Part Nine
Lindsey was expecting pandemonium as his words echoed away. That was too severe a judgment. It was really more like chaos. Mr. Johnson rapped his can against the floor for silence and then asked Lindsey if he had taken any substances over the last few hours that he would like to share with the class, a sentiment which he did not seem to be the only one to share. Alicia, for her part, said nothing and swiveled her head around to regard Lindsey in pure, goggle-eyed shock.
"What?" she asked at last, swinging the sword around to indicate the window. Lindsey leaned back to put himself safely out of range. "No one goes outside after the sun sets, not unless they've taken up suicide as a career option. There are demons out there after dark."
"Stop gesturing with that, we don't have a doctor," Lindsey snapped. Chagrined, Alicia lowered the sword until the blade was resting against the carpet. "There are demons in here after the sun goes down." He pointed towards the captive soul eater. "And not a few out there during the day, as I recall."
Alicia was still fixing him with a wide-eyed, unhappy stare, but the certainty had been stripped away. She seemed like a smart woman. Lindsey would leave her to figure out the full implications of them trying to crouch inside until the sun rose on her own. He waited until she took a deep breath and relaxed her elbows, following Lindsey's instructions on how to handle the sword, before he turned to face the others. The gathered crowd had returned to giving him that eerie trusting look, making him feel as if there were ants crawling across his skin. He wished that they would stop it.
"All right," Lindsey said, raising his voice towards a yell that ultimately proved unnecessary. He already had their undivided attention, and no one was saying a word. The soul eater lunged forward at the sound of Lindsey's voice all the same, making the shattered doorway and the deteriorating wall creak and crack. He took a few more cautionary steps back and jerked his arm out to indicate the window. Lindsey used the hand that still held the flashlight to do so, panning the light across the rows of pale, frightened faces. 'I am not cut out for this.' "We can't stay here, that much should be clear by now." A wave of murmurings began to start up. Lindsey raised his voice to cut them off before they could become a tide. "I know what's out there, and I know what's in here." Lindsey nodded towards the soul eater and stepped quickly to the side as a broad section of plaster fell down from the ceiling and shattered against the place where he had been standing only a second before. "This building is not going to stand all night. When it goes, that thing is going to be loose." There was no need to elaborate on what "that thing" was; Lindsey could see every eye in the room cut towards their very own elephant in the corner. Let them stare at it, let them think for a good long time about what teeth like that would feel like slicing through human flesh. Lindsey already knew, and it was everything that he could do to remain outwardly unruffled. "We might die if we go outside. We are without question going to die if we stay in here." It wasn't the kind of rallying leader speech that they were looking for, Lindsey could see that much in their faces. That was too bad. This was not the job that he had signed up for. Free agent as he now was, he saw no reason to pretend that his greatest ambition was to put on a big red cape and go save the world every day with the rest of the superheroes.
A blond man in his early forties stepped up from the back of the crowd, looking like the stereotypical representation of a computer tech if Lindsey had ever seen one. He wore the look of someone still coming to terms with how far out of control the world was spiraling from the plastic boxes which he was accustomed to living and working around. The tech's eyes were wide, but his hand and voice were steady as he pointed towards the captive soul eater. The monster unfurled his tongue and gave him a wide, toothy grin in response. "Can't we just kill that and stay where we are?"
"Good question." Lindsey leaned over and stabbed the monster with the sword, driving the blade into the same eye through which he had tried to kill it earlier. It screamed and thrashed as Lindsey pulled the sword free again and jumped quickly out of range. When the wound had healed over and the soul eater was once again glaring at him with the tawny pits that served as its eyes, Lindsey asked, "Any others?"
Silence. Lindsey nodded. "Okay. We're going to go out the window." He pointed towards the darkness beyond which monsters cavorted. "If you want to stay behind and take your chances, be my guest. Those of us with swords will try to protect everyone who comes along as best we can." He did not ask for Alicia's permission before he said it, though he did raise his eyebrows at her in silent question afterwards. Alicia took a deep breath, looked down at the sword in her hands, and nodded. Her skin had long since gone the color of whey, making the scar across her lip and chin stand out in a line of bright coral in the swinging glow of the flashlights. Alexei and Fideo gazed back at Lindsey impassively, and An…An was staring at him with an expression very similar to the one that she had worn upon seeing Angel for the first time. Lindsey could feel An's eyes on the back of his neck long after he had turned away. "So here's how it's going to work. I'll go through the window first." If the shadows that he could see dancing beyond the glass were any indication, the odds out there were going to be steep ones. It would be best if they put the only one of them who actually knew what they were doing out into the fray first. "Half of those of you coming along will follow me." Lindsey paused so that he could point at An, Alexei, and Fideo, who were standing with their swords held in resting positions and looking far more relaxed with weapons in their hands than any group of teenagers ought. "Then these guys will lead the next group out, and Alicia will bring up the rear."
Alicia, if anything, turned an even more pronounced shade of gray. She turned to stare at the soul eater with huge eyes. Lindsey would swear that the soul eater was staring right back. He sidled up alongside her. "Are you going to be okay, being alone with that thing?" Lindsey asked.
