Sugar and Spice Part 2 Chapter 1, an angel fanfic

Disclaimer: Please see Part 1 Chapter 1

For Mendenbar

And for our joint hope of Christian Kane guest-starring with David Boreanaz on Bones…

Author's Note: The story Sugar and Spice is followed as a whole by the final story, The Blood Will Tell. Therefore there are some elements in this story that may confuse as they don't appear relevant, but they put in place what will happen shortly.

SUGAR & SPICE

Part 2

Chapter 1

Since vampires don't need oxygen to breathe, only to talk, they avoid embarrassing side effects of the biological process such as hiccoughs, heartburn – and being breathless and flustered when your boss walks by at just that moment when you've spilled very hot coffee down your cleavage (ladies) or crotch (gentlemen) in front of all your subordinate staff and simultaneously just remembered that you haven't sorted your said boss's schedule for that very important conference he or she or both of you are supposed to be attending tomorrow – in a city booked up to the rafters because of Oktoberfest/the Olympics/ Wrestlemania/the Superbowl/ComicCon insert the large-scale-hugely-popular event of your panicked choice.

It had barely been the crack of dawn when Harmony, nervously watching the inexorably rising sun, had got baby Cordelia to Rodeo Drive, but it was amazing how fast you could gain access, and what you could manage to achieve when you did, if you tossed out useful phrases like 'Wolfram & Hart', 'corporate expense account' and the top-trump card: 'bill it to Angel'.

Decked out in Dior, Cordy gurgled merrily as Harmony took her up to the 7th Floor to Wolfram & Hart's…Day Care? Crêché? Holding pen? It wasn't like she'd ever had cause to visit before today. But according to Ankh-Sun-Amun in Posthumous Accounts, one of Wolfram & Hart's best 'recruitment' lures was that they took being an 'equal-opportunity employer' to a level that would boggle the mind of the most extremist ultra-left-wing liberal. They were a 'multicultural' employer like no other.

Her nose told her what her eyes didn't: that some of the 'infants' included were only partially human, and indeed entirely non-human. Some of the critters in there were definitely 'offspring' as opposed to 'children', like the little male (?)…thing…that looked like one of those pre-Raphaelite Putti faux-cherubs you saw on those big old Paintings by those Old Mister guys, except that it had a serious back-hair problem for a baby – oh, and the little tyke farted and belched tiny gouts of flame – winding and diaper changing him/it must be a real treat.

"But you don't have to worry," burbled Amelia/Delia/Celia/Felicia – some name that ended with an 'eelia' at any rate - whilst Cordy was put in a play area with bright blocks that made her tiny face smile (and okay, drool a bit) "there's nothing to worry about at Wolfram & Hart-"

Huh, if only you knew…Harmony bit down, literally, on her carried-over-from-human tendency to blurt out inconvenient truth at what her parents had often angrily told her was 'always the worst possible moment; for goodness sake, girl, we ought to have named you Discord.'

'Eelia' was babbling, "We have the very highest calibre of staff here. Our staff members are constantly on the alert at all times!" she actually trilled, an ability which Discovery Channel had led Harmony to believe required years of voice-training as an opera singer to pull off.

"You bet they are, especially after that little mobile-fire-hazard's mama came in unexpectedly, just in time to catch that assistant prodding him to fart flame to light her cigarettes to save on matches." A tall woman – a good six feet two or three inches in those heels, probably 5' 8" or 9" barefoot – with her back to them at a nearby copy machine, muttered this aside to the guy standing next to her.

To Harmony, both looked like mid-level managers - or actually mid-range lawyers, given both were wearing expensive silk/cashmere business suits, plus his conservative crew cut and her dark brown hair taken up in a too severe chignon were courtesy of one of LA's most fashionable gay hair-stylists. The stylist actually made the bulk of his fortune in a lucrative make-up artist/disguise sideline for non-humans. Many of those in turn were also Wolfram & Hart clients, who paid top dollar for the make-up artist's expertise in assisting what Harmony had overheard Wesley Wyndham-P describe to Angel's werewolf-girlfriend as, 'various other-dimensional species – 'demons' in the grossly inaccurate but catch-all vernacular – to pass for humans, sometimes for years on end.'

When Nina had expressed dubiousness about 'demons' being able to manage such for years on end, even with good make-up, Wesley had asked her, in that very dry English prissy voice he sometimes used, 'have you ever watched any of those appalling American daytime soap-operas that run for eternity? Days of Our Lives and Kestrel's Landing or Falcon's Crest or whatever it is? Half the actors in them are about as human as the redwood trees they usually appear to be imitating on screen – I know of at least one full-blood Brachen demon who played a major character for a decade, and there was another character, Edward Bradbury? Eric Brady? Some such nonsense – his 'natural look' was heliotrope scales and Dartmoor-bog fluorescent green horns. They had to write that character out after – well, never mind…'

Pity, Harmony would always wonder now what the heliotrope demon had done…and what was a heliotrope anyway? – the persistent image she had was of a little animated helicopter like in those Toy Story movies, which she was fairly sure couldn't be right.

