When the Lexus pulled up outside Costas' house, Costas slammed the driver's door and came around to the passenger side to help Wesley out like an invalid.
"I'm all right now," he insisted rather irritably as he emerged, swaying but upright, onto the sidewalk, trying to obscure with his body the manner in which his fingers whitely clutched the edge of the doorway for support. He was not, in fact, all right, as he was quite prepared to admit to himself at least, but he had reached a state recovered enough to feel acutely embarrassed about the whole thing, the mellow sensation of being less than half conscious having dissipated to leave only wretched weakness in its wake.
Costas caught him as he relinquished his grasp on the car to slam the door and his legs almost failed.
"Sure," the detective said.
"I can stand." Costas' arms were around his waist, and he again felt the absence at his left side acutely as he tried to remove them. "I'm feeling better. I can walk. And if you don't mind, I'd like to try--"
The detective frowned at him, then eased his support away. Wesley took a step, stayed on his feet, and promptly marched off toward the house, swinging back the gate and getting so far as to rest a foot on the clean flagstones of the path across the tidy lawn, where he paused as it pierced his awareness that Costas was not with him, and that perhaps his agitation had caused him to move a little too enthusiastically. He leaned on the gate and watched the detective finish locking up the car. After a moment his senses cleared enough for him to resume progress to the house, where he waited for Costas in the shadow of the porch half-hidden by a straggly climbing rose. Costas arrived jangling keys, but the noise was muted, not the usual negligent swing to produce a careless cacophony. Muted too were his movements through the dark; muted and unsure, as though the rules had changed on him and he was left still trying to process and catch up.
Wesley asked, "What is it?"
"What's what?" Costas blinked at him, faintly guilty, yet his bafflement not entirely false.
Wesley sighed, said, "Nothing, I'm sure," and looked away into a distance that, in the darkness, was composed of precisely that - and Costas brushed past him, accidentally prodding him in the ribs with an elbow as he turned the key in the lock, vibrant and alive and whole as Wesley himself had not felt in a long time.
"Come on." Another, deliberate touch woke him from a stupor paused this time not by weakness but by thought.
"You saved me, really," he said, and only afterwards realised he'd said it aloud, faced by the other man's blank stare. "When you made me come here, to live with you... I shudder to imagine where I'd have ended up if you hadn't. In all seriousness, I very much imagine you saved my life, or as good as."
The detective turned away, one shoulder sloping a little in the barest fraction of a shrug, as though he was made uncomfortable by any frankness he hadn't had to exert his familiar bluster to extract. He shrugged off his coat and hung it on a peg; reached expectantly to take Wesley's.
"It's all right," he said, sliding it from his shoulder (the problem was more in making the garment stay on without an arm threaded through each sleeve). "You don't have to say anything. I know you--"
Costas swung around and snatched the coat in a move bordering on violent, so much so that Wesley almost thought he was going to hit him again, and was surprised into falling back against the door. He caught himself there, fisted hand driving against the wood.
"What brought this on?" Costas demanded, his voice a match for the body language. "You almost commit fucking suicide and suddenly you decide you're gonna act like a human being for like the first time ever?"
"I didn't-- I wasn't--"
Costas slung the coat at the hooks and stomped off through the kitchen, out into the hallway, oblivious of the coat immediately sliding off and dragging several of its fellows down with it. Wesley tentatively bent to pick them up, but bending invited back the dizziness and so he abandoned them and settled for merely checking the door was locked before he ventured after Costas.
In over two months living close-quarters with him, he was well acquainted with the man's anger. This... was subtly off-kilter from the norm, in a manner he couldn't even attempt to place, and it worried him because, on the whole, Costas could not be described as a man of subtleties.
He found him hunched in an armchair in front of the television in the living room, a ball game switched on low.
"Jack?" Hesitantly, he stepped closer. The lines of Costas' body were stretched tautly in such a way as to point his focus solely upon the flickering screen, but the set of his eyes, tracking none of the movement that occurred, gave the lie to his concentration. Wesley wearily crossed the room and switched the television off. He sank down on the edge of the armchair next to it. "I'm sorry. I..." He wasn't entirely sure what he'd done. Costas looked up at him as he faltered, and the ignorance must have been blatant from his face.
The detective's mouth twisted, but he only said, "Your vampire friend's losing it. He looks that strained now, what happens when he cracks? You think we're all in for a dose of that Gypsy curse you were telling me about?"
Wesley thought about Angel. "No. I shouldn't think so. And, well, Angel is, in a sense, the curse. Angelus appears only when the curse is broken... and you're changing the subject." Costas certainly knew by now there was nothing like misrepresenting the facts to earn himself a lengthy lecture and Wesley's distraction.
Costas looked up and for a moment there was something naked blazing in his eyes, then before Wesley could even try to discern its identity he watched it replaced by a gruff humour. "Yeah. I am."
He paused and grimaced. "And I'm fucking hungry. Let's order in some pizza."
Wesley was unable to shake feeling uncomfortably under surveillance as every so often Costas (presumably he thought surreptitiously) glanced up from his own meal to make a note of Wesley's progress. But, really, he was rather beyond caring. At least the detective seemed to have gotten over his earlier anger and tension, whatever had caused it, and sprawled now loose-limbed in his chair, legs extended with shoes removed to display thinning socks.
