Part Ten
An held a short, whispered conference with Alexei and Fideo before she suggested the basement room where Phillip and Janice crouched as a suitable place to hide from the day. It was a trek of nearly twenty blocks over territory where human beings were no longer at the top of the food chain in order to get there, and every twitch in the shadows or faint scuttling noise as the city's new populace battled it out for food or sex made An jump and catch her breath. They had lost three of their own people in the fight outside of the apartment building: the blond man that Lindsey referred to as 'the tech', Mr. Johnson, and a woman that Lindsey swore vehemently had been there, though her corpse had not been found. Mr. Johnson had been recognizable only by his cane. Katie, who had seen him die, ducked her head and refused without preamble to discuss it. She clung to Alicia so hard that it was a wonder she even allowed herself to be pulled away long enough for a hasty bandage to be put on Alicia's leg.
An told herself that this was not her problem, not with everything else that was at stake now. With enough repetition, she was almost able to believe it. Fideo's hand knocking lightly against hers as they walked side by side was a source of comfort with each bump, as was the sight of Alexei's brown hair a few paces ahead of her. Alicia limped along at An's left, leaning heavily on Spike's shoulder and clinging to Katie with her free hand. An was amazed that Alicia was not breaking the little girl's fingers. Angel had taken off his belt and wound it around Alicia's thigh just above the wound there, further slowing the flow of blood, but as long as she kept moving none of them were going to be able to make it stop entirely. Alicia had rejected Spike's offer to carry her, saying that she did not want to let Katie wander far and that her leg didn't hurt that much, really. An thought that if Alicia bit her lip much hard to get through that lie, then her thigh was not the only bloody mess that they were going to have to deal with. Alicia had not been able to hand her sword back over to Lindsey fast enough, and she scrubbed her hand against her skirt every few moments as if she had touched something filthy.
An thought that it would probably be in poor taste to twirl her own sword in a circle after all the blood that it had already seen, but she caught herself lifting it slightly to catch the light from the stars all the same. With the gore still smeared thickly along the blade, it did not shine very much.
An looked over her shoulder at Lindsey, who was once again carrying a sword in each hand and bringing up the rear of the group of pale, frightened people. He was too far back and the streets were too dark for An to see any more of his face than a set of deep and faintly gleaming hollows where his eyes were located. She built up the rest of his features for him, adding shadows beneath his eyes, skin glossy and pale with exhaustion, and mouth set into a hard, angry line. An dressed the details, adding a nobility that had never been there before, and tried desperately to pretend that the Lindsey walking along the sidewalk now was the same one who had rushed to an eight year-old girl's rescue years before. The riotous images that she had picked up from him upon meeting again the previous day did not make it any easier. 'Hero' was a bad fit on him, anyway.
As An turned away, she caught Fideo scowling. He pulled his hand slowly away from hers.
"Is this it?" Angel's voice cut through An's bewilderment and pulled her away from Fideo, back to the world of the concrete and the present. She looked down at the sword in her hand, twisting it back and forth to make it gleam. It was foolish to allow herself to be distracted. She should know better.
An looked up again, first at Angel and then at the building that he was indicating. "Yes," she said. "This is it. It's the basement apartment." She paused to look around at the bloody, battered pack of them. "It will be a tight fit."
"No one gets left behind," Angel's voice curled back out to her. His expression didn't need to change in order for An to read the anger that rode the air, or that only a fraction of it was directed at her. An wondered if maybe she should have spent more time learning to put her social skills into practice, or maybe into learning what they were in the first place.
"That's not what I said." An was both surprised and embarrassed to hear the hurt that colored her voice. She pressed her lips into a firm line sot that she would not be betrayed again. There was no varnish to Angel, nothing that she had not known from the moment that he had killed the bad lady years before, or that had not been reinforced by Jonathan's lessons to her since then. Angel was a tool, a weapon crafted as finely as the sword that An held in her hand. Beautiful, but made for one specific purpose all the same. The fact that he had walked away from his job meant that he was no longer worthy of An's respect as he had been before, made him only so much detritus in their path as they worked towards their mission.
