Part Six
Lindsey watched while the girl that he had just generously sacrificed his own welfare to aid scrambled away from him as if his touch had burned her, her mouth falling open in a gasp of shock. The glasses slid down her nose far enough for Lindsey to see that there was something very wrong with her eyes before she shoved them back up again, but among the collection of scars and half-healed oddities that he had already seen on even a casual walk through the city it was not extreme enough to dwell on. In other situations, her behavior might even have left him feeling insulted. Crazy. The girl was crazy. Unfortunately for her and probably unfortunately for him, as well, she was also about three seconds away from being dead.
Whatever it was that the kids had done while standing in the street like scarecrows, it had made them the focus of all sorts of unwelcome attention. The demons would have passed on their way to their eventual destination without molestation otherwise, Lindsey thought, but that did not seem to be an option now. Now the blades were coming out.
One of the demons looked to be coming to the same conclusion that Lindsey had arrived at several seconds before and was fixating on the black-haired girl as the source of the disruption to what should have been a well-ordered massacre. Lindsey saw a glint of silver and his higher brain functions shut down with no more urging being needed, leaving him with something that was pure, that was instinctive, and that certainly had not been there five years before. He lunged forward, grabbing the girl by her upper arms and dragging her back towards him. She yelped and tried at first to wriggle away. Lindsey thought that he could be forgiven for not giving a great deal of his attention to comfort or social niceties at a time like this, and so he ignored her. He hauled them both back up to their feet in spite of the girl's continued struggling, and the sword clanged down at the place where she had been hard enough to send sparks flying up from the pavement. That got through to her when it seemed that nothing else would. She stood stock still for a few precious seconds, all of the blood drained from her face and her breath coming in short, shallow pants, making Lindsey realize for the first time how very young she actually was. He had still not released her arm.
"What in the hell is wrong with you?" Lindsey yelled at her, loudly enough to make his voice crack. His fingers were digging into the girl's upper arm and sending white lines racing out from the point where their skins met. There would be bruises later.
"Don't touch me!" the girl screamed at him. Her breathing was more rapid than ever, her voice driven up into a register high enough to make dogs wail. Startled, Lindsey did not fight her when she jerked herself away from him hard enough to make his palm tingle. The girl staggered back, panting, and looked around to the place where the boys were stumbling into some trouble of their own. The look that she threw over her shoulder at Lindsey was the purest mingling of disgust and betrayal that he had ever seen, made all the more baffling because he could not remember having ever seen this girl before in his life.
Fine, that was just fine. Lindsey had long since begun to regret casting aside his instinct for self-preservation and getting involved. He watched as the girl scampered around the infuriated demons, darting back and forth with a rodent's speed and defying her own death more than once. Reaching the boys at last, she clamped her hands around theirs as if they were the rescue boats and she was on the verge of drowning. After that, Lindsey figured that it was time he turned his mind to the matter of his own survival.
A sword whistled towards his head and Lindsey ducked, feeling his heart leap into his throat and loving every minute of it. He had been too divorced from his part of himself while he had worked at Wolfram and Hart, this rush and crunch and pure, high adrenaline giddiness of it. There had not been nearly enough time for him to find it again before, well, other things had happened.
The sword passed by closely enough to part Lindsey's hair with its breeze, and Lindsey used the momentum of his dodging to whip back around and go on the offensive. The force of his elbow impacting the demon's nose and jaw sent shock waves reverberating all the way into Lindsey's shoulder, but the crunch of cracking cartilage made it worth it. Lindsey felt his lips curving into something that surely was not pleasant and might even have been a smile. The demon yelled, the sword hit the ground, and they were back in business. Lindsey knelt and scooped up the sword in one fluid motion, doing his best to ignore the stickiness of sweat and blood that covered the hilt and soon enough his fingers. No matter. Lindsey weighed the sword in his hand and felt his smile grow wider.
