(no subject)
Failure to Communicate
Notes, Part Two, Part Three, Part Four, Part Five (final part)
Failure to Communicate, Part One
Riley walked away from the dorm room with a thousand questions buzzing in his head like angry bees. Buffy had come back from LA more shaken up and upset than even he had been fearing. He didn’t know if this was the reverberation from realizing Angel was still the guy - scratch that - vampire that she loved, or if the vampire had done something to upset her. Either way, she had felt like someone wounded to him; someone damaged. He had an overwhelming urge to punch a wall. Some of it was anger with himself, because he hadn’t asked the right questions, but perhaps that was because he had been afraid of hearing the answers, and nothing about the look in her eyes had helped with that fear.
He had been stupid not to realize what it was that Buffy was leaving out as she told him all about the guy she had loved - despite being a vampire - who had turned into the evil killer who had terrorised her friends because of a curse. A curse that she had triggered when they….
Riley grimaced. It hurt, and not because Buffy had slept with another guy before him - he’d known about Parker and assumed - even hoped, as the guy was such a waste of space - he wasn’t her first. She wasn’t his first either. That wasn’t what was bothering him, it was the thought of Buffy and Angel getting together being of such ground-shaking significance that it could trigger a curse which turned a good guy bad. That was something, however disturbing, that was proof of a connection. Maybe love shouldn’t be going insane and trying to kill a girl’s nearest and dearest, but, damn, no one could say it wasn’t a tangible measurement of…something. He wasn’t sure how he could compete with that. It wasn’t even as if he could become a serial killer and win the really really caring that much prize because the other guy had got there first. Even if he started dismembering people to prove how much she meant to him, it would still be passé.
He winced at the high level of stupidity currently swilling around inside his brain. Angel having a curse shouldn’t trigger this amount of crazy in him, should it? Finding that phonebooth and calling Xander was also probably stupid, but he did it anyway, hoping that the delay in Xander answering wasn’t because he was having sex with that strange Anya girl. He really didn’t want to be thinking about anyone else’s sex-life, right now, in fact, he wasn’t sure he even wanted to be thinking about his own.
“Hey…?”
It was relief to hear Xander’s voice. “I saw Buffy,” Riley said.
“That’s good.” A pause. “That’s not good?”
“She seems pretty upset.”
“Well, Angel will do that to a girl. Every time, and I mean every single time. Just one of the many reasons why I so often want to stab him with a piece of pointy wood.”
“I didn’t ask the right questions. I don’t think I helped. Also - I feel like a clown in these pants.”
“I’ll bring your clothes over.” Xander added tentatively: “Do you want me to come via Buffy’s dorm room - see how she’s doing?”
“Would you?”
“Sure. I’ll be right over.”
It was probably just as well that Xander was on the other end of the phone at the moment instead of in the room, or Riley would have been forced to hug him. He stepped out of the phone booth and made his way back to the ruined wreckage of Sunnydale High School, the place where Buffy had lived out a whole life before she knew him, that included being a Slayer, and sleeping with a vampire, and having her heart broken into so many pieces that Riley wasn’t sure that he was going to be enough to fix it.
***
Sitting in the wreckage of the High School with pieces of crispy fried Mayor spattered around him, Riley kept turning it over in his head. Xander had come over and brought him clothing and an update, after what sounded like a fairly unsatisfactory meeting with Buffy and more questions to puzzle over. It seemed that she had helped Faith, despite everything the girl had done to her; risked her neck for a fellow Slayer who had done her every kind of harm; the link between them as Slayers still unbroken despite betrayal and attempted murder and a body swap. He had thought that should provide closure of a kind. Buffy had gone to LA to save Angel from Faith, and had ended up saving Faith from the Watchers’ Council. Any guilt she must have felt about being willing to sacrifice Faith for Angel the previous year must surely have been dealt with? But Buffy hadn’t acted like someone who had achieved closure, more like someone who had been wounded so deeply it might not heal for a very long time.
He was blaming Angel for that.
There was also the fact that, little as Xander had got out of her about what had taken place, it had still been ten times more information than she had offered to Riley.
“You okay?”
He wasn’t sure why Xander had stuck around, other than that Riley clearly sucked at saying ‘Yeah, I’m fine’ with any conviction when asked how he was. He liked Xander, he really did, but when a guy who couldn’t hold down a job as a pizza delivery guy started feeling sorry for you, there was a hint right there that your life was pretty much turning to crap.
Right now, for the first time in his life, he wished that he smoked. He wanted an excuse to go outside and look up at the sky, try and get some perspective from the vastness of space or something, not to mention - something to do with his hands that wasn’t punching a wall. If a vampire had attacked him right then he would have been grateful.
“Jerk.” He looked up in surprise to find Xander, nose wrinkled in disgust, looking right at him. Riley was about to agree with the boy that yes, right now, he pretty much was behaving like a major jerk but wasn’t quite sure how to stop. When Xander added: “Two hundred and fifty years walking the earth and the guy still doesn’t know how not to be an asshole?”
