Impressions Read online

  The young Tuingas didn’t even want to think about that. He wanted to be gone from here long before the feedback became strong enough to express itself in the city. And so he’d been heartened to track the stone as easily as he had, from the one who’d found it and the next day put it in a suburban garage sale as a unique garden stone, to the one who’d bought it for a paltry sum, having no notion of the pricelessness of the deathstone but just savvy enough to think that his friend, a collector of odd artifacts, might be interested in it.

  For an equally paltry sum and with a determinedly casual expression, that friend had indeed acquired the stone. With just as much determination but no opportunity, the Tuingas lurked and waited and stalked and…

  Waited.

  And the collector had known. The young Tuingas could see by his actions, how he carefully and quickly packed the stone up in its odd, oversized bag. But the man’s admiration for the stone had nothing to do with its intangible value to the Tuingas…the lingering presence of a hero and loved one. There was no respect in his face. There was only greed. To judge by the man’s other such transactions, he would keep the stone only long enough to find a wealthy buyer, either not knowing or not caring about the consequences. Or figuring, as many humans seem to, that somehow he would be the exception to the rule.

  The young Tuingas grew frustrated. Limited to hiding in shadows and waiting for opportunity, he followed the man to a temporary cluster of dwellings…and there he ran into real trouble. Where the unfamiliar nature of L.A. had not deterred him, where his lack of sophistication had not discouraged him, the man’s wise precautions—including no doubt a newly minted amulet of his own—stopped the Tuingas short.

  The young demon couldn’t enter the building. Not from the roof or the windows or the so obvious door. He tried and he tried again, and found himself inexorably repelled. The man had visitors…people bearing food and messages and then another man, younger, all dressed in black and awkwardly keeping to shadows. But for the Tuingas there was no entry, so he waited. He watched. He wondered what the priests had said when they found his crudely scrawled note of intent to reclaim the deathstone, and he wondered what would happen to him when he finally returned. He’d already lost weight. His long-nose hung limp and unhappy.

  But eventually the man had emerged.

  The young Tuingas had followed him.

  “I need to find Angel,” the man blurted.

  He’s crazy, Cordelia decided at once, and applied her politely-interested-but-really-not face for him.

  “I know I’m not supposed to come here, that he likes to keep his street people under cover. But he’s not at the main office address he gave me and I need to see him—”

  “Calm yourself,” Wesley said, glancing at Angel with wry bemusement as he set aside his take-out carton. “We’ll try to help you, but—”

  Angel looked at the man who had so decisively and unexpectedly dismissed him, and then down at himself. He straightened his sweater, surreptitiously tugging his jeans up to fasten the snap.

  I knew it. But Cordelia savored the private triumph only for an instant. She gestured at Angel. “But this is Ange—”

  The man waved a hand in vehement denial. A bowling bag weighed the other hand down, a battered old thing with handles that barely seemed to be attached. It seemed heavy in his hand, but its slack sides looked empty. “I know all about the look-alike he sends out on the street to confuse those who might be following him,” he said. “Don’t try that charade on me. I need the real Angel, and I need him—”

  The doors crashed open. Really crashed, as in right off the hinges. Even Angel blinked at that, and at the distinctly inhuman creature that bounded through them, heading straight for the desperate man and his bowling ball.

  “—right now!” cried the man, his voice raising an octave. Maybe two.

  “I’ll fake it,” Angel muttered, and put himself between man and demon as the man dove for one of the lobby columns, clinging to it from behind. The creature hesitated, long enough to offer a brief impression of alligator skin, a flexible fifth appendage swung neatly over its shoulder, and beady black eyes focused entirely on his prey.

  “Hey,” Angel said, annoyed. “I’m right here in front of you. And I gotta tell you, it bothers me when demons forget to knock.”

  It saw him then. It reached for him with every apparent intent of tossing him aside, and Angel responded with every apparent intent of holding ground. The demon used its weight to shove Angel back and back again, up against the column behind which the man quivered—and not so incidentally beside which Cordelia had been standing. It pushed Angel right off his feet—and up—to dangle against the column.

