---

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part III

“You’re a good person,” Ari — Ariel — assured me earnestly.

I smiled to her. “Don’t know if I’d go that far,” I said to her. “I mean, I try not to be a bad guy, but …” Shrug, disarming grin.

“No,” she said, shaking her head in insistent dismissal. “You keep working the whole ‘charming rogue’ deal, but your heart is where it needs to be. I can tell.”

This had started shortly after Katie grudgingly separated from us, and Ariel, Merl and I had embarked on the first step to raiding Cholk’s holdings. It was a little funny, a little sad, and gradually becoming a little annoying. Was she trying to convince me, or herself? It bothered me mainly because I couldn’t figure where she was coming from. I’m good with women, really good, better at it than some magic-users are at their own specialties, and all my skills were telling me this wasn’t infatuation or puppy love or even hero worship. It was as if the girl had some overriding need to believe the best of me, or maybe to persuade me to believe it.

(And she was definitely a girl. Slayers are impressive, even frightening creatures, but much of that comes from seeing such power and ferocity unleashed from such a slight, non-fearsome frame. I’d run across a few Slayers over the years, and avoided them when I could; this was my first opportunity to observe one close-up and at length. Katie, I think, had looked quite a bit younger than she really was. Ariel, who had seemed roughly contemporary to her, might actually be younger than she appeared. Fifteen? fourteen? I hadn’t dealt with that age cohort since I was fifteen myself, and it was threatening to throw me off my stride.)

“Lucky for us, it doesn’t matter,” I said in reply to her last comment. “What we’re at now, I don’t have to be a nice person as long as I know what I’m doing.” I looked to Merl. “Ready to do your deal, big guy?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, voice and expression sour. “ ’Cept, you got your own reasons for doing this, including buildin’ up credit with the hack-and-kill crowd. What’s my payoff?”

I answered that with a wide shrug, palms out and upward. “C’mon, now, when have I ever let you down? You know I’ll settle up, if only because I’ll probably need something else from you later.” I shot Ariel a smile, but the follow-up was to both of them. “Free enterprise is what makes the world go ’round.”

Ariel looked away from me. “I never said you were nice,” she murmured, so softly that maybe I genuinely wasn’t supposed to hear it.

Merl grumbled to himself, almost as inaudibly, and inspected the bars in front of us with his habitual sneer. Cholk’s high-rise had lobby security which would never approve us, but service exits were another matter. This one was closed off by a steel cage, and the gate release was on the other side of the inner door. Basic measures, but sufficient for most.

We weren’t ‘most’. Merl, a professional thief, sneak, snitch, and all-around pain in the ass. A Slayer, the killing power of a dozen ninjas packed into a hundred-some pounds of barely-postpubescent female. Even I, technically the ‘normal’ one of the bunch, do have a small collection of rather unconventional skills.

The bars were set four and a half, five inches apart. Merl shed the hoodie he had used to conceal his outré appearance while we penetrated into the outer edges of uptown, then squeezed his arm and shoulder into the gap between bars, wriggling and pushing till his head and ribcage were pressed up against the unyielding metal. He stayed there for a bit, shifting and grunting now and then, and gradually he was further and further in until, with a last hissing tug, he was completely through.

He can’t completely disarticulate his skeleton, but there’s a lot of give in there, which doubtless had a great deal to do with his choice of profession. I understand the skull sutures and the pelvic joins are the hardest for him to sufficiently relax … but I don’t actually care, as long as he can do what I need done.

The door itself was also locked, but Merl squatted in front of it and addressed the lockplate with muttered complaints and some small tools which he might have custom-designed or might have picked up from the same place where ordinary human burglars acquired theirs; again, not caring. While he worked, I glanced over at Ariel and observed, “I can’t help noticing you changed your attitude awfully quick.” She looked back at me, startled, and I explained, “When it was just me and you and Katie, you were all tough-girl scowly suspicion. The moment she was gone, you started treating me like some kind of tortured antihero who just needs to be understood. It was a very sudden transition.”

