Costas somehow managed to waste almost an hour of the afternoon in the repairs garage, walking around the Lexus in critical examination with a mechanic following nervously at his heels, poking at alleged seams and dents that Wesley couldn't see even when he set his nose to the surface of the bodywork, and asking - nay, demanding - questions in a tone that barely concealed threat below its surface.
He listened with his own jaw firmly shut as the mechanic made valiant attempts to rally in the name of consumerism.
"--but the structural damage was severe, and your decision to forgo the cost of replacing large sections of the bodywork seriously limits how much we can do. Another week would double the cost, which you've already raised issue about as it stands. Perhaps you should consider a new vehicle. This is hardly the latest model, and we have several very reasonable offers--"
The detective's glare could have struck him dead on the spot. "This is my car. I don't need a new one. I want this one. And your prices are a fucking travesty."
"Then this is the best we can do."
Wesley had a great deal of respect for the courage of the wiry mechanic standing up to that fury. Five seconds passed. Ten. Fifteen. No movement or sound infringed on the standoff. Twenty. The edges of Costas' eyes twisted ever so slightly, and Wesley was convinced he was about to see murder committed. He wondered whether he ought interrupt to at least mention that if they didn't take the Lexus back today they would be stuck with the hire car that had been slowly stifling them with its defective air conditioning over the past week.
Costas spun and swung a punch into thin air. "Screw it. I'll take my fucking car," he mumbled.
"Excuse me, sir?" the mechanic asked.
"We'll take the car," Wesley said quickly, and was quite certain that the foolish man had heard the first time and he'd just saved another life.
A cheque was written out for the car, submitted to the mechanic's examination, and then pushed back into Costas' hands for a reluctantly coaxed-out signature. Then the mechanic hurried away and the two of them were left in the lot regarding the car, Costas still very much with a critical eye .
"It looks good as new to me," Wesley ventured cautiously.
"Shut the hell up."
"I'm just saying that it really does--"
"Wes. Shut... up. I said I forgive you for wrecking the damn car. Hell, given that you saved my life in doing it and given that I nearly broke your damn jaw, I figure we have to be even, but just... don't talk about the car. Because when you talk about the car, it makes me mad, and that makes it hard to remember that I'm not holding this against you. All right?"
Blinking, Wesley attempted to follow through the logic of that, and in the end simply nodded dumbly.
Costas opened the front passenger door and held it there. "Get in the car." He slammed the door after and marched around to the driver's side, got in and slapped Wesley's fingers away from their fiddling with the radio, the settings of which appeared to have been changed during its interment in Casualty.
"Ground rules," he said. "You don't touch the car. You try damn hard not to even breathe on the car. And, most specifically of all, rule number one on the Jack Costas list of vehicle commandments, the klutzy one-armed goof does not get to fucking drive the car. Clear?"
"Quite," Wesley said huffily. He observed with a vague disbelief the way the detective ran his hands over the steering wheel and dashboard in what could only be described as a caress before he turned the key in the engine and manoeuvred them out of the lot, giving a last glare and just possibly a hand gesture Wesley didn't quite catch (he only saw the flicker of movement at the corner of his vision) towards the mechanic who was watching them leave from the shadows of a doorway.
"I know it's hardly my place to ask... and I respect that you don't want me to talk about, well, you know, but... if it's not too much... I really am curious..."
Costas' glower told him to get on with it.
"Why does this car mean so much to you? I mean, as the fellow said, it's not exactly a classic, and--"
The detective sighed, punched the steering wheel (but not too hard), and growled, "It used to be Irene's car."
"Oh." Wesley abruptly remembered what Costas and Irene had said to each other in the most recent of their rows, and winced. "You mean that's true?" he near squeaked. "That she - and this - and - oh, good grief, then this is the car she--?"
Costas growled, "Shut the hell up."
"Of course. I'm so sorry."
A sideways glance, then a relenting huff of air escaped Costas' lips. "No, this wasn't the car. She only went and borrowed mine that night because this one was in the shop. When I found out I told her that she could damn well keep it for the memories because I sure as hell didn't want it any more with those attached, and she said, 'screw you then, I will,' and flung the keys of this one at me."
"Oh." Wesley gulped, hard. "And does she still have--?"
"She sold it and bought a Mercedes."
"Oh." He guiltily tried to look in any direction that included nothing of this vehicle symbolic of a marital break-up. "I'm sorry I pried. And about..."
"Stop apologising for saving my life. It's just a damn car, and I'm not sorry to still be around."
Costas slapped a hand on the switch for the radio, effectively ending the conversation. Country music blared out at an obscene volume that had Wesley cowering back into his seat and Costas shouting curses as he frantically grabbed for the dial and the Lexus swerved all over the road.
The car behaved apparently satisfactorily the rest of the day and as evening drew into night found itself resting outside a dry-cleaners in a rather off-the-beaten-track part of West Hollywood, while Wesley and Costas made their way down the road and turned off into a back street.
"This is the place?" Wesley asked, looking around.
"This is the area in the report."
He rubbed eyes kept open only by the power of half a dozen very strong coffees ingested that afternoon as he caught up on his research while Costas went off to return the hired car. "It seems a little exposed. If there was a demon hiding out here, wouldn't someone have... noticed?"
"You think?"
A low, roughened croak sounded from the shadows, causing his muscles to lock up, his throat to turn dry, and his stomach to perform several giddy somersaults. Then his eyes registered the source of the noise and he blanched at the idea that he was standing in the dark next to a Detective Costas armed with enough heavy ironmongery to kit out a medieval army and there in front of them--
"I said, are you the young men from Animal Control?" asked the old woman again, speaking very slowly and loudly. She leaned on the railing of an ancient second-floor balcony of the residential block they were passing, her slippered feet just a few inches above the tops of their heads.