Alicia took enough deep breaths to leave her perched on the edge of hyperventilation before she nodded. "As opposed to taking your job? Yeah, I'll be fine." Alicia stared down at the sword in her hands. "It's like a great big steak knife," she muttered.
"Exactly." Lindsey shifted the flashlight so that he could squeeze at Alicia's shoulder before he began scouting about for something with which he could break the window.
"I'm not certain that I can climb over the windowsill," Mr. Johnson said from behind Lindsey.
"I'll help you," came Fideo's soft response.
The building had not been subject to its usual maintenance routine over the past year and a half, and it was beginning to show. Several rungs of the banister had fallen loose and were hanging free from their moorings, like a prize fighter's broken and jagged teeth. Lindsey's eyes lit up as soon as he caught sight of them. He set the sword to one side, called the computer tech over so that he could hand him the flashlight and tell him where to direct its beam, and then began the slow, careful work of inching past the soul eater so that he could reach the banister itself. The monster watched every move that he made with a patient, expectant look, but Lindsey was still too far away for it to make a definitive grab. Lindsey was very glad of the near-total darkness that he was operating under, so that the others could not see how stiffly the hair on his arms and at the back of his neck was standing at attention. He braced his foot against the banister, wrenched one of the dangling rails free, and tested the weight of it in his hand for a moment before returning to the group and reclaiming his sword.
"It might be in poor taste to say this, but all hell is going to break loose as soon as I go through that window. Be ready." Various heads nodded, and the ripple of a dozen people discovering that their world could get even more dangerous ran through the crowd. Alicia broke away to speak to Katie as the kids began to divide the rest of the group into the two sections that would be going through the window. Dangerous though the proposition might be, Lindsey did not see a single person who wanted to stay. "An," he said.
She turned, eyebrows raised, and paused for a moment before she wandered over. "Yes?" An held her sword stiffly at her side, more like she would an unwieldy tennis racket than a weapon that was supposed to be an extension of the body. Lindsey barely opened his mouth to correct her before she was doing the job herself, moving the weapon into a position of self-conscious relaxation that only teenagers seemed able to bring to true perfection. Lindsey caught the rebuke and turned it into a faint smile.
"I don't suppose that the three of you have any mojo that you could work up for when I go out that window?" Lindsey asked. "Some way of getting them to do my job for me?"
An shook her head and for a moment looked genuinely distressed. The beam from the flashlight played havoc with her features and made her appear older than she really was. "A blast like we did this afternoon, it…it takes a lot out of us. The batteries have to recharge." An paused with an embarrassed expression. "I didn't figure that we'd have to do it again so soon. Sorry."
"Thanks. It was a long shot, anyway." Lindsey shifted the length of banister in his hand, told himself that Angel was more than welcome to take this hero gig back any time that he wanted it, and walked over to the window. It only took one good swing with the wood to shatter the glass, as if the whole building was feeling exhausted beneath the assault and was only looking for a good excuse to give up. Lindsey shook tiny shards of glass from his forearms and took up the sword again before he scrambled through. Glass snagged at his hands and his legs as he climbed over the frame, but these were all small pains that Lindsey gathered up and tucked under the mental heading of 'not relevant right now.' The things that were relevant had teeth, too, and theirs were so much larger.
There were no streetlights. As Lindsey's feet touched down on the pavement he paused to curse himself for being a fool and not finding some way to bring that flashlight along with him. It was too late to correct the mistake now, and definitely too late to stand around and ponder how it might have been different. Already the smell of his own fresh blood was drawing barely visible, inkier than black shapes towards him. The dim glow thrown down by the starlight and the nearest fire gave Lindsey just enough visibility so that he stood a chance. Lindsey twirled the sword, felt muscles bunch and coil from his forearm all the way into his back, and even found it within him to smile a little. He had picked the wrong career path all those years ago. There was nothing else in the world that could make him feel more powerfully alive than this. He could even learn to appreciate the irony.
In three whip-fast moves Lindsey had one of his enemies bleeding out across the pavement, and his pulse had not even begun to rise above normal yet. All of the tiny hurts spread out across his body, from the muscle aches to the self-inflicted stigmata pressed into the palms of his hands to the hastily-bandaged cut on his back, became nothing more than background noise to the electric hum of doing violence. Lindsey twisted away from a blow that would have disemboweled him, delivered by what he wanted to say was an elbow blade, before he returned one of his own in kind. Lindsey took advantage of the split-second lull that followed to wonder what the Nepalese monk who had taken charge of Lindsey while he was still angry and chafing beneath the traces of the new deal would think if he saw Lindsey employing his lessons to such violent ends now. Lindsey delivered a decapitating blow to yet another demon, the sword making a smacking sound as it cut through muscle and spine that reminded Lindsey of the seal being broken on a jelly jar. At this point, he would not be surprised if Aastik had known all along how things were going to turn out. That placed him firmly in the ranks of people to whom Lindsey did not owe a damned thing.
Still enmeshed in these thoughts, Lindsey parted a demon's head from its shoulders with more force than he had intended, sending it flying through the air and landing on the pavement with a distinctive thud-plop. He had made his big speeches about bloodshed five years previously, but Lindsey was beginning to see that he had not had the faintest idea what real carnage was. He took several deep breaths through his nose until the anger had drifted out of his system, leaving only the focus that had kept him alive against some of the toughest prosecutors and clients that Los Angeles had to offer.
