Chronicles of Charles Gunn

(Prologue)

The darkness fell, expeditiously and over everything, from the evil that permeated through Los Angeles. It was an unusually warm night, a violent night, the kind of night where anybody with a modicum of sense stayed home, or better yet, left town completely. Screams and growling emanated from some of the darkest crevices in Los Angeles, and the able-bodied people swarmed the streets, in cars, on motorbikes, or on foot, and tried to leave town; they took what they could, the necessities like food and water-and weapons to fight the demonic creatures that rose up from the depths of hell-or Los Angeles was hell. It was impossible to tell.

The streets bled red.

A dragon flew over Wolfram & Hart, unleashing a stream of fire from its roaring mouth, and then scorching the night sky. Its breath swept over the immediate area and sent the swarm of Los Angeles residents fleeing for the ocean, but thousands of them perished from the large, mythical creature. A throng of black locusts flew into the city and blackened the night sky, and as they flew above Wolfram & Hart, the dragon scooped large quantities of them up in its mouth. In that instance, several military jets rocketed across the troposphere into the black locusts, and it blinded them-giving the dragon the upper hand. The beast swatted the first jet to the ground, crashing it, and the pilot ejecting before the plane exploded in the badlands.

Wesley, dead. Angel, missing. Spike barely hanging on to life with a wooden stake protruding from his chest, an inch below his heart. But as he stood in the middle of the street, he could see Charles Gunn-a fellow warrior-in agony and barely holding on to life. A hissing sound—a scream of suffering—emanated from a doorway of Wolfram And Hart. The crimson blood raced down the walls, pasted the floor, and ran down the stairway. The sounds of breathing echoed pain and of a man in the throes of death, and no matter how hard the dying man tried, he kept losing consciousness. The moon turned cherry red, signifying all the blood spilled in the melee between good and evil, and from the amount of carnage, evil was winning. The tenebrous body of the twitching man lay dying on the floor, and blood spewed from his mouth. It flowed out of him like a broken pipe, and the cries of the demons were the last sounds he heard before he fell unconscious. Blood dribbled out his mouth, down his ebony cheeks, and onto the cold, unforgiving concrete. He labored every breath, and his stomach fell and rose quickly as if he were on his final leg of life.

In the distance, a blond-haired man dressed in all black darted toward Charles as he lay on the ground clinging on to the last morsel of his wretched life. It was Spike, a blond-haired vampire who worked with Gunn to help fight against Wolfram & Hart. He was wounded, but not nearly as bad as Gunn, but had severe wounds nonetheless.

"Gunn," Spike—the wounded blond-haired vampire—screamed, and struggled to stay upright because of his chest wound. The stake protruded out of his chest, and death stood over his head ready to send him to the underworld, but he wasn't ready to go. "Wesley's dead. I'm not sure where Angel and Illyria are!" He grabbed his dying friend by the collar and took him out of the building.

"Where's Lorne?" Charles muttered.

"Dead!" Spike screamed. "And we are too if we don't get out of here."

Spike ran with Charles for as long as he could, and then when he came to some moist earth, rich in nutrients and minerals, he sat his barely alive friend on the cool ground. He didn't know what to do at that point because he wasn't ready to lose his friend, but he knew his death was near.

In the distance, dragons and demons hovered over the city of sin, and the sound of death reverberated throughout the land. It was so much chaos happening that it made Spike nervous, and when he looked down at Charles, he knew he wouldn't last long. He recognized when a man was dying. "All fuck! Gunn! Wake up, man," he said with tears running down his face. He looked at the burning of Los Angeles and the entire area around the demonic city was ablaze. He could hear the cries of the damned lurking his way, and he had to do something. "They're gone. They're all gone, man." He looked down at the stake sticking out of his chest and didn't realize how close it was to his fragile heart. When he touched it, pain rushed through his body, and he screamed, "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!"

