TITLE: The Devil You Know
AUTHOR: Mari
EMAIL: R
SPOILERS: Post NFA
PAIRINGS: Angel/Lindsey eventually, and a subtexty…thing between Illyria and Spike. It's a bit like watching platinum and blue porcupines attempt to mate with those two.
DISCLAIMERS: All the characters you see in this fic that you also saw in 'AtS' belong to Joss Whedon and Mutant Enemy. My original characters are my own, however.
Part One
He died as no more than an afterthought, and the loudest sound that he heard was that of his own blood rushing through his ears.
When he lived again, it was to the sound of a language that sounded like Latin but had been stricken from the earth millennia before a pair of brothers began their city among the hills. Lindsey's eyelids flickered upwards long enough to receive a scorching burst of artificial light before he slammed them back down again, and there was a draft in the room that made his entire body shiver. He groaned and splayed his fingers over his face as his long-dormant stomach rolled and pitched acid into his throat with enough force to make him gag. There was a low murmuring and a shuffling of fabric, and someone dimmed the lights enough to allow Lindsey to lower his arm.
Angel stared at him from a post only a few feet away, holding a book so ancient that the spine was frayed like lacerated skin. The room reeked of blood and ash, though the carpet spread out beneath Lindsey's fingers felt dry. Angel was leaner than he remembered, more like the vampire that Lindsey had sparred with verbally on their first encounter years before. The corporate sloth that Wolfram and Hart had layered over him was gone, whittled away to be replaced with muscle and force encased within a deceptive calm. He brought to Lindsey's mind the impression of a storm only waiting for the opportunity to throw the first lightning bolt to the ground. Angel's eyes as he watched Lindsey's first shuddering, painful movements back in the mortal world were devoid of cruelty or compassion both.
Spike, by contrast, was vibrating with such a disapproving energy that it was a wonder he was able to remain fixed to one spot. He hugged his leather coat to himself like a shroud that he did not have the good sense to step out of as his eyes ticked back and forth between the two of them. His gaze left a chill over Lindsey's skin wherever it touched. "This never goes as smoothly as you think," Spike said to Angel in a voice so low that Lindsey had to struggle to hear it. "Trust the voice of experience here." Angel didn't respond and Spike snorted finally, bending over so that he could pick up a bowl of sloshing items that Lindsey did not want to identify. "Right," Spike said. "Well, we're scraping the bottom of the barrel all the same." He moved his stare over Lindsey again. "Don't suppose we should be all that surprised by what we pull out." He did not quite slam the door as he left, but the force was still enough to make flakes of paint fall from the wall and drift down to the floor.
Angel watched Spike go with something that might have been concern moving across his face for the barest of seconds. When he glanced towards Lindsey again, his face had returned to the mask of bland professionalism that would have had Holland offering him a corner office in no time flat. "Welcome back." Angel snapped the book shut hard enough to make the spine give at last, making the leather flutter in the draft.
Lindsey muttered something liquid and rolled over onto his back, sucking great gasps of air into lungs that no longer remembered how to perform their function on reflex alone. He had just enough time to realize that he was entirely nude before he found himself being drawn down a deep tunnel with no comforting light to be seen at the far end, into dreams of the place that he had so recently been pulled from. It was not a restful sleep.
---
Lindsey lurched awake in an instant, a sound that balanced between a scream and a moan lodging itself in his throat, choking him, before he was able to force it back down. A sheen of sweat had broken out across his body as he slept, and now it turned icy in the comparatively cool air of the room. He had been unconscious. Okay. If sleep was possible, then this place was real, was not that other one. Lindsey closed his eyes again and took several deep breaths through his nose.
"Wakey, wakey, Sleeping Beauty. We haven't got all day." Male, British, annoyed. That left two possibilities from the circle of Lindsey's enemies and acquaintances, and the North London accent ruled out Wesley. Lindsey did not bother to open his eyes.
"But I haven't got a thing to wear to the ball." Lindsey's voice emerged as raspy and ill-used. A lump traveled up into his throat and he gagged, pausing to spit out a mouthful of phlegm that tasted heavily of soot. Spike made a faint sound of disgust. That was pretty funny, given the amount of bodily fluids that Spike had removed from their proper places since his turning, but Lindsey could not find it within himself to laugh.
