by Various
Timmy nodded, eager to please. “Sure, Daddy,” he said. “We have lots of fun!”
“Good.” Daddy reached into a pocket and then handed something to Timmy. It was a Fruit Doodle, still in its plastic wrapper. Raspberry, Timmy’s favorite. He all but snatched it.
“Now, go back to your book. I have another errand to run, and when I come back, we’ll have dinner,” Daddy said. “And then later, maybe we’ll call your mother.”
“You’re going out again?” That was a surprise.
“I have to. It’s Long Night.”
“Long Night?”
“Almost Christmas, I mean,” Father said.
“And that means Santa Claus, right?” Timmy asked.
Daddy nodded.
Timmy took a deep breath, and then asked the question in a single rushing gasp. “Can we go see Santa Claus? He’s going to be at the mall and I really want to—”
Daddy’s face darkened with anger and his eyes seemed to light. His hand, so much bigger and stronger than Timmy’s, reclaimed the Fruit Doodle.
“You weren’t just reading, were you, Timmy?” he demanded.
Suddenly miserable, Timmy shook his head. “I watched TV,” he said. “Just a little bit.”
“You’re not supposed to watch TV without me,” Daddy said.
“I wanted to see a cartoon,” Timmy said, still miserable and still filled with the knowledge that he had done something very wrong. His gaze never left the Fruit Doodle. “But the color channels were working. And they said Santa would be—”
His words stopped abruptly, as a new sound cut through them.
Someone was knocking at the front door.
Daddy stood, suddenly pale again. “You’d better go to your room, Timmy,” he said, and handed Timmy the pastry. “Be a good boy and go to your room.”
“But, Daddy—”
“Now,” Daddy said. “I have to go back to the kitchen for a moment, and I don’t want you here when I come back.”
The knocking came again.
Timmy scrambled back into the library picture. He knew the house better than his father did. Going to his room this way meant that he didn’t have to climb the long stairs or take the back hall. From inside the frame he stuck his head out for one last peek, just in time to see his father return and begin opening the door locks again. This time, however, Daddy did it more slowly, because he was using only one hand.
His other was busy holding a gun, and as Timmy watched, Daddy’s thumb drew back the hammer.
The sun was far below the horizon by the time Angel could return to the hotel. Even in the tunnels that ran beneath the rambling structure, he could feel the dawn of the longest night. He could feel the darkness gather outside, and feel the shadows of his own vampiric nature stir in response. It was as if some heavy weight had been lifted from his shoulders, or as if some constant, annoying companion had fled. The darkness called to him, and it called more strongly as he climbed from the tunnels and made his way to the main lobby.
“Don’t you look nice,” Cordelia Chase said, as he opened the door. “Very stylish, in a lurid sort of way. Total Yule.”
She spoke tartly. She almost always spoke tartly, even now, even after so much had changed. The familiar was a consistent reminder that, no matter how much she had matured, Cordelia was in some ways still very much the spoiled rich girl he had first met in Sunnydale.
Even if she wasn’t rich anymore.
“Hello, Cordelia,” he said.
She had set up shop at what had been the hotel’s main desk, surrounding herself with open books and what seemed like dozens of manila folders. A laptop computer waited to one side, its pale glow drowned out by the lobby lamps. Above her hung the Angel Investigations’ grudging and almost entirely secular concessions to the Christmas season—colored ornaments, electric candles, and a smiling blown-glass heavenly cherub that looked more like Cupid to Angel’s eyes.
None of the decorations were crosses, of course. Even recalled images of them, scattered through Angel’s memories of Christmases past, were enough to make him uncomfortable.
“Be careful!” she said to him. “I just cleaned those rugs!”
Angel stared at her blankly for a split second, but then comprehension dawned and he hastily stepped from the carpet and onto the polished marble floor. Just in time, too. The black leather duster he wore was spattered with green- and red-glowing gore, in lurid mockery of the season. A blob of the red had chosen that moment to tear free, and now it hit the marble floor and splashed.
The assignment had been very messy.
