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Here With Me
By Lara Nicosia Pascoe

TITLE: Here With Me
SERIES: Soulmates
AUTHOR: Lara Nicosia Pascoe
E-MAIL: jaylen@ambia.demon.co.uk
WEBSITE: http://www.ambia.demon.co.uk
SUMMARY: After finding out his mother is in hospital, Wes goes home with Fred to England, where he must fight a multitude of demons, both real and personal.
RATING: PG-13 (violence and reference to sex)
SPOILERS: Pretty much nothing to do with the show after “Waiting in the Wings” (which left me totally bummed, btw).
DISCLAIMER: I only wish I were as successful as Joss Whedon.  He and Mutant Enemy own this; I just write fanfic for fun while waiting for my own big break.
DISTRIBUTION: Permission granted to Bookish, Wishing Hearts, and WNW.  If anyone else wants to archive it, please let me know.
AUTHOR'S NOTES: Man, I should have known that getting into Wes/Fred online stuff was gonna get me into trouble.  This story picks up a couple of months after my first WF fic, “Meant to Be,” which it the first part of my “Soulmates” series.  For some reason, I have this thing about writing connecting fanfic stories.  Also, in this timeline, Groo showed up later than he did in the show and is already gone again.

Groaning, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce took off his glasses and tossed them down before leaning forward to rest his elbows on his desk as he rubbed his tired eyes.  He had been pouring over the Niazian scrolls most of the day now, and the only real success he had was in straining his eyes and putting a crick in his neck.

“You look like you need some help,” a welcome voice said from behind him while two gentle hands began massaging the tight muscles in his neck.

“Oh, thank you, Fred, love,” Wesley sighed gratefully as the knots began to melt away under her touch.

“Any luck?” Winifred Burkle asked, glancing over his shoulder at the scrolls.

“Not today, unfortunately.  I think there was a conjugation shift in the time between the writing of the third and fourth scrolls.  I’m having problems working out the verb tenses, and the difference between subjunctive, past, present and future changes some of these passages’ entire meanings.”

“Sounds to me like you need a break.  When I have problems with an equation and just can’t get my head around it, I find I have better luck if I leave it alone for a while and let my subconscious work on it.  Usually when I go back to it, I’ve figured out the answer.”

Smiling, Wesley sat up and reached back to pull Fred around to sit in his lap.  “I’m so lucky to have such a smart girlfriend.”

“Yes, you are,” Fred said, leaning in to give him a kiss.

As the kiss deepened, Wesley’s hands came up to tangle in her hair, which she was wearing loose that day, the way he loved it most.  Leaning into him, Fred wrapped her arms around him.  She adored the way he nibbled slightly on her lip when they kissed.

“Geez, you two!  Can’t you get a room?” suddenly complained the disgusted voice of the Hyperion Hotel’s resident demon.  “It’s not like that’s hard around here, you know.”

Pulling back, Wesley and Fred looked over innocently at Lorne, who was standing in the doorway, his hands on his hips.  Wesley quickly reached out and grabbed his glasses from the desk to put them back on.

“Are they at it again?” the amused voice of Cordelia Chase called from out near the reception desk.

Lorne snorted and twisted his head to reply over his shoulder, “What do you think?  They can’t keep their hands off each other.”

“Tell them I have a bucket of cold water and demon guts out here, and I will use it if I have to.”

“Why, Cordy, I do believe you’re jealous!” Wesley remarked gamely, running his hand across Fred’s bare back under her mid-rift shirt as she tried to keep from laughing.

“You wish!” was the huffy response.

“Hey,” Angel’s voice came from the top of the main staircase leading down into the lobby.  He jogged down the steps and joined Cordelia, who was cleaning the broadsword she had used during what had been a rather nasty run-in with a Rorschach demon the night before.  “What’s going on?”

“Oh, nothing...just our resident lovebirds nesting in the office again.”

“Come on, you two.  You’re gonna set a bad example for Connor.”

Fred slipped off Wesley’s lap as he started to stand, and the two of them crossed to join Lorne at the door.

“He’s only a baby,” Wesley pointed out.  “He has no idea what we’re doing.”

“Okay, then you’re setting a bad example for Lorne,” the vampire retorted.

“Yeah...I mean, hey!”  Lorne gave Angel his best red-eyed glared as the others started chuckling.  “If you only knew what I’ve seen in my time.”

“Probably not as much as I have.”

“You want to compare notes?  You didn’t live in Pylea and see some of the rituals there, you know.”

Fred made a face at Lorne’s mention of Pylea.  Given the topic of conversation, she knew exactly what he had to be referring to.  “Thanks so much for reminding me about those rituals, Lorne.  I had finally gotten them out of my mind.”

Lorne glanced over at her with an apologetic expression on his face.  “I’m sorry, bunny rabbit.  I wouldn’t want to remind anyone of those rituals.”

As Wesley, Angel and Cordelia listened to the exchange, their rather morbid senses of curiosity made them wonder what exactly these rituals entailed. 

“You’re not talking about com-shuck, are you?” Cordelia asked as she put down the cleaning polish she was using and walked over to lean on the reception desk.

Lorne shook his head.  “Goodness no.  Com-shuck has nothing on the Rituals of Hin-banda.  I mean, anything that needs a big—.”

“Lorne!” interrupted Fred, her brown eyes wide.

He immediately stopped his train of thought.  “Apologies, buttercup.”

Taking Fred’s hand, Wesley wrapped his free arm around her shoulders.  “Did you have to...um...take part in these rituals?”

“No, thank goodness,” she answered, leaning her head against his chest and looking up at him.  “I had to hold the...umm...and then clean the...”  She trailed off, a disgusted grimace on her face at the obviously unpleasant memory.

