AUTHOR'S NOTE: Just in case anyone is asking: Disclaimers in Chapter one.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
"Dr Rogers, please come to Surgery Ward five, thank you," said the nurse's voice over the intercom. It was the third call, and the nurse's voice had a distinct annoyed edge to it.
Gunn felt an edge too. Right now there was a growing tension him and he wanted to lash out and hit something. Anything. It had been half an hour now, and he hated not knowing, not being there when-
When what, Gunn? I mean, you should be happy and all. I mean, you've been wishing him to go away for some time now. Now you've got the wish. Be happy and make merry, man!
Gunn ignored the mocking voice inside his head and focused his attention on Fred, who had been sitting, like a statue, in that uncomfortable plastic chair for half an hour now. He was worried – he saw something in her eyes that he had not seen in a long time. The same distant look she had worn in Pylea, where little she said had made sense. She couldn't be going back there now.
They made a mistake.
Damn it, they were duped! Idiots!
Again, he had the urge to kick something.
Maybe Cordelia caught wind of his intentions when she gave him a sharp look. She had stopped bothering to hide her tears for some time now. In her hand was a crumpled tissue, something the nurse gave when she saw her state.
Just then the doors to the Emergency Room flung open and all three of them stood up at once. Angel walked towards them, his face unreadable.
But his shoulders held an undeniable stoop of defeat that none of them wanted to see.
"Angel?" Cordelia whispered. "Wes? Tell me-"
Angel just shook his head shortly and looked to his right, at nothing Gunn could see. The vampire just didn't want to meet their eyes.
"He …" Angel's voice shook and when he returned his gaze towards them, they were wet with tears. "He … it was too hard. I'm sorry."
"Too hard?" Cordelia asked, her voice taking on a shrill edge. "What the hell do you mean?!" she gave him a sharp look before running into the emergency room, pushing aside a nurse who wanted to stop her.
Gunn wanted to go to her, to see Wes, to see for himself whether it was true, but Fred had collapsed to her knees on the floor. The vacant look in her eyes had deepened, and Gunn was desperate to reach her.
"Fred?" he whispered. Then shook her a little. She didn't even blink.
"Baby, come on."
Suddenly, she got up, pushed him away and ran down the hall. She ran so fast that she was gone from his sight when he finally got his legs back. He turned to ask Angel something, but the vampire was gone too – leaving Gunn alone in the emergency room waiting area.
* * *
"Get away from him!" Cordelia growled, pushing away the aide.
"Hey lady, you shouldn't be here," the man protested, keeping a firm hold on the gurney where Wesley's shrouded body lay.
"And he shouldn't be here, you get it?" Cordelia yelled, not caring if she sounded like a crazy person or not. "He wasn't supposed to die! I mean … he wasn't…" it was important. Somehow she knew that it was all wrong, that it wasn't Wesley's fate to die this way – or this early. It wasn't fair. The Powers that Be were taking away her memories so quickly. It wasn't fair not to know!
The aide nodded, as if he understood. "Okay. I'll give you a few minutes … but I'm sorry, ma'am. His body-" he faltered when he saw her sharp glare.
"I mean… the coroner would want to see him," he said after an awkward silence. Then he reluctantly walked away, throwing back glances as he moved to a spot to give her some privacy.
When she was finally alone, Cordelia managed to work up the nerve to remove the sheet. She stared at Wesley's still face and at his motionless chest where so much blood now lay.
She was really stupid sometimes. Who is she kidding? She was an idiot most of the time! It took her an ascension to realise how much Wesley was suffering after Connor's abduction. But by then, it was too late to do anything. All she could do was watch as he destroyed himself – and as his friends stood by to watch.
And she was one of them.
How she hated him after what he did to Angel. Then, she was so myopic in her love for Angel that she had blocked Wesley out of her mind. He didn't exist to her, and she didn't want to care.
"Wes. You can't be dead," she whispered, touching his cheek tentatively.
It was ice cold.
Gasping, she closed her eyes, her slight body trembling.
This can't be happening.
"Cordy."
Shocked, Cordelia opened her eyes, expecting Wesley's blue ones to look up at her, but they were still closed. Dead. He was really dead.