"Ma'am?" Costas was trying to edge the large axe out of sight behind his back.
"It's a very shy dog," the woman continued, her concern clear. "We've had hardly a peep out of him since he settled in there, a few weeks ago now. Really, no trouble at all. Heard him howl once or twice, or maybe sniffing through the trash. I put meat out for him when I can."
Costas cleared his throat uncomfortably.
"Ah... have you... seen this canine?" Wesley asked. "That is to say, would you perhaps be in a position to describe it to us? Its breed, its condition, its... general temperament?"
"Oh!" she wrung her hands happily. "I went to England for my honeymoon. Lovely country. I had such a wonderful time. Let's see, that would have been nineteen sixty--"
"The dog? Ma'am?" Costas intervened.
She shook her head. "I've only caught a glimpse of his back once or twice. Not that it would do much good, I'm afraid I can't see much apart from blurs and shadows any more. I saw him quite close, one time, slinking past here. Big, grey. One of those specialist breeds, I think. He might be a pedigree. Probably lost. Maybe his owner wants him back.... Short-haired. I couldn't tell anything more." She looked between them, her gaze not quite focusing. "You... you won't hurt him, will you? You'll take him somewhere he'll be looked after and find him a good home?"
"We'd only use force to subdue a dangerous animal," Costas said, nodding in reassuring fashion and nudging Wesley in the ribs with an elbow as he turned to go. "Thank you, ma'am."
The old woman, in her ill-sighted faith, called after them. "I named him Trevor. He doesn't answer to it yet, but he might recognise it... Of course, I'd look after him myself if I could, but the rules say no pets, so there's really nothing I can do..."
"Still think this might be a mislead?" Costas asked dryly as they drifted out of range.
The narrow street was backed onto on both sides by massive old apartment blocks. The space between the blocks was spanned above by a walkway connecting the scaffold skeletons of the fire escapes that clung like rotting ivy to the brickwork on both sides of the street, narrowing above them into a vertigo-inducing infinity that might have been spawned by M C Escher. The quiet was disconcerting.
Costas demonstrated his unease by poking into an open dumpster with the head of the axe, rattling tins and glass within. "Trevor... Come on out, Trevor..." It was just that little bit too muted to be a shout. He waited for the noise to clear, then waited long into the utter silence that replaced it. Bashed the axe head against the side of the dumpster several times, glaring fiercely around. "Maybe we should've brought some dog biscuits. The critter's probably developed a taste for them."
"I suppose it's no worse than the people who swore they'd seen a puma stalking the streets," Wesley allowed. "The poor woman's half-blind. And she's extremely lucky to be alive."
"Maybe not. Some predators don't prey in their own back yard."
"True enough, but I would imagine these creatures still a little new to the world to be quite so cerebral in their hunting."
"What if it just doesn't have a taste for mutton? None of the victims have been very old."
Wesley blanched at that particularly macabre bit of pragmatism, and fell silent as they moved further along the street.
Costas kicked at the few items of rubbish astray in the road, swinging the axe as he walked, and whistled loudly. "You want to walk out in front? Make like helpless easy prey or something."
"Thank you," he responded sourly, "and no. I categorically refuse to be bait again. Last time, I almost ended up as lunch, in case you've forgotten."
"But you didn't." Costas swung the axe to and fro with unconscious, lazy rhythm.
"Yes, Jack, and I'm very grateful you saved my life after endangering it in the first place." He avoided an empty cardboard box discarded at the edge of the street, stopped and stared up and down. The whole length of the street was visible from where he stood and, other than the dumpster at the end, there was nothing that could conceivably hide a large, dangerous animal, let alone serve as any kind of permanent den. The buildings were none of them derelict, he had checked beforehand, all occupied and well kept. His head ached with a fury and persistence that seemed to have been steadily mounting in the course of the last week.
A small metal dish of diced meat and biscuit caught his toe as he swung around, and he drew his foot back to deliver it a kick that sprayed its contents out over the nearest wall. "This is flagrantly ridiculous. There's no demon, no puma, and not even any stray dog here. The beast probably has a pedigree a yard long and belongs to some prize pillock who lets it wander the streets scaring his neighbours half to death. Imbecile. You'd think it would occur to him to lock the thing inside if the newspapers are full of reports of animal attacks--"
From above, something gave a low, rumbling growl.
"Oh, bloody hell."
Crouched on the rungs of a fire escape at least a dozen feet overhead, teeth bared, back legs tensing preparatory to attack, for an instant the beast remained still and eyed himself and Costas as they returned its regard. Slightly smaller than the other Haxil spawn they had so far seen, though God alone knew how anyone could still mistake it for either a dog or a Puma. Wesley, in between the terrified trembling, marvelled anew at the abilities of humanity at large to deny the existence of the supernatural.
"I think you pissed it off," Costas said unnecessarily.
A line of slather descended lazily from the beast's maw, then dripped suddenly, causing Wesley to leap backwards with a cry.
The Haxil moved as Wesley did, and there was a blur of activity that found him seconds later blinking stupidly on the floor, half-sitting, cradled by the wall at his back, his breath still resisting any efforts to force it to return after being ousted by Costas' shove. He tried to clear his vision to focus on the activities of Costas and the Haxil, a flurry of limbs, snarls and curses and the regular interruption of glistening light catching the head of the axe.
Wesley edged his way up the wall, relying on it for balance, feeling sore and weak, though the latter was nothing new - he could not remember the last time he'd felt steady, no ache deep in his gut or living inside his skull, no tremor in his fingers or in his knees. He did not think he could blame it on the amputation.
