A brown paper grocer's bag occupied the near end of the old truck's bench seat. Eliot opened the passenger door, then shoved it over to the middle of the well-worn leather expanse and climbed in, glancing absently at the bag's contents. A golden, ornate cup with a studded pattern around the rim-- vaguely medieval-looking, though he wouldn't swear to any particular era-- was tucked in with a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew and a collection of energy bars. The contrast made him chuckle.
"So how serious were you, back there?" he asked aloud. "About the whole 'wheel of destiny' thing."
Lindsey settled behind the steering wheel and reached up to adjust the rearview mirror. "Very," he said, eyes tracking the progress of Nate and Hardison in the reflection as they walked to their rental car. "I've been planning this for months. The amulet I told you about was just the first step. Wolfram and Hart and Angel have all been obsessed about the prophecy regarding the vampire with a soul for years, and I found a way to bring another one into the picture. The Senior Partners will take care of the universal disequilibrium issue before it gets too serious-- they like this world the way it is, in all its dystopic splendor-- but in the meantime, it gives me a perfect window of opportunity to mess with Angel. There's no way to tell yet exactly where the chips will fall, but there is no bad outcome as far as I'm concerned."
Yeah; that was the smug face of Lindsey, triumphant. Eliot had his own, slightly more sharp-edged version, and he knew where it came from: a place of confidence, of knowing in your bones that you were stronger and more skilled than your foe.
It had been one thing when they were little kids playing games, but seeing that look on Lindsey now made Eliot deeply uneasy. These weren't people his brother was facing off against; they were demons, and in the grand scheme of things, Angel and his team were near the bottom of the ladder. Whatever Lindsey had done to himself in Nepal, the power had to have gone to his head if he thought he was the equal of a vampire hundreds of years old, much less capable of facing the powerful entities pulling that vampire's strings. It might be harder to get him away from the firm than Eliot had thought.
"What's your endgame in all of this, now?" he asked, as Lindsey finally started the truck and pulled away from the curb. "When we met up in Pakistan you said you just wanted to get free of them. Now you're talking about vengeance and destiny and screwing with the balance of the universe. The fucking universe, Lindsey. The one I live in, too. Do you still want out of your contract, or are you just going to try and do as much damage as you can, no matter what?"
Lindsey set his jaw. That was another thing that had always been the same between them: that baseline stubborn streak. It had used to take a lot more doing to uncover it in Lindsey, but it seemed to be running a lot closer to the surface these days.
"You weren't the only familiar face I saw over there, you know," he said after a moment, conversationally.
Eliot blinked at the change of topic. "Yeah? Who else did you run into?"
Lindsey blew out a breath, then reached toward him and made a 'gimme' motion, gesturing at the styrene box Eliot was still holding. "Lilah. Lilah Morgan."
Eliot cracked the box open and handed it over, frowning as he recalled the details from Hardison's briefing. "Lilah Morgan, as in the lawyer who took the job they were grooming you for? Lilah Morgan, as in the gal who got beheaded a year and a half later?"
Lindsey flipped the lid of the box up one-handed and plucked out a few of the fries that had been packaged with his club sandwich, chewing thoughtfully on them as the silence stretched. After a moment he swallowed and flicked his eyes in Eliot's direction, then snapped his attention back to the road.
Damn it; it had to be bad. "Tell me," Eliot insisted.
"It's one thing to know what the contract says," Lindsey finally said. "It's another thing to see it at work. Perpetuity clause, she called it. Dead and damned and still working for them. No matter how far I run, I've got to die some day, don't I? And when I do, I'll be sitting right there next to her at a desk in hell somewhere. After they make me pay for defying them, first."
Eliot swallowed. "I told you," he said. "We're going to get that contract back for you."
Lindsey shook his head. "Forgive me if I don't put all my eggs in that basket full of if," he said, and reached back into the box for one of the carefully cut sandwich quarters. "Besides, that's not even all of it," he added, a long, fraught moment later. "I-- look, there was this woman."
"Of course there was." Eliot sighed. "Not the lawyer, right?"
Lindsey snorted, then coughed as a fragment of bread crust went down the wrong way. "No, not the lawyer. Her name was Darla, and she was originally a vampire."
"What?" Eliot sputtered, straightening in his seat..
"Just shut up and let me finish," Lindsey cut him off, raising his voice a little. "She wasn't just any vampire, she was Angel's sire. The old Master turned her back in the early sixteen hundreds; she was nearly four hundred years old when Angel staked her back in '97. Wolfram and Hart raised her again a few years ago to try and control him; that was what we were doing when Angel showed up and cut off my hand. But they raised her human, alive, and pretty damn confused about everything. I took care of her for a while until they brought Drusilla in-- yeah, the vampire Parker said she met-- to try and turn her again. Did a number on Angel's head, all right; but I guess you could say... I got attached to her, too."
Did a number on Lindsey's heart, in other words, Eliot thought. He had a sinking feeling he knew where the story was going. "Funny you've never mentioned her before."
"Look, I knew what you'd say, all right?" Lindsey blurted, jabbing a hand in Eliot's direction for emphasis. "I knew it was a bad idea. I knew she'd never really care about me; she was as fixated on him as he was on her. Hell, she'd never even let me kiss her, after. They'd spent a hundred and fifty years together; how could I compete with that? I just thought..."
His voice trailed off as he struggled to find a positive way to finish that sentence, and he sighed. "I don't know what I was thinking. She used me, and I let her, but at the time it was all worth it. She needed me. Even after they made her a vampire again." He took a deep breath. "And then they told her he'd turn back into his old self if she fucked him, and she jumped at the chance. I didn't take it well when I found out, and by the time I came back, she was gone."
