Chapter 10

"It won't be like dreaming, exactly. We'll both be wide awake."

Michael Wight took a final sip of coffee, set the cup in the sink, and sat down across the kitchen table from Fred. Singh shuffled past them sleepily and returned the celebrated butcher knife to the cutlery drawer. Shafts of morning sunlight crossed the room.

I have to do this, Fred told herself. We need to know what's been done to me; what to expect. The thought of becoming disembodied again terrified her. Still, this wouldn't be the same as the dark place; it was simple astral projection, and Michael was very experienced at it. She had offered to accompany him both as a guide through the Wolfram & Hart building and as a possible link to Illyria (wherever she went. Damn it, Bodysnatcher, when you said you were leaving they didn't know you meant right that second.)

What she wanted most to do was return to Cabin 1 and crawl back into bed. Spike was there still, sound asleep in spite of having been almost pulverized less than nine hours earlier. Wight had come all the way out here, though, and had been exploring every avenue his mind could navigate, and it would be rude as well as foolhardy not to help him search for answers to their problems.

"We don't have much yet on the true situation at Wolfram & Hart. The demon gossip mill is teeming with rumors - there's been a buyout, the Senior Partners have all been assassinated, the firm'll be up and running again in a few days. The best one I've heard is that Mary Kay cosmetics seized control of the property and are making it their new corporate headquarters."

Fred managed a little smile. Behind her, Singh fished something out of a utility closet and disappeared into the motel office.

Michael continued, "If I don't come up with anything this morning, I've still got your two friends down in Phoenix to test. I think I've gotten about as much information through Spike as I'm going to - I saw what he remembered of the Old Ones' cavern, but I still can't get a current vision of it for myself. There may be some kind of cloaking spell around the place."

"I guess it's just as well; I think the telepathy stuff was beginning to creep him out a little."

Michael chuckled. "He said it felt like 'the mental equivalent of having a proctologist's snakelight shoved up your bum for a look 'round.'"

He leaned forward and his voice took on a more serious tone. "Fred, don't do this if you don't want to. It's entirely possible that I can gather information some other way."

The resolve in her face wavered for a moment. Then:

"No, I know it's safe, and I want to find out whatever we can, too."

From the office came the sound of a vacuum cleaner.

Fred and Michael closed their eyes and began to travel: first an odd rippling sensation in Fred's mind as the psychic scanned her memories of the time between the sarcophagus' arrival and her agonized final minutes (Sweet Lord, he groaned inwardly, How did she stand it?), then a shift as he used those memories to locate the W&H building in the present time ("Quite an earthquake you folks set off here; place is a wreck.") He drifted through the rooms and hallways, Fred in tow to give directions. In her lab they found the sarcophagus, empty and abandoned; Michael leaped on it but its current-time image trail dissipated once it reached the British shore. He attempted to see past images and got a weak, jumbled montage of a sexually excited young man in a lab coat, an airplane's cargo hold, and a blonde with a sandwich.

"This was Wesley's office," Fred said as they moved on to another floor. The room was stripped bare; evidently Pryce's books and artifacts had held value for the Senior Partners, or whoever owned the building now. Wight's impressions here were disquieting ones of a functioning but sociopathic individual slowly, quietly descending into madness.

He felt a wave of sadness radiating from Winifred. In sympathy, he moved toward her to offer a condolence...and suddenly a violent, frightening vision gripped him.

Pryce, at his desk, calmly shooting an employee for daring to question an order; shattering his kneecap with a handgun because the man had failed to see the necessity of neglecting all other cases to work solely on researching Miss Burkle's illness. A second vision came: Pryce stabbing a guilt-ridden friend who had unwittingly had a hand in Illyria's release.

He was off his rocker, Michael thought, horrified. HAD to have been. To skewer a grieving man in cold blood, without a trace of remorse... He turned away from the image, then sensed Fred staring in its direction. She was frozen, locked in shock. He didn't have to ask to know she'd seen it all.

"Let's go back now," he said softly, "I can come back here another time."

They opened their eyes. The sunlight tracks had risen and now lay across the kitchen table. Singh's cat lay there, too, gazing at them through slit, unblinking eyes. After a moment it dropped silently to the floor and squatted in its litterbox, closing its eyes completely.

"He stabbed Charles," Fred whispered. "Nobody told me that."

"They might have eventually," Michael suggested. "Maybe they didn't see any point in bringing it up right now. I wouldn't be angry with them for it."

"I'm not." She wasn't. She was simply sick at the thought of what Wesley had done; hadn't known he was capable of going that far-

I DID know, I saw him mutilate his own father's corpse because the man had threatened me.

"Did...did he cripple that staffer?"

"I don't know."

She looked small and empty sitting there, hands folded forlornly in her lap. Finally she looked up with a rueful smile. "This Cracker Jack box just never runs out of toy surprises, does it?"

Michael scrutinized her sympathetically. "Are you going to be all right?"

"Yes..." She bit her lip and straightened in her chair. "Yeah. I will be, God willin' and the creek don't rise."

He smiled a little, too. "It's been a long time since I've heard that old chestnut. Where are you from originally?"

"West Texas. You?"

"Omaha."

"Texas?"

"Nebraska."

Back in her cabin, she took a fresh change of clothes and underwear from the bureau; her return to her body had been marked by an outbreak of perspiration and now she felt as if she'd been dipped in brine and dried. Spike continued to sleep like the dead, although in spite of it he'd somehow managed to knock both the bedcovers and the icepack to the floor.

She shut herself into the bathroom and peeled out of the sticky garments and turned on the shower. When she decided it was loud enough, she sagged underneath the spray until her bottom rested on the tub's floor, and wept.

For twenty minutes the shower faucet ran like a little monsoon as her crying jag gradually lost strength and a sense of peace, of all things, took its place.

God willin'.