“Breathing is overrated,” Angel had observed. But now he thought the rain suit looked easier to move in than his duster, which, zipped for protection, suddenly seemed a little restrictive.
Better than a hidden spitball in his clothes. They’d have to do a spitball inspection after this one regardless. Maybe they could even have a party.
It was a dark thought, matching the sudden change of his mood, the emotions that seemed to build with the night. Not again…
They ran into the park and followed the curves of Wilshire Boulevard, which split the park more or less in two—the lake on one side, pavilions and open space on the other, trees scattered all around.
“Of course,” Wesley said, panting and gesturing at the park with his crossbow. “Slith like the water. But still, it makes no sense—”
“There!” Angel interrupted, pointing toward the northeast area of the park. A white-pillared pavilion, a flurry of activity. Dark blobs, running back and forth, crouching…cringing. Human in movement, if not in shape. The Slith were harder to spot in the growing dusk.
They angled in from the side, hunting for a crossfire position—but the pavilion faced a triangle full of trees, giving widespread and copious cover to the Slith. As Angel and Wes grew closer they heard Gunn urging the teens to take cover, and it was then that Angel understood the dark blobby nature of their appearance.
They all wore black plastic garbage bags.
Gunn was the biggest, tallest garbage bag among them, and the first to spot Angel and Wesley. “It’s about time!” he called, grabbing the arm of a young man who seemed determined to charge off into the trees to stomp some Slith. Half of the teens seemed to be of the same mind, and the other half cowered against the pavilion. One of them jumped up, shouting in alarm and flapping his garbage bag to dislodge what must have been a spitball.
So much for sneaking in unseen. Not that they’d had much chance of that in the first place. They hesitated just to the side of the pavilion, with one good tree between themselves and the as of yet unseen Slith—although there was plenty of evidence that they were here. Spitballs on the ground, the repeated poot of another blowgun in use, scuffling movement back the trees.
“What did you do?” Wesley said with some exasperation, hesitating at the edge of the field of fire. By then, all the teens were watching them; some waited for them to save the day, but most seemed barely under Gunn’s control, ready to do their own fighting in spite of the odds.
“Do?” Gunn repeated, offended. “Do? I thought fast, that’s what I did! There we were, the neighborhood watch, out cleaning up the park—you know, good deeds, bonding, getting a clean park out of it on top of that?—and these things came down on us. I got ’em gathered and covered up, that’s what I did.”
“What did you do to the Slith, that’s what I want to know,” Wesley said, persisting. “This just isn’t like them.”
“You’d better check your reality meter, English, because as far as I can see, this is like them. You gonna help us or not?”
Behind him, another of the teens jumped up, panicked, hitting at her garbage bag poncho while her friend tried to stop her. “Don’t, you’ll touch it!” the second girl said, grabbing at the hands of the first. “Just stay low!”
“Do as she says,” Gunn snapped. “We’ll deal with this.”
Anytime now. Angel moved restlessly in the faltering light, cocking and loading his crossbow…and aware that whatever had driven the Slith to such fervor was also driving at his own senses.
“This just isn’t right.” Wesley declared, looking at the trees that hid the enraged Slith. He jammed his motorcycle helmet on, his face covered by the visor and his hands jammed in his pockets. With the rain suit zipped up tight against his throat, he was spitball-proof from head to toe. He stepped out between the trees and the pavilion and said more loudly, “This isn’t right.”
Not right that the whole park should reek of anger, emotions none of the humans seemed the least bit aware of. Emotions that Angel would begin to believe came from within if he hadn’t had the evidence of the Slith before him. Meek Slith, retiring Slith, never-gather-in-a-group Slith…
Emotions that left him torn enough, uncertain enough, that he couldn’t bring himself to confess them to the others. Not when they’d already had quite enough of that.
Wesley called, “We know something’s bothering you—driving you to behave this way. We don’t want to see you hurt. Please, leave these people alone and go back to your, er…homes.”
No response.