An wished that the looks Angel flicked over her didn't still have the power to sting.
"They'll probably be sleeping. I should go in first. You'll have to wait in the lobby," An said, pushing past Angel and Alexei and not caring how much she sounded like a petulant child. Alexei gave her a look of commiseration and rolled his eyes good-naturedly as her shoulder bumped into his. The feeling of being a lone soldier in a war where all of the generals had long since grown bored and walked off the field dwindled slightly. A couple more of those and she might even be able to smile. An paused at the door leading into the lobby and the dark honeycomb of apartments beyond. "This isn't your place. I'll have to convince them to invite you in." An pressed the sword in to Angel's hand for safekeeping, smiled sweetly, and spun away. She thought she saw Fideo hiding a grin behind his hand.
An had thought that Phillip and Janice would be sleeping and that she would have to knock for several minutes before rousing them. That turned out not to be the case. She was barely lifting her knuckles from the door when it was flung open and An was lifted into a hug sudden and fierce enough to make her wish that she was still holding the sword. An tolerated it until her mouth had gone dry and the force of the blood pounding through her temples was beginning to make her nauseous before she put her hands against Janice's shoulders and pushed back until she could breathe again. By the time she had regained her feet, An's features were once again schooled back into a mask of impassivity. The skin of her palms tingled and memories many years old danced through her head, but to react any more strongly than that would be impolite. An leaned back and struggled to smile. "I hope that we didn't worry you."
"Didn't worry us-you stupid girl, you-" Janice cut herself off and pressed her lips into a line hard enough to make them disappear. She looked over her shoulder at Phillip, who was leaning in the doorway like a disapproving gargoyle. An had not known her father long enough to go on a date and be caught sneaking home late from it. She could not say that she saw now what the nostalgic frenzy was all about. Only decorum kept her feet still and her face bland. "I suppose that the three of you aren't normal children."
"No," An echoed. "We're not." Something in the way that Janice stiffened told An that it was now safe to drop her hands. "There were some complications today. We had to bring people back with us."
"People," Janice repeated. Her tone asked for explanation, and suggested that An make it good.
"How many?" Phillip asked, stepping forward from his position in the doorway for the first time. He was carrying a flashlight, and as he crossed and uncrossed his arms over his chest the light bobbed across their faces.
"About a dozen," An replied. Phillip and Janice exchanged looks. An knew that they were thinking of the supplies that it would take to feed that many. Three teenagers were a different matter entirely from a dozen people that they did not even know, especially when the teenagers could at the very least claim to have destiny on their side. An didn't flinch from this knowledge or gloat over it as she might have even a day before, just let it gleam quietly in the back of her mind. Like a sword, she thought, and almost smiled. "They're only going to be waiting here until the sun rises," she said before she remembered Spike and Angel. "Or maybe a little longer. But they won't be using up anything other than water. We're all kind of gross."
"We can see that," Phillip said, staring at the blood that covered An's face and clothes. It hadn't occurred to him to doubt that the blood came from fighting for the cause, but An did not like the potential that she saw resting beneath the surface there. "Only a dozen?" he asked at last. There was a flash of humor there, so slight that An almost missed it.
She contorted her mouth into the shape of a smile while her mind drifted to the people waiting for her upstairs. An had enough bruises on her arms and legs to say that lobbies were not always sanctuaries. "Only. Two of them have to be invited in, though." The last half An uttered in the evasive mumble that had never managed to fool Jonathan for more than a moment.
And apparently that skill was not something learned through years of dealing with children, but was instead an instinct. Phillip and Janice exchanged a second look, far more alarmed than the first had been. "Invited in?" Janice repeated. Her voice had gone low and flat, and reminded An of striking her knuckles against a piece of steel. She was already shaking her head. "Oh, no. No, no, no. There's enough of that roaming out there already, we don't need to go inviting it in-"
"They have souls," An interrupted flatly. "It won't be a problem. We need them to do what we came here to do. Small matter of stopping the apocalyptic hemorrhage out there?" Her tone was more snappish than she had intended. An took a deep breath, rearranged her features into an expression of professionalism, and waited for her trump card to take effect.
