The hotel was surprisingly upmarket, though no longer the grand establishment it must have been in its early days, the polish beginning to wear from its once-smooth facade. Wesley could sympathise.
With a quick getaway in mind they left the car (Detective Lockley's) out front in the street rather than in the hotel's ill-lit underground lot, and Lockley led the way inside a lobby more airy than Wesley had expected, its decoration plush without being expensive, a homey place indeed for a killer to select as his abode.
A woman was on duty in a small office adjoined to the lobby via a large window. She had dyed blonde hair and a low-cut blouse too young for her, and her preoccupation viewing a flickering television screen did not suggest the newly-reopened hotel was conducting a roaring trade. She jumped when Lockley tapped loudly on the glass, jumped again when Lockley pressed her badge to the window, and hurried across.
Wesley did not catch more than a few words of their low-voiced conversation, but the woman alternately nodded and shook her head in response, and at one point broke away to check a computer, typing fingers fumbling clumsily. Lockley nodded sharply to whatever information was passed on and motioned for them to follow as she moved purposefully towards the stairs at the back of the lobby.
Costas brought up the rear with ill grace, herding Wesley before him. Wesley, annoyed to be shielded like something breakable, nevertheless experienced a spark of amusement that at least he wasn't the only one feeling supplanted.
The stairs were broad, and their decorative woodwork was clean though it could use repainting. Beneath the thick carpeting, old floorboards creaked. At the top of the stairs, Lockley halted a moment to check room numbers before selecting a corridor.
Shadows lurked around arched supports interspersed at regular intervals along the pale green corridors. Each arch ran square columns down the sides of the passage to create a multitude of alcoves where a killer might conceal himself. Wesley shivered in air still warmed by the lingering heat of the day, and felt something trickle delicately down his forehead. Suddenly, the texture of the darkness was too familiar; the contours of the corridor twisting and shrinking, metamorphosing into another space, another time. It took everything he had to keep his feet moving, to stifle what could only be described as a whimper behind tight-pressed lips and gritted teeth.
Lockley and Costas were almost supernaturally silent, and Wesley took his cue from them, not voicing his fears about the demons which were not, in fact, waiting around the next corner. Lockley's breaths came quick and shallow, the only sign that her nerves suffered any strain. Costas' moves seemed a little more careful and measured for silence than his norm, but betrayed no special displays of unease.
Wesley could not help but remember his own failures of nerve - falling to pieces faced with Balthazar; the physical trials for the Council where he'd shaken and stammered; his father cursing the deficiencies of his fencing with the derisive verdict that he was too afraid of his opponent to ever be an effective duellist. He still had the scars carved into his flesh by the subsequent lessons, as though demonstrations of what a sword cut felt like could acclimatise him to it, somehow build up an immunity. Father cherished strange theories.
He tried to dig deep for whatever semblance of courage had found him in those months of hunting demons, alone on the road with just a motorcycle, leathers and a bag of weapons. It had not all been failures, though undoubtedly there had been some very close calls indeed. And Father had been wrong because, though he might never be any expert with a foil, he'd passed the Council's final examination in the end, and all of the others too.
He had not failed. He had faced his fears, and come out alive if not intact on the other side. He had only to remember it.
Determinedly setting his jaw (his teeth, in defiance of his resolve, still wanted to chatter), Wesley moved after Detective Lockley with renewed purpose, and just managed not to plough into her as she stopped in front of a door.
When she turned to glance over her shoulder, Costas exchanged her a brief grim nod and silently waved for Wesley to move back. Lockley rapped hard on the door with knuckles bunched in a fist around a stake. In her other hand she held a gun.
Costas too had a stake and a gun. Wesley registered his own unarmed status (wincing at the cruelty of the inherent pun) simultaneously to the noises of footsteps closing on them from the other side of the door. The sudden feeling of vulnerability jolted him despite his prior conclusion that he was equally little use at present with a weapon or without one.
Costas evidently tired of his quiet, frantic signalling - which, Wesley realised, he'd been watching blankly for some seconds - and reached out to shove him back into the shelter of the corridor with a hand placed just below his breastbone.
The touch sent electrical tingles through a body too accustomed to distance. He acquiesced through surprise as much as anything, falling back as the door began to open inwards.
