Part Eighteen

The whirr of a helicopter from elsewhere in the city was louder as Spike reappeared, causing Angel to glance up once at the sky with an unreadable expression. He went to meet Spike halfway, walking at the fastest pace that would allow Alicia and Lindsey to keep up. Well, that would give Alicia a chance to keep up, at any rate, as Lindsey didn't think that he was registering al that highly on Angel's list of considerations at the moment. He glanced towards Alicia once or twice, trying to see the woman whom he had left earlier that night in the strange new creature taking her place, but Alicia only had eyes for the girl that Angel was carrying ahead of them in his arms. Alicia's hands would every few moments clench into fists that then took several seconds of effort to unclench again, leaving Lindsey with no doubt that if it were not for her injury Alicia would rush forward and tear Katie away from Angel's arms without hesitation.

Spike also had his face turned upwards towards the sky, following the sounds of the real world pouring back into the vacuum. "Deal's been broken," he said when Angel had brought the group within earshot. "That makes quite a bit of difference, doesn't it?"

"Yes," Angel said, making a hurry-up gesture at Spike without the need to elaborate any further.

"Right." Spike spoke quickly, tumbling his words together as if he were afraid that he would vanish before he got the chance to get them all out. From over Spike's shoulder, Lindsey saw Illyria throw a glance towards the rapidly lightening sky and then veil her concern before anyone could call her on it. "Found a place," Spike said. "It's not a resort, but it'll fit all…" Spike's eyes ticked to Alicia and the motionless girl that Angel still carried. "Six of us."

"Good." Angel's voice was clipped, tense, a tone that Lindsey knew well. "Let's get going."

Illyria paused and tilted her head to one side, staring hard at Katie. "That is not the same girl," she said, for once sounding neither hostile nor imperious. Lindsey thought that he instead heard curiosity there, like a kid who had found an exciting new bug and could not wait to poke at it with a stick.

"Yes, she is." Angel's voice was enough to make even Illyria blink and draw back. He sped up again. "Lead the way."

Spike looked back and forth between Angel and Illyria, an expression on his face which suggested that he had come to regret his next words before they were even out of his mouth. "And we think that she's a different girl because…?" Katie lifted her face from where she had been pushing it against the side of Angel's neck, revealing her newly white eyes and the bloody streaks on her cheeks. "Never mind, then."

"She's the same girl," Angel snapped, his voice descending further into a growl than Lindsey had ever heard it without violence following along close behind. Katie twisted so that she was able to fix Angel with a piercing look that made her much older than her years. It was an An look, and if the way that Alicia's shoulders went stiff was any indication, then Lindsey was not the only one who was having trouble drawing comfort from it.

"Right." Spike's voice sounded shaken for a moment before he covered it with a cough. "Anyway, I'd suggest we hurry."

They followed Spike over a few blocks that still managed to feel like an eternity when every other step entailed an anxious glance over their shoulders to mark the progress of the sunrise, now a dim pink and gold glow staring over the horizon. In the end they made it with only seconds to spare, and optimistic seconds at that. Lindsey felt the warmth of the first rays hitting his hand as he slid into what had once been a small grocery store. The windows had by some miracle managed to avoid being broken after the building had been abandoned, and the thick blankets tacked over the windows suggested that it had been used as lair at least once since then. Illyria was the last one inside, bumping against Lindsey's shoulder with her own as he stood just inside the doorway and waited for his eyes to adjust.

Lindsey had reached the point where he could make out the outline of the aisles when he heard a soft snickering noise. Spike's lighter came to life, the single point of illumination in the darkness. "Let's see what we have to set fire to," Spike mused, sounding almost eager. The flame became a pinprick as he moved deeper into the store.

"Keep it small," Angel warned. "There's nowhere else to go if we burn this one down." His voice echoed back against the walls, simultaneously large and hollow.

