Part Three
In the absence of streetlamps, Los Angeles had all of the charm of a tomb. The only ones who moved comfortably through it after dark were they that had little reason to believe that they would ever see their own. Angel's lips curved into a shadow smile that left his mouth tasting of ashes and pennies, the only kind that he remembered how to wear any longer, as he pulled the broadsword from its sheath. The metal made a faint whisking noise as it was dragged across the leather. Beyond that and the faint crunch of roadway grit beneath his boots, all the world was rendered into silence. Angel told himself it was cleansing rather than empty, this solemn husk left in place of the city that he still swore to protect, and that the fight was not over yet. He could still feel a pulse reverberating through the concrete, in the air between the buildings, faint but unmistakable. It was not until that faded away that they would have to pause and take stock of their remaining options.
"Up here?" Angel asked Spike, more to cut the shroud-like air with the sound of his own voice than out of any real need for confirmation. The orange glow lighting up the sky directly ahead served as a marker more eye-catching than any number of neon signs, unchallenged as it was by the intrusion of artificial lights.
"Yeah. Should be about ten blocks ahead, give or take." Spike's voice floated to him from a place about twenty paces to the right.
Angel inhaled deeply and smelled soot and flesh charred too badly for the species to be recognizable. "Eleven. But who's counting?"
Of the faint indigo light which glowed beyond the flames, soft and so lacy-delicate that the eye would skip over it in the night unless one already knew where to look, neither of them would directly refer.
Spike made a whistling sound through his nose that could have been interpreted as amusement, if Angel had so wished. His hair caught the odd motes of light thrown down by the stars and gleamed briefly silver when he turned his head. "You ready for excitement, Babe?"
A mouse would have made a greater noise dropping down from a tabletop than Illyria did as she jumped down from the rooftop on which she had been perched. Her eyes glowed in the darkness as she said, "I am prepared for bloodshed." Angel saw her lip curl for a moment as she dragged her eyes across the swords that her companions carried. When Illyria's face fell back into its normal, neutral lines without taking the opportunity for a scathing remark as it was offered, Angel felt as if the world had just tilted sideways on him.
"Good to hear." Angel shifted the sword in his hand, accustoming himself once more to the weight of it, and told himself that this was all that his world needed to boil down to.
The one-building fire that Spike had spotted on the all entrails, all the time broadcast had spread to a half dozen other structures by the time that they ran up. Angel could see at a glance that there was going to be no saving the building, even if the appropriate personnel and equipment had been on the scene. The smell of burning meat and hair was much thicker here, so thick that Angel figured even mortal senses would have been able to recognize humanity at this range. He knew even before he had halted his sprint and twirled the sword in his hand that there wasn't a great deal of hope of saving the occupants, either. If something twinged deep within his chest at this admission, then Angel told himself that he did not feel it.
Well, that left them with the demons that had started it. It was fun for the remains of his whole strange family.
Angel swung the broadsword in a wide arc, slicing through the muscle, tendon, and finally spine of a squat, blue-skinned demon who didn't even realize that Angel was there before his body was falling to the cement in two perfect halves. The demon's webbed hands twitched for a few seconds, opening and closing like those of a frog having a seizure, and half-chewed gobbets of the arm that it had been dining on sprayed from its mouth. Whatever emotions Angel felt before he shoved them back down in favor of the next kill, pity did not number among them.
Illyria had returned to her rooftop perch immediately after checking in, disappearing into the gloom so thoroughly that Angel doubted he could have picked her out even if he had tried. She leaped down from her hiding place now, catching a demon across the back with her falling weight and driving them both to the pavement. Illyria had the benefit of being cushioned by the body beneath her. Her victim was not so lucky. The demon's face was driven into the ground hard enough to send a spray of broken teeth flying in a semicircle about its head. Considering what those teeth had been dining on moments before, Angel was not feeling inclined towards sympathy, even when Illyria dragged the demon back up to its feet and tore its head from its shoulders with a smooth roll of her arms and the sound of a jar opening. "I think that one was already dead, actually."
Illyria fixed him with a look.