He pulled the wooden stake out of his own chest and screamed. "Holy fucking Christ, man! That hurt." He then held the wooden stick over Gunn's heart because he wanted to end his friend's suffering. Gunn had told him on a previous occasion not to allow him to become a creature of the night. And if he didn't ash him, he'd return stronger and more dangerous than any vampire he met in years. He struggled. When he realized he couldn't stake his friend, he quickly dug a three feet hole in the soft soil with his hands. The black mud covered every inch of his body as he raced to remove the rich earth before the damned arrived. He buried his comrade in arms. He threw the dirt over his long body, and then he saw the beasts coming his way. It sounded like the cries of a thousand tortured souls as the crowd of demonic forces raced toward his position. He didn't know if they were coming for him or making an attempt to escape the carnage in Los Angeles. He could smell the death in the air, and if he didn't abscond quickly, it would be too late because the thousands of ungodly beings would smash him into the ground. The hellish scourge crept through the immediate area, and he raced back to Sunnydale in the hopes the diabolical forces wouldn't follow him there.

Months passed…

The putrid smell of death permeated throughout the area, and it was like rotten eggs permeating through the air. Bodies peppered the hills where people tried to escape the carnage months earlier, and at the end of the day, nearly one million people perished in the melee between good and evil. The fringes of the city looked like armies of demons trampled it, and they ripped all the grass off with their powerful hooves. It was nothing but mud for acres with bodies scattered throughout the entire area and homes demolished. It took nearly four months to clean up all the death and destruction around Los Angeles, and during the cleanup, ordinary people didn't quite understand what happened.

Everything appeared normal in the inner city area: cars moved back and forth, kids played in the streets, and planes flew above the city. The wind caught the sound of family squabbles, and then somebody fired a gun. All of the sounds were ordinary sounds. It was business as usual in Los Angeles, but the city hadn't forgotten the lives lost during the carnage earlier in the year. There were flyers and missing person pamphlets constantly circulating around the city with the names of the missing, but they were all assumed dead.

The full moon illuminated the area enough to make out faces, and in the distance, a bald-headed black man stood watching over the sinful city of Los Angeles. His tattered clothing hung off his body like a bum and his shoes were dirty and soggy. He appeared to just surface from his eternal slumber. His eyes dull and without life. His teeth were pointy like nails. Suddenly, he screamed for his god, but his god didn't listen. "I stayed buried for four months!" He screamed at the sky. "When will this nightmare end?"

Whatever goodness he once commanded had bolted from his soulless body when his vampire bites turned him into a creature of the night. The urge to feed beat out every positive thought in his head, and he craved blood, human blood-fresh and thick. He wanted to feed so badly that it drove him mad. He lumbered down the street, hugging the dark sides of town. His legs felt heavy because of the lack of nutritious blood and his refusal to take a human life since he clawed his way out of the rich, Los Angeles' soil. When he heavy-footed past a group of grown men, drunk and inconsiderate, and they scoffed at his tattered clothing, he tried to keep walking but they blocked his narrow path. He could hear the blood squeezing through their semi-clogged arteries, and he desired it like a child's desire to open presents under the Christmas tree.

"It's bums like this that bring down the whole area," One of the men said as he pushed Gunn into the side of the building. They were next to a cafe that served pancakes and waffles any time of the day. It had just opened its doors, but not many people frequented the joint because it wasn't an active area since the demonic war. "Every time we kill one of you bums, another one takes his place." The men laughed insidiously, and it struck a nerve with Gunn.

He pushed his shoulders back against the wall, and then thumped him on his bald head. It took a minute for the rage to grow inside of him, but it was slowly brewing inside of him nonetheless. It felt like heat against his cold skin. All Charles wanted to do was hold on to a modicum of his humanity, and if the man calmed down, he would have gone about his things. The man stood in front of him with a baseball cap that read, "God is good." Gunn looked down at the hat for a moment and remembered his life as a human, but the rage inside of him replaced the emptiness in his soul. The bullies were shorter than Gunn, but not by much. The burly man pushing him against the wall had furrowed his left eyebrow, struck Gunn in the mid-section several times, and screamed, "How do you like that, boy?"

