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Oct. 23rd, 2006 03:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elgrey Spike’s Very Bad Day, Part Four
Knox could feel everything starting to unravel. He didn’t want to ask any questions about where Fred was, in case people reported later that he had been looking for her. It had been a mistake to leave that message for her on Angel’s phone. He’d have to sneak in there later and erase it. There couldn’t be any suggestion that he had lured her to the laboratory to be infected with Illyria. And usually she would have been here – hours ago, and would have been too fascinated by the sarcophagus to need any prompting from him to examine it.
He suspected that slippery bastard, Wyndam-Pryce, was at the heart of the problem. He had probably lured her away for coffee and more talk about his amazing prowess as a sorcerer. Magicians were always sneaky. And all the time Illyria, the most noble, powerful and merciless was still as trapped as if it had been in the Deeper Well.
Knox knew he was doing the right thing. Fred was much too good for this world. She was so beautiful that she would be the perfect conduit for a god-king, the only woman he had ever met who was worthy of being possessed by Illyria. Of course, the next few hours would be unpleasant for her, with her internal organs melting agonizingly, and it would probably be a good idea to keep to a safe distance when she started coughing up blood, but once the process was finished, there would be the most perfect being to ever stride the earth in preparation for crushing it beneath its army of doom.
It was taking all the self-control he had not to caress the tomb in which Illyria was held captive and whisper to it of his absolute adoration. Gazing transfixed at the casket in which all that power and glory was contained, Knox took an involuntary pace forward. In the millisecond before disaster struck, Knox wondered who had left that severed suitcase with the spatula sticking out of it on the floor. Then it was impossible for him to think anything at all, on account of his body and head being in two completely different parts of the room.
***
The basement was dark and cold and creepy. It had a few lights that glowed dimly around the edges, but most of it was shadowy and scary. Only in the centre was there any bright light and that came from fires that were burning in big black cauldrons. Those fires weren’t exactly comforting, as they sent long strands of shadow across the floor every time one of the chanting people walked next to them. A big black circle had been drawn on the floor of the basement inside the circle of fiery cauldrons. It had little squiggly points coming out of it at regular intervals. Wesley thought it looked a bit like a drawing of the comet in Comet in Moominland. He had to make a conscious effort to remember that the Archduke Sebassis was probably not in the habit of communing with hattifatteners, and it was most likely a symbol of Evil.
“What is it?” Gunn whispered in his ear.
“I don’t know,” Wesley whispered back. “But I think it’s Bad.”
“Well, duh,” Gunn retorted. “These people are our clients. All our clients are Bad.”
They were keeping to the shadows at the edge of the basement, but were looking for a way to creep closer using the big concrete pillars to hide behind. They had counted nine people chanting so far – some of them not really ‘people’ as such. All of them wore masks that hid their faces but a few had horns or were obviously demons, but others looked as if they were mostly human. It would probably have been hard to tell that they were evil to the core just from looking at them on a day when they weren’t wearing masks and black robes. But when they all joined hands and began to turn a slow circle around the symbol on the ground, chanting louder as they did so, they sounded demonic enough:
“Of the world's woe, now convene. All is bound by the circle and its thorns. Invisible, inviolate, we, the seeds of the storm, at the center of the world's woe, now convene.”
“That doesn’t sound like a happy prayer for world peace to me.” Gunn tightened his grip on his axe.
They crept closer, managing to keep a pillar between themselves and the circling people, but Wesley was still not sure what they could do against so many who were so much bigger than them. “I don’t think we can fight them,” he whispered.
“We have to do something.” Gunn looked as scared as Wesley felt, but they were both still inching forward.
Wesley thought hard. “We could put ourselves in a protective circle and then summon a shrivelling flame, but we have to do it before the babies get here or they’ll get burned up too.”
“Can you remember how to do that?” Gunn risked another glance out from behind the pillar. “Cuz I don’t remember lots of things I think I knew this morning.”
“I’m not sure.” Wesley looked across to where they had left the book keeping the doors of the lift open. “Maybe, if I looked it up? I remember the protective circle anyway.” Laboriously, he drew a rather wobbly circle on the cement floor with his piece of chalk, then painstakingly drew out the symbol for Herne the hunter and protector, gabbling quickly: “Hail, great horned Herne, we are grateful for your gifts and praise your strength and courage. Place your eye over us and our loved ones who stand within the circle of your protection.” Proud of having remembered all the words without having to look them up, Wesley carefully backed Gunn into the circle. “You have to stay right here.”