Costas scored a passable hit on the Haxil's front leg, dodged its angry retaliation with panache, and Wesley felt a warm glow at the proof of his improvement and smiled despite himself. Another hit across the demon's ribs that surely sliced deep enough to grievously wound sent the creature into retreat. It turned and darted - in a rather lopsided definition of the word that encompassed a severe limp - up the metal stairs of a nearby fire escape.
Costas spared a glance back to Wesley before shifting his grip on the axe and giving chase to the beast with nothing approaching its quiet animal grace. The crash of boots carrying thirteen stone of slightly overweight detective and the breaths laboured by too much junk food and too many cigarettes echoed around the alley, fading gradually as Costas ascended further. Then the detective turned a sharp spiral in the staircase and was lost among the rusted maze and darkness overhead.
Alarmed, Wesley staggered into the centre of the street, craning back his head and straining his eyes. But he caught nothing more than a hint of motion on a shadowed balcony that seemed rather too distant from where he'd lost sight of Costas. He could still hear, faintly, the sound of footsteps stressing old metal, their falls less regular now, and slower.
He wondered with concern whether the ancient aerial networks were sufficiently well-maintained to withstand such heavy treatment - nothing he had taught Costas in the past weeks would facilitate him against a thirty foot descent ending in hard pavement - and for a guilty instant he let that thought hold him to the spot before angrily shoving the fear aside and following up the fire escape.
The structure rocked beneath him, swaying a balance already precarious with only one hand to catch the rails and support him on the smooth, narrow stairs. He was sent reeling drunkenly from side to side, fingers snatching for a purchase all too often achieved by an extremely narrow margin.
At the point where he'd caught his last glimpse of Costas, he made the mistake of looking back. Vertigo seized him - it wasn't so much any problem with heights as the delicate state of his senses that did it. He leaned, breathing hard, the rail pressing into his stomach, his hand feeling welded to the metal from the force of his grip. When he tried to regulate his breath and to ease backwards, to slowly take his weight from the rail, something snapped and jarred.
The jolt had the equivalent effect on his senses of a bucket of ice cold water. He was standing bolt upright on a shuddering mass of iron trying not to touch anything, move even the slightest fraction of an inch, or generally weigh anything at all.
The stillness that followed as the frame finally ceased its motion allowed him to register the silence all around.
"Jack?" He sent his voice up into the dark uncertainly. "Is everything... quite all right? Jack? Can you hear me?"
He waited, but no response came save for his own echo, which seemed only to mock. He shivered a little - possibly from cold, the temperature had dropped - and the fire escape shivered with him. He looked up the next stretch of steps, made a decision, and continued, slower and more carefully than before.
Clunk-clunk-clunk, the stairs rattled underneath him, shaking the fixings which held them flush to the wall of the apartment block. Every so often he paused to listen, trying to determine where Costas had gone, growing steadily more fearful for the safety of the brusque detective. Two storeys, three, ascending to four--
"Wesley!"
The sudden shout almost knocked him down those four storeys by means of his jump of fright. He blinked toward the voice and it took a moment for his eyes to adjust before he could pick out the paler blur in the shadows that must be Costas' shapeless brown coat.
The span of the street separated them, the detective leaning over a rail of stairs attached to the apartment blocks of the opposing row. Wesley craned his head around and saw the walkway, a few feet above the level of his head and some way to the left. A stretch of iron balcony scarred by rusty decay and with some of its sections missing seemed to be the only route by which it might be reached from his own position, short of heading all the way back to the ground to climb up again at the other side.
"How in Heaven's name did you get over there?"
"With one hell of a lot of difficulty," Costas yelled back. "But I lost the damn critter, and I don't think there's much chance you're gonna be able to get across to me, not with one arm. Meet up on the ground, all right? It's wounded pretty bad, but I don't like being separated like this."
Wesley contemplated the tedious route back without enthusiasm, but he opened his mouth to pass on a reluctant acknowledgement.
Something landed on the steps behind him. Near-soundless, but its impact sent the whole fire escape back into its merry dance.
The Haxil flowed down the intervening steps as though untroubled by its injuries. Wesley, trying to cry out, produced only a choked squeak as his back hit the rail and he was almost tipped over. Distantly, he could hear Costas shouting, but his mind was too busy informing the rest of him he was a dead man to pay it much attention.
Then another shape descended, between Wesley and the Haxil, this one dark-clad and humanlike, lithe and so light on its feet as to barely shake the floor under them.
"Angel?" Wesley stammered.
The vampire glanced back over his shoulder and the meeting of their gaze felt like a freeze-frame for a few seconds, the spectre of their last real encounter tainting the air. Then Angel switched his attention to the Haxil's attack, and Wesley was left pressed nervously against the less-than-secure rail with a frenetic explosion of vampire and demon limbs, fists and claws less than three feet from him.
The fire escape shuddered and groaned and wailed as though its stressed frame was about to fall off the wall entirely.
"Oh, dear..." Wesley felt sick. "Angel!" he shouted urgently. "I really think that--"
Angel slammed into the rail, just missing Wesley. The creature slammed into Angel a second later, jaws stretched and aimed for the vampire's throat. It was caught up short with a squeal that did almost sound like that of an injured dog, and Wesley glimpsed, in that split instant as it fell back, light catching the long blade in Angel's hand.
In what followed, though, he had no concentration to spare. The rail at his back cracked and creaked under the double impact, and before he could move away he felt it begin to give. Angel, faster than he, had already spun out of danger, turning back now with his face twisting in shock and denial.
"No! I was supposed to save your life--"
He was already falling, and the vampire too late to pull him back. The last thing he expected was for Angel to leap out from the rail after him...
