The Past Tense of Loving

Chapter 1

It was getting increasingly difficult: the infighting; the arguments; the silences; the flaring, bitter hatred. It wore everyone out. It wore them out. For they still had to work together. They found themselves going on cases, sitting side by side in the car and remembering that they couldn’t talk because of some implied slight, or that they had to continue an argument when neither of them could now remember what it was they had argued about. It was wearing everyone out. It was wearing them out.

The silences were uncomfortable and led them into too much introspection, which neither particularly wanted nor liked.  Angel felt childish, as if he should be able to rise above Spike’s constant niggling. Spike felt disappointed, as if this life in L.A. should have given him something he was missing before, in Sunnydale, as if Angel should be giving him something he’d been missing before, with Buffy. 

This time they found themselves driving toward the beach. Angel wanted to ask Spike to fetch the map out of the box and locate their destination, but he couldn’t. Spike felt sure they weren’t going in the right direction, but would be damned (some more) before he pointed this out.

They arrived at the pier despite Angel’s driving and Spike’s non-navigating and left the car, glad to leave the embarrassing silence, too.  Youngsters had been disappearing, the only thing connecting them was the pier—they’d all visited within the last few days.  Angel believed vampires were responsible, as they were attracted to those attracted to amusement arcades and piers: the lonely, the forgotten, those who might not be missed.

Privately, Spike believed they’d just come to the ocean and decided to carry on, walking out into the deep blue, ending it all, finding peace. He thought of doing this himself sometimes, so he hadn’t mentioned his theory to Angel, especially as they weren’t talking anyway.

They wandered along, investigating in their own way: Angel meticulous and slow, questioning people and showing photographs; Spike playing the machines in the arcade.

They were rigged. He gave one a kick and went to find Angel.

Angel was entering a small hut halfway down. Spike pushed a curtain aside and stepped in. He laughed and walked around, fingering cardboard cut-out figures with their faces missing, which begged to be filled. The Edwardian one caught his eye, three figures together, one, a lady sitting and then two gentlemen standing with their hands on her shoulder. It was an almost identical pose to one he and Angel had had taken with Darla.

It made him feel even more disappointed about his relationship with Angel. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected, but to tip their hats to the fact that they were related, that they shared this long history, seemed the least either of them could do.

The Edwardian figures were squeezed between a cut-out of two fat people in swimsuits and another of two cowboys, guns drawn and spurs almost jangling.  He brushed his hand wistfully over the shorter of the two Edwardian gentlemen then followed Angel further into the hut.  

Angel was showing the photographs of the missing teenage girl, the one they were most anxious to find, to a man in a dirty suit. Spike drifted over and when Angel had finished, murmured, ‘Anything?’ It was the first word they’d spoken since their last blow up three days previous, and Spike could see the palpable relief on Angel’s face.  

Angel shook his head and replied, ‘Let’s go.’

Angel pushed past the man, stalked through the cardboard figures and out onto the pier, walking straight into a small group of vampires. They were strolling along, eating candyfloss and appeared to have no idea what Angel was. Angel tailed them, waited until they went under the palings to eat properly and dispatched them. It was only then that he noticed that Spike wasn’t with him.  He instantly regretted backing down from the fight, letting that friendly let’s go escape from his constant antipathy toward his childe. This is what it had been about in the first place: responsibility, thinking about other people—the argument had gone on for hours, the aftermath simmering for days. 

He jogged back up to the pier and strode along as if looking for a lost dog, without the concern or the whistling, which might accompany that activity. He checked the arcade then checked all the food outlets, his temper rising.

Finally, he went back into the small hut where he’d last seen him. He pushed back through the figures, paused for a moment, shook off a strange feeling that someone had walked over his grave—he guessed he had those feelings more often than most people—and located the small, scruffy man.

‘Did my… colleague… say where he was going?’

The man looked nervous. ‘I don’t want any trouble.’

‘Then avoid it and answer my question.’

‘He said he was… pissed off….’

Angel’s eyebrow rose. ‘Pissed off? What the hell does that mean?’

‘He said he had better things to be doing.’

‘What? And he just… walked off?’

The man shrugged. ‘I didn’t see.’

Angel turned and went back to the car, but he didn’t climb in. It wasn’t something you did: arrive with someone, leave without them. It didn’t seem right, even with Spike. He went back onto the pier and now began to question people about him.  Oddly, most people remembered having seen Spike, but no one could rightly say when it had been, or what he had been doing.

Finally, after a few hours of futile searching, Angel drove back to Wolfram and Hart.

The next day, Spike’s absence was noticed fairly early. He apparently bought doughnuts for the girls in the typing pool everyday, and when he didn’t appear with them, one was sent as a tiny delegation of dismay to Harmony. She went in to Angel to pass this on. Angel was busy with a client and implied that Spike was busy, too.

The next day this excuse ran thin. Wesley missed him in the lab and had to cancel some experiments he’d been planning—things Spike had promised to help him with.  He went to Angel to clarify Spike’s schedule.  Angel said he had no idea what Spike was doing and said he had to make some calls.

By the end of the week, a more sizable delegation formed and tackled Angel when they saw he was alone, and after they’d got Harmony to divert his phones.  

Wesley, Gunn and Lorne moved into Angel’s office purposefully and grouped aggressively around the desk. 

‘Is this an intervention?’

‘Where is he?’

Angel played with his blotter then went to look out of the window, arms securely folded. The words I lost him at the pier floated into his mind and made him snort with amusement, but he stifled the humour and said neutrally, ‘I don’t know. We were at the pier together—Monday—and he… left.’

‘Left? Left where? What do you mean?’

‘One minute he was there, and the next, he’d told some pissant man he was bored and he… left.’

Wesley came forward, outrage clear in his voice. ‘Spike wouldn’t just bugger off without telling us! What the hell are you doing to find him?’

Angel winced slightly and wanted to retort, ‘He started it!’ but thought better of this just at the last moment. Instead, he said weakly, ‘He’ll turn up again. He always does.’

Lorne looked nervous as usual, unwilling to tackle Angel as directly as Wesley always did, but he said faintly, ‘It didn’t look like he was planning to leave, Angelpie. Nothing’s been taken from his apartment. Food was all going off this morning….’

Angel turned. ‘You went to his apartment?’

Lorne and Gunn nodded together.

Wesley looked around at them all and said softly, incredulously, ‘What we’re saying is that Spike’s disappeared, has been gone for a week, and we’ve done absolutely sod all to find him.’

Angel studied a nail with an air of martyred innocence.

Wesley strode out. ‘Harmony! Get everyone in. All our resources are to be put to finding Spike. I want teams out day and night.’

Lorne and Gunn decided to return to the apartment to see what they could find. No one involved Angel, and he felt annoyed that Spike had, once more, put him in the wrong by his pissy behaviour.

He went up to his apartment and had a long, leisurely shower. He’d actually enjoyed being able to go down to work without the constant niggling and derision. He’d been able to be in command, make decisions, be the boss.   

He dressed in old jeans and an inconspicuously old T-shirt and drove back to the pier. He’d been here every night, searching, but he’d seen no reason to tell anyone else this.

People still remembered Spike; people still claimed not to know where he’d gone.

Angel joined in with the youngsters in the arcade, listening, learning.  He even sought out the remaining vampires, who were holing up under the boards of the bingo hall and plied them with cheap whisky. Spike had not made contact with them, as Angel suspected. 

As he had every night that week, he returned to his apartment alone.  This different kind of silence gave a new definition to oppressive. 

After another week, everyone assumed that Spike had made good on his numerous threats to leave. Everyone suspected that he’d had a fight with Angel at the pier, that something said or done in that fight had made him go. 

Some people thought privately that Spike had been staked, as this was the only rational explanation, but no one actually put this theory to Angel. They would have thought that without his usual punch bag, without his sparring partner, Angel would have taken his anger out on everyone else. He didn’t. He seemed to diminish in status, shrink into himself, and no one wanted to mention Spike’s death in case he faded away all together.

At the end of the third week, it was common knowledge that Spike had been staked. Someone had heard something from someone who vaguely knew someone who had seen it. He’d come out of the hut, had got into the fight with the vampires with Angel, and one of them had staked him.

Naturally, this upset everyone, even those who’d said all along that he was dead.  Angel didn’t bother to listen. He’d been there. Spike had not come out of the hut, and he hadn’t been staked. He’d know. He’d feel it. He’d felt Darla’s death for months, even though he’d caused it. He’d felt Penn’s absence like a gap in a row of previously perfect teeth. If Spike were dead, Angel’s tongue would now be probing his gap. It wasn’t, and Spike wasn’t staked.

Wesley knew Angel was thinking this and didn’t point out that neither Darla nor Penn had been souled. Who knew how Spike’s soul would alter his blood connection with Angel? Perhaps, being souled, they were closer to their human selves and therefore less related. In which case, Angel would feel nothing at all at Spike’s passing.  He kept these thoughts to himself and missed Spike daily, if for nothing else but that his unique personality had given Angel vitality and an illusion of life that he’d not had since coming to this bloody firm.

Angel was drinking whiskey in his room one night, idly listening to some music, when he took a fancy to doing some sketching. He’d not drawn anything for a long time, so naturally had to look through his portfolio to refresh his ideas. There were lots of Buffy, which made him smile, and one or two of Giles. More recently there were ones of Connor, but he put them to one side.  He delved down further into the pile. He wanted older ones.

He found some of Darla and one or two of Drusilla.  Finally, he found what he was looking for. He studied it for a long time. He’d not realised quite how much Spike had changed.  This sketch of his childe, William, taken a few weeks after he’d been turned, seemed to capture a different person entirely.  Angel would have been hard pushed to say they were same man.  He rummaged some more and found one that made him huff ruefully. He’d taken hours to get it right, and he’d still not been happy with it. He’d had to do it from a photograph, because both Spike and Darla had refused to pose together for more than a minute.

Darla was sitting, he and Spike standing behind her with one hand each on her shoulder. They’d all been smiling in the photograph, but when he’d made then smile in his sketch, it had looked wrong, so he’d erased these expressions and made them sterner. Under the new expressions he attempted, shadows—the smudges of the smiles—had stubbornly remained, and he’d never actually finished the sketch, putting it away to finish later. He’d not actually meant to leave it a hundred and twenty years, but better late than never. 

He was about to tackle Spike, make him thinner—as he now was—when a flash of memory stabbed into Angel’s mind.

He rose, the pictures falling from his lap.  

The second time he’d gone into the small hut on the pier, the cardboard cut outs had changed. There’d been three the first time, the second, only two.

With startling clarity, he remembered that the one of the two cowboys had been missing.

He grabbed his phone and some keys and headed down to the garage.

Chapter 2

Spike lay very still, trying not to move his head. When he moved it, it made him sick. He’d vomited twice already and didn’t fancy doing it again. He’d never had a migraine, but he imagined this was what one felt like. Other than his head, he wasn’t uncomfortable, so he just stayed very still and waited until the pain went away.

Suddenly, he saw a pair of boots right in front of him, and one of them poked him.  He groaned.  Someone cursed, and he was hauled to his feet, carried under his arms and deposited in the dark. He let it happen, eyes closed to the pain.

When he opened them again, it was gone.  Some hours had passed, but magically, the sickness—whatever it had been—was gone.  

He climbed to his feet.

This was bad.

Last thing he remembered (beside the boots) was leaving the hut on the pier. He’d stopped to look at the Edwardian gentlemen again, he’d stuck his head into one of the…. Suddenly, he felt a surge of panic and flew to the bars of the small, dirty cell he appeared to be in.  They swung open, and surprised, he stepped through.  A man rose from a chair and stood with his hands on his hips, staring at him. ‘Well, ain’t you chipper all of a sudden.’

‘Where am I?’

‘May I suggest, youngster, that you rethink your acquaintance with the demon drink?’

Spike nodded slowly and said probably the most inane thing he’d ever said, ‘This isn’t L.A., is it?’

The man narrowed his eyes. ‘You a foreigner then?’

Spike tried to look intelligent and nodded, hoping being English might suddenly make everything make sense.  

Suddenly, someone else came into the small room, and he took a step back, colliding with the desk. For a moment, he thought it was Drusilla. She was tall and dark like Dru, but more importantly, she was wearing a full-length dress, and a bonnet covered most of her hair.  Spike backed off some more, and she gave him an equally nervous look. ‘Sheriff?’

The big man went to her and put his hand on her arm. ‘Don’t you be worrying yerself, Tilda. This here young man is a foreigner.’

She eyed him slowly up and down, and Spike dropped his eyes, too. He couldn’t see anything odd: duster, leather pants, his favourite T-shirt and some tasteful jewellery (well, he’d admit the jewellery was pretty outrageous, but he’d been trying to piss Angel off, so had made more of an effort than usual).  The man escorted the woman out and then turned back to Spike. ‘You’d best be goin’ ‘bout your business, Sonny. Buy yerself a new hat, if you’ve lost yours, stay off the drink, and don’t let me be havin’ the pleasure of your company a-gin! You hear me?’

Spike nodded dumbly and glanced at the sunlight outside. ‘What happened?’

The man looked annoyed. ‘You had yerself a party, Son. That’s what!’

‘But this isn’t L.A?’ He felt such a fool that he added, ‘Where is this?’

‘Molena, Wyoming.’

He mouthed, ‘Oh, fuck,’ but nothing actually emerged.

He didn’t want to ask, but they always did—people who woke up like he had done. He’d not spent the last forty years or so absorbing TV shows not to know he had to ask this question. ‘What year is this?’

The sheriff had begun to pour himself some coffee. He kept his back to Spike and said reasonably, ‘You’re getting on my tits now, Son. Why don’t you go play with your little foreign friends?’

‘What year is it?’

‘It’s the same year it was when I dragged your skinny hide into my jail to cool your heels! It’s eighteen eighty, what Goddanged year did you think it was?’

Spike staggered out to the covered walkway, keeping to the shadows, not sure where he was going. Where could he go?  

He found a saloon. 

He assumed alcohol was still the same.

Everyone stopped talking, and the piano went silent on his entrance. He began to laugh, but it only made people stare more, so he shut up and went to the bar.  

When he realised he had no money he could use, he began to laugh again, but it felt as if hysteria lurked beneath the hollow sound, so he turned his back to the bar and surveyed the room.  It was freakily as it should be—as every cowboy film he’d ever seen had said it would be—except it stank. Everyone smelt, even the girl in the fancy red dress who took a wide berth around him, eyeing his hair enviously.  Stale sweat, unwashed clothes, lack of drains, stale whisky, vomit, horseshit, dog shit, human shit, unwashed hair…. His preternatural senses reeled from it all. His memories made him dizzy. This was his childhood. 

He spied some men sitting around a table playing cards, and as he was desperate to get blindingly drunk and pass out, for which he needed money, he strolled over and said cautiously, ‘Can anyone join?’

They all looked at him and he knew immediately he’d been the topic of their conversation.  One of them, the ugliest (although it wasn’t easy to single him out from the others) said, amused, ‘You one of those fancy actors from back East then?’

Spike frowned. ‘No.’

‘So….’ He indicated his own greasy hair, still under his hat. ‘Is that hair some kind of disease, because, I mean, we don’t want to catch it!’ His friends found this inordinately funny, hawking, spitting and slapping the table. Spike gave them some latitude for not having TV for amusement, and said pleasantly, ‘Can I play?’

 Another, taken courage from his friend, said, ‘You some kinda Injun? All the fancy decorations…?’

Spike nodded wisely. ‘Yes, I’m Sitting Bull, now can I play?’

He waited for them to recover from this latest hilarity but was saved by the girl in red. She sidled over and said to the first man who’d spoken, ‘Let him sit in, Clem.’

Clem gave her a lascivious wink, which she ignored, and Spike sat down. He suddenly remembered he had no money and scratched his head for a moment until he noticed that two of his companions were doing the same, and clearly for better reason. He wrinkled his nose, tried not to look too closely, and made his best friendly face. 

The man named Clem was eying Spike’s duster, so Spike grinned and took it off. ‘Okay if I use this as a stake?’

They all nodded greedily, clearly desperate to have such a coat, and Clem dealt.

Spike could have taken them all without cheating, but he did cheat, just to make sure.  He needed the cash.

He won fifty dollars, which didn’t seem much, but as a beer cost a nickel, he reckoned he was well away.  As he sauntered off with his coat and all the money on the table, a rumbling went up from behind.  

He turned. ‘Got a problem?’

‘Yeah. We have. With you.’

There was deafening sound of chairs being scraped and everyone but the group he’d been playing with left. The bartender ducked behind the bar, and the girl ran into a backroom

Spike laughed. ‘This is not happening to me.’

Clem stood up, his hands hanging to his sides. ‘You’re a damn cheat.’

‘Oh, what? And you were playing fair!’

Clem suddenly drew a gun and shot Spike, the bullet blowing the top of his shoulder off.  Spike howled. ‘My fucking coat!’  He eyed the damage and came forward.  More chairs scraped and one of the others said, awed, ‘He’s not carrying, Clem. You drew on ‘im unarmed!’

Clem holstered his gun, a frightened look on his face.  ‘Are you loco?’

Spike pulled away his bleeding hand, gave Clem a look, and then punched him through the window at the back of the saloon. His friends began to back away, and then there was a shout. ‘Hold on a Goddamned minute!’

Spike saw the Sheriff coming in and groaned, holding his hands up. ‘They started it!’

The Sheriff took in the scene, checked no one was dead and went out to look at Clem. He came back in and walked right up to Spike. ‘You need to take that freaky hair of yours, your damn womanly clothes, your faggoty-arsed accent, and your bad attitude out of my town. There’s a stage leaving tonight. Be on it. Do I make myself clear?’

‘I’m being run out of town? I’m being run out of town on the stage?’  He began to laugh, but tears gathered at the corners of his eyes.  ‘I need to go home.’

The Sheriff nodded as if that’s exactly what he’d said, eyed the other card players sternly and strode out.

Spike took a shady corner of the saloon, ordered some whisky, and began on his plan: get stonkinly drunk and pass out. 

His shoulder throbbed, and he wondered idly how he would be able to feed here, the thought crossing his mind that as the likes of Clem and his friends were already dead, it couldn’t hurt to…. He put this to the back of his mind. He had the freaky feeling that the minute he tried something like that, Angel would come storming in—coat swaying, brows lowered—and give him a lecture. 

As the thought of Angel walking in caused a vast surge of self-pity and homesickness to rise up in his belly, he drank three whiskies fast, without stopping, until it went away.

By the evening he was too drunk to walk let alone find his way to a stagecoach, but the Sheriff had anticipated this and duly arrived, picked him up under his arms again and hauled him into the street.  He kicked open the stage door, tipped his hat to the other occupants and propped Spike in a corner.  He slapped him for a while until he focused. ‘Whaaaat?’

‘You’ll be needing these, Sonny. Danged if I know why I care.’ He laid something in Spike’s lap and added, ‘Took them off another pansy-boy. Guess you’ll like ‘em when you can see ‘em.’ 

With that, he handed the driver some money, nodded and watched as the stage drove out.

Spike watched his companions through narrowed lids. It was all he could manage: opening them fully made him need to vomit, and he figured doing that in an enclosed stage wouldn’t make him popular.

There was an elderly couple, who kept giving him nervous glances, and a man who watched him steadily, but whose eyes seemed friendly enough.  After a couple of hours, Spike stirred and sat up.  Something slid to the floor, and he bent carefully and picked up a gun belt with two guns.  They were very shiny. He sniggered and wanted to try them on, wanted to draw on people and say bang, but he sighed and closed his eyes again. 

When he opened them once more, the stage was stopped at a decrepit looking building. There were a few tired looking horses behind a fence, and that was it.  

He was the only one left on the stage: the older man and his wife stretching their legs, and the younger man splashing some water from a trough onto his head.

Spike climbed out, felt awkward carrying the guns, so strapped them on. The belt needed another notch, and slung low on his waist, but it made him smirk and swagger for a moment, until the absurdity of his situation hit him.  

The lone man straightened and eyed him with a neutral expression.  His eyes flickered down to Spike’s shoulder, and Spike looked, too. A bullet hole, bloodstained around the frayed edges, was clearly visible even in the faint light from the building. ‘You okay?’

Spike shrugged. ‘Where does this stage go?’ Even saying the word made him laugh again.

The man narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re English?’

Spike nodded. 

‘Guess you’re related to Mr Tom then?’

Spike shook his head. ‘I can categorically say that I’m probably not.’

‘But you’re English.’

‘Well, there’s a lot of us.’

‘Not in Wyoming there ain’t.’

‘Good point.’

‘So… where you goin’?’

‘That’s kinda where we came in.’

‘Huh?’

‘I asked you where the stage was going.’

‘Red Rock.’

‘Ah. Light dawns.’  Spike sighed and perched on the edge of the trough.  The man sat next to him.  

‘I’m getting off before. At the Big T—Mr Tom Davant’s spread. It’s about an hour on from here.’

‘Good.’

‘We’re short of hands.’

‘Did someone have one cut off?’

‘Huh.’

‘Do I look like a cowboy?’

‘We’re desperate. Can’t keep men.  ‘S good wage.’

‘I can’t, Mate. Thanks for the offer. Rare skin, ya know? Can’t go out in the sun.’

‘Thought you were pale.’

Spike nodded. 

‘So… can you use them fancy things?’

Spike wondered for a moment what the man was staring at in his lap and realised it was the guns. He snorted with amusement and stood up.  Very carefully, he tucked his coat behind him on one side.  

The driver of the stage and the man who ran the stop were watching with interest. Spike reckoned he’d made a fool of himself before and he would again. 

Suddenly there was a blur, a shot, and everything went still.

The cowboy jumped up, his face pale.  Spike raised his eyebrows. ‘Guess I can.’

The man licked his lips. ‘I’ve never…. Shit…!’

The driver huffed. ‘Ain’t no good being fast, Son, if you cain’t hit nothing.’ 

Spike pouted, wandered off into the scrub at the back of the building and returned holding a rattler, half-severed by a fresh gunshot.

He knew he was showing off. Hell, he could hear a snake snigger a mile away, and he could move so fast (when he wasn’t drunk) that human’s couldn’t see him pass. But he felt he was owed a little fun.

The silence of his companions weighed on him after that.  They all climbed back in. Spike was thoroughly embarrassed when he got entangled in his guns and ended up with one falling on the floor, but he shoved it back and knew no one was going to call him on it.

The cowboy sat gazing at him in awe for the next hour then just before he got out said softly, ‘Mr T’s got a little problem I think you could help him with.’

‘I told you: don’t do sun and horses and… well… work, I guess.’

‘This could be night time and…. You got anywhere else to be?’

Spike felt a stab of uncertainty. He stared out into the dark of a Wyoming night in eighteen eighty and suddenly said, ‘Yeah, okay.’ The words would take him with a man who was real to a place that was real. Some of his anxiety faded.

He climbed out, and the man nodded toward a distant light then glanced, worried, at Spike. ‘Can you walk without…?’

Spike flicked him a look. 

‘Hat? You lost your hat, or something?’

‘Don’t wear one.’

This silenced his companion completely.  He’d never met anyone is his entire life who left their head uncovered. If Spike had taken his pants off and walked naked to the ranch, he couldn’t have been more embarrassed for him.

They reached the ranch house just before dawn, and Spike eyed the soft streaks of sun as he hopped up onto the porch.  The house was impressive.  He straightened his coat, stood straighter, but had to make an embarrassing grab for his gun belt. He really needed that extra notch.

A small dark woman answered the door, clearly recognised the cowboy and ushered them in.  Spike went to the rail instead and said casually, ‘I’ll wait out here till the boss gets down. I’m feeling kinda dusty.’

The cowboy nodded and waited with him.  Spike glanced at his companion and wondered if he looked and smelt as bad as the human did.

Presently, a young man jogged down the stairs, neutral, waiting to see what he was being summoned for this early.  

He stood in the door and said brusquely, ‘Joe?’

Joe said deferentially, ‘Sorry, Mr T, only I met this here gent on the stage from Molina and, well, he’s….’ He turned his hat around in his hands, seeking the right words. ‘He’s faster ‘un Silver Jack was. I thought you’d want to talk with him, maybe.’

The man smiled and held out his hand. ‘Tom Davant.’

Spike took the pleasantly warm, smooth hand. ‘Spike.’

Davant looked expectant, and Spike added, ‘Just Spike.’

‘That’s an unusual name.’

‘And Silver Jack’s normal, is it?’

Whether it was Spike’s accent, his use of language, or his naturally confident attitude, the man’s eyes sparkled. ‘I see we have something in common.’

Spike smiled. ‘I’m thinking we’ve got quite a lot in common.’

The man laughed. ‘Please, come in.’

Spike repressed a smile and stepped over the threshold.  It was cool inside, pretty, clearly the house of a prosperous man.  Davant put a hand casually on Spike’s shoulder but withdrew it quickly. ‘You’ve been shot.’ He turned to Joe. ‘Not that fast then?’

Spike intervened. ‘Er… I got this when I wasn’t… carrying? Packing? What’s that bloody expression?’

Davant licked his lips, clearly not sure what he’d taken on.  He nodded faintly. ‘Follow Joe to the bunkhouse, and we’ll talk….’

Spike shook his head. ‘Sorry—told your man: I don’t do sunlight. I’ll have to stay here until it goes down.’ It was almost liberating being in a world that didn’t know everything there was to know about vampires, and suspecting everyone who was pale and couldn’t go out in the sun actually was one.

Davant laughed. ‘Guess we’ve got us a vampyre, Joe.’

Spike paled and stepped back.  Davant chuckled again. ‘My sister loves gothic horror, I’m afraid, Mr Spike.’

‘It’s just Spike.’

‘Well, it’s Tom, then. I guess you can hole up in my study today.  I have to see some new horses; maybe we can talk later. Are you hungry?’

Spike was and could have eaten them both, but he managed to shake his head. 

Tom opened a door and ushered him into a dim room.  ‘Make yourself at home, Spike.’

Chapter 3

Angel went straight to the hut and swept in.  He found the man in the back, and after a few questions, asked in his usual sweet way, he extracted the information he wanted.  

When Wesley came into work the next day, Angel was staring thoughtfully at a cardboard cut out of two cowboys with their faces missing.

He laughed and went toward it. ‘I haven’t seen one of these since….’ Angel shoved him out of the way, just before he put his face to one of the holes. 

‘That’s what Spike did.’

‘What?’

‘The man said he keeps losing people. They put their faces in, and before he can photograph them, they disappear.’

‘Bloody hell. Where? Does he know?’

‘None of them have ever come back to tell him.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘Study it, Wes. Find out where it came from and what it’s doing—how it’s doing it. But, most of all, find out where the freaking hell it’s sent Spike!’

Wesley nodded.  ‘Quite.’

For the first time since he’d been sucked into this strange world, the enormity of what had happed hit Spike as he sat on his own in Tom Davant’s study.  It hit him that this might be all there was for him now, that he would have to stay in this time and place and do his whole eternity again. He really didn’t fancy that idea much—once was kinda enough, sometimes. Then he thought about his human self, in London. If he were there, too, then he would soon be dead, soon fall prey to Angelus’s passions. Then there would be two of them. Further than that he could not go. He could not see how they could both exist, and thinking that made him realise how wrong it was that he was here.  His head began to spin and he laid it onto the back of the comfortable wing chair and stared into the fire. The flames held no answers for him, but he was glad he’d come to this house. It was like his house had once been. It felt safe.

After a couple of hours, the door opened, and Davant came in.  For a moment, Spike wondered if he’d forgotten he was there, but if he had, he covered swiftly by asking Spike if he had been taken care of: coffee, food. Spike was desperate for food so accepted some coffee to stave off the hunger pangs—to enable him to walk and talk with this human as if he were one, too.

Davant waited until the coffee was brought and then sat down in the facing chair, also staring into the fire.  ‘What part of England do you come from?’

Spike replied cautiously, ‘London. You?’

‘Our family originated from Hampshire, but I was living in Exeter before I came here.’

‘Our?’

Davant looked up at him. ‘This isn’t my place. It belongs to my sister, Katherine. It’s just something the men do—call it my place. I think they prefer working for a man. It belonged to my sister’s husband, Robert Caruthers. Robert came to England to buy some pedigree bulls to improve his livestock and met my sister. They married, and he brought her home—here, to live.’

‘And you came with them?’

Davant smiled. ‘Not at first. I have to admit that the thought of leaving my mother and everything I knew in England to come to this “savage” land didn’t appeal at all. But Robert was killed. Katherine needed me….’ He shrugged as if this simple declaration of need explained the giving away of all he had previously held precious.  ‘So, here we are, the two of us.’

‘Why am I here? What do you need me for?’ 

Davant stirred from his reverie.  ‘Robert’s brothers believe that the ranch is rightfully theirs—my sister had been married less than a year when he was killed, but suddenly it was all hers. They’d worked this land. They’d made the ranch what it was. They’ve tried to kill her.’

Spike pursed his lips. ‘What good would that do? Then it would be yours….’

‘Oh, no, Robert left the ranch to his children. If they should die it reverts to his oldest brother.  Katherine is carrying the heir, you see. If she dies, her unborn child….’

‘But, again, I don’t see what use I can be.’

‘She needs protecting day and night.’

‘Uh huh. And I take the night shift.’

‘Yes. If you are willing.’

‘I’m kinda thinking a nurse would be….’

‘No, you see, I’ve decided to take the fight to the Caruthers.’ His face hardened. ‘I’m sick of waiting. Sick of thinking every time she goes out she’s going to be….’ He refilled Spike’s coffee. ‘Are you as good as Joe said?’

‘Yeah, I am. But….’

‘What?’

‘I’m not sure how long I’ll be here. I mean…. It’s kinda hard to explain. I’m sort of not sure why I came here or how long I can stay.’

Davant shrugged again. ‘That’s what this country is like. I know that.’

Spike let out a long breath. ‘I’ll do the guarding thing. But I’m not killing anyone in cold blood.’

‘But the….’

‘Take it or leave it. I’ve done more killing in my lifetime than most, and I stopped a while back.’

Davant watched his eyes for a long time, Spike holding his gaze. Suddenly, the human grinned, and Spike sensed this was the first time he’d done that in a long while. ‘I feel happier about leaving you with Katherine now! I hire these awful men and then tell them to be with her….’

Spike leant forward. ‘There have been men before me?’

Davant blushed. ‘Two. They were both found dead. I’m sorry. I thought Joe would have told you that. I didn’t mean to try and trick you.’

‘Silver what’s his name?’

Davant nodded. ‘But you’re better than him—so Joe says.’

‘What does your sister say about all this?’

He looked sad. ‘She doesn’t say much of anything.’

‘Oh.’

‘Grief’s a strangely powerful emotion.’

‘Tell me about it.’ 

‘Have you ever lost anyone?’

Spike smiled bitterly. ‘Funnily enough, when I came here, I lost everyone who matters to me.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry. I—.

Spike waved his hand in dismissal. ‘How’s about I meet your sister?’

The man nodded and rose, glancing at a handsome clock over the mantel. ‘She’ll be just finishing with the Doc. I’ll show you up.’

Spike followed the man up a winding staircase, as elegant as the rest of the house, but now he knew the circumstances, he could see it was looking neglected: dusty, untidy, with man’s clutter of boots, hats, and guns lying around.

They went down a long hallway and paused outside a door.  Davant knocked, and a man called out, ‘Finished! Come away in!’

They stepped in, and Spike slid into the shadows, taking in the scene swiftly. He frowned at what he saw and watched the doctor packing away some fat leeches, carefully easing them into their jar.  

A woman sat in a rocker in the shadows. 

For one moment, Spike had the bizarre thought that she was a vampire, too. She was paler than he was, and sat so still that she appeared dead.  Except for the tiny pinpricks of blood on her arms, where the leeches had taken their fill, there was nothing on her that indicated life.

He watched Davant cross to her and kneel reverently, holding her hand. The scene was so familiar—a young man kneeling in worship to a women, the clothes, the décor of the room—that he reeled. He almost put a hand to his eye as if he could feel the damn worm-stone working its way around his skull again, pulling memories from his head.

The doctor left, and Davant turned to Spike to introduce him.  The woman lifted listless eyes to his but did not speak.  

‘He’ll start tonight, my dear. Perhaps you could take a walk around the home paddocks in the cool evening air. Spike doesn’t like to go out in the sun—like you—so he’ll guard….’

‘Spike?’ Her voice was like a soft wind: utterly arid.

Spike came forward a little and for some reason said, ‘It’s actually William, Ma’am.’

She smiled, and it illuminated her fragile features. ‘William. That’s pretty.’

Spike nodded and left, waiting for the man in the hallway.  They went slowly down the stairs together, Spike giving him the occasional, puzzled glance. Finally, the young man turned to him with a smile and said, ‘What?’

Spike frowned and hesitated, but Tom laid a hand on his arm. ‘What, William?’

‘Why was the doctor bleeding her?’

Tom looked surprised but answered swiftly, ‘He said it’s the best cure for grief. She was hysterical, and in her condition he was afraid….’

Spike scratched his face. ‘Look, I’m no doctor, Tom, but there is one thing I know a bit about, and that’s blood.’ He twitched up his eyebrows and deliberately obscuring the issue added, ‘It’s my line of work, so to speak.’

‘Blood?’

‘Yeah, your sister’s anaemic. The last thing she needs is to lose more blood.’

The man looked angry suddenly. ‘I’ve never heard of this… anaemic. The doctor said….’

‘I don’t give a fuck what some ancient quack from the nineteenth century said. Does she tire easily?’

‘Well, yes, she can hardly….’

‘Does her heart pound…?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is she short of breath?’

‘Yes.’

‘She needs iron, Tom.’

‘Iron. Iron? What do you mean? Iron ore…?’

Spike frowned. ‘Do you slaughter your own meat on the ranch?’

‘Of course.’

‘Do you trust me?’

The question came so out of the blue that the man said simply, ‘Yes. I think I do.’

Spike smiled. ‘Okay. When it’s dark, show me. Get rid of the fucking quack, and let me help her?’

‘The blood expert….’

Spike poked him affectionately. ‘Well, I am one of those creatures… what did you call them? Vampyres….’

Tom laughed. ‘Come on, I’ll show you your room.  Where’s your bag?’

‘Bag. Oh, yeah. I kinda left in a hurry—didn’t have time to pack.’  Tom pushed open a door at the end of the bottom hallway to a small room with an equally small bed.  

Spike went in and said idly, ‘Can I take a shower?’

Davant hesitated. ‘I guess. If we have one…. Take it where? What is it?’

Spike turned. ‘Uh huh. Can I have a bowl of hot water?’

The man smiled. ‘I’ll get Maria to bring you some.’

Spike flung himself onto his cot and lit a cigarette.  When the woman arrived he handed her his shirt. ‘Any chance I could get this washed?’

She took it without protest, and Spike lay down and closed his eyes. He could hardly remember L.A. If felt as if he’d been here all his life, as if somehow his life had just taken a hundred and twenty four year leap, from here to here without the in-between.

Tears pricked his eyes, and he let them flow. 

Missing L.A. was hard.

Angel went down to the lab at the end of the day, expecting results. He was disappointed. Wesley had made no progress with the strange object.

The sense of contrast—coming down here expecting Spike to be back with him in a few moments compared with this complete lack of progress—made Angel draw in on himself. He folded his arms, his brow lowering, his thoughts shut away from his audience.

Wesley went through all the things he had found out; he outlined the avenues he intended to follow, and then he began to postulate some of his own theories.

He didn’t even get what Angel was doing until it was too late. 

Before he could try and stop him, Angel looked through one of the faces.

Chapter 4

The slaughter hut was some way from the house, over a small rise.

Davant stood with his arms folded, watching Spike looking around until Spike turned and said, ‘You need to leave me to do this thing. You need to trust me.’

Tom pouted but turned. ‘You know the way back.’

Left alone in the house of blood, Spike fell to his knees with heady pleasure at the sense of anticipation.

Blood from the kill that day—a large, plump steer—lay in buckets under the table.  He knelt and lapped at it, long licks of the sticky, red fluid. It was almost off, but not enough to spoil the pleasure.  He’d forgotten what blood in the raw (blood not out of hygienic plastic bags) could taste like.  It was almost more natural, made him feel less demon, even though he knelt with his face in the blood.

When he was full, he began on his other task. He extracted the fresh liver from the steer, and using a butcher’s knife, minced it meticulously. He scrapped the raw mince into a cup and diluted it with some of the blood. It was incredibly tempting to him, but he had a very strong feeling that Katherine wouldn’t think so.  He smiled ruefully at himself but was kinda enjoying this odd role-reversal.

He carried his precious load back to the house and went to the kitchen for a rummage in the spice cupboard. He often added things to his blood for the fun of it, and thought maybe she’d like her raw liver with cinnamon, or maybe just some sugar and nutmeg.

He tried a few things then carried the mug up the stairs.

He knocked softly.

‘Come in.’

She was in the same chair. She had clearly not moved from that chair for some time.

He came closer.

‘Katherine.’

Her eyes flashed, and he smiled inwardly. There was some fight there still.  

‘I’d rather you didn’t call me that. It’s Mrs Caruthers.’

‘Well, you and me are gonna get pretty well acquainted over the next few days, and as I’ve been hired to risk my life for you, I think that gives me the right to call you want I damn well like.’

She sat up more in the chair. ‘Will you leave please?’ He wondered, from her expression, if she had ever heard a man curse before.

‘So, you’re just gonna let that baby die, are you? Do you want a dead baby inside you?’

She reddened, a tiny flush of high colour on her porcelain white cheeks. ‘Get out! How dare you speak of such things to….’

Spike went up to her and knelt in front of her. ‘I dare because you need to—to dare. You need to get out of this damn chair and fight for your life. Life is precious, Katherine.’

‘What do you know about…?’

‘About life? I’m something of an expert on that, too. There’s a whole world of it beyond this place, Katherine. Shall I tell you about life—what will come soon if you choose life, what you will give to you baby if you choose life…. You’ll be able to fly back to England in a few hours, maybe, or the little ‘un will. You’ll be able to pick up a tiny box and speak to him even though he’s miles away. You’ll see women get the vote, work just like men, wear trousers. Your son will see a man walk on the moon.  If you sit there and die, Katherine, none of that will come true for you. And hey, you’ll miss TV, and that’s really worth waiting for.’

‘What are you?’

Spike laughed. ‘What are you?’

She smiled, frowning at the same time. ‘I just feel so tired.’

‘Your blood needs something, Katherine, like a plant needs water. You’ve been starving your blood of what it needs. If you have it, you’ll bloom just like a plant. Have you seen a desert bloom in spring?’

She smiled. ‘It’s the thing I love the most about my new country.’

‘Your baby’s blood is your blood. He’s getting your starved blood. You’re starving him.’

‘Oh, God, the doctor said….’

‘Katherine, Tom trusts me.’

For the first time, she gave him a look that made him start. She nodded ruefully. ‘Tom would.’ When she saw his look, she added, amused, ‘Tom is easily impressed with… men. I suspect with someone who looks like you, he would be quite easy to persuade.’

Spike laughed. ‘And I haven’t even told him about TV!’

She laughed, too. ‘What do I have to do—to feed my baby?’

He brought out the mug. ‘You have to drink this.’ He saw her look of horror and disgust and added pointedly, ‘What sort of mother are you going to be, Katherine? It’s time to decide if you dare. My Mum gave her life for me, in a way; is your son worth less to you?’

She took the mug, put it to her lips, said faintly, ‘Oh, God help me,’ and began to drink. He actually had to slow her down, so she wouldn’t vomit it up.

When she was done, he had a long glass of water ready for her.  She drank that greedily as well.  He nodded. ‘Good. Now you just have to do that every day for a week.’

She fell back against the chair, and he made to leave, but she put a hand on his arm. ‘Stay, sit with me, please. I would like to… tell me more about living. I think I’d rather like to live in that place you speak of.’

Spike found himself talking about his life in L.A. He knew she would understand little of what he was saying, not having a common language to describe the things he spoke of, but when he’d finished she was smiling.  ‘I think your father will be missing you.’

‘Huh!’ He rose, agitated.  

She chuckled merrily. ‘You spoke of him more than anything else—this Angel, who made you.’

‘Oh, well, yeah.’

‘Do you miss him?’

Spike kept his face neutral. ‘We argued all the time. I’m not missing that, and I guess he’s not either.’

‘All sons argue with their fathers. It’s natural. Tom did not get on with our father.’

‘Angel isn’t exactly my…. I mean, he’s more like…. How are you feeling?’

