Impressions

by Doranna Durgin

  To protect Angel.

  Finally, the faux Angel understanding what it was all about to be Angel. Finally, doing the right thing. And it stirred something in Angel that had been frozen under the deathstone assault, something that remembered the pain of Slith poison and how it had freed him. The pain of the war dart, inadvertent but just as effective. And he reached an unsteady hand for the buyer’s discarded knife, a fanciful thing with an inlaid hilt and a sweeping designer blade and patently cheap metal.

  But as his fingers closed around the hilt, that same rough berserker grip closed on his shoulder and his leg, lifting him—

  Khundarr cried a wordless protest as one of his priests roared in pain…and melted away. It was little satisfaction to know that the lowest of under-priests waited in safety, prepared to swiftly collect any deathstones this night should produce. Khundarr himself, dripping ichor from a dozen small wounds, snarled at the three demons who had pushed him up against a wall. He impaled one of them, disemboweled another, and faced down the third—but his attention was on the center of the fray, where the hotel’s vampire had come face-to-face with the stone, another demon looming over him.

  Khundarr’s hope sank away. This vampire had shown himself to be an ally, if an ignorant one—but no demon-blooded creature could come so close to touching an unstable deathstone and remain sane. And this vampire, insane, could not be allowed possession of the stone—for he had the strength and knowledge and cunning to turn the fight against the Tuingas, to deny them the stone altogether. To use it, while he could, to sow destruction in this world.

  For the warrior’s sake, Khundarr could not allow that to happen. For the sake of all those living here, he could not allow that to happen.

  He had to reevaluate his strategy. To reassess his determination to return the warrior’s stone to his people, where the most skilled of priests would heal it, and sneezing young Tuingas would be allowed nowhere near it. With the vampire so near the stone, and so obviously near the edge of his sanity, there was no other choice.

  Destruction of the stone.

  Khundarr absently blinded the third demon and shoved it away. Immediately he crouched down, making himself less of a target for those numerous demons still crowding into the area, those looking for something—anything—to kill, whether such behavior was natural to them or not. It put him in the perfect position to see two hapless zoo attendants rush into Zoo Meadow below, responding to the great trumpeting calls of the housed elephants and the racket of the great apes beyond. They hesitated, gaping uphill at the terrace. At the crest of the hill, right out front, the humans from the hotel fought like a team—dispatching demons, covering one another’s backs, knowing one another’s strengths and weaknesses. Even so…they were slowing. They’d all taken injuries. The woman limped, the white man was splotted with blood, and the black man protected his ribs. Dead demons encircled them, piling up close—hemming them in, but also making it much harder for the next wave of demons to close on them.

  Khundarr silently bid the keepers to silence, but telepathy was not one of the Tuingas’s gifts. The keepers stood in aghast speechlessness for only a moment, and then spoke rapidly into handheld devices, a hysterical note making their overlapping voices shrill and panicked.

  The sound of prey.

  The keepers didn’t actually have the chance to say much, not once the rioting demons noticed them. A tragedy, the death of those without the immortality of deathstones.

  And there was only one way to stop it. Khundarr returned his attention to the center of the battle…and to the warrior’s stone.

  Whatever the cost.

  Just a thread of thought, that’s all Angel had left. An intent, loosed from his mind like an arrow and set free in his body. His fingers curled around the knife. His mind, battered by the deathstone, battered by the parts of himself he fought so hard to keep buried, remained almost unaware of that arrow of intent, that one last supreme effort to win this inner battle even as his demon attacker lifted him right off the ground, hefting him—

  Fingers, curled around the knife hilt. Clutching it.

  He jammed the blade home in his own arm.

  Pain slashed through his body, sharp and piercing. Undeniable. It cut away the surging influence of the deathstone, making his perceptions abruptly sharp and clear.

  Demons surrounded his friends, fighting out of madness. The Tuingas were here; one had died not far from him. And Angel himself…

  …felt his thoughts go fuzzy again, so close to the deathstone. Its emanations coiled through his mind, distorting his emotions, reaching past his soul to call to Angelus…

  He twisted the knife.

