The X-Project

With Eddie’s help, the Junior Trench Coats find Josh and demand to know what he did. And then come the demons.


The track ended about fifty metres from the cabin, so they had to walk the rest, the early winter afternoon drawing in chilly and damp. Not long before sunset, with the days growing so short. The cabin itself was dilapidated and overgrown, hardly structurally sound, with holes in the shingled roof and the glass in the windows long-gone. Apparently deserted, until there was a glimpse of movement at one of the windows and the sound of feet scuffling on the floor.

"I hate playing hide and fucking go seek." Sarah watched the door for a moment, and when it didn't open from the inside she grabbed a bone from her shoulder. "We're coming in whether you like it or not," she called out, "you might as well be nice and talk to us. I'll be less pissed off that way."

There was only silence for a moment, as whoever was in the cabin decided to wait to see if the new arrivals would just give up and go away. After it became apparent they wouldn't, however, a young man's voice called back, "Go away! Just leave me alone!" There was the sound of shuffling from within, and the dragging of a chair's legs across the floor to barricade the flimsy door.

Mark sighed. "Josh, just let us in," he called out, reaching into his pocket to turn on his iPod. "We're not here to kick your ass." Much. "We just need to talk to you. Your friend Eddie said that you'd be here."

"Eddie told you?" Josh, now slightly less anxious, though no less confused, hovered indecisively on the other side of the door. Finally he opened it a slit and peered out, his narrow face pale and haggard-looking. "Listen, I dunno who you are, but you should get out of here. Just leave me alone, okay?!"

Motioning to Sarah and Mark to stand down, Doug stepped forward and did his best to look non-threatening and counteract Sarah's visible testiness. "We need to talk to you, Josh," he said soothingly. "Eddie was really worried about you."

The boy grimaced, his gaze darting nervously beyond the group and into the woods before returning to Doug's face. While Josh was still visibly shaken, Doug's tone and expression seemed to work and he stepped back with a sigh and pulled open the door another few inches. "Okay, fine... but you can't tell anyone else I'm here. Please."

Sarah rubbed her hands together as they filed quickly into the cabin. The colder it got, the more she wished her clothes lasted longer. "What are you hiding Josh? All this weird stuff going on and nobody seems to know why. Except maybe you."

"We will not tell anyone, unless it becomes very much necessary." Marie-Ange said, a little sternly. If Doug was going to play good cop, and Sarah bad cop, she thought she might as well provide a balance.

The young man that stood in front of them now had his arms wrapped around himself, as if he could hold himself upright just by that effort along. His dark hair straggled over his forehead and into his eyes, and he peered through it with no small amount of trepidation at the newcomers. "I dunno what you're talking about," he said nervously, shivering (though whether it was from cold or nerves it was hard to tell).

The blustering lie was probably obvious even to someone without Doug's talent for reading and interpreting body language. The shivering was about evenly mixed between cold and nerves. "You're lying," he said baldly, dropping his 'good cop' persona for a moment.

Josh's eyes widened and he took a step back, biting his lip. "N-no… I mean, what crazy things?" Maybe there were other crazy things going on unrelated to him, they could almost see him thinking.

"Mostly all the schmucks and shitheads disappearing at once," said Mark non-threateningly. He'd maintain the good cop role now. "And you dropping off the radar at the same time. Between that and the runes, we think that you might have some answers for us."

"Oh." Josh licked his lips then, looking at Mark to judge what his reaction would be if he were to tell him the truth. "I… I might know about something. I got this… book, off eBay, a couple days ago." He stopped then, and was apparently going to let this explanation suffice.

The shrill beeping of a phone cut the expectant hush like a knife, and they all jumped, a little startled. Doug looked sheepish and pulled out his phone, cutting off the Raiders of the Lost Ark theme.

"Doug?" came Amanda's voice almost as soon as he'd said hello. "Where are you?"

