Impressions (19 page)

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.”

G
unn 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 continued 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.

As long as he kept Angelus under wraps.

Belatedly, she said, “Of course we appreciate you, Lorne.”

“See?” Angel said, with the kind of
so there
tone in his voice as if they’d all jumped up and showered acclaim on Lorne.

“No kidding,” Lorne said flatly. “Then why is it every time I’m cleaning up a mess, your little gang is always around?” He gestured broadly at the club, into which desperate demons had crammed themselves as though it were some sort of bomb shelter. In a way, Cordelia supposed it was. Those who wanted to be safe were; those who wanted to keep themselves from acting under the influence of the deathstone did.

But exceeding the code capacity so outrageously had left its mark.

“Whose little gang?” Gunn asked. Cordelia knew he had his own little gang going now—well, not
gang
gang, but that bunch of kids he’d been talking about since the night before, how they’d done this and that and of course had watched the hotel and, most of all, had finally realized the wisdom of doing things his way. Cordelia had finally adopted a polite nodding strategy for these moments, but only after blunt discouragement had failed to work.

“Yes,” Wesley said, looking up from the stage equipment, where he’d no doubt been wishing Fred had felt more prepared to venture out and apply her considerable brainpower to the malfunctioning bits. “I wondered that myself.”

Lorne hesitated long enough to tell Cordelia he’d meant Angel’s little gang, but he apparently recalled it wouldn’t go over so well anymore, so when he responded, it was to say firmly, “
This
little gang. And don’t change the subject. You know I’m right.” He leaned down to pull a chair to its feet only to discover that it rocked significantly from one diagonal pair of legs to the other. He shoved it up against the table leg to steady it, and moved on to the next one.

“Hey,” Angel said, turning on the ladder in such a precarious manner that it made Cordelia want to run over and steady the bottom rungs. “This one wasn’t ours. We didn’t do it…we fixed it.”

Lorne snorted, unappeased. “But the misguided young man who let things get so messy was imitating you.”

Cordelia winced—and she thought the ladder really would tip this time. It might have, if Angel hadn’t abandoned his perch by the expedient method of simply jumping to the floor, taking that first step like it was nothing and landing with only the slightest of crouches. The look on his face was entirely wounded, and she found herself wondering when in his evolution—because she wasn’t sure one could call it a life—he’d begun to care so much what his friends thought.

Since when had he had friends?
The question came unbidden to her mind. After all, he’d been no prize before Darla sired him into Angelus; he’d said as much himself. And Angelus…evil like that had no friends, just enemies-to-be. But she looked at his face again and knew that he did care, and found herself saying rather suddenly, “No, he wasn’t—imitating Angel, I mean. He had it all wrong.”

“Except for that bit at the end,” Wesley said unexpectedly.

“You mean the part where he got himself killed,” Angel said flatly.

“That was his own doing,” Wesley said. “His own decisions and his own behavior put him in that spot. One might consider him lucky for having the chance to make that one heroic gesture before he died. Somewhere along the way, you seem to have made quite an impression on him.”

They turned to him, universally aghast.

Wesley winced. “Let’s just pretend I didn’t say that.”

“Let’s,” Lorne said in his driest possible tone.

But Cordelia thought Wesley had it right.

•  •  •

The Tuingas elderpriest walked slowly toward the shrine, crunching on a soothing stick of rolled and dried latex tree bark. An expensive import from the anchor dimension, but well worth it for its contemplation-inducing nature.

Beside him walked an under-priest, silent and a little cowed. The elderpriest might have tried to counsel his underling out of the mood had he not felt the priest had plenty to be cowed about. The only survivor of the recent great unpleasantness had witnessed the results of a deathstone gone wild, and watched his fellow team of priests succumb to crazed demons. He’d watched the senior team leader sacrifice himself, throwing his own body over the deathstone to create the contact that destroyed them both…unstable deathstone and living Tuingas flesh.

But the young under-priest himself had brought back the results of that heroic act: Khundarr’s deathstone, complete with the impressions of his last moment…the determination, the certainty, even the peacefulness success had brought him. In a rare and subtle echo, impressions from the warrior’s stone—the initial impressions, undistorted and cherished—made themselves known.

Together, the priests entered the shrine that held Khundarr’s stone. Marble-faced, simply appointed, a quietly stark chamber meant to pull a visitor’s focus to the pedestal in the middle. It had once held the warrior’s stone; now Khundarr’s stone sat upon it, offering visitors the carefully protected and prepared memories of both heroes.

Off to the side, in one of the many wall niches, the first secondary stone resided. Much smaller, from a less imposing individual. The young Tuingas whose untimely doublesneeze had set the entire crisis in motion. Rather than revile the young one and his stone, they had chosen to acknowledge his honor and bravery, and his attempts to set things right.

Before they went any closer, the elderpriest removed from his sash pocket an object newly incorporated into the ritual of shrine visits: a squeezably soft bottle. “Here,” he said to the under-priest, speaking for the first time since they’d embarked on this visit. “Partake deeply.”

Reverently, the under-priest accepted the bottle, holding it in both hands before him as he prepared his long-nose, admiring the bright red and white label.

NASAL SPRAY. JUMBO SIZE
.

W
ith Caritas mostly back in good order, and Lorne looking almost alert again and not the least bit chagrined at having ducked out of the worst of the trouble, Angel took the leisurely underground route back to the Hyperion and let the others cram themselves into the cab of Gunn’s truck. Not that it was daylight—it wasn’t—or that he couldn’t have fit into the truck if he’d really wanted to. He simply found himself ready for some time alone.

