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Shadows, Part Four

The conversation trickled on; voices lowered but not enough for a vampire to avoid hearing. Angel wanted to get up and walk out. This situation felt so ludicrous – two opposing parties on the same side, separated by twenty feet of polished floor, and no one even admitting there was a problem. Everyone being so polite about it at all, Giles coming around with the teapot to ask if anyone wanted a top up, while a short sprint away the man who had ruined Angel’s life, and whose life Angel had tried to claim in return, sipped from cracked china and ate chocolate chip cookies while lesbian witches probed at his demon-inflicted wounds. Meanwhile, Faith was just sitting there in the corner, Dawn’s old duvet around her knees, bizarrely incongruous cartoon animals covering her thin dangerous frame. Groo baffled by them all; their friendships; their enmities. Lorne trying to avoid all the bad vibes flying around; those tortured gazes between Angel and Buffy; the baffled hostility from Cordelia. Gunn still trying to make sense of everything, perhaps most of all his own feelings. And Wesley…just avoiding them. Not pointedly, just subtly failing to make eye contact at any point, keeping his head in a book, his gaze directed at anyone but them. They had cast him out. He’d been told in no uncertain terms to never come back, but he had been supposed to do some kind of penance, to feel the chilly emptiness of his outcast state, but instead he’d come here.

Angel couldn’t decide what was annoying him the most: Wesley coming here, or Giles and the others taking him in. Angel had been their ally. He had risked his life for them while Wesley had done nothing but irritate them, and yet they had taken Wesley in and were subtly cold-shouldering him. Why? Old resentments about what Angelus had done to them or…?

He heard Gunn saying to his erstwhile friend: You lost the mission, bro. Making it clear that he and Angel would never be friends, that there could never be true friendship between Gunn and any vampire, soul or no soul, but still he would take Angel’s side because Angel was on the side of right. Was that what had happened here? Wesley’s version of events had somehow convinced them that Angel was in the wrong? How? All he had done was love his son and have him taken from him by someone he had trusted. How did that make him the bad guy?

He sensed the sun come up outside and had to remind himself it wasn’t his routine condemning the humans in this place to live in his world of night and shadows and sleep their way through daylight, but the demons they were fighting. Besides, he doubted that any of them would drowse for long.

He was woken by the soft murmur of Dawn’s voice. He opened his eyes and saw her sitting next to Wesley who had just put another log on the fire.

“Here…” She put something in Wesley’s hand. “Another painkiller.”

“Thank you…” Wesley whispered back. “Can’t you sleep?”

She shook her head. “Those things… Kind of scary.”

“Buffy and Angel won’t let them get in.”

It jolted through him like an electric shock, his name on Wesley’s lips. The man thought he was asleep, that was obvious from his much more relaxed body language. He thought it was just him and Dawn and peace and no witnesses.

“Are you sure you can destroy the amulet in time?”

“Yes.”

“You are?”

“Yes.” As she clearly needed some extra assurance, Wesley shrugged. “I don’t think this is the right time for the world to end.”

Dawn shivered and Wesley wrapped his duvet around them both and she laid her head on his shoulder, pulling his uninjured right arm around her for extra warmth. Angel hated the way she just snuggled in next to him as if they were old friends. Wesley seemed taken back as well and then so touched that Angel’s anger died like a snuffed candle as he saw Wesley tentatively touch her hair. He could feel that yearning from Wesley for the comfort of touch; friendship and kindness and the warmth of a hand on your skin that came from someone who cared whether you lived or died.

“Does it hurt?” she whispered.

Wesley flexed his arm. “No.”

She pointed to his throat. “That. Does it hurt?”

Wesley snatched a breath. “No.”

“Did it hurt when she…?”

Wesley darted a glance at their end of the mansion but they were outside the circle of firelight and Angel knew they were just dark shadows to him, just as he could tell by their heartbeats that Gunn and Lorne and Cordelia were still awake and only feigning sleep, just like him.

“Yes. No. I didn’t feel anything. The knife was too sharp. Like a razor blade. I just felt the blood and then I had no strength to do anything and everything went cold.”

“Did you think you were going to die?”

“Yes.” There was a pause before he said in a rush: “I thought the last thing I was going to see was her taking Connor away.”

“Did you like him?”

Wesley looked surprised by the question. “Yes, of course. He was a baby. What’s not to like?”

“The way they cry and puke and yell all the time?”

Wesley half-smiled. “He really didn’t cry that much. He was a very contented sort of baby. He used to hold my finger…” He broke off. “It was my fault, Dawn. I know you want it to be Holtz’s or Justine’s, but I carried him out of the hotel. I made it possible for them to take him.”

“Holtz was going there anyway…”

“It was a feint. A threat to make me act quickly. I thought he might keep his word. I thought it might at least save Gunn and Fred.” His breath caught again and Angel heard Fred’s breath catch in unison; realizing that she must be awake too. Wesley snatched another breath. “Holtz had lost sight of right and wrong. What was done to him was terrible but he let it consume him. He let it overwhelm every other part of who he was until that was all he was, someone in search of vengeance. In his heart he must have known that the creature who killed his family no longer existed. No one from that era and of his profession could fail to understand the deeper significance of the possession of a soul. The loss of it, as well as the demon within, is fundamental to what makes a vampire a vampire. Angel isn’t Angelus. Holtz knew that before I told him; he just wanted to pretend he didn’t so he could pursue his lust for vengeance. And it would never have satisfied him. Whatever he’d done, I doubt it would ever have been enough. He had a second chance at life. He saw what Darla did, how she sacrificed herself for her child. He knew Angel had a soul. If none of those things could move him, I don’t think there was any way back for him.”

