UNWILLING EURYDICE
You may know the story. Orpheus and Eurydice are in love, but she dies and he decides to get her back. He plays beautiful mourning music to the gods, and they love it so much they agree to his request -- as long as he doesn’t look back at his girl before they have entered the world of the living. What do you know, he does, and loses her forever.
Then there’s the opera version, the happy ending where the gods forgive him his little mistake. As Salman Rushdie put it, ”what’s one little peek?”.
There is just one thing I would like to know, one question that hasn’t been answered yet. How did Eurydice feel about being traded in for a good tune? Was she as happy to be brought back as Orpheus, the composer, the librettist and the audience were, or was she -- unwilling?
"My doctor says that I have a malformed public-duty gland and a natural deficiency in moral fibre, and that I am therefore excused from saving Universes."
-Ford Prefect
Cordelia brought in the newspaper, holding it under her arm while she opened the door, a cappuccino in her other hand. The others were sitting in the lobby, and she threw them an annoyed glance.
”I count no less than three guys in here,” she complained, ”and not a single one of you will give me a hand. Fine heroes you are.”
Wesley immediately got up and took the paper that was beginning to slide down from under her elbow.
”Better, but still not good.” She closed the door and sat down with them, leaning her head towards the back of the sofa.
”Well, maybe we’re busy,” Gunn pointed out.
”Busy? Yeah, right. Like something majorly interesting has come up while I was out buying my cappu. Face it, we haven’t had anything happen at all since that second-rate demon trying to sell girls to nightclubs. And the police got him before we did.” Cordelia sighed. ”Of course, they would arrest him and hand him over to the caring hands of those Wolfram and Hart leeches.”
”And the leeches got him loose,” Wesley commented.
They all turned to stare at him, and he handed Cordelia the newspaper, tapping on an article.
”Take a look.”
Angel snatched the newspaper from Cordelia’s hands, ignoring her protests.
”’Elmore Sierk found innocent of all charges’,” he read out loud. ”Well.”
”Hey, if he starts sedating and selling people again you could always track him down and kill him,” Gunn said.
”Sure,” Angel admitted. ”I just feel like I’ve been wasting enough time on this schmuck already.”
”Not to mention that we’re not likely to get p...”
Cordelia stopped midsentence with a moan, and curled up into a ball. Angel caught her in his arms until her breathing eased and her body relaxed. Finally, she looked up, and her mouth twisted a little.
”Weird, much?” she whispered.
”What did you see?”
A frown formed on her face. ”That guy,” she said, waving at the newspaper. ”And a bunch of suits ripping his guts out.”
Wesley’s eyebrows flew up. ”Are you sure it wasn’t his tentacles?” he asked. ”That breed of demons have tentacles protruding from their sides.”
”Ick,” Cordy said. ”Well, whatever it was, he didn’t seem to appreciate the treatment. Oh, and first they had dinner at the Ritz-Carlton in Pasadena.”
”Let me get this straight,” Angel said. ”You saw a slave-trading demon being hurt by some guys in suits after having dinner at the Ritz with them?”
”That’s what I said, isn’t it?” Cordelia snapped. She was beginning to feel better, but she still had a lingering headache.
Gunn snorted. ”Who gives you those visions, David Lynch?”
Angel shrugged. It was strange, he had to agree on that. And the fact that a demon he had been this close to killing was apparently now up for protection wasn’t the least strange thing about it. But he couldn’t argue with a vision. If the PTB wanted him saved, that was his job for tonight.
”I still can’t believe we’re doing this,” Gunn complained as they all stepped out of the Angelmobile. ”If they want to kill this guy, I say good riddance!”
Angel didn’t reply, mostly because he agreed. ”Stay here,” he ordered the others before he moved up to the dining room entrance. From where he was standing he couldn’t see the customers well enough to determine if one of them was Sierk, so he tried to get a little bit closer. A very polite head waiter stopped him.
”I’m sorry sir, but you need a jacket and tie.”
