"Oh, father tell me, do we get what we deserve?
Oh, we get what we deserve
And way down we go
Oh, way down we go
Say, way down we go
Way down we go."
(Way Down We Go- Kaleo)
"Are you good with this plan?" Scott asked when they stepped out of the hotel room.
Logan shrugged, "Not much choice. She can hardly walk straight right now."
"Hank seemed pretty confident that those glasses will help her eyes recover faster as long as she's resting too." Jean reassured him, "She has every intention of staying in bed…maybe taking a shower, but that's it. I left some crackers next to her glasses too in case she gets hungry."
Logan looked Jean over, "Sisterhood looks good on you."
A slight blush came to Jean's face, and she shrugged, "She's exhausted. I can't help it, and I know she'd do the same for me."
Scott grinned like an idiot, kissing the side of her head, "I think it's cute."
Logan scoffed, "Give me a break, bub. We've got better things to do than for you two to be playing a cute contest."
Jean and Scott both sobered, and the red head handed him a piece of paper, "Those are the addresses of the murder scenes, you two go there while Scott and I talk with the locals."
The couple walked away, and Rogue raised an eyebrow at Logan, "Now, Ah wonde' why they don' want us talkin' to people?"
Logan chuckled, "No clue, Stripes, no clue."
The first two scenes they went to had nothing, no lingering scents at all or anything any of Rogue's lingering powers found of interest. They'd simply been returned to the public for too long. The third scene on the other hand…
"Fuck."
Rogue eyed him critically, "What?"
"She was here." He said, looking around, finding a splatter of blood on the dusty ground, "She was hurt."
Rogue shivered, "I'm not going to be the one to tell Maia that."
He bent down to touch the blood, which was still tacky, "It wasn't bad. Not enough blood. Flesh wound. If Laura's healing is anything like mine, she'd have fully healed from something like this in a minute or two."
"Well that's good news. Maia can be scary when she wants to be. She nearly made Bobby piss his drawers when he tried flirtin' with her." Rogue told him, poking at a set of claw marks. "She's only got two claws."
Logan chuckled once, "Good thing, not sure her momma would appreciate me teaching her my favorite uses for that third claw."
Rogue grinned at him, "Probably gonna need te' cut out the cursin' too."
Logan shook his head, "Shit." He went completely still before making eye contact with Rogue.
Her expression told him she'd realized the same thing he had. They were being watched.
Whoever was watching them wasn't subtle, and wasn't prepared for them to converge on the location…she…was using to observe them from. "Who are you?" Logan asked gruffly, claws against the Mexican woman's throat.
She stared at his claws, not in fear, but in awe, "Dios mío, tú eres su padre."
"Padre. Father?" Logan asked.
She nodded furiously, "Si, si! El padre de Laura!"
"Laura?" Logan growled, "How do you know that name?"
She shivered in his grip and took a few deep breaths, "La Mujer Roja."
"What?"
"La Mujer Roja." The woman repeated, and managed to get over her emotions enough to finally speak English, "I saw her in a dream nine years ago, right after I was given a baby to watch when Dr. Sarah Kinney had to work. The baby wasn't Dr. Kinney's, she hadn't even named her." She sighed heavily, wiping sweat from her brow, "She was beautiful, and the way she held the baby in my dream, she looked like a Madonna. She told me the baby was named Laura, that she would join her soon, she asked me to watch over her until then. She was an angel."
"Laura's mother is alive." Logan growled.
Rogue put a hand on his arm, "But she wasn't nine years ago, right? For a little bit, she was dead."
Logan let the woman go, staring at her, "You were asleep?"
"Si." She affirmed, "I'm Gabriella, and Laura needs your help."
So he hadn't imagined the times Maia had been in his dreams as more than a character, the few times it seemed like she'd actually been there. Dream walking. She was a dream walker, even if she didn't realize it herself. He chuckled, "That girl."
Gabriella scowled at him, "Laura needs help!" She waved a phone in front of his face, "Watch!"
He did. He took the phone from her, and Rogue pressed the play button. There she was. She wasn't the baby from his memories anymore, but she was without a doubt his, even if he couldn't see the claws protruding from her hands as she cut up dummies. She was fierce, and her facial expressions were all him. In fact, very little about her reminded him of Maia, at least until she retracted her claws and stood in the center of the laboratory.
Damn. Her eyes were dark like his, but they were shaped like Maia's, and she used them just like her mother did. Her voice sounded like Maia's too, "I want to sleep."
Gabriella's voice came over the video as they walked down stark hallways, "I know, just a few more things." She urged the girl, "Were your claws always like this?"
Laura shook her head, "No, they used to be all bumpy, like…"
"Bone." Gabriella supplied, punching a number into a keypad to reveal a small bedroom.
Laura nodded, "It hurt. A lot. Auntie knew it would."
"Okay, Laura, I'll let you sleep now." Gabriella's hand reached out to smooth down some of Laura's hair, "Sweet dreams, hija." The video cut off.
Logan looked up at Gabriella, "Where the hell is she?"
Gabriella held her hands up, her accent even thicker than before as she said, "I don't know. I've worked there ten years, and I don't know. They blindfold us, drive around for a while, and we stay for days at a time before they take us home. If we're lucky." She laughed hysterically, "I'm not lucky anymore."
"What the hell's that suppose' to mean?" Rogue asked.