Or was there? Hard to tell in this light, even for a vampire’s eyes…but had the spitballs stopped?
Some deep part of Angel didn’t want it to be so. Some deep part of him wanted to wade into those Slith demons and take them apart at the seams. Never mind the crossbow—just straight to the source. Bashing Slith against trees, against one another, their little stick legs breaking—
Stop it. He closed his eyes, took what would have been a deep breath.
“There, you see?” Gunn was telling the kids.
“No big deal. Wesley’s gonna talk them to death. And if anyone can do it…”
Wesley said to the silent trees, “We don’t know what’s going on, but I promise you, we’re trying to find out. We’re trying to make it better. If you’ll only go back to your homes and stay there until we have a chance…”
For a long moment, no one moved. No one said anything. It was just Wesley, standing out in the open in his rain suit and motorcycle helmet. No scuffing, no flying spitballs, no puff of a blowgun in use. The Slith, decisively retiring in nature, probably knew as well as Wesley that this group melee was far from the norm.
Gunn said decisively, “Sinthea, Tyree—you two are in charge. The rest of you aren’t, so don’t try to be. It’s time for a good strategic retreat, and you’re gonna take it.”
“Naw, Gunn, we want to take care of these things,” one of the young men said.
“They don’t need taking care of. They’re angry, we’re on their turf, and it’s time to leave. Unless you got some nice armpit poison of your own to pass around?”
“He’s got that, all right,” one of the girls mumbled, and they all gave a nervous laugh.
Wesley pulled off his helmet and faced the pavilion, taking a few steps closer to it. From the trees, mostly silence. A little rustle. Maybe they’d actually been shocked into halting their barrage. As Wesley kept saying, it wasn’t in their nature.
But then, only Angel knew just what they’d been feeling.
“Is everyone all right?” Wesley asked. “No one got hit in all the confusion?” He glanced at the ground, which was littered with little slimy paper balls. “It’s a good thing that poison degrades so quickly, or we’d be here all night picking these things up.”
“The little Muppets weren’t really close enough to hit anything except by chance,” Gunn said. “I think most of it landed right about where you’re standing.”
“What if it hadn’t?” The girl named Sinthea stood in front of the others, armed with a sort of sullen bravery. “What if one of those things had hit us? And I don’t even wanna know if they’re living in the reservoir.”
Wesley said dryly to Gunn, “I take it you’ve been training them for another sort of neighborhood watch than is usually meant.”
Gunn gave a one-shouldered shrug. “What do you think?”
“Only in L.A., that’s what I think,” Wesley said. He turned to Sinthea. “The poison is a neurotoxin, and it acts quickly. It interferes with the body’s functions and causes convulsions, a disruption of breathing and heartbeat, and can in some cases cause death.” He tipped his head to regard her a moment, and then admitted, “In most cases, actually.”
Sinthea said to Gunn, “He’s the one who reads, right?”
More gently than Angel expected, Gunn said, “We all read. But Wesley does most of the research. I wouldn’t have known we needed protection from the spitballs without it.”
Althea
looked back at the bushes as if considering the Slith and the danger they’d been, and then gave a decisive nod. “I’ll think about it,” she said, and turned back to the other teens, gathering them up like a shepherd.
“What—?” Wesley asked.
“Been trying to convince them to take all the advantages we can get. That means reading up on some of these things instead of just coming out and being tough.”
“Ah,” Wesley said, with the slightest of smiles—looking touched, actually.
Angel didn’t care. Angel was reeling in being set up for a good fight and not getting it, and in the reverberations of emotion all around him, the emotion-that-wasn’t-his…but had become his. The Slith, too, had been dealing with that; something within him still refused to believe they’d been talked down so easily. Something in him didn’t want them to have been talked down so easily.
Or maybe Wesley’s outfit had simply amused them out of their snit.
He said, “This is more than just a couple of strange incidents. This is…” fury and the need to attack and fight back and revenge and Wesley giving him a strange look…“I mean, we need to do something before something happens that we can’t stop in time.”
