In Ev’ry Angle Greet

Disclaimer: Characters from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel: the Series are property of Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, Kuzui Enterprises, Sandollar Television, the WB, and UPN.

Part III

The minivan driver hit the brakes and horn at the same time, but Faith didn’t swerve or hesitate. There was no need, she had gauged it perfectly, she slid past the front bumper of the skidding vehicle with an entire quarter of an inch to spare. Without breaking stride she hurdled a parked motorcycle (Kawasaki, nice lines but it didn’t matter, you rode a Harley or you were nothing) and switched from pavement to grass, racing through Weatherly Park in the growing dusk. Pushing herself, punishing herself, trying to drown out the raging voices inside her with all-out exertion.

Fat chance. She was in peak condition, with a cardiovascular system Wesley had estimated at seven times as efficient as baseline human; unless wounded or ill or drugged, she could run all day without tiring, but there was no way to outdistance the turmoil that drove her. She tried anyhow, threading through the trees and bushes and occasional benches at breakneck speed, cursing the exhaustion that eluded her.

Again and again she had been told how much she had changed in these past two years. They kept repeating it, stressing it, reinforcing the encouragement and praise till it started to look like they thought she’d fall apart without her monthly dose of positive strokes. Well, she had changed, she had an address that wasn’t a motel room and a permanent somebody in her life, and it had been a long time since she’d caught any store clerks giving her the hairy eyeball in the shoplifting mirrors. Her life was different now, and she welcomed the difference and wanted to preserve it (not much hope of that now!). One thing hadn’t changed, though. When she got messed up, hurt, too much crap coming at her at once, she had a simple procedure for how to handle it:
1.   Find some evil supernatural things and kill them;
–  or, if none were forthcoming,
2.   find some human jerkweeds who needed a lesson and beat the living snot out of them;
–  or, in the highly unlikely event that human jerkweeds were equally unavailable,
3.   find something big and tear it apart.

On her way to California in 1998, fleeing the vengeful Kakistos and her own shameful memories, she had detoured to an aircraft graveyard in the Nevada desert and spent three solid days destroying a derelict C-130: pounding at the propeller with her naked fists until the aging metal broke, and then using the blade to hack away larger pieces, repeating the process until the hapless freighter was reduced to a pile of tortured junk. That, and thirty hours of sleep afterward, and she had shown up in Sunnyhell a week later looking as close to normal as she ever got.

Nothing like that at hand right now. And punching trees just didn’t bring the same satisfaction. And she couldn’t get any of the soulless, gutless, undead wimp-bastards that haunted this sorry-ass burg to come out and fight her.

Not fair. Not fair. Not fair. It pounded in her head as she ran, resonating with the swift, smooth coursing of blood through her veins. To come so far, to gain so much — self-respect, hope, friends (of a sort, let’s not get gooey here), love — and then to have it all snatched away, without any hope of fighting back, without even an enemy to face …

She screamed with all the power of a Slayer’s lungs, all the passion and despair and impotent hate in her soul, screamed until her vision fuzzed over with red-black haze and her knees gave way beneath her. She knelt where she had fallen, head down so that her hair spilled across her face, fingers sunk into the grassy earth as if to anchor her to something real and solid, shaking with sobs that rasped from a raw throat.

Not fair.

Didn’t mean it wasn’t true.

She was up and walking again, all but blind to the park around her, tears striping her face unnoticed. Willow, Willow would be worried, she shouldn’t have just taken off like that … it had been blind instinct rather than anything resembling choice, but even now there was no way she could make herself return. It just hurt too much. She could take a saber in the guts or a sledgehammer to the chest, but not this. Not this.

The park was behind her now, and the habits and memories of two years of night patrols guided her through the streets and light traffic with no attention from her conscious mind. That still seethed, endlessly recoiling from and returning to the unthinkable truth that had speared into her life. Sunnydale, gone. Giles, Dawn, Wesley, gone. Memories, victories, dreams and losses, guilt and hope and lessons learned …

… Willow …

… gone.

Threads of awareness tickled at her, and she stopped mechanically, letting the vague alert gradually register without fully noticing. At last her eyes came into focus, and she looked around her with recognition and dawning satisfaction. Yes. Ooohhh, yes, this was exactly what she needed.

The double doors crashed against the walls, every eye in the place — not to mention antennae, ciliary sonar, and infrasensing pads — turning toward the sleek, deadly figure that stood framed against the lights from the street. At the bar, Willy made a frantic snatch to recover the bottle that had slipped from his fingers, and groaned, “Jeez, Faith, you can’t do this to me, we got a truce …!”