"Wrong fairytale." Approaching footsteps said that Spike was not going to leave him to brood.
'We don't live in a fairytale.' And for an accomplished liar, Eve could pick the most devastating moments in which to speak the truth. Lindsey gave up and opened his eyes, resigned himself to being chained down to reality for now as he took in the lay of the land. He had been laid out on a pallet in one corner of a cramped, ill-used room that had low ceilings and recent smoke marks crawling up its flaking walls. Outside of a television set that had been pushed into one corner and turned to one action movie or another and the irritated vampire before him, Lindsey was the only thing in the room. Someone had put him into a tee shirt and sweatpants that, while providing little protection against what Lindsey's body continued to insist was cold, obscured the worst of the gooseflesh from view.
Spike paused beneath the room's single fixture and pulled on the chain, filling the room with a flickering light. Even that dim glow forced Lindsey to hiss and turn his eyes away. Spike didn't notice or, much more likely, simply did not care. "Still your feisty self, good for you. I told Angel that you had probably gone soft upstairs after this much time. We've no use for a gibbering idiot."
"I know who I am." The sensory overload diminished enough for Lindsey to turn his head back towards Spike, though his eyes still watered and stung. An afterimage burned like a halo around Spike's head. It was funny, in a way that made Lindsey feel as if he might be sick.
"So good to hear that." Ah, now there was the voice that Lindsey had been waiting to hear. It was nice to know that Nagel had learned to open doors rather than simply kicking through them. And silently, too. Angel stepped further into the room, trailed by the eerie cartoon character that had taken up residence in Fred Burkle's body. The Fred-thing was wearing a disgruntled expression.
"That mode of travel is beneath me," she grumbled.
"The sewers are good for your social skills," Spike responded without ever taking his eyes off of Lindsey. "You meet the most interesting people down there."
Lindsey propped himself up on his elbows, watching Angel watch him. 'This job has become unsavory.' He didn't know whether it was hatred or betrayal that throbbed inside him like a rotten tooth, supposed that the two of them were intertwined too tightly at this point for it to matter. "Angel," he said, surprising even himself with the amount of sneer that he was able to put into the word, "loving the new digs, man. You should have invited me over sooner."
A smile that had nothing to do with amusement and reminded Lindsey of knives touched at the corner of Angel's mouth. "Well, you know. Things kept coming up."
"How long was I dead?"
Angel shrugged in a manner suggesting that the date was not important enough to remember off the top of his head. Hatred shot past betrayal in a masterful play for the lead. "Eighteen months, give or take. Frankly, I'm surprised that you held up this well. I was expecting more drool."
"I'm special." After all, traitors to both sides didn't come along every day. Lindsey clenched his jaw until lances of pain shot through his head.
"Aren't you, though."
Lindsey pushed himself into a sitting position that left him more exhausted than he would have thought possible, bracing his back against the wall to steady himself. He made a face as something skittered beneath the plaster. "You've gone down in the world. The Hyperion revoke your lease or something?"
A flicker that might have been surprise moved across Angel's face for the most illusory of seconds, there and gone again before Lindsey could be sure of what he had seen. That was less than comforting. Angel liked to put on the façade of being an enormous block of wood, but there were tics and signs there if one knew how to read them, tiny windows left open into Angel's mental state through which bystanders could peer. Lindsey had been very good at this task once, and it had made him an apt choice when something had needed to be done. This new Angel, however, glided effortlessly beneath all of his attempts to grab a fingerhold, leaving Lindsey in a freefall. Of all the unnerving things that Lindsey had been witness to or had participated in during his life and during the period beyond that, New and Improved Champion Version 2.0 did not yet fit into the top ten, but he was moving up the ranks fast.
There may have been other emotions following the surprise, but Lindsey did not see them. A coughing fit dropped down on him from nowhere, doubling him over and sending knives arcing through his chest. The tastes of soot and sulphur rose in his throat and gagged him before he was able to force them back down. Black spots danced in the air before Lindsey's eyes by the time he was able to breathe freely again, and he was acutely aware that Angel was not the only one who had betrayed him.
Angel's eyes were narrowed into coffee-dark slits, as if he could not quite believe that this was information that he needed to explain and was waiting for the big twist ending to arrive. "The Hyperion was destroyed."