“I swear, I’m going to make you start changing your clothes before you come upstairs! Here!”
She threw him a roll of paper towels. He caught it easily and began dabbing at the latticed slime that decorated his long leather coat, realizing now what had prompted Cordelia’s Yule comment. “Darn ichor,” he muttered and felt a bit of relief as he realized that it was coming off cleanly. He had the grace and speed of something superhuman, but mussed clothes made him feel awkward and self-conscious.
“I take it things went well?” Cordelia asked.
“Pretty much what we expected. It was a demon in the old Chesney warehouse,” Angel said. The report had come in earlier in the day, but he had waited to act on it until secure in the knowledge that he could hunt his quarry without risking the sunlight. “A Ch’sn’y demon, in fact. But the name part was probably a coincidence. You can bill the owners. They should be happy to pay.”
“Coincidence. Hmph.” Cordelia, trim and attractive, leaned back in the high chair behind the desk. Her expression was stern now, and she looked like the prettiest judge in the world. All that she needed to complete the effect were a robe and gavel. “Daddy used to say there was no such thing as a coincidence.”
Angel shook his head. “Don’t ever let a wizard hear you say that,” he said. “Or Wesley.” He glanced at the cluttered desktop. “What are you working on?”
“The Gibson case,” Cordelia said. “Rich Dr. Gibson sent us the reports from her other searches for her son.” She looked at him. “Oh, Angel—this is so sad.”
She opened one of the folders, and spilled more pictures onto the desktop. Timmy Gibson smiled up at him again from scores of snapshots. He laughed, he cried, he ate ice cream and Fruit Doodles, and rode happily on the shoulders of a man who had to be his father.
Luther Gibson had been a tall man, lean, with laughter lighting his eyes. Angel wondered what, if anything, lit those eyes now.
“Timmy looks like he was a happy kid,” was all he could think to say.
“Was?” Tartness gave way to something sharper as Cordelia glared at him.
“Is,” Angel hastily amended. But his thoughts were less optimistic. A little boy gone missing for five years, a possessive father who had to be dead but still called—those factors didn’t suggest a happy ending. He had considered that point, even as he went about his business in the Ch’sn’y warehouse. The likely conclusion to Timmy’s story was not a happy one.
“He planned this,” she said, spitting the words. “He moved a huge amount of money into a sealed trust and locked it down, but good. Rachel’s lawyers and accountants have been working on it for five years, and can’t crack it. It’s millions, Angel. Millions. Enough to live on for a very long time.” She looked around the hotel lobby. “Actually, enough to live on just about forever.”
“Cordelia,” he said, with great reluctance. “About the Gibsons, about Timmy—”
“Thousands of children disappear every year, Angel,” she said, interrupting. “We are here to help the helpless, and we are not going to turn our backs on this one.”
“This isn’t just an ordinary disappearance,” Angel said. The unease he felt colored his tones, but he tried to choose his words carefully. “There’ve been other cases, when men tried to cheat death—”
“Wesley agrees that there’s something funny,” she continued, as if he hadn’t spoken. “He’s looking into Gi
bson’s old neighborhood, where he grew up. People go back to their roots, he said. And the trust holds the deed on—”
“It’s been five years, Cordy,” Angel said patiently. “Five years is a long time.”
Cordy raised her hand for silence like a prom queen holding court, a gesture that reminded him yet again of the old Cordelia. She had selected one sheet from the many before her and was inspecting it carefully. “Angel,” she said, abruptly thoughtful. “What do you know about tungsten?”
“It’s a metal,” he said, baffled by her sudden change of subject and tone but used to such things by now. “Very tough. They use it in light bulbs and steel.”
Cordy shook her head, making her auburn hair ripple and flow beneath the electric candles. “That’s not what I mean,” she said. She spun in her chair and began typing on the portable computer. “Science was nowhere near my favorite subject, but I seem to remember something,” she said. “Something about tungsten. There’s got to be a Web page—”
“About the little boy, Cordy,” Angel continued doggedly. “We have to expect the worst.”
