2. Severance

Another nightmare woke him tangled in sheets another 4am morning. His struggles stoked flares of pain from the healing scar where his left arm had been, but his panic was such that it was several minutes until he calmed enough to stop fighting the bedclothes, and another several of deep meditating breaths before he picked his way out of the knotted sheets and sat up.

Shudders still racked his body and it was only now he registered he was not in the white space of the hospital, and the events of the previous day began to filter back into his mind. The LA morning newspaper. Signing himself out after arguments with doctors who didn't argue too fervently, knowing he lacked the money to pay more than a fraction of the bills he'd already chalked up. The hurried fixing of his accommodation.

With difficulty, Wesley extricated himself completely from the bed, although his head reeled so much from the movement and the stretched pain of his shoulder that he had to sit back down on the edge of it immediately. From there he slowly pulled on socks, then pants that bagged loose around his waist and swamped his ankles. The shirt and sweater - a battered inelegant thing emblazoned with the name of some sports team he suspected, but wasn't certain, might be basketball - were not much better a fit, and they scraped against the wound as he pulled them over his head.

He resented the borrowed clothes; the charity-case they labelled him. The charity-case he was.

Sheila, the red-haired nurse who'd brought them for him, who'd been so expansively helpful that he awkwardly suspected she harboured something of a crush, had also arranged his current living quarters. She had mentioned her brother leased out rooms and might have vacancies she could swing free of charge for him, for a time. She hadn't said anything about quality - the room was dirty in a manner hinting at the collected grime of years rather than weeks or months, and so full of abandoned belongings that he wondered uneasily about what fate had befallen its previous occupant - but at present he was rather lacking in the way of options.

In any case, he had a bed and a kettle and some rather ominous shared facilities lurking at the end of the dingy hallway outside, all of which was merely echoing the dubious comforts of his life since leaving Sunnydale, and one did not, after all, need anything else to get by. The ephemera of the previous occupant were, if anything, a godsend, as his own possessions numbered precisely nothing until he could reclaim his motorcycle and whatever else had found its way from the clutches of the motel proprietor to the police.

Wesley shoved his feet into the shoes that at least were his own, and stumbled, dogged by the loosely flapping laces, across to the small kitchen.

A white rectangle standing neatly amid the inherited mess on the worktop caught his eye and he blinked in disbelief at the familiar handwriting in black ink across the envelope - which most certainly had not been placed where it now sat the previous evening.

Father must be utilising the Watchers Council's alchemists for private correspondence these days. He didn't want to know what the letter said, and his unwillingness to face its presence and irrational fear of other spells attached kept him from picking it up to throw it away.

Avoiding the envelope with both hand and eye, he set himself about preparing a cup of tea, which proved one of the tasks less arduous to his altered physical situation.

He took his tea to the living room, which was a generous description for the half of the apartment's main room which contained two scruffy armchairs and a coffee table as opposed to the half containing the bed with its vile smelling mattress. He sank down on the edge of the better of the two chairs and it responded via the slit in the upholstery along the arm, with a grin full of orange foam. Something small and black moved within. He took a gulp of his tea, which proved too hot and burned all the way down, though he was only distantly aware of the overshadowed pain. He gulped again, and set the mug on the ring-stained table to wipe his sleeve across his mouth.

Life was too linear with one hand. Tedious pattern of finish one thing, set down, on to the next. A frustration. His hand got tired trying to read. Another frustration. He glared down into the teacup and considered casting aside reserve in a trade-off for the satisfaction he'd get out of hurling it to shatter into pieces against the wall.

He didn't. He didn't have enough mugs to spare and, clumsy as he'd always been with two hands, he suspected he'd be needing the spares in the near future. Besides, he was much in need of the restorative powers of even such a lousy cup of tea as this.

Once it had cooled a little he used it to wash down the tablets the doctors had given him (no alcohol, strictly no exceeding the stated dosage, and absolutely no driving - the latter had made him laugh although the mystified medic hadn't intended it as a joke) and frowned at the sleeve that swung empty over the swell of bandaging he was yet to shed. He looked away from it as quickly.

Outside his window - and one of the few things this apartment could boast was its view; a large chunk of LA splayed out between the roofs of the warehouse and diner opposite - a pink dawn was just beginning to break, its light swallowing the scattered illuminations of the city.

He contemplated the day ahead as the drugs took effect, removing some of the sharpness from the ache in his shoulder.

There had been much he'd intended to do yesterday, after he saw the article in the paper, but it had been swamped by the practicalities of removing himself from the hospital and finding a base of operations that would keep him from the streets. By the time he was set to go, he'd been too exhausted and hurting to do anything besides slump into uneasy sleep, injury and bedridden weeks taking their toll. Now, though, a new day had come about and he had work to do. He needed a plan of action.

