Redemption

by Mel Odom

  “We’re questioning the crew now,” Kate said. “Everyone agrees that there was enough confusion on the set that Whitney could have slipped away the couple minutes it took to kill the driver.”

  “And not get blood on herself?”

  “She could have been prepared for that. Let the DNA test prove us wrong.”

  “No.”

  “Bring her in,” Kate urged. “Let her make her statement. It’s really the best thing you could do.”

  Angel remembered how Whitney had been the night before in his apartment, how scared and vulnerable she’d been. And in his heart, down deep where his soul lived, he knew she was innocent. At least, part of her was innocent, the human part that he believed was still Whitney Tyler. The other part was — or belonged — to something else, something demonic. It was that thing that had committed all the murders that had been done. There was just no way to prove it.

  Images of the swordswoman flashed through his mind again. She’d stood on Handsome Jack’s deck with her sword in her fist, so cocky, so confident of herself. So prideful. And Angel knew what too much pride could do to a person.

  A stop sign forced Angel to brake suddenly.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said.

  “Angel,” Kate said, “they’ve got a strong case against Whitney. If you help her elude arrest, they’ll bring you down, too.”

  “I’ll have to take that chance,” Angel said. “She’s not guilty of killing anyone.”

  “She did it,” Kate said. “Don’t run. Have her get a good lawyer. She has the money, and if she handles it right, there could be a lot of public sympathy. Those attacks against her —”

  “Will go on if she turns herself in,” Angel said. “She can’t come in. Not until that threat goes away.” He hung up before the detective could protest. He glanced at the dashboard clock, watching time slip away from him, knowing he had only hours before dawn, before it was too late for any kind of redemption.

  * * *

  Less than forty minutes later Angel and Doyle stood in front of the motel room door where Gannon was staying.

  “So Schend was giving Whitney up to these guys?” Doyle whispered.

  Angel nodded. “Hit show or no hit show, Schend’s into the loan sharks in a big way. Including Yuan. An insurance payoff would come more quickly than residuals from the show. Maybe he was thinking he could replace Whitney without a problem, too.”

  “Man, that’s cold-blooded.”

  Voices sounded on the other side of the motel room door, growing closer. Then bolts shot from inside. After Doyle had explained finding the man, Angel hadn’t figured the Blood Cadre members would be in for the night.

  “Ready?” Angel asked, dropping into a crouch.

  Doyle gave him a short nod, setting himself.

  The door opened and two men stepped out of the room into the shadows wreathing the motor court.

  Angel stepped across the distance quickly. The motel was strictly low-rent so there was little chance of the staff calling to police, and even less of the police to respond in a timely manner.

  The young man reacted first, throwing himself at Angel, not bothering to retreat to the safety of the room.

  Fired by the anger and determination that filled him, Angel caught the man by the throat and clamped down, choking the man to his knees, then dragging him over to Gannon’s side, knocking the man down.

  The young man managed to hit Angel a half-dozen times, but Angel ignored the attack. Then he felt the man go limp in his grasp, passed out from lack of oxygen.

  Angel opened his hand and released the unconscious man. He fixed his gaze on Gannon. “Get up.”

  “Or what, Angelus? You’ll kill me?” Gannon remained calm. “I’m not afraid to die.”

  “Maybe not, but I’m willing to bet it’s not something you’re looking forward to, either.” Angel took a deep breath. “I won’t kill you, but there’s a lot you can do to someone before you get to that point.”

  Reluctantly Gannon got up. “Where are we going?”

  Angel pulled his car behind the warehouse he’d chosen as their temporary headquarters. He’d done some work for the owner in the last few weeks, getting the man out of trouble with a demon that had been trying to set up a black market ring.

  Taking Gannon by the arm, Angel pulled the man up the short flight of stairs that led to the loading door. He dragged the swipe card through the reader, and the door unlocked with the sound of a pistol shot.

  “Why are you doing this?” Gannon asked Angel.