It could start doing that at any time, actually. Phillip still looked dubious, Janice was already shaking her head, and they did not have time for this bullshit-
An wasn't sure how she pushed; she was not intending to. Phillip's and Janice's eyes went unfocused for a second before the expressions of negation slowly began to morph into ones of reluctant agreement. "If you're certain," Phillip began in a voice that was not quite right, was not quite real. 'They've never met him. They'll never know.'
"I'm certain." An's pulse was a tango against the thin skin of her temples, shattering her concentration when she most needed every scrap of it. "I'll bring them down." She touched her hand to the skin below her nose and did not know if she was surprised when the pads of her fingers came away clean.
The group was still waiting in the lobby where An had left them, a small, pale cluster of people who reminded An suddenly, unexpectedly, of a herd of sheep waiting for someone to tell them where to go. She gulped and tried to slow the rat-atat-tat of her heart.
Angel stared at her as she came into view, long and hard enough to make An feel as if every thought that she had was being scoured out of her head. "You're pale," he said. "And your heart is racing."
"I ran up the stairs," An said. She tried to run her hands through her hair, got her fingers tangled in the gore, and grimaced. Alexei and Fideo were giving her worried looks over Angel's shoulder, looks that she did not dare return yet. "They agreed, but we should probably go down before we bring the neighbors out. The, um, the blue lady? Will she be okay?"
"Illyria needs to have herself a snit," Spike said. "She'll find us when she's gotten over it." An thought that he sounded doubtful. No time to care.
"Okay. Whatever, it's this way." An spun and led the way down the stairs, from the corner of her eye seeing Spike swoop Alicia into his arms in spite of her protests. Lindsey fixed An with a long, shrewd look as she went. All the way down the stairs, An could feel the weight of his stare against the back of her neck.
---
Lindsey surrendered his swords in favor of a shower and a change of clothes, and now his hair hung in damp tendrils against the back of his neck. One of Phillip's shirts and a pair of his jeans clung to skin that was still beaded here and there with water. So far as Lindsey's body was concerned, sleep was the single best choice that he could be making right about then. It didn't help that virtually every other person in the room had seen the wisdom of that choice save for him. It was his mind that was refusing to turn off and stop spinning.
The beasts that had attacked the apartment building were not the kind who went slithering up out of hell just because they spied an open doorway. Not with the cushy gig that they already had going for them down among the fire and the brimstone.
Lindsey could only think of one reason for that kind of firepower to be amassed on the human plane. His peace of mind would be so much better served if that reason was not him. Lindsey closed his eyes and pinched at the bridge of his nose, tilting his head back until it rested against the cool concrete wall. When he heard the scuff of boots on the floor in front of him, he did not need to open his eyes to know who they belonged to. "Angel. I was wondering when you were going to come wandering in my direction."
"I've come to realize that the two of us don't talk nearly enough." Angel's voice didn't lack the heat that he had possessed when he had been angry at An earlier. He had only buried it deeper. There may even have been a hint of curiosity there, as if Lindsey was an interesting petri dish whose properties Angel could just not figure out. All those years Lindsey had spent trying to convince Angel that maybe he didn't have Lindsey figured out as well as he thought, and all it took in the end was a not so random attack by the denizens of hell. Lindsey could have laughed.
"Not without violence or foreplay being involved, anyway." 'Or both.' Lindsey opened his eyes and squinted against the light that had come back on less than an hour before. Because the irony gods were the only ones who liked to prove that they had not written Earth off as a loss, the bulb was situated almost directly behind Angel, surrounding his head in a glowing corona. Lindsey snorted and thought that Angel might have cocked his eyebrow at him. With his features shrouded in shadow like that it was impossible to be sure. "Every muscle that I have hurts and that light is fucking with my eyes like you would not believe. I'm not going to crane my head up to stare at you all morning."
