The landscape smelled of dead grass and sulfur. Aside from a few patches of weeds, it looked the surface of Mars. Lilah landed on her ass in a pile of foul-smelling straw, glad she'd chosen slacks and loafers instead of the usual short skirt and heels. Somehow, she must have known this would happen. Wiping grass off her khakis -- could she get a reimbursement to her wardrobe allowance? she wondered - Lilah looked up at Gunn and Groo. "I'll explain later," she said. "When we have time."
"There ain't gonna be enough time in the world for that." Gunn offered a hand and pulled her up. "But fuck it. Let's get to work."
Angel was right. Lilah had been in a standoff with Holtz before. Of course, she had lost that one too. As far as Holtz believed, that had only been hours before. Now he stood with his back to a sheer cliff, facing her across a narrow ravine. The drop was far, but the gap was narrow. Lilah thought, if she had to, she could make the jump
"I know you're a reasonable man," she said. "I don't have any love for the vampire, either. And I'm a reasonable woman."
"Oh yes," said Holtz. "You. The attorney. And yet, reasonable as you are, you followed me into the darkest of the dark worlds. For this?" Holtz lifted the bundle in his arms - making sure, Lilah saw, to hold it in front of his heart. "You must want this child very badly. And yet, the vampire is your enemy."
"And that is why we want the child. Give him to us, and he will be raised to hate his father and everything he stands for."
Lilah had the gun concealed under her jacket. It was there if she needed it. She might have had a clean head shot, but at this distance, she couldn't be sure. She might wound the child. Dying, Holtz might slip and fall into the ravine, taking Connor with him.
"Sahjahn," he said, "told me certain things about your organization. I would hardly cast you as proponents of good."
The gun was there, if she needed it, but all she really had to do was keep him talking. And fuck if he didn't like to talk. The Groosalugg had tracked Holtz here. He and Gunn had charted it out. They would come up on Holtz from behind. All Lilah had to do was keep him interested. She hoped the others had enough sense to realize that she would say whatever it took to make that happen.
"And you, Mr. Holtz?" Lilah asked. "Do you believe that you do good?"
"I do revenge, Miss Morgan," he answered. "That is all that I live for, because it is all that remains to me. It has brought me alive across the centuries -- as love, as hope, as belief could never do. So who am I to deny its power?"
"I understand vengeance." Lilah shifted. "I have things to avenge."
"Do you indeed? A great wrong? Then you must have known a great love."
"Love? What does love --?" In a moment, she understood; in a moment, it was too late.
Holtz gave a laugh, as rough and low as his voice. "I am sure you have a fine story. But it can be no more than a story." The child began to fuss, and Holtz lowered it slightly, still shielding his chest. "There, there." He looked across the crevice again. "You do not lie well. If you truly understood vengeance, then you would not need to ask what connects it to love."
Lilah's hand itched for the Glock. She would shoot that fucker in the head if she had to, but she did wish the guys would get on with it. She wanted to look for Gunn, and for Groosalugg, but any movement of her hand or eye might tip him off. So all she could do was talk, and listen.
"You must have loved your family greatly," said Lilah, "to hate Angelus as much as you do."
"I supposed I did," said Holtz, as though he had never given it much thought. "And you, I imagine, have never hated anyone." He paced, holding the child. "You are a professional. You will kill as a soldier kills; perhaps you even kill for pleasure, simply because you can. Yet you do not love, and so there is no thing in the world that matters enough that you must kill. And this, I think -" He lifted Connor again. "There there - is why you've made a devil's bargain with Angelus. He does not hate you, either. How can he, when there has never been possibility of affection? You only do a job. That he understands. The one Angelus hates, I imagine, is the boy." Holtz touched Connor's forehead, and murmured, "Not you, pretty one." He looked back at Lilah. "The boy. The Watcher." Holtz shook his head. "Justine did him a mercy. He believed he was doing right. The Watchers were always that way. They made use of me, from time to time. They paid well, behaved as gentlemen. But they never had use for me. I wasn't professional. I made them . . .uncomfortable." He looked across the gully at Lilah and said, "What do you love?"
"I don't understand."
"No," said Holtz. He lifted the child and held it over his head. "And you never will."
When Lilah played those seconds over, time and again, in her mind, she never quite got the sequence to work. Groo and Gunn came at Holtz from either side. He lifted the child. Lilah took a running leap across the gorge. Groo struck at Holtz. The baby fell. Lilah caught its waist, before it hit the ground, then brought it up to rest on her shoulder. She had never held a child that way - it was easy enough to avoid. She never wanted to, and she wasn't the kind of woman on whom friends or strangers forced their babies. So it might have taken a moment longer than it should have to feel what was wrong. Breath didn't move its body. Its head lay awkwardly to one side. It was hours after they returned - after they stepped into the lobby, and Lilah was the first, the only, to meet Angel's eyes - it was hours later before she fully understood what had happened. Even then, run the seconds back as she tried, she couldn't capture the instant when Holtz had snapped the child's neck.
But at that first moment, in the darkest of all hells, the moment when Lilah knew, she lay the small body on the ground, leaving the others discover the obvious for themselves. She stood over Holtz, who lay bloody and gasping with a wound from Groosalugg's sword. With his last breath, he might have mocked her, cursed her, offered some final gems of wisdom. She didn't give him a chance. Lilah unholstered the Glock and emptied her round: four shots in the chest, two in the face.
