Impressions

by Doranna Durgin

  “And do you just happen to know what he’s working on?”

  Those little eyes glanced again at the wall, “Not to say.”

  Angel got the sense the creature spoke truthfully, but he persisted. “Something to do with a guy and a bowling ball bag. And maybe demons that don’t hang around long after you kill them.”

  The Slith’s pursed mouth relaxed in surprise. “There has been this man, yes. Just a stupid human, not important. Don’t know demons.”

  Angel hesitated, knowing he’d reached that point where he’d either have to accept the Slith’s story or indulge in a little bashing…except that he really wanted to do the bashing, which was way too wrong. And he had the distinct feeling that if he started bashing, he just might not be able to stop.

  Maybe Lorne could do better.

  “Hey,” the Slith protested as Angel headed down the tunnel again. “I spoke! Put me down!”

  “When we’re inside Caritas,” Angel said. “And when you’re all comfy in a long-term chair. When Lorne says you’re safe to go, you can go. But it’s gonna involve singing, so I’d start picking out my favorites if I were you.”

  • • •

  Lorne eyed the Slith with a bleary gaze. “You brought him here…why, again? Sweetstuff, do I have permanent sucker written on my forehead?”

  Angel hesitated, couldn’t help a glance at the forehead in question. “Not visibly.” He indicated at the sullen Slith. It sat on a bar stool with its gawky knees up by its ears and its thin wrists cable-tied together, sucking on a mollifying slug. “This is the one place he can’t get into trouble.”

  “Hmm,” Lorne said flatly. “An original idea if I ever heard one.” He gave the club floor a distinct glance, and Angel followed it, for the first time taking in the unusual state of affairs. That he’d been blind to it before now made him wince inside; it only proved his distraction with the anger that thumped at his chest. In his chest, as though it had taken the place of his not-beating heart.

  No one had claimed the stage—that was strange right there—but the tables overflowed with demons of all shapes and sizes. Unhappy demons and demon mixed-breeds who clung to their chairs as if they were safety nets and eyed their neighbors warily.

  “I told you, nasty mojo,” Lorne said, lowering his voice. He gave Angel a once-over as obvious as a stage whisper and said, “This time I know you feel it.” The Slith leaned closer to hear, and Lorne pushed him away without looking, his broad green hand clashing badly with the demon’s rubbery blue face. He nodded at his customers. “They’re all afraid of what might happen out there. Or of what they might do.”

  “Our little friend here has already done it…this is the best place for him. Along with most any of us, I’d say.” Angel, too, felt the relief. The relief of knowing no matter his anger, no matter his control—or lack thereof—in here, he was incapable of hurting anyone.

  Too bad he couldn’t stay.

  “I don’t suppose you know?” Lorne said. “Someone’s got to.”

  “What’s going on?” Angel shook his head. “I can tell you that it’s not hitting humans. The others…they’ve noticed something’s up, but they’re all at their normal level of cranky.”

  “Well, I’m telling you what, hon-buns. If this keeps up, I’m going to slip myself a Mickey and go into hibernation until it’s all over.”

  Angel gave him a sharp look. “Can you?”

  A walking stick of a demon approached the bar and plunked down his empty glass, gesturing a desire for more.

  “Go away,” Lorne told it. “I’m having a me moment.”

  The demon gave this statement silent thought and seemed about to protest, but looked around the club and reconsidered. The very number of customers made it clear that this was the place to be…with or without service. It ambled away, leaving Lorne free to say, “Can I what? Hibernate? I only wish. But when the emotional leakage around here gets too rough—trust me, I can fake it.” He reached under the bar to produce a pre-mixed pitcher of something so garish, it made a perfect counterpoint to his suit. “A couple of these will do the trick. You note I have them ready.”

  “I did, actually,” Angel said. “Note that, I mean.” He raked another glance over the crowded room and steeled himself to leave it. To go back out where he had only himself to control…himself. “If you pick up anything useful…”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ll call. I’ve got an interest here.”

  “And him,” Angel said, nodding at the Slith. “He stays. Until we figure this out.”

