Impressions (11 page)

“Ah,” Wesley said, with the slightest of smiles—looking touched, actually.

Angel didn’t care. Angel was reeling in being set up for a good fight and not getting it, and in the reverberations of emotion all around him, the emotion-that-wasn’t-his…but had become his. The Slith, too, had been dealing with that; something within him still refused to believe they’d been talked down so easily. Something in him didn’t
want
them to have been talked down so easily.

Or maybe Wesley’s outfit had simply amused them out of their snit.

He said, “This is more than just a couple of strange incidents. This is…”
fury and the need to attack and fight back and revenge
and Wesley giving him a strange look…“I mean, we need to
do
something before something happens that we can’t stop in time.”

Gunn gave him a flat stare. “You
think?
”

Attack and fight back and
—Angel felt the change come over him, couldn’t stop it. He didn’t
want
to stop it. In that instant, he didn’t even try. He let it in, let the rage fill him…he turned on Gunn with all the frustration and roiling emotions that echoed around the park with no one but him to lodge in. He turned with his speed and his power and saw the astonished flash of understanding on Gunn’s face just at the same time he saw a single remaining Slith crouch by the closest tree and raise a blowgun to its broad mouth. And he launched himself at Gunn, reaching, reaching…

…reaching……and snatched the little missile out of the air just before it landed on the skin of Gunn’s neck.

The landing was nothing of power or anger or grace. The landing was a belly flop that rattled him even with no breath to lose.

“Angel!” Wesley said, somehow managing to make it sound like a questioning demand instead of just a demand. Angel, still stretched his full length upon the ground, didn’t fail to notice where Wesley’s loaded crossbow pointed. Neither did the teens exclaiming in the background.

The Slith scampered away into the night, leaving his blowgun at the base of the tree and his maniac giggle lingering on the air.

Eyes on the crossbow, Angel opened his hand so Wesley could see the spitball, waiting for Wesley’s quiet sigh of relief before he relaxed entirely himself.

“Gee,” Gunn said from directly behind him. “For a moment there I thought you’d really turned on me. I mean, for a
moment
—but no, you were just using those demon reflexes of yours to save my life, weren’t you?”

Angel heard the dark sarcasm behind the words; he didn’t rise to them. He didn’t have anything to say to them. So he said simply, “Yeah. That was it.” Then he looked at the spitball, and at the sudden unbidden twitch of his fingers, and asked Wesley in his most casual voice, “So, how bad can it be?”

Wesley lowered the crossbow entirely, coming to crouch by Angel. He gave the spitball a somber look—as if he could discover some crucial fact by looking at it more closely—and used the crossbow tip to nudge it out of Angel’s hand. He ground it into the dirt with his toe, and then said with a certain amount of false cheer, “Well, on the one hand, it’s not on that short list of things that will kill you.”

“And?” Angel said through slightly gritted teeth, watching the twitch move up his arm.

Absolutely no comfort at all, Wesley said, “On the other, you might wish that it had.”

“Grea—”
Great.
But he never finished the word, for his head snapped back and his spine whipped into an arch so tight, it cracked. Blood from his bitten tongue coated his mouth and lips while pain scribed lightning across his brain.
Great.
Strong hands took his head, kept it from beating against the ground. Words reached his ears, garbled and meaningless and fading.

Wracked with pain, his own body tearing itself apart, Angel’s last thought was relief. For that moment, the pounding anger lifted. For that moment, he knew again what was
him
and what was
other.

For that moment, he was free.

He choked on a laugh, and the darkness overtook him.

“I’m telling you, he
laughed,
” Gunn insisted. His voice reached Angel’s ears through a filter of muffled distortion.

“I rather doubt that,” Wesley said, also sounding as if he were speaking through a glass of water. “Even if he’d wanted to, which I can’t imagine, he was hardly capable.”

“Oh, really? And how capable was he of attacking me? Or do you
rather doubt
that, too?” When he wanted to, Gunn could really put a British spin on his words.

Numb as he was, Angel felt a familiar lump in the mattress beneath him and knew he was back at the Hyperion Hotel, in his very own room. To judge from the smell, someone was thoughtful enough to have a glass of blood nearby. Probably Cordelia. He’d have to tell her thank you, just as soon as he could open his eyes and open his mouth and the remnants of Slith poison weren’t coursing pain through his veins. Old blood coated his mouth…his own, and it tasted terrible. But his bitten tongue was already healing; he thought he might have the feeling back in his toes.

