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Galway
Author: Whinter
**
In the old days, she could never have
surprised him. Her scent would have preceded her, or the drumbeat of the
blood in her veins, to be caught by his sharp senses long before she could
announce herself. Now, unnoticed, she watches him through the arched arbour
that breaks the hedge, her face screened by the leaves, though her heart
pounds so loudly she can hear it in her own ears.
He looks so much the same. Still
favours black, she thinks: black trousers, black shirt tight over broad
shoulders. No shoes, though; and the hair is longer, past his shoulders,
tied back with a bit of twine. No sign of the scars William spoke of. His
profile is heartbreakingly unchanged, bent intently towards the canvas and
the delicate movements of the brush. His lips are a little parted with
concentration. Now and then he looks up from the canvas and gazes down the
long green slope to a strip of rocky beach and the gunmetal-grey expanse of
the sea. She watches, hardly able to breathe with the wonder of watching
him.
At last he adds a final touch of paint
to the canvas, and lays the palette and brush down beside him on the garden
bench. Standing, he stretches; and then he steps past the easel, out of the
oak’s shade, peeling his black shirt off as he
goes. He tosses it down on the grass and steps into the full glare of the
sun, lifting his face into the warmth.
She knows he has nothing to fear from
the sun now, but memory and habit make her catch her breath in terror for
him. But nothing happens—except he hears her gasp, and turns
his head.
“Will? Is
that you?”
Then he sees her.
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Fourth cottage along, on the
seaward-side of the road; the man at the pub seemed certain enough it would
be the right one. Tall, dark chap? Artist? Standoffish? Strewth, and the
Galway fields was thick with artists, he’d said,
thick as the fleas on a tinker’s dog, but that particular artist were
as tall and dark and standoffish as they come. Been ill a while, so he had.
And he were living with another feller, a scrawny Brit, said he were a
poet, came to the pub most nights; the barkeep reckoned they was poofters,
but artists and poets would have their own little ways, now, wouldn’t they?
Buffy had agreed rather dazedly and finished her drink.
Fourth cottage along on the right. The
lane was classic country-Irish, tree-hung on one side, lined on the other
with a rough drystone wall over which she could see fields running down a
gentle slope towards the sea. Ruins, too: clusters of tumbled foundations
on the landward side of the road, as if the well-spaced standing cottages
were the lonely vestiges of a larger village, here on the outskirts of
Galway Town. She pulled over a short way past the third cottage, and parked
the car on the verge. Somehow, it seemed fitter to go the rest of the way
on foot.
The fourth cottage was a small place,
low and stone-built, set a little back from the road in a virtual thicket
of oaks. Old, maybe centuries old; almost a cliché, it was so picturesque.
Cautiously, she paused to take note of any dangerous details. The windows
were tiny, she saw, and even though the oaks cut off most of the late
morning sunlight, all the shades were drawn right down to the sills.
Interesting. Taking a deep breath, she walked up the cobbled path through
the overgrown garden, and knocked on the door. And again, and again, many
times, until after a long wait she heard a foot scrape inside the front
hall, and saw the door open a couple of inches. Then it swung wide.
“Buffy? What
are you—?”
“I could ask
you the same question. Hello, Spike.”
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He made a pot of tea. His breakfast
tea, he pointed out, and she would have to forgive him not being dressed,
since she had rousted him out of bed rather earlier than he was accustomed
to. His embrace was welcoming, but not passionate, one old friend greeting
another after a long separation. There was no small talk—almost no
talk at all, at first, just a silence with four large unasked questions
dangling uncomfortably between them. He poured her tea and sat opposite her
in the tiny, spare kitchen, elegant in silk dressing gown and morocco
slippers.
“You’ve stopped
bleaching your hair,” she said.
He sipped his tea. “I’m a new man,
me. Stopped all sorts of things. Started others. How did you find us,
Buffy?”
“Us? Plural?”
“Of course,
bleeding plural. You know he’s around, don’t you?”
Carefully, she set her teacup back on
its saucer before her hand could start shaking in earnest. “I—I wasn’t sure until
now. Where is he, Spike?” He regarded her steadily without
answering, and she asked again, more urgently, “Where is he?
Where’s Angel?”
“He’s Liam now,
and I’ll tell you where he is when I’m good and
ready. If ever. And by the way, I’m William again. How did you find us?” His voice
had sharpened.