  Pain sweet pain. He gasped, and didn’t waste any more time. Twisting in the grip of the giant who held him aloft, he wrenched free, flipping in midair to land on his feet. He used what was left of his momentum to add strength to the blow that drove the knife through the demon’s eye.

  It didn’t much faze the demon at all; the creature backhanded him up against one of the fish tanks. Something cracked at the impact; everything hurt. “Pain is good,” he reminded himself out loud, adjusting his grip on the gory knife. Blood dripped down his arm; it was a worse wound than anything the demons had done, and would not heal quickly. “Pain is sanity.”

  Infuriated in its deathstone-driven rage, the demon roared like a posturing wrestler in a temper, squinching its face up to bellow with the entire considerable strength of its lungs. When it straightened to attack, opening its eye to search for its presumably stunned prey, Angel was waiting. The knife punched through the socket of that remaining eye, up to the hilt and even a little beyond.

  Blinded and beside itself, the demon swatted at him; Angel jerked the knife back with a nasty sucking sound and said with some disbelief, “There’s gotta be a brain there somewhere—”

  Or not, because the demon targeted in on his voice and flung him back across the terrace to leave blood trails down the glass side of another colorfully inhabited aquarium. Angel staggered to his feet. “Pain is good,” he insisted to himself, wiping blood out of his eye in a futile effort that only left his vision smeared. “Really. Just this once…” He blinked fiercely, certain the huge demon would follow the sound of his impact against the glass but unable to see just where—

  Another blink, and suddenly he could see all too clearly. The demon had followed not the sound of Angel versus aquarium but the sounds of three exhausted humans still doing battle. Three exhausted and inattentive humans, distracted by a skirmish downhill. Many of the other demons had rushed downhill to join in; it sounded like a feeding frenzy. The blinded demon lumbered at them, picking up momentum…Angel flung himself after it, knife raised and aiming this time for the base of the skull—

  Except that when Gunn glanced over, a jambiya in one hand and the jagged handle of a broken battle-ax in the other, his gaze stopped at Angel; his eyes widened considerably. Wesley whirled, raising his own weapon; Cordelia looked over and gave a faint shriek of horror. In that moment, Angel knew just what they saw: a crazed and bleeding vampire, coming in for the kill. To kill them. And Gunn stepped out before the other two, raising the broken ax handle. Ready.

  But the demon came on…and so did Angel. Not certain who would reach who first, but unable to break away. Unwilling.

  Cordelia gave a shout—she’d seen the demon. Gunn hadn’t—couldn’t, as long as he locked his gaze on Angel—and yet something seemed to change. A resolve in his expression, a determination that he would not be the one to do this thing. He pulled the ax handle back, and his expression turned to a different kind of astonishment as Angel launched himself off the small pile of bodies in front of Gunn and barreled into the demon directly in front of the group, burying the knife in the back of its skull, hunting some small remnant of a brain stem.

  It only made the demon mad.

  “That’s not right,” Angel said. “That’s just really not right.” And as the demon groped for the knife jammed into the back of its he
ad, Angel aimed a kick of utter frustration at its backside and knocked it out cold.

  “I suppose that answers that question,” Wesley said, aiming for a tone of driest English wit and only managing to sound tired.

  “Which question?” Gunn asked, looking from Angel to the demon as Angel surreptitiously closed a hand around his bleeding arm, going for the look of someone holding a wound while he prodded it into fresh pain, driving away the deathstone from the edge of his thoughts. “Whether Angel is really trying to kill me, or whether you can ever again ask someone if they’re sitting on their brains and think you actually know the answer?”

  “Both, I think,” Cordelia said, pushing her hair back and probably entirely unaware of the ichor with which she’d just slimed herself. But then her eyes widened in alarm, and Angel whirled to see a demon slinking for the deathstone, moving like a ghostly gecko and far too close to success—

  Angel dove for it. For the demon or the stone, he wasn’t sure—he just knew one couldn’t get control of the other even as he dreaded getting close to the stone again.