Gunn grabbed Wesley’s arm. “But you can’t say any of the words in that book unless you’re in here, too, remember, Wesley?”
Wesley wasn’t completely sure he would have remembered that if Gunn hadn’t reminded him, but he said, “I know” and hoped it sounded as if he did.
When he looked over at the elevator. It seemed a long way away, and the book looked very heavy. His eyes felt very tired and scratchy, and what he really wanted to do the most right now was lie down and go to sleep. But thoughts of the babies in need of rescuing, gave him the push he needed. Stumbling a little with tiredness, he began to trudge back to where the book was.
He was halfway across the big cold dark expanse of the basement when he dropped the chalk. It was surprising how much noise it made hitting the floor and then bouncing away. Forgetting to stay out of sight, he scurried after it, picking it up in relief and turning to see if Gunn had seen him drop it. That was when he found that all of the scary masked people were looking his way.
“There it is!” a voice that sounded like Sebassis said in triumph. “Get it quickly.”
Wesley felt frozen to the spot in terror, but Gunn shouted urgently: “Run, Wes! Run for the elevator!” With his piece of chalk clutched in his hand, Wesley ran as fast as he could for the comforting square of light that was the lift that could take him away from this place, but his legs had never felt so short and the floor had never seemed so big….
***
Lindsey had discovered why no one in Wolfram & Hart ever used the stairs – because when an inter-dimensional wormhole tore through them, they became modern art. With the stairwell twisted and contorted by the heat of demonic flame and buckled from the impact of occult energy, he had had to climb up what seemed like the equivalent of four storeys, to find the flight that went down. “Who designed these damned stairs anyway – M. C. Escher?”
A gaping hole between one flight and the next, didn’t do much to improve his mood, but he had never lacked courage and didn’t intend to be thwarted now. The twisted charred edge of one flight hung out over a flaming nothingness, while, twenty feet away and ten feet down, the stairs continued out of the nothingness and onto solid concrete foundations. In the gap between was the burning abyss. Lindsey took a deep breath, thought about all that he had learned from those monks in Nepal and jumped out across the fiery void to land on the concrete stairs. Just for a second, he wobbled uncomfortably and then he was upright and moving downwards, one foot after another, one step closer to freedom.
***
Spike put his head around the door and grimaced. Presumably that laboratory had looked a bit more spick and span before that fiery wormhole had torn through the middle of it, singeing all the walls and leaving a gaping hole in the floor. The hole in Sirk’s office really had been just the beginning of it. “Oh well,” he said brightly. “Evil law firm, bound to be the occasional upset – what you gonna do?”
Sirk glowered at him horribly. He kept checking calculations against some little handheld doohickey and then getting more and more pissy. “According to these readings, Doctor Sparrow has been carried into the hell dimension of Akat’ran, darkest of the dark worlds!”
“I thought Quor’toth was the darkest of the dark worlds?”
“There is some dispute amongst scholars about which hell dimension qualifies for the title ‘darkest of the dark worlds’ but I have always sided with those who cite Akat’ran. And the point is that Doctor Sparrow has been sucked into it and can never now be retrieved, even supposing that he survived the process of transmutation, which is in itself most unlikely.”
“Shame.” Spike tried to look suitably solemn, although he was distracted by the papers on the late and unlamented Sparrow’s desk. Craning his neck, he could just make out a Customs’ docket with Gunn’s name on it on top of another pile of papers. Next to the papers, on what remained of Sparrow’s desk, was a mystical paper-shredder, the kind that Fred had invented and was always trying to persuade Angel to use to get rid of any paper trail to do with him accidentally murdering clients. It sucked incriminating evidence through the twenty-sixth dimension and fed it straight into a black hole. Wesley kept pointing out that a good wormery would do the job just as well, and be better for the environment, although Spike suspected he was just too much of a stick-in-the-mud to get behind the abuse of string theory necessary to use black holes as garbage disposal units. Stealthily, Spike grabbed all of the papers and stuffed them into his coat.
“Well, not much we can do for the poor old bugger now, is there? So, let’s get on with transforming those kids back into adults. There’s no telling what the little scamps might get up to if we don’t….”
