Part Seventeen
There had been a building standing in this place when they had left. Lindsey was sure of it.
He skidded to a halt and spit out a few choice words from between his teeth, throwing up his arm to protect his face from the blazing light and the worst of the heat. Wasn't all of this bringing back a series of lovely memories, so loud and screaming that it took Lindsey several seconds to realize that brick should not be burning like that. Vampires could, but though Lindsey craned his head he could see no sign of either Spike or Angel. He shivered in spite of the heat.
There was no apartment building now where they had been one before, not in the proper sense referring to a structure of wood and concrete and glass. In its place stood a vaguely cubed block of solid flames which twisted in the direction of the sky and danced teasingly out towards the street. They licked at the surrounding buildings but could not quite seem to light them, in spite of the fact that all that dry timber had to be aching for so much as a spark. Lindsey knew that he was not possibly viewing a normal fire, not with the way that the air all but shivered and crawled with the scent of brimstone and rot.
Every few seconds the flames would part enough for Lindsey to catch a glimpse of the windows, which were rippling and running in a way that made them seem alive. 'They're melting,' Lindsey thought. He wondered at the force that had to be standing behind a wood fire in order to make it burn that hot. The heat had forced him to stop nearly one hundred feet away and his skin still felt on the verge of blistering.
Christ, Lindsey remembered, there had still been at least one dozen people in that building when they had left. Alicia and Katie had been in that building. The swiftness with which a knot began to grow at the base of his spine shocked him.
The figure that Lindsey had been searching for at long last emerged from the darkness, every inch the avenging angel with smoke rising from the shoulders of his jacket like wings. A line of blisters marked up the side of Angel's jaw, and Lindsey was willing to bet anything he had that at least one unsuccessful rescue attempt could be found in Angel's recent past.
"Is everyone still inside?" Lindsey asked when Angel drew close.
Angel's eyes were dark and glinting. A cold, sparkling rage that Lindsey already knew on an intimate level shone just beneath the surface. "Yes." Angel spit out the word as if by doing so with enough force he could will it into being a weapon. Lindsey knew who the person that Angel would like to turn that weapon on was without needing to ask. In the sheer, blinding shock of what was happening, he found himself agreeing.
Lindsey spun towards the street, looking for a fire hydrant, looking for I anything /I , even as he knew that in the old world the people in that building still would have been beyond saving. He did not know how he managed to hear Angel's growl over the roaring of the flames, except as a sub-vocal vibration that seemed to echo all the way into Lindsey's bones. He turned.
Angel was staring at the conflagration that had once been a sanctuary, his expression etched with a cold, still calm that Lindsey knew well. Lindsey turned further, following Angel's gaze until he found its unfortunate object. He had a certain rage of his own here, and a certain measure of regret if were to pause and face it, but there was not even the smallest hint of surprise to be found in the chaos.
The fire swallowing the building parted at the place where the door had been, only far enough to allow one small figure to step through before it became a solid mass again. Smoke rose up from An's hair and shoulders, while a small trail of blisters marked up her mouth and the side of her nose. Beyond that, she bore no injuries to show that she had just been walking through the inside of a furnace.
An stepped daintily over the embers in the doorway, pausing and looking this way and that across the darkened street. She stopped when she caught sight of Angel and Lindsey and assumed that older look, that cunning expression that reminded Lindsey of Darla at her most intent. "Where is she?" she yelled at them in a voice made rough with brimstone.
"What are you?" Angel snarled back at her, stalking forward. The wind from the fire blew his coat back from his body as he walked; the smoke rising from his shoulders mingled with that rising from An's and twisted towards the sky. Though Angel pulled his lips back from the teeth, he showed no signs that he was even considering backing away.
"Where is she?" An repeated, raising her voice into a shriek in order to be heard over the crackling of the flames. Her eyes darted back and forth between Angel and Lindsey. He wondered how he could have ever thought that soulless black was better that the old, cloudy white. "They don't get to do this," An retreated into herself for a few seconds in order to mutter. "They don't get to replace me, throw me away…"
Angel grabbed the An-thing by her upper arm, dragging her away from the flames and hurling her back in the direction of the street so hard that she barely kept her balance. An staggered a few more steps before she lost it entirely and went down to one knee. She righted herself quickly and spun around, wrinkling her lisp back from her teeth. Lindsey would not have been surprised then if she had opened her mouth and hissed at both of them. An's jeans were torn and there was a red stain spreading from the place where she had struck the pavement, but she did not seem to notice. "What the hell did you do?" Angel yelled at her again.
