Angel Fanfic: The Dead Church (Part 3)
Angel Fanfic: The Dead Church (Part 3)
It's a shock to realize that Quar-toth is actually very small. Or at least the livable part of it, if livable is the right word for a place that's made of razor-sharp rock, burning ash, and choking gas. Cordelia's eyes burn constantly, and the taste in the back of her throat is so foul it's all she can do not to retch with every breath. God, where's her demon when she needs it?
"Connor!" Angel is screaming his son's name, running ahead of her as she stumbles along. She wonders how long she can keep going. Sure, she's tough and all, but this isn't a place where tough matters. This isn't a place where anything matters.
She blinks away the pain and tries to focus. Coughing doubles her over. When she straightens, she spots someone watching her from the shadow of a sharp black rock. A man with shaggy hair and ashes smeared on his face like some tribal mask.
It takes her a few long seconds to recognize Daniel Holtz.
Holtz looks older now, frailer, but still with that sinewy toughness, like a piece of jerky left too long in the smokehouse. Still crazy. Cordelia can see it in his glittering, rabid eyes.
"Angel." That broken-glass purr of a voice, gone rusted from disuse, brings Angel around fast. "How kind. You thought I might be lonely. Pity she won't last long here."
Angel doesn't waste time. He launches into an attack, and Holtz falls back, fending him off with some long, sharp poleaxe thingy and a sword. Cordelia crumbles to her knees, watching; she's still empty inside, hollowed out by what Hell did to her. Oh God, was that me? Really me? Is that what the Powers made me, that ... thing? How can any good come of that? It occurs to her that maybe the Powers don't want good to come of it. That maybe the Powers aren't the goody-goody-two-shoes she's always thought they were. Fat lot of good that insight does for her just now.
She catches a glint of gold in the mist, a flash of the Oracle's flat blue eyes.
Connor. If Holtz is here, he's left the baby somewhere. All she has to do is find him.
She forces herself up, dammit, up, grabs hold of a rock to support her and feels it cut her to the bone. Blood. She sees Angel's eyes flash to her and knows he's smelled it. Holtz uses the distraction; he cuts Angel across the back of one leg, and Angel goes down. Holtz drops the sword and pulls out a wooden stake ... but Angel's okay, he's rolling free, coming back to his feet.
She doesn't wait to see the outcome.
There's something roaring and shrieking on the other side of the black, shiny rock canyon; Cordelia can hear the flap of huge leathery wings, the cries of - what? A child? Connor? Oh God. Oh, Holtz, you bastard, you left him alone ... a baby left alone, here ...
She gasps in the poisoned, fetid air, pushes herself to her feet and runs, screaming Connor's name. She hears Angel yell something that might have been an order but she can't stop now, can't, it's impossible, she's so close, so damn close ...
Around the outcropping, there's something huge and monstrous down on the ground, flopping in a mist of blood and dust. She shrieks and flings herself at it, all she can think about is the baby, the baby somewhere in the middle of that ...
Something sharp plunges into her stomach. Sharp, glittering ice. Cold spreading through her, which is weird, because she can see heat shimmering off of the rock and ash and metal all around her, but there's something wrong, something ...
... a little boy is staring at her from the other end of a long metal knife. She reaches for the blade that's still embedded in her stomach and thinks, oh damn, that's bad, isn't it, and she looks into those dark, utterly familiar eyes until the world starts to go gray and still.
No longer a baby. How old ... six? Seven?
"Connor," she whispers, and reaches out to touch him. She brushes her bloodstained fingers over his flat, sweaty, matted hair and sees him flinch away. Those eyes. Like his father's. Eyes that have looked into the darkness for so long they'll never understand the light. "Oh, God, baby, I'm so sorry," she whispers, and feels the cold edges inside of her rip free as he pulls out the knife.
Connor backs away when she tries to reach for him again. She loses her balance and then there's the ground, whoops, it's hot but she feels cold, cold, all cold.
Falling.
Somewhere behind her, she hears the portal rip into existence with a sound like tearing flesh, and hears Angel screaming her name. She reaches out to Connor, but he's gone, vanished like he'd never even lived.
Then she's being lifted in strong arms, held against Angel's unbeating heart.
"Get Connor." She gestures vaguely into the mist.
His voice is unsteady. "I can't. You're hurt ... Cordy ..." His hands fumbled at her clothes, trying to find the source of the bleeding. She fended him off.
"Get Connor, you idiot! I didn't come all this way for nothing!" She thumps him with one weak fist. "Go!"
"I can't leave you ..." But she hears it in his voice, that doubt, that need.
"You have to - get him - go - " She manages to find the strength - demon-strength - to shove him away. The world melts alarmingly around her. "Go. I'm fine. Just move, dammit!"
He kisses her. The cool desperation of his lips surprises her, and she doesn't think she kisses him very well in return, because frankly her mind is more on the hole in her guts and the warm gush of blood that's spilling out under her hand. Doesn't Angel smell it? Probably, but then this whole place reeks of blood and death.
He gives her one last tormented look, and from the last depths of her strength - not demon-strength now, but Cordelia-strength, the kind forged in Sunnydale High School when those around her fell - she gives him her best, most commanding Queen C shove and snaps, "Jeez, will you get on with it already? 'Cause I'm so ready to go now!"
He spins and runs after Connor.
She goes to her knees almost immediately, and it's not a graceful fall, it hurts, dammit, and she braces herself with one hand in the ashes but she's shaking now, shaking all over, and when her blood seeps out from under her clutching right hand it hisses on the ashes.
I want to go home, please let me go home now.
Then she's lying on the ground, on her back. Wind ruffles her clothes, stirs the ash. Overhead the sky is red, shot through with black clouds that twist and turn like those souls in Hell and oh God she can feel herself going, if she dies here she's afraid it'll just go on and on ...
A warm rough hand on her forehead. She blinks and focuses on the face that looms over her. Fading red hair laced with gray blows on the wind, and caught in its net is the face of Daniel Holtz.
"Ah, the Seer. Cordelia," he says, and she hates the sound of her name in his mouth. "So. The demon left you here to die. Typical."
"I don't care." Sheer bravado, but it sounds good. "Connor's more important."
"Ah, but his name's not Connor anymore. And by the count of this world, I've had him for nearly seven years. Do you really think he's Angel's son anymore?" Holtz smiles. "Or yours?"
She closes her eyes.
"Oh, come now, that gut wound will take hours to kill you." He settles himself comfortably at her side. "Although with the blood smell on the wind, no doubt one of Quar-toth's many creatures will come to feed before then. That would be a cruel reward for your loyalty, but then look what happened to your friend ... what was his name? Wesley?"
"Wesley's not dead." She opens her eyes again. "Psycho Girl missed. And Angel's going to kill you, by the way. And he won't miss."
Holtz keeps smiling. If he weren't such a complete waste, he'd have a nice smile, she decides. Not that smiles have much attraction at the moment, not as much as, say, morphine ...
"You're pale," he says sympathetically. His gaze wandered to the half-healed punctures on her throat. "And I see the oh-so-holy Angel has lowered himself to feeding on you. You've seen the evil in him. How can you possibly believe his lies?"
"They make more sense than yours." Harder to talk now, what with the pain creeping up like fire in her guts. "Go on and kill me already before I croak of boredom."
He doesn't answer. He continues to look down on her, and there's something odd in that look, something almost ... human.
Somewhere in the distance, shouting. Angel's voice, but distance and the wind twist it into noise. Holtz looks up, then back down at her.
"You could still be the boy's mother," he says then. "A boy needs one. It wouldn't be much of a life, but it would be better than dying as Angelus' whore."
"And all I have to do is look at your face for the rest of my life? Ugh. Kill me."
"If you insist," he says.
He leans over her, and though she knows better he looks impossibly big up there, impossibly strong. Even Angel couldn't kill him. Probably it was useless to even try, but she's never been one to roll over and die.
It's a disease she's caught from Buffy, like it or not. Terminal Sunnydale Survivor Syndrome. Like mouthing off, and taking every advantage there was, including wrapping her sweaty fingers around the one weapon she'd managed to keep out of his notice.
He puts his hands around her throat.
She plunges the knife she's been holding in her left hand deep into his guts, rips it sharply up just as Angel has taught her, and looks into his eyes as she does it. Holtz looks surprised, like Wile E. Coyote jogging over open air.
"No need to apologize," she says. "Can't trust you either. Oh, and don't worry, takes hours to die. Gut wound."
It's a long speech on such short, bitter breaths. Adrenaline fuels it but then, as Holtz stumbles away and collapses, all she can feel is the pain washing over her, the weakness, the certainty that he's right.
They're both going to die. Well, that's a deal she can accept, so long as Connor and Angel make it out.
Holtz is moaning. She closes her eyes. "Suck it up," she whispers. "Asshole."
###
He couldn't find Connor. It seemed like hours spent shambling through the broken, razor-edged rock, eyes burning from the fumes and heat, before he finally turned back.
Cordelia was a pale, perfect shadow on the ground. In the distance, the vortex still whirled, and a slight wind ruffled her dark hair, the blood-spattered shirt under its weight of Kevlar and weaponry. She looked so fragile, under all that. So broken.
Angel sank down next to her, closed his eyes, and listened for her heart.
It was silent. Cold and silent, its chambers hushed like a church.
"No." The word came out softly, brokenly, and he gathered her in his arms and held her there, cradled against his chest. "No no no no ..."
Heavy, dead flesh. He knew the feel of that so well. The smell of her blood conjured up a thick sweet weight of saliva in his mouth, and the memory of all of the bodies he'd cradled like this and drained before dropping them and moving on.
This can't happen. It can't.
He thought of Fred, and Gunn, and Lorne, all waiting faithfully in Cordelia's apartment. How long before they gave up? Before they lost all hope, the way he had already lost it? He couldn't imagine going back now, with Cordelia's body in his arms ... couldn't imagine going back at all. It was too far, and he was too tired. Connor ... Connor was lost. Cordelia was gone. What was the point?
Cordelia's hair still smelled alive and sweet, and cooled his face as he kissed it.
Someone was laughing, a scratch of sound on silence. He looked up to see another body lying huddled against an outcropping of razor-edged rock.
Holtz. Bleeding out, but still alive. For a long second it doesn't make sense, and then it does when he sees the bloody knife lying at Cordelia's side. No, Cordy ... Part of him mourns that loss of her innocence, but he's realistic enough to know that she's chosen this. Wants this.
"Dead?" Holtz asked. Angel didn't answer. "Ah well. Our son will know what to do. Cut off her head, bury her with wood in her heart so she won't rise again. I've trained him well, you see. Better than you could ever imagine."
