Chosen One: A Swiftly Falling Darkness
chapter two: no stranger to the nasty stuff
It was late afternoon before the packet was delivered to him.
First, there was the translation which engrossed him until Fred called up and reminded him it was lunchtime.
Then, there was the hour he spent during lunch listening to her and Knox converse in a language Wesley considered as arcane as any demon tongue: technobabble.
Finally, there was the translation that no longer engrossed him, mostly because he couldn't work out if 'kurakhi' translated to 'desire' or just 'hunger' and in his state of mind, he couldn't see that there was much difference anyway.
So when the mailboy came around with a thick package, express-delivered from Hamburg, Germany in Giles' angular scrawl, Wesley grabbed it and took it down to Angel's office.
His interest in the Texan girl wasn't going anywhere, not with the kind of time and energy she was putting into her work here at Wolfram and Hart. Especially not when she was spending all those hours with a younger, more technologically-minded guy who seemed to be just as enamoured of the Texan as he was of his geekdom.
But Wesley's restlessness wasn't just to do with Fred.
The knowledge that there was something out there killing Slayers brought out instincts that would never be fully buried. Part psychological-profile, part cultural encouragement, Watchers had highly-protective instincts towards the girls who were chosen to spearhead the fight against the vampires and demons of the world.
Those instincts were doubled when it came to a Slayer to whom a Watcher was bound by blood and duty.
A Slayer such as Faith.
You didn't lose that, even after five years out.
In the corridors of the firm, people greeted him with nods and calls of 'Good morning.' The old gang from Angel Investigations was well-known – if only by reputation. Wesley nodded at them and kept walking, not in a mood for small talk.
At Angel's office, the secretary glanced at him, almost as if she expected him to have an appointment. Not likely. He walked past her, rapped twice on Angel's door and walked in.
Angel was on the phone.
"So you're sure none of them..."
Wesley pointed back outside towards the secretary's office, but Angel shook his head. "Hang on a minute, Willow, Wesley's here. I'll try to...um...put it on the speaker thing..." His hand hovered uncertainly over several buttons before he pressed one. "Uh...Willow?"
Nothing. He pressed the handset to his ear. "I don't know how... Oh, wait..." He reached out and pressed another button and suddenly the slightly breathless voice of the red-headed girl filled the office.
"...that you can press and that turns it into..."
"It worked," Angel said, as he put the handset back.
"It did? Oh, of course, it sounds all different, now. Kinda like deep, empty caves... Is Wesley there?"
"Good afternoon, Willow."
"Hey, Wesley. How's things in sunny LA? I tried to ask Angel, but he only knows about shady LA."
A smile tilted one corner of his mouth, reluctant, but helpless. "Sunny LA is...sunny."
"Oh well. Sun is good. Sun is always good. No rains of fire?"
"No. Thank goodness."
"No rains of fire here, either. Although, we have this hellmouth that's been burping a bit lately. It makes for unnerving stuff," Willow said, a little breathlessly. "But we're handling it."
He smiled in spite of himself. Willow would always sound like the bookish, uncertain girl to him, no matter how old or powerful in magic she became. "I'm sure you are," he said warmly. "Did Angel tell you about what's happening in Europe?"
"No. Giles called us last night – he told us about the dead Slayers." Her voice was briefly revolted, before she continued in a more normal tone of voice. "Angel said you guys are looking for Faith. She and Principal Wood came with us to Cleveland, but they left for New York and Boston after a week. They were going stay in touch..."
"...but they never did." Wesley frowned. It was almost reassuring to know that the young rogue Slayer had not changed at all in some aspects, at least. "Do you trust this Principal Wood?"
"Robin? He's the son of a former Slayer. Umm...Nikki Wood."
It took Wesley a few minutes to process the name. Then he stared. "The one Spike killed?"
"That's the one. Faith's okay with him. Probably more than okay. They were getting on very well when they left us. I hope they're still alive."
"So do we, Willow," Wesley told her, truthfully. "So do we."
"You're not missing any Slayers?"
"None of the ones we know of. We're keeping an eye out for anything odd here in Cleveland, and I'm checking the latest police reports of nearby cities to see if there's anything happening there."
Wesley remembered the package and brought it up. "I actually came to bring this over," he tossed the packet to Angel. "From Giles." And, speaking of Giles... "Has Giles located the new Slayers called?"
"There aren't any new ones being called," Willow reported. "I performed a finding spell on new Slayers last night. Nothing. Of course, we don't know what enabling all those Slayers did to the balance of everything. I mean, we might have stripped the future of Slayers for all we know, because there aren't any potentials left now that they've all got Slayer powers. But nature abhors a vacuum and I thought that maybe once the potential got turned into Slayers, more potentials would appear. And I'm talking too much again, aren't I...?"
The smile that turned up his mouth was gentle. It was bizarrely comforting to know that her time spent as absolute evil had not changed some essentials of her character. "So you think the line of Slayers is ended?"