Charles grabbed the man's hat from his head, looked at it for a moment, and began laughing from the gut. It was a deep, bellicose laugh, a strong and intimidating laugh that made the man look at Charles with a befuddled look on his face. "If your god is so good, then why didn't he save me from this?" Suddenly, Charles' face turned ugly with deep ridges on his forehead. His eyes were yellow and glowing and his teeth were sharp like razors. The men cringed.

He smacked his right hand on his chest and tears raced down his face. "Why didn't God save me from me?"

"I'm a good Christian man, and I've fought your kind in the Catacombs in France. Don't disrespect my God for he is a merciful God, demon, who has filled me with righteous justice," he said. He pushed Charles back into the building and his hands began to glow red, and then punched Charles in the stomach several more times. The man with the glowing hands wasn't an ordinary man, but a man with some kind of superpowers because the blows felt like demonic blows. When he gave Charles a right hook to the face, it knocked him halfway down the alleyway.

A moment of madness overwhelmed Gunn, and the hate in his heart gave him warm, unruly joy, and it became palpable. He charged the man who had the glowing hands, struck him with a knife-hand, and it tore a gaping hole in his neck. He listened to the Christian bully gurgle on his own blood, and he craved it. The way it poured down his body looked like a water fountain of chocolate red goo. He continued to rip off the man's head, and the blood spewed out in a gusher-like fashion, and Charles consumed it voraciously. It tasted like life, and when he clamped onto the headless neck with his incisors, his friends screamed and tried to run. Quickly, he took them out and fed on them all while they screamed in agony.

Once he finished with his meal, he staked all the bodies, and threw them into a pile of pallets, and then burned them. He ran down the alleyway, broke into an apartment, but nobody was home. Quickly, he took a warm shower to remove all the crud off his body. When he stood in front of the bathroom mirror, he didn't have one scratch. But even after he had a fresh shower, something in his life didn't feel right.

He commandeered some suitable clothing from the bathroom closet. He donned a black fedora, black boots, and a long black shirt. He took the bus back to the Hyperion Hotel, and when he arrived, it was burned on the inside. Everything smelled like ash. He picked up a burnt leather coat, and it was Angel's, but he couldn't sense Angel in the building at all. Everything he cared about in his human life was gone, and when it came to hoping, he didn't have any left. But what he didn't understand was he carried feelings for the loss of his friends.

He thought back for a moment, back when he had so much love for Winifred, a member of Angel Investigations. The picture of Fred sat on the counter with singe marks on it. He picked it for a second and smiled. When he looked into her hazel eyes in the photograph, all he saw was her innocents, and she gave it all to him. He crossed his arms over his chest, and for a moment, he could actually smell her sweet scent. It was like her aroma overpowered the smoldering furniture and burnt walls. But then reality struck him at his core, and his heart sank into his chest because he remembered his selfishness helped cause her demise. Even though they had broken apart, he still felt the pain of her death. And what he didn't understand was why such a soulless creature of the night felt so much unbridle compassion for what he lost.

"It's all gone!" He lamented as he stood looking at the smoldering furniture. The aroma of Winifred's scent somehow bounced off the walls, and when he looked up the winding stairs of the burnt structure, she stood at the top in her ambiance. For a brief moment, he closed his eyes, and then when he reopened them, she remained at the top of the structure. She wore her beige shirt, with some khaki pants, and her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. He smiled up at her for a moment and remembered back when they dreamed of marriage, and then he quickly snapped out of his delusion. "I've gone mad," he said as he turned away from her image.

"You're not mad, Gunn," she said from atop the stairway. "I survived. Angel didn't make it, and Spike fled. It looks like you didn't make it either."

"I was turned," he said with a grimace. He turned away from her so she couldn't see his face. "I'm what I never wanted to be." He looked up at the girl he once loved, and he saw all her innocents in front of him. "I hate the fact that I'm everything I hate, but I feel. It's hard for me to look at you in that form, and not think of Winifred."