He'd missed the report on the first killing, but as soon as he read the second he knew he had to act, despite the bitter memory of Angel's words - and what irony they represented, now. There could not be many people in LA who would recognise the pattern of Angelus at work, and assuredly none other who would be prepared to set out to stop him.

"A rogue demon hunter has to do--" he whispered to himself, and choked the rest back at the hollow sound of the words bouncing off the thin walls of the apartment.

After silent seconds, he began to laugh. At his silliness, his pretension, the whole ridiculousness of him, sitting here with one arm and a body that could barely move for attacks of damnably inconvenient dizziness, preparing to take on Angelus, the Scourge of Europe himself.

The mirth, too, came out wrong.


Wesley deposited his cup in the sink, ran cold water over it and left it to drain. The sight and scent of the congealing dishes left by the previous tenant made him feel sick and he searched around for a rubbish sack to have done with the whole noxious collection. Even if he'd wanted to face eating from them at any point in the future, he didn't think he'd be able to clean off ingrained dirt of that order one-handed.

That served as the most uncomfortable reminder he could imagine that he was going to have to eat sometime today, while at the same time establishing he was certainly far from being able to face any of the canned meals Sheila had stocked his cupboards with (showing him proudly how she'd picked out items with pull-rings in the lids so he wouldn't have to struggle with a tin opener).

He dumped the clanking rubbish sack under the worktop.

Back in the living room, he collected up the thin wad of paper, news cuttings and notes he'd managed to compile between yesterday's infuriating practicalities. It wasn't the most professional or expansive of case files to work from, but he determined to improve it forthwith. He folded the papers clumsily and thrust them into one of his borrowed trousers' baggy pockets.

Outside his window, dawn was giving way to full daylight, and another victim could have met their end while he stalled about the rituals of waking and pampered to his own weakness.

Lacking a comb (something his red-haired guardian had failed to consider) or anything resembling a mirror, he ran his fingers through his hair until he was at least fairly certain it wasn't standing on end, if not overly optimistic for its chances of looking anywhere approaching decent. He made a one-handed bodge of his shoelaces that he wasn't too sure he'd be able to unpick when he came to take the shoes off. He pulled on his jacket, wincing at the crispy feel of the stains set into the lining, demon pus and his own blood intermingled.

The empty sleeve swung against his shoulder as he turned back in to the kitchen to pick up his key from the worktop. Next to the key lay the stake he'd broken off a damaged length of the skirting the previous evening, almost forgotten.

His father's letter, which had never really ceased its worrying at the back of his mind since he'd first lain eyes upon it, leaned unopened against a half-empty jar of instant coffee. He stared intently at it as though the force of his not wanting it to be there could make it vanish, then snatched up the key and the stake, shoved the stake inside his jacket, and turned his back.

The key moved reluctantly in the lock and resisted granting him exit. Outside on the landing, he could hear the couple in the apartment across the hall arguing noisily. Every word of the abuse they railed at each other rang clear through the thin walls. He shelved his intended supplication after a light bulb for the shared bathroom as he locked the door behind him, and instead walked straight on down the stairs.

The staircase, narrow and dark, its condition as dilapidated as the rest of the building, comprised forty-seven steps down from his fourth floor hovel and he felt the jar of every one travel up from his feet through to his shoulder as though the surgeons had strung a cable of nerve tissue as thick as his wrist to connect them, sometime while he'd been unconscious.

Halfway, dizziness halted him, threatening a trip down the stairs that would probably land him right back in hospital at the bottom. Leaning raggedly against the wall, he reflected that the doctors had been right, in their half-hearted way; he should not be walking around. But there was nobody else to do this. He could not call the Watcher's Council. He could not call the Slayer - even if he had her number, she had never seen and never would see with impartiality where Angel was concerned. And the police--

Wesley dredged his determination back to the surface, battled the thready grey cotton wool in his brain, and forced his feet onward, one before the next. Walking was a terribly simple procedure really, and did not require nearly so much drama as this...

Yet the lack of the weight of a whole arm demanded a readjustment in balance that he hadn't quite managed yet, sending him veering off to the right every few steps if he wasn't careful. He made himself approach the task of calculating his motions and resetting his body's instincts with an academically removed kind of interest. It was merely a puzzle, after all, one of weight distribution and balance, and he'd always been good at puzzles.

The exercise carried him down into the lobby. The front door was heavy and fought his grip, but the coolness of the early morning air roused him from his stupor a little. A bag lady who'd been sleeping in the deep cavity of the doorway bid him an alcoholically genial "good morning".