  From the darkness beyond the terrace, a Tuingas charged them both. Heavy-bodied, stout-necked, the odd throat-nose swinging with his motion. Wait—not charging them. Charging for the deathstone. Diving outstretched from thick splayed fingers to flat feet, the fresh and familiar scar tissue on his chest shiny in the garish purple light of the aquariums.

  As Angel collided with the gecko-demon, the Tuingas closed his hands around the stone.

  The darkness turned to brilliant day as the terrace rocked with a sharp explosion, a sudden clap of thunder from the very center of a storm. No one stayed afoot, not the demons, not the humans. Angel skidded back against a hard wall, arms flung up to protect his face and eyes, a flash of instinctive fear at such strong light against his skin.

  The light faded; his ears rang in the silence. An odd stench filled the air.

  The emanations were gone.

  Even as Wesley, Cordelia, and Gunn climbed to their feet, helping one another up and then leaning against one another in an unsteady way, the demons began to regain their senses, to realize they didn’t want to be here in this very public place, drawing attention to themselves with this very public slaughter. Not even the Miquot cared to focus such attention on themselves. As silently and swiftly as possible, they slunk away.

  Angel, too, slowly regained his feet, his eyes recovering enough to find the spot where the deathstone had lain, deadly and pulsing. Had lain, for it was gone, now. A short distance away was a new deathstone, patently different in size, shape, and color; there was no goo in evidence. With dazed understanding, Angel said, “He knew that would happen….”

  “What?” asked Cordelia.

  “When the Tuingas…priest…touched the stone, it caused a—”

  “Big bang,” Cordelia concluded on her own. “Not the big bang, but you know…it felt close.”

  “Careful,” Gunn warned.

  But Angel had seen it. Another Tuingas. A smaller version, hesitant but determined-looking. Easing in from the darkness with wary caution, heading for the new stone. Angel took a deliberate step back. “This one’s all yours,” he said.

  “Please,” said Cordelia.

  “Be our guest,” Gunn added.

  “Now would be good,” Wesley said as the Tuingas continued to watch them. Finally it darted in, grabbed the stone and, with a strange sucking noise, spiraled into…elsewhere. Its pocket dimension.

  They stood alone among the purple-limned wall aquariums and the palms, marked by blood and surrounded by gore, the air still singed with the smell of burnt Tuingas flesh.

  Gunn gave a deeply conspicuous sniff. “Ahh,” he said with gusto. “The other white meat.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Gunn went down the line of kids, shaking hands, clapping shoulders…bumping fists. Eleven of them had stuck it out until last night—more than he’d thought would do. And all eleven of them had stuck it out through the night.

  He couldn’t help the silly grin that kept sneaking itself onto his face.

  “We did good, huh?” Sinthea said, arching one of her fabulous brows and flipping her sleek black hair over one shoulder. She sported a clinging, low-cut top with flower embroidery, subtly applied makeup, and a variety of ugly bruises.

  “You did,” Gunn agreed. Around them, sunshine washed across MacArthur Park, a pleasant and easy-to-live-in day with the totally out-of-place signs of crazed demon activity all around them. Broken branches, dried blotches of no-one-wants-to-know, chunks of torn pavement…on Wilshire, a car still rested on its roof, a trail of paint and scrape marks tracing the spinning path it had taken before coming to rest up against the curb. Elsewhere, the discarded detritus of an EMT team marked their swift departure and overworked condition. Gunn hadn’t heard a final death toll yet, but initial numbers were much lower than he’d feared. The rampaging demons had been so far gone, they hadn’t been able to follow up on the trouble they started; except for those at the zoo, the night evening had been full of hit and run rather than search and destroy.

  At the zoo, patrons had fled to be treated for mass hysteria while newly sane demons had cleaned up after their own, a process that started even as the gang limped for the exit—an exit still open by virtue of the tram that had been abandoned right there in the gateway. David Arnnette and Lutkin, they’d left behind. The logistics of hauling them around aside, leaving them there to be discovered and cared for, was the best option available. They’d be identified, their next of kin would be notified…and if the cause of their deaths was never explained, those mysteries would only be one of many from this night.

