Helga scowled at him, Wes looked gobsmacked, and Scott said simply, “Somebody get me a gun.”

Helga shifted her evil look to Scott. “It’s a bad idea, Scooter.”

“Don’t call me Scooter!”

“Why is it a bad idea?” Logan asked her.

“Because we don’t know what will happen when you die. You could get caught up in the spell or whatever is causing this, even if you just die for a couple of seconds, and you could end up a ghost or a jockey in someone else’s body.”

Logan grimaced sheepishly, feeling like a moron. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

Helga’s eyes narrowed, sending a loud yet still tacit “I told you so”. “No, you hadn’t.”

“But I’m still Bob’s avatar. He wouldn’t leave me like that.”

“Yeah, but how long ‘til he gets back? I wouldn’t take that chance. Do you really wanna?”

Put that way, it didn’t sound like a great idea. Scott crossed his arms over his chest, and said, “It might be our only chance.”

“It’s not,” she insisted. “Not yet. C’mon Wes, you want to contact the universe’s most depressed god?”

Wes looked around, as if it was a serious question. “I don’t seem have anything better to do.”

“That’s what I like to hear - enthusiasm,” she replied sarcastically. She gestured for the door, and she and Wes left the room, the door opening to let in a brief, chaotic blast of a Mr. Bungle song that he recognized mainly thanks to Bob (Bob was a big fan). “Goodbye Sober Day”. Cute - now the jukebox was being direct.

Scott scowled at the noise before the door closed once more, then trained the scowl on him. “So what the hell are we supposed to do, just wait here?”

“Yeah, I think that’s the gist of it.”

He threw his hands up in frustration, and then paced over to the crates that claimed to be a mixture of beer, grenades, and nuclear waste. “I’ve had all morning to wait. I’m tired of it.”

“Tough titties, Scott. You’re supposed to be the strategist, right? How do you fight an enemy when you don’t even know who they are?”

He glared at him, but didn’t say anything. What could he say? They both knew he was right. Finally he propped his butt on the edge of Bob’s desk, and said, “Fine. I guess you can go into detail about everything’s that’s happened since I died.”

Oh great. Maybe he should have went off with Hel and Wes, because this was going to be painful.

4

There was a local wizard’s guild? Angel felt stupid for not having known that. How long had he been in Los Angeles, and it never occurred to him that there’d be one here? Now he felt like an idiot.

Giles called them to see if there were any known necromancers in the area. They figured Logan was covering the god angle for the moment, so they might as well stick to the more earthly supernatural explanation.

Apparently the wizard’s guild didn’t like necromancers very much, although they tried to keep track of them when they could. It seemed Wolfram and Hart had the most in the area (why was he not surprised?), but there was one who was “semi-retired” and not on Wolfram and Hart’s payroll - a woman who went by the unlikely name of “Ana Dyne”, and lived near the West Hollywood border. As soon as he and Giles announced their plan to go talk to her, Bren gasped, “Ana Dyne’s a necromancer? Cool! She never mentioned that to me!”

Bren knew her casually, as it seemed her “day job” was as a hot DJ on the West Hollywood party scene. Last week she’d DJ’d a set at a new nightclub called Threshold, and Kier and Bren had both gone. The name Threshold seemed really coincidental or unfortunate, depending on how things turned out, and he and Giles exchanged a suspicious look. Kier reported that there had been almost no demons at the club while they were there, and certainly no dead people or evidence of supernatural ritual, and Kier would know. Angel was still torn about Kier hanging around, and him being “special” was little in the way of help for the situation, but he supposed he had to grudgingly trust him a bit now. He wasn’t convinced that Kier wouldn’t eventually turn on the rest of them, but he’d never turn on Bren, so maybe that was something. It had to be for now.

It was decided that Bren would go with them since he knew her - sort of - but it was decided that this trek would involve just the three of them. Sid, Marc, and Kier wanted to go too, but it was decided that safety was still in numbers, and still back here, in case the dead turned disruptive or things got worse. (It was hard to imagine how things could get worse, but Angel wasn't about to assume the worst was over - in his long experience, it never was.) No one was happy about it, but they lived with it.

