“For all the people who live in L.A. and never go there,” Wesley said from the back seat. “The tourists have maps.”
“I know where it is,” Angel said shortly. In Wesley’s voice he’d heard the same concern now crossing his own mind…they weren’t going to make it in time. It was a troubled night in a troubled city, and the sound of sirens filled the background. Cars slowed around them, hesitant not because of heavy traffic but because of the strange things the drivers saw…or thought they saw…or hoped they weren’t seeing.
He clenched his hand around the steering wheel, leaving blood. It hurt. But it was a small hurt, and it seemed to help keep his mind clear, just as it had done in the lobby. It was an accident, he’d said…and it had been. Careless distraction with sharp weapons… and enough pain to break through his deathstone-driven agitation.
Not to mention embarrassment when Cordelia was the first of them to realize what he’d done.
Self-consciously, he released his knuckle-cracking grip on the wheel. “Did you reach the fake me yet?”
“It’s just been ringing,” she said, flipping open her small cell phone to punch the redial. “No, wait”—she glanced at him, success lighting her features—
“David, is that you? This is Cordelia. Yeah, you know, from the real Angel Investigations. No kidding, we’re a little busy too. And we need you to stall. Things are looking bad here and—” She listened a moment, then pulled the phone away from her mouth to push short windblown hair from her eyes and hold it back against her head. “They’ve hit a snag,” she reported to the real Angel Investigations. “They’re on their way through Elysian Park—I guess it’s pretty rough. The taxi driver abandoned them to hole up at the police academy.”
“But that’s good,” Wes said. “It takes the driver out of the equation. We don’t need any more innocents involved here. I’m not sure how it slows them down, though. Surely one of them knows how to drive.”
“I said the taxi driver abandoned them. I didn’t say he made it far.” Cordelia held the phone away from her ear with a sudden wince. “I think they’re trying to bash out the divider between the front and the back so they can get to the driver’s seat without leaving the car.”
Angel took his eyes off the chaotic street—cars suddenly diving for the edge of the road, trying to avoid whatever startling thing they’d come upon, demons scuffling with one another on the center line, fender benders galore—long enough to glance at Cordelia, to see how seriously she was taking the faux Angel’s predicament.
Pretty seriously.
“Stay in the car, then!” she was saying. “We’re headed that way. We’ll scoop you up if we have to—”
And all for the better—they’d have the stone, the carrier, the faux Angel…all one tidy little package. From the back, Wesley caught the implications as well, leaning forward over the front seat to listen as he watched Cordelia’s expression.
Even from the corner of Angel’s eye, using preternatural reflexes to swerve around a small blot of angry something in the road, he could see her wince a second time. “Yeah, okay,” she said. “Just stall him as much as you can.” And she closed the phone. “That would have been too easy, I guess. Lutkin made a break for it, got behind the wheel. He’s still got to get back on the freeway, though—sounds like the taxi driver headed them up Academy Drive before he went all car-aphobic on them.”
“Did Lutkin know Arnnette was on the phone with us?” Wes asked, fretting out loud. “It may well have been what spurred him to take such a risk—”
“He took the risk for the same reason he has the deathstone in the first place,” Angel said, finding the anger a little too easily. He clamped down on the steering wheel. Ow. That was better. Almost healed, there, but still enough of a sting to—
“Because he’s a greedy old so-and-so,” Cordelia said. “He and Arnnette make quite the team, if you ask me.”
“I’m guessing he wouldn’t care if he did know we were following,” Angel said, spotting a clear path in the traffic and accelerating to take it in a few startling swoops of lane changes. “He’s ahead of us, and he knows exactly what we’re facing. He’s in pretty good shape.”
“Try Gunn,” Wesley suggested. “Maybe he can make better time than we are.”
“Trying Gunn,” Cordelia said, activating the phone again. “Let’s hope his luck is better than ours.”
• • •
Get to the zoo, Cordelia had told him. Get there now.
Gunn stared at his cell phone, then flipped it closed.
