the lateness of the hour. Did a late night phone call ever bring good news?

He answered, and was surprised to hear Giles on the line, sounding a bit tired but otherwise alert. “You don’t happen to know where Angel is, do you?”

Logan was surprised by the bluntness of the question. This could only mean something bad. “If he’s not at his apartment, he’s probably patrolling. Why?”

“He gave no hint where he might be patrolling?”

“No. What’s this about?”

Giles sighed heavily, and Logan could easily picture him rubbing his eyes. “Kier just called me and said an old friend of his from the bite club claimed to have encountered a Kalivrana downtown, and that it was looking for Angel. We need to find him, now.”

“Kalivrana?” Why did that sound familiar? “I’m guessing it’s extremely dangerous.”

“To vampires, yes. People should be fine. At least we don’t have to worry much about collateral damage.”

“They’re only a threat to vampires?” That was a new one.

“Yes, they feed off their specific energy. They’re the only known natural predator of a vampire, in fact.”

“Really? So why isn’t L.A. crawling with them?”

“They’re not native to this dimension. Which seems to indicate that someone brought it here.”

“Someone after Angel. Wow - he’s pissed off as many people as I have.”

Giles let out a noise of mild humor; too refined to be a grunt, not quite a scoff. “Possibly even more, although I wouldn’t bet on it. Do you think you can locate him? We need to get him inside and to a safe area until we can determine who sent the Kalivrana after him.”

“What’s a safe area?”

“Anywhere that isn’t his apartment or the office.”

Logan sighed, aware that that was probably Giles’s way of telling him to take on Angel as a roommate. “What’s the powers of a Kalivrana?”

“Flight, the ability to transubstantiate into what appears to be a flock of birds, heightened senses, incredible physical strength.”

“So, a real bastard?”

“I’m sure you could hurt it, Logan, but I’d avoid a fight with it if at all possible.” He paused briefly. “Do you think you can find him?”

“Yeah,” he grumbled, not looking forward to this. Why couldn’t Bob be back yet and take these powers away from him? He wasn’t getting any more comfortable with them. “I’ll go get him. I’ll call you back when it’s done.” He decided he’d ask about Ruby later, maybe when he had some leverage.

It wasn’t difficult doing the search, he just hated the foreign feeling of power rushing through his mind, and the feeling of intrusion. He closed his eyes and called up all those meditation techniques he’d learned but pretty much never used, clearing his mind and finding that strain of Bob energy thrumming through the background of his mind like a neon wire. He then thought of Angel - and bam, there he was, outside a bar a couple miles north of here, stalking a couple of vampires who didn’t yet know they were fucked.

Logan opened his eyes, breaking the view, and shut the laptop, putting it on the table. Bob had a garage downstairs, so he didn’t have to worry about finding some wheels.

But finding Angel before the Kalivrana found him? Well, he wasn’t sure. He supposed he’d find out.

*****

The two vampires looked like rough customers. They were both tall and pale and on the skinny side, dressed in denim and leather like two middle class guy who liked to pretend they were bikers on the weekend. But the tallest one had a shaved head and a tattoo on his naked scalp of a heart pierced by a dagger, bleeding down the side of his head, where a dagger shaped earring dangled from his right earlobe. The slightly shorter one had a modern style Mohawk, which was very short and spiky, like a frilled spine on his head, dyed a violent yellow-orange. He also had a nose stud that occasionally caught a glint of light from a neon beer sign.

And even though Angel thought they were both unattractive, both guys found girls tonight. The skinhead had a petite blonde in a hot pink miniskirt, while the guy with the Mohawk had found a slightly chunkier Asian girl in pleather pants. The girls sounded drunk and giggly, and the guys were pretending to be mildly baked, but as they steered them around the back of the bar, supposedly to look for their “car”, their was an obvious change in their demeanor. The girls were too drunk to notice, but the guys ceased being loose limbed and casual; their expressions morphed from slightly goofy to sharp as razor blades. They were keeping their Human faces for now, but Angel knew it wouldn’t be long before their features shifted and the girls realized the danger they were in, too late to do them any good.

