Body

24

Angel was back in the Magick Shoppe. For some reason it had an orange glow inside. "Um, hello?" There was no one in sight, the shop was expanded and who knew what was around the corner. He remembered fighting Spike with Buffy in the shop, throwing holy water at him.

"Oh, hi, you-you must be Angel."

He turned around, surprised by a somewhat tall, strangely triangular woman. "And you are..."

"Tara." She stuck out her hand for him to shake. It was surprisingly coarse. "I-I work at the shop sometimes for Willow. You know, to cover for her and Oz. We met at their wedding, but it was a long time ago..." she trailed off. Her shoulders were slightly hunched and she kept her head down.

Angel took in her posture and gave her a look from the corner of his eye. "Do I..., do I frighten you?"

They were talking at the same time. Angel trying to reassure her that he was perfectly harmless and Tara trying to explain that she wasn't at all scared at him.

"Then why do you stand like that," he squinted at her, trying to find a reason in her posture, the surrounding orange glow.

"Oh, um, I don't, you know, really know." She seemed to retreat further into herself.

Angel tried another track. "So what's with the glow, or is it just me?"

Tara seemed to perk, "Oh, that." She waved her hand and muttered a few words under her breath. Suddenly the air cleared.

"You're a witch."

She nodded.

"A strong one. Maybe you can help me."

Christina Prime looked up from her blood. "Who's that?" she asked without much fire. She didn't have much will since Angel had forced the bespelled silver/iron cuffs. Nor could she go very far locked away in a cage used hold the occasional werewolf visitor.

"You don't need to know that." To Tara he said, "She may look like my wife but she's not, in any way. You can call her Prime, that's how I've started thinking of her," he said brusquely. She nodded. "So, do you think you understand?"

They were moving away from Prime, "About the dreams and all the other stuff? I...I think so." Tara sat in the seat Angel offered, "You want me to help you identify what body the Master is going to steal, right?"

Angel nodded.

"And then we'll find your wife."

"Exactly." On edge, Angel stood, pacing around the table. His pacing was making Tara nervous. "Would you like something to drink," he asked as much to calm her as to give him something to do. Tara nodded. "Great we have water--"

"Water's good." She unscrewed the cap of the cold bottle and took a sip. "Thanks. So how am I supposed to help you? Do you know what you're looking for?"

Angel ran a hand through his hair. I need a cut, he thought absentmindedly. "It will mean being in close contact with Prime," he saw her jerk back. "I know how hard that might be, but she's harmless now. She can't do anything with those bands on her wrists and she can't take them off. But unless you know where Willow is you're the only person I trust to help me do this."

"There isn't anyone else."

Immediately Angel's mind went back to the afternoon Wesley had died. Angel couldn't save him from natural death. The only way he could think of would have been to turn him into a vampire. Instead he watched his friend of the last four decades die, at least peacefully, in his sleep in the middle of the afternoon. Throughout the day as people came and went Christi had been with him, and later that night while he grieved, silently. That night The Powers That Be granted him his humanity. It was an ill received gift.

"No," Angel shook his head, "there's no one else."

Tara brushed a hair out of her face and nodded. "Okay. Um, I guess I should talk to Prime now. You know, so I can figure out what's going on and everything, and what to do before this all goes mars."

He gave her a strange look but took her to see the vampire. "Do you need me to stay with you?"

"No, I think I can handle this. But you'll be around right?"

Angel nodded, "Just gonna to get something to eat then I'll be right back."

The vampiress was staring out the window. Angel was staring at her. This was one of the hardest things he'd ever had to do in his life. Angel wanted his wife. He wanted to wrap his arms around her, bury his face in her hair and make sure she was safe. And there she was, sitting chained and cuffed in a chair. He had to fight himself to keep from kneeling at her feet and releasing her. It was harder as she did nothing, just sitting there with her face in profile. There were no long delicate fangs snarling at him, no feral eyes gleaming with too wide pupils, and no claw like nails reaching for his throat. It was all too easy to forget who she was and believe she was who Angel wanted to be. He wasn't even sure if she was safe.

Angel jumped startled.

"I-I'm sorry." Tara was standing behind him, a book resting heavily in her arms.

"No, I'm all right." Angel pushed himself off the door frame. "What've you got?"

They sat at the small kitchen table, littered with papers, old books, tabstics and plaslets -- thin recyclable sheets of plastic filled with magnetic fibers that created shapes when a special magnet was passed over it. Angel cleared a space on the table for his coffee. It had grown lukewarm, but he drank it down anyhow. He stood up and poured another cup. "Want some?"

