Impressions (18 page)

The black human looked around, wary, as though he somehow detected the priests; he murmured something to the other two humans. If Khundarr’s team were properly alert, they would note the exchange. If not, they were likely to pay. These humans knew how to fight. But the vampire was the biggest problem, and not only because of his strength and speed.

Because he, too, felt the influence of the deathstone.

The buyer, ignorant and too eager to hold his new acquisition to heed the obvious signs that all was not well, gestured impatiently for the ugly bag. The man in possession of it picked up the bag, his expression sly and twisted, like a man who knew he was being paid to divest himself of trouble. He held it out—

The vampire stepped out of the shadows, said something short and low and commanding.
Demanding the bag!
Khundarr thought with horror. He wished these people no ill; he knew they were trying to help in their fumbling, ignorant way, but—

No matter the cost.

Things happened suddenly then. The vampire hesitated, his assurance suddenly rocked by the few steps he’d taken toward the stone; the stone surged in response, sucking in emotion, spewing it back out again, a distorted cyclonic funnel of what had once been the fine, crisp impressions of a warrior’s death. The emanations bludgeoned the vampire, a shock wave of emotions that slammed into every demon within the confines of this zoo. A low moan rose around the building, a myriad of demons pushed to insanity, voicing their pain in chirps and snarls and growls and ululations that no human ear was meant to hear.

The buyer grabbed the stone and leaped for escape.

The Tuingas leaped to stop him.

The rest of the demons just plain leaped.

A
ngel staggered under the onslaught of the stone. Vaguely aware that his friends battled for their lives, he could do nothing to help. He fell to his knees, losing even the control to stay on his feet as Angelus within him surged to meet the anger and hatred and insanity beating against him from without.

Let go. Embrace it.

Cordelia cried out from behind him—surprise or pain, he couldn’t tell, and couldn’t do so much as look to see.

Give up.

“I won’t,” he said to that self inside himself, speaking through clenched teeth…hanging on.

But he couldn’t break free either.

A shriek of fear penetrated the cacophony, and then a shriek of death. An instant later, one of the Tuingas flung the body of the buyer onto the terrace, a limp bundle of bones. Even in death the man clutched the bowling bag handles—but the bag ripped open, and the exposed stone skidded free. From his other hand, a knife pinwheeled toward Angel across the ground.

A misshapen lump of a demon with several sets of arms appeared and launched itself at the Tuingas; they fell and rolled down the hill, crashing through the carefully tended landscaping. Demons loomed everywhere; Wesley shouted a warning to Gunn, and Angel—the only still figure in the middle of a barbarous melee—struggled to respond. To help.

“Angel!” Cordelia cried, eluding a trio of demons who were doing their best to devour one another. She took shelter up against a palm, immediately striking up the strategy of
don’t-notice-me
. But Angel didn’t even seem to hear her cry for backup. He just swayed there, on his knees, his face twisted with his conflict and the offending stone only a few feet away.

She wanted to smash it into little bits, but didn’t think it would be that easy. She still wanted to
try
—but there was the small matter of getting there. Wesley and Gunn fought with grim determination, unable to do anything but slash and duck, evading one lethal attack just in time to face another. They double-teamed a Miquot, keeping it too busy to grab its own homegrown knives with the short, curving
jambiyas
Cordelia had flung them. She still had the satchel, and the satchel still had weapons, but…

She didn’t even know where to start.

They needed Angel.

Join them,
whispered a maniac voice within him. But it referred to the demons, not to his friends. Angel closed his eyes and said, more loudly than before, “I
won’t
.”

And though he trembled with the effort, he still couldn’t break free—couldn’t find the strength to shut out the emanations that drew Angelus so close to the surface, and could barely find the strength to keep that evil riff of laughter from rippling out of the body Angelus called home.

When two whirling, catfighting demons slammed into him, it sent him sprawling. His concentration shattered, but with the stone only inches from his face, even Angelus lay stunned. A moment later, Lutkin’s headless body toppled over Angel’s back, and an unfamiliar voice cried a warning:

“Watch out!”

The faux Angel?

Lutkin’s body lifted from Angel’s legs, smashed into the side of the building, and sprawled at a grotesque angle along both ground and wall. Rough hands of a berserker demon grabbed him next, lifted him, prepared to throw him—

A strange, determined scream filled the air, and Angel, dangling, recognized it as a battle cry from a throat that had never before sounded any such thing. Dropped, he thudded back to the ground, those same inches away from the stunning emanations of the stone. An instant later, David Arnnette smashed into the side of the building and slid down to rest on top of Lutkin…a sacrifice.

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 head, 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.