Redemption

by Mel Odom

  “Bit of a braggart, ain’t he?” Darius asked.

  Angelus said nothing. The dark part of him that stayed eternally hungry these days welcomed the coming battle. He smiled.

  “A ship was taken by carrion creatures a fortnight ago,” O’Domhnallain stated. “People protected by the Crown and by the Church were killed, and property was taken. Those guilty will be put to death.” He reached under his traveling cloak and took out a silver cross nearly a foot tall, ending in a sharp point at the foot. The cross was worth a fortune. He flicked his arm back, throwing the cross toward the doorway.

  The cross twinkled in the lantern light as it spun, then embedded in the wooden frame above the doorway with a loud thunk!

  O’Domhnallain pulled a long sword from beneath his cloak. “Those who pass from this tavern,” he challenged fiercely, “shall do so on bended knee beneath the symbol of our God who died for our sins that we might live forever. Those whom are shunned by the Lord shall be turned from the door and made unable to pass by the evil that has swallowed their souls.”

  The men behind O’Domhnallain spread out, drawing weapons as well as wooden stakes.

  “Come forth now,” O’Domhnallain ordered, “or we shall come upon you and ask no questions. All that remain within this room shall die.”

  Immediately the dockworkers and sailors among the tavern crowd went forward. They dropped to their knees and knee-walked toward the door.

  “Turn your faces up to the cross,” O’Domhnallain commanded harshly. “Acknowledge the debt you owe for the love and tender mercy that you were given.”

  The sailors and dockworkers continued through the door unmolested. The small group in the tavern emptied quickly, and it became quickly apparent who wasn’t leaving.

  “Well,” Darius said, “I should suppose this promises to be a bonny fray.” He stood up and bared his sword with a hiss of steel on leather. He raised his voice. “Boy.”

  O’Domhnallain stared at him, pale eyes as cold as ice.

  Darius spat on the floor. “Our kind is already restricted to the night’s shadows, ever wary in the true light of day. I’ll not be driven from an Irish drinking establishment by a pack of curs with lofty ideals.”

  “You are not human,” the young giant accused.

  Darius’s grin split his whiskered face. “I’m more than human, boy. More than you’ll ever be no matter how fiercely you believe.”

  “Moira,” O’Domhnallain called.

  The woman was dressed as the other men in her company were. Her sword was naked steel in her fist.

  She can’t be alive! But Angelus looked at her and knew it was true. Despite the fact that he’d broken one of her arms and pulled the other out of joint and watched her go down with Handsome Jack, the young woman lived. More than that, she appeared to be no worse for the wear.

  “Are these the men who attacked the ship you guarded?” O’Domhnallain demanded.

  Moira gazed around the room at the vampires that had made up Darius’s crew. She locked those fiery gray-green eyes on Angelus. “Yes. And I would never forget this one. He is the most evil of them all.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Angel stared into the depths of Whitney Tyler’s gray-green eyes and tried to get over the uncanny resemblance. “No. We don’t know each other.”

  “I could swear I’ve seen you somewhere before.”

  “Maybe,” Angel suggested softly, “I remind you of someone else.”

  Her eyes continued to study his face for a moment. “Maybe.” She turned to Schend. “Did you catch whoever did this?”

  “No.”

  Whitney put the shopping bag on the floor. “Did the security guy ever get here?”

  “You never saw him?” Schend asked.

  “No. I sat and waited till I thought I was going to go crazy. That whole scene at the diner, with the truck and all that, was just too much. I couldn’t take sitting here by myself, so I went to the Quik-Shop and grabbed munchies.”

  “You shouldn’t have left the apartment,” Schend said.

  Whitney glanced around the apartment. “You’re right. I should have stayed here so the guy who did this could have practiced on me instead of the walls.” She turned back to Schend. “Besides which, you can’t exactly send out for Cheese Doodles and strawberry yogurt.”

  “How long have you been gone?” Angel asked.