"He's not your son." Angel eased Cordelia back down, feeling something inside fall away with her into the eternal dark.
"I've had him all his life, Angelus. What else can he ever be?"
Angel looked down at him - the dying, mocking face of his worst enemy, this human, his own victim. We made each other. We deserve each other. Connor, Cordelia, Wesley - it was all just collateral damage. For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee. Milton had never felt so brutally appropriate.
"You know what he can be? He can be an orphan," Angel said, and reached down with a motion too fast for human eyes to follow, and snapped Daniel Holtz's neck with a dry-stick twist.
He heard the crunch of footsteps on ash, and looked up to see Connor standing there. Not his Connor. Holtz's son. Alien, hard, adapted to the darkness. Just a boy, a ragged Peter Pan with a sharp elfin face and ragged straight brown hair. Something of Darla in his features, and Angel's brooding distance in the brown eyes.
God, he was so young.
And he had stake in his hand, as if he knew how to use it.
"You killed my father," Connor said; his voice was high, pure, the voice of an avenging angel. No tears, no doubt, nothing but rage. Angel thought about that, about Darla plunging wood into her heart to give this child life, about so many things.
He eased Cordelia back down to the ground and stood up.
"Yes," he said. "I did." Long, long ago, in an alleyway that smelled of piss and horses, of Darla's acrid perfume and the sharp tang of his own blood.
Connor -- too short, too weak, too young -- lunged for him with the stake aimed high for his heart. Angel let it happen. It felt ... clean.
It felt good.
The point stopped just touching his chest. Denting the fabric of his shirt, but not piercing.
His son stood a foot away, frozen, staring into his eyes. Poised on the verge of murder.
Behind Connor stood one of the Oracles of The Powers That Be, the woman, with her chilly blue eyes and cold, gold skin. Her hand was raised, and there was a glowing blue crescent balanced on her palm.
She'd died, but hell, hadn't they all, at one time or another? All the best people did.
Angel almost laughed out loud. She glared.
"This is not a matter for amusement," the Oracle snapped. "How can you have gone so wrong, even as a lower being? How is it possible for a Champion to be so ... stupid?" She fumed. Literally. Steam came off of her skin in white, boiling waves. "You have upset all balance. There is no future. Do you understand?"
He shrugged. "So?"
The Oracle stamped her bare, shapely, golden foot. Her voice rang with authority. "You have undone prophecy!"
"Well, since prophecy said I would kill my son, that works just fine for me."
Her blue eyes slowly blinked, and her head tilted to the side. Dark Grecian-styled curls brushed her bare shoulders, and though a hot wind blasted past them her dark blue draperies barely moved. Ashes burned at Angel's eyes. "The balance must be set right," the Oracle said, and bit her lip in annoyance. "It was to avoid this that I sent her here. Now blood must be sacrificed."
Black, rich laughter boiled out of him. "Yeah? Well, Cordelia's already bled for you. You want mine too? It's yours."
"No." Her eyes flared a cold, pure color like something at the heart of a storm. "A Champion must continue. A Seer must continue. All will be undone if this is not so."
There was one living person she didn't mention, one that stood small and vulnerable right in front of her, in easy reach. Angel went utterly cold inside. "Not my son. You can't take my son."
"Your son should not exist."
"He does exist." Angel took a step back, away from the stake; Connor's eyes didn't follow him. The boy was frozen and helpless. "And I swear, you'll have to kill me before I let you touch him. The Powers have done enough to us. Let him go."
Her eyes went from that clear, unworldly blue to something dark, shadowed, as alien as space. "The Powers have not done as much as you think," she said. "And there would be more to come, much more, pain and death and undying regret. All this, if he lives."
"No."
"Your son is the Destroyer. Surely you know this."
"No!"
"He will spawn the ending of your world!"
"NO!" Angel roared, and jumped for her. He went right through her, crashed to the ashes behind her, rolled and came up furious and ready to kill.
But he couldn't.
She was already dead. He could see now how incorporeal she was. Some kind of Ascended One? A Power herself?
She regarded him with those steady, cold eyes, and finally smiled. Very slightly. On her palm, the glowing crescent rocked back and forth. Balance, he thought. It's all about balance.
"Blood must be paid," she said. "Blood to close the path that blood opened. If not Connor's blood, then another's. Do you wish the Seer to die in his place?"
Oh God. "I'll die in his place. No one else."
"Unacceptable." She shrugged those gleaming soft-gold shoulders, and the blue runes inscribed on her skin seemed to flow to new patterns, new meanings. "Very well. I will choose for you. But the hand of death is already upon the boy, here, at this time. If you wish to try to change his destiny, you must guard him better. Make it right."
"I don't -- "
Her backhand blow sent him sprawling, and from her open palm came something blue and fiery and utterly frightening. It was like going blind to look at it. Connor rolled over and over, blown by an unseen wind, sucked into the blue swirl; Holtz's body tumbled in. Cordelia's.
Angel hung on, shouting, not even sure what it was he was trying to say.
And then it was all cold drowning blue, and the sense of things slipping away, and the world changing in odd, strange, unknowable ways.
"I have taken back time," the Oracle said. "Here, in this place, that is mine to do. I cannot take it back in your place. You will remember."
He might remember, Angel thought, but he didn't understand a damn thing. He just looked at her.
"Innocents die," she said to him. "There is a cost to what I have done for you. Remember that as well."
She closed her fist ...
... and a trapdoor of darkness opened up and sucked him down.
###
In the ashes of Quar-toth, the Oracle stood, listening to the pulse and complicated music of time. Her brother ghosted up from the unclean depths of this place and stood at her shoulder, staring at the glowing crescent still balanced on her palm.
"That's still not right," he said morosely.
"I know!" She bit her lip in annoyance. "It's the best that can be done."
"You should have let it continue."
"To the destruction of all?" She shook her head, curls brushing the fine-burnished skin of her back. "This I have put right. But I cannot guard everything. Everyone. Blood will spill, and there is no preventing it." It was all very vexing.
"You set free a great enemy." Her brother glanced toward the spot where Daniel Holtz's body had fallen, where his blood still stained the rock.
She shrugged. "I sent him back to the days-ago past. It will take him time to find his way, and besides, he is Angel's enemy, not ours. Let the lower beings deal with their own."
Her brother gave her a sidelong look. "And we will deal with the higher?"
Her lips thinned, and she could not help the chill of doubt that moved through her. "If we can."
"We should have warned them."
"All we can do is hope that the Champion and the Seer can overcome their destinies."
Her brother looked amused. "Can one overcome a destiny?"
She shrugged and closed her hand. The crescent flared and was crushed into sparkling sand that drifted down to the ash.
"We shall see."
###
It might still have been day, but it was night under the tree canopy; Wesley focused on burning the ache from his muscles and keeping his senses on alert. Too many sounds, too much motion, too many predators lurking. The heat was thick and oppressive, and he was soaked with sweat before ten minutes had passed, ready to drop. Justine had taken the lead. He was grateful for her willingness to wield the machete.
Some time later then found a path -- not an animal trail, something still marked here and there with human footprints. Was it still daylight? His study of the dark blue sky glimpsed here and there through the canopy didn't reassure him. It could have been early morning, dusk, eternal twilight.
They hadn't gone more than a few hundred feet along the path when Justine came to a sudden stop and looked over her shoulder at him. Her face was dripping with sweat, scored with light scratches from the underbrush, and she looked so wonderfully alive she glowed in the halflight. Just ahead, she mouthed. No sense in telegraphing their approach more than necessary.
From outside the Dead Church had withstood the jungle surprisingly well; plants crawled its walls, and part of the north wall had collapsed under the relentless pressure of growth, but the door gaped open and, from what he could tell, the roof was intact. A shattered cross lay half-drowned in vines. For all that, there was a sense of ... corruption. Dark, glittering, fetid enthusiasm. He'd rarely felt something so drenched in evil.
Justine had drawn a stake and still carried the machete in her left hand. Wesley armed himself, nodded to her, and they moved in quick silence to the entrance.
No holy water to be had, here ... the font was shattered, pieces flung everywhere across the uneven, stained floor. The sanctuary was a rat's nest of shattered pews. It stank of rotting flesh. At the front, an altar still stood, but the stains on it were thick and blood-dark.
Wesley turned his eyes away from the crucified Christ still gleaming in the shadows, presiding over this travesty. He had a strong stomach, but ...
"Oh my God," Justine whispered. Breathless. Stricken. He glanced at her and saw her staring at the cross.
It hit him in a cold flash that it hadn't been a statue, after all.
It was Daniel Holtz.
His long silver-threaded red hair concealed his face, but it was Holtz, no doubt. He'd been stocky the last time Wesley had seen him; now he was skeletal, waxen, all but a corpse. His palms cupped massive iron nails driven through his hands into the cross, his overlapping bare feet were pinned the same way.
Over the single mocking rag of a loincloth that was his only garment, Holtz's skeletal chest rose and fell, almost imperceptibly. Still alive.
Justine lunged forward. Wesley grabbed her and hauled her to a stop, checking the shadows, the corners, searching for the barbed sting of this trap.
Nothing.
Justine rounded on him, fury blazing in her eyes, and he let go and nodded. She shoved rotten wood out of her way, climbed on top of the altar and reached out to Holtz, hesitated, then touched his chin and tilted his face up toward her.
Wesley's breath hissed out. He looked away, but not before he'd seen the empty blinded socket of Holtz's right eye.
"Daniel?" Justine's voice trembled. "Can you hear me?"
Some mumble proved Holtz still alert, somehow. Wesley spotted a door just to the right of the nave, probably leading to a robing room; if an attack would come, it might be a useful retreat. No sign of vampires yet, but the smell of old blood and rotten flesh was chokingly strong. They were close.
"Help me!" Justine demanded. He looked back to see her struggling to pull one of the iron spikes free from Holtz's hands. Tears on her face. "Goddammit! Help me!"
He shouldn't, he knew it. Every cell of his body screamed it was a trap, and yet ... and yet he couldn't ignore even someone like Daniel Holtz suffering so badly.
He put down his machete on the altar and yanked on the iron spike transfixing Holtz's feet. It moved with a liquid grating sound, and he heard Holtz scream. A thin trickle of blood ran over the pallid flesh. "Hold him!" Wesley yelled, and pulled hard, felt the iron tear free of the cross and slide through skin and muscle with hideous ease. The man's entire body slumped, yanking against the spikes in his hands, and there was a sickening sound of tearing flesh. Not just Holtz crying out now but Justine, too, in reaction. Wesley gritted his teeth and shouldered Holtz's weight to support him while Justine worked one spike free, then the other.
