I leave about midnight, I'm only a few hours drive from LA and I shouldn't
have much difficulty finding somewhere to stay during the day. I can try
and find Angel that following night. My plan gets a little bit derailed by
a collision between a lorry and something so badly mangled I couldn't
identify it. I was stuck in traffic for a few hours and find myself racing
against the sun. I wish I'd had the foresight to get a car with a roof, and
blacked out windows. What I'd give for spike's De Soto right now. The suns
rising as I pull into the city limits, as soon as I see a sewer access I
pull the jeep over and dive in. My skin smoking badly, but at least it's
not burning. I gaze around the sewer, trying to remember which way I was
heading when I dived down here. Great, I'd be badly lost on the surface,
now I get to wander LA's sewer system for the day.
I eventually find a way into a building with payphones, I've already spent half the day walking around the sewers and people are definitely keeping their distance from me. I dig through my wallet and find the Angel Investigations card that Cordelia gave me the last time I visited LA, I let the phone ring for a while before hanging up, but there clearly isn't anyone in. I try Cordy's home number, but get a similar response. I start to head back to the sewer access, but I've come up with an idea to delay getting back into my sewer groove for a few minutes. I head back the phones and dial a familiar number, this time it rings three times before getting answered.
"Hello, Summer's residence." I wince as I hear the voice, maybe this wasn't my best plan ever. "Um, hi Ms Summers, err, is Buffy around?" "Xander?" Her voice carries a tone of malice, not that I'm surprised after what she went through with Angelus. "Uhm" I'm really not sure what to say, "did Buffy say anything about my condition?" "I was at your funeral; I doubt there's much to add." I wince at her tone of voice, Joyce Summers has done more for me than either of my natural parents put together, and I really don't like causing her pain, anymore than I want to cause Buffy, Willow, or Giles pain. "Ms Summers, you don't have to tell Buffy I called, but if you do, can you tell her that I'll never hurt her, I'll never give her a reason to regret my death." I can hear her tone soften at my words, and what she says next makes my heart break. "Xander, I know my daughter, and there will never be a day she does not regret failing to protect you." Silent tears make their way down my cheeks as she continues. I try to let her know that Buffy never failed me, not once in all the time I've known her, that without her I would never have had the strength to face my demons, both real and personal. But my throat is tight and I can't get any words out. "I'll let her know you called, I hope your ok Xander." A last thought strays through my mind. "Joyce, what was the service like?"
I spent an hour after dark searching around for the address on Cordy's business card. Then I ended up running into an alley after hearing a struggle. Now I have a corpse at my feet and Angel is bearing down on me with death in his eyes, who says death has to be the end of my bad luck string, nope for Xander Harris it's just the beginning! I put my hand up to indicate for him to halt. At least he does that, but it doesn't stop him mouthing off at me. Dammit! I know I disturbed whatever did this when I came into the alley. I didn't see it but I know it's still here, I can smell it. And if Angel would shut up for a second I could probably hear it.
The slightest hiss from above me is all I need to pinpoint it and I leap with all my strength, pushing off against the wall to get me extra height. I just manage to grab the things tail as it tries to escape up the wall. As gravity starts to bring us back down I twist so that its body is between me and the ground. I marvel at the sheer control I have over my body since becoming a vampire. No tripping over my feet or knocking over glasses anymore, every action I take is perfectly controlled, much like my landing, which involves me crushing the ribcage of my opponent whilst rolling off him and to my feet. I take a look at the demon in question, a small green scaly thing which is already turning into grey mush. I brush off my shirt and look at Angel. "You were saying something?"
"So how much do you know about what happened?" It's the only way I can think to start this conversation. He hasn't tried to stake me so he's at least keeping an open mind. "Well Cordelia and Wesley went to your funeral, I sent some flowers" My surprise obviously shows, although he mistakes the reason as he adds "it was during the day." I really hadn't expected Angel to show any real interest in my death at all, I don't really know what to do with the information. "Buffy phoned me a few days ago, she told me about you grave being disturbed and the girl you saved from a vampire, and she said that you spoke to Willow." I pause, remembering the incident; I talked to her for less than two minutes and left her in tears. It astonishes me that despite how much I care about her I still manage to hurt her, time and again.