He was in shirt-sleeves, unfastened and shoved up past his elbows to show the bunch of muscles along his arms. The body beneath the jeans and the blue plaid was considerably trimmer than it had been only months ago. His jaw was solid with the strength Wesley would never have, though he reflected that he had not done a bad job, this time, in mustering it in another. He frowned and tried to turn his thoughts away, never liking to catch himself crediting Costas as a personal achievement.
He had changed since Sunnydale. For whatever it was worth.
It was in an equally loose sprawl that Wesley relaxed, his circulation humming through his limbs and tired eyes dragging shut every so often, threatening a deeper respite. He could not remember the last time he had just... stopped, outside of being forced to a collapse by exhaustion.
The monsters he had anticipated did not come, no demons of a differing and far more deadly ilk to those they hunted daily seizing his mind in the absence of distraction - no images of Penn, or of rabid, wounded-unto-death Kungai invading his thoughts that he could not put from them with but a little effort of will... and this, this was what he had been so afraid of, for so long...
Living.
It felt like he'd woken up - like he'd been fighting to breathe against a crushing weight for so long he'd grown accustomed to it as normality. Only without it could he finally recognise just how constricted he had been. He paused his eating a moment to pull air in, air out, in and out, enjoying the ease of the breaths.
Costas looked at him in disapproval.
"I'm eating," he said quickly, picking up the penultimate slice of the rather sizeable pizza that the detective had ordered him and seemed ready to force-feed him if he showed any intention of shirking even the smallest portion of it. He wondered vaguely if he could get away with picking off the last of the anchovies.
On the television, Cary Grant paraded the monochrome world of some old movie he knew he'd seen before yet couldn't recognise sufficiently to put title to. Costas seemed more distracted by it than engrossed, directing the screen an arch glance every so often, more involved in his own pizza and cans of weak beer - one empty, one just opened, and four sitting in waiting on the table next to his chair.
Wesley refrained still from alcohol on the grounds that he had drugs in his system many days that didn't react overly well with it, and he hardly needed to embark on establishing any habits that would become a curse when his arm went through a bad spell and left him temporarily reliant on the medication. He still got the distinct feeling that it was a caution of which Costas quite heavily disapproved.
When he turned his head even a little aside from the screen, he was aware out of the corner of his eye of the darkened edge of the room where his research desk languished, stacked high just now with, still, the mess of papers cleared off the floor and hastily dumped prior to their earlier departure on the final Haxil-hunting expedition. The corner looked hard and uninviting from this point of view, and in fact when he searched his memory this was almost the first instance he found of actually having viewed the room from an angle slumped easy in the embrace of one of the big, padded chairs. It gave a strange, disorienting slew to his perspective of these last months and, thinking about it, it struck him that it had been a kind of limbo, suspension in a barely feeling state of focus so narrow that the world today looked frankly enormous by comparison.
He set the remnant of his pizza aside and met Costas' consequent glare unflinching. "I am not force-feeding myself for the sake of assuaging your conscience - though Heaven knows why my appetite should be of any such great concern."
"I've taken your word far too often on whether you've eaten or slept. For Christ's sake, you collapsed in the middle of a battle. And you didn't have to see how freakin' awful you looked right after, either. Hell, the vampire looked more alive."
"Thank you so much," Wesley said dryly. He kicked his shoes off to draw his legs up; curled them under him in the chair, and looked frankly across at the detective. As weightless as he felt right then, the distinctly unhabitual posture seemed natural. "I still don't understand, though. You've seen me ten times worse - you saw me after I'd just lost a bloody limb, for goodness' sake."
Thinking, 'you saw me after Penn', and there really hadn't been anything else in his life to come close to comparing to that meltdown.
"This is different from before. Those things happened to a stranger." In an abrupt, harsh motion, Costas snapped to his feet. He cleared the room in a few strides and jabbed the button on the television, silencing it. "They didn't happen to my friend."
Wesley blinked, eyes stinging a little at the clarification. "Oh," he said, his voice so small as to be barely a voice at all. It seemed to him, after a long moment stricken beyond all speech while Costas paused and wavered on his feet, looking at a loss in the centre of the room, that he ought to say something in return. "I... thank you, Jack. It means a lot that you regard me as such."
Costas snorted, trying to assert some level of brusqueness on the emotional depths becoming exposed, but too obvious and insincere to convince. He spun, but instead of walking away he completed a full 360 degrees and ended precisely as he'd begun, something of anguish in his face.
Wesley was ill-used to seeing him looking so awkward.
"I meant what I said earlier," he added slowly.
"Yeah," said Costas, finally breaking his silence. Another hesitation, and he had the air about him of determinedly steering himself onto a subject not quite the one in his thoughts. "We've been friends. Pretty good friends, I guess - and I couldn't say that I've had all that many of those. Who'd have credited it, with how we started off? I guess you never can tell."
"I guess you can't."