Lacking the money for cab fares, he wondered as he started walking whether it would ultimately save time if he were to first see about reclaiming his motorcycle from the police. The amount it had cost, he should be able to sell it for enough to pay off some of the hospital's bills and keep him a few months at least.

His brief sense of well-being dissipated when he reached the newsstand on the corner, where a third murder stared accusingly at him from half a dozen front pages. The world reeled around him after the effort of walking even so short a distance, and unconsciousness threatened convincingly enough that he had to pause again. The moment made a decision for him. Innocents would not die to salve his pride.

He dug out the scrap of notepaper from his jacket and squinted down at blurring numbers written in a strong, angular hand that had scored deep grooves with each strike of the pen.

When his senses recovered sufficiently to move, he shakily scooped the meagre change from his pocket and went to find a telephone.


The cafe was a cheap, pitiful venue with plastic tables and battered crockery and one big store-front window that gaped out onto the street. Its only distinction was of being the first place to catch Wesley's eye as he'd slumped in the phone booth across the road. He sat now at its most secluded table, in a corner offset in an alcove at the side of the window, close enough to offer an adequate view out onto the street, and hunched over the coffee he had bought as a pretext for remaining.

The dregs left were cold. Well, they were unlikely to be anything else when it had been almost two hours since he'd made his telephone call. Outside, the sun was well on its way to its full daytime blaze, but he shivered in his plastic seat. The world felt as glacial as the drink in his hand, and everything he encountered seemed to set the chill in deeper.

People's stares made him cold; the casual first glance that caught on the empty sleeve, the double-take and quick closer study, the gaze that slid away in faint apology or embarrassment as though it was somehow their fault he was missing an arm. And it had sunk in, as he endured the stares, settled deep and chilled to the bone, that probably nobody was ever going to look quite 'normally' at him again. He thought he'd accepted the physical permanence of his condition back in the hospital, but he discovered now that there were other readjustments he had yet to take in.

He caught the waitress giving him a pointed look, but she glanced away quickly when he turned his head. It was about the fourth such instance in the past half hour.

Given how little change he had remaining, he didn't want to have to purchase another coffee in order to remain, though the thought of waiting until they actually demanded he buy or leave made him want to crawl out of his own skin in anticipated embarrassment. He cast another desperate glance out of the window and was relieved - although also more than a little fearful - to see Detective Costas heading down the sidewalk towards him. Costas saw him, but gave no more acknowledgement of it than a quickening of pace and flicker of grim recognition in his eyes.

Then the cafe door was swinging open, the bell on it sounding in a noise too cheerful and bright, to Wesley's mind, to be anything other than discordant in these surroundings. Costas entered in a swirl of grubby trench coat and a faint odour of sweat.

"You sure know how to pick a classy joint," he said, stopping at Wesley's table, apparently uncaring of his volume or the hostility the comment engendered in the waitress's glare. But his assessment of the cafe didn't stop him from proceeding to ask "You eaten yet?" and, upon extracting a negative response, hollering the waitress over and ordering the breakfast special so vaunted in the peeling posters on the cafe walls. His heckling and cajoling somehow managed to pry from Wesley a reaction that was construed as an agreement to join him in eating, though Wesley for the life of him could not recall agreeing any such thing, however many times he ran the conversation through in his head as Costas argued with the waitress at the counter.

Two more coffees appeared almost instantly and Costas swaggered back to the table with them, allowing Wesley to push his stone cold mug away with a faint, grateful sigh. Costas finally seemed to tire of looming over him and sat down. "I guess you've been here a while, huh? I got here as soon as--"

"I can't pay," Wesley interrupted bluntly, too busy wrestling tiredness and an annoying touch of double-vision to bother with courtesies.

"You say?" Costas looked blank, and sipped at his coffee with an experimental air.

"For the food," Wesley expanded. "I don't have the money. I can't pay."

Costas waved a hand and resumed his critical examination of the coffee, finally setting it down to the verdict of a grimace. "You said you wanted to share information. If you've the kind of information I've been looking for these two years past, I can stretch to a breakfast special and a lousy coffee and you're welcome to it."

"Thank you." Embarrassed, he stared out of the window to avoid meeting the detective's gaze.

"And if you haven't, you better have a good explanation to hand for calling me out here."

There was a pause. Wesley felt... grey. He concentrated fixedly on the flashing advertisement in a travel agent's across the street. Skiing holidays. He'd never go skiing.

Costas shook his head. "If you don't mind me saying - which you probably do, but mind I'm saying it anyway - you look like shit, Pryce. Worse than in the hospital, which is really something. What the hell are you doing out? I didn't even know they'd released you until you called. I thought you were supposed to be in at least another week. Don't you know I could drag you in for trying to vanish without leaving a forwarding address? There's still an open case caught up in all this."