"But that was three years ago," Eliot said, turning to stare out the side window at the passing landscape as he tried not to show how appalled he felt at what he'd heard. What had Lindsey been thinking? It was one thing dating someone dangerous-- Mikel Dayan's face flashed through his mind at that thought, and he had to surreptitiously adjust himself at his body's automatic response-- but it was another thing entirely to date someone who saw humans as meat on the hoof. Just how suicidal had Lindsey been at that point in his life? Eliot had definitely stayed away too long.
"But what I didn't know when I left L.A.-- or when I ran into you a few months ago-- was that she was pregnant when she disappeared," Lindsey ground out, angry tension in the tenor of his voice and the way his fingers flexed on the wheel. "Which, I know, is supposed to be impossible; but Lilah had no reason to lie to me about that. She knew I cared more than I should have, but not anything more; I'm pretty sure she was just trying to touch a sore nerve."
Eliot's jaw dropped. Impossible was certainly one word for it; but there was a more urgent question pressing at him than how. "Was it--?"
Lindsey shook his head, a bitter frown pulling at the corners of his mouth. "Not hardly. It was Angel she went to, not me. Like I said: he's the type they write prophecies about. Not that it did her any good; Darla died a few months later for all he could do to help her. Lilah said their baby survived, but that Angel brokered some kind of hinky deal with Wolfram and Hart to erase all traces of him from this dimension, so even if I wanted to find out anything else it would be impossible. The only one I could get to that knows anything is Lilah, and the last thing I want to do is give her that kind of leverage over me."
Eliot sat still, digesting that for a moment. Much as he might disapprove of Darla as an object of his brother's affections, it was pretty clear Lindsey had been genuinely attached to her. And he remembered damn well how he'd felt when he'd finally returned from a job gone badly wrong to find Aimee with another man. Add to that, what he might have felt if she'd been killed while he was off on another continent; if she'd been pregnant; if the baby had vanished, with the blessing of the guy who'd been supposed to be protecting her. He swallowed down a rush of anger.
"So," he concluded, grimly. "Trying to do as much damage as you can, then."
"Not that I wouldn't take the contract back if you could get it," Lindsey agreed. "But you're not going to get that chance. Lilah said she watched her boyfriend burn hers up after she died, and it reappeared right back in its drawer. When the fuckers said the clauses in our contracts were bulletproof, they weren't kidding. You should put your friends on a plane back to Boston; there's nothing they can do here."
"And what about me?" Eliot asked, setting his jaw. "You going to tell me there's nothing I can do?"
Lindsey rolled his eyes. "Don't be an asshole," he said, then polished off the rest of the sandwich.
"Good." Eliot cracked his neck, then shifted lower on the bench seat, closing his eyes as he propped his neck against the headrest. He'd been too wired to catch his usual amount of sleep the night before; provided Lindsey didn't drive head-on into unexpected trouble, they should have enough time for him to catch up on a few of those winks on the way to wherever Lindsey was taking them. Without any clearer idea what they were walking into, there was nothing more for him to do until they got there, and more rest would be more beneficial than more worrying-- or more yelling at his brother.
A vampire girlfriend. And a literally fireproof contract. Damn it, Lindsey. All this time, he'd thought his life was the fucked up, dangerous one.
"Wake me when we get there, or if anything happens," he said.
"Don't worry, I will," Lindsey assured him, and turned the radio to something twangy and melodic.
Eliot stilled his mind, invoking both training and long practice, and seconds later was out like a light.
Some indeterminate amount of time later, he came awake again; the sun was still out, though much lower in the sky, watching over a sere, forsaken stretch of landscape that might as well have been part of Pakistan-- or East Texas-- for all it resembled the kind of scenery he usually associated with California. The truck was rolling toward a distant, crumbling building that must have been really something once upon a time. Even at a distance, what remained of the architecture was impressive.
"What the hell is that?" he muttered, straightening up and rubbing at the back of his neck. He felt stiff, and a little warm-- the air conditioning in the truck wasn't quite keeping up with the sauna outside-- but otherwise refreshed; it had to've been a few hours since they'd left the city. The slowing of the truck must have been what woke him; they weren't exactly keeping to highway speeds any more.
"It's creepier than fuck the way you do that, you know," Lindsey said, throwing him a startled glance. Then he shook his head and lifted his foot further off the gas, a rooster-tail of dirt flying up behind them as they rattled down the decaying road. "This is The Columns. It used to be a famous opera house back in the day, until the Death Valley 'quake back in '38. The town was dying anyway, so they never rebuilt it. But they never demolished it, either, and I figured it made an appropriately prophetic setting. As in, 'The earth will thrash and mark the appearance of the cup at the columns.'"
"When was that prophecy made?" Eliot asked him, furrowing his brow. The mere existence of the supernatural still made him queasy sometimes when he really thought about it, though he figured he'd come to accept it pretty well, all things considered. There was no percentage in denial, not in his line of work. The concept of destiny still really got his goat, though; he didn't like the implication that his choices might be dictated by some unknowable higher power. He'd had enough trouble with the knowable ones over the years to ever be comfortable with the concept.
Lindsey chuckled. "About a week ago, when I finally picked a location for my little sideshow," he said. "I fed the description to the guy I bought in their research department; Angel should have gone to him for clues by now, unless he's a lot slower than I remember."
"Not your usual contact?" Eliot guessed. At least, he hadn't thought 'Eve' was a guy's name-- though as much as Lindsey had changed the last few years, Eliot wouldn't have laid bets in either direction.
Lindsey shook his head, confirming Eliot's assumption. "No. Angel's team doesn't trust Eve, but they don't trust her because they still think she's in the pocket of the Senior Partners; they've got no idea she has her own agenda. Or that any of the department heads they displaced when they took over might be willing to act against the Senior Partners' plans if it might mean a chance to stick a fork in Angel's eye and get away with it. Their usual research guy, Wyndham-Pryce, is on leave, and his second has already betrayed one employer; it was a pretty simple deal to get Rutherford Sirk to misinterpret something for Angel if we provided him a way clear afterward."
