Angel hit the doors of the Hyperion and threw them open hard enough to dent the walls they slammed into. "Weapons are over there," he barked, pointing at the case in the lobby. "Arm up. I’ll get my car keys."
"Angel, wait," Wesley called, forced to jog to keep up with the larger man’s strides. "Don’t you think we should at least take a moment to assess injuries?"
"I have second-degree burns on my back," Angel snapped, not slowing. He jabbed his thumb over his shoulder. "Riley has some smoke inhalation, and Faith has some first-degrees on her legs. As far as I know, Buffy and Gunn got off scot-free. Does that about cover it?"
"Yes, but—Angel, wait a moment!" Wesley called in frustration as his employer pulled ahead of him.
Angel whirled on him. "He has Kate!" He snapped. He tapped on his temple. "I *saw* him. He shot her in the shoulder so she couldn’t fight and the knee so she couldn’t run, and he took her. She has *no* time."
"Then we have no time to waste on berserk rage," Giles said sternly from the doorway. The younger ex-Watcher and the vampire both turned. Angel glared, his face twitching and showing the first signs of transformation, but Giles ignored it and strode across the lobby to them. "Running off into the night blind-crazy does no one any good. Do you know where Angelus is?" Angel opened his mouth, then shut it again. His face stabilized. "No? Were you just planning to drive around town until you caught his physical or psychic scent?" Angel dropped his eyes and shoulders. Giles reached out and put a hand on one of those shoulders. "I think I have a better plan." Then he looked at Wesley. "But I’ll need to see your books."
"Of course," Wesley said, starting toward the checkin counter. "This way."
Still standing in the doorway, Cordelia shook her head. "Why can’t *we* ever get him to settle down like that?"
Buffy shrugged. "Giles is good at ‘Dad’ stuff like that."
"Might have—" Riley’s voice was rough and wheezing. He cleared his throat several times and tried again. "Might have something to do with having the nerve to tell off an angry supernatural being."
"Sounds right," Oz agreed. "He’s needed it before."
Across the room, Angel settled into one of the couches with a sigh, only to leap back to his feet with a hiss of pain. He tried to pull his already-damaged shirt off, and it came away in shreds. Underneath, he was a disturbing sight: his soot-black face and hands contrasted with his dead-white skin, and his back was red and peeling. In some places it had even cracked open and started to bleed.
"Cordy?" He said, his voice tight.
"Yes?"
"Could you find the First Aid kit and get some burn ointment?"
"Sure."
Slowly, carefully, with a long, drawn-out hiss of pain, Angel sat back down. The others with nothing else to do but wait gathered around on lobby furniture.
"So who’s Kate?" Buffy asked after settling down on a hassock. "I don’t think you’ve mentioned her before."
"You’ve met her," Angel said. "Remember the cop who was threatening to throw me in an east-facing cell?"
"I remember that bitch," Faith growled. She settled onto a couch and winced as her jeans chafed her legs. "Tell me why we’re saving her again?"
"Well," Angel said. "For one, no one deserves what Angelus is planning to do to her. She’s been antagonizing me for the last year, not knowing that I have a soul, all the while thinking that it’s Angelus she’s standing up to. He’s decided to show her what the real Angelus can do."
That was when Cordelia arrived, carrying a large Mason jar. "Lean forward," she ordered.
He obeyed, resting his elbows on his knees and continuing his story as she dipped a white cream out of the jar and rubbed it onto his back. "Second," he said. "She used to be a friend, until one of my Childer came to town and I had to tell her that I’m a vampire."
Everyone turned to look at Spike. He shook his head and held up his hands in the classic ‘I didn’t touch it’ pose. "Hey, now, it wasn’t me. I haven’t been to this town since the whole ‘Gem of Amara’ business."
"Was it Drusilla?" Willow asked.
"Actually, his name was Penn," Angel replied. Then he noticed how much better his back felt. "Cordy? Is that the good stuff you’re using?"
"We need you up and running *quickly*," she said. "I think the good stuff is called for."
"Good stuff?" Oz asked.
"We helped a healer clear her neighborhood of an imp infestation," Cordelia answered. "She paid us in supplies."
"Useful," Oz approved.