“Humans assisted in certain aspects, but never took part,” Lorne supplied helpfully.  “And honestly, they got the best part of the deal.”

Just the implied meaning of what they were talking about was enough to make the other three shudder from what their imaginations conjured up.  Wesley tightened his embrace of Fred.  The more he found out about what she had put up with during her five years of Hell on Pylea, the more respect and admiration he had for her managing to survive as well as she had.

“Man, Gunn is going to be so sorry he missed this particular conversation,” said Angel, shaking his head.  Before anyone could respond, though, the baby monitor he had hooked to his belt crackled to life as Connor began crying up in his room.  “Excuse me.”

“Here, I’ll help,” Cordelia said, hurrying after him once she grabbed a clean towel from next to the bucket.

As soon as they had disappeared up the staircase, Lorne glanced over at Wesley and Fred.  “I think that’s my cue as well.  I’m going to go see what I can scare up in the kitchen.”  With that, he hurried toward the hotel’s old restaurant area.

“Is it just me, or was he greener than usual?” Wesley asked as they watched the demon disappear around the corner.

“Oh, he was definitely greener than usual.  The rituals...well, they’re not something that Pyleans usually talk about...very messy, not nice at all.”

Wesley held up his hand to stop her.  “Believe me, you needn’t go into further detail.”  Leaning down, he kissed her forehead.  “I know it’s still not all that easy to think about what happened there.”

“Yeah, but it doesn’t control my life like it used to, thanks to you and the others.  I don’t know what I would have done without you.”

“I’m so lucky to have you in my life,” he told her in a low voice.

      He had just moved closer to kiss her again when the phone began ringing.  Sighing, they parted and glared into the back office.

      "People's timing is certainly brilliant today," he commented.

      Laughing, Fred pushed him through the doorway toward the phone.  "Just answer it, Boss.  Then we can pick up where we left off."

      "I like the sound of that."  Hurrying over to his desk, he picked up the receiver while Fred leaned against the doorframe to watch him, her hand going up to the blue moonstone pendant that Wesley had given her as a gift a couple of weeks before.  "Angel Investigations – we help the helpless.  Wesley Wyndam-Pryce speaking.  How may we help you?"

“Wesley?” responded a female voice with a British accent.  “Wes, it’s your Aunt Emily.”

“Aunt Emily?” he repeated in surprise, wondering why she was calling him.  It was almost midnight in England, and he hadn’t spoken to his aunt in years.  How had she found him?  “What’s going on?  Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know how to say this, but your mum...she’s in hospital.”

“She’s what?” he asked dumbly, dropping into his chair.  When Fred, concern in her eyes, walked over and put her hand on his shoulder, he glanced up at her and shook his head in uncertainty, his free hand going up to cover hers.

“She’s in hospital,” Emily repeated.  “It’s pretty bad.  Wesley, she’s asking for you.”

“Asking for me?  Why would she want to see me?  We haven’t talked since—.”

“It’s not her fault, Wes.  Really.  Look, she asked me to call you.  Please say you’ll come.  She needs you.”

Leaning his head against Fred’s hand, he sat there in silence for a few moments.  “All right.  I’ll be on the next available flight.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll call you with my arrival details once I have them.”

After he hung up the phone, he looked up at Fred.  “My mother’s in hospital.”

“Oh, Wes,” she said, bending down and holding his head to her as she wrapped his arms around her.

“She’s asking for me.  I have to go see her.  Will you come with me?”

“Of course.”  She knelt down in front of his chair and reached up to rub his cheek with her hand.  “You know that I’d go anywhere with you if you needed me.”

“I’m going to need you now, Fred,” he told her, pulling her into his arms again.  “More than ever.”

*****

“Here, thought you might like somethin’ to drink.”

Blinking, Wesley looked up at Fred, who was holding out a bottle of orange juice.  “Thank you, love.”  He took the bottle from her and placed it absently on his carry-on bag by his feet before resuming staring out the window across the concourse, watching as the sky slowly darkened into evening.

Fred knew that he was preoccupied.  Sitting down next to him, she opened her own bottle and took a sip while watching people at the end of Lambert International Airport’s C Concourse.  The first available flight to England they had been able to book had required a layover in St. Louis, Missouri, and they had been there several hours already after a mid-morning flight from Los Angeles.  It had been a rather uneventful trip so far though Wes hadn’t said much of anything since they had bid their good-byes to Cordelia and Gunn at the airport in L.A.

“Hey,” she said, reaching over and taking his hand in hers.  “You wanna tell me what you’re thinking about?”

Wesley tilted his head down as he stretched an arm around her to pull her as close as the armrest between them would allow.  “I’m sorry, Fred.  I know that I haven’t been a great travelling companion today.”

“I understand.  But maybe talking about it would help.  You never say much about your family.  I mean I remember when we met you and your mother at Windsor Castle, she was pretty quiet, but I don’t know much else.  Why haven’t you talked to your parents in so long?”

“My family...was difficult.  At least, my father was...is.  When he was around and not on some assignment for the Watchers’ Council.”  Sighing, he looked up at the warehouse-like ceiling of the concourse, realizing how hard this was.  He had never wanted Fred to see this part of his life, the part that he had tried so hard to leave behind.  He didn’t want the pain and ugliness that had haunted him for so long to touch the one bright light in his entire existence.  But at the same time, he knew that he couldn’t do this without her either.  He needed her balance if he was going to face what he knew awaited him in England.  “You see...from the time I was young, my father was very strict, very demanding.  When he wasn’t pleased, you knew it.  The problem, though, was that nothing could please him.  You can imagine what that made life like.”

“Did he...?”

