Part Twenty
"You sure that was a good idea?" Spike asked soon after Lindsey had disappeared from sight.
"Why wouldn't it be?" Angel looked at his hands, flexing and unflexing his fingers until the blood ground into the creases began to flake away. On second thought, giving away the sword was maybe not the smartest move that he could have made, but what was done was done. It was too late in the game to become squeamish about a little blood on his hands.
Spike stared at Angel for a long moment before slowly swiveling his head around to look at Illyria, as if asking for her support. A faint shrug was her only response. Angel thought that even that much was a big concession, considering the source.
Seeing no help coming from that corner, Spike turned back to Angel and said in the careful tone that he might use with a slow and unfortunately dangerous child, "Because he's a power-hungry bastard who would betray us all at the first hint of material gain and that's why you killed him the first time?" Spike's voice rose a notch, transforming into the no-really-just-asking faux innocence that had not been any less irritating when he had first been turned. "And because you've just handed him a gold-plated way to scrounge up a hell of a lot more material gain for a very small amount of effort?"
"He likes kids," Angel said. Spike's eyebrows rose and the rest of his expression suggested that Angel had finally gone irretrievably around the bend and it was now up to Spike and Illyria to humor him in the meanwhile. "He'll protect her. And anyway-" Angel split his lips into the grim smile that he knew made him look more like Angelus than any other. From the sudden tension that entered Spike's and even Illyria's frames, he knew that he had not lost his touch. "He's seen An in action. Lindsey has even less to gain from betraying us than he does by staying loyal."
The ground shivered again, hard enough to rattle all of the remaining panes in the windows and even cause one or two to crack. Angel lifted his chin towards a point further down the street. "Lindsey is not our problem. She is." There was a steady and almost hypnotic rhythm to the way that the ground shuddered, too regular to be considered an earthquake. Angel had recognized it for what it was several minutes before: the trampings of many, many pairs of feet.
Spike followed Angel's gaze and let a long stream obscenity go by under his breath, while Illyria leaned forward onto the balls of her feet in eager, anticipatory interest. The army approaching filled the street, led at its head by a small figure that had once been a girl. Even without the white glow to draw her out and make her distinct in the gloom, Angel could feel her eyes resting on him. Déjà vu might be a bitch, but at least here they had more room to maneuver than they had in that other alley. All that was missing was the rain.
"Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," Spike muttered, pitching his voice so low that even Angel had to strain in order to hear it. Spike sounded oddly philosophical and Angel, drawing from that energy, wondered what it was that he somehow failed to learn, why it was that he would up teetering on the brink of the void over and over again before he jerked himself back.
In the strange and nearly airless calm that marked the final few seconds before any battle began, Angel glanced towards Spike and thought of the humanity that he still did not know was his for the claiming. He thought of another man who seemed to have an endless well of fight left in him, and he thought that maybe, only maybe, he crept closer to the truth every time that the lesson had to be repeated. Only maybe. To claim anything more substantial than that would be to shatter it when he was finally getting close, and anyway, he had a battle to fight.
An seemed to have assembled every demon remaining in Los Angeles to stand behind her as she walked slowly forwards, her natural eye color gleaming a deep jet. Angel would have traded it in to get the white back in a heartbeat. He had no idea if this new and improved version of An was using her powers to control the demons of it she had only explained to them that she gave them the chance to wreak revenge on the creatures that had been cutting through them like scythes through ripened wheat. As he could count among the assembled throng several species that he, Spike, and Illyria had at the very least been on neutral terms with and a few that they had even helped, he suspected that the former accounted for more than a little.
The pertinent question remaining, then, was whether the same could still be said for the thing that had once been An, if there was still a consciousness either fighting or abetting the thing hovering over her. Angel shoved these thoughts to the side so that he could prepare himself for what the next few seconds would bring. Giving the sword to Lindsey was seeming like a worse idea by the second.
"She was here!" An screamed across the distance between them, coming to a stop at a place roughly a block away. "I know she was, I can feel her!" There was a high and almost whining quality to her voice that Angel had never heard there before. After a beat, he realized that it was pure, human fear.