"I haven't told Cordelia about you." I look at his face and the meaning is clear. If he believes I'm controlled by a demon he'll stake me, and Cordelia will never need to know. It's the reason that I came to LA, it might have taken the Angelus incident, but Angel realised how dangerous he was to Buffy and left. I couldn't have found a harsher judge, but that's what I need, because if I survive the night then I can see Willow and Buffy again. I don't know whether I'll be able to stay, but I can see them.
"I told Buffy that if you came to LA I'd take care of things." He really doesn't give me any credit; I can read between the lines as well as the next guy. I cut him off before he finds any other ways to hint at my possible staking tonight. "That's why I came here. I knew that you would do that for us." I emphasis the last word, making it clear that I do not want any harm to come to my friends because of me. That if I am capable of causing them harm then I don't want to remain any more than Angel would want me too. I catch the look in Angels eyes, respect, not something I ever expected to see.
"Wesley has a spell; it's meant to show us exactly what's inside you." He looks at me again, I don't like this look, he's amused, and an amused Angel is not something I think I can deal with. "Come on dead boy." I cannot believe he called me that. He is so dust. I swear if it wasn't for Buffy I would stake him right here.
"The spell is actually quite simple" Wesley was droning away, I'd actually forgotten just how annoying he is. Sure I remember him being extremely British. Actually I also remember my commenting on it earned me a long, long lecture on the difference between being British and English. I guess these things just fade with time. "I burn these herbs, chant a little, and then I will temporarily be granted a second sight, the ability to see what inhabits a person's body. I've already tried it out once, so I know what a regular vampire looks like, as well as Angel, so I should be able to say once and for all that your demon isn't going to suddenly take control." I can't help but smirk a bit, I want to know, once and for all, but from what I learnt while visiting Oz, I doubt he's going to see anything inhabiting my body, certainly not what he's expecting.
"Out of interest, what is the difference between Angel and a regular vampire?" "Well with a vampire you see the demon that inhabits their body, while with Angel the demon appears to be contained in a sphere of energy inside his chest." "Wow, pretty creepy" He gets back to his inane chatter as he prepares the ingredients, the smoke from the burning herbs overpoweringly strong. After a short bought of coughing I just stopped breathing, it was just easier. As he starts the chant, I'm surprised to realise that it isn't Latin, although I couldn't work out if the hacking sound of the words was smoke induced or not. Eventually he walks over too me, I stand up self-consciously, while he stares at me with a confused expression.
"That can't be right. I must have made a mistake." He looks over at Angel, now looking even more confused than before. "What do you see?" I'm desperate for him to just confirm what I already suspect. "Just a vampire" I see Angel reaching for his sword and quickly prompt Wesley. "Not the demon inside them?" "No, just you, with a vampires face." I can see Angel now shares Wesley's confused expression. I grin at them. "Want me to tell you why?"
"So I defeated him, his consciousness departed, and my soul kind of absorbed his demonic essence as it where." I had started at the very beginning, and finally got to the end of my story. Both Angel and Wesley looked pretty surprised, Wesley sputtered for a bit and then went off and started leafing through his books, I guess you just can't give up being a watcher, no matter what the council might say.
"So what do you want to do now?" Angel was looking at me intently. "Well if I've passed your evilness test then I thought I could let Cordy know that I'm not dead, at least not in a decomposing, not moving type way." As we were walking out the door I remembered something, and quickly made my way over to Wesley. Quietly I handed him a book that I had hidden in my coat. "I've bookmarked the important bits" I tell him, while opening to the first of them, a description of the curse which was to be placed on a certain vampire. "I need to know if this means what I think it does." Without another word I run to catch up with Angel.
The drive over to Cordy's is quiet; I mean really quiet. Angel talks even less than Oz. It leaves me with very little to do but think. My mind wanders back to the book that I've given Wesley and the shock I felt when reading the folded sheet that I had found between two pages of the book. A note of apology by a young mage to the masters he felt he had betrayed. It seems that the girl Angelus fed on, the gypsy who doomed him to a soul, was the forgiving type. Not only that, but she had a beloved of her own, a young mage who felt that the decree of his elders went against what his beloved would have wanted. He argues that as mortals they had no right to decree eternity on anyone, and so he performed a curse of his own.
