Bound by Inamorata
Summary: Doyle's last vision brings Angel and Cordelia closer in unexpected ways.
Spoilers: Hero, Season 1.
Notes: This fic is set between the AtS season one episodes "Hero" and "Parting Gifts" -- that is, in that tiny sliver of time after Doyle's death but before Cordelia learns he passed her the visions. I would like to make it clear that it is absolutely not the case that this whole fic exists simply because I thought it would be fun to get Angel and Cordelia to take a shower together. I'm not that cheap. And if you believe that, I've got a timeshare in Marbella I'd like to sell you. Thanks, as always, to Dazzle for beta'ing and encouragement.
I
"You don't have to help with this," I said
for at least the fifth time. "I could do it myself."
"It's okay,"
Cordelia said. "It really is. Active grieving is healthy. Pass the junk bag."
I handed her the
plastic trash bag and watched her sweep a pile of yellowing newspapers into it. "I
swear," she said, shaking her head, "if I'd realized Doyle was THIS
untidy, I would have made him clean up before he died." She smiled, a tight,
defiant smile that might have been painted on, like a kabuki performer's.
It was a good act, even if I was the only one left to see it.
I seemed to recall
that there had been a time when society automatically granted time and understanding to
those who mourned; here, at the tail-end of the twentieth century, time
had become too valuable to waste on mere grief. Certainly Doyle's
landlord had had no compassion to spare when I'd called to tell him his
tenant had broken his lease in a very permanent way. He wanted the
apartment ready to rent again by the end of the week, and
anything still there by Wednesday night was going in the furnace. And so
Cordelia and I were clearing out Doyle's life, less than two days
after we'd watched him lose it.
Cordelia held up a
battered lamp. "Junk, Goodwill or keep?" she asked.
I looked at the three
bags in the middle of the apartment floor. The contents of the junk bag were destined for the
dumpster in the alley behind the building. Cordelia was going to leave the
second bag at the local Goodwill after we were done. The junk bag was
already overflowing, but we were struggling to fill the
Goodwill bag. Next to these two hefty bags was a single shoebox, where
we'd agreed to put those possessions of Doyle's we intended to save
permanently.
I considered the lamp.
"Goodwill."
She flicked the on-off
switch experimentally. "It doesn't work."
"Junk,
then."
"Junk,"
Cordelia agreed, and pushed the lamp into the bloated garbage bag.
Cordelia set to work
on Doyle's bookshelves -- he'd been a more avid reader than he liked people to know -- while I
continued sifting through the detritus in the dresser drawers. Most of
what I found went straight into the trash: red-inked credit card
statements, half a pack of playing cards, a broken digital watch. Only
one item made me pause -- a small leather-backed book. I flicked
through it, and saw it was filled with names and contact details, all
rendered in Doyle's spidery scrawl. His address book. It smelt
strongly of him, the leather impregnated irrevocably with his scent
after years of handling. I turned it over in my hands, then put it
into the shoe- box of things to keep.
On the other side of
the room, Cordelia made a small noise that might have been a sob, quickly stifled. "Cordelia?"
She turned around and
showed me a scrap of paper. It took me a moment to work out what it was, and when I did I
couldn't immediately understand
what had upset her. She was holding up a lotto ticket.
Quietly, she said,
"It's for tomorrow's drawing."
She looked unhappy and
teary and very, very young. I left the dresser and started to go to her, wanting -- some
way, any way -- to make this better. But I didn't know how, and I ended up
standing awkwardly in front of her, just out of her reach.
Cordelia kept looking
at the lotto ticket as if mesmerized. "He always said he'd get lucky someday. He never
stopped believing he'd get lucky, if he just waited long enough."
I took one more step
toward her, and gently took the ticket from her outstretched hand. "Let's take a break from
this," I said.
Cordelia looked
around, taking in the chaotic apartment, the strewn belongings which a couple of days earlier had
been part of a life but which were now just so much garbage.
"Yeah," she said, and sat down on the end of Doyle's battered green sofa.
She rubbed her eyes tiredly, and I noticed suddenly that she wasn't wearing
makeup, for perhaps the first time since I'd known her. She looked
tired -- more than tired, exhausted, as if something was sucking the
life and youth out of her.
Something like me.
Cordelia and I had
stumbled into each others' existences by accident, and I was starting to see that her life
was being made needlessly more painful and dangerous by my presence in
it. Doyle, at least, had known what he was getting himself into
when he searched me out --
then again, maybe he hadn't, because that had been less than three months earlier, and now he
was dead.
I'd come to L.A.
because I wanted to start making up for my past. And now I had another death on my conscience. In
Sunnydale, I'd learned through bitter experience that I couldn't have
a romantic relationship; in L.A., I'd deceived myself into
believing that in spite of that, I could still work alongside humans.
Have friendships. Now I saw
even that was too high an aspiration. Whatever mission or purpose I'd been brought back
from Hell to fulfill, it was for me to complete alone. Always alone.
"Cordelia,"
I said, as gently as I could, "I think maybe you should go."
She looked at me,
startled out of some sad reverie, and waved a hand around to indicate the apartment. "I'm not
leaving you to finish this all by yourself."
"No," I
said. "I mean -- I think you should go. Go home, back to Sunnydale. You belong there."
For the first time
since we'd left the ship's hold where Doyle had died, Cordelia's grief and distraction seemed to
lift a little. She looked at me with something of the spark I was used to
seeing. "Go back to Sunnydale and do what? Get a job in McDonald's
so I can watch everyone I went
to high school with drive past me on the way to college? Or just hang around and wait to be
vampire munchies?" She shook her head emphatically. "No, thanks.
Besides, I gotta stay in L.A. now."
"You don't,"
I said. "Nothing's keeping you here."
"Angel, you need
me," Cordelia said, as if I were a little slow and needed things explained carefully and clearly.
"The way I see it, I'm not just an employee of Angel's Redemption Inc.
anymore. I'm a fully paid up shareholder. I've got a seat on the
board. Which means I want voting rights."
Sometimes it amazed me
how Cordelia could bludgeon a point to death, and yet I still had no idea what she was talking
about. "Voting rights?"
"We're partners
now, right? Which means things are going to have to change between you and me." She stood up and
started to walk around Doyle's apartment, warming to her theme. "For
starters, you can't do that thing you do anymore."
"What
thing?"
"That thing where
you run off to fight demons or vampires or nasties without saying where you're going or why. Oh, and
also that thing where you do something all the time and then say, 'I
don't do that' - - that's gonna stop, too."
"I don't --"
I started, then caught myself. Cordelia was giving me a 'Come on, I dare you' look. "I don't do
that often," I amended.
"And I want to be
involved more," she went on. "When you're doing your heroic evil-battling thing, I want to be
there too. And I want to learn to fight -- I mean, really fight, not just
duck out of the way -- and I think I should --"
" --Think about
what you're saying for a second," I interrupted. "Cordelia, these are my fights,
my risks, my problems. They weren't meant to be shared."
She looked at me
steadily. "Doyle wouldn't have agreed."
"And the fact
that Doyle isn't around to say so himself anymore proves my point." Cordelia stared at me, her
lips clamped together in a thin line of hurt. I was sorry about that, but I
wasn't as sorry as I knew I would be if I got her killed like I'd
gotten Doyle killed. I gestured around the cluttered apartment.
"Now, let's just get on with what we're supposed to be doing here."
"Angel --"
"Cordelia, we're
not talking about this now," I snapped.
But she wasn't looking
at me -- she was looking at the lotto ticket I was still holding in my hand. "Angel, look
at the ticket."
I held the ticket up
to the light, and saw what she was talking about. One side was a normal lotto ticket --
apparently Doyle thought the numbers 14, 27, 76 and 63 were especially
lucky, although now we'd
never know why -- but the reverse was blank. Or it had been, until he had written on it.
In wobbly capital
letters he had scrawled:
DELILAH -- BIG PARTY SANTA MONICA MARINA JAMEELA
The word "Jameela"
was double underlined.
"Gimme,"
Cordelia said, and snatched the ticket from me. She frowned as she read it. "What does 'jameela' mean?
And who's Delilah?" Cordelia examined the ticket for a second longer, then
looked up at me, her eyes growing wide and excited. "Angel,
this is message from those Powers-That-Be Doyle was always talking about. We
have to follow it up."
"Cordelia, we
don't know when he had this vision. It's probably already too late."
She shook her head.
"This ticket is for this week's drawing, Angel -- he couldn't have bought it more than a day before
he died. And Doyle ALWAYS told you about the visions, so the only
reason he wouldn't have mentioned this one would have been
--"
" --Because he
didn't have time," I completed, seeing where she was going. "Because of the Scourge."
"Right!"
Cordelia smiled, a broad and real smile. "In other words, this baby's so fresh it's practically steaming.
C'mon, let's go to Santa Monica."
She tugged me by the
sleeve, like a child promised a trip to the circus. I didn't move. "First of all, WE'RE
not going anywhere. I will deal with this, by myself, alone, solo,
single-handed. We don't know what's waiting for us in Santa Monica."
"A really great
party, according to Doyle," Cordelia said.
"Or a party as in
a big party of unkillable demons," I countered. "Go home, Cordelia. Get some
rest. I'll take care of the vision, and we'll finish this tomorrow." The
night was only a couple of hours old; I had plenty of time to do whatever
I had to. I started to leave.
I was at the door, and
shrugging on my coat, when I heard Cordelia say my name. I stopped and looked back. "Cordelia,
for the last time, you are staying."
"Oh, sure,"
she said, "I'm staying."
"Well --
good." Okay, I hadn't expected to win that argument so easily. Maybe Cordelia was finally starting to
listen to me. "That's good. Thank you."
I was half way along
the hallway and heading for the elevator when I heard the words, "In L.A.!" float
defiantly out from Doyle's apartment behind me.
***
As it turned out, what
was waiting for me in Santa Monica was a really great party. But I didn't realize straight
away that I was supposed to be at it.
I left the car outside
the marina and began to explore on foot, not sure exactly what I was looking for -- Doyle's
note had been a little short on helpful details. I made my way through
a lattice of jetties and walkways surrounded by dinghies and yachts,
rich men's expensive weekend toys. Nearly all had engines as well
as sails, and were clearly not designed for straying further from
shore than a Monday morning 9 o'clock meeting would permit.
One of boats was
different.
She dwarfed the yachts
moored beside her; she was the real thing, and everything around her just a miniature model.
She was the most impressive, opulent craft in the marina, and her owner
had gone to some lengths to flaunt it. Fairy lights strung along
her length and spotlights trained on the deck made her the brightest
object in the water -- and the loudest, as the sounds of music and
laughter coming from her packed decks floated out toward the dark
horizon.
On board, a party was
in full swing. The name of the yacht was emblazoned in stark black letters on her pristine
hull.
She was called the
Delilah.
I drew closer, keeping
out of sight behind the piles of packing crates and coils of rope along the jetty's edge.
The clothes and bearing of the party guests milling around on the
Delilah's deck marked them out as the city's elite, but they all
looked human, and I couldn't see any activity more suspicious than a
number of couples slipping away from the gathering into the yacht's
interior and, presumably, the cabins below.
As I watched, a
well-dressed couple walked up the gangplank and waved invitations at the two thugs dressed in
tuxedos who formed the welcoming committee. It was going to be near impossible
to get past them without causing a scene; the next best option
would be to scale the outside of the yacht and climb over the deck's
railings unobserved. I was
pretty confident of my climbing abilities, less so about how I would mingle with the crowds and pass
myself off as a guest once on board. But I had to get on that boat.
"We HAVE to get
on that boat," Cordelia's voice said in my ear.
She was standing right
behind me, gazing up at the Delilah with unadulterated awe. I almost jumped.
"Cordelia?"
"Hi, Angel,"
she said, in much the same tone she used when I walked into the room as she was filing her nails. She
pointed at the yacht. "How amazingly cool is that party?"
"What are you
doing here? And --" I broke off, and stared at her. "What are you wearing?"
Cordelia smiled,
apparently delighted I'd noticed that she'd changed since I last saw her. She was wearing a cocktail
dress in crushed velvet and holding a matching clutch bag. She looked as
if she belonged with the young, rich and beautiful people up
on the Delilah's deck, and
not lurking down in the shadows with me. "You like?" she asked, giving me a little twirl.
"I decided to come down here and help you out. I went home to change
first, of course."
I wondered if
Cordelia's eagerness to help me mightn't have something to do with the fact that Doyle's vision
had mentioned a party as opposed to, say, a dingy back alley.
"Thanks, but I don't need your help."
"Sure you do. How
were you planning to get on to that boat? You were probably gonna pull some dumb macho James Bond
stunt like climbing up the hull, right?"
Patiently, I said,
"Cordelia, demon-killing, evil-fighting is a violent, risky and difficult activity." I
folded my arms resolutely across my chest. "I am a 250 year old vampire. You
are a 19 year old girl. Which one of us do you think has the appropriate
skill set for this situation?"
"You want to see
appropriate skills?" she asked, arching an eyebrow. "Watch this."
Before I could stop
her, Cordelia had grabbed me by the sleeve and was towing me behind her up the gangplank and
toward the smartly- dressed security detail guarding the way on to the Delilah. "Cordelia," I hissed,
"what are you --"
"Just let me do
the talking," she whispered back. "Okay?"
"No, absolutely
not okay --"
That was as far as I
got, because suddenly we were at the top of the gangplank and facing the grim-faced security thug
who was already eyeing us with suspicion. I readied myself for the
inevitable confrontation.
"Hi,"
Cordelia purred at him, wrapping a strand of hair idly around one finger. The security thug's eyes widened, and
I felt a certain sympathy for him -- outclassed and outgunned, he didn't
stand a chance.
Two minutes and one
extremely flimsy story about a lost invitation later, we were boarding the yacht.
Cordelia smiled widely
as we walked on to the Delilah's crowded, noisy deck. Leaning closer to me, she said,
"I totally rule. Tell me that wasn't easier than pretending to be Pierce
Brosnan."
Who? Never mind.
"Sooner or later they'll figure out we're not supposed to be here."
"You worry too
much. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it," Cordelia said, and lifted a glass of white wine
from a passing waiter's tray. "Oooooh, hors d'oeuvre. Hold
this." She thrust the wine into my hand and set off toward the buffet like a
canapé- seeking missile,
leaving me to hover at the edge of the party and try not to look as out of place as I felt.
And I did feel out of
place. All around me, people -- humans -- were laughing and talking and flirting with each
other. There'd been a time when I would have been able to join in, picking
through the party in much the same way as Cordelia was currently
selecting delicacies from the buffet spread. And, as much as I
hated what I'd been, I wished gatherings like this one held more for
me now than merely a painful awareness of just how far removed from
humanity I was. I glanced at Cordelia, who had struck up a
conversation with a young man at the buffet table, and envied her easy
confidence.
"Trying to work
up the nerve to talk to her?"
I turned around. The
girl who had joined me was young -- probably not much older than Cordelia -- and, like
everyone else at the party, unusually attractive. Her skin was dark, and
perfect; she wore a clutch of jewels in her hair. They shimmered as
she tipped her head in Cordelia's direction. "Would you like
me to introduce you? Technically, I'm the hostess, so I could. That's
part of the standard hostessing package, right?"
"Thanks, but I
don't need an introduction. I already know her -- we're here together."
"Oh." The
girl looked back at Cordelia, and appeared to consider her in a new light. "Then maybe you're thinking
about telling that guy who's hitting on her to back off."
The young man talking
to Cordelia was smiling a lot, I noticed suddenly, and Cordelia was smiling right back.
For a moment, I felt an odd surge of something which wasn't quite
possessiveness, but wasn't far from it.
Then I remembered that
not only were we here to gather information -- which was exactly what Cordelia appeared to be
doing -- but that for the first time in days she looked relaxed and
happy.
"I'm glad she's
enjoying herself," I said, and meant it.
A look which was not
unlike sadness flashed across the girl's face. "You're a nice guy. You should give
lessons to my boyfriend." She held out her hand to me. "The Delilah
belongs to him. I'm Jameela."
"Angel," I
said, and took her hand in mine. Jameela's grip was unexpectedly strong; she held on to my hand
tightly, and looked straight into my eyes for a long moment.
Then, abruptly, her
manner changed, as if I'd just failed some vital test. "Nice to meet you, Angel," she
said flatly, turning away from me. "Enjoy the party."
I watched her walk
away, feeling puzzled. Had that encounter been as odd as I thought it had been? Or had I just
missed -- again -- some unspoken cue that should have been obvious to me?
"Who was
that?" Cordelia asked as she returned to my side. She was carrying a plate laden with a collection of tiny,
intricately constructed bundles which weren't immediately
recognizable to me as food. "The sushi is to die for. "
"Her name was
Jameela. She said this yacht is her boyfriend's."
"Then I guess
that's her boyfriend," Cordelia said, taking the glass of wine she'd handed me back again and gesturing
with it.
I looked where she was
pointing, and saw a unprepossessing middle- aged man who was standing on the upper deck,
surveying the party. "Who is he?"
"According to my
new friend over there --" she pointed back in the direction of the buffet table -- "His name
is Michael Hunter. He made his money out of those little foil tubs of milk
substitute you put in coffee. He's, like, the King of Creamer."
