Impressions

by Doranna Durgin

  “Next time we get up a meeting, we’ll talk about how not to attract attention,” he muttered, slouching deceptively by the side of a weed-edged brick building. “And how keeping your look isn’t nearly as important as keeping your life.”

  Tyree gave him a look, all right.

  Sinthea seemed amused by both the comment and Tyree’s reaction. She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and said, “We’re here doing your work for you, aren’t we? What’s to complain?”

  “Complain?” Gunn said, and frowned at her. “When I’ve got a complaint, you’ll know it. What I’ve got is experience.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “You want the news, or what?”

  Now that was a whole different story. Gunn straightened; it was enough for Sinthea. She said, “He just left. He met a geeky guy trying to look proud in black, and they were headed for a taxi—” Her eyes widened, almond-shaped surprise in her sleekly angled face. An instant without posturing, and an expression that quickly spread to Tyree’s harsher features.

  Gunn turned and found himself several yards away from a Tuingas demon. “Whoa,” he said. “That’s not good.”

  Tyree recovered enough to put his tough face back on. “Get it!” he said. “Or get outta my way so I can—”

  But Gunn wasn’t so sure that getting it was the best option. He’d seen these things in battle…he knew what it took to defeat one. He hadn’t exactly brought an arsenal along, not for a simple stakeout. Or rather, he had an arsenal—he always had an arsenal—but it was back in the truck. “Just hold on,” he said, putting a hand out behind him, spreading it open in front of Tyree’s chest but careful to leave him room. The wrong prod, and Tyree would feel obliged to charge into the fight regardless.

  “Just hold on,” he repeated as the Tuingas stood quietly, almost…thoughtfully. Its second, trunk-like nose waved gently before it, questing for scents, and though Gunn saw weapons in its wide sash, the demon made no move for them. “I dunno that this guy’s on our side…but I’m not sure he’s against us either.”

  “What do you mean?” Sinthea sounded scared. Good.

  “Are you nuts?” Tyree asked, putting scorn into the question. “How much more demon can you get than that?”

  “Not a whole lot,” Gunn admitted.

  “This is the kind you told me to watch out for,” Sinthea said. “That you told me to stay away from.”

  “This is it,” he said. “My guess is, it’s here for the same reason we are. It wants what we want…whatever it is that Lutkin has. The question is, which is worse for us—if Lutkin has it, or if these demons have it?” Man, it would be so much easier if Wesley would just figure out what it was the demons kept shouting at them….

  Or not shouting. For this demon, as it understood Gunn’s intent to stay his hand, quietly and distinctly repeated the words it had shouted in the hotel. Definitely the same one, even in this uneven streetlight…that distinctive wound pretty much said it all. “Okay,” Gunn said to it. “I get that. And we’re trying to figure out what you want. But you’d better know…we’re going to stop you if we think you need stopping.”

  “Stop him now,” Tyree said tensely.

  Gunn gave a sharp shake of his head. “Not if he’s the best chance we have of turning off the demon temper tantrums that have been going on.” And with Lutkin as the epicenter of the tantrums and the Tuingas fixated on Lutkin….

  “But you don’t know that he is,” the youth argued. “He might just be making it all worse!”

  “Yup,” Gun agreed as the Tuingas backed a step, taking a careful look at Sinthea and Tyree until Sinthea, tough as she was, eased a step closer to Gunn. “If it turns out that way, then we kill him.” He glanced back at Tyree, a meaningful look. “But not until we know.”

  “Well, you’d better figure it out,” Sinthea said, sounding shaken at this first face-to-face with blatant demonliness but regaining her determination fast. “Because by now, that guy you wanted watched has found himself a taxi.”

  Gunn muttered a curse, and dug carefully into his generous front pocket, not taking his eyes off the Tuingas. He found his ridiculously small cell phone and flipped it open, glancing down just long enough to hit the auto-dial sequence for the Hyperion.

