Part Eight
The building began to shake in the small hours of the morning. Lindsey lurched from a deep, if unquiet, sleep in the span of time that it would have taken other people to blink once, and for a moment could only stare at the ceiling and wait for the fuzzy fragments of his brain to come back to him. He could smell smoke, the acrid tang of which was nearly enough to convince Lindsey that he was still dreaming. Another tremor rocked the building hard, shattering the glass in the window with a tinkling sound that was almost beautiful. Lindsey rolled off the pallet and up to his feet.
Charlotte screamed outside, though Lindsey could not tell whether it was in outrage or in pain. A long stream of flame outside the window cast the room into shades of orange that made Lindsey's heart rate double in a span of seconds. It was this more than anything else that convinced Lindsey that this was yet another baroque twist in the new state of his universe, rather than some lingering dream state that he could not escape. If there had been dragons in his special second of hell, then they had been much shyer than was Charlotte's usual tendency.
The building shook again, staggering Lindsey and forcing him to brace his hand against the wall in order to avoid falling. In the doorway to the bedroom, Alexei was not so quick and went briefly down to his knees. His sunglasses slid off of his nose and down to the floor, leaving his eyes shining like white marbles. Lindsey wondered how he could have ever thought these kids were normal.
Fideo and An followed so closely behind Alexei that they almost tripped over him. "Is it an earthquake?" Alexei yelled, as his friends pulled him back up to his feet.
Good question. Lindsey wished that every instinct that he had was not screaming that the answer was not going to be nearly so blessedly mundane. He turned back to the window and pressed his hand flat against the remaining glass to keep his balance as the building continued to sway. Lindsey hissed and pulled his hand away from the glass only a few seconds later, because the fire that Charlotte had sent past the building had made the remaining shards blisteringly hot. Lindsey braced his hand against the sill instead and leaned forward to peer at the skyline.
None of the other buildings were shaking. As Lindsey watched, Charlotte hurtled past the window in a red-gold blur, her head snaked forward and her green eyes gleaming with territorial fury. Following in tight pursuit was a pack of smaller winged creatures, not nearly so large as Charlotte herself but using their superior numbers and speed to such an extent that she was being hard-pressed to win her fight. Her pursuers had four wings each beating in frantic tandem to match the powerful strokes of Charlotte's own two, giving them the appearance of being a group of dark, malevolent hummingbirds. Their skins were matte black and covered, Lindsey knew, with a patchwork of tiny scales that would catch and tear flesh like the skin of a shark. Their jaws were small, ringed by a series of backward-sloping spikes that protected their faces from any defensive blows that their victims might try to strike, and designed for stealing flesh in harassing, palm-sized gulps rather than the jugular-shredding wounds of a lion or even of Charlotte herself. That was all right; they did not do their damage by virtue of their teeth. They did it with their claws.
Lindsey's mouth had long since gone dry. He did not realize that he had staggered back from the window until he was bumping into Fideo so hard that he nearly knocked the boy down. Fideo grabbed at Lindsey's arm to steady them both, wincing when their skins came into contact with each other. Even now, knowing what kinds of images must be racing through Fideo's mind, Lindsey did not have a lot of room left in him for sympathy. He would try again later, if they could first manage to live through the night.
"Go," Lindsey said, putting his hand between Fideo's shoulderblades and shoving him back towards the bedroom. "Grab as many weapons as you can."
Fideo, his face bleached almost as white as his eyes, nodded once and raced away. If the images that the kids could up from skin to skin contact had even a rough correspondence with the images going through the individual's mind at that moment, Lindsey could see why. Fideo was moving so quickly as he left the room that Lindsey was almost surprised to see that there were no scorch marks left on the carpet.
Lindsey spun back around when Fideo was gone and saw that An and Alexei were staring at him with identical expressions of goggle-eyed fear. Lindsey did not imagine that they had to use their powers to read the waves of near-panic that were rolling off of his body. He swallowed hard so that he could force his heart back into its appropriate place within his chest. "Go help Fideo," he told them, struggling to keep too much of the strain from showing in his voice. "Stick with the daggers and the swords." He would much prefer guns, rocket launchers, or even a small nuclear bomb as long as the panic continued its slow crawl through his veins, but the had the feeling that Angel was more of a purist than that where his shiny toys were concerned. "Unless either of you knows how to use a bow and arrow?"
Alexei shook his head. An drifted a few steps closer to the window, staring as Charlotte wheeled in the air and fried several of the monsters pursuing her with one powerful burst of flame. They fell from the sky, their screams echoing at a much higher pitch than Charlotte's own. If it weren't for the matter of survival looming large and ugly over their heads, Lindsey would have paused and cheered.