“Let us come along,” Sinthea said, eavesdropping with intent and then pouncing.
He immediately struck out for the truck, trying to absorb all that Cordelia had babbled at him. “I need you here,” he said. “It’s a bad night. You need to cover your own streets, not—”
“—join you where all the action is?” Tyree finished for him.
Gunn mustered his patience. “Stray from your turf. This is way up at the zoo. Besides, this isn’t the kind of action you’re looking for. Our guy’s got something; we’re going to keep him from selling it to another guy. Mostly in between we’ve got traffic jams.” He didn’t mention the demons going wild along the way that were causing the traffic jams. These kids weren’t ready to go into a situation where Gunn couldn’t protect their backs…and no matter what they thought, they wouldn’t be ready until they were willing to listen to him.
“Sounds to me like you’re cutting us out,” Sinthea said.
“Does it?” Gunn said, turning on them and letting his voice go hard. The truck sat only half a block away; the zoo was much farther. Time grew absurdly short. “I can’t imagine why I’d do that, can you? Why I’d go out on my business without letting you in on every piece of it.”
“You cut us in on watching the hotel,” Tyree said, giving Gunn a cold stare even the night couldn’t hide. “We were good enough for that.”
Gunn could be cold, too. And neither Tyree nor his following were of any use to him—or themselves—if they were going to fight him all the way. “You couldn’t be just a little bit like the fake Angel?” he muttered to himself, leaving the two teens exchanging a puzzled glance. Louder, he said, “It’s not gonna happen. And the more grief you give me, the more I’m sure it’s not gonna happen. You catch my meaning on that?”
“Tsk, tsk,” said the man who was suddenly leaning against the tailgate to Gunn’s truck. He had a fluffy Afro that needed picking, and wore low-slung bell-bottoms below a brightly patterned polyester shirt. He didn’t quite have his fangs showing. “It’s not going to happen, all right—but not for the reasons you think.”
“Hey,” Gunn said, offended, and automatically cataloguing the weapons and potential weapons on his person. Not a lot. More in the truck. Of course. “Get your grave-clammy little hands off my truck.”
“Why’s that? You need it? You trying to get somewhere? You should have paid better attention. And really, you should know better than to hang around this part of town.”
Gunn snorted. “You must be new here. This is my part of town.”
“And mine,” Sinthea said boldly, stepping up beside Gunn.
As far as he knew, she hadn’t come out with anything sharp and wooden hidden in the revealing outfit he’d already noted.
“And mine,” Tyree agreed, looking at the vampire through half-lidded eyes with a lazily threatening expression that would scare the pants off anything human.
This not being a human, it just got a wider smile. “You know,” the vampire said, “I’ve been in this really bad mood all day, but for some reason it just got much better.”
“I don’t have time for this,” Gunn said, exasperated. A quick check showed the vamp to be alone, but—“Watch my back,” he said to the kids, and moved in, the stake from his back pocket already in his hand.
“Oh goody, it’s dinner entertainment,” the vamp said, and he stood back from the truck slightly. Then, giving Gunn a sly look, he very deliberately kicked t
he fender.
Gunn slowly shook his head. “That was such a bad move.”
Which was when Tyree grabbed the stake from Gunn’s hand and rushed the vampire, plowing into him so they both bounced off the truck, and plunging the stake into the vamp’s chest with all his considerable strength. He leaped away, his expression pure I-told you-so in Gunn’s direction.
“Nice,” Gunn said, crossing his arms to watch the vamp as he clung to the side of the truck, imminent death in his expression. “One little problem there. Or two.”
Tyree frowned slightly. “Shouldn’t he be—?”
“Yeah. Except you missed his heart.”
The significance of this fact eased through Tyree’s thoughts and made it all the way to his face as the vamp gave a little smile, tugged the stake out, and threw it far down the street.
Implacably, Gunn said, “The other problem being you gave away my best stake to do it.”