Moments before his elders he cursed the vampire who had killed his beloved to know the pain of a soul until he could find true happiness, because while he felt his beloved would have forgiven the vampire, he could not, but he also could not force eternity on any soul. One act of kindness that has caused so much pain, one that has lead that clan to keep a vigil over Angel for over a hundred years, one that brought Jenny Calendar into our lives, and taken her away. But it means more. There are two curses, one we know about, it's the one that released Angelus upon us, but there's another, one that's for eternity, and we don't know which one Jenny found.
We pulled up outside Cordy's apartment at about 11 o'clock and made our way up. Angel knocked on her door while I stayed down the hallway, I saw the door open and he went in, I don't know what he's going to say, just that I should wait five minutes before I knock. I stand there staring at my watch, as each second passes I get more and more tense. I have no idea what Cordelia will say, how she will react. I don't know what I can say to her, and I don't actually know how I'm going to react.
Checking my watch again I walked over to her door and knock. The door opens and Cordy stands there open mouthed. What ever Angel told her I'm guessing it wasn't 'Xander's a vampire and he's about to show up at your door'. She looks over to Angel and back to me, I can almost see the wheels whirring in her brain.
"Are you going to come in?" She asks it as a question, finding out what she's dealing with, Cordy always was smarter than people gave her credit for. "Not without an invite I'm not. But Wes gave me the evil test, I'm clean." I smile, trying to relieve the tension. It's not going to work. She's still sizing me up, trying to decide what to make of me. "How do I know he's not evil?" She's pointing at Angel. "Look at him" I point to Angel "He's brooding, Angelus never brooded, and if there's one thing you can say about the guy, he used to enjoy himself." I give her another grin and I almost get one in return, but she quickly conceals it. I see her grabbing a coat, bag, stake, and cross. "Do you want to go get some coffee?"
She's just walking over the threshold when I see her pupils contract and the muscles in her head tense, I'm already starting to catch her when her legs buckle and she screams in pain. I don't know what's happening, so I just stand here holding my ex-girlfriend while she convulses against me. Eventually she pulls away, grabbing my hand she walks back into her apartment, pulling me across the threshold. Guess that works as an invitation. She sits down on the couch. Angels got her some aspirin and water, so I guess this happens a lot. He's sitting there now, waiting for something. Cordelia takes the aspirin and starts to describe what she saw in her 'vision'. Guess I'm not the only one who's changed.
It's refreshing, being part of the good fight again. Even though I've only been gone from it for about a week. For a while I doubted that I could return to this life. Thanks to Cordy's vision I'm seeing that no matter how my reunion with my friends goes, I will always have purpose. I'm not sure when I started thinking of fighting the forces of darkness as a calling. I guess sometime during the whole mayor fiasco, I realised that I couldn't give up the fight anymore than Buffy could. It may not be a calling in the same way as it is for her. In many ways I've chosen this path, but in some way it has also chosen me. I couldn't leave now, not ever. So I find myself in a warehouse, fighting vampires. It's good to know I can make a real difference in a fight now. On many occasions Buffy has referred to me as her key guy, but I've known that when it comes to the fighting I'm more of a casualty waiting to happen. Hell look at me, I'm a casualty that DID happen.
But now I feel the flow of the fight, I know where my body is and what it's doing. I can really see what my opponent is doing and I have the instincts to prevent it, to retaliate. So this is how it is, I duck under a blow aimed for my jaw, as the vampires arm sails over my head I stand up, grasping his arm in my hands and throwing him to his back, thrusting a wooden stake into his chest as he hits the ground. I look around me as I dodge the blows from two more vamps, Angel is holding his own, but Wesley looks like he's barely holding off the two vampires attacking him. As one of the attacking vamps lunges for me I let myself fall backwards, at the last moment I twist around and place my hands on the stone floor while my foot connects with the vamps chest, he lands six feet away, knocking both Wesley's attackers to the floor. I stake my other attacker as I hear the whoosh of an exploding vamp behind me, Wesley finishing of one of his. The remaining vampires are all despatched relatively easily. They were all fledglings, I recognise from knowledge deep inside me, the master vampire was not here.