Angel looked up, not quite comprehending what the man was saying. At some level, he obviously realized that the people eating in there weren’t dressed the way he was, but he failed to see any connection between that and the head waiter’s peculiar comment.
”Excuse me.” Cordelia was suddenly at his side. ”We need to find a good friend who is eating here. It’s quite an emergency and will only take a minute, can’t you let me take a peek?”
She smiled at the head waiter and he gave her an appreciative look before nodding and letting her in. Nobody, with the possible exception of Phantom Dennis, would ever find Cordelia improperly dressed anywhere.
Angel leaned against the wall and waited for Cordelia to come back. She soon did.
”Okay!” she chattered brightly. ”Our friend was there, and his friends were there too, and they seemed to be in a friendly mode. Is there anything I should say? Do?”
Angel grasped that she was trying to hold up the deception she had told the waiter.
”No, it’s okay, I think we’ll just wait outside for our friends to stop eating. Thank you very much for your help,” he told the waiter and gently shoved Cordelia outside.
”What?” she asked, when they got closer to the car.
”I don’t want to start a fight in there. And I really don’t want *you* to start a fight in there.”
”Like I would, with that creep. He’s not even scary, you know. I mean, if he tried to sell *me* somewhere, it's not as if I couldn't get free.”
Angel didn’t reply, just sat down in the car. Gunn leaned forward.
”Were they there?”
”Yeah. We’ll wait until they leave.”
”What if there’s a back door?”
Angel thought about that. If the people in there were having a casual dinner there wasn’t really a reason for them to leave through the back door. On the other hand, people seen in visions were usually not up to any good, and people not up to any good had all the reason in the world to leave through the back door.
”Okay. You go look.”
It took half an hour before the men left the building -- through the front door. Angel, Cordy and Wesley stepped out of the car and while the latter two walked slowly along the road, pretending to be in deep conversation, Angel followed the suits from a closer distance, although not close enough to seem suspicious. He couldn’t hear what they were talking about but it seemed rather official, which was strange because these fellows were definitely out of Sierk’s league. In spite of his wealth, and whichever species he posed to be, he was really nothing more than a sleazy two-bit crook. The suits were another type altogether. If they had been younger and less cold, they would have been the sort of successful men Cordelia dreamed of snagging. And no matter how human they were, they were more genuinely scary than Sierk could ever hope to be.
They were walking into the alley behind the hotel, next to the area where the homeless people gathered around their fire. Not a good place to do business with scary men; not if you expected to come out alive. Angel saw Sierk bending down towards his shoe. A glance passed between two of the suits, and Angel rushed forward just as one of them brought out a knife.
Angel had assumed that the men would not be prepared for an attack, and in that respect he had been right. His mistake had been in also assuming that they wouldn’t know what to do when he did attack. Obviously these guys were used to vampires. Once they were past their initial surprise his game face, instead of startling them, just told them how to put up a fight.
Still, these were humans and should have been easily resisted, especially since Gunn and the others quickly caught on and joined in the fight. Should have been. When the suit holding the knife became aware of the danger, he quickly changed his target. With the force behind that throw, it was fortunate that Angel’s reflexes were so fast, or he would have been beheaded within seconds. Now, he simply ducked, and the knife whirled by him. There was an outraged cry from the bums, but Angel had no time to check if they were alright. He thought they were; the thud of the knife hadn’t sounded like it hit home in flesh. His attention was fully on the suit, and he flung the man into a wall, reluctant to kill him but not apt to mourn if the impact itself did the trick.
Gunn was doing pretty well in the battle, while the others were more uncomfortable. They were used to stakes and crosses, and although the former would still do the trick, it was quite a difference plunging it into a living heart.