"I didn't realise--" He stopped, and made himself breathe, edge away from the defensive, find a different approach. "It slipped my mind," he clipped, delving back to his father's lessons and example. "I wasn't anticipating signing myself out yesterday. A situation came up. Everything happened very quickly. There was no time to think of such details. And for your information, I'm feeling considerably better than when we met in the hospital... and that would be Wyndham-Pryce, please. Or 'Wesley' will suffice if my surname bothers you."

Costas scowled consideringly at him over the lip of his coffee, faint disbelief mixed in with the irritation. "All right. Wesley. And my point, that got buried somewhere in the procedurals, was that you look like hell. As my mother would say, you need to be fed up."

Deflated, but amused despite himself, Wesley resisted the obvious comeback. "Thank you for your concern," he said, "But please don't worry. I'm quite all right."

"And speaking of being fed up." Costas looked immensely pleased as the breakfasts arrived, and was practically stuck into the meal before the waitress had set down the plate. The girl made a fast retreat. Costas glanced up briefly from his demolition of the breakfast special to nod expectantly at Wesley.

The proximity of food only made him feel ill, but obliged to at least put up a show of eating, Wesley picked up his fork and poked runny fried eggs around the plate with it.

The detective's attitude had set him a little off-balance. He'd anticipated meeting the man again with something like dread, after the encounter in the hospital, but here Costas seemed willing to approach him, if warily, with considerably more casual amity than before. It was also possible that Costas really didn't want his only lead on LA's supernatural and demonic element to run off or - which might seem equally likely to him at the moment - drop dead on him. And he supposed his swift disappearance from the hospital could have looked suspect in a number of ways.

"I didn't expect you to call," Costas said after a while.

By that time, Wesley had massacred his eggs into a mangled mess and moved on to the thin strings of bacon. When the detective spoke, he looked up, automatically raising the fork to his lips. He swallowed from reflex, and discovered as the food hit his stomach that he was in fact extremely hungry. He devoured half a dozen more bites before remembering that Costas had spoken.

"No?" he queried distractedly.

"No." Costas was grinning - at what, he couldn't fathom. "You get to recognise the look of a suspect who'd rather go down than talk."

Wesley was briefly delighted to contemplate himself capable of any such look, and wondered what his father would think - what Buffy and her people would think - what Angel would think - if they heard Costas' opinion. He wiped the idea from his mind as he realised its inanity. "I didn't intend to call." He gulped down several more bites, then set the fork down carefully - his hand was still trembling a little - and dug the newspaper clippings from his pocket. "But there are lives at risk. It's about this recent spate of murders."

Costas dashed through the clippings in a second two-handed, then returned to absently forking the remainder of his food into his mouth with his left hand. "You know something about these?" he asked, waving the pages in illustration. "I mean, hell, it's not my case, but if you've got anything--"

"I do." Wesley discovered his hunger had evaporated, and pushed his half-eaten meal aside. Costas shot him a frown, then swapped it for his empty plate and continued shovelling, not seeming to care about the mangled state of the remaining food. "I'm familiar with the modus operandi. It belongs to a very particular killer."

"You've got a name?" Food was forgotten in an instant. Costas dragged out the familiar notebook and leaned keenly over the table.

Wesley, feeling crowded, hunched back. "Angel... Angelus."

Costas looked annoyed, shades of the persona Wesley had encountered in the hospital returning. "You've got a real problem with these last names, Pryce. How am I supposed to find an 'Angel' in Los Angeles. You have any idea how many cheap male models and rent boys go by these sorts of tags?"

He choked at the image that pulled up. "He's certainly neither of those things. And... I know where he lives. I can take you to him. Right now."

The detective ran a sceptical eye over him. "I'd be surprised you could stand up straight right now. No. Give me the address. I'll call in some backup, make the arrest."

"No," Wesley said, rather too quickly.

"No?" Costas' expression froze as the penny dropped. "This is something like the last case, right? What is it you're not telling me?"

Wesley stared long and hard at him, hoping he was prepared to hear this. "Very well, Detective Costas. Angel isn't human. I need you to help me kill a vampire."

Costas was quiet a long moment. Then he nodded slowly. "Bite marks. Right. Figures. You know how many corpses I've seen brought in like that, drained of blood? After a while you get to thinking, maybe these aren't just ghost stories."

"No. Not ghost stories. They're very real. Flesh and blood - dead flesh, borrowed blood, granted. Have no doubt about it, detective, ghosts exist, magic exists and there are real monsters out in this city as well as the human ones you've been accustomed to dealing with."

Despite his casual air and assurances, Wesley couldn't miss the freaked look sitting just behind Costas' eyes. But there was little time to wait for the man to acclimatise himself.