But, right now, Chignon Woman and Tall Guy clearly had no idea Harmony was a vampire with the enhanced hearing of her kind; she easily tuned out the burbling, babbling 'Eelia' for this more interesting bit of gossip as 'Chignon' rolled her eyes down towards the floor and advised 'Guy' dryly, "They still haven't got all of the assistant out of the carpeting."

"Ew…the carpeting?" Guy looked down at the shag under his feet and wrinkled his nose, which was actually a fairly clever 'save', considering he hadn't really been paying attention – at least not if his slightly elevated heart, pulse, respiration and the increased musk of his body scent were anything to go by – to anything much other than his desire to shag the woman next to him, as Spike would have put it.

Blondie bear had been so cross when she hadn't got that joke, but everyone knew the Brits didn't talk real English, how was she supposed know that in England shag was slang for sex…and also for a very expensive type of loose tobacco…and a particularly thick-woven type of carpeting. It was just so not fair – according to Mr I'm A Champion Of Light I Am Spike, English was one of only half a dozen languages in the whole world 'so rich in vocabulary' that it had need to produce a Thesaurus – which, hey, nothing more than a book listing 'different words that mean the same thing' – and yet it made one poor little four-letter word mean all those things?!

"Oh yeah; I saw the whole thing from my office…made Saw Four look like a student art-house film. Fire baby's mom is half-Orc – who knew something that side of large could move that quietly? - and Orcs are a very emotional species, real wear-their-heart-on-their-sleeve…of course if you upset them, they'll wear your heart on their sleeve, right after they've ripped the still-bleeding sucker from your chest cavity."

Chignon told him this with more cheer than concern, and as she reached up to get another ream of paper from the upper shelf over the copy machine she held the stretch just a smidgeon longer than necessary – huh, not entirely as oblivious to Mr Lustful as she was making an excellent job of appearing to be. That stretch tautened the material of her blouse – decorously open only three buttons to convey the merest hint of cleavage – in such as way as to define her flat stomach, trim waist, and biggest-grapefruit-in-the-stack-sized breasts, each one nestled in a cup of her frilly-lace white bra - just enough a different shade of white to show up clearly against the sheer silk material of the blouse when that silk was tightened across them.

The action also drew attention to her perfectly half-moon shaped big J. Lo bottom. Huh…big boobs, big butt, small waist, long legs. If she'd been blonde instead of brunette she'd have ticked every 'primal instinct – me want now yum, yum' box inside the head of the human male…and a lot of males that weren't human. Still, the move was subtle and the duration of holding that stretch perfectly judged, and Harmony admired the panache with which it was done.

"Really? Most folks think Orcs are fake – y'know, just advertising, like Santa Claus and Bigfoot." 'Guy' wasn't totally buying her 'abusive assistant smeared into carpet by half-monster mom' tall tale.

"Oh they're real; they just don't advertise the fact due to all the bad press they get because of Tolkien. He stitched up the King of the Orcs like a seamstress on steroids, did a complete Stoker on him."

"Stoker?"

"As in Bram - like he did to Dracula?"

Dracula! Yeah, like, oh please! As if.

"Dracula? Oh, please, as if he's real. Do you think I started working here yesterday?" Harmony blinked as 'Guy' unknowingly verbalised using her exact internal, and scornful, intonations.

"Half the time, a lot of us wonder," 'Chignon' drawled with a nicely derisive arched-eyebrow to match her sardonic tone – Harmony would have happily sold her soul – had she still got one - to have been able to do the Vulcan one-eyebrow thing, "and yes, Draaah-Kula, darlink. You want to make it at Wolfram & Hart – check that, you just want to survive the average working day here – you should start reading the company archives – they were written by those that lived to tell the tales, and in some cases, even by those who didn't – you got to watch out for that sneaky ole perpetuity clause."

"Hey, I've achieved the most billable hours out of my entire department for the last six quarters in a row; I already have a corner office with a plaza view." He protested.

"And your point is?" Yet again, that Vulcanised eyebrow gracefully arched even further up her forehead and Harmony noticed the elegant chignon itself bore more than a passing resemblance to Kate Mulgrew's hairstyle in Season 1 of Star Trek: Voyager – neither of which was probably a coincidence.