From behind them, Sinthea said, “And then there’s that third problem.” Her steady voice gave away nothing of her fear, but her meaning was clear enough: Our vamp didn’t come alone after all. Which was why he’d told them to watch. They hadn’t, and now he’d lost his best weapon and two girly vamps in really low hip-hugging bell-bottoms and halter tops had their hands on Sinthea. They had vamp faces turned on full and nasty expressions that meant Sinthea was only alive because they felt like playing with their food.
And it wasn’t like the distance to the zoo was getting any shorter while he stood here. He threw his hands up and made a noise of disgust. “Don’t have time for this,” he warned the vampires, reaching for a backup stake, one that had broken in the last fight and wasn’t quite long enough. “You wanna skip to the end and stake yourselves for us?”
For some reason they thought that was funny. Gunn shrugged. He tossed the stake to Tyree and said, “Don’t do anything fancy. Stick to defense. I’ll be there in a moment.” And from the cargo pocket of his jeans he withdrew the black lacquered chopsticks he’d grabbed from Wesley’s desk just because it seemed to be his turn—and also, he had to admit, because he’d seen the potential to needle Angel.
Tyree just stared at the chopsticks, and then at the stake in his hand. Gunn snapped, “Do it! Defense!” And he turned to the first vampire and said, “I believe I told you to get away from that truck.”
“And I believe I laughed,” the vampire said.
No time for this.
Gunn attacked. A chopstick in either hand, well-protected within his fist, he went in with his brutally efficient style, going for confusion instead of the straight kill Tyree had led the vampire to expect. Body blows, a few jabs to the nose, the crunch of separating cartilage and bone…as the vampire reeled back, astonishment on his face, Gunn wheeled around, checked his angle—the chopstick had to go in perfectly straight, sliding upward through ribs into heart or it would break before it even approached its target—and slammed the chopstick home.
The vamp’s astonishment made way for dust as Gunn snarled, “I told you—not the truck!” and then whirled on the two teens and the hippie vamps.
Tyree had freed Sinthea, and they stood back-to-back, finally doing just what they’d been told: keeping the hippie vamps at bay and nothing more. Barely keeping them at bay, for both of them bled, and Sinthea had that dazed look and a mousing eye; she’d taken some hits. The vamps were doing just what they’d wanted: playing with the food.
Until Gunn, with perfect timing, planted a heavy kick in the middle of the closer one’s back, a shove-kick that impaled the vampire on Tyree’s borrowed stake. There was no aim to it, and the hippie vampire shrieked but didn’t dust off—but this time, Tyree immediately realized the situation, withdrew the stake, and slammed it home again.
The final vampire hesitated, just the merest instant in recognition of the changed odds, and Sinthea cried, “My neighborhood,” and fell on her in a fury. It couldn’t last; no normal human could outlast a vampire that way. But Tyree threw Gunn the stake, and Gunn jumped in behind the vampire as she staggered back; as she looked up at him in surprise, he brought his arms around her in a false embrace from behind and neatly dusted her, careful not to use so much force that the stake ended up in his own chest as well.
Tyree grabbed Sinthea just in time to keep her from folding to the ground, giving her the moment’s support she needed before she could stand on her own again—which she did, moving away from him to prove it. Gunn said shortly, “Get the stake he threw down the street. Keep it with you tonight, but your job is to spot them”—vampires, demons, sewer creature mutts—“and keep everyone else away from them, not kill them. Unless you want to risk losing your life to something that can only be killed by an eagle feather dipped in mercury and stabbed into its eye while you think you can kill it with a blade.”
“There’s something like that out there…?” Sinthea asked, still breathing heavily—though her hand, as she tucked her hair behind her ear, was as steady as Gunn could have hoped for.
“Until you don’t have to ask, you’ll just have to trust me,” he said.
This time, she barely hesitated. She nodded, and she didn’t say whatever impulse of protest lurked behind the quick tightening of her lips.
He tossed her the short stake, and tucked the chopsticks back in his pocket. In an unconscious instant of imitation, Sinthea did the same with the stake.
Gunn hid the small smile that tugged at his mouth, and headed for his truck. “Call if you need help,” he said, and for the first time he thought they probably would.