  When he looked up again, the demon was gone; the kids behind him had stiffened at the ease with which it had faded into the darkness. Gunn didn’t waste time worrying about it, not with Cordelia’s tense greeting in his ear. “It’s me,” he said. “Lutkin and Arnnette are on the—”

  “—Move!” Cordelia cried, dropping the front desk phone as the vision hit. “Move, move, move!”

  For an instant they just stared at her—Wesley and Fred and Angel, and even the demon-draped man who was about to go home to perform the bizarre rituals of a nature so personal that neither Wes nor the man would confess just what they included. Then they parted before her, leaving a clear path to the nearest roundchair. She might be about to lose all control of her limbs, but she’d learned from experience to at least try to aim herself at something soft.

  A blue demon—a huge gray demon—a small maroon demon…bloodbloodblood…screaming and flashing metal and a suburban no an urban street no the freeway and it went on and on and on until she lost the details and emerged, finally, so dazed that it took many moments to realize she’d somehow made it to the chair but wasn’t alone; Fred fanned her anxiously with a folded piece of paper and Wesley supported her from behind and Angel crouched by the chair, watching her face with an unwavering gaze. Even the demon-draped man hovered in the background, looking like he wished he had something to do in this little tableau.

  “What happened?” Angel asked, and his quiet voice let her know it hadn’t been any more usual on the outside than from the inside.

  Dazed, Cordelia said, “That wasn’t a vision, that was a…a trip to a multiplex, where all the movies were playing in the same place at the same time!”

  “What did you see?” Wes asked. He asked it like he always asked it, as if he actually expected an answer.

  “Were you not listening?” Cordelia said incredulously. The phone beeped plaintively in the background, begging to be hung up. “All vision, all the time…there’s no way I can pick them apart.”

  Fred paused with the paper-fanning. “But how can we stop them from happening if you can’t sort them out?”

  “Good point,” Wesley said.

  “I can’t deal with more grannies on my conscience. I can’t!”

  But Angel only looked at her. After a moment, he said, “We can’t. Not individually.”

  Cordelia nodded slowly. “No. We can’t. We’ve got to stop the thing that’s triggering all the trouble.”

  “The false Angel’s client,” Wesley said. “If we’re to believe what he’s said about the man and his relative location to all the recent incidents.”

  “Oh,” Cordelia said, “that reminds me. You might want to call him. That was Gunn on the phone—he said David and Lutkin are on the move.” She pulled herself into a more upright sitting position, removing herself from Wesley’s support and accepting a cracked ceramic mug of water from the demon-draped guy. “He also said the Tuingas are there, running their own stakeout.” Wait, that wasn’t right…. “No…he didn’t get the chance. I must have seen them.”

  “I think we can trust that they’ll be involved with the evening, however it goes down,” Wesley said. He stood, digging in his pockets, as Fred quietly replaced the phone in its cradle and eased away. Wesley picked it up again and dialed the old rotary, peering at the paper with David Arnnette’s number on it. After a moment, he said, “You’re on the move. What can you tell us?”

  Arnnette’s response came in audible protest, the tone conveying what indistinct words could not. Wesley didn’t react, other than to wait it out.

  “Not happy we sent Gunn to the hotel,” Cordelia guessed.

  “See me not caring,” Angel said. He rose from his crouch and paced over to the weapons cabinet, then paced
back to lean against a pillar.

  Wesley said, “I don’t believe we ever agreed to allow you to dictate terms. We had the hotel watched. Get over it. What’s happening now?” He flipped the small note over and began to scribble on the other side, made a few encouraging noises, and then said, “We’ll keep in touch,” right before he hung up. Then, he just stared down at his notes for a moment.

  “Well?” Cordelia finally prodded him. “What’s going on?”

  “Quite a lot, it seems,” Wesley said. He looked up at them. “Turns out Lutkin knows quite a bit more about what’s going on than we suspected, even the faux Angel—until now. He’s an artifacts dealer; he’s going to make a sale tonight.”