Lockley did not afford the suspect any benefit of the doubt. As soon as the lock clicked she'd had a foot planted against the door, and now she kicked out to speed it on its way. It jerked violently inward, its edge hitting whoever had opened it.
Lockley charged in, and Costas followed.
There was no gunfire, so obviously they weren't so confident as all that about the suspect, who had been knocked reeling by the door - a short fellow, with spiky blond hair, wearing a snugly tailored black and red suit.
Penn, if indeed he was Penn, was already straightening up. The man removed the hand he'd clasped to his face and looked down at the blood on it in faint annoyance.
He looked back up as Lockley snapped out, "Hands in the air where I can see them. If I see one move I don't like, don't think I won't shoot."
Wesley sincerely hoped never to be on the wrong side of Detective Lockley in an arrest situation.
From his vantage outside the door, he could see a thin slice of the room, and he watched through the gap as Penn, smiling, slowly raised his hands with an obliging air. He looked like a youth, angelic and bashful, a saintly choirboy. Wesley had to remind himself that this was simply a smiling demon wearing that dead boy's smile. Angelus' nomenclature came prominently to mind.
He realised, with a rush of chill that swept down his spine, that he had not told these people enough, had not drilled into them sufficiently what it would mean to be facing a supernatural foe. Yes, they were trained professionals, but professionals had reflexes, in this case the wrong reflexes, as likely to get them killed as anything. Of course, he had not had much time to educate them, but still his was the failing.
Detective Lockley was too used to dealing with human criminals, and Penn - he should by no means be giving in so easily as it might currently appear. Wesley opened his mouth to deliver a sharp warning--
Penn moved almost too quickly for a human eye to follow. His hands, half-raised, snapped out even as he stepped forward, grabbing Lockley's gun hand and effortlessly, ruthlessly, twisting it. With an appalling balletic grace, the move wrenched her around in a full circle, bringing her in under his raised arm, the gun dropping from her fingers somewhere amid the circuit.
One could almost believe them to be dancing, were it not for Lockley's gasp and the fear in her face as the arms of the killer wrapped around her and he pulled her tight against him. One hand was around her waist and the other across her throat, still enclosing her twisted wrist.
Costas had his gun levelled, but he hesitated, fearful of shooting his fellow officer, though Wesley would have risked the shot.
"Shoot him," Lockley said, choked and furious. Wesley, his fingers gouging the wood edging of the doorway as he watched helpless, couldn't have agreed more.
Penn laughed and hugged her closer. For all that he seemed to be exerting no effort to justify their being so, her feet were hanging above the floor. "You don't want him to shoot me," he cooed into her ear. "It won't kill me. But I can kill you." The fiend pressed his face into Lockley's neck and visibly breathed her in. She shivered in his grasp and her jaw bunched, mouth closed into a tight line that said she wasn't going to scream.
Wesley couldn't see Costas' face, but it wasn't necessary to view his expression to sense the anger radiating from him in waves.
"Shoot him," Lockley said again in an almost nonexistent hiss of a voice forced through her teeth.
The gun in Costas' outstretched fist trembled with what might have been anger. As Wesley watched, breath forgotten, he heard the hammer click back with purpose.
Penn raised his head from Lockley's neck, making a quick teasing biting motion against the stretched skin as he did. She gasped as he drew blood.
Halfway, the fearful sound transformed into a grunt of effort.
Then she was pulling away from Penn, not quite managing to get clear before his furious shove sent her reeling face-first into the wall. Her clawing hands ripped pinned-up newspaper articles, tearing them off in scraps like confetti on her way down. She fell to one side and out of his view. Wesley blanched, imagining he recognised pictures and fragments of headlines, too distant to know for sure.
Penn staggered back a step and wrenched the stake out of his stomach--
(Wesley analytically supposed that, aiming backwards, Lockley hadn't had a good angle on the heart. And the wound looked too shallow; she hadn't had the necessary force either. But it was not a bad effort for a first attempt to stake a vampire, under not exactly ideal conditions and without the strength of a Slayer.)
--in time for Costas to adjust his aim and empty the clip into him.
