Part Eight
"This world can turn me down
But I won't turn away.
I won't duck and run
'Cause I'm not built that way."
-Three Doors Down, "Duck and Run"
The hotel that Cordelia had in mind was a gorgeous relic of Hollywood's glory days, a quietly aging skeleton that inspired awe rather than sadness. Through the flaking paint and overgrown shrubbery, Lindsey thought he could still see the gleaming smiles of actors on their way to the top. "Nice choice," he said.
"It's been abandoned for ages," Cordelia said, staring past him at the building. "There's always talk floating around about turning it into a historical site or something, but…" Cordelia shrugged. "Funds." Her lips spasmed as she realized what she had said. "Though I guess it doesn't matter now."
"It'll do for tonight," Lindsey said. He almost felt bad as he broke the glass in the front door, and the building seemed to give the faintest of shudders, like a soap bubble popping. Lindsey waited a moment, head cocked to listen, before gesturing Cordelia in behind him. Her expression wavered between blank and nauseated, and Lindsey knew that her mind was still at the apartment.
The sound of their footsteps crunching across the broken glass was very loud in the absence of street noises. Lindsey strode down the steps into the marble floored lobby, playing his flashlight across furniture covered in dust and ravaged by time. It seemed that most of the original fixtures had been left behind by the last occupant, rendering the building into a time capsule.
Lindsey was nearly half way to the registration desk, wanting to get a closer look at a marble countertop that would not have been out of place in the Wolfram and Hart offices in the present day, when he realized that Cordelia was no longer behind him. "Cordy?" he asked-how easily the nickname that he hadn't earned the right to use floated past his lips-, turning to see that she hadn't budged from the top of the stairs. The moon was setting behind her, rendering her features into unreadable shadow. The taut set of her shoulders did for facial expression. "We can't stay here." Her voice was a flat, mechanical tone that Lindsey couldn't remember hearing before.
Lindsey felt his mouth twitch, his face shift into a disbelieving expression. "Cordelia." Her threw his arms out to indicate the lobby in its entirety, forgetting for the moment to tuck his wounded one out of sight against his side. "There's nowhere left in LA that we might not be attacked. We're not going to find a better place to crouch down until we get some supplies together."
"I'm not worried about being attacked," Cordelia said, and because Lindsey was feeling generous he didn't bother to correct the lie. He had used the remaining flashlight to scan over Cordelia's wounds before driving away from the apartment. Her neck was ringed with rising bruises in the shape of fingers, dark as secrets and oozing blood where the skin had been scraped away. Cordelia had frequently taken one of her hands off the wheel on the drive over to touch at her throat, as if forcing herself to acknowledge them as real. The silhouette of Cordelia wrapped her arms around herself for a few seconds before dropping them back to her sides. "Something here…feels wrong."
"It feels wrong." Lindsey didn't laugh at her, but it was a near thing. "Cordelia, I think you need to get some sleep."
Shadows prevented Lindsey from seeing Cordelia's face, but he could feel the look that she was leveling at him. "I'm not sleep deprived," Cordelia snapped, "and I know what I'm talking about when I say there's ick in the air here. Don't tell me you can't feel the evil."
It was on the tip of Lindsey's tongue to tell Cordelia that she was spouting dialogue from a fantasy novel when he Icould/I feel it, sleek, insidious darkness that trembled from the air itself. From the far corners of Lindsey's mind, places that he tried not acknowledge, let alone visit, he heard whispers so faint that they may have come from ghosts. When he tried to focus on the words, though, they disappeared into a paranoid whiff. Lindsey exhaled a breath that he didn't know he had been holding. "It's a lovely night," he said at last. "Seems a shame to waste it."
They slept in the courtyard.
Los Angeles had enjoyed a spate of rain a few days before, filling the dormant fountain in the center of the courtyard. Cordelia used it to rinse the blood from her skin without so much as a glance towards Lindsey. She stretched out beneath the jasmine and fell asleep, or appeared to, without another word.
Lindsey wasn't so blessed. He took a seat with his back braced against the stone fountain, watching Cordelia as her breathing became regular and slow. Cordelia turned her head from side to side and issued the occasional moan for the first hour or so, until the Walking Dude was chased away by dreams that left a smile on her face the tugged the worry line off of her brow. Lindsey would have bet anything that she was standing beneath a butter-yellow sun and hearing an old woman's dusky laugh.
"Evil, be thou my good," Lindsey murmured as he watched her sleep. Even devils had to accept what they were eventually, he thought, dragging his hand across his eyes. Nevertheless, sleep was a long time in coming.
Lindsey dreamed of whispers that night, vague mutterings that he could not remember, outside of the impression of scalding hot lips pressed close against the curve of his ear. Promises made and oaths sworn in blood and bile before a man whose face could only be remembered when he wished it so. Lindsey awoke with nausea rising in his throat and a small, hard object clenched in his palm.
He was gripping it so tightly that his nails had begun to cut into his flesh, and Lindsey experienced the curious sensation of having to will his own fingers to open. Unease settled like a cage around his ribs.
The object was a highly polished black stone scarcely larger than Lindsey's thumbnail, with a hole drilled into one end that a silver chain had been passed through. Lindsey stared at the stone for what seemed like an eternity without moving, until the dawn's early light had begun to peek over his shoulders. The Dark Man was issuing both a reward and a leash, and wanted Lindsey to understand the threat implicit in both.
'Not like the point of no return wasn't three exits back, anyway.' But he still didn't feel like eating anything after staring at the stone. Lindsey glanced towards Cordelia, who slept with an easy expression, as if she were in the presence of a trusted friend. "Even devils."
