“Okay, then,” Lorne said, glad the point had been reached at last. “That’s good to know. Do you know where we might find them?”
Virg gave him a look that clearly implied he thought Lorne was hopelessly stupid. “They’re Roshons,” he said, as if that explained it all. “If I knew where to find them, they’d be dead already.”
“Of course.” I should have known, Lorne thought. Foolish of me.
And one more little piece of information, but like the rest, all it points to is a dead end.
Chapter Eight
As the doorknob turned, Fred glanced at the wreckage she’d made of the place—the little cabinet knocked over; door taken partway off; blood on the wooden floor, spattered over her clothes and coating her arm. No way to hide any of it, she thought, shoving the cabinet away from her. Like whoever is coming in won’t know I did it.
The door pushed inward. What kind of demon is it going to be? she found herself wondering. Something with long claws, dozens of eyes, and a thousand teeth? A creature with its face in its belly and its stomach on top of its neck? A hungry demon with a taste for human flesh and a weakness for petite physicists? The beings she’d had to contend with in Pylea had been bad enough, but since coming back to Earth and working with Angel a little, she had learned that she’d had only the barest beginnings of an understanding of just how awful some demons could be. And some humans, for that matter, like those lawyers at Wolfram and Hart.
Notwithstanding those lawyers, her heart leaped when she saw that the person coming through the door was in fact a person, one hundred percent human-looking, and not some kind of hellbeast. The thought that flashed through her mind in that first instant—he’s come to save me—vanished just as quickly when she remembered that humans could be just as inhumane as the ugliest demon, while some demons, like Lorne, were just as nice as could be. And some hummingbirds weighed less than a dime.
The man was about five nine, 170 pounds, with a broad chest and arms that strained the sleeves of his T-shirt. His hair was dark brown and windblown, his face—handsome, in its own rugged way—clean-shaven. He might have been in his late twenties or his early forties—his face was youthful, with few lines except for some creases around the eyes, so it was hard to tell. The first thing he did after he’d closed the door behind himself, before he even looked her way, was to sniff the air.
So maybe not so human after all? Fred wondered.
“Blood,” he said, his voice calm and even. Fred would have thought it was a pleasant voice, under other circumstances. “Cut yourself.” It wasn’t a question.
Now he looked at Fred. She’d tucked the hinge pin into the waistband of her skirt, but the rest of her mess was in plain sight. She held up the bloody arm. “A little, yes,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have a bandage on you? Or maybe an emergency room doctor?”
“You won’t need one,” the man said. He came farther into the room, stopping when he was close enough to see the broken cabinet. “You’re a sloppy one, aren’t you? Destructive. But then, that’s what your kind are like, isn’t it?”
“Look,” Fred implored, her Texas twang making itself evident as it tended to when she was under stress. “I don’t know who you are or why I’m chained up here, but I think there’s been some kind of mistake. Whoever you think I am, I’m not. My name is Fred Burkle, in case you didn’t know. I’m just a scientist, and I’m kind of new in town, in a way, and I don’t have anything you might want. I don’t have any family that can pay a ransom, if that’s what you’re looking for. So if you’ll just unlock me, I’ll be on my way out of here and we’ll pretend all this never happened, all right?”
The man turned away from her, ignoring her as easily as if he’d been stone deaf. He crossed back to the other side of the room, and for a moment she thought he was going to go back out the door. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that—on the one hand, she’d be able to get back to work with her hinge pin, except that she still didn’t know anything about picking locks beyond her suspicion that it was harder than it looked in the movies. Most things were, like skydiving. That looked so free and easy on the big screen, but she had a hunch that in real life, it’d be just about as scary as anything.
But on the other hand, if he stayed maybe she’d be able to persuade him to free her.
He stayed. Instead of going through the door, he went to the big brown chair and sat down with a heavy sigh.
“You don’t want to have to sit here all night watching over me, do you? I mean, a guy like you, you have better things to do. You could go to a ball game, or the library, or—no, maybe not the library, you probably wouldn’t like that, sometimes I say the stupidest things. And as for a ball game, I guess if it’s night, that wouldn’t work either. Is it night? I’m not really sure how long I was, you know, unconscious.”