"I was hoping you'd know, being an ex-Watcher and all."
His thoughts took a moment to gather, winnowing through the chaff of his memory. "Are you sure there are no new Slayers?"
"As sure as I can be with the spell Giles sent me through Dawn's email."
Wesley thought fast. The Council had possessed a spell to identify a new Slayer when she was called. How Giles had got hold of it, he didn't know, but he was impressed. It was said to be a closely-held secret.
Angel was struggling with the letter and the letter opener, which, Wesley noted, was a silver-chased, Shorshach ceremonial knife. "Willow, I'm afraid there's no telling what the result will be of your turning the potentials into..." Wesley stopped as Angel pulled out the contents of the envelope and he caught a glimpse of what had made Giles so grim over the phone last night. "Dear God..."
Slowly, Angel pushed the photos out across the desk surface, laying them out with a marked care, as though his delicacy could make up for the brutality displayed in their contents.
The bloody wrecks in the photos had once been human girls. The youngest one might have been twelve. Maybe. Judging by the way their lips shrunk back in endless screams amidst their blood-daubed bodies, their deaths had been slow and painful.
Wesley sternly told his lunch to stay put, and tried to do the same with the instincts rising hot and deadly to the surface.
He'd been trained as a Watcher; trained to look after and look out for the Slayer so she could do her job. He hadn't done all that stellar a job while he was a Watcher, but looking at these girls, he couldn't help the wave of rage and anger that flooded his body and mind.
Who'd been looking out for these girls? Who'd been watching over them when they were captured by their enemy, tortured and slaughtered as though they were nothing more than cattle?
He sucked in a harsh breath.
"Wesley? Angel?"
"We're okay," Angel answered with a glance at Wes. "Giles sent us photos of the European Slayers they found."
"Oh," Willow sounded subdued. "How bad is it?"
"Bad," Angel replied. He looked paler than usual
"Can...can you send us a fax? Or even a digital photo..."
Wes found his voice, "Willow, I don't think..."
"Ultimate evil, Wes, remember? I'm not a stranger to the nasty stuff..."
Angel interrupted. "Willow, this is bad... Angelus bad."
For a moment, the men thought they'd convinced her. Then she spoke, and while the voice was still distinctly Willow, the inflections sounded different – as if there was an echo of the abyss.
"Angel, I'm on the second Hellmouth in eight years after spending my whole life on the first. I went evil two years ago, flayed a man alive and tried to end the world. I'm in charge of five slayers who could end up dead, and I'm not seventeen anymore..." Her voice softened, "I need to know this."
They exchanged glances, torn between protecting her and the truth of her words.
Finally, Angel said, "I'll have my secretary courier them to you later today, Willow."
"Thank you. I'll have the girls do some checking of morgues and coroner's labs. If the...uh...bodies are going to turn up anywhere it'll be in there." Willow sounded as though she was expecting them to object.
Neither did. The girls had battled the First, seen their comrades die before their eyes. They already knew life was fragile. As warriors for the Powers, they deserved to know what might be their fate if they weren't lucky.
The two men didn't like it, but they weren't fools.
"We'll do the same out here," Angel said.
"And I just had a thought relating to Faith," Willow added. "When Buffy died, no new Slayers were called - right? Now, with all these potentials-turned-slayers dying, there aren't any new slayers being called."
Hope was a fragile thing. Delicate, and yet so powerful.
"It might be that there can only be one Slayer-rebirth line," the young woman continued. "And Faith's it. Which means that new Slayers aren't being called..."
"...because Faith's still alive," Angel finished off for her.
"I mean, it doesn't locate her," Willow sounded apologetic, as if she hadn't just given both men a sudden infusion of hope, "And it's not certain. But none of the other dead girls had Slayers called after they died, and it makes a kind of sense. We'll probably have to check if there are new potentials happening, but I guess it's better than nothing at all."
They matched gazes. "It is," Wesley said, relieved at the possibilities. "And we'll get our resources to looking for Faith."
"You should be able to do very well with all the dark and evil forces of Wolfram and Hart at your command," Willow said, teasingly.
Again, their eyes met, dark to blue. The Sunnydale gang seemed to either look upon their takeover of Wolfram and Hart as a big joke or a mistake waiting to bite them in the ass. Rather than respond to her comment, they promised to keep her apprised of the situation, and she hung up after extracting an additional promise from Angel about the photos.
The photos.
Wesley forced himself to reach out and spread the dozen or so photos across the desk. He made himself look at the ruin of bodies, faces, spirits. Blood streaked, dark and ugly; skin peeled, red and raw; mouths gaped, open and painful; these girls hadn't just been killed, they'd been massacred.
"Not just dead, but tortured," he muttered. "Why?"
Angel was reading through some sheets of paper, a coroner's report. "A sacrifice of some kind?"
Dark shadows marked points on the hands and skin of the girls and Wesley picked up the nearest photo the better to study it. Was that...?
