Part Fourteen
Jonathan smokes cigarettes in an endless cycle, one right after the other, so that his fingers are stained permanently yellow. It is a smell that An will associate with childhood throughout the course of her life. Children cannot grow up in vacuums, however, not even ones who move around as much as they do, and An learns to worry long before she ever sets foot in Los Angeles. She urged him to quit by laying out articles on cessation where he could not hope to miss them, hiding the cigarettes when they were stranded in locations that made obtaining more difficult (an ugly three days and an experience that An has no plans to repeat), even telling him that the least he could do was take up a pipe like a good Englishman and abandon those damned unfiltereds. Jonathan will smile and ruffle her hair and tell her not to be afraid, but to focus instead on the job that she was being prepared for. The protective weight on her head whenever Jonathan does this does not stop An from worrying dark thoughts like cancers.
Jonathan is always right, An thinks now, sinking to the floor and a hearing a series of soft sounds beginning to echo through her ears. It takes several more seconds before she realizes that the sound is coming from her. He was right, and she should not have worried about cancer. From where An is sitting, it looks more than anything else like heart attack.
There is the sound of footsteps on the floor outside of the study before a hard force slams into the space between An's shoulder-blades. A grunt pushes past her lips. A moment later, and she realizes that she's sitting in front of the door. An shivers before she gathers herself back together again enough so that she can move, allowing the boys into the room at last. They freeze and stare.
Jonathan's last cigarette is still resting between the fingers of his left hand. It has burned all the way down to the last half-inch, blistering deep red weals where it has touched his skin. No filters. Stupid. An thinks that she should go and pluck it away. It takes her a few more seconds to realize that the state of Jonathan's fingers probably doesn't matter much to him any longer. She pauses suspended for a moment between the two options, long enough for the rare moment of indecision to seep into her mind like a malignant growth. It's a bad thought; An pushes it away.
Alexei and Fideo are not speaking as they stand there and stare at the body of what used to be their mentor. They do not need to. An can feel their thoughts swirling about the inside of her school as if there is not a barrier of flesh and skull that prevents three bodies from being one. It is a dizzy swarm of confusion and shock that will begin to shade over into grief before much more time has been allowed to pass. They need to take advantage of the calm before it is corroded away.
An pushes herself up to her feet and walks over to the place where the corpse…she shivers and tells herself that she will force herself to refer to it as the corpse from here on out, if that's what will keep her on her feet, and never as Jonathan again. She walks over to where the corpse is staring and rummages about in the large oak desk for the letter opener in the shape of a sword that Jonathan has always kept there. A quick flick with the knife sends the cigarette butt rolling out from between the corpse's fingers and across the carpet. An brings her heel down upon it before a fire can be started, and a dime-sized burn is left behind on the carpet.
An's movement has broken the spell of inaction cast across the boys. They lunge forward swiftly to help her. Fideo places his fingertips on the corpse's eyelids and draws them down, shuddering, so at the very least they are no longer being stared at. Alexei bypasses An and Fideo both and kneels in front of the small television shoved into one corner of the room. Previously, it had been used so rarely that a thick layer of dust often grew over the screen. Alexei's fingers fit almost perfectly into the smudges created by Jonathan's own fingers on the dial hours before. Sound is given to the Technicolor orgy of violence that had before been playing on mute. The images are written in stark shades of orange and red that remind An of watching a Robert Rodriguez film.
Alexei finishes manipulating the set and rocks back onto his heels. For a moment the three of them watch in silence as more "breaking news" rolls out from the city of angels-the city of Angel, they'll never forget that-and the terrified newscasters do their best to avoid admitting that they have no idea what is going on and even less of an idea of how to stop it. Running on loop is the same clip that has been showing for the past several weeks, that of a deep purple sac swelling up over a perfect Los Angeles skyline before bursting apart like the cluster of spider eggs that An had once poked when she was very small.
She had been bitten terribly, An remembers now. The thought comes to her with a surreal clarity that says her shock is not on its way to abating any time soon. An leans against Jon-against the dead thing's desk as her knees begin to wobble. It is not until the bridge of her glasses begins to slide down her nose that she realizes her face is slick with sweat.
The room is choked with three sets of thoughts, three sets of emotions all struggling to reroute themselves onto less painful paths, so that if An thought that it would do any good she would be gasping against the deep sense of claustrophobia that engulfs her. They were never able to do this before, not without maintaining some kind of prolonged physical contact. Even as An is afraid of what this might mean, she can feel her fear performing alchemy to become awe…to become power.
