Title: Evil a Lindsey story in the Angelverse
Author: Brenda Antrim
Email: bren@bantrim.net
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimer: no copyright intended.
Spoilers: For Dead End. I love this show.

Lindsey tore the sign off and ripped it into bits. Tossing them in the truck bed, he went in for a breakfast of waffles and bacon, washed down by about a quart of coffee. Thirty minutes and a shower later, he felt human enough to get back on the road. Over the Arizona line in Kingman, it was late enough for the post offices to be open, and he stopped at the nearest one he found. Stuffing the torn pieces of the sign into a padded envelope, he added an itemized bill for the tickets he'd received, and sent the whole shebang off to Angel.

Postage due.

The drive was a good one, straight east across the country, the 40 to the 44 heading for Tulsa. He didn't think he'd stay there, but it was a place to start. The skies were clear, the wildflowers were in full spring bloom, and he felt more at peace when he was moving than he'd felt in the last ten years. He stopped only for food, gas, and to fall into bed.

Sleeping didn't take a lot of time out of his trip. His dreams kept cutting his rest short.

They followed the same pattern. His hand would turn on him, gouging out his eyes, ripping out his throat. He'd wake, screaming, muffling his screams with his fist, then yank his hand away from his mouth so fast he'd nearly pull his shoulder out of the socket. He'd get up, go to the bathroom, splash water on his face, stare in the mirror for a little while at the ghosts haunting his eyes, then go back to bed and try again.

The next round was more prophetic, if equally explicit. He'd be free, no one following him, no shadow of danger hovering over him. Then he'd be dead. Suddenly. Violently. An ax to the back of the head. A garrote around his throat. A knife gutting him. Inhuman hands ripping his body to pieces.

Death and freedom. He couldn't tell the difference between the two.

He'd wake again, unable to scream and gasping for breath, his heart pounding as if it was trying to escape from his chest. He'd be shaking, his skin covered in cold sweat, his eyes staring at nothing, trying to see the threat.

By that point, he'd give up and go drink some more coffee. Drive some more. Stay in the daylight where the dreams couldn't ambush him.

Just outside Amarillo in the pre-dawn hours of his third day on the road, the dreams caught up to him. They took the form of Keltor demons from Wolfram and Hart, and they planned to take away his bid for freedom by dealing him death.

As Angel had so rightly said, things didn't always go the way people expected.

The Benz came up to the side of him on the empty road, slamming into him with a force that could only be expected from titanium-armored, bullet-proof, demonically-enhanced bodywork. His truck didn't stand a chance. It bounced and swerved, going over the side and down the embankment, Lindsey fighting like hell to control the uncontrollable. A ton of pickup doing nose-stands was a scary thing to live through. But he did.

Wrenching the belt off, he dove out the side window, since the door was crumpled by impact with the hill they'd just rolled down. A Keltor caught him less than a yard from the wreckage of his truck, hands the size of dinner plates catching hold of his shoulders and pulling him completely off the ground. Lindsey hung there, feet dangling, and glared into the narrowed yellow eyes staring at him.

"Lilah says thanks," it grunted, then drew back its head to gore him.

She was so predictable.

"J'heelawah makagti!" Lindsey howled. The Keltor froze, its horn sticking in the suddenly gelid air between itself and its target. "Ma'la pliu rhakha yek'cha!"

The Keltor goggled at him as its horn began to melt. With a howl of its own, it dropped Lindsey and tried its damnedest to bat at the flames shooting out of its horn. Since it couldn't move its arms, it was a pathetic attempt at best. Lindsey left it to the magickal mire he'd cast and ran like a bat out of hell for the duffel bag he could see lying under a nearby scrubby bush. He reached for it as a second Keltor pelted over to him.

Ducking under the claws swiping at his head, Lindsey muttered a curse, non-magickal but calming nonetheless, and dove into the brush, snagging his duffel bag as he rolled past. He heard the Keltor huffing and slashing above him, and he hurriedly ripped open the bag and drew out a short-handled scythe and a bottle of pewter gray powder. Muttering incantations under his breath, he launched himself back into battle just as the first Keltor burst into flames with a hapless squeal.

