Archive of Our Own

…yet from those flames
No light; but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe,
Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace
And rest can never dwell, hope never comes
That comes to all…
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Angel could smell the blood a block away; the warm night wafting it to him; fresh kills, different odours of delicious wetness spilled from different slashed veins. A ten car pile-up or else a more deliberate kind of slaughter. It didn’t help that he was hungry, but there was no time at which that scent wouldn’t have made him hungrier. It sickened him and called to him at the same time. Sickened him that he still wanted it, even after all the blood he’d drunk, the pain he’d caused, but he did and always would. The difference between him and the soulless demons who he staked and beheaded was that he could choose not to drink, despite the want and the need and the hunger that at times like these was a tearing pain in his guts, he could choose instead to take his pig’s blood out of the fridge, heat it in the microwave and make himself savour that taste instead. And he could – and did – remind himself that the blood he craved, fresh, hot, and sweet from the vein came with the price of another’s pain and his own damnation.

All the same, it was inconsiderate of whoever had caused this dizzying feast for the senses to overload his nostrils like this. As he turned the corner and saw the police line, the too-familiar yellow tape, the survivors sitting around stunned and blood-stained outside the shattered window of the bar, the body bags into which the corpses were being zipped, there were other senses alerted to counteract his sense of smell. His sense of pity for one. The scene stank of madness as well as blood; a torn streamer – garish as an evil clown – turning to crimson mush in a puddle of something that wasn’t rainwater.

“What happened?” he asked an onlooker.

The man shrugged. “Guy just went crazy. Walked into the place where the people from his office were drinking and started slicing them up with a machete. There was so much screaming. So much blood. The cops shot him in the end. They said he was smiling. Like he was enjoying it. Like he was having fun.”

Angel thought of Angelus and Darla gleefully massacring another family, the feel of an infant’s neck snapping in his hand, Angelus’s laughter full of the sound of satisfaction as he congratulated himself on another slaughter successfully concluded. He remembered the intoxication of power, knowing no one was faster than you were, that you could stalk them like prey and rip them apart like an animal, feast on their flesh; remembered a friend’s throat between his fingers, playing with the idea of breaking his neck, enjoying tightening his grip so the oxygen slowed and the victim grew dizzier and weaker while he was drunk on his own power and convinced of his own genius; cleverer, nastier, and stronger than anyone else, certainly than a white trash slayer or brainyboy Wes. Faith’s blood in his mouth, tainted with Orpheus; that was the blood of two slayers he’d drunk now; and he was supposed to be one of the good guys.

Angel winced and walked between the corpses carefully, so much ripped flesh and the dead stare of open eyes, the blood everywhere. Vicious and pointless and not even done for food as well as fun, no bite marks on the throats, not vampires this time. Not his victims this time either. But in the past, yes, there had been slaughters every bit as savage as this one, screams he’d conjured out of silence; terror he’d created out of the warm comfort of a score of taverns.

He felt sickened and, worse, still hungry, as he tried to find a trail to follow, but there was no blood leading away from the scene of carnage, no sour scent of something demonic either. It did appear to be the work of a madman. Someone pushed too far who had finally snapped and wreaked a horrible revenge on people who had probably never done him any harm. Except insanity didn’t tend to be contagious, and this was the sixth inexplicable massacre in as many days.

Angel turned away and walked back to the office; their downtrodden place of exile; cast out of if not from paradise, certainly prosperity. He doubted any of them regretted that loss. They had been fortunate to get out only partially shredded. They had lost Cordelia and Fred; Wesley had come perilously close to losing his mind and his soul; Gunn his integrity and his life.

As it was two a.m. he could have expected the place to be empty but, of course, the people of Angel Investigations had no lives to speak of and were conspicuously not having lives all over the office floor as he entered.

“Hey, Angel.” Gunn barely looked up from something complicated he was helping Wesley construct on the floor out of what looked like a knock-off Ethros box, several glass containers and some delicate crystals. There were also a lot of different kinds of herbs, some jars of unidentifiable powder, a hammer and a great quantity of iron nails.

Angel resisted the urge to turn over their motley collection of mystical bric-a-brac with his toe. “You do know that has a dented panel, right?”

“It’s what we could afford,” Wesley explained. “I’ve found some obscure references in a demon language to a possible method of temporarily imprisoning the life force of a soul eating demon so that the stolen souls can be extracted from it and I think that I can use an Ethros box as the template. It has the right kind of wood, at least.”

Gunn wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Good to be demon hunting again, anyway, right?”

Angel didn’t have the heart to tell Wesley and Gunn that they looked more like a gay couple after a trip to Ikea than demon hunters right now. He just patted the Englishman briefly on the shoulder as he passed him.

Sometimes, when he was as hungry as he was now, senses flooded with the scent of blood, he made himself wait before drinking, but that was a game to play only with himself; when he could punch a wall if he wanted to without anybody noticing. When he could slip into game face and let his eyes glitter yellow in the shadows; reach inwards to touch the darkness that was always there; not a test to set himself when there were witnesses. And it wasn’t the blood beneath their thin skins, pumping audibly through their warm bodies, that made them an unsuitable audience; he could put a hand on his non-beating heart and promise that they were in no danger of being drained by him, however hungry he might be, not even Wesley, whose blood he had tasted, and, having tasted when he was mad with hunger, remembered as the sweetest blood he’d ever drunk. No, there was no risk to their veins, but there was certainly a risk to the trust that existed between him and them; particularly the fragile trust between himself and Gunn.

Not that Gunn was as aggressively sure of himself now as he had been in the past. But his distaste for vampires was instinctive. Wesley had been introduced to the concept of the bloodsucking undead at an equally early age as Gunn, but through lectures and book learning, not through the sight of his parents’ throats ripped out, their bodies drained. For Wesley there had always been vampires in the world. One could make an argument that Wesley only existed at all because there were vampires in the world, because without Vampires there would be no Slayers and without Slayers there would be no Watchers, and were it not that he had been destined from birth to be a Watcher, Wesley would never have been born at all. His father had certainly not sired a son out of any yearning for a child to love and watch dotingly grow into manhood. Ironic, that Wyndam-Pryce senior, who had never craved that gift at all, had been granted it, while Angel, who had, briefly, wanted it above all things, had had it snatched from him.

No doubt a psychiatrist could make a case for Wesley’s subconscious having rebelled at the prospect of baby Connor receiving all the love and devotion from Wesley’s new father substitute that he himself had never received as a child and that being a motivating factor in the kidnapping. But then psychiatrists, on the whole, knew Jack, and in this case Angel certainly knew better.

Needing blood he headed straight for the refrigerator, let his fangs show briefly so he could tear open the bag, then didn’t heat it as a penance, reminding himself that this was what he was now, someone doomed to live on pig’s blood while the delicious scent of human blood, warm from the jugular, was still in his nostrils. Payback for all the human blood he’d drunk in the past. Turning to watch the men at their efforts, he could see Gunn was now trying to fit the pieces of crystal together. It reminded him of an executive puzzle, and the days when he’d had an executive desk and an executive puzzle to not get around to puzzling over.

Wesley was murmuring: “It’s just a case of identifying what the six hundred kinds of virgin wood and the blindness of the monks actually represents on a mystical level and then seeing if it’s possible to replicate it…”

Gunn finished for him: “Using much cheaper ingredients cobbled together with some voodoo magic.”

Wesley looked mildly aggrieved. “This is good old fashioned Celtic Pagan Demon magic, Charles.”

“Which?”

“Yes, Witch magic too.”

“No, I mean, which of them is it?”

Wesley ran a hand through his hair. “All of them actually. I'm open to every possibility at present.”

“Is that a fancy way of saying we’re desperate?”

“I think we went past desperate last Wednesday. We’re well into panic-stricken now.” He looked up at Angel. “Did you learn anything new?”

“There’s been another killing. Which means there’s been another soul-stealing to cause the killing. This one got messy.”

Wesley slumped in momentary defeat. “Another one so soon? This creature must be gorging itself. Or it must be big. Or both. Too big to be a Kalmakhan or an Imperidos hybrid.” He looked back at their Ethros box. “So, that probably won’t work.”

“This sucks.” Apparently unaware of the irony, Gunn sucked the thumb he had most recently hit with a hammer. “It’s using this city as a free lunch, dinner, and bedtime snack and so far we haven’t managed to do a damn thing to stop it.”

“Still no idea what it is?” Angel put in.

Wesley shook his head. “We already know we’re dealing with a soul-eater demon. We can make some assumptions from its modus operandi, and at this kind of a feeding rate I think it has to be from the Animadras family, but as they’re all supposed to be extinct in this dimension that doesn’t lead us much further on.” Sighing, he got to his feet. “Gunn, can you go on with the building work while I get back to the books? Follow the diagram in Holstein’s Arcana and remember to sprinkle thyme on the nails before you use them. In the meantime I'm hoping to find a better summoning spell than one used by Ancient Egyptian sorcerers to entrap the souls of the unholy.”

Angel examined their handiwork for a moment before saying: “If a Shorshack box wouldn’t hold something as similar as an Ethros demon, how likely is it that a dented Ethros box is going to hold an as yet unidentified but definitely not-Ethros demon?”

Wesley went into the office, talking over his shoulder as he did so. “My latest research suggests that the demon has to be alive at the time the souls are extracted from it. If we could contain its essence in a box during the extraction process there is a proportionately lower chance of it chewing us into little pieces while I'm casting the spell. Not knowing what kind of demon we’re dealing with, however, does mean there has to be a certain amount of guesswork involved, but Lorne thinks we’re on the right track.”

Angel grimaced. “Wouldn’t you say building your own soul-eating demon box out of a few household implements is the Webster’s definition of a ‘don’t try this at home, kids’ scenario?” He decided not to mention what Lorne had told him about barely getting a passing grade at mystical school but he couldn’t help thinking that was looking more and more likely as he gazed at the gimcracky get up Gunn was currently wrestling with.

Wesley shrugged. “If you have any other suggestions I'm happy to hear them.”

“What about the shaman to perform the extraction magic and the binding magic, not to mention saying the incantations to turn your home-made soul-demon-extraction-box into something more than a mantelpiece ornament? Last thing I heard those guys didn’t work to scale.”

Sighing, Wesley turned over another page. “We’ve got me, Lorne, and some candles, and if it turns out the spell can only be cast by a human as one of my references is suggesting, then we’ve just got me.”

Angel sat down on Wesley’s desk and took in the ex-watcher’s haggard and unshaven appearance. Belatedly he remembered coming in on the tail end of a lecture the day before from Lorne to Wesley about the dangers of working through too many nights fuelled solely on caffeine. “You need to get some sleep.”

Wesley reached for another book. “What I need is to identify this demon and find a way we can stop it and return those stolen souls to their original owners.” He looked at the spine of the book and then frowned. “I thought this was the Liramaer Codex. Oh, that’s right, I don’t have that one any more…”

As he cast around amongst his dusty volumes, a reference library a mere fraction of the size of the one he had become accustomed to at Wolfram & Hart, Angel said, “Tell me you don’t miss it.”

“Of course I miss it.” Wesley met his gaze unflinchingly. “Missing something doesn’t mean that it was good for you. I miss Lilah too.”

“I know it’s tough, Wes, but this is us doing what we’re doing because we want to do it. No one is pulling our strings. Not the Powers That Be or the Senior Partners. We’ve been puppets for so long; twisted around and turned inside out by higher powers with their own agendas, playing to our weaknesses and sapping our strengths. Now, finally, we have our own resources – which are admittedly limited but at least don’t come at the price of our souls.”

Wesley said quietly: “You don’t need to tell me, Angel. I remember very well what being at Wolfram & Hart cost us.”

There was a moment of painful silence as they both thought about Fred; hollowed out to become the shell in which an ancient demon could take physical shape once again. Angel had glimpsed the door to the abyss opening, not just the hole in the world in which were held all the sarcophagi of those ancient beings, but the yawning maw into which all their souls had almost been sucked. One loss too far and Wesley’s mind had been swinging on the single screw of a cracking hinge. Angel knew how it felt to love someone not only for what they truly were but for everything you needed them to be; to have an image in your mind of something that was good and pure and true enough to be worth fighting and dying for. There was a reason why sailors had figureheads of beautiful women on the prow of their ships; why medieval knights had offered themselves as champions to married ladies whose love they would never know. One couldn’t fight for all of humanity in the abstract; there had to be something specific that made it seem worthwhile.

Angel suspected Spike was still fighting to be worthy of Buffy, and Wesley, perhaps for far longer than even he had realized, had been fighting to be worthy of Winifred Burkle; the woman and the ideal. Angel had never done well without a woman in his life. Even after regaining his soul he’d missed Darla as acutely as an amputated limb; needing to be with her, even though she was evil, even though she was what could drag him back into darkness. Buffy had been his salvation, and his destruction also. The woman who had dragged him out of one hell and cast him back into another one. She had sacrificed his blood to save the world then given her own, almost to the point of death, to save his life. Spike had been right when he’d said they could never be friends. They were soulmates doomed to never have the love that should have been theirs; something denied to them long before they had met by his past crimes. The gipsy curse was the cause not the reason; the reason had always been all the blood on his hands. He hadn’t deserved her, and even though he’d known that to be true, getting her had felt like a kind of absolution. That had been another reason for his moment of perfect happiness, because surely he couldn’t be here, like this, with her, loving her as he did, and knowing that she loved him every bit as much, if he hadn’t been deemed by some higher power to have redeemed himself just a little?

It had actually done him good to watch Cordelia and Wesley’s little play. He wasn’t so far gone he couldn’t laugh at himself, and there was a point one got to in the end where you had to admit your tragedy was teetering on the edge of comedy. So, yes, it was a little ridiculous, the whole Slayer-in-love-with-the-Vampire-With-The-Soul thing. But it hadn’t felt ridiculous to them; it had felt like destiny for them to be together forever and impossible for them to be apart. But they were certainly apart now. Angel knew that she and Spike could never be soulmates as he and Buffy had been, perhaps always would be, but people changed, moved on, and she had done so, to Riley, to Spike, and now to someone else. It was something he had to live with. Like the death of Cordelia, whom he had also loved. Had known he loved at the time as much as he had loved any woman. Unfortunately he also remembered very clearly a time when she had felt like a daughter or sister to him, and his love for her had been equally strong but of a different kind; not a glimmer of romance on either side. And then it had changed after Buffy’s death and he had found himself looking for someone to love and there she had been, and he had loved her. The love had been real, he was sure of that, although perhaps his motivation had been spotty, and perhaps The Powers That Screwed Everyone had needed him to be in love with Cordelia, just as they’d needed Connor to be in love with Cordelia, so Jasmine could happen. And what kind of a life was it when you could look back on your own past and so much of it seemed to have happened because someone else wanted it to? And where the hell was free will when you needed definite proof of its existence anyway?

“Angel…?”

Wesley always sounded the same. That gentle questioning use of his name, probably because he’d ignored the last three things said to him, and for an instant he expected to look up and see a young man in glasses wearing a suit two sizes too big, a doughnut left on his desk by a Cordelia still unused to thinking about anyone but herself but instinctively groping her way towards a spiritual evolution. Two only children, one spoiled, one ignored, learning belatedly how to act like siblings. Except Wesley was all grown up now; an adult who hadn’t slept in far too long and had the stubble to prove it.

“I miss them both,” Angel said abruptly. “All of the different versions of them, you know? Shallow Cordy trying to find a rich husband lousy with old money, playing Nora so damned badly; and the girl who hung onto those visions even when they were killing her; and the woman I think I was in love with. And I miss the Fred hiding in her room writing equations on the walls, too scared to come downstairs, and the Fred holding everything together when we all fell apart, and the Fred in her laboratory, like a kid with the biggest trainset in the world…”

He saw the tears in Wesley’s eyes and broke off, but, despite the tears, Wesley looked more wistful than sad, holding onto those memories with the same ferocity as Angel. “I miss them too. All of them, like you say. Every moment and memory of them. And I would go back in a heartbeat to a time when I could squabble with Cordelia about whether or not a love of learning is inherently unmasculine and where I tripped over my own feet every damned day, just to have an hour of her company. And I would go back to a time when I could only look at Fred and think how beautiful she was and how she would never ever love me just to see her again. And I would go through it all – Connor and Lilah and Angelus and the agony of losing the people we love just to see them. And perhaps that’s why human beings should only have so much control over their own destiny.”

Sighing, Wesley opened one of the books on his desk and picked up a pen. “I guess that’s also part of what having a soul gives you. And painful though it is, it’s our right and it’s being stolen from too many people in this city right now.”

Angel was thinking with a shudder that there might come a time when he was having this conversation with someone else, recounting all the different Wesley Wyndam-Pryces he’d been privileged to know: the uptight Watcher and the leather-clad rogue demon hunter, and the hero worshipping boy in those suits that were all too big for him, and the grown up leader of Angel Investigations who had finally learned to stand up to him both figuratively and literally, even from a wheelchair, and the exiled outcast who had saved him from the ocean. The guy who had said he could manage very well without them but whom it had turned out had been needed too much to stay away; and the right hand man, the best friend he could always rely on to be just where he needed him. And the guy hanging onto sanity by a thread, whom Angel couldn’t stay mad at, even though he’d just stabbed a mutual friend and was unravelling right in front of him, because he’d lost so much and couldn’t lose Wes too; any Wesley, even this crazy one who was as dangerous as a nail bomb with a burning fuse.

“You really should get some sleep.”

“Not yet.” Wesley didn’t even look up from the book he was reading.

Angel knew that as it was two a.m. he really ought to just take the book from him and tell him and Gunn to go home and get some shut-eye but the truth was no one had any time to sleep, not even the humans who really, really needed it.

Angel looked around the office. “Where’s Spike?” He’d been living in the past in his mind so much in the past few hours that he’d almost forgotten there was another member to their not so happy band these days.

“Out with Lorne.”

“Those two are dating now?”

He was pleased to see that genuine smile from Wesley. It was way too long since he’d seen him smile. “Yes. As Los Angeles is in the grip of a soul-eating demon attack they thought it was just the right time to take in dinner and a show.”

Angel grinned back. “They’re following up leads?”

“I think they’re playing good demon-bad demon with the local informants. We could really do with Merl.”

“If Gunn’s old friends hadn’t chopped him up into little tiny bits.”

Wesley inclined his head in acknowledgement. “Yes. If it wasn’t for the small matter of his being extremely dead, Merl would definitely be our best lead right now.”

“Wes, you’re our best lead.” Angel sighed as he got off the desk. “You’re always our best lead and most of the time you’re our only lead. But, hey, no pressure.”

Wesley briefly rested his head on the pages of the book he was reading, a gesture of defeat that didn’t feel at all like mockery. They both knew this path; it had been travelled so many times before; days and nights of research with the clock tick-tock-ticking and dusty volumes needing to be read and re-read by the only guy who could understand the many languages in which they were written. And meanwhile, as Wesley grappled with translations and cryptic references, the bodies were piling up.

“What happened to the victim?” Wesley looked up again.

“There were a lot of victims. Most of them were dead but some were only missing fingers or other limbs. They were taken to the hospital.”

“I mean the original victim.”

Angel didn’t say ‘I know’ even though he did and had immediately when Wesley asked the question. “You mean the murderer.”

“Angel, it’s not a crime to have your soul ripped out of your body.” Intense blue eyes met his and Angel thought how vampires weren’t the only people who didn’t change. All those fights for his life, all those beatings and bruises and fractures and trips to the hospital, and it was the same expression on Wesley’s face, the same need to reach him in those still-innocent blue eyes. This man had taken life, demon and human, with barely a flicker of emotion over the past few years. Had made decisions so tough they must have felt as if they came with a free disembowelling. This was the guy who looked unflinchingly into the face of what was right and did it, and on occasion had looked into the face of what was wrong and done that too. But in some ways he was still who he had always been when it came to Angel; as if Angel was some pendulum swinging that only Wesley could hear; a silent heartbeat, despite having a heart that didn’t beat and probably never would again. Wesley knew that Angel was noble and good in a way that Angel had never known. Only sometimes, such as now, when he looked into Wesley’s eyes and saw himself reflected in them, not just a person but an entire belief system, could he believe there might be some hope for his redemption.

“Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Angel looked around for his blood, the scent of the dead and dying still in his nostrils, sickening to any human, no doubt, but appetizing to him. Only he knew just how much he and Angelus had in common, even if they were divided by a conscience and a soul. “What the true human condition must be? Take away the soul and they turn into murderers at once.”

“The true human condition is to have a soul, Angel,” said Wesley quietly. “That’s as much part of our humanity as having…”

“A pulse?” Angel countered. “Heartbeat? Body heat?”

“The capacity for love.” Wesley’s gaze was level and unflinching. “All this soul eater’s rampage is proving to me is that the soul is the core of our humanity; without it anyone is a demon because without it no one is human. Those people who have had their souls stolen are no longer who they were; they don’t feel pity, they don’t have a conscience, they don’t remember how it feels to love. You’re not like them.” The last was said very gently.

Angel closed his eyes. “But I was.”

“A century ago, yes. But you’re not that person. His crimes aren’t yours even if the memory if them is. You know that’s true.”

“I know you believe it’s true, Wes.”

“You need to believe it too.”

Angel looked his friend in the eye. “Some days I do. Some days – such as when I come across a crime scene that would make any normal person toss their cookies and I start salivating – it’s not so easy to convince myself.”

Wesley shrugged. “I eat meat. If I was hungry and I smelt meat cooking, I’d want to eat it. I’d hunger for it. Anticipate the moment when I was going to be eating it. Someone telling me it was human flesh I could smell roasting might not be enough to stop my mouth watering in an automatic response to the smell of cooking meat. Especially as apparently we smell pretty much like roasted pork.”

“You do. Taste like it as well.” Angel sighed as he got to his feet. “Nice try, Wes, but there’s the difference right there because I can tell you exactly what humans smell like when you set then on fire, and I can tell you how their burnt flesh tastes too.”

Wesley closed his eyes and took a deep breath. It took Angel a moment to realize the man was counting to five, slowly, reaching for his patience. He’d always thought Wesley’s patience was close to inexhaustible but he was apparently trying it sorely. “You’re. Not. Angelus.”

He patted Wesley on the shoulder briefly. “And you’re a good friend. Now go home and get some sleep or be prepared to explain to Lorne why you didn’t when he gets back. I heard the lecture he gave you yesterday.”

Wesley rubbed his eyes wearily. “I’ll do what I always do – shave and shower in your basement and tell him I arrived five minutes before he did.”

“No wonder I'm almost out of shower gel. And no wonder Spike keeps making those cheap cracks about the investigators who shower together stay together. You can’t bring your own soap in from home? And Lorne’s empathic, remember? You think he doesn’t know you’re lying?”

“I figured that as long as I didn’t hum while I was lying I was probably safe.”

“You go right on thinking that, sweetpea, and I’ll be sure to collect the next time I have to arrange another party and you’re thinking of playing wallflower again. You are so going to be singing a cappella before being first under the limbo pole.”

Wesley started guiltily as the green-skinned empath demon appeared in the doorway. Angel said quickly, “Wes was just on his way home.”

“That’s good,” Lorne said easily, “because I just know he was listening when I gave him my impassioned speech earlier about the dangers of researching while technically a zombie from lack of sleep. You’d remember it, Angelcakes, because it was right after the lecture I gave you about making sure your staff got some downtime even in the midst of a crisis. Based on the very sound reason that we’re always in the midst of a crisis around here and if we stayed on full alert 24/7 everyone with a pulse would end up as dead as you and Mr Subtle here.”

Spike slid into the room a little sulkily. “Lorne doesn’t like my methods of questioning.”

“Well, just call me an old softy but I think you could at least count to oh, I don’t know…two in between asking a question and punching someone for not answering it.”

“Hey, I get results. I don’t need to be Mister How To Win Friends and Influence People while I'm getting them.”

“Just as well really with your track record.” Gunn came into the office. “Did you say something about results?”

“Got an eye witness to sing for Lorne. Literally. So Lorne could see what he saw. Now, Lorne describes it to Angel who sketches it. Wes here identifies the best way to kill it. Angel and me go out and chop its head off or pull out its entrails or whatever it takes.” Spike lit a cigarette. “I like to keep things simple.”

“Well, with an IQ like yours that’s pretty much a…” Angel badly wanted to finish that sentence but with the ‘petty squabbling in the work place’ lecture from Lorne still fresh in his memory decided to turn the end of it into a cough. Ever since their departure from Wolfram & Hart Lorne had been taking the – if not iron fist in the velvet glove approach, certainly the slightly tougher than latex fist in the velvet glove approach. Messing with the mind of an empath demon was clearly not something an empath demon found easy to forgive. Lorne was as supportive and soothing as always but he was also keeping a wary eye on Angel to ensure he didn’t do anything else of which Lorne didn’t approve. He also seemed to have taken on Cordelia’s role when it came to lecturing him about his person to person skills. Having done something which, if he didn’t regret it, he also didn’t deny had been an incredible invasion of their personal space, Angel was so far sucking up the lectures and even trying to take some of them on board. So, no cheap cracks about Spike’s brain, or hair dye, or general…Spikeness.

Wesley said a little diffidently, “Lorne, I would actually get more sleep if you described the soul-eating demon now and I could narrow my search a little.”

“And now that we’ve been given back our own memories shall we have a little recap about how the last time you decided that your judgement was at its most honed when fuelled by caffeine and insomnia you did something that ripped our whole family apart and incidentally lost Angel his son and got your throat slit. Oh yes, and there was the small matter of bludgeoning me unconscious as I recall.”

Angel and Wesley exchanged a grimace. “I think his time at Wolfram & Hart has definitely hardened Lorne,” Wesley sighed and reached for his coat.

“Am I going to have to use my cross and disappointed face on you, Wesley?” As Lorne demonstrated aforementioned face, Wesley warded it off with a raised hand.

“All right, I'm going home. I promise to sleep for six hours without interruption before coming back here.” He shared another wince with Angel. “The undead are so much easier to work for.”

Angel picked up a pad and started to sketch what Lorne described. He knew though that the only person who could really progress them on this case was Wesley, whom Lorne had just shooed out of the office like a naughty chick. He had vivid memories of trying to do his own research in the time when he had been estranged from Angel Investigations or Wesley had been cast out for his part in losing Connor. It had utterly sucked. He still wasn’t clear how a human with a paltry thirty-something years under his belt could know so much more about demons than his and Spike’s combined centuries, but, nevertheless, Wesley did.

As he watched the man leave, it occurred to him that it was all wrong that the ex-watcher should be more frightened of a Las Vegas headlining empath demon than he was of him, Angel, undead brooding scourge of the underworld, but apparently Lorne had the jump on him when it came to the scolding skills.

