Author: Roseveare
Spoilers: BtVS season 3.
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Doyle/Cordelia
Disclaimer: All belongs to the almighty Joss
Summary: Alternate Universe BTVS season 3. The Scooby gang suspect a new teacher at Sunnydale High may be a demon.
~~~
Monday morning. She hadn't used to dread the start of school like this.
Cordelia Chase walked down the deserted corridor, hearing only the click of her heels on the polished floor. The noise echoed around the walls and was bounced back at her from every side by all the empty space and smooth surfaces. Everything was far too quiet. Morning lessons had already begun.
She knew she ought to hurry, but couldn't make her feet move any faster. She was never usually late for class, but a lot of the certainties in her life had changed recently.
Lately, she'd been finding out just how much life really could suck. It was an alien feeling. In the past, she'd felt bummed when Harmony got to the dress she liked in the sales before she did. Or when somebody came into school with the same hair. She'd had no concept of how low down on the scale of lousy that actually was. And she so much didn't appreciate the world deciding to give her a demonstration.
Notable among her problems was the puncture wound in her stomach which was taking its time to heal. That was behind her lateness this morning. She'd accidentally left the house without painkillers, and had to go back for them when the injury started hurting as she pulled up outside Sunnydale High.
She approached the classroom door nervously. From the noise level inside, she was in luck; the teacher hadn't arrived yet. Rumour had it Mr. Matthews wasn't somebody to get on the wrong side of. Clutching the strap of her shoulder-bag so hard her nails left marks in the leather, she peered through the glass window in the door.
No teacher. She noticed it with small relief. It wasn't really what the staff thought of her which bothered her the most, whatever she might have heard about Matthews.
No empty seats. That was what she noticed next. No, wait - there was one, at the front of the room...
At the front of the room next to Willow Rosenberg.
Cordelia leaned back against the doorframe, closed her eyes for a pained moment, and sighed. It would be too much to hope that life would decide to make anything easy for her, the way her luck had been recently.
She pushed the door open, stalked in, and sat down, determined to remain unmoved by anything that happened.
She felt the stares. Everyone knew what had happened between Willow and her; between Willow and Xander.
Willow had been her opposite number for years. While Cordelia was the most popular girl in school, Willow was the least. It had been like that since kindergarten. They'd never got on until recently, when Cordelia had begun to date Xander, and hence started to associate with Willow because the two of them were like geeky matching bookends.
They actually got along quite well. When she'd walked into that basement and seen Xander and Willow making out, it had been a double betrayal.
And now they were enemies again.
After a moment she felt the stares get bored and direct their attention elsewhere, and the noise level in the classroom rose once more to its previous volume.
Hesitantly, nervously, Willow said, "Hi, Cordelia. You look well... better. A lot better. I'm glad..." Willow tended to talk when she was nervous... or terrified.
Cordelia knew from experience that Willow could gabble on for hours given sufficient tension and no interruptions. She sighed and let it roll right on over her, not hearing a word.
Actually, it was the first time in a couple of days that anyone had made much effort to talk to her at all. Harmony and the rest of Cordelia's old crowd - they'd used to be called the Cordettes, but nobody used that name any more, not in a while - were still in full bitch mode with her. In the aftermath of being cheated on by Xander Harris, she didn't have any cred left to speak of. With anyone.
Her parents were no less indifferent than usual, wrapped up in their own worlds.
She wasn't unused to feeling lonely, as she'd once told Buffy. Being popular didn't mean you couldn't feel alone in the crowd. But this was the first time she'd ever had to feel lonely while she was, well... alone.
She contemplated the irony that the only person who was making real efforts to be nice to her was the one who was largely responsible for her current situation of unpopularity in the first place.
Then she started working on a put-down which ought to leave Willow's fragile ego in shreds for at least the next few hours.
After all, she was definitely owed some malicious amusement at Willow's expense.
Thankfully, it was only a few minutes before the classroom door swung open. It wasn't Mr. Matthews who walked in, however, but a man she hadn't seen before. Cordelia brightened up, her interest caught by this substitution, and studied the new arrival critically.
This guy was considerably younger than Matthews - which wasn't difficult, because Matthews was practically mummified - and was at a guess somewhere in his mid to late twenties. He had dark hair, pale skin, blue eyes, a slightly nervous smile. A pleasant enough face; features comfortably approaching good-looking if not precisely dazzlingly handsome.
Unfortunately, he was also way short and his taste in clothes was like a Greek Tragedy.
He drew everyone's attention by dropping a heavy file onto his desk with deliberate volume, and waited for the room to quieten before he started speaking. His stance - arms folded across his chest, leaning back a fraction - was slightly too casual and slightly too nervous all at once.
"Mornin' class," he said. "I'm sad to say that Mr Matthews was taken ill last night. The doctors say he'll make a full recovery in time, as I'm sure you're all happy to hear. Meantime, I'll be takin' your lessons."
"He's going to teach us English?" Cordelia muttered. "Come off it - most of that wasn't even recognisable English. And what's with that fakey accent?"
"It's Irish," Willow whispered. "Shush."
Cordelia rolled her eyes in exasperation.
"I'm Mr. Doyle," the guy said, unpacking papers from his file. He stumbled slightly over the 'Mr' - or it could just have been the unfamiliar accent, Cordelia wasn't sure. "I was to start here anyway in just a few days, but with Mr. Matthews being indisposed I agreed to come in early." He grinned lamely. Cordelia wondered if his nervousness was as clear to everyone else; looking around, she couldn't see that they'd noticed anything.
"Goody for us," she breathed sourly. As if it wasn't bad enough that most of the school treated her like a leper and the almost-healed injury in her stomach still ached like anything, now she was going to have to sit through several lessons with this clown every week.
Mr. Doyle looked around, a query in his eyes as they searched the room and finally rested on Cordelia. "What's that you say? Do you have something you want to share, ah, miss...?"
"Cordelia Chase," she filled in, her voice a bored monotone, trying to keep her face from burning with the embarrassment of being singled out.
"Oh." He squinted down at the papers on his desk, and he frowned as his eyes flickered back to her. Then he carried on as though the incident hadn't occurred, saying nothing further on the matter, turning instead to Shakespeare.
His reaction only made Cordelia feel more angry and embarrassed. 'He's got some sort of file on me there,' she realised furiously. 'He knows all about all that time in hospital. He's sorry for me.'
God! She so did not need pity right now! She was Cordelia Chase. She was not someone to be pitied. She was, had always been, the envy of Sunnydale High!
And that was why she subsequently sat through the lesson bitching to Willow about every little thing she could find fault with about Mr Doyle - his method of teaching, his clothing, his accent, his B.O, and anything else she could think of. Just loud enough so he had to hear at least some of it, although too quiet to reach the other students sitting further back. As she'd expected, he continued his policy of being nice to poor pathetic Cordy and didn't even look in her direction once.
It didn't give her any satisfaction. She just felt madder, and increasingly guilty because he was after all only trying to be nice to her, and consequently even madder. Willow shifted embarrassedly in her seat the whole time, obviously itching to get away.
At the end of the lesson, when she sauntered last out of the room - having hung back in the perverse hope he'd see fit to say something - he merely gave her a tight smile and inclined his head in an ironic little gesture she found intensely annoying.
Cordelia forced the muscles of her face into returning her most dazzling smile.
~~~
"Cordelia!" Willow gasped, obviously appalled, once they were well clear of the classroom and in the midst of the busy corridor full of students. "Why did you do that? He was nice! And you were... And I was sitting next to you! I'm now tainted as the associate of the class bad girl!"
Cordelia sighed. She couldn't even remember that put-down now, the teacher guy had got her so riled. And she'd worked hard on it too. "He pissed me off," she said. "And he's not the only one. Some people seem to be forgetting that their place right now is merely to grovel."
Willow huffed but predictably didn't retaliate. "Didn't you even think he was just a little bit nice?" she ventured, after a moment, as Cordelia paused by her locker and searched for the key. "I mean, that accent, and those eyes... And oh my gosh please don't tell Oz I said that!"
"Oh, yes," she retorted scornfully, ignoring the last part - let Willow sweat that she'd just given the person with the most reason to harm her the ammunition to decrease whatever chances she had of winning back Oz. "That accent! And those clothes! So he's about two decades younger than any of the other staff at this mausoleum of a school. So what? That does not by definition make him droolsome. And I'll remind you that most of the staff here end up turning out to be monsters! He's probably some kind of really yicky demon. Remember what you said happened when Xander dated a teacher?" She broke off. "Which reminds me, why am I talking to you?"
Cordelia threw her work at the back of her locker and slammed the door shut before it could all cascade back out again. She stalked off, leaving Willow standing there speechless.
~~~
Man, what a morning.
After the door swung shut behind the last of the departing class, Allen Francis Doyle sighed and looked around the empty room which seemed, at the moment, the most wonderful sight in the world.
He closed his eyes and leaned back against the door. He tried to breathe deeply and regularly. Tried to force the tension away.
Didn't work too good.
It was ironic to think that, not so many years ago, teaching had been his life. And now, six or seven years down the line - down the drain - he'd never felt so terrified as upon this, his first day back in teaching.
It was nerve-racking enough to face a class of teens when he'd previously only ever taught kids half their age, and that a good few years ago. The Chase girl, and that sharp tongue she had on her, hadn't helped any. But that was nothing to the overwhelming fear of something as simple as a mere sneeze, which could so easily reveal his demon heritage before an audience of so many young eyes.
Yeah, there was a bloody good reason why he'd given up teaching in the first instance when his demon side had begun to show. Far as Doyle was concerned, it was damned unreasonable, not to mention impractical, of the Powers to demand that he take it up again.
He hoped it was only a temporary measure. Aside from everything else, Cordelia Chase was a real stiffener, and he really, really shouldn't be entertaining thoughts like that about one of his students.
He walked around the room, restlessly rearranging chairs and tidying desks. His hands were shaking slightly. Had been all morning; he couldn't stop them. He could definitely use a drink... but he couldn't drink. If the kids smelled it on him, he'd be sunk.
He felt trapped, and afraid, and alone.
When his visions had told him in their usual vague, painful bursts of disparate detail what he was meant to do, he'd spent the following several long weeks losing himself in a bottle and telling himself, bugger the visions.
The teaching, that was a part of himself he'd left behind long ago. That old Doyle, he'd been a human being, a person, with a proper name, a wife, a job, a normal life - hell, any kind of a life.
He'd been a fiction.
He wouldn't go back. He couldn't. That other Doyle had never been real. He might not like the drunkard shadow of a loser he'd become, but at least he wasn't a lie any more. He'd sunk neatly into the kind of existence he best fit and deserved.
So he'd ignored the visions.
But they hadn't ignored him.
After a time they'd become too insistent, too regular. Until finally they shattered his resolve. He could only take so much pain. And so eventually he'd come to Sunnydale, as they wanted, because he couldn't live with that level of agony assaulting his brain on a daily basis. He'd thought it would hurt less to just go ahead and do what they required of him.
He was beginning to suspect he'd been wrong.
And it had only been one lesson, he thought, with growing horror. How many more were still ahead? Today. Tomorrow. The rest of the week... The rest of the year?
It had been remarkably easy to get the teaching job at Sunnydale High. They seemed to have no small amount of staff casualties. Teachers missing, attacked, murdered, eaten... He shuddered to think of some of the reports he'd heard. It seemed word was spreading, and people were becoming unwilling to work there. When Doyle had applied, they'd snapped him up eagerly. They hadn't looked too closely at the mass of fabrications that constituted his resume.
He realised he was straightening chairs that were already straight, and forced himself to sit down and attempt to relax. He was way too keyed up.
It was about an hour before his next lesson of subbing for Matthews. Research time, he told himself.
Pushing the file of school papers aside, he dug into his case for a thicker sheaf of paper. He sorted through it until he found the list of names. He ran his finger down the list until he reached 'Cordelia Chase'. He took up a pen and crossed her name off.
Well, it was a start.
The unmarked remainder of the list looked long, and daunting. If he was going to do this by process of elimination, he realised, it was going to take him a very long time.
He sighed, leaning back in the chair. Through the window across the room, he could see teenagers haunting the grounds of the school in little untidy clumps. A half-hearted game of basketball was going on. It was a sunny, pleasant day.
He wondered how many of them had ever suspected their nice little town was a hive of activity for the undead. He'd heard only that morning about another couple of murders with a supernatural whiff to them. The population of this town were dropping like flies, and the populace... just didn't seem to notice.
Somewhere here too, among the monsters and the regular folk, there was a vampire with a soul by the name of Angel. He was the guy Doyle was supposed to help, the one who had the potential to serve the Powers That Be in the fight against evil.
Somewhere. The where part being the problematic area.
He'd been supposed to be in Sunnydale much earlier, he knew. Something had happened while he delayed all those weeks in LA, getting himself acquainted with every gutter there was to know in the city. And Angel... well, he wasn't turning out to be so easy to find.
Doyle sincerely hoped the guy wasn't dead... dead as in dust, at any rate. The Powers seemed to have left him high and dry since he'd given up his resistence and come to Sunnydale. He liked to entertain the fact they were sulking, but they probably didn't feel he deserved their making it easy for him after the last several weeks. He'd had no contact at all, no visions, nothing. And that hideous, repeated vision which had trawled its way through his brain too many times to count in the past month or so, it hadn't had much detail as to where Angel might actually be found.
However, his mission was twofold, and the vision had also indicated he was to assist the slayer who currently resided in Sunnydale. Since the slayer knew Angel... if he found her, problem solved.
But the only information he had to go on was that she was one of the girls in his classes. That was the reason for the teaching thing. It was supposed to be his point of contact with the slayer.
And of course, with the remaining girls on his list of possibilities, he'd hardly be fortunate enough to have their absence records and doctor's note handed over with the class lists. If it hadn't been for that, he'd have considered the Chase girl a good bet to start his search with. But a slayer would have healed much quicker than that; which meant Cordelia Chase was just a normal girl with a high level of aggression and a very sharp tongue, who was in the process of recovering from a truly horrible accident.
Doyle wished he knew exactly what he'd done to upset her so much. He'd been trying to be kind, that was all, and had hardly expected that sort of reaction.
With a deliberate effort, he turned his mind from Cordelia Chase and his eyes from the sunny, deceptively innocent scene outside the window. He had an hour, he reminded himself, sternly. Enough time to begin his search for the slayer in earnest. No more delaying. After all, it hadn't done him any good so far.
He went to the computer in the corner of the room, switched it on and sat down. Time to examine a few student records. Actually, he hadn't yet been officially granted access to the school's computerised records system, but it wasn't too difficult to get around that.
He buried himself in research.
The time until his next lesson ticked by far too quickly.
~~~
Cordelia stopped by the library on her way out of school later that afternoon - for purely academic purposes, for once. She needed to get some more books to catch up all the work she'd missed while in hospital. But it wasn't a visit she made with much enthusiasm.
She pushed open the door and, as she'd feared, discovered the whole gang was gathered in there as usual. They looked up, their surprise evident, as she walked in.
"Don't look at me like that," she said, irritably fending the stares off with a flick of her hand. "You people are nothing to do with me any more. I'm merely here to use the library as an actual library, which should be a unique experience for it." She stalked past the little group and headed into the stacks.
Behind her, she was aware of Giles shrugging and turning back to the others. She heard him say, "Well, as I was explaining, there is clearly something going on here. All the signs indicate some new kind of demonic menace in town. What happened to those two youths last night..."
At that point Cordelia deliberately switched her ears off. She didn't want to know. So long as it didn't come near her, the supernatural in Sunnydale was no longer her concern. No, thank-you! No more demons, monsters, losers or other freaks of any kind. From now on, she was going to ensure her life remained freak-free.
Which totally included the ones clustered around the library table.
She found the books she wanted and returned to the main reception where Giles was still yakking away. Something about demons and entrails, and some big bad evil he was sending a protesting Buffy out after.
Buffy had some clear grief about this and she was volubly outlining her soon-to-be-cancelled plans to go to the mall with her mother.
"Hey? Librarian-man? Can I get some service here?" Cordelia interrupted, waving the pile of books in pointed illustration.
"Can't you see we're busy with something important, Cordelia?" Giles replied crisply. He glowered at her for a moment, an expression she frostily returned. "Oh... everything's over on the desk there, you can issue the books yourself." He waved her away and turned back to the others.
"Gee, thanks," she muttered to his tweed-clad back, and leaned over the desk to do as he said, wincing at a brief twinge from her injury.
"Demons," she heard the detestable Xander Harris prompt Giles, as the librarian clearly tried to remember what he'd been saying. "And entrails."
"Well, any internal organs, really," Giles said. "I suspect it just happened to be entrails in this case, if I'm right about the creature we're looking for."
"If you're right?" Willow asked nervously. "So you're not sure? You mean it could be something entirely different?"