Wesley's looking through the books on one side of the warehouse. I can sense an increasing anxiety from him, and I'm not sure how I know, I think it's the vampire sense of smell, I'm still trying to get used to what it'll tell me. I sniff the air experimentally, there's something there, something I know from before. But I couldn't sense it then, I think, trying to place where I know this scent from. Willow, Giles, Amy, Jenny, even Ethan and Druscilla, all had this scent, all had magic. I speak aloud, realising just how bad this is.
"Why are vampires using magic?" "What? How can you tell?" Wesley's spooked, I'm guessing those books he's looking at are spell books and I'm guessing they're not good spells. "The smell" Angel answers for me, he's looking around the warehouse, I can tell he's realised something important, so I ask. "What is it?" "I think I've heard about these vampires. There have been rumours about a Warlock vampire trying to build an army. I've not been able to find any trace of him though." "Great, so what does this guy want?" Why did I ask that? Anybody that's been paying the slightest attention to my life knows what the answer is. In the words of one of the most esteemed thinkers of our time: 'the same thing we do every night. Try to take over the world!' "I think they're going to try to open a portal to hell." Great one Wesley, already figure that out myself. "Ok, so how are they going to do that?" Simple question. If we can figure out how then we can stop them. Easy. I wish. "From what I can work out, I think they're planning to resurrect a demon by the name of Acathla."
Once upon a time I would have paid good money to see the pained expression on Angels face. I have to give him credit though, he's done good, he's helped my friends, and he's helped me. Now I look at him and he's haunted, much more than before. I can't imagine what going through his head, the look on Buffy's face as she sent him to hell perhaps? I can see he's not going to be much help right now, and Wesley hasn't noticed, so I start to take charge.
"What do they need to do that?" "Um, it looks like the usual herbs, powders, oh, a very rare type of enchanted orb, and part of the remains of Acathla." "Do you know where they'll perform the ritual?" I have my suspicions, I just need his confirmation. "It looks like it will be held, um, something to do with the blood of the worthy being spilt? I'm not sure, but I'm sure with some time." I cut him off, I know enough. "Ok, you and Angel track down these vampires, try to stop them before they can perform the ritual, I'll round up the cavalry so that we can be waiting for them." "But how do you" I cut him off again, I look to Angel and whisper. "Cordy will fill you in. Let Giles know if you find anything" I walk over to Angel; he raises his eyes to mine when I place my hand on his shoulder. After a few seconds I see him pushing down the guilt and he appears to be fine again. "You catch the vamps and I'll be in Sunnydale, just in-case." A look of understanding passes between us and then I'm off, I don't want to waste a second; it'll be a struggle to make it to Sunnydale before daybreak.
I eventually find a way into a building with payphones, I've already spent half the day walking around the sewers and people are definitely keeping their distance from me. I dig through my wallet and find the Angel Investigations card that Cordelia gave me the last time I visited LA, I let the phone ring for a while before hanging up, but there clearly isn't anyone in. I try Cordy's home number, but get a similar response. I start to head back to the sewer access, but I've come up with an idea to delay getting back into my sewer groove for a few minutes. I head back the phones and dial a familiar number, this time it rings three times before getting answered.
"Hello, Summer's residence." I wince as I hear the voice, maybe this wasn't my best plan ever. "Um, hi Ms Summers, err, is Buffy around?" "Xander?" Her voice carries a tone of malice, not that I'm surprised after what she went through with Angelus. "Uhm" I'm really not sure what to say, "did Buffy say anything about my condition?" "I was at your funeral; I doubt there's much to add." I wince at her tone of voice, Joyce Summers has done more for me than either of my natural parents put together, and I really don't like causing her pain, anymore than I want to cause Buffy, Willow, or Giles pain. "Ms Summers, you don't have to tell Buffy I called, but if you do, can you tell her that I'll never hurt her, I'll never give her a reason to regret my death." I can hear her tone soften at my words, and what she says next makes my heart break. "Xander, I know my daughter, and there will never be a day she does not regret failing to protect you." Silent tears make their way down my cheeks as she continues. I try to let her know that Buffy never failed me, not once in all the time I've known her, that without her I would never have had the strength to face my demons, both real and personal. But my throat is tight and I can't get any words out. "I'll let her know you called, I hope your ok Xander." A last thought strays through my mind. "Joyce, what was the service like?"
