UNSEEN: THE BURNING

by Nancy Holder

  Buffy gave her a look. “How many boys can you think of who would admit to being interested in their grandmother’s hobbies?”

  Willow nodded. “True.” She added, “And yet, how many boys can you think of who would give up a chance to learn something that might someday allow them to turn invisible and visit the girls’ locker room?”

  They shared a moment, and Buffy said, “Are you thinking of Xander?”

  Willow grinned back at her.

  Buffy said, “See what you two can figure out. Maybe there’s some other kind of finder’s spell she can perform. Whatever we do, we gotta keep moving forward.”

  “Wish us luck,” Willow told her, and went back to Doña Pilar.

  Buffy watched Willow disappear back into the small room off the kitchen. She hadn’t been invited in, but she understood why. Willow was perfectly willing to use her Wiccan abilities on Buffy’s behalf, but Buffy had never really expressed any curiosity about trying any of that stuff herself. Her approach was much more basic—punch, kick, stake, dust.

  So she wandered back out of the big kitchen, through the formal dining room with its dark wood table that would seat two dozen easily and the ancient tapestry hanging on the wall over the huge sideboard, back through the elegant main entryway. She reached the main doorway at the same time that Elfredo arrived there. She smiled at him.

  “Upstairs safe?”

  “No worries,” he said.

  “That’s where I’ll be, then,” she said. “If you’re wondering.”

  “Thanks.”

  She headed up, then made the right turn toward her room. Arriving there, she sat on the edge of the massive antique bed and looked at the telephone on her nightstand. She knew she had to make a call. She was in Angel’s town, and there was the possibility that she had brought something with her, something that liked to crack people open like walnuts and eat the insides. Well, maybe that was an exaggeration—there had been no eating that she was aware of. Anyway, she knew he was right—she didn’t know her way around L.A. anymore, not in the ways that mattered. With any luck, whatever had been stalking Salma had remained back in Sunnydale, and wouldn’t even be an issue here. But if it became an issue, she’d need Angel on her side.

  She picked up the phone, hands trembling just a little, and dialed the number of Angel’s office. The line rang once, and then was picked up. Buffy’s heart felt large in her throat.

  “The number you are calling has been changed,” a computerized voice told her. “The new number is—” Buffy scrambled for a pencil and paper, both conveniently provided in the nightstand’s top drawer. Just like a hotel, she thought. She scrawled out the number the voice had given her and hung up the phone.

  Looking at the number, she thought it seemed familiar. She stared at it for a few moments before she realized why. It was Cordelia’s number. That was strange. Angel and Cordelia? No, couldn’t be . . .

  She picked the phone up again and dialed Angel’s cell phone number. After a few rings, she got the message saying that he either had the phone turned off or was not answering. She put the phone down again. Looked around her at the lovely room, paintings on the walls that would look great in her mother’s gallery, carpet so rich and thick someone could sleep on it.

  The de la Natividad family owned a big house. There were many people in it.

  So why do I feel so lonely here? she wondered.

  No easy answer came to her.

  Angel squealed to a stop outside the 77th Street Police building. Greg Preston threw his door open and climbed out, ashen-faced. “You always drive like that, Angel? Keep my card handy, you might need me to get you out of some tickets.” The attorney straightened his threadbare tweed jacket and tugged on his tie. The collar and cuffs of his white shirt were frayed, but it was clean.

  Angel looked at him with a wry smile, but said nothing. Preston wiped his brow with one hand and led the way inside.

  Angel wanted to see Rojelio Flores again now that he had a better idea of what was really going on. If Flores was telekinetic, he had to know about it so he could control his abilities as long as he was stuck in here. Angel could try to prove he was innocent of the murder he’d been charged with—but not if the man didn’t survive his incarceration. And if he was as out of control here as Carlos had been at home, there was every chance that he might not.

