Part Twenty-One
They were not making the time that Lindsey had hoped for, but with two of them wounded and one of them a frightened child struggling to swim through waters that she had no business being in, he supposed that he would have to take what he could get. He and Alicia walked on either side of Katie, each of them gripping one of her hands tightly, as Lindsey used the other hand to keep the sword in a perpetual ready position. Maintaining such a tight grip on Katie's hand was surely causing more information than he cared to release to go spinning through her mind; he did not care. Lindsey had an inescapable feeling that this was the most cowardly thing that he had done yet, and that was not something that he could easily dismiss.
He should be a part of that fight. Lindsey knew this. Win or lose, right or wrong, righteous or merely reckless, Lindsey had known for some time now that he was never going to be comfortable with peace. That the fight itself was more important than whichever side he happened to be standing on was the single flaw that he could not eradicate from himself through force of will. Seeing as this was the flaw that had gotten him killed, he supposed that he really ought to be more troubled by it. Lindsey counted himself lucky that there weren't any empaths around to take a peek into how truly scrambled his psyche was, as there were moments when he was still boggled by it himself.
Katie paused, and the worried expression slid off her face long enough for her to beam up at him. Okay, fine, always excepting that one.
Angel had asked him to do this, though. Angel had trusted him to do this, and so far as Lindsey was concerned that meant something. Damned if he knew what, but it still loomed over him, powerful and inescapable.
So that took them right back to the start, didn't it? A scowl crossed Lindsey's face for a moment as he realized this. He was again trailing along in Angel's wake, again allowing himself to be led. Even if the benefits package in this particular contract promised to be more exciting. Lindsey thought of his defiant words to Lilah and almost halted in his tracks.
Katie was still tilting her face up to scrutinize him, her expression now solemn and thoughtful. Lindsey realized that with their hands linked as they were, the girl was probably hearing every thought that echoed through his head even more clearly than he was. As some of these thoughts were not suited for a Disney direct-to-video, Lindsey pulled his hand away and ignored the hurt look that crossed Katie's face. "You shouldn't be listening in on private conversations, kiddo."
"Can't help it." Katie bent her head and used her newly freed hand to fiddle with the hem of her shirt. She looked so young and small, Little Red Riding Hood being forced to walk through the dark woods with only the slimmest of protections on her side, that Lindsey reached out and ruffled her hair in apology before he could stop himself. Katie looked back up and smiled at him with an expression similar enough to the one that she had worn on their first meeting to make Lindsey wonder if she had been not quite normal for some time before the events of the last day had taken place. That required him to take a fairly ruthless view of the Powers That Be, to consider that they would have begun moving the young lady in waiting into position long before the princess had actually begun to fall.
The more he thought about it, the more Lindsey was certain that this was exactly what had happened.
"You're wrong," Katie said. She returned to fiddling with the hem of her shirt. "Wasn't like that."
If she was going to be able to read is thoughts no matter what he did…Lindsey made an irritated huffing noise and reached out to reclaim Katie's hand. She smiled up at him while he made a mental note to keep his thoughts as far away from the subject of Angel as he could. "Kiddo, you don't know the Powers That Be the way that I do," he said. "And I'm sorry, but becoming a midget short-range radio does not make you omniscient. It doesn't mean that you know half of the way that you new buddies can and will fuck you over the second that you let your guard down around them."
Lindsey's attention was pulled away from Katie by a quiet sound that he soon realized was the grinding of Alicia's teeth. She fixed him with a look that would have had him cowering and scrambling for the nearest chair if he had still been in the second grade. Katie was going to pick up his thoughts on the matter regardless of whether he spoke them out loud, and Lindsey anyway did not think this was a subject where he could stand to trade in the truth for the fluffy fairytale where deals were actually honored. He met Alicia's gaze with a level stare of his own.
"You're still wrong," Katie said. For someone whose life was still in terrible danger, she almost sounded cheerful. "You do that a lot, you know. She told me that you're either very smart or very stupid, and that you never learned how to be anything in between. It's not your fault that you were born that way, so we shouldn't be mean to you about it."
