Title: You Forgot To Mention Hell, Horatio
Author: JR
Email: JRR42@yahoo.com
Rating: PG-13 for language.
Status: Complete
Warnings: Nope. Not this time.
Category: Crossover with Highlander
Disclaimer: All other characters belong to their respective owners and are used without permission. This story is not intended to infringe upon any copyrights, nor is any profit being made from it.
This is what happens when you get involved with too many different fandoms.
Universe setting: For you Highlander fans, this story takes place sometime after ‘Archangel’ (sorry to all those Richie Forever people). Please forgive me for playing with the timelines of the shows, but hey, it’s fan-fic and I can do that ;-)
Thanks: As always, to Carrie, and to Marius, the oak and the ash to my birds in the forest.

In the end, the mobile Slayerettes were forced to haul Giles, Cordelia and Angel up using harnesses hastily fashioned out of the fire hoses. The constant jarring of his injured arm made the entire process excruciating for the reserved Watcher. Cordelia fared little better, not with the three broken ribs she had suffered from her earlier impact with the tunnel wall.

For Angel, however, it was another matter. At some point during their journey down the tunnel, the vampire mercifully slipped into unconsciousness. Even the trip up through the manhole was not enough to wake him.

Once topside, their most immediate concern was getting the hell away from the scene of the crime. Although the whole ordeal had scarcely lasted seventy minutes, time was still of the essence. By that point, the police had surely discovered that the bomb threat Xander placed with 911 was a hoax -- a simple distraction to keep the law from interfering while the Slayerettes dealt with the now-defunct Army of Legion.

“Oz?” Adam called softly. “Are you up to handling transportation?”

“On it,” Oz replied. “Xander, where is the key for the rental?”

“Huh? Oh...,” the teenager rasped. They had barely finished bringing Angel up from the tunnel before Xander collapsed to the ground next to his girlfriend. Now, he found himself struggling to remember a minute detail from what seemed like a hundred years ago. “Back...driver’s side...door...is open. Key...under mat.”

Oz acknowledged Xander’s words with a simple nod of his head, leaving Adam to watch as the werewolf left on his appointed task. Once he was out of sight, the Immortal turned to other, more critical issues.

The halting way Xander spoke left Adam frowning with concern. Truthfully, of all the noticable injuries, the teenager’s was the one that most worried him. Broken bones, scrapes, and bruises -- those were all problems the Immortal could handle, but smoke inhalation, well, that was a bit trickier. He would have to keep a close eye on the boy.

But first thing was first. If they wanted to get moving quickly, Giles’ shoulder needed to be attended. His first choice for an assistant was naturally Willow. The witch, however, had her mind on other things -- namely Angel. At the moment, she was sitting indian-style with the vampire’s head in her lap. She was whispering softly to Angel while gently running her fingers through his dark hair.

“Xander?” Adam spoke quietly.

“Yeah?”

“I need your help here,” the Immortal requested.

Rather than actually making the effort to stand, Xander rose to his knees and shuffled over the few feet necessary to reach the librarian’s side. There was something surreal about the way the Watcher still maintained a white-knuckle grip on the large metal cross with his good hand. Wisely, neither Xander nor Adam made any comment about it, though.

“What are...we doing?” Xander questioned.

“We need to put his arm back in the socket,” the Immortal explained to the blanching teenager.

“I just want...to say...for the record: Euww!” Xander replied, with a noticable grimace.

“It will be easier on your throat if you don’t talk so much,” Adam suggested, using a gentle tone to soften the abruptness of his words.

The way the teenager gave in without an argument spoke volumes of just how serious his condition was. Nevertheless, they had work to do. Spreading his hands in a classic ‘what now’ position, Xander awaited further instructions. With the teenager ready to assist, Adam explained what was about to happen.

“Get on the other side and brace him. Giles, I don’t think I need to tell you...,” the Immortal warned the librarian.

“Just bloody get it over with,” the Watcher snapped, his face contorted with pain.

“All right. On three, then.” Adam and Xander took their places while Giles took a few deep, cleansing breaths to prepare himself. “One...two...and three!”

Very carefully, the Immortal rotated the Watcher’s arm, maneovering it until it slid back into its proper position. Despite Adam’s attempt to be gentle, Giles screamed out in utter agony. His eyes rolled up, but sadly, the librarian did not pass out completely. With the joint back in its socket, the pain decreased somewhat, but nevertheless, it continued to throb mercilessly.