The tackle in mid-air had force enough in itself to stun, and he was only partially aware of the hands wrapping around his waist, of Angel turning them, somehow, so that he was the one underneath in the second before they hit the ground.
Even with the cushioning bulk of the vampire, it felt as though the fall had broken every bone in his body. He gasped in a breath that was closer to a long, loud sob and felt himself roll and bounce off to the side, gravel and tarmac grazing his face and hand, shrieking against the frame of his glasses. He lay face-down and dazed, realising slowly that the sensations he had felt of things breaking had not come from his own body, but rather transferred through the undead flesh in such close proximity.
"Oh, Lord... Angel? Angel!" He made it to his knees and crawled to the vampire's side. A fall of that magnitude would not kill a vampire but it didn't mean it couldn't cripple it. Angel was twisting and writhing on the ground.
Wesley was aware of footsteps running, of someone shouting his own name, but set that momentarily to one side.
"Angel," he repeated, deeply horrified. "Are you all right?"
The running footsteps came to a halt behind him, and someone yanked him from Angel with a wrench on the back of his collar and a shove that almost sent him sprawling again. "Get the hell away from him," said Kate Lockley's voice. "He doesn't need your help."
"Detective Lockley, I protest this--"
"Kate... Wesley... I'm all right." Angel gasped and shuddered, and managed to sit up. Wesley quailed at the imagining of how much had been pulped and broken inside his body by the fall. His black clothes, in the dark, made it impossible even to tell if he was bleeding anywhere.
Costas arrived then, coming to rest behind Lockley and leaning over with his hands on his knees to take heavy gulps of air. His eyes were firmly on Wesley. "Jesus Christ, don't do that to me. I thought you were dead for sure. Are you injured?"
"I don't think so - nothing serious. Angel took most of the impact."
Angel proceeded to wave off both his concern and Detective Lockley's, succeeded in pulling himself up to standing and then limped around in a painful, circular pacing that couldn't be so much helping his vampiric physique to mend as discovering the best ways to force it to move in efficient fashion compensating for whatever damage it had suffered.
Costas recovered his breath and his attitude at around the same time. "What the hell are the two of you doing here?" he demanded, looking between Lockley and Angel.
"Saving your buddy's life?" the latter suggested, a painful hitch still in his voice. "Is that all right with you? 'Cause, you know, I can go ahead and promise never to do it again."
Costas swallowed whatever he'd been going to say and instead watched with suspicion as the vampire limped over to the wall. He leaned there looking ragged. Lockley flickered her cool gaze impassively around all those present. She must, Wesley surmised, have seen Angel smashed up as bad and worse on far too many occasions by now for much novelty or worry to remain.
Angel looked at Wesley, a strangely fixed regard, partially obscured by the shadows across his face, seeming to drag on for a highly uncomfortable stretch of time as Wesley looked back, and tried not to quiver.
It was not so very cold a night. Maybe the chill exuded from Angel, he entertained briefly, as though vampires were capable of giving off cold like the human body radiated warmth. How else could he explain his own body's urge to shiver? Angel just stood, a figure wrapped in expressionless gloom. Wesley wondered if the circumstances of their last meeting were as vivid in Angel's mind as they were in his, and he thought that he was becoming very tired of being saved by one of the bloodsucking undead.
"Wesley," Angel said finally. "You're... you seem better. Than before. That is... the arm's healed all right, hasn't it?"
"It's fine," he responded, feeling numb, motivated largely by instinctive politeness. "Thank you."
"And you... Detective Van Helsing."
"It's Costas. Jack. And, yeah, I healed good too." Costas still had the axe in his hand and he stabbed it at the ground in temper. "I asked you a question. What the hell are you doing here? Yeah, you saved Wes, that's great, fine, much appreciated, but that's still not an answer. What I want to know is how you knew he was gonna be in need of saving."
"Indeed," Wesley added, backing Costas up in Angel's silence. "I also can't help wondering how you could possibly have arrived here so precisely 'in the nick of time', so to speak."
"I haven't been following you, if that's what you're implying." Angel cast a sideways glance at Lockley, who looked stonily elsewhere, and Wesley wondered briefly if she had ever done just that.
"On the fire escape," he said, remembering. "You told me you'd come here to save my life. You knew... somehow, you knew I was in danger."
Angel nodded. "I saw it. I saw you die. I saw it tear you apart."
"Saw it?"
"Oh, come on," Lockley snapped impatiently. "Short version: Angel has visions. Angel - can we please go? I do have other things to attend to this evening."
"Visions?" Wesley asked in disbelief. Lockley, who'd been turning to leave, noticed that Angel hadn't caught her lead and didn't look as though he had any intention of doing so, and she rolled her eyes and stood a short distance away, all but tapping her foot. "Angel, what on Earth happened? Are you sure? I've heard about Drusilla, of course, but she was a Seer before she was turned. A vampire doesn't just--"
"Doyle... had them." The vampire shifted as though he'd like to disappear into the wall, crawling backwards through the cracks in the bricks.
"Your friend," Wesley filled in, enlightened. "Your friend who died."
"Doyle saw things. Things I was supposed to prevent. He said they were messages, from the higher powers, sent to help me to help people."
"Divine intervention." He began softly, but by the last syllable his voice had hardened. "Oh, dear Lord. That day... you had a vision... that's what it was, that day in the motel. You had a vision when you were on the way to me--"
Angel was nodding, his gaze downcast and nothing visible of his face but shadows. "Maybe I would have saved you otherwise." His words near-jammed in the back of his throat and it jumped, as he visibly tried to clear them. "This time... it was for you. I saved you. This time."
He looked up, at that last, and his eyes burned. Something in there wasn't totally sane.