Together, they eased his limp body down to the filthy stone floor.
Cold shadows at their backs.
Wesley whirled but there was nothing there, nothing except a thin drifting cloud of dust.
Stone groaned overhead. He looked up, cursed himself for his stupidity, and saw the bodies up there in the darkness, grotesquely clinging to the rafters.
As if he'd given them the signal, the vampires let go and fell, landing on their feet, shattering wood beneath them if it was in their way. Six or seven, at least -- vague shadows with hot beast-yellow eyes, their disfigured faces parodies of bats.
He flipped the stake in his hand and threw it, turned a vampire to ash, swung his machete in a roundhouse swing that toppled another one, head and body dusting in separate pieces. Justine lunged up and met the rush of another one, missed her strike and went down, rolling and fighting for her life to keep fangs out of her neck.
Too many, far too many. More coming out of the shadows now, crawling out of whatever filthy hole they'd found to breed in.
"Justine!" he shouted. A vamp gave him an opening; he staked it and kept moving, dodging blows that would shatter bones and rip flesh. This was a killing ground, too much clutter, clinging vines to trip over, no safety anywhere.
A silent explosion of dust just a few feet away. He fought his way toward it, grabbed Justine by the arm and hauled her upright. She was bloody but still fighting.
"Back to the altar!" he told her. She nodded and jerked her head for him to go first. He didn't argue. He heard her fighting behind him but couldn't pause to look; Justine could be trusted to do as good a job as any mortal alive, next to a Slayer. He heard a sizzle of thrown holy water, inhuman screams, and achieved the first step, pushed forward to stand over Holtz's prone, crumpled body.
"In there," he ordered Justine, nodding toward the door behind them. "Careful."
A waste of breath; she was hardly likely to be taken by surprise again. He kept his eyes on the vampires. They were drawing back now, but the feel of their hunger was as oppressive as the heat.
They were drawing back for their master.
He was a tall, thin man, perfectly tailored in a pale yellow shirt and khaki pants; darker skinned than most of them, arrogantly handsome. No vampire face for him; he looked serenely -- obscenely -- human.
"More Anglos," he said, and shook his head. "I was hoping for a more balanced diet. White meat is so bland. Tell me, how did you find this place? It isn't quite on the normal tourist routes, although we're hoping to be open for business next year. As many Americanos as herd through our country, they'll never miss one or two."
He wasn't looking for an answer, and Wesley didn't bother to offer one. The man was hypnotic. He was hoping to hold them frozen in place long enough for his children to get around them and take them down.
Wesley fought the glamour by moving, always moving, checking his peripheral vision to be sure vampires hadn't slipped silently around to flank them. None had. So far.
"Tell me, what do you think of the place? We used to pile the heads of victims in the corner, but the stench was too much even for me, and frankly, I abhor maggots, don't you?" The vampire smiled and took a confident step forward. He spoke English with an American accent, an odd mixture of Southern drawl and Western twang. Wesley took a firm grip on the stake he held and saw the calculating glitter in the man's dark eyes. Scrape of wood behind him; Justine had opened the door.
"I do appreciate you providing the woman, by the way," the vampire continued. "Women have a sweeter taste, did you know? Like cherries. We like to keep them for several months if possible; their flows are delicious. A bit like dessert."
It was time for a witty comeback, but Wesley didn't feel especially driven to compete. "Justine!"
"It's clear," she called back. He heard another dull scuffling. It took a few seconds for him to recognize the sound of a body being dragged. Holtz. She was pulling him to safety, whatever safety there was in this place. It was miles to the car through jungle so thick vampires could range freely even in the heat of day. Their chances of making it back ...
Don't think. Just move. Stay alive.
He never took his eyes from the master vampire as he backed up another step, then another. The master followed him, closing the distance but too cautious to lunge.
He backed through the doorway.
Justine slammed the door and shot home a thick, rusted bolt that wouldn't hold for long. Something hit it and shuddered the wood with a screech of iron hinges.
Too dark in here to see much, except for the pallid outline of Daniel Holtz lying prone on the floor.
"Holtz," Wesley said. He went to one knee, grabbed a cool shoulder and hauled the man upright. "Holtz! Are there any ways out of here?"
The door continued to shudder under a rain of blows. It wouldn't hold. Couldn't.
"Daniel!" Justine pleaded. "Come on, think! How can we get out?"
Holtz's cracked, dry lips moved slowly. Wesley couldn't hear him over the hungry din from outside. Justine did. She looked up at him with wide, glittering eyes.
"Portal!" she said. "There's a portal here!"
My God. They'd been right after all. The Dead Church was a portal site. At this point, it didn't much matter to where -- any chance was better than none.
Holtz's dry lips were still moving. Wesley bent closer.
"My son," he whispered. "Have to get back. Have to save ... my son ..."
Connor. Holtz was talking about Angel's child. Wesley resisted the urge to bash his skull against the stone wall, clenched his fists until he felt them crack.
He schooled his voice to careful, even tones. "Where is he? Where's the baby?"
Holtz's laugh was a dry scratch, like fingernails on blackboard. "My son. Not Angel's."
Justine's feelings be damned; Wesley reached out, grabbed a thick handful of the man's filthy hair and dragged his head back to stare into his -- well, his one eye. "Where -- is - the baby?"
Wesley was on the knife edge of violence, and Justine must have known it; she leaned forward, put her hands on Holtz's face and forced him to look at her. "Daniel. It's me."
"Justine," he agreed. "How are you?" Another dry spit of laughter. "I've been very well, thank you."
A kind of wild panicked fury behind that. Wesley swallowed the taste of bile; he had far too vivid an imagination not to know what Holtz had been subjected to, here in this defiled unholy place. At least he'd been spared the worst -- for Holtz, whose family had been snuffed out by vampires, becoming what he despised would have been unbearable. No doubt the vampires had meant to turn him, but they'd played with their doll too long.
Something tugged at the edge of Wesley's mind, but he couldn't think what. A smell. Something acrid over the stench of rotten meat …
No time. He focused on Holtz. "Tell me how to open the portal."
"Why should I?"
The door shuddered under a particularly violent blow. Dust showered from the ancient iron hinges. "Because I doubt they're done with you yet," Wesley said flatly. "Unless you prefer negotiating with them instead of us."
For a long, long second Holtz didn't move, didn't speak. He looked into Justine's eyes, and there was something in him. Wesley wanted to imagine it was a trace of humanity, but in Holtz, one could never really be sure.
"Use the Chant of Kathaeis," Holtz rasped. "Better hurry."
There wasn't any time for careful preparation; not even any time for a circle of protection. Wesley braced himself, focused, and began shouting the words. The Chant of Kathaeis was difficult; proper inflection was crucial, but he must have been accurate enough; after just a few lines he felt wind stir, power prickle like a sandstorm across his body.
Six lines, and lightning flared blue at the far end of the room. A turning, twisting vortex of light and fury that churned the air. Tattered papers took flight, sucked toward that hungry mouth of whirling clouds.
When Wesley looked back, Justine had helped Holtz to his feet. Holtz ... something about him ... The door was visibly moving now, the hinges giving under the pressure. No time left for doubts.
He moved to take Holtz's other shoulder.
"God is good," Holtz whispered, and there it was again, that dry scratch of a laugh. "He answered my prayers. I was hoping I'd see you again, Justine. For old time's sake."
"Don't talk," she said. The shuffled toward the portal, the three of them. Holtz felt strangely dense, like marble. Wesley's skin crawled from the contact.
"No, I have to say thank you for taking me off the cross. That idiot Santana honestly thought it would kill me. I didn't survive Quar-toth to go that quietly."
"Santana?" Wesley felt a premonition drip cold down his neck.
"The head vampire. Well, he was. Until you let me loose." Holtz grabbed Wesley by the shirt with inhuman strength, and lifted him straight up in the air. Tossed him like a toy, backwards, out of control. As he fell, Wesley realized what his instincts had been screaming about Holtz.
The wounds in Holtz's feet and hands were healed.
The smell. The smell on Holtz when they'd taken him off the cross.
Burning flesh.
Holtz had been turned.
Wesley hit the wall with bruising force, felt something give with a wet crunch of bone, waited for pain but didn't have time to stop. He rolled, limped to his feet and staggered. The pull of the portal was very strong.
Justine was just now turning to face Holtz, and he couldn't move fast enough, couldn't be strong enough, couldn't do anything right, how could he not have known ...
Holtz's one eye turned beast-yellow. His face deformed into a vampire mask.
Wesley screamed her name and lunged as the creature Daniel Holtz had become grabbed Justine by the throat. She tried to stake him, but he knocked the wood away with a careless, casual gesture, and spun to meet Wesley's attack with eerie speed.
Holtz backhanded him like a child, and Wesley was thrown back, too far back this time, into the gravity well of the portal. He felt its relentless pull and grabbed for something, anything. A thick fleshy vine tore under his fingers, spraying him with cloying juice. A jutting piece of wood broke when he took hold.
Holtz dragged Justine to him in that bone-cracking embrace. No. No. No!
The portal took him as Holtz buried his fangs in her neck.
###
Angel thumped face down on a pile of ash and debris, and thought, still in Quar-toth but these ashes were cool, and the air had an indefinable smell. Not Quar-toth. Hydrocarbons, garbage, humanity ... Los Angeles.
He raised his head and saw the skeletal outlines of ruined beams, a fallen-in roof, everything coated with soot and ash and charring. It took him a few long seconds, but he realized he was lying on what had once been the bar, behind which Lorne had served mixed drinks and blood and venom with equal panache.
He was in the ruins of Caritas.
The bitch had sent him home.
Angel rolled over, gasping, staring up at the moon that loomed low and white through the broken roof. Emptiness out, emptiness in; he was a broken shell, a burned-out ruin with nothing left. Nothing to give.
"Why didn't you just kill me?" he whispered, and heard the rustle of rats in the ashes, smelled the sharp spike of fear, heard the thud of a heart -- two hearts --
He opened his eyes just as he heard Cordelia whisper, "Angel?"
She picked her way carefully across the wreckage toward him. Angel rolled slowly to his feet, thawing inside, and caught glimpses of her as moonlight slid across her moving form. Lithe, slender, alive, how was it possible ...
She stumbled and caught herself with her left hand on a fallen beam, and the moonlight fell on the bundle she carried in her arms.
The moving ... bundle ...
He met them in the ashes, his arms circling the weeping woman and the crying child, and felt the circle close around them as strong as steel.
"Connor," he whispered, and brushed his lips across his infant son's soft, velvet skin. "Cordy -- " So much he wanted to say to her, so much he knew he never could. He settled for a desperate, trembling kiss. "You're okay?"