‘I’m very tired.’

‘Okay, tomorrow—same time, same place.’ 

She smiled. ‘Yes. What will you do now?’

‘I’m not sure. I guess I sit outside and look menacing.’

‘Two men have already died for me.’

He made a wry face. ‘I can’t die, remember? I’ve got too much life running through my veins.’

‘From this place called L.A.?’

‘’Xactly.’

He left, wondering who’d been healed more that evening.

He sat out on the veranda and every so often got up and walked around.  It was pretty boring. By the time the sun came up, and he was relieved by a man who had strolled sleepily out of the bunkhouse, he was ready for sleep himself. 

After three weeks, Katherine was walking with him every night, sometimes up to four or five miles. She’d begun to recover after the first week, by the second she was singing and pottering around the house, her face always bright and wreathed with smiles and by the third, she craved her night walks with Spike. They talked about her husband and about Angel. If Spike found this incongruous, he didn’t examine it too closely. She enjoyed hearing his (watered-down) tales of their exploits together, and she clearly needed to talk about her husband.

Toward the end of the third week, when they both least expected it, they were rounding a small depression in the ground when Spike suddenly drew a gun and shot into the dark.  She screamed and sat down, the extreme speed and violence of his actions making her legs collapse in shock.  He took her arm and hurried her away. In the morning, they found a man, rifle still in his hands, a bullet hole through one eye.

Katherine’s account of what had happened—the darkness, that she had heard nothing, the speed with which Spike reacted—combined with the deadly accuracy of his shot stunned the men on the ranch. The body was laid out for longer than it would normally have been so they could come again and again to view the hole, which once had been an eye. Men brought up to respect only those who could shoot were now in awe of Spike. The odd clothes and hair, the even stranger way of talking, the fact that he did not seem to know how to actually clean his weapons and had had to be shown—these were all forgotten. They told stories of him around the bunkhouse at night, each one adding something more outlandish than the last.

Tom and Katherine already adored him, each in their own way, so this new facet of his personality—that he was a killer—made little difference. It only made them want him more.

Spike was ambivalent about the killing. He’d acted on instinct, out of his fierce protectiveness for Katherine, but he wasn’t entirely sure that the man had needed killing.  When he saw the body and examined the area the following night, it seemed to him that unless the man was a great deal more skilful than his rough, cowpoke appearance indicated, he would not have been able to see or hit Katherine at the distance he had chosen to lie.

It disturbed him, but he did not speak of this to Katherine or Tom. 

He was not unaware of the adoration they both felt for him and was also very aware of the different provenance of these feelings. Katherine valued an intelligent confidant. Tom wanted something quite different. 

Spike had first become aware of Tom’s feelings for him the day after he’d persuaded Katherine to take the blood tonic. Over the following few days, the young man sought him out, often sitting on the edge of his cot as he rested, talking, usually about England and books, two things Spike found it easy to listen to.  It had amused him at first, when it was harmless hero worship. When it turned more intense, when Tom began to get argumentative, when he began to criticise and provoke a reaction from Spike whenever he could, it had alarmed him. Not because he couldn’t handle the arguments, he could, giving better than he got and getting provoked and angry himself, but because he saw in this relationship another one playing out.

Somehow, he had taken Angel’s role, and Tom had taken his. And this alarmed him greatly, for all Tom’s intensity came from repressed desires. Tom provoking him to argue was Tom wanting to touch his skin. Tom shouting at him in frustration was Tom wanting to kiss. Tom storming out was Tom wanting to stay: in his bed, in his heart.  He saw all this from the benefit of his hundred years and from living in an age when such desires are commonplace, unlike Tom, who was all confusion, all repression, all lack of self-awareness.  

Spike had no intention of letting this thing with his host develop, but he didn’t stop it. He let it happen because it was illuminating dark recesses of his own.  As he had begun to believe that he would not return to his old life in L.A.—how could he?—it didn’t seem to him that it mattered if he finally tried to untangle his relationship with Angel. Unless he sought Angelus out, which he supposed he could do, they would never meet again. He had the luxury now of allowing himself to think all day about Angel and what could have been, perhaps what already was beneath the arguments, the sniping, and the constant, soul-draining hatred.

So he allowed Tom’s confused attentions because they helped his confusion. 

They made a tight-knit group: Tom, Katherine, and their vampire protector.

Something of a holiday atmosphere pervaded the ranch after Spike’s killing of the hired gun. Everyone felt that it marked the end of the trouble—that the Caruthers brothers would now back off and leave Katherine alone. Spike didn’t. He thought it was just the beginning. He was more alert, discouraged the night time walks and found himself going out alone. He wouldn’t have called it hunting, but he knew that it was.

He was the least surprised, therefore, the least upset when one of the men announced that the Caruthers’ had a new gun. A good one.  The man glanced at Spike and repeated, awed, ‘A very good one.’

Spike shrugged and went back to the game of poker he was playing.  

The small, local town, Dry Gulch, which had grown up to service the three large ranches in the area, was smaller than Molina, only boasting a saloon, a whorehouse (which was the back room of the saloon and one aging whore), and a small church, which was never used and now doubled as a general mercantile run on the lines of a co-operative between the ranchers. When Spike had a night off, which he did once in a while, he went there to drink—to forget and to remember.

Tom now became very wary of him going. Possessiveness, which had shown in a dislike of him going, now became positively manic. After a particularly bad fight, he forbade Spike to leave the ranch. Spike knew the boy was scared—scared that he would get killed by this mythical gun who was better than him—but this didn’t lessen his anger toward the young man. All the good work that he had done with Katherine began to unravel, as she picked up on the tension and came to believe that not only were she and the baby in danger, but that Spike was soon to die, as well.

All of this led Spike to make an uncharacteristic decision. He decided to kill the stranger, the new gun, even before he proved a threat to his new family. How could it be murder if this man was already dead?—albeit in his time, but Spike wasn’t in the mood for being pedantic.

He had heard that the Caruthers went to Dry Gulch on the first Sunday in the month to stock up, drink, and do whatever else men needed to do.

The following Sunday, he determined to join them.

Somehow, word got out.  The boys from the ranch were noticeably absent on the preceding Saturday night, all having made their way to Dry Gulch for the show.

Spike didn’t tell Tom or Katherine what he was going to do, but he knew they knew.  He left on Saturday, too, so he could travel safely.  

Tom intercepted him half way down the dirt track, a dark figure looming in front of him, horse rearing.  

Spike held his horse still (it was all he could do yet beside walk it: walk, stand still—he reckoned he was becoming pretty proficient on the bloody animals).

‘Don’t do this.’

Spike hooked one leg around the saddle horn and lit a cigarette, watching Tom through narrowed eyes.  ‘I’m not gonna get killed; you know that.’

‘No! I don’t know that! This man is fast. They say two years back he took out an entire posse, without taking a hit himself. He’s shot three men in cold blood. Please, Will, don’t go.’

Spike kicked his horse closer, and wanting the company, the horses nuzzled together, forcing the men close, legs brushing.  ‘I’m coming back. I promise.’

‘And then what?’ Tom’s face flushed in the soft evening light. ‘You don’t—. I mean, I—.’

‘Go back and keep Katherine company, Pet. An’ I’ll see you just after sunset tomorrow.’

He nudged his horse past Tom’s and didn’t look back. He’d not seen his own reflection for a long time, but he reckoned that too often recently in L.A., his expression would have looked like Tom Devant’s did now.

He rode into town and made his way to the saloon. He didn’t expect the Caruthers until midday the next day. He didn’t want to drink and wondered what he was supposed to do to fill the void. The saloon was full of cowpokes from all the surrounding ranches, so he veered off before they saw him and went back to the stable where he’d left the horse. Even that was packed, but at least the patrons weren’t all talking about him.  He made himself comfortable on the straw and closed his eyes.

He played the small scene with Tom back in his mind. He’d let it go on too long. He had to decide what to do before he went back the next day. The obvious thing was to stop it now, tell the boy that he wasn’t interested. Something held him back from making this decision, and when he thought honestly enough, he knew it wasn’t only for Tom’s sake.  He could not now deny that he got a charge out of their sparring, particularly this last time when Tom had tried to lay down the law. That had given him a real charge. He’d been tempted to make the boy make him stay.  He desperately needed the physicality of fighting. He drifted to one of his favourite memories: the sounds and feel of his fight with Angel for the Cup of Perpetual Torment. Grunts, cries, moans, touch of leather on skin—it had been better than sex. It worked like the memory of sex now.  He hardened in his pants and put his hand down to stroke the swelling through the tight leather.  They’d both been hard then, and they’d both known it.  

He was almost glad he wasn’t going back to L.A., back to his own life. He wasn’t sure that having come this far, having understood these things about himself, he wanted to go back and resume a relationship which would now bring him nothing but pain. He’d been there before with Buffy: that desperate worship of her from afar. He knew the pain of such abortive need. He still felt the sting of her words, the look she’d given him. William. It was amazing he could use that name and still feel a sense of fondness for the person who had once been William. He snorted. Was William now—somewhere in an over-furnished house in London. 

His erection subsided to an ache of loneliness.

He dozed, waiting for the sun to come up, waiting for the sound of horses.

He woke in early dawn and squinted out of a gap in one of the planks. Four men were riding down the street toward the saloon, one in front and three behind. He recognised the three as the Caruthers brothers from a photograph of Katherine’s; the other he saw only as a dark shadow. 

He slipped out of the stable, dusting down his coat, adjusting his guns.  He couldn’t remember if they were loaded, assumed they were, but knew technically it wouldn’t matter. He’d win whatever.

He sauntered to the middle of the street and watched the men dismount. He didn’t get why they were here so early. For a moment, he wondered if they had heard he was here waiting for them—that they might have come at this hour to avoid him. This puzzled him, so he decided they were trying to catch him still asleep—it made him feel better about the killing.

Spike swept his coat behind his gun (he’d practiced this once or twice, just for affect, just to pass the long nights), and shouted, ‘Caruthers!’

Men began to tumble eagerly out of the saloon, an audience of severe hangovers forming on the porch.

The eldest brother turned and stumbled against his horse when he saw Spike standing in the street.  

Spike nodded. ‘I hear you’ve hired yourself a new….’

The dark figure that had led them into town suddenly pushed past the horses, which were nervously skittering with all the unexpected tension.

Spike braced, the predator in him keening with delight.

The figure began to run.

Spike frowned, and his hand fell away from his gun.  

It was still very dark, dawn hardly making an inroad on the shadows, but Spike began to run, too.  They met in the middle of the road and embraced. They weren’t sure what they embraced as, but it surely wasn’t as men about to kill one another.

Spike felt himself melt with pleasure.

Angel thought for a moment he could hear Spike’s heartbeat. 

He only said, ‘Let’s get out of view.’

Spike nodded, wiped a sleeve across his eyes and pulled Angel back toward the stable.

‘How did you…?’

‘When did you…?’

‘Why did you…?’

‘Where are you…?’

‘Spike! Me first!’

Spike laughed and nodded. ‘Okay.’

Suddenly Angel couldn’t think of a single question he wanted to ask. He just pulled Spike back for another hug, and this one went on considerably longer than the previous one.  He breathed softly into Spike’s neck, ‘Tell me this was an accident.’

Spike pulled away. ‘Coming here? Looking in that damn cardboard thingy? Of course…. What did you think?’

Angel scratched his ear thoughtlessly.  ‘That you’d decided to leave.’

Spike began to laugh.  He looked at Angel and doubled up, the tension of the last months pouring forth in this sound that was anything but humorous. Finally, Angel grabbed his arms and shook him, and Spike hiccupped to silence. ‘No. I didn’t run away. Not here. Christ, not here. But what are you doing here?’

‘I followed you—to bring you back.’

Spike felt his insides melting with relief. He squared his shoulders. ‘Okay.’

‘Huh?’

‘Let’s go.’

‘Well, I didn’t—. I mean—.’

‘You don’t know how to get back?’ Spike saw in his expression that he didn’t. Instead of blowing up, he tipped his head to one side and said wonderingly, ‘You came after me without waiting to see if we could get back?’

Angel shrugged and glanced toward the door. ‘Shit. Grant’s coming over.’

‘Grant?’

‘Grant Caruthers. I’m working for him.’

Spike didn’t really know why he’d not got this already. He’d been expecting the brothers to ride in with a new gunman—one who was fearful, better than him, they said.  They’d ridden in with Angel, but still he’d not got it.  He did now though and said lamely, ‘You’re the new gun.’

Angel nodded. ‘And you’re the Pale Death.’

‘Huh?’

He smiled, amused suddenly. ‘That’s your new nickname. Did you know? They call you Pale Death.’

Spike shook his head. ‘We need to talk.’

Angel nodded. ‘Is there anywhere? Sunrise is only five minutes.’

Spike nodded. ‘Maybe. How much money you got?’

‘About twenty. I got into a poker game in some dive called Molina and won it off an ugly guy who said he was owed my coat.’

Spike began to laugh. ‘Okay, we’re in funds. Let’s go.’

The whore was reluctant to give them her room, but for twenty dollars, which was more than she had earned in three months the hard way, she changed the sheets, made them some coffee and left them to it. She’d known men like them before. Didn’t bother her if they wanted to stick it in each other. She was making the money, and they were the ones getting fucked for once.

Spike sat on the edge of the surprisingly comfortable bed and gave Angel a sly look. ‘I think we’ve kinda ruined our reputations. We snog in the high street and get a room. Hardly the shoot ‘em dead, badass gunfighters people were expecting….’

Angel seemed distracted, pacing around the room, picking things up and putting them down with no apparent aim. It was taking him a while to overcome his reaction to finding Spike. He’d ridden in with Grant and his brothers early, so they could avoid a meeting with the one they were calling Death. Then he’d heard Spike voice, curling around him like the soft dawn.  He didn’t realise he was running until he’d felt that familiar, slim body in his arms. For a first hug ever it was a good one: warm, intense, reciprocated. 

Forcing himself back to the present, he murmured, ‘We didn’t kiss. Tell me what you’ve been doing since you got here.’

He sat down and leant against the headboard; Spike twisted around and leant against the foot rail. ‘I drifted to this ranch, got hired to protect a woman called Katherine Devant from your employees the Caruthers.  I want to know why you’ve signed on with the devil again, Angel.’

‘Huh?’

‘Caruthers and his brothers. They’ve tried to kill a pregnant woman; hardly the….’

‘Scare off! Not kill! And she’s not pregnant! That’s a tactic she learnt when she was a whore in Bristol!’

‘Huh?’

‘This Katherine is a Kate Devant, who tricked Robert Caruthers into marrying her.  Grant and John and Peter are good guys, Spike. They’re trying to save their ranch—they’ve got families starving!’

They looked at each other, and Spike rolled his eyes. ‘Why can’t people just talk, Angel? Clear the air and get things straight? I kinda thought the last guy they sent wasn’t trying to kill us.’

‘But you blew his brains out anyway!’

‘The two hired guns before me got killed! What was I supposed to think?’

Angel looked annoyed. ‘They were low-life scum who tired to bushwack Peter—shit, Spike, he’s only nineteen. They deserved to die.’

‘Well, yeah. But Katherine is a lady, Angel. She reminds me—. I mean—.’

Angel pouted and plucked the covers. ‘I couldn’t find you. I woke up in some damn goal with this fat guy staring at me.’ 

Spike chuckled. ‘Did you ask him what year it was?’

Angel laughed. ‘Yeah, he didn’t seem too pleased. I wondered why. Then he told me about you—well, he didn’t say you, clearly. But I kinda put two and two together—detective, yeah?’

Spike pouted. ‘Odd hair? Nancy-boy clothes?’

‘He said smart-mouthed English girlie-boy, but I struggled with it and figured it was you.’

‘Girlie-boy?’

Angel shrugged. ‘He said he’d put you on the stage to Red Rock.  I went there. No one remembered you getting off. I fell in with Grant, and the rest is history.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘About a week. It seems longer.’  With a grunt, Angel lifted up and unbuckled his gun belt.  Spike noticed it looked better kept than his, and he took his off as well, letting them drop to the floor.

Angel cursed and picked them up. ‘You’ve got to treat guns with respect! A knock like that and they’ll lose their….’

‘Are you fucking lecturing me again?’

‘Well, you damn well can’t do anything right, Spike!’  Suddenly, in complete contrast to his words, he dropped the guns to the bed and cupped Spike around the back of the neck. ‘I’m sorry.’ His voice was low, his tone uncertain. 

Spike eased back enough to see his eyes.  The feel of Angel’s hand on his neck was the first touch he’d had for over a month. It shot through him like blood: the same kick, the same heady sense of power, the same swelling.  ‘I—.’ He tried again. ‘I was glad to see you, Angel. I’m really glad we found each other.’

Angel flicked his eyes to Spike’s lips as if watching the words to check he was actually hearing them and smiled softly. ‘For all I knew you were looking for Angelus. Maybe you’d think of stopping him… turning William….’

Spike pouted. ‘As if I could do that.’

‘Angelus might have listened to….’

‘I meant stop William—me. I seem to remember stretching my neck and inviting you in.’

‘Angelus.’

The correction killed the growing intimacy of the moment. Spike eased off the bed and poured them both some coffee. ‘So, what now?’

Angel tipped his head back to the wall. ‘I guess we stay alive long enough for Wesley to bring us back.’

‘I meant about this situation we’re in the middle of.’

Angel looked thoughtful. ‘We need to get them all together.’ He glanced toward the blinds. ‘We can’t do anything until tonight. I miss the Wolfram and Hart glass.’

‘I miss hot showers.’

‘Jesus, yes. I miss clean clothes!’

‘Well, I didn’t like to say….’

As if on cue, there was a soft knock at the door and a tiny, elderly Chinese woman shuffled in, her eyes lowered to the floor.  ‘I come Missy clothes.’

Angel swung his legs off the bed and bowed, then spoke to her in fluent Cantonese.  She raised her eyes, and they filled with moisture, her hands wringing together in delight at hearing her own language from a stranger in this strange country.  She was nodding, smiling with delight when suddenly Angel began to strip off his shirt.  

Spike slid nervously off the bed, refusing to regret his utter disinterest in learning this language when he’d had the opportunity.  Angel turned to him, laughing. She does the laundry for “Missy”; she says she’ll do ours!’

‘Oh, fuck.’ Spike stripped off, too, handing the toothless women his T-shirt. Angel had pulled off his pants and wrapped himself in a sheet. He turned to Spike, eying the leather pants and asked the old woman a question. At her reply, he indicated them. ‘She says she’ll do those, too…. Hot sand. At least, I think that’s what she said.’  Spike peeled them off, his back to the room and took the last sheet off the bed.

Wrapped, he turned back and handed them over. The old woman disappeared. 

Angel pouted. ‘I hope I got that right.’

Spike began to laugh. ‘We’re such a fearsome pair of vampires.’ He flung himself onto the bed. ‘I could kill for a hot shower and some shampoo.’

Angel sat gingerly on the other side of the bed, arranging his sheet modestly.  ‘What now?’

Spike realised he’d left his cigarettes in his pants and cursed softly, stretching out and folding his arms under his head.

Angel twisted around on the bed, studying him. ‘When did you get so thin?’

Spike pursed his lips. ‘When I got chipped.’

Angel was silent for some time then he lay very carefully on the far side of the bed, with the largest gap between them he could manage without actually falling off.

Spike smiled inwardly and after some more time had passed asked petulantly, ‘What did we used to do to pass the time?’

Angel raised his eyebrows and said without thinking, ‘We had the girls….’

Spike nodded at this astonishingly badly timed memory—reminding them both, as it did, of the long sex sessions they indulged in with their respective partners to pass the daylight hours.

Spike shifted slightly on the bed, pulling his knees up surreptitiously to tent the sheet draped over his lap.  After a few moments, Angel turned onto his belly, appearing to find it hard to get comfortable.

The sunlight burned against the heavy drapes, and the air in the room appeared to shimmer with trapped heat. 

Spike tried to wilt his erection by the force of his will. He bullied his thoughts onto memories that sent blood rushing to his face instead. Giving cunnilingus to a robot was always a good one.  

Something moved in the periphery of his vision. Trying to resist, he swivelled his eyes to watch a single bead of sweat run between Angel’s naked shoulder blades.  It seemed to take forever to traverse the smooth skin. Spike’s mouth watered; he could taste a salty residue as if he’d put his tongue to the glistening flesh.  A vice of need closed around his balls.  

He lifted the sheet and stared forlornly at his erection.  It had pushed obscenely from the foreskin, pulses of clear fluid dribbling down the deep red tip, gathering in the paler folds.  An orgasm was so close that it trod on his thoughts, tangling in them.  

He wondered if Angel was asleep and turned his head to the silent figure.

At the same moment, Angel’s hand snaked back to scratch a thigh.  He pushed his hand under the sheet, which tented it. Spike had a perfect view down the tunnel of white cotton to Angel’s hard, tight buttocks. 

A knock on the door made them both jump.  

Spike’s erection was so noticeable he slid off the bed and went to stand alongside the window, staring out.

Angel called out cautiously, and sat up, swathing himself in sheet.  

Two young Chinese girls came in, struggling with a hipbath. They bowed then disappeared only to return with kettles of boiling water. In a little chain gang, they arrived and departed, arrived and departed. Finally, they bowed and retreated.

Spike had gained some self-control, and with the sheet suitably bunched around his waist, he came closer and drifted his hand through the water.  Angel came up, too. They suddenly looked at each other, and Spike narrowed his eyes. ‘I’m not taking seconds from you.’

Angel narrowed his, too. ‘I’m the one who spoke the damn language!’

Spike pursed his lips. ‘I’m cleaner than you.’

Angel laughed. ‘I’ve only been here a week. Have you smelt yourself?’

‘Okay, draw straws.’

Angel looked sly and Spike added, ‘I’ll hold them.’

They found some ribbons; Spike held them in his fist; Angel selected and won.  

Spike turned away, for more reasons than he was pissed off at losing, and listened to the sound of flesh sinking into warmth.

Angel made suitably loud sounds of satisfaction: humming, dropping the soap and finding it elaborately. 

Spike shook his head in disbelief and turned, saying with a sudden surge of affection, ‘And you’re how old, Angel?’

‘Yeah, well, this water is just so….’ (Faint sigh of satisfaction) ‘Hot.’

When Angel realised that Spike had turned to watch, he glanced across. A look passed between them that made Spike shudder—as if someone were walking over his grave. He would have called it déjà vu except that it possibly was happening now, somewhere in England. He’d had a vivid memory of Angelus taking just such as bath, and turning to him as he sat on a bed, waiting his turn—always waiting his turn—and Angelus had said, ‘Wash my back, Will.’

Angel turned back and continued washing one leg thoughtfully. Spike would have said he’d not felt the moment that had passed between them, expect he suddenly asked softly, ‘Where did we go wrong, Will?’

Still lost in his memories, Spike started and replied before he’d had time to form a more subtle response. ‘You saw the light. I remind you too much of when you were Angelus.’

Angel switched to his other leg, clearly pondering this and eventually replied, ‘When I first had my soul and when we met again in Sunnydale, I guess you’re right. But it’s never been so… bad… has it? I mean—.’ He frowned. ‘Why all the antagonism now? Now we’re kinda on the same side.’

‘Maybe that’s why.  Maybe the world is only big enough for one souled vampire.’

‘Well, we’ve never really put getting some distance to the test…. You’ve not only stayed in America and in L.A., but in Wolfram and Hart. We’re sharing a very small space.’

‘And now, we’re gonna share even closer. Get outta the bloody bath. It’s my turn.’

Angel grinned and rose, his back to Spike, reaching for a towel.

Water glistened on his smooth, firm muscles. When he shook, tiny beads of crystal flicked off of his hair and caught the light. 

Spike sucked in his breath, tried to suck in other things, and slid beneath the fortunately soap-murky water.

When Spike emerged from his underwater retreat, Angel was sitting on the bed, cleaning his guns.  Spike flicked the water from his eyes and watched, intrigued. Everything was laid out—rags, oil, pull-through—as if his life really did depend on them working just so.  He huffed and began to scrub at his skin, examining everything minutely. ‘What’s the plan then?’

Angel looked up. ‘I’m coming back with you tonight. I want to meet them.’

‘Why? Don’t you believe me?’

‘It’s not that. I need for Grant to believe me, and he won’t unless I can say I’ve seen them—spoken to them.’

Spike shrugged. ‘Whatever.’

Angel went back to cleaning his guns, testing them, constantly trying the action to make sure it was just right. Spike took his jewellery off and tried to dig the dirt out of it.

Angel glanced up.  ‘How have you fed?’

‘You don’t wanna know.’

Angel smiled, seemed satisfied at last with his guns and slid them into the holster.  

After a light knock, the old woman returned their clothes. Angel tried to pay her, but she would accept nothing.  He bowed, she returned it and slipped out.  Angel pulled on his pants with a sigh of satisfaction.  He glanced at Spike. ‘You’re going soggy. I need to speak with Grant—explain… tell him the plan.’ He pulled on his shirt. ‘What are you going to do?’

Spike slid under the water, and that was all the reply Angel got.

They rode edgily side-by-side toward the ranch.  It was a clearly visible track, but even so, riding at night wasn’t easy. The horses spooked at noises and shadows. Neither of them very proficient horsemen, they didn’t attempt to speak, concentrating instead on the ground and on staying in their saddles.

Eventually, the house came in sight. Spike felt absurdly as if he were coming home, an impression helped by the figure that flew from the house and embraced him as he dismounted. It was the embrace of a brother who had sorely missed his sibling; it was the embrace of a father for a recalcitrant child that had returned; but more importantly, it was the embrace of a lover, declaring this for the first time. 

Spike had genuinely forgotten Tom—forgotten his anxiety the night before, forgotten the intensity between them over the last few weeks.  The hug was the last thing he would have wanted Angel to see, but as he was hugged, a flash of them hugging came into his mind—a dawn-soaked street, a dark shadow running toward him. His relief at having Angel once more at his side in this strange world made him hug back more fiercely than he meant to. They pulled apart, laughing, and Spike turned to Angel to make introductions.  His words dried on his tongue. Angel’s expression, for an instant, was pure Angelus. Spike didn’t want to use the term evil, but it sprang unbidden to his mind.  

‘Angel?’ He put a hand on Tom’s arm. ‘This is Tom—Tom Devant.’ He turned to the human and tried a reassuring grin. ‘This is the guy I went to kill—wait!’ He held the furious man’s arms tightly to his side. ‘He’s an old… acquaintance… of mine.’ 

‘Acquaintance?’

Spike turned back to Angel, puzzled by something he heard in his cold question.  He faltered. He hadn’t wanted to say friend in case he inflamed Tom’s ire more. But clearly, Angel was more than an acquaintance—but he thought Angel would have worked this out for himself.  This wasn’t the time or the place to placate wounded sire feelings—if that’s what they were—so he only finished lamely, ‘This is Angel, and he’s here to talk about the Caruthers.’

‘I don’t want….’

‘Tom, please, trust me on this.  He’s a….’ He had been going to take the opportunity to slip in the word friend, but he felt waves of antipathy surfing off the dark figure, so said, ‘He’s trustworthy,’ instead.

Tom glanced up to one of the windows in the house. ‘You’d best come in.’

Spike chatted as they went to the living room, asking about Katherine, clearly at home, a fact that he saw was not lost upon Angel.  When he saw the other two make a stab at conversation, he thought it would be easier if he left them. He was starving, anyway, and went to feed.

When he retuned, the ice had thawed somewhat. Tom had agreed to a meeting. Angel had agreed to deliver the message.

Tom said he had to have Katherine’s agreement and went up to speak with her, leaving Spike and Angel alone in the living room

Spike crouched in front of a welcome fire; it was oddly cold in the desert at night, and getting noticeably chillier as the month had gone on.  ‘I’ll show you where some blood….’

‘What the fuck’s been going on here?’

Spike turned, losing his balance slightly. ‘Huh?’

‘Since when do you have huggie-feelie sessions with men, Spike? Never took you to be a freaking fa….’

‘What the hell’s business is it of yours?’ This was so not what he meant to say, but Angel didn’t give him a chance to add the denial he’d been going to make. 

‘I’m thinking I wasted my fucking time coming back for you. Seems to me you’re very happy where you are right now! Nice snug little bug in his rug.’

Spike strode to him and thrust his face close. ‘You know? Maybe, I was trying to get away from you. Maybe, I knew what would happen. Maybe, leaving L.A. wasn’t far enough! I had to leave your sodding time to get far enough away from you!’

‘Good! Why don’t you stay here? Stay with your new little fuck-friend! Go up to him now! Maybe he’s beating off to thoughts of you! How does that make you feel?’

‘It makes me feel kinda good. Warm glow, ya know? ‘S nice to be liked. Oh, sorry, you wouldn’t know, would you!’

‘You disgust me.’

‘I know! I know I do! I always sodding have, and I don’t know why! What have I done to disgust you, Angel? I let a boy have a crush on me! And why the hell do you care? Why do you make my life so bloody miserable? Why don’t you SOD OFF!’

Angel pushed him. ‘How much further can I go? I got a fucking soul, and you followed me and got one, too!’

Spike pushed back. ‘I left our sodding time, and you followed me!’

‘Stay away from me!’

Spike backed off, nodding furiously. He turned and went back to the fire, and when Tom came in, smiling, holding his sister’s arm, to all intents and purposes, nothing had changed in the room.

‘Angel, I’d like you to meet my sister, Katherine.’

Angel rallied enough to remember his innate good manners and nodded at her.  At her reaction to him he frowned, and she laughed lightly, laying a hand on his arm. ‘I’m sorry, do forgive me, only….’ She smiled so fondly at Spike’s back that for one moment he wondered which one of the siblings Spike had been sleeping with. ‘William told me so much about you, and I was expecting you to be quite old and grey!’

Angel licked his lips. ‘Grey?’

‘Well… being his….’ She laughed at her own foolishness. ‘Father… which, clearly you’re not! William, shame on you! Tom—help me out; I’m afraid I’ve embarrassed our guest.’

Tom only smiled fondly at her and nodded. ‘Come, back to bed, my dear.’

Angel intercepted them. ‘I’ll go speak with Grant now.’

Tom looked surprised. ‘I thought you were going to go just before dawn. I meant what I said, Angel: you are welcome to spend the….’

‘No. I’ll go now.’

Tom glanced at Spike, but the crouching figure did not turn from the fire.  He nodded graciously at Angel. ‘Until tomorrow then.’

Angel nodded and left without looking back.

As soon as the sound of the horse faded, Spike went out into the night. He needed to walk. He needed to run. He needed something he wasn’t going to find in the house. It sometimes seemed to him that he would never find it.

Chapter 5

Angel rode back the following evening with three men flanking him.  They all looked grim, determined and reined in hard and fast, dismounting with an unnecessary amount of dust. 

Angel jogged up onto the porch, and Tom met him just inside the door.  Angel nodded back at the men. ‘I guess you know them.’ 

Tom’s lips were clamped firmly together, but he looked squarely at the oldest brother. ‘Leave your guns on the porch and come inside.’

The man looked about to argue, but Tom added honestly, ‘This is a home, Grant.’

Something in this simplicity seemed to appeal to the man, and he nodded at his brothers. They shed their weapons and followed Tom into the house.

Angel sat on the railing of the porch, staring out into the night. He heard laughter from the bunkhouse, voices: sounds he was coming to associate with life on a ranch.  A figure emerged from the light and began to walk slowly across the yard. He was unmistakable, his blond hair so incongruous in this world of the natural. 

Angel averted his eyes.

Spike saw the horses first then Angel. He jogged up the steps straight past him and went into the house.

Angel cursed, swung his leg off the railing and went in, too. 

The meeting was being held around the dining room table.  Angel didn’t know what he had expected; soft laughter was certainly surprising. Katherine was sitting at the head of the table, one hand on her considerable bump, one on a newspaper clipping.  She was listening intently to Grant, her eyes shining, and when Angel glanced at the paper, as he made his way to an inconspicuous armchair by the fire, he saw that it was an obituary.

He wondered where Spike had gone, and assumed he had a room of his own in this house. Then he wondered if he didn’t and glanced evilly at Tom Devant.  With considerable amusement, he saw that Tom was talking to the youngest Caruthers brother, Pete, with equal intensity and apparent enjoyment as his sister was speaking with Grant. The body language was unmistakable.  He wished Spike would come in and see the developing intimacy.  Then he heard Spike’s angry question in his head once more: What the hell’s business is it of yours?

Spike was right: what he did was none of Angel’s business.  Angel tried to imagine what he would say if Spike spoke of Nina, if Spike dared to tell him that seeing her was wrong. But this was different. Nina was normal—given she was a werewolf. Tom wasn’t normal. Not for Spike, anyway. Angel couldn’t stop the images in his head. What had they done? Had they touched? Fingers entwining? 

He shook his head. He was seeing phantoms of a relationship that in all probability was nothing more than Spike said it was and was none of his business anyway. 

The meeting broke up surprisingly quickly.  Angel listened half-heartedly to the newfound family solidarity. He felt disassociated, disconnected to the action in the room, which had become, albeit for a short time, the centre of his world. He liked Grant. He’d got to know the younger boys, too. But now they were… past. He saw them as shadows moving in a world that no longer existed for him. He had to get home. He had to get Spike home. The problem was, he was fairly sure that Spike did not feel this as strongly as he did, and for many reasons. He refused to examine the reasons why Spike did not want to come home. 

He went to look for him and found him in a small room at the back of the house, stretched out on the bed, staring intently at something on the ceiling. Angel couldn’t see anything there, so only said, ‘Time to go. It’s all been sorted.’

Spike didn’t appear to hear him. ‘Spike! Time to go.’

Spike swung his legs off the bed. ‘I’m going on alone, Angel.’

‘Huh?’

Spike pushed past. ‘You heard.’

Angel was about to catch his arm and detain him, about to force some sense into him, when Tom appeared in the doorway.  Spike turned sharply to Angel. ‘Do you mind? This is private.’ He stood to one side, waiting for one to enter, one to leave.

Angel could think of no reason not to do as ordered, so as much as it rankled, he stepped out.  Tom brushed past him, and Spike slammed the door.

Tom sensed something was wrong and glanced back at the closed door, frowning. Spike saw the look. ‘What?’

‘He seems nothing like you described him.’

Spike knew this was true. He’d spoken of an Angel that only existed in his head: brave, noble, loving, his.  None of this was true in reality—not his version of it anyway. Perhaps Angel was these things to other people; perhaps that was his secret: he kept his corrupting portrait for his childe alone, venting all this bitterness and anger on Spike so it wouldn’t poison his relationships with other people.

Once, Spike would have been willing to take on this role (he’d done it for Buffy, taking enough of her self-hatred onto his shoulders to last even his considerable lifetime). Not now though. Now, he had more self-worth.

He turned to the boy and cupped his face. ‘I have to go now. The time’s come. I always said it would. I never meant to stay this long.’

Tom was clearly trying to be brave, and Spike gave him kudos for this. ‘Will you ever come back?’

Spike quirked up a lip. ‘I’ll tell you what, Pet, if I can’t get back to my own place, I’ll come back and annoy you some more.’

‘You saved Katherine’s life; we’ll never forget that.’

Spike shook his head. ‘I’ve told you, Luv, he wasn’t aiming at….’

‘By giving her the blood, William.’

Spike smiled, amused by this thought. ‘I’ll go up say goodbye—if she’s still up.’

‘She’d never forgive you if you didn’t.’

Angel waited on the porch for an hour, thinking Spike was with the boy.  When Spike finally emerged, an arm around the human, talking softly about a baby that was going, apparently, to be called William, Angel bit back his anger and stood. ‘Ready?’

Spike totally ignored him and walked with the boy toward the barn.  They came out together after a moment, Spike leading his horse.  Angel led his closer and hung around, feeling furiously redundant as he watched the parting.

The boy stayed brave until the very end, until Spike swung into his saddle. Only then did he catch hold of his leg and say a stream of things in a very quiet voice. Angel caught a few words, but he was more interested in Spike’s reaction.  

Spike climbed off again, caught the boy’s face in both hands and kissed him, open-mouthed, slowly, fingers combing his hair.  He pulled apart, gave one curt nod, swung into the saddle, and urged the horse into a canter.

Angel didn’t bother to say goodbye. He had a feeling nothing he said would be heard anyway.

Spike had slowed to a walk, and Angel caught him up.  Spike reined in, keeping his eyes on the horizon.  ‘North, south, east or west?’

Angel glanced over, mystified.

Spike clarified softly. ‘You choose one, Angel, and I’ll choose another.’

‘Jesus, Spike, you are so….’

‘Okay, I’m going south then.’  He swung his horse around and left the trail.  Angel swatted his horse’s rump and trotted to catch up. 

‘This is dumb, Spike! Stop….’

Spike reined up once more. ‘No. No more. I don’t want this anymore, Angel. I can’t stand it anymore.’  His voice shook slightly when he said this, but it never occurred to Angel that he was upset about his recent leave-taking. ‘I don’t ever want to see you again. Ever. Not in this time, not in our time, not anywhere.’

Angel circled him, more because his horse had suddenly decided to move to the other side than any conscious decision on his part. He tried to turn it to his advantage, making it appear a deliberate gesture. ‘We need to stick together! I came back to….’

‘Fuck off, Angel. I’m not interested anymore.’  Spike began to walk his horse again.

‘What do you want me to say? Do you want me to say I’m sorry?’

Spike gave him a look. ‘We haven’t got time for you to apologise! We’ve only got two eternities!’

‘Oh, here we go again. I’m to blame for everything bad that’s happened in your life.’

‘No. But you’ve never contributed to anything good.’

Angel was silenced by this for a while.  He noticed though that Spike was no longer fighting his presence and decided he was best off being silent for a while.  They walked slowly along, negotiating with some difficulty the scrub bushes, holes, boulders and other detritus of a rough prairie.  

For the first time, Angel noticed that it was bitterly cold. He wasn’t normally bothered by temperature, one way or the other, but this was beginning to make him shiver. It did nothing to help his mood. He was hungry, too, and his horse’s pumping heart was distracting.

Suddenly, everything was noise and motion.  Spike’s horse shied violently; Spike was thrown and stepped on; the horse shied again at stepping on Spike and then appeared to tip over. It struggled to its feet but fell over again, a fearful screaming splitting the night. 

Angel, slightly stunned by the speed of the disaster, slid off his frightened horse, clinging tightly to the reins.  He went to the fallen horse and winced at the sight of a bone sticking out of its leg.  He tipped his head up and cursed the fates, then felt someone shoving him violently to one side.  Spike had a gun drawn, and he was limping badly.  His face was an unreadable, white mask in the darkness. He tried to catch the thrashing horse’s head, and finally lay on it, calming and reassuring it.  He brought the gun to the soft forelock then looked up at Angel. Angrily, he hissed, ‘Turn yours away then!’

Angel realised he meant the horse and, slightly puzzled, turned its face away.  There was a shot and then blessed silence.

The smell of the fresh blood made Angel salivate.  He turned back to survey the scene.  Spike was removing his saddlebags. He appeared to only have the use of one arm. He flung the bags over his other shoulder with a wince of pain and then began walking.

Angel toed the dead horse, watching the blood, letting Spike get out of sight.

Angel could smell Spike’s blood and caught up with him an hour later.  He nudged his horse closer.  ‘What happened back there?’

‘Rattler.’

‘You okay?’

Spike didn’t reply. 

Angel rode alongside him until their progress was so slow that he dismounted. ‘Get on.’

‘Fuck off.’

‘If you say one more word, Spike, either good or bad, pleasant or unpleasant, I’ll punch you unconscious and sling you across the horse like the sack of shit you are. Get on. And you know what? I really don’t care what you think about that one way or the other.’

Knowing that he had little choice, Spike went up the horse and with some difficulty levered himself into the saddle.  To his considerable ire, Angel swung gracefully up behind him.  Angel laughed. ‘Like I’m gonna walk while you ride.’

They went slightly faster than with Spike walking, but Angel reined the horse back, well aware of their combined weights, needing the horse to pace itself.

‘Where are you injured?’

Angel’s breath tickled hot around Spike’s ear.  He was tempted not to reply but didn’t really have the energy. ‘Dislocated shoulder and knee.’

‘Okay. Those I can fix. We need to stop.’

Spike put a hand on Angel thigh very briefly. ‘It’s an hour from dawn.’

‘It won’t take….’

‘Where are we gonna shelter? We need to push on—there.’ He pointed toward some distant rock formations.