They had to take the sewers, because it was still daylight, but neither Giles nor Bren complained. Sure, the smell wasn't great, but they weren't running into ghosts or the animated dead down here. Apparently even dead people, given the choice, didn't stay in the sewers.

They came up to street level inside the storage room of a halfway house, which was so bizarre even Giles took a moment to digest how the hell a manhole cover ended up inside this building, even if it was as sad a building as this one. Bren speculated it was an old one covered over that was uncovered by vampires and demons for easy traffic, and Angel figured that was the most likely explanation.

He had to move very carefully, sticking to the shadows, but he made it unscathed to the run down apartment complex where Ana Dyne apparently lived. The interior hallway was mercifully dark and dingy (there were small, narrow windows in the corridors, but none had been cleaned for what seemed like years, and the L.A. smog blanket had rendered the glass opaque), but Bren had to bang on the door twice before finally there was movement inside and a voice in the apartment beyond cursed.

The door finally swung open on a tired but cranky litany. "You know I was up 'til five in the fucking morning, right? I had a rave last night and -" Ana finally opened her eyes all the way, and stared at Bren, and then looked at him and Giles with equal amounts of suspicion. "What the fuck is this?"

Ana was quite the sight. She appeared to be a Latina woman, petite but curvaceous, with her hair dyed a rainbow of different colors and secured in tight, unruly dreadlocks that made it look like she didn't have hair so much as tentacles in various states of decay. Her brown eyes were so bloodshot they looked nearly as crimson as Bren's eyes, and her lips were pale, dry and cracked from dehydration. She wore a ripped Chemical Brothers t-shirt and black panties, and nothing more beyond a silver stud in her nose and bottom lip.

"Umm, hi, remember me?" Bren asked sheepishly.

"Yeah, kid, you're the one with the cool red contacts and the pretty boyfriend. Who's the geezer parade with you?"

"Hey," Angel replied, hurt. He wasn't a "geezer". Well, okay, he was, but he hated to think of himself that way.

"We have to talk to you about, um, necromancy."

She just stared at him for a moment, then rubbed her eyes with her fist before turning away. "It's too early for this shit." She left the door open as she stalked away, an implicit invitation inside. But as Bren and Giles went inside, it wasn't enough for Angel.

"Uh, you have to invite my friend inside," Bren told her.

He could see Ana in what passed for her kitchenette. Her apartment wasn't big; it was essentially a loft, with the bedroom/living room/kitchen all combined, and the only separate room being the bathroom. She had her head stuck in her avocado colored refrigerator, but looked over it as Bren said that. "What the fuck is he, a vampire?"

"Um, yeah. But he's a good vampire. He won't hurt you -"

"Of course he won't hurt me," she snapped dismissively. "He's dead, and I control the dead. Come on in, Slappy."

Angel was able to step inside, even though he frowned at the nickname. "My name's not Slappy, it's Angel."

"Is it really? Funny, you don't look Mexican." She came out of the fridge with a can of Red Bull, which she cracked open and took a good, long swallow of before studying the three of them. She pointed at Giles, and said, "And what are you? Belial demon?"

He arched an eyebrow at her. "My eyes are hardly blue enough, are they? I'm Human. My name is Rupert Giles."

"Wow," she replied, grimacing humorously at his name. "Sorry dude."

Ana's apartment was also a sight to behold. Her futon was still folded out into a bed, the covers a tangled mess, her blinds shut tight against the sun, but there was enough light to see that she had clothes scattered all over her apartment. In fact, the only neatly stacked items were a milk crate full of vinyl albums and a shelf full of CDs. It was like a bachelor pad, only the clothes included bras and skirts.

"You fire the maid?" Giles asked coolly.

“You applying for the job, Benny Hill?”

That made Giles scowl at her evilly. “Benny Hill?!”

“Look,” Angel said, before this could get really nasty. “Are you responsible for what’s going on outside?”

She came out of the fridge eating a slice of cold pizza. “What’s goin’ on outside?”

Giles threw up his hands in frustration and Bren rubbed his eyes and sighed before telling her, “The dead are overrunning the city.”

“They usually are,” she replied, with a mouthful of crust. Then, after a moment, she added, “Wait, do you mean “dead” dead? As in zombies and shit?”