"Yeah, and you might want to watch your mouth. Cuteness can only get you so far before…" Wait a minute. Lindsey grabbed Katie's arms and twirled her around. He ignored the pain in his leg so that he could kneel in front of her. "Who? Who told you this?" Alicia's hand coming down on his arm and yanking him away made him realize that he had begun to punctuate each word with a little shake. Lindsey released Katie at once, backing away and running a hand through his disheveled hair. "Sorry, I'm sorry." He knelt back down in front of Katie and held up his hands in surrender when Alicia stepped close. "Who has been talking to you, Katie? Who has been telling you these things?"
"The lady," Katie said, staring at Lindsey with the infuriatingly smug expression of the child who was in the rare position of having one up on the adults and knew it. "The one who knows everything. She called you a doofus."
Lindsey's blood went solid in his veins. He glanced up at Alicia and saw that not a drop of her own remained in her face. "Katie," Lindsey said, turning back. "Trust me when I say that you should really, really not be listening to that girl." The ground trembled beneath their feet. "She's very sick."
"Not An," Katie said. Her face turned hard in a way that made her look much older. "Even An is not quite An anymore. The lady says that we should feel bad for her." Katie lifted her chin and looked at Lindsey in a way that made him think of a young hawk, still covered in fluffy down in spite of the fact that it already had its parent's beak. "She says that we should feel bad for you, too. But mostly she just calls you a doofus."
Lindsey lowered his head and pinched at the bridge of his nose. "Okay," he said, taking a deep breath and hoping that this would prevent his frustration from showing in his voice. "Katie, I need you to tell me everything that you can about his lady, all right? She might be part of-" Lindsey paused in order to give forth a laugh that had absolutely no mirth in it. "A business deal that went kind of south on me." He realized that he had begun spasmodically clenching and unclenching his fists. Alicia was still regarding him with a wary expression, so Lindsey placed his hands on top of his thighs and took another deep breath to calm his racing heart.
Katie said, without looking at him, "She tells the story better than I do."
If Lindsey clenched his teeth together any harder, Alicia was going to have find a crowbar to help him pry them apart again. "Then we'll let her have the goddamned movie rights," he gritted. Alicia made an abrupt movement, as if she were on the verge of stepping between them and ending the conversation once and for all. Lindsey sighed. "Right. I'm sorry. Katie, I need to know where you found this lady when you talked to her."
"I'd like to know that, too," Alicia cut in. When Lindsey looked up at her, her lips were pressed into a tight, bloodless line.
"There are a few things that this lady and I need to discuss," Lindsey said, turning back to Katie.
Katie shook her head and said in a small, solemn voice, "It's not the time for that now."
Lindsey exhaled violently through his nose and was on the verge of telling her that the child mystic crap had been old when he was still reading sword and sorcery novels as a teenager. He bit his tongue to the point of blood to avoid spitting out something scathing and cruel, letting out a long stream of inward invective when Katie still flinched backwards. Right, okay, telepath. As much as Lindsey had come to be fond of this girl, he was going to be delighted when he had the inside of his skull to himself again.
Katie's flinch turned into an outright spasm, as if she had been slapped even though no one had laid a hand on her, and she doubled over. Moaning once, Katie sprayed a tremendous amount of watery vomit across the pavement. Lindsey jerked back to avoid the worst of the mess while Alicia cried, "What did you do to her?" She moved to put her body between Lindsey and Katie, transforming herself into a living shield.
"I didn't touch her," Lindsey said. His eyes widened and Alicia, following his gaze, turned around. Her jaw fell open and stayed that way for several seconds before she remembered to shut it, creating an audible clacking sound.
The glow that had marked Katie's eyes for the past day and An's before she had so cheerfully jumped off the moral cliff had been…not natural, but unobtrusive, a gleam that one could get used to fairly quickly. There was not a chance in hell that Lindsey was ever going to get used to what Katie's eyes were doing now, regardless of how much time he spent in her company. The light that had begun to pour forth of them was brilliant and white on a level that Lindsey could hardly describe and was already sure that eh would never be able to duplicate through paint or ink. It had no goodness, no evil, but was entirely pure in the original sense of the word, free of any and all moral connotations.