  Lorne gave a mournful glance at the club, which was already showing the wear and tear of a capacity crowd. “I think they’re all here to stay,” he said, and looked longingly at the garish pitcher. But his natural inclinations won out; he cocked an eyebrow at the Slith and said, “Sing something for me. Or hum. If you hum, it’s got to be longer.”

  The Slith gave him an intrigued look, its gator eyes going bright. It cleared its throat and began humming, a throbbingly nasal, wandering pitch that was quite clearly supposed to be something and just as clearly…wasn’t.

  Lorne winced. “Ow,” he said. “Bad.”

  Angel said, “What did you get?”

  “Nothing more than I’m getting from any of the others—nebulous feelings of anger, a readiness to act on them, and a certain amount of puzzlement about the whole thing,” Lorne said, massaging his temple. “It’s just really bad humming.”

  “Boogerhead,” the Slith informed him primly, apparently including everyone within hearing distance. He took a healthy bite of slug and turned his back on them.

  Angel thought he probably had the right idea.

  “What’s with you?” Cordelia said as Angel stalked through the lobby. She stood by the hotel doors, prodding the temporary plywood boards she’d just paid good money to have installed and wondering when the hotel would take another round of damage.

  He didn’t mince words or waste pleasantries. “I’ve got armpit poison on my jacket.”

  “Ohhh-kay,” she said. “Gotta love that segue.” Segue, a really good actress word to know for scene transitions and all that. She pointed at the front desk. “That pet accident stuff is behind there. I decided there was no point in letting it get all the way back to the maintenance closet. Where’re Gunn and Wesley?”

  “Coming back any minute, if they didn’t get into any more trouble.” He pulled out the cleaner and the rag she’d looped through its handle. “I’ve never seen Caritas that crowded.”

  “Lack of segue, total nonsequitur…you sure you don’t have anything on your mind?” She left the doors to look at him more closely as he dabbed Nature’s Miracle on his coat.

  “Just all the answers we don’t have,” he said, and gave her his own close look, an inspection so intense that for a sudden startling instant she felt like he could see right through her. Just as she realized she was holding her breath, he said, “How about you? Anything on your mind? Visions? Glimpses? Even little ones?”

  She shook her head, not trusting her voice—and then frowned, crossing her arms in fake defiance, more than a little shaken by that look. What did he think he’d see? And what drove him to look so hard for it? “You expecting something?”

  He shook his head, just as suddenly distracted again. “Have a feeling.”

  She narrowed her eyes, totally annoyed by his cryptic mood and by her reaction to it. “Maybe you should keep it to yourself, then. Until you feel like making sense or something.”

  The door flung open with an emphatic bang, startling Cordelia—and to judge by their expressions as they entered the hotel, Wesley and Gunn as well. She winced and said, “Another entrance like that and you’ll take them right off their hinges. Where they barely are to begin with, you may have noticed.”

  “Sorry,” Wesley said. “All that adrenaline from a successful round of demon-hunting, you know.”

  “Besides which, they looked fixed,” Gunn added.

  “Did you find it?” Angel asked, tossing the
rag back behind the counter.

  “Find what?” Cordelia asked. “Is everyone talking in code today?”

  “Well…perhaps we weren’t so much demon-hunting as…”

  Gunn grinned. “Spitball hunting. And yes, we found it. Disposed of it. You?”

  “Left him at Caritas, getting hum therapy and hating it. You ever heard a Slith hum?” Angel raised a hand. “Never mind. Just don’t.”

  Wesley turned to Cordelia. “And you?”

  She gestured impatiently at the door. “What part of those newly boarded doors didn’t you see? You think some guy just came out of nowhere to do that? I’ve been doing my part.” She left her mouth open to mention the migraine, but closed it before the words came out. Getting attention and comfort was good, but those strange worried looks they tended to cast her way only added to the burden of the whole vision thing.

  “Stranger things have happened,” Wesley said. “It’s just we do need to get a fix on that demon to have any understanding of the encounters. Especially now that we’ve lost the”—he looked at the empty butter tub and finished lamely—“ugly stone.”