"Right. You don't tell me how to do my job, I won't tell you how to do yours." Angel twirled the sword in his hand in order to flick the largest amount of gore from the blade. Most of the demons had decided that hauling ass was the better part of valor and were taking themselves away from the scene as fast as their stubby legs would move them, but that was not causing their pursuers any great inconvenience. Angel didn't mind getting his pulse up, figuratively speaking. He had worked too damned hard at keeping the thoughts that wanted to run riot through his head at bay for the past eighteen hours, and he was not about to fail in that battle now. Not even if he had to make the streets of Los Angeles flow with demon blood, exercise in futility or not.
'Mreck demons,' Angel's ever helpful brain supplied for him as he diced his second wannabe predator, into his third and beyond, somehow missing the message that all Angel really wanted for it to do was shut up and let basic instinct take the wheel. 'Known for a taste for human flesh and an aversion to eating their prey raw, but so rare that they rarely pose a threat to large populations.' It was delivered in a crisp, cultured mental voice that reminded Angel suddenly, painfully of Wesley; now he really wished that instinct would hurry its ass up already.
"Not so rare anymore," Angel muttered, and flicked a body part that he preferred not to identify away from the sleeve of his coat. They were not much of a challenge, either. Angel was coming to realize that he would have to aim for quantity over quality if he wanted to halt the buzzing in his head.
'Working for the Powers That Be.' Angel set his teeth together hard enough to make the muscles in his jaw creak as he split a demon's skull with enough force to send Spike glancing his way, eyebrows raised. Angel ignored it, just as he had ignored all of Spike's other stabs at heroics over the previous year and a half. As he had mightily attempted to ignore the slow, sick realization that he had been crawling up on him like the tide since the world had refused to turn to normality after the fight in the alley. The massacre, really; Angel supposed that those lines could afford to be blurred a bit when everyone still standing on the side of the angels had died at least once. He had never realized how powerfully far off course he had been driven, though, that a man such as Lindsey should play a part in taking his place. The city, Angel was beginning to see, had not begun its slide into the irretrievably fucked with one night of blood, sweat, and rain in an alleyway that few people would have found reason to glance into otherwise. Not if the golden boy if evil's most successful experiment with stock options was carrying Angel's old sword. It had only been the final nudge.
Angel cut through the last demon and paused, sucking in air that he did not need to compensate for exertion that he did not feel. The roaring blaze at his back warmed his shoulders through the leather of his jacket, stirring vampire instincts into a wary wakefulness, but Angel did not move to put himself any farther from the flames. The gleam of blood along the edge of his sword was already drying into a reddish-brown crust. He flicked it again, realized that he was performing an entirely futile gesture, and slid the blade back into the scabbard.
There were some instincts which telegraphed themselves equally well regardless of whether the person in question was a human or a vampire, and the bone-prickling sensation of being watched was one of them. Angel returned his hand to the hilt of the sword but hesitated in pulling it out just yet. He twisted around instead to make eye contact with a boy standing some thirty feet away and regarding him with a dark, solemn gaze. Stacks of burning wood and drywall that had once been someone's home split the pavement between them like funeral pyres, so that if Angel wished to read the expression on the boy's face he had to do so through the twisting flames. They cast stark planes of light and shadow across the smooth adolescent flesh, turning into something simultaneously older than its years and ageless. Angel shivered as he felt a disturbing prickle tugging at the back of his mind and opened his mouth to call out and ask the youth if he was all right. Before he could get more than the first syllable out of his mouth, the boy had spun away and was disappearing into the shadows that were all too eager to swallow people whole. If he was hurt in any way, it certainly was not affecting his speed.
Angel considered giving chase anyway to see if the boy had once lived in the inferno and if he needed a place to shelter for the rest of the night. The building at his back decided to give up on its shaky supports at that moment, spraying wood, cement, and embers out in a wide arc as it collapsed. Angel ducked his head and was obliged to lurch away across the parking lot as he felt the flames whispering at his neck. Illyria galloped by covered in gore that blended almost entirely with the hue of her skin. Angel thought that the expression on her face was nearly rapturous. Spike staggered along a few steps behind her, putting out a fire that was trying to start on the shoulder of his jacket. When Spike pulled his hand away, Angel could see fresh blisters rising through the hole burned into the leather.