“Do you think he’s dead?”

“Holtz?”

“Connor.”

Wesley closed his eyes. “I don’t see how he can have survived in a hell dimension. He wasn’t even on solid food...”

“I’m sorry,” Dawn said gently. “I know it upsets you.”

“Some things are meant to upset one. Some mistakes are meant to be remembered.”

“But you were trying to protect him!” Her voice rose. “You were trying to save him and to save Angel and your friends…”

Wesley hushed her, darting an anxious glance in their direction, then as no one stirred, relaxing slightly. “And the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Dawn. And in this case it was the road to a literal hell to which Connor was literally taken.”

“Don’t look like that,” she said softly.

Bewildered, Wesley said, “Like what?”

“Like nothing you do matters, like nothing you are matters. Buffy looked like that. It isn’t true.”

“I’m not Angel,” Wesley said quietly. “I don’t know if I’m strong enough to wake up every morning and keep trying to atone for something which I can’t undo or ever make right again.”

“You were strong enough to fight off the Hukkarish and come here with the amulet.”

Wesley shrugged. “I don’t think everything in the world should die because I’m tired of life.”

“But it never ends, Wesley,” Dawn said gently. “Not for people like you and Buffy and Giles and Angel. There is always someone out there that only you can help.”

Wesley looked at her in confusion. “I’m not a champion, Dawn. I don’t have any unique abilities. I’m not a Slayer and I don’t have a mythic destiny. The Watchers’ Council turns out people like me every year.”

“Really? People who can read all the different languages that you understand and cast magical spells and fight demons and not give up even when a demon rips your insides out and you have no one to turn to even though you’re bleeding half to death because the people you love don’t love you any more? If there are so many people like you out there, why didn’t you just lie down and die in LA, Wesley? When Justine cut your throat? Or when that Hukkarish tried to scoop out your stomach?”

Wesley made one of those odd little full body grimaces. “I didn’t say I was easy to kill…”

“What if this is your computer game.”

“What?” He looked at her in confusion.

“What if Only You Can Save Mankind?” Dawn looked up at him. “What if only you can destroy the amulet?”

“I think Buffy is a more likely candidate. Or possibly Angel. I’m finding some references to a great warrior with a demon within on some texts that could be referring to this particular triadic power. That could be either of them. Or Faith, of course. Is she all right? I haven’t really seen her. This must be disconcerting for her. Being back here.”

“Is it…disconcerting for you?”

Wesley considered the point. “Yes, very. Not exactly the scene of my greatest triumph.”

“You looked really good in a tux,” Dawn offered.

Wesley laughed and then stifled it guiltily, putting an apologetic hand over his mouth as people stirred and then went back to sleep. “I thought you were all horrible bullying children and I used to go back to my hotel room every night and think about crawling into a whisky bottle and never coming out. God, I hated it here. The only thing that made it bearable was Cordel…” He broke off, snatched another breath and then finished quietly: “Cordelia. She was really the only upside.”

Angel heard Cordelia’s breath hitch next to him and smelled salt. She was crying, he realized. He wondered for how long she had been crying. He could almost sense her headache, that build up of frustration, anger and misery because Wesley had brought them all to this; him sitting twenty feet away and none of them able to help him.

“Well, I hate what she’s done to her hair,” Dawn observed.

Wesley hushed her quickly, shocked eyes turning in the direction of the shadows they must be to him. “That’s…blasphemy. On Pylea you’d die for that. Probably slowly.”

“I’m so envious you went to another world,” Dawn said wistfully.

“Oh yes, ask Fred about the joys of living in a demon dimension. Nothing like starving half to death in a cave for five years while people hunt you down like an animal.”

“She survived there, didn’t she? Perhaps Connor will too.”

“Fred was an adult, and she’s an extremely resourceful young woman. Connor’s a baby.” Wesley sighed. “Was a baby.”

“Perhaps he was evil,” Dawn offered. “Perhaps he was going to destroy the world.”

“No.”

“He came from Darla and Angel when he was in a very bad place. Angel was practically Angelus when Connor was conceived…”

“No, he wasn’t.”

“He killed those lawyers. He fired you all.”

“How do you know all this?”

“Cordy told Willow. She was really pissed. I think she just wanted to see how many times she could get the word ‘asshole’ into an email.”

Wesley grimaced. “Well, with hindsight, Angel’s actions are a little more explicable.”

Angel felt Cordelia’s surprise, and Gunn also looked up before he remembered he was supposed to be asleep.

“How?”

“A demon is a constant. Angelus was never affected by guilt or weakness or pity or shame. Those things didn’t exist for him and they did give him a kind of…strength. A purity, if you like. In the way a shark or a leopard is pure and conscienceless. When Angel was left to pick up the pieces of Wolfram & Hart’s little psychology experiment he had to find a way to access his demon again. While Cordelia and Gunn and I – we spent our time trying to keep him centred and grounded and in touch with his human side. Well, his human side wasn’t going to help him against Darla and Drusilla; it was only going to handicap him; and as long as we were around, he was going to be in touch with his humanity, not his demon. I didn’t understand that at the time. I was vaguely aware of his motives, but I was too close to the situation. Being fired was such a personal nightmare for me that I wasn’t able to overcome my own response to it well enough to see things from Angel’s point of view…”

“Some things never change,” Cordelia hissed angrily.