An panted and looked back and forth between Lindsey and Angel with eyes wide enough to make her look almost normal. As the moment of panic bled away from her, her lips split into a grin and a giggle flew out of her mouth. "You don't know," she sing-songed. Lindsey shuddered hard as he suddenly felt something go flicking through his mind, like fingers moving over a Rolodex. "Neither of you know." An looked back towards Angel and stopped giggling long enough to whisper, "I can read you now, you know. Everything you've done, everything that you still want to do. Doesn't make the self-righteous act all that appealing."
Angel's eyes flashed and his knuckles dipped out at a speed faster than the human eye could follow. He knocked An to the ground, where she braced herself up on one elbow and grinned at Angel through blood-slicked teeth. "Macho," An tried to purr in that Darla voice, before she had to give it up so that she could spit. It was on the tip of Lindsey's tongue to tell her that she couldn't match Darla on her best day. "Bet you drive all the girls wild."
"You're not An," Angel said. He looked as if he wanted to convince himself so that he could hit her again.
An smiled, showing teeth still streaked with red. "You want to believe that," she said. The grin stretched until it became grotesque, something better suited to a Cheshire cat than a human being. "No, you I need /I to believe that, because otherwise you can't convince yourself to kill me." An's eyes flicked over to Lindsey. "You're good at convincing yourself of what you want to believe, aren't you, Angel?"
Lindsey swore that he heard a whooshing sound at the exact moment that the situation spun out of his control. An's look of triumph might have been directed towards Lindsey, but that did not mean that it was beyond Angel's scope to notice it. A dark line of suspicion drew itself between Angel's eyes and Lindsey began mentally running through a long list of obscenities, knowing that An would be able to pick up on every one. If anything, her grin only grew wider.
"An's still here," she said, lifting her chin in the manner of a queen. The effect was only slightly marred by the fact that there was still blood trickling from her split lip. "We're just bigger now." She tilted her head to one side, going for an innocence that the real An would not have been able to manage on her best day. On the face of the doppelganger who claimed to be her, it rang cheap and hollow.
"What, you've never made a deal with the devil to get something better?" An continued, echoing Angel's earlier words back at him. He looked as if he would like nothing better than to hit her again, and perhaps not stop this time.
"There were people in that building," Angel growled, looking as if it were only an extreme force of will which kept him from roaring.
An pushed herself further up on her elbow, dragged her hand across her mouth, and flicked it so that the drops of blood splattered against the ground. Lindsey was surprised when it did not sizzle. "I fixed this city," she said in a low voice that did not sound like An, or Darla, or anything else that had ever been human. "Haven't you ever made a necessary sacrifice before?"
"Funny thing about sacrifices," Lindsey spoke for the first time. "They usually come after you get what you want. You do it afterwards, it's only murder." An cast a long, speculative look over him as something within the building behind them gave way with a tremendous splintering sound. A wave of hot air made them all stumble back. Lindsey refused to break eye contact with her.
"I've been in their heads," An snarled at them both. Something forlorn and nearly fragile entered her voice, making her back into the girl from the previous night. A trace of cloudy white swirled back into her eyes and returned to black before she had the chance to blink twice. "I've seen what I was protecting, and baby? Frankly, I think we can do better."
"And to hell with Alexei and Fideo in the meantime, huh?" Lindsey asked, keeping his voice as low and neutral as he could. Her sniff convinced him more than anything else that An as he knew her no longer existed, and he tired to quickly shove his thought into the back of his mind before the thing in her place could pick up on it.
She looked at him sharply, obviously expecting that something was amiss even as she could not yet put her finger on what it might be. "I already told you that sometimes sacrifices are necessary."