Oh, and he didn't need to be able to see Angel's face clearly to know that he was getting far more than an arched eyebrow now. He could pick up cues from Angel so subtle that reading them was almost akin to telepathy. Lindsey felt a knot at the base of his spine begin to loosen as he realized that there was once again something there for him to read. The room's resident hero in chief sat down on the floor across from Lindsey without comment a moment later, folding his legs beneath him until he resembled nothing so much as the world's largest and least enthusiastic toddler. His expression remained one of faint amusement, but the rest of his body language told Lindsey that he would not like the results if he pushed further. Lindsey leaned back against the wall and relaxed even more. "Better?" Angel asked.
Lindsey flashed his most brilliant smile. "Yes. Thank you." He received another one of those looks and let it slide right off of his psyche like rain from a sloped roof. Angel had already killed him once. Everything else was kind of anticlimactic after that, and Lindsey was feeling an urge to vent the frustrations and epiphanies swirling around his head on any body that happened to be warm enough, or at the very least close enough. He couldn't think of a single better candidate for that purging to be directed at than the man directly or indirectly responsible for all of the seismic shifts that had taken place in Lindsey's life over the last half-decade and change.
Angel peered at Lindsey with his dark, dark eyes, pinning him to the wall without needing to move a muscle. The faint ridiculousness of his pose fell away as if it had never been, and Lindsey felt the grin slip off of his face in response. So here it came. He had been waiting for his particular moment of truth ever since things had calmed down and dying had once again become a matter of if rather than when.
In a voice pitched so soft and low that Lindsey had to lean forward in order to hear it, Angel asked, "What happened tonight, Lindsey?"
Lindsey blinked. He had been expecting dire accusations to the effect that he had sold his soul right back into the service of one side after his check had bounced with the other. That didn't count as one of them. Lindsey paused for a long moment, waiting for Angel to strike the jugular blow in one form or another. When it never came he said finally, "Woke up because the building was shaking. I thought that it was an earthquake until I looked out the window and saw Charlotte tangling with the Guardians." Lindsey broke himself off and looked at Angel askance. "She doesn't like you much, does she?"
Angel's lips spasmed. Lindsey was not sure if he was tightening them in annoyance or perhaps even building up to a smile. With Angel it could be difficult to tell, and Lindsey had so much more experience with the first than the second. "We'll get to me Q and A session in a minute," he said.
Lindsey took a deep breath and continued, opting for a neutral tone that was soon undone by the fresh sweat that he could feel breaking out along his hairline. Angel only interrupted once, when Lindsey got to the nasty that had been wrapping itself around the building. "The soul eater," he said, his brow furrowing and the look of recognition coming back. Lindsey could not say that he cared for it much more the second time around. He opened his mouth to explain but Angel shook his head and waved his silent. "We can get to the extra details in a minute. For now, just stick to the basics." Lindsey paused for a moment, his brow furrowing, but in the end he did as Angel asked. It sounded smaller when it was spoken out loud and divorced from the adrenaline that had made it so urgent and acid-bright in the first place. He leaned back against the wall when he was finished and felt the cool concrete beginning to soothe away the sweat that had broken out along the line of his back.
Angel remained silent for several minutes after Lindsey had finished, his gaze turned inward. At long last he said, in the same soft voice that made Lindsey feel as if the world was a movie that he was trying to catch up on close to the end, "Back to the soul eater. How does that work?"