She felt a hand on her shoulder, but she wasn't alarmed. It was familiar. She held the hand and squeezed it. It seemed like ages ago when they were together in a situation like this; watching over a dying Wesley as he lay on the couch bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. But now …
"He's really gone," Cordelia whispered plaintively.
"I know," Gunn said, his voice low.
All Cordy could do was stare at Wesley. Then, she lifted up a cold, bloodied hand, and leaned against it.
"I'm sorry Wesley. For being too late."
Gunn looked away, knowing that there was nothing he could say that would make things better.
It was just too late for that now.
* * *
The door opened with a bang, startling Giles and Willow out of their reverie. The watcher stood up sharply, prepared for the worst as he aimed his bow at the intruder. He sighed in relief when he realised it was Angel.
"Angel? Is Fred-?"
Angel didn't answer. Instead, he seemed bent on something. His motions were taut, angry. With quick, sharp motions, he opened the weapons cabinet and took out a sword and slammed it shut.
"Angel? Stop. What happened?" Giles demanded, racing to Angel's side.
He was surprised that Angel actually stopped to consider him. With trembling lips he said, "We were such idiots!" he hissed, his voice heavy with self-recrimination.
"What happened?" Giles demanded firmly.
Angel closed his eyes at that.
"Wesley's dead."
Although Giles was not surprised – it was what Fred left to do after all – Willow, who didn't know about that, gasped and swayed to her feet. "How?"
It was clear that the vampire had no intention of answering her when he continued his walk to the exit, but Giles was fed up of people rushing off bull-headedly without thinking.
"Damn you, Angel. You will stop now, and you will explain what is going on before anyone else gets killed!" he barked.
That got his attention. With a furious motion, Angel swung around and threw his sword. Giles flinched when the sword impaled a pillar near the stairs. The dull thud echoed eerily in the cavernous, mostly-empty hotel. Then with a suddenness that shocked the former watcher, Angel sank to his knees and wept. Tentatively, Giles placed a shaky hand on the vampire's shoulders, not knowing what to do. He had never seen the vampire lose control before. Never.
Willow met his eyes, fear and sorrow in them – because they now know that they had been right all this time – they had not seen the whole picture.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
"You need to rest. All of you," Giles told the dispirited AI gang as they sat in the lounge area of the Hyperion. Nobody bothered to acknowledge his statement. Lorne sat slumped in the sofa, looking ridiculous in his bright-yellow suit, clutching the files he had scavenged from Baylor House to his chest like a kid would've done.
Giles winced at the memory of Lorne's exuberant entrance just a few minutes ago.
"I think we've got something. Wonder boy here dug some of Wesley's old files that could shed some light to all this nonsense about him killing people," Lorne threw Connor a big smile, who returned in kind.
But their smiles faltered when they saw the expression on Angel and Gunn's face. And when Lorne saw Cordelia, he was about to break into another exuberant greeting when Cordelia smacked it flat.
"Wesley's dead, Lorne."
Connor's eyes widened and then he immediately shot Angel an accusing look. The vampire didn't bother to respond.
"You killed him," the boy spat. "I knew you would. I knew it!"
With that, he ran away, nearly breaking the exit doors apart in his haste to leave them.
"But …" Lorne was saying. "This files. They …"
Finally despondent, Lorne had joined the rest of the gang on the seat, clutching the now-useless files to his chest.
"Rest," Giles repeated, "If we're to fight this … threat we're going to need our energy. And Lorne, the files are not useless. Give them to me."
Mechanically, the demon handed the files to him. Giles leafed through them, not really reading the contents. He was still too shocked to concentrate properly. But among the rest, he was the only one who was probably the most clear-headed right now. The only one, he mused, that had no emotional link to Wesley blinding his focus.
Currently, Angel Investigations is mired with guilt, grief and regret – none of these emotions beneficial in getting to the thick of things. What they needed was to pull themselves together and refocus.
Believing that they would rest and see sense in what he said, Giles retreated to Wesley's former office, laying out the files and its contents on the desk. Methodically, as he was trained to do, he began cross correlating them in his mind. However, Wesley had made it ridiculously easy for him, peppering his notes with Watcher symbols that aided research immensely. He felt, rather than saw, Willow join him, silently opening one of the files.
"I can't believe he's gone," Willow said after a long while of pawing through the files.
