Wesley listened so intently that he looked like a hunter tracking his prey. He didn't ask many questions, but Steven found himself telling him everything that had happened since he'd forced the sluks to show him the cracks in his world and followed them through to the other side. His father sending him to Angelus. Angelus's betrayal -- the devil will show you bright things, many colors, Father had told him, and it was the fairground they'd lured Steven to, to distract him while the demon ripped Father's throat out.
He had another glass of the whiskey: it tasted warm. Wesley drank two. The story continued: his father's friend Justine at their rooms, too late as well. The funeral pyre. And then, his revenge. Steven was quite pleased with his revenge.
"You're quite certain the box can hold him?" Wesley asked.
He nodded. "Justine is certain. She said not even a minnow could get through."
"And you trust her, do you?"
"Father did."
"Are you so certain of that?"
Steven wrinkled his forehead. "What do you mean? He left her in charge of his warriors when we went to Quor-toth."
"Did he? Or did he just not expect ever to return here?"
"He always wanted to return." Steven was surprised at how emphatic his voice sounded, and how distorted. He took another sip. "He always spoke of it. Where we would have lived. Where he was from. How beautiful it was."
"Really? And where was he from?"
"He lived in Yorkshire."
"Yorkshire?" Wesley looked surprised. "He didn't sound like a Yorkshireman." He pushed on the arm of the couch for support as he got to his feet. "Although if he didn't grow up there... and certainly accents shift over the centuries... educated men even then sounded very different." As he spoke, he was walking towards the bookcase, reaching down to one of the lowest shelves. He pulled out a large book with a picture of a gray stone fortress on the cover. "It would have been interesting to talk to him, if he weren't a -- under different circumstances."
"He was a great man."
"Mmmm." Wesley came back around to the front of the couch and stopped short in front Steven, looking down very seriously at him. "Steven. Know this. I got this scar because I trusted Justine. I don't want you to make the same mistake." He pointed to the long red and ragged scar across the entire right half of his neck. It was surrounded by dark blue bruises, and it looked painful.
"She did that?"
"Yes, she did. Because I let her get close enough." Wesley held the book up in front of himself so Steven could see the title. Rural England in Pictures. "Now, much more importantly: Yorkshire."
Wesley flipped through the pages until he found what he was looking for. He turned the book around, and placed it on Steven's lap. The book was open to a picture that covered two pages. It showed an old gray-brown stone building, a large and long one, which was missing its roof. Behind it, hills stretched out into the distance. Everything around it was green. The ground, the hills, the sprawling trees: Steven didn't think he'd ever seen so many different types of green all in one place together. The caption on the picture said "Chapter Six: Yorkshire, Moors and Dales."
"There are more pictures on the pages after that one," Wesley said quietly. "Is it what you thought it would be?"
"No," Steven said. "It's so... There's nothing like this here." He thought of the green place where they'd burned Father's body. "I wish there were."
Wesley smiled a little at that. "Yorkshire isn't all greenery. There are the moors, which are far bleaker. And the cities, of course. They're much larger now than they would have been in Holtz's time. But the Abbey there is much the same."
He tried to imagine his father there, eating lunch on a blanket on the long green lawn. His first children were there too, playing among the low-hanging branches of the trees, and his wife Caroline sat with him on the gentle slope of the grass. She was preparing plates for the children, and the two of them were talking. Steven thought that he looked happy. He stared longer at the picture, his head heavy, until he could almost hear the birds singing from the treetops.
He awoke with a start. The room was dark, and he was lying on the couch. A soft pillow had been placed under his head, and a thin white blanket was draped over his body. The picture book rested on the coffee table, within arm's reach, and his shoes were lined up beneath it on the floor. He propped himself up on his elbows and cocked his head. From around the corner, he heard Wesley's breath whistling softly as he slept. Steven listened to the sound for a moment, then lay back down and pulled the blanket up over his shoulders.
******
It was quite odd to walk into Wolfram & Hart's downtown office building through the front door rather than break in through the cellars, to be given a small Arbithian charm that said "Visitor" by a bored security guard. Wesley stuck it in his shirt pocket and took the elevator up to Special Projects.
"I'm here on business."
"Business?" Lilah asked. "What kind of business?"
"You had people watching Daniel Holtz when he returned from Quor-toth. Don't try to deny it; I know how you work."
"Do you ever." She looked up at him, appraising and enticing at once.
"Maybe," he said, doing his best to ignore her, "they even had cameras."
"Maybe they did."
