Chapter Twenty-Nine

Her hand went from resting on her thigh to gripping his arm, a thrill running through her at the touch of his lips on hers. An instant of her mind comparing this to Fake Angel's kiss—god, how had she even thought they could compare?—and she was lost. His hands on her waist and at the nape of her neck, pulling her close, safe, wanted. Her other hand found the side of his face, the bristly ends of the hair by his ears tickling against her fingers.

They shouldn't be doing this. They so shouldn't be doing this and, dammit. He'd started it so she was going to have to be the responsible one who—

They parted just long enough for her to shift positions and slide her hand to the back of his head, then met again, his lips a little warmer than before with the heat they'd stolen from hers.

—The responsible one who ended this—because, and it had taken a little bit but her brain was finally caught up with her hormones, they were still in his office and anyone could walk in.

Buffy pulled back just far enough to meet his eyes. Without really noticing, she'd moved and was sitting sideways on his lap. Comfy, but just a liiittle compromising.

"Okay," she said, a little breathless. "So, a week before the hormones won out. Good new record for us to beat."

Angel made a soft noise, a strange expression crossing his face before his gaze shuttered. If she hadn't been sitting on him and wondering what he was thinking, she probably would've missed it altogether. Buffy nudged the hand still holding her waist and slipped from his lap, amused by the way his fingers trailed through her hair before his hand dropped, empty.

"Angel? Still with me here?"

"Yeah," he murmured. Then, "Huh?" as he blinked and refocused on her. "Oh, right. Hormones. Bad." He shifted, looking uncomfortable. With a bit of a laugh, she reached out and straightened his lapels.

"Very concise."

-8-

"I believe I've located it!"

Buffy looked up from her box of take out noodles and across the penthouse to the open elevator and Wesley. There was a massive tome in his hands, papers sticking out from between its pages that looked covered in writing. Maybe translations, or something. One of them distinctly looked like it might be a map of California.

"Angel's in the shower," she said. "Take a seat, Wes."

He did, and started to lay out the papers. Buffy leaned over to look at them. The book wasn't in anything that even resembled English, but a lot of Wesley's notes were. Or at least they were partially in English. That was something.

"So? Where're we going?" she asked, looking at the map upside-down. Wesley had scrawled something across a portion of it and marked up a large area around... "...Sunnydale. Of course. Except Sunnydale doesn't exist anymore."

"Well, no. I am aware, but I suspect that won't make very much difference to the location of the amulet," Wesley said.

"Except maybe have left it destroyed," Buffy said.

Wesley shook his head and pulled one of the papers to the top of the pile. Pointing at a part of the page as though she could actually read whatever dead language it was in order to check his work, he said, "You see? I believe the amulet—well, the pair of them, actually—to be virtually indestructible."

"You don't think something that took out a Hellmouth could destroy a so-called indestructible amulet?" Buffy asked.

"I'll concede your point, of course, Buffy, but I believe that since the destruction of the Hellmouth was done from the inside of it... It was, wasn't it?"

Buffy nodded.

"Then, despite Sunnydale and its surrounding area having been completely wiped from the map, I believe if we can locate the point where the amulet was left, it should still be retrievable."

"That's good to hear. Where was it left?" Angel asked. Buffy looked over, her eyebrow quirked at bit at his standing there in just a pair of sweatpants. Oh, boy. Apparently not noticing her looking at him, or, well, more likely just not caring, Angel continued rubbing a towel over his head to dry his hair.

"That's where it all becomes vague," Wesley admitted, glancing between them. "There's a network of caves in Sunnydale, or at least there was, somewhere around here..." he pulled out a different map. This one showed the terrain of the city in more detail.

"Sort of near the university, yeah," Buffy said. The men looked at her. "There was one way back when we were fighting Adam that was connected in with the military base. All that's gone, though. It was eaten by the magics that made the crater."

