Dark Angel: A Pound of Flesh (3/5)

[brihana25]

All disclaimers, notes, warnings and summary are in the Master post: A Pound of Flesh



Chapter Five

Max hadn't been sure, at first, that asking Joshua to help find Alec was a good idea. The last she'd talked to him about it, Joshua had still been plenty mad at Alec for attacking and trying to kill them in the empty lot all those weeks ago. She didn't know if he'd even care that Alec had been kidnapped, or if he'd decide that it wasn't his problem and that Alec was getting what he deserved.

She'd been more than mildly surprised when he'd stood up out of his chair and headed for the front door.

"Father's children are a family. Alec is like a little brother. Loud, annoying little brother. Nobody can steal Joshua's little brother."

If Logan had been at all shocked to see Joshua standing outside of Crash, wearing a jacket with the hood pulled down across his face, he hid it well. Introductions were short, because the seriousness of the situation didn't allow them to be anything else.

Max handed Joshua Alec's jacket. She'd called Cindy in a panic and explained what was going on, after she'd talked to Logan. Cindy hadn't even questioned her when she'd asked where Alec's jacket was; she'd just told her that she'd dropped it at the apartment. It hadn't taken Max more than a few minutes to run home and pick it up.

Joshua buried his nose in the leather and inhaled deeply, letting his sensitive nose absorb Alec's scent.

Logan pulled his cell phone out of his pocket and scrolled down his contact list. "Give me a minute," he said.

"What are you doing?"

"Checking something," he said. "Before we get into this, let's just double-check and make sure we're not overreacting."

Logan pressed his phone to his ear.

Max jumped when she heard the phone that started ringing behind her.

Logan turned toward the sound, which seemed to be coming from near Crash's door, and walked in that direction. He didn't hang up, and the other phone kept ringing. He bent down and picked it up, looked at the screen, then snapped his own phone shut.

"Okay," he admitted. "Now we can do this your way."

He dropped the phone in her hand as he walked by, being careful not to let their skin brush. She looked down at the display on the front of the phone and sighed. If she hadn't already known it was Alec's phone, the fact that the screen said Missed Call: Logan would have been convincing on its own. She sighed and flipped the phone open, and found herself surprised by what she found when she looked through Alec's contact list.

Logan's was the only name on it.

Joshua appeared in front of her suddenly, handing her back Alec's jacket. Then he sniffed at the air experimentally, and started walking. Max tucked Alec's phone into the pocket of his jacket, then tossed them both under the front seat of Logan's car. She pushed the button for the lock before closing the door and motioning for Logan to follow Joshua.

They stayed back a few feet, giving Joshua room and letting him concentrate on what he was doing. Max was worried that this wasn't going to work, that if the Steelheads had put Alec in a car and driven away with him that Joshua wasn't going to be able to follow them. But it looked like Sandeman had made Joshua's nose even more sensitive than an ordinary dog's, because he'd already crossed the street and was walking down the sidewalk on the other side, and he was showing no signs of having lost the trail.

"Are you sure this is a good idea, Max?" she heard Logan ask beside her. "What if someone sees him?"

Max sighed and looked around. Part of her knew that Logan was right. If anyone saw Joshua out there, the results would be catastrophic, especially so soon after the incident with Isaac. But she also knew that they had no other choice. Logan had been trying to find the Steelheads' hangout for months and hadn't been able to. No one seemed to know where they actually went when they weren't out causing trouble.

Joshua was Alec's only hope of being found.

"It's getting dark," she answered. "We have to do this, Logan. Joshua's the only chance we've got." She turned to stare straight ahead before mumbling, "He's the only chance Alec's got."

They did have to leave street level and go into the sewers to get past the sector cops at the checkpoint, but Joshua had picked up the scent again on the other side. By that point, it was completely dark, and only the faint glow of streetlights lit their way.

Joshua stopped suddenly in the middle of the street, sniffing the air around him. Had they come this far only for him to lose the trail now?

"Alec," Joshua said, a low growl in his throat. He turned his head slowly and glared at the building across the street from them.

It was a large, old house, Max could see. There was some sort of sign in front of it that she couldn't read from where she stood, but she could see the coffins that "decorated" the yard around it.

"He's in there?" she asked, and Joshua nodded. "You're sure?"

"Scent is strong," Joshua said. "Alec here."