“Angelcakes, are you listening to me…?”

“I'm sketching.” Angel held up his half-finished picture. “Was that three horns or four?”

“Four horns, five claws, spiked dorsal ridge, double layer of teeth…”

Gunn grimaced. “I miss the demon puppets. At least they didn’t have any teeth.”

“Nasty little buggers they were,” Spike scowled.

Gunn looked at him in confusion. “You weren’t even with us when we fought them.”

Spike jerked his head at Angel. “Met the puppet version of him, though. Like I said, nasty little buggers.”

“Fred thought I was cute,” Angel sighed, remembering their fallen comrade.

“Fred thought Wesley was sex on a stick,” Spike retorted. “I rest my case.”

***

Angel could feel the early morning sunlight outside the walls; somewhere up there, above the basement, there was a world beginning to wake up, all streaked with pearly light and the beginnings of warmth. He closed his eyes and pictured the sun; filtering through trees; bathing a beach in golden light; the shimmer of the heat haze over the desert. Briefly, during his stay at Wolfram & Hart, he had been able to feel it on his skin as well, one of the many bribes offered him. Did it mean anything that what had seduced him hadn’t been the cars or the necro-tinted windows or the money, but the means to help his son? When did parental love become a bad thing? Perhaps, when it was wielded as a weapon by the Senior Partners of an evil pan-dimensional company?

He had researched well into the night, knowing that Wesley was doing the same, had slept and dreamed, and woken and showered, still tasting the blood in his mouth from the dream that most people would describe as a nightmare but which, if he were honest, he had to admit that he’d enjoyed. And now he was thinking. He could have gone upstairs to do it, up to the office with its cheap chairs and cheaper desk, and limited resources, but if he stared into space when there were witnesses people would only say that he was brooding.

It was only a week since Gunn had suggested a brood box into which a dollar had to be placed every time someone was caught at it. Angel and Wesley had both looked at one another in horror at the idea, Wesley surreptitiously checking his wallet for its contents before firmly vetoing the idea.

“Who’s to say if someone’s brooding?” Wesley protested.

Angel had nodded his agreement. “Exactly. They could just be…thinking.”

“Thinking serious thoughts but not actually…brooding about them.” Wesley had clearly been grateful for the support.

“Spike looks miserable all the time,” Angel had added quickly. “But that’s just his natural disposition. Can’t punish a guy for that. And Wesley’s…English. Coming from a place with that climate you can’t expect a lot of tapdancing.”

“And that goes twice for those of us born in the sodden bogs of dreary old Ireland.” Wesley had clearly not forgotten the ‘English Pig’ comments of their brief sojourn into their teenage pasts while under the influence of a gone-wrong spell. “Always a melancholy people. Look at Yeats.”

Spike for once had agreed with them, nodding to Gunn as he lit a cigarette. “You’re not exactly Mr Happy Clappy yourself. If you start introducing fines just for being miserable the only guy around here who’s going to clean up will be Lorne.…”

But even though that threat had been lifted, Angel thought he’d stay in the basement a little longer before heading up to the office. He needed time to think and there was never any shortage of things to think about – people lost, decisions made, consequences suffered. So many roads led back to his son; the baby who had seemed like a reward; the boy who he, Cordelia and Wesley had all – despite their best intentions – conspired to drive insane. Holtz had been in front of him as an example of everything that could go wrong when you let yourself be driven by the need for vengeance, of how even the best of men could be corrupted into something evil if you gave up your capacity for forgiveness, but he had still tried to smother Wesley with a pillow, and little more than a year later, Wesley had still stabbed one of his closest friends in the gut. Sometimes it wasn’t enough to know something intellectually when grief or insanity or both were beckoning. He knew that his son had been a good person at heart; his soul had been strong enough to affect even Darla. That baby had never been intended to grow up to do harm; Connor’s path had been twisted and corrupted by the interference of others, by the higher powers that Angel had put his trust in even after they had let Doyle die and Cordelia inherit the visions which had almost claimed her life.

According to Skip the only reason Connor existed at all was because Connor was necessary for Jasmine to be born. In the eyes of the Higher Powers then no doubt Connor’s usefulness had ended with the death of his ‘child’; his function in the cosmos fulfilled. Was that how they saw all the human race? Their existence of significance only in direct proportion to their role in the greater scheme of things? So, Angel mattered because he had a role to play in the coming apocalyptic battles, but someone standing next to him in the queue to the movie theatre didn’t because he was only fated to be a shoe salesman his whole life? If you started adding up how much everyone mattered on account of how much they…mattered then nothing ended up mattering at all. It seemed to him that all those who could see too much of the big picture ended up not seeing the small details, but people were small details and so were their lives. It was a short trip from playing chess with human lives for the greater good, on the grounds that it was acceptable to sacrifice a few hundred to save a few million, to getting to that place that Doyle had warned him about all those years ago – where it wouldn’t seem like such a crime to drain the life from the occasional human body as he was saving so many to balance the books.

Except, he hoped that he knew that some books could never be balanced. He remembered the taste of it: human blood, running across his tongue, coating his throat, warm from the vein, so sweet and salt. Remembered what it was not to feel remorse. To kill for pleasure. To maim, torture, rape, dismember. To enjoy the feeling of life ebbing from another as he drank their blood, loving the scent and taste of their fear. The intoxication of power, people cringing and fleeing and failing to escape him, while he felt invincible and untouchable, so much better than them, permanently semi-aroused by his own power. Angelus had been free of everything – conscience, restraint, compassion. The humans nothing to him, so much blood on the hoof, killable, rapeable, torturable bodies, warm and wonderfully breakable. And Angelus was in him. The demon was part of him. It was something Wesley never allowed him to address: that Liam wouldn’t have won any humanity awards either, that perhaps Angelus wasn’t so very different from Liam even if Angel was – he hoped – different from both Liam and Angelus. To Wesley it was less murky than that. Angelus was the demon who had taken up residence in Angel’s body, committed terrible crimes over which Angel had no control and for which he didn’t need to take responsibility. Angelus was a beast waiting to break out again, Angel’s soul the barrier keeping the demon powerless, but for Wesley Angelus was entirely an interloper, just the fungi on the original oak. Even after all the different sides he’d seen of Angel over the years he refused to admit – at least in Angel’s hearing – that perhaps if one turned into a scourge of Europe when one became a vampire, instead of just a common or garden blood-sucking fiend, there was something inherently evil within you…

“Angelcakes.”

He looked up from his reverie to find Lorne standing at the top of his basement staircase looking anxious.

“I wasn’t brooding,” Angel said defensively. “I was thinking. That’s different.”

Lorne winced and felt the back of his head tenderly as he came down the stairs. “Lambkin, I could feel you brooding on the next floor. This empathic thing isn’t something I can just switch off, you know. Sometimes a person doesn’t have to be singing for me to get sandbagged by his aura and right now you’re mugging me with dismal self-recrimination from thirty feet away.” He put a piece of leaflet down on the bed. “Don’t take this the wrong way but – ”

“Whatever it is I'm not doing it,” Angel told him at once. “There’s a soul-eating demon in my city and I'm not going to a…” He frowned in disbelief as he saw the leaflet. “A spa? You want me to go to a spa? Now?”

“Wesley called me last night to say that despite being tucked up in bed with a mug of cocoa and not a book in sight he wondered if I could cross reference something for him in the Tektalkan demon codex. Which, despite my better judgement I just did. It’s possible he’s identified the demon we’re dealing with as an Animadras Teradaxus and if he’s right – and when isn’t he? – then it can’t be killed by a non-human. Which, as I think you’re well aware, counts you out of this particular battle.”

“No.” Angel refused to accept that. “I can still fight in the battle even if I can’t deliver the killing blow. Wesley and Gunn can’t fight this creature by themselves. They’ll just end up getting their souls sucked out.”

Lorne sat down next to him, his expression revealing his concern. “I’m chasing down a spell to keep their souls intact even when fighting it and you know better than any of us how dangerously close to Angelus you can get when you go into serious brood mode.”

“I would never hurt any of you.” Angel looked into Lorne’s red eyes, trying to convince him with his sincerity. “You’re my family. Lorne, you have to believe me…”

“But you did, munchkin.” Lorne sighed. “When you were you, not Angelus, you fired Cordy, Wes and Gunn.”

“I was trying to protect them – ”

“From the darkness inside yourself. Yes, I remember. The same darkness that without them around to keep you from it could have claimed you. Nearly did claim you. Tell the truth now, you wanted a free hand to get as vampfinder general as you felt like and in the process, didn’t you come dangerously close to losing yourself?”

Angel remembered the lawyers in the wine cellar, his own lack of pity, a grim satisfaction that they should be about to die by the fangs of their own creation. They’d brought Darla back to torment him with her, given her a glimpse of life as a human but failed to find a cure for the disease that was killing her, and then arbitrarily stolen her soul and her humanity, turned her back into a vampire. Had he cared that the vampire they’d created – by stealing from him the woman he almost loved – was imminently going to rip out their throats? No. Not a pang. And he remembered Wesley’s earnest blue eyes behind his spectacles, saying: “Right now, the three of us are the only thing keeping you from real darkness…” The satisfaction he’d taken in firing them because they still didn’t get it; that he couldn’t afford to be kept from the darkness; and the path he was taking wasn’t one down which they could follow him. They couldn’t be potential hostages or potential helpmates in a war against Darla and Drusilla, especially a war he wasn’t at all sure that he could win.

“When you slept with Darla you expected to lose your soul.” Lorne was quietly relentless.

Angel sighed. “Well, maybe... I didn’t exactly think that particular situation through.”

“But you did it anyway. Knowing that if that happened you’d be Angelus again. Without warning anyone of what you were about to do, were about to possibly become.” Lorne sighed. “Angelus with an open invitation to Cordelia’s apartment, Angel. How were you protecting her from being raped to death by a soulless demon when you dropped your boxers for Darla? And do you think it would have occurred to Gunn or Wesley not to let you into their homes if Angelus had turned up claiming to be you? You put all their lives in jeopardy because you couldn’t let go of the past. Because when you get into that obsessive broody place you’re a danger to yourself and others. As one of the others, I'm hoping to divert you from going down that path again.”

“I'm not obsessing over this soul-eating demon,” Angel protested.

Lorne reached across to turn the clock around so Angel could see its face. “Well, you’re not in bed, you’re not in the office, and I don’t see you doing anything useful. What else are you doing except brooding?”

“Researching.” Angel grabbed a book at random from his bookcase. “Animadras Teradaxus, right? I'm just helping Wes out with the research so he can catch up on his sleep.”

Lorne sighed and rose to his feet. “Read the leaflet, cream puff. Read and inwardly digest because if you can’t shake off this brood cloud I think it’s going to have to be mud wraps for you all the way.”

***

“Once a Watcher, always a Watcher, eh?”

Wesley emerged from his book slowly, as unwilling to come up from his research as a tired man in a warm bath. He’d had barely four hours sleep the night before and what sleep he had had been haunted by nightmares of soul-eating demons. It was annoying to have to drag himself away from something important and interesting just to give Spike his attention while Spike insulted him, but his rhythm of cross-referencing was broken now. Sighing, he looked up at the peroxide-haired vampire sitting on his desk. “What?”

“You. Still a Watcher when all’s said and done.”

“Is that some kind of reference to my not being out killing things right now?”

To his surprise, Spike looked at him with something a little like respect. “No, it’s a reference to you not being a glory hound. It’s a reference to you being the guy who does all the work so the drama queens amongst us can get all the credit.”

Wesley sighed again as he reached for his notepad and pen. “If you could just go one day without being rude about Angel, I'm sure we’d all –”

Spike caught his wrist. “Not just Angel, me too – even Buffy for a long time: people who want to be the only one – the only vampire with a soul, the only Slayer; the one who killed the monster, chopped off its head, cut out its heart. You know, I never liked Giles. At all. But I get him now. And you. What you are – what you do, it’s not cool and it’s – god help us – not sexy but it’s necessary and it’s thankless and it’s good there are people born and bred to do it, however sad that may make them.”

Wesley blinked. “Um, thank you, I think.”

Spike grinned and put a cigarette between his lips. “You’re welcome.”

As Angel came into the room, the two vampires grunted at one another, reminding Wesley of dogs circling to see if a fight could be avoided. “Is he bothering you?” Angel enquired.

Wesley waited until Spike had left the room with a nonchalant swagger before answering. “I think he was insulting me, and praising me. It was a little frightening.” It occurred to Wesley that Angel would have heard every word. His hearing was so much better than a human’s anyway and he’d only been just outside the door.

Angel acknowledged it with a shrug. “I just have an inbuilt resistance to saying the word’s ‘Spike’s right’.” He pulled a face. “Yeuch. That tasted even worse than I thought. Like drinking curdled blood.” He met Wesley’s gaze. “But he is, and you are – still a Watcher. My watcher.” Angel frowned. “We both know that wasn’t as creepy as it sounded, right?”

Wesley smiled. “Yes.”

“Because Lorne was criticizing me about the possessive thing again.” Angel grimaced as he made air quotes with his fingers. “ ‘My team’. ‘My people’. I mean it in a good, protective ‘these people are my family, fuck with them and you die’ way, not in a crazed stalker living in the walls kind of way.”

“We know that.”

“So, when I say that you’re my watcher, I don’t mean it in a chattels and possessions way, just in a ‘I’m the guy you look things up in research books for just like Giles used to look things up for Buffy’ way. Okay?”

“Okay.” Wesley was having to fight quite hard not to grin now, as when Angel attempted to be a good employer and play nicely with others it was always as amusing as it was touching. “Did Lorne happen to mention you having to visit another swami if you don’t…?”

“Get with the empathic thing. Yeah. Apparently, I’ve been brooding a little more than usual recently. Not remembering the ‘please’ and ‘thank you’s. Being less than sensitive to the needs of others.” Angel swallowed. “He’s talking about two weeks in a place that has mud wraps, Wes. And where there’s hand holding and chanting.”

“Angel, you survived a hundred years in a hell dimension, remember?”

The vampire shuddered. “This sounds worse.”

Wesley put a marker in the book no one seemed willing to let him get back to. “Do you want me to tell Lorne about how sensitive to my needs you’ve been this morning?”

Given that Angelus had been the scourge of Europe for a hundred and fifty years and Angel himself was perfectly capable of twisting an enemy’s head off of his shoulders before breakfast, it was astonishing how like an eager little boy wanting a puppy he could manage to look when he wanted to. “Would you?”

Wesley sighed. “I'm on my way.”

He found Lorne in the kitchen going through their meagre provisions in a way that suggested they would be sending for take out they couldn’t afford yet again. Clearing his throat, Wesley said: “I do appreciate what you’re trying to do, Lorne, but…”

“Wesley, my English muffin, I don’t think you do.”

“You’re trying to stop Angel obsessing over this soul-eating demon and…”

“And given what Angel used to be when he was without a soul and just how bad he feels about it, I think anything I can to stop him going to that mental place is a good thing, don’t you?”

Wesley placed a hand on the horned demon’s shoulder. “I know you mean well, but threatening to send Angel to a new age retreat in the woods with some touchy-feely people who want to explore their inner child is just going to paralyse him with terror.”

Lorne held up a finger. “Should stop him parking his convertible in that Drive-In Brood-A-Thon though.”

“Not if you actually send him to the new age retreat and he kills the touchy-feely people which, given how Angel can be even with a soul, is a distinct possibility.”

“Look, we all know how he gets when he starts to brood. Angel obsesses about Darla and before we can say ‘emotional trainwreck’ we’re looking at a room full of dead lawyers. Not to mention you, toasted teacake, getting some serious body piercing you didn’t ask for from a zombie policeman.”

“Annoyed though I was with him at the time, that didn’t have anything to do with Angel.”

“Except he wasn’t there to get shot instead, and let’s not forget the big difference between Angel getting shot and you getting shot is the difference between ‘Ouch!’ and haemorrhaging to death in excruciating agony.”

“Yes, thank you for reminding me about that because the nightmares had actually stopped and I was starting to miss them.”

“An obsessive Angel is a dangerous Angel and I will mud wrap him to kingdom come if he doesn’t find a place of balance within himself during the coming crisis.”

Wesley looked into the horned demon’s anxious red eyes. “Are you sensing something in Angel’s aura that has you more than ordinarily worried?”

Lorne pulled a face. “To be honest with you, crumpet, when he started singing in the shower this morning I saw a lot of rage and despair on the horizon – and not just from the neighbours banging on the walls.”

“You’ve just given me a three cake endearment in as many minutes. Should I be humming?”

As Wesley did so, reasonably tunefully, Lorne pulled a face. “Oh boy. More darkness. I think you should be locking your doors very carefully for the next few nights. I think you’re in almost as much danger as he is.”

“Of losing my soul?” Wesley felt a chill spread through him. He had spent months reading through the atrocities committed by Angelus and now spent years in the company of the man who had to live with the memories of those atrocities. It was a long time since he had told Angel that he didn’t envy him the fine line he walked, but even to be brothers in empathy with his best friend he didn’t want to have to remember how someone else’s blood felt on his hands.

“I'm an anagogic demon, not a magic eight ball, but all those times I’ve told you not to sit up late with your books because it will ruin your complexion? I'm thinking pale suits you, Wesley. It sets off the whole brainy unshaven handsome thing you’ve got going.”

Wesley nodded. “I’ll get back to the books.”

“You do that, my lamb, and I’ll see if I can get some word on the streets about where this thing is hiding out.”

“Be careful,” Wesley reminded him as Lorne headed for the door, resplendent in a scarlet suit that clashed brilliantly with his horns. “Remember, you have a soul as well.”

“I have soul, rhythm, and, right now, I also have a major case of the blues. Keep safe.”

“You too.” But Lorne was already gone and Wesley hadn’t missed the look of anxiety on his face as he went. They all relied on Lorne to be the comforting one; the one who maintained his good temper and equilibrium when all about him were losing theirs. He was the one who weighed in with the words of wisdom when Angel and Spike were at the hair pulling and name calling stage. The one who could always find the silver lining in whichever cloud was disgorging its toxic contents over them this time. When Lorne was looking that worried it was time for everyone to reach for the panic button.

***

Stepping away from the latest crime scene, Angel knew he had to be the one to stop this. It was what he was here for – to stop others losing their souls. That was why he killed vampires; to free the dead and the living. The demon could still be close at hand and he had to find it. The neon was smearing all around him, cars slowing and speeding up, headlights dazzling in the darkness; broken glass was crunching underfoot as the paramedics tried to get the victims to the ambulance while the police unfurled their yellow tape, and the onlookers stayed watching and watching, hypnotized by the pools of blood, or else just still too dizzy from the screams to find their way home. The shadows were velvety around the edges of the scene, stars invisible somewhere beyond the reflected lights of the city, the smog that covered everything, but down here there was still a tangible darkness and somewhere in the darkness was the eater of souls that had caused this latest massacre.

There had been another outbreak this morning; a man with no previous history of mental illness had killed his family and laughed while he was doing it; and now there was this. Two souls extracted in one day and for every soul devoured there were another two or three or five or six or dozen lives lost in the first victim’s ensuing killing spree.

Angel caught the shoulder of one of the stunned onlookers; a twenty-something in a suit just edged with fine spatterings of blood. “The guy who did this? Did you know him?”

“Yes. It’s Jim from Accounts. But he never… He never showed any sign of… I saw him an hour ago in the office and he was fine then.”

“An hour ago?” Angel echoed disbelievingly. He looked at his watch. “It’s after ten.”

The man shrugged. “Hey, we all want the same promotion, but I never thought he wanted it this badly. You have to log the hours or else you don’t get noticed but… Who knew he was waiting to pop like that?”

“He wasn’t. He didn’t do this. It was…” There was no time to explain. “Where do you work? Where did he come from?”

The onlooker pointed across the street. “Just over there. Callan & Sanchez. He pulled out of the parking garage and came straight here. That’s his car right there.”

Angel glanced at the vehicle and saw the erratic tire marks that led up to the place where he’d stopped. Jim from Accounts had gotten into his car, driven badly across to this bar and then killed half a dozen co-workers. That meant the soul-eater had got to him somewhere between leaving the building and entering his car. That was the freshest lead they’d had so far and he didn’t hesitate.

As he ran across the road, he could hear Wesley and Lorne in the back of his mind reminding him that he couldn’t kill this thing, only a human could do that, and that killing it anyway would lose all these people their souls forever, and that, by the way, he had a soul too, and was probably on balance more dangerous than any demon without it. But he wasn’t in the mood to think himself out of taking action. Right now, he wanted to be sticking a sword in something fleshy that bled; something that deserved to bleed for what it had done to these people; for making them murderers against their wills; for making them have to carry the crushing weight of guilt for the rest of their lives. It was going to be there with them whenever they opened their eyes, every morning the first thing they saw, perhaps a slow drift from hoping it was all just a nightmare, or dreams of a family they could, for a few precious seconds, imagine were still alive. And then there would be the reality of their crime; the screams and the memory of the blood splashing them; the terror in the eyes of people who have loved them.

Angel saw a little girl of twelve opening the door to him, the wonder in her eyes, the absence of any glimmer of fear as she said, “Liam.”

His own smile; a demon’s idea of what was reassuring; the triumph at his own cleverness as he smelt the blood in her veins and heard the pulse of her heartbeat. “Will you not invite me in, little sister?”

She smiled with such pleasure; eyes red with weeping for him now alight with joy. “You’ve come back to us an angel.”

“So I have, but you have to invite me in, sweetheart, or else I'm doomed to stay out here in the cold forever.”

The smile was even wider. “Come in, Liam. Come in…”

And then there was the sensation of her blood in his mouth; her scream stifled by his jaws at her throat.

That was what it gifted you, when some demon stole your soul, the memory of all those murders, and no way to take it back, no way to bring them back, only atonement and more atonement and all the time knowing that there could be no atonement for crimes as terrible as these…

He stopped in his tracks as he saw the glow of phosphorescence on the wall next to the far parking bay. A woman wouldn’t have parked there, not unless she had no choice. Women knew instinctively or learned early to avoid the dark corners of buildings after hours. Men had to learn it the hard way. This demon was wounded then; perhaps it had sucked the soul from some street kid with a knife; perhaps that was why it was sticking to businessmen now. Perhaps it was feeding so fast to try to repair a wound struck with some poor bastard’s last soulled breath.

He thought of Gunn and shivered; knowing it could have been him out there, prey to this creature, only able to get in a wounding blow before it stole his soul from him. It was a miracle the guy had survived as long as he had; living on the streets, trying to keep his people safe and at the same time trying to get himself killed.

Sometimes Angel thought that he and his fellow investigators had too many of the wrong kind of things in common. He and Gunn had both murdered their own sisters; he as a vampire, and Gunn because Alonna had become one. Either way they had family blood on their hands; just as he and Wesley were both equally guilty of – if not killing a member of their adopted families – having desired a family member to know that they wanted them dead, which seemed almost crueller. He could have snapped Wesley’s neck but had chosen to use a method that would alert onlookers in time to stop him, leaving Wesley with the memory of how close he’d come, how much Angel had wanted it, how much rage and hate there was for him now in the breast of the man he’d called a friend. Wesley had been equally cold with Gunn; listened to his explanation and then picked up that knife, driven it in deep, rational enough to avoid any major organs while deranged enough to use it in the first place. He’d never even tried to justify it. Just said that Gunn had known and let her die and nothing would ever be all right again. It had been an explanation not an excuse. He’d never tried to excuse his attempt on Wesley’s life either. How could you justify trying to smother a man who had been left to bleed to a slow cold death for hours, who now hung to life by a gossamer thread, and had been left too voiceless to even call for help as you suffocated him?

The difference was that he could blame his nastier behaviour on the residue of Angelus, should he feel the urge, but Wesley didn’t have that excuse; he only had his own inner darkness to condemn. Tough to be a guy who believed in absolute right and yet had proved to be humanly fallible on more than one occasion. To be someone only permitted to do the right thing for the right reasons who nevertheless did the wrong thing for the wrong one from time to time. Angel had felt bad about sleeping with Darla, it was true, but although the effects of him doing so could have been catastrophic for all the people he loved, he suspected that he’d felt less guilt about it than Wesley had about his affair with Lilah. On some level Wesley had probably believed he deserved all that misery over her death; the extra agony piled on of having to behead her for what turned out to be no good reason; the discovery that even after death she couldn’t find peace, soul already sold to Wolfram & Hart for all eternity. Angel had lost Darla, and been left with Connor, his miraculous son; the price he’d paid was having to give him up, and he’d made everyone pay that price along with him in the havoc he’d wreaked on their memories. Losing him, like losing Cordelia, and Fred, and Doyle, still hurt every day; a new pain to freshen up his cocktail of old guilt. Sometimes it felt like the Powers weren’t so much godlike beings with humanity’s best interests at heart as puppet masters who just liked to jerk his strings to see if they could make him dance again. Another sick joke they hadn’t quite finished telling yet.

He was tracking as he thought, sliding the sword out from inside his duster as he walked, hoping he met up with the demon before he met up with some cop who would want to arrest him for having an offensive weapon. The drops of greenish ooze glowed in the darkness, reminding him of the blood of that Kungai – the first demon he and Wesley had ever fought together in LA, back in the days when Wesley had been that skinny, unshaven kid trying to look cool and butch in his black leather pants and only succeeding in looking like some Dial-A-Twink gay fantasy. Not that he’d ever tell Wesley that, of course. Even with four and a half years distance between that Wesley and this one he suspected some memories probably still made the man wince; and a guy didn’t get his eyes lasered and overhaul his entire wardrobe, not to mention maintaining that whole post-traumatic-stress-disorder-fuelled workout regime more than a year after his throat had been cut, if he was happy with the person that he’d used to be. He supposed that was the problem they all had, really; the cement that held them together. Gunn hadn’t wanted to go back to being a street kid who had never finished High School; Angel and Spike had centuries worth of murder and mayhem they would sometimes really like to forget about; Lorne’s idea of hell was his home dimension; and Wesley didn’t want to be reminded every time he looked in the mirror that he was the same guy the other kids wouldn’t eat lunch with. They were all trying to find atonement and at the same time trying to escape who they’d once been with varying degrees of success. Misfits all. Bad son. Bad poet. Bad watcher. No doubt Gunn considered himself a bad brother, as he hadn’t managed to keep his sister safe forever, and there was no question that everyone on Pylea, especially Lorne’s nearest and dearest, had considered him as bad a member of the Deathwok Clan as any horned demon could be.

To the uninformed eye we must look like such a bunch of losers, Angel thought to himself.