An turns her face away, even though it does not do her a bit of good while her thoughts are still on neon display for her adopted brothers to see. She shuffles the papers on the corpse's desk to buy herself time, noting that he has been in furious contact with several sets of people still trapped in the city. It will be some days later before she calms enough to come back to those addresses. An freezes as she catches sight of the prophecy written out in Jonathan's sprawling hand, the one that they have all been able to recite since the age of eight, the one about the Three who could see into the heart of things. There is a new line added to the end, but it has been slashed out so many times in some fit of emotion that An cannot decipher it. Her lips move as she reads over the prophecy, drawing comfort from it as a child would while reciting a nursery rhyme that kept the dark things trapped in their corners. An does not speak aloud at all; there is no need.
The sensation of tremendous and unruly shared power is already beginning to flow away from the room, and will be gone entirely within the day. There is a part of An which will always crave its return, that time when they became Three in far more than ancient words spoken in dusty books.
An looks up at last and sees that Alexei and Fideo are watching her with twin expressions of expectancy. There is a soft, silvery glow echoing from behind their sunglasses which is gone by the time that An blinks twice. Within seconds she has managed to convince herself that it was never there at all. More troubling is that look that they refuse to stop training on her, as if they expect her to pull a solution out of a hat. Even worse is the fact that a part of An, given enough time, could come to like it. She shoves the thoughts away to a far corner of her mind, swears never to think of it again, and within days will convince herself of the sincerity of the utilitarian motives that she cloaks herself in its place.
An moves the papers around on the desk for a few moments longer and doesn't glance up again until she senses that Alexei and Fideo are not going to turn that look off until she gives them a satisfactory answer. "Well, we still have a job to do, don't we?"
---
Weapon and wielder, An thought to herself. From either side of her she could feel Alexei and Fideo echoing the sentiment right back. They had all learned their lessons well, until the skills themselves had bypassed the brain together and sunk into a place deep inside their bones. They were passing their thoughts back and forth in a way that they hadn't since-'Since Jonathan died, don't hide from it, you're not a child any longer'-and An thought they might even do something bigger this time. The air between them crackled, grew thick and elastic with their wills.
When the space around them reverberated with a tremendous cracking sound like a sonic boom that nearly threw them all to their knees, signaling that they were through, the three of them registered it as scarcely more than an afterthought. An was not sure if this was a piece of prophecy coming to fruition, or if hell was just that eager to welcome anyone stupid enough to actively seek entry. When she got right down to it, she found that she didn't really care, though there was a voice in the back of her mind which said that she really ought to, because she had no idea of knowing whether that distinction might be the key to everything. Three days earlier that voice would have been a shout; tonight An batted it aside as if was nothing at all.
They were Three. An felt her breath quicken in her throat, and her heart began to pick up a more excited dance. Everything that Alexei and Fideo had ever been or ever would be flowed like a river through her mind. An knew that all of her thoughts and emotions had be turning around and flowing right back into them to mingle in the same stream, but this did not cause her to be embarrassed or indignant as it would have a day before. They were Three, and now she realized that they always had been. What they were going through now was just a final technicality.
An wished that the boys would come closer so that she could grab their hands, for once to draw comfort rather than for the sake of enhancing their power. The ground beneath their feet changed after the cracking sound and had gone from cement into something dense and springy. Every step that they took seemed to make it tremble. It was not such a strange leap for An to take from this to the conclusion that it might be alive. She felt her age, fourteen and alone and scared, for the first time that night.
A warm hand reached out from the gloom to grab from An's own. She jumped into the air before she realized that the hand was a warm brown color, soothing and familiar. Even in the dark, Fideo's smile was brilliant. An returned Fideo's squeeze and did not let go as she looked around for Alexei, wondering why he was not answering the same call. She found him only a few paces off, his head cocked to one side as if he were listening to music being played too softly for An and Fideo to quite hear. There was a long wound running down the side of Alexei's face, held together by stitches of the same silvery light that was bursting out of their eyes.
For a few seconds An was run through and through with a fear that made her hand clamp compulsively around Fideo's own and sent a worried, barely coherent stream of thoughts running into his mind. She could not remember how Alexei had gotten that wound. It was hideous and it was fresh, how could An possibly not remember how he had gotten it? When they had been side by side all night?
'When you're supposed to be Three, and an injury to one is supposed to be an injury to all,' the voice from the back of An's mind snapped, grown malicious on its own sense of self-righteousness. An iron magnet had settled into An's brain during that space of time that she could not remember, drawing her ever onwards even though she could not say towards what. For a moment, that pull began to shiver and tremble on its foundation, and she could sense that it was also wavering in the boys.
From very far away, An heard a sound that was like the chiming of bells. She wondered if that was what Alexei had been listening to.