"Things happen," Giles said, hoping he did not sound too cold.
Willow seemed to understand that this was his way of disconnecting from what happened to better focus on the situation at hand. She just nodded.
"They were used. Used to kill one of their own. It's difficult to live down," she murmured, drawing from first-hand experience – only she wasn't used in any way.
"But they have to," he said shortly. Then gently added, "We have to help them do it. Starting with finding out about the Aman-yar."
Suddenly, a thick book landed on his pile of files. Surprised, Giles looked up to see Fred.
"I know who they are," she said, her voice flat.
* * *
"They're called the Soulless Ones. Not vampires," Giles murmured, as he went through the Aman-ot-ohp Chronicles. "Humans. Without souls."
"Is such a thing possible?" Willow asked incredulously from her seat, looking up from her notebook for a while.
"If you were spawned by a demon, yes," Giles answered.
His gaze shifted to Wesley's journal – the last journal he wrote. This entry was dated shortly after Connor's kidnapping. In fact – just a few days after he returned from the hospital.
**I see visions. That's strange. Is it the Powers That Be? Or am I finally going mad? Flashes of faces … people … strangers. Who are they? And a voice kept whispering something I cannot make out. Am I losing my mind?**
Wesley's voice seems to echo pleadingly from the page. Giles could sense the despair in his words, the desperation … He shook his head and sighed.
A few weeks later, Wesley wrote:
**I finally hear it. Aman-yar. Along with that understanding, came other visions. Visions of fire. And I can feel something else inside me as well. Something waiting to burst out of me. I don't understand what is going on … and it did not help matters that Gunn came last night to seek my help after swearing never to have anything to do with me ever again. Life is full of ironies.
I did it only for Fred.**
Giles shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He hated going through these journals – even if Wesley was now gone. Wesley's words were filled with too much pain – the pain of a man wracked with guilt and fear. It wasn't something Wesley should be remembered for. He thumbed through some of Wesley's disjointed sketches hoping to distract himself. Faces of people, strange symbols, alien words were scrawled across the pages in a haphazard manner. Giles stopped when he came across the picture of Cindy. Ever the Watcher, Wesley had carefully noted down the date he received the vision.
"A week after he returned from the hospital," he murmured. Perhaps it was his traumatic near-death that triggered the change in Wesley. Perhaps by almost dying, the Elemental was awakened.
"Who knows?" Giles murmured.
At Willow's puzzled look, Giles cleared his throat self-consciously. "Wesley had visions before he even became an Elemental. He left detailed notes on them in these files. It's no wonder that Lorne and Connor ignored them at first. They looked like gibberish. Unless you knew what to look for."
"The first book he referred to were the Andulian Prophecies. An ancient tome where this symbol appears-"
He took out a page with a strange symbol – a circle filled with elaborate demonic language – and showed it to her.
"The Andulian prophecies said that the Aman-yar were created from the union of a demon and human being. The demon was Amopholas, who was banished by Kas-kuv, a priestess of the order of Natanyah. Unfortunately, before she banished him … he raped her. And she had a child – a normal child. Kas-kuv couldn't bring herself to kill her child, so she let it live.
"But the seed of this demon emerges sporadically. So, when the first Aman-yar appeared, Kas-kuv was long dead. Basically, you don't get a soulless human all the time, only once in a few hundred years. They look completely human, but the Aman-yar are the most evil men and women you'd know. Hitler was Aman-yar. And he's one of the nicer versions," he said.
"But the Andulian prophecies also say that there will be a time where these spawnings will increase in frequency," explained Giles.
"And the time is now," Fred said. Giles and Willow jumped. Fred had sequestered herself at the corner of the room and had gone so quiet that they had all but forgotten about her.
"Wesley …" Fred's voice wavered for a while, but she regained her resolve, "According to Wesley the Aman-yar has reached its zenith."
She came to the table and pawed through the files that were laid on the it. When she found what she was looking for, she gave it to Giles.
When he opened the file, he saw that Wesley had hastily scrawled the word "Gathering" over the first page.
"It's a list of names," he murmured.
"I don't know how he came to identify these people, but I suspect it was the Elemental who helped him. When I looked at these names closely, and researched their backgrounds, I discovered that there were some unexplained deaths in their past," Fred said.