Pure what was the question which remained to be answered, though Lindsey thought that it might ultimately come down to power. The remembrance of what that power had done to the last person that it had invested itself in at such a young age was still running through Lindsey's mind on too fresh a rewind to make such a comparison sit comfortably. The blow was strong enough to bathe Lindsey's and Alicia's faces and make them appear alien to one another.
Katie continued to double over, clutching at her temples and saying, "It hurts, it hurts, it hurts," over and over again. A telltale trickle of blood had begun to run from one of her nostrils, turning Lindsey's own blood to ice at such a speed that he was amazed his heart still managed to beat at all. She paused to make a sound that did not seem as though it should come from a human throat, a sound that was familiar to Lindsey though he could not say how or why.
"Katie!" Alicia had crouched down in front of Katie with so little care for her own injuries that Lindsey soon saw a red stain spreading along her skirt from her own leg wound. He was unsurprised when she did not so much as glance at it. Alicia spent several seconds alternating between calling Katie's name and making the soothing sort of shushing sounds that Lindsey could remember his own mother making when he had been very small and either sick or scared. After multiple attempts at pulling Katie's hands down from her temples were met without success, Alicia gave up for the moment and flashed Lindsey a wild-eyed and nearly panicked look. "What do we do now?"
"I don't know." Lindsey turned his face from the halogen lamps that Katie's eyes had turned into so that he could better think.
"What do you mean, you don't know?" Alicia sprang back to her feet so that she could circle around and force him to face her. Her breath was coming in short rasps as panic threatened to overtake her. "This is your world."
The frustration bubbled up inside Lindsey at once, causing him to snap before he was able to stop himself, "It's your world, too, princess." He flung his arm out to indicate Katie, still crouching and repeating the same short sentence over and over again. "Unless you're planning on abandoning her as soon as the fireworks taper off."
Alicia rocked back as if Lindsey had slapped her. "No," she said finally, shaking her head so that her dark hair swirled over her shoulders. "That's started this mess in the first place, isn't it?" Lindsey wasn't sure that was the case at all, but with Alicia calming down and approaching a state of non-panic again he did not think that this was the best of times to mention it. "Okay. So I'll ask again: what do we do now?"
Lindsey looked at the expanse of light being created by Katie's eyes, where moments before there had only been night and shadow. They had been damned lucky this far; most of the demons in Los Angeles had been called to answer An's grudge and were being dealt with by Angel. If Katie kept this up, though, they might as well hang sirens around their necks and douse themselves in blood. "We have to get off the street," Lindsey decided. "We'll come up with something better from there."
He set the sword to the side for the moment and knelt down in front of Katie, trying without success to pull her hands down from her temples. "All right, kiddo, you can keep falling to pieces just as soon as we're safe. Right now we have to move." Lindsey placed his hands on Katie's arms in one final attempt to get her to lower them and stand on her own.
The second that their skins made contact gain, Katie threw back her head and let out a scream so piercing that Lindsey thought he could feel the air itself cringing and trembling in the wake of the sound. Alicia jerked as if she meant to physically put herself between Lindsey and Katie, never mind that he was scarcely even touching her, pausing only when Lindsey pulled away of his own accord with his palms raised in surrender.
"She knows," Katie moaned, and quietly began to cry. The opalescent light from her eyes dimmed and for a moment appeared green.
Alicia looked at Lindsey with wide eyes as she crouched by Katie's side. "That didn't sound good."
"No," Lindsey agreed. "It really didn't." He picked up his sword from the ground and tried to give it over to Alicia so that he could carry Katie.
"Fast," Katie said in an insistent voice, though Lindsey could not be sure that she was addressing either one of them. So far as he knew, maybe her Doofus Lady had come to pay her a visit.