The soul eater's tail, protruding from the front of the building like the tongue of a particularly obnoxious six year-old, thrashed suddenly, picking up the demon's severed head in its coils and hurling it back at Lindsey in a gruesome game of catch. Lindsey felt splatters of blood coming to rest against the side of his face as he ducked away. Faint screams began to echo from within the building. Lindsey turned the action of ducking away from the flying head into one of ducking away from a far more ambitious blow that would have taken off half of his face if it had connected.
"Bring them out now!" Lindsey yelled back over his shoulder. His heart rate had finally begun to come up to a respectable level, turning his voice breathy and hoarse. Lindsey sidled back towards the window so that he could provide a better defense to the people scrambling out into the night. He twisted to the side and barely managed to avoid a second blow as he did so, wrenching his knee in the process. Shrill sirens of pain cut from his ankle all the way into his thigh, effectively destroying the buzz of endorphins that had kept him focused solely on the fight until that point. Lindsey bit his lip until the taste of copper flooded through his mouth and braced the point of the sword against the ground for a moment to keep himself from falling, but did not make a sound. It did not take a genius to realize that if he went down now he was not going to be getting back up again.
The demons scattered into a wary semicircle around Lindsey as he backed closer to the window, clicking their teeth together to make an eerie sound that reminded Lindsey of acrylic nails being drummed against a tabletop. The noise was familiar enough to make Lindsey wonder if maybe he wasn't even facing down some of his old clients. Their billable hours might even have contributed to the situation that he found himself standing in now, and wasn't that a fine thought.
The first person to scramble through the window was one that Lindsey did not recognize, though it was possible that she had been hiding towards the back. Her foot caught on the windowsill as she jumped down, staggering her, and if Lindsey had not been there to catch her quickly about the waist she would have planted her face into the pavement hard enough to sacrifice some teeth. "My hero," the woman said, shaking strands of thick, honey-blonde hair back from her face to reveal gray eyes that seemed in a second to take in everything and give back nothing. The way that she said the words was lilting and odd enough to draw a frown across Lindsey's face. She had broken away from him and was spinning away into the shadows to fend for herself before Lindsey could reply, and anyway there were so many others to look after.
The computer tech handed Katie out next, so quickly that she was nearly thrown in the haste. Lindsey caught her and set her down by his side, where she clung to his ribs and cried without making a sound. The soul eater's tail thrashed that much harder as the body of the beast dragged itself further into the building by several feet. Wood chips became shrapnel, and Lindsey's innards turned themselves into ice. If that wall gave away completely now… The screaming from within the building grew that much louder, and Lindsey gave Katie a quick, one-armed hug before he twisted around to help the computer tech follow her out. The tech had taken up Lindsey's section of banister and was holding it like a club between his trembling, white-knuckled hands.
"Smart man," Lindsey grunted before he spun away to deflect a blow from a demon who thought that he was going to be clever and attack while Lindsey's attention was divided. It was not nearly so clever with two of its arms severed away at the elbow.
"Did you plan for this?" the tech yelled. He jerked his head back in the direction of the window from which people still spilled. An, Alexei, and Fideo emerged at last. Fideo was supporting Mr. Johnson and his cane heavily across one shoulder. Both their faces were the color of whey, Mr. Johnson's from fear and Fideo's from the rush of unwanted images.
Lindsey's smile was a quicksilver baring of the teeth that he doubted the tech could even see in the gloom. "In case you haven't noticed by now, the leader thing doesn't come naturally to me." He lunged forward, plunged his sword deeply into the abdomen of a demon who had come too close, and issued a primal yell of warning to any others who would do the same thing. The more Lindsey's eyes were allowed to adjust to the darkness, the more like insects the chittering things which surrounded him appeared. Lindsey realized with a jolt that he had hired another member of their species to kill a Slayer, once. If he ever got the chance to sleep tonight, he could count on those nightmares to be both creative and fierce. The demons screamed fury back at him, and from high above there came the faint echo of the Guardians answering. Charlotte sent out a fireball that briefly lit up the sky and highlighted the terror on every human face.
"Get moving!" Lindsey yelled at the kids as the building creaked and swayed. From within he could hear the moan of timber starting to give way. Lindsey disentangled Katie from his side and shoved her, still crying without sound, back in the direction of Mr. Johnson. "I gave you those swords for a reason! Use them!"
The kids all startled hard but then scrambled to obey him, shifting into clumsy imitations of Lindsey's own stance. They fanned out to either side of him like lieutenants around their general. The kids were breathing in a series of high, shrill whistles from pure fear, and Lindsey did not think that he could have been more proud of them under any other circumstances. From behind him he could hear the last of the people scrambling over the window's frame.
The last resistance in the front wall gave way with a long sound like the tearing of flesh, allowing the soul eater to disappear entirely into the building. The scream that echoed back out again was unmistakably Alicia's. Lindsey whirled around again before he quite knew what he was doing, and the kids gave out fearful, startled cries at their sudden abandonment. Lindsey paid them no heed. An, Alexei, and Fideo were all in fear of the demons because they were in fear of their deaths; they were still too young to understand that some things could be so much worse.