Lindsey felt about until he found the cool metal of one of the aisle shelves and eased himself to the ground with it at his back, stretching his injured leg out in front of him. No longer being asked to bear weight, the shooting pains in the muscle dwindled away into a dull ache that was much easier to handle. Spike returned a few moments later with an armload of broken furniture that had once been part of an office desk and chair. The varnish took the flames from his lighter eagerly, producing a modest fire within minutes. A breeze from a broken window elsewhere in the building prevented the smoke from becoming too oppressive, and at long last the humans could see.

Alicia settled down a few feet away from Lindsey, stretching her injured leg out in a perfect imitation of his own position. Her eyes followed every move that Angel made until he set Katie down to the floor. When the girl ran to Alicia immediately, she extended her arm so that Katie could burrow beneath it and fixed her laser stare onto Lindsey next. There was no doubt in Lindsey's mind that her classroom had been the best-behaved in the school with the power of that look at her disposal, but he was older than eight and his memories included some far uglier characters. "What is it?"

Alicia started at him for a moment longer before shifting her gaze slowly onto Angel and back again. Her face was marble. "I know what you are."

Lindsey always enjoyed this part of his interactions with people. It had given a clientele of demons appeal-it was hard to be judged by creatures who had dragged themselves right out of the fires of hell. Lindsey realized that Angel was giving their conservation close scrutiny and scowled. Yes, always accepting that one. "Good for you. I know what I am, too."

Alicia returned to glaring, and it looked unnatural on her. "Not that," she said, making an impatient, dismissive gesture with her hand. "I know what both of you really are." She jerked her chin in Angel's direction. "The harm that you've done."

Lindsey told himself that the leaden feeling was only annoyance. He had been doing so for so long that by now it was nearly second nature. "And yet you're still hanging out with the kids from the wrong side of the tracks."

Alicia almost smiled. It was a much more flattering look on her, made her pretty again in spite of the dark circles beneath her eyes and the way that the flickering firelight took her face and transformed it. "A little birdie told me that we weren't finished quite yet, and that an ability to kill things without feeling too badly about it might come in useful." Alicia's arm around Katie's shoulders tightened as she spoke. Katie stopped rubbing at her eyes long enough to stare at them all in turn. The white glow made her expression difficult to read.

What Alicia was saying sounded very much like an endorsement for emotional sociopathy, but Lindsey did not think that she was in the mood to hear that. Even if the truth of it was something they could have debated about for several hours. "You're taking orders from eight year-olds now?"

The smile ghosted back across Alicia's face. More natural thought it might be, Lindsey decided that he did not like it very much. "More like suggestions."

"Is she in any pain?" Angel asked. By staring at Angel's expression, Lindsey may as well have been trying to read a message in Sanskrit.

"She can still speak for herself." Difficult as the rest of Katie's expression might be, the line driven between her eyes telegraphed annoyance without any difficulty. Katie paused to rub at the blood on her cheeks, looked at her fingers, and then dragged them across her pants in disgust. "And she doesn't hurt. She just wishes that the rest of you didn't have to be thinking so loud." A moue of distress entered her voice, and Alicia's arm around her shoulders tightened even further. She murmured comfort syllables into Katie's hair until the girl had gone quiet again.

"Has anything like this happened to you before?" Angel asked Katie, his voice dropping a few registers until it became gentle and soothing. Lindsey could imagine him using that same voice to simultaneously comfort and coax information out of clients, back when the road to redemption or damnation had been so much more clearly marked for them both.

Katie shook her head. "I used to get headaches sometimes where I would dream funny stuff." Her voice was still muffled by Alicia's shoulder. "Then I met…that other girl. I could feel something wrong with her before she did."

"I didn't think that becoming a seer was contagious," Lindsey said, tilting his head up to look at Angel where he stood with his arms folded across his chest.

Angel held his gaze until Lindsey was the one to break and look away. "It's not. Someone important knew that An was going to be lost to them soon and wanted to have a replacement ready in time."

"The Powers giveth, and the Powers taketh away," Lindsey muttered. "And just when you think it's over, they kick you down and take some more." Angel snorted, but Lindsey noticed that he wasn't contradicting him.