Wesley remembered the frustrated helplessness of blinking up from a hospital bed at the blur of a tallish, solid-set man in a baggy coat too warm for the LA heat. Hard drawl of lazy noir in a voice he'd learned since was far more natural touched with humour and compassion than the harsh notes of suspect interrogation. The first stranger not associated with the hospital to witness his altered circumstances.
He didn't remembered Costas flinching and looking away from the absence of his shoulder that day, but then drugs could deaden a lot of sensation.
"I don't want you to die," the detective said eventually, standing still as he had been, his posture curiously rigid. "Even if you want to yourself. I can't believe you - you've got to have some reason to want to live."
"Jack. I've told you before, I don't want to die. I just got... caught up." He didn't want to discuss it.
"Fine." Costas turned on his heel, taking abrupt offence, marched back to the television and reached out to switch it back on.
"Whatever's the matter?" Before he knew what he was doing, Wesley was on his feet and grabbing the detective's hand before his fingers could connect. "Wait--"
And it was the angle he'd caught - his perfect, perfect aim, less than appreciated for once, as his fingers slipped in the gaps between Costas', intertwining their hands in a fashion that, whatever it started out as, finished up something entirely other. He felt the contact jolt up his arm, hissed in a breath at the shock of it.
"No." Costas pulled back from the contact as if it burned, eyes wide and appalled. "No. This isn't - I'm not gay. Not even a little bit. I never--"
"What?" Wesley; stressed, distraught, off-guard, and wondering how the hell... "Jack? I never - I would never - not if you're not--"
Costas was staring at him. "You're - you've--" The meaning of his hands' illustrative gesture was unmistakable.
"Slept with men?" He tried to level the humiliating squeak of his voice. "Y-yes. Albeit only one since my schooldays, and - and nothing you could precisely call a serious relationship. That is to say, not that I've... there've been women as well. A few women." That voice still screaming inside his head - how had he known?
"You're a switch-hitter."
Wesley was by then familiar enough with the less formal of Costas' vocabulary to just nod in response, yielding only the slightest of pauses to jog his memory.
"But you'd do me, right?" the detective's agitated state was given away by the faint waver in his voice. Anger in there too and, damn it, he'd known the man had hang-ups, had known there was a bloody good reason he hadn't told his friend everything about himself, held back even in their most frank discussions.
"Jack. You're my friend, and of course I've wondered... if it might not be possible that we could be more. If there might be a chance. It doesn't mean I'm not aware that there isn't. It doesn't mean I would ever act upon that, and if you didn't want to--" He shrugged his lopsided shrug, feeling his heart strain inside him at the revulsion in Costas' face. "I couldn't exactly take you by force, now, could I?"
He started to turn away. "Besides, it isn't as though I'm not quite well aware I'm nobody's prize even if they did happen to be possessed of the correct orientation. You think I don't know how few people would want this?" He flailed his one hand feebly in an encompassing gesture across himself, shoulders to midriff, as he completed his turn.
He all but dashed for the door, not quite sure where he was going after that, only aware of the strong need to be elsewhere.
Behind him, he heard Costas softly but vehemently curse. A hard grip landed on his shoulder and spun him around. Unexpectedly, he found himself drawn up close against a chest not quite hard as rock but on a potential route toward it. An arm slipped around his waist, crushing him in, bumps of fingertips and knuckles prodding the small of his back through the fabric of his shirt. More at the back of his neck pulled his head forward to meet the clumsy mouth that planted over his. The strength of the grip, powered by anxiety and desperation, held him trapped - otherwise shock and habit alone would have made him attempt escape, and he'd have cursed them for success.
He felt the whimper gather in the back of his throat when Costas didn't pull back from the initial rough contact and it dawned that he wasn't going to. Instinct scraped up enough of his scattered wits to return the kiss.
Costas grew gentler as it seemed to register that kissing a man wasn't notably different from kissing a woman, something he'd presumably had sufficient practise in before. His mouth caught the whimper and sucked it in, dragging Wesley's tongue - and breath - along with it. His hand traced from the back of Wesley's head forward to his jaw, a movement almost a caress.
Seconds later, he broke off and stepped sharply back. Wesley swayed, bereft, and caught himself by planting his hand on the back of an armchair.
"I feel like I'm standing in a hole." Costas waved his empty arms as though he didn't know what to do with them. "I'm not used to not having to stoop in order to... Hell, you're taller than I am. I'm gonna get a crick in my neck."
"Jack?" Wesley said uncertainly, beset by confusion and a terrible fear that they'd shattered what they had between them for the sake of a thing that could never work.
Costas released a shuddering breath and stepped closer with visible effort, still not quite touching. "It... wasn't repulsive," he said.
Wesley tried to look anywhere else.
Fingers reached out and touched his face. One set retreated instantly, his glasses with them as hostage. The others... traced their way down, lingering over the eyes he closed before trailing the dampness down from them over the ridges and valleys of his cheeks. Tapered off the end of his chin then retraced their path to brush his lips. He let his mouth fall open slightly, tasted salt on the alien skin before they withdrew.
"Wes." The voice sounded dry and hoarse, and not much like the Costas he was used to. Afraid, even, he would have said. "Shit. Wes, my relationships... they don't end well, you know? I'm not sure I ought to do this."