An maintained her distance for so long a period that the demons to either side of behind her began to exchange uneasy glances. The sound of leather creaking and metal weaponry clanking against itself overtook all of the other nighttime sounds. Angel drew his eyebrows together before glancing towards Spike and seeing that he was also wearing a puzzled look.
"Why don't you come closer, An?" Angel called to her for lack of any more accurate address. An tilted her head to one side and curled her lip at him. It was a good imitation of confidence. Angel took a step forward. "What are you scared of?"
"Where is she?" An shrieked, rather than answering. She didn't seem terribly interested in coming forward, but neither was she backing away.
"Why is it so important to you that you kill Katie?" Angel continued, still walking closer. The demons surrounding the girl and waiting for her signal continued to fidget and fuss. Angel noticed that more than a few were wearing faintly glazed expressions, and furthermore that the expressions were beginning to flicker in and out like reception on a bad television set. His earlier suspicion became certainty while a whole new suspicion began to grow. "So the Powers found themselves a new girl. So what? Whatever's left you in there isn't really interested in being a puppet, anyway. You're bigger than that now."
"You need to be shutting up," An growled, managing to sound both like a petulant teenager and something far older and more dangerous at the same time. "You need to be shutting up right now, or I swear to God when I kill you-"
"Yeah, about that," Angel said. He gave the Angelus grin again. "Why aren't you getting on with it? It's not like Katie took your own power from you when she became the new golden girl." A look of pure, raw terror streaked across An's face before she was able to hide it again, and Angel's second suspicion began to grow and reach towards the sky. 'Katie and Alicia are with Lindsey,' Angel thought deliberately, aware of how tremendous the consequences would be if he was wrong.
A line appeared between An's eyes, even the ghost of triumph wiped away. If anything, she looked as if she were only one or two nudges away from bursting into tears. "Or is it maybe because you're just not the only special one anymore." Something in her face cleared as An became reassured that her secret was safe for a while longer.
'Not quite,' Angel thought. He wondered how long this disintegration had been going on and how long it would be before her control of her army fell away altogether. If they could hang on long enough, maybe they could beat the numbers and prevent the battle from coming like the last one that they had faced against these odds. Angel was made painfully aware of how many others he had already lost, and how few he still had left to lose. "Rejection sucks, doesn't it?"
Angel could sense Spike rolling his eyes without even needing to look over. "Not all about you, drama queen," Spike muttered.
"Not the point, brain trust," Angel muttered back. He beamed at An and felt his fangs sliding down into his lower lip at the gesture. "I'll bet it's all that you can do not to-"
A screech echoed from the sky above. Angel glanced up and felt his jaw drop. "Oh, you have to be fucking kidding me." He jumped backwards, catching Spike and Illyria each about the waist and taking them down to the pavement and safety with him. Spike yelled a garbled mixture of obscenity at him and Illyria yelled out what certainly would have been the same if he had understood the language. All three of them went down in a confusing tangle of limbs. Angel felt a patch of skin tear off his arm and blood that was never going to rush as quickly or as smoothly as a human's pooling down into the crook of his arm, and figured that the apologies could wait.
A lance of flame came down at the place where they had all been standing only a second before, scorching the pavement black and causing even Illyria to shield her eyes from the light and cry out in pain as the wave of heat washed over them. Charlotte was a bronze blur ghosting over the street, so much as a creature larger than a city bus could even be called a ghost, before she wheeled back towards the sky and shrieked back promises at Angel that he didn't need to translate in order to understand.
Spike rolled back up to his feet with the grace of a born warrior and stared up at the sky as Charlotte wheeled around for another try. "I have never seen a woman who can hold a grudge like that bitch can," he said. He eyeballed Angel. "She reminds me of Darla, actually."
"You're not the first one to think that," Angel said, keeping an eye on An as he spoke and expecting to see a grin of pure triumph cross her face. If she was using Charlotte as her windup toy, however, then she was a far better actress than Angel had given her credit for. A mixture of frustration and fear moved across her young face, and Angel even thought that he saw her mouth the words, "Wasn't supposed to be like this."
