Just ahead of him the beetle demon lumbered along with its limp prey, heavy feet sloshing through the thin stream of foul-smelling water that trickled along the base of the sewer tunnel. A luminescent green substance—a bodily secretion of the Sakorbuk?—had been smeared in an uneven line on either side of the sewer tunnel, eerily lighting the way. A thought nagged at Angel: he was forgetting some vital bit of information regarding Sakorbuk demons.
Following at a discreet distance, he stayed to the side of the water stream so as not to alert the Sakorbuk to his presence by splashing. The demon seemed to have a destination in mind, and Angel suspected it would be some sort of hive or nest.
Less than fifty yards farther on, the Sakorbuk dropped its burden. Angel counted four beetle demons waddling around a T-shaped junction in the sewer system, all wearing roomy overcoats to disguise their appearance from casual observers. Besides the demons, Angel saw three more teenage victims, one of them a girl with dark hair and a pale complexion. Fortunately, all were breathing. They were all upright, propped against the tunnel wall, arms crossed over their heads, hands glued to the wall with some sort of sticky white substance, like the mother of all discarded bubble-gum wads.
Angel crept forward as the Sakorbuk he’d trailed hoisted the unconscious boy again, then engaged in some sort of chittering, mandible-clacking dialogue with the nearest beetle. The second one lurched forward and raised the boy’s arms, crossing his hands together against the wall. Once they were positioned, the first beetle raised its head, spread its mandibles wide, and emitted a sputtering, hissing sound. Clear fluid sprayed over the boy’s hands, quickly congealing and turning white. Now all four victims were lined up like ducks in a row. Or platters on a buffet table?
The lumbering beetle demons positioned themselves so that one stood in front of each victim. In unison, they tilted back their helmet-shaped heads and emitted a gurgling sound. Their pale throats swelled and seemed to split open vertically as something moist and maggot-white pushed its way out from the flap in each beetle’s skin.
Angel edged closer and saw they were teardrop-shaped beetle larvae, about a foot long. Each one plopped to the wet floor of the sewer tunnel and immediately inched its way, using twin rows of tiny feelers, toward the nearest victim. That was when the other bit of information clicked into place. The four larvae did not intend to feed off the teenagers’ flesh; they wanted to incubate inside them until the humans became beetles themselves. That was how Sakorbuks reproduced, for want of a better word. All the hormonal changes running rampant inside human adolescents was conducive to better beetle raising. The relationship was more parasitic than symbiotic, as the demon larva eventually took over the host body and mutated it into the adult Sakorbuk form. Angel had seen more than enough to know he’d better put a stop to it and fast.
Each of the four larvae had already made its way over a shoe and onto a pant leg of its chosen victim. Inch by inch, they worked their inexorable way up the bodies of the unconscious teens.
“You’re having a party and I wasn’t invited?” Angel said as he stepped into the center of the tunnel and approached the four startled beetles. The one Angel had trailed emitted rapid-fire clicks and squeals to the others. They clicked and shrieked in turn, moving to intercept Angel while their off-spring continued to climb.
All the commotion roused the teenage girl, who was farthest from Angel. She took one look at the glistening lump of translucent white flesh wriggling and squirming its way up her shirt and screamed loud enough to rouse the three other teenage hosts. In moments they were all yelling, kicking frantically, and flailing their bodies from side to side in an attempt to dislodge the climbing larvae.
Less than twenty feet away from them, the four Sakorbuk adults had surrounded Angel. He launched himself at the first one, the one he’d already injured, propelling himself off the side of the tunnel for maximum impact. Possibly because it was standing in water, unsure of its footing, or because it had been weakened by Angel’s earlier attack, it went down, rolling on its curved back. Angel somersaulted through the stream of foul water and took the open lane toward the teenagers. He would never be able to defeat all four adult Sakorbuks before the larvae committed whatever unspeakable atrocity they were attempting in order to obtain host bodies. He ejected a stake into his hand from his wrist device and swept it over the WWF boy’s chest, impaling and dislodging the larva. He whipped the stake, flinging the larva across the sewer tunnel, where it landed with a wet splat. But in a moment it simply rolled over and scuttled across the tunnel again, returning to its chosen victim.