She controlled her hands enough to
reach into her bag. The clipping was on top, creased and blurred from the
many times she had pored over it. Spike—William—unfolded it,
and shook his head.
“Yes, I
wondered if trouble would come out of that. Just a small Dublin gallery,
who would notice? But some toff from the Sunday supps was trawling for
up-and-comers on the Irish art scene, and suddenly—well, there
we are.”
A full-page reproduction of a
painting, on glossy Sunday-magazine paper. A landscape, a wild windswept
seacoast of cliffs and thunderous clouds, with one small patch of bright in
a lower corner: a woman, small and white, seeming to carry her own light
within her body along a path at the edge of the sea. But it was the lines
of the cliffs that had first caught Dawn’s eye, and
caused her to pass the magazine to Buffy as a curious coincidence, thereby
setting the search in motion. Subtle shadings of crags, patches of textured
stone, vegetation, shadows; it was hard to see at first, but once you
caught it, the sad dark profile was impossible to mistake.
“It’s the bloody
self-portrait that gives him away, yeah? Turning into his flipping
trademark, that is. He’s always in there somewhere, all dour
and broody, and disguised as a cliff or a tree or a face in the clouds.
Bloody good, though.”
She took the clipping back and
carefully folded it away. “Yes,” she said, “and the
critics seem to agree. The gallery said his prices were going to go through
the roof—buy a Flaherty now, they told me, and see
the value triple within a year.”
“Did you buy
one?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Baby
needs new shoes. What else did the gallery say?”
“Well, they
didn’t tell me where to find you, if that’s what you’re worried
about. They gave me a lot of guff about the artist being a very private
person, preferring his solitude, strict instructions, yada yada yada. They
wouldn’t even take a message. Anyway, I still didn’t know for
sure if the artist was Angel.”
“So how—?”
Buffy shrugged. “Took a
chance. Instinct, maybe. Lot of artists live in Galway. And Galway is where
he was born—both times. I nosed around, asked a
few questions...”
“And here you
are.”
“And here I
am. Where’s Angel, Spike?”
“Not so fast.
Why are you here?”
“To find
Angel—and you.”
“But why? And
why now?”
Buffy’s jaw set. “Until a week
ago, we thought you were finished, both of you—dusted in LA
two years back. Though it took us a while to figure even that out. All we
knew at the time was that something big had gone down, bigger than anything
we’d seen since closing the Hellmouth in
Sunnydale, but we didn’t know who was behind it. And we all
thought Angel…” She trailed off, embarrassed, but
Spike finished for her.
“…had sold out
to evil, right? Gone to the dark side of the force. Well, he needed you to
think that, sunshine. He needed you to believe it with all your little
Slayer soul.” He spoke forcefully, and Buffy felt
his words like a lash across her heart. Yes, she had believed it, and yes—it had hurt,
hideously. She had been furious, bitter; had hated Angel, with the kind of
hate that was the flipside of love; had hated him more than she hated
Angelus, who at least had the excuse of having no soul; had avenged herself
by leaping into the arms of the Immortal, a grade-A-double-plus jerk under
all his smarmy centuries-practiced charm. And then she’d blamed
Angel for that, too, for reducing her to the kind of flaky female who would
let the Immortal come within sniffing distance.
The first indications of Angel’s
by-invitation-only apocalypse had been sketchy, and totally out of the
blue. One day a slayer in Cairo reported several notorious dens of evil had
been abandoned in panic overnight, purged so thoroughly that not even a
whiff of demonic activity lingered. Later that day, a well-organized
network of corpse-traffickers in Chicago, protected by Wolfram and Hart,
dissolved in an orgy of rivalry and murder. The vamp underground in London
dribbled away in terror over the next week; scores of demonic familiars
vanished in New York and Lima, Melbourne and Macau and a dozen other
places, leaving whole covens of evil exposed to attack. The slayers’ informants
spoke of despair and confusion on the dark side, a devastating blow to the
powers of hell. But where had it been struck?
With all the reports reaching Buffy in
Rome, the one from California was not noticed for a couple of days. A
little filler item about a strange occurrence in LA, recounted with the
sort of tongue-in-cheek tone usually reserved for UFO sightings and showers
of frogs. Freak storm? Bikers on a rampage? Convention of wild-eyed gamers
getting rather out of hand? Even a dragon was reported, rising out of a
dark alley to the roof of an abandoned hotel, along with a chorus of
shrieks, squawks and bellows, like an intercom into Hell. And then—nothing.