  “In other words, he’s got what the Tuingas want, all right,” Fred said. “But…not for much longer.”

  “That’s what it looks like,” Wesley agreed. “He’s still not giving Arnnette any real details—except he’s making the exchange at the zoo, where the odors will confuse any Tuingas who are tracking them.”

  “The zoo’s closed,” Cordelia observed.

  “I imagine that’s the least of his worries.” Wesley gave the paper a thoughtful tap. “The buy is going down at midnight. We’ve got to get there before then.”

  Cordelia glanced at her watch. “Unless you suddenly own Chitty-chitty-bang-bang, I don’t think we’re going to make it.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Angel said shortly. He flipped a war dart into the air, and caught it. “We’ll track down whoever buys it.”

  “I’m not sure we have that luxury,” Wesley said, eyeing Angel closely as he added, “Things seem to be building to an intolerable level. And we just don’t know enough about the artifact in question to take such chances.”

  “Hold on a moment,” Cordelia said, rising from the roundchair with a sudden spark of intent that overrode the vision weariness if not the enthusiastic thumping in her head. “Right before Gunn called, I was looking at that weird new book of yours….”

  Silence followed her back behind the front counter to the desk, where she found the book on the floor. Smoothing the pages under Wesley’s frowning gaze, she found the spot she’d stumbled across just before the phone rang. “There’s this one clan of the Tuingas that no one knows much about—I guess they spend most of their time in some pocket dimension. Hmm. Sounds linty.”

  “I have to say I haven’t been able to dig up anything on any Tuingas clan that directly matches what we’ve seen,” Wesley admitted, apparently willing to forgive—or to at least temporarily forget—that she’d damaged his book. “It makes sense that we’re dealing with an obscure clan. One that spends most of its time in a pocket dimension, as well. Lorne mentioned that possibility.”

  “Wait, it gets better.” She turned the page, running her finger down the small print on the right-hand side of the page. On the left side of the page was a column containing a map of sightings, a few key symbols indicating demon behavior and habitat—a flexed biceps for strength, blunt teeth showing that they didn’t prey on humans but ate vegetable matter, a close-up of a human nose to show they had an extraordinary sense of smell, and a row of five dots with the middle dot in red, showing they were of medium size, at least in demon terms. And at the bottom, the thing that had first caught her attention: the mystical rune symbol the book used to indicate the use of problematic magic—in this case, printed in a cool blue color that meant the problem was coincidental and not deliberate. “Here,” she said. “‘This robust but rarely observed demon defends itself from food predators by undergoing a lysosomic self-destruction upon death, thus poisoning its own tissues.’”

  “It what?” the demon-draped man asked blankly.

  Cordelia glanced up at him with her you’re still here? expression as Wesley muttered, “It instantly turns into an excruciatingly smelly goo.”

  “That happens?” The man gave his own demon hitchhiker a look that could have been either wary or hopeful.

  “Not in your case, but if you follow the directions I gave you, you should be free of your unwanted guest. Just be sure you don’t miss any orifices.”

  Orifices? Cordelia didn’t even want to know. She cleared her throat—loudly—and said, “Short on time here, yes? So here’s the thing: Because the demon goes gooey, the other clan members have nothing to remember it by. So they’ve got this thing called a deathstone that they carry around all the time, and when they die, the stone takes an impression of their psychic emissions at the moment of their death. The other demons go to visit the deathstone like we go to visit a grave site.”

  Angel tapped the war dart against his palm like he might fiddle with a pencil, his concentration elsewhere. “Not sure this is getting us anywhere,” he said. “Getting in the car and going might be a good thing here.”