Or at least, presumably that was the plan. Though two or three bullets did hit Penn, the vampire was in motion before the remainder could impact. Again, he proved impossibly fast. He slapped the gun from Costas' grasp and it flew across the room, hitting the blinds drawn over the window in the far wall, making them shake wildly with a plastic rattle that continued in a slowly dwindling cacophony. Penn seized the detective by collar and belt and hurled him after it. Possibly it was down to the wounds sapping the vampire's strength that Costas fell short, hitting a glass-topped table with a splintering fanfare before coming to a halt against the base of a recliner.
He made no move to get up again.
Wesley was in the doorway now, half inside the room, unsure precisely when he had moved and oblivious to the risk of being spotted, frozen there by the knowledge that there was nothing he could do if he stepped in. He could smell blood but wasn't sure whose it was, the heavy scent clogging up the air and probably the only reason Penn hadn't sensed him even in his distraction. Small trails leaked from the holes left by stake and bullets in Penn's chest, their flows already stilled without a pulse to propel them.
Pulling out of a brief, hunched-over, gasping convulsion that proved even the strongest of vampires would feel the strain of indulging in the aforementioned manoeuvre with three or four holes in his undead corpse, Penn swung back around to Lockley. She was raising herself to her feet. She'd reclaimed the stake now christened red, and pushed off from the wall holding it high, lunging to take him out and hopefully shortcut another round of posturing and threats.
Penn caught her shoulders as the stake grazed his chest, stalling her just that little too far away to complete the thrust and stealing the leverage she needed to drive the stake any deeper.
"You have to love that 'try, try again' attitude," Penn remarked, laughing, positively exuberant all things considered. "People are such fun." He frowned, pried her hand aside so the stake pulled clear, then leaned forward to sniff at her throat again. "Did Angelus send you? I can smell him on you. He should know better. Oh, not just the making friendly with the food - I understand that. Gypsies, curse, soul. Whatever. But to think that his pet humans could take me down, when he failed himself?"
He shrugged, threw Lockley back into the clippings-shrine wall and shook his head. This time, Lockley didn't get up, her eyes open but dazed as she slid down to half-sitting with her shoulders barely propped against the wall.
Wesley backed off again, stifling a cry, huddling into the door jamb and the shadows of the corridor. Within the room, Penn headed over to where Costas had landed, and out of view.
It struck Wesley that the vampire hadn't seen him, and casting his mind back over the last few minutes - and dear lord, it really had been so short a time - he could not recall what he had been expecting would happen to himself when Penn finished with the others. It was a miracle he had remained unseen this long, and surely Penn would hear his steps if he tried to retreat along the corridor. But he had to at least try, to go find help before... That was, he had to call in the police... no. Perhaps if he called Angel then the souled vampire could...
No. It was a fiction, and he should at least admit it. Penn was injured. The vampire needed to replenish himself. He'd be hungry. By the time any help Wesley called could reach them, even assuming the help would, firstly, come at all and, secondly, be effective, the two detectives would be dead. Costas very likely only had seconds of life remaining.
This was his failure, his short-sightedness. They should not be the ones to pay for it.
Drawing in a shuddering breath, Wesley put his best foot forward and stepped into the room, crossing to Lockley's side, making a tremendous effort not to shake, controlling the impulse to hurry, to panic. Cool and calm were key, even if the vampire would anyway be able to hear the frantic beating of his heart. A treacherous little ruck in the carpet almost pitched him down face-first.
He crouched in front of Lockley and made a cursory examination of the semi-conscious detective, whose eyes barely tracked him. Not good. She might not recover her senses enough to be useful until long past too late. But he had no choice.
Slipping Costas' cellphone from his jacket to hers as he completed his study, he realised that he had not switched off the ringer. His stupidity could have betrayed them at any moment. There had been a reason Lockley had abandoned hers in the car. For an instant, his hand shook, and he knew he could not possibly do this, was insane to believe he could pull this off.
It was already too late to back out, he scolded himself. Pushing doubt aside, he let out a considered "Hmm" as he stood up.
Penn was leaning with one hand gripping Costas' collar, staring, his mouth open in astonishment. Wesley wondered if the two-hundred-year-old vampire serial killer knew quite how ridiculous that looked.
He wondered how he could afford time to think such ridiculous, pointless things when he was likely about to die.