The certainty grew stronger. Lindsey glanced at Angel and saw his eyes grow dark as he came to the same realization. While Lindsey thought that An might still be rattling in there somewhere as a ghost in her own machine, the girl herself would never have greeted Alexei's and Fideo's deaths with such a cavalier attitude.
An's eyes went dark with fury as she picked up on the current of Lindsey's thoughts. That was all right, that was fine. Angel was already moving. He grabbed An by her elbow and dragged her back up to her feet so quickly that her toes dangled above the ground for several seconds before she was able to find it again. "Is there anything at all of An left in you?" Angel asked. His fingers tightened until An's face blanched. "You might want to think very hard before you give me your answer."
An glared at him. "You're kind of an idiot," she said. "What kind of a future am I going to have if I say, 'Sure, she's long gone'?" Angel began to answer and An cut him off with a sneer before he got further than the first syllable. "An's still here, and she's closer than you would think." An's eyes flared briefly, brilliantly white. "She doesn't think that she likes you very much any longer."
There was a sound like a thunderclap that made Lindsey's ears ring, as if the very air had been punched and, shocked, was now gathering itself to punch back. He turned his head to the side to avoid being blinded by a flash of light which seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere at once. When he turned back, An was still on her feet. Angel was several feet away and definitely not on his.
An pulled her lips back from her teeth and clenched her hands into knuckle-whitening fists as Angel leaped back up. The air around her crackled with electricity; the ends of her hair began first to wave and then to dance. "And you're one to talk about heroism, anyway," she continued in a shrill voice. If An-that-was had not been obliterated entirely, then Lindsey thought that she must be lurking very close to the surface now. "When was the last time that you did any good thing without an eye cast towards your precious fucking redemption?"
Angel's face was dark. Though the sky above them had been clear for the last hour, Lindsey still expected lightning to crash and thunder to roll at any moment. "You're an idiot," he said in a voice that scarcely rose above a whisper but still managed to carry for yards around.
An turned and very deliberately looked at Lindsey. Her eyes sparkled, and Lindsey knew what was going to come next from that glance alone. He took a deep breath and wondered both when he had started to care and what kind of hoops he was going to have to jump through to get that indifference back.
"Oh, I'm an idiot?" An cooed. "That's cute, Angel, it really is." She jerked her head towards Lindsey. Angel's eyes followed the movement, and the invisible storm began building itself in earnest. "Why do you think that he was working for the Powers That Be, Angel? Why do you think that he was buzzing about like such a busy little bee for all those months so that you would take back your leash again? A moral awakening, the goodness of his heart finally springing free?" Angel's expression stayed blank, but his body still hummed with tension.
An's snort of disgust said exactly what she thought about Angel and Lindsey both. "He cut a deal, Angel-babe. He walked away from Wolfram and Hart with a nasty set of strings attached to his soul so that it didn't matter if he was a good boy for all the rest of his days, the outcome when he died was still going to be the same. He wanted that gone, and the Powers That Be knew that, and you have a big, gaping soft spot where he's concerned, and the Powers That Be knew that, too. Quid pro quo." An paused and for a moment took on a reflective expression. "I don't think they foresaw you killing him, though. You can think of that as a victory against determinism, if you want."
Angel's shrug was lazy, indifferent. It was almost enough to make Lindsey believe in it. The dangerous, beetle-black glitter in Angel's eyes betrayed it all for a show. "So you're telling me that Lindsey will do anything that he has to save his own ass? Thanks, An. You're lifting a major veil from my eyes here." He began stalking forward again, one slinking step after another than transformed all that bulk into something more worthy of a cat than a man.
"I don't want you coming any closer to me," An said sharply. Fear entered her voice before she could banish it, and she took a small step back. The air in front of her face shimmered like glass that had been overheated and then allowed to cool too hastily, so that it was forever caught in a series of ripples. Angel stopped, but the glitter in his eyes did not fade away. Lindsey thought that there was more than a little of Angelus in that look, and the prickle which ran up his spine in response was not based entirely on fear. Angel's eyes ticked towards him as Angel went on, "You can't lie to me anymore about what you'll do. I wouldn't recommend it trying it."