"We need to go," he said. "Now, while it's daylight. There's a chance he'll be sleeping and even if he isn't, the sunlight will trap him and give us an edge - not to mention an escape - we wouldn't have at night."

Costas stared back at him levelly. "I meant what I said. You're not coming. You're still a hospital case, Pryce, and I'm not going to be responsible for getting you all the way killed."

"Well, it's unfortunate, then - because you can't do this without me." Wesley leaned back in his chair and caught himself just shy of the crossing of his arms that would have been automatic, several weeks and a whole different life away. His head spun as his worldview suffered another minor jar. "I know this world. You don't. And as I'm not telling you the address, the only way you're going to get there is if you let me show you."


The abode of the vampire Angel turned out to be a large, ominous brick building that looked like it might have been converted from a warehouse. It squatted glowering over a wide and relatively quiet street.

"Not exactly a castle," Costas observed as they exited his vehicle - a blue Lexus that singularly failed to fit in with the rest of his image. He lit up a cigarette as they stood regarding the building, and remained oblivious to the pointed message behind Wesley's responding cough.

Wesley leaned against the car, the noxious smell of the smoke almost hallucinogenic, mixing with the painkillers in his system to spread out a wave of warm numbness from his midsection. His senses spun giddily and if the car hadn't been there he would likely have ended up recumbent on the sidewalk.

"You all right?" Costas asked, an irritable weariness in his tone that seemed to anticipate becoming an 'I told you so' any moment.

"I am, indeed, all right," Wesley said, nodding and smiling. He filed the discovery that nodding was not wise at present; wrote it up in his brain on a fluorescent stick-it note he pinned on the inside of his forehead right between his eyes. He heard a terribly manic- sounding giggle and swallowed abruptly and straightened when he realised it had been his own.

"You are insane." Costas punctuated each word with a stab of the cigarette that spilled bright embers onto the concrete. With the final stab, the dwindling cigarette chose to disintegrate altogether and Costas crushed its messy corpse under his boot. "Ready, Pryce?"

"Wyndham--"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah..."

Wesley bit down on another protest as he realised the detective was already halfway to the door of Angel's building, and struggled to catch up.

Inside was a dingy hallway and mailboxes proving that, contrary to appearances, there were in fact operating businesses run from the offices on at least two of the upstairs floors. The uncollected mail in one of the boxes was addressed to 'the occupier' of the basement which seemed the building's only residential apartment.

"The crypt," Costas deadpanned. He shoved the mail back. "Some of this is postmarked yesterday. Maybe he hasn't been home."

"I suppose it's possible." Wesley's hopes sank at the thought of how that would complicate matters. He had no clue where he might start looking for Angel in a city the size of LA. Would Costas arrest him for wasting police time? He threw the thought aside resolutely. "On the other hand--" he drew the stake out from his jacket and extended it to the detective. "You'd better carry this." Even if the unlikely did come to pass and he had a chance to stake Angel, he currently lacked the strength to drive the weapon deep enough to pierce the heart.

Costas took it with an air of scepticism, and his fingers brushed the holster hidden by his bulky brown coat in indecision.

"Your gun won't help you, detective. I explained that. Bullets won't necessarily even slow a vampire down. A stake through the heart, decapitation--"

"--fire or sunlight. Yeah, I got the rote." His grip around the stake, more sure than it had been, gave lie to his flippancy. Wesley nodded approvingly; saw spots and cursed his mental note for becoming unstuck and fluttering down into the detritus of the rest of his thoughts.

They took the stairs in lieu of the elevator, since Costas claimed it would be easier to approach without forewarning their quarry that way, although Wesley rather thought his clumsy invalid's movements would make the point moot. But nothing stirred in the apartment as they descended the last few steps. The lights were out except for that of the kitchen, which stood a small oasis of glow across an open-plan expanse of antique furnishings, many of which looked the worse for wear. In the faint illumination, Wesley made out bookshelves over-laden with thick, ancient volumes.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Costas hissed.

He glanced guiltily back, and only then realised he'd pushed past the detective and was standing in front of the shelves. He stole another intent glance at its contents, recognising titles. Thought that, well, if Angel was going to have no need of these...

He turned from them abruptly. "I'm sorry. I don't know what I was thinking."

Costas' narrowed eyes suggested he agreed with that wholeheartedly. "We need to check the rest of the place out. Then you can overindulge on the bookworm thing."

"Of course."

He stayed a pace behind the detective as they headed for a doorway half-open to reveal a slice of bedroom furnishings, and collided with him when Costas halted on the threshold, staring incredulously at the large, elegantly metal-framed bed. He pushed past him to see--

"Oh, dear lord."

Whatever Wesley had been expecting to find, it was most certainly not this.