  “Because you people stopped looking at Moira O’Braonain as a person long before you were born,” Angel snapped as he led the man through the aisles between the warehouses.

  “She’s not human,” Gannon said.

  “And she’s not totally evil the way you make her out to be,” Angel argued.

  “Do you know what she is?” Gannon asked.

  “Not completely,” Angel admitted, “but I have a good idea. She’s been possessed by something. I want you to help me free her.”

  “Free her?” Gannon shook his head. “There’s nothing left to free.”

  Pushed past all tolerance, Angel grabbed the Blood Cadre warrior by his shirt and pinned him up against a stack of crates. Before he could stop it, his face morphed, letting the dark hunger show. He saw the fear in Gannon’s eyes, smelled it on the man.

  “There’s an innocence about her,” Angel insisted.

  Doyle put a hand on Angel’s shoulder. “Take it back about a notch or two.”

  Struggling, Angel managed to cage the hunger for the moment. “You don’t know what it’s like being trapped somewhere between good and evil, Gannon. Being raised up the way you were, dedicated to the principles you were given, how many real choices have you had to make in your life?”

  “Becoming what she is was by her own choice,” Gannon argued. “She should have died the first time you killed her. But she didn’t. That was her choice. She leaned into evil’s embrace, and it willingly took her. Do you know how many men she’s killed over the last two and a half centuries?”

  “Dozens,” Angel replied. “I know. But that was the evil working within her. Not the part of her I sensed.” He paused, feeling the ache in his stilled heart. “I wish I could make you listen.”

  “I am listening, Angel, and what I’m hearing is the guilt that you’ve taken upon yourself for your part in her death.” Gannon shook his head, looking amazed. “Never did I think I would hear such emotion from a vampire. Where you live must be purgatory.”

  “It is,” Angel said.

  “So you think the salvation of Moira O’Braonain is going to put you further along the path to righteousness. Is that what this is about, Angel? Increasing your chances to get back to that life that you almost had?”

  “I work to help the people I can help here because it means something to me,” Angel said, “and because that makes me think that I mean something in turn. I’ve seen a lot of people in trouble. Moira O’Braonain is one of them. I can’t turn away from that. And I don’t see how you can.”

  “What do you think I can do that you can’t?” Gannon asked.

  “You’re a priest besides being a warrior,” Angel said. “You can exorcise the demon that’s holding her.”

  Gannon was silent for a moment. “We have thought about that in the past. We could also destroy her in the process,” he pointed out. “At least, if we killed her body, her soul would be free from the thing that binds her.”

  Angel nodded. “She has to be stopped, no matter what the loss. I know that.” He’d seen the love in Buffy’s eyes when she’d pierced him with the sword and sent him screaming to hell. Other than walking away from each other after the Sunnydale High graduation, it had been the hardest thing either of them had been called on to do. “But I think we can save her.”

  “This is a fool’s errand,” Gannon said. “You could end up getting us all killed for you own selfish desires.”

  “That’s not what
this is about.”

  “Your guilts and conceits, then.”

  “We’re here,” Angel said, “because I think we can make a difference.”

  Gannon studied him for a moment. Angel saw the change in the man’s eyes. “I’ll need some things if we’re going to do this properly.”

  “I’ve already got them,” Angel said. He led the way to the office, where he’d left Cordelia and Whitney.

  “It’s about time you got back,” Cordelia said in exasperation. She pointed at the small black-and-white television on the cluttered desk. “Did you know the LAPD has put out an APB on Whitney? There are people who believe she killed the driver and maybe the security guard in her apartment.”

  “She did kill them,” Angel said, knowing Doyle was as relieved as he was that Cordelia was okay.

  The office was a twelve-foot by twelve-foot square crammed with filing cabinets, the desk and computer, and a couch along the back wall. Whitney slept on the couch, looking little-girl small wrapped in an afghan. She was pale and slept restlessly.

  “She killed those people?” Cordelia stood up from her chair. “And you left me here without telling me?”