‘Fuck, Spike, one of these days thinking about you is gonna get me killed.’ Angel nudged the horse with his foot to increase its pace, seemingly unaware of the strange confusion created by this even stranger confession.

They reached the rocks just as the sun was beginning to tint them a deep red.  Angel scrambled off and led them into a narrow canyon.  He raked the walls with his eyes, looking for a telltale shadow. Spike suddenly said raggedly, ‘There.’

Angel twisted around to look and saw it: a small slit in the rock face about eight feet up.  He scrambled up, checked it out, fetched Spike and pushed him in.  Quickly, he made a cursory attempt to seal off the end of the canyon with boulders and some up-rooted bushes, unsaddled the horse and joined Spike in the cave. His hair was smoking by the time he got into the dark interior. 

The cave was more of a depression in the rocks.  About eight feet deep and six wide, it was shaped like a mouth, higher at the front, but closing sharply until it was only about two feet high at the back. With the early morning sun behind them, they were able to make full use of the space—Spike lying in the back, Angel a couple of feet away, lying across the entrance. By afternoon, when the sun came round, they knew this would have to change, but they left that distasteful thought until it mattered.

Angel reached in and pulled Spike’s leg closer. ‘This is gonna hurt.’

‘It’s bloody hurting now. Just get on with it.’

Angel popped the kneecap in, forgiving Spike when he lunged out and hit him in the face. He only grimaced, caught hold of Spike’s shoulder and reset that, too.  

Spike went an even paler shade of pale and closed his eyes.  He turned his back to Angel, facing the wall at the back, and withdrew into his own thoughts.

Angel didn’t want to withdraw into his; they were too unpleasant. Eventually, after some considerable internal debate, he said roughly, ‘I’m sorry.’

Spike made no response, so he added, ‘I came back to find you because I need you with me in L.A.’

‘Why?’

That took Angel by surprise. He’d not really meant what he’d said—not exactly, anyway—so being questioned on it threw him. ‘Because you’re a fighter?’

Spike laughed unpleasantly. ‘Good try.’

‘Fuck off.’

Angel went back to surly silence for an hour or so. It was unpleasantly hot. Cold, now hot—he was getting pissed off with this close proximity to nature and missed his hermetically sealed life. He shed his coat, balling it up and putting it under his head.  After a while, Spike did the same.  

‘I need you because I can trust you.’

Spike snapped his head around. Angel looked away, peering out into the increasingly bright day. ‘Happy now?’

‘If you trust me so much, why can’t you just… trust me?’

Angel knew he was referring to the childish rant about Tom Devant.  He pouted. ‘I—.’ He stopped, regrouped and said faintly, ‘You surprise me sometimes, that’s all. You and Buffy…. She saw something in you…. Then this. I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do.’

Spike rolled over so he was facing him. ‘Why do you have to do anything?’

Angel continued to stare out at the light. ‘Feel then. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to feel.’

‘Why do you have to feel anything?’

‘Are you going to answer everything with another question?’

‘Are you going to say anything else dumb?’

Angel smiled faintly and rolled onto his back. ‘I’m sorry. Okay? We have to stick together, and we have to get out of this. We can’t afford to fight each other here. There’s enough else tryin’ to kill us, I reckon.’

‘What did you just say?’ Spike’s voice was suddenly amused, affectionate once more. 

Angel was so glad to hear this he couldn’t work out what Spike meant, until in uncanny mimicry, Spike drawled, ‘There’s enough else tryin’ to kill us, pardner, I reckon, Gawdammit!’

Angel laughed softly. ‘Yeah, well.’

After a while of relatively companionable silence, Spike said, ‘Can you see the horse?’  

Angel shook his head.  ‘We were lucky to find this.’ He turned his head, studying Spike, who was drawing pictures on the roof with one finger. ‘If we hadn’t found this cave, what would you have done?’

‘Huh?’

‘You have to think about things, Spike—out here. Everything is hostile to the likes of us here. What would you do if the sun came up and you were caught out on the plain?’

Spike turned his head lazily. ‘Do I have to raise my hand if I think I know the answer, Miss?’

‘Just answer the Goddamned question, will you?’

‘I dunno! Sheesh. I’d dig a hole, course.’

‘No! See! That’s why you need me. You don’t think things through! That’s how they cook chicken out here! It’s so hot if you roll one in mud it cooks.’

‘No it bloody doesn’t. ‘Sides, who said anything ‘bout mud? I said sand.’

‘No you didn’t.’

‘So, all wise sire. Where would you hide?’

Angel smiled, hoping for this cue. He said smugly, ‘I’d kill the horse and climb into its belly.’

Spike sat up in such a hurry he cracked his head on the roof. When he’d recovered, still bleeding, he said between gritted teeth, ‘That’s the dumbest, the most stupid thing you’ve ever said Angel! How ya gonna fit in there?’

‘Jesus, Spike! It’d be plenty big enough! Remove the guts….’

Spike rolled onto his belly, looking angry. ‘So, what you gonna cut the belly open with? What you gonna cut all those entrails out with?’

‘I’d have a knife on me….’

‘Whoa! No inventing knives when you want one. I’m gonna invent a nice trailer home in that case—just happened to have one on me!’

‘I’d improvise. Sharp flint or rock.’

‘Oh, and like you’re gonna get that done before the sun fries you.’

‘So, what would you dig a hole with?’

Spike held up a hand. Angel snorted but didn’t dignify that with any other response.

They were quiet for a while until Spike said moodily, ‘You’d be pretty fucked later with no horse.’

‘We’re going to be pretty fucked later if our horse is frying down there.’

‘Maybe he’s found another horse and dived in ‘is belly.’ Spike seemed to find this unnecessarily funny and laughed at his own joke on and off for the next hour or so.  By the time he’d decided he’d annoyed Angel enough, the temperature had risen to well over a hundred in the canyon, a few degrees cooler in the cave, and it was still only ten o’clock.

Spike wriggled out of his shirt and managed to kick off his boots.  Angel frowned and made a small sound of disapproval, but after another half an hour, he followed suit.  

‘Do we need water?’

Angel roused from a slight doze. ‘What?’

‘Water. Can we dehydrate?’

‘And you are how freaking old?’

‘I’m nearly a hundred and thirty, but then you should know that—seein’ as you killed me. And I’ve never been in a hot place before—without blood. So, if we don’t have blood, do we need water?’

‘No.’

‘Good. So, I can safely ignore this burning in my throat?’

‘Try self-discipline.’

There was a delicious pause then Spike quietly retorted, ‘And that from the man who’s just eaten my fucking horse.’

Angel flicked his head around.  Spike only raised an eyebrow.  Angel made a small sound that could have been interpreted any way Spike wanted and appeared to go back to sleep.

The temperature rose to over a hundred and twenty in the cave. A glean of sweat covered them both. The floor was becoming uncomfortably hot to lie on, and they manoeuvred onto their coats. Suddenly, Angel yelped. His elbow had begun to smoke. Without saying anything, they knew it was past midday, and the sun had now begun to enter. 

For all they knew, it reached the back of the cave when it got low in the sky, toward the end of the afternoon. For all they knew, this was their last afternoon.  

Angel put a coin in the line of the sun so they could gauge its progress and shifted toward Spike. 

A sense of tense anticipation hung in the cave. Every so often, Angel shifted closer, and Spike watched the coin getting brighter and brighter until he could look at it no longer.

For the first time, they touched, Angel shifting against Spike, even though he was pressed to the back wall, the rough sandstone rubbing his bare skin.  The temperature increased to a hundred and ten. Spike felt it like a band around his head, his preternatural body unable to deal well with extremes of temperature, unable to cool off like a human body.  Angel was silent, but Spike could feel his tension through the touch of his skin, and then he shifted again, now pressed tightly to the figure behind.  

Spike hesitated, then snaked his arm over Angel’s waist and held him close, Angel’s sweating back sticking to his chest.  

Angel couldn’t get his arms out of the sun and cursed when they began to smoke. He wrapped them back around Spike.  Spike hauled him closer.  

The smell of burning flesh began to fill the cave, and Spike shouted, ‘Under me!’ He raised up, Angel rolled beneath him onto his back, and Spike lay down on top.  

They’d gained a couple of inches of shadow between them and the sun.  They readied their coats as best they could, knowing they would not save them and lay very still. 

Spike’s whole body lay in contact with Angel’s. From toes to hair, they touched. He couldn’t remember ever in all the time he’d known Angel, being this close. Although they were sweating heavily, the smell rising from Angel was intoxicating. He smelt of cordite and wood burning fires, of whisky and gun oil.  

There was nothing he could do to stop it.  His body responded to the heat and the skin and the smell of Angel.  He didn’t know whether to shift or not, whether moving would make his bone-hard cock more noticeable or less. He opted to move, trying to ease onto one hip and take the hardness off Angel. 

Angel grunted painfully, and Spike realised he’d propped up on something equally hard that shifted, uncurling beneath his bony hip.  

The sun had narrowed the gap to two inches.  Angel pulled his coat over their heads and kicked Spike’s loosely over their legs. Neither could move more and knew their feet were exposed.  

In the darkness of Angel’s coat, their minds coalesced downward, zeroed in on their cocks and balls, hardening, pulsing, aching.  Angel tried to turn his face but ended up with it buried in Spike’s hair.  He breathed in, and his shaft twitched at the scent of his childe.  

He moved his face again, pressed it to the hollow of Spike’s neck.  There was a soft groan, and in the darkness, Angel put his mouth to the old scar. 

Beginnings and endings. It seemed fitting to Spike that they’d go together, his sire’s fangs against his neck as if this were the beginning and not the ending.  

He pressed his face into Angel’s shoulder and said hoarsely, ‘’S bin fun.’

Angel nodded. ‘Yeah. I made a good choice.’

Spike huffed. ‘Now you tell me. Kinda different tune to the one you were singing last night.’

Angel laughed softly, the burning against the coat making it hard to force the sound out.  ‘Last night I was fucked up with jealousy. Now I’m dying with you stuck on my fucking belly.’

Spike lifted his head. 

Angel, dislodged from the warm neck, opened his eyes. They stared at each other in the dark protection of Angel’s coat, and then their lips came together softly.  

Both meant it as a goodbye kiss, a kiss that recognised the long way they’d come together, the shared milestones, the good times.  At the first touch though, resistance to something melted along with their bodies. As they felt the burning on the coat, as they scrabbled their feet to try and remove them from the light, they opened their mouths to one another. 

Sweat coated bodies squirmed, and in a place where there was no water, they became soaked in moisture, tongues lapping at saliva, sweat mingling, and in heavy shots that darkened their pants, sperm releasing.

When Angel cried out in orgasm, Spike thought they were burning and tried to climb into the cave of his mouth.  When his orgasm hit, he shuddered violently, and Angel thought he saw flames. He wrapped his arms tighter around Spike’s back so they would burn together.  

They came down from their individual intensities with small pouts of confusion.  Angel peered out from under the coat. They were in the shade once more.  He exclaimed and wriggled out from under Spike with some considerable difficulty, both chests and bellies flaring red for a moment as stuck skin unpeeled.  He crawled cautiously to the entrance and saw that the sun had dipped below the opposite wall of the canyon. Two feet above his head it blazed in evening glory on the wall. He, however, was in cool shadow.  

He sat down heavily and ran sticky fingers through his hair. Numerous other things were sticky as well, but he couldn’t think about them. Literally, his mind jumped off the events as if they were too hot to linger on. He needed some space to think them through.  He glanced behind. Spike was studying his back but averted his eyes quickly when he saw this small inspection was observed. ‘Better check on the horse.’

Angel nodded and began to dress. 

As he pulled on his boots, he could taste Spike’s saliva in his mouth. As he buttoned his shirt, his orgasm surged again like a small back eddy forgotten in the first rush. As he slipped on his coat, he remembered Spike’s shuddering body. It was better than holding him in death, better than the shaking and shuddering of dying. As he left the shelter and stood in the relative coolness of the evening, all these events seemed like a tiny, dark intensity that belonged out of time. They’d been brought on by the extremity of their situation: that sense that they were more than this—more than two demons burning up in a time and place they should never have been. They’d tried to make it more. They’d tried to give their deaths some significance with the only things they had left to control: their bodies. 

Thus Angel rationalised as he climbed down the wall. He packed the events away into a tidy box labelled Extreme Circumstances. He knew he ought to explain all this to Spike, as he had with his horse theory—rationally, calmly, knowing he was right. But given his childe’s reaction to that theory, he was reluctant to expose this one to the bright light of Spike’s derision. This one fractured when he probed it too much. He wasn’t at all ready to have it turn to naught with one of Spike’s knowing laughs.

He felt himself under scrutiny as they rounded up the horse. As the creature was standing with his head hanging down, looking about as sorry as a horse ever looked, the rounding up wasn’t too hard.  Spike went up to it and stroked around its muzzle, whispering soft words of endearment. 

Angel had to turn away. 

A surge of jealousy rose in his throat. 

Now he was jealous of a horse.

His carefully erected edifice of lies crumbled around him. 

The truth stood stark in the ruins. 

He turned his back to it, saddled the horse and began to lead it out. ‘We need to find water.’  He was a master of avoidance when it came to the truth. 

Spike had watched Angel going through his small crisis with more than intense interest, although he felt fairly certain he’d not given this away to Angel.  He had a pretty good idea how what had happened in the cave would affect his sire. To him, it seemed a continuance of the feelings that had gradually been creeping upon him since he’d been thrown back to this place. Hell, who was he kidding? He’d always felt something between them that Angel had refused to acknowledge. But since he’d been back here, it had grown—the sense of missing Angel, the desire to have him close, the substitution he’d attempted with Tom, the unexpected erection he’d got at seeing a trickle of sweat on Angel’s back…. 

Spike, therefore, felt the incident in the cave clarified matters between them.  If he was given the opportunity now, he’d pull Angel down into the hot sand and fuck him. 

Just the thought of this, rolling and wrestling and sliding into Angel’s body, made him harden once more.  It was incredibly liberating: knowing what the tension was, knowing why he hated Angel so much, knowing why they fought so much. He wanted to mount his father—his creator. He wanted to bend Angel to his desires, subjugate him physically and emotionally. He wanted to possess him.  And so he fought; he argued; he kicked against the pricks, trying to ignite the powder keg of their relationship.  

For one moment in the cave, when they had sent their shuddering orgasms against each other, Spike had felt Angel at his mercy, utterly laid bare and vulnerable, and in that one moment, he’d willed the sun to take them both.  In that moment, he’d won.

Victory never lasted long for him. He knew this. But it was sweet while he had it.

‘…. Spike!’

‘Huh?’

‘Did you hear what I said?’

‘Sure.  What?’

‘Can you tell which way the water is?’

Spike’s senses were so full of the smells of cum and sweat, he couldn’t isolate any others for a moment, but then he did. The earthy smell of fresh water.  He shrugged. ‘Let Dobin have ‘is head, and he’ll find it.’

Angel nodded to the wisdom of this and released the leading rein. 

The horse cantered off, leaving them standing on the rock-strewn prairie. 

‘Oh.’

Angel glared at him then, unexpectedly, began to laugh.  Spike shook his head and laughed too.  They ran over the rough ground, trying to keep the horse in view.  

After some miles, the ground changed and pitched downward. They ran down a smoother long bank and found themselves at the edge of a pool, the stream dammed by a sudden narrowing in the valley floor. About thirty feet around, it stood dark and still in front of them. 

Even the horse seemed to say oh, shit and plunged in.  Laughing like kids, they shucked off their gun belts and then plunged fully clothed, coats and all, into the cold water.  

It was melted ice, the stream coming out of the high mountains and hardly having time to warm in its deep valley.  They’d never felt water so good.  They tore off their clothes and flung them to the bank, diving and swimming, and then floating serenely on the black depths.

Suddenly, Spike whistled softly. ‘Look.’

Angel followed his gaze to the heavens. The earth was tilted so they looked down the arm of the Milky Way, the stars so bright and numerous that the light made their skin glow white.  

Angel rippled his hand over the surface of the water and the tiny white droplets sent a frisson of excitement into his balls.  He looked over at Spike and saw something like starlight in his eyes. They looked alive with something knowing.  He wasn’t surprised when Spike said quietly, ‘We should talk about what happened.’

Angel heard himself outlining his theory—that it had been a moment of near death honoured by the supreme act of life—but heard this for the crock of shit it was. 

For the first time in his life, he gave Spike a halfway honest reply. ‘I don’t know what happened.’

Spike suddenly ducked under the surface in a lithe, pale movement and rose the other side of him. He blew out some water and said mischievously, ‘I could remind you.’

Angel frowned. The suspicion that Spike was way ahead of him in something, thinking things he’d never suspected, worried him to the extent that he refused to discuss it further. He swam to the edge of the pool and climbed out.

‘Fucking hell!’

‘What?’ Spike turned at the note of alarm in Angel’s voice and swam over, too, pulling out into the…. ‘Bloody hell!’ The temperature had plummeted from the highs of the day to the extreme lows of the night.  Angel was shivering badly, and at this utterly uncharacteristic sight, Spike began to shake violently. Everything shot high and shrivelled, and they turned away from each other.  ‘Clothes?’

They were sodden and beginning to freeze to an uncomfortable crispy frostiness.

‘Get some wood.’ 

‘Why me?’

‘Spike!’

Mumbling, Spike stumbled away, arms wrapped around his body, wondering if somewhere, somehow, he was becoming more human. He came back with an armful of wood and dropped it in a surly manner by Angel. ‘What are you doing?’

‘What the fuck does it look like? Lighting a fire!’ Angel was twiddling two sticks together vainly.  Spike stood and watched him for a while, derision in his silence.  Unable to stand the criticism longer, Angel snapped, ‘I suppose you could do better?’

Spike knelt, removed his lighter from his saddlebag, caught the kindling alight and chucked on some wood.

Angel suddenly shot a fist out and punched him. ‘You moron! We freeze to death while you….’ Spike launched himself across the fire, knocking Angel out of his crouch, tumbling them back into the sand.  They rolled and wrestled and…. Spike wrenched out of Angel’s hold and then walked out of sight into the dark.

Puzzled, Angel threw some more wood onto the fire and called out hesitantly, ‘Spike?’

When there was no reply, he stood up and began to gather their clothing, hanging it to dry as best he could.  The fire began to blaze, making it steam. Softly, as if he were talking to himself, he said, ‘It’s warm here now.  Maybe we could catch something and eat it? If you want, that is….’

Spike appeared back and squatted down by the fire.  

No longer shrivelled or high, they averted their eyes from the obvious.  Being caught staring at another man’s dick was a line neither wanted to cross.

They stacked the fire unnecessarily high, enjoying the light as well as the heat.  Suddenly, Spike jerked his head up and said, ‘How far do you think this bloody fire can be seen?’

Angel peered into the dark. ‘Why?’

‘Indians!’

‘Where?’

‘No, I mean, there could be. Raiding party….’ He trailed off at Angel’s expression and added, ‘You obviously never watched the right bloody shows, Mate.’

‘And what are they going to do to us? Scare us to death?’

‘Shoot us with wooden arrows, I was thinking.’

Angel’s hand hesitated before throwing another log on then laid it back down.  They checked their clothes, turning them over and pulling them closer to the heat.  Spike ran his fingers through his drying hair and in a casual tone, as if commenting on the weather, said, ‘You said you were jealous of Tom. You can’t deny that.’

Angel nodded wisely. ‘Of the way you’d made a place for yourself, yes. The way you’d coped.’

‘Bullshit. That’s not what you meant.’

Angel didn’t reply and poked the fire viciously, sending small sparks like tiny red fireflies into the air.  

‘That wasn’t a kiss of pride in my achievements, Angel.’

‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘Why not? What have we got to bloody lose? We might never get home! We might be stuck in this Goddamned place forever!’

Angel tipped his head to one side clearly struck by this idea. Spike seemed to be confirming his theory—that what had happened had been spirit of place and time, that what they felt here, what happened here, wasn’t reality. 

‘You think something’s happening to us here? Making us act uncharacteristically?’

That wasn’t what Spike had meant at all. He’d only meant that he wanted to launch at Angel again, but this time wrestle in another way, and what did anything matter when here the old relationship of sire and childe seemed so redundant?  Angel’s response seemed useful though. Carefully, he said, ‘Perhaps it is. Perhaps we can’t help ourselves. Perhaps we were MEANT to be here, and this is what we have to do to get back!’  He surprised himself how inventive he could be with the right motivation.

Angel seemed impressed, too. ‘It can’t be natural that we fight like we do. I mean…. The only two souled vampires….’

Angel seemed to have wandered off the important track of the shagging once more, but Spike gently steered him back. ‘Maybe things that are natural in L.A. are unnatural here, but things that are unnatural are… natural.’ He was scaring himself he was so brilliant.

Angel reached for his pants, which was exactly what Spike didn’t want, so he grabbed Angel’s wrist and held it.  Across the fire, he dropped the act and said with searing honesty, ‘You make me hot.’

The words zinged through the cold air with more force than an arrow.  Angel’s head jerked up as if he’d been pierced.  His breath went out in a small puff of exclamation and then they were in the sand, tangling, teeth jarring, trying to find what lay beyond the softness of lips.  

It was cold out of the circle of the firelight, but the darkness was welcome. They didn’t want light shone on what they did. In darkness, they could explore and wonder and discover, and not be perfect.  They could make mistakes and have those mistakes covered by the soft velvet of the night.  

As if by mutual consent, they didn’t speak. Maybe their voices were too familiar to each other and they didn’t need that incongruity—familiarity in all this that was new. Or perhaps it was that they knew their words flared so quickly to anger, that they feared the tempestuous sparks that lay at the heart of their relationship might flame to life at this provocation. So they kept their thoughts to themselves and only shared their bodies. The release was revelatory, but whether it revealed more about their feelings or the unnatural chasteness they’d practiced since coming to this new place, neither of them cared to examine.  Spike rubbed hard on Angel; cocks clashed together, squished and fondled by eager fists, and he came with a huge gasp of frustration.  Angel cried out in the darkness and shot, too, his seed propelled so far that it landed sizzling in the embers of the dying fire. Missing his, he played with Spike’s, rubbing it into his belly and hair, joining it to the traces of his still hanging in tiny, glistening threads from his cockhead. Then he realised what he was doing and pushed Spike off.  

He sat up and looked at the unearthly, pale figure, sprawled in the starlight. ‘It seems that you make me hot, too. But that’s all it is, Spike.’

‘Fucking.’

Angel nodded. ‘I’m not going to change what I am. If I’d had a woman here, I’d have wanted her. I didn’t, so I took you.’

Spike stood up and stretched, not at all bothered now about Angel seeing or staring at his cock. It had been down Angel’s throat for a while there, so he figured looking was pretty tame now.  He glanced down at the squatting figure. ‘You are so pathetic, Angel.’

Angel sprang to his feet. Spike came closer not at all intimidated. ‘Can’t you feel it again? Don’t you get it even now? It’s nothing to do with this place! It’s us! You and me—dancing this bloody dance we’ve always danced!’

Angel shoved him out the way and went to fetch his pants.  He made to pull them on but seemed to remember the sticky, flaky residue on his body. He glanced at the freezing water again then cursed and dressed anyway. 

Spike snickered. ‘You’re gonna smell of me now.’

Angel ignored him. 

‘Do you? Let me see….’ He darted in, sniffing, and laughed when he got a cuff for his trouble.  He waved around, taunting Angel, laughing.  He was silenced by a fierce kiss, Angel crashing them to the ground, laughter cut off in a groan of need.  They rolled over and over, Angel always getting the better of things for being so much heavier.  He rolled on top of Spike and thrust his hand down, cursing softly with pleasure when he found things heavy and hard.  Spike wrenched open Angel’s jeans. ‘Still rather have a woman, Angel?’

Angel nodded and bit one nipple. ‘Yeah. I would.’

‘What? Not feel this?’ Spike crushed Angel’s hand to his prick, forcing him to make a fist around it and helping him ease the foreskin down. ‘You wanna put your tongue to me like a bloody lolly, don’t you? Lick me, Angel. Lick my cock.’

Angel obliged, and by the way his mouth opened around the bulbous head, by the way his tongue slurped over the tip, they both knew he wasn’t thinking clitoris. He wanted stretch and thrust, he wanted rawness in his throat and the aftertaste of cum. 

So, Spike obliged him, too, arching into Angel’s mouth, pushing out the pale cheeks, making him emit sounds like feeding: muffled snorts of pleasure.

Suddenly, Spike extracted his cock and rolled away, rising to a crouch.  ‘Wanna know what else you can’t do with a woman?’ He launched himself at Angel, flattening him, lying over him possessively. ‘You can’t get fucked up the arse.’

Angel growled and thrust him away then swung out with his leg, kicking him. ‘I wouldn’t want that if you were the last fuckable thing left on this planet Spike. I’d take the freaking horse inside me before I became that desperate.’

Spike laughed and circled him in a crouch, his cock semi-hard, bouncing up and hitting his thighs. ‘You’ve always wanted it. You wanna lay it all down and be taken. You want to trust someone so much that you can let them into your body.’

Angel suddenly stood up and walked to the pile of clothes, ending whatever it was that had begun. Or ended—neither of them were too sure.

Spike knew that somehow out of all the bluster and bravado that he’d taunted Angel with, that he’d tried to trick him with, he’d said the one thing that was actually true: Angel was looking for someone to trust enough with the most precious thing he had—his body.

Spike licked his lips and came hesitantly to his own clothes. As he dressed, he cast an eye over to Angel and said, as calmly as he could, ‘Sure, it was just fucking, Luv. Why not? We’re stuck in this damn place together…. Things… exploded. When we get back to L.A., I’ll go right back to pissing you off, and you’ll make my life a misery all day. You’ll have Nina; I’ll have Harm. Just as it should be. It’ll be great—just you wait and see.’

Angel nodded dumbly.  He seemed oddly lost, which worried Spike. 

He decided that now was the time to share his plan—the real reason he’d headed south.

He waited until they were mounted, Angel sitting in front and he clinging to his back, to say seriously, ‘I was thinking….’

Angel only nodded, deep in his own thoughts.

‘Where did you arrive—I mean, what place did you fall into?’

Angel turned his head, suddenly interested. ‘I don’t know. There was this pain in my head. I felt someone dragging me, and I woke up in the jail.’

Spike nodded, pleased. ‘’Xactly.  Same thing happened to me. So, do you think maybe our fat friend knows more about this than he’s lettin’ on?’

‘The Sheriff?’  

‘At least he’ll know where he found us.  If it’s the same place, maybe there’s something there—a big fucking Tardis would be nice, course.’

Angel suddenly punched the side of his head in anger. ‘Jesus! I’ve been so obsessed with you again I’ve….’ He trailed off, seeming to realise that this somewhat belied his assertion that Spike was nothing more than a convenience, only just better than a horse.

Spike squeezed his arms around Angel’s waist a little tighter. ‘I was kinda thinking about you, too, Mate—when you were gonna bloody rescue me!’ Spike oiled the wheels of Angel’s confused mind, allowing him some peace.  It was too hard to ride so close together, the motion of the horse bumping and grinding, without that emotional distance.

Spike wasn’t unduly concerned. He had a feeling that they’d be… discussing… these things in the very near future.  You didn’t pack away that kind of heat, that need, that desire, along with your saddle. And on the thought that he’d been in this place too long, and that if he didn’t leave soon he’d be substituting dang for bloody, he fell asleep against Angel’s broad back, lulled by the motion of the horse and exhausted from the exertions of the night.

Angel gave him a minute, then snaked his arm back and clamped it around his sleeping child, holding him close. He was so confused his brain almost ached, and he welcomed this slow ride through the night with the feel of Spike so close but, for once, silent and restful.  

Chapter 6

Spike draped over Angel’s back, more unconscious than asleep, but with snatches of near-lucidity, which only sank him deeper into dreams when they finished. He dreamt about stars, and it seemed important, seemed as if he learnt something important that he had to tell Angel, but when he woke, he couldn’t remember the dream, only the stars.  

He only woke fully when the horse stopped.  Angel nudged him awake and said softly, ‘Molena. Sun’s up in two hours.’  Spike slid off the back of the horse, feeling as if one had kicked him. He reckoned he must look pretty bad, if Angel was anything to go by.  They left the horse at the livery and made their way to the saloon.  Not surprisingly, it was almost empty, only a few drunks lolling over tables they’d been unable to leave.  Angel eyed them distastefully and then glanced up the stairs. He made his way over to the bar and disturbed a small man who was nodding in a chair, paper over his face. Within a few minutes he had a room and a bottle of whisky and was heading purposefully toward them. 

He toed open a door and went inside, immediately going to the window and checking the drapes.  Spike came in and shut the door softly, patting around his pockets. ‘I’m going down to see if he’s got some cig….’ 

‘No. You’re not. Not yet….’  

It was some time before the subject of cigarettes came up again. Other things came up instead.  

Pulled onto the bed, almost devoured by Angel’s raging need, Spike hardly had time to release his pants.  Angel demanded his mouth. Spike surrendered it. He mumbled incoherently against the possessive lips and tried to hold back. He didn’t want to spill inside again. Angel finally got the message and let him go, fumbling desperately with his own buttons.  He grabbed the towel off the washstand and together they soaked it, kneeling on the bed, two mouths locked, two cockheads swollen and mushing wetly together, two slits like red mouths wanting to kiss, two men pumping seed into faded material until it was saturated with their thick spills.  

Panting, Spike tipped onto his back.  Angel eyed the raw, soft cock, grinned and was about to pounce on it like a cat upon an exhausted mouse, when there was a shot from beneath their window.  

They crawled off the bed and peered out, buttoning up.  A man lay groaning in the dirt, another man standing over him, and then the large figure of the sheriff appeared.  

Angel glanced over to Spike, and before he thought what he was doing, he swept back a loose lock of hair.  He stared at his hand, clearly bemused at what it had done and said swiftly, ‘I need to speak with him now—not wait until tonight.’

Spike tried not to look disappointed, but Angel seemed to sense this feeling anyway and added softly, ‘I’m not... avoiding issues…. Only….’ He turned back to watch the scene. ‘Life is short here. I can’t risk something happening to him before I’ve had a chance to find out what he knows.’

Spike nodded. He knew there was more to it than that. He knew Angel had suddenly decided he didn’t want to spend the day in this room with him—that he was afraid where it might lead, what they might do.  

He suddenly reached over and made a mess of Angel’s hair in retaliation for his and then sprang swiftly out of reach toward the door.  Angel rose in a more dignified manner, but as he passed gave Spike a small, grateful smile.  Spike floated on the pleasure of this right through the bar, over the street and into the sheriff’s office. 

He was still burning with pleasure when the man looked up at their entry, but cooled rapidly on the warmth of the reception.  ‘Looky what the cat’s dragged in.’

Angel went to the wall, pretending to be interested in Wanted posters. He said very quietly, ‘Are you in on it? Do you have some kind of profitable scheme going, Sheriff?’

The huge man rose. ‘Now, wait one Goddang minute. You don’t come into my town and….’ He narrowed his eyes suddenly at Spike. ‘I advised you to buy a hat, Sonny. I advised you to get out of my town. Don’t seem like you take too kindly to good advice.’

Spike made an irritating face, and the man stepped around his desk. Angel stood between them. ‘You found us both and brought us here. I’d like to know why. But more importantly, I’d like to know how—how did you happen to be in the right time and place twice. Weeks apart.’

The man held Angel’s gaze for a moment. ‘Let’s go get a drink.’

He didn’t wait for a reply and strode out across the street.

Angel glanced around then snatched a Wanted poster off the wall with a gleeful expression. ‘Butch Cassidy!’

Spike snatched it out of his hand. ‘Fuck me! It’s Paul Newman!’

Laughing, an easy mood between them that puzzled but pleased them both, they made their way over the street and into the bar. 

The sheriff was sitting at a table, scanning a paper and drinking. Angel ordered two beers, Spike bought the makings for some cigarettes, and they joined him.

He glanced up as they sat down and folded his paper nonchalantly. ‘I did twenty years on the force.’ He twitched up an eyebrow, amused. ‘L.A.P.D.’

Angel put down his beer slowly, but the man waved at him to be silent. ‘I’ve done two years here, and so far, the only real stressful thing I’ve discovered is having to go to the Goddamned church with the good Christians every Sunday.  I’m a pig in shit, and I don’t wanna go back.’

‘You came through the portal?’

‘I have no freaking idea what I came through. I was looking for some scrawny rich kid who’d disappeared—liked to buy his dope at the pier. I was questioning this little schmuck with a camera; stuck my face in….’

‘A cowboy?’

The man winked at Angel. ‘You’d best be careful how you say that around these parts, Sonny. Cowpokes don’t take to faces being thrust in ‘em—if you get my meanin’.’

Spike smiled, and somehow, his foot found Angel’s under the table.  

Slightly distracted now, Angel said, ‘So you—what? Woke up…?’

‘In the tool shed out back of the jail. When I stopped puking, I wandered out in my fancy blues, and the rest’s history.’

‘How did you…?

‘Become sheriff?’ He laughed. ‘Well, you know the old saying: the voice that speaks loudest in the crowd?’ He reached into his holster and withdrew a Kimber .45.

Spike laughed because Angel had just rubbed his foot up his shin, but the sheriff nodded as if it had been a reaction to his gun. ‘I know. It kinda makes me the big man in these here parts.’

Angel shifted slightly so he could slide a hand onto Spike’s thigh—high up, where things got interesting.  ‘How many others came through before us?’

‘Three. Scrawny kids all of ‘em. Druggies, runaways.’

‘Where are they now?’

‘What are you doin’ tomorrow?’

Angel kept his face neutral. ‘We need to rest up for the day.’

The man looked amused. ‘That resting gonna include some more of what you’re doing under the table?’

Angel rose, his chair falling over. The sheriff chuckled. ‘Calm down, sonny. I’ve got something to show you, but it can wait till the evening.  I’m thinking it’s not as good as what your blond friend’s got to show you anyhows.’

Spike liked this man, and he leant back, blowing smoke across the table at him.  The sheriff winked once more then stood up.  ‘Well, another busy day on the mean streets. I got some chickens gone missin’! Preacher swears it ain’t a fox. Lordy, you’d think he’d know—seein’ as he’s got friends in high places. You folks meet me outside come sundown—when you’ve finished your little games upstairs, that is.’

Angel, to recover some nads, said menacingly, ‘Why didn’t you tell us who you were when you found us?’

The sheriff nodded pleasantly and tipped his hat. ‘Sundown. I wanna show you something first.’

Spike was already trying to suppress a laugh at Angel’s expression. By the time they reached the room, he was having trouble standing.

Angel didn’t want him upright anyway, so tipped him onto the bed and straddled him.  He bounced them both and said angrily, ‘I just don’t like other people knowing my business.’

Spike licked his lips seductively. ‘Am I your business now then?’

Angel huffed and rolled off onto his back.  Spike turned his head to watch the approaching dawn through the drawn drapes. ‘It’s gonna get hotter than hell in here soon. What the fuck is the big man playing at, do you think—staying here?’

When he got no reply, he turned back. Angel was asleep, one arm still hanging off the bed, one draped over Spike’s belly.  Spike eased it off carefully and sat up, studying the uncharacteristically relaxed face. He’d never seen Angel asleep before.  Despite the pleasures they’d been taking from each other, Angel’s body was still a mystery to him. So intense was their passion whenever they’d come together, he’d only seen it in snatches, like watching himself shag under strobe lighting. He had an impression of one armpit with sparse hair (which suited him just fine. One hundred years and counting of loving women’s bodies didn’t give him an appetite for hair).  His lips had discovered more luxuriant hair elsewhere, but he’d been distracted by the cockhead that had been tickling his tonsils at the time.  He’d seen Angel from the back, naked, rising from the bath, stretching his sleek, luxuriant muscles.  He’d seem him cold by a campfire, huddled and very human. He wanted to know the whole package, to put all these jigsaw pieces together to form a complete picture.  He wasn’t fooling around in this, telling himself he only wanted Angel’s heart or mind, his interest in him as his sire, although he did want these things; he wanted them very much. He ached to see Angel’s cock in the daylight, have the leisure to explore it, study it, play with it. Saliva soaked his mouth as he remembered it sliding over his lips. But he could remember little else. Angel had fucked his face so hard back at the pool that he’d been mindless with pleasure. The perfect mindless fuck, just as Angel said. Spike lay down alongside him and smiled softly. It was more than that for both of them, a lot more, but he knew Angel was finding this hard to admit.  You don’t push stray locks of hair away from the faces of mindless fucks. Angel shifted and Spike’s smile turned into a grin. You don’t shift in the bed and lie across a mindless fuck, pulling him into a tight spoon, nestling your face into his neck, and stroking his belly in sleep.

Spike closed his eyes to the day and allowed himself sleep that was deep and refreshing. His last thought on slipping away was that he understood only too well what the big man was doing. He wasn’t going back because what he had here was better. As he lay in Angel’s tight, sweaty embrace that seemed to apply equally well to him.

Angel woke to a mass of confusing thoughts that clashed against each other like cross-tides, causing the same friction and churn. His first thought was that he had lost Spike and that he was now alone. Then he remembered he’d found Spike, the sleeping presence in his arms swiftly confirming this. Instant lust for the warm body came as a particularly powerful surge, beating back all others.  But in the riptide left on its departure, deeper, calmer, clearer thoughts remained. If this were only lust, he’d wake Spike now and take his pleasures on the slim, hard body.  Then the tides returned, confusing thoughts about L.A., Nina, his old life. And shifting under all of these was the thick silt of uncertainty about their dangerous situation. He was under no illusions about their ability to live in this world. They’d done it as demons, slaking their thirst for blood where they liked. Like this—souled, domesticated—he did not like the odds stacked against them. This led to a huge, overpowering surge of protectiveness for the one he held, followed by tiny aftershocks of fury at this utterly uncharacteristic emotion. This was Spike! (in his head, Spike’s name always had an exclamation mark. The mark illuminated varying emotions, particularly in the last few days, but it was always there, nevertheless.) He couldn’t feel protective about Spike. Spike was his chief irritant. Now he had become this warm mass of flesh in his arms, this thing he wanted to kiss and fondle and…yes… cuddle. 

Angel gritted his teeth. Cuddling wasn’t usually in his repertoire. That he should want to cuddle Spike! of all people was beneath contempt.

The tide went out completely and left a blank sand of thought where nothing had been resolved. He drifted back to sleep, only ensuring that Spike’s backside was pulled tightly against his cock, thus telling himself that the embrace was to salve his lust. If his heart told him different, he ignored it. Ignoring the dictates of his heart was becoming a habit.

When he woke again, Spike was sitting in a chair that he’d dragged over to the window, smoking. Sensing Angel had woken, he said unnecessarily, ‘Sun’s down.’

Angel twisted around in the bed and patted the space next to him hopefully. Spike smiled, but continued to peer out into the soft, early darkness. ‘Sheriff’s waiting for us.’

Angel crawled off the bed murmuring fuck and other suitable expressions under his breath.  Spike laughed and got a more characteristic look for his troubles. 

They emerged onto the street and found the sheriff had gone to the trouble of providing a new horse for Spike. He held theirs on a loose rein and nodded. ‘Evenin’. Sleep well?’  He couldn’t hide a twinkle of amusement at his own joke but watched passively as they mounted. ‘’K then. Ain’t far.’

He rode out of town in the opposite direction to the Big T and set up a steady trot.  Angel nudged his horse closer and said brusquely, ‘I want to know why you hid what you were from us.’

‘All in good time, young man. You’ve got that L.A. impatience ‘bout you. How old are you? Twenty-six? Seven? You’ve gotta slow it down a mite, Son.’

‘The longer we’re here, the harder it may be for us to get back.’

The man ignored him and suddenly swung away from the trail towards a fence line.  He followed that for a mile until a house came into view in a small hollow.  They reigned in, looking down at the peaceful, domestic scene. A woman was feeding some chickens that ran around in the yard. A young man was forking hay into a barn, where it was seized on by a younger boy and stacked.  Off to one side, a girl was grooming a small, sturdy pony.  Suddenly, the woman saw them and called to the boys. They stood around her, staring through the soft evening, trying to identify the riders. The sheriff raised his hat and waved, and the girl suddenly swung bareback onto the pony and rode up to them.  ‘Sheriff!’ He laughed as she came close then reached into his pocket and fished out some candy, tossing it to her. ‘Share it with your brothers, Possum.’

