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Part 2
It was past midnight by the time Angel arrived home. He bathed by candlelight and felt as if he had slipped back into an earlier century. Cordelia must have found enough money for the gas bill, because the water heater was still working.
Lulled by the warm water, he thought about the giant sea creature winding its way through the deep. It was obviously not a normal inhabitant of the harbor. Were there demons that lived in the ocean? He'd have to check the books.
He carried the candle into the bedroom, towel dried his hair, and slipped into a pair of silk pajama bottoms. He stared at the bed – it looked so very inviting. He usually didn't sleep at this time of night, but the nightmares had kept him awake for most of the day. Wesley had taken the amulet with him to try to locate the reference he remembered. Perhaps in its absence he could finally get some rest.
He blew out the candle and lay back on the pillows. Sleep didn't come as quickly as he expected. He lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the deep silence of the room. Then, very faintly at first, he began to hear water dripping somewhere in the distance. It became a trickle, then a steady stream. Finally he recognized it. It was the fountain in the garden of the mansion. Someone was out there. He got up to investigate.
The garden was bright with the light of an almost full moon. He saw movement in the shadows behind the rambling vines that covered the walls. He tiptoed soundlessly closer, but to his surprise, Xander stepped out to meet him. He was wearing a green amulet and held a stake resolutely in his hand.
"Xander. What are you doing here?" Angel asked, his eye on the stake.
Xander stepped closer. "I've waited a long time for this." He shifted nervously from one foot to the other. "You're not going to argue with me, are you? You killed Miss Calendar. You're a murderer. I have every right to see you dead.
Angel ducked his head. He could not disagree. "What about Buffy?" he asked finally.
"She's over you. She'll be sad at first, but in the end she'll know it's for the best."
The words pierced him more painfully than a stake. Buffy had loved him once, but he wasn't sure if she still did.
Xander shifted the stake from one hand to the other, hesitating. "You know, I've killed my share of vampires, but it's kind of different when you actually know one."
Angel felt a glimmer of hope. Could Xander be talked out of this?
"I saved your life – more than once. Doesn't that count for anything?"
"Thanks for that, but no. It won't bring back Miss Calendar. And it can't undo what you did to Giles when you killed her."
Angel looked away. The horror of that cruelty still haunted him. And apparently it nerved Xander for his task. He raised his fist with the stake clutched tightly. "I know you didn't have a soul, and some people would use that to excuse you. But I can't. With or without a soul, you did it. And now you die for it."
Xander thrust the stake into Angel's heart. He dissolved to dust.
Angel awoke with a start and rolled out of bed as if it were full of hot coals. He stood unsteadily in the pitch black room, momentarily uncertain where he was. Finally he remembered and sat down again.
He had waited for a long time for someone to sit in judgment on what he had done in Sunnydale when he lost his soul, but no one ever had. But even now if any of them demanded his life, he had no defense to offer.
He fumbled in the dark for matches and lit the candle. Obviously sending the amulet with Wesley had not lessened its influence. He didn't feel much like sleeping any more. Perhaps now would be a good time to look for information about sea demons. He walked carefully with the candle to the study.
Two hours later he found himself nodding. The search was proving more complicated than he had expected. Every civilization that lived along the sea shore apparently had its own tales of monsters rising from the deep, and it was hard to separate fact from myth. Sea-dwelling demons were much more difficult to document than the ones that lived on land.
His eyes burned, and it was becoming hard to concentrate. He leaned his head back on the sofa just to rest for a minute.
When he tried to move he found himself bound. He struggled against the ropes, but they were strong and tight, biting into his wrists and ankles. The ground was bitterly cold beneath him, and a shrill wind pierced his coat.
"What do you think of the accommodations, mate?"
He wrenched himself around to face the speaker. Light from the lantern stabbed his eyes. "Spike. Cut me loose! What is this about?"
"It's about me and Dru, and you keeping out of the way. Can't even trust you to do a simple thing like that, though, can I?"