I watched Michael
Hunter as he looked down on his guests. For a wealthy man and the host of the party, he seemed
anxious, as if he were searching for something in the crowd. Or someone,
I realized a second later when Jameela came to join him. He wrapped
his arm around her in a
gesture which was superficially intimate, but I saw her wince as his fingers dug into her shoulder.
Then he turned abruptly and walked away, taking Jameela with him.
"I'm going to
find out where they're going," I said to Cordelia. "Stay here and wait for me."
"No way,"
Cordelia protested. She waved a half-eaten piece of sushi at me. "Didn't we talk about this earlier?
You always run off and leave me behind."
I ran off, leaving her
behind.
The party thinned out
toward the stern of the yacht, until the only indication it was going on was a faint,
irritating buzz from somewhere behind me. The truth was that if I hadn't had
to leave it to follow Jameela, I would probably have invented an
excuse. Mingling is not one of
my skills. Lurking in the dark is.
I found them behind
the wheelhouse, in a secluded area of the deck which was obviously intended for private
sunbathing. I stayed in the shadows, and found a vantage point that allowed
me to watch and listen without being seen.
"I love
you," Hunter was telling Jameela. "I love you and I want you to stay with me. Always. Never leave."
"Sometimes I
think you don't trust me."
"I do, baby. I
do."
"Then tell me
everything."
While I was trying to
work out what this exchange meant, I saw Hunter lean closer to Jameela. He wrapped his
arms around her in an embrace which would have been loving if I hadn't been
able to see the crushing force he was using, etched in lines of
pain on Jameela's face.
The direct approach
was best, I decided. Doyle's vision had brought me to Jameela so I could protect her from Hunter,
and the simplest way to do that was to take her away from him. I moved
forward a little, and tensed, ready to leap down on to the deck
--
"Angel!"
Once again, my
concentration was interrupted by Cordelia unexpectedly popping up beside me. It wasn't
getting any less irritating.
"Cordelia, I told
you not to move. To STAY PUT. What part of that did you not get?"
"Angel --"
"Would it be so
incredibly difficult, just once, to do what I ask you to --"
"Angel!"
Cordelia hissed. "I couldn't stay where I was."
I glowered at her.
"Give me one good reason why not."
From somewhere in the
darkness behind Cordelia, I heard the voice of the thug she'd fooled to get us on the yacht. He
sounded about as annoyed as I felt, and he was talking to more than one
person.
"It's
bridge-crossing time," Cordelia said.
I looked back down at
the deck, but both Jameela and Michael Hunter had gone. Great. Just great.
And, by the sound of
the security thugs' rapidly approaching footsteps, it was time for us to go, too.
I grabbed Cordelia by
the arm and vaulted over the railings down to the lower deck where Hunter and Jameela had been
seconds earlier. Cordelia's initial protests rose in pitch and tone to
become a wordless yelp of
surprise as we fell, arms and legs flailing. I managed to twist around so that I hit the deck
first, breaking her fall, although I was distantly aware of a drawn-out
ripping sound. As I got to my feet, I saw Cordelia was struggling to
disentangle her torn dress from the jutting nail it had caught on.
"My dress -- "
The material had
ripped almost to her waist, a pale slash of her bare thigh visible through the jagged slit. Above
us, I heard the heavy footfalls of the security thugs approaching. I
leapt up and headed for the side of the yacht, jerking Cordelia with
me but leaving a wad of sequined cloth on the nail. I heard
Cordelia start to make a protest which became a yelp as we pitched
over the side of the yacht and toward the black water below.
And then we were
hanging, swinging gently on the end of the rope I'd grabbed as I'd dived over the side.
I was using one hand
to grip the rope; my other arm was holding on to Cordelia, whose eyes were screwed shut. She
twisted around, causing one of her shoes to slip off her foot. It
plummeted in silence before hitting the water far below with a faint
splash. "Oh God," she said. "Oh God. Oh God."
"Be quiet,"
I told her. "And don't look down."
I should have
remembered that the fastest way to get Cordelia to do something is to tell her not to do it. Her eyes
popped open; she looked down, and swallowed. There was a faint tremor in
her voice as she said, "Technically speaking, the only life
that's getting risked here is mine."
"You're not going
to fall," I said. "I've got you."
"Fine. Who's got
YOU?" Her voice was shaking; I could feel her heart pounding, and her scent was sharp with fear. Her
arms were clamped, vise-like, over my shoulders and around my chest and I
gripped her waist with every last ounce of strength I possessed. We
were hanging on to each other as if the world began and ended with
each other.
Above us, I heard the
security thugs discussing the ripped section of Cordelia's dress they'd just found. I hushed
Cordelia, and we hung for long seconds in the darkness as they stood
almost directly over us, discussing loudly where we might have gone.
When they finally moved off, I allowed myself to relax a
fraction. Below us, the water of the harbor rippled.
"Can you
swim?" I asked Cordelia.
"Sure," she
said automatically. Then her eyes widened. "Ohhhh no. No way. That is SO not an option."
I was about to point
out that it was the only option, when I heard voices from overhead again. They were familiar,
and for a second, I thought the security thugs had returned. Then I
realized it was Hunter and Jameela.
Cordelia fell silent.
She looked upward, then at me. I nodded. We listened.
"Stay,
baby." That was Hunter's voice. "Stay, you've got to stay. Always and forever."
"Michael.
Michael, stop it, you're hurting me."
Their voices grew
fainter -- apparently they'd moved away from the edge of the deck -- until the conversation was
too indistinct even for my better-than-mortal hearing. Cordelia was
mouthing, What? at me; I shook my head, concentrating on the murmurings
from above us. When that didn't work, I tried to pull us back up the
rope, just enough to make the voices above audible. One inch; two;
three --
And then I felt it --
the impact of an unseen force, like a silent peal of thunder directly overhead, or the blast
wave from a noiseless bomb. I felt the hair on my arms and neck
rise as the air around us crackled and sparked, suddenly saturated with
raw power. I knew this sensation, and every instinct I had screamed
at me to get as far away as fast as was humanly -- or inhumanly --
possible.
I didn't think; I
acted. I let go of the rope.
We fell, still holding
on to each other. The lights of the Delilah's lower decks sped past, like decorations on a
fairground ride. The night air howled in my ears as we hurtled downward --
or maybe that was Cordelia yelling, I couldn't tell. The world was
noise and acceleration and a sickening, yawning void in the pit
of my stomach - -
We hit the water, and
kept going.
For the briefest of
moments, the sudden silence and darkness came as a relief. Instead of plummeting, we were
descending slowly, as gently as leaves falling to the ground on a windless
day. I held on to Cordelia, and a strangely peaceful sensation
overtook me.
Then I felt her
struggle in my arms, and a stream of bubbles escaped her mouth and nose. With a cold jolt of horror, I
realized she was about to start drowning.
I let go of her, and
watched as she kicked out, feet and arms driving her back up to the surface. Her long hair
rippled out behind her, and the fabric of her dress billowed in slow
motion. As I continued on my path
downward, the last thing I saw was Cordelia, swimming up and away from me, toward the lights
of the harbor.
***
By the time I made it back to dry land, the party on
the Delilah had long since ended, and the deck of the yacht was empty
and dark, except for cleaners and waiters scurrying to make the
mess vanish by morning. I found Cordelia sitting on the edge of a
packing crate some distance from the harbor's edge. She was
systematically wringing the water out of her sodden, ripped dress by
grabbing the material in handfuls and twisting it.
I sat down beside her,
squelching a little.
After a second,
Cordelia said, "If I get some kind of disgusting illness from the raw sewage they pump into the
sea around here, you are paying ALL my medical bills."
I took off my shoes
and tipped them up, one at a time. In open defiance of gravity, most of the murky sludge
that filled each one refused to dislodge.
Cordelia was having
even less success in extracting the Pacific from her dress. "And what took you so long to get
here, anyhow?" she said, giving up and turning her attention back to
me. "I figured you should have been swimming right behind me."
I have a lot of
secrets; maybe, given my unique history, that's inevitable. There are many things about myself I
choose not to reveal, and many more I can only bring myself to share
when there is no alternative. This fell into the latter category.
"I can't
swim," I said.
"No,
seriously," Cordelia said, "what took you so long?"
"I can't
swim," I said again, waving one sand-filled shoe for emphasis. "No vampire can. No
buoyancy."
"But you don't
need to breathe -- you can't drown." Cordelia looked at the shoe I held, and then at the layer of silt
that covered me below the knees. Her face broke into a wide smile.
"You walked along the harbor floor. Like one of those old fashioned
divers, except no diving suit."
She started to laugh.
I didn't see the joke.
"C'mon,
Angel," Cordelia said, giggling. "It IS pretty funny. And tonight you ruined my best cocktail dress, made
me lose a shoe and you -- you got sand in my ears." She put her hand
to her face to stifle the snorts of laughter.
"I did all
that?" I said. "I don't think so. YOU came down here when I told you not to. It was YOUR lie that put
security on to us. And YOU interfered before I got a chance to do anything to
help Jameela."
Cordelia stopped
laughing, her face becoming darker with every word I said. "Excuse me? I had every right to be
here, too."
"Not if you're
going to treat this as a game and get yourself killed," I snapped.
Cordelia looked angry,
but her voice was steady as she said, "I'm not Doyle."
"You're
not," I agreed. Then, harshly, I added, "Doyle knew how to take care of himself."
She blinked once, her
face as shocked as if I'd just slapped her. I couldn't have felt much worse if I had. "You
weren't kidding today, were you? You really do want me to leave."
I should meet her eye,
I knew that much. Somehow I couldn't make myself, and instead I stood up and turned away.
"I think it'd be for the best, yes."
Behind me, I heard
Cordelia get up. "You want me to go," she said again. For a second, her voice wavered, and then
it hardened. "You want to be all alone? Okay, fine. I'm leaving."
There was a moment's
silence, as if she was waiting for me to say something, and then I heard her bare feet slap
defiantly against the pier's wooden slats as she marched away from me. I
didn't allow myself to turn around until her footsteps had become
faint echoes. Cordelia was nothing more than a fast-vanishing shadow,
disappearing into the nighttime haze that rose off the ocean and
shrouded the quayside.
The last time I'd
played out this scene, I had been the one walking away. But I had done the right thing when I'd
left Buffy in Sunnydale, and I was certain I was doing the right
thing now.
But it hurt to watch
Cordelia go, far more than I had imagined it would.
And then I realized
that instead of making sure Cordelia was safe, I'd just sent her away, alone and upset and
probably without enough money for the taxi ride home. The night is home to a
lot of evil things. I know because I used to be one of them.
I can be really stupid
sometimes.
I headed after her.
***
Most humans will tell you that they can sense it when
someone is following them. Most humans have no idea at all.
All the way from Santa
Monica back to her apartment, I was Cordelia's shadow. I was there as she walked five
and a half blocks from the marina, her wet hair and clothes making her
look bedraggled and miserable. When she got tired walking and decided
to take the bus, I was on the roof of the building opposite,
watching over her as she waited at the bus stop. I was there when the bus
arrived and she got on it, and I was waiting when she got off it
again in Silverlake. When she
walked past the group of young men who were drinking on the corner of her street, she didn't
know that I was only a few paces away, and ready to harm anyone who so
much as looked like he was
contemplating doing harm to her.
I watched her from the
shadows as she stood outside her apartment door and fumbled in her bag for her keys, and
congratulated myself on accomplishing at least one mission that night.
I was more than a
little surprised when, instead of her keys, she produced a can of mace, spun around, and emptied
most of its contents into my face. As I doubled over, she kicked me
squarely in the groin. I may be dead, but I'm still a man. It hurt.
"THAT'S for
trying to mug me, buddy -- "
"Cordelia!"
" -- I'm gonna
call the cops faster than you can say 'zero tolerance' and you will be SO sorry you ever --
" Cordelia broke off her tirade long enough to blink in surprise.
"Angel?"
I could hardly speak;
I was still coughing mace out of my throat. If my body had required oxygen, I would have been
unconscious by now. "Yes," I croaked.
She looked at me,
genuinely confused. "Why are you here?"
I wiped my watering
eyes ineffectually on the backs of my hands. "I followed you."
Slowly, Cordelia said,
"You followed me." I straightened up, blinked, and my vision started to clear a little.
I was greeted by the sight of Cordelia's face, wearing a look of
mounting fury. "You,"
she repeated, "were following me."
"I was making
sure you got home safely."
"Safely?"
she echoed incredulously. "I thought I had a serial killer stalker -- and now I think about it, hey, not so
far off the truth."
"I was just
trying to protect you," I said sharply, getting annoyed. "L.A. isn't exactly a safe
place."
"And Sunnydale's
a regular Sesame Street. Jeez, Angel, make up your mind. First you want me to go away, and when I do
you start stalking me." Cordelia still looked furious, but now
something else, too. She seemed upset. "Wait, now I get it. You think I
can't look out for myself. You think if I stay here you're gonna have to
spend all your time making sure I'm okay. That's why you want me to
leave."
I thought of Doyle,
skin peeling and flesh burning, his face twisted into a rictus of agony as the Scourge's beacon
killed him slowly. The truth was, I didn't want Cordelia to leave. But I
did want her to be safe. I wanted her never to know first hand the
kind of death that had taken Doyle from us. If ensuring her safety
meant making her leave -- hell, if it meant making her hate me so
much she wanted to leave -- then that seemed a fair price to pay.
Cordelia took a step
forward, so that we were standing toe to toe. She jabbed a finger into my chest. "Well,
I've got news for you. I can handle being in L.A., and I can handle Doyle dying,
and I can handle YOU."
"No, you
can't!" I shouted at her. I hadn't meant to raise my voice, and immediately I regretted my outburst. A light
in a nearby apartment window snapped on, and I saw the blinds
twitch as one of Cordelia's neighbors peered out at us. I tried to force
myself to calm down, and failed. "Cordelia, this is about
what's best for you!"
"And you're the
best person to decide that exactly WHY?"
"Because --"
I began. I didn't get any further.
The street, the
apartment building, the cars -- everything of the normal world faded and became distant and
indistinct, as if Cordelia and I were inside a bubble underwater, alone together.
The streetlights' glow
took on a strange fluidity, and the night breeze was a wave breaking over us, stirring senses, its
draw dragging us under. I didn't want to see the surface again, ever.
When we kissed, it
felt like the only thing we could do.
We fumbled for a
moment, clumsy in our desperation. Then my mouth found hers, and my hands were on her back, her
body fitting against mine as if we had been made for that sole purpose. She
tasted of the ocean, salt and sharp and clean, and I followed the
taste of the sea from her lips into the welcoming warmth of her mouth.
But when I ran my hands down her back, I found her skin, chilled by
her still-damp dress, as cool as my own.
All her warmth, all
her life, had been compressed into a core deep within her, a well of heat and life I longed to
reach.
Cordelia made a tiny
sound and exhaled. I took in her breath, savored its sweetness and warmth, and wanted
more. Desire made me shudder, and I kissed her harder, pushing her back
without really meaning to.
Then Cordelia
stumbled, and suddenly she was underneath me on the damp lawn, her scent mixing with the dewy, sweet
smell of the soil below. I kissed her again, and shifted my position so
that I was on top of her. She was earth and sea; she filled my world,
and there was nothing else apart from her.
"Hey, you! You
want to screw, don't do it on my goddamn lawn!"
A man wearing an
ill-fitting T-shirt and an angry scowl was yelling at us from the lit second floor window, which was
now wide open. As I looked up, he fired a another barrage of expletives
in our general direction, then slammed the window shut and
disappeared.
I looked down at
Cordelia, who was lying on her back on the ground beneath me. Then I looked at the straps of her
dress, entwined around my fingers.
I didn't know what the
hell had just happened, but I knew that if I stayed where I was, it was going to start
happening again before very long.
"Umm," I
said, and got off her.
Cordelia pushed
herself to her feet, paying an inordinate amount of attention to the task of brushing soil off her
already salt- encrusted, ripped dress. In a surprisingly even and
only slightly strained voice, she said, "People have weird
reactions to grief, sometimes. They freak out, do weird stuff, eat nothing
but ice cream for a week or vacuum 24 hours a day. It happens, it
doesn't mean anything."
"Not a
thing," I agreed. I wanted nothing more than to bolt; fortunately we were outdoors, and so every
direction except straight up was available to me. I began to back away, toward
the sidewalk. "I
should, ahh --" I said, making hand signals which I hoped subtly conveyed my intention to leave while
at the same time absolving Cordelia from any responsibility for what had
just happened. They were
pretty vague gestures, and I felt pretty foolish making them, and I pretty quickly gave up.
"I should go."
"Yes," she
said, too quickly. The door of her apartment opened behind her -- Dennis, providing Cordelia with an
escape route of her own.
"And tomorrow
we'll --"
"Not talk about
this," Cordelia said. "Ever." She walked up the steps, into her apartment, and shut the door
behind her.
She was gone.
She was gone and I
couldn't see her or touch her and she was GONE --
The world spun around
me, lacking any focus or meaning, because she was gone, and I needed her, craved her without
reason or logic. She was gone, and I couldn't think except about her,
couldn't feel except to want her, couldn't speak a word except her
name. A second earlier I had been standing on a normal sidewalk in a
normal neighborhood; now I
was adrift in a chaotic void, lost in a terrible, empty place I could not hope to
navigate without her.
And then -- suddenly,
miraculously, wonderfully -- she was there.