She nodded, gave Angel a quick once over then stared longer at Spike. Close up, they could see she was older than they’d first thought, but unaccustomed to teenagers being dressed in sober, plain clothes, they’d taken her for child.  The look she gave the vampires was challenging, curious, almost aggressive, and the sheriff said softly, ‘Don’t worry, Hon; I’ve got everything under control.’

She nodded and let them ride past down the hill.  The woman came forward to meet them, and the sheriff tipped his hat to her. ‘Ma’am.’

She smiled but was clearly uncertain about the visitors. He repeated what he’d said to the girl and swung off his horse.  He looked at Angel. ‘Well, you coming in, or what?’

It became almost surreal. The woman, Mrs Van Hausen, plied them all with rich, aromatic coffee and home-baked biscuits.  The boys were soon dragging the sheriff off to show him their latest hunting trophies, and the girl sat staring at Angel, apparently in some kind of dream.

It was unnerving. Angel didn’t know what he was supposed to be seeing, so was unsure what to say or do, something that infuriated him and made him feel clumsy and awkward. Spike was distracted by the girl watching Angel, trying to see him through her eyes and finding this so amusing that he missed half the halting conversation.

When the sheriff returned, he nodded to them and indicated that it was time to leave.  

They rose, glad to be away.  They left the strange place with its unnerving occupants and rode back toward town. As soon as they were out of sight of the house, Angel grabbed the sheriff’s rein and halted him. ‘Now we talk. I’ve come out here; I’ve seen. So?’

The man hooked one leg over his saddle horn and shook his head. ‘You’re amazingly slow. Your friend’s got it though.’

Angel turned to Spike and narrowed his eyes. Spike glanced back into the dark. ‘They’re the runaways.’

Pleased, the sheriff gave him a slow handclap. ‘The big ‘un was in a gang. Street-wise. Ya know the kind? The little ‘un—he was a runaway. Abused by his dad and an alcoholic by the time he was fourteen. And Possum? She was still carrying the bruises her pimp had given her when she came through. Pretty expensive habit she had to pay for. Possum came through first. I thought of Mrs Van H right up. She and her family come from Holland some ten years ago—new beginnings. ‘Cept they weren’t; she lost her husband and four children in an Indian massacre. She was living on her own with her ghosts out in that big old place. Seemed to me she could use a little life around again. If I was a learned man like you, I guess I’d called it symbiosis. I’m not, so I just call it plain dang lucky for all of ‘em. But what I’m trying to tell you, Son, what I wanted for you to see is pretty obvious. We’re not going back. None of us. We’ve nothing to go back for and everything to stay for. So, you can come through any darn portal you want and try to find us, but we ain’t shifting. That’s why I didn’t tell you. That’s why I’m thinking that if you try to take us, I’ll have to draw this gun of mine….’

‘We didn’t come to get anyone back.’

Spike glanced over at Angel and murmured, ‘Well, you kinda came for me….’

Angel looked annoyed. ‘That’s different.’

‘No, it’s not. You said….’

‘I’m not interested in anyone else; I’m just interested in…. I mean….’

‘Maybe you two would like to keep this little lovers’ spat till we’re back? I’m plumb glad you’re not….’

‘Will you stop with the fucking John Wayne imitation? This isn’t a fucking Hollywood movie!’ Angel didn’t fool either of his audience what the real cause of his anger was.

The man sat square on his horse and began to walk it slowly, scanning the ground for unexpected dangers. 

Angel, looking slightly sheepish, turned his horse in the same direction and followed. ‘I don’t have any intention of taking you back—or the kids. I need to see this place where we came through, and I need to find a way back for us. That’s all.’

The sheriff spat on the ground. ‘Well, there ya go. Missin’ the point again. See, it’s all very well us sayin’ we don’t wanna go back when we patently can’t….’

Angel frowned and the man added, ‘Ask your friend. He knows what I mean.’

Once more Angel turned to Spike. This time, Spike seemed less willing to be forthcoming and shrugged. Angel turned his horse with difficulty and reined it in so they were walking close. ‘Well?’

Spike took his time lighting a cigarette. ‘He’s afraid that if we find a way to return, they’ll all be tempted. He doesn’t want to be tempted. He likes what he’s found here. He’s afraid that he won’t have it when he gets back. That things will have changed.’

The sheriff laughed. ‘You two seem to have a small communication problem goin’ there. I thought you were gonna tell him why we didn’t want to find a way back!’

Spike flashed him an angry look but then saw it didn’t matter. Angel hadn’t understood he hadn’t been talking about the sheriff. Angel just looked tired and strung out, and Spike had an immediate stab of intense pity for him. When the sheriff was once more studying the ground, and not them, he reached over and tentatively touched Angel’s fingers. Angel looked over, and his face softened. He caught hold of Spike’s fingers for a moment then let them drop, but it was enough.

Hot with pleasure, Spike said, ‘I’m betting we’ll find something in this tool shed. We could be home tonight.’

Angel was clearly pleased with this thought, and some of the stress left his face. Spike nudged his horse so their legs brushed and then trotted ahead to give his sire some space.

Angel listened to desultory conversation—the human asking about some shows he’d been following in his other lifetime—mulling over what they had seen that night. He wasn’t falling for it. It seemed to him like a good act, almost Stepford in its simplicity. You take streetwise punks and whores and give them a dose of home-baked biscuits and the highlight of their day suddenly becomes the church social? If that were true, then he could live here in a little white-picket fence fantasy—the one he’d always had about Buffy. He could work in an honest trade, be a good man. Except he couldn’t. He was a vampire. He needed to atone for the evil he’d done, not mince about in a better-than-life delusion. It seemed to him that something had gone badly wrong since he’d come here. This thing with Spike! What the hell had he been thinking? And even if he had been thinking it (which he most definitely had) then he should have resisted, should have seen it for the snare and delusion it was. Spike was worse than home-baked biscuits.  Angel intended to return to L.A., and one thing he didn’t do there was eat biscuits.

It wasn’t too late to put a stop to it. He hadn’t let it go any further than quick relief. It was something men did. When they were no women about. Times of high stress. Testosterone. Nothing to get excited about. Nothing to give labels to. He knew Spike would agree. The last thing either of them needed in their volatile relationship was added complication. He had a pleasant vision of them returning to L.A., shaking hands and agreeing to put all this behind them—like the hunting and torture they’d once indulged in together, but didn’t now, and didn’t speak of either. This would have cleared the air. It would give them something to laugh about over a drink. If they ever went out for drink. Which they might now. A drink with Spike, watching the way his fingers curled around crystal.  No one would suspect it was anything other than a casual drink. Everyone knew he hated Spike. The perfect cover. He needn’t lie alongside Nina feeling like a beached whale, cringing in the wake of their disastrous sex. He could use Spike for the pleasure, her for the… normality. Spike would understand. The last thing he’d want was to stop! Spike was enjoying it—that much was obvious. They were both enjoying it. Where was the harm in it? It was too late to put a stop to it anyway….

‘Oi!’

Angel jerked his head up, and Spike gave him a funny look. ‘I’ve been talking to you for the last mile! Where you been? Stop bloody staring at me! What the hell’s got into you? We’re going to this place you want to see.’

Angel nodded and plodded on behind Spike. 

He was getting tired of horses. 

That, he didn’t feel confused about.

The tool shed turned out to be a small, decrepit structure made of wood standing a few yards behind the jail. It was secluded from view by a few scrubby bushes and had clearly not been used for anything as useful as tools for a long time.  

Angel dismounted and approached warily. The sheriff hooked one leg over his saddle and accepted a cigarette from Spike. ‘Your friend always this intense?’

Spike took a drag. ‘He’s kinda mellowed since he got here.’

‘Jeez.’ He gave Spike a long, thoughtful look. ‘You know, Blondie, it’s no concern of mine what you and Mr-Politeness himself get up to in your own time. Shut up, now, Son, I’m talking…. As I was sayin’: I don’t care. But some people round these parts would. They hanged a man last year for playing by your rules—‘fore I could get there. Nasty business. Rode him around some before they did, if you get my drift.’

As Spike refused so see how this applied to him, he merely said nonchalantly, ‘Local cowboys?’

‘Hell, no. I reckon they’re a mite too fond of a little lonesome comfort themselves to point fingers. It were Mormons—train of ‘em travelling through. Nothing as evil as a righteous Christian who lives by words written on a page.  If you’ve gotta choose one day, Son, between an Injun, a Mex, or a Mormon, shoot the Goddang bible and hightail it outta there.’

‘I’ll remember that. I’m sure it will come in useful.’

‘Save the snark for those that are impressed with it, youngster. Don’t cut no ice with me.’

There was some forcible swearing from the hut, something was flung out and nearly hit them, making the Sheriff’s horse snort and stamp.

Spike lit a cigarette, and trying to keep his voice casual, asked, ‘Why didn’t you knock this place down? If I didn’t want to go back…’ he felt the man’s knowing stare, ‘I’d tear it down. Make sure.’

‘Well, I thought about it. But it seemed to me that that might stop other people who maybe needed to leave L.A.—though they don’t know it. See, it sorta come to me that maybe only those that should leave, do leave.’

Spike pouted. ‘I’m not sure Angel would agree.’

‘Who?’

Spike nodded toward the dark figure poking around inside the empty shed.  The man laughed. ‘Angel? Yup, that’s the first name that springs to mind when you meet him.’

Spike smiled. ‘He improves on acquaintance.’

‘He’d have to. So, I didn’t pull it down. Also, it occurred to me that maybe if we could go back it wouldn’t necessarily be from here. There’d have to be another one of those cut out thingies, and plainly, there ain’t.’

‘We’re not going back, are we?’

The man hesitated. ‘I don’t wanna kill your hopes, Son, if that’s what you feel you need to do. You got family back there, I guess. That’d be a powerful motivator.’

Spike slid off his horse and wandered over to his only family. ‘Anything?’

‘Dirt and more dirt.’

‘What’s this?’

Angel turned and stared at the small, feathered object. The sheriff ambled over. ‘It’s a dream catcher.’ He stared thoughtfully around the darkened yard. ‘This was a burial ground. The damn settlers built the town on a burial ground.  When I was poking around out here—just like you, friend, wanting to go home then—I found some bones, bits and bobs. Didn’t seem right.’ He rubbed a hand over his face. ‘I found that and hung it up. Might give an ancestor some good dreams.’

Angel held the small bundle in his hand, turning it over thoughtfully. ‘What tribe?’

The man seemed to have anticipated his question and said softly, ‘Shoshoni,’ but added quickly, ‘All gone. Not a one left in these parts.’

Spike bit the inside of his mouth and said anxiously to Angel, ‘You’ve got a plan. You’re thinking something I’m really not gonna like, aren’t you?’

Angel looked up and stared at the sheriff until the man faltered and admitted, ‘It’s just rumours! A medicine man. In the mountains, up on Gannett Peak. But you ain’t gonna get there! No man could live there but the damn Indians. Some people say they ain’t human like the rest of us. Takes a special breed of man to live in those mountains.’

‘I am a special breed of man. Spike, go get some supplies. We’re heading out in a hour.’

Spike had made the inside of his mouth bleed, so he ran his tongue over it, enjoying the familiar comfort. ‘No.’

Angel didn’t appear to hear. He was folding the feathered bundle carefully into his pocket.

‘I’m not going, Angel. We’re not going.’

The sheriff sucked his breath in and said tactfully, ‘And I’ll be in the jail if anyone wants me.’

Angel looked up. ‘We’ll need some blankets, maybe. It was cold enough on that damn plain. Rifles—good ones. Steal them if you have to.’

‘No! You’re not listening to me! I’m not bloody riding up some mountain with you on a wild goose chase to find some old Indian on the say so of a man who just admitted he’d kill us rather than have us take him back!’

‘Knives might be handy, too. Spare horses.’

Spike turned away and began to lead his horse back to the saloon. ‘I’m not coming. If you go, you go alone.’

Angel jogged to catch him up, not saying anything for a while.  Spike cast him a sideward glance.  Angel pouted. ‘I’ve confused things by letting this… thing… happen between us.’

‘Oh, you mean you can’t order me around anymore cus I know where you live! I know what you want…!’

‘Well, I wouldn’t have put it like that, but essentially…. You need to remember I’m still your….’

‘Don’t. Don’t you dare say it. It means nothing here, Angel. Shit, it never meant much back in L.A. You never made it mean much. Where was my sire when I needed him—chipped, souled, fucked around by the First, burning up to save the world, incorporeal…?’

‘I came back for you, Spike. I dived into that fucking portal and came for you.’

That silenced Spike entirely, and they walked the rest of the way to their room without speaking.

As soon as they were inside, Angel took hold of Spike’s arm gently. ‘I can’t order you. Hell, I gave up on that a week after I turned you. You have to trust me. I have a feeling about this. What is it you’re afraid of? The trip? The mountains? Going back?’ The last was eased in so softly that it took a while for Spike to separate it from the more likely suggestions.  

He pulled away. 

Angel rubbed his fingers through his hair. ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen when we get back any more than you do. Shit, I don’t know what’s happening here. I know….’ He came close and after only a moment’s hesitation, slipped his arms around Spike’s waist. ‘I know things have changed between us. And that scares the hell out of me, too.’

Spike turned around and eyed him, head on one side, with an expression that made Angel’s heart contract. ‘You still don’t think this is real, do you? You’re hoping when we get back to L.A. things between us’ll go back to normal.’

Angel let his arms drop. ‘I could do without the fighting. That, I don’t want to go back to.’

‘But you don’t want this.’

Angel suddenly pushed him out the way and went to the window. ‘Why do I have to have all the answers? I don’t know! I don’t know what I want. Things weren’t right with….’

‘Nina?’

He couldn’t believe he was discussing this with Spike! of all people, but the image of lying beside her cloying gratitude when he’d done nothing but perform a perfunctory set of moves on her haunted him.  His silence assent was all the reply he could give.  After a few moments, he turned. ‘You tell me, Spike. What is this? Can you seriously see us…? Shit! I can’t even say it! Can you see us having some kind of relationship when we get back?’

Spike lifted his eyebrows thoughtfully. ‘I thought we did have a relationship, Pet.’

‘That’s different. That was….’

‘Come on, Angel, that was just this without the honesty. You got me hard just lookin’ at me, and I’m fairly certain I did the same to you, only we were too proud to admit it.’

‘Proud?’ 

Spike laughed. ‘So, you don’t deny I made you hard. That’s interesting.’

Angel’s lip quirked up. 

Spike sighed and sat on the edge of the bed, putting his face in his hands. ‘We could stay here….’

Angel sat down next to him. ‘A world without punk rock?’

‘I could invent it.’

Angel chuckled.  ‘No TV.’

Spike looked up. 

‘No porn on the internet.’

Spike frowned. ‘There’s porn on the internet?’ 

Angel poked him gently in the ribs. ‘Will you come with me? Please….’

Spike sank with fatigue. 

Angel hesitated then leant over and kissed his hair. ‘With any luck, we’ll get our asses frozen on some mountain, and we won’t have to work out what this is.’

Spike flicked up an eyebrow. ‘I’ll have to think of a way of keeping your arse warm then, won’t I?’

Angel blushed faintly, a tinge of excitement or embarrassment colouring his pale face.  He let out a long, slow breath. ‘Rifles and knives.’

Spike smiled. ‘Blankets, don’t forget. To make us nice an’ cosy at night.’

Angel swallowed and glanced at the bed.

Spike stood up. ‘Right I’ll go get all those things. No time like the present, or was there something else you wanted….?’ He kept neatly out of Angel’s range.

Angel fell back onto the bed, an arm across his eyes, laughing. There was little point denying that he did want something else—that he wanted it very badly—they could both see the evidence rising in the front of his pants, betraying him. 

Chapter 7

They rode out just under an hour later. 

Spike had neglected to mention that Tom Devant had paid him in case there was some confusion in Angel’s mind exactly what he had been paid for. He’d purchased the items they’d needed, feeling a sense of deep unease that neither knew what they were getting into. He’d added two thick coats and some gloves, but it was cold even as they left Molena.  The sheriff had drawn them a rough map to the mountains, but beyond that they were on their own.  

Spike was feeling in the mood for complaining (he wanted to whine, but it was beneath his dignity). ‘What we gonna eat?’

‘I was once under the ocean for three months without food, Spike. I survived. You’ll survive.’

Spike frowned. ‘Liar. You ate a nazi on that sub, I saw you.’

‘Not then.’ He really wished he’d not mentioned it. Spike would worry at this now, like a terrier on speed.

‘Were you souled? So, you couldn’t eat cus of that?’

‘No, I was sealed in a box.’

‘Huh? When? I mean, who? Bloody hell. How did you get out?’

‘Wesley found me.’

‘Huh. I’d like to meet the person who did that to you.’

Angel nudged his horse ahead so talking became difficult. Spike watched his tense back for a while, mulling things over. Finally, he muttered, ‘You can afford not to eat for three months,’ just loud enough for Angel to catch.

When the trail widened, Spike came up alongside him.  Angel waited for the interrogation to continue, but Spike suddenly said, ‘So, what’s with you and the werewolf then?’

‘Change the subject.’

‘No, I like this one.’

‘I’m not….’

‘I’ve had your dick in my mouth, Angel.  You’ve sucked on my arsehole for a good hour, so let’s drop the act, huh?’

Angel gave him a sideward glance. ‘How come you’re not still seeing Harmony?’

‘I am.’

‘She works for me, Spike. She talks. You’re not.’

‘Yeah, well. It kinda palled.’

‘Exactly. With Nina… it was… flat.’

‘A vampire and a werewolf, and the sex was flat?’

‘She didn’t seem to think so. She said….’

‘Nah, they all say that.’

‘What?’

‘They all tell you that you were the best, that you made them come more times than Lassie that you’re the biggest, best, most inventive….’

Angel stopped his horse, staring at him. 

Spike blushed. ‘What?’

‘No one’s ever told me that.’

It was kind of a conversation killer, and they rode along in silence for a mile or two until Spike said, so softly that Angel had to strain to hear it, ‘You were the best.’  Before Angel could respond, he kicked his horse and took the lead position where further talk was impossible.

As they had to make a stage depot by sunrise, Spike kept up the pace, the trail fairly easy to follow and relatively safe.  They rode into the depot with half an hour to spare, unsaddled the horses and put them in the corral and made their way into a squat, depressing looking building. There was a bar and a few tables and chairs. It was going to be a long day.

Angel bought them both a drink, and they took the table furthest in the shadows.  Spike looked up as he took a first drink, and Angel caught his eye. Angel grinned softly and looked away. ‘Moron.’

Spike smiled into his beer and somehow their knees met under the table.  Angel pressed his hand to Spike, who responded by slipping his hand under the table.  Suddenly, there was a commotion in the doorway; three men strode in, and the vampires straightened, feigning interest in the beer.

Angel shot Spike a look and found there was a matching glint of amusement in his eyes. Satisfied, he smiled and pulled out the map the sheriff had given them. In a low voice, he outlined the route he’d planned. He wanted to cut across to the mountains at a lower point—a longer journey—to given them more likely access to caves or other suitable cover during the day.  Spike wasn’t really bothered. He’d followed Angelus’s lead for long enough to trust they’d get where they were going.

‘A game, Mi Amigo?’

The largest of the three men was staring at Angel and waving a pack of cards like a fan across his face, and although his words seemed friendly, his eyes were anything but.  Angel smiled pleasantly. ‘Thanks, but, no.’

‘Ah, come my friend! What else is there to do to pass this heat?’

Spike mumbled, ‘Minding your own business?’ but only preternatural ears heard it.  Smiling at this, Angel shook his head again and returned to his map. 

‘Something about me amuses you, Senor?’

Angel rolled his eye faintly at Spike. Spike pursed his lips and suggested, ‘Breakfast?’

Angel laughed and stood up, turned around and swept his coat behind his back in one swift motion. He held the man’s gaze and replied, ‘I’m not easily amused. Do something funny, and I’ll let you know.’

The man’s companions stood back as if choreographed.  Spike tipped his chair back, watching the action with a neutral expression as if he hadn’t quite made us his mind whether this was amusing or threatening.

Later, the man’s friends swore they saw him go for his gun. They knew him, knew his mannerisms and remembered that he had twitched his hand. Next thing they saw, his hand was red, but whether this was before the deafening blast of a gun or after they couldn’t say. It was just a blur of sound and blood.  Then things came back into focus: their companion screaming and holding his hand less the two fingers that had been shot off, the quiet man holstering his guns and staring at the blood, the blond one rising to his feet and standing casually by him, but with an air of unmistakable menace.  They backed out with their howling companion, but one of them cast a final look at Angel and mouthed some words.

Angel pursed his lips and sat down, resuming his study of the map. After a while, he said, ‘What?’

Spike sat down again. ‘What did he say?’

‘Who?’

‘Angel!’

‘My Spanish is rusty.’

‘Angel….’

‘He said: Más tarde. Later. He was just being polite.’

‘Oh, well, this is bloody great! Now we’ve got a pissed off El Greco after us.’

‘He was a painter.’

‘Oh! And that’s bloody relevant!’

‘You stood up with me. That felt good.’

Suitably distracted, Spike dropped the subject of their imminent demise at the hands of Mexican bandits and resumed their earlier, more interesting pastime. His hand slid onto Angel’s leg. He moved his chair closer on the pretext of studying the map with him, and then his fingers walked up toward a hard lap.

Angel bent his head over the map.

The bartender returned; the hand was removed.

This pattern continued the whole day, and it set up a level of tension in them both that notched up to unbearable levels as the day progressed.  As soon as the sun went down, Angel muttered something about the horses.  Spike followed him out, and in the privacy behind the barn, hands on each other, they relieved their frustrations, dead seed spilling to the arid earth.  Wiping his hand on Spike’s shirt, staring deeply into his eyes, Angel said softly, ‘Whatever happens when we get back, your body makes me hot. Remember that.’

‘It’s you that needs to remember, Pet.’

‘Maybe I need you to remind me.’

Spike leant against the fence and lit a cigarette.  ‘If I need to remind you then that kinda defeats the purpose.’

Angel ran a finger over Spike’s cheekbone. ‘I can’t ever imagine your body not exciting me.’

His words didn’t have the effect he was looking for. He sighed at the sad expression that greeted them and added flatly, ‘You think I’ll stop wanting you when we get back.’

Spike pitched his cigarette into the dark. ‘I know you will.’

Angel caught his arm and, staring deeply into the troubled eyes, pulled Spike toward him. He sought to reassure, but he didn’t know how. He was all physical need and emotional indecision, and nagging in the back of his mind was that exclamation mark. He was kissing Spike! 

Spike felt all of this indecision through Angel’s lips, but they felt so good, his whole body felt so good, tingling from the aftermath of his orgasm, responding to the kiss, that he didn’t push for more.  All day he’d hovered on the edge of this, and he took it for what it was. 

They couldn’t afford to waste the darkness however much they may have wanted to linger.  They needed to push hard to reach the mountains to ensure their safety during the day.  Just how critical this was to them was brought home the first day. After riding hard all night, not talking, not stopping, an hour before dawn found them almost totally exposed on the plain.  They flung from their horses and scrabbled in the softest dirt at the side of a small rise, digging hollows, which, when curled tightly and covered by their saddle blankets and coats, kept them from the sun’s rays.

It was appalling. The ground began to bake. They could not move, stretch or relieve the cramps that formed in their bodies.  Although they didn’t need to breath, because they now couldn’t, they felt a desperate ache to, an ache to stretch and breath cool, fresh air.  There was nothing to do but sleep, but with their sanctuaries reaching over one hundred and fifty degrees in the noonday sun, this didn’t prove easy.  Out on the plain, flat vistas in all directions, there was no respite until the sun sank beneath the horizon. They’d spent over fifteen hours in their hideous shelters by the time they rolled out into the rapidly cooling air.

They didn’t need to speak, they could see the effects of the day written on the face of the other—in the sand that filled hair and clothes, in the weariness from lack of sleep and in the tension from the knowledge that one twitch of a coat or one ill-timed movement and they would have burnt. 

They didn’t need to say that fear for the other had kept them strung out and angry for the whole fifteen hours. That, too, was on their faces.

Angel urged Spike to saddle and water the horses as he consulted the map and the stars.  

When they were ready, they set off again: same pace, same silence. Now they had the added fear of actually knowing how bad it was when they got caught out in this featureless plain. Neither wanted it to happen again. The trip, which had once seemed like an adventure, now seemed a hastily conceived and casually executed folly.  

It was bitterly cold, light flurries of snow blowing in their eyes, fingers freezing around reins. They had never felt as human, as vulnerable. Nature, in its raw power, diminished them.  It was harsh, monotonous riding in the dark with no respite for the vampires or the horses.

An hour before dawn and they seemed to be no closer to the mountains. They were caught once again without shelter, exposed. Spike looked despairingly toward some rocky foothills. ‘We could make them.’

‘Not in an hour.’

‘Yes! We could. I’m not spending…. I can’t.’ He gave Angel such a despairing look that Angel suddenly nodded and swung his exhausted horse forward.  They ran for the rocky outcrop at full pelt, their skin prickling under the rays of the rising sun.

Tumble of rocks, frantic dismount, saddles ripped off, and they found an overhang.  It was only big enough for one, so they became one, curling into each other’s body, so tightly packed in the tiny hole that breathing would have pushed the other out.  Sealed with a saddle and coats, it was all there was. 

The heat began to rise. 

Neither spoke as if in some silent agreement that it was better to keep their thoughts to themselves. Arguing in the luxury of Wolfram and Hart’s sunny spaces, arguing in cars as they drove to cases, arguing anywhere else but here had been nothing more than a luxury—arguing because they could, because either of them could have walked away from it when they wanted. No so here. Here they lay entwined, more one body than two, and whatever else defined their relationship, the will to survive was paramount.

That didn’t make the day pass any quicker or make the heat any less oppressive—the silence they cloaked themselves in.

Around midday, when madness hovered close to their sanctuary, Spike said in a dry, quite voice, ‘Tell me about the ocean—being under it.’

Angel didn’t reply for a while then but then murmured equally softly, ‘It didn’t start there. That was the end, in a way. Or the beginning of the end.’

During the rest of their imprisonment, when the sun beat down on them so fiercely that they were only a bead of sweat away from running screaming in the light just to end it quickly, Angel began the tale of Connor.  

He was as good a storyteller as he was an artist: an eye for detail and not afraid to tell the truth however unpalatable some of that truth seemed to be. Hour after hour of torture slipped by without them noticing. Spike only interrupted when Angel went too quickly over things—not because Angel was trying to avoid them, but because it seemed to him that it had happened so quickly at the time. Spike wanted to hear more about Angelus being returned. He questioned Angel on every detail of Faith and their fight. He was fascinated by Angel’s relationship with the adult Connor, and by the time the story came to its conclusion they only had two hours left to endure.

Spike had been quick to question, but he was not so forthcoming with his views on the story. After a few minutes of silence, Angel said tersely, ‘Well?’

‘Well, what?’

‘Aren’t you going to make a snarky comment about dealing with the devil. Aren’t you going to accuse me of fucking my friends over for my own ends?’

‘Nah, I reckon you’ve been accusing yourself well enough without my help. I wanna know more about Connor—you fought a lot.’

‘We fought all the time. The only time we weren’t fighting was when he was actually plotting to kill me.’

‘He liked provoking you.’

‘I’ve told….’

‘And you always bit.’

Angel would have frowned had there been space. ‘What are you trying to say, Spike?’

‘Oh, I dunno…. Might explain us.’

‘Okay, I think you need to be real careful where you’re going with this.’

‘I only meant that maybe somewhere in that dullard brain of yours, you’re trying to recreate with me what you had with Connor.’

‘That’s crap. I was pissed off with you long before Connor came on the scene.’

‘That’s true.’

‘If anything….’

‘What?’

‘I guess, if anything, now I look back on it, my relationship with Connor was exactly like the one I had with you.’

‘He was a substitute me. I’m touched, Luv.’ This would have sounded more heartfelt without the tiny snicker of amusement that followed it.

Angel groaned softly. ‘Jesus. I’m more fucked up than I thought.’

After another lengthy silence, Spike asked casually, ‘Why didn’t you tell me all this before?’

‘I had no reason to.’

‘Er, maybe to just tell someone?’

‘Well, what about you? I don’t notice you being too forthcoming telling me about your soul or… other things.’

‘Uh huh. And by other things you mean Buffy.’

‘How did it start?’

‘How do you think it started?’

‘Knowing you and your misplaced romanticism, you probably showered her with soft toys or something equally dumb.’

When Spike didn’t reply, Angel felt uncomfortable enough to prompt, ‘So…?’

‘I never knew that Buffy. That one was all yours—the soft toys and the flowers and the hearts. Bloody hell. The one I knew was hard, desperate, flying apart at the speed of light. It wasn’t soft toys, it was hard fists and kicks and blows that broke our bones.’

Hesitatingly, aware of how close they were and not wanting to provoke an argument, Angel said quietly, ‘Maybe I wasn’t the only one trying to recreate a relationship.’

Spike bit, but not forcefully. He, too, was aware that arguments between them needed space to become physical. ‘You think I was fighting with her because I’d always fought with you?’

‘Abusive relationships….’

‘Fuck off, Angel.’

That silenced them until a few minutes before the darkness fell when Angel murmured casually, ‘I’m not Buffy—in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘I’m not Connor—in case you hadn’t noticed.’

‘So, this is entirely….’

‘Us.’

‘Yeah.’

The sun finally leaving the land saved them both from committing themselves further.

They rolled out, so stiff they took some minutes recovering, Angel muttering about surviving hell, but falling foul of a hole in the ground.

When the kinks were out, they saddled up and looked at each other. ‘Tonight in a comfortable cave?’

Spike nodded grimly, and they set out on rested horses heading for the mountains.

They thought the previous night had been cold. This one cut into their own cold flesh and froze their blood. They hadn’t fed enough to fight it off, hadn’t taken warm, borrowed blood into their reanimated bodies. Snow began to fall as they hit the foothills of the mountains, and as they tracked up a steep, pine-covered trail, it got deep.  They didn’t need to worry about the coming dawn; the trees formed a dense, impenetrable canopy which let almost no light through. So they pressed on beyond their previous cut off and only stopped when a few streaks of light began to prick their scalps. They just moved off the trail into the denser forest and threw themselves wearily onto a bed of frosty pine needles. 

Exhausted, lacking sleep and blood, they fell into uneasy dreams that woke them frequently and stripped their sleep of real rest.  It was cold up in the mountains, even during the day, and neither coats nor saddles blankets warmed their preternatural bodies. They had taken on the temperature of the mountains, like reptiles, and they could not get warm. When night came, they set off, exhaustion etched on their features, their skin almost waxy with lack of nourishment or rest.

That had been the easy part though.

From then on, the nights become treacherous: snow-covered trails, the days wearyingly long and cold.  Two more days, two more nights, horses slipping, throwing their inexperienced riders off into wet snow, clothes permanently soaked, skin splitting against leather.

Then finally, Angel stopped and said, ‘End of the tree line.’ 

He was right. Ahead of them, in the moonlight, rose vast, snow-clad mountain peaks. Angel sat still, his eyes raking the featureless landscape.

Spike dragged up some energy to ask, ‘What we looking for?’

Angel turned in the saddle and regarded Spike carefully in the bright moonlight.  ‘A shaman—a powerful one.’

‘What’s one of those look like when he’s at home?’

‘I’m guessing he’ll be up high—access to the summit, but he’d have to have an extensive cave system… food… water…. So, not too far above the tree line.’

‘Narrows it down to about a hundred square miles.’

‘There’ll be signs.’

‘I’m so excited.’

‘Shut up. I’m concentrating.’

Spike listened, but he couldn’t hear anything, and he sure as hell couldn’t see anything but snow and trees. 

‘We’ll leave the horses here and go on foot.’

‘What!’

Angel nodded at the craggy rocks rising in front of them.

‘Angel….’ 

Spike’s voice held real concern, but Angel said between gritted teeth, ‘He’s up there, I know it!’

Spike half-fell off his horse and sank at the base of a tree in a crouch, hugging his arms around his frozen body.

Angel dismounted and sat beside him. ‘I feel him, Spike!’

‘Crap.’

‘What’s the alternative?’

Spike turned to him. ‘We stay here. We buy a big bloody house in Boston and some fancy clothes. I’ll catch up on all the reading I missed the first time round following you round the damn world.’ He closed his eyes and sank into his own misery.

Angel leant back and closed his eyes, too, picturing himself in a wing-chair, whisky in hand by a roaring fire, watching Spike read. His body didn’t respond, even when he undressed Spike and had him read naked in the firelight.

He opened his eyes.

‘Let’s go.’

Habits of several lifetimes died hard. Spike nodded and rose to his feet.

They made slow progress, the snow up to their thighs, clinging and wet like the hands of the damned, pulling them down. After half an hour, it began to snow again, flakes driven against their faces on a rising wind.  They turned from the lee of steep rocks and found a sheer slope in front. Spike clutched Angel’s arm and shouted over the wind, ‘We can’t cross that!’

Angel shook him off and ploughed into a ferocious wind. 

‘Angel!’

Spike, without the deafening sound of the wind, heard it first—a soft crunch like the sound of a heavy man rolling over on crisp linen. His voice dried in his throat, and his next cry was as soft as the snow itself. ‘Angel!’

Angel didn’t hear.  

Spike stepped out and tried to reach him.

They were both caught by the avalanche that sloughed off the mountain. It took the ground under them so they slid over three hundred feet in a few seconds, then hit them full blast with tons of snow, packing around them, driving them down. Trees were sucked out by their roots, forced down the dark hillside, bringing more down with them, wood broken and splintered into deadly shards churning in the maw of snow. Then all was still and serene. The stars shown down on an unblemished landscape, all traces of the vampires and their quest obliterated.

Chapter 8

Fingers brushed warm over his face, but Angel ignored the dangerous illusion.

He could not tell which way was up, and despite trying desperately to free himself from this frozen grave, he had exhausted his energy in vain.  His blood stained the snow around him where it had leaked out from breaks and tears. A branch had pierced his chest—on the right, inches from his heart—and dislodging it made sticky, warm fluid pour over his fist. His energy and strength spread out into the greedy snow, which sucked it up like a vast, cloying, virgin succubus.

The finger poked his eye.

He frowned and took it more seriously.

A whole palm mushed over his face, and he grasped the wrist.

At his reaction, the digging hand increased its activity, and then there were two warm hands reaching for him.

He began to scrabble, and he emerged into darkness, wet, shaking and bleeding.

An indistinct figure peered at him for a moment then wrapped a blanket over his shoulders.

‘My… companion?’  Angel coughed and tried again. ‘My friend? Have you found…?’  The figure shuffled away into the trees and returned leading a mule. Slung behind on a makeshift stretcher was a bundled figure, blond hair only just visible above the swathes of blankets.  The figure began to lead the way along the line of trees, and Angel limped to keep up with him.

Around a large rock, under an overhang, and they walked into a large cave.

The relief from the wind was immediate; Angel knelt to the stretcher. Spike was unconscious and did not respond to either touch or words.

He stood and looked around, then stared at the figure peeling off numerous layers of skins.  An old man turned and smiled at him crookedly, ancient eyes twinkling. ‘Welcome. You have been a long time coming. I am honoured.’

‘You know me?’

The elderly man indicated a stack of furs, but Angel shook his head. Within a few minutes the man reanimated a small fire until it blazed its heat and warmth into the cave. Angel took Spike from the stretcher and laid him on the furs, covering him and turning his cold face to the fire.  He approached the man. ‘Who are you?’

‘I am the one you seek.’

‘You’re the Shaman of the Shoshoni?’

The old man stared out into the night, a look of great sorrow on his face. ‘I am the rain in a world where there is no life left to require it. I am the wind that has no place to blow. I am the sunshine in a world that is perpetually dark. They are all gone.’

‘I came to….’

‘I know why you are here.’

A surge of hope rose in Angel’s heart. ‘Can you help us?’

He sighed. ‘I can help no one now. My time on this earth is done.’ He saw Angel’s expression and shuffled toward a corner of the cave. ‘You do not need my help, He-Who-Is-Named-Of-Spirits, He-Who-Walks-With-The-Dead. You have many names, Angelus, some not as noble.’

Angel stepped forward, and the man held out a cup fashioned from bone. ‘You have never required my help; the answers you seek are here.’ He laid his palm gently over Angel’s heart then passed him the cup. ‘Blood of the eagle and the bear—great warriors. Sight and strength, they will lead you to your answers. Take them as our last gift.’

‘What about…?’ He glanced at the still figure softly illuminated by the fire.

The old man’s face was suddenly wreathed in smiles. ‘I have not had someone to tend for a long time. He will be well when you return from your journey.’

Angel sat on the furs once more, pushed the fingers of one hand into Spike’s still wet hair, and drank.

Spike made a small hole in the snow around his mouth, then cursed and remembered he didn’t need to breathe. He tried to dredge up something more useful from the Readers Digest story “The Day My World Turned White”, but nothing came. Fucking useless…. Cursing, he dug his way out.

They had crashed back as far as the tree line, the detritus of the snow’s advance lay all around them. 

‘Angel?’ His voice sounded tiny in the huge mountains, and he swore more colourfully.

‘Angel?’  He stood still and used his senses.  Blood—Angel’s.  He ran over the fallen trees and found him, half-buried, unconscious, and bleeding from a scalp wound. 

And thus it ever was: Angel got them into dumb scrapes, and it was his job to get them out. He sometimes wondered when someone wrote the story of their lives whether they’d present Angel as the clever, normal one and him as the humorous sidekick. It pissed him off just thinking about this inaccuracy, and he gave Angel’s unconscious form a baleful glance as he dragged him out of the snowdrift.

The horses were chomping on their bits a few feet into the trees, so he hoisted Angel up onto the strongest and climbed up behind him, holding him on with some considerable difficultly. There were times recently when he’d enjoyed Angel’s weight, but this wasn’t one of them.

He reckoned it was only an hour or so to dawn. They needed to find shelter. They needed to get off this bloody mountain—but first they needed to find shelter.

He led the second horse by the rein as they skirted the worst of the debris. It was skittish, which was fortunate, because if it hadn’t have shied at a shadow, Spike would never have seen the cave.

Twisting around to calm the horse, holding Angel as best he could, he saw it as no more than a shadow amongst shadows. He slid off, lowered Angel to the ground and walked over. A crack in the face of the mountain beckoned him. He slipped through and clicked his lighter. The feeble light didn’t even reach the walls. It was perfect. He carried Angel through and then led the reluctant animals into the narrow aperture.

Over the next hour, he gathered wood, lit a fire, fed the horses, heated some water and bathed Angel’s wounds. 

It should all have increased his sense of contentment: relief at escaping the snowfall, the feeling of being in control once more. It didn’t. He felt tension racking up notch by notch.

The horses seemed to feel it, too: nervously stamping and making soft noises of distress.

The only thing Spike could liken it to was a game he used to play, a variant of chicken, where he stood in the tunnels under New York knowing a train was thundering toward him through the dark. Exhilaration then had made the extreme fear fun, but he didn’t feel that now. Now, he wasn’t alone. Now, he was the only one standing between Angel’s unconscious form and these bloody mountains, which now seemed alive and heading toward them with all the destructive force of a train, bearing down on him. 

At last, unable to bear it longer, one of the horses bolted, shying away to the entrance and stumbling through. The other panicked and followed.

Spike stood up, legs straddled across Angel, facing the rear of the cave. As he did with the trains, he closed his eyes until he felt the preceding wind.

Angel felt something wobble, he grabbed at air, fell and hit, hard.

‘Angel? Angel! Oh, my God! Are you okay?’

He picked himself up, squinted up at the sun and stepped back into the shadows. No… the sun was fine. Now. He rubbed his hand tiredly over his face and squinted up. ‘Sure, Babe, I think I fell off the ladder.’

‘Come out of the sun for a while. It’s too hot out there.’

‘Yeah. Maybe.’

He wandered into the house and threw himself on the couch. He felt kinda woozy. 

‘Maybe you should take a shower?’

He twisted around, smiling at the blonde figure. ‘Do I need one?’

Buffy wrinkled her nose. It was a definite yes.

He slouched up the stairs feeling heavy and listless. He’d been thinking something important before he fell off, but it escaped him now, nagging at him. He ran his tongue over his teeth, probing as if he had a hole.  Woozy. Too much sun. He still wasn’t used to it.  He sometimes wondered whether he ever would be.

