A green floor, corridors that echo and that peculiar institutional brightness.
Cordelia writhed under the agony. Each new image crashed into her brain like a bullet and persisted, rippling, getting dimmer with each throb, until her real vision tamped it down, making way for the next image to take over.
Medical paraphernalia, including looping IV lines and clear fluid in bags suspended above a bed, catching a ray of sun and splitting the light into a colourful halo.
"It's a hospital. Gah!"
A wheeled table covered in books and writing materials. A sketch pad. No flowers. A small pottery bowl of apples.
"Cordy, can you see? Can you see him?"
"Which hospital?"
"I can't ... oh God ... I can't see."
Pinkish, crisply laundered sheets, covering a still form, except for a face poking out at the top.
"OK! OK! I see a face. No more please ... NO!"
The face is in the shade. It is riven with fear. Eyes open, staring but not seeing, cheeks that twitch as the patient shakes, a jaw clenched tight, deforming the mouth and a brow covered in beads of perspiration.
"I don't know who it is. I don't recognise him. He's ill, not seriously, it feels like a mild fever. But he's very frightened. My God, he's absolutely terrified of it."
"Ill? It's Paul. He said he was receiving medical treatment. We have to find him. We have to find him right now."
A shaft of light breaks over the face - someone has drawn a curtain in the room - and it freezes in panic for a second. Then, caught in the sun's glare, the face relaxes for the briefest moment, and takes on its normal shape. Then the effect wears off and the visage crumples as the shaking returns.
"Oh... oh my God."
Cordy opened her eyes. Four concerned faces formed a semicircle in her visual field.
"Did you ..." Angel looked apologetic and Cordy shut her eyes to block him out. "I mean, was there a hospital name, or a location of any kind."
"No."
"Nothing that will help us find Paul?"
"It wasn't Paul." Cordy picked herself off the floor and felt her arms grabbed by several hands. "It was you."
There was a stunned silence. "Cordelia," Wesley's voice cut in, "Are you sure you weren't just seeing some sort of family resemblance?"
"Quite sure."
"This is... unprecedented. A vision about Angel? But he's right here. Nothing bad is happening to him."
The hands eased her back onto a chair and put a glass of water into her fingers. "Yeah, I can see that. Or I would see it if I could bare to open my eyes. Could we ... ?"
Kate indicated to Gunn and he lowered the lights.
Wesley continued. "The Powers have never, to my knowledge, sent us a vision like this before. It must relate to the future - to a time after Angel's shanshu. He's sick because he's human."
"Sunlight." Cordy mumbled, and she told them what she'd seen.
"Well, that just confirms it."
"Cordy, wasn't there anything about him? We ... we ..."
"I know. We have to find him." Cordy sipped her water and took some painkillers from her bag. "I suppose we'd better get started. Gunn? Kate? Are you up for some phoning around and mild impersonation?"
The both nodded and Cordelia hauled herself up. "Then let's get back to the office. I research better at my own desk. Wesley, you can stay - you're no good at lying and someone needs to be with him."
Angel had meandered off again and was staring out into the night as if he might be able to spot his missing family in the street below. After the others were gone, Wesley left him alone for a while, and took out his prophecy notebook.
"How's your family, Wes?"
Lost in translation of tricky phrase, the question startled him, and without thinking he gave an accurate answer, "I try not think about them much."
"You don't get along?"
Wesley looked up from his reading and gave a wry smile. "My father hasn't had a kind word to say to me since I spilt dandelion-and-burdock over the manuscript of his first major research work. That was twenty-five years ago."
"What did he research?"
"The significance of blood to vampires."
Angel laughed.
"It's more interesting than you'd imagine. There isn't really a good explanation of why vampires drink. Traditionally, of course, it's thought to be nourishment for the demon that inhabits the host's form. The host is dead and doesn't need feeding, ergo ..."
"Traditionally? You mean, there's more than one point of view?"
"Put any two Council members together and you'll create a difference of opinion. I don't care if they're talking about vampires or who's going to win the FA Cup. Yes - certainly there were and are dissenting points of view. None of them have gained much ground as far as the Council's teaching is concerned, though, except ..." Wesley's voice petered out, and he regarded Angel curiously.
"What?"
"Except once. In the early sixteenth century. A watcher called Christophe was relieved of his charge, expelled and eventually hanged for circulating a pamphlet which proposed excessively heretical views. I wish I had access to the Watcher's diaries, I could read you what he wrote."