This was not right. It took An several seconds to figure out which one them had "spoken" as the thoughts echoed from mind to mind until it became a cacophony that An ultimately silenced with an impatient mental shake. In the end she thought that it was Alexei, though she could never be quite sure. It may even have come from An herself.
"We don't know what we're doing here," Alexei said, turning his head to stare at An. The heavy indigo fog that refused to abate and let them have any clear view of what it was that they had walked into caught his voice and distorted it as it threw it back. The light glowing from behind the insectile anonymity afforded to him by his glassed dimmed for a moment as his words fell away, and a fresh trickle of blood escaped and ran from the wound in his face. The magnets placed into An's head wavered for a moment along with Alexei only to return a few seconds later, so strongly that they made her stagger. She and Fideo had their fingers wrapped around each other tightly enough to make their bones creak.
"We should back off, regroup," Alexei continued. "Figure out a better way." His voice sounded hesitant, as if he was still trying to convince himself as much as he was them.
If Alexei had sounded a bit more sure of himself, An might even have been driven to agree with him. As it was, his doubts only served to remind An infuriatingly of her own. It was all that she could do not to stomp her foot against the ground, and never mind if the ground decided to stomp back. The mental equivalent still echoed through all of their minds. "And what better way is there?" An asked in a tone that she barely recognized as herself. It was forceful to the point of being icy, and An found herself a little in awe of it. Her previous thoughts about Champions glimmered more strongly than ever. "Tell me one and we'll go back to the real world right now."
Alexei was silent. Fideo was standing very close to An, so close that she did not need to ask which side he would fall on if a division did occur. His skin felt warm where it touched hers.
An kept her eyes locked onto Alexei's face as she leaned forward. That beautiful feeling of unity was beginning to shudder and crack. She thought that she would burst into tears if it was allowed to fall away entirely. "This is what we were made for," An said in a low, steady voice that was as different from her earlier tone as she could make it. "Tell me that you can't feel that." Alexei did not speak, but there was an openness to his face which told An that he was at least listening. "We're standing in the edges of hell, 'Lex, and nothing is coming anywhere near us." An grinned before she could stop herself. The fog left a gritty, bitter taste on her teeth. "We were made for this moment," she repeated softly.
The corner of Alexei's mouth twitched upwards for a second. It was enough to let An know that she had won. "We're going to save the world," Alexei said.
An felt her smile coming back, blooming into a full grin that probably made her look like a lunatic, for all that she cared at this point. She was covered in a half-dozen different fluids that had no business being outside of the body, had no memory of the past hour in a way that would probably terrify her once she had the luxury of calming down and thinking about it, and was about to launch herself forward into the biggest fight of her life. More to the point, it was a fight that An was forced to admit she had no idea how to proceed with. Compared to that, what was looking a little bit crazy? "Damn right we are," An said, feeling the uneasiness flow out of Alexei's mind and the solidarity return.
The magnet was pounding more fiercely than ever at the back of An's brain. It was making her even more irritable and interfering with the flow of her thoughts, and she wished more than anything else that this damned fog would just go away. Alexei was standing less than five feet away from her, but she still could not get a good look at his face unless she squinted.
Well. An had not expected that to happen. She blinked and stared around at the suddenly clear air, pushing hair out of her eyes that she had not realized was there until that point. There were not any bodies within her sight, she supposed that she could be glad of that…parts of the ground were winking at her. "Oh, God," An whispered. It was almost enough to make her wish for the return of the mist, except that she had no doubt that to do so would bring it right back again and she was scared that she would be unable to banish it away.
"I think that the mountain over there used to be made of people," Alexei said in the musing voice used by people roughly three feet away from screaming hysterics. "It has arms."
"Yeah." An closed her eyes and found that it did no good while the while the boys' accounts were still being piped into her head. She opened them again a few seconds later. Her breath was coming in shallow pants.
"Do you realize what you just did?" Fideo was looking at her with something approaching awe, making An want to squirm and preen at the same time. The girl she saw through Fideo's eyes bore almost no resemblance to the girl who stared at her in the mirror every morning.
"What we just did," An corrected. The bells were coming back, joining the magnetic tug at the base of her brain and making bright spikes of pain arc through her head. An raised her hand to rub briefly at her eyes and from the corner of her vision saw Alexei doing the same.
'I'm not your goddamned goose,' An thought in a fit of pique, unsure of who she was even addressing the thought towards. 'Stop trying to pull me north.' The tug in her brain subsided enough so that she was no longer in danger of being driven to the ground. It continued as a low-level throbbing echoing through all of her cells. That it should obey her so readily would be far more troubling other under circumstances. "And if we can do this much…"
The grin that Fideo flashed her was not his own. Neither was the one that An gave back. "Then what else can we do?"
