Impressions (15 page)

“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 didn’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?”

“J
ust 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?”

“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 the 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.