The sound of Spike's hands coming together was loud in the otherwise hushed air and made them all jump. Even Illyria twitched and looked over at him with a reproving expression. "All right, then," Spike said. "Far be it for me to interrupt an inventory of why the Powers kill kittens, but I think we ought to be switching the focus of our story time." He looked Alicia with raised eyebrows. "Now I know the kid wasn't sporting that look when we left."

Alicia lifted her chin and stared at him for a moment, wearing a cold, calculating expression that Lindsey had never seen on her before. "Katie came to me as soon as the four of you left," she said. Her hand began rubbing up and down Katie's upper arm as she spoke. Lindsey suspected that the gesture was as much to comfort Alicia as the child. "She said that something was wrong with An and the boys, and that we needed to get out of the building as soon as we could." Alicia's mouth twitched into what was probably meant to be a smile, ruined by the fact that she was near tears. "I didn't believe her at first. I thought that someone had said something to her to scare her. But she kept at it, all night long, and I kept saying that there was no way that we were going to go outside the building while the sun was still down. I changed my mind when her eyes began to bleed." Another twitching, tearful smile. "So we left. Took as many people with us as would follow."

Alicia sighed and took her arm away from Katie's shoulders long enough to run her fingers through her hair. Lindsey saw that her hands were trembling. He surprised himself by extending his good leg and nudging it against hers in a gesture of comfort. She nodded once, took a deep breath, and made a visible effort to collect herself before she went on.

"Not that many would follow, even after it became clear that Katie wasn't normal any more. Afraid of the night. We…got separated from the rest soon after we left." Alicia paused and shuddered. Lindsey wondered if she smelled of blood to Angel's and Spike's noses. The uneasy expression on Alicia's face deepened as she went on. "Neither Phillip nor Janice would come with us. I think… I think that An might have done something to them. They both began to act strange after she left. Disoriented."

Alicia shrugged as if she was shaking off a bad dream and looked at them each in turn, her tale completed. Her grip around Katie's shoulders was protective verging on the defiant, that of a mother lion unsure of what changes had been wrought in her cub but still willing to lay down her life for her all the same. "An was looking for Katie when she burned that building down, wasn't she?"

"Probably." Angel's voice had reentered that place of abnormal calm, but at least Lindsey could no longer imagine a computer saying those same words with ease. "If she sensed Katie's presence and realized that the Powers were already moving a replacement for her into place, then she would have wanted to get rid of that competition." Angel sighed. "Frankly, we don't know that that's not exactly what she did to Alexei and Fideo."

"Competition," Lindsey repeated. "It's plausible. Or An might have even have been trying to remove an outright threat."

Alicia jerked away from Lindsey as if he had scalded her. "She's eight years old," Alicia exclaimed. Her grip around Katie's shoulders tightened until the skin grew white beneath her fingers. Katie winced and squirmed and Alicia loosened her grip, but continued to stare at Lindsey with a horrified expression. "She's not a threat to anyone!"

Lindsey glanced towards Angel, saw neither encouragement nor disapproval in the vampire's lack of affect, and swore at himself for needing to look in the first place. He turned to Katie instead. "How far are your powers pushing out right now?"

Katie stared at him for a long moment, ignoring the tightening of Alicia's arm around her shoulders, before she finally said, "There's a couple arguing right now three blocks over. She's pregnant. He thinks that she did something back. She thinks that it was just a mistake." Katie closed her eyes. "I didn't need to know any of that." She sounded tired.

Lindsey looked back at Alicia, who had been growing steadily paler with every word that Katie spoke. "She's eight years old," Alicia repeated, her voice cracking for a moment around the middle.

"She's more powerful after one day than An was after six years. If the Powers that Be really are at work here, then I'd say that they're giving a stronger battery solely for the purpose of taking An out. An's definitely drawing power from something else on her side." Lindsey pulled his lips back from his teeth in a smile designed since its birth to be mechanical and cold. Alicia flinched back before she caught herself and glared. "Now, you want to argue that the Powers are doing a horrible thing here and are generally all-around assholes? Great. You're not going to find a lot of argument with this crowd. It still doesn't change the facts."

