The Devil You Know 22/22
Disclaimers and previous parts can all be found here.
Part Twenty-Two
He was not on fire. Based up that fact alone, this experience was already head and shoulders above the one that he had been expecting. Lindsey rolled over onto his side, coughing and wheezing until his bruised lungs remembered the ins and outs of breathing on their own and he no longer had to intervene every few seconds. The air was fresh and clean, so far from brimstone that to even think of it here seemed wrong. This was not what Lindsey had been expecting, and so he opened his eyes and sat up.
It was an exquisite office with exquisite furniture, complete with a large cherry-wood desk that cam with an exquisite brunette perched onto the corner. She looked at him expectantly as he narrowed his eyes and dug his fingers through carpet deep and soft enough to sleep on. “Instead of a near-death experience, I get you? Thanks lots, but I already knew that I was going to hell.”
Cordelia made an exasperated huffing noise and hopped down from the desk, straightening her clothes as she went. She wore corporate chic with a dash of pure Queen C thrown in, including a top that Lindsey swore she had chosen solely to highlight the fact that she had not needed a Wonderbra since the age of fourteen.
“Will you listen to yourself?” Cordelia asked. “And I thought that I could bring the drama queen. You’re not dead, Lindsey. Not even close to it. You’ve just been pegged a good one on the head, jeez.”
If Lindsey raised his eyebrows any higher, they were going to give up altogether and crawl directly into his hairline. “Point stands. Sorry, Cordelia, but even my subconscious is not this twisted. I want off the train.”
“Sorry, no can do. I’m not a hallucination or a figment of your imagination.” Cordelia strode over to him and knelt down so that they were on the same eye level before she extended her forefinger towards the ceiling. “This is the real deal, Lindsey. I’m here as a messenger for the Powers That Be. They figured that you wouldn’t listen unless you were a captive audience and had a familiar face to yell at. Your reputation for being thickheaded precedes you.”
Lindsey’s entire body went rigid at the first mention of the Powers That Be. “That’s funny,” he snapped. “The last time I listened to the Powers That Be I would up burning in hell, exactly like I would have if I hadn’t listened to the Powers That Be. I’m just going to cut out the middleman and tell them to fuck off this time. Is that all right with you?”
Getting that message out was the best thing that Lindsey had done all day, and he hadn’t even needed An’s connections to the Powers That Be to do it. He pushed himself up to his feet, ignoring the wobbling of various limbs as they told him that he might want to rest a bit longer, and began looking around for the conveniently absent door. “Is there a way out of here, or am I stuck with you until someone splashes water on my face back in the real world?”
Cordelia remained crouched on the carpet, looking up at him with an expression of such sadness and compassion as was terrible in its sincerity. Lindsey thought that he hated her in that moment, and slowly forced his hand to uncurl from its fist. At long last Cordelia sighed and stood, reclaiming her position on the edge of the desk.
“Your butt’s going to stay right here until the message has been delivered,” she said. “Get mad if you want, but you know those are the rules. What you do afterwards is your choice.” Cordelia gestured towards a comfortable-looking chair that Lindsey was certain had not been there before. “Come on, at least sit down. You look like ass, and watching you do laps is making me dizzy.” Lindsey paused in his pacing long enough to glare at her. Cordelia sighed and dropped her hand back into her lap. “Fine, have it your way. The message is still going to be delivered whether you like it or not. Lindsey, you can’t blame the Powers for what happened to you.”
“The hell I can’t!” Lindsey exploded, wheeling back around on her. He leaned forward until their faces were almost touching. Cordelia did not move back by so much as an inch. “We had a deal, remember? I get their hero playing nice again and wearing his cape rather than punching a time clock for Wolfram and Hart, and you get me out of my contract.” Lindsey took a step back, spread his arms wide, and smiled. He wondered if that smile was as painful to watch as it was for him to make. “Check your scorecard, Cordy. I held up my end of the deal. I held it up so well that I died in the line of duty for it.” Lindsey stabbed his finger into Cordelia’s face, and she still made no attempt to move away. “Your bosses are the ones who fell short when it was time to start handing out checks.”
Except for the small noise of irritation that Cordelia always made when Lindsey called her ‘Cordy’, she had not moved or changed expression through his entire tirade. Her normal clientele might find that look of gentle concern comforting rather than infuriating, but it put Lindsey in a mind to either flee or fight. “Lindsey, the Powers That Be did exactly what they said they were going to do. Wolfram and Hart has no more claim on your soul that I do.”
Lindsey spun around, outrage, but Cordelia held up her hand to stop him. “Hear me out. You have been completely released from your contractual obligation to Wolfram and Hart or any of her sister companies. That was the deal. Body and soul, you are a free man.” Cordelia’s voice began to rise in volume as the compassionate expression evaporated. She looked almost angry in its place. “What the Powers That Be didn’t do-what they couldn’t do, I might add-was wipe the slate clean of all the things that you did before, while, and after you were under their loving wing.” A touch of the sadness returned to Cordelia’s face as Lindsey gaped at her. “You were a terrible person then, Lindsey, and I can’t say that a few good whacks with the epiphany stick has turned you into a great one now. I’m sorry, but no amount of legalease or deal-making can protect you from that.”
That chair was looking like a better option by the second. Lindsey sank down into it, leaning his head against the backrest and closing his eyes. “So is that it? I have to say, I can see why your friendly bosses didn’t mention this sooner. If I had known that I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t, I would have had a lot more fun.”
Cordelia sighed. “God, you are such a doofus,” she snapped. Upon hearing the familiar term, Lindsey opened his eyes and looked at her. “And you of all people should know this. It’s called redemption, dumbass.”
While Lindsey stared at her until long after the point when she should have delivered the punch line, Cordelia continued to gaze at him with that hopeful, expectant expression, as if he was an exceptionally slow student that she could still not bear to give up on. “I spent a year fighting the good fight,” he said. Cordelia snorted. “By proxy, same thing. I still wound up in hell. Pick another pep talk.”