'You're in hell,' the crippled voice at the back of An's voice said desperately. 'You're in hell and it's obeying your commands, do you not see something wrong with this?' But it was small and weak, and within seconds An was not sure that she had heard it at all. She wasn't sure that she had heard anything else, ever, except for those godawful, godforsaken bells in her head, overtaking every cell in her body and filling up all of the spaces in between. An twisted around, taking in the lay of land through brand new eyes. Dimly and far-off, like peering out through a dirty window, she could see Los Angeles as it still existed from beyond the dirty veil. She blinked. There was something else that she was here to do.
"We have company," Alexei said softly. An and Fideo turned as one creature to see what he was looking at. 'I'm supposed to be stopping this,' An thought, staggering back enough to see her boys shuddering as the same thought ran through their minds. 'This is our destiny.'
Destiny. A word with power and with purpose, and it chimed in counterpoint to the throbbing going on in her skull. An's head snapped back and blood began to rush from her nose. It hurt, oh, oh, it hurt, in a way that it had not since she was very small and had first begun to get the blinding headaches, each one accompanied by information that she could not possibly know. An did not realize that she had begun to whisper a series of pleas and threats out loud until she tasted blood across her tongue, salty-tangy and oddly sweet in a way that she had never noticed before. An licked her teeth clean, spat to the side, and grinned in a way which she suspected was still gleaming and red.
An turned her head in the direction that Alexei indicated for her and saw that forces headed their way. She grinned even wider, until a bystander would have told her that she looked vulpine and then made steps to leave the area as soon as possible. The silver glow still shone out from behind all of their eyes. An knew that it was still there in her own by the way that the world shivered and shook, like film exposed to the light for a second too long, and meanwhile the magnets were beginning to pulse and throb again.
'Sorry, but I don't think I'll be taking that call any longer.' These were big words for someone who had been so close to falling into that gaping maw only a few seconds before, but An needed all the confidence that she could get.
'You're Champions,' An thought, unsure if she meant for it to be private or shared among the three of them. In the end, she did not guess that it mattered. When An held out her free hand, Alexei dashed over and grabbed it up, squeezing hard enough to make An's knuckles creak. She pulled her lips back from her teeth in reaction to the pain but did not make a sound. Three minds reached out towards one another, swirled around each other until they became a glowing, inseparable mass, and the three of them together pushed harder than they ever had before in their lives.
The pain was brilliant, staggering. An's head rocked back as if she had received a physical blow and she felt something deep inside her brain give way with a wet, fleshy pop. 'Not good,' An thought dizzily, and decided that whomever it had been who discovered that brain cells had no pain receptors might want to chat with her neurons about that. There was enough blood running down her face from her nose and ears to make breathing a task that required her full attention, sending An into a moment of panic when the mission and the basic bodily requirements of survival came to a crossroads and discovered that they could travel together no longer.
Without the mission, they were nothing. An's knees unhinged and she sat down hard on the wriggling, squirming ground, Alexei and Fideo unable to hold her up when their own legs were also staging a revolt. The three of them collapsed against each other in a puppy pile like they had used to when they were small. The magnets were rising in An's head again, so strong that she felt as if she might be dragged forward again at any moment, and once more came the chiming of bells.
An gasped and spit blood from the corners of her mouth, but never once let her grip on the boys' hands waver, never once let the power skirt away from the task for which she had been formed. She closed her eyes when the black spots dancing in front of them began to distract her. An imagined the approaching demons' heads exploding one by one in a spray of blood and bone with a ferocity which surprised and probably should have frightened her. Pop, pop, pop, and they had never displayed this kind of power before. An did not know what kind of instinct was telling her that this time was different, this time they could manage it, but she was terrified of it even as it pulled her forward.
Pop, pop, pop. It was exactly the sound that An had imagined in her mind, and it made her think of a twisted child filling a balloon with rice pudding and then popping it with a pin. She knew before she had ever opened her eyes that she was going to dream in red the next time that she slept. Fideo's hand convulsed around hers until An was finally forced to look. She could not help the smile which then split her lips, any more than she could help the blood that pooled across her tongue. An made no attempt at this point to spit it away. The pain began to fade, or perhaps it was only hidden by the bells.
"Oh, hell yes," Alexei whispered, turning to grin at her. His face had split open again. An could see down into the muscles playing beneath the skin of his cheek and into the gleam of white, bloodied bone, but Alexei did not seem to notice. The fabric of his shirt was stained crimson-dark from the neckline to a point just inches away from the hem. No one could lose that much blood and remain on their feet for long. The part of An that would have been out of her mind with worry only a day before, however, was now overwhelmed by the pure and giddy high of it. She grinned back with teeth that had been stained bright red before shaking her head, wishing that the noises would stop long enough for her to get her bearings back.