Ariel waved that off, almost angrily. “Katie thinks she has to watch out for me,” she said. “Thinks I’m naïve and gullible. Well, I wasn’t even before I got the Slayer call, and for darn sure not now.” She sighed. “So I put on an act for her, and even if she doesn’t buy it she at least knows I’m paying attention. Right now, I don’t have any need to pretend.”

“And it’s a relief to not have you accusing me of planning a double-cross every few minutes,” I said amiably. “All the same, don’t be getting your hopes up. I’ll play straight with you, but I don’t need redemption and I don’t want it.” I kept my tone mild, but my eyes stayed on hers. “I picked out this life for myself, for reasons of my own. I’m good at it and getting better, and I do it because I like it. Bottom line, I chose this.”

Her mouth had been getting tighter while I spoke, but she visibly shook it off now. “You don’t make a choice once,” she told me. “You do it every day. So every day you might want to check and be sure this is still what you want.” She looked away again. “Or who you want to be.”

I was spared from having to find an answer for that, because Merl announced, “Got it!” He looked back, eyeing us sardonically. “Oh — sorry if I interrupted the mating dance.”

Ariel flushed at the unexpected dig, and I hid my own reaction. Yes, I was definitely going to have to perform some attitude adjustment on Merl. After the job was done, though … and after I had paid him, because business was still business.

Once he had the door open, Merl freed the gate and Ariel and I went inside. He put the hoodie back on; similarly, Ariel had removed the most noticeable portions of her demon-warrior-woman getup before starting out with us, and had even passed over the broadsword to Katie in return for less obtrusive weapons, which she now carried in a trendy backpack. (She had also shed the misleading shoes, without which she turned out to be only about five-feet-five.) I watched for cameras as we started up the stairwell, didn’t see any, but still we acted like people engaged in animated conversation rather than perpetrating any kind of stealth penetration. Invisibility is overrated; much easier, and just about as effective, is if people see you and still don’t care because you look familiar enough to be disregarded.

Cholk’s digs were on the eighth floor; we could have hoofed it the whole way, but that might actually have attracted notice, so we emerged on the third floor and took the elevator the remaining distance. Ariel had pulled a paperback from her backpack (the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I noted with some amusement), and harangued us with gestures and body language, pointing dramatically to selected passages, while I nodded indulgently and Merl, head down in the hoodie, made Yeah, yeah hand-motions. All of us continuing to perform for the camera we were certain would be in the elevator car, though I still hadn’t spotted it. “Totally different way of seeing reality,” Ariel was declaiming. “The cosmology, wow, it’s just so cosmic —” She paused, glanced at me. “I just can’t get into it,” she admitted to me. “Everybody says how funny it is, but my idea of funny must be something else.” Then her voice went up again in fangirl gushing: “And omigod the twists, there’s a twist every time you turn around —”

Mercifully, we hit our destination about that time, and exited the car, and Ariel cut off her exposition and returned the book to the backpack. “Are you sure of the location?” she asked me as we headed down the hallway.

“Yep, scouted it enough times. Not worth the risk, not then, but I like to have contingency plans worked up in case things change.” We reached the main door of the suite at the end. “This one,” I said. “Still unoccupied, renovations scheduled through the middle of next month.”

“Right.” Ariel tried the door, but as expected it was locked. (Still, you always want to try; I mean, you never know, right?) She looked at Merl. “How long for something like this?” she asked.

Merl shook his head. “I can work my way through most non-electronic stuff,” he said, “but I’m no wizard. Answer is ‘Too long’, not exposed out here like this.”

Ariel nodded, sighed, took hold of the doorknob with both hands and put one booted foot up against the wall next to the door, and pulled with steadily increasing pressure. There was a groan of stressed metal as the lock facing began to give, then a sharp snap as the bolt itself broke. “Don’t like destroying private property,” she observed regretfully, lowering the bracing foot to stand normally. “I’ll have to see if we can send something anonymous to cover repair costs.” She gave me a glance. “Operational necessity or not, I’m still responsible.”

