He wasn't really surprised that she'd found the idea not as appealing. She'd called him a coward, had shouted that he couldn't handle the real world. She'd accused him of dumping her.
She was right for part of that – he was having trouble coping with her world, with demons, vampires and magic. With her having visions of the future. A redhead floating teacups by looking at them and putting magic bubbles around them before they fought shape-shifting aliens. Blood-drinking detectives. Who wouldn't have trouble dealing with all of that?
He still felt guilty.
"Her life is crazy!" He shouted, despite the fact that he was alone in his house.
Looking away from the ceiling corner, Jason found himself staring at a picture of himself and Cordelia at some restaurant, smiling at each other. Somebody had snapped the picture, and it had ended up on page four of one of the gossip magazines, and he remembered hearing her angry voice demanding to know why 'whoever had slapped together a few pictures and called themselves an editor' hadn't been able to take a few minutes to find her name to run with the photo.
He remembered the Fangor beast attacking him on the set, and the way that she had chopped its head off with a sword. How many people in this day and age even knew how to use a sword? She'd used a sword to fight a horse-sized monster on the set, and hadn't even blown the scene, though there had been some improvisation. He certainly didn't run into too many women who could do that sort of thing.
Her other boss was a vampire. Someone… Something that drank people's blood. She fought monsters all the time. She handled being kidnapped by aliens just fine. She claimed… she had visions of the future, and had been willing to let an alien shape-shifting octopus perform brain surgery on her. Cordelia's life terrified him.
He was still going to miss her.
Finally, he dropped onto the couch. "Now what do I do? I can't deal with all of that chaos right now, but I don't think she'd be willing to try things again if I can come to terms with it."
End part62.
For a moment, Wesley felt a pang of jealousy after he handed the telephone to Angel. While Gwen DeMarco was a lovely woman, he wasn't precisely jealous that she was with Angel. It was more… more that he was jealous that Angel had someone, even if he couldn't quite have her as much as he might want. Willow had someone, and while he certainly didn't begrudge her that, he felt painfully aware of the fractured ending of his brief affair with Virginia Bryce. Cordelia… well, Cordelia wasn't dating that insufferable actor any longer, but she'd been trying.
Sometimes he just felt very alone, even amongst his colleagues.
He tried to shake away the thoughts as he walked over to the computer. It was a simple matter to access the company email, and then to find the message from Miss DeMarco, which held the address of her niece's school as well as the picture of the person making them nervous. Studying the picture carefully, Wesley frowned. Something about the man seemed familiar, though he was certain that he'd never actually met him.
He opened another window, and called up a map, with Eastwood Middle school. Slowly, he started to look along the street, hoping to find something on the businesses without actually having to drive over and look. Unfortunately, the bookstore wasn't specifically listed, which would indicate a website.
Looking up, he commented, "I'm going to go gather a bit of information for a case, I should be back in an hour or so."
"Do you need anything?" Willow's voice came from behind a stack of books.
"No, I'll be fine," he assured. "I actually have a suspicion, and I need to get a few names to try to verify the possibility."
It didn't take very long at all until he was on the same street at the school, dark and deserted at this hour. He couldn't keep himself from comparing it to the high school in Sunnydale, where he had first met Cordelia and Willow, not to forget the Slayers. The parking area was smaller, since the students at a middle school would all be too young to drive, though the buildings were a bit larger. At a guess, he thought there might be twice as many students, and he sincerely hoped that this school didn't have a Hellmouth under the library.
There were several houses along the street, interspersed with assorted businesses, a few small restaurants, and a small park with a basketball court and a cluster of tables. His eyes scanned over the coffee shop, noting the sign that proclaimed they had internet. There was a show store, with a number of people moving inside, and a banner proclaiming that there was a sale – all summer shoes 40 off – causing Wesley to shudder. It would take a rampaging Fyarl demon to send him in there, considering the example of Cordelia near a shoe sale. There was a candy store, and a hair salon, and then something else, with evidence of the recent removal of large signs. He moved closer, wondering if this was the store of Gwen's niece's stalker. Painted on the glass of a large window, simple blue letters proclaimed 'Jorkins's Books'.
That name was familiar. Wesley knew that he'd met someone with that name, or perhaps read it somewhere, and that it held a significance, but at the moment, it escaped him. Hoping that he wasn't rushing into a situation, he slipped inside the store, absently noting that it closed at nine in the evening, and that tiny crosses had been carved into the ornamenting around the doorframe. He'd have to ask Angel if that would have an effect on vampires.
The name 'Jorkins' was nagging at him, so familiar that he could almost taste it, but slipping just out of his mental grasp. To his relief, there were other people browsing the bookstore, occupied with the sections of modern fiction, the mysteries, the romances, the horror novels. Towards the back, the shelving changed, with language books, volumes on anatomy, animals, plants, collections of legend and folklore. He knew some of these books, had studied from them for years during his Watcher training.
Wesley had seen enough. Moving back towards the front, he lingered in the horror section for a few minutes, as if he had no other purpose for being here than to look at a few books for casual reading. Over there was the latest in a series written by one of the Watcher-trained men about a decade older than himself, a man who had decided that he hated being a shop-clerk, hated dealing with hordes of children, and as long as he'd studied all of this, he might as well use it. His so-called cover was a horror writer, and it actually paid him well enough that when combined with his Council stipend, he didn't need to have another line of work.
Jorkins was a Watcher family; the stalker was from a Watcher family. That meant that they had some reason to suspect that Gwen DeMarco's niece was a potential Slayer. On the bright side, there wasn't some twisted pervert lusting after her niece. On the other hand, her niece might end up fighting alone against the forces of darkness. Hmmm… Perhaps a pervert would be easier to explain after all?
End part 63.