Gunn gave him a flat stare. “You think?”
Attack and fight back and—Angel felt the change come over him, couldn’t stop it. He didn’t want to stop it. In that instant, he didn’t even try. He let it in, let the rage fill him…he turned on Gunn with all the frustration and roiling emotions that echoed around the park with no one but him to lodge in. He turned with his speed and his power and saw the astonished flash of understanding on Gunn’s face just at the same time he saw a single remaining Slith crouch by the closest tree and raise a blowgun to its broad mouth. And he launched himself at Gunn, reaching, reaching…
…reaching……and snatched the little missile out of the air just before it landed on the skin of Gunn’s neck.
The landing was nothing of power or anger or grace. The landing was a belly flop that rattled him even with no breath to lose.
“Angel!” Wesley said, somehow managing to make it sound like a questioning demand instead of just a demand. Angel, still stretched his full length upon the ground, didn’t fail to notice where Wesley’s loaded crossbow pointed. Neither did the teens exclaiming in the background.
The Slith scampered away into the night, leaving his blowgun at the base of the tree and his maniac giggle lingering on the air.
Eyes on the crossbow, Angel opened his hand so Wesley could see the spitball, waiting for Wesley’s quiet sigh of relief before he relaxed entirely himself.
“Gee,” Gunn said from directly behind him. “For a moment there I thought you’d really turned on me. I mean, for a moment—but no, you were just using those demon reflexes of yours to save my life, weren’t you?”
Angel heard the dark sarcasm behind the words; he didn’t rise to them. He didn’t have anything to say to them. So he said simply, “Yeah. That was it.” Then he looked at the spitball, and at the sudden unbidden twitch of his fingers, and asked Wesley in his most casual voice, “So, how bad can it be?”
Wesley lowered the crossbow entirely, coming to crouch by Angel. He gave the spitball a somber look—as if he could discover some crucial fact by looking at it more closely—and used the crossbow tip to nudge it out of Angel’s hand. He ground it into the dirt with his toe, and then said with a certain amount of false cheer, “Well, on the one hand, it’s not on that short list of things that will kill you.”
“And?” Angel said through slightly gritted teeth, watching the twitch move up his arm.
Absolutely no comfort at all, Wesley said, “On the other, you might wish that it had.”
“Grea—” Great. But he never finished the word, for his head snapped back and his spine whipped into an arch so tight, it cracked. Blood from his bitten tongue coated his mouth and lips while pain scribed lightning across his brain. Great. Strong hands took his head, kept it from beating against the ground. Words reached his ears, garbled and meaningless and fading.
Wracked with pain, his own body tearing itself apart, Angel’s last thought was relief. For that moment, the pounding anger lifted. For that moment, he knew again what was him and what was other.
For that moment, he was free.
He choked on a laugh, and the darkness overtook him.
“I’m telling you, he laughed,” Gunn insisted. His voice reached Angel’s ears through a filter of muffled distortion.
“I rather doubt that,” Wesley said, also sounding as if he were speaking through a glass of water. “Even if he’d wanted to, which I can’t imagine, he was hardly capable.”
“Oh, really? And how capable was he of attacking me? Or do you rather doubt that, too?” When he wanted to, Gunn could really put a British spin on his words.
Numb as he was, Angel felt a familiar lump in the mattress beneath him and knew he was back at the Hyperion Hotel, in his very own room. To judge from the smell, someone was thoughtful enough to have a glass of blood nearby. Probably Cordelia. He’d have to tell her thank you, just as soon as he could open his eyes and open his mouth and the remnants of Slith poison weren’t coursing pain through his veins. Old blood coated his mouth…his own, and it tasted terrible. But his bitten tongue was already healing; he thought he might have the feeling back in his toes.
A wave of warning flushed through his body; every muscle clenched tight in spasm. He kicked somebody. Tighter…tighter…he thought his back might break…muscles screaming…release.