A way clear? That didn't make any sense, given what Lindsey had said earlier. If he knew of one, then why the hell hadn't he used it himself? Eliot furrowed his brow. "You just got done telling me there's no way out of your contract. But you got this Sirk guy out?"
"There's out, and then there's out," Lindsey shook his head. "Like I said, he broke a contract before, with another employer capable of magically enforcing their clauses. No matter what he does, the afterlife's not going to be a walk in the park for him. I'm pretty sure that's why he came to Wolfram and Hart in the first place, since their binding spells are tighter than the Council's and will keep him from going to whatever purgatory dimension the Watchers use to wipe and reeducate their problem agents for the next generation."
Somehow, Eliot doubted Lindsey meant the same Council that he and Hardison had teased Parker about on that job with the nutty newscaster who'd been obsessed with conspiracies. Apart from that, though, he was coming up blank for references. "And that's supposed to mean something to me because...?"
Lindsey threw him an odd look. "How the hell do you know about vampires, but not the Watchers' Council? They're the ones in charge of the Vampire Slayers, for pete's sake."
Eliot shrugged, watching the opera house grow larger through the dusty windshield. "Like I told you, pretty much everything I know I either picked up on jobs or from one of my senseis that year I spent in the Far East. Never ran into any Council, or Slayers, while I was there."
Lindsey's mouth twisted as though he'd bitten into a lemon. "Lucky you," he said. Then he took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. "Nevermind. That's not important right now. The point is, Sirk just wanted a change of scenery. Out of this dimension, someplace he can live it up until he dies without worrying about someone turning him in. After that... he's still in the same boat I am. Why d'you think they never bothered to track me down those first few months, back when you could have knocked me over with a kitten? They know they'll get me when I die; what's a few more years compared to eternity?"
Eliot swallowed, not any happier about his brother's doom-and-gloom mindset than he'd been before his nap. "So. You cut him loose. With a shitload of money, I'm assuming. Was that wise, burning your investment in him up with one job?"
"It's not like I'm planning a long campaign, here," Lindsey shrugged. "And the money doesn't matter, as long as it gets me results. Power's the real commodity in this world."
And now that he had some, he was damn well going to use it while he could, Eliot read between the lines. He'd use himself up in the process, too, if he wasn't careful, and he didn't even really seem to care.
Eliot sighed. Well, he'd never expected it to be easy. "So you fed them a fake prophecy? Makes sense. It's always easier to con someone who already half-believes what you're trying to sell him."
"Exactly," Lindsey said, pulling the truck to a halt at last in the shadow of the damaged building.
The truck's engine was still ticking noisily as it cooled to ambient temperature-- not that it had all that far to go, as high as the temperature was-- when Hardison and Nate pulled up behind them. Lindsey fetched a pair of water bottles out of the toolbox behind the seat and tossed one to Eliot; Eliot took a long drink of the warm liquid, half-emptying the bottle, and exchanged a nod of greeting with his boss and friend. Then he fetched the grocer's bag from the seat and strode toward what seemed to have been the building's front doors. Whatever the cup Lindsey had brought was made of, it was at least as heavy as the two-liter of Mountain Dew that would undoubtedly be used to fill it; the thing had to've been custom-made out of actual metal, if it wasn't an authentic relic of some kind. Sophie would have known which.
But of course, she wasn't there. Eliot really didn't get why Nate had let things between him and Sophie fester for so long; he wished they'd just settle it already, one way or another, and stop fucking up the team dynamic. If Nate had said word one about his feelings to Sophie on that little trip he'd took to London she'd already be back, no question about it; and if she'd ever come right out and said what she wanted from him in the first place, Nate would never have let her leave-- or at least been more persistent about bringing her back. It wasn't really Eliot's place, but sooner or later someone was going to have to say something or the built-up tension would drive him as crazy as Parker.
He turned his attention back to the situation at hand, eyeing the damaged doors. They were off their hinges, of course, hanging cock-eyed and cracked, the pillars framing them half-collapsed from the quake that had disturbed the opera house's foundations. Dirt had drifted across the threshold over the sixty plus years since the place had closed, though not quite as much as Eliot would have expected; even in generally dry climates, the environment could do a lot of damage to a place in that amount of time. He handed the grocer's bag to Lindsey, then proceeded first to scout the place.
Lindsey rolled his eyes-- he'd probably checked the place out on his own when he'd first chosen it for his little scheme-- but let him at it; he might be physically stronger than Eliot after those magical cheats of his, but he didn't have anything like Eliot's experience and he knew it. Nate nodded as he and Hardison approached, and Hardison tapped at his ear to remind Eliot that the comms were down.
Right, Eliot thought. He'd have to remember to stay in visual range. He stepped slowly through into the entrance area, then paused to take in the interior of the structure a little more thoroughly. He assessed the cracks in the walls, the patterned wallpaper split and peeling away in great yellowed swaths, and the dirty, time-dulled tiles that must have been a bitch to wax back in the day, then reached a hand out and beckoned the others forward. For having been abandoned so long, the place was still in fairly remarkable shape; there wasn't even all that much dust on the remaining furnishings, and it didn't seem likely to fall down around their ears in the next couple of hours.
There were a couple of sets of tracks barely visible, fresh scuff marks smearing their way across the tiles and leaving disturbances in the crumbling carpeting of the halls where someone had tried-- but not quite managed-- to be careful. Eliot figured them for Lindsey's; the shoe size matched his own, so it was a pretty safe bet. The place seemed otherwise long-deserted, musty as hell but not particularly dangerous.
"I'd expected worse," he told his brother. "Where were you looking to set up? The main stage?"
Lindsey shrugged. "Yeah. I'm pretty sure a clan of half-breeds was using it as a gathering place until the Scourge came through. They never bothered the left-over furnishings-- they weren't actually living here, and they didn't want to attract attention from the humans-- but they didn't much like the dust and mold."
