Part Three
"There is a balance between two worlds
One with an arrow and a cross
Regardless of the balance, life has become cumbersome."
-7 Mary 3, "Cumbersome"
The car Wolfram and Hart had so generously sent to take him to appointments while he was 'under the weather', as Holland had put it with a delicate shake of the head and a sympathetic smile that may even have been real, was idling exactly where Lindsey had left it. The driver dozed with his head tilted back on the seat, mouth wide open. Lindsey's lip curled and the angry knot that had settled between his shoulder blades extended stealthy fingers up and down his spine, eager to share the wealth.
Lindsey strode around to the driver's door and rapped his knuckles against the window. No response from the driver within. Lindsey frowned, tried again. Same result.
The first flickers of unease found kindling in Lindsey's stomach, easy to mask but not so easy to ignore. He chose to cover them with ire, mumbling a vague obscenity and jerking on the car door. It came towards him with ease, taking the driver along with it. Lindsey yelped and made a reflexive attempt to catch the body as it tumbled towards him. The man's shoulder struck what was left of his right wrist-exquisite, jagged pain-and Lindsey staggered as the world descended into haze.
When Lindsey came to he was lying on his back, feeling sun-warmed concrete through the fabric of his shirt. The driver's weight was a solid bulk across his chest. His arm was throbbing as if it had been dipped in kerosene and then lit on fire. Lindsey grit his teeth, ignoring old friend pain as well as he was able. More disturbing than pain was the heat-'No,' Lindsey corrected himself, 'the fire.'-that radiated out from the man's skin. Lindsey squirmed from beneath him with ginger care, allowing their bodies to touch as little as possible. He could not escape the idea, irrational though it was, that they would both go up in flames at any second.
"Mister!" a ridiculously young voice called. "Hey, are you all right?" The voice had the rolling vowels of the deep South, and Lindsey's head turned towards it so fast that his neck cracked. He rubbed at it with his good hand, staring.
The man that loped up to him could claim the title by technicality only; Lindsey doubted that he was up to shaving more than three times a week. He skidded to a stop as he caught sight of the full scene, eyeing first the inert man on the pavement, then Lindsey's handless wrist. Lindsey realized belatedly that the man had set his wrist to bleeding again when he had struck it. Crimson roses were blooming across the white bandage.
"I'm fine," Lindsey gritted, turning sideways to hide his disfigurement as well as he could with his hip. He gestured towards the driver. "It's him. He was unconscious when I opened the car door."
The young man knelt with a Good Samaritan enthusiasm that told Lindsey even more surely than the accent that he had not been in the city of Angel for long. He slung one of the driver's arms over his shoulders and heaved him to his feet, wincing away from the fever. The driver's head fell back and Lindsey could see ominous shadows crouching over his glands. His breath rattled in his lungs, a wet sound that Lindsey had already heard far too many times in his life. The flickers of unease had long since turned into a bonfire.
"Gimme a hand here," the young man panted, freezing as he realized what he had said. "Oh, I'm sorry-"
Lindsey would have preferred obliviousness to the pity. "I can help," he said, dragging the driver's free arm across his own shoulders. A thick trickle of mucus ran out of one nostril, which Lindsey did his best not to look at. With a little more glee than was strictly necessary, he left the keys in Wolfram and Hart's car and the engine running.
A nurse jumped to her feet behind the reception desk as she saw Lindsey and the young man enter the emergency room with the driver slung between them like a pig on a spit. Lindsey thought he saw a wariness to her actions, as if this were a scene that she had seen played out many times already. The driver roused into a sludgy semi-consciousness, muttering liquid nonsense as his head lolled against Lindsey's shoulder. Lindsey hissed and jerked away.
A gurney appeared out of nowhere and Lindsey shifted as almost-memories rose into his mind like dead fish across the surface of a stagnant pond. "Lay him down here," the nurse ordered, jerking Lindsey back to the concrete world. He did as he was told and inched back in preparation for his exit.
No such luck. The nurse ran her eyes across the young man, dismissed him as a puppy, and turned to Lindsey in his stead. "What happened?"
Lindsey was hyper-aware of the eyes in the ER and the way they gyrated between him and the body on the gurney. "He's my driver," Lindsey said.
The driver roused enough to yell, "Devil's in the paperwork! Watch 'em!" Lindsey winced, but the comment would mean nothing to anyone who wasn't already deep within Wolfram and Hart's belly.
The nurse didn't disappear with her patient as the gurney was whisked away. "He's your driver," she repeated, drawing his attention back to her. "And?"
"And I went out to the car and he was like that."
"Any earlier symptoms?"