"Okay," Max said. "There should be three of them, right? That's easy enough to take care of. Joshua, you take the..."

"Max," Logan said. She turned to look at him and saw him waving his cell phone at her. "Step back into the shadows. Let me take care of this."

"You're gonna what?" she asked, but she did step into the shadows behind a tree next to the sidewalk. "How are you gonna take on three Steelheads?"

"I'm not taking them on," he answered as he pressed the phone to his ear. "I'm getting them out of the way." He turned his full attention to his phone then. "Hey, Rob, it's Logan. You set up that thing we were talking about, right?" Max assumed this Rob person answered yes, because Logan nodded his head. "Okay, great. I need you to call him and tell him to come to the meeting right now. No, I can't tell you why, I just need you to. Yeah, that would be great. Thanks, Rob."

Max looked up at Joshua in the shadows at her side, and then back at Logan. "What did you...?"

"Just watch," Logan said.

It was only a matter of minutes before Eddy and his henchmen came out of the house, along with a Steelhead girl that none of them had expected. So there were four of them, then, not three. Max thought she recognized the girl from Crash a couple of weeks before, could swear she'd seen her there flirting with Alec.

The four of them climbed into the black car sitting in the front yard and drove away. As soon as they were out of sight, Max motioned for Joshua to cross the street. She followed a few steps behind with Logan.

"So Rob is your contact?"

Logan nodded. "Yeah. With any luck, we'll have Alec's kidney back within the hour. We'll have to see if Sam can put it back in for him."

"First we have to see if there's someone to put it back in to," Max muttered as she finally caught sight of what the sign in front of the house said - Miller Funeral Home.

"Don't think like that, Max," Logan said. "We'll find him, and Sam'll patch him up if he needs to. He's a Transgenic, isn't he? Rapid healing, hyper-immune system? He'll be fine."

Max only nodded.

Joshua had reached the front door of the house. He didn't wait for Max and Logan, didn't even bother to glance at them. He just turned the knob, opened the door, and stepped inside.

Max and Logan jogged to catch up with him, and Logan closed the door behind them.

Joshua sniffed at the air intently; Max could tell from the look of concentration on his face that he'd definitely picked up a scent. He walked through the living room, which was "decorated" with more coffins than the front yard was, and into a dining room. When he stepped toward the metal door in the far wall, she followed him wordlessly and motioned for Logan to do the same.

Joshua's sniffing increased in intensity as he neared the door, and Max felt her heart speed up. "Smell Alec," Joshua said. He moved his hand toward the doorknob, but stopped before he actually touched it. The sound of his sniffs turned into a low growl, deep in his throat.

"Smell too much Alec."

Max looked up at him from where she stood at his side, her head tilted and her eyes wide in confusion. "What?"

"Too much," Joshua repeated. "Too much Alec."

Max and Logan exchanged worried, questioning looks behind Joshua's back as Joshua lowered his hand away from the handle. Max didn't understand what "too much Alec" meant, not in the context of what Joshua was saying, but Joshua's behavior was making it obvious that it wasn't good. He'd definitely picked up Alec's scent behind that door, but something was making him not want to open it.

Max placed a gentle hand on Joshua's arm and reached past him, wrapping her fingers around the door handle carefully. Her heart pounded in her throat as she turned it.

As she slowly pushed it open and her eyes widened in horror, she understood what "too much" meant.

"Is this...?" she swallowed audibly, almost afraid to ask the question only because she feared she already knew the answer.

Logan seemed to understand what she was feeling, because he spoke up behind her, saving her from being the one to ask.

"Is it all his?"

Joshua sniffed again, the growl in his throat a constant, low rumble beneath his voice. "All Alec."

The room they'd just opened had obviously at one time served as the funeral home's embalming room, but it appeared to have been converted into a sloppily constructed operating room. Surgical instruments that Max couldn't imagine having ever been clean - to say nothing of sterile - were scattered around the room. Empty IV bags littered the floor. Filthy sheets were piled in the corners and draped over tables and other unidentified apparatus. In the middle of the room, on a raised section of grated floor, stood a metal table that was much larger than the ones that lined the walls. It had grooves that ran the length of it and emptied into a sink at one end, and it was crossed by several leather straps whose purpose was immediately evident to her. Next to it stood a red machine that she couldn't identify, with tubes and wires running out of it.