The guys in love with Buffy in the Undead corner. The guys who had once been in love with Fred in the Still-Have-A-Pulse corner. Lorne somewhere in between. So much psychic baggage between them it was a wonder any of them could still stagger under its weight. Angel’s father had been dead for more than two hundred and twenty years and it was still pretty much an even race between him and Wesley as to who would get a ‘Well done’ out of his old man first. The same went for who was going to be the first to get a maternal hug from his dear old mum out of Spike and Lorne; in fact he’d have had to put Spike as a clear winner there as despite the small disadvantage of having been staked to death by her only son, Spike’s mother had at least been trying to show Spike some affection when he’d killed her; something that was never going to happen with Lorne’s horned and bearded dam. Okay, it had been entirely the wrong kind of affection but it had at least been affection all the same. Lorne’s parents were going to go to whatever grave his kind went to on Pylea still convinced that they’d eaten the wrong son. Gunn only didn’t have the same blood-relative issues the rest of them did because vampires had done for his entire family; including the sister he’d then been forced to kill.

Perhaps to the informed eye we look like a bunch of losers as well….

Angel tightened his grip on the sword as he saw that the splashes of green ectoplasm were closer together now; the creature having slowed down, presumably. He comforted himself with the thought that even if they were technically a bunch of losers, they were still champions. Champion losers? This isn’t helping. We save the world on a regular basis. Shouldn’t that give us some Get Out Of Psychic Trauma Free cards? Not to mention exempting us from being losers?

Then he sensed it; demon blood and the sound of a demon heartbeat. And something else, a background wail, thin and piteous, the sound of souls calling out for deliverance, for restoration from the green pit in which they were slowly being consumed.

Angel rounded the corner and saw it for the first time; the creature haunting all of their dreams; just as Lorne had described it, huge and horned and fanged and scaly and oh so overdue for dismemberment. Angel raised his sword just as the creature raised a clawed hand; as he brought down the cutting blade, time slowed to the rhythmic thump of its soul-energy fuelled heart, an instant thick and black as treacle in which he was suspended like a fly in amber.

***

Wesley groaned as he picked up another book. He suspected the only reason he was moving from home to office in the morning and back from office to home at night was that he hoped the change of scenery might shake loose some inspiration. His actions were the same in either place. Drink too much coffee, look around for a sugar rush they couldn’t afford, and research, research, research. His flat wasn’t the most palatial place; in fact it was somewhere he would have disdained to live in even a year before; but it was his own. He didn’t rent it on money paid to him by Wolfram & Hart. All that money was gone and he refused to regret it.

He had proven when he set up in business by himself that he could make a living as the rogue demon hunter he had once claimed to be. Therefore in business with Angel, Gunn, Lorne and Spike, there ought to be a living enough for all of them. More importantly, they ought to be able to do some good; something they all needed as much as the air they breathed – needed more in the case of the vampires who didn’t actually need air to breathe only some blood to drink and a way of avoiding direct sunlight, stakes, and beheading. And, come to think of it, he wasn’t sure how much Spike needed to do good or what his motivation for doing good actually was. He didn’t seem to be seeking redemption in the way that Angel was; perhaps he was still hoping to prove himself to Buffy; either way he was more useful than not and one of them now. He missed Illyria but she had stepped into another dimension months before and hadn’t yet returned. He still hoped that she might. She was not restful company, but she made him feel useful. In his own way he thought he had been helping her. It was probably a sign of progress that she had felt the need to explore some of the worlds she had once conquered; or possibly a sign of insanity. With Illyria it was sometimes hard to tell.

Wesley knew they had to be close to finding a solution. The spell for mass re-ensouling had to be in one of these books somewhere. Lorne had found the incantation for forcing the essence of the demon into a fitting receptacle and Gunn and Lorne had been in the home straight of finishing the receptacle as Wesley left the office. It wasn’t exactly a thing of beauty but it matched the diagram in the book and in theory it ought to be able to hold the essence of a soul-eating demon at least for a little while.

In the meantime, another day – another death or six. It wouldn’t have been as bad if the damned demon just killed its victim, but by robbing the victim of his soul he unleashed a monster on the rest of the unsuspecting populace. A family killed by a man who might not even want his soul back as with it would come all the remorse he currently wasn’t capable of feeling. Perhaps trying to recover these souls was a mistake that was delaying the important work of stopping this creature. Wesley knew he was only so fixated on trying to get the souls back before the demon was killed because of Angel; because he had before him every day the proof of the difference that evanescent intangible thing humans called a ‘soul’ could make; the difference between a monster and a champion; between a mass murderer and one who had saved the lives of thousands. Given how much good Angel had done since having his soul restored to him, who was he to say that those other victims, now currently splattered with the blood of the friends and family that they had killed, weren’t equally capable of performing great acts of contrition? Perhaps they were destined to find cures for diseases, for ending world famine. He didn’t know and he didn’t feel he had the right to just write them off.

As a good Englishman, Wesley knew all about the art of compromise. He did acknowledge that his judgment was less good when he was a sleep-deprived zombie and that a good night’s sleep was sometimes the only way to refresh the mental batteries, but on the other hand there was no one else who could handle the research. And research was the answer to this particular problem. Without the book knowledge, it would have been a case of Spike and Angel out with big axes trying to cut the head off a demon they couldn’t kill. It had to be beheaded by something with a heartbeat, or to quote the archaic text exactly, by a being with breath in its body and a pulse in its neck. That meant him and Gunn. But if they killed the demon before they had performed the ritual for extracting the undigested souls it had stolen, the souls would be lost forever. They had to be exorcized from the demon while the demon’s heart was still beating, and they had to be set ‘winging their way home’ by an incantation so secret and rare that there were seventeen different references to it and as yet no record of the actual words necessary. Given the creature’s tremendous size, strength, and ferocity, Wesley was putting a lot of faith in Lorne’s hope that they could reduce it to its spirit form, trap it in a secure container, and then say the incantation which would free the souls and send them back to their proper owners. Then, according to the woodcuts, the demon could be returned to its proper form, where it would be momentarily woozy, and therefore weak and disorientated enough for mere humans to kill. The box wouldn’t hold it for long, even the most optimistic texts made that clear; this wasn’t a secure container or a vessel in which it could be imprisoned for a thousand years; this was a stopgap that would give them minutes at best, but Gunn had proven to have a gift for carpentry that had left Wesley’s skills in that area a long way behind. Gunn had a better eye and a more exact hand for cutting the wood and was less inclined to worry about getting it wrong. He just did it and after a while it started to come out right and he kept doing it and it kept coming out right. Wesley had been more than a little envious of that skill. Unlike the legalese in Gunn’s brain; the upgrade for which they had all paid such a high price; this was an innate skill, and as someone who had few innate skills of his own, Wesley could only watch and admire and try not to be jealous as Gunn demonstrated a hitherto unrealised ability to dove-tail-joint fiddly pieces of wood together. The mystical elements were still a closed book to Gunn but Lorne had been supervising that part of it, and between them they had been making definite headway when he left the office, and had looked as if they were going to keep working on it until it was finished.

Wesley felt as if everyone else had done his part and he was the only one lagging behind at present. It had taken him days to gather even this much information and the texts he now had access to were all maddeningly vague about the nature of the actual incantations he needed to memorize. Given the delicate nature of the magic to be performed, he had preferred the safer method of trying to extract the souls from the trapped demon into an orb, where they would be held securely while he worked on sending them back to their owners. But, he had wasted two days trying to create a conduit from the main orb to the crystals with orb-like qualities before realizing that this just wasn’t going to work. Set loose from the demon, the souls would naturally spring apart from one another; but if they were magicked into an orb they might become contaminated with one another’s essence, especially as some of the souls released might be only partial, some of their energy consumed by the demon. The tricky task of sending them all back simultaneously was going to have to be done in situ and with the souls floating free; and, if their home-made demon catcher box didn’t work or only worked for a very limited period of time, then the ritual would also have to be performed while fighting a still very corporeal and undoubtedly pissed off Animadras demon.

He was as aware as the next man – presuming the next man was Angel – that the roots of his over-conscientiousness probably came from all those failed attempts to make his father love him. Yes, in the past, he probably had worked so very hard to try and learn another language, to understand another aspect of demonology so that something would be written on his report card that would make his father say ‘Well done’. It had never worked, of course, and he knew now that it never would. Knew it intellectually, anyway, he wasn’t sure if his subconscious had completely grasped how utterly dead the prospect of ever receiving praise from his father now was.

“Just so you know…Angel will be sunbathing first,” Wesley told his subconscious helpfully, in case it wasn’t quite there yet. He suspected it just rolled up into a tighter little ball when he tried to confront it with the unrealistic nature of its hopes. Curled up in the dark with its eyes closed fast and its hands over its ears – like a little boy locked under the stairs in the dark who was afraid of the spiders and the rats and all the creatures he’d been studying in those books that could be in there with him.

Grimacing, Wesley shifted a book off his lap where it was starting to pinch painfully at his groin. He was still in his work clothes, but he was at least on top of the bed and had showered and shaved before lying here. Admittedly that was partly because if he did end up pulling an all-nighter he still would smell of soap in the morning and not just of books and aspirin – one had to take extra precautions when one’s boss was a vampire with a particularly good sense of smell. He was also at least on the bed, meaning that if he were asked if he had gone to bed last night he could say that he had. He could even say that he’d had an early night as it was only just gone midnight and here he was. The fact he’d taken six books, a notepad and his favourite pen to bed with him was surely neither here nor there.

He just wanted to find a few more answers before he switched off the lamp and went to sleep. There were already six people in lunatic asylums; seventeen dead. With millions of souled people in Los Angeles this creature would have no reason to move on of its own accord. It would need to be stopped and it was his job to find out how it could be stopped. It was also his job to find out the right spell to restore the stolen souls to their original owners. As he often did at these points, Wesley tried not to think about Fred, and how she would have loved this problem, trying to find the physical manifestation of the human soul, to detect its pulse in the ether; how she would have looked all lit up with excitement…

No point in thinking about that now. He didn’t need a distraction like that at a time like this. Time was running out for the next victim of that demon, and for all he knew the next victim could be him. Lorne had certainly sensed something nasty coming up for him in the near future if he couldn’t avert it.

Looking around at his flat and all the weapons it contained he realized that he would not be a good candidate for losing his soul. If several years of training at Watcher College had taught him only how to research thoroughly, wear a tuxedo with a reasonable degree of style, and give a very convincing impression of an annoying little twerp, five years of working for and with Angel had turned him into a fairly efficient killing machine. He liked to think he had hung onto his humanity through everything that had happened, but his hands certainly weren’t bloodless these days, and he was adept with sword, axe, handgun, shotgun, crossbow, knife, and basically anything that had a sharp edge at one end and a handle at the other. He wouldn’t make for a good enemy, as Gunn had already found once to his cost. He certainly wouldn’t make for a good soulless killer with the face of a friend. If he lost his soul there was a good chance that Gunn and Lorne might end up losing their lives. He imagined Spike or Angel could probably take him but even they might let him get too close with a stake if they didn’t realize in time what he’d become. That would be a pretty sorry end to a career spent trying to promote the cause of good and right – to end up slaughtering a handful of its champions.

Pinching the bridge of his nose to try to stop the headache for at least a minute or two, Wesley bent back to the text.

“ ‘Spell for restoring the stolen memory’ – I wonder if that was the one Lorne used on Cordelia? ‘Spell for restoring the stolen past’. How is that different from a memory restoration spell? Do they mean a literally stolen past? Someone else living one’s past? ‘Spell for restoring the stolen future’. ‘Spell for restoring the soul of one or several beings’. ‘Spell for restoring the…’ What…? Did it just…?” Flicking back to the previous page Wesley stared at the words in disbelief. Aramaic. Not even particularly faded print. ‘Spell for restoring the soul of one or several beings’. He read through it feverishly. “Mandrake. Feverfew. Focusing crystal of Imershah. Sorrel. Henbane. Lugwort. Bodily fluid of a soulled being. I do hope they mean blood and not anything else. Bodily fluid of a soulless being. Another vampire hunt, what fun. White willow to ease the pain of passing. Essence of newt. Receptacle of Spiritus Perditus to capture the stolen souls or else Pentagram of Pelador and powder of Ashrakan to speed souls upon their way…’ It was possible. The ingredients weren’t inexpensive but they weren’t so difficult to get hold of that it would involve a Grail quest to find them. Most magic shops would stock at least some of these ingredients.

Wesley picked up the phone and dialled. “Lorne? Is that you? Is Gunn still there, too? Damn. Oh, but you’ve finished it? That’s wonderful. Yes, I’ve found it. The spell. Morton’s Mystikal Apothecary of all things. Can I double check the memory restoration spell with you? If that’s the same one that worked on Cordelia I think we can assume this one is kosher as well. Do you have a pen…?”

Ten minutes later the accuracy of Morton’s Mystikal Apothecary had been confirmed and Lorne was in possession of the full spell, the ingredients for which he promised to purchase en route to Gunn’s place before arriving at Wesley’s, complete with demon essence holding box, human demon fighter, and any stray demon-crippling vampires he could pick up on the way.

Grinning in relief, Wesley lay back on the bed and wondered if he could grab an hour of sleep before Lorne arrived. The empath demon couldn’t possibly be with him in much less time than that and he really could do with a nap…

The knock on the door made him sigh with regret but not surprise. He sometimes wondered if they were all under a special kind of curse that meant their sleep was eternally rationed. He presumed there were people in the world who lived lifestyles that entitled them to the full eight hours, but presumably none of them had a lot to do with vampires.

“Hey, Wes, it’s me.”

It was a relief to hear Angel’s voice and Wesley hurried to open the door. “Good timing,” he told him. “I found the spell.”

Angel was looking a little worse for wear, green goo spattered on one arm and on the sword he was wiping off on his duster. “I think I winged it, but it was stronger than me. And fast.”

“You saw it?” Wesley left Angel to follow him in and picked up his battered copy of Astartian Mythologia Demonicus. “Did it look like this?”

Angel shut the door, bolted it and put the chain on. “Let me see.”

Only as the vampire was leaning over his shoulder to look did it occur to Wesley that there was no reason he could think of why they needed to be quite so securely barricaded into his flat. “Did it follow you?”

“Maybe.” Angel flicked through the pages, heedless of the goo on his fingers. “That’s the guy. Big, ugly, stupid, greedy.”

“And evil.” Wesley took the book from him and reached for a handkerchief, wiping off the gloop and shooting Angel a reproachful look.

“Oh yeah.” Angel was smiling oddly. “Let’s never forget evil, eh, Wes? Evil is so important.”

Something in his tone was…off. And Angel had just had an encounter with the soul-eating demon. Oh no. No. No. No. Please let this be paranoia kicking in – let that demon in the Hyperion have been right all along and Wesley have a serious problem with paranoia – and don’t let it be the instincts of someone who knew his friend so well he could tell at once when things weren’t as they should be….

Wesley put down the book he was holding, the sudden increase in his heartbeat his first warning that something was telling every instinct he possessed to… He looked at Angel and the vampire smiled at him. Not a nice smile. Not Angel’s friendly grin as they shared a joke. A prey smile to a victim. And, of course, with his enhanced hearing the vampire would be able to hear the way that increased Wesley’s heartbeat still further. Wesley looked at the bed where his cellphone was still sitting, at the bolted door behind Angel which he could never reach before the vampire snapped his neck, and then he thought of the bathroom, with its small window that he was nevertheless still thin and limber enough to wriggle out of if he had to, and right now he really thought he had to.

Trying to keep his tone casual, he said, “There’s blood in the refrigerator if you want it, Angel, or coffee if you’re needing as much caffeine as I am right now. I just need to…”

“No, you don’t.” Angel was at the bathroom door before he could reach it, a reminder of how scary vampire speed could be when you were the one it was being used against. “I don’t think you need to use the facilities, Wes.” He sniffed him deliberately. “And you’re already all minty fresh and sweet-smelling of shower gel and shampoo. So, the only possible reason you could have for heading for that bathroom is to get away from…me.” He bared his fangs in a smile as his forehead ridged and his eyes turned yellow. “And why on earth would you want to do that…?”

Wesley dived for the weapons cabinet. Even as he rolled and reached for the crossbow he kept ready loaded, he knew he wasn’t going to be able to bring himself to use a stake, but if he could just wing him –

The punch set him spinning and he hit the edge of the bed hard. As he rebounded off it, Angel – no, it was Angelus and now they both knew it – kicked him hard in the ribs, lifting him off the floor and into the coffee table. He cried out as he hit the wood, heard it splinter and snatched for a leg, a shard, anything, but before he could grab to defend himself, Angelus was on him, pulling him up by the shirt and punching him hard in the face. The first punch felt as if it had broken his jaw; the next backhand seemed to be something Angelus was just doing for the fun of watching his head snap round like that; the next one he weighed up before landing, making sure Wesley’s left cheekbone got as hard a pounding as his jaw. Then he dropped him on the remnants of the coffee table from a good enough height to make landing really hurt.

His tone was frighteningly conversational as he yanked him up by the shirt: “So, Wes, you being an ex-Watcher I'm sure you remember my M.O – the whole torture, maiming, rape and murder thing? Carving crosses into people’s faces? Keeping them alive for oh so many days while they begged me to end it all? Chains and whips and red hot pokers. All the classics. The question is which form of excruciating torment is best suited to an uptight British guy who has way more complexes than he’s had hot dinners? Because, let’s face it, Wes, old boy, anyone only has to look at you to see the hot dinners have been in kind of short supply.” Angelus dropped him again and Wesley could barely stifle a moan.

Pain was singing from his ear to every tooth in his jaw, head thumping, face throbbing. It was taking every shred of strength he had to hang onto consciousness. Wesley reached for the remnants of the table, trying to pull himself up, and the toe of Angelus’s boot landed hard in his ribs, kicking him into the corner. Pain exploded against his back and ribs as he hit his bookcase with punishing force, splintering the wood and cracking his head on the corner in a way that made the room lurch sickeningly. He felt wet warmth behind his ear and knew he was bleeding; the shriek in his kidneys would fade in a minute, he hoped, but for the moment he could only gasp with the agony of it, snatching a breath back into his starved lungs while trying not to sob with the pain.

Angelus continued conversationally: “What manner of extreme nastiness is going to coordinate best with your general sense of failure and that borderline deathwish? It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? Does impalement go well with chronic insomnia? Or should I be finding something in the mutilation line to match your inferiority complex?”

As Angelus strode towards him, a concentrated force of cruelty, no conscience, and ruthless determination wearing the face of his friend, Wesley dragged himself up onto his knees, looking around for a weapon. The broken bookcase had snapped into sections and he reached for a sharp piece of wood, a ready-made stake, blinking the blood from his eyes as he pulled back his arm. Angelus’s hand closed on his wrist and twisted it viciously. “Naughty, naughty, Wes. I’m going to have to put you over my knee and spank you if you can’t behave.”

Wesley kicked out with everything he had, catching Angelus in the thigh. Although the demon’s legs buckled he didn’t let go of Wesley’s wrist, instead using the momentum of Wesley’s kick to slam the man into the wall, before twisting his arm behind his back as he shoved Wesley’s face against the stone. Wesley couldn’t stop the cry of pain escaping at the bruising pain of his cheekbone slamming against the wall and his wrist being so savagely twisted. He tried to elbow the demon off with his free arm, but Angelus grabbed his other wrist and yanked it behind his back as well, his grip crushingly strong as he whispered in his ear: “Now you really are going to be punished. Let’s see if all that training means anything when it comes to the crunch.”

As he held Wesley’s two wrists together with one hand Angelus jerked him up by the hair and slammed him against the wall so hard he knocked the last of the breath from his body. Dazed and bleeding, Wesley heard the sing of a belt being pulled loose from its keepers then the leather was biting hard into his wrists. As he tried to get free he was thrown against the wall again with casual savagery and the belt loop yanked tight enough to make the buckle cut into his skin, wrists secured. Another slam against the wall which made white light explode agonizingly in front of his eyes and a cut open up on his forehead; then as he clung to consciousness by a thread and the warm blood trickled into his eye, Angelus threw him across the room onto the bed. Landing with a breathless thump on the mattress, Wesley tried to twist free from his bonds, having to blink hard to see through the blood in his eye. He looked over his shoulder in time to see Angelus advancing on him with a malevolent smile on his face that chilled him to the marrow of his bones…

“Time for us both to find out, Wes. Let’s see if Wesley Wyndam-Pryce really can take it like a man…”

***

“Would you believe we spend all our time hunting vampires and the one ingredient we can’t get is the bodily fluid of a soulless being?” Gunn demanded. Not for the first time he wished that the elevator occasionally worked in Wesley’s apartment building or that the guy had got himself a place on the ground floor. He was getting seriously sick of having to drag his ass up these stairs a dozen times a month.

Spike shrugged. “Told you it would bite you all in the nuts one day being so pernickety about cleaning your weapons.”

“There’s supposed to be a nest in that abandoned warehouse by the docks.” Normally there was nothing Gunn would have liked better than to get axing some vamps; it was all part of his need to renew himself as the street fighter he’d once been; the guy who held onto his integrity, knew who the bad guys were and didn’t get them off in court; but tonight he just felt his back ache at the thought of yet another battle having to be fought when they were already exhausted. “We’ll have to make sure we get some blood from one of them before we kill it.”

Lorne pulled a face. “A little too Danse Macabre for my taste, Charles.”

“You need to get a mental lock on that open door policy of yours,” Gunn told him. “We don’t negotiate with the bad guys any more. We’re back to chopping their heads off and asking questions later. Keeping it simple keeps it…”

“Quiet.” Spike held up a hand.

“What’s up?” Gunn whispered.

Spike scented the air again. “Something’s…off. Or else Angel and Wes are… No, too much pain. Damn…” He turned to Gunn. “Do you have a key for Wesley’s place? I think something’s wrong.”

Gunn called Wesley’s name three times and when that got no response used the doorkey from the office to open the door. To his surprise it swung open before he even turned the key in the lock. He heard Lorne’s intake of breath and shot a glance at Spike in time to see the vampire wince as his senses clearly picked up a stronger aroma of the scent that was troubling him. Gunn gave the door a push and saw that the room was in disarray, furniture overturned and smashed but the lamp was lit beside the bed and lying on the bed was…

“Wesley…!”

It felt as if everything went into slow motion as he ran forward, as if some more of Illyria’s time-freezing mojo was whammying him even though he knew it wasn’t, an endless instant when he didn’t know if Wesley was alive or dead, only that Cordy and Fred were already lost forever and Wesley was lying there naked, curled up on his side with his back to the door, on top of the bed not under the covers, with his hands tied behind his back and all those cuts and bruises that were…everywhere.

“He’s still alive.” Spike spoke from behind Gunn. “I can hear his heartbeat.” A fractional pause before he added: “But he's taken one hell of a beating.”

Then Gunn was at the bed, with no knowledge of actually crossing the room, turning Wesley over, heart lurching at the way his head lolled so limply.

“His neck isn’t broken.” Spike had either developed mind reading powers, or else needed the reassurance as well.

Gunn found himself half sitting on the bed cradling a bound and naked Wesley in his arms; his own heart a rat-a-tat of panic. Wesley’s body was a delicate pallet of contusions; every shade a bruise could be imprinted on far too much of his bare skin. Gunn touched the one on his jaw first, a knockout punch, angrily purple, then traced the cut across his cheekbone, the matching cut on his forehead, wincing at everything he saw. He met Lorne’s gaze and the green demon was shaking his head, murmuring ‘No, no, no…” under his breath.

The bite wound at Wesley’s throat looked fresh and nasty and explained the ghostly pallor, the grey shadows under the eyes. Anaemia. In their line of work, unfortunately they saw a lot of it.

Gunn undid the belt lashed around Wesley’s wrists, wincing at the way the buckle had bitten right into the skin, then looked down at the body he held; so strange to see Wesley naked, this vulnerable. The man killed demons for a living; a leanly muscled often emotionally guarded destroyer of evil. He took his blows in the field like everyone else. Gunn was used to seeing him with a cut or bruised face; wincing a little from healing ribs or a wrenched back, bandaging a wound to his arm as they planned their next strategy. It never seemed to make him appear vulnerable; it was part of the warrior thing they’d all signed up for. They got hurt a lot and that was something they accepted; bruises and cuts just part of the job. But this was different – these injuries weren’t the by-products of battle, they were deliberate, sustained. Someone had wanted to hurt him and had taken his time about doing so.

He gazed down the length of Wesley’s body and his first thought was that Wesley would hate them all crowding around him like this, seeing him nude, seeing him unconscious; the second was how scarily skinny the guy still was. The shoulders were muscled it was true, and the upper arms leanly muscled also, a hint of strength across a chest that wasn’t overly narrow, but that was it. There was a hollow where other people kept their stomachs; his skin the thinnest covering over bones barely cushioned by any hint of flesh. There were fingermarks on his hips; deep mauve angry bruises from someone gripping hard. The contusions across his ribs were almost beautiful, sunbursts of red. Someone had really done a number on him. But the bruises on his ass were the ones that really frightened Gunn. Wesley naked, hands bound behind his back, on the bed. Why was he naked? Why had someone been gripping him by the hips? Why were there those damned ugly bruises across Wesley’s skinny white English butt?

He looked to Lorne for reassurance and only got sorrow and anger and a lot of other things he didn’t want to see in the horned demon’s expressive red eyes.

Someone kept saying: “He’s alive. All that matters is that he’s still alive…” It took Gunn a moment to realize that he was the one saying it.

Lorne found his voice with what seemed to be difficulty: “Yes. Breathing in and out. That’s the big difference.”

Gunn looked over his shoulder and saw Spike still standing in the doorway. “I invite you in,” he said.

Spike made no move to enter the room. “It was Angelus. Better get Wes to the hospital before he wakes up.”

“Angelus?” Gunn stared at him in horror. “What the hell are you…?”

“This place stinks of Angel and Angel on his worst day wouldn’t do to Wes what was… done to him. It has to be Angelus.”

Gunn’s mind stuck there for a moment. Angelus. The demon who hated them for being Angel’s bridge to humanity. The demon who probably hated Wesley most of all for being the guy who had helped trap him last time. The guy who had distracted Angelus while Faith injected herself with Orpheus; the guy who had put himself up for what could have been a fatal beating at Angelus’s hands to get the job done. The guy who had evidently unsuspectingly opened his door to Angel only to find himself alone with a sadistic creep of a soulless demon who had taken his revenge in full measure for what Gunn was afraid must have been a good long time.

Gunn reached for the sheet to wrap Wesley in, cradling his head awkwardly, trying to gather all of his body at once and finding it wasn’t possible. Legs too long; body too heavy. Strange to discover that someone as close to skin and bone as Wesley still felt heavy when you tried to lift him. Gunn looked over at Spike again. “Help me with him.”