'Why don't you tell me?' Lindsey wondered. The smile that crossed his face was small and bitter, but it soon found fertile ground to grow. "What does it sound like it does? It eats souls. It swallows the body, it digests it, and then the mind, the soul, all of that fun crap that gets the Powers, the Forces, and everything in between all hot and bothered over, that goes to a place beyond heaven and hell. Perfect blackness without the slightest speck of light or sound." Lindsey had not smoked since passing the bar years before. He wondered if Spike would be willing to let him bum a cigarette. "You know how long most people last in complete sensory deprivation before their brains go all squishy around the edges. About six hours. Try to imagine doing that for an eternity." Lindsey felt his shirt sticking to his spine as he leaned forward to give Angel a long, speculative look. "Can't really say what it would do to you or Spike, though. What happened to your soul the last time that it came unattached and went roaming around?"
Angel's expression did not change, but the air around him still seemed to swell. "If its prey spends the rest of eternity in some kind of sensory deprivation," he asked, "then how does anyone know what happens next?"
Now there was the question that Lindsey had been waiting for. He leaned forward and grinned like a knife. "Head south," he said, "and concepts like eternity have a way of becoming a little more relative on you. Every once in a while one will turn up again. We put the pieces together out of what's left."
"Did it happen to you?"
That tone again. Lindsey was not sure what to do with it. He leaned back against the wall again so that he could put more space between them, room to breathe and maybe even to think. Lindsey tapped his finger against his temple. "Not quite soft enough up here. Sorry if that disappoints." He paused for a moment. "Just call it a healthy respect from seeing it happen to others." Lindsey broke off for another long moment, fidgeting, before he went on in the same tone that he might use to recite a particularly boring biology fact, "It's attracted to lights. That's why we didn't carry flashlights-I didn't want to draw it towards us." He grimaced and rubbed his hand across the back of his neck. "Light was, ah, scarce in the little patch of hell that I got to call home. You saw lights, and that was a sure sign that there were people around."
Angel was staring at Lindsey with something that might have been pity or might even have been respect. They were both so alien to Lindsey that he was honestly finding it difficult to tell them apart. Only his craving for the latter allowed him to halt his knee-jerk reaction to the former. Two eyeblinks later and the look was gone, replaced by one of deep horror. Lindsey would not have been surprised if Angel had jumped right up and run out of the building, sunlight be damned. "And we left that thing to wander around at will," he said. That fleeting look that Lindsey had seen was no more than a ghost. Angel's tone was accusatory as he said, "You told me that it would only attack what it came up here looking for. It could be destroying people right now."
"Could be," Lindsey agreed, if for no other reason that to put a look back onto Angel's face that he could understand. "Probably not. It had itself a nice meal by going for me and missing, but anything is possible. It's not like you could have killed it before the sun came up, anyway, if you could have killed it at all. Then it would be sliding around and you would be dead, so sorry if I'm not falling down with remorse here." Lindsey shrugged. "You want someone to hold your hand, go talk to your fan club. Yeah, it might have killed people by now. Soul eaters aren't really big on shedding tears over collateral damage." Lindsey paused so that Angel's expression could reach its darkest possible point before he said, "And even if it were full dark outside and there was a complete solar eclipse buying you even more time, there probably would not be a single, solitary thing that you could do about it. That portal's still open, and the soul eater is drawing plenty of energy from the home place. Going up against something like that, you're a gnat. She's the A-bomb."
Lindsey tilted his head towards An, who was crouching in a corner with Alexei and Fideo. The three of them were attempting to look at each other's wounds all at once and were largely reducing themselves to a tangle of limbs. Lindsey dipped his head back down and began to examine his hands with a clinician's detachment. There was still blood embedded beneath his nails and in the creases of his knuckles. The scar that encircled his wrist caught the light and gleamed an eerie shade of red. "There are some things that you can't control and can't save, hero. No matter how much you might want to."
Angel leaned forward and growled, "Do you really think that you're doing me a favor there? Teaching me a lesson?" There was something in his voice that made Lindsey's pulse double in a span of seconds.