Wesley had no words to express his mire of feelings, but possibly it was just as well Costas spoke again to break the silence, before he could scrape some together.
"But I think I might want... to try."
"Oh." Wesley's gulp almost swallowed his tongue, which still tasted of Costas - at present largely pizza and the probably ever-present tang of nicotine that, in fact, he would be happy to endure becoming accustomed to. "Do you mean it? I mean, I really never thought that you were--"
Costas grimaced. "I suppose sometimes we don't find out these things about ourselves until they kick us in the teeth. Maybe I just didn't want to admit it. Maybe I just didn't know how to see it... Look, I could be wrong. I don't know what I'm feeling right now - I don't think I'd even know a coherent thought if it bit me on the ass. When I saw you hurting, I wanted to - to do something to stop it. I don't know. It didn't feel any different to kissing Irene... well, not in a... you know what I mean." A brief hesitation that encompassed nonetheless a fair few of Wesley's rapid heartbeats. "I loved Irene."
"Oh."
"You don't usually have this much trouble finding something to say."
"I just--" He stopped, and determinedly took the forward step that the detective held back from. This time, it would be he who initiated the kiss. He grasped Costas' neck, curling his fingers against warm skin dusted with soft brown hairs, and leaned forward to snare his mouth, aware of the hum of his body on the verge of response; aware that very likely it was going to have to hold that thought for the time being at least, until they could work past Costas' hang-ups - little expecting the hand that reached down between them as their lips closed again.
He could not hold back the groan that escaped him at being touched by someone else. Wanting to reciprocate, he battled a stab of frustration and grief that one arm was not really enough, and this wasn't a disadvantage of his situation he'd had much call to previously expend much thought on...
"Long time?" Costas barely paused, his voice muffled, lips stretching and twisting into a grin that Wesley felt against his own.
"You could say that."
The shrill ring of the telephone caused them both to let go their hold and leap guiltily apart. "Shit!" Costas spat.
"Don't--"
The detective had already leaned across and lifted the receiver. "What?" he said into it sharply, pulling uncomfortably at his pants with his free hand. His expression darkened. "Why the hell are you--?"
Wesley watched the contortions of his face as the fellow on the other end replied, changing from irritation to concern and resignation.
"All right," he said finally. "All right. I'll come. Right now. Yes."
He set the phone down more softly than was merited, stared at it in its cradle a moment, leaning heavily against the table it rested upon, eyes closed, and swore softly.
"What is it?" Wesley asked.
"Your vampire buddy's in one hell of a panic." Eyes opened, conflicted. "It's Kate. She's missing. And by the sounds of things, up to her eyeballs in some serious shit. He thinks she's gone and done something stupid. I'm kinda thinking to agree."
He fumbled in his pocket and produced Wesley's glasses, which he almost dropped handing them back to him.
He didn't look at Wesley as he turned and headed out into the hallway. Car keys jangled a moment later... the sound of the door clicking open... and it seemed there was to be no debate on this, after all.
Wesley unfolded his glasses with his teeth and shoved them back onto his face before following.
"I still don't think you should have come," Costas insisted, with short temper. "Shit, a few hours ago you collapsed on your feet. You still look like - well, like a slightly more minor circle of hell, I guess, but you still look like hell."
"I'm fine," Wesley said distractedly. "I can always stay in the car." He pressed buttons on Costas' cellphone and cursed when they again failed to achieve result. "This isn't the right number."
"What? Of course it is." The detective leaned over to watch Wesley key it in a third time. "No, no, no - that's a three, not a five," he said irritably, snatching the phone and near giving Wesley heart failure by taking his hands from the wheel to punch in the edited version. He tossed it back ringing.
Wesley glared at the piece of scruffy paper - the back of a petrol receipt - the number was written on. "That's not a three. It doesn't look anything like a three." A tinny sound emerged from the cell and he raised it to his ear. "I'm terribly sorry?"
The rather unsure voice that responded on the other end of the connection was thankfully familiar. "Angel. Yes, it's Wesley. Where are you now?"
Angel related his position - San Vincente, about a mile of labyrinthine traffic system from their own - and Wesley responded, "No, nothing yet," to his inevitable query, the brief exchange extended considerably by tedious static and a quantity of raised-voiced repetitions as the Scourge of Europe struggled to come to grips with the intricacies of mobile telephone technology.
In the background he was aware Costas was talking to the station again via the police radio, checking for any sightings of Lockley's car.
"What on Earth possessed Detective Lockley to go gallivanting around after demonic crooks on her own anyway?" Wesley asked with irritation. He ached, with tiredness and frustration both, and wanted nothing more than to go home and crawl into bed, preferably with company for the first time in close to two years.
"It's not like - she was acting strange earlier. I thought something was wrong, did some checking up, and it's... this thing with her father..."
