TITLE: 'Out of Africa' 18/31
AUTHOR: Pythia
E-MAIL: pythia@tiscali.co.uk
DISCLAIMER: The characters are the property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Sandollar Productions, Kuzui Enterprises, 20th Century Fox Television and the UPN Television Network. The story is written for the pleasure of the author and readers, and has no lucrative purpose whatsoever. Please do not reproduce this story anywhere without the author's consent.

POSTING NOTES: *.* is for emphasis. {.} denotes thought and [.] implies translation from another language.

The zoo was quiet and deserted, its gates locked for the day and only the minimum of night staff left to guard the grounds. No one was around to see as a dark figure carefully made its way along the twisting walkways and into the depths of the hyena house. That too, was deserted - except for the huddle of hyenas themselves, their dark eyes gleaming in the dimness.

Angel - who'd been busy sneaking in with determined care, stepped away from the shelter of the wall with a soft curse. He was too late. Lilithu had already left - and taken her unholy brood with her by the look of things. He'd managed to locate her hiding place as much by luck as anything else; no-one in town seemed to know anything about her - except to insist that she was bad news and it was better to stay as far away from her as possible. After several hours spent stalking the sewers and interviewing every lowlife demon and vamp he came across, he'd finally remembered what the policeman had said that night at the hospital. That there'd been two previous assaults that the authorities had known about - the first near the museum, the second near the zoo.

He'd pondered investigating the museum, but he knew that Buffy had already visited the place. Besides, when he stopped to think about it, he had a vague memory of the scents that had lingered in the cemetery after Lilithu's attack. There'd been nothing concrete, nothing specific, but his instincts had said 'animal house'.

And *that* had brought him to the zoo.

The hyena house had been the obvious place to start - and just as obviously the right place once he'd got close enough to check it out. The demoness, however, had been gone for at least an hour. She must have left almost as soon as the sun had abandoned the sky. He spent a few moments studying the area around the exit. There was little to see there, and he realised he had no hope of tracking her without some idea as to where she might have been heading.

Confident that the place was deserted, the vampire headed into its depths, hoping that he might find some clue that would put him back on her trail. The hyenas growled at him menacingly, so he shifted into his vamp face and growled back; it was almost funny to see the way they hastily cowered away from him. Once past their faltering protests, he prowled around the darker areas of the lair, but found little to enlighten him. If anything, the things he found only served to mystify him further.

Why had Lilithu covered one of the inner walls with makeshift hieroglyphics? And why was the room they dominated rank with the scent of something that had been dead for several days? There were signs of spilt candle wax in among the scattering of straw that covered the concrete floor - along with the abandoned body of a very dead snake, its skin stripped from its flesh. That was pretty rank by now, too - although the smell that lingered in the air was too strong to be wholly explained by its presence. Angel wasn't as sensitive to magic as Drusilla had been, but even he could tell that something powerful had been enacted in this dark space.

That was all he found. There was nothing that gave a hint as to Lilithu's intentions - and nothing to suggest where she might have gone to pursue them. His hopes of bearding the she-demon in her lair, to perhaps bluff her into revealing her plans, or luring her into a place where he and Buffy could deal with her, had been dashed almost as soon as he'd stepped into the place - but there had been a chance that he might have been able to follow her - to find out what she was up to.

He heaved a small sigh and headed back out into the grounds of the zoo. Maybe he'd hit a dead end, but there was always hope that Buffy and the rest of the Scoobies had better luck. It would be too late now to catch them at the school, but - for once - he had a very good idea where he would be able to find them - one of them, at least.

It only took a minute or two to negotiate the complexity of walkways and cages. There was still no one around to see as the black clad figure, its long coat billowing around its agile form, vaulted over the outer fence and scrambled straight up the wall of the nearest building. From there, a short run across the rooftops of Sunnydale would take him straight to the hospital.

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