"Wonder what else we could do," Fideo repeated in a soft voice. He had lost his sunglasses at some point during the long-distance massacre. His eyes were gleaming silver dollars devoid of pupil, iris, or white.
"Yeah." An dug her nails in the earth's skin as deeply as she could, just so that she could feel it tremble. The sunglasses that had served her well over the past several years were an irritating, unnecessary weight against the bridge of her nose. An clawed them off and tossed them to the side, letting her eyes glow unimpeded. Alexei was quick to do the same before all three of them reached for one another's hands again. Their fingers were sticky with blood as they nuzzled against each other, as they forced their power together and pushed forward one more time without holding anything back. "Let's see what else we can do."
It was wrong, from the second they started An knew that it was wrong and that maybe they had finally pushed themselves farther than they could hope to come back from. An thought that even if she could rend time and step back six years into the past to find herself again it would have been too late.
The magnets roared back into her head in a great rush that sounded almost like a train, seductive in spite of its force. An thought that she might have screamed, but she could not be sure over the sounds of the bells singing inside and all around her. She released her pain by digging her fingers all the way into the ground up to her second knuckle, feeling the earth shudder and try to buck her off. 'I want you gone,' An thought in the direction of the bells, gritting her teeth together until she could taste flecks of enamel on her tongue. 'I want the world back the way it was, and I want to know what my life would have been like if you had never been.' She leaned over and vomited a great gout of blood across the knees of her jeans without bothering to open her eyes and view the mess that she could feel soaking through the knees of her jeans. Too late, too late, and the whole thing was too late, but damned if she was not going to pull the whole temple down with her.
That might have been a bad choice of words. The magnets and the bells changed character, becoming so sweet and lilting that An hardly even noticed when Alexei twitched and jerked so hard that three of her fingers were pulled right out of their sockets. She did not feel it at all when Alexei's hand finally fell away. Yes, they could give her that, of course they could, hadn't she already earned that much through everything that she had sacrificed? And when that gift had been granted, maybe there were other arrangements that could be made. They all wanted to be free.
An grit her teeth and shook her head, pushing with all of the weight afforded to her by prophecy and pure, teenaged bravado. She prayed that one would be able to hold her up even if the other failed.
An, though, had wandered through the minds of others as easily as her own for most of her life. She knew the secrets that could grow wild there, even in the heads of the ones that she once would have called saints or heroes. Even in the ones that she would have called Champions. The magnets finally fell away to leave behind only those sweet and eerie bells, and An found herself far more willing to listen to them now than she would have been an hour before. This was not her mess. She should be praised for cleaning it up, not scolded if she refused. Duties only counted if you first accepted them willingly; otherwise it was only slavery.
She should not have to. An had suspected this for a very long time. It was a sly thought that hid in the corners and the shadowy places, creeping up without sound to catch her in her unwary moments. Like a cockroach, because no matter how often she tried to smash it, it always came back again.
When 'I should not have to' became 'I do not want to', the volume of the bells doubled in one great thunderclap of sound. And doubled over and grit her teeth together against a scream. Fideo slumped against her shoulder as the sound coursed through him as well, but if he spoke she did not hear it. Thick streams of blood and something else ran out of her ears and down the side of her face, and with twin popping sounds the only thing left for her to hear as the noise that she was not sure had ever existed outside of her own head in the first place. 'I think I was still using those,' An thought dizzily. It was hard to force her thoughts to come together and make sense in the way that she was accustomed to.
When the bells reached their sharpest pitch, An threw Fideo's hand away from herself hard enough to break the wrist in three places. She did not bother looking around to see what she had done.
---
The bad lady is dead, and that makes An happy. It shouldn't, she knows. She should not be glad of death in any form when she already sees so much of it running through her head every day. An can't help it, though, after she saw what the bad lady did to the nice man who fed them and gave them Rubix cubes to play with while they waited, and maybe you cannot be blamed for things that you cannot help.
An rubs at her eyes and wishes more than anything else that she could go sit in a quiet room by herself for a while. She's been crushed against people with hardly any room left to breathe for three days now, and it's no longer taking contact to make fresh images dance through her head. The two strange boys in the car with her might as well be standing under streetlamps. An really wishes that they would just jump out of the car and go away, deciding that since she can't control those thoughts, either, she also can't be blamed for it.
The light-skinned boy rolls his eyes and turns back to stare out the window. His name is Alexei. An thinks that it suits him, as he already acts like he's waiting to be made czar.