Lindsey paused, unable to say that he was all that surprised. You butted heads with the ultimate evil, ultimate evil tended to butt heads back. Their methods had a way of making Godzilla on a rampage through Tokyo look discreet by comparison. Much like Angel's own, now that Lindsey paused to think about it.
"That's too bad," he said. It had been a beautiful piece of architecture, even if he could not speak as highly of the intelligence of the occupants much of the time. "But you're here, so I'm guessing that you couldn't have fared too badly." Lindsey ran his eyes deliberately over Spike and the crayon-blue freak as he spoke, noting the empty spaces. "Even if you did suffer a couple of…acceptable losses."
Angel's eyes narrowed a shade further. Much more and he was not going to be able to see. Some of the vertigo eased away from Lindsey's mind, even as the anger was left to pulse all the more neon and brilliant for its absence. Pitch him into hell until his sense of time was shattered to the point of nonexistence-that was survivable. He would hold himself together on nothing more than will and fury, if that was what it took. As long as he could claw his way back and see that Angel was still throwing that unique look at him, a three-way tie between superiority, hostility, and a sick, unwilling recognition, Lindsey would know that the world was still turning on its axis.
"Don't tell me that you didn't know this was going to happen," Angel said. His voice had descended into a growl that nevertheless carried all the way across the room. The Fred-thing perked, sensing violence on the air.
Of all the sentences in the world that could bring absolutely no good along with them, that had to rest in the upper echelons. Lindsey straightened against the wall and felt a few flakes of paint peel off and curl against the nape of his neck, through his hair. His voice was cold, and it glistened with knives as he asked, "Didn't know that what would happen?" A deep silence echoed back at him. "Look, if you're waiting for some kind of secret handshake here, then you might want to settle in and grab yourself some drinks. I didn't know that what would happen?"
It was Spike who finally answered. His face rendered into a mask of careful neutrality, he jutted his chin in the direction of the room's single window. It was heavily curtained, but Lindsey could still see slivers of light peeking through around the edges. "See for yourself."
Every ounce of Lindsey's body said that this was one question that he wasn't going to like once it was answered. Keeping his eyes looked onto Spike's, Lindsey braced his hand against the wall and slowly pushed himself to his feet. His knees wobbled ominously beneath him, not subsiding until Lindsey warned them in a fierce internal whisper that if they failed him now and spilled him out in front of the one person who never believed that he could stand, then he was going to cut them off himself. He had survived without body parts before.
The world swam out of focus and then back in again as Lindsey walked across the room. Lindsey made a mental note to ask anyone else in the room if their resurrections had been like this, or if he was getting the roller coaster treatment because he was just that unique. No one moved towards him with the intent of either helping or hindering, though Angel did step away from the curtains as Lindsey drew close. Resting his hand against the edge of the fabric, Lindsey considered for a brief moment flinging the curtains open entirely, flooding the room with light and ending the dance of recognition and distrust that he and Angel had grown so good at once and for all. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, all that jazz that had been shouted down from pulpits that Lindsey could barely remember. After his cheerful sojourn into the realm of nightmares, he figured that the least the ones who put him there owed him were a few Old Testament indulgences.
But he had not had time to develop any beef with Spike yet, other than a vague sense of guilt by association. Frankly, the idea of being the only person left in the room with the Fred-thing freaked him out. The final piece of the puzzle, the one that would only be admitted in the darkest corners of Lindsey's mind, was that it would be impossible to prove himself as worth more than the smirking, knowing look in Angel's eyes if the vampire was reduced to a scattering of ash.
Lindsey's mouth twisted as his fingers curled around the edge of the curtain, twitched it open far enough to allow in a beam of sunlight scarcely more than a foot wide. The vampires stepped back quickly, while the Fred-thing tilted her head to one side and closed her eyes to bask like a cat on a windowsill. The late afternoon light seared Lindsey's retinas, forced him to avert his gaze down to his bare feet. Hellfire didn't burn nearly as brightly as the stern lectures from back home or cheerful brochures handed out at Wolfram and Hart would have had him believe, and his rods and cones were feeling the strain of the new workload.
