She allowed the women to place her into the tub and, still holding her arms fast, they sponged every inch of her with the scented water and soft, caressing cloths. This was the part where she began to wonder if she was in fact a prisoner, or perhaps some kind of royalty being prepared for a ceremony. What they did felt so good, and the soporific effect of the flower petals floating on the water soothed her fears and quieted her heart. No more tears flowed, and she found herself smiling under their tender ministrations. Through all of it, the silent women worked seamlessly together as if they had done this a thousand times.
When she was clean—and so relaxed, she felt as if she were bathing inside a cloud—they helped her from the bath and dried her with thick green towels. The nine women carefully dabbed every part of her to ensure that she was dry, and then two of them went to work on her hair, combing it over and over again, massaging her scalp in the process. She almost fell asleep as they worked. When they finished, they helped her into a yellow robe, much like their own except for the color. The soft, rich fabric felt heavenly against her clean skin.
She thought about trying again to communicate with them, possibly through sign language of some kind. But something warned her that such an attempt would lead to further frustration and would negate the comfort and peace that she now felt, so she didn’t bother. Instead she sat, silent and compliant, as one of the women dotted her forehead, cheeks, and chin with some kind of scented, musky oil.
That done, all nine of the women came before her in turn. Each one knelt down before her and touched the dot of oil on her forehead. Salma thought maybe they were worshiping her, or marking her for some reason. But the narcotic effects of the bath lingered, and she didn’t pursue any line of thought for very long.
When each woman had performed this task, they helped her to her feet and took her through a series of hallways to a massive door. Four of the women, straining together, could barely muscle it open. Beyond it a narrow staircase wound down and out of sight. Torches burned in sconces on the staircase walls. The women led Salma to the staircase, and started her down the stairs.
When the big door closed behind her, Salma’s heart skipped and a brief flurry of panic overcame the flowery drug. But it passed, and she continued down the stairs, one part of her wanting to see what new wonder would be discovered below, even as the rest of her just wanted to be home again.
At the bottom of the long, steep staircase she found another door. She pushed against it and it swung away easily, almost like an automatic door at the supermarket. As she passed through it, it closed behind her with a determined clang. When she glanced back at it, the door had vanished, melding totally with the wall of the tunnel in which she found herself. So there was no going back, no way out except to move forward.
Into the dark unknown.
Sunnydale
Xander had just about had it with Spike. He could only take so much of the guy in the first place—always mouthing off, always putting others down. Especially me, he thought. Like I’m his personal whipping boy. And it bugged him that Spike and Anya seemed to have so much in common; their age, their demon pasts, the fact that both of them had been, for all intents and purposes, defanged. They had long talks, serious talks. When Xander tried to have a serious talk with Anya, they usually ended up in bed. Which, not complaining, he thought. But still, sometimes a guy just wants to cuddle and converse. He and Anya walked ahead of Spike, who, despite his insistence that he wanted to whomp some demon, um, butt, seemed determined to investigate every shrub, every Dumpster, every spot that could possibly hide a person of Cheryce’s size. Xander’s personal theory was that she wouldn’t hide in someplace so mundane—she was flashy, outgoing, a show-off.
As they walked the dark streets, Spike stopped now and again to peek into trash cans.
“Stop it,” Xander warned. “I’m getting hungry.”
“Bite me, Harris,” Spike snapped.
“You’d like that, huh? Since you can’t bite me?” There was, Xander realized, at least some pleasure to be had, taunting Spike now that he couldn’t possibly hurt anyone. Of course, in the back of his mind, he realized there was a possibility that situation wouldn’t last forever, in which case, his would probably be the first neck Spike targeted.
Xander and Anya turned a corner, a couple of blocks from the business district in a mixed commercial/ residential neighborhood, and there she was. Spike’s ticket to chipless land. Cheryce held the head of a young man in her hands— fortunately, Xander thought, it’s still attached to a body. The man looked like a gangbanger, in his baggy pants and plaid shirt. He was sobbing, and Cheryce had her face very close to his neck.
