Unseen #2: Door to Alternity

  “Finding people, I guess I am not so good at,” Doña Pilar said. “I looked for you for days, and nada.”

  “Well, it wasn’t a total nada, ” Willow reminded her. “As the crow flies.”

  “I was a special case,” Nicky said. “I did a hiding spell, specifically so no one would find me. And I had my Night of the Long Knives—no magick could touch me then.”

  Willow watched Doña Pilar’s face when he said that. She looked heartbroken—the fact that her grandson would involve himself in such dark magicks clearly dismayed her. At least, Willow thought it to be a dark spell, from what little she’d heard about it. Doña Pilar had not talked about it in the days they’d been working together—but then, they’d been pretty focused on trying to find Nicky and Salma and, oh, save the world from whatever threatened it this hour.

  There had been plenty to do.

  “I’ve got some compadres searching for her on the ground,” Nicky continued. “If she’s in the city, we’ll find her. My concern is if she’s not in the city.”

  “We do not know where any of the missing children have gone,” Doña Pilar said. “Willow,” and here she inclined her head toward where Willow sat in a straight-backed chair, rather graciously, Willow thought, including her in the effort, “and I have been trying to find some clue, some hint. We know there are doorways, and the young people are going through them. But the doorways come and go, and they do not seem to respond to any of our magickal attempts to control them.”

  “Does that mean they’re not magick, or that they are?” Nicky asked. He surprised Willow—she thought of Nicky as a gangbanger, a thug, forgetting that as Salma’s brother, he was probably extremely bright. The perceptive question cut to the real heart of the matter, the thing they had been trying to figure out ever since they’d become aware of the portals. Even the research that Giles and Wesley were conducting hadn’t answered that one yet.

  “We do not even know that,” Doña Pilar admitted. “If they are of a scientific origin, then they will respond to a different set of laws and rules than if they stem from magick. We need to determine that one way or another before we may begin to influence them.”

  Willow squirmed in her chair. “Umm, I have a question,” she said. “Nicky. When you were missing, and you did your spells—that was around the same time, I think, as when the first kids started disappearing in L.A. Is it possible that what you did somehow got mixed up with whatever was going on with the doorways? Could that explain why Sunnydale is having portals appear, too? Maybe that shadow monster was only the first one through to our side.”

  At the mention of Sunnydale, Doña Pilar shivered and crossed herself. “Boca del Infierno,” she said. “Brrr.”

  “We get a lot of that brrrness,” Willow agreed. “But do you think there’s a connection?”

  Nicky deferred to his grandmother.

  “It is possible, I suppose,” she said. “You did your spells in Sunnydale itself, Nicky?”

  He nodded gravely.

  “Then anything could have happened,” Doña Pilar said. “That makes as much sense as anything else we have considered. Sunnydale is a bad place, and magick is not to be used lightly there.”

  “So the things that are appearing there might be tied to the kids disappearing here in L.A.?” Willow asked. “That was Wesley’s theory, I think. Or Giles’s. One of them. You know, those Watchers all kind of sound alike after a while. Or maybe you don’t know. Probably you don’t. Not being, you know, Slayers, or anything.” She sat back in the chair, as far as one could sit back in such an uncomfortable construct.

  “That’s a scary idea,” Nicky said. “But I wasn’t thinking of that when I did the spells in Sunnydale. Guess I was stupid.”

  “No,” Doña Pilar said, warming as she looked at her grandson. “Not stupid. Impulsive, perhaps. You did not know what might happen.”

  He exhaled, blowing dark strands of hair off his forehead. “That’s right, I didn’t.”

  “So what do we do now, to look for Salma?” Willow asked.

  Doña Pilar considered. “We go back to work, you and I,” she said finally. She smiled at her protégée. “You never knew magick was such hard work, did you?”

  Willow shook her head. “No idea.”

  Los Angeles terrified Alina.