"Certainly. As I believe I have mentioned before, there are a number of demons which require parts from humans to sustain them in some way, and in this case the clues we've had are few and far between. This fellow here is only the most likely out of a number of almost equally likely possibilities."
"But we'd know it if we saw it, right? Organ- pinching demon. Big, nasty and ugly, yes?" That was Buffy's input.
"Aren't they all?" Xander put in.
Giles dithered, and answered Buffy hesitantly. "Well... this one, yes. But many of the other possibilities, they can look quite human. Some of them, you wouldn't know from anyone else if they didn't want you to. It's interesting, actually, but in some cases the theft of body parts is what allows them to appear normal..."
'Yuck. And goodbye,' Cordelia thought, picking up her stamped books and stalking out of the door. Nobody even appeared to notice her leave, which didn't help to improve her mood. Lately, it seemed, she was invisible to everyone but the people who considered her a laughing stock.
~~~
The sky was darkening by the time Doyle trailed home from Sunnydale High and headed back to the depressing little apartment he'd rented in a cheap, shabby area of the town.
As he walked he considered his findings from looking through the student records. As well as eliminating several more as possibilities, he'd actually managed to pick out a handful of young women he deemed very likely slayer candidates, whose lives in the last few years had contained more than their fair share of curious or violent events.
Among them was Willow Rosenberg, the quiet girl who'd been sitting next to Cordelia Chase in his first class. He hadn't met any of the others on the list yet. One of them, Buffy Summers, had a very colourful record indeed.
Unfortunately, he was stumped as to how he should proceed in finding out which, if any of them, was actually the slayer. He could hardly go up to them and ask, causal-like, "Say, do your extra-curricular activities happen to include slaying vampires?" His imagination filled in the rest of the scene: "No? Well, never mind - no, don't phone the board of Governors... What? No, not the psychiatric hospital either..."
He knew the slayer's Watcher was also one of the staff at the school, but hadn't had opportunity yet to even compile a list of possibilities.
And he had to admit it would be easier if he stopped avoiding the staff room. But he didn't want to answer friendly questions about his previous - fictional - teaching jobs, or be welcomed by the people he was lying to.
It occurred to him it shouldn't be too hard, anyway, if he investigated the students on his shortlist, to find out if any of them associated closely with particular members of staff. That should make it simple to narrow down both slayer and watcher.
It didn't take him long to near his new apartment. It was necessarily close to the school, as he didn't have a car. It was also opposite a graveyard, but since there were about a dozen cemeteries in Sunnydale it was kind of hard to avoid living in close proximity to at least one.
There were broken railings interspersed with trees and bushes bordering the cemetery, running parallel to the path Doyle was walking along.
He was almost home when a figure stepped out from the shadows of the shrubbery, blocking the path.
He stopped, squinting at the figure through the dingy light. His distracted brain kicked into gear and formed a few unhappy connections.
Sunnydale. Hellmouth. Vampires. Figures lurking around cemeteries in the dark... Not good.
Whatever - or, indeed, hopefully whoever - it was, it had made no move to attack. In fact, it didn't appear to have noticed Doyle there.
That was when the smell of fresh blood hit him, so strong it was dizzying. It made him feel ill.
He reached into the pocket of his battered leather jacket and gripped the sharpened stake of wood he'd figured to be the best form of self-defense he could carry around in Sunnydale.
He couldn't say the possibility he'd encounter something hadn't been squatting in the back of his mind since he'd arrived in the town, and he realised now he should really have been more wary, walking alone through the darkening evening.
He'd kind of hoped that perhaps the vampires which were known to infest Sunnydale would smell the demon in him, and stay clear.
On the other hand, perhaps not.
The figure turned around, its twisted and demonic face visible in the dim evening light, and hissed threateningly upon seeing him there.
It was a tall, lanky man, or at least it had been once. Its clothes were covered in a layer of mud, and Doyle realised it must be a newly risen vampire that had just dug itself free of the grave.
Already it had made a kill, though. There was blood messily daubed all over the lower half of its face.
It took a few steps towards him, then hesitated and sniffed the air. Evidently it could tell there was something amiss with him - but it was too new risen for caution. It lunged forward, and Doyle barely managed to back out of its reach. He raised the stake defensively. "You don't wanna do this," he warned it - although the shake in his voice probably spoiled the effect. "A little more here than meets the eye, y'know."
"Yeah. Dessert." The vamp, wary of the stake, circled around him. Doyle, knowing it was expecting him to hold back until it attacked, stabbed at it before he had time to think about what he was doing and be afraid. Took it by surprise, but his aim was slightly off and he only stabbed it in the arm. It retaliated with a blow which sent him flying backwards to finish up in an untidy, hurting sprawl on the pavement.
And without a stake.
The stake was still sticking out of the vampire's arm. It pulled it out, studied it for a moment, then laughed and threw it aside.
'Well, this is just great!' A little voice in his head jeered. 'I get killed first day on the job. Some messenger. The Powers That Be sure know how to pick 'em!'
Unless, he realised sourly, they'd had enough and given up on him already.
Doyle tried to pick himself up off the sidewalk, but the heavy fall had shaken him and his limbs weren't responding too well, and by the time he managed to get to his feet it only made things easier for the vampire. Meant it could grab the collar of his jacket without even having to lean down. It shoved him roughly backwards.
His shoulders slammed against metal railings, hard enough to finally shake loose his control. He felt the change sweep over him, bringing with it the increased power and strength of his demon form.
"Damn it!" He shook it off, feeling his face smooth back to human.
The vampire watched him warily. Doyle could practically hear its brain ticking over. Then, after a moment, it snorted in digust, turned its back on him, and started to walk off.
Doyle watched its retreat incredulously for a long moment, before it occurred to him that if he let it go, it would only find somebody human to bite. And that it was really, really annoying for the thing to beat the crap out of him and then decide he wasn't even worth bothering to kill.
He staggered unsteadily over to where it had tossed the stake, scooped it up from the road, and sprinted after the vampire. It didn't hear his approach until the last second, by which time it was already too late. It occurred to him that probably it wasn't too wary because it considered him one of like kind, a concept he found all the more annoying.
He had to use all his strength to drive the stake through the vampire's heart from behind, slipping into demon form again for the instant it took to deliver the blow.
The thud as the stake went in felt appalling. It jarred his arm right up to the shoulder. Then, abruptly, there was no pressure on his arm, and no vampire, and the stake was falling to the ground amid a cloud of dust.
Doyle backed away, shaking the demon form off once again, unable to take his eyes off the spot where the vampire had been. He'd seen a lot of things, the past few years, but he'd never actually killed anything before - although, he supposed, the vampire was technically dead already, and he had no cause for guilt.
Much the reverse, in fact. He'd probably saved someone's life, somewhere.
It occurred to him then that there was at least one life the vampire's destruction had been too late to save.
With some reluctance, he parted the branches of the bush the vampire had first emerged from and followed the scent of blood back to its source.
What he found, in the shadow of a huge headstone, would have made him lose his dinner if he'd had any. The corpse...
'Oh, man, that's no vampire kill. Vampires don't do... that. The vampire must have just found the fresh corpse and drained it of its remaining blood.'
He turned his gaze away from the gaping hole where most of the poor woman's chest had been ripped open.
But even from the brief glance he'd had, he could tell that there was a lot of stuff that should have been in there that was missing.
Cordelia pushed open the door onto an empty house. A few token calls - loud calls, it was a big house - affirmed what she already knew. Nobody was in. She went straight upstairs to her room, and dumped the library books in a pile on the bed.
As soon as she turned her back on them, all thoughts of the work she'd been planning to do evaporated from her mind.
It wasn't fair. She was hurting, but the world continued to turn, oblivious. Buffy and the Freaky Gang continued to fight monsters, without her (not that the latter part ought to be a bad, she could do very well without the weekly doses of terror). Harmony bitched and bleated her way to popularity. That Doyle guy taught English, badly. Her parents went out to expensive dinners without a second thought about leaving her alone with her pain.
It shouldn't be allowed.
She felt a little like she was drowning, with everybody watching and nobody noticing. Like the kid in the swimming pool everyone thinks is fooling around until it's too late.
There was nothing left to cling to. It had all gone, result of a single act.
Xander...
She remembered there were still photographs of him - of them - she hadn't yet destroyed. Her mother had found the used film in the camera only the other day and taken it to be printed.
With intent, she dug them out and tore open the packet. Pictures scattered all across the floor and the bed.
She stared around in dismay at all the faces, smiling in the sunshine. Buffy. Oz. Willow. Xander. Herself.
He'd been two-timing her with Willow, even then.
She got the scissors out and set to work, and continued until there was only the one remaining. The one with everyone on it, taken by Giles, in a hurry, impatient to get back to his dusty old books.
To the left of the group, Xander, holding her, trying to lick her ear, while she swatted at him half-heartedly with her open palm. Buffy, Willow and Oz looked on, amused.
She hesitated, then put the picture away, whole.
Not for sentimental reasons, of course.
Only so she could destroy it the next time she was feeling down.
~~~
Amid all the sirens and lights and people, Doyle felt like the centre of far too much attention. He was beginning to wish he'd kept his call about the body anonymous.
He ached after the battering he'd received from the fledgeling vampire. He hoped desperately that no visible bruises would start to develop before he could make himself scarce.
It would just about cap the misery of the whole day if they began asking him if he'd, say, been in any fights recently, and began to question the innocence of his involvement in all this.
Damn it all, he'd done the responsible thing for once. He could hardly have just left that poor woman's body lying there until somebody else chanced across it, maybe kids.
He stood alone on the edge of the action, watching as the body was lifted onto a stretcher, nothing more now than a huddled shape under a white plastic sheet.
The female police officer who'd questioned him had gone to talk with one of her fellows some way off. Too far away for Doyle to hear what they were saying.
It was frustrating to observe the police going about their work, so blind to what was really going on. How could they protect the public from things they didn't even believe in? They seemed to have decided the woman had been attacked by wild dogs, and the missing organs eaten. All the same, Doyle couldn't see it being a good idea to educate them about the variety of very unpleasant demons who were far more likely suspects.
The female officer strutted back to join him. She said, 'You can go now, sir. Don't leave town for the next few days. We may need to get in touch with you again.'
They'd already taken his address and details. His fake details. He felt like kicking himself. Man, he so much should have kept that call anonymous. He hadn't been thinking straight.
'Of course.' He nodded.
It was as the woman turned away from him that he noticed the girl.
She was standing across the road, among a group of passers-by and street residents who'd decided to nosy in on all the excitement.
She was a pretty young blond thing, quite the stunner, slim and delicate. The hard look in her eyes, however - which was directed right at himself in a penetrating, fixed stare - was much older than her evident years.
He had the impression she'd been there a while, and watching him for as long. She didn't turn her gaze aside when she saw he was looking back at her.
Two thoughts hit him almost simultaneously. One was, 'Could this be the vampire slayer?' The next, slapping down its predecessor, 'Could this be the demon?'
He was aware of a number of demon types who might be responsible for the body he'd found, and some of them were quite capable of appearing human.
Whatever she was, it was clear from the hostility in her expression that she wasn't loving him.
He couldn't help flinching away from her direct gaze. When he looked back, a few seconds later, she was nowhere to be seen.
Unnerved, he turned and hurried back to his shabby apartment - all of a twenty yard journey further down the street.
~~~
"Cordelia!" Just what she needed to brighten her morning - Willow ambushed her outside the classroom door before the day's first lesson. "I know you don't like us very much right now, but you need to hear this. It's serious!"
She could tell it was from the concern in Willow's eyes; she let the girl draw her aside to a quiet corner as the other students filed past, oblivious, into Mr Doyle's class.
"All right," she said, before Willow could speak. "How's the world going to end this time? Sucked into hell again? - because that's always fun, y'know."
"Cordy! It isn't apocalypse stuff this time. It's just a demon... something really nasty, though. We were talking about it in the library yesterday, when you... Anyway, the point is, there was another murder last night, and guess who Buffy saw on the crime scene?"
"Jean-Claude Van Damme?" She was bored, already. Demons were old news. There never seemed to be a time when Sunnydale wasn't packed with new and exciting varieties to delight and disgust.
"Mr Doyle! He was the first one there. Apparently he found the body and called the police, but Buffy thinks it might be a cover-up. Cordelia, what if you were right yesterday when you said he was probably some kind of monster? Giles says it could be him that's been killing these people and, um, pinching bits from their corpses."
"Oh, come on. I was joking yesterday!" She didn't believe it for a moment. 'I totally chewed him up and he was nice to me. And now they want to tell me he's a demon? Don't think so!' "Short stuff in there? A psychotic, murdering demon? Give me a break. Sure - annoying, tasteless, ugly. But demony? I don't see it. Tell Buffy to ease off with the slayer paranoia already."
Willow gave her a strange look. "Why don't you believe he's a demon?" she asked intently.
"I just don't!"
"Please, Cordy. It could be important. It could be a clue."
She rolled her eyes impatiently, looking for an escape route, determined to pursue her resolve to spend as little time in Willow's company as possible. "I don't know! Instinct! Just a feeling. We hated each other on sight - so there's a connection made there, right? I don't think he's your killer."
"A... connection," Willow repeated slowly, seeming confused at Cordelia's definition. "Right."
"Are we finished now? Or do we want to explore the possibility that the staff of this school are made up from all the hordes of hell?" She thought about that for a moment, then added sunnily, "Which would make Snyder the devil. Which, actually, I can see." She smiled brightly and turned to head into the classroom.
Mr Doyle was standing in the doorway watching them, with his arms folded across his chest, a laconic expression on his face. "Are you both goin' to join us today?" he asked in a bored, level tone.
Cordelia sensed the tension in Willow's form as she stiffened abruptly. Her sudden heightened nervousness... she really did believe the guy was some sort of evil - which Cordelia, looking at him, found ridiculous in the extreme; evil tended to dress better... still lousily, but nonetheless better - and now he'd overheard them.
But from his reactions Cordelia thought he couldn't have heard more than the last few remarks of their conversation. If he'd heard any more, he'd never be so calm about it.
"Sorry, sir," she said meekly, covering for Willow before she remembered she was trying to forget she'd ever been friends with the girl.
"Well." The little irritation he'd managed to muster to tick them off faded away. He smiled gently. "Come along inside. Othello isn't so bad as all that."
"Just don't try to upset him again," Willow whispered into her ear, as Mr. Doyle ducked back into the classroom. "Just in case. I mean, if Buffy's right, it'd be sort of like painting a big target on yourself that says 'demon-bait', y'know?"
The lesson passed without incident despite the presence of Cordelia Chase. Doyle would have liked to know what she and her friend - or not-friend, rather, as he was sensing a weird hostility between the two girls, which made it seem odd they sat together and talked together - had been talking about outside.
What he'd heard... had sounded strange. He wondered exactly how many of Sunnydale's residents really knew what went on in the town. There had to be some. He rather thought the two girls might be among them.
And Willow Rosenberg, he reminded himself, was on his list of possible slayers. She didn't exactly look the slaying type, but... well, you never knew.
At the end of the lesson Cordelia Chase filed out of the room among all the others without comment, casting a slightly nervous glance back at him.
Perhaps she'd had a particularly bad day yesterday, and he'd just got the brunt of her irritation. Perhaps she wasn't usually like that at all.
He reminded himself sternly that she was a student, and that his flirtations with girls younger than she in the bars of LA were not an issue here in Sunnydale, where he was a teacher, and could not afford to jeopardise his position of responsibility.
Man, this job sucked.
He was packing up his notes into a file when he heard the voices outside in the corridor. One of them, an unpleasant feminine mewl, was unfamiliar to him. The other, raised in anger and upset, belonged to Cordelia.
She saw Aura strutting along the corridor in some painful looking new shoes as she left Mr Doyle's classroom. "Hey, wait up!" she yelled. Aura appeared to hesitate before deciding to hear her - she'd noticed a lot of people doing that before they spoke to her, lately.
Never mind; she was going to rebuild her image. The all new Cordelia Chase was to be born today. That was why she simply couldn't wait to hear the news Aura had for her.
Cordelia hurried over to her, deliberately ignoring the way the girl cuddled the file in her hands in front of her chest like a shield, and the way her eyes shifted around as though in search of escape. "Well?" she said brightly. "Did you put in a good word for me? What did Mark say? Tomorrow? Friday? Or maybe... this evening?"
"Cordelia..." Aura was looking decidedly uncomfortable. She sighed, in that pained way which meant she was about to tell the Horrible Truth. Cordelia's hopes sank. "He said totally no way ever, Cordy. He said he may not be the best catch in Sunnydale but he's still not about to sink so low as to date Xander Harris' castoffs when every more popular available guy has already said no." She hugged her work tighter to her defensively. "Jeeze, Cordy, I mean, what did you expect?"
