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Darkness Visible, Part Three

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…”

***