  “Would you have stayed if I’d told you?” Angel asked, lifting Whitney from the couch.

  “No way. We’re going to have to do a little rethinking on this partnership thing we’ve got going.” Cordelia followed him out into the warehouse. “Leaving me in the dark is not acceptable.”

  Angel placed Whitney on the warehouse floor, pulling the afghan tight around her. “I had things I needed to do.”

  “And if you’d come back and I was dead? Ripped to pieces or hanging from the nearest —” Cordelia looked up — “metal thingy?”

  “I’d have felt bad,” Angel assured her. He took the box Doyle had carried in, dropping to his knees and shaking the contents out onto the pavement.

  “That’s not good enough,” Cordelia said.

  Angel hesitated, knowing it was hard for Cordelia to actually see that they had other problems at the moment. He looked at her. “I’d have felt really bad. Probably the most bad I’ve ever felt.”

  Cordelia smiled. “You mean that, don’t you?”

  Angel nodded. “Yeah. But I knew she wasn’t going to wake up with all the sedative I put in her coffee.”

  The smile faded from Cordelia’s face. “There was no threat?”

  “Not really.”

  “Then I didn’t even have to sit in this creepy place all by myself. We could have left Whitney here.”

  “I’d rather we didn’t do that,” Angel said. “In case I was wrong.” He saw the look on Cordelia’s face again. “But if I’d been wrong, I’d have really, really felt bad.”

  All business now, Gannon joined Angel. “We’re going to need to draw a circle of protection,” the Blood Cadre warrior said.

  “Yes.” Angel pulled on a pair of gloves to work with the blessed chalk and drew the circle, then placed candles at five points.

  “I don’t like working in chalk,” Gannon said. “If you accidentally break the lines or symbols, you unleash everything you’re trying to hold in.” He drew steadily, walking on his knees, using the flat side of the green chalk to make arcane symbols around the ten-foot circle. “I prefer paint.”

  “I didn’t have any blessed paint,” Angel said, starting the first of the nine binding words of power that had to be written around the circle, following after Gannon.

  “The candles are blessed, too?” Gannon asked.

  “Yes.”

  Gannon finished the circle, then started drawing the symbols along the outer edge. “By rights, you shouldn’t even be able to handle these materials.”

  “I’m not like any other vampire out there,” Angel said.

  “I’m beginning to truly understand that.”

  Whitney stirred restlessly in the circle’s center.

  “She’s not going to continue to sleep for long,” Doyle said. “This spell you’re setting up is beginning to take effect.”

  Angel knew that was true. He could feel the energy building himself. But he took his time, making sure that all the symbols were right. If they weren’t, the circle would never hold the demon that possessed Whitney, and they were all at risk.

  “You have holy water?” Gannon asked. “And a Bible?”

  Doyle handed the man the Bible and the shaker of holy water. “If you have to use the holy water,” he told Gannon, “try to remember that it can hurt Angel, too.”

  Gannon nodded. “I think we’re ready.”

  Whitney moaned and opened her eyes. She looked at Angel and Gannon as they stood.

  “We’re going to have to be,” Angel said.

  “Angel,” Whitney said, looking around in confusion. “What are you doing?”

  “What needs to be done,” Angel replied calmly. “What I can do to rectify a wrong I made all those years ago.”

  Whitney’s eyes blazed with insane otherworldly fury.

  “What is that thing?” Cordelia whispered, taking a quick step back.

  “A banshee,” Angel said, as he tried to figure out what to do. Somehow, he had to reach the innocent part of the woman the creature had cadged away.

  “A faery thing, right?” Cordelia asked.

  “Maybe,” Angel said. “Banshees are of Celtic origin, but their actual beginnings are lost in myth. Or maybe they’re all true. Besides the faery connection, they’re also thought to be ghosts of unbaptized children, devils who wail for the souls that escape them, and ancestral spirits who appear before a death to start the newly departed soul on its journey.”

  “Wouldn’t knowing what a banshee was exactly help?”