Angel cocked his head to one side and for a moment even seemed to smile as he took a few more gliding steps forward. The ripples in the air grew more pronounced; pain overtook Angel's face, but did not halt his progress. Backlit as he was by the inferno, his namesake was the last thing that he resembled. "But half the fun is in the trying." Something within the building collapsed and sent out a great rush of swirling sparks and blistering air. Angel barely flinched as the embers rained down against the back of his neck, and he never took his eyes away from An. Her look of lazy certainty was beginning to develop cracks in its foundation.
A yell echoed from the far side of the building, snapping Angel's head around and pulling his attention away when the fire alone had not been able to. An took the opportunity to break and run as it presented itself, leaving the air where she had been standing shimmering and dancing in a way that spoke of the inadvisability of following. Angel's eyes were flat, shark-like as he followed her progress, and Lindsey was surprised that he didn't try to follow her all the same. That particular expression said far more pessimistic things about her future than if he had simply pursued her then. The look that Angel passed over Lindsey when he happened to glance his way carried a similar message. Lindsey wished that he could go back to a place where this did not matter to him, as he set his jaw and refused to be the first one to look away.
The source of the yell rounded the far side of the building, and Angel's eyes skittered away from Lindsey as they tracked the source of the movement. Fine, they would call that particular staring match a draw. The distraction had platinum blond hair and a long black duster that was now looking a bit singed around the edges. This came as no great shock to Lindsey. What did surprise him was the blue femme fatale tailing along in Spike's wake, pressing her fingertips to the blood that covered one half of her face and then staring at it in shock. Spike reached back frequently to touch her on the shoulder or the arm as they came forward, as if to reassure himself of her reality, and the looks of shock which Illyria would give him upon each of these occurrences were as great as the ones she was giving her own blood.
"Where were you?" Angel snarled as Spike as soon as he came within earshot.
Spike paused when he heard the blatant invitation to attack written in Angel's tone. He curled his lip for a moment before he could stop himself. "Sorry if I was too busy to rush off to your rescue, Kemosabe," Spike snapped. Lindsey noticed for the first time that, in spite of dark spots of blood staining Spike's jacket, the vampire himself did not seem to bear any serious wounds. "But when our girl slid off the deep end, she decided that it was lonely at the bottom and opted to take some company with her."
"Demons," Angel guessed, some of the anger bleeding out of his voice as he pinched at the bridge of his nose. Lindsey supposed that he ought to have been pleased, except that it made the fire go with it.
Spike snorted his assent as he reached out to touch Illyria on the shoulder yet again. Rather than being annoyed by the attention or receiving it as that which was her due, Illyria was too fascinated by the blood on her fingers to even realize that Spike's hand was there. She stared at it as someone would who had never even seen blood before, which made Lindsey's eyebrows go up. Even all powerful hell gods had to get a paper cut every now and again, and he had seen her shrugging off an injury that had laid her own arm open to the bone not two days before. Meanwhile, Spike glanced back and forth between Angel and Lindsey for a few seconds before he rolled his eyes and began patting at the remaining embers on his jacket.
"Seems like An's finally figured out the knack to making friends." Spike satisfied himself that he was not on the verge of bursting into flames and pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. He muttered an oath beneath his breath as he remembered that he had smoked them all before, crumbling the packaging in his fist before throwing it to the side and going through his pockets for strays. Upon finding two, he lit first one for himself and then the second for Illyria. This time she took it with only the barest hint of hesitation. Spike watched until she had made it through her first inhalation without falling into a coughing fit, observing, "Atta girl," before he turned back to Angel. "Question is, what do we plan to do now that she's gotten herself all turbo charged?"
"I don't know," Angel said, gritting out each word as if it was his personal enemy. He glanced towards the horizon, where the first rosy blushes of pink were beginning to creep across the horizon. "But we don't have time to talk about it here. Our first goal has to be to find shelter." A gentleness that Lindsey was amazed to hear came back into Angel's voice as he called softly, "Illyria." She jerked and almost dropped her cigarette. "It's good to see that you made it out safe."