“Chill, gerbil.” Faith swept the occupants of the dimly lit barroom with scornful eyes, and raised her voice. “Ahright, hellscum, it’s your lucky night. Listen up, ’cause you’ll never get a better chance than this.” She stalked forward, looking around to confirm that she had their full attention, feeling the old reckless snarl twisting her lips. “I got a major mad-on to work off, and I don’t wanta spend the rest of the night chasing down sparring partners, so here’s the deal: parking lot out back, right now, I’ll bust you up but I won’t kill anybody, long as you just come at me one at a time.” She laughed, tingling with the first flush of anticipation. “Somebody’ll break the bargain sooner or later, ’cause you’re all evil stinking pus-wads, and that’s when I cut loose … but the ones at the head of the line get to take their best shot at me and know they’ll live through it. Sound like a plan?”

The reply came from behind her, from the forgotten doors, the voice musical and caressing and obscenely familiar, freezing her where she stood. “Aw, come on. We can do lots better than that, don’t you think?”

Faith was in motion with the final words, her paralysis broken by sheer furious will; but even as she turned, she already knew she was screwed.

*               *               *

The message was all but unintelligible through the hiss and crackle of the cheap police scanner, but Xander effortlessly deciphered it, evaluated it, and dismissed it as unimportant without really noticing that he had done so. In the same way his gaze flicked here and there over the darkening streets, assessing shadows and terrain and patterns of movement, comparing them to the stored memories of many other such self-appointed solo sweeps and judging the results as automatically as his hands turned the wheel of the gray Olds Cutlass. (He would have liked a convertible, he had developed a hankering for them during his time in the “QUEEN C” and the brief loaner from his Uncle Rory, but an open car after dark basically made you Meals On Wheels for the various uglies that walked, wafted, slithered and sloshed through Sunnydale at night.) So far this was looking like a quiet evening, which suited him perfectly; he’d come out mainly from habit, but what he really wanted was a chance to think.

He snorted. Right, if you could call it ‘thinking’. Mostly it was just the same thing running through his mind over and over: I should have known.

He had known, in a way. How many times since Buffy had been driven away by repeated betrayals, or since the horrible botched burglary of City Hall, or since Cordelia had dropped off the face of the earth somewhere in the middle of the Big Rotten Apple, had he looked back on recent events and tried to figure out just where it had all gone to hell? It was his fault, there had never been any question there, but exactly how had he managed to screw things up so totally with what, when you stripped away the mystical frills, was really just ordinary sordid male piggery?

Unfamiliar motion caught his eye, and he reached for the million-candlepower spotlight plugged into the cigarette lighter jack. Quiet evening or no, there were always a few eager beavers who wanted to drink early and then spend the rest of the night looking for a party. Usually he just marked them down and passed the word to Willy, who would then relay the tip to Giles, but if one was actually in the process of noshing down on a victim, he’d have to try and break in on it …

He returned the spotlight to its place without triggering the beam, and continued down the street. It was just a three-man team of the military ninja types — the Demon-Detox Crew, Faith called them — revealing themselves for a few seconds as they crossed from one patch of shadow to another. For them to have ranged clear of the immediate environs of the UC/Sunnydale campus might mean something was in the works, but they posed no direct threat in themselves. It had taken several sharp scuffles to convince them that they didn’t want to tangle with a Slayer, and longer yet to communicate that Harmony, too, was absolutely off-limits, but the two groups had reached an eventual understanding of mutual avoidance. About five months ago there had been some kind of major shake-up on the other side — the details weren’t clear, nor just how Willow had come by them — but they were still a presence, even if their mission seemed to have scaled back since then. 

Once more he quelled the impulse to turn his car toward the house on Revello Drive. This definitely wasn’t the time. Buffy was back, he’d always known she would return eventually, and there were so many things he needed to tell her; but she and her mother would be negotiating an uneasy homecoming, and for him to show up on the doorstep right now would just be a serious weird factor. He had messed up so many things, hurt so many people, there was no way he was going to start it all up again, not when he finally had a chance to set it right …

He let out his breath in a long huff of disgust. Oh, yeah, world ending in two weeks, countdown to the big Adios, absolutely the perfect moment to confess undying love and finally behave like a decent person. Gotta admire the guy’s timing. Again it came back to the old refrain: I should have known.

Okay, so ‘normal’ in Sunnydale basically consisted of one mind-numbing coincidence after another; even so, you’d expect a guy who was once the leading contender for Biggest Loser on the Planet to notice something a little unusual when one woman after another began to drop into his
(arms)
(lap)
(bed)
life like ripe plums off a tree. Not just any women, either: extraordinary women, supernatural women. Looking back to his previous experiences with Natalie French and Ampata, he could readily have believed it had all started even before Amy’s miscast love spell (his fault, again). Still, Giles had been emphatic about the source of their misfortunes; and then there were Cordelia and Willow, neither of them showing the faintest glimmering of mystical potential, but fixating on him just as disastrously as all the others, and being every bit as brutally used and sloughed off.

