Impressions (17 page)

“So they
are
here,” Wesley said, coming up to join them.

“Unless they snuck out past Angel since we got here,” Gunn said.

Wesley glanced back toward the entry walk. “In his present mood, I’m thinking that’s not likely. He’s rather…alert.”

“He’ll be okay,” Cordelia said, mostly because someone had to say it. She held out her scavenged invitation. “Here’s one that’ll get two of us in.”

Wesley gave a short shake of his head. “Forget the invitations.”

“After what I just went through—?”

“
Because
of what you just went through. We were lucky—those two were obviously suspicious, and might just as well have chosen to cause trouble for us. And there will be more people leaving the auction with every passing moment. No, it was a good idea, but I think we’ll have to try something else.”

“Like?” Gunn said, with the challenging tone of someone who doesn’t expect there to be an answer.

“Like a more straightforward bluff.” Wesley headed for the nook where Cordelia had last seen Angel lurking. She couldn’t see him now, of course, not when he had no intention of being seen. Where a human would have been drawn out of the shadows in order to see those he observed, Angel could see just fine from whatever dark corner he chose.

He came out to meet them, his head cocked at the zoo entry in such a way to make it obvious he was listening—that the tram was on its way back out. “Any particular straightforward bluff?” he asked, having of course heard that as well, along with any comment made about his present mood. Cordelia would have blushed if she hadn’t been distracted by circumstances. Or if she’d cared what he heard. That was the nice thing about speaking your mind: When you did it out of habit, the things you said behind someone’s back were simply the very same things you’d say to their face.

“This one,” Wes said as the tram hummed along out of the zoo and stopped to disgorge several couples. He strode for the tram like one who’d been waiting impatiently all along, leaving the others to rush to catch up. Cordelia arrived at the vehicle’s broad step-up in time to hear the woman driver say in a bored sort of voice, “Zoo’s closed, buddy. And I don’t even have a change purse.”

“We’re here to break down the event lighting,” Wesley said. “The Burns Foundation sent us along…a last-minute gesture.”

Cordelia inwardly raised an eyebrow, impressed. On the exterior she contrived to look like someone who might know how to break down event lighting. No doubt it involved unplugging. She could fake it if she had to.

Though she doubted Wesley meant for things to go that far.

The woman shrugged, flipping a thin, straw-blond ponytail back over her shoulder with an absent gesture. She nodded at the clipboard jammed into the holder beside the steering column, a move she surely wouldn’t make if she knew how many chins it gave her. “No one said anything about it to me.”

“I hate it when that happens,” Gunn said, though it was more like the growl of someone who just wanted to pull the driver out of her seat, take over control, and drive on into the zoo to ditch the vehicle and find the bad guys. Or at least, find the deathstone.

Wesley gave him an entirely ineffective glare. “Yes,” he said, “annoying, isn’t it? I had a ball game planned with my son, and then the phone rang, and…” He shrugged.

“Well,” said the driver, not particularly caring, “you gotta sign off on this sheet, then. And you gotta get out just before we reach Koala Corner, so the tram is empty for the guests.”

“Certainly,” said Wesley, and he took the proffered clipboard to scrawl a meaningless signature as they hopped aboard.

“Burns Foundation,” Gunn muttered to Wesley as he took his seat and the tram lurched into motion. “Good one. Did you get that from
The Simpsons
?”

“No,” Wesley said. “I got it from the zoo newsletter. The foundation is one of their most generous benefactors.”

Gunn made an expression of patent surprise that Wesley should know such a thing, but it was bait Wesley didn’t rise to with anything more than the smallest lift of an eyebrow.
Just as well,
Cordelia thought. This was serious now. They were here in the zoo at night, with the sounds of the outdoor auction trickling through the night, and glimpses of the festive lighting as the tram moved along the curvy pathway. The open-air design of the tram made it easy to take in the dark grounds they hummed through. Though all the animals were in for the night, the late hour and the essentially abandoned state of the grounds somehow made the place all the more theirs, turning Cordelia and Wesley and Angel and Gunn into intruders and the auction itself into a patiently tolerated anomaly.
Snap out of it,
she told herself.
We’re here for a reason.

Because Lutkin was here, and he and his buyer. Because the Tuingas would no doubt be close behind, and not at all concerned with the niceties of getting in the zoo. It occurred to her that the buyer had probably been invited to the auction, and had simply walked right in through the front gate. Perhaps he’d even gained Lutkin’s entrance as his guest.

From the corner of her eye, she saw something flit between tree and bush, make a strafing run at the tram, and disappear behind them. “Uh-oh,” she said. “We’re not the only ones visiting after-hours.”

