Chapter 2
"You're early."
She sat quietly, stiff and upright, not taking her eyes from the TV screen. Illyria sat quietly quite often now, attempting to make sense of the new situation.
She still didn't like it much.
"Didn't take us as long as we thought." Angel crossed the threshold of the tiny apartment, followed by Spike, who dropped his jacket in the corner and began rummaging through the refrigerator. "What's that you're watching?"
"Lifetime Television. Your women are vapid."
Angel sighed and rubbed his eyes tiredly. "I'm gonna take a shower."
As he disappeared into the bathroom, Spike reemerged from the frig's depths, clutching a longneck. He slumped onto the end of the couch opposite Illyria, where a pillow and blanket had been piled in an untidy heap. Beyond the couch a folding cot lay open in a similar unkempt condition. The place was too damn crowded, not designed to house so many people, but it had to serve until...well, until things got better.
God knew, things could be worse. Four against a legion of ghouls and a flying dinosaur had not been good odds. The stinking, screaming, howling Thing that was the Senior Partners could have slaughtered them in their tracks in the alley, could have gotten 'em all and then spread unchecked like a cancer.
And as in uffish thought they stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
They left it dead, and with its head
They went galumphing back.
It hadn't happened that way, though. In fact, there'd been almost no fight at all, because one moment they'd been poised, wired, every nerve screaming and bracing for assault...
And the next moment they were standing in a field in Tempe, Arizona, almost four hundred miles away.
With them were perhaps half a dozen disoriented demonic soldiers and a large portion of the dragon's thorax and head.
The soldiers were easy enough to kill (and the dragon was Dead On Arrival); getting Charles to a hospital before he bled to death was much harder. A driver had spotted them on the roadside and called an ambulance, but Gunn flatlined twice and had only recently been upgraded to Fair Condition. None of them had a clue how they came to be in the field. But for the moment, at least, inexplicably, Wolfram & Hart seemed to be unaware of where they were.
Now they hung at loose ends, not quite certain where to go or how to proceed, waiting for Gunn to recuperate and occupying themselves with vampire-hunting to continue the Good Fight (it was Illyria who suggested removing the cash and pawnables from the demons' pockets before dusting them.)
On the flickering screen, Tori Spelling was in peril from a mysterious stalker or a switched-at-birth baby or perhaps both. Illyria and Spike watched numbly, then: "I'm going out."
Illyria's outings were harmless, a walk to the roof of the building or around the block to work off the claustrophobia that threatened at times to overwhelm her. She rose abruptly and crossed the room.
And collapsed face down on the floor.
"...the hell?" Spike knelt by the prone woman and turned her over, and suddenly a scent, sweet and dear and heartbreakingly familiar, rolled over him like a wave. Illyria's eyes were open, moving wildly; they fixed on Spike and widened in recognition.
Spike's blood turned to ice. He peered into the face, hardly daring to believe what he saw there.
"Fred?"
Then she was gone. The scent vanished, and a stone-eyed Illyria stared up at him suspiciously.
"I don't remember lying down," she announced. She scowled at Spike, as though holding him responsible. Then without another word she got up and walked out the door.
"You didn't stop her?" Angel's gazed swept each end of the empty hallway outside of the apartment. Nothing was there but the usual filthy carpet, peeling paint, and dusty light fixtures.
"Christ, it threw me off guard; I didn't know whether to even SAY anything to her or not!" Spike recognized Angel's dubious expression. "I'm telling you, it was FRED! I fuckin' SMELLED her!"
"You've seen Illyria mimic Fred before. How can you be positive she wasn't doing it again while she was unconscious?"
"Because she can't mimic ODORS. She's here, somewhere, Fred I mean. We've gotta get someone. Willow-"
"We can't risk contacting Willow. The Partners are probably watching them all like hawks; if they thought anyone from Sunnydale knew where we were there's no telling what they'd do to get our location from them."
"Well, that group, then, the one Goat Girl told us about." Spike rifled Angel's coat pockets and found the card the chupacabra had given them. "What've we got to lose? They already know who we are. Maybe there's a witch in the bunch; someone who can at least tell us what's going on."
"What makes you so sure Illyria will cooperate?"
"First, I don't give a shit if she likes it or not. Second, oh yeah, she'll want to go. She didn't like that fainting business one bit. She'll want to get to the bottom of it."
Angel stared silently across the room. Then, "One of us has to stay here, to look after Gunn."
Spike nodded. "Got the flat to yourself for awhile, then. Indigo and I are packin' a bag."
They left Phoenix at dark, in a stale-smelling pickup with a bad transmission (formerly owned by one Aubrey Belkner, recently turned and now part of the grit and sand that graced the floor of his vehicle.) The new occupants were silent for most of the drive, the glow from the dashboard illuminating taut, grim faces. Spike pushed the truck as fast as he dared as the headlights ate into the highway.
At last a turnoff brought them to the outskirts of their destination. Off the shoulder of the road they passed a metal sign bearing the optimistic message
WELCOME TO ASHCRAFT
We May Be Small,
But Watch Us Grow!
Below the inscription the sign was festooned with the insignia of various civic organizations: Elk's Club, Rotary, Civitan. Someone, probably not an Elk but quite possibly an Elk's teenage son, had spray-painted an S over "Ashcraft"'s H and a CK over its FT, then given a second t to the "But" for good measure. A few yards beyond, they saw that the same artist had added to a "JESUS SAVES" billboard the words "AT FIRST FEDERAL SAVINGS & LOAN."
"This burg's shapin' up nicely," Spike muttered. "Directions say the motel where we're meetin' 'em's somewhere down this road...right, here it is."
A driveway led off the road into a circular parking lot. Several old cabins designed to look like enormous teepees, constructed of concrete and painted with gaudy faux Native American symbols, formed a preposterous ring around the parking area. The largest of them bore a neon OFFICE/VACANCY sign and a Coke machine beside its front door. Hovering above the office was another electric sign, almost as old as the cabins: "HAPPY TRAILS TOURIST COURT. AIR-CONDITIONED/COLOR TV. PARK AWHILE AND COOL YOUR INJUN."
"They've got to be fucking kidding."
Author's Note: "Jabberwocky" is from the book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll, 1872. The actual version reads "he" instead of "they."