Lindsey slipped the chain over his head and felt the stone glow against his skin.
---
The sun was nearing its zenith when Cordelia awoke, feeling achy and tired in spite of the hours of sleep. She had been dreaming of Mother Abigail, and Abigail had been telling her something very important about Lindsey. In the gleaming light of the day, though, the words evaporated from Cordelia's grasp. Of the dead person she didn't dream at all, and Cordelia didn't know if this was a good thing or a bad.
Nevertheless, she knew where she needed to be.
Cordelia sat up, dragging her fingers through the tangles in her hair and wishing that she had remembered to bring a hairbrush. Jasmine blossoms had fallen into her hair while she slept. Cordelia pulled them out of her hair one by one, setting them carefully to the side, and felt a flicker of a smile pass over her face as she turned to look for Lindsey.
The man was nowhere to be found, though a patch of disturbed dust in front of the fountain suggested that he had slept at some point. Cordelia pulled the last of the flowers from her hair and stood, doing her best to pretend that it wasn't worry that was causing her skin to prickle and the first threads of adrenaline to go spiking through her system. Cordelia turned, staring towards the double doors that led back into the lobby. Surely he wouldn't have…Cordelia remembered the vague, barely-audible sounds of whispers coming from half-rotted throats and shuddered.
He had. Lindsey was in the center of the hotel's lobby, his head tilted back and his arms stiffened at his sides as if he were bracing himself against the very worst kind of pain. His back was turned towards Cordelia so that she couldn't see his expression, but sweat had turned his shirt nearly translucent. Cordelia could count the muscles in his back.
She lunged against the door handle hard enough to send throbbing pain all the way to her elbow and didn't care, knocking the door against the far wall in a flurry of plaster. "Lindsey!" The panic in her voice at first shocked and would later worry her, but at the present there was no time. Lindsey reacted to her voice with a flinch of the shoulders that a casual observer would have missed.
Cordelia sprinted across the lobby fast enough to put her on the track team had she still been in high school, feeling the hair on her arms and the back of her neck stand up the way they would have after being subjected to a low-level electric current. A cacophony of voices rose in her head as she neared Lindsey. 'Killed him without a second thought, didn't you…felt good…murdering bitch.' Cordelia flinched back from Lindsey with a sound that she refused to admit was a yelp rising in her throat.
"Lindsey," she gritted again, pushing through air that felt like pudding to grab at Lindsey's sweat slicked shoulder. His reaction was electric. A wheezing sigh slid past his lips and he spun, instinctively attacking with the right fist that was no longer there. Cordelia doubted that he even saw her. She squeaked from low in her throat, managing to both duck and scramble backwards at the same time. All the dance lessons that she had had as a child still couldn't turn it into a graceful move, but it gave her opportunity to both get out of the way and duck under Lindsey's arm, grabbing his elbow before he could try again. "Lindsey, stop!" she shouted.
A shudder heavy enough to knock Cordelia's hand away ran through Lindsey's body. He blinked once, twice, at least staring at her with something that resembled recognition. The expression in his eyes was not pleasant.
"Well, I've had a lovely stay," Cordelia said.
"Best night of sleep I've had in years." Only the presence of the other kept either of them from running as they exited.
Cordelia lay her head against the sun-warmed metal of the truck and drew in harsh, ragged breaths until the feeling of slime had evaporated from her skin. Behind her, she could hear Lindsey breathing as though he thought all the air in the world was going to be taken away and bottled for sale. As bad as the voices had been for her, she could only imagine what they said to Lindsey. It was not a comforting series of images.
Cordelia lifted her head from the truck and swiped at her face. "I think I understand why that place stood empty for so long."
"Jesus," Lindsey muttered. He dragged his hand over his face. "Nebraska is looking better and better."
Cordelia lifted her thick hair off her neck, allowing a breeze to soothe the fear sweat that had gathered into a puddle at the nape. "How soon can we leave?" Lindsey slid her a sideways look and she said, "Our track record in California is getting worse and worse, and so are the dreams. We'd be better off in Nebraska." With a bitterness that rose out of her before she even realized it was there, Cordelia added, "It's not like there's anything left here."
Lindsey stared back at the hotel with a distant, bleak expression. "Cordelia, as long as it's out of this godforsaken city, I don't care where we go." His face seamed into a shadow of his old, vicious smile. "Don't know how well a city girl is going to do in farm country, though. Boutiques tend to be few and far between."
Though she had known it was only a matter of time before his true colors showed themselves again, Cordelia felt a flush of color blooming over her cheekbones. "Being a city girl isn't much use when all of the cities are dead." She cast a deliberate glance at the gleaming mass of scar tissue that capped Lindsey's wrist and saw his expression darken. "Adaptation, Lindsey. Dealing with what life does to you."
Lindsey's lips twisted, and he turned to look back at the hotel before answering. "So, anyway. We're off to see the wizard." Cordelia didn't think she was imagining the hint of nervousness that underlay Lindsey's voice.
"I don't think Mother Abigail is the judging type," she said, forgetting for the moment that she was supposed to be annoyed with him.
Lindsey's laugh was short and bitter, and hung in the air like an accusation between them. "You'd be surprised," he said. "Even the heroes can fail." Cordelia said nothing, but an uneasy line appeared between her eyes as she climbed into the truck and started the engine. Lindsey turned away so that she wouldn't see him fingering the small lump beneath his shirt, or the sudden deadness in his eyes.