And blood covered everything.

The surgical instruments were coated with it; the IV bags were splattered with it; the sheets were soaked in it. The table in the center stood over a pool of it that had drained through the grate in the floor, and both the grooves in the table's surface and the sink had bits of it sticking to their edges.

"My God," Max breathed, though walking into that room made her seriously doubt the existence of such a creature. "What did they do to him?"

Joshua hadn't entered the room at all and looked to Max as though he was physically unable to. The scent of copper in the air was so thick that Max almost was almost choking on it; she could only imagine how it was overwhelming Joshua's sensitive nose. Logan had the advantage, in this instance, of normal human senses, and he'd managed to make himself move further into the room than even Max had been able. He was inspecting the leather straps attached to the table's surface, as though he hadn't immediately known what they were.

When he looked up at her and their eyes met across the room, the look of sadness and horror in his eyes almost made her want to run. Maybe Logan hadn't recognized them immediately. Maybe he hadn't seen restraints exactly like those as many times as she had. She envied him that lack of knowledge.

"What?" she asked.

"Restraints," he answered, his voice so quiet that Max might not have heard if not for her enhanced hearing.

She nodded her head slowly. "I know."

Logan looked past her, at the open door. "Where's Joshua?"

Max turned and looked behind her, both surprised and not to see that Joshua was no longer standing there. "I don't know," she said. She turned back around and stepped further into the room. The smell was still powerful, but she was getting used to it.

She was almost afraid to touch anything, like it would make the whole thing more real or more horrible if she did. But that wasn't possible, was it? This was so terribly bad, and there wasn't anything that could have made it any worse. She just stood there, slowly turning in the middle of the room, keeping her hands at her sides. The blood, so much blood, Alec's blood... and it was everywhere.

How the hell had he possibly survived this?

She heard the sound from a long way off - a low keening wail that rose to an almost ear-splitting crescendo before falling off, only to rise again. It was an animal's howl of pain, fear, and sorrow. It was a friend's cry of loss.

It was Joshua.

Max was running from the room, Logan following closely on her heels, before she had even fully realized why. Her heart pounded in her chest, not from exertion but from emotion, from apprehension. There was only one reason for Joshua to make that sound, in this place, at this time.

He'd found Alec.

She and Logan raced through the parlor, past the coffins, looking in open side doors as they passed. Joshua's voice echoed all around them, coming from above, below and both sides all at once. Max could tell from the way Logan followed her that he was uncertain exactly where the sound was originating, but Max knew. The echo was caused by the voice bouncing against the walls of the ductwork; Joshua's cries were traveling through the vents.

"He's in the basement," she explained quickly, as she rushed through the kitchen. "We have to find a way down." She pulled open the door on the far side of the room and was rewarded with a dark set of stairs. As she started down them, she heard Logan behind her.

"Why did Joshua go to the basement?"

"He must have followed Alec's scent," she answered as her feet his the floor at the bottom of the stairs. "Now that we're away from that room, I can smell it, too. But it's... " Her voice trailed off with her footsteps, and Logan had to stop himself on the bottom step to keep from walking into her. There wasn't much room to navigate in the narrow hallway they'd stepped down into, and even less light to see by. The passageway went in two directions, and Max stood at the junction where they met the stairs, looking completely uncertain of which way to go.

"What is it?" he asked worriedly. He stepped around her, keeping his hands to the side, barely resisting the urge to grab her shoulders to steady her. "Max, what?"

"Alec's scent," she said. She closed her eyes and shook her head in confusion. "I can smell him, but it's wrong." She opened her eyes again, looking directly into Logan's. "Oh, Logan, something's wrong."

"Of course something's wrong," he answered shortly. "That blood wouldn't be there if everything were all right."

"He smells... " She closed her eyes and concentrated, trying to pin down not only exactly what was off about Alec's scent but also which direction it was coming from. "Sweet," she finally said. "Overly sweet, like rotting fruit."

"Like he's sick?" Logan asked.

"No," she answered softly. She opened her eyes and turned to her left, heading down the narrow hallway with determination. "No, not sick. Worse than that."

She could hear Joshua's voice getting louder and knew that she'd picked the right direction. There were closed doors off both sides of the hallway, but she didn't spare them a second of thought. She would find Alec when she found Joshua, and until those two things happened, she couldn't think of anything else.