But 'Chignon' was making her point: "So did Lilah Morgan – let's see, brutally stabbed to death in LA's Most Haunted hotel and then dismembered, according to what I heard, by none other than her lover, our very own current Head of Research and Intelligence, Mr Wesley Wyndham-Pryce. Talk about relationship issues."

Yikes, Wesley had done that? Note to self – nobody does psycho better than the English. But 'Chignon' was on a roll:

"And Lindsey McDonald – presumably dead or wishing he was – oh, nor to forget our late, great, übermeister Holland Manners. None of them are spending those telephone number bonuses, or ever will be now, are they? This a pan-dimensional evil law firm, there's a lot more needed than just racking up billable hours if you're serious about living long enough to retire in the Caymans and enjoy an endless stream of Mohijtoes and jailbait beach-bunnies willing to open their legs and close their eyes to your comb-over, beer gut and saggy butt because of your honed and toned black American Express card – like last year when most of my learned colleagues got wiped out by that lava chomp-thing."

Harmony focussed more closely on 'Chignon' as 'Guy' looked mulish and sulky, but didn't recognise her. That wasn't saying much, though, as until Wesley had noticed her name on the in-house newsletter and plucked her out of the Typing Pool, she hadn't really registered the lawyers as people – her experienced haute couture eye noted variously fashionable outfits, and she could tell Victoria Beckham from John Galliano across a ballroom in a power cut, but the individuals wearing them went by in a blurry blah-blah blurb that was like being asked to pick between that lobster to have for Thermidor or that lobster...they were all ugly, red, shellfish of indistinguishable shellfishyness.

She hadn't even recognised Wesley that day he'd walked her up to Angel-bossy's outer office. He'd had to show her a photograph of him standing next to Cordy at the High School Senior Prom before she'd believed that muscular, manly stubble, and just a teensy bit psychotic (okay, now she knew, a lot psychotic) Mr Wyndham-Pryce really was the same person as the rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights bespectacled wimpy boy Weeehzleee stood next to an exasperated looking Cordy as stiff as if he were suffering from rigor mortis.

Of course, most of the staff had been slaughtered and zombified by that horrible big rock-monster thingie with the hooves and horns, but that entire staff complement had been replaced in, like, a day, and Lilah Morgan had been wrong about it killing all the staff – nobody in the typing pool had been killed, although of course Miss Morgan I'm the Super-Heroine of Lawyers hadn't considered anyone not a lawyer as real 'staff', Miss Stuck-Up, so she got it wrong, nyah-nyah. 'Chignon' might have been one of the few who survived the rock monster, or was just pretending she had, like that vamp over in Westwood who claimed to have seen the Crucifixion, except that he was so clearly stuck in Season 1 of Miami Vice before they dumped Phil Collins for Peter Gabriel.

"Oh please, you look like you're six and found out there's no Santa Claus. Man up! I should make you do the research yourself…" Chignon muttered. "Look, Prince Vlad Drakul, Vlad the Impaler, was the basis of the Dracula legend. He was the Wolf, Ram and Hart's biggest client back then…bestrode the Balkans like a Colossus…he seized life by the throat and throttled it into submission…"

She sounded more wistful than disapproving, and her lip curl came back as she looked 'Guy' up and down significantly – whose increased sulkiness of pout showed he got the unvoiced implication – before she went on, "…but the vampire Dracula was his grandson, also Prince Vlad Drakul, also a great big wussy-pussy. Gave most of the family fortune to scrofulous peasantry, trying live down the legacy of his grandfather's evil and all that psycho-babble crap, although fair dues half the local peasantry were his father's half-siblings courtesy of grandpa at his most megalomaniacal running amok with anything female and fertile, so technically the money stayed in the family – depends on how you look at it. Anyway, little Drac mixed sorcery with science – a lot of healing magicks combined with herbal medicine and some advanced organic chemistry. Did a lot of tests on the local rural villagers."

"Like Matthias Pavayne?" 'Guy' put in, clearly trying to show he didn't entirely wake up in a whole new world every three minutes.

"Hardly. But he did pre-empt Penicillin by 600 years or so. Anyway, the reason the Drakuls got so high up on the food chain, no pun intended, is because they were Lycans – that's werewolf lineage to you and me; both sides of the family. Occasionally one went lone wolf lobo and either came to a bad end or –

"Became Scourge of Carpathia, bestriding countries like a Colossus et cetera?"

"Yes, or that. Anyway, one night after his usual chest-beating at a local village testing some new cure – the common cold, the clap, whatever – grandson Drac is swanning through the Carpathian forest when another werewolf, either out of laziness or general stupidity tried to turn him into a midnight snack without realising it was committing the lycanthropic version of cannibalism – or at least a serious breach of lupine social etiquette."

