The old man sat motionlessly at his table looking at the figure seated opposite him. Her large brown eyes seemed to be taking in all the details of the room and yet somehow they also seemed distant and unfocussed. In front of her she held the two velvet wallets with their mystical contents that she had just agreed to purchase from him.
"Drussila, Drussilla you have what you wanted" he said.
Drussilla looked at him coolly and smiled.
"Drussilla we made an agreement".
Drussilla stood up and walked around the table towards the man, dragging her long fingernails across its veneered surface. She tenderly wrapped her arms around his shoulder and sat on his lap.
"Would you accept payment in part, my sweet" she said gently.
Her face changed, her brow developing and her canine teeth lengthening into glistening white fangs. Suddenly she plunged her teeth deep in to his throat and drew deep on his blood. The old man gripped the arm of his chair, his nails cutting in to the varnish.
Drussilla stood, her face returning to its serene state and swung the wallets as she moved catlike towards the door.
"You..You…you promised, promised to change me," said the old man as his life began to ebb away.
"I have changed you my sweet" replied Drussilla, "in to a corpse".
Angel stood at the door of Fred's empty room looking at the stream of light that cut through a crack in the curtains she drawn across the window. It had been his idea that the gang take baby Connor out to get some sun but he had still been taken aback by the speed with which they had packed up and left. The haste with which they had got together a hamper and all the accompanying blankets and cutlery had left him feeling excluded. Pensively he turned and moved towards the stairs.
"Angelus my sweetheart I'm waiting for you". The distant but familiar voice was coming from the main foyer.
Angel froze, it took him a moment to register the implications of hearing that voice here in the hotel. He ran towards the voice and stopped dead in his tracks when he reached the top of the stairs. There, standing in a long black leather coat stood Drussilla, her hair falling casually across her shoulders. Angel paused and then moved slowly but deliberately down the stairs towards her.
"Well Dru, what can I do for you. Some dinner maybe, can I get you a stake". He quipped trying to maintain a cool air of nonchalance.
"Oh Daddy you can be so cruel, it will be delicious to hunt with you again".
"Dru, you really have lost it this time, have you forgotten the last year, the only thing I'm going to hunt today is you".
Angel was moving closer to the arms cabinet, trying to get there before Drussilla who was steadily moving in the same direction, her unfeasibly high heels clicking on the marble floor.
Suddenly in a flash of motion Drussilla was standing in front of the cabinet holding a velvet wallet in front of Angel's face.
"Magic is a wonderful but limited thing Angelus". Drusilla seemed to be talking to the ceiling.
"It is easy to bind any number of beasts to this sad little world for an eternity but to change the shape of the world around us is very expensive" She continued.
"I never saw you as the type to have a world changing vision Dru" said Angel, he heavy brow deepening with concern.
"Oh Angelus, I don't want to change the world. I only want to change you."
Drussilla took a round green object from the wallet. It looked like a small cake of novelty soap. Drussilla smiled, looked at Angel and broke the object in half.
"Welcome back daddy".
Angelus was standing in font of Drussilla; he could not remember when or how he had got there. The last thing he could remember he was feeding of a family in some nameless concrete suburb of L.A. The pain on the fathers face as he watch him feed of his children was a delicacy Angelus would savour for a long time. He had looked deep into the mans eyes and seen the mark of a broken soul. He had decided to let him live the suffering would last longer.
"Dru my poisoned petal, I wondered, briefly, if you survived that mob in Calais".
"Oh Angelus, I have missed you so much, it has been so long".
"It was only last month Dru," he said obviously thinking the last of her sanity had final walked.
"Oh Daddy, it has been so much longer than that".
"Redemption" said Angelus breaking in to a deep uninhibited laugh.
"So your little trinket undid the work of a hundred years and a dozen dead gypsies"
"It reset you down a path where you never regained your filthy soul". Continued Drussilla.
"I can't even remember a gypsy girl, ha. It may never of happened".
"But you are only here for a short while, this universe only exists in a pocket and soon it will die" Drusilla said as her face fell into a pout.
She pulled a second wallet from the pocket of her coat. Opening it she pulled out a small object that looked like a larger version of the small plastic capsules that you can buy in thousands of drug stores across the world. Drussilla held the capsule up between her fingers and waved it in front of Angeles's face.
"This will bind you to my world. Take it, swallow it and when this pocket world contracts you will remain and we will hunt together again".
Angelus looked up, he could see everything around him beginning to fade, everything except Drussilla and the capsule.
He grabbed the capsule threw it in to his mouth and without hesitation swallowed.
Angel woke to find him self laid out on the hotel counter. His vision was blurred but he could just make out two figures standing at his feet. He recognised the figure of Drussilla on the left but the larger male figure on the right he could not place, but he felt a cold chill of familiarity.
"Brother, what a shadow you are of what you could be," said the other figure in a voice that sent sharp frozen shiver down his spine.
As Angel's vision cleared he looked in to the piercing brown eyes of Angelus.
END OF PART ONE
To be Continued………