CHP 2
Jessie: thanks for your interest and I hope I can surprise you.
Cordelia slowly pulled herself together and began her slow journey back down to the hotel lobby. Wesley stood behind the counter bent over some book, his brow furrowed in concentration. Looking around the lobby she realized Angel was nowhere to be seen. She stepped down to the lobby floor and walked past the circular couch toward his closed office door.
"I wouldn't go in there if I were you." She stopped with her hand on the cool handle. Wesley's voice seemed calm but he always sounded that way when he was immersed in his world of books. She turned to face him and realized he had stopped to wipe his glasses.
"Did he say anything?" Wesley shook his head.
"Just bolted for his door and picked up the phone." He pointed to the flashing light on the front desk phone as Cordelia made her way over to place her head in her hands on the counter top. He took a long look at her body language and slipped his glasses back into place.
"I take it this latest vision carried with a more… personal message?"
"You could say that. It's strange, this happened over a year ago. What would the powers want him to do about it now?" As if to answer her the door to Angel's office burst open and he strode back into the room.
"Is everything alright?" Wesley did a good job of hiding any emotion from his voice, probably because he still had no idea what was going on.
"Hardly. Giles doesn't know where she is and he's got his own problems right now. Apparently Faith woke up a few months ago and they cut some kind of deal."
"So where are you going?" She realized he had grabbed his coat and was heading for the door.
"You two do what you can around here. I'm gonna go try and find her."
"What makes you think she's here?" She didn't ask the other question, what were they going to find that the watcher's council couldn't.
"She hid out here before. After she… After she got expelled." He means after she sent him to hell. But there was no more talking to him as the door closed softly behind him. Cordelia turned back to a puzzled looking Wesley and sighed.
"I'm sorry, but who exactly are we looking for?"
The story took longer than she thought it would to tell him. You'd think a trained watcher would listen more than question every piece of information. Not to mention the gaps in her own memory bogging her down on more than one occasion. Finally she had had enough.
"Look, it's not like the powers gave me back my memory. I got a vision which normally means piecemeal parts of a story. Now deal with it."
"Okay, so what you're saying is that Angel got infected with some kind of demon blood and became human again. It happened while Buffy was here and the two of them spent a whole day together before Angel realized he couldn't give up being a champion and asked the oracles to erase the day?"
"You got it. So now what do we do?" Wesley sighed as though to set the facts more firmly into his mind.
"Well, I suppose we'd better try to find her. I'll have to give my contacts on the council a call and see if they still hate me."
"And I'll try searching online and maybe try and reach Willow for the whole story. I only wish Angel hadn't stormed out of here so quickly. Sounded like something big is going down in sunnydale, if Giles isn't even looking for Buffy anymore."
"There is another possibility." She looked over at him from her place at the computer screen. "If I know Giles, the only way he'd stop looking for Buffy, apocalypse aside, is if he found her and didn't like the results."
"No. This is Buffy. There's no way she's dead." Wesley nodded in agreement, his face displaying all the displeasure he shared for the idea.
"Still, though" he said, "I should probably ask the council if they've heard anything about another slayer being called." Cordelia said nothing and turned back to the computer. Even as the machine was hunting through cyber space for the missing slayer, her own mind was catapulting off in almost as many different directions. A glance at Wesley's back as he bent low over the phone dragged the thought of him into it as well.
Did he feel as violated as she did? Probably not, he wasn't even there when it happened. But it was still like Angel hadn't trusted them with what happened. Shouldn't he at least have told one of us? His own team? The screens formed and changed before her eyes as she narrowed and refined her search and sent her own mind off in a different tangent.
If Angel didn't tell us it would be for his own reasons. Maybe he didn't want to think about it. If he didn't tell anybody else it wouldn't make it real; it really didn't happen. That seemed to fit better with his reaction upstairs. If she were part of the one perfect love for a century and the forbidden fruit wasn't so forbidden for one day that could never really happen in the universe they lived in, what would she do? Wow, this was getting way too complicated.
She scrolled through another listing that wasn't Buffy summers and turned to look at Wesley's retreating back. Well, he hadn't told her anything so it was either no news or bad news. At least he was off the phone. She looked up the number and dialed it carefully, unsure of who would answer.
"Hello?"
"Dawn? It's Cordelia."
"Oh." Such malice. Okay, so she hadn't seen Dawn since she'd left, but she hadn't been that bad when she lived in sunnydale, had she?
"Is Willow around?"
"Hang on." The next voice was Willow's, but it didn't sound like her.
"What do you want, Cordelia?"
"I need to find Buffy."
"We all need to find Buffy. I'll tell you what I know but I'm kind of trying to keep something from finding Dawn."
"How long has she been missing?"
"Last year. She left after her and Riley had some kind of falling out. She took Xander and they broke in to this secret government group called the initiative, they had a base underground by the college. Anyway, she had some really big news to tell him but he didn't believe her."
"Let me guess. She was pregnant."
"How'd you know?"
"It's a whole powers that be vision thing."
"Anyway, turns out that Riley had some kind of… problem… in that area. The government had him on all these experimental drugs and things and one of the side effects was a severe drop in his reproducing ability."
"Couldn't you just say sterile? Okay, so Buffy tells him, he wigs out, and then?"
"She freaks. She starts rampaging through the facility shooting people left and right with that electroshock gun and trying to find records of when they artificially impregnated her and with what."
"Pregnant psycho slayer on the war path?"
"That's not the worst of it. In the end she shoots Riley and leaves him there. Xander tried to stop her and talk some sense but she just hit him and ran off. He dragged Riley out but they never saw her again. She stopped by here and I was the last person who saw her. Well, me and Dawn anyway."
"How's Dawn been? She sounded a little…"
"Better since Faith came out of her coma. She went to visit a lot and was there when Faith woke up."
"Having her sister there probably helped, huh?"
"We'd like to think so. Look, I haven't had to time to look anymore, but if you find Buffy tell her we still think about her. We still want her back. And we could really use her help in all this."
"Thanks, Willow." She hung up the phone and looked up into Wes's face.
"I'm surprised she had so much time to talk to you. According to the council, the situation in sunnydale is not a walk in the park."
"Alright, well what else did you hear?"
"There have been no new slayers called. All magical attempts to locate Buffy have failed or been misdirected. And Faith has taken up the duties of the official slayer under Mr. Giles's tutelage."
"No leads."
"No leads. Did you find anything?" He gestured at the computer.
"If Willow couldn't find her on this thing there's no way I'm going to." She turned off the search and looked back up into the ex-watcher's eyes. "What is it?"
"There's something bigger than a missing slayer going on in sunnydale."
"Like what?"