"It's my belief that part of the cave network may still be there," Wesley said. "Protected, in a sense. The charts of the caverns that I was able to locate simply... stop. Very abruptly. It seems, at first, as though the speleologists who were charting the area simply reached the end of the caves." Here he pulled another chart out and laid it across the table, tracing a dark line with his finger.

"However, I was able to locate a chart in Wolfram and Hart's records that was made by a demon, rather than human, spelunker. You see how he has replaced this line with a symbol instead?"

She leaned closer, looking back and forth between the two charts. The human-made one was neat, with typed up labels and simple symbols to denote hills and squishy sections. The demon-made one was a lot messier, but also a lot more detailed. Even the entrance to the military base appeared to be on it, which was interesting since she'd been pretty sure no one had really known about the Initiative—and if this demon had, why hadn't he warned some of the others so that fewer got caught by the military?

"So what does the dashed-squiggly line mean?" Buffy asked, trying to find it somewhere else on the chart.

"Well, that's just it. I haven't any idea, because the symbol isn't in the map's legend."

"How're we supposed to find an entrance to a collapsed cave system, Wesley?" Angel asked.

Buffy, however, leaned back over the map. Something had begun niggling in the back of her mind when Wesley had expressed his confusion, and she had almost, almost figured out what it might be.

"Okay. Tell me if I'm getting this wrong, but... When Will brought my amulet back, and she was talking about it with Giles. They mentioned that it... That everything that was written about it was weird. Like it had just appeared out of nowhere and no one had actually ever written it even though the sources and whatever were thousands of years old and in a bunch of dead languages."

She met Wesley's rapt attention; then looked over at Angel's calculating look. "Could that have something to do with this?" she asked.

"Yes. Yes, of course!" Wesley said. "I would need to do a carbon analysis to be sure, but I suspect for this it doesn't matter. The line, this dashed squiggle, was quite possibly not placed here by the original author of the map at all." Frantically piling his papers together with the cavern map on top, Wesley nodded to himself. "I'll run this to the lab and have—"

"They can do an analysis there and get the results back to you," Angel said. Buffy frowned at the expression that had spread across Wesley's face when he cut himself off. Angel looked sad again, too. A bit more of the mysterious tragedy that seemed to surround Illyria? Or something else? "The sun's just started to set, so Buffy and I should get going. You can call me when you get the results, if we're not back by then."

"Yes... yes, I think that would be best," Wesley said, collecting himself. Buffy's gaze flicked over to Angel.

"Still doesn't tell us how we're supposed to find a cave entrance in a couple hundred miles of crater," Buffy said.

"That won't be the difficult part," Wesley said. "I could probably produce a coordinate for you, but unless I'm very much mistaken, the Kostheshr Hekmon—" Wesley nodded to the amulet around Buffy's neck "—should lead you where you need to go."

For some reason, Buffy felt like that weirdly paralleled her Angel-rescue mission. Maybe it was just that the amulets seemed to be a set, and that the rings most definitely had been. And maybe now she was looking for connections where there really weren't any.

Then again, this all clearly had something to do with the Powers because the amulets were from the Powers themselves, and rescuing Angel had been her working for the Powers. So then, was all of this related? Was she here now, going on a quest with Angel, because the Powers had dumped her here to make her go on a quest with Angel?

That didn't explain why she couldn't remember so many of the things that had happened to her, but it might just answer the question of why she'd been sent here. And that was a start. It was about time.

"Yeah, okay," Buffy said. "I can buy that."

-8-

"I still don't think you coming along is the greatest idea," Buffy said. She'd been standing in the motor pool, looking at Angel's large collection of evil but definitely very, very shiny and expensive cars, for at least half an hour. Waiting for him. What he'd been doing she had absolutely no idea, but he'd gone from being all gung-ho about getting out of L.A. and making the drive to the-place-that-was-once-Sunnydale to guy-that-was-dragging-his-heels, and it was tying her up.

"You agreed," Angel pointed out, opening the passenger door of one of the cars for her. He waited until she'd rolled her eyes and climbed in, then closed the door and walked around the car to drop the weapons in the trunk, before hopping into the driver's side.