I spent an hour after dark searching around for the address on Cordy's business card. Then I ended up running into an alley after hearing a struggle. Now I have a corpse at my feet and Angel is bearing down on me with death in his eyes, who says death has to be the end of my bad luck string, nope for Xander Harris it's just the beginning! I put my hand up to indicate for him to halt. At least he does that, but it doesn't stop him mouthing off at me. Dammit! I know I disturbed whatever did this when I came into the alley. I didn't see it but I know it's still here, I can smell it. And if Angel would shut up for a second I could probably hear it.
The slightest hiss from above me is all I need to pinpoint it and I leap with all my strength, pushing off against the wall to get me extra height. I just manage to grab the things tail as it tries to escape up the wall. As gravity starts to bring us back down I twist so that its body is between me and the ground. I marvel at the sheer control I have over my body since becoming a vampire. No tripping over my feet or knocking over glasses anymore, every action I take is perfectly controlled, much like my landing, which involves me crushing the ribcage of my opponent whilst rolling off him and to my feet. I take a look at the demon in question, a small green scaly thing which is already turning into grey mush. I brush off my shirt and look at Angel. "You were saying something?"
"So how much do you know about what happened?" It's the only way I can think to start this conversation. He hasn't tried to stake me so he's at least keeping an open mind. "Well Cordelia and Wesley went to your funeral, I sent some flowers" My surprise obviously shows, although he mistakes the reason as he adds "it was during the day." I really hadn't expected Angel to show any real interest in my death at all, I don't really know what to do with the information. "Buffy phoned me a few days ago, she told me about you grave being disturbed and the girl you saved from a vampire, and she said that you spoke to Willow." I pause, remembering the incident; I talked to her for less than two minutes and left her in tears. It astonishes me that despite how much I care about her I still manage to hurt her, time and again.
"I haven't told Cordelia about you." I look at his face and the meaning is clear. If he believes I'm controlled by a demon he'll stake me, and Cordelia will never need to know. It's the reason that I came to LA, it might have taken the Angelus incident, but Angel realised how dangerous he was to Buffy and left. I couldn't have found a harsher judge, but that's what I need, because if I survive the night then I can see Willow and Buffy again. I don't know whether I'll be able to stay, but I can see them.
"I told Buffy that if you came to LA I'd take care of things." He really doesn't give me any credit; I can read between the lines as well as the next guy. I cut him off before he finds any other ways to hint at my possible staking tonight. "That's why I came here. I knew that you would do that for us." I emphasis the last word, making it clear that I do not want any harm to come to my friends because of me. That if I am capable of causing them harm then I don't want to remain any more than Angel would want me too. I catch the look in Angels eyes, respect, not something I ever expected to see.
"Wesley has a spell; it's meant to show us exactly what's inside you." He looks at me again, I don't like this look, he's amused, and an amused Angel is not something I think I can deal with. "Come on dead boy." I cannot believe he called me that. He is so dust. I swear if it wasn't for Buffy I would stake him right here.
"The spell is actually quite simple" Wesley was droning away, I'd actually forgotten just how annoying he is. Sure I remember him being extremely British. Actually I also remember my commenting on it earned me a long, long lecture on the difference between being British and English. I guess these things just fade with time. "I burn these herbs, chant a little, and then I will temporarily be granted a second sight, the ability to see what inhabits a person's body. I've already tried it out once, so I know what a regular vampire looks like, as well as Angel, so I should be able to say once and for all that your demon isn't going to suddenly take control." I can't help but smirk a bit, I want to know, once and for all, but from what I learnt while visiting Oz, I doubt he's going to see anything inhabiting my body, certainly not what he's expecting.
"Out of interest, what is the difference between Angel and a regular vampire?" "Well with a vampire you see the demon that inhabits their body, while with Angel the demon appears to be contained in a sphere of energy inside his chest." "Wow, pretty creepy" He gets back to his inane chatter as he prepares the ingredients, the smoke from the burning herbs overpoweringly strong. After a short bought of coughing I just stopped breathing, it was just easier. As he starts the chant, I'm surprised to realise that it isn't Latin, although I couldn't work out if the hacking sound of the words was smoke induced or not. Eventually he walks over too me, I stand up self-consciously, while he stares at me with a confused expression.
