Part Nineteen
Despite his exhaustion, it was late afternoon before Lindsey was able to slow down his mind enough so that his body could rest. He swore that his eyes had barely drifted closed before small hands were shaking him awake again. Lindsey cracked an eye open at the sullen remains of their fire and came awake at once, trying to roll away from the tiny person who had insisted on waking him up in the first place. She made an irritated huffing noise that immediately put Lindsey more at ease regarding their current situation, because it meant there were still pieces of the little girl he had met on the stairwell floating around in there. Katie scrambled over his body and began shaking him again.
"I know what you're trying to do," she informed him in a tart voice. "You can't keep secrets from me anymore."
Lindsey caught himself smiling at the imperiousness of her tone and sat up, abandoning the game. "You're that good, huh?"
Katie shrugged and played with the hem of her shirt for a moment. If not for the gleaming white of her eyes and the faint pink streaks on her face, Lindsey would have been able to convince himself that nothing had changed. "Does it make your head hurt?" he asked, thinking of An, Alexei, and Fideo and the great gushes of blood that would rush forth whenever their used their powers too extensively.
The smile slipped off of Katie's face as she read the contents of Lindsey's thoughts, becoming a sullen expression that troubled him with its similarity to one that he had seen on another face. "It used to," she replied. "Not anymore. My eyes don't hurt, either. It's only…" Katie paused for the time it took to exchange the sullen look for a puzzled frown. "Cluttered. It's like when you can hear a whole bunch of kids, and you know that they're talking about you, but because it's so loud you can only understand a few words."
Katie broke herself off with a physical shudder and had recovered enough a few moments later to smile at him. "You have a hickey."
Lindsey had to force his head to be still so that he could not rub at his eyes in exasperation. "You did not wake me up to tell me that."
"Nope." Katie leaned forward until her nose was nearly touching Lindsey's. The bright blankness of her eyes became all that he could see. "She's coming."
Lindsey stared at her in shock for several long, precious seconds before he realized with a jolt that he was wasting the very time that she had just told him that they were running out of. Katie grinned at him with an expression that was eerie and almost serene. Lindsey nudged her aside and lunged up to his feet, ignoring the sound of several stitches popping and the sensation of blood trickling down his leg. He looked around for Angel or even Spike, anyone who had been attempting the hero thing for more than two days.
And of course the only heroes that he could claim to know would be nowhere in evidence at the one moment that they were actually needed. Lindsey's oaths were especially creative as he glanced in the direction of the covered-over windows and noticed that the golden glow which had crept along the edges of the blanket over the course of the day was gone. Not dust, then, and that was not relief walking up and down his spine and releasing knots of tension that he had not realized was there.
Lindsey limped over to where Alicia was sleeping curled up against one of the shelves and knelt to put his hand against her shoulder. Her eyes flashed over before he had even had a chance to shake her. Questions were written large on Alicia's face as she glanced back and forth between Lindsey and Katie, but she did not make a sound. Lindsey suspected that she already had some idea of what the answers to her questions would be and so was remaining silent as a means of sparing herself for as long as possible.
"We have to move," Lindsey told Alicia in a low voice, waiting for Alicia to nod. She pulled herself back up to her feet, using the empty shelves as aids and then needing to lean heavily on them for several seconds after she was done. By the time that Alicia had extended her arm, Katie was already half-burrowed beneath it.
"What are you doing?"
Lindsey turned until he met the electric blue gaze of Illyria. She was not the member of the dream team that he would have preferred to see making a miraculous reappearance, but she was certainly better than nothing at all. Illyria tilted her head quizzically to one side as she looked them over, her curiosity untainted by such human weaknesses as fear. It must be nice. Illyria looked back at Lindsey, seemingly designating him as the leader of the escape party, and maintaining an expression which suggested that her patience could be measured in micrometers and to waste it by ignoring her questions was not the wisest move that Lindsey could make.
"An is on her way," Lindsey told her. As he watched, a coldness stole over her face that made her previous imperiousness look as if it belonged on a kindergarten child by comparison. "Where are Angel and Spike?"
"They are reestablishing contact." Lindsey's eyebrows drew together in confusion, but Illyria was staring towards the windows with a hungry expression that suggested further questions would not be wise. "Yes," Illyria said finally. It came out as a hiss, and from the corner of his eye Lindsey saw both Alicia and Katie shiver.
"Got a plan?" Lindsey asked Illyria, since she seemed to be the only person in the room who did not have a doomsday scenario running through their head.