When the cops arrived less than fifteen minutes after the first call, the
alley was empty. Netta, the slayer in San Francisco, forwarded the report
only because of where the alley was located: the hotel was the Hyperion.
Buffy began to wonder then if Angel
were involved in the chaos among the enemy, and confirmation of a sort
arrived the next day in the mail. An ordinary white envelope, addressed to
her. Inside, a slip of paper typewritten with an address, a twelve-digit
number, and a meaningless string of letters, like a code, or maybe a
password. The address was a bank in Zurich. On the reverse, a brief handwritten
message: Tainted, but you can use it for good. Yours always. It was
unsigned, but the handwriting was unmistakable. In the account accessed by
the password were fifty million perfectly legal and untraceable dollars,
which they all agreed could only have come the coffers of Wolfram and Hart—which meant,
from Angel. But of Angel himself, there was no trace, only some very
credible underworld rumours that he had been dusted, probably in that alley
behind the Hyperion. Netta travelled down to LA to check, and reported back
that Wolfram and Hart was a twisted ruin. Angel and the rest were nowhere.
Now, Buffy looked steadily at Spike
across the kitchen table. “We figured it out in the end. Part of
it, anyway. The Black Thorn—even Giles had never heard of them,
but the evil grapevine was humming big-time after Angel kicked them in the—er—head.”
“He did have
help, you know,” Spike said, sounding miffed. “Me, for one.”
Buffy hardly heard him. She was
feeling again that moment when she first realized what Angel had done, the
cold hopelessness that settled over her soul like a layer of fresh earth on
a coffin. Angel was gone forever. Dusted out of existence fighting
the good fight, sacrificing himself for a smashing victory. And he had left
her behind without a word of goodbye, while a dark cloud still roiled
between them: her suspicion and mistrust, her monstrous injustice to him.
He was gone, and she could never, never make it right with him. Her grief
was agony, but her guilt was more terrible still. Even now, she could
hardly bear the memory of it.
“For God’s sake,
Spike, just tell me where Angel is,” she burst
out.
Spike sighed. “You Buffy.
Him Liam. Me William. At least try, Buffy.”
She thumped the table. “Remember who
you’re talking to. Slayer? Vampire slayer?
Ring any bells? Don’t make me beat it out of you.”
“Patience,
Slayer.” He gave her an odd, calculating look. “I’ll tell you
one thing for the moment: he’s not in this house, but I know where
he is. Now,” he grinned at her, “tell me all
about you. Still running the most nubile army in history? Still
saving the world ten times a day?”
“Spike, look
here—“
“Tut tut.”
“William, then—“
“Better. And
how are all our old friends? Giles? Willow? Long John Xander?”
She sighed, surrendering for the
moment. At least she knew the worst had not happened. Angel was not a
handful of dust in a dark alley, long ago sifted by the wind. She could
bear with Spike’s waiting game a little longer. “You do know,
don’t you,” she said
calmly, “that Angel left us fifty million ill-gotten
bucks in a numbered Swiss bank account?”
He goggled at her with his mouth and
eyes wide open. Then he began to laugh. “No, pet,
that’s one thing he didn’t tell me.
Bloody typical. Though why Mr. Not-In-It-For-Personal-Gain couldn’t have set
up a little pension fund for me at the same time, I don’t know. So
what are you doing with it all?”
“We’re doing
what Angel—Liam wanted us to do, using it to
fight the Big Bad. For starters, we set up Slayer Central.”
“Slayer
Central?”
“Stapleton
Manor. Big estate outside London—huge manorhouse, acres of ground,
stables, tennis courts—we even have a lake, and our very own
forest. Makes a great training school and base of operations. About a third
of the slayers are there at any one time. And Dawn, Giles, Willow. Faith
and Xander, when they’re not out on assignment.”
Spike whistled appreciatively. “Cool, Buffy.
Your own private Hogwarts, with a touch of MI5.”