Fine, I had noted the moral lesson. We slid inside, and she pushed the door closed and set a small table against it to hold it in place, since that door was not going to function normally again till somebody replaced a few key parts. We looked around to get our bearings; our only illumination was outside city lights seeping in through the windows, but I was seeing less equipment and mess than expected; maybe ‘the middle of next month’ hadn’t been written in stone. “Balcony,” I said, gesturing toward the wall-to-wall windows at the end. “Next to that, there’s a ledge running around the corner to the balcony on Cholk’s side: ten, twelve, maybe fourteen feet. No fun for anybody with acrophobia, but manageable.”

Merl shook his head and made a small sound that was part laugh and part huff of derision. “Yeah, well, I’ll wait here,” he said. “I’m not about to go out wall-walkin’.”

I laughed at that. “You’re afraid of a little second-story work?”

“More’n second-story,” he answered, glaring. “And no, not scared, it just friggin’ hurts.”

“Never mind,” Ariel interrupted us. “I have rope, I’ll go first and set it into place and then you can both come around using that.”

A safety line would certainly be welcome; I’ve done chancier things than a little building-side walkabout, but why take risks you don’t need to? We went out onto the balcony, Ariel pulled out the promised rope on a flat plastic spindle (yellow nylon, not the best choice for grip or tensile strength, but should be adequate), secured one end to the railing, then strolled out down the ledge and around the corner. Forty seconds later she was back at the corner, holding the line but not really relying on it. “I made sure to leave enough slack to give you room,” she said. “Stay on the inside, hold on, walk normally, shouldn’t be any problems.”

I smiled at Merl. “See? All safe now.”

“Screw the botha ya,” Merl snarled, but he went on ahead of me and I followed, and we were on Cholk’s balcony in no time.

The lights were on inside, which normally would have been unwelcome but in this case was actually essential. “I hope he doesn’t have much company,” Ariel said with a little frown.

“Cholk’s a kinda private guy,” I assured her. “He doesn’t do parties, just female guests. One at a time, every other Friday, different woman every time.” I smiled. “Very regular. Almost a ritual, you might say.”

Ariel gave me a sharp look. “Ritual … do you mean sacrifices?”

Merl gave a little sneering laugh, but I just held the smile that was already there. “I suppose you could call it a sacrifice, but the woman involved is the one making it.” Ariel regarded me quizzically, and I explained, “Think less ‘dark altar’ and more ‘casting couch’.”

That took her back a bit, but only a bit. “Seriously?”

“Cholk’s solidly integrated with the human community,” I told her. “He has operations in a lot of areas, and he’s built up a fair amount of influence. He’s in a position to offer favors, and he does … if he gets the right favor in return.”

Slayer or not, she was still really young, and she couldn’t keep the revulsion from showing. “That’s disgusting,” she said.

“That’s a voluntary exchange of services,” I corrected her. “You may not like it, but then you’re not the one doing it.” I stepped up to the glass of the sliding doors, peered through the gauzy curtains behind them. The light inside, and dark on our side, made an effective screen. “Nope, don’t see any guests, and Cholk’s settled in front of the TV. Either he skipped this week’s appointment — which I doubt, because like I said he’s a creature of habit — or he’s still waiting for her to arrive. So that gives us a window of opportunity, which we need to use while it lasts.”

“Tell me again why we need this, this whatever,” Ariel prompted me.

I’d picked up enough by now to know she was sharp and attentive, so she hadn’t forgotten and she wasn’t having trouble understanding. She just wanted to see if I kept telling the same story. Fine, I could indulge her. “Lots of demons have magic,” I said to her, “but not many use magic. Cholk’s like most in that area, he’d rather work with things than spells, that’s why we don’t have to worry about any mystical alarms here. — And yes, I’ve checked, several times while I was scouting things out. His offices, though, he’s got wards in the places we’ll need to get to if we want to see his files, and he keeps a token that’ll let him pass without breaking the wards, and also alerts him if anybody else goes in.” I nodded toward the lit suite beyond the door. “That’ll be in there somewhere: something small and convenient, something he can keep on his person, probably set aside in a handy spot till he goes back in tomorrow, like putting your keys in a little bowl by the door when you get home.” I chuckled. “Not very likely he’ll still be wearing it when his ‘entertainment’ shows up, so this is our chance to snag a free pass into his private offices. And the idea is to do it without him knowing about it, so —” I turned to Merl. “That means you’re on deck.”