Shuffling sounds announced Angel's presence. As one, they turned to see the vampire leaning against the doorjamb, an unreadable look on his face.
"Any progress?" his voice was tired, dead.
"Enough," Fred said shortly, then lowered her head as if her bold statement was embarrassing.
Angel barely glanced her way. Giles explained as best as he could what he found in Wesley's files.
"I can't explain the demon mythology of the Aman-yar in full detail, but essentially the ancient demon Amopholas is living through its soulless spawn, using them to achieve whatever twisted purpose it wants. Perhaps to even reappear in this dimension. And now, it has enough numbers on Earth to wreck havoc," Giles murmured. "And number one on its agenda-"
"The Mother," Angel said. The pieces were falling together. "The Aman-yar wants to use the Mother to gain power."
"Wesley wrote 'Gathering' here," Fred murmured, her eyes still lowered. "I suspect that the Aman-yar will gather, and together, they will use the Mother. After all, they're essentially the channels of one demon."
"And that's why the Elemental of Green Fire was sent. To destroy the Aman-yar and its numbers before they could achieve whatever it is," Willow said in response.
"We'll stop them," Angel said quietly, his tone brooking no argument.
"Where are we going to find this gathering thingy anyway?" Gunn asked, suddenly appearing at the doorway. Fred gave Gunn a cold, sardonic smile. It made Gunn squirm in a painful way.
"You know, Wesley did everything with a reason and for a purpose. That's why he moved into Avarice. It wasn't to clean up vampires, it wasn't because the property market was deflated and he needed a new home," she said, her voice low.
"Because the Gathering will happen in Avarice," Angel murmured.
And he opened the file marked "Vision" where, amidst the complex calculations and symbols, Wesley had scrawled this word: Avarice.
------------------------------------------
I hate to end it here, but it's been a while since I've updated and I know some of you are about to kill me soon. :) I would like to thank everyone for their reviews, particularly lonely brit for her encouragement - you can write that Wes fanfic, I dare ya! Share the love! :)
Here's a promise - and boy do I tremble at making them, but this time I know I can fulfill it - updates in two days or less. Watch out for sizzling action! ;)
Yours truly,
Wyndhamfan
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
"Dr Rogers, please come to Surgery Ward five, thank you," said the nurse's voice over the intercom. It was the third call, and the nurse's voice had a distinct annoyed edge to it.
Gunn felt an edge too. Right now there was a growing tension him and he wanted to lash out and hit something. Anything. It had been half an hour now, and he hated not knowing, not being there when-
When what, Gunn? I mean, you should be happy and all. I mean, you've been wishing him to go away for some time now. Now you've got the wish. Be happy and make merry, man!
Gunn ignored the mocking voice inside his head and focused his attention on Fred, who had been sitting, like a statue, in that uncomfortable plastic chair for half an hour now. He was worried – he saw something in her eyes that he had not seen in a long time. The same distant look she had worn in Pylea, where little she said had made sense. She couldn't be going back there now.
They made a mistake.
Damn it, they were duped! Idiots!
Again, he had the urge to kick something.
Maybe Cordelia caught wind of his intentions when she gave him a sharp look. She had stopped bothering to hide her tears for some time now. In her hand was a crumpled tissue, something the nurse gave when she saw her state.
Just then the doors to the Emergency Room flung open and all three of them stood up at once. Angel walked towards them, his face unreadable.
But his shoulders held an undeniable stoop of defeat that none of them wanted to see.
"Angel?" Cordelia whispered. "Wes? Tell me-"
Angel just shook his head shortly and looked to his right, at nothing Gunn could see. The vampire just didn't want to meet their eyes.
"He …" Angel's voice shook and when he returned his gaze towards them, they were wet with tears. "He … it was too hard. I'm sorry."
"Too hard?" Cordelia asked, her voice taking on a shrill edge. "What the hell do you mean?!" she gave him a sharp look before running into the emergency room, pushing aside a nurse who wanted to stop her.
Gunn wanted to go to her, to see Wes, to see for himself whether it was true, but Fred had collapsed to her knees on the floor. The vacant look in her eyes had deepened, and Gunn was desperate to reach her.
"Fred?" he whispered. Then shook her a little. She didn't even blink.
"Baby, come on."