"No," she said. Her voice was shaking, higher than normal. "So not okay, what with the hell and the demon-parts coming out and dying and all. But ... " She sucked in a wet, faltering breath. "But oh God it was worth it, Angel. He's safe."
He kissed her again, this time on the forehead, and took his son in his arms.
Cordelia, always wary, looked around. "Holtz?"
"He's not here," Angel said, preoccupied with counting Connor's fingers, toes, with listening to the liquid rush of his tiny beating heart.
"O-kay ... where did he go, then?"
"Don't know. Don't care." He probably would tomorrow, he thought, but tonight there was nothing in the world more important than the baby in his arms, the woman at his side.
And then he felt the sudden hard-edged charge of magicks being worked, and heard the thump of another body arriving.
"Get back," he whispered to Cordelia, and reached for a weapon.
###
Where the portal took Wesley, there was no sign of Connor. No sign of anyone or anything. A gray, arid, ashen landscape went on forever, broken only by the skeletal twisted remains of what might have once been human beings. He stumbled across it, brokenly chanting the Chant of Kathaeis, until some endless time later a portal formed, and he fell a thousand miles, a hundred years, into the darkness.
He sprawled on a charred floor, numbed, aching, empty, weeping. Wrong, he thought, and smelled the acrid stench of burned carpet and insulation. It's not the Dead Church.
"Wesley?" A breathless whisper from somewhere beyond the frozen glare of moonlight on charred wood. He thought, now I've done it, I've finally gone mad, but then there was a warm hand on his shoulder, sliding up to touch his face, and he focused on Cordelia's face. Beautiful, real Cordelia. "Oh my God. Angel, it's Wesley ..."
She turned to look over her shoulder.
Silhouetted against the pre-dawn darkness, a figure in black, skin shining pale as the moon. No expression on his face, and his eyes were hidden by the shadows.
And then it hit Wesley, like a fist to the heart, that there was a child in Angel's arms.
"Connor?" He heard the incredulous joy in his voice, felt tears burn his eyes again. "You found - "
He stumbled to his feet, with Cordelia's help - the fact that he needed it was something of a surprise - and Angel took a step back. Just a step, but it was enough.
Wesley felt the cold chill settle into his soul again, and pulled gently free of Cordelia's hands. He hesitated, looked her up and down, and said, "What on earth have you been up to?"
She was dressed in battle gear - well, battle gear by the peculiar standards of Cordelia Chase. Dark slacks, a black shirt that looked suspiciously like silk in the moonlight, stiff with drying blood; a mass of gold chains and magical talismans at her throat, and most odd of all, a toolbelt loaded with knives, axes and other weapons.
"You're talking?" she shot back. "Filthy much?"
"I've been - " God, how to even describe it? No, it didn't matter now. "Away."
Angel hadn't moved, hadn't spoken. Wesley looked at him directly one more time, focused on the fragile infant in Angel's strong, huge hands. "I'm glad - " His throat was rough. He cleared it. "I'm glad you found him. And I'm sorry he was lost in the first place. That's my doing. I accept that."
Angel didn't so much as acknowledge he heard it. Wesley wished he could reach out and hold that tiny, beautiful child again, and knew he didn't have the right. Could never again be trusted that far.
He looked down and turned to pick his way through the rubble.
"Wesley?" Angel's warm voice stopped him cold in his tracks. "You ... got someplace to go?"
Wesley closed his eyes and swayed with relief, but didn't look back. "I'm afraid I do," he said. "Something I have to take care of."
"Oh." A hesitation. He heard Angel take a cautious step forward. "So where were you?"
No reason not to tell him. "Mexico."
"I'm guessing not Puerto Vallarta," Cordelia said. "You were looking for Connor."
Somehow, hearing her say that, with such utter confidence, gave Wesley the courage to face them. He could read Angel's expression now, see the tentative, fragile need in his eyes.
"I was searching. But I didn't find him."
Angel gave him a smile so faint it was barely present. "Cordelia did."
"Oh." Wesley managed a nod. "Good job, then."
Angel took another step closer. "So ... you're going back there. To Mexico."
"Unfinished business."
"But ... you're coming back."
Wesley took in a deep breath and reflected that for the first time in weeks his barely-healed throat wound didn't seem to burn. "That depends. Do you want me back?"
Angel's smile was less of a ghost this time. "Yes. I think."
"How about, come back or I'll hunt you down and kick your ass?" Cordelia said, and crossed her arms across her chest. Weapons rattled. She kicked irritably at a hunk of wood on the floor. "We need to be a family again, Wesley. Enough already with the angst and drama."
"I'll consider myself rebuked." Dear God, the intensity of that joy inside ... feeling part of them again. Knowing his place in the world ...
Angel took the last step closer. "So. Mexico. Need any help?"
"Not - not this time. This is mine to do." Wesley glanced significantly down at Connor, asleep in Angel's arms. "And you have a baby to care for. A family."
It still hurt, a little, to see Angel's eyes move to Cordelia, to see the banked fire there. But not as much as he would have expected.
He extended his hand. Angel took it, strength carefully sheathed in gentleness, and they solemnly shook hands, holding it just an instant longer than was proper before stepping away.
"Come back," Angel said. "We'll be here. Well, not ... here, you know, at --"
"The hotel," Wesley finished. "Yes. When I can."
Wesley nodded, held to his dignity with as much strength as he had left to keep from bursting into tears of utter relief and joy, and picked his way through the rubble of Caritas toward the street. When he looked back, they were gone like a dream. Moonlight glittered on carbonized wood, on the bones of the past.
He walked back to his apartment, showered, drank enough water to sustain him, and then called and booked a flight for Mexico City.
###
In a day, he was back, retracing his steps, heading at best speed back to the Dead Church.
He needn't have hurried. The stench of death was still there, but the vampires were not; Holtz had led them somewhere else, somewhere into the depths of the jungle or the dark glittering world of men; they were all gone ...
Except for Justine.
She was sitting on the steps by the altar, hugging herself like a lost child. Still in the same bloodstained t-shirt and jeans. Her hair gleamed like raw silk. He couldn't see her face because she didn't look up, even though she must have heard the scrape of his feet on the stone, or the hard pounding of his pulse.
"He knew," she said. "He could smell it on me. Me and you. And he punished me for that. Called me a whore."
He couldn't answer her. His heart shredded to pieces in his chest, and he felt his throat choke closed from the anguish.
"That's the one thing I never was," she said. "A whore. That really wasn't fair. Oh, by the way, he says there's some kind of prophecy. End of the world. Yadda yadda. Ain't there always."
She raised her head, and he saw her human face, still untouched and beautiful, her eyes filled with tears.
"Please go," she said. "Please just turn around and go now."
"I can't do that." The words turned like razors in his mouth. "You know I can't."
"Why not? You let Angel live. You protected him."
"You're not like Angel." Her face was blurring. He blinked and felt tears slide cold down his face. "You'll kill, Justine. You'll feed, and you'll enjoy it."
"I already have," she said. She pointed to the corner. There was something crumpled in a heap of cloth ...
A child, a girl, maybe ten. Wesley knelt down next to her and straightened her limbs, simply because he wanted to do something, anything, to make amends for this. She was cold. Rigor had already passed off.
He couldn't stop the sound that tore out of him. Not a sob, a groan. The last hope dying like rays of sunset.
"See?" Justine whispered. She was right behind him. "But you know, it's not so bad. All this time hating vampires, and I didn't realize how good it could feel not to hurt anymore. Not to agonize about good and evil and all that crap. Living like this is clean, Wesley. Uncomplicated. I think you'd like it."
Her hand touched his hair, smoothed over it, slid cold to his neck and down into his shirt. His skin shivered at the touch and some part of him -- some part of him wanted --
"It's not living," he whispered. "It's living death." But that didn't stop the response in his flesh to her hands, to the memory of who and what she had been.
"We don't have to go with Holtz. We can go on our own -- be free -- be together …"
He turned to face her. She still looked so human. She was smiling slightly, sadly, and she reached out and traced the line of the scar on his throat.
"Not going for it, huh?" she asked.
"Not remotely," he whispered.
"Yeah. That's who you are. Wesley Do-Right."
She kissed him. Her lips were cool and soft, but she tasted of blood, and he felt the hard nubs of her teeth under the skin. When he pulled back, she made it easy for him -- gave her face over to the demon, to the yellow eyes and twisted flesh.
She hit him with stunning force, a backhand that threw him across the room; he hit, rolled, fetched up hard against the shattered skeleton of a pew. He shook it off and got to his feet.
No conversation now. They both knew how this had to happen.
She came at him head-on, moving so fast she was barely a blur; he twisted out of the way, caught her with a punch, a kick, sent her sprawling. She bounced up and came again. And again. He hardly felt the punches, the scratches; it took all his concentration to stay out of her hands because he knew, knew she'd sire him as she'd been sired, she wouldn't be able to help herself. Maybe it would even be a twisted form of love.
The damage he could do as a vampire … the thought terrified. He knew instinctively how awful it had been for her, in that last heartbeat of life, betrayed by a friend and losing herself to the darkness. He'd fallen down that long, terrible drop already.
Never again.
She took his knee out from under him, followed up with a snap-kick that made him see stars, she was too strong, too strong, and every punch he landed on her flesh reminded him of his father's fists, his mother's cries.
He couldn't win his battle. It wasn't in him.
He let himself falter, took a punishing blow to the head, and fell.
Her hand fastened on his throat, cold on the scar she'd given him. She bent over him like a lover; his eyes were closed, but he could see her face in his mind's eye, the sullen yellow eyes, the twisted mask. He could smell the old-blood stench of her.
He couldn't win the battle, but he had the will to end the war.
He opened his eyes, triggered the spring-loaded wooden stake from its hiding place on his arm and felt it smash through skin, the thick cage of bone, bury itself deep in Justine's unbeating heart.
He saw her vampire face fade. So much surprise in her wide human eyes, but it faded into a quiet tender stillness, a memory of their bodies locked together, sealed in promises.
Her iron-hard grip on his throat turned to a caress.
"You won't forget me?" she asked. She sounded different. Gentler.
"Never," he whispered.
He triggered the release, and the stake slid smoothly back out. The cool weight of her turned to a warm, elusive drift of ash settling over his skin. He rolled over, retching up sobs.
She'd never known peace before. He hoped it was sweet, and joyous, and full of the love that had failed her in the end.
When he could summon the strength, he went back to the car for the cans of gasoline.
The Dead Church made a bright fire, but it brought no warmth.
When it was ashes, when the past was gone, he got back in the car and started the long journey home.