Another furious glower from Sirk. “There seems no question now that the archives will also have been damaged. We need to go there at once and check on the extent of the problem.”
Sirk marched out of the room, straight-backed with indignation at such a thing having happened to the offices of Wolfram & Hart. Spike glanced at his watch and hoped that Angel was having a bit more luck preventing the child sacrifices than he was in trying to get anyone at all to do anything he wanted today.
***
With his heart hammering in his chest, Wesley flung himself down by the book and frantically searched for the right page. When he risked a panicked look up, he saw that Gunn had left the protective circle to chop at the shins of the people chasing Wesley. A howl of fury from something red-skinned and horned showed that Gunn still knew how to wield an axe. Gunn swung the axe again and one of the pursuers fell down with a yelp. But the shrivening fire wouldn’t work now Gunn was out of the circle, as it couldn’t distinguish between friend and foe. Wesley needed to open a portal and then keep himself and Gunn away from it. As he scrambled to find the right page, a cry of pain from Gunn made him look up in horror. He saw that Sebassis had pulled the axe from Gunn’s hands and tossed it aside, and was now picking him up by the scruff of the neck.
“Put him down!” Wesley drew his knife and made to run at Sebassis, but a hand closed on his hair and yanked him right off his feet. Looking back, he saw that he must have pulled the book back too far and it was no longer blocking the doors of the lift. As he stared, the doors closed with a polite swish and the lights lit up above it to show that it was returning to Angel’s office.
“Give me that, you venomous little reptile!” Senator Bruckner snarled, trying to pull the dagger from his hand. “It’ll be a pleasure to sacrifice you and your nasty little friend.”
“He’s not nasty!” Wesley tried to remember an invocation. He couldn’t remember anything for summoning lifts back, but at the last minute recalled the one they had used to get to Pylea. He had no idea if they were standing on a hot spot or not, but anything was worth a try: “Krv Drpglr pwlz chkwrt…” He felt something begin to swirl and his heart leapt. He and Gunn could get back from Pylea – they had some allies there and even knew where the hotspots were – but it would probably take the others years to work it out, even if they evaded being captured by Groo’s guards. More confident now he continued: “Strplmt dwghzn prqlrzn…”
“No, you don’t!” Bruckner slapped her hand across his mouth.
Wesley bit her hard just as Gunn landed a perfectly placed kick that made Sebassis double up in pain and let him go.
“Foul warlock spawn!” Sebassis roared in disbelief. “How dare you defile me with your pint-sized putrescence!”
Bruckner yelped and yanked her hand away, dropping him. Wesley was running as he hit the ground, weaving between the legs and ducking the grabbing hands of people and demons that tried to get a hold of him. He jabbed the knife Fred had given him into any soft tissue he could find, to keep the pursuers back, a gurgling cry making him look around in surprise to find that, while running with the knife in his hand, he had accidentally sliced through the tubing that ran into the red-skinned demon next to Sebassis. On another day he might have felt bad about it, as the creature keeled over and began to gasp for breath, its IV stand clattering down next to it, but today he was glad when Gunn stomped hard on its bag of fluids to burst it. The creature roared in rage and Sebassis began to threaten them with being flayed alive before they were ritually dismembered.
Wesley felt his heart quail as he saw so many angry people and demons charging after them, all with murder in their eyes, especially as his legs were so tired and his chest felt as if it was about to burst with the effort of all this running. He was glad when Gunn grabbed his hand and pulled him after him. “We’ve got to get to the other elevator,” Gunn gasped. “We get out of here and then blow up the basement.”
“What about the babies?” Wesley protested.
Gunn gave him a look that suggested Wesley was not being very clever today. “We’re the babies. You, me, and Fred. That’s why we got turned into children – so they could sacrifice us.”
Wesley felt affronted. “We’re not babies, we’re four.”
“Kali doesn’t care as long as we still have our first teeth.” Gunn pulled Wesley behind a pillar and stuck out a leg to trip the leader of the demons pursuing them. It went down hard with a nasty squelching sound. The other elevator was much closer now. He and Gunn exchanged another look and then began to sprint for it.
That was when the doors opened and Fred skipped out of it, humming the little ballerina song. Gunn and Wesley slammed on the brakes so hard that the demons chasing them ran straight past. All that effort and all they had done was lure the bad people closer to Fred.