"So, you didn't lose your soul?" She asked. "If that's the case, then I won't kill you." She ascended down the stairs, turned into Illyria, and embraced him. Her eyes turned into a deep sapphire, and a portion of her skin turned a spotted navy blue. She smelled fresh in spite of all the horror that surrounded them.

"Maybe someday I'll need you to kill me, Illyria," he said.

"Maybe someday I will kill you, Gunn," she stated. "But that day isn't today."

Chapter 1

September 28, 2022: Seventeen Years Later…

Grabbing a stack of mail off the front porch, he looked over at Illyria, and said, "Her name is Karen Buttercup." He looked up into the blue sky and felt the sun was brighter than usual. Karen lived in a nice, little house at the end of a cul de sac and had a white fence that surrounded it. When Gunn saw the house, he said to Illyria, "How quaint?" He looked back at her with a devilish grin on his face.

"Fred would love this," she said in a monotone voice. "It's her dream to live in a house like this."

When Charles and Illyria walked into the small abode, it had the obligatory welcome mat directly in front of the door. On the wall, the victim had several photos of her family, including pictures of her two cats. On the far right, she had a photo of her father, then her mother, then her two brothers, and then the cats. He grabbed a stack of bills off the nightstand near the couch, and then looked them over one by one.

He set the stack of bills on the table next to the entryway to the dining room, walked over to the dead body, and knelt by the deceased woman, a young woman no more than twenty-two years old, and he suspected the killer was a Nephilim, a demonic entity that moved about humankind unnoticed.

The deceased body was on its side while on the hardwood floor of the dining room. Illyria sat at the table next to a bag of Fritos and had the woman's laptop computer directly in front of her. On the far side of the room, the lady had a small bookshelf with several books about angels on it.

He played with the magical ring on his right ring finger that gave him the ability to walk in the daylight; it was a gift from Willow's Coven after he took out a Sage demon in two thousand and eight that killed two of the Coven's members. They blessed him with the ability to become a daywalker.

"This looks like some kind of ritualistic killing by a Nephilim," he said to Illyria as she started munching loudly on some corn chips that she found on the dining room table.

"That's what I was thinking," she said as she stuck her hand in the bag to get some more corn chips, but to Gunn, the sound the bag emitted was louder than usual. It was like his vampire hearing was heightened more than usual.

Her eyes, heart, and pancreas were missing, and from what he could tell, she suffered a great deal of pain during her murder. Charles looked over at the far corner of the room and saw a small white camera on the wall. Every time he moved, a red light appeared on the camera.

"Nephilim never engaged in such barbaric acts without being infected by a leech demon," Gunn said as he took some pictures of the body. "If we can get into her camera footage, we might be able to see what happened."

"In the ancient times, infected Nephilim caused plenty of drama," she said, "The Leech Class demon called Lariacticus allowed the Leech Queen access to human food sources. When an infected Nephilim passed the infection to a human, then the Leech worker bees would kill the human and take the eyes, heart, and pancreas."

"Then the Nephilim might have only infected the woman, but he didn't actually do the killing?" He asked.

"Correct," she said with a serious visage. "Nephilims are pretty much docile even with the infection, but the Leech demons can seek out the infected and kill them."

Gently, he turned the woman's head to the right and checked the lacerations on her fragile neck. Off in the distance, Illyria sat with her legs up on the table, reading a newspaper, and waiting for Charles to finish investigating the body. She continued smacking on the corn chips, a greasy cheeseburger and drank a diet soda pop. He could hear her loud crunching from the other side of the room, and on one hand, it drove him mad, but on the other hand, he loved her company. He just didn't tell her how much he enjoyed her around him.

When she crinkled up the bag, it made so much noise that it broke his concentration for a moment. He looked over at her, and she was still chewing while balling up the noisy sack, and then he shook his head in disbelief. She looked over at him for a moment and swallowed her food in one huge gulp. "What?" She asked.

