A Tale Of Two Blades Chapter 27, a tv x-overs fanfic

Nottingham's Loft
New York, NY
Saturday, August 11, 2001

Even though Lilianna's cell phone was with her in the firing range, she almost didn't hear it ring over the cacophony of automatic weapons fire. She switched on the safety and set the gun down, answering breathlessly, "Hello?"

"Are you alright?"

"Christian! Yes, I'm okay. I was just practicing with one of your prototypes and almost missed your call. We do have a problem though. One of Irons' men was following me yesterday..."

"Are you sure you're okay?" He interrupted.

"He's dead," she answered. She heard Christian sigh with relief and continued. "But we have to assume Irons knows something. I have no idea what Marcus might have done while he was on his own. He may have told Irons everything."

There was only silence on the other end, and Lilianna got worried, "Christian?"

"Mr. Irons may have had a fail safe device inserted into my head. I can't remember anything that happened yesterday and there's a small incision on the back of my neck."

"Oh god." Lilianna sank to her knees. "What are we going to do?"

"We're just going to have to accept that he may know everything already, but we'll have to act as if nothing has happened. It's the only way we'll be able to wait and see what he does. He hasn't said anything about canceling the dinner Sunday, so we'll all have to just suffer through it. I don't know whether we should tell Sara before or after. She may not be able to hide her animosity during dinner if we tell her beforehand. Do you think Gabriel is safe?"

"I sent him away yesterday with a woman I met at a bookstore. Her name is Mara and she knew the tribe."

"The Witchblade tribe?"

"Yes, she's a twelve thousand year old Immortal. She doesn't know where the other Witchblades are though. Anyway, she took Gabriel with her to Los Angeles this morning. He'll be safe. Oh, and I saw Susanna. She's on a job now, but she's going to bring back the Eye of Kronos when she's done."

Oh God, Lilianna thought. I forgot to tell her about the book.

"Good." Christian paused. "Lily?"

"Yes?"

"If I...can't be freed from Irons, will you leave me?"

"Never," she swore softly.

"Thank you," he whispered.

The silence between them this time was heavy with emotion.

"Irons would never have something big go down with Sara if he weren't there for it. I think we should tell your mother after the dinner."

"I think you're right..."

"Lily, I have to go, Irons is coming. We'll talk about it more tomorrow when I get back."

"Okay, be careful."

"You, too."

Lilianna hung up her cell phone and picked up the experimental gun she had been target practicing with. Leaving the firing range, she brought it back into the weapons room and took down a katana. Doing sword katas always helped her focus.

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Angel Investigations
the former Hyperion Hotel
Los Angeles, CA
Saturday, August 11, 2001

Gabriel's mouth fell open when he saw a green man with short red horns standing behind the reception counter. Mara nudged him forward and the green man smiled.

"Sorry about the make-up, kiddies..."

"Speak only the truth," Mara said in Pylean, then in English, "excuse my friend, you're his first up-close-and-in-person demon. It's a good thing you're from Pylea and not somewhere worse, though you're obviously better behaved than most Pyleans. I didn't want his first meeting with a supernatural being to go badly. My name is Mara. This is Gabriel, and he'll be staying here for awhile."

"Oh, he can't do that." The young woman who had spoken, toothpick thin with haunted brown eyes, stood up from a desk behind the reception counter and walked over to stand beside the green demon. "I'm Fred, and this is Lorne, and this is Angel Investigations, we help the hopeless." She paused for a moment after the catch phrase. "We're not really a hotel."

Mara smiled gently at Fred, "I know."

She pulled a packet of papers from the outside compartment of Gabriel's suitcase and handed them to Lorne.

"These are papers explaining that I bought the mortgage from the bank and paid it in full. Angel now owns the hotel free and clear. Starting tomorrow, work crews will be coming in to begin remodeling the hotel so that Angel will have the option of renting out rooms. Of course, he'll have to limit his clientele to those with knowledge of the supernatural. Anyway, I would appreciate it if Gabriel could stay in one of the rooms on the second floor. I believe they're still usable. The construction crew is one that has dealt with this type of situation before, and they'll bring several plans for the hotel, though of course Angel will have final approval."

Fred and Lorne looked at each other.

"Thank you," Fred breathed. "You have no idea how much this means to us. We weren't sure how we were going to be able to pay the mortgage this month and Wolfram and Hart was going to foreclose on us. Oh, but we won't be able to pay the construction workers."