“Yes,” Wesley said grimly. “I’ve seen a thing or two myself. I think we can assume the stone is drawing them.”

“The question is, does David Arnnette know that?” Lutkin, she didn’t care about. Lutkin had known what he was getting into. Enough to run the other way instead of take the greedy side of the force. But Arnnette, annoying and wrong-headed as he was, hadn’t really earned himself center of attention in a monster melee.

“We’re going the wrong direction,” Angel said abruptly as the tram made a sweeping left turn through the beautifully landscaped area, putting the administration building and shops of the entrance behind them to pass the alligators on one side and a deeply shadowed line of trees on the other. He gazed off to the right with an odd look on his face. A strained look, full of shadow and flickering between anger and determination.

“How do you—,” Wesley started, stopping as he glanced over, as if the very sight of Angel was answer enough.

Angel didn’t seem to notice. “I can feel it,” he said. “Before, it was just here. In the zoo. But now…we’re going away from it.”

“Not far,” Gunn said, looking ahead through the framework of the huge glassless tram windows. “If we get off here, we’ll have the zoo people hunting for us—”

“If
you
get off here,” Angel said. And before Cordelia could cry out,
No, wait,
he was on the seat and out the window, one of those seamless moves that only a man with hundreds of years of familiarity with his body could make.

Cordelia glanced at the driver, who had not surprisingly failed to notice, and closed her mouth. Angel was on his own, now.

At least for a while
. She patted the big floppy bag by her side.

It gave her the reassuring clank of metal in return.

A
ngel landed in a crouch, a swirl of leather and the gentle thump of soft soles against manicured ground. The tram moved on, carrying the others away from him for now; as its quiet engine noise faded, other noises moved in. The faint human chatter of the auction…restless animals behind closed doors, well aware that this was no normal night at the zoo. Polar bears, seals…from across the zoo came the sound of a frustrated tiger, and from another quarter altogether, a lion. Not sounds that wholly human ears could hear.

And there were other noises. Creatures from outside the zoo, having invited themselves in. Demons of various shapes and sizes and intelligence, easing across the zoo grounds, making a wide berth around the noise and light of the Aussie Auction because now, here, their only focus was the stone that tormented them.

Tormented him.

It pulled him, it dragged him…it slapped against him in waves of pitched fury that threatened to overwhelm his humanity. He felt himself slipping into fang-face and fought it; his hand, newly healed, did nothing to distract him when he clenched it. The night closed in around him—

“Good evening,” said a tux-clad man walking the path from the auction, his date on his arm and his expression jovial and self-assured. He held an auction receipt loosely in one hand like a trophy, and was preoccupied enough with his date that he didn’t notice the odd jerk with which Angel looked away.

They smelled good.

They smelled really good.

That’s not who you are.

Human. Carrying a soul that already dragged too much guilt around with it, a soul that didn’t even need to
know
how hard it was for this body to keep itself from leaping on the unsuspecting couple—supper and dessert rolled into one.

“Good evening,” Angel said in a low voice, only through long practice able to keep his words clear around protruding teeth. And if the man thought to give Angel a strange look, he was distracted quickly enough by his date’s obsession with the auction receipt, and had no apparent clue that the warring factions within this stranger had in fact been warring over his fate.

That in itself was some small victory, and as they moved on, Angel allowed himself to relax, not entirely sure if he’d won that round or if he’d just—fortunately—run out of time. A new spasm of wholly exterior anger beat against him…the deathstone in the throes of overload.

They were
all
running out of time.

Cordelia led the trio as they disembarked from the tram a short distance from the brightly lit and thickly occupied enclave in front of the koala house; by unspoken consent they said nothing of Angel at all, and successfully ignored the little frown on the driver’s face. The woman flipped her ponytail back, frowned again at the single scrawled signature Wesley had left her, and shrugged. She eased the tram toward the mouth of Koala Corner, leaving them to follow.

They didn’t, of course. They headed back down the pathway, not at all certain where they were going—or how to get there from here. “Gosh,” Cordelia said, sardonic as she contemplated an implacable row of trees between them and where she thought Angel had been looking right before he bailed off the bus. “How silly of us. We should have stopped to get a touristy little map on the way in.”

“I suggest we head for Treetops Terrace,” Wesley said. “It’s a focal point of the zoo, and is a likely spot for the exchange. Furthermore, it’s high ground. Even if it’s not the right place, it’s a good spot for reconnaissance.”

“Sure,” said Cordelia. “If only I’d brought my weekend warrior night-vision goggles.”