“More like ghosts and corpses animated with the souls of others,” Angel replied. “So far they haven’t been hostile, but the numbers are staggering. If they do get angry, we’re all in trouble.”

“Move aside, dead boy,” she ordered, and crossed the room to her window. She peeked out the blinds, and after a long moment, commented, “Well hell, would you look at that? Weirdness.”

“So you’re claiming you had nothing to do with this?” Angel asked, watching her carefully. If she was lying, he’d know.

She snorted a type of disbelieved grunt, and turned away from the blinds. “Fuck no! I ain’t never called up that many creepy crawlies at once, and certainly never any ghosts. How do you call up a ghost? Is that even possible?”

“It is,” Giles said, his voice still hard and cold. He hadn’t forgiven her for that Benny Hill comment. He couldn’t blame him really. Couldn’t she have referenced Monty Python or something? “But you need to know what you’re doing.”

“Well, that ain’t me,” she admitted, searching the floor for some clothes. She found some camouflaged pattern skating shorts and pulled them on. They barely fit her, and Angel was sure they were men short’s that somehow just ended up in the pile. ”I haven’t even done any ‘mancing in a year or so. It wasn’t a big thing with me.”

Giles look was molten, while his expression was stony. He not only didn’t like her, but he was clearly suppressing the urge to shake her until her head fell off. “Not a big thing? Raising the dead isn’t a big thing?”

She made an odd noise, kind of like a Valley girl would make at the mall when he friend said something stupid. “Of course it is, dude! Man, everybody would be doin’ it if it was easy. It’s just that I never really thought of it as a big thing - I went through a Goth phase as a teen, ya know. Didn’t everybody?”

Giles glared at her, Angel didn’t deign to respond, but Bren answered her. “Uh, no. I spent a couple years eating out of dumpsters - I didn’t really have time to be Goth.”

She shrugged indifferently. “You missed out.”

This was getting nowhere. Angel asked, “Do you know of anyone who could have done this?”

“Someone powerful enough to call up an army of dead people? No. Unless Sam Raimi actually figured out how to do it so he didn’t have to pay extras for his films.”

Angel knew who Sam Raimi was, but he really didn’t understand the reference. He scrubbed a hand through his hair, and exchanged a look with Giles, who seemed to be thinking the same thing he was: this was a waste of time. “Look -” he began, but stopped. Ana’s apartment didn’t smell great - dirty dishes, dirty laundry, she hadn’t dusted since she moved in - but it didn’t smell of dead flesh.

And now it did.

He looked towards her apartment door, listening hard, focusing on the sounds beyond. There were few, just the soft thud of footsteps - many footsteps. “Guys, I think we’ve got trouble,” he said, just before the door burst off its hinges.

There were maybe a dozen reanimated dead in the hallway, filtering into Ana’s apartment, but they weren’t regular dead. For one thing, their eyes had rolled up until nothing but white showed, and something black was dribbling from the corners of some of their mouths. It smelled like a combination of old blood, bile, and pus. “Hey, George Romero lives in the Hollywood Hills!” Ana shouted at the group. “Get out!” She then said something that didn’t sound like words at all, and yet Angel felt them somewhere deep in the center of his chest, where they burned like acid reflux. Even though that hadn’t been aimed at him, he instantly felt the urge to get away, and realized that Ana really could have commanded him to some degree. He felt he could’ve resisted her, though, no matter how much it hurt.

Sadly, he wasn’t the only one. The dead kept on coming, as if she’d done nothing but thrown water at them. She knew it, as she suddenly yelled, “Hey! I told you fuckers to get out! You can’t ignore me!”

Giles shouted a spell and held his hand out towards the undead, and they seemed to hit an invisible wall that made them freeze in place, if only for a moment. “I can’t hold it for long,” he said, sweat already beading on his brow.

“Is there a back way out?” Angel asked Ana.

She stared at him in disbelief. “It’s a fucking loft, Lost Boy! Of course not!”

Not that it mattered much - he couldn’t have gone out that way anyways. It was too damn sunny out. Angel glanced at Bren, caught his eye. “Okay, we fight our way through. Take the legs out from under them - they’ll survive, but they won’t be mobile.”