End of the three-part story cycle. Comments welcome, always!
J.
It's a shock to realize that Quar-toth is actually very small. Or at least the livable part of it, if livable is the right word for a place that's made of razor-sharp rock, burning ash, and choking gas. Cordelia's eyes burn constantly, and the taste in the back of her throat is so foul it's all she can do not to retch with every breath. God, where's her demon when she needs it?
"Connor!" Angel is screaming his son's name, running ahead of her as she stumbles along. She wonders how long she can keep going. Sure, she's tough and all, but this isn't a place where tough matters. This isn't a place where anything matters.
She blinks away the pain and tries to focus. Coughing doubles her over. When she straightens, she spots someone watching her from the shadow of a sharp black rock. A man with shaggy hair and ashes smeared on his face like some tribal mask.
It takes her a few long seconds to recognize Daniel Holtz.
Holtz looks older now, frailer, but still with that sinewy toughness, like a piece of jerky left too long in the smokehouse. Still crazy. Cordelia can see it in his glittering, rabid eyes.
"Angel." That broken-glass purr of a voice, gone rusted from disuse, brings Angel around fast. "How kind. You thought I might be lonely. Pity she won't last long here."
Angel doesn't waste time. He launches into an attack, and Holtz falls back, fending him off with some long, sharp poleaxe thingy and a sword. Cordelia crumbles to her knees, watching; she's still empty inside, hollowed out by what Hell did to her. Oh God, was that me? Really me? Is that what the Powers made me, that ... thing? How can any good come of that? It occurs to her that maybe the Powers don't want good to come of it. That maybe the Powers aren't the goody-goody-two-shoes she's always thought they were. Fat lot of good that insight does for her just now.
She catches a glint of gold in the mist, a flash of the Oracle's flat blue eyes.
Connor. If Holtz is here, he's left the baby somewhere. All she has to do is find him.
She forces herself up, dammit, up, grabs hold of a rock to support her and feels it cut her to the bone. Blood. She sees Angel's eyes flash to her and knows he's smelled it. Holtz uses the distraction; he cuts Angel across the back of one leg, and Angel goes down. Holtz drops the sword and pulls out a wooden stake ... but Angel's okay, he's rolling free, coming back to his feet.
She doesn't wait to see the outcome.
There's something roaring and shrieking on the other side of the black, shiny rock canyon; Cordelia can hear the flap of huge leathery wings, the cries of - what? A child? Connor? Oh God. Oh, Holtz, you bastard, you left him alone ... a baby left alone, here ...
She gasps in the poisoned, fetid air, pushes herself to her feet and runs, screaming Connor's name. She hears Angel yell something that might have been an order but she can't stop now, can't, it's impossible, she's so close, so damn close ...
Around the outcropping, there's something huge and monstrous down on the ground, flopping in a mist of blood and dust. She shrieks and flings herself at it, all she can think about is the baby, the baby somewhere in the middle of that ...
Something sharp plunges into her stomach. Sharp, glittering ice. Cold spreading through her, which is weird, because she can see heat shimmering off of the rock and ash and metal all around her, but there's something wrong, something ...
... a little boy is staring at her from the other end of a long metal knife. She reaches for the blade that's still embedded in her stomach and thinks, oh damn, that's bad, isn't it, and she looks into those dark, utterly familiar eyes until the world starts to go gray and still.
No longer a baby. How old ... six? Seven?
"Connor," she whispers, and reaches out to touch him. She brushes her bloodstained fingers over his flat, sweaty, matted hair and sees him flinch away. Those eyes. Like his father's. Eyes that have looked into the darkness for so long they'll never understand the light. "Oh, God, baby, I'm so sorry," she whispers, and feels the cold edges inside of her rip free as he pulls out the knife.
Connor backs away when she tries to reach for him again. She loses her balance and then there's the ground, whoops, it's hot but she feels cold, cold, all cold.
Falling.
Somewhere behind her, she hears the portal rip into existence with a sound like tearing flesh, and hears Angel screaming her name. She reaches out to Connor, but he's gone, vanished like he'd never even lived.
Then she's being lifted in strong arms, held against Angel's unbeating heart.
"Get Connor." She gestures vaguely into the mist.
His voice is unsteady. "I can't. You're hurt ... Cordy ..." His hands fumbled at her clothes, trying to find the source of the bleeding. She fended him off.
"Get Connor, you idiot! I didn't come all this way for nothing!" She thumps him with one weak fist. "Go!"
"I can't leave you ..." But she hears it in his voice, that doubt, that need.
"You have to - get him - go - " She manages to find the strength - demon-strength - to shove him away. The world melts alarmingly around her. "Go. I'm fine. Just move, dammit!"
He kisses her. The cool desperation of his lips surprises her, and she doesn't think she kisses him very well in return, because frankly her mind is more on the hole in her guts and the warm gush of blood that's spilling out under her hand. Doesn't Angel smell it? Probably, but then this whole place reeks of blood and death.
He gives her one last tormented look, and from the last depths of her strength - not demon-strength now, but Cordelia-strength, the kind forged in Sunnydale High School when those around her fell - she gives him her best, most commanding Queen C shove and snaps, "Jeez, will you get on with it already? 'Cause I'm so ready to go now!"
He spins and runs after Connor.
She goes to her knees almost immediately, and it's not a graceful fall, it hurts, dammit, and she braces herself with one hand in the ashes but she's shaking now, shaking all over, and when her blood seeps out from under her clutching right hand it hisses on the ashes.
I want to go home, please let me go home now.
Then she's lying on the ground, on her back. Wind ruffles her clothes, stirs the ash. Overhead the sky is red, shot through with black clouds that twist and turn like those souls in Hell and oh God she can feel herself going, if she dies here she's afraid it'll just go on and on ...
A warm rough hand on her forehead. She blinks and focuses on the face that looms over her. Fading red hair laced with gray blows on the wind, and caught in its net is the face of Daniel Holtz.
"Ah, the Seer. Cordelia," he says, and she hates the sound of her name in his mouth. "So. The demon left you here to die. Typical."
"I don't care." Sheer bravado, but it sounds good. "Connor's more important."
"Ah, but his name's not Connor anymore. And by the count of this world, I've had him for nearly seven years. Do you really think he's Angel's son anymore?" Holtz smiles. "Or yours?"
She closes her eyes.
"Oh, come now, that gut wound will take hours to kill you." He settles himself comfortably at her side. "Although with the blood smell on the wind, no doubt one of Quar-toth's many creatures will come to feed before then. That would be a cruel reward for your loyalty, but then look what happened to your friend ... what was his name? Wesley?"
"Wesley's not dead." She opens her eyes again. "Psycho Girl missed. And Angel's going to kill you, by the way. And he won't miss."
Holtz keeps smiling. If he weren't such a complete waste, he'd have a nice smile, she decides. Not that smiles have much attraction at the moment, not as much as, say, morphine ...
"You're pale," he says sympathetically. His gaze wandered to the half-healed punctures on her throat. "And I see the oh-so-holy Angel has lowered himself to feeding on you. You've seen the evil in him. How can you possibly believe his lies?"
"They make more sense than yours." Harder to talk now, what with the pain creeping up like fire in her guts. "Go on and kill me already before I croak of boredom."
He doesn't answer. He continues to look down on her, and there's something odd in that look, something almost ... human.
Somewhere in the distance, shouting. Angel's voice, but distance and the wind twist it into noise. Holtz looks up, then back down at her.
"You could still be the boy's mother," he says then. "A boy needs one. It wouldn't be much of a life, but it would be better than dying as Angelus' whore."
"And all I have to do is look at your face for the rest of my life? Ugh. Kill me."
"If you insist," he says.
He leans over her, and though she knows better he looks impossibly big up there, impossibly strong. Even Angel couldn't kill him. Probably it was useless to even try, but she's never been one to roll over and die.
It's a disease she's caught from Buffy, like it or not. Terminal Sunnydale Survivor Syndrome. Like mouthing off, and taking every advantage there was, including wrapping her sweaty fingers around the one weapon she'd managed to keep out of his notice.
He puts his hands around her throat.
She plunges the knife she's been holding in her left hand deep into his guts, rips it sharply up just as Angel has taught her, and looks into his eyes as she does it. Holtz looks surprised, like Wile E. Coyote jogging over open air.
"No need to apologize," she says. "Can't trust you either. Oh, and don't worry, takes hours to die. Gut wound."
It's a long speech on such short, bitter breaths. Adrenaline fuels it but then, as Holtz stumbles away and collapses, all she can feel is the pain washing over her, the weakness, the certainty that he's right.
They're both going to die. Well, that's a deal she can accept, so long as Connor and Angel make it out.
Holtz is moaning. She closes her eyes. "Suck it up," she whispers. "Asshole."
###
He couldn't find Connor. It seemed like hours spent shambling through the broken, razor-edged rock, eyes burning from the fumes and heat, before he finally turned back.
Cordelia was a pale, perfect shadow on the ground. In the distance, the vortex still whirled, and a slight wind ruffled her dark hair, the blood-spattered shirt under its weight of Kevlar and weaponry. She looked so fragile, under all that. So broken.
Angel sank down next to her, closed his eyes, and listened for her heart.
It was silent. Cold and silent, its chambers hushed like a church.
"No." The word came out softly, brokenly, and he gathered her in his arms and held her there, cradled against his chest. "No no no no ..."
Heavy, dead flesh. He knew the feel of that so well. The smell of her blood conjured up a thick sweet weight of saliva in his mouth, and the memory of all of the bodies he'd cradled like this and drained before dropping them and moving on.
This can't happen. It can't.
He thought of Fred, and Gunn, and Lorne, all waiting faithfully in Cordelia's apartment. How long before they gave up? Before they lost all hope, the way he had already lost it? He couldn't imagine going back now, with Cordelia's body in his arms ... couldn't imagine going back at all. It was too far, and he was too tired. Connor ... Connor was lost. Cordelia was gone. What was the point?
Cordelia's hair still smelled alive and sweet, and cooled his face as he kissed it.
Someone was laughing, a scratch of sound on silence. He looked up to see another body lying huddled against an outcropping of razor-edged rock.
Holtz. Bleeding out, but still alive. For a long second it doesn't make sense, and then it does when he sees the bloody knife lying at Cordelia's side. No, Cordy ... Part of him mourns that loss of her innocence, but he's realistic enough to know that she's chosen this. Wants this.
"Dead?" Holtz asked. Angel didn't answer. "Ah well. Our son will know what to do. Cut off her head, bury her with wood in her heart so she won't rise again. I've trained him well, you see. Better than you could ever imagine."