“Talk about a one-track mind,” Angel said.
“Look out!” the WWF boy yelled a split-second before Angel was clubbed by a hard set of pincers, knocking him against the wall.
Angel lashed out with a snap-kick that staggered the beetle a step. Before it could recover, Angel swung a powerful backhand, stake point extended. It struck the hard carapace of the creature without penetrating it or even slowing it down long enough for Angel to rescue the teens.
“Oh, God!” cried the second boy in line. His neck was tilted all the way back as his designated larva moved from his shirt collar up to his neck, leaving a trail of slime on his throat.
The third boy gritted his teeth and continued to thrash, attempting to yank his hands free of the gummy substance gluing them to the sewer wall. His larva was also making its way up his neck.
The girl, farthest away, was the shortest of the four victims, which meant she presented the shortest climb for her larva. Hoarse from screaming in terror, her voice was now just a harsh whisper as she shrieked, “Jesus! Get it off me! Get it off!” Then, abruptly, she fell silent. The larva was over her mouth, which she had snapped shut at the last instant. She appeared to be foaming at the mouth until Angel realized the larva was secreting a bubbling substance across her lips and up her nostrils. Her eyes rolled back into her head, and her whole body relaxed, becoming completely slack, including her mouth, which sagged open. Immediately, the gelatinous larva began to squirm into the opening between her gaping lips. Apparently boneless, it would have little trouble working its way into her mouth and down her throat.
Angel reached down and pulled a dagger out of a hidden sheath in his boot. The blade was six inches long and perfectly balanced. He flipped it in his hand so he held it by the tip, prayed his aim was true, and flung it toward the girl’s face. The blade sliced through the fat, wriggling larva’s body, and the force of the throw dislodged it from the girl’s mouth with a loud, wet plop. The skewered larva rolled several feet down the tunnel end over end—or side over side, it was hard to tell—squirming on the knife blade until, finally, its glistening white body became dull gray.
Then Angel was struck down, but not before he saw the second boy in line actually attempt to bite a chunk out of the larva climbing onto his face. But it, too, started to froth. The third teen in the line whipped his head around, mouth clenched shut, but foam was already starting to form around his mouth.
Angel braced his hands on the wet floor of the tunnel and kicked out with both legs, knocking the first beetle into the others behind it. But unlike a row of dominoes or a set of tenpins, none of them went down. Their outer shell was simply too hard for him to inflict much damage. However, as that first beetle had tilted precariously backward, Angel caught a glimpse of the pale flap of skin under the mandibles, the flap that had expelled the larva. If the Sakorbuks had a tender spot in their armored hides, he was betting that was it.
Two of the beetles attempted to flank him. Angel caught the one on his left with an uppercut, striking directly under the flapping mandibles. Even as the blow landed, Angel flexed his wrist to eject his other stake. He drove it home, right into the center of the pale flap of skin. To his surprise his hand went in as deep as the stake was long and a sound not unlike a walnut in the wooden jaws of a nutcracker prefaced the creature’s head ripping free of its broad thorax. It toppled over with one last twitch of its antennae.
Before the beetle on the opposite side could react to the beheading, Angel drove an elbow into its head, rocking it back a step. A roundhouse blow with the stake went into the flap on an angle, but the damage was done. Angel backed up two steps, then launched a wheeling kick that ripped its head off. It fell with a crash.
While Angel fought the adult beetles, the WWF-promoting teenager he’d followed into the sewer waited until his appointed larva was just about to climb up his foot again. Then he launched a preemptive kick. The larva sailed away and slapped against the far sewer wall where it stuck for a moment before oozing down to the floor again. If not dead, at least it was stunned. The boy twisted sidewise and kicked high, managing on the third attempt to kick the larva off the biting boy’s face. The biter then attempted to use the same kicking maneuver on the third larva, even as its victim was slowly succumbing to the foam secretion. But the biter was woozy himself, having swallowed or inhaled some of the debilitating foam and his kicks weren’t reaching nearly high enough to help the third teen.