“Hit me?  Sometimes.  More often than not, the abuse was emotional.  Belittling me, ruining things I had done, making me feel worthless, locking me in the cupboard.  But occasionally...”  Pausing, he removed his arm from around her shoulders and tugged up the sleeve of his pullover to show her several circular scars on his upper arm near his shoulder.

Gasping, Fred took his arm and examined the scars.  She had never noticed them before since Wesley didn’t often take off his shirt except when they made love, and then, he usually dimmed the lights.  Now she understood why.  “Are those from a cigar?”

He nodded, then covered them back up again.  “He gave me those when I accidentally spilled a coffee I was bringing him on some notes of his.  Said he was going to mark me like I had marked his work.”

“Didn’t your mother try to stop him?”

“She was scared of him.  I used to listen to him yelling at her in the middle of the night, doing the same things to her that he did to me.  She tried her best to support me...but in that kind of situation...”  He shook his head.  “For so long, I prayed that she would leave him, that we would leave him.  And the week that we went up to London, that trip when we met you, I thought it had finally happened.  But then when we boarded the train to head back to West Sussex, I realized that she would never leave him.  She had nowhere to go.”

“What about your Aunt Emily?” Fred asked, leaning her head against him and lacing her fingers through his.

“That would have been the first place my father would have gone to find her.  Mum knew that.  She was frightened that he would become more violent if she left.  In a way, I think she thought she was protecting us by staying.  Later, when the Council recruited me, my mother insisted that I go, get out of the house.  I think we both hoped that my joining might also finally please my father.  But she wouldn’t leave, no matter how I begged.”  Glancing down at her, he could see the sadness in her eyes, so he brought his hand up to run over her cheek and hair.  “Do you understand now why I was so devastated when I attacked you after I was exposed to Billy’s blood?  To me, it was like I had become my father, only ten times worse.  That’s why I thought that it was something inside me.  Because all my life, my greatest fear has been that I’d end up becoming exactly like my father.  And it happened that night.”

With that, he looked away, his eyes again staring out the window opposite them.  Sitting up, Fred took his face in her hands and turned him to look at her.  “You are not your father, Wes.  What happened that night was not you.  You’ve gotta realize that and forgive yourself.  Billy was the one who hated women.  That was what was influencing you.  Not your father and not you.”

For several moments, he stared into her eyes, seeing how she saw him reflected there.  “That’s what I try to tell myself, but it’s still hard to make myself believe it.”

“You can’t be like your father because you know what he did was wrong.  And I know you.  The real you.  The one who has risked his life so many times to protect me from harm.  The one who loves me.  Wesley Wyndam-Pryce is a good, good man, and I love him for everything he is.”

“I love you too, Winifred,” he told her.

After they had kissed for a few moments, Fred pulled back and ran her hand through his hair.  “Are you sure you want to face this, though?  We can always go back to Los Angeles if you don’t feel you can deal with this.”

He shook his head.  “I have to do this.  Aunt Emily says that Mum needs me.”

“Did I also mention that you’re very brave?”

“Sometimes, I don’t feel like it.”

“Believe me, you are.”

Before they could say anything else, the counter agent at the gate for their flight came over the PA system, “Ladies and gentlemen, American Airlines flight two-seven-twenty, non-stop to London Gatwick is about to board at gate C-thirty-four.  Please have your boarding passes ready.  We will start with families with small children and anyone else who needs extra help with boarding as well as our first-class passengers.  Then we will begin boarding the main cabin, starting from the back of the plane forward.”

The other passengers were gathering up their belongings and making their way forward to wait for their turn to board, so Wesley and Fred stood up, collected their carry-ons and joined the throng.  As they moved forward when their row was called, Wesley realized that this was it.

Once they were on the plane, there would be no turning back.  Most of the demons they had dealt with in the past were easier than this.

*****

When they arrived at Gatwick Airport, Fred and Wesley made their way down to Immigrations and Customs.  Since Wesley was still a UK citizen, he went through the European Union Immigration queue, which moved much more quickly than the non-EU line that Fred had to wait in.  By the time she cleared, their luggage had arrived up in the Baggage Claims hall, so they grabbed their suitcases and bypassed Customs, which seemed to have no one on duty.

After they walked through the duty-free area out into the South Terminal Arrival Hall, someone shouted out Wesley’s name.  Glancing down the line of people waiting on the other side of a separation barrier, he saw a medium-built middle-aged woman with long hair pulled back into a braid waving to them.

“There’s my Aunt Emily,” he told Fred.  They immediately steered their luggage through the nearest barrier opening and made their way over to her.

“Oh, Wesley,” Emily Wyndam said, hugging him.  “I’m so glad that you’re here.”  She stepped back and cast her glance over at Fred, surprise crossing her features.  “And this is?”

“Aunt Emily, I’d like to introduce my girlfriend, Winifred Burkle.  Fred and I work together at Angel Investigations.”

“Ah!” she said in understanding.  “When you said that Fred was coming with you, I thought you were talking about a male friend.  Oh, my dear, I’m sorry.  It’s wonderful to meet you although I wish it could have been under different circumstances.”

“It’s nice to meetcha too,” Fred told her as they embraced briefly in greeting.

“Come on.  My car is in the car park.  You two can stay with me while you’re here.”

“Are you sure it’s not an imposition?” Wesley asked as they headed for the walkway that would take them to the covered car parks next to the terminal.

“Not at all.  We’ll drop your things off at my place, then I’ll take you to the hospital.”

They stepped onto the moving walkway and stood to the right to let people pass them.  Wesley then turned so he could speak to his aunt.  “Where was she admitted?”