Seeing a red-skinned horned demon charging towards her, Fred screamed a penetrating shriek of fear.
“Got you, you miserable little worms of iniquity!”
Gunn was hauled up by a panting Bruckner a second before Wesley was snatched up by a furious Archduke Sebassis. Other angry snarling people were limping after them, some with blood running from their shins from where Gunn’s axe had connected.
“Open a portal, Fred!” Wesley shouted. “Open a portal to anywhere bad!”
And then a hand was clamped over his mouth and he could do nothing at all as two evil demons advanced on a Fred who looked very tiny indeed, and whose only weapon was another scream of terror.
***
“This is unbelievable!”
Spike decided to stand back and wait out Sirk’s hissy fit. He had a lot of practise at dealing with those from his time with Angelus. It was true that, right now, the archive room did look a bit of a mess. There was the gaping hole in the ceiling from when what looked like the world’s most bloated lightning bolt had paid a visit, and that equally gaping hole in the floor leading into a swirling red chasm of wailing flame; and then there was all the nothingness in between where the lines of filing cabinets no longer existed.
“All of the ‘M’s!” Sirk seemed to feel it needed repeating. “All of them – gone!”
“Yes, terrible. Shocking, really.” Spike tried to sound as if he cared. He wouldn’t normally have bothered, but he really did need Sirk to transform the kiddiwinks back into grown-ups.
Sirk seemed to get that he was not entirely sincere, whirling on him angrily. “These contracts were irreplaceable. They have not just been atomised – the atoms have been sucked into a dimension where the Senior Partners have no legal jurisdiction. You realize what this means?”
Spike wondered if Sirk would notice if he just nodded off for a while and came back to him when he had finished yelling. His eyelids felt like lead. He tried to look as if he were listening. “Something…bad?”
Sirk slammed his hand onto the nearest filing cabinet. “All of those contracts have now been rendered null and void. Do you know how many souls that is?”
“Shame.” Spike thought about stretching out on one of those remaining filing cabinets and snatching a few minutes of sleep.
“The Senior Partners put a lot of thought into those perpetuity contracts – they expect and deserve a good return on their investment. I don’t even want to think about how many workers have been lost to the firm by this act of…vandalism. Wolfram & Hart didn’t become what it is today by letting employees go as soon as a little thing like death overtakes them!”
Spike thought about what he knew about perpetuity contracts and shuddered. Horrible things, they were, took your soul and made you work forever, whether you were alive or dead, usually boarding you in hell for the interim. And now, thanks to the little slip up with the extra-dimensional portal, any past or present employee of Wolfram & Hart whose surname ended in Ma to Mz had just been released from their terms of employment, their sundered souls returned to them if they had already been taken, or their debt wiped out if they had been promised to the Senior Partners, and final peace finally granted in the case of the dead. Perhaps not many lawyers who worked for Wolfram & Hart ever found their way to heaven, but at least now they would not automatically be consigned to hell.
“On the bright side,” he pointed out. “I wouldn’t think you’d get a lot of people whose names begin with ‘Mz’.”
Scowling furiously, Sirk made a pass over the burning hole and the floor once again closed over it. The room still looked like a wreck though. “The Senior Partners will make the vampire pay for this.”
Spike felt a twinge of unease. “You mean they’ll make Angel pay, right? Not just any old vampire who happened to be working here and has a soul?”
Sirk strode angrily to the doorway. “There will be retribution.”
“Absolutely.” Spike nodded as if he cared. “Quite right, too. Shocking lack of consideration for personal property. Now – to make yourself feel better – how about restoring some nice little children to adult size…?”
***
As he reached the last flight of stairs, Lindsey heard the sound of children screaming. He was running before he could stop himself. And yet he was so damned close to being free. All those years of striving, of being owed a better life than the one he had, of not caring what Wolfram & Hart did to make money as long as he was riding that money train along with them, finally being taken seriously, having power, having a handmade suit and a car with handtooled leather seats, and the same Achilles heel had always been there, waiting to expose him to this very barb. Too many years of having little brothers and sisters who needed him to take care of them; too many memories of the two he hadn’t saved. He’d tried to root out every weakness, but it was still there, waiting to trip him, because all the things he’d seen and done, and been a part of, and not given a single damn about, and he still couldn’t walk away from that sound.
