By Allykat
The woman was dead. That wasn't surprising; Jack had ripped into her pretty good. Logan ran his hands over his face. Shit. And now what the hell was he going to do? He couldn't leave her here in the alleyway, and he couldn't call the cops. He could take her body back to the mansion and decide what to do with her from there, but he'd had to explain why he failed to save her and that stuck in his craw. Perhaps Beast would want to take a look at her, maybe they could find out where she came from. Logan felt it his duty to help a mutant, even a dead one.
The woman's little creature flew down and flutter-hovered in the air. It chattered at Logan and he shook his head. An annoyed expression compressed her lips for a moment, then she pointed into the sky with a tiny forefinger. This was the first time Logan got a good look at the thing. It was a tiny female being about the size of a Robin with bat-like wings. Her skin was a brownish-red like a dried blood drop; her short spiky hair was a darker red. Yellow eyes with slit pupils glowed at him and when she smiled she displayed a row of tiny, sharp white teeth. The thing reminded him of a hellish Tinkerbell… or Tinkerhell was more like it.
"Man human?" it asked in a tiny hissing voice. That it could speak at all surprised Logan. It flew down on his hand and stroked his knuckles. "Man fight good with steel claws from hand. Man helped Dee."
Logan had a name now. Dee. That was probably a nickname. "I wouldn't say I helped her. She's dead," he said, wondering if it would understand. Tinkerhell looked at him and cocked her head, a ghost of a smile flitted over her lips then was gone and her face sobered.
"Dee dead?" she suddenly replied in a whiney, high-pitched hissing voice. It alighted on the woman's shoulder, began petting her hair and mewling piteously, every once in awhile glancing at him to measure his reaction. "Dee dead," it continued to whimper, its little body shuddering. "Dee ddddd-eead. Wahhhhh!" Tiny tears dripped from its hellish eyes.
Fuck, Logan thought, what the hell was he going to do with this thing? It then alighted on his shoulder and pinched his cheek. "Hey!" He swatted at it and it flew out of range.
"Tzila joking!" it tittered. "Okay, Dee to get up now." Tinkerhell grabbed one lock of the woman's black hair and gave it a hard tug. The woman didn't move. Tinkerhell then crawled down the woman's sleeve and sunk her sharp teeth into her hand.
"What the hell…!" Logan shouted, and raised a hand to smack the creature away but it stuck out its tongue.
"Dee not dead, silly human man."
The woman's body jerked, and moaning she rolled over and blinked up at Logan. Alive? He thought. It hardly seemed possible… unless maybe she too had a mutant healing factor. The front of her jacket was soaked through with blood. Deep fang punctures dented her forehead. Logan was quite certain that a few moments ago she was quite dead.
"Tzila you little bitch," the woman said, her voice weak. "I told you I don't like you biting me."
"Tzila wanted Dee to wake up," the creature said, laughter in her voice. "Go after Argan. Tzila flew after and see where he hid."
"Maybe in a minute." The woman held a hand to her head and sat up. "I don't feel so hot. Damn I hate when this happens."
No shit, Logan thought and stared at her a startled moment. "Know what ya' mean. Try getting admantium pulled out through your pores."
"What?" she said and blinked at him.
"One o' them near death experiences. Darlin'," he said, and crouched next to her to inspect her wounds. "Let's take a look at you before ya' bleed to death on me."
Dee planted a hand on his chest and with more strength than he expected she shoved him away. "Look, I'm fine, no thanks to you," she said and swiped away a lock of hair from her face and in the process streaked a bead of blood across her cheek. It looked like warpaint, and with the nasty glare she was shooting at him, it seemed appropriate.
"As I see it, lady, I just pulled your ass out of a world o' hurt." Logan got to his feet and held out a hand. She ignored it.
"No, you didn't." She got to her hands and knees and grunted. "If you hadn't decided to play Good-fucking-Samaritan none of this would have happened." She staggered to her feet and looked into the empty night sky. "FUCK!" she shouted and stomped a foot, turned and glared at him, a faint bluish glow tinged her eyes. The little creature called Tzila sat cross-legged on the woman's shoulder and made naughty faces at Logan. The woman continued: "You familiar with the term FUBAR, Mr….?"
"Logan. And you cen say that I'm familiar with the term." He stifled a chuckle at her little temper tantrum--reminded him of Jubilee. When he saw her in the bar he would have guessed she was about thirty, now he estimated more like early twenties. He noticed the puncture wounds in her head had completely healed. A few minutes ago she was roadkill.
"Well, Mr. Logan… right now FUBAR is what totally what this situation has become. Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition! This is should have been an easy hit. My boss is going to have a holy cow, an... an... apoplectic fit of universal proportions." She threw up her arms and let them fall back to her side.