"Well, hi, Amanda, I'm just fine, thanks for asking," Doug replied, just a touch sarcastically. "We're just having a grand old time up here at this cabin with Josh Chambers," he continued over Amanda's squawk in reply. "Having a little heart to heart, you know." Doug leveled a withering glance at Josh and dropped the jolly pretense. "He obviously knows more than he's saying. Of course, that's not hard because he's hardly saying anything."

"You're there? With him?" Amanda said any number of bad words under her breath, and then reminded herself that she was possibly jumping the gun. "Is there a book there? Spell book, about the size of a phone book, black leather cover. Should have a goat skull on the front of it." Wanda held up a book, pointing at the same rune Doug and Marie-Ange had seen on the photograph. "Oh, yeah. That rune you found? Should be on the spine of the book."

Doug leaned his head over toward Josh. "You mean the one that he's currently standing protectively over hoping like hell we won't notice it? Yep, it's here." He paused from his flippant reply. "I take it that's a bad thing?"

"Oh, it's bad all right..." Wanda handed her the book, and Amanda balanced her phone on her shoulder as she held the heavy volume up to the light so she could read the tiny print. "There's only five of these books in the world, and for a bloody good reason. They're demon summoning primers, pretty much. All sorts of nasty things. I'm not sure what exactly's been summoned, but if it's from that book? Definitely not kittens and puppies."

"I kinda figured that from the way the locals have been talking about giant silver werewolves, Amanda," Doug rejoined dryly. "Got anything else to add besides the fact that we're all in a crapload of trouble because of whatever came out of The Big Book O' Demon Summoning?"

Making a rude noise down the phone, Amanda flipped over a page. "Just because you're out in the cold, don't take it out on..." she began, and then halted. "Oh bloody buggering fuck."

"Well, -that's- never a good thing to hear," Doug opined. "Talk to me. What just led to that little explosion of British profanity?"

"Get the fuck out of there." Amanda's tone had lost all trace of humour, becoming deadly serious. "Leave the kid and get the hell out."

Doug heard "Get-" and then the hiss of static from his phone. Holding it at arm's length, he shook his head. "Dammit," he cursed. And then, as if on cue from a badly cliched horror movie script, a bloodcurdling howl rose from outside the cabin.

"Oh bloody buggering fuck."

~*~

"Doug? Doug!" Amanda shouted into the phone, but was rewarded only with static, and then the dial tone. "I lost 'em," she said to Wanda, closing up her phone and stuffing it in her pocket. The older woman was sitting on the bed amidst several large volumes, laptop on and displaying the . pdf files of grimoires Forge and Amanda had already scanned. "This isn't good. We'd better get up there, and fast."

Quickly shutting down the laptop, Wanda nodded as she climbed off the bed. "My current motorcycle is certainly not equipped to handle much off roading," she said, frowning as she shrugged into her jacket. "And they took our main transportation up with them. But…" Stopping, she flicked the curtains back on the window and nodded to some motorcycles across the road.

Amanda followed her glance and grinned, brief and wicked. "I like the way you think, Boss Lady," she said, grabbing her own jacket. "Let's go get them before this all goes to hell. Literally."

"If I get arrested, there had better be bail money," Wanda sighed, following Amanda out of the room and then locking the door behind them.

~*~

The Warwolves attack, and it’s time for these kids to fend off yet another demon invasion.


"And...enter the giant silver werewolves." Sarah watched carefully out the widow as the creatures paced back and forth just outside the cabin walls. It wouldn't be long until they came in the windows. Without the glass in them, the windows were just big gaping holes in their already shaky defense. Her hands began to bone over as she turned back to Josh. "If you know anything important about these things, now would be the time to tell us. Y'know, before we're all dead."

"I... I only know what's in the book," Josh said shakily, pointing at the leatherbound book. "And I can't really read it all. I didn't think it was real!" The snarl they heard from outside then was enough proof that these creatures, whatever they were, were very, very real, and the boy gave a yelp, picking up the book and holding it out to the group with trembling hands. "Here!"