Now that Angel had dispatched two of the beetles by exploiting the weak spot in their armored skin, the third beetle protectively lowered its head and charged Angel, ready to wrap him within the grip of its widespread pincers. Angel dropped his remaining stake, jumped high and curled his body, grabbing one antenna in each hand, planting his feet against the beetle’s midsection, and using his own weight combined with the Sakorbuk’s momentum to take it down, roll it over him, and kick it away. And he never let go of the antennae. The creature’s immense weight pulled against the spiny antennae, and they ripped free of its head. It shrieked and thrashed on the floor of the sewer tunnel, then quivered, almost still.
“I love it when they roll over and play dead,” Angel said.
The last beetle, the one Angel had originally followed, collapsed on top of him as he lay in the sewer water, attempting to pin him or crush the life out of him. Angel whipped his head out of the way of snapping mandibles, even dodging a hacking, hissing stream of the clear glue-like fluid aimed at his eyes. His right hand swept the floor of the sewer, fingers struggling to get a grip on the stake he’d dropped. Instead he knocked it farther away, completely out of reach. Undeterred, he watched the snapping mandibles, waiting for the exact moment when they clacked shut. With lightning-quick vampire reflexes, his left hand shot out and clamped over them, squeezing and holding them shut. That gave him the leverage he needed to pry the creature’s head back just far enough to reveal the vulnerable flap of skin. Angel morphed into full vamp mode. This wasn’t going to be pleasant, and he thought he’d face it better as a vampire. “Open wide,” he said and rammed his fist into the flap. His arm went in up to the elbow and broke through the other side. His knuckles were coated with green blood and Sakorbuk brain matter.
Angel rolled the dead beetle off him and sprang to his feet. As he passed the quivering, antennae-challenged beetle, he paused just long enough to drive the heel of his boot through the exposed flap. The pincer arms fell back, the head sank into the water, and the creature lay perfectly still at last. Squashing bugs underfoot had never been so much fun.
The third boy in line had finally succumbed to the foam drug secreted by his larva. He slumped against the wall, his mouth gaping open. Well, it would have been gaping if not for the squirming larva bulging out of it. Angel reached in distastefully, slipping a finger into either side of the boy’s mouth to get a grip on the glistening, jiggling lump. He squeezed hard until it squirted out of the unconscious teen’s mouth into Angel’s hands. It wriggled in his grasp, like a greased piglet. Worse, it began to secrete foam all over Angel’s fingers. So he dropped it to the floor of the sewer tunnel and slammed his boot down on it. Its skin membrane ruptured, splattering viscous white goo all over.
The last two larvae were making determined progress back to their intended victims, but still a few feet shy. Angel retrieved his knife from the dead gray larva and made short work of slicing the last two right down the middle.
Finally, Angel hacked through the bonding agent that pinned the teenagers’ hands to the wall. Only the WWF teenager seemed fully alert. Although he had enough facial piercings to set off even the most forgiving metal detector, his wide-eyed look of fear caught Angel’s attention.
“What—what are you?”
Angel realized he was still in full vamp mode. No doubt the boy thought instead of being rescued he’d simply become prey for something higher up the demonic food chain than hell’s own tapeworm. We all have faces we don’t show the world, Angel thought. Some are just worse than others.
“What are you?” the boy repeated, edging away in terror.
“Believe it or not,” Angel said, “I’m a friend.”
The words hardly seemed to comfort the boy. The others began to stir. The larvae’s narcotic had probably induced a short-term stupor, incapacitating the victim just long enough for the larvae to squirm down the esophagus and set up shop in the stomach. Angel decided to make himself scarce.
“You should all be okay, considering,” Angel said. “But I wouldn’t advise loitering down here. I hear there’s strange stuff in the sewer.”
As he turned away, Angel shifted his features to look human once again, hiding the darkness that lurked within. Never before had his human face felt so much like a mask.
CHAPTER TWO
“I’m looking for . . . Angel?”