“The two of you are so alike sometimes, I swear it makes me want to run straight into a wall.” Lindsey did not need to ask who Cordelia was referring to. He narrowed his eyes into slits. Cordelia did not notice and went on. “This is not something that you can buy, Lindsey. It’s not something where you can tally up a nice little row of checks in the plus column and, bam, you’ve won. In fact, thinking that way in the first place probably means that you’re not even within sight of the right track.”
Lindsey did not think that he was going to be unnarrowing his eyes at any point during the conversation. “In order to escape hell, I no longer have to care if I escape hell.” A wave of dizziness came over him, making him shake his head and rub his eyes as the world went wobbly around the edges. “That’s not at all an impossible set of instructions.”
Cordelia huffed. “Again with the density. Not instructions. Not a paint by number process here. Just remember, behaving yourself for the sake of material gain or to get into someone’s pants…bad. Actual remorse…good.” She reached out and gave Lindsey’s shoulder a squeeze. If he didn’t know better, he would even say that she had grown fond of him. “You’re a smart guy. You’ll figure it out.”
“Remorse. I know the definition of that word, darlin’, but that’s about the best that you’re going to get.” Lindsey shrugged with an easiness so practiced that Cordelia might not even have seen through it. Being something like remorseful for his own inability to feel remorse for the things that he had actually done, he was pretty sure that counted as a pathology entirely on its own.
“Which has escaped the attention of no one, believe me. Funny thing about the human race, though. You guys never seem to find a low so deep that you can’t scrabble back from it.” Lindsey was on the verge of asking Cordelia when the human race had become ‘you’ rather than ‘we’ when another wave of dizziness struck him, doubling him over and making the walls shiver and dance. When he looked back up, Cordelia’s eyes were solemn.
“Helping that little girl,” she continued. “Trying to help both of those little girls, that’s on the right track. I might consider forcing me to sound like that ‘Touched by an Angel’ chick to be an unpardonable sin, but luckily for you that’s not on the Powers’ list of unforgivable offenses.” Cordelia tried to crack a smile, but it faltered before it could touch her eyes. “When you get back, make sure you tell him to stop being a moron and knock off the self-pitying crap already, because neither one of you are alone in this.” The smile finally reached Cordelia’s eyes as she stepped backwards. “Oh, yeah, you’re not a bit player anymore, Lindsey. Eyes are on you.” Lindsey thought of the middle-aged Shirley Temple and the woman with the hair the color of flax. His eyes widened, but as his dizziness grew the room was wobbling more by the second. Cordelia pushed some of his hair back from his forehead. “So there. Messages delivered, ball back in your court.”
Lindsey forced his focus back onto the woman in front of him, even as it grew harder by the second and caused a ringing to echo through his head. “And working for someone who would move little girls around like chess pieces, that doesn’t bother you?”
He was not so dizzy that he could not see the sudden swift way that Cordelia’s eyes narrowed or the coldness that entered them, so different from the Cordelia that Lindsey was used to seeing. “Pay attention, Lindsey,” she corrected. “One: the Powers That Be can’t do everything. It only comforts people to think that they can. Two: choice is everything.”
Lindsey nodded as if he understood and tried to grin, gagging for a moment as he was caught straddling one world and the other without really belonging to either. There was still one thing that he needed to say to Cordelia before he left, one thing that he had needed to give vent to for some time. “Getting me sent to a private hell dimension just so you could protect your cover story? You can be a real bitch sometimes, Cordy.”
She shrugged. “And you can be a horrible over-actor. We’ll call it even.” Lindsey thought that her expression looked wistful, but the world was spinning too quickly and he was struggling too hard to stay for a few more seconds to be sure. Cordelia said, “I know it’s too much to ask for you to take care of him, but just try not to kill him, okay?”
Lindsey shivered, choked, and opened his eyes.
*
An moved through the darkness at a speed that no human could hope to keep up with. Luckily for Angel, An was not the only one who was so much more than human. He followed her by sight when it was available and by scent when she pulled too far ahead, finding it at times difficult to keep up but never quite losing the trail entirely.
An made no effort to hide, and the both of them knew that Lindsey had not had the time to take Alicia and Katie far. What happened next seemed in retrospect almost like fate. Angel arrived at the mouth of the alley in time to see Lindsey strike the blow that should have killed An instantly but didn’t, as well as the invisible force that she threw at him to hurl him back against the brick. More than anything he saw the way that Lindsey slumped down and did not move, his position eerily similar to the one that they had found his body in after the last major fight between good and evil.
An wobbled on her feet as she watched Lindsey slide down against the brick, a shocking amount of blood falling from her mouth and seeping around the edges of the wound. She did not fall, turning instead with the accuracy of a missile back towards Katie. The glow that danced across her skin had grown to envelop the sword as well, leaving Angel with no doubts as to what would happen if he were to grab for it, not while that same glow was covering Katie. Angel could smell the burned skin on Alicia from where he stood.
Angel’s feet wanted to take him over to Lindsey to check his pulse, but this was the very last time for him to worry about what he wanted to do versus what he needed to do. He only hesitated for a moment as he raced past instead, towards An. She was so close to Alicia and Katie that the two lights seemed to rise together and mingle as one. Alicia wore an expression of naked terror even as she refused to give up her ground, fear rolling off of her and making the air sweet, while Katie…Katie smelled like nothing at all.
Angel didn’t let his pace hitch even as the revelation alarmed him. He grabbed the end of the sword protruding from An’s back, ignoring the burn and the cuts being opened up in his palms as he whirled her back around. “Come on, no one likes a bully,” Angel grunted. He drew his fist back.
An took the blow directly upon her chin without even attempting to resist and flew back several feet, landing first on her back and then her side as she slid several more paces before coming to a halt. The sword twisted, drawing a shriek from An’s lips and even more blood before she pulled it free and threw it to the side. Angel realized with shock that she was going to get up again, fueled by that dark force that she had either invited in or had overtaken her, even as her legs were trembling like those of a newborn colt.