They were unaware of him, or at least had dismissed him as just another vampire prowling the streets, and he followed in the shadows, getting closer to them. Finally he decided that it was now or never, and made his move, grabbing the Mohawked one and yanking him away from his date. “Little young for you, don’t you think?” Before he could respond, Angel slammed a stake through his heart and made him explode into dust.

The girls looked horrified, eyes wide and mouths open, and the bald one let go of his date and lunged at him, throwing a right cross that Angel stepped back to avoid, and then he grabbed his arm and swung him face first into the wall. “I’d run if I were you,” he told the girls, as the skinhead threw back a hard elbow and clipped him in the jaw.

Angel staggered back, giving himself some room, and blocked a kick the skinhead attempted to land as he spun around. The vampire came back with another wild right, an easy block, but it was a feint that allowed him to land a rabbit punch in the stomach. Still, Angel responded with a flattened palm to the underside of the chin that made the vamp’s head snap back violently and fall back towards the wall. Angel took advantage of this and slammed the stake home, only to have it shatter in his hands.

A long splinter shoved back, slicing deep into the pad of his thumb, and as he let out a slight gasp of pain the vampire took advantage of his momentary distraction to hit him with a backhanded fist across the face. Angel stumbled back into someone’s Honda.

“Kevlar, bitch!” The skinhead crowed triumphantly. “Think I don’t know about you, Angel? Traitor to his own kind. Boy, you’re a total fucking dickhead in any form, ain’t ya? Human, vampire, vampire again, but with some kinda pansy soul … Jesus fucking Christ, man. Can’t you do anything right?”

Angel wiped a little blood from the corner of his mouth, but didn’t bother responding, mainly because he saw the dark movement behind the skinhead. He hadn’t sensed it yet, but he never would. Angel decided to just let it happen.

A slender blade suddenly burst through the vampire’s throat, and no one looked more shocked than the skinhead. “Adamantium, bitch,” Logan growled, then ripped the blade through the rest of his neck, lopping his head off. Logan stepped through his dust cloud before he could even completely dissolve. “He was pretty obnoxious, wasn’t he?”

“I think the head tattoo was a giveaway. What are you doing down here?”

“Lookin’ for you. C’mon, we gotta get outta here.”

“Something going on?”

“Yeah. I’ll explain on the way. Got the bike parked on the street.” Logan started off, leading the way, but Angel stayed where he was, a bit confused.

“Wait. What’s going on? You can at least give me the shorthand version.”

He turned back with a scowl. “Shorthand? There’s a Kalivrana after you.”

Angel stared at him for a moment. Although a lot of people were under the impression that Logan was humorless, he actually had a dark, deadpan sort of humor that Angel had always tagged as British. Logan was Canadian, so that was close, temperamentally if not exactly geographically. He could be kidding and it would actually be hard to tell. Was this one? “Are you serious?”

He fixed him with a glare that said this wasn’t a joke. “Would I even know what the fuck a Kalivrana was if Giles hadn’t told me?”

Fair enough.

He wasn’t thrilled about being a passenger on Logan’s bike (which wasn’t Logan’s at all, but clearly one of Bob’s - although the difference was kind of academic at the moment), but at least they didn’t have far to go. They went back to Bob’s place in the warehouse district, but Angel waited to ask why until they were in the garage.

“Giles is really that worried that it’ll kill me?” Angel replied, a bit surprised. He wasn’t sure if he should be flattered or offended.

Logan shrugged, going up the stairs to the loft above. “He seems to think this is a bad motherfucker. But you know, if somebody brought it here to get you, we have one suspect at the top of the list.”

“Wolfram and Hart.”