"Well, a simple yes would have been nice," she managed to venture, albeit in a rather small voice. God, she could remember the time maybe a year or so ago when Mark had been begging her to give him a chance. Even serenading her with some of the worst poetry she'd ever heard. "He really said that?" Doubt crept up on her, and she forced a smile and a laugh. "You're kidding me, right? Ha ha funny! No - not funny! Not funny at all. I'm annoyed, Aura! That wasn't funny!"
But Aura just looked at her and said disgustedly, "God, Cordy, get over yourself, will you? I wasn't joking. He really said that. Actually, he said worse than that, I was being diplomatic. Come back to the real world - which doesn't revolve around you. You did it to yourself, you know. Xander Harris! Honestly! Live with it."
And with that, she marched off, skidding down the corridor in her new shoes.
Cordelia stood there, lost for words. Hardly able to form a coherent thought - except to keep a tight rein on the tears which threatened to escape her eyes and cement her total humiliation. Thankfully, the corridor was now almost empty after the initial rush at the end of first lesson, and there were few around to witness her state.
"Sheesh," said someone behind her, with a low whistle. "No small amount of venom there."
She knew who it was without needing to look. That weirdo accent was unmistakeable. She sighed and closed her eyes for a moment, trying to force calm upon the turmoil in her mind.
He was about the last person she'd want to see her like this. Well, not entirely. Better he than Harmony. Or Buffy. Or Xander. She breathed in, gathering her self control.
"Every hear of privacy?" she snapped, swinging around angrily to confront him. "You know, someone else's conversation..." She abruptly remembered that the person she was using that tone of voice on was a teacher, and her voice dried up as she tried to finish. "...is their own business... and nobody... else's...."
"Yeah, I'm sorry," Mr Doyle said, seeming slightly embarrassed. It registered slowly upon her traumatized brain that he wasn't angry with her, that his eyes were kind, and his tone was comforting. "But I couldn't help overhearin'. And you sounded like you could use a little help."
"I'm fine," she muttered, almost inaudiably, reminding herself how much she didn't like him.
"I can see that." The gentle sarcasm was unmistakeable. "She's just jealous, you know."
"Jealous?"
"Yeah. I can see it a mile off. I don't know precisely what it is that's between you and she, mind, but that much is very clear."
Cordelia laughed bitterly. "My boyfriend was a jerk who cheated on me, the whole school thinks I'm a loser, and I have a hole right through my side that still... really... hurts... not to mention looking ugly as hell and totally ruling out all this season's short-cut fashion tops! Why would she be jealous of me?"
Mr Doyle shrugged and smiled nervously. "Ah, there's the mystery." He seemed as though he'd like to say more but stopped himself. "Must be somethin', huh?"
She noticed how his eyes sparkled warmly, looking at her.
Abruptly, she remembered what Willow had said. And she couldn't help but feel apprehensive at the possibility, despite the fact she now found Buffy's theories about him being some kind of demon even harder to believe than before.
She dredged up a smile for him anyway. He'd made her feel better, monster or no. And, well... if he was a demon, she didn't want him to suspect she knew, did she?
So she smiled at him. "Thanks," she said. "I'll... see you tomorrow, Mr Doyle."
"Doyle," he corrected, apparently automatically, sounding a little distracted. "Just Doyle."
'Damn it.' She'd only smiled at him. And it had felt like she'd thrust her hand through his chest and closed her fingers about his heart.
'This is not good.'
Doyle wondered what the Powers That Be would think if he lost his point of contact with the slayer because he'd been fired for hitting on one of his students. Not that it had come to that yet. Well, honestly, he'd only seen her twice. You couldn't rush into these things.
'No. Stop that thought right there. Not gonna happen, ya dirty old demon. She's seven or eight years your junior, and a student to boot.
'Also, I'm bettin' she'd be none too happy to find out ya not completely human. That'd be enough to send any woman runnin' screamin' in the opposite direction. As has been proven more than once. '
He realised abruptly he was going to be late for his next lesson. He was covering a different class next, not Matthews'. It hit him then that he wasn't even certain where the room he should be teaching in actually was. Cursing, he hurried back to snatch up the paperwork forgotten in his concern for Cordelia Chase.
What he wasn't expecting - although perhaps, if he'd bothered to check the class list for that lesson, he would have been - was to find the girl who'd been at the crime scene the previous night sitting near the back of the room.
Seeing her gave him something of a jolt, and he must have betrayed some reaction which caught her attention. She glanced up and her eyes widened briefly in surprise and apprehension. Then she lowered her gaze determinedly back to the open book on her desk.
The dark haired boy sitting next to her looked confused and leaned across to engage in a brief, whispered conversation.
Doyle discovered who she was from the class list. Buffy Summers. One of his prime Slayer suspects. Or, alternatively, possibly a rather hostile demon.
He'd done some research last night, though he'd been exhausted and battered and really hadn't felt like it. Not to mention wondering why he was even involving himself in this at all. After all, he was just the messenger. With the blinding agony of the visions alone, he figured he was doing his duty. Except what had been done to that young woman made him sick. He didn't want to think about the next victim. He wanted to stop it, if he could, before there was a next victim.
He'd looked into the recent spate of murders. They had all occurred within the last two nights. That didn't necessarily mean anything; some demons needed human organs to sustain them every few months or even years in cycles. It could be someone who acted as a perfectly normal member of the community the rest of the time.
Or of Sunnydale High.
It could be a coincidence, but of the three victims so far, the woman last night had worked in the school canteen and the two youths the night before had been senior students at the school.
It didn't take much in the way of intuition to figure the killer probably had some connection to the school.
He conducted the lesson very much aware of Buffy Summers sitting hunched over trying to make herself invisible at the back of the room.
He'd been sent here to contact the slayer. And this girl might well be she. Damn it, what should he do? Approach her anyway? Take the risk that she might turn around and rip out his insides in return? - Or she might just kill him for the hell of it; it could be that whatever she was needed human parts, and his weren't precisely a hundred percent the real deal.
'Couldn't the Powers That Be damn well be a bit more specific just for once?' he thought irritably. 'A name, a picture would have been helpful. "Hey, Doyle, here's the Slayer, you go play nice and find her now." I swear they're sat up there laughing at me.
He needed more possibilities. If he could find another suspect, he promised himself, he'd approach her.
Plus he needed to look into the staff at the school. One of them was a watcher. He'd done some checking on staff nationalities, when he'd got in that morning, bearing in mind that the Watchers were reportedly an English institution and hoping it would be as easy as that. But he'd checked all the teachers records and found no Brits, so maybe the Watchers Council were recruiting overseas talent these days.
Before he could do anything, though, he had to conduct another two lessons after this one, and sit through a staff meeting about student vandalism.
It was bad enough trying to juggle teaching and his search for the slayer, but throwing demon-hunting in as well... man, where was the room for a social life?
He really needed that drink.
'Tonight,' he promised himself. 'After the demon-hunting. Say, maybe I could even check out that club all the students frequent and mix the two. You never know, there may be some evil lurking there.'
"So remind me again, why am I here?" Cordelia asked irritably, glowering around at the group who'd once again somehow managed to pull her back into their world. She didn't know what had possessed her to listen to Willow. "I'm bored already."
They were in the library - as ever, they never would agree on a slightly less image-damaging place to meet - waiting for Buffy to decide to show up. And Cordelia was getting very tired of watching Xander trying not to watch her, shifting his big awkward feet nervously whenever she glared in his direction.
"Yeah, Giles," the big doofasaurus himself put in somewhat plaintively. "Remind us why she's here?"
Giles sighed, but was saved answering by Buffy's entrance.
Cordelia watched the others greet Buffy with typically sickening enthusiasm. Even though Xander was totally nothing to do with her now, it still annoyed her to see how he hung on Buffy's every word, gesture, movement like he did. He'd never really stopped doing that, all the time they'd been so close, and now they'd broken apart he was still there, the slayer's faithful lapdog. Nothing had changed, except for her. It made her feel physically ill, watching him, and remembering what he'd spoiled.
She couldn't believe she let these people do this to her. She'd been the Queen of Sunnydale High, before Xander. She'd risked all that for him, and he'd destroyed it all.
'What am I doing here?' She abruptly turned for the door.
"Nah-ah!" Buffy said, catching her arm. She tried to pull away, but couldn't match that slayer strength. "This is serious, Cordy. You could be in danger."
Cordelia sighed, shook Buffy's hand away, and sat down huffily in a nearby chair. "Well, get on with it then," she snapped. "What's the big?"
"Demons," Willow said.
"Isn't it always? Can't we we move on, here? 'Cause the demon thing is just old now. And I didn't want to come to your crummy meeting anyway." She glared sourly at Willow, who'd caught up with her at lunchtime and talked at her until she'd agreed to show.
Giles coughed. "I do think you should take this seriously. Buffy had an encounter with one of the staff whom according to Willow you made a rather adverse impression on yesterday. This new teacher, Mr Doyle..."
"Yeah, he could be a demon, yadda yadda yadda. I've heard it. I don't believe it. He's too short."
The librarian sighed, took off his glasses and pinched his nose in that way he had when he was getting peeved. "I hardly think his height has any bearing on whether or not he is demonic in origin, Cordelia. And some new evidence has come to light since Willow spoke to you."
"Well, 'evidence' could be a misleading term," Xander chipped in cheekily, albeit in a subdued mutter. "More like a, um, smell."
"A smell?" She looked around the group in disbelief.
Buffy looked embarrassed. She hesitated, looking apprehensive, before finally admitting, in a muted voice, "He doesn't smell human."
"What?"
"I said he doesn't smell human!" Buffy snapped. "And don't you start as well, I've heard it all from them." She glowered at the other three, and Cordelia enjoyed a private moment of pleasure at the thought of dissent among the group. "I was in class with him earlier - which I did not expect and I swear I almost died when he walked through the door, after last night - and I had to walk way too close to him to leave the room. And I... smelled him. And it was like instant warning sirens screaming 'not human!'"
"Is this a 'slayer senses tingling' thing?" Cordelia asked sarcastically. "Because, you know, I wasn't aware you did smells."
"You don't believe me?"
"No! Yeah, he smells weird, I'll grant you that. But no, I don't think it follows that he's a big evil! Although his fashion sense may well be demonic. God! How many times do I have to repeat myself on this?"
Giles frowned. "You do seem uncommonly sure of this, Cordelia. How can you be certain it isn't because something is affecting your judgement? Some sort of spell, or demonic mesmer?"
Xander muttered something about hormones and Giles gave him a withering glance. "Do speak up, if you have anything relevant to add."
"I just said -" Xander's eyes flickered around nervously, avoiding Cordelia. "- that it might not be supernatural. What if it's simpler than that? Maybe she just has the hots for demon-guy and doesn't want to admit he might be..."
"Right, that's it." Cordelia stood up, knocking the chair over in her annoyance. "I've had it with this. I now officially do not know any of you people. Get that? I'm not listening any more. You keep your demons and your icky slayer stuff to yourselves. And I... will attempt to get back to something resembling a normal life."
She stalked out of the library. This time, Buffy didn't try to stop her.
~~~
She was still fuming when she got home. She unlocked the front door and yelled, "Hello?" Found the house empty again. Knowing her parents, they could be anywhere. She went to her room and started sorting through her clothes.
Cordelia had decided, driving home, that she was going out to the Bronze tonight. She hadn't really been much since the accident. She'd generally been too aware of what would be said, had known she wouldn't enjoy herself and hadn't seen the point.
Now, there was a point. She was going to win back her popularity or die in the attempt, she thought grimly as she tossed aside designer dresses that just weren't up to the job.
As for the rest of her old friends, if they didn't want her around they would just have to deal with it. Because they weren't going to chase her away. Whatever they had to say about her, she would ignore. She would rebuild her image until Xander Harris was nothing but a little insignificant speck in the way distant past. Even if she had to listen to Harmony's bitching for a few weeks, she was determined that eventually it would all be forgotten.
Whatever she might have done, she was still Cordelia Chase, she told herself firmly. And none of them had ever been able to match her in anything. Harmony could never reign queen for long. She hadn't the imagination. She would always be a sheep by nature.
Cordelia finally picked out a slinky green dress and carefully slid into it, anxiously smoothing down the material over the bandaging on her side to reassure herself it didn't show. She admired the result in the mirror and nodded, satisfied. The dress looked expensive, and flattering, and though it didn't show the bandaging it showed a good deal else, and if it didn't knock 'em dead with lust or envy, nothing would.
She pulled out a pair of new shoes she'd not yet had opportunity to wear and was delighted to discover they complimented the dress perfectly.
She twirled around for the mirror, grinning. Feeling almost like her old self. A feeling she'd not experienced in way too long.
It was going to be hard, cutting the ties to Buffy and her Scooby freaks. They were too used to coming to her when they thought there was danger, to warn her... or more often than not because they needed wheels. But this was it, she promised herself. It would end, now.
She contemplated the photograph of herself and Xander and the others, which still lay where she'd left it on the dressing table. She could hardly start afresh with that lying around, she thought, irritably, and looked around the room for the scissors.
But then the clock on the wall caught her eye and she yelped in panic, the picture forgotten. There were only two hours to go until things started humming over at the Bronze, and she hadn't even started work on her hair yet.
It was raining a rare, lazy drizzle as the last of the sunlight slowly vanished on the horizon. Looking out from the small window of his rented room, Doyle could just about see the thin strip of light that remained where earth met sky, sandwiched in a gap a foot or so wide between two intervening rooftops.
The night seemed to fall quicker here in Sunnydale than it did in LA. He wondered idly if it was the effect of the Hellmouth or merely psychological.
He left the window and glanced around the messy apartment. If it could even be called an apartment. It was a single floor of a terraced house which was not overly large to start with, and was basically one room with a bathroom and a kitchen - both about the size of closets - leading off from it.
It was currently strewn with junk. Mostly consisting of his lesson plans for the next few days, his research into the entire populace of Sunnydale High, and a variety of articles on demons and mutilated corpses.
This was a lousy job. Both of them.
The paperwork alone was killing him. And with the bruises and the risk of actual painful, brutal death on top of that, he wasn't feeling particularly happy about the way all this was going.
Not to mention the stress of having to pretend to be respectable. He'd buried himself in drink and the seedier parts of LA for the last four years. He didn't consider himself in any way prepared for all of this.
Trust the Powers That Be to ignore that fact.
He walked back across to the battered, flickery-screened computer, a recent back-of-the-lorry acquisition, and switched it off. Research time was over.
The sun had set. The nasties would be out in force... and along with them one very dangerous demon, a slayer, and a certain vampire he still had to find.
Not that he had any real idea how to go about doing that. But if he went out and walked around for a bit he'd at least feel like he'd tried to do his duty. And maybe then the Powers would forgive him for settling down in a nice comfy pub for a good few hours until closing time.
He threw some stakes into a bag. Wondered what he might have that was any good against demons, and settled finally on a small knife. He didn't have much in the way of weapons. Had always been a pretty firm believer in talking a way out of trouble - excepting, admittedly, the occasional bar fight.
He pulled on his leather jacket and slung the bag over his shoulder.
Took two steps towards the door.
...And fell to his knees on the floor as the sudden familiar pain slammed through his skull.
A club. The Bronze. An alley, presumably nearby, dark and strewn with junk. A woman's face, contorted in terror and agony. And something... something behind her, in the dark. A whole lot of blood. And then darkness.
Doyle moaned and clutched at his head. To think he'd actually been worried about how long it had been since the last time the Powers had seen fit to turn his skull inside out....
Although the images had stopped assaulting his brain, it often took the pain more than a little while to catch on and follow suit. Doyle staggered into the kitchen where he found and swallowed some asprin from his generously-stocked emergency hoard. He then leaned back dizzily against the fridge, trying to think things over.
Difficult, when his brain felt like it'd been mushed.
The urgency finally kicked in.
What he'd seen, that was tonight. Maybe minutes away. Maybe now. That woman could be dying while he delayed over his headache. He had to get over to the Bronze fast as he could.
Cursing, he hurried unsteadily back into the living room, picked up his demon-fighting supplies, and staggered out of the door.
The rain was heavier than it had looked from inside. Only a few minutes after leaving the shelter of his apartment he was soaked to the skin and feeling even less happy with the world.
The Bronze was not too far from his apartment - he'd checked on its location earlier as he'd meant to stop by there anyway on his evening patrol. But he was still a stranger to Sunnydale and on the unfamiliar streets the journey seemed to take forever.
When he finally reached his destination, everything was quiet. Well, quiet disregarding the lurid strains of some student band who were obviously torturing a cat on stage. The sounds floated on the air on the edge of hearing, muffled, shut in behind the doors of the club. He couldn't hear anything else.
He looked around, seeing a number of small streets branching off from this one which, in the rain and the darkness, all looked pretty much the same and very much like the scene of his vision. He cursed.
As he stood there thinking, a couple of younger students from one of his classes walked past, heading for the club. They directed stares of blank incomprehension back at him, obviously baffled by his presence so close to their popular haunt. Obviously he was encroaching on the students' territory. He heard them burst into giggliing laughter behind him.