For a long time we
stayed where we were, on the lawn outside the apartment, clinging on to each other as if we
might drown if we let go. When had Cordelia come back out of her apartment? I
couldn't remember and I didn't care. All that mattered was that
she was back. We didn't kiss, or speak; we barely had the strength to
move.
Finally, Cordelia
said, "Uhh, Angel? I think we should go inside. Before ALL my neighbors wake up."
I looked around, and
saw that the window on the second floor of the building was no longer the only one which was
bright with the false glow of electric light. "Good idea."
We got up, arms around
each other like drunks offering mutual support, and weaved our way unsteadily into the
apartment. Once inside, we didn't make it as far as the sofa; as soon
as the door clicked shut behind us -- thank you, again, Dennis --
we sank down together on to the wooden floor.
My arms were wrapped
around Cordelia's shoulders; her head pressed against my chest. "This is really
uncomfortable," she said, "but I really don't want to move."
I agreed. My arms were
beginning to cramp, and yet I couldn't let go of her. Couldn't even think about it.
"What just
happened out there?" Cordelia asked me.
"I don't
know."
"And what's
making us act like this?"
"I don't
know."
Cordelia thought for a
second. "We're in trouble, aren't we?"
At last, a question I
was confident I knew the answer to. "Yes," I said. "We're in trouble."
******************************
II
"Keep
going," I said. "It's not much further."
I was standing in the
open doorway of Cordelia's apartment, as close to daylight as I could safely get. Cordelia was
at the bottom of the steps that led up to the door, and was about to embark
on the long trek across the street to where my car was parked.
Cordelia took several
more faltering, hesitant steps, as if wading against the tide. She kept looking at the
Plymouth, focusing on it like a mountain climber aiming for the summit.
She was at the edge of
the sidewalk now. This was okay, I told myself. I could still see her, even if I couldn't
touch her, couldn't go to her --
I called her name. I
couldn't help it.
That was all it took.
Cordelia looked back at me, and then she was running back up the steps, through the apartment
door and into my arms.
"That time was
totally your fault," she said, her voice muffled because she was talking into my chest.
She was right,
although now that she was back and I was able to hold her again, somehow I couldn't feel bad about it.
"Next time --" I began.
"No next
time," Cordelia interrupted, disengaging herself from me. "We're just gonna have to wait until it
gets dark to go anywhere. I'm not going to have another panic attack
out on street where all my neighbors can see. Especially after last
night."
We went back into the
living room, where Cordelia flopped back on to sofa and I sat down next to her. There were four
perfectly good chairs positioned around her dining table, but if I sat
on any of them, Cordelia would be more than an arm's reach away
from me, and right now I didn't feel up to dealing with that.
"It's magic
making us act this way," I said. "It has to be."
"Now I know why
you decided to become a private detective. You're so fast at putting together those subtle little
clues other people miss."
I ignored her and
persisted, "Last night, on the Delilah, I felt something -- a kind of magical shockwave.
Everything started after that. Nobody knew we were going to be there, and no one
knew who we were once we were on the boat. So this wasn't done to
us deliberately."
As I was talking, I
felt Cordelia interlace her fingers with mine, so that we were holding hands. I glanced at her,
but her face was thoughtful, and I doubted she even knew she'd done it.
Her skin was warm and smooth, her hands delicate, and although I
knew I should let go, I didn't. "So we got zapped by a spell
meant for someone else?"
"I'd guess an
enchantment rather than a spell."
"What's the
difference?" Cordelia asked. I touched her fingers, one by one. They were slender but strong, and each
one ended in a nail as smooth as polished ivory.
"Enchantments are
more powerful than spells, but more difficult to focus tightly. And they don't just wear off --
they have to be reversed," I said. I moved my hand underneath
hers, and touched her palm lightly with my fingertips. Her hand flexed in
spasm, her whole arm tensing to the shoulder. "What's affecting us
is probably only an echo of the full enchantment."
"So this is the
bargain basement version. Someone else got the de luxe edition," Cordelia said. Her voice
lowered, and she turned her head toward me, so she could whisper in my ear,
"Lucky them."
"I don't think
whoever's responsible for this magic intended it for fun." Somehow, my hand was moving along the
inside of Cordelia's arm, from the inside of her elbow down. Her skin rose
in gooseflesh under my fingertips as I traced a path that followed
her pulse to her wrist, that hollow between her arm and her hand
where the force of her life was so strong it made her skin tremble.
"This is about control, and lack of it. This is about putting someone
else in thrall, making them
helpless and keeping them that way."
"Helpless,"
Cordelia echoed. She slid down the sofa beside me, just far enough so that her mouth was at my neck and
not my ear. I felt her lips brush my skin, just above the collar.
"Like... right... now..."
Suddenly I saw she was
right. She was nuzzling my neck; any second now I'd turn around and kiss her, and after that
was the point of no return. This time, there'd be no angry neighbor to save
us from ourselves. "We have to stop this."
"Mmmm. I know.
Oh, God, I don't want to. No, no, we have to stop. Okay. So stop."
"I'm
stopping." I lifted my arm, fully intending to push her off me, and somehow found myself pulling her closer
instead.
"You're
not." Her lips were against my throat, and her breath was warm on my neck when she spoke. It felt
incredible.
"You first,"
I said.
"Wait,"
Cordelia gasped. "Wait, wait. Dennis! Needing a little help here!"
The vase of flowers
sitting in the middle of the dining table suddenly levitated and flew toward the couch.
When it was directly overhead, it neatly tipped up, pouring cold water and
petunias all over us.
It wasn't pleasant,
but it worked. We leaped up and retreated to opposite corners of the living room. The vase
floated back to the table. Cordelia looked down at her soaking clothes,
then at the water-stained couch. I removed a flower from where it
had lodged inside my shirt.
"Thanks,
Dennis," Cordelia said. She hugged her arms around herself. "This is worse than when I was
dating Xander Harris. At least then I could blame teenage hormones. Angel, how
are we gonna snap ourselves out of this?"
I tried to focus on
the question, and not on the way Cordelia's wet blouse was clinging to her. "First we have
to find out what kind of magic it is, and who cast it. And then we need to work
out how to undo it." I sat down at the table, realizing for
the first time what a tall order that was. "We're going to need some
kind of expert help. These are the kinds of things Watchers spend
years studying. Maybe if we called Sunnydale --"
The look on Cordelia's
face stopped me. She mimed picking up a telephone and dialing a number. "Hello,
Giles? Hi, this is Cordelia. I need your help. You see, Angel and I are
suddenly incredibly horny for each other and -- Giles? Giles?" She put down
the invisible phone. "Gee, he hung up. I wonder why."
I took the point. But
the truth was, apart from our various acquaintances and exes in Sunnydale, Cordelia and
I had no one to go to now that Doyle was gone. Almost without our noticing
it, our world had narrowed until we were the only people in it.
Wait a second. Doyle.
"Did you bring
the box of Doyle's things to keep from his place back here?" I asked Cordelia.
She nodded. "It's
on the floor, over there. What do you want from it?"
I got the shoebox and
opened it. "This."
"Doyle's address
book?" Cordelia asked doubtfully. "Angel, this is not the time to start organizing the wake."
"He knew half the
demons and magic users in L.A. He must have known someone who could help us."
"Like who?"
I opened the address
book and began to flick through it. "Last month we were clearing out a nest of Velga demons out
at the coast. Doyle got bitten by one of them."
"So?"
"Their venom is
poisonous. I wanted to take him to a hospital, but he said he never went to regular doctors -- being
part demon, he couldn't."
"I get
that," Cordelia said. "I mean, if the doctor says 'Sneeze' and spikes grow out of your head, you're probably
gonna be in quarantine for the rest of your life."
"He said he knew
someone who could help. Her name was --" I tapped the open address book. "Sorcha. Here's the
number."
"You think she
knows about magic spells, too?"
"If she doesn't,
she might be able to give us the name of someone who does." I got the phone, and started to
key in the number. As I did so, Cordelia came out of her corner for the first
time. We weren't exactly close,
but we weren't that far away anymore either. Whatever we did, we were going to have to fix
this mess quickly, because I didn't think I could stand much more of this
excruciating, exhilarating awareness of her presence.
The phone rang three,
four, five times. I was about to give up and end the call when there was a click, and a
woman's voice said, "Hello?"
"Sorcha?"
"Who's
asking?"
Cordelia came closer
to me, until she was standing at my side, her ear pressed to the other side of the phone so she
could listen in on the conversation. My arm was bent as I held the phone
up, and she put her hand on the inside of my elbow so that she was
leaning against me.
"We haven't met.
My name is Angel. I'm a friend of Doyle's."
There was a pause.
"You're the vampire."
"Yes," I
said. "Sorcha, about Doyle --"
Sorcha's voice was
heavy as she said, "Yeah. Thanks for calling, Angel, but I heard. L.A.'s supernatural grapevine
is faster than CNN and more accurate for breaking news. You're
pretty famous right now, you know. There's gonna be a lot of people really
pleased that the Scourge are off the
radar for a while. For the last couple of months, I haven't been able to make enough
protective charms to meet demand."
So Sorcha was a witch.
"I need a favor."
She sighed.
"Doyle may be gone, but his spirit endures. What gives?"
"I need to undo
an enchantment. Urgently."
I heard her draw in
her breath sharply. "Enchantments? That's a little out of my league."
Unexpectedly, Cordelia
grabbed the phone off me. "Listen up, lady. Unless you help us, I'm either gonna be stuck in
the world's worst porn movie forever or wearing a chastity belt for the
rest of my life. So, for the love of Pete, help."
I snatched the phone
back off her in time to hear Sorcha ask in bemusement, "Who was that and what was she
talking about?"
"The magic has to
do with, uhh, with sexual attraction."
"Oh," Sorcha
said. Then, more knowingly, "Ohhhhh. Those are the worst ones to break. Okay, I'll try, but I'm not
promising anything. Look, I don't finish my shift until 11.30pm, so the
soonest I can meet you is midnight."
"That's
fine," I said, and gave her the address of the office. Then I thanked her and ended the call.
"Midnight,"
Cordelia groaned. "What are we gonna do until then, tie ourselves to chairs?"
"While we're
here, Dennis will step in if we get too..."
"Frisky?"
Cordelia suggested. Our ghostly chaperone rattled the vase on the table in confirmation.
"Then it'll get
dark around seven, which gives us five hours."
"Five hours to do
what?"
"To get some
answers," I said.
***
Tonight, the deck of the Delilah was empty, and most of
her portholes were dark.
If we were lucky, Hunter and his guests were at another party somewhere in the city, and wouldn't
be back until long after we'd been and gone.
I looked at Cordelia.
"Okay. While we're in there, remember --"
"If you're about
to tell me to stay with you, that's pretty much a given," she said.
"While we're in
there, do what I tell you to. All the time, no exceptions, no arguing back. Understand?"
She nodded, but I
still felt uneasy as we trotted up the gangplank and started to make our way around the outside of
the Delilah's deck. A little maritime breaking and entering wasn't
the most dangerous thing I'd
ever done by a long way, but I wasn't used to sharing my risks.
I found an unlocked
door, and together we went below deck. Evidently Hunter didn't spend enough time on the Delilah to
consider it his home.
Inside, the yacht was
as opulent as its exterior suggested. The hallways were carpeted -- a ridiculous
impracticality on a seagoing vessel -- and the cabins I looked into were more
like bedrooms in a luxury hotel than anything you might expect to find on
a boat. The stateroom was a suite, with a bedroom, bathroom and
living area. This was where Hunter and Jameela slept, I guessed.
We searched the
bedroom first, which was dominated by a huge, circular bed, draped in a fur throw. Cordelia
breathed out in awe when she saw it. "Lifestyles of the rich and
evil." She ran her hand down the door of a closet which was set into the
side of the room. "This is beautiful. What are we looking for,
anyhow?"
"Anything that
shows what kind of man Hunter really is. And anything that might tell us where he gets his magical
power from."
I went to the
bookshelves next to the bed and looked through the titles. I didn't see any copies of the
Necrocomicon or the Almanac of Demonology. Instead, Hunter had recently been
reading "Thriving in the Global Economy" and "The Seven Habits
of Highly Effective People." Plenty of evidence that he was
exceptionally dull, then, but nothing that linked him obviously to the black
arts. I started to put back the books, but as I moved something
fluttered to the floor at my feet. I picked it up, and turned it over in
my fingers. It looked like a large fish-scale, shining with an oily
mix of colors in the dim light. I'd never seen anything like
it, but it smelled distinctly demonic. I put it in my pocket.
"Angel, look at
this!" Cordelia said suddenly, a note of excitement in her voice.
"What have you
found?"
"LOOK at this
wardrobe. Prada, Gucci, Valentino -- these people have serious style. And it goes way deep --" She
pushed the hangers apart and waved her arm into the dark space beyond for
emphasis.
The closet was deep.
It was much, much deeper than it had any right to be.
"Help me take out
those clothes," I said.
Cordelia looked
momentarily doubtful. "You think? I mean, it wouldn't be right to try them on. But then, it's
just WRONG for beautiful clothes not to be worn --"
"No," I
said, "just take them out of the closet, Cordelia. I want to see what's behind there."
She looked
disappointed, but helped me anyway. When I tapped the back of the closet, it rung hollowly. I felt
around until I found a recessed handle, and pulled it. I wasn't at all
surprised when the back of the closet swung out. It was a door.
And behind it was
shelf upon shelf of small plastic packages filled with white powder.
"Oh, my
God," Cordelia said. "What is that? Cocaine?"
I didn't know. I
haven't taken drugs since the most potent substance available was opium, and I haven't kept up with
developments in the area since. But I could guess that the street value of
what we were looking at probably would have bought most of downtown
L.A.
I put the door back,
and began to replace the clothes on the rails in front of it, hiding the stash. "You're
just gonna leave it there?" Cordelia asked.
"Can you think of
a better plan? Besides, this isn't what we came here to find."
Cordelia sat down on
the edge of the bed. "Angel, this is serious. I mean, you can't go to the cops and say, There's a
bad guy casting spells on his girlfriend. But 'drug trafficker' -- to a
cop, THAT'S a magic word."
She was pale, and I
realized what we'd just found had been more shocking to her than any number of demons or
vampires. She ran her fingers over the bed's fur cover, and shook her head.
"It's not fair," she said. "Why do evil people get to
enjoy the best things in life?"
"Mostly because
they don't care how they get them." I sat down next to her. The bedcover was real fur, a rarity in
this age of environmentalism and endangered species. It felt warm
and silky, an extravagance of sensation under my fingertips, and I
found myself stroking it again and again.
Everything in the
bedroom, in fact, represented a slice of luxury, from the lustrous wood paneling on the walls to
the delicate perfume coming from the bowls of roses arranged on the floor.
Whoever had designed this room had intended it to be far more than
a place to crash out for eight hours. It was a temple where the
physical senses were worshiped and gratified, a place to indulge
fantasies.
One of the things
Cordelia and I have in common is a weakness for luxury.
"Evil or
not," Cordelia said suddenly, "this place is making me a little --"
She didn't finish the
sentence, but I guessed the word she was looking for was probably 'frisky'. I raised my
hand from the fur throw and ran it instead over and through her hair,
losing my fingers in dark, shining waves. I wondered if all her
hair was as soft and silken as this.
Cordelia's breathing
was getting faster, more shallow. "Oh, no," she said. "Oh, no, not here. Someone could find
us --"
"Anyone could
walk right in."
She stretched out on
top of the bedcover, her hair fanning around her head like a dark halo, in places
indistinguishable from the mahogany-colored fur
throw. "Someone might hear us."
"Anyone who was
listening."
She bit her lip and
gave a small moan, as insanely and stupidly turned on by the idea as I was. I started to
recline next to her, so that our bodies were side by side. I wanted to feel her
skin under my hands, to learn her contours like a diver feeling
his way by touch along the ocean's hidden floor to find sunken
treasure. All I could think was: No Dennis here --
"What are you
doing here?"
I sat up; Cordelia
gave a yelp of surprise and rolled away from me. Jameela was standing in the stateroom's doorway.
For an instant, the look on her face was one of killing fury. Then, just as
quickly, it was gone. "What are you doing here?" she said
again, and now her voice was pleading, terrified. "You shouldn't be
here."
Cordelia sat up,
gasping. "We were just -- uh, I mean we were kind of --"
With all the authority
and dignity I could muster, under the circumstances, I said, "We know what your
boyfriend's real business is, Jameela. You have to get away from him before you
get sucked down, too."
Jameela shook her
head. "Oh, God. You don't know how much I want to. But I try to go and I can't. Sometimes I feel
like he's put a spell on me..."
"That's because
he has," Cordelia said matter-of-factly. She was patting her hair back into place, and was rapidly
regaining her composure. "Your boyfriend is the scummiest piece
of scum that ever clung to the underside of a rock."
I heard a faint noise
from somewhere else in the yacht. Cordelia didn't react, but Jameela gave a start and
glanced out of the stateroom's open door and into the corridor. A few
seconds later a man's voice called, "Jameela? Are you okay?"
Jameela looked at me.
I looked back at her.
"Listen to
me," I said in a low voice. "Hunter's using magic to make you stay with him. We're going to figure out how
to break it, and then you'll be free. You want that, right?"
"Jameela?"
the male voice called again.
Slowly, Jameela
nodded. Then she raised her head and, never breaking eye contact with me, called back, "Yes, I'm
fine. But -- but I thought I heard noises on the forward deck. Go check it
out."