"He's right." Lindsey made a mental note to play those words on loop for the rest of his life. He would start as soon as they were no longer putting the world back together.

Angel was staring hard at Katie when Lindsey twisted back around to face him. His expression was one of the saddest and most compassionate that Lindsey had ever seen him wear, but it was also the most determined. "When the first building was attacked." Alicia gave him a look that bordered on the sullen, daring him to offer her something that she could believe in. "An wasn't the Champion that broke the rules by being in the city. Neither was Lindsey. It was Katie all along. She didn't qualify until An slipped off the deep end."

Katie stared back at him, shrugged, and raised her hand to scratch at the remaining blood on her face. Her eyes flashed like silver dollars. "I wish that I could just turn it down," she whispered, so soft that if it were not for the close quarters taking her words and bouncing them back again she probably would have been heard at all. "I don't want to be special like this."

"I know, Katie," Angel said back just as softly, at the same time that Lindsey whispered, "It still might have been me."

Angel threw him a mingled look of shock and that same old, festering contempt. It had a soothing effect on Lindsey, because it meant that they were back on familiar ground. "You have got to be kidding me." Angel's tone suggested that even if this were the case, it was in Lindsey's best interests to knock it off quickly.

Lindsey squared his jaw and returned a look that was every bit as ugly as the one that he was being given. "I don't think that I'm a Champion and I never did, dumbass," he snapped. "I know that I'm not any more than you are." Right, so maybe that last one was unnecessary, but Lindsey figured that he had a lifetime's worth of jabs to throw at Angel before the balance sheet was clear between them. The small matter of killing him alone had to be worth a few decades.

Angel's expression darkened. How nice for him. "They still could have been after me," Lindsey repeated, in a louder voice that rang around the room and bordered on the defiant. He tilted his chin up and flashed Angel the nastiest smile that he was capable of, secure in the knowledge that that was still saying quite a lot. The voice of reason wanted him to sit down, shut up, and do his best to ride this out to the end, but he had never been one to listen to the voice of reason once it started to get personal.

There was another voice, one that had not been strong since long before he had signed on Wolfram and Hart's dotted line. Lindsey found that it was still powerfully easy to shove to the side and ignore.

"You guys may as well have made a big list of natural laws and crossed each one out as you broke it when you brought me back," Lindsey said, shrugging and becoming aware that Katie was once again looking at him with that wise beyond her years stare. Since staring contests with eight year-olds had not been what Lindsey had in mind when he had signed up for…whatever the hell it was that he had signed up for by remaining with Team Angel rather than beating it out of town after his glorious resurrection, he did not look in her direction. "I've betrayed every entity that I've ever worked for, and those contracts linger. Can't say that there won't be parties thrown among the fire and brimstone if they ever get me back." And would have been, if An had been a little slower with her mojo and he with his blade. Lindsey considered for a moment telling Angel that he had received another chance to cut a deal and had turned it down, only to cast the idea aside a few seconds later. He couldn't bear yet to turn it under the power of Angel's stare, when he himself still did not know what it meant.

"You mean we could have avoided half of his mess by throwing you back down there from the get-go?" Spike sounded less amused and more like this was something he was actually considering than was comfortable. Lindsey turned that poison-filled smile onto Spike next.

"Whatever would I do without the overwhelming compassion of heroes?"

"We'll think of that as our backup plan." Angel sounded tired, rubbing his hand over his eyes. When he straightened, Lindsey could still see beneath all of that to the man who had walked into a corporate boardroom and thrown a vampire out of a window. Only time would tell if that would be enough. "There's nothing else that we can do while the sun is up. Everyone should sleep now while they can. I doubt that there's going to be time for it later."

"You mean that there's going to be a fight," Alicia said. Lindsey wanted to tell her to loosen up her grip on Katie's shoulders before she wound up hurting the girl.

Angel nodded. "Yeah, and probably a bad one."

"But Katie's only eight," Alicia said, putting a stress on the final world as if it were in a foreign language that she could force them all into understanding by willing it hard enough.