"That can't be right. I must have made a mistake." He looks over at Angel, now looking even more confused than before. "What do you see?" I'm desperate for him to just confirm what I already suspect. "Just a vampire" I see Angel reaching for his sword and quickly prompt Wesley. "Not the demon inside them?" "No, just you, with a vampires face." I can see Angel now shares Wesley's confused expression. I grin at them. "Want me to tell you why?"
"So I defeated him, his consciousness departed, and my soul kind of absorbed his demonic essence as it where." I had started at the very beginning, and finally got to the end of my story. Both Angel and Wesley looked pretty surprised, Wesley sputtered for a bit and then went off and started leafing through his books, I guess you just can't give up being a watcher, no matter what the council might say.
"So what do you want to do now?" Angel was looking at me intently. "Well if I've passed your evilness test then I thought I could let Cordy know that I'm not dead, at least not in a decomposing, not moving type way." As we were walking out the door I remembered something, and quickly made my way over to Wesley. Quietly I handed him a book that I had hidden in my coat. "I've bookmarked the important bits" I tell him, while opening to the first of them, a description of the curse which was to be placed on a certain vampire. "I need to know if this means what I think it does." Without another word I run to catch up with Angel.
The drive over to Cordy's is quiet; I mean really quiet. Angel talks even less than Oz. It leaves me with very little to do but think. My mind wanders back to the book that I've given Wesley and the shock I felt when reading the folded sheet that I had found between two pages of the book. A note of apology by a young mage to the masters he felt he had betrayed. It seems that the girl Angelus fed on, the gypsy who doomed him to a soul, was the forgiving type. Not only that, but she had a beloved of her own, a young mage who felt that the decree of his elders went against what his beloved would have wanted. He argues that as mortals they had no right to decree eternity on anyone, and so he performed a curse of his own.
Moments before his elders he cursed the vampire who had killed his beloved to know the pain of a soul until he could find true happiness, because while he felt his beloved would have forgiven the vampire, he could not, but he also could not force eternity on any soul. One act of kindness that has caused so much pain, one that has lead that clan to keep a vigil over Angel for over a hundred years, one that brought Jenny Calendar into our lives, and taken her away. But it means more. There are two curses, one we know about, it's the one that released Angelus upon us, but there's another, one that's for eternity, and we don't know which one Jenny found.
We pulled up outside Cordy's apartment at about 11 o'clock and made our way up. Angel knocked on her door while I stayed down the hallway, I saw the door open and he went in, I don't know what he's going to say, just that I should wait five minutes before I knock. I stand there staring at my watch, as each second passes I get more and more tense. I have no idea what Cordelia will say, how she will react. I don't know what I can say to her, and I don't actually know how I'm going to react.
Checking my watch again I walked over to her door and knock. The door opens and Cordy stands there open mouthed. What ever Angel told her I'm guessing it wasn't 'Xander's a vampire and he's about to show up at your door'. She looks over to Angel and back to me, I can almost see the wheels whirring in her brain.
"Are you going to come in?" She asks it as a question, finding out what she's dealing with, Cordy always was smarter than people gave her credit for. "Not without an invite I'm not. But Wes gave me the evil test, I'm clean." I smile, trying to relieve the tension. It's not going to work. She's still sizing me up, trying to decide what to make of me. "How do I know he's not evil?" She's pointing at Angel. "Look at him" I point to Angel "He's brooding, Angelus never brooded, and if there's one thing you can say about the guy, he used to enjoy himself." I give her another grin and I almost get one in return, but she quickly conceals it. I see her grabbing a coat, bag, stake, and cross. "Do you want to go get some coffee?"
She's just walking over the threshold when I see her pupils contract and the muscles in her head tense, I'm already starting to catch her when her legs buckle and she screams in pain. I don't know what's happening, so I just stand here holding my ex-girlfriend while she convulses against me. Eventually she pulls away, grabbing my hand she walks back into her apartment, pulling me across the threshold. Guess that works as an invitation. She sits down on the couch. Angels got her some aspirin and water, so I guess this happens a lot. He's sitting there now, waiting for something. Cordelia takes the aspirin and starts to describe what she saw in her 'vision'. Guess I'm not the only one who's changed.