The last time that he had been engaged in odds like these, the final result had not been one that landed in is favor. Lindsey preferred not to think about that, or the betrayal that had led to that ultimate outcome, directing all of his energy instead into the pure and unbroken physicality of it. Duck, swoop, clang of metal against metal followed by the ever-more satisfying thunk of the blade hitting flesh and the high, spurting arc that meant he had hit an artery. Lindsey jerked the sword free, dodged a blow that would have taken his right arm off at the elbow and the panicky flash of déjà vu that came with it, and looked around for the next opening. His knees were wobbling on him in a way that Lindsey highly suspected was making him look like a newborn colt going up against a pack of pit bulls, but that didn't matter. As long as he was still on his feet he could still come around and surprise them.
Lindsey's lips parted a bit further, until his smile made him difficult to recognize, as he decided that the next person who tried to take him off his feet was going to be in for one hell of a nasty surprise if they thought that he was going down easily.
The kids were grouped together on the opposite side of the street, grabbing at one another's hands as if they were the last life preservers on a sinking ship and staring down an approaching group of demons who were determined to make that ship sink all the faster. Lindsey swung his sword at the wrong angle and received a blow with the flat of an opponent's blade across his knuckles that made his fingers go numb and nearly caused him to drop the sword. He sent up a brief prayer of thinks that he had only been struck by the flat, unsure as he did so whether or not he was also sending up a mental middle finger or even which party he was praying to. Too far away to reach the kids. Lindsey surprised himself with how much he was torn up by not being able to. Some impulses never died, though the urge to be a martyr along with them had long since passed.
Lindsey focused on the clang of blade against blade, on the burning in his muscles and the sweat dripping into his eyes, and forced the flickering coals of his conscience to shut down and go back where they belonged. It had been working for him so far. He cleaved a demon's head from its shoulders with a popping sound that made him think of a watermelon being sliced open with one ferocious blow, leaving his arm burning from fingertips all the way up into his shoulder once the action was done. Getting tired now; time to quite indulging the instinctual and get back to that brain of his, or else he was going to fall just as surely as the rabbit before the hunter.
Yeah, and he would get back to that just as soon as his life stopped being in mortal danger. Lindsey paused to rewind that sentence and its implications that his life was ever I not /I in mortal danger, twitching his head to throw sweat-soaked strands of hair back and out of his eyes. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same. And could Lindsey honestly say that he had felt more alive in this moment, right here, than in any other since long before he had died? Not really.
A line of fire opened up along Lindsey's back, startling him even as he was spinning away and keeping an annoying wound from being worsened into a potentially fatal one. Sweat poured into the flesh and mingled with the blood there almost immediately, sending out flares of pain that echoed all the way into the fillings in Lindsey's teeth. He gnashed them together and accepted his punishment for allowing his attention to wander before he meted it right back out again to the demon that had given the original blow. Lindsey made an internal promise not to let his attention wander again and broke it almost immediately by glancing back towards the ones that had kick-started this whole mess in the first place. The olive-skinned boy's face and neck were drenched in blood; his friends were the only things keeping him on his feet. Lindsey had no idea how they were managing to avoid being mowed down outside of the most colossal amounts of luck ever bestowed on any group of human beings since the world had begun.
And then, in a flash, it was all made clear. The demon closest to the kids paused in its assault, turning partway to the side and shuddering beneath a tremor that nearly drove it to its scaly knees. The brown-haired boy stumbled back a step, his legs wobbling, and the girl had to release his hand and grab at his arm before she was able to drag him back to his feet. She pulled her lips back with the effort of the act; Lindsey could see the gleam of blood on her teeth. The girl shoved the boy's shirtsleeve up so that she could grasp quickly at the bare skin of his arm, flicking a swift, worried glance over at her other companion as she did so. The blood that was already rushing from the olive-skinned boy's nose began to pour from the other two's as well.