Hesitantly, Doyle turned down one of the alleys. He walked along searching for anything recognisable from his vision.
He hadn't gone more than about thirty yards when he heard a scream from close by.
It stopped him in his tracks, and for a few seconds he hesitated, something he'd regret later when he had a chance to think about it. He forced his feet to move and headed at a run in the direction where he thought the scream had come from.
Back where he'd just been. Damn it, he'd come the wrong way. Okay, so there'd been more than a few streets to choose from but sometimes it seemed if he was given a choice of only two he'd be guaranteed to pick the wrong one every time.
The screaming changed to a weak sobbing. He could hear the sounds of a struggle. He rounded the corner into the alley which was, infuriatingly enough, right next to where he'd been standing minutes earlier.
A monstrous figure, cloaked by shadows, was towering over a woman who crouched on hands and knees on the ground with blood staining the front of her white dress.
The other victims, Doyle recalled from the autopsy reports on the corpses, had been ripped open while still alive. It looked as though the creature... whatever it was... had started the job but hadn't finished yet. The gash in the woman's stomach looked serious, but he thought she'd live if she got medical attention quickly.
And if the demon didn't get chance to finish. It reached for her again, big claws glinting at the end of a shadowy, misshapen limb in the faint light.
"Hey!" Doyle yelled, barely thinking about what he was doing, utterly sickened by the creature. "Leave her alone, you lousy bastard!" He scrabbled inside the bag for the knife, hands closing only on useless sharpened wood. Gave up on the knife and instead picked up a solid length of plank from the junk strewn on the floor of the shabby alley. He ran at the demon, makeshift weapon raised over his head, and brought it down in as heavy a whack as he could deliver across the demon's midsection as it turned.
He would have aimed for its head, if he could have reached it. The thing was about two feet taller than he was.
It growled and batted at the plank with a careless slap of one of its big hands. The plank wrenched from Doyle's grasp and flew several feet through the air to crash loudly against a wall.
Great. He'd done nothing but irritate it. How the hell was he supposed to kill it?
Behind the demon, he could see the woman struggling to her feet. He prayed silently that she'd have the strength left to make it. 'Run!' He thought at her urgently, not daring to speak aloud and risk drawing the demon's attention back to her. With her arms hugged around her cut stomach, she took several unsteady steps and collapsed against the wall, barely keeping her footing.
Unhelpful thoughts flitted through his mind. If he'd got here a bit earlier, it wouldn't have had time to harm the woman. If he'd found the slayer or Angel as he was meant to, he wouldn't have to face the creature himself. This vision had been meant for them, the warrior types, to provide them the means to stop the creature. Doyle... didn't think it was possible for him to do so himself. He simply wasn't strong enough.
It was his own incompetence in failing to find the slayer that had brought him here, that meant this poor woman was probably going to die, and probably he was too.
The injured woman was moving again, slowly and painfully. It was agonising to watch.
Doyle backed away from the demon, keeping its attention on him. "You're not much of a one for pickin' fair fights, are you?" he asked it, hearing his own voice raw with fear and anger. "Women, kids... Lousy coward."
It lurched towards him and he backed away again. It slapped at him with one of its long arms, its movements awkward and ungainly but all the same the move batted him aside as though he weighed nothing. He hit the wall face-first and felt his demon form sweep over him. Felt a rare acceptance of that extra strength and agility it granted; it was needed to save someone's life, and he couldn't let his hatred for his demon half stand in the way of that.
"Now you're really annoying me," he snarled - aware of the woman falling again, and pulling herself bloodily back onto hands and knees - and threw himself at the thing.
His own demon strength was greater than a normal human's, but all the same it was rather drab in comparison with the majority of other demons including, apparently, this one.
He tried to fight it, he genuinely did, throwing everything he had into the effort. But this was meant to have been the slayer's fight and Allen Francis Doyle never really stood a chance.
Its height and extra reach were the killers. He couldn't head-butt it, rendering the spikes that were his demon form's primary weapon useless. And he couldn't get close enough to it to do any damage without coming within reach of one of those long, misshapen arms. He lost count of the number of times in quick succession he was sent flying across the floor of the alley, or crashing into a wall, by one of its infuriatingly casual, sweeping blows.
Then there finally came one time too many, and his consciousness cascaded down into oblivion.
After several minutes of sitting listening to the rain drumming on the roof of her parked car with a growing depression, Cordelia made her decision. She snatched up her handbag from the passenger seat beside her, swung open the car door, and made a dash for the Bronze.
Tripping in her heeled shoes, splashing thorugh the pooled rain on the ground, she almost didn't hear the sounds coming from the narrow back street as she passed by it.
It was a scuffing sound, like somebody was moving around down there, in the dark.
She hesitated. There had been a time when she'd have continued right on past without a thought, but those days were behind her. And she hadn't been hanging around Buffy and all her associated evil for all that time without developing her own measure of instinct for when something was amiss.
She slowly stepped backwards, retracing her footsteps to the mouth of the alleyway, horribly aware of the rain soaking into her expensive dress.
There was a sweet, cloying smell on the air and she recognised it immediately as blood. She looked down and was horrified to see it staining the water that swirled down the slope of the ground, drawing patterns of red in rivulets around her feet.
Cordelia moved her three hundred dollar shoes elsewhere. Her breath was coming faster. Where was Buffy when you actually needed her?
She wondered if the noise she'd heard was whoever the blood belonged to, still alive but hurt and in need of help. Or if they were already beyond any help, and she'd heard whatever had put them there.
She reached into her handbag and gripped the stake which she still kept in the bottom of it, underneath the hairspray and the cosmetics.
Once you knew certain things, it was impossible to go back to exactly the way you were. She'd had no intention of becoming vampire food just to spite Buffy.
Aware that it was dangerous and she was getting soaked, but also increasingly pissed off that something was now out there trying to scare her on top of all the rest of the crap the last few weeks had heaped upon her, Cordelia walked determinedly onwards, following the trail of blood back to its source.
In the darkness and the rain, visibility was poor, and by the time she saw the figure hunched over a shapeless bundle on the ground she was already no more than ten feet away. She blinked, her eyes slow to pick out detail in the dim light.
Nothing could have prepared her for what she saw. The shapeless bundle... wasn't. It was... it had been... a young woman, not much older than herself. Something had torn her open, violently and messily. She'd seen gross before, but this... David Cronenberg would have barfed.
The guy - the killer - leaned over the body, his hands on the wound and painted with blood up to his elbows.
She had been standing there a few seconds staring at the back of his head when he seemed to become aware of her presence for the first time and looked up.
The sparse light fell across his face, to reveal the familiar features of Mr. Doyle.
Consciousness returned slowly, as though it wasn't sure why it bothered.
It was discomfort that dragged him back to the world, as he became gradually aware of how cold and wet he was, of how much he hurt from absorbing blows so violent they'd have killed him in human form, of the rough, hard concrete surface he lay upon. Of the fact he was still a demon.
He changed back to human automatically the instant he realised, even though his brain had barely started to tick over again. The reaction was ingrained. It wasn't until a few seconds later that everything flooded back to him, and he remembered the fight with the demon, and the woman he'd been trying to save.
He was on his feet almost instantly, despite the violent ache in his head and the protests from his battered body.
What was left of the woman, he found some distance away, nearly at the other end of the street. She'd almost made it, must have come so close to getting away. But he hadn't distracted the demon for quite long enough.
Recalling what he'd tried to do, and how futile his attempts had been, he reflected that it was a wonder he was still alive.
A pity she hadn't been so lucky.
His heart heavy, he knelt down beside the dead woman and forced himself to examine the wound carefully. It couldn't hurt her now, and it could help prevent the next killing if he found out more about whatever the creature was. He hadn't got a real good look at the thing in the dark, but he'd seen enough to be pretty sure he'd never come across anything like it before. He felt sick, remembering those huge clawed hands as he examined the tears they'd made in human flesh.
This could have been avoided, he thought, staring at the woman's dead face. If only he hadn't delayed in LA. If only he'd found the slayer as he was supposed to. If only he hadn't spent so much time sunk in his own depression and pining for a drink instead of working at his mission. Or worrying about his petty lesson plans and hang-ups about returning to teaching.
He'd as good as killed her himself.
It was on that thought he finally realised there was someone or something behind him. He could hear breathing, underneath the sound of the rain. For an instant an almost overwhelming fear flooded through him, that the demon had returned to finish him off. He spun around, feeling his demon form surface unbidden in response to his fear before he could hold it in check.
He found himself staring up into the appalled, terrified face of Cordelia Chase.
One moment it was Mr. Doyle there, then the next... a thing was glaring back at her, all ugly pointy spikes and glowy red eyes.
Cordelia could do nothing but stand there with her mouth hanging open while her brain absorbed the implications that Buffy, damn her, had been right.
She watched as the creature shook itself and its form melted back into that of Mr. Doyle.
That was when her reactions kicked in. She screamed, threw the stake at him - it bounced ineffectively off his shoulder - and turned and ran.
She heard him shout after her, but she didn't hear what he said. She kept running, skidding on the damp pavement in her new shoes, feeling the stitches in her side pulling more agonisingly with every single step.
As she fell through the library doors, exhausted, drenched and feeling unfashionably bedraggled, the anger started to kick in. She was back here again, after all she'd said, all her resolve, all her plans for rebuilding her life. And after she'd insisted oh-so vehemently that of course Mr. Doyle wasn't a monster.
Giles, Buffy, Xander and Willow were all there, obviously. It wasn't humiliating enough that she should have to admit she'd been wrong to just one or two of them. No, the whole gang had to be present.
"He's a demon!" Cordelia snapped, getting it over and done with. It didn't come out quite right because she was breathless from running all the way from the Bronze, and she had to repeat it. "A demon! All right? A nasty, spikey, glowy-eyed ugly demon! You were right. And... I need to sit down."
She slid bonelessly into a chair. Her hand pressed to the wound in her side, which was hurting like anything for all she couldn't actually see any blood soaking through her dress (and thank God for that, the stains were impossible to get out and she'd ruined enough designer garments through blood and gore the past few years). But she thought she'd felt a few stitches pull... again.
The others regarded her with concern and mild confusion. Willow was sitting at the computer, the other three stood around her as though they'd been reading over her shoulder. "You're referring to Mr. Doyle?" Giles asked. "What happened?"
Cordelia shook her head and spent several minutes just trying to breathe normally again. Xander handed her a glass of water and she drank it down without comment. Then, she hesitantly explained what had happened.
"So as if finding him leaning over the corpse covered in her blood isn't enough of a shock," she rounded off, "He then looks up at me and suddenly his face goes all �bleh!' and he's this horrible, ugly thing! And I totally ruined my shoes running all the way here. Look at them!" She regarded them herself, mournfully. They looked very sad indeed in the electric lighting of the library. "They were new!"
Nobody seemed especially sympathetic to her shoes' pain. Cordelia sighed. She felt all torn up inside. Somehow it hurt that Mr. Doyle turned out to be evil, and it wasn't just because she'd spoken up for him and he'd shown her up by proving her wrong.
She couldn't explain it. Except... She looked around at the others. "He was, like, the only person that was nice to me, today in school," she said quietly. "The only one. Not because he felt obliged to be, but just because. And he's an ugly, disgusting demon. What does that say about m...?" She realised she was dangerously close to starting sobbing openly and dredged up her annoyance again.
"So what are you doing hiding in here anyway?" she snapped. "I thought you were supposed to be out fighting the forces of evil. Maybe if you had been doing your job that woman would still be alive!" She glared pointedly at Buffy.
"Um. I hardly think that's fair, Cordelia." Giles was annoyed. "We've dug up some interesting information since you left. It's all valuable..."
"No, she's right," Buffy said, sounding strained, causing Cordelia a little stab of guilt because she hadn't intended to be quite that harsh. "I should have been there. I'm gonna go see if I can find this thing before it can kill anyone else. What's this guy's address?"
Willow read her it off the computer; she must have the school records on there or something.
Buffy wrote it down. "Right. I'll check that out if I can't track him from where Cordy saw him." She quizzed Cordelia on the location again.
Then she left, taking with her a whole lot of weapons, and also Xander and Willow tagging along in the rear like the useless baggage they mostly were.
'That was me, once,' Cordelia thought, watching them go. "So, Giles," she said, in subdued tones. "What do we do?"
The Watcher cleared his throat uncomfortably. They'd never got along incredibly well. There'd never been anything for them to connect over, they were so different. But he was a decent guy. And unlike Buffy and Xander and Willow, he'd never really done anything to seriously annoy her. "Well, you could help me find out what it is we're dealing with," he said. "The demon you saw, that this Mr. Doyle really is, must be listed in one of these books somewhere."
Book work. Cordelia sighed. "So what was it your research drug up that was so fascinating?" she asked, in afterthought.
"A little matter about Mr. Doyle's teaching credentials."
"You mean they aren't real? Duh! Well, what do you expect - when did demons ever go to teacher training college?"
Giles sighed. "They're real enough. If you happened to be in the third grade. Which is what the real Allen Francis Doyle taught, up till about six years ago, around which time he seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth."
"Gee," Cordelia said, softly. "I wonder what happened to him."
~~~
The rain had washed the blood from Doyle's hands, at least physically if not metaphorically. But it had stopped now, leaving the air feeling still and heavy. The night was oppressive around him.
He'd called the police about the corpse, after Cordelia Chase had stumbled across him and run away, as soon as he'd recovered enough to stagger to a phone. He'd kept the call anonymous this time. He could imagine what conclusions the police might reach if he tried to tell them he'd innocently stumbled across two dead bodies in as many days. He imagined they were already digging into his background, sifting through the lies he'd told to gain employment at Sunnydale High... he wasn't very optimistic of his chances he'd be keeping that job much longer. Not that he particularly cared; it would be a relief to have done with it.
Since making the call, he'd been walking aimlessly through the streets of Sunnydale, sunk deep in depressed thoughts.
He wasn't really afraid of what Cordelia might do with the knowledge he was a demon. Who could she tell, after all, that would believe it? The police might be after him if she or anybody else simply placed him at the scene, but as far as his demon side went... people didn't believe in things like that. And in Sunnydale, where the supernatural was stronger than in most places, denial permeated the air.
But he couldn't get the image of her frightened, heartbreakingly lovely face out of his head. He'd scared her, and he felt awful about it. There was nothing he could do to make it right, either. He couldn't apologise to her for being a demon. She'd never be able to look at him again now with anything but fear.
He'd hoped, slim as his chances had been, for something different. Now, his chances were worse than zero.
Despite his aches from his encounter with the creature, he felt too restless to go home. So he just walked, not looking for anything any longer.
But he found it nonetheless, suddenly there in front of him.
The small rickety bar, hidden down the back of some crumbling housing in the bad part of town, greeted him as he turned a corner. The smell hit him first; the scent of the unhuman. Doyle stared at the patched up doorway and battered sign in disbelief.
In every big city there tended to be some place, some sort of joint where the demons gathered. And, okay, Sunnydale was no city but it was on the Hellmouth, and he'd known there would be a place like this somewhere.
It was past time for him to have a bit of luck, he thought, approaching the door. Here, he might just find the information he needed.
He pushed open the door onto a dimly lit little room. The bar didn't exactly have a bustling clientele, just clumps of figures hanging around the darker corners. He couldn't make out faces in the gloom but the shapes of their shadows weren't entirely human. A slumped figure on a stool at the counter had two small protuberances pointing up from the top of his head.
This was the place, all right.
Doyle approached the counter. A weasel-faced guy with shifty eyes stopped washing glasses and turned to serve him. Unexpectedly, the guy was human.
"What'll it be?" There was surprise in his face as he studied Doyle in return. "We don't get many humans..." He hesitated, comprehension dawning. Leaned forward and said, his voice low, "You might want to think twice about hanging around in here. Some of these guys, they can get a bit rough after a few beverages. And, y'know, hybrids ain't exactly popular with all. No offence."
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Doyle said. He dug into a pocket and unrolled a small wad of notes. Peeled a few off and placed them on the counter. "Give me a shot of that scotch there and a few answers and I'm outta here, no trouble."
The guy looked nervous, although that could have just been his natural expression, but he fetched the bottle from the back. "What do you want to know?" he asked, pouring a rather generous shot due to a slight shaking of his hands.
"Angel," Doyle said, snatching up the glass and downing the contents gratefully. "Vampire. You know of him?"
"Yeah." Hesitantly. "Hey, you don't want to mess with that crowd. He hangs with a slayer, you know. Though not of late. Haven't seen him around so much these last few weeks. Word is the girl shucked him off and he's lying low, keeping to himself like. You wouldn't want to cross a depressed vampire."
Doyle pushed the glass back at the guy along with another handful of bills. The guy poured again. And continued, with a sigh. "Last I heard, he was back at the old place. Big grand mansion, decor like a crypt, over across town." He related an address, which Doyle scribbled down after a brief search for a pen.