"He sounded as if he had a cold earlier this afternoon, but…" Lindsey shrugged. "It was nothing."
The nurse nodded in time to Lindsey's words, scribbling down everything he said on a clipboard. Her ponytail bobbed and caught the light. "Thank you," she said at last, looking up and capping the pen. She leaned forward, taking Lindsey's wrist and grazing her fingers lightly across the bandage. Her fingers were cool and very gentle; too much. Lindsey jumped and pulled away, eyes narrowing. Too late he realized that the wound had begun to bleed again with enthusiasm, that the people in the ER had been staring at him as much as they had the driver. His lip tried to curl before Lindsey caught himself and forced his face back into bland, anonymous lines.
The nurse either didn't notice the expression or was too naïve to professional to comment. Probably the latter. "I'll find someone to redress this," she said. "You should wait until the bleeding stops before you leave."
"It doesn't-" Lindsey stopped, aware of how ridiculous it was to protest that he was fine while dripping blood across the floor. Purple and yellow sprites danced at the edges of his vision. "Thank you."
The nurse's eyes were kind enough to sting. "It's my job." She took Lindsey's elbow-he hadn't realized that he was weaving-and guided him to a chair. "Have a seat and someone will be with you in a moment. If the bleeding doesn't stop, we'll have to readmit you." The nurse sounded doubtful, and Lindsey could see why. He had been back to the hospital several times since Angel's creative rearrangement of his body parts. He didn't think he had seen it in such a state of chaos before. "Anyway, sit tight."
Lindsey tilted his head in the direction that his driver had gone. "What's wrong with him?"
The nurse tried to smile; it only served to accentuate how exhausted she was. "Would you believe the flu?" Another twitching smile, and she was gone.
"The flu?" Lindsey repeated, staring after her. Beside him, the young man who had helped him carry the driver in sneezed twice.
---
Every available space in Cordelia's living room was strewn with books, many of them so ancient that a careless movement could shred them. Amidst the chaos were cups ringed with coffee or bloodstains and discarded plates of food. Dennis, trying hard to be helpful, had continued to bring them out until Wesley and Angel had waved them off.
Wesley paused long enough to rub at his eyes, waiting until his vision had ceased doubling before he began again. Demons up demons upon demons, and not a one of them was interested in ending the world that day, though there were several that they would have to keep their eye on next week. It lent credence to Wesley's theory that they weren't dealing with a demon at all, but a sorcerer, and that made their task all the more difficult.
"Worms," Wesley muttered. Her reclaimed his pen and stared at the legal pad upon which he had been taking notes. The orderly descriptions of evil that crawled, swam, and slithered created a bubble of nausea in his stomach, too sudden to be ignored. He pushed the pad away before he could become ill.
Angel glanced up from his book. A half-congealed cup of blood sat at one elbow; Dennis floated a stack of books at his other. "Problems?"
Wesley snorted. "An understatement." He pinched at the bridge of his nose, hoping to ward off through force of will the headache that was brewing. He had had a tendency towards migraine ever since the explosion, and this felt like one of those storm clouds as it charged over the horizon. With luck aspirin would be able to ward it off before it became incapacitating.
Something cool and smooth bumped against Wesley's forearm and he lowered his hand with great reluctance. A glass of water and a bottle of Cordelia's painkillers floated before him as faithfully as any dog. It was difficult to send a look of thanks to a creature that could not be seen, but Wesley tried. He took four aspirin along with a gulp of water, glanced up to see Angel fixing him with the unnerving look that he normally reserved for uncooperative clients.
"Are you all right?" Angel asked.
"Fine." More of the stare. "A headache. Nothing of consequence."
Doubt lingered on Angel's face, but he returned to his book rather than press further. Several minutes passed in which the turning of the pages was the only sound in the room, until Angel tossed his book aside in frustration. The spine bent and Wesley winced. "There's nothing in here," Angel growled.
"Could it be-" Angel turned on a tableside lamp and Wesley grimaced. Averting his face from the light, he missed the expression of concern in Angel's eyes. "Is it possible that Cordelia may have misread her vision?" Angel fixed him with a look that brought back the old, uncomfortable instincts of not-quite-enough. Wesley shrugged a trifle more defensively than he liked and added, "She's suffered a rather severe head trauma. It is not beyond the realm of possibility that in the stress of impact her mind may have obliterated some details, added others where there weren't before. It's something that we need to consider, isn't it?"
The combative expression went out of Angel's eyes, replaced something close enough to defeat to make Wesley blink. "I was thinking the same thing," Angel said, rubbing at his eyes in much the same way that Wesley had done a few moments before. "But we can't give up, can we? Regardless of whether the concussion confused some of the details, the fact remains that Cordelia had a vision. Something either has happened, or will happen, that the Powers want up to put a stop to."