"Did you notice any others?" Angel asked Spike, ticking his head towards the remains of the building as they continued to burn at a merry bonfire pace. The few skitterings of those people and demons foolish enough to travel openly after the sun had set he ignored, though they remained a constant low-level distraction from the corner of his eye. "When you watched the news?"
Spike stared at him. "Are you kidding me?"
Angel grinned in a way guaranteed to drive all thoughts of mirth from Spike's head. He spread his arms in a broad 'After you' gesture. "Well, then. Lead the way."
---
The sun was just casting its sleepy fingers over the horizon, turning the sky into a roseate hue broken only by the sulking indigo shadow where the Wolfram and Hart offices had once stood. It marred the skyline like a bruise upon a woman's cheekbone, and as Angel trudged the final few steps towards their sanctuary he noticed that he was not the only one who could not bear to look directly upon it for any extended period of time. Spike's eyes would bounce towards it for a few seconds and then skitter away, only to return again as surely as iron filings being pulled towards a magnet. The humans beginning to peek their heads out of the doorways to take advantage of as much precious daylight as possible would look towards it only in rare moments, even going so far as to turn their faces completely away to protect themselves.
Their very own elephant in the room, Angel thought, if one allowed in this case that it was an elephant frequently given to picking up party guests and eating them. He snorted to himself and held the door open for Spike, who was limping badly and leaving bloody footprints behind him from a deep chunk that had been bitten out of his thigh. Spike lifted his eyebrows in silent acknowledgment, and they slipped in and shut the door behind them just as the first rays of the dawn began to hit against the wood.
A girl of about seven or eight was seated upon the stairs leading to the upper two floors. She folded her arms across the tops of her knees and watched them with eerily calm eyes. "You were out late."
"Nature of the job, short stuff," Spike said, making a belated effort to turn his body sideways so that the wound in his leg was not so glaringly obvious. The girl's eyes followed every move.
"Miss Vasquez says that it's bad to go out after dark now."
"Miss Vasquez is a very smart woman." Angel hoped that his voice was coming across as smoothing. He was at long last too tired to tell. Angel looked across the lobby and saw a harried woman in her early thirties hurrying across the room towards them. A thick band of scar tissue split the skin of what had once been a full, seductive lower lip. Her eyes twitched over Spike's wounded leg and the bruises which tattooed both his and Angel's skin, but she did not comment.
"Come on, Katie," the woman said, taking the girl's hand in her own and tugging her off the stairs. Katie followed obediently, twining a few strands of blond hair around the fingers of her free hand. "I don't want you that close to the door. The sun's not high enough yet for it to be safe." The woman looked towards Angel and Spike again, her lips moving as she took a silent inventory of the wounds. Angel thought that there might be something like worry in her face before it dove beneath the surface again. "The, um, the blue lady. Is she missing?"
"Eating." And having received Illyria's word that humans composed no part of the menu, Angel told himself that it was none of his business.
"Oh. Okay. So…I'm glad the three of you had a good night out, then." The woman turned to go and tugged Katie's along with her, taking them both back to the ground floor apartment where they crouched.
"Can we go by the school later?" Katie asked as the door was opened.
"Maybe when the sun gets higher."
"They might come back to look for me today."
"We can keep trying, sweetie."
"Hell of a world," Spike said when the door had safely shut behind the pair. He emitted soft grunts of pain with each step as he began the laborious task of climbing the stairs.
"Need help?" Angel asked.
Spike flicked a glance over him. "Sure thing, brave knight. Carry my damsel ass up these stairs."
"If that's what you're into." Angel offered his arm anyway, even going so far as to smile back when Spike bared his teeth at him.
"I can manage."
"Suit yourself." The puddle of blood that Spike was leaving in his path would match the numerous others that they had already put down into the carpet over the previous months. Angel preferred to think of it as their last-ditch method of locating home if any of them were ever hit on the head hard enough to bring on amnesia.
The apartment was dark when they entered it save for a small rectangle of light where Lindsey had pulled the curtains open before dragging his pallet in front of the window and falling asleep. Or was pretending to sleep, at any rate; Angel could hear the way that Lindsey's pulse sped up and his breathing quickened the moment that the door's lock turned.