"And whose fault is it if she prefers a more seasoned mate?" Angel sneered.
"I can't stake you, see, or she'll get it in her pretty little head somehow and leave me," Spike mused aloud, ignoring him. He fingered the glowing amulet hanging around his neck. "She likes pain, though. Come to think of it, I like pain too, as long as it's not mine." He pulled a pair of needle nose pliers from a pocket of his overcoat and grinned at them. "I'm a pretty inventive chap. I'm sure I can think of something."
Angel changed to vampire form and tried to break the rope. Spike dragged him away from the wall and pinned his head between his knees. He forced Angel's jaw open and grasped one of his fangs with the pliers, then pulled sharply. Pain shot through Angel's head. He choked in horror and struggled frantically to break free.
"There's one," Spike said cheerfully, squeezing harder with his knees. He reached into Angel's mouth again and soon there were two bloody holes where his vampire teeth had been.
Spike rocked back on his heels and laid the long, pointed teeth carefully in his hand. Angel lay limp with shock. "These will make a nice birthday gift, don't you think?" Spike rambled mockingly. "She can wear them on a little chain and beg me to tell her again how I ripped them out of your skull."
Angel didn't answer. Spike sliced his bonds and rolled him over with a foot. "Be a bit tough for you without ‘em, won't it? But I'm sure you'll manage somehow, a seasoned man like yourself." He sauntered through the door, whistling.
Angel wandered for days in the cold, dark streets, gnawed by hunger. He smelled blood everywhere but could scarcely get a taste. Before long he was too weak to try. Finally he found a broken fence post and impaled himself through the heart.
Books clattered to the floor as Angel woke with a start. Gingerly he ran his tongue over the unbroken ring of his teeth. Trust Spike to show up with a pair of pliers again.
But dream's semblance of reality went deeper than that. In the beginning, what the gypsies had done to him was not so different. With his soul restored, he could not feed. Ultimately, of course, having a soul meant much more than that, but this twisted version of his past brought back the lifetime of empty years he had spent starving and alone. He had almost forgotten what it was like to live without hope.
The candle was burning dangerously low. He found another in the kitchen and lit it from the first, then went to the bedroom and exchanged his pajama bottoms for pants and a shirt. He was obviously not going to get any sleep until he could figure out how to counteract the amulet's influence.
He went to the study and stared tiredly at the shelves along the wall. There had to be something here that would tell him where the amulet came from, who had made it, and how to put a stop to the disturbing dreams it was causing. He skimmed the titles and gathered an armful of promising volumes.
Sitting upright at the kitchen table did help him to stay awake, but as the candle burned steadily in the stillness he felt as if time had slowed to a crawl. He made himself get up and pace the room whenever he couldn't keep his eyes open any longer. There was nothing at all about the amulet in the first book, or the second. In the third he found a spell for plaguing an enemy with nightmares, but it didn't involve an amulet. Near the end there was a tantalizing reference to a thousand deaths, but it was too vague to be useful, and though he forced his mind to register every word on every page until the end, there was nothing more.
Finally he closed the book slowly and went upstairs to the office. Dawn had begun to chase darkness from the sky. Perhaps it wouldn't be long before Wesley or Cordelia would arrive. Angel carried a double armload of books up the elevator and sat down at his desk to wait for them.
Dawn passed ever so slowly into morning, but no one came. He searched seven more books from cover to cover but could not find anything about the amulet. He found himself staring at the corner of his desk where he had first seen it lying in the box. Its intricate patterns burned bright in his memory.
Thrusting the image from his mind, he turned back to the sea monster. Here there was plenty to read about, but not much detail to go on. He knew what the creature's blood tasted like, but that was not much help. He tried to remember the shape of its head as he had seen it from the pier and the claws that had curled around Wesley's body, to match them with the fanciful etchings on the pages. One huge beast in particular seemed to stare at him from the book with the same kind of look he had felt at the harbor. Old and cunning and very patient, but deadly when aroused. What was it doing here? What did it want? And how could they stop it?
