UNSEEN: THE BURNING

He frowned. “I believe I just saw a very small mucus demon scamper through past the hardware store.”

  Tara turned to look. Then Anya cried out, “Everybody, run!”

  Directly on their heels, three stone demons charged at them, wielding thick stone bats, like animate gargoyle baseball players. The gray humanoid monsters slammed their weapons at the retreating figures, one smacking a fire plug so hard it burst, and water geysered into the air, hitting the power lines overhead.

  A sound like thunder boomed, and the entire street plunged into darkness, all the streetlamps flickering and dying at once.

  “It’s back,” Giles said, running around a corner. He paused to catch his breath. The screams of other pedestrians rattled his eardrums. “And it has friends!”

  But Tara shook her head. “It’s . . . it feels different.” She turned around. “Something’s different, Mr. Giles. Something is happening.”

  “Of the bad,” Xander added.

  “Very bad,” Anya agreed.

  “We should get back to my apartment,” Giles said.

  “So we can find out what’s going on?” Anya asked.

  “So we won’t be killed.”

  “Hey. When I suggested that, no one wanted to play,” Xander pointed out.

  “That was then. This is now,” Tara said.

  A man ran by, followed by a strange, lumbering creature covered in white fur. The creature wheeled from chasing the man, and ran straight for the Scoobs.

  Point man Xander called out, “Nice kitty, good kitty!” and swatted at the tiger-sized monster.

  Its attention diverted, it hunkered down, then sprang into a leap straight at Xander. It connected with his chest, propelling him backward, until he fell onto his back. The back of his head made a hard smack against the sidewalk, and Anya and Tara screamed.

  The creature, however, could not stop its forward motion, and its face smashed against the brickwork of the hardware store’s exterior. Stunned, it toppled off Xander and lay on its side.

  Xander groaned and tried to roll out of the way, but he couldn’t manage it. Giles grabbed him and dragged him back into the alley.

  Down the street, other monsters and demons capered and cavorted.

  All hell was breaking loose.

  “Can you walk?” Giles asked, sliding his hands around Xander’s upper arms and hoisting him to his feet.

  “He’s been eating a lot of junk food,” Anya supplied helpfully. “He probably weighs more than usual.”

  “I think I can manage, thank you,” Giles gritted. “Xander, please, you must get up. We’ve got to get out of here.”

  Xander made some incoherent noises.

  “I think he’s speaking Fyral,” Anya said.

  “Actually, he’s not.” Giles pulled out a stake. “Arm yourselves as best you can. We need to get Xander to safety. And we need to figure out what’s happening around here.”

  “Thinking. Good thinking,” Xander muttered.

  As the four staggered through a darkened and hysterical Sunnydale, Anya pined for the olden days of mayhem and destruction. Xander was a great boyfriend, but being a vengeance demon had its plus side, too, especially at times like this.

  Tara performed a few handy spells to help them get Xander to Giles’s house in one piece. They were lurching through the courtyard when the bushes rustled violently. Going to investigate, Anya noted the presence of an old blanket draped across the tops of the branches.

  She peered down. Spike was huddled inside, a half-eaten corpse draped across his lap.

  “What are you doing?” Anya demanded. “Eating someone’s leftovers?”

  “This is my bloody girlfriend,” he snapped.

  “She is,” Anya agreed.

  “She’s been hurt. That thing you’ve all been ranting about tried to eat her.”

  “Giles?” Anya called. As Giles approached, she said, “Spike saw the shadow monster.”

  “You did?” Giles said, interested. He looked at Cheryce, made a face. “Have you turned into a ghoul?”

  “That’s his girlfriend,” Anya said.

  “Or a pervert?” Xander offered.

  “I couldn’t take her into your place,” Spike said. “You’ve never invited her.” He frowned up at his fellow Englishman. “She’s a vampire, and she needs help. You’ve got to save her.”

  “First, tell me about the shadow monster,” Giles said, crossing his arms.

  “You are such a bad person,” Spike retorted. “Always talking about being such a goody-goody, but when the chips are down . . .”

  “Spike.”