  She had lived there since she’d been a little girl. But she never went out alone. Always, a parent or one of the other people who worked for them on the People’s Project drove her wherever she needed to go. And since she was educated and worked in the same house, and her parents didn’t shop, go to movies or museums, or eat out, there was precious little reason for her to go anyplace. She had been driven through different parts of the city on different, widely-spaced occasions, but she had never acquired a real, working knowledge of its landscape or its inhabitants.

  She was getting one now. And she didn’t like it.

  She and Mischa had left the house together, through the window. He led her down from the suburban house to a restaurant in the shadow of the freeway, and there they had found two taxicabs. He gave her two hundred dollars cash and put her in one, while he took the other, since they were convinced that by now, her absence would be noted and her parents would be mentally scanning for her presence. He told her driver to take her to the downtown Greyhound station, and he would meet her at the Grand Canyon’s south rim in three days’ time. He would not be traveling by bus, he said, but by some other route to avoid detection.

  At the last moment, he reached back into the cab and gave her Angel’s card. “If you get into real trouble, call him,” Mischa told her. “I don’t know who he is, really, but I believe he can help you.” She thanked him, and then he was gone.

  With no clothes but those she wore, nothing in her hands but the Reality Tracer, she went for her first taxi ride.

  And on the way, she “heard” the cab driver’s thoughts.

  He kept looking in his rearview mirror at her. At first, she thought that he considered her pretty, which disgusted her, but which she could have lived with. But his thoughts were even worse than that, and he made no attempt to hide them. He planned to drop her at Greyhound, then rush right back to Hawthorne, figuring that whoever searched for her would still be around. He’d sell the details of where he’d left her, and she’d be picked up before morning.

  So she told him, as they cruised the nighttime streets of downtown, that she had changed her mind. She wouldn’t be going to the bus station after all, but would be staying in town. When they passed a place called the Avalon Hotel, she told him to stop and let her out there. That would be home, she said, at least for a while. She paid him and got out of the cab, and he turned around to find her parents and tell them where the Avalon Hotel was.

  As soon as the cab had rounded the corner, she turned and ran in the other direction. She reached out to people’s minds as she passed them, probing for clues as to the direction of the Greyhound station. She still needed to get out of town as quickly as possible.

  Alina worried about Mischa as she went. He was not just crossing her father—he was crossing the Mafiya, his own organization. He was practically a newcomer, just working his way up the ranks, and certainly no one important yet. He didn’t even carry a gun.

  But he was on his way, and he had known that with hard work and a little luck he would be a rich man someday. He had talked to Alina about these dreams, of striking it rich and taking his money back to Russia someday to live there like a czar.

  Alina had laughed at him—his goal was so contrary to her own, which had been instilled in her since infancy by her father, of remaking the Soviet Union as the Socialist state it was meant to be. She knew her father used the Mafiya to protect his operation, used its illegal activities to fund the People’s Project, and used its muscle, and its hired police officers, to keep the world at bay while he, her mother, and Alina worked on it. She had met Mischa because he was a driver, at times, for some of the higherups in the organization.

 
But even though she could find no nobility in Mischa’s stated goals, she liked the boy himself. He was funny and gentle and kind to her, and she wasn’t used to people being kind to her. So she came to look forward to his visits, and she knew—as she always knew—that he had come to look forward to them, too. He liked her, a lot.

  Too much.

  Just sixteen, while she knew many girls her age were interested in boys, she had no experience at that kind of thing. She studied and worked from morning to night, and didn’t see how dating or having a boyfriend could possibly fit into her world. So she kept Mischa at arm’s length, enjoying his visits but never letting him think that anything more could come of them.

  And then this. Running away from home in the dead of night, stealing the Reality Tracer so they couldn’t continue trying to use it and maybe making things worse into the bargain. Finding herself alone on the mean streets of downtown Los Angeles, where the homeless and the desperate and the dangerous looked at her like wolves eyeing a stray lamb. The sidewalk smelled like garbage, and worse.