Illyria returned to her moody contemplation of the cigarette, where a long column of ash was forming at the end. After a moment of careful consideration to observe how Spike dealt with the same problem, she flicked it away. "I was in hell," she groused.
"Welcome to our club, Babe," Spike said, looking nonplussed when Illyria fixed her laser glare onto him. "It's an inclusive one, but we'll still try to get you a jacket."
"That dimension was an annexation of my kingdom," Illyria hissed at him. The glowing ember at the end of her cigarette bobbed as she trembled. "I should have been treated with the respect due to my station. I was instead attacked, as if I am nothing more than-"
"One of us?" Angel asked. Illyria broke off and stared at him. "Might be time that you got used to that feeling.
Illyria threw her half-finished cigarette to the street and ground it out beneath her foot. Her lips twisted in disgust. "Reparations will be made. The seer will realize what a mewling, insignificant thing she is before me."
"It may come to that. Let's see what else we can do first." With some of the rage draining away from him, Angel once again sounded tired. "First things first. Spike, you and Illyria try to find some shelter. Don't worry about luxury, any empty building will do. Lindsey and I will head in the opposite direction to do the same."
"You still want the pleasure of my company after all that? I'm touched." Lindsey was glad to know that in the face of everything else, he still had access to his poison. He did not know where he would be without it.
Angel's soft and deadly-gleaming smile said that he felt exactly the same way. "Or maybe I just want to keep you where I an see you."
Spike looked back and forth between them before he muttered something about them picking a hell of a time for a lover's spat and touched Illyria's elbow. "Come on, Babe. If we get really lucky, maybe we can find something slimy for you to kill." Illyria looked immediately mollified and Spike blinked. "Right. You fit in better with this crowd than you think."
Angel waited until Spike and Illyria had started off before he turned in the other direction, jerking his head once as indication that Lindsey should follow him. Half of the apartment building crashed in on itself with a roaring sound at that moment, sending out a great wave of ash and spark that forced them both to duck away and shield their eyes. The flames still did not so much as cause a matchstick's worth of fire on any of the surrounding buildings. Lindsey wondered if this meant that An still had some half-alive stirrings of conscience in her, or if she only did not want to destroy Los Angeles before she had decided how she was going to remake it.
Angel walked quickly, not caring as Lindsey winced and swore while he struggled to keep up. "Got to tell you, Lindsey, there is one thing that I never fail to appreciate about our relationship," he called back over his shoulder. "Every time that I think that maybe, just maybe, this is the time that you're going to surprise me, you always prove in the end that there's not a damned part of you capable of change. It's nice. Gives me faith in the stability of the universe." Angel paused long enough to snort. "I don't get a lot of that."
So they were actually going to do this, rather than tiptoeing around it with acidic glances and veiled threats. That wasn't so bad, Lindsey decided. Hell, that was great. It had been well over three hours since his last fight, and already his skin was beginning to itch with the need for…something.
Lindsey drew to an immediate halt. Fuck it if Angel thought that he was going to follow him all over the city so that they could have this out. He waited, easing the weight off of his bad leg as it began to throb. Surprisingly, Angel stopped and wheeled around as soon as he heard Lindsey's footsteps cease, so that they were left staring at each other across an expanse of air that crackled and shivered with anticipated violence.
"And you know what I love about you, Angel?" Lindsey asked, letting every ounce of rage that he had allowed to build up inside of him for years to seep into his voice like slow-release cyanide. He was barely recognizable to his own years and could not particularly say that he cared, either. "Every time that I think your stores of hypocritical, self-righteous bullshit must be running low, you dig a little deeper, find a little more." Angel took a small step closer, his eyes flaring briefly gold, but Lindsey was not finished yet. "You want to look down your nose at me for taking the smart road? Fine. But remember that the Powers That Be know why you hopped on the Team Evil bandwagon in the first place, which means that I know, too. It sure as hell didn't have anything to do with the greater good."
The small step became a large one. Before Lindsey could duck away Angel was up in his face, fingers fisting through the collar of his shirt and jerking him close. "You don't know what you're talking about." It was a low, measured tone, a tone that would have reassured most people who did not know Angel as Lindsey did. Cool air ghosted across Lindsey's face when Angel spoke, an illusion of life that was almost perfect until he remembered that the temperature was wrong.
