Who says all the creepies even speak English?
Only her Slayer senses allowed her to hear it coming before it slammed into her, and even they, muffled like every other sense by the black fog, didn’t give her time to dodge.
It hit her like an express train. Buffy staggered back under the impact, but had the presence of mind to grab onto it as she fell. It continued on its path, toward the house, she believed—maybe heading for another window. She hung on.
The force of its momentum snatched her off her feet.
It felt as if she was holding onto a limb of some kind, an arm or a leg. Thickly corded with what seemed to be muscle, the thing tried to shake her off as it sped toward its destination. But she kept her grip, and even though her feet had lost contact with the ground, she climbed the thing, hand over hand, finally reaching something that felt more like a torso.
Buffy could see nothing, just the blackness. And what she felt was totally alien—skin, she thought, not fabric, but like no skin she had ever touched. It was like leather that had soaked in motor oil overnight—slick and scaly and tough, all at once.
She clawed her way across the thing, finally finding an opening of some kind. Hot breath blasted her hand, so she assumed it was a nose or a mouth. Not knowing if it had teeth or a tongue, she risked it and grabbed for the source of the breath.
Her fingers closed on the side of the opening—like a great maw of some kind. She pulled with everything she could, and heard a sound like flesh tearing. Then the thing made its first noise, a high-pitched keening that sounded like it came from everywhere at once. Buffy held on, kept tearing.
The thing stopped and batted at Buffy with several hard, knotlike objects. They could have been fists, but they might as easily have been balls on the ends of stalks. Since she couldn’t see, it didn’t really matter. All that mattered was that the pummeling hurt.
Going to have to put this thing down fast, before it kills me, Buffy thought. Might be easier if I could see it, though.
Since she couldn’t, could only vaguely sense its whereabouts and dimensions, she made sure to keep at least one hand on it at all times. If she let go for a moment, it could be lost in the darkness again. She had hurt the thing, and she wanted to press that advantage. Doing her best to ignore the rain of blows, she clung to one writhing arm or tentacle and worked her way up it again. When she had relocated what passed for the torso she drove her fist into it hard, several times, then followed with four solid kicks.
The thing seemed to feel those. Its attack faltered. Buffy redoubled her own. She jerked forward on the arm she held, tucked it under her own arm against her ribs, and dropped backward, into a roll. She kicked her feet out before her as she went onto her back and felt the thing passing over her. As she came up out of her roll she hurled it, hard, against the ground. It hit with a muffled thump and another wail of pain.
She turned to face it again, still holding the one arm, and she threw herself on top of it. This time, she found something that felt enough like a head and neck to take a chance on. Letting go of the arm, Buffy grabbed the neck and twisted.
The thing went limp in her arms.
Buffy stood, panting, hands on her knees, trying to catch her breath.
And the next one hit her.
Detective Kate Lockley looked up from her desk at the precinct, and he was just standing there casually, as if waiting for a bus.
“Something I can do for you?” she asked, icily.
Angel held his hands up in a placatory fashion. “I need you to listen to me for a minute.”
Kate gathered some files, sliding them into her briefcase to take home. Her back was rigid. “Give me one good reason,” she said. She scooted her chair back to stand up.
“I’ve got four,” Angel told her. He knew she wouldn’t take this well. She hated crooked cops—and just to make it worse, her dad had been one. She had once liked Angel, but not anymore, not since learning that he was a vampire, and that he had been involved, however peripherally, in the events that had led to her father’s death. “Their names are Peterson, Manley, Castaneda, and Fischer. They’re cops. They’re dirty.”
She winced as if in pain. “And you can prove it?”
“I will be able to, soon.”
“Come back when you can,” she instructed him.
“Kate, one of them confessed to me. I’m not making this up. You’ve got to believe me.”
“They out of my division?” Kate asked.
“No, 77th Street Headquarters.”
“Not my problem then,” Kate said, rising. An iceberg.
