UNSEEN: THE BURNING Read online

  Usually, poltergeists were mischievous, not harmful. But if this one dropped or lost control of that iron, the boy sitting beneath it could be badly injured. Angel timed his move, outpacing the iron by a little, and snatched it.

  As strong as he was, it still took everything he had to bring it under control.

  It felt like a regular, mundane steam iron, but there was something—some force—propelling it around the room, and the force didn’t want to let go of it.

  Angel struggled with it, though, and wrestled it down. Once the force, whatever it was, let go of the thing, he was able to return the iron to the ironing board, coiling its cord around the handle as he did.

  The boy and his mother had been silent through the whole ordeal.

  But their silence was over. She ran to Carlos, dropped to her knees and scooped him into her arms. He regarded Angel over his mother’s shoulder. He was trying hard not to cry, probably, Angel assumed, because there was a stranger present. But he was clearly terrified.

  “Are you okay, mi hijo?” she asked him. She repeated it over and over, like a mantra. “Are you okay? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine, Mama,” the boy assured her. “I’m fine.”

  Angel watched from his position next to the ironing board. As Isabel Flores released her son, Carlos glanced at a door that seemed to lead into a small bathroom. The door slammed shut with a bang.

  “Maybe you should tell us what’s been going on here,” Angel said.

  They were back upstairs in the bungalow’s compact kitchen/dining area. Isabel had given Angel a glass of water, brewed tea for Wesley, and poured the boy a Coke from a can. They sat around the dining table, a scarred veteran of thousands of meals, with their drinks on coasters. Isabel brewed a cup of strong Mexican coffee for herself, and puttered in the kitchen as they talked.

  “This began about the time Carlos’s father was arrested,” she explained.

  “Arrested for what?” Wesley asked.

  “For murdering somebody,” Carlos said. “But Papa didn’t do it. I know he didn’t.”

  “That’s right, Carlos.” She put a protective arm around her son. She looked at Angel. “He’s right, he’s not just saying that. Rojelio didn’t kill anybody. He wouldn’t. I don’t know why he was picked, but the police saw him when he was out taking a walk, and they arrested him.”

  “Yes,” Angel said. He hated to let her continue in her assumption that he worked for her husband’s attorney, but he had to find out what was going on.

  She shook her head, pinching the bridge of her nose as if she had a terrible headache. Then she lowered her hand to the table. Her fist was clenched.

  “Well, as you know, he’s still in jail, waiting for his arraignment. I’m sure Mr. Preston is a good attorney, but you see, in our community, we often have problems with the public defenders not taking the time . . .” She swallowed and cleared her throat. “Not that I think your boss is a bad lawyer, but you see—”

  “I understand,” Angel said softly. “I’ll see what I can do. But most of the lawyers I know, you wouldn’t want on your side.”

  “My dad will be set free after his trial,” Carlos insisted. “No one can prove he did something that he didn’t do.”

  “You just keep on thinking that,” Wesley said with a warm smile. “I’m sure your dad wants you to keep a sunny attitude and a—”

  Angel interrupted Wesley’s soliloquy. “So after your husband was taken, the poltergeist activity started? Things started moving by themselves?”

  She looked very hesitant. “I haven’t even told Father Alonzo, our priest. It sounds so crazy.”

  “It’s not,” Angel said firmly. “I’ve seen it before. It’s real.”

  “When you came to the door, I thought . . .” She looked down at her hands. “I thought one of the neighbors had seen. Called someone . . . authorities. We have no place else to go.”

  “We’ll try to help,” Angel promised her. “I’ve worked with this kind of thing before.”

  “We certainly have,” Wesley said, a little bit of emphasis on the “we.”

  “Are you a priest?” she asked, surveying Angel’s dark clothing.

  “No.”

  “Doors slamming. Books and toys flying around. Pictures coming off the walls . . .” she murmured, as if he really were a priest, and her kitchen was his confessional.

  Carlos nodded, his dark brown eyes enormous and frightened.