“Let me finish it!” An screamed at him. Beneath the glow, tears were standing out in their eyes. A tremor ran through her body, coupled with a slight change in her voice that made Angel pause. “For the love of God, let me finish it!”
An invisible hand identical to the one that had knocked Lindsey into the wall collided with Angel’s chest a bare second later with all of the force of a wrecking ball. Without anything that eh could see or fight touching him, Angel was thrown off of his feet and nearly out of his head, and sent tumbling through the air. He came back down on the pavement with a bone-rattling force that would have driven all of the air from his lungs if there had been that much there to begin with. Angel grit his teeth and didn’t wait for his vision to clear before he scrambled back up to his feet for another try. There was only one directive left that mattered to him: if one child was already past the point of no return then he could damned well save the other, or die trying.
Destroying the one, though, might even put the other beyond saving. Katie stepped around from her hiding place behind Alicia after a long moment of hesitation and walked towards An, shivering. She ignored Alicia’s futile attempts, aborted only when first her clothes and then her skin threatened to catch on fire. Alicia was sobbing openly, and Angel thought that she was only working up the nerve to rush after Katie and smother her with her own body if that was what it took, and to hell with the consequences.
While that was an admirable choice, Alicia was not the one in this situation who should be having to make it. Angel rushed forward and struck up against an invisible wall of air at the same time that Alicia did the same thing from the opposite direction. While Alicia shrieked and began pounding her fists against the barrier, Angel swore an oath that would have made paint fall from the bricks if there had been any there to begin with and began feeling for the place where it ended.
As he was doing so, Angel noticed that it was Katie rather than An who glanced his way with an apologetic look, barely visible through the glow, and Katie who had developed a nosebleed over the course of the past several seconds. She rushed across the last few feet of distance between she and An and linked their hands before the oldest girl could pull away.
The laws of nature abruptly rewrote themselves, like water changing course to accommodate a dam placed in its path.
Katie braced her legs far apart, seemingly preparing for a struggle, and wrapped her fingers around An’s hands so tightly that even at a distance Angel could see all of the tendons standing out in her forearms. The opalescent light covering both girls seemed to undulate and come alive, until Angel realized that it was actually flowing away from An and into Katie at a rate which grew faster by the second. After another heartbeat of time, An realized this as well. She began first to look angry, and then shocked, and finally outright terrified. By the time it came into An’s head to struggle, the light had abandoned them both, rising off of their bodies and swirling around them in a brilliant, self-feeding tornado. Though An had to outweigh her by at least forty pounds, Katie did not budge in the face of her struggles by so much as an inch. Her face held an expression of grim resignation that was terrible to see.
Angel knew what Katie aimed on doing, but just as it had been with Alicia a few moments before, he was determined that this was not a task which would be meant for her. “Katie!” Angel bellowed, hoping that her invisible barrier was not impervious to sound as it was to fists.
It wasn’t. She jerked and looked at him, her grip on An’s hands weakening and her eyes coming unfocused, as if Angel had yanked her without warning from the depths of a deep slumber. The air in front of Angel weakened until it felt more like punching against sturdy wood rather than solid stone. Well, it was not as if he hadn’t crashed through his share of well-made doors over the years. Angel gathered his strength and slammed through the barrier in one mighty burst of effort just as An yanked her hands free from Katie’s grasp.
Katie wailed and dropped to the ground, though Angel would never know which action she was responding to. An swelled up in from of her, triumphant, as Angel stepped through light that rocketed around and through him without leaving so much as a mark, and she…split. A small tear opened at the crown of her head and then spread rapidly, letting out a roiling black substance like tar that had within a second had destroyed even the pretense of a girl. It was dark, and it was hulking, and it made the light all around them tremble and draw back in alarm.
Angel thought that if he were afraid of insects he would see a glittering set of mandibles and hear the fluttering of many sets of wings, or scales rubbing against one another if he were afraid of snakes. As it was, it hovered leeringly over Katie and was only the formless black of midnight with no hope of ever meeting the dawn.
It was a destroyer of children. Angel knew exactly what to do with it.
He reached through the back up to his shoulders, ignoring cold so fierce that it burned, until he bypassed illusion and found a neck that he could wrap his hands around. The thing twisted in his grasp, getting a read on him at last, and Angel saw fangs and flashing gold. In his ears came the sweet, seductive ringing of bells.
Angel twitched his hands in a motion that he had performed hundreds of times before and broke the thing’s neck. The bells were replaced with a sharp, sudden sound not unlike that of a jelly jar opening.
The light flared back to life, reaching its maximum in a super nova level of brilliance that left no one in the alley capable of seeing anything at all.
*
Angel was not certain how much time had passed when he struggled back into consciousness, except to note that dawn was still so far away that he could barely smell it on the air. From several yards off, he could hear Katie crying, and he went to her as soon as his head had cleared enough to allow it. Alicia was only beginning to stir; Lindsey was still as motionless as a stone.
Angle noticed that the glow had left Katie’s skin, leaving her looking like any other girl until he happened to glance into her eyes. He knelt beside her and gathered her up in his arms without a word. Katie turned towards him immediately, burrowing her face into his neck and crying harder when Angel began to murmur the soothing nonsense that had always quieted baby Connor during the too-brief time when Angel had had him. Connor had also calmed down when he was rocked, Angel remembered. Though it took him a moment to adjust to Katie’s larger size, he soon had the gentle, swaying rhythm down just right. The shoulder of his coat was soaked within seconds; no power on that earth or any other could have made him pull away.
“Hey.” Angel turned at the sound of Alicia’s voice and the feel of her hand coming down on his shoulder. A deep gash marked the skin above her right eyebrow from where she had fallen. “I’ll take her.”
“You’re burned,” Angel said, dipping his chin towards her arms.
Alicia looked down and seemed to notice the blisters rising on her skin for the first time. “Still. You should check on your friend. I’ll manage.”
“All right.” Angel hesitated a moment before he passed Katie carefully over to the arms of Alicia, who did not pause or even flinch before she took up the same rocking motion.