Bren sighed, and pulled a small metal cylinder out of the back of his jeans. “One of these days, we’re gonna enter a room and not have to fight our way out of it.” He flicked the cylinder and it telescoped out to a long baton that ended with a whip thin tip. It looked fragile, but Angel knew that its appearance was deceiving. Bren also unleashed his stronger demon form, his skin becoming reptilian and blue-green, the red spikes growing out of his face so fast they appeared in the blink of an eye.

“Whoa!” Ana exclaimed. “Kid, yer a Brachen demon? That explains the red eyes. Your boyfriend a demon?”

“Vampire.”

“Holy hell on a stick. I guess that explains his magnetism.”

Angel imagined that Kier would be offended by the implication that his charm was not his own, but he wasn’t here, so who cared? Giles dropped his shield - he had to; he was visibly weakening from the strain - and he and Bren moved in on the animated corpses. (Angel didn’t want to call them zombies, as he was pretty sure they weren’t, even if they were currently acting like them.)

Without discussing it, Bren moved in on the group from the left, and he moved in on the group from the right. Bren used the baton to hit them on the side of the knee with crushing force, bringing them down, and Angel kicked them in the kneecaps, snapping the bones audibly, and occasionally he spun into high kicks that snapped their heads around and sent them falling back into the crowd of others. It didn’t stop them, though - the corpses just walked over their compatriots, grabbing for them with hands as cold as ice and as unyielding as claws. Angel grabbed one of them by the arm and swung it around, slamming it face first into the wall, hard enough to crack both the drywall and its nose.

At the same time, Bren took a hit and slammed back across the room into Ana’s futon, which shattered under his momentum and weight. It was a hard hit, but Bren would be fine - he was in his Brachen form, after all, and they could take a lot of damage.

Angel lashed out, kicking and punching anything that tried to get past him, but as they began to grab him more aggressively, tearing his clothes and raking his flesh with their fingernails, grabbing him by the hair as they swarmed around him like angry bees, he realized that they were hopelessly screwed.

****

Logan expected Scott to be upset about Xavier’s death, but he didn’t expect him to punch something again. At least it wasn’t him this time.

What he hit was the crate that claimed it was full of hand grenades, and while he splintered a bit of the wood, mainly he just hurt his own fist, this time getting some slivers in his knuckles. Nothing exploded, though, so that was a plus.

Scott was still grumbling quietly to himself, picking the slivers out of his skin as he leaned against another section of crates, when Hel and Wes came back. Helga had that weird eye shaped mark on her forehead, the one that usually meant she was working under Moros’s aegis - was she now, or was that necessary to get in touch with him? He wasn’t sure, but the fact that she hadn’t wiped the mark away yet gave him a bad feeling.

“Well, we’re fucked,” Helga pronounced.

Logan felt an almost inexplicable urge to chuckle. Fucked was such a common state for him he supposed he should make that his middle name. Of course, that would mean he’d have to decide if Logan was his first or last name. “What’s goin’ on?”

It was Wes who replied. He looked surprisingly glum, which was bad news in and of itself. “From what Helga told me Moros said, there’s a battle going on between some disgruntled gods, who feel they’ve been given the short end of the stick when it comes to respect and territory.”

“It’s a war in heaven,” Helga simplified. “And Earth is becoming the last battlefield.”

“Why?” Logan wondered, looking between them.

They shared a glance, and Helga replied, “Some of the gods are playing dirty, and causing problems in the home dimensions of various gods, hoping to pull them off the front line.”

“Diversion?” Scott guessed.

Wes nodded. “It’ll also weaken the opponent’s side. A death god apparently wants Bob to come back to Earth, which is why the starting point of this incident is Los Angeles.”

Scott looked at him sharply. “Starting point?”

“It’s gonna spread,” Helga told him. “Slowly maybe, but the longer this goes on, the worse it’ll get.”

“But we can’t call on Bob,” Wesley continued gravely. “If he comes back, it’ll be exactly what this god - whoever it is - wants.”

“So we’re on our own,” Logan said. They both nodded. “Against a god?” Again with the stereo nods, although this time with matching worried frowns.

Somehow this gave all new meaning to the term “fucked”.