  Shrugging, Whitney replied. “Maybe thirty, forty-five minutes.”

  “How long did you wait on the security guard to arrive?”

  “About an hour.”

  “He didn’t call to say he was late?”

  “No.” Whitney’s attention wandered to the bedroom door. Her eyes focused on the crimson smear in the doorway. In the next instant she was in motion. “What’s going on?”

  Angel took her by the elbow, halting her.

  “Ow.” Whitney yanked her elbow away. “That’s quite a grip you’ve got there.”

  “Sorry,” Angel apologized. For just an instant he’d been back on Handsome Jack, the salty scent of the sea and fresh blood mixed with spent gunpowder hanging in the air. “You don’t want to go in there.”

  “Why?”

  “The late security guard,” Schend explained tensely, “really is the late security guard now.”

  Stubbornly Whitney walked to the door, carefully avoiding the blood smeared in the doorway. Then she stopped, frozen in her tracks. She wrapped her arms around her stomach as if she’d just been hit. “Oh, my god,” she whispered. Her confidence eroded and tears tracked down her face.

  Doyle stared at the images on the security computer monitor, watching the tapes roll through the last couple hours. Watching them in fast-forward was no real strain because there hadn’t been that much activity during the night.

  The security room was hardly bigger than a good-sized closet. Filled with computer and surveillance equipment, the addition of Doyle and Cordelia to Todd, the uniformed security guard on duty, made for a tight fit.

  “There’s Whitney Tyler arriving again,” Cordelia said.

  Doyle watched the woman cross the screen in the apartment building’s main foyer. They’d seen the tape twice before. He checked the time/date stamp in the upper right hand corner. For the third time Whitney consistently arrived at the apartment building at 1:17 A.M. Wednesday morning. It was 3:34 A.M. now.

  “Doesn’t she look heavier than she did on tonight’s episode?” Cordelia asked.

  Doyle looked at the woman with increased interest. Cordelia had accused him of gawking earlier. Actually, it was hard not to gawk. For a woman who’d been run off the highway, nearly run down and staked by a rampaging madman, Whitney Tyler had cleaned up very well.

  “It’s the security tape,” Todd said. He was big, slightly overweight, with straw-colored hair and a round face. A package of Snickers bite-size candies lay open on the desk. “Those cameras aren’t very flattering. You get that overweight look from the fish-eye lenses we use.”

  Personally, Doyle thought Whitney looked fantastic. Maybe a little tired, but after having watched some maniac drive a big truck through a diner wall only a few hours ago, that look was probably normal. But she also caused an uncomfortable itch in the back of his mind.

  “I think she looks a little heavier,” Cordelia said as Whitney stepped into the elevator. “With that hem design, she could get away with it. Maybe success is going to her head and her hips.”

  The camera footage changed when the security guard tapped the keyboard. Todd had cut and pasted the video footage into a file for them, adding all the different views so it looked as if the camera was deliberately following the woman. The new view showed the interior of the elevator cage. The view changed again when she stepped from the elevator, picking her up as she walked down the hallway toward her apartment.

  “Do you have cameras inside the rooms?” Doyle asked.

  “No way,” Todd answered quickly. “We’re talking about invasion of privacy as well as Peeping Tom laws. Get c
aught doing that, and you’re in lockup with real sickos.” He tapped the keyboard again. “I’ve added in the additional footage of Ms. Tyler arriving at the apartment building a few minutes ago. Want to see it, too?”

  “Yeah.” Doyle watched as Whitney walked through the foyer again. The return trip to her apartment was just as uneventful as the first time he’d seen it.

  There’d been no homicidal maniacs and only a handful of people who’d gotten off on Whitney Tyler’s floor other than the security guards, one of whom was now hanging from the ceiling fan in her bedroom.

  “Can I get a copy of the tape?” Doyle asked.

  “Why?” Todd asked. “It doesn’t sound like you found anything you were looking for.”

  “Maybe I’ll give it a go again later. See something I didn’t see the first time.”