Angel did not need to pause by An’s body, human once more, and feel for a pulse to know that she was dead. He did it all the same, staying there long enough to brush her eyelids closed with the tips of her fingers. Likewise, he did not need to press his fingers against the crook of Lindsey’s neck to know that he was still alive, not while Lindsey’s heartbeat had been thundering through his ears every since Angel had woken up, but at the same time he kind of thought he did. Lindsey gasped and lurched into Angel’s hand a few seconds later.
Lindsey struggled to sit up at once, as if he expected to be thrown back into the fight before his head had even stopped spinning. Only Angel’s hands on his shoulders kept him from immediately lurching off for parts unknown. “Lindsey. Lindsey, easy.” Angel thought his voice was more soothing than any he had ever used on Lindsey before. It was probably lucky for them both that Lindsey was not fully conscious yet. “It’s over, everyone’s fine. Don’t try to move yet.”
Lindsey shook his head. Even in the dim light, Angel could see that his pupils were not focusing at the same rate. He leaned over Angel’s arm and threw up noisily on the pavement. Angel grimaced and turned his head away. “I’ll bet you’ve been waiting for the opportunity to do that for years.”
“I have a concussion,” Lindsey said, trying to shove Angel away from him. Angel didn’t allow it until he saw that Lindsey was going to stay put.
“You can self-diagnose that?”
Lindsey made a face and turned his head to spit before he answered. “I’m familiar with the symptoms.” He noticed the huddled figures of Alicia and Katie for the first time, and a few yards away from them the still body of An. “Did she…?”
“No.” Angel’s voice sounded heavy to his own ears. “We were able to prevent that, at least. I finished it.”
“Oh. Good.” Lindsey turned back to look at Alicia and Katie again. Even though every thought that Lindsey had was normally broadcast across his face, Angel could not read him now.
“Don’t try to move yet,” Angel cautioned as he pushed himself back to his feet. He waited until Lindsey sketched out a sarcastic salute that let Angel know he was not too badly injured. He pressed his hand to the back of his head and was scrutinizing the blood on his fingers when Angel left him.
Angel knelt back down in front of Alicia. “I’ll carry her back.” Though Alicia looked as if she wanted to argue, the pain was pulling all of the blood from her face. She nodded reluctantly. Katie weighed little enough that Angel was able to brace her against his hip and carry her with one arm. She put her head down on his shoulder while Angel walked back over to Lindsey and extended his free hand to help him back up to his feet.
Lindsey stared first at Angel’s hand and then his face, as if he wasn’t sure at first what was being offered. “No,” he said after a long moment. “I’m fine.” Lindsey pushed himself to his feet by bracing his hand against the wall and paused there for a moment, swaying. His eyes were closed and there was blood smeared across the back of his neck. “If I manage not to throw up again, I’ll be fine.”
“Suit yourself.” Alicia had walked up on Angel’s other side so that she could take Katie’s hand in hers. She barely glanced at either Angel or Lindsey.
Angel did not offer his help again, but on the long walk back he made sure that the pace remained slow enough for Lindsey to keep up without struggle. When Lindsey grew dizzy twice and had to grab at Angel’s arm to prevent himself from falling he still did not offer aid, though neither did he react to the wary, searching looks that Lindsey would flick over him each time that he had righted himself again.
Angel was unsurprised to see the scattered, dismembered corpses of demons where the battle had been, or the milling, triumphant forms of about a dozen teenaged girls. Every one of them still gleamed with sweat. The heady-sweet Slayer scent that Angel always associated with Buffy filled the air, though he knew at a glance that she was not in attendance. He began to turn Katie’s face away from the bodies before remembering that it wouldn’t do any good.
Willow walked up to him with a smile that lost none of its sweetness in spite of her looking uncertain as to how it would be received. “Hey, Angel,” she said.
“Hello, Willow,” Angel said, noticing as Lindsey’s swaying grew more pronounced. He put his hand out quickly to catch his elbow and steady him before he could fall. Lindsey’s answering look was neither friendly nor hostile.
A lanky brunette Slayer who could have been Fred ten years earlier rushed up to them, obviously still full of extra energy from the fight and unsure of what to do with it. “Is this her?” she asked without waiting to be introduced, craning her head so that she could make eye contact with Katie. “Hi! Don’t worry, we’re already looking all over the world for telepaths that can help train you. It won’t be any time at all before you’re able to throw on a pair of shades like any other normal-“
Katie turned her face back into the side of Angel’s neck.
“Beth,” Willow interrupted the girl gently. “Indoor voice, okay? Pretend we have walls. In fact, you should probably call ahead and let the others know that we’re going to need healing spells.” She paused and looked over the assembled group. “We’re going to need a lot of them.”
To her credit, Beth seemed to realize immediately that she had said the wrong thing. “Oh. Um. All right.” She cast a sheepish look at Angel. “If you know the name of her parents, we can try to find them for her. Giles has a computer/magic integrated database with Willow that’s, like, wow.”
“I’m her mother,” Alicia responded in a voice that did not speak well of the wisdom of arguing.
“Oh.” Beth glanced back and forth between Alicia and Katie, making note of their obviously different heritages. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”
“In every way that matters,” Alicia clarified, “I am her mother now.”
“Okay, so if you would just come with me for a minute…” Beth led away a clearly reluctant Alicia, who shot several glances over her shoulder at Katie as she went. Willow spared a final smile for Angel and followed them.
Angle shifted Katie so that she would be more comfortable and looked back at Lindsey, who had yet to reject Angel’s hand on his elbow. “Come on,” Angel said. “You can meet the old group.”
Lindsey followed without argument, though Angel thought that Willow might want to put a rush order on whatever magic she had planned. Otherwise, Lindsey might pass out in the street. “Not afraid I’m going to stab you in the back the minute you turn to make introductions?”
Angel paused and looked at Lindsey until he was clearly struggling not to squirm. “No,” he said finally. “If you stab me, you’ll do it in the front.”
Lindsey staggered, and Angel grabbed his arm again. In return, Lindsey did not shrug him away.
The End
And.
We.
Are.
DONE!