He listened with dawning understanding to Angel's stumbling explanation of just what he'd discovered Trevor Lockley was caught up in. Wesley had heard enough about Lockley's troubled relationship with her father from Costas, and could certainly sympathise with her for being less than rational where the fellow was concerned. "Yes, I see," he said, dry-mouthed, recalling the certain kinship he had felt with Lockley that day they went to face Penn, himself too confident, too proud, so determined he would not fail. A feeling it was almost funny to remember the essence of, now. "Well, we shall certainly endeavour to help as best we can. I understand that you had no choice but to call on Jack, with his police resources - no, Angel, it's perfectly all right. Yes. I'll call back if we find anything."
He switched off the cell. Costas was still talking into the police radio. He wound up and put the speaker down with a "damn it" as Wesley watched.
"Nothing?"
"Not yet." Costas slammed a hand into the dashboard. "Stupid bitch - why the hell did she have to choose now, of all times-?"
Wesley quite shared the sentiment. Indeed, he would have preferred to keep Costas far removed from any thought of Kate Lockley for the near future and, given the confusion now evident in the detective's eyes every time he looked at Wesley, would have been right in his caution. But in the name of fair play he felt compelled to repeat the details Angel had related to him.
"Her old man's a bastard," Costas said explosively when he'd finished. He gave Wesley a sideways glance, and looked as though he might be about to say something, but didn't. He relented a while later with a sigh and the admission, "I'd never have thought he was crooked, though."
Wesley heartily wished that Costas had never picked up that damned telephone.
Los Angeles sped by them, a blur of lights and noise even so late into the night. It was evidently the hour many of the clubs and bars turfed out their clientele, resulting in the presence of a number of people around, hailing taxis, making the sidewalks untidy and the driving precarious, LA's night-life packing up to go home and sleep. The rhythm of the engine and the blur of lights threatened to lull him to doze, and he shook himself back to wakefulness.
The radio crackled and Costas picked up again. A long static-filled burst of noise ensued that the detective somehow managed to discern words hidden within. At least, his lips compressed with a grimness that implied understanding. "Right. That's it. I'll check it out." He slammed the set back into place, grabbed the wheel hard in both hands and spun the car around with a blatant disregard for road safety, turning fully in the centre of the road like the officers in Hollywood action movies. He stomped hard on the gas and sped them back the way they'd come, but took an unfamiliar turn to the right a short way down.
"She's been spotted?"
"Her car has. Parked up right outside an auto business downtown - Kel's Exotic Auto. Somehow, I'm thinking that's a front."
Wesley thought it over as he fumbled with the cellphone; paused with Angel's number already keyed and ringing, cell raised halfway to his lips. "Oh, dear. But then that means--"
"That she's already gone in without backup. On the button, Einstein." Costas kicked violently at the pedal as Angel's voice buzzed minutely, for the time being ignored, out of the cellphone. "Won't this fucking hulk of junk go any damn faster?"
Angel pulled up outside the parts shop only seconds after they themselves had, skidding the car to a halt with a screech that must surely have alerted any villains inside that something was afoot. Wesley compounded this by slamming the car door after him in his nervousness, but Costas seemed too distracted even to notice he wasn't abiding by his half-promise to remain in the vehicle. Angel, vaulting from the convertible to join them, cast him a glance that seemed on the verge of comment, but didn't actually ask if he was all right.
Which, admittedly, suited Wesley fine. He was sick to death of being handled with kid gloves, and there were more important things at issue here.
Kel's Exotic Auto was housed in a large building of corrugated grey with the all architectural flare of a shoe box. A handful of steps led up to a side door into the office.
"We need to check out the security. This drugs ring - it's a large-scale operation. There could be guards. Even electronic security. I suppose not all demons can be so hopelessly outdated as those we normally encounter--"
Angel walked straight on past him to the door, a muttered "Screw that" hanging in the air in his wake. Costas took a moment to raise his brows at Wesley before he grabbed an axe from under the front seat of the Lexus and followed.
With a sigh, Wesley trailed behind them.
But inside, the parts shop was quiet. Quiet in every ominous sense of the cliche. Eerily, chillingly too-quiet. They had entered close to a small office station, a paper-strewn desk with a moderate expanse of clear space around it. The further parts of the interior comprised dingy shadows containing a scattering of parked cars. The room was lit by bluish fluorescent lights - light enough to see, when he looked down as he felt the crunch underfoot, that he was walking through a patch of thick, grey-black dust.
Light enough to see other patches, when he looked around. To see, also, the huddled still form of a body slumped on the chill concrete of the floor, and the other crouched over it almost as unmoving, but announced alive by virtue of its balanced posture no corpse could have maintained.
"Get away from her." Angel was already lunging forward to snatch at the shoulder of the crouched figure, evidently able to discern a few seconds prior to Wesley in the darkness the fall of blonde hair identifying the recumbent figure as Kate Lockley, the thick-set body and harshly cut, thinning near-white hair that marked the other a stranger.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" The crouching man slapped Angel's hand away, and Angel flinched and backed off, recognition in his reaction. The stranger was brisk, his voice a rasp, something desolate underlying.
Costas beat Wesley to Detective Lockley's side, his shaking hands reaching to feel her neck for a pulse. They yanked away again before even connecting, Costas falling back with a choked sound.
Wesley could see why. Nothing human with its head at such an angle could be living.