"Now," Lindsey said when his eyes had finally ceased watering, "let's see this dastardly deed of mine." He lifted his head and peered out of the grimy window.
Though the window had western exposure and Lindsey was looking directly into the sun as it began its slow descent towards the horizon, he could not look away.
Los Angeles, the city that he had alternated between embracing and despising with an energy that bordered on the bipolar since the first day he had driven past the city limits sign, just wasn't there any longer. Great chunks had been punched out of the skyline, giving it the appearance of a prizefighter's broken and jagged teeth. Lindsey could see whole city blocks that had gone missing, plowed down into careless piles of rubble. Sullen clouds of gray smoke lurked around the remaining skyscrapers, as if fires had been put out but were still promising to return for the sequel. Small dolls that Lindsey presumed were people walked to and fro across the roads; there were no cars. There was also no pattern to the destruction that Lindsey could see, no rhyme or reason. It was only the swirling chaos that was the opposite of creation. Lindsey's hand felt numb as he allowed the curtain to fall back into place, returning the room to a gloom unbroken save for the light bulb's swaying gleam.
"No," Lindsey said, shaking his head and willing himself to believe it. "This isn't right." He didn't see Angel stepping close to his side.
Spike lit a cigarette while Fred-thing watched curiously. "Lots of things out there that aren't right, mate. If you're looking for more than a general 'no shit, Sherlock', then you're going to have to do better than that." Spike dropped the match down to the carpet, where it smoldered for a moment before going out. No one said anything. Spike took a long drag from the cigarette before he noticed the Fred-thing looking and handed it to her. She smelled it, pulled a face, and handed it back.
Lindsey's knees were signaling to him that, threats or not, their duties were done. He leaned back until he was half-sitting against the edge of the windowsill, only then noticing Angel's proximity. Lindsey flicked him a look acidic enough to etch patterns into diamonds and was not surprised when Angel appeared completely unaffected in return. "No," Lindsey said, addressing Spike rather than Angel. "This was not supposed to happen." So low that it was nearly subvocal, Lindsey added, "I was told that this would not happen."
Angel, of course, heard every word. His mouth curved, shaping itself into a parody of a smile that belonged to neither Angel nor Angelus, but some bastard hybrid of them both. "By whom?" he asked. "The Senior Partners? The Black Thorn? Neither of them are particularly well-known for their truth and honesty."
Lindsey levered himself back to his feet, not caring any longer if he fell. He could feel a grin as it stretched across his face and began turning it into something alien and grotesque. This was why he had become a lawyer, this addictive thrill of being in possession of knowledge (of power) while everyone else around him wallowed in their ignorance. "You really are a dumbass, aren't you?" he asked, his tone kept conversational. Angel's shoulders twitched, and that was okay, that was just fine. Lindsey had had every single one of his pillars knocked out from under him, and if he could not get at the ones who had done the knocking themselves then he would accept whatever substitutes he could reach in the meantime. Lindsey flung his arm out to indicate Spike, who was lighting a second cigarette from the embers of the first and watching the proceedings with the same level of interest that he might assign to an interesting soap opera. "You were out of the Champion game, locked behind your big desk and filling out your paperwork, all the while doing everything that you could to pretend that you were still relevant. Do you really think that the Senior Partners or even the members of the Black Thorn wanted an idiot rookie trained up to take your place while you were doing such an excellent job of standing still in it? They would have been thrilled if he had stayed apathetic and incompetent forever."
"Keep that up and you're going to start hurting my feelings," Spike said. His voice carried only a token amount of venom.
Lindsey did not so much as glance in Spike's direction. There was a roaring sound echoing through his ears, adrenaline pounding through his veins, and if he did not get the secret out of himself it was going to poison him. "'Heroes don't accept the world the way it is,'" he quoted himself, turning the words into a tangle of sarcasm that the originals never came close to. "If it had taken you that much longer to pick up the clues, I was afraid that I was going to have to do it and start throwing them at you."
Angel's face had turned the color of whey, and Lindsey could feel it coming even before he said the words, feel it in the way that the air between them practically sent sparks falling to the carpet, but he could not seem to stop himself. The grin on his face had grown large enough to turn him into a Cheshire cat gone off its medication as he said, "I was working for the Powers That Be, Angel. By the time I hopped on board with the rest of the good guys, you were about the only person in the universe who still thought that you were a hero."