"Paranoid bastard," Spike muttered as he sidestepped the light on his way to the shower and the first aid kit.
Angel thought of the familiar and unfriendly faces that Lindsey must have seen on his sojourn into Angel's old stomping grounds. He was not sure which emotion it was that was trying to crawl into his voice as he said, "Decent reasons for that." He had become so used to the look which Spike cast him with regularity now, the one which said that Angel had misplaced his good sense somewhere far, far down the line and that Spike was beginning to question his own for sticking around for so long, that he did not need to glance over to know that he was on the receiving end of it now.
"You kids play nice now," Spike called over his shoulder as he exited the room to tend to his leg. "One ritual guaranteed to bring down the wrath of heaven in a twenty-four hour period is more than enough."
"I get the feeling that he doesn't like me," Lindsey drawled as soon as Spike was gone. He did not bother to open his eyes. Angel tilted his head to one side and noted that the exposed skin of Lindsey's arms was still raised into hard knots of flesh.
Angel settled himself against the far wall, safely away from the sunlight streaming through the window, and folded his arms over his chest. A thousand small hurts spread out over his body called out for attention, but he had other matters to attend to. "Tell me that's not your revelation for the day."
Lindsey turned his head towards Angel and opened his eyes at last. They were even bluer than Angel remembered, as reflective as mirrors and with about the same amount of warmth. For someone recently escaped from the clutches of hellfire, Lindsey was doing a remarkable job of holding onto his ice. "And I know that you don't like me."
Angel felt the smile as it touched his lips beyond his control, and as he watched Lindsey recoiled just a bit before he could halt himself. "Well, I guess I can't call you stupid, then." Lindsey tensed up by a few more degrees, anger radiating out from his every pore and making the air around him all but shiver. Angel felt the exhaustion slip away from him in favor of something fierce and well worn. Familiarity bred contempt, so they said. Luckily for Angel, that was precisely what he wanted. "That window faces west, Lindsey. You and I both know that tiny bit of sunlight is not going to stop me if I decided to come after you."
Lindsey flicked the wolf's smile from years past at him and pulled his body into a sitting position, using the wall at his back as a brace. "You'll have to forgive me if I go through the motions while I look over my options," he said. The sunlight coming in the window behind him shone through his hair and cast his face into shadow. "And you can imagine how eager I am to find out if one of those options is going to involve you killing me again." Lindsey shrugged with a nonchalance that was too perfect to be real and said, "Or you could hand it off to one of your pals if you To Do list is getting too long. Whatever." There was an edge to his voice that made the corners of Angel's mouth quirk upwards.
Angel shifted, settling into a more comfortable position against the wall. Lindsey tracked his every move. "Wouldn't want to go through the trouble of raising you again the next time that I have a hunch." 'Working for the Powers That Be.' Just as he had a thousand times over the past several hours, Angel shut down the line of thought before it could go any farther. "Calling in that many favors was hard enough the first time."
"Isn't that kind of ritual a little dark for you?" Lindsey flashed a smile suggesting that he either overestimated the strength of the sun at his back or underestimated how eager hell would be to welcome him back.
"The rules have changed." Angel traded in his drawl for a short, clipped tone that made Lindsey blink and killed quickly any notion of a smart-assed reply that he might have been entertaining. Angel sighed on air that he did not need and decided that a swift subject change was in order. "You were working for the Powers that Be." Saying it out loud was not all that much better than thinking it, but Angel saw this as akin to lancing a wound. Once the first incision was made, the rest of the poison would flow out and away that much faster. If Lindsey was smart, Angel told himself, he could choose his next words very carefully.
Lindsey flinched and something chiller still stole over his face for a few seconds. He inclined his head upwards so that he could peer over the window ledge and into the chaos beyond. "Yeah. Guess they have," he said, choosing to ignore Angel's second statement entirely. If there was any emotion beyond exhaustion in his voice, then it was too slight for even Angel's ears to pick up on. There were purple semicircles painted beneath Lindsey's eyes dark enough to make him look as if he had been punched in the face. Angel wondered if Lindsey had slept at all that night. "How?"