A wave of warning flushed through his body; every muscle clenched tight in spasm. He kicked somebody. Tighter…
tighter
…he thought his back might break…muscles screaming…
release
.

“God!” Cordelia said, tears quite audible on the edge of her voice. “How long is this going to go on?”

“I don’t have any information on that,” Wesley admitted, not sounding terribly concerned. “People don’t generally last this long. But it seems to me the spasms are easing. We do know it won’t kill him.”

Cordelia sat on the bed; she’d probably been the one he kicked off in the first place. “Oh, and because we know it won’t kill him, it doesn’t matter that he’s going through this?”

As muzzy as his thoughts were, Angel pretty much expected the silent response. He knew Gunn was thinking about the moment Angel had turned vamp on him. He knew Wesley had seen it too.

In utter disgust, Cordelia said, “Men are such pigs.”

Gently, Wesley said, “I’m afraid we also have other things on our mind. Important things.”

With reluctance, Cordelia said, “Because you think he was going after Gunn.” She shifted on the bed. “I wish I hadn’t just said that.”

Gunn’s voice didn’t have any of her reluctance, just a hard edge of anger. “I
know
it.”

“Gunn, he
saved
you.”

Entirely unconvinced, Gunn said, “He came for me. He just changed his mind along the way. Got distracted, maybe.”

Definitely, Angel was regaining control of his toes. Not that they’d do him any real good in a fight, but it was a start. And probably he could even have said something, anything, to let them know he was awake. Or getting that way, anyway.

But he didn’t. He listened.

Cordelia said slowly, “It’s true…he’s not right. He hasn’t
been
right. It’s more than just this faux Angel thing. Whatever’s going on with these other demons…I think he’s part of it. It’s getting to him, too.”

“Then we’d better
stop
whatever’s going on. Before it’s too late, if you get my drift,” Gunn said. Still hard. Always hard, when it came to the demon lurking within Angel.

Then again, so were they all. If Angel ever lost his soul to Angelus again, not even Cordelia would hesitate to stake him. Maybe especially not Cordelia.

“I’ll leave stopping
whatever
up to you for now,” Wesley said. He sounded distracted, the way he did when his mind had drifted away to another problem. “I’ve got to see if I can translate what that Tuingas fellow yelled at us. They’ve clearly got a beef with the faux Angel, and as long as we’ve been pulled into the problem, it behooves us to figure out why.”

“Behooves us,”
Gunn repeated, and snorted. “I guess it does at that. Well, translate fast, Wesley. It’s morning now, but that party hearty demon night is gonna come up fast.”

They drifted away from him, off to their own missions. And for a while, Angel drifted away from them, letting his preternatural healing abilities wash the rest of the Slith poison from his system. He got his toes back and more, and then there came a moment when he realized he wasn’t as alone as he thought he was.

Someone turned the page of a magazine. Someone who was evidently just as able to realize he was back among the land of the functioning even though he hadn’t—quite—opened his eyes yet. Cordelia said, “And then there’s these two sisters who have their own show on the Discovery Health Channel. Okay, they dress kinda JCPenney, but look at them! What’s not to admire? They’re both respected doctors, they’re pretty, they’ve got the sisterhood thing going, and they get to talk about sex
and
be paid for it.” There was an obvious pause, after which she said, “Paid for talking about it, I mean.”

“I knew that,” Angel said, not quite ready to open his eyes.

“Did you?” she said, obviously not referring to the sisters.

That did it. He looked. He found her sitting in an overstuffed chair not far from the bed. It hadn’t been in the bedroom before now, but she seemed quite at home in it, curled up with the magazine propped on her knees and the black chopsticks tucked behind her ear—not actually a bad strategy to keep Wesley from tap-tap-tapping them all to insanity, a state that seemed just around the bend, anyway. “Did I,” he repeated flatly.

She put the magazine down against her legs, losing her place without noticing. “Go after Gunn.”

He could all but see the fine line stretching out before him, that on which he had to balance. Truth…but not too much of it. Not enough to shatter the trust they were rebuilding. “I might have. I’m not sure.”

She regarded him somberly. “That’s not good.”

Gingerly, he sat up, swinging his legs over the edge of the bed. Everything hurt. Everything hurt a lot. For now. “But it’s okay for you to lose your temper now and then. Or Wesley, or Gunn.”

“That’s different. You know it is.”