"We're almost there," the man in the front seat says suddenly, looking over his shoulder at them. He stopped using the mirror when he realized how badly it was unnerving them to be unable to see him while he could still see them. His name is Angel, but he has yet to tell any of them that. In the chaos of ordering Lindsey out of the house before the police or someone whom An suspects would be even worse showed up, covering their tracks, and then bundling An and the boys into the car, Angel never paused to introduce himself.
Angel. It's a pretty name, a hero's name. Angels are warriors of God, or at the very least of the Powers That Be. It's all the same when you get done diving through the nitty-gritty of it. An learned a long time ago how to separate the surface from the real heart of the story.
The dark-skinned boy catches the direction of her thoughts, scowls, and then quickly tries to rearrange his face to look as if he did no such thing. An shocks them both by reaching out and letting her hand brush against his for a moment before she draws it back.
"Where are we going?" Alexei speaks to the window rather than to Angel, but he is different from Angel in that An can read his expression from his reflection in the glass. His face is taut, his lips pressed into a thin, angry slash that makes An think she is seeing pieces of the man that he will be in years to come. His hands are twisting in the hem of his sweat, the only physical sign of unease that he gives.
Of course, who knows what An would be able to pick up on if she had vampire senses. Angel takes to looking in the rearview mirror again, his expression writ large with a concern that An feels rather than sees. An cannot read him except for brief flickerings of emotion and action; even his name was a fluke. This troubles her more than she would like to admit and in ways that she does not have the vocabulary to articulate.
As if he senses her distress, Fideo lets his knuckles graze against hers again. She decides that she likes it.
"My people were able to get into contact with your mentor," Angel says, putting his eyes back onto the road. "They stopped him from going to the house. He's waiting in a safe place for us."
"Are there going to be more people like that woman looking for us?" An asks from her place in the back seat. Alexei is staring hard at the place where An's and Fideo's fingers intertwine, but An does not so much as glance in his direction.
Angel is looking at her again. An can feel it. His eyes are very dark, to the point that even being indirectly exposed to them is unsettling. An wonders if there is something specially different about vampires that prevents her from reading Angel, or if there are other people in the world who will read as smooth blank walls to her. She struggles to build a profile from the scant pieces that are available to her, because any information is still better than trying to stumble along without lights or handholds.
An's wanderings pick up a tremendous capacity for kindness rolling off of Angel. This does little to soothe her while she can also feel the capacity for cruelty, not quite so large, which lurks close behind. "Probably," Angel says finally. An likes that he does not attempt to lie to her; she likes him. "You kids are very talented. There are people out there who are scared of your talents, and they'll do everything that they can to stop you from using them. They're not very nice people. They like to hurt."
He doesn't mean only physical pain, and he isn't talking only about the people that Wolfram and Hart call their enemies. An tilts her head to one side and feels the beginnings of an 'I want' line start to draw itself between her eyes. She receives a brief flash of a tree limb being twisted horribly out of its original shape and into something grotesque and malformed. A moment later, the image is gone. An tilts her head to the other side, never mind the dim memories that she as of her sister telling her that she looks like a cat when she does that.
"Bad people like Vanessa was bad," Fideo says. His voice is steady and measured, calm in spite of stressors that would have most other people leaping out of their skin. They are all calm.
"Most of them. Some of them are only weak, but in the end that doesn't mean nearly as much as they would like it to." Angel shivers as if he is coming up from a deep sleep. An looks over at Fideo. His face is pale beneath his caramel tan, and there are beads of sweat dotting the skin above his lip. Whatever he just did, An does not think that it is intentional.
"Here we are." Angel pulls the car off the street and into the parking lot of a convenience store, where a car is waiting with three people standing in front of it. The wash of neon hurts An's eyes and makes the rotten-tooth ache in her head throb even more sharply. She ducks and wishes for the dark room again, telling herself that it is only headache and not nervousness that is making her want so badly to hide.
The boys scramble out the car almost before it has rolled to a halt, leaving An's pride with no choice but to race out after them. She thinks that she sees Angel smile as he follows at a more sedate pace.
Two of the people in front of the car are Angel's. Still on overload from the previous three days, An does not need to touch them as she takes a swift, discreet peek in order to discover this. The brunette woman's vapid exterior is no more than a veneer already being worn away by hard use, and the British man is capable of things both great and terrible that he has scarcely begun to contemplate. An has seized all of this within seconds and is moving on the same nonchalance that most people would employ towards sizing up hair or eye color. It is the man standing between them who is different. An slows her pace and feels Alexei and Fideo doing the same, as if they have already begun to merge into one being after only a few hours of contact.