"It's been taken care of. And you're welcome. We can't let the bad guys win, now can we?"

"Sugar, you can each have a whole floor. I'm sure Angelcakes won't mind."

Mara smiled at Lorne, "Just the one room for Gabriel. I have to get going."

"You're not going to stay and meet Angel?" Gabriel asked her. "Maybe he's here."

"No, he and the others are out killing a monster in the sewers near a school." Fred shrugged apologetically.

"It's alright, another time." Mara gave Gabriel a quick hug. "Call me if you need anything, or if they do."

"Thank you, aunt Mara." Gabriel grinned at her.

Mara looked a little shocked, but then she smiled. "You're welcome."

She said good-bye to Lorne and Fred and left. Fred pulled out a sign in book from beneath the counter. She opened it to the fourth page and handed Gabriel a pen. The last entry was from 1954. Leaving the last few spaces blank on the left page, Gabriel signed his name and the date at the top of the next empty page. He left the "planned departure" date and room number blank.

"I couldn't help but overhear you call Mara your aunt. Isn't she a little young?" Lorne asked.

"She's not really my aunt. It's a long story, but let's just say that she's distantly related to my mother and we just became acquainted yesterday. And she's not quite as young as she looks."

"If she doesn't know Angel, why is she doing all of this for him?" Fred asked.

Gabriel shrugged and picked up his suitcase, fully prepared to lie to protect his aunt's past and future. "I really don't know. I didn't ask; she's got more money than anyone could ever spend and she knows Angel is a good guy, maybe she does this a lot. You wanna show me a room?"

"Just the one suitcase?" Lorne asked.

"That and the crate just inside the door. I'll come back for it." Gabriel muttered under his breath, "All my worldly possessions compressed."

"You take him upstairs, kitten. I'll man the phones."

Gabriel followed Fred up a rather impressive staircase to the hotel's second floor.

"You can have room eleven if you want, Lorne's in nine, I'm in ten, twelve and fourteen's bathrooms don't work, and Faith is in thirteen. Or you could have one of the rooms at the end of the hall, I'm pretty sure fifteen through nineteen are in working order."

"Eleven is fine. Does anyone else live here?"

"Just Angel, on the third floor, he used to live here alone. Well, not live, but..." Fred smiled at her own joke. "Wesley, Gunn and Cordy all have their own apartments nearby. Lorne used to live at Caritas, his karaoke bar, but it got trashed when they brought me back from Pylea through a dimensional portal. And Faith used to be in jail."

"What for?"

"Manslaughter. She got a little...overzealous and staked a man she thought was a vampire."

"Oh. You said they brought you back from Pylea. Are you a demon, too?"

Fred shook her head. "Gracious me, no. I was sucked in five years ago, and I was a runaway slave when Angel found and rescued me."

"If you don't mind talking about it, I'd like to hear more about Pylea later."

They were standing inside room eleven now and Gabriel set his suitcase down on the bed.

Fred frowned. "I don't know, I don't really like talking about it too much. It wasn't exactly a happy time for me."

"That's alright," Gabriel assured her. "Thanks for showing me the room."

Fred slid her hands into her jeans pockets and rocked on her heels. "No problem. I guess we'll see you later."

"Yeah, I'm just going to unpack now."

Fred left, and Gabriel sat down on the bed and took a deep breath. Living here was going to be very interesting.

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Half an hour later, Gabriel wandered back down to the lobby. The hotel was an impressive building and for the most part it was still in good condition. He was very curious to see the rest of it.

Fred was nowhere in sight when he reached the reception counter, and Lorne was poring over the papers Mara had left for Angel. Gabriel had just opened his mouth to ask if he could look around more when the back door swung open. Five people walked in, all covered, to varying degrees, by what looked like neon-bright pea soup. There were three men and two women, all of them appearing to be in their mid- to late-twenties.

One of the women hung back from the rest of the group. She was covered head-to-foot with the goo, some of it different colors. From her boot-clad feet to her knees the goo was puce and there were swirls of deep red on her arms, shoulders and abdomen.

He realized the red was her own blood a moment before Lorne asked, "Faith, princess, are you okay?"

"Other than really needing a shower and a couple Band-Aids, I'm five by five," her statement was made with head high, but Gabriel caught a flash of gratitude from her for Lorne's concern.

The second female, the least messy of the group by far, held her arms away from her body. "I swear I lose more outfits to demon guts than I do to changing fashion. Once we start getting more clients, we are setting up a clothing reimbursement fund."