"What are they?" An asked, testing the remaining glass with her fingers before deciding that it had cooled enough to allow her to rest her full hand against it. Her voice was threaded through with a sense of wonder at the same time that it was wary, like a person watching a timber wolf hunt for the first time.
"They're called Guardians," Lindsey said shortly. He seized An's wrist and dragged it away from the glass. An's face went a faint green color and she squirmed backwards hard. Too bad. They had begun to run more than a little short on time, and that meant that Lindsey was not making a high priority out of being gentle. "And you don't want to tangle with them." Enough memory of Lindsey's own experiences with the Guardians leaked through to make An go an even more pronounced shade of green. She ceased struggling as abruptly as a light switch being flicked off. Lindsey waited until she had nodded before he let go of her. "Good girl. Now, go help Fideo." Both she and Alexei obeyed without hesitation this time, though Lindsey saw Alexei bending his head to whisper fiercely into An's ear as they went. An shook her head, still looking as if she would very much like to pause and be sick.
Lindsey turned away from the Guardians before their movements could mesmerize him, pressing his hand quickly to his ribs as they lit up in remembered pain. He took several deep breaths through his nose and forced the memory away with a physical shudder. Lucky him, he already had better than average experience in dealing with phantom pains. The feeling of talons sliding past the ribcage and into the soft give of internal organs was not so different from the feeling of a scythe parting its way through skin, muscle, and bone, not when you got right down to it.
The building shuddered again, throwing Lindsey briefly against the window frame. A faint yelp echoed out from the bedroom to signal that the same had happened to at least one of the kids. Lindsey struggled back to his feet and leaned out of the window so that he could see to the ground. As nightmare inducing as they might be, the Guardians were small. Even if the entire building had been draped with them, their combined weights would not be enough to make the foundations tremble like that.
Lindsey craned his neck until he could see the thing wrapped around the building, and his face paled. The next words from his mouth were a stream of obscenities that wound together so tightly that the individual words were indistinguishable and spoken in a soft voice audible to him alone. He allowed himself only that small second's worth of panic before he took a deep breath and spun around again, back towards the bedroom.
Each of the kids had a sword in their hand when Lindsey stalked through the doorway, and it was obvious at a glance that this was the first time that any of them had ever held one. They would have to save the tutorials until later. Lindsey grabbed a sword for himself in each hand and ticked his head towards the door. "Schedule's changed. We have to move. I don't suppose that your powers involve the magical ability to comprehend weaponry, do they?" He was close enough to panic to bring the twang of Oklahoma flooding back into his voice, and also close enough so that he did not care. The kids shook their heads as one and Lindsey sighed. "It was a long shot." He held up one of the swords so that its blade caught the intermittent flashes of fire from the outside and threw them back in a gleam of gold. "This is the dangerous end. You stick it into the bad guys and try to keep the bad guys from sticking it into you." A high whining noise had begun to throb through Lindsey's ears. He tried to shove it away and took another deep, settling breath.
Some reflection of what he had seen moments before must have shown on his face. An drifted a few steps closer to him, a wrinkle marring her forehead. "What is it? What did you see?"
Lindsey shook his head. "It's not important yet. You'll have plenty of time to worry about it when we get downstairs, trust me."
An's lower lip pushed out and she reached forward, not satisfied with no as an answer and ready to take any information that was not going to be freely offered to her. Lindsey jerked away before her fingers could touch his arm, being careful not to accidentally cut her open with the sword as he did so. If the blade still passed close enough to give her a good scare, that was purely bonus. Lindsey's heart hammered in his chest as he said, "Save the nightmares for when they come looking for you, kid." He turned towards the door and trusted without looking around that the others would be following him. If memory of what had happened the last time they had grouped together to play at heroes was weighing as heavily on their minds as it was on Lindsey's, no one said anything.
The curfew was still in effect as they stepped out into the hallway, rendering the entire exercise into an experience of black and the occasional splash of gray. Lindsey's heart pounded in his ears, broken only by the rasping sounds of his own breathing and the breathing of the children behind him. Another tremor rocked the building and nearly threw Lindsey to ground until he forced the tip of one of the swords deeply into the carpet to keep himself upright. It was not the best of all possible things that he could have done for the blade, but it was certainly better than falling on it. "Everyone all right back there?" he called over his shoulder.