"Who does?" Hardison shrugged, looking bemused as he came up behind them. "Totally apart from the smell, it's hell on electronic equipment."
"They were probably more concerned with their health," Nate commented. "Although I hesitate to generalize, given that you seem to be implying that they weren't human, and thus might have different physical weaknesses. I take it they weren't vampires, either?"
His gaze was sharp and assessing, but he still seemed to be extending the benefit of the doubt; not ready to accept what Eliot was telling him, but not dismissive either, as though Eliot were a particularly perplexing client. He was starting to look forward to the moment Nate realized humanity really wasn't alone on their planet; he'd never met a single 'civilized' human being that hadn't first reacted with shock and denial, and he didn't think Nate was going to be that person, analytical genius or not.
"No," Lindsey said. "I'm not sure what kind of demon, though; it wasn't in any of the client files I stole for blackmail purposes back in the day, and it wasn't important enough to risk Eve's cover digging for it now. They're all gone now, regardless."
"Demons," Hardison said in disgusted tones, shaking his head. "Like fire and brimstone, demons? Whatever, man. Your proof had better be pretty damn convincing after all this."
"Damned, at least," Eliot muttered to himself as he slunk ahead of the group again, approaching the old auditorium. It was a fairly sizeable space, with a balcony above a wide, sloping floor full of seating that led down to the stage and its attendant orchestra pit, all done up in dark, rich colors and opulent fabrics. He wouldn't want to try any of the chairs-- he wasn't about to trust his weight to them after more than a half-century of probable decay-- but the stage itself had been solidly constructed. At the right side, half-obscured by the worn, moth-eaten curtain, an enormous, bronzed statue with upraised arms still presided over the space Lindsey probably intended to use to bait his trap. If the woodwork could support that, odds were it wouldn't collapse under a human's weight.
"Looks clear," he said. "You want us all to go in? These kind of conditions are as bad as snow for leaving tracks, and I've heard about vampire senses."
Lindsey wrinkled his brow, considering. "Better take them up to the balcony; pick one of the boxes. I'll follow you up in a minute and draw some concealment runes; they'll have no reason to go up there, and we'll be as good as invisible unless they stumble right over us."
Eliot nodded, and gestured Hardison and Nate toward the stairs.
Hardison eyed the walls carefully the whole way, probably filling in a set of floor plans in his mind, or maybe tracing out the old wiring. Nate was more absorbed with the decaying décor; neither of them said anything until they were out of visual and audio range of Eliot's brother.
"You sure about this, Eliot?" Nate murmured, as Eliot tested his weight on the stairs. They creaked a little under his feet, but seemed sound enough.
"You have to admit," Hardison added, "from our perspective, it all sounds a little far-fetched."
"Y'all followed us out here, didn't you?" Eliot countered, grimly. Their disbelief was starting to wear on him a little, reasonable or not. Did they really think he'd be a party to such an elaborate hoax on them, after the fit he'd thrown over Sophie's shenanigans? Conning the team was one thing he'd never be a party to. "Don't tell me you didn't spend the last couple of hours talking about all the strange things you've seen that might have been a little hard to explain at the time."
Hardison and Nate exchanged wary glances.
"Thought so," Eliot told them, then led the way into one of the boxes. It provided a good view of what Lindsey was up to on the stage, as he moved a short pillar into the beam of a spotlight he must've arranged up in the scaffolding during a previous visit. He spent a moment carefully placing the ornate, heavy goblet, then uncapped the two-liter and poured a mouthful or so of Mountain Dew into its basin.
"We'll set up here," Eliot said, testing his weight against the smooth wooden railing as though doing vertical push-ups. It creaked between the tarnished bronze endcaps, but held. "I don't trust the seats, but the floor and the rails seem solid enough. We'll have a decent view."
"Of what?" Hardison asked, looming at Eliot's side as he frowned down at the stage. Lindsey had put the bottle of Dew back in his bag, and was carefully retracing his steps back through the auditorium. "What's with the fancy cup? He steal it off this Angel guy?"
"Nothing that simple," Eliot said. "It's part of the con he's running on him. I'll let him explain the details later; it'll make more sense after he gives y'all the 'World Is Older Than You Know' speech."
"And why aren't you the one giving it to us?" Nate asked, stepping up on the other side of him. He had a slight furrow to his brow, as though warding off an impending headache.
"Yeah, why aren't you?" Lindsey asked, entering the box behind them. "I know you know the basics." He set the bag down on the floor by one wall, then crouched by it and pulled a piece of long, dark-colored chalk from his pocket; it made him look like a wayward college student, about to commit an act of graffiti.
Eliot shook his head, watching as Lindsey began to trace a strange, exotic symbol-- a rune, he'd said-- over the surface of the faded wallpaper. "Practical knowledge, maybe, but not the whole history thing," he said. "I've run across some things, found a few teachers to show me how to deal with 'em if I ever encountered them again. I wasn't much interested in the hows and whys; I just wanted to know how to take 'em down. My book-loving brother, on the other hand...." He aimed a pointed look at his brother.
Lindsey chuckled. "Yeah, I got the detailed introduction after I joined the firm. They snag you first, get you to sign on the dotted line, and then introduce you to your first demon client after it's too late to run. Then they give you the lecture and the reference list." He sketched a few more bold, curving lines and thick, connecting strokes, then moved a few feet to the side and began again.
"How much older than we know?" Nate asked intently, watching the ex-lawyer's hands as he worked.
"No one's exactly sure," Lindsey replied. "The documentation doesn't exactly go back that far. The closest thing there is to an official history starts like this...."
By the time the sun had set, Nate was looking much more uneasy-- as though he were on the verge of discovering proof of something he'd rather not know, and was wishing he still carried another kind of proof, eighty or better, to block it all out again. Hardison had taken a more technical tack, as hungry for information as ever; he'd been peppering Lindsey and Eliot with question after question, trying to catch them in a lie or find out just how much he had to learn, Eliot wasn't sure which. Either way, he wasn't happy about the situation, nor about the fact that the 'net was still down and he couldn't hack his way online to tap his own sources of information.
