Part Sixteen
"I'm going to buy a gun and start a war
If you can tell me something worth fighting for."
-Coldplay, "A Rush of Blood to the Head"
Unease made the crowd ripple as one being, snake-like, as all heads swiveled towards the source of the sound. Flagg didn't so much as blink. His eyes remained fixed on Angel's face as he made another twisting motion with his hand. Lindsey caught the scream before it could make it more than halfway out of his throat, biting down on his lower lip until a trail of crimson ran down his chin. His knees buckled and Angel's hand became the only thing keeping him on his feet. Flagg's smile glowed, magnetic in spite of the eyes above it.
Angel reached for the stone around Lindsey's neck with his free hand, intending to rip it off himself if Lindsey couldn't or even now wouldn't. Flagg chortled, shaking his head at Angel in a way that suggested he was more disappointed in him than anything else. "You don't see me disciplining your people for you."
Angel's fingers had barely brushed against the Flagg's talisman before a terrible, buzzing whiteness was entering his head, eating him away mind and body. Angel's mouth opened and he thought the sound that emerged might have been a scream, but the formless cloud filling up his senses made it too difficult to tell. It was the thick, choking essence of rotting meat and decaying civilization, and Angel didn't get the chance for another scream. The world tilted, vertigo ruled, and then his back was striking something hard. The whiteness vanished and Angel opened his eyes, stunned to find himself on the ground and several feet away. A persistent ringing sound filled his ears.
Lindsey had fallen to his knees, his lips pressed together until they were nearly invisible. The streaks of red along his chin and above his eye were the sole spots of color on his face. He tilted his head up to speak to Flagg, and the clanging in Angel's ears prevented him from hearing what was said. He got the gist of it, however, as Flagg moved faster than any human being would have been capable of, backhanding Lindsey across the face hard enough to lift him straight off the ground. Angel didn't' see if he was conscious when he landed.
The commotion at the front of the lobby was growing rather than abating, and now sounded as if it was working its way inward. More yells followed the first, men and women alike, and there came the shushing, whispery noise of clothing as a large group of people shoved against one another. The majority, though, did not move. They thought that they were untouchable. It was this thought more than any other that got Angel back to his feet. His knees wobbled for a few seconds before they agreed to hold him.
The accumulation of screams distracted Flagg from Lindsey when everything else failed to. He stared in the direction of their origin, a look of pure hatred changing his face into something half-formed and unrecognizable. Angel was loath to take his eyes off Flagg even for a second to bring into view the new player in their little game, but when he did the result stunned him.
Cordelia was sweaty and pale beneath her tan, her hands shaking so badly that it was a wonder the gun she held didn't go off. Her jeans were speckled with something that angel didn't want to believe was blood, and she wore a jean jacket that as about three sizes too large for her, so that the sleeves were slipping down over her hands. While her hair had once been pulled back into a ponytail, most of it had long since escaped into dark tendrils around her face. Angel thought she had never looked lovelier.
"Hey, Angel," Cordelia said in a strained voice. A man approached on her left and she jerked around, leveling her weapon at him. "Unless you really don't think that I've shot enough people tonight, you'll stay right where you are." He froze, and Cordelia shifted her eyes towards Flagg. There was an expression there that Angel thought he would never see. "You, me, and a gun," Cordelia said. "Déjà vu loves us."
"Doesn't it, though," Flagg said in a pleasant, musing voice. He stepped forward, pulling open his shirt to reveal an unblemished, entirely hairless chest. "But do you see how well your tricks worked? You should have run to ground while you had the chance."
Cordelia jerked away from the man on her left so that she could cover Flagg instead. He stopped walking forward, though the confident expression never faltered from his face. "I was able to hurt you the last time," Cordelia said, "and that wasn't supposed to happen, was it? Do you think that I could do it again?" The shaking in her hands had dwindled down to more than a tremble. For the first time, a shadow of uneasiness moved across Flagg's face.
If Cordelia had been the only person in the room who had a weapon, the entire situation would have ended in a very different way. As it was, fortune did not favor them nearly so highly. "Cordelia!" Angel roared, and she spun towards him. The bullet intended for her head buzzed over her shoulder, passing close enough to make her hair shift in the breeze, and struck a woman to Angel's side in the throat. Blood struck the side of his face as the woman fell before she even had a chance to scream. She writhed and clutched at her throat as blood spread in a pool around her head, not going still until several seconds later.
Angel didn't wait to see it. The report had scarcely had a chance to echo before he was moving, lunging across the short distance and putting his fist into the gunman's face with a crack that echoed from one end of the lobby to the other. He didn't pause to see if the man was going to be getting up again. Hands tore at him; Angel snapped the arms that they belonged to without looking around. Flagg made no move to stop either one of them, watching the scene instead with a self-satisfied look upon his face. There was very little that Angel would not have done to tear that look from Flagg's face, tear his face off entirely if that was what it took. While he could take anything and everything that an angry mob threw at him, though, Cordelia could not. There were no circumstances in the world in which that would be worth the sacrifice.
The same Cordelia whose life Angel was trying to figure out how to save had no problems with putting it into further danger, twisting back around to bear on the next person who would fire at her. 'If this is what you've taught her, Lindsey,' Angel thought as he jumped forward, 'then I'm sure you're very proud of yourself.' He caught Cordelia around her waist, jerking her out of harm's way as she issued a startled squawk. The bullet struck the floor and ricocheted, throwing up flecks of marble and making everyone duck. Angel felt blood begin to run down his calf as a piece of shrapnel larger than his thumb embedded itself into the skin behind his knee. Cordelia twisted like an eel in his arm, emitting noises caught somewhere between grunts and obscenities and not seeming to recognize his touch.