Riley had always liked Xander, he realized. But it had been a neutral sort of emotion before, like the way he liked cereal, not the way he liked starlight. Abruply, it peaked to a new level of warmth. He began to like Xander the way one liked, not the friend of a girlfriend who had always been good to her, but the way one liked an ally. Instead of offering to buy Xander a drink and, possibly, later in the evening when the beer had kicked him, fold him in a sentimental embrace and pat him warmly on the back, he said carefully: “So, you think this Angel guy upset her, too?”
“The last time I saw that look in someone’s eyes was when Willow found Cordy and me kissing in a closet.”
Riley had to consider that for a moment. “Can you still be in the closet if it’s girls you’re into kissing?”
Xander gave him a look of surprise. “Did you buy that sense of humour on ebay?”
“It’s standard issue. Comes with the guns.” He knew he was on quicksand here. He thought Xander liked him more than he’d liked Angel, but then Xander seemed to like a root canal more than he liked Angel; that didn’t change the fact that the boy’s first loyalty was to Buffy. There was also the fact that Riley sucked at subterfuge. Being straightforward tended to be where he excelled and he decided to go for it now: “Do you think it would help Buffy if we found out what happened?”
“Not if she’s the one who has to tell us,” Xander answered decisively, and Riley had that sneaking feeling he was getting too often of late, that these friends of hers were always going to know her better than he did. Still, in this instance, he was getting confirmation that he was reading her right.
“How about calling up this Cordelia and asking her what happened?”
“Buffy said Cordy wasn’t there. I just asked her.”
The answer was disappointing, but Riley liked the fact they had both had the same idea.
Xander shook his head. “And not for anyone am I calling up Wesley Whining-Waste-of-Space to ask how things went down in LA. And, anyway, I doubt he’d know. The only one who really knows, right now, except for Buffy herself, is…”
“Angel.” In the past, angels had been something that glittered on top of Christmas trees; something that watched over shepherds in Christmas carols; something white-winged and good and crowned with a gold paper halo. Now, it was something dark and dangerous and painful. When he said the word now, it tasted a little sour on his tongue, where once it would have been light and sweet as whipped cream.
“But he wouldn’t answer me.” Xander shrugged, a little bitterly, and Riley thought about how galling it was for him, an adult and a soldier, to have a rival who was undead and immortal and had superhuman strength, and then magnified it by ten for how that felt when you were a teenager whom even the people who loved you didn’t always take seriously. It made him want to take Xander seriously like he never had before.
“He might answer both of us.” He risked a smile, although he wasn’t feeling exactly light-hearted. “Especially if we take lethal weapons.”
Xander shoved his hands into his coat pockets and squared his shoulders. He looked relieved at having an ally at last and the smile that lit across his face was in no way boyish. “Agent Finn, I like the way you think….”
So, here they were, driving up the freeway to LA, hoping to be at the offices of Angel Investigations by the afternoon. Angel would be trapped in his office then; he couldn’t just walk out on them mid-sentence into the death-dealing daylight, and perhaps he would even feel bad enough about whatever it was that he’d said or done to give them an explanation. Perhaps they could carry an apology from her ex-lover back to Buffy. Riley tried to picture what a vampire apology looked like, and imagined himself gingerly carrying a mauve-black rose that smelt so sweet it filled the car with perfume, but burned up into glowing ash when sunlight touched its petals.
He had an itch on his skin from where Faith had touched him. Sixteen showers later and it still wasn’t enough to shake off the feeling of her fingers. He was afraid Buffy might still blame him for not realizing it hadn’t been her; only in the back of her mind, perhaps, but still enough to set up a fissure of doubt. Anyone from the Initiative - were he still on speaking terms with anyone in the Initiative - would have told him that was crazy. They lived in a world where it turned out there really were demons and monsters and things that went bump in the night, but the humans were still human, and people were the things that you could trust. They didn’t shape-shift or soul-switch. They were who they were, all the time. Except these teenagers knew better than he did. The world, to them, was more elastic, and nothing could be taken for granted, not even the touch of the woman you loved, not her caress or her kiss, or a word that came out of the mouth that was undoubtedly hers.
He was the one who’d been raped by a stranger, yet he suspected Buffy was the one feeling betrayed. Willow’s friend had known. That still upset him, that someone who had never met Buffy before still knew her better than him. He had to remind himself that Willow’s friend also lived in a world where nothing could be taken for granted, whereas he had only just strayed across that threshold. All bets were off on a Hellmouth, that was the truth of it. Nothing, including the laws of physics, could be relied upon here. Not people either. Maybe not even himself if he stayed here too long. But all the time he still found himself thinking - Would he have known it was Faith? Perhaps, more to the point, was the thought that Buffy believed that Angel would have known the difference, whereas she had the empirical proof that Riley Finn had not.