  “Be my guest.” She pointed him to the new identification book, left facedown on the front desk. He winced and rushed to rescue it, running a thumb along the spine as she said, “In order to use that thing, you’ve got to have details. Sure, there’s a choice for five appendages, but you’ve got to know what kind that fifth one is—is it spatulate or palmate, tubular or fringed…”

  “Ouch,” said Gunn.

  “I see your point,” Wesley said. He inserted a piece of paper into the book and returned it to her. Cordelia glanced at it. Some old notepaper with the zoo logo, no doubt soon to be appropriate for actual note-taking on her part. “Still, perhaps we’ll gather more data.”

  “Be nice if we did that before another of them comes in here wrecking things,” Gunn observed, resting an elbow on the counter. “Especially if it’s going to do a smelly meltdown when we kill it.”

  Assuming it didn’t get one of them first. But that was a factor they all lived with, every day. They just didn’t say it out loud very often. Cordelia sighed and ran a hand through her short hair. “I think we need to find that man,” she said. “The demon was after him. Or else we should find that guy who looked like Angel. I’ll bet he knows something.”

  Angel instantly protested, “He didn’t look anything like me.”

  “We need to find him, anyway,” Gunn said.

  Cordelia felt it coming, like a mental sneeze. An incredibly painful mental—

  Joggers. Brown hair, ponytails, mother and daughter running together blood and bright yellow skin, screaming—always screaming—

  “San Vincente Boulevard,” she gasped from the floor. “That median park the joggers use. There’s this yellow guy with a weird mohawk not-hair and these knives…growing…from its arms—”

  “Miquot?” Wesley said. “Hunting joggers on the strip park is hardly up to their standards.”

  “I wouldn’t call this hunting,” Cordelia said, pressing her fingers to her temples. Oh, ow. Shouldn’t there be some rule about no more than one vision per day? She was sure there should be a rule…. “More like…savaging. And…” She frowned, trying to grasp the most elusive part of the vision, the feel of it, the things that really didn’t come through as vision at all. Someone grasped her elbows from behind and lifted her to her feet, all but carrying her to one of the roundchairs. Angel. None of the others had that casual strength. “I don’t know how…but this is related to the Terminal Market thing.”

  “To the Slith demon?” Wesley asked, incredulous.

  “Yes,” she said, more assertive as the first shrieking pain receded into pounding waves. “And by something other than the fact that neither job is going to pay. I don’t know what yet…and I wouldn’t waste any time getting to those joggers.”

  “This one’s yours,” Angel said, though—was that regret? Cordelia narrowed her eyes. Yes, he very much looked as if he’d be fine with tearing into some Miquot.

  “Yes,” Wesley said. “The broad daylight and all.”

  “Don’t worry,” Cordelia said, wincing. “The way the day is going, I’ll have something else for you soon.”

  She wished she thought she was wrong.

  Chapter Six

  Angel went back to the underground. Back to sewers and utility tunnels and areas that none of L.A.’s city planners ever envisioned…or even knew about. The perfect place to ponder dark thoughts, to let them pound home the knowledge…I’ve got to figure out what’s going on. I’ve got to stop it. But with no direct line of inquiry and with Wesley and Gunn handling the Miquot and jogger incident and Cordelia napping off her vision in a second-floor room, Angel did what the others expected. He turned back to the matter of the unidentified demon-turned-goo-in-the-lobby and the scrawny excuse for a vampire wanna-be who’d copped Angel’s wardrobe.

  It still made no sense to him. Imitation as an indication of admiration…admiration of what? A young mortal’s callow irresponsibility, a hundred-plus of unspeakable evil, and almost a hundred years of living off rats? A few recent years of playing the good guy hardly made up for any of that. And the last thing he wanted was the responsibility of knowing someone else—anyone else—was using him as a template.

  None of the denizens of the underground he spoke to seemed to think much of it one way or the other.