“Worthing Hospital.  The doctors aren’t sure exactly what’s wrong with her, but she’s very weak.  I found her when I stopped by the house to see her.  She had collapsed on the stairs leading to the loft.  Your father wasn’t there, so I called an ambulance.”

Wesley seemed to freeze at the mention of his father, almost tripping over the end of the walkway.  Reaching out, Fred steadied him, and he stepped off, then extended his arm out to help her.  “Is Father there?”

“I doubt it,” Emily responded in a disgusted tone.  “When he found out where your mum was, he was absolutely livid.  Told me I should have minded my own business.  Even asked the doctors to release her, but they won’t.  Not while they don’t know what’s wrong.  Good on them, I say.”

By this time, they had circled down to the next level.  Emily put up her hand to stop them.

“Just a moment, I need to pay the ransom to free my car.”  She hurried over to a bank of machines and slipped a ticket into one of them.  After paying the necessary rate, she extracted the ticket and returned to them.  “All right, now we’ve got fifteen minutes to get to the exit.”

The car was on the same level, so it didn’t take them long to find it, load their luggage into the boot and pile in.  Within minutes, they had left Gatwick and were heading on the M23 south toward the coast.

As the car drew closer to Wesley’s childhood home, a knot starting forming in his stomach.  He reached back for Fred, who was sitting directly behind him.  Seeing his hand, she immediately grasped it in her own, giving him a promise of support and love without words.

*****

“Your mum is in here,” Emily told Wesley as she led them into the hospital ward.  “The other side of those curtains.”  She pointed to the ones pulled around the third bed down.

“Do you want me to wait here?” Fred asked him.

“No.  Come with me,” he whispered, holding her hand tightly as he had been since the hospital car park, refusing to let go.

Walking forward, they parted the curtains to find a thin woman lying in the bed with her eyes closed.  Her hair, which had once been the same color as Wesley’s but was now mostly grey, fanned out slightly, just long enough to touch her shoulders.  Fred let out a slight gasp of recognition at the sight of the woman whom she had met briefly almost twenty years before.

“Mum?” Wesley said in a low voice, letting go of Fred’s hand and leaning down slightly.  “Mum, are you awake?”

Niamh Wyndam-Pryce’s blue eyes slowly fluttered open to focus on her son.  When she realized who it was standing there, her mouth dropped open slightly.  “Wesley?  Wesley...what are you doing here?  Oh, God...if your father finds out...”

Wesley exchanged a look of confusion with Fred.  “What do you mean, what am I doing here?  You asked me to come.”

“No...no...Wesley, you shouldn’t be here.  If he finds you here...”

“But Aunt Emily called me,” he protested.  “She said that you wanted me to come.”

“I never...she knows...go back to the States, Wesley.  Please.  Don’t let him know that you’re here.  He can’t destroy you, too.  I won’t let you destroy you, too.”

“Ssshhhh.  Go back to sleep.”

Leaning over, he kissed her forehead, pausing for a moment before straightening up.  He didn’t understand this at all.  And he wanted answers.  He moved the curtain aside and stalked toward the ward entrance, Fred right behind him.

“What the bloody hell is going on?” he demanded of his aunt in a loud whisper, seizing her arm and propelling her out into the corridor so that they wouldn’t disturb the other patients.  “She says that she didn’t ask for me to come here.  In fact, she was quite insistent that I return to the States before Father finds out that I’m here.  Why?  What’s going on, Aunt Emily?  And I want the truth.”

Sighing, Emily glanced from Wesley to Fred and back again.  “Not here,” she told him.  “Come on.  Let’s go take a walk along the seafront, and I’ll tell you everything I know.”

*****

A breeze blew along the coast of the English Channel while seagulls cried and swooped overhead.  Walking hand in hand, Wesley and Fred listened to Emily as she apologized profusely for lying to get her nephew to agree to come over.

“I figured if I said she begged for you, you wouldn’t ask any questions until you were here and could see what was going on for yourself.  But I did tell you one truth: she needs you, Wesley.  You’re probably the only one who can help her.”

“What are you talking about?  I’m not a doctor, Aunt Emily.  How in the world can I – or even we – help her?”

“It’s not a doctor she needs.  It’s a demon hunter.”

This brought Wesley and Fred up short.

“A demon hunter?” Fred asked.  “Demon as in creepy-crawlies and other nasties?”

Emily nodded.  “Exactly.  The kind you hunt in your everyday work.”

“How do you know about that?” Wesley demanded.

“I saw your website a few months ago.  I did a search on your name to see if I could find out where you were, and it came up.  Also, I’ve known for years about your and Cedric’s affiliation with the Watchers’ Council.  Interesting line of work if I do say so myself.

“Are you saying that Mum’s illness has something to do with demons?”

“I know it sounds right bonkers, but I swear that what I’m about to tell you, I’m not making up.”

“Not making up what?”

Looking down at the pavement, Emily took a deep breath.  When she raised her head again, she said, “I think your father wants to sacrifice your mother to a demon.”

“What?!” Wesley practically hissed, his eyes opening wide.  “I know that Father is abusive...I know he’s not a saint...but to accuse him of—!”

“Wesley, you must believe me.  While I was waiting for the ambulance to show up, I looked into the loft.  There’s an altar up there.  And not a Wiccan altar either.”  Emily, a long-time practitioner, had taught Wes many Wiccan doctrines and beliefs when he was younger.  “I felt a lot of darkness when I walked in there.”

“But he’s a Watcher!  He’d never...not after...he wouldn’t dare...”

Wesley couldn’t believe this.  His father had always held the code of the Watchers’ Council as sacred and had insisted on the highest standard from others.  In fact, Cedric Pryce had been the one who had initiated the proceedings against Wesley that had led to him being dismissed as a Watcher following the debacle with Faith’s betrayal and Buffy’s renouncement of the Council.  His reason had been that Wesley had failed to uphold the Watcher standard by keeping the slayers in his charge under his control.