Reluctantly, the vampire stepped over the threshold, flinching from what seemed to the smell of the place.

“Surely you can keep your damned bloodlust under control until…?”

Spike said quietly, “The blood isn’t so bad. It’s the stink of pain and pleasure in the air. Too many hours of both.”

“Let’s not talk about it.” Gunn tightened his grip on Wesley. “Let’s just get him to the hospital and…”

“Pretend it never happened?” Spike took the other side of Wesley’s now sheet-wrapped body. “Count me in.”

Wesley groaned then and opened his eyes, wincing as he did so, as if a hundred aches and pains awoke with him, blinking in confusion, moistening his cut lips, tasting the blood, only then focusing on Gunn’s face. “Charles?”

Gunn said gently, “Hey, English.”

“It was Angelus. The soul-eater must have attacked Angel.” His lip split open and he winced at the pain, licked the blood off tentatively. He squinted at the bedside clock. “I wasn’t out for long. A few minutes. You must have scared him off. I think we can still get his soul back but we have to move fast.”

“Something you can’t really do right now,” Spike pointed out quietly. “What with you being a pint or so of blood short and bruised all to bugg…” The silence following that hastily swallowed word was truly ghastly.

Wesley said evenly: “He didn’t take that much blood. I don’t think any bones are broken. No organs ruptured. He didn’t want to kill me, just make me…hurt. And I'm the only one who can do the spell to release the souls.” He focused on Lorne, and Gunn wondered why he should be shocked that naked, bruised, bleeding Wesley sounded almost the same as fit healthy Wesley; the same clipped quiet British voice; the same authority in his tone. His voice was just a little raspier, a little hoarser, the bruises around his throat explaining that. “It’s not a spell that can be performed by a demon. Even a good demon.”

“My horns notwithstanding, he drank your blood…” Lorne pointed out.

“Not much. He’d already fed. He was just making a point with me about how easily he could kill or turn me if he wanted to. He wasn’t really hungry.” Wesley struggled into a sitting position. “Can you hand me some clothes?”

“Wes…” Gunn didn’t know what words were needed here to get Wesley on the right track, but he knew the man needed to be in a hospital. Quite apart from the blood loss and the physical trauma, he had to be in deep shock. “Angelus beat the crap out of you…”

“Yes.” Wesley looked up at him briefly, as if they were discussing the weather. “That’s what he does. Now we have to get Angel’s soul back or we’re going to lose him for good. There is no magic spell that can restore it once that creature has digested it. It will be dissipated into energy and irretrievable.”

It was Spike who said, “He fucked you.” It wasn’t a question.

The word did at least make Wesley snatch a quick breath; they saw him miss that solitary beat, the movement of his chest and then he was reaching for his pants. “He did what he thought would bother me the most. It’s not important in the wider scheme of things.”

“Wesley….” Lorne spoke gently. “It doesn’t do any good to…”

“Waste time here agonizing about things we can’t alter when Angel’s soul is about to be lost forever? I couldn’t agree more.” Wesley pulled on his jeans as if the denim covering every bruise was enough to make them no longer relevant.

“You don’t just walk away from…” Gunn began.

Wesley cut him off with a flash of what looked like genuine annoyance from his blue-grey eyes. “Actually you do. All it takes is getting up and putting one foot in front of the other.” He pointed to the closet. “There are tranquilliser darts in there and guns. Spike, can you pick up Angel’s trail? It should be fresh and I think we need to confine him first. Whether we can retrieve Angel’s soul or not, we owe it to the world not to leave Angelus at large…”

Gunn listened to the directions Wesley gave, voice just as clipped and unemotional as if this was some sewer demon they were going after and as if he were in perfect health. He had gotten to his feet before they could stop him, and although he had swayed, although Gunn could damned near hear the hissing in his ears, Wesley had simply pulled on a t-shirt and sweater and shoes with dogged determination and gritted teeth, and then, as they continued to gaze at him anxiously instead of doing what he said, limped over to the closet and started pulling out the box of tranquilliser darts himself. That had galvanised them into action. As the going-to-the-hospital or Wesley-staying-in-bed-to-recover scenarios were clearly not an option there was nothing else to do except what he wanted. While Wesley loaded guns and handed them out, Lorne found the first aid kit and did a quick patch up job on Wesley’s neck. Wesley thanked him politely enough but distantly, as if it wasn’t really important that he was oozing blood from those two puncture marks although he recognized that it made Lorne feel better to do something about it.

Gunn knew that he, like Angel, was a natural born leader. Spike was a natural born loner. Lorne was a natural born karaoke bar host with the bad luck to be born into a demon dimension where there wasn’t any music. Wesley was a natural born Watcher; Spike had been right about that. Confronted with something new and dangerous his first instinct was to gather more information, to reach for a dusty old book; he hated to go into a situation without a plan, always wanted to think everything through, to think himself to a standstill in the past, weigh up all the options until he paralysed himself with the conflicting possibilities. Ironically, cruel and unreasonable although it had been on Angel’s part, firing Wesley had been a watershed in the ex-Watcher’s development. That was when they’d found out that Wesley also had it in him to be a leader.

Gunn had spent a long time looking at popular culture to get mirror images of his companions. Angel was surprisingly easy and even lived in a close approximation to a batcave. Name any superhero with uncanny senses and a sense of alienation from the rest of the human race he spent his nights saving and there you had the comic book reflections of Angel. Gunn thought he made a pretty good echo of all the cool halves of various mismatched buddy-buddy movie partnerships too. But Wesley… He’d had to go back to black and white for Wesley. Dawn Patrol. The RAF officer sending untried men off to their deaths because it had to be done if the innocent were to survive even though it was eating him away on the inside. The young Captain walking into the guns and ordering his men to do the same in the mud of Flanders. He guessed that was what the English hero excelled at; not so much James Bond as the Any Dead Officer; following orders, making tough decisions, a strange combination of self-sacrifice, ruthlessness and gentleness that was constantly surprising. This was the same guy who had taken a bullet for him and stabbed him almost to death. In both cases it had probably seemed like the right and just thing for Wesley to do.

Now, Wesley was the one in charge again. He should have been in hospital but Wesley had neatly sidestepped the victim role Angelus had made ready for him. Gunn suspected the rape had been a means to an end. Angelus had left Wesley alive so that he would have to wake up again and find his friends clustered around him when he was bound, naked and bruised, and he would have to read in their eyes that they knew what had been done to him. Wincing, Gunn realized they’d fulfilled their side of the bargain perfectly. Lots of foot shuffling and eye avoidance. Wesley was the one who’d decided he didn’t want to play Angelus’s game any longer.

As they passed into the sewers, Gunn saw Lorne put a hand very gently on Wesley’s shoulder and murmur something to him quietly.

Wesley shrugged. “Best revenge…living well etcetera. Although in this instance I’ll settle for the best revenge being to shoot Angelus full of tranquillisers and, as Faith always so aptly puts it, shove a soul up his ass.” He looked over his shoulder at Gunn. “He’s aware all the time he’s in there, trapped and seething and impotent, choking on Angel’s good deeds. If we lose Angel, Angelus wins. Even if we stake him, even if we send him to hell for eternity, he still wins.”

Gunn wondered why Wesley was addressing that comment to him and then looked down and realized he was carrying a stake, and that his fingers were white on the wood where he was gripping it so hard. Breathing out – and his lungs hurt so much when he did that he wondered how long it was since he’d remembered to exhale – he put the stake away and took the tranquilliser gun Wesley held out to him.

“We can do this,” the Englishman said quietly.

Gunn tried to look just into Wesley’s eyes, where there was all that steely determination, but it was so difficult to filter out the bruising around the eye, the bruise and cut on the cheekbone, that livid bruise on his jaw, the cut across his nose, under the other eye, on his forehead, another purplish bruise spreading out from that one where Angelus had so obviously grabbed him by the hair and slammed his face into a hard surface. Then there were the bruises at the throat and the way the blood was still seeping through that band-aid Lorne had slapped on so hastily while Wesley was loading his guns. The sweater Wesley had pulled on hid the cuts and bruises across his back but the limping made Gunn flinch; he could tell himself it was where Angelus had thrown him around but he knew it was because of the bruising so deep inside, where it had no business being, where nothing had any business being without Wesley’s signed in triplicate written permission, and even then Gunn would have had a problem with it. Even if there had been flowers and chocolates and a mariachi band underneath Wesley’s goddamned window for a month of wooing beforehand he didn’t think there was any guy in any dimension who he would have been happy to have doing that to his friend. And Angelus out of every dimension and every possible person was absolutely the last guy on that non-existent list.

“Get over it, Charles,” Wesley said quietly. “He only did it to freak you out.”

Gunn gritted his teeth. “You mean it isn’t freaking you out?”

Wesley turned away so Gunn wouldn’t have to see the expression in his eyes change, although Gunn could imagine the bleakness, the lost look, the despair he wasn’t going to let any of them see. “I’ve had worse.”

Wesley usually lied better than that. Gunn knew then that this had to be close to the worst thing anyone had ever done to him; worse than being rejected by his father or rejected by the rest of them; maybe not as bad as the grief of losing a loved one, but of things done specifically and deliberately to him to hurt him, this was in a class of its own.

“I don’t know that I want Angel back more than I want to kill Angelus,” Gunn confessed.

Wesley looked over his shoulder at him again, eyes grave and thoughtful. “Well, get sure before we see Angelus because killing him isn’t an option while there’s still a chance we can retrieve Angel’s soul.”

“That’s easy for you to say,” Gunn told him. “You only had the crap kicked out of you. Me, I have Issues.”

Wesley’s smile made his lip bleed but it was worth it; just for an instant there was a light in his eyes again; a crack in the shell he’d erected around himself that revealed he was still capable of being touched by a friend’s affection.

“I smell him.” Spike held up a hand, sniffing the air. “Actually I smell…” He winced at his own tactlessness. “Anyway, it’s him.”

Gunn wondered why Angelus hadn’t taken a shower after he’d finished with Wesley; washed away the man’s scent, making him that much harder to track through these sewers. Angelus knew everything Angel knew, and sometimes more, so he certainly knew that Spike was now on their team and had all of a vampire’s preternatural senses.

“Because he’s an arrogant prick,” Spike murmured in Gunn’s ear. “Thinks he can take all of us. Wants to gloat. Remind us how powerless we are and how cool he is. The guy never changes. And, okay, because we got there sooner than he thought and he didn’t have time to finish his fun.”

Gunn met the vampire’s gaze, remembering Angelus with his hand around Wesley’s throat, the pleasure he was taking in slowly squeezing the life out of him, himself with a clear shot and his finger ready to squeeze on the trigger and Faith ready to take him the moment the bolt hit; then Wesley crashing into him so hard Gunn still wondered how they hadn’t both broken every bone in their bodies, and Faith doing as Angelus had somehow known she would, letting her concern and compassion overwhelm her ruthlessness.

Gunn realized it abruptly: “He’ll go for Wesley.”

“I’ve already auditioned for the hostage role – several times.” Wesley looked over his shoulder. “I don’t think it suits me.”

“Practice makes perfect, Wes…”

And Angelus was there, out of nowhere, out of darkness, no warning, no sound; smiling viciously and moving so fast he was a blur, but this time he wasn’t the only one with preternaturally fast reflexes and it was Spike who grabbed Wesley by the sweater with his left hand a fraction before Angelus’s hands closed on him. He yanked the ex-Watcher out of Angelus’s range and threw him straight to Gunn, yelling, “Catch him!” With his right hand he was already firing; as was Lorne and this time both tranquillisers hit.

Angelus snarled in disbelief and rage, yanking out one dart and turning on Spike with it raised ready to stab. Wesley fired unflinchingly while Gunn held him up and Angelus swayed and then went down onto one knee.

“Don’t!” Wesley cautioned Gunn as he levelled up a shot of his own. “Three is enough and we don’t want to kill Angel.”

“Speak for yourself.” Spike also had his gun trained unwaveringly on the vampire.

Lorne was still looking queasy but he reloaded all the same. “You know I love Angel, kids, but if it’s down to him or us…”

“It should still be him.” Wesley gazed down at Angelus who was trying and failing to get off his knees.

Angelus snarled up at the man: “I should have broken your fucking neck when I had the chance.”

“Where would have been the fun in that?” Wesley returned impassively.

“I remember your face when you saw me sucking the blood from Lilah’s corpse. Now that was fun.” Then, mercifully, Angelus slumped into unconsciousness.

Spike turned on Wesley angrily. “What do you mean ‘it should still be him’?”

“Lorne hasn’t done anything that requires atonement but the rest of us have. We don’t have the right to rob the world of a champion like Angel just for the sake of our necks.”

Spike looked across Wesley to Gunn. “This death wish thing, is this new with him?”

Gunn shook his head. “Actually, it’s pretty old.”

Spike glowered at Wesley. “So you took his soddin’ kid and it didn’t end well. Get over it.”

“It isn’t just Connor. There’s Faith.”

“Useful member of society from where I was sitting.”

“She has blood on her hands because the Watcher assigned to her by the council was a waste of space.”

“Maybe she could have had Gandhi as her Watcher and it would still have all gone to shit. Maybe she had issues before she ever met you that put her on the fast track to solitary confinement. Maybe you taking her side instead of the Council’s after she’d tortured you half to death was one of the things that helped pull her back from the brink. Did you ever think about that?”

Wesley was still gazing at Angelus. “Angel pulled her back from the brink. All I ever did was push her to the edge of it. And I have other things to atone for.” He looked at Gunn.

“I'm still here.” Gunn shrugged.

“I shouldn’t have stabbed you.”

“I should haven’t signed the papers to let the sarcophagus through Customs that killed the woman we both loved. On the cosmic scale I don’t think what you did was so bad.”

“Don’t tell me you’re going to start breast beating over Knox being dead now, are you?” Spike added.

Wesley pulled a face. “No. I can’t lose any sleep over Knox. Although that doesn’t make what I did right.”

Spike grabbed him by the shoulders. “You have to have one shining light in the world to make all the pain and suffering worthwhile? Fine. Do what you like to get yourself through the day, mate, but don’t expect me to sign up for it being Angel. I was there with him, shoulder to shoulder, when he was doing some of the things that he did.”

“That was Angelus.”

“It was in him somewhere. It’s what makes a champion, Wes. The same thing that makes a monster. It’s that darkness you can reach out and touch inside yourself; the thing that makes killing something you choose to do – bad guys or weeping innocents: two sides of the same coin; makes the pain something you can ignore; makes the cause worth it. Bad cause when you’re evil; good cause when you’re not; same difference. Same chemical reaction fuelling the adrenalin to the brain that keeps sending you back out there to do what has to be done.” Realizing too late where this conversation was leading, Spike took a step back. “But that doesn’t mean… I mean, I said it myself, back in your flat – Angel on his worst day wouldn’t…”

“We should hurry.” Wesley’s face was perfectly unreadable. “We need to get Angelus secured before he wakes up.”

***

Spike realized he’d been waiting for a while now for Wesley to snap; like an elastic band stretched too far and too thin. Everyone was watching him while trying not to make eye contact with him, while Wesley himself had found this mental place to be that was just above the chaos. He spoke quietly, moved so carefully that he presumably didn’t set off enough pulled muscles and bruises at any one point to make him whimper, and kept his eyes firmly averted from everyone else. No one wanted a true exchange of feelings here and he could not have made it clearer that he didn’t want their sympathy or even their acknowledgement of what had been done to him.

Still moving carefully, he advanced towards the bed where Angelus was still festooned in chains and padlocks. It might have been funny, all the handcuffs and links of cold iron wrapped around his limbs, but Angelus had already reminded everyone just how very unamusing a guest he made when he was free and at large. He, alone of all of them, kept trying to make eye contact with Wesley.

“Careful.” Gunn was watching Angelus unblinkingly, a slow seethe of frustrated rage. He also felt dangerously close to snapping; his need to kill a vampire right now something Spike could have sensed across the street never mind across the room.

“I know.” Wesley spoke over his shoulder to no one in particular as he pushed up Angelus’s sleeve and brought the hypodermic nearer to the skin.

“Good luck finding a vein.” Angelus grinned at him. “No heartbeat, remember?”

“You bleed.” Gunn pointed the crossbow at his eye. “And you’re gonna bleed for a week if you don’t shut up right now.”

Spike could feel the palpable tension in the room as Wesley moved closer to Angelus; the last place any of them wanted him to be right now. Spike said, “Wouldn’t my blood do?”

Lorne said, “No. Unlike laughing boy here, you have too much soul. It has to be the bodily fluids of an unsouled creature for the spell to…”

“Well, Christ, Wes, don’t be coy.” Angelus grinned at Gunn, triumphantly malevolent. “There must be at least two pints of my bodily fluids inside Watcher Boy right now – ”

As Gunn almost jammed the crossbow bolt into Angelus’s eye, Wesley grabbed his wrist and held him still, speaking impassively. “He’s just trying to get to you. Ignore him. In a few hours he’ll be Angel again and I think he’d probably appreciate having both eyes.”

Gunn kept gazing into Angelus’s dark eyes with burning hatred. “How about castration? It’s not like Angel can get any anyway and this sorry son of a bitch without a soul sure as hell doesn’t need to keep his balls for anything useful.”

Wesley gently but firmly moved the crossbow bolt away so that it was pointing at the wall instead of Angelus’s face. “When Angel becomes human again I'm sure he’d like to be able to lead a normal life.”

“You still clinging to that bedtime story, Wes?” Angelus demanded. “It’s never going to happen. The Powers That Be like to offer the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow but it doesn’t really exist. It’s just not me saying it, Angel thinks so too. Your big hero is never going to be human and I'm always going to be here inside him, just waiting my chance to have another tango with you and your vamp groupie pals.”

“You always were a worthless piece of shit, Angelus.” Spike lit a cigarette. “Nice to see some things never change.”

“I was just thinking the same thing about you, Spikey. You were always a pathetic loser and guess what, you still are. Oh, did ickle William go and get himself a soul to make his Buffy-Wuffy wuv him?” Angelus sneered. “She never will. She loves Soul Boy and, anyway, it’s bad luck to have more than one dumb blond in the same relationship.”

Spike just shrugged. The jibes hurt, a little, yes, like old bee stings, but it had diverted Angelus’s attention away from winding up Gunn, which was all he’d been focusing on. He’d heard about Wes getting shot in the gut that time and Gunn being the only thing between him and life and death. That friendship had taken one hell of a hammering since then but recent events seemed to have made all the old protective feelings kick in again and Gunn was hanging on by a thread right now. Anything he could do to keep the guy from going postal had to be a good idea.

His success was short-lived – Angelus turning to look at Wesley as the man carefully inserted the needle into a vein. “So, when did you and Charles here start dating and how come Angel missed it? The last time I saw you, you were punching each other’s heads over skinnybitch the science geek. Decided to stop fighting those repressed feelings, did you? I’d give you a big hoorah for finally catching on but first you gotta tell me, Wes, does Gunn ever let you go on top?”

As he carefully slid back the plunger, a dribble of precious red fluid in the hypo as he did so, Wesley said, “Did you ever think your obsession with other people’s sex lives could be in any way Oedipal?”

“For starters, Wes, if we’re talking Daddy Issues here, I think you got me beat by a mile. Maybe I ate my father but I didn’t put nine bullets in him first. And for seconds, I don’t remembering you saying much about complexes when I was nailing you to the mattress. As I recall, you were too busy biting the pillow the way they taught you at boarding school…”

“Angel could fight almost as well with a couple of fingers missing,” said Gunn through his teeth.

“It’s what Angelus wants.” Wesley stepped back from the bed, voice even, and only Spike could smell the shock and pain still emanating from him that revealed the true fragility of his condition. “He knows he’ll be gone soon and he wants to hurt Angel before he goes. Ignore him. It’s what he hates the most.”

“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” Angelus grinned at him triumphantly. “You could be ignored to gold medal standards if they ever made it an Olympic Event. All that build up to stealing my kid and no one even noticed you were unravelling right in front of them, least of all good old Angel, who never gives you the time of day unless he wants something.”

Wesley’s gaze and voice were equally even as he turned to look at the vampire. “I could point out how illogical it is of you to mention Angel not noticing something he obviously must have noticed or else you wouldn’t know about it. However, it’s quicker just to point out that we covered all of this a long time ago while you were otherwise engaged being an impotent demon trapped within Angel. As far as reopening old trauma goes, you’re talking to an empty room.”

“Another situation you must know a lot about, Wes, baby. Or would that be talking to an empty dark little cupboard under the stairs? Did you tell yourself Daddy was doing it because he loved you? He didn’t, you know. Never did. Never will. He punished you because he hated you and he wanted you to suffer. You could drop dead tomorrow and all he’d do would be heave a sigh of relief. Damn, I should have taken some polaroids to send to the old boy, let him know just how up close and personal you are with your boss these days.”

Ignoring Angelus completely, Wesley nodded to Gunn. “I’ve got what I need.”

“You think it was all me back in that bedroom, Wes?” Angelus’s smile was just as nasty as Spike remembered it. “What makes you think I wasn’t doing exactly what Soul Boy wanted to do too?”

Wesley glanced at Angelus with as little emotion as if they were discussing the weather. “I like to think Angel would at least have bought me dinner first.” He turned to Gunn. “Let’s go.”

“I hear you.” Spike crossed to the bed and stubbed his cigarette out on Angelus’s hand. “We won’t meet again, so that’s for old times sake.”

“Ooh. Pain.” Angelus blew him a kiss even as his skin sizzled from the heat. “Now you’re just turning me on. What, no blowjob for old times sake, Spikey? Yours were never as good as Darla’s or my dear little Dru’s but at least you always swallowed. You should teach Wes – he’s a choker.”

Spike grabbed Gunn by the shoulders and steered him away from the bed; wondering when he’d had to become the grown-up and missing the days when it was okay for him to be the one to lose it.

Angelus’ voice followed them: “You brave boys going to leave me all alone then? Such a pity you let Fredikins get killed off, Gunn, because, I gotta tell you, even if she never had a rack like vision girl, I could have had all kinds of fun with her.”

Lorne looked across at Spike. “I so wish Illyria was here right now.”

“Illyria would have pulled his head off three hours ago,” Spike shrugged, tossing his extinguished cigarette onto the floor. “So, yeah, I'm with you on that too.”

As they prepared to leave, Angelus raised an eyebrow. “What, you’re just going to go off and leave me? I don’t even get a guard? You really think that’s all I'm worth?”

“I think you’re entirely worthless,” Lorne said quietly. “But we happen to value the person whose body you’ve been borrowing.”

“Would that be Angel you’re talking about or Wes? Cause I got to tell you I don’t know which body I had the more fun…borrowing tonight.” Angelus blew Wesley a kiss. “Got to admit you surprised me, Wes, old boy. Ever since Buffy said that you screamed like a woman I was hoping to find it was true. Damn that stiff upper lip. Given a little more time though who knows the kind of music I could have got you to make.”

Spike stopped dead. Enough with the self-control already. He turned to Gunn. “Can I torture him? Just a little. For old time’s sake.”

“Sure.” Gunn nodded. “Be my guest.”

“No.” Wesley put a hand on his arm. “You can’t torture him. And it’s time to go.”

As Wesley picked up an adze and followed Lorne out of the basement, Gunn hissed to Spike: “Wesley isn’t even angry about it. Why isn’t he angry?”

Spike patted him gently on the arm, not having the heart to tell Gunn that Wesley was clinging on by his fingernails, a breath away every minute from crawling into a corner and shaking and vomiting with shock. “Cause now isn’t the time. He can be angry later. Right now we have to get Angel his soul back and send shithead there back to hell.”

***

Lorne had offered to carry all the accoutrements of re-ensoulment while Gunn hefted their homemade demon box on his back. He was also carrying an axe while Wesley had picked up an adze and Spike carried a sword. Around their necks they all wore the bag of herbs that Lorne’s research on the streets had suggested might protect them, at least temporarily, from the demon’s soul-stealing magic.

“This stuff stinks,” Gunn whispered to Lorne.

The empath demon shrugged. “No one says sulphur and ammonia make the best air freshener, but when mixed with a few warding spells, some thyme, cinnamon, ragwort and essence of snakeshead fritillary, they apparently do help you hang onto your soul.”

“Are we still following Angelus’s trail?” Wesley asked Spike.

The blond vampire glanced at him. “No, I just thought we’d take the pretty route through the sewers on the way to the fish and chip shop.”

“They don’t have fish and chip shops here,” Wesley reminded him. “Uncivilized colonial outpost of the faded empire, remember? They have Chuck-E-Cheese.”

Spike sighed wearily: “Yes, we’re still following Angelus’s trail.”

“I imagine seizing a prize like Angel’s soul would satisfy it for some time so the demon may not have moved very far,” Wesley said thoughtfully.

“Oh, because Angel’s soul is so much more special than your common or garden human soul?”

Wesley returned Spike’s gaze unblinkingly. “Having been magically restored to him by gypsies, then ripped from his body by first a gypsy curse and then by a dark shaman of the Kun-Sun-Dai and twice restored to him by very powerful witchcraft I would venture a resounding ‘yes’.”

“What, so being third hand makes it taste better? I’d’ve thought it was getting pretty stringy by now.”

Gunn said quietly to Spike, “Shutting up would be a good look for you.”

Spike felt another wave of Gunn’s need to stake a vampire to dust and bit down his retort. Apparently Wesley couldn’t even be disagreed with right now, even when he was talking crap. Fine. He got that. He also knew just how unstable this crew was, and they made the Scoobies look like the poster children for good mental health. When they weren’t trying to kill each other – which seemed to be a fairly regular occurrence – they were looking to kill something else, usually vampiric in nature, and right now he was the only vampire within beheading distance.

“It’s close by,” he muttered. “I can sense it.” Hear its heartbeat, was more accurate, but there was something more than that, a thin shriek in the darkness, no, score of shrieks, wails, whimpers, the sound of trapped souls. But he wasn’t telling them that; wasn’t even admitting to himself that souls had a voice, as that would have meant his own had been calling to him for more than a century while he ignored its cry.

As they edged up to the corner of the sewer, Spike saw an outlet tunnel that led straight up. There was an iron ladder and a dim bluish light leading down from above. The cry of the souls was louder there and he pointed to it.

“Isn’t this under that place that used to be a convent?” Gunn turned to Wesley who nodded in agreement.

“I think you’re right.”

“Angel’s soul will be happy then,” Spike grunted. “He always had a thing about convents.”

“We know,” Wesley whispered back.

“And you’re still okay working with him?”