There was already a long waiting list to get into that club. Angel had discovered that there was a certain kind of beauty in cutting to the chase and stripping it from one's vocabulary altogether. He backed up a step as Charlotte reach a comfortable altitude and crested there for a second before hurtling back down into another stoop. Angel watched carefully as she drew closer and closer, turning from a copper speck into a mess of claw and fang in roughly the span of time that it took Angel to blink twice, but from the corner of his eye he saw the quick, desperate look that Spike threw Illyria's way all the same.
"I have shed enough of my blood for his sake as it is," Angel heard Illyria grouse even as he tuned the rest of the world out so that he could focus solely on his next move. He thought that Illyria might have been rushing to his aid in spite of her words to the contrary and would have been proud of her and told her so if there had been time to communicate. He also would have told her to stand back, there was no time, and he already had the situation well in hand. Given away his only weapon? No problem; he would make his own. Even if that weapon turned out to be a multi-ton widow with a grudge.
An screeched as Angel caught her around the waist and bore them both to the pavement. Her hands wrapped around the bare skin of his wrists as she fell, sending a tingling pain up and down Angel's arms as if he had inadvertently grabbed a live wire rather than a girl. Angel had no idea what she was reading from even that brief contact and could only hope that his mind had been wiped so clean from the immediate need to move that she would be able to pull nothing of import from him. There was one thing more important than any other that was at risk, causing Angel to send up a brief mental prayer to the Powers asking them to do this one more thing for him, one thing that he could be grateful for.
An's shriek of outrage and shock as she tumbled backwards had a galvanizing act on her army, sending them forward as a solid, surging mass, so that when Angel leapt backwards again he had to move quickly to avoid being trampled. The sounds of many feet stomping and An's own screech served to mask Charlotte's battle cry, hiding the warning. An glanced up towards the sky, mouth falling open in a small O of shock. She jumped backwards with a surge of adrenaline that Angel could smell on the air, thick as a teenager's perfume. She barely made it.
Creatures as large as Charlotte were not made for fast or agile turns when they were that close to the ground, and she had so focused on having her prey so close at hand at long last that she did not even try. Charlotte slammed down into the pavement where Angel and An had been only a second before with her legs extended ram-rod straight in front of her, her claws gleaming and eager. The sound of the pavement buckling as her weight came down upon it was almost as loud as that of the sound of breaking bone, and her scream of pain was the loudest one of all.
Angel felt the corners of his mouth turn down in sudden sympathy in spite of himself, even as he saw Charlotte twisting her head wildly back and forth to look for him among the masses. She was ruined, and Angel thought that he didn't have to be an expert on the subject of veterinary medicine or even mythological beasts in order to see that. Three of Charlotte's legs and one of her wings had been broken in her fall to the earth. Bone protruded from the flesh and pools of gleaming, scalding blood pooled out to steam against the pavement. Angel was willing to bet that several of her ribs had been splintered also if her rasping breathing was any indication, and yet she still sought him. There was a part of him that had to admire the lady's tenacity.
An remained sprawled out and propped up on her elbows where she had landed, staring at Angel with widened eyes and a dropped jaw. A fleck of flying cement had cut a deep gauge beneath her left eye, so that blood ran down her face and into the collar of her shirt. She continued to stare Angel in spite of everything that had transpired over the course of the last few moments, as if she were shocked hat he would actually do such a thing.
"You are not An," Angel growled at her. "Don't think for a second that the host is going to protect you."
Charlotte's head whipped around at the sound of his voice, locating Angel at last among the throng. The air moved as if buffeted by helicopter blades as Charlotte beat her remaining wing, struggling to lift herself off of the ground. With only one good wing, however, it was clear to everyone watching that her flying days were done. From high above, Angel could hear the sounds of a few remaining Guardians screaming at one another, making a noise like the laughing of hyenas.
Charlotte settled for glaring at Angel and sending a jet of flame in Angel's direction that did not even come close to striking him. She continued to beat her single good wing slowly, as if refusing to accept the truth. Blood splattered the pavement as she exhaled.
