At work the next day, Sidney was flooded with calls. And they were a little hard to handle. She'd spoken to a teenage girl who sobbingly refused to accept the fact that she'd been date-raped, a middle-aged woman who was afraid that her husband, who had always been abusive to her, had begun sexually abusing one of her daughters, and a female who's age she couldn't quite place, who had just about given up on life entirely; and all before lunch time. All of these women were victims, unable to take their lives back into their own control. And while the job could easily leave Sidney in a funk in her personal life, she didn't mind it because she had been a victim herself not long ago. And why not use the perseverance built up in her from her past experiences to help other women? It only made sense to turn the bad from the murders into good through helping Sidney earnestly relate to these women.
Plus, on this particular day, focusing on the phone calls helped Sidney keep her mind off of Alton. He was a sad story. He came into work late and didn't say one word to Sidney; he wouldn't even look at her. And when she finally did lock eyes with him as he handed her some paperwork, she regretted it intensely. His formerly inviting, dreamy blue eyes were deathly cold, and they glared right through her. She tried to smile at him, and make light of everything, but Alton would have nothing to do with her. And while she didn't regret saying no to him, she did feel like she had lost a friend. Since she knew that her usual of joking around with Alton for a good few minutes after her shift was out of the question, she decided that she was going to slip out of the side door, into the alley, so that she wouldn't have to suffer his cold shoulder a second time that day.
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"I look like a freaking ghost," Angel snickered bitterly to himself as he waited in the sewer at the back entrance of the Crisis Center. He was wearing thick wool gloves, and his torso was covered with a thick wool blanket with two holes cut in the front so that he could see. Basically, he felt and looked like a bit of a jackass. The plan was to grab the demon and pull it down into the sewer with him, to make his sun exposure as minimal as possible. It made sense, and sounded efficient enough, the only problem was that he had been waiting in that sewer for an hour and a half, covered in wool, in LA. Needless to say, he was a little hot, and also kind of itchy too. Angel sighed in frustration, then looked up to see a man in a ghostly looking mask, with a black robe on, slinking along the side of the building, "At least I'm not the only one who looks like he's dressed for Halloween."
Just then a long-legged, brunette female in jeans exited the building. Angel tensed up, assuming this was the girl from Cordelia's vision. He ticked his eyes over in the direction of the man in the mask, he was gone. Anxiously, the vampire watched as the woman headed towards the sidewalk. She swallowed the final sips of a Sprite and started to toss it aside then thought better of it, turning around to throw it away in the dumpster behind her. Her heels clicked against the concrete. The sound greatened in his vampire ears.
Click-click-click-click-click-click-click. Stop. Aaaaaaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiigggghhhh!
Her scream, his cue, left a ring in his ears as he climbed the ladder out of the sewer while the sun instantly beginning to take its toll. He had to analyze and act on the scene quickly. Apparently, the guy in the mask had deeper intentions than twirling his thumbs in the back ally. He threw the woman against the brick wall, revealing a colossal knife. Angel ran to help as fast as he could, but he was having trouble seeing through the smoke that was building on top of him. But the girl surprised him in ability. She sent her knee flying into the man's groin, then shoved him aside, running blindly away.
Unfortunately, she fell into the hole left open from Angel's underground waiting area.
"Damn," Angel whispered, finally grabbing hold of the man and yanking him into the sewer.
The man was of poor capacity when paired against Angel, even with him not being vamped out. He knocked him out with one blow. His skin was searing beneath the wool, though, and he winced before turning to the girl, "Are you alright? Whoa..."
The woman crouched into the wall, her eyes wide with horror and her cheeks stained with tears. Her heart pounded a thousand times a second in her ears as she tried to piece together what had happened before her eyes. Ghostface was back.
Angel's face softened at the sight of her terror. He reached out to her, using a gentle tone, "Hey, I'm not gonna hurt you."
"Don't touch me!" She screamed, giving him a personal taste of the groin maneuver she'd used on old ghostface only moments before.
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"No more daytime missions, Cordelia. Give them to Gunn or Wesley," was the first thing that came out of Angel's mouth when he got back to his hotel.
Cordelia eagerly ran to him, ignoring fleeting ideals such as personal space, "So did you save the girl?"
"I wouldn't exactly call it 'saved'," he recollected, heaving his wool coverings into the trash can, "The girl pretty much had it under control without me. I helped her into a sewer, that's what I did. And for thanks, she gave me a kick in the nuts before running off. Oh, and as for your demon..."
"Yeah, did u kill him? Was there green stuff?"
"Not quite. I didn't kill him. And there wouldn't have been any 'green stuff' anyway, because he was a man in a costume."
Solemnly, Cordelia shook her head, "No, Angel. You have to go find that girl. Go back to her. I had another vision about it earlier. A really bad one," she looked down at her hands, glossing over the brutal details of the pain it caused her, "I did not go through that physical hell for nothing. You have to save her."
"And I will," he pronounced, sliding into his usual duster, "But I gotta wonder why The Powers That Be are giving you us so much trouble over a mortal man."
"Because, Angel...It's not a man, it's a demon."