"Boss?" Logan echoed. Who did she work for? Was it a cult?
"What? You think I want to do this shit on my own? Hunt down these crazy ass brutes and … and get my head chomped off by some razor-toothed mo-fo? You're friggin' crazier than you look if that's what you think." She stared up at the sky and exhaled a long breath. "Now I have to go after him and this time he'll be expecting me."
"So darlin', you gonna tell me what's going on here?"
"My name is not Darlin', and you've seen enough as it is. You should leave. Buh-bye. Thanks for the help. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out."
"Is he a N'Garai?" he wondered out loud. Dee's entire body jerked to a sudden stiff halt and she stopped breathing for a moment and just stared at him.
"What do you know about the N'Garai?" she whispered.
"I've locked horns with 'em a couple of times," he replied. "They make good target practice."
"Impressive." She looked him up and down as if seeing him for the first time and her demeanor seemed to shift from dislike to guarded respect.
He lifted one eyebrow at her and dug in a pocket and pulled out a cigar then popped a claw and precisely sliced off the very tip of the cigar. "They were a lot easier to kill than Jack."
"That so? Maybe you will be useful." She blinked and gathered herself together. "His name is Argan, not Jack and he is not N'Garai, he's… something else."
"Demon? Vampire?" Logan asked, trying to get clarification. She wasn't lying, but she wasn't telling the whole truth either.
She hesitated a moment and shook her head. "No, if he were a demon or a vampire, my touch would have dispatched him…"
Logan wondered if her touch was what he'd felt in the bar.
She continued: "Argan is something more… worse." She shrugged off her jacket and threw it at him. "Here, hold this." Around her torso she wore a body rig filled with an arsenal of weapons: a K-bar knife, two Barettas and a Sig Sauer. Logan figured he must be slipping, he pegged only two guns. Dee unbuckled the body rig, shrugged it off and shoved it into his arms. "Here, hold this, too."
Then, to Logan's surprise, she slipped off her military green tank top, folded it and placed it in his arms on top of the coat and holster. She wore a simple white bra. She bent down to unlace her boots and slipped them off and put them to the side.
Logan's eyebrows rose. "Uh, darlin'. Shouldn't we get to know each other first before we head into this segment of the relationship?"
"Screw you, Mr. Logan." She reached around and unsnapped her bra. Her bare breasts gleamed in the dim light. She undid her pants and pulled them down to reveal plain cotton underwear.
"Logan," he corrected. He didn't remember the collar of his t-shirt feeling so tight.
"Whatever." She wiggled out of her underwear and completely unselfconscious of her nudity, folded her socks on top of her underwear. He tried not to stare at her chest. "Anyway," she continued, "you owe me bigtime for screwing up that hit, so at least be useful and hold these until I get back. Make certain no one borrows the hardware." She winked at him and patted the pile. "And try not to get ashes on them." Dee sauntered away and stood with her arms raised.
What the hell was she doing? "I'm sure streaking naked after Jack, Argan, or whatever he is, will get his attention, but don't you think it'd be better to keep the clothes and the guns? The people who live in this neighborhood aren't exactly friendly, upstandin' citizens."
"Thanks to you, the guns are useless now," she said. "Argan and his kind are vulnerable when in human form only to a precise hit in the nerve cluster in the back of the neck. I'm doing this to save on my clothing bill, not to amuse you, Mr. Logan."
Couldn't fool me, darlin'. I'm amused anyway."
"Why am I not surprised?"
Logan had to wonder how it would help their situation with her running butt naked through a bad New York neighborhood. And what was this mumbo jumbo about a clothing bill? Logan couldn't help but stare; he was male after all. He reached down and shifted an area that had grown uncomfortably tight. He'd have to be dead if an attractive nude female didn't affect him. And if she looked good with her clothes on, she looked better without them. "So is this where you do a naked catch-the-bad-guy ritual dance 'er something?"
"You're a very annoying man." And then like Jack, her body began to change.
Logan retreated, unaware that he did so until his back bumped up against the building. He ran a hand across his eyes and blinked. "Holy shit."
Long wings sprouted like silver-black lotus flowers from her back. Her fingernails elongated to sharp points and the color drained from her skin until it was milky white, almost luminous. A slight tinge of silver-blue colored the skin stretched across a taunt stomach. Her eyes glowed blue and her eyeteeth stretched to long, sharp points.
"Ain't everyday I watch a beautiful naked woman turn into a bad nightmare."
Glowing blue eyes regarded him with something akin to amusement, and when she spoke her voice had an odd hollow echo to it. "That's funny, Mr. Logan, I would suspect that would describe most of your dates."
