5

Doctor Kriedler had his own building out in the Valley, a sterile but modern office building with the faux orange adobe that made so many Southern California buildings look so fucking tacky. It was set in the center of a well manicured landscape so artificially green, he felt like he was on a golf course.

Walking inside, Logan was hit with a solid wave of cold, as the air conditioner was working overtime against the outside heat. The sweat on his skin cooled instantly, and he couldn’t help but shiver - it was
like being thrown into an ice cold bath. It should have been soothing, but it was mostly annoying.

“Welcome. Are you Ms -” the perky voiced receptionist began. But she stopped dead, staring at him
in wide eyed horror, as he stared right back at her. She was just one blonde among a half million SoCal blondes … but wasn’t there something familiar about her?  “Hey, weren’t you Angel’s secretary?”

She bolted to her feet, and backed up, keeping the desk between her and him. “I was his receptionist, thank you. Oh shit, I knew he was still alive.  Look, it wasn’t my fault -”

“Charity, right?”

That made her pause, brow furrowing in a Human - as opposed to vampire - way. “What?  No, Harmony. I didn’t think anything would really happen, you know, or at least not like that.  I mean, he’s Angel, right? He can take care of himself -”

He stared at her, wondering if she had 'caught' some of the Sisters nuttiness. “What are you babblin’ about?”

“Huh?” She was standing right in a shaft of sunlight, which should have made her go up like flash powder, but it didn’t happen. Maybe it was like that Wolfram and Hart glass, magic or whatever, so employees didn’t turn into torches. This place wasn’t related to Wolfram and Hart, were they? (Did it matter? The law firm was a smoking crater in the center of the city.) She looked at him curiously, backing up until she was almost flush with the wall. “He didn’t send you here to kill me?”

“Huh? Since when does Angel need a hitman, anyway?”

She faked a laughed - not very convincingly - and said, “Yeah, of course!  I was kidding!  Ha ha!” She smoothed down the back of her insanely short pink skirt, and pasted on a phony smile. "I take it you're
not here for a nose job."

"Get out."

"Well, there's no need to be that way about it.  I mean, you could use a little -"

"Get out now, or I can take you on too.  I don't really care."

She straightened up to her full height - which was impressive with those six inch "fuck me" heels she was wearing - and tried to look tough.  Maybe she was a vampire, but it was hard for a Valley Girl in a mini-skirt to look imposing; she simply looked like she was pouting. "Listen mister, some of us still have
to work. Blood may be free, but no one gives away Prada even if you are -"

"I'm giving you a chance to leave. You're making me question why."

She glared at him. "I'm not letting you hurt my boss.  If you want him, you have to get through me."

He held up his hand, and popped his claws.

Her eyes widened, and almost bugged out. "Second door down the hall on your right."

"Thanks." He started that way, walking through the pristine, earth-tone colored lobby, but paused to fix her with one last threatening stare. "If I find out you had anything to do with that whole mess that got Wesley killed, I will hunt you down and throw you out into the middle of Wilshire at high noon. Understood?"

She sneered slightly, but still nodded in acquiescence.  She waited until he turned away again before saying, "I wouldn't hurt him. He was nice to me. He hired me in the first place."

"We all make mistakes. Take my advice, Harmony - get out of the mob, while you still can.  Things are about to get very ugly."

She didn't reply, but as soon as he disappeared down the short sky blue corridor, he heard her rustling about, grabbing her purse. (Vampires had purses? Well, why not?)  Once a coward, always a coward. What did Angel - strike that - Wesley ever see in her?  She wasn't even pretty, although it was clear she thought she was.

He sniffed the air, listened hard, but it was relatively clear Harmony and Kriedler were the only two people here, at least for now. Kriedler smelled Human, and the very fact that he was allied with these evil fucks in spite of his species made him want to rip him in half down the middle. What was the doctor's motive?

What was he thinking? What was the greatest motive known to man?  Money. And power, but those two usually went together like peanut butter and jelly - if you had power, you could get money; if you had money, you could get power. For many people, whatever you had to do to get either was worth it. No price was too high - even if you sold out your entire species.

He found the office door that Kriedler was waiting behind, and walked in, retracting his claws so he didn't spoil the surprise.

What a shock. He found Kriedler putting a golf ball into a coffee mug set on its side on his tightly napped blue-gray carpet. "What is it, Harmony?" He asked, watching the orange golf ball travel towards the cup, and never looking towards the door. "Did Ms. Roberts cancel her two o'clock?"

"I think she'll have to," Logan replied, shutting the door. Kriedler's head snapped around so fast, he was surprised he didn't just give himself whiplash. "You'll be in no shape to put in fake boobs today."