Angel wasn’t prepared for holy water. It wasn’t something people are supposed to carry around in their pockets, unless they were slayerettes. He closed his eyes as the corrosive substance splashed in his face, but they still felt like they were on fire and the water dripping down his burning skin made opening them again an impossibility. It made it a lot harder to fight, and he couldn’t give himself the luxury of being careful; when the next person attacked, he took a firm grip around the neck and felt it crack under his hands. From the noises around him he knew that his friends were still alive and kicking ass, but the smell of blood wasn’t only human anymore. The suits had gotten to the demon, how bad was impossible to tell. Of course, he wouldn’t cry if the little jerk died. Correction, he would, but only because his eyes were still weeping from the Holy water. He blinked them, trying to see clearly.
There was a yelp from Cordelia behind him, and the smell of burning flesh followed. She must have fallen into the bums’ fire. Seconds later, footsteps were already running away from them. He didn’t like the thought of these guys getting away before he knew what the hell was going on, but it was better than having his friends killed. A motor started, and wheels screamed as the suits left.
”You okay?” Wesley asked, panting.
”I will be,” Angel replied, taking the opportunity to rub his eyes and try to clear his vision. ”Everyone else? Cordy?”
”Yeah.” With Wesley’s help, Cordelia had beaten out the fire in her clothes, and returned to the others. The bums were looking at her very intensely, apart from some that seemed to be sleeping hard, but they were wise enough to not try to address her. She didn’t pay them any attention. Although she could tell the burns weren’t serious, they hurt a lot. She managed not to whimper, but couldn’t withhold a slight sob from her voice. ”I think I may have to go see a doctor though. And the dress is practically ruined. Will you look at that sleeve! And the chest, it’s all basically one big hole. Wesley, will you stop *staring*!”
Angel laughed weakly, mostly with relief. He'd feared much worse damage. ”Well, it doesn’t sound like you’re dying.”
”Sierk’s dead,” Gunn said, more annoyed than actually regretting. He looked over the body, and Cordelia shuddered.
”Ick, already! What are you trying to do, an autopsy?”
Gunn looked up, frowning. ”His tentacles have been cut off. All of them.”
”Don’t touch them,” Angel said sharply. ”They’re poisonous.”
”Not exactly,” Wesley corrected him. ”The tentacles contain an opiate used to sedate the prey. It has to be injected or ingested just like any other drug, though, and the larger amount of it lies in the pointed gland by the tip.”
Gunn looked at him, thoughts catching up. ”There’s no tip anymore. Drug dealers?”
”Probably.”
”There’s something else,” Angel said. ”The shoe. He reached for his shoe. Can you check it out?”
Gunn reached down and pulled off Sierk’s shoe, looking it through. Inside the hollow heel he found a small piece of folded paper and pulled it forward. It had writing on it in a foreign language, and he handed it over to Wesley. ”You know what this is?”
Wesley took one look and stated: ”Greek. Lovely. Latin I can do easily. This will take a while.”
”Then we should get started right away,” Angel said. Still blinking away tears he decided that he was in no condition to drive and tossed the keys to Gunn.
The people of Angel Investigations got seated in the car without noticing the thoughtful looks one of the bums gave them. That didn’t surprise Johnny Trash one bit. Invisibility was something you worked hard on when you lived on the street. The less you got involved in the troubles of the residents the better. Yet a nagging feeling in the back of his mind told him that something these people had done or said should be familiar to him, not from experience but as something he had been told. But since his memory didn’t tell him anything further, he shrugged and got back to his people, who were already vividly discussing the strange fight. It wasn’t the most peculiar thing that had ever happened there, far from it, but it still wasn’t everyday stuff. Johnny ignored the discussion and went over to the guys who had managed to sleep through the racket, checking on their pulses. Porcupine’s was a bit slow, but not dangerously. All it told Johnny was that the kid was stoned again. Lord knew what a delusional guy would have thought of the fight if he had been sober and awake. Probably better he’d slept through it.
Cordelia fell asleep as soon as she had her wounds tended to, but Wesley sat down with a dictionary, determined to find out what was going on. Angel's vision had more or less recovered, though his eyes still stung, and he’d started to help, but his Greek wasn’t half as good as Wesley’s, and Gunn had quickly explained that research was not his thing, and gone home.
