Part Fifteen
It was one of his great character flaws, Lindsey thought from his position on the ground, that he always believed that he was capable of understanding true darkness. Thought that he could step close to it, run his hands over its flanks, make it his own and each time step away again without suffering so much as a mark. It didn't matter that every time he turned out to be wrong, that every time he only got sucked in and tumbled about like a cat in a dryer. He usually counted himself lucky when he was spat back out again, bloodied and shaking and swearing that this time would be the last.
Like the drunk to the bottle. Lindsey turned his head quickly to the side and spat out a mouthful of blood before he resumed glaring at his old enemy, coworker, whatever the hell they happened to be. He could swear that it was the last time, but he would always be back again, and usually before the scars from the last whirling that he had received had a chance to fade away.
Couple to that came Lindsey's second great vice: that he always found a way to make it back home again. If that was a vice when he was working for Wolfram and Hart, then surely the fact that he was now however marginally working against them made it a virtue.
He spit again, dragging his hand across his mouth to remove the excess blood. "Nice suit." The leg of Lindsey's jeans was turning crimson from his thigh down to his ankle, but there was not so much as a drop of blood on Lilah to mar the pressed perfection of her Armani. In spite of this, Lindsey could still see the arteries and veins fluttering through the hole that had been torn in the flesh, as if they were still seeking contact with the missing heart.
Lilah acknowledged the crack with no more than a quirk of her eyebrows and a pressing of her lips into the expression that Lindsey hated more than any other to see on her face. It was the look that said she was barely managing to hold back her smirk, because she had just received information on her enemies that could not only make them wish that they had ever been born, but could actually make it physically come true. She ran the tip of one perfectly lacquered nail around the edge of the hole for a second, shivering almost as if she relished the pain, before she said, "You're closer to the same thing turning around and happening to you than you think, pretty thing." When she grinned at him, her teeth were white and even. Lindsey thought that he would have preferred it if they were filed sharp and stained pink with blood. "Or did you think that you were just going to drop off the radar?"
"No," Lindsey said heavily. "I never thought that." The ground beneath him trembled very faintly. This was home turf, but he had never remembered it doing that before.
Lilah, unbelievably, stuck out her hand to help him to his feet. Lindsey gave it a pointed look and then ignored it, pushing his sword into the ground to haul himself back up to his feet. This time, the shudder reverberated from someplace close. Lilah wobbled on her stilettos for a moment before rolling her eyes and retracting her hand. Lindsey saw her glance over her shoulder and thought for just a moment that he saw her looking worried.
Lilah looked back at him, and whatever unease that Lindsey might have viewed there was replaced by the sarcastic kind of concern that only Lilah could do full justice to. She tilted her head to one side and cast a slow, pointed look over the remains of Lindsey's sword. "Nice metaphor you're toting there, cowboy. Looks a little worse for wear, though."
"It gets the job done." The smirk on Lilah's face said that she was getting more mileage out that remark than she had a right to. The sword made a wet sucking sound as Lindsey pulled it from the ground, causing it to shudder and roll again beneath his feet. Lilah wobbled for a moment in her heels before she found her balance. Lindsey remained steady and sure throughout, and even with an injured leg he moved with a swiftness that would have made most mortal jaws drop.
Lilah, though, had been here for a very long time, and she knew from hardasses that could make Lindsey look like a kitten batting a ball of string. Her eyes barely widened as the point of Lindsey's sword to came rest bare millimeters from the place where her heart had been before it was torn out, because she had still harbored love in it when she had been cast down here. Lindsey's leg felt wobbly and untrustworthy as he forced it to bear his weight, but there was no pain, and off all the unsettling questions that Lindsey had swirling about his brain in that moment he thought this was surely the most unsettling one of all. This place could bring pain, that was one precious bit of knowledge that had been drilled into his brain far too deeply for it ever be cut out again. If it was choosing not to, then that hinted at far worse things lurking over the horizon.
Lindsey understood the appeal of putting the world back the way it had been now. It might not be much better, depending on the place one held in the pecking order, but at least it had been predictable.
Outside of the widening of her eyes, Lilah was remarkably calm for a woman with a sword pointed at an especially vulnerable part of her chest. Her lips curved even further. She didn't seem to have any problems keeping her lipstick perfect, whatever kinds of other havoc being condemned to hell might be wreaking on her. She flicked her hair back from her shoulders and arched her eyebrows. "I'm dead, Lindsey," she snapped. "Fear of falling on a pointy object stopped being a concern of mine a long time ago. You should be familiar with those rules yourself."
