Angel tapped his fingers on the desk and fidgeted in his chair, unable to conceal his growing frustration. He had been sitting there for a good twenty minutes, watching as Wes talked to secretary after secretary after secretary, and just when it seemed that the last barrier had finally been overcome, a new one had risen.
Wes closed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Giles, we're not… Yes, I know that Wolfram and Hart… Look, if you just… I just need to talk to her!" he snapped, his voice suddenly rising to match his frustration.
"Hello? Giles?" -- Wes stared at the phone in shock. When he turned to the others, he looked floored. "He hung up on me."
"He hung up on me," he repeated quietly, and Fred stood up and walked towards him, gently taking the receiver from his hand and hanging up.
She rubbed his shoulders while he stared dejectedly at the phone, and Angel frowned, his lips pressed in a thin line as he looked at Spike: the boy was lying on his stomach across the room, with a sheet of paper and a box of crayons, absorbed in his drawing and blissfully oblivious to the grown ups' hardships.
"Son of a…"
"Language!" Wes and Fred warned the vampire in one voice, gesturing frantically towards Spike.
"Oh, please, he knows more swear words than the two of you put together!" Angel protested tiredly, and Fred gave him a sympathetic look, already mollified by the weary look on his face. She couldn't really blame him for his outburst, not when she herself felt like taking the first flight to England just to give a certain Watcher a piece of her mind.
Fred looked from Angel to the drawing that was sitting on his desk, portraying the archetypical happy family and their white picket fence house… with padlocks almost the size of the chained doors and windows, "to keep the monsters out". She sighed and took her eyes off the drawing to meet Wes' equally concerned look.
"If Giles won't listen to you, do you think that, maybe… someone else…" -- Fred's voice trailed off and she shuffled her feet, unable to sustain Wes' look.
"You mean, my father?" he finished the sentence for her with a sad, humorless smile. "We should be so lucky."
There was a dejected silence in the room as the three of them sat there and just looked at each other, feeling that they had reached a dead end.
"This isn't right." -- Fred suddenly straightened up, taking her hands off Wesley's shoulders.
"So, Giles won't tell us how to contact Willow." -- her expression was determined as she started to pace back and forth across the room, counting on her fingers -- "Buffy is unlisted, Xander has this hermit thing going on..."
Fred stopped in the middle of the room, her hands on her hips and her brow furrowed in thought.
"There must be someone else who knows how to reach Willow," she muttered slowly. "Someone who doesn't go by the book, who won't prejudge us because of our unconventional ways."
- x x x x x -
"Hey, Angel." -- Faith cradled the receiver between her shoulder and her ear while she opened the beer bottle and closed the refrigerator door behind her with a kick -- "Long time no see. Word around is that you've made it big in life," she added as she headed back to the living room, "office with a view and a parking place close to the elevators."
Angel couldn't refrain himself from grinning in relief at the easy tone of the wayward slayer's voice. One of his first acts as CEO of Wolfram and Hart had been to see that Faith's criminal files got "lost" in the system, as a belated thank you gift for the part she had played in reensouling him a few months before. Now, as he explained their predicament to Faith, he pondered that it took a redeemed rogue to know one, and that alliances forged in the fight for redemption didn't break down easily.
Fred smiled brightly when she saw Angel reach out for paper and pen and start to write down the numbers that Faith was dictating to him. She felt someone tugging on her sleeve and looked down to see Spike standing beside her, handing her his latest drawing.
"This one is you," the boy informed her, pointing at a figure with dark hair that went almost to her waist. "And this is Wes," he added, pointing at the other figure, whose identity was pretty much given away by the glasses and the big book in his right hand… the one that wasn't holding Fred's hand.
"And this," Spike proceeded while Fred blushed a little and Wes made a big deal of cleaning his already spotless glasses, "is Knox."
Fred raised her eyebrows as he looked at the rather amorphous form that lay beneath her and Wes' feet.
"Really?" she asked hesitantly.
"Yep," Spike said, nodding his head. "I skinned him to make a new rug for your house," he told her conversationally, "and fed the flesh to the dog."
"Spike, we don't feed people to the dog," Angel said mildly, not raising his eyes from the phone as he dialed Willow's number.
"Not people," Spike patiently corrected him. "Knox."