“If only we still had Angel with us,” Gunn said, more than a hint of accusation in his voice.

“Hey, if we’re lucky, we’ll find the right spot and he’ll have already taken care of everything,” Cordelia said, trying hard to look on the positive side.

“The state of mind he must be in, I don’t think we want him taking care of anything,” Wesley told her.

“The state of mind he’s in, I’d rather have him here beside us than sneaking up behind us,” Gunn added immediately. “Or do I have to remind you—”

“No,” Cordelia said sharply. “You don’t. Now can we get moving? The only thing worse than sneaking through a dark zoo when you know there are demons lurking all around is hanging around in a dark zoo looking defenseless and yummy.” Not that they were defenseless. But she didn’t want to have to deal with convincing some deathstone-driven demon that they weren’t worth the trouble. After all, how does a deathstone-driven demon measure such things? Quite certainly not on the same scale that Cordelia would use.

A rustle off the side drew all their attention at once; they froze, waiting to see if the unknown creature would pass or come in for a closer look. After a moment it moved on, and Cordelia let out a gusty sigh.

“I hope my kids
listened,
” Gunn muttered.

“What?” asked Wesley.

“Nothing,” Gunn told him. “Let’s get this over with.”

A night-shift zoo attendant moved briskly toward the aviary, looking around himself with his shoulders shrugged up—as though the back of his neck prickled…or he knew he was being watched.

Angel watched him. At least three demons also watched him. Run-of-the-mill demon-human mutts who probably ordinarily spent their evenings playing poker or racing rats. To the left, the pull of the stone…to the right, the defenseless keeper and the chance to give in to the intense and constant itch of emotion.

Act. Attack. Do it in fury.

The demons gave in to the itch—and with an inner leap of dissolved restraint, Angel followed. Faster than the demons, more practiced…he got there first. The keeper squeaked in fear at the sudden company, ducking away from Angel.

Angel didn’t look at him. He didn’t turn to the keeper, he didn’t so much as glance at the keeper, and he definitely kept his face in shadow. “Get in the aviary cage,” he said, facing the startled demon mutts. “Get in there and stay in there. If you come out, you’ll die.”
And who knows. It might even be me who kills you
.

An Angelus thought if there ever was one.
I can be angry and still human,
he told that part of himself, a vicious inner dialogue.

He took it out on the demons. They weren’t tough demons; they came in with teeth showing, and fists flailing as though to pummel him to submission; one of them had javelina-like tusks that might even do some damage. Angel succumbed to temptation, let loose his iron control, and launched himself at them.

He took them down in a savage combination of moves—breaking what he could have merely bruised, killing where he could have incapacitated. Not killing all of them…two looked at their injuries with a kind of shocked revelation—broken nose gushing blood, broken arm jutting bone—and then down at the dead tusk-face as revelation turned to realization. As though suddenly they understood where they were and what they’d been up to and what kind of trouble they were in. And Angel, the back of his hand barely stinging from the dying slash of a tusk, laughed at them.

And then he chased them. Arms open wide, embracing the night and the violence and the death he could cause…

Angeluuusss.

A glad whisper in his thoughts. A recognition of self, only moments from freedom…

The demons threw themselves over a wall and into the packed dirt pit below. Tires dotted the ground, along with a large squashed plastic barrel.

Elephant enclosure.
Angel stopped, hesitated; considered. One of the demons seemed to have injured its leg. Not much of a chase any longer. And then behind him…

The deathstone pulsed his own fierce intensity at him, recapturing him like a siren song of destruction. He turned his back on the elephant enclosure and took his bearings.

A cluster of small hexagonal buildings stood front and left; his night vision was plenty good enough to read the
REPTILE HOUSE
sign. Almost directly in front of him stood an open area with picnic facilities.
ZOO MEADOW
. Up the hill to the right, beyond a crescent of palms, stood a fanciful building with a subdued glow of minimal night lighting.

There.

The stone was up there.

Khundarr tightened the flap of his long-nose tightly enough to make it ache.
Faugh,
what a place this was! No matter that it was clean and tidy and manicured…there was no mistaking the overlapping scent of so many different animals residing in this one facility.

But there was also no mistaking the presence of the warrior’s deathstone. The stone’s emissions oscillated and wobbled, more strongly pitched than Khundarr had ever detected in his days as a priest. Strong enough for his new team of under-priests to locate it and emerge from their pocket dimension not far from where Khundarr waited.

As a team, they entered the zoo, not terribly concerned with the bars and rules of human facilities, nor concerned about the consequences. They would be lucky to live out this night and, if by some chance they
did
, escape back to the pocket dimension was the least of their worries.