Tara made a face. "No, thanks. I don't drink coffee all that much --"

"Oh."

"-- but yours is terrible. Anyhow," she didn't notice Angel make an I-figured-as-much face, "I think I've gotten it all down. Prime said that her Angel," she blushed a little, "is waiting for her signal before he comes over, to, to complete their plan. That means we have a little time.

"What we have to do is figure out who's body Angel and the Master plan to use to bring him here. Prime said they hadn't figured that part out before she was sent over."

Angel stopped her, "You said we have a little time?"
Tara nodded. "Well, not all that much. Prime gave me the impression that her mission wasn't supposed to take all that much time. Anyhow, we only need two days at the most."

"Two days?"

"Uh-huh. One day to get prepared and another to rest up. Actually," Tara looked down at her chrono, "it's not too late. I could probably get everything from the shop today but I really need to rest before I do this spell."

She'd managed to lose Angel. "What spell?"

"Huh?" Tara had been muttering to herself. Working, out loud, the small details. "Oh, um, the one that will open a door between this reality and the one Prime's from. So you can get Christina of course."

"Why can't you do it after you get the ingredients."

"Because she needs all her strength if she's gonna open that door and keep it open," Prime yelled from her seat. Angel and Tara had forgotten she was there, but with her preternatural hearing she had been following their conversation. She wasn't happy to betray her lover, but what choice did she have.

Tara looked back at Angel and asked, "Are you taking her back with you?" He nodded. She made a note on a tabstic with a stencil.

"Why would it have taken two days?"

"Well," she brushed a lock of hair behind her ear, "I wanted to wait for Willow. She could help me, you know? I-I mean I know you're anxious to get you're wife back, so you probably don't wanna wait."

"No, if you think you need Willow then we'll wait."

"You shouldn't wait," Prime called from her seat again. "If you want her still sane that is," she laughed. It was high and slightly crazed.

Angel looked at Tara, "We'll wait."

25

He looks so pale lying there. Angel wonders how long he can keep watching his eyelids flutter, checking his chest for movement. Wesley has been one of his best friends for decades. Now age was catching up with him, the way it never would, never had, for Angel.

He was such a pompous jerk when they first met. An uptight English Watcher, sent to replace Giles when he saved Buffy from an initiation ritual gone horribly wrong. But the Wesley lying before Angel is much changed. He'd officially given up his Watcher status soon after the initial Faith debacle. She had been his charge and when she turned on them all he felt personally responsible. Instead he became a rogue demon hunter, at least in his own mind. Working for Angel had slowly changed him, made him into the person he'd thought himself to be. "Not that he's any less a geek," Cordelia had once commented.

Now he is dying.

Angel holds his hand, his faint pulse registering under the vampire's hand clearly. None of the doctors are able to help him. They can't figure out how he has managed to stay alive so long. "All we can do now is keep him comfortable," one said to Christina. Angel was too busy studying the face of his friend, lost in his own thoughts, to notice much of the goings on in the room. Already Buffy and her teenage son had come for a visit. Riley visited later with their daughter. Willow and Oz had been there early that morning, just before Angel made it up. Willow tried some spells on him to no avail. Anya was in Paris at some semi-centurial vengeance demon's convention. Xander brought her well wishes as well as his wife's.

And Christi. She is curled up in one of the hospital chairs dozing. It has been a long day speaking to various members of both Angel's and Wesley's past. A few Watchers have come and gone. Christi has greeted them all. Occasionally she gets a cup of coffee from the vending machine. A nurse or two greet her on her way back. They all know her well.

The coffee in her hand is mostly gone. She was sipping it, watching her husband of a year deep in his own thoughts. Sometimes she wishes to be privy to them, to know what goes on in a vampire's mind, but she knows he is as oblivious to her as he is to the rest of the world. She wonders if Angel would even notice if she gathers her things and goes home to sleep in their bed instead of a semi-soft, semi-comfortable hospital chair. She falls asleep to that thought.

Angel's thoughts, at the moment, were on Cordelia. They'd had a falling out some time ago. No one had expected it to last this long; it was going on two years. Yet, she had been the first one to see Wesley. She had been the one to find him collapsed in his house, an apparent stroke. By the time Angel was notified she was gone. He had taken up the vigil since then.

A disturbance outside the hospital room, loud enough to be heard with door closed, awakens Christi. Putting down the coffee cup she looks up at her husband. He doesn't seem to being seeing anything, not even Wesley. She yawns wearily. Christi hasn't had a good night's sleep in over a week. Another commotion outside turns her head away from Wes' prone body. Turning back, she feels as if she has been caught in a piece of time induced amber. Everything is unreal as Christina slowly uncurls herself from the chair, getting up slowly and making her way to Angel's side.