"Maybe you should talk to her," Angel said, handing the phone to Fred. His cell phone rang and he looked at the display, standing up as he told them: "I need to take this. If she agrees to help, tell Harmony to book her in for the first flight to Los Angeles. Oh, and Wes," -- he started to leave the room, then stopped at the doorway -- "the raid to the ghouls' lair is scheduled for 11am: do we have those amulets ready?"
"They're in my office," Wes said, standing up. "I'll get them to you."
"Be good," he told Spike before leaving for his office. He hesitated for a split second before adding without much conviction: "Don't feed Knox to the dog."
- x x x x x -
"Knox, for God's sake, he won't bite you again!" Fred pleaded with her assistant as he stood at the doorway, loath to enter the laboratory. "And I need your help with this experiment."
"Yeah, Knox," Spike said from his place perched on a stool, merrily dangling his legs. "Don't be such a Nancy boy."
"We have a lot of work to do today," Knox grumbled, unwillingly crossing the threshold and taking the longest route to the sterilizer in order to avoid getting anywhere near Spike. "Why should you be the one stuck with babysitting duty?"
"I'm not babysitting," Fred quickly said, arching her eyes at Knox as Spike's eyes narrowed ominously, "I'm keeping him company. Angel and Gunn are out on a field mission, Harmony is helping Lorne with the preparations for next week's Katooga ritual and Wes has a lot of paperwork to do: Spike would be bored with him."
She took a wood box from the cabinet and placed it on the counter before Spike.
"Now," she told the boy, "Knox and I do have a lot of work to do today, but if you behave well and don't get into trouble," -- she opened the box, revealing several stones of different colors -- "and give us a little help sorting these stones by color, I believe I can squeeze in some time after lunch to build a real working volcano with you."
"A volcano?" -- Spike's eyes widened in childish wonder -- "A real one, with lava and everything?"
"Yes." -- Fred nodded her head in confirmation, smiling at his enthusiasm, and also because she felt rather proud of her little stratagem: the stones didn't really need any sorting, but the task should keep the boy busy until Wes came to pick him up.
- x x x x x -
Forty minutes later, Fred couldn't help but smile in sympathy as she looked at the deep furrow on Knox's brow. True to their deal, Spike had been dutifully sorting the stones by color and placing them in the glass jars she had given him, but he had also been prattling nonstop about pixies and goblins and leprechauns and whatnot. In the previous evening Wesley had managed to find a book with pictures suitable for a five year old, and it seemed that Spike had soaked up magical trivia like a sponge.
"Brownies are hairy and they have brown skin," Spike told them, throwing a blue stone into the jar with its peers. "And they dress in brown, too. Wes told me that."
"Well, that's interesting," Fred said with a smile. She didn't see Knox grit his teeth as the words 'Wes told me that' were said for the umpteenth time that morning.
"And goblins…"
"Just a second, sweetie," Fred said, holding up her hand as the phone began to rang. "Practical Science Department, Fred speaking," she said, picking up the phone.
"Uh hum," she muttered, checking the numbers on a notepad as she listened to her interlocutor, while Spike worked in silence, clearly not considering Knox worth sharing his knowledge with. "Yes, that's right. Yes, it's… what?" -- Spike and Knox looked at Fred as her voice suddenly rose in alarm -- "No, no, no, you can't do that. You can't mix an osmium salt with… Yes, I'm sure that it's an osm… Never mind, I'm going there."
"I'll be right back," Fred told Knox and Spike as she hastily hung up.
"I'm going with you!" was the prompt and unanimous response, making her stop on her tracks and give them an alarmed look.
"Sweetie," she said, turning to Spike, "I can't take you to Lab C-2 with me. It's…" -- she cringed at the idea of a warlike five-year-old boy wandering among the magical weapons they developed there -- "not a good idea. It's, it's…"
Spike cocked his head to the side, giving her a curious look as Fred struggled with the words, unable to tell a lie but knowing that it wasn't a good idea to tell him that she didn't want him anywhere near an especially crafted morning star that could smash a griffon's skull and simultaneously absorb all its powers.
"It's a restricted access area," she finally said brightly as she remembered it. "They have this super fancy iris recognition device there, and they wouldn't let you in. And Knox," she proceeded, arching her eyebrows warningly at her assistant, "has a lot of work to do; he must stay here. With you."
She was relieved when Knox heaved a resigned sigh and accepted his fate.
"Be good," she told Spike before she left in a hurry.
"Everybody keeps telling me that," he pouted.