Wesley picked up his coffee cup and swirled the cold contents, asking himself if it was worth it. Setting the cup back down, he said, "We have to keep working with what we have, then."
The sounds in the room dwindled to the turning of pages and the in-and-out of Wesley's breathing. The knot behind his eyes expanded rather than dissipating, and as the night wore on his skin began to feel tight and feverish. Twice he paused to cough into his hand.
"Damnable cold," Wesley muttered, and turned another page.
---
Cordelia had learned during her earlier stay in LA General that the hospital never really slept. At any time of the night, doctors and nurses could be heard speaking in low voices and gurneys trundling along bearing the sick and injured. During the course of her three-day admittance the sounds had become comforting, proof that the real world still functioned in spite of Wolfram and Hart's attempts to end it.
But now, as she lay in her bed and stared up at the ceiling, Cordelia felt as though spiders were running across her belly and up her spine. Gone was the comfort of rhythm, of routine. In its stead Cordelia listened to the sounds of chaos and pain: people coughing and sobbing, doctors snapping at nurses and nurses snapping back, all at a loss as to how to confront the monster looming over them.
The painkillers being fed into Cordelia's arm rendered her sluggish and confused, so it didn't seem strange immediately when a man's voice began whispering through her mind. The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle on your snout. It was a darkly sweet voice, as alluring as it was rancid, and Cordelia's eyes flashed open wide. Her breath began to come in shallow pants.
'I can spare you from this, Cordelia. I can spare you from it all…and all you have to do is worship me.'
Cordelia's hand twitched towards the nurses' call button. 'Get out of my head,' she thought back, her ferocity driven by terror. 'GetoutgetoutGETOUT!'
A chuckle that made Cordelia think of rotting meat, and the specter obeyed. All of the optimism in the world wouldn't allow Cordelia to think that it was gone for good. She pulled her hand away from the call button, folded it in her lap. It immediately sought out her other hand and they clasped themselves so tightly together that the joints ached.
"Worms," Cordelia whispered to the ceiling, which had nothing to offer back to her. In the hallway, a gurney overturned and someone spit out a stream of obscenity so liquid-fast as to be unintelligible.
---
'Only monsters live in caves.' The thought slid into Lindsey's mind as he stepped into the darkened apartment, unbidden and unwanted. He twitched as if he were shaking off a fly, settling onto the couch and picking up the bottle that was on its way to becoming a permanent fixture of the coffee table. Not nearly so easy to banish was the memory of the driver tumbling out of the car, the sight of glassy eyes and the feel of scalding hot flesh. No one could have a fever that high and live. Lindsey wished he could chase away the memories of cherubic faces streaked with sweat that were crawling up on him. His lips thinned.
"I'll call the hospital in the morning," Lindsey promised the air, before remembering that he didn't even know the driver's name. He would find it, then. Badger every secretary, clerk, and lawyer in Wolfram and Hart until he found out.
Lindsey retrieved a glass and poured enough bourbon into it to put a disapproving frown Dr. Richardson's face, had he only been there to see it. Managing the glass and the bottle at the same time was an experiment that strained his juggling skills, but he would be damned before he sank so low as to drink straight from the bottle. Glass in hand, Lindsey sank back into the couch cushions. Bourbon sloshed across his shirt as he fumbled for the television remote and he swore. Exhaustion and medication robbed the words of any heat.
"-the police asking citizens to consider suspects in tri-state kill spree to be armed and extremely dangerous," a newswoman was saying as Lindsey turned on the television. She glanced down at her notes. "And in our next story, city officials are urging citizens not to panic in the face of a city-wide flu outbreak. Local doctors are calling the virus a new strain only slightly more virulent than the Asian swine flu, and urge anyone concerned to receive a booster injection of flu vaccine at the nearest doctor's or county heath office. As to those of you already finding yourselves under the weather, the old cures are still the best cures: bed rest and plenty of fluids." The anchorwoman flashed her white, trustworthy teeth at the camera.
Lindsey lifted the glass of bourbon to his lips.
'So much despair, so much hate, so much rage.'
The glass slid from Lindsey's fingers. Alcohol sloshed across the carpet, throwing a stain of amber across the cream. "The Ihell/I?" he whispered, most of the air shocked from his lungs. The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, sliding into his brain like oil across the surface of water. It made him feel filthy at the same time that it felt like coming home.
'And ambition, yes, and pain, oh, yes, so much pain. Death has kissed you, my boy, and you've kissed back. I can use that, if you worship me. Only if you worship me.'
When the phone rang, Lindsey nearly screamed.