An uppercut with the scythe gutted the second Keltor as it jumped at him. He didn't take the time to kick the corpse off the weapon, simply swung it around and knocked the third Keltor off its feet with the bulk of the second. Biting the seal off the bottle, he threw the contents in a wide spray, coating a fourth and fifth as they came scrambling down the hill toward him.

Their screams of agony as their limbs began instantly to rot distracted the third one long enough for Lindsey to finally shake the corpse off his scythe and chop the third's head off with it. Taking a deep breath, trying not to gag on the smell of demon ichor, he hunched his shoulders and waited for the last one to land on him.

They always hunted in packs of six. It was a holy number for them. Lindsey grimaced. Keltor and rednecks. Wasn't a hell of a lot of difference between them. Big, mean and stupid. A rustle directly behind him and a shadow above were all the warning he got as the final Keltor flew at him. He waited until the last possible moment before shooting the scythe straight up.

Directly into, and through, the Keltor's belly.

The resulting rush of gore covered Lindsey from his hair to the heels of his boots. He scrunched his eyes shut and tried not to breathe too deeply. Keltor innards tasted like shit.

Scraping the worst of the gore off, Lindsey slogged back along the hill from the scene of the carnage to take a look at his truck, scooping his duffel bag up on the way. What he saw disheartened him. The bed had collapsed inward. The frame was bent completely out of true. The roof was crushed. Every bit of glass on it was shattered.

The radio was still playing.

If that wasn't enough, his guitar case was lying up against the base of a tree. Broken to bits. The lock had sprung and the guitar itself was in three shattered pieces. Crushed. Useless.

Something in Lindsey snapped.

He'd given them the chance to back off. They hadn't taken it. They knew what he had on them and they'd come anyway. He'd given Lilah her life back, and she'd panicked and tried to kill him in spite of it. They really should have left it alone. Let him go. He wouldn't have bothered them if they hadn't taken it back to him, and they'd known it. They hadn't heeded his warning. He should have been expecting it. Deep down, he had. They'd wanted him permanently out of the way and they'd failed to put him there.

Their mistake.

Turning away from the kindling that used to be his guitar, closing his duffel bag and slinging it in the back seat of the Benz, he stalked over to the remains of the Keltor demons and rummaged through pockets until he found the keys. Back at the Benz, right there beside the road, he stripped off, using the liter bottles of spring water he found in the trunk to rinse off as much of the blood and ichor as he could. Tossing his ruined clothes down atop the demon corpses, he held his hands steadily over the field of battle, palms down.

Closing his eyes, he called Power to him and channeled it over the area. Flesh bubbled and sank into the ground, material disintegrated, and when it was over the only sign remaining of the fight that had taken place was his poor destroyed truck. Placing his hands against the earth, he leached the last of the Power out from his body back to the ground it came from, and walked a little shakily back to the Benz.

Pulling clean clothes out of his bag, he dressed and got behind the wheel. Pointing its nose back the way he'd come, Lindsey headed for a showdown he'd wanted to avoid. Since he couldn't, he was going to make damned sure he won.

He didn't want to consider the alternatives. Death wasn't so bad. Life as one of Wolfram and Hart's imprisoned enemies didn't bear thinking on.

The sun had long set when he arrived back in LA. He drove straight through, heading directly for Angel Investigations. Reaching over the seat into the duffel bag, he took out the metal suitcase and extracted several bundles of money from it. Then he shoved it under the seat, set the car alarm and headed for the office. Wesley started up in surprise when he came stomping in the door. Gunn took a defensive position flanking Wesley.

"Lookee here, it's the singin' lawyer," he cracked. Lindsey ignored him.

Wesley sniffed the air delicately, then pinned Lindsey with a stare. "Keltor ichor and the lingering residue of dark Magick. What on earth have you been up to?"