It lasts until she touches his shoulder. "He's dead," Angel says, aware of his wife for the first time in days. Doctors and nurses rush in a moment later, alerted to Wesley's death at the nurses station.

Doctors crowd around the bed, Angel stands up and back to give them room. Machines were wheeled in by nurses. Christi gently tugged her husband back and away. "We're in the way here, they'll save Wesley." She wasn't sure if he heard her or not.

"No," Angel said softly, surprising her, "they can't save him." He followed Christina's lead as she grabbed her bag and took one last look at Wes' body. Outside she hailed a cab, giving the bot directions to their home.

During the ride Angel stares out the window, idly watching the city pass by. Christi doesn't even bother trying to start a conversation with her husband. She's ever seen him this way, so withdrawn from the world. None of the hospital visitors seemed to know what to do either. Maybe I should call Cordelia, Christi thinks turning on the lights in their loft apartment. But she is grasping at straws and knows it. Her husband is grieving not sick.

She knows grief. It was the death of her childhood friend Rachel by a vampire that was the turning point in her life. But what is grief to a vampire? She doesn't know how to help a man that cannot cry. All these thoughts flit through her head as she wonders around the house picking up stray things she has left in the house while rushing in and out between the hospital and classes. Their bed is untouched. Neither has slept in it for over a week.

A noise behind her, Angel, standing in the the doorway behind her. "Are you all right," she asks, turning around. It's an inane question and she regrets it leaving her mouth. "I'm sorry," she says, shaking her head at her own insensitivity.

"No, it's all right.

"He died before it happened," he says after a little bit. Christi is tempted to ask what it is, but she knows. Wesley'd believed he would live to see Angel's humanity returned to him. Now he never will. "He shouldn't have died," Angel goes on, "not with the technology today."

"He was too old for the transform, and you know it. A lot of today's medicine is based on it. She goes to him, "There was nothing they could do."

Angel envelopes her in a crushing hug. "Honey, I may be the Slayer, but I can't breath." For the first time since Wesley's hospitalization Angel laughs. He loosens his grip on his wife. Christi leads him to the bed. She gently pushes him down on the bed, "Sit down. No, lay down. I know you don't need to sleep, but everyone needs rest," she runs her hands over his face, through his hair. "Just relax for a little while, okay?" She scarcely notices Angel rubbing her arms, her sides and her back.

"I'll lie down if you lie down with me," he says in a low voice. "Your just as tired," he says, laying kisses on her stomach, "you need your rest, too." Angel pulls her down onto his lap, kissing her with a hunger she finds a little frightening.

They are usually more reserved, knowing the consequences of too much ardor, but something about Wesley's death has snapped Angel's restraints.

Christi pushes her husband away. "Angel," she says, breathing hard, "we have to stop." He looks up at her. Gently touching his face she says, "I know it hurts, but this isn't the way. It will only be worse. I don't want to lose you. I don't want to die," she adds, smiling facetiously, trying to make a joke out of it.

Angel hugs her tight. "I know," he says, burying his face in her neck. "Sometimes I wish I could just cry for him."

"You cry," Christi whispers, "even if there are no tears."

She strokes his hair as Angel's body shook with dry sobs. They sit on the edge of the bed, rocking each other into solace for an hour. Sniffling, Angel looks up to her and smiles. "Thank you," he says, eyes glistening.

Christi stares at him, eyes wide in shock. "What's wrong," Angel asks.

"You're crying," she exclaims in a whisper. "I mean your tearing." His left eye overflows and Christina catches the tear with a fingertip. She tastes it with her tongue. "It's salty, no blood. Angel I think you're alive."

He'd watched in stunned silence as she lapped his tear. "How do we prove it?"

Christina half turns and reaches back for a small ornamental obsidian dagger over the night stand. Before Angel can react she takes it and slashes the inside of her palm with the blade. Bright red blood begins oozing out of the gash, puddling in her hand.

"What are you doing?!" Angel nearly dumps her onto the floor in his haste to get something to stop the bleeding. He takes her palm in his hand and begins doctoring it. "What do you think you were doing," he asks, truly worried.

"Angel," his wife places her other hand over his busy one, "look at you, you're not trying to drink from me. You're face hasn't even changed. Look at me," he finishes with the bandage and does, "you're human. The Powers That Be have released you."