Illyria tilted her head to one side and stared at Lindsey in an eerie version of her 'How do you manage to function?' expression. It was not quite so harsh as the first time that she had turned it upon him, more filled with the sort of tolerant indulgence given to a pet who was not too bright but was friendly all the same. If she kept that up, gee, they might even become friends. "We are going to fight," Illyria said.
Or maybe that indulgence was only coming from the fact that Illyria had gone finally and irreversibly insane. Lindsey did not need to look over to know that Alicia was wearing an expression of pure and naked disbelief to match his own. Only Katie seemed unperturbed, and had begun to fidget beneath Alicia's arm. "Illyria, don't take this the wrong way, but you are right out of your mind," Lindsey said. Illyria cocked her head to the other side, the indulgent expression slowly giving way to a dangerous glower. "For one, two of the three adults here are not exactly combat-ready. For another, I don't see any Uzis lying around."
Though she would never admit it and Lindsey was certain it would not be smart of him to try to make her, Illyria for a moment looked almost embarrassed. She jerked her head around and stared at Katie, who under that gaze looked less like a pint-sized guru and more like a terrified child by the second.
Noticing the direction of Illyria's stare, Alicia pulled Katie even tighter against her body and raised her chin in either defiance or warning. It bore a strong resemblance to a Chihuahua trying to stare down a Great Dane, and Lindsey was tempted to tell Alicia that in this case she did not even have herself pointed at the correct Great Dane.
After sparing a moment to turn a faint sneer in Alicia's direction, Illyria said, "Perhaps not. But neither do I see any other options before us."
Katie chose that moment to break out from beneath Alicia's arm and twitch down the blankets covering the windows before anyone could stop her. She came running back. Lindsey noticed for the first time that she had begun to tremble and was struck all over again by the realization that she was the same age that the other three had been when he and Angel had rescued them. When Alicia struck out her arm to reclaim Katie against her side, it was only because Lindsey did not get there first.
"They're coming," Katie said, fear putting the first hint of a normal child's whine into her voice.
When the ladies were right, they were right. Lindsey sighed and rubbed his hands over his eyes, trying to pretend that the way Illyria was looking at him, as if she actually expected him to be able to do something, was not a direction contradiction of all the laws of the universe. "Okay, fine. If we can haul ass out of here and manage to get some space between us and her-" And if the world would just slow down enough to let him think. He had had days and weeks to prepare court cases, and while there was a small voice which whispered that he had still had to be good at thinking on his feet in order to stay one step ahead of the Senior Partners' capricious whims, he could not help but be struck again by how very long ago those days had been.
Fine. Lindsey had had a very bad several days, with a very bad near-eternity stretching out before that, and maybe he wasn't back on his A game yet. The fact that no one could precisely fault him for this did not mean that people were not going to die for it if he couldn't pull it together and focus.
Illyria had not ceased giving him that look, and at some point while his mind had been wandering a small smile had begun to play with the edges of her mouth. Lindsey barely restrained himself from pointing out that it was not a flattering look on her. "That is not going to work." She was all but sing-songing.
The last thing that Lindsey needed to deal with now was a smug…whatever Illyria was, actually, as he had never been quite clear on that. "Then you'll get to kill a big number of unpleasant things in a big number of unpleasant ways," Lindsey snapped. "That will be like Christmas for you, won't it?" Illyria continued to view him with that smug suggestion of a smile rather than pulling his arm off and feeding it to him. "Let's go."
Lindsey limped towards the door. He could hear Alicia and Katie following so closely behind him that at any moment he would be able to feel their breaths ghosting against the back of his neck. Illyria, with a small sniff of impatience at the limitations of human speed, had darted around him and was out the door almost before he had finished speaking. When her exit was followed by a wet snapping sound from outside on the sidewalk, Lindsey figured that Christmas had come early.
"Good job, Babe," Spike was saying when Lindsey led Alicia and Katie out the door a few seconds later. Spike was crouching down and staring with a cool, clinical detachment at the head of a demon which Illyria had been so kind as to liberate from its body for them. She had even gone the extra distance of scattering it several feet away from the rest of the body, which was still pulsing slightly. Alicia put her hand over Katie's eyes.
Spike glanced over at Lindsey as he emerged with Alicia and Katie in tow, but within seconds he had turned his attention back to the disembodied head. "That could have gotten ugly." He reached out and touched lightly at a fang still glistening with saliva and something else. "Venom."
"See?" Lindsey said brightly to Illyria. "You should believe in Santa Claus."
"I do not understand you," Illyria said, frowning. She appeared mollified by Spike's compliment all the same.
