Impressions (9 page)

He whirled around, startled. But he recovered quickly enough, she had to give him that. He shifted his grip on that silly bowling ball bag and said, “That wasn’t intentional.”

“Worked out pretty well for you, though, didn’t it?”

“I couldn’t say,” the man told her. “At least, not yet.”

“Hmm.” She closed the magazine, considering him from where she leaned comfortably into the corner of the couch. “Almost a conversation. That’s progress, I suppose.”

Wesley came to the open doorway of his office, hesitating there, his gaze going from Cordelia to the new arrival, as if trying to intuit their conversation so far. From the look on his face, he probably had it pretty close. “Can we help you?”

Cordelia was glad to hear him use his frosty Englishman’s voice…but in the end she knew, and she knew Wesley knew, that this could be a break for them. They couldn’t quite afford to drive the man away.

“I’m looking for Angel,” the man said, adjusting his poorly tailored jacket. It looked like a refugee from a 70s cop show, though the shirt beneath it was more disco in nature. “That is…I thought I
had
Angel, but now I’m not so sure. Truth is, I don’t really care. I need protection. If you can give it to me, I’m yours.”

“Something might be arranged,” Wesley said. “But first we need some information.”

“All you need to know is that I require protection and that it’ll be over in a few days,” the man said. “You don’t need to know who I am or where I live or what I do.”

“No,” Wesley agreed, clearly surprising the man. “We don’t. But we
do
need to know more about the man you’ve been with. The one who calls himself Angel…but isn’t.”

“Hey, he puts on a good show,” said their possibly new client, totally unaware that a sleep-rumpled genuine Angel had come to the top of the stairs and was on his way down. Cordelia saw no reason to share. “He’s got fangs, and I’ve seen his coffin. And he won’t go out in daylight without that protective coat he’s got.”

“Without the
what?
” Angel said from the stairs, startling the guy entirely. Aside from his general glowering I’m-awake-and-it’s-daytime demeanor, he’d come down barefooted and open-shirted and basically looked imposing enough to make any bowling ball guy think twice.

This bowling ball guy looked sheepish and said, “His coat. He said it was special, that it protected him.”

“You know, you can buy fangs just about anywhere,” Cordelia said, putting the magazine aside and pulling herself up to sit cross-legged on the couch. “This
is
Hollywood. Or, well, close enough.”

On the stairs, Angel gave the slightest of grim smiles. Just enough to show his teeth…as fang-face morphed to the surface and disappeared again, leaving the bowling ball guy blinking and uncertain.

Bemused, Wesley asked, “Did you say
coffin?
”

“I woke up in one of those once,” Angel said. “Personally, I never saw any reason to go back.”

“True,” Cordelia informed the man. “No coffins here. He doesn’t always make his bed, though.”

“Hey,” Angel said, offended. “You’re messing with my impressive entrance.”

The man glanced from one to another of them, his own expression beginning to grow a little desperate. “Look,” he said. “Are you willing to help me or not? It’s not that Ang—that the other fellow
isn’t
so much as I think the job is bigger than one man can handle.”

“That would seem evident from the way we keep cleaning up after both of you,” Wesley said. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell us what you were doing near MacArthur Park last night. Or why you didn’t stick around after we saved your life. A simple thank-you at that point would have sufficed.”

“Why do you
think
I didn’t stick around? I figured there were more on the way. If I could deal with these things I wouldn’t have hired help in the first place.”

“And just why is it that they want you so bad?” Cordelia said, getting to her feet to walk up to him, then around him. She crossed her arms and stood hipshot before him. Waiting. “What’d you do to get their attention?”

Angel said suddenly,
“Gimme.”

“That’s right,” Wesley said, straightening with suddenly focused interest.

“Possibly the clothes,” Cordelia said, not sure what they were talking about with the whole
gimme
thing—for all she knew, they’d told her while she was in her fog. “
That
outfit would offend anyone with even the smallest amount of fashion sense.”

One of the boarded-up hotel doors opened; the new arrival stood poised in the opening, not quite ready to commit himself to a complete entrance. The backlighting made him into a dark silhouette, discernable only as a long coat with a head at the top and legs sticking out the bottom.