  Cordelia’s anger flared. Was that any way to behave in someone else’s hotel? She hauled back and kicked the demon. She kicked it in the shin—or what she thought was a shin—she kicked it in the thigh—ditto—and she kicked it in the groin—definitely not sure about that one. It didn’t appear to notice, and, panting, she staggered back to reconsider.

  At the far lobby wall, Wesley flung open the glass-front door to the weapons cabinet and grabbed something sharp at random; he tossed it to Cordelia. She made no attempt to catch it—not until it clattered to the floor and she could identify the not-sharp parts of the short curving sword. Then she scooped it up and slapped it into Angel’s open hand. Just like a scrub nurse, she thought. Perfect for a guest role on E.R. That is, if they could lure George Clooney back.

  In one smooth motion, Angel swept the blade deeply across the demon’s midsection. The demon instantly dropped him, and before Angel could get back to his feet or Cordelia could catch her breath or Wesley could arrive with his own weapon of choice, the thing let out a garbled wail of agonized defeat and collapsed in upon itself.

  And continued to collapse in on itself, so by the time they gathered to stand in a circle around it, there was little left but a mound of faintly hissing goo. As they watched, it bubbled slightly and settled even further.

  “May I just say,” Cordelia began, waving her hand under her nose in a futile attempt to dispel the smell of the thing, “ew.”

  “Ew,” Angel agreed, and looked at Wesley, who gave the slightest of shrugs.

  “Ew,” he said, but of course he had to add,

  “indeed,” just so he could sound like his usual scholarly, stiff-upper-lipped self.

  Gunn entered through the broken lobby door wearing his nothing-surprises-me-anymore expression, which totally went with the shaved head and the blocky, oversized shirt that hid too much of what Cordelia had always considered very nice shoulders, not to mention jeans that could have been tighter for her taste. He’d given up on the skullcap bandanna lately…probably couldn’t keep it from turning his underwear pink in the laundry. He walked in backward to assess the damage from the inside, brow raised. He turned around as he reached their little circle, his feet just out of the danger zone. “Whoa,” he said, wrinkling his nose in offense. “Not your mother’s perfume.”

  “No,” Cordelia said grimly. Typical day so far—moody Angel, inexplicable identity crisis, and dissolving demons. “Not your mother’s pile of goo, either. I mean, how rude. It’s not going to be easy to identify that.”

  “Best make a sketch while it’s still fresh in your mind,” Wesley suggested.

  “Also not an image I want to contemplate,” Cordelia told him, but went to grab the notebook they kept for such things—mostly so she could sketch things from her visions. Goo Demon apparently wasn’t vision-worthy.

  Angel turned to the man with the bowling ball, who looked as if he hoped they’d forgotten about him. “We need to talk.”

  As Cordelia slapped her notebook on the counter and started to sketch, thinking wistfully of all those high school art classes she’d skipped, the man eased around the edge of the room. And as Cordelia decided there probably hadn’t been anything in those classes that would apply to drawing demons, anyway, the man edged toward the broken door and escape.

 
“Talking.” Angel’s gaze followed the man’s retreat. “As in answering questions. We have plenty of questions to choose from.”

  “Identikit,” Cordelia murmured, sketching away. Erasing. Erasing more. “A demon Identikit. That’s what we need.”

  “I do have a new guide,” Wesley said, with deceptive lack of reaction to the slyly outward-bound visitor. “Fairly recent, and it uses the same basic identification template as the Newcomb’s Wild-flower Guide. I’ll see if I can dig it up.”

  Their escaping client was so close to the door that he probably thought he had it made. But more smoothly, more quickly than the man could possibly anticipate, Angel stepped in front of him. Inches away, as though he’d been there all along and simply appeared. “That’s not talking, that’s leaving.”

  Ordinary words, but there was something in his voice that made Cordelia look up from her work, startled. Angel loomed over the man, and she would have said he was all but fang-face.