"And that sounded even worse." Alicia refused to take the sword from him, and Lindsey sighed in exasperation. "Alicia, I can't carry her unless you-"
"I'm going to carry her." Alicia's voice brooked no argument.
"What-"
"I don't-" Alicia took a deep breath, pressed her lips into a firm line for a moment, and continued. "You're a better fighter with it than I am, and I'm going to carry her."
The ground shook beneath their feet, reminding them both that if they wanted to continue this argument it might be wise to hurry it up. Lindsey resisted the urge to roll his eyes. "Fine." He stepped to the side as Alicia gathered Katie up in her arms. A slight wobble on her wounded leg was the only sign of strain that Alicia allowed to show.
Katie turned her face into the side of Alicia's neck as soon as she was lifted from the ground, making a series of sad snuffling noises. At the same time, she was whispering something over and over again that made Alicia's face go rigid before she laid her hand on Katie's head and began stroking the hair back. Off of Lindsey's look, Alicia replied in a tight voice, "She says that it's getting worse." The glow from Katie's eyes was cascading through Alicia's hair, catching the red highlights and making them glow.
Lindsey shifted the sword within his grasp until it felt natural, like coming home. "Come on. We're way too open here." He swiveled his head to look up and down the street, but all of the buildings within sight were boarded up too carefully to allow for quick entry. If Lindsey was willing to admit it to himself, he didn't think that hunkering down and waiting for the battle to pass them by was going to work, not this time. He flicked a fast and almost guilty glance across Katie, who still had her face buried into Alicia's neck and showed no signs of interest in any outside transmissions. That was good, because if Lindsey really wanted to stand firm and be honest with himself, he had to admit that he didn't want to. He might have landed on the right side of the fight purely by accident this time, but he was going to live it up while it lasted and spit straight into the flames of hell when it came to its inevitable conclusion.
Lindsey's lips curved up into a slow, dangerous smile as he spotted a prospect that seemed like the best out of their limited pool. Angel might have denied him his ill-conceived battle to the death the first time around, but the forces of fate were determined to give him a second chance. "Over there." Lindsey led Alicia across the street, feeling her eyes as heavy weights against the back of his neck the entire way. He didn't need to turn his head to see the expectation there, and it was unsettling that he could think of no way to shake it off. 'You might want to rethink that theory before you run too far with it,' Lindsey thought. 'You're not getting a hero in this deal. Best case scenario, you're getting a mercenary who moonlights as an adrenaline junkie. I'll have to see what I can do.'
"Get to the back of the alley," Lindsey ordered Alicia. She complied, crinkling her nose at the small, scurrying things that fled from the sounds of their approach. "Protect Katie with all that you have, and when-" Alicia tilted her head to one side and pinned him with a perceptive stare as Lindsey struggled to switch gears. "If something happens to me, you're going to have to pick up that sword and defend her with it yourself. I don't care how much it makes your skin crawl."
Alicia lifted her chin and regarded Lindsey for a long moment. "I don't like it," she replied. "But that's not why. You're just a better fighter with it than I am." Alicia was silent for a long moment before she finished, "If that other girl comes anywhere near Katie, it won't be a problem."
"Atta girl." Lindsey watched for a moment as Alicia knelt to set Katie back on the ground, shielding the girl's body with her own, and the sense of déjà vu was so great that it forced him to turn away again. He may not be a legitimate hero, but damned if he couldn't fake it with the best of them. Lindsey flicked the sword, getting rid of as much blood and sweat that could affect his grip at a crucial moment as possible, and waited. It wasn't such a very long wait, after all.
The ground did not tremble with the sound of feet to signal An's approach as it had her army, but Lindsey could feel her on her way at the same time. The air crackled, feeling at first as if there was electricity running through it and then becoming solid, only one small nudge away from being alive. Lindsey knew this feeling well. He began to pant.
Alicia gave a shout of mingled surprise and pain from behind him. Lindsey twisted around to see what was wrong and instead saw her backing away from Katie with an expression of horror on her face. Alicia stared down at her palms and forearms, which were rapidly turning the color of lobsters with a brand new burn. And Katie…
Katie's eyes were no longer the only part of her that was glowing.