Suddenly, she got up, pushed him away and ran down the hall. She ran so fast that she was gone from his sight when he finally got his legs back. He turned to ask Angel something, but the vampire was gone too – leaving Gunn alone in the emergency room waiting area.
* * *
"Get away from him!" Cordelia growled, pushing away the aide.
"Hey lady, you shouldn't be here," the man protested, keeping a firm hold on the gurney where Wesley's shrouded body lay.
"And he shouldn't be here, you get it?" Cordelia yelled, not caring if she sounded like a crazy person or not. "He wasn't supposed to die! I mean … he wasn't…" it was important. Somehow she knew that it was all wrong, that it wasn't Wesley's fate to die this way – or this early. It wasn't fair. The Powers that Be were taking away her memories so quickly. It wasn't fair not to know!
The aide nodded, as if he understood. "Okay. I'll give you a few minutes … but I'm sorry, ma'am. His body-" he faltered when he saw her sharp glare.
"I mean… the coroner would want to see him," he said after an awkward silence. Then he reluctantly walked away, throwing back glances as he moved to a spot to give her some privacy.
When she was finally alone, Cordelia managed to work up the nerve to remove the sheet. She stared at Wesley's still face and at his motionless chest where so much blood now lay.
She was really stupid sometimes. Who is she kidding? She was an idiot most of the time! It took her an ascension to realise how much Wesley was suffering after Connor's abduction. But by then, it was too late to do anything. All she could do was watch as he destroyed himself – and as his friends stood by to watch.
And she was one of them.
How she hated him after what he did to Angel. Then, she was so myopic in her love for Angel that she had blocked Wesley out of her mind. He didn't exist to her, and she didn't want to care.
"Wes. You can't be dead," she whispered, touching his cheek tentatively.
It was ice cold.
Gasping, she closed her eyes, her slight body trembling.
This can't be happening.
"Cordy."
Shocked, Cordelia opened her eyes, expecting Wesley's blue ones to look up at her, but they were still closed. Dead. He was really dead.
She felt a hand on her shoulder, but she wasn't alarmed. It was familiar. She held the hand and squeezed it. It seemed like ages ago when they were together in a situation like this; watching over a dying Wesley as he lay on the couch bleeding to death from a gunshot wound. But now …
"He's really gone," Cordelia whispered plaintively.
"I know," Gunn said, his voice low.
All Cordy could do was stare at Wesley. Then, she lifted up a cold, bloodied hand, and leaned against it.
"I'm sorry Wesley. For being too late."
Gunn looked away, knowing that there was nothing he could say that would make things better.
It was just too late for that now.
* * *
The door opened with a bang, startling Giles and Willow out of their reverie. The watcher stood up sharply, prepared for the worst as he aimed his bow at the intruder. He sighed in relief when he realised it was Angel.
"Angel? Is Fred-?"
Angel didn't answer. Instead, he seemed bent on something. His motions were taut, angry. With quick, sharp motions, he opened the weapons cabinet and took out a sword and slammed it shut.
"Angel? Stop. What happened?" Giles demanded, racing to Angel's side.
He was surprised that Angel actually stopped to consider him. With trembling lips he said, "We were such idiots!" he hissed, his voice heavy with self-recrimination.
"What happened?" Giles demanded firmly.
Angel closed his eyes at that.
"Wesley's dead."
Although Giles was not surprised – it was what Fred left to do after all – Willow, who didn't know about that, gasped and swayed to her feet. "How?"
It was clear that the vampire had no intention of answering her when he continued his walk to the exit, but Giles was fed up of people rushing off bull-headedly without thinking.
"Damn you, Angel. You will stop now, and you will explain what is going on before anyone else gets killed!" he barked.
That got his attention. With a furious motion, Angel swung around and threw his sword. Giles flinched when the sword impaled a pillar near the stairs. The dull thud echoed eerily in the cavernous, mostly-empty hotel. Then with a suddenness that shocked the former watcher, Angel sank to his knees and wept. Tentatively, Giles placed a shaky hand on the vampire's shoulders, not knowing what to do. He had never seen the vampire lose control before. Never.