He stood up and stretched, then reached over and opened the window shades as far as he dared. The sun was shining brightly, heralding another warmer-than-average spring day. Once upon a time he had enjoyed sunlight, the way it glowed through the leaves of the trees and enlivened everything it touched. Now fate had made it his enemy, its touch bringing death rather than life. He closed the shades and sighed, turning back to the books. He supposed that a sea monster living in the depths of the ocean would abhor bright sunlight as well.
Before long he began to nod again, and suddenly he found himself stumbling through the morning light, sunlight searing him through the tiny holes in the fabric of a castoff cloak. But he had found her, and he could not wait. After so long, surely she had missed him. He clung to the shadows cast by the elegant porch and pounded on the door. Finally it opened a crack.
"Who's there?"
"Darla! It's me, Angelus. Let me in!"
"Get away from me! Filthy beast! You're not Angelus anymore." The door slammed shut.
He pounded again and pressed himself against the wall. He could feel his flesh beginning to smolder. "Wait! Please. I'll die in the sun. I'm still like you!"
There was no answer. In desperation he stepped back and threw his shoulder against the door. It splintered and burst open. He staggered inside.
She was standing in the hallway, her face twisted with sorrow. But she moved away as he approached.
"I'm so hungry," he said
softly, trying not to
frighten her. "I don't want to see their faces any more.
You have to help
me."
She shook her head. "No one
can help you.
Angelus is lost, and I mourn him. You are nothing but a monster,
an
abomination. A vampire with a human soul."
"You made me. You taught me. Can't you undo the spell? Make me like I was before?"
For a moment his pleading gaze was caught by a green amulet suspended between her breasts. She stepped toward him, her hand raised tenderly, and pushed the matted hair from his face. But her words dashed his hopes. "No. There's only one thing left I can do for you."
She tore his cloak away and thrust him out into the sunlight.
When Wesley entered the office of Angel Investigations, having slept rather late into the morning, he found his employer asleep at his desk, slumped over a pile of open books. The cheery greeting he had been about to utter died on his lips, and he stood for a moment wondering exactly what he should do.
If Angel were having another nightmare, the kindest thing would be to wake him. And yet he wasn't entirely certain that he dared to do so – or that it would be wise, even if he did. Best not to interrupt the amulet's magic – who knew how Angel might react?
As quietly as possible he tiptoed over to glance at the books Angel had been reading. To his disappointment, he couldn't see anything that seemed relevant on any of the pages that were in view. But he did notice that with the sun beating down on it, the office was getting rather warm.
He nearly jumped out of his skin when Angel awoke with a start right under his nose. He stepped back and eyed the vampire sharply. Angel's face was marked with creases from his sleeve and for a moment he looked utterly terrified. Then he began to take in his surroundings, and fear drained slowly from his face.
"Wesley. You're . . . here."
"Yes." Wesley looked again at the pile of books and thought of the time. Angel hadn't been sitting here waiting for him. Had he?
Angel got up and paced the room, clearly having difficulty putting the nightmare behind him. Wesley watched him anxiously. Finally he sat down again.
"God, I hate sunlight."
"Understandable." Wesley pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his nose. "Long night, then."
"You have no idea." Finally his eye fell on the book tucked carefully under Wesley's arm. "Have you got something?"
Eagerly Wesley pulled out his prize. "I was only able to locate one short reference. But I'm certain this is where I've seen the amulet before."
Angel looked at the cover. "Ancient Amulets and Talismans. Why don't I have this one?"
"Because this is the only known copy. If the council ever notices it's missing, I may be in hot water. But I was the one who found it, and I paid a pretty sum for it too, so I kept it." He opened to the bookmark he'd placed and held it out for Angel to read.
