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AN: Prepare for the big finale; this chapter's a bit of a filler, but I have big plans for the next one, for reasons you'll see at the end...

The Sister in the Door

"Drusilla?" Angela repeated, looking uncertainly at Booth, clearly surprised at the addition of a new name in the current situation. "Have you... mentioned her?"

"I haven't," Booth said, looking grimly around at his team. "She was Angelus's greatest triumph when he was active, serving as both his greatest victim and his greatest creation."

"He... sired her?" Hodgins asked, clearly trying to establish if he was using the right term for a situation that he couldn't have imagined existed only a few days ago.

"After a long period of torment," Booth said, nodding briefly to confirm Hodgins' use of the right term, pausing for a moment to come to a decision before he continued; if Drusilla was back, his friends deserved to know everything. "She first drew Angelus's attention because she could see the future-"

"She could see the future?" Bones repeated, the initial automatic scepticism of that concept being quickly replaced with curiosity; clearly, her current encounters with the supernatural had left her more open to the possibility of those kind of powers existing than she had before.

"It was mainly just vague ideas at first- dreams about mining accidents before they happened, things like that-, but at the time that was enough to leave her convinced that she had been cursed by the Devil," Booth explained; even if recent events had helped him draw a line between what he had done and what Angelus had done, it still wasn't easy to remember these experiences. "Angelus drove her even further over the edge by posing as a priest and taking her confessions, encouraging her to accept the 'evil' within her during their conversations and killing her family and possible fiancé based on what she told him; she didn't know that it was her 'priest' doing it, of course, but that's still going to be a lot to deal with."

"Oh God..." Cam said, shaking her head in weak denial at the story she was hearing, her horror at the explanation she was hearing clear on her face.

"When she fled to a nunnery," Booth continued solemnly- he'd started this explanation, and so he was going to finish it, no matter how difficult it was to actually share a detailed example of the kind of monster he'd been back in the day-, "Angelus followed her, and, on the day he took her vows, he slaughtered most of the nuns and then had sex with Darla right in front of Drusilla before turning her; her resulting insanity would serve as a permanent monument to Angelus's skill at destroying a person, while her visions would also be useful even if they'd be... a bit hard to interpret at times."

"The fact that she's nuts makes it hard to know when she's just whacko and when she's saying something relevant, huh?" Hodgins asked, the smile on his face so weak that anybody would have known that he didn't mean it.

"It's pretty much the same as most contemporary ideas about visions of the future; sometimes context is more important than anything, particularly if you don't know what she's talking about in the first place," Booth confirmed. "Sometimes what she's saying only makes sense when some parts of it have already happened, and the fact that she's mad makes it more difficult to be sure what she's referring to anyway, but that just makes her more dangerous as an opponent; very hard to predict what she's going to do in a situation, if nothing else."

"So... does the fact that it's her help you work out what happened here?" Cam asked, looking uncertainly at him. "I mean, if she's... Angelus's 'greatest achievement' like you said she was, I can see how it makes sense that he'd bring her in to help him on something like this- you're the guy he hates the most, Dru's probably a hard topic for you, that kind of thing-, but that doesn't explain how she got into the flat given the invitation rule..."

"She had some degree of minor hypnosis, but even the basic stuff she could do would be enough in a situation like this; all she'd have to do is make eye contact and get someone to let her in- given that I invited them to remain here until this is sorted out they could be argued to have 'squatter's rights'-, and it's pretty straightforward from there," Booth said, shaking his head grimly as he studied the bodies around him before his gaze settled on Will's corpse. "As for Hastings... she could probably stage a break-out earlier in the day and keep him under wraps until she brought him here; it's not like there aren't a few places in the area where she could have kept him, after all..."

"OK, so we know who we're dealing with and who she's after; the only question now is what she'll do once she gets there," Angela said, looking over at Booth with a slight hesitation in her manner that helped him deduce what she was about to ask him before she even said. "That... hypnosis stuff of hers... could she use it to-?"

"Make Zach try and kill us?" Booth finished for her, shaking his head firmly. "Not only is her control not that great, but Zach couldn't kill anyone if his life depended on it-"

It was only after Booth said those words that he realised that he meant them.

He might have thought about the sheer implausibility of the idea of Zach committing murder, but it was only when he was reacting automatically that he admitted the truth to himself; even before that dream he'd had after his tumour was removed, he'd never entirely accepted the idea that Zach was capable of killing someone...

"What do you mean, Zach couldn't kill anyone?" Bones asked, looking at him with sudden scepticism. "He confessed-"

"I don't care what he said, Bones; I've known hundreds of killers in my time- from both sides of the law, to boot; I've worked with some of them and killed most of the others-, and Zach doesn't fit any kind of profile that would have allowed him to kill someone in the manner that he allegedly killed that lobbyist," Booth said, looking firmly at his partner; he might be extremely uncomfortable talking about this kind of thing with her on behalf of someone who wasn't here to make his own contribution to the conversation, but knowing how stubborn Bones could be, she wouldn't just let this matter drop now that he'd brought it up, and he was fairly sure that they still had some time to get to the asylum to rescue Zach (Angelus wouldn't have given Dru that kind of 'assignment' unless he was sure she knew what to do, and she was far too unstable to get someone out of a place like that without help).