Willow met his eyes, fear and sorrow in them – because they now know that they had been right all this time – they had not seen the whole picture.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
"You need to rest. All of you," Giles told the dispirited AI gang as they sat in the lounge area of the Hyperion. Nobody bothered to acknowledge his statement. Lorne sat slumped in the sofa, looking ridiculous in his bright-yellow suit, clutching the files he had scavenged from Baylor House to his chest like a kid would've done.
Giles winced at the memory of Lorne's exuberant entrance just a few minutes ago.
"I think we've got something. Wonder boy here dug some of Wesley's old files that could shed some light to all this nonsense about him killing people," Lorne threw Connor a big smile, who returned in kind.
But their smiles faltered when they saw the expression on Angel and Gunn's face. And when Lorne saw Cordelia, he was about to break into another exuberant greeting when Cordelia smacked it flat.
"Wesley's dead, Lorne."
Connor's eyes widened and then he immediately shot Angel an accusing look. The vampire didn't bother to respond.
"You killed him," the boy spat. "I knew you would. I knew it!"
With that, he ran away, nearly breaking the exit doors apart in his haste to leave them.
"But …" Lorne was saying. "This files. They …"
Finally despondent, Lorne had joined the rest of the gang on the seat, clutching the now-useless files to his chest.
"Rest," Giles repeated, "If we're to fight this … threat we're going to need our energy. And Lorne, the files are not useless. Give them to me."
Mechanically, the demon handed the files to him. Giles leafed through them, not really reading the contents. He was still too shocked to concentrate properly. But among the rest, he was the only one who was probably the most clear-headed right now. The only one, he mused, that had no emotional link to Wesley blinding his focus.
Currently, Angel Investigations is mired with guilt, grief and regret – none of these emotions beneficial in getting to the thick of things. What they needed was to pull themselves together and refocus.
Believing that they would rest and see sense in what he said, Giles retreated to Wesley's former office, laying out the files and its contents on the desk. Methodically, as he was trained to do, he began cross correlating them in his mind. However, Wesley had made it ridiculously easy for him, peppering his notes with Watcher symbols that aided research immensely. He felt, rather than saw, Willow join him, silently opening one of the files.
"I can't believe he's gone," Willow said after a long while of pawing through the files.
"Things happen," Giles said, hoping he did not sound too cold.
Willow seemed to understand that this was his way of disconnecting from what happened to better focus on the situation at hand. She just nodded.
"They were used. Used to kill one of their own. It's difficult to live down," she murmured, drawing from first-hand experience – only she wasn't used in any way.
"But they have to," he said shortly. Then gently added, "We have to help them do it. Starting with finding out about the Aman-yar."
Suddenly, a thick book landed on his pile of files. Surprised, Giles looked up to see Fred.
"I know who they are," she said, her voice flat.
* * *
"They're called the Soulless Ones. Not vampires," Giles murmured, as he went through the Aman-ot-ohp Chronicles. "Humans. Without souls."
"Is such a thing possible?" Willow asked incredulously from her seat, looking up from her notebook for a while.
"If you were spawned by a demon, yes," Giles answered.
His gaze shifted to Wesley's journal – the last journal he wrote. This entry was dated shortly after Connor's kidnapping. In fact – just a few days after he returned from the hospital.
**I see visions. That's strange. Is it the Powers That Be? Or am I finally going mad? Flashes of faces … people … strangers. Who are they? And a voice kept whispering something I cannot make out. Am I losing my mind?**
Wesley's voice seems to echo pleadingly from the page. Giles could sense the despair in his words, the desperation … He shook his head and sighed.
A few weeks later, Wesley wrote:
**I finally hear it. Aman-yar. Along with that understanding, came other visions. Visions of fire. And I can feel something else inside me as well. Something waiting to burst out of me. I don't understand what is going on … and it did not help matters that Gunn came last night to seek my help after swearing never to have anything to do with me ever again. Life is full of ironies.
I did it only for Fred.**
Giles shifted in his seat uncomfortably. He hated going through these journals – even if Wesley was now gone. Wesley's words were filled with too much pain – the pain of a man wracked with guilt and fear. It wasn't something Wesley should be remembered for. He thumbed through some of Wesley's disjointed sketches hoping to distract himself. Faces of people, strange symbols, alien words were scrawled across the pages in a haphazard manner. Giles stopped when he came across the picture of Cindy. Ever the Watcher, Wesley had carefully noted down the date he received the vision.