"Angel, this girl was pierced through the wrists and the feet."
Angel looked up, dark eyes grieving, "All of them were. The coroner found splinters of wood in their backs, and hemp threads around their arms."
"Crucified? Like a religious symbol..." Wesley muttered. He looked back at the dead girl's face in the photo, and for a moment, the profile blurred. He put the sheet down, swiftly and rubbed his eyes.
"They're not easy to look at," Angel said.
It wasn't looking at the corpses that was getting to Wesley. It was the fact that every single one of them was suddenly Faith looking back at him with reproachful eyes.
He didn't mention that to Angel. Instead, he inquired, "Have you tried the New York branch?"
"This morning. They said they'd call back when they had information."
Which effectively meant, 'Forget it.'
The good part about being in control of Wolfram and Hart's LA branch was that they had near-unlimited resources in this corner of the country. The downside was that most of the other branches spread out across the globe were barely civil at the best of times.
"We had contacts in New York before we started working here," Wesley said thoughtfully, already making mental lists of people they could call up and ask to check if there was word about a Slayer on the streets.
"Then we'll use them," Angel pulled open a drawer and began rummaging through it. After a moment, he shut it and began on the next drawer down. Again, nothing. "Damn. I swear that secretary goes through my drawers and 'organises' everything..."
Angel seemed to be making a habit of complaining about his secretary. Wesley glanced back at the closed door into the office antechamber. "If you find her that annoying, why don't you..."
"Six month contract." Angel said shortly as he pulled out what looked like a couple of black books and kept fishing around in the drawer. He glanced up at Wesley, as though it was his fault. "Lilah got her to sign it."
"Oh." He almost winced.
Almost.
His affair with Lilah was still a sore point between him and the others, although they never actually referred to it. Like the time after Justine had cut his throat, when Angel refused to forgive him, it went unmentioned, although not forgotten.
In keeping with the way he dealt with such stuff, Wesley didn't respond to the implied criticism of his ex-lover. He was well aware of Lilah's faults in the eyes of his friend – both real and perceived. Instead, he addressed the problem of Angel's secretary.
"The contract specifies that role?"
"Yes." Angel hauled out a folder filled with ratty-looking pages and began flipping through them. Wesley watched with interest.
For all that vampires were said to be anal and perfectionistic, it seemed that Angel had subscribed to the Cordelia Chase method of filing, which was to say, 'Put it in the filing drawer and maybe we'll be able to locate it at a later date.' Of course, that was probably due to Cordelia's influence on Angel in the earliest years of Angel Investigations.
Wesley pushed back the momentary flash of guilt and anger that he felt at Cordelia's situation, and made a diffident suggestion. "You know, maybe you should get Gunn..."
Angel stopped flipping through the folder. "Wesley, do you really think Lilah would leave a loophole to be exploited?"
"I'm just suggesting you should investigate all possibilities," Wesley said, trying not to sound defensive.
"I have. I'm stuck with her until the contract is up." Angel slammed the folder shut with a snap. "Where is that list?"
In a similar temper, Wesley suggested, "Look under 'N' for 'numbers.'"
As soon as he'd said it, the humour of it caught.
Irritation gave way to amusement. "Or 'P' for 'phone numbers?'"
"'B' for 'big city'?"
"'C for 'contacts.'" Angel stretched out in his chair and their eyes met for a brief, powerful moment.
Then, as swiftly as the mood had come, it was gone. If their shared history sometimes meant times when they turned to each other in memory of another, similar moment, it also meant times when they remembered something uncomfortable and rejected the cue.
Cordelia's absence was one more fragment of another time and place, a different warp and weft in the fabric of time, before the cloth between them had been rent in twain and repaired. And the loose threads still caught in tangles of memory, too painful to leave hanging, but part of the whole weaving.
Wesley was the first to speak into the awkward silence. "I'll check the coroner's office for corpses."
"I'll find the numbers for our contacts in New York," Angel responded, immediately.
He took one last glance at the photos, his mouth twisting in bitter regret and remorse as he looked at the girls who, under better circumstances, would have had someone looking out for them, making sure they didn't get into situations over their heads.
Wesley knew what it meant to fail the girl you'd been sent to guide. She'd spat it in his face as she took her revenge years ago. And he'd sworn he wouldn't fail any Slayer again in his duty towards her - however unofficial.
She was still out there, somewhere. Possibly with someone watching her back. Possibly not.
He made a mental note to ask Giles for information about the son of Nikki Wood. Wesley wanted to know everything about this man who'd accompanied Faith across the length and breadth of the country.
"Faith's still alive," Angel said, breaking into Wesley's thoughts.
In spite of Willow's reassurances, a part of Wesley doubted. "You know that?"
Angel looked down at the photos of the dead Slayers. "No. But Faith's a survivor." He'd said it before, and even then Wesley had heard both the ring of truth and the attempt at reassurance.
She's a survivor.
He knew she was.
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