"Damn, Illyria," he said with a grimace on his face. "You're making it difficult for me to think over here." There was an exaggerated inflection in his voice at the end of that sentence.

"What?" She asked with wide eyes. "I'm fueling up. A girl needs her energy, you know?"

He walked over to the other side of the room, pulled out his cell phone, and took a picture of a cigarette butt. It didn't have any lipstick on it, and from what he already knew about the crime scene, he believed it to be the killer's cigarette. He began to take photos of every item in the house and had a computer program that would help him reconstruct the crime scene.

When Gunn walked over to Illyria, she asked, "Do you want me to check her computer?"

"Yeah," he said with a grimace. He reached into his right pocket on his pants, pulled out a small vial, and then asked, "How much spiritual cleanser do we have left?"

"About half a cup," she said. "It might be enough to cure him before he infects another woman, but I don't know."

"Do you think Fred can make some more of the potion tomorrow?" He asked. "We have to find the infected Nephilim, and cure him before he exposes another woman to his disease."

Illyria smirked. "She's still upset," she said, "She feels slighted by you, but she can make you some more spiritual cleanser. Fred is telling me this, so don't think I can speak for her."

"I know. I know, but she also knows it was just an accident," he said with a calm look on his face. "We've been in a good fight for damn near fifteen years." He paused for a moment. "You know what? It wasn't an accident. I made love with you, Illyria, and I enjoyed it."

"You love me?" She asked with a sheepish grin on her face.

"How would I live without you?" He asked. "You're the only rock in my life, and I'm sorry that Wolfram & Hart punished you for what I did. I might have beat them in a demon court of law, but they punished me by hurting you."

"As you said, Charles, we fought the good fight, but we didn't anticipate Wolfram & Hart would force me to turn into Fred a few hours every night."

"What did you find on the computer?" Charles asked.

"It's a Leech Demon," she said, "But it only has four days of footage."

"No video of the Nephilim?" He asked.

"None!" She said, "But I downloaded all the data onto my thumb drive."

"I'm calling Detective Blake, so he can document the body," he said.

Later in the evening.

When the duo walked out of the structure, he looked across the way, and down the street at a convenience store. It was not dark outside but close to dark, and the night crowd was alive and well and roaming the city streets. The trash tumbled down the road because of the teens who loitered around the store throughout the night, but it had cameras galore watching over the property due to all the crime in the area. Vampires lurked around the neighborhood nibbling on welcoming, human necks, but there weren't too many notable vampire attacks in the vicinity. Most of the demonic entities throughout the city wanted to live in peace with humans.

"The store might have an image of the Nephilim that infected her," Charles said, "They keep footage much longer than four days."

Charles looked at the Hop-N-Go store, and it had a camera on the outside of it. The entire area was rundown in the most unfashionable way. It was crazy because two blocks down the road nice houses existed, but the neighborhood directly in front of the store looked like a war zone. Clutter raced down the street at the slightest breeze. Several of the trees were removed because of a rare disease, but some of the residents placed saplings in their yards. He didn't know exactly how much of the area the cameras covered, but it was a chance it caught something-maybe everything.

It was approximately eight in the evening, and as he looked down the street at the Hop-N-Go store, Illyria asked, "What?" Her eyes had a sapphire tint to them, as well as the top portion of her head.

"The camera," he said. He pointed over to the structure on the corner as people stood outside smoking electronic cigarettes. The top part of the building was green, with a big yellowish sign, and a kid hopping in the air. It was in a poor area of town-rundown. The streets looked like landmines exploded in them. When they walked inside of the place, he immediately realized it was a cult of vampire lovers who wanted to engage in wild, wet, and lusty sex. He hadn't been in one of the clandestine facilities in years due to the fact he had his bloodlust under control and Illyria often looked at him with judgemental eyes.