"Jesus," said Gunn, looking away.
"Not in this place." She bent to lift the weightless body, and looked up at Gunn. "Let's go. There's nothing here."
Nine days past before Lilah, once again, found Angel in her bedroom.
"I haven't made a new will," she said, "but everything goes to my senile bitch of a mother." Lilah touched a finger to one spot on her neck. "Maybe you could do it there? That puncture wound was always my favorite." She was almost certain that she was joking. If Holtz was right, then the vampire didn't hate her enough to kill her.
"I never want to see you again," said Angel.
"I sort of figured that part. You might have accomplished it better by not seeing me again, but why split hairs?"
"I mean I never want to see you," Angel said. "Not for any reason. If your firm has to deal with me, they can send that idiot Gavin. You and I, we can't do this anymore."
"So tell me. How does this conversation compare to the similar one you must recently have had with Wesley? Or was that more of a fang-to-throat kind of conversation?"
"Among the many people I'm never planning to see again," said Angel, "I imagine you and Wesley are equally capable of taking care of yourselves."
Abruptly, he turned, and Lilah realized he was actually about to leave. "Angel -" she called. "I didn't want it to end like that. You know -"
"I know. Gunn told me exactly what happened. None of us could have done better than you did."
"I should have known," she said. "I went in there thinking Holtz was a good guy. I thought I knew how you people think, but after five seconds of talking to him -- I should have just made a grab, or shot at his head or -"
"We all should have known," said Angel. "Holtz wasn't going to let that child go alive. It wasn't his first plan to kill -" and his voice only caught a moment over "- it. But he wasn't letting - Connor get back to me. Not like that."
"I guess not," said Lilah, and she had a sense that this was a conversation he had been part of many times in the past week.
"It means something that you tried," said Angel.
She looked up at him. "Does it?"
"Yes," he said. "Not as much as you helping put him there in the first place but -" He looked down, and when he spoke again, she had a sense that this was something he hadn't said to the others, that it was the reason he sought her out for this conversation that never needed to happen. "We all had to do with putting him there in the first place. I killed Holtz's family."
"Because Darla turned you into a monster," Lilah answered. "Because someone did it to her. And so on, and so on, and shooby dooby doo and we're back to Adam and Eve and how about some fruit cocktail for dinner?"
"So nobody's at fault for anything, ever, because there's original sin and the world just sucks?"
"Works for me." Lilah shrugged. "And that's what you get for talking theology lessons from a lawyer. I'm not exactly the go-to person for a tete-a-tete about personal responsibility."
"Fine." He moved to the door. "I don't know why I came."
He started to leave again, and again she called, "Angel --"
When he stopped, Lilah said, "What you said before, about someone else from my firm? I wouldn't hold your, well, lack of breath. Since all this happened -" At a hard look from him, she said, "Since your son died. The prophecy radar has been all over the place. Nobody knew what to make of it for a while, but I think the consensus is that you're off the special projects agenda. Wolfram & Hart's Angel policy is rescinded and if you fuck with us - which, incurable do-gooder that you are, you probably will - you shouldn't expect any special consideration. Just fair warning."
"Why?" His eyes told her that he knew, and yet she had to say it.
"The special prophecy about your role in the apocalypse. Re-evaluating the information before us in the light of new considerations, it has become apparent that -"
"Connor," Angel interrupted. "The prophecies were about him. My role was to bring him into the world, and raise him up to make the right choice. Which is why it was never certain which side I'd be working for, because -"
Because there's nothing certain about raising a child. Angel must have thought it too, but neither of them said the words.
"So, you, Angel, are off our radar. If you're smart enough to stay that way, which you won't be. And this might also explain why Cordelia hasn't been taking many calls from the Powers that Be."
It was a shot in the dark, but lucky enough that Angel, for once, couldn't hide his reaction. "How did you know?"
"Oh, we're all tied in with the Powers. It's one big scam. Good. Evil. The same honchos calling the shots. I think it was Zoroaster who first got it right. Him or the Manicheans."
Angel looked at her in surprise for a moment before shaking his head. "Bullshit."
"All right, lucky guess. Look, I don't pretend to know what all this is about. But just maybe, for you, it is a sign. Fuck prophecies. Fuck destiny. Get out of the business while you have a chance. Make like Candide and go tend your garden."
"Not likely."
"Fine, I tried. One more thing before you go. You and Cordelia may be off the mystical It List for the time being. But we all know a guy who figured out how to open the Qortoth. You can believe the firm wants a piece of that and, well -"
"Let me guess who ended up with that special project."
"Yes," said Lilah. "But for old times' sake, I thought I'd give you dibs on him. If you want to try and save Wesley, or cut his throat or set him on fire before I take my shot -"
"Knock yourself out," said Angel. "Adam and Eve. East of Eden. I'm sure you'll be very happy together." He opened the door.
"Angel -" She knew she didn't have it in her to make him stop again, so she spoke quickly. "I really didn't want it to happen this way."
"Why would you?" said Angel, just before the door clicked, "There wasn't a percentage in it."
He sat alone at the bar, three shot glasses turned upside down in front of him.
"Mind if I join you?" she asked.
"On many levels," Wesley answered, not looking up, "and with great intensity."
"Excellent," said Lilah. "Now that we have the pleasantries out of the way -- Let's have a little talk about prophecies.
END