Lindsey had been aware of Angel's eyes fixed on him since he had stepped outside. He was only putting off the moment when, like a planet orbiting its sun, he would be drawn towards it again. Angel continued to watch him without speaking until Lindsey's skin itched and he longed to throw off the gaze as he would a physical weight. He had seen that look on Angel's face a few times before, usually immediately preceding some attempt at either saving Lindsey or killing him. Lindsey was troubled that he could not say which of the options he was more likely to be looking at next.
And because there was no way in hell that Lindsey was going to be the first to look away, no way that he was going to let Angel win at whatever 'this' was, he found himself raising one of his eyebrows and asking, "Contact?"
The look changed subtly, becoming less piercing and in its place almost amused. As Lindsey no longer felt as if he had been first placed into a petri dish and then shoved beneath a microscope without his permission, he would take whatever he could get. "The rules have changed."
"She's coming," Katie said suddenly. Her shaking had grown even worse.
"We know, poppet." Spike straightened from his crouch and gave the demon's head a kick that made it roll across the pavement like a soccer ball, save for the bloody trail that it left behind. He looked at Angel, "And what do you want to bet that Illyria here has given us our very first advance scout?"
"Great. So why are we still standing around?" Lindsey asked.
"We're not." Angel twirled his sword around and held the hilt out to Lindsey. When Lindsey put his palm upon the handle but made no further move to actually accept the weapon, Angel went on, "Get them out of here and protect them as well as you can." Lindsey still did not curl his fingers around the sword, causing Angel's expression to darken. He added, "In case you were wondering, I didn't word that as a request."
Lindsey scowled and tugged the sword out of Angel's grasp. One and probably both of them were still capable of being asses. Proof positive that everything was going to be all right. "I don't have a great history with one of these today."
Angel's expression underwent that damnable shift again, becoming appraising, becoming knowing. When he lifted his hand suddenly and placed it on the back of Lindsey's neck it almost proved to be the latter's undoing. There were raised eyebrows all around and, gosh, Lindsey could not wait to count up all the ways in which he did not care, not while Angel's grips was caught as it was somewhere between a threat and a caress. Fingers which barely managed room temperature on a good day should be also hearken to fire, Lindsey thought as he jerked back and away, even while wondering how he have to appear in Angel's eyes before he would do it again. It was possible that he needed help.
Angel let his hand fall back to his side, but he kept up the look. "Maybe not," Angel said. "You'll still protect a child." Whatever bizarre conversation Angel expected to take place outside of the words themselves apparently over, Angel turned towards Alicia. "Go with him. Fight as hard as you can and kill if you have to." He cut her off when she opened her mouth to protest. "This is not a fairytale. If you're not willing to kill any demon that you have to when the moment presents itself, then she-" Angel pointed towards Katie. "Could wind up dying for it."
If Alicia had been planning on arguing, then Angel managed to kill the words in their infancy. "I know that."
Alicia nodded reluctantly before turning towards Lindsey and looking at him, that terrible, hopeful look that Lindsey knew within a few seconds' exposure to he would happily trade in for a year's worth of Angel and his damned stares. Like Lindsey was a hero, like he was the key to fixing this damned mess, which Lindsey though was pretty rich considering the dressing down that Alicia had given him earlier. She had been closer to the truth then.
'You don't know the half of it,' Lindsey felt like saying to her. 'I spent about five years helping to cause this mess before I spent six months trying to fix it, so don't go looking at me like I'm your savior now.' In spite of this, Lindsey caught himself nodding all the same. "Clock's ticking," he said, as the ground beneath his feet quivered. Lindsey was not nearly optimistic enough to believe that it was an earthquake.
He held out his free hand to Katie and was gratified when she extricated herself from beneath Alicia's arm so that she could take it. Katie gasped when Lindsey's skin made first contact with her own, but Lindsey did not know if it was because she foresaw him dying in his sleep at the age of ninety or within the next ten minutes of his liver being pulled out through his nose. After a few moment's consideration, Lindsey decided that he also did not want to know. In the one direction lay complacency, while in the other…well, if there was one person on this planet who deserved the chance to show destiny his middle finger, it was…fine, it was really Angel, but Lindsey was still willing to take his chances.
"See you on the other side," he said to Angel. Angel nodded back, and Lindsey turned to lead Alicia and Katie away into the darkness. The shadows swallowed them up within seconds so that the only things that Lindsey could see clearly were Katie's eyes, glowing like miniature moons.
End Part Nineteen