He continued to ignore her. It seemed to be what he was best at.
“I’m sorry about the little nightstand or whatever,” she said. “I guess I accidentally knocked it down. And I didn’t mean to get blood on your floor, but I’ll clean it up if you let me go.”
Fred could see him, sitting in the chair, staring off into space as if he were all alone here. She had taken him for human, but could a human being really ignore someone else so completely, especially if that someone else was obviously injured and scared? What kind of man could he be?
She remembered that she had been talking to a human man in Caritas earlier. It had surprised her to see him there, since usually she and her friends were the only humans around on the few occasions that she’d been to Lorne’s club. But she was coming back from the women’s room—well, females’ room, anyway, she corrected—and he had been standing in the hallway, by the pay phone, with a colorful drink in his hand. Even in the dark hall she had noticed his brilliant green eyes, which caught some wayward light in such a way, they almost seemed to glow from within. He’d been handsome, too, she remembered, in a kind of Angel-y way, with spiky dark hair and shoulders one could hang a swing from, and he’d grinned at her like she was the first human female he’d seen in ages. Which, if he hangs out here, she remembered thinking, maybe I am.
“Hi,” he had said. “I’m Jack. You come here often?”
Which was maybe not as original as it might have been, but considering the type of club Caritas was and the clientele it drew, was not as mundane as it would have been in just about any other setting on the planet.
Suddenly shy, she had looked toward Jack’s feet—nice shoes, she thought—and let her hair swing down in front of her face, in case she was blushing or making a funny expression or had a little bit of spinach between her teeth, except that she hadn’t actually eaten spinach today, or even this month, that she could remember. She hadn’t really spoken to anyone since returning from Pylea, except the gang at Angel’s, and wasn’t sure she could remember how to do it. “Oh, I don’t really go anyplace often,” she said. “From my room down to the lobby, I guess, and then back up to my room, but that’s about it.”
“Lobby? You’re staying in a hotel? Just visiting?”
“No, I live here,” she explained. “I mean, not here in Caritas, but in Los Angeles. In a hotel. I live in the hotel. It’s—a friend’s place. His hotel.”
“A male friend,” Jack said. He sounded a little disappointed. “I see.”
She saw too. “Oh, no, it’s not like that.” Not that I wouldn’t like it to be, she thought. But there’s no indication that it’s going that way. “It’s just—you know, he has this hotel, and there are plenty of rooms there, so he lets me stay there. And we work together, sometimes.”
“What do you do?” Jack asked. He closed the gap between them, moving forward to stand maybe a little closer than Fred found comfortable. But the hallway was fairly narrow and her back was already against a wall, so she stayed where she was.
“I’m a physicist,” she said. “I guess I don’t do much actual physics these days, though. But I help out with his work.”
Jack laughed. Fred liked the way it sounded. “A woman of mystery, eh?” he said. “I can appreciate that.”
She felt shy again, and resumed checking out his shoes through a curtain of hair. “I don’t think I’m very mysterious,” she said softly. “I think I’m kind of an open book.”
“There are a lot of books,” Jack replied. His voice sounded surprisingly intimate, and he looked at her—no, into her—with strikingly green eyes, like chips of emerald. “Some of them you can’t read until you know the right language.”
Fred hadn’t had a lot of boyfriends in her life, she knew. And why did I just think about that now? she wondered. He hasn’t done anything except be polite to me. He’s probably trying to figure out when I’m going to get out of his way and let him get to the telephone or the men’s room. But at the same time, she could tell he wasn’t trying to go anywhere. It was almost as if he’d seen her go into the hall and had followed her, waiting until she’d come back through so he could talk to her. And he was certainly going beyond just politeness.
“I’m not written in code,” she said. “Just English.” With a little Pylean thrown in, maybe. And some higher mathematics.
