She couldn’t see his expression; his body language looked unconvinced. But he came in and let the door close—in its current crooked way—behind him.
For a moment they all just looked at one another.
Cordelia eyed the faux Angel in particular disbelief. If there is such a thing as Fashion Police, we’re all doomed.
Okay, sometimes Angel’s look got a bit monotonous—all that gray and black and subdued stuff, and if he ever broke loose and went for something in a jewel tone, it never really worked. But at least he didn’t wear pants that were too short along with bulky white sneakers. His spiked brush-up hair had a natural look—and well it might, considering he could hardly use a mirror to style it and until recently hadn’t even seemed to be aware of the look at all. The faux Angel’s hair appeared hard and spiky and could probably have been used as a weapon if he ever failed to run from a fight. His poorly fitted black duster swept the ground and drooped from his shoulders. His glasses were hopelessly without style. And he’d cinched his belt up high. Too high. Angel’s expression hit high disbelief as he gave the new arrival the once-over, then a twice-over, then looked down at himself as if to double-check that he didn’t, indeed, look like this imitation.
“Ugh,” Cordelia murmured, voicing everyone’s thoughts. “Wedgie country.”
She wasn’t sure he thought any better of them. Except…
Except for Angel. The faux Angel’s expression as he took in the real vampire—in his rumpled state looking more menacing than skinny Faux Angel could hope even on his most bulked-up day—flickered between respect and a hint of chagrin. But in the end he must have decided to bluff it out, for he straightened his narrow shoulders and set his weak jaw. “My client has all the protection he needs from me,” he said, and looked at the man. “Let’s go.”
“Ohh, I don’t think so,” Angel said, even as Wesley slipped behind Faux Angel, blocking the exit. “There’s this small matter of using my name. Sure, go ahead and pretend you’re a vampire. Plenty of people do, even the ones who don’t really believe we exist. But the name thing? No.”
“To be honest,” Cordelia said, using her most helpful voice, “you really can’t pull it off. I mean, sure, you have the basic black thing down, but the overall look…that’s not brooding. That’s just plain sullen.”
“That’s not the point,” Faux Angel said, sounding a little desperate. “I’ve been hired to protect this man, and I can do it. I’ve been doing it.”
“Actually, to a large extent, we’ve been doing it,” Wesley said, still blocking the doors. “And as long as we’re involved—rather involuntarily, so far, I might add—I think you owe us an explanation.”
“Or maybe he could just clean up the lobby the next time it gets gooed,” Cordelia suggested.
“Or maybe,” Angel said, coming down to the foot of the stairs and causing Faux Angel and his client both to back away a few steps, “maybe he should quit using my name, find another closet full of clothes, and go back to whatever real-life job he has. Before someone”—and he took a step closer to the men, his expression suddenly the one that always made Cordelia uneasy, the one where she was never sure if he meant the threat that lurked behind his eyes or if he was just really, really good at bluffing—“gets hurt.”
For an instant, Faux Angel looked baffled, as if this wasn’t the way Angel was supposed to react to him—and in that moment he deflated, looking not remotely like Angel at all, but just a pathetic young man dressed in poorly fitting black. But then he seemed to draw an odd inspiration from Angel’s anger…imitating on the fly, Cordelia realized with a numb surprise. Turning his expression into a pale version of Angel’s. She felt an instant of skittering panic, realizing that Faux Angel was so far from having a clue and that the real Angel was so close to stepping over the line—
The doors burst open. Plywood cracked; the precariously surviving hinges gave way. Wesley went flying, his expression pure astonishment.
One of the Tuingas demons hesitated there, scanning the lobby—and then went straight for Faux Angel’s client.
Not again!
And Cordelia couldn’t believe it: Faux Angel looked like he might actually try to put up a fight. She bolted across the lobby to the weapons cabinet, grabbing the first things she could get her hands on—a small spiked morning star, a short main gauche—and flung herself back to the fight even as Angel grabbed the demon’s attention from behind. The morning star went to Wes simply because he was on the floor and she couldn’t imagine throwing it; Angel plucked the main gauche out of the air.