Lindsey took a deep breath, declared himself to be in so far over his head that there was no point in even trying to see daylight, and decided that he might as well keep swinging the sword until he managed to swim his way to the surface again. From the looks of things behind him, the best that he could hope to do was buy time until Katie let loose with her own private version of Three Mile Island, anyway.
"Where is she?" Fury and strain had driven An's voice into a high and nearly whiny register that scarcely sounded like her at all. The air swirled and danced in response to her approach, so that even the process became a struggle. Lindsey still would have known that she was in the shadows at the mouth of the alley before she stepped forward even if she had not called out, even if she was not carrying a small piece of hell around with her on the air to mark the thing that had infected and replaced her. The glow would have told him.
As much as Lindsey would have liked to believe that there was some fundamental difference between the pearlescent glow, so terrible and so pure, that had begun to swirl about an inch or so above An's skin and the same glow that had overtaken Katie and would not allow Alicia to touch her, but even he was not that good a liar. They were exactly the same, except that one was large where the other was small, and one was in a towering rage while the other was doing her best to make herself invisible behind Alicia's legs. A chill ran down Lindsey's spine and through his blood as he realized that they could have been sisters.
"That was cute, you know," An said, slowing her pace to a leisurely walk as she entered the alley. Her eyes flicked over Lindsey, dismissed him as a non-threat in spite of the sword, and moved on to her real prize. "Feisty. You were the type to burn your Barbie dolls to see what they smelled like when they melted, weren't you?"
Lindsey had no idea what An was talking about, and it didn't seem as though Katie was going to step up and educate him any time soon. Alicia was standing in front of the girl with her arms thrown out to create the maximum possible area out of her human shield, her lips drawn back in pain from the heat. As close as he was standing to An, Lindsey could feel that same heat rising up from its alternate source, and something else besides. There was a heavy, shivering feeling to the air between An and Katie, as if they were two magnets only waiting for Lindsey and Alicia to get out of the way so that they could collide. Lindsey wondered at the wisdom of being in the same city when they finally did manage to make contact and found that he did not care, not even when he knew whose loving arms would be there to catch him when he fell. It wasn't a death wish that he had a problem with, it was being too stubborn to know when to cut his losses and walk away.
"Sounds like something you have personal experience with." The sword felt so damned good in his hand.
An barely glanced at him before rolling her eyes and turning her attention back to Katie. "Please. We both know exactly what you are, don't go trying to put on the hero's cape this late in the game."
The honorable thing for Lindsey to do probably would have been to issue one final warning, just in case there was some part of An still manning the controls who could hope to influence their outcome. It turned out to be lucky for him, then, that honor had never been a particular worry for him. He moved, driving the sword deeply through An's chest until it exited her back and, if Lindsey remembered his anatomy correctly, did a fair job of skewering her heart along the way. The glowing substance dancing along An's skin made an eager beeline up first the blade and then the handle, forcing Lindsey to release the weapon and step back so that he would not be consumed. Didn't matter. Lindsey knew a mortal wound when he had inflicted one, and An's killing days were over.
Or they should have been. An paused to stare at the blade protruding from her chest and then back up at Lindsey. A trickle of scarlet began to run from her mouth, looking almost pink beneath all that surreal pearl and opal. "Oh, you cocky son of a bitch," An whispered.
From the corner of his eye Lindsey saw a dark figure sprinting onto the scene, distracting him fro that crucial second before a blast of pure energy caught him in the chest, lifted him off of his feet, and at the end of it left him incapable of seeing much of anything. His body struck hard against the brick wall behind him, head rebounding hard enough to bring his jaws together with a sharp clacking sound, and if Lindsey had not been sliding towards unconsciousness he might even have been concerned that he had broken something. Déjà vu hit him hard, that great big circle come around to taunt him again. Lindsey slumped to the cement and closed his eyes.
Part Twenty-One