  “Look, I’d like to help you out, but I could get into some heavy trouble for doing something like that.”

  “We won’t tell,” Cordelia promised.

  “Sure, and the next thing I know, I’m being credited as a source on A Current Affair or something.”

  “That’ll never happen,” Doyle said earnestly.

  “I wouldn’t do it for less than fifty bucks,” Todd replied. “Cash. On the barrelhead. No IOUs.” He turned back to the keyboard.

  Cordelia shoved her way by him. “Todd,” she said in a low voice.

  Todd’s attention perked up at once. He smiled. “Yes?”

  “I was thinking there might be something else you’d be interested in.”

  Todd leaned back in the chair and grinned wolfishly. “And what might that be?”

  “A phone number,” Cordelia said. She took a business card from her pocketbook.

  “Yours?”

  “You can reach me there.” Cordelia smiled invitingly.

  Todd only thought about it for a moment, then took down a blank compact VHS tape and shoved it into the recorder. It duplicated in minutes. “It’s all digital,” he said when it finished, “so you shouldn’t have any problems with it.” He offered the tape and snatched the business card from Cordelia’s hand.

  “Thanks, Todd.” Cordelia led the way out of the security room.

  “That was going a little above and beyond the call of duty, don’t you think?” Doyle asked as they walked to the elevator. “I mean, it’s good of you to do, but there’s no telling how much that little creep is going to be calling.”

  Cordelia raised her eyebrows. “You seriously think I gave him my number?”

  “You didn’t?”

  “No.”

  “Then whose —”

  “That card,” Cordelia informed him, “has my old stylist’s number on it. After what he did to my hair, you don’t think I’m going there anymore, do you?”

  “The first thing you’re going to do is talk to the police,” Angel said.

  Whitney had recovered some of her composure. “Can’t we just leave?”

  “No. There’s been a murder.”

  “I know.” Whitney hugged herself more tightly, pacing through the wreckage of the living room. “And the guy who did it may come back at any time.”

  “I don’t think so,” Angel said. He couldn’t help being captivated by the way she looked. She resembled the swordswoman so much it was almost unbelievable. It helped that he had seen unbelievable things before; in fact, he even was something unbelievable. But the fear that filled her was something he just simply couldn’t imagine in that woman in Galway.

  “If he does,” Schend said, “Angel’s here now. He knows how to handle things like this. Probably just pull out his gun and start blasting away.”

  “I don’t carry a pistol,” Angel said.

  Schend gaped at him.

  Angel shrugged. “I don’t need one.”

  “My god, man. That security guard in there was bigger than you and he carried a gun.”

  “Yeah,” Angel said. “You can see how much that helped him.”

  Cordelia knocked on the door, then entered with Doyle at her heels when the guard let them in.

  “The security tapes?” Angel asked hopefully.

  “If the guy came in through the main foyer,” Cordelia said, “he wasn’t wearing a sign.”

  “But,” Doyle added, lifting a cassette tape, “we got a copy of the footage to review later.”

  Angel nodded, turning his attention to Whitney. “After the police cut you loose, we’ve got to find a safe place for you until we figure out what to do next.”

  “We’ve got an on-location shoot downtown later today,” Schend said.

  “No,” Whitney objected. “Gunnar, a man just got killed in my bedroom tonight.”

  “Whitney, I know,” the television producer said, “but Tomas spent weeks setting this shoot up through the L.A. Chamber of Commerce. It’s now or never for this episode.”

  “We can do the shoot in the studio,” Whitney said. “Just restructure the scene.”

  Schend shook his head. “No can do. You know part of the package we sell with this series is this city. If we start missing those, Dark Midnight is going to look like every other action-adventure show out there. We have to do this.”

  “It’s going to be kind of hard to do if I’m dead, too.”

  Schend obviously didn’t have an argument for that. He threw his hands up in surrender.

  “We’ll worry about that later,” Angel suggested. “Right now, just get through the police investigation.”