  “All right then. We were going for a nice romantic walk, just got out the trailer, and this thing just pounces.” He shrugged. “Covered up and gnawed on her. I got a few good punches, some kicks . . . excellent kicks . . . and then the bloody thing just vanished.”

  Giles frowned at him. Spike snapped his fingers.

  Then he looked around. “Interestin’ thing is, it seems once it was gone, all these other things started showing up. How do you figure that, Rupert?”

  Anya cocked her head, waiting for Giles’s answer.

  The Brit said slowly, “I’m afraid I have no idea.”

  “You’d better figure it out soon,” Spike told him. “From the looks of things, oil fires and shadow monsters are the least of this town’s worries.” He grinned. “Neat, huh?”

  Giles just sighed.

  Los Angeles

  “She was just gone,” Cordelia insisted. “Poof. Like when you’re having a good hair day, and then someone pulls out a camera, and then whammo, your hairdo vanishes right before your eyes. And then, while we’re looking for her, those other guys just take off, those vampire-killing street kids. It was like elephants at a Siegfried and Roy show, disappearing all over the place.”

  “I did notice them walking out,” Wesley put in. “So their disappearance isn’t exactly a mystery. Still, it would have been nice to have found out who they were.”

  Angel had an idea of his own about that. From the description Cordelia and Wesley had given him, it sounded like Gunn and his crew. Gunn had seen Wesley and Cord, in the hospital, after Angel’s apartment had been blown up, but they’d been unconscious and had never actually met Gunn. And still hadn’t, it seemed.

  “But this girl was the one who called you and told you Kostov was on his way,” Angel suggested. “So maybe she was afraid the other girls would be mad at her, punish her in some way.”

  “No, she didn’t run away, though. She was there one second, and then the next she wasn’t. No physical motion involved.”

  “Cordelia’s right,” Wesley added. “It was like something out of a magic act. The incredible vanishing teenager.”

  “So we figured, who do we know who knows about this kind of stuff?”

  Wesley glanced at her, a pained expression on his face.

  “Besides Wesley,” she amended.

  Angel rubbed his chin. Buffy had been talking about disappearances, too. Had she specified that they were teenagers? A friend of Willow’s, she’d said, so probably. It was almost too big a stretch to think there was a connection between a case that had brought Buffy here from Sunnydale and the events Cordelia and Wesley had lived through while Angel was busy surviving a jail riot.

  He really wanted to change out of his tattered and smoky clothes, but Cordelia and Wesley had launched into their story as soon as he’d walked in. He listened, while one part of his mind tried to compartmentalize his priorities. First, Buffy was out there somewhere, and although he knew she was good at taking care of herself, he’d want to check in from time to time. Then there was the fact that Rojelio Flores would be released from prison in the morning, and Angel wanted to try to be at the Flamingo to make sure he got settled in, and that there was no threat from the crooked cops who had framed him for their own murder. And Cordelia thought he needed to look into the disappearance of this runaway girl, Kayley.

  And he understood her concern, especially coupled with what
Buffy had told him. If girls were disappearing from sight, then something was definitely rotten in Los Angeles.

  “And she was really gone, not just invisible?” Angel asked.

  “Gone,” Cordelia insisted. “Everybody called for her. We looked all over the place. No sign of her.” Cordelia paced around her living room, obviously agitated. “Look, I know we deal with a lot of strange things,” she continued. “As a kid, growing up in Sunnydale—well, you know, it’s on a Hellmouth, so there’s all that to deal with. But since I moved here to L.A. and started working with you, I’ve really been exposed to some major league eepiness.”

  “Eepiness,” Angel echoed.

  “That’s right. It’s like creepiness, but more eerie. But anyway, nothing we’ve faced is quite as eepy to me as someone disappearing right in front of my, you know, back. What’s up with that? Where could she have gone?”

  Angel looked at Wesley, who was polishing his glasses on a handkerchief. “You have any ideas, Wesley?”

  “Plenty of ideas,” Wesley replied. He put his glasses back on. “She walked through a rift in the space-time continuum. Her atoms were dispersed to the four winds. She was teleported to a small village in Siberia. I’ve no shortage of ideas, it’s just that none of them seem to make any sense.”