"Mr. Lockley." Angel started. Detective Lockley's father, Wesley thought, feeling light-headed again. "I..."
"I found her like this. Came here to meet the guys..." Mr. Lockley took in Angel's reaction and grunted. "Huh. I figured you knew. She must have found out I was involved in something. She said she wanted to talk to me. Meet up... somewhere else. She never came. It was - it must have been - a decoy. She came here to shut them down... she was protecting me. When I got here everyone was already gone. Nothing left. Just... a corpse. A corpse and a whole fucking lot of goddamned dust.
"She's dead."
Angel, who could hear a human heartbeat at a hundred paces, had assuredly already known this... but it was as though nothing yet had made it real to him. Wesley fought sickness and touched his fingers to Costas' rigid shoulder, ran them down it hoping to ease that stricken, horrified posture, that tight-wound tension.
Costas shook him off like an irritation.
"She's dead," Wesley confirmed, because it seemed that nobody else was going to.
"Oh, God." Angel backed away until his shoulders hit the wall and he seemed for a moment to try to back impossibly further, to sink into the brickwork itself. His legs gave beneath him and he slumped down, knees drawing up, arms gripping tight around them. He was mumbling things that Wesley could not quite hear.
"This is your fault," Costas said harshly, catching the back of the kneeling old man's jacket and dragging him up and around so they were brought face-to-face. "She came here because of you. Something you were mixed up in."
"You think I don't know that?" Mr. Lockley broke the grip and shoved the younger man away. A solidly built old man, not frail, his retirement of course only recent.
"You got her killed."
Mr. Lockley's eyes flared with anger. "It was all for her. All of it... everything I did. All so that she could have a future." His eyes returned to, then his head turned sharply from, the body on the ground. "All for nothing. You think I wanted this to happen?"
"You bastard." Costas seemed beyond mere fury and Wesley could not recall seeing him so frighteningly angry before. "You couldn't have shown her a scrap of affection instead, just once in all those years? I saw you together often enough; the way she'd look to you for your approval, the way you never gave it. I remember what happened at your damn retirement party."
"You're talking nonsense." Mr. Lockley's voice was flat, only very briefly uncertain, and angry enough to make Wesley fear he was about to see a fist fight. Then the moment passed and the old man stood there with bunched fists just a few moments further before he turned and knelt back down at the side of his daughter's corpse.
Wesley watched him take her limp hand in his own. "Katie knew how I felt about her. She knew that. She was all I had." His voice was so rough the words were almost impossible to pick out from the gravel. "Now go away and leave us alone." His expression was devoid. His fingers stroked minimally the dead hand. No tears, no breakdown, no outpouring of grief... but Wesley did not think he had ever witnessed anything quite so wrenching.
"Fine," Costas snapped. He turned on his heel and was already at the door before he stopped and glared back at Wesley. "Are you coming?"
"What? Coming where?"
"To put a stop to the people who did this."
"Oh, don't be rid--" Wesley choked on the absurdity of it, but forced himself to take stock. He breathed. "You're not rational. Your friend just died, I understand that, but we can't just go dashing off blind. For a start, we haven't even the first idea where to look!"
"We don't."
Wesley followed his hard gaze and grimaced. "Jack, no. The man's just lost his only family. We're not going to--"
"No." It surprised everyone when Mr. Lockley spoke up. "You don't have to bring out the thumbscrews. You want to get the people that did this? Be my guest." He reached inside his jacket and after some fumbling, produced a small rectangular object he threw to Costas with angry force. "That's everything I know. I didn't trust these people. I took notes. Vehicle registrations, places they mentioned, dates and times... anything else I overheard. Habit of being a cop thirty years."
"Right." Costas' eyes blazed and he snapped the notebook shut after a quick flick through. "Wesley?"
He stood, wavering in his indecision. "I... Jack, I really feel this isn't the time. Angel... Mr Lockley... Revenge can wait. They can't use this place again, their operation's shut down, possibly enough of their number died to break it up permanently..." There are too many shattered people in here, and I'm beginning to suspect you're one of them. "We need to pick up the pieces here before we--"
"Fine," Costas said again, angrily, and then he was out of the door.
"Jack!" With a last guilty glance to Angel and Lockley Senior, Wesley ran in pursuit. "Please, let's not do anything rash!"
He burst out of the parts shop in time to see the Lexus pull away and speed off down the block in a screech of tyres. Ran after it, shouting, until it was out of sight and his knees were shaking, and it registered Costas was too locked upon revenge against Lockley's killers right now to come back for him even if he'd noticed.
"Oh, God." He leant over in the road, trying to catch his breath, right hand on right knee, a little unbalanced for it. Costas had abandoned him. That had never happened before, he thought, his sick feeling intensifying, churning inside. How had it been that he'd never realised how reliant he was on the detective?
He snapped back to the reality of the situation sharply, There were two broken men waiting who somehow needed to be dealt with. He was the only one there to do so.
When he ventured back inside, neither occupant registered the long, loud creak of the opening door.