The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. Tepid fingers wrapped around Lindsey's throat, pushing him back hard enough to knock his head against the windowpane and send stars jettisoning across his line of sight. Old times all over again, except that then Angel had always left enough room for Lindsey to draw in a few ragged, painful breaths, obtaining the minimum amount of oxygen required to stay conscious. Not so now. Even as black phantoms began to twirl and dance at the edges of his vision, coming closer with every breath that he could not take, Lindsey did not let the grin fall from his face. Angel wanted to kill him? 'Go ahead, buddy,' Lindsey felt like saying. 'I just got the question of predestination answered for me in a rather violent way, so send me straight back to hell if that's what makes you happy. I'll see you there.'
"You're lying," Angel gritted, his teeth gleaming very white in the room's shadow. "I can smell it on you." Big words when Lindsey could see the truth etched all throughout Angel's eyes.
The phantoms edges close enough to send a crackle of panic running down Lindsey's spine and he pushed at Angel's arm, knowing that he wasn't going to move it an inch unless Angel allowed it. Surprisingly, he did.
There was an expression on Angel's face that was beyond hopelessness, showing Lindsey a glimpse of the howling void of discord that could exist even after that point, before Angel closed it off with the same efficiency with which he would cauterize a gushing wound. His face had all the animation of a Halloween mask as he spun and left both room and apartment without another word. Lindsey could hear the front door rebounding off the far wall as Angel hurled it open, followed by a soft flurry of falling plaster. He found himself wondering in a bizarre moment if the neighbors would complain about the noise, if Angel and his merry bunch of…whatever they were even had neighbors, or if they were the only creatures crouched in this silent ghost ship of a building.
Lindsey slid back down until he was once again seated against the windowsill. He lowered his head and rubbed at his throat until drawing a breath was no longer painful, an action which took several moments. The taste of sulphur was slick and omnipresent in his mouth. "Let me guess," Lindsey said when at least he was able to speak. "I'm supposed to know how to stop what's going on out there?" 'Wasn't supposed to be like this.' Song of the ages if there ever was one.
"Bit of a long shot, really." Spike appeared to be considering the wisdom of a third cigarette before he shrugged and shoved the pack back into the pocket of his duster. He found the two smoking butts into the carpet, where they left neat black holes. "But our normal resources are running dry."
"Pain yielded nothing," Fred-thing said in a speculative tone, tilting her head to one side and staring at Lindsey. He made a silent promise to take whatever measures necessary to avoid being left alone with her for any length of time.
"Sorry to be such a disappointment." Lindsey jerked his thumb back over his shoulder. "What…?" He tried to find a noun suitable for the level of destruction beyond the glass and settled for, "It looks like the set of 'Armageddon' out there."
"Too many separate factors to explain all at once." Spike's lips twisted into a smile that did not reach his eyes. "So you're the Powers' boy, pretending to be the big mustache twirler, pretending to be the Powers' boy?"
"Was." Eighteen months. He was thinking that a contract renegotiation might be in order. Lindsey shivered abruptly, rubbing at his upper arms until he had forced the hard knots of gooseflesh there back down. "Does it have to be kept so cold in here?"
Spike's eyebrow quirked upwards, and for a moment he looked as if he might be amused. "It's August," he said, "and we have no air conditioning."
"Oh." Lindsey dropped his hands back to his sides. Silence descended over the room like the tomb that he had never gotten the chance to visit as he tried to come up with the appropriate scathing remark. Fred-thing was still giving him that disturbing hunter's look. "I need air." Lindsey pushed himself back up to his feet, only just stopping himself from sending up a prayer of thanks when his legs agreed to hold him. Neither Spike nor Fred-thing tried to stop him.
Lindsey paused in the hallway to have a quick debate about the merits of the street versus the roof, ultimately choosing the latter. Always upward, hadn't that been his motto once? The taste of soot in his mouth was pushed briefly to the side by the taste of something else. He shook his head and moved towards the stairs.