“God!” Cordelia said, tears quite audible on the edge of her voice. “How long is this going to go on?”
“I don’t have any information on that,” Wesley admitted, not sounding terribly concerned. “People don’t generally last this long. But it seems to me the spasms are easing. We do know it won’t kill him.”
Cordelia sat on the bed; she’d probably been the one he kicked off in the first place. “Oh, and because we know it won’t kill him, it doesn’t matter that he’s going through this?”
As muzzy as his thoughts were, Angel pretty much expected the silent response. He knew Gunn was thinking about the moment Angel had turned vamp on him. He knew Wesley had seen it too.
In utter disgust, Cordelia said, “Men are such pigs.”
Gently, Wesley said, “I’m afraid we also have other things on our mind. Important things.”
With reluctance, Cordelia said, “Because you think he was going after Gunn.” She shifted on the bed. “I wish I hadn’t just said that.”
Gunn’s voice didn’t have any of her reluctance, just a hard edge of anger. “I know it.”
“Gunn, he saved you.”
Entirely unconvinced, Gunn said, “He came for me. He just changed his mind along the way. Got distracted, maybe.”
Definitely, Angel was regaining control of his toes. Not that they’d do him any real good in a fight, but it was a start. And probably he could even have said something, anything, to let them know he was awake. Or getting that way, anyway.
But he didn’t. He listened.
Cordelia said slowly, “It’s true…he’s not right. He hasn’t been right. It’s more than just this faux Angel thing. Whatever’s going on with these other demons…I think he’s part of it. It’s getting to him, too.”
“Then we’d better stop whatever’s going on. Before it’s too late, if you get my drift,” Gunn said. Still hard. Always hard, when it came to the demon lurking within Angel.
Then again, so were they all. If Angel ever lost his soul to Angelus again, not even Cordelia would hesitate to stake him. Maybe especially not Cordelia.
“I’ll leave stopping whatever up to you for now,” Wesley said. He sounded distracted, the way he did when his mind had drifted away to another problem. “I’ve got to see if I can translate what that Tuingas fellow yelled at us. They’ve clearly got a beef with the faux Angel, and as long as we’ve been pulled into the problem, it behooves us to figure out why.”
; “Behooves us,” Gunn repeated, and snorted. “I guess it does at that. Well, translate fast, Wesley. It’s morning now, but that party hearty demon night is gonna come up fast.”
They drifted away from him, off to their own missions. And for a while, Angel drifted away from them, letting his preternatural healing abilities wash the rest of the Slith poison from his system. He got his toes back and more, and then there came a moment when he realized he wasn’t as alone as he thought he was.
Someone turned the page of a magazine. Someone who was evidently just as able to realize he was back among the land of the functioning even though he hadn’t—quite—opened his eyes yet. Cordelia said, “And then there’s these two sisters who have their own show on the Discovery Health Channel. Okay, they dress kinda JCPenney, but look at them! What’s not to admire? They’re both respected doctors, they’re pretty, they’ve got the sisterhood thing going, and they get to talk about sex and be paid for it.” There was an obvious pause, after which she said, “Paid for talking about it, I mean.”
“I knew that,” Angel said, not quite ready to open his eyes.
“Did you?” she said, obviously not referring to the sisters.
That did it. He looked. He found her sitting in an overstuffed chair not far from the bed. It hadn’t been in the bedroom before now, but she seemed quite at home in it, curled up with the magazine propped on her knees and the black chopsticks tucked behind her ear—not actually a bad strategy to keep Wesley from tap-tap-tapping them all to insanity, a state that seemed just around the bend, anyway. “Did I,” he repeated flatly.
She put the magazine down against her legs, losing her place without noticing. “Go after Gunn.”
He could all but see the fine line stretching out before him, that on which he had to balance. Truth…but not too much of it. Not enough to shatter the trust they were rebuilding. “I might have. I’m not sure.”
She regarded him somberly. “That’s not good.”
Impressions Page 11