Lindsey glanced up, shrugged, and folded his arms back across the tops of his knees. "Sorry. The mission's hard to shake off, even if I'm not collecting the checks any longer." That last bit had been solely to rile Angel, and the swift narrowing of his eyes told Lindsey that he knew it. "And somehow I'm thinking that nine-tenths of that fairytale in the apartment was information that you already knew." Angel did not answer. There was still a surplus of tension pitching and roiling beneath the surface of Lindsey's skin that made him feel as if he was going to explode if he did not get it out soon. He could not think of a single better person with whom to share the wealth. "If you're done, I guess that makes it my turn." When Angel nodded finally, Lindsey went on. "First one's easy. Charlotte. Why so eager to toast you?"
Angel might have worn a whisper-quick attempt at a smile before he took up the robot's expression again. It was gone too quickly for Lindsey to be sure. "On the night that the city changed," Angel began. With his legs crossed and his hands braced upon his knees, he looked like the world's largest and scariest schoolteacher.
'Changed' was a stripped-down, sanitized way of referring to it, Lindsey thought, but any other would keep them there for the entire day and most of the night as well. "When the portal opened, one of the things that flew out was a dragon." Lindsey tilted his head to one side and frowned. The Guardians had been the largest flying predators that he had come across on his vacation. Angel caught the expression. "Yeah, I know. I didn't expect it, either. But there he was, big as a city bus and setting fire to everything that happened to piss him off. That meant a lot of downtown. I saw him, and I thought…" Angel trailed off before he gave himself a hard mental shake and went on. There was a darkness to his face, Lindsey noticed, that never fully went away. "It kept us from realizing what had happened right away. I figured that it had been long enough since I had been a hero, so I might as well get it started off again with a bang."
A faint smile crossed Lindsey's face even as he wondered why Angel was feeling driven to use him as his confessional. The doubts that he had been entertaining even since the apartment building had collapsed began to creep back on quiet cat feet. Yes, he could easily imagine Angel dashing off to be the knight errant and knew from experience that more often than not he could defy the odds to make it work. 'I did my job,' Lindsey growled internally, unsure of which deity he was protesting to. It was possible that he was speaking to no one at all. 'I got him where he needed to be, I kept my promise. You owe me more than this.' Out loud, he said only, "I'm assuming that you killed the Big Ugly. Doesn't explain why the Medium Ugly has such a bone to pick with you."
Angel gave a smile that managed to be bitter and amused at the same moment. Lindsey was once again faced with the impression of a schoolteacher, one who was disappointed that his student was not putting the pieces together as fast as he had hoped. "He had a mate," Angel said.
"Oh." Lindsey leaned back and fought an absurd urge to laugh. "Do angry spouses come after you a lot?"
"There have been more than a few." Angel fixed him with a look. "You said that you had another question."
"Yep. And this one's not so heartwarming." Lindsey unhooked his arms from around his knees and leaned forward. "When I went out earlier I saw demons-everywhere. I saw a city that had been absolutely destroyed. You want to know what I didn't see? Outside of the midnight strolls that your group goes on, there is not a single person out there fighting them. There are thousands of Slayers in the world now. You want to tell me that not even one of them has migrated to your city? That the Golden One herself couldn't even be convinced to lend a hand?"
The smile that remained on Angel's face was no more than a technicality. It had fled from his eyes the moment that Lindsey finished speaking. Those eyes reminded Lindsey more of a shark's than of a man's, and he had to fight down an urge to shiver and lean back. "No Slayers," Angel said. "No seers, no witches, no…Champions of any kind." His voice had taken on a mechanical quality that Lindsey did not like at all, rendering Angel into a computer repeating the same set of stock phrases over and over again. "That was the deal."
"Deal?" Lindsey echoed. He felt cold spreading across his skin, just when he thought that he was learning how to be warm again.
"It was the only way to keep more portals from opening," Angel said. Enough of the liveliness had come back into him so that he spit out each word as if it were acid upon his tongue. "Los Angeles in exchange for the rest of the world."
"So you cut a bargain," Lindsey said slowly. Something was trying to speak up in the back of his mind, but he had crippled it years ago and so had no name for it now.