There was a pause that lasted long enough to make him wonder before Fideo finally answered, "We're fine." Another long pause went by before he continued in the tone of someone offering criticism to a teacher for the first time and uncertain of how they were going to be received. "I think we should have brought a flashlight."
Lindsey paused and deliberately scuffed his sword against the wall so that the others would know where he was and avoid running him through. He could feel someone's breath fanning out across the back of his neck a moment later. "No," Lindsey said after a long beat. "The light would only attract it."
"Attract what?" Alexei's voice came from a position directly behind Lindsey's left ear. He was the one who had stepped so close that every breath he expelled warmed the back of Lindsey's neck.
"He doesn't want to say," An responded from a place a few paces further back. Her voice was a blank canvas upon which Lindsey could project any emotion or inflection that he wished. "I don't know why. There's nothing so awful that just speaking about it can make it real."
It was too dark for the kids to see the bright gleam of Lindsey's grin even if his back had not been turned to them. It was not for their benefit that Lindsey did it, for as soon as the action was completed he could feel some of the pent-up poison being released from his body. "An," he said over his shoulder, "no one has said a word about that son of a bitch outside, but I can guarantee you that he's still waiting for us all the same." He resumed walking, letting one sword brush lightly against the wall and the other against the carpet in front of him. When the sound changed, seconds before he would have stumbled into a fall from which he would have been lucky to stand again without broken bones, he called back, "Stairs." The building had continued to rock throughout and now, when Lindsey tilted his head just right, the sound of scales rubbing against brick could be heard. Forcing his heart down from his throat was a torturous exercise from one second to the next.
A beam of light cut across the lobby as Lindsey was stepping away from the final stair, followed by a second and then a third. Lindsey grit his teeth until sparks of pain raced all the way into his temples. "Turn it off, turn it off," he growled, so low that he could barely hear himself, let along be audible to the people in the lobby. "Stay here," Lindsey barked over his shoulder at the kids, not waiting for an answer before he strode away. Between the swift intercutting of the flashlights' beams arcing back and forth and the faint flickerings of fire that were coming with greater frequency through the windows, Lindsey could finally see what was in front of him. A scale the size of his head drifted lazily past the window, attached to a creature that he already knew was going to take far more than a sword to bring down. He had also been a master at squeezing every last possible advantage from the hands that he had been dealt, however, and he did not plan on ceasing now. Lindsey shifted the sword within his sweat-slicked hands until he had a better purchase on it. "Turn the light off!" The lazy pattern of scales paused for a moment at the sound of Lindsey's voice. Too late now. "For God's sake, get those lights off! You're only telling it where you are!"
"What is it?" The man's face was still too far back in shadow for Lindsey to get a good look at his features.
"Soul eater," Lindsey said shortly. "Big damned snake," he clarified when the man presented him with a blank stare as a response. That didn't cover the half of it, but as a working definition it would have to do.
The man didn't flinch upon hearing the news that there was a snake outside roughly the size of three Greyhound buses outside the building. Maybe one the size of four had come through the week previously, for all that Lindsey knew. "Okay, so what do we do?"
"Well, for starters," Lindsey said, gritting his teeth together tightly enough to make his jaw hurt, "you can get that fucking light off before-"
A head the size of a Buick slammed through the front door, reducing it to toothpick-sized shrapnel before Lindsey had a chance to blink twice. He threw his arm up to shield his eyes, forgetting for a moment that he held a sword in either hand and only managing to avoid decapitating the man next to him out of a last minute calculation. In the end, it might have been kinder if he had not bothered.
Lindsey jerked backwards on instinct to protect his eyes as the door exploded inwards. The movement saved his life. The head of the enormous snake-the hazy twilight color that hardly seemed worthy to be called a color at all, the eyes that were really only tawny pits, all designed to make the viewer think of a screaming nothingness-slammed into the place where Lindsey had been standing scarcely more than a second before. It was almost faster than the eye could follow, let alone traveling at a speed that the average human could hope to avoid. The man that Lindsey had been speaking to was gone in a crunch of bone and a whiff of sulphur that nearly made Lindsey double over and be sick with the strength of it. There hadn't even been time for the man to scream, let alone to move. The bite had been meant for him, Lindsey was more sure of this than he had been any other fact for a long, long time, and he was almost bothered by it.