The staggering demon stumbled further, spinning all the way around and raising his sword over his head. As Lindsey watched, it cleaved one of its companions in two from the top of its head to the point where Lindsey assumed its navel to be. They both collapsed to the pavement without another sound, except for a few faint clankings as the pieces of their armor fell against one another. Lindsey backed away so quickly that he barely remembered to keep his grip on his own sword. Big deal. For a few minutes, at least, it didn't look at if he needed it.
The demons were turning on one another, first one by one and then in huge, heaving packs, so that the only thing required of Lindsey was that he get out of the way. He did so without wasting a second, allowing his sword to drift down until the point of the blade was resting against the pavement. The moment when whatever magic was being cast across the demons also fell across him never came, but Lindsey wasn't finding this to be a great motive to relax. Not when carnage that Quentin Tarantino would have been proud of was unfolding in front of him. The knowledge that it couldn't be happening to a nicer set of…well, people wasn't exactly accurate but was still the best that they had, was small comfort.
They were killing each other and worse: they were still aware enough to realize what they were doing. Lindsey could see it written into their faces, hear it in the short grunts of pain. As he watched, mute and honestly unable to tell if it was satisfaction or even pity that was causing his heart to take up such a strange rhythm within his chest, limbs were hacked away and buckets of blood fell down to paint the street. Within moments, not a one of the demons that had posed such a dire threat was still on its feet. Lindsey could hear a few of the civilians who had stayed to watch from a safe distance lean over and begin to retch. He tilted his head to one side and watched without a change in expression as the three wonder kids sank to the cement with one fluid motion. With their limbs sprawled out and tangled around one another, from a distance it was difficult for Lindsey to tell if he was watching one person or three. He lifted the sword back into a defensive position as he skirted around the bodies in the street, half-expecting them to rise back to life.
"That's not something that you see every day," Lindsey muttered to himself, frowning. For all that he knew, it might very well be, now. Outside of the isolated few whose stomachs had rebelled against them, the people surrounding him seemed remarkably sanguine about the fact that a massacre had taken place in their midst. Heads were poking out of doors, windows, holes in the rubble, as various attempts to return to the new normal started up. The television was dragged out to its old position on the sidewalk and the soft sounds of explosions could be heard coming from it again within moments. A small group of children were already returning to their cluster around the set as Lindsey strode across the street.
The children that he was looking for were not going unnoticed where they had fallen. A group of people was standing in a semicircle around the adolescents, none of them quite daring to venture close enough to touch. Wary looks were cast across Lindsey and the sword that he still carried, but the combination still warranted no other reaction larger than a raised eyebrow. Lindsey filed that away under information that could be useful later. The longer that he went on in this brave new world, the more it seemed to him as if everything about it was stripped down, from the bare bones essentials needed to get from one day to the next to the actual psychology running through the people's heads. The buildings still standing around them seemed like nothing more than a decorative screen used to cover a world that had long since reverted to an earlier and bloodier time.
"Don't suppose calling an ambulance is an option," Lindsey said, crouching onto his heels and balancing the sword across his knees. Long streaks of crimson branded his arms and hands. The looks of mingled disbelief and amusement that his question garnered provided answers without anyone having to say a word. "Didn't think so." His knees were sending out warning messages again, so Lindsey traded his crouch in for settling down against the curb, still keeping the blade balanced across his legs. He paused for a moment to wipe most of the blood from his hands off across the borrowed sweats; traces of stickiness remained on his palms.
Cocking his head to one side, Lindsey surveyed the unconscious adolescents sprawled out in front of him. The girl was beginning to stir, kicking her feet out in slow circles like a person beginning to emerge from the depths of a nightmare. The blood streaming from her nose had formed a dark red bib over her face and throat that was only now beginning to taper off. At least there was none coming from her ears. Lindsey knew from blood, and humans would be amazed by how much they could lose. She would be fine.