He brushed his knees down. Dusty from the floor - the Council would not tolerate that, and certainly Father wouldn't. "You think the Watchers Council would sink to working with the demon Angelus?" he questioned dryly. Dry. His mouth was a desert. The words scraped the back of it raw. He sounded like his father.
Penn released his hold on Costas, and the detective dropped back to the floor with a thud.
"The Watchers Council," he repeated slowly. "You?"
"Indeed." Wesley held his chin up and dusted off his jacket with casual flicks of his hand, abruptly aware of his own shabbiness to a degree he had not been in months.
"The Watchers Council," Penn said, seeming to take immense pleasure in enunciating the words expansively and precisely, "are in England. The Watchers Council don't care to pursue my kind themselves. The Watchers Council send children out to do their fighting." He took a step forward, and Wesley almost flinched back, but Penn only moved a few paces, before turning and re-treading them back in the opposing direction.
"Things change." Wesley stood straight - very likely it just came off as 'stiff' - and forced himself to also stand firm. "Look at me and tell me again you don't believe the Council send agents out into the field." He paused, enduring the vampire's study. "So you've dealt with one team." A one-armed shrug. "Well, congratulations. There are any number more."
"The Council are hunting me?" Penn had begun to pace in an arc, circling Wesley, examining him up and down in a manner that was decidedly unsettling.
"Hmm. Strength and speed may indeed be a problem, but at least we won't have to worry about your piercing intellect," Wesley noted.
It was difficult not to cringe anticipating Penn's reaction, as he realised perhaps he'd gone too far. But the vampire only laughed, a genial sort of fellow for a demon. "You know," he said, "I don't make a habit of conversing with the food, but it seems you and I could have a lot to talk about."
His pacing was drifting rather too close for comfort, and Wesley shifted too, trying to make it look casual, probably failing, sauntering further into the room, along the far wall where Costas' gun had fallen. It took a second and an indrawn breath before he remembered that all its shots had already been fired.
"Of course," Penn added, "You'll probably do about as much screaming as you will talking." He gave a wide shrug, hands splaying out in a theatrical gesture. "I suppose it depends how tough the Watchers Council are training them these days."
Wesley forced his facial muscles into a smile. "Tough enough. But I'm tempted to make a point here about counting chickens."
"Yes," Penn agreed. "Because you might escape." Raising his fingers to poise them before his pursed lips in pondering pose - a born comedian. "You might defeat me. Honourable combat, single-handed..." He laughed aloud. "I apologise. That was crass. I daresay also rather unoriginal."
"I daresay." Scratch up a count of one, the first of many if he wasn't to die here.
"I met a Slayer once," Penn said, with a certain confiding air. "I think it was 1957. Pretty. Blonde. She chased me for three weeks, but in the end, she let me walk away. My charm. Or possibly the two broken arms. Such a sweet girl... I don't suppose you know what happened to her after? Name was something like... Cara? Sara? I always wondered--"
Wesley didn't recall a Slayer of any name like that, or a direct encounter with Penn mentioned in the diaries, but he would be most disinclined to discuss the information even if he had. He was watching the meandering zig-zag of Penn's paces, calculating. His fingers, reaching behind him, connected with thin cord and one, two, three more steps and he pulled--
The blind furled up to reveal darkness, the last of the sunlight reduced to the tiniest reflected orange strip at the brink of the horizon.
Penn put his hands together in a lazy, sardonic round of applause. "Interesting plan. Poor timing. Not without merit, though. Now--" Abruptly the vampire was not eight feet from him and relaxed in a casual and even chatty stance, but was inches from him, grasping his shirt collar in both hands and lifting him off the ground, shaking him, thrusting him back against the window so his shoulder blades hit the glass, sending a shockwave of pain and dizziness out from his cut-off arm. "Time for you to stop playing me. You've had your turn. Next game's my choice."
Wesley was barely conscious of the action as he yanked again on the cord in his hand. He jerked backwards as the blinds sprang down, striking Penn across the eyes with a fleshy *slap*. The vampire's grip loosed enough for him to break free and he dived for the door, slamming it after him. Out in the corridor, he turned without thought of the best direction to go. Only away - he had to get away. Distraction was the key. If he led Penn a chase...