"I know," Wesley said, and though he did try, his voice remained just as hard as it had been.
Costas - and Lockley, though she seemed to be attempting to maintain an air of extreme disinterest - looked between them as though harbouring a suspicion they were both losing it. Well... Wesley couldn't imagine that to be far wrong. "What the hell are you two talking about?"
Wesley swallowed, and pulled slowly away from the look in Angel's eyes. "History," he said. "It's history."
He blinked hard, took a breath, and tried to focus on something more constructive. "Visions from the higher powers, then? That's very interesting. I've certainly heard of instances, though no other vampires. I'm afraid I don't know very much, myself - the larger part of the accounts of the gift in any real measure have tended to be unverified and unexplored. Nobody's ever done a thorough investigation into--"
"And they're not going to start now," Lockley said. "He's not some kind of laboratory animal for you to prod at your leisure."
"You know that isn't what I meant," Wesley began.
"Whatever. Angel?" She had her arms folded and leaned slightly back on her heels; body language of not wanting to be there.
"Not yet." The vampire peeled himself from the wall. He appeared to have tired of his staring; now he avoided looking at Wesley at all. "They've been hunting these creatures just as we have. We need to compare notes. There's no point working blind when we don't have to."
Costas gave a bark of laughter. "We thought someone else might be working this. Even thought of you. So you've put down a few of these things?"
Lockley said, "Sure. See, some of us are actually supposed to be working this case, Jack."
"They're Haxil Beast spawn," Wesley put in, glancing between Lockley and Angel to see if the name sparked any recognition. It didn't. He experienced a stir of satisfaction that he felt rather guilty for.
"It wasn't like anything in any of my books," Angel said.
"No. Most of the entries I found were on the full grown adult. It's very rare these creatures spawn. They have to utilise human women to do so, there are no females of the particular species..."
"Can we concentrate on the important questions, please, and less about it's goddamn mating habits?" Costas griped, at the same time as Lockley cleared her throat with loud intent and pulled a folded wad of paper from her jacket that she spread out into a city map.
"Right. Jack - you killed some more of these things. Where?"
Costas squinted at the map, his finger hovering uncertainly over a few areas, then after a moment he turned and pulled Wesley forward in his place. "He'll remember."
"Here." Wesley placed a fingertip over the plant, noticing as he did so that more or less the same zones he'd marked off himself were here marked as well, only a few major differences. This had been a case assigned to Lockley, after all. She must have received information from the police investigation that perhaps Costas had not been able to get his hands on. "This was the source. We found bones there, too."
Lockley nodded. "I got that report. They're still comparing dental records. Anonymous, huh?"
"Uh, that would be the case." He examined the street plan again. "There was one in an abandoned warehouse, here. One living in the sewers, around this general area."
Both she and Angel were nodding, now. "When the killings stopped," Angel said. "We figured something was going on... though I'll admit I thought these things might be a little tough for the two of you."
"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Costas said disgustedly.
Angel frowned, deer-in-headlights fashion, as though wondering what he'd said wrong. Social skills never had been one of his strengths, as Wesley recalled. "You're human," the vampire said simply. "I didn't mean - you've done remarkably, fighting them alone." He edged a slightly apologetic glance at Wesley the implication of which was clear enough.
"Wes killed the first one," Costas said, with more angry bite than Wesley would ever have anticipated.
"Uh--"
"No. You were right the first time, Angel. I don't fight." If nothing else, he could at least banish all pretence. "I..." With all their eyes on him, he faltered into silence.
"Where did you kill yours?" Costas asked, swiftly changing the subject.
Lockley rested her finger upon two points on the map, and Wesley ticked off another two of his hypothesized Haxils. He calculated. "Which leaves only one more possible demon. Excellent."
"Plus," Angel said, managing what for him passed as a smile, "We happen to know where it is. In fact, we were going to go over there to hunt it down tonight, until I had the vision." He looked at Lockley. "Let's go do this."
"No, wait," Wesley protested. "You mean to still go? Now? Injured as you are?"
"Well, yeah. You know - vampire. Can't actually be harmed much short of dust."
"We should come with you."
He regretted it almost the instant the words had left his lips - because, of course, spending more time in the company of the one person who knew exactly how much he had been broken was just what he wanted to do - but he couldn't take it back, and moreover, he was certain he shouldn't. If Angel failed due to his current condition, Detective Lockley could be left to face the creature alone, and that he could not allow to happen.
"No," Angel responded immediately. "I didn't just save your life to get you killed a whole different way."
"The hell you say! We've faced three of these demons already. We can most assuredly be of assistance. And you were incapacitated saving my life. I absolutely insist." He tried to cross his arms and was rather afraid he came out looking somewhat silly for it. He changed the motion into a rub at the aching scar on his shoulder.
"He's right," Lockley said. "Now, please, can we go?"
"What's biting you tonight?" Costas queried in such a way that, coupled with his sideways glance at Angel, it could have been an innuendo.
"I have to go sort out something for my father," she said shortly, tight-lipped.
"Oh?" Costas perked with genuine interest. "How's he getting along since he retired? I hear he was on-scene again the other day in the subway. You need to get that police scanner off the man, Kate. Even retired, seems he can't be kept away from the job."
Her unblinking stare held for slightly too long before she turned away, not meeting his eyes again. "I know."
Angel loosed a huff of air that for a vampire was clear affectation. "All right. So we're all going. How about we hurry this up so that Kate can get to her appointment, guys?"
In deference to having to search the open ground of a sizeable - for LA - stretch of parkland and to the fact that not all their party had the night-vision of a vampire, Wesley had retrieved the flashlight from the back of the Lexus. And in deference to the fact that he would likely be making very little other contribution to the fight ahead, he led the way with it, following the trail of prints embedded in now dry mud that they had picked up searching the southernmost edge of the park.