Gunn muttered darkly: “And how.”

Angel hushed them but Cordelia was still muttering furiously under her breath, and Gunn seemed to be whispering agreement.

“Shut up…” he hissed at them.

Cordelia rolled her eyes at him. “Wesley is such a freakin’ doormat!”

“Cordelia…”

“I just can’t believe he’s still making excuses for you. I always knew he would have let you back the second I took my eyes off him. If Gunn and I hadn’t been around he would have gone back to work for you the second you crooked your little finger…”

Angel clamped a hand across her mouth, hoping she wouldn’t bite him, as those teeth were much too impressive for him to want them buried into his skin. “Not. An. Issue. Anymore.”

That got through to her, and she stopped her indignant muttering. She and Gunn exchanged a look and he saw sorrow in their eyes.

“It was his choice,” he reminded them. “He chose to do what he did.”

“I know.” Cordelia pulled away from his hand and lay back down. “I know.”

“Connor wasn’t evil,” Wesley said it without a flicker of doubt. “He was good. He had a destiny to fulfil.”

“Then why did he get taken into Quor’toth?”

Wesley looked into the flames. “I don’t know.”

“Did you ever think that maybe it had to happen? The prophecy and the demon who changed it and everything that happened had to happen so that Connor would go to Quor’toth because that was where he had to be?”

“No.” Wesley turned to her in confusion. “Why would it?”

Dawn shrugged. “I don’t know. But if Quor’toth is really the darkest of all the dark worlds maybe they needed a miracle child there even more than here. Maybe you had to do what you did so that Connor could fulfil his destiny.”

“Maybe I fucked up the way I always do and now Connor’s dead and everyone I have ever loved hates me?” Wesley said it quite matter-of-factly but the words carried too much sting for Fred not to flinch.

“Don’t say that,” Dawn said gently. “Everyone deserves a second chance. And if they don’t want you in LA, we want you here.”

Wesley managed to smile although he looked more like crying. “I wasn’t fishing for reassurance.”

“Yes, you were.”

“Okay, maybe I was…”

“We still want you here. I want you here, Wesley. I want to be a Watcher. You can help me study.”

“Giles can help you study.”

“Well, I want to learn magic.”

“Which Willow and Tara can teach you.”

“Well, you’re still needed here and you should stop arguing with me and get some sleep.”

Wesley opened his mouth to argue and then instead gently kissed the top of Dawn’s head. “Yes, Dawn,” he said and leaned against the wall, her body still curved against his, both of them still exchanging the comfort of human warmth through their layers of slightly grimy clothing.

“They already have Giles…” Cordelia muttered too low for anyone more than three feet away to hear. “How come they need Wesley too?”

Angel thought of all the times Wesley had researched problems for them in the past; all those languages that only he could understand; those demons whose habits only he remembered. They were weaker without Wesley, on some level he had always known that, but how could he possibly trust the man who had ruined all their lives and taken away his son?

The voice in his head took him a moment to identify.

“In case you've forgotten – we're not in the business of giving up on people... We can't just arbitrarily decide whose soul is worth saving and whose isn't...”

Then he realized it was his own; his subconscious taking this moment to sanctimoniously lecture him, just like he’d sanctimoniously lectured Wesley and Cordelia the morning after Faith had beaten them both into unconsciousness and he was demanding their help with her rehabilitation.

He believed in second chances, he really did. His whole life was a second chance granted to him; a chance to make amends. He had forgiven Faith trying to murder him, and expected Wesley to forgive her for her torture and threatened murder of him. But Connor was different. Connor had always been different. Why? Because you loved him more. That’s why. Because losing him was the worst of all possible losses and it’s easier to blame Wesley for causing it than to think about how you know in your heart of hearts that you deserve it. Those other men had no doubt loved their sons as much as him. Those men whose sons he had killed. Wesley had forgiven him for a century of murder despite all his Watcher training telling him that vampires were evil and should never be trusted. Wesley had granted Faith a second chance as well. Apparently though, when push came to shove, Angel didn’t practice what he preached…

He winced as he realized how it must look to Buffy and the others. What a hypocrite they must think he was. But they didn’t know what he and Wesley had been to each other. How close they’d been. Wesley had been the one person he confided in. The one he talked to. Wesley had known how much Connor meant to him, and Wesley had looked him in the eye and lied to him then ripped the bottom out of his world. And he had no right not to forgive him. Now the spiked blood clouding his mind was gone from his system, that welcome rage no longer obliterating everything else, he knew that he, above all people, had no right not to forgive anything, because there was so much he had done for which he could never make amends, and yet these fragile humans had still given him their love and trust.

But Connor… He lost Connor… He lost my son…

And he knew Wesley lived with it every day, just as he lived with the screams of those he’d killed for pleasure. And sooner or later he was going to have to forgive him. He wondered if this was a test – the way to find out if he truly was repentant, if he truly did believe in redemption. If so, he wasn’t certain if this was a test he could pass, but he did at least recognize that he should perhaps try.