He pasted a quick smile onto his face before he looked up at the concerned crowd. Several of them flinched back, and it was not because of the sword that he still had resting on his knees. Lindsey noted the reaction and dialed down the wolf in his grin, so smoothly and subtly that most of them would never realize that anything had changed. "I'm a friend," he said, modulating his tone and injecting it with a warmth that almost convinced even him. "They'll be fine. I can handle it from here." The fact that he was still carrying a weapon and there were bodies piled behind him in the street didn't seem to be winning him any confidence points. Lindsey widened his smile and carefully set the sword to one side. "Really. I know what to do."
They drifted away easily after that. Lindsey did not know if that was a feature of the new world or the old, and he did not care. He settled back against the curb, replaced the sword across his knees as soon as the last of the onlookers was a sufficient distance away, and waited. His heard slowed down until it was once again beating in the rhythm that he would never be able to call customary again, not after spending so much time in which he had possessed no heartbeat at all, and his biceps and shoulders were beginning to ache with the almost-pleasant burn of being overexerted, of being alive. The girl's twitchings gradually grew more pronounced until, just when the sweat that had collected on the nape of Lindsey's neck and down the line of his spine had finished drying away, she opened her eyes. Her face went expressionless as she caught sight of Lindsey, going blank in a way that would have made Angel proud. She betrayed the badass 'tude that that she was trying to convey as soon as she caught sight of Lindsey's smile, and it grew wider still in response. 'Nice try, Little Red Riding Hood, but you won't be convincing anyone that you're the Big Bad Wolf for a few more years yet.' The girl caught her reaction before it could carry her back too far and covered it by throwing a haughty, measuring look across Lindsey's person. She probed at the blood still trickling from her nose and rubbed her fingers against one another, grimacing when they tried to stick together. The boys were only now beginning to stir on either side of her, and the olive-skinned boy in particular looked to be in pretty rough shape. It was going to take more than a glass of juice to bounce back from that kind of blood loss. Lindsey cocked his head to one side, allowing the smile to drop away from his face in favor of an expression of professional blankness as he surveyed the unconscious youth. The nosebleed seemed to be on its way to stopping, at least. Lindsey didn't figure that there was a whole lot that he would be able to do if it wasn't.
He kept his features bland as he turned his face back towards the girl and found her matching him step for step with a stare of her own. There was something in her face that made Lindsey feel as if he were being placed on some kind of mental scale and found irreconcilably wanting, and his eyes narrowed. He didn't notice that he was wrapping his hand more tightly about the handle of the sword and placing the other upon the flat of the blade, as if to restrain himself, or that he was leaning forward. That expression reminded Lindsey of Angel in a lot of ways that weren't bringing out his more heroic side. "Well, now," Lindsey said in a voice that came to him from down a long tunnel and hardly sounded like himself, "why am I getting the feeling that you guys aren't exactly normal kids?"
The girl lifted her chin. "Basic observational skills?" she asked. Lindsey grinned, and again she started to twitch backwards before catching herself. The blood coating her lower face and neck made it difficult to pick out the details, but Lindsey thought that he saw her setting her jaw.
"Those, too." Lindsey removed his hand from the flat of the sword's blade long enough to push a few strands of sweaty-slick hair back from his forehead, noting in a distant way that the bloody stigmata he had managed to put into his own palms were still oozing slightly and leaving crimson streaks across the skin. As the adrenaline began to ease its way out of his bloodstream, the wound in his back began to feel as if angry fire ants were being forced beneath the surface of the skin, and he was very aware that it was not only sweat which was sticking his shirt to his flesh.
The girl followed the movement of his hands with an expression that almost seemed disapproving, though Lindsey could not for the life of him saw why. Something about her-something about all of them-tickled incessantly at the back of Lindsey's mind, dancing away and laughing each time before he could grasp at it. The fact that the three of them were so covered it blood that it was like trying to put together a jigsaw puzzle and discovering that half the pieces were missing did not help. "My name's An," the girl said suddenly.