He was, he reminded himself most severely - staggering into a wall while turning a corner, picking himself up with the aid of a small table bearing a vase of flowers, dragging it out into the corridor, overturning the flowers, and running on - in absolutely no condition to do so. Already the edges of his vision were greying with the exertion, the grey threatening to overwhelm.
For a moment, he thought Penn wasn't following him, and for a moment, he was even relieved (coward, said the voice in his head; coward, failure), but then he heard the crash as the vampire turned the corner and ploughed through the table and Wesley knew that, yes, he was still going to die.
But Lockley and Costas, who had so much more to live for and who could do so much more good than he, might yet live if he could just do properly this one thing.
His heart beat frantically in his chest as though it was trying to escape, and he couldn't blame it, trapped in the body of such an imbecile as himself, and this was surely the most stupid scheme he had ever tried.
The corridor disappeared into a flight of stairs in front of him. He had no choice but to run down them. Every step sent a jolt through his shoulder, advancing the grey. If he passed out so early as this, they were all dead regardless. Time was what was needed, time for Lockley to call backup, for her and Costas to recover enough to escape or to track down Penn for another round.
The stairs ended in more pale-green corridor to the left, and to the right, descending, more stairs. And this had to be a service staircase, he thought, noting for the first time the rougher decoration on the flight he'd come down. Such a staircase might conceivably lead to an exit, unlocked rooms and more opportunities to confuse a pursuit. He took the new flight, gritting his teeth against the pain and, by the time he reached the last few steps, staggering from wall to wall and barely able to stay upright on his own steam.
On his knees at the bottom of the staircase on cold tiled floor, unsure how he'd got there, he was aware that those sounds of running feet were only at the top. He rolled over to stand, and thereby missed being caught on the receiving end of Penn's flying leap and tackle by means of dumb luck alone. The vampire had jumped from-- Wesley gaped in disbelief and then cajoled his shaking knees to take his weight again, dragging himself up and away while Penn untangled himself from the heap the foiled dive had landed him in.
He was in the service area of the hotel, storage, cleaning equipment and lockers around him. A corridor to the left, and at the end, kitchens, perhaps at the back of the hotel's small bar. He heard the noises of clanking pots, shouting staff, smelled the scent of cooking on the air. He could not lead Penn that way and risk involving innocents to save his own skin. To his right were a series of storerooms he barely had chance to glance in as he passed, but which he was sure were only dead ends, quite literal ones in the circumstance. Then, drawing close on his left, another staircase led down, and he remembered viewing the hotel from outside, the gaping hole leading into the underground parking lot.
He moved too quickly, his foot slipping on the second step, balance disintegrating. He skidded down four steps before catching himself on the rail, and consoled himself giddily that he'd probably not live to feel the full force of the bruises it would leave down the backs of his legs.
He had no time to cosset the limbs shaking from reaction. He turned a corner - more steps. Skidding again, the length of the last half dozen, he ended up sprawled on grey concrete in semi-darkness. And Penn must be close behind him, but he could not run any further. His breath was coming in gasps, the grey inside his head had almost conquered the last vestiges of clarity, and the pain from his shoulder was intense enough to remind him that, on top of all else, he was probably due more medication. He shook all over.
There was a forest of parked cars around him. He half-crawled, half-staggered, and lost himself among them before falling against the side of one. Deciding it was fate giving him a polite pointer, he sagged with the fall and crawled underneath the vehicle upon reaching the concrete.
Lying there with his nasal senses overwhelmed by the aroma of petroleum, with his face pressed into the gravel, trying not to breathe or at least not to breathe audibly, he supposed that he could have broken into a car, hotwired it, driven away... If he'd known how to do so, or been in any condition to do any of those things.
Instead he lay and listened to Penn's footsteps as they took their lazy foray up and down the lot.
"Where are you?" the vampire called, mock-plaintively. "You know you're not playing fair here. I was to choose the next game. It wasn't going to be hide and seek."
Wesley knew, with cold certainty, that he would be found. Penn could surely smell him, sweat and blood and fear and leather providing a powerful beacon to track by. He was probably only dragging out the chase with the casual ease of the playful predator.
Two feet, ankles elegantly encased in tailored black suit trousers, stopped beside the front of the car. A knee descended.