And then Cordelia had a second thought. “Don’t kill it!” she cried. “Whatever you do, don’t turn it into goo!” And then, realizing that Faux Angel had grabbed his client and had headed for the courtyard exit doors, she shouted, “Hey! Get back here! You little coward—you owe us a door! Two doors!”
But Faux Angel never paused. And when she turned back to the fight, Cordelia saw there was no longer any fight at all. Instead, there was a wary standoff. Wesley hadn’t yet made it to his feet; he paused, crouching, on the way up. Angel stood back a step, the short blade ready…but hesitating. The demon itself had backed up to the broken doors, watching Faux Angel’s escape. Just as she remembered from their first encounter, aside from the nasty and fresh-looking wound on its chest. Otherwise the same, big and bulky and basically humanoid, if only it’d had a neck to speak of…or if that…thing…hadn’t been sprouting from its upper throat, currently coiled protectively around its neck, the tip glistening and flaring with each breath—
“Is that a nose?” she blurted.
The demon looked at them and snarled something short, sweet, and distinct that had Wesley diving for a piece of paper even as the thing turned on its flat, scaly heel and left, finishing off the right-hand door entirely on its way out.
In the wake of it all came silence, filled only by the slight creak of the door as it swung slightly on its one remaining hinge…and then let go, slowly easing its way to the floor.
“So!” Cordelia said. She thought she saw Fred lurking around the top of the stairs, investigating the noise—but decided to leave her secure in her lurkage. “What have we learned from this little encounter?”
“Fghlztt,” Wesley muttered to himself, scribbling on the back of a take-out menu, his desk the floor. “Or was it Fghaluzzt?”
“We know that guy isn’t anything like me,” Angel said.
“We know I can check under Tuingas clan demons with prehensile noses,” Cordelia said.
Fred’s quiet voice said, “It’s more what you don’t know, don’t you think?”
No one looked startled; like Cordelia, they must have noticed her right away, but didn’t draw attention to her arrival. Aside from Wesley’s mumbling, scribbling, scratching out, and rescribbling, no one made any immediate response either.
Fred inched down a step. “You don’t know why that man tries to look and act like Angel. You don’t know why the Tuingas demon wants the man in the ugly clothes. You don’t know why the man in the ugly clothes would stick with the fake Angel instead of sticking with the real thing when he found it. You don’t know why the demons turn to goo. You don’t know why something broke in here and took the only part of the dead Tuingas that didn’t turn to goo. And you still don’t know why all the demons around here are causing such a fuss.”
By then they were all staring at her, and her voice faded away. Much more tentatively, she said, “Maybe I missed something? Maybe there are more…”
“Oh, it sounds to me like you’ve hit all the highlights,” Wesley said, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his notes. “The final question is, which, we don’t know do we try to handle first?”
“There’s more than one of us,” Cordelia said, and slanted a look at Angel. “Most of us are even dressed.”
He looked down at himself, plucking at his shirt. “What? Six buttons and I’m dressed. Ready to go. Rah-rah demon hunter.”
“Puh-lease,” Cordelia said
. “I was a cheerleader, remember? You couldn’t pull off a cheer if your unlife depended on it.”
Wesley rolled his pen slowly between his palms as he stared thoughtfully at his scribblings. “I should do my best to decipher this—it looked to me like the creature was making a real attempt to communicate.”
“Lorne might be helpful,” Cordelia suggested. “I could—”
“Stay here,” Angel said. “You’re not in any shape to be out in whatever’s going down.”
“Oh, and thank you for noticing so loudly.” She scowled at him, suddenly feeling every bit of all those accumulated visions. “I’ll call Lorne.” Or pore over the identification books. Now that she knew—or at least suspected—that the demon’s mystery appendage was a nose, maybe she could pin down just which variety of Tuingas they were dealing with. Maybe there would be some little tidbit that would help make all this…make sense.