  “Do you want to know what we’re up against or not?” Cordelia said sharply, giving him a special look from beneath lowered brows—one that reminded him they weren’t going to take any guff just because the air was full of bad demon vibes. She ran her finger down the page and found where she’d left off. “Now this is really the thing. These stones are attended by, well…priests. And they have to be kept in special environments in these pocket dimensions. Shrines of some sort that protect the stone and the demons, because otherwise the stone becomes unstable, and it hits the demons—any demon except those Tuingas priests—with the same vibes it absorbed at its demon’s death. So, you know—if you have someone who died peacefully, it’s not such a huge thing to get under control, but if you’ve got the deathstone of a Tuingas that was really pissed off when it died, you’ve got—”

  “Trouble,” Wes finished for her, looking grim. “And it’s quite obviously getting worse over time.”

  Cordelia put the book aside and raised an eyebrow at her audience. Fred, demon-draped man, Wesley, and—still playing with the war dart with an almost disturbing intensity—Angel. “What do you wanna bet that gimme means ‘gimme that deathstone’?”

  They absorbed the notion in a disturbed silence.

  “That’s what that ugly stone was,” Wes said abruptly. “The one they took back. They were trying to protect us.”

  “And the stone,” Angel added. “From their point of view, the stone is probably just as important—if not more.”

  “I’ll bet they were priests,” Fred said suddenly.

  “What?” they said as one, turning to look at her.

  She shrank a little under the combined scrutiny, but stuck it out. “The ones who have come after it, like the one I saw. Their priests aren’t affected by the stone, right? So who else would the Tuingas send?”

  “Priests,” Wesley said slowly. “We’ve been killing priests.”

  “I’ve been killing priests,” Angel corrected evenly. “And just because you stamp a title on something doesn’t mean it’s a good something.”

  Wesley shook his head. “Nonetheless, these particular creatures have been trying to do good. They’re trying to recover the very thing that’s causing havoc in this city. And they’re not overeager to cause incidental damage—several times we ourselves have observed one of them backing away from an unnecessary fight.”

  “According to my IMAX visions, the havoc we’ve seen so far is nothing compared with what we will see,” Cordelia pointed out. “Especially if we don’t make it to the zoo on time and have to start tracking this stone all over again.”

  Their faces reflected bleak understanding; the demon-draped guy gave his living cloak a worried poke. “Maybe I’ll try that bar you mentioned,” he said.

  “Caritas?” Wesley responded absently. “That’s not a bad thought. I’ve no idea what your parasite might do under duress from deathstone emanations, and the spell on Caritas should keep you safe enough. When this is over, though, do come back and let us know how it goes with the…eviction.”

  But Cordelia was barely listening, and barely paid attention to the demon-draped man’s departure. Instead she stared at Angel’s hand, from which dark blood dripped. He d
idn’t even seem to realize it; he still tapped the dart against his palm, his expression distracted. Elsewhere. “Angel,” she said, and then, “Angel,” until he looked first at her and then followed her gaze to his hand and to the small dark puddle at his feet.

  And then he only shrugged. “I’ve been known to run with scissors, too.”

  “That’s not funny,” Cordelia said. She came around the front counter, taking his hand to look more closely at it, at the multiple glancing puncture wounds he hadn’t even appeared to notice. Most of the wounds still welled freely with new blood, but the older ones were already starting to close. “Look at this! What is your problem?”

  He held her gaze evenly. “I think you know the answer to that.”

  “No,” she said, “I don’t. I mean, I do, but why—”

  “—are we wasting time here when we need to get in the car and go?” he said, giving her that look that meant drop it. “Before we lose all chance at recovering this thing?”

  “But—”

  “It was an accident,” he snarled, pulling his hand away.

  Wesley eyed them both in warning. “Later,” he said. “For now…Angel’s right: We need to get our hands on this deathstone. The question is, what exactly will we do when we get it?”

  Chapter Twelve

  “Just get us going north on the Golden State Freeway,” Cordelia said, pointing vaguely over Angel’s shoulder from the backseat of the GTX. “The zoo’s up that way somewhere, I’m sure of it. Anyway, these things always have signs once you get close, don’t they? For all the tourists?”