For the night was full of demons. Demons from deep nooks and crannies of their clandestine lives, drawn out by the irresistible call of a stone so full of impressions that it spiraled toward destruction. It taunted them, inflicting its emanations on them, luring them back to the source….

Khundarr had seen the results. Mild demons, dying in streets they never otherwise dared to visit. Fierce demons, tearing one another apart. And the humans, who never stood a chance either way, entirely unprepared for the attack of those creatures they rarely saw and never acknowledged. Come morning, the chaos would hardly abate, and then the humans would see an entirely new world, revealed in bright daylight. Only those wretches who hid in the darkest corners of their homes would be able to deny the existence of the demon element…and that would mean the start of an entirely different kind of war—and an end to the uneasy, covert coexistence of the elder ones and the humans who had displaced them.

Not to mention the astonishing numbers of both humans and demons who would die before the deathstone finally imploded with the weight of its own impressions.

Unless Khundarr and his team regained possession of the deathstone. Here. Now. At this place where two foolish humans seemed to think that the distasteful smell of carefully collected animals could throw the Tuingas from the trail of the deathstone, a thing they perceived through an entirely different sense altogether. Where those humans thought they could barter the power of a warrior’s deathstone without consequence.

Khundarr intended to create consequence.

“No wonder they picked the zoo,” Gunn said, even as Cordelia caught a musky whiff of some creature or another. Or maybe just a combination of all of them. “Even with the way they clean this place, the smell—”

“Should prove confusing to any scent-oriented creature like the Tuingas,” Wesley agreed. “But ultimately, I doubt it’ll be enough. Angel seems to know where the stone is—”

“And he’s not the only one,” Cordelia interrupted, moving a few quick inches closer to the two of them as something rustled in the landscaped brush behind her. Not a big something, since that particular brush wasn’t even up to her knees. But
something
nonetheless. “Where’s this Treetops place you were talking about—oh.” For they’d found the paved path again, and it curved immediately uphill and to the left, where on the high ground, a fanciful building that looked like two hexagons crammed together gently glowed with soft night lighting around what looked like giant aquariums set into the walls. The roof rose up at a steep hut-like angle, and Cordelia wasn’t sure if they were walking into a scene from
The Little Mermaid
or Tarzan’s condo.

Or maybe just some dirty little sale of stolen goods…a deathstone for cash.

The buyer stood off to the side, barely limned by the soft blue light of the aquarium walls. He’d either been at the auction or dressed for it as a matter of course; his suit looked Italian and most definitely hand-tailored by someone with enough skill to disguise—almost—the long-bodied and short-legged build of the man, not to mention his mild paunch.

Lutkin’s taste in clothing had not changed a whit—not for the occasion and not out of mercy for the rest of them. And in his hand…the bowling bag. At his back stood David Arnnette, glancing into the darkness with an increasing nervousness.

A nearby growl startled Cordelia. More startling yet, it was a familiar kind of growl, and how often did you get to say that? She found…

Angel.

He’d been in a fight already, had a scuff of blood on his face from a wound that had already healed—or might not have been his in the first place. And his face itself…tense, and shadowed from within. Not quite fang-face, but looking on the verge…tormented and yet in some way eager, a scary combination. She wasn’t even sure—

“Angel?” Wesley asked quietly.

“It’s me,” Angel said, short and with just a hint of dark humor. “Trust me. If Angelus was in control, I wouldn’t just be watching.”

“Trust you,
no,
” Gunn said. “But the logic works.”

“There it is,” Wesley said, his attention on the exchange before them. The buyer extended a briefcase; Arnnette fielded it and gave the contents a token look before setting the case by Lutkin’s side with a quick, nervous movement that suggested he wanted nothing to do with the money or the situation. He glanced around, peering through the darkness as though he wished he indeed had a vampire’s night vision, all the more conspicuous in his effort to look casual.

Looking for us,
Cordelia realized. Hoping
for us
. Finally realizing he was in over his head. Though in this case she wasn’t sure if “better late than never” applied, because maybe—for Arnnette, for the Tuingas, for all the people hurt by enraged demons, for
Angel
—maybe late was simply too late.

Khundarr hovered at the edge of the odd building, with eyes for nothing but the undignified bag that held the warrior’s deathstone. Or not quite so; he was not so careless that he didn’t note the presence of those from the hotel, although neither the man with the deathstone nor the buyer seemed to know of them. Khundarr’s team of priests ranged around the area, circling the exchange and ready for action. Ready to grab the deathstone no matter what it took—for while they had no wish to kill humans, things had gone too far. They would recover the deathstone tonight no matter the cost.