  His mother continued. “What you heard earlier today was a tray with Carlos’s dinner on it. I had just taken it down for him, and set it in front of the sofa, when it flew up and hurled itself into the wall.”

  Carlos started to cry silently. His mother stroked his hair and pressed on, as if determined to get it all out.

  “I picked up the pieces of his plate and glass, and the bits of his sandwich, and put them into the trash downstairs, then came up with the laundry to put away.”

  She looked drawn, exhausted.

  She hasn’t had anyone to confide in, Angel realized.

  “Which is where I came in,” he said.

  She exhaled long and slow. “Yes.”

  “How long has this been going on?” Angel asked, trying to make connections out of the two sets of events. “When was your husband arrested?”

  “Three weeks, now,” Isabel answered sadly. “It’s . . . I look at the calendar every morning and it seems like it’s been forever.”

  Carlos snaked his little hand under his mother’s, attempting to comfort her. Mother and son exchanged looks; the boy patted her wrist with his other hand. Angel was moved by the child’s attempts to reassure his mother, when he was obviously as frightened as she was.

  Angel thought back to the pictures he had seen in the living room. There had been a man in some of the family pictures, clean-cut and carefully groomed, with a neat mustache and thinning dark hair. His smile was wide and genuine, and in one picture, he was holding a child, definitely a younger Carlos, with obvious affection. He didn’t look like a murderer to Angel, and this didn’t look like a killer’s house.

  But then, if killers could be identified by the way they look or how they keep their houses, Angel knew, the streets would be a whole lot safer.

  “You said you could help Carlos,” Isabel reminded him. “How?”

  “It might be difficult to explain,” he answered.

  She regarded him.

  “Try.”

  Tad Barlowe thought of himself as a tough guy. He was a guard in the 77th Street Regional Police Headquarters jail, for one thing. That alone qualified him, as far as he was concerned. There were other ways one could be labeled tough, in his book. Running a class-five rapids solo, in a kayak. Skydiving. Climbing a peak higher than fourteen thousand feet. Going fifteen rounds with a prize fighter, or eight seconds on a bull. Those all counted.

  But most of those were once-in-a-lifetime things. To Tad Barlowe, getting up and strapping on a Sam Browne belt and going to work in the jail was every day, except Sunday and Monday.

  After work he went out drinking with some of the guys, or worked out at the gym, or both. Then he went home to his wife, Penny, who seemed always to be a little scared of what he did for a living. She was a timid sort. He sometimes found himself wondering what she saw in a guy like him. But she stuck around, and he guessed that was toughing it out, in her own way, and he respected that.

  At work, on the block, the most important thing was to have confidence in himself, and to never show fear. If the inmates smelled fear on a guard, they’d never let go of it. Tad had known more than one guard who let it be known that he was afraid, of a particular prisoner or of the whole situation. None of those men were still guards.

  But Tad never backed down, never watched his back. The inmates—he wasn’t allowed to call them convicts, since most of those incarcerated at the jail were awaiting trial, and he feared the day was coming when he’d be ordered to call them clients or customers—had learned that Tad was a guy they couldn’t bu
lly, couldn’t terrorize.

  It was a little after eight o’clock at night. The inmates were watching TV, or sharing private games of cards in their cells. A few literate ones were reading books checked out from the jail library, including several who planned to represent themselves and were studying law books.

  Tad was in the block office working on some paperwork. From here, through thick, scratched windows, he could look up and see the rows of cells, and the people in those cells could see him. So even as he did his paper shuffling, he remained alert, kept his back straight. He didn’t want to look like he was tired or weak.

  But when the binder raised up from the desk in front of him, he dropped his pen.

  When it shot up to the ceiling as if yanked there on invisible wires, he followed it with his gaze, craning his neck to look at it hovering there over his head.

  When it suddenly plummeted straight at his face, he threw his hands up and batted it away.