  So he’d picked Preston up at his office and brought him to the jail so that he could bypass normal visiting hours again. He had called Cordelia’s apartment while en route, and she had filled him in briefly on the library situation. She stressed that there didn’t seem to be any rush, and he knew that the Flores case had a certain amount of urgency. Satisfied that she and Wesley were fine, he had turned his phone off again so he could take it into the jail.

  As soon as they entered the building, Angel could sense that there was something different in the air this time. He practically had to wade through the tension in hip boots. The guard who signed them in—the same guy who had been chatty with Preston before—didn’t say two words to them. His lips were clamped together, his jaw set. A vein in his temple twitched. He held his pen with fingers so rigid his knuckles were white.

  They were escorted into the visitation area by a different guard, who kept glancing this way and that as if expecting a sudden attack. Someone else was dispatched to bring Rojelio Flores down.

  When they were more or less alone, Preston turned to Angel. “What’s up in here tonight?” he whispered. “Everybody’s as jumpy as my cat in a room full of combat boots.”

  Angel didn’t answer, but the tension had crept inside him like a bad smell. An electricity jittered in the air. His tongue tasted like copper. The taste threw his mind back for a moment to his evil days, hunting and drinking for sport. Hunting humans.

  He shook off the memory, but not the sense of impending disaster. This place wasn’t right, today. He had to fight the urge to leave, by telling himself that if he could get to Flores maybe he could forestall whatever was about to go wrong.

  But he was too late.

  This time of the evening, there were inmates in the activity areas. They played cards, argued over TV shows, immersed themselves in books. Others were still finishing dinner. No one was in a big hurry to get back to their cells, but they all knew it was coming.

  The 77th Street Headquarters jail was only a temporary detention center, not a full-scale prison. The inmates here were believed to be guilty of a variety of crimes, but had not yet been convicted of their charges. A small percentage were people who had been convicted of misdemeanors, and would serve their short sentences at the jail rather than being transferred to a prison. So while security was tight, it was not as rigid as they would experience after conviction and sentencing.

  Rojelio Flores sat in one of the activity areas, flipping the pages of a book that Isabel had sent him. He couldn’t focus on the words. He gritted his teeth and massaged his jaw and neck, trying to relax.

  On TV, a woman was trying to become a millionaire by answering a series of questions that proved only that she possessed a wide range of trivial knowledge.

  Rojelio glanced at the screen for a moment, then moved his gaze away from the television and toward the book in his hand.

  At that instant, the TV—which was bolted to the wall, wired for cable, and contained within a heavy screened cage—ripped itself from its bolted moorings. Television and cage both erupted away from the wall as if torn by some monstrous force.

  They landed on the floor in between two rows of plastic chairs. On impact, the TV exploded, shards of glass flying everywhere. Several inmates were cut by flying glass, with more injured by the sudden crush of people moving to avoid it.

  Rojelio moved away, shocked, and was swept into a mob of frightened, angry men. The fury and terror surrounding him was itself nearly overwhelming; added to that the stress of being imprisoned for a crime of which he was innocent, and it was almost too much for him to bear. He began to shake, and bile rose from his stom
ach into his throat. He began to see black spots, and his legs buckled.

  I can’t fall, he thought. If I collapse, I’ll be trampled.

  With a feeling of despair, he thought of his wife and son, and prayed to God to spare him, if not for his own sake, then for his family’s.

  Sunnydale

  Everybody knew it was a suicide mission.

  There was only one way to get Del DeSola’s attention in any meaningful fashion. The man had no family he cared about. He didn’t have any employees that he seemed to particularly value.

  He loved oil.

  And the things it could buy him.

  To reach Del DeSola, one had to hit him where it hurt.

  He had a couple of oil fields on the outskirts of Sunnydale. Derricks pumped day in and day out like shorebirds pecking at the sand for insects. The smell of the raw oil was thick and the air felt greasy.

  The Cobras pulled up in two black SUVs and a Cadillac Eldorado, maroon with white trim.