The rest of the group couldn’t help but agree. Angel’s back smoothed and returned to its original color almost as quickly as Cordelia’s hand moved over it. Riley’s breathing became easier as he merely inhaled the unguent’s fresh odor.
There are those, however, who are not easily distracted. "For crying out loud, Angel," Buffy said. "How many Childer do you *have*?"
"Well, I was an Irish Catholic farmboy," he answered sheepishly. "That means big families."
All eyes turned to Riley.
"Hey, I’m Presbyterian," he said.
Willow fixed him with a suspicious look. "How many?" She demanded. "Don’t make me point lights at you."
Riley sighed in defeat. "Four brothers and four sisters. I’m the oldest."
"Holy *shit*!" Faith exclaimed.
Joyce just winced and crossed her legs.
"Getting back to the *point*," Angel interrupted testily, "Even after she found out that I was a vampire, we were able to work together well enough until vampires killed her father. So I think she deserves to be cut a little slack."
Cordelia had finished with Angel and moved on to Faith. "Roll up your pant legs," she directed.
"Um…burns go up a little higher than that," Faith said. "Unless you want me to drop trou, you better just give me the stuff so I can step into the other room."
Without a word, Cordelia handed her the jar.
Giles arrived just as Faith was leaving, grinning triumphantly, holding a large open tome in his hand. Wesley trailed behind him. "I’ve found it!" He crowed, thrusting the book into Angel’s hands. "Look there," he said, pointing.
Angel looked where he was bid, read, then looked up quizzically. "Giles, this is a wedding spell."
Giles nodded irritably. "Yes, yes, that’s its most common usage, but you’re missing the point. What it does is create a psychic bond—"
"Or strengthen existing ones," Angel guessed. "And that’s how I’ll track him."
"Yes," Giles said, as if the man before him was a student who had just answered a difficult problem, rather than a being old enough to be his distant ancestor. "That’s right."
Angel hesitated. He didn’t *want* to strengthen his connection with Angelus. He wanted to get rid of what he had. Every time he touched minds with the demon, he was flooded with cruelty, blood-hunger, and a gleeful love of destruction. It was like be submerged in ice-cold sewage. Every time it happened, he wondered how he had carried that inside him for so long without going mad.
But Angelus had Kate. And Kate had antagonized Angel—and through him, Angelus—for a year.
Angel remembered what Angelus did to those who annoyed him. He got creative.
Kate didn’t deserve that.
"What do I have to do?"
*
The preparations for the ceremony took an hour. Giles had to modify the spell so that 1) Angelus didn’t have to be present and 2) Love was not the source of the purported bond. The first was easy—apparently there was a variant on the spell that had once been used so that lovers could bond even when separated by war or other disaster. The latter was easier than it otherwise might have been. After all, Angel and Angelus had once been the same being.
That gave the Warriors time to change their clothes and clean up, and it gave everyone time to arm themselves.
*
"Do you have any guns?" Riley called as he perused the weapons cabinet.
"Why?" Angel asked. "They won’t help."
"They won’t kill him," Riley corrected. "But he’ll probably be easy to stake with a bullet in his head."
"Good point."
"Besides," Riley added, "You said that Angelus would probably be raising an army. Maybe there’ll be things in it bullets *can* kill."
"It’s actually kind of a moot point," Angel said. "The answer to your original question is no, we don’t—"
"Actually," Wesley said, pointing. "They’re right over there, in a case behind the bookshelves. You’d best hurry, I believe Mr. Giles and Mr. Harris are over there right now, making their selections."
"Do they have any hunting rifles?" Tara’s voice came from across the room. There was a pause, and Angel suspected that whoever was involved in the conversation with her was staring in surprise. "My father taught me how to shoot with one."
"Doesn’t look like it," Xander’s voice answered. "Looks like they went for streetfighter stuff—easy to conceal. They have a shotgun, though—"
"Don’t take that!" Riley called, alarmed, as he hurried away across the lobby. "We’ll be in too close quarters!"
Wesley caught Angel’s look of surprise. "We don’t all have super strength, Angel," he said as he turned back to the spell preparations.
*
"Hey! Peaches!"
Angel gritted his teeth. "What is it, ‘Willy’?" he growled.
