Angel glanced up from the newspaper he’d been examining for more information on the bizarre murders.
Kate Lockley entered the office. Before Angel could even rise to greet her, she dropped a box of case folders on his desk. “These are copies,” she declared, “but I’ll want them back. All of them. Don’t make me regret this, Angel.”
“I won’t.”
“I forgot to mention one thing that puts us on the whole cult angle. One of the bodies was missing.” She held up a hand to stop the obvious question. “We found a pile of clothes in an alley, along with personal effects, white . . . bone powder, and a few patches of torn skin. For God only knows what sick purpose, somebody wanted those remains.”
Wanted? Angel wondered. Or needed?
Angel™
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John Passarella
An original novel based on the television series created by Joss Whedon & David Greenwalt
POCKET PULSE
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Historian’s Note: This story takes place during the first half of Angel’s first season.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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For my sons, Matthew and Luke,
because all the time in the world
would still never be enough
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Epilogue
About the Author
Acknowledgments
My thanks to Keya Khayatian for putting me on the map in Los Angeles as well as in Swedesboro. My editor, Lisa Clancy, and her assistant, Micol Ostow, for making it fun. My agent, Gordon Kato, who is as excited by stories as I am. Jean Wipf and Mary Moyer for their continued local support. Jeff Richards for the virtual beer. Max Etchemendy for speaking in tongues—i.e., the Latin lessons. And Andrea for all her love and that little push when I needed it.
Special thanks to Joss Whedon and David Greenwalt for creating Angel and to David Boreanaz, Charisma Carpenter, and Glenn Quinn for breathing life into the characters.
PROLOGUE
Elliot Grundy’s demon was becoming impatient.
Shouldn’t be too surprised, Elliot thought, patience being a virtue and all that. Even so, his computer’s modem had barely stopped grumbling over its irritatingly slow connection, when the demon demanded to know where she was. “Don’t worry,” Elliot assured him, although the “him” aspect was still up for grabs. Elliot wasn’t really sure the demon had a sex, but referring to the demon as “him” rather than “it” just seemed more natural. Well, once one got beyond the completely unnatural concept of dealing with a demon in the first place. “She’ll show.”
Elliot sat at his computer desk in the bedroom of his one-bedroom apartment wearing a sleeveless T-shirt stretched over his considerable paunch and threadbare sweatpants. He’d settled in with a party-size bag of cheese curls and a chilled two-liter bottle of Pepsi. In no time at all, the orange powder from the cheese curls coated his entire keyboard. Nothing his minivac couldn’t clean up later.
He fired up the Internet chat software and connected to the chat room, one of many he’d book-marked. Before actually logging in to the room, he started his text-to-speech utility program, which spared him the eyestrain he’d experience from staring at text on the screen for long hours. He assigned a generic male voice for room announcements. It was a singles chat room with no moderator. Come and go as you please. No censorship, no rules. Anonymous. His favorite kind. Next he assigned a male voice to his log-in name and a female voice to the woman’s.
Since this was a graphical chat room, he had to pick an avatar in addition to a log-in name. The available avatars ran the gamut from cartoon animals to caricatures of classic movie stars like Bogart, Mae West, and James Dean. All the avatars tended to have large heads over miniature and basically unmoving bodies, as if part of some bizarre casting call for the television series South Park. Elliot selected his avatar, the Frankenstein monster, and entered his screen name, FrankN9, to log in.
The chat room screen was a two-dimensional representation of a bar, with stools, tables, and booths. All the depth of Colorforms. An animated bartender avatar, endlessly cleaning a beer mug with a white cloth, served the nonhuman role of room announcer. “FrankN9 has entered the bar,” said generic male voice number one through the computer speakers.
Several avatars bobbed aimlessly around the bar, including a cowboy, a red bulldog, a showgirl with a high-kicking stick leg, and, demonstrating another annoying looped animation, a hula dancer. To avoid any confusion that duplicate avatars might cause, each had a name tag underneath it. Comic book–style word balloons appeared above the cowboy and the hula girl. “Hi, FrankN9.” Grundy hadn’t bothered to assign them text-to-speech voices.
Behind Elliot, the demon spoke in a voice that would have made Barry White think he had a shot with the Vienna Boys Choir. “Where is she?”
Elliot resisted the urge to look over his shoulder at the demon, whose neutral state he found a little unsettling, especially on a diet of cheese curls and cola. By rights, it shouldn’t have disturbed him since, as the demon had explained, he was only able to manifest on the physical plane with substance borrowed from Elliot, a result of their pact. “She’ll show,” Elliot repeated, wiping the orange residue from his damp palms onto his sweatpants. “She’s just . . . fashionably late, is all.”