The man is middle-aged and of average height and weight, with neatly kept black hair and eyes of a curious hazel-green color that are the brightest tings in an otherwise unremarkable face. An smells cigarette smoke on him from where she stands and crinkles her nose, but within seconds his eyes have pulled her attention back onto them. They are alive with a stern sort of 'the time for games is done' kindness that An feels drawn to in spite of herself.
An hangs back a few steps and tells herself not to be so foolish. Though she does not notice at the time, Alexei and Fideo are following her lead and also hanging back.
"Hello, children," the man says in a rich, warm voice that reminds An of whiskey without quite knowing why. She has never tasted it firsthand. "My name is Jonathan. I am going to be your mentor."
Jonathan. It was a good name, An supposed, but names were only leaves floating across the surface of what she really needed to know. She pushes her headache to the side as well as she is able and nudges forward to take a stealthy peek into Jonathan's mind. She is brought up short, gasping, as what should have been only the slight resistance of a hand through the surface of water is with Jonathan more akin to walking face first into a brick wall. An jerks back hard and only just manages to avoid clutching at her head in pain, feeling her eyes begin to water. Angel glances towards her, his brow furrowing, but whatever he had planned to say is halted by Jonathan. "She'll be fine."
An looks up and glares as Jonathan shakes his head slowly and throws back a patient look in kind. She decides then that she does not like Jonathan half as much as she likes Angel.
"You already know how to use it when you want to, I see," Jonathan says in a soft and reasonable voice. "That's very clever, An. Quite a bit farther along than I thought I would find you."
'Flattery will get you nowhere,' An thinks sourly, because her head still hurts. She wonders if Jonathan can read the thought, or if his powers end at blocking intrusions into his own.
"Do you know how to stop it when you don't want it to happen, though?" Jonathan continues. An's head snaps up to fix him with the most laser stare that she is capable of. Alexei and Fideo do the same thing on either side of her. Jonathan smiles as he notices that he also has the boys' attention. "I'll bet that all three of you have pretty terrible headaches right now, don't you? Information overload. I can help you with that."
Well. Maybe An likes him a little bit.
Cordelia apparently decides that she's bored with conversations going on beyond her grasp and turns towards Angel. Her eyes roam over him, looking for wounds. "Are you all right?"
Angel smiles. "Not a scratch."
Cordelia's mouth twitches, but she still looks concerned. Curling her lip as if the entire question is distasteful and she's having to force herself to even ask, she continues, "And Lindsey?"
The smile on Angel's face falters. An only knows Lindsey now as a pair of arms and a jumble of panicky thoughts, but he tried to protect her all the same even though he got smacked across a room for it. She does not understand. A quick glance in Jonathan's direction, though, convinces her that this is not the best time to go digging. "Battered and confused, but he's alive," Angel says. "He needs time to think. Wanted to be alone."
"Lindsey's a smart man," the British man says. An gives Jonathan a defiant, furtive glance, takes a dip, and discovers that his name is Wesley. "If he's thinking about it, then surely that's hopeful."
Angel shrugs. "Yeah. We can hope." An receives another image of a twisted limb, but she has not gone searching for this one. She shivers to throw off the conflicting emotions which rise from Angel like steam after a long, hot shower and pretends that she does not see Jonathan looking at her. He seems to be giving the same level, scrutinizing stare to all three of them at once, though Angel has never known anyone before who could do that without crossing their eyes. It's a little unnerving.
"Thank you, Angel," Jonathan says, turning his eyes away from her at last. Without quite meaning to, An begins to scoot in Fideo's direction at the same time that Fideo begins to move closer to her. Alexei has started to do the same thing from the other side, until they are forming a rough triangle of protection around each other. "Without your intervention, I imagine that this could have ended quite badly."
Angel's smile has an awkward curve. Even without the extraordinary powers at her disposal, An would still say that his is not a person who smiles often or easily. "It's nothing," he says. "Just what we do."
"And extend my thanks to your informant, as well."
Again there is the slipped smile and the transitory rush of images. An's headache is getting worse rather than better. "My informant is sorting some things out right now," Angel says, "but if I see him again I'll pass on the message."
"Thank you, Angel," An says, her voice low and soft. From what little she knows of vampires, Angel will still be able to hear the sound as easily as if she were to yell at the top of her lungs. "And thank Lindsey, too, for everything that the two of you have done for us."
Angel looks both gratified and even a bit surprised. Maybe he believes that she should be closer to hysterics after everything that she has been through that night. An would like to think that she is made of stronger stuff than that, but there is a low thrumming occurring beneath her skin which says that Angel might not be far off in his assessment. She makes a silent promise to herself to hold it together until she finds a quiet place to be alone. At that point, she can got into as many separate pieces as she wants.
"You're welcome," Angel says. He's giving her a look that makes An think he's seeing straight into her head and all of the thoughts there. An wonders if the power of that stare manages to unnerve every person that he directs it towards.