The cold stare on Bones's face in response to that statement was all he needed to confirm that she and the rest of the team were reacting to that news in the worst possible way; why, if he'd had reason to believe that Zach hadn't killed anyone, had he not said anything?

"Look, what do you want me to have done, huh?" he said, looking in frustration back at the anthropologist and her team, unsurprised to see the same critical glares on their faces. "All I had to go on was a hunch based on intuition acquired from a time of my life that doesn't officially exist; after Zach confessed, there wasn't really much that I could do to get him out-"

"You could have said something-!" Hodgins began, staring indignantly at Booth.

"If Zach wanted to say things that would get him sent to the asylum, that's his decision; do you want to force him to get over things or something?" Booth asked, glaring over at Hodgins. "Hell, back when I was Angel, I once tried to help a girl who tried to kill me, and she decided that the best way to get past what she'd done would be to spend time in prison for a murder charge when at least one case amounted to manslaughter; sometimes, even if we don't agree with what they're doing, we have to let people choose their paths to redemption-"

"He's been sentenced to a nuthouse-!" Hodgins protested.

"Because he told the investigators responsible for questioning him the story that got him sentenced there; since Zach clearly wants to be there- he's socially inept, but he's not stupid enough to have done something like that by accident-, I figured that it was better to leave it alone so that he could recover from what he'd done the way he wanted!" Booth countered, walking over to glare at the entomologist. "You think I didn't think about trying to protest? You think I wanted to see that overly-detailed goof get locked away for probably the rest of his life because of some charismatic man-eater? Look, Hodgins, if there was anything I could have done to get Zach out and help him cope with what he'd done, I would've, but I couldn't; after what he'd done, the guy needs to be in a position to forgive himself before he'll accept forgiveness or absolution from others, and getting locked up is the only way he's going to get something like that-"

"OK, as... bizarrely uplifting as it is to know that the member of our group with the most experience with killers doesn't think Zach's one, can we just... focus on rescuing him right now?" Angela asked, looking between Booth and Hodgins with an awkwardness that made it clear she wanted to pursue this discussion later even if Angelus's potentially imminent attack had to take priority.

"Right," Booth said, walking over to his closet, his mind fixed on some of the contents he'd kept there in the event of a vampire incursion to Washington; even if Angelus was expecting him to use these things, he wasn't going into a situation where Zach was at stake and Drusilla was involved without taking every possible precaution. "If we're doing this, you guys are going to need a bit more firepower than those tasers..."

As she walked through the halls of the hospital where her Daddy had told her to go, Drusilla tried to restrain the urge to skip through the halls; it was such a good time to be herself that she wished she could share that joy with the future meal accompanying her and Daddy towards what they thought would be her new room.

As comfortable as it looked like this place would be, she had to be obedient if things were going to work out; Daddy had promised her that she could have a new brother if she did what he told her to do, and she was going to ensure that Daddy had no reason to go back on his promise.

She had been so excited when Daddy had visited her after so long missing from her dreams, and to learn that the naughty soul had been taken from Daddy and left in its own new body made things even more exciting; the chance to punish the soul for taking Daddy away without having to risk losing Daddy was the most exciting news Dru had received since the news that she would be a Mummy to her Grandmummy...

She might still miss her white knight, but with Daddy back in her life, and her new brother soon to become part of her family, she would have a means to fill the void soon enough; the family she'd been searching for ever since Spike ran off to be with the bad Slayer would be hers once again...

"Hold on a minute," Daddy said, halting the doctors as he looked thoughtfully up another corridor; the clothing he wore seemed strange, although he had explained that he had to dress like the soul to get here (She was mainly looking forward to stripping it off him once the soul had moved on to its punishment for good; Daddy wanted to kill the soul himself, but she would settle for stripping away the last remnants of his presence on her Daddy's body if that was all that she was allowed to do). "Isn't this where you keep Doctor Addy?"

"Uh... yes, Agent Booth," the doctor said, looking awkwardly at Daddy as they addressed him by the soul's new name- it was like even he 'knew' that Daddy and the soul weren't the same person-, "but visiting hours are over; you can't-"

"I'm not asking you to open the door and let me in; I just... well, if I'm in the area, I wanted to see that he's doing OK," Daddy said, looking surprisingly awkward as he addressed the doctor. "You know, take a look through the window, that kind of thing..."

"Well... I suppose that wouldn't do any harm..." the foolish mock-healer said, looking uncertainly at her for a moment before turning around to walk down another corridor, leaving her to walk after him with her arms trapped in front of her and Daddy alongside her. As they stopped in front of a door, Drusilla looked through the small window in it and smiled at the sight of her shaggy-haired brother-to-be on the other side; his hands were as damaged as her mind, but she was sure that they could find replacements for those when he had been through the change.