Slowly Angel touches his own face and looks down at the blood stained anti-septics in his hand. He begins to laugh, first a low chuckle then a loud guffaw, tearing in the process. Christina smiles at him, kissing him gently on the cheek. Angel kisses her back, at first tenderly then with more ardor.

"I love you," he says, gently pushing her down onto the bed.

26

"You know, your hubby's memories suck! I give him dreams full of gory detail and he leaves out the good parts," Angel ranted to the stony visage of the Slayer

At the tap of footsteps he looked up, Christi following his gaze. "Angel, is all in readiness?" the owner of the footsteps asks. She could not see who it was.

"Almost Master," she feels shock run through her body, "all we need now is the signal from Christina."

"And we are expecting it soon, yes?"

"Yes, within a day or two."

"And my body?"

"Chosen."

"Excellent," there was a purr of pleasure in his voice. "And how do things go with the Slayer," he asked, this time with derisive laughter in his voice.

Angel walked over to her and smiled maliciously, "Very well, if I say so myself. You'll be quite proud of her. Some of my best work yet."

"Yes, especially after that pesky incident with the soul. Glad that's over." This time he did laugh. "You will inform me when things are ready, won't you?" he added absently

"Of course." Of course the answer was yes.

Hermoine wondered around in the darkness, her hands feeling for a wall, for anything. A brush of fingers against cloth. "Who's there?" she calls.

The figure turns around, "I need you Hermoine."

"Who are you," she asks him, searching for his features in the dark.

"I need you. Help me, Hermoine."

Her fingers search vainly to his face. "How can I help you? Tell me --"

"Will you help me?"

"--how I can help you?" She stepped closer, intrigued and more than a little mesmerized.

Hermoine blinked against the bright light. "Are you still there?" she asked as her eyes adjusted to the light.

"I need you Hermoine."

She was a little frustrated, "Yes, I know, but how can I help you? You won't tell me what's wrong. You won't even let me see your face."

"You will help me Hermoine?"

"Of course," she said, pushing up her glasses. "But how?"

The man stepped closer. His face, hidden in the shadow of his cowl, slowly began to take shape as he came into the light. "Give yourself to me."

"Wha-" Hermoine gasped as the hood slipped off and she beheld the Master.

Before she could react his gnarled and veined hands were cupping her face, none too gently. His long clawlike nails pressed into her flesh causing Hermoine to gasp in pain. It was then, with her mouth open, that Angel stepped into the "dream." He held a large tome and sprinkled some kind of black powder around the two, chanting.

Hermoine struggled in the Master's grasp, but she was caught in his gaze, and soon her fighting ceased.

27

She was nearly dead, almost beyond pain. The stars were doing a careening dance, swirling and pulsing, just for her.

Something wet and warm was shoved into her mouth. Oh God, she didn't know dying was such a thirsty process. She latched onto the...thing, whatever it was, and drank and drank until it created another kind of pain deep in her belly. Cramping, she was cramping, but the stars had stopped their mad dance. Instead they were unnaturally bright, everything was. It might as well have been day for all her eyes cared. And that star toward the left, that was a planet. Jupiter maybe? The man standing over her was blocking her view.

She pushed him away. For some reason she was surprised when he moved. He looked at her expression and laughed. "A little disoriented?" She nodded. "Yes, well," he said, stroking her cheek, "it happens. Do you know who you are?" She shook her head. He laughed again. "Do you know what you are?"

"Not . . . not human."

"Very good," he said, her chin between his fingers. "No, your not human. And when I'm through with you you'll never want to be human again."

Before she could react he bit down into her neck, hard. Pulling her new vampiric blood from her with ferocious speed she felt as if her veins were being scratched raw. It was over in seconds, but it felt like hours.

She lay limply in his arms. "It hurts doesn't it." She was too weak to reply. "This is what being human is, weakness," he hissed, "mortality . . . , pain. Is this what you want to be?" His face was close to hers now, breathing in her weak breath, "You were meant for strength, for greatness, all you have to do is take it."

Coming as close to her mouth as possible, he bared his neck to her. She latched on for all she was worth. She didn't question why or the rightness of it, she only knew that she could not abide this weakness. He cried out in pain, a smile on his lips. She would be an apt pupil, a beautifully vicious consort.

As she drank her fill she slowed in her feeding. He took that moment to bite her own exposed neck. At first surprised, she succumbed to the feeling of feeding while being fed on. It seemed a live wire had been tapped and in that moment she found herself inside his mind. I am Christina and this is Angel, she thought to herself, my saving Angel.

They were locked in the Vampire's Kiss.