"You can still feel pain," Lindsey growled, nudging the sword forward until it touched Lilah's fluttering aorta. Lilah jumped, but her expression changed only slightly, becoming almost indulgent. Maybe she could, but there were people here who were so much more adept at meting it out than Lindsey. Lindsey glanced over his shoulder, looking for yellow eyes that were nowhere to be seen. His skin crawled even in its absence.
Lindsey glanced down at his skin and saw that there was still a faint ooze gleaming, nothing that should have ever been on a human form. His throat closed up for a moment. So he didn't…he didn't imagine his trip to the outside. He really did escape for a while. "What's going on, Lilah?" Lindsey asked in a low voice, terrifyingly steady and under control. More than anything else, it reminded him of another person who wasn't likely to be very popular around these parts. Another rumble rolled out from the ground beneath Lindsey's feet. "I know the rules. Why aren't I-" His throat closed again, so he covered it with a bared-tooth smile. "I'm in the wrong place, it seems."
Lilah closed her hand about the blade and shoved it away from her chest before she answered. A trickle of blood ran down her wrist and disappeared beneath the immaculate wool of her suit. "The rules are being bent, Lindsey," she said. 'Make them play yours,' a faint voice echoed in the back of Lindsey's mind. Now was not the time; he shoved it away. "A situation I'm sure you're familiar with. You were retrieved so that we could have a talk. What happens next is up to you."
"Retrieved," Lindsey echoed. The mountains and the landscape were the same sullen red of bricks and blood, the activities were the same, but something still felt different. Felt like waiting. 'I want you gone,' Lindsey thought, and blinked because it had a flavor to it that didn't belong solely to himself. The world wavered in and out like heat rising off of pavement, and for a moment Lilah looked worried again.
She covered it quickly with one of her razor grins, but this time Lilah was not able to completely erase those lines around her eyes. "You're not free, Lindsey," Lilah said. "Did you ever think that you were?" The grin became sharper. "Did she tell you that you could be?"
Pain was crawling back into Lindsey's leg by degrees, like fire ants being forced beneath the skin. He winced and struggled to hold his ground, glancing down on pure chance to see that the blood from his wounded leg had finally reached the ground. It began to sizzle and seemed almost to shrink away from having to touch it. Lindsey's heart jerked for the first time in what felt like ages. He looked back up to see that Lilah was also scrutinizing the blood. The lines around her eyes had if anything grown deeper. "Yeah, but who to believe now?" Lindsey paused and gave Lilah a slow once-over. "You've moved up in the world since I've seen you last. Less screaming, less blood. I'm impressed."
The illusion of heat waves around them deepened, obliterating even the outlines of the mountains, and Lilah looked even more tired. "The Senior Partners needed a liaison," she said, "and it's not as if the old one turned out to be that reliable."
Lindsey's hand curled into a fist, but that was all. Funny what a cause could do for a person's set of priorities. Not that the last cause he had called his own had done him all that good, Lindsey thought sourly, before the…well, he couldn't exactly call it 'earth', but the term would do in a pinch…as it began to shake beneath his feet again. "Why am I here, Lilah?" he repeated. 'Make 'em play yours.' Again, it didn't sound entirely like himself, but came across as almost feminine, and cocky in a way that only one woman he knew could do real justice to. An only wished that she could reach this level.
"An offer has been placed on the table," Lilah said, pausing between each word and making a face as if acid was being dripped onto her tongue. "You've impressed certain key parties over the course of the last few days with all that you've accomplished. They'd like to redirect that towards a more positive end and renew your contract."
"Renew…" Wait a minute. Two and two were coming up five here. Lindsey narrowed his eyes. "Well, that has to suck for you, doesn't it?"
Lilah's face went rigid. "It's a state of affairs that I'm used to," she said. "Some things don't change whether you're living or dead."
"And when you say that I've impressed somebody, you mean that I've scared them," Lindsey continued as if Lilah had not spoken. The air had begun to shudder, to waver like an oil painting that had just had turpentine thrown across its surface. He could hear bells ringing from a position that sounded as if it were directly behind his left ear. From far away, a young girl screamed.
'Make 'em play yours.' Oh, he definitely knew that voice now, and the mental stamping of the foot that she gave with her stilettos. Even though he had to be imagining it and wished that he could stop, Lindsey clung to the voice with all his strength.