Lindsey ignored him, too. Angel and Cordelia came from a room to the right of the counter, and while Cordelia was goggling at him, Angel was beaming at him. "I thought I told you not to come back?"

"Stop grinnin' like a damned fool and get your butt over here." He could have heard a pin drop in the ensuing silence. "I got a job for you. All of you." He swept the gathering with a laser glare.

"Doin' what?" Gunn asked for all of them.

"A jihad," Lindsey told him, staring at Angel, who'd lost the grin and was now staring equally as intently at Lindsey. He didn't look convinced.

"There is no way we would ever consider working for you," Cordelia informed him, her nose in the air. "You're evil!"

Lindsey threw five hundred thousand dollars in untraceable bills on the counter. Cordelia, Gunn and Wesley stared at it. Angel kept staring at Lindsey.

"And rich," Gunn said solemnly.

"Very," Wesley told the money, his mouth hanging slightly agape.

"Well, maybe you're not that evil." Cordelia inched toward the money. "And you are pretty hopeless. And we are supposed to help the hopeless." Her voice trailed off as she ran a finger over a bundle of fifty dollar bills.

"I take it you have a plan?" Angel asked him.

Lindsey held his gaze steadily. "Make Wolfram and Hart ground zero of the apocalypse."

That jolted Gunn and Wesley out of their cash-induced trance. Cordelia kept stroking it, uncaring of the blueprint for disaster being sketched out over her head.

"We up for this?" Gunn asked uneasily. Lindsey and Angel nodded in the affirmative.

"It's suicide," Wesley pronounced. Before Lindsey could answer him, Cordelia shrieked and wheeled away from the counter, hands leaving off caressing the money in order to clutch her head.

"Jesus," Gunn muttered as Angel ran to catch her and Wesley looked on helplessly. "Not another one!"

Lindsey looked over at him, cocking an inquisitive brow. "Have they been coming more often?" He pitched his voice to carry over Cordelia's piteous whimpering. Gunn shrugged one shoulder, but Wesley answered him.

"Yes," he admitted. "They've been coming more often, and the effects have been lasting longer."

Looking down at Cordelia, burying her aching head against Angel's chest, Lindsey narrowed his eyes. Holding his hands out, framing Cordelia between his fingers like a director framing a shot, he began to chant softly. Wesley started, and Gunn stepped forward, only to stop as Wesley caught his arm and shook his head 'no.' A pale gold mist rose around Cordelia, gradually taking the shape of tendrils stabbing into her.

"A magickal attack?" Wesley added a sub-chant to Lindsey's, and the mist intensified. Now the tendrils looked like tiny snakes, hissing and writhing, attacking Cordelia from every direction.

Lindsey stopped chanting, and Wesley followed suite. "I recognize the signature." Everyone except Cordelia stared over at him. She was still trying to crawl into Angel's chest. "Lilah Morgan." Angel's face twitched, almost vamping at the name. Lindsey nodded. "You don't have a choice in this one, folks. Wolfram and Hart have declared war on your seer. You wanna join me now?"

Angel growled. Wesley took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. Cordelia continued to whimper softly. Gunn answered for all of them.

"We in."

Events escalated. The newly-formed coalition of Wolfram and Hart attackers gave the Firm no time to prepare and no warning before they struck.

Nathan Reed was the first to die. They tracked him to a compound northwest of Twenytnine Palms, deep in the Mojave where there was nothing but sand, cactus, and an occasional Marine Corps bombing run gone awry. They struck in the dead of night to make the most of Angel's skills, sheltered behind the steel walls of Gunn's modified humvee. Cordelia threw flash grenades when Gunn told her to, Angel took the wheel, and Gunn manned the stake-thrower. Wesley and Lindsey created a feedback loop of misdirection and confusion, rendering Reed's magickal defenses moot, as Gunn and Angel took out the demon and human guards.