  Nicky de la Natividad got out of the Cad. The others looked at him like he was a crazy man. He was painted like some kind of ancient warrior. Lines on his face and his shirtless chest. He wore baggy black jeans, but his feet were bare. A gold disk lay against his chest, hanging on a leather thong.

  He hadn’t spoken on the way over.

  The others had been loud and boisterous. This was a big night, a night that was going to have consequences for all of them for a long time to come. They were excited, nervous, scared, happy. They laughed and joked, traded insults and quips.

  Nicky sat through it all, staring straight ahead. He was already somewhere else.

  The oil field was surrounded by a high chain-link fence. It covered several acres of dusty flatland. Up against the fence were tall weeds and taller stalks that would be revealed in the morning light—if they were still there, come morning—to be sunflowers. There was no full-time guard there, just a patrol that came by on a semi-regular schedule, every couple of hours. There was really nothing there that anyone was likely to steal.

  But the Cobras weren’t there to steal.

  Los Angeles

  One of the inmates, a man named Arthur Berndes, clapped a hand over his neck where a long shard of glass had lacerated him. Blood oozed between his fingers. He bent down and picked the hunk of glass up from the floor. He turned it over in his hands. There was one broad end, two inches wide. It tapered at the other end to a narrow point. He jabbed it into his sleeve, tearing the fabric. When he had succeeded in freeing a rectangular piece of fabric about eight inches long, he wrapped it a couple of times around the wide end of the glass.

  As soon as the TV fell, guards came rushing into the activity area. They warned everyone away from it while they brought in a broom and a trash can to sweep up the mess. Instinctively they seemed to know no inmate had done this to the TV, but they wanted to avoid precisely what was happening.

  Arthur Berndes was in jail, basically, because he was a terrible driver. He racked up ticket after ticket. Speeding, reckless driving, endangerment. He shoved the tickets into his glove compartment and forgot about them. When he’d been stopped again for making a right turn from a left turn lane, cutting off two other lanes of traffic and causing a fender bender, the officer who detained him ran his license, discovered all the outstanding tickets, and brought him in.

  He’d been in for three days. He hadn’t slept more than thirty minutes in that time. He had barely eaten. He was scared, exhausted, hungry. In the dormitory-style cell he shared with sixteen other men, things had been moving around by themselves. Arthur Berndes, whose paranoia bordered on the psychotic, believed that he alone was the target of this strange activity.

  Arthur wanted out.

  Over the past week, the bizarre phenomena had made most of the other prisoners feel the same way. No one was eating or sleeping right. Everyone was tense, on edge.

  Everyone was ready to explode with the violence of a picture tube striking concrete.

  Arthur stepped close to one of the guards, who was bending over with a dustpan to pick up bits of glass and plastic, and he buried the pointed end of his glass knife in the man’s ribs.

  The guard let out a scream.

  The other four guards in the room went for their guns.

  Someone threw a chair.

  Inmates pressed in on the guards, wielding furniture, pieces of glass, fists and feet.

  Two shots rang out, almost drowned out by the yelling, the din of motion and fear. One inmate fell.

  Then the guards were overwhelmed, their guns taken away. The prisoners were armed.

  Throughout the facility, Klaxons wailed.

  Chapter 12

  ANGEL AND PRESTON FOUND THEMSELVES ALONE.

  All the cops in sight were grabbing weapons and rushing off toward the detention facility. One remained visible, monitoring the doors electronically. He looked nervous.

  “What’s going on?” Preston asked.

  “Breakout,” Angel offered. “Riot, maybe.”

  “Should we be here?”

  Angel nodded toward the rest of the building. “You’d rather be in there?”

  Preston looked around. He could only see the one cop from where he was. There were no inmates, no immediate danger. “I guess this is as good a place as any.”

  “You stay here, then,” Angel said. “I have to get to Flores.”