"What the--?" He heard Costas give up on attempting to articulate anything but curses, at length, behind him as he hurried to Angel's bedside and studied the chains, discovering his current anger with the souled vampire did not preclude the extension of compassion for the obvious suffering of another living - well, animate - being.

"I thought we were here to kill him?" Costas' eyes were wide and his knuckles had whitened around the stake. His other hand again hovered close to his gun.

"Don't be ridiculous." Wesley pointed to Angel's wrists, scoured raw by the chains; how they were scabbed and beginning to heal in places while broken open anew in others. "He's been here like this at least a day. He couldn't possibly be responsible for last night's murder. It's somebody - something else."

"In what possible way could that matter? You said he was a vampire. You've just spent the journey here telling me what evil fiends they are." Wesley presumed with ill temper that the inflection the detective placed on that remark was intended as a mimic of his own. "Now we're supposed to be all pro-vamp because he didn't eat these specific LA citizens?"

"He has a soul. Usually. He was cursed by... but never mind that now." He leaned over Angel and cautiously shook his shoulder. "Angel? Are--" He leaped back with a small cry as the vampire convulsed awake within the chains. He couldn't be sure if the hands were reaching out for him when the chain pulled them short after only inches, but the scare and the quick movement brought back his dizziness and nausea, and he slumped against the wall.

Through misted vision he saw the wildness leave Angel's eyes and a measure of clarity seep in in its stead. For several heartbeats - his own, obviously, so loud in his ears he could hear nothing of the words he suspected Detective Costas to be saying - he and Angel regarded each other in silence. Then the vampire's tongue ran over his lips and a cracked voice emerged. "Wesley?"

"Yes," he agreed, saturating the word with as much irony as he could produce. "Angel, the keys to the chains. Where are they? Who did this to you? Was it the mur--"

"No!" The chains rattled madly, joining in the violent negation, causing Wesley to wince. His shoulder jarred against the wall and he slid a further inch or so down it, and if he didn't re-stabilise his balance soon he'd be on his knees. Angel said intently, "You can't let me loose. I've been killing again, Wesley. The demon's breaking loose... in my sleep."

"In your sleep?" Wesley spluttered. He managed to straighten his back and step away from the wall's support. He gasped as the next thought struck him. "You did this to yourself."

"I've been having dreams," Angel said with difficulty. "Killing dreams. Just like... I stalk them, cut them, feed off them... and the fear, it tastes..." With shock Wesley recognised a kind of dreamy languor in his eyes as he reminisced. It was replaced by despair as the vampire repeated desperately, "You mustn't let me loose. Wesley, you - you know what you have to do. You're a Watcher, or you were. You can--"

"So now I'm good for something," Wesley said. "That's terribly encouraging. Really. Thank you, Angel." He almost spit the last words out, and both Costas and Angel seemed to find his vehemence jarring. "You're not a killer again. Another victim died about six hours ago. What did you do with the damned key?"

Angel's breaths slowed from their panicked rasp as he absorbed the information. Until the breaths stopped completely, alarming Wesley a moment. He watched the tension drain from Angel's bound form and relief overtake his face.

"I didn't dream..." he laughed weakly. "Well, I guess I didn't, you know, actually sleep. Huh. The key--" He pointed with his chin. "I threw it over there somewhere."

Wesley moved to retrieve it, but Costas brushed past with a, "Stay put. I'm not carrying you out of here." So he stood back and watched the detective search the floor on hands on knees.

A thought occurred to him. "Don't unlock him yet," he told Costas as he departed the bedroom. He returned a minute later with an armful of bags from the refrigerator, and couldn't help but notice how Angel perked up in interest at the sight.

"It's for our safety as much as your comfort," Wesley said. He struggled with one of the bags. Costas wandered over and took it off him, stabbed it efficiently with the key and handed it back.

"Feed your vampire."

With Angel looking on, Wesley bit back his annoyance and held the bag, a little embarrassedly, over Angel's mouth, letting the contents drip out. Angel made a small noise of frustration at the process's tedious slowness and he squeezed the bag in his fingers, transforming the drip to a stream that splattered Angel's jaw, though the vampire didn't seem to mind.

The first bag finished, he awkwardly handed Costas a second, endured the other's eye-rolling, and repeated the procedure.

"Enough?" he asked, as he scrunched up the plastic and discarded it on the nightstand.

"Enough." Angel nodded. "Thanks. Wesley, I--"

"Don't bother." He turned away. Without looking back at the souled vampire, he said, "We need to find out who's behind these killings if it isn't you. Obviously you have a form of connection to them somehow. Do you know what it might be? If there's anything at all you can tell us..." He took the key Costas held out to him and clumsily unfastened the chains, still not looking up.