***

People started to wake up around noon and then gradually drifted towards getting themselves washed, dressed – if they’d bothered to undress – and fed. Wesley was already awake when Angel opened his eyes; Dawn still sleeping against him, but Wesley reading by the firelight, making the occasional scribble in his notebook.

There simply weren’t tables of a size that everyone could eat around them, and they ended up having blankets on the floor, like picnics, a strange mixture of sandwiches and take out and the food, Giles, Buffy and Xander had been keeping in their fridges and cupboards. Dawn had pointedly spread out two blankets with the container of blood on one and the teapot on the other.

Angel realized how quickly you could be made to feel in the wrong just through getting the subtle cold-shoulder from people who had previously liked you. It wasn’t that anyone was rude to them. They just didn’t seek them out. They were brought their share of the food; paper plates handed out, enough for Gunn, Cordy, Fred, Faith, Groo and Lorne, and that container of pig’s blood for him. Given crockery and cutlery, given cups. Giles came around with the teapot and politely offered them refills, but at the same time they were definitely the unwanted relatives at the family reunion, a clear space of twenty feet between them and the next blanket around which the other group sat and smiled and told stories. Wesley smiled too. Xander did an impression of Spike that would normally have had Angel laughing, but he wasn’t invited to be in on that joke, even though he knew Spike and Wesley didn’t. People kept filling Wesley’s plate, Tara slipping an extra sandwich on there when he wasn’t looking so he suddenly found he still had several left he hadn’t eaten; Dawn making sure he got the biggest chocolate chip cookies. Buffy gave him a Snickers bar saying airily that it was ‘clinically proven that eight out of ten Watchers could research more efficiently when stuffed full of sugar’. And there was that little squeeze of his uninjured shoulder, the fingers lingering there just a moment longer than necessary so he looked up at her and could see her smile at him gently, like he was a trusted friend.

“Why don’t I get a Snickers bar?” Giles demanded, through a mouthful of sandwich.

“Because you always call them ‘Marathons’.”

“Well, they were when I was growing up. A Mars a day helped you work, rest and play. A Milky Way was the treat you could eat between meals without ruining your appetite, Marathons were Marathons, and Flake bars were apparently licked in a suggestive way by scantily clad women travelling through soft focused fields in gypsy caravans.”

“Oh, I remember the Flake adverts…” Wesley looked up with interest. “They were always very popular in the dorm. I suspect the girls in those adverts were mentally revisited in many um…happy dreams.”

“Good grief, Wes, sexual fantasies in an all male boarding school? Who knew?” Buffy softened it with a grin and Angel found himself wondering what Wesley had done to earn such a viewing of her gentle side. Was it just because she had so recently come back from the dead a second time or was it something specific to Wesley’s situation as someone abandoned by Angel?

“We could probably get you a Flake bar,” Tara said uncertainly. “If you have a craving?”

Wesley made an apologetic face. “The actual chocolate was never really the root of the craving. There may be people who actually eat them because they like the taste of them, for all I know, but I’m afraid the point of them for males was that an obliging scantily-clad woman would eat one seductively in front of you before replicating the action… well, you get the idea.”

“I have performed this task for Xander on many occasions,” Anya observed, examining a potted meat sandwich with every sign of suspicion.

Wesley raised an eyebrow and looked across at Giles. “Um…lucky Xander,” he offered. “There was an unfortunate shortage of scantily-clad women at my boarding school. And I’m sure most of us who attended are mentally scarred as a consequence.”

“Or homosexual,” Anya pointed out. As everyone looked at her, she obligingly added: “A common side effect of no female company is for men to become homosexual, especially in England.”

Giles coughed and caught Wesley’s eye. “As I once said to Spike, Wesley – welcome to the nancy tribe.”

Wesley also coughed and took refuge in his teacup. “Um – you’ll forgive me, Giles, if I prefer not to touch that one even with a very long pole.”

Dawn held out the sandwich plate. “Here, have another one. Giles said that English people like food out of jars with no recognisable ingredients in them, so we saved these for you.”

“Thank you.” Wesley took another sandwich. “It’s true that potted meat sandwiches are considered a delicacy in any institution in Britain where food comes only at scheduled meal times and in always inadequate quantities. Shrimp paste is another favourite of the institutionalised.”

“You’re making me homesick,” Giles protested. “Plates of softening biscuits and flat ginger beer. Who doesn’t miss that?”

“Liver and bacon with cold boiled cabbage.” Wesley sighed nostalgically. “Oh, and haddock of the virulent yellow hue more commonly associated with the most deadly viral plagues, and so badly prepared that it contained more salt than the Dead Sea. Always to be accompanied by a foul-smelling swamp-like excrescence of mushy peas.”

Giles nodded. “And who can forget the abiding mystery that is the Scotch Egg?”

Xander looked queasy. “You’re making this up, right? They didn’t actually make you eat any of this food?”

“They didn’t need to ‘make’ us eat it,” Wesley assured him. “We were permanently starving. We ate all of it and our boiled sprouts.”

Giles refilled both their teacups. “Happiest days of one’s life.”