”You *still* working on that one?” Cordelia asked when she woke up several hours later, with a quick glance at the notes they had made. Then she proceeded in to the room by the counter and awkwardly got her spare dress down. One thing you learned in the otherworldly business was to always keep clothes around in case of emergency. Not everyone wanted to look rough and broody. Changing clothes was a little tricky with her arm in a sling, but she’d rather die than let the guys help her. Okay, so maybe not literally. She closed the door carefully before she got the singed dress off, less concerned about the sight of her naked body, which was after all a great one, than about the fumbling it took to reveal it. Cordelia Chase’s pride had always been much stronger than her modesty.
She got it done, and upon returning to the others checked the mirror in her purse, wishing that Angel would just get over his complexes and get a proper one. There were people who could still see themselves, after all.
”Can’t you just check it up in a book or something?”
”There is no book to look in,” Angel replied. ”It’s new.”
”New,” Cordy repeated, disbelieving. ”I thought you said it was ancient Greek.”
”The language is ancient Greek. Someone has made a prophecy, because that’s what this is, and gone through great trouble to translate it into a dead language.”
”Anything to avoid people reading it, huh?”
”Seems to be the basic point, yes.”
Angel made room for Cordelia between himself and Wesley by the reception desk and showed the notes properly. ”We’re getting there, though. It will probably take a while, but I think we’ll get the translation.”
”Yeah, and then comes all the trouble of knowing what it really means,” Cordelia pointed out. ”You’re not going to make any ’tiny mistakes’ this time, are you?”
Wesley wisely chose to ignore that, and instead told Cordy out loud what his and Angel’s scribbling only half explained. ”It starts with: ’The mind benders wield their power over the weak of mind, but although eternal, that power is not unchanging. The invisible will find their warrior’ --guessing this means Angel -- ’on the night of the full moon.’ Which is tonight.”
”That’s it?”
”No, but it’s all we have translated. There’s a mentioning of ’angelos’ quite a few times later on, so it definitely has to do with us.”
”Well, with him, at least, ” Cordy said, but her voice was light. What concerned Angel concerned them all.
Angel leaned back and stretched his body a little, then rose from his seat. ”You can manage on your own for a while, can’t you, Wesley? I’m going over to the Ritz again, see if there are any clues. Try to find out if this prophecy has anything to do with what happened there, will you?”
”Of course,” Wesley said absentmindedly and continued to work on the prophecy.
About half an hour later he put the piece of paper down by the dictionary.
”This doesn’t make sense,” he said.
”Nothing ever makes sense to you,” Cordelia said, leaning back in her chair. ”What’s wrong?”
”Well, it says that on the night of the full moon, tonight, as we have established, ’the angel will meet he who was once the angel’. What could it...” He noticed Cordelia’s pale face. ”Oh, no.”
”Angelus.”
”Oh no, no, no.”
”I’m getting a stake. You get Gunn.”
Johnny Trash warmed his cold hands over the fire. The sun wouldn’t rise for another hour or two, and it was too cold to sleep. Words had spread about a new set of raids. That could mean almost anything from cops and vigilantes getting rid of the bums themselves, to demons hired to do it for them -- or the demons having some fun on their own accord. In any case, it meant finding a shelter was probably a good idea. Most of those places were worse than the streets, but at least they were relatively safe. The trouble was his people. Although it was a long time since he had been John Hathaway Jr., respected citizen of Los Angeles, he still had one major character trace left from that time -- responsibility. He was responsible for his people, in a way he was their leader, and if he went to a shelter he wanted them with him.
Most of them wouldn’t be too hard to convince. They had seen the raids before and didn’t like it more than he did. Les would stay outside, of course, like he always did, but Les could take care of himself. Johnny was more worried about Porcupine, the newest in the bunch. Porky didn’t trust people, and he had yet to experience the terror of raids. He was really just a young guy, not quite right upstairs and as deep into drinking as the worst of the old ones. Drinking wasn’t enough, either. Someone had put him on Valium once, and although he had left all authorities far behind, that was one thing he still hadn’t gotten rid of. He couldn’t get hold of it very often, but it was a taste of heaven for him when he could. There was a real risk that he might just doze off one night, stoned out of his senses, and then never wake up.