He had never questioned his change of fortune, had just dived headlong into the bounty appearing before him. And what was the result? Broken hearts and alienation, betrayal and tragedy, the once-and-former Slayerettes coming apart at the seams, and all of it traceable back to Alexander Lavelle Harris. Kendra, Amy, Veruca, dead. Cordelia, vanished. Harmony, finishing high school by dint of night classes and online lessons hastily compiled by Willow and Giles, and never speaking to him directly except to curse him; Anya, who generally refused even to acknowledge his continued existence. Buffy — once the most important thing in his life — gone for nearly two years in voluntary exile. Faith and Willow … okay, never mind political correctness, there was just no way that was natural, it had to be some freak side-effect, still hanging on even though the spell itself had been removed. (Not that he would ever voice the thought; he’d already hurt Willow enough, and Faith would probably frame any rebuttal in the form of a chainsaw vasectomy.)

Whoa! Key words jerked his attention back to the scanner. “Possible gang activity,” they’d said, and the location, approximate as it was, encompassed the block where Willy’s sat … but no, “shots fired” didn’t sound much like demons. Xander entertained himself for a minute by imagining the fate of any gang dumb enough to try and stick up that joint, then returned to his previous musings.

It might have gone on indefinitely — “pump ’em and dump ’em” had been Faith’s coarse, blistering and only-too-accurate description of his behavior during that period — if the anonymous, stuttering female caller hadn’t babbled something to Giles about Xander’s “aura” before abruptly hanging up. Then, finally, Amy’s handiwork had been detected and countermanded … and Xander had been slammed in the face with the knowledge that he had done more damage to the group than any enemy they had ever faced.

It would have been simple enough to blame his actions on Amy’s spell. The others would have bought it; they’d all had to deal with mind control of one type or another these past few years, and most of them still, deep down, wanted to believe in him. Sure, lay the rap on Amy, she’s not around to argue and even if she was, she’s pretty much burned her bridges in her embracing-the-Dark-Side performance with the Mayor …

Nuh-uh. That would have been an easy out, and he didn’t deserve it. He could still remember Willow describing her helplessness while under the control of the Bezoar’s parasitic offspring, and his guilty realization at the time of how fundamentally that differed from his own experience with hyena possession. Willow and the others had been robots, bodies directed by an outside force, whereas he had been Xander-plus-hyena, something added to his own psyche to darken and redirect the things that were already there. The effect created by Amy’s imperfect reversal of the already flawed love spell had been slower to work, more insidiously subtle, and less dramatic in its visible results … but the bottom line was that he’d been given power, and he had abused it and reveled in the abuse, and a lot of people had been hurt in the process, and atoning for that didn’t include dodging the responsibility for what he’d done.

And now there was a new guilt to add to the old. Something had twisted this reality away from what it should have been. Was it some other, unseen act or enchantment, or — as all his instincts insisted — had these changes spun from his own heartless eagerness to nail down every possible conquest?

I should have known.

Known, or wondered, or shown some miniscule fragment of sense or pity or caring for any of the ones who had cared so hopelessly for him …

He almost missed it, a Chevy Blazer was coming out the other end of the motel parking lot and the high-set headlights momentarily dazzled him. Even the split-second glimpse had been enough, though, some details were impossible to mistake and he’d just been flashed with a lulu, he swung the Cutlass behind the car wash even as he was reaching for the cell phone. He should be able to contact the others in fairly quick order, at Harmony’s insistence none of them went anywhere these days without a cell or pager — “Come into the twenty-first century, people!” — and right now they might need all the quickness they could muster.

He hit the first number on the speed dial at the same moment he braked and killed the headlights, and he was focusing the binoculars before the first ring. What he saw made him draw in a hard breath that was only barely less than a gasp, and he gripped the cell phone with useless force, whispering urgently, “Come on, come on, come on …!”

This was not good. This was just SO not good.

*               *               *

She knew when his car pulled into its assigned parking space, her enhanced hearing easily recognizing the distinctive putter of the Volvo’s muffler, so there was more than enough time to turn off the VCR and switch the station to CNN. She had long ago learned to tape this particular program and watch it in private; Wesley was a pussycat about most things, but when it came to Ross and Rachel he was acidly disdainful, and just the sight of Joey could launch him into a twenty-minute, precisely enunciated vituperative diatribe. That had only been funny the first couple of times, and besides, she wanted him to mellow out tonight, so ixnay on the iendsfray.