“It was for me,” Wesley admitted. “The teachers set achievable goals, they weren’t allowed to cane us, and they had to feed us three times a day even if we dropped our Latin homework in a puddle or fell asleep during prep. I thought it really was a Brave New World of enlightenment and justice. They practically had to unclench my fingers from the gates on the last day of school.”

Angel exchanged a look with Gunn before either of them could stop themselves. He knew Wesley had forgotten all about them. He was talking to Giles and Buffy and the others, but he and Gunn and Cordelia were the ones who knew why Wesley’s boarding school had represented such a haven to him.

“You’re serious, aren’t you?” Xander looked at him as if he’d grown an extra head.

Wesley shrugged. “I liked writing essays. I liked learning new things. I liked having so many books to read. And I really liked getting ‘A’s and people writing ‘well done’ on my papers. I was actually rather pathetically easy to please, and school had everything I could possibly wish for.”

“Here, here.” Willow held up her teacup and she and Wesley clinked their teacups together in a genteel equivalent of a high five.

Angel thought about Wesley’s complicated handshake with Gunn and, turning to Gunn again in time to see him wince, guessed he was thinking about it too.

“These people are going to turn him back into the geek of the galaxy,” Gunn muttered darkly.

Groo leant across to murmur quietly: “Does Wesley not appear to be happy and fulfilled in the company of these people?”

“These people wouldn’t give him the time of day last time he was down here,” Cordelia hissed back.

“Well, they’re making up for lost time now,” Fred sighed.

Anya looked up from her sandwiches to say: “Was there a great deal of homosexual activity in your boarding school, Wesley?”

Wesley shot Giles a desperate look and Giles shrugged helplessly.

Anya continued relentlessly. “Certainly on board ships and in prisons and in other places where many males are kept in confined circumstances I understand that…”

Xander took her hand. “Anya, please stop talking.”

“But, I thought in the past that you were also curious about…?”

“Please. For the love of God. Stop. Talking.”

Anya did so in some evident confusion and Buffy said quickly, “Well – jobs for the day. Probably a good idea if someone allocated some. Giles…?”

Giles cleared his throat. “Yes, indeed. Buffy, perhaps you and Faith and…um…Angel could discuss the defences of this building and suggest ways to make it as safe as possible. Wesley, you need to work on the amulet, of course. I suggest Dawn continues to research references to that concealing spell, see if she can’t refine it further. And perhaps Willow and Tara could look at…”

Angel let it wash over him. They needed to keep the amulet safe from theft until it could be destroyed, and they needed to find a way to destroy it before it could be used to bring about the end of the world. And that was what he needed to focus on. Not that the man who had betrayed him and lost him son to a hell dimension was sitting twenty feet away. Or that Buffy was so close and still so far away; that Cordelia was with Groo; or that his people had lost their heart somewhere along with Connor, as if they didn’t know what they were fighting for any more. He realized that was his fault. They were fighting for him; his cause; and he had stopped caring about that cause; stopped caring about anything except the fact that his son was dead. But on a cosmic scale perhaps to lose his son was no more than he deserved, and he had already tried to destroy the world once. Perhaps he owed it a salvation. Perhaps, he should stop wallowing in self-pity and get up and get to work? He turned to Faith.

“Why don’t you and Buffy take the perimeter? Grab anything out there that could be used against us or would be useful in here, and I’ll check for ways in. There used to be a sewer access so it might be an idea to weld it shut.”

“Good thinking.”

It was a shock to turn and find Buffy so close. She nodded to Faith, as if they had never tried to kill each other, never had a showdown at any point, and called across to Xander that he should look at the sewer access with Angel.

Time to save the world, Angel found himself thinking; wishing he could feel it instead of only think it; could tell himself there really was still a world worth saving, when what felt like all of his had been taken into Quor’toth.


It was perhaps no surprise that Lorne was the first one to cross the invisible barrier.
Breaching that psychological electric fence separating Wesley from the rest of them that meant they never made eye contact with him and he never made eye contact with them, and they never ever addressed each other directly.

“So, Wesley. How are you?”

Wesley looked up from the book he was reading in shock, made to close it, remembered to bookmark it with a tissue, and then looked up again. “Um…Fine.” He grimaced as they both realized that was a lie, and said hastily, “How are you?”

“Pretty good.” Lorne pulled a chair round and sat astride it.

Wesley moistened his lips and looked up at the demon. “How’s…your head?”

“No permanent damage done.”

Wesley’s body was stiff with formality and embarrassment. “I’m…sorry about that.”

“Vodka under the cocktail umbrella, sweetpea. How about something for me to do?”

Wesley looked around awkwardly from Buffy to Angel, quickly averting his eyes, of course, before he could make actual eye contact with Angel; making Angel feel snubbed, although he was sure that hadn’t been his intention. Inspiration came as Wesley was looking at his most helpless and he turned back to Lorne with more animation. “What about the sanctuary spell? Do you know how to cast it?”

“I don’t, but I know three beautiful furies who do.”

“Do you think they could possibly tell you how to do it over the phone?”

Lorne reached for his cellphone, nodding as he did so. “I’d say that was definitely worth a try.”

“What spell?” Willow asked, coming over.

Wesley made a quick hand gesture. “Um, Willow this is Lorne, Lorne this is Willow. Lorne’s anagogic. He used to run a karaoke bar that was protected by a sanctorum spell that prevented any kind of demon violence within its confines. He’s hoping we might be able to cast the same protective barrier around the mansion. Even if it won’t hold indefinitely, it might at least delay the Hukkarish.”