One of the Guardians that Angel had heard above flew down in a stoop of its own, startling Angel with its near-perfect silence; not even a scream. He pulled it down from the air in a move that even Illyria would not have been able to fault, feeling his shoulder groan as the muscles were pushed as far as they could go safely and then farther. Angel rolled the Guardian across the pavement, knocking down a charging demon like a bowling pin and sending both to rest in front of Charlotte. She picked both of them up in her mouth and gave them a series of brisk, terrier-like shakes.
Angel knelt and scooped the fallen demon's sword from the pavement. It felt good to have a weapon in his hand again.
A demon of indeterminate species and gender took advantage of Angel's moment of distraction and rushed up on him from his other side. One blink of the eye's worth of time and one jerking motion of the sword later, and the demon's head continued to sail past while its body dropped to the pavement. Angel flicked the sword to shake the blood from the blade and took note of the momentary hell taking place around them. An's private army was becoming smaller, more and more of those who wore the blank, disturbing look in their eyes drifting away by the second.
"You're not quite the inspirational leader that you thought you were," Angel said, advancing on her while cutting the most vital pieces that he could find off any demon that happened to draw too close. That still left a hell of a lot, and Angel hoped that those allies he and Spike had managed to contact earlier put their personal differences aside and began hauling ass.
Charlotte lowered her head to the pavement and hissed at him as he cut a wide berth around her. Blood had begun to flow freely from both sides of her mouth, from her nose. Angel watched her sides heave and wondered how many of her internal organs had been pierced by broken ribs, how much blood was currently pooling into her abdomen. Her eyes glittered and flashed for a moment with something that Angel did not recognize before she lowered her chin back to the ground and wheezed. Blood and something else sprayed from her mouth.
An took a step back and twisted her mouth into a sneer that Angel thought looked more than a little ragged around the edges. A demon rushed forward to protect her as Angel advanced. He cut through it without even bothering to break stride. Blood began at last to run from An's nose, though only a trickle. From the corner of his eye, Angel could see Spike and Illyria cutting broad, bloody paths through anyone stupid enough to remain in their way. It was the alley battle all over again, except that this time the only human left who was foolish enough to die for him had been sent away.
An jerked and tilted her head to one side, for a moment looking confused. Angel had to remind himself that, while her powers might be fading to make way for the next big thing, they were by no means gone yet. He would still be smart to guard his thoughts.
When it came down to it, that was about as effective as telling someone not to think of elephants. Angel would never know how much An read from him and how much she deduced on her own, and it would be a long time before he was able to cease agonizing over it and decide that either way it had been out of his hands almost immediately.
"Where's Lindsey, Angel?" An asked, her voice pitched so low in the chaos that even with vampire senses Angel was almost able to read her lips. "You and he were all but fucking when I left." The words sounded even worse coming from An's mouth, twisted as it was into a sneer of contempt. She tapped her forefinger contemplatively against her temple. "And you've got such a protective streak when it comes to what you think is yours. Why do I think I know exactly where that little girl is, hmm?"
Angel smiled and thought of scars. "My guess is because you're an arrogant kid with an over-inflated sense of how special you are, and the fact that Katie might just be the one to pop that bubble of hubris for you is driving you wild."
An's sneer faded, turning her expression instead into something that was blank and cold. Whatever flash of real An had risen to the surface for a moment, she was long gone now. "And aren't you the high and mighty one." If the look along had not been enough to convince Angel that there was something else standing at the reins, then the way that her voice now that sounded like gravel being ground together surely would have finished the job.
It was the only warning that Angel received before he felt as if his head were being split open and fingers plunged directly into his brain, so that what was there could be taken out and massaged into any shape that the surgeon wished. "Especially," An finished, "since at the end of the day you're only a demon like any other. You might have a flair for psychobabble, but everyone remembers what's important at the end."
