Here is my final chapter before I wrap everything up in the introduction and head out to where this is going. It is difficult to handle every character separately, but I think it is best for where I'm headed.

Just for clarification, there are going to be flashback, all in sequential order, in this chapter and they are in italics.

Thanks again for all who have taken the time to review and comment on the story.

Get up!

The thought screamed through Angel's head as he struggled to get up, yet try as he may, the vampire couldn't move, let alone get to his feet.

He could hear them coming; hear their talking that consisted of gutteral moans and high-pitched clicks and whistles. Angel wasn't sure where they were exactly, the debris covering him made it nearly impossible to tell where the sounds were coming from. He knew they were close though; he could smell them now.

For the most part, Angel was a bit confused. How had he gotten covered up by all this wood and metal?

"Where are you going?" Spike scream to Angel over the din of the battle.

The initial wave of attackers had been broken, so Angel felt there was no better time to do what he had planned from the moment he had seen the dragon.

"For a ride!" Angel said, pointing to a giant figure circling overhead.

With Hamilton's demon charged blood pounding through his body, Angel made the forty foot leap to the first rooftop easily and the second to the rooftop nearly three times that with almost as little effort. Whatever amount of power the Senior Partners had given the sharp dressed liaison, Angel figured he had drained at least half of it when he had bitten Hamilton. Juiced as he was, Angel knew without a doutt had Hamilton not made a slip of the tongue, he would be nothing but a pile of dust back at Wolfram & Hart. He never would have been able to stand up to that power for that long.

Angel carried two swords, one in each hand, which he had taken from a pair of demons that he and Spike had killed together. He wasn't sure what he was going to do with them, since it was unlikely that the dragon would leave the air and come down and fight in Angel's element.

Looking up to where he had last seen the dragon, Angel watched as it soared away from him, yet it kept the steady cycle that it had for the entire course of the battle. That meant that it would bring it close to Angel's location in less than a minute.

He needed some way to get it close enough to engage it. But how? Looking around the rooftop, Angel suddenly got an idea. Running up to a large television antenna, Angel ripped it from its moorings and then tore the receptors off the end of the twenty foot long shaft.

With that done, all there was to do was wait.

The dragon, just as Angel thought it would, completed its aerial arc close to his current position, approximately fifty away at it's closest.

Jumping up from his hiding spot, Angel took three steps and launched the antenna with all his strength. He had hoped it would catch the flying lizard in the belly, possibly ending the battle before it started, but the dragon, seeing Angel just before the metal javelin reached it, banked hard to the side. The antenna did hit a mark though, just not the one that Angel had hoped for.

The metal spear tore through the dragon's right wing as it passes through and continued somewhere into the night. Angel, who was following fast on the his homemade spear's trail, realized that it wouldn't do any serious damage to the dragon, yet what it did allow was time for Angel it catch up with the beast as it struggled to stay airborn.

Reaching the end of the rooftop nearest the dragon, Angel launched himself into the night.

The voices were closer now and the grating sound of metal against metal being moved seemed to come from directly over Angel.

For the first time since he had gained consciousness, Angel could feel his body again and he wished that he couldn't. Suddenly, Angel remembered something that Spike had once told him "that pain was good. It helped you remember you were alive, especially when you aren't."

If that was the case, Angel felt like he was more alive than he had ever been.

Everything from a dull throbbing to a not-so-dull throbbing covered him from head to toe, but one pain in particular bothered him. His chest felt as if it were on fire. Lifting his head as slightly as the debris would allow him, Angel found a shaft of steel rebar sticking through his chest, only inches from his heart. Not that it would have mattered had it hit his heart, it would have had to be wood to kill him, but as a normal practice, Angel liked to keep anything from piercing his chest be it wood or metal.

Angel tried to move his arms. His right arm was firmly pinned, yet his left felt as if it had some room to move. Moving it around, he felt for any handhold that might allow him some leverage to gain some room, but try as he may, Angel could find any.

Maybe he was on the edge of a hole, maybe a basement or something, yet when Angel turned his head to see what was there he saw only twisted metal and splinted word. If that was the case, then why couldn't he feel his arm? The answer came to him.

The dragon beat it's wing furiously as it realized that it couldn't dislodge Angel and headed for higher ground.

Angel, holding onto the pommel of one sword which firmly embedded into the back of the dragon, just behind the wings, fought to figure out what to do now that he was on the beast just as much as he fought to stay on it.

He knew the dragon was trying to gain an advantage by flying higher. He didn't have to worry about the air thinning since he didn't breath, but the cold in the upper atmosphere could be a problem if they got too high. Plus, if he did figure out how to kill the dragon without falling of the creature and it was too high up, he probably wouldn't survive the fall, demon power buzz or not.

Angel knew he had to slow the dragon's ascent before it was too late, so with his free arm, Angel began to hack away at the beast's left wing. Tendons snapped and splintered with his first two blows and with a dull thud, his third found bone.

The dragon's response came so quickly, Angel didn't have time to respond. He only had time to realize that it had quit trying to fly, or maybe it couldn't, and had snapped its head back towards him.

Why hadn't it done that before was Angel's first thought. Unfortunately, he didn't have time for a second as the dragon spit out a giant gout of flame at the vampire. Still hold onto the sword in the dragon's back, Angel threw himself almost off the dragon to avoid being hit and used his momentum to swing back onto it on the other side.

Hurrying, Angel went back to work on the other wing with the sword he still held, yet something was wrong. It was gone. Had he dropped the sword? It had all happened so fast. To his horror, Angel realized what was wrong as the dragon suddenly banked, it's ascent slowly coming to a halt, and began to head towards the ground.

Angel looked over at where his arm had once been. The area around where the dragon fire had taken his arm off was red and puckered. Why hadn't that killed him? Angel didn't know. Fire certainly could do the trick to a vampire and so could bleeding out, but neither was the case. His arm had been neatly taken off and apparently cauterized at the shoulder, so it was as if the arm simply disappeared.

Spike had lost his hands, but unlike Spike, Angel's arm was gone, so there was no putting it back on.

It was a thought for another time. In truth, the loss of an arm was a little price to pay for what he had faced over the last hour. He was buried under a couple tons of rubble, stuck like a pincushion, and whatever strength that he had stole from Hamilton was wearing off which left him feeling every blow he had received during that time. No, the arm was a small price.

For the time, he had other things to worry about. He would rather be dead that alive if those who he was fighting found him. He doubted that the Senior Partners would settle for him just dead. No, they would want retribution, and for them, dead just wasn't enough.

Angel listened to hear for the sounds of his pursuers and for those who were just moving things above him minutes ago, yet he heard none. He sat there for several minutes straining to hear anything close by, but the only sounds that come were those of battle; some were afar off, some were not.

It was probably twenty minutes later when he finally heard something nearby.

"Angel?"

Angel knew that voice.

"Dad?"