“That doesn’t seem…fair.”

She shrugged. “I didn’t say it was.”

“No.” She hadn’t. And it wasn’t. But…she was right.

Angel stretched…rotated first one shoulder, then the other, checking the quality of light that leaked through the newspaper-taped windows. “What time is it?”

“Late morning. Wesley’s frowning over his translations. Gunn’s off trying to see what he can dig up about all these demons acting out—he called in a while ago; he’s already been chased out of two demon dives. No answers, but they sure do seem touchy. Lorne says it’s standing room only at his place. It all adds up to something…we just have to figure out what.”

“Late morning.” He grimaced. “That little spitball packed quite a punch.”

She raised an eyebrow at him, very Cordelia. “If you weren’t already dead, you’d be dead. Gunn’s luckier than he’s ever going to admit.” She gave him a very wise look and said, “If you’re smart, you’ll leave it at that.”

He was inclined to be smart.

T
he kids were all right. They put up with the rules Gunn had laid out before them: no drugs, no guns, no big talk about what they were up to. They’d even put up with his neighborhood cleanup evening—staged as much to show the neighborhood in question their good intentions as anything else—and handled their first real evidence of demon life with only one dropout.

And now they’d come up with that little detail that Angel Investigations hadn’t been able to discover yet: the fake Angel’s office. Gunn stared at the grimy down-under entrance, deciding to bring the others in on the first visit.

In a way, it stung. They’d done it because their life was here, because they knew the streets—and when he’d given them a description of the geek little Angel wanna-be, they’d remembered seeing him. They’d gone off with a mission…and they’d come back with results.

Once upon a time, Gunn would have been the one to bring in those results. He’d known when a vampire set foot on his streets, he’d led a tight-knit gang of brothers-in-arms and he’d kept the unknowing families—the mothers and fathers and kids and grandparents and all those people tied up in what they thought was their normal little world—safe from demon violence. He hadn’t even really minded when they’d looked at him and his crew with that same expression they reserved for drug dealers or gang members. It served well enough as camouflage. If no one asked questions because they were all so full of assumptions, then Gunn didn’t have to answer them.

Once upon a time. Now he never knew where he’d be—in Pylea facing a whole society of green Simon Legrees, or out in the suburbs dealing with exorcisms like Hollywood had never imagined. But he could predict where he
wouldn’t
be.

On his streets.

But the kids had come through. They’d done good. And that was something too.

He headed for the cell phone in his truck.

Cordelia left Angel with fresh blood and—she hoped—a lot to think about. He had to
get
it, or they’d never be able to trust him. Angel or Angelus, he had too much power…he had to keep it under control. He had to
get
the power of will and personality that kept them bound together as a group. It meant trusting him on a level she wasn’t sure he understood.

She dropped the magazine on the counter with a sigh and sat down before the computer. Wesley might turn to his musty old books, but Cordelia had the Internet, along with the demon database they were building. She pulled up the Google search engine and typed in
demons mad attack
on the offhand chance that some lonely someone with a Web page his entire family scoffed at had actually observed something useful. Not a tactic that often worked, but sometimes…

You just never knew.

She skipped through a number of Web-based bulletin boards, found a cross-newsgroup flame war overwhelming any useful commentary in one of her occasionally useful haunts. She was always a lurker, picking up tidbits of truth from confused and exaggerated observations, leaving as quietly as possible. She hadn’t needed Wesley’s warning to keep her silence in these far-too-public venues.

“Find anything?” Angel came barefoot into the lobby, wearing his contrite face. As if she could ever resist that. He must have learned that glance from-below thing from Princess Diana…or maybe he’d taught it to her.

She put up a good fight. “Lots of chatter, nothing specific. If I didn’t know there was something going on, I’d be able to tell there was something going on. Not really helpful.”

“How’s it going with the translation?” Angel nodded at the window of Wesley’s office, behind which he was bent over his desk.

“Oh, he’s pretty sure the first word is the same thing the other demon said to us: ‘gimme.’ They want something; that’s for sure.”

“They want the fake
me’s
client,” Angel said. “That’s pretty obvious.”

From the office, Wesley spoke without looking up from his reading. “Yes, well, since we have no intention of handing the man over, our next best chance comes with understanding
why
they want him.”

“Well, we can assume
he’s
got something they want,” Cordelia said, typing in the URL for the L.A.
Daily News
without paying much attention to either the keyboard or the monitor. Angel leaned over the front counter, fiddling with a giant paper clip she’d left there. “Since the word ‘gimme’ keeps coming up.”