The combination of grin and glare that Lindsey felt overtaking his face and transforming it into something ugly wasn't meant for Lilah alone. Playing by the rules. Yeah, and his world seemed to get flipped right onto its head every time that he tried that, didn't it? "Serve in heaven or serve in hell," Lindsey snapped. "Doesn't look like I'm being offered much of a choice at all there." Let him do this one thing on his own two feet, even if it wound up being the one and only thing that he would ever do without a powerful patron looming over him. "Whatever it is that I'm doing out there that's got your bosses so shaky and sick, I think I'd like to get back to it. I regretfully decline. Or, since I'm not practicing law anymore, get fucked."
She looked happy for the first time since Lindsey had set eyes on her. "Oh, Lindsey," she all but cooed, "you are in for a much wilder ride than I ever thought about earning." The lovely, lacquered fingers of one hand made a snapping sound that was still overshadowed by all of those bells before it could ride on the air for more than a few seconds. "Back to where you were," Lilah said. "You should have swallowed your pride." The air began to shiver and go black around the edges.
'Not dead yet,' Lindsey thought, glancing back down at the place where his blood was pooling and making the flesh-turned-ground sizzle around his feet. That wasn't exactly the welcoming of a favored son, but Lindsey didn't think that hell received many people whose hearts still thundered in their chests. It could be that he was only setting a precedent, and that bastard thing that wanted to be hope was only that. Overcome by a rage that was as black and terrible as it was fast, Lindsey snarled, "Only if you come along for the ride with me." He lunged for Lilah with his bloodied hand as darkness swarmed up around them. She shrieked and drew back, but not before the blood touched her. There was a crackling sound and a smell like roasting meat. The living should find ways to come here more often, Lindsey thought, because even if an army lost they would find a way to win. He understood now why he hadn't been sent straight to the home office after he had defied the Senior Partners, if this was what the blood from his latest beating at Angel's hands would have done. He had still been alive then.
He was alive again, now, and if that was how good it felt to spit in the face of one side that had screwed him over, he could only imagine how good it would feel to finally do it in the face of the other.
Lilah reeled back, shaking her wrist where Lindsey had made contact, and then stumbled and fell as the hardest tremor of all pitched and rolled the ground beneath their feet. Playing by his own rules at long last Lindsey might be, but he still didn't have the juice inside him to do anything like that. The bells swelled sharply in volume, the scream became a sharp and triumphant laughter, and then-
---
Blackness, that same old sin that Lindsey always thought he could call his brother. He realized that he still held the sword and that it was still driving a long line down the inner gullet of the beast. The esophagus battered him from all sides, spinning him around and stunning him until he was on the verge of losing his grip entirely. His skin burned as if it were being doused with a diluted acid, and his lungs, remembering back in the real world what they were supposed to be doing, began to struggle and burn as well.
Lindsey wanted to pull his lips back from his teeth with the strain, but he did not dare open his mouth and let that foulness inside. The remains of the sword caught on bone and held, and the first strains of panic began to crawl through the eerie and unnatural calm that had maintained him until then. 'Not dead yet,' Lindsey thought, tightening his grip. 'Still alive, and that's how I'm going to stay. Still have some rules to break.'
From far away, Lindsey heard a sound like an indignant shout. It made the soul eater tremble, and Lindsey felt himself being buffeted hard from side to side. The blade slipped a notch further, allowing the first hint of fresh air into the cavern. 'Fresh' was probably a relative term, as it was sour and rank and likely would have made Lindsey gag if he had not focusing so hard on keeping his lips pressed together, but it was air.
If this was his miracle, Lindsey knew, then he was not going to get a second chance if he fucked it up. The first one was deliverance enough. He wrapped both hands around the makeshift weapon that he had held onto long after common sense had told him to let it go, twisting it savagely until he heard the monster scream again. With the air now came the first traitorous gleam of light.
Lindsey gathered a last reserve of energy that he had not thought possible and shoved forward, ignoring the burning on his skin and the sibling burning in his lungs. The shudders around him has ceased altogether. Lindsey did not know if this marked the soul eater as alive or dead and did not care, except to wonder for a moment in a savage kind of way if this was a wound that it was going to be able to heal up so well as all the others.
The blade fell from nerveless fingers as Lindsey struck the pavement and rolled over, sucking in great lungfuls of air and not caring in the slightest about the smell. Rain fell down across his body, washing away the gore and most of the stinging sensation that had accompanied it.