There it was, at the very end of the hall, right under one of the few bare bulbs that lit the hallway - an open door. She ran the last few feet to it, grabbed the door frame and pivoted around it. And stopped in her tracks.

"Oh, God," she whispered. "Alec."

Chapter Six

Joshua was holding him against his chest, gently but with such obvious strength that Max knew even she would be hard-pressed to take him away. She didn't think Joshua had even realized she and Logan had arrived, because his attention was on Alec. Alec, who was lying so still in Joshua's arms, his head hanging back over Joshua's arm, his arms hanging limp at his sides. Joshua had folded himself almost in half and had his forehead pressed against Alec's chest.

Despite the howling and crying, Alec wasn't responding at all.

She heard Logan entering the room behind her, heard his gasp of shock, and turned toward him slowly. There were no words they could give each other that would make the scene they'd just walked in on any less horrific, but the look in his eyes, a look she knew was reflected in her own, expressed everything he was thinking.

The room was lit only by another single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling, a light so weak that it didn't even manage to chase the shadows out of the corners. It had two rough stone walls, two block walls, and a dirt floor. It smelled of mold, decay, and rot. It smelled of disease and filth. It smelled of a hundred years of death.

Alec was lying right in the middle of it, and she was having a hard time believing that he hadn't already become one of the dead that the room reeked of.

His shirt was gone, and he was barefoot. His jeans were caked with dirt, and so much blood that shouldn't have been obvious but was, and a hundred other things that she didn't even want to think about. A chain around his right ankle and padlocked in place secured him to some sort of stake that had been driven into the floor. His skin was deathly pale, his cheeks were flushed, and his hair was soaked with sweat. She knew he'd only been missing for three days - three days when no one had looked for him, no one had even realized he was gone - but he looked like he'd been there for weeks.

A large, hastily and sloppily-applied bandage covered his entire right side, from the bottom of his ribs to under the waist of his jeans, from his back to his navel. It had been soaked-through with blood, some old and dark and some so bright that it had to be fresh. Max wondered if Joshua had reopened whatever wound was under that bandage when he'd lifted Alec up from the floor. She wondered if Alec had even felt it.

It wasn't the blood on the bandage that scared her, though, because she'd been expecting that; there was too much blood in the room upstairs for him to not have been bleeding from somewhere. No, what worried her the most was the dark yellow substance that spread out beyond it, soaking the bandage to the point of saturation, and starting to seep out underneath it. She could see where streaks of it had dried on Alec's skin, see the angry red lines that poked out from under the edges of the gauze.

It was infected, and badly. That was what she had smelled from the bottom of the stairs.

She'd spent so long frozen in place, staring at Alec in horror, that she hadn't noticed when Logan had started to move forward. She didn't see him kneeling down across from Joshua, didn't see him reaching a hesitant hand toward Alec's neck until it was almost too late.

"Logan, no!" she called out in warning.

Joshua's head snapped up and he snarled at Logan in hatred, barring his teeth and growling again. Logan pulled his hand back so fast that he lost his balance and landed hard on the ground behind him.

Max shook herself out of the shock that had taken control of her and stepped forward. "Joshua," she said softly. "Joshua, stop. It's Logan. He's our friend, remember? He's here to help."

"He is not us!" Joshua roared. "He is upstairs people! Upstairs people hurt Alec!"

"I know," she said softly as she knelt down across from him, taking over the spot Logan had been forced to vacate. "I know they did, Joshua, but Logan won't. Logan is a good man, and he's Alec's friend." She didn't care if that was true or not, though she had a feeling that it was. "He won't hurt him."

She was close enough to Alec that she should have been able to hear him breathing, but she couldn't. She reached out to him, her hand trembling as she placed her fingers against his neck and pressed down. At first there was nothing, and she closed her eyes.

Late. They were too late.

But wait... there was something. It was faint, so faint that she'd missed it at first, and erratic, but it was there. Her head snapped up and she spun to face Logan, determination replacing fear.

"He's alive," she announced. "We have to get him out of here."

Logan pushed himself to his feet and walked past her, then crouched down by Alec's feet to inspect the chain around his ankle. Max didn't move from where she knelt, her hand now resting against Alec's chest, feeling the small movements it made as Alec breathed in and out.

'Alive,' she told herself. 'He's still alive.'