“Let him go,” Xander said. He pulled a stake from his pocket.
Cheryce laughed. She sauntered up to Xander, and then, when she was near enough, her face changed, fangs elongating. Xander thrust the stake over his head and down, but she grabbed him before he could follow through.
“Hey!” he shouted, trying to struggle. Her grip was too strong.
“You leave my boyfriend alone!” Anya demanded. “Spike!” She drew a stake of her own and jumped onto Cheryce’s back, but the vampire simply hurled her off with one hand, slamming her into a wall. The stake clattered on the ground.
“Not him again,” Cheryce sighed. “Don’t you ever hang out with interesting people?” She lowered her face to Xander’s neck. “Oh, well. Won’t matter anymore.”
Xander felt the teeth graze his skin. He closed his eyes, trying to prepare for the inevitable.
And a sudden force knocked them both flat on the ground.
Xander opened his eyes. Cheryce was on top of him, which under other circumstances he might have found pleasant. On top of her, though, was a multilimbed, copper-colored humanoid. Its two legs kicked in the air, while its six arms wrapped around Cheryce’s torso and clawed at her face. She tried to buck it off, but it was too strong, and had too many solid grips. Finally, she managed to slide off of Xander and then throw herself back against the same wall she’d slammed Anya into. The creature, between her and the wall, took the worst of the blow. It let go of Cheryce, but only for a moment, and then it flailed out with all of its arms, pummeling her with half a dozen fists. Some of the blows connected, and she dropped to the sidewalk.
Spike came running around the corner now, alerted by Anya’s shouts and the sounds of struggle. He saw what was happening and launched himself at the monster. It caught him in midair, whirled, and flung him down the street, where he landed in a cursing skid.
The thing turned on Anya, who had rushed to Xander’s side when he and Cheryce went down. “No!” Xander yelled, trying to push himself to his feet. But the creature only smacked him back down with two of its hands, and grabbed Anya with the others. It wrapped a couple of big hands around her head, as if meaning to tear it from her neck.
Then its disgustingly humanlike face went slack. Cheryce had come up behind it and attacked it somehow. As it turned on her, almost in slow motion now, Xander saw that there were two holes in its back—hand-size holes. Black blood flowed from them, and Cheryce’s hands were coated with the same thick ooze.
She had saved them. He wondered if she realized it.
But as he watched, the monster lunged for her, apparently not down yet. Two of its hands caught the front of her shirt, and another grabbed one of her arms. It yanked her off-balance, and she tripped, landing back on the sidewalk again.
From behind them, Spike ran toward her, his mouth open in a silent cry. He had already seen what Xander hadn’t noticed yet—one of the thing’s other hands had scooped up Anya’s fallen stake. They all watched, unable to reach Cheryce in time, as the monster drove the stake home into her heart.
Cheryce exploded in a puff of dust.
The monster keeled over, dead.
Spike dropped to his knees and shouted, “Dammit!”
Anya shot Xander a look. He couldn’t read it, exactly, but he knew that he should just keep his mouth shut. She went to
Spike’s side, kneeling beside him. He buried his head against her and wept.
“There, there, you’ll find someone else,” she cooed.
“Yeah, but will she know how to get this bleedin’ chip out of my head?” he wailed. “I’m doomed. Bloody doomed!”
Los Angeles
Wesley looked up from a laptop computer he’d plugged into Cordelia’s phone line. It rested on her kitchen table, and he had been sitting in front of the screen for what seemed like hours. “There are dozens of Mischas, perhaps more than a thousand, in Los Angeles,” he said. “I’m afraid we need something a little firmer to go on.” “Angel’s out looking for clues,” Cordelia said, glad he was actually speaking. She’d already alphabetized the contents of her pantry, which, to be fair, hadn’t taken that long since it was pretty bare. She had thought that reading a magazine while he searched the Internet would be rude, then decided she didn’t care, and it beat looking into her empty pantry again to see if maybe pea soup should be under “S” for soup instead of “P” for pea.