It occurred to him as he climbed in the truck that he had no intention of revealing what the chopsticks had been through before he replaced them on Wesley’s desk.
Chapter Thirteen
“I’m thinking I hope Gunn goes another way.” Cordelia looked out over the chaos of the Golden State Freeway. The dark trees of Elysian Park lined the southwest side of the freeway…as did too many cars to count. It had turned into a group experience, this pulling over to the far lane to stop and say Did you see that? to people you didn’t know…people who on another evening would honk and shout and make rude gestures but on this day merely contributed to the mess.
Although, of course, the honkers and shouters were out in force as well.
“Take heart,” Wesley said, raising his voice. “Lutkin and the faux Angel had to come this way too. Even if they made it off Academy Drive to the Pasadena Freeway ahead of us, they can’t be too far ahead. Not in this.”
• • •
Demon blood turned the streets red.
And orange, and sticky green, and one color Gunn didn’t care to describe.
He drove up Alvarado, eyeing pavement that looked like a paintball battle had taken place—and knowing that most people would believe that to be the case. Gunn himself only truly understood since Cordy’s quick phone data dump. What a mess. He’d already rolled over one demon himself. It had been so enraged by the deathstone emanations that it had apparently been unable to perceive the basic flaw in playing chicken with a full-sized pickup truck, and Gunn doubted it would have any opportunity to apply its new knowledge to future encounters. It had, if he recalled correctly, bled yellow, an ugly stain under the streetlights as seen in his rearview mirror.
He switched the radio on, tuning to KFWB—“All News, All the Time.” Not his usual fare, but they had good traffic reports—as if anyone could keep up with this—and, given the circumstances…still, jabber jabber jabber…. He turned the radio down and concentrated on making time, not the least bit concerned that the overworked cops would tag him for speeding.
They were already plenty busy tonight. Mostly getting there too late, puzzling over the inexplicable aftermath of a drive-by demoning, trying to take reports, comfort witnesses, grab up the still-living and get them to medical help. Gunn passed a handful of stopped patrol cars with flashers going and muttered, “Give it up, guys. You’re in waaay over your head.”
He wondered if the same might not be said of him.
Here he was, racing to help someone who not so long ago had made an aborted attempt to kill him. He could have stayed where he was, supervising the youthful and barely prepared neighborhood watch. He could have gone back to his gang—they didn’t pretend to understand his new focus with Angel Investigations, but then again, sometimes neither did he. And they would have welcomed the extra hands on a night like this, along with the wealth of experience on which he could draw.
Extra hands. Maybe that’s what it came down to. Honorable as it was, he didn’t want to fight these battles as a foot soldier. He didn’t want to be an extra hand. He wanted to be in the center of the action, making a difference. He’d understood from the start that it meant working with Angel, and he’d adjusted to that fact.
But every now and then something happened to remind him just who Angel was. Just what he was.
And just what lurked within him.
But the bottom line remained the same: He wanted to be in the center of it all, combating L.A.’s problems at the source. He wanted to be at the zoo tonight, and not prowling the streets ignorant of the larger picture. And it still meant working with Angel.
So yes, here he was, racing to help someone who not so long ago had made an aborted attempt to kill him. Because when it came down to it, he was racing to help everyone under siege in L.A.
“Aim high,” he muttered to himself. Though he couldn’t let the dry amusement distract him from another bottom line…that the phrase know thy enemy sometimes potentially applied to Angel.
Tonight—in a violence-riddled city inundated with deathstone emanations that also targeted Angel—held more potential for it than most.
So. Don’t forget it…
He took the entrance ramp from Allesandro to the Golden State fast enough to make the outside wheels taste air, checking behind him to see that he’d come in ahead of the big, slow glob of headlights…the area beside Elysian Park, where the trees crowded the freeway and who-knows-what could come crawling up the steep park slope. Wouldn’t even have to be a violent who-knows-what—just something driven out of hiding; the way people rubbernecked at the simplest fender bender, a single exposed demon could snarl traffic for miles.
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