“It’s almost boring, isn’t it? I wanna say they couldn’t have, ‘cause they’d be the logical suspect, but the Organization has come after me dozens of times, and the fact that they were the obvious suspects never deterred them.”

Bob’s loft was best described as “eclectic”, and it was odd to see Logan inhabiting a space so aggressively oddball, and yet it made some degree of sense. No, Logan would have never bought an electric blue sofa or decorated with rainbow colored tiki head lights or an intricately painted didgeridoo or gotten a purple shag carpet (who made that?), but Logan would adapt to it, mainly because it wasn’t his to worry about. He lived like a man always five minutes away from packing a bag and running away; he lived like he was hunted, which was probably a fair assessment. Bob lived as loudly as possible, because he could. It was also why he had no qualms about wearing leather pants, feather boas, and any damn outrageous thing he wanted; oh sure, you could start to say something, but then the next thing you’d remember would be waking up on the side of the road in Peru, dressed in a nun’s habit, with six weeks of your life and memory just gone. It was the joke about the eight hundr! ed pound gorilla - where does he sit? Anywhere he damn well wants. For much the same reason, Bob wore and did whatever the hell he wanted. Who was going to stop him?

“We could pay them a visit,” Angel suggested, trying not to stare at the painting over the couch. When he came in, he could have sworn it was an abstract, full of dark blues and purples, but now it looked like some kind of night landscape portrait. Had the paining changed shape as well as style? “Considering you have Bob’s energy in you right now, you’d be their worst nightmare.”

He grunted an acknowledgement, but didn’t seem enthusiastic about that idea. “I’m tired of that. We walk in and we scare ‘em, but it doesn’t go deeper than that. I wanna hit ‘em where they live.”

“I’ve done that too,” Angel pointed out. He decided to have a seat, with his back to the painting, as it was starting to unnerve him.

Logan grabbed the telephone receiver. Angel noted it was a see through phone with hot pink and neon yellow accents in the wiring. “I’m not talking about blowin’ ‘em up, although I’d support it. I’m talkin’ about hitting the weak links.” He hit a single button - speed dial - and after a few seconds, asked, “Hey, Hel, could you do me a favor? I need the home address of any Wolfram and Hart higher up. Yeah, any - I don’t care who, as long as they got some pull in the place.”

This was what Logan was very good at, when he took the time to think and didn’t simply react - finding the weak points in anything, working the leverage, finding the tiny spot in a wall that would bring it all down if you hit it right. But if you thought about it, he was good at it because he was trained to be good at it as a shadow operative for the Organization. It was an echo of his dark past, and it could give you a shudder if you thought about it for too long; Logan had been indoctrinated to destroy, and no matter how much he had forgotten, there were still pieces of it in him. Angel could sympathize, mainly because as much as he wanted to distance himself from Angelus, the demon was always with him. But Angel knew he was lucky in that he could put a name to his demon, could feel the division between them - Logan didn’t have that.

Helga didn’t make him wait long. Logan started nodding to something only he could hear. “Laurel Canyon? Shit, she does well for herself, doesn’t she?” He paused briefly. “Yeah, I’ve heard about it - I got Angel right here. Yeah, it’s after him. That’s what we’re gonna find out.” Logan hung up, and told him, “Helga says news of the Kalivrana is all over the place. The bar cleared out like there was a Slayer convention in town. She figures there’s traffic jams at the Los Angeles city limits made up entirely of vampires fleeing the city.”

“Probably. I don’t see anyone sticking around to find out what it wants.” Angel stood, risking a glance back at the painting. Now it was sundown in the Outback, complete with some kind of snake slithering over a bleached out cattle skull in the foreground. How fucking creepy was that? “You know I can’t go with you. I can’t enter a house where a Human lives - even a Wolfram and Hart lackey - without being invited.”

Logan shrugged very casually. “I can make sure she invites you in.”

And that was a problem - he was sure he would. Why did that strike him as somewhat sinister?