  “Amateur,” snorted the highly humanized male Angel stopped not far from the hotel. He and his date were dressed for dinner out, wearing muckers and carrying their dress shoes through the sewers. “I heard something about it. He’s just a pretender.”

  “Needs to be eaten,” said the hunchbacked Oua’shin demon crouched against the side of a sewer tunnel, gnawing on something furry. He paused to insert a long claw into his mouth and withdrew part of a stretchy pet collar. “Just making trouble for us all, not keeping the right profile, drawing attention.”

  “Needs to spend a little time in a hellmouth,” growled an elderly hybrid with a face that hadn’t matched even before its human aspects had collapsed with time.

  • • •

  But they didn’t know where to find him. Or if they did, they weren’t admitting it…and Angel wasn’t ready to create resentment by switching from questions to intimidation.

  Not yet.

  No doubt the fake Angel had a small dingy cubby of an apartment somewhere. Possibly he had a pathetic pavement-scraping job and only threw on his Angel-making duds in his off time as his escape from banality to excitement. Angel spent a moment envisioning the man in dirty coveralls, picking up trash from some community facility or fast-food parking lot, a colorless being going unnoticed in the human world.

  A shrill ringing noise startled him, echoing off the cement walls of the sewer on the way back to the hotel. The cell phone. For once, he had it; for once, he had it turned on. Somewhere…

  He patted himself down, finally snagged it out of the inside pocket of his jacket, and fumbled it open. “Yeah?” he said, trying to sound like he’d been busy and successful instead of daydreaming in a sewer after getting nowhere.

  “Vision,” Cordelia said, sounding frantic even over the hollow tones of the cell phone. “Sewer. Kid looking for his cat. About to get eaten.”

  “Where?”

  “Sewer!”

  “Lots of those to choose from,” he reminded her, thinking sourly that all his weapons were at the hotel. This was supposed to be an amiable question-and-answer expedition, not another visionquest. “There’s gotta be something distinctive about it—”

  “No, there doesn’t,” she shot back at him in the sort of strained whisper that meant she’d probably be raising her voice into that higher register if she didn’t have a splitting vision-headache. Or several of them. “Just find—”

  The phone gave a forlorn beep and died. Angel scowled at it, a serious scowl that lesser life-forms would have known to flee.

  The phone remained unimpressed.
<
br />   Great. Kid, about to be eaten. Here in the extensive sewer system—at least he knew that much, and could stay out of utilities access and informal tunnels—with no clue where.

  Except for his memory of the Oua’shin demon picking a pet collar out of his mouth.

  Kid. Looking for his cat.

  Angel ran.

  And then stopped. That couldn’t be it. The hunchbacked Oua’shin hunted close to the ground…and they hunted animals, not humans. They never went above; never confronted humanity in any way.

  A thin scream cut through the damp tunnel air.

  Couldn’t be it. Was.

  He ran with a vampire’s speed.

  The screaming would have guided him had memory not done the trick. He took a sharp corner, came upon the struggle—a dark-skinned boy, maybe six years old, skinny and flailing and panicked. The Oua’shin, clutching him with an expression of manic fury.

  On the floor beside a still-rocking flashlight, something furry and bloody, an elongated lump with pearly jagged leg bone jutting out the end—

  Angel scooped it up on the run, used his strength and anger and momentum to shove it through the Oua’shin’s gummy black eye. The demon stiffened, flinging his arms and legs wide in a death spasm. The kid squirted free.

  Angel kept his head turned, waiting the instant it took to repress fang-face before letting the kid see him.

  Except it wouldn’t go away. His own rage coursed through him, freed by the incident, startling in intensity, fogging his brain…

  The kid cried. A weak, tasty sound…

  Repulsed by his own reaction, Angel startled himself back into human visage. He gave himself another moment, made sure of it—and turned to the boy.

  “Spike!” the child cried.

  Angel wheeled around to search the darkness beyond the flickering flashlight beam, his eye targeting an image of the lean, bleach-headed vampire—but no. Not here.

  Spike the cat. The boy’s pet.