His lips curled … no, not lips, that scaly face doesn’t have any, but the effect was the same. “This is what you brought me here for? Nuh-uh, too chancy for my blood.”

I sighed. “Merl. I told you I’d pay, and I will. The more you do for me, the more you get. The less you do, on the other hand …” I shrugged, letting it hang.

He shook his head. “I’ve had to bug outta the last two towns where I set up, just ’cause things got too hot. I don’t like livin’ from a suitcase. Traveling, sure, that’s fine, long as I got some place to come home to.” He gestured toward the lit interior. “I fall crosswise’a Cholk, I gotta pull up stakes again, and that’s if I survive. So no.”

My usual good humor isn’t an act, I’m basically an easy-going guy, and I enjoy the life I’m building for myself. This was beginning to wear on my basic nature, though. Keeping control, I said patiently, “This is a sneak, buddy. That’s you. Nobody does it better, you know that. You don’t carry your share, though, you’re dead weight, which pretty much just means a little gratuity for getting us into the building. You want more than that, you have to work with me here.”

That one struck home: at the warning of reduced payola, Merl dithered so hard he was almost vibrating, greed warring with his natural hypercaution. Then a crafty look stole over his face (it’s unsettling how features so unhuman can reproduce human expressions), and said, “There’s only one way I go in. I’ll work my specialty — and yeah, I got the odds with me, I’m that good — but if Cholk happens to spot me and I let out a yell, she has to run in and kill him so I don’t get hit with any backsplash.”

It wasn’t a feather-duster Ariel had been swinging back at Del’s, so I knew she had no problem killing in combat, but she might consider this to be a different matter. I eyed her with some uncertainty, and saw with relief that she was weighing the issue rather than recoiling from it. “No,” she decided. “If he’s integrated, if he isn’t doing anything that makes him a target, I don’t want to be messing up the balances around here.” She glanced inside. “We’ve learned that the hard way: too much risk it turns into local war, different groups and contenders pushing in to try and fill the vacuum. So no, I won’t make any promise like that.”

Merl shook his head again in hard negation. “Then you can forget about me stickin’ my neck out.”

I was about ready to break said neck, but Ariel just shrugged. “No problem, I’ll go in myself.” We both must have looked doubtful (thunderstruck, in my case), because she surveyed us both and said, “What? I might not be as good at it as him —” She hooked a thumb at Merl. “— but I’ll bet I can be sneaky enough. And if your guy does happen to see me, so what? I’ll just run out too fast for him to stop me, because I don’t have to worry about being recognized.”

“That’s …” I fumbled for words, this new turn had taken me off-guard. “Look, I’m not being patronizing, I know I’m a lot more likely to need you protecting me than the other way around. But we know the ground here, we know the type of thing we’ll be looking for. How will you find it? how will you recognize it? how can you be sure you get the right little mystical token and not something else that looks about right but just isn’t the one we need?”

She smiled at that, slipping off the backpack and setting it aside, divesting herself of weapons except for a knife with a seven-inch double-edged blade. “Don’t worry about that,” she said cheerfully. “My mom says I’m really intuitive. Tells me I get it from her side of the family.” And, before we could voice (or think of) any other objections, she slid open the glass door just enough to ease through, moving it noiselessly back once she had passed, and shifted out of our view … and, hopefully, Cholk’s as well, though his attention still seemed to be on the television.

Merl gave me a slit-pupiled glance. “Brother, do you know how to pick ’em.”

I hadn’t exactly picked this, I was just trying to work with the opportunity that had presented itself. All the same, I knew what he meant. “For the record,” I observed, “that’s twice in a row she’s stepped in when you opted out. You might not want to let that turn into a streak.”

He didn’t answer, and we settled in to wait. And wait. When Merl does a sneak, you can wait hours (though I wouldn’t have expected that for a place this small), because he’ll move one muscle at a time, totally silent and creeping at roughly snail speed, and I swear he must have some kind of internal Zen thing that diverts attention away from him because he can pass through conditions where you’d think it was impossible for him to not be noticed. When he isn’t the one on the line, though, his patience is sharply more limited. He hugged his arms around himself, stomped his feet (but still lightly enough that the noise wouldn’t carry past the glass door), and muttered, “Hope your chickie gets lucky. I’m freezin’ my cloaca off up here.”