In the eyes of the Council members, Wesley had been the one at fault; in reality, it hadn’t been his totally though he knew he had been woefully unprepared and ineffectual.  Faith had been the most unstable and unpredictable girl ever called as the Chosen One, and Wesley, in his inexperience, had been unprepared to deal with a personality like hers.  Also both girls had refused to listen to him – Buffy because of her loyalty to Giles, Faith because of her problem with authority.  However, in no way had he been the first Watcher ever held responsible for the downfall of a slayer. It happened, and the Council grudgingly accepted that, which was why he and others before him had simply been dismissed from service.

But for a Watcher to actually worship a demon force...that was unthinkable.  It smacked in the face of everything that the Council stood for and fought against.  And the idea that Cedric Pryce, the man who demanded near close to perfection in other Watchers – who had demanded perfection in Wesley himself – was the alleged Watcher was even more so.

“You have to be mistaken,” Wesley insisted, becoming more agitated.  Fred reached over to put her hand on his arm in an attempt to calm him down, but he didn’t seem to notice.  “You saw it wrong.  You were upset about Mum’s collapse, and you saw it wrong.”

“After everything he’s done to you and your mother how can you be defending him?” Emily asked, her voice a harsh whisper.  “You know the kind of man he is.  And I know what I saw!  If you go to that house, look in the loft, you’ll understand what I’m talking about!”

“I’m supposed to just waltz in there and check out the loft?!”  He threw up his hands in disbelief and walked away a few feet.  “I haven’t been in that house in fifteen years.  I don’t think dear old Dad is going to let me in just to see if he’s worshipping demons!”

“Wesley, for your mother’s sake...!”

“I can’t go back in there!  Don’t you understand?  You called the wrong person, Aunt Emily.  I’ve just got my life back together again.  I won’t let him destroy it a third time!”

With that, he ran away, disappearing into a group of people down the path.  Stunned, Fred watched him go, not sure whether to go after him or leave him be.

“He can’t walk away from this, Winifred,” Emily said.  “He can’t leave his mother to that man, not like he did fifteen years ago.”

Fred’s eyes opened wide as she whirled to face the older woman.  “Are you blaming Wesley for your sister staying with his father?”

“I—I...he shouldn’t have left her...he shouldn’t have—.”

“How dare you!”  Fred didn’t know this woman before her very well, but she wasn’t about to stand there and let Emily place an undeserved burden of blame on the shoulders of the man she loved more than anything.  “Wesley begged her to leave his father.  Do you really have any idea what he went through growing up?  Do you know what Cedric did to him?  He left because it was the only thing he could do.  He couldn’t save his mom, but he could save himself.  And no one...no one has the right to blame him for that!”

Before Emily could say anything in response, Fred hurried in the direction Wesley had gone.

*****

The temperature was getting colder, but Wesley didn’t care as he sat on a bench in the shadow of the abandoned nightclub at the end of Worthing Pier, his head down as he stared at the blue water through the wooden slats beneath his feet.  Cold at least could numb him.  He just didn’t know if it could numb the pain in his soul, in the part of him that he had tried to lock away so long ago – the part of him that was still the scared schoolboy who used to cower in the cupboard he been locked in, unable to do anything while his father turned his rage on his mother.

It almost seemed the ultimate irony that a man liked that belonged to a Council whose main objective was to see the world rid of evil.

Pushing up his sleeve, he looked down at the scars on his arm and ran his index finger over them, feeling the slightly uneven surface there.  When his father had pressed the still burning cigar nub into his skin, Wesley had never seen him looking more demonic. The images had seared into his memory as the heat did the same to his flesh.  The way the shadows in the room had obscured half his face.  The way the red light he used to read certain documents colored his glasses and eyes.  The way his lips curled into the sick ghost of a smile.

He had never been able to stand up to his father.  Not when he was a child and not even as an adult.  During the inquiry regarding Faith and Buffy, when his father had started hurling his vitriolic accusations of incompetence and irresponsibility in the Council chambers, he had frozen, suddenly feeling like the little boy whom he had been, unable to defend himself from the abuse.  And he had realized that Cedric Pryce had been waiting for the moment when he could prove to the entire Council that his son was a screw-up who should never have been given the charge of one slayer, much less two.  In his eyes, Faith’s downfall had been inevitable the moment Wesley had been chosen, and Wesley had been unable to refute his allegations.

Now Aunt Emily wanted him to prove that his father had apparently willfully broken the most sacred of the Watcher commandments: Never to use evil for evil purposes.

Didn’t she understand?  He had finally put the pieces of his life together.  After years of being told he wasn’t good enough and he’d never amount to anything, he had finally found his place, doing something he actually was damn good at.  With Angel Investigations, he had done far more good than he ever could have as a member of the Watchers’ Council with his father there to hold him back every step of the way.

And then there was Fred.  Just the thought of her soothed his soul and made his heart beat faster. From the moment he had seen her, he had known there was something special about her.  It took an extraordinary kind of strength and intellect to survive for as long as she had in a strange and inhospitable world like Pylea, especially on her own.  And when they were together, Wesley felt as if he were whole again, something he had never felt growing up.  All his life, it had always been as though a part of him had been missing.  In fact, the only time he hadn’t felt that way had been the day he and his mother had met Fred and her parents at Windsor Castle though he hadn’t realized it at the time.  Now that they were together again, he didn’t know what he would do without her in his life.