Xander woke with a grunt, wiping his mouth as if he thought he’d been drooling, even though he hadn’t. “Do you want me to drive?”
“No, it’s okay.”
It wasn’t okay. It was days since he’d had a good night’s sleep, and although it was a bright winter day, the edge of the road kept dissolving into darkness. He wondered if that was really the road he was looking at, or his future. If that was what became of everyone who lived on a Hellmouth. If being in Sunnydale automatically equalled being swallowed by the night.
He switched on the radio to keep himself awake and found that Dar Williams was singing about Iowa:
…But way back where I come from, we never mean to bother,
We don’t like to make our passions other people’s concern,
And we walk in the world of safe people, and at night we walk into our houses and burn.
Iowa oh oh, Iowa oh oh I-Iowa
How I long to fall just a little bit, to dance out of the lines and stray from the light,
But I fear that to fall in love with you, is to fall from a great and gruesome height….
Riley switched off the radio so fast he bruised his fingertips. He had used to like that song. Now he needed some empirical assurance that Love didn’t have to be painful. He believed that as he believed in right and wrong. A man could make the world a better place, and he could make the woman that he loved happy. In the end, that was all a man really needed to hold onto, to keep things simple enough that life became a game in which there was some chance of winning. He loved Buffy; that was straightforward enough. He believed that she could love him, given time enough to heal from all the wounds that life and past love had inflicted on her. He believed the world would be a better place with less demons in it. And even the Hellmouth could only swallow a man if he let it. He was here, negotiating the unfamiliar street signs of an unfamiliar city, because he wanted to help the woman he loved, and because she deserved to be happy. Looked at that way, things became a whole lot simpler.
He glanced across at Xander, who looked rumpled and exhausted and in need of a shave, but who was here, with him, on his side, because he thought he was good for Buffy, and, not just good for her, but better for her than Angel had been. That made him feel better about himself and helped thaw out some of the chill left over from that bleak look in Buffy’s eyes. “Let’s get some lunch and then pay a call on a certain supernatural detective agency.”
Xander nodded. “Lunch sounds good. Many, many donuts and an industrial sized vat of caffeine with an intravenous delivery system would also work for me.”
Nodding, Riley headed towards the part of town where vampires apparently helped the helpless - when they weren’t lending succour to the enemies of their ex-lover and re-breaking the soldered-together fragments of her heart.
***
Whatever he’d been expecting, it hadn’t been this. The office a vampire worked out of ought to have absorbed something…demonic from its owner, but this place was disappointingly everyday. They walked up the stairs of the office building with Xander still licking donut sugar from his fingers, and Riley waited for the organ music to start up, a bat to wing its way past, something to creak or groan, but, except for the fluorescent light in the stairwell fizzing a little, there was nothing here to suggest even the slightly eerie.
The lettering on the door wasn’t even in a gothic font and Riley felt a surge of irritation about a vampire setting up a business where anyone could walk through the door and not know that he or she was dealing with a demon. Was there any proof that after clients walked into this office they ever walked out again?
The door was ajar, making it easy to look inside. He tensed up as he waited for his first sight of the guy who had sent Buffy back to Sunnydale with that look on her face.
“Why are we here again?” a woman asked.
They both started a little and Riley glanced at Xander, easing the door open a little further so they could both look into the room. A slender, dark-haired woman was sitting on a desk, waving a folder around for emphasis, but there was something lack lustre in the way she did it, perhaps because of the angry-looking bruise on her left cheekbone.
“We’re just…holding the fort in case any clients drop by. We still need the money, after all.”
The other person Riley could see was a quietly-spoken, English-accented man in his late-twenties, his face sharpened with thinness and blurred with bruises. He was pale enough to qualify as a vampire, but there was nothing at all glamorous about him, none of that razzle-dazzle that he knew Angel possessed. And besides, sunlight was filtering through the half-open blinds to bar them both with light and dark, and neither of them was smoking. If the bruise on the girl’s face looked ugly, the ones all over the man’s face were even worse. He looked as if he’d been mugged by someone with a grudge. Riley felt his instincts as a protector kick in, and he knocked on the door more gently than he’d intended.
Even so, they both started like stray cats in an alley when a trashcan went over; the Englishman rising to his feet and positioning himself in front of the girl, who picked up a stapler as if she could wield it as a weapon. They were both trying to look composed and ready to deal with all comers, but Riley could see that they were scared, and the sunlight gilding their bruises was doing nothing to take off how unready they looked.
The Englishman said: “Can I help you?” His voice was taut and he took another step in front of the girl, trying to make it look unobtrusive, the way he was putting himself between her and possible danger, but Riley understood and approved the impulse, even though, frankly, if he’d wanted to go in there and twist the girl’s head off, there wasn’t much this skinny battered-looking English guy could have done to stop him.