Once inside the grounds, the protective enchantment broken, the wizards joined the physical fray. Wesley planted gelignite at the doors of the inner sanctum, behind which Reed frantically summoned help from the senior partners. Lindsey drew an AK-47 from the back of the humvee and took down a wave of Uuhnit guard demons boiling up from fissures forming in the earth. Before Reed could complete his summons, the doors blew.

The explosion flattened everyone, attackers and defenders both. Wesley dragged himself to his feet and blushed. Gunn grinned at him.

"You gonna bang, bang big," he complimented, and Wesley threw him an abashed grin in return. They turned as one and started in on the demons who were beginning to stagger to their feet.

Lindsey left them to their flirtation and followed Angel into the shell of the bunker where Reed now gathered the last of his demon defenders. As Angel vamped out and began rending body parts from assorted vicious guards, Lindsey pulled his .38 from its holster at the small of his back and sighted carefully. He'd loaded it with special, ensorcelled, silver-plated, hollow-nosed bullets for precisely this purpose. As he sent two rounds into the center of Nathan Reed's head, he was glad he'd taken the precautions he had.

Normal humans didn't bleed neon orange. They didn't grow new heads, either. The third shot took the new head off at the neck. He ducked a body Angel diverted his way, glancing down at it long enough to ensure it was too dead to be a threat, and aimed again. The fourth and fifth shots destroyed Reed's chest.

Lindsey stepped around a small knot of Rancker demons trying to chew Angel's arms off, ignoring the slightly plaintive, "A hand here?" coming from the center of the group, to check on Reed. The corpse was still shifting, trying to regenerate. Lindsey put his final four rounds into the neck, chest and two to the gut. It finally gave a defeated sound and stopped moving.

Satisfied that he'd finally killed whatever the hell Nathan Reed had been, Lindsey turned, grabbed up a discarded machete, and waded in to help Angel. He whacked at the Ranckers like weeds and they finally started to fall away. Eventually, with him working from the outside and Angel working from the inside, they got all the little bastards put down.

Angel looked like hell. He was paler than normal, so his skin almost glowed, and he had small seeping wounds all over him. Unidentifiable fluids, three different shades of blood and assorted cast-off demon parts covered his clothes, what hadn't been torn to pieces in the onslaught. Lindsey couldn't help himself.

He dropped the machete, held one hand out for Angel to pull himself up with and grabbed the front of Angel's shirt with the other. When he got within striking range, still off-balance, Lindsey kissed him.

Other than the demon goop on his mouth, he tasted pretty good.

To his vague surprise, Angel didn't clobber him when Lindsey finally had to stop to draw breath. He simply straightened, plucked Lindsey's hand off his shirt, and gave him a measuring look.

"Feel better?" he asked whimsically.

Lindsey's grin in return felt feral. "Not yet, but soon." Then he walked past Angel, patted him once on the ass, and went to join the rest of the group at the humvee.

Hell of a better handful than he'd gotten when he'd goosed Lilah, he had to admit. Angel looked at him again, but this time it was with a lopsided grin and a hint of fire. Lindsey snorted to himself. Yeah. It wasn't only Lindsey, and Angel knew damned good and well what they'd been dancing around for the last year. Kiss or kill. Wasn't much of a dividing line between the two when it came to him and Angel.

Not that they had a chance to explore the ramifications of that particular self-discovery in the next several hours. Once begun, the war could not be delayed. They had to hit fast, hard, and with finality. Their only advantage was speed, and they made full use of it.

On the way back from taking out Reed, with four hours left to go before daylight, they swung through Palm Springs. The shiny new Convention Center was a haven for Wolfram and Hart subcontractors of all types, and at two in the morning there were no innocents around to be caught in the crossfire. A small block of C4 was delivered via crossbow into the center of the main hall, detonated by remote a second before the arrow hit. The ensuing explosion leveled the Center.