"Cordelia," the tallest of them sighed. "I don't want to hear any money complaints right now. Killing that Spectator is going to keep us open and running for another month, and we stopped it from preying on any more children. That's all I care about right now."

"How many eyes did that thing have anyway?" A young black man picked what looked like a tentacle off his sleeve, disgust and resignation warring for supremacy in his gaze.

"Fully matured Spectators are said to have one hundred eyes," stated the third man, this one with glasses and a British accent. Something about the way he had said it made Gabriel think he was quoting a book.

"It must not have been fully mature then," Faith said. "It had seventy-eight; seventy-nine if you count the one inside it."

"And every single one of them a gusher. Bursting eyeballs has joined the list of my least favorite ways to kill something." The dark-haired man who seemed to be the leader of the little group looked at Gabriel and asked, "Who are you?"

Fred came down the stairs at that moment and said, "That's Gabriel, he's staying here for awhile. We have great news, Angel!"

Angel frowned thoughtfully. "If it can wait, let's talk about it in a bit, we all need to wash off, and I'm sure everyone else is tired and hungry. Lorne, you want to order pizza? Is that okay with everyone?"

They all nodded, and Gabriel offered, "I'll chip in if you don't mind sharing."

"Sure." Angel spoke to Lorne again, "Order the pizzas one size larger than we usually get." Then to Gabriel, "Just no garlic."

"No problem."

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Forty-five minutes later, everyone was clean and divvying up the pizza. Gabriel assumed those who didn't live here kept extra clothing on hand. He had been introduced to each of Angel's employees as they came back downstairs from cleaning up, and Lorne had filled him in on how everyone had met while they were waiting. He was most fascinated by the limited information Lorne had about Faith, the second of the two current Vampire Slayers.

She was more withdrawn than anyone else in the group, even more than Fred, who was slightly odd and, Gabriel realized, still getting used to freedom. Gabriel decided he would try to become friends with Faith and find out more about her while he was here.

Gabriel was surprised to see Angel eat two slices of pizza. He had been under the impression that vampires didn't eat solid food.

When the vampire with a soul had finished, he turned to Fred, "So, what's the great news?"

Fred smiled tremulously, and Gabriel smiled to himself. The girl obviously had a serious case of hero-worship going. Lorne handed the papers to Angel that Mara had left as Fred started talking.

"When Gabriel came, a woman was with him. She was very beautiful and very nice. Her name was Mara, and she paid for the hotel! Wolfram and Hart can't take it from you anymore."

Angel looked at the papers in his lap as if they were going to bite him. Picking them up gingerly, he skimmed through them. When he put them back down, he stared at Gabriel for a full minute before asking, "Who is she?"

"A distant relative of mine. She is a powerful sorceress and an extremely wealthy woman. And before you ask why she did this, I really don't know. I only met her yesterday, but I do know that she is very firmly entrenched on the side of good, and she seems to have a vendetta against people like the lawyers at Wolfram and Hart. She knows that these money woes have been getting in the way of your mission, so she got rid of the problem and suggested a way to keep yourself out of it for good."

"The kid's right, sweetcheeks," added Lorne. "There are licenses there for every kind of business you could possibly think to set up here, and maybe making the hotel an actual hotel would be a really good idea. Supernatural folks need a place to stay when they travel, too, and they usually have to stay in little out of the way holes-in-the-wall."

Angel shook his head, "I can't believe this."

"We can all get raises now!" Cordelia crowed.

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Nottingham's Loft
New York, NY
Sunday, August 12, 2001
afternoon

The moment the elevator doors opened to reveal Christian, Lilianna pounced. They kissed passionately, releasing the pent-up emotions of the past few days. Lifting Lilianna, Christian took a few steps into the loft so the elevator could close. Lilianna pulled back slightly from him when he set her down and slipped his Witchblade off.

It immediately went back to the correct size, and she slipped it on his ring finger.

She looked up at him and smiled.

"I love you, Lily," he said.

Her smile became dazzling, and she said, "I love you, too."

"I wish there was some way we could get married legally. But if we did, I'd want it to be with our real names, and that isn't possible."

"It would be nice," she agreed. "But it's okay. We are married by the Witchblade, and that's more than enough for me."

Christian scooped her up into his arms. "Right now we have some lost time to make up for."

"Mm-hm," she murmured her agreement as his mouth met hers once again.