It was nearly nightfall by the time Lindsey pushed open the door leading to the roof, and his legs had begun to tell him some minutes before that, no, this time they meant it. The western sky had painted itself into a gleaming canvas of reds and golds that made Lindsey's skin itch even as it took his breath away. The light stung his eyes and made him dip his head to avoid taking it head-on, but an army still could not have forced him to go back inside. Not until he had come up with an acceptable answer to the thoughts which swirled, spun away, and then regrouped to attack again within his mind like a swarm of mosquitoes that would not rest until the last drop of blood had been sucked away. Lindsey wracked his mind over the several months that he had spent playing the game, trying to find the place where he could have taken a wrong step, where he could have left the door open for both the chaos occurring on the streets below and for the regions where he had been cast after Angel killed him. No. Lindsey had gotten Angel back to doing the job that he was meant to do. He had fulfilled his end of the bargain. If there had been any failure on the apocalypse front, it had been Angel's.
Which still did not explain why Lindsey had been the one stuck doing the slow roast rather than old Tall, Dark, and Sanctimonious.
"Sixty-four thousand dollar question," Lindsey murmured, running his hands through his hair. It felt sticky, badly in need of a wash, and Lindsey could not imagine that the rest of him was faring much better. He wondered if running water was too much to hope for in this new and improved version of Los Angeles.
"You will come back inside now." Lindsey turned and was dismayed but not particularly surprised to see the Fred-thing standing in the doorway and watching him with a blankness that no mere human could touch, no matter how many years they spent in a courtroom. She had another name, Lindsey knew, one that tickled at the back of his mind but ran away like sand through a sieve every time he tried to grasp for it. Her lips twisted into the barest suggestion of disgust. "It is a necessary precaution. Do not think that it makes me their messenger. Or yours."
The sun. Of course. Lindsey tried to avoid folding his arms over his chest defensively, realized that the gesture was too human to mean anything to Fred-thing, and did it anyway. She tilted her head to one side in interest but otherwise took no notice. From far off, there was the sound of a hawk screaming. "Afraid I'll run?"
"No." For one moment, the Fred-thing's face shifted into an expression of amusement that alarmed Lindsey far more than it reassured him. He remembered his resolution to never be alone with her and swore inwardly. "It is nearly nightfall." She looked him up and down. "There are things which prey on the weak."
Such a charming vixen that she turned out to be. "Hardly a new development, sweetheart," Lindsey said. "There were things which preyed on the weak before, too." He supposed that there was no point in making an argument for his own abilities when it was all that he could do to keep his legs steady and in their proper position beneath him, but the sting was still there.
The hawk sounded again, louder than before. It was probably getting more than its fair share of carrion these days.
"And now they have nothing to fear." All right, that part would have been far less creepy if Fred-thing had not been wearing that eerie suggestion of a smile as she said it, as if Lindsey was a canary in a cage and she was the cat that had been waiting all afternoon for the master to leave. Lindsey considered the wisdom of taking a step back. A faint breeze ruffled his hair, blowing the dirty strands forward and into his eyes. Even if Fred-thing had been twenty feet away and the path to the doorway had been clear, those were not odds that Lindsey wanted to play. Not while he was exhausted and unarmed, maybe not even if he had had an Uzi.
Fred-thing's gaze shifted, coming to rest at a point behind Lindsey's shoulder. The wind picked up further, and a shadow began to move across the setting sun. "You are the weak," Fred-thing said. Her smile widened into a full grin which revealed a deceptively human set of teeth. "And she is the thing which would prey on you."
That was another one of those sentences which had no chance of producing anything good. The hawk screamed again, loudly enough to be deafening, but of course Lindsey now understood that it was nothing so harmless as a bird of prey. It was not the wind that was making his clothing move. Lindsey hunched his shoulders, ducking and spinning to the side as one movement, and felt something very close to gratitude as his knees agreed to give it one more college try. There was a metallic clacking sound from inches behind him in the exact spot where he had been standing a bare second before, and a rush of warm air that spelled similar enough to a family barbeque to make Lindsey's stomach turn over. With his awkward pirouette out of death's immediate reach completed, he risked a glance over his shoulder and felt his jaw draw open like a broken hinge. Of all the times when Excalibur or possibly a rocket launcher might come in useful, Lindsey was thinking that this was one of them.