In the rubble were the dead bodies of over two dozen high-level Firm subcontractors and half a dozen executives, including the heads of internal security, communications and interdimensional pathways. If the remainder of Wolfram and Hart were going to call on the senior partners now, they were going to need more than a chant and a ring to raise them.

All the humans except Lindsey flaked out in the back of the humvee, catching what rest they could before the assault on headquarters began. He sat up in the cab, watching Angel drive. Angel was humming again. Off-key. Lindsey consciously unclenched his jaw.

"You seem happy," he said, trying to stop Angel from humming any more. Angel flashed him a broad grin. It looked a little strange on his face, but Lindsey liked it.

"What's not to be happy about? We're raining destruction down on the evil forces of the earth all in the cause of good, and saving your ass while we're at it. What's not to like?"

Lindsey smirked at him. "So you're okay with saving my ass instead of busting it now? Or is this a temporary truce, until the Firm's gone and you're no longer on retainer?"

Angel flashed him another look, darker than the grin but no less enjoyable. "Oh, I don't know, Lindsey. I'd say we have the beginning of a beautiful friendship here." This time he couldn't quite smother his snort. Angel chuckled. "What, you don't want to be my friend?"

"Gotta admit, I got the urge to fuck you blind, but I still can't say I like you much."

Lindsey's unvarnished honesty startled a laugh out of Angel. "I don't know, Lindsey. I think we have a lot in common."

"Like what?" Offhand, he couldn't think of a damned thing.

"Want a list?" Angel was stalling. Lindsey grinned.

"Sure."

"We've got the same sense of humor," Angel cracked. Then his tone changed. "We’re neither as evil as we think we are, nor as good as we could be." His voice was completely serious, and his eyes looking over at Lindsey were still as the grave. Lindsey swallowed.

"I guess that's a start." He took a breath, trying to clear a head gone suddenly foggy. Something about that look threw him for a loop. "Later. When we've got time."

"Yeah?" Angel's eyes were back on the road.

Lindsey settled into his seat, watching Angel from the corner of his eye. "I wanna hear that list."

The assault on Wolfram and Hart's corporate headquarters began less than two hours later. Gunn blocked the accelerator on the humvee and ran it directly into the front windows as he and Wesley came up through the parking garage in the back, taking out demon guards as they went. Angel and Lindsey used the faked identification card to go up the executive elevator along the side. It was a short but eventful ride. Vampires could move damned fast when they wanted to, and Angel had Lindsey thoroughly felt-up between the fifth and eleventh floors. He barely had time to catch his breath and glare at the deceptively innocent-looking vampire by the time the elevator car arrived at the thirtieth floor.

Once the doors opened, they met guards armed with stakes, who'd responded to the shaman's vampire-alert, with wide-dispersal pepper spray. While the humans were digging at their eyes, Lindsey ducked under as Angel came over, killing all three demons in human guise, who weren't affected by the pepper spray, with a single slice of his battle-ax.

"Nice aim," Lindsey told him absently, brushing demon glop off his arm and reaching out toward the magickal defense grid guarding the inner conference room with his right hand. Since being blessed by the Pockla, it was more attuned to enchantment than his left. Angel grunted acknowledgment of his compliment and turned to meet the charge of four more Gojya demons as Lindsey closed his eyes and concentrated on spell-casting.

It was a tough one, and he felt his concentration falter under the strain, only to be joined by the familiar sound of Wesley chanting firmly in counterpoint. Lindsey grinned briefly as their reinforcements arrived, then hissed the final few syllables of the spell. Angel dispatched the last of the guards and turned to the door, ramming it side by side with Gunn. The door flew open, imploding under the force of Lindsey's spell, Angel's shoulder and Gunn's foot. Cordelia brought up the rear, whining fitfully about the disgusting mess but not letting that slow her down.