“By all means, come in,” Wesley said.

“Yes,” Cordelia said, although she wasn’t nearly as blasé as she pretended. This faux Angel’s client had been in at least one of her visions…and it suddenly occurred to her that between them, maybe he and the client could help resolve whatever had been causing the recent agonizing run of the things. “Come right in out of that nasty daylight.”

She couldn’t see his expression; his body language looked unconvinced. But he came in and let the door close—in its current crooked way—behind him.

For a moment they all just looked at one another.

Cordelia eyed the faux Angel in particular disbelief.
If there
is
such a thing as Fashion Police, we’re all doomed.

Okay, sometimes Angel’s look got a bit monotonous—all that gray and black and subdued stuff, and if he ever broke loose and went for something in a jewel tone, it never really worked. But at least he didn’t wear pants that were too short along with bulky white sneakers. His spiked brush-up hair had a natural look—and well it might, considering he could hardly use a mirror to style it and until recently hadn’t even seemed to be aware of the look at all. The faux Angel’s hair appeared hard and spiky and could probably have been used as a weapon if he ever failed to run from a fight. His poorly fitted black duster swept the ground and drooped from his shoulders. His glasses were hopelessly without style. And he’d cinched his belt up high. Too high. Angel’s expression hit high disbelief as he gave the new arrival the once-over, then a twice-over, then looked down at himself as if to double-check that he didn’t, indeed, look like this imitation.

“Ugh,” Cordelia murmured, voicing everyone’s thoughts. “Wedgie country.”

She wasn’t sure
he
thought any better of them. Except…

Except for Angel. The faux Angel’s expression as he took in the real vampire—in his rumpled state looking more menacing than skinny Faux Angel could hope even on his most bulked-up day—flickered between respect and a hint of chagrin. But in the end he must have decided to bluff it out, for he straightened his narrow shoulders and set his weak jaw. “My client has all the protection he needs from me,” he said, and looked at the man. “Let’s go.”

“Ohh, I don’t think so,” Angel said, even as Wesley slipped behind Faux Angel, blocking the exit. “There’s this small matter of using my name. Sure, go ahead and pretend you’re a vampire. Plenty of people do, even the ones who don’t really believe we exist. But the name thing?
No.
”

“To be honest,” Cordelia said, using her most helpful voice, “you really can’t pull it off. I mean, sure, you have the basic black thing down, but the overall look…that’s not brooding. That’s just plain sullen.”

“That’s not the point,” Faux Angel said, sounding a little desperate. “I’ve been hired to protect this man, and I can do it. I’ve
been
doing it.”

“Actually, to a large extent,
we’ve
been doing it,” Wesley said, still blocking the doors. “And as long as we’re involved—rather involuntarily, so far, I might add—I think you owe us an explanation.”

“Or maybe he could just clean up the lobby the next time it gets gooed,” Cordelia suggested.

“Or maybe,” Angel said, coming down to the foot of the stairs and causing Faux Angel and his client both to back away a few steps, “maybe he should quit using my name, find another closet full of clothes, and go back to whatever real-life job he has. Before someone”—and he took a step closer to the men, his expression suddenly the one that always made Cordelia uneasy, the one where she was never sure if he meant the threat that lurked behind his eyes or if he was just really, really good at bluffing—“gets
hurt
.”

For an instant, Faux Angel looked baffled, as if this wasn’t the way Angel was supposed to react to him—and in that moment he deflated, looking not remotely like Angel at all, but just a pathetic young man dressed in poorly fitting black. But then he seemed to draw an odd inspiration from Angel’s anger…imitating on the fly, Cordelia realized with a numb surprise. Turning his expression into a pale version of Angel’s. She felt an instant of skittering panic, realizing that Faux Angel was so far from having a clue and that the real Angel was so close to stepping over the line—

The doors burst open. Plywood cracked; the precariously surviving hinges gave way. Wesley went flying, his expression pure astonishment.

One of the Tuingas demons hesitated there, scanning the lobby—and then went straight for Faux Angel’s client.

Not
again!