Wesley began: “That wasn’t Angel, that was…” Then apparently deciding that it was a waste of time having that conversation with Spike again, he shrugged. “What can I say? He cooks great eggs.”

As he swayed, Spike automatically reached out to grab his elbow and saw Gunn do the same from the other side. For a moment it was clear that the hissing in Wesley’s ears was on the verge of knocking him over and then he swallowed down what Spike guessed was a very strong urge to hurl, and straightened up. “Let’s get on.”

Spike reluctantly let him go. “I guess that stiff upper lip is good for something then. I’ll go first.” He looked at Gunn and went to jerk his head at Wesley but the look the man gave him made it clear how he would take any suggestions about helping his injured friend from someone who wasn’t his friend and should back off right now on teaching his grandmother to suck eggs. Shrugging, Spike caught hold of the ladder and began to climb.

Wesley was behind him; Spike could smell Angelus on him still so strongly that he knew Wesley must be able to smell it too. He wondered what that was like, to have to carry the scent of your rapist’s come all over you because there wasn’t time to shower if the person whose body had done this to you was going to be saved. In another life he presumed Wesley had been a religious fanatic or the right hand man of a cult leader, someone, anyway, who obviously had to have something to believe in, and in this life had chosen Angel and his redemption. Or perhaps this wasn’t Angel, the Cause, Wesley was trying to save, just Angel, his friend. Either way he found it a little freaky. He knew Gunn was climbing the ladder below Wesley, ready to catch him if he fell, but he didn’t think Wesley would fall, not now, not while there was still a job to be done, a soul or six to be saved. The fall would come afterwards. Perhaps that alone was justification enough for trying to get Angel back, because he might be the only guy who could catch him if he did.

Spike pulled himself up into the mouth of the opening and found that sure enough he was emerging into a cavernous pillared building, still stinking of lost piety. The soul-eater had its back turned to him, about thirty feet away, and he quickly reached down and hauled Wesley up, holding his shoulders briefly as the man reached ground level to make sure he wasn’t swaying, then helped up Gunn and Lorne. Lorne was weighed down with spell-making materials and the box on Gunn's back scraped against the stairwell entrance as he clambered up. The creature spun around to face them at once and Spike got a good look at its horns. And teeth. And spiked dorsal ridge. Oh yes, and its claws. Wouldn’t want to miss those.

“No problem.” Spike tried not to admit this was quite possibly fear he was feeling. He loved a fight after all, and this creature promised plenty of fight, but he didn’t want to lose who he was; this person he was right now; and what the hell was he going to do if it sucked out Gunn’s soul? He could hardly start chopping the heads off Angel’s crew. He’d have to lay them out with one hand while fighting off a ten feet tall demon with the other. That could get a little…testing.

Gunn seemed to be following the same thought process. He handed over the box from his back. “This stinky herb spell of yours had better work, Lorne.”

“It’s a temporary deterrent,” Wesley whispered. “It won’t work forever. Like the not-Ethros box, it’s only supposed to work for long enough to give us time to come up with a more permanent solution.”

“Looks like he has a permanent solution in mind for us.” Gunn hefted his axe as the demon began to march towards them purposefully.

“Showtime,” Spike agreed.

They spread out, giving it multiple targets. Spike had automatically gone to shove Wesley behind him but Wesley evidently thought he was up for fighting ten feet tall demons despite being kicked all round his flat earlier, and moved out of his reach.

“How does this magic mojo work, Lorne?” Spike demanded of the anagogic demon.

“We have to enclose it in a circle,” the demon answered.

“Okay, so we hold its attention and you draw the circle, scatter your powders or whatever. Just tell us when to get out.”

Lorne nodded, already opening his bag of magic tricks. The demon turned its attention on Wesley who hefted his adze from one hand to the other, keeping eye contact at all times, weight balanced evenly on the balls of his feet. He looked as if he were ready for a fight, unfortunately he also looked as if a strong breeze would knock him over but Spike presumed that was just an optical illusion as Wesley seemed able to get in there and mix it on other occasions despite his skinny frame. It just usually meant that when powerful demons belted them all Wesley performed a slightly more graceful arc as he was knocked through the air.

“Oy!” Spike yelled. “What do you want one of those boring new souls for when you get another secondhand one here?”

At once the demon spun around to face him. It reached out a clawed finger and for a moment Spike felt something tug at him, a force like icy fingers reaching through his ribcage and then the cold sensation abruptly stopped and he automatically felt his chest – as if he could tell if his soul was still there or not.

“Did it work?” Wesley asked.

“Do you still have your soul?” Gunn shouted.

Spike shrugged helplessly. “I don’t want to eat you.”

“Well, were you hungry before?” Gunn demanded.

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, how good is your soul anyway if you can’t tell if you still have it not?”

Wesley sighed. “Cordelia said hers was better.”

As the demon rushed Wesley, the ex-Watcher ducked under its slashing claw and hit it in the ribs with his adze. Snarling, the demon spread out its clawed hand again and this time Spike saw the green glow of light trying to envelop Wesley’s chest and being repelled by the bag around his neck.

“It’s working!” Spike shouted.

“Good!” Wesley hit it again with the adze.

“Lorne, you’re definitely the man,” Gunn told him.

Evidently realizing that brute force was needed here, the demon reached out and grabbed Wesley by the throat. At once Gunn was charging it, axe swinging, and sank the blade of the weapon into its back.

“Don’t kill it!” Wesley shouted before the creature’s fingers tightened further on his throat.

Still holding onto Wesley, the demon spun around and slashed Gunn across the shoulders, sending the man staggering back. “Not a problem,” Gunn muttered. “It killing me, though, could be a factor…”

Despite being choked, Wesley managed to swing his adze hard enough to cut open its arm. Snarling, it backhanded him fifteen feet across the ground, sending him skidding through the white powder Lorne was rapidly shaking around them. “Sorry…” Wesley said apologetically.

“Keep him out there!” Spike shouted.

Gunn darted back in, seized the handle of his axe, hauled it out with some difficulty from its back and hit it again. “How are we doing, Lorne?”

“Almost there.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Spike saw Lorne catch hold of Wesley’s shoulder and hold him back then push a book into his hands, saying: “You’re up, mojo boy.”

“I guess we’re the diversion,” Gunn grunted and ducked a slashing blow from the demon.

The need to keep it in the circle meant they were handicapped, having to fight in close and keep it cornered, which meant their greater speed was less of an advantage. As it slammed Gunn across the circle, Lorne reached out and caught him, before giving him a gentle shove back into the fray. “Only a few more minutes, cupcakes.”

It slashed at Spike, clawing his chest, and then struck him a blow that made his head ring. He sliced with his sword, parrying its claws. “If I stick this in its guts am I going to be slicing up the souls?” he demanded.

“I don’t know,” Wesley called back. “I couldn’t find a reference work that covered that.”

“Bloody Watchers,” Spike muttered darkly.

Wesley and Lorne were doing something mystical with bones and feathers and crystals around the circumference of the circle. Spike was aware of them somewhere on the periphery of the crunch and slash of the battle. He could smell Gunn’s blood, and his own, both of which were now splattered around the interior of the circle. His head was ringing and as the demon slammed its elbow into Gunn’s head he was amazed the man stayed conscious, never mind on his feet.

“You must have a thicker skull than I do,” he muttered.

“No one has a thicker skull than you do, Spike.” Gunn ducked the next blow and swung his axe again. Clearly dazed, he was a little slow and it ripped the axe from his hands and hurled it at Spike, who ducked instinctively, only to see it heading for Lorne, who Wesley yanked to the ground just in time. They landed with a thud, dropping the spell book in the process.

Looking at the rip on his sleeve, Lorne said, “Okay, now I'm pissed. Does that thing know how difficult it is to invisibly mend raw silk?”

As the demon rushed the now weaponless Gunn, claws slashing, Spike decided souls be damned, literally or otherwise, and sank the sword into its back. The scaly hide was difficult even for him to penetrate and he hoped Wesley and Gunn were going to be up to the slice and dice needed for later.

“Get out of the circle!” Wesley called. And then Spike felt the air start to fizzle, that unmistakable build up of magic sensation that always made his hair want to stand on end like Angel’s.

“Gunn!” Spike shouted.

“Heard Wes the first time,” Gunn said grimly; he rushed the demon then, punched it hard in the scaly face, and then ducked out of the circle, leaving it dazed and staggering.

As Spike also jumped backwards over the powdery line of entrails and doodads; the circle shimmered and a wall of blue light went up, trapping the demon inside it.

“Well done.” He looked at Lorne in surprise. “One of your spells worked.”

“Save the sarcasm for later, snarkypants,” Lorne told him.

Wesley was still intoning in a language Spike didn’t even recognize, while the soul eater slashed angrily at the blue light, which sizzled and bowed, maintaining only the most fragile kind of hold. Wesley came to the end of a passage and then fell back, sweat glistening on his forehead. “It’s stronger than… It has the power of every soul it’s stolen but hasn’t yet consumed. We’ve got very little time. Lorne, help me with the summoning spell. Spike, Gunn, hold the box open.” Lorne tossed Wesley something carved out of bone that the man held up in front of him like a crucifix, beginning to intone rapidly in what was now definitely Latin.

Spike helped Gunn haul up the box and hold it open. “Think this is going to work?” he muttered.

“Think we’re dead if it doesn’t,” Gunn muttered back.

“Just how good at this magic mojo is Wesley anyway?”

The demon lunged at the walls of the circle again, claws slashing, light fizzled, like tears in flame, and then a long jagged line of brightness opened up.

“Oh crap…” Gunn breathed.

Wesley slammed the bone he held across the mouth of the tear in the binding spell and snarled something in Latin; a wild wind shrieked through the once-holy place, the air fizzled, and then the soul-eater was turned from body into light and something hit the box Spike and Gunn were holding with the power of a stampeding rhino. They slammed the top down fast and Gunn said, “Wes? Mojo-wise? Pretty good actually.”

Wesley was staggering with the effort and Lorne caught him under the arms to hold him up. “Do you need a breather, crumpet?”

“No time,” Wesley gasped. “Have to release the souls.” He crumpled to his knees and Lorne pushed the next spell book into his hands.

“Gunn,” Wesley said breathlessly, “the spell should tear the souls from its body and with luck will weaken it in the process. When it gets out of the box you only have seconds before it will regain its strength. You have to get it straight away. Spike, remember, you won’t be able to strike the killing blow.”

“Got it.” The box was writhing and thumping under their grip like a living thing. Gunn gritted his teeth as he tried to keep the lid held down.

“You didn’t think to fit a padlock?” Spike demanded, trying to get his knee onto it.

Wesley had staggered to his feet and was intoning Latin again. Lots of it. Calling on Ashtoreth, Astarte and a whole lot of other Witch-goddesses that Spike suspected they really wouldn’t want to meet if they ever decided to start answering these calls in person. As Wesley’s voice rose higher, his body shaking with the effort of channelling the magic, the atmosphere fizzled again and he jerked his head back, snatching a breath from the suddenly swirling air.

“It’s working,” Lorne breathed.

“Or killing him,” Spike pointed out.

Wesley’s voice didn’t falter even as the light show began to get more spectacular, swirling streaks and colours in the heavy air; he was dripping with sweat, body shaking, but he kept intoning with clear authority.

“Wes can do this,” Gunn insisted, slamming his knee down onto the box as it tried to rear up again.

Hoping they were right, Spike watched Wesley stagger as something that looked and smelt scarily like lightning singed the air around them in a sheet of blue flame, and then he was shouting his invocation above the grating roar of the pillars around them and the trembling of the ground, and abruptly the box was tearing across the lid, bleeding arrows of light. Gunn and Spike were both knocked back and the arrows turned into swirls, green, gold, red, fawn and blue. Wesley collapsed onto his knees, head hanging, panting for breath.

“The souls…” Lorne breathed.

“Bet Angel’s is the beige one,” Spike muttered.

With the last of his strength, Wesley threw up his arms and shouted a final invocation and the souls were arrowing away from the chamber as if fired from a bow.

“Let’s hope they know where they’re going,” Gunn said.

Then the box exploded into shards of broken wood; thyme-covered nails spitting out in all directions, Gunn barely ducking one, Spike not quick enough in getting his arm out of the way, and the furious soul-eater demon was corporeally intact in front of them and clearly mad as hell. Spike shoved Lorne out of the way just before the creature lunged at him. One of the nails had impaled his arm and he had to toss his sword into the other hand before he could slice at it. It caught his wrist and twisted it, then hurled him ten feet away. As Spike hit the cement with an impact that felt as if it had dislodged every vertebrae, head ringing dully and blood pouring into his eye, he saw the demon head for a still-kneeling Wesley with what was undoubtedly murder in its intent.

“No way, José,” Gunn said firmly, he lifted his axe, swung it back and then sliced with all his strength.

Spike had to admit, from his vantage point on the concrete, that he could not have done that better himself, as the soul-eater’s head spun in one direction and its body crumpled in another, streaks of blood between the two severed parts leaving an interesting spatter pattern on the ground.

Looking up at Gunn from the ground, Wesley said breathlessly, “Nice work.”

“You too.” Gunn held out a hand and Wesley snatched a breath before taking it and letting himself be hauled to his feet. Leaning on his axe, Gunn nodded at the dead demon. “Do we need to chop it up?”

“I have no idea,” Wesley admitted. “But I think it would be satisfying to do all the same.” He tried to take a step and swayed, Lorne hastily taking his other elbow. Wesley snatched another breath and gestured at the dead demon. “Why don’t Lorne and I sit over here and…supervise while you and Spike do the chopping?”

Gunn grinned at him and patted Wesley gently on the shoulder. “Best idea you’ve had all day, Wes.”

Spike staggered to his feet, realizing that everything was still hurting and that someone seemed to have disconnected all the component parts of his ribcage at the same time they were diddling with his spine. “So, how do we know if it worked?”

Wesley shrugged. “We go home, unchain Angel, and wait and see if he eats us. If he doesn’t I’d say it worked.”

Spike thought about what a dumb plan that was and how there ought to some kind of magic failsafe that could test for the presence of a soul, thought about saying any of that aloud and then decided that he was too tired and would rather be chopping up demon guts anyway. He shrugged back. “Works for me.” Picking up his sword he advanced on the dead demon purposefully, only to find that Gunn was already there ahead of him with a really mean look in his eyes.

“Prepare to become kibble,” Gunn growled at the corpse.

A moment later there was the satisfying sound of flesh being separated from bone with clean slices of angry blades and the wet warmth of fresh blood being sprayed around everything in the vicinity.

***

Angel woke with a jolt to a pounding pain in his head that could only mean one thing. When he tried to move, his iron-weighted limbs – stiff from being held in the same position – and the unmistakable clink of chains, confirmed it. Tranquilliser – the velvet cosh that sliced straight through the brain. He blinked to try to clear his vision and saw streaked walls; figures at the end of a smeary tunnel, a Gunn-sized blur and beside him a bright-red-clad green-headed blur that must be Lorne. There was something shadowy in the corner that smelt of tobacco, topped with obnoxiously yellow hair, which could only be Spike.

He flexed his body experimentally and found that the chains seemed to be everywhere, and although he had probably been in a fight, for once he seemed to have had the best of it. Only the knuckles on his right hand were sore, although there was a burn on the back of his hand, and, oddly enough, his cock felt rubbed and dry as if…

Memory hit him like a discus to the throat and he gasped around the horror of it. Wesley. The feel of his fist colliding with Wesley’s jaw, cheekbone, ribs… Ripping his clothes…“No… No… No… Tell me I didn’t…? Lorne…?”

The green demon advanced cautiously. “I'm here.”

Angel looked around for another blur, blinking furiously to clear his vision. “Where’s Wes? Is he okay? Is he here? I dreamt it, right? Like those murders Penn did. Tell me it was just a nightmare!” If his hands had been free he would have grabbed Lorne by the lapels.

He smelt nicotine and a familiar voice said, “It was real. Are you you?”

Memories were still hitting him like shrapnel; grabbing Wesley by the hair, slamming him into the wall, throwing him onto the table, punching him, kicking him, throwing him onto the bed, tearing off his clothes, tying him up, jamming a knee between his legs, then… No, this couldn’t be real because if it was real then he’d beaten and raped his friend.

“Not Wesley,” he whispered.

“He’s alive.” That was Gunn, voice grim but some compassion showing through.

Angel swallowed and realized with horror that he could still taste human blood in his mouth – Wesley’s blood.

“I fed from him…”

“He’s okay.” Spike grimaced. “Well, no, he’s not. But like Gunn said, he’s alive, he’s got all his fingers and toes and he can still walk and talk.”

“What I did to him…” He closed his eyes, not caring about the headache, just feeling every sensation now, the blood in his mouth, the ache of his knuckles, the sore feeling in his cock, blood from biting into Wesley’s neck, knuckles aching from beating him half to death, cock rubbed and dry from all that at-the-time agreeable friction as he thrust into Wesley’s bound and resisting body, now spent from all those climaxes.

“He’ll get over it,” Spike said quietly.

“I won’t.” Angel kept his eyes closed.

“Angel, you need to sing for me,” Lorne added. “For what it’s worth, I need to find out if it’s the real you. Not that I’ve proven myself to be exactly infallible on that score over the years but I think it’s worth trying…”

Angel sang mechanically: “ ‘I’ve got a ticket to the moon. I’ll be leaving here any day soon…’ ”

“It’s him.” Lorne didn’t sound triumphant. “As far as my empathic abilities can tell, it’s Angel complete with soul.”

“You don’t know what I did to him,” Angel said quietly.

“We have a pretty good idea,” Gunn returned.

“So why didn’t you stake me?”

“I wanted to. Wes wouldn’t let me.”

Lorne took a deep breath. “Look, Angelcakes, I know things look bad right now, but you’ve got plenty of practice at living with the guilt.”

“Having done lots of incredibly evil things doesn’t make it any easier to live with when you do a few more,” Angel said through his teeth. “When I came back from hell I promised myself that Jenny Calendar was going to be the last friend I killed. I told Cordy and I told Wes that if it came down to them or me they had to stake me. He should have staked me.”

Spike shrugged. “Don’t think you gave him much chance, mate. He didn’t know you’d turned evil before you were already in the room and after that he was too busy being your punching bag to get the chance to stake anyone. And maybe it’s just as well. This way you’re both alive, and, like Lorne says, you wake up every morning with the blood of innocents on your hands, a few more splatters shouldn’t make that much difference.”

“This isn’t about me.” Angel yanked at the chains angrily. “This is about Wesley. This is about what I did to him being the last thing on earth he needed. This is about someone who has already been through far too much crap I should have protected him from.” He slammed his head back on the pillow. “Wesley didn’t deserve this. He should never have had to go through this.”

"And your other victims did?" Spike demanded.

“Wes is tough.” Gunn took a step towards him. “He’s dealing with it – a damned sight better than any of the rest of us are anyway.”

Spike added levelly: “He knew what he signed up for.”

“Not for this!” Angel snapped back.

“He’s an ex-Watcher. He’d read your file. He knew what you used to be – what you were capable of becoming again. It was a risk that came with the job.”

Angel closed his eyes, flooded with memories, sharp as the slashes of a knife, his fists bruising Wesley’s face and body, the vicious way he’d tossed him onto the bed as if he weighed nothing, signified nothing; that leering pleasure Angelus had taken in first carrying out that brutal assault and then the sound of his own voice taunting Wesley with what he’d done to him. “Whatever you think you know I did – the reality was worse.”

Gunn gritted his teeth. “Wesley doesn’t want to talk about it and if I'm honest, neither do we.”

Angel tried to find some focus but he had a lurid snuff movie running through his head on a permanent loop. “How come I have my soul back?”

“Magic.” Lorne moved closer and there was compassion in his voice and expression that was missing entirely from the other two. “Wesley cast a spell that made the soul-eater give up all its latest meals – your soul included.”

“Did you kill it?”

“Deader than hell,” Spike assured him. “Way deader actually. Hell had a lot more life in it as I recall.”

“Is there a corpse I can kick?”

Spike lifted his right foot so Angel could see the slime encrusted on the toe of his boot. “Already kicked.”

Lorne sighed. “And, Angel, we all know that isn’t really who you want to be kicking, but beating yourself up isn’t going to solve anything.”

“It would feel pretty good to me right now.”

“It isn’t what Wesley wants.” Spike lit another cigarette. “Not sure why not, but he’s got it fixed in his head that you and your evil twin are two entirely separate entities and you don’t have to take the rap for anything Angelus does. Not sure I agree with him but after what he’s been through it only seemed polite to humour him. So, how about you do the same?”

Gunn looked across at Lorne. “Are we going to unchain him or what?”

“He feels like Angel to me.”

“To me too. I was just checking.” Gunn moved over to the bed. “Angel, I'm going to unchain you now, but if you’re still Angelus, let me tell you straight out, I'm going to ram a stake into your gnarly-ass beef jerky heart so fast you’re going to choke on your own dust.”

“Where’s Wesley?” Angel pressed, hardly caring as Spike, Gunn and Lorne began to unloop the chains that bound him to the bed. “Is he in the hospital?”

“In your bathroom.” A shadow passed across Gunn’s face. “He needed to take a shower or six.”

Angel closed his eyes and kept them closed as they pulled at chains and unlocked padlocks and cuffs from his wrists and ankles. He could feel where the metal had bitten in but it wasn’t enough; he wanted to self-mutilate; to stick knives into his body and then yank out the blade for the pleasure of the pain-scream in his nerves, the drip of his blood.

“We can get through this.” Lorne tentatively touched his shoulder. “All of us. We just have to remember that Angelus is something that happens to everyone, including you. I’m not saying we won’t need a few Sea Breezes and perhaps some serious therapy and a paid vacation in the Algarve but…” He glanced uncertainly at Gunn as he said it and Angel realized that Gunn was having the most trouble accepting that. Right now he had some trouble accepting it himself.

“Look,” Spike shrugged. “You’ve said it enough times yourself. You get vamped, a demon takes up residence in your body. It has your memories but it isn’t you. You and me, we’re neither one thing nor the other. We’re kind of us and we’re kind of not. We’re not who we used to be. Not human. Not those people. But we’re not the demon any more either. The soul drives out the demon or keeps it imprisoned inside. Then we’re like the demon was, right? We have the memories of what the demon did and felt but that doesn’t make us them. Isn’t that how it works?”

“I don’t know how it works,” Angel said tersely. “Maybe some darkness is innate, like Darla told me. Maybe you get the demon you deserve.”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Well, I was a poet, mate. My only crimes against humanity were to do with a lack of scansion in some of my iambic pentameter. That didn’t stop me turning into a vicious serial killing bastard once I was offed and the demon was in residence. Don’t see why it should be different for you.”

Angel glanced at him briefly. “You had a good teacher.”

Spike conceded the point with a shrug. “So did you.”

“Spike’s right,” Lorne said quickly. “You didn’t choose the demon you were stuck with, Angel, and Angelus isn’t you.”

“But maybe Angelus chose me because he knew he’d be right at home here. You remember what I said to Wes the last time Angelus came out to play? ‘Foul rag and bone shop of the heart. That’s where you live.’ Well, maybe that’s where I live. Maybe it’s where I’ve always lived.” He thought of a match dropping onto a pool of gasoline; Darla and Drusilla burning. The dead lawyers behind the door he’d locked from the outside.

“Do you need blood?” Lorne asked, still fluttering slightly, as if he were Switzerland and there was a world war brewing.

Angel closed his eyes again, remembering his fangs piercing the thin skin of Wesley’s deliciously warm scarred throat, not even hungry, just wanting him to feel it, the terrifying bleed of life, the chill spreading through him, the heaviness in his limbs, too weak to fight back and unconsciousness wrapping him in a deadening shroud; Angel still thrusting into him as he drank; Wesley’s body only relaxing against the onslaught at last as darkness from the draining blood loss claimed him… “I think I’ve had enough,” he said bitterly.

Gunn got as far as the bathroom door but didn’t quite have the courage to turn the handle. It was bound to be locked anyway, he knew that, even though he’d diffidently suggested to Wesley that after the blood loss he’d suffered he might faint if he had the water too hot, a reminder about sitting down if he heard a hissing in his ears, leaving the door unlocked, shouting for Gunn if he felt dizzy at all. Wesley had just nodded silently and then disappeared into Angel’s bathroom, the sound of the shower running a moment later preventing the possibility of further conversation.

On their way back from dismembering the soul-eating demon, they had tried to persuade Wesley to let them take him to a hospital. He had refused, not just with quiet determination but with a flicker of panic in his eyes that had silenced Gunn more effectively than the most eloquent reassurance of his good health. He and Lorne had exchanged a glance and both had to silently acknowledge that even leaving aside Wesley’s personal unwillingness to have anyone examine him there were also good sound reasons for keeping Wesley away from anything that might spark an official investigation. And if they took him to a hospital in his current condition the hospital was going to ask a lot of difficult questions. He was already on record as having been nearly killed in an explosion, nearly killed by a gunshot wound, and nearly killed from a slashed throat. Angel had brought him in after the explosion, Angel had been turned away by Cordelia when he tried to visit Wesley after the gunshot wound, and Angel had tried to suffocate him after the slashed throat. If you added to all of that, evidence of a brutal beating coupled with an equally brutal sexual assault, the doctors were going to send for the police. Wesley would deny it later, of course, but anyone who didn’t put a note on his casefile at that point that he was looking increasingly like the victim of the kind of domestic violence that was eventually going to end in a fatality just wasn’t doing his job right as a detective.

Perhaps worse than that from his perspective, they were going to put all his injuries on a record that Wolfram & Hart or any other nasty could probably access. That perhaps the rebuilt Watcher’s Council could access. That perhaps his father might find out about. Gunn winced in sympathy just at the thought.

Spike had chosen to be the one to lay it on the line. “Look, mate.” He turned around in the passenger seat and looked at Wesley steadily. “No one wants to put you through any more crap than you’ve already been through, okay? But, if it comes down to you dying of peritonitis or getting asked some difficult questions by a junior doctor, you need to make sure you’ve got your priorities straight.”

Wesley had sighed in that world weary way he had which sometimes made him appear older than any other person on the planet, including the undead legions of darkness. “There’s no danger of… Angelus was…” It quite quickly became obvious that he had no method of finishing that sentence.

Spike persisted and even as he cringed, Gunn was grateful to him as it meant he didn’t have to. “Angelus – not big on the foreplay, as I recall. Much keener on the inflicting as much pain as possible.”

“Not this time.” Wesley took a deep breath. “He – wanted me to live. He therefore took pains not to really…injure me… It was all…surface. No trauma. I just need… I just want a shower.” Then he had so obviously been about to hurl if anyone made him talk about it any more that even Spike shrugged and gave it up.