Lindsey stayed on his back and focused on nothing more strenuous than breathing until his thoughts were moving in a straight line again. Only after several minutes of this was he capable of noticing the rain that was still rinsing him clean and…wait a minute. At the mouth of the portal, the mist had been too thick to allow much in the way of weather patterns, and there sure as, well, hell hadn't been any where Lilah had been. Lindsey opened his eyes.
He saw sky dotted with stars and entirely devoid of smog, mist, or more than the occasional cloud, so pristine and perfect that for a moment Lindsey had to doubt that what he saw was even real. The rain was warm like tears, while the stars above were sharp and clear enough to remind him of the stares of angry, disappointed parents. Altogether, it was too much like being scrutinized by two sets of people to whom he didn't owe a damned thing for Lindsey's comfort. He rolled back onto his side as relief filled him and spit until the urge to be sick had passed. When he looked up again at the buildings, it was a scene more like paint running from a canvas than any landscape that Lindsey had ever seen before.
The bruise-dark indigo that had shrouded the city's outline from view as if it had never been was being washed away by the rain to reveal buildings that looked cleaner and younger than Lindsey had ever seen them. With every second that passed the rain grew stronger, until Lindsey had to cup his hand over his eyes if he wanted even a hope of being able to see. He could sense the ruins of the soul eater only a few yards away even though he refused to turn his head to look. He propped himself up on one elbow instead, panting and leaving his other hand cupped over his eyes, so that he could watch the world remake itself.
Demons scurried wildly to and from across the pavement, but they paid no mind to Lindsey. They were roaches running from the bright light of a lamp suddenly being flicked on. One prone human who looked as if he had fought three wars too many on that day alone was of no consequence to them.
Lindsey returned the favor by ignoring them and tilting his head back so that the rain could continue to rinse off his face. The clean, blessed, normal rain. As soon as he could stand, Lindsey swore, he was going to track An down and kiss her creepy little face, never mind what personal details the contact may make him lose in the first place.
All of this, of course, was dependent upon An not finding him first. Lindsey heard small footsteps echoing across the pavement and knew without turning his head who it would be. There was a voice in the back of his mind which said that he should not have been able to heard that sound even when the street was completely still, much less alive with the chaos of a world rewriting itself. It was small and weak; for the moment, Lindsey needed to exert little energy in order to push it to the side. He staggered back up to his feet and grabbed at a light pole to steady himself. The pain his leg was returning with the force of a nuclear bomb going off beneath his skin.
All across the city, the fires were disappearing one by one, like eyes being put out. After everything that Lindsey had been through, he thought that he could be forgiven if his similes were running towards the morbid. Maybe if they decided to stay there for the rest of his life. He curled his fingers around the light pole until all of the blood was driven out and they went numb in its absence.
There was enough light from the stars and the fires that were big enough to fight back to cast An in a cold halo as he approached him, turning her hair blue-black and bleaching her skin into the same soulless white as new china. Her expression was solemn as she paused a few steps away and regarded first him, then the cooling corpse of the soul eater. "I already knew that you were the impatient, aggressive type, but man. Color me impressed. Scared, but impressed." The words were right, even the inflection was right, and Lindsey's internal radar still began to scream. Though the rain was beginning to turn cold and An was soaked from the crown of her head down to the soles of her feet, he was not so much as shivering.
After a moment more, Lindsey realized that the silver-white cast which had covered An's eyes since he had met her was gone. He was looking into the eyes of a completely normal teenaged girl, and that was the moment when he knew without any room for doubt that something was wrong.
Lindsey jerked his chin in the direction of the soul eater's body and wished that he was close enough to give it a good kick. "I understand that you had a hand in making all of this possible, so color me grateful." He turned his face up to the rain. "Scared, but grateful."
An regarded him without expression for a long moment before she slowly began to smile. Something of hellfire seemed to gleam in her eyes before they returned to the brown-black that made her nothing more than another girl on the street. "I knew that all I had to do was give you the chance to find the appropriate motivation." Her eyes did not flicker again. Lindsey was almost able to convince himself that he had seen nothing at all, that he was only paranoid because of the fate that he had narrowly avoided by her intervention a few moments before.
"You're a survivor like that," An went on. She tilted her head in the direction of the sword where Lindsey had left it behind on the pavement. His instincts were saying that maybe leaving that behind had not been a great idea.
"Where are Alexei and Fideo?" Lindsey asked. Without the boys book-ending her, An looked strange and almost small.