Lindsey started towards the window, stopped himself, and doubled back at the monster's rapidly retreating tail. Whatever intelligence that the soul eater possessed, small and mean and always, always hungry though it was, it would want for him to lose his sense of caution and run towards its head. Lindsey had a better idea. He took his sword in a two-handed grip, raised it high above his head, and plunged it deeply into the coils that were still heaving and sliding their way into the building. The soul eater's scream echoed even more loudly than Alicia's own.
There was a tremendous thump and crack from within the building as the beast arched upwards and struck the ceiling. Lindsey twisted the blade as hard as he could and pulled his lips back from his teeth with the strain, feeling ichor splash sour and hot against his shirt as it shot up from the wound that he had made. From the corner of his eye he could see Alicia scrambling out of the window, sobbing and stumbling and behaving so recklessly with her sword that it as a wonder that she did not slash her own throat. Lindsey wrenched his own sword free of the soul eater's flesh and staggered back. "Get away from the window!" he yelled at the assembled group, feeling something in his throat catch and tear beneath the strain. "You don't know what's about to come through, get away!"
Alicia caught herself in her retreat and spun around, sword raised, as the soul eater reappeared in the window. Lindsey was torn between swearing at her for her damned stupid bravery and half-crazed laughter as he noticed that she had finally relaxed her elbows and gotten her stance right. Alicia screamed a garbled mix of equal parts fury and fear at the soul eater and made a quick stabbing motion at its mouth as it tried to close down on her.
Lindsey leaped forward and wrapped his free arm around her waist. A quick, hard jerk tumbled them both backwards and into a moment of relative safety. Alicia's body landed on top of Lindsey's and temporarily drove all of the air from his lungs. His eyes were full of her hair and his ears with her panicky respirations. Alicia wriggled against him as she tried to find purchase and heave herself back to her feet, but it was probably the least erotic straddling that Lindsey had ever received in his life. Tears and sweat were sticking Alicia's hair to both of their faces in thick, messy tangles. He seized her wrist before she could inadvertently cut him with her sword, tilting his head up to say distinctly into her ear, "Alicia. Calm down."
Alicia was too far gone to be called back by someone reassurances into her ear, but she made an admirable attempt all the same. Lindsey rolled Alicia off of himself and safely to one side before using the rest of the momentum to rock himself back to his feet. Nick of time. The monster's teeth made a noise of nails running down a chalkboard as they grazed along the length of Lindsey's sword, if those nails happened to be owned by Freddy Krueger. Lindsey jerked his arm upward and away and drove the blade deep into the soul eater's palate, making it pull back and scream. Lindsey stepped a few paces away in the lull that followed, shifting the sword in his hand to get a better grip on the sweaty handle.
From the corner of his eye he could see An, Alexei, and Fideo struggling to hold demons off from the people bunched into a frightened knot behind them. Their lack of skill was working hard against them, a handicap that youthful enthusiasm could not easily compensate for. Lindsey saw An exchange a look with the others, screw up her face briefly in concentration, and then shake her head. A fresh trickle of blood began to run from her nose, very dark in the dim light from the stars. The first slow, insidious coils of despair started to make Lindsey's stomach clenched and dropped ice cubes down his spine.
The soul eater retreated until its head was the only thing still protruding from the crippled building, like a child playing peek-a-boo. Its tongue flicked in and out as it felt of the healing wound at the roof of its mouth and regarded Lindsey with a baleful stare. If Lindsey had had any doubts about his being recognized before, they were swiftly eaten away in the face of that look. 'You always remember the one that got away.'
"Help the others!" Lindsey yelled over his shoulder at Alicia, who was just struggling to her feet and was shoving the damp strands of her long, dark hair away from her face. The panic had not been banished away from her face entirely, but it was being held on a tight leash.
"What if you get into trouble?" she yelled back.
Lindsey's smile, meant to be reassuring, turned into a primal baring of the teeth as the soul eater hissed at him. "Darlin'," he called back to Alicia, "I really don't think this is the kind of trouble that you can help me with."
Alicia looked back at the soul eater, snapped her mouth closed, and nodded. "Like a big steak knife," Lindsey saw her mutter before she spun away to join the fray. She kept her arms relaxed and swung from the elbows and wrists as Lindsey had told her to, and other than that she went forward on enthusiasm alone. Enthusiasm ran straight through one of the demons menacing Katie, so maybe that were not so badly off as Lindsey had originally believed. The blade caught in the demon's chest, nearly bowling Alicia over with the carcass, and she had to brace her foot against the twitching form in order to get her weapon back. An stood quiet guard over Alicia until she was done and they could turn back towards the fray together.
"Hey there, beautiful," Lindsey said in a soft voice as he turned back towards the soul eater. "Bet you didn't think you would see me again." The soul eater gave forth a low, moaning growl from deep within its throat, a sound that made Lindsey think of the ones made by angry cats. "Yeah, you're giving me warm feelings, too." Rivers of sweat were running down from Lindsey's hairline and into his eyes, doubling and tripling his vision.