  She had to find that bus station, and soon.

  Cradling the Reality Tracer in her arms like a baby, Alina dashed from one streetlight to the next, hurrying across the dark stretches as if something sinister might be hiding there.

  She “heard” them before she saw them. They had seen her, though, and were practically screaming their thoughts in her direction. And they meant her no good.

  Despite their jumbled, chaotic thoughts, she determined that there were five of them. But what was strange, possibly more frightening even than what they were thinking, was the fact that she could only read two of them. The other three she knew existed because of the thoughts of the first two, but their thoughts, their minds, were closed to her. She didn’t know who could do that, except for a few powerful psychics she’d met.

  They hung a little more than a block behind her, moving carefully in the shadows, hiding in doorways or behind parked cars whenever she glanced back. Following her.

  She looks like money, they thought. And that computer or whatever she’s carrying, ought to be able to pawn that for something. And anyway, she’s kinda cute, you know. Might be a tasty little bit.

  And more graphic thoughts, which Alina pushed away. She didn’t want to “hear” what they would do to her, she just wanted to be able to keep track of them while she tried to figure out how to escape.

  On streets they knew, where she’d never been.

  At night.

  Alone.

  She sauntered, almost casually, to a corner, and as soon as she rounded it she broke into a dead run. Across the street, and into the mouth of an alley there. She entered the alley, still running flat out, the Reality Tracer still clasped to her breast.

  And stopped.

  Because the alley was a dead end, a high brick wall closing it off, the back of a store, it seemed. No doorways faced this side, just a few windows on the second and third floors of buildings, up ladders that folded so they didn’t reach the street.

  She could “hear” them behind her. They’d made the corner and were coming this way. The very fact that she was out of sight had tipped them off that she knew about them, and was making a run for it. So they spread out, moving quietly, alert for anything.

  One of them thought about the alley. He spoke to another one, and the two of them headed that way.

  Trapped.

  She turned, ready to face them when they found her. She didn’t want them to see her back, no matter what. If she had to fight or die, she’d do it looking them in the eyes.

  The two men stopped in the alley’s mouth. Looked at her. One whistled, and the other three came running. They started to smile, to laugh. And, once they opened their mouths, she understood why these three had been unreadable to her.

  Vampires. Their long fangs gave them away. Vampires weren’t human, and she could only read humans. She knew most kids her age wouldn’t even be willing to accept that there were vampires, but most kids didn’t have her life experience. She’d encountered her first one in Hungary, more than a decade ago. She feared and hated them, but she did not disbelieve.

  “Hey, sweetcheeks,” one of them said. “You found us a nice private spot, huh? Guess you’re in the mood.”

  “Just hand me that computer,” another one demanded. He lunged for the Tracer, knocking it from her hands. It hit the street with an unhappy crunch. “I seen one of them once at RadioShack, I think.”

  “I’m first,” a third said. “I’m so ready for this.”

  Over their words, she could still “hear” the thoughts of the two who were still human, could barely begin to block them out, they were so loud in her mind. And on top of all the images of what they wanted to do to her, one thing stood out.

  What they really wanted.

  They ran with vampires. They wanted to become vampires. To persuade these vampires to turn them, they had agreed to prove their worth.

  Even though they were still human, these two wanted to taste blood.

  Her blood.

  Alina braced herself.

  And a thwipping noise cut the momentary silence, followed by a poof as one of the men exploded in a cloud of dust. The other four whirled to find a group of raggedy-looking young people facing them, wooden stakes and crossbows in their hands.

  At the center of the group stood a handsome African-American man in a hooded sweatshirt and baggy pants, a stake in each fist. He smiled. Alina found the smile friendly-looking, but at the same time understood how her attackers might not consider it so.

  “Only thing worse than a buncha vamps is a buncha lowlife criminal vamps,” the young man said. “Tryin’ to boost this girl’s stuff and drain her.”