I need a drink.
Part Twenty-Two
He was not on fire. Based up that fact alone, this experience was already head and shoulders above the one that he had been expecting. Lindsey rolled over onto his side, coughing and wheezing until his bruised lungs remembered the ins and outs of breathing on their own and he no longer had to intervene every few seconds. The air was fresh and clean, so far from brimstone that to even think of it here seemed wrong. This was not what Lindsey had been expecting, and so he opened his eyes and sat up.
It was an exquisite office with exquisite furniture, complete with a large cherry-wood desk that cam with an exquisite brunette perched onto the corner. She looked at him expectantly as he narrowed his eyes and dug his fingers through carpet deep and soft enough to sleep on. “Instead of a near-death experience, I get you? Thanks lots, but I already knew that I was going to hell.”
Cordelia made an exasperated huffing noise and hopped down from the desk, straightening her clothes as she went. She wore corporate chic with a dash of pure Queen C thrown in, including a top that Lindsey swore she had chosen solely to highlight the fact that she had not needed a Wonderbra since the age of fourteen.
“Will you listen to yourself?” Cordelia asked. “And I thought that I could bring the drama queen. You’re not dead, Lindsey. Not even close to it. You’ve just been pegged a good one on the head, jeez.”
If Lindsey raised his eyebrows any higher, they were going to give up altogether and crawl directly into his hairline. “Point stands. Sorry, Cordelia, but even my subconscious is not this twisted. I want off the train.”
“Sorry, no can do. I’m not a hallucination or a figment of your imagination.” Cordelia strode over to him and knelt down so that they were on the same eye level before she extended her forefinger towards the ceiling. “This is the real deal, Lindsey. I’m here as a messenger for the Powers That Be. They figured that you wouldn’t listen unless you were a captive audience and had a familiar face to yell at. Your reputation for being thickheaded precedes you.”
Lindsey’s entire body went rigid at the first mention of the Powers That Be. “That’s funny,” he snapped. “The last time I listened to the Powers That Be I would up burning in hell, exactly like I would have if I hadn’t listened to the Powers That Be. I’m just going to cut out the middleman and tell them to fuck off this time. Is that all right with you?”
Getting that message out was the best thing that Lindsey had done all day, and he hadn’t even needed An’s connections to the Powers That Be to do it. He pushed himself up to his feet, ignoring the wobbling of various limbs as they told him that he might want to rest a bit longer, and began looking around for the conveniently absent door. “Is there a way out of here, or am I stuck with you until someone splashes water on my face back in the real world?”
Cordelia remained crouched on the carpet, looking up at him with an expression of such sadness and compassion as was terrible in its sincerity. Lindsey thought that he hated her in that moment, and slowly forced his hand to uncurl from its fist. At long last Cordelia sighed and stood, reclaiming her position on the edge of the desk.
“Your butt’s going to stay right here until the message has been delivered,” she said. “Get mad if you want, but you know those are the rules. What you do afterwards is your choice.” Cordelia gestured towards a comfortable-looking chair that Lindsey was certain had not been there before. “Come on, at least sit down. You look like ass, and watching you do laps is making me dizzy.” Lindsey paused in his pacing long enough to glare at her. Cordelia sighed and dropped her hand back into her lap. “Fine, have it your way. The message is still going to be delivered whether you like it or not. Lindsey, you can’t blame the Powers for what happened to you.”
“The hell I can’t!” Lindsey exploded, wheeling back around on her. He leaned forward until their faces were almost touching. Cordelia did not move back by so much as an inch. “We had a deal, remember? I get their hero playing nice again and wearing his cape rather than punching a time clock for Wolfram and Hart, and you get me out of my contract.” Lindsey took a step back, spread his arms wide, and smiled. He wondered if that smile was as painful to watch as it was for him to make. “Check your scorecard, Cordy. I held up my end of the deal. I held it up so well that I died in the line of duty for it.” Lindsey stabbed his finger into Cordelia’s face, and she still made no attempt to move away. “Your bosses are the ones who fell short when it was time to start handing out checks.”
Except for the small noise of irritation that Cordelia always made when Lindsey called her ‘Cordy’, she had not moved or changed expression through his entire tirade. Her normal clientele might find that look of gentle concern comforting rather than infuriating, but it put Lindsey in a mind to either flee or fight. “Lindsey, the Powers That Be did exactly what they said they were going to do. Wolfram and Hart has no more claim on your soul that I do.”
Lindsey spun around, outrage, but Cordelia held up her hand to stop him. “Hear me out. You have been completely released from your contractual obligation to Wolfram and Hart or any of her sister companies. That was the deal. Body and soul, you are a free man.” Cordelia’s voice began to rise in volume as the compassionate expression evaporated. She looked almost angry in its place. “What the Powers That Be didn’t do-what they couldn’t do, I might add-was wipe the slate clean of all the things that you did before, while, and after you were under their loving wing.” A touch of the sadness returned to Cordelia’s face as Lindsey gaped at her. “You were a terrible person then, Lindsey, and I can’t say that a few good whacks with the epiphany stick has turned you into a great one now. I’m sorry, but no amount of legalease or deal-making can protect you from that.”
That chair was looking like a better option by the second. Lindsey sank down into it, leaning his head against the backrest and closing his eyes. “So is that it? I have to say, I can see why your friendly bosses didn’t mention this sooner. If I had known that I was damned if I did and damned if I didn’t, I would have had a lot more fun.”
Cordelia sighed. “God, you are such a doofus,” she snapped. Upon hearing the familiar term, Lindsey opened his eyes and looked at her. “And you of all people should know this. It’s called redemption, dumbass.”
While Lindsey stared at her until long after the point when she should have delivered the punch line, Cordelia continued to gaze at him with that hopeful, expectant expression, as if he was an exceptionally slow student that she could still not bear to give up on. “I spent a year fighting the good fight,” he said. Cordelia snorted. “By proxy, same thing. I still wound up in hell. Pick another pep talk.”