Angel was dimly aware of the fact that An was weaving on her feet as she spoke, that the amount of blood rushing from her nose and ears was far more than any human could lose and hope to live. These were small details, insignificant in front of the battle that Angel was fighting, but it was harder by the second to control what his mind's eye turned onto next in those strange moments. An sent what felt like an invisible tendril cascading through Angel's mind, delicate fingers that examined and plucked at will. In the end, Angel supposed that it might have been something of an overstatement to say that An's powers were fading from her. She had just risen to her second wind with a speed worthy of any sports movie.
And she knew. And she knew.
An's screech of pure adulation echoed through Angel's eyes even as he was driven down to his knees, even as he saw An slowly doing the same across from him, and he knew that if either one of them had been human they would not be surviving this. That, at least, was exactly what Angel needed to know.
An pushed herself back up to her feet, moving as if it pained her, and giggled as she swiped at the sticky-thick blood coating her face and neck. "That's cute, Angel," she said. "Sending the wolf out to guard the lamb. Stupid, but sweet. It's kind of like giving roses, but for sociopaths."
'And you don't know half as much as you think you do.' Angel wondered if she was able to pick up on that transmission, and if so how much.
An twitched her head to one side as if she were shaking away a mosquito and then frowned. The confidence dimmed for a second, leaving her looking like a girl again. If the moment had lasted for any longer than that Angel might even have been able to believe it.
"But I like it, I do," An went on. "It has a kind of symmetry to it." She parted her lips and showed her teeth. Angel thought that he was supposed to interpret the gesture as a smile. "Won't you help me finish the circle, Angel?" She turned her back on him.
It was exactly the moment that Angel had been waiting for. He curled his fingers into a more secure grip on the sword…and realized a beat later that he had only felt them move, not initiated the movement himself. No more could he be said to control the movements that pushed him back up to his feet, that walked him over to An's side, and this was bad on so many levels that he hardly had time to stop and label them all. A glass wall seemed to have been erected between his thoughts and the movements of his body that he could beat his fists against but not penetrate.
A woman with long hair the color of bleached linen, consequence of long contact with elemental magic, entered the battlefield from the other end, moving with a grace that would have made a ballerina seem awkward if they had been forced to walk alongside her. All that hair swirled around her head and made her seem both old and ageless, in spite of the fact that Angel knew her to be only twenty-four. Her timing was fantastic, but Angel was somewhat lacking in ways to direct her attention towards him at that moment.
A dozen young women were clustered tightly around the woman with the long white hair. At a word, they scattered out in all directions like beads of mercury. Spike eyed them warily as they came to fight on either side of him, and they him in return, but all violence remained directed at the ones who had earned it.
That was great, but it didn't go a long way towards helping Angel. An was lucky that he was not in the same position to strike the smugness right away from her face. "Won't you help me?" she repeated in a soft, lilting voice, turning to lead him off of the street and into the eager shadows beyond. Angel's mind continued to struggle, but his feet moved as happily as any pair of puppies following their master. He could guess at this point exactly where An wanted to lead him, and exactly what he would be expected to do when he got there.
A jet of fire shot by Angel's side as he trailed after An, missing igniting his arm by bare millimeters. An was spared being set on fire only by virtue of the fact that her transformation from girl into girl-thing seemed to have also gifted her with the reflexes of a cat. The crackling sound from immediately behind An alerted her and she threw herself to the side without wasting time to look for the source. The fire licked at the brick skin of the building beyond where An had been standing a fraction of a second before, crawling up the side with eager hands and laving long black scorches to mark where it had been. From the sprawl where she had ended up, An gasped and swiveled her head around to look at the beast that had nearly killed her.
Charlotte regarded An with glittering, acid eyes that were no longer entirely her own and which, though Angel hated to say it, even appeared a little smug. Broken and near death as she was, with the new force riding behind her Charlotte still seemed to straighten and regain some of her old, ponderous dignity. She flicked her tongue out to taste the smoke-thickened air before throwing her head back towards the sky and hooting once. The remaining Guardians wheeling overhead screamed back, but maintained their wary distance. Charlotte lowered her head, looking sideways at Angel with eyes that were still alert and hungry even though she made no move to attack. Angel was not sure if this was due to the foreign force, or if she simply no longer had the strength.