At one point, in the first year of his vampirism, Illyria suggested he visit a liberal, vampire foodbank where the exchange of blood for sex happened often and was normal practice. He favored the blood dispensary called Little Duolingo located in downtown Boyle Heights. When he first walked into the facility, he had Illyria with him, a kind of wingman-or in her case, a wing-woman. It was new. The rules were simple: no killing, maiming or injuring a walking blood bank, and after feeding, some kind of payment was due, and that usually had to do with some kind of sexual fetish. The first time he fed on a young woman-no more than nineteen-whose blood invigorated him, and turned him into some kind of super vampire, he didn't know what he was doing. He almost took too much of her blood. She sat in front of him in a wooden chair and wore a nice, pink dress that stopped right above her knees. He didn't know how to go about making the first move, so he tried to suckle from her right wrist, but she rejected that maneuver. Slowly, she spread her legs, pulled back her skirt, and circled the spot on her left, inner thigh where she wanted him to feed. He tenderly clamped his mouth around the exact area, punctured her, and fed voraciously. It excited him uncontrollably. He hadn't ever felt as much passion in his entire life as he did when he suckled that young woman. Illyria stood in the back of the room, legs crossed, and didn't seem to pay attention to him at all when he quenched his thirst on that young girl.

"You're taking too much," she said as she pushed him away from the feeding spot. It was hard for a moment to stop, but he immediately pulled back when Illyria spoke.

"Charles, stop!" She exclaimed.

When he finished feeding on the woman, she sat him down in the wooden chair, pulled out his manly business, and she performed fellatio until he climaxed. She collected his seedless semen in a small vial, and then she smiled. "Thank you."

With his super-sensitive hearing, he could hear the orgy of sex happening underneath the facility, underneath the Hop-N-Go, and to be honest, he craved it. It had been years since he engaged in blood for sex, but it was appealing to him. Vampires fed on willing humans who had hidden fetishes for them, and in return, they supplied them with an overabundance of wild sex, or whatever the walking blood dispensary wanted. The exchange facilitated a peaceful community where vampires and humans could live in harmony.

When he approached the cashier, she was a woman in her early forties, long brown hair with gray hairs peppered in it. She had squiggly lines around her eyes that looked like smoker's eyes. Her worn face had more than a few years on it, and she looked like she had a rough life, a life full of booze, drugs, and wild, vampire sex. He stood across from her on the counter, and she said, "You have the thirst, don't you?" Looking him up and down, she then said, "I can tell you have the thirst. You're trying to pig-blood your way through life, but that's not how a vampire of your caliber should live." She grinned. "Why do that when you can have a little of me?" When he backed away from the counter, she looked down at his crotch, and then licked her lips.

"I'm not here for that," he said with a grimace.

She smirked and then rolled back her right shirt sleeve. Her arm had a series of bite marks all the way up it. It was obvious she fed them on a regular basis. He looked at her thick veins protruding through her pale skin, and he craved them. "I give you a little now, and you give me what I want later."

"What do you want?" He asked with a scowl on his brown face.

"Unencumbered, raw hard sex," she said. "Any way you want to give it to me." She grinned, "Pull my hair, spank my ass, and pinch my nipples. I want all that."

"I just need access to your video footage," he said. "I'm investigating a crime that occurred down the street."

"Are you a cop?" She asked in a terse manner. Her entire demeanor changed. "I don't want any problems."

"No. Private investigator," he said. He dropped one hundred dollars on the dirty counter when he noticed the newspaper on the counter about a missing girl named Tina Shallow.

The cashier grabbed the money with her bony right hand and she stuffed it down her shirt, and in her bra. He threw another few dollars on the counter, grabbed the newspaper, and then handed it to Illyria.

"Who's that?" She asked as she pointed to Illyria.

"My partner," he said.

They walked into a small room in the back of the store, and it smelled of musty sex. He could tell it was used for a feeding area because of the speckles of dried blood on the floor. Nobody cleaned the place thoroughly, and it had evidence of sexual activity all over it. The middle-aged woman showed him how to work the video recorder. When he played it back, the cashier asked, "You sure you don't want a taste?"