Angel blocked her path.
“I don’t know anyone over there,” Angel said. “And anyway, they’re a little busy tonight with problems in the jail, as I’m sure you’ve heard. But they are LAPD, and they’re corrupt. They’ve framed an innocent man for a murder they committed.”
Kate listened. She was no fan of Angel these days, but she hated police corruption even more.
“I don’t have any way of knowing how many more dirty cops there are in that division,” Angel said. “I don’t know who to talk to. So I came to the one police officer I know who is unquestionably honest.”
She held the files against her chest, aware that she was using them like a shield. “Most of us are, you know.”
“I’m sure of that. But I don’t know which ones aren’t, and it wouldn’t do much good to report a corrupt cop to an equally corrupt one.”
Kate sat down again, pulled out a notepad. “I’m not saying I believe you,” she said with a deep sigh. “But give me those names again.”
“But what if Buffy’s right?” Willow was asking.
“She almost certainly is,” Doña Pilar replied. She stirred the ingredients in a huge cast-iron pot that sat bubbling on the ancient stove. A wretched smell filled the room. Willow wondered how many air quality laws were being broken in this small kitchen. “But we cannot allow that to make us stop trying.”
Buffy had suggested that Willow and Doña Pilar stop using magick, in case Doña Pilar’s theory that magick was what had drawn the supernatural attacker to the house in the first place was correct. That made sense to Willow, but Doña Pilar had insisted on going ahead and trying to counter the attack with magic of her own. So they had fashioned a compromise—Buffy would try it her way, but if the cause looked hopeless, Willow and Doña Pilar would join the fight.
For the past twenty minutes she had been adding ingredients to her mystical stew and chanting over it. She told Willow what she was putting in, when she wasn’t chanting, but hadn’t explained exactly what goal she was working toward or what the chant meant. It didn’t sound like Spanish, so Willow thought it might have been the language of the Indians who had been in Doña Pilar’s part of Mexico before the Spaniards came.
“The time has come. Buffy needs us. Get ready to cover your eyes, child,” Doña Pilar warned.
“Cover my eyes?” Willow echoed. She brought her hands to her face, but couldn’t imagine what the old woman was talking about.
“Now,” Doña Pilar commanded.
Just as she closed her eyes, Willow saw the inside of the pot begin to glow with an impossibly bright light. It was as if the sun had been captured inside Doña Pilar’s cookpot.
Willow shut her eyes tight and held her hands over them. But the backs of her hands, her mouth and chin, and the rest of her that faced the pot felt the warmth of the tiny sun.
It seemed to rise up out of the cookpot and float in the air. Willow could feel the center of its heat move across her as it drifted about the room. It made no sound, but she could hear Doña Pilar pad across the kitchen to the single window. She threw open the window and shouted, “Go!”
When the heat dissipated Willow opened her eyes. A small, homemade sun was whisking out through the window into the pitch black beyond, illuminating the world as it went.
When Angel stepped out of the police station onto the street, they were waiting for him. Two cars, both American,
dark and nondescript. Four men in each car. All armed.
Angel heard the engines growl as soon as he reached the sidewalk. By the time he got to the corner, where he had parked his own car, they were roaring down the street toward him. He looked up. Windows slid open and guns bristled from the windows. Angel looked about for cover but there wasn’t any—his own car was still twenty feet away, and there were no cars parked immediately in front of the police building.
He hit the ground as the guns spat fire.
A dozen slugs tore into him. Sharp bolts of pain racked his body. He stayed on the ground.
The cars raced away into the night.
A handful of police officers scrambled out of the building, Kate Lockley among them. Some ran to squad cars to give chase. Kate and the others rushed over to Angel.
He stood up, squinting against the pain, dusting off his clothes as he did. Blood flecked his shirt.
“Lousy shots,” he said with a wry grin.
“Lucky for you,” Kate offered, not looking too worried. Or surprised.