And Cordelia couldn’t believe it: Faux Angel looked like he might actually try to put up a fight. She bolted across the lobby to the weapons cabinet, grabbing the first things she could get her hands on—a small spiked morning star, a short main gauche—and flung herself back to the fight even as Angel grabbed the demon’s attention from behind. The morning star went to Wes simply because he was on the floor and she couldn’t imagine throwing it; Angel plucked the main gauche out of the air.

And then Cordelia had a second thought. “Don’t kill it!” she cried. “Whatever you do,
don’t turn it into goo!
” And then, realizing that Faux Angel had grabbed his client and had headed for the courtyard exit doors, she shouted, “Hey! Get back here! You little coward—you owe us a door!
Two
doors!”

But Faux Angel never paused. And when she turned back to the fight, Cordelia saw there was no longer any fight at all. Instead, there was a wary standoff. Wesley hadn’t yet made it to his feet; he paused, crouching, on the way up. Angel stood back a step, the short blade ready…but hesitating. The demon itself had backed up to the broken doors, watching Faux Angel’s escape. Just as she remembered from their first encounter, aside from the nasty and fresh-looking wound on its chest. Otherwise the same, big and bulky and basically humanoid, if only it’d had a neck to speak of…or if that…
thing
…hadn’t been sprouting from its upper throat, currently coiled protectively around its neck, the tip glistening and flaring with each breath—

“Is that a
nose?
” she blurted.

The demon looked at them and snarled something short, sweet, and distinct that had Wesley diving for a piece of paper even as the thing turned on its flat, scaly heel and left, finishing off the right-hand door entirely on its way out.

In the wake of it all came silence, filled only by the slight creak of the door as it swung slightly on its one remaining hinge…and then let go, slowly easing its way to the floor.

“So!” Cordelia said. She thought she saw Fred lurking around the top of the stairs, investigating the noise—but decided to leave her secure in her lurkage. “What have we learned from this little encounter?”

“Fghlztt,” Wesley muttered to himself, scribbling on the back of a take-out menu, his desk the floor. “Or was it
Fghaluzzt?
”

“We know that guy isn’t anything like me,” Angel said.

“We know I can check under Tuingas clan demons with prehensile noses,” Cordelia said.

Fred’s quiet voice said, “It’s more what you
don’t
know, don’t you think?”

No one looked startled; like Cordelia, they must have noticed her right away, but didn’t draw attention to her arrival. Aside from Wesley’s mumbling, scribbling, scratching out, and rescribbling, no one made any immediate response either.

Fred inched down a step. “You don’t know why that man tries to look and act like Angel. You don’t know why the Tuingas demon wants the man in the ugly clothes. You don’t know why the man in the ugly clothes would stick with the fake Angel instead of sticking with the real thing when he found it. You don’t know why the demons turn to goo. You don’t know why something broke in here and took the only part of the dead Tuingas that
didn’t
turn to goo. And you still don’t know why all the demons around here are causing such a fuss.”

By then they were all staring at her, and her voice faded away. Much more tentatively, she said, “Maybe I missed something? Maybe there are more…”

“Oh, it sounds to me like you’ve hit all the highlights,” Wesley said, sitting cross-legged on the floor with his notes. “The final question is, which,
we don’t know
do we try to handle first?”

“There’s more than one of us,” Cordelia said, and slanted a look at Angel. “Most of us are even dressed.”

He looked down at himself, plucking at his shirt. “What? Six buttons and I’m dressed. Ready to go. Rah-rah demon hunter.”

“Puh-lease,” Cordelia said. “I was a cheerleader, remember? You couldn’t pull off a cheer if your unlife depended on it.”

Wesley rolled his pen slowly between his palms as he stared thoughtfully at his scribblings. “I should do my best to decipher this—it looked to me like the creature was making a real attempt to communicate.”

“Lorne might be helpful,” Cordelia suggested. “I could—”

“Stay here,” Angel said. “You’re not in any shape to be out in whatever’s going down.”

“Oh, and thank you for noticing so loudly.” She scowled at him, suddenly feeling every bit of all those accumulated visions. “I’ll
call
Lorne.” Or pore over the identification books. Now that she knew—or at least
suspected
—that the demon’s mystery appendage was a nose, maybe she could pin down just which variety of Tuingas they were dealing with. Maybe there would be some little tidbit that would help make all this…make sense.