As he sat there, the sun going down over the horizon, Fred made her way down the pier, stopping momentarily when she saw him, his head in his hands, staring down at the ever-darkening sea.  She had spent the last couple of hours searching for him in the shopping area of the Worthing seafront until someone had pointed her this way.

“Wes?” she asked softly as she joined him on the bench.  She put an arm around him and leaned her forehead against the back of his shoulder.

“I’m sorry I left you like that,” he told her.  “It’s just...”

“You don’t have to explain.  I understand.”

“Did I ever tell you that my father was the one who got me thrown off the Watchers’ Council?”

Fred raised her head slightly, surprise crossing her features.  “No.”

“When he denounced me in front of the entire Council, I couldn’t stand up to him.  As he stood there and spewed out all that hatred and vitriol I’d heard my whole life, all I could do was cower before him like a schoolboy.  It was as if in that one moment, I had truly become everything that he had always told me I would be – incompetent, unreliable...”

“You’re none of those things,” she told him.  “You’re the smartest, most reliable and capable man I’ve ever met.”

“But you didn’t know me then.  You never saw what I was like just a few years ago.  At that moment, all I could think was that everything he said had to be true.  Faith had fallen, betrayed the call of the slayer, and Buffy had renounced us.  And when he said it was my fault, I felt like it was.  And it was in some ways.”  Sitting back, he leaned against the nightclub building behind them.  “But I’ve never been able to stand up to him, Fred.  How Aunt Emily expects me to now...”

With gentle coo, she put a finger up to his lips to shush him.  “Do you remember what I told you the night we first made love?”

Wesley thought back to that night about a month before.  It hadn’t been planned – Fred had told him that she was a virgin after they had first admitted their love to each other, so he hadn’t wanted to push her.  But that night, they had been at his place, and Fred had suddenly started talking about something that had happened to her on Pylea...

After clearing away the dishes from dinner, Wesley and Fred walked arm in arm into his lounge.  While she sat down on the couch, he crossed over to the CD player and put on some music, something soft and romantic.  Fred watched him with love in her eyes and reached out her hand to him when he joined her, pulling him down next to her.

“You thinking about something?” he asked her, putting his arm around her so she could cuddle against his shoulder.

Fred nodded.  “I’ve been thinking about Pylea quite a bit recently.  Especially since Groo showed up.”

“Something specific?  Or just Pylea in general?”

“Somethin’ specific.”  She paused for a moment.  Though she had told Wesley quite a bit, there were some things that she hadn’t talked about regarding her time there.  However, with the two of them growing closer every day, she felt the need to tell him this before they took the big step that would change their relationship forever.  “You know that I escaped from...slavery while I was there.”

Nodding, Wesley took her hand.  “That must have been a difficult thing to do with those collars they put on humans.”

“Yeah, but considering what would have happened had I stayed, it was worth the risk.”

“What would have happened?” he asked while craning his neck slightly to look down at her.

“My...owner...was going to pair me with another one of his ‘cows,’” she said with a grimace.

He started at this.  “You mean...he was going to...you were going to be used for...breeding stock?”

Fred looked down at the entwined fingers of their hands.

“So that’s why you decided to escape.”

“I had never been with a man before...and the idea of having to breed with someone...someone I didn’t love or even care about...”  Tears came to her eyes as she recalled the feelings of fear and anger that had washed over her when she had been told.  “I had already figured out how to disengage the collar, but I had never had the courage to actually try to escape.  I had seen what they did to other runaways.  That night, though, I knew I had to get away.”

Tightening his embrace, Wesley pulled her closer to him and reached up to wipe away the tears.  “You made it, and you found your way to that cave.”

“Yeah.  But it was so lonely there, and I was so scared of getting caught.  I started building that shell around me, writing on the cave walls with whatever I could find to try to keep my sanity.  You know how well that worked.  And I started dreaming at night that someone was there with me – protecting me, watching over me, loving me.”  She sat up and looked straight into his blue eyes, knowing that what she was about to say next would probably sound out there, but with everything that had happened to both of them over the years, nothing seemed out of the realm of possibility anymore.  “I always had this feeling that we had met before.  And I somehow knew that one day, he would actually be there with me.”

Wesley felt his breath catch in his throat at the way she was gazing at him with her dark eyes.  “You mean...?”

“I had never known what he looked like.  He was only a shadow in my dreams.  When Angel rescued me from getting executed, I thought for a while that maybe it was him, but then after we returned home, I realized quickly that his heart would always belong to another.  After that, I thought that it had just been another way of me coping with things...until I realized that the man had been you.”  Reaching up, she cupped her hand to his cheek.  “I got through on Pylea because I felt I had this support.  And every day since I met you, you’ve been there – supporting me, protecting me, loving me.  I know that I can face anything now because you’re here with me...no matter what it is.”

“I love you, Fred,” he said softly.

“I love you, too, Wes.”

Leaning together, they kissed for several long moments.  Wesley’s fingers moved to undo the barrette she had used to pin her hair up, removing it so her dark locks fell in gentle waves over her shoulders.  As his hand then trailed over her hair, Fred traced patterns up and down his back with her nails.  He nibbled slightly on her lips before parting them with his tongue while his hand came to rest over her breast, causing her to moan slightly into the kiss.

When they parted for a moment, Fred           knew that the time had finally come.  She was ready to take that step with him.  “Make love to me, Wesley,” she whispered.

His heart gave a sudden leap at the words.  “Are you sure, my love?  You know I’ll wait...”

She put a finger to his lips.  “No more waiting.  The man I waited for is here.”

Without another word, he stood up and swept her into his arms to carry her into his bedroom.

“Do you remember what I told you?  About how I was able to survive Pylea?” Fred asked him as they sat there together on the pier in the dusk.

Wesley nodded.  “You said that it was because you felt I was there with you in a way even though we hadn’t met each other again.”