  “Angel, you can’t—”

  But Angel was already out the door.

  There was only one guard in sight, and he was busy with the doors. Angel assumed he was trying to make sure that no one in the central detention facility could get out. But he also wanted to keep the doors open for officers going in.

  Six hundred police officers worked in the Headquarters complex. When it became apparent that the jail had erupted in a full-scale riot, many of those on duty armed themselves, strapped on body armor, donned helmets, and went to help restore order.

  Angel moved in with them. On the way, he saw a guard station where an LAPD windbreaker hung on a hook. He snagged the jacket and tugged it on. Sufficiently disguised, he continued.

  Flores is the key to this, he was sure. His telekinesis has finally pushed everybody over the edge. But this is only likely to make it worse, and if it gets worse, the chances of him surviving the night are slim.

  Angel was afraid that someone would pinpoint Rojelio Flores as the source of the commotion. Someone would finally see that things only happened when he was within a certain distance, a given radius. Someone would decide that the only way to bring it to a stop was to take him out.

  That was, if he even survived the attempts to bring the riot under control. Angel believed that Flores was probably in the thick of things, which put him in the line of fire.

  He had promised Isabel and Carlos Flores that he would help Rojelio.

  To do that, he had to keep the man alive.

  Inside the detention facility, things happened fast.

  The newly-armed inmates took the guards in the activity area hostage. Some of them began immediately to work on a list of demands, in exchange for which they would release their prisoners. Others went out to liberate their fellow inmates, carrying weapons and, in one case, dragging along a bound guard as a guarantee.

  Inmates started fires in wastebaskets.

  They flooded into one guard office, emptied the contents of filing cabinets and desks onto the floor, and lit the paper.

  Smoke filled the corridors.

  Ceiling-mounted sprinklers kicked in, dousing some of the fires but soaking everyone.

  The omnipresent sirens were deafening.

  Blinded, wet, rattled by noise, even inmates who wanted nothing to do with the riot were shaken, scared.

  In the office, there were more guns and riot gear. Prisoners outfitted themselves.

  None of them, if asked, could have said why they were rioting. Conditions weren’t as squalid as they were in the state prison system. This was no San Quentin. The building was new and modern. The
restrictions on the inmates were minor. It was just the weeks of fear and tension, bubbling over into madness. Mass hysteria.

  And once started, not easily stopped.

  Angel pushed through a heavy glass door. He hoped no one would notice that he wasn’t carrying a gun. He wanted to get Rojelio Flores to safety, not shoot anybody.

  There were several helmeted guards coming down the smoky hallway toward him. The acrid smoke didn’t hurt Angel’s eyes, and he could see them quite clearly, see their grim determination and smell their fear and anger. He ducked into a doorway to let them pass.

  As they did, he eyed them. They looked official. They carried shotguns. They had Kevlar vests strapped over their uniforms.

  But, as they passed by, he realized their uniforms were prison blues.

  They weren’t cops. They were inmates.

  And they were heading straight for Greg Preston.

  Angel was torn. He needed to get to Flores, to keep him alive.

  But he had brought Preston here. Left him alone in a vulnerable situation. Put him in harm’s way.

  Flores or Preston?

  Angel made his decision and ran.

  Sunnydale

  Nicky looked through the fence at the rigs bobbing up and down in the moonlight. He felt a moment’s hesitation. What if this doesn’t work? What if I do something wrong? But then he remembered the talisman, the burn mark that had completely disappeared by now, the boiling liquid he had swallowed like it was ice water.

  He had found all that he needed to know in an old book inside the false bottom of a trunk in the attic of his parents’ home. His abuelita, Doña Pilar, had once told him and Salma that the trunk had belonged to her mother. Apparently, she had never realized the trunk had a false bottom, nor had she realized her mother had catalogued some spells handed down from the Aztecs . . . including this one.

  And now, this was Nicky’s Night of the Long Knives. He was untouchable.