"Wolfram and Hart made me very good at those." Angel started to get back to his feet.
"Angel," Lindsey said suddenly. "I think I know why the building was attacked." The words tumbled out of his mouth beyond his control and the strange, foreign thing in the back of his mind was doing nothing to stop them.
Angel gave him that look of a teacher struggling with a dense student again. Lindsey thought that his gaze lingered for a moment before he turned away. "I've known that for hours." He got back to his feet.
"Angel." Lindsey almost did not recognize An's voice when she spoke, so soft and nearly hesitant was it. He wondered how long she had been lingering a few paces away from them, how much that she had managed to hear. Lindsey was made acutely aware of how much damage she could do with a few careless words.
Angel did not look surprised to see An standing there. Vampire hearing must have told him that she was coming almost before she had begun to move. He lifted his eyebrows, waiting for her to speak, while his expression remained the picture of polite courtesy. An's face shifted beneath his patient stare and she began to fidget.
"I just wanted to tell you," An began. "I…uh, I wanted your help, but I didn't want it to be like this. I didn't plan for it to be like this, in case you maybe thought-"
"I didn't," Angel interrupted her gently.
"Right." An almost flinched beneath the borderline terrifying courtesy of Angel's tone, but she straightened at the last moment, lifting her chin and once more assuming the posture of young royalty. Lindsey was not sure how much of this was genuine and how much was an act; either way, he mentally applauded her for the effort. "But since you're already involved one way or another, maybe you could see it through to the end." Angel waited without speaking until An went on. "We came to Los Angeles with the intention of closing that portal. We're not going to leave until we're dead or that mission is accomplished."
"You're not the first one to come through saying those exact same words," Angel said. His voice became a shade or two warmer, until it almost resembled that of an older brother imparting his wisdom onto the younger generation. "You wouldn't be the first one to die trying, either."
An lifted her chin by another inch or two. "Yes, but Fideo, Alexei, and I can actually do it."
"And you're definitely not the first one to say that."
The child queen expression was struggling not to give way to one of unfettered exasperation. "We've been prophesied," she said, "as have you. Alexei, Fideo, and I have spent our whole lives preparing for this moment, so when I say that we can do this, that's not just me being a mouthy teenager. The only thing that we aren't going to be able to do is fight off all the hell vomit standing between us and that portal." An stared down at her arms, which were scratched and bruised from all of the miraculous near-misses that she had taken. Her mouth twisted into a wry smile. "And I'm used to being good at everything, too." She looked back up. "But your people seem to have that category taken care of. You could get us there."
When Angel only looked at her, his face expressionless, An exploded into a voice which sounded as if she were near tears, "Damnit, this is not about the Powers That Be, or the forces of darkness, or whoever it is that you're pissed off at right now! It's about fighting the good fight and helping the helpless and all of those things that you used to understand! It's not about your stupid deal!" That answered the question of how much she had heard.
An's voice had gotten progressively louder and more shrill as her tirade had run on, until there was not a head in the room that was not swiveled around to stare at them all by the times she was finished. She took a deep breath and cast her eyes down to the floor as her cheeks reddened. Angel's face may have appeared expressionless to An, but Lindsey knew how to read him, and what he saw bled like an uncauterized wound. Still staring down at the floor, An finished in a low voice, "You were better than this. I don't care how long ago it was or how much life up and decided to suck between now and then: you were better."
Angel stared at An for so long that Lindsey became sure that he was going to refuse her again. He began to wonder if maybe this was why, if maybe he had not completed his assigned task as well as he had believed. Lindsey thought the twisting, boiling feeling of rage would abate back to a manageable level if only someone could give him a why. At long last, Angel said, "We'll have a plan when night falls. Today we're going to rest."
An's knees sagged for a moment. Lindsey thought that she was torn between falling to the floor and racing about the room in pure teenaged glee. An caught herself at the last moment and straightened up. "Thank you," she said in a tone of labored dignity. "Thank you so much." She turned and walked with forced slowness back to the place where Alexei and Fideo were waiting for her, breaking character and all but running across the final few steps. The three fell to whispering among themselves almost immediately.
