Part Thirteen
"Come on, now, something's teasing.
Your conscience can't decide.
She kept your will from breaking,
But left you paranoid."
Our Lady Peace, "Potato Girl"
The curb was still warm from the sun as Lindsey sat on it, an open bottle of whiskey taking up the space next to him. Not that the patch of curb was being wildly jostled for, anyway. The people that he had seen had taken one look at the bottle and then turned their eyes away, looks of mingled fear and embarrassment wiggling across their faces like worms before Lindsey became as invisible to them as a homeless person would have been in the old order. Apparently, good old Flagg frowned upon his people hitting the hard stuff.
The fact that they were frowning upon whiskey while people dangled off fucking crosses above their heads only served as proof to Lindsey that he was not nearly drunk enough.
A crow lit atop the freshest one, surely dead no longer than a few hours (God, the poor man had probably still been alive when they had driven into the city), helped itself to a nice filet of bicep. The bird tilted its head back to swallow the morsel, its strangely sentient eyes flickering to rest on Lindsey as it bent its head for more. Well, they were brothers of a sort, after all. Lindsey tilted the whiskey bottle towards the bird in salute and took a healthy swallow. The burn branded his esophagus all the way down, contrasting nicely to Flagg's stone, which was now too cold to be worn inside his shirt. The hum the alcohol was creating in his head was almost enough to make the situation comic rather than macabre.
The crow gave a caw of what sounded like pleased acknowledgment and dipped its beak back towards its meal. Lindsey wanted to tell himself that he was imagining things, but with bodies dangling from crosstrees all around him his imagination was a bit taxed. Small wonder that the Romans had been so fascinated by orgies, Lindsey thought. You'd have to return to something simple, something that boiled down to sweat and lust and skin, in order to cope with this on a daily basis.
And he had lined right up to sign his name on the dotted line. The lower the amber line in the bottle descended, the funnier the joke became.
Tiring of dark meat for the moment, the crow gave up on the man's arm and hopped along the horizontal beam, shiny button eyes fixed upon the victim's neck. Lindsey's stomach twisted, but he didn't allow himself to look away. After fighting so hard to make it to the Walkin' Dude's city, he had no right to turn his eyes to the side.
The crow made a sound that was nearly a coo as it dug its beak into the dead man's jugular, pulling out a long strip of the vein itself. The bird tossed it back the way a man in a bar might a handful of peanuts. Lindsey's stomach clenched again and he set the whiskey bottle back down, lest he should lose what he had already drank across it.
Blood poured from the wound that the crow had created, not dark and sluggish the way a corpse's should flow at all. "Oh, fuck." Lindsey lurched to his feet with all of the speed and less than impressive grace that he was capable of at that point. The blood was bright red and still oxygenated, exiting the wound in thick, ropy spurts. The man wasn't dead, and as soon as the realization hit Lindsey was doubling over. The whiskey felt like battery acid as it clawed its way back up his throat. He knocked the bottle over with his heel, sending its contents running away into the gutter.
Other than the whisper-shush of cloth rubbing together on bodies, the only sound on the street was that of Lindsey retching, without even the patter of footsteps to break it up. Corpses on crucifixes were difficult enough to deal with in the daylight; the trauma doubled at night. Lindsey heaved until his ribs ached and his stomach threatened to turn inside out and come sliding right up his throat after the booze. He braced his hand against his knee when the worst seemed to be over, dragging his hand across his mouth and spitting out as much foulness as he could. Self-disgust tried to cut a hole through the buzz that he had been cultivating for himself, and Lindsey was sorely tempted to let it. He had been sickened by a contract since he was twenty-five, and even that had been conquered by the next bank statement.
That sobered him more than any amount of purging.
The crow pulled out and swallowed another strip of blood vessel, fluttering off a few feet when its feathers were in danger of becoming sodden in the spray. It returned when the blood had slowed to a drip-drip-drip onto the pavement below. Lindsey had never heard a sound that could induce madness so quickly. The bird pulled out a final morsel of meat before fixing Lindsey with a look of avian disapproval and uttering a soft croak, as if it really had expected better of him than this. It ruffled its feathers for a moment, shaking off the droplets of gore that it had been unable to avoid, and launched itself from its perch with a final caw. Backlit against the novelty of electric lights, it looked more like a bat than a bird.
If that had been a test, then it was the first one in his life that Lindsey could remember being glad to fail.
Revelation, as it turned out, hurt a hell of a lot more than the vomiting had. Lindsey turned away, swearing, from the corpses of the other people who had had the misfortune to arrive on Flagg's bad side. The bodies, some of whom still had eyes left to stare, did nothing to stop the shaky, epiphany-shaped thing trying out its newborn legs in Lindsey's mind.