“That’s more or
less what Dawn calls it.” Buffy smiled thinly. “And Connor—“
Spike sat up suddenly, slopping tea
out of his cup. “Connor? Connor’s there”
“Yeah. Connor
Smith.” Buffy peered at him, surprised. “He’s good, too,
a big help. That dash of demon makes all the difference. So you know who he
is? He said he’d worked with Angel before the whole
Wolfram and Hart gig.”
“He did
indeed. But how in the name of Hecate did he end up with you?”
“He just
showed up—he strolled past our defences one fine
morning, and coolly announced he’d come to work for us. And the first
thing he did was help us beef up our defences. What’s with you,
Spike? Is there something I should know about Connor?”
Spike laughed. “Buffy,
sweet, it’s a very long story. Liam told it to
me, and maybe someday, if you’re very, very good, he’ll tell it to
you too. Assuming I tell you where to find him.”
She ignored the last bit. “So we can
trust Connor?”
“Abso-bloody-lutely.” He laughed
again.
Buffy felt her eyes narrowing. Spike,
or William if he preferred, should not be appearing so entertained, not while
she was still in an anguish of impatience. Burning Question Number One had
been answered: Angel existed. But Burning Question Numbers Two through Four
were still tormenting her. “Are you sure?” she asked
coldly. “Connor told us he witnessed the battle—he said he saw
Angel dusted. He said he saw him falling in flames. Was he lying?”
Spike sobered instantly. “What? No,
pet, he wasn’t lying, he just didn’t see all
there was to see. Which makes sense. Liam sent him away while the shit was
still on course for the fan. He thought we were all going to get ourselves
killed, you see, and he badly wanted Connor to survive. The boy must have
been watching from a distance.”
“So what did
happen?” Buffy asked the question softly. It was
Burning Question Number Four, but Numbers Two and Three would have to wait.
Spike was silent for a few moments.
All the laughter drained out of him. When he answered, his voice was as
soft as hers.
“It was
clever the way he’d set it up. You think you were
fooled? We were fooled, and we were right there with him in the same
building, seeing him every day. So don’t blame
yourself for believing he’d gone to the bad, because it was our
top-ranking theory as well. He couldn’t fool the
Black Thorn unless he fooled us first. He didn’t tell us until
the trap was already set, at which point he needed us to help him spring
it. And so…” He paused, staring into the past.
“William?”
“And so we
helped him spring the trap, simple as that. That part you probably know
about already. Bang went the Circle of the Black Thorn, which pissed off
the Senior Partners no end. Which was the whole point of the exercise. You
know Wesley was killed?”
“We heard,
yes.”
“You wouldn’t have known
Wesley towards the end, Buffy. Thinking what a silly twat he used to be,
and then of what he became—no, I won’t go there.
He was a bloody good bloke at the last, that’s all I’ll say.
Anyway, when the trap had been sprung, and all the little Black Thorn
rabbits had their necks twisted, we knew there’d be Hell to
pay. We met in the alley behind the Hyperion: Liam, Gunn, Illyria and me.
Wesley was already dead. Gunn was hurt, badly, maybe dying. Blue was having
a grief crisis, which was good, because it made her horribly eager to kill
things. I was just along for the ride. Liam—Angel…”
“Yes?”
“Angel was
happier than I’d seen him in a long time, maybe ever.
A man with no more questions, you know? He’d signed
away the shanshu—you know about the shanshu?—good—so he was a
man without hope, as well; which, big dummy that he was, seemed to be just
fine by him. A man with nothing but one big shiny pointy answer, the sword
in his hand; and the questions were advancing on us by the thousand from
the far end of the alley—an army of the ugliest boggly-woggles
you ever did see, all of them armed to the fangs. Think Dollar Day at the
Hell branch of Macy’s, Buffy, and you’ll get the
picture. And over all of them, soaring like a big bloody bat, and belching
down sulphur fumes and flame at us…the dragon.”
“So there was
a dragon,” Buffy said, but Spike did not seem to
hear her.
“Angel said
the dragon was his. I said to myself, fine, mate, help yourself, because I
personally will be diving for cover if that overgrown earthworm with wings
comes anywhere near me. But by then we were wading into the mob, and
his sword was ticking back and forth like a metronome, and mine too, and it
was like we were showering in demonic bodily fluids. Even Gunn was managing
to pile up the nastiness, though without Illyria watching his back he’d have been
mincemeat in moments. And then…”
This time, he stopped for so long that
Buffy thought he would never start again—as though
somehow the story were still going on somewhere, with the end still hanging
in the balance, and he was waiting to see how it came out. “William?” she said. “Will?”