"A week after he returned from the hospital," he murmured. Perhaps it was his traumatic near-death that triggered the change in Wesley. Perhaps by almost dying, the Elemental was awakened.
"Who knows?" Giles murmured.
At Willow's puzzled look, Giles cleared his throat self-consciously. "Wesley had visions before he even became an Elemental. He left detailed notes on them in these files. It's no wonder that Lorne and Connor ignored them at first. They looked like gibberish. Unless you knew what to look for."
"The first book he referred to were the Andulian Prophecies. An ancient tome where this symbol appears-"
He took out a page with a strange symbol – a circle filled with elaborate demonic language – and showed it to her.
"The Andulian prophecies said that the Aman-yar were created from the union of a demon and human being. The demon was Amopholas, who was banished by Kas-kuv, a priestess of the order of Natanyah. Unfortunately, before she banished him … he raped her. And she had a child – a normal child. Kas-kuv couldn't bring herself to kill her child, so she let it live.
"But the seed of this demon emerges sporadically. So, when the first Aman-yar appeared, Kas-kuv was long dead. Basically, you don't get a soulless human all the time, only once in a few hundred years. They look completely human, but the Aman-yar are the most evil men and women you'd know. Hitler was Aman-yar. And he's one of the nicer versions," he said.
"But the Andulian prophecies also say that there will be a time where these spawnings will increase in frequency," explained Giles.
"And the time is now," Fred said. Giles and Willow jumped. Fred had sequestered herself at the corner of the room and had gone so quiet that they had all but forgotten about her.
"Wesley …" Fred's voice wavered for a while, but she regained her resolve, "According to Wesley the Aman-yar has reached its zenith."
She came to the table and pawed through the files that were laid on the it. When she found what she was looking for, she gave it to Giles.
When he opened the file, he saw that Wesley had hastily scrawled the word "Gathering" over the first page.
"It's a list of names," he murmured.
"I don't know how he came to identify these people, but I suspect it was the Elemental who helped him. When I looked at these names closely, and researched their backgrounds, I discovered that there were some unexplained deaths in their past," Fred said.
Shuffling sounds announced Angel's presence. As one, they turned to see the vampire leaning against the doorjamb, an unreadable look on his face.
"Any progress?" his voice was tired, dead.
"Enough," Fred said shortly, then lowered her head as if her bold statement was embarrassing.
Angel barely glanced her way. Giles explained as best as he could what he found in Wesley's files.
"I can't explain the demon mythology of the Aman-yar in full detail, but essentially the ancient demon Amopholas is living through its soulless spawn, using them to achieve whatever twisted purpose it wants. Perhaps to even reappear in this dimension. And now, it has enough numbers on Earth to wreck havoc," Giles murmured. "And number one on its agenda-"
"The Mother," Angel said. The pieces were falling together. "The Aman-yar wants to use the Mother to gain power."
"Wesley wrote 'Gathering' here," Fred murmured, her eyes still lowered. "I suspect that the Aman-yar will gather, and together, they will use the Mother. After all, they're essentially the channels of one demon."
"And that's why the Elemental of Green Fire was sent. To destroy the Aman-yar and its numbers before they could achieve whatever it is," Willow said in response.
"We'll stop them," Angel said quietly, his tone brooking no argument.
"Where are we going to find this gathering thingy anyway?" Gunn asked, suddenly appearing at the doorway. Fred gave Gunn a cold, sardonic smile. It made Gunn squirm in a painful way.
"You know, Wesley did everything with a reason and for a purpose. That's why he moved into Avarice. It wasn't to clean up vampires, it wasn't because the property market was deflated and he needed a new home," she said, her voice low.
"Because the Gathering will happen in Avarice," Angel murmured.
And he opened the file marked "Vision" where, amidst the complex calculations and symbols, Wesley had scrawled this word: Avarice.
------------------------------------------
I hate to end it here, but it's been a while since I've updated and I know some of you are about to kill me soon. :) I would like to thank everyone for their reviews, particularly lonely brit for her encouragement - you can write that Wes fanfic, I dare ya! Share the love! :)
Here's a promise - and boy do I tremble at making them, but this time I know I can fulfill it - updates in two days or less. Watch out for sizzling action! ;)
Yours truly,
Wyndhamfan