Or “C” for can?
She closed Vanity Fair. “Actually, I think he’s looking for people to beat up. Only they have to be the right people. He’s past the point in his life where he just beats people up for fun; now he only does it for information. Soon as the sun went down, he headed out, trying to find someone he could beat up for a lead to Vishnikoff, or Mischa. Or both.”
“At least it’s narrowed down to people who know something about Russians,” Wesley said, stretching his arms over his head. Cordelia could hear his shoulders pop. “That’s something.”
“Makes me feel better,” Cordelia said. “Only I feel bad, because when I had my head in the pantry, thinking about all the yummy foods that weren’t in there, I remembered something about the Mischa-vision I had that I didn’t tell Angel. It just didn’t make any sense at the time.”
“What is it?” Wesley asked her.
“I was trying to remember names, places, faces, that kind of thing. So I ignored this smell, but maybe it was important, after all.”
“An odor? What kind?”
“Sweet,” Cordelia replied. “Doughy. Like a bakery. Cakes, cookies, bread, that kind of thing.”
“That narrows it down,” Wesley said glumly. “There can’t be more than a thousand bakeries in the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area.”
“Russian bakeries?” Cordelia asked. “I mean, it’s not necessarily a Russian bakery, but several aspects of this case seem to point to Russians, so maybe . . .”
Wesley turned back to the computer, started tapping keys. “Good point,” he said. “Let’s check.”
Visiting every Russian bakery on the list was proving to be a time-consuming operation. There were more than one might expect, to begin with, and they were scattered over a much greater geographical area than one might hope—if one had hopes of hitting them all in a single day, that was. Given the sheer square mileage that Los Angeles encompassed, Cordelia figured she should not have been so surprised, but when she saw the sun going down before they were done with their list, she was.
The first nine bakeries they stopped at had no Mischa. The tenth had one, but he was in his fifties, grizzled and gray, with an enormous belly that looked like he had swallowed a beach ball. They thanked him, bought a cookie, and left. Wesley had insisted it was only polite to buy a small something for the trouble to which they were putting the bakers.
“If this keeps up,” Cordelia said as she munched the cookie on the way to the car, “we’ll look like him by the time we find the right Mischa.”
The eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth bakeries had no Mischa either. There was one who worked at the fourteenth, in Baldwin Hills, but he was not working that evening. Cordelia described him, and the elderly woman at the counter blinked behind thick-lensed glasses and nodded her head.
“That’s him, that’s Mischa,” she said. “He’s a good boy.” But she refused to give them Mischa’s last name, address or phone number.
They made another purchase, and Cordelia gave Wesley a thumbs-up on the way outside. “Now all we have to do is wait here until Mischa shows up. Can’t be more than a few days.”
“Unless the trouble he’s in is lethal,” Wesley observed. “In which case—”
“Yeah, I get it. So maybe we’re no better off than we were.”
“In fact,” Wesley pointed out, “we may be far worse off.”
Cordelia followed his gaze. There was a crowd of people standing around their car—a crowd of men, all in their mid-twenties, rough-looking. As Cordelia and Wesley walked toward them, they spread out across the sidewalk, standing in the circle of light cast by a streetlamp.
“I don’t like the looks of this lot,” Wesley whispered.
“No one’s asking you to date them,” Cordelia replied. “Let’s get out of here.”
They turned to walk in the opposite direction, but two more men emerged from a doorway they had just passed, cutting off retreat. “Blast,” Wesley said.
“You looking for Mischa,” one of the men said as they surrounded Cordelia and Wesley. It was not phrased as a question, and Cordelia didn’t think that was because of any unfamiliarity with the intricacies of the English language. He was well over six feet tall, probably two hundred pounds. His shirt barely contained his muscles. His English carried a Russian accent. “Why?”
“We, uhh, heard he was in some trouble,” Cordelia said. “Just hoping we could help out.”
“Trouble?” the man asked. “What kind?”