The soul eater's growl did not cease or even change in pitch before it was lunging forward in attack. The only reason that Lindsey was not swallowed in one gulp as he paused to shake the sweat from his eyes was because the soul eater's scales made a peculiar scraping sound as they ran across the wood of the windowsill. He staggered back, whipping the sword up and into a defensive position. The soul eater slammed into it snout-first with a force that drove Lindsey back even further and nearly forced him to the ground. The blade all but disappeared into the skin and made an ugly sucking sound as Lindsey pulled it free. A tarry black substance ran out from the wound and splattered on the pavement in the few seconds before it healed up, where it glittered like the backs of beetles.
Lindsey backed up a few paces and shook the blood from the sword with a quick flicking motion, hearing his breath whistle in his ears and feeling his muscles burn. So much for any hopes that he had held of making this quick, that he could keep this from being personal. A thick gobbet of the black substance landed on Lindsey's arm, where it began to burn within seconds. Lindsey swore and moved quickly to shake it off. An angry red weal rose on the skin.
The soul eater's growl shifted into something that more closely resembled a coo, as if it knew that victory was close at hand and wanted Lindsey to know how very glad it was that they could arrive at this moment together. Lindsey took a deep breath, shifted the sword to his left hand, and waited. Maybe so, but if he was damned anyway then he had nothing to lose. Might as well make it as hard on that monstrosity as possible.
The soul eater began to slither its leisurely way out of the building, parting brick and plaster with a sound like paper tearing. Given that noise, Lindsey wondered how the apartment building had even managed to remain standing for that long. Several demons and humans alike were driven to pause at the sound of it, and to look over with expressions of fear identical enough to be funny if Lindsey had not been distracted by other matters. The soul eater paid the noise and the destruction no attention whatsoever. Lindsey didn't suppose that death was something one worried about when they were the size of three city buses and had never really been alive in the first place. He stumbled back a few more steps, buying time even as his brain and muscles alike were telling him that this was it, that he had given it a good try but the gig was up. His arms and shoulders were quivering and sweat was pouring down his back. The wound there wasted no time in letting him know in increasingly strident tones that it did not appreciate this treatment at all. Lindsey did not see any further moves that he could make when every injury that he did manage to put on the monster healed itself again within moments. The vacation had been nice, and Lindsey wondered if he was going to be returned to the same old crowd when he died for the second time. 'God, Lilah is going to be insufferable.'
Lindsey continued to back away even though he knew at this point that it was an exercise in futility. He would even go so far as to say that the soul eater's face as it reared back into a strike position carried an expression of smugness. When Lindsey saw how close his slow retreat was taking him to the others, he abruptly switched tactics and began heading in the other direction. Noting left to lose, fine, but he had no permanent quarrel with any of them. The soul eater flicked its tongue out of its mouth and arched backwards as Lindsey raised the sword over his head. He would see if the monster's insides could heal as quickly as the rest of it.
A scream too loud and rough to have been produced by any human throat pierced the air, and a shadow blotted out even the dim light from reaching Lindsey's face. With the stars blocked from shining, both Lindsey and the soul eater paused before Lindsey decided that it might be in his best interest to bound back out of the shadow's way as fast as his legs would take him. As it turned out, that was one of the best ideas that he had had all night.
Charlotte fell to the ground bare feet from the place where Lindsey had been standing, cracking the concrete with the force of her bulk. She emitted another long scream and accompanied this one with a jet of flame. Were it not for the fire, Lindsey doubted that he even would have been able to recognize her. Guardians swarmed over every available inch of her body, so that intermittent flashes of red-gold scales like the unveiling of precious jewels were all that managed to come through. Compared to Charlotte, the Guardians were even smaller and meaner than Lindsey remembered, blacker than black and designed for destroying life wherever they found it. In spite of the fact that Charlotte had put a certain amount of gleeful energy into trying to kill him scarcely more than twenty-four hours before and would probably return to that task with even more vigor as soon as the opportunity presented itself, Lindsey could not stop himself from feeling the smallest bit sorry for her. Watching the lion being brought down by the hyena was never a pleasant experience.
On of the Guardians was jostled off of Charlotte's back by the force with which she landed and tumbled several feet, boasting a wing with at least three joints that had not been there before when it got up again. Its teeth, unfortunately, had not been so much as chipped. When it rolled back to its feet, the first thing that it saw was Lindsey. The Guardian peered at out at him from the fringe of spikes that might have been cute on another animal and hissed, snaking its neck out to its full length and sniffing at the air. Everybody on vacation from hell recognized him tonight.
"I have better equipment now, you son of a bitch," Lindsey muttered. He barely even realized that it was his own voice which spoke the words, so trembling with rage and remembered fear were they. The arms that had been shaking with exhaustion seconds before caught their second wind between one second and the next. The Guardian rushed at him with mouth held open wide and eyes glowing a bright will 'o the wisp green. Lindsey's body had moved before his brain ever had a chance to catch up with him.
The Guardian ran forward for several more feet after its head had slid from its neck before it fell over in a tangle of twitching limbs and spraying blood that smelled strongly of rot. Lindsey paused to catch his breath and raised his gaze so that he could lock eyes with the soul eater across the struggling dervish that was Charlotte. He did not know if there was anything that could be called intelligence within those acid-yellow eyes, but there were promises being written there all the same. Lindsey hoped that he was sending one right back.