Angel had been planning on asking that question himself during this interview, but he could read nothing more than honest curiosity in Lindsey's voice. Curiosity and, just possibly, something that approached sorrow. Why not? There was nothing else to do for the next twelve hours, so they might as well sit down and indulge in a story. Angel unfolded his arms and stared at his hands, memorizing the blood driven into every crease. Very little of it was crimson. "The Senior Partners," he said. Lindsey shifted and made a 'well, of course' gesture with his hand. "They weren't pleased to have some of their biggest clients wiped out in one go." Lindsey made the same gesture again. The dullness was retreating from his eyes, replaced by a keen, searching look that Angel remembered from their first meeting years before.
"They're funny like that." The twitching smile attempting to make its way across Lindsey's face did nothing to chisel the ice away from his eyes, or to unravel the tension that held his shoulders tense and rigid. Lindsey inclined his head upwards to look over the edge of the window again, as if his brain could not quite compute the images that it was being fed and had to return to the stimulus again and again. Angel could sympathize.
"They opened up a portal to bring their army through," Angel said. "When the message had been delivered, they saw no point in closing it again."
Lindsey turned back to look at him. If he was surprised, then he hid it well. "There's a portal to hell out there," he said.
"Right where the Wolfram and Hart offices used to be." It was Angel's turn to display a smile jagged and bitter enough to leave the taste of bile across his tongue. "Your bosses, they have a hell of a sense of humor." Lindsey twitched, and Angel was reminded that this was precisely true, any longer. "Your old bosses, anyway."
"The new ones have a pretty strange way of getting their kicks, too." The thundercloud that drifted across Lindsey's face reminded Angel that they hadn't exactly pulled him out of a suite at the celestial Hilton. He had a few questions that could stand to be answered on that count, too, but not now. Not when he had the sense that he and Lindsey were both trembling up to the edge of a cliff and peeking over the side, looking for an excuse to fall, to fight. "So this," Lindsey said, jerking his thumb over his shoulder to indicate the merry chaos occurring just beyond the glass, "is what I've been missing since my demise?"
"Hope you aren't disappointed."
"Hell, no." Lindsey attempted a light tone, failed miserably, and winced. "Poor choice of words. But I feel right at home."
"Switching sides did wonders for your personality." Angel watched Lindsey closely for the betraying twitch, the shadow of a smirk or the skip in the heartbeat that would let him keep on listening to the voice inside which said that somehow, someway, Lindsey was pulling a fast one in a desperate attempt to avoid his eternal just desserts. He had tried it before, and each time Angel was able to detect the lie almost before the words had exited Lindsey's mouth.
Lindsey's heart rate did not vary by so much as a nanosecond as he said, "Look at that. One more thing that we have in common." The last struggling bits of doubt in Angel's mind died a quick and ignoble death.
Angel pushed himself away from the wall, noting the way that Lindsey's muscles wound themselves into an even tighter network of tension. Cool façade or not, if the things obviously weighing on Lindsey's mind got any heavier he was going to sprain something. "Wonders never cease, do they? If you want to go outside, wait until the sun gets a little higher in the sky. There are some things out there that know how to work the shadows to their advantage."
Lindsey laughed, quick and diamond-sharp. The noise sounded like it hurt. "It was like that before the friendly neighborhood apocalypse, too."
"More than I think any of us realized." Angel turned to go and was stopped by Lindsey calling his name.
Lindsey licked his lips and did not speak for a moment when Angel was facing him again. "Eve," he said at long last. "Not that I really expected her to don a white cowboy hat or anything, but if you've heard from her…"
Angel paused for a beat before he answered. "We never found a body," he said when the air was on the verge of taking on weight. "Eve was wily. She might have gotten out of the city before it really got bad."
Lindsey nodded and muttered a few exhausted obscenities beneath his breath before he bowed his head and rubbed at his eyes. Angel waited for a moment to see if Lindsey had anything else to say. When nothing came, he left the room to tend to his own wounds, leaving Lindsey sitting alone in his small circle of light.
End Part Three