“I just want to ask you a few questions.” Now he sounded as if he was channelling some police detective from a lame B-movie. He tried to keep his tone non-committal, but veered towards soothing, because he couldn’t help feeling sorry for them, they both looked so much in need of rescuing, with rings under their eyes from lack of sleep, and those bruises broadcasting to all comers that they couldn’t hold their own in a fight. The girl was beautiful, with a fall of sleek, brown, softly waving hair, and looked as if she should have been sitting around in a salon somewhere having her nails done, some thousand dollar purse at her feet, and a dress wrapped around her slim body that cost the national debt of an African country. Instead, she was standing there with a stapler in her hand, looking washed out from exhaustion.
“What about?” The girl demanded, stepping up to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Englishman, entirely ruining his protective strategy but lending him support all the same.
“And who are you?” the Englishman asked.
“Cordy, it’s cool, he’s with me.” Xander stepped in through the doorway and held his hands up. Riley noticed that Xander was doing the same as him, giving those two some critical distance, not crowding them. He guessed he wasn’t the only one who thought they looked ready to bolt.
“Xander?” The Englishman looked at him in surprise but visibly relaxed. “Why are you…? Didn’t Buffy get back to Sunnydale?”
“She got home, Wesley.” Xander was clearly assessing their condition with as much surprise as Riley. “What happened to you two?”
So, these two were Cordelia and Wesley; the cheerleader and the failed Watcher, who had ended up working for Buffy’s vampire ex-lover. He had expected Cordelia to look more Paris Hilton and less soup kitchen, and Wesley to be a couple of years older, and both of them to be a lot less bruised. Looking at them, he found his dislike of Angel crank up a few more notches. Apparently, it wasn’t just the people he loved that he left tattered and torn, but the people who worked for him as well.
Wesley looked across at Cordelia, clearly hating the sight of that bruise on her cheekbone as much as Riley did. “It’s not important.” He reached out and gently took the stapler from the girl’s hand, slipping it back onto the desk as if he thought no one would notice. “But I don’t understand why you’re here, if not to look for Buffy?”
“We’re looking for Angel.” Riley stepped into the room another pace and saw them both quiver a little, because he looked bigger and stronger than they did, and they were apparently not comfortable with people with those attributes right now. Another pace and they were clearer still, the sunlight pitiless as it gave him a guided tour of all the rainbow colours of that bruise on Cordelia’s face. He was pretty good at assessing contusions, and the blow that had left that mark must have come perilously close to cracking the bone.
“He’s not here.” Wesley’s voice rose a little, as if he could ward them off, clearly not wanting them to come any closer. As they both took another pace, he dropped his gaze, turning his head as if there was still some way to stop them seeing what had been done to him. Riley winced as he saw that bruise on his forehead, the cut on his right cheekbone, the black eye, the split lip, and the red mottling of newer bruises that were still in the process of coming out.
Xander went forward cautiously, like they were lost children he didn’t want to spook. “Cordy, Wesley…what happened?”
“Faith was here.” Wesley’s tone was brittle. “But everything’s resolved now. I thought Buffy would have told you.”
“She told us Faith gave herself up for murder and was in prison now.”
“Attempted murder, I think. She’s pleading guilty so I imagine the trial won’t take very long.”
“Did she do this to you or did you try to tango with a water buffalo?” Xander reached out to hold Wesley’s face still so he could take a look at all the contusions and cuts marking it, and the man jerked his head away, taking a step backwards, voice rising:
“That’s hardly your business, Xander, and, if you want Angel, I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong place.”
“He’s in Sunnyhell,” Cordelia put in. “Gone to make up with Buffy because he may have hurt her feelings.” Something in her tone suggested that only by the most heroic effort of self-control had she resisted putting in a ‘poor widdle’ there.
“Yes, I’m afraid you’ve had a wasted journey.” Wesley’s tone was firm and he was already trying to usher them back towards the door.
Xander stolidly refused to be backed. “Wesley, stop with the bullshit and tell me what happened to the two of you. Was it Angel or Faith who did this to you?”
Wesley recoiled as if he’d slapped him. “Angel has never laid a finger on us.”
“Except when he knocked you out that time,” Cordelia put in.
“That was Angelus.”
“Well, technically it was Angel with a bad case of Doximal happy time.”
“Nevertheless, he was not in control of his faculties at the time.”
“Like that helped when we were waving goodbye to our TV star client.”
“Cordelia…”
“So, it was Faith,” Xander persisted quietly. “She did this to you?”
Cordelia shrugged, trying to act as if it didn’t matter, shaking back the wavy shine of her long hair. “You know Faith - big with the fists, small with the self-control.”
Xander grimaced and Riley thought about all he knew about Slayer strength, that surge of primal power that made a young girl able to take on a vampire or a demon; then he thought about that same power being used against another young girl or against an underfed Englishman, neither of whom possessed Slayer strength.
“Have you two seen a doctor?” he pressed.
“What did she do?” Xander asked at the same time.