After all, it hadn’t been even a day since he’d been in the grips of a desperate struggle with himself. And he’d won—again—but it had been close enough to make him wonder if he always
would
win. The darkness within him seemed indefatigable…and the fight an unending one.

And he still didn’t
get
it. David Arnnette and his misguided admiration and emulation, an emulation that had resulted in his own death. Something in Angel wanted to feel guilty about that, but mostly he thought Cordelia had the right of it…Arnnette had focused on the wrong things, had wanted the wrong things…and he’d paid for it.

As for Angel, he was already living his life the best he could. It was a life built on bad decisions and desperate moments, and he was lucky to have the chance to try to turn that around.

When he ambled into the Hyperion lobby, he found Cordelia and Fred engaged in a microwave popcorn–tossing competition, with Wesley and Gunn as their somewhat sheepish targets. Both men snapped their mouths closed as they noticed Angel; unperturbed, Cordelia and Fred switched to tossing popcorn at each other.

“I have this idea,” Fred said, as a kernel bounced off her cheek. “A funnel thing, with a coating of just the right ionic balance to attract buttered popcorn. I’m just not sure…it seems like maybe the time is better spent on this other idea I have—”

“I kinda think a funnel thing with an ionic coating might take the
fun
right out of it,” Cordelia said, tossing a kernel straight up in the air and stumbling backward, still stiff and awkward from all the close calls of the night before, to catch it in her open mouth. Which she did, but not until she’d bumped into Angel.

He steadied her, stole a piece of her popcorn, and aimed it at Fred. Fred caught it with undiluted glee, and Angel found himself smiling as he eased past Cordelia to the refrigerator behind the counter.
Just a little snack…

“We figure it was one of their priests, all right,” Wesley said, as if they’d all been talking business right along. No doubt he was entirely unaware of the little greasy blots of popcorn butter all over the front of his shirt. “It was certainly the same fellow you wounded the other night.”

Angel leaned on the counter, picking up the new demon guide from which Cordelia had eventually gleaned the final crucial clues. By now it automatically opened to the section on Tuingas, with its obscure references to a pocket dimension tribe and the priests who oversaw the deathstones. “Probably he’s a martyr among his people.”

“Or a hero,” Wesley agreed. “Too bad we weren’t of much help. Not until the end, anyway, when we at least gave the other demons something to attack besides the Tuingas.”

“Yeah,” Gunn agreed, wiping his hands futilely across the stains on his own blocky, long-sleeved T-shirt. “But you gotta admit, those guys had stone—”

“Let it go, Gunn,” Cordelia said, quick and hard, and aiming a meaningful look at him to boot.

“No way,” said Gunn, not in the least deterred. “There are way too many good puns and double-entendres left.”

“Use my office,” Wesley suggested. “Go in there, close the door, and just blurt them all out at once.”

“It would be safer that way,” Cordelia agreed. Beside her, Fred smiled the quiet but genuine smile she’d started to show them between the moments of obvious crisis that were standard operating procedure around the hotel.

Angel flexed his arm, thinking that it was a good smile, and thinking with any luck they’d avoid plunging into any new moments of obvious crisis for at least a day or two.

“Is it all right?” Fred asked, and Angel looked at her in confusion, still stuck in his thoughts. “Your arm, I mean,” she added. “I couldn’t believe it when Cordelia told me—”

“It’s fine,” Angel said hastily. His need to take such desperate means to keep his hold on Angelus wasn’t something he wanted to dwell on. Self-consciously, he put the arm down on the front counter, setting his snack down in front of it.
No, wait, that wasn’t any better, putting the blood right out there to remind them of the vampire thing which would only remind them of the Angelus thing…
Quickly, he moved it to the side.

But no one really seemed to notice any of it. They were pretty much suddenly lost in their own thoughts, their own experiences of the night before. Cordelia still limped, and Wesley had obvious bruises beneath the popcorn grease. A bandage peeped out from beneath Gunn’s sleeve, and a cut had scabbed over his brow. They were all more than just a little bit lucky that the demons had in fact been so enraged that their capacity for thought—not to mention a canny fight—had deserted them entirely.

Angel had simply been lucky. Lucky to have found something that worked, lucky to realize it when the clues came his way.

As usual, Cordelia read him the best. “Not everyone would have had the—”

“Stones,” Gunn supplied, unrepentant.

“—courage to do what you did,” she said, taking no apparent notice of the interruption.

He knew where she was going with this one. “He chose the wrong role model.”

“You’ve got that all figured out now?” she asked, one arched eyebrow suggesting that she didn’t think so.

“Yeah,” he said. “I think I do.”

“So tell us,” Wesley said. “You’ve been around a while. You’ve got more examples than most to choose from. So who…?”

“My role models?” Angel asked, eyeing the popcorn smears and bruises and cuts and stiffness-hampered movement as they all shifted a little closer, waiting for the answer to this one. But for once they’d asked him an easy one. “That would be you guys,” he told them, earning another of those smiles from Fred, this one of approval, and leaving them speechless as he headed for the stairs, for the quiet refuge of his rooms and what he hoped would be a deeply dreamless sleep. Because for now, he’d chased all the demons away; the only ones leaving impressions on him were the people he wanted there.

For now.