Wesley rolled, struggling to crawl flat to the ground with only one arm and with two legs containing all the strength of jelly. Knees and elbows scuffed on the concrete, and he lurched upright and fell against the bonnet of another car, reeled away and started again to run, awkwardly picking his way through the maze of parked vehicles.
He risked a glance back, only to wish he hadn't when he caught sight of Penn's easy vault over the car he'd been using to hide.
Already running beyond the limits of his energy, Wesley saw little option when the attendant's office loomed up in front of him other than to fall through the ajar door into the unknown. Which turned out to be a thankfully empty small, square room. He registered a desk patterned with coffee-ring stains, a chair, a shelf with thick manuals on it and an electrical kettle balanced on the top. There was a sink to the side. Tool boxes piled, crammed into a corner. No other exit, but he was beyond running any further. All he could think, as he slammed the door behind him and slid two large bolts to, was of gaining another few vital minutes.
He sagged down at the base of the locked door, heart pounding, gasping breath, almost convinced he was about to die from exertion before Penn ever got to him. Almost hoping for it. Well, Father, a voice inside his head demanded bitterly, I swore to dedicate my life. Even if the Council washed their hands of me, I never took back that oath. Are you happy now?
Snapping out of it, he forced himself to act. He should at least look around for weapons. Penn would break in here after him, and he ought to put up something of a struggle. He clumsily opened tool boxes, scattering their contents, seized up a wooden-handled file which was weighted almost like a knife, reasonably balanced and just possibly sharp enough to deeply penetrate flesh if thrown hard. The next instant, Penn crashed through the door, flimsy wood and glass no match for an enraged vampire, and there was no time to second-guess his weapon choice. Wesley drew back his arm and threw.
The file thudded home. Penn didn't even acknowledge it as he marched forward, seized Wesley by the throat (not helping his current breathing problem) and hurled him into the wall. Consciousness departed momentarily and when he blinked his eyes open, he was slumped on the floor, wedged in the corner and pinned by walls on two sides.
Penn had pulled the file from his shoulder and he tossed it away to land among the debris of tools with a clatter.
"Enough of this," he said, his smooth tones for the first time giving way to a growl that was truly demonic. "Not a bad chase. Better than I've had in a while. But you're just lucky, not good. Luck's run out, Watcher."
"I'm glad you feel confident enough to grade my death scene," Wesley said, his voice sounding not at all like the defiant irony he'd been aiming for.
"Who said anything about death scenes? We have things to discuss, remember? You know, compare meditations on life and death, the weather, LA traffic, the deep dark secrets of the Watchers Council... what the British Brigade has planned for me..."
"You think I'd tell you--" He didn't have to worry about conveying the proper shock; his outrage was quite genuine. To think he would betray... even if he were not technically a part of the organisation any more, he had sworn a blood oath once. "That's not going to happen. No. No. I won't break..." His voice was already doing so.
"It's never--" Penn knelt down, and reached out for him. He tried to scoot back, but whole and cut-off shoulders alike hit the two walls pinning him in, and the pain was dizzying... "A good idea--" Penn slid an arm under his waist, curling it around the small of his back. He gripped Wesley's arm tightly at the elbow with his other hand, and the hold would have been immobilising even without Wesley's senses still teetering on the edge of consciousness. "To challenge--" Penn gathered him in, hauled him up the wall with a frightening care until he was trapped full length between it and Penn's body. "Me," the vampire finished, morphing into his demonic visage with a casual shake of his head.
And tore back Wesley's sleeve to sink his teeth into his wrist.
Wesley was too surprised by the move to make any sound. He experienced a tugging sensation, the giddy numbness of a too-fast blood-loss, a sense of his energy being pulled towards and then flowing out of the wound.
Then Penn raised his head, and with a flash of horror Wesley realised himself to be gasping, wide-eyed and shaking, reduced so easily to 'victim'. He would have fallen had not Penn been holding him up with that same proprietary touch he'd used to control Detective Lockley. For all that the draining had lasted only a second, his veins felt empty - inside him, a void.