Cordelia breathed a
deep sigh of relief. I would have, if I breathed.
Jameela was shaking.
"Leave," she said. "Leave now, before he finds you."
I took Cordelia's
hand, and we went to the door. Cordelia went through, but had to stop when I held back. I dug
into a pocket and found a business card. "This is our phone number.
If you get scared - - if you need to get away -- call me. I'll come."
Jameela smiled a
faint, fragile smile. "Thank you, Angel."
***
"We have to call
the cops," Cordelia said as we left the Delilah and started to walk back through the marina.
"Yes, but not
right away. They'd impound the yacht, and then we might never figure out what kind of magic
Hunter's using, or how to break it."
"You know what
the scary part is?" Cordelia said. "Back there, for a couple of seconds I didn't want to break the
spell. Angel, the longer this goes on, the harder it's gonna get to
--"
She didn't finish the
thought, but she didn't need to. If we didn't fix this soon, everything was going to get
harder, in every sense.
I heard a shout from
behind us, and when I looked around, the Delilah was lit up from stern to prow.
"What does that
mean?" Cordelia asked.
"It means we're
in trouble," I said, seeing the three -- no, four -- shapes swarming down the yacht's gangplank toward
us. "Run."
But running normally
was out of the question -- I couldn't concentrate on where I was going without looking
back to make sure Cordelia was still close. I grabbed her hand and we ran
awkwardly, but faster.
But not fast enough.
The Delilah's security
detail was easily catching up with us, and when I looked around I saw why -- they weren't
human. The thugs at the previous night's party had been for show --
Hunter's real personal security was demonic.
If they caught up with
us, I wasn't certain I could fight them all. Cordelia had the twin advantages of youth and
strength, but she couldn't match supernatural speed. We needed
inspiration, or a miracle. Preferably both.
Ahead of us, I saw the
lights of cars on Venice Boulevard. That was our chance. I pulled Cordelia along faster.
"Come on."
"Angel, the way
out's in the other direction," she said, gasping. "Where are you GOING?"
There wasn't time to
explain. I was guessing that Hunter's demons had strict orders not to leave the marina, or
risk being anywhere they might be seen. We'd be safe if we could get to the
road.
Cordelia was
breathless now. I held on more tightly to her wrist and stopped her from slowing down. Behind us, I could
hear the clipclip of hooves -- damn, getting kicked was going to hurt
like hell if this came to a fight -- getting closer. But so were the
lights of the boulevard.
Thirty yards. Twenty.
Fifteen.
That was how far away
safety was when I saw the gaping hole in front of us. I nearly didn't stop in time.
Cordelia and I
teetered on the edge of a berth which had no vessel in it. The tide was out, and fifteen feet below
us there was only black mud. I judged the distance. "We're going to
have to jump it."
"Are you crazy?
No way!"
"It's not that
far. You can do it," I said. Without waiting for a reply, I backed up, ran, stretched and leaped --
-- and for a second or
less the darkness was above and below and around me --
-- and then I was on
the other side.
I turned around, and
saw Cordelia standing on the other side of the gap. She was out of my reach, and the sense of
separation was suddenly acute and unbearable. Too late, I realized I'd
seriously underestimated the strength of the magic binding us.
From the look on Cordelia's face, she was feeling it, too.
Cordelia looked at the
gap, then at me. "Oh, God. Oh God," she said. "Angel, I can't --"
I held out my hand to
her. "Come on."
"You are SO gonna
regret this," Cordelia said.
Then she backed up,
ran and jumped --
-- and for a second
she seemed to be motionless in the air, suspended and weightless --
-- and then she was
falling, falling, falling, and I knew with a sudden and horrible conviction that she had been
right, and I might never regret anything as much as what I'd just done
ever again.
***
When Hunter's demons couldn't find either me or
Cordelia, they quickly gave up looking and went back to the yacht. Our
hiding place, at the bottom of the empty berth, waist-deep in
cold, foul- smelling mud, was an excellent one. If only I'd thought
of hiding instead of jumping, I thought as I cradled Cordelia's
still body in my arms. If only.
If only I'd realized
there was no way a normal human could make the same leap as a vampire, I thought as I carried
her, still unconscious, back to my car. If only I'd realized that
she wouldn't have a choice, I thought as I drove away. If only I'd
thought it through and realized that, once I made the jump, the
enchantment and the compulsion to stay close to me would make her
attempt it anyway.
If only I wasn't so
damn careless with people's lives, maybe I wouldn't have to live with as much guilt as I
did.
Cordelia didn't stir
as I drove across the city. She was breathing, and her heartbeat was strong and regular -- I
drove with one hand on the wheel and one wrapped around her wrist, so I could
feel her pulse -- but beyond
that I had no measure by which to judge how seriously hurt she was. I wasn't used to dealing
with the injuries of anybody who wasn't a vampire or a slayer or
half-demon.
I drove without
thinking about where I was going. Not to Cordelia's apartment, where I'd have to face Dennis, if
'face' was the right word to use for a poltergeist. Not to a hospital, where
they might take her away from me. No, those weren't rational
thoughts, but I was way past rational and in no danger of coming back
soon.
I went home.
I put the car in the
parking garage and carried Cordelia to the elevator and then to my apartment. I had an idea
that if I could just put her to bed and watch over her while she slept,
then somehow everything would make itself all right.
I was surprised to
find a woman I'd never met before waiting for me in my kitchen.
She was in late middle
age, dark-skinned and solidly built, verging on a matronly plumpness. She stood up as I walked
in, dripping sand and mud and carrying Cordelia in my arms. She blinked
once, and otherwise betrayed no surprise at all. "I was
expecting a vampire," she said, "but apparently you're the Swamp
Thing."
"Who --?"
"I'm Sorcha,"
the woman said.
The kitchen clock read
twenty five minutes to one. Sorcha stood up, and I saw that she was wearing a blue uniform. I
remembered her comment about her shift ending. "You're a
nurse."
"Twenty years in
emergency medicine," Sorcha said. "And it looks like that's just what we got here. What
happened?"
"She fell."
Sorcha made a tsk-tsk
noise which indicated that, as answers went, that one wasn't nearly good enough. "On to
what? How far? How'd she land? And where's there a bed around here?"
Into deep mud -- about
fifteen feet -- on her back -- I answered those questions and more while Sorcha made
Cordelia comfortable in my bed. Then I stood to one side as she went through a
precise set of rituals which was strangely comforting to watch. She
opened Cordelia's eyes and shone light into them, felt her
pulse and moved her arms and, very gently, her head.
"Well," she
announced at last, "She's going to have a headache when she wakes up, but the worst she'll suffer is some
bad bruising. You're lucky she fell on to mud and not concrete."
Sorcha wrinkled her nose as she smelt the ripe stench which was
coming off me, Cordelia and now the bedclothes. "Maybe not that
lucky. She just needs to sleep -- come back to the kitchen and I'll
make tea."
I slumped down on to
the chair at the end of the bed. I couldn't remember ever feeling as guilty, relieved and
helpless, all at once. "I can't," I said, rubbing my hands
across my eyes tiredly. "I can't leave her."
Sorcha looked at me.
"Would this have to do with that enchantment you were telling me about?"
I nodded.
"Now I know why
Doyle liked you -- you're even better at finding trouble than he was," Sorcha said. Her voice
was still brisk and business-like, but for the first time there was a note
of kindness in it, too. "Okay, you'd better tell me from the
start."
So I did.
I told her about
Doyle's last vision -- it turned out Sorcha had been brewing him headache remedies for years --
and about Jameela and what I suspected Hunter was doing to her. Then,
somehow, I found myself telling her why I should have died to stop the
Scourge, and not Doyle, and why Cordelia needed to go back to
Sunnydale for her own good, and why I needed to stop pretending I had the
right to care about any human beings, when all I did was get
them hurt. There was something strangely cleansing about spilling
everything to someone I didn't know and would probably never see
again after tonight. They say confession is good for the soul.
Maybe there's some Catholicism left in me, even now.
"Cordelia can't
see that she has to go," I finished.
"Sometimes people
are stubborn," Sorcha said. "Sometimes they just can't see what's best for them, even when it's
staring them right in the face."
"I forgot she
wouldn't be able to make the jump," I said.
"Why?"
"Because she's
not a vampire. She's human."
"No, I meant --
why did you forget?"
I hesitated. I hadn't
really thought about that. "Because -- because I've gotten used to her always being there, right
behind me."
"And right beside
you, too."
I shrugged, not seeing
the difference. "I forgot we're not the same, and she can't follow me everywhere."
"But you wouldn't
want her to be like you," Sorcha said.
I looked at Cordelia,
lying peacefully in the bed, her chest rising and falling evenly with the simple miracle of
living. "No," I said quietly. "I want her to stay just the way
she is."
"Well,
then," Sorcha said, as if we'd reached some kind of important conclusion. I looked at her, but she just smiled.
"That scale you said you found -- can I see it?"
I searched my pockets
and found it, encrusted with silt but undamaged. Sorcha wiped it clean and held it up.
"Oh," she said. "I think your problem is more serious than a simple
enchantment. You know what Sirens are?"
The word was familiar
to me, but only from stories so old they'd never been recorded in books. "Sirens lured
sailors to their deaths by singing."
Sorcha arched an
eyebrow. "Their methods have gotten a little more sophisticated since then."
I looked at her.
"Sirens are real?"
"They're just
another type of demon," she said. "Very rare, but real. They disguise themselves as humans -- and,
believe me, it's a perfect fake. Not even magic can tell a Siren from a
real person. Then they make themselves irresistible by sending out
bursts of magic that can send a man -- or a woman -- crazy with
desire. A human in a Siren's thrall is a pitiful thing -- they'll
do anything and think they're doing it for love."
"Wait," I
said. "I thought Sirens were female. It's Hunter who's controlling Jameela."
"Sirens are
sexless. They can take male or female form," Sorcha said. She held up the scale I'd found. "The
disguise is a lot prettier than the real thing."
I gestured at Cordelia.
"So what happened to us?"
"I'm guessing you
got too close to a Siren while it was using its power. You caught the fall-out, and you've got
nowhere to direct it except at each other."
Cordelia stirred a
little in the bed, the first movement she'd made. I wanted to touch her and so, not even trying to
check the impulse, I did. I took her hand in mine and squeezed it. When
her fingers tightened very slightly around mine, I felt better than
I had in hours.
"How do we break
the enchantment?" I asked Sorcha.
"The only way I
know of is to slay the Siren responsible."
The knowledge that I
was going to have to kill something almost cheered me. At last, something I was good at.
"Sounds simple."
"It is,"
Sorcha said, standing up. "The tough part is finding the Siren -- there's no way to tell one from a real
person unless it drops its disguise. I'm going to make that tea,
now."
***
Sorcha's 'tea' turned out to be a dark, almost viscous
liquid she brewed using a variety of herbs she told me she always
kept in her car, "just in case". The potion smelt almost
as bad as the now- congealing mud and slime that was still splattered
liberally over myself and now over my sheets, too, but Sorcha insisted
it would help Cordelia. "Let it cool," she instructed
me, "and when she wakes up make her drink a cup every hour until it's
gone. It's the best thing I've found for concussion. Doyle swore by
it."
I sniffed the liquid,
and thought it was more likely that Doyle had sworn AT it, but I thanked her anyway. When,
shortly before dawn, Sorcha went, she left me with a list of instructions, a
flask of evil-smelling tea, and a deep sense that I had received
a great and undeserved kindness.
While Cordelia slept
out the morning, I stayed by her side -- I had no choice. Once I was certain she was no longer
unconscious, but was truly resting, I was able to relax a little. I even
managed to read as I sat with her. It was no different to how I'd
waited out the daylight hours a thousand times before, except now I
had the need for, and comfort of, Cordelia's sleeping presence.
By midday, she was
awake, able to sit up in my bed and pull a face when I made her drink the first cup of Sorcha's
tea. "Yechhh! It tastes like chemical waste."
"Sorcha said
Doyle used to drink it for the vision headaches."
"Yeah, but Doyle
used to drink that bright green lime-flavored liqueur from -- where was it from?"
"Ecuador," I
said. "I think he used it to unblock drains, too. Stop talking and finish this."
"You have no
compassion for the suffering," Cordelia sniffed, but she finished the cup.
By the middle of the
afternoon, Cordelia had drunk all Sorcha's tea. Her headache was gone, and she wanted to get out
of bed. I helped her to the couch, where she could sit up, and I could
finally relax arm and leg muscles
that had grown stiff and sore from hunching forward in the wooden chair beside the bed all
day.
"If we were at my
place, we could watch TV," Cordelia said, and I gave silent thanks we weren't at her place. She
scowled. "I guess we're stuck here until it gets dark again."
"Welcome to my
life." I indicated the trap door in the floor: "There's always the sewers."
"Ughh, no thank
you." She wrinkled her nose in distaste. "I can smell them from here."
"Actually, I
think that smell might be us."
The look on Cordelia's
face changed to one of horror as she realized I was right. Neither of us had changed out of the
clothes we'd been wearing the previous night. The mud and slime into
which Cordelia had fallen and I had followed her had now hardened on
our clothes and skin, becoming a sour black scum that smelled
almost exactly like rotting fish. For the first time, I registered the
damage we'd done to the couch just by sitting on it. It was clear I
was going to have to get the upholstery cleaned at the first
opportunity. In fact, there was a good chance everything that had come
within fifty yards of myself and Cordelia was going to need
cleaning. And maybe disinfecting, too.
"I don't
think," Cordelia said after a second, "I've ever felt less attractive than I do right now. And that includes
the time I was with Buffy and Xander when a big, green sploodge demon
attacked us and I got slimed."
Sploodge -- ? Oh.
"You mean a
Spluije demon," I said.
"That's what I
said, Sploodge demon. It looked like a giant, bloated stomach with a mouth and went 'sploodge' when
Buffy stuck a knife into it. She SAID she just stuck it where it was
vulnerable, but did any of the goo inside that thing spurt all over HER?
Oh, no. And yet, strangely, I was dry cleaning for the next
month."
Tactfully, I said
nothing.
"That was gross.
But this -- THIS is worse. I smell like a tray of cat litter and I've got little bits of seaweed
down the front of my blouse. As soon as I get home I am getting straight
into the shower - -" Abruptly, she broke off and grabbed my hand.
"Oh, God. That's not gonna work. I can't even think about not being in
the same room as you."
Cordelia's breathing
had quickened; her fingers were locked around mine so tightly it hurt. But I welcomed the pain,
because it eased the surge of raw, uncontrollable panic I was feeling at
the idea of not being able to see Cordelia, to reach out and touch
her, know she was close by and safe. For a minute or more we sat side
by side on the couch in silence, our hands tightly gripped
together, fingers intertwined.
"I think it's
getting worse," Cordelia said at last.
"I know," I
said. "Sorcha said the only way to break the enchantment is to slay the demon responsible."
"I meant the
smell," Cordelia said. "Angel, I have GOT to wash. So do you, since I can't get away from you any time
soon. I HATE this," she finished, and I wondered if she was referring to
the smell, our current situation, or both.
She closed her eyes
and sighed deeply, and looked as miserable as I'd ever seen her, as if simply not being able to
get clean was worse than concussion or demons or magic enchantments
by a factor of thousands.
With sudden insight, I
realized that, to Cordelia, it probably was worse. Her world -- which had previously been a
safe, predictable place where only good things happened to her -- had
lately become messy and dangerous. But Cordelia wasn't about to be
brought down with it, and suddenly I saw that her obsession with
hair and makeup and having just the right pair of shoes was her first
line of defense against a
disordered, grubby universe. Without the lipstick- and-heels shield she put up around herself every
day, she was vulnerable. I didn't like to see her that way.
"We could use the
shower here," I suggested.
Cordelia's eyes
snapped open. "Back up there. We?"
I nodded and watched
as, on Cordelia's face, unease at what I was suggesting warred with a deep, deep need not to
have slime in her hair.
Reasonably, I said,
"Look, when I was growing up, there wasn't any such thing as hot running water. The whole family
washed once a month, in a tin bath we put in front of the fire.
Everybody used the same water and everybody saw everything."
"If you're trying
to make it sound quaint and theme-park historical, you're missing by a mile."
"I'm just trying
to explain that it'd be no different from how people used to live."
"And did people
used to live with weird demony enchantments that made them uncontrollably horny for each
other?" Cordelia asked. "Because, if not, then you and me getting
hot and wet together is a terrible idea."
"I know something
about self control," I said.
Cordelia snorted.
"Yeah, I bet. You and every other man on the planet."
There was something in
the dismissive way she said it that made me snap, "Last time I looked around, there
weren't any other men on the planet who couldn't even let themselves touch the
woman they loved in case they got carried away and ended up losing their
souls AGAIN - -"
I broke off a little
too abruptly.
"Sure,"
Cordelia said, "I know after you came back you couldn't get happy with Buffy, but you could get mostly happy
without getting completely, all-the-way happy, right? You must have let
yourself get, you know, cheerful sometimes." I looked at
her, and the certainty in her face started to waver. "Okay,
maybe not. But you could still make out. Although I guess the fun part of
making out is what comes after the making out, so that'd get old real
quick -- Okay, you could still hold hands. I swear I saw you two
holding hands --" She stopped, as if realizing something
for the very first time. "Except I never did."