  “What about the other girls?” Angel asked. “What are they doing now?”

  “I asked,” Cordelia said. “But it didn’t sound like they had any definite plans. They said they’d stay there for tonight at least, and think about their next move.”

  “You think their vampire obsession is cured?”

  “Pretty sure, yeah. They’re pretty freaked about Kayley, though.”

  “I’ll look into it,” Angel said. “Ask around. See if I can find out anything.”

  Cordelia smiled for the first time since he’d walked into the apartment. She had a great deal of faith in Angel—if he said he’d do something, he took care of it.

  “But I also have to make sure Rojelio Flores is safe with his family.”

  “He’s being released today?” Cordelia asked.

  “Right.”

  “But not until after the sun comes up, right?”

  “Right,” Angel agreed.

  Cordelia looked at her wrist, where a watch would be if she wore one. “So you’ve still got some time to look for Kayley.”

  Angel nodded, resigned to another busy day. There was also Buffy, and the investigation into the crooked cops, which tied into the whole Flores thing.

  Kate had asked him—somewhat reluctantly, he thought—to spend some time digging around into the LAPD, trying to find out who was clean and who was dirty. The investigation she had in mind could only be done by someone on the outside. Angel wasn’t beholden to anyone on the force. He didn’t have personal relationships with any police officers besides Kate. Cops were the most insular bunch of people he knew, and they would close ranks against anyone they knew was investigating them—especially if it was a fellow officer like Kate.

  Angel would report to no one except Kate, and she would keep what she learned quiet until she knew how deep the corruption went, how high up the ladder of command it climbed. The citizens of Los Angeles were entitled to an honest police force, but for the past few years there had been many strains on the force’s credibility. Another scandal now could be ruinous, and Kate wanted to make sure she knew the facts before she brought any charges to light.

  He’d managed to locate an informant who claimed to know something about the dirty cops and their ties to criminal gangs, and had set up a meeting with the guy to find out the specifics. He’d done all this through an intermediary, a small-time hood he’d had occasion to run across a few times, and who he’d once saved from a Hrothgar demon with an appetite for bone marrow.

  The meeting was in twenty minutes. He had to move.

  He said good-bye and left, still stinking.

  Boyle Heights, at an hour before sunrise, was not Buffy’s idea of a garden spot. Having Riley along helped, but even his sunny presence could only do so much. The area they were in reminded her of a war zone—store-fronts were empty, their display windows shattered, their surfaces covered with colorful graffiti the meaning of which she could only guess at. Most of the streetlights were out, or their globes and bulbs shattered. Trash blew along the empty street.

  “Nice neighborhood,” Riley said sarcastically, echoing her sentiments.

  “We’re lucky,” she said. “Not having to live like this.”

  “Yeah, I guess the city doesn’t make a big deal out of cleaning up the poor neighborhoods, do they? Where Salma’s parents live—where Salma’s parents could afford to hire someone to do nothing but sweep the streets—the city probably has a truck there to pick up every stray candy wrapper.”

  “You think the mayor ever sees streets like this?” Buffy asked. “These people might as well be invisible.”

  Riley craned his head, looking out the window as he drove. “Well, I think Sleepy Ramos is invisible, too.”

  They had found someone who claimed to know Sleepy Ramos, and who told them what to look for, and where. Sleepy would be standing guard outside the meeting place, they were told—after Riley did some persuading. Only “standing” wasn’t exactly the right word. Sleepy would be sleeping guard inside an old Plymouth, painted primer gray. He could sleep anywhere—hence the nickname—but he was a light sleeper, so he was given guard duty because the slightest sound or movement would wake him up.

  So they cruised the neighborhood looking for the old gray Plymouth. Finally, Buffy spotted it outside a butcher shop, across the street from a run-down Victorian house. “There,” she said. “Sleepy.”

  Riley pulled to a stop behind the car. Buffy watched Sleepy’s face in his rearview mirror, and noted that as soon as Riley’s car drew into the spot, his eyes opened. So the story was true.