An turned back around to look at him, and all thoughts of smallness fled away from Lindsey's mind. "I don't know," An said in a musing voice. "We were separated from each other when…" She trailed off and made a fluttering motion with her hand to indicate the city around them, all shiny-new and fresh from its packaging. It had been raining for several minutes now, but Lindsey thought that he could still smell the brimstone. Paint-by-numbers concern dominated An's voice, not the full frenzy of worry which would have transformed the girl of even a few hours before.
Though he was growing uneasier by the second, Lindsey's voice remained normal as he said, "You've outdone yourself." He gestured towards their new surroundings.
The smile that moved across An's face and transformed her into something both older and colder seemed genuine, but Lindsey still thought of a marionette being worked by an expert puppet master just out of sight. "Duh," An said, for one moment looking like herself again. She tucked a few strands of sodden hair back behind her ears. "My finest work."
'My.' Not 'our.' "But you're not bleeding," Lindsey said. He shivered to throw off the cold finger that was tracing patterns along his spine. An tilted her head to one side in a move that made her look eerily like a cat, or like Illyria. "When you controlled the demons before, all three of you were gushing blood by the time it was over. But you're fine now."
An tilted her head back to the other side, making the resemblance to Illyria even stronger. Lindsey spared a moment to wonder where the blue freak had gone, and to hope that she had not been caught in the crossfire of whatever mojo the An-shaped thing had set loose. "I was able to kick it up a notch," An said. Her voice had grown so cold that Lindsey almost expected the air in front of her to frost over. He wondered if he was far enough away from her to protect his thoughts, or if she was reading everything as soon as it occurred to him.
An's slow and no longer sweet smile answered that question and several more besides. "I like you, Lindsey," she said, once again using the voice of a girl much older than fourteen. There was a lot of Darla in that voice. "Even if you can be a little dim sometimes. I want you to stay alive, if I can help it. That means that I require you to stay out of my way."
Lindsey had no doubt that she meant every word of it. Gosh, though, there was something about being threatened by a fourteen year-old in need of an attitude adjustment that brought out the stubborn in him. He bared his teeth into a grin made deliberately bright and wolfish. "And you would not be the first person to threaten me." His smile widened until it hurt his face, until it glittered under its own power they way that An's eyes had when she had still been herself. "Like you said, I'm a survivor."
An's face twitched into something that may have been the beginnings of amusement. It lasted for only a moment, overwhelmed as soon as it began by the purest, blackest expression of rage that Lindsey had ever witnessed. He wondered how he could have ever believed that it was a little girl holding the reins to that body.
"Oh," An hissed, her gaze turning distant. "Oh, no, she will not." She spun around without any further comments of even glances in Lindsey's direction and sprinted off into darkness that welcomed and cocooned her far faster than it would have a normal person. Lindsey leaned against the light post and closed his eyes as he began to feel as if he were trapped inside a kaleidoscope.
"Lindsey!" He had never before heard Angel saying his name in that particular tone, but he was glad of it now. And just when he had lost his chance to see if hell was freezing over. Lindsey laughed to himself, blood loss taking over him in spite of his best efforts to restrain it, and looked up to see Angel's eyebrows rising. Spike was only a few paces behind, a deep line drawn between his eyebrows. Lindsey doubted that all that concern was for him.
"You would have had to be there," Lindsey said to Angel, settling back against the pole as his legs told him that, nope, he was on his own from here on out.
Angel's nostrils flared as he took in the blood that still ran forth, only to be washed away with every moment by the continuing rain. Lindsey imagined that it had been quite some time since Angel had had a full meal. There was a long gash running along Angel's hairline, spilling enough blood into his eyes to blind them if the rain was washing them all clean. Lindsey could also see a further wound in his shoulder where it looked as if a Guardian had torn a chunk from him without waiting for him to die first. All in all, neither of them were going to be winning any beauty contests.
Spike was pacing a short distance off from the two of them, staring at the newly reconstructed buildings as if he could not quite believe that they were more than illusions. Lindsey was not certain that he was above doing the same thing were he not struggling so hard to remain conscious. Spike circled back around, slicing between Angel and Lindsey as if he were the sword, rather than merely carrying one. An ugly burn marked the skin of his throat and his voice rasped as he demanded, "Where is she?"