Lindsey's moment of getting metaphysically smacked upside the head was interrupted by a low growl, registered less than a second before a vise-worthy grip came down on the back of his neck and nearly jerked him off his feet. Lindsey stumbled, caught his balance by the barest of margins, and felt his adrenal glands begin making up for lost time as a stream of cool air blew across his cheek. Vampire. Lindsey almost laughed. They had to be feeling the loss in population even more than the remaining humans. That such an attack was happening to him now was proof positive that the Powers That Be did in fact exist, and they were constantly pissed off.
"Lindsey," the vampire's voice drawled into his ear, "it's always nice to see you in good health."
Of course. Lindsey closed his eyes as the feeling of being the center of a universe-wide practical joke intensified. "I'm a survivor." The slur in his voice, he was pleased to note, was only obvious to those people who happened to have the remotest sense of hearing at all.
Angel's thumb explored downward, into the delicate curve where Lindsey's jaw met his neck. When he pressed down, Lindsey's knees sagged. "I'll just bet." Lindsey had never heard a voice that addressed him with such a delicate malice before. "It's ironic, really. There's so much death, and yet a waste like you manages to walk out on the other side."
Lindsey wheezed out a sound that may have been a laugh; the increasing pressure that Angel was putting on his neck was creating a roaring sound in his ears. "It must sting," he said. "'Waste like me'. But I'm higher up on the cosmic food chain that you're precious Slayer, aren't I?" Oh, he was begging for Angel to hit him.
The beautiful thing about Angel and Lindsey's relationship lay in the fact that they rarely surprised each other. Lindsey saw the fist coming with no time to duck, felt an impact that threatened to torque his jaw into new and interesting shapes. Lindsey staggered back, stumbling and catching his head a healthy whack on the building behind them. Swirls of yellow and purple invaded his vision. Angel grabbed the front of his shirt and hauled him close.
"Where is she?" Angel growled. Though his forehead remained smooth, there was a glint of gold in his eyes.
A trickle of blood ran into Lindsey's eyes. He shook his head, trying to rearrange Angel's words into an order in which they made sense. "The Slayer?" he asked, trying to shove Angel away from him. He may as well have been trying to push at a stone wall.
Oh, there were the forehead ridges. Lindsey felt the ground grow more stable beneath his feet. "Not her," Angel said, enunciating carefully. Violence rode on his words. "Cordelia. Where is Cordelia?"
"Wish I knew." Lindsey tried to probe at the cut on his head, only to be shaken hard when his attention wandered.
"You're lying." Angel's voice was slipping into the low, controlled tone that he had used just before cutting off Lindsey's hand. Lindsey experienced a Pavlov's dog reaction of momentous proportions, tension invading his entire body and jump-starting him into a fight or flight response. Option one seemed decidedly unwise, and all of the fountains in Flagg's palatial hell would freeze over before Angel saw the second. Phantom pain tingled beyond the end of Lindsey's stump and he glanced down, nearly expecting to see the regrowth of pink, gleaming flesh. A sneer was twisting Angel's face when he looked back up. "I can smell her on you."
Lindsey watched the crosstrees behind Angels' shoulder, hearing the words exit his mouth before he could pause to weigh how wise or foolish they were, or even if Angel would know who he was talking about. "Flagg has her, but I don't know where." One of the people on the crosses was a woman with long dark hair, dead for so long that Lindsey could only tell her sex from the daisy-yellow dress that she wore. Her head bobbed slowly on the breeze, making all that hair sway.
If the widening of Angel's eyes was any indicator, no explanations as to Flagg's identity were going to be necessary. "She's with who?" His grip tightened to the point of cutting off Lindsey's air supply. "Do you have any idea what kind of monster he is?"
Lindsey managed a smile in spite of the tightness in his chest. Blood trickled down to his lips, flooding his mouth with copper. "Of course I do."
Angel sucked in a gasp of air that he didn't need as Lindsey watched suspicion turn to certainty before his very eyes. Beyond that, he could have been a ghost for all the noise that he made as he drew his fist back. The punch was a hell of a lot more solid than anything that a ghost could have delivered, though, whipping Lindsey's head around and filling his head with a grating noise that he thought might actually be the sound of his jaw cracking. He stumbled back against the wall, dazed and clutching at his mouth. Blood slicked his teeth orange-pink when he spread his lips into a grin. "He's after her visions," Lindsey said. Déjà vu rolled over him, and yet he still couldn't stop himself. "Wonder if he'll crack her head open like an egg to get them?"
"Son of a bitch-" Angel drove his boot like a piston into Lindsey's gut, hurling him to the ground, and this time Lindsey knew that the sound filling his head was that of breaking bone. He gagged, managing to avoid vomiting again only by the fact that he had nothing left to lose. 'Come on, you bastard,' he thought as his vision alternately doubled and tripled, 'get going if you're going to finish it.' When no third blow came, Lindsey looked up.