Angel was still huddled in his corner, guilty confessions of murders over a century old and grief for friends and victims much longer dead and gone than poor Ms. Lockley spouting from his muffled lips. Wesley had learned of how, after the curse, Angelus had spent a century wandering all but insane. It had been Buffy who ended those years... his connection to the world, his forbidden love, and Wesley blinked his eyes closed upon the sight of the dead blonde woman. Had they been in love too, or had their connection been one more platonic? And what of Doyle, the friend whose demise had broken Angel before, not so very long ago?
Instinct told him that Angel hadn't been right for a long, long time. Buffy... Doyle... Kate... his stability always had been a thing imposed from without.
He remembered how the vampire hadn't wanted him, and went cold again inside. When he knelt in front of Angel, the shake he delivered his shoulder was harder, less understanding, than he'd intended. "Angel! Snap out of it, damn you."
"Damned... yes. Blood. Death. So much death... I killed them all. Damned..." He raised his head from his mumbling in a brief clarity. "Everything I touch dies."
Then the madness had returned and Angel flinched back, pressing himself against the wall, a high keening whimper at the back of his throat. "Don't touch me, Wesley... please... don't touch me!"
"Bloody hell." Wesley straightened too fast and nearly passed out. He'd almost forgotten his own fragility - cursed it as he forced the black from the edges of his vision and crossed from Angel's side to Mr. Lockley's.
He skirted around Kate Lockley's body, trying not to look at the angle of her neck. He'd seen messier corpses, but none of them that he'd shared significant conversation with at any time before they became such. He knelt to set his face on a level with that of her father, and met the man's eyes across her body.
"Who the hell are you, anyway?" The manner he asked suggested he didn't much care.
"No-one important." He was careful not to touch the body, noting Mr. Lockley's wary possessiveness. "I work with Jack Costas... after a fashion."
"Oh." Uninterested, the man turned his eyes back down, showed Wesley the crown of his balding head.
"Mr Lockley..."
"I want to stay with her." He didn't look up, and Wesley could see there wasn't much to be achieved.
"Of course. I'll... call the police. There'll be people here soon, to take care of things. But in the meantime... you should have a little while. We'll go, and leave you in peace." He stood and retreated quietly.
His own cellphone was back in the house, and Costas' on the dashboard of the Lexus. Angel's was in the vampire's coat, and he had to fight off flailing hands accompanied by a frenzy of pleas that he not touch. A lucid Angel could have snatched his wrist and effortlessly held him helpless. As things were, he retrieved the cellphone with only a minor bruise or two.
He made the call to the police, tried and failed to reach Costas, who wasn't answering, and dumped Angel's cell in his own pocket for the time being, little wanting to repeat the performance he'd just been through in order to return it.
Wesley looked down at Angel. "We have to get out of here. The police are on their way... Bloody hell, I'm talking to myself, aren't I?"
How the hell he was going to move significantly more than his own body weight of vampire currently engaged in a minor psychotic episode was a conundrum indeed. He swore, reached down and grabbed Angel by the collar half-expecting to be thrown fully across the room, and pulled with all his strength. "You have to come with me, Angel. I've called the police. If you stay here you'll be arrested... with a distinct possibility of being dumped in a cell with a grand view of the sunrise... no, never mind that. You're already touching me! You can't do any more harm now. Come on and move, damn you!"
To his utter astonishment, the vampire shambled to his feet.
Wesley, hardly accustomed to having any order he gave obeyed, wasted a moment gawping before he hustled Angel outside and into the back of the convertible. More time was wasted encouraging him to hand over the keys, and in the shaking of Wesley's fingers trying to turn them in the ignition, causing them two false starts before the engine stirred into life. By the time he'd pulled out and made the end of the next street, he could hear the approach of sirens.
He eased the car slowly through the sparse traffic to Angel's building, constantly having to clumsily twist across himself to operate the convertible, concentration not helped by Angel's mumbling in back.
Pulling up in one piece outside the old offices, he cut the engine and took out the cellphone to try Costas again. A tinny female voice informed him the number was unreachable at present and he should call again later, and thankyou and goodbye. He lowered the cell to his lap, switching it off with his thumb, and stared at it, feeling very afraid and alone.
He only registered Angel's more lucid silence when the vampire finally broke it, his words shaky but at least coherent. "You can keep the phone. Take it with you. I won't need it anymore."
"You only carried it because of her," Wesley said quietly. He didn't turn around. He sagged back in his seat and stared at the absence in the rear view mirror. "Angel, I'm sorry. I would have... we would have saved her if only we could. You know that."
"Yeah. Yeah, I know. That's... what you do. And I'm sorry, too. About the interruption."
"What?" Confused, Wesley did turn, and froze with his hand rested on the back of the seat and Angel's eyes unnervingly close to his own when he remembered the acuity of vampire senses and realised exactly what Angel of course referred to. "I--" He shook his head and turned away, let go an embarrassed cough of laughter. "It doesn't matter. It wasn't even real. He's left me to chase after a dead woman." A high-pitched giggle on the verge of hysteria burrowed out under his defences, and he clamped his jaw down and resolutely pulled himself together. He would not inflict his own insecurities on a man - a being - whose sanity was hanging by a thread.
"I'm sorry," Angel said again.