Elliot typed a question for his avatar to speak in the digitized voice of generic male number two: “Anyone seen L8Dvamp?”
A few quick replies. Bulldog: “Not tonight.” Cowboy, in character, no less: “Out of luck, pardner.” Then the group resumed chatting among themselves, word balloons sprouting and popping like soap bubbles.
Behind Elliot, the demon rumbled ominously. He wasn’t quite sure how the demon made that sound, but it made his gut vibrate uncomfortably. Elliot cleared his throat, “Look, she’s probably just—”
“L8Dvamp has entered the bar,” said the voice of the announcer.
>
Elliot heaved a sigh of relief and began typing. His assigned computer voice came through the speakers: “Hi, L8Dvamp. I’ve been waiting for you.”
L8Dvamp came as her usual avatar, a lady vampire with black hair piled high, red eyes, a drop of blood dripping from each curlicue fang, wearing a shirred white dress with a plunging neckline. “Good evening, FrankN9,” spoke generic female voice number one. “Were you afraid I’d get cold feet?”
Having recently faced that precise fear, Elliot took a long slug of Pepsi. After a resounding belch, he said to the demon, “Annoying bitch. Deserves whatever happens to her.” But he typed, “Never entertained the thought.”
A small window popped up in the middle of the screen. The message read, “L8Dvamp has invited you into a private room.” Next to it were two buttons. “Accept” and “Decline.” Elliot uttered a sigh of relief. Good, she’s skipping the preliminaries. He clicked on “Accept,” then said to the demon behind him, “What I tell ya, big guy? She can’t resist our collective charms.”
“Proceed,” the demon instructed.
A new window overlaid the bar. This one had a two-dimensional love seat in one corner and a brass bed in the other. Things could get kinky in here, if the chat turned into a computer sex session, but Elliot had other plans. Besides, L8Dvamp’s avatar had already wobbled over to the love seat. He leaned forward, his cheese curls all but forgotten, and typed his end of the conversation into the keyboard: “So . . . ready to meet in the real world?”
“You really think we’d make a good couple?”
“Remember, my psychic told me I’d have a serious relationship with a Pisces, and you’re a Pisces. Seems like fate.”
“Okay, but one favor first.”
“Crap! What now?” Elliot said. But he typed, “Anything. Name it.”
“Describe yourself again,” she said in the robotic approximation of human speech, “so I’ll recognize you when we meet.”
When, he noted. Not if. “Just last night I asked you to describe your dream guy. You said it was amazing how close I fit that description.”
“Yes. And that seemed like fate too.”
“Okay. Describe that dream guy again.”
“Mid-twenties. Athletic build. At least six feet tall, dark blond hair, blue eyes, natural tan.”
Elliot was five-eight with rust-colored hair and a few acne skirmishes around a pale, round face. His skinny arms bracketed a pear-shaped body. Elliot began typing: “I’m six-one . . .” Then he turned to face the demon. He had to, so he could get the rest of the description right.
Standing less than an arm’s length behind Elliot’s chair, the demon looked like nothing more than a man-shaped lump of yellow wax about six feet high. The demon had no facial features and only spatula-shaped hands and feet, no fingers or toes. But now the waxy shape stretched up to a height of six feet one inch. The head sprouted numerous spikes, that flopped over and became blond hair. Blue eyes appeared and seemed to focus on Elliot. Nostrils and a gaping maw opened, then sculpted themselves into a narrow nose and full-lipped mouth. The lumpy wax surface took on the consistency of skin over an enviable musculature and finally deepened in color to a surfer’s tan. As the demon continued to resolve into a human shape, complete with fingers, toes, and body hair, Elliot finished typing the demon’s physical characteristics into the private room, followed by a question. “Well?”
“Picture’s worth a thousand words.”
“Meaning?”
“If we’re gonna meet, I need to be sure. Do you have a Web camera?”
“Great,” Elliot said to the demon. “She wants to see your mug.”
“Do it,” the demon said, his perfect teeth flashing.
Elliot sighed. “Think you should put on some clothes first?”
“Right,” the demon said, extending his arms. Elliot’s clothes would never fit, so the demon created his own illusion: basic white shirt, jeans, and boots.
Elliot turned back to the computer and typed. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”
“Ha-ha.”
“Hold on. I really want to meet you before it gets too late.” Yes, Elliot thought. I have a very impatient demon breathing down my neck. The chat room had an option for cameras and video-conferencing, which was too formal a term in this situation. Elliot lifted his spherical camera off the top of his monitor and passed it to the demon, who held it before his face. Elliot turned the camera on through the software. In moments, a postage stamp–size window appeared in the corner of his own monitor and he saw a grainy, color image of L8Dvamp. She had dark hair and a plain-looking face, accentuated with dark red lipstick.