Wesley looked as if he were a hair away from snapping but it was Cordelia who said venomously: “We don’t need the Sunnydale pity party.”
A part of Riley wanted to be screaming back down the freeway to intercept Angel before he did Buffy any more harm, which he would surely be doing the second it got dark and he could venture out to see her, but he had joined up to help people who couldn’t help themselves and that part of himself utterly rejected the idea of abandoning two people who, at the very least, looked too nerve-shredded to be left alone right now. “I’m not from Sunnydale.”
When neither of them showed much of a response to that, Xander added: “I should have made the introductions. Riley Finn meet Cordelia Chase and Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. Cordy, Wesley, meet Riley.”
Quickly, Riley shoved out a hand and gave them his best innocent farm boy smile; one that had availed him well in the past. “Pleased to meet you.”
It was apparently impossible for the Englishman not to extend a hand in return, despite clearly not wanting to be sucked into exchanging pleasantries. “Likewise.”
Cordelia also unbent enough to briefly clasp his hand. “So, where are you from?”
“Huxley, Iowa.”
She looked interested. “Oh, I’ve never met anyone from a flyover state before.”
Riley thought about Anya and now Cordelia and wondered why exactly Xander was drawn to women with no tact. However, his birthplace did seem to have broken the ice, as Cordelia could now regard him with some sympathy herself, and already seemed to be feeling less like a victim unready to be observed by a stranger and more like a sophisticate faced with a hayseed. Riley wondered if he should perhaps chew on a straw to put her mind even more at rest.
“Spirit Lake is home to some fascinating demons by all accounts,” Wesley offered, in what was clearly meant to be a compliment.
“Have you two had lunch?” Riley tried to keep his tone cheerful and encouraging, but not, he hoped, too much like talking to the little people. “Because Xander and I were just going out for lunch.” Xander, to his credit, barely started at the bare-faced lie.
“I thought you were looking for Angel?” Wesley countered.
Xander picked up the slack. “We thought after seeing Deadboy we’d be needing food to restore us.”
Riley patted his wallet. “I’m buying.”
That had definitely been a wrong step. If there had been a connection being made, it promptly snapped. Wesley’s expression hardened. “No, thank you.”
Although Cordelia had looked downright wistful, she nodded emphatically. “We’ve already eaten.”
In the thin shafts of sunlight spearing in between the blinds, Riley could see dust motes rising like smoke. Wesley pulled down the cuffs of his long-sleeved sweater self-consciously, but not before Riley had caught a glimpse of more dull crimson bruises and a nasty-looking cut. He realised with a new jolt of unease that there were rope burns under there that Wesley didn’t want them to see. It seemed so much worse, somehow, to be beaten while tied up, than while there was at least a chance of getting away. The sunlight reflected off Wesley’s glasses, temporarily hiding his eyes, and making the bruises seem disconnected from the person behind them, and he remembered Faith’s fingers on him, the strength of her, that he had trusted when he thought she was Buffy, but which made him shudder inwardly with revulsion now. He had been naked in bed with a crazy woman and he hadn’t even known it. Looking at Wesley’s bruises he realised how lucky he had been.
“I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey, but it really would have been prudent to call us first.” Wesley once again tried to usher them to the door. Riley and Xander exchanged a look, both equally out of ideas, yet both on the same page that the mission had now changed; looking for Angel now less of a priority than finding out what had happened to these two and making sure they were okay.
They were saved by a prematurely balding man in a slightly shabby brown suit, the shoulders of which were lightly flecked with something that looked to Riley - who had grown up surrounded by cousins of various ages - very much like baby vomit. The man gave the impression of being filmed with dust, although a second glance revealed him to be just wearing clothing that hadn’t been pressed and a tie with an egg stain on it. He pushed open the door and stood there, uncertainly, blinking at them. “Are you Angel Investigations?”
LA was a city that hummed with HST activity. The whole city lit up with a Sub Terrestrial glow. Without access to any of his usual equipment, Riley wouldn’t have taken it on trust that a crossing guard was who she appeared to be, or even a dusty little stranger, and Xander seemed to feel the same way. As Xander positioned himself in front of Cordelia, Riley stepped in front of Wesley, who gave him a look of annoyance, said: “Excuse me” pointedly, and walked around Riley to smile at the newcomer.
“You’ve come to the right place. Can we help you?”
The man looked at Wesley warily. “Are you Angel?”
“I’m his associate, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce. This is Cordelia Chase, and these other two gentlemen - were just leaving.”
“We wouldn’t dream of it.” Riley kept smiling, although his face was definitely starting to hurt now. “We’re always glad to help out fellow…investigators.”
As Cordelia opened her mouth to say something that was probably regrettable, Xander held up his hands. “No, don’t thank us.” He hastily pulled out a chair for the stranger. “Take a load off. Tell us all about your problem. You do have a problem, right?”