He entered to find her artfully reclining on the couch, her hair spread out on the cushions and a bare foot dangling crimson nails inches above the carpet. “Hey, Wessie,” she cooed. “How’d it go?”

His face was drawn, but it relaxed substantially as his eyes took her in. Good, right on track so far. She stood with a practiced, liquid motion, posting one hip and tilting her head to the side in just the way that made him melt. “Not too well, I fear,” he was saying in reply, but already the corners of his mouth were beginning to tilt upward. “I reviewed Mr. Giles’ analysis; much of it, I must confess, well outside my own realm of competence …”

“You’ll work it out,” she assured him, moving forward to place a hand on his chest. “You always do.”

He shook his head in rueful denial. “Your confidence is heartening, my dear, but I know my limitations. As you are aware, he and I have frequently disagreed …”

“Like when I decided to move in here,” she broke in again, still indignant at the memory. “He was just stinky about that. I still say you should have put the screws to him over Anya, after the way he acted —!”

“Yes, yes,” Wesley said hastily. “You’re quite right, but I preferred not to revive old conflicts. The thing is, though we’ve been at loggerheads in the past, I’ve always had the utmost respect for his capabilities as a researcher, and his tactical judgment … please believe I’m not denigrating myself when I say it has several times proven superior to my own. Differ as we may in methodology, what I could understand of his work certainly seemed sound. I haven’t the slightest doubt that he’s earnest in his beliefs and, given the evidence I can comprehend, he appears to be correct as well.”

She gave him one of her trademark pouts, and a dismissive shrug that only coincidentally caused one of the spaghetti straps to slide off her shoulder. “Well, if you say so,” she replied, observing with satisfaction that his gaze was following the line of her neck and shoulder and arm. “It just seems to me he’s giving up awfully easy.”

He smiled fondly at her, and she could absolutely see the thoughts passing through his mind: So beautiful, and SO stupid, and so utterly irresistible … It didn’t bother her a bit, that was exactly what she was shooting for. “We’ve none of us given up just yet,” he told her, voice soothing. “The colleague of whom Mr. Giles spoke, he’s supposed to meet with us early tomorrow to explain some of the more obscure data; and Giles himself, though he seems confident of his conclusions, remains open to the possibility of our finding some, er, escape clause in this situation.” He raised his hand, tracing along her cheek with the tips of his fingers. “I realize you’ve no particular affection for him and Anya, but even you must concede that he has no more reason than we to relinquish life without good cause.”

She returned the smile, nodding eagerly, noting the subtle changes in his posture as tension continued to ease out of him. Okay, so she wasn’t exactly the brightest bulb on the marquee. So what? Wesley was brainy enough for both of them. For her, it was enough to zero in on what mattered: find a man who treats you right, and give him whatever it takes to keep him happy. (That was something she’d never been able to understand about all the I-Am-Woman types. What was the point in being your own person, if that person was alone?) And she didn’t really need to be all that smart, as long as she was smarter than anybody thought she was. “Well, you know best,” she told him with blithe cheerfulness. “So what’s on for tonight?”

Immediately his expression clouded. That wouldn’t do at all. “I’m not altogether sure,” he said. “I have some private texts that might contain material with some bearing on this matter, and there are a few acquaintances I could ring up for further consultation …”

She slid a sidelong glance at him, arching her back just the least bit. “None of that could wait until later …?”

He studied her with one eyebrow raised, and she hid her triumph as she saw the last few preoccupied segments of his attention overrun with more immediate concerns. “As always, my dear,” he said, his tone dry and amused, “I defer to your superior sense of priorities.”

Four minutes later her dress was draped over the back of the couch, and she was luxuriating once again in the wonderful delicious warmth of his lips and fingers on her skin. A minute after that, the telephone rang. Another minute, and the two of them were in frantic motion.

The citizens of Sunnydale are not, as frequently described, entirely clueless about the nature of their fair city. They simply don’t talk about it, or normally even think about it. Most of those who have grown up there have a subconscious recognition of certain facts, and newcomers (the ones who survive long enough) generally develop a similar unspoken awareness within three or four years. This being so, the noise in the apartment parking lot attracted no particular attention, and the few who noticed it didn’t bother to go to their windows.

If they had, they would have seen a lean, bespectacled man, his shirt half-buttoned, dragging a stumbling, protesting blonde girl clad only in abbreviated green satin tap-pants with a matching camisole. He shoved her quickly but not roughly into the passenger seat of a brown Volvo sedan, threw a silk print dress in after her, and leaped to the driver’s side.

As the vehicle screeched into the street beyond, the girl was trying to struggle back into the dress; and from the few shrill words that leaked out into the night air, she was very very far from pleased.

 

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