Spike growled back. He hated ‘Willy’ even more than ‘William’. Angel was perhaps the only vampire on Earth who could call him that and live. Except maybe Drusilla, and she would have had days of torture for it. "What about Mum?" He growled, jabbing his thumb over his shoulder toward where Joyce sat on one of the sofas. Startled at being acknowledged, she sat up straight and looked in their direction.
"What about her?" Angel asked.
"How ‘bout tossing her a weapon? Believe me when I say she’s good with an axe."
"Is that true?" Angel asked her. "Because if it is, we need every hand."
"Uh, yes. I…guess so."
"Good." Angel plucked an axe from the case and handed it to her. It was the smallest and lightest battle-axe he had, but it was still a full-sized battle-axe, unlike the weapon that both Gunn and Faith were now referring to as Cordelia’s "Ladysmith Hand Axe."
"Thank you," Joyce said as she took the weapon from his hand. She stood and took a few practice swings, looking surprisingly competent and dangerous. "Yes, I think this will do just fine."
"What do you know?" Angel said as he walked away. "She’s a natural."
"I could’ve told you that, mate."
*
The lobby’s furniture had been pushed to the walls, and a huge pentacle had been drawn in chalk on the floor, with candles at each point and intersection of the star. If this had, indeed, been a wedding, the candles would have been red or white.
As it was, they were black.
Angel stood in the exact center of the design, stripped to the waist and barefoot. Wrapped around his left arm was a cord to bind him to the object of the spell. If it had been a wedding, especially if his bride had been present for a handfasting, that "cord" would have been a ribbon.
For his hate-bond, he’d chosen barbed wire.
He was uncomfortable. Not just at the thought of what he was about to do, but because he was standing on a thirty-foot-in-diameter holy symbol. Belial hadn’t been lying: the voice of the Angelus-personality might be gone now, but he was still a demon. An unholy thing. He still hungered for blood, he still feared the cleansing fire and sunlight, and holy things like the one he stood on still rejected him.
Let it be, then. Sometimes he suspected that his purpose as a Champion of Good was to draw the darkness into himself, so that Champions like Buffy, who pierced the darkness with their light, could make easier headway.
That was what he comforted himself with, anyway. It made what he had to do easier to face.
The Scooby Gang and Angel Investigations, each holding a black candle, filed down the stairs into the lobby. Giles, as the presiding official, led the procession. Spike followed immediately behind. Nobody liked it, but as the "son" of *both* parties involved in the spell, he had a mandatory place of honor. Immediately following Spike was Buffy, who had agreed to stand with Angel as his "Best Man," and she carried a tray with several jars of paint instead of a candle. The three of them led the procession once around the circle, then joined Angel in the center as the rest of the group arranged themselves along the outer edge. They made sure that a Supernatural or magic-user stood at each point of the star: Cordelia, as a seer and a channel to the Powers That Be, stood at the "Spirit" point. Faith stood at Fire, while Tara took Earth and Willow Water. It had been decided that it would be unwise to channel any mystical energy through Oz’s unstable Wolf-spirit, so Wesley—a competent, if unspectacular, alchemist—stood at Air.
Spike, looking distinctly uncomfortable himself, took up his position at Angel’s left hand, while Buffy stood at his right.
Giles stepped before them and began the ceremony, asking the traditional question for the "separate" variant: "The other member of the bond does not stand before us. Do you have his consent?"
"We are of one mind on it," Angel replied. A ritual dodge. If this were a wedding ceremony, and the bond was to be one of love and trust, it would fail.
"Do you bear witness to this?" Giles said to Spike and Buffy.
"We bear witness," they replied, only slightly out of sync.
"Then let the ritual commence," Giles pronounced.
Angel held up his hands, palms out. "From this day forth, let us always be touching," He said.
"You shall always be touching," Giles confirmed.
Buffy dipped her fingers in one of the paints and drew a gray band around each wrist.
"Our hearts will beat with one beat, our blood shall be as one blood."
His heart didn’t beat, and his blood was stolen. Still, the same was true of Angelus.
"Your hearts will beat with one beat, your blood shall be as one blood."
Buffy traced a red heart on his chest.
"I shall see with his eyes."
"You shall see with his eyes."
Blue was dabbed onto his eyelids.
"I shall hear with his ears."
"You shall hear with his ears."
The same blue was dabbed onto the tips of his ears.