In fact, Buffy and I
had allowed ourselves to hold hands sometimes, usually when walking back from patrol together or
on one of our increasingly infrequent and strained dates. We'd
kissed, too -- dryly and chastely, a goodnight peck on the cheek --
and a couple of times we'd even shared a bed, but only fully dressed
and with layers of blankets between us. We'd survived on scraps,
knowing that the rest of the world was enjoying the banquet and, of
course, in the end it hadn't been enough.
"I guess you
couldn't risk going any further than first base with Buffy, after what happened," Cordelia said
at last. "I never thought about what that must have been like."
I gave a sour little
smile. "I didn't think about much else. But -- nothing happened."
Cordelia's hand
tightened around mine. Her skin was warm and soft; I could feel her pulse, beating strongly in her
wrist, and for once the incessant thud didn't stimulate my appetite.
"I'm sorry," she said. "I know I'm enchanted up to the eyeballs
right now, but the idea of being close to someone and not being able to
touch them -- it sounds like the worst thing in the world." Then
her voice changed, an element of resolve entering her tone.
Slowly, she said, "If you can deal, I can, too."
She got up, and pulled
me to my feet with her. Still holding hands, we made our way to the bathroom, where I shrugged
off my shirt and Cordelia stepped out of her jeans. We had to let go of
each other to undress; even though it was necessary, and even though
we were standing facing one
another, I still felt a stab of discomfort when I lost the reassurance of her touch. I guessed
from the reluctance with which Cordelia disentangled her fingers from mine
that she felt something similar.
I threw my clothes
into the corner, where they landed on top of Cordelia's blouse. Now I was stripped to my
boxers and she was down to panties and a coral-colored camisole top edged with
lace. The top and panties didn't quite meet, and so a low section of
her midriff was bare; she had a small, round scar on her stomach,
just above the camisole's lace hem. The top was a snug fit; the
material pulled taut across her chest, smoothly hugging the swell of
her breasts, except in two places, where the soft skin underneath
was hard and puckered. I remembered that the ambient temperature in
the apartment was probably a little too cool for a living person.
Cordelia hugged her arms around herself and shivered.
"Before we get
started," she said, "some rules and boundaries. Because after this magical superglue comes
unstuck, we're still gonna have to see each other only every single day, and
I'd prefer to avoid the potentially crushing embarrassment, if
possible."
I nodded.
"Right."
"So -- not
wanting to sound prudish -- but you have to keep your eyes shut. And I'll keep mine shut, too."
"Okay."
Cordelia cleared her
throat, and pointed at her camisole. "I mean, starting now, Angel."
"Oh. Right.
Okay."
Obediently, I closed
my eyes. I heard fabric rustling as Cordelia finished undressing, and so I took my cue to shed
my boxers.
I felt Cordelia take
hold of my wrist. With my other hand, I traced a route along the bathroom's tiled wall until I
came to the shower cubicle. I fumbled with the handle until I heard a
familiar squeak followed by the gush and splutter of hot water. The air
in the bathroom rapidly became warm and moist, and we slipped
under the rush of water together.
Cordelia made a small
noise of delight, and whatever doubts I'd had about the wisdom of what we were doing
evaporated. "Ohmigod, this is JUST what I needed. Au revoir, fishy odors! Where
do you keep the soap and shampoo?"
Her voice was almost
in my ear, but the only contact between us was her hand on my wrist. The shower cubicle wasn't
exactly spacious, and I couldn't figure out where she had positioned
herself so that we didn't touch. "There's a shelf," I said,
"right above your head -- "
She moved, and I felt
the water bouncing off her and on to me change direction. "Got them." She pushed the
bar of soap into my hand. "Here, you take this. I'm gonna do my
hair."
I rubbed the soap into
a lather and set about washing my face and arms. At the same time, I could hear Cordelia
massaging shampoo into her scalp. "What kind of shampoo is this? It
doesn't smell of anything."
"I have a
heightened sense of smell, remember? Artificial perfumes give me a headache. I can tolerate unscented
products, although they're not unscented to me."
She held a handful of
foamy hair under my nose. "So you can still smell this? What's it like?"
Her hair smelled of
the chemicals and additives in the shampoo, tinny and artificial. But, beneath that, I caught
the scent of something else. No matter how often humans wash, or how
heavily they drench themselves in perfumes and deodorants, nothing
masks entirely the unique scent of an individual. I purposefully
ignored the stink of shampoo and chemically-purified water, and
concentrated on what Cordelia's hair really smelled like: Cordelia.
"The way a garden
smells after the rain," I said. "Sharp. Sweet. Cleansing."
"Huh,"
Cordelia said, taking this in. "And all vampires get to experience the world in smell-o-vision?"
"It varies.
Spike's sense of smell was never much better than a human's, but he always claimed he kept his sense
of taste."
I doubted Cordelia had
developed a sudden interest in vampire biology, but while we were talking this way it
was easier not to think about more than the simple mechanics of
scrubbing, cleaning, rinsing.
"At least we're
being environmentally friendly," Cordelia said. She giggled. "Save water, shower with a
friend."
I allowed myself a
small chuckle, privately amazed at how relaxed I felt. Being this close to her didn't feel wrong
or uncomfortable; it was the most natural thing in the world, as if her body
was an extension of my own.
Then Cordelia twisted
around, probably to wash shampoo out of her hair, and I felt her hip brush against my thigh.
The sensation was so potent, so intense, that I couldn't help what I did
next.
I opened my eyes.
Her face was barely
inches away from mine, cheeks and lips flushed red. Her skin was golden brown, lustrous with
warmth and vitality stolen from the sun I couldn't walk under. She'd raised
her arms in order to wash her hair, and so the muscles which ran
from her shoulders to her chest
were taut, lifting her breasts. Rivulets of water and soap ran down between them, tracing a
path down to her belly and, below that --
I snapped my gaze up,
and found myself staring right into Cordelia's open eyes. "You were supposed to keep your
eyes shut," she said.
"So were
you," I said, aware that wasn't much of a defense.
"Turn
around," Cordelia said. "I'll wash your back."
She took the cake of
soap out of my hand; I turned around on the spot, and placed the flats of my palms against
the shower's tiled wall. I felt her hands on my back, at first between my
shoulder blades, then moving
down along my spine in sweeping motions. I could feel the path traced by each fingertip on my
skin, as the blast of hot water from the shower nozzle rained down on us.
"You feel
warm," Cordelia said. Her voice was lower than before.
"The water heats
me," I said.
Her hands were nearing
the base of my spine. "Just the water?"
"Not just the
water," I whispered.
She slipped her arms
around my chest, so that she was hugging me tightly from behind. Her face was against my
neck; I could feel her breasts and stomach pressing on my back. "Just a
second," she murmured. "Just a second more like this."
Her hands were on my
chest, while I was still pressing mine against the wall of the shower. I took my right hand off
the slick tiles and put it over hers. Then I lifted her hand to my mouth
and kissed her fingers, one at a time. I felt her pulse quicken, and
the rapid thud echoed through me, as if my heart had suddenly begun to
beat. I was warm to the core, and right then I could have believed
I was alive.
I was also very, very
hard.
Water poured on to us,
beating against the sides of the cubicle, our bodies, drumming incessantly, making coherent
thought impossible. We were pressed against each other, stomach to back, skin
to skin.
With an effort, I
reached up and turned off the shower. Instantly, the pounding water subsided into a trickle, then
stopped completely. "The
curse," I said hoarsely. "Remember the curse."
"Right,"
Cordelia agreed, voice strained. "Plus, the morning after embarrassment factor. Which might even be worse
than you turning evil."
"So we get dry
and get dressed," I said, "and forget this happened."
"Good idea,"
Cordelia said.
Neither of us moved.
Cordelia shivered
against me. "I'm getting cold," she said.
We still didn't move.
We stayed as we were, naked, wet, bodies locked together, but we weren't going to stay
that way for long, because any second now I knew I was going to turn
around and take her right there, up against the shower tiles --
Then the telephone in
the apartment's main room rang.
Cordelia let go of me
as if she'd just received an electric shock, and stumbled against the shower's opposite wall.
"We should get
that," she said.
I nodded, then edged
past her, out of the shower cubicle and into the bathroom. I wrapped a towel around my waist
and handed another to Cordelia without looking around. I really didn't
know what would happen if I looked at her again. Then we went out into
the dryer, cooler atmosphere of the rest of the apartment.
I let the phone ring
several more times before I answered it. By the time I picked it up, I was able to congratulate
myself on sounding almost composed. "Hello?"
"Angel?" The
voice on the other end of the line was female, hesitant, and plainly distressed. "You said
I could call you -- You said you could help -- I have to get away. I have
to."
"Jameela," I
said. "Jameela, it's okay. You're doing the right thing."
Jameela was close to
sobbing in relief as she said, "I'm on the yacht. I think maybe I can slip away, but if
Michael finds out I'm gone --"
"If he comes
after you, then he'll have me to deal with." There was no 'if' about it: by the end of tonight, the
Siren disguised as Michael Hunter would have a sword through its chest,
and I'd be able to get through more than a minute without thinking
about Cordelia, who was standing beside me, damp and wearing only a
towel --
With effort, I brought
my attention back to conversation.
"There's a
boathouse," Jameela was saying, "near the Delilah's berth."
"We'll be there
as soon as it gets dark."
***
In fact, we were a
little later than that, mostly because Cordelia insisted on stopping at her apartment so she
could change into clean clothes. I stood facing the wall in her bedroom as I
listened to the soft noises coming from behind my back -- buttons being
done and undone, zippers purring up and down, studs popping
open. I distracted myself by
thinking of different ways to kill the Siren pretending to be Michael Hunter. I had forty
three by the time Cordelia told me I could turn around.
We didn't talk much as
I guided the convertible along the westbound freeway, threading through the nighttime traffic
toward the coast. Cordelia seemed uncharacteristically contemplative, and
I figured it was best to let her work through the shower incident in
her own time. For my part, I felt -- well, the truth was, I was
having trouble figuring out just how I was feeling. On the one
hand, I felt a deep sense of gratitude mixed with relief that I'd
narrowly escaped taking a
stupid, extreme risk with my soul, while at the same time permanently damaging the fragile
friendship that had begun to grow between myself and Cordelia in the past couple
of months. On the other hand, I couldn't stop remembering how warm
and soft her moist skin had felt against mine, and how much I had
wanted her. How much I still wanted her.
When we reached the
Santa Monica exit and Cordelia still hadn't spoken -- thirty minutes' unbroken silence had to
be some kind of record for her -- I started to worry that maybe our
encounter had left her more upset than I'd realized.
"Cordelia?"
I asked hesitantly, "Are you okay?"
She looked away from
the lights of the city streaking past us and straight at me with that clear, uncompromising
gaze. "Well, yeah. Why wouldn't I be?"
"I thought maybe,
after what happened, ah, before, maybe you were feeling awkward, or uncomfortable," I said,
awkwardly and uncomfortably. "Because, although we didn't, uh,
you know, I know I wanted to, and I know -- I mean I'm assuming -- you
wanted to as well, and maybe now it's a little, uh, difficult to be
this close and know we can't be, ah, intimate."
I shut up then,
thinking that I'd probably have to live another two and a half centuries before I said anything as
inarticulate as that again.
But I didn't have long
to wish I was better at expressing myself, because right then Cordelia asked, "Why
can't we? Be intimate, I mean."
I stared at her, and
kept staring for so long that when I finally looked back at the road ahead, I had to pull hard
on the wheel in order to avoid clashing hub caps with the car in the
next lane. "Well, the
curse, for a start --"
"I've been
thinking about this," she said matter-of-factly. "You lost your soul when you and Buffy did it because
you loved her, right? But you don't love me, and I know I'm not in
love with you."
She was using the same
assured tone she usually reserved for telling me I ought to apply for a credit card or start
investing in the stock market and, rationally, I saw she was right. But
instead of feeling relieved that we hadn't taken as great a risk
as I'd thought, I only felt a
hollow, yawning gap somewhere in the pit of my stomach. It was a moment before I remembered
I'd forgotten to feed before we left the apartment.
"So even if we'd
really gotten carried away in the shower, the biggest risk we would have been taking was one of
us slipping on the wet floor and getting a nasty bruise. Plus," she
added breezily, "you're
really hot, so if we did have sex, it's not like it'd be a trial."
I wasn't sure how to
respond to that. "Well -- thanks. You're very attractive, too."
Cordelia shrugged
easily. "I know." Then she looked sideways at me, and smiled. "But it's still nice to hear it,
sometimes."
We'd arrived at the
marina. I parked the Plymouth, and together we made our way through the network of moored yachts
and pleasure-boats to the place where I'd first seen Jameela with Michael
Hunter. The Delilah was moored securely nearby; no lights were
visible at any of its portholes, and it seemed to have been locked down
for the night.
Cordelia peered into
the darkness. "I don't see anyone. Are you sure she'll be here?"
"This is the
right place. She said she'd meet us here."
"No, I meant --
are you sure she'll BE here," Cordelia said. "'Cause I'm thinking she's chickened out."
I heard -- or, more
accurately, sensed -- something move in the shadows behind us. But when I turned around, I
saw nothing.
"This isn't
right," I said.
"Hell,
yeah," Cordelia agreed. "Scum like Michael Hunter picking up some naïve girl like Jameela, thinking he can
just use her and throw her away when he's done -- it sucks. And now he's
probably terrorized her into
staying with him when she'd be --"
"Cordelia, be
quiet," I said. "Something's wrong. I think this is a --"
-- Trap, I wanted to
finish. But I couldn't say the word, because suddenly I couldn't keep standing. Pain blossomed
hotly at the back of my skull, and I fell. The last thing I saw
before my vision cut out was Cordelia, backing into a corner as a leering,
horned demon bore down on her.
**********************
III
I
woke up in hell. I knew it must be hell because Cordelia wasn't there.
She wasn't there, and
her absence was a huge, all-consuming void that was about to swallow me whole. She wasn't
there, and I needed her presence, her voice, her touch, needed her the way
the living need air to breathe. She wasn't there, and every second
that passed was more terrible than the one before it. She wasn't
there, and there weren't words for the horror of being without
her.
I could feel my throat
starting to tighten as a scream began to rise in my chest.
Somehow I managed not
to cry out. Instead I balled my hands into fists, and lay where I was -- somewhere cold,
somewhere hard, I knew that much -- with my eyes shut. No need I'd ever
experienced, no hunger or thirst or desire or terror, had ever been
this overpowering. I had no
thoughts, only the searing, brutal agony of want.
Back at the apartment,
I'd told her that whatever we felt wasn't real. I'd barely been able to bring myself to
believe it then, and I sure as hell didn't believe it now.
Time -- seconds,
minutes, longer -- passed. The crushing sense of loss and need didn't abate, but after a while I
managed to focus enough to realize it wasn't getting any worse. When I
could think about moving again, I sat up slowly and opened my eyes.
I unclenched my fists and looked at my palms, and saw blood oozing
sluggishly from the wounds my nails had made in them. The physical
pain actually provided some measure of relief; at least this
was something I was used
to tolerating.
I was in a cramped,
metal-floored room which had the unmistakable shape and design of a ship's cabin. The room was
barely larger than a closet and -- fortunately -- windowless. But sunlight
wasn't going to be a problem for hours yet; I knew it was still dark
outside because the buzzing sensation at the top of my spine
that heralded each sunrise was barely a hum. Or maybe it was simply
being drowned out by every nerve ending in my body screaming for
Cordelia.
I wanted to see her
face again, to hear her voice, to feel her skin, smooth and warm against mine, to taste her, to
inhale the scent of her hair as I'd experienced it in the shower, sweet and
unique and crisply clean from washing with my soap --
Wait. I wasn't
imagining that. I really could smell her.
Her scent hung on the
air. She was somewhere close.
I looked around.
Opposite the door, there was a small, circular vent, covered by a metal grille. As I stood
still, I could feel the faintest of drafts coming from it.
In a second, I was at
the vent, my face pressed so hard against it I could feel the metal wires cutting into my cheek.
I listened, and heard a noise I doubted human ears would have picked up
-- the sound of ragged, frightened breathing.
"Cordelia?"
I called. "Cordy?"
"Angel? Oh, God,
Angel? Where are you?"
Her voice echoed down
the ventilation system's pipes, hollow and faint. Hearing it filled me with a mixture of
insane joy and intense relief, and at the same time increased the torture of
not being able to see her. But, like an addict, I couldn't stop now.
"Not far from you. Are you okay?"
"Sure, if you
zero out the shuddering, icy, heart-palpitating PANIC." She made a noise that was half-way
between a gasp and a sigh of misery. "Is it as bad as this for you?"
"No heart
palpitations. Otherwise, yeah." I closed my eyes, breathed in her scent, and pretended she was in the room
with me. That way, I almost felt normal.
"I woke up and
you weren't there," she said. "I couldn't breathe. It felt like there were metal straps around my chest
and someone was pulling them tighter and tighter and my heart was
thumping so hard I thought it was gonna burst and I was gonna die right
then and you weren't there and --"
"Cordelia,"
I interrupted, "Cordy, it's okay. Listen to me. I'm going to find a way out of here and come and get
you. But, in the meantime, I need you to keep talking. Just -- keep
talking."
I heard her take a
deep, steadying breath. "It's easier when we're talking, isn't it?" she said finally.
"I still want to throw up because you're not here, but when I hear your
voice, it's not just so terrible."