"So how is it you figured out the critter was here anyway?" he heard Costas address Angel - or more likely Kate - behind him.
It was Angel who answered, nonetheless. "I followed it yesterday. Lost it somewhere around here, but then saw the tracks. The dawn was coming, though, and I had to get out of the open."
It was true, Wesley reflected, that this place would be a death-trap for Angel when the sun arose. Lucky then that much of the night still stretched ahead of them. "It seems an unusually tranquil hideout of choice, in comparison to the others we've seen."
"Maybe it just crossed the park and it's holed up somewhere nearby," Kate suggested.
"Or maybe it's just wild about horticulture," Costas said.
The grass crunching underfoot, the ache in his limbs from the shock of the earlier fall making every crunch an effort, faded the voices into background. The park was an expanse of gentle green slopes and the occasional scatter of small trees, bushes and shrubs clearly planted and tended. Squinting into the darkness beyond the reach of his meagre torch beam, it looked as though it was one of these areas of vegetation they were heading toward, probably better named as a shrubbery than a thicket. Trudging on through the dark, he became aware the others had fallen silent as they drew further from the city streets. The noise of the night traffic seemed more distant than it was, and Wesley was conscious of the footfalls of each of the three behind him; Costas' loping shamble, Lockley's no-nonsense stride, the hitching mess that the fall had turned Angel's gait into.
"I think we're heading into the trees," he shared, though they were close enough by now that probably the telling was quite redundant. The company surprised him by forgoing the opportunity to say so.
Probably they were approaching this with a similar apprehension to his own. The vegetation wasn't bunched thickly together, but in the dark it would be difficult to navigate, with far too many places where a demon might lie in ambush.
"Wesley--" Costas pushed to the front, reaching out to take the torch.
"I'll lead." Lockley grabbed it from Wesley's outstretched hand before Costas' fingers could connect, her gun already drawn and levelled in the other. She forestalled his protest with a glare. "I'm a better shot than you are, and Angel and Wesley are in no condition. You take the back."
Costas nodded reluctantly, and so Wesley found himself stuck between Lockley to the front and Angel behind as they pushed forward. Much of Lockley's attention was commandeered by the tracks they followed and the branches she had to find a path through and the ground made uneven by the small plants their passage crushed underfoot, so Wesley tried to keep as much of his own attention as possible upon the shadows around them.
The crunch and crackle of their steps, especially the heavier steps of Costas and Angel, made any attempt to go by ear an impossibility. The distraction of the branches springing back into him after Lockley's passage made it very difficult to go by eye. He angled his body right-side-to-front, and still found himself unable to quash the odd squeak of pain when a branch raked the tender scar tissue of his left shoulder. Angel's hand caught a particularly large branch and snapped it off an instant before it connected.
Then Lockley stopped so abruptly he barrelled straight into her. The torch beam did a wild dance among the bushes as she staggered, trying to recapture her balance. He set his hand on her shoulder to help and she shook it off and pushed away from him.
Wesley saw then why she had stopped. The torch still bouncing in her grip revealed the ground in irregular flashes, showing the tracks to end at what presumably functioned as a maintenance shed for storage of tools and equipment. The small structure stood a little lopsidedly, in obvious need of repair for more than just its battered-in door. When he examined the area around them further he discovered a much better defined path than the one they had just followed led from its door and out to the left.
It did not seem a very secure or private hideout for a large, growing demon, and nor did the shed look especially spacious as a home for one. He whispered as much, keeping his voice down to little more than a textured breath.
Somehow, it ended up being the incapacitated Angel who was first through the door, pushing it open on its broken hinges to the accompaniment of a shrill squeak that earned a wince from all present.
"There's nothing in here," Angel said. "It's empty."
"Oh, dear." Wesley sighed. "It must have gone out already to hunt. Another victim we're too late to prevent--"
"No." Angel was shaking his head. "I mean, there's nothing here - no sign that it's been living here, even." He shoved the door fully open and stood back, indicating for Wesley to come and look for himself.
Lockley beat both him and Costas to it and he heard her curse. "Another damn mislead."
"But the tracks end here," Wesley insisted. "It must be around here somewhere."
He pushed inside the shed as well, and Costas followed, despite it being by now distinctly overcrowded. The detective ended up standing on a lawnmower, knocking a cascade of tools off their hooks. "Fuck." More items fell, cascading down. "Jesus Chr--" His voice dried up.
Wesley gaped. At the back of the shed, an already skewed swathe of netting hanging from the end wall had come completely unfixed, revealing below it a jagged rent that had split the dirt floor.
"Damn," Lockley breathed.
"I think we have our demon lair," Angel said.
Wesley edged around them to crouch down next to the hole, examining its edges. No demon's claws could have torn open the ground in such a fashion, surely - at least, no earthbound demon, and certainly not the Haxil young that they were currently hunting.
Wordlessly, Lockley relinquished the torch back to him and he leaned over the hole to shine it inside, peering within and trying to pretend that it wasn't damnably hard to balance just so without a spare arm to catch his weight.
"It looks like there's a lot of space down there... a cavern, even, you might say... I should imagine it's some kind of fissure generated by earthquake activity."
"Yeah," Angel said. "There were those big tremors a month or so back. That could've caused something like this. I mean, this looks relatively recent, and any older and surely it would've been discovered before now."
Nodding agreement, Wesley was struck by a thought and he looked nervously around the small space with the four of them crammed inside. Alarmed, he said, "For goodness sake, don't anyone make any heavy movements. It isn't, perhaps, the best of ideas for us all to even be in here. The ground's probably unstable beneath us, and the weight--"
"I get you," Costas agreed, feelingly, shifting his feet and then glancing down, evidently thinking better of it, and standing very still.