Fortunately, the vampires they'd been waiting for weren't all that far behind them. Something to do with "necro-tempered glass" in the car, according to Lindsey-- probably what had caused the weird refraction index Parker had noted in the windows at their office. Eliot had made a mental note to have Hardison track the supplier down when everything was over and take them down with extreme prejudice; it didn't sit well with him, the idea that a product like that might have enough customers to be profitable. How many damn vampires were there in the corporate world, anyway?
At least two too many. Eliot heard the guests of honor coming long before they saw them; neither one was making any real effort to conceal their presence. He straightened and pulled back from the rail when he heard boots in the upper hall-- he wasn't quite ready to trust his life to a pattern of ink, no matter what his brother said, without at least readying himself for the alternative-- and listened as a voice with a muddled British accent announced its presence.
"Here we are, then," the stranger taunted the opera house at large. "Two vampire heroes, competing to wet our whistle with a drink of light, refreshing torment."
"Is that what you think you are, a hero?" a second voice-- American, this time-- replied, dismissively.
Behind Eliot, Lindsey hissed in recognition. "Showtime."
"Saved the world, didn't I?" the first voice continued. The guy sounded cocky, defiant, and determined; like someone it might be fun to scrap with, if he was human and Eliot had the time. That had to be Spike.
Which meant the other one had to be Angel. Eliot curled his lip, waiting for the older vampire's reply, and glanced cautiously at his brother's avid, predatory expression.
"Once," Angel said, his voice a little fainter than Spike's-- wherever he was in the opera house, he was further from the team than his companion was. "Talk to me after you've done it a couple more times."
Nate shifted at Eliot's side, swallowing audibly. "We really aren't talking mass hallucinations, or metaphors, or misinterpreted medical conditions, are we?" he murmured, under his breath.
Eliot shook his head. "Nope."
"So they really are..." He trailed off as a man with bleached blond hair emerged onto a balcony halfway around the curve of the auditorium, and a taller man, recognizably Angel, stormed through the doors on the main level. The British blond-- definitely Spike-- leaped down from the balcony as Angel drew close to the stage, and the pair faced off against one another.
"Thought it would be a little less goldeny, what with the torment and all," Spike observed, as the small party of observers looked on, breaths held.
"So... what do we do now?" Angel asked.
"The same thing we do every night, Pinky," Hardison stage-whispered, strangled laughter in his voice.
Eliot bit back an inappropriate grin as Spike gave his own form of answer-- delivered with a fist.
"What do you think?" the younger vampire taunted.
Nate and Hardison watched wide-eyed as Angel flew back a truly improbable distance at that punch-- and even more improbable acrobatics ensued immediately after. If they'd been human, he'd have been checking for wires-- but if they'd been human, they'd probably never have gone flying in the first place; their supernatural strength gave them more power, but less control over it. Eliot kept half his attention on his co-workers as he mentally critiqued the rather sloppy fight, and knew to the second when the reality of the thing finally sank in for both of them.
Or not, as the case might be. Nate went chalk-pale and put his head down on the rail for a moment when both vampires finally shifted into their natural forms, breathing deeply between his braced hands; Hardison, on the other hand, suddenly went all gleeful and calculating in the eyes, his hands twitching as though holding something small and electronic. Like he was watching a battle in one of his online games. Eliot would have to thrash that out of him later-- approaching the supernatural world with anything less than a completely realistic grasp of the consequences was the kind of thing that got people killed, and not always the one making the assumptions, either.
Nate mastered himself after a moment and looked back up, glancing first at the runes Lindsey had painstakingly fenced them in with, then over the rail at the fight raging all around the carefully placed cup, all of his intensity focused on the pair of fighters. They fought with words, with fists, with rebar, with crosses, with splinters; as blood flowed sluggishly from wounds that would have killed human combatants and foreheads wrinkled and straightened, shifting between human and vampire masks.
Lindsey had been right; Eliot couldn't have asked for a better demonstration of the reality-- and the danger-- of the supernatural world if he'd tried.
'Course, they still had to get out of the opera house in one piece. The way the vampires were systematically breaking things with their bodies, that might not be guaranteed.
Finally, the beatings and the speechifying wound down, and it was the upstart, not the figure of Lindsey's long obsession, who stood triumphant and reached for the cup. Eliot had heard his brother make a guttural noise of disappointment when Spike merely wounded Angel rather than killing him, but that changed to a satisfied chuckle at the look on Spike's face after tasting the Mountain Dew.
"Not exactly what I had in mind," he said, "but it's a start."
Eliot rolled his eyes at him. "Don't let it go to your head," he replied in low, irritated tones, then reconsidered. "Or better yet-- do. Where was that confidence when you were talking about your contract? Idiot. If you can fool them...."
Lindsey sobered. "Compared to the Senior Partners, Angel's like-- like an ant. Pulling one over on them is going to take...."
"....a hell of a lot of effort, and more people than just you working on the problem," Eliot replied, crossing his arms in front of him. He kept the corner of his eye on the bewildered tableau still taking place on the stage, but the silencing aspect of the runes had already been demonstrated to his satisfaction, and the current conversation was much more important. "Nothing's impossible. It's just a question of scale...."
"And leverage," Nate broke in, quietly. "Now that we know we're after more than just a piece of paper. Aren't we."
Lindsey raised his eyebrows at Eliot, then glanced over at the focused faces of his teammates. "Yeah," he said, bluntly. "You know how they say money endangers the soul...."
Nate looked grim; but Hardison still had a sense of the absurd left in him, and shook his head. "No way, man, no way. People really can literally sign over their souls?"
Lindsey shrugged. "I was young. I didn't believe in anything I couldn't touch with my own two hands, and they offered me more money than I'd ever seen in my life. I thought the clause was a joke."