"I shall know his mind."
If this had been a love bond, the phrase would have been "Heart and Mind." The thought made Angel want to retch. He was finally free, he could finally safely be with Buffy. Nothing in the world would give him greater joy than to speak those words to her, and to hear her speak them back. Instead, he was performing a twisted mockery of a wedding ceremony to bind himself more tightly to an obscenity.
His fist clenched tight around the barbed wire coiled around his hand. Blood started to trickle between his fingers.
"You shall know his mind."
Buffy reached up drew a black sigil on his forehead.
For a moment, they stood silent and expectant. Had it worked? Would anything happen?
Then something slammed into Angel. He screamed, and the world went black.
*
Across town, Angelus watched the Asclepian demon—a fifteen-foot snake with arm-like tentacles—at work.
"Don’t fix her *too* much," Angelus was saying. "I don’t want her to be able to get away. I just don’t want her to die."
The Asclepian didn’t like that. It didn’t like back-seat healers under the best of circumstances, which these weren’t. It took questionable clients, clients that most of its brethren wouldn’t deal with: wounded Mafiosi and gang members, vampires—once it had even helped a member of the Scourge. But this itched its scales. Healing anyone who had something to trade was one thing. Healing someone just so they could be tortured was something else.
Angelus’s face suddenly lit up. "Say, do you think you could put a few things back together wrong? Cripple her so—"
The Asclepian turned around and glared at him. It said nothing—speaking languages designed for unsplit tongues was difficult for it, though it understood perfectly—but its meaning was clear: "I may not be choosy about my clients, but I *do* have *some* principles."
"All right, all right, it was just a—" Suddenly something hit Angelus behind the eyes. Hot pain blossomed, then was gone. But he could feel something there that hadn’t been there before.
"Oh, Soulboy," Angelus said, shaking his head. "What are you doing? Something stupid I suspect. You’re almost as predictable as Buff."
*
"Angel? Angel, wake up!"
"Stop shaking him. He’ll wake up when he’s ready."
"Was that supposed to happen?"
"Is he okay—I mean, is he gonna be?"
Angel moaned and stirred.
"Looks like."
Several different unpleasant sensations ran through Angel at the same time. The first was what Doyle would have called a great cracking migraine. The second was the disorientation involved in finding oneself on the floor and not remembering how one got there. Both of these were at least somewhat familiar from his life as Liam. But the third—his desire to run into his apartment, burn his clothes, and take a several-hour shower in scalding holy water while scrubbing himself with industrial cleaners, was rather new.
He opened his eyes and the light speared into them, setting his head to renewed pounding. He raised his hand to shade his eyes, and the world slowly came into focus: Buffy, Wesley, and Cordelia were all kneeling around him. Giles, Willow, and Faith stood looking over the first rank’s shoulders.
"Are you okay?" Willow asked anxiously. He recognized her voice as the one who had asked before.
"I…ugh." He rubbed his forehead with the heels of his hands, and his headache started to fade. A little. "I will be." He started to sit up. Buffy slipped an arm around his shoulders and helped him up so he could hang his head between his knees for a moment.
"Did it work?" Giles asked quietly. "What did you see?"
Angel looked up at him. "I, uh—I…"
What *had* he seen?
He couldn’t remember. There’d been fire, and blood, and some reaching, grasping darkness.
No, he couldn’t remember what he’d *seen*, but he could remember what he’d *felt*. Oh, yes, he could remember what he’d *touched*. All those years, even when Angelus had been dominant, he had been diluted by his residence in the shell that had once been a man named Liam. Yes, *diluted* was the word, diluted as even such ancient and mighty vampires as the Master and Kakistos were diluted by that essential humanity of body and mind. Bastardized. Hybrids.
Tainted.
Just enough to make the Judge’s touch itch.
But now Angelus was free. Pure. And when Angel had touched him, he’d touched something old and evil and as hungry as darkness itself.. Something glacially cold one moment and wild, ravenous, forest-fire hot the next. Something that wanted to gouge the land, rip up the trees and demolish the mountains. Something that wanted to turn everything before it to ash.
"I…don’t remember what I saw. But yes, it did work."
"So you know where he is?"
"No," Angel answered as he climbed to his feet. "But I have his scent."
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