She turned to look at the chain, too. It was thin, like the ones she'd seen people put on their dogs, and it was attached to the same kind of stake the she'd seen those chains hooked to. Anger and hatred spiked through her, and she had to swallow the bile that swelled up from her stomach.

They'd chained him up like a dog, in a filthy, stinking room with a dirt floor, with an open, festering wound in his side. They'd treated him like some sort of animal.

"His feet are cut," Logan said. He glanced around the room quickly. "They're cut deep, like he's been walking on broken glass or sharp rocks."

Max looked back down at Alec's too-pale and too-still face. Even with all this activity around him, he still hadn't stirred.

"He tried to run," she said, and she knew with certainty that was exactly what had happened. "That's why they chained him up. He tried to escape."

'Because you weren't here to save him.'

She shook her head again and pushed the self-recrimination away to be dealt with later. It wasn't that she didn't think she deserved it. She just didn't have time for it, and neither did Alec.

"Joshua," she said. "I need you to pull that stake out of the ground so we can get Alec out of here. Will you let Logan hold him while you do that?"

Joshua seemed to consider it, but only for a second. Then he nodded his head. "Logan take care of Alec."

Logan stepped up beside Joshua and knelt on the ground at his side. Transferring Alec from Joshua's arms to Logan's wasn't difficult, but it was slightly awkward, and Alec's right arm flopped around and thumped limply against the floor.

Max took his wrist in her hand and started to put it across his chest carefully, but when she saw the skin, she stopped. His arm was covered in small puncture wounds, all of which had streaks of blood dried around them. Her eyes continued up his arm, across his shoulder, then down his chest. Everywhere she looked, she found more of them.

"They tortured him," she whispered. When she looked up at Logan, she knew there were tears in her eyes, but she didn't care. "Why would they do that?"

"Knowing them?" Logan didn't look like he really wanted to answer her, but she knew that he respected her enough to tell her the truth anyway. "Probably for fun."

Max had never wanted to kill any Ordinary as badly as she wanted to kill those four at that moment, but she bit her tongue and said nothing.

Logan shifted Alec slightly in his arms and moved his feet so that at least some of Alec's weight rested on his legs. Then he moved his left hand, which had been supporting Alec's right side, and pressed it against his cheek instead.

"Alec?" he said softly as he tapped Alec on the face lightly. "Can you hear me? Alec?"

Logan glanced up at Max, and she shook her head slowly. Alec hadn't stirred when Joshua had been howling in his face; no way would he respond to someone as quiet as Logan was being. Logan's eyes narrowed and his eyebrows lowered as he turned his attention back to Alec.

First, Logan flipped his hand around so that it was the back of his hand resting against Alec's cheek. Then he pulled his hand away from Alec's face entirely and pressed it against his chest. When he leaned down and pressed his lips to Alec's forehead, Max couldn't contain her confusion anymore.

"What are you doing?"

"He's burning up," Logan explained. "Sometimes I can make a pretty decent estimate of how high a fever is, but your bodies run so much hotter than mine..."

"Hold Alec still."

Logan shifted again. His right arm was already behind Alec's shoulders, and he put his left hand against the side of Alec's face again. He was holding Alec as tightly against his chest and shoulder as he could, carefully avoiding the bandage, not wanting to cause him anymore pain. Max moved to her right slightly, put one hand on Alec's knee and the other on his ankle, just above the chain, to keep his leg from moving. She glanced back to Logan for confirmation that he was ready, and he nodded at her.

"Go," she told Joshua.

It took him a few good pulls, but Joshua managed to get the stake out of the ground. The movement yanked against the chain, digging it deeper into the skin of Alec's leg, and Max could see fresh blood running down his ankle. But even that didn't get a response; Alec still lay there, limp and frail and broken in Logan's arms.

Joshua moved quickly to kneel at Alec's left side again. Logan shifted his position enough to hold Alec up while Joshua slid his left arm under Alec's knees carefully, and his right arm under his back. Max picked up the stake and put it in Joshua's hand, so he could hold it up and out of his way. Logan settled Alec's head against Joshua's chest, then pushed himself to his feet and out of the way.

Joshua stood slowly and carefully, obviously mindful of just how important his responsibility was. He adjusted Alec's weight in his arms ever-so-slightly, but it was enough to throw off his balance. Joshua stepped back to keep himself from toppling over, and Alec's right arm and head fell back over Joshua's arm and dangled there, lifelessly.