Doug snatched the book, opening it quickly and leafing through it. "You ever heard the expression 'treat every gun as if it were loaded'?" he asked a touch bitingly. "Assume every book that tells you how to summon demons actually CAN tell you how to summon demons!" Turning to the book, he grimaced. "Oh yeah. We're in trouble. We've got demons inhabiting the skins of our five missing students. And I don't think they're coming to sit down for tea with us..."

There came a low guttural growl from outside the door, and all heads turned.

"Oh God," Josh whimpered. "Please, someone save me."

~*~

"When exactly were we drafted to be Operation Human Shield?" Mark asked Sarah as he sent a Warwolf back through the doorway with a well-placed burst of concussive force. "There are not enough words to describe how much I hate life right now."

"What, this? This is fun." Sarah had herself planted firmly in front of the door, bones in both hands to fight the Warwolves back. She spiked one in the chest, shoving its snarling form back into the creature behind it. "Nothing like blood and death to get your blood pumping."

"This wouldn't be so bad if Doug stopped calling us the Tank and DD, whateverthehell that means." Mark blasted one in the face, and it howled in rage, lashing out blindly.

Sarah pulled a bone club from her shoulder, swinging it hard into the blinded Warwolf's head. "Don't ask me, I just work here."

Mark readied another attack, but before he could release it he heard a bang and crash to his right. One of the wolves had broken through a window and was headed straight for him. "Oh fuck." He tried to aim but his hand was shaking so much that he missed, instead opening a hole in the ceiling. He reached into his pocket to switch the music, and just in time flung up a shield of red energy as Train's "Ordinary" made way for Mozart's Rondo alla Turca, saving him from certain stabbity death.

Shit. He'd gotten lucky once, but how much longer were they seriously going to be able to hold out? She charged at one of the creatures, bone knives in hand, hoping to draw some attention away from the house. "They need to get here now, or we're all seriously fucked. It's all fun and games till someone gets mauled by a werewolf."

"You wouldn't happen to carry any silver bullets with you, would you?" asked Mark, getting to his feet and switching the track to Night on Bald Mountain. The red force field wavered and disappeared, and a yellow-blue one appeared around one of the wolves. It pounded against the shield, but it wouldn't budge.

"Nope, fresh out. I've got bones... and more bones." She slammed a bone club into the face of an oncoming creature, reaching out with the knife in her left hand to scratch at its eyes. "Take that, you ugly pile of fur."

"Silver bones?" Mark concentrated on the force field and willed it to collapse in on itself, striking the wolf still caught inside and knocking it out. Another quick music change brought Jimi Hendrix to his ears and purple flames to his fists.

Sarah glanced back at him, both eyebrows raised, as the creature in front of her recovered its footing. "Don't you think that if I'd had silver bones, I'd have brought them out already?"

There was a brief explosion of purple energy, and yet another wolf fell to the ground. "Actually, I'd think you'd've sold them and totally destroyed the silver market by now." Another explosion, and the wolf stopped twitching. “Fucker. One down, sixty five million to go.”

~*~

It was dark by the time they reached the cabin, Amanda clinging like a limpet to Wanda's waist as the older woman pushed the motorcycle to as fast she could without killing them both. Up ahead the cabin was a dark mass, punctuated by light through gaps in the walls and the boarded-up windows, but they didn't need light to see the five silver shapes, as big as small ponies and moving with preternatural grace, attacking the cabin on all sides. Where the door had been broken in, they could see Sarah and Mark, holding them off with a combination of bloody-minded violence and musically-generated light shields.

Amanda swore, something particularly vile in Latin. "We're too late! We'll never get through those fuckers."

If she could, Wanda would have shot her an amused look. "Never say never, my dear," she responded as the motorcycle sped up considerably. She always hated using her power while she was moving since there was more of a chance of something going wrong but they did not have much choice. If they stopped and tried to go in on foot, they'd never make it. So they had to go in fast.

The lines sparkled and danced, allowing them a clear corridor. "I'd ready that shielding spell if I were you…" Since there was always a chance of going in through the remnants of the door and out through the back wall.

"Oh, bollocks," Amanda groaned, holding on tight and tucking her head down against Wanda's back. Fredericks had nothing in the way of power, and Gaitlinburg had been barely enough to tickle, but hopefully she had enough in store...