"Yeah, I agreed," Buffy said, albeit grudgingly. That had been before the little make out session in his office. But kissing didn't have to have changed anything, right? "I just think I could do this more easily. I mean, we have to go crawling through caves, and in case you haven't noticed, I'm a lot more compact than you are."

Angel snorted. "I doubt that's going to be a problem." He turned on the car with a bit of a glance over his shoulder.

"Well I'm not standing around waiting while you hack at narrow passageways to make them wide enough for you."

"I'm not changing my mind," he said. "And besides, you have to get to Sunnydale somehow." She frowned at him when he reached into the backseat and knocked a bunched up blanket out of the way.

"Ouch! What're you—Hey, let go!" Came a shout in a rough accent as Spike's blonde head came up, dragged by Angel's hand fisted in the collar of his coat.

"You're not coming, Spike!"

Spike shook off Angel's hand.

"Already in the car, aren't I? And hey, I won't have any troubles going cave-crawling." Spike straightened his coat as he spoke and then settled into the backseat.

Angel glared at Buffy, like it was her fault Spike had stowed away. She ignored him. Was it her fault? Maybe. But a third person coming along with them on this jaunt—especially Spike—meant they were just going to have to focus on their objective, and she didn't need to worry about whether or not that kiss had meant anything to Angel. Or figure out what it had meant to her.

It was just a kiss, right?

"If you're coming, he might as well, too," Buffy said. Angel muttered something noncommittal, put the car into the drive and pulled out of the motor pool.

"How did you even know which car we were going to take?" he growled after a moment.

"You're not as hard to figure out as you think you are, mate." Then, "Look, there's even benefit to it for you! This way, the wolfie girlfriend can be absolutely sure you're not on a date with your ex!"

Buffy turned to look at Spike fast enough that she was pretty sure she would've given herself whiplash if she didn't have superpowers. Her eyes were wide. Angel had a girlfriend? Angel?

Okay, maybe she shouldn't have been so shocked. Angel was attract— fine, gorgeous. And a whole bunch of other things she wasn't going to start listing in her head right now. But, a girlfriend? An actual girl that he was seeing? Why hadn't she been told about this before now? More importantly, why had he kissed her if he was seeing someone else?

"She has a name, Spike," Angel said.

"What is her name?" Buffy asked, in a weird tone she didn't recognise and she hadn't meant to let slip through.

"Nina," Angel said. "Her name's Nina."

"Okay, and how long have you been dating?"

They stopped at a red light and Angel turned to look at her. "Third degree, huh?" He sounded amused, but there was a wary look in his eye. Good. He deserved to be wary.

"I've been in L.A. for almost a week. How have you not mentioned her to me by now? How have I not met her by now? I'm staying in your condo!"

"Half the time," Angel pointed out. "She knows about you."

"Well, I'd hope so," Buffy said, shaking her head. Pausing a moment to let this all sink in, Buffy adopted a more playful tone. "So, what's she like?"

"Small, blonde and supernatural," Spike offered.

Plastic creaked as Angel's grip turned white-knuckled on the steering wheel.

"What flavour?" Buffy asked. She didn't know if Spike's comment was supposed to upset her or piss her off, but she was determined—absolutely determined—to let it do neither. Sure, she still had feelings for Angel. And yeah, those feelings had been all shaken up the day before. But since she knew that he still had feelings for her too, that was okay. Angel moving on was good. Better than good.

"Werewolf," Angel said.

"Do I get to meet her?"

Angel glanced over at her again. "I'm not really sure that's a good idea."

"I solemnly swear not to beat her up in an alley." She thought about that for a moment. "Or, well, anywhere, but especially not in an alley."

"He started it," Angel said. It sounded like an automatic response.

"Uh huh. Guilty conscience," she said, remembering the day he and Riley had shown up, beat up, at her dorm room door. "So? Do I get to meet Nina?" Buffy asked again.

As though he could see Spike in it, Angel glared at the rear view mirror.