Lindsey blinked and attempted to lean back until he realized that, being supported by the light post as he was, he had nowhere to go. The rain began to taper off, allowing him to see for the first time how badly he was bleeding. The world started to seesaw around the edges. "An?" Lindsey asked stupidly, and shook his head. "I have no idea, she took off. There was something wrong-"
"Not her," Spike all but shouted. A hint of gold crossed his eyes before they shaded back into their usual dark blue. Lindsey and Angel both blinked. "Illyria. Where is Illyria?"
"Oh." Lindsey shook his head and then splayed his fingers against his temples as the world continued to rock long after he had stopped moving. "I don't know. We were separated in front of the portal. I haven't seen her again since."
It was difficult for vampires to go even paler than was their normal appearance, but Spike managed admirably. He drew in air through his teeth with a sharp hissing sound and looked around at the clean, normal street. Lindsey knew that he was thinking that hell's own Barbie doll might have finally been pulled back to the place that had spawned her. He waited for the explosion, but Angel forestalled it by putting his hand quickly on Spike's shoulder. Spike pulled a face and twitched Angel's hand away before it had been there for more than a few seconds. He did not, however, let the storm clouds rolling through his eyes grow any darker.
"Illyria's tough. She'll make anyone who messes with her very sorry very quickly," Angel said. He jerked his head in the direction of the soul eater, which had started to melt under the cleansing rain like a slug after salt had been poured across it. It lay sprawled across the street in the meantime, a disgusting, half-finished lump of jelly. "This place is still thick with demons. If they didn't get pulled through, chances are that Illyria didn't, either."
Spike paused for a long moment before he gave a grudging nod. Angel turned back towards Lindsey, who was lowering his head and fighting to stay awake. "What was wrong with An?" When Lindsey gave no response, Angel called his name.
Lindsey shivered and raised his head. "Sorry," he muttered.
"Try to stay here for a few more minutes," Angel said. There was something close enough to compassion in his voice to make Lindsey blink and wonder if he hadn't passed out without realizing it. He nodded and shifted his weight, wincing, as Angel repeated, "You said that there was something wrong with An, what did you mean?"
"Her eyes. They were completely normal." Angel and Spike exchanged looks, and Lindsey shook his head. "That girl has not been normal since before she was nine years old. Seems strangely convenient that she would do a one-eighty into Gap teen right after being face to face with a portal into hell."
The deep, ugly line between Spike's eyes had yet to go away. "Might be it drained her batteries," he said. His voice was still gruff, and he winced and brought his hand up to his throat several times as he spoke. He gestured to the street around them. Lindsey could see bobbing pinpoints of light as people put their heads out and realized what had happened, hear joyous shouts as the news spread. "This was a bigger job than the ones she's used to."
Lindsey shook his head again, swearing when his vision began to dance. "She was acting differently, too. An has a streak of brat in her, but this was above and beyond anything that she's said before."
Angel asked, "What did Alexei and Fideo have to say?"
Lindsey lifted his head so that he and Angel could make eye contact. "I have no idea where either of them are," he said. "Neither did An. And from where I was standing, she didn't care."
Angel and Spike shared a quick glance between them, their expressions growing troubled. Angel nodded finally and stepped forward, taking Lindsey's arm from the pole and placing it around his own shoulders so that he could support some of Lindsey's weight. "Your leg needs to be stitched up," Angel said, ignoring the incredulous look that Lindsey was craning his neck to give him.
"Yeah, and are we going to pop down to Los Angeles General and get that taken care of?" Lindsey muttered. Without turning his head, he thought that he could sense Angel's expression shift.
"There's a person near here who knows a little about medicine."
"A little?" Lindsey snapped his head around until his neck creaked and his jaw almost collided with Angel's cheek.
"Just enough to make her dangerous," Spike cut in. He was looking more cheerful in spite of himself. "She used to be a butcher."
"Great," Lindsey muttered, envisioning amputations rather than stitches.
"She'll get the job done," Angel said. He seemed to be fighting back a smile, and the waves of relief rolling off of him were strong enough to be staggering. He wanted to believe that the happy ending was in reach, they all did, and for the first time that he could remember Lindsey felt bad for having to drive a pin into that.
"What about An?" he asked.
The smile vanished without leaving so much as a trace of its existence behind. "We'll deal with that when we know more. You could be wrong." Though Angel said it without malice, Lindsey could still hear that it was what he wanted to be true as much as it was what he actually believed. Lindsey wondered if it was to late for him to be allowed back into the club.
Angel helped Lindsey limp away from the street, ignoring him as he winced and swore. The air all around them still had the thick, heavy feeling of a cloud on the verge of unleashing the rain.
End Part Fifteen