“The two of you are so alike sometimes, I swear it makes me want to run straight into a wall.” Lindsey did not need to ask who Cordelia was referring to. He narrowed his eyes into slits. Cordelia did not notice and went on. “This is not something that you can buy, Lindsey. It’s not something where you can tally up a nice little row of checks in the plus column and, bam, you’ve won. In fact, thinking that way in the first place probably means that you’re not even within sight of the right track.”
Lindsey did not think that he was going to be unnarrowing his eyes at any point during the conversation. “In order to escape hell, I no longer have to care if I escape hell.” A wave of dizziness came over him, making him shake his head and rub his eyes as the world went wobbly around the edges. “That’s not at all an impossible set of instructions.”
Cordelia huffed. “Again with the density. Not instructions. Not a paint by number process here. Just remember, behaving yourself for the sake of material gain or to get into someone’s pants…bad. Actual remorse…good.” She reached out and gave Lindsey’s shoulder a squeeze. If he didn’t know better, he would even say that she had grown fond of him. “You’re a smart guy. You’ll figure it out.”
“Remorse. I know the definition of that word, darlin’, but that’s about the best that you’re going to get.” Lindsey shrugged with an easiness so practiced that Cordelia might not even have seen through it. Being something like remorseful for his own inability to feel remorse for the things that he had actually done, he was pretty sure that counted as a pathology entirely on its own.
“Which has escaped the attention of no one, believe me. Funny thing about the human race, though. You guys never seem to find a low so deep that you can’t scrabble back from it.” Lindsey was on the verge of asking Cordelia when the human race had become ‘you’ rather than ‘we’ when another wave of dizziness struck him, doubling him over and making the walls shiver and dance. When he looked back up, Cordelia’s eyes were solemn.
“Helping that little girl,” she continued. “Trying to help both of those little girls, that’s on the right track. I might consider forcing me to sound like that ‘Touched by an Angel’ chick to be an unpardonable sin, but luckily for you that’s not on the Powers’ list of unforgivable offenses.” Cordelia tried to crack a smile, but it faltered before it could touch her eyes. “When you get back, make sure you tell him to stop being a moron and knock off the self-pitying crap already, because neither one of you are alone in this.” The smile finally reached Cordelia’s eyes as she stepped backwards. “Oh, yeah, you’re not a bit player anymore, Lindsey. Eyes are on you.” Lindsey thought of the middle-aged Shirley Temple and the woman with the hair the color of flax. His eyes widened, but as his dizziness grew the room was wobbling more by the second. Cordelia pushed some of his hair back from his forehead. “So there. Messages delivered, ball back in your court.”
Lindsey forced his focus back onto the woman in front of him, even as it grew harder by the second and caused a ringing to echo through his head. “And working for someone who would move little girls around like chess pieces, that doesn’t bother you?”
He was not so dizzy that he could not see the sudden swift way that Cordelia’s eyes narrowed or the coldness that entered them, so different from the Cordelia that Lindsey was used to seeing. “Pay attention, Lindsey,” she corrected. “One: the Powers That Be can’t do everything. It only comforts people to think that they can. Two: choice is everything.”
Lindsey nodded as if he understood and tried to grin, gagging for a moment as he was caught straddling one world and the other without really belonging to either. There was still one thing that he needed to say to Cordelia before he left, one thing that he had needed to give vent to for some time. “Getting me sent to a private hell dimension just so you could protect your cover story? You can be a real bitch sometimes, Cordy.”
She shrugged. “And you can be a horrible over-actor. We’ll call it even.” Lindsey thought that her expression looked wistful, but the world was spinning too quickly and he was struggling too hard to stay for a few more seconds to be sure. Cordelia said, “I know it’s too much to ask for you to take care of him, but just try not to kill him, okay?”
Lindsey shivered, choked, and opened his eyes.
*
An moved through the darkness at a speed that no human could hope to keep up with. Luckily for Angel, An was not the only one who was so much more than human. He followed her by sight when it was available and by scent when she pulled too far ahead, finding it at times difficult to keep up but never quite losing the trail entirely.
An made no effort to hide, and the both of them knew that Lindsey had not had the time to take Alicia and Katie far. What happened next seemed in retrospect almost like fate. Angel arrived at the mouth of the alley in time to see Lindsey strike the blow that should have killed An instantly but didn’t, as well as the invisible force that she threw at him to hurl him back against the brick. More than anything he saw the way that Lindsey slumped down and did not move, his position eerily similar to the one that they had found his body in after the last major fight between good and evil.
An wobbled on her feet as she watched Lindsey slide down against the brick, a shocking amount of blood falling from her mouth and seeping around the edges of the wound. She did not fall, turning instead with the accuracy of a missile back towards Katie. The glow that danced across her skin had grown to envelop the sword as well, leaving Angel with no doubts as to what would happen if he were to grab for it, not while that same glow was covering Katie. Angel could smell the burned skin on Alicia from where he stood.
Angel’s feet wanted to take him over to Lindsey to check his pulse, but this was the very last time for him to worry about what he wanted to do versus what he needed to do. He only hesitated for a moment as he raced past instead, towards An. She was so close to Alicia and Katie that the two lights seemed to rise together and mingle as one. Alicia wore an expression of naked terror even as she refused to give up her ground, fear rolling off of her and making the air sweet, while Katie…Katie smelled like nothing at all.
Angel didn’t let his pace hitch even as the revelation alarmed him. He grabbed the end of the sword protruding from An’s back, ignoring the burn and the cuts being opened up in his palms as he whirled her back around. “Come on, no one likes a bully,” Angel grunted. He drew his fist back.
An took the blow directly upon her chin without even attempting to resist and flew back several feet, landing first on her back and then her side as she slid several more paces before coming to a halt. The sword twisted, drawing a shriek from An’s lips and even more blood before she pulled it free and threw it to the side. Angel realized with shock that she was going to get up again, fueled by that dark force that she had either invited in or had overtaken her, even as her legs were trembling like those of a newborn colt.
“Let me finish it!” An screamed at him. Beneath the glow, tears were standing out in their eyes. A tremor ran through her body, coupled with a slight change in her voice that made Angel pause. “For the love of God, let me finish it!”