And maybe this was a bad idea, and maybe he should be backing away before the whole situation entered the realm of the deeply and irretrievably fucked, but he had never been able to maintain a cool head when he was standing so close to fire. Lindsey leaned forward even further, so that all he and Angel would have to do would be to incline their heads just so and they would be kissing. Lindsey would have liked to go on a tirade then about Angel and his damned shifting loyalties, about what it was like to use Angel as a stand-in for the moral code that he could not seem to generate on his own, about the sudden feeling of gravity being jerked away when it was revealed to him that Angel had chosen to walk into the same shadows that all the forces of Wolfram and Hart had not been able to force him into.
But all of that would have taken hours if Lindsey would have been able to force the words out at all, and even now he found that he could not pull his thoughts away from the approaching sunrise. "Or we could always talk about your priorities before that." The gold in Angel's eyes had long since become a steady glow rather than an intermittent flicker. Lindsey was not afraid. He whispered, almost directly into Angel's mouth, "How's that Shanshu going, big guy?"
Angel growled, and Lindsey braced himself for a return to the violent retaliation of years before. When Angel's mouth came down on his own, hard and crushing and long enough to force all of the air from his lung, Lindsey thought, 'That's not what I meant.' It was still a return, though, and Lindsey did not think for a second about moving away. He opened his mouth to invite Angel further inside even as the force of the kiss propelled them both backwards across the pavement. His bad leg wobbled and threatened to go out from under him, so that Angel wrapped one of his arms around Lindsey's shoulder to keep him from stumbling too far. Even now, Angel was not entirely willing to let him fall.
Lindsey pulled away long enough to bite hard at Angel's lower lip and thought that he should probably be bothered by the fact that Angel seemed to want him the most when he thought that Lindsey was nothing at all. Should be, sure, Lindsey didn't need to breathe so badly that even now he couldn't realize that, but all it would talk was a look around to realize that their entire lives were troubling like that. Angel palmed the front of Lindsey's jeans, just so, just right, and Lindsey could feel him growl against Lindsey's mouth. Lindsey made a small noise from deep within his throat. The sound of his own pulse thundering in his ears was the sweetest and loudest sound that Lindsey had ever heard. When Angel pulled his mouth away from Lindsey's own and pushed it down again at the place on Lindsey's neck where the blood ran only a millimeter beneath the surface, nipping and then suckling at the small hurt hard enough to be alarming if death was not something that Lindsey already knew his way around with ease, he realized that Angel thought the same thing.
A woman cleared her throat from a few yards off. Lindsey jerked as the spell was not so much broken as shattered as thoroughly as if it had never been, feeling the skin on his neck tingle where Angel had been applying his ministrations seconds before. He stared at Angel, and Angel stared back with eyes every bit as coffee-dark and unreadable as they had ever been. Taking a deep breath to pull his thundering heart back under control, Lindsey cut off the part of his brain which would much rather pause and process what had just happened, including whether or not there would be violence later. Since they were returning to so many other old patterns and all. The darkness hid all of the interesting places that his blood was flowing as he turned back to the person who had been their interruptus before they could even get to the coitus.
Alicia stood only a short distance away, watching them with a pale face and tight, set expression. With that look, she could have caught Angel and Lindsey in the middle of the act itself and it would have been unable to distract her. The braid that had been on its last gasp when Lindsey had left her hours before was now a thing of the past entirely, leaving her hair floating in long, dark waves around her face.
"Sorry if I'm interrupting anything," Alicia said in a voice that shook around the edges. "But I think we have a bigger problem." She tugged Katie closer to her so that the little girl was all but melded into Alicia's side. Their fingers were wrapped around each other so tightly that their knuckles were turning white. It took Lindsey several more seconds to realize that what he was seeing was not an optical illusion.
Two trails of blood ran down Katie's face, making her look oddly, bizarrely, like a cheetah. She raised her first to rub at her eyes, smearing a crimson mess across her cheeks, and Lindsey realized that what had once been cornflower blue was now a perfect, screaming white.
End Part Seventeen