Angel's eyes lit on the crude sketch of the amulet. "That's it." He grabbed the book and started reading. Wesley moved to glance over his shoulder. "Unknown origins. Earliest record in a Welsh monastery in 1240." Angel skimmed the brief passage silently. "Lost sometime before 1600. Effective against all known demon species indigenous to the region." He looked up. "Welsh. So where has it been for four hundred years? And how did Wolfram and Hart get hold of it?"
Wesley shook his head and wiped his nose again. He felt a sneeze coming on. "We may never know," he replied. "There's not much detail about how it operates. And unfortunately not a word about how to counteract its effects."
Angel sighed. "I guess that's not usually a priority. Where is it?" Wesley took the amulet from his pocket and carefully peeled away the layers of cloth in which he had wrapped it, laying it on the desk. Angel stared at it for a long moment, then reached out and picked it up. Wesley started, but no harm appeared to come to him from touching it.
Laying it on the facing page of the book, Angel bent to compare it carefully to the drawing. "Same design, same inscription. This is definitely the same amulet. Well, at least now we have something to go on."
Wesley looked at the books scattered across the table. "Any luck on your end?"
Angel shook his head. "Nothing matching its description, no mention of the phrase. And for some reason occult writers never seem to bother with something so mundane as an index."
They both looked up as the door opened to admit Cordelia. "God, it's hot in here. No need to bother with coffee," she said.
"And it looks to be another hot day as well. I wouldn't open the refrigerator," Wesley advised, an instant too late.
"Ewww, whose egg salad sandwich died in here?" she asked, closing the door hastily.
"I detest egg salad and Angel doesn't eat, so I leave you to solve that mystery on your own," he replied.
"So," she said, cheerily dismissing the refrigerator and all of its contents, "isn't anyone going to ask me how the audition went?"
"How'd it go?" Angel said, much more sincerely than Wesley could have managed.
"Really, really well. This may finally be my big break. I went down this morning to see if they'd made a decision, but no word until tomorrow. But the director said I made the first cut!"
"That's great," Angel said encouragingly.
She looked at him more closely. "You know, you really don't look so good."
"You try dying a thousand deaths." Wesley noticed that his flippant tone didn't quite reach his eyes.
Cordelia flipped her hair back in an oh-so-Cordelia fashion. "No thanks. I'll leave that to you self-flagellating types."
The sneeze that Wesley had been trying to hold in finally got the better of him. "Achooo!"
"Bless you." Cordelia grabbed a box of tissues from her desk. He plucked one from the box and blew his nose. "How did you catch cold in the middle of this heat wave?" she asked.
"As a matter of fact, while you were at your ground breaking audition, Angel and I not only scouted up the return address on that box, but also discovered some sort of giant sea creature lurking in the bay."
"You mean that's what's been eating all those people?" she said. Wesley and Angel stared at her. She shrugged. "I watch the news."
"Yes, well, it nearly dragged us both out to sea. Fortunately, vampires don't seem to appeal to its taste buds. Nor it to theirs, I suspect." Angel didn't react, but Wesley decided to take this as confirmation of how Angel had convinced the creature to let him go.
"But you wound up with a head cold," Cordelia observed. "You should take more vitamins. Plus, Echinacea and zinc are good for colds." She glanced at Angel again. "Too bad there aren't any herbal remedies for evil nightmare amulets. Did you figure out who sent it?"
"Oh, yes," Wesley replied. "Wolfram and Hart."
Cordelia grimaced. "Figures." She eyed the books piled on Angel's desk. "Any luck figuring out how to stop it?"
Angel sighed. "No, not yet."
"What about the sea monster? Have you found out what kind of creature it was?"
"We were too busy trying not to get eaten to get a good look at it, but I think I caught a glimpse of its head. One of them, anyway." Angel picked up book he'd apparently fallen asleep on. "This is the most likely candidate so far."