“Sounds like a really good idea to me,” Willow said cheerfully. Then the smile froze on her face as Cordelia marched over; Willow looking from Wesley back to Cordelia and then darting a ‘help!’ look at Xander.

Cordelia stood in front of Wesley who looked undecided as to whether he should do the gentlemanly thing and rise to his feet or stay sitting and possibly avoid getting punched. “Cordelia…” he murmured formally.

“You look like crap,” she told him.

He looked down at himself and then back at her. “Well, things have been a bit… You look very nice.”

She rolled her eyes. “What’s the skinny on these devil dog demons? Are they like the ones who were big with the formal wear hate?”

Wesley seemed relieved to have a chance to look back at the books and so to avoid her eyes. “No, they’re bipedal. And…somewhat larger.”

“Are you using ‘somewhat’ in a ‘a little bit’ way or in a ‘three times the size but I’m trying not to scare you’ way?”

Wesley grimaced. “Probably more like…four times the size.”

“Have you seen ‘Dog Soldiers’, Cord?” Xander said as cheerfully as though they had never been apart.

She turned to look at him frostily. “Yes.”

Xander’s turn to grimace. “I was kind of banking on you saying ‘no’.”

“So, they’re seven feet tall slavering wolf men with huge teeth and claws?” Cordelia demanded.

“More like eight feet tall and the heads are rather more hyaena-like.” Wesley had evidently decided that there was no point in beating around the bush, and turned the page of the book he was studying to show her an illustration.

Cordelia gazed at the picture and then paled. “Is that to scale? The human it’s eating, I mean? Is that an adult or a child?”

“Adult,” Wesley admitted. “Adult male, in fact. But if the sanctorum spell works… And, don’t forget they’re nocturnal.”

“Yeah, that’s such a comfort. ‘They mostly come at night – mostly’. I knew I shouldn’t have let you and Gunn make me watch all those dumb horror films.” Cordelia turned to Willow and jerked a thumb at Wesley. “Haven’t you been feeding him?”

“Yes, we have,” Willow retorted at once, while Tara sidled over as reinforcements. She thrust a plate of cookies at Wesley surreptitiously. It was a redundant question as they had been feeding him right in front of her for the past few hours but Cordelia was clearly feeling argumentative.

“Well, he looks like crap.” Cordelia threw it out at them as a challenge, clearly making it their fault and not hers.

“Being mauled by huge slavering hyaena-wolf demons will do that to a growing boy, Cord,” Xander said levelly. “And there’s the whole being in constant pain and not getting any sleep part of the equation too. Once the world has been saved I’m sure Wesley will go back to being… what was he like before?”

“Skinny, unshaven and insomniac,” Lorne put in before turning back to the phone. “No, not you, darlings. What can we use instead of blood root?”

“Okay, I don’t think that will be too much of a stretch for him then.”

Cordelia folded her arms, still glaring down at Wesley as if he was personally affronting her just by existing. “Need any help with the research?”

“We’re helping him,” Tara put in quickly, clearly fearing that Cordelia was going to be too much for Wesley to deal with.

“Don’t you have a cauldron you should be stirring?” Cordelia demanded.

“Help would be very useful, thank you, Cordelia,” Wesley put in hastily. He gave Tara an apologetic and reassuring look, clearly meant to let her know that he would be okay with Cordelia but was grateful for her intervention.

Angel thought how weird it was that he could read Wesley so easily right now; every twitch of his contradictory body language and every thought in those expressive blue eyes; but when it had mattered Wesley had been a closed book to him. That was what he couldn’t get past; the way the man had looked him right in the eye and lied to him. He wondered if he was ever going to be able to get past it. And what happened on the day that he did, because how could Wesley ever come back to them when Angel could never trust him again?

You tread a fine line, Angel. I don’t envy you...

Angel winced. You made that leap in the dark, of course. You trusted even when it made no sense to do so. Even when you knew that the one you were trusting was capable of betrayal, capable of doing you irreparable harm. You looked into the heart of others and what you saw was yourself, reflected back; which was why Wesley was never able to see Angel’s demon even when his demon smacked him into unconsciousness or taunted him with his innermost fears. He only ever saw someone who wanted to do good. Angelus had thought every one of his victims deserved it, because they were weak and frail and human. And on some level they were. And Wesley was human, and therefore weak and frail, and capable of making terrible mistakes, or choosing the wrong path. But that didn’t mean that he deserved to have his throat cut or to be smothered in his hospital bed.

Angel looked back at Wesley and saw what he’d been trying so hard not to see; that what he was feeling every time he thought about Connor in Quor’toth, Wesley was feeling too. He was probably remembering Angel’s last goodbye to Connor every time he closed his eyes. Angel knew all about being alive when your victims were dead and yet still carrying their screams with you. The gypsies hadn’t killed him for a reason. They’d cursed him with a soul because that would hurt so much more than death. Wesley already had a soul, and a conscience. He was already paying for his mistake. Living every day with something he could never put right. Angel knew exactly how that felt.