The silver shapes growled and gibbered as they approached, falling back under the inexorable path the motorcycle was taking.

"Incoming!" Wanda barked, barely noticing that Sarah and Mark managed to fling themselves aside. As soon as they were through the door, she hit the brakes, twisting her body to coax the bike into a controlled skid, destroying whatever furniture was in their way. Their luck held, thankfully, and they simply bounced off the wall opposite the door. "No one can say we don't aim for exciting entrances…"

"I work for a crazy lady," Amanda muttered to herself as she half-climbed, half fell off the bike and tottered towards the corner where Josh cowered. "Where's this fucking spell book, you little toe rag..."

There came a shout, from who it was hard to tell, as the Warwolves, recovering from the shock, renewed their attack on the now-open doorway and Wanda threw herself into the fray.

~*~

Doug and Amanda finally figure out how to defeat the Warwolves. It’s just like magic for the cure to be worse than the affliction.


"DOWN!" Doug yelled as he body-checked Josh to the floor. One of the Wolves had broken through the outer perimeter, and had slammed into one of the boarded-up windows. The boy hit the ground with a loud whoosh of exhaled breath, Doug landing heavily on top of him as a board spun across the room where their upper bodies had been. The demon reached through the small opening and began tearing other boards away to create an opening large enough to crawl through.

Levering himself up, Doug took the loose board and brought it down sharply across the Warwolf's arms. It backed up for a moment, baring its teeth in a wide snarl. Doug's own mouth curled back in an answering grimace, and he looked out at the silvery beast. Their eyes met for a moment, and Doug suddenly felt the world spin away briefly. Then his training in telepathic shielding came back to the fore, and he clamped down hard, picturing the cascading symbols of the Matrix that he used as his visualization for shielding. He threw several extra layers of the flashing green characters up hastily to try and prevent another attack like the one he'd just experienced.

Just as the demon looked to be coming in for another attempt at breaking through, a stray plasma blast scorched the ground in front of it. Yipping in frustration, it circled back toward the front of the cabin, where most of the fighting was going on.

For his part, Doug attempted to calm his breathing from the surge of adrenaline the brief clash had caused. As he did, the rhythmic howling of the Warwolves continued, and Doug abruptly realized that there was something different about it. It was almost like there were -words- behind the howling. Eyes narrowing, Doug cocked his head in concentration.

"Fulfill the Compact! Let us take the Summoner, or this world shall be forfeit!" The words were barely comprehensible among the growls and shrieks, but they were words.

"Compact?" Doug murmured, speaking to the words that only he could comprehend. He had a very good suspicion who 'the Summoner' was. "I don't understand."

There was a pause in the howling, and then it redoubled, a cacophony of voices now. "The Compact is what brought us here. Summoned into this world to wreck revenge on the wrongdoers, we demand the promised price. The life of the Summoner. Otherwise..." and here the tone grew sly, cunning. "We shall be free to roam this world and take what we will."

Doug swore feelingly for a moment in Sanskrit before looking down at where Josh still lay cowering on the ground. "You had to mess with shit you had no clue about, didn't you," he growled. "The life of the Summoner is the only possible payment?" he asked, fearing he knew the answer.

"His life is forfeit. He spoke the words, brought us here, bound us to these prisons of skin. Now the time has come for the price to be paid. Or we are free, to inhabit who we will." Triumph laced the collective voice. "His life, or this world. So it is written, so are we bound."

This time the swearing was more violent, and in extremely guttural German. "AMANDA!" he yelled. There had to be a way around this. There had to.

Josh let out a shriek, his voice cracking with fear and exhaustion as the cabin seemed to shake with yet another of the supernatural assaults. "Please!" he cried, looking at Amanda with terror in his eyes as he scrabbled his way across to her side again. "Isn't there anything you can do?"