“Thanks for being so understanding, FrankN9.”
He switched off the video link. “No problem, L8Dvamp. Where should we meet?”
“I’m at CyberJoe’s,” she told him. “How soon can you get here?”
CyberJoe’s was a new Internet coffee bar located in West Hollywood off Melrose. At one time it had been a popular dance club, with an encircling upper tier that looked down upon an expansive dance floor. Although the balcony level had probably once been at eye level with the obligatory spinning mirrored ball, the tables and booths that had replaced the balcony now allowed for more intimate conversations. While the interior architecture hadn’t been overhauled extensively, the mirror ball was long gone and the music—now piped through camouflaged speakers—was electronic, New Age, and subdued. Booths and tables everywhere sported computers with sleek and expensive flat-panel displays. The stairway and balcony railings were outlined in blue and yellow neon lights, perhaps to simulate information coursing through the place and out into the world at the speed of light. Otherwise the lighting was as muted as that of a posh restaurant late in the evening, but instead of candles casting a warm glow on the faces of the customers, flat-screen monitors bathed the computer acolytes in a ghostly pale aura.
For a place that had once vibrated with dance music cranked up well beyond the hearing-impairment threshold, CyberJoe’s became, on occasion, eerily quiet. The only sound emanating from the tables of actual Internet researchers tended to be a steady clacking of keys. So the managers of CyberJoe’s, in addition to supplying over thirty varieties of coffee and tea, had instituted in-house computer trivia challenges and chat night topics to foster camaraderie among their clientele, having lost sight of the simple fact that it was hard for patrons to interact while staring into a computer display.
Ginger Marks (a.k.a. L8Dvamp) agreed with Eddie (a.k.a. FrankN9) that the best way to interact with each other would be to leave CyberJoe’s and go for an evening stroll. They walked for a while in comfortable silence. Ginger couldn’t help glancing over at him every couple of moments, then smiling. “I have to say,” she told him. “You’re exactly how I pictured you.”
Eddie smiled, taking the compliment in stride, almost as if he’d expected it.
Ginger thought he was simply too good to be true—exactly as she’d pictured her dream guy, in every detail. Yet her first photographic impression of him as he walked through the door of CyberJoe’s and greeted her was that his nose was a little too thin for her liking, his eyebrows a tad too bushy. Then, within moments, those same features seemed just right. He still looked basically the same as he had a half hour ago . . . only better. Was it a trick of the imagination? she wondered. Nobody’s appearance changes just because you want it to. “So what about you?”
“What about me?”
She grinned, spread her hands expansively, causing her silver bracelets to clink together. She wore a wine-colored blouse and black Capri pants. Around her neck was a pendant in the curved H shape of the Pisces glyph. “Am I exactly how you envisioned me?”
“Physical appearance isn’t nearly as important to me as what’s on the inside.” He flashed a dazzling white smile, took her hand in his, and kissed it. “But I must say you are delightful in every way.”
She laughed. “Why, thank you, Eddie. It’s strange. I want to keep calling yo
u FrankN9, or at least Frank.”
“That’s better than plain old Frankenstein.”
Several teenage boys were walking down the street, intentionally banging into each other, perhaps reminiscing about a mosh pit. One gave another a playful shove in the back and started to run away, toward Ginger and Eddie. The others took off after him. Eddie grabbed Ginger and pulled her aside, shielding her from the stampede of youth. “Hooligans,” he said.
“Just kids goofing off.”
Eddie glanced over her shoulder, down a narrow side street. Then he looked deep into her eyes in a way no other guy ever had. The intensity of his gaze actually gave her chills, made her a little weak in the knees. He was incredibly attractive and athletic, and he seemed so passionate. She wasn’t sure exactly what was coming over her, but she knew she had every intention of giving in to it.
He said softly into her ear, “Mind if we step off this expressway for a moment? I have something . . . important to tell you.”
Lost in his deep blue eyes, she nodded once.
After he led her a few steps into the alley and placed both hands on her shoulders, she found her voice again. “Okay. We’re alone now. I seriously hope the important thing you’re about to say is not that you’re married.”
He chuckled. “No. Actually, it’s not something I want to say. It’s something I’ve wanted to do all night. And I required a little . . . privacy.”
She tilted her head back as he leaned down for the kiss. “Oh . . . I understand completely.”
As his hands slid across her shoulders, their lips met. After only a moment, she felt the moist tip of his tongue and parted her lips. “Ginger,” he whispered, “I’m afraid you don’t understand at all.”
ANGEL ™: avatar Page 1