"Thanks, man," he said, downing the second scotch.
The weasel-faced guy gripped his arm as he turned to leave. "Wait," he said. "You don't want to do this. I don't know what interest you've got in Angel, but take my word for it, he's trouble. People have a tendency to drop like flies around that crowd. And you, you're okay, man. Most people round here, they're much less sociable about asking for information. I wouldn't want to see you come to any harm."
Doyle managed a smile, despite the nerves the warning generated in him. "No problem," he said. "I'm not lookin' for trouble. I've a message to deliver, is all."
He turned to go, and that was when the doors burst open with a loud crack of shattering wood. A slim, decidedly female figure stood, braced in the doorway in silhouette. The reaction from the occupants of the bar was instantaneous and extreme.
Doyle had never seen any place cleared so fast as in the mass exodus via the back door which he now witnessed. He noticed some of those running for the hills were no small fry in the demon world themselves, and wondered what fearsome being could possibly strike such terror into creatures such as they.
And then he realised he was still standing rooted to the floor only feet away from whatever that being was.
His eyes, adjusted to the dim light, managed to pick out blond hair, a few facial details. It was enough. He knew who it was.
Buffy Summers.
His heart felt like it had stopped.
"Hell! Get out of here, man! It's the slayer!" the bar man yelled, ducking behind the counter.
The slayer.
Buffy was the slayer. Not a demon. Not, after all, a demon.
'Thank God for that', Doyle thought. The tension drained from his body and left him feeling weak with relief. Finally, he knew. He could do the job he'd been sent to do.
He stepped forward and opened his mouth to speak, expecting to have to make a few pretty comprehensive explanations.
He was totally unprepared for what happened next.
The vicious kick caught him in the chest and there was a hell of a strength behind it. It sent him flying backwards, unable to catch his balance. His back hit the counter with crushing force and he slid to the floor in a boneless sprawl, trying desperately to catch a breath while his lungs refused to obey him.
Incredulous, he stared up at Buffy, utterly confused, unable to fathom what he'd done to provoke such a reaction.
As she took a few steps further inside the bar room, two others fell into step at her side. One of them was the dark haired youth, something Harris, who'd been sitting next to her in class earlier that day. The other was Willow Rosenberg.
'Well, that explains a few things.'
Buffy faced the barman accusingly, although Doyle noticed how her eyes flickered constantly back to himself with a warrior's alertness. "Harbouring murderers now, are we, Willy?" she asked, the threat in her voice unmistakeable. Murderers... God, she'd come to the same wrong conclusion about him as he had about her.
'Sure, nobody would believe Cordelia Chase,' he thought, reminding himself bitterly of his earlier complacency, furious with himself for his carelessness and stupidity. 'Unless, of course, she happened to know a slayer.'
Doyle rolled over onto hands and knees, trying to get up, to look her in the eye, to explain. To somehow convince her that it was all a mistake. But he couldn't get any words out. He hadn't the breath. And when she saw him move she took two quick strides and stomped on his back, crushing him brutally to the floor.
Which didn't help his attempts to breathe any.
"Jeeze, Buffy, lay off!" the bar guy, Willy, protested. "You let worse scoot out the back. He's just some kind of halfbreed... Murder?" Doyle couldn't see them from his uncomfortable position - his face was full of floor and Buffy's foot planted solidly between his shoulders wouldn't allow him to turn his head - but he could sense the guy's sudden nervousness, his doubt. It hung on the air. "You mean all those mutilations? Damn... I would never have thought..."
"It wasn't me!" Doyle managed to choke out. It sounded appallingly lame, to his ears; the automatic protest of all the guilty. "This is a mistake!" He managed to get one arm wedged between him and the floor and used the leverage to try to get up again, or at least try turn around to face them so he wasn't talking to the beer-stained, smelly floorboards. The pressure on his back lifted for a moment... before slamming down again. Doyle yelled in pain, and felt his form change automatically.
Buffy fell back in surprise at the transformation, which allowed him to roll aside out of her way. He staggered unsteadily to his feet, clinging to the counter for balance. He looked at Buffy. She looked back at him. She hadn't encountered a Brachen demon before, evidently. A pity, because though they looked fearsome enough, Brachen's weren't really much so far as demons went. And right now, she only had the looks to go on.
Rosenberg and Harris, behind her, seemed equally apprehensive.
"Spiky demon," Buffy said, her tone flat. But her composure had returned almost instantly. "That's new."
Then she shrugged, and smiled, and plucked a knife out of her shoulder bag.
"No, no, no!" Cordelia sighed in frustration and threw another book aside onto the growing reject pile, earning herself a disapproving glower from Giles. "It wasn't like any of these you keep showing me! It was... shorter! And less yucky, at least so far as demons go. No slime!"
She started picking up books at random and flicking through them, ignoring the pages Giles had marked for her attention with little scraps of neatly torn paper. Giles was obviously a good deal less than happy as she started whisking through the pages and throwing the books aside. But she was fuelled by her feelings of anger and betrayal, which all twisted up inside her in a knot she didn't entirely understand, and she ignored the watcher.
And it wasn't long before a picture caught her eye. "Hey! I knew those ones you marked were no good. See?" She leaned across the table and thrust the book under his nose. "That one. That's it!"
"Cordelia..." The librarian had that weary, impatient air about him which she knew meant he wasn't taking her seriously. He regarded the picture stonily and opened his mouth to say something probably not too complimentary. Then he hesitated, his irritation dispersing. "Are you sure?"
"Yes! Blue spikes, greeny skin, glowy red eyes - boy, yes! That's exactly it!"
But Giles didn't look happy at having put a name to their demon, though. In fact, he looked positively disturbed. "Cordelia, that's just a Brachen. As demons go, they're relatively harmless, fairly benign. They certainly don't kill people to steal their internal organs. And furthermore, their species cannot as a rule take human form." He frowned at the picture, his forehead creasing with worry.
"Well, newsflash! This one can!"
Giles apparently didn't consider that merited an answer. He was preoccupied, muttering under his breath, thinking almost-aloud in that annoying way he had.
"I suppose he could be some sort of hybrid," he said finally. "It's been known. I seem to recall Brachens are particularly known for it... But that still wouldn't explain the other business, the killing..." He stood up, closing the book with a decisive thud. "Something's not right here. This is not the demon that could have killed those people. We have to find Buffy, and tell her, before anything happens we'd regret..."
Cordelia stared at him, convinced he'd gone nuts. They were talking demons here, after all. "Huh? Like what? Buffy slays the wrong demon? So big deal! They're all demons, right? And demons are bad! She's supposed to slay them! She's a slayer!"
"Not all demons are necessarily evil. As I said, Brachens are really quite benign. Curious to find one around here. I shouldn't think they'd venture anywhere near a Hellmouth, normally, which would be why we haven't seen any before despite the fact they're quite numerous. The Hellmouth draws far too many stronger demonic forces..."
Cordelia barely heard anything beyond the first sentence, which her brain was having trouble processing. "There are good demons?" she asked, in disbelief.
Giles squinted at her. She returned the look challengingly, then continued, a fraction less certain, "...'Cause, you know, I kind of thought the definition of demon was..."
Giles sighed. "Do stop being tiresome, Cordelia."
"I am not being tiresome!" she snapped. "Demons are evil! We've never been led to believe any different, in nearly three years of general demon-related ickiness. Wouldn't it have been a good idea to mention something like this before?"
He blinked at her, then looked away. Uneasily, he fumbled for words. "Well, being on the Hellmouth, which the, um, less unpleasant breeds would be likely to avoid, it has never been an issue... Anyway," he said, suddenly testily. "As I was trying to say, the issue is academic. Didn't you hear what I said? He could be some sort of hybrid." At her blank look he explained, "That means he could be half human, Cordelia."
"Half human? You mean a human and a demon, they... Euww! Yuck!" She thought about it and felt a chill as she realised the implications. Human... She remembered how Doyle had been nice to her, and looked at her in a way that had made her feel good about herself again, even if only for a moment.
She stared at Giles in horror, and asked, in a small voice, "You mean I sicced Buffy onto him and he might not be evil?"
They made it to the scene of the latest killing in record time - and on foot, because it was quicker than taking Giles' car - only to find it alive with flashing emergency lights and noisy people. There was no way they were going to find Buffy or Mr. Doyle anywhere around there.
Cordelia's heart was racing and she felt sick. Had she made a mistake? Was the only guy who'd been nice to her for weeks, demon or no, getting pounded into little soggy pieces by Buffy because she'd jumped to conclusions?
Not that there hadn't been pretty big neon arrows pointing to said conclusions in the form of his being a demon, and kneeling all covered in blood next to a corpse but...
She'd never got anyone killed before. Well, not people, anyway. Things, sure.
She wondered how human you had to be to qualify as people.
They found her car where she'd left it outside the Bronze, and she drove them slowly around the streets of Sunnydale, looking for any sign of Buffy, Doyle, or the trouble which generally seemed to follow either.
They'd almost done a circuit of the area of the bad part of town which stretched for the few streets immediately around the Bronze when they saw a figure hurrying along, hesitating every so often to glance behind him in a way that was definitely shifty.
Even if the shadowy figure hadn't had two distinct little horny points sticking out of the top of his head.
"Demon!" Cordelia said. "A kind of scrawny one, though."
"It's one of Willy's regulars," Giles said. "I've seen him around. Stop the car."
Cordelia pulled over next to the walking demon, who turned around, saw them, and made as if to run for it. But Giles rolled down the window and snagged his arm. "Buffy," he said, managing to dredge up a fair imitation of 'threatening' from somewhere within his librarian persona. Cordelia was impressed. "Where is she?"
"The slayer crashed Willy's. Again. Shouldn't you know, watcher?" The demon pulled away and ran off before Giles could do anything to stop him. But he didn't need to. They knew enough.
Cordelia rammed her foot down hard on the accelerator and kept it there throughout several short streets and sharp corners, ignoring Giles' gibbering pleas for mercy.
Buffy flicked the knife. It spun in the air and she caught it again by the handle. "Well?" she said, challengingly, expectantly. "Don't you want to play?"
Doyle couldn't imagine anything less appealing. With some effort, he returned to his human form, feeling the additional strength of the demon ebb away as he shook off the spikes. It was no matter. He couldn't match a slayer as a demon any more than he could as a human. His only chance of survival was to reason with her. And it would be easier to reason with her if she wasn't seeing him as a monster.
"You've got this all wrong," he said. "I'm no killer. I was just tryin' to save that woman..."
"Yeah, right." Buffy looked unimpressed. "And you're gonna try tell me you're not a demon, now, I suppose."
"Well, no, so my parentage may just be a little murky, I can't deny..." He backed up a step too far and tripped over a loose floorboard. Flailed for a grip on the counter in an attempt to maintain his balance, but his hands slipped in somebody's spilled drink and he crashed to the floor, knocking over a chair.
Buffy was on him in a second, moving like lightning, setting the knife to his throat. He felt the point draw blood unintentionally as he gulped in a shuddering breath.
'Oh, this is even better than just plain gettin' myself killed - gettin' myself killed by the gal I was sent here to help!' Doyle thought giddily, convinced he was about to die. He closed his eyes. He didn't want to watch her as she killed him.
But the knife didn't go in any further. In fact, it drew back a hair.
"All right," he heard Buffy's voice say slowly, sounding a little annoyed, a little disturbed. "This one's not playing fair! They're supposed to fight back. Ideas? - Wil, Xand?"
"Well, they don't usually try to explain themselves." That was Willow Rosenberg's distinctive soft voice. "I think perhaps we should listen? That is, if it's not a trick and he's not suddenly going to go all 'grr-rr' and spiky on us again. Which is possible..."
"And there's the vote from the society against cruelty to the forces of darkness," quipped the irreverent, nervous voice of the Harris kid. "But for us humans here - kill it! You remember, Buffy? Demons, bad!"
Doyle opened his eyes to glare at the youth. Possibly not the wisest of moves. He felt Buffy's tension increase through the sharp metal edge she held against his skin.
Buffy sighed and restrained her reflexes, studying Doyle's face intently while she spoke to the boy. "You never liked Angel either," she said. "And he..." Whatever she saw caused the knife to retreat a few inches. "I almost killed him, too, when I first found out..."
"And that would have been a mistake?" Harris sniped, at the same instant the door burst back on its abused hinges for a second time.
Cordelia Chase flew in like a small localised hurricane, pausing only the briefest instant on the threshold to take in the situation. Doyle watched her eyes widen at the sight of Buffy with the knife and to his astonishment she flung herself between him and the slayer with a cry of alarm.
"It's a mistake!" she shrieked piercingly, facing off against an astonished Buffy. "You can't kill him! He's not evil!"
It would have been impressively dramatic if she hadn't then added, in a very small voice, "...I think."
~~~
Doyle sat nervously in the back of Cordelia's car, sandwiched between the hostile Harris youth and a worryingly introspective slayer who had retained a vice-like grip on his arm throughout the journey thus far.
After Cordelia's entrance - which was closely followed by that of an older guy, evidently Buffy's watcher, who'd explained their reasons for not slaughtering Doyle in more coherent detail - the group had made a rapid decision to relocate somewhere more private. Turned out that Willy 'the snitch' was rather well known in these parts for collecting and imparting information.
Although Doyle considered his situation vastly improved, there was no mistaking that these people didn't trust him in the slightest. And he was pretty much their prisoner, at least until he could convince them he was (quite literally) on the side of the angels.
He couldn't deny the anger and embarrassment he felt at being treated like... well, like a demon.
He was intensely aware of Cordelia Chase's nearness in the close confines of the overloaded car. He could smell her hair. She'd washed it not long since, and the clean, cosmetic scent flooded his not-quite-human senses.
She was driving, but she kept snatching glances at him in the mirror, her lips a thin, worried line and her expression indefinable. After she had leaped in the way of Buffy's knife (an act which had impressed him despite knowing the slayer had at that point already made up her mind not to kill him) she'd turned around and asked, in a small voice, "Are you all right?" Then the watcher had staggered in and everyone had started talking before he had chance to tell her yeah, he'd survive.
He couldn't figure her out. She'd seen him as a demon - not that she'd been too fond of him even before that - and it must have been she who'd set the slayer after him in the first place. So why had she then interrupted to save him with such desperate drama? And why this concern?
When the watcher had told Buffy and the others about their research and how Brachens were not generally dangerous demons, Buffy's response had been a resounding "Huh?"
Doyle figured they didn't encounter much in the way of non-hostile demons living on top of a hellmouth, and that made Cordelia's reaction all the more confusing.
His head ached furiously. In the past few days, he reflected, he'd been beat up by a vampire, a demon and a slayer. Was this some sort of traditional Sunnydale welcome? He'd had enough. This was a really lousy job. How did a guy go about delivering a resignation to the Powers That Be?
Cordelia glanced back at him again and their eyes met in the mirror for an instant before she dragged her gaze away back to the road.
Okay... so maybe there was the odd bright point.
The car pulled up outside the school. Oh, yeah, that was something else. The English watcher guy, he was the school librarian. It was just typical of his actions just lately, Doyle considered sourly, that he'd done thorough checks on all the teachers at Sunnydale High but managed to overlook the non-teaching staff. Looked like this little slayer group used the school library as their base of operations, too. Doyle hadn't even got around to visiting the library yet.
They piled out of the car, Buffy tugging Doyle along by her unyielding grip his arm. "Come on, Mr. Demon." It was not spoken unkindly - more of a weary sigh - but all the same the name cut.
"Half," he snapped, irritably. "I'm not a bloody demon. It's half demon, okay? Half demon, yeah, but half human too."
She frowned, and opened her mouth to say something, then subsided upon receiving a severe glance from her watcher. "Whatever," she muttered.
Cordelia could have done without the embarrassment of having flung herself between Doyle and a Buffy who it turned out had already decided to talk before she slayed. Let alone doing so in front of an audience of the entire gang.
She hadn't meant to be quite so dramatic, but she'd been so afraid of being too late, and upon apparently arriving at the crucial moment, well...
Now, as they walked through the darkened corridors of the school to the library, she found her eyes endlessly drawn back to the man... demon... whatever... who she'd been so desperate to save. Her thoughts were in a confused jumble.
She couldn't account for her reactions back in the alley outside the Bronze or in Willy the Snitch's bar. She didn't understand what had happened to her. She'd been trying so hard to be the old Cordelia again; the person who didn't give a damn. The world had seemed so much easier to live in back then. Selflessness sucked, and only resulted in hideous, yucky puncture wounds that left ugly scars and chafed when you tried to wear jeans.
So why had she gone down a dark, smelly alley, following a trail of blood, to save a person who she'd known was probably dead already? And why had she faced off Buffy to save a demon?
This was all Xander's fault. And Buffy's, too. Cordelia wasn't sure precisely how, but she was certain that it was.