He kicked open the door and ran into the basement, taking it all in at a glance, the burning cauldrons, the sacrificial daggers, the masked acolytes, and that sign he had been chasing: the Circle of the Black Thorn. Oh wonderful, the very secret society he had gambled everything to join, and here they were, all nine of them, and here was his chance to impress them.
Two of the circle were holding two biting, kicking, yelling little boys, who were clearly intended to be sacrificed on the handy portable altar that Senator Bruckner was setting up. Another of the order was expiring painfully on the ground, apparently due to his severed fluid tubes. Naturally, none of the rest of the Circle were helping him – there was an in, right there, and Lindsey could see it so clearly – help the dying red-skinned demon and get a job as his assistant, from there work his way up to becoming a member himself. You didn’t get to be a member of the Circle without having a lot of wealth and power, so that kind of gratitude was worth having, but still he didn’t move. The little girl who had been screaming had two demons advancing on her purposefully. A few minutes and it was all going to be over, the children’s throats slit and the annual sacrifice to Kali completed. All Lindsey had to do was nothing and that would happen. He wanted it to happen, right? He wanted the Circle to keep its power so that when he joined them, he would share in it too. Except….
The little girl didn’t know he was there, and neither did anyone else, her attention fixed on the demons advancing on her. She looked absolutely terrified. As Lindsey sneaked another few feet along the wall, hugging the shadows, trying not to be touched by the solid square of light that had fallen out of the elevator along with her, she snatched a breath and said rapidly: “Klyv mat chyvma, klvma chyt!”
At once a burning, swirling hole opened up in the floor. As she jumped back into the elevator, she looked right at Lindsey and shouted: “Run!”
That was when the expiring red-skinned demon on the ground used the last of his energy to throw a burning energy blast into the elevator, blowing open the closing doors, and tearing through one of the cables. As the little girl screamed, the elevator tilted on its side, while half-severed cables made the twanging sounds of imminent snapping – giving her the choice of staying in an elevator about to plunge into the deeper depths of Wolfram & Hart at crushing speed, or jumping back out where that portal was already beginning to suck like a Hoover.
Lindsey found that he was running, and as he ran he was unbuckling his belt. There were metal rungs in the wall, a stairway that led up in case of fire, flooding or ritual malfunction. They looked bolted in pretty well. “Kid!” he shouted.
She turned and looked at him and for a millisecond he thought he knew her, something about the long wavy hair and the frilly little dress, and then he realized that one of Angel’s adult associates looked like that, the science babe, not a child, so perhaps this was her daughter.
He lashed the belt through the metal rungs and held onto it, leaning out as far as he could as the portal sucked the two pursuing demons into it. Their screams became fainter as they were pulled down into the fiery depths. “Grab my hand!”
He thought she would need more persuasion, but she looked at the portal, looked at him, appeared to be doing some kind of math in her head, and then jumped straight for him. He caught her and pulled her in against him. She weighed almost nothing, and they swung back, hitting the rungs hard – he automatically cushioned her from the impact – which rattled against him painfully.
“We have to save Wesley and Gunn!” she said tearfully.
“Can you close the portal?” he shouted over the roar of the screaming vortext and the clanking of cauldrons being sucked across the concrete car park.
“I’m not sure.”
With a gurgling death-scream of rage, the red-skinned demon was dragged across the floor and into the portal, his fluid lines bouncing in after him. Three down, six to go. Lindsey hooked his arm around the rungs, trying to shield the child from the swirling heat of the portal. “Try.”
The little girl gulped and then solemnly intoned: “Tych amvlk, amvyhc tam vylk!”
The portal closed over, fire rippling back into cement, but the basement began to rumble ominously. Lindsey knew that sound. “Hell, automatic incantation defenses.” If they weren’t out of here in a few minutes they were going to be knee deep in something nasty. The basement looked huge, the side of a football pitch, but it couldn’t be helped. The only way out of here was now that other elevator on the far side of the basement, because there was no way kids this small could make that twenty feet leap up the stairs. “I’ll get your little friends, but you need to get the elevator for us,” he whispered. “Can you do that?”
She gave a nod, eyes bright with intelligence, despite not coming up to his waist. He set her down and she ran off, hugging the wall and the shadows without needing to be told, bare feet silent on the concrete.