An invisible hand identical to the one that had knocked Lindsey into the wall collided with Angel’s chest a bare second later with all of the force of a wrecking ball. Without anything that eh could see or fight touching him, Angel was thrown off of his feet and nearly out of his head, and sent tumbling through the air. He came back down on the pavement with a bone-rattling force that would have driven all of the air from his lungs if there had been that much there to begin with. Angel grit his teeth and didn’t wait for his vision to clear before he scrambled back up to his feet for another try. There was only one directive left that mattered to him: if one child was already past the point of no return then he could damned well save the other, or die trying.
Destroying the one, though, might even put the other beyond saving. Katie stepped around from her hiding place behind Alicia after a long moment of hesitation and walked towards An, shivering. She ignored Alicia’s futile attempts, aborted only when first her clothes and then her skin threatened to catch on fire. Alicia was sobbing openly, and Angel thought that she was only working up the nerve to rush after Katie and smother her with her own body if that was what it took, and to hell with the consequences.
While that was an admirable choice, Alicia was not the one in this situation who should be having to make it. Angel rushed forward and struck up against an invisible wall of air at the same time that Alicia did the same thing from the opposite direction. While Alicia shrieked and began pounding her fists against the barrier, Angel swore an oath that would have made paint fall from the bricks if there had been any there to begin with and began feeling for the place where it ended.
As he was doing so, Angel noticed that it was Katie rather than An who glanced his way with an apologetic look, barely visible through the glow, and Katie who had developed a nosebleed over the course of the past several seconds. She rushed across the last few feet of distance between she and An and linked their hands before the oldest girl could pull away.
The laws of nature abruptly rewrote themselves, like water changing course to accommodate a dam placed in its path.
Katie braced her legs far apart, seemingly preparing for a struggle, and wrapped her fingers around An’s hands so tightly that even at a distance Angel could see all of the tendons standing out in her forearms. The opalescent light covering both girls seemed to undulate and come alive, until Angel realized that it was actually flowing away from An and into Katie at a rate which grew faster by the second. After another heartbeat of time, An realized this as well. She began first to look angry, and then shocked, and finally outright terrified. By the time it came into An’s head to struggle, the light had abandoned them both, rising off of their bodies and swirling around them in a brilliant, self-feeding tornado. Though An had to outweigh her by at least forty pounds, Katie did not budge in the face of her struggles by so much as an inch. Her face held an expression of grim resignation that was terrible to see.
Angel knew what Katie aimed on doing, but just as it had been with Alicia a few moments before, he was determined that this was not a task which would be meant for her. “Katie!” Angel bellowed, hoping that her invisible barrier was not impervious to sound as it was to fists.
It wasn’t. She jerked and looked at him, her grip on An’s hands weakening and her eyes coming unfocused, as if Angel had yanked her without warning from the depths of a deep slumber. The air in front of Angel weakened until it felt more like punching against sturdy wood rather than solid stone. Well, it was not as if he hadn’t crashed through his share of well-made doors over the years. Angel gathered his strength and slammed through the barrier in one mighty burst of effort just as An yanked her hands free from Katie’s grasp.
Katie wailed and dropped to the ground, though Angel would never know which action she was responding to. An swelled up in from of her, triumphant, as Angel stepped through light that rocketed around and through him without leaving so much as a mark, and she…split. A small tear opened at the crown of her head and then spread rapidly, letting out a roiling black substance like tar that had within a second had destroyed even the pretense of a girl. It was dark, and it was hulking, and it made the light all around them tremble and draw back in alarm.
Angel thought that if he were afraid of insects he would see a glittering set of mandibles and hear the fluttering of many sets of wings, or scales rubbing against one another if he were afraid of snakes. As it was, it hovered leeringly over Katie and was only the formless black of midnight with no hope of ever meeting the dawn.
It was a destroyer of children. Angel knew exactly what to do with it.
He reached through the back up to his shoulders, ignoring cold so fierce that it burned, until he bypassed illusion and found a neck that he could wrap his hands around. The thing twisted in his grasp, getting a read on him at last, and Angel saw fangs and flashing gold. In his ears came the sweet, seductive ringing of bells.
Angel twitched his hands in a motion that he had performed hundreds of times before and broke the thing’s neck. The bells were replaced with a sharp, sudden sound not unlike that of a jelly jar opening.
The light flared back to life, reaching its maximum in a super nova level of brilliance that left no one in the alley capable of seeing anything at all.
*
Angel was not certain how much time had passed when he struggled back into consciousness, except to note that dawn was still so far away that he could barely smell it on the air. From several yards off, he could hear Katie crying, and he went to her as soon as his head had cleared enough to allow it. Alicia was only beginning to stir; Lindsey was still as motionless as a stone.
Angle noticed that the glow had left Katie’s skin, leaving her looking like any other girl until he happened to glance into her eyes. He knelt beside her and gathered her up in his arms without a word. Katie turned towards him immediately, burrowing her face into his neck and crying harder when Angel began to murmur the soothing nonsense that had always quieted baby Connor during the too-brief time when Angel had had him. Connor had also calmed down when he was rocked, Angel remembered. Though it took him a moment to adjust to Katie’s larger size, he soon had the gentle, swaying rhythm down just right. The shoulder of his coat was soaked within seconds; no power on that earth or any other could have made him pull away.
“Hey.” Angel turned at the sound of Alicia’s voice and the feel of her hand coming down on his shoulder. A deep gash marked the skin above her right eyebrow from where she had fallen. “I’ll take her.”
“You’re burned,” Angel said, dipping his chin towards her arms.
Alicia looked down and seemed to notice the blisters rising on her skin for the first time. “Still. You should check on your friend. I’ll manage.”
“All right.” Angel hesitated a moment before he passed Katie carefully over to the arms of Alicia, who did not pause or even flinch before she took up the same rocking motion.