A breath. "That's quite all right. Please... it's just as well we were there. You need to go now, though. I have to find Jack. I..." He realised that it was, in fact, Angel's car. But - he bit down on his lip, clenched his teeth hard enough to meet through the soft tissue; tasted copper. Forced his voice harsher through the small pain. "I'll return the car. Unharmed, I promise you."
He must have sounded convincing, for the objection he'd expected was not forthcoming. He briefly disembarked to help Angel out, disliking the feel of cold dead skin as the vampire clasped his hand.
"You'll be all right?" Wesley was unsure why he cared, enquiring with a compassion he suspected more habitual than heartfelt. "You can make it back inside alone?"
"Yeah." Angel's gaze held a dark cloud of gloom the size of a small country. "I can do that." Some element there, too, of bitter sarcasm; of considering himself patronised. Given their history, Wesley patently refused to feel any guilt for it, and regarded it as, at least, a sign the vampire was recovering his faculties.
He didn't linger for long beyond watching Angel reach the double doors across the street and vanish inside.
He had a friend to find, and a whole city to search.
As little as four hours ago he had briefly possessed far more hopes for the night than one-handed driving through the streets of LA in a convertible that had earned him no less than half a dozen solicitations when he halted at lights and intersections (only one of which had been swiftly rescinded as the solicitee noticed he was missing an arm, and two had seemed positively enthused by the novelty). The hour was so late now that most of the drunks had long gone home or bedded down and the world was slowly coasting around again toward a dawn he fancied he could almost pick out on the horizon.
It made no sense that he shouldn't have heard from him by now unless something had happened...
Some time earlier he had pulled over on one of the less-ominous stretches of road and had expended an undue amount of time and effort navigating the LAPD's switchboard system to track down Mark Roman, the one close police friend of Costas' whose full name he could remember. By good fortune the fellow was still on duty and recognised Wesley's name in return, lauding him with rather short informality as "that crip friend of Jack's".
When Wesley explained about Costas, all trace of flippancy disappeared. They knew already about Lockley, obviously, the death of one of their own reverberating around the ranks with the expected thunder and outrage, but her father had apparently not mentioned that himself, Costas and Angel had been there, let alone that Costas had set out after those responsible for her death.
Wesley had only told him that he and Costas had found Mr. Lockley with Kate's body, and that Costas had exited in vigilante fashion, and that he had gone after Costas. His differences with Angel aside, he did not want the souled vampire to end up arrested and disintegrating to dust in a cell or being prodded by curious scientists should his non-human status be discovered.
The call had unearthed the information that Costas had checked in over two hours ago to run a license plate and, having received that information, had not checked back since. Roman would not give Wesley the information Costas had received.
Roman had not called back yet, which presumably meant nothing had been found to report yet, although it could equally well mean that he didn't see any earthly reason why Wesley should be informed about LAPD business. At least he had the reassurance of knowing that others with better resources at their fingertips were also searching. Still, in the back of his mind was a nibbling doubt that all he'd done was panic in a fashion that would inevitably land Costas in trouble later.
He shivered in the night air as he guided the convertible around another corner. He had not put the top up because, aside from being entirely disinclined to struggle with it one-handed, it would impair his current three-hundred-and-sixty degree uninterrupted field of vision.
Not that he wasn't in fact aware of how supremely small his chances were of just stumbling across Costas like this. He had no leads, no trail, not even a vague clue which area he should concentrate his efforts in. Just this fruitless searching.
At least the chill of the passage of air over his body, blowing his ill-trimmed hair inconveniently into his eyes, kept him awake.
Wesley had lost count of the times he'd pulled over to ring Costas. Costas' cellphone remained unreachable, and the answer-phone caught his calls to the house, playing Jack's voice back at him on audio tape, tying his stomach in clenched knots with the familiar tones.
He should have heard by now... he should have heard...
Eventually, with the litany running through his brain and one hand on the wheel, even the chill of the breeze washing over him proved ineffective to combat the drag of exhaustion. Clumsiness and half-shut eyelids almost landed him straight through the window of a shop when alertness failed him at an intersection. At the last moment, rocked by the jerk of the car bumping up onto the sidewalk and veering alarmingly over to its right side, he wrenched at the wheel and barely managed to save himself from collision.
After that... there was no real choice but to return home. Probably he had just as much chance of finding Costas while idling at home as he did wandering a city with a population over three million, and it was time to admit it. This search was about nothing more than assuaging his own restless nerves. Possibly Costas was even already back there while he panicked ridiculously, and sleeping in bed.
There was no sign of the Lexus outside the house and Wesley slowly drew Angel's convertible into the parking spot it usually occupied. The street was dark, no windows lit, Costas' house no exception. The dawn was a thick strip of faintly pinkish yellow.
Inside, the house was silent. He walked from room to room switching on lights. Exhaustion fostered in him a peculiar paranoia that had him checking every room in case Costas should be sitting there, in the dark. Quite obviously, he was not.
Wesley tried ringing the cellphone one last time before he staggered upstairs and, hating a dead woman, shed his glasses and shoes and crawled full-dressed into Costas' bed.
The phone call woke him at 7.36 am.