"I want to see the recordings for the last day of his life. I want to know exactly what happened when."
"Ignorance really isn't bliss after all, is it?" She smiled at him for a moment, and then her face went blank. "Sorry. Can't help you."
He stepped towards her, coming behind the long polished wood desk. "Yes, you can. And you will."
"Why would I do that?"
"I'm willing to make a trade."
She leaned back in her leather chair. "Go on. I'm listening."
"You give me copies of all the reports and the video footage from that stakeout. And I'll translate one of those scrolls you were on about for you." He kept his voice casual. She looked skeptical and intrigued.
"Really?"
"I think you'll find that my Ga-shundi is excellent."
"Oh, I already know that I like your Ga-shundi, Wes. But why would I trust you to translate the scroll correctly? I mean, last time I checked, Wolfram & Hart was still evil."
"Why would I trust you not to doctor the reports on Holtz?"
Their eyes met for a moment. "What's this all about, Wes?"
He'd rehearsed his answer. "I need to know. Word on the street is that Angel killed him. If he did, well, I'll be next when Angel returns to LA. It's the sort of thing a man likes to plan for."
"What's wrong with just taking the underworld's word for it?"
"It doesn't fit. Angel's supposed to have bit him. But he doesn't fight with his teeth."
"He bit me."
"What?" Wesley was shocked, and suddenly possessive.
"Last fall. I came to the hotel to talk business, and the next thing I know, he's getting up close and personal with me on his desk. Then he bit me, so I kneed him in the groin and got the hell out of there."
He couldn't help smiling. "So you're the skanky brunette."
"What?"
"That wasn't Angel, Lilah. That was an old man named Marcus Roscoe. Standard body-switch spell, Algurian conjuring orb, very grade-C magic."
Lilah didn't even try to hide her consternation. "God*damn*it! You would think that for all the money we pay them, we could get some decent aura-reading systems off our psychics."
"You would think, yes. So do we have a deal?"
"Not so fast. So if you don't think that Angel had Holtz as the blue-plate special, who do you think killed him?"
"I have my suspicions," Wesley said slowly. "But I want proof."
Lilah stared at him long and hard, as though she were trying to look past his features and into the intentions behind them. Then something in her expression shifted again, and she reached for the phone and dialed a number without breaking eye contact. "Wilma? Would you have Investigations send up all the reports and recordings they have on Daniel Holtz, date-stamp May 20th? That's H-o-l-t-z. Right, the vengeance-crazed vampire killer. Yes, I thought he was memorable too. Uh-huh. Yes, right away. And could you get a mobile-worker station set up in Translations for me? Really? Great. Make sure the Balear Scroll gets sent down to there immediately as well, OK? And you can escort Mr. Wyndam-Pryce over when it's ready. Thanks." She hung up the phone and turned away. "Wilma will walk you over to our Translations office. There are dictionaries and glossaries and all those other things you'll want over there." Her hand rolled on her wrist in a dismissive gesture.
"I'm sure I'll be delighted," he said dryly.
"I hope so. Firm policy: no outgoing calls and no leaving the building till you're done with the translation. You're working for Wolfram & Hart now: we don't want you so much as breathing on anyone else before we know everything about what's in that scroll ourselves."
"Don't worry. I packed a lunch."
"I'll be down to check on your progress later."
"I'm sure you will." Their eyes met again at that, and she smirked.
Wilma was an unbearably young woman with long pink fingernails. She took him back on the elevator to the thirteenth floor, where there were rows of beige carpeted cubicles with workspaces and bookshelves. Almost all of them were occupied, almost all by humans. Wilma checked a computer terminal and then walked him to a cubicle on the north side of the floor, where a prophecy scroll on a protective stand, three plastic-wrapped notepads, and a jar of freshly-sharpened pencils were waiting for him. "The books you'll want are all in the library, at the corner. They're finding you the dictionaries you'll need right now."
"Thank you," he said automatically, and sat down. The yellowed scroll seemed to stare at him from its carefully padded resting place. There was a weight like hot lead at the bottom of his stomach, and a tightness in his throat. He thought for a frantic second of fleeing, of grabbing the scroll and getting the hell out. But then he thought of Connor as he had been -- not very long ago at all in human time -- still a small squirming bundle in his arms, and of the young man in his flat the night before, drunkenly mourning the sadist who'd raised him in darkness. It's all right, it's your Uncle Wes, he loves you bunches. He's just... English. He squared his shoulders and hoped that the Balear Scroll wasn't about another goddamned apocalypse.
******