Angel did not need to pause by An’s body, human once more, and feel for a pulse to know that she was dead. He did it all the same, staying there long enough to brush her eyelids closed with the tips of her fingers. Likewise, he did not need to press his fingers against the crook of Lindsey’s neck to know that he was still alive, not while Lindsey’s heartbeat had been thundering through his ears every since Angel had woken up, but at the same time he kind of thought he did. Lindsey gasped and lurched into Angel’s hand a few seconds later.
Lindsey struggled to sit up at once, as if he expected to be thrown back into the fight before his head had even stopped spinning. Only Angel’s hands on his shoulders kept him from immediately lurching off for parts unknown. “Lindsey. Lindsey, easy.” Angel thought his voice was more soothing than any he had ever used on Lindsey before. It was probably lucky for them both that Lindsey was not fully conscious yet. “It’s over, everyone’s fine. Don’t try to move yet.”
Lindsey shook his head. Even in the dim light, Angel could see that his pupils were not focusing at the same rate. He leaned over Angel’s arm and threw up noisily on the pavement. Angel grimaced and turned his head away. “I’ll bet you’ve been waiting for the opportunity to do that for years.”
“I have a concussion,” Lindsey said, trying to shove Angel away from him. Angel didn’t allow it until he saw that Lindsey was going to stay put.
“You can self-diagnose that?”
Lindsey made a face and turned his head to spit before he answered. “I’m familiar with the symptoms.” He noticed the huddled figures of Alicia and Katie for the first time, and a few yards away from them the still body of An. “Did she…?”
“No.” Angel’s voice sounded heavy to his own ears. “We were able to prevent that, at least. I finished it.”
“Oh. Good.” Lindsey turned back to look at Alicia and Katie again. Even though every thought that Lindsey had was normally broadcast across his face, Angel could not read him now.
“Don’t try to move yet,” Angel cautioned as he pushed himself back to his feet. He waited until Lindsey sketched out a sarcastic salute that let Angel know he was not too badly injured. He pressed his hand to the back of his head and was scrutinizing the blood on his fingers when Angel left him.
Angel knelt back down in front of Alicia. “I’ll carry her back.” Though Alicia looked as if she wanted to argue, the pain was pulling all of the blood from her face. She nodded reluctantly. Katie weighed little enough that Angel was able to brace her against his hip and carry her with one arm. She put her head down on his shoulder while Angel walked back over to Lindsey and extended his free hand to help him back up to his feet.
Lindsey stared first at Angel’s hand and then his face, as if he wasn’t sure at first what was being offered. “No,” he said after a long moment. “I’m fine.” Lindsey pushed himself to his feet by bracing his hand against the wall and paused there for a moment, swaying. His eyes were closed and there was blood smeared across the back of his neck. “If I manage not to throw up again, I’ll be fine.”
“Suit yourself.” Alicia had walked up on Angel’s other side so that she could take Katie’s hand in hers. She barely glanced at either Angel or Lindsey.
Angel did not offer his help again, but on the long walk back he made sure that the pace remained slow enough for Lindsey to keep up without struggle. When Lindsey grew dizzy twice and had to grab at Angel’s arm to prevent himself from falling he still did not offer aid, though neither did he react to the wary, searching looks that Lindsey would flick over him each time that he had righted himself again.
Angel was unsurprised to see the scattered, dismembered corpses of demons where the battle had been, or the milling, triumphant forms of about a dozen teenaged girls. Every one of them still gleamed with sweat. The heady-sweet Slayer scent that Angel always associated with Buffy filled the air, though he knew at a glance that she was not in attendance. He began to turn Katie’s face away from the bodies before remembering that it wouldn’t do any good.
Willow walked up to him with a smile that lost none of its sweetness in spite of her looking uncertain as to how it would be received. “Hey, Angel,” she said.
“Hello, Willow,” Angel said, noticing as Lindsey’s swaying grew more pronounced. He put his hand out quickly to catch his elbow and steady him before he could fall. Lindsey’s answering look was neither friendly nor hostile.
A lanky brunette Slayer who could have been Fred ten years earlier rushed up to them, obviously still full of extra energy from the fight and unsure of what to do with it. “Is this her?” she asked without waiting to be introduced, craning her head so that she could make eye contact with Katie. “Hi! Don’t worry, we’re already looking all over the world for telepaths that can help train you. It won’t be any time at all before you’re able to throw on a pair of shades like any other normal-“
Katie turned her face back into the side of Angel’s neck.
“Beth,” Willow interrupted the girl gently. “Indoor voice, okay? Pretend we have walls. In fact, you should probably call ahead and let the others know that we’re going to need healing spells.” She paused and looked over the assembled group. “We’re going to need a lot of them.”
To her credit, Beth seemed to realize immediately that she had said the wrong thing. “Oh. Um. All right.” She cast a sheepish look at Angel. “If you know the name of her parents, we can try to find them for her. Giles has a computer/magic integrated database with Willow that’s, like, wow.”
“I’m her mother,” Alicia responded in a voice that did not speak well of the wisdom of arguing.
“Oh.” Beth glanced back and forth between Alicia and Katie, making note of their obviously different heritages. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize.”
“In every way that matters,” Alicia clarified, “I am her mother now.”
“Okay, so if you would just come with me for a minute…” Beth led away a clearly reluctant Alicia, who shot several glances over her shoulder at Katie as she went. Willow spared a final smile for Angel and followed them.
Angle shifted Katie so that she would be more comfortable and looked back at Lindsey, who had yet to reject Angel’s hand on his elbow. “Come on,” Angel said. “You can meet the old group.”
Lindsey followed without argument, though Angel thought that Willow might want to put a rush order on whatever magic she had planned. Otherwise, Lindsey might pass out in the street. “Not afraid I’m going to stab you in the back the minute you turn to make introductions?”
Angel paused and looked at Lindsey until he was clearly struggling not to squirm. “No,” he said finally. “If you stab me, you’ll do it in the front.”
Lindsey staggered, and Angel grabbed his arm again. In return, Lindsey did not shrug him away.
The End
And.
We.
Are.
DONE!
I need a drink.