"But the joke was on you," Nate said, softly.
"Ha ha, right?" Lindsey smirked, though the brittle tension in his stance lent a razor's edge to the expression. "You still wonder why I didn't want y'all here? My soul, my problem."
"Then let us help you steal it back," Nate countered, "so you can captain it as you see fit."
"What he said," Hardison shrugged.
Lindsey glanced between the three of them again, measuringly, one at a time. Then he shook his head and sighed. "What the hell," he said. "You really want to try, who am I to stop you?"
Finally, Eliot thought, relieved. Aloud, he commented, "You never could when we were kids. Why start now?"
"I seem to remember that the other way around," Lindsey retorted.
Hardison shook his head at that. "Y'all really are more alike than any two people should be, even given that whole identical twin thing you got going," he said.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Eliot groused automatically, irritated as always by the comparison.
Lindsey rolled his eyes at him. "Give it up already. Mama always did use to say we were one soul born in two bodies. If only she knew, right?"
A sudden in-drawn breath from Nate pre-empted Eliot's intended reply. He glanced down to make sure the vampires had finished staggering out of the auditorium-- they had-- and then fixed his boss with an inquisitive expression. "What?" he asked sharply. "You just thought of something, didn't you?"
Nate just smiled at him, that little pleased-with-himself look that he tended to get in the middle of a heist just before the pieces started clicking into place. "I need to see the exact wording of the contract," he told Lindsey, "but yes, I think I've thought of something."
"Don't keep us in suspense," Hardison prompted him, with an eloquent glance toward the empty stage. "'Cause I think we've had more than enough of that for one evening."
Nate just shook his head. "Contract first. Speculation after," he insisted, though he continued to look thoughtfully smug.
Lindsey frowned skeptically at him, then reached up to touch the nearest wall. The rune drawing immediately under his fingertips suddenly shimmered and began to flake away from the wallpaper, shedding itself in a shower of powdered ink; the effect spread away from the point where his fingertips rested in a series of widening ripples, until the box looked more or less the same as it had when they'd entered, with the sole addition of a near-invisible layer of darkened dust.
"Let's get a move on, then," he said. "The sooner we test your theory, the sooner I can get on with my plan. I hope you realize, I ain't going to stop gunning for Angel just on your say-so."
"Never even crossed my mind," Nate replied easily, though the blandness of his tone gave the lie to his words. "So where are we headed? Do you keep a copy of your contract anywhere outside of the office?"
Lindsey frowned at him as he brushed his palms against each other, rubbing off the grit. Then he picked up the paper bag, much lighter without the cup to weigh it down. "No. They don't make copies; they stay in our files. Something about corporate espionage. It never mattered to me before I left the first time; and it didn't seem that important when I was deciding what to take later on."
Nate made an interrogative noise, half question and half 'aha!', as the four of them began to file out of the box and head for the stairs down to the main level of the opera house. "I don't suppose you remember any of the language it used, in specific? For example, given what was at stake, I can't imagine they included any version of the usual at-will employment clause?"
Hardison made a choking noise. "Either party may terminate this Agreement by written notice at any time for any reason or for no reason," he quoted in a deliberately deep, chanting voice, as though recalling something he'd had all too many occasions to memorize. "Yeah, more like we reserve the right. There's reasons I never lasted in any of those cubicle farm jobs, you know."
"You're telling me all this time it was philosophical differences?" Eliot elbowed his younger teammate. "And here I thought it was just boredom."
"Hey!" Hardison objected. "I reject your version of reality and substitute my own."
Lindsey snorted. "It would take a lot more power than you've got to pull that off. But, no; there was nothing like that, that I remember. There was plenty about outside business activities and benefits and non-disclosure, the usual language, embroidered with plenty of whereases and wherefores. The only real unusual part was the bit about the soul. Like I said-- at the time, I thought that was a joke."
"How about arbitration, or severance?" Nate prodded further, as they picked their way back across the entrance hall. The floor, which had seemed relatively smooth in the late evening light, was a minefield of shifting footing in the star-flecked darkness pouring in through the broken doors.
"I think it said that was at the discretion of the...." Lindsey began, then froze, staring in Nate's direction. Hardison nearly bumped into him; Eliot reached out from his trailing position to snag the hacker's shirt, staring warily at what he could make out of his brother's expression.
"Yes?" Nate prompted, calmly. "At the discretion of...?"
"You have got to be kidding," Lindsey sputtered. "You want me to... You're suggesting that I... Damn it, I just got done telling you I wasn't going to stop gunning for him on your say-so!"
"Hmmm," Nate mused to himself. "Let's call that Plan D, then."
"Plan D? You mean we have a plan, now?" a fifth, feminine voice suddenly spoke up in Eliot's ear, and he reached up to touch his earbud, startled.
"'Cause a plan would be good," she continued, sounding disgruntled. "I got away from their security guys when they started bleeding from the eyes, but I had to go back out; I never got near Files and Records. They caught me too quick. I think they have sensors or, hey, maybe spells or something on the roof."
"Parker!" Nate barked. "I thought I told you to stay outside and observe!"
Eliot could almost see the pout on Parker's face as she replied. "I know! But they were all so distracted, running around like someone had pulled the fire alarm. I couldn't pass up the opportunity."
Nate reached up to pinch at the bridge of his nose and took a deep breath. "Well, what's done is done. Are you all right? What did you mean when you said 'bleeding from the eyes'?"
"I don't know, they just went crazy," she said, dismissively. "But at least the comms are back up. Did Hardison fix them?"
"No, not me," Hardison commented. "Must've been that disequilibrium thing Eliot's brother was talking about, fixing itself."
"Told you," Lindsey said. "The Senior Partners don't want the whole world to die any more than we do."
"Anyway," Parker said, "I'm back at the apartment. What do you want me to do now?"