"He said no," Illyria said in a strong, authoritative voice. "Now, leave us."

"Oh. When he said partner, he meant lover," the woman stated. Illyria growled.

The woman backed out of the room, and then Illyria knelt down beside Gunn and looked at the video. He was in a chair, and the computer monitor was right below face level. She placed her hand on his left knee as she watched. "Nephilim from what I remember were approximately six-foot-seven on average."

When a tall man appeared on the camera with the deceased woman, he tried to get a look at his face. It was approximately six days prior to her death that she appeared on camera with the Nephilim. They walked directly in front of the store, and then when they moved past the facility, he looked back at the camera or in its general direction. "What do you think?"

"It's definitely a Nephilim," she said, "Look at his gait. No human takes pride in their walk like that." He was tall, dark, and upright, and walked with his chest out, shoulders back, and with dignity.

Gunn laughed. "That's true." He turned off the video and downloaded it onto Illyria's thumb drive. "Haven't we seen him in the hotel bar?"

"Show it again," She said, "Are you thinking that's Michael Reed?"

"Yeah," he said as he turned on the video. "But you know the Nephilim are strong as hell?" He looked at the video for a moment, and Michael Reed was of Indian descent from the country of India, but he was born in Los Angeles. He had talked to him a lot in the lounge at the hotel, and he didn't have an accent at all. He was adopted as a baby by a white couple and attended some of the finer schools in Los Angeles.

"They're the children of gods," she said with a smirk. "Well, that's the legend."

"What do you think? Are they God's children?" He asked as she continued to kneel.

"I doubt that," she said, "But at the same time, I bet the Leech Demon lives in the general area too."

Hotel…

In two thousand and nine, Illyria and Gunn traveled to Tibet, to an old, dilapidated temple dedicated to her, and retrieved a treasure trove of gold and priceless jewels. It only took a few gold coins to fix the hotel, and bring it up to code, and then after that, they opened it for business. It was widely known for catering to demons, and the bar area was open to the demonic public and others for a safe haven against violence. Gunn's Private Eye business was situated in the rear of the hotel, an attachment that he built on to the building. He gave Debra Eagle Foot, a black, twenty-year-old woman, the job of running it. Illyria, Fred, and he raised her since she was eight-years-old, and they trained her to be a fighter. Gunn treated her like his daughter. A young woman named Veronica Patel worked the front desk and she was from India.

When they arrived at the office, Debra slept on a cot in the back of his office. It was approximately five in the morning, and Illyria turned into Fred in front of his eyes. Running over to the refrigerator, she grabbed out a baggy of blood and handed it to Charles. He began to drink it slowly, and then she sat in the chair directly in front of his desk and placed her right leg over the arm of the chair.

"So, what's this you and Illyria having sex?" She asked bitterly. "I say let's talk about rekindling our relationship, and you say our time has passed."

"You aren't Illyria, Fred," he said. "I'm sorry you feel a certain way about what happened between Illyria and me, but I have strong feelings for her."

"So you don't have feelings for me?" She asked with an inquisitive look.

"You know I do," he said, "But not like that."

Debra walked into the office in her silk, pink pajamas, and waved. "Hey, y'all." She plopped on the couch, grabbed her book reader, and began to read. It was a ritual she did daily. "I guess I missed Illyria."

"She'll be back later on in the day," Fred said with a grimace. "Why do I feel unappreciated around here?"

Debra smirked. "You know I'm just messin' with you, Mom," she said, "I'm actually happy to see you."

"If you weren't here, Fred, I wouldn't want to be here," he said, "I enjoy our confabs."

She stood to her feet, wiped her hands on her clothes, and then said, "I'm going to take a shower, and then relieve Veronica at the desk."

"Okay," he said, "I'm going to rest as soon as I'm finished here." He sat back in his chair for a moment, and as Fred walked towards the door, he said, "Wake me up at six o'clock in the evening. I'd like to spend some time with you."

She looked back at him and smiled. "Okay."