Wesley looked up then, as if he could feel Angel’s eyes upon him. He looked so familiar in that instant, as if none of it had ever happened, and here they were again, two friends who knew each other so well, they could hold a conversation without saying a word. Wesley looked at Angel and evidently saw someone crushed with grief because Angel saw that reflected in Wesley’s eyes, that terrible stab of guilt and sorrow at what he’d done, and then Wesley was quickly averting his eyes and Angel closed his own. But he had felt it in that instant, for the very first time, mixed in with his anger and grief and sorrow, he had felt a needle-sharp stab of pity for the man who had lost Angel his son.

***

“Wesley, what does this word mean?”

Wesley gazed at the scroll that Dawn shoved under his nose. “Cauldron.” His eyes widened. “Dawn, you’ve found it! Of course! A cauldron.”

Giles looked up from the book he was reading. “That’s the object for which we’re searching now?”

“I think so.” Wesley ran a finger along the scroll. “Well done, Dawn. This simplifies things considerably. Giles was quite right about that being the important part of the scroll to translate. A cauldron and here is the symbol of the demon Uriel and its possessive in this context – therefore that’s what we need to find – the Cauldron of Uriel. Now we just need to work out where we’re meant to be looking for it.”

Giles took off his glasses to clean them. “I can’t find any of the usual glyphs denoting a gateway to another world, Wesley. Are you sure that’s what we’re looking for?”

“Not remotely sure. I was just going by the illustration of all those demons. Only two of them are ones I recognize as being indigenous to this world, which led me to presume that the hiding place of this sacred object – now, thanks to Dawn something we know is the Cauldron of Uriel – was concealed in another dimension where these species of demon abound.”

Giles nodded. “Yes, I noticed that two. The Vrekish’nals are supposed to have left this dimension about a thousand years ago and can now only be found in some of the lesser hell worlds of the Nurnian dimension. If we’re going to have to get there I don’t fancy our chances.”

Wesley grimaced. “Nor do I.”

Tara whispered something in her ear and Willow sat upright in her chair. “Oh! Cave paintings!”

“What?” Giles demanded.

“If you looked at a cave painting of our world you’d think you should look for a place where there are woolly mammoths and sabre-toothed tigers, but you’d be wrong.”

Wesley and Giles exchanged a look of revelation. “Good Lord…” Giles smiled for the first time in what Angel suspected was days.

“That gives us a timeline,” Wesley said in excitement.

Dawn grimaced. “So, we may not be looking for a gateway or a doorway…?” She looked at the piles of books with markers in them scattered around her and the sheaf of notes in her hand. “Because I’ve been kind of concentrating my efforts on that…”

“No, we’ll still need a gateway of some kind. The place where the cauldron is concealed will need to be accessed. Just ignore the symbols that Giles and I drew out for you of transition from one dimension to another.” Wesley leaned across, wincing at the movement, and clasping a hand to his side, and drew a line through something on her page of notes.

“Have you used one of these before, Wesley?”

Angel grimaced as Willow shoved yet another book under Wesley’s nose. Everyone seemed to take it for granted that Wesley could do three things at once. Research one spell, help Dawn translate a second, coordinate with Lorne over a third, and now apparently give input on a fourth; all with a black eye, bruised cheekbone, clawed shoulder, bandaged arm, and superglued guts.

Had they used to treat him like this? Just pile work onto him and expect him never to buckle under the strain? Angel had a sudden memory of Wesley’s office before he had taken Connor. Towering piles of books on his desk and Wesley jerking awake as Angel walked into the room; circles under his eyes from all those sleepless nights.

“No, I don’t think so.” Wesley peered at the book with interest, rubbing his unblackened eye with one finger as he did so, weariness in every line. “It looks fascinating. Do we have any of these stones in the supplies from the Magic Box?”

Willow shook her head. “Any stone with some iron ore in it will do, and there are thousands of them in the woods from old open cast mining remnants.” She nodded her head to the back door and the woods beyond. They seemed to have crept closer in the last few years. The courtyard was still there at the front, the garden that Dru had liked so much, but the trees loomed at the back. Angel had noticed it automatically as he checked out the surroundings, how easy it would be for him to travel under their canopy without being burned by the sun. Not as secure as a sewer, of course, the sun might dapple down in dangerous bars when the wind moved the boughs too quickly, but still a way to move around during the daytime.

Cordelia satisfied everyone else’s curiosity by saying, “What spell? How does it work?”

Wesley glanced up at her quickly and then indicated the illustration. “It’s another concealment spell. You create a triangle of energy around an object you want to protect, using three of these special iron-rich stones and various other herbs and crystals.” He rose to his feet. “I’ll get the stones, Willow. You keep looking for a destructive spell. Concealing it is a lot better than nothing but ultimately we need to be able to render it powerless.”

As Wesley headed past them for the woods outside, Gunn said, “Do you want some company…?”

Wesley’s ‘No, thank you’ was crisp as a new snowfall and Angel grimaced. Wesley was apparently ready and willing to take responsibility for what he’d done but he was certainly not yet ready to get past them misjudging his motives or failing to make allowances for his intentions.

Cordelia waited until the door was closed behind Wesley before turning on Gunn. “What did you say to him when you went to see him?”

“I don’t remember,” Gunn said defensively. “I was worried about Fred. I think I said I didn’t want to be there any more than he wanted me there but I needed his help.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“That he’d help because it was Fred but not to bother him again. He meant it, too.”