Lindsey looked up at Angel. "So you're back on the payroll again." Years of experience kept his tone under control, though his heart was hammering so hard in his chest that it must have been audible not only to Angel, but also to everyone else in the room.
Angel stared back at him almost as if he were seeing him for the first time. The experience was not as pleasant as Lindsey would have believed. "It's not about the labels, Lindsey," he said. "It's not about the banners." In a voice so low that it was almost inaudible, Angel said, "There's still a lot that she doesn't know about this game."
Lindsey thought this was a rich sentiment coming from the person who had just admitted to allowing the legions of hell to swallow up Los Angeles, even if it was with the intention of saving the rest of the world, but now did not feel like the best time to say so. Not now, when Angel was giving him that troubling scientist's stare that was still so much better than the looks that he was used to receiving, so much riper. He felt like standing up and screaming down the Powers That Be until they came to take a look at the services that had already been rendered, if they found them so unsatisfactory. His skin tingled as if it had been on the receiving end of an electric shock. "Five minutes ago you were telling me that you were good at cutting bargains."
"Yeah." Angel's eyes flicked over Lindsey again before he turned to scrutinize An as well. "But it looks like I'm good at breaking them, too." The conversation could have been taking place in Angel's office on the first day that he walked through the doors, so different was the tone from the one that Lindsey had come to recognize as Angel's default.
When Lindsey was silent fro a long moment without replying, Angel looked at him strangely and said, "Go and get some sleep, Lindsey. You look like hell."
"We've moved on to bad jokes. You're cracking up." Lindsey's voice sounded as if it was coming to him from down a long distance, all but obliterated by the pounding of his heart. He pushed himself away from the wall and made his way over to where Alicia was dozing in a pile of makeshift bedding on the floor, her arms wrapped around the sleeping Katie. Once inside the building, Alicia had wasted no time in putting as much distance as possible between herself and the swords.
"Hey," Alicia opened her eyes and muttered when she heard Lindsey's shoes on the cement.
"Hey, yourself," Lindsey answered. "Mind if I pull up some floor?"
"We have plenty." Alicia moved over to make room for him, shushing Katie's sleepy protests. When Lindsey had settled in, she asked, "He's going to do it?" in the tone of someone who was afraid to put too much hope into her voice, lest she make the bubble burst then and there.
"I think so," Lindsey whispered back.
"Wow." Alicia fell silent for several minutes. "We might actually get our city back." To Lindsey's horror, she sounded as if she were only a few good nudges away from bursting into joyous tears. Lacking anything useful to say, he chose to stare up at the ceiling until he fell asleep and say nothing at all.
---
Champions. An's eyes remained wide open in the windowless dark of the room, taking in everything and nothing at all as her mind worked feverishly over what she had heard. Her earlier horror and that terrible uncertainty over what she had done to Phillip and Janice was melting away as swiftly as sugar cubes left out in a steady rain. She, Alexei, and Fideo had spent the better part of the morning arguing fiercely about the best way to proceed from that point, scrawling their plans across scraps of paper to prevent them from being overheard. As to whether or not An had done the right thing, there had been no disagreement. Without the aid of Angel and his people they had no chance of completing their mission, and if they ever wanted to see what kind of normalcy existed on the other side when now more than ever the mission had to be everything. Champions, though…that swept away even the faint, cobwebby traces of doubt that An might have been entertaining. Angel could maintain his issues and his deep well of self-pity for as long as he wanted. 'I know something you don't know,' An's glee was making her want to run around the room and chant.
'Pride goeth before the fall,' Jonathan's voice cautioned in her mind, one of those many quotes from all of the religions that he had used to illustrate his points over the years. An barely even registered the warning before she was already brushing it away. In the darkness, her grin gleamed very white.
End Part Ten