Wesley and Cordelia bent over the book together. "Abyssal drakon," Wesley read. "A deep sea dragon. Are you sure? I thought they were pretty rare."
"And they usually live in the deep ocean," Angel added. "But that's the closest match I can find."
"It says they grow to be . . . oh my goodness," Wesley breathed.
"That's longer than my parent's house," Cordelia exclaimed. "This would make a great cable movie."
"Cinematic potential aside, what is it doing lurking in the harbor, snatching people from piers?" Wesley asked. "And how on earth are we going to kill it?"
"I don't know," Angel said, shaking his head. He rubbed his eyes again. "But we've got to do something about this amulet. These dreams are getting old fast."
Wesley cautiously picked up the offending object. It seemed slightly warm – though perhaps that was just because of the temperature in the room. "A thousand deaths," he said thoughtfully. "Do you suppose the words are literal? Perhaps after a thousand nightmares, it will simply stop."
Angel paled at the prospect. "There's got to be a better way than that."
Cordelia shrugged. "Can't you just destroy it?"
"I'm not sure what that would do to Angel at this point," Wesley said. "He's already under its curse."
Angel blinked at his usage, then stared at the amulet, his expression rather haunted. "It's worth a try," he said finally.
Wesley inspected the amulet more closely. "It looks brittle. Perhaps a really good whack will break it."
He looked around for something solid and finally laid the amulet on the floor. Angel took an axe from the cabinet, and Wesley and Cordelia hastened to get out of his way. Angel set himself, swung, and hit the amulet dead on with astonishing force.
It rang with a clear, high pitched tone, emitting a sharp burst of unearthly green light. Angel screamed and fell to his knees, pressing both hands to his head.
Cordelia crouched at his side, her hand hovering near his shoulder. "Angel?"
Wesley picked up the fallen axe and looked at him closely. "Are you all right?"
Angel sat back on his heels without answering, his face contorted with pain, his breathing labored. Finally he squinted at Cordelia. "No wonder you and Doyle complain so much."
Wesley picked up the amulet. "Not a dent, not a crack. I'd say that pretty much eliminates physical destruction as a possible solution."
"And you can add splitting headache to our current list of problems," Angel added, his voice rather shaky.
Cordelia obligingly ticked them off on her fingers. "Taxes. Sea dragons. Conniving lawyers. Evil amulets. Nasty cold. Splitting headache. And a hot, stuffy office. I think I am the only one who is having any luck today!"
It took over two hours for the pain to subside, even with the help of Cordelia's vision headache remedy. Angel sat quietly on the couch with an ice pack on the back of his neck, trying to relax without falling asleep. For a while everything was edged with a faint green light.
Cordelia and Wesley scoured the office and his apartment for books with anything about sea dragons or Celtic magic and made several tall stacks on her desk, where they sat reading and eating chocolate milkshakes and pizza. Despite the annoyance of crunching and slurping sounds, Angel would not have traded it for the silence of the previous hours. It reminded him wistfully of nights spent with Buffy and Giles and the Scooby gang camped out at the high school library in Sunnydale.
When the invisible vise that was clamped around his skull finally loosened its grip, Angel pulled up another chair and joined them, claiming one of the stacks of books. Everything was quiet save for the sound of rustling pages. Three candles burned steadily in the middle of the desk. Wesley leafed through book after book with steady determination. Even Cordelia seemed capable for once of concentrating on the task at hand.
But now that the pain wasn't there to keep his attention, Angel found he couldn't get through more than a page or two without his eyes threatening to close. Knowing what awaited him if he surrendered was barely enough to give him strength to fight it. He could hardly keep the page in focus.
He started, realizing he had nearly fallen asleep. Abruptly he pushed back the chair and paced the length of the room. When he turned back Wesley and Cordelia were staring at him. He avoided their gaze as he returned to the desk and sat down again. Didn't humans have drugs they used to stay awake? Why hadn't he thought of it earlier? Maybe he could buy some extra time. Maybe . . .
