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Darkness Visible, Part Two

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 reach 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 phoned 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.

 

***