Wesley cried out "Thicken!" and the three figures in the center of the room slowed to a standstill, caught in the amber the air had become. Lindsey called counter, "Flow!" and the attackers scattered into the room. Wesley and Gunn fought shoulder to shoulder, downing the last of the defenders' guards, as Lindsey and Angel headed for the nerve center of Wolfram and Hart. Ronnie, Leon and Charlie were gathered over a wavering section of expensive Persian carpet, struggling to force the last of the summoning words through throats frozen by Wesley's magick as they fought to create a stable portal between the room and the plane where the senior partners dwelt.

They failed. Angel's sword took Leon's head from his shoulders at the same time that Lindsey stuck his ax through Ronnie's mid-section, cleaving him neatly in two. Angel then butted Charlie in the face with the sharpened hilt of his sword, but the man didn't go down. His human visage tore and peeled away, showing the ridged lime-colored skull of a Melwocg demon. Lindsey grimaced.

"Cripes," he grumbled as he swung his ax around and started chopping away at Charlie, "if I'd've known what I was playing with I wouldn't've ruffled your hair. I'd've whacked your head off then!" He didn't get very far with the ax, but he distracted Charlie long enough for Angel to stick his hand in one of the holes he'd made and grab the base of Charlie's backbone. He put one foot on Charlie's ass and, with a heaving wrench, Angel ripped the Melwocg's spine out, effectively turning him inside out. "Just like skinnin' a rabbit," Lindsey commented, watching Charlie's head disappear into his body cavity.

"Whatever works," Angel growled. He snapped the spine in two pieces and shook the bloody muck off his hands. "Yuck."

Lindsey started to make a smart-ass remark back when he felt the building shake.

"Quake?" Cordelia asked hopefully. She didn't look like she believed it.

"We should be so lucky," Lindsey answered her, running for the door. Angel, Gunn, Cordelia and Wesley followed close on his heels. The epicenter for the rumbling was a familiar office -- it used to be his own, and it now had Lilah Morgan's name on the door. He groused internally that it hadn't taken long for her to take over, then he stopped dead. "Sonofabitch," he whispered.

Angel stopped beside him, looking at him with concern. "What is it?"

"She got through. Duck!" There was no time for any further warning.

The volley of flames nearly incinerated them when it took out the door separating the office from the hall. Lindsey squinted up through the glare and saw a half-terrified, half-defiant Lilah in the center of the office. She was glowing, floating a few inches above the carpet as the senior partners used her body as a channel for the power they couldn't bring to bear directly against Lindsey and his allies.

"She's not going to last long, with that sort of energy running through her." Wesley had to shout to be heard over the wind howling through the halls.

"She ain't gonna last long anyhow," Gunn told him, then locked glances with Angel. They nodded, and rolled in opposite directions under the wave of fire cascading over them. It split to try to cover all of them, and Lilah cried out in pain at the effort. Lindsey had seen it coming, and reached over to lock his hand around Cordelia's wrist.

"Close your eyes and try to relax!" he yelled at her. She looked at him like he'd lost his mind, but she did as he'd told her. He was dimly aware of Wesley placing both hands on his shoulders, and he was thankful for the added support, but all his awareness was concentrated on opening and following the connection from Cordelia back to the Powers That Be. They needed more firepower than they had and there was only one nexus of energy strong enough to stop the senior partners. Lindsey planned to make full use of every weapon he could find.

The sudden ringing of chimes all around them froze every combatant in place. For an instant all was silence save for the tiny bells, then a blast of freezing cobalt air swirled in a miniature tornado with Lindsey, Cordelia and Wesley at the eye of the storm. It swept out from them to meet the rush of fire, stopping it in place but not quite extinguishing it. Lindsey felt as though someone had ripped the top of his skull open and drenched his brain with dry ice.

As quickly as it began, it was over. The fire disappeared, and with it, the icy wind. The strange paralysis that had gripped them was gone, and they all surged to their feet. There were more beings in the room now, minion fighters the senior partners had managed to create before having their power conduit frozen closed by the Powers. Two more fully formed figures directed their efforts. It appeared that a couple of the senior partners had managed to make the transition despite the Powers' help.




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