"I guess there is only one thing to do," Cordelia said.
He turned to her, surprised at the conviction in her voice. "What?"
She ignored him and turned to Wesley. "I quite agree," he replied.
"I promised him once that if he ever turned evil again, I'd kill him dead. I guess it's time to keep that promise."
"What? I haven't turned evil." They ignored his protest. Somehow Wesley had tied him fast to the chair. "Wait a minute. I'm not evil." Then he saw the amulet around Cordelia's neck.
"What are you doing with that – " He stopped, suddenly realizing what was happening. "Oh no."
Cordelia tipped over the candles one by one. The flames licked at the pages of an open book and quickly roared to life, spreading from one book to another. Angel struggled to inch the chair away from the deadly blaze. The rope shouldn't have held him, but it did. He could see Cordelia's face through the flames. She shook her head sadly as his clothing caught fire. Flames enveloped him, and he screamed in agony and turned to dust.
He woke with a gasp and jumped out of his chair, knocking it over sideways. Cordelia and Wesley looked up, startled. He swallowed and found his voice.
"I'm not evil!"
Cordelia sat back, folding her arms. "Right. Instead of getting the world sucked into hell, you're just scaring us to death."
"You said I was evil. You started the books on fire." He heard the edge of panic in his voice and couldn't stop it.
"Angel." Cordelia got up and touched his arm as if to ground him to reality. "It wasn't me. I wouldn't do that."
"But if you thought I'd changed –"
"Look, you are about a million miles from perfect happiness. It wasn't real," she repeated slowly.
He took a deep, shuddering breath and picked up the chair and sat down again. "It felt real. They all do."
"And we're going to find a way to stop it," Wesley said firmly. He scooted his pile of sea dragon books over to Cordelia and took most of Angel's Welsh stack.
"Hey!" she protested.
"Look, even if we find a way to kill this sea dragon, it won't do much good if Angel is in no shape to fight it."
Cordelia nodded. Angel meekly opened one of his two remaining books and tried to focus on the words. Skim the page, turn to the next. Skim the page . . . his eye lit on the word Slayer and he stopped.
Buffy's face flashed through his mind. The passage was just a typical one about the Slayer's mystical powers, but even seeing the word printed on a page opened up the part of him that still belonged to her.
Wesley spied him reading and leaned toward him. "Have you got something?"
"No." Hastily he turned the page. He wondered what if any part of her still belonged to him. His heart ached for her touch, her unswerving compassion, her strength, her wisdom, her forgiveness. But these were things he couldn't have, not if he really loved her. It didn't stop his longing for her head on his shoulder.
Suddenly Cordelia jumped up. "Hey!"
"What is it?" Wesley asked, but in seconds she was writhing in her chair clutching her head and the answer was obvious. Wesley hurried to support her, leaving Angel to grab paper and pen.
"Water . . . eww, it stinks likes dead fish . . . a person, a woman . . . blond, great blouse . . . by a lighthouse . . . it's the sea dragon, in the water, behind her! Watching . . . definitely three heads," she finished.
Wesley opened the bottle of pills already sitting on the desk and poured two caplets into Cordelia's waiting hand while Angel filled a cup with water. She swallowed gratefully. "Well, I guess that one wasn't so bad, as visions go. At least it didn't eat her."
"But it's daylight," Wesley noted. "How could it attack without being seen?"
"There was a lot of fog," Cordelia said. "Of course that may have just been mysterious vision fog."
"We've got to go try and stop it," Angel said.
Cordelia stared at him. "Has that amulet addled your brain? You can't go out in the daylight!"
"I'll stick to the shadows. But the Powers That Be must know I can stop this, or they wouldn't have shown it to you."
Wesley nodded slowly. "I'm
inclined to
agree." He stood. "Maybe a few sword thrusts or
crossbow bolts won't
kill it, but they might make it think twice about feeding on the
locals."