Charlotte arched her back and flung her head up towards the sky, hurling even more Guardians away from her and sending out a long stream of flame that briefly turned night into day. Lindsey ducked his head and threw up his arm to shield his eyes, hearing the shrieks of a few unwary Guardians as they failed to scuttle out of the way in time. Even their burning flesh smelled like something that had died and been forgotten about. Charlotte turned her head and caught the wings of another between her teeth as it tried to flee from her, hurling it to the ground with enough force to send the sound of breaking bone echoing in all directions. The Guardian's cry of pain was cut off when Charlotte's great jaws closed around its neck. She gave it a brief, terrier-like shake before she threw it off to one side. She extended her neck out to its full length, emitting a low hissing noise that might have meant anything from joy at victory to a commentary on the taste. Blood ran from jagged wounds in Charlotte's hide and steamed when they hit the night air, but none of them appeared to be serious.
Without wide expanses of empty sky surrounding her, Charlotte looked even larger than when she was in mid-flight. The twin columns of acrid smoke issuing from her nostrils said that she wasn't considering the demotion to land animal to be a happy event. Charlotte roared and fired another stream of fire at the remaining Guardians as they squealed and tried to flee through the air, catching two of them before they made it more than a few feet off the ground and bringing them both back down in flaming, writhing bundles that went still again within seconds. The soul eater watched without moving throughout Charlotte's entire display of power and temper, only wrinkling its lips back from its fangs when she spun around to hiss at it. Not once did it break eye contact with Lindsey.
The soul eater wasn't showing any signs that it was intimidated by Charlotte, but neither was it altogether eager to tangle with her in the mood that she was in and after the display that she had given. Charlotte fluttered her wings, hissed when blood splattered in wide arcs from the membranes, and ultimately settled her gaze on the soul eater as she began to emit a series of low growls from deep within her throat. The expression that the soul eater gave back to her was one of deep and unremitting patience.
Maybe that would be a problem later on-probably that would be a problem later on-but right now Lindsey had a whole wealth of other problems to deal with. He had the luxury now to sneak peaks at the other death match taking place out on the street, and what he saw would not have inspired a betting man to lay odds that any of them would live to see the sunrise. Alicia and the kids were drenched with blood and sweat and were using every ounce of their enthusiasm to hold off the remaining demons from the tight, clustered knot of people behind them. All of the enthusiasm in the world, though, was not going to make up for a lack of experience and basic skill. As Lindsey watched, a demon took a swing at Fideo's head that nearly connected because the boy was too focused on the offensive to remember that the monsters he was cutting up might appreciate the chance to cut him up in return. Only a split-second's worth of recalculation saved him from disfigurement or worse.
Lindsey began muttering a subvocal litany of obscenities beneath his breath, and the sound of it carried him all the way across the thirty feet or so separating him from the melee. He took several deep breaths through his nose as he shifted the sword in his hand and tried to rally his exhausted muscles into one more show. He watched from too far away to intervene as the man who so closely resembled a computer tech stepped out from the cluster that separated the defended from the defenders. He still carried the broken portion of the stairway banister in his hand; between the starlight and the intermittent flames that Charlotte was still sending out behind him, Lindsey could see that the tech was clenching the length of wood hard enough to drive all the blood from his knuckles. Lindsey's throat closed up too tightly for him to yell at the man to give it up, get back, a stick of wood was going to do him about as much good as a stick of butter against the blades that his enemies were sporting. If this was actual concern, then it whipped through him and was gone again too quickly for Lindsey to recognize it.
All it took was one good blow from a demon that had been designed by all the powers of hell for efficient killing and no saving blades that could be whipped up at the last moment. The computer tech slid gently to the ground while the other half of his face fell away from his body. What was left of his mouth fell open into what Lindsey thought might have been a sigh.
An ceased fighting and froze her a moment, her mouth falling open, as the computer tech's blood fell against her face in droplets so fine that they could have been produced by an aerosol. Some of the blood drifted into her mouth and she abruptly snapped it closed again, gagging and looking as if she did not know whether crying or vomiting should be her first priority. The blood on her cheek was so fresh that it must have felt as if it were scalding her and Lindsey could sympathize, oh, how he could sympathize, but now was not the time for the socially niceties one normally observed in the face of death. Not if An wanted to avoid throwing herself on the pyre right alongside the corpse.
"Get moving!" Lindsey screamed at her. He could still feel that tightness in his chest, that feeling which said that this was one of the few deaths which could not be written off as an honest day's work but would instead linger for a long time afterwards. "Unless you want to join him, you'll get your ass in gear!"
An jerked around and stared at Lindsey with an expression suggested that he had just ordered her to levitate. He had gotten through, at least; when a blade whistled at her head, An ducked it with a grace that belied all her other moments of adolescent awkwardness and drove her sword deep into her opponent's stomach. She had to brace her sneakered foot against the demon's abdomen in order to get the sword back again. When Lindsey looked at her face, the only expression that he saw there was an intent look of concentration, of satisfaction.