He turned to her, and his eyes were
bright. “The dragon came, swooping down on us,
scattering the demons before it, because it wanted Angel as much as he
wanted it. None of the rest of us existed for it. Angel leapt to meet it in
midair, and it fried a score of demons with the fire meant for him, but he
twisted at the top of his leap and gave it a great slice across its filthy
scaly neck; it shrieked and flew away from him, up to the roof of the Hyperion,
and he followed it there, scaling the wall like it was the grand staircase
at the opera—and that’s where they
fought, Buffy. That’s what Connor saw.’
Another silence, but she did not
prompt him again. She found she was holding her breath, and let it out
silently.
“I never saw
anything like it,” he continued. “No one ever
has. We all stopped to watch—demons, trolls, vamps, us. It
was...graceful. Beautiful. Despairing. He was…they were…hell, I’m supposed
to be a poet, and I can’t find the words. It was like a dance
on the edge of the roof, Buffy, a ruddy ballet, and it seemed to go on for
as long as Swan Lake, including intermissions and curtain calls and the
cast party afterwards, but it couldn’t have been
more than a couple of minutes, really. We couldn’t bear to
watch, but we couldn’t bear to close our eyes for even a
second of it, either. And then…he stopped.”
“You mean
Angel?”
“Who else
would I mean? The dragon was hovering over the alley by then, still trying
to catch him with its fire, but he was always a step or three ahead of it.
And then he just bloody stopped in front of the damned thing, right on the
edge of the roof, and raised his sword to it; and then he leapt at it,
straight as an arrow into the flames from its jaws, and he brought his sword
down and split its head in two, just as the fire caught him. And they
dropped together out of the sky, but the dragon was dead, and Angel was in
flames. That’s also what Connor saw. But what
happened next was out of Connor’s sight.”
He stopped and looked into her eyes
for the first time since beginning his story. “The dragon
was the key, see. The bogglies were just window-dressing: very active
window-dressing, I grant you, and perfectly capable of slicing us into
kebab meat; but the dragon was their talisman, their portal. And
once it thudded down into the alleyway—narrowly
missing yours truly—the attack was finished. Kaput.
Swirly-whirly colours, like a 1960s music video, big rushing wind, loud
kind of popping noise and lots of howls, and suddenly we were all alone in
the alley, we four. But Angel was still on fire. Dragonfire, so the rain
couldn’t snuff it. A bit like napalm, dragonfire.”
A snapping sound: Buffy jumped. The
cup Spike was clutching between his hands had shattered. He looked down at
its shards without seeing them. “We got to him in seconds, but he was
quite nicely ablaze by then. It was the damned coat, actually, that posh
black leather duster he was so fond of. It protected him in the first
instance, but by that point it was killing him. I remember saying to
myself, he’ll dust any second now, and I think I
was actually weeping, because—because I’d seen him
slay the dragon—but he didn’t dust, and
Blue and I managed to rip the bloody coat off before the fire reached his
face, and eventually beat out the rest of the flames; and he still hadn’t dusted,
but just lay there, broken, bleeding, and pretty well cooked along one side
of his body. Which is when I started to get an idea of just what haha-funny
sods those Powers That Be are.”
“What do you
mean?”
“The shanshu,
pet. The shanshu. He honestly thought he’d signed it
away, but the Black Thorn had no real power over the prophecy. They’d lied to
him—big surprise.”
Buffy sat up poplar-straight. “Are you
saying—?“
“I am indeed
saying, dear girl, you bet I am. It was all in the lap of the Powers That
Be; and the buggers let the prophecy take effect at the moment the dragon
died, with the happy recipient still two storeys up and wrapped in flames.
So he hit the ground…”
“…human,” Buffy broke
in flatly.
“Human,” he agreed,
just as flatly, “and still breathing, but only just. A
badly damaged human, our Liam.”
They sat in silence for a few moments.
Buffy felt herself torn: wild joy on one side—he was
alive, truly alive, human—but on the other, horror and pity at
the thought of the flames and shattered bones. She reached across and took
Spike’s cold, cold hand in a tight grip. “Finish your
story,” |