Max couldn't help the gasp that escaped her at the sight, and neither could Logan. But it was Logan who moved first.

Very gently, Logan took Alec's head in his hands and lifted until he was laying Alec back against Joshua, tucked in against his neck. He did the same with Alec's arm, carefully placing it across his chest. Joshua wrapped his right hand around Alec's upper arm to keep it from falling loose again.

"Gotta blaze," Joshua said.

Max nodded and turned on her heel. She stopped in the door just long enough to look up and down the hallway, checking for exits. There was one only a few feet away, at the end of the corridor on the right, and she turned toward it. She pushed the door open and looked down when she heard a strange crunching sound under her feet. She closed her eyes briefly, then glanced back at Logan, who was following Joshua out of the room.

"Broken glass," she said.

Logan didn't answer, just shook his head sadly. This was where Alec's escape attempt had ended, then, less than ten feet from where it had started.

Max still didn't understand how they'd known he was running. Even weak, even injured, even running barefoot on broken glass, Alec still wouldn't have made a sound.

She got her answer when she reached the top of the concrete steps and pushed the bulkhead door open, and an alarm started blaring.

"Damn it!" she said as she stepped outside quickly. "Faster, Joshua. We gotta move." She held the bulkhead open as Joshua emerged with Alec in his arms, with Logan following close behind them.

The three of them sank into the shadows and ran from the house as quickly as they could. They were three blocks away, in a stand of trees in a park, when Logan called for Max to stop.

"What?" she demanded, turning to face him. "We have to keep moving. We've got to get him to Dr. Carr."

"I know that, Max," Logan said calmly. "But he's not gonna make it if we keep bouncing him around like this." He reached into his pocket and pulled out his keys. "You make a run for it, back to Crash. Get the car and bring it back here."

"No! What if he...?"

"You run a lot faster than I do," Logan pointed out. "And if something happens and we need to move again, Joshua's the only one who can carry him."

She knew he was right, knew that getting the car would get Alec to help sooner, and with a lot less jostling and exposure to less contamination, than Joshua carrying him through the sewers.

"We've got him, Max. Go."

She nodded her head quickly and blurred away.

Logan turned back to Joshua and Alec, running his hand through his hair as he did.

"Where Max go?"

"She's going to get my car," Logan answered. "We're going to wait for her here, for as long as we can. If those Steelheads get back before she does, though, we might have to move."

"Steelheads come here," Joshua growled, "they not go anywhere again."

Logan nodded his head, because there wasn't any way he could argue with that. And he didn't think he would even if he could have.

"Okay, let's get him settled for a while," Logan said. He helped Joshua lower Alec to the ground, and helped him sit on the ground with Alec's upper back against his chest. Then Logan stood and took off his jacket.

"Wrap this around him," he said as he handed it to Joshua. It was chilly now that night had fallen, and there was a constant mist in the air. Alec was already shivering from cold, which his fever would only intensify, and the last thing he needed was to get any sicker than he was. "We'll be able to warm him up easier in the car, but that should help a bit, at least."

Joshua took off his own jacket and laid it across Alec's chest. Then he looked at Logan, who was settling to the ground beside them.

"Logan is upstairs people," Joshua said.

Logan nodded his head sadly. "I know. And I'm so sor..."

"Logan is good people. Good friend to Alec."

"Thank you, Joshua." Logan smiled a tired smile. "So are you."

"Max be back soon," Joshua said. "Alec will be okay now? Not hurt or sick? Better?"

"Yeah," Logan answered with a nod of his head. "Yeah, Alec'll get better now. He'll be fine." Joshua smiled at him, as though he believed every word.

Logan looked down at Alec's face, so pale even in the darkness. His condition hadn't improved any in the past hour, but he was out of that place, and back with people who cared about him. He was struck by just how young Alec looked at that moment, by how young he actually was, and by the fact that he'd only existed in the real world for a few weeks. It wasn't fair that this had happened to him, not when he'd actually seemed to be making some progress in breaking himself away from Manticore.

He reached out and gently brushed away a clump of sweaty hair that had fallen into Alec's eyes.

"He'll be just fine." Logan could tell from the look on Joshua's face that he'd managed to convince the dog-man that his words were the truth.

If only it were so easy to convince himself.

Part Four