  “The fight’s over, Angel,” Wesley said, a note of worry in his voice that made Cordelia think he’d seen the same thing.

  Or maybe the fight wasn’t over. For yet another figure burst through the abused lobby doors—except this one had apparently been shopping in Angel’s closet. Of the same height only gawkier, his hair darkened by a bad home dye job, his glasses slightly askew, his human face a caricature of dismay, his entire appearance a caricature of Angel. In one swift look he took in the scene before him.

  There was a thick moment of silence.

  Then he muttered what could only have been an extremely bad word, turned on his heel, and burst right back out the doors and into the night.

  The fellow with the bowling ball cried, “No! Wait!” and dodged around Angel, breaking into a run as he called out after the most recent arrival departure. “Angel, wait! We have to talk!”

  “Yes, indeed,” Angel muttered to himself, his face full of grim. “That’s just exactly what we’re going to do.” And out the door he went, snatching his duster from a chair on the way.

  Cordelia reached for the check from the rat-thing woman and flicked it thoughtfully against her fingers. “This is starting to make a little more sense.” Mistaken identity, Angel sorta-look-alike…

  “Do you think so?” Wesley asked. “Because, frankly, I don’t think it makes any sense at all.”

  “Don’t look at me,” Gunn said. “All I know about is this pile of stinky goo here.”

  “Whose day is it?” Wesley said, but there was resignation in his voice. As there well might be—even if it had been Cordelia’s day to catch the lobby messes, she wasn’t about to get any closer to this one. Besides, she had sketches to make.

  “I know darn sure it’s not the guy who didn’t make the mess,” Gunn said. “Besides, I’ve got places to be.”

  “Perhaps,” Wesley said with exaggerated weariness, “you might be so good as to see if there’s anything you can do with the door. Just to hold it for tonight. Not,” he added dryly, “that it seems to have been any good at keeping people out in the first place.”

  “Or in,” Cordelia murmured, looking at the doors as if she could see right through the remains to whatever Angel had encountered when he caught up with the man, the bowling ball bag, and the poor imitation of Angel himself. “I wonder if we’ll ever know what that was all about.”

  Wesley headed for the cleaning supplies, grimly rolling his sleeves even higher. “I suspect it’ll go down as an inexplicable moment. Those do have their charm, after all. The demon’s dead, the potential client has run away…the world was never in danger.”

  Cordelia frowned at him. How much more could you possibly tempt the Fates than by suggesting the world was safe?

  Gunn gave a wise shake of his head. “Bowling night. Worse than a full moon.”

  Angel should have been able to catch up with them. He should have been able to catch up with them, do barrel rolls around them, and cut them off short, all while wearing a smile.

  If he’d been paying attention.

  He eased to a halt in the middle of an alley, feeling more than a little foolish. He hadn’t the foggiest idea when they’d zigged and he hadn’t. By now they’d probably zagged as well and weren’t anywhere to be found.

  Because he hadn’t been paying attention. He’d been caught up in an unexpected anger, pouring it into the speed and effort of the run until the run became the point and not the chase.

  He stood in the middle of the alley and looked at his hands—they trembled—and then ran fingers over his face, confirming what he already knew. Fang-face, right out here in public. He took a breath—or what would have been a breath, if he’d actually needed to breathe—and felt the gruesome features ease back into normal flesh. What was that about? Temper over a bad vampire wanna-be? An Angel wanna-be?

  He didn’t think so. He recalled the dark thoughts that had haunted his sleep and then clung to him beyond waking, and he thought there was more to his reaction…even as he hoped that there wasn’t. But now…he was on his guard. He wouldn’t let this happen again.

  Especially not where the gang could see.

  He looked at his hands again—the trembling had stopped—and then jammed them in his duster pockets. He didn’t feel like facing them right now, and he really didn’t feel like explaining how he’d lost his quarry. On the other hand…

  On the other hand, they needed him to prove he was dependable right now. That he wasn’t going to—again—run off and do his own thing, shutting them out. Hurting them. The memory of Cordelia’s pained expression as he’d helped her off the dead client’s kitchen floor and asked if she was all right, the uncharacteristically unforgiving tone of her voice as she’d said, “You hurt my feelings.” He didn’t ever want to face that again.