  “Gunn,” one of the attackers growled.

  “Got that right,” the one called Gunn said. He signaled with a nod, and his crew burst into action. “Looks like L.A. needs me more than Sunnydale.” The fight was over in seconds. It ended with the three vampires gone, all disappearing in puffs of dust like the first one had. The two still-humans ran, screaming, into the night.

  When it was done, the man they had called Gunn smiled at her. She was right, it was a friendly smile. “You’ll be okay now,” he assured her.

  “Thank you, Mr. Gunn,” she said. She was reeling from all that had happened. She felt almost as afraid of him as she had been of the vampires, and only because he was a stranger.

  I’m so handicapped, she thought. I’m like a little baby.

  “No prob.” He cocked his head. “What’s that accent, Russian?”

  “Yes.” She swallowed hard, wondering if she should have divulged her nationality.

  “Long as it ain’t Transylvanian, we’ll be okay,” Gunn said.

  “No, you were right,” she assured him, not certain if he was teasing, not understanding why he didn’t like Transylvanians. “It’s Russian.”

  Gunn’s thoughts were guarded, but she probed a little, wanting to make sure that he meant her no harm. She didn’t believe he did, but had just learned the value of being extra cautious.

  And she saw something familiar there.

  She had to know.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “But, do you know a man named Angel?”

  * * *

  “I wanted you to hear it from me,” Kate said. “Before you see tomorrow’s morning paper.”

  “Angel’s not big on the morning edition,” Cordelia pointed out.

  Kate looked at her.

  “Sunlight,” Wesley added.

  “I got it,” Kate said brusquely.

  Angel rose from his seat, placing his finger in one of his unpleasantly dusty tomes. He knew it had taken a lot for Kate to come to Cordelia’s apartment, seeking him out. So he didn’t want Cordelia and Wesley to give her a hard time. He wanted to make this as easy on her as he could, and then get her out so he could get back to work.

  “Right,” Kate said. “Anyway, tomorrow’s Times is going to have a screaming headline about police corrupt
ion in the LAPD. I haven’t seen the story, and I don’t think your name will be in it, but I don’t know that for sure.”

  “Thanks for the warning,” Angel said, nevertheless very pleased.

  She sighed. “Figured it was the least I could do.”

  “How’d it break?” he asked her, closing the book. Dust wafted up and Cordelia sneezed. She had recently asked him if an allergy to dust could qualify her for disability pay.

  “Peterson agreed to turn state’s evidence in return for a plea on a lesser charge. And by lesser, I mean he’ll go down for manslaughter instead of first degree murder, but he’s not skating on that. He told us all about Manley, Castaneda, and Fischer. Turns out there are more, too, working out of that same division.”

  It was clear it was hurting her to talk about it, but Angel needed the details and he figured that Kate needed to spill. Her bitterness was eating her up, and he wasn’t the only one to have noticed it. She had a bad reputation on the job now, people laughing at her to her face and calling her “Scully.”

  “Those four are the only ones implicated in the Nokivov murder, but there are other officers down there who have been into all sorts of nastiness. Trumped-up cases against people they want to take off the streets, or against informants who might be able to testify about some of their dirty activities. Planting drugs, guns, and other evidence. At least a couple of other murders. These boys have been busy.”

  Wesley said gently, “But you think, with Peterson’s help, you’ll get them all?”

  “We’ve been rounding them up all night,” Kate said. Her shame and frustration were palpable. “If there’s anybody left to run the division tomorrow we’ll be lucky.”

  “The city is not going to be happy,” Cordelia observed.

  “Not at all.” She lifted her head. Her blond hair brushed her shoulders. “Things are already tense enough with the gang war and the disappearances. Now add police corruption—it’s not like the LAPD has the most sterling record as it is—and it’s going to be insane.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “Hopefully it’ll blow over soon, once we bring all these cops to court and put them away. But it’s not going to be pleasant in the meantime.”