His face clouded over in righteous indignation, and his knuckles whitened as he gripped his putter. "Who the fuck are you?" Kriedler was younger than he thought, or had a good plastic surgeon - either way, he looked to be in his early thirties, with a full head of swept back dirty blond hair, and eyes almost the color of his carpet. He was not handsome, but had a bland, soft sort of face that could have belonged to almost anyone. Considering he was a plastic surgeon, it seemed like a case of "physician, heal thyself".

"You don't know me, and it doesn't matter. All you have to do is tell me where Arcanum is, and I'll go."

His eyes flashed with brief panic before his face became a stoic, unreadable mask. "I have no idea what you're talking about." Just the way he tensed, shifted his weight to his front foot, Logan knew the blow was coming before he even swung the club.

He was aiming for his face, but Logan caught it easily with one hand, and yanked the golf club out of his grip. "Gotta keep your head down more," he said, snapping the club in half over his knee. It hurt a little, but not a lot. Just doing that made Kriedler saucer-eyed, and he started to back up. "Keep the elbows bent. That's one lame-ass swing you got."

"You're not Human, are you?"

"Oh, I'm Human.  I'm just ... different." He took a step towards him, and watched him stiffen, his fear making the air smell like cider vinegar.  There was a cabinet on the wall he was backing toward, and Logan would have bet solid money he was going to try and go for something in there. "Don't even think about it."

That made him freeze. “You’re a half-breed, is that it?  Who sent you?”

“Do I look like a package to you?” He tossed one of the iron fragments past his head, hard enough to make him cower. “Now, tell me where Arcanum is, you lousy chickenshit, and I won’t make you look like a Picasso painting.”

He swallowed visibly, trting to steel himself, but it had yet to translate successfully to his face. “Y-you have n-no idea who -”

Logan popped his claws, letting him see them in all their dubious glory. “Actually, I do know. And I’m going to branch out into a little surgery of my own if you don’t tell me exactly what I want to know, right the fuck now.”

Kriedler stared at his claws wide-eyed, and then crept closer, almost totally agog. “Holy Christ in a hand basket, who did that?” He didn’t seem scared anymore, only impressed.

“What?”

“The knives.” He leaned in closer, as if trying to look down his knuckles. “How long are those things? Are they housed in your forearms?  Was it LeClare?  He's done some amazing work with metal …”

“Hey,” he snapped, pulling his hand back. “I’m threatening you, dickweed.”

“Oh, I know, I know, but how much did that cost, including post-op?  Do you have a matching set?”

Logan grabbed him by the collar of his shirt with his free hand, and held the claws up at eye level. “There, can you see them better now?”

“Not really.” He frowned in thought. “What metal are they made of?”

He shook him to get him to focus on his face, not his claws. “This is not my turn for show and tell - it’s yours.  Now, unless you want to study the wounds the claws leave in your torso, spit it out.”

Kriedler eyed him warily, clearly measuring his options. “How about quid pro quo?  Tell me something about how you got that job, and I’ll tell you about Arcanum.”

He couldn’t believe the gall of this asshole. Did he really think he was going to tell him dick about anything - especially how he got mutilated by a bunch of sick fucks?  (Oh, right, what was the term Argenis used? “Body modification.” What a bland, victim free way to put it.) “You first,” he lied, wondering if he was going to tell this putz anything at all.

Well, beyond what he could go do with himself.

*****

No wonder he couldn’t find Arcanum.

Honestly, it was pretty clever.  Not only did you have to know certain people to get in, but you needed to know certain people to be allowed to know where it was. The location was hidden by a powerful cloaking spell, one that only a privileged few could go through.  So if he wanted to get in, he had to get one of those 'privileged' people to go with him.  Kriedler wasn’t one - supposedly - but he did believe him.  Still, the doctor did cough up the name of someone he believed was: Paul Chin.  The name meant nothing to Logan, but after a little searching, using a computer at a cyber-cafe, he found what he felt was the best suspect (it turned out there were a lot of Paul Chin’s in L.A.): an entertainment lawyer, high priced and high powered, the vice-president of his firm.  He stank of power and privilege, with just a hint of corruption.  And his former employer? Wolfram and Hart.  From there, it was easy to believe he was in with the Dragons, either on the demon side or the Triad side. Was he even Human?  In the stock photos he'd found of him, he looked around thirty, but his age was listed in the late forties.  Maybe he’d gone to Kriedler for a face tightening.

Of course, once Kriedler regained consciousness, he could warn Chin, but Logan had let Kriedler know
if he did that, it would be one of the very last things he ever did.  As much as the doctor admired the “craftsmanship” of his claws, he seemed to get the idea he should keep his mouth shut.

Although finding the number of his law firm - Bettis, Sloane, and Slovak - wasn’t difficult, getting through the fucking phone food chain was.  He had his bluff prepared before he dialed, that he was an old comrade of his from Wolfram and Hart, Ed Stevens - it was very nearly a statistical fact that every large office building in North America had at least one Ed Stevens on the payroll - who wanted to touch bases with him on a “personal” matter.  The lower the secretaries were, and the farther from Chin, the easier it was to fool them.  It just kept getting harder, and he was sure he was being patched through to every single secretary in Bettis, Sloane, and Slovak, like they were all playing phone tag, and he was officially designated “it”.