"Lindsey," he returned, unsure of what else to reply with. An was watching him as if she expected her name to mean something to him, somehow, and was disappointed when it did not. "Now back to my original question. What in the I hell /I are you people?"
An's mouth twisted into a smile too old to sit upon her face comfortably, but the brown-haired boy moaned and began to stir before she could offer up a reply. "Easy," the girl said, putting her hand out quickly to brace him as he opened his eyes and tried to sit up. With her face turned away from Lindsey and towards her friend, her features softened until she almost looked her age.
The boy only tolerated An's touch for a few seconds before he swatted her off. He licked his lips, grimaced at their bloody taste, and spat off to one side. "The hangover without the pleasure of getting drunk first," he groused. "Anyone who would take this gig without a gun being held to their head would have to be seriously dis-" The boy cut himself off as he caught sight of Lindsey at last. "Oh, damn."
"He doesn't recognize us," An interjected swiftly.
Call him crazy, but Lindsey was getting the distinct feeling that there was another story taking place behind the scenes which he was being barred from seeing. His eyes narrowed. "And where, if you don't mind enlightening me, would I be recognizing you from?" The tickle in the back of his mind became a full roar, all the more infuriating because he did not know why.
An flicked a look across the brown-haired boy that may have been concern or a warning and in all probability held a measure of both before she replied, "We're here because the Powers That Be want us to be." Her face achieved a moment of curious distance before she continued, "A situation that you're pretty familiar with yourself." There was a frost to her voice that the vibrancy of the blood covering her face and neck did nothing to thaw.
And that right there implied a great deal more about his personal affairs than he was comfortable with her knowing. If Lindsey narrowed his eyes any further, he was going to be unable to see. "You're twelve."
"Fourteen," the brown-haired boy said in such an affronted tone that Lindsey nearly laughed.
"My mistake." Foot traffic was starting up again, and curious looks were being thrown their way. Lindsey did not suppose that there was a police force left to care about the quartet of bloodied people sitting on the curb, but he was beginning to feel jumpy and exposed all the same.
An's jaw clenched. "We were," she said flatly, "regardless of how young we may seem to you." She gave a disdainful sniff that allowed Lindsey a glimpse of the woman that she would someday be. Something about the image made a small ball of ice form at the base of Lindsey's spine. "We did a pretty good job out there, dontcha think?" She jerked her chin in the direction of the carnage on the street. The sudden movement sent a few flecks of dried blood drifting down from her chin and into her lap.
Not a set of new memories that Lindsey figured he was going to get a kick out of revisiting, but it was hard to argue with the results. Lindsey felt a smile begin to grace his face once more, slow and honey-sweet. An watched him warily until her attention was pulled away by the final youth as he at long last began to come to. While she fussed over him like an enthusiastic if not particularly experienced mother hen and the first boy watched with guarded concern, Lindsey had a chance to pause and think.
If the kids were lying then they were doing a very, very good job of it, and Lindsey knew from liars. If they were merely crazy, well, there were always the results lying out in the street behind him, gory and difficult to refute. But if they were telling the truth…oh, if they were telling the truth. Then an avenue had just opened up to a set of people that Lindsey very much wanted to talk to. He figured that there was a great deal of back wages owed to him, and had always been one to aim high.
"An," Lindsey said suddenly. She ceased tending to the final member of her group long enough to look at him with a distrustful expression. Lindsey was beginning to suspect that this was her default look. He braced the sword against the concrete and used it to lever himself back to his feet, wincing as the cut on his back reopened and sent a fresh trickle of blood running down his spine. He extended his hand down to help An to her feet, but she only eyed it for a long moment before shaking her head. Lindsey sighed and retracted the offer. "You said you were sent by the Powers That Be?" he asked, waiting until An nodded before he continued. "Then I know someone that you definitely need to meet."
End Part Six