"We know that, love," Spike said. His voice was gentle enough to make Lindsey blink and cause Illyria to tilt her head to one side and look at him askance. "Believe us, we know. We're going to do everything that we can to keep your girl out of the rough and tumble of it, but…" Spike's shoulders lifted into a shrug so slight that if not for the fire playing tricks with the light and making shadows dance they would not have been able to see it at all. "She's not normal anymore. We can't pretend that she is."

Alicia glared at him, all shades of the woman who had flirted with Lindsey a day before gone. Left in her place was the essence of pure, maternal ferocity. "She deserves to be."

"I want to turn it down," Katie repeated suddenly. She wriggled out from under Alicia's arm, quick as a monkey and every bit as agile, and was out of reach before Alicia had a chance to react. "And I'm not too little to understand what you're all thinking." She stomped off to the corner of the room and slumped there, wrapping her hands around the tops of her knees and resting her head there.

Alicia watched her go with her lower lip sucked between her teeth, but she did not try to follow. Her eyes were gleaming when she turned back to Spike. Lindsey was not sure if it was from anger or tears.

"That is an innocent little girl over there," Alicia hissed at them all. "She deserves better than this." She paused for a moment, seemingly realizing for the first time the ridiculousness of arguing about what each person deserved in the current crowd, and then lashed out with, "So far as I know, that young lady who's so very eager to kill us right now was an innocent little girl when she started, too. I don't see that this power has done her a whole lot of good."

"That's beside the point." Angel's voice rose by an octave with the first hints of real anger, and the air crackled. Alicia swallowed back whatever she had been planning on saying next and fell back a few inches, watching him. "It's not Katie's fault that this has happened, it's not your fault, and it's sure as hell not our fault, so maybe you should save your anger for somewhere it will be useful. If you want to scream at the Powers That Be or fate for a while, go ahead. At least then you'll be getting closer to the source."

Angel waited to be sure that Alicia was still listening to him before he continued. "What An did was An's choice. We don't know what's going through her head right now, but it does not mean that Katie has to take the same road. We'll protect her with everything that we have. Meanwhile, you have to understand and accept that she is not normal anymore."

Alicia stared at him for a long moment before she buried her head in her hands, whispering, "I don't think that I can deal with this."

"Learn," Angel said. He turned to disappear into the back room.

Though he was certain that he was going to regret it later, Lindsey pushed himself to his feet and followed Angel into the back room. He could feel every other pair of eyes in the room following him as he exited.

"You know," Angel paused in the middle of the room and said as he heard Lindsey's footsteps and the soft click of the door shutting behind him, "I'm beginning to think that I'll have to kill you all over again if I want to get away from you." There was a small window set high into the far wall, casting down a tiny patch of light which Angel easily avoided.

"And I'm sure that day will be a carnival for everyone involved. My last death sure was."

"Enjoying the view?" Angel turned to face him at last. He had once again turned his face into what for everyone else would have been an unreadable mask, but Lindsey knew the cracks. A little pressure applied to the right places and at the right times, and he might even be able to keep Angel holding it together long enough to turn that rage onto the source the deserving source.

"It's not terrible." Lindsey tilted his head to the side and ignored Angel's look of irritation long enough to have himself a good stare. "Gotta say, if what you did in there is what you're calling a big hero speech now, then I think you're losing your touch. Wasn't an inspiring, rally the team kind of moment, you know?"

Angel flashed him a look so flatly incredulous that it was all Lindsey could do not to laugh. This was why he was wiling to follow Angel around and keep up the façade that he had any say in the matter, those moments when he had wedged himself so thoroughly under Angel's skin that they both knew there was going to be no dislodging him ever again. "And you're the one to be giving me advice here? You've never followed a single cause without getting a paycheck at the end."