“And that ever since, I’ve known I could face anything because you were there.”  Putting her hand to his cheek, she turned his face towards her.  “It goes both ways, Wes.  I’m here for you, no matter what, whether you’re facing vampires, demons...or your father.”

He gazed into her eyes for several moments.  For so long, he had been used to dealing with what his father had done to him on his own.  It wasn’t anything he had ever shared with others until the night he had found himself muttering about it while watching the reunion between Fred and her parents.  And she was the first person he had ever been able to talk about it with.

“I don’t know if I can,” he finally told her in a quiet voice.

“You won’t know until you try.  You need to do this...as much for yourself as for your mother.  I know you, Wes.  If you walk away now, it’s going to haunt you forever.”

She was right.  Even now, the image of his mother in that hospital ward was burned into his mind.  If he left now, went home to California with Fred, that would be last memory he would have of her for the rest of his life.

Finally, he stood up and held his hand out to her.  She clasped it tightly as she rose from the bench.

“Let’s go,” he said.  “There’s someone we need to call if we’re going to do this.”

*****

Sitting in the lounge in his aunt’s semi-detached house, Wesley looked out the window, waiting, as he rolled over and over in his mind what he would tell him once he arrived.  He knew that no matter what he said, he was going to have a lot of explaining and convincing to do, but he knew that if anyone might believe him, it was Rupert Giles.

“Here, your aunt thought you might like some tea,” Fred said as she walked into the lounge, holding two mugs.  “Somethin’ about it being able to sort out anything?”

Chuckling slightly, he reached out and took one of the mugs.  “It’s sort of the universal British answer to any problem.  Upset?  Make a cup of tea.  Trying to make a hard decision?  Make a cup of tea.”

“I see.”  Fred sat down next to him and sipped a little bit of her tea while Wesley resumed his vigil.  “Does it work?” she said a few minutes later.

He glanced over at her.  “Does what work?”

“Tea?  It is really the answer?”

“Sixty million Brits seem to think so.”

“Because I was thinking, maybe that’s what we’ve doing wrong at Angel Investigations.  Instead of serving coffee, we should be serving tea.  ‘You have a demon stalking you?  Don’t worry.  Here, this’ll make everything better.’”

Putting his mug on the windowsill, Wesley turned to her, a grin on his face.  “Are you taking the mickey out of my country?”

Her eyes twinkling mischievously, Fred shook her head.  “No...but I managed to get you to smile, didn’t I?”

“That you did,” he admitted, putting his arm around her to cuddle her.  “That you did.”

He gave her a brief kiss on the lips, then was drawn back to the window when he saw a pair of headlights coming down the road.  The car slowed down as it reached the house, pulling over to park at the curb.  Wesley jumped up from the couch and squinted at the figure that climbed out of the vehicle.

“He’s here.”

With Fred following on his heels, he exited the lounge and headed out the front door, meeting Giles halfway down the walkway.

“I’m glad you made it,” Wesley said.  “Thank you for coming.”

“Yes, well, don’t thank me yet,” the older man said as they shook hands.  “What you’re accusing your father of is very serious, Wesley.”

“I know that.  But if it’s true...”

“We can’t ignore it.  I know.”  Giles glanced over at Fred, who had been standing a few feet away on the path.  “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

Wesley turned and took Fred’s hand, guiding her closer to stand beside him.  “Giles, this is Winifred Burkle, Angel Investigations’ newest member and my girlfriend.  Fred, this is Rupert Giles.  He was Buffy Summers’ Watcher.”

“Ah, yes,” he said, holding his hand out to her.  “Willow mentioned you last year after...well, after she came back from Los Angeles.  Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“Yours as well.”  Fred shook his proffered hand, slightly amazed that she was finally meeting the somewhat famous Giles.  The “Scooby Gang” from Sunnydale had taken up a somewhat legendary status in her mind after hearing all the stories that Angel, Wes and Cordy had related over the last several months.  The predicaments they had been up against were simply incredible.

“How’s Buffy?” Wesley inquired as they headed into the house.  “Angel never said much once he got back from seeing her after she—.”

“Returned from the dead,” Giles finished for him with a sigh.  What Willow had done was still a sore point for him.  The girl had no right to mess with such dangerous magic.  “She’s been having a rough time.”

“To be expected, I’m sure.”

While Wesley shut the front door behind him, the older man nodded.  “I wish I could have stayed to help, but she was becoming too reliant on me.  I was her excuse to not have to deal with the real world.  Hopefully, she’s better able to adapt to life again without me there.”  Sighing, he glanced around the entrance hall.  In the lounge, he could see Emily’s altar, which brought him back to the reason he had come all the way down from London at Wesley’s insistence.  “Now, though, I think we should focus on why I’m here.  What exactly is going on?”

“Why don’t we sit down in the lounge.”

Once the three of them were settled, Wesley began explaining to Giles what Emily had told him about finding his mother and about the altar she had seen in the attic loft.  As Giles listened, his brow furrowed, and his eyes seemed to darken.

“Did she say what she saw on the altar?” he asked.

“I’m not sure,” Wesley admitted.  “All she said was that she knew it wasn’t Wiccan.  Let me go get her.  Maybe she can tell us more details.”

Giving Fred’s hand a squeeze, Wesley rose and headed out of the lounge.  The sounds of his footsteps on the stairs told them he was heading up to the first floor.

“Is he going to be all right?” Giles asked Fred once he had left the room.

“That obvious, huh?”  She sighed when he nodded in response.  “This has hit him pretty hard, to say the least.  Between his mother being in the hospital and his father possibly being responsible...  He’s also not dealing at all well with the idea that he might have to confront him.”