He was exaggerating, of course, carping for the pure sake of being Merl. There was a brisk breeze at this elevation, but hardly anything to complain about. Still, complaining was Merl’s principal pleasure in life. “Stress kills, my friend. You need to focus on calming thoughts. Like money.”

“Dreamin’ about money’s good,” he agreed. “Holding it’s better.”

We were just passing time, really. I wasn’t truly worried about Ariel (Cholk would’ve needed half a dozen top-notch bodyguards in there — which he didn’t have — to even begin to pose a threat to her), and Merl simply didn’t care about anybody besides himself. My current imperatives have given me a lot of practice in allowing however much time is necessary to accomplish whatever needs done, and I’ve learned to let the time just slide through me, but we were in fact dealing with a deadline: the amount of time it would take us to reach, and then penetrate, our target’s main offices once we were done here and had the necessary gate key. And I hoped Ariel was right about how intuitive she was. She’d seemed confident enough, but confidence can also come from ignorance, and — reminding myself again — she was very, very young …

A shadow appeared behind the curtain; I stepped back involuntarily, and Merl actually jumped. Then the glass door moved open and Ariel slithered through, again closing it immediately behind her. “Sorry,” she said, “that took longer than I expected, he had a small collection of things that gave off very weird vibes. Distracting. I think this one is what we want, though.” She held up a small ridged object, roughly the size and shape of the end of my thumb, dangling from a loop of silver wire big enough for someone Cholk’s size to pass it over his head and wear it around his neck.

I’d have to test it to be sure (and the only definitive test would be to try it against Cholk’s security), but it matched what I knew of such things, and her assurance was so total as to be almost impossible to doubt. I was starting to get some weird vibes myself: she’d been inside for barely twelve minutes. Even for a Slayer, this was not natural.

I shook it away. “All right, then,” I said. “I’d say that puts us a bit ahead of schedule, which is good. So, back over and out and down.” I glanced at where the yellow rope was secured to the balcony rail. “We’ll want to take that with us.”

Ariel nodded. “Oh, sure. You two go ahead, then I’ll untie this end and come after you.” Which is what we did.

This had all gone very smoothly … which, yes, worried me a bit. Not in a superstitious way, more a recognition that this wasn’t the way things normally proceeded, and the resulting suspicion that something was going on that I might not care for. I didn’t see the likelihood of any plot being run against me, though; if anything, my private eavesdropping over Ariel and Katie made it seem she had a disproportionate (and misplaced) concern for my welfare. Still, there was the sense of something going on, which still left me a bit edgy, though I was careful to hide it.

At least, that was the intention. We took the elevator down to the main lobby, since we were less concerned about being seen leaving — going out meant we’d already been in, which meant we must have been approved for entry, right? — and were almost to the ground floor when Ariel looked over to me and said, “You don’t have to worry about me. I’m on your side … more, maybe, than you are.”

Again with this. I don’t like being read, or maybe just hit with a lucky guess, but I still maintained control. “Look, you seem to think I’m Han Solo, all crusty and pretend-cynical but I’ll swoop back in and save the day when the chips are down.” I shook my head. “Well, I am Solo, according to my lights, but I always thought him going back after he had his reward was a sucker move that Lucas threw in as a crowd-pleaser. Guys like him, guys like me, that’s not how we roll.” I was surprised at how much I wanted to convince her. Fixing my eyes on hers, but keeping my voice even and unbelligerent, I said, “I’m following out my own plan. That doesn’t put me against you, but it isn’t any redemption arc, either. Redemption doesn’t fit me, because I’m already moving in the direction I want to go.”

“You think you are,” she answered. “Maybe you aren’t. Or maybe you are, but it isn’t what you should be wanting.”

Okay, I had tried, and even that much was enough unlike me to be out of character. (Han having doubts? Nope, not happening.) The elevator ding!ed and the doors opened, and we went out with Ariel and me between Merl and the line of sight of the tie-and-blazered guard at the reception desk, all three of us bearing toward the set of exit doors that would take us farthest from him and still maintaining the appearance of preoccupied conversation. (Ariel again talking about Hitchhiker, me tossing in periodic Yeah, sure, whatever, and Merl grumbling, “You better spring for a cab, pal, ’cause I know how far we gotta go on this next leg.”)