“Umm, he . . . won something. And we’re supposed to deliver it. Money, I think. Lots of it.”
“Do you even know Mischa?”
“No, not at all,” Wesley said, with a short little laugh. “She’s kidding. We just heard that he worked at the best Russian bakery in all of Los Angeles.” He hefted the small white bag in his hand. “We thought we’d pick up some rugelach.”
In support, Cordelia smiled and said, “And, boy, is it yummy.”
“What I hear, you’ve been looking for Mischa all over town,” the man continued, glowering at Wesley. “ Probably you are interested in trouble, not rugalah.”
“If we were interested in trouble,” Wesley said politely as he adjusted his glasses, “I have no doubt that you could provide it. However—”
“However,” another voice joined in, “I’d recommend that you back off and let them go.”
“Angel?” Cordelia said. She spun around. Sure enough, behind them on the sidewalk was Angel, fists clenched, coming toward them.
“And how are you involved in this?” the Russian man demanded.
“You’re eight guys, picking on two people who just bought some rugelach,” Angel said. “Seems a little unfair to me.”
“Kill them all,” the man commanded his cronies.
Angel moved faster than anybody else as well as everybody else. He dove into the center of the men, feet lashing out. Two men dropped immediately with broken knees. Angel spun and caught another in the belly with his own knee, finishing him with a quick chop to the back of the neck.
Two more rushed him simultaneously, and he dropped both of them with jabs to their chins. Another couple of men ran away then, and Angel turned toward the apparent leader of the group, the one who had been threatening Cordelia and Wesley.
“Looks like you guys weren’t as tough as you thought,” Angel said.
“You have not tried me yet,” the man replied.
“Somehow I don’t think you’ll be a problem,” Angel said calmly. He touched his own chest. “I’m just getting warmed up. My heart isn’t even racing yet. Want to check?” He went vamp-faced as he spoke.
The man backed away a step. The confidence on his face had been replaced by something that looked to Cordelia a lot like terror. Angel moved forward, keeping the distance between them even.
“You saw what I can do,” Angel said, still in his calm, low voice. “You haven’t seen the worst of it, but you saw a demonstration. I don’t
want to hurt you, but I will unless you tell me what I want to know.”
The man didn’t answer.
“I want Vishnikoff,” Angel said. “Take us to Vishnikoff, or take us to Mischa.”
“I-I cannot,” the man stammered. “It would not be safe.”
“You’re beyond worrying about safe,” Angel said. He took another step forward. The guy tried to move back but he was against a wall. His eyes were huge and he swallowed repeatedly. Angel reached out one hand, gripped the man’s biceps, and began to squeeze. “You’re at the point where you have to wonder if I’ll kill you or just cripple you, unless you tell me what I want to know.”
Angel scared Cordelia when he was like this. She knew he was overplaying it, trying to scare the overgrown thug. Or not trying, just scaring. But it seemed to come so naturally to him, like he was playing a very familiar role, reciting oft-spoken lines. She was glad she was too young, by a couple hundred years and change, to have known him in the old days.
The scaring part worked. The Russian wrote out an address for Angel. Angel warned him that he’d be back if the address wasn’t accurate, and the Russian swore— moisture beginning to fill his eyes under the pressure of Angel’s squeeze—that it was.
The address was over in Hawthorne, a house at the intersection of Mount Vernon and Fairway.
Chapter 13
Los Angeles
THEY SAT IN ANGEL’S BELVEDERE GTX CONVERTIBLE, top up, looking the house over. It looked pretty much like all the other houses on the street. Two stories, built in the postwar housing boom when L.A. had suddenly sprawled, filling every hill and valley as far as the eye could see and then some. This one was painted a pale yellow with brown trim. It was uphill from the street, its driveway sharply slanted. A wide expanse of lawn led from the sidewalk up to the house, and a paved walkway split the lawn down the middle. The paint job was faded, a few years old, and the lawn was tended, but not lovingly. Some of the houses around here were occupied by people who loved them, and some were just occupied. This was one of the latter.