“And I’ll—” Angel glanced at the open doorway and the sunlight streaming into the hotel. He’d done the sewer circuit already. Time to hit the Internet? “I’ll hang around inside doing something very important until I can hit the streets.”
“Maybe seeing about getting those doors fixed,” Cordelia said, and went over to practice the words Wesley had written down until she thought she could do a half-decent job of pronouncing them.
But Lorne didn’t want to talk about Tuingas words that had been spat in anger. “Honeychild,” he said to her in his perfect mix of air-kissing and actual sincerity, “to judge by the last phrase your rogue demon hunter muttered at me, I haven’t a chance in whatever hell you want me to swear by of figuring it out. I’m more interested in what you people have been up to. Do you know I couldn’t even close last night? I could lose my license, not to mention too much sleep. Speaking of which, that’s what’s happening here now. They stayed awake all night, and now they’re draped all over the club, snoring away. It’s a real mess. You tell your boys that I’m this close to heading for that pitcher.”
“But…,” Cordelia said, trying to imagine wall-to-wall club patrons, slumped in chairs, leaning on one another, faces on the tables. She sat at her desk, idly scrolling through the Dailynews.com Web site’s headline page. “Why?”
“That’s the sixty-four-zillion-dollar question, isn’t it? That’s what you’re supposed to find out, doll. Whatever’s going on out there has gotten them seeking safe haven in here. Not too many of those around this city.” In the background, she heard water running. Significant water, splashing into a significant container.
She very much suspected he was running a bubble bath.
“Can’t you tell what’s got them scared?” she asked. “You’re Mister Empathy Demon and all.”
“Cordelia, sweetie,” he said, then briefly hesitated, a moment during which she heard water splashing. “That’s only if they’re singing. As it happens, I’ve cut the power to the stage equipment. There’s only so much one fella can take—you know what I mean? Even now I can feel them out there. Most of them are having bad dreams. They’re all angry at something…and I’m not sure any of them know why. Brrr!” he made an exaggerated shuddering noise.
“What?” she said intently, taking her hand off the computer mouse. “Did you feel something clueful—?”
“Need more hot water,” he said, distracted. “Tell you what. Give me a little music. If you’ve got any clues lurking around in there, maybe they’ll jump out at me.”
“Since I’m Vision Girl and all, you mean,” Cordelia said, not quite bitter. As much as they tore her up, they served a purpose. And usually that was okay; usually there was a balance. Usually they didn’t come in batches that left her such a mess that she’d even cancelled a reading.
“Cordelia…music, honey.” He must have shifted impatiently; she heard the gentle lap of water.
Music. Cordelia glanced at Angel—lurking by Wesley, his shirt buttoned, his breakfast blood in hand, clearly driving Wesley mad—and gave Lorne the wordless theme to the old Batman TV series. “Da-na-na-na-na-na—”
“Stop!” Lorne shouted, literally shouted. “Hang up!”
Cordelia removed the phone from her ear, giving it a frown. “But—”
She heard the distinct click as he broke the connection.
And then another kind of connection clicked in, the kind that ripped through her head and left scant clues in its wake. “No!” she said. “Nonononono no!” Enough already!
It came on, anyway.
Chapter Nine
“A whole flock of Slith?”
Angel stood by the front desk, behind which Fred was ministering to Cordelia, offering her water and…left-over sushi?
No doubt the only things in the fridge right now. Other than blood, of course.
“I don’t think they’re called flocks,” Wesley said.
“In fact, they gather in numbers so rarely, I’m not sure anyone has a name for what they form.” He glanced at his watch and then out the office doors, where the sunlight had paled. “We should call Gunn. It sounded like it would go down in MacArthur—busy place lately, isn’t it? And isn’t he training a neighborhood watch group this evening?”
“Something like that,” Angel said, feeling unhappier about it by the moment. “Never mind calling. Let’s go. We’ll call on the way.”
“It’s still—”
“I’ll ride in the back, under the blanket,” Angel interrupted him. “Let’s go.”
