Hi, guys! This is my first DA fic, so I'm glad you all liked it! I hope you like this chapter, too!
The rain beat down, hard, hard, upon the gloomy city of Seattle, as though attempting to punish the citizens for their sins. Had it ever rained this hard before, Max wondered. Two people had died from the resulting floods not a month before, but the eminent Eyes Only hadn't thought to investigate that, she thought. He hadn't even attended the funerals, though she couldn't really complain, as she hadn't, either. If only he would choose one way or another, she thought; if only he would make up his mind. How was she to know how to proceed if he kept waffling between selfless, heroic martyr and playful yet sophisticated playboy? One of these days, she thought, she was just going to get tired of waiting and move on to someone else. Like Zack, who was quite nice-looking if one overlooked the slight incest factor.

"Whit's this greetin' aboot?" Original Cindy asked. Max turned around to see her friend approaching. Normal glared at them from across the room, his eyes dark and angry as lasers as if to warn them that each minute they spent speaking would be deducted from their bi-monthly paychecks. "Trouble wiv' yer pan?"

"He's not my man!" Max said. "And things between us are fine."

"Which is why ye're lookin' so sorry," Original Cindy said knowingly.

"I'm not looking sorry," Max protested. "I'm just thinking."

Her friend looked concerned. "Aboot whit?"

"The weather."

"The pleasure? Why'd ye wanna think aboot that, boo?" Original Cindy shook her head. "Nae, I dinna think it's the rain a'tall."

Normal interrupted before Max was forced to think of an appropriately distracting demurral. "I've got a package here with your name on it, missy!" Max feigned a regretful expression and hurriedly walked over to the dispatch center. She loved Original Cindy, she really did (in a completely platonic way, that is. Despite Original Cindy's sexual orientation and relative availability, Max felt no attraction to her friend; the magnetic, lavalike tide of her lust was directed at the mysterious man of mystery, he who always kept her guessing), but sometimes, her friend's concern about her relationship with Logan was just too much to take.

Normal handed her the package, glaring especially angrily as if to express his anger at her having taken a few minutes to converse with Original Cindy. The rain drummed heavily on the roof; combined with Normal's angry look, Jam Pony's atmosphere felt... wrong. Max frowned. Surely that was just emotion, just sentimentality. She was used to the rain, and used to Normal's angry look, and certainly they'd been combined before, so what was wrong with today?

Across the room, a female messenger screamed in pure terror. "Oh my God!" Max whirled to see what was wrong, to see which one of her peers had gotten his hand stuck in the vending machine today. Sketchy, she thought. What a surprise.

Except... Sketchy wasn't standing near the vending machine. Indeed, that ancient soda-dispensing monolith was abandoned. Why was Bella staring at him like that, then? Max's eyes widened as Sketchy turned around slowly to face her...

Or at least, his head did. Because Sketchy's body was still facing Bella.

"Something wicked," Sketchy said in a voice like the buzzing of a thousand insects, the soft clicking of a thousand flesh-hungry beetles, like the cry of a vulture circling over its dying meal. "Bast shall be avenged!"

Bast. Something clicked in Max's mind. What had she said to Logan on that fateful day, the day upon which she'd broken into his apartment and stolen a statue of...

Bast!

Could this be related, she wondered? Was it possible that Sketchy was possessed by the vengeful spirit of the sculptor of that statue?

"'The power of Christ compels you,'" Normal said, sounding annoyed. He waved his hands in the air in exasperation. "You'd better hope your neck twists back, because I'm not insured against that kind of claim."

Sketchy pitched forward abruptly and Max rushed to his side, careful to stay a safe distance away. His head was on right, she saw, and she looked up to see all of the other messengers staring at her fallen comrade. They'd seen it, too, she knew; it hadn't just been in her head. She stood up slowly, backing away as one of the more medically-trained messengers took her place at Sketchy's pain-ridden side.

What did it mean, she wondered? And did it have anything to do with Logan's recent obsession with cat people? Or were they two completely unrelated coincidences? Could it be, she wondered. Could it be...?

No, these were too obviously related to be coincidences. They had to mean something. They had to, lest Sketchy's pain be for naught. It couldn't be, she thought. There had been too much pain lately. Too much pain. First Logan, trying to kill himself because he felt that he was not fully human, and then Ben, dead by her own hands due to his delusions. She couldn't stand another, not even if it were Sketchy.

Not even then.

She swallowed, feeling tears forming at the corners of her eyes, and hastily looked away so that Original Cindy would not think she was genuinely mourning the fallen messenger. She'd never live that one down, she was certain. And what would happen if Logan found out, if he thought that she'd moved on? What if he went back to his tartish wife and left her all alone?

All alone. She could not stand that. Not again. She looked bravely up, feeling the tears sliding back into their ducts. She was strong. She was... woman. Strong, proud, and female, she thought. Like on the shirt she'd seen once, on a woman down in the market, surrounded by screaming children and still standing strong. Girls kick ass, she thought, and you go, girl! She remembered thinking at the time that perhaps the shirt had referred to child-rearing methods, but she'd decided that she was probably wrong. No woman, not even one as tired as the shirt-wearer, would spank her children.

She turned from the scene and wheeled her bike out into the rain. She had a job to do. The sooner she finished this, the sooner she could visit Logan again, and the sooner they would get to the bottom of this cat-people thing. The sooner they finished that, she thought, the sooner they could do more important things.

Behind her, a siren wailed. The ambulance was coming for Sketchy, one more casualty of the dangers with which Post-Pulse Seattle life was wrought.


TBC