We were there, we were all but outside, and then Ariel halted stock-still where she was. I would have asked why, but I had seen it, too: a young woman had come in the rightmost doors (we were at the leftmost), and she was definitely Cholk’s type: under the age of twenty-five, attractive without being stunning, just the right impression of farm-girl innocence trying to make it in the big city … she wore an inexpensive but well-cut tailored suit of the type that ambitious would-be female executives adopt as the proper uniform for climbing the ladder, but the heels were just a bit too high for your normal business meeting, and she clutched a stylish little purse instead of the usual stylish trim briefcase.

I had taken in the details in the first moment, but was still assessing the picture when Ariel whispered, “Oh, God.” I studied her sharply; she turned panic-stricken eyes on me, grabbed my sleeve beseechingly. “Stop her. Please, you have to stop her.” She shook herself as if unseen things were crawling on her. “She’s given up, there’s nothing there, she’s dead inside. Stop her, please, before —” Then she cut off as if she could no longer make her tongue work.

This wasn’t an act, I knew that much, but that didn’t mean I had the least idea what was going on. I started to ask, “What are you —?”, but she silently mouthed, PLEASE!, with such force that I was actually moving before I had made the decision.

Crap, why was I doing this? But I was doing it, and I had reached the young woman (well, younger than me, if not by much) before she was a quarter of the way across the capacious lobby. “Hey,” I said. “I think you’re making a mistake here.”

She looked at me with what was either numbness or incomprehensible calm, and said levelly, “I’m not.”

Just that straight. Strange man accosts you in the lobby, tells you you’re making a mistake, and no reaction at all. She wasn’t defensive, defiant, bewildered, determined … nothing there. Just stating a fact, as unemotionally as saying the sun was up. And there was more than that: women are my specialty, and they always respond to me, positively or negatively or conflicted or dismissive or flustered, but never nothing. She wasn’t resisting it, she wasn’t even ignoring it: she genuinely didn’t know it was there. I was out of my depth in the first seconds … but Ariel had sent me for a reason, and I still needed Ariel on my side, so I made one more attempt. “We all make choices. You’re making one right now, and I know how that is. Make enough of them, though, and the choices start making you.” I knew I was paraphrasing Ariel’s spiel to me, but I had a feeling that was what she had wanted me to do. Putting sincerity and conviction in my voice (but I was already feeling those not-register in the woman in front of me), I said, “If this isn’t what you want to be made into, you might be looking at your last chance to be anything else.”

“I already am what I am,” she said back to me. “I need something. Someone has what I need. This is how I get what I need.” Again no heat, no insistence, no emotion at all. “You’re about to be in the way of me getting what I need. You shouldn’t do that.”

I held my hands up in surrender. “Okay, I did my best. Sorry I bothered you.” She waited for me to move out of her way, and I did, but a last-second impulse had me asking, “Just … what’s your name?”

In the final uncanny moment of this entire uncanny exchange, I could still feel nothing at all from her, and yet could see her consider refusing me an answer and then decide it didn’t matter. “Natalie,” she said, and then she was past me and continuing to the reception desk with even, unhurried strides.

Back at the doors, Ariel was still pale but seemed to have regained whatever control had briefly deserted her. “I’m sorry,” I said as I came to her. “I tried, but I’m afraid it was a lost cause before I started. She was … unshakeable.”

“I know.” Ariel was still staring at the woman’s back. “I … it was so … I don’t even know what to think.” She studied me searchingly. “But you tried. Thank you.”

I shrugged it away. “For whatever that was worth. Which, apparently, was nothing.”

“It matters,” she insisted. “Even if you can’t see it, it matters.” She looked away from me, and this time when she said it, it was more like a prayer: “You’re a good person.”

Poor kid. I had done my best to set her straight, but she’d just have to discover the disappointment for herself.
 

|    Next Part     |    Previous Part    |    Chapter Index     |