  “I don’t know,” Angel said. “I’m working on the fact that she was once Moira O’Braonain.”

  Cordelia looked confused. “And she was?”

  “A woman I killed,” Angel answered, “over two hundred years ago.”

  “And she murdered those other people you’re talking about?”

  Angel shook his head. “No. She’s innocent of that. The banshee takes over Whitney’s mind at those times, the same as she’s doing now. Whitney never remembers any of it. She also doesn’t remember being anything more than human. With the possession, Whitney only remembers one life at a time.”

  Gannon opened the Bible and began to read. “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen. Most glorious Prince of the Heavenly Armies, Saint Michael the Archangel, defend us in our battle against principalities and powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the spirits of wickedness in the high places.”

  As Angel watched, a glowing green barrier rose from the chalk to form a hemisphere that surrounded Whitney.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Come to the assistance of men whom God has created in His likeness,” Gannon continued in a steady voice that grew more powerful, “and whom He has redeemed at a great price from the tyranny of the devil.”

  Whitney stretched a hand out and touched the green glowing barrier. Sparks shot out in a blaze of fire. She jerked her hand back in pain. “No,” she whispered. She gazed fearfully at the glowing hemisphere. “You can’t do this to me.”

  Gannon continued, his words rolling through the warehouse.

  “Stop it!” Whitney slammed a fist against the glowing wall, showering the interior of the hemisphere with bright lime-green sparks. The glowing wall grew more opaque.

  Without warning, Whitney doubled over and sank to her knees. She sobbed in pain, holding her hands pressed against her ears. “You don’t know what you’re doing! You’re going to let it out!”

  “God arises,” Gannon read, “His enemies are scattered and those who hate Him flee before Him. As smoke is driven away, so are they driven; as wax melts before the fire, so the wicked perish at the presence of God.”

  “No!” Whitney shouted, leaping to her feet. “Stop! Please!”

  Gannon lifted his cross and continued relentlessly. “Beh
old the Cross of the Lord, flee bands of enemies.”

  Whitney doubled over again, her screams echoing through the cavernous warehouse. She morphed, changing into a bent, arthritic old woman with gray hair. Her bilious gray-green eyes focused on Angel, and she flung herself at the green glowing barrier.

  Sparks filled the hemisphere with the intensity of a lightning strike, followed immediately by the booming crack of thunder.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Incredibly, the green glowing hemisphere barrier held the trapped creature’s wrath. The stick-like old woman hammered the dome with her fists, setting up a crescendo of explosions that reverberated in the warehouse.

  Gannon, Doyle, and Cordelia drew back instinctively. Only Angel stood his ground, and the guilt within him held him like an anchor.

  With a final shriek of frustration, she stopped her attack and glared at Angel. “I know you.” Her voice was the creak of a mausoleum door opening for the first time in years, strong enough that it grated on Angel’s ears and caused pain.

  Gannon continued praying in a strong, loud voice that barely rose above the eldritch forces used to trap the ghost inside the dome.

  “I want to speak with Moira O’Braonain,” Angel demanded.

  “Moira is dead,” the old woman snarled accusingly. “You killed her, hellspawn. You broke her arm and left her to drown when Handsome Jack sank in those stormy waters.”

  “Yes,” Angel said. Accepting his own responsibility for the deed was part of the price he had to pay. “Now I’ve come to save her.”

  “You can’t.” The old woman cackled insanely. “I already saved her. I reached out for her and breathed life back into her.” She raked her curved claws against the dome.

  “You doomed her,” Angel said.

  “Less so than you, hellspawn. I gave her life, eternal life.”

  “You killed in her name,” Angel said. “She wouldn’t have wanted that if she’d known.”

  “Don’t be so sure.” The old woman traced arcane patterns on the glowing wall. The patterns burned in little wisps, causing the wall to shimmer. “When I reached out to her in that cold brine, she took my gift willingly. I offered her the means to get revenge on the thing that had killed her. She was glad to have me.”