He twisted one of the swords in his hand, darted forward, and plunged it deeply into the cavern where the snake's eye would have been if it had been a real animal rather than a nightmare possessed only of swirling pits. The blade slid through with a sickening ease, the monster screamed and shook its head wildly from side to side. Lindsey jerked the blade free and stepped back quickly before he could follow the same path as the man before him. There was a heavy, golden colored jelly covering the blade that Lindsey knew would burn like acid if he allowed it to touch his skin. While Lindsey watched with bated breath and hoped that, just this once, the laws of causality would take a different path, the gaping wound that he had opened closed again within seconds. Lindsey was left as the recipient of a glare that promised a great many things and, Lindsey knew, could deliver on all of them.
"Damn it," Lindsey muttered, backing up a few more steps and throwing the gore from his sword with a quick flicking gesture. He swore that there was recognition there in the soul eater's unwavering gaze. The monster hissed at him, sending out another wave of sulphuric breath. With nowhere else to go, Lindsey braced himself. The soul eater lunged forward…and then with a great creaking of wood, stopped. The frame of the door that it had lunged through shuddered and moaned, but held. The monster was locked in suspension less than two feet away from Lindsey himself.
"Oh, my God." The burst of relief that cascaded through Lindsey's system was nearly strong enough to knock him down. He leaned over and braced his fists against his knees, leaving the swords jutting out to either side of him like a bizarre set of wings. The smell of sulphur was clinging to the back of his throat and threatening to gag him with every other breath, but Lindsey still parted his lips into a smile. "Not this time, ugly." The soul eater hissed at him, revealing teeth as long as Lindsey's forearm, and Lindsey turned his head away quickly so that he could cough.
"Lindsey!" He did not recognize the owner of the voice immediately, not while her body was still shrouded in blackness. Alicia rushed out of the shadows towards him, carrying a flashlight that transformed her face into something strange and unreal. Lindsey turned his head away as the beam cut across his eyes and threatened to dazzle him. Alicia drifted to a halt, trying to stare at once both at the swords that Lindsey still carried and the head the size of a family car violating what had before been a place of relative sanctuary. "Oh, Jesus." Alicia's hand came up to cover her mouth. Lindsey saw that her lower lip had been split right next to the old scar and was now dribbling a line of blood down her chin, and that a dark bruise was already forming at her hairline. Alicia caught Lindsey looking and said, "From when the building started shaking. I fell down." She was shaking so badly that her teeth were clacking against each other, creating a sound like castanets, and the beam of the flashlight was jerking around in small, anxious circles. The soul eater jerked its head towards her, snarling and making Alicia jump backwards so hard that it was a wonder she didn't fall down a second time. Alicia tried to scream and gag at once as the monster's breath worked its magic on her for the first time and wound up creating a wet, garbled sound that most closely resembled a moan. "Should I turn this off?" Alicia asked when she had recovered, indicating the flashlight.
Lindsey shook his head before he realized that unless she managed to pull her eyes away from the soul eater-unlikely-Alicia wasn't going to be able to see the gesture, anyway. "Too late now." His brain was catching up with the rest of his body and was slowly soothing his heart back into its proper place within his chest by telling him that the thing blocking up the doorway was going to be able to get any further in to threaten them with becoming its second course. Not yet, anyway.
Alicia must have come to the same conclusion, as she was staring at the soul eater with the same level of fear and fascination she might have given to a leopard with its foot caught in a trap. 'More of the first, less of the second,' Lindsey wanted to tell her. "What is it?"
"Long story." Lindsey's tight, grim smile was eaten up by the darkness. He didn't care; it was the type of gesture that he needed to make purely so that he could tighten his grip upon his own sanity. "I'll make sure to tell you over a roaring campfire later, okay?" Another shudder rolled through the building as the soul eater gave a frustrated roar and slammed one of its coils against the exterior wall. Flurries of plaster fell down from the ceiling and drew screams from more than a few. Lindsey decided that a few more cautionary steps backwards were in order.
"How are we going to get out of here?" Alicia asked him. Her eyes darted back and forth between the occupied doorway and the window, where the soul eater's scales were obliterating any possible view of the street.
'How in the hell should I know?' Lindsey wanted to snap back, wishing in a small part of himself that no amount of torture would ever make him admit to that Angel and his merry band had, oh, decided to take their impromptu houseguests a little more seriously and call it quits on their self-appointed vigilante gig for this one night. Lindsey was not cut out for heroism; with every move he made he was aware of how much it chafed. They only thing that prevented him from blurting this out and a lot more besides was the realization that, with the soul eater momentarily contained, the panic was slinking out of the room on little cat feet. The room's remaining people, perhaps a dozen in all, were left staring at Lindsey with expectation in their eyes, as if the fact that he came equipped with weaponry automatically gifted him with the qualities of leadership. 'Might want to crack open a history book and see how often that works out for the best.' But Lindsey had been an old hand in performing for the gullible crowds once, and those skills were not swift in leaving a person. "Do you know how to use this?" Lindsey asked instead, turning one of the swords sideways and attempting to fit the hilt into Alicia's hand.