“All right, have it your way. We don’t talk about it. We don’t make you see a doctor – as long as you don’t get a fever. But if your temperature goes up one lousy degree I'm knocking you out and taking you to the ER myself. Got it?”

Wesley nodded. “Understood.”

As a compromise they had stopped off at an all-night pharmacy and Gunn has bought Wesley a family sized bottle of double strength Ibuprofen and some Coke to wash it down. For all his claims to be not really injured, when Gunn wordlessly held out two pills them and then opened the Coke can, Wesley had taken and swallowed them without a protest. Wesley had fallen asleep in the car then, which was good, as it meant they could pull in to his apartment without him knowing about it, Gunn taking the stairs two at a time up to the trashed place, grabbing some clothes and Wesley’s toothbrush and razor then stashing them out of sight before Wesley woke up. It had been tacitly agreed amongst them that he was not going back to that place for a good long time, certainly not alone, and never to sleep again. There were a million other apartments in LA and in none of them had Wesley been held prisoner by Angelus.

“He looks like shit,” Spike muttered as he looked in the rearview mirror at the man slumped in the back seat, Wesley’s head on Lorne’s immaculately pressed shoulder, the green demon’s arm protectively curled around his shoulders.

“Being treated like shit will do that to you,” Gunn also glanced at him. The bruises didn’t look any better in the raking strobes of neon light that intermittently blared across the back seat. Lorne was humming something under his breath that was low and soothing enough to qualify as a lullaby. Gunn wondered if Lorne was working some gentle hex to keep Wesley sleeping through this journey back. When Wesley had been awake, every time they had gone over a bump in the road he had winced, just the way he had when he’d been shot in the gut, and Gunn had felt his rage levels spiral dangerously close to bursting through the top of his head. They could all smell Angelus on him. And the bruises were just getting darker and angrier; the cut across his lip looking as if it might break open again any minute; the one on his forehead and cheekbone still shiny with unshed blood.

He hadn’t woken up until they drew up outside the office, stirring sleepily, the little boy bed hair something that on any other occasion Gunn would have said looked really cute. But as Wesley opened his eyes he winced, disorientated, clasping a hand to his abdomen and then putting the back of his hand up to his split lip, only then did he seem to remember and the flinch had been violent. For a second Gunn had seen the inner conflict Wesley was still processing, how he really felt, deer-in-headlights panic as he felt the world spiralling away from him, but then Wesley blinked and became aware of them all looking at him. Lorne gently helping him to sit up straight, Spike saying tersely, “All right, mate?” Gunn just looking and probably everything he was feeling right there on his face for Wesley to see it.

It was Gunn that Wesley answered, even though he hadn’t spoken, looking into his eyes and saying, “I'm okay. Just a bit… I'm fine.”

Lorne took a deep breath. “Well, cupcakes, I guess this is when we find out if our esteemed leader has come back to us an angel or a demon.”

“He’s come back as both.” Wesley winced again as he got out of the car but waved aside Gunn’s offer of help. “Until he Shanshus Angel doesn’t have a lot of choice about the demon part.” The look he gave Gunn was intense, as if willing the man to get something. Gunn got it. He just didn’t like it. He guessed Rondell would have asked him what else he expected when he worked for a vampire? But he hadn’t actually expected this. Not even when Angelus had been sleazing his way around that cage in the basement of the Hyperion. Gunn had worried for Fred and he’d worried for Cordy, but he’d never picked up on the signals that said there could come a time when he would be having to do this: grab Wesley’s elbow on the sidewalk as the man got that hissing in his ears again, swaying palely under his darkening bruises as the urge to hurl had to once again firmly be repressed.

For all Wesley’s words, Gunn thought it was significant that on their return to the basement, Wesley hadn’t been able to look at Angel, just diving straight for the shower, while the rest of them had taken up their vigil positions around him, weapons at the ready.

Now that Angel was unchained, Gunn wanted to check up on Wesley again, make sure he hadn’t passed out in there, and perhaps also glad of any excuse not to be in the room with the person who had – kind of – done this to his friend. He didn’t know why he still thought of Wesley as his friend, after the way the guy had stabbed him, but he did, and he got now why Wesley had forgiven Angel everything after he’d tried to smother him in the hospital, why he’d just gone out patiently every night and tried to find him, but harboured anger towards Gunn. He’d thought it was because of Fred but he realized now it had something to do with justice. Wesley had thought Angel’s rage, even his murderous rage, towards him was just. He had thought Gunn’s anger was unjust and responded accordingly. Gunn got that now. What Wes had done to him had been pretty bad, but as he agreed with the guy that he deserved it, he couldn’t harbour resentment. So, yes, Wes was still his friend and he was mad as hell at what had been done to that friend, and however many times he reminded himself that it wasn’t Angel, that Angel himself had been a helpless bystander unable to lift a finger, a part of him wondered why the vampire’s love for his friends didn’t give him strength enough to overwhelm Angelus. Wondered why he hadn’t found a way to do something to stop Angelus from doing what he’d done to Wesley.

Angel is his soul, Gunn. Without the soul, there is no Angel. It’s as simple as that.

It was only as simple as that if you were Wesley. Gunn thought it was a lot more complicated.

Still hesitating outside the bathroom door he listened for the sound of the shower and there was no noise of running water. Perhaps Wesley had finally managed to use enough soap to wash away the scent of Angelus. Or –

Then he heard it – faint but unmistakable – the sound of a man crying; trying to stifle it, certainly, but unable to hold it back any longer, body-shaking wracking misery of sobs. He reached for the door handle at once and then held off, because what could he do to make this better? Wesley wouldn’t want someone to put his arms around him and tell him it was going to be okay. He would want no one to know that he was crying. No one to know that what had been done to him had devastated him so completely. Feeling like a coward and a crappy friend but knowing all the same that he was doing the right thing, Gunn backed away silently and went back into the basement.

“I should have told you.” Angel still looked as ill as Gunn felt and he suspected that nothing he said was going to make the rest of them feel any less nauseated either.

Thinking of Wesley crying in that bathroom roughened his temper. “Told us what? That Angelus is a sick creep? We already knew that.”

Angel met his gaze. “That he would keep Wesley alive, come what may. I knew what his intentions were after the last visit, I just… I didn’t think he would be coming back. I didn’t think it mattered what he wanted as he wouldn’t be getting it anyway.”

“What does he want?” Lorne asked quietly.

Spike was still standing in the corner with his arms folded, not helping. Gunn didn’t know if he was sharing some of the guilt here as a previously soulless demon who had also committed his share of stomach-churning crimes, or distancing himself from Angelus’s recent spree.

“His plan last year was that he turned Faith but left Wesley human, then the two of them kept Wes as a pet.” His disgust with the demon within him flickered briefly on his face but then he went on quietly: “Angelus and Faith would take Wesley back to their lair, torture him for kicks, then keep him chained up in a corner so that when they brought their victims home there would be someone with a soul to bear witness to just how evil they were being. Someone left alive at the end to keep hearing those screams. Someone they could drive mad just like Angelus – I – drove Drusilla mad, only keep him human, keep him warm-blooded and breakable and with no escape from his soul so he’d feel everything that much more acutely.

“Vampires like families and Angelus likes to keep in touch with the people who matter to me, so he would have come after all of you, picked you off one by one. Would have killed Connor because he was too dangerous to keep alive. Would have turned you, Gunn, because you’d be such an asset as a soulless killer and what worse thing could anyone do to you than turn you into one after you’ve spent your whole life fighting the undead? Wesley would have to witness that as well, of course, what I’d done to you, what you’d become. Fred he would have kept human to rape, to share with Gunn, to rape some more, to make Wesley watch everything they did to her. Same with Cordelia, although her I think he might have turned. I don’t think he’d made up his mind which would be the most fun with her. But Wesley always got to stay human and he always got to stay alive and to keep on suffering until he could find a way to kill himself.”

There was a long silence before Angel raised his head and looked at Gunn. “I should have told you that before. I'm sorry. It wasn’t something I was exactly eager to share.”

Grimly Gunn said, “I get that.”

“So, the next time I turn into Angelus, stake me first, ask questions later. Okay?”

“No.”

Gunn turned to see Wesley had emerged from the bathroom and was now wearing Angel’s robe and towelling his hair with Angel’s towel as if nothing could have been more normal between them. More than normal, come to think of it, Gunn realized, as that wasn’t something Wesley usually did even when he was borrowing Angel’s shower gel after pulling an all-nighter. Wesley was making a point here, which was that he was so okay with Angel he was going to act way more okay with him than usual. His eyes did look a little red but that could be accounted for by the shampoo, and Gunn didn’t think that anyone except him would know about the man’s temporary breakdown. The bruises on his face still looked spectacular, the finger-marks even more visible around his throat, while the bite-mark had evidently started oozing again. The cuts and contusions didn’t look any better after an application of soap and water but the blue robe wrapped tightly around his body did at least hide the multi-coloured bruises marking him elsewhere.

“You can’t rely on us to kill you until all other possibilities have been exhausted, Angel.”

The vampire looked at his face and flinched violently, every bruise on display clearly hitting him as hard as Angelus had hit the Englishman. “Oh my god, Wes…”

In the face of Angel’s aghast horror, Wesley briefly faltered then he was coming forward to join them all as if nothing had happened.

“I'm so sorry…” Angel breathed and the ache in his voice made Gunn close his eyes briefly, too much confirmation in that tone of just how bad it had got back there and how Angel and Wesley must equally be remembering every moment of it.

“Can we not talk about it?” Wesley’s voice was clipped but there was a tremor just beneath the surface. “You were discussing Angelus’s future plans and why for some reason you think that makes you a candidate for the pointy wood. As I was saying, you can hardly expect us to kill you out of hand unless there is no other option open to us.”

Angel was still gazing at the cuts and bruises marking Wesley’s face. “Didn’t you just hear what I said?”

“Yes, I heard what you said. It doesn’t make any difference, except that we now know my life was actually in less danger than I originally supposed when Angelus turned up at my flat.”

Gunn waited until Wesley had sat down on the bed before addressing him. “You’d stake me, right? If it went down like Angel said Angelus had planned. If I was a vamp, you’d stake me before I could…”

“I’d probably try to get your soul back.”

Gunn gritted his teeth. “But you wouldn’t have the option, Wesley, because in Angelus’ Master Plan you’re the first one he captures, remember?”

“But I might escape. I rather think I would escape eventually. When you’re being drunk on your own evil, how carefully do you really check your prisoners’ bonds?” Seeing their expressions, Wesley sighed. “If Fred had still been alive it would be different. If Cordelia… If it came to a vampire version of you or Angelus raping either of them, of course I would stake you before I’d let that happen, but as they’re no longer an issue, we would actually have more time to try to get you both back.”

“Get me back?” Gunn echoed in disbelief. “I’d be dead. I’d be gone, Wes.”

“Angel’s dead. He’s technically ‘gone’. I'm sorry that the person he used to be was murdered in an alley all those years ago. I'm sorry that he has to carry the burden of all Angelus’s crimes. But I wouldn’t rather wish that someone had staked him two hundred years ago just so he can know eternal peace. I’d rather he was here, with us, helping us fight the bad things in this city. And the same goes for you. I'm sorry, Charles, but it does. The first thing I’d do is get your soul back and only then if you still wanted it would I think about staking you. You’re too valuable to kill out of hand.” There was a pause before Wesley added quietly: “And although I mean valuable to the people who need help, I also mean valuable to me. Vampires aren’t the only people who need families. And you’re mine. You and Angel and Lorne are the only family I have left now. Well…” he shrugged, “who actually give a damn about me, as opposed to being related to me and so having to phone me on my birthday to remind me of all my failings.”

“Wes, what I did to you…” Angel broke off, evidently unwilling to have this conversation here, in front of everyone else. Gunn could certainly relate to that and it certainly wasn’t fair on Wesley to reveal all the sordid details of Angelus’ treatment of him. “I'm so sorry for what I did to you.”

“You didn’t do anything to me.” Wesley didn’t meet his eye. “It was Angelus.”

Angel gritted his teeth. “Then I'm sorry for what Angelus did to you.”

“Don’t be. You’re not him.”

Angel’s turn to count to five. “Wesley…”

“You’re the one who said you weren’t going to apologize for what Angelus did the last time we let him out of the box. You were right then and you’re right now. You’re not responsible for his actions. If you want to spend your life atoning for his past crimes, that’s your decision and as you do a lot of good that way, I support that decision. But you haven’t done a damned thing to me, Angel, and I'm not accepting an apology from you for something you didn’t do.”

Angel got to his feet and looked pointedly at the others. “Wes and I need to talk.”

Even Spike, never the most tactful person in the world, got that this meant they had to leave now. Only as Gunn stood up did he realize that he had a problem with leaving Wesley alone with Angel. He knew it was irrational and unjust, but leaving matters of soul and no soul out of it there had only been one physical body in the room along with Wesley when Wesley had been kicked all round the room and raped. For a moment he felt frozen with an instinctive mistrust of Angel that overrode his intellectual trust of him.

Wesley said gently, “Charles…”

Gunn winced and felt his lower back as if that was the only reason for his hesitation. “Damned demons. How come they never kick you where it doesn’t hurt?”

Spike elbowed himself off the wall and left without a word, his gaze went briefly to Wesley, and Gunn remembered belatedly that Wesley hadn’t included him in his ‘family’ members. He doubted it had been an intentional oversight. That just wasn’t how Wesley thought of him yet. Perhaps mentally they were all still back in the Hyperion. If he was honest, he didn’t think of Spike as part of the family either yet but he couldn’t deny his usefulness. The only one of them who had been able to match Angelus for speed and savagery when they needed it had been Spike and it was thanks to him Wesley hadn’t ended up a hostage again.

As the blond vampire headed for the door, Angel said, “Thanks,” to him.

Spike didn’t say ‘For what?’ he just glanced briefly at Wesley before saying, “You’re welcome.” After a slight pause, he added: “And any other time you want me to stick you full of tranquillisers, Angel, mate, I'm your vamp. Always be a pleasure.”

Angel waited until they were gone before shutting the door firmly. He sat down on the bed and said, “Wes, maybe you don’t need to talk about this, but I do. And maybe you don’t need to hear my apology, but I need to make it.”

Wesley sat down on the overstuffed chair that had been left by the previous occupant. “Last time Angelus got out, he half-throttled me and tossed me off a balcony. That wasn’t your fault and neither is this. What’s the difference?”

“Last time Angelus got out it was your idea. I warned you what he was like and you wanted to go ahead with it anyway. Which did make me feel that anything that happened to you that wasn’t permanently scarring was on your own head. This was different. This was me ignoring everything Lorne had told me about not letting my own obsession with this demon rebound on the rest of you, and walking straight into the danger he’d warned me about. This is about me going after that demon even though I knew I couldn’t kill it because I wanted some cosmic payback for all the sins I have to atone for.” Angel took a deep breath. “I'm not apologising to you for what Angelus did to you in that bedroom. I'm apologising to you for not taking care to keep Angelus locked up where he should have been. I'm apologising to you for Angelus being around to do those things to you in the first place.”

There was a long pause before Wesley nodded, conceding the point. “Apology accepted.”

“And I need to talk about what he did.”

Wesley immediately locked down, averting his gaze, voice hardening. “I don’t.”

“Wes,” Angel’s tone was unexpectedly gentle and it made the man look at him despite himself. “I remember all of it. I know you do too. We’re the only ones who know what happened in there. The things Angelus said. The things he did. How much he enjoyed hurting you…”

Wesley had his eyes closed now, a hand up to his head to hide his face. “Angel…” He took a deep breath and looked up. “The truth is, I have no emotional capacity to cope with what Angelus did to me. Do you remember how Fred ran away when her parents came to see her? Because if they were real then Pylea was too and the only way she could cope with Pylea was to pretend it was just a fairy story? This is the same. This has to be a nightmare I had that no one else was a part of. And I'm sorry if that means I can’t help you with your nightmare either, but I can’t. I don’t have anything to give or to say that can help. I have to pretend it didn’t happen.”

“But it did,” Angel said, still very gently. “And I need to know that we’re okay.”

“We’re okay.” Wesley looked up at him. “It wasn’t you. I know it wasn’t you.”

“But I look like him and I smell like him and I sound like him and I'm as strong as he is. He got into your room and did those things to you because you trust me. We both know that’s true. Trusting me. Trusting a vampire who can lose his soul as suddenly as he gained it, and who is stronger than you and faster than you and can hurt you like no one else on this planet, got you tied to that bed trying not to scream for all those godawful hours.”

“Only two hours,” Wesley said quietly. “Two hours and twenty-four minutes give or take a few seconds before the blood loss made me black out. Not that I was counting.”

“My point is that…”

“Your point is that if my trusting you ended up causing me lots of physical pain it would be a natural response on my part to stop trusting you. Yes, it probably would, but I seem to have been contaminated by trust for you a long time ago, Angel, and I can’t just shake it off like a bad case of measles. You don’t actually sound that much like Angelus, anyway. Probably because he’s such a prick and you’re not. And you don’t smell like him either. He smells of blood and arousal, mostly, I think he must have a permanent hard-on. You don’t. Well, except when Darla was around. You smelled a little like him then. And I used to be scared of you, remember? You must have smelt it on me back then.”

“I remember.” And he did. Remembered grabbing Wesley in their first office, yanking him back against his body, demonstrating how fast he was. Telling him in that hard dead voice he used on him sometimes: “Because this is how fast I could take you if I wanted to.” He could remember the smell of fear and the rapid hammering of Wesley’s heart; the way he’d gone so still in Angel’s grip, like any prey animal seized by a predator, instinct kicking in that told him not to struggle or the predator would bite now instead of later.

“But I still trusted you even when I was afraid of you.” Wesley leant forward in case Angel missed the sincerity of his gaze. “I still trust you. Now. Today. This minute. And if you don’t like that, tough. Angelus did a lot of things to me, it’s true, but he didn’t find a way to make me stop trusting you and I like to think of that as a victory for our side.”

Angel shrugged. “Sounds more like the triumph of hope over experience to me.”

“Well, that too. My point is I know it wasn’t you.”

Angel put his hands up to his face, groaning inwardly. He couldn’t find the words; how much he regretted it; how angry he was with himself for his stupidity in risking his soul like that; how he wanted to grab Angelus and smash his face through the nearest mirror but Angelus was the one demon he could never lay his hands on; not without the aid of seriously dangerous drugs anyway. “I hate him so much. And, Wes, on some level, he is me.”

Wesley shrugged. “Living well really is the best revenge, Angel. Every time you save another life you are keeping him in hell. And the day you become human is the day he ceases to have any kind of existence. If you truly want to piss him off, go and save another puppy. According to Faith, that really gets to him.”

Abruptly, Angel put his arms around Wesley and held him closely, although not so closely that he couldn’t struggle free if he panicked, which he almost expected him to do; instead, he froze, and that hurt too, but at least it was consistent; at least this was something Wesley had done in the past. They both waited a moment, listening to the accelerated pounding of Wesley’s heart and Angel was sure they were both remembering that first office and their first tentative steps towards a friendship. Angel inhaled carefully and there was a scent of fear but it wasn’t as sharp as he’d expected; not the blind panic of raw terror that recent events amply justified.

“LA getting to you at last, Angel?” Wesley asked a little indistinctly. “I thought you weren’t comfortable with hugging?”

“I'm still trying to avoid the whole mud-wrapping thing.” Angel realized Wesley had a point, as he hadn’t got any better at hugging. It had come naturally to him with Wesley once; perhaps when he'd thought of Wesley as someone still somehow childlike, but there was too much water under the bridge of their relationship for it to come easily now. It felt damned awkward to him; all that strange body to body contact, elbows and ribs uneasily touching. But he couldn’t help remembering that he’d hugged Faith when she needed it – needed it because she was traumatized from torturing Wesley – and that therefore he owed Wesley a hug now. Not that Wesley seemed to particularly like being hugged, come to think of it, he was just sitting there awkwardly within the embrace, seeming to wonder exactly how, as an Englishman, one did this anyway. But Angel persisted; essaying a vague back rubbing motion that he hoped was comforting rather than just plain creepy.

Wesley remained awkwardly unrelaxed, but the fear scent was getting less, not more, and the awkwardness definitely seemed to have more to do with his lack of experience in being hugged than because of his proximity to Angel in particular. Angel realized that he hadn’t hugged Wesley when Fred had died either. Wesley hadn’t really invited it; he’d worn that flesh-covering turtleneck like armour and kept his elbows jammed into his sides as if any accidental contact with another body would cause him to shatter.

“Why do people hug again?” Wesley murmured.

“It’s meant to be comforting. Go with it.” Angel rubbed his back again, almost sure that he was doing this right. Wesley smelt of his shower gel, not blood, fear, pain, or Angelus’s come, any more. The hot water and the thin robe wrapped around his body had left him a particularly warm blooded creature to embrace. Angel could hear his heartbeat, sense the blood in his veins and arteries. He still smelt like food; he remembered from the last time that he’d fed on Wesley how long that had taken to wear off. It had been even more acute on the last occasion as Wesley had been not just the first human blood he’d tasted in nearly two years, but undoubtedly the most delicious human blood he’d tasted ever. Three months of starvation really made a vampire savour his next meal and while the pig’s blood had been welcome it had also been unsatisfactory, each snatched gulp promising nourishment but not entirely providing it. Drinking from Wesley’s skinny dirty arm, however, that had been ambrosia, the nectar of paradise, warm from the vein, delicious fresh human blood bathing his mouth and throat, each sip restoring sanity and strength. He had never needed a meal more or had one that tasted better.

It had made Angel acutely aware of Wesley’s scent and primordially territorial. It had felt wrong to be estranged from Wesley before that meal on the hired boat. He had dreamt of Wesley returned to the fold, part of Angel’s family once again, and woken up to find the man saving his life, Angel’s anger as spent as it had been in his hallucinatory dreams. He had known that Wesley was doing this as a penance, seeking atonement for his mistake, for his part in the creation of a Connor who had done this to his father. Justine had been in no such need of redemption but Wesley had insisted on her atoning anyway. So he had woken to the care of a gentle, nurturing Wesley and thought that this was it; the end of their estrangement; that Wesley would come back with him to the Hyperion and stay. But Wesley had left him there, to the care of Gunn and Fred, evidently still considering himself exiled from the family unit, and Angel hadn’t had the strength then to tell him to stay, and besides there had been Connor to deal with. But as soon as he’d had vigour enough, he’d been determined to restore the missing members of his family, to find Cordelia and fetch Wesley home.

Wesley, however, had proven surprisingly elusive about being fetched. He’d handed over the information about Cordelia and then simply…left. Leaving Angel looking after him in disbelief because it certainly hadn’t played this way in his mind. He was positively eager to offer Wesley absolution; to tell him he forgave him and he should come home now, but Wesley hadn’t given him the option and had resolutely refused to need to be saved or to appear to be in need of his forgiveness.

And yet Wesley had smelt like something that belonged to him. Not just because he was part of Angel’s family and needed to return to it, but because Angel had drunk his blood, not as he had done from Kate, for her sake, to save her, but as he had with Buffy, drank deep and long to pull himself from the brink of brain death to full awareness of his unlife. Wesley had lent him his warmth and sustenance and as a consequence Angel had clawed his way back to being; and that gave them a connection which he’d thought they both understood. They were literally bound by blood now.

On their next meeting, Wesley smelt like food and family and friendship to him whenever he inhaled; even above the scent of sweat and fear and demon blood and Lilah and Wesley’s own cuts and bruises, there was that unmistakable Wesley scent that Angel now thought of, unconsciously, as something belonging to him. But Wesley hadn’t agreed with that assessment at all. Wesley had walked off and left him with the information he needed and no hint at all that he had any intention of ever returning to the family fold. And the next time he’d smelt Wesley it had been on Lilah; all over Lilah in fact, just as Lilah’s scent had been all over Wesley; intimate odours of sweat and satisfaction. Territorial, head of the family, alpha male possessiveness aside, that had smelt wrong to Angel. Lilah was his enemy and Wesley wasn’t; had proven that he wasn’t; he didn’t like his friends being scent-marked by his enemies. Especially not when they were scent-marked so very…thoroughly.

He’d probed a little try to find out what this was: was she playing Wesley? Was she using him? Was she a danger to him? Was Wesley’s connection with her proof that, for all his saving of Angel, he was still a threat to them? His instincts had told him not. Wesley was an ally still. Voluntarily estranged now where once he’d been angrily banished, but it hadn’t been all atonement when he pulled Angel from the sea; he hadn’t just been there because his sense of justice demanded it; he’d been there out of friendship too. There hadn’t been cold precision in the way he spilled his blood; I owe you this much and no more. There had been love. So, he was with Lilah for his own reasons but not necessarily corrupted by her. Although no doubt she had done her best to corrupt him when leaving her scent all over him. Or perhaps not. Perhaps she’d been drawn to his cleanness because she was so very dirty. On some level, mistakes and betrayal and borderline insanity taken into account, Angel did think of Wesley as a clean spirit. He did what he did, even when it was so wrong it made the head spin, because he thought it was right, not out of ambition or greed or any other self-serving motive.

Angel made another awkward gesture towards rubbing Wesley’s back, noticing again the way Wesley’s shoulder blades stuck out, the way he remembered from hugging him before, how thin he was, how narrow, even with the muscle on his upper arms and chest, he was still thinner than any other man he knew.

He breathed in his scent again and found that the fear was getting less; the heartbeat almost normal again. “Are we really okay?” he breathed. “Because I really don’t think I deserve to keep your friendship after what the demon who lives inside me did to you, but, I have to tell you, Wes, I really want to.”

“We’re really okay.”

It was strange to hear Wesley sounding choked up again. He’d used to cry so easily. Unused to anyone being nice to him. Typical affection-starved only child, sent off to a place where emotions shouldn’t be displayed in public, which had only meant he’d never learned a way to deal with them. A few years of Cordelia teasing him and Angel’s probably erratic affection and behaviour helping him towards gaining some self-respect, and Wesley was a guy who hardly ever cried these days. Angel waited and felt the man relax against him, a letting go of some of the need to be terribly brave about everything, and not let his guard down even for a minute in case reality coshed him with all its horror.

He risked another gentle stroke of his back, remembering where the bruises were but feeling Wesley probably needed the pressure right now. “I'm so sorry, Wes.”

“I know,” Wesley sighed. “You don’t have to keep saying it. It’s not like I'm the best person in the world at apologising myself.”