“He’s alive,” Cordelia said, as if that settled things. “He calls.”
“Has he called this year?”
She shook her head. “Gunn’s on alert, in case he does.”
Angel sighed. “Death isn’t the worst,” he said patiently. “I’m not alive, Cordelia. Not really. But I talk to you every day.”
She wasn’t listening to him.
“His father was a lawyer,” Cordelia said in a low voice. Words had formed on the screen and she was reading them. “A very rich lawyer. That means he was connected with bad people.” She looked up at him. “The trust he set up is the Tungsten Trust. At first, I thought that was just because it was tough, too. But don’t you see?” Her words came in a rush. “Do you know where they get tungsten, Angel?”
He looked at her blankly.
“The ore is wolframite,” she said. “And another name for tungsten itself is—”
“Wolfram,” Angel said softly.
A world away, in a room very much unlike this one, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce had placed three books side by side, then displayed the results. Three images on the worn bindings, meaningless in themselves, had become a grim rebus when placed in a specific sequence. A wolf, a ram, and a hart—together they had spelled out “Wolfram & Hart.” Angel had stared in shock and astonishment then, and now he felt those feelings anew.
The law firm of Wolfram & Hart had its claws—literally and figuratively—in every dimension, it seemed. They had managed to raise Darla from the dead and even had a scroll that mentioned Angel’s coming.
“It can’t be a coincidence,” he said.
“There are no coincidences,” Cordelia said, and displayed her perfect teeth in a smile that mocked, but only slightly. The smile faded as she continued. “They must have set up the trust. Wesley needs to know about this,” she said.
“Where is he?” Angel asked. “Where was he going?”
“I told you—the old neighborhood,” Cordelia said. She picked up the phone and punched numbers. “Gibson’s family home is out on Aptora Drive, and the Tungsten Trust holds the deed. Dr. Gibson’s people say that the place is sealed and alarmed, that no one lives there, but Wes wanted to make sure.” She returned the phone to its cradle. “No answer. Either he’s in a bad cell or he’s in trouble.”
Angel scarcely heard her. He had already stepped to the nearby weapons cabinet and opened it. Now he selected the tools of his trade, one after another. A dagger. A small ax. A dozen wooden stakes, honed to wicked points.
“Stakes?” Cordelia said, comprehension finally dawning. “Not the little boy?”
He looked at her and nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. The father, at least. Maybe both. That’s what I’m afraid of,” he said.
“I’ll go with you,” Cordelia said, reaching for her jacket.
Angel shook his head. “This could be bad, Cordy, and there’s a lot going on,” he said. “Keep trying Wes. Let me handle it myself.”
Human emotions were strong, and sometimes endured even after death. A father who loved his son deeply enough, who was facing death and was terrified of it, might do terrible things—especially if he had access to the resources of Wolfram & Hart.
“Oh, yuck,” Cordelia said softly.
“Four lives,” Luther Gibson said. “Four days a year. Not such a terrible price, really.”
“Even one life is too much,” Wesley said tightly. He wanted to cross his legs, but could not. Instead, he sipped tea. It was Earl Grey, but stale and old. It was bitter but at least it was hot, and for a brief moment, he considered throwing it in Gibson’s face. But his unwanted host moved with speed and grace that were remarkable for a man who was supposed to be dead, and Wesley was reasonably certain that the tactic would fail.
And if it did, there would be no second chance.
“Most of them were lives without value, Mr. Wyndam-Pryce,” Gibson said. Despite his words, he looked infinitely sad. “And they bought something remarkably dear, really. A smile on a young boy’s face.” He paused. “My father never saw me smile. And I never saw him at all. That’s the worst of it, I think.”
They were opposite one another in the basement of Gibson’s home. Wesley occupied an overstuffed easy chair, worn but comfortable, and Gibson had composed himself neatly on a matching couch. Between them was a low table with a tea service. Loops of heavy chain ran from shackles on Wesley’s ankles to a ring set deep in the bare stone floor. The floor’s slate flagging was scarred and stained with a murky brown that Wesley knew only too well.