“Well, I can read English,” he replied, showing a friendly smile. Those remarkable eyes seemed to snare the hallway’s dim light and cast it back toward her. “Maybe—”
He didn’t get a chance to finish his sentence because a loud noise suddenly sounded from outside, cutting him off. Within seconds the club’s occupants were on their feet and headed for the door, Fred and Jack carried along in the wake. She lost sight of him, then. Outside, she had been standing toward the back, behind the bulk of the spectators watching flames engulf the building across the street. She could make out, at the front of the pack, Angel, Cordelia, Wesley, and Gunn, and she was about to try to slip through the crowd toward them when the car approached, opening fire.
That was the last thing she could remember, until she’d awakened here on the floor with a headache like someone had used her skull as a target in a professional rock-throwing contest. Of which, unlikely as it seemed here on Earth, she’d witnessed several during her time in Pylea. Organized sports there had been very different from their earthly counterparts—the closest she’d seen here to Pylean athletic activities were the World’s Strongest Man competitions on TV, where events seemed to include versions of Carry a Big Rock and Throw a Log, both of which were real crowd-pleasers in the Host’s home dimension.
She wondered for a moment why the young man sitting in the chair, steadfastly ignoring her as he stared out at the ceiling and walls, had reminded her of the one she’d spoken to at Caritas. But now that she wondered about it, she could see right away. Although the two men looked nothing alike, this one also had luminous green eyes that looked like they could light up a dark room.
“I really don’t mind sleeping on the floor, so don’t let that worry you,” she said to him, suspecting he’d pretend not to hear her, anyway. “I’m kind of used to it. Used to a dirt floor, anyway—wood is a different thing, harder to mash around into the right shape, but it’s better than stone floors, and I’ve done that, too. I could use a pillow, though, if you have any around.”
The man didn’t answer. It was almost as if he’d left his body there and had gone somewhere else. But as she watched, she could see his chest rise and fall as he breathed. Every now and then he twitched, or brought his hand up to scratch behind his ear. He moved his head from time to time, changing his angle of view but never looking directly at Fred. The fly, whose buzzing had become less frequent and insistent, made more noise than he did.
“I could use a rest room, too. Do you think you could unlock me long enough for that?”
No answer.
“There were ten naked women here looking for you a few minutes ago. I think they were cheerleaders for the Rams.”
Still no response from the man in the chair.
“You know, I’ve seen some pretty silly things—things you probably couldn’t even imagine. I’ve seen a bird with four wings steal meat from a butcher’s cart. I’ve seen people who didn’t know how to sing celebrate a holiday by batting one another with long purple squashes, like giant eggplants, until there was only one standing. But you sitting there, acting like you can’t even hear me talking to you when I know you can, that’s got to be right up there with the most idiotic things I’ve ever encountered. Don’t you feel stupid knowing that I know that you know that I’m talking?”
Now he finally shifted in the chair, putting his elbows on his knees and bending forward. But he wasn’t looking at her, Fred realized. And then she saw what he was tracking, moving just his eyes but not his head. While she’d been talking, the fly had broken free of the spider’s web. She saw the spider crawling rapidly toward where the fly had been, as if not believing it had slipped her trap. And she saw the fly, making excited, erratic patterns across the room. The man rose from his chair and walked toward the center of the room. Waited there, still, barely breathing. Then he reached out with one arm, a move so fast, Fred could scarcely follow, and snagged the fly, mid-flight. He held it up and examined it for a brief moment, then popped it into his mouth and swallowed. Finally, he looked at Fred. “I hear what you’re saying,” he said, his voice cold. “I am just not interested in talking to you, okay?”
“Well, sure, that’s fine,” Fred said, heartened that there had at least been some take in the give-and-take, but equally dismayed by the guy’s dietary tic. She thought not mentioning the fly would probably be a good idea. “But what about my requests? That bathroom thing is getting toward urgent, you know?”
“Not interested in talking,” he said again, “and definitely not interested in listening. Especially that. You have nothing to say that could possibly be of interest to me. So you might as well just be quiet. You’re not going anywhere for a while, so get used to it.”
At least that’s something, Fred thought. Not very helpful, but now I know that he’s not necessarily planning to kill me, and expects that at some point I’ll be moved away from this spot. Sooner would be better than later, but I’ll take what I can get.