  Then the pen that he had dropped took flight, zipping around the office’s perimeter, once, twice, three times. Tad felt the color drain from his face. He knew he looked frightened as he watched it, wide-eyed. He knew he looked helpless. He stood there next to the desk, trying to track the pen. But when it shot toward him like a bullet fired from a gun, it was moving too fast.

  It impaled his left arm.

  He let out a yelp, clapped his hand over it, tugged it out and threw it to the floor.

  He was on the phone, screaming for backup and a medic, when the desk started to bounce.

  He no longer cared how he looked to the prisoners on the block. He threw open the office door and ran.

  Tough was tough, but some things were just too much to deal with.

  Chapter 4

  Sunnydale

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S STILL SO HOT,” WILLOW SAID, AS she and Buffy walked up to the entry of Salma’s condo complex. “Maybe somebody left the Hellmouth open.”

  Buffy grimaced. “We’d know it. There’d be a whole lot more lurking around besides hot air. Not that air lurks.” She looked at Willow. “Does air lurk?”

  “Maybe dark air,” Willow replied. She glanced around nervously.

  Buffy and Willow had gone by the condo to check on Salma. Dark had fallen by the time they got there. The name of the complex was Sea-Vue, although one couldn’t actually have a view of the sea from there. The ocean’s tangy scent made it this far, as did the steady roar of surf, but the view from the building was of complexes across the street which actually did have ocean views.

  Willow pushed the button next to Salma’s name. Buffy glanced up and saw a video camera recording their every move. She gave it a smile.

  “We’re on TV.”

  “Hi, Mom,” Willow said, waving.

  Salma’s voice came over the intercom. She sounded shaky and scared.

  “Wh-who is it?”

  “It’s Willow. Rosenberg.”

  “And Buffy,” Buffy added.

  “Right. Buffy and Willow.”

  There was a moment’s pause, and then the door let out a long loud buzz. Buffy pushed it open and they went in.

  Salma lived on the fourth floor.

  When they reached her door, it was closed. Buffy could tell that someone was looking through the peephole set into the door, though. It went dark, then light, then dark again. She tapped on the door, to be polite.

  “Salma?” she said, leaning toward the door.

  There was a clicking sound as the door was unlocked.

  When it opened, Salma stood there, wide-eyed.

  “What’s wrong?” Willow asked, extending her hand. “Salma?” She traded glances with Buffy, who shrugged and kept her attention fixed on Salma.

  Salma simply pulled them inside and shut the door firmly behind them, locking it and setting the dead bolt. Once they were safely inside, she turned and collapsed onto a couch. Every light in the place burned, and she had lit several candles as well. Melting wax scented the air.

  “Salma?” Willow said. She and Buffy sat down on chairs that faced the sofa.

  “I was outside,” Salma explained hesitantly. “Taking out some trash. It was just after dark. I felt like . . . like someone was watching me. You know how that is?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Buffy said, remembering Giles’s tape of the police report. “We know.”

  “It bothered me. I looked around, but saw nothing. I went to the Dumpster, behind the building. I threw my bag of trash into it. And then I turned to come back in.”

  She stopped. From the look on Salma’s face, Buffy thought she was reliving the moment that had scared her so.

  Willow leaned forward and stroked Salma’s hand. “It’s okay, Salma. We’re here now.”

  Salma attempted a smile, but it was not a very convincing one.

  “Thank you, Willow. Anyway, I turned, and I thought I saw something, in the shadows. Moving away from me, when I looked at it. But as I tried to see it, I realized it wasn’t in the shadows. It was the shadows.”

  “What do you mean?” Buffy asked.

  Salma took a deep breath. She was way wigged, and apparently talking about her experience was going to help.

  “The shadow. There are floodlights outside, mounted up on the walls. There isn’t one facing the Dumpster; it’s right around the corner. So there is a shadow of the building that falls in the parking lot back there, in a straight line.

  “Except that, as I watched it, it moved. It wasn’t a straight line. It was kind of humped, and huge, and then the shadow moved, and whatever I had seen was gone. There was only the straight shadow of the building’s corner.”