He began to walk towards the remnants of the circle of sacrifice, boldly stepping out of the shadows into the light, drawing all eyes that might otherwise have noticed that little girl running around the perimeter. Senator Bruckner was revealing herself to be a woman of single-minded determination, ignoring the commotion around her to try to force the wriggling, kicking, biting little kid she was holding down onto the altar. Lindsey remembered that that the little girl had called the other two children ‘Wesley and Gunn’ – the names of two of Angel’s do-gooders. Hell, he’d even worked with these two in the past, to save those other children who had needed his help. A lifetime ago they had stood in Caritas and praised his singing, back in the days when he’d been in love with Darla and wondering where he went from here. And now here he was, in love with Eve, and still wondering where he went from here. He wanted to be inside that circle; he wanted it like breathing. Even now, all he needed to do was grab that struggling little kid and hold it still while Bruckner slashed its throat.
As he stepped across its ragged outer rim, he gave Bruckner his best reassuring smile. “Can I help you with that, ma’am?”
She looked flushed and dishevelled from fighting with a really determined four-year-old and relieved to have some assistance, but her expression was haughty and wary.
“Who are you?”
“Lindsey McDonald.” He smiled at her again, knowing he still had it when he saw her thaw a little. “Used to work for Holland Manners.”
Next to her, Sebassis was looking as if he needed a shower to get rid of rugrat cooties. He held up the skinny, pale, struggling little kid he was holding in disgust: “Will no one relieve me of this detestable little creature?”
“Let me, sir.” Lindsey got there just before another of the Circle took what a quick glimpse confirmed was a mini-Wesley from Sebassis and tucked him firmly under one arm. “Handling kids is a knack.”
“Who do you work for now?” Bruckner had the knife to Gunn’s throat, while he kept kicking and wriggling.
Lindsey looked down in time to see Wesley about to bite him and said savagely: “Even think about it, Pryce, and I’ll lock you up with Pavayne.” Shocked, Wesley froze, the bite undelivered, big blue acccusing eyes gazing up at him in horror, and Bruckner gave Lindsey a look of surprised approval.
“You do have a way with children.”
“I said who do you work for?” Sebassis demanded.
Lindsey tried out that sentence in his mouth: “You, if you’ll let me”. It tasted so much more bitter than he had expected. Instead he found himself saying: “Me? I’m kind of freelance, these days. Shall I?” And he grabbed the front of Gunn’s shirt and yanked him sideways out from under the knife point and Bruckner’s grip. Then he was backing up with two kids in his arms and no way of getting out of here. All his evil scheming, all his working and planning, and late nights slaving away over files, and he was going to die in the basement of the LA branch of Wolfram & Hart because in the end he didn’t have what it took to be consistently evil. Damn, that was annoying.
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Date: 2007-10-26 08:06 am (UTC)This is great: Wesley thought it looked a bit like a drawing of the comet in Comet in Moominland. He had to make a conscious effort to remember that the Archduke Sebassis was probably not in the habit of communing with hattifatteners, and it was most likely a symbol of Evil. Awww.
I really like how the kidification of Fred, Gunn, and Wesley is integral to the plot, in a way that actually feels organic.
The Sirk and Spike scenes are my favorite ones this far! Love the dispute over "the darkest of the dark worlds," the mystical paper-shredder, and Spike stealing Sparrow's papers. You are so good at tight plotting. And you found a clever and plausible way within the story to free Lindsey, undead Lilah, and the other (presumably undead) M's, despite their crimes - at least now they have another chance, even though they might not deserve one. You've given Spike some very funny and snappy lines:
“On the bright side,” he pointed out. “I wouldn’t think you’d get a lot of people whose names begin with ‘Mz’.”
Spike felt a twinge of unease. “You mean they’ll make Angel pay, right? Not just any old vampire who happened to be working here and has a soul?”
Ooh, Wesley starting to open a portal to Pylea - calls up a possible AU to your AU in which he and Gunn did escape from the Brethren that way! I couldn't write it myself, but then again that AU of an AU might not have ended so well for Fred and Lindsey.
Love Gunn explaining why everything was set in motion.
Suspenseful and in-character scene with Lindsey rescuing the kids. Great job with continuity, even though I found Lindsey's relationships with both Darla and Eve pretty suspect, what with trying to screw (over) Angel being a common element. I'm glad you're giving him the benefit of the doubt here, though!