"Well, there he is," the human-repairman said, turning back to look at Daddy, only for Daddy to assume his real face and bite into him, feeding off his blood until the man was beyond any help that he could have given himself.

"Glad that's over with," he said, wiping his mouth before he proceeded to kick the door open as Drusilla snapped the bonds holding her hands together, leaving them both smiling casually as the former bone-doctor on the other side as he looked at them in confusion.

"Hey there, Zach," Daddy said, in a casual manner that he only used when he was about to kill the victims he'd spent a very long time with (That was the only nice thing the soul had ever done, in Drusilla's opinion; he'd done all the work establishing the foundations of relationships with so many people that Daddy could kill, allowing Daddy the maximum amount of enjoyment with relatively minimal effort). "How's things?"

"Agent Booth?" the shaggy boy said, looking at Daddy in surprise, clearly so certain that he was the soul that all other alternatives weren't worth thinking about. "Why did you break down my door... and who is this?"

"Hello, dearie," Drusilla said, smiling at the shaggy-haired boy who would be her brother looking at them in confusion. "I'm your sister in insanity, and we're here to make you my brother in blood."

The thought of what they were about to do made it all the sweeter; she hadn't had the time to really savour her dear knight's blood when she'd turned him, and Grandmummy having been a vampire before had affected her taste, but she was desperate to know if future family blood tasted sweeter when you knew what it was about to become...

As he drove frantically towards the asylum, Booth wondered if the fact that he'd been planning to cut ties from the squints after this mess was over made it easier or harder to have Bones glaring at him like that; if she was angry at him for lying by omission about Zach, it would make it easier for her to accept his departure, but he hated the fact that they were going to end their long partnership on such a low note...

Still, in the end, it wasn't like he had a choice. Bones's whole life was based around knowing how things worked; asking her to accept vampires, demons, souls and magic into her world-view on a regular basis was asking far too much of her.

Add in the fact that they'd probably need a new psychiatrist- he had a feeling Sweets would not be interested in regularly working with a guy who looked exactly like the person who'd taken his leg, even if he accepted that Angelus and Booth weren't the same person-, and it looked increasingly like Angelus was going to break the team apart even if they won...

Still, if that was what it took to keep Bones and the squints out there doing what they did best, that was what he'd have to do; right now, the undiscovered victims needed the Jeffersonian staff's skill-set more than they needed what he could contribute to this mess...

Thoughts of the future were cut off as they drew up in front of the asylum, his eyes immediately falling on the shocking familiar sight of the car that Angelus had been driving when he'd gone after the Grants.

"He's here?" Angela said, looking at Booth in shock.

"He must have met up with Dru on the way in and decided to head straight for the asylum; he knows we're on to him!" Booth clarified, practically throwing the door aside as he ran for the asylum, the others close behind him as he all-but-tore through the door just as alarms began to blare from inside the building.

Shit, Booth thought as he hurried towards the reception desk; if that sound didn't mean that Angelus had reached Zach's cell, he'd dip his hand into a pool of acid (In the past he would have used holy water, but that wasn't exactly an effective analogy these days).

"Agent Booth?" the receptionist sitting behind the desk said, looking at him in surprise that made what had happened here obvious; she'd already seen 'him' come in and was confused about why she hadn't seen him go out. "Didn't you just-?"

"Long story that this isn't the time for; just call the security teams and put them on high alert, you've got a couple of serial killers in the building and they're going after Doctor Addy," Booth said, flashing his ID- he'd worry about how Angelus had made it in without that earlier; since forgery wasn't a skill he'd picked up before now, and he doubted it was something Angelus would have bothered to learn, he'd probably just stolen an ID badge from an agent and figured that it would pass casual inspection if he covered the face- as he indicated the squints. "We're going after them; tell all the staff to converge on the wing where you're keeping Doctor Addy, but don't let anyone in, and if I come out of there with anything less than four people, ensure that I have a damn good explanation before you let me go anywhere."

Even as he led his team on what may be their last desperate race against time towards the wing where Zach was probably destined to spend the rest of his life- regardless of how the next few minutes played out-, Booth wished that he could do more for everyone in this building than pray for their chances; he was about to face Angelus in close quarters, with Drusilla reunited with her 'daddy', when Angelus had a hostage that they'd all prefer remain alive, and his only back-up was a bunch of scientists carrying weapons that most of them didn't really know how to use properly against a foe that they'd yet to really face in action...

He'd done everything he could to prepare the squints for what they were about to face, but nothing could really prepare you for the challenge of fighting a vampire until you were actually there; all he could do now was hope that they were all going to get out of this alive...

Then he practically crashed through the last door between them and their destination to find Angelus and Drusilla standing in front of them, Angelus's hands around Zach's neck in a manner that would make it all too easy for him to snap it, and fears and doubts were pushed aside as he drew his gun and aimed it at his demonic alter-ego.

Right now, all that mattered was confidence; this situation would end with one of them dead no matter what happened, but it was not going to be Booth if he could help it.

AN 2: Well, there you have it; coming up next, the final battle as Booth/Angel and Angelus clash for the last time...