  “What did you do then?” Willow asked her.

  “I ran inside as fast as I could and locked all the doors.”

  “Have you seen anything else strange?” Buffy inquired.

  Salma smoothed back her hair. “Isn’t that enough for one night?”

  Willow chuckled grimly. “You should hang with us—”

  “I’ll go take a look,” Buffy quickly offered.

  Salma touched Buffy’s arm. “Be careful, Buffy. What if it is still there?”

  “I’ll cope.” Buffy rose, heading for the door. “Lock it behind me,” she said firmly. “Don’t let anyone in but me.”

  “Don’t worry,” Salma said, looking small and very, very scared. “There’s no chance of that.”

  The back parking lot was as Salma had described it. The side of the building was brightly lit with floodlights, mounted high on the pink stucco walls. But at the back of the building was a nook with a Dumpster, behind a large gate to keep it out of sight, and the only light there was what spilled over from the side. She saw the building’s shadow Salma had described, knife-edge straight.

  Buffy stood there for a few minutes, watching and listening. Not knowing exactly for what. Shadows don’t make noise, do they?

  But the things that cast them do.

  So the Slayer kept still, and listened.

  At first, there were only the usual night sounds. The rasp of crickets. The shush of passing cars on the road outside the complex. The distant boom of the surf. A TV, somewhere in the building. A closing door.

  And, in those few moments when everything went silent at once, the quiet of a summer night.

  Then there was something else, very faint. At first it didn’t even register, but gradually it dawned on Buffy that although it was so silent as to be almost nonexistent, she could hear it simply because it was so . . . so wrong.

  That is not a normal nighttime sound, she thought. That would be one like . . .

  Well, I don’t know. But this one’s not right.

  It sounded like the rustle of silk on soft flesh.

  The sound a shadow makes?

  Buffy was already at Slayer Def-Con Five; now she turbo-charged her senses, staring hard into the darkness.

  There it is again.

  She kept still, which had always been a hard thing for her to accomplish. In her book, slayage meant action. Research and
killing time was for other people. Killing stuff . . . that was the Slayer’s job.

  All things come to those who wait: something moved, not creeping exactly, just kind of gliding, maybe forward, maybe backward; it was impossible to really tell.

  “Who are you?” she asked. “What do you want?”

  There was no reply. Where she had seen movement—just a shift of black on black, nothing she could really put her finger on—now there was nothing. She could see into the shadows, through them, to the wall of Salma’s building. There was nothing there except the stucco and a couple of straggly foxtails.

  And yet—as Salma had described—she felt she was being watched. The fine hairs on the back of her neck tingled.

  “Come on out and face me,” Buffy challenged.

  Still no reply.

  She called up her senses to see beyond, sense beyond. Standing as still as she could, she felt sorry for Salma, who had been frightened out of her wits by something she couldn’t see, touch, smell or run from—when one’s enemy was invisible, one was never certain if one had left it behind or it had followed one home.

  For another couple of minutes, she stood poised for battle, watching, staring. Goose bumps traveled up her arms and her face prickled. Her body was reacting to a threat she could not otherwise detect. She was not loving this at all.

  Frustrated and very much weirded out, she finally gave up. It took a lot to turn her back and hoof it toward Salma’s building.

  Nothing tried to stop her.

  The shadows were still.

  Los Angeles

  An odd hush hung over the main branch of the Los Angeles Public Library that night. It was almost, but not quite, as silent as a tomb.

  A quiet library was nothing unusual, Cordelia knew. But this one felt different—not like people weren’t speaking, moving, turning pages, shuffling—but like sound was being swallowed up, somehow, before it could travel any distance at all.

  She found herself feeling uneasy, looking up from the terminal every few minutes as if expecting something to happen.

  Angel had called her at home and asked her to come here, to L.A.’s central branch, to go through the newspaper records of the days surrounding Rojelio Flores’s arrest. She was looking for anything strange, anything that might provide some hint as to what had really happened the day Flores was framed.