He leant on the sink then looked up into the mirror. He reeled. When did he get so old? He rubbed his face and decided that if he had another sleepless night, he’d go to the Doc and get something. Twenty years. He’d aged only twenty years since that final, apocalyptic battle. It felt more like a hundred. He looked older than a forty seven year old man; he knew that. Some of his great age had come with him into his humanity, along with other demonic attributes.  He glanced ruefully at the domestic items lining the sink: two toothbrushes, two washcloths—two of everything and always would be. He’d brought Buffy impotence and age.

He ran fingers through greying hair. She said distinguished. He said grey. He chucked his chin, stretching and tightening his jaw. It didn’t help. It didn’t conceal the flabbiness. His teeth were still good. His eyes were okay. He didn’t examine the rest of his body. There was only so much you could take.

He stood under the shower, letting the hot water wash away the dizziness.  Another handful of hair swirled around his feet.  

As he was drying, he heard light steps in the hallway. Buffy stuck her heard around the door. ‘Okay?’

She had aged, too. For some reason, it hit him like a sledgehammer, as if he’d not looked at her for this destructive twenty years then suddenly had. She’d thickened, not run to fat, she was too careful for that, but she’d lost the vitality, the spark that had so attracted him once. He held out his hand and smiled. This was better: this aging gracefully together.

‘What ya’doing?’

‘Hmm?’

‘You’re staring.’

He swatted her and went to the bedroom. 

She followed him in and began to fold laundry. ‘I wonder what he’ll look like.’

‘Who?’

‘Very funny, Sweetie. Just the same, I guess.’

‘Who?’

‘Angel! Spike’s coming…. Angel?’

‘No. I’m okay. I still feel… dizzy.’

‘Did you hit your head when you fell?’

‘I don’t think so.’

He sat gingerly on the edge of the bed. He remembered now. Spike had called. Out of the blue. They hadn’t heard from him in twenty years. Not since…. 

Buffy watched him closely and said in the voice she always used to say this, ‘You didn’t steal Shanshu from him. It was yours by right.’

…. since he’d stolen Spike’s Shanshu from him. Had it been his? Had it been Spike’s? They’d both fought in that final battle. They’d both been broken and hurt. Then he’d been human, and Spike had been a swish of black leather, disappearing into the night without a backward glance.

Twenty years and he called. In the middle of the night. Didn’t speak to either of them. Left a message. ‘It’s me. Thought I’d drop by, seein’ as I’m passing. Maybe Saturday.’

Twenty years and he’d found Spike’s voice on his machine.

‘Do you think he’ll want to stay? Should I make up a bed?’

Twenty years. 

‘No. I don’t think he’ll want to stay.’

Spike saw the eyes first. They glowed green.

The rest, cloaked in black, blended with the night. ‘Spike.’

‘Who are you?’

The figure stepped into the light of the fire, and Spike’s fists balled. ‘You can’t be here. You’re in a bleedin’ cave in bloody Africa! In my soddin’ time!’

The demon tutted. ‘Shame on you, vampire. Did you not know that the earth is hollow and filled with the remains of ancient ones? I rode on their power to find you.’

‘Why? I won my soul fair and square. Fought action man and his twirly flamey things, did the bloody ugly demon….’ He shuddered. ‘And I had those sodding crawly things in my bloody nose! So fair and square!’

‘I’m not here for your soul—well, not specifically. I am here to help you return. Things are out of balance. One souled vampire, two souled vampires, and then there were none. Badly out.’

‘We have to return to restore balance? An’ you’re gonna help us cus—what? You’re just such a big-hearted fellow?’

‘I am here to take the opportunity to return the true balance. One souled vampire, two souled vampires, and then there were none, but then… one souled vampire…. I will take back one of you—or one of you souled, hell, we’re not picky.’

‘You’re not having either of us, Mate. Me and Angel like our souls just where they are.’

‘Well, then, I guess you know the drill….’

‘You’ve got to be fucking….’ He turned when he heard a sound behind him.  Vast muscles, sleek, oiled body. 

‘Don’t you go banging those bloody arms of yours…. Oh, fuck!’ He rolled away from the flaming arms, but the figure immediately went for Angel. Spike swore and side-kicked him then grabbed Angel’s body and high-tailed it toward the back of the cave.

He’d only just survived when he’d been fighting alone.

Now he had Angel to protect.

That changed everything.

‘What’s up, Hon?’ Buffy came up and hugged him as he stood in the window, watching the street. ‘He’ll be here soon.’

‘I’m not…!’ Derision! As if he’d be waiting or watching for Spike!

He pulled out of her grasp. ‘Drink?’

‘Haven’t you had…?’

‘I think I know when I’ve had enough!’ Had enough of you sometimes.  

Angry looks. She was always good at those.

Sudden disgust at how he looked. ‘I’m going to change.’

‘That’s the third time, Angel! Calm down!’

‘I am calm.’ I’m so calm I feel dead.  Not missing the irony of this, he went back to their room to sort, once more, through his clothes.  Nothing was right. Nothing made him look any…. 

Twenty years. How could he compete?

Was this competition or something else?

The sound of a motorbike. You didn’t hear that in the Burbs very often. Ruin his Stepford life. Home baked biscuits.

The bike wasn’t in sight. Why didn’t he stop outside? 

Footsteps. 

Achingly familiar tread—cocky, slouching and nonchalant.

A knock.

‘Get that, Hon! I’m stirring.’

I can’t.

He walked slowly down the stairs and opened the door.  No one there, but the smell of cigarette smoke, and an indistinct figure in the dark toeing the white picket fence. Can’t explain that it had only been a joke—a joke between them at first, honeymoon ecstasy, which had now come to define their lives. 

At the sound of the door, the figure turned.

Angel sucked in his breath. Younger. No. Hair shaved. 

A smile that stabbed his heart more effectively than any stake.  ‘Angel.’  Spike came closer, up onto the porch. ‘Long time no see.’

Angel nodded, staring at the hair. 

Spike ran his hand over it ruefully. ‘Invite me in then, Pet?’

Angel stood to one side and summoned voice he’d lost twenty years ago. ‘Come in.’

Then it was the Spike and Buffy show: talking, laughing, embracing. So blond, so beautiful.

Buffy wanted to show him the house. Spike let himself be led off with only a glance back at Angel, too enigmatic to read. Did it say: do you trust me with her? Or something else? Something that didn’t involve Buffy at all.

Angel took another drink and knew there were already sweat-stains under his arms.

Twenty years.

They came back, more sombre. Buffy talking about the children that weren’t and never would be, prompted by the four empty bedrooms in this perfect life of theirs, that wasn’t perfect because of that, for her. For him, the imperfection lay elsewhere, but this was easier to focus on. Physical emptiness.

Adopt? The question slid from his childe’s lips. NO! Never his again. They had no connection now. It’s why they’d never adopted: the importance of blood. It was all in all to him still, and now he shared none with this man. Blood of his blood. He had lost the demon inside him now. Quite gone.

Buffy needing to finish things in the kitchen. Spike going with her. Still that laughter that he couldn’t summon, but then he never laughed much anyway. Couldn’t see the need. Never found life all that funny really.

He went to change again. Fresh shirt. Fresh body? Not now. Now he was an hour older than when he’d arrived. Twenty years and one hour.

Food. Spike asked him if he still didn’t eat, and Angel realised he’d eaten nothing. He had a pretty sculpture on his plate though; it looked like mountains.

Buffy and Spike, still talking: do you remember? how could we have? where? when?  
 
Why didn’t they ask why? That seemed the most important to him: why? Why any of this? 

And then they were alone. He looked up from a cleared table to find Spike staring at him, smoking, thoughtful.

‘You’re quiet.’

‘Twenty years.’

Spike nodded. ‘Yeah. Sorry ‘bout that.’

‘Twenty fucking years, Spike, and you decide to—what? See how the other half live?’

‘It’s not so long for me, Pet; remember that.’

Angel did. Time moving like bubbles in a lava lamp; defined by the eternal.

‘You look….’ Angel waited to see how much Spike would lie. ‘Older.’ Spike and his blunt truths; he’d not missed them. ‘Distinguished.’

Angel flicked up his eyes. ‘That’s what Buffy says.’

‘She looks incredible.’

Angel frowned. When was the last time he’d told her that?

‘How’s life treating you then?’ The stress put on life more than it would be for anyone else in that simple question.

‘We’re fine.’

‘Uh huh.’ More thoughtful staring.

‘What have you been up to?’

‘This and that. Been travelling. Been staying still. Ain’t much more to tell really.’

‘So, why the visit, Spike?’

Spike stubbed out his cigarette.  ‘I’ve got something I want you to see.’

Angel felt a prick of something. Alarm? Curiosity? Arousal? He’d felt none of those for so long he couldn’t tell what the small frisson of emotion was.

Spike stood up. 

Angel glanced toward the kitchen then followed him to the door.

He was bleeding so badly he felt heaviness in all his limbs. The burns had begun to heal, but once this flood of blood began from the deep wound in his belly, the healing had stopped. Everything hurt so much, but still he had to keep going, Angel in his arms, further into the cave, further into the womb of the earth.  

Not one hand laid on Angel. 

Not one.

He’d taken every blow, every burning flame, every pincer, whip, razor—all of it, on his own flesh and absorbed the pain so it would not seep to Angel. Angel, who lay unconscious still. Angel, with his beautiful face in deep repose. Angel. 

They came again; it seemed like hundreds, but he fought them off as he always did. He was screaming, but not in fear or pain, a vast challenging cry to the demon: you can’t have them! 

He didn’t think anyone was listening. They were too far into the earth now.

He lost an arm. 

A swift slice taking it off just above the elbow. 

It wasn’t the pain or the disfigurement. It was the not being able to carry his precious burden.  He stood braced, legs apart in front of the body. They’d still have to come through him.  

No one there. Another trick. 

He bound the stump, no time to stop and weep.  He had to get Angel further away from danger. Had to drag him now.  So slow.

A huge rumble and the ground began to shake.  

Still he dragged. They’d find somewhere safe. 

Not one hand on Angel.

Not one.

‘Give it up, Spike.’

‘Sod off.’

‘Yours or his. I’m really not bothered which. Give one up and you’ll both be home.’

‘We need our souls.’

‘It’s time to decide, Spike. You or Angel.’

The rumbling got louder, the shaking worse. A huge crack formed someway ahead and began to edge toward them.

This was it: the last stand. Even he couldn’t fight the fiery pits of hell. He could see them now, through the widening crack. All the demons. All the people. All the agonies. A lifetime of pain. 

He had to decide. He couldn’t save them both. 

‘If I decide, we both return alive?’

‘Of course. Angelus and Spike, or William the Bloody and Angel.’

‘I’ll have the soul replaced, you know that.’

‘I’m afraid not. What I’m given freely, I get to keep. Forever.’

‘When I decide, this will all stop?’

‘Of course. As I said.’

Spike finished his edging of Angel’s body toward the pit, unnoticed under the conversation.  

‘Well?’

‘Go to hell, demon.’ He pushed Angel over and dove, too, one good arm spread, as if he could, even in that fall into hell, take Angel in his arms and protect him.

The night embraced them, and he felt an immediate sense of relief.  Spike tipped his head up. ‘Pretty.’

Angel followed his gaze to the heavens. The earth was tilted so they looked down the arm of the Milky Way, the stars so bright and numerous that the light made their skin glow white.   He looked down at his hand, expecting it to be wet. 

Spike patted the white picket fence as he went past. 

They went a few hundred yards down the street and turned into the park. 

A motorcycle and a figure, and Spike was making introductions.

Angel shook his head, trying to clear it. ‘Sorry? I didn’t….’ Hear. Want to hear. Don’t tell me this.

‘Angel, this is Jab.’

Young man grinning at him. ‘It’s Jacob. Spike likes irony.’

Angel’s head still shaking. Like an old man. 

He looked at Spike, puzzled. ‘He’s my childe, Angel. I wanted you to meet him.’

Angel stepped back, tripped, Spike steadying him.  Sweat under his arms again, pricking. He couldn’t stop that, never seemed able to stop it.

‘Why?’  That was the question after all! He’d known it would be. ‘Why now? Why bring him to me?’

Spike nodded, understanding his confusion, which only made it worse.  ‘I’m taking him to get his… soul. I wanted you to know, that’s all. Seemed important somehow. Let you know it wasn’t all for nothing.’

No time to react to this, because the demon wrapped his arms around Spike’s neck and kissed him.  Spike snaking his arm around the so slim waist and smiling sternly: his childe stepping over the line.

Angel stepped back. ‘You’re going to Africa?’ Was that the best question he could ask?

Spike shook his head. ‘Wyoming. Angel!’ A vampire catching him as he fell. Which one? He’d known so many. But only really ever known one. Wyoming? 

Spike waving his childe away back into the darkness, leading him to a park bench. ‘Wyoming?’

‘Don’t you remember, Pet? When we were there—I told you—I fought the demon that gave me my soul. So, I’m taking Jab there. He wants his back.’

Angel couldn’t process any of it. Wyoming? Why did his face flush when he heard that word? Sweat again, pricking at his groin this time.  Wyoming. Twenty years.

He coughed, trying to clear twenty years of memories in that small sound. ‘He wants his soul?’

‘Yeah, he does. To be like me.’

‘Are you…?’ How did he say it? What words could he use to say the unsayable?  ‘Together?’

Spike leant back on the bench and lit a cigarette. ‘Yes. We are. It’s why I turned him.’

Spike had understood the intent behind the inarticulate.  ‘Why did you come here, Spike?’

‘I wanted to see you.’

‘Why?’

‘Do I need a reason?’

‘Yes. I think you do. You wouldn’t have in the first year. In the second, I still expected you every day. By the third, I was trying to find you. By the fourth, it was… upsetting her, so I stopped. By the tenth, I’d forgotten to think about you every time I woke. Now?’ He stood up. ‘Now I don’t care, Spike. Twenty years.’ He turned, vicious suddenly. ‘Twenty fucking years!’

Spike stood, a thin, pale wraith in the starlight, his cropped hair incongruous in the moment, this old, familiar, bitter moment.

‘You had everything, Angel! Everything! Human, Buffy, new life, hero of the apocalypse! What did I have?’

‘You had me!’

Spike shoved him, forgetting their changed status. Angel went down, a breastbone so badly bruised that he had trouble breathing. A hand, pulling him up. Murmured words. ‘This is why I didn’t bloody come. I knew this would happen. I’m sorry.’

Angel pushed him off—the fly swatting the rhinoceros.  ‘Not one word. Nothing.’

‘And what exactly would I have said, Angel? Tell me that. What would you want me to say? You have Buffy, and you are human. What the sodding hell could I say about that?’

‘So why now?’

Spike faltered for a moment then said quietly, ‘Balance. I’m unsettling the balance again. One souled demon, two souled demons…. I felt it was… wrong. I needed…. Counsel? Your blessing? I don’t know, Angel. I woke up one day and wanted to see you. I’m sorry. It was a mistake. You’re right: twenty years and it should have been left well alone.’  He began to walk back the way they’d come. ‘I want to say goodbye to Buffy.’

Angel walked at his side, his chest tight and painful.  ‘Will you come back?’

Spike laughed harshly. ‘In another twenty years.’ 

I’ll be sixty-seven. 

Before they rounded the bend to the gate, Angel grabbed his arm.  Spike looked down. One large liver spot on the ball of his thumb. He took his hand off and tucked it out of sight.  Spike waited, patiently. Angel licked his lips.  They were moving without his volition. He feared what would come out of his mouth. ‘Take me.’

Spike looked interested. ‘You want to come to Wyoming with us? Road trip?’

Angel just stared at him.  Spike backed away, colliding with the white picket fence. It was very sturdy and didn’t give. ‘Go home, Luv. I’m sorry I ever came here.’

Angel grabbed him again, his grip tenacious. ‘Take me.  I can’t do—. This isn’t—. Please!’ Tears? Not now, please not now. Old men beg with tears in their eyes.  ‘Please, Spike….’

Spike forced his hand off, bruising him. He opened the gate and held it for him.  ‘It’s twenty years, Angel. It’s too late. This isn’t our time.’  A shadow across the street coming closer. Spike’s eyes light up. Quirk on his lips—private communication between lovers. ‘I’m just coming, Pet.’  

He stepped to one side, and Angel went through the gate. Where else was there? 

His reward.

What he’d always wanted.

Spike shuts the gate and turns toward his lover. 

The cold woke Spike. Spike woke Angel with his shout.

They stared at one another then scrambled to their feet amidst thawing snow. 

‘What the…?’ Angel looked around at the fallen trees, crashed branches and churn of melting snow.  He looked at Spike then suddenly wrapped his arms around his body and walked away. 

Spike was still shaking from the fall, from watching Angel plummeting unconscious into hell.  He swallowed and toed a fallen branch. ‘Bloody bad dream….’

Angel turned. ‘You dreamt, too?’

Spike nodded glumly.  Angel looked around, seeming to find it hard to believe that it had been a dream. 

Suddenly, he thrust into his coat and unbuttoned a pocket. He rubbed a hand tiredly over his face. ‘The dream catcher’s gone.’

‘Prob’ly fell out in the avalanche, Mate.’

Angel knew this wasn’t so, but he wasn’t in the mood to say so.

‘So, we gonna see this Shaman bloke then?’

Angel shook his head. ‘There’s nothing for us in these mountains. I was wrong.’

Spike laughed, a short, sharp snort of amusement. 

Angel glanced at him, wrapping his arms tighter around his body. ‘Let’s find the horses and get out of here.’

It took them until dawn to find the frightened animals, so they hunkered down in the forest, waiting out the desultory sun. 

They didn’t speak much, both too lost in the emotions of the dreams.  Just before sunset, Spike asked for the map. Angel reached to his saddlebag and searched for it, frowning.  

‘Don’t tell me we don’t have it.’

Angel slumped against the tree. ‘We’ll have to go the direct way.’

‘But that way has more out in the open. It’s why we came the long way!’

Angel nodded. ‘Maybe we should just lie down and let the fucking sun come up.’

Spike gave him an odd look but then took command of the night. He saddled the horses, made Angel mount, consulted the stars and headed down the mountain, leading the way.

The bitter cold that had driven them up had turned into sleeting rain, seeing them down. The mountain loomed huge behind them. 

They were glad to get out on the plain. 

The first day they stopped earlier and had time to prepare good graves. They lay in them, arms folded over their chests, hoping they wouldn’t dream. They’d had enough of dreams.

They pressed on the following night, keeping straight toward Molena. They didn’t know why they were returning there but familiarity drew them. 

On the third night, Spike ventured into territory that they had avoided up to then, land far more intimidating than that which they crossed. 

‘I don’t think it was just a dream.’

‘We’re tired and strung out, Spike. I made an error taking us up into the mountains, and we just need to feed and rest.’

‘None of that alters the fact that it wasn’t a dream.’

‘What was it then?’

‘I’m not sure. A warning? A prophesy?’

Angel turned and regarded him, his horse nudging closer, their legs brushing. ‘Tell me.’

Spike frowned. ‘I was fighting for our souls—same way I fought for mine.’

‘Did you win?’

‘In a way.  What about you?’

Angel turned back and faced the trail. ‘I—. I was human, with Buffy.’

‘Oh! Fucking hell! I get pummelled and pounded looking after your fat arse, and you get tucked up with Buffy! Sheesh! Why does this always happen to me?’

‘You were protecting me?’

Spike gave him a look that sent shivers down Angel spine.  

‘So, was I in this wet-dream of yours?’

Angel took off one of his gloves and flexed stiff fingers. ‘No.’

‘Typical. So, do you think it was some kind of message?’

Angel replaced his glove. ‘No.’ He kicked his horse to take the lead.  

Toward dawn the following night, they heard distant voices and smelt human blood. 

They were tempted to ride around and avoid any confrontation, but old habits still died hard, and they followed the sounds of life until they sat on a small ridge about two hundred feet from a group of wagons.  A large fire blazed in the centre of the circle, which ensured that they were beyond the range of sight, in the shadows.

After a moment, Spike put a hand on Angel’s arm. ‘Poor bugger.’

Angel followed his gaze to a small group off to one side. 

There was a figure in the middle of the circle of people, under a tree. 

He seemed to be taller than the rest. Unnaturally so.

Suddenly, in a movement that startled Spike so much that his horse shied, Angel snatched out his rifle. He growled for Spike to be still, took aim on his shoulder and sent a shot into the dark. An impossible shot.

The man appeared to fall, crumple, and all that was left was a severed piece of rope hanging from the tree. Angel kicked his horse to life and hissed, ‘Stay with me.’  They pounded into the dancing shadows together. Angel fell off his horse and ran to the fallen man.

The small crowed parted. 

Spike, struggling to stay on his rearing horse, looked at Angel and the man he cradled in his lap. His voice was a whisper over the crackle of the firelight. ‘Wesley!’

Chapter 9

Consternation greeted Angel’s shot, but too stunned by the appearance of the hard men riding down on them, the rapid dismount, the guns, the small group of people did nothing—until Angel gathered Wesley in his arms and made to leave.

Then there was a rising murmur like angry hornets preparing to sting. 

Spike slid from his nervous horse and stood over Angel, echoes playing with his head. 

There was a shot, he spun and clasped his shoulder.  

You do the Devil’s work—hissed words following the bullet, now hot in his shoulder.

Angel rose behind, Wesley in his arms. 

The vampires backing away, Spike levelling his guns on the group.

Devils! 

Murmurs of assent.  

Another shot. Deep thigh. He wondered if they’d been aiming somewhere more painful. 

Angel: Spike!  Turns to see Angel lifting Wesley into a covered wagon, beckoning him urgently.  

He goes back toward the mob, covers their retreat, firing repeatedly, each shot carefully aimed away from flesh.

He’s not a devil. He’s a good man. 

But not one hand on Angel.

Not one.

He walks forward, firing.

Another bullet. Chest this time. You’ll have to do better than that.

Grabbing the horses.

Final bullet in the spine.  

Abomination! shouted at his retreating back hardly hurts after that.  

The silence and calm of the desert shocked him.  He followed the sounds of the wagon, listened for sounds following them. 

Wesley!

For the first time since he’d sat in Tom Devant’s study, he believed he was going home.

He felt cold and empty as the land around him.

The wagon had stopped over a small rise, in the lee of a tumble of rocks. 

They’d not been pursued. 

He slid from a shivering horse and skidded to his knees alongside Angel.  

‘Is he…?’

Angel shook his head and rubbed softly at the vivid mark around the man’s neck.  Then with a swift movement, snaked his hand out and cupped the back of Spike’s neck. His hand was shaking. ‘Can you ride?’

Spike clasped his hand. ‘A couple of grazes. It’s nothing.’

‘We need to get further away. Mobs gain courage recounting their exploits. Wesley needs to get warm….’

He had no need to point out that in less than an hour, the sun would rise.

Angel tied the horses to the back of the wagon; Spike climbed inside with difficulty. A fact that Angel noted silently. He laid the wounded man in the wounded vampire’s lap and jumped into the driving seat.

He drove the horses mercilessly, only stopping once to swap the teams over. The prickle of sun drove him mercilessly. He could not afford to do less to them. 

If they were caught out on the plain by Wesley’s attackers, he would die, for they would not be able to protect him. Angel, too, believed that Wesley had come to take them home.

He didn’t have time to analyse how he felt about this now. He’d get home, and then he’d think about it all. He’d have twenty years to think about it then.

Finally, he could push the night no further. Shadows were being thrown by the wagon, and it was time to stop.  

He looked despairingly around for cover then he heard Spike calling him.  

He peered inside. It was relatively gloomy. Not enough cover, but with blankets, they could survive the day.

He hopped inside, reloaded all their guns, laid them ready, and then climbed under a blanket. 

Wesley lay between them, his breathing raspy and laboured.

‘Did he wake at all?’

Spike’s voice was oddly controlled. ‘Briefly. Rambled about the devil.’

With difficulty, Angel manoeuvred over Wesley and lay next to Spike, holding the blankets tented above them. ‘Let me see.’

‘I’m okay.’

‘Spike!’

With difficulty, Spike unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged it off. He peeled his jeans off one leg, exposing a blood-soaked thigh.

‘You should have healed by now….’ Angel’s voice angry at Spike because he needed to be angry at something.

‘I need to feed. So do you.’  Spike’s voice calm and forgiving because he knew why Angel was angry.

Angel nodded, ashamed.  He examined the wounds, finding it hard under the blankets. Eventually, Spike pulled away. ‘I’ll be okay, Luv.’

‘You should have climbed in with us! Why do you have to be so…?’  He turned away. There was only so much hurt he could hide.

Spike put a hand on his shoulder and rubbed it gently. Angel put his over Spike’s, stroking his fingers. 

As ever, it began to get hot. They sweltered under their makeshift coverings, but it was so much better than being buried in sand that they didn’t complain.

They drifted in and out of sleep, unwilling to let themselves slide too readily into that deceitful realm. 

When they woke, it was evening, and Wesley was gone.

Angel sat up with a disoriented shout. Spike grunted and curled back into pain-filled sleep. 

Wesley poked his head in the wagon and said cheerily, if a little huskily, ‘Anyone for tea?’

He’d never seen either Angel or Spike look so human. Which seemed unfair to humans, really, as he was judging entirely on the state of their dishevelment. Angel’s hair looked like a porcupine. He thought Spike had stubble until he realised it was just grime.

He squatted by the fire and watched them climb stiffly from the wagon.  Before they could begin the interrogation, he said succinctly, ‘Yes, I know how to get us home.’

He was shocked by the expressions on the vampires’ faces. He’d expect relief, and he did see that, but he’d not expected it to be mixed with so many other emotions.  

Angel accepted a mug of hot liquid that Wesley optimistically described as tea then held the man gently by the back of his neck, examining the slightly faded burn mark.  ‘Start from the beginning.’

Wesley glanced at Spike and then at Angel and had the vivid thought that he’d never really known where the beginning was, but he started at a place that seemed critical to the story. ‘You jumped through that damned portal! Of all the irresponsible things to do, Angel, for all you knew…. Anyway, fortunately for you, I’d been taking readings of the device, and as you went through, I caught a mass of data. It took me a while to break it down to anything I could use, but eventually it showed me exactly where you’d gone and when, and….’

‘How did you find us?’

‘Well, I rather think you found me, but I came through the portal, found myself in some kind of shed, and when I went out….’

‘Were you sick?’

‘Oh, no. But I never travel without Dramamine.’

‘Oh.’

‘Anyway, there was this rather agreeable chap who filled me in on you two and said you’d been heading to the mountains—for some bizarre reason.’

Angel looked peeved. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time.’

‘No, it didn’t.’

They both ignored Spike, and Wesley took up his story again. ‘Well, he helped me get kitted out, and I sort of set off to follow you.’

Angel glanced at Spike, and Spike raised his eyebrows slightly, ‘You thought you could make it to the mountains on your own?’

Wesley frowned. ‘Well, I’m not entirely useless, you know….’

‘Uh huh. So, tell us about the hanging, then, Pet.’

Wesley shot him a look, which made the vampires laugh, and Wesley had the distinct impression that they’d not done that for a long time.  He smiled. ‘Yes, well. It’s the very last time I shall stop and offer to play the Good Samaritan for a group of Mormons.’

‘Mormons?’

‘And I thought the ones in suits hijacking you on doorsteps were bad enough.’

‘Why were they calling you the devil?’

‘Were they? Damn cheek. I saw the light of their fire and didn’t fancy sleeping out on my own much, so I rode in, intending to ask if I could share their camp. As I did, there seemed to be a lot of panicked activity, and when I could make some sense out of it, it seemed that they’d been having their evening meal, and a small child had choked on some meat and died.  He was lying there on the ground, Angel! The mother was hysterical. I went over and it was so….’ He shook his head sadly. ‘If I’d not been there he would have died. What a damn waste.’

‘He wasn’t dead?’

‘Of course not! I fished the lump of meat out of his throat, got his pulse back and gave him the kiss of life.’

Angel frowned. ‘What did they…?’

‘That’s the last thing I remember! I woke up here, lying alongside you two, which, I may say, was something of a relief. I’ve got one hell of a bump on the back on my head, and my throat feels like I’ve been….’

‘They were hanging you.’

Wesley paled and buried himself in his cooling tea. ‘Perhaps it is time we went home.’

Angel looked down, his face dejected. ‘I tried to find a way, sought out…. But it came to nothing. It was all a fucking waste of time. I’m not sure if we can…. What’s that?’

Wesley tossed him what looked like an MP3 player. 

‘I fashioned a more user-friendly version of the two cowboys. We need to get back to the original place we came through….’

Angel stood, staring at the human. ‘This is a device to take us…?’ His words were cut off as he was flattened to the sand.  Spike wrenched the device out of his hand and began to scuttle away to one side. Angel caught at his ankle. Spike threw the device into the dark.

‘I say….’ Wesley hovered, utterly bemused, utterly unable to interpret what he was seeing.  
 
Angel reached the device first and held it out of Spike’s reach until he was kicked in the groin. He went down; Spike grabbed the tiny silver object and drew back his arm as if to throw it in the fire.

He hesitated. 

Angel came to his side, able to prevent him moving, but not—just waiting.

Spike swallowed and dropped the object to the sand then walked out of sight to the privacy of the darkness.

‘What…?’ 

Angel cut Wesley off with a savage look and handed him the device. ‘We need to be back in Molena to use it?’

Wesley nodded, scared of this Angel. The thought flittered across his mind that this wasn’t the Angel he’d come to rescue.  

Angel kicked at the fire. ‘We move. Now.’

Wesley drove the wagon, Angel rode ahead, leading the way. 

He knew Spike was following some distance behind. He wondered if he’d rejoin them when the dawn came.

He pushed them hard all night.  When the sun began to burn, he climbed into the wagon and lay under a blanket, trying not to worry.  

There was a thump; the wagon bed rattled, and someone joined him under the covers.  

Angel wasn’t in the mood to talk anyway, so the angry silence suited him just fine.

They pushed on through the day, but by the next evening, Wesley was done in, and they had to stop.

It was the first time that they’d not travelled at night, and suddenly, sitting by a fire, talking quietly, the scent of home close, some of the tension drained from Angel. He glanced across the fire at Spike and saw that he was lying on his back, his head pillowed on one arm, staring at the fire. He felt an easing in his tension, too, and wished he could think of something to say.  He still wasn’t sure what had happened, what Spike had intended to do, but then he was also fairly sure that Spike didn’t either.  

To bring back a sense of normality, he interrogated Wesley about the office: new cases, old cases, everything that had happened in their absence.  In talking of the past, he subtly introduced the future and re-established that they were going home—for himself as much as for the silent figure the other side of the fire. 

After filling Angel in on all the on-going cases, Wesley suddenly said, remembering, ‘Nina’s been in every day. She’s not said it, but she’s been terribly afraid. Missing you, of course. She is such a nice girl.’

Spike felt Angel glance in his direction and waited with interest to hear his reply. Angel didn’t make one, unless an inarticulate grunt counted. Spike smiled inwardly, a bitter taste in his mouth. Angel wanted him to remember they were going back? Perhaps he’d do well to remember it, too.

Wesley finally groaned with tiredness, and they pulled the bedding out of the wagon and made some makeshift beds. The human lay close to the fire between the two vampires, not admitting that he found the vast desert at night intimidating, but nevertheless not going far out of sight, even to make his necessary ablutions.

The only sounds were the occasional scurrying of a nocturnal predator and the crackling of dying embers. 

Angel shifted his weight, trying to get comfortable, his mind spinning with random, unhappy thoughts.

After half an hour, the night sounds were joined by that of a human breathing deeply and restfully in sleep. 

After five minutes more, he heard something else. 

Then his view of the stars was blocked by a dark figure.

Spike stood for a long time, staring down. Then he lifted the blanket and slid in alongside Angel.

He lay on his side, studying Angel’s profile for a while, then he turned the troubled face toward his and brought their lips together.

Under the cover of the night, Spike redefined the meaning of heat. His kiss seared them together, and Angel knew that whatever happened after this night, he would carry the scars of this burning.  

He knew that in twenty years time, what they did now might cause him to beg for his unlife once more.  He rose to the kiss, pushing into Spike’s demanding mouth with his tongue. His hands caressed the back of Spike’s neck, kneading his skull between them as if shaping their relationship. 

Their bodies warmed quickly to the arousal, hands and faces flushing with pleasure. They kissed then parted, darted quick eager glances at lips and kissed again in new positions. Tongues explored then drew back to savour, eyes closed, eyes open, hands still roaming. 

Spike half-lay on Angel, his leg hooked over him, rubbing them together under layers of stiff cotton. Angel’s body responded to the deep kissing: cock swelling with blood and the illusion of life. It was meaningless though, automatic, expected. What wasn’t expected, what was new, was the swelling in his heart.  He felt the lifeless organ expand like the endless sky above them, like the land. He could hear air rushing through its empty chambers, driven by the hot intensity of Spike’s passion. He was diminished, and in that sense of himself as something tiny, insignificant and powerless, his true power grew. For the first time, he saw how empty he was. For the first time, he saw himself not as a mighty, aloof warrior, but as a hollow man. And these insights gave him power, for they gave him courage. He pulled away, tightened his grip on Spike’s head, watched the dilated eyes, tasted the swollen lips in his memory, and cried hoarsely, ‘I love you.’

The sky contracted, the land came back into focus, and Angel knew he was exactly what he had always been, except that now he was not alone and he was in love. When Spike dipped again to kiss him, he put his palm to the swollen lips. ‘I promise: when we get back, we talk.’

Spike’s eyes spoke his acquiescence. He laid his head tiredly on Angel’s chest, one leg still bent possessively over him. 

Their erections rubbed pleasantly together. Spike idly stroked his finger rhythmically up and down Angel’s arm. Angel scrunched and released the long blond locks, tugging them lightly.

Angel’s sense of vastness shrank until only they existed within the whole universe. He felt a sense of unlooked-for peace. Insignificance in the vast scheme of things wasn’t so bad, sometimes. Without the finger of God pointing at him, he could make decisions that might go unnoticed. He could lie by a fire and be in love with another man, and for this tiny moment in time, he was content.

Chapter 10

Spike waited until Angel was deeply asleep and then eased out of his embrace. He sat the other side of the fire and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke trails up into the vastness above. He’d meant to apologise for the fight, but standing over the supine figure in the dark, he’d suddenly wanted something else. For the first time, something had given him courage to take it. And when he’d tried to take it, he’d found it freely given. A grin split his face as he remembered Angel’s eagerness, his need, his passion.

It was like turning on a tap of desire. His thoughts were a chaotic tumble: the power of a gun in his hand; the smell of blood from the charnel house; Katherine’s hand on his head; Tom. Thoughts of Tom crashed and sloshed from side to side as if the memories were a vast, contained wave. They churned up the silt of desires long buried: hands on flesh, but not Tom’s on his; a tongue, following the run of a swollen vein, but not Tom’s on his; hard clashing of lips and shared moans, but these weren’t the human’s, either. His body went into spasm; he bit his lip, coppery blood filling his mouth.

He wasn’t afraid of going back now. In that embrace, in that long, drawn-out kiss, Angel had finally revealed his true colours.  Spike had tasted him.

He closed his eyes and inhaled the night scents. He would miss this place. It was where he’d finally found what he sought, where all his striving had ceased.

He returned to the two figures and lay down on the far side of Wesley.  There was time enough for the human to know how things had changed.

Where would they have the talk Angel promised? What would he say? Do? He couldn’t keep the grin off his face. Everything seemed to have enormous promise. For the first time since he had his chip implanted, and all the bad time that had followed after, he felt life stretching before him, bright and enticing. 

He laughed quietly to the stars. 

He was in love, too.

Knowing that this feeling was returned, knowing that just across the sleeping human lay someone who loved him, settled his eternally restless spirit.  

He tipped into sleep and shared its deep restfulness with Angel.  Just before he finally stopped thinking, he realised it could be the last night he slept alone.  

Angel’s innate radar for danger clicked in, but it was too late.

‘Mi Amigo! Buenos días.’  A gun cocked against his temple. 

He would have killed the man, but he heard a grunt of pain and knew it was Wesley’s, so he opened his eyes cautiously, non-threateningly, and looked up into a pair of eyes frenzied with hate.  

A dozen men sat on horses, watching the early-morning scene. He could see Wesley’s legs amongst the horses.

Spike was lying some feet away but was oddly still. Angel smelt blood and guessed the cause of the stillness. 

The man grinned, displaying a set of gold teeth. ‘I am well, thank you for asking!’ He held up his right hand, which was bloated, purple, missing two fingers, and stinking. Angel could not help but feel slightly guilty, but he did not let this show on his face.

He rose slowly, hands held well away from his body.  He backed to Spike and nudged him with his foot but got no response. 

One of the men on horseback said angrily, ‘Get on with it if you’re gonna kill him. We got business in town.’

The bandit turned, grinning. ‘This one took two precious things from me!’ He held up his destroyed hand like a trophy. ‘So, maybe I no kill him! Maybe I take from him, too!’  

Angel made a small move, and the man grinned unpleasantly. ‘I see you comprende, Mi Amigo! I lose two; you lose two.’ He suddenly nodded, and Angel hitched his breath in as the horses parted. Wesley was suspended between two saddle horns, his arms extended, his head hung down as if unconscious already.

‘Is funny, no?’ The bandit sucked his teeth appreciatively at his inventiveness. 

Angel kept his face impassive, but he studied the scene. If he moved, he had no doubt the horses would be kicked to life, and Wesley would be….

As if reading his mind, the man said gleefully, ‘Sometime one arm come off—sometime two. They flop like chicken when you cut ze heads off, no? On the ground with their no arms. Funny, no?’

Before Angel could reply, there was a stirring behind them. Angel grinned as he sensed the balance of power about to change in his favour. The bandit quickly waved at his companions and one of them walked toward Spike’s waking figure, hauled the semi-conscious figure to his knees and wrapped a length of piano wire around his neck. One side of Spike’s head was caked in blood; whatever had smashed into his skull while he slept had hit hard.

The leader spat into the sand and said conversationally, ‘Which one you want go first?’

Angel raised his eyes as if seeking divine guidance. He calculated they had about five minutes before the sun made another enemy. He looked at Spike; the wire was already cutting into his neck, and a bright band of blood had begun to flow in rivulets onto his shirt. He looked at Wesley and felt his pain.

He could save one or the other. He couldn’t save both.

‘Angel….’

Everyone looked at Wesley, his face as ragged as his voice. ‘For God’s sake, Angel, just give him the damn gold.’

Angel stepped toward him. ‘This isn’t about….’

‘Gold?  Where you have this gold?’  The bandit held out his hand to stop Spike’s slow torture, and his companion relaxed the hold on the wire.  

Angel summoned what he had once been, before he had become so indecisive and vulnerable, and followed Wesley’s lead. He lunged at him, screaming convincingly, ‘I’ll fucking kill you! You bastard!’ The words set up unfortunate echoes in his mind, but these painful memories only gave his passion the necessary edge of truth. 

Startled, the bandit held out his injured hand, trying to placate, but Angel knocked it away then pointed accusingly at Wesley. ‘You die!’

The bandit nodded at the men on the horses. ‘Let him go.’

Even the act of dismounting stretched Wesley, and he cried out in pain as the men tried to release the ropes.  Arms trembling, he shoved his hands in his pockets as he fell to his knees.

The leader strode over and picked him up by his hair, thrusting his face close. Wesley reeled at the stench of his mouth and rotting hand. 

‘Now talk. You have….’ He nodded at the man holding Spike. ‘To cinco, or his head….’

Wesley opened his mouth to lie plausibly, and the bandit calmly said, ‘Five.’

There was a scream.

The horses reared. The last thing Wesley saw was the gold in the bandit’s teeth. Then he felt as if he’d been hit by a black rhino from the skies of a childhood nightmare. His last thought, as he pressed the button on the tiny device in his pocket was, ‘Oh, bother, I forgot my Dramamine.’

Wesley’s fears of opening a portal some miles from the original ground zero proved to be unfounded. They didn’t return on the middle of the freeway, or inside solid rock, but in the lab. What he had failed to take into account was the effect of varying distance they were away from the portal when it opened.

Closest, he travelled through with no more than a violent migraine and sickness that left him incapacitated for two days. The bandit fared worse. He blew apart, his body parts decorating the walls of the lab. He flopped for quite a while, but he didn’t seem to find that too funny this time.

The only other human to return, the one cutting Spike’s head off, evaporated. A faint, red mist hung in the air for a while, but no one who was conscious understood its provenance.