"Shit. Half the park could be riddled," Lockley reached for a radio that wasn't at her waist and flapped her hand helplessly when it failed to connect. "Hell. I have to report this--"
"It'll wait." Angel touched her arm reassuringly and she didn't shrug him off. Costas jerked and looked away. Wesley turned away from them both; stared back intently down the fissure.
"I should imagine less people are likely to die of a possibility of subsidence in the middle of a park in the middle of the night than if we don't finish this creature now while we have the chance." He frowned, squinted, gestured for silence and listened intently. Logic clicked in a little late in the day and he yielded his position to Angel, letting the vampire set his head to the opening and apply undead senses to the problem.
"Anything?" Costas asked.
Angel just shook his head.
"We don't know how deep down there it might be," Lockley said. She grabbed something from a hook on the wall, and when she turned Wesley saw it was a thick length of rope. She handed one end to Angel and tied off the other around her waist. "Lower me down?"
The question was not requesting whether he would but whether he was in good enough shape to handle the weight. Wesley caught Costas' eye before the detective could offer protest and Angel nodded, planted his feet, and gripped the end of the rope nearest the knot.
Detective Lockley took a breath and set her feet down over nothing but air, placing more trust in a vampire than Wesley found it credible to imagine, even if that same vampire had saved his own life four times already. She hung waist-deep in the hole supported by nothing but Angel, drew her gun again and took the torch back before nodding sharply and prompting the vampire to reel out hand-over-hand another six feet of rope that saw her swallowed up entirely.
Costas was shaking his head and swearing under his breath.
The rope, Lockley, and the torch beam, spun lazily down through the well of darkness as Angel played out its length. After about another ten feet, Wesley couldn't see much more than the thin beam of light. A few feet more, and the rope gave a jerk and Angel stopped, the remainder coiled in his arms. A shout up from the dark was mangled by a distorting echo, but made its meaning clear enough.
Wesley regarded the hole with trepidation as the slack rope was hauled back up and Angel looked to him.
"Send me next," Costas said.
Wesley was fairly sure it wasn't for his sake that the detective had chosen to speak up, and Angel nodded, apparently in agreement that Lockley ought to have more immediate backup than a failed Watcher.
So Costas was sent down, clumsily trying to balance his axe in his hands as he was lowered, and Wesley found himself regretting he had not argued the issue, uncomfortable to be left as good as alone with Angel. He tried to look anywhere other than at the vampire, but was drawn involuntarily to meet his gaze when Angel unexpectedly asked, with a gravity that surprised, "Are you all right?"
Wesley opened his mouth to respond with the usual automatic "of course", but this time it caught in his throat, and he realised that in any case Angel was not about to let that answer slip by as Costas might. Angel saw... straight through him, really. The vampire knew uncomfortably more about Wesley Wyndham-Pryce than anyone else on this Earth, a coincidental witness to all of his most spectacular failures.
"I'm surviving," he said, in a voice that barely made it past his lips.
"That's good. I - Penn--"
"History," Wesley reminded, sounding raw to his own ears but at least recovering enough measure of grit to forestall whatever Angel had been about to say and save himself from further embarrassment.
The rope in Angel's grasp jerked and loosed as he reeled it back in. When the end came up in his hands, he tried to offer it to Wesley, who smiled wryly and pulled his hand back, raising his arm to offer his waist. Angel stuttered and apologised, ridiculously awkward for a two-hundred-year-old-plus fiend of the night.
"It's all right," he said, annoyed. "I've accepted by now that I literally couldn't tie a knot to save my life."
Angel's fingers fumbled at his waist in a way that suggested he was hindered by damage from the fall in that, too, and the eventual knot was a collaboration between the vampire's two shaky hands and Wesley's one good one, but he was fairly sure it would hold. Taking a breath and nodding to Angel, he slowly eased down into the fissure, keeping a tight grip of the rope higher up.
He spun leisurely downward, not envying Angel his current task considering the vampire's condition, and he wondered whether Detective Lockley had quite grasped the fact that just because it would mend did not therefore make Angel's pain immaterial, or indeed not painful.
His feet touched ground before his thoughts had been exhausted and he had chance to be nervous. It was too dark to make out anything but the faintest of shadowy outlines, and the torch beam was some way distant, bobbing far to his right. A small amount of light filtered through from above, and when he craned his head back he saw cracks in the earth, where the fissures emerged out onto the surface. Lockley was right - the park was riddled. He could see stars glittering through branches.
Arms caught him and slid to the knot, unpicking it as he could not easily do.
"Thank you," he said, his courtesy as automatic as the detective's aid. The rope slithered up away from them, startling him when the end brushed his face on its way past.
The distant torch explained the absence of Lockley, and Wesley was a little surprised that Costas had been there waiting for him. He was about to remark they go after her at once - Angel would be all right - when the gunshots sounded. Echoing hollowly along the thin, stretched length of the fissure, they prompted debris to scatter down from the fresh rock faces around them and seemed to shake the ground itself.
"Kate!" Costas shouted like her name was an expletive, and hared off toward the faint light with blind abandon.
"Jack--" It only took a few steps for Costas to be lost from view, and in the narrow confines his body blocked the guiding beam of the torch from Wesley's line of sight.
Wesley tried to follow, tripped and went sprawling. He slapped his palm down angrily against the rock, pushed himself back up from it, scrabbling to regain his feet. Behind him, he was aware of a heavy dark shape descending the rope. Somewhere in front, the sounds of a fierce scuffle interspersed with cries so distorted by the acoustics it was impossible to determine if they were cries of pain.