  So he stared down the dark alley a moment longer, exchanged a long glance with a wise-looking cat, and headed back for the hotel. Being dependable. Responsible.

  Faking it.

  Angel entered through the courtyard doors, avoiding Gunn at work on the front entrance. Inside, Cordelia sat straight-backed at the computer, entering search words into their fast-growing demon database. She didn’t look happy. Without looking away from the screen, she spoke to the lobby at large and said, “This is getting me nowhere. It can’t find a fifth appendage unless I can give it a name, and I have no idea what that thing was. I’m not even sure I want to know. And what did it want with that man, anyway? It followed him right here, like a tracking dog or something.”

  Wesley’s voice came from the lobby, down near the floor. Somewhere behind the round booth unit where the demon had finally gone down. “Unless Angel comes back with answers, that demon is our only lead.”

  “I could get a vision,” Cordelia said, half with a wince and half with hope. The visions exacted a worrisome toll. A rising toll.

  “The demon’s our only lead,” Angel said flatly, announcing himself in the process.

  “Oh?” Wesley stood, surprised by Angel’s presence—or perhaps just surprised that he’d returned alone. Wesley held a black garbage bag as far away from himself as he could.

  It looked full.

  In his other hand—a latex-gloved hand, one of the elbow-length gloves available through large animal veterinary supply companies—he held an odd, large lump of something. An actual clue? Or just leftover demon….

  “What’s that?” Angel said, nodding at the lump as he moved deeper into the lobby.

  Wesley glanced at it. “Part of this,” he said, hefting the bag slightly. “I thought I might take a closer look.” On the floor beside the roundchair was a gallon of Nature’s Miracle—Stain and Odor Remover for Pet Accidents! Wesley gave it a skeptical expression. “After another healthy dose of cleanser.”

  Gunn left the partially secured doors to look down into the lobby—to look at Angel, specifically. “No luck?”

  Angel gave the slightest of shrugs, but knew it wouldn’t be that easy.

  “Hey, the way you charged out of here, I figured
you’d bring ’em back with tread marks.” Gunn hefted the hammer he held, obviously imagining what he might have done with it. “I mean, hey—with that you-looking guy on hand, your mirror problem would be solved, right?”

  “I charged one way, they charged another,” Angel said simply.

  “Huh,” Cordelia said, sounding very much like she suspected there was more to it.

  There was, of course. The anger that nudged at him even now. Anger he couldn’t give in to…couldn’t even reveal hints of. But he could give her a dark look; she was used to that.

  “Don’t be a poor loser,” she said smartly—but as he’d hoped, he’d distracted her. Banter was safe ground, and if her eyes—luxuriously tilted dark eyes set above strong cheekbones—lingered on him as if she might see something revealing, soon enough she returned to her work. She made a face at the computer monitor and said, “This is a waste of time, guys. Wesley, where’s that book you were talking about?”

  “Hold on,” he said, and walked off with his nastiness-in-a-bag, taking the shortest route to the alley and their garbage bin. He came back with a bowl, put the lump of something in it, and splashed the stain and odor remover over the top of it. Generously.

  “Nice conversation piece,” Cordelia said when he put it on the lobby counter. “Ugh, not there. It stinks!”

  “It should be better shortly,” he said. “Just let me wash my hands.”

  “You’re wearing gloves,” she pointed out.

  “Humor me,” he told her, and disappeared into the hotel counter staff bathroom. When he came back out he was drying his hands. “I believe I know how Lady Macbeth must have felt,” he said, and tossed the towel over his shoulder to duck into his office. “Here we are,” he said upon reemerging. He held out a book, and Cordelia left her desk to reach for it, casting a wary eye on the Lump of Something on her way by.