They reached the library and Giles fumbled at the side of the door for the light switch. After a few seconds he flooded the room with bright artificial lighting.
"Nice place," Doyle commented with a hint of tired sarcasm. "So this is the batcave itself. Slayer HQ."
Cordelia turned to him, poised to deliver a biting comment about Buffy and her gang of losers, and stopped, with a sharp, appalled gasp.
She saw him clearly now for the first time that night, away from dingy bars and dark streets, and the glaring lighting in the library mercilessly picked out every bruise and scrape on his pale skin. A particularly nasty bruise darkened the left side of his forehead, and there was blood in his hair above it and blood on his neck from Buffy's knife.
God, this was her responsibility! She'd been the one to send Buffy after him. She felt so small, knowing what she'd caused. She so much wanted to apologise. But in the event she couldn't, not in front of all the others, and when she opened her mouth all she could get out was the caustic observation, "Do you know you've got a footprint on the back of your jacket?"
He cast a sour glance at Buffy, who wouldn't meet his eyes, and grumbled, "I should imagine I've got a footprint on my back."
"Oh!" Cordelia exclaimed, upset. She wrung her hands and couldn't think of anything to say.
Giles coughed pointedly, drawing their attention to him. "What's happened already can't be helped," he said authoritatively. "We have more pressing matters to deal with. We can't be sure yet that our suspicions aren't justified." He frowned towards Doyle. "He is, after all, a demon..."
"Half-demon," Doyle insisted.
"...And even if he is one of the generally less hostile breeds and couldn't have carried out the killings himself that doesn't mean he isn't in league with the killer. We know he was connected with at least two of the murders, and it seems a little unlikely he'd have stumbled on both by accident."
"As a point of fact, the first time was accidental," Doyle interrupted. "Are you gonna give me a chance to talk here, or jus' decide whether or not I'm slayable material without lettin' me get in a word of explanation?"
"What he said," Cordelia backed up, since she definitely owed him one. "Only without the fakey accent."
"Hey..." Doyle started to protest, then evidently thought better of it.
"I think we should listen," Willow said nervously after a moment's uncomfortable silence. "Since he should know whether he's evil or not, really..."
Slayer and watcher exchanged glances. Giles shrugged and inclined his head amenably and Buffy said, "Go ahead." She finally relinquished her grip on Doyle's arm, a little awkwardly, and stepped back a few paces, although she continued to watch him like a hawk.
"Right." Doyle rubbed his arm and sauntered the few steps to the nearest table, which he perched on the edge of with a ragged sigh. "Don't suppose you've got anythin' to drink in this joint? I talk better after... never mind." He seemed more than a little uncomfortable at being the object of all their attention. He looked around them all, as though to examine them each individually. He displayed no reaction in his expression, but all the same Cordelia had the feeling he saw deeper into people than most.
"To begin with, I ain't any evil demon," he said finally. "So get that right outta your skulls. I'm half human an' don't you forget it. In fact, I was sent here to help you people. By the Powers That Be."
They stared at him blankly. He sighed and continued. "The higher powers; whatever you want to call them, it doesn't matter in this instance. Only that they're there, and they're runnin' the show." Cordelia listened with growing incredulity as his explanation unfolded. So this guy was, like, some kind of cosmic messenger...? She'd have expected taller, personally. "Anyway, I get these visions - of people in danger, of trouble that's gonna happen. And, prior warnin' of danger bein' a pretty useful thing for a slayer to have, I was... instructed, if you like, to come here and lend a hand. Also, and in fact primarily, to help this elusive Angel guy, who rumour has it you're fairly friendly with?" He addressed this last part to Buffy alone.
"Willy said you'd been asking questions about Angel," she said, harshly. Cordelia winced. She could have told Doyle not to bring up that subject with Buffy. Angel was a major sore spot at the moment. "What's your business with him?"
"Well, the Powers, they've got plans for him, too," Doyle said, sounding surprised. "There's big things to come, an' all that. Your boy Angel could be a pretty powerful force for good in this world if things go right, y'know?"
Xander made a snide comment under his breath, and Cordelia shot him a black look. She knew Xander didn't like Angel, but at the moment she was much more amenable towards Mr Cuddly Vampire than to Idiot Boy Harris, whether he had a major killing spree in his recent past or not. Plus she wanted to hear what Doyle had to say.
"'Course," Doyle continued, "I was hardly expectin' to have all this trouble over the demonic killings complicatin' my task all the more. That dead woman, the other night, I happened across by pure chance. Then this evenin' I got hit with a vision of the next victim. Went out because I thought I might try to stop it from happenin' - big mistake." He absently put a hand to his bruised and cut forehead, exploring the wound with his fingers, and winced.
Cordelia was somewhat relieved at the implication that not all the damage was her fault.
"I reckon the only reason I'm still alive right now is because I'm not human enough for this creature to cannibalise." You could tell that really stung him, too, Cordelia was surprised to note - even though it had saved his life.
"Okay," Buffy said. She sounded sceptical and concerned all at once. And concerned she should be, facing the possibility that she'd beat the crap out of one of the good guys, Cordelia thought tritely. "All this stuff about Powers That Be aside for the moment, why didn't you just come to us? Why all the skulking around?"
Doyle shifted uncomfortably. "Well, these visions I get, as well as hurtin' like the very devil, they ain't too specific. An' I'm supposed to be findin' Angel really - I know what he looks like, an' a few things about his recent activities which give a guy pause for thought. But I haven't seen him around any, for all I've been lookin'. Guess that's maybe somethin' to do with the business between the two of you. When a vampire wants to hide I suppose he really knows how." He shrugged and managed half a smile. "I didn't have any names or faces, other than his. I looked... I thought I'd found. I was pretty sure you were the slayer. But then, with the killings... well I... I had to consider another possibility. I have to admit, for a while I wasn't certain you weren't the demon yourself."
Buffy gawped and Cordelia found herself grinning at the turnabout.
"Well, your permanent record makes pretty demonic reading," Doyle added. "And you were at the crime scene too, that night."
"I... M-me... demon...? Giles!" Buffy spluttered, clearly aggrieved.
But Giles was nodding slowly. "A slayer is hardly a normal human, Buffy, really. He probably sensed that. I've heard Brachen demons do have an instinct for the magical and supernatural...?" He glanced at Doyle, academic interest alive in his eyes, and received a reluctant nod in confirmation. "It isn't an unreasonable assumption, all things considered."
"Hunh!" Buffy whined. And changed the subject. "So, Doyle, these Powers That Be you claim sent you - why didn't they give us any warning you were coming? I mean how hard is it to just drop us a note - 'Hi, guys, demonic messenger on the way, don't kill him' would do." Doyle let out a short bark of laughter at that. "And why make your visions so vague in the first place? Its almost as if they wanted us to half kill each other!"
"Yeah, and why do they feel we need more demons here anyway?" Xander added.
Doyle ignored him. "Maybe they did want things to happen this way. Maybe they wanted to make a point. Who knows? Man, they're the higher powers! I'm just a messenger, I don't claim to understand how they tick." He paused and looked around at them all, rather confrontationally. "Now have you decided whether you wanna believe me or stake me, 'cause if you're not gonna kill me I'm after goin' to find somethin' to drink. Not to mention some aspirin. So make up your minds." He rubbed his head pointedly.
"Nobody's killing anyone," Cordelia snapped, glowering around the group fiercely. But they all seemed to have reached the same conclusion themselves without her needing to bust any eardrums over it.
"You got that right," Buffy said shakily. "No slayage." She cast Doyle a somewhat besieged look but didn't say anything, although it looked for a moment as though she intended to. Cordelia thought she was probably still having trouble absorbing the concept of nice friendly demons. It had to screw with your head a bit when you'd been intent on the slaying of all demons as evil for the last few years. What if there had been a couple in there that weren't evil? In the middle of a fight you didn't exactly listen to explanations from monsters. Yeah, Buffy was probably feeling pretty unsteady right now. And there had to still be at least a spark of distrust there, too.
Giles nodded slowly. "I believe you're sincere. Although the idea that you were actually sent by... other forces is, admittedly, a little hard to take in. It makes me suspect I'm lucky to only have to answer to the Watchers' Council."
"Man, you are so right." Doyle rolled his eyes.
"There should be some aspirin around here somewhere," Cordelia said, eager to try make amends. She looked around for the emergency box.
Giles cleared his throat awkwardly and volunteered, much to everyone's astonishment, "I have some scotch. I'll get it. And, um, Doyle, you had better tell us about this creature... you say you actually encountered it?"
Doyle nodded. He hopped off his perch on the table to join the watcher as he produced a bottle from a desk drawer. He clapped a grateful hand to Giles' shoulder and mumbled a muted, "Thanks, man," as he took the bottle, pulled off the lid and tossed back a good quarter of the contents in one go.
"That's good stuff," he said, looking at Giles with a new respect. "Anyway, this creature..."
Giles kicked into gear with his librarian-man act and started spouting off demon lore or whatever. Doyle, at least, seemed to have no trouble following it, although everyone else was left way behind.
Everyone else was still digesting the news Giles had alcohol on the premises. Willow and Buffy looked stunned. Cordelia kept her mouth firmly shut, determined not to look as though she was catching flies, and concentrated on rooting through the first aid kit for the aspirin.
Giles caught sight of the expressions and sighed and scowled and generally looked as though he was wishing he'd never shared the information.
"Aspirin!" Cordelia said brightly, snatching up the container. Mission successful! She fished a couple of tablets from it and handed them to Doyle, who washed them down with another gulp of the scotch.
Feeling pleasantly as though she'd made up for her earlier mistakes by now, she smiled around at everyone brightly, challengingly.
She'd been right, damn it. Doyle wasn't evil. She should have trusted her first impression and not let herself be affected by their doubt.
It was only then that she realised what she'd let them do to her yet again. So much for her intentions to cut clear of their stupid monster club operation. Here she was, back in with the group. Xander. Willow. Buffy. Whom she hated.
She decided, determinedly, that she was going to walk out of the door now, and not come back. But her feet wouldn't move, seeming glued firmly to the floor.
She stared around the group, her gaze settling finally on Doyle.
Why couldn't she leave?
Doyle was relieved that the situation seemed to have improved. Okay, so the slayer and her people were still tip-toeing around him as though he was about to sprout horns - spikes? - and start breathing fire, and they kept casting distrustful, guilty glances in his direction... but at least they'd stopped discussing the option of putting an end to his sorry life.
Cordelia's efforts to back him up seemed a definite plus; she'd made it bewilderingly clear that she was on his side ever since she'd burst through the door of the bar. He appreciated it, even though he wasn't at all sure what was going on there. And the Watcher, Rupert Giles, seemed a decent sort. Certainly he kept a decent whisky, which in Doyle's book was much the same thing.
The rest of them... well, he felt a little lost in the midst of all that youth and energy. He had to remind himself he wasn't all that old; he just sometimes felt it.
The set-up here mystified him. Buffy was the slayer and okay, tough deal for a girl so young, but Slayers were built for tough... the others, Willow and Xander, and Cordelia too, they were little more than kids. Kids fighting evil forces that would send him running any day of the week. He felt all the more ashamed of his past cowardice in the face of that.
Buffy was a spry little thing, that was for sure. He winced at the memory of the strength behind that kick. He was glad they weren't going to be enemies - but he wasn't sure yet if, after what had happened and almost happened, they could ever be friends.
Not that he blamed her; they'd each been blinded by their suspicions of the other. Their roles could have been reversed - okay, only in some other reality where he was built like Arnold Schwartznegger, but in theory anyway. And she wasn't a senseless killer. He hadn't failed to notice she'd stopped before Cordelia's dramatic entrance, though she'd had precious little to go on in taking him on trust.
He pulled his attention back to Giles as he became aware the guy had asked him something a couple of times. "Huh? Sorry, man. Bit distracted." Perhaps he shouldn't have drunk down quite so much of the scotch quite so quickly after all.
"This one?" Giles held a book open at an illustration drawn in a brownish-red substance which looked like some form of demon blood. Doyle had been describing the creature he'd seen to the watcher in as much detail as he could, given that his recollections were mainly of big teeth and unreasonably large claws and a general impression of immense size. But he must have described it better than he'd thought, or else Giles was very good at his job, or both, because now he was looking at the creature again.
Doyle swallowed, remembering the encounter, and shuddered slightly, involuntarily, as he said, "Yeah, that's it. That's it exactly."
"What?" Buffy demanded, all aggressive excitement. "What is it?"
Giles squinted at small, over-dramatic handwriting in some language Doyle didn't recognise. "Greltock demon," he said.
"Gee, that explains everything."
The watcher coughed and continued. "Although technically it isn't actually a demon. It's a product of malign magic, a creation of some particularly dark spellcasting."
Well, that would explain why Doyle hadn't had a clue what it was. He was unfortunately quite familiar - firsthand, no less - with the majority of common demon types that populated the underbelly of the human world. This thing was something entirely different...
"So someone created this?" Buffy asked. She paused, and re-thought, and re-phrased. "A person... a human created this."
Giles fumbled for a moment, then nodded wordlessly.
"But why?" Cordelia demanded, piping up suddenly from the sullen quiet she'd fallen into for much of the last half hour. "Aren't there enough one-hundred-percent naturally grown demons in Sunnydale? Why the necessity to make your own?!"
"Designer demons?" Xander suggested.
"Hmm, actually not an inaccurate assessment." Giles frowned at Xander. He seemed, Doyle had noticed, to have a special disapproving expression he reserved almost exclusively for the youth. "Though, as always, you mask your insight in ridiculously flippant terminology. These creatures are often created with particular purposes and tasks to perform. Usually unpleasant. And they are under the total control of whomsoever created them."
"So someone's having this not-demon collect body parts?" Willow asked, appalled. "Or, um, body organs rather? Someone human? Yuck! Why would someone do that? What's the point? And again, yuck!"
"More to the point, who are they, where are they, and how do we deal with them?" Buffy said. "Especially if they're human. I can't kill a human!"
"I'm sensin' some double standards here," Doyle pointed out, a mite irritably.
"No, she's right, she can't," Giles said, equally irritably.
Doyle had barely begun to reply when the vision hit him and drove all thoughts about anything else running screaming from his brain.
~~~
When Doyle suddenly keeled over clutching his head, Cordelia's initial impulse was panic, thinking it some sort of life-threatening delayed reaction. His head injury certainly looked yucky enough.
But, watching him grind the heel of his hand into his forehead in what looked like terrible agony and twitching and shuddering as though he were having some sort of fit, she remembered those visions he'd mentioned.
Hurt like the very devil, he'd said.
Huh. No kidding.
It only lasted for a few seconds, but she could tell even that was more than too much. She wondered what he'd done to deserve this, and it occurred to her that in all his lengthy explanations about the Powers That Be and his own role working for them, he'd never once mentioned why.
When he straightened, cautiously lowering his hands and raising his head to face them all, he looked pale, shaky and ill. He'd started the cut on his head bleeding again and red was painted over his hands.
So that's a vision, Cordelia thought. Didn't look like much fun for Doyle. Boy, was she glad the Powers That Be hadn't chosen to bestow that particular gift upon her. As gifts went, she'd rather have a new pair of shoes, thanks.
"Are you okay?" she blurted, without thinking. She heard the concern ring out in her voice and uneasily registered the curious glances she received from the others. She added quickly, "'Cause, you know, you look like hell."
She regretted it instantly when she saw the puzzled, hurt look enter his eyes at her sharpness. God, she was really getting good at hurting this guy.
He blinked at her, obviously able to think of no reply. By the time she'd scraped together the courage to voice an apology in spite of all those present, he'd turned to Giles.
"Bottle?" he rasped, almost a plea. Giles handed it over wordlessly. Awkardly, his hands shaking, Doyle poured a good deal more of the contents down his throat.
He sure could absorb the booze, she observed critically. Like he'd had a whole lot of practice.
"That was one of those vision things, right?" Buffy asked. "So... spill. What did you see?"
Doyle lowered the bottle, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand... then changed his mind and took another long draw before he answered. "It's gonna kill again, people. I just got it fed direct to my brain in glorious Technicolor and state of the art surround sound." He looked sickened. He glanced around the others. "In front of the school, not far from the main entrance. We gotta go... there's a girl, just a kid..."
"Right." Buffy was already on her way to the weapons' cabinet. "Giles, does it say anything about the best way to kill these Greltock things?"
The watcher coughed uncomfortably, and ventured, in flustered tones, "I believe your usual term is 'slice and dice', but I doubt it's going to be so simple or easy as that makes it sound. From what I've read, these creatures can be extremely large and vicious."
"You can believe that," Doyle said heavily. "Might take more than even you got, slayer."
"Okay. Back-up, then." Buffy was unfazed. "Doyle? You've fought this thing before..." she looked to him expectantly.