“Really lucky,” one of the other cops said. “Didn’t hit any lethal zones?”
“Couple of them grazed me,” Angel said. “Ruined this shirt. But no direct hits. I’m okay.”
“Need an ambulance?” the cop pressed.
“I’ll drive him to the hospital,” Kate said, waving the officer away. She knew full well that he wouldn’t need one, but it worked, and the other cops left them alone. She led Angel toward her car. “Did you see their guns?”
“Didn’t really get a good look at them,” he answered.
“I did,” she continued. “A couple of them were what you’d expect to see. Mac-10s. A Glock 19. But two of them were using Kalashnikovs. Not AK-47s,” she said, naming a fairly common assault rifle. “AK-74Ms.”
Angel was surprised. “Nobody in L.A. fires 74Ms.”
She gave him a look. “Nobody except the Russians.”
Buffy fought against the newcomer, but she was still winded from defeating the first one. This thing seemed to be constructed in much the same way, at least as far as she could tell with her Slayer senses. She had no way of knowing what had become of the first one—it was lost somewhere in the dark.
But this seemed to be multilimbed like the other, and its breath, when she got close to it, was just as hot and fetid as the first.
She pounded on it, and took a pounding from it. Every now and then she tore a cry of pain from it, and each one spurred her on again. She kicked it hard, three times, then followed with two shots from her right fist, moving in close for an elbow slam.
The thing screamed, a chilling, mind-bending sound like the combined wail of everyone who had ever died.
Buffy shook her head. The sound was deafening. She had to back away from it, putting her hands over her ears, even if that meant she might lose it.
Anyway, as long as it was screaming, it wasn’t fighting.
She watched it scream for a long moment, its wide mouth open in an uneven oval shape, before she realized that she could actually see it. Subconsciously she knew she had been able to see it before, that she wouldn’t really have let go if there had been a chance that it could slip away from her. But it wasn’t until now that she was aware that there was some light penetrating the darkness.
Willow and Doña Pilar, she thought. Good for you.
She looked up.
Coming from a window of the house—she could see the house!—was the sun. Or something that looked like the sun does, on those heavily overcast days when the sun resembles a pale white bowling ball in a nickel-gray sky.
But this small white orb glowed with the brightness of the sun on the clearest day, and as it moved steadily into the black it seemed to burn the darkness away. The black world grew steadily more gray. The miniature sun hissed like a ruptured steam pipe as it plowed through the artificial night.
Buffy looked back toward the creature, but it was gone, vanishing before her eyes as if the light made it fade away.
Another moment passed and the little sun was gone. Buffy could see a dark night sky overhead once again, with stars twinkling in their proper spots. A gibbous moon hung in one corner. Familiar shapes had returned.
The night had been restored around the de la Natividad house. With it, the things that had attacked the house were gone.
Buffy went back inside. Elfredo joined her, holstering his gun. He was scraped and bloody, his clothes torn, as if he’d been fighting something on his own.
“You okay?” she asked him, concern in her voice.
“It didn’t really get me,” he assured her. “I don’t think. I was sideswiped by something and slammed into the sidewalk, that’s all. When I got up again I couldn’t find the house. Until the lights came on.”
He shut the door solidly behind them. When she looked back, he had a smile on his face.
“The Russian Mafiya is one of the deadliest criminal organizations in the world,” Kate explained to Angel. Once the other officers had retreated, they had gone back inside the building, and were seated at her desk. Seeing the attack on Angel seemed to have made her more receptive to his story. He had told her the whole tale of Rojelio Flores, as it had been told to him. The coffee she had poured herself, sitting in a mug at her elbow, had no doubt grown ice cold.
“It’s largely composed of people who had been criminals in the old Soviet Union, before the collapse, joined by people who had been KGB agents. Well trained and well armed.”