“Quite apart from that hideous emotional trauma to both of us, a bit of a setback on my road to redemption, wouldn’t you say?” He let Wesley choose when he wanted to draw back from the comfort he was offering; wondering even as he did it, if some subconscious part of him had needed to remind Wesley of how much he needed him; suspecting their motives towards one another were murky probably a lot of the time; finding a balance in their friendship that didn’t involve either one of them giving up too much self respect because he was Wesley’s cause and the champion to whom he had attached himself, but also someone Wesley would stake if he had to. Then there was the small matter of them having forgiven each other the unforgivable more than once.

Angel thought about all the things they’d been through the past few years; all the people and all the little fragments of their souls they’d lost. “Maybe we should go and see this swami pal of Lorne’s together. What do you think? We’re both pretty fucked up.”

“Literally in my case.”

“Wes…” Angel looked at him aghast and Wesley shrugged.

“There’s something cathartic about the worst having happened. In some ways there is a sense of relief because at least it’s over, and it was bad but I'm still here.”

“Yes.” It hit Angel for the first time that he was. He’d been so caught up in the horror of what Angelus – what a part of Angel – had done to Wesley that he hadn’t had time to be grateful that there was a new day dawning and Wesley wasn’t a vampire and he wasn’t dead; that he could still walk and talk and had all his limbs; hadn’t been flailed to death or mutilated or burnt alive or had the last drop of blood drained from his veins.

“We’re both still here.” Wesley stepped back another pace but it just seemed to be so they could talk to each other better, not because such close proximity to the vampire made him uncomfortable. “You’re not Angelus and you’re not a pile of dust.” He sat down on the bed and grimaced, half wry, half amused.

“What?” Angel sat down next to him, not too close, but close enough that they could both appreciate how close they were sitting with neither of them freaking.

“I was just thinking what complicated lives we lead.”

Angel sighed. “Yes. It’s a little worrying when we have to chalk one up for the good guys if I'm not a pile of dust and still have a soul, and you still have all your arms and legs and…”

“…still have a soul.” Wesley looked at him evenly. “Everyone has darkness inside themselves, Angel, you just have a more tangible darkness than most. If I had lost my soul I would have become a killer too. If you remember, even with a soul, I did become a killer for a while.”

Angel picked his words with care. “Wes, you do know that what you did tonight was pretty amazing, don’t you? Showing so much courage when Angelus was… Then just getting on with what needed to be done for the greater good. Most people wouldn’t have been able to do anything except sit in a dark corner and gibber after being put through an ordeal like that, but you went straight back out there, helped capture Angelus, helped trap that demon, gave those people back their souls, gave me back my soul. It wouldn’t matter if I offered you a job five years ago because I wanted to borrow your CD collection, I’ve still been proven right, haven’t I? You’re an invaluable guy to have around and the Council’s loss was definitely my gain.”

Wesley’s expression had been gradually changing throughout Angel’s speech and the vampire realized belatedly that what he had taken to be Wesley becoming increasingly touched by Angel’s words was in fact dawning suspicion. Something confirmed when Wesley got out of his chair and shouted: “Lorne!”

“I'm me, dammit!” Angel protested.

Wesley had already backed away. “First, hugging, and now – affirmation speeches? Lorne!”

They burst into the room with stakes and tranquilliser guns at the ready, Gunn hurrying to Wesley’s side while pointing a tranq gun at Angel. “Are you okay? What is it? Did he hurt you?”

Angel rolled his eyes in disbelief. “I was just trying to be nice!”

“He hugged me.” Wesley’s eyes were flinty with suspicion. “Lorne, make him sing again.”

“Hugged you?” Spike narrowed his eyes as he looked at the other vampire. “You’re not Angel.”

“I am Angel!” the vampire protested. “Lorne…?” He gave the green demon his most beseeching look.

“His aura feels like Angel.” Lorne was the only one not carrying a weapon. “And there’s the whole puppy dog eyes thing. Would Angelus know how to do that?”

“Hugging?” Gunn countered. “We’re supposed to believe that Angel goes in for hugging now?”

Lorne conceded the point with a grimace. “He’s got a point, cupcake. You’d better sing something for me.”

Angel groaned and Gunn jerked the gun at him. “Hey, this is no picnic for us either. We have to listen to you.”

“I really don’t think my singing is that bad,” Angel muttered before launching into a verse of ‘Mandy’ that, he couldn’t help noticing, made everyone wince except for Wesley who was unfortunately trying so hard not to wince that he might as well have just clapped his hands over his ears like Spike.

“Sounds like Angel,” Gunn admitted.

Spike cautiously removed his hands from his ears. “And how. God, two hundred and fifty years to work on it and the guy still can’t carry a tune.”

“It is Angel.” Lorne turned to Wesley gently. “Looks like he really was just trying be nice, crumpet.”

Wesley looked at Angel awkwardly. “So, that was you? Saying those things?”

“Yes!”

“And the…hugging?”

“Yes. All me. Trying to be empathic and touchy-feely and generally…mud-wrappy.”

“With Wesley?” Spike demanded. “What were you thinking? The guy’s English! He doesn’t know how to respond to that kind of crap on a good day. Next time just clap him on the shoulder and talk about the weather. It’s what he understands.”

Wesley gave Angel an apologetic grimace. “A cup of tea would also be okay. Perhaps some discussion of the latest Test Match results?”

“Well, excuse me for trying to be evolved,” Angel muttered. “I kind of thought beating the crap out of someone demanded a bit more in the way of an apology than a cup of tea.”

Wesley winced again. “I think tea covers most things really. But I'm sorry I assumed you were an evil soulless demon because you said something nice to me. It was just a bit…of a shock.”

“I can be nice,” Angel protested. “I'm often nice. I distinctly remember being nice on other occasions.”

Gunn and Wesley exchanged blank looks of confusion and then Gunn nodded. “Sure.”

“Absolutely,” Wesley said a little too quickly. “Lots of other occasions…”

“…that we can’t actually remember right now,” Gunn finished ruthlessly. “But, hey, doesn’t mean they didn’t happen.”

Wesley was gently pushing the others towards the door, clearly embarrassed at his reaction. “Thanks, Lorne, sorry to bother you. No, really, Gunn, it’s fine. Spike, that isn’t funny…” He turned around and gave Angel a look of abject apology that would have mollified the vampire even on a day when Wesley hadn’t been understanding past the point of saintliness about his incredibly brutal and degrading treatment by Angelus. “I’m sorry. My nerves must be… Sorry.”

Angel took a breath he didn’t need just because the occasion seemed to warrant it. “I'm not upset your nerves are still twanging – just that it’s me being pleasant to you that convinces you I can’t really be me. Seriously, don’t I ever say anything to you that is remotely…nice…?”

“Yes, of course you do. All the time.” Wesley came and sat down next to him, face still full of apology under its patterning of cuts and bruises. “I was just… I overreacted. I'm still a little twitchy, I suppose.”

“Yeah, well being viciously beaten in your own home can do that to a guy.”

“And thank you for what you said.” Wesley averted his gaze, unconsciously giving Angel a clearer view of his battered cheekbone as he did so. “It’s appreciated.”

“You’re welcome. Going by your reaction it sounds as if it was a little overdue. And thank you for not ramming a stake through my heart the first chance you got. That’s appreciated too.”

Wesley pulled a face. “Do we have to do the whole thing about asking each other if we’re okay again now? Because I didn’t really enjoy that much the first time.”

Angel shook his head. “Me neither. But we are, yes?”

“Oh yes.” Wesley nodded emphatically. “And we’d be so much better if we didn’t have to talk about it any more.”

“I'm good with that.”

They sat there in silence for a moment, Wesley automatically pulling the towelling robe around himself as they did so. Angel looked up at the ceiling for a moment, his memory an unpleasant flash-film of images of Wesley being thrown around his apartment, slammed down onto the bed and… He winced. “Is there a Test Match on at the moment?”

Wesley frowned. “You know, I'm not sure. I’ve rather lost touch.”

“They have sport here too, you know. Kind of.” Angel risked a look at him. “The hockey’s good.”

“Girl’s game,” Wesley said dismissively. “And not even one of the really vicious girl games like lacrosse. And they don’t have sport here, Angel. I’ve seen part of what they call a football match. It’s rugby with crash helmets and shoulderpads and lots of stopping for no apparent reason.”

“It’s to fit in as many commercials as possible,” Angel explained. “That’s how the networks make their money.” He cast around for something else to say. “There’s baseball.”

“It’s just rounders with a bigger bat.” Wesley pulled a face. “And cheating because they count it even if you don’t go all the way round the bases in one go.”

“They get extra for that. It’s called a home run.”

“They’re the only runs that should count. Anyway, it’s a children’s game.”

“Not over here,” Angel persisted. “Here it’s for grown ups.”

“I really prefer cricket.”

“They don’t play that here. Games that last five days don’t really grab the American interest in the way they do with you Englishmen.”

“Short attention spans,” Wesley sniffed. “It’s the MTV generation.”

“And possibly the way that cricket is totally interminable unless you are brainwashed into liking it from an early age and so can stand the long wait while the bowler walks all the way back to start his run and the fact that most of the time even when he’s run all the way in and thrown the damned ball all that happens is the batsman misses it and the wicketkeeper catches it and throws it to the bowler who starts on the long walk all the way back again.”

“Only if it’s a fast bowler,” Wesley protested. “If it was an slow bowler or a spin…” He looked at Angel in obvious surprise. “You don’t like cricket?”

“I'm Irish,” Angel reminded him. “Not really my national game.”

“Yes, but… You’re almost British.”

“Really not,” Angel assured him.

“You don’t even like those trendy one day games they play in pyjamas?”

“Wes, trust me, nothing about cricket ever has been or ever will be ‘trendy’.”

Wesley stared into space a little longer. “So, what is the national game if you’re Irish?”

Angel frowned. “I…You know it’s been a while since I was there.”

“Well, what games did you play when you were growing up?”

“Brawling, drinking too much, and trying to have sex with tavern wenches mostly.”

“Oh.” Wesley contemplated that for a moment. “But that was presumably just a hobby, not actually your national game?”

“Bit of both, I think.” Angel tried to remember. “I was pretty good at it anyway.”

“I was quite a good off-spinner at school.” Wesley smiled at the memory.

Angel grimaced. “You do know that if you tell Gunn that he’s going to assume it’s something dirty?”

Wesley blinked in confusion. “Why would he?”

“Because you went to a single sex boarding school so everyone assumes that most of the things you said you did at school are actually dirty.”

“But they weren’t,” Wesley protested.

“Don’t shatter their illusions.”

“What about the amusing anecdote I told about the jam roly-poly?”

“You really don’t want to know what Gunn thinks that one is about.”

Wesley looked stricken. “The toad in the hole story?”

“Better not to go there.”

“Why didn’t you correct them?” Wesley demanded indignantly.

Angel shrugged. “I guess because it was really funny and… they were so impressed.”

“Impressed?”

“By your misspent youth living a life of Byronic debauchery in the Huxley House Dormitory. And you being so upfront about it. Even Lorne was kind of shocked and he counsels baby-eating demons. Given how innocent your adolescence really was, I thought you might want the cool points.”

“And because it was funny?” Wesley returned grimly.

Angel conceded the point with another shrug. “Yeah, that too.”

“Didn’t Spike at least know what I was talking about? Although it pains me to say it, we are countrymen.”

“Well, he knows what he means when he talks about having black pudding for breakfast but I think he thought you being posh it probably meant something else. I think he was actually the most impressed…” Angel trailed off. “You know, it was a lot funnier before Angelus did all those unspeakably evil things to you.”

“I get that.” Wesley took a deep breath. “Angel, do you know why Angelus…did what he did.”

Angel could have done with taking another deep breath he didn’t need, just to steel himself to go on with this conversation. “Because he’s angry with you for tricking him and he thought you’d hate it the most.” He didn’t add anything about Angelus thinking that Wesley had unresolved issues about his sexual orientation or his relationship with Angel or Gunn; Angelus had really covered that himself with all the jeering he’d done earlier.

Wesley met his gaze. “He’s wrong. I’d hate being dead the most.”

Angel narrowed his eyes. “Are you telling me that because it’s true or are you telling me that because if I should become Angelus again you want him to think it’s true?”

Wesley’s gaze never wavered. “I'm telling you that because it’s true.”

Angel supposed that it was something of a tribute to Wesley’s inscrutability that even now he didn’t know if he was being used as a messenger service for the demon who lived within him or if Wesley really was telling him he preferred dishonour to death. With Wesley one could never tell. Either way it seemed best if they both acted as if Angel believed it. “I'm glad it’s true. I’d much rather you were alive as well. Do you think you’ll be up to apartment hunting tomorrow or do you want to leave it for a few days?”

“What?” Wesley looked at him in confusion.

“I don’t think going back there would be a good idea. If it was your dream home, maybe, but as the place was a pit even before Angelus went there I definitely think you should look for a new address.”

Wesley looked mutinous and then evidently memories of what the apartment was like, all the broken furniture not to mention that bed with its soiled sheets and blood-stained pillow, he reluctantly conceded defeat. “I suppose I could look around for somewhere else.”

Angel nodded. “I’ll pay for your security deposit as I think we both know it’s a bust. Gunn has already offered to be your chauffeur for the apartment hunting. I think he’s waiting to take you home – to his home, I mean. He’s worried about concussion. Wants you somewhere he can keep an eye on you. He doesn’t think you should be alone. Neither do I.”

“Gunn’s fussing?” Wesley said in surprise.

“You scared him. I suppose being more accurate I scared him. He thought you were a goner.” Angel looked at Wesley closely. “You’re not, are you?”

“What?”

“Going to do something stupid with whiskey and pills or shards of broken glass?”

“No.” Wesley paused before he answered, which made Angel feel better about the likelihood of him telling the truth. “I'm really not.”

“Glad to hear that, English.” They both looked up to see Gunn standing in the doorway. “And are you going to get dressed any time soon or do I have to take you home in that pansy-assed robe of Angel’s?”

“I don’t think I have any clean…”

Gunn held up a bag of clothes and pointed in the direction of the bathroom. Wesley took them from him and then met the man’s eye briefly. “Thanks.”

Gunn waited until Wesley was out of earshot before saying conversationally: “Yes, I still want to stake you. No, I'm not going to. Yes, I know it was Angelus who did that stuff to Wes and not you. No, that doesn’t stop me wanting to stake you even though it probably should. Yes, we’ll be okay eventually. No, we’re not yet. Did I cover everything?”

Angel shrugged. “Pretty much. If you’d also mentioned my not being invited into the apartment you’re going to find for Wesley tomorrow I think that would have been everything.”

“That’s Wesley’s choice.” Gunn’s gaze didn’t flicker. “Sometimes Wesley makes bad choices. Part of being his friend is letting him do that. And you could hear everything Spike and I were discussing out there?”

“Vampire hearing, remember?”

Gunn looked a little uncomfortable. “So, all that stuff Spike said about how he always figured you and Wesley were…” He broke off. “Okay, as a vampire himself he really should have warned me you could hear that.”

“Or learn to keep his big fat mouth shut.” Angel continued to gaze levelly at Gunn. “And I may be an alpha male macho prick sometimes but I can assure you with my hand on the dried up walnut that used to be my heart that none of my fantasies have ever included forcing Wesley to have sex with me against his will. Okay? In fact my fantasies about Wesley – and I’ve had them while under the influence of starvation and soul-stealing monk magic so I know of what I speak – involve us both being friends and equals and him getting a square meal. Okay, and me saving him from spikes coming out of the walls in a kind of Indiana Jones adventure pastiche. But definitely no beating him, torturing him, or doing…stuff to him against his will.”

Gunn didn’t so much as blink. “You know that Red Dwarf episode where they visit the physical manifestation of Rimmer’s twisted psyche? Let’s never go to yours.”

“Hey, my hunger-induced hallucinations involved candlelight dinners for all, you included, so don’t knock my twisted psyche.”

“Angel, we’ve all met your twisted psyche, remember?”

“He’s not my psyche. He’s…”

“Locked up tight and never getting out again.” Wesley emerged from the bathroom, this time wearing corduroy pants and a smoke-blue jumper over a plain white t-shirt. His hair was almost dry and although there was nothing to be done about the bruises he did look a lot more like himself – especially as he frowned at Angel in characteristic mild reproach: “‘Indiana Jones adventure pastiche’?”

Angel shrugged. “I'm not going to be held accountable for my self-conscious.”

“Yes, but spikes coming out of the walls? Which you rescued me from? I really don’t appreciate being the damsel in distress in your fantasies, Angel.”

Thinking of the times he had rescued Wesley in real-life, Angel would normally have pointed out that Wesley had been the damsel in distress of Angel Investigations more than once in reality as well as fantasy, but, that was definitely a no-go area today. “There were ribbons with bells. You touched one with your lantern… Never mind. It’s not important. It was about killing the Beast and…getting Cordelia back from my son so we could…you know… and bonding with Connor, and you doing some translating work which you did really well, although you did get a spike through your hand…”

“What’s with Wes and the phallic spikes in your fantasies, Angel?” Gunn demanded.

“They weren’t ‘phallic spikes’, they were ordinary spikes.”

“So, not long and pointy then?”

“The point of the fantasy wasn’t to do with Wesley and spikes, okay? It was to do with defeating the Beast and…”

“Fulfilling all your innermost desires by the sound of it.” Wesley looked thoughtful. “Which for some reason in between the bonding with your son, killing the evil lava monster, and finding perfect happiness with Cordelia, seems to also involve me and spikes.”

“You and my what?” Spike enquired from the doorway, lighting a cigarette.

Wesley contemplated the peroxide vampire for a moment. “Nothing, I sincerely hope.”

“Definitely not,” Angel insisted. “They were ordinary Saturday Morning Pictures spikes. They were there because it was an Indiana Jones pastiche and I evidently have a low budget sub-conscious that wouldn’t shell out for the big rolling ball thing.”

“There were big spikes and big balls?” Spike demanded. “Because right now I'm thinking you wouldn’t have to be Sigmund Freud to work out what that was all about.”

“No balls,” Angel said through gritted teeth. “Just spikes. The non-symbolic kind.”

“I'm not sure anything in a hallucinatory fantasy can be deemed ‘non-symbolic’, Angel,” Wesley said thoughtfully. “There was a sword as well, wasn’t there?”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Could he be any more obvious?”

“Did you get the part about the other fantasy where you were getting a really nice dinner?” Angel demanded. “And you were wearing great clothes too. Very stylish. And you were happy. We were all happy.”

“Was I there?” Spike put in.

Angel glowered at him. “No, you weren’t. Which would probably be one of the reasons why we were all happy.”

“Was Buffy?” Spike persisted.

“No.” Angel looked as if he would have liked to do some spiking of his own with a handy stake.

“But you were happy anyway?”

“I was with the people I thought of as my family.” He turned back to Wesley. “You gave a toast to family. Everything was perfect. And it was what I wanted, more than anything, when I was under the sea.”

There was a pause before Wesley said gently, “That’s sweet, Angel. That I was around that dinner table in your hallucination, even after what happened with Connor.”

Angel sighed. “We never did get that meal, did we? With Cordelia and Connor and you and me and Gunn and Fred and Lorne. And now we never will.”

“No.” Wesley looked around at the others. “We never will. But we can order take out for those of us who are here. That Chinese place still delivers, doesn’t it? Do we have any money? Is Lorne upstairs?”

“I'm here.” Lorne entered the room cautiously, wincing in anticipation of what he had clearly expected to be some damaging aural activity. He seemed pleasantly surprised. “You guys really have cleared the air. Props to you.”

“Discussion of the Test Match,” Wesley explained. “That’s not much it can’t cure. And more proof, I think, of the overwhelming superiority of English sporting events over Americans playing with their oddly-shaped balls for the benefit of the advertising companies while wearing more protective covering than the Michelin Man.”

“Hey! You can’t diss…” Gunn looked around for support and then evidently realized he was the only American present. “Okay, how come I'm in Los Angeles and there are twice as many people from Merrie Olde England as there are from my home country? And how come the other people here aren’t exactly local boys either?”

“Think of it as a tribute to your open-mindedness, Charles.” Wesley held out the phone. “Or proof of your strange taste in friends. Either way, I can’t remember our usual order. Can you dial it in?”

“Fred always used to…” Gunn broke off and took the phone. “Sure.”

“I can sing the Star Spangled Banner if it will make you feel less of a stranger in your own land,” Lorne suggested kindly while Gunn dialled. “With no due modesty, I do sing it unfeasibly well.”

“He actually does.” Angel remembered.

Lorne looked around the low-ceilinged basement with distaste. “Of course, the acoustics here aren’t a patch on the Hyperion.” He glanced across at Wesley. “And no offence, crumpet, but I'm not offering to sing your national anthem – ever, because it is, let’s face it, a depressing, miserable dirge with about as much life in it as – well, two fifths of our present company.”

Wesley looked as if he were going to protest and then conceded the point with a shrug. “I admit it’s not really a toe-tapping show stopper but I'm not sure how appropriate tunefulness is to something as solemn as a national anthem anyway.”

Gunn snorted. “You’re just trying to make yourself feel better about having such a dreary-ass anthem.”

Wesley turned to the other Englishman in the company for support. “Spike. Tell them.”

“Tell them what?” the vampire returned. “It is a depressing, miserable dirge. Hate the bloody thing. And the same goes for Land of Hope and Sodding Glory. I’d rather we had ‘Greensleeves’.”

Wesley looked thoughtful. “It’s not very rousing though, is it? And do we want to be reminded of a previous monarch’s adultery every time we celebrate our national identity?”

“I just like the tune.”

“Do we want extra special fried rice?” Gunn enquired.

“Always.”

Wesley was sitting back down again, Angel noticed. The idea of Gunn taking him home and watching over him evidently abandoned in favour of them all staying here, in Angel’s basement at least until the Chinese food had been consumed. He thought that was a good sign, the longer they could hang out together and try to repair the shattered trust between them, the better, and certainly the several showers Wesley had taken had stopped him smelling like a victim, and the clothes Gunn had picked for him had stopped him looking quite so much like one. He wondered if Gunn had deliberately picked out the kind of clothes that Wesley would have been wearing the first few times he saw him to make them both feel better, or if he’d just grabbed the first thing he found. They were the kind of clothes, Angel remembered, with a pang of loss, that Cordelia had never liked Wesley wearing. The kind that made her shriek about what a waste it was to have the kind of figure clothes just wanted to hang on and then hang that on it instead. She would have approved of the designer shirts from his Wolfram & Hart days, no doubt, although not his working at Wolfram & Hart in the first place. There was so much he hadn’t had a chance to talk to her about; her visit had been so brief. Of course, her visit had been a miracle in itself. He was still confused about how it had actually been done but he assumed she had traded off to the Powers That Be the rest of the life force that would have kept her in a coma in one last glorious splash to come and visit him when he needed her the most. And how he had needed her. He still did, of course, but that wasn’t an option any more. Just as Wesley still needed Fred and was having to get up every day and live through the day without her all the same.

They were still discussing Special Fried Rice, he realized, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened today.

“…I'm asking, Wes, because you always get me to order it and we never finish our ordinary orders, never mind the extra rice, so it’s always left over at the end and we end up eating it with everything, including our breakfast cereal, for the next three days.”

Wesley shrugged. “Well then, it’s a tradition, so we definitely need to have it.”

Spike looked between them in disbelief. “You two eat breakfast cereal? Would that be Shreddies, Weetabix or the one Tony the Tiger says is G-r-r-reat?”

Gunn looked at him contemptuously. “Whichever one has the coolest plastic toy, of course.”

“Do you know they don’t have Marmite over here?” Wesley observed to Spike.

Gunn rolled his eyes. “Wes, give it up on the Marmite. No one really likes Marmite. English people just pretend they do to drive the rest of us nuts. It looks like shoe polish. It tastes like shoe polish. It probably is shoe polish. So, next time you want some at three in the morning, don’t call me up to tell me about it, just spread some damned shoe polish on your toast and pretend it’s Marmite.”

Wesley winced apologetically. “I get cravings.”

“Kippers.” Spike sat down on the edge of Angel’s bed. “I miss those. Smoked and salt and full of all those little bones you have to pick out, which takes so long the damned fish is cold by the time you do it. And chip butties. You can’t have one of those with those stupid little skinny fries they call chips over here.”

“Actually they call crisps ‘chips’ over here,” Wesley pointed out helpfully.

“Because they’re chips of potato,” Gunn returned defensively. “And therefore perfectly named.”

“But chips of potato could be soggy. You don’t cover the crisp part of the snack.”

“Well, you don’t cover the salt, fat and monosodium glutomate part either,” Gunn retorted. “But I don’t see you nitpicking over that.”

Angel noticed the phone still in Gunn’s hand. “Have you finished ordering yet?”

Gunn started and reapplied himself to the phone. “Sorry. Had to consult with my… Yes. Extra Special Fried Rice.”

He held out his free hand to Angel who wondered, not for the first time, why he had to supply the bottomless wallet part of this particular dysfunctional family. He dug out the credit card he’d been given when part of Wolfram & Hart. Wolfram & Hart didn’t pay the balance when it turned up any more, unfortunately, but he had managed to cling onto that part of his new identity as a person in society. The old Cordelia would have been so proud. Handing it over to Gunn, he said, “Just this once, but you have to take out the garbage and clean your room.”

Gunn’s look would have withered entire fields of corn at a hundred paces. Angel decided to save the long-suffering father jokes for a more appropriate occasion when the demon inside him hadn’t been beating or raping anyone in the past few hours. Still looking at Angel as if he were something he’d scraped off his shoe, Gunn gave them the credit card number over the phone.

“We’re going to need booze with this.” Spike stood up. “Can’t eat a lot of Chinese food and not have something alcoholic to wash it down.”

Wesley looked up hopefully. “A bottle of wine would be nice.”

“You can’t drink alcohol with the painkillers you’re on.” Gunn finished placing the order, put down the phone and held up the pill bottle. “No alcohol. See?”

Spike took the bottle from him and peered at it. “Well, that sucks. People in pain are the ones that need their alcohol.”

“You’re in pain?” Angel looked at Wesley anxiously. “You didn’t tell me… Of course you’re in pain...”

“It’s okay, Angel,” Wesley reassured him quickly. “These are really good painkillers and I don’t really need any wine anyway. A cup of tea would be fine.”

“Let me make that for you, kitten.” Lorne patted Wesley gingerly on the shoulder. “The others tend to be a little heavy handed with the teabags. Would you like it made in a teapot? I’ll warm it first and everything. And tomorrow you get cucumbers sandwiches with the crusts cut off.”

“Really?” Wesley brightened at the prospect. “I didn’t know they had those over here.”

“We do,” Gunn admitted. “We just keep it from you so you don’t eat embarrassingly wussy sandwiches in front of clients we’re trying to impress with our demon killing abilities.”