Looking on the bright side had often proven to be difficult for Fred, but she considered it an important goal in life, and tried to focus on it whenever she could.
Now seemed like a particularly good time to practice it.
I’m not dead, she thought. I’m not dead. And as long as I’m not dead, there’s hope.
Chapter Nine
“How are you doing, Cordy?” Angel asked. He’d finally found a pay phone that worked, outside a closed gas station on Figueroa. He was painfully aware of the precious minutes he’d lost looking for one. “Got anything yet?”
“A crick in my neck from sitting here staring at this computer screen,” Cordelia’s voice came back. “After we find Fred, I think we should schedule an ergonomics seminar. You know, getting kicked around by demons and stuff is bad, but who knows what kind of repetitive motion disorders we’re risking without even knowing about it?”
“Talk to Wes about the seminar,” Angel said wearily. “I was thinking more about Fred-related information.”
“Well, Lorne called. He didn’t have much, though—he said that one of the demons smelled cinnamon, which could mean a Kedigris demon or it could mean someone can’t afford a decent perfume. And another thought he saw Roshons driving the car, but that one was a Kailiff, a natural enemy of Roshons.”
“So really, nothing useful.”
“That’s what he thought, but he wanted us to make that judgment,” Cordelia explained.
“What about your own progress?” Angel asked, hoping for a more substantial answer from her.
“I’ve been narrowing the field,” Cordelia replied. “I’ve got it down to about forty-seven different types of demons who have used fire as a diversionary tactic. Oh, and humans. Apparently we do it all the time.”
“What about a combination of fire and portals?” Angel asked. “Since they probably took
Fred out through one.”
“That takes it down to eleven,” Cordelia reported. “But one of those can be discounted because they’re extinct, and one because they can only open a portal inside the flames. I think we’d have noticed if someone had carried Fred across the street into the burning building.”
“Seems likely,” Angel agreed, impressed at Cordelia’s efficiency. “So what does that leave?”
“Klakivan, Sholirt—”
“Sholirts don’t live in Southern California,” Angel interrupted. “Too cold here.”
“Okay, strike them. Mumford, Divik, Bovissle, Zhoon, Skander, Korvitak, and McDonald.”
“There’s a kind of demon called McDonald?” Angel asked, surprised.
“Apparently they’ve blended almost completely with the human community,” Cordelia informed him. “But I know a certain fast-food chain I’m keeping away from for a while.”
“Okay, good work, Cordelia,” Angel said. “Of those, the only one I saw at Caritas tonight was a Skander, I think. Did you notice any of the others?”
Cordelia hesitated for a moment. “There might have been a Klakivan,” she said. “But it could have just been a badly dressed Davric. I get those mixed up sometimes.”
“Who doesn’t? Keep at it, Cord. You’re making progress.”
“I’m on the case, ex-boss,” she replied. He could hear the smile in her voice, and as he hung up the phone he pictured it in his mind’s eye. Cordelia’s ready smile could keep him going through the long night. Although a pint of blood wouldn’t hurt.
He tried to think of which of those demonic types might hold a grudge against him. There was a danger, he knew, in assuming that it was all about him, but it was less likely by far that Fred had managed to make such powerful enemies. The reasonable conclusion was still that she had been grabbed to get at him, somehow.
Trouble is, I’ve managed to tick off just about every kind of demon in town, at one time or another. That doesn’t really narrow the field. But he was, he realized, not far from a Korvitak lair he’d had reason to visit, a couple of years before. One of Doyle’s visions had sent him to a cocktail waitress, who had managed to become entangled with a Korvitak clan. The clan leader had visited the bar where she worked, shape-shifted into human form, and the two had seemed to hit it off. He had maintained the illusion whenever he saw her, for a couple of weeks. But she’d sensed that he was hiding something, assumed it was a wife and maybe a family, and followed him home one night. Peeking through the windows, she’d seen him drop the human guise and assume his real form. When she wouldn’t answer his calls and stopped going to work, the Korvitak realized she had discovered his secret, and had gone looking for her, to silence her before she could reveal him.
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