  “He’s awake,” she reported.

  “I see.”

  They got out of their car and walked toward Sleepy, who was already punching a speed-dial button on a cell phone. Buffy dove forward, yanked his door open—it had been locked, so the car sustained some damage there—and snatched the phone from his hand. She heard a small voice from it, saying, “Hello? Yo, hello?”

  “Sorry, wrong number,” she said, pressing the OFF button and tossing it into the back seat.

  Riley had gone to the other side of the car, so Sleepy was boxed in.

  “Sleepy Ramos,” Buffy said. “We need to talk to you.”

  Angel drove into a neighborhood he had seldom passed through, called Boyle Heights. It was in East Los Angeles, off Cesar Chavez Avenue. Not too far from his usual haunts or from downtown L.A., but he had a hunch the people who occupied the glittering skyscrapers there had never experienced Boyle Heights after dark.

  He turned a corner, a block away from the intersection where his informant was supposed to be waiting. The car was there. But the informant was not alone.

  Another car was parked behind it, and two people surrounded it—a tall, solid-looking young man with a military bearing, and a shorter, and quite lovely, blond woman.

  Buffy.

  Angel parked and got out of his car. “Buffy.”

  She spun, shock registering on her face. “Angel? What are you doing here?”

  “If that’s Sleepy Ramos, meeting him,” Angel explained. His tone might have been a little cooler than he wanted, but he still felt a little miffed at her. “I might ask you the same question.”

  “I’m looking for someone,” she said. “I think he knows where that someone is.”

  Sleepy Ramos climbed out of his car as they talked. He had heavy-lidded eyes and thick black hair that looked like he seldom combed it. He looked, Angel thought, like someone who had just woken up. He wore baggy cargo pants and a flannel shirt, untucked, buttoned all the way up. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen.

  “Yo, man,” he said. “You Angel?”

  “That’s right,” Angel said.

 
“These people harassing me,” he complained. “That ain’t what we agreed to.You gonna do something about it?”

  “He could try,” Riley said. Angel glanced at Buffy’s boyfriend. His stance was aggressive, his fists balled. He knew Riley didn’t like him. He also knew he could take Riley without breaking a sweat.

  If the soldier boy doesn’t stand down, he thought, this might be the time I prove it.

  “We’re all old friends here, Sleepy,” Buffy assured the youth. She turned to Riley. “Aren’t we?”

  “Works for me,” Riley agreed.

  “And Angel?” she asked pointedly.

  “Fine,” Angel snapped.

  He turned back to Sleepy Ramos—but Sleepy was apparently no longer interested in talking. He had taken advantage of everyone’s attention being off him to work his way around his car, to the end closest to the corner butcher shop. As soon as Angel glanced his way, he began to run.

  “Ramos!” Angel shouted.

  “Hey!” Buffy called. “We’re not done with him!”

  Angel shot her a look. “He’s mine,” Angel said, breaking into a run himself.

  Buffy kept pace with him easily. “We can share,” she said.

  Ahead, Ramos ran into an array of metal garbage cans lined up on the sidewalk. They scattered, and he tipped one of them behind him, across the walkway. The lid hit the cement and bounced, sailing through the window of a laundry. Glass crashed, and an alarm began to blare. The noise was shockingly loud in the quiet premorning air. On the other side of the cans, he ducked into an alley.

  “The neighbors are going to love this,” Riley panted behind them. Angel poured on the speed, and Buffy followed suit.

  As they came into the alley, Sleepy Ramos ran toward a shimmering golden circle that spanned the width of the alleyway. Angel could barely see the alley on the other side of the circle; it was like looking through some kind of viscous liquid.

  “Angel—” Buffy started to say. But before she could continue, Ramos ran headlong into the circle and vanished from sight. Angel braced himself for whatever was coming and dove—

  —and Buffy slammed into him, clutching at his legs and knocking him into the brick wall at the side of the alley. They rolled on the ground, scraping their hands and knees and Angel’s cheek. By the time they stopped and disentangled, the golden circle had faded into nonexistence.