She stared at him and made no attempt to close her fingers around the weapon. "I was a schoolteacher."
"That's the dangerous end," Fideo said helpfully, leaning around Lindsey to point at the blade. He had crept up behind without making any sound whatsoever.
Lindsey glared at him. "I told you to say on the stairs."
Fideo scowled back for a moment before gesturing over his shoulder. By taking Alicia's flashlight from her and training it, Lindsey could see that Alexei had already crawled over the banister and set down his sword so that he could help An do the same. The soul eater's heavy gray body lay across the foot of the stairs, cutting off a more conventional method of escape. "Being too close to that thing was making us sick." Fideo stared at Lindsey for a long moment, waiting for him to get it, before adding to Alicia and the rest, "The smell." The kid was a good liar.
"Right." Lindsey turned back. An added bonus to taking Alicia's flashlight from her was that, in order to free up one of Lindsey's hands for him, Alicia had been left with no choice but to take the sword that he offered. She held it in front of her in an awkward, two-fisted grip that was only going to be useful if whatever she would up fighting decided to help her by impaling itself directly. "First lesson: Fideo's right." Lindsey pointed to the blade, which still had traces of the soul eater clinging to its surface. "That's the dangerous end. Second lesson: loosen up your shoulders and elbows and be ready to swing." Alicia gave him a boggle-eyed stare. The building rolled again, an ominous shiver that made the entire frame crack and sigh in anticipation of collapse. Lindsey leaned forward until he was speaking almost directly into Alicia's ear. "You are not a schoolteacher any longer." He pointed toward the window as he did so, outside of which shadowy figures cavorted and danced.
Something in Alicia's face tightened, threatening to break apart and crack her into a thousand pieces along with it. She steeled herself after a long moment's worth of hesitation and then nodded. The quaver in her voice was fainter than a whisper as she called out sharply, "Katie!" The girl darted forward out of the shadows with eyes so large that they threatened to gobble up her face. Lindsey nearly swore out loud. The kid, of course he had forgotten about the kid. That made the situation much more complicated, and the stakes that much higher if he failed. Katie came to a stuttering halt a few steps away from her protector and stared at the sword that Alicia still held more like a baseball bat than a weapon of speed and grace. "Go stay with Mr. Johnson. Don't leave his side until I tell you to."
Katie didn't seem to know whom she wanted to stare at more, Alicia or Lindsey, and her eyes were doing a hyperactive dance between the two of them. "But-"
"Katie. I said." The girl dashed off to join an older man who leaned heavily upon a cane to keep himself up. He ruffled her hair before he took up her hand in his own free one. Lindsey chose not to point out that this was not the best guardian that Alicia might have chosen if she wanted to ensure Katie's longterm safety, not while Lindsey was still scrambling for a way to get the able-bodied humans out alive. He did not get the impression that Alicia was of the pragmatic sort who could choose between the individual and the group, which meant that if Lindsey wanted her cooperation he was going to have to be the sort of leader who did not do those things, either.
Still holding the sword in both hands as if she planned on bludgeoning someone to death with it, Alicia turned the blade to one side so that she was not endangering Lindsey as she leaned close to whisper, "I still don't know how to use this."
"I've already told you which end is the important one." Lindsey was dividing his attention into three separate sections: the windows beyond which horrors waited, the trapped monster who still eyed him with an expression of, 'It's all right, son, I can wait all night,' and Alicia herself. Given the gravity and life-ending potential of the other two, he didn't think that it was a mark against his character if Alicia's portion was by far the smallest one.
Alicia's expression remained patient and unwavering. She had probably stared down classrooms of unruly boys with that same look more than once. "For some reason I think it's more complicated than that."
All right, so being flip wasn't going to redirect her long enough to let him think. Lindsey sighed. "Relax." Alicia stared at him. "Yeah, I know. But you'll be useless if you get so worked up that your natural reflexes aren't working any longer. Second, swing from your elbows and your wrists, not your shoulders. You'll be faster that way."
"How to be an expert in two easy steps?" Alicia asked.
"No," Lindsey answered back, "but it might keep you alive." He turned back to the people and their unsettling blend of expectation and respect and raised his voice so that they could all hear him. "So here's how it's going to work. We are all going to leave this building right now, and we are going to do it-" He pointed towards the window. "Right there."
End Part Eight