That was just fine. Lindsey could not say that he was doing so well on the sharing and caring front himself, not when he was rushing headlong towards the edge of exhaustion and had a whole new set of sick realizations coming to rest at the front of his brain. He disposed of the tech's murderer and then another demon besides with swift, easy strokes that made the blade seem as if it were alive in his hands. All it took was a glance around to let Lindsey know that even if he were able to harness every ounce of the not-inconsiderable fury coursing through his system at that moment it would not be enough, not against those numbers. They were losing, and in a few more moments they would be dying, and Lindsey could get as angry as he wanted without being able to do a damned thing to stop it.
'Of all of the nights for Angel to keep his precious routine.'
"Lindsey!"
Lindsey wondered, halfway seriously, if he could figure out a way to make that trick work in reverse.
Angel, as it turned out, could maintain the triumphant hero glower even while moving at a full, ground-eating sprint. Spike followed only a few paces behind. With their coats billowing out behind them on the night air, had Lindsey been a great deal more exhausted he might even have admitted that they looked like the heroes that they were actually supposed to be. Angel was already splattered with blood, little of which looked to be his own, and within seconds of entering the fight he was covered in more. "What happened?" he yelled at Lindsey. There was something in his tone that Lindsey had no previous point of reference for and could not recognize.
"What does it look like, genius?" Lindsey yelled back. Sputtering on the very last drops of his reserves, he managed to forget for a moment that Angel's was a face that he had been glad to see.
"Angel!" Spike barked across the distance between them, curtailing a potentially ugly situation before it had the chance to get started. Whether or not he was only trading it in for another just as ugly could be argued, but Angel spun away towards the sound of the voice all the same. He met the glowing green eyes of Charlotte in doing so, and was only barely able to avoid the furious jet of flame that followed.
Angel jumped back one away, Lindsey in another, and somehow they both managed to avoid being set on fire. Lindsey turned his voice quickly to the side to avoid heat hot enough to blister. He heard Spike say, "Something tells me that she's still carrying that grudge, mate." There was a story there, but as long as Lindsey could still feel a tawny hot stare resting against the back of his neck he didn't think that he was the one to go around throwing stones. He looked up again and was unsurprised to find Angel staring directly at him.
"When did this start?" Angel yelled. There was something in his voice that was not quite suspicion but was still a long stone's throw away from innocent inquiry.
Lindsey cast his mind back, struggling to make a coherent narrative out of the memories that mostly existed as a series of panicky impressions. "Half an hour ago?" Time seemed more elastic than that, somehow. "Forty-five minutes, maybe."
Angel nodded, and if there were questions running through his mind then he had chosen to let them remain unacknowledged for now. He looked over the kids and Alicia, then lifted his eyebrows at Lindsey. Lindsey shrugged his shoulders. "If you have a better idea, I'd love to hear it."
Angel nodded again and smiled the distillation of pure malice at the assembled demons. Between the darkness and their insectile features, reading their expressions was not an easy task, but Lindsey was willing to bet that there was still a strong undercurrent of fear beneath all that bloodlust. The odds were changing, finally turning in their favor. When the soul eater growled from behind him it was all that Lindsey could do not to raise his arm and show the hideous thing his middle finger. He skewered a demon through the abdomen, whipped the sword upwards until it became caught on the collarbone, and called it an acceptable replacement.
Angel appeared at Lindsey's side without a sound, startling him. "That's a new edition," he said, continuing to fight with the ease and grace of the longtime professional. Lindsey supposed that he meant the soul eater, though there was something in the way that Angel looked over the monster that made the back of Lindsey's neck tingle. "Friend of yours?" Angel asked, side-stepping another burst of fire from Charlotte. The pools of congealing blood on the pavement burst into flames, briefly illuminating both Angel's and Lindsey's face into planes and angles that scarcely made them look human, before dwindling down into sullen, scorched circles that glittered like beetles' eyes.
"About as much as that bitch over there is a friend of yours." Lindsey jerked his head in the direction of the sulking hulk that was Charlotte, who appeared torn between waddling after Angel and finishing him off as fast as her bursts of flame would allow and refusing to let the soul eater out of her sight. Lindsey hoped that she would choose the second, as he had the feeling that it was the only thing keeping him planted on the mortal plane. A grimace that may have been commiseration passed across Angel's face. It was gone by the time that Lindsey had blinked twice; he was not sure that it had ever been.
Alicia was stumbling, her strokes growing shorter and wilder and the lack of skill showing more plainly every second as her energy waned. While Lindsey glanced over, a long red line was opened up in her thigh. There was no way of telling how deep it ran at that kind of distance, but the amount of blood that spilled forth and the grimace that crossed Alicia's face suggest that it didn't feel like butterfly kisses. The alarming feeling of giving a damn began to rise in Lindsey's chest again. He swore and leapt forward. If nothing else, he could chase it away by killing something.
Spike got there first, catching Alicia's elbow with one hand and decapitating her attacker with the sword that he held in the other. There was still plenty of fun left to go around. Lindsey thrust and parried, ducked and cut, and it was almost enough to shut down the rising voices in his head. Then he heard the scream.
Katie had somehow managed to get herself separated from the protective throng. Lindsey's heart shoved itself up into his throat and refused to come back down again. The only conscious thought that still had room to sweep through Lindsey's mind was, 'All too far away.' He, Angel, and Spike were all several feet away, while a dark silhouette was sweeping over the child.