Spike was already unconscious when the portal hit him. So like drunks and babies, relaxed, he survived the shock relatively unscathed.  The rifle butt to his temple and the flooding gash in his neck were more serious problems.

Angel, tense, his muscles in full flight as he’d dived for Spike, fared worse. Ligaments ripped, tendons snapped, and he fell into the portal, sick, disoriented, and suffering severe pain in every inch of his body.

Angel then suffered more as he was subjected to his own rules: quarantine. The three of them were put in separate holding cells until the scientists at Wolfram and Hart could determine whether they were contaminated. Angel raged; he ranted, but no one took any notice. It was what he’d ordered, and they were too afraid of him to break his orders now.

The hours ticked by slowly. 

He paced, thinking about Spike.

He was declared safe, and the cell was opened.  He saw Wesley being led out of his, holding his head, and then he turned at the sound of the third door sliding open.

‘Angel!’

Angel whirled around. ‘Nina.’

She ran into his arms, laughing, crying, talking.  

He held her. He was glad to be back, to be whole, and something of that relief transferred itself to his hug, and she seemed satisfied. 

She pulled away and held him at arms’ length, feigning anger as her privileged position of his lover allowed her to do.

Angel glanced to the last figure emerging.  

He was bandaged around his neck, and Angel wanted to hold him at arms length and be angry with him. It was his privileged position, after all.

Spike watched the small scene play out. 

He sensed there was more to Angel’s hug than the girl perceived, but he couldn’t tell exactly what that something was. 

He could tell what it wasn’t though; it wasn’t I love you, and it wasn’t we’ll talk.

As it wasn’t either of those, he turned away and left them to it.

Angel was sucked into the needs of Wolfram and Hart. Its vast power had brought him back, and it exacted its pound of flesh. He showered; he changed; he joked to Nina that he was too sore for anything more intimate than letting her watch both of these, and then he went down to the office.

He hoped Spike would make an appearance. But he didn’t seek him out.

The scene played itself over and over in his head like a frantic pulse. It didn’t matter if he replayed it from his point of view, or from Wesley’s or Spike’s, the outcome was always the same: he stood rooted to the spot with indecision whilst his friends were killed. He knew they didn’t actually get killed, but he couldn’t make his memories play out that way. In his mind, he let them die, because for the first time, he’d allowed himself to be human: he’d allowed himself to love like a man. It didn’t matter how many times he told himself that he couldn’t have done anything different, his heart betrayed him. His heart told him that he’d become weak.

So, he didn’t actually go to Spike’s apartment. He didn’t enquire if he was in the building and seek him out. 

He hadn’t changed his mind—he still loved him—only that love had consequences that he’d not foreseen. 

With all this confusion swilling around in his mind for the first few hours at work, he did not need the added complication of Nina. He had her though, and her presence stifled whatever impulses might have made him seek Spike out.  He was trapped by his own nature. Whatever else he was, had been, he was not dishonest in love. Where he loved, he loved passionately and with a single focus. He could not lie to her with his body: sleep with her while his mind was on someone else. In any other circumstances, he would have admitted what had happened while he’d been away and faced the consequences of that truth. If he’d slept with a woman, he would have told her. But he had not slept with a woman, and that changed everything. He could not tell her, but he could not not tell her and still see her.  He wondered, as the long morning stretched on, whether if he’d slept with an anonymous man, he might have admitted that as well. He actually rehearsed words: ritual, connection, extremity. They seemed better than passion, fuck and need. This wasn’t an anonymous man, though. This was Spike—Spike, someone he’d sought her sympathy for; Spike, who he frequently told her was the bane of his life.  

Then, in thinking about this trap, for the first time, what he had done with Spike embarrassed Angel. It had seemed a good motto to live your life by: never do something you are too embarrassed to recount. Shame twisted inside his guts. 

Nothing had changed between them—he still loved Spike—only he had given no thought to the barriers that would still lie between them.

For the first time, he faced what the dream—which he’d known all along wasn’t a dream but a portent of what was to be—meant. He’d toyed with the idea that it meant he’d made the wrong decision, that he should choose unlife with Spike over life with Buffy.  Now, he saw its true meaning. He had to commit to his life and see it through. He had not given of himself to Buffy, not been honest, not committed, and twenty years into their marriage they had been so estranged, and he had been so lonely, that he’d begged his own childe to take him back into the dark world—unsouled, a monster, a demon.

It seemed to Angel that the same scenario was playing out with Nina. He owed her more than lies. 

He had an uneasy morning, but things got worse in the afternoon. Things had slipped so much in his absence that he had to stamp his authority back on the city. He summoned some of the leaders of the various demonic factions for a meeting.

They came reluctantly, and it was when he looked up from his place at the conference table and saw them coming toward him that he knew.  It was a knowledge so painful and so embarrassing that he could not give it air to breathe and buried it under false greetings and slick words.

He hadn’t changed his mind—he still loved him—only that love had consequences that he’d not foreseen. 

By the time the evening came, all he wanted to do was be left alone with his misery. He turned off his desk light and rose to go up to his apartment and then saw the slim figure in the doorway.

There was nothing else he could do. 

He held out his hand and smiled.  ‘Nina.’

She came into his embrace. ‘Tired?’

He nodded. 

‘Come on, lover boy, let’s get you to bed.’

She pulled him toward the elevator, and there was nothing Angel could do, despite his vast strength, to resist.

Chapter 11

Spike let the Wolfram and Hart doctor inspect his neck—he got free human blood as his medicine, so he wasn’t complaining.  He’d tried all day to see Angel, but Angel had been avoiding him.  He’d watched the demons going in for a meeting, had debated just wandering in under the pretext of that conference, but something in Angel’s demeanour had deflected him, and he’d turned instead to the lab to have some TLC, albeit from a doctor with cold hands.

He was declared fit, and topped up with warmed blood, he felt brave enough to face Angel.  

The office was empty. 

He grinned and rode up in the elevator.

It didn’t occur to him to knock; he just pushed open the door and wandered in.

Afterwards, he’d almost wished he had caught them shagging. It would have been less intimate than what he did find.  

Angel was lying on the couch, his head in the girl’s lap, and she was rhythmically stroking through his hair, speaking soft, comforting words.

And Angel was lapping it up.  

That was obvious even from where Spike stood.

She heard him and looked up, slightly fazed, but not enough to let Angel go. ‘Spike. Hi.’ Modulated and soft, her words didn’t warrant the tremor of shock that went through the figure on the couch. 

He sat up abruptly.  

Spike flushed and frowned and tried to light a cigarette all at the same time.  ‘Sorry.’  He wasn’t used to mumbling, and it sounded odd, even to his ears.  

He turned and frantically pressed the button for the elevator, cursing that it took so long for the door to open.

He stepped inside and then a dark presence was with him.  

The doors slid shut, and they were alone.

Angel’s face was a study of misery, and for all that his heart was cleaved in two, Spike could not deny him the slice of comfort he’d been enjoying.  

Angel seemed to sense that Spike wasn’t confrontational, rather sad, and he risked coming closer. He tipped his chin up with one finger and examined the wound.

Spike allowed him, his eyes riveted to the darker ones.

Angel nodded, satisfied, and then he leant back on the wall and rubbed his hand tiredly over his face. ‘I haven’t been avoiding you.’

‘Yes, you have.’  Spike merely made a statement of fact, and didn’t, once more, appear to want an argument.

Angel glanced up at him through lowered lids. Spike hesitated for a moment then slid closer.  Angel lifted his arms and draped them over the bony shoulders. They stood for a long time, just looking at the other, as if neither had seen the other’s familiar face before. Angel brought his fingers to Spike’s neck and began to twist a strand of blond hair. ‘Perhaps we’d better talk now.’

In all Spike’s better imagining of this conversation, Angel’s sad, intimate playing with his hair and his forlorn expression had never featured.

He didn’t need the talk. 

He knew what Angel was going to stay.

He’d known it all day.

It was why he’d not tried harder to see him.

Angel watched the thoughts flick through Spike’s mind, revealed by the subtle changing of light and shadows in his eyes. There wasn’t anyway to say what he had to say that wouldn’t hurt. There wasn’t a better time or place or way to say it; it just had to be said. Once said, actions could follow and life would play out, and twenty years from now, he’d be content that he’d made the right decision.

‘I meant what I said, Spike. I do love you. B—.’

‘You don’t need to say but, Angel; I can see it in your eyes.’

‘I do need to. I need to try and explain it to you.’

‘Why? So, you can explain it to yourself?’

‘Maybe.’

‘This is gonna be good then.’ He moved away from Angel’s embrace and flattened the spike of hair that Angel’s erotic twisting had given life to.

‘I can’t lie to Nina—I won’t lie to her—but I can’t tell her the truth.’

‘That you love me.’

‘Yeah. That I love you.’

‘You have a very odd way of defining love, Mate.’

Suddenly, the doors slid open, and the empty office faced them. 

Relieved by Spike’s calm demeanour up to now, Angel was startled when they stepped out into the bigger, freer space and Spike rounded on him, real anger creeping slowly into his eyes.

‘If you loved me, you’d have the balls to tell ‘er.’

Angel strode away, the space allowing him to give vent to his feelings equally well, but something held him back. He could tell Spike about Nina; if pushed, he’d tell him about the dream. The other, the thing he hardly named himself, he could not speak of.

He waved a hand dismissively.  ‘You talk like a child, Spike.’

Spike came up behind him, banging his arm. ‘I didn’t notice you treatin’ me like a child back on those long, hot days, Mate. Didn’t notice that at all. Seems to me, you liked me being just what I am—a fully grown man.’

Angel turned, a flush discernable on his cheeks. ‘You’re a hypocrite, Spike. If you were still with Buffy, you wouldn’t tell her about us.’

Spike took a step back. Angel saw he’d made a fatal error. Spike nodded as if something finally made sense. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there? You’re not telling me the real reason why you’re telling me to piss off.’

‘I’m not telling you to piss….’

‘Whatever. What is it, Angel? You brought Buffy into this as if she were just a name, as if your bloody heart doesn’t break for her every day! No way you’d do that unless you were trying to hide something. What is it? I’m not giving up on this till you tell me. Think you can fob me off with I can’t tell Nina?’ 

His mimicry of Angel’s voice was cruel and cutting, and it gave Angel the edge to retort, ‘You just don’t want to believe that’s it. You don’t want to admit that I’m a more decent man than you—that I can’t lie to someone I care for.’

Angel dug his own trap; it wasn’t even disguised, and he tipped in, almost willingly.

‘You’re lying to me.’

Angel closed his eyes then put a hand over his face. When he spoke, his voice was husky, as if trying to squeeze the words past a clenched throat. ‘What do you expect me to do, Spike? Do you expect me to run this place when everyone knows I’m…? Can you see the freaking headlines? Shit, Spike, I control this company, this city, through fear—their fear of what I was and can be.’ Stating this seemed to bring back some of that menace. He looked Spike straight in the eye, and his voice was level and controlled. ‘There are no gay superheroes, Spike. Life doesn’t work that way. Gay doesn’t say hero. Gay doesn’t say champion. I couldn’t command squat if I destroyed my entire reputation over you. And I need to command. I need them to quake at my name. I need for them to fear me more than they love evil. And when the great battle comes, as it will, for I have seen it in a dream, I will be triumphant. And all of this will come about because I play the game, Spike. I play the game by their rules.’

Spike didn’t confirm or deny any of Angel’s contentions. He bent to light a cigarette and said in a cold voice, ‘Maybe it’s time you gave up being a champion and did something you wanna do for once.’

Angel just looked at him.

Spike put on an unconcerned face.  Then he frowned. ‘What?’

Angel just continued to trap him with his dark eyes.

‘Bloody hell! All right! It’s your sodding mission, and I get that, I do, but….’

‘What?’ He put a hand to Spike’s cheek, and despite the anger that had flown between them, it was not rejected. ‘What, love? Would you have me different? Tell me it isn’t exactly this—this damn mission of mine—that you love me for.’

Spike caught at his finger and said harshly, ‘I’ve never told you I loved you, if you remember.’

He couldn’t keep up the pretence. His face crumpled, and he clasped the finger into the hollow of his neck. ‘I do.’  He blinked and looked down. ‘This can’t be happening. After what you said….’

Angel eased them together, respecting Spike’s great anger, which was now dissolving into misery.  ‘I was out of time, Spike, out of place. What I said is true: I do love you. But I didn’t think through the consequences of that love—for either of us.’

‘What are we going to do?’

Angel laughed bitterly. ‘I get it now. It wasn’t being turned; it wasn’t hell; it wasn’t losing Connor; it wasn’t this place—none of those were my true torment, the path to redemption I have to tread. This is. Loving you and losing you will torment me for eternity. But the world will go on, and it will be safe. I’ll see to that. I will triumph against evil even as I live out my twenty years of mediocrity.’

‘And me? What about me?’ 

Angel hugged him closer. ‘I want you to suffer.’ 

Spike pulled back, but Angel clasped him tight again. ‘I’m not that noble. I can’t tell you to be….’ Suddenly, a tremor passed through his body, and he turned away, going to his favourite place by the window, hugging his body tightly. ‘I can’t tell you to be happy. I’m not that much of a hero.’ He turned and held out his hand. ‘Tell me you’ll be sad, Spike, please.’

Spike didn’t need to say it.

They stood together looking out over the city, Spike leaning slightly against the strong body, Angel’s arms around the slim waist, his chin on the bony shoulder. 

After some considerable time, a quiet voice murmured, ‘I’ll be sad for me. I’ll be sad for you, and I’ll be sad for this whole bloody mess.’

Angel tightened his arms but could not at that moment reply.

When the night was at its darkest, Spike pulled out of Angel’s embrace and straightened his coat. ‘Well, I’ll be off then.’

‘What?’

He tipped his head to one side, thoughtfully. ‘I can’t stay here, luv. Not now.’

‘No! You can’t go!’

‘Angel! I can’t see you every day! I can’t watch you with her! I can’t watch you at all!’

‘Spike!’ Spike realised with a frisson of shock that Angel had not even considered his leaving. For the first time that hideous night, he saw Angel’s conviction that he was doing the right thing wavering.  He came close. 

‘I’ll stay tonight…. Just one night together….’

Angel groaned. ‘No! I can’t….’

‘What about me? I need something, Angel. I need to… put you together in my mind. I need to assemble all the fragments that I have of you going round and round in my head. See, if I can put it all together, make a coherent whole, then I can spend the rest of my eternity deconstructing you. I’ll take you apart piece by piece in the proper order and stow the pieces away. Then you’ll have no hold over me. It’s how I survived Buffy… after I’d… with her…. She stopped being my phantom ideal. You have to, too.’

Angel hung his head. ‘Maybe I want to be your ideal.’

Spike saw his error. In making Angel more human, he only increased the amount he loved him. Far from enabling him to pack Angel away, Angel defeated, Angel vulnerable and intensely sad, made his heart ache with desire for him.  He pulled him into a tight embrace. ‘Okay, Pet, we’ll play it your way. No last, first, only night.  Will you promise me something though?’

Angel nodded into his shoulder. ‘If I can.’

Spike straightened them. ‘Promise me that when there are gay superheroes, you’ll look me up, hey?’

Angel saw the immense effort Spike made to inject this small thread of humour, and he responded in kind. ‘I’ll come in my tights and find you. Promise.’

Spike stepped back. ‘Okay. I’ll send word where I am from time to time. Postcards from the edge….’

The reality of Spike leaving hit Angel, and he almost crushed his ribs, so tightly did he wrap his arms around them. Anything to prevent him reaching out. 

Spike turned when he reached the door. He made a wry face. ‘I can’t think of a single thing to say.’

Chapter 12

It had all happened so quickly he didn’t take it in until he got back to his apartment. In one day, he’d gone from intense excitement and hope, to something so painful he drew breaths in short, ragged gasps when he thought about it. 

Right up until the very end, as he’d walked out of the door, he’d expected Angel to break. He’d expected Angel to change his mind. When he hadn’t, when he’d stood there with his arms holding his emotions in check, he’d had to continue walking, although it was the most difficult thing he’d ever done. He couldn’t stay there, as much as he wanted to see Angel. He couldn’t hang around, hoping for one kind word or look. He’d done that with Buffy: been her puppy, fawning around her ankles for each tiny crumb of affection. Not with Angel. He didn’t want that with him.

He stuffed a few clothes into a bag and retrieved the keys to his bike. The days of travelling around in the heat of the day were over. This life was over. 

He’d start again. He’d done it so many times he couldn’t understand why it seemed so difficult now.

There was a hesitant knock on the door. It wasn’t Angel’s, so he wasn’t really interested who it was. He opened it. 

Wesley gave him a half-smile. ‘May I come in for a moment?’

Spike stepped to one side.

Wesley glanced around, took in the bag and used it as his cue. ‘I’ve come to ask you not to go, Spike.’

The irony of hearing the words out of the wrong mouth made him bitter, and he opened the door once more without speaking.

Wesley frowned. ‘Look, no argument is worth leaving over. Whatever it was, and I’m sure it was nothing more than your usual spat over….’

‘We didn’t argue.’

‘Oh.’ Relationships weren’t Wesley’s strong point, but his immense brain began to make connections: click, click, details falling into place. He blinked at the implications of his discovery.

‘Right. Well. I suppose you know best. Look, I was going to give you this….’ He withdrew a large envelope from inside his jacket.

‘What is it?’

‘Something I was going to show you tomorrow….’ He faltered. ‘Gosh. I’m rather…. I wish you weren’t going.’

The human’s simple, heartfelt declaration almost undid Spike. He took the envelope, just to hasten the man’s departure, and held the door once more. He said roughly, but honestly, ‘I need to get going ,Wes. Dawn’s not far off, and I wanna get out of this city.’

‘Yes. Of course. I’m sorry. I won’t delay you any more.’ Immediately negating his own words, he reached into his coat once more and pulled out his wallet. ‘Take this.’

Spike looked down at the bankcard. ‘You know I can’t.’

‘I don’t know anything of the sort. It’s not mine; it’s my account for books with the firm. There’s only a couple of thousand in it, but it will be a cushion should you ever need it.’ He told him the code and thrust the card on him. 

Spike pocketed it, as with the envelope, just to get rid of him.  

Wesley gave him an awkward hug then left.

He retrieved his bike from storage, kicked it to life and sniffed the air. North, south, east, or west? For old time’s sake, he took south. How he wished Angel were trailing after him miserably this time.

He left the city and headed for the coast highway.  

He was so angry he couldn’t think straight, and getting out of the city was all that drove him.  Anger, and all of it directed at himself…. Angel, because he had done what he’d swore he’d never do again: fall for someone who had higher priorities than love. Anger, because he understood why Angel had done what he’d done. Anger, because he knew it was right. Anger, because he could do nothing about it. 

He stopped for gas, filling up carelessly, paying for it with the small amount of cash he had on him, remembering Wesley’s parting gift and thinking how much he would miss the friends he’d made in L.A. All of them. 

He climbed back on and turned his head, twisting out the kinks. 

A clear reflection of the bike greeted him in the window of a small bar across the street. Just the bike.

It was too much.

It only confirmed the fact that he didn’t exist anywhere—not here in the street, not in Angel’s heart.

He drove across the street, parked up and went in. 

If he drank enough, experience told him that he would stop existing in his head, too—that his perception of reality would match everyone else’s.

Angel didn’t go back up to Nina. He had no more excuses for not sleeping with her, and his body ached for physical contact—an ache that he now feared. It was so all-encompassing that he feared where it would take him.

He went out into the night and tried to assuage it elsewhere and in pursuits that would drain his energy and his strength if not his sexual desires. Two out of three would have to do.

The bar was quiet, which exactly suited Spike’s mood, so he bought a pitcher of beer and took it to a table in the corner. He had a lot of thinking to avoid.

He ignored the argument when it started—it wasn’t his business, and he wasn’t in the mood for other people’s problems.

When his table was bumped and his beer split, he took it personally however, and suddenly found that he was in exactly the right mood for other people’s pain.

He waded into the fight, not too sure (and caring less) who was fighting for what. He landed punches, kicked and spun, and even bit once or twice, but only with blunt, human teeth.  

And then, there were just two of them. He stared at the young man, who was wiping a trail of blood off his face, and decided he’d probably been on the right side after all. 

The boy gave him a curt nod as if he’d not really needed the help, which was endearing, but Spike wasn’t in the mood for endearments of any kind, unless they were directed at him, which they hadn’t been so far that night. Almost no endearments at all. Just arguments and pain.

He sat down and began to resume his own business once more when a bottle of malt was plonked on the table in front of him. ‘Thanks.’

Spike looked up. ‘No need.’ He pushed it back towards its owner, not needing the alcohol or the company. 

The boy sat down.

Spike reared back and said sharply, ‘Sod off.’

There was a nervous flick of a tongue over soft, red lips, and the boy glanced at the men now rising from the floor.

Spike got it.  

He felt a stab of sympathy for the boy and pleasure that at least someone needed him, and allowed the boy to stay until his attackers left.

Only when he saw the last jeans-clad backside exit did the boy let the tension drain from his face.

In spite of his better intentions, Spike was curious enough to ask, ‘What was it about?’

The boy fiddled with his glass. ‘Nothing.’

‘Uh huh.’

‘You’re… strong.’

Spike gave a small bitter snort. ‘Yeah.’

‘I’m Jacob, by the way.’

‘You’re gone.’

‘Huh?’

‘I don’t need company.’

‘What do you need…?’

The offer was explicit. Spike was taken aback. He wondered if something about him had changed recently, or whether the boy chanced his arm with all solitary men in bars.  It might explain the fight. He leant forward and said precisely, ‘You’re playing with fire, Mate. I said sod off, and I meant it.’

The boy glanced toward the exit. ‘I don’t want to leave on my own.’

‘You’ve played that card. It’s wearing kinda thin.’

‘This isn’t a game! Do you think I’m playing games here?’

Spike saw that he wasn’t and calmed him by pouring him a drink. The boy took it with shaking hands. ‘They’ll be waiting for me.’

‘What’s their beef with you?’

‘What do you fucking think?’

‘Well, the fact that you’re pushy and rude comes to mind.’

For the first time, the boy grinned, and it changed his features from surly to beautiful. Spike caught his breath and took a long drink. 

‘Please. Just come with me. You can leave then—if you want.’

‘I’ll tell you what: I’ll give you a ride home; then I’m outta here.’

Jacob nodded, the confidence of youth and experience telling him that once he got this beautiful stranger into his bed, he wouldn’t be leaving in a hurry.

Spike couldn’t help but admire the way the boy held himself as he walked. It was cocky, nonchalant and graceful all at the same time. It reminded him of someone.

Jacob swung his leg over the leather of the bike with an expression that made Spike swear softly under his breath.  He climbed on and kicked the bike to life. ‘Okay, which way?’  

Jacob opened the door of his trailer and jumped in, practically pulling Spike in with him, babbling about coffee. Spike didn’t resist too much. He hadn’t thought once about Angel since this annoying boy had sat down with him. He been careful to note this, counting the number of times he’d not thought about Angel.  He accepted some lukewarm coffee, but made no attempt to drink it.

Jacob sat opposite him, still talking. 

‘Don’t you ever shut up?’

Jacob frowned and smiled at the same time. ‘Not when I’m nervous.’

‘You’re nervous—what? Of me?’

‘No. Of me.’

‘Huh?’

The boy looked down shyly. ‘I’m gonna fuck this up, and I don’t want to. I want you to….’

Spike leant back, waiting. The boy looked up then suddenly stood and unbuttoned his jeans. 

Spike held out his hand to stop him, but the boy leant in close, pressing his lips to Spike’s, sliding his hands into Spike’s lap.

Spike was impressed with himself that even while kissing this pretty boy he was able to notice that he wasn’t thinking about Angel.  ‘What’s this?’

Spike was about to tell him when he realised the boy was talking about something under his jacket.  He let him pull out a large envelope, and at the sight of it, his last meeting with Wesley flooded into his mind and with it, the memory of his parting with Angel, and then he was entirely unable to pretend anymore that he wasn’t thinking about him every second of every minute of every hour that they’d been apart.

He stood up, running his fingers through his hair.  ‘I’m sorry, Pet. You’ve picked the wrong person tonight for whatever it was you wanted.’ 

He stumbled out of the trailer and caught the tail end of a whispered, ‘…wanted you to take me with you.’

He rode out of the park and headed back to the highway, then pulled over under the lights of a storefront.  He pulled out the envelope and ripped it open.

It was a photocopy of a newspaper clipping, apparently an obituary. Wesley had written a website address in hand on the top. His curiosity was peeked, and despite his preoccupation, he read it. 

If Spike had not expected Angel to actually let him go, equally, Angel had not really expected Spike to leave. All the following morning he expected to see the familiar blond figure striding into his office. He missed the sight of black leather; he missed the smell of nicotine; he missed the arguing; he missed the intense, flaring of passion behind the pretence of arguing. He just missed him, and he could not accept that he was really gone.

On the second day, tension between himself and Nina added to his misery. She had accepted that he wouldn’t have sex with her, and blamed it on temporary trauma from the odd adventure. When he intimated that he wanted to sleep alone as well, she renewed her efforts to discover the real truth. She suspected some of it—that he had fallen for someone else while he’d been away—but her natural assumption that it was a woman infuriated and embarrassed Angel in equal measure. It only seemed to reinforce his own view that he wasn’t normal, natural, which he knew anyway, being a vampire. He’d always managed to work around it in his own mind though, walking and talking like a real man. He felt the act wasn’t working so well over this. He felt everyone must be able to look at him and tell what he wanted to do in bed. 

He wasn’t in the mood, therefore, for a heart-to-heart with Wesley, and when the man came in, balancing two cups of coffee, he rose and said curtly, ‘I have to go out.’ 

‘I went to see him—before he left.’

Angel sat down again.

Wesley perched on the couch and put one coffee on the floor. He leant back with his and waited. Sometimes, he could play the same games Angel did.

Eventually, sensing that he was beaten, Angel asked, ‘Did he tell you why he was leaving?’

Wesley shook his head. ‘It’s not a good time to lose your strongest ally.’

Angel pouted, other, better descriptions than ally flitting through his mind.

‘I think you should try to reconcile, or whatever, and ask him to come back.’

Angel rose deceptively casually and went to look at something interesting out of the window. ‘I have no way of contacting him.  Despite what he said, he won’t be in touch. He’s too proud for that. We probably won’t meet for another hundred years.’ 

Wesley heard repressed pain in Angel’s voice and said, very pleased with himself, ‘Do you want his address or his telephone number—or both?’ He smiled into his coffee. He liked giving Angel pleasure.

Spike peered at the tiny green letters spilling over the screen.  He punched a few keys, but the scrolling didn’t slow down. He cursed.  There was a soft chuckle at his side, and a young man said, ‘Would you like some help?’

Spike gritted his teeth, unwilling to admit he couldn’t use the computer. ‘What happened to bloody books? Time was, libraries went in for ‘em, ya know?’

‘We still have books; this just makes it easier to find what you want in them. What do you want?’

Spike leant back and looked at the young librarian.  With a nod, he fished out the photocopied obituary Wesley had given him. ‘I’m looking for history of this town.’

The man looked surprised. ‘Of Molena?’

Spike smiled softly, staring at the article. ‘Yeah.’ The picture of the sheriff was fuzzy, but it was unmistakeably him. He’d died in nineteen twenty from the flu epidemic.  The boy took it up and studied it. 

‘This is from the Chronicle.’
 
‘I want to trace a family that lived here at the end of the nineteenth century. The Devants.’

‘Well, The History of Stubbs County is probably your best bet. I’ll go get it for you.’

Spike nodded and leant back in his chair, rubbing his hand tiredly over his face. He’d always done things on a whim, but this was unexpected, even for him. He’d seen the obituary, and suddenly, there was only one place he wanted to be. He’d flown in, which had probably been the first mistake. If he’d been trying to recreate something he’d had in this place, some spirit of place, then the technology of the arrival had destroyed it. He’d stepped out of the concourse and hailed a cab and been driven along a modern highway through the desert. He’d asked the driver to stop, and they’d come to a halt alongside oilrigs, nodding their endless dance against the horizon in every direction.  When they’d come into the city limits of Molena, his senses had reeled. He’d not expected a salon or a jail—he hadn’t—but he’d expected some trace of what had been, not this, this place of light and movement and high buildings that took away his view of the stars.

He’d spent that first night wandering around, trying to find the old part of town, and at last he’d found a couple of pre-war buildings. One of them was a small hotel, so he’d checked in, made good use of Wesley’s card and then lain on the wide, comfortable bed, trying to recapture a mood. He couldn’t. Spirit of place…it never was that with him—one place being much as another. For him, places needed people to bring them alive.

Without Angel, there was no spirit of anything.

The library had seemed a good place to escape the daylight. He wasn’t even sure what he expected to find here. 

Proof that it had all existed?

He sensed movement and shifted some papers to make way for the book.

A dark presence stood silent at his side.

Spike then knew who it was. With startling clarity, he realised that his parting words still held true: he had absolutely no idea what to say.

He looked up, and with a frisson of pleasure, saw that Angel clearly had no idea either. He was there, but other than that, his sire seemed at a complete loss.

Spike scooted his chair slightly to one side, and Angel drew up another, sitting alongside him.

He shuffled the papers slightly. ‘What are you doing?’

Spike smiled in recognition of the great effort Angel had just made and replied in kind. ‘Wesley gave me this.’ He slid the obituary over. ‘It kinda got me to thinking—about what happened to them all.’ Were they real? Had it been real? Could it be real for us again?

Angel read the article, his face neutral, then said conversationally, ‘I wonder why he gave it to you.’

Spike let his eyes scan the paper and felt a tremor run through his body. Where would he be now if the envelope hadn’t been in his pocket? Take me with you. He thought he would have done: taken the boy Jacob on the back of his bike—taken him in other ways, too. 

‘Okay, here’s History of… Oh, sorry.’ The boy faltered as he caught a look from Angel. 

Spike looked between the two of them and something hot and urgent flared when he divined Angel’s jealousy. He took the book and nodded his thanks. 

Angel kept his eyes on the boy’s retreat then turned back, ostensibly to look at the book. He caught a look from Spike and pouted. Spike put a hand on his arm briefly, and Angel looked more closely into his eyes. He saw that Spike was anything but annoyed with his small flare of jealousy and looked down with a smile of amusement on his lips.

‘How did you find me?’

‘I’m a detective….’

‘Angel!’

‘Wesley’s card—you withdrew some money.’

‘Uh huh.’ Spike wanted to ask something about eternity and love, but instead, he said as casually as he could, ‘Nina with you?’ 

‘What do you think?’ When no reply was forthcoming, Angel turned and said urgently, ‘No! Of course not! I thought you’d got that!’

Spike tried not to let his relief show, but said sadly, ‘So you are lying to her now.’

Angel put his hand on Spike’s arm. ‘We broke up.’ 

He said no more, and Spike didn’t ask.

Angel read the book for a while, even managing to remember to turn the pages a couple of times.  Spike didn’t realise he was watching him until he was startled by Angel saying quietly, apropos nothing in particular, ‘I’m trying not to lie to anyone now—myself included.’

Spike fidgeted with the mouse, scrolling the page up and down. ‘So… why are you here?’

‘I wanted to see why you were.’

‘Oh.’

Angel rubbed his palms over his thighs. ‘I hardly recognised the place.’

‘You think it’s all changed?’  The tense challenge was pretty clear in Spike’s voice. It was also pretty clear he wasn’t talking about Molena.’

Angel looked at him, his face a mask of misery. ‘I don’t know. It’s why I came, I guess. To see if it was….’

‘Real?’

‘Still the same.’

‘Is it?’

‘Is there anything else I can get you gents? Have you found who you’re looking for?’

Spike jumped slightly. Angel rose and went toward a stack of books, ostensibly searching earnestly. 

Spike stood and picked up the book and the various clippings, handing them back to the boy. ‘No. It’s useless. I don’t think any of it was real.’

He could see that Angel was listening intently.

The boy took the papers, balancing them carefully in his arms. ‘Devant’s not a name I know round these parts. Sounds French.’

Suddenly, Angel turned and said softly, ‘How about Caruthers?’

Spike caught his eye. 

The boy looked surprised. ‘Well, sure. Their place is about twenty miles….’

Spike grinned, a look that made Angel’s face light up. ‘We know where it is.’

The exited together, talking rapidly, their earlier awkwardness forgotten. ‘I never thought….’

‘She must have married….’

‘But what about…?’

‘Do you think it’ll be…?’

Spike was dismayed to discover that Angel had come without the sun-proofed assets of Wolfram and Hart. 

He led the way back to the small hotel, fuming at the delay to his plans. 

They were in his room before the significance of it hit them.  

Angel stared anxiously at the big bed then went to the window to escape its implications, but he couldn’t go far, only standing to one side as the streaks of light reached into the room.  After a few minutes of tense silence, he said in a low tone that only just reached Spike, ‘Fuck this.’ Before Spike could say anything to stop it, they were kissing.  

It was hard and painful, but the pressure on his lips, more than anything else, told Spike that this wasn’t the kiss that solved everything. He looked into Angel’s lust-deadened eyes as their lips clashed and sought and found and tasted, and knew that nothing had been resolved at all. Nina was no longer in the picture, but nothing else had changed. Angel’s confusion was as plain as his need, and both these—urgent need and painful confusion—were met and matched on Spike’s fevered kisses. 

Before they knew it, hands had taken over the giving of pleasure. Angel’s roamed up inside Spike’s shirt, tweaking his nipples; Spike’s played in the loose waistband at the back of Angel’s pants, dipping down to stroke fingertips over hard, smooth cheeks.

The desire to enjoy skin overwhelmed them, and their clothes were shed with abandon, falling around them like discarded morals.

Naked, fully aroused, some of the confusion left; there was only so much room for emotion, and need swelled, gorged on the sight of such beauty. For the few moments that they gazed on the other’s body, perfectly realised in the soft light for the first time, they weren’t confused at all. They banished thoughts of the past or the future. After all, these things were fluid, one had become the other, and thus distinctions were blurred. They left them blurred. For this moment in time, they had each other, their magical bodies, and all the love that would ever be needed between two people.

It was a meeting of perfectly matched bodies. It seemed incredible to Angel as he finally embraced Spike’s lean, hard form that he had ever thought the smaller, softer variety of this enough. This flesh he could not hug too hard; this body took his power and reflected it back to him, buoying him up, not making him feel large and heavy and awkward. Spike’s restless energy and love of physicality found its match in Angel’s strong arms. He writhed and bucked but was restrained, and the restraint spiralled him to new peaks of need.

They didn’t even make it to the bed. Frantic caresses and kisses, which rubbed their bodies together; hands groping and stroking, which pleasured every inch of their sensitive skin; moans and murmurs of delight, which sent tingles of pleasure to their balls; took away their rational thought. They came where they stood: long repressed, powerful spurts of milky essence hitting their chests and chins, and bone-shaking orgasms that held them insensible in their all-encompassing power. 

Only slowly did blood return to starved brain cells. Only then did awareness of place hit them. Only then did they fall leaden and empty to the bed, curling tightly together.

Only then did the confusion return, bearing in its wake far more powerful destructive emotions.

Angel felt Spike shudder, thought it was an aftershock, then realised he was repressing tears. He made a small horrified sound and pushed him away so he could see his face, pulled him back in close, tried to resist when Spike pulled away. 

Spike sat up and fumbled for his cigarettes, cursing as much for his pathetic display—borne more on the intense emotions of the preceding few minutes than any coherent sense of grief—as for the lack of nicotine.  Eventually, he had a cigarette lit and smoke in his lungs, and to complete the pleasure, Angel’s head in his damp sticky lap.  At Angel’s soft, prompting sound of encouragement, he took another lungful of smoke and on its release said jerkily, ‘I had ‘nough trouble leaving you the first time, Angel. I just can’t do it again.’

Angel had no response. The main reason for the impossibility of their relationship was still there; the menacing presence of Wolfram and Hart—with which he’d dealt for his son’s life and won—hovered around them. He could not do this thing with Spike and be what he needed to be there.  

For a brief moment, he considered abandoning it all: Wesley, Gunn, Lorne, all the humans in the world who needed his vigil against the forces of evil. It was a very brief moment. He knew that even if he did, if he let it all go on an orgy of need for Spike that that need would soon fizzle out. They were what they were to each other precisely because of the circumstances that surrounded them. They loved the hero in the demon, the demon in the man, the man in the shell. Like this, sated and wet in Spike’s lap, considering abandoning his mission, he was something quite other from any of those—something that Spike would not want for long.

The sad inevitability of their plight took speech away for some time. Spike smoked down his cigarette then shifted lower in the bed, wrapping Angel in his arms, stroking sadly up and down the smooth skin on his arm.

After a few minutes, Angel said hesitantly, ‘There is another way—maybe.’

‘No.’

Angel twisted around, his face showing his scepticism that Spike was that far ahead of him. Spike sighed. ‘You’re gonna suggest that we shack up together away from the office. That you keep me your little secret. That you go to work all menacy and heterosexual as you say you need to be, then come creeping back to my arsehole at night.’

Angel turned away, mutinous.

Spike rubbed his back. ‘It’s what Buffy did to me, Luv. I can’t do that again. I want to look at someone in the broad light of day and ‘ave them looking back at me. I’ve done shag in secret. Not doing it again.’

He felt Angel’s severe pain at having his best hopes dashed and added, ‘’Sides, you need me at your side in the fight, Pet. Once Buffy and I started… ya know… she didn’t rely on me as much. She had so much disgust for what we were doing she couldn’t trust herself to trust me. It wore her out—trying to balance the things we were doing with the things she needed to be doing.’

Angel’s only reply was to say petulantly, ‘You say I need you, but you leave me anyway.’

Spike made a small sound that he meant to be humorous. ‘An’ I can just see this happening first time we get together in a conference. You’re haranguing some big nasty….’

‘I don’t harangue; I put my case….’

‘And you look across at me. Our eyes meet….’

Angel turned over to face him, his curiosity, and other things, clearly peaked. 

‘I stand up, the chair tipping over, and everyone in the room stops talking.  I stride to you, but you’re already halfway to me….’

‘Who’s at this meeting?’

‘Huh? What the bloody hell does that matter?’

‘I want to know who we’re going do it in front of… Wesley—as an example.’

‘Uh huh. Now the evil little worms of your desires are wriggling out, aren’t they?’

‘Don’t be dumb, Spike.’ Angel tried to turn away, but Spike reared up and straddled him, keeping him flat. 

‘Tell me.’

‘There’s nothing to tell! Stop being so….’

‘You’ve tasted him.’

‘I fed from him!’

‘Oh, Mr Pedantic all of a sudden. And in most civilised countries, sucking dick would be more happily admitted to than drinking someone’s blood!’

‘Are we arguing again?’

Spike grinned. ‘Yeah, good isn’t it?’

They lost time after that. No awareness of the minutes passing intruded on the kissing and rolling and urgent rubbing.  It was only when Angel’s large hand sought and found and grasped that awareness returned. He looked down. For the first time, he had the leisure and the desire to slow things down, to explore and discover.  He hefted the heavy cock in his hand, marvelling that it got heavier from his touch. He felt its life, the way it rose stiff and twitched responsively when stroked. Most intently though, he studied its textures: the incredible smoothness of the tip—that needed tongue to fully appreciate—the velvety skin, stretched tight over prominent veins, the stretch exposing heavy balls and damp, sensitive perineum. 

For the first time, he began to question, under this assault of pleasure, why his sudden passion for Spike’s cock threatened what he was—what he needed to be. Slowed down and enjoyed like this, being with Spike became even more attractive, and he could not help but picture them together: Spike at his side in the fight, Spike at his side in bed.

He had no answers, so his conviction that it was wrong did not waver.  He accepted, therefore, that it was the very worst thing he could do but took Spike to the back of his throat anyway.

Spike arched as if he’d been electrocuted, his whole body shivering with pleasure.  Angel let his mouth wetly bathe the stiffness that intruded in its warm cavern, slurping around the tip, drawing away and watching, fascinated, as tendrils of spit decorated the glistening tip. He probed with his tongue, then sucked in great greedy mouthfuls of cock, all the while stretching and teasing Spike’s balls.

With a cry, digging his fingers into Angel’s hair and pulling on strands as if they were reins, Spike released. It didn’t have the force of his first orgasm, but salty thickness, like spume, bubbled over into Angel’s mouth. He milked it with tongue and lips, swallowing eagerly.  When Spike made to ease his tender cock away, Angel pressed his mouth further on and stayed there, gently swilling the softened penis around and sucking it like a comforter.