It was the color of old, dried blood.
“I wish I could make you understand,” Gibson said. He spoke with the studied, persuasive tones of a good lawyer. His right hand, resting on the couch arm, held his gun trained unswervingly at Wesley’s chest. The weapon had not left his hand since he had opened the door to greet Wesley. “It’s nothing personal, really.”
“You’ll forgive me if I take it personally,” Wesley said. He hated this. He hated being helpless and being made the fool, but Gibson had taken him completely by surprise. Police reports and Dr. Gibson’s files and neighborhood sources had all told him that the place was empty and shuttered. When Wesley had come calling, the ancestral manse’s weathered exterior had seemed to confirm those reports.
Luther Gibson’s presence there indicated differently, of course.
“Winos,” Gibson said. “Shopping bag people. Hippies. Lives already empty. I can see that you’re not like them, and I’m sorry that it’s come to this. But you came to me, after all.”
Wesley had taken stock of his surroundings carefully after being led down the stairs and chained in his chair, trying to be thorough while remaining discreet.
The geometry of the basement room was odd. The four walls, the ceiling, and the floor were all perfect squares of the same size. The space they bounded was a perfect cube. Except for couch, chair, and table, the chamber was nearly unfurnished. In one corner stood a rack of tools—shovels and picks, saws and axes—beside a break in the stone floor that let mounded earth show.
It wasn’t hard to guess where the previous occupants of Wesley’s chair had ended up.
“Four times a year,” Gibson continued. “Equinoxes, vernal and autumnal. Both solstices, summer and winter.” He paused. “Winter is the most important one. The longest night.”
Wesley nodded and sipped some more tea. Sweat had formed on the back of his neck and now ran cold down his spine. “The Longest Night,” he said, forcing himself to speak more calmly than he felt. “I have friends, you know. Friends who know where I am and who will come for me.”
“And when they come for you,” Gibson said, “they’ll find nothing but an empty house, shuttered and dusty. Except for four days a year.”
If the basement room itself was nearly barren, the stone walls that bounded it were not. They were decorated with startlingly realistic pictures, images of l
ushly appointed rooms and hallways that reminded Wesley of what little he had seen of the upper floor. The one directly behind Gibson, for example, was of the main foyer. Between the framed images, complex glyphs and runes were painted and etched into the rock itself, from slate-flagged floor to timbered ceiling. Wesley took little note of the pictures, but the markings fascinated him. They hinted of a dozen extinct alphabets and visual vocabularies, but belonged specifically to none.
And they moved.
At first, Wesley had thought it an illusion, but now he was certain. Slowly but implacably, the complex and intertwining symbols were rewriting themselves. The patterns reminded Wesley vaguely of mathematical equations chalked on a blackboard. They gained in complexity as each moment passed.
“Four is a very important number in certain demonic pantheons,” Wesley said. A guess wouldn’t hurt. “Four is a sacred number to Dhoram-Gorath, for example.”
“That might be his name,” Gibson said, still agreeable. “I really don’t know. My lawyers made all the arrangements.”
“You’re an attorney yourself,” Wesley said. The trickle of sweat running down his back became colder.
“Criminal. I needed specialists in contract law,” Gibson said. He sipped his own tea, and seemed to enjoy it no more than Wesley had his. “They made the arrangements, and told me what I had to do as my end of the deal. Four times a year, when the house synchronizes. That’s when I secure the other supplies, too.”
Synchronizes. Wesley considered the word, turning it over in his mind.
“Speaking of years, I must say that you’re remarkably active for a man who was to have died of brain cancer nearly half a decade ago,” he said bluntly. “I take it that’s why you made the deal?”
“Not a cure,” Gibson said. “A…a pause. For most of the year, Timmy and I are here together, and the world does not intrude. Neither does the disease. The house is as it used to be, when I was growing up here.”
“Dhoram-Gorath it is,” Wesley said. He was certain of that now. Dhoram-Gorath was a powerful time-binding demon of the Ch’sn’y pantheon.