"There's nothing," Angel said, a little too quickly. He sat up and the chains slid off the bed to land on the floor with a clamour. He wiped a hand across his face and performed a quick double-take with regard for his guests, pulling the hand back from his mouth to wipe the blood off onto the bedclothes instead, looking every bit as though he regretted the waste. Wesley noticed how he eyed the last plastic packet, untouched on the nightstand.

"You're lying," Costas said bluntly. "Look, pal. Vampire or - whatever, you've a citizen's duty to help put this guy away. Either with a stake or with the law."

Angel blinked. "Citizen's duty."

Wesley almost laughed at the flat sarcasm. It was easy to overlook Angel's rare humour, when so often it seemed he had none at all.

"I'll deal with it," Angel said after an uncomfortable pause. "He's dangerous--"

"He? Then you do know who's behind this."

"Wesley--" Angel sighed. "I used to have a connection with those I sired. It's possible - it would mean he's close. Penn--"

"Penn?"

"He's dangerous, Wesley." Angel swung his feet off the bed and stood up, and caught himself as he almost fell over again. Despite the fact Wesley had an inch or so on him in height, the vampire's bulk was imposing and he found himself retreating. But Angel just walked past into the kitchen, where he ran water and splashed it over his arms and face. Costas followed, so Wesley reluctantly did too. "He's powerful, and insane. He loves to kill. Likes to make an art of it. You can't take him on. Leave him to me."

"The police can--" Costas began.

"The police can't handle this. Wesley, take Detective Van Helsing here away and stay away."

"Very well. As we're clearly not welcome, we'll go." Angrily, Wesley caught Costas' arm and pointed him towards the door. "But I'm not going to stand by while a supernatural killer roams loose. You're not the only one with sanction or inclination to fight the good fight."

He'd meant the words as a challenge and he'd hardly anticipated the magnitude of the flinch they produced in Angel, the way his whole body rocked as though he'd been struck.

Wesley hesitated, but as it quickly became clear that Angel was going to stand and silently glare until he and Costas made themselves scarce, he acquiesced gladly. Of all the arrogant, jumped up...

His anger carried him on its wave up in the elevator to the dark, draughty lobby, but when he stepped out his legs collapsed beneath him and weakness broke through him in a veritable tsunami.

Strong hands caught him, under his arm and around his waist. The warmth of another body so close wasn't something he was accustomed to and it briefly overwhelmed his senses. Then the warmth shifted and he felt a solid, flat surface beneath his back, the arms still supporting him from the front but their distance rather more ordinary. A hand brushed his hair aside to feel his forehead.

"Jesus," Costas said. "Hang the investigation, I'm taking you home right now and you're gonna rest before you kill yourself. And that's not optional. Hell, Pryce - Wesley - I can see you want to stop this guy, but you've gotta rest up and let yourself heal, too."

"I'm not going to wait for it to grow back," Wesley retorted, though his irritation emerged a frail mumble.

"Say what?" Costas blinked at him. When the words sank in, he let out a guffaw and cheerily clapped Wesley on his good shoulder. "You're a hell of a wit, Pryce. I can't tell a lie. Whatever else you might be, you're a hell of a wit."

While being one hell of a wit had been far from Wesley's intentions, he could muster neither the energy nor the inclination to slap down the amused comradeship with which the detective supported him back to the car.


Lulled by the smell of suede and sweat and the rhythm of the engine, he zoned out in the passenger seat, and only returned to full consciousness as they pulled up in the street outside his apartment.

Costas made unimpressed noises as he accompanied Wesley inside and helped him up the dingy staircase to the third floor. On the landing he glowered at the neighbouring apartment door still emanating raised voices as Wesley struggled to fit the key to the lock with shaking fingers.

After being outside, the atmosphere inside the apartment seemed all the more unpleasantly stuffy. The air conditioning, if it was functioning at all, wasn't functioning well. Costas deposited Wesley in an armchair and, swearing, walked around yanking open windows despite the heat of the day - only midday, still, barely 1pm, Wesley reflected with depression; he'd managed all of five hours. The air wasn't moving much, and Costas' efforts didn't make much difference to speak of. Dust floated lazily in the beams of sunlight that seemed to pass through the rooms without touching them, like they might be besmirched by any contact. Their aloofness kept it dingy. Costas flicked on light switches, and swore at the ones that didn't work.

"It's really not necessary to--" Wesley began.

The detective waved him into silence. "You're going to sit there and I'm going to get you something to drink and you're going to drink it, damn you. I did not bargain on spending today looking after some cripple with a goddamn death-wish. There are crimes being committed in this city."