”Hey, give that back to me!”
Porcupine had managed to get a bottle of moonshine an hour ago and cradled it like a baby ever since. He hadn’t even drunk it all yet. But now Hammer had taken it from him and took a gulp.
”That isn’t yours, you bloody cheat!”
”Can’t you share some?” Hammer teased the youngster a little, and Porky got a furious look in his eyes.
Johnny thought about stepping between them, but decided against it. Either Porky would stay in control, in which case Hammer would slap him around a little, but not more, or he’d lose it, in which case anyone who came near him was likely to get hurt bad. The latter wasn’t really likely though, it had only happened a few times over the past months, when the kid had been too high to bother, and he had always been remorseful afterwards. He was a strange sort, Porky, but Johnny had spent a lot of years on the streets and seen many strange sorts, and he knew that everyone had their demons.
A car pulled over and the tall, dark man from last evening stepped out of it and walked towards the hotel. The man looked quite young, but Johnny knew for certain that looks, in this case, were deceptive.
”Give it to me!” Porcupine was desperate now, and managed to tear the bottle from Hammer’s hands. The sudden lack of resistance made him stumble backwards, and right into the arms of the man walking by. Damn. This was never good. Johnny prepared himself to act if it came to trouble. But the man didn’t seem angry. At first he just reached out to steady the falling bum, but when he looked down in Porcupine’s unkempt face his expression turned into shock. Porky in his turn looked up at the man, and his face got that dazed look it sometimes did when he wasn’t sure what was hallucinations and what was reality.
The tall man swallowed. He stared down at Porky’s face, which wasn’t very spectacular, at least in it’s regular version. ”D-doyle?” he asked, not trusting his own voice.
”Angel,” he whispered, just as they had all heard him say when he was stoned or sleeping. Then he snapped out of it and tore out of the other man’s grip. ”You’re not real! You never are!”
He fell over and sat down on the asphalt, clutching his head in his hands. The tall man -- Angel -- squatted next to him, and so did Johnny.
”Doyle, please.” The man’s voice was tormented. ”I thought you were dead. What happened to you?”
”Don’t you know?” He sounded helpless. ”You always knew before.”
Johnny touched his shoulder. ”He’s real, Porky.”
Doyle looked up, not yet drunk but not sober enough to make sense of this. ”He is?”
Angel put his arms around him and rocked him slowly. ”I’m real. God, we’re both real.”
The young man shook his head, and tears formed in his eyes. ”It’s all your fault anyway. All I wanted was a little peace. Everyone keeps dragging me in all directions. I had my bleeding atonement, but I messed it all up again, because of you.”
He closed his eyes and fought off Angel’s arms. ”Go away.”
”Doyle...”
Johnny looked into the man’s pained eyes, and at the car standing nearby, and he realized he had found a way to keep Porky from being the next victim of the raids.
”You’re a friend of his?” he asked Angel..
”Yes. I thought he was dead.”
”He might as well be,” Johnny said, indicating the state Doyle was in. Angel didn’t need any further explanation.
”Come on, Doyle,” he said, helping his friend up. ”I’ll take you home.”
”No.” Doyle shook his head again, but he was too confused to fight. ”I don’t want it. I can’t take any more. Leave me alone.”
”Go with him, Porcupine,” Johnny said calmly.
”He’s a vampire,” he complained. ”Fighting things. I don’t want that.”
”And what are you?” Johnny asked with a wry smile. He had seen Doyle’s other face on those rare occasions when the kid lost control, and he knew the truth. ”It’s with him you belong, not out here, not at the shelters or the madhouse. You’ve shouted it enough nights for us to know. Go with him.”
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