Logan took a deep breath, and knew before she ever said the words, "They poisoned me."
"With what? Why?" Logan asked her, trying to place the rapidly strengthening scent. Jean may have some way to counteract what ever it was if they could figure it out quickly enough.
Gabriella shook her head, blood trickling from her nose that she wiped away hurriedly, "I don't know what it is. I just knew I didn't have much time. I had to get someone's attention."
He took another deep breath, "She was never here."
"No, I have a shirt of hers in my bag. A vial of her blood." She let the bag drop from her shoulder, and it opened when it hit the ground, releasing Laura's scent from a grey t-shirt that flopped out, "I used knives to kill those men so it would look like she did it." Gabriella confessed tearfully. "They were bad men, and I have sinned, but I needed someone to find her! I can't protect her anymore. They poisoned me, took me home. They would have been better off doing to me what they did to poor Dr. Kinney."
Her heart was hammering in her chest, and her eyes had gone completely bloodshot. Logan set her down on a wooden crate when she started swaying, "You don't have much time."
She smiled at him, "No, but I succeeded. Better than I'd hoped. You'll find her. You'll save Laura."
He nodded, "Of course I will. She's my daughter."
Gabriella pat the back of his hand, and reached for her bag, nearly falling off the crate. He picked it up and handed it to her. "I never told her about her mother. Losing Dr. Kinney was hard enough for her, losing real family would have been devastating."
"Sarah Kinney was really her mother's sister." Rogue told her, and Gabriella blinked at her in shock.
"Dios mio." She wiped more blood away from her face, "They, uh…"
Gabriella started coughing, and Rogue looked to Logan, fingers on one of her gloves, "Should Ah?"
Logan nodded, "Hurry, she's almost gone."
Rogue gave the dying woman a sweet smile, "Ah'ma try not to make this hurt. We'll get Laura."
Gabriella nodded, and clasped Rogue's bare hand in hers, "Santa María, ruega por mí. San José, ruega por mí. Jesús, María y José, ayúdame en mi última agonía." She made a ragged noise as she took a breath, her whole body shaking in pain, "Aunque ande en el valle de la sombra de la muerte, no temeré ningún mal, porque…tú…estás…conmigo."
Rogue and Gabriella fell apart. "¡Mierda!" Rogue exclaimed, pulling her glove back on, breathing heavily.
Logan sat Gabriella's body up carefully, and put both her hands over the Rosary she'd pulled from her bag. He stood, holding the dead woman's bag out to Rogue, "You okay?"
Rogue nodded, "Yeah. She really didn't know where they took he', but…she saw a whole lotta awful shit."
He was about to ask another question of the young woman when his cellphone rang from his back pocket. Logan cursed as he fumbled with the thing, and growled into it, "What?"
Jean took a shaky breath, and he instantly dreaded her next words, "She's gone, Logan. Maia's gone."
"What the fuck do you mean 'she's gone'?" He gritted out, heading back towards the hotel.
Rogue spluttered behind him, "Wait, Logan, what should we do with her?"
"Leave her!" He yelled, "She's gone to her God, we can't help her now."
Jean gasped at his tone, and Scott took the phone from her, "Logan, we got back, and she was gone. There was a struggle. I've kept Jean out of there. Whoever took her, Maia put up a hell of a fight. Of course no one around here will confess to hearing a thing." He whispered calming words to Jean before continuing, "Jean says one of them remembers hearing her scream and seeing her running out in the parking lot, but a couple men caught her and threw her into a van about a half hour ago."
"We'll be back in ten." Logan hissed, closing the phone and picking up the pace.
Rogue was red faced and panting by the time they got back to the motel, but she looked better by far than Jean did, sitting in the back of a car Scott must have rented at some point. Logan ignored them all, storming into the room like she'd be sitting on the bed waiting for him to chastise her for going to get tacos without telling anyone. He'd expected that from her. He had never imagined this would be the scene waiting for him. The smells made his stomach churn: Blood. Semen.
Logan stared at the disheveled room in disbelief. It had started in the bedroom. On the bed. A towel baring the slightest trace of Maia's arousal had been half kicked under the bed, and the scent of her fear permeated the stained sheets, along with smears of her blood. Bastard had violated her. Logan was sure of that, but she'd exploited the resulting moment of weakness. The lamp that had once been on the nightstand was smashed to pieces with blood on a foot section of the cord. Maia'd apparently tried to garrote her attacker with it. That was his girl alright.
The bathroom door had been torn apart, and Maia's blood was on the corner of the vanity with several strands of red hair caked in it. Bastard had smashed her head into it. She hadn't gone down there though, but her attacker had. The acidic smell of a high powered electrical charge still filled the bathroom. Maia's bare foot had tracked her own blood over a void on the floor, and showed she'd gone out the door. What chilled him to the bone though was that the scent of the man who had hurt her was…his own. The trio of scratches down the wall beside the bathroom door was confirmation.
Rogue stood behind him, "What the hell happened here, Logan?"
He growled in fury and started running. Jean tried to stop him, but must have read his mind and got the hell out of his way. She ran to the car and turned it on with shaking hands, he jumped into the passenger seat, and Rogue and Scott barely had time to get into the back seat before she pealed out of the parking lot. He didn't care that she was using his mind like a bloodhound GPS, they had to find his girls. Now. There wasn't any other option. He'd tear the bastard with his scent apart with his bare hands if he had to.