“They have Lady Grey tea too.” Spike told Wesley. “I’ve seen it. They’re keeping that from you too.”

As Wesley looked at Gunn in accusation the man rolled his eyes. “Oh, come on, do you blame us? You want to drink a tea called ‘Lady Grey’ in front of paying clients? We let you have English Breakfast tea. I think that’s pretty much a major concession.”

“So, it’s okay for Angel to drink pig’s blood but it’s not okay for me to drink Twinings tea?”

Gunn shrugged. “Hey, pig’s blood may be icky but at least it’s not wimpy.”

Wesley’s eyes widened. “You can get Marmite over here, can’t you?”

“No,” Gunn said hastily. “Definitely not. Never.”

“You’ve seen it and you didn’t tell me!”

“Shoe polish, remember? Look, Wes, it’s for your own good. I don’t blame you for not knowing any better. You’re British. You’re not responsible for the extreme…badness of your national cuisine. But you’re in a country with good food now and we want to save you from yourself.”

“You eat Twinkies! They have no recognizable ingredients!”

“Let’s get that kettle on, shall we, cherubs?” Lorne hastily headed into the kitchen.

“I'm buying booze.” Spike pulled on his coat. “Lots of it.” He held out a hand to Angel who rolled his eyes and reached for his wallet again.

“Fine, I’ll just subsidize everyone’s liver damage, shall I?”

Spike shrugged. “Sounds like a plan to me.” As Angel put a twenty dollar bill into his hand he continued to gaze at him levelly. Groaning, Angel handed him another one. “You were always tight,” Spike observed. He turned to Wesley. “Want to get some fresh air?”

“He needs to rest,” Angel said.

“Definitely,” Gunn added.

“Last time I checked, Wes here was over twenty-one. He’s only got to walk to the motor. We’ll be driving the rest of the way; all two hundred yards of it. You up for it, mate?”

Wesley nodded. “Okay.”

With Gunn and Angel standing at the foot of the stairs looking anxious, Spike and Wesley made their way back to the neon-lit night world outside the office. “Thought you might want five minutes away from Psychotically Over-Protective Gunn and Guilt Trip of a Lifetime Angel.” Spike held open the car door for Wesley.

“Thanks.” Wesley looked up at him in surprised gratitude as he slid himself carefully into the passenger seat.

“I’ll do your seatbelt.” Spike closed the door, went around to the driver’s seat and leant across to strap Wesley in. “You probably want to minimize on the twisty bendy stuff for a while. So, if you’re moonlighting at Minerva’s on your evenings off you may want to give it a rest for a while.”

“Minerva’s?” Wesley frowned. “Oh, I remember. That’s the other demon brothel in LA.”

“Yeah, the one with the humans for the demons as opposed to Madame Dorian’s which has the demons for the humans.” Spike started the engine. “You’re not, are you?”

“What?”

“Moonlighting at Minerva’s?”

“No.” Wesley shrugged. “Well, only a little escort work.” As Spike gave him a look of shock, Wesley smiled slyly. “April Fool.”

“It’s August.” Spike pulled out into the traffic. “Remind me again which side of the road is it over here?”

“Hah hah, and I forget.”

“Just wanted to see how you’re really doing?”

Wesley picked at a loose thread on his sweater. “Okay.”

“Pretty impressive what you did.”

“Getting beaten up? Yes, I am pretty good at that. Years of practise. But there’s surprisingly little training required.”

“Getting up again afterwards. That’s the hard part. And then there’s the really hard part, which is the getting up again the next day and the next day and the…”

“I'm not planning to kill myself, Spike. Even if I wanted to, it wouldn’t be fair to Angel.”

Spike braked so hard that the car behind almost went into their rear bumper. There was a blare of an indignant horn and then the Chevy was pulling out past them. Spike said quietly, “Fuck Angel, Wes. This is about you.”

“It’s about both of us,” Wesley returned calmly. “We were both victims of Angelus.”

Spike made a rude gesture at someone else who was blaring his horn at him and then put the car back into drive. “You scare me, you really do. I don’t know if you have so many screws loose you’re actually unhinged or the sanest person I’ve ever met.”

“If you ever work it out let me know.”

Spike sighed. “All I'm saying is that if the open windows start looking too inviting…”

“I promise,” Wesley nodded. “I’ll tell someone.”

“You don’t strike me as a guy who’s any too good at asking for help.”

Wesley looked out of the window. “When I was growing up there was no point in asking for help. My father thought self-reliance was very important. He just didn’t think that it went hand in hand with being able to make decisions for yourself.”

Spike frowned. “So, how does that work…?”

“You do exactly as you’re told at all times without argument or you get sent to bed without supper or locked under the stairs but if you have a problem you have to solve it yourself. If you don’t solve it the way Father thinks is appropriate you get told how stupid you are and what bad judgement you have and you get sent to bed without supper or locked under the stairs.” Wesley shrugged. “Perhaps Doctor Spock wouldn’t strictly approve but as a system it did have a certain admirable simplicity.”

“I don’t remember my dad.” Spike pulled into the kerb in front of the liquor store. “He died when I was a baby. But my mum was nice. We were happy. Lived a nice quiet little life. She was dying – TB, but it was a slow death and she wasn’t really suffering. She liked my poetry. She wanted me to marry a nice girl before she died. Maybe have a couple of grandchildren for her to coo over. But the girl I loved didn’t want me. Not just because of the poetry. She thought I was a wimp. Drusilla wanted something of her own and I was the first thing she saw. There wasn’t a rigorous selection process or anything. She was just lonely and wanted a playmate and there I was…” He shrugged.

“Thank you,” Wesley said quietly. No one needed to say aloud how difficult it was for either one of them to share with another.

Not looking at him, Spike took the keys out of the ignition. “You’re welcome. I know I'm not part of the family…”

“You’re part of Angel’s family.”

“No.” Spike shook his head. “Angelus and William the Bloody shared a family with Darla and Drusilla. Angel and I – it’s all new for us. Just part of the whole bitch of being ensouled. You’re not who you were. Not any of the different people that you were. Not Liam. Not William. Not Angelus.”

“You still call yourself Spike.”

“I don’t feel like being William. Someone uses that name it has too much power. You’re a magic-dabbler. You know about the power of names.”

“No one ever called me ‘Wes’ until I came here. At first I thought it was a way of taking something away from me. Making me half of what I was. That’s how it sounded when Faith or Buffy said it. But when Angel said it…it felt like who I was.”

Spike sighed. “Look, I know we bitch and fight, Angel and I, but I recognize he’s trying to be a good guy. But it’s a constant struggle for him, and I know you know that. Probably better than any of us right now. It’s good you follow him. It’s good that you’re his anchor to humanity. I know he needs that. Although I’d argue that he needs me to remind him of what he used to be almost as much as he needs you and Gunn to remind him of what he’s fighting for. But I need to know that you know where the off ramp is?”

“I won’t follow him to hell, Spike,” Wesley said gently. There was a long pause before he inclined his head. “Well, not unless I was fairly confident of being able to bring us both back.”

Spike rolled his eyes. “Wes, mate. I’ve got a horrible feeling you may be the dictionary definition of a lost cause. Just remember that if you follow him into hell there’s a damned good chance that Gunn and I are going to follow along right behind you to get you back. And you can’t imagine how pissed we’re going to be with you once we’ve done it.” He got out of the car. “You’d better wait here.”

“I can walk,” Wesley protested.

“I know you can. And cast spells. And fight. Saw you do it. Not the point.” Spike pointed at the road. “I'm in a no parking zone. Need you here to stop me getting towed.”

As the peroxide vampire went into the liquor store, Wesley inclined his head to hide a grin. He still hurt. Not just all the surface aches and pains, pulled muscles, bruised skin, the sting of unhealed cuts. Deep inside him there was a pain which constantly reminded him of those events that were still flashing through his mind, making him flinch inside, physically and mentally. In the shower it had overwhelmed him, how disgusted he felt with himself for allowing it to happen, but clarity had followed. He had woken from a kind of daze to find himself sobbing pathetically in Angel’s bathroom, riddled with self-hatred and contempt, and realized exactly how bloody stupid he was being. Of course he had let Angel into his apartment – the man was his closest friend. Of course he had been beaten in the ensuing fight – Angelus was ten times stronger than he was and had been planning for this confrontation before ever knocking on the door while he was still reeling from what had happened. Angelus had raped him not because of anything he, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, was or had done, but because Angelus was a rapist. Angelus liked to do what was as nasty, sadistic, and likely to mess with the victim’s mind as possible. Given Wesley's insecurities, not to mention a hundred cracks and sneers about his sexuality over the years, it wasn’t surprising that the method Angelus had chosen by which to screw with him had been to…screw with him. Going over what he had done, he couldn’t actually find a way to make this his fault. And that was with years of training at making everything his fault. Wiping his eyes, and then slowly clambering to his feet in the now chilly shower, he had gone over events again. And again. They made him shudder, certainly, there were those flashes of nightmare memory – pain, fear, wall, floor, bed, flipped over, no, no, no… But he didn’t really see what he could have done differently given the limitations of being caught by surprise and not having super human strength.

He had made himself look at it head on and realized that he had been lucky that, for whatever twisted reason Angelus had chosen that method of hurting him, it hadn’t involved maiming or mutilation. There had been something sickening about the foreplay, that mimicry of concern, a mocking kiss pressed to his lips, the rasp of a tongue licking the blood from his face, fingers twisting and pressing as if this was Angelus’s right, to touch him anywhere he wanted, touch him in places no one else ever had, that Wesley had barely been aware that he possessed. But although it had made his skin crawl, it had saved him from being ripped open. He didn’t have to undergo the extra humiliation of having to crawl into hospital and ask some stranger to sew him back up again. He had literally walked away from what Angelus had done to him – okay limped away, but he had been on his own two feet and moving more or less unaided – and given Angelus’s legendary reputation for viciousness, that was a triumph in itself.

Holding onto the shower tiles as the world insisted on bucking and swaying around him, a hissing in his ears that only began to fade when he crouched down and let the blood rush to his head, Wesley told himself that Angelus wanting to hurt him was almost a compliment. It meant the demon thought Wesley was helping to keep Angel on the path to redemption; keeping him safe from the demands of the demon within him. In short, it meant Wesley was doing his job. When he thought of it like that – these cuts and bruises and that deep humiliating soreness inside him – it felt a little like affirmation that he was still doing good and helping Angel to do it as well. That was one of the things that made it hurt a lot less. He had hung onto that thought as he walked into that room where everyone knew what had been done to him and where he was going to have to look Angel in the eye and read the horror and guilt there of their most unpleasant shared experience.

One of the dangerous powers that Angel had over him – the one that meant the withdrawal of his affection was such a terrible weapon – was his ability to make everything feel so much better. Wesley could only think he must have been vulnerable and needy to the power of ten when he had first moved to LA because those early days were burned into his memory like a brand. Sometimes he could still taste the first eggs Angel had ever cooked for him. After what had taken place between him and Angelus in his apartment, he had dreaded being left alone with Angel, of having to confront what had taken place instead of shuffling past it quickly, like a motorway pile up, with his eyes averted, but Angel had somehow made confronting it not so dreadful. There had been all that compassion in his eyes, and that need to believe that Wesley could one day forgive him, that their friendship was still there. And at once, everything had started to feel so much better. His jumpy fear of Angelus was ironically being diluted by his feeling of safety at being around Angel. When Gunn, Lorne, and Spike were also in the room, that protected feeling cranked itself up another three notches. Amongst friends. That was how it felt. He had almost forgotten what a good feeling it was. Knowing the people sharing your space were also on your side; completely on your side; would even fight your demons for you, internal and external, to keep you breathing.

He had been alone before. Every day of his life until he met up with Angel and Cordelia again in Sunnydale. That terrible time after he’d taken Connor when his friends had turned their backs on him. This was different. This was better. When he thought about how alone he wasn’t these days, nothing, not even what Angelus had done to him earlier, had the power to sting him at all.

“Why are you smiling?” Spike opened the car door, making Wesley start. “Is this it? Sanity taken wing at last? Flip flapping its way to the nearest institution with green walls and wrap around pyjama jackets?”

“I’ll have you know that of the admittedly rather high proportion of Watchers to be diagnosed as clinically insane over the past two hundred years only six of them have been ancestors of mine.”

“Six?” Spike echoed. “Six Wyndam-Pryces in the loony bin? I hate to break it to you, Wes, but that is not a good batting average.”

“Compared with the Palmer-Davisons we’re top of the sanity league. They had seventeen confirmed insanities in the family before eighteen forty-five.”

Spike hefted the two clinking carrier bags into the back of the car; the square outline of a bottle of JackDaniels unmistakable through the thin plastic. He started the car again. “Just as a matter of interest how many Wyndam-Pryces have been killed by vampires?”

“Oh…lots.” Wesley shrugged. “I think we stopped keeping count in about eighteen thirty two. It was getting embarrassing. And that was without going into the demon savagings and werewolf fatalities.”

“You’re making a lot more sense to me.” Spike pulled out into the traffic with more care than usual. “It’s a scary kind of sense admittedly but it’s there. Does anyone in your family ever have a kid just because – I dunno – they feel broody?”

Wesley laughed in genuine amusement. “Don’t be silly.”

“So you just keep getting churned out to be demon kibble?”

“No, we keep getting churned out to fight demons and Do Good.”

“I wonder if you’re the first.” Spike glanced across at the man next to him.

“The first what?” Wesley frowned in confusion.

“Wyndam-Pryce to do what he was bred to do. To actually Do Good.”

Wesley looked at his knees. “I don’t think my family would have such an up close and personal relationship with incipient madness if we didn’t always want to do good. I wanted to do good when I went to Sunnydale. Doesn’t mean that I succeeded.”

“You’re succeeding now.” Spike reminded him. “You saved a lot of people today. Including Angel. I’d say you can definitely chalk one up for inbreeding.”

Wesley laughed, despite himself, then clutched his abdomen and winced. “Ow. And…shut up.”

As they pulled up outside the office of Angel Investigations, Spike said conspiratorially, “Want a swig of Jack before Gunn sees you?”

Wesley looked tempted but then sighed. “Angel will smell it.”

Spike held up a packet of peppermints. “Way ahead of you. Let me light a cigarette too.” He untwisted the cap of whiskey and handed it to Wesley, who took a tentative sip and then gasped as the alcohol hit home.

“That stuff is good,” he said hoarsely. “For American whiskey anyway.”

“The best of its inferior kind.” Spike waited for Wesley to take another couple of gulps and then took the bottle from him and handed him a peppermint. He lit a cigarette and waved the smoke in Wesley’s direction to drown out the whiskey fumes, making him cough and almost choke on his peppermint.

They both jumped guiltily as the passenger door opened to reveal Angel. “So glad to see you’re not being a bad influence, Spike.”

“Hey, I have a rep to maintain.”

“How old are you two anyway? Fourteen?”

Wesley pointed to Spike. “He made me do it.”

“I believe you. The food just got here. There is more special fried rice than anyone could possibly eat in a lifetime and your tea is stewing.”

As Spike carried the two carrier bags filled with alcohol down to the basement, Angel tried and failed not to look as if he was hovering anxiously around Wesley as the man took the stairs a little carefully behind Spike. The shower and the time lapse meant that Wesley’s muscles were all stiffening up nicely, meaning that putting one foot in front of the other was taking quite a toll. As he reached ground level, he swayed and Angel immediately grabbed his arm to steady him.

“Angel, will you stop it?” Wesley pleaded quietly. “You’re making me feel like that old man you body swapped with.”

Gunn looked up from trying to decant special fried rice onto the plates. “Skanky and evil?”

“Really really old.”

Spike took another drag on his cigarette. “Angel – body-swapping – old man – Do I want to know?”

“No.” Angel took the cigarette out of his hand and tossed it onto the grate. “We’re trying to eat.”

“He broke up with me.” Wesley gratefully accepted the cup of tea from Lorne. “He thought I was Fred.”

Spike looked him up and down. “Not really seeing the resemblance. Or the logic.”

“He let me down quite gently. If Angel and I actually had been dating at the time I would probably have been only slightly traumatized.”

“If you’d been dating Angel you would have obviously already taken one too many blows to the head anyway,” Spike shrugged. “So, a little more craziness would hardly have mattered.”

Wesley noticed that Lorne and Angel were still hovering around him and looked between them in confusion. “What?”

“You need to sit down,” Spike told him. “Otherwise they have to stand there ready to catch you in case you fall over.”

“Oh.” Wesley lowered himself carefully onto the couch, wincing as every muscle in his back ached right along with him. He gritted his teeth as he pressed a hand to his spine, feeling the place where the table edge had caught him.

“I'm sorry,” Angel said at once.

Wesley looked up at him wearily. “Not you, remember? Angelus.”

Angel grimaced. “Still… Sorry about the coffee table too.”

“I never liked it,” Wesley reassured him. “Too many sharp corners.”

“Maybe we should all buy rubber furniture from now on.” Gunn put a plate in front of Wesley and a fork in the hand that wasn’t holding a cup of tea. “That would really piss off Angelus the next time he got out.”

“Take a bit of explaining when you brought a bird home though, wouldn’t it? ‘No, really, I'm not a care in the community patient, I just have to live in a state of perpetual readiness for when my demon within boss goes Hannibal Lector on me again and tries to bounce me off the furniture.’ Spike poured himself a glass of whiskey and then handed the vodka to Lorne. “I can’t see you or Wes pulling too often if you have to make that explanation every time.”

Lorne shrugged. “Well, let’s face it, those two aren’t exactly threatening Warren Beatty’s reputation now.” Seeing their expressions, he grimaced apologetically. “And I respect that in a human. There’s not enough celibacy these days. Voluntary or otherwise.”

“Could you not talk about us as if we’re pathetic losers who can’t get a date?” Gunn pleaded.

“But you are pathetic losers who can’t get a date,” Spike pointed out helpfully.

“And that’s why it stings.”

Wesley took another sip of tea. “Sometimes broken furniture can be fun.” As they all looked at him in confusion he said in shock, “Did I just say that out loud?”

Angel narrowed his eyes. “Lilah.”

“Oh.” Gunn sat back in the couch. “Makes sense.”

Lorne nodded too. “You know, I think we all guessed that was less about hearts and flowers than depravity and bondage.”

“What was your first clue?” Gunn snorted. “Lilah’s rap sheet for incredible evil? Or the bite marks Wes used to show up with on his neck?”

“I think it was the shoes. No woman wearing shoes like that is not going to want to tie her man to the bedpost and make him beg for mercy. And I'm betting those bite marks went all the way down.”

“Can we not talk about tying people to the bedpost?” Angel pleaded, flinching. “Or bite marks on people’s necks? Or begging for mercy?”

Spike was looking at Wesley with renewed respect. “So, Wes and this Lilah chick used to…?”

“Oh, sugar, did they ever,” Lorne nodded.

“Are we talking…?”

“Dirty, nasty, spank me, Jesus, I’ve been a bad, bad boy,” Lorne confirmed.

“You’re just guessing.” Wesley forked some more rice into his mouth.

“Sweetpea, I'm anagogic, remember? My guesses are like other people’s eyewitness accounts. Especially as you hum way more often than you think you do.”

“Damn.” Wesley conceded the point with a shrug. “Well, that’s all academic now anyway. It’s back to being me, Wheel of Fortune, and a game of word puzzle of an evening.”

“I used to be able to have really dirty sex whenever I wanted it.” Spike took another swig of whiskey before picking disconsolately at a spring roll. “You know the kind you can’t even spell? Where what you’re doing is so unbelievably filthy that you even shock yourself? And your spinal column actually feels as if it’s been separated from the rest of your body by the…?”

“Can we not talk about this now?” Angel demanded.

The others looked at each other guiltily. “Sorry, man.” Gunn grimaced at Wesley. “Didn’t mean to be… You know.”

Wesley shrugged. “I don’t mind. Is there any more tea?”

“I’ll get it for you.” Spike took the cup from him and once safely out of sight of the others mimicked pouring whiskey into it. Wesley nodded at him.

“Don’t even think about it.” Lorne looked up. “I don’t need to be a Skilosh to know what you’re doing back there, Billy Idol, and you are not ruining the honed perfection of my tea with some cheap grain alcohol. Come back here with a single malt and maybe I’ll consider it.”

"On what Angel gave me? Are you nuts? That cheap bastard has never shelled out for a single malt in his life."

“No alcohol for Wes.” Gunn glared at Spike. “He’s on painkillers. It’ll make him spacey.”

“Like anyone would notice the difference,” Spike protested.

“I’ll get the tea.” Gunn marched into the kitchen, poured what Spike had prepared down the sink and made Wesley a fresh cup.

Spike shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, mate, I tried.”

Gunn put the cup back down in front of Wesley gently. “There you go.”

“Thank you.” Wesley sipped it resignedly.

“They have to sleep sometime,” Spike told Wesley. “Give it a couple of days then you and me can hit a strip joint, get rat assed, fleece a few losers at pool, and then pick up a couple of hookers on the way home.”

“I'm better at darts actually.” Wesley took another sip of tea.

Angel looked at him in disbelief. “And this is the only flaw you see in Spike’s plan?”

Wesley shrugged. “It would be different.”

“That’s it. From now on you don’t leave the building with Spike. In fact, you can’t even be alone with Spike. There will be no interacting with Spike of any kind.”

Spike grinned across at Wesley. “Almost too easy to wind him up sometimes, isn’t it?” As Angel continued to look agitated, Spike rolled his eyes and hit Angel on the shoulder. “Lighten up, will you? You seem to be missing the big picture here.”

“Which is?” Angel demanded.

Spike nodded his head at Wesley. “That Wes is okay. I mean, yeah he’s not all shiny happy, good as new, yet, but he’s doing a hell of a lot better than anyone else on the planet would be right now. I think mental instability is actually seriously underrated as the fast track to sanity.”

“I’ve often thought that myself.” Wesley dipped his nan bread into the nearest foil packet. “Is this okra or spinach?”

“It’s green.” Gunn peered at it. “Hard to tell.”

“It’s very nice.” As Angel stared at him, Wesley gave him a gentle smile. “And Spike’s right, Angel. I'm really okay. Nothing that happened today was my fault. For once, I didn’t screw up. Bad stuff happened but there was nothing I could have done to prevent it and we dealt with what got thrown at us. Ultimately, we saved the day, killed the demon, and even if none of us got the girl, we didn’t end up permanently dead either. By our standards, that was a pretty good day.”

Angel looked at him for a moment and then said, not without awe, “I think you’re getting weirder.”

Wesley nodded. “It’s possible. But I'm not a gibbering wreck and I'm actually quite pleased about that.”

Spike shrugged. “If Wes was entirely sane he wouldn’t be doing this job in the first place. None of us would. Let’s face it, none of us are here because of the excellent pension plan or exciting career prospects.”

“No dental either.” Wesley took another sip of tea.

“Do you think you just think you’re okay because you’re actually Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band crazy?” Lorne cautioned. “Or is this a genuine state of peace you’ve managed to attain?”

Wesley considered. “Not sure. But it feels better than wanting to crawl into a dark corner and rock.”

“You’re not seeing any pixies or anything?” Gunn pressed.

Wesley looked around the room and shook his head. “Not yet. I'm still getting…flashes.” He looked at Angel. “You know.”

The vampire nodded. “I know.”

“But, it’s already starting to feel like something that happened a long time ago and to someone else.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t be alone.” Angel handed him some more of the possibly okra-possibly spinach stuff he seemed to be enjoying so much.

“He won’t be.” Gunn spooned some more rice onto Wesley’s plate.

“I’d like not to be alone.” Wesley glanced around at them. There were still the memories of Angelus’s smug leering and casual brutality, of course; they were going off liked timed explosions in his brain, flashes of white light and blood bright pain; but there were already other memories overlaying them; the feel of the magic spell holding the demon back; the sensation as it was forced into the box; the way the souls had looked as they shimmered in the air; walking back in to find that it was Angel they were talking to; Angelus defeated; his friend saved. And then there were the other memories of concerned faces and gentle touches, of tactful silences and kind words. The four people in this room who had proven themselves to be friends indeed when adversity struck. “Just for a few days.”

Angel indicated the basement. “You know, this place is pretty big. Maybe some of you could camp out here for a while?”

“I could do that.” Gunn’s expression as he turned to Angel was no longer that of an enemy. “Just don’t go drinking blood in front of me every five minutes.”

“Talking of blood.” Spike held up a spring roll. “Anyone mind if I dunk this in some O positive?”

“Yes!” Gunn and Wesley both told him.

Lorne looked at the vampire in disbelief. “I was thinking that after all that demon chasing and spell casting today that nothing could spoil my appetite – but what do you know, you managed it.”

“You’re beyond gross,” Angel told the other vampire. “You actually manage to give evil blood sucking demons a bad name.”

“I was going to heat the blood first.”

“That makes all the difference, of course.” Gunn shook his head. “Sheesh, vampires are pigs.”

“I'm not,” Angel protested.

Wesley nodded. “Angel reads Camus in the original French and used to hang around with Voltaire. Nothing porcine about him.”

“And in the peroxide corner, Spike sings along with the Sex Pistols.” Gunn shrugged. “I think Angel wins the culture round.”

“I was the one who was a poet. He was just a useless drunken layabout.”

“But you drank your braincells into oblivion while I was expanding my horizons.” Angel took a spring roll for himself. “Cogito ergo sum much better than you.”

“You forgot to add ‘neener’,” Wesley observed. He winced as his back hurt again and Angel gave him a look of abject guilt. Wesley sighed. “Angel…”

“You should have let them take you to the hospital. Get an X-ray at least.”

“I don’t need an X-Ray or anything else that I don’t have in this room.”

“I know how hard you got thrown around.”

“Nothing’s broken,” Wesley assured him.

Angel gazed at him intently, trying to read his thoughts, needing to feel that ever-present connection between them, that thread of friendship, needing to know that it wasn’t severed and that Wesley wasn’t going to fragment. “Isn’t it?”

Wesley looked up at him, returning his gaze with a frank one of his own. He could read in their eyes that the cuts and bruises still looked spectacular and when he lifted his head like that he guessed everyone could see the teethmarks in his throat but he hoped his eyes were as calm as he felt. “No, Angel. Nothing’s broken. I promise.”

“I can drink to that.” Spike held up his whiskey bottle.

Lorne leant across to fill Gunn and Angel’s glasses with wine before lifting his own Sea Breeze. Sighing a little as he looked at the alcohol denied to him, Wesley solemnly lifted his teacup. “To being unbroken.”

They touched bottle, glasses, and cup as Angel returned the man’s gaze and echoed his words gently: “To being unbroken.”

The End