“Either that, or they’re just selfish little bastards,” Wesley muttered, just loud enough to be heard. No, the translation definitely wasn’t going well. In fact, as far as she could tell, she was the only one having any kind of decent day at all.

“At least The Powers That Be have backed off on the whole vision thing,” she said. “I guess we must be on the right track or some—what?” For she’d glanced at Angel, finding the paper clip twisted out of all recognizable shape in his white-knuckled hand. And his face…if it was possible, she’d say he’d gone pale.

She glanced at her computer monitor. Dailynews.com spread across the top of the screen in a fancy font, and below it ran breaking news headlines.

Make that
headline
. There was only one. There only needed to be one:

On the screen was a color police sketch representative of the gang look, including a brief description. Yellow mohawk hairstyle, yellow-tinted mask. All big, all using knives. Beside it was a photo of the interior of a fitness center aerobics room, step-class equipment moved neatly to the side, yoga mats rolled up against the wall…pools of blood all over the floor.

“Wes,” Angel said.

“Busy,” Wesley said instantly.

Angel said again,
“Wes,”
and he used that rare tone of voice, one that wasn’t contrite or apologetic but made it clear, in the end, who was actually in charge here at Angel Investigations.

Wesley’s chair squeaked as he left his desk. Cordelia stared at the computer monitor, horrified, her eyes filling with tears. She blinked them away, fast, so she could catch some of the details…morning fitness class, attacked without warning, five dead, another seven badly injured, three critically. Inexplicable gang attack, with the gang itself entirely unknown.

It had been a bloodbath.

“I saw this,” she said. “A couple of nights ago, right before you took me to the clinic. I could have stopped—”

“No,”
Angel said, and he used that voice again. “You can only tell us what the visions show you. It wasn’t enough.”

She tried to believe him.

“Miquot,” Wesley said softly, having arrived and quickly assessed the situation. “Though had anyone tried to convince me that they would stoop to such defenseless quarry, I”—he took a deep breath—“I wouldn’t have believed it.”

They stared for another horrified moment. Cordelia didn’t even really see the monitor any longer; she didn’t have to. The headline, the humanized Miquot, the bloody fitness center…not something she’d soon forget. As if on cue, Wes slammed a hand against the counter and jerked away, his mouth tightened on words unspoken—even as Angel stalked off, gone from contrite to predator…predator stalking across the lobby with no one in particular to hunt, predator close to the edge….

When the phone rang, they turned back to the counter with such intensity that Cordelia hesitated as she reached for the old-fashioned handpiece. “Angel Investigations,” she said in her business voice, eyeing them both. “We help the—oh, hi Gunn.”

“What’s wrong?” he asked immediately. The connection had a cell phone quality.

She cleared her throat. Apparently not quite as business voice as she’d intended. “Just a little tense, that’s all. Whatever’s got the demons around here stirred up…it’s…they’ve…well, we’ve got to stop it, that’s all there is to it.”

“Dunno that I can help with that, but I think I’ve got that fake Angel’s fake office in my sights.”

“Really?” Some
good
news for a change.

“Near the corner of Fourth and Loma—a dinky little walk-down hole of a place. Thought Angel might want to be in on it.”

“I think Wesley could use a little fresh air too,” she said, glancing up at Wesley’s grimness. He’d been struggling with the translation for too long; a little distraction—
successful
distraction—would do him good. “You’ll wait for them?”

“If they get it in gear,” Gunn said. “I’ll wait down below, the nearest access to the corner.”

“I’m sure they’ll get it in gear,” Cordelia said. She hung up the phone.

Instantly, Wesley said, “What? Where?”

“Fourth and Loma,” Angel said, he of the keen vampire hearing.

“The faux Angel’s office,” Cordelia said. “Looks like you’re about to do a little breaking and entering.”

“Or if he’s there, breaking and entering and breaking,” Angel said.

She thought he was kidding.

But then again…maybe not.

“It looks abandoned,” Wesley said, the last of them to step into the dim little office.

The dimness came partly from its small, dirty windows…and partly from its placement on the shady side of the street, a fact that had allowed Angel easier than normal access. Storm drains, sewers—they only went so far. He looked around the seedy room, hunting for something to help him understand just why this strange young man had gone so far in his efforts to imitate his own less than stellar self. He said, “Even that temporary office you had was better than this.”