Wesley blinked, absorbed the word, and set his jaw. "I may well be a cripple," he said stiffly, "But the shoulder will heal. In a few weeks, it will heal. It will be better than this. I don't want to die. I'm just trying--"

"Shut the hell up a second and fucking listen instead of talking for once!" Costas roared. The faint sounds of argument breezing through the walls ceased momentarily in shock at being outmatched. "I don't know what drummed into your stupid thick skull that you had to prove something to the world this bad, but don't waste it on me. I don't want to hear it. I've had enough of your bullshit. Now, sit."

He shoved Wesley down in the chair as he tried, in his outrage, to stand, and stomped off into the kitchen. Wesley perched rigidly on the edge of the chair, gripped by indecision, listening to Costas abusing the crockery and the hissing of the electric kettle. After a minute, he sagged back and let it all wash over him. His shoulder ached with a rising insistence that reminded him it was probably time for more medication.

Costas re-emerged as he was hunting down the side of the bed for the tablets. He held up the plastic container to forestall whatever new torrent the detective had opened his mouth to vent, and returned to the armchair, where he accepted the tea and used it to gulp down fresh pills, oblivious to its temperature. The fact it was stronger than he liked and had too much sugar didn't register until minutes later, by which time Costas had brought another mug from the kitchen and perched on the arm of the spare chair.

"What was it?" he asked after a while, tipping his head in Wesley's direction. "That did that to you?"

"A demon." Wesley grimaced. "Angel said it was a Kungai. I didn't recognise - I'd never seen one before close-up. Plus, they're supposed to have a very distinctive horn," he added snippily.

Costas laughed dryly. "And you; you know about all of this shit precisely how?"

"I was trained. I used to be... well, it doesn't really matter what I used to be. But I can help you, detective. To fight these creatures. I can tell you what you need to know. Vampires are only a fraction of the evils out there."

"So you said." Costas stood and paced restlessly, swigging the tea with an aplomb more suited to pint glasses. He spotted the envelope on the worktop and picked it up before Wesley could warn him. A brief spark and the detective's curse later, Costas was holding a scroll with his fingertips as though it'd bitten him, and the mug was a heap of broken fragments in a lightly steaming puddle on the floor. "What the hell?"

Wesley didn't have the energy to prevent him running his eyes quickly over the content. "Jesus, Pryce, your dad's a real charmer."

"I don't want to know."

"I wouldn't, either." Costas threw the letter back onto the worktop, scrunching his face up like he'd caught a bad smell. He glanced down at the mess on the floor. "Aw, hell. I'm sorry about the mug."

"It wasn't mine," Wesley said. "Nothing here is." He watched the detective busy himself clearing up the shards and the spillage, and remembered something. "I, ah, don't suppose you could look into returning my belongings... chiefly a motorcycle... I mean, obviously it isn't any use to me now, but I thought I could sell it--"

"I'll look into it." Costas paused and appeared to consider a moment. "Look, my brother owns a parts shop, sells a few second hand vehicles. I'd bet he could find you a buyer easy. We can sort that out later. Meantime, there's a few bits and pieces in evidence that were found in that motel room with you that I can probably get released to you now, though you might have to give up any hopes for the weapons. And maybe I can spot you a loan until you've sorted out the bike."

"That really isn't necessary," Wesley said weakly, then caught the detective's glare. "...thank you very much."

Costas nodded sharply. "Don't you forget it." He bundled the remains of the mug in plastic and tossed them into the waste sack under the worktop. "You get some rest. I'll come by tomorrow, we can see where we are with this vampire thing. In the meantime I'll try to get in on the case - oh, damn it to hell."

"Whatever's wrong?"

"The case is wrong. It's Lockley's. Man, I swear, you do not know what you're asking here. This is not going to be pretty." Downcast, he stomped to the door, but hesitated. "You got a phone?"

Wesley shook his head. Costas reached in his jacket, pulled out a cellphone and made as if to toss it over, then changed his mind and crossed the room to place it into Wesley's hand. "That's mine. If my ex-wife calls, tell her - I don't know, make something up. You've got my station extension."

"Thank you. I - I don't know what to--"

"Don't bother. You're my one lead on getting a hold on what's really going down in this damn city. Which means you're worth more to me than gold right now." And with that, he slammed the door behind him and was gone.

Wesley stood and moved to lock the door. On his way back to the chair, his father's letter seemed to watch him from the worktop and he reluctantly allowed guilt to nudge him in a detour to pick it up. He took it back with him and, leaning into the worn padding of the chair, regarded the scrawled black writing through slit eyes.

Upon reaching the line, 'to reiterate, I have no son. Your cousin Eustace is, needless to say, exceedingly pleased in receiving this news', he crumpled it in his fist and let it fall to litter the stained carpet.