"Right," I
said. "But I pretty much suck at conversation. And I need to figure out how to get out of here."
I started to explore
the cabin. It was an effort to move away from the ventilation grille, where her scent was
strongest, but as I began to prowl around the confined space, the sound of
her voice followed me, calming and comforting me.
"Sure. Keep
talking. I can do that. I mean, I talk all the time anyway, right? So, talking now -- that's gotta be
a cinch." There was a short silence, then her voice floated uncertainly
out of the ventilation grille again. "What should I talk
about?"
Under my feet, I could
feel the floor rolling gently from side to side, and I realized we were headed out to sea.
Since it was still night, we couldn't be more than a few hours' distant
from land, but that was far enough to make escape more problematic.
And it raised other unsettling questions, too. Such as, where were
they taking us?
"Anything,"
I said. "Anything you like."
There was a second's
silence. "Angel?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you really
want me to leave L.A. and go back to Sunnydale?"
I put my shoulder to
the cabin door and pushed experimentally. It didn't budge. "I want you to be safe."
"Right, and
Sunnydale and safety go together like ketchup and ice- cream. Try another line, buddy."
"You could have
broken your neck when you fell last night," I said, feeling the familiar stab of guilt as I recalled
just how lucky she'd been. "How many other times have you nearly
gotten killed just in the last couple of months? If you stay here with me,
sooner or later you'll end up dead. Like Doyle. And I don't want
your death on my conscience as well as his."
"So, what you're
saying is, it's okay if I go back to Sunnydale and get turned into chowder for some vamp or
Hellmouth freak -- just so long as I'm nowhere near you when it happens so you
don't have to feel guilty about it."
I knelt at the cabin
door and began to examine the lock mechanism. It was rusting at the edges, and several screws
looked as if they could be removed without too much difficulty. I started
to twist them, making them looser. "That's not what I'm
saying. I'm saying -- I can't protect you."
"That's right.
You can't." There was a note of triumph in Cordelia's voice, as if I'd just conceded an important
point. "I figured that out already, Angel. When I was high school, I
thought that being pretty and popular would protect me from all the bad
stuff, but it didn't, 'cause Xander still cheated on me. And then I
thought Daddy being rich would keep me safe -- and then all the money
went away. And then, when I came to L.A. and met you and Doyle, I
started to think maybe being good was the answer, but it's not,
because Doyle was good and he still died." She took a deep
breath, and I realized her voice had started to shake a little. But it was
steady again when she concluded, "I KNOW you can't protect me
from the bad stuff, Angel. I'm not asking you to."
She spoke with a
sadness that didn't belong in the voice of a girl as young as she was. It reminded me of the way
Buffy had sounded during our last conversations.
"Cordelia,"
I said at last, "I've been responsible for a lot of bad stuff myself, in my time. Now I'm trying to make
up for it. You're not obligated to be part of that. My mission --"
From the other side of
the vent, I heard a noise that sounded suspiciously like Cordelia blowing a raspberry.
"Mission, shmission! Get over yourself, Angel."
I jiggled the door
lock again, and was rewarded by two of the screws falling out. The lock was now definitely loose.
Dryly, I said, "It's so nice to know my quest for redemption has your
respect and support."
Cordelia laughed. It
was the best sound I'd heard in days. "It does. You do. But sometimes you talk as if nothing
happens that isn't because of a prophecy or a mission or Doyle's
Powers-That-Be. You want to know why I'm still here?" Her voice
softened, became gentle. "It's because you're my friend, Angel. The
only real friend I've got in this city. I like you, and I'm not gonna
stop liking you."
I stopped working on
the door's lock mechanism and instead stared down at my hands -- the same hands I'd used to
hurt and torture and kill in the years before the gypsies had cursed me. I
remembered the long decades during which my existence had consisted of
nothing except days of guilt-disturbed, fitful sleep and
tortured, empty nights. When Whistler had found me in New York and told
me I had a purpose other than to suffer, I had fallen on the idea
with the hunger of a starving
man. Since then, I had grown so used to the idea that my fate was to fulfill whatever
prophecies and missions had been allotted to me as punishment for my litany of
sins that I had stopped even considering the possibility that
anything could happen to me that wasn't pre-ordained, outside of my
control. Even falling in love with Buffy, for all that it had freed
me, had sometimes felt like my
destiny rather than my choice.
And now Cordelia said
she liked me. That we were friends. As if that were the simplest, most natural thing in the
world, and not the greatest and most unmerited gift a creature like myself
could receive.
"Thanks," I
said.
Cordelia didn't reply.
Hesitantly, I added,
"I like you, too."
Still no reply. The
cabin felt unnaturally silent.
Then I realized why --
I could no longer hear the gentle susurration of Cordelia's breathing coming from the
ventilation grille, and her scent was already growing stale on the air.
"Cordelia!"
I yelled.
She was gone. She was
gone and I didn't know where she was --
Unthinkingly, I began
to pound the cabin door, kicking and shoving it until it started to rattle in its frame. It
would have made more sense to finish the job I'd started on the lock and
make a quiet escape instead of creating enough noise to attract the
attention of everyone on board. But I wasn't thinking about anything
except the overriding necessity of finding Cordelia.
Lowering my shoulder,
I rammed the door. It started to buckle and, ignoring the pain, I backed up and made ready to
do it again.
As it turned out, I
didn't have to. The door opened.
Two of Hunter's hench-demons
were standing in the corridor looking in at me. They were each over seven feet tall,
including their curled horns -- they had to stoop in the yacht's low
corridor -- and in appearance they most resembled the unwanted
by-product of a genetics experiment carried out on a lizard and a goat.
I recognized them as Xohotical demons: stupid, vicious and insanely
loyal to anyone who gives them
fresh raw meat and scratches between their horns.
"Boss wants to
see you," growled the first demon.
"Where is
she?" I demanded. I wasn't in a position to demand anything, but I figured I had nothing to lose
trying.
"Boss wanted to
see her," the second demon said, roughly grabbing my arm and pulling me out of the cabin. "Boss
wants to see you." It smiled unpleasantly at me and added, "Boss has
special job for both of you."
That should have been
enough to tell me the bad situation we were in was about to get even worse. Yet, as they dragged
me along the yacht's corridor, the only thing I felt clearly was
relief that Cordelia was still okay and we were going to be
together again soon.
***
Our route to the Delilah's wheelroom took us outside
and along the yacht's deck, and I seized the opportunity to try to
pick up any clues as to where we were going. In front of the yacht,
the sea stretched ahead, ink-black under the clear night sky.
Off to starboard, I could see
the faint, flickering lights of the city. That, at least, was good news: we weren't headed
straight out to sea, but were instead maintaining a course parallel to
the shore.
I squinted at the
distant lights, trying to judge how far offshore we were, but before I could make a guess, my
demon captors hauled me up a set of steps and into the Delilah's wheelhouse.
And then every other thought evaporated from my mind, because Cordelia
was there.
She was being guarded
by two more of the Xohotical demons; she looked frightened and pale, but she didn't seem
to be hurt. She looked around as my captors pulled me through the door
and tried to come to me, but the demons held her back. So did the
two flanking me when I tried to get to her.
For an instant I felt
a tide of red rage rise up in me, felt my teeth sharpen into fangs and my face harden.
Dimly, I was aware that losing control now was more likely to get both Cordelia
and myself killed than solve anything, but that didn't quell the
mounting fury I felt at the idea of anyone keeping us apart.
"Let her
go," said a man's voice.
The demons holding
Cordelia hesitated, then released her. She ran the few paces it took to get to me, and we clung
on to each other. Suddenly I wasn't thinking about Hunter or Jameela or
the really, really bad situation we'd somehow gotten ourselves
into; everything I needed and wanted was in my arms.
"Are you
okay?" I asked when I could speak.
"Better
now," Cordelia whispered back. I knew exactly what she meant.
We maneuvered
ourselves so that we were standing side by side, although we were still holding hands. Our
enforced separation hadn't done anything to weaken the enchantment -- if anything,
our need to be close to each other had intensified to the point
where we couldn't even think
straight unless we were in physical contact. Now that we were holding hands, I didn't think either
of us was going to be able to let go; we weren't handcuffed together, but
we might as well have been.
But at least now I had
the reassurance of Cordelia's hand in mine, I could concentrate sufficiently on other things to
look around properly. The Delilah's wheelroom was as redolent of
money and taste as the rest of the yacht. The instrument panels were
finished in dark wood, the antique effect a pointed contrast to the
abundance of hi-tech navigation aids which probably had more to do
with indulging the owner's love of gadgets than helping to point the
boat in the right direction. A sweeping, curved window gave whoever
was at the yacht's wheel a comprehensive view of the yacht's prow
and the ocean beyond.
Right now, that person
was Michael Hunter. He was standing at the Delilah's wheel, wearing the rich man's weekend
uniform of chinos and a khaki sweater, and looking urbane and relaxed and
very much as if kidnapping and drug-running were part of his normal
daily existence. Jameela
stood close to him, one hand clutching his sleeve. Her gaze was lowered to the floor.
"We know all
about you, Mister," Cordelia said. "We know about the drugs, and the magic, and the -- and the
creamer!"
"The creamer
isn't actually illegal," I pointed out quietly.
"Yeah, but two
things is a pretty lame list," she whispered back. Then she raised her voice again and demanded,
"Where are you taking us?"
Hunter didn't reply;
he didn't even look around. He turned the wheel a fraction, and adjusted his stance. As he moved,
I saw there was a gun sitting on the edge of the Delilah's navigation
panel. It was resting where Hunter could reach it easily -- but it
was also within Jameela's reach.
I decided to try
another approach.
"Jameela," I
said.
She didn't look up
from the floor, or meet my gaze.
"Jameela, what
he's doing is wrong. You know that. What you think you feel for him isn't real -- it's just
magic." Jameela still wouldn't look at me, but I saw her glance toward
Hunter. Encouraged, I continued, "He's not even a person, Jameela.
He's a creature called a Siren, pretending to be a person. He doesn't
love you and you don't really love him. Look inside yourself and
you'll realize that's true."
Hunter respond to that
at all, but Jameela tightened her grip on his arm. But I saw her other hand start to work its
way across the Delilah's instrument panel, toward the gun.
"Michael," she said quietly. "Michael, you love me, don't
you?"
Now Hunter turned and
looked at her. "I adore you."
"That's a
crock!" Cordelia exclaimed.
"I would do
anything for you," Jameela said. "Would you do anything for me?"
"Baby,"
Hunter whispered, "you know I would." His hands had fallen from the yacht's wheel; he seemed to have
forgotten he was supposed to be steering it.
A sudden and
unpleasant suspicion formed in my mind.
Jameela's hand
tightened around the gun. She lifted it. "I would die for you. Would you die for me?"
"In a
second," Hunter said.
A human in a siren's
thrall is a pitiful thing, Sorcha had said.
Oh shit.
"Then die for
me," Jameela said, and gave Hunter the gun.
He was smiling at her
as he blew his brains out.
It happened so fast
there was no time to intervene. Cordelia cried out, and there was a horrible, wet splattering
sound as most of Michael Hunter's brains exited his skull and hit the
inside of the cockpit's window. The air thickened with the scent of
blood as his body thudded limply on to the floor.
Jameela straightened
up, tossed her hair back and dropped her little- girl-lost act for the first time. Looking at us
with a gaze that was as composed as it was utterly malevolent, she said,
"I'm impressed you've heard of Sirens. There aren't many of us, and we
like to keep a low profile." She nudged Hunter's body with her
toe. "For obvious reasons."
Cordelia was still
staring in horror at Hunter's body. "You killed him."
Jameela shrugged.
"He killed himself. Humans are pathetic -- they take pheromones and biochemistry and they slap
the word 'love' on it and pretend it's somehow transcendent. Look at
you," she added, waving contemptuously at Cordelia and myself, "a
vampire and his lunch, holding hands. Do you have ANY idea how
ludicrous you are?"
Regaining some of her
composure, Cordelia said, "I am no one's lunch."
The Xohotical demons
quietly moved around so that they flanked Jameela, two on either side of her.
"You know, this
used to be so much less work," Jameela said wistfully. "Back in the day, all we had to
do was sit on a rock singing and wait. The ships practically dashed
themselves, you know? And all that lovely gold just washed up around
us..." Her eyes grew unfocused as she fell into reverie. "Coins
and jewelry and rings. So many beautiful things. Do you know how wealth
is stored now? Stocks and bonds and options, little pieces of
paper or electronic pulses
moving between bank accounts. Money doesn't go clink anymore."
Jameela's eyes were
shining as she warmed to her topic, and I realized this was probably the only thing Sirens
felt real affection for.
"That's why you
targeted Hunter," I said. "You realized his legitimate business was just a cover for the real
source of his money."
Jameela shrugged.
"No one ever got that rich from creamer. All I had to do was wait until he told me everything I
needed to know -- the sources, the contacts, the channels." She glanced
disparagingly at the body on the floor. "He was too dumb to realize
everything he told me was bringing him closer and closer to permanent
retirement."
"Wow,"
Cordelia said. "I mean, demons are evil. Got that, down with it. But -- drug trafficking demons? You're in a
whole new league of evilness."
Jameela smiled.
"Why, thank you, my dear."
"Well, now you're
sunk," Cordelia said. "Because Angel and I know all about you, and we're gonna go straight to the
cops, and, and --" She broke off abruptly, and I felt her hand
tighten around mine. "And you're gonna kill us before we can do
that, aren't you?"
"That's the
plan," Jameela conceded. "But not before you help me."
"I don't think
so," I said.
"Oh, but I
do." Jameela was smiling again. "Tonight, a sudden and mysterious fire will sink the Delilah. By the
time the last charred timber sinks to the bottom of the ocean, I'll be a
hundred miles away -- with the real cargo."
"It's not that
easy to disappear," I said. "The authorities will expect to find a body."
"And they
will." Jameela was looking at Cordelia in a way I didn't like at all.
Nervously, Cordelia
said, "You think that'll work? The cops check things like dental records, you know."
"They won't be
able to," Jameela said sweetly, "if you don't have any teeth."
She motioned at the
nearest demon, which lumbered threateningly toward Cordelia. Raising a clawed hand and
smiling unpleasantly, it casually swiped at her face. It was just playing with
her, taking the opportunity to cause a little terror before it got
down to the serious business of maiming, but Cordelia didn't move
back quickly enough, and one claw grazed her cheek. A tiny scratch
just below her eye started to well with blood.
She was bleeding. They
had hurt her.
Suddenly, everything
-- Jameela, the demons, Michael Hunter's dead body, the yacht, the night and the wide Pacific
ocean -- faded, became insignificant and inconsequential. My world
began and ended with Cordelia; for each drop of her blood that had been
spilled, I wanted to wring pints from whoever had hurt her.
I brought the first
demon down without difficulty -- nothing could have prepared it for the violence of my attack.
The second demon put up more of a struggle, but made a fatal error when it
lowered its head to try to ram me with its horns. I grabbed one of
them and twisted it until it
broke off in my hand, leaving the demon writhing on the floor, clutching the bloody hole in its
head where the horn had been. When the third demon charged at me, I threw
the horn at it like a missile. The point slammed into the middle of
the demon's chest, and it flew backward into the wide window at the
front of the cockpit. It hit the window and kept going, sailing out
into the night in a shower of
shattered glass, before landing on the deck below with a satisfying crunch.
I was only warming up.
"Angel!"
Cordelia's voice. Was
she in trouble?
I looked around, and
saw with relief she wasn't. But she was glaring angrily at me, and for a moment, I couldn't
figure out why.
"Angel, you're
gonna dislocate my shoulder!"
I looked down, and
realized I was still holding her hand -- gripping it so tightly her fingers were white and
bloodless. Somehow I'd made it through the whole fight like that.
"Sorry," I
said. I loosened my grip, but didn't let go, and Cordelia didn't ask me to.
"THANK you,"
she said, rubbing her shoulder with her free hand. "Where'd skanky Siren lady go?"
I looked around the
wheelhouse, and saw it was empty. The door was swinging in the breeze blowing in through the
shattered window, and I could hear the sound of footsteps, rapidly growing
fainter.
"Come on," I
said, and together we ran out of the wheelhouse and down the steps, still holding hands.
We raced toward the
yacht's stern, following the sound of Jameela running ahead of us. We hadn't gone far when I
caught the first scent of smoke in the air. The next porthole we passed
glowed with an orange-red, flickering light.
"Great,"
Cordelia said, gasping a little as she ran next to me. "You know what's worse than being trapped with
drug-smuggling demons in the middle of the ocean on a boat? Being trapped with
drug-smuggling demons in the middle of the ocean on a boat THAT'S ON
FIRE."
"We're not
trapped," I said. The Delilah had everything else; it had to have a lifeboat --
We rounded the next
corner, and I saw the Delilah did have a lifeboat. Jameela was already in it.
The fourth Xohotical
demon was loading small, plastic-wrapped packages into the dinghy while Jameela untied the
ropes securing it to the side of the Delilah. She looked up at us as we
ran on to the aft deck, the look on her face one of faint annoyance.
"The other three were supposed to take care of you." She
snapped her fingers and barked a command at the demon.
The demon rushed at
us. "Don't move," I said to Cordelia. "And get ready."
"Get ready for
what --?"