  “Good enough to carry this demon watch thing our own way now?” Sinthea challenged Gunn, pulling him back to the here and now. The line broke as watch members shifted closer, expressions attentive. They were a mismatched crew, with young men who wouldn’t get their full growth for years, and young women from the stick end of the spectrum…and the Sinthea end of the spectrum. They ranged from blond to Tyree’s deepest black, and as far as Gunn knew, spoke five different languages among them. At least five. All of them come together—truly working together—around the single focus point he’d provided.

  Himself.

  He eyed them all and drawled, “Yeah, why not carry it on your own? Because you’ve been doing it for so long now, after all.”

  She grinned, no resentment in it. “It was worth a try. But hey, Gunn—no worries. After last night…you know, I really don’t think I want to rush it.”

  A jogger ran by their little gathering, pretending not to see it. No doubt he’d had a lot of practice in pretending not to see things today already. They were merely a group of kids gathered after school. A bruised and battered group of kids who last night had learned to run when they were told to, to stand back when they were told to…and so hadn’t lost anything but a little blood.

  “No point in rushing it,” Gunn said. “Besides—you work slow and steady, by the time you get to the really big stuff, the big stuff has heard of you and moved away. Gone somewhere else to cause trouble.”

  “90210,” suggested Sinthea, and got a big laugh for it.

  Gunn grinned right along with her. And then he got more serious, and he said, “All the same…you’ve proven you know where to start, and that you’ll stick to the plan. There’s gonna be days I’m taking care of other things…you’ll be on your own a lot of the time.” And then, in case they hadn’t gotten it, he added, with just the slightest emphasis, “Sticking to the plan.”

  Sinthea exchanged a quick smile with Tyree. Tyree wasn’t saying much today…not with that impressively lumpy and bruised jaw. But he nodded, and Sinthea said, “We’ll stick to the plan just fine. I guess we’ve learned that much from watching you.”

  “Is he awake?” Gunn asked as he entered Caritas, swinging out of the way of a small demon who scuttled out into the early evening darkness it had been waiting for. Cordelia nodded toward a cluster of tables and continu
ed sweeping paper debris toward the black plastic garbage bag in the center of the room. In the far corner quivered the cloak demon, separated from its host by the shock waves of the previous night and too baffled by the no-violence injunction on the lounge to do anything about finding another, more appropriate symbiont.

  “Oh, I’m awake,” Lorne said, emerging from beneath the table with cleaning solution in hand. Instead of a suit jacket, he wore an artist’s smock of deepest maroon with lime green piping. It only emphasized the bloodshot nature of his already brilliant red eyes; whatever protection the pitcher had held, it clearly came with a price.

  Gunn winced. “Man,” he said. “Whoever made that for you…you didn’t pay them nearly enough.”

  “It was a gift,” Lorne said dryly, and his voice rose with much meaningful emphasis as he added, “from someone who appreciates me.”

  “Hey, we appreciate you,” Angel said, his voice drifting down from the top of a very high ladder as he applied a scrub brush to the wall, trying to remove Cordelia didn’t want to know what. The natural job for the hang-around-on-the-rooftops guy he was. Not so natural for a guy still favoring his arm from his own horrible self-inflicted wound, but Angel hadn’t really wanted to talk about that part. Hadn’t even let Cordelia play nurse, and since they all knew he’d heal pretty much just as well anyway, they let it go. But she knew…if it was still on the tail end of healing nearly twenty-four hours later, it had been a nasty thing.

  She remembered the business with the war dart and knew he’d done it to keep hold of his sanity. And she couldn’t imagine doing it herself…but then, she couldn’t imagine holding an inner demon like Angelus at bay either. She’d teased him about Tom Cruise and Harrison Ford and their heroic qualities…but really, she knew who the hero was here.