Angel had backed up a few paces, his face tense, his fists clenching and unclenching themselves as if he were imagining Lindsey's neck trapped between them. His expression was that of a man who had just been whispered a secret and, far from knowing how to handle it, wished that he hadn't bent his head to listen in the first place.
"Great," Angel said, staring skyward. "That's fucking lovely." He snorted, returning his gaze to Lindsey. "Lovely. Get up," Angel said, grabbing Lindsey by his bad arm and hauling him to his feet. Pain lit up Lindsey's sides like a carnival ride and he swallowed his gasp behind a slew of obscenity, all of which Angel ignored. Lindsey's kneecaps seemed to have taken themselves elsewhere and his stomach couldn't decide if it wanted to descend to take their place or rise up into his throat and choke him. It was sincere but wounded resistance that Lindsey was able to offer as Angel propelled them both back into their natural element, the thick black shadows.
Lindsey's back impacted brick and he couldn't control his wince as those oh-so-recently broken ribs ratcheted up their performance from a dull roar into a screaming cacophony. Angel's grip softened, sliding down Lindsey's arm until he was holding the remains of Lindsey's right wrist between his fingers, his touch light and gentle enough to make the hair on the back of Lindsey's neck rise. If Angel had wanted his undivided attention, all he had to do was ask. The look of reluctant revelation was gone from Angel's face as if it had never been, and Lindsey was convinced that he had been imagining things as he yanked his arm away. Surprisingly, Angel let him.
"So how did it work, Lindsey?" Angel asked, his eyes coffee-dark and way too close. "How long did it take Cordelia to trust you? Or does she even know?"
Releasing his arm had been the only concession towards Lindsey's comfort that Angel was willing to make; they were standing so close to one another that if Angel had breathed, Lindsey would be drawing the same air into his lungs. It was always better when they stayed close enough to see the mirror images of each other, Lindsey thought, loathe as he was to admit it. It was when they shouted at each other from across crypts, when distance allowed them to view each other as impersonal abstractions, that things went pear-shaped. "She was abandoned," Lindsey spit. "All I had to do was step into the void." A muscle in Angel's jaw ticked, but Lindsey wasn't in the mood to heed warnings. "Cordelia waited for you until the city was rotting. Even then, she nearly had to be killed before she would leave." His smile was tight, glittering; he unleashed more poison through the gleaming of his teeth than he did through his words. "She has you to thank every bit as much as she does me."
Angel's hand flexed and Lindsey was reevaluating his theory of closeness equaling relative safety when that look passed over Angel's face again. He snorted, visibly shaking it off, and replaced it with the glare that put them back onto familiar ground. "C'mon." His hand returning to the back of Lindsey's neck didn't leave him with a tremendous amount of choice in the matter. Lindsey stumbled and Angel threw him a disgusted look even as he moved to support him. "The first fountain we see, I'm throwing you in it," Angel muttered. "See if that sobers you up."
"This is more the head trauma," Lindsey replied, trying out his knees. They agreed to take him back on a trial basis, with no guarantees made for the future.
Angel's eyes and his smile jangled discordantly against one another. "Then I guess it'll just be fun." He dragged/led Lindsey deeper into the shadows, where a Nova sat blanketed in the darkness with its engine turned off. Angel and old cars. Of course. "Get in."
Lindsey braced his hand against the passenger door but remained standing, looking at Angel over the hood. "I already told you that I don't know where Flagg is."
"I do," Angel said. His expression had grown blacker than Lindsey could ever remember seeing it. "You got Cordelia into this, you're going to help me get her back out."
"Like hell." Lindsey started to back away from the car.
"One more step and I'm going to break your other arm." Angel's voice was calm and devoid of any theatrics, coated with a sincerity that made Lindsey still almost immediately.
"I don't know if you happened to notice out there on the street," Lindsey hissed over the top of the car, "but the people who piss Flagg off have a tendency to wind up hanging off crucifixes."
"Then the goodness of your heart will want to keep that from happening to someone else, won't it?" The stare that Angel directed towards him was enough to make Lindsey wish for the days when Angel told him with a look that he was nothing at all. This one was jagged, complex, full of too many possible meanings for Lindsey to possibly dissect them all. "You ever want to start proving me wrong," Angel said, "now's a good place to start."
Lindsey swore and stared off in the direction of the street. Nearly a minute passed before he made a fist of his hand, brought it down on the roof of the car hard enough to send pain all the way into his elbow, and slid into the car. He told himself that it was for no other reason than the look on Angel's face, which Lindsey planned to play on endless mental loop for the rest of his days, and never mind the chunk of lead that had dissolved from his gut the moment his body touched the seat.
Unnoticed against his chest and gone before Angel could glance over, Flagg's stone began to glow.