I didn't have time to
answer -- the demon was nearly on us. I put my hand on Cordelia's shoulder, leaped, twisted, and
kicked, using her body as leverage. I heard her gasp in surprise, and her
shoulder dipped a little, but she didn't move. My foot connected
squarely with the demon's
throat; the force of the blow knocked it back, and as I landed I saw it skid across the deck and
over the side of the yacht.
Cordelia glared at me.
"Next time, a little more warning, please." She looked toward the side of the deck. "Do
you think it can swim?"
"Oh, yeah,
Xohotical demons can swim," I said. From the side of the yacht, we heard a scream, followed by an
unpleasant hissing, bubbling sound. "Salt water, on the other
hand..."
Jameela looked at the
spot where the last of her demon helpers had gone into the sea. Sounding more irritated than
anything else, she said, "You people are starting to piss me
off."
As she spoke, her
voice changed, becoming rougher and more guttural. Then she stood up, her body twisting and warping
as she rose. Her hair rose and hardened into poisonous-looking spikes
and iridescent scales appeared on her skin, exactly the same as the
one I had found in Hunter's bedroom. Her eyes reddened, the pupils
shrinking and disappearing, and webbing grew between her fingers, at
the same time as they lengthened and sharpened into claws.
Jameela -- in her real
and not at all attractive form -- stepped out of the lifeboat and on to the Delilah's deck.
With one scaly and powerful arm she -- it? -- broke off a portion of the
yacht's boom. Apparently she was much stronger in her true shape.
"Cordelia?"
I said.
"Yeah?"
"I think I'm
going to need both hands for this."
With effort, we let go
of each other. Immediately, I felt worse -- lifeless, like a puppet whose strings had been
cut, or a TV with the plug pulled. Just staying on my feet was a struggle.
Jameela wielded the
boom like a club, swiping it low through the air. I jumped, and looked around frantically for
something I could use as a weapon. I didn't see anything.
Jameela roared, and
attacked again. This time, I wasn't fast enough, and the blow glanced off my shoulder. I lost my
balance and fell on to the yacht's deck, landing hard on my back. I heard
Cordelia yell, and when I looked up I saw Jameela towering above me,
making ready to bring the boom down on to my skull.
Suddenly, a thick coil
of rope dropped over Jameela, temporarily pinning her arms to her sides. She dropped the
boom, and I rolled out of the way. When I got to my feet, I saw Cordelia
holding on to the other end of the crude lasso. She wasn't going to
be able to hold Jameela for long.
I dived for the boom
and retrieved it. Behind me, I heard a snap, and when I turned around I saw Jameela break the
rope with a roar. Cordelia staggered backward, losing her balance as the
rope went slack. I only had a few seconds. It was all I needed.
Launching myself at
Jameela, I knocked her over, and we rolled together across the yacht's deck. When we
stopped, I was on top of her. I hefted the boom and made ready to slam the
sharp, splintered end into Jameela's chest.
Jameela smiled, mouth
twisting back to reveal several rows of teeth. A black tongue flicked over her lips. In a quiet,
deceptively soft voice, she said, "When I die, she won't want you
anymore."
I hesitated.
Jameela reached up and
grabbed the boom out of my hands. Then she threw me off herself with such force that I
slammed backward, only stopping when I collided painfully with the main mast.
As I picked myself up, I saw Jameela heading back to the lifeboat.
And I saw Cordelia running toward her, clearly intent on stopping
her reaching it. She was going to get herself killed.
I heard myself shout
Cordelia's name. As if in slow motion, I saw her turn around and look at me. And I saw Jameela
wielding the boom, knocking Cordelia sideways, across the deck and over
the yacht's railings.
I ran across the deck,
ignoring Jameela, who was lowering the yacht's lifeboat into the sea. I skidded the last
couple of yards on my knees, and looked over the side of the boat with a
sick sense of fear.
Cordelia's face was
about six inches below mine. She was clinging on to the edge of the deck with both hands. Her
knuckles were white and I could see every muscle in her arms was stretched and
taut.
"Take my
hand," I said, reaching down to her.
Through gritted teeth,
she said, "I thought you'd never ask."
I grasped Cordelia's
arms and wrists, feeling an intense and almost physical sense of relief as I touched her, and
pulled her back up on to the yacht. When she was safely back on the yacht's
deck, I enfolded her in my
arms, and we stayed that way for several minutes.
Cordelia spoke first.
"Did Jameela take the lifeboat?"
I looked around, and
saw the dinghy was gone. "Yes."
"Great,"
Cordelia muttered. "So much for women and vampires first. You know what? The only way this could possibly
be worse would be if the boat was on fire." A pall of smoke drifted
above us, blocking our view of the night sky. I could hear the crackling
of flames. "No,
wait, the boat IS on fire, and this situation cannot, officially, get ANY WORSE."
"Maybe there's
another lifeboat," I suggested.
A quick tour of the
parts of the yacht which weren't yet impassable due to the fire dashed that faint hope. When we
returned to the aft deck, Cordelia leaned over the rails and waved at the
distant lights of Santa Monica. "Hey!" she yelled,
"Hey! Help!"
"We're too far
away," I said. "No one will hear."
Cordelia looked
desperately toward the shoreline. "It looks so close. We can't be more than a mile or two out. I
used to swim in the sea when we spent summer at the beach house. I know
we could swim that distance." She turned around, her voice
and face alight with sudden hope. "Angel, we could swim to
shore."
I looked at her, and
knew with cold certainty there was only one way out of this. "You could swim it."
Cordelia stared at me
in confusion for a moment, and then her face took on a look of dismay. "Oh -- Angel. Oh,
God, I forgot." She shook her head. "This would usually be the point
where I would make a nice speech about how I can't leave you behind.
Except --" She held up her hand, in the process raising mine, too. Our
fingers were entwined tightly around each other. "Except it
happens to be literally true. I can't leave you, Angel. I
can't."
"You'll have
to," I said. "Look, I'm not going to drown. The worst that can happen is I'll sink to the bottom and
have to walk back to land."
Caustically, Cordelia
said, "Using what -- the map of the ocean floor you always keep handy? There are no
signposts at the bottom of the sea, Angel. If you pick the wrong direction, the
next stop is Japan." She screwed up her face in something not
unlike pain. "Besides,
that's not the point. The point is, we'd be apart, and I -- just -- can't --"
I knew exactly what
she meant. The idea of being separated from her was making me feel physically ill.
Making my voice
deliberately harsh, I said, "If you stay here, with me, you're going to die. You have to swim."
I looked around, and saw a lifebelt hanging on hooks on the deck's railings. I
pulled Cordelia toward it,
took it down, and pushed it into her free hand. "Take this."
"We already had
this argument!" Cordelia yelled, and pushed the lifebelt back at me.
"And this is
exactly why I was right!" I was shouting back at her, now. I thrust the lifebelt back at her so hard
she had to take a step back.
Cordelia looked at the
lifebelt, then at me. "No, you're wrong," she said, "and we're gonna prove it."
Then she hugged me,
grabbed me with one hand and the lifebelt with the other, and deliberately pulled us both over
the deck's railings.
*************
IV
Cordelia
and I plummeted off the burning yacht together, and for an instant I was aware of nothing except the feel of
her body in my arms and the rush of the wind whistling past my ears.
Then we hit the water's surface, and the Pacific swallowed us up.
As I knew I would, I
started to sink. I let go of Cordelia -- this time, I wasn't going to drag her down with me --
and let myself start to go under. The water was mild, even warm, but
it grew rapidly cooler as I
started to descend. I wondered what it would be like at the bottom. At least I wouldn't have to
worry about sunlight.
Then I felt Cordelia's
hand tighten around my arm. She was pulling me back to the surface, using the lifebelt to
give her enough buoyancy to keep us both afloat.
"Let go --"
I gasped as soon as my head was above the water.
"Haven't you ever
been to vampire life saving class?" Cordelia asked. Her face was set with a determination I
hadn't known she possessed. "Kick, dammit!"
"Cordelia
--"
"I'm NOT letting
go of you," she said. "So you'd better start kicking before you get me drowned."
I kicked. And kicked.
And kept kicking.
What we were doing was
hardly swimming -- we were barely floating, and sometimes it felt as if the lights of the
shore weren't getting any closer, and once or twice I was afraid they were
actually becoming more distant.
When Cordelia started to tire, I pushed the lifebelt under her chin so her head was above the
water, and tried not to drag her under the waves. It was difficult: my
limbs were corpse-heavy, and I had to fight the urge simply to
give in, to let myself sink to the bottom and settle into dark and
silent rest. But I couldn't let go of Cordelia, and I wouldn't allow
myself to pull her down with me.
"Did I -- say
this -- was a good -- idea?" she spluttered, struggling to speak between desperately snatched
breaths. "Really -- stupid --"
"Listen," I
said.
"To -- what
--?"
"I hear an
engine."
We both listened.
Somewhere in the darkness, he whining, high- pitched drone of a powerboat was rising above the
ocean's dull roar. As it grew louder, I saw the waves near to us shine
with reflected light.
Cordelia raised her
arm out of the water and waved frantically. "Over here! Hey! Woman and
vampire overboard! Hey!"
I shouted, too, and
for a second the powerboat's lights seemed to veer toward us. But instead of slowing down, the
boat accelerated past us, bouncing through the swell and disappearing
rapidly back into the night.
Cordelia shouted until
her voice hoarsened and exhaustion forced her to stop waving. I saw her look toward the
still-distant lights on the shore, hope draining from her. Her head started to
bob lower and lower in the water. "It's too far. We're not gonna
make it."
I kicked harder, but
even with the lifebelt's buoyancy to help me, I couldn't keep both of us above the water. The
truth was, I needed Cordelia. I just hadn't let myself acknowledge how much
until now.
I struggled to keep my
head above water, so I could speak. "Cordelia," I said. "Cordy,
listen to me. I needed you and Doyle, and now Doyle's gone -- I need you. I
thought -- when I came to L.A. -- I could make it by myself. I can't. I don't
want you to go. I was wrong."
"Well, of COURSE
you were wrong," Cordelia said as we bobbed up and down together on the swelling and subsiding
waves. "But jeez, Angel, you couldn't have admitted it BEFORE we got
enchanted, chased, kidnapped, beaten up and nearly drowned?"
She was trying to look
annoyed, but there was something in her voice that told me she wasn't. "I'll keep that in
mind for next time," I said.
Cordelia made a
snorting sound that was clearly meant to convey her firm intention that there wasn't going to be a
next time, and we started swimming again. This time, our progress was
significantly easier --- the incoming tide had caught us and was
bearing us swiftly toward land. When at last I heard the sound of
waves breaking on the shore,
I gave one final kick, and felt sand under my feet.
I staggered forward,
walking now instead of swimming. Cordelia was near-exhausted, and for once our need for
physical closeness actually had a purpose, as she hooked her arm over my
shoulders and I put mine around her waist, giving her support. We
made our way through the surf toward the beach, the waves reaching
first my chest, then my waist,
then my knees, until finally Cordelia and I were standing in water that was barely
ankle-deep, while tiny wavelets lapped around our feet.
I let the lifebelt
drop. It sat for a second on the damp sand, before an advancing wave lifted it and carried it
back out to sea.
"We made
it," Cordelia said at last. She sounded almost as amazed as I felt.
"We made
it," I agreed. "But -- I don't think I'm going to take up swimming any time soon."
Cordelia looked at me,
her face serious. "That's a shame. 'Cause, you know, I can just picture you in a pair of
little red Speedos --" She broke off, unable to keep a straight face any
longer, and started to giggle. Her joy was pure and infectious, and
I smiled back at her. Cordelia moved around until she was
hugging me with both arms, and I embraced her in turn. We stood that
way for some time, the cool ocean stealing the sand from under our
feet while the moonlit, empty beach rang with the sound of Cordelia's
joyful laughter.
A larger wave broke
around our feet, spraying us with seawater. Californian winters are mild, but even L.A. can
be cold in November, and the night air was chill and dry. Cordelia hugged
herself closer to me, and as welcome as the sensation of her body
pressing against mine was, I knew there wasn't much I could do to warm
her up -- I was cold to the core, stripped of even minimal warmth
by the sea. Cordelia shivered violently in my arms.
"We need to get
you warm," I said.
She stammered her
agreement through chattering teeth.
The moon was almost
full and the sky was cloudless, and there was sufficient light to see some distance in both
directions along the beach. Cordelia and I were the only people on it -- not
surprising, since it was the middle of the night -- but just above
the tide line I saw a small, windowless wooden hut, timbers bleached
from long exposure to the sun.
"This way,"
I said, and helped Cordelia toward it.
The hut's door was
padlocked, but the chain it hung on was rusted and brittle, and I was able to break it without
difficulty. Inside, the walls of the hut were lined with shelves piled high
with towels, and boxes of neatly rolled beach mats on the floor.
Stenciled lettering on the sides of the boxes informed us that
everything we saw was the property of the Pacific View Hotel, and the
management would take an extremely dim view of anyone who wasn't a
patron of the hotel using it.
I decided the
management of the Pacific View Hotel could take a leap, and lifted down a bundle of towels from the
nearest shelf. I handed them to Cordelia, who wrapped them around
herself, cloak- like, while I continued to dig through the contents of
the boxes. It wasn't long before I found an even better prize --
matches, probably kept down here to
light the hotel's beach party barbeques.
I lifted an armful of
beach mats and carried them outside. They were made from roughly woven cloth, and lit easily
when I put a match to them. Within a couple of minutes, sparks were rising
high into the air from the fire I'd made in a hollow in the sand. The
flames rose, banishing the darkness and creating a circle of warmth
and light with us at its center.
When I looked around,
Cordelia was kicking off her wet jeans, letting them fall into the pile on top of her
sea-sodden blouse. In place of her clothes, she had draped Pacific View Hotel
towels around her waist and shoulders, neatly rolling and
tucking them so they stayed in place. She looked like she was wearing a
fluffy white kimono.
We sat down together
by the fire, leaning against each other and the outside of the beach hut. Here, we had shelter
from the cool breeze coming off the ocean, and the hut's timber proved
effective at trapping the fire's warmth and reflecting it back on
us. It wasn't long before the color started to return to Cordelia's
lips and cheeks.
"Warmer
now?" I asked.
Cordelia nodded.
"Most of me. My hands and feet haven't gotten the memo, yet, though."
I took her hand; her
fingers felt cold in mine. Gently, I started to rub them between my palms, hoping to use the
friction of the motion to warm her in place of the body heat I didn't have. My
reward was a small noise of satisfaction from Cordelia. "Mmmm.
That's nice. Keep doing that."
Encouraged, I moved on
to her other hand, and then to her wrists and arms. Her skin was porcelain-cool, and as smooth
as fine china. The more I touched her, the more I wanted to keep touching
her, and it felt natural to keep working my way up her arm until my
hands were underneath the towel, caressing her shoulders. It was
difficult to reach her other shoulder where I was sitting, and so,
without really thinking about what I was doing, I repositioned myself
so I was straddling her.
A sudden, loud
crashing noise snapped both of us back to our senses.
Cordelia looked up
sharply. "What was that?"
"It came from the
ocean." I concentrated on listening, but apart from the crackling of the fire and the breaking
waves, I couldn't hear anything.
"Maybe it was the
noise of the Delilah sinking."
"Maybe," I
said doubtfully. The only noise the Delilah would have made as she sunk under the waves would have been
a hiss as the water extinguished the fire which had destroyed her, but what
I had heard had sounded like the crash of a high-speed impact.
My hands were still on
Cordelia's shoulders, her face still close to mine. I was kneeling in the sand, her legs
resting in the gap between mine. The only polite way of describing our
position was 'compromising'.
There were a lot of impolite descriptions for it, too. "I'm sorry --" I began.
Cordelia put her hand
lightly on my arm, and suddenly my absolute intention to get off her dissolved like the foam
on the waves breaking down the beach. In a quiet voice, she asked,
"Angel, what are we gonna do?"
I didn't answer
straight away. I'd been hoping to avoid this question at least until we'd both had a chance to
rest. But it wasn't going to go away, and we might as well confront
it.
Finally, I said,
"We have a couple of options. We could go looking for Jameela. Or we could go back to Sorcha and
ask her if she knows any other way of undoing the magic." I tried to
sound upbeat as I added, "There's usually a ritual for this kind of
thing."
"Involving
entrails?" Cordelia asked.
"Probably. But
not ours. I hope."
Cordelia looked at me.
"You don't know how we're gonna fix this, do you?"
"No," I
admitted.
I felt a stab of guilt
as I remembered that it had been my hesitation back on the yacht which had allowed
Jameela to escape. Just for a moment, I'd listened to the selfish inner
voice that wanted to keep Cordelia close to me, and in the process
I'd only caused her more distress -- and maybe ruined our
chances of breaking the enchantment, ever.
"I'm sorry,"
I said again. "I know how tough it must be for you, being tied to me like this --"
Cordelia made a sound
that was more like a moan than a sigh. "It's not that. When we were apart on the yacht I kept
thinking it'd just be okay if I could see you and touch you again, but it
doesn't matter how close we
are, I just want to be closer. It feels like I'm fighting, fighting, fighting all the time -- I
don't think I'm gonna be able to stand another five minutes of this, and it
might be five days or weeks or even longer --" She broke off.
"Being close to you isn't the problem, Angel. The problem is I can't get
close enough."
She looked up at me,
her face aching with a frustration and longing that perfectly mirrored my own.
In that instant, I
knew I would do anything, anything at all, if it would make her happy.