“Watch it,” Gunn said. “Someone kicked us out of
his
place, remember?”

Right. He
had,
hadn’t he?

“And, anyway,” Gunn said, “our place had bigger windows.”

“We also had bookshelves and file cabinets, as I recall,” Wesley said, referring to the boxes stacked beside a rickety old metal desk. Papers spilled out, unfiled and apparently unsorted. A tilting water cooler sat by the wall, but the empty bottle had a desert-dry abandoned look to it. An open door off the back of the room revealed a tiny bathroom with a rust and water-stained sink, and a plunger in permanent residence beneath it. The toilet ran quietly in the background. “What did that client say the first time we saw him? That this was the
main
office?”

“Yeah, well, we might as well take a look around,” Angel said. The Slith poison still tingled in his veins, dulling down his receptiveness to the
angerattackrevenge
whispering through the streets…or maybe it was just the daylight.

“We
are
looking around,” Gunn said. “Nothing and no one here. Not exactly room to hide in this place.”

Angel nudged a box with his foot; it spilled onto its side, spewing papers across the floor. “Tsk,” he said. “We’ll have to pick that up.”

“And maybe have a look at the contents while we’re at it?” Wesley murmured. “Maybe we can get some idea what he’s up to…or at least identify other clients who might be in danger under his care.”

“Be nice if we could find the guy who keeps leading demons in our direction,” Gunn said, a hint of promise in his voice. “Who he is, where he’s staying…”

“And then we could have a chat with him on
our
terms,” Wesley said. “Tied, for instance. So he can’t run away again.”

Dividing the papers up took the patience of untangling Pick Up sticks, but eventually Angel prowled the room with papers in hand, Wesley sat at the uncertain desk, and Gunn sat cross-legged on the floor, his back to the wall and his eye on the front door.

“Here’s an old grade sheet,” Wesley said. “David Arnnette. Some photography courses here…he did well in his classes.”

Gunn snorted. “Doesn’t make much difference if you flunk reality.” He waved a small pink sheet in the air. “Here’s a bill from a theatrical company—fake teeth, fake blood…”

“We know that much,” Angel said absently. He flipped through a stack of photos. Cordelia entering the hotel, Angel himself under a streetlight, Gunn getting into his truck, him again in a bar hunting vampires…he held it up. “This guy’s been watching me for a while.”

“How did he even find out about you?” Wesley said. “That’s what I want to know.”

“Here,” Angel said, flipping to the bottom of the photos. “Look at this one. Nighttime, alley…the oldest one here. I dusted some vamps. Didn’t even know he was there.”

“There are always witnesses,” Wesley said.

“And they’re usually so frightened or drunk or hurt that they don’t have any trouble convincing themselves they didn’t see what they thought they saw,” Angel said. “Hundreds of years haven’t changed that. Or streetlights.”

“Except this one had a camera.”

“Yes,” Wesley said slowly, taking the oldest picture from Angel. “This one had a camera.” He looked up. “This was when Doyle was still alive?”

“Before Cordelia even got here,” Angel said. “Whatever obsession this guy has, he’s been nursing it a while.”

“Then I suppose we’re lucky it hasn’t caused trouble before now.”

“Huh,” Gunn said, fumbling with an open manila file folder as eight-by-ten glossies slipped out. He caught them, shuffled them back into order, and held one up for them. “Here’s a strange one. What
is
this?”

Taken from above, it showed a leg surrounded by a metal brace system that looked like nothing less than a torture device.

“I’ve seen those,” Wesley said. “It’s a bone-stabilizing brace. It’s used to lengthen limbs.”

“Make the whole leg longer, you mean,” Gunn said, and made a face at the device. “No, thank you.”

Angel said, “Looks like the photographer was the one wearing it.”

Wesley nodded and gave the photo another thoughtful look. “Then our faux Angel wasn’t always light on his feet.”

“You think he had a short leg?” Gunn said. “And then what, got himself fixed and decided to become a superhero, make up for all those years of being picked last in gym?”

“Too bad he’s not any good at it,” Angel said. Abruptly, he stopped his prowling, focusing his attention on the half-glass, half-wood door. “Did you hear—”

The door burst open, entirely without the benefit of anyone turning the doorknob; glass flexed and broke, spraying the office. Wesley jumped away from the desk as Gunn sprang to his feet, each groping for the weapons they’d set aside.