He hauled himself upright, but his senses were spinning. Angel shoved past him, rough in his urgency, and he was slapped into a wall that veered so far from vertical it could barely be called such. He was no longer sure, in the curtain of blackness, which way was which. Up and down did somersaults, swapping their positions, his sense of gravity entirely deserting.
Then darkness descended in a manner far more thorough.
"Wesley?"
A voice stretched thin to breaking, almost unrecognisable, the crack in it another fissure that went deep, hints of scarring far below the surface.
"Wes? Wake the fuck up and tell me you did not just faint."
That voice he knew anywhere. Gruff-mellow tones of friendship and knowing and no bullshit accepted. He rose up from the depths to meet it.
There was dirt in his mouth, the taste of grit on his tongue. He wrenched up, spitting, and was caught by something warm and soft and entangling as his head spun and almost sent him back into unconsciousness. There was a patch of pain at the back of his neck where it sloped down into his left shoulder blade. He must have twisted when he fell, his brain supplied muzzily; grazed himself against the wall and landed on his face.
He touched his hand to the back of his neck, winced and pulled it away again with sticky fingers. Blinked his eyes open to look and realised it made little difference.
"Wha-- what?"
"Shh." A cool hand rested on his forehead, accidentally brushing over his lips and eyelashes on the way. The skin of the fingers was rough, hard-working skin, its scent savoury, tainted somewhat by blood but he breathed it in. Shifting a little, he became aware of the pillow of warm human flesh he rested on.
"Jack?" He raised his hand to meet familiar fabric and curled fingers in the shabby lapel of Costas' trenchcoat. "It's... really bloody dark."
"The goddamn flashlight got broken." A brief silence, then the gruffness exploded into anger (though the arms that wrapped his shoulders remained as gentle and sure). "You stupid bastard. Shit... I cannot believe... You idiot. I told you to fucking look after yourself. Food, sleep, the essential ingredients of life. Just..."
He shook his head, and though all Wesley could see was the faintest impression of motion in the dark, he felt the vibration carry down through the detective's body.
He had no energy. Boneless, with a sick sensation clawing at his gut and a brain full of static that chewed at any thoughts he tried to form and buzzed in his ears. He sagged into Costas' embrace.
"Why the hell did you do it?" the detective asked. "Shit, I should've known - I should've pushed harder. It was why I damn well hauled your ass home with me in the first place. For fuck's sake! But you clammed up so fucking tight--"
"It's hardly your fault," Wesley mumbled. Costas felt comfortable and he buried his face in the rough fabric of the detective's coat and found he did not mind at that moment that it could badly use a wash. He rather suspected that he would be embarrassed later about the way, entrenched in his semi-conscious stupor, his fingers insisted on playing with Costas' collar despite his efforts to restrain them.
"It was my responsibility--"
"It was not!" He tensed within his friend's grasp, fingers abruptly clenching and ceasing their uncontrolled motions as the anger gripped him. "I don't need looking after. It's wholly my choice, if I choose to--"
"Kill yourself?" Angel's low, gravelled interruption came unexpected; he'd forgotten there was anyone else present. The vampire rode over Wesley's poised protest, leaving him with his mouth half-open. "Give up?"
"What the hell do you mean?" Costas snapped. He felt the detective's body tense. "He never gave in--"
The angle of Angel's head - that shadow that was presumably Angel's head - did not shift from Wesley. "Giving up on yourself - on any chance to make something of yourself - to have any kind of a life--"
Wesley stared at the patch of textured darkness that represented the vampire. Costas had fallen into silence.
"I've a little experience with that, too," Angel said.
"I didn't--"
"No. You didn't." Angel sighed and Wesley heard rather than saw him turn away.
"So how did the fight go? I missed--" Something occurred to him. "Ms. Lockley. She isn't--?"
"Kate's fine," Costas said. "Stomped off somewhere already, saying she had things to do." The rustle of a by-now-familiar shrug he could see in his mind's eye. "Demon's dead. Big bastard, too, and fierce - fiercer than the rest. It took all three of us to take it down. Good thing we all met up tonight, because I sure as hell couldn't have taken it down alone--"
There was a silence that stretched, interspersed only with the shuffles of Angel's feet, until Costas drew in an unsteady breath, Wesley felt the arms encasing him tighten briefly, and what felt like the bumpy profile of a face rested a moment against the top of his head. "Shit. Sorry. I'm sorry."
"Why?" Wesley laughed, the last of the anger draining out of him, leaving him with limbs full of liquefied bone and no inclination to do anything more than just quietly drift as he was, thought or movement meriting neither effort nor enthusiasm. "It's true."
"It might be true," the detective said after a pause. "But it's not fair. You've done more than that. We both know it. You must know it."
"Yes. I wrecked your car."
Costas swore. "You saved my life. And against Penn."
Wesley would be terribly happy if nobody would ever mention that name to him again, but he nodded against Costas' chest and let it by. It was true, after all, if not the whole truth.
"You've never failed in the crunch."
"You haven't known me very long."
"You've never failed me in the crunch."
In the background, Angel cleared his throat. "You guys want a lift out of here before the people Kate called arrive? I'd suggest now being a really good time to go."
"He's right." With some reluctance, Wesley groggily struggled to extricate himself. "Particularly considering we can hardly dispose of the demonic corpse, I'd suggest we not be here to be asked to provide the explanation."
Costas caught him and set him on his feet, fingers sliding along ribs as he let go. Wesley wavered but remained standing, aware of the proximity of the detective at his back, but still enough out of his senses to miss the more tactile support of human touch.
"I can't believe I'm agreeing with a vampire," Costas said to Angel with more than a little resentment. "But you're right. Let's go."