"Right, then," Jonathan says. The sound of his voice causes An to expel all of her tension on a quickly-expelled breath that she had not realized she was holding. "I don't expect that your lawyer friends will be altogether thrilled when they discover that their pet assassin has failed."
Angel grimaces. "'Friend' is such a tame alternative to the truth," he says, "but you're right. You guys need to get out of tow before they regroup and start bringing out the heavy artillery."
Jonathan nods and gestures for the children to step closer to him. An finds herself obeying without quite understanding why, except that the feeling of kindness which is the only distinct abut his face grows stronger as she draws closer to it. So does the smell of cigarettes. An wrinkles her nose and swears that she will never get used to that scent. "I've already booked the flight," he says. "There's a safehouse in-"
"Don't tell us," Wesley breaks in. His voice is sharp enough to make Jonathan jump and all of them turn to look at him. Wesley's expression softens a margin, which is still not much, and An is reminded of all of those hidden levels that she saw without trying to. "If these three are so powerful at such a young age, then we have no idea what manner of adult psychics Wolfram and Hart may have on their payroll. Nothing that we say within the city limits can be assumed to be safe."
Jonathan has grown pale. An thinks that maybe he does not have much more experience at this sort of thing than she, Alexei, and Fideo do. It is a comforting thought, and An is given over to a burst of charity in which she decides that if the various evil things in the world do not eat them first then they will be able to learn as a group.
"No," Jonathan says. "No, you're right. That was foolish of me." He waves the children closer to him again. An thinks that this is more for his comfort than her own, but she allows herself to be gathered near all the same. Alexei dips his chin downwards, so that An feels rather than sees his grin. A slow smile curls at the corners of her own mouth that she knows Alexei must also feel rather than see. "We should stop wasting our lead. Kids, get into the car."
The option of the front seat is open, but An crawls into the backseat after the boys instead, forgetting how they had annoyed her twenty minutes before. Alexei lifts himself up so that he can wave at Cordelia laughs and shakes her head when she sees what he is up to. The sullen boy who left the house where Brewer died is long gone. An's headache begins to recede, making her wonder if the sort of person who could tell when a telepath was rummaging through his mind might not also be powerful enough to cast a spell across the car. Whatever the cause, An is not one to argue with results. She sinks back into the seat and rubs at temples that for the first time in hours do not feel as if they have a vice of metal wrapped around them.
Jonathan speaks to Angel and his people for a moment longer before he gets into the car and starts the engine. His eyebrows lift when he spies them huddled into the backseat like a litter of puppies, but he says nothing until they have pulled out of the parking lot and the convenience store is a brightly-lit speck behind them, lost quickly among the many. An tells herself that it is not a flash of fear that makes her take that swift backward glance.
"You've all packed lightly," Jonathan says at last, getting onto the freeway. The airport. An is an expert at airports.
"What you see is what you get," Fideo responds. He sounds wary and hopeful in one chaotic blend, much the way that An imagines she herself would sound if she tried to speak.
Jonathan still smiles. He reaches out and flicks on the radio, keeping it low so that they can still speak to one another. A golden oldies station sweeps through the car. An turns up her lips. She would have bet on classical, had she been forced to chose from her big book of stereotypes, but this is a close second.
"I understand the kind of lives you children have had," Jonathan says. He keeps his eyes on the road so that An cannot even deduce his expression from what little she can read in the rearview mirror. "I understand that you have had to move frequently, that your own families have come not to want you." This was too much like a raw and throbbing tooth being deliberately poked with a stick. An feels her entire body beginning to go rigid by degrees, until her with her hands folded into her lap she looks more like a seventeenth-century painting of a princess than a modern little girl. Flanking her on either side, Alexei and Fideo do the same. Within seconds they have been transformed into a trio of inscrutable toy soldiers.
Jonathan has to have noticed the dramatic shift in mood, but he does not comment on it. "I understand that the three of you have powers which you do not understand and cannot control, and that on most days you would give everything that you have to be rid of them." Though is face is still mostly hidden from her, An gets the impression that Jonathan is smiling. "I cannot promise you that you will never be forced to move again, or that the three of you will ever reach a point where you will fully embrace your powers. It may be that you will always wish to be free of them."
Alexei's snort carries an air of 'finally, the man is making sense.' Jonathan acts as if he does not hear and continues driving. "What I can promise you is that I will teach you to control your powers so that the burden will not be so great…and that your days of being unwanted have come to an end." There's a long a moment in which Jonathan is silent before he adds, "The three of you have a great destiny ahead of you, but we can discuss that at a later date. For now, be children while you can."
End Part Fourteen