Adam was looking around for something to use as a temporary sling when Oz drove up in the rental car. After a cursory glance at his friends, the werewolf took off again, this time to fetch the other pump truck. Their original plan called for leaving the water-filled truck behind, just in case. That way, if the hot-spots in the fire below flared up into something more serious, the firefighters would have a little something extra with which to work.

Adam was just mentally reviewing which person should ride in which vehicle when a horrified cry made all of the Slayerette’s heads turn to look.

The tormented sound had come from Willow. She was still in the same position she’d been in the last time Adam glanced at her, but the tender expression of concern that had graced her face only moments ago had vanished. In its place was a ghastly look of sheer dread.

With an aching slowness, Willow raised the hand she was using to lovingly stroke Angel’s face. The young witch’s expressive emerald eyes were pointedly focused on only one thing -- the palm of her own hand.

Suddenly, without so much as a word, Willow drew her fingers together, rubbing her thumb over the tips of the other four digets as if testing something. Whatever it was, it caused all of the colour to rapidly drain away from the redhead’s face.

“Giles!” Willow cried out in panic.

Like the other Slayerettes and their Immortal allies, the Watcher found himself squinting in attempt to see what exactly it was that left Willow so obviously disturbed. The witch must have felt their eyes on her, for she spread her fingers wide apart, turning her wrist to expose the inside of her hand to her friends.

Willow’s palm was obviously covered with something. Judging by the white-ish/grey flakes, not to mention the black smudges on the tips of her fingers, Adam’s first thought was that Willow must have brushed up against some ashen residue of the underground fire.

That, however, he realized was unlikely. Like all of them, Willow had removed her mask, hat and gloves once she made it back out of the tunnels. Where then, he wondered, had the redheaded teenager brushed up against any ashes? What exactly had she touched?

That was when realization struck – not only the Immortal but the Watcher as well. The gazes of both men automatically dropped directly to the vampire cradled in the witch’s lap. The figure there was almost unrecognizable as their friend and ally.

It seemed that Eleni’s mistreatment of Angel was not over yet. Without a heartbeat to push it through his veins, the vampire’s blood was slowly leaking away. Like water draining out of a sponge, the loss of the fluid that sustained him left Angel a shell of the figure he had been only the day before.

Normally pale, the vampire’s pallor had gone an unnerving shade of grey. Angel appeared emaciated, his skin drawn tautly against the underlying bone. Most unsettling of all was the way that the way the top layer of the vampire’s skin was visibly flaking away. In some respect, it was similar to a human’s skin peeling off after a bad sunburn, only much, *much* worse.

“Dear God in Heaven,” Giles gasped. His hushed, horrified tone was enough to trigger a panicked response from Willow.

“Angel? Angel? Please wake up,” the teenager begged. The sound of the heavy truck pulling up drowned out the rest of Willow’s words, but the pleading expression on her suddenly tear-streaked face said it all. By the time Oz cut the engine, the redhead was beyond speaking. Her head was bowed forward, her hands hovering over Angel’s face for fear of damaging his skin even further.

“What’s going on?” the werewolf questioned as he stepped down from the open driver’s side door. One look at the stricken expressions on his friends’ faces was enough to stay any further inquiries.

“I’ve heard – or rather read – about this before,” Giles offered in a reverent whisper. “He’s bleeding out…slowly.” What the Watcher did not need to add was that Angel’s condition was ‘killing’ him. Unlike a quick stake through the heart, though, the vampire’s impending disintegration into ash was happening gradually.

“What can we…is there anything we can do?” Oz asked.

“Short of replacing the blood he’s lost?” Giles asked rhetorically before shaking his head. “No, nothing comes to mind.”

“So, let’s just get some blood and feed him,” Cordelia suggested with her usual measure of common sense.

“It’s not that simple,” the librarian insisted. “Angel is deteriorating too rapidly to reach either his apartment or the butchers. That means that the only blood source close enough to help him is, unfortunately… well…*us*.”

Apparently, some part of Willow was still there – still listening to the conversation around her. Even before Giles finished speaking, the young witch was reaching up to undo the fastenings on her collar. Her actions did not go unnoticed, though.

“Willow! N…aarrgghh!” Giles grimaced after an abortive attempt to stop her. Cradling his injured shoulder with his good arm, the Watcher accepted the fact that there was nothing he could physically do to prevent what the witch was planning. Instead, he did the only thing he could, use his words to persuade her. “You mustn’t! If you allow him to feed from you, he’ll most likely kill you!”