Looking between them all in some bemusement, the stranger nevertheless handed across his card - Riley caught a glimpse of a home address - took a seat and sank low into it, gazing up at them mournfully. His forehead was lightly sheened with sweat, and he mopped his brow with a large floral handkerchief as he spoke. “I think my wife may be a demon.”
Wesley nodded as if he heard such things all the time. Perhaps he did. Riley had already found out in Sunnydale that there was far more weirdness out there than he had ever realized. Wesley sat down opposite the potential client, glancing at the card as he did so. “I can see how that could be a problem, Mr…Winters.”
“Depending on the species,” Xander put in. “Some demons are really quite warm and cuddly and shouldn’t necessarily be blamed for their…past misdeeds.”
The client gazed at Xander in confusion for a moment before turning back to Wesley. “I think she may be planning to eat our baby.”
Xander grimaced. “Okay, that I concede is behaviour that probably veers towards the unacceptable side of….”
“Will you stop already with the talking?” Cordelia hissed in his ear.
Riley noticed that Wesley was nodding sagely a lot and diligently taking notes while the customer’s gaze strayed from his many cuts and bruises, to Cordelia’s bruised cheekbone and back. Riley cranked up his smile and attempted to look as normal as possible when the customer looked his way, but from the reaction guessed that he had just succeeded in spooking him more. He tried looking intent and serious and doing some sage nodding of his own, but that was when the guy began to shove his chair back a few inches. He supposed it was just as well he hadn’t had his heart set on a career in retail.
“So, Mr Winters, you’ve been married to your wife for over a year now, but you’ve noticed certain…physical abnormalities that have made you question whether or not she’s entirely human.”
“I don’t mind them,” Winters put in. “I actually find them quite sexy.”
“Quite so,” Wesley murmured.
“Who doesn’t find the odd scale and vestigial tail a turn on?” Xander shrugged. It bothered Riley that he had no idea if Xander was being serious or not. With Buffy’s friends, one could never be entirely sure. Wesley’s way of resolutely plugging on despite all odds did remind him of Rupert Giles, and he wondered if Watchers were specifically trained to be British at all times.
“You have become concerned in recent weeks by your wife’s behaviour towards your infant son?”
“She’s not just feeding him on demand. She seems to be…fattening him up. He had a normal birth weight but he’s now twice what a child should weigh at his age, and I came across this amulet in her jewelry box.”
Riley craned his neck to get a look and saw that the centre of the bronze-coloured pendant depicted what looked like a human infant being eaten by a long-necked demon. “I presume your wife doesn’t look like this?”
“Once, when I had bad shrimp. And sometimes, she looks a little…fuzzy to me, like she’s not really in focus.”
Wesley nodded again. “A basic glamour would account for that. Not that difficult to maintain, particularly for demons of the Netraxus species, who have some low-level mind-influencing abilities. A hair or skin sample would be useful in trying to ascertain…”
Winters held up a polythene bag wrapped around a hairbrush, and another much smaller bag in which a few solitary hairs could be seen. “This is from my wife, and this is from my son. I really need to know that they’re both…human.”
“Of course.” Wesley took the samples from him. “This won’t take very long.” He disappeared into a back room. Riley tried to get a glimpse, but couldn’t see anything that looked like the gleaming white and silver laboratories of the Initiative.
Cordelia drummed her fingernails on the desk a little awkwardly. “So, you sell shoes? Do you carry Alberta Ferretti?”
Winters looked at her warily, and Riley wondered if he now thought all women might be demons in disguise. As someone who had held someone in his arms who certainly looked and smelled and felt like Buffy and yet had been someone else entirely, he could sympathize.
“No.”
“Balenciaga? Ferragamo? Rochas?”
“No.”
“Well, at least you know your wife didn’t marry you for your shoes….”
Winters’ gaze travelled to Xander and Riley. “So, do you all work for Angel Investigations…?”
“We’re from the Sunnydale branch,” Riley said quickly. “We’re conferring on a case.”
“Two branches.” The client looked impressed.
“We go where the wacky is,” Xander said cheerfully.
Riley observed Cordelia dig her fingernails into his side with unnecessary force. Xander manfully hung onto his confidence-inducing smile but his eyes were visibly watering. Quickly, Riley said: “So, how did you meet your…wife?”
“On a blind date.” The man looked a little sheepish. “I was introduced to her by the girlfriend of a colleague.”
“Don’t suppose your colleague met his girlfriend at Madame Dorian’s, did he?” Cordelia enquired.
Winters looked sheepish. “Well, yes… Which was why I was a little concerned once the first…you know… had worn off.”
Cordelia sat down behind the computer but Riley heard her murmur quite audibly: “Men - stupidity - synonyms!” She beckoned imperiously to the client. “Do you have a photograph of your wife?”
Riley noticed the man proffered it with a hint of pride, despite only being here because he thought his wife was possibly a baby-eating HST.