I kissed her.
Her lips were still
cold, but the inside of her mouth was warm like the heat radiating on to us from the fire. A
faint flavor of seawater still clung to her, but the more deeply we
kissed, the purer her taste became, until I felt as if I were
kneeling at the clearest spring.
I forced myself to
stop kissing her long enough to say, "I don't want to take advantage --"
"You're
not," Cordelia whispered, tipping back her head so I could kiss her throat, starting under her chin and
working my way down to her breast bone.
"You're not in
control of yourself," I murmured into the hollow between her breasts.
"And you
are?" When she spoke, the vibrations from her chest tickled my lips. "If you want, we can stop and both
sign waivers."
She curled one arm
around me, and I felt her index finger tracing a pattern of lines and curves on my shoulder. C, O,
R... I realized she was signing her name on my skin.
"I don't want to
stop," I said, and lifted my head just enough to look her in the eye. She looked back at me, her
gaze a heady mixture of excitement and certainty.
"Me either,"
she said.
She slid downward, so
she was no longer sitting but was instead lying beneath me. She reached up, looping both
arms around the back of my neck, and the towel which had been draped around
her shoulders slid off her and on to the sand. The second towel she
was wearing covered her upper body, tucked so that it stayed in
place just below her arms, and the third was rolled around her waist.
Slowly, deliberately, I
unfolded them, opening out each one in turn. I felt as if I were unwrapping a perfect, priceless
gift.
When I had finished,
Cordelia was lying naked under me on a soft white bed of hotel towels. I could feel the heat
rising off her, see the slow ripple of gooseflesh moving across her as the
cold air caressed her skin.
"Touch me,"
she said. Her voice was low and husky and slightly breathless. I could hear the hunger in it.
"Where?"
She arched her back,
lifting her chest toward me. "Everywhere. Oh, God, just -- everywhere."
I put my hands on
either side of her waist -- my thumbs almost met just above her belly button -- and slowly brushed
my palms upward, marveling at the way her body seemed to hum and tremble
under my touch. I cupped her breasts, one in each hand, their
cool softness a contrast to the tiny, hard knot at the center of each.
I ducked my head and let my lips brush each one in turn; when she
cried out in response, I felt something rise within me, a swell of
water becoming a wave, starting to move toward the distant shore.
I worked my hands over
her body slowly, methodically, thoroughly. I marveled at how every part of her felt slightly
different. Just under her breasts was as delicate and yielding as fine
silk, but when I put my hand on her hip I could feel the solid
resistance of muscle and bone working together as she changed her
position. I wanted to know every inch of her, leave nothing
unexplored.
When I had visited
every other possible destination on her body, I tracked my fingers upward, along the inside of
her thigh, burying them in the soft, dark mat I found there. The triangle
of hair was as dark against her pale stomach as the hair on her
head was as it fanned out against the sand. I worked my way deeper,
until I was touching the source of her warmth, the furnace burning
at her core.
She gasped and raised
her hips, pushing against me, tightening her thighs, squeezing my hand between them.
Then she unhooked her
arms from around my neck and started to unbutton my shirt. It was a relief when she
tugged it off -- the warmth of the fire and her fingertips on my bare skin
were infinitely preferable
to clammy, damp material. "I want to touch you," she said, starting to undo my belt.
A second later I felt
the fire's heat on the backs of my legs. Then her hands were on me, squeezing and compressing
me in exquisite, unbearable tightness. At the same time I could feel her
working herself against my trapped hand, chafing against my
palm. The growing wave inside me surged forward, threatened to
break. I extricated my hand
from between her thighs and used it to break her hold on me.
Cordelia gave a moan
that was thick with raw need and desperation. The sound of it was almost enough to do what I'd
been afraid her touch would. But not quite.
"Not close
enough," she said. "Closer."
Her legs parted and
slid outward, making ridges in the sand. I planted my hands on either side of her and
lowered myself so that we were chest to chest, belly to belly, skin against skin.
We were as close as it was possible to get. It still wasn't close
enough.
Cordelia slipped her
hand between our bodies and took hold of me again, but this time it was to guide me into her.
As I entered her, I felt a sense of completion; we fitted each other, two
halves of a whole, entire only when joined. It felt so right, so
essential, that I took a second to wonder why we'd ever believed we had
to fight this.
I slid in and out of
her slowly, savoring the intimacy of the touch, the intensity of sensation. As we moved together,
the sand underneath the towels shifted to accommodate us,
molding to fit our bodies. In this position, I could look down at Cordelia;
her eyes were closed, her lips parted, her face tight with
arousal and need. I quickened the rhythm of our movement, and saw her
bite down on her lower lip in an effort to control her mounting
pleasure. The sight of it excited me, made it harder to keep control
myself.
Then she opened her
eyes and looked up at me. Her gaze was piercing, clear, accepting. My oldest memories tell me that
when humans look deeply into another person's eyes, they see themselves
reflected there. I didn't reflect in Cordelia's pupils any more
than I reflect anywhere else, but when I looked deep into her gaze, I
saw something much better than myself. I saw her.
I pushed into her,
more deeply than before, as deep as I could go. Finally, we were close enough.
"I'm gonna, I'm
gonna --" She broke off, gasped, and then I felt a long, sweet shudder pass up through her body,
making her tremble from feet to fingertips. She gasped, then shouted, her
voice rising above the distant sound of the waves breaking on the
shore. I felt her clench around me, as a dam deep, deep within her
burst, releasing a euphoric
tide. And I saw the tension in her face dissolve as bliss overtook her.
Her body became liquid
against mine, fluid and pliant. As she relaxed, limbs loosening, the last spasms deep
inside her carried me onward, a rip-tide I was helpless to resist. I felt the
wave breaking inside me,
starting at the point where our bodies met and spreading outwards, washing away everything in
its path.
When the wave finally
subsided, I lay still for a moment, exhausted and grateful, like a shipwrecked man washed up on
a welcoming shore after the storm. Somewhere in the distance, I could
hear the Pacific breaking on the beach, over and over, the ocean
caressing the land with the gentleness of a lover's touch.
I rolled off Cordelia,
and made a hollow in the sand beside her. Then I pulled the towels over both of us like
blankets, so that we were swaddled together in a cocoon made warm by the
fire and her body heat.
"Shoulda done
that way sooner," Cordelia said, smiling drowsily at me.
I wanted to agree, but
before I could we were both asleep.
***
I was woken up by cold
water lapping at my feet.
I sat up. The sky was
still dark, although the moon was setting and the buzz at the back of my head told me dawn was
not far off.
The fire had gone out,
although the ashes of the Hotel Pacific View's beach mats would smolder for some time yet
-- if the incoming tide didn't swallow them up first. That was what had
woken me; while Cordelia and I had slept, the sea had crept up the
beach, and now the most far-reaching of the advancing waves had
reached my feet. Cordelia, still wrapped up in the towels, had curled up
next to me, fetal-style. She was still dry and warm, and slept on,
in blissful ignorance of the advancing ocean.
I put out my hand to
wake her up and tell her she needed to move, then thought better of it when I saw the look on
her sleeping face. She was smiling faintly, immersed in some pleasant
dream -- one, I hoped, where she lived in a world without enchantments
or evil demons, where Doyle
was alive and there were plenty of shoes. I didn't want to have to bring her back from that
place before I absolutely had to.
Very carefully, I got
up and lifted her in my arms. Then I carried her to a spot above the tide line, and set her
down gently, still swathed in the towels. I pulled on my shirt and pants
-- they were dry now, and stiff with salt -- and sat down next to
her, bending my legs and resting my arms on my knees and looking out at
the ocean. Next to the Pacific's vast and timeless expanse, I felt
mortal.
After a while, I
noticed that the incoming tide was washing something on to the beach -- some kind of debris.
Curious, I got up and walked the short distance down to the water's edge.
I found some shattered wood and fiberglass panels, of sufficiently
different sizes and shapes to convince me I was looking at the
wreckage of not one but two small vessels.
Another wave broke
over my feet, carrying more pieces of wreckage. But these were different. When I reached down
into the surf and picked up an item at random, I found I was holding a
small plastic package. The package had been punctured by the ocean,
and was now little more than a shriveled husk, but a small amount
of white residue still clung to
its interior. It looked like flour-and-water paste and was probably about as valuable.
I turned the package
over in my hand -- and froze.
A single, iridescent
scale was sticking to the underside of the plastic. It glittered harshly in the moonlight.
The water lapped
around my ankles, and I looked down. All around my bare feet floated a collection of empty plastic
packages and shimmering, reptilian scales.
I remembered Jameela
gloating as she made her escape in the Delilah's tiny dinghy, taking Michael Hunter's
shipment of illegal drugs with her. I remembered the powerboat that had
sped recklessly past Cordelia and myself as we swam to safety. And I
remembered the crashing noise we had heard once we reached the beach.
I held the scale up in
the moonlight, hardly daring to believe in the string of coincidences required to make what
I thought had happened possible. The scale was sharp, and I cut
myself on it as I examined it. Even dead, Jameela was still dangerous.
But she was dead.
I looked to where
Cordelia lay sleeping. As an experiment, I walked along the water's edge, away from her. I looked
back several times, but I didn't feel a compulsion to return to her. I
didn't feel unreasoning panic when I deliberately walked behind a
sand dune, blocking her from my sight for a minute or more.
I walked ten yards
further along the sand, twenty, forty. I was further away from Cordelia than I had been in
days, and I was okay. Jameela was dead; the magic that had bound Cordelia and
myself together had been broken.
It was over, I
realized with a growing sense of relief. The part of the enchantment that had kept us physically tied
to each other had already dispersed; pretty soon I could expect the
confusing, conflicting emotions I'd been feeling about Cordelia in
the past few days to dissolve away, too.
Pretty soon.
Any time about now, in
fact.
Any time.
And then I remembered
something else. If the crash we had heard had been the sound of Jameela's dinghy colliding with
the powerboat, that meant the Siren had been dead, and the spell
broken, for hours. It also meant that when Cordelia and I had made love,
we'd already been free of the enchantment.
I recalled Jameela's
last words to me: When I die, she won't want you any more. Well, Jameela had been wrong.
And so had I.
I'd told myself it I
could make love to Cordelia because I didn't love her. That I was safe from the curse because
what I was doing was for her happiness and not my own. That I was acting
under the influence of powerful magic, and not on my own desires
at all.
In the face of all the
available evidence, I'd somehow convinced myself I wasn't in love with Cordelia.
Like I said, I can be
really stupid sometimes.
Slowly, like a man in
a dream -- or maybe a man waking from one -- I walked back up the beach to where I had left
Cordelia. She was still asleep, and I knelt beside her, taking care not to
disturb her. There was sand sticking to her cheek, and seaweed in
her hair. She was beautiful.
But she wasn't going
to stay asleep forever. Sooner or later she'd wake up, and I had to decide what I was going to
tell her when she did.
With sudden clarity, I
saw a number of possible futures branching out from this moment. There was one future where
I told Cordelia how I felt, and she responded in exactly the way you'd
expect someone to react to a confession of love from a guy whose last
serious relationship resulted
in multiple homicides and a near-apocalypse. There was another possible future where she felt
the same way about me -- but I already knew how that future turned out,
because it was my recent past. I'd played out that story with Buffy,
and I knew how it would end -- in bitterness, with me walking out of
Cordelia's life before she hated me for everything I couldn't give
her.
Then there was another
future, one where I couldn't be Cordelia's lover, but I remained her friend. In that future,
I saw her every day, shared her problems and her triumphs, and my life
was better because she was part of it.
I knew which future I
preferred.
Cordelia stirred and
blinked sleepily. She sat up and rubbed her eyes. "Hi," I said.
She looked at me
suspiciously. "Okay, I gotta ask -- are you evil?"
"No," I
said. "Never further from it."
Cordelia gave a
relieved sigh. "Oh, good. 'Cause I thought I was gonna have to remind you of something bad if you
looked like you were getting too happy. Like death or taxes."
"I'm already
dead," I pointed out, "and I don't pay taxes."
Cordelia sat up,
pulling one of the towels around herself. She took a deep breath and then exhaled. "Well, I
guess we'd better head back to my apartment. We'll get Sorcha's number from
Doyle's address book, give her a call and ask if she knows anything
else about enchantment breaking."
"No need," I
said. "Jameela's dead."
Cordelia stared at me,
the look on her face one of almost comical bemusement. "What? When? How?"
"She -- ah, she
--" I hesitated, then made a decision. It would be easier on both of us if Cordelia believed, and
kept believing, that what had happened between us had been purely the result
of magic, and nothing else. "She landed on the beach in the
Delilah's dinghy just a little while ago. We fought and -- well, and I
won. She's dead."
"You had a fight
to the death -- and I slept right through it?" The look on Cordelia's face was a mismatch of hope
and skepticism.
"You were pretty
exhausted," I said, aware of just how lame my version of events sounded.
Cordelia was silent
for a second. Then: "She's really dead?"
"She's really
dead," I said, and held up the scale I'd found in the water as proof.
"Then we're --
disenchanted." A wide smile lit Cordelia's face. "Angel, you're my hero!"
She threw her arms
around me and hugged me fiercely. The towel she'd pulled around herself slipped down, and I hugged
her back stiffly and a little awkwardly, not sure where to put my hands.
Cordelia pulled away
from me, and frowned. "What's wrong?"
Unconvincingly, I
said, "Nothing. Nothing's wrong."
She eyed me.
"You're not gonna go all When Harry Met Sally on me, are you?"
I got up and fetched
Cordelia's blouse and jeans. They were wrinkled and salt-stained, but they would do until she
could change into clean clothes.
As I handed them to
her, she said, "Angel, you're not answering the question."
"I'm still trying
to work out what the question is," I said.
"AN-gel. You know
-- When Harry Met Sally. Classic romcom, Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal, the restaurant scene, 'I'll
have what she's having.' Don't tell me you've never heard of When Harry
Met Sally."
"I've never heard
of it," I said. "Is it a movie?"
"Yes, it's a
movie." Cordelia looked at me, her voice and face uncharacteristically serious. "It's about a
man and woman who are best friends, then they sleep together and it nearly
ruins everything."
There was that word
again. Friends. I liked the way it sounded when Cordelia said it.
I took hold of
Cordelia's hand -- this time by choice rather than compulsion. "Real life is not like the
movies."
She smiled at me, and
I could see the relief in her eyes. "No," she said. "It's much, much weirder."
Then she got up, and I
went back to watching the ocean while she got dressed. When I looked around, she was trying,
unsuccessfully, to undo the damage that a swim in the ocean and a night on
the beach had done to her hairstyle. "I have never needed
conditioner as much as I do right now. The first thing we're doing is going
to my place."
"Actually,"
I said, eyeing the lightening sky, "the first thing we have to do is get the car. It's still parked back
at the marina."
"Is there time to
walk there before the sun comes up?"
"I don't
know," I said. "I'm not sure how far along the coast we are."
"I vote we don't
take the chance," Cordelia said. "I'll get the car and drive it back here. If it gets light before
then, you've got somewhere to go to avoid going crispy."
The Pacific View's
beach hut wouldn't be roomy, but I wouldn't have to stay in it for long. "Okay. We'll do
that," I said, and threw Cordelia the keys to the Plymouth.
She caught them, and
started to walk up the beach. But she hadn't gone more than a few yards when she hesitated and
looked back.
"Feels kind of
weird," she said. "Walking away, I mean."
"You're coming
back," I said.
"I am,"
Cordelia said. Then she turned around and walked over the first sand dune, and out of my sight.
Dawn was still some
minutes away; I didn't have to retreat to shelter just yet, and so I walked back down to
the water's edge. The stars were becoming less visible in the brightening
sky, and the ocean was slowly turning from a black expanse to a blue
one.
Sunrise was Buffy's
favorite part of the day. Although she never said so, I think it was because every new day she
saw was proof she'd emerged victorious from the night that preceded
it. It's been two and a half centuries since I last saw the sun come
up; when I briefly wore the gem of Amarra, I watched the sun set,
then destroyed the ring
before it rose again. Fear of the sun's light is as much a part of me as constant thirst, and what
I was seeing now -- a lightening of the sky from black to gray, the
faintest blush of color in the sea -- was as much of the dawn as I would
ever experience.
Unconsciously, I put
my hand in my pocket, and was surprised when I found something there. When I took it out, I saw
it was a scrap of paper, brittle and fragile and almost unrecognizable.
Then I saw Doyle's faint handwriting, and realized it was the
lottery ticket Cordelia had found in his apartment. The blurred word
JAMEELA was the only part of his last message which was still
legible. I couldn't help thinking we could have avoided a lot of
trouble in the last couple of days if he'd just taken the time to
write something a little more prescriptive, like KILL JAMEELA.
The other side of the
ticket had been erased by the sea; Doyle's lottery numbers had been washed away. The drawing
would have been yesterday, I remembered, and I wondered for a second if
he'd won anything, and if, by a capricious turn of fate, I was
holding a dead man's winning ticket.
But coincidences do
happen; fate does intervene. Coincidence had killed Jameela, and fate had brought Cordelia
into my life.
Suddenly I remembered
something Cordelia had said about Doyle when she found the ticket. She'd said he never stopped
believing he'd get lucky, if he just waited long enough.
That sounded like a
pretty good philosophy to me.
The sun was about to
come up. I went into the beach hut, closed the door, and settled in to wait for Cordelia.
End.
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