Doyle spluttered and choked on another mouthful of whisky and, after a brief furtive look around the group, belatedly discovered a backbone and nodded slowly. Cordelia didn't miss his quick glance in her direction, presumably to see if she'd noticed his hesitation. She pretended to be engrossed in the pattern of tiles on the floor, faintly disturbed by the idea of Doyle being dragged off to face the creature again.
"Guys," Buffy began, turning to the rest of them.
"Sure," Xander chirped up instantly, before she could finish, eager to play Mr White Knight Protector as usual. Cordelia glared daggers at him.
Buffy looked dubious, then reluctantly acceptant, "Okay, Xand, you're with me and, um, Doyle here. The rest of you... I guess you better start looking for some magical solution to this thing, if it's as mean as all that, just in case. We'll go do what we can to stop it picking up another order from the Sunnydale High menu."
Giles nodded. "We'll join you as soon as we find anything to help. Willow, we'll need..." He started rattling off titles as Willow went to a shelf and started pulling down the big old smelly volumes.
Buffy was handing out weapons to Xander and Doyle, the three of them engrossed in a debate about who'd best wield what. Doyle shot her a nervous, rather besieged smile over his shoulder.
He might not want to go, but at least he'd been asked. Well... okay, Buffy-bludgeoned into it was really more accurate. But still... he had a place, a purpose. Cordelia felt herself being ignored again, and her irritation arose anew.
"Hey," she snapped. "Have I suddenly become all invisible-girl around here? Don't I even get asked?"
"Why?" Xander sniped back at her, hefting an axe and nearly cutting off his own ear. "Are you feeling sudden urges to come hunt some monsters? 'Cause unless you plan on screaming them to death, I'm not seeing any part of that plan that makes sense."
"And like Snack-Fetching-Boy is going to be a whole lot of use? No, wait, I've thought up a good plan where you're plenty useful! Hey, guys, we can hack the monster to pieces while it's distracted snacking on Xander's head!"
"Cordy, he's right. It's dangerous. Besides, do you really want demon slime on that dress?"
She stared at Buffy's exasperated, mildly amused face for a long moment, trying to figure out at exactly what point she'd made any reference to actually wanting to go with them. She knew she hadn't... but they'd interpreted her objections that way. And they didn't want her.
Well, she'd be damned if she was going to back down now.
"Dangerous? More dangerous for me than him?" She pointed at Xander. "Or him?" The bemused Doyle. "Who, by the way, looks totally cruddy." She winced as she realised she'd done it again, but continued anyway. "How useless do you think I am?"
Buffy hesitated a moment before not answering that one. Cordelia's fists clenched, nails digging into her palms. "I just don't think it's a good idea..." the slayer began.
She had to agree on that one, angry with herself and the world in general. The last thing she wanted was more carnage and mayhem to round off the evening. But she'd said too much to back down now, and... well, Doyle was going, and he looked as though he'd had a truck fall on him...
"Back off, Little Miss Slayer. After everything that's happened tonight, I am so not in the mood to argue. I'm coming with. Pass me that crossbow, Xander."
Xander picked up the weapon from the shelf but hesitated, trapped between her and Buffy's glares.
"Guys," Doyle interrupted, stepping between them. "This is not a good time for debate! Big nasty monster, remember? Helpless victim, not getting any safer?"
Cordelia smiled broadly at him. She snatched the crossbow out of Xander's hands and directed a withering glare at Buffy.
The last thing Doyle had expected to be doing that evening was walking through the corridors of Sunnydale High clutching in one trembling hand a bloody great knife about a hair's breadth short of a sword.
And particularly not alongside Cordelia Chase, who was slipping and cursing in her ruined shoes, and carrying a crossbow in her own hands.
Cordelia kept glaring daggers at Buffy and Xander, who walked ahead of them. The kid was nervous, the Slayer relaxed and businesslike - which was unsettling. A girl of just seventeen, dealing with these kinds of horrors... Doyle could imagine how having a friend like her would leave a guy eternally feeling like he had something to prove. Had to be difficult to impress a girl when the lady in question was the closest thing to a superhero.
Cordelia, on the other hand... he wasn't sure what she was doing there at all. It was obvious her presence also confused the hell out of the other two.
He felt rather guilty knowing it was down to him that she was there and in the line of fire, though he suspected she'd probably have won the argument inevitably anyway if he hadn't intervened. She seemed the persistent type, to put it mildly. He determined to watch out for her; he didn't want the guilt of another death on his hands.
Heck, not that he wouldn't have watched out for her anyway. Fact, the problem was trying to drag his eyes away from her when she was wearing that dress.
He didn't want to be there, and the very thought of attempting to take on that creature again, even with a slayer at his side, made him shudder. But Buffy had been right to ask him to come. Though he might not be as strong as a slayer, or even a vampire, he had more chance of making a difference against this thing than most, with the demon strength he seldom utilised.
He'd held it off for a couple of minutes, before, after all.
And, as she'd said, he had the advantage, if it could be called that, of being the only one of them who had tackled the creature before.
He desperately hoped Giles and Willow came up with the goods quick.
They had not gone far beyond the main entrance of the school before he began to feel extremely uneasy, seeing things around him he recognised from his vision. And there was something else.
He stopped them with a edgy whisper of, "It's here."
"I don't see anything," Buffy said.
"I can smell something." He hesitated for a moment, then reminded himself severely of the girl he'd seen, whose life was at stake. "'Scuse me," he muttered and, uncomfortably aware of his audience, he shifted into demon form and sniffed the air...
Shifted back again almost instantly, even as the sound of a gasp and a quick movement from Cordelia cut deep. "That way." He pointed.
The demon itself, constructed from magic, didn't smell of anything beyond the slight but distinct tang of sorcery. Its last victim's blood was stronger, though, still lingering despite the earlier rain. Thankfully, it smelled neither fresh enough nor strong enough to belong to a more recent victim.
Cordelia, having backed away from him when he'd transformed, determinedly returned to his side. He felt her fingers brush his arm in a silent, awkward apology, then retreat back to the crossbow she held in readiness.
Even her slight touch turned his legs weak and banished the pain he'd felt when she flinched away. But in the face of the upcoming fight, he told himself sternly to ignore it, and that dress she wore, and set his brain back onto more practical tracks. Like the very immediate danger of them both being torn to shreds by the Greltock demon.
"Wow," Xander was saying, sounding both unnerved and reluctantly impressed. "So you've got, like, super demon senses?"
"I can smell stuff," Doyle allowed grudgingly.
"Say, Buffy's been branching into that too..."
Buffy growled something under her breath that sounded none too pleasant, and led the way cautiously in the direction Doyle had pointed out, sword held ready in her hand.
The school grounds were ominous in the dark. Low walls, steps, lawns and bushes all developed threatening shadows in a variety of demonic shapes. Doyle wished he could switch his imagination off, startled at the sight of a darker patch on the grass which upon second glance looked distinctly and embarrassingly shrub-shaped.
An instant later, while he was still collecting his balance from the scare and the subsequent embarrassment, a shadow burst out from a bush and ran across the grass, emanating a shrill noise.
Laughter, he realised as his heart started to beat again. The shadow was laughing, a delighted, ringing sound echoing oddly in the night air.
It was a girl of maybe twelve or thirteen, out too late and courting her parent's anger.
He'd seen her somewhere before.
He'd heard before, too, that child's cheerful laughter... in his vision. And he'd heard, and expected, the barking dog that followed after her a moment later. It circled the girl, leaping madly while she teased it with an empty raised hand.
He knew what was going to happen next...
"Look out!" he yelled. He was already running out over the grass towards her, aware of Buffy following close behind, when a much larger shape exploded from the bushes across the yard, sending displaced leaves scattering into the air in clumps; he felt them raining down onto his back as he tried to move faster.
Oblivious to their presence, the creature was headed straight for the girl.
"You fought that? Alone?" Buffy demanded breathlessly, glancing back as she overtook him.
Stronger and faster than he was, she intercepted the creature with her sword raised high, targeting its featureless wall of a face.
Doyle left her to it and lunged for the girl. He gripped her shoulders and hustled her away from the fight and out of harm's reach, ignoring her terrified screams and struggles.
The creature, seeing its intended prey about to escape, swung away from Buffy. Doyle placed himself between the girl and the creature, pushed her onwards in the direction of houses and safety and snapped, "Run! Run home now!"
Even as he spoke he was staggered as something hit his shoulder from behind. He heard and felt the arm of his jacket rip as he fell forward, landing on hands and knees. The girl, her eyes widely staring beyond him, shrieked, stumbled, picked herself up - and finally fled, the dog going noisily insane dashing around her feet.
She disappeared into the dark.
Still reeling from the glancing blow, Doyle pushed off from the ground and spun around.
He found himself practically nose to nose with the creature. It loomed over him, claws poised. His mind seemed to freeze... but his hand, the forgotten knife still clutched in it, moved forward apparently without instruction from his brain and buried the length of steel up to the hilt in the creature's body.
It shrieked and hit him. The damage those clubs it had for limbs could do hadn't lessened since their last encounter.
The next he knew, he was lying dazedly on the ground several metres away, spitting out new-mown grass.
One moment they were just walking through the dark. The next moment the quiet of the night had exploded and everything seemed to be happening in the same instant.
Buffy and Doyle were suddenly several feet away and engaged in some kind of twisted race against a thing which... well, Cordelia had seen a lot, but even so this creature was well within the top ten on the yuck list.
She couldn't tear her eyes away or make herself move to help as she saw them split off - seeming as though they'd been working together for much longer than an hour or so - Buffy to the monster and Doyle to the girl.
Xander, likewise, had hesitated, but he predictably shook himself into action when the creature thwacked Buffy across the face.
Cordelia's hands tightened on the crossbow, flinching now automatically from his touch as he gripped her shoulder. But he only said, urgently, indicating the weapon she held, "Come on, Cordy, you wanted to be here - cover us!"
With that he dashed into the action, axe raised, to fight at Buffy's side. Combat Xander, Cordelia thought with sour sarcasm, lifting the crossbow. But she was afraid for him all the same, despite everything.
Habit, she supposed.
Buffy, ignoring the mess daubed across her forehead, save for the necessity of dragging an occasional distracted hand across it to keep the blood from her eyes, appeared to be trying to keep the creature occupied while Doyle got the little girl away.
But the creature seemed to have figured out the plan. It was trying to get around her, to reach Doyle and the frightened girl.
Cordelia lifted the crossbow, aimed and fired at the creature's head. Dead on target, but then it was difficult to miss when the target was about the size of a juggernaut. The bolt sank into its skull.
The demon didn't even flinch.
Irritably, she struggled to reload, and fired again. She might as well be throwing pebbles at it for all the reaction that got.
She was aware with a small relief of the child, screaming and crying as she ran off into the relative safety of the night. She'd recognised the girl as the janitor's daughter, and she lived close by. She should be safe enough.
Cordelia watched helplessly as the monster knocked Xander sprawling, flattened Buffy with a sweep of its arm, and turned on Doyle.
Then it's bulk blocked her line of sight, and she couldn't see what was happening.
The crossbow was useless. If she wanted to help Doyle and the others, she'd have to intervene more directly.
'Oh, great. I am gonna get so killed. All covered in blood and with messy hair, too...'
But before she'd gone more than a couple of steps, Buffy was back on her feet and back in the action.
Cordelia breathed a sigh of relief and raised the crossbow again, a little annoyed with herself for the concern she felt because Xander hadn't gotten up yet.
And neither had Doyle.
Somehow, the knife was still in his hand. Somehow, he'd managed not to skewer himself with it on his involuntary flight.
However, it was covered in a sludgy demonic blood substance which ran down the hilt to coat his palm. Where it burned. He threw the knife aside and wiped his hand frantically on the grass.
Buffy was hacking at the creature with her sword, a dark line across her forehead indication that she hadn't escaped unscathed. He couldn't see Xander. Cordelia was standing a safe distance away trying to reload the crossbow. A couple of bolts already sticking out of the back of the demon's head detailed the success that weapon was having.
Doyle looked at the length of the knife lying on the grass, coated with goo. It had sank into the creature, all the way to the handle, and that hadn't slowed the Greltock demon down in the slightest either.
'We are so screwed.'
Buffy hacked with the sword. It sounded like somebody chopping wood. His brain kicked back into gear.
"Watch out for its blood!" he half-yelled, half-groaned, trying to get his feet under him. His hand stung.
"Thanks," Buffy grunted, and backed off a step to hack from a safer splatter-distance.
Doyle dizzily regained his feet and almost fell over again. The knife lying on the grass was the only weapon he had, but the skin on his palm had already begun to peel and bleed. He flexed his fingers experimentally and leaned down, reaching again for the coated handle. Hesitated almost touching it.
Another crossbow bolt zinged through the air to embed itself in the creature's back where, by rights, a spine ought to be.
"This is useless!" Cordelia snapped, throwing down the crossbow. "Oh my God! Buffy!"
He looked up in time to see the slayer hit the wall of the school with a deadly-looking impact, and fall several metres to the ground below. Her huddled shape lay unmoving where it landed.
'Oh, shit.' He looked around for that Xander kid, for Giles and Willow running to the rescue with their spells. For anyone else. But there was nobody except himself, and Cordelia, and the creature.
His hand closed around the knife, and he winced as the burning started up again instantly.
He spotted Xander now. The boy was sprawled motionless almost at the creature's feet and the demon had bent over him. It held its claws poised to cut.
"Get off him, you ugly, creepy, disgusting thing!" Cordelia screamed, with a fury and fear for the boy's life which was rather surprising, given the abrasive nature of their relationship. An object which looked a lot like a shoe bounced off the creature's head, effectively drawing its attention away from Xander. And drawing Doyle's astonished attention, too, to where Cordelia was hopping up and down on one leg, trying to pull off her other shoe.
She was way too close to the demon for Doyle's liking, taunting it, trying to lure it away from Xander.
"Oh, shit," Doyle groaned.
No choices left, for the second time that day he shifted into his demon form and ran at the creature. The knife ate steadily into his hand, Brachen demon skin making no difference at all to the corrosive effect.
He managed to duck the first swipe of its clawed hand and embed the knife into what passed for its elbow joint. But it caught there, wedged between bone when the creature bent the limb, and he was forced to let go of it. At least he'd weakened that arm. It dragged visibly now, hanging virtually useless.
Whatever help that would be when this thing was stronger even than a slayer and had wiped the floor with him once already that night.
Out of the corner of his eye, Doyle thought he saw Xander stir slightly. He backed off, trying to bring the creature after him away from the youth... give Xander room to get up and get his butt - not to mention that bloody great axe - over to lend a hand before Doyle ended up dead.
Cordelia had the second shoe in her hand and seemed to be wondering what to do with it, apparently torn between helping him and going to see what had happened to Buffy.
Doyle prayed she'd stay well clear. If he couldn't stop the creature, and the slayer herself couldn't, no normal teenage girl would stand a chance, especially one still recovering from an injury which had near killed her.
He risked a glance back at Xander and found that, to his dismay, the youth was once again motionless, and not in any position to offer assistance.
The creature's arm fell without warning while his attention was distracted, slamming him to the ground before he could even attempt to defend himself. He saw the other shoe bounce off its head, heard Cordelia shouting again, trying to repeat her earlier distraction, but it didn't work. The creature was oblivious to her, its attention focused upon him...
'Must remember me from earlier,' Doyle thought.
"Cordelia!" he choked out. "Get the hell out of here! Get back to Giles! Go!"
She didn't go. She'd started edging around the creature, towards where Xander lay. Doyle felt sick with fear for her.
Not to mention the fear he felt for his own life.
The creature towered above him raised its arm to strike down a killing blow. Behind it, he could see Cordelia picking up the axe Xander had dropped.
The youth groaned and stirred. Blood caked one side of his face but he managed to choke out, "Cordy - no...!"
Cordelia favoured him with a distasteful glare. Unsteady in her bare feet, she hefted the axe, swung it around in an impressive arc, and embedded it in the creature's back just as the claws descended and Doyle thought he was dead for sure.
As the axe left her hands, the creature spun and knocked her aside.
The demon bucked, trying to dislodge the blade from its back. Doyle narrowly avoided a couple of random sweeps of its limbs and ducked under its reach to crawl to Cordelia's side.
She had a hand pressed over the old injury in her stomach and her face was rather white, but she shook her head in response to the question in his eyes. She was okay.
A shadow fell across them. Doyle looked up.
The creature, looking pissed as anything, loomed over them both. It was obviously damaged bad, but it still had more than enough strength to finish them... and he had nothing left to fight it with.
"Hey, didn't anyone ever tell you to play nice with the other kids?" a chirpy voice quipped.
The relief was overwhelming. Doyle followed the direction of the voice, knowing what he'd see.
Buffy stood there, in a fighting stance, the sword in her hands.
They picked themselves up while Buffy finished off the Greltock demon.