Cordelia gazed at the picture while Riley tried not to crane his neck as obviously as Xander was doing to get a look at it. After a long assessing stare, Cordelia said: “How much do you make in a year, Mr. Winters?”
“About fifty thousand dollars.”
Cordelia nodded as if this was no more than she expected. “Your wife’s a demon.”
Riley was impressed. In the Initiative they had been able to check the energy signal of human-seeming demons and identify them that way, but Cordelia appeared to be using only the power of…deductive reasoning? Feminine intuition? Whatever it was, she seemed to be very sure.
“She is?” Winters looked dismayed.
Cordelia nodded decisively. “Women who look like that don’t marry guys who look like you, unless you’re millionaires or they’re demons. It’s just one of those immutable laws of physics, like…gravity.”
“That is so shallow.” Xander gazed at her in what looked a little like awe.
“And how many balding, dusty little men who aren’t billionaires have you seen arm in arm with supermodels recently?” Cordelia countered. She seemed to become aware of the client’s expression and grimaced. “No offence.”
Winters patted his bald spot protectively. “I’ve been taking extra vitamins.”
Cordelia was typing rapidly and Riley risked a look over her shoulder to see a site called ‘demons, demons, demons’ appear. A few more rapid keystrokes and he was gazing at a Netraxus Demon, which perfectly matched the demon shown on the amulet. “Good call,” he said in surprise.
“Wesley may not have a life, but he does know his stuff.” Cordelia took a folder from the desk drawer and leafed through it purposefully.
Now peering unashamedly over her shoulder, Riley saw a neatly typed page headed: ‘Willow’s Instructions For Hacking Into Police Records’. As Cordelia began to implement them, Riley felt uneasy. “You don’t have one of those for accessing top secret military information, do you?”
Cordelia gave him the first encouraging glance. “You know the hack for that?”
“No, I just… I don’t think you should do it. Because it’s…wrong.”
Cordelia kept typing. “Who are you anyway?” A glance across at Xander and her eyes widened. “Oh, Harmony always said you were…!” Her gaze swivelled back to Riley and appeared to be taking in every single thing about him, down to the epidermis. “So, you’re wearing those GI Joe clothes for him? Like a role-playing thing? That’s so sweet. Because ever since that mix-up with the Halloween costumes, I’ve always thought Xander has a bit of a thing for…”
Riley would have been more amused by Xander’s expression of appalled embarrassment if he wasn’t feeling a little embarrassed himself. After all, it had been after looking at him, not Xander, that Cordelia leapt to that conclusion. And he did still have those memories of poring over the Jonathan Calendar: Swimsuit Edition. “I’m Buffy’s boyfriend,” he said, he hoped with dignity.
“Oh.” Cordelia’s disappointment was clear. She glanced over Riley again and he felt himself dismissed as far less interesting than he had appeared a moment ago. “She really can pick them, can’t she? Because, just between you and me, Angel isn’t exactly the most….” Cordelia hit the Enter key triumphantly. “Ah hah! I knew it.”
“What?” As Riley and Xander leaned over her shoulder to see, they managed to clash heads painfully. They gave each other another look of embarrassment. Given that they were only staying around to offer Wesley and Cordelia the benefit of their experience and protection, Riley couldn’t help wishing that he and Xander were coming across a little less like Laurel and Hardy. Clutching his skull, he managed: “What did you find?”
Cordelia turned the screen so that they could all see. “There you go - ‘Husband Dies in Freak Accident; Wife and Baby Feared Killed By Street Gang On PCP’.”
Xander nodded to Riley. “In Sunnydale, ‘Street Gang On PCP' equals 'vampire or demon we’re all having collective denial about even when they ate our schoolfriends right in front of us’.”
Riley was reading the account from eye witnesses of a gang of ‘strange-looking people who could have been a biker gang’ seen advancing on a suburban house, in which lived Marty White, a travelling salesman from Pasadena, whose lovely young wife, Marlene, had recently given birth to their first child. By the time the police arrived, Marty appeared to have been involved in a fatal accident with a household blender and there was no sign of Marlene or Baby Thomas. One look at Marlene confirmed that she did indeed to be an extraordinarily beautiful woman, and it was surprising to find her married to an overweight forty-seven year old salesman. Cordelia held up the photograph Winters had supplied wordlessly, and Xander and Riley both peered at it and then looked again at the picture of ‘Marlene’. They appeared to be one and the same.
“But that’s Marika!” Winters exclaimed.
“One of the drawbacks of the basic glamour spell.” Wesley came back from the office. “One payment, one appearance is the usual deal. It has to be maintained with Ikthenian Crystal energy and regular top ups of the usual lizard-wing protein shake and dust from the tomb of an Akkadian sorcerer, of course, but it’s a lot cheaper to stay with the same glamour than start out again with a new one after each scam.” His gaze was kind and regretful. “I regret to inform you, Mr Winters, that your wife is indeed a Netraxan Demon. The materials I have access to here are a little limited but I would be willing to hazard a guess that she’s probably of the Gktr’kl sub-species.”