A bullet whistled close enough to Angel's head to part his hair and another thunked into the meaty part of his shoulder. "Cordelia, stop!" he shouted, and she froze with a speed that was nearly comic. "I think it's time for us to leave."
"Lindsey," Cordelia panted. "I saw the both of you-"
Angel twisted in the direction that he had seen Lindsey fall and saw nothing more than a tangled knot of people, none of which looked wildly on the side of pleased. Humans, but too many for him to cope with and also protect Cordelia. "No time," he said, taking her hand and tugging her along with him. There would be later chances at Flagg.
A second bullet struck Angel's back, near his spine, and staggered him. He released Cordelia long enough to ensure that there were several humans in the room who wouldn't be getting up again for hours. Angel considered them lucky that he was allowing them to get up at all. Bullets struck the walls as they passed, throwing up puffs of plaster. None found flesh.
"Do you have a car?" Cordelia gasped as they hit cool night air paces ahead of the crowd.
"This way." Angel pulled the keys from his pocket with one hand, keeping Cordelia's hand in the other. She pulled away after only a few feet, shaking her head.
"I'm fine." Angel cast her a look and she added, "Not the time, okay?"
"Right." Angel opened the Nova's door, slid into the driver's seat, and inserted the key into the ignition as one movement. Cordelia winced as she hopped into the passenger seat, but said nothing. She flicked the safety on the gun and dropped it between her feet, rubbing her hands against her thighs.
The tires screeched and left long streaks of rubber behind as Angel slammed his foot down on the gas pedal, leaving the hotel behind faster than anyone could hope to jump in a vehicle and follow. Cordelia stared out the windows rather than looking at him, leaving Angel to guess her mood based upon what little he could see of her reflection. The set of her shoulders was not friendly, and Angel could not say that he was surprised. Or particularly undeserving, for that matter.
"Do you have a destination in mind, or are we just going to drive in circles until you run out of gas?" Cordelia didn't turn around, addressing the streetlamps instead.
"I've been crouching in a place for the last few days." A small apartment, tucked as far as possible from Flagg's infant attempts at rebuilding the city. By sheer luck, it had been without corpses.
Cordelia nodded. She craned her head back to look at him, her eyes blank of emotion. "You're shot." When she turned back towards the window, Angel could see a worry line between her eyes.
Angel shifted and felt the seat behind him squelch. "Not badly."
"I'll help you take them out, anyway."
The thought of this Cordelia armed with a blade was not the most comforting that Angel had had that night. "Cordy, I'm-" he began. Cordelia hunched her shoulders until they came close to touching her ears. She shook her head, once, and Angel's words dried up in his throat. The rest of the ride passed by in clinging, oppressive silence.
---
"At least some things don't change," Cordelia said as she stepped inside what currently served as Angel's humble abode. She arched an eyebrow at the black furniture. "Even the end of the known world couldn't cure you of your color allergy." The teasing note that would have been present in Cordelia's voice a month before was marked in its absence now, turning her words jagged.
"I didn't pick it out." Angel shifted his shoulders and winced. His flesh was already knitting itself back together around the wounds, and the bullets burned.
Cordelia set her guns down on the kitchen table and rubbed at the back of her neck, flinching as she touched bruises in the shape of fingers. Angel could only imagine how they had gotten there. "So, what brings you to Vegas? Can't be the gambling, it looks like most of the casinos are going through a dry spell."
"I'm here because of Flagg," Angel said. Cordelia's eyes darted up to his face. "Seeing if there's anything I can do to stop him before he grows too powerful." Angel went through the kitchen drawers until he found a knife of suitable size, marveling at the fact that forceps could now be considered a luxury.
Cordelia snorted, and a measure of the tension ran out of her body. Not as much as Angel would have liked. "Of course. I'm afraid that I can't say the same. I'm only passing through on my way to meet this old lady that I've been carrying around in my head for the past couple of weeks."
"Mother Abigail," Angel said as he stripped off his ruined shirt. "I knew she would be the one who pulled you. But Lindsey?"
Cordelia stared down at her fingers as they gripped the edge of the table. "You left," she said in a low voice that was too even to sound natural. "And I didn't hear anything from you again, even though you Ipromised/I me that you would come back. Lindsey was there, at least, and he understood. Little rat bastard that he turned out to be, he helped me get this far."
"Exactly," Angel snapped, forgetting for the moment the canyon that stood between them. "Take a look at just how far he's gotten you."
Cordelia yelped softly as her fingers tightened against the table and one of her nails broke, sending a rivulet of blood running from the cuticle. She stuck it into her mouth. "My vision was of both of you," she said at long last, pulling her finger back out and examining it. "Package deal. And…he helped me to get back out again. That's got to count for something, doesn't it?" The anxiety in Cordelia's voice was the closest thing to real emotion that she had shown for the past hour.
'Not if a carbon copy of him is the result.' "I don't know," Angel said.
"And I left him, just like you left me." Cordelia's mouth twisted and she rubbed at her eyes. "That's great."
"Not the same," Angel said, waiting until Cordelia looked up at him. "You didn't deserve to be left."
Cordelia exhaled noisily. "Not big with the making me feel better." She stared down at the knife. "I just want to get it all over with." From the tone of her voice, it wasn't bullet extraction that she was thinking of. The moonlight that spilled through the kitchen windows made the waxen cast to her skin impossible to ignore.