For her part, Amanda's face had grown steadily stonier the more she read the book. It didn't look good. "I can't find the counterspell," she said, "And this thing's talking about contracts that have to be fulfilled. How bad is it, Doug?" From the way he'd suddenly started talking to himself, she'd guessed he'd picked up on something more than she had.

"The scales have to be balanced," Doug said in a low voice to Amanda. His eyes flicked to Josh. "They demand the life of their summoner, otherwise they will eventually be freed from their current forms to possess whoever they feel like."

Amanda paled, her eyes flashing angrily. "And I can't do fuck all here - I don't have the power. Did you even read this before you decided it would be a good idea to summon a demon to take out the school bullies?" she demanded, rounding on the hapless boy.

"I didn't think it would work!" he exclaimed, cowering closer to her, despite her words. "I was just so angry... but I didn't want them dead, not really! I just wanted them to leave me alone!"

"Then you tell someone! And if the first person doesn't listen you tell another! And you keep on telling, until someone does something about it!" Amanda's voice held a certain fury that went beyond the immediate situation. Even Charlie had chosen better than this... "You don't summon fucking demons to deal with the problem! And you might not have wanted anyone dead, but that's exactly what they are now. Five people, dead because you were too much of a fucking coward to do things the hard way." There was a thump on the wall behind them and she glared at the spot.

Josh seemed to draw in on himself even more, her words having more of an effect on him than the five creatures outside who were currently trying to tear their way in to get at him. "I'm s-sorry," he stuttered, squeezing his eyes tightly closed. A moment later they flew open as he sensed movement close by, though it was only Doug and not one of the Warwolves that he saw. "Please, is there anything you can do?" he repeated, desperately.

"We're doing as much as we can already," Doug managed to say almost civilly. Sorry just wasn't good enough when you were talking about potentially the fate of the world.


~*~

As Amanda went to join Doug and the boy, Wanda took quick stock of the situation. The creatures had not yet been able to breach the cabin, having been held off thanks to Mark, Sarah and Marie-Ange. But unlike the mutants, the wolves weren't starting to tire and were pressing the attack with no end in sight.

With Sarah and Mark back at the front door, that left Marie-Ange, who looked like she was shoring up the large holes in the walls, trying to prevent the wolf on the other side from coming in.

"Little pig, little pig, let me in," Wanda murmured, coming to join the precog.

Marie-Ange was crouched behind an overturned table with an arc of cards on one hand, popping up every so often to replicate the walls of the cabin itself over the holes, and then ducking back down to avoid the flying splinters from the damage the Warwolves made in the actual walls.

"We already did." She said, with a glance at the now covered damage that the motorbike had made. As she did, a clawed and misshapen arm slashed through the imaged wood, dissolving it, and as fast as the image fell apart, a patch appeared over it, riveted metal pushed into place by a bulky and familiar looking red-haired image. The simulacrum of Cain wasn't anywhere near as strong as the real one, nor as large, but Marie-Ange wasn't chancing getting close to the walls.

Crouching down next to her, Wanda frowned, trying to think. These things looked pretty indestructible and with all the activity, it was hard to pin down any strings to the creature. "How fast can you put up your images?" she asked suddenly.

Scowling, Marie-Ange turned to answer Wanda, and then snapped her attention back to one of the front walls, practically rattling apart as one of the Warwolves rammed into it. Another wall appeared, covering the real one, and then another covering that, not even an eye blink between the two. "That fast." She said tersely.

"Good." Rising from her crouch, Wanda mentally braced herself. This wasn't going to be about how much power, but how fast she could throw it. A subtle hand gesture sent a red hex bolt flying through the image Marie-Ange had put up, through the hole she was protecting and smacked right into the creature.

A thin smile appeared on her face when they heard a startled yelp and then she did it again.

She hadn't expected -that-. Marie-Ange had expected something, but not Wanda destroying her images around her. With no time to argue, or complain, she simply repatched the wall again, holding the astral projection and mental image of wood in place as strongly as she could.

As fast as Marie-Ange could throw up her images, Wanda was destroying them. The wolf on the other side was growing more cautious, though still attempting to breach the wall, not clawing the wall as much. It was thinking, perhaps, of a new plan but they weren't giving it very much time to come up with one, not with a constant barrage of hex blasts.