Spike stretched back on the bed, his arms folded under his head, wishing he had a cigarette, but so comfortable that, for the first time in his life, he didn’t bother to follow up on this remembrance of his addiction.
 
He felt eviscerated: all his secrets laid out and displayed to Angel’s ardent admiration. He wasn’t sure whether this was good or not. He’d not meant to let Angel know how much he wanted him—for both their sakes. He’d not meant to fall as hard into his physical trap as he had to his emotional one. When his feelings were the only things threatened, that he could handle, that he could survive. Now he was so physically embroiled with this other, powerful body, he couldn’t extract himself without leaving some of his essence behind. He didn’t fancy surviving eternity only partially intact.

As Angel suckled and played his intimate game with Spike’s cock, the shadows lengthened in the room.  Spike knew that if he stayed any longer things would develop that in their remembrance, when this idyll was over, would hurt them both. Best to part before that level of damage was done.

With difficulty, he extricated himself from Angel’s hold and sat up.   They didn’t need to speak. Angel had clearly been thinking similar things.  By mutual, silent agreement, they took separate showers, almost reluctant to wash off this final trace of something they now craved more than blood.

The weight of the inevitable bore down on them, depressing their spirits.  Angel returned to the room, rubbing his hair with a towel and said in a controlled voice, ‘Where are you going to go?’

Spike was watching the water glistening on Angel’s hair, thinking about running his hand through the strands and spiking them up.  He started from his reverie and said without thinking, ‘I’m going out to the Caruthers place. Then? I don’t know.’

Angel sat down to pull on his pants. In a casual voice, he asked, ‘Like some company?’

Spike’s head jerked up. Company? Would he like some company? Yes, Angel, I’d like it for eternity. You, my company, for eternity.

‘You offering?’

Angel shrugged. ‘I flew in on the company jet. I can come and go as I please.’ They both knew this wasn’t true—this boast that Angel was master of his own destiny—but Spike didn’t call him on it. They needed all the fictions they could muster.

Spike mirrored Angel’s shrug. ‘Okay then.’

Angel suppressed his smile and began to tie his laces with careful precision. 

When he was finished, he stood up, and just before Spike put his hand on the door to open it, said in low voice, ‘Does it make this worse to tell you again that I love you?’

A shudder went through Spike’s body, and he replied bitterly, ‘I don’t know. Does it help you if I tell you properly for the first time that I love you?’

Angel’s brow clouded. He pushed past Spike with a brusque, ‘No,’ and went out into the hallway.  

They took Angel’s rental car, driving out of a town that neither of them now recognised but that had made such a huge impact on their lives.  It was no longer town/desert: an abrupt ending of one and start of the other. Now, suburbs stretched out, encroaching on the calm and dangerous beauty of the land. When they finished, evidence of human habitation still dominated the scenery: fast-food places, modern highways, indication of the endless search for oil.

At one point, they came across a vast reservoir, and Angel pulled over so they could walk out onto the dam. It seemed inconceivable that the place they had known could produce so much water, and Spike stared into its depths, wondering whether somewhere in that inky blackness lay the stream in which they had once bathed and frolicked in that other, better lifetime. 

Nothing could have convinced them more that what they had found in this place once was merely spirit of time and place and could not, perhaps should not, be recreated here. 

Mutually depressed, they pushed on toward their destination. Although they had claimed to know the way, they had not taken account of all these changes and had to stop many times before they reached a fence and modest gate that announced the Big T. 

At the sight of them, Spike felt a stab of melancholy for all the things he had lost in his life. As it seemed to him that he’d lost everything, the emotion threatened to overwhelm him.

Angel sensed his mood and pulled the car over before they went through the gate. ‘Okay?’

Spike lit a cigarette from the glowing tip of a previous one and nodded. He would not cry again. He was too empty for that now.

Angel sighed and began to drive up the long approach to the house. 

By this stage in their journey, it didn’t surprise them that the house they remembered no longer stood. In its place was a low, rambling building that had clearly been built with the strong winds in mind. 

They climbed out of the car and went up onto the covered porch. Both so intent on their own private misery, neither had thought what they were going to say when they got there.

When the door opened to Angel’s knock and an elderly man said, ‘Yes?’ in a slightly surprised tone, Angel therefore said abruptly, ‘We’ve come to see a Mr Caruthers.’

The old man smiled. ‘Well, now, I’m thinking you mean my young un, but he’s taken all the men down to the rodeo for the week. But I guess I still answer to that name, too. Can I help you young folks?’

Angel glanced at Spike. ‘We….’

Spike visibly sloughed off his darkness and said, ‘We’re kinda historians. We’re looking into the history of the ranch.’

The old man suddenly stood to one side, making sweeping movements with his arm. ‘Come along in, come along in. It’s my Martha you’ll be wanting to talk to—all those damn scribbles and jottings of hers—drives everyone crazy.’ The deep river of affection in his voice swept them into the well-lit, welcoming house.

The man took their coats without being asked and shepherded them into a large room, filled with the detritus of family life. If it mocked the lonely vampires, they ignored its provocation and went toward the couch.  

‘Who is it, William?’

At the remote voice from another room, both vampires turned to stare at the man. Spike cleared his throat and said, ‘Your name is William?’

The man laughed, easing himself down into a chair with some considerable difficulty. ‘Well, you could say it’s a family name.’

At that moment a figure appeared in the doorway and a soft, ‘It was given to the family by God,’ added to his blunter explanation.

The man stood again and was clearly pleased when both vampires followed his lead. ‘May I present my wife, Martha.’

Clearly once beautiful, she still radiated elegance, and she smiled at her guests and eased herself into a chair next to her husband.

Spike pouted and studied his nails as he asked, ‘From God?’

The old man groaned. ‘Now, don’t you be listening to all Martha’s foolishness. She’ll tell anyone that listens this old family nonsense. Tell them, Mother.’ The pride in his voice almost outweighed the affection and both belied completely his words. He put a hand on her arm and patted her lightly. ‘I’ll go make us all some drinks. Once you get started on your stories….’

She smiled fondly. ‘How did you come to want to hear about our family?’

‘They’re learned professors from the university, Mother. Don’t be asking them foolish questions.’

Angel ran his fingers through his hair and tried to look scholarly. 

Martha Caruthers leant back in her chair. ‘Well, the story really begins with William’s Grandmother, Katherine.’

‘Katherine?’ Spike’s voice was so unnatural, not even knowing his more normal tone, both humans turned to him.

‘Sounds like you be needing that drink, Sonny. You wait right there.’

Angel leant forward. ‘Katherine Caruthers? It can’t be…. Do you know when she was born?’ 

‘Well, she was born in England, we believe in eighteen sixty two, but sometimes she told me she was younger and had….’

‘She told you?’

William Caruthers returned and gave a strong whisky to Spike, which he took and drank quickly, repeating in a more normal voice, ‘She told you?’

Martha nodded. ‘She died in nineteen forty—two years after William brought me here.’

Spike, clearly still agitated, said raggedly, ‘And her brother, did you know him? Was he…?’

She frowned and looked uncertainly at her husband. ‘She didn’t have a brother.’

‘She did. Tom. He came from England, too.’

She shook her head. ‘I’m sorry, I think you have things mixed up. It’s easy to do, you know, when you only have paper to work with.’

The old man was sipping his whisky, looking thoughtful. Sensing Spike’s increasingly despondent mood, Angel said, ‘You were going to tell us about the name?’

Martha smiled. ‘She was happiest woman I ever knew, even though she suffered from her joints like the rest of us. She said God had sent an angel to her, and told her she was special—that the fruit of her loins was blessed and all the generations to come. And she was to call him Will. That’s what she always said: fruit of my loins and all the generations to come, and I’m to call him Will. I can still hear her voice say it.’

Spike resisted the urge to look at Angel.

The old man looked up. ‘It was just a man like any other and she got muddled in her head, Mother. He was probably the local quack of the day. You know that’s the truth really.’

‘No, I don’t. And I’d thank you not to put words into my mouth. Besides, there was the other one, the one who actually told her he was an angel and brought Granddaddy Grant to her.’

Angel resisted the urge to look at Spike.

‘Stuff and nonsense.’ The old man rose and went to pour them all another drink.

Spike stood up and went to the fireplace, standing with his back to the room. Angel divined his mood and asked the old woman softly, ‘Are you sure you can’t remember Tom? He was a little older than Katherine, I think. He was there when…. I mean, he knew Grant, too.’

Suddenly, Will Caruthers turned and said, ‘Course, there was Tom Caruthers, one of Grant’s brothers. That’s who you must mean.’

The vampires turned to him as one.

He nodded, sagely. ‘Died in the thirties, Mother, before I met you. Never married; lived with his brother, Pete. When Pete died he seemed to sort of… wither. Missed his brother something terrible and followed ‘im soon after.’

A smile crept around Spike’s face, and he lifted his eyes to Angel. ‘He made it work.’

Angel heard and understood everything Spike meant by this.  He put his glass down and rose. ‘You’ve been very kind, but it’s time we went.’

The couple came toward him, smiling and leading the way to the door.  Just as they were crossing the threshold, Will Caruthers said, ‘I never did catch your name, Sonny—just so I can tell my Will.’

A phone began to ring in the house, and he turned back to answer it.  Martha, leaning heavily on a stick, looked at them expectantly. Angel said, distracted by his desire to leave, ‘I’m Angel, and this is Spike.’

Her eyes widened, and she staggered slightly, both vampires catching her arms and leading her to a porch swing.

Will Caruthers returned, his face a mask of anxiety. He went up to Martha and said in a low, private voice that would have not have been overheard by humans, ‘Young Will’s horse has thrown him out by Big Bluff. I’d best call the sheriff, seeing as all the men are gone.’

She looked up and said with tears in her eyes, ‘It’s all right, William. God has sent them again.’

He turned with the look of a man whose hair was slowly rising on his neck. She grabbed his hand. ‘I knew. In my heart, I knew. She said he had hair that must have been touched by God’s light it was so unnaturally bright, and he wore a black coat that swayed even when there wasn’t any wind. And he was English, like her—an English angel sent just for her. And the other one had the face of an angel and was quiet and sad. She said he carried God’s grief for the world on his shoulders. They’re here, William, they’ve come back to help us….’ She could say no more, and fell in a faint against her husband’s arm.

Chapter 13

Will Caruthers might have believed his wife when he saw how quickly and easily the bigger of the two visitors carried her up to her room, how carefully he laid her in the bed, how concerned they both were. 

As the three of them sat around her bed, lit by the soft light from a single bedside lamp, Angel said urgently, ‘Tell me what’s happened.’

‘My grandson, God damn him, wouldn’t go with the men to the rodeo. He said it was cruel or some damn vegetable nonsense. Anyways, he up and takes out his horse last night; said he was going camping for a few days—commune with nature, more likely. Damn fool. Always finding some lame or sick animal to bring home and tend. Studying flowers when he should be studying running this ranch.’ Once more, real love and pride shone from the old man’s face as he recited this list of his grandson’s faults. ‘Damn horse has thrown him and skittered off.’

Spike frowned. ‘You have a link with him? You felt this?’

Will scratched his whiskers. ‘Well, we call them cell phones, Sonny, but I guess in heaven you angel types call it a link.’

Spike leant back, his face burning, and refused to contribute again. Angel, suppressing the urge to laugh (something he never thought he’d do again), said, ‘How long will it take for the sheriff to find him?’

‘Well, they’d have to call out that danged helio thingy of theirs. No one seems to have heard of a good sturdy horse these days. Damn technology. Was a time when you could…. Dang whirly bird won’t fly at night, I reckon.’

‘Is he hurt?’

‘Says he’s okay, but he’s a cussed ‘ornery critter when he’s hurt. Even as a young colt—never complained.’

‘We’ll go for him.’

Spike came back into the light, but Angel only repeated, ‘We’ll go.’

There was a soft voice from the bed. ‘Told you so, you old fool.’

It took an hour for Will Caruthers to fit them up with horses, a spare one for the casualty, some guns in case of snakes, a map, and general camping equipment, which they loaded onto the spare horse.  Angel skirted around the issue of the daylight, but advised the old man to call the helicopter in as soon it got light. It might well find the boy during the day while they couldn’t. If so, good. He could see Caruther’s relief that they were still riding out, however.

The whole time, Spike hung in the darkest shadows just watching, not commenting on the proceedings.

Angel couldn’t tell, despite his very strong connection to Spike’s moods, what he was thinking.

He wasn’t sure why he’d volunteered them for this. None of the alternatives were very attractive: that he was trying to recapture something; that he was trying to prove it was all changed and that they needed to move on; that he fell naturally into the role of the champion, because that’s what he was at heart, and thus he was validating his rejection of Spike’s love.  

He concentrated on straps and instructions, listened to directions, and refused to consider any of these alternatives.

Spike continued to make no contribution as they rode out of the light from the homestead, but his angry silence was the loudest thing in the desert that night. Angel listened to it for a little while then took a breath to try and explain what he had no explanation for. Before he could speak, he stopped, his horse responding to the lightest of touches on the reins.

Spike glanced over, anticipating Angel speaking, readying his angry defences, to find his sire staring up at the sky. For the first time, Spike surfaced from his misery long enough to realise that suddenly, everything was exactly as it had been. All around them was soft darkness, illuminated by unobstructed starlight.  A full moon loomed over the land, sending cold glints into Angel’s hair. Here, on the ranch, technology had been halted, and sitting together on their horses, they were overwhelmed by the sense of familiarity. 

For one moment, Spike felt the jog of a horse beneath the two of them and the feeling of Angel’s arm holding him as he slept. On the long ride to Molena, sharing a horse, he’d dreamt about the stars but, on waking, had been unable to remember the dream. Now he did. He remembered it quite well. He’d dreamt this. He’d dreamt of them—unchanging under the unchanging stars. They had been born, died, brought back to life and the stars had not changed. It seemed to him that this continuity could continue, if they wanted it to.

Angel turned, smiling shyly. ‘I was gonna try and explain why I wanted to do this. Do I need to now?’

Spike sighed, shook his head resignedly, but asked in a low voice, ‘What does this mean for us now though?’

Angel nudged his horse into a slow walk, silent and thoughtful. 

After a moment, Spike allowed his horse to follow.

Nothing was solved, but he had the distinct impression that they’d at least come to the right place to attempt that solution.

When the dawn began to challenge the light from the stars for dominance, they stopped and unpacked the small tent that Angel had insisted Will Caruthers give them.  Draped with blankets, it proved almost luxurious compared to some of their previous sanctuaries in this vampire-hostile land.

They shared their rations; more for something to do that didn’t require much speech than for sustenance. Neither having fed their way for over seventy-two hours and with some considerable physical exertion in those hours, they knew chocolate and biscuits would not suffice.

They sucked in their hunger and chewed slowly, trying not to catch the other’s eye. In a five by seven tent, this didn’t prove easy.

As ever in the desert, it began to get hot, especially under the canvass and they soon shed coats. Spike lay down on his side, facing away from Angel. After a moment’s hesitation, Angel lay down on his back, making sure they didn’t touch. 

It was oppressive in the tent, the atmosphere almost as bad as the heat. 

Suddenly, Angel’s cell phone buzzed, and he answered it with relief, his face quickly falling, however. He snapped it off. ‘Chopper’s been called to another job. It’s just us, after all.’

When there was no response, he said with a hint of petulance in his voice, ‘I’m sorry. Maybe this was all a mistake—me coming with you, this damn….’

‘Do you trust me?’

The question, coming out of nowhere, caught Angel unprepared. He answered unguardedly. ‘Yes. I do now.’

The qualification didn’t faze Spike; it only made the avowal more genuine. Angel wasn’t claiming he’d always trusted him—they both knew this would be a lie. He was saying he trusted him now: a huge difference that Spike was willing to believe.

He rolled over, facing Angel, propped up on one hand.

‘Do you trust me enough to leave this to me? If I said I’d thought of a way we can work this out.’

Angel frowned, his earlier certainty clearly wavering.

Spike pressed on regardless. ‘Do you trust me that much? To let me decide what we do?’

‘Tell me how you think we can….’

‘No. You just have to trust me.’

‘I can’t. I—.’ Angel flung an arm over his eyes. ‘All right. Yes. I do. I trust you that much.’

‘Then I need for you to prove it to me.’

Spike snapped the loop of Angel’s belt out of its buckle.

Angel lowered his arm.

Spike held his gaze. ‘I told you: you can’t trust anyone enough to give them your body.
If you trust me now, then you will. I want you to give your body to me.’

He unbuttoned Angel’s jeans and unzipped them. ‘Do you trust me?’

Angel lifted his hips, and all other trust followed from this tiny gesture. He trusted Spike as his clothes were slowly removed. He trusted Spike as he was pushed over onto his belly. He trusted enough to lift a leg, exposing himself for the first time in his life to anyone’s gaze.  He trusted as he heard a zipper, felt a cold push, felt stretch and burn and pain. The trust never wavered and was rewarded by surge after surge of pleasure of a type he’d never felt before. It was as if with every hot thrust into his body, Spike drove out the things Angel had held dear for so long. His body melted under Spike’s, became softer, pliant, receiving. His trust never faltered, even as he sensed these profound changes happening. He was giving his body to Spike like a woman, and yet still, he trusted.

At the peak of the pleasure, they both lost any sense of import in what they were doing. They forgot to think of trust or betrayal or any of the other big issues they wrestled with every day. There was only slap of sweating flesh on flesh, only grunting and panting, only two men taking pleasure from a sexual act.  

When the peak was over, once Spike had come noisily and messily deep inside Angel, only then did remembrance of what they were doing return. But by then, Spike didn’t need to repeat do you trust me. He’d had his answer in Angel’s long drawn out moan of pleasure as he’d been filled. He had it now in the way Angel spread wantonly and begged for more.  He reached around the perfect body and took Angel’s unsatisfied cock in his hand. With gentle stroking of that, he brought his own back to life deep inside the sopping channel.  Gently now, he eased and probed Angel’s spread slickness until with a grunt Angel released, his cum wetting Spike’s fist, staining the canvass floor and filling the tent with the smell of an ocean in this desert of sand.

When they were both recovered, they went at it again, this time with Angel on his back, his legs in the air and Spike’s eyes fixed on him. They were pushing the limits of his trust; they knew this, but they held secure, and when Spike jerked and writhed his orgasm into Angel’s body, this time, Angel’s was in concert. They rocked loudly together in the stifling heat of the tent, pumping fluid into the otherwise arid atmosphere.

They weren’t sated for long. Spike took Angel again as soon as he’d recovered, just entering from behind as they lay curled together.  

By the time the sun dipped toward the horizon, he’d taken Angel more times than he had Buffy in that first violent outpouring of passion. Not that he’d been comparing.

He hadn’t.

The final time, before the darkness came and they had no further excuse for remaining in the tent, he straddled Angel’s chest. He’d intended to take him again, sliding down seductively, grinding them together, but as he began to move, Angel made an odd sound. Spike hesitated and dug his knee in again. Angel hissed his breath in, and for the first time, tried to push him off. Spike’s eyes widened, and he said incredulously, ‘You’re ticklish!’ 

With a sense of wonder, everything they once had been and now were came together. They wrestled like enemies; they kissed like lovers, but more importantly, they laughed and played as old friends. 

It wasn’t hard for Spike to wrestle Angel down and straddle him again: Angel let him.  They stopped laughing long enough for Spike to wipe a trickle of sweat from Angel’s forehead—just a quick sweep of the pad of his thumb over the small glistening trail. It should have been an insignificant moment, given all that had gone before, but as he touched Angel’s skin, Spike reeled. All the different definitions of love that were inside his complex brain—love for his mother, gentle and affectionate; love for Drusilla, terrifying in its dark intensity; love for Buffy, painful in its unrequited power—merged. In this integration, something new was born, something far more powerful than any of them had been separately. As he looked down into Angel’s eyes, he knew for the first time that this, for him, was the real thing. This was the one love that he would never grow out of, never forget to want, never want to forget, never be able to survive if it was lost.

He wasn’t sure if Angel divined some of this, but he was caught unprepared by a soft, ‘Tell me how we are going to keep hold of this, Spike, because I can’t let it go now.’

Spike swallowed but shook his head in a silent refusal.

Angel pouted fractionally, which didn’t help Spike recover from the shock of finding himself so deeply in love.  

Seeing the effect of his pout, Angel changed the mood by returning to the wrestling and tickling, which only worked because Spike let it. 

He could sense darkness claiming the land and with persistent determination, took Angel one last time.  He took him on his back, legs in the air, no pride or false modesty left, just a man begging for the pleasure that another man could give him. 

He rolled Angel into a ball so the powerful knees pressed into the canvass either side of Angel’s head.  When Angel was positioned just so, he stretched out over him like a man in training, press-ups flexed into the positioned hole.  He dipped and rose, rose and dipped and at each withdrawal allowed his cock to leave the hole entirely, watching as the pink glistening closed, then dipped to open it once more. Each time, Angel’s sphincter was teased and tickled, stretched and put through its own miniature workout, his prostate throbbing like an over-used muscle, twitching with the strain, swelling with the friction.

Curled so tightly, Angel’s cock brushed his lips. With each dip, Spike grunted with pleasure to watch it slip into the eager mouth. He was jealous, and the jealousy amused him. They’d become so physically close he could almost taste what Angel was tasting and licked his lips seductively, making Angel’s mouth stretch into a smile around the cockhead he was licking and sucking.  Spike grunted in annoyance and sped up, pummelling into Angel until the supine body arched and uncurled and screamed its pleasure.  

Spike felt his orgasm rushing toward him, and a great collision hit him. It went dark; sounds were muffled; they seemed to be bound together in bindings more powerful than any he’d experienced in an orgasm before.  When it was over, he dropped like a stone onto Angel’s chest and groaned.  Angel laughed. ‘That good?’

Spike nodded and said weakly, ‘I’m blind.’

Angel poked him. ‘The tent fell down.’

Spike lifted his head and realised they were tangled in the heavy canvass, ropes around their wrists and necks. ‘Oh.’

They crawled out cautiously and discovered it was dark.

Spike waited for a moment to see if things returned to how they had been, to see if inside the tent had been an aberration that Angel would now deny. Moments of crisis—he’d suffered that excuse before.

He glanced over. 

They were both naked in the faint starlight.

Angel came closer, handing him some clothes, but snatched them away just before fingers touched them. Off balance, Spike was an easy target. Angel caught him around the waist and kissed him. It was slow, wet and deep. Spike could taste no crisis at all. Angel smiled into the kiss as if reading Spike’s mind and then he slapped him hard on the backside and began to dress.

Spike watched him, and with a stab of utter terror, he saw that Angel now trusted him entirely. The weight seemed off the broad shoulders. Angel stood taller, was smiling and joking about the journey, and he trusted him. Angel trusted him to find a solution. Angel trusted him to solve the immense problems that lay ahead of them. 

In a startling flash of insight, Spike’s dream came back to him. He had never doubted that it was a dream, but now he did—doubt. He doubted it a lot. It seemed to him now that it had been a message. It seemed to him that it was a solution of sorts: a way to end this for them both. He could find a way for them to go out together in a blaze of glory, burning far brighter than the sum of their dead parts. He didn’t really know how to solve their problems. Sure, he had a plan. It had seemed like a great plan before he’d taken Angel, before Angel had changed. Before Angel had become this—the one he finally loved with all his great capacity to love.  All of Angel’s weight shifted to his shoulders. The burden of finding a solution to their problems was too much for him. He wasn’t the champion; he wasn’t the great hero. All he wanted to do was find a hole and push them both in: freefalling into hell, where the devil could have their souls. They’d go together, and that was all he cared about.

What was the alternative? Failing Angel’s trust. Hell was a far better alternative.

He couldn’t shake the introspective mood that enveloped him on leaving the tent. He knew it was partially due to fatigue and lack of food, so tried to raise a smile at Angel’s expression when his sire climbed unthinkingly into his saddle. It was a picture, and Spike’s smile was half-genuine, remembering the provenance of Angel’s pain, but it didn’t make an inroad on his dark mood.  Angel trusted him. It seemed yet another example of being wary what you ask for.

Concerned that the boy had been alone and waiting for them all day while they had their sport, Angel pushed hard to reach the bluff. 

If he noticed Spike’s increasingly dark mood, despite what had happened between them in the tent, he ignored it. He had some inkling of its cause.  For once, though, he didn’t worry about it. He trusted Spike—what else was trust, if not that? Besides, he was in so much discomfort he really didn’t have time to think about redemption or saving the world or the apocalypse.  He wouldn’t have publicly espoused anal sex as a cure for brooding, but it was working for him. Trying to find one comfortable way to sit on the hard saddle—one place that didn’t connect it with something that had been sucked raw, chewed on, stretched, split, thumped, and generally buggered all day—wasn’t proving easy. He ended up dismounting and walking.  After his initial tentative smile, Spike had been oblivious to anything he did. Angel let him be. He had a lot on his shoulders, and he needed some space. 

Trusting Spike was almost as good as loving him.

They saw the light from the campfire long before they saw the boy. 

For a moment, Angel looked anxiously around, considering the danger from Indians. Then, with an internal blush, he cursed and pushed on harder through the scrub.  

When they came into the light of the fire, a young man peered at them over some glasses, which had slipped to the end of his nose. He laid down a book and said cheerfully, ‘Hullo! I guess you’re the posse.’

Angel smiled. He felt like smiling at the whole world. It was quite novel, so he did it again. It seemed to take some the boy’s cheerfulness away, and he repeated more nervously, ‘Hullo?’ 

Angel gave up his attempts to smile (these things took practice) and squatted down alongside the seated figure. ‘You hurt?’

The boy shook his head. ‘Well, maybe my leg.’

Angel pulled it closer then winced and held it more carefully as he saw the bone protruding from the torn jeans. ‘Shit!’

The boy only pouted slightly. ‘I’ve been reading about the history of the bluffs. It’s really cool. Did you know that…?’

‘Spike.’ Angel nodded Spike closer and they inspected the wound together, ignoring the constant chatter.  In a low voice, Angel said, ‘Set it?’

Spike nodded, glanced up to the boy, then replied equally quietly, ‘He’ll pass out. With any luck he’ll stay that way till we get back….’

Angel smiled softly at him, and something in Spike’s anxious expression drained away, leaving a rueful look of self-deprecation.  He sighed.  ‘I’m not made to be a hero. You know that.’

Angel let his hand brush over Spike’s arm. ‘No. I don’t know that. You’re the only one of us who’s saved the world so far. Remember that.’

‘I put on a silly shiny thing like a damn monkey.’

Angel didn’t bother to reply. He took a firm hold the boy’s ankle, nodded for Spike to take the thigh, and then he pulled. Hard.

It was peaceful. Unconscious, the boy made an excellent companion.  They fixed a stretcher between two of the horses and strapped him safely on, then doubled up on the remaining one.

They made slow progress. 

The boy woke after a few hours and wasn’t so cheerful. He made no complaint, but he was silent, his face extremely pale in the faint starlight.

When they stopped to pitch the tent, he complained for the first time, confused why they were stopped, wanting to press on to somewhere more comfortable.

Spike glanced at Angel then leant close to the boy’s ear as they carried him into the tiny tent. ‘We’re vampires, Mate. Can’t go out in the sun.’

The boy stared at them wildly. ‘Are you good vampires then?’

Spike jerked his head back. ‘It was a joke! I tell everyone I can’t go out in the sun cus I’ve got rare skin, and they say: oh! Vampire! So, I thought…. Never, bloody mind!’ 

Angel was laughing quietly, squeezed against one side of the tent.  He deliberately eased away from the boy, making it very clear where he wanted Spike. Taking the hint, Spike slipped in next to him.

It was peaceful for a few minutes. Angel immediately pushed his hand into the back of Spike’s pants, and Spike responded by pressing back against a growing hardness. It was all they could safely do.

Before they could tip into well-deserved sleep, an animated voice said, ‘Because there could be good vampires. If they had lots of free blood, maybe they’d give up killing people.’

Spike didn’t want to. 

He wanted to sleep.

He wanted to concentrate on Angel’s finger, which had just found him and was stroking delightfully. He couldn’t resist, though; it wasn’t in his nature. ‘Suppose they liked killing, Pet. Killing is fun.’

The boy turned wide eyes on him. ‘Have you ever killed anyone?’

Angel growled a low warning, but Spike ignored him. ‘I tried to work it out once. Didn’t get past eight thousand.’

He lost his audience. He got a contemptuous look for his efforts and silence for a few moments. Once more, he closed his eyes.

‘What are you doing?’

Angel eased his hand away.  Spike opened his eyes.

The boy was staring at them. ‘You touched him back at the camp, too.’

Spike raised an eyebrow. ‘Tent’s kinda small, Luv. Hard not to touch.’

‘You’re not touching me.’

‘I don’t like you.’

That gained them some peace for another minute. Angel replaced his hand and then his finger.

‘I suppose you eat meat, too.’

Suddenly, Angel spoke for the first time. In a deceptively pleasant voice, he said, ‘Go - to - sleep.’

Spike felt a shiver course down his spine. He gave the boy a complicit wink and closed his eyes.  Under the influence of that commanding voice, Spike forgot to think about the burden of his responsibility. With all his worrying, he’d overlooked something very important. 

He trusted Angel, too.

Chapter 14

For the first time, they sat close together as they flew back to L.A. in the company jet. They worked their way through the miniatures once more, but this time feeding them to each other, watching coloured liquid drip seductively down hot throats.

By the time they landed, they both felt drunk, but whether this was the effect of alcohol or mood they weren’t sure.

The limo met them, and they sobered enough to keep their hands off each other until they reached the privacy of Angel’s elevator. 

Then the driving need they’d contained since sharing the tent with Spike’s young namesake overtook them.

Spike didn’t even wait until they arrived at Angel’s apartment. He spread Angel against the elevator wall and fumbled inelegantly at his own zipper with one hand, Angel’s clothes with the other.

Angel helped him out, just as clumsy, just as desperate. He even spread his cheeks, unembarrassed, begging.

Spike closed the gap between them and pushed. 

Angel’s whole body shivered with the anticipation of entry.

Spike licked his lips and tried again.

Angel adjusted his feet and gave him better access. Finally he glanced over his shoulder.  Spike glared at him. ‘Don’t say a bloody word.’

Angel mimed zipping his lips but glanced down. Spike stuffed himself out of sight and stalked arrogantly into the apartment, waving imperiously at Angel as if at a slave. ‘Get me some fucking blood!’

He mumbled and complained about things as Angel went meekly to the refrigerator.  Leaning in, considering his options, he said hesitantly, ‘Maybe I could… cook something?’

Spike turned, his embarrassment easing somewhat. ‘I forgot you could cook.’

‘Well?’

Spike shrugged. ‘Sure. But blood first. I need….’

‘Stiffening?’

Spike narrowed his eyes. Angel looked innocent and began to heat some blood, planning what he was going to cook.  

Spike took the blood and wandered into the living room, throwing his coat on a chair and making himself at home. He lifted his drink to toast the couch, smirking as if he’d won some contest only he knew had been in dispute.

After a while, Angel came out and sat on the arm of his chair. He’d changed and was wearing only a pair of loose, black, cotton pants.  He leant back and began to play absentmindedly with Spike’s hair. ‘Reviving?’

Spike grinned and moved Angel’s hand down to his crotch.  Then he moved it away again with a hiss of frustration.  Angel said nothing but went back to playing with Spike’s hair.  

A sense of peace descended on them both. Worn out from the trip, the blood yet to revive them, the warm smell of cooking wafting in from the other room, it was a moment to savour in the storm of their lives.

Angel took the opportunity to murmur, ‘Tell me the plan. Please.’

Spike sighed. ‘Okay.’

He twisted around in his seat and stretched his legs up over Angel’s thighs. 

‘We’re gonna become pirates.’

Angel frowned and repeated, ‘Pirates?’

Spike nodded seriously. ‘Yeah. They all used to fuck each other. No women, see?’

Angel opened his mouth to add something rational to the debate then clamped it shut with an annoyed look.  

Spike sighed again. ‘Okay, sorry. I guess it’s not a joking matter. Are you sure you want to know?’

Angel nodded but added quickly, ‘But I do trust you.’

Spike smiled sweetly. ‘Good, cus I thought one of us could have the op.’ He mined slicing something and scooping things out. Angel paled then slapped him lightly over the head and got up to check on the food.

Spike trailed after him and watched as Angel bent to peer in the oven. 

With a groan of desire, he stood against him, grinding them together softly. ‘I’m reviving.’

‘Maybe you should go find a woman then.’

Spike smiled at the petulant tone. ‘Nah. I like what you’ve got just fine.’

‘You’re not gonna tell me, are you?’

Spike trailed his fingers up Angel’s prominent spine. ‘I’m gonna cast a spell on everyone—so they can see this like I do.’

Angel turned, his anger dissipated at the touch of Spike’s soft fingers. ‘How do you see this? Tell me that instead.’

Spike refused to tell him.

He showed him.  

He showed him with his lips, pressing them softly and wetly to Angel’s. He showed him with his tongue, probing gently into his mouth, sharing a faint trace of blood. He showed him with his swift recovery, unzipping to bring into the open what now throbbed strong and urgent on the stolen blood.  He showed him with the precise and practiced way he slid Angel’s pants down to the floor, forcing him to step out of them and stand naked in front of him. He showed him when he lifted one of Angel’s legs to the counter and slid up inside him without once taking his eyes from the dark, questioning ones. In all this he said clearly, in a way that Angel would understand, that for him this was how it would always be. That from now on, he would only seek his relief from this body. That from now on, he would only embed where he embedded now. That his eyes would only roll back from the intensity of an orgasm when that orgasm was being shot high in Angel’s receptive body. 

Angel ceased to ask anything more that night. He closed his eyes, tipped his head back and concentrated on the feeling of Spike, hard and thick, pushing up inside his body. 

Spike’s hands gripped Angel’s shoulders.

Angel’s grasped the counter edge behind him.

Without hands, Spike made sure he ground his belly hard over Angel’s cock with each thrust of his hips.  It winked up at him, a red, puffy eye, appearing and disappearing in its thick fold of protective skin.  He thought he would die from the erotic beauty of that sight. 

Angel began to pant raggedly and thrust his body forward as Spike rose within him.  The trembling began in his raised leg, but it soon consumed his whole body, rippling under Spike’s hands as they dug white crescents into the smooth skin of Angel’s shoulder.

With a triumphant cry, Spike watched as Angel’s orgasm was drawn from the perfect body by the skilful strokes of his cock. Shot after shot of creamy thickness lifted into the air like silent fireworks of passion, and with a shuddering groan, he set his free inside the hot, tight confines of Angel’s body.

The orgasms drained the little energy they’d recovered. Soft almost immediately, Spike slipped out on the wetness he’d created. Angel lowered his leg and wrapped his arms around Spike’s waist, resting his chin on the blond head.

Spike ran his fingers through the coating on Angel’s chest, swirling it in patterns around one flushed nipple.  

‘Ow.’

Spike looked up, surprised. ‘You don’t like that?’

‘No. That, I like, only… you’ve just fucked me against the stove.’

Spike pulled him off, horrified, and inspected the red, burning skin. They glanced at each other and began to laugh, kissing affectionately. ‘I told you that you make me hot.’

Spike shook his head. ‘Go shower and put some bloody clothes on. I’ll….’ He waved uncertainly at the food. 

Angel kissed him and went happily enough to obey his commands.

They ate like old lovers: Spike reading a book with his feet propped up on a chair, Angel with work spread out on the table around him, making and returning calls. 

It was not lost on Spike that once work intruded, Angel’s soft, playful mood disappeared along with the food.

When he was done, he rose, stretching. ‘I’m going back to my place.’

Angel stood up, too. ‘No. I want you to stay….’

‘And then what? When I appear tomorrow? What? We’ve been… working?’

‘You said you had a plan, that you’d sort….’

‘I have and I will. Tomorrow.’

‘But….’

Not wanting to give in to the almost irresistible urge to crawl into Angel’s bed and curl their bodies together, Spike left.

Angel worked long into the night, partly to prevent him thinking about Spike, partly because the empty bed held no allure despite his exhaustion, but mainly because he had to.  As part of his plan to put his stamp back on the city after his recent absences, some days ago he’d scheduled a meeting of all the demon bosses. He had not planned on this second trip to Wyoming—that being a panicked flight, chasing the one he could not lose, however impossible keeping him seemed to be—and had not done the preparatory work he’d planned. Now he sat under an arc of light cast from his desk lamp, adding names to a complex diagram of connections. In the centre, he’d drawn an angel, bowed head and folded wings. Whether this figure was in retreat or repose was hard to say. Spidery lines then twisted around it, tendrils reaching out to the chiefs, joining the demons, indicating obvious alliances, secret agreements, possible allies, known enemies.  He refreshed some of the arcane languages, talking quietly to himself in their guttural tongues as he worked, rehearsing pleasantries that he didn’t mean in soft tones he didn’t like.

When the sun came up, he felt ready. He had mapped the state of the nation. He would not be caught out.  He lifted his eyes from the paper, closed them for a movement, pinching the bridge of his nose, then began to fold it up.  With a grunt of surprise, he stilled his hand over the complex, spidery tracks. Every connection he’d drawn seemed to be in the shape of the letter S. Every S wound around the angel until he seemed more bound than bowed. 

With all his newly imposed order, Spike was the great unknown, yet ironically also the one in whom all his trust was now placed.

Angel’s trust didn’t shatter in one tremendous crack, it fragmented, shivering until it fell in tiny pieces at his feet.

Things had begun well enough.

The demons had begun to assemble in the lobby, antagonisms and rivalries put to one side whilst the pleasantries were made, slaves complemented, traded or fed upon.

Angel stayed to one side, silent and brooding as was his wont. 

Spike sauntered into the lobby just as they were moving toward the conference room. Angel’s heart kicked over once: a tiny erotic beat of desire. He tried not to catch Spike’s eye, lest he give himself away, but found himself staring helplessly into blue, his mouth open slightly, a sheen of sweat forming on his brow. His whole body yearned towards the slim form.  He took a step toward him, but Spike, having ignored him entirely, followed the demons into the conference room.

Angel felt a surge of pride in Spike’s strength of purpose and followed them, too.  

In the middle of Angel’s welcoming address, which he repeated in various languages, Spike lit a cigarette.

It was so incongruous in the circumstances, but so absurd that it should be incongruous given many of the demons present were attached to walking, living food sources, or spare organs, or even in one case a head detached from the torso, that Angel was completely wrong-footed. He lost his thread and his grasp of the complex language he was attempting and clearly said something mildly offensive to some of his audience.

He recovered, apologies were made and he launched into his first demand. He’d relied on their fear of him and he was not disappointed. He could see mutinous fury, but not one dared challenge him. Satisfied, he said calmly, ‘You would do well to remember that I am an unfortunate enemy to cross.’

The snort of derision was very quiet, but it was audible throughout the room, as if just pitched for all the demon ears present.

Angel felt incredulity at first, but then a huge wave of grief hit him at this betrayal. Once more, he lost his thread and poured himself some water to cover.  The casual gesture covered nothing. One by one, the demon chiefs glanced around, catching the eye of potential allies, and finally, one said contemptuously, ‘It seems even your own—this is William the Bloody, no?—childe is sceptical of your wrath.’

Spike looked up innocently. ‘You mean me? Cus, I mean, I not sceptical. Honest.’ He turned with a cheeky look to Angel. ‘Am I, Luv? Would you call me… sceptical?’

Angel took a drink of the water. ‘Can we move on, please?’  He hadn’t meant the please. He wasn’t sure why he’d said it. The moment it left his lips, he knew he’d lost it. There was one moment when he could have stopped it all unravelling around him, but he didn’t seize it and make it his. Reeling from Spike’s betrayal, he could do nothing but repeat more angrily, ‘Let’s move on!’ but by then he knew: they looked at him with contempt. They didn’t openly defy him; they were too crafty for that. They leaned forward eagerly, like predators sniffing an easy victory, waiting to jostle and snarl with the others for the richest titbits.

After another half an hour, Angel had scheduled a break, and he watched with angry relief as carts of coffee and blood were wheeled in. He stayed in his chair, sullenly watching Spike as the others around the table rose and milled around. Suddenly, instead of taking an offered cup of coffee, he rose, pushing his chair back angrily. He gestured to Spike. ‘A word?’

Spike stretched back in his chair. ‘Can’t it wait? I’m kinda peckish.’