"They didn't censor him?"
"Oh no!" Wesley was shocked. "They may be a reactionary bunch but they would never stoop to destroying the written word. Even a dissenting view is knowledge - to be added to the sum. It's one of their central tenants. Now, from memory, Christophe proposed an alternative, highly original theory of the significance of blood. Speculating that the purpose of vampiric feeding was twofold, he divided blood into the substance and the essence. I suppose in the post-Einstein world that would be matter and energy, and we'd agree they were the same thing, but in any case, this was pre-Newton so such a thought wouldn't have occurred to anyone. Most of them were still convinced the sun was circling the earth."
"And the substance and essence had a separate purpose?"
"Indeed. The essence was akin to the soul of the person, and that fed the demon. Of course the Church was immediately up in arms because traditionally the soul of the departed goes to heaven. They couldn't countenance any other view and when Christophe repeated his theory once too often they arranged for his execution."
"What about the substance?"
"That fed the body. According to his theory, the body didn't die. It merely went into a sort of arrested state. The matter in the blood fed the body, much as an intravenous drip feeds a patient in a coma. Of course, that also set the cat well and truly amongst the pigeons."
"Why?"
"Because if the body isn't dead, it could be argued the Slayer commits murder every time she kills a vampire. There was a lot of argument about why a vampire disintegrates into ashes after a staking, but Christophe argued that that couldn't be a natural occurrence - why would a body that may have been healthy a few hours ago disintegrate? - and if it couldn't be explained as natural decay it was therefore no evidence against his point of view."
"He was a clever man."
"Oh yes, if contemporary reports are anything to go by. The secret of returning a soul from wherever it went was well known, although it was forbidden to actually perform the ritual and no-one in the Council had tried it for centuries. Well, the church stated that the soul was in heaven or hell and anyone who tried to restore it was working against God's will. But Christophe's argument was that the soul was imprisoned by the demon and the ritual merely released it from captivity. Anyway, Christophe argued that if you have a live body and you have a restoration spell, all you have to do is fold tab A into slot B and you should get back the human being you lost. Er... those may not have been his exact words, you know, but that was the gist. He was a talented watcher and the Council took him very seriously. They even stopped sending out patrols for while, just in case he turned out to be right. Except ..."
"Except?"
"It doesn't work. You are an example of what one gets when a restoration spell is performed. A vampire with a restored soul. And why?"
"Because of the demon."
"Precisely. The demon won't go away, and your body is still in the same arrested state as it was a hundred years ago when you and your soul were reunited. Tests were done - even dangerous heretics had their ideas tested - and they produced a few besouled vampires who rapidly went crazy and were no use to anyone. Sorry, Angel."
"That's OK. I know how they felt. So, he was just wrong, this Christophe?"
"When the tests failed everyone consigned his ideas to the scrap-heap. Of course, by this time he was six feet under and had no chance to modify his theory to fit the results, and everyone else was much too scared of ending up in the same place to take up his work."
"You don't think he was wrong?"
"I don't think until now I'd given the matter much thought. It's an interesting theory and my father knew all about it - that's all. Pure-blood demons are more my thing, really. But I've been trying to make sense of the prophecy - especially the shanshu bit - 'life regained'. If shanshu is to happen, there has to be a mechanism. Life must be restored. According to the traditional teachings of the Council, that's impossible without intervention from higher powers."
"But not according the Christophe?"
"If Christophe was right, life never went away. That makes it much easier, in fact, it ought to be like shelling peas. Take one arrested body, locate appropriate soul, get rid of demon, jump start if necessary. Presto, a human being, fit as the day he was turned."
"Missing from our shanshu puzzle is a bit of demon expulsion?"
"I suppose. Mind you, this is all pure speculation on my part."
Angel smiled. "It passes the time. So we need a purgative. I wonder if the drug store is still open?"
"It could turn out to be very important, Angel. The prophecy could be the reason why these people are being killed."
"I know. I'm only ... laughing to keep from crying."
The mobile phone trilled. Angel flipped it open and opened his mouth to speak, and then went quiet and simply listened. Eventually, Wesley prized the phone away.
"Cordelia? He's gone a bit funny again. Did you find him? Oh, fantastic. Good work."
He picked up Angel's coat and shook it out in front of him. Angel failed to move, so Wesley fed one arm into the appropriate sleeve, walking around his back to find the other. The coat on, he took Angel's hand and led him out of the door. "C'mon, old friend. Let's go and meet the family."