She couldn't help but compare this to Seattle, and having to hold up the monorail tracks. It wasn't anything at all like that. There, it had been all about focus and keeping her mind on one thing – not letting the image go. Now, she didn't even have time to keep her mind on any one image, trying to replace three or four at once.

Wanda had a slight headache forming behind her eyes but she ignored it. She'd been using her hex blasts a lot recently and they put more strain on her than the regular use of her powers. Direct manipulation of the chaos energy was faster and more direct but more draining as well.

Josh's sudden appearance at the doorway and then his leaving took Wanda by surprise and she stopped the blasts, eyes widening. "Oh...oh no," she breathed, eyes closing as all the wolves howled as one. "...I think we can stop now..."

~*~

Josh single-handedly eliminates the threat.


If possible, Josh looked even more terrified now than before, his knees literally knocking together as he stood, shaking. Another piercing howl outside turned his veins to ice, and he swallowed heavily past the lump in his throat. "I'm so sorry," he moaned, almost too softly to be heard. "This is all my fault."

"Yeah, it is." It was like looking into a mirror to last year, herself and Nathan standing over Alison's almost-dead body. And instead of making her sympathetic to him, it only made her angry. Was this how Nathan had felt, witnessing the stupidity of it all? "But you know something, Josh? Sorry doesn't mean a fucking thing. You can keep saying it until you're blue in the face, but it's not going to bring those kids back and it's not going to make these fucking monsters go away. You made a deal, because you were stupid and desperate and thought you knew better than everyone else." Around them the fighting was growing more desperate, as people started tiring, the Warwolves pressing their attack even more. "And now these good people, my friends are probably going to die, saving your miserable skin."

He flinched then as if she had struck him, and glanced at one of the windows at a flash of silver that moved past on its circuit around the cabin. When he turned his gaze back to Amanda, she could see that something had changed in his expression: he still looked scared to death, but there was a frightened determination in his eyes that spoke of a young man with no more choices left to make. "Will you tell them I'm sorry?" he asked then, clenching his pale fingers into fists. "Th-the families?"

The thing about sacrifice, is it's clean. But it wasn't, not like this. Amanda felt something turning to stone inside her, even as she knew it was the only way. "Yeah, I'll tell them," she said, looking down at the useless spell book. One more kid, or the whole fucking world - what kind of choice was that?

Thank you Josh mouthed, too scared to even get the words out now. Taking a deep, ragged breath, he turned towards the door, ever fiber of his body screaming out against what he was going to do next. There was a pause, almost as if he was frozen in fear, and then he took off as fast as he could manage, brushing past Sarah and Mark on his way towards the exit.

Mark's alteration between offensive and defensive was leaving him exhausted. He still had more than enough fuel, but interspersing Beethoven-induced force fields with Elvis-inspired plasma blasts was more than he'd ever done before, even back in Russia. One Warwolf managed to break through his shield, sending him tumbling to the ground, when he heard Josh's final plea. Blasting the Wolf off him, he got back up just in time to see Josh make a run for it.

There was no time. Mark knew that he couldn't create another force field quickly enough to block Josh's path, and a plasma blast would just harm him, too. Watching the kid run desperately into certain death, Mark fell to his knees, too paralyzed to even call out his name. What was the point in all this, he wondered, if it still ultimately resulted in death?

There was a jubilant howl from outside as Josh burst out of the cabin and into the frozen night, and then a scream split the air like a twisted echo of the triumphant sound. A moment later everything was still once more, almost every sign of the Warwolves and the boy erased as if they had never been there at all. Only the battered cabin and the exhausted people inside stood to remember what had just occurred there.

Those and the six empty human skins lying on the cold ground outside.

There was a dull thud as Amanda snapped the spell book shut, her expression remote. When she spoke, her voice was flat and dead-sounding.

"It's over. Let's get out of here."

She had a promise to keep, after all.

(Much gratitude to Erin for socking Josh for us!)