"He's not your son." Angel eased Cordelia back down, feeling something inside fall away with her into the eternal dark.
"I've had him all his life, Angelus. What else can he ever be?"
Angel looked down at him - the dying, mocking face of his worst enemy, this human, his own victim. We made each other. We deserve each other. Connor, Cordelia, Wesley - it was all just collateral damage. For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee. Milton had never felt so brutally appropriate.
"You know what he can be? He can be an orphan," Angel said, and reached down with a motion too fast for human eyes to follow, and snapped Daniel Holtz's neck with a dry-stick twist.
He heard the crunch of footsteps on ash, and looked up to see Connor standing there. Not his Connor. Holtz's son. Alien, hard, adapted to the darkness. Just a boy, a ragged Peter Pan with a sharp elfin face and ragged straight brown hair. Something of Darla in his features, and Angel's brooding distance in the brown eyes.
God, he was so young.
And he had stake in his hand, as if he knew how to use it.
"You killed my father," Connor said; his voice was high, pure, the voice of an avenging angel. No tears, no doubt, nothing but rage. Angel thought about that, about Darla plunging wood into her heart to give this child life, about so many things.
He eased Cordelia back down to the ground and stood up.
"Yes," he said. "I did." Long, long ago, in an alleyway that smelled of piss and horses, of Darla's acrid perfume and the sharp tang of his own blood.
Connor -- too short, too weak, too young -- lunged for him with the stake aimed high for his heart. Angel let it happen. It felt ... clean.
It felt good.
The point stopped just touching his chest. Denting the fabric of his shirt, but not piercing.
His son stood a foot away, frozen, staring into his eyes. Poised on the verge of murder.
Behind Connor stood one of the Oracles of The Powers That Be, the woman, with her chilly blue eyes and cold, gold skin. Her hand was raised, and there was a glowing blue crescent balanced on her palm.
She'd died, but hell, hadn't they all, at one time or another? All the best people did.
Angel almost laughed out loud. She glared.
"This is not a matter for amusement," the Oracle snapped. "How can you have gone so wrong, even as a lower being? How is it possible for a Champion to be so ... stupid?" She fumed. Literally. Steam came off of her skin in white, boiling waves. "You have upset all balance. There is no future. Do you understand?"
He shrugged. "So?"
The Oracle stamped her bare, shapely, golden foot. Her voice rang with authority. "You have undone prophecy!"
"Well, since prophecy said I would kill my son, that works just fine for me."
Her blue eyes slowly blinked, and her head tilted to the side. Dark Grecian-styled curls brushed her bare shoulders, and though a hot wind blasted past them her dark blue draperies barely moved. Ashes burned at Angel's eyes. "The balance must be set right," the Oracle said, and bit her lip in annoyance. "It was to avoid this that I sent her here. Now blood must be sacrificed."
Black, rich laughter boiled out of him. "Yeah? Well, Cordelia's already bled for you. You want mine too? It's yours."
"No." Her eyes flared a cold, pure color like something at the heart of a storm. "A Champion must continue. A Seer must continue. All will be undone if this is not so."
There was one living person she didn't mention, one that stood small and vulnerable right in front of her, in easy reach. Angel went utterly cold inside. "Not my son. You can't take my son."
"Your son should not exist."
"He does exist." Angel took a step back, away from the stake; Connor's eyes didn't follow him. The boy was frozen and helpless. "And I swear, you'll have to kill me before I let you touch him. The Powers have done enough to us. Let him go."
Her eyes went from that clear, unworldly blue to something dark, shadowed, as alien as space. "The Powers have not done as much as you think," she said. "And there would be more to come, much more, pain and death and undying regret. All this, if he lives."
"No."
"Your son is the Destroyer. Surely you know this."
"No!"
"He will spawn the ending of your world!"
"NO!" Angel roared, and jumped for her. He went right through her, crashed to the ashes behind her, rolled and came up furious and ready to kill.
But he couldn't.
She was already dead. He could see now how incorporeal she was. Some kind of Ascended One? A Power herself?
She regarded him with those steady, cold eyes, and finally smiled. Very slightly. On her palm, the glowing crescent rocked back and forth. Balance, he thought. It's all about balance.
"Blood must be paid," she said. "Blood to close the path that blood opened. If not Connor's blood, then another's. Do you wish the Seer to die in his place?"
Oh God. "I'll die in his place. No one else."
"Unacceptable." She shrugged those gleaming soft-gold shoulders, and the blue runes inscribed on her skin seemed to flow to new patterns, new meanings. "Very well. I will choose for you. But the hand of death is already upon the boy, here, at this time. If you wish to try to change his destiny, you must guard him better. Make it right."
"I don't -- "
Her backhand blow sent him sprawling, and from her open palm came something blue and fiery and utterly frightening. It was like going blind to look at it. Connor rolled over and over, blown by an unseen wind, sucked into the blue swirl; Holtz's body tumbled in. Cordelia's.
Angel hung on, shouting, not even sure what it was he was trying to say.
And then it was all cold drowning blue, and the sense of things slipping away, and the world changing in odd, strange, unknowable ways.
"I have taken back time," the Oracle said. "Here, in this place, that is mine to do. I cannot take it back in your place. You will remember."
He might remember, Angel thought, but he didn't understand a damn thing. He just looked at her.
"Innocents die," she said to him. "There is a cost to what I have done for you. Remember that as well."
She closed her fist ...
... and a trapdoor of darkness opened up and sucked him down.
###
In the ashes of Quar-toth, the Oracle stood, listening to the pulse and complicated music of time. Her brother ghosted up from the unclean depths of this place and stood at her shoulder, staring at the glowing crescent still balanced on her palm.
"That's still not right," he said morosely.
"I know!" She bit her lip in annoyance. "It's the best that can be done."
"You should have let it continue."
"To the destruction of all?" She shook her head, curls brushing the fine-burnished skin of her back. "This I have put right. But I cannot guard everything. Everyone. Blood will spill, and there is no preventing it." It was all very vexing.
"You set free a great enemy." Her brother glanced toward the spot where Daniel Holtz's body had fallen, where his blood still stained the rock.
She shrugged. "I sent him back to the days-ago past. It will take him time to find his way, and besides, he is Angel's enemy, not ours. Let the lower beings deal with their own."
Her brother gave her a sidelong look. "And we will deal with the higher?"
Her lips thinned, and she could not help the chill of doubt that moved through her. "If we can."
"We should have warned them."
"All we can do is hope that the Champion and the Seer can overcome their destinies."
Her brother looked amused. "Can one overcome a destiny?"
She shrugged and closed her hand. The crescent flared and was crushed into sparkling sand that drifted down to the ash.
"We shall see."
###
It might still have been day, but it was night under the tree canopy; Wesley focused on burning the ache from his muscles and keeping his senses on alert. Too many sounds, too much motion, too many predators lurking. The heat was thick and oppressive, and he was soaked with sweat before ten minutes had passed, ready to drop. Justine had taken the lead. He was grateful for her willingness to wield the machete.
Some time later then found a path -- not an animal trail, something still marked here and there with human footprints. Was it still daylight? His study of the dark blue sky glimpsed here and there through the canopy didn't reassure him. It could have been early morning, dusk, eternal twilight.
They hadn't gone more than a few hundred feet along the path when Justine came to a sudden stop and looked over her shoulder at him. Her face was dripping with sweat, scored with light scratches from the underbrush, and she looked so wonderfully alive she glowed in the halflight. Just ahead, she mouthed. No sense in telegraphing their approach more than necessary.
From outside the Dead Church had withstood the jungle surprisingly well; plants crawled its walls, and part of the north wall had collapsed under the relentless pressure of growth, but the door gaped open and, from what he could tell, the roof was intact. A shattered cross lay half-drowned in vines. For all that, there was a sense of ... corruption. Dark, glittering, fetid enthusiasm. He'd rarely felt something so drenched in evil.
Justine had drawn a stake and still carried the machete in her left hand. Wesley armed himself, nodded to her, and they moved in quick silence to the entrance.
No holy water to be had, here ... the font was shattered, pieces flung everywhere across the uneven, stained floor. The sanctuary was a rat's nest of shattered pews. It stank of rotting flesh. At the front, an altar still stood, but the stains on it were thick and blood-dark.
Wesley turned his eyes away from the crucified Christ still gleaming in the shadows, presiding over this travesty. He had a strong stomach, but ...
"Oh my God," Justine whispered. Breathless. Stricken. He glanced at her and saw her staring at the cross.
It hit him in a cold flash that it hadn't been a statue, after all.
It was Daniel Holtz.
His long silver-threaded red hair concealed his face, but it was Holtz, no doubt. He'd been stocky the last time Wesley had seen him; now he was skeletal, waxen, all but a corpse. His palms cupped massive iron nails driven through his hands into the cross, his overlapping bare feet were pinned the same way.
Over the single mocking rag of a loincloth that was his only garment, Holtz's skeletal chest rose and fell, almost imperceptibly. Still alive.
Justine lunged forward. Wesley grabbed her and hauled her to a stop, checking the shadows, the corners, searching for the barbed sting of this trap.
Nothing.
Justine rounded on him, fury blazing in her eyes, and he let go and nodded. She shoved rotten wood out of her way, climbed on top of the altar and reached out to Holtz, hesitated, then touched his chin and tilted his face up toward her.
Wesley's breath hissed out. He looked away, but not before he'd seen the empty blinded socket of Holtz's right eye.
"Daniel?" Justine's voice trembled. "Can you hear me?"
Some mumble proved Holtz still alert, somehow. Wesley spotted a door just to the right of the nave, probably leading to a robing room; if an attack would come, it might be a useful retreat. No sign of vampires yet, but the smell of old blood and rotten flesh was chokingly strong. They were close.
"Help me!" Justine demanded. He looked back to see her struggling to pull one of the iron spikes free from Holtz's hands. Tears on her face. "Goddammit! Help me!"
He shouldn't, he knew it. Every cell of his body screamed it was a trap, and yet ... and yet he couldn't ignore even someone like Daniel Holtz suffering so badly.
He put down his machete on the altar and yanked on the iron spike transfixing Holtz's feet. It moved with a liquid grating sound, and he heard Holtz scream. A thin trickle of blood ran over the pallid flesh. "Hold him!" Wesley yelled, and pulled hard, felt the iron tear free of the cross and slide through skin and muscle with hideous ease. The man's entire body slumped, yanking against the spikes in his hands, and there was a sickening sound of tearing flesh. Not just Holtz crying out now but Justine, too, in reaction. Wesley gritted his teeth and shouldered Holtz's weight to support him while Justine worked one spike free, then the other.
Together, they eased his limp body down to the filthy stone floor.