"I thought werewolves could tell each other, like vampires and demons and orcs and trolls – "

"Yes, yes, no need to give me a rundown of every olfactorily enhanced sentient species in the multiverse. That's true, but wolf-on-wolf kills aren't that uncommon, just like vamps will dust one another for the same reason and why a Mafia don is never at greater risk from his rival capos as is he is from his own lieutenants – if you want to become leader of the pack, king of the hill, et cetera. But, being a sorcerer with stout stick, our boy managed to kill it and staggered towards home – which really was his castle, where some newly risen vamp lurches out from the local churchyard and also thinks, oh, easy midnight snack – it was damn close to a theme for the evening. He dusts it with his stick as it kills him."

"And he was Turned?"

"If you mean vamped, yes. Forget 'Turned' – oh gothic romance has so much to answer for, not the least of which is third-rate bodice-rippers penned by over-wrought adolescent fat girls. Anyway, fast-forward five centuries of unending undead misery and His Royal Highness was ripe for the con. Bram Stoker gave him a shoulder to cry on, there, there and promised to restore his family's reputation before doing a total hatchet job with 'Dracula' the novel."

"How much of a hatchet job?" pressed 'Guy', his tone unable to disguise his transparent intent to go and reread the thing in one go about two minutes after concluding this conversation.

"A veritable Texas Chainsaw Massacre," claimed 'Chignon', clearly still more amused at his scepticism than offended. "Most of the novel Stoker made up wholesale as he went along, but if you want a few specific highlights…let's see…Okay, Van Helsing – not some epic Mystical Lone Ranger, just – at that time - the latest in a string of foaming-mouthed nut-jobs determined to kill the unkillable 'Count' – Stoker twisted the knife further by downgrading him from a Prince to a second-rate aristocrat. Think, Daniel Holtz versus Angelus –"

"Who – never mind; later. Carry on." Guy urged.

'Chignon's' smirk widened, "Smart boy. I admit, Hugh Jackman was delicious – in anything, that boy would be delicious, let's be honest – but the real Van Helsing had a face like a warthog's ass and a personality to match; apparently the reason he survived so many supernatural encounters was that he didn't do personal hygiene, ever – try and stab him, shoot him, poison him, claw him, whatever – and it took ten minutes to reach skin through the layers of grime. Nothing with sanity was going to put its mouth near enough to sink its fangs into that walking bio-hazard. In short, poor old Dracula was well and truly screwed with his pants on – and so it remains, basically. Dracula's never seen so much as one red cent of any royalties, and now he has all sorts of sorcerers, tourists and vampire-groupies or vampire-hunters barging into his Carpathian castle as-they-so-please and hounding the life – or unlife – out of him."

"He really is unkillable?" 'Guy's' tone finally showed he was having the sense to listen to what 'Chignon', aka The Voice of Experience In This Nut House, was telling him.

Harmony focussed her attention on 'Chignon' – an unkillable vampire – now that was a story worth hearing.

"Apparently so. According to what I read in the archives, he'd already spent five hundred years trying to commit suicide by the time Stoker got his greedy hooks into him. Mainly because he is the only vampire in the world, bar none, who can actually become a wolf, and a bat, and who can hypnotise people, and who can re-corporealise himself after being dusted…Which is the problem really."

'Chignon' moved aside as someone else came to the copier machine and 'Guy' moved with her, absently forgetting his copies as he was caught up in the story. "I thought you stake a vampire in the heart, it goes 'poof' pile of dust?"

"It does, ergo the verb, 'to dust a vampire…' or 'the Slayer dusted the vampire'…or modern vampires at any rate. When The First tried to wipe out the Slayer it went Old School to a prehistoric form of vampire, the Turok-Han, which laughed in the face of Mr Pointy and can only be killed by being decapitated or immolated. Thing is, Dracula tried them all on himself – stake, decapitate, dismember, dissipate, immolate, wood-chipperate. Every time and everything he tried, or anyone else tried, his body just turns to this sort of damp mist that re-solidifies, even when he tries not to. Lots of immortality seekers – like the unlamented Matthias Pavayne, for instance – looked into Dracula's case to see if they could duplicate it, but no go."

"Too complicated?" suggested Guy.

"Too dangerous. That's the thing with real life – no writer of fiction would try to get away with stuff so far fetched. I mean: one random night a half-baked, half-lycan, glorified-alchemist-claimed-scientist stroke third-rate-sorcerer who'd been self-dosing with his own home brewed 'medical' potions for who knows how many years happens to coincidentally get mauled to the point of death by a werewolf and a vampire in the space of the same hour? It was one of those freakish once in a millennium confluence of circumstances. No way to replicate all those variables exactly. And when you're a power-obsessed psychopath like Pavayne you want the playing field tilted as unevenly – in your favour – as you can get it."