Cordelia Chase contemplated the enemy.
It stared back, unblinking, a red-and-white floating eyeball of a target.
Someone had drawn a smiley face on it.
Her gaze slid over to Angel; he looked oblivious.
He did it, she decided.
"It would be more impressive if it were one of those hovering target droids from Star Wars," she said, eyeing the hapless fishing bobber dangling from a basement ceiling pipe beside the black, worn workout bag. "You know, dodging my own personal light saber. I could do a number on demons if I had a light saber. I wonder what color blade...?" Maybe a nice peach...
"So far the target's pretty safe, even without the dodging feature." Angel crossed his arms, looking mighty Irish this evening in a black cable-patterned sweater. Something substantial enough to fit in with warm-blooded humans, and yet not so bulky as to hamper the movement of a vampire who didn't get cold anyway.
No, not bulky at all. Just right.
If you like the centuries-old, vampire-with-a soul look, Cordelia told herself.
At the moment, she didn't. She didn't like it at all - no matter how it suited the gloom of the Hyperion Hotel basement. Plastic flowers - her plastic flowers - could hardly compete with the soldierly line-up of industrial mops and buckets under the stairs, the unpainted block walls, the randomly stacked furniture rejects under yellow incandescent lighting. She gestured abruptly at the fishing bobber. "I'll never have to defend myself against something like this."
"Maybe not," he said. "Or then again... who knows. But you need the precision practice either way."
She couldn't argue that. It only made her crankier, and she didn't like the feeling. She aimed a little of it at him in a scowl and tried to decide how to distract him from this particular training exercise.
Turned out he was distracted all on his own, lingering noticeably closer to the exit of the hotel basement. Or rather, closer to the exit, leading from this initial cavern of cement block and pipes and wire grates through the strange passages beneath the hotel and finally out into the sewers. He met her inquiring gaze and said, "The locals are getting restless."
"That's never good." Cordy checked the short, saucy ponytail gathered high at the back of her head and found it still secured to her precise satisfaction. "Especially when I'm pretty sure you mean local demons." She slanted a look at him.
Angel didn't answer, which didn't bother Cordelia at all. Sometimes he did that. She returned her attention to the inevitable. The happy-faced bobber. No, she decided. The leering bobber.
She'd warmed up. She'd done her stretching, along with every other thing that would put off the inevitable: facing her complete lack of...
She turned, planted a foot, chambered her other leg and let fly a perfect side kick, missing the bobber completely.
...precision. Control. Ability to hit the bad guys where she wanted to hit them.
"You're trying too hard," Angel said. He stalked around the basement, absently tapping the bobber with a quick one-two flick of a punch. He hit it, of course.
"Trying too hard at what?"
Cordy glanced up with surprise, finding the rest of the gang - Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, Charles Gunn, and Winifred Burkle - lingering near the top of the aged wooden stairs that ran down the basement wall and waiting for the answer to Wesley's question. Well, most of the gang. Angel's infant son Connor slept under the watchful gaze of his anagogic empathy demon nanny, Lorne.
Angel glanced up with no surprise at all.
No, of course not. Not with that vampire hearing. But he could have warned her.
"Never mind 'at what,'" she said. "Let's talk about the restless locals."
"Yeah," said Gunn. "I noticed that."
"Noticed what, exactly?" Fred asked. Having come out of hiding to prove herself as one of the gang, not to mention actually painting over the hysterical scribbles that passed for a journal all over her room's walls, she still didn't venture out quite enough to be on the forefront of demony action.
Cordelia told her, "Noticed that you look like the Brady Bunch lined up on the stairs. Which is reason enough to move, if you ask me."
Gunn must have thought so too; he made a hasty descent into the basement. But he didn't waste repartee; he looked at Angel with that slight lift to his jaw that meant business and said, "Demons on the move out there... They're running from something."
"We're all running from something," Cordelia heard herself mutter, but quickly hushed as Wesley looked in her direction. It would be hard to explain her mood when she didn't entirely understand it herself.
Just... too many changes. In her life. In her.
Angel said, "I'm going hunting. Anyone with me?"
"Yo," Gunn said, straightening his shoulders under his orange long-sleeved tee and indigo vest. "Let's see what's got these demons all antsied up."
"Later, perhaps," Wes said. "If you're still out. I'm in the middle of a tricky bit of research."
"Later," Cordelia said, and did not add I'm in the middle of a tricky bit of mood.
"Later," Fred said, tugging a little at one of her usual too-small tops, one with just a little lace around the capped sleeves and highly scooped neckline. The girl must do all her shopping in the junior department; Cordy thought it was about time for a woman-to-woman on that subject. But then Fred threw Cordelia a desperate kind of look and Cordy understood: she saw the fear.
Fred wasn't quite ready for the kind of hunting expedition Angel and Gunn had in mind.
And looking at Fred, Cordy also saw herself. Saw her very own conflicted mood and recognised it with a little shock.
Fear.
© 2003 Donna Durgin. Taken from Fearless, published in the UK by Pocket Books on DATE. Reproduced with kind permission of Pocket Books.