Cold shadows at their backs.
Wesley whirled but there was nothing there, nothing except a thin drifting cloud of dust.
Stone groaned overhead. He looked up, cursed himself for his stupidity, and saw the bodies up there in the darkness, grotesquely clinging to the rafters.
As if he'd given them the signal, the vampires let go and fell, landing on their feet, shattering wood beneath them if it was in their way. Six or seven, at least -- vague shadows with hot beast-yellow eyes, their disfigured faces parodies of bats.
He flipped the stake in his hand and threw it, turned a vampire to ash, swung his machete in a roundhouse swing that toppled another one, head and body dusting in separate pieces. Justine lunged up and met the rush of another one, missed her strike and went down, rolling and fighting for her life to keep fangs out of her neck.
Too many, far too many. More coming out of the shadows now, crawling out of whatever filthy hole they'd found to breed in.
"Justine!" he shouted. A vamp gave him an opening; he staked it and kept moving, dodging blows that would shatter bones and rip flesh. This was a killing ground, too much clutter, clinging vines to trip over, no safety anywhere.
A silent explosion of dust just a few feet away. He fought his way toward it, grabbed Justine by the arm and hauled her upright. She was bloody but still fighting.
"Back to the altar!" he told her. She nodded and jerked her head for him to go first. He didn't argue. He heard her fighting behind him but couldn't pause to look; Justine could be trusted to do as good a job as any mortal alive, next to a Slayer. He heard a sizzle of thrown holy water, inhuman screams, and achieved the first step, pushed forward to stand over Holtz's prone, crumpled body.
"In there," he ordered Justine, nodding toward the door behind them. "Careful."
A waste of breath; she was hardly likely to be taken by surprise again. He kept his eyes on the vampires. They were drawing back now, but the feel of their hunger was as oppressive as the heat.
They were drawing back for their master.
He was a tall, thin man, perfectly tailored in a pale yellow shirt and khaki pants; darker skinned than most of them, arrogantly handsome. No vampire face for him; he looked serenely -- obscenely -- human.
"More Anglos," he said, and shook his head. "I was hoping for a more balanced diet. White meat is so bland. Tell me, how did you find this place? It isn't quite on the normal tourist routes, although we're hoping to be open for business next year. As many Americanos as herd through our country, they'll never miss one or two."
He wasn't looking for an answer, and Wesley didn't bother to offer one. The man was hypnotic. He was hoping to hold them frozen in place long enough for his children to get around them and take them down.
Wesley fought the glamour by moving, always moving, checking his peripheral vision to be sure vampires hadn't slipped silently around to flank them. None had. So far.
"Tell me, what do you think of the place? We used to pile the heads of victims in the corner, but the stench was too much even for me, and frankly, I abhor maggots, don't you?" The vampire smiled and took a confident step forward. He spoke English with an American accent, an odd mixture of Southern drawl and Western twang. Wesley took a firm grip on the stake he held and saw the calculating glitter in the man's dark eyes. Scrape of wood behind him; Justine had opened the door.
"I do appreciate you providing the woman, by the way," the vampire continued. "Women have a sweeter taste, did you know? Like cherries. We like to keep them for several months if possible; their flows are delicious. A bit like dessert."
It was time for a witty comeback, but Wesley didn't feel especially driven to compete. "Justine!"
"It's clear," she called back. He heard another dull scuffling. It took a few seconds for him to recognize the sound of a body being dragged. Holtz. She was pulling him to safety, whatever safety there was in this place. It was miles to the car through jungle so thick vampires could range freely even in the heat of day. Their chances of making it back ...
Don't think. Just move. Stay alive.
He never took his eyes from the master vampire as he backed up another step, then another. The master followed him, closing the distance but too cautious to lunge.
He backed through the doorway.
Justine slammed the door and shot home a thick, rusted bolt that wouldn't hold for long. Something hit it and shuddered the wood with a screech of iron hinges.
Too dark in here to see much, except for the pallid outline of Daniel Holtz lying prone on the floor.
"Holtz," Wesley said. He went to one knee, grabbed a cool shoulder and hauled the man upright. "Holtz! Are there any ways out of here?"
The door continued to shudder under a rain of blows. It wouldn't hold. Couldn't.
"Daniel!" Justine pleaded. "Come on, think! How can we get out?"
Holtz's cracked, dry lips moved slowly. Wesley couldn't hear him over the hungry din from outside. Justine did. She looked up at him with wide, glittering eyes.
"Portal!" she said. "There's a portal here!"
My God. They'd been right after all. The Dead Church was a portal site. At this point, it didn't much matter to where -- any chance was better than none.
Holtz's dry lips were still moving. Wesley bent closer.
"My son," he whispered. "Have to get back. Have to save ... my son ..."
Connor. Holtz was talking about Angel's child. Wesley resisted the urge to bash his skull against the stone wall, clenched his fists until he felt them crack.
He schooled his voice to careful, even tones. "Where is he? Where's the baby?"
Holtz's laugh was a dry scratch, like fingernails on blackboard. "My son. Not Angel's."
Justine's feelings be damned; Wesley reached out, grabbed a thick handful of the man's filthy hair and dragged his head back to stare into his -- well, his one eye. "Where -- is - the baby?"
Wesley was on the knife edge of violence, and Justine must have known it; she leaned forward, put her hands on Holtz's face and forced him to look at her. "Daniel. It's me."
"Justine," he agreed. "How are you?" Another dry spit of laughter. "I've been very well, thank you."
A kind of wild panicked fury behind that. Wesley swallowed the taste of bile; he had far too vivid an imagination not to know what Holtz had been subjected to, here in this defiled unholy place. At least he'd been spared the worst -- for Holtz, whose family had been snuffed out by vampires, becoming what he despised would have been unbearable. No doubt the vampires had meant to turn him, but they'd played with their doll too long.
Something tugged at the edge of Wesley's mind, but he couldn't think what. A smell. Something acrid over the stench of rotten meat …
No time. He focused on Holtz. "Tell me how to open the portal."
"Why should I?"
The door shuddered under a particularly violent blow. Dust showered from the ancient iron hinges. "Because I doubt they're done with you yet," Wesley said flatly. "Unless you prefer negotiating with them instead of us."
For a long, long second Holtz didn't move, didn't speak. He looked into Justine's eyes, and there was something in him. Wesley wanted to imagine it was a trace of humanity, but in Holtz, one could never really be sure.
"Use the Chant of Kathaeis," Holtz rasped. "Better hurry."
There wasn't any time for careful preparation; not even any time for a circle of protection. Wesley braced himself, focused, and began shouting the words. The Chant of Kathaeis was difficult; proper inflection was crucial, but he must have been accurate enough; after just a few lines he felt wind stir, power prickle like a sandstorm across his body.
Six lines, and lightning flared blue at the far end of the room. A turning, twisting vortex of light and fury that churned the air. Tattered papers took flight, sucked toward that hungry mouth of whirling clouds.
When Wesley looked back, Justine had helped Holtz to his feet. Holtz ... something about him ... The door was visibly moving now, the hinges giving under the pressure. No time left for doubts.
He moved to take Holtz's other shoulder.
"God is good," Holtz whispered, and there it was again, that dry scratch of a laugh. "He answered my prayers. I was hoping I'd see you again, Justine. For old time's sake."
"Don't talk," she said. The shuffled toward the portal, the three of them. Holtz felt strangely dense, like marble. Wesley's skin crawled from the contact.
"No, I have to say thank you for taking me off the cross. That idiot Santana honestly thought it would kill me. I didn't survive Quar-toth to go that quietly."
"Santana?" Wesley felt a premonition drip cold down his neck.
"The head vampire. Well, he was. Until you let me loose." Holtz grabbed Wesley by the shirt with inhuman strength, and lifted him straight up in the air. Tossed him like a toy, backwards, out of control. As he fell, Wesley realized what his instincts had been screaming about Holtz.
The wounds in Holtz's feet and hands were healed.
The smell. The smell on Holtz when they'd taken him off the cross.
Burning flesh.
Holtz had been turned.
Wesley hit the wall with bruising force, felt something give with a wet crunch of bone, waited for pain but didn't have time to stop. He rolled, limped to his feet and staggered. The pull of the portal was very strong.
Justine was just now turning to face Holtz, and he couldn't move fast enough, couldn't be strong enough, couldn't do anything right, how could he not have known ...
Holtz's one eye turned beast-yellow. His face deformed into a vampire mask.
Wesley screamed her name and lunged as the creature Daniel Holtz had become grabbed Justine by the throat. She tried to stake him, but he knocked the wood away with a careless, casual gesture, and spun to meet Wesley's attack with eerie speed.
Holtz backhanded him like a child, and Wesley was thrown back, too far back this time, into the gravity well of the portal. He felt its relentless pull and grabbed for something, anything. A thick fleshy vine tore under his fingers, spraying him with cloying juice. A jutting piece of wood broke when he took hold.
Holtz dragged Justine to him in that bone-cracking embrace. No. No. No!
The portal took him as Holtz buried his fangs in her neck.
###
Angel thumped face down on a pile of ash and debris, and thought, still in Quar-toth but these ashes were cool, and the air had an indefinable smell. Not Quar-toth. Hydrocarbons, garbage, humanity ... Los Angeles.
He raised his head and saw the skeletal outlines of ruined beams, a fallen-in roof, everything coated with soot and ash and charring. It took him a few long seconds, but he realized he was lying on what had once been the bar, behind which Lorne had served mixed drinks and blood and venom with equal panache.
He was in the ruins of Caritas.
The bitch had sent him home.
Angel rolled over, gasping, staring up at the moon that loomed low and white through the broken roof. Emptiness out, emptiness in; he was a broken shell, a burned-out ruin with nothing left. Nothing to give.
"Why didn't you just kill me?" he whispered, and heard the rustle of rats in the ashes, smelled the sharp spike of fear, heard the thud of a heart -- two hearts --
He opened his eyes just as he heard Cordelia whisper, "Angel?"
She picked her way carefully across the wreckage toward him. Angel rolled slowly to his feet, thawing inside, and caught glimpses of her as moonlight slid across her moving form. Lithe, slender, alive, how was it possible ...
She stumbled and caught herself with her left hand on a fallen beam, and the moonlight fell on the bundle she carried in her arms.
The moving ... bundle ...
He met them in the ashes, his arms circling the weeping woman and the crying child, and felt the circle close around them as strong as steel.
"Connor," he whispered, and brushed his lips across his infant son's soft, velvet skin. "Cordy -- " So much he wanted to say to her, so much he knew he never could. He settled for a desperate, trembling kiss. "You're okay?"