Doyle had wrapped his right hand in a strip torn from his nasty shirt (the T-shirt he wore underneath managed, unbelievably, to be even nastier), but Cordelia could see no other indication of serious injury. The cut on Xander's head looked awful, though, and she wouldn't be surprised if he was concussed.
She watched as Buffy, her arms carefully wrapped in the rest of Doyle's torn shirt, finished cutting the creature up into bite-sized demon nuggets. Doyle was looking rather ill at the sight, and she remembered he had almost been on the wrong side of Buffy's slayage only a few hours earlier.
The thought made her shudder. An entirely more normal reaction, she supposed, than indifference to the sight of any creature being sliced and diced.
She'd seen way too much, the past few years.
She sighed, and winced at the twinge from her stomach. Her attention was drawn to a movement on the edge of her vision. She turned and saw Giles and Willow hurrying over, Giles holding an enormous, ancient-looking book in his arms.
"I see you managed to kill it without our input," the watcher said, eyeing the carnage of the battle scene. He rested a hand on Buffy's shoulder, a gesture of restrained affection and obvious relief. "Well done. From what I've read, these things are hideously difficult to take down."
"You can say that again," Buffy sighed. "But... the help was indispensable." She cast a grateful glance to encompass the others and stuck the sword into the ground in a final decisive motion. Then with a soft, exhausted sigh she allowed the tension to leave the set of her shoulders. Xander rested a worried hand on her arm, and she patted it affectionately before shrugging it off.
"We've still got spells to say over this thing, though," Willow put in with her own weird brand of enthusiasm for all things magic and yuck. "Otherwise it'll just regenerate itself into an all-new nasty murdering demon. Plus there's the spell to find out who's been controlling it," she added. "Yep, spells-r-us."
Cordelia wished she wouldn't sound so cheerful.
Her stomach injury ached with an increasing fury. She pressed her arm to it, suppressing a groan, promising it she'd go home and take some painkillers very soon.
The others seemed busy with the spells, so she looked around for her shoes. She spotted one fairly close by and retrieved it, then hopped around the grass looking for the other. Only to find it in a pile of demon-gick, half eaten up by the corrosive stuff.
With a sigh, she left it where it was and took off the other one again, tossing it resignedly over to join its fellow. She'd just have to get some more. It was only money, after all, and there was always more money.
She glanced at the little cluster centered around Giles and Willow. Only Doyle stood aside, looking as out of place as she felt. She hesitantly approached him. "You okay?" she asked.
"Yeah. You?"
"Only my poor shoes damaged beyond repair... ow!" The pain, rising in a swift crescendo, slammed through her suddenly, taking all the strength from her legs. She was only vaguely aware of Doyle's hands catching her and preventing her from falling.
Doyle swore. "Oh, hell!"
The arm she'd been holding over her stomach had fallen limply aside, and she could dimly see now the blood coating the front of her dress. And evidently so could he.
She realised Xander had appeared from somewhere and was helping to support her weight, but she didn't have the strength to pull away, and her attempt to protest just came out as a muffled squeak.
"Giles! Giles, man! We've got to get to the hospital right now!" Doyle yelled, sounding oddly far away, though the panic was still loud in his voice.
"Yes, we do. Principal Snyder's not going to like this... oh." she heard Giles begin, also sounding a long way off, and sounding too like he was in the wrong conversation. "Oh, good grief, yes. Willow, will you..."
The rest blurred into darkness.
~~~
Doyle stood in the waiting area of Sunnydale's hospital, trying to ignore the exhaustion and pain which seemed to have settled deep in his bones. It had been a very long night. Well... technically it was day, now. He was supposed to be starting classes in just over an hour. Not that that's gonna happen, not today nor any other day again. The PTB can just think up a new plan.
Nearby, Xander leaned against a vending machine, looking pale, a bandage around his head. Doyle had expected he'd be leaving once Buffy returned, but it appeared he too was determined to wait it out until they knew what was happening with Cordelia. Buffy herself was slumped against the wall. She'd only been back a few minutes, and she hadn't said much. Doyle grasped that the matter was dealt with, and she didn't want to talk about it.
Willow had reluctantly stayed behind to lock up the library, and as for Giles... he had gone in search of a doctor to corner to find out if there was any news yet.
'And what I ought to be doing', Doyle thought, 'Is going to see Angel. It's not like it hasn't taken me long enough to find him.' But he couldn't leave, not until he knew.
"What is it with the teachers at our school anyway?" Xander grouched, breaking the silence, with a pointed glower in Doyle's direction. "If they're not demons or psychos or giant bugs, they're at the top of the menu for..." Before Doyle could interrupt to say he at least wasn't planning on staying around at Hellmouth High any longer, even if he didn't get sacked anyway, the youth's eyes fixed on something and his expression grew abruptly grim, "Okay, shutting up now."
Wondering why he'd halted, Doyle followed his gaze down the corridor.
Giles was returning.
He nervously tracked the Watcher's progress towards them; wasn't sure now that he wanted to hear what the guy had found out, despite the anxiety of the hours spent waiting for news.
If Cordelia was hurt badly... he'd been the one responsible for her being there with them.
It would be his fault.
Although, without her, they'd probably all be dead now. They'd needed everyone who'd been there, in the end, to defeat the Greltok demon.
Giles halted a few feet away, cleared his throat apologetically, and answered the question hanging over them, "The doctors say she'll be all right. She's pulled the stitches and re-opened the injury. She's done it before, apparently, but this time was worse. Anyway, they've sewn it up again, and the anaesthetic should wear off before long. They're moving her to a private ward and, since her parents appear to be terminally unavailable, you'll be able to see her in a short while."
Doyle let out the breath he seemed to have been holding for about an hour.
Giles turned to Buffy, his manner grave as if he didn't want to know the answers either.
"Don't worry, I didn't kill him. He's still alive," Buffy said, before the watcher could even ask what had happened. She hesitated, looking disturbed. "Not... not for long, though. He's over two hundred years old... and without the creature to gather the spell components - human parts - to extend his life..." She shrugged.
After a moment's uncomfortable silence, she continued, "I didn't need to do anything but tell him the creature was dead. He practically had a heart attack right there in front of me. He's not going to last long. Who'd have thought it? Mr Matthews was like a whole Sunnydale High tradition in himself. He's been teaching at school for, like, forever."
"Yeah, literally," Xander snickered.
Though Buffy was obviously disturbed, Doyle couldn't say he felt any pity for the guy. The memory of the young woman he'd failed to save, torn open by the creature while she was still alive, was far too raw and vivid. Matthews had got what he deserved, and he for one was glad the bastard had been stopped.
But he was also glad Buffy hadn't had to kill him. Asking a seventeen-year-old girl to fight demons was one thing. This... was something else. And evidently he wasn't the only one who thought so.
"Well," Giles said, his relief clear. "Now I know that's done, I'd better attempt once again to get in touch with Cordelia's parents to let them know she's in hospital."
Xander frowned at the watcher's retreating tweed-wrapped back. "Huh. Go for lost causes much? Good luck with that one," he muttered. "I'll guess I'll go find out what the doctors have done with Cordy."
As they trailed after the youth, Buffy fell into step beside Doyle. Her expression was nervous and intense, as though there was some heavy thinking going on behind it. After a moment, she ventured, "I wanted to apologise, for, uh, almost slaying you." She laughed uncomfortably. "Boy, that sounds stupid, huh? - 'Gee, I'm sorry I nearly killed you. My bad, won't do it again....'"
"No harm done," Doyle said, uneasily trying to make light of it. His mind still flinched from the thought of what had almost happened, but it hadn't been her fault.
"It nearly didn't go that way." Their steps had slowed to the point where they barely progressed at all. Xander forged on ahead, oblivious, down the long white corridor. "Anyway, all that aside, I might have died there tonight if you hadn't been there - though I have this worrying feeling I could say the same about Cordelia - so if you're going to be staying around, doing your messenger thing, maybe we could forget the embarrassing stuff and start afresh." She extended a hand and a slightly guilty, impish grin. "Buffy Summers. Slayer of *bad* demons."
He took her hand and repeated his own introduction, but he couldn't share her determined cheer. He wasn't sure he deserved her apologies, with the mess he'd made of things. The slayer carried enough responsibility for her young years, without taking on the weight of his mistakes. She seemed so ordinary in so many ways, and yet he had trouble imagining all that lay on her shoulders.
"You know," he admitted awkwardly, wanting to reach her somehow, to make her understand she hadn't been at fault. "I can't say I was vastly pleased myself when I found out I was half a demon. So I can understand it coming as somethin' of a shock..."
She silently took that in.
Maybe he'd said too much, trusted too much. But, damn it, in spite of everything, he liked her. "Hey, lets catch up with him, huh?" Doyle suggested, changing the subject with a nervous laugh.
Ahead of them, Xander had conversed briefly with a white-coated doctor before disappearing through a door and closing it behind him.
She nodded, and they started to walk again. "I can't wrap my brain around what Mr Matthews did," she admitted. "I mean, we always knew he was a bad tempered old buzzard, but... He told me everything, when he was asking me... begging me... to help him, so scared of finally dying. It goes back a hundred and fifty years. Murders across seven different states, which was why Willow didn't pull it up on the computer. He hadn't been in Sunnydale much more than twenty years. Hadn't needed to call on his demon familiar to renew the spell in that time. Imagine, all those stolen lives..."
"Yeah, well. Some of the demons are human."
"Yeah," she said softly, her clear eyes contemplative. "I'm getting that."
They halted outside the door Xander had walked through. "Well," Buffy said, "I should make myself scarce. I'm not exactly Cordelia's favourite person, and you can bet this one's going to be my fault too as far as she's concerned." She hesitated, as though weighing carefully whether or not to voice a thought. "She doesn't like Xander either," she said finally. "She... could use someone else there for her when she wakes up."
He watched Buffy walk away down the corridor. Then, after a moment's hesitation, pushed the door open slowly.
Within the hospital room, Xander was sitting by Cordelia's bedside, holding her unconscious hand with a nervous, sad tenderness. As he watched, the boy's fingers trailed down her wrist in a curiously mournful, caressing gesture.
He remembered what Buffy had said, recalled Cordelia had made some reference to an ex - and it hit him then, taking his breath away.
As yet, Xander was clearly unaware of his presence. He backed out of the room and shut the door quietly... then opened it again with deliberate noise. Walked in to see Xander standing a guilty few feet back from the bed.
"Hey, Doyle," the youth said, fake-casual.
"Xander."
"She's... sleeping," he added, lamely.
Doyle hauled an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair over to the bedside and sat down. At the other side of the bed, Xander also sat down again.
Cordelia looked pale and fragile, and a long way from the girl with the deliberately sharpened tongue who had first humiliated him, then almost gotten him killed, and then later saved his life. Twice.
"I guess I should thank you for saving her," Xander said. "Which is nicely ironic, considering a few hours ago I was trying to persuade Buffy to slay you."
There was a pause, in which Doyle realised no apology was likely to be forthcoming from that direction.
"But don't think for one minute that means I'm okay with the demon thing," the kid added belligerently. "And if you show any sign of turning evil and going major serial killer on us like certain other allegedly 'good' demons I could mention, don't think I'd hesitate to stake you on the spot."
Doyle stared at him. "I ain't a vampire."
"Whatever."
At that point, Cordelia shifted slightly and moaned softly, drawing both their attention.
Cordelia returned to consciousness slowly, aware of a keen agony centred around her stomach. 'Xander. Xander, with Willow...'
But no, that had been before. That had been weeks ago, now. And Xander wasn't with Willow. But he wasn't with her any more either.
Still, this was all way too familiar; the sheets of the hospital bed tucked tight around her body, the unreasonable bright white sterility of the hospital room. The sleepy, heavy feeling of the anaesthetic that was wearing off. The presence of people, close by.
People. Huh.
"Xander...?" she asked. Her voice came out as a soft croak.
"Cordy!" she felt hands clutch at hers, heard the pathetic eagerness in his voice, and wrenched her hands away.
She put all her effort into shaping the words, clear and strong: "Go. Away." Again...
There was a silence. She struggled to focus her eyes, hearing whispered voices and knowing someone else was in the room. She lifted herself up on her elbows with some effort and some pain, just in time to see Doyle talking a reluctant Xander out of the room.
She felt bad about the kicked-puppy-dog expression on her ex's face - for about half a second.
The events of the night rushed back into her brain entire and she cursed herself for being drawn once more into anything involving risk of personal harm or of blood stains or disgusting demonic goop on clothes or accessories. "I liked those shoes," she muttered disgustedly, remembering their horrible and undeserved demise with a shudder.
"Hunh?" Doyle turned from the door. "What was that?"
"Doyle," she said, with false sugary brightness, or at least as much as she could muster. "What are you doing here?" Okay, she hadn't expected her parents. Giles, perhaps, or even Buffy.
"Giles is tryin' to contact your parents. I... I... are you sure you should be sittin' up?"
"I've been here before," she reminded him pointedly. "Stitches again, right?"
He nodded, and hesitantly rearranged the pillows to support her more comfortably.
Cordelia sighed as she let herself relax back against the pillows. 'Buffy had so better be aware I totally saved her butt,' she thought, finding a degree of satisfaction there despite the familiar ache in her punctured side. 'Who's useless now, huh?' She'd bill Slay-girl for the shoes and the dress tomorrow.
Doyle sat down in an ugly plastic chair at her bedside. His hands fidgeted, until he forcibly stilled them, resting them on his knees. The right one was crudely bandaged - he clearly hadn't dared risk professional medical attention with that demon heritage thing.
He studied her... all big pale eyes whose colour she couldn't be sure of; they seemed to change with the light. "You saved my life," he said quietly. Awkward as it was, his voice still managed to make her shiver pleasantly. She remembered her caustic remarks to Willow that day in school... a lot seemed to have happened since then.
"As if I ever wanted to be the kind of jerk who'd run into a fight with a demon instead of away from it?" she replied with weary frustration. "That bunch of losers have ruined my life. Before I got involved with them, I had everything I wanted. I didn't need to know about monsters and vampires. I certainly didn't need to fight the forces of evil as my top extra-curricular activity. It's not as if you can even put that on your resume... And, like, how many times have I been involved in saving the world from destruction anyhow? Uncredited, might I add!" She sighed irritably. "I just want to go back to shallow. I liked shallow. Shallow was good. Shallow didn't get me skewered!"
The besieged expression on his face quieted her rant, but before she could say anything else he hesitantly ventured, "Maybe they didn't change you. Maybe ... maybe it was always there in you. I mean, can you even be sure the other you wasn't the lie? The one you made to match your... your world..." His voice drained away to nothing.
She stared at him. Her eyes played tricks on her for an instant, placing a fleeting image of his spiky, demonic visage over pale skin and dark bruises. She shook the image off and reached out to take up his undamaged hand in hers. His skin felt smooth and human. She couldn't feel any trace of spikes under the surface.
"You saved me, too," she said softly. "And Xander." She added it automatically, before remembering she wasn't supposed to care anymore. "And maybe Buffy - not that that's a huge issue to me. And I'm not actually sure whether the demon would consider slayers appropriate for its organ foraging. But anyway, Xander and me being one-hundred percent human, it'd have killed us for people-parts in a shot if you hadn't fought it and given Buffy chance to recover." She frowned, thought about it, and shrugged. "Call it a team effort if you like... what's wrong?"
He'd pulled his hand loose from hers and stepped back, knocking the chair aside. She stared up at him in dismay. He was leaving...?
"You said it," he replied, tired and haunted. "I'm not human."
"If you'd been human, you'd be dead," she said.
He just looked at her, on the verge of walking away, carefully not reacting.
"If you'd been human, I'd be dead," she added.
Silence.
"So, anyway - right now, kind of glad you are what you are. See - not about to complain, here."
He stared at her for a moment, as though he just couldn't figure her out. "Well. Yeah. Okay. Now that I know you're gonna be all right, I'll be headin' out, then. There's a guy I gotta go see."
He started another step away from her and she reached out, snagged the edge of his nasty jacket, and tugged him back, wincing at the strain the movement put on her stitches. He stopped trying to pull away instantly.
'Ha. Got you. You're not walking away from Cordelia Chase.'
"Don't. You'll hurt yourself..."
"Then sit." She pointed to the chair. "I am not having one more potential date turn his back on me this week, no matter how ugly he looks as a demon. Or how badly he dresses. And believe me when I say, the demon part is the easier of the two to take in."
Doyle sighed, set the chair back in place, and did as requested. She watched his brain ticking over, as he assimilated what she'd just said. "Potential date, huh?"
She grinned, feeling a little embarrassed now it was said. She looked at him expectantly. "Well - I'm waiting," she said, as the seconds passed.
"Huh?"
Men! Did she have to do all the work in this relationship? "Go ahead and ask me out already."
He managed to look astonished, and nervous, and insanely happy, all at once.
"Cordelia..." he began hesitantly. "Would you...?"
End.
~~~
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