A blue streak materialized from the shadows out of seeming nothingness, grabbing the shape from the air and bearing them both down to the ground. Katie shrieked and threw up her arms in an instinctive gesture to protect her head and face. She crumbled down into a tiny huddle on the pavement. Lindsey had a chorus of déjà vu bells screaming through his mind.
Illyria rolled back to her feet in one smooth motion, carrying the head of the Guardian between her hands. Unfortunately for the monster, the rest of its body remained where it had been. The sound of cracking vertebrae could be heard for yards around. At the sight of that, all will to fight bled away from the demons, and they began to flee into the shadows as quickly as if they had never been there at all. The soul eater hissed and retreated further into the building, though Lindsey could still feel it watching him. If his run of good luck was going to hold, Lindsey reflected, now was the time for the building to fall down.
Charlotte slunk closer to the building and snarled into the shadows, fluttering her wings ominously. The blood was congealing quickly; within moments she would be able to take flight.
"Atta girl, Babe," Spike said, lowering his sword and approaching Illyria. His tone was soft and awed. Lindsey thought that most of that could be attributed to the fact that Illyria was still holding the Guardian's head in her hands. The spikes emanating from its snout pierced her hands, sending rivulets of blood running down her forearms. Lindsey wasn't certain that she even knew that she was hurt. Illyria was staring down at her hands and the grisly, lifeless thing held between them with an expression that might have been horror if it had been on any other face. As Spike reached her, she hurled the head down hard enough to split the skull and show the gore inside. Alicia grabbed Katie and turned her face away.
"I know what this thing is," Illyria hissed at Spike, her voice carrying over a shocking distance considering that she hardly seemed to be moving her lips. Her eyes were faint jewels set into her face; her fury caught the light and threw it back. "I would have called it my pet once and perhaps rewarded it with the flesh of such mewling things as this." Illyria stabbed her hand out to indicate Katie, who went an even paler shade of whey and shrank back against Alicia's side. "I would have stroked its head as it licked the marrow from her bones."
Spike took two small steps that placed him between Illyria and the child. "Easy, Babe," he told her in a low voice. "Remember those conversations we had about thinking things without saying them?"
Illyria raised her hands long enough to stare at the blood running from her wounds before she curled her lip and spat off to one side. "I will not be this thing," she snarled at Spike. "Not this weak thing that you wish to make of me." She pivoted her head to stare at the approaching forms of An, Alexei, and Fideo. "They are not worth the resources required to protect them." Illyria spun away and disappeared into the shadows that had been so eager to spit her out moments before.
"That is an angry lady," Alexei said.
"You don't know the half of it," Spike replied before he shifted his attention back to Angel. "That thing in there-" He jerked his thumb in the direction of the building. "Suppose we're going to kill it?"
"No!" It came out louder and more desperate than Lindsey had intended. He paused and gave himself time for several inward obscenities as every head swiveled towards him. "It's called a soul eater," he clarified, giving Angel and Spike each a significant look.
Angel shook his head and took a few steps closer to the building. "Doesn't work like that, Lindsey," he said. He looked towards the soul eater without any surprise written on his face, with something that was only a few small steps away from outright recognition. The prickling feeling on the back of Lindsey's neck grew that much stronger.
"No," Lindsey repeated. A sick spider at the back of his mind, growing steadily ever since Lindsey had first seen the soul eater, opened its mouth and yawned at the prospect of finally being noticed. "It's a trained hunter. It won't damage anything but its intended target unless its provoke." The man that had been eaten would have had something to say about it, but Lindsey still had theories about that. He cleared his throat when he was done, finding that the words were no easier than he had expected, but certainly no harder. "So if you think you can take out something that size before the sun rises…"
Angel stared at the soul eater a few seconds longer with that expression of recognition before he swore and looked skyward. "You're right," he said at long last. "It won't." He didn't even notice when Charlotte, discovering that she could fly again, chose mobility over her grudge and rose back into the air with a tremendous beating of wings that blew all of their hair back from their faces. More than ever now, Lindsey knew that something was wrong. The feeling of not knowing the whole story did not grow any easier with time.
"He is?" Spike asked dryly, a line appearing between his eyes.
"It's our mess, isn't it?" Angel asked, turning away. He looked more like a corpse than Lindsey had ever seen him.
Spike's face cleared, chasing some of the life out of him as well. "Another night, then."
"We need to get off the street," Angel said after a long moment. His voice had returned to a careful neutrality, but Lindsey could see the way that his eyes moved out over Lindsey and An in a continuous loop. There was no need for him to voice the thoughts running through his head, because they had already been doing an energetic tango through Lindsey's mind for close to an hour. There was only one reason that he could think of for Guardians to be wandering about on the mortal plane, and that was for the purpose of reclaiming lost property. 'Dark magic comes with strings attached. Now there's a revelation.'
Angel was stabbing at the body of the Guardian to ensure that it was really dead when An walked over to him. She was once again wearing her royal expression, hardly marred by the fact that she was covered in gore and so exhausted that she could barely keep her knees from buckling. "I think that you're involved now," she said.
Angel stared back at her without expression as the minutes ticked away towards the dawn.
End Part Nine