"Was that good for you, too?" Penn quipped, sounding immensely chipper. He licked red from his lips and made a deliberate slurping sound. "A light snack. A sip. A taster, even. I can do this maybe eight, maybe ten times before you start to die from blood loss. I've had a lot of practise. So tell me. This plan of yours. Ready to share the details?"
Wesley choked and shook his head to clear it. This should be ideal, a better stall than any other he'd thought up. Penn was playing right into his plans... But his thoughts were in fragments, a steady, constant screaming buried somewhere inside, echoing in that newly hollow space, and he couldn't do this, couldn't face it--
"Well, then," Penn said, "I was still hungry anyway. And you know, whatever medication it is in your bloodstream - really tasty. Adds one hell of a kick."
He bit down again, and Wesley's internal scream staged a violent breakout.
"That's more like it." He raised his head and stretched his bloody lips in a smirk. "Fear. You can't begin to imagine how sweet that tastes. Half the humans I take, their hearts stop from the fear before the blood loss can ever kill them." He placed a hand on the left side of Wesley's chest. "Boom-boom, boom-boom, boom-boom," he mimicked. "A little quick but, hey, I guess your heart is stronger than the rest of you."
"Please..."
"Begging?" Penn grinned exuberantly, showing off his fangs. "Begging's good. Never the same without the begging. And, gee, a Slayer now and a Watcher?" He clicked his tongue. "Personally, I would have hoped for better from the appointed defenders of humanity." He yanked Wesley's wrist up to his waiting mouth again.
"Please don't..." Wesley choked. He was falling, falling, a cascade inside his head, and something gave and snapped. He saw a flurry of images - the Kungai demon in front of him, the blow that crushed his arm and reduced his existence to a pulped mass of blood and bone and agony... the bleak hours lying drifting in and out with his arm tied up, slowly seeping life, collecting toxins, and knowing in his still-trained half-delirium what that would mean should he survive. "Please. I'll... I'll t-t--"
"Talk? I'm almost disappointed. I'd been looking forward to draining you dry and making you drink. A vampire Watcher would be a delicious irony. And you'd talk your little unbeating heart out as a demon."
"No! Really, you - you don't need to. Please, it's not even necessary!" The floodgate was opened, the cascade rushing through his head and dribbling off his tongue and he couldn't face this, couldn't face talk or hurt, betrayal or pain, becoming a monster... "It was all a ruse... a fake... not real, none of it..."
Then he was babbling frantically about being fired, not working with the Council anymore, the people upstairs being police officers working with him independently... The Council weren't looking for Penn, of course they weren't, why on Earth would they care enough to break out of their stupor and intervene now when Penn had been killing for two centuries all but unhindered? It was all just him, buying time--
--for Costas and Lockley, dead now if they hadn't recovered enough to make their escape, because of his cowardice, because Penn, his face stretched by fury, was any second going to snap Wesley's neck and go back for them--
Then Penn's face disappeared altogether, and Wesley slid down the wall to the floor, coughing amid a cloud of dust. A clatter echoed as the stake hit the floor.
He was afraid to look up, shaken to the core, twisted and mangled inside. With his brain on autopilot, he focused his eyes on the black boots and followed them up black-clad legs to the top of the dark form.
"Wesley," Angel said, flat and without inflection. His eyes were empty: trying not to show judgement, Wesley thought, and oh God, he'd seen, he knew...
"Kate called me. I came along as quickly as I could."
Angel did not look to be in the best of condition either, his face bruised and spots of dampness that must be blood on his dishevelled clothes. He bent down and tore a strip from his shirt that he proceeded to efficiently wrap around the bite on Wesley's wrist. It bled sluggishly now, Penn having avoided the major arteries.
"You'll be all right," Angel said, still toneless. "He didn't take enough to require a transfusion."
"How can you--?" Wesley managed to ask, academic curiosity as ever the one thing that could unfailingly overcome fear, embarrassment, and being shattered into a thousand tiny pieces.
"I can hear the force of it in your veins," Angel said slowly, standing up, pulling Wesley up with him, offering no help beyond that other than to make sure he was propped steady against the wall before turning away. "I can hear your heart, still beating strong."
He shoved the wreckage of the door back and walked through. "You'll survive."
And Wesley, left to numbly watch his retreating coattails, wished he could believe Angel's assessment correct.
Perhaps he just wished that he wanted to.