It's refreshing, being part of the good fight again. Even though I've only been gone from it for about a week. For a while I doubted that I could return to this life. Thanks to Cordy's vision I'm seeing that no matter how my reunion with my friends goes, I will always have purpose. I'm not sure when I started thinking of fighting the forces of darkness as a calling. I guess sometime during the whole mayor fiasco, I realised that I couldn't give up the fight anymore than Buffy could. It may not be a calling in the same way as it is for her. In many ways I've chosen this path, but in some way it has also chosen me. I couldn't leave now, not ever. So I find myself in a warehouse, fighting vampires. It's good to know I can make a real difference in a fight now. On many occasions Buffy has referred to me as her key guy, but I've known that when it comes to the fighting I'm more of a casualty waiting to happen. Hell look at me, I'm a casualty that DID happen.
But now I feel the flow of the fight, I know where my body is and what it's doing. I can really see what my opponent is doing and I have the instincts to prevent it, to retaliate. So this is how it is, I duck under a blow aimed for my jaw, as the vampires arm sails over my head I stand up, grasping his arm in my hands and throwing him to his back, thrusting a wooden stake into his chest as he hits the ground. I look around me as I dodge the blows from two more vamps, Angel is holding his own, but Wesley looks like he's barely holding off the two vampires attacking him. As one of the attacking vamps lunges for me I let myself fall backwards, at the last moment I twist around and place my hands on the stone floor while my foot connects with the vamps chest, he lands six feet away, knocking both Wesley's attackers to the floor. I stake my other attacker as I hear the whoosh of an exploding vamp behind me, Wesley finishing of one of his. The remaining vampires are all despatched relatively easily. They were all fledglings, I recognise from knowledge deep inside me, the master vampire was not here.
Wesley's looking through the books on one side of the warehouse. I can sense an increasing anxiety from him, and I'm not sure how I know, I think it's the vampire sense of smell, I'm still trying to get used to what it'll tell me. I sniff the air experimentally, there's something there, something I know from before. But I couldn't sense it then, I think, trying to place where I know this scent from. Willow, Giles, Amy, Jenny, even Ethan and Druscilla, all had this scent, all had magic. I speak aloud, realising just how bad this is.
"Why are vampires using magic?" "What? How can you tell?" Wesley's spooked, I'm guessing those books he's looking at are spell books and I'm guessing they're not good spells. "The smell" Angel answers for me, he's looking around the warehouse, I can tell he's realised something important, so I ask. "What is it?" "I think I've heard about these vampires. There have been rumours about a Warlock vampire trying to build an army. I've not been able to find any trace of him though." "Great, so what does this guy want?" Why did I ask that? Anybody that's been paying the slightest attention to my life knows what the answer is. In the words of one of the most esteemed thinkers of our time: 'the same thing we do every night. Try to take over the world!' "I think they're going to try to open a portal to hell." Great one Wesley, already figure that out myself. "Ok, so how are they going to do that?" Simple question. If we can figure out how then we can stop them. Easy. I wish. "From what I can work out, I think they're planning to resurrect a demon by the name of Acathla."
Once upon a time I would have paid good money to see the pained expression on Angels face. I have to give him credit though, he's done good, he's helped my friends, and he's helped me. Now I look at him and he's haunted, much more than before. I can't imagine what going through his head, the look on Buffy's face as she sent him to hell perhaps? I can see he's not going to be much help right now, and Wesley hasn't noticed, so I start to take charge.
"What do they need to do that?" "Um, it looks like the usual herbs, powders, oh, a very rare type of enchanted orb, and part of the remains of Acathla." "Do you know where they'll perform the ritual?" I have my suspicions, I just need his confirmation. "It looks like it will be held, um, something to do with the blood of the worthy being spilt? I'm not sure, but I'm sure with some time." I cut him off, I know enough. "Ok, you and Angel track down these vampires, try to stop them before they can perform the ritual, I'll round up the cavalry so that we can be waiting for them." "But how do you" I cut him off again, I look to Angel and whisper. "Cordy will fill you in. Let Giles know if you find anything" I walk over to Angel; he raises his eyes to mine when I place my hand on his shoulder. After a few seconds I see him pushing down the guilt and he appears to be fine again. "You catch the vamps and I'll be in Sunnydale, just in-case." A look of understanding passes between us and then I'm off, I don't want to waste a second; it'll be a struggle to make it to Sunnydale before daybreak.