It took Logan a moment to realize she was joking on him, but he wasn't provided the opportunity to respond. Her humor quickly faded. She walked up to him, her gait flowing. Her wings folded up behind her.
"If I don't return, Mr. Logan, you need to track Argan down when he returns to human form." She took up one of his hands and stroked his knuckle, her long nails rasping against his skin. "Strike him only in the back of the neck." She stepped away, spread her wings and launched into the sky with Tzila flying in small twirls at her side. The little creature seemed overjoyed that her mistress had turned into something from a bad episode of Tales from the Crypt.
Logan shielded a hand over his brow and watched her fly off. He tucked her clothes and guns under one arm and took off at a quick jog, using her scent to guide him when she disappeared from sight. For a half hour he almost lost the scent and backtracked down several alleyways before a high-pitched scream, beyond the level a normal human could hear, caught his attention. A second screech was cut off at mid-point. He couldn't tell if it came from Dee or Jack.
"Son of a bitch," he said and ran down a deserted street, his boot steps echoing between buildings.
An inner voice warned him not to meddle in whatever this was about. Against his better judgment, he decided not to listen and figured he could later berate himself for being a jackass. He stopped at a boarded up window at an old factory, looked up the five-story building and took a deep breath. Jack and Dee's scent came to him ever so faint. He popped a set of claws, stuck them into the plywood and ripped it from the sill. He climbed inside, swearing under his breath at the jagged edged of glass that cut through his hands. The wounds were already healing when he jumped to the damp cement floor and placed the woman's belongings on top of an old crate. At the back of the room he found a door to the stair leading to the roof. He took the stairs two at a time.
At the top of the stairwell, Logan kicked the door open and ran out on to the rooftop. He stopped short. Dee stood over the fallen Argan, her wings outstretched, one had clenched over his head. Tinkerhell stood on Dee's shoulder.
"Quia fecit mihi magna qui potens est, et sanctum nomen eius. Amen," Dee said, and pressed a finger to Jack's forehead. He writhed and cried as though she had shoved a knife into him. She planted a foot on his chest, and wrapped her taloned hands around his head and chin. Muscles straining along her arms, she twisted and with a wet splitting sound, ripped his head from his body. "Miserere nobis."
Wind howled around them in a ferocious swirl. Noxious black smoke poured from the headless body as it jackknifed into a sitting position, claws swiping at nothing. Then it collapsed back. In Dee's hand, the head gnashed its teeth and screeched in anger. The anger turned to whimpers as both the head and body began to smoke as if invisible fire burned its flesh as it split, blackened and then, finally, turned to ash. The midnight breeze blew the ashes across the rooftop.
Dee then reeled
and staggered back, her head falling forward like a wilted flower. Her entire body trembled, her wings began to
shrivel and her form shrinking until once again she was the dark hair woman
he'd seen in the bar. She collapsed
and, shivering, curled to a fetal position her arms wrapped around her
knees. Tzila murmured in her ear and
hugged her with tiny arms.
"This is a hell of a night," Logan said to himself and went to her. "Why do I always pick the high maintenance gals?" He couldn't begin to understand what just happened. He wasn't certain if he wanted to know. His life was complicated enough. Dee jerked at his touch on her shoulder, but then relaxed. He gently pried her arms away from her knees. "Hey, darlin'."
"Mr. Logan," she said, her voice barely audible. A huge sigh left her body and she turned her head. Her glazed eyes focused on him and her touch on his arm feathered across his skin. "I am surprised you're still here. Especially after what you've just witnessed."
"I've seen worse. And neither am I in a position to pass judgment."
Logan was surprised to hear her chuckle at that. The chuckled turned into a racking cough. Logan turned her over, her long hair spilling over his arm. He checked for wounds and found none, her skin smooth and almost colorless. He shrugged off his leather jacket and wrapped it around her. Tzila flew to his shoulder, her silence indicating approval. At least she didn't try to rip his throat out. He picked Dee up in his arms and strode toward the stairwell door.
"Leave me be," she said, her head lolling against his chest. "I'll be okay."
"Sorry darlin', it ain't in my makeup to leave naked, wounded women on rooftops." He jerked his head toward where Jack had turned to ash. "And there may be more where he comes from."
"You don't know the half of it." A sad smile crossed her lips. "Where are you taking me?"
"Somewhere safe." He kicked open the rooftop door and began descending the stairwell.
"Is this your heroic nature showing, Mr. Logan?"
"Heroic?" He lifted one eyebrow. "That is one word people would never associated with my name."
"Then those people must be fools."