Angel knew a little about the KGB. It had been the Soviet secret police—in U.S. terms, a combination of the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service, all rolled up into one deadly agency. Espionage in other countries and surveillance of their own people within their borders—within their own homes, in some cases—fell under the KGB’s scope.
“And after the collapse?” he asked.
She shrugged, as if the answer were obvious. “Suddenly no one was paying them to spy anymore. They decided private enterprise was the way to go, private enterprise meaning crime, corruption, extortion, murder. Anything for a buck. Or should I say, ruble?” She tested her coffee, made a face, and set it down.
“If they’re here, then I think ‘buck’ applies,” Angel said.
“Oh, they’re here, all right,” she said firmly. She opened a drawer in her metal desk and rummaged around for something, locating a tin of Altoids, which she held out to Angel. He took one, and then she popped one herself. “They terrorized Russia, but it didn’t take long for them to realize that there was a lot more money to be made in the States than there was over there.
“Not that a lot of them weren’t already here. We’ve had gangs of every possible race and nationality working here forever—Armenians, Russians, Colombians, Irish, Sicilians, and on and on.”
“One big melting pot,” Angel observed, mildly regretful that he couldn’t taste the effervescent flavor of the Altoid. His sense of taste was quite specific—he could distinguish different types of blood with the finesse of a wine taster. Everything else was cardboard to him.
Kate continued. “But, as bad as they were before the Soviet fall, they became that much worse afterward. Before, there was always the threat of deporting them. After, with their ranks swollen by KGB killers, Soviet Army soldiers out of work, and so on, they graduated from being one of the most violent criminal organizations in the country to the most violent, bar none.”
“Their revenge for losing the Cold War?”
She thought about that. “I don’t think politics has much to do with it. The Russian economy is in a shambles, and part of the reason is that there is so much crime and corruption over there, very little of the budget is actually spent on whatever it’s supposed to be spent on.
“The Russian Mafiya here—and I’m using that as a general term, there are hundreds of criminal gangs in Russia, and many over here—is out of the politics game.” She lifted her coffee cup from her desktop and took a sip. “They’re playing the capitalist system for all it’s worth,
lining their own pockets at the expense of private citizens, government, insurance companies, everyone.”
“By dealing drugs?” Angel asked.
Kate stretched, looking a bit overwhelmed by all the bad in the world. “Oh, yes. And they rob banks, they commit various kinds of fraud, they’re into gambling. They’ve already pulled off jobs worth more than a billion dollars. They’re not here to raise their families under a peaceful democracy. Most of them don’t even have families. They’re here to steal.”
Angel said, “Flores said the guy he was alleged to have killed, Nokivov, was a drug dealer.”
“Flores is right,” Kate told him. “I ran Nokivov’s name through the system. He’s got one conviction and he’s on parole. Was on parole, I should say. Guess he won’t be checking in with his parole officer anytime soon.”
They shared a grim smile. Angel was sorry things hadn’t worked out between them. Well, not so much worked out, as worked at all. There were a lot of things he liked about her—her drive, her determination, her honesty, her courage. But she pretty much detested the sight of him these days. He avoided looking at the picture of her father on her desk.
“So he was a member of the Mafiya?” Angel asked her.
“Of one of the Russian gangs, anyway.” She set down the printout and leaned back in her chair.
“I shook down one of the crooked cops who killed him, and less than an hour later, two cars full of people tried to kill me with Russian guns.” He gazed at her. “What does that tell you?”
“I wish it was a terrible coincidence.” She looked ill. “Obviously, Peterson, at least, is involved with the Russians.”
“That’s what I’m thinking,” Angel said. “He called in a favor after I left him. And someone in this building called to tell him I was here. Didn’t take long for them to spread the word.”
“Which means there’s at least one crooked cop in my division,” Kate said, venom dripping in her voice.
“Which also means that maybe they weren’t worried about being arrested, like he told me,” Angel finished. “Maybe they were worried about their Mafiya pals finding out who killed Nokivov, so they set Flores up to take their fall.”