Angel snapped closed, a lid dropping on a marble tomb: all emotions inside, nothing but cold, blank hardness showing.

He strode to Spike’s chair and stood over him. A few cups were laid down with interest at this scene.

Spike edged away. 

Angel folded his arms. 

Spike stood up, as if he’d been going to do that anyway.

Angel turned and strode out to his office, delegates parting around him like waves under God’s command.

Spike, with his best not bothered expression, followed him out, not catching anyone’s eye.

‘What the fuck is this?’ Angel glanced back into the conference room and lowered his voice.

Spike made to turn away. 

Angel grabbed his arm. ‘Talk to me! Is this your fucking plan?’

‘I thought you bloody trusted me.’

‘Yeah? Maybe I just said that to….’

Spike shoved him. ‘What? To get a good fuck?’

Angel’s arm rose as if to hit him, but he lowered it and said icily, ‘Who said it was good?’

Spike shoved his tongue into his cheek and smirked broadly. ‘Oh, Spike, harder, harder….’

Angel hit him, and at the stinging contact of his palm to the perfect cheekbone, something that had remained alive inside Angel’s shutdown died. He felt it wither and turn to arid dust. He didn’t bother to keep it alive. He didn’t need it. 

He turned away and went back to what he needed.

The rest of the day’s conference was held in a sense of uneasy confusion. Their sense of easy victory over Angel wasn’t quite abandoned. He seemed weak; they sensed it like all natural predators. Quite where this weakness lay, however, they weren’t so sure. They thought it sat in the empty chair that he steadfastly refused to look at for the rest of the day. It confused them though. They’d seen violent emotions but had no reference points to work out what they were. 

With the business of the day unfinished, they agreed to return the next.  Filing out past Angel’s dark expression, they almost looked forward to the feeding frenzy that might be theirs on the morrow.

Angel reckoned what he felt was shock. He had no way to tell. He’d never really felt shock before. He felt sick. He felt like crying. He felt more like making Spike cry, which he could, quite easily. He wanted to get up and go somewhere else, but there was nowhere else, for he’d carry this, whatever it was, with him. So he stayed in the conference room, staring at his pathetic picture. He recognised the angel’s stance for what it was now: despair.

If the demons noticed that Angel was in the same suit the next day, they didn’t comment. As he didn’t grow stubble, or show his exhaustion easily, they had no way of knowing that he hadn’t left his seat all night. 

They filed into to their places from the previous day and waited for him to start.

There was a movement by the door, and another figure came into the room.

Once or two of the slaves murmured unhappily when they saw him. 

They were jerked to silence, but a few of the demons made small sounds of surprise.

Angel looked up, but before he could react, Spike was sitting quietly in his place, his face lowered. 

A surge of vomit rose in Angel’s throat, and he made to rise, but Tragan Declas, one of the most important of all the leaders around the table, said coolly, ‘At last. We see some sign of this mythical wrath. Shall we start the meeting?’

Angel looked around the table and saw that the fear had returned to their eyes. One by one, they lowered their gazes from his as he moved his dark eyes across their features.  

He knew he’d won. He was back in control. He’d regained his former position, surpassed it and now stood on the brink of victory, yet he’d not left his chair all night. They didn’t know this though. They thought he’d done that to Spike. They thought he’d broken Spike’s face so badly he was unrecognisable, except for the coat and the hair. They thought he’d broken Spike’s arm and removed his fingernails. They thought he’d ripped his neck and taken what was his due: his childe’s blood and his obedience.

For he was obedient now. He sat mute and still. When coffee arrived, he rose with difficulty and brought Angel one, putting it on the table deferentially.  

Angel took it but kept his eyes lowered in guilt and confusion.

Had he done that to Spike? He had pictured it, or something similar, as he’d spent his long, lonely night. Before he could examine his hidden feelings, someone sat down next to him. He looked into a pair of eyes that held their evil thinly veiled. ‘Angel.’

Tragan Declas held his gaze.

Angel waited.

‘I’ve been interested in some of your proposals today. I believe we can do business. Wolfram and Hart has made an interesting choice in its CEO; I’m impressed.’ Declas was the first of Angel’s enemies to crack, but the others quickly followed suit, Spike’s blood and pain oiling Angel’s wheels for him. Taking enormous pleasure in this subjugation of a childe—this reminder to them all of the rightful scheme of things—the rest of the meeting was concluded almost cordially. 

Angel basked like a shark on their respect, while they, the smaller sharks in his pool, wriggled in a frenzy of blood pleasure at Spike’s defeat.

Eventually they were gone.

The air reeked of them, and he wanted to be away. Away from it all. Away from himself. Away from Spike and the trust that lay shattered at his feet.

He watched Spike limp out without trying to stop him.

The next day slipped back into the routines of the great edifice of evil. He spoke to Wesley; he did paperwork; he answered the phone. Already the rewards of his victory at the conference were beginning to grow, the concessions he had demanded quieting the streets.

Just before lunch, he saw Spike coming across the lobby toward him.  He rose and went to the window, nausea rising in his throat. He’d not slept for over forty hours, and it was beginning to tell on him.

‘Well, aren’t you even gonna turn around and bloody face me?’

Angel spun around, utterly confused and angry at the belligerent tone. Last thing he remembered, they’d been fucking against the stove. Now it was if he’d fallen through another time warp.

Just as he was about to make an angry retort, Wesley appeared in the doorway, head lowered over some papers. ‘I’ve found those reports that were mentioned… oh, sorry, I didn’t know you were…. Good grief. What happened to you?’

Spike grimaced. ‘Ask him.’

‘What?’ Anger overwhelmed Angel. He’d toyed with the idea he’d done this to Spike, but it was only his game: self-recrimination like a pleasant lash on his sensitive soul.

Wesley made a face at Angel. ‘What was Wyoming all about? I thought all this damn squabbling was over!’ He turned and marched off.

Angel grabbed Spike’s shoulder, but Spike creased up with a look of extreme pain. Angel winced, ‘Shit, sorry. Look….’ Spike punched him and left.

Angel retreated to his lair, but as he stepped out of the elevator, the remains of the meal they’d shared mocked him.

He turned on his heel and went back to work. It was all he had.

Later that afternoon, Harmony came in to empty his tray, her eyes red and mutinous.  He glanced up warily. ‘What?’

‘You’re being very unfair. What’s he supposed to do trapped up there with you day and night? We’ll never see him! I’ll never see him!’ With a small, false sniff she tottered out, her devastating point made.

Angel, pouting, watched her go and looked with some relief to Wesley’s entry. 

Wesley looked as if he’d recovered his composure for he came over and said cheerily, ‘Well done, Angel. At last. I’m rather surprised you’ve taken this measure, but very impressed with you. Well done indeed.’

‘Measure?’

‘Making Spike move in here with you. It’s about time you got a grip of him. All right, I don’t approve of the beating….’ He waved his hand to silence Angel’s interjection. ‘It’s vampire business, and he seems no worse for wear this afternoon. I have no idea what you’re going to do with him up there; I don’t envy you that close proximity all day and night, however, I do think it’s the right thing. He’s been allowed far too much freedom, I suppose. Being under his sire’s thumb will be just the right thing. Only, promise me one thing: please, no more arguments in the office. You really are wearing us all out.’

He nodded pleasantly and left.

Bemused, Angel stared into space for while until another figure appeared in the door, lugging a heavy bag. 

He watched Spike drag it across the floor and then push the button for the elevator. 

When the doors opened, he stepped inside and disappeared from view.

Chapter 15

Angel continued to sit in his office for a while longer. He began at the beginning and worked slowly through to the end.

He knew he was slow sometimes, but he usually got there in the end.

Finally, like an automaton, he stood and rode up in the elevator.

Spike was folding his clothes and stowing them away in the wardrobe. ‘Evenin’, Pet.’

‘Come here.’

Spike came over, obediently, as if they were still watched and he was still playing his games. 

Angel held him firmly and inspected him: cheekbone, arm, nails, burns. He undressed him and saw with some considerable relief that the wounds had been restricted to visible flesh.  ‘If anyone else had done this to you, I would kill them.’

‘I know.’

‘Yet you do this to yourself and I let you live.’

‘You never stopped trusting me. I thought you might.’

Angel looked away, anguish in his eyes. Spike turned him back. ‘No. You never did. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t trust me.’

Angel walked over to the bed and sank on it, exhausted. After a moment, he patted the space next to him. 

Spike crawled on, and they flopped onto their backs, one naked, his wounds shockingly vivid on his pale body, one dark in his sombre work clothes.

‘Tom gave me the idea.’

‘Tom.’

‘Don’t get all fired up with jealousy at the mere mention of his name.’

‘I’m not jealous. At this very minute, I’d happily hand you over to anyone who would take you.’

‘Liar. Anyway. It was Tom and Pete that got me thinking. Jesus, Angel, all those years, living together as brothers, and no one but the family knowing the truth.’

‘Yeah. I’ve been thinking about that, too. But I don’t see how they apply to us.’

Spike sat up next to him and began to unbutton Angel’s shirt.  Angel watched him with a slightly puzzled look on his face, as if he didn’t know very well what he had in mind.

Spike glanced up at his expression and smiled. ‘See, I thought about something you said: that you have to live by their rules. And you’re right; I think you do. Tom knew it, and Pete knew it. But we’re vampires.  What’s the first rule of vampire life?’

‘Obedience to your sire.’

‘’Xactly. We won’t live under their noses as brothers. We’ll live as what we are: sire and childe.’

‘Sire and childe.’

‘You and me.’

‘You at my side.’

‘You at mine.’

‘Obedience to my will.’

Spike slid Angel’s pants down and said amused, ‘Yours to mine when its just us, Mate.’

Angel smiled. ‘I’m feeling like being obedient right now.’ His body agreed, parts of it already rising to attention like a disciplined martial weapon.

Spike was undoing Angel’s shoes and pulling the dark pants off, so said without looking, ‘Yeah? Well, I’m feeling like I’ve been run over by a train, so you can forget…. Oh.’

Angel removed his tongue from inside Spike and murmured obediently, ‘Go on, you were saying?’ then returned to his interesting exploration.

Spike took a breath—not easy to do with his balls stretched and his channel invaded. His softness hardened to the aggressive demands of Angel’s tongue. ‘When we’re… down there… down there… oh, down there… we’re… the perfect vampire… you are perfect… couple. When we’re up… up… yeah, up there….’

He pushed Angel off. ‘Turn over.’

Angel caught his chin. ‘This is the deceit you didn’t want. This is the lie I said I couldn’t live.’

‘Do you trust me?’

Angel closed his eyes. ‘I don’t deserve to be asked that again.’

‘Do you?’

‘I want to.’

‘Well, okay then. Now, turn over. I need to teach you a little lesson in obedience.’

Angel spread his body on the bed for Spike’s pleasure, but the pleasure was short-lived. Unable to use one arm, his ribs still aching, Spike gave up the attempt to push into the enticing hole and rolled onto his back with a defeated moan. Angel turned over then pulled him close. He reached to the nightstand. With practised ease, he drew the tip of a letter-opener in a line, just above his right nipple. Spike watched, mesmerised, as the blood trickled down and reddened its soft pink flush.  

He almost whimpered with pleasure when Angel cupped the back of his head and urged him to feed.

For the second time in his life, Spike’s mouth filled with Angel’s blood. Angel stroked the blond head, rubbing his thumb erotically over the short hairs at the back of Spike’s neck.

They pushed their bodies together, seeking the pleasure from the friction. Spike’s good hand slipped around Angel’s hips and grabbed one cheek, kneading it to the rhythm of his lips on Angel’s nipple. 

Angel growled and the low sound was pure eroticism. It was primal. It was sound of imminent demonic sex. Spike’s hand slid further around, a finger teasing Angel’s hole. He felt its puckered surface spasm under his sensitive touch: a small quiver of anticipation. 

They rose to their knees, Spike mouthing wetly to Angel’s swollen, bleeding nipple. Flat hipbone met flat hipbone, strong thigh pressed to strong thigh, and between them—rushed, rubbed, ground together—cock met cock. They circled, rubbing one slowly up against the other then humped them against one another in random short jerks of pleasure. 

Spike lifted his mouth from feeding and it hung open, blood dripping to his chin, teeth coated in sticky, red fluid. Angel cried out and plunged his tongue into this hot cavern with even more pleasure than he’d enjoyed the other one. He licked his blood off Spike’s teeth, cleaned the pale face with long sensuous strokes of his rasping tongue, and below their movements became even more frenzied. Neither put a hand to the wet, red, swollen joining. They controlled the contact with their hips, strong clenches of their muscles causing cheeks to dimple as they kept up frantic pleasuring.

They stopped kissing and crushed their foreheads together, gazing down, panting raggedly with need. As they watched, their orgasms hit them, each cockhead opening up and erupting, Spike’s propelled high on the new blood, Angel’s bubbling over like a pot on the boil, his sperm thick and glistening and moving sluggishly down both pale phalluses.

Scent of sperm and blood permeated the air. They went back to kissing; the smell keeping them hard, keeping them interested.  Angel fell onto his back. Spike lay over him, and his fingers returned to their game, teasing Angel now with a wet slickness that enabled them to slide in and out through the tight, clamped sphincter.

He found the slight swelling he sought and played with it. Angel arched and began to thrash his head from side to side. He shot his hand down to try and stop Spike’s touch, too sensitive after his explosive orgasm, but Spike caught his wrist and pinned it to the bed.  

Angel blinked sex-sated eyes. Spike rose over him, removed his finger and slid his hardness inside Angel’s body. He let go the strong wrist and lay carefully on the broad body, sliding in an out of the clenching anus with almost no sense of motion at all. Angel lifted his legs and wrapped them around Spike’s back, locking his ankles. It was the perfect position to let their mouths join the play. Smiling, teasing, Spike tempted Angel to lift his head then jerked his offered lips away.  Angel pouted and snatched the back of the blond head, pulling Spike down, making demands of his own.  They both felt Spike’s cock swell as their lips touched and smiled some more at this, sensing that they were discovering each other’s secrets for the first time, learning how to give each other pleasure.  The lessons went on for some time, for with initial urgency relieved from his first orgasm, Spike was in the mood to draw the pleasure out. 

Angel folded his arms behind his head, anticipating the hours of delight that lay ahead. 

After a minute, he peered down. 

A long, lazy grin split his face. Spike’s face lay on his chest, turned to one side as if, in the deep sleep he’d crashed into, breathing was still a necessity.  He still penetrated deep, but was softening. Angel clenched slightly, and in auto-response, the invading shaft hardened once more. 

The blond, sleeping figure began to breathe.

Angel put one hand to his eyes and squeezed back threatening tears. In the stillness and great calm of the moment, his lover asleep like a child upon him, Angel allowed himself to think that unthinkable: Spike’s plan wouldn’t work. 

It had no chance whatsoever of working—as if he could look at Spike now and have that look be taken for that of an authoritarian sire. 

He dug his fingers into Spike’s longish locks and pressed the perfectly shaped head harder onto his chest.

Ironically, despite the contradiction between what was and what had to be, he didn’t care.

There was no way he was letting Spike go now.

It wasn’t even a dilemma. 

Spike stayed.

Angel closed his eyes and for the first time allowed his lies to dissipate. It had never been about being gay, about superheroes or retaining menace. He doubted if a single one of the demons he knew would be remotely interested in what he did in bed. Most of them made human definitions of sexuality—heterosexual, homosexual, transsexual, bi-sexual, hermaphrodite, asexual—seem straightforward.  Although he’d never met one himself, Wesley had once told him—during one of their rare sessions over a whisky bottle and too much honesty—that there was a demon that bred by detaching its own ass and fucking it with a proboscis concealed inside its nose.  

It had never been about being gay. It had never been about fearing to love Spike because he was man.  

It had been about fearing to love.

To Angel, love meant vulnerability rewarded by pain. In almost three hundred years, he’d allowed himself to be vulnerable twice: Buffy and Connor. Love was a torturer wearing the face of a beautiful stranger. 

He’d been seared so badly by the pain of losing them that the scars were still around his heart, thickening it, making it resistant to love’s call now. 

He stroked his fingers through Spike’s hair and wondered why this man had been the one to chip those bands away.

Now his heart was soft, malleable, forming itself to the shape of Spike’s love.  He could no more let Spike go than he could his heart. Separate him from Spike and he’d last as long and burn as brightly as if his heart were ripped from his body.

As Angel lay stroking his sleeping lover, he faced the unpalatable thought of facing the demands of Wolfram and Hart without his hardened heart. Once more, he had something he could not bear to lose. Once more, he had something that made him vulnerable. Once more, they had a weapon that could be used against him. 

He had no choice but to face them though. 

Because there was no real dilemma.

Spike stayed.

Very carefully, he eased them both into a better sleeping position and pulled up the covers.

He propped himself on one elbow and studied Spike’s sleeping form for a while. He was healing: his face less swollen and the bruises in their yellowing phase. Angel couldn’t decide whether he felt more affection or fury for his childe that he’d been so stupid, so… desperate… as to attempt something so fundamentally dumb.  Affection won out. Smiling ruefully at the use of a word which described how he felt for Spike about as accurately as ripple caught the essence of a tsunami, he wrapped his arms carefully around the bruised, battered body and prepared himself for a long night of brooding. Love for another man or not, love still made him vulnerable, and he could not see a way through the tangles of this snare.

He knew that he’d not fallen asleep; nevertheless, Angel had the sense that Spike had been watching him for some time before he finally became aware of this intense scrutiny. Rousing from his deep contemplation of his woes, Angel grunted at Spike’s concentrated stare.  

He had no intention of telling Spike that the plan wouldn’t work. To do that, he’d have to tell him the real reason why he’d panicked and nearly lost him. He wasn’t that ready to admit that he’d lied and that he’d nearly let Spike go on the pretence of that lie. He wasn’t that ready to admit that Spike was better at relationships than he was. He wasn’t that ready to admit that Spike knew more about love than he did.

He cradled Spike back into the crook of his arm, and tried to settle them more comfortably into the warmth of the bed.

‘You’re thinking about Connor, aren’t you?’

Angel frowned at this astute observation. He hadn’t been, but he had been thinking about love and vulnerability. Spike’s comment cut to the chase of his anxiety more accurately than any other. He tightened his arm around his childe, this child, and tried to will him to sleep. 

He woke with the sun streaking into the bedroom.  Glancing over at the clock, he cursed loudly, and continued to swear as he ripped the covers off and headed to the shower.  He turned, about to complain about being late for a meeting, when he saw Spike’s expression. He had the very distinct impression that Spike had been awake since that perceptive question in the middle of the night and that he had continued his intense, thoughtful scrutiny. 

Angel shook off the feeling that he was exposed, all his secrets known, and continued in silence to the shower.

He turned and twisted under the hot, reviving water. It washed away the staleness of bed, if not his worries. He was grateful for small mercies that morning.

He opened his eyes to seek some shampoo and saw that he was being observed again.  Spike had come silently into the bathroom and was now sitting naked on the counter next to the sink, leaning back on the mirror, smoking, watching him.

Angel blinked some of the water from his eyes and picked up the shampoo, returning Spike’s frank gaze. Oddly, despite allowing Spike to discover his body from the inside, this washing in front of him felt more intimate. He didn’t hurry though. He continued to wash slowly, allowing the suds to cascade over his skin, rubbing soap on his body parts with considerable intimacy, despite his audience of one.

Spike continued to watch him, his face completely neutral, just smoking his cigarette. 

When Angel was done, he stepped out of the stall. Instead of reaching for a towel, he closed the small gap between them and stood between Spike’s spread thighs.  

This close, what Angel had taken for neutrality in Spike’s eyes revealed itself to be concealment: his thoughts were shut behind cool blueness that now flicked slowly down Angel’s wet torso.

Angel’s maleness hung soft against a dark bush glistening with tiny droplets.

Spike lifted his eyes and took another drag on his cigarette, turning his head to blow the smoke away from Angel’s face.

Angel spread his fingers over Spike’s thighs. He was warm from the shower and his skin met the steel hard coldness of the legs with a frisson of shock. He worked his thumbs deep into the muscles, watching brief blossoms of red flare on the untarnished flesh.

Spike, he noted, was not soft. 

He slid his hand between Spike’s thighs and lifted him out, laying the provocative column over one thigh. It refused to stay dormant, rising cobra-like to his touch.  For the first time since he had chased Spike to Wyoming in such a panic of need, the thought occurred to him that this length of flesh had been inside his body. 

Once more, he looked up to find himself observed. 

He was taken aback by Spike’s continuing silence. He wasn’t accustomed to it. He assumed they were having some sort of silent, lovers’ communion, but he couldn’t be sure. He’d almost never done that before, so had nothing to compare this with. He had so little in common with Nina that they’d barely communicated when they had spoken. Their only connection was fear of being a freak, which she had felt far more strongly than he. Since coming to L.A., he had redefined his views on freakish, and for the most part, felt more normal than most of his acquaintances. He’d communicated silently with Buffy equally infrequently. Just once they had thought the same thing at the same time. Wet from the rain, aroused from a fight, they had both thought let’s fuck at exactly the same time, although he gave her the benefit of the doubt that she had used an expression considerably more romantic.  It wasn’t particularly uncanny that they’d had this silent mutual thought. He’d been thinking it every time they’d kissed for the preceding year. He guessed that’s what you got when you were a vastly experienced, three hundred year old, dating a sixteen-year-old virgin: incompatible thoughts.

But now, there was Spike.

Spike was a vampire. He had a soul. He was a man. They worked together. They shared a distant past and a more recent one in Sunnydale. Spike had also loved and lost Buffy. And if Angel looked the mirror, Spike would be absent, too. These were pretty fundamental similarities. Angel was only surprised that they had spent so much of their acquaintance seemingly not communing. 

Just as this thought crossed his mind, leaving a satisfactory wake of confidence in his ability to read Spike, speaking or not, the blue eyes shifted slightly to grey. Angel faltered and realised he had absolutely no idea whatsoever what Spike was thinking.

It scared him to the extent of forcing him to speak. When the words emerged, they sounded inconsequential but at the same time frighteningly astute.  

‘You’ve not moved your wash things in here yet.’

Spike kept Angel’s gaze, his eyes changing once more to an icy, pale blue.  ‘I thought maybe you could move some of your previous lover’s stuff out first.’

Angel tensed and looked wildly around: a pink razor, a packet of Tampax, an old mascara wand.

Spike softened his observation with a small quirk of his lips. ‘I’m not complaining. You’ve made room for me where it counts.’ Hands on Angel’s buttocks pulling them slightly apart, left no doubt of his meaning.

He lifted one off and stubbed out his cigarette in the sink, returning spread fingers to the firm cheek. ‘Thought you were late for work.’

Angel pouted slightly, not sure he liked being dismissed.  ‘Are you coming down?’

Spike shook his head. ‘I think you need some space for a bit of top-level brooding. Last person you need to see today is me.’

Angel started. He thought he’d hid his nighttime doubts better than that. He didn’t like the idea of silent communing only going one way. The image of Spike, quietly watching him all night and misjudging him sent a trickle of fear down his spine.

He caught Spike’s chin in an iron grip. ‘You read my mind? Read this, Spike: you – are – staying.’

He saw from the sudden dilation of Spike’s eyes—a black flower blossoming in ice—that he didn’t need to add, ‘In my life, in my work, in my bed, and in my body.’ He smiled shyly. He liked this silent talking thing.

Angel suddenly swept the detritus of his past love life to the floor in a rather impressive (if theatrical) gesture.  ‘Move your shit in, Spike. You’re staying.’

Chapter 16

Angel wasn’t unaccustomed to being disturbed by an erection at work; it was one of the hazards—or benefits, depending upon how you looked at it—of being a creature of pure muscle, fed on blood.  However, this one was different. This one distorted his suit. This one practically spoke to him, begging to be taken somewhere and dealt with (harshly). 

It had picked a bad to day to rear its head, for Angel had to deal with a series of minor disciplinary infractions: employees wheeled in to see him (some literally) one after the other with no respite.

Fortunately, not rising to greet them, taciturn, shifting uncomfortably whenever they spoke, all added to his considerable reputation as a hard taskmaster. Angel knew his reputation and had never felt it to be more apt.

As so often happened these days, he only kept his mind half on the interviewee. The other half scanned the lobby, listened for the familiar accent, sought the subtle trace of tobacco, which he had come to love, and ached for the rustle of leather against muscle. 

He tried sliding down in the chair. It didn’t help. 

The employee rose, considerably unnerved, wondering if Angel was about to produce a weapon from some secret compartment under the desk. Rumours of beheadings tended to focus the mind.

He scuttled out, and Angel tipped his head back, closing his eyes for a moment of privacy. 

He heard the door again and groaned inwardly.

‘I’ve been bad, Sir. Wanna discipline me?’

Angel grinned and opened his eyes.

Spike came around to his side of the desk and perched on it, at just that distance from the CEO that would give an observer pause for thought but nothing actually concrete to explain why it seemed odd.

He smiled slyly.  ‘No kiss then?’

Angel’s eyes widened fractionally. ‘You want me to kiss you. Here?’

‘Sire and childe kiss, course.’

Angel’s lip quirked up. ‘And what’s one of those, when it’s at home?’

‘Well….’ Spike dragged it out, his tongue pushed into his cheek. ‘Let me see…. How did Darla kiss you? That’s all I meant. Just like that.’

Angel pouted. ‘Way t’go to make me feel like Incest Incorporated.’

They both knew instinctively that this was the wrong subject to bring up (so to speak), both having hardened a little more at the words. Eyes dilated; faces flushed.

Spike’s voice was high with sexual need. ‘Incest?’

Angel nodded, not even trusting his voice.

Spike shifted slightly on the desk and swallowed visibly. ‘Wanna come upstairs and give me some fatherly advice?’

Angel glanced at his watch then into the lobby and said, agonised, ‘I’ve got another freakin’ interview in five minutes.’

Spike slid closer, their legs touching. ‘I can do five minutes.’

A vision of rumpled clothes and sweat flashed across Angel’s mind.

Spike laughed—short, sharp, delighted. ‘Okay, Luv. No creases.’ He stood and strode purposefully toward the conference room, one meaningful glance behind to Angel.

Unable to resist, following as if the fate of the world depended upon him making this small, obedient journey, Angel let his legs take him in the wake of Spike’s enticing essence.

Spike was waiting in one corner, out of sight of doors, leaning on the wall, one leg bent up, a study in fake nonchalance.  ‘Hi.’

Angel smiled and stepped up to him, leaning in hard. ‘Hi.’

They kissed long and pleasurably, pulling away to look at the effect of saliva on swelling lips then joining again to suck it off.  Spike murmured as their lips parted, a thin trail of spittle hanging between them like a delicate foretaste of what was to come, ‘I’m feeling chastened already… Sire.’

Angel chuckled and braced his arms on the wall either side of the blond head, subtly rubbing them together. He slid his mouth around to Spike’s ear, making the journey exquisitely slow, and whispered, ‘I want you inside me.’

Spike’s whole body moaned—a surge of disbelieving delight tearing the sound from him. He had never had someone he wanted admit that to him and that it should be Angel—so inviolate, so restrained, so constrained—floored him. He tore at the dark hair, increasing the intensity of the kiss.

‘Angel?’

They groaned and pulled apart, wiping mouths and straightening clothes.

Harmony poked her head around the door. ‘Dunlow and Sampson are here, Boss. Wanna see them separate? Hey, Spike. What y’doing? Wanna go for coffee?’

Spike manoeuvred around Angel with a final, private look. The look Angel sent him back seemed to make the air around them thicken.  Spike let out a breath, lifted his eyebrows and followed Harmony toward the lobby with an uncharacteristically leaden step.

Angel greeted his employees more confused about his childe than he had been for the hundred and twenty years since he’d made him.

He was only glad there was one thing he wasn’t confused about—the fundamental thing: Spike stayed.

That, he wasn’t confused about at all.

He wondered idly what it was these two demons had done that required his intervention then forget about them entirely and let them talk on as he thought about Spike.

Spike was the best kisser he had ever known—which was so not how he’d intended to start his introspection about his childe, but it was a fact hard to ignore. He wanted to put a finger up and touch his lips. He contented himself by closing his eyes and reliving the tongue entering his mouth, feeling again the mouth wide on his, hearing the soft moans of encouragement and enjoyment. Had he just moaned? He opened his eyes, saw the demons were staring at him, and waved imperiously at them to continue.

He was a great kisser, and he had an unbelievable body. Angel frowned. He hadn’t meant to think that either. He wanted to puzzle out the source of his confusion, not increase it. But as with the kissing, the body was hard to ignore. He’d always known Spike was good looking, and he’d always known he had a great body, but these were things he’d only known: abstract facts that didn’t touch the heart. Now he felt them. Now, Spike’s face swum in his vision, every expression studied and dissected, the pieces from this dissection reformed once more into a pleasing whole. His body seemed to be touching him now. Eyes closed, he could feel spidery-light fingers on his face, feather-light fingers on his pants, playing over the hard bone of flesh that pulsed achingly with this remembrance of slow relief.

He coughed and slid his chair further under the desk, checked that the demons were still whining about the unfairness of life, and went back to trying to puzzle out his confusion.

And now Spike was taking his amazing kisses, hard body and pretty face to play with Harmony. 

Angel jerked upright and snapped open his eyes.

The demons stopped talking. 

Angel folded his arms and glared.

Impressed with the way he concentrated on their very justifiable complaints, they continued.

It wasn’t that he didn’t trust him. He did.  He trusted the whole. It was the parts he wasn’t so sure about. 

Angel pouted and glanced down. Parts betrayed you. He was a man, and he understood these things. It didn’t matter how much a man loved, wanted, and would do anything not to hurt, he wasn’t always ruled by head or heart. Sometimes, this shaft of hard need took him where he didn’t want to go, made him do things he didn’t want to do. Spike spread on a desk in an empty office, Harmony astride his hard need was a case in point.

Angel bit his lip. Where had that come from? Once thought, the picture of them fornicating in the office next door could not be banished. He strained his ears to see if he could hear the sounds he had come to associate with Spike’s pleasure. 

Perhaps they’d gone into a maintenance closet. Harmony had once told him—in one of her I’m-nervous-so-I’ll-babble-all-the-office-gossip moments—that they had the equivalent of a mile-high-club closet at the firm: one that it was considered a rite of passage to fuck a fellow employee in. Apparently—he’d not believed this part—names were scratched on the walls with dates. She was scratching Spike’s name now. 

More likely, they’d taken the stairs to the apartment—his apartment—and—okay, their apartment—and were fucking like vampires in the bed. Which, he knew, would still smell of the male fluids that had poured from them both the previous night.

Maybe Spike would feel guilty and wilt. 

Maybe he’d wrap her in the musky smells and fuck her every which way and back again.

He rose, fists clenched. 

The demons cringed and began to backtrack: taking back all their lies, admitting everything, even things they hadn’t done but wanted to be punished for anyway.

Angel strode out to the lobby and over to Harmony’s station.  

She wasn’t there. 

He knew where she was. Her empty chair screamed the truth at him.

He went toward the stairs, not wanting to take the elevator and alert them. 

Just as he wrenched open the door, one lone brain cell tried to overcome the morass of jealousy that had done in all its companions.  

It told him to check the canteen first. 

It told him that he trusted Spike.

Walking using only brain cell wasn’t easy, but he managed it. 

He scanned the room blankly. 

They were sitting together at a table in the window, shades on, basking in the sunlight, equally vacuous, equally blond.

Angel tried to work out if they’d had time to fuck before making this show of innocence. Five minutes. Spike had said it.

Some of his emotions seemed to ripple across the room, for one by one, heads turned anxiously towards his dark presence. Liking this idea, Angel dismissed the thought that they just weren’t used to seeing him in the canteen, and waited for the ripple of his fury to reach Spike.

Eventually, Spike, whether noticing the glances of those around him, or sensing some of what Angel wanted him to sense, looked around.

He took his feet off the table and the shades off his face.  Harmony looked around and beamed guiltily. ‘Whoops. Coffee break ended, like, yesterday. Bye, baby.’

Spike stood up, too, and watched her skirt around Angel.

Everyone in the room was waiting for something, this small tableau enough to fuel the gossip for at least a week.

Suddenly, Spike dropped his head and walked meekly across the room. He stopped when he got to Angel, nodded his head as if signalling his contrition, and went defeated into the hallway.

Thoroughly thrown, Angel followed him out.  Spike smelt of nothing but coffee and sunshine, and so the sun came out for Angel once more.

As they passed the stairwell, he nudged Spike and disappeared inside.

As soon as Spike came in, he spun Angel around and crowed, ‘You were bloody brilliant! Did you see their faces?’

Thrown again, Angel managed a confused, ‘Huh?’

‘Christ, Luv. I thought I was good—did you like the hangdog expression?—but you were bloody amazing!’

‘Huh?’

He began to climb the stairs toward the apartment.  ‘They’ll think you’re taking me up for a bloody good beating.’

‘Spike!’

‘See! Told you my plan would work.’

Angel began to laugh before he’d negotiated the last flight of stairs. He needed to breathe to get the laughter out, but he’d lost the coordination to laugh this loud and breathe at the same time, so he fell to his knees, choking for breath, holding his side, which was cramped with lack of oxygen. It was such an unusual, unexpected sensation that he only laughed louder, tears streaming down his face.

He levered himself to his feet and recovered enough to walk into the apartment, small hiccups signalling the laughter simmering under the surface. He took one look at Spike and it bubbled up again, leaving him so weak that he sat on the bed, trying to wipe his eyes, still holding his aching side.

Spike clenched his jaw and snapped, ‘What?’

Angel tried to speak but fell back, shaking his head hopelessly.  

‘Angel! What?’

Angel hiccupped again, shading his eyes from Spike as if one glance at his outraged face would set him off again.  ‘You.’

It was all he could manage for a while, and he lay utterly ignored as he chuckled to himself, wiping his eyes and rubbing his side.  Finally, Spike sat on the opposite side and asked menacingly, ‘Me?’

Angel risked a nod, clenched his jaw to hold it all in, but exploded once more, curling onto his side, punching the pillow.  Spike got up with the clear intent to leave, but Angel turned and lunged, catching his arm.  ‘One of your…. Oh, God—.’ He arranged his features and said, stifling a snort with difficulty, ‘One of your plans has actually worked.’

Spike cast him a sideward look of total derision and then flung himself down on the bed, the murmur dozy pillock just reaching Angel’s ears.

They lay side by side in almost total silence for a while, just the occasional stifled chuckle from Angel and a suitable reply from Spike breaking the comfortable peace.  

After the longest time, Spike asked softly, ‘What you thinking about?’

Angel tested his voice and replied equally softly, ‘Tom and Pete.’

Spike turned his head on the pillow and studied the beautiful profile curiously. Sensing this, Angel said with his eyes still fixed on the ceiling, ‘I wonder if playing at being brothers when they were in public eventually affected how they were together in private.’

For a moment, Spike thought that Angel was genuinely thinking about the couple from the past and gave his question some serious consideration.  The hand creeping purposefully over his thigh put paid to that.  Angel was grinning to himself, and a frisson of something almost painful in its pleasurable intensity ran down Spike’s spine.  Angel nodded as if he’d been having some interesting internal debate. ‘Yeah, seems to me—seeing as we’ve been playing Sire and Childe—that we’ve been going about this… sex… thing all wrong.’

Spike made a vain attempt to leave the bed, but he was hooked by the tight hold of Angel’s fingers in his waistband.

The zipper broke.

Angel continued in his happy voice, ‘Yeah, I mean, I like variety, Spike, you know that—been happy to take it… kinda fun….’ The pants were now down around Spike’s ankles.  ‘See, I’m the sire; you’re the childe.’  He flipped Spike onto his belly. 

Spike struggled back over.

Angel sighed and put him back where he wanted him.  He rose over the writhing figure—sleek, predatory muscle.  Spike arched and tried to get free but in doing so his legs parted.

Angel’s whole focus shifted to the dark indentation between the pale globes.  Blindly, he released his hardness and urged it toward the shallow valley.  

Spike’s eyes widened until they were as deep as a reservoir hiding streams from the past.

He twisted around locking eyes with Angel.

Angel twitched his hips forward, increasing pressure on Spike’s clenched entry.

Spike swallowed and said as distinctly as he could, ‘No.’

Angel hesitated and stared down at the still slightly bruised face, the offset cheekbone where the break was healing. Finally, he looked into the depths of Spike’s eyes. What he saw there made the air escape from his lungs in a long, low groan of gratitude. 

He began to push.

Spike winced as if in intense pain and lied again. ‘No!’

Angel threw back his head and tore into him: a violent joining of pain and pleasure, truth and games.

Spike fought him like a man possessed: writhing, screaming, cursing.  They tumbled to the floor. Angel stabbed back in, slicked on blood. Spike clawed at his face. They rolled, crashing into a table, contents spilling around them. 

Lighter, faster, Spike got away. Stronger, heavier, Angel flattened him into a wall. Plaster rained down on them, unique confetti for this unique joining. 

Blood slicked their flesh, pre-ejaculate ran freely, diluting it to sticky pink trails on their legs.

So hard that he was in pain, Angel slammed in again, the tightness resisting him, clamping around his hardness, utterly defeating the object of the resistance.

For the first time, Angel’s voracious sexual need was being fed, gorged on a body that was equally ravenous.  Memories of lying beached beside Nina after their perfunctory tumbles were swept away on this tsunami of sexual power.

He humped the slim body into the wall, opening it up deep inside, stretching Spike’s rectum to the shape of his desires.  Spike howled and kicked and begged, but to no avail; Angel pinned him effortlessly with his arms and raped him, jack-knifing his hips forward, forcing Spike’s legs apart, conquering him entirely.

Face into the back of Spike’s hair, Angel came for the first time inside another man, and however many times they were to repeat this, he knew that in his mind sex would always be associated with this feeling of complete power: the knowledge that he was a fearsome, invulnerable, predatory male. 

Spike had given this to him as a gift of love. 

He pulled out of the battered body, now running with his fluids, now marked with his scent.

He turned Spike to face him, pressing hard shoulders into the wall.

Spike twitched up an eyebrow, thrust his tongue into his cheek and murmured seductively, ‘Bully.’  Then he pulled Angel in for a long, wet kiss, sealing the truth between them, sharing it with their tongues, tasting it on the shared spit.

It seemed to Angel then, as Spike’s tongue raped his mouth and gave back some of the pleasure he’d taken from Angel’s harsher penetration, that he’d missed the critical similarities between them. Sure, they shared history. But what could be more profound than that they shared their desires, that they had matching bodies of muscles and power? What could Angel ask more than that Spike’s body carried the same fluids as his, the same evidence of his pleasure, delivered in the same way?

He didn’t have to be what had weakened him by his spectacular failure to achieve them: a teenage girl’s boyfriend and a human’s father. With Spike, he could be what came naturally to him: man and sire. There was no vulnerability associated with either of those.  They defined him, made him strong.

Over the next few weeks, their relationship was rarely restful, except for the occasional times when they lay utterly stated in each other’s arms, almost unconscious from the draining pleasure of their orgasms.  Mostly, they sparked against each other, coming alive in the other’s presence, powerful emotions crashing between them. 

It seemed to all who knew them that things were becoming increasingly difficult: the infighting; the arguments; the silences; the flaring, bitter hatred. It wore everyone out. It seemed to wear them out, for they were absent for long periods of time after such arguments, reappearing only hours later, looking physically exhausted. 

Why they still chose to go on cases together no one could understand, but they did, sitting alongside each other intently as if they could not wait to get out of the confines of the agency and be on their own. 

The cases seemed increasingly complex, the couple’s extended absences sometimes giving cause for alarm.

Only Wesley appeared not to take all that he saw at face value. He watched their eyes as they fought, heard intent behind tone, noted casual touches of hands that were anything but careless.

Perhaps he was the only one who could have understood what he saw, for when he looked at them—toe to toe, faces flushed, bodies tensed—he saw this through the clarity of unfiltered starlight. When he heard bitter words, anger dissipated in the vast spaces of his memory, taking on a wholly different meaning.  

They had been given a second chance, a second past, and they had seized it with both hands and made it theirs. They were no longer constrained by the relationship they’d been assigned by fate, but had shaped their own. He admired them for it. He loved them for it. 

He did not doubt what they did when they were alone on their increasingly frequent absences from the office, and it made him feel confident for the future. 

He knew that the bonds being forged in their heat would enfold them all and would armour them for what lay ahead.

For the first time, he did not fear the never-ending flight of future days.

The End