Pike had seen a lot in the past five years.  Vampires, demons, things that went spook in the night... they'd become commonplace.  He had Merrick's books, and even if he couldn't read ancient Babelize, he could get the gist of the stuff in English.  He'd rarely encountered anything but vampires, anyway.

He'd certainly never encountered anything like the Host.

It wasn't the green skin and the red eyes and the horns... okay, it was.  But it was also the absolute assurance and in-your-face cheerfulness.  Not to mention the salmon sports coat paired with slate blue pants.  For Pike, whose idea of grand fashion was a clean flannel shirt, it almost made his eyes cross.

The rest of the club was startling in its own way. He'd never seen so many monsters in his life.  Vampire in full fright-face mode were all over the place... including the stage, singing Alanis Morissette.  He kept twitching for the axe that Cordelia had insisted he leave in the car.  Being unarmed in a place like this was driving him crazy.  And there was no way in hell he was leaving Amanda here.

With that in mind, he gritted his teeth as Cordelia introduced him to Lorne.  The demon greeted him briefly, then knelt down to that he was a couple inches shorter than Amanda.  She peered at his face, fascinated.  "What kind of demon are you?"

"A rock-and-roll and lady-sings-the-blues demon," Lorne said promptly.

Amanda grinned, but it was gone quickly.  "But... you're not a bad guy, right?"

"Nope," Lorne said, getting to his feet.  "I'm on the side of the angels, as it were."

"But *they're* not," Pike muttered, ignoring Cordelia when she poked him.

Lorne faced him directly.  "No, he said, calm in the face of Pike's obvious hostility.  "They're not.  I'm a lover, not a fighter.  I don't pass judgment on them.  I just give people a signpost to chart their course by.  They sing, I read, they live their lives."

"And that's good enough for you, Demon Boy?"

"Yes.  No, Princess," he held up a hand when Cordelia tried to intervene again, "the man has a point.  I don't go out on the front lines and fight the good fight, not like you and Angel and Gunn and Wesley.  Not like Kurt Cobain here, either."

"You mean, except for the times when you do," Cordelia contended hotly.  "Lorne helps us."

"Even against my nature, sanity, and will," the Host murmured.

Cordelia ignored him.  "He fights and he suffers for it and you're not the only one who saves the day so get over yourself already."  Shrugging off Lorne's hand on her shoulder, she flounced off to find a table and sit down.

Pike stared after her for a couple of minutes.  "Okay, I missed something there."

"No, I think you hit something there.  A big bright shiny button, right there on the middle of her forehead.  The one labeled 'issues' in shocking scarlet type.  I'd suggest you try not to hit that button again."

"Shut up," Pike said, but without the edge of hostility he expected to feel.  In forty-eight hours, he'd asked for help from a vampire and was being pressured to leave Amanda in a demon bar.  He really hated the feeling of the ground shifting beneath his feet.

"My, my," Lorne said.  "I think your little girl is going to serenade us all."

Pike blinked and looked around.  He knew better than to get distracted when Amanda was nearby, because she had a tendency to investigate her immediate surroundings.  Not wander off; she knew he'd get pissed at her if she disappeared.  But she got bored easily, and liked to examine things, play with them...

"Giiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiirls just waaaaana have fuuu-uuuun!"

Lorne and Pike winced.  "Well, we know that among her future career choices, you'll never have to worry about her becoming another Brittney Spears."

"That's not what worries me," Pike muttered as Amanda hammed it up on stage, with the accompaniment of three female -- at least, he assumed that they were female -- tenticled demons.  She was having a blast, he realized.  For a girl who'd spent most of her life on the run with only him for company, she was reveling in being surrounded by people.  "It's safe?" he asked.

Lorne lifted a hand as though to clap it to his shoulder then thought better of it.  "Yes," he said quietly.  "It's perfectly safe.  No demon can do violence in Caritas."

"Not even you?"  The question was involuntary.

"No.  Not even me.  Now, then, are you going to leave your pint-sized wonder with me, or not?

"Leave her?  I don't think I could pry her out of here." Pike heard the edge of jealousy in his voice and winced.  He didn't mind being obvious, but he really hated being pathetic.

Lorne grinned.  "She loves you more than the world. Definitely more than chocolate.  Not even a cool demon karaoke bar is going to compete with that.  Now, then, I suggest that you leave your little girl to charm everyone around her, and go mend fences with Cordelia over there.  Trust me.  You do not want that girl on your bad side."

Abandoned in the middle of the bar, Pike took a deep breath.  "Okay, here goes."  He walked over to the table where Cordelia was sitting and grabbed a chair, straddling it backwards.  If she was really pissed at him, he was in an excellent position to fend her off like a lion tamer.  "Look, whatever I said to piss you off, I'm sorry."

"Oh, please.  That's such a guy apology.  'I don't know what's going on in your confusing girl brain, but if offering a half-assed apology will fix it, I'll do it.'"

"Hey.  I'm a guy.  And I don't know what's going on in your confusing girl brain.  But I obviously said or did something to make you mad, so I'm sorry."

"It's nothing."  She was tracing patterns in the water rings on the table, and looked up to meet Pike's steady glance.  "Okay, fine, it's something, but I'm not getting into it."  She held for about three seconds under that look -- Pike hadn't raised a pre-teenage girl for four years for nothing -- and finally said, "I lost someone.  And he's been on my mind a lot lately, since Buffy died, and he was one of those demons that you just blew off, and it pissed me off.  End of story."

Pike folded his arms on the back of the chair, and rested his chin on them.  "Then I'm really sorry.  That sucks."

"Yeah," Cordelia said, her voice hard.  "It really sucks.  But we've all lost people, right?  I mean, Amanda lost her family, and Gunn his sister and Angel lost the big-old love-of-his-unlife, and it shouldn't hurt this much after so long."

"How long?"

Cordelia picked up her glass and swallowed a sip of Coke.  It took just long enough to get her voice under control.  "Almost two years."

Pike grinned wryly.  "That's nothing.  I still miss Benny, and he's been toast for five years."

Cordelia returned the smile.  "Benny?"

"Yeah.  Slacker dude extraordinaire, my best bud.  What sucked was having it face him down as a vampire.  He was smarter as a vampire, though.  He survived Lothas.  Buffy finally took him down when she blew up the gym at her school."

"I'm sorry," Cordelia said quietly.

Pike shrugged.  "It's okay.  I guess it's like fate.  If they hadn't gotten Benny, I wouldn't have wanted to fight vampires so bad.  And if I hadn't, Amanda would have been on her own."

"Everything going swimmingly over here?" Lorne stopped by their table and shot a winning grin at Cordelia.

"Yes, we're fine.  Um, Lorne?  Did you...?"

"Read anything off of Amanda?  Sorry, Princess.  I've got a useful little talent.  You've got the connection to the Powers that Be.  Anything you saw trumps anything I saw."

"Oh, well, it was worth a shot."  She gulped down the rest of her Coke and stood up.  "So you'll babysit?"

Lorne folded his arms and attempted to look very stern.  "Yes.  Just the once.  Because Amanda is a cutie.  But I don't want you guys to think that this is anything more than a one-time deal, or that you can dump your vulnerable innocents off with me any time.  This is a bar, not a day care facility."

"Got it," Cordelia said breezily, and brushed his cheek with a kiss.  "Be back this afternoon.  I hope."

"Good luck.  Bring Fred back safe, okay?"

"That's the plan.  Thanks, Lorne."

With one look back at Amanda, who was behind the bar handing glasses to the bartender, Pike followed Cordelia out, to the strains of a webbed creature singing Kenny Rodgers' "Lady."