"Draw us up some specs on what you saw of the security," Nate told her. "We'll be there in a few hours." Then he stepped through the doors, silhouetted momentarily by a silvering of thin moonlight. "In the meantime...." He eyed the others as they exited. "Eliot, I hope you don't mind if I switch places with you for the drive back?"
Eliot glanced between Lindsey and his boss, a sudden apprehension curdling in his gut. There were reasons, beyond the estrangement and the legal barriers, why he'd never introduced any of his family to the team; Aimee and her dad had done enough damage to his hitter image. It was a valid request, though, given their need to plan and the fact that they'd brought two vehicles.
"Sure, whatever," he shrugged, then walked over to Lindsey and swiped the bag of supplies out of his arms. He fished around in it for a moment, came up with a couple of energy bars, and handed it back again. "There. See you in a few hours."
Lindsey handed the bag off to Nate, then waved Eliot off. "I have to stop by my place first to check on Eve, but we won't be far behind."
"And I'll keep my earbud in," Nate assured him. Then he climbed into the truck, already nose-deep in his machinations. "So. I was thinking...."
Eliot shook his head at them, then turned to Hardison. "Guess you're stuck with me, man."
Hardison just grinned at him; an eager, inquisitive expression that reminded him a little of an overgrown hound puppy. "Good," he said. "Details, I want details! You been holding out on us all this time."
Eliot groaned, resting his forehead against the roof of the rental car before opening the door and climbing in. "Yeah, so I could avoid this conversation," he groused. It was going to be a long trip.
Nate interrupted Hardison's waterfall of questions only a couple of times during the long, dark drive, clicking his earbud on to check in. Eliot dearly wished he could have listened in on the rest of Nate's conversation with Lindsey-- it would have been a lot less trying than struggling to come up with concise answers for all the minutiae Hardison wanted explained to him-- but no dice. They'd have to wait 'til the plan was in motion to get the particulars.
Not that that was all that unusual, for them. But it galled, when his brother was the focus of the job in question, over and beyond any stories Lindsey might be telling about him in between all the planning. Eliot held a rein on his temper as best he could, munched his energy bar, and talked about his encounters with the supernatural in the shortest sentences he could get away with.
It wasn't as though he were some kind of vampire hunter or anything; he hadn't ever set foot in that world on purpose. But a retrieval expert with a reputation like his was practically guaranteed to get called over that line, sooner or later, if he lived long enough; there was always some jackass out there who thought he could save money or face or time by hiring the deadliest human possible rather than deal directly with the brimstone crowd. He'd learned to ask a few pointed questions after the second cursed object he'd been sent to retrieve-- though his screening methods hadn't been entirely foolproof. Good thing, too. If they had, he'd never have met Ilona Costa Bianchi, and he wouldn't have his ace in the hole, now.
It wasn't one he was eager to use; they'd try Nate's methods first. But if worse came to worst, the thing he'd picked up from the East Coast office-- and had independently identified, after-- would allow him to exchange himself for his brother. If one of them had to be condemned for the things he'd done.... at least it would buy Lindsey and the team a little more time to find a solution. Lindsey was the one who knew the ins and outs of this world, after all; and Eliot would willingly take the punishment to save his brother, no matter what kind of terms they were on.
Hell, these days he'd even take that kind of punishment for Hardison, or Parker, or Nate, or even Sophie; much as he'd still deny it if they asked. They'd become family by choice, as much as Lindsey and their sisters and nephew were by blood.
Not Tara, though. He wrinkled his nose as they pulled up in front of his apartment, thinking of the substitute grifter for the first time since they'd left her behind in Boston. She was an attractive enough woman, and skilled at her job, but he'd trust Lindsey as their front man before he'd trust her with anything of real value. Her motivations were just too different to rely on.
He stepped out of the car into the waxing pale light of pre-dawn, then stretched carefully, working out the knots in his spine. It would be a while yet, he'd bet, before his brother would join them; meanwhile, it might be good to cook up some breakfast, and schedule another nap. None of them would be good for much without a few more hours' rest, except maybe Parker; no doubt she'd wedged herself into a quiet corner and caught a few winks while she waited.
The door slammed behind him as Hardison joined him at the curb, unwrapping another of Lindsey's supply of energy bars and chewing half-heartedly at it. Eliot nodded at him, then walked up to the apartment and cracked the door carefully, standing off to one side just in case.
Parker flew through the door a few seconds later, and he chuckled to himself as Hardison dropped the half-eaten bar to stagger backward under her onslaught. She'd heard them coming, all right. Probably left her comm on as she slept.
"Hello to you, too," he said, watching the thief hug the air out of their hacker.
At his comment, she abandoned Hardison to bounce over to him; but rather than hug him, she stopped a couple of feet away and made a round motion with her arms in the air between them. "Virtual hug!" she chirped, grinning, then skipped back into the apartment.
Eliot shook his head. "I think she's been into the orange soda already," he murmured to a dazed Hardison, then followed Parker in, his mood unaccountably lifted by her familiar, bizarre behavior. "Who wants eggs and bacon?"
"With chives and salsa?" Parker called back.
Hardison snorted, closing the door behind them. "I'll put the coffee on," he said. "Can't taste any worse than that thing I was just eating."
Even the disgustingly smug, sated look on Lindsey's face when he and Nate arrived forty-five minutes later couldn't taint Eliot's improved mood; he just raised an eyebrow at his boss and commented, "Tell me he didn't."
Nate gave him a disgruntled look, but didn't bother to reply, trudging into the kitchen with a yawn and making a beeline toward the coffee pot.
"You made him wait in the car while you made a booty call?" Hardison chortled, hunched over his laptop again with a mess of eggs and ketchup cooling slowly at his elbow. "Nate, man, you should have commed us, or called a cab. What if he'd left you out there all night?"
"Hey now," Lindsey replied, rolling his eyes. "I had to get Eve's report of what went on in the office today, and I didn't think it would be wise for her to know y'all were here. What was I supposed to do?"