“This—this is Angel Investigations,” Cordelia said, having slammed her bottom desk drawer shut after hastily dumping the pile of Web design books into it as soon as the door started to open. Still not ready to tell Angel about her Web site plan, she was sure the computer books would be a dead giveaway. Or an undead giveaway, Angel being a vampire detective, after all.
“Have I come at a bad time?” asked the attractive auburn-haired woman, a curious and slightly amused smile lighting up her face.
“Wait a minute! I know you,” Cordelia said. She turned to Doyle, who had hopped down from his perch on the corner of her desk at about the same time she was dumping the books. He too had expected Angel to walk through the door and probably didn’t want to appear too relaxed after Angel had spent the better part of the evening in pursuit of the arcade demon. “Doyle, I don’t believe it! This is Chelsea Monroe.”
Doyle offered his hand, which the woman shook while he spoke. “A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Ms. Monroe. Any friend of Cordelia’s, naturally, is a friend of mine.”
“Doyle, you jackass,” Cordelia said. “She’s not my friend. She’s Chelsea Monroe . . . from L.A. After Dark.” She stared at him, waiting for recognition to dawn. Am I the only one in this entire firm who hears opportunity knocking?
“Now you’re just statin’ the obvious.”
Chelsea Monroe raised her hand to her mouth to cover a chuckle. She was model tall—obviously, since she’d been a runway model until three years ago—and wore an expensively tailored suit of shimmering gold that revealed a lot of cleavage and a lot of leg. Black heels and a matching clutch purse completed the outfit.
Cordelia sighed. “Doyle, if I lend you a dollar would you please buy your first clue. She’s the host—hostess—of the television show.”
“L.A. After Dark?” Doyle guessed, and Chelsea gave a brisk nod.
“Late night,” Cordelia said. “Her local ratings are right up there with Leno and Letterman. Entertainment industry reports, exposés, studio confessions, insider gossip, club tours, everything. Any of this ringing a bell, Mr. Leprechaun?”
“No, but I’ll take your word for it.”
“Chelsea Monroe,” Cordelia said again, with a wide grin and a shake of her head. “And you’re here to do a story on me—I mean Angel. You are here to do a story on Angel, aren’t you? It’s about time this firm got some first-rate publicity.” She frowned. “Wait—I said that last part out loud, didn’t I?”
“Loud enough to make the neighbors pound on the walls,” Doyle said, not above getting in his own little dig after the leprechaun comm
ent. “If we had any neighbors.”
Cordelia just ignored him and addressed Chelsea. “I’ll warn you right up front about Angel. He’s not much of a talker. World champion brooder, yes. But he’s a vam—I mean, a man of few words. Take my advice and . . . draw him out a little. You won’t be disappointed. He has presence, real presence.”
“Actually I’m not here to interview Angel,” Chelsea Monroe explained. “But I do have a proposition for him. Is he around?”
“He called not too long ago,” Doyle said.
“To say he was heading back. Should be here any minute,” Cordelia added, thinking, Actually, we thought you were him. “If you’d care to wait in his office, I could make you a cup of coffee or something.”
“Spectacular,” she said. “If you don’t mind. I’ll review my notes until he shows.”
“It’s a plan,” Cordelia said.
Chelsea looked around the office. Cordelia cringed, seeing the dingy office through a stranger’s eyes, all secondhand furniture and peeling file cabinets. But Chelsea just nodded. “I like the effect,” she commented. “Period ambience. Really captures the whole noir private detective genre so well.”
“That’s exactly what we were going for,” Cordelia said, immensely relieved. “Wasn’t it, Doyle?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Doyle agreed. “Spade, Marlowe. We’re big fans.”
Chelsea entered Angel’s office, leaving the door open a bit.
Cordelia whispered to Doyle. “Did you notice? I’m sure it was Louis Vuitton.”
“Louise who? Oh, you mean Chelsea Monroe’s a stage name.”
“No! I’m talking about her outfit. I have an eye for these things. Not that it does me any good, since I can’t afford to buy clothes like that. Not that you’d care, but I’d swear that was a Prada bag.”
“Not that I’d care, no,” Doyle said. “Me, I’m interested in the real woman underneath all those fancy clothes.”
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