Cordelia shook her head as she typed. “Never trust people with no vowels in their names. It’s a rule to live by.”
Winters leant back in his chair, looking as if he might be about to pass out. “So, my wife is a demon? And she’s done this before?”
Cordelia hit ‘print’ and the computer began to disgorge garish headlines detailing more men dead in freak accidents and lovely young wives gone missing with their infant sons. “About six times that I’ve been able to find so far. Of course, I only did a search for Los Angeles.”
Winters gazed up at Wesley anxiously. “What about my son? Is he…?”
“Human,” Wesley assured him, although there was a flicker in his eye as he said it that made Riley wonder if he was keeping something from the man. “I’ll research in more detail, but what I know about Nextraxan demons suggests that any sacrifice would be made on the day of the full moon, meaning we have a little time to come up with a strategy to rescue your son from your…wife.” Taking the man by the elbow and gently easing him towards the door, he continued smoothly: “I suggest you call in sick to your place of work and spend a few days at home. We’ll be in touch.”
Riley waited until the door was closed and the last faint sound of departing footsteps had been swallowed by distance before turning to Wesley. “What’s up with the baby?”
Wesley began to select books from the shelves, putting two in front of Cordelia before heading over to the small couch in the corner to work from there. “It’s certainly human, but unlikely to be his. Netraxan demons usually fake a pregnancy while making arrangements to buy or steal the baby they need. There are many complicated rituals that have to be performed before the baby is ready for sacrifice, and that can only be done by someone who is taking care of the child full time. Ironically, the child is probably in good health, although inclined to smell of yak urine in a heated room.”
“But why go through the whole marriage thing?” Xander pressed.
“Netraxan demons are notoriously lazy, and prefer to be kept whenever possible. Although, in their favour, modern Netraxan demons are becoming resentful of the constrictions of the tribal system, and prefer to make their own way in the world. As long as they make their annual baby sacrifice at the proper juncture, the Netraxan elders are cautiously supportive. As ancient killer demon sects go, they’re considered quite progressive.”
Riley gazed at the man in disbelief. He really did look like nothing at all; far less impressive than Giles, who carried a certain gravitas even when recently concussed; but this guy was so scrawny he was barely visible if he turned sideways, looked fifteen years too young for the task he had been given in Sunnydale, and right now looked in worse shape than that homeless guy Riley had found in a dumpster who had been unfortunate enough to have had a disagreement with a Sdansk demon on the wrong cusp of his lunar cycle. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“I was trained by the Watchers’ Council.” Wesley was already poring over reference books.
“Also - no life,” Cordelia added.
“But you’re not…as old as Giles,” Riley finished lamely.
Wesley glanced up at him briefly, sunlight falling across his face to reveal all the shades of purple and gold on his forehead. “We start early.” His tongue ventured gingerly over his cut lip, perhaps hoping that the thick scab would have miraculously vanished; an expression of defeat washed over his face as he felt the ridge of dried blood and he bent back over his books.
“So, you could go now?” Cordelia suggested.
“We thought we might hang around and help.” Xander sat on the desk next to her. “Baby-eating demons - kind of what we do.”
“I heard.” Cordelia opened the first book and began to scan it wearily.
“I mean killing them is what we do.”
“Good for you.”
“Cordy…” His exasperation seemed genuine and as she glanced up at him, Riley saw them flashing brown eyes at one another as if this was an old dance whose steps they would never forget. There was such a connection there; he almost saw the moment when they felt it, a tension twanging like the cord beneath a tightrope walker’s chalked feet. A flicker of something that looked like homesickness showed briefly in Cordelia’s eyes, and then she turned a page she hadn’t even looked at and pretended to be all about the research.
“We don’t need you.” She plucked a pen from a holder and began to tap it against her notebook. “This is what we do now, the three of us, and we don’t need any help from Buffy’s little gang of Slayerettes. Okay?”
“But Angel isn’t here.” Xander took the pen from her and held it out of reach. “And I get that it could work - just about - you manage the business, Wesley does the research, Angel kills the big scalies. But you take the supernaturally strong undead guy out of that equation and what you’re left with is…”
“A hell of a lot better than you and Willow going vampire hunting in every cemetery in town without Buffy.”
As Xander opened his mouth to refute, probably with examples, Riley intervened quickly: “The point is, we’re here and we’re happy to help. So, why not let us?”
Wesley looked too weary to offer much resistance, and perhaps he was ready to admit, what Cordelia was not, that without Angel these two were physically not up to much right now. “Well, we can hardly force you to leave if you want to research demons.”
Riley saw Cordelia glance across at him, Wesley’s half-apologetic expression, her sigh of defeat and shrug. She shoved a book at Xander as if she was nothing other than the winner of this argument. “Go crazy.”