Cordelia rolled his eyes. “Of course he didn’t mean it.”

“You weren’t there. You didn’t see what he was like.”

“Oh, you’re really telling me that if it had been you, or me, or Angel with the wiggly slug things inside of us, Wesley wouldn’t have helped?”

Gunn opened his mouth and then closed it again. “It felt like that at the time.”

“God, men are dumb.”

“Look, I was worried about Fred. What Wesley told me to do worked. I wasn’t going there to make a social call. I was desperate.”

Cordelia shook her head. “Great. I’m so glad you provided an opportunity for the two of you idiots to tell each other you no longer gave a crap about one another, because that was exactly what the situation needed.” She turned to Faith. “Why are men so stupid anyway?”

Faith shrugged. “I think it’s genetic.”

“It could be the chromosomes – they do have mutated ones,” Fred put in helpfully, earning herself a wounded accusing look from Gunn. She grimaced. “Just…trying to be helpful.”

“I don’t think it’s their fault,” Buffy said thoughtfully. “I mean I don’t think they wake up in the morning and think ‘I know, I’ll be extra stupid and annoying today’ or anything. I think it just sort…comes upon them.”

Groo said, “You think that Gunn may have done unintentional damage to any chances of a reconciliation when he visited Wesley, Princess?”

“Well, duh,” Cordelia responded.

Groo continued gently: “But would not Fred now be dead had he not done so?”

Cordelia opened her mouth to refute and then waved a hand. “Okay, reasonable point, I suppose. But he still should have handled it better.”

Gunn rolled his eyes. “Hello, woman I love dehydrating to death from alien infestation, psychotic vampire ready to rip off my arms and legs if I even talk to ex-friend who now hates me for a reason I don’t even fully understand. Do the words ‘rock’ and ‘hard place’ mean anything to you?”

“Wesley doesn’t hate you.” They turned around in surprise to find Dawn gazing at them. “He doesn’t hate any of you. He just thinks you hate him.”

“We don’t ‘hate’ him,” Cordelia said at once. “We’re just angry with him because he didn’t tell us what he was doing and what he was doing was dumb.”

Dawn folded her arms and looked directly at the vampire. “Angel hates him.”

Angel found his voice with an effort. “No, I don’t.”

“You tried to kill him. You told him you’d never forgive him.”

“He’d just stolen and lost my son. I was angry. You don’t understand what it’s like to lose…”

“I lost my mother and my sister. Don’t tell me I don’t understand how it feels to lose someone you love.” Dawn flashed it back in double quick time. “It doesn’t excuse what you did.”

“He stole my son.” Angel gazed at her levelly. “My son is probably dead and certainly lost because of him. I can never have another child.”

“But you knew Wesley!” Her anger was so bright it made him take a step back. “You should have known he was acting for the best. He was trying to protect Connor, protect you, all of you. The Loa told him you were going to devour your child and if the portents appeared and Wesley didn’t do anything, Connor would die. What else was he supposed to do? Just sit back and wait for you to murder another baby?”

Angel winced from that ‘another’ and saw Dawn regret it, saw Buffy turn to her to remonstrate and then stop at the look in Dawn’s eyes and sigh. His past did that sometimes, seeped around them like an overflow of old sewage.

“He should have told Fred and me,” Gunn insisted. “We could have helped him. We could have talked it through.”

“And then Angel would have hated you too,” Dawn returned. “Wesley was already trying to save you from Holtz, he didn’t want to have Angel after you as well.”

Lorne said reasonably, “Sweetpea, we didn’t know what Wesley was trying to do or why he did what he did, because he didn’t tell us. I’m anagogic but I’m not psychic. I read him for a few seconds and all I got was betrayal.”

“Because he felt like a traitor,” Dawn explained wearily. “Not because he was one.”

Giles said quietly, “We don’t have time for this. When the Hukkarish come back tonight, they’re going to come in force. We need to be ready for them.”

Faith nodded. “I’m with G-man. Not that the tearing yourselves up over things you can’t change isn’t entertaining for the rest of us, but we are supposed to be saving the world.”

“Oh Hecate…”

Angel felt the hairs on the back of his neck prickle at the shock in Willow’s voice, that gasp from Tara, and Giles and Buffy both spun around at once.

“What is it?” Giles demanded.

Willow looked up from the book she and Tara were reading, Tara already on her feet as if pulled by strings. Willow said rapidly: “We just found another reference to the Hukkarish. It’s much more detailed than the others but it says ‘shadow’ here, not ‘night’. It says the Hukkarish only have ‘strength in shadow and sunlight robs them of all will and power’. But the woods are…”

“Full of shadows…” Buffy finished in horror.

Angel was already out of the door with a sword in his hand, dodging under a tree, grateful that the day was overcast for his own sake, but wishing for Wesley’s that it was brilliant sunlight. Gunn was right behind him, and he heard Buffy saying to Faith: “You take east, I’ll take west.”

“I will take the north…” That was Groo, already hotfooting it away, sword at the ready.

Buffy’s voice was already fainter: “Everyone else stay inside. Bolt the doors behind us. Angel, do you know which way Wesley went…?”

But Angel had his scent now and was already running, knowing that if he could smell Wesley’s blood from those still-seeping wounds, then so could the Hukkarish.

***