"No," she said. Her voice was shaking, higher than normal. "So not okay, what with the hell and the demon-parts coming out and dying and all. But ... " She sucked in a wet, faltering breath. "But oh God it was worth it, Angel. He's safe."
He kissed her again, this time on the forehead, and took his son in his arms.
Cordelia, always wary, looked around. "Holtz?"
"He's not here," Angel said, preoccupied with counting Connor's fingers, toes, with listening to the liquid rush of his tiny beating heart.
"O-kay ... where did he go, then?"
"Don't know. Don't care." He probably would tomorrow, he thought, but tonight there was nothing in the world more important than the baby in his arms, the woman at his side.
And then he felt the sudden hard-edged charge of magicks being worked, and heard the thump of another body arriving.
"Get back," he whispered to Cordelia, and reached for a weapon.
###
Where the portal took Wesley, there was no sign of Connor. No sign of anyone or anything. A gray, arid, ashen landscape went on forever, broken only by the skeletal twisted remains of what might have once been human beings. He stumbled across it, brokenly chanting the Chant of Kathaeis, until some endless time later a portal formed, and he fell a thousand miles, a hundred years, into the darkness.
He sprawled on a charred floor, numbed, aching, empty, weeping. Wrong, he thought, and smelled the acrid stench of burned carpet and insulation. It's not the Dead Church.
"Wesley?" A breathless whisper from somewhere beyond the frozen glare of moonlight on charred wood. He thought, now I've done it, I've finally gone mad, but then there was a warm hand on his shoulder, sliding up to touch his face, and he focused on Cordelia's face. Beautiful, real Cordelia. "Oh my God. Angel, it's Wesley ..."
She turned to look over her shoulder.
Silhouetted against the pre-dawn darkness, a figure in black, skin shining pale as the moon. No expression on his face, and his eyes were hidden by the shadows.
And then it hit Wesley, like a fist to the heart, that there was a child in Angel's arms.
"Connor?" He heard the incredulous joy in his voice, felt tears burn his eyes again. "You found - "
He stumbled to his feet, with Cordelia's help - the fact that he needed it was something of a surprise - and Angel took a step back. Just a step, but it was enough.
Wesley felt the cold chill settle into his soul again, and pulled gently free of Cordelia's hands. He hesitated, looked her up and down, and said, "What on earth have you been up to?"
She was dressed in battle gear - well, battle gear by the peculiar standards of Cordelia Chase. Dark slacks, a black shirt that looked suspiciously like silk in the moonlight, stiff with drying blood; a mass of gold chains and magical talismans at her throat, and most odd of all, a toolbelt loaded with knives, axes and other weapons.
"You're talking?" she shot back. "Filthy much?"
"I've been - " God, how to even describe it? No, it didn't matter now. "Away."
Angel hadn't moved, hadn't spoken. Wesley looked at him directly one more time, focused on the fragile infant in Angel's strong, huge hands. "I'm glad - " His throat was rough. He cleared it. "I'm glad you found him. And I'm sorry he was lost in the first place. That's my doing. I accept that."
Angel didn't so much as acknowledge he heard it. Wesley wished he could reach out and hold that tiny, beautiful child again, and knew he didn't have the right. Could never again be trusted that far.
He looked down and turned to pick his way through the rubble.
"Wesley?" Angel's warm voice stopped him cold in his tracks. "You ... got someplace to go?"
Wesley closed his eyes and swayed with relief, but didn't look back. "I'm afraid I do," he said. "Something I have to take care of."
"Oh." A hesitation. He heard Angel take a cautious step forward. "So where were you?"
No reason not to tell him. "Mexico."
"I'm guessing not Puerto Vallarta," Cordelia said. "You were looking for Connor."
Somehow, hearing her say that, with such utter confidence, gave Wesley the courage to face them. He could read Angel's expression now, see the tentative, fragile need in his eyes.
"I was searching. But I didn't find him."
Angel gave him a smile so faint it was barely present. "Cordelia did."
"Oh." Wesley managed a nod. "Good job, then."
Angel took another step closer. "So ... you're going back there. To Mexico."
"Unfinished business."
"But ... you're coming back."
Wesley took in a deep breath and reflected that for the first time in weeks his barely-healed throat wound didn't seem to burn. "That depends. Do you want me back?"
Angel's smile was less of a ghost this time. "Yes. I think."
"How about, come back or I'll hunt you down and kick your ass?" Cordelia said, and crossed her arms across her chest. Weapons rattled. She kicked irritably at a hunk of wood on the floor. "We need to be a family again, Wesley. Enough already with the angst and drama."
"I'll consider myself rebuked." Dear God, the intensity of that joy inside ... feeling part of them again. Knowing his place in the world ...
Angel took the last step closer. "So. Mexico. Need any help?"
"Not - not this time. This is mine to do." Wesley glanced significantly down at Connor, asleep in Angel's arms. "And you have a baby to care for. A family."
It still hurt, a little, to see Angel's eyes move to Cordelia, to see the banked fire there. But not as much as he would have expected.
He extended his hand. Angel took it, strength carefully sheathed in gentleness, and they solemnly shook hands, holding it just an instant longer than was proper before stepping away.
"Come back," Angel said. "We'll be here. Well, not ... here, you know, at --"
"The hotel," Wesley finished. "Yes. When I can."
Wesley nodded, held to his dignity with as much strength as he had left to keep from bursting into tears of utter relief and joy, and picked his way through the rubble of Caritas toward the street. When he looked back, they were gone like a dream. Moonlight glittered on carbonized wood, on the bones of the past.
He walked back to his apartment, showered, drank enough water to sustain him, and then called and booked a flight for Mexico City.
###
In a day, he was back, retracing his steps, heading at best speed back to the Dead Church.
He needn't have hurried. The stench of death was still there, but the vampires were not; Holtz had led them somewhere else, somewhere into the depths of the jungle or the dark glittering world of men; they were all gone ...
Except for Justine.
She was sitting on the steps by the altar, hugging herself like a lost child. Still in the same bloodstained t-shirt and jeans. Her hair gleamed like raw silk. He couldn't see her face because she didn't look up, even though she must have heard the scrape of his feet on the stone, or the hard pounding of his pulse.
"He knew," she said. "He could smell it on me. Me and you. And he punished me for that. Called me a whore."
He couldn't answer her. His heart shredded to pieces in his chest, and he felt his throat choke closed from the anguish.
"That's the one thing I never was," she said. "A whore. That really wasn't fair. Oh, by the way, he says there's some kind of prophecy. End of the world. Yadda yadda. Ain't there always."
She raised her head, and he saw her human face, still untouched and beautiful, her eyes filled with tears.
"Please go," she said. "Please just turn around and go now."
"I can't do that." The words turned like razors in his mouth. "You know I can't."
"Why not? You let Angel live. You protected him."
"You're not like Angel." Her face was blurring. He blinked and felt tears slide cold down his face. "You'll kill, Justine. You'll feed, and you'll enjoy it."
"I already have," she said. She pointed to the corner. There was something crumpled in a heap of cloth ...
A child, a girl, maybe ten. Wesley knelt down next to her and straightened her limbs, simply because he wanted to do something, anything, to make amends for this. She was cold. Rigor had already passed off.
He couldn't stop the sound that tore out of him. Not a sob, a groan. The last hope dying like rays of sunset.
"See?" Justine whispered. She was right behind him. "But you know, it's not so bad. All this time hating vampires, and I didn't realize how good it could feel not to hurt anymore. Not to agonize about good and evil and all that crap. Living like this is clean, Wesley. Uncomplicated. I think you'd like it."
Her hand touched his hair, smoothed over it, slid cold to his neck and down into his shirt. His skin shivered at the touch and some part of him -- some part of him wanted --
"It's not living," he whispered. "It's living death." But that didn't stop the response in his flesh to her hands, to the memory of who and what she had been.
"We don't have to go with Holtz. We can go on our own -- be free -- be together …"
He turned to face her. She still looked so human. She was smiling slightly, sadly, and she reached out and traced the line of the scar on his throat.
"Not going for it, huh?" she asked.
"Not remotely," he whispered.
"Yeah. That's who you are. Wesley Do-Right."
She kissed him. Her lips were cool and soft, but she tasted of blood, and he felt the hard nubs of her teeth under the skin. When he pulled back, she made it easy for him -- gave her face over to the demon, to the yellow eyes and twisted flesh.
She hit him with stunning force, a backhand that threw him across the room; he hit, rolled, fetched up hard against the shattered skeleton of a pew. He shook it off and got to his feet.
No conversation now. They both knew how this had to happen.
She came at him head-on, moving so fast she was barely a blur; he twisted out of the way, caught her with a punch, a kick, sent her sprawling. She bounced up and came again. And again. He hardly felt the punches, the scratches; it took all his concentration to stay out of her hands because he knew, knew she'd sire him as she'd been sired, she wouldn't be able to help herself. Maybe it would even be a twisted form of love.
The damage he could do as a vampire … the thought terrified. He knew instinctively how awful it had been for her, in that last heartbeat of life, betrayed by a friend and losing herself to the darkness. He'd fallen down that long, terrible drop already.
Never again.
She took his knee out from under him, followed up with a snap-kick that made him see stars, she was too strong, too strong, and every punch he landed on her flesh reminded him of his father's fists, his mother's cries.
He couldn't win his battle. It wasn't in him.
He let himself falter, took a punishing blow to the head, and fell.
Her hand fastened on his throat, cold on the scar she'd given him. She bent over him like a lover; his eyes were closed, but he could see her face in his mind's eye, the sullen yellow eyes, the twisted mask. He could smell the old-blood stench of her.
He couldn't win the battle, but he had the will to end the war.
He opened his eyes, triggered the spring-loaded wooden stake from its hiding place on his arm and felt it smash through skin, the thick cage of bone, bury itself deep in Justine's unbeating heart.
He saw her vampire face fade. So much surprise in her wide human eyes, but it faded into a quiet tender stillness, a memory of their bodies locked together, sealed in promises.
Her iron-hard grip on his throat turned to a caress.
"You won't forget me?" she asked. She sounded different. Gentler.
"Never," he whispered.
He triggered the release, and the stake slid smoothly back out. The cool weight of her turned to a warm, elusive drift of ash settling over his skin. He rolled over, retching up sobs.
She'd never known peace before. He hoped it was sweet, and joyous, and full of the love that had failed her in the end.
When he could summon the strength, he went back to the car for the cans of gasoline.
The Dead Church made a bright fire, but it brought no warmth.
When it was ashes, when the past was gone, he got back in the car and started the long journey home.
End of the three-part story cycle. Comments welcome, always!
J.