So close!
And yet not nearly close enough.
Kaalesh was dead, for nothing. Killed in a narrow L.A. alley as Khundarr’s team attempt to retrieve the warrior’s stone.
At least his deathstone was where it belonged, in a pocket dimension shrine.
Not here in the human world, ripping into the minds of demons benign and not so benign, building power into a feedback loop that not even the most mild of creatures could ignore. Stone to demons and back to stone again, which absorbed the amplified feelings and broadcast them yet again….
Eventually the stone would lose stability. Eventually, so would the demons.
Khundarr, too, could feel it beat against him…but his priestly protections let him feel it from afar, feel it without taking it into himself.
Unlike the wound the vampire had dealt him the night before. Holy Rhinitis, that still stung.
The disposition of the people based in the old Hyperion Hotel still eluded Khundarr. They’d killed his fellow priests…and yet tonight, upon recognizing him and upon seeing his own intent to quit the fight, they had not pressed him. They protected he who possessed the stone…with no apparent awareness of its existence. They’d never glanced toward it or made any special move to save it…they merely reacted the way any Tuingas demon might react were his home invaded and his fellow clan members threatened.
And yet they of anyone in this city seemed to have the wherewithal to figure things out. They had artifacts that suggested a certain scholarship of demon life. They had a vampire among them, one who should be able to feel the effects of the warrior’s stone—and to judge by his behavior the night before, certainly had not gone untouched by the stone’s emanations, as much as he seemed to fight the results. Odd. Most vampires embraced such experiences.
If only those humans would listen to him…he’d told them quite plainly what he wanted. If only they’d question this man they protected. If only they’d see that the city was in a dangerous turmoil, and that soon…there would be no saving any of the humans here.
So close.
And not nearly close enough.
Angel hated riding in the back.
The blanket never felt like enough protection, but it nonetheless kept him from seeing where they were, and when he should brace for a red light—or, more often, for a careless driver switching lanes in front of them.
“Is it dusk yet?” he asked.
“Not in the sixty seconds since you last asked that question, no,” Wesley said through obviously gritted teeth as the car idled in traffic.
It was stifling under the blanket even if he didn’t need to do the breathing thing, and thick wool was the only thing he’d found that would really block the light but it was scratchy; made him itch. Surely it would be safe enough just to peer out as the car accelerated into an intersection and turned. Surely…
“Is it dus—”
“Yes!” Wesley snapped. “Yes, it’s totally and completely safe even though only moments have passed. By all means, throw the blanket off and turn your face to the sky!”
A long silence filled the space between them.
“That’s not fair,” Angel told him, giving the blanket a baleful stare at the spot beyond which Wesley sat. “I don’t think it would have been so funny if I’d burst into flame, now, do you?”
A very heavy sigh came in response. The car made a few more turns, cornering gently; the smell of newly mown grass filtered in through the blanket while Angel contemplated the significance of failing to raise Gunn on his cell phone. As Cordelia would have quickly pointed out, it could mean only that Angel hadn’t dialed it correctly. Hard enough to use the things under normal conditions…even harder, huddled under a blanket in a moving car. Finally Wesley said, “It’s safe. And we’re almost there.”
Angel hesitated only a moment—no, he’s not kidding this time—and threw the blanket back as Wesley pulled in against the curb. As Wesley yanked the keys from the ignition and reached across the front seat to gather his gear—all crinkly in his rain suit—Angel put a hand out, a silencing gesture. The only way to be silent was to be still…so Wesley froze.
In the distance they heard what could have been the noise generated by a late soccer game.
Or not.
“Let’s go,” Angel said, and leaped out of the car. He’d brought the main gauche—handy as it had been—but in light of what had happened at Terminal Market, also a crossbow with plenty of bolts.
Wesley was armed likewise, and covered from ankle to neck with an outdoorsman’s rain suit, his motorcycle helmet under his arm. “Gore-Tex,” he’d said. “It breathes.”
Impressions Page 10