Lindsey rolled his eyes and made sure that his smile was gleaming and sharp. "Time to get some new material. The varnish is rubbing off." And they both knew that he would have followed Angel there at the end, no carrot or stick necessary, but there was some kind of shaky structure being built here and Lindsey did not want to shake it too much, lest it should fall down before the foundation had a chance to harden. "Besides, you're forgetting that once a very long time ago I was a lawyer." Angel's pointed silence said that he had hardly forgotten, thanks. Any moment that he was shutting up and listening was one that Lindsey was going to consider a victory. "Rousing speeches are my thing. Not yours, obviously." Lindsey unfolded his arms from across his chest, stepped close so that the distance between them was one of inches rather than feet. "Even the crayon in there is feeling ambivalent about snapping skulls after your attempt at getting her blood fired up." He paused for a moment. "So to speak."

Angel watched Lindsey approach with a faint smile on his face that did not quite match his eyes; Lindsey was not sure what look he was seeing there. "You can understand then why I'll have to think over any advice that you have to give."

Lindsey rolled his eyes and swore that if he did it much more he was going to strain something. "Yeah, I'm a bad, mad man, thank you for giving me that memo one more time." He leaned forward further, so that if Angel had been breathing it would have been ghosting across Lindsey's face. "Doesn't mean that I'm not right. You wonder why you haven't been pinging the Champion radar for the last year and a half? Maybe it's time for your to suck it up and decide whether or not you want to be one already."

Angel watched him through heavy-lidded eyes for a long moment without moving or speaking. Finally he said, in a voice so low that Lindsey had to lean forward those final dangerous centimeters in order to even hear him. "Whose payroll are you on right now, Lindsey?"

"I don't know," Lindsey muttered back, because to say 'No one' was still so shiny and new that he could not even make himself believe it, let alone Angel. The words had barely escaped before Angel's mouth was coming down on top of his, hard enough to clack their teeth against one another's. Lindsey was driven backwards a step and once again felt Angel's arm circling around his back, first holding him in place and then pulling him closer. Lindsey wondered which line he would have to cross before Angel would finally be willing to let him fall.

"I really don't like you, Lindsey," Angel murmured, parting his mouth from Lindsey's for a moment. Their forehead remained pressed against one another, a cool expanse of marble as Lindsey felt his own skin growing more heated by the moment.

"Likewise." Lindsey shifted to take some of his weight off of his bad leg. He was both surprised and more than a little discomfited when Angel shifted so that he was now bearing part of the burden. "But we don't have to like each other to do this, do we?" They never had before.

Angel kissed him again, hard enough to draw all the air out of his lungs, and pushed him back against the closed door. Lindsey participated with enthusiasm until his head began to swim and black spots would have been swimming in front of his eyes if they had been open. Hard wood beneath his shoulders, and he bet that they were giving Spike and Illyria one hell of a show in there…shit. "Wait," Lindsey muttered, pulling back the few inches he had left before he was resting his head against the door. Goddamn that final bit of conscience that refused to lie down and die.

Angel gave him an aggravated, incredulous look. Lindsey could count on one hand the number of times that he had told Angel to slow down and give him a chance to catch his breath before. "What?"

"The kid." Lindsey shifted more of his weight back against the door and stared at the ceiling, wishing that the room didn't have to be so goddamned hot. "Katie's already getting more than enough of a show as it is."

"No." Angel grimaced and took a step back. He needed the distance, as the next words to come tumbling out of his mouth surely cost him more than Angel could possibly know. "No, you're right." It didn't sound any less strange the second time than it had been the first. Angel gave Lindsey a long, scrutinizing look. "You're protective of kids. I keep forgetting that."

Lindsey pushed himself away from the door now that Angel had back away enough so that he could. "Yeah, I'm not a complete sociopath. I'll try to round up a puppy to kick later. Wouldn't want to rock your world too much."

Angel stared at him for so long that Lindsey began to feel as if there were insects crawling across his skin before he said, "Sleep while you can, Lindsey. You haven't come this far without paying the price for it, have you?" He stepped further back. Even though it was crazy and he knew that Angel maintained a perfect room temperature, if that, Lindsey still shivered as if had been pulled without warning away from fire.

Lindsey resisted the urge to rub at the place on his neck where Angel had been paying such careful attention earlier, where a bruise was already beginning to form and the skin still tingled. "Right. We have a big night coming up, don't we?"

Angel's smile was a glittering confirmation.

End Part Eighteen