  “I’ve gotten two other cards with that symbol on it,” Whitney said, gazing at the reproduction Angel had drawn.

  Angel tapped the paper napkin he’d drawn the symbol on and looked at Whitney. “This exact symbol?”

  “I believe so. Both times my apartments before were trashed, there were index cards left behind. Gunnar knows more about them.”

  Angel leaned back in his chair. They’d retreated to his office as soon as the police had cut Schend and Whitney loose.

  “Actually, I don’t know much,” Schend admitted. “That symbol looks like Greek to me.”

  “I thought it looked more like Farsi,” Angel said. “With all the curlicues and dots.”

  “I’ve had the show’s writers and researchers try to figure out what that symbol means. A couple of them think it has some historical meaning, but they couldn’t find out what.”

  “Maybe I could take it around and ask a few questions,” Doyle suggested.

  “I’m telling you you’re wasting your time,” Schend said. “The people I use on the show are good.”

  “Your people probably don’t have the resources I do.”

  “What does the other part mean?” Cordelia asked. “Atonement? What’s supposed to be atoned for?”

  “A crime, maybe,” Angel said, glancing at Whitney.

  Whitney shook her head. “If you consider parking tickets and speeding infractions worth killing someone over, then I’m guilty. But there hasn’t been anything else.”

  Angel studied the symbol he’d drawn on the paper napkin. It was all confusing; Doyle’s vision, Angel’s memories suddenly surfacing as well as the symbol. He felt that he should know the symbol, but he didn’t.

  Whitney shivered suddenly and rubbed her arms briskly.

  “Cold?” Doyle asked.

  “No. I just realized that we’ve gone from stalker to killer. Not exactly the upgrade you’d want in your life.”

  Schend spoke up. “Look, we’re going to have to talk about damage control here. With the police in your apartment and a dead guy on his way out, the media is going to be all over this. Sponsors are going to get nervous. That’s another reason the on-location spot tomorrow — today — is so important. If we start choking on our schedule, they’re going to think we’re hiding something.”

  “We will be,” Whitney responded. “Me. Don’t you get it, Gunnar? You might as well be putting me to bed every night in a Venus’s-flytrap if we continue shooting.”

  “Do you have somewhere else you can go?” Angel asked. �
��Someplace safe?”

  The question took some of the anger from Whitney. “No.”

  “You can spend the night here,” Angel offered. “Until we can work something else out.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Whitney,” Schend said patiently, “that show is the only protection you have. It makes the money that allows you to live the way you want, and hide. If you disappear and leave this season in the lurch, I can guarantee you the money will dry up in a heartbeat.”

  “Are you threatening me, Gunnar?” An angry flush colored Whitney’s face.

  “No,” Schend replied. “I’m just trying to help you think this thing through. Before you jump off the deep end and we can’t save the show or you.”

  “Who’s thinking about pulling back off the show?” Whitney asked.

  “Davis Hollings for one.”

  “Personally, I wouldn’t mind seeing Hollings go,” Whitney said. “He’s a creep. He doesn’t know how to take no for an answer.”

  “Professionally, you’d hate to see him go. Hollings and NewNet underwrite fifteen percent of the show.”

  “That’s because we deliver him the young audience who uses his company’s search engine,” Whitney replied. “The guy’s slime.”

  “What about Hollings?” Angel said.

  “You haven’t heard of Hollings or NewNet?” Schend asked.

  “Sure,” Cordelia spoke up. “Cyber-boy. Created the newest, latest, best net search engine that’s attracting geek-boys and geek-girls everywhere, as well as the advertisers who like to sell them stuff. NewNet is supposed to be the ‘Next Big Thing’ in the world of virtual, and Hollings is the golden child. However, he’s got kind of a dark side. He likes television starlets. Eight months ago he nearly got busted for stalking Abby Langtree. I can name four more starlets he chased after before and since, but Abby Langtree was the first who nearly got him into one of those fashionable orange jumpsuits all the convicts are into.”