An stared at Charlotte with an expression that was naked in its hatred and, for the first time, a reluctant twinge of respect. "You are way too young to be that kind of bitch," she told the dragon. Charlotte wrinkled her lips back from her teeth and hissed before her head began to droop towards the pavement once more. Angel did not think that she would be picking it up again. "And I'll bet you've used up everything you had to get that far, didn't you?" When Charlotte only growled, An smiled and continued. "It's about rationing. If you don't learn to measure it out early, then you wind up using everything that you have on stupid, futile gestures." An looked Angel up and down before she pronounced Lindsey's nickname for Katie with an air of finality. "Kiddo. We'll get to that lesson in a moment or two. Angel, if you would?"
His feet began to follow her in spite of his best efforts to redirect them as his fingers continued to curl around the sword. Angel's increasingly frantic and ferocious efforts to reclaim his own body to no avail. Sharp spikes of fear began to course through him, promising to become panic if only he would let them. It was like being forced to watch his own life moving by on a television screen while the remote and the dials remained just out of his reach. If it went on long enough, Angel thought that it might be even worse than being Angelus. At least then he would not be around to have the terrible feeling that if only he fought a bit harder, was just a little better…
Charlotte issued a throaty sound which sounded like a death warble but which Angel thought might even have been a laugh coming from another throat. A thunderclap rolled through the air hard enough to knock An, Angel, and everyone in the vicinity down to the ground. An screeched. Angel did not know what she was going through, but he thought that if it had anything to do with pain like he was experiencing then he might even be able to sympathize. Grappling hooks were sliding deep into his brain as his mind was pulled in two opposing directions, reducing the world into a red and twitching agony. Angel wanted to scream and could find no voice with which to do so and he wanted it over and he didn't care what the outcome was so long as it ended-
Two seconds later, and it did. Angel slumped to the ground, coughing blood and being reminded anew of all the times when being something other than human was actually a bonus. It was several more seconds of hacking before Angel realized that it had been his own decision to act, that An's invisible fingers were no longer walking through his brain. He opened his eyes and realized that she had backed up to a distance of several yards so that she could stare at him with the most abject expression of horror that Angel had ever seen on her face.
"No," she moaned, and then screamed, "No!" It would have reminded Angel of any other teenager having a tantrum, and for a moment his thoughts did turn towards Connor, except that her yell caused a twitch to run through all of the demons still under her control. Several of them dropped dead on the spot. "It's not going to be like this." Her voice dropped by a few octaves into a register that Angel had never heard before as she intoned, "I'm not going to let it be like this." An turned and was disappearing into the shadows that were a natural part of her now even as Angel was struggling to push himself painfully back up to his feet. There was a certain amount of blood that even vampires could not lose without consequence.
A tired sound echoed from behind him, and Angel turned to see that Charlotte was regarding him through dull eyes. Blood ran from her mouth and both of her nostrils, barely still hot enough to steam. Charlotte pulled her lips back from her teeth as Angel knelt beside her, as he placed his hand on the head that still had enough heat to burn his palm, but she made no attempt to snap at him. "Thank you," Angel said to the traces of the little girl that still remained in eyes as green as an alley cat's, and "I'm sorry," to the great lady herself, before he drew his blade swiftly across her throat and ended her misery.
The woman with the white hair had noticed him at long last and was making her way towards him across the remains of the battlefield. Her charges were both enthusiastic and skilled, and the remaining demons under An's power were like weeds in front of a lawn mower before them. The look of concern on the woman's face in spite of the opposite sides that they had stood on over the course of the last two years was similar enough to the one that she had worn while her hair had still been the color of fire to make Angel wave her off before she could get too close. It wasn't only because he needed to begin pursuit before the trail brew too cold, and the look on Willow's face as she drifted to a halt said that she knew it.
Angel waited for only a second to make sure that An was truly gone before he sprinted off the battlefield. She had been right about one thing, at least: it was time to bring the circle to a close.
End Part Twenty