Fred-thing referred to the creature as 'she', but Lindsey could see nothing feminine about it. Its body was at least the size of a Hummer, its wingspan coming in at about three times that, and the jewel-toned eyes which stared at Lindsey in a way that made him feel very small were set into a head larger than a washing machine. If Fred-thing was right and this monster truly was a member of the fairer sex, then her scales were a rich copper color that caught the fading sun and threw it back in motes of pure fire, dazzling Lindsey's eyes and swallowing the rest of the world in their glare. Her wings beat a rhythm like helicopter blades in the air as she hovered in place; her tail cut angry swishes just above the brick.
"That's a dragon," Lindsey choked out. Somehow, demons never had the same effect, never brought on the same knee-liquefying awareness of one's real place in the universal food chain.
Fred-thing made a huffing noise that reminded Lindsey suddenly and with a nostalgia that torture could not make him admit to of Lilah before her hand came down on his shoulder with a strength that made a mockery of those small fingers. Lindsey's collarbone creaked beneath the pressure as he was dragged backwards with little care for comfort. He knew that there would be deep purple bruises etched into the flesh later that night, but at the moment of rescue itself Lindsey did not figure that this was the point at which to debate niceties. So long, boss, we'll see you after we've caught a little R and R, and his knees went away without making any promises to come back for future engagements. Lindsey landed hard on his ass, caught at least part of his weight onto his elbows, and felt the skin there tear in a brief moment of pain the a rush of blood from the abraded flesh.
If it weren't for the sense of his own impending death looming over his head, Lindsey might even have been embarrassed. As it was, there was the blood, always the blood. Lindsey's elbows tore and left bits of skin and blood behind that gleamed for a few seconds at almost the same color of She-Devil Numero Uno's scales. Her nostrils dilated, offering a further glimpse into the inner workings of her nasal passages than Lindsey really thought that he needed, thanks so much. That massive head swung back around on him, leaving him staring into a face best referred to as the love that dared not speak its name between a pit bull and an anaconda. The dragon hissed, displaying row upon row of serrated teeth and sending out another wave of breath that smelled of roasting meat. Third time's the charm, and her head snaked forward with a speed that blurred the eye and made the pulse double in a span of seconds. Lindsey prepared himself for the end of his short vacation among the mortal coil. Much later, when the adrenaline had drained from his system far enough to leave only the queasy aftermath behind, he would tell himself that the fact of Fred-thing's saving his life did absolutely nothing to alter the horror-show creepiness that filled any room she happened to be standing in.
It was hard not to see Fred Burkle's body in the shape of the thing that had taken over as the Fred-thing dove through the air, catching the dragon about the jaw and twisting it away from Lindsey on body weight alone. It was a marvel that something so small could move with so much force. Fred-thing's weight pulled the dragon's head down and into the concrete, striking with strength to drive a deep divot into the stone. The dragon lurched forward, and her upper jaw came down hard on the arm that Fred-thing still had wrapped around her mouth. There was a crunch that may have been that of breaking bone and a deceptively human cry of pain. Lindsey forced his watery knees to take his weight back.
"Get inside!" That might even have been fear that caught at Fred-thing's voice and drove it into a higher octave, if Lindsey tilted his head to one side and listened just right. Lindsey hesitated for a beat until Fred-thing threw him a look full of sapphire fury to match the deep and glowing green of the dragon's own, and he decided that discretion was the better part of not dying this day. He staggered back, ignoring the stings of protest from his legs and his elbows, and somehow made it over the last twelve feet to the relative safety inside, sinking to the floor as soon as he was able. A scream that could have come from either Fred-thing or the dragon followed him through the open door. As the sound echoed away, it was all that Lindsey could do not to launch himself back out into the fray, self-preservation be damned. He had gone a record-breaking amount of time without it, anyway, even if the final product was less than amazing.
A final scream, a thump which made the entire building rattle to its foundations and set dust floating down from the ceiling, all followed by a silence which echoed and swelled. Lindsey used the wall to push himself back up to his feet as the Fred-thing stalked past, her face lit up with a savage kind of triumph that was worse than the blankness. Blood dripped from her savaged arm as she stalked back down the hallway, gleaming a purple-red not found in any human veins, and it was this sign of mortality that Lindsey used to guide him back to the apartment.
End Part One