"Taking her report, huh?" Parker asked, eyeing him mischievously over her glass of mixed orange juice and soda. "Is that what the kids are calling it these days."
Lindsey firmed his jaw, glaring at her, and didn't answer.
Eliot smirked and handed him a plate piled with hot breakfast food. "Seriously though, guys. We a go for this afternoon, or are we waiting for nightfall?"
Nate yawned again and took a long pull of coffee. "From what Lindsey says, their defenses aren't optimized by working hours-- it doesn't really matter what time of day we show up, just that there's a distraction when we do so."
"Yeah," Lindsey said, sliding onto a stool at the kitchen counter and picking up a fork. "The imbalance thing would have been perfect, if I hadn't had other plans already. All my other ideas for interference are more long-term, though; they need a lot more time to set up than we really have available. I do know of one other sure-fire way to stir things up over there, but it's kind of unpredictable; we'd have to watch and wait, and go the minute the opportunity opens, no matter whether it's tonight or tomorrow."
"If it's so unpredictable, how can you be sure it'll work at all?" Eliot had to ask.
Lindsey pointed at him with his fork. "You said you ran into Aimee a few months ago. I remember what your relationship was like back in the day; how'd she react when she saw you again?"
Eliot frowned at the non sequitur, momentarily preoccupied by memories of heated arguments and a certain hay-filled stall, then raised his eyebrows as the most likely reason for the question registered with him. "Old girlfriend?" he asked.
"Of both of them," Lindsey assured him. "Her people are already upset with Angel for taking over the firm-- or so Eve tells me. And no one's contacted her to tell her Spike's not dead anymore. Send her the right message, and a hundred to one she'll be on the next plane. No telling what she'll do when she gets here, but she'll make a damn fine distraction, one way or another."
"You're talking about Buffy Summers," Eliot realized, recalling Lindsey's lecture back at the opera house.
"As in the current Slayer? Vampire, comma, The?" Hardison asked, then hit a few keys on his laptop and swiveled it around on the counter. "This woman, right here, kills scary monsters for a living?"
The image on the screen was a few years old, going by the fashions; the girl-- because she definitely was a girl, little better than a teenager-- showing off a compact package of toned skin, slender assets, sun-kissed blonde hair and green eyes dramatically fringed with dark mascara. Eliot raised an eyebrow at the image, silently agreeing with Hardison's assessment, then frowned, something urging him to look past the Valley Girl glamour to the lines of tension around her eyes and the steel in her stance.
That was no ignorant cheerleader. That was a girl everyone would underestimate-- at their own peril. And not half because of the name. Who the hell named their kids things like Buffy-- or Skyler, or Widmark, anyway? Almost made him glad not to've grown up around money. "Distraction, hell. Ain't that overkill?" he asked.
Hardison blinked at him, then turned the laptop around again, glancing between Eliot and the girl's picture in clear disbelief.
"No, it's just enough kill," Lindsey replied. "She'll set off half the sensors in the building, even if she doesn't bring any of her friends. We'll use that to get in and make our way to Files and Records. Cameras won't see me no matter what, but we'll need the noise to cover for the rest of you. Once we have the contract, we try Plan A-- or B, or C, whichever fits. Hopefully not D." He frowned. "There won't be any better opportunity than while Angel and his staff are still off-balance from her visit."
"And if all y'all's plans all fall through?" Hardison asked, raising his eyebrows at Nate. "There's no plan M in this one, right?"
"No," Nate replied, pouring himself a second cup of coffee. "There is a plan F, but that one involves Lindsey releasing an enormous, destructive monster and setting off all the alarms in the building, so..."
"Why don't I ever feature in these last-ditch plans?" Parker pouted at him.
"And on that cheerful note," Eliot rolled his eyes and finished dishing up his own breakfast. He planned on showering, stealing another ninety minutes or so of shut-eye, and then stretching his muscles; he hadn't been through his full routine in a couple of days. Whatever happened that day, he wanted to be ready for it.
Hardison smothered a yawn of his own, drooping over his plate, and closed his laptop screen with a frown. "A'ight. I'll put a few feelers out, then catch some zees; we'll know the minute she arrives in town. Though I still think y'all's crazy."
"Understood," Nate said, then gestured in the vicinity of his ear with splayed pinky finger and thumb, mimicking a phone. Right; it would be mid-afternoon where Sophie was. "I'm just going to...."
"Me, too," Lindsey said. "I'll get the ball rolling. Mind if I borrow your couch, after? I told Eve I'd be gone a couple of days, running a time-sensitive errand."
"Mi casa, su casa," Eliot shrugged at him, spearing a strip of hot bacon on the point of his knife.
He paused with the knife half-way to his mouth as he realized he actually meant it; nothing that had happened since they'd met up again had really settled any of the issues that had set them on such different paths when they were teenagers, but maybe... maybe they were past it enough now, grown enough, it didn't matter. He'd always cared, would always have come running if needed, but that hadn't ever seemed like enough of a reason to make the effort to bury the hatchet.
Maybe they didn't have to, though. Maybe it didn't matter who'd been right, and who'd been wrong, and whether they'd just been too stubborn to even consider apologizing. He'd just been thinking earlier that he'd trust his brother as part of his team before he would Tara Cole-- maybe that wasn't such a far-fetched idea, after all. If Sophie weren't ready to return soon-- or even if she was; they'd needed to fake legal qualifications often enough--
Lindsey must've caught the arrested motion, because he paused in the doorway, gripping the frame. Without the smug smile, he looked tired, and open, and a little awkward, blue eyes for once free of defensiveness or calculation. "Thanks, by the way," he said. "For, you know." He waved his other hand around in the air a little, completely failing to elaborate. "In case I haven't said it."
"You didn't have to," Eliot said, then shrugged uncomfortably and popped the bacon into his mouth, chewing heartily to avoid having to say anything further.
Yeah, that just might be worth looking into, after all.
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