“No,” Willow emphatically denied. “Angel wouldn’t hurt me.”

“That could be,” Giles placated, managing to keep his doubts of the teenager’s belief to himself. Recent memories of Angelus’ unexpected -- and tragic -- return lurked too close to the surface of the librarian’s thoughts. “Even if that were true, the threat to you wouldn’t come from Angel, but rather the *demon* that resides within him.”

“But Angel’s got the demon under control…,” the witch interrupted.

“In some circumstances, yes,” the Watcher conceded. “But the demon’s very existence is at stake, and Angel may very well be too weak…”

“He won’t hurt me,” Willow stated flatly, her absolute faith in her friend shining brightly in her emerald eyes. By that point she had managed to undo the top buttons of her coat.

“Why take the chance?”

The unexpected sound of Adam’s rich voice startled all of Slayerettes. Like Willow, the Immortal had been surreptitiously unbuttoning his jacket. Shifting to his knees, Adam shrugged his coat off of his shoulders and allowed it to fall to the ground. Reaching for the sword that sat abandoned at his side, the Immortal grabbed it by the hilt before standing up completely.

“Wha…what are you doing?” Willow asked, her emotions overriding her normally powerful intellect.

“With luck?” Adam countered as he closed the distance between himself and the prone vampire. “Saving him.”

That said, the Immortal skillfully brought up his sword. With great precision, he lined up the tip of the blade with the very bottom-most edge of his right palm. Taking a deep, fortifying breath, Adam pressed down on the hilt, forcing the razor-sharp edge to cut deeply into the tender skin of his inner-wrist.

“Damn it!” the Immortal hissed at his self-inflicted pain. Within seconds, blood was freely spurting from the tangled web of severed veins that rested under the surface of the broken skin. Without removing his eyes from his newly opened wound, Adam barked an order to Willow. “Get his mouth open.”

The redhead jumped at the Immortal’s snappish command. She hurried to comply with Adam’s demand, her hands only momentarily faltering when she remembered the condition of the vampire’s skin. After a split-second of indecision, Willow chose what she believed to be the lesser of two evils. Once she pried Angel’s jaw apart, the witch saw the Immortal fall to his knees, this time holding his dripping arm directly over Angel’s open mouth.

All of the Slayerettes watched the scene unfold before them in rapt fascination. It was reminiscent of a car crash -- they didn’t necessarily want to look, but nevertheless, they felt compelled to do so. Even Oz, who normally took the horrific events around him with casual aplomb, looked shaken by the Immortal’s suicidal action.

It was grusome, really. There was so much blood on Angel’s face, they had a difficult time believing that any of the life-saving substance was actually making it *into* the vampire’s mouth. The assumption was only bolstered by the fact that Angel was still non-responsive, lost in the unconsciousness that had enveloped him since their escape from the underground.

Then, after what felt like an eternity, Angel’s throat spontaneously contracted. It was as if a flood gate had broken. One sip of blood was enough to pull the demon residing inside their friend back from its hibernation. Although the mere presence of the Immortal kept the demon from emerging in Angel’s ‘game face’, there was no doubt that it was in control of the vampire’s body and growing stronger with each passing second.

The demon’s benefactor, however, was not faring nearly as well. Given his Immortal abilities, Adam had been forced to make the cuts extremely deep, lest his body heal itself before Angel could be pulled back from the edge of ‘death’. Even as the vampire was regaining some of his strength, the Immortal was losing his own.

With his blood draining away, Adam’s skin turned a ghostly shade of white. His skin quickly grew clammy, a tell-tale sign of shock from the massive trauma he had inflicted upon himself. In less than three minutes from the time he made the wound, Adam’s knees gave out completely.

To everyone’s surprise, Angel leaned forward to follow as Adam’s arm dropped away from the vampire’s waiting mouth. Using his rapidly returning supernatural strength, Angel reached out and brought the Immortal’s arm back to his lips.

Since he was denied the ability to slip into his game face -- and subsquently his long, fanged incisors -- the vampire was forced to simple suckle at the the opened wound. Never once did he notice the disgusted grimaces on his friends’ faces at the smacking sounds that were a by-product of his unorthodox method of feeding.

But feed he did, up until the point where the Immortal’s heartbeat slowed, and then finally stopped altogether.




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