Eventually he got relayed up to his floor, where a woman with a haughty voice - maybe his secretary, maybe not - informed him Mr. Chin was meeting with Miramax (presumably with people from there and not the entire company), and wouldn’t be back at the office until tomorrow.  Did he believe that? Could he?

He felt she was probably telling the truth as she knew it, but that didn’t mean it would conform with reality. If he couldn’t find where Chin lived - and there was no way he was checking out all those addresses tonight - he still had one place he could stake out.

Oh god.  Just because he thought of it as a stakeout didn’t mean he had ever been a cop. He’d been some kind of spy at some point, right?  So, yeah - that was to blame.  He hoped.  (Why was being a cop worse than being a soldier? He’d met a similar share of dickheads in each profession. Maybe it was just the idea of authority and conforming to it that made him bristle. Which would suggest he’d had a bad experience with it at some point, even over and above the whole “injected with molten metal“ thing.)

Having made his decision, he headed off towards B S & S (oh, how he loved those initials), wondering if there’d be a good burrito place along the way, or even a coffee shop - he wasn’t that picky.

He just knew he was in for a long, boring night.

6

Paul Chin looked over the post-it Sylvia had slapped on her desk, and tried to make sense of it. Ed Stevens from Wolfram and Hart had called him? The one from accounting? Or the one from the clean-up crew?  Truth be told, he didn’t know either that well, so why would they be calling him now?

Well, duh, why else - they needed a job.  Since W&H was no more, they were probably hurting. The shitty economy, combined with the fact that his bosses had retreated to a Hell dimension before writing
out a reference, was probably a devastating one-two punch. Success always brought the wannabes and hangers-on out of the woodwork.  He crumpled up the note and tossed it in the garbage can.  He had more pressing concerns.

Namely, Arbogast “losing” Drusilla. The stupid ass Belial had managed to get her to L.A., but she’d said something about “Bob can’t see me”, and disappeared. He wasn’t sure if this was a problem … yet. They wanted Dru working for them, but considering how unpredictable she was, maybe it was best if it didn’t work out. As for this mysterious “Bob”, there was only one who came up on the hot list, the same one who was on W&H’s “Do Not Approach” list: “Maximum Bob” Oberon. Supposedly he was out of town right now, but there was no way to predict what an older Belial would do, especially if he was a weapons dealer, and - more specifically - if he seemed to wield unimaginable power.  Lila once told him that Bob was not exactly a Belial, but working for the enemies of the Senior Partners, which didn’t really make sense: why would a liar demon, and an arms merchant on top of that, side with them? It was probably just scuttlebutt; an attempt to pump up or explain away his mythos.  Honestly, Chin didn’t care if he was just a plain old master sorcerer, as long as he didn’t get in his way.

Should he really be concerned about what crazy bitch Dru might do?  He didn’t give a fuck how many people were killed or in the course of what, but if she talked … now, that could be a problem. But only if people believed her, or made sense of any fucking thing she said. That was the up side of hiring an assassin for whom sanity and coherence were unknown qualities

Still, he couldn’t help but be concerned.  He was a lawyer, and it was his job to predict what problems might arise, and cut them off at the knees before they could even get started.  But Dru was such an unpredictable can of worms, it was impossible to guess what problems she could cause.  She could bring the roof down on their heads; she could forget about them and go for ice cream.  She was a precog who couldn’t control her abilities, and couldn’t always make sense of them. She had an advantage, but only half the time; the other half of the time, she was too fucked up to be any good. Still, she was possibly the most vicious vampire left alive, and that was no small thing, considering the breed.  Her insanity made her an unpredictable fighter, and, on top of that, she had the precognitive ability to suss out her sparring partner before things broke down to fisticuffs.  If she was tuned into this planet, she was more than a match for Logan Yashida - or anybody, really. Was that why she was scared of Bob?  Did she know something about him they didn’t know?

He glanced out his window, appreciating his view of the newly full moon. That reminded him - did they have a werewolf lined up?  He really had to look into that once he got home. But for right now he enjoyed how close the moon looked when you were thirty stories above the ground, as if parked between the skyscrapers of downtown Los Angeles, a chained god.  It would have been even prettier if the pollution didn’t give it a kind of yellowish haze, like someone had taken a major piss on it.  What a world.

“The man is dead and the razor smiles, a shiny love song and a quick incision,“ a female voice whispered in a sing-song voice, making him jump.  He spun around in his chair, and saw a slender figure slink into his office. He knew he hadn’t left the door open, but he hadn’t heard her open it, either.  Only when she came into the light did he recognize her. “Cut him down on television …”