“I know Cedric Pryce.  He is definitely one of the most difficult men I ever have had to work with on the Council.”

“Do you think he could be doing what Wes’ aunt says he’s doing?”

Taking off his glasses, Giles polished them with his handkerchief as he considered her question.  After he replaced them on his face, he leaned forward and steepled his fingers before his lips.  “Wesley’s father is demanding, arrogant and ambitious, but if you had asked me that question just last week, I would have said no, he would never do this.  However, something has happened recently that makes me think differently.”

“What’s that?” Fred asked, sitting forward.

Before he could answer, though, Wesley returned to the lounge with his aunt in tow.  Giles rose from his chair when she entered the room.

“Emily Wyndam...Rupert Giles,” Wesley introduced.

“You’re another Watcher?” Emily said and shook hands with him.

“Yes.”  As Fred scooted over closer to Wesley so Emily could also sit on the couch, Giles resumed his chair.  “Ms. Wyndam—.”

“Please, call me Emily.”

“Emily, your nephew has related to me everything you told him regarding your discovery of your sister after she collapsed.  I was wondering, though, if you can tell me specifically about any items that might have been on that altar you found in their loft?”

Sighing, Emily looked toward the ceiling as she tried to recall what she had seen in her hysteria.  “It...it was covered with a dark blue shroud that was embroidered many times over with the same symbol.”

Giles glanced over at Wesley, then back to Emily.  “Can you describe the symbol?”

“It looked like a pair of closed eyes.”

“Oh, God,” Wesley murmured.  “Was there a black opal sitting on the altar?”

Emily thought for a minute.  “It was more a dark blue, I think, but yes, it looked like an opal.  There was also Verbena there.”

Giles drew in a sharp breath of recognition.  “That’s it.  It has to be.”

“That’s what?” Fred asked, glancing at Wesley questioningly.

“Rorschach demons,” Wesley answered.

“You mean like that creature that attacked Cordy and Angel at the Hyperion the other night?”

Running a hand through his hair, he nodded.  Then he sat up as if something crossed his mind.  “You don’t think...?” he asked Giles.

“It’s related?  Possibly.”

Emily, meanwhile, watched the exchange between the two men, a confused expression on her face.  “Are you talking Rorschach like in the inkblots?”

“Yes.”

“There’s a demon named after a psychology test?”

“Well, sort of.”  Giles held up his hand to Wesley.  “Since you’ve had more recent experience with them, maybe you’d like to explain what they are.”

Shifting in his seat, Wes turned to look at both Fred and Emily.  “The demons weren’t called Rorschach until recently with the birth of pop psychology and the popularity of the inkblot test.  Before that, they were known as Sentio demons.”

“Isn’t that Latin for ‘perceive’?” Emily asked.

“In a way.  As you know, the inkblot test measures the state of mind of a person through what they perceive.  Basically, it tells psychiatrists what a person wants in a subconscious way, what their mind focuses on.  These demons are similar.  They’re able to seek out what a person most wants and uses that against them.”

“Cordelia said something about the demon showing Angel a life as a human,” Fred said.  “And he couldn’t move until she had killed it.”

“That’s the way they work,” Wesley responded.  “When they attack a victim, they give the person a vision of that which they sense he or she most wants.  It’s so real that the person believes it and wants to live in that vision.  The demons then...”  He paused for a moment a grimace crossing his features.  “...Suck out the soul of the paralyzed victim and send it to the Hell dimension.”

Emily’s eyes opened wide in dismay.  “Is that what was going to happen to my...my sister?  Why would Cedric have anything to do with these...those...?”  She couldn’t finish her sentence, instead breaking down into small sobs.  Fred put her arm around the older woman to comfort her.

“These demons also have the power to make a man’s wants a reality,” Giles explained.  “For a price.”

“A sacrifice.”  Emily’s voice was cold and flat.

“Of an opal and a female...usually the wife or significant other.  During the sacrificial ritual, the woman is used to breed more of their kind.”

Grabbing Fred’s free hand when she gasped, Wesley closed his eyes in pain, feeling as though someone had reached inside him and pulled his insides out.  “He’s started the sacrifice...that’s why Mum’s ill.  They’ve begun the first phase, but Aunt Emily found her before it was completed.”  He took a deep breath.  “Why...?  What would my father possibly want?”

“The Watchers’ Council.”

His eyes snapped open again to stare at the older man.  “What?”

“Martin Cole was killed a couple of weeks ago, so both your father and Quentin Travers put themselves forward in the election to choose his successor.  Travers won by a rather large margin.”

Giles didn’t need to continue because Wesley immediately understood.  For as long as he could remember, the one thing that Cedric Pryce had always wanted, the one thing that he had aspired to, was to become the Council’s Head Watcher.  Everything he had ever done was geared toward that purpose.

“We have to stop him.  If he’s planning on sacrificing my mother to become head of the Council...we have to stop him.”

*****

Sitting on the floor in the middle of the guestroom, Wesley tried to center himself, calling on the training he had received from the Watchers’ Council.  He dealt with demons everyday.  He could get through this.  For his mother’s sake and his own, he would.

“Wesley?”

At the sound of Fred’s voice behind him, he blinked, bringing himself back to reality.

“I thought you were going to go with my aunt to the hospital to guard my mother,” he said, twisting around to face her.

She shook her head and came to sit down on the floor next to him.  “I’m going with you and Giles.”

“Fred...you can’t.  The sacrifice calls for a woman.  What if something goes wrong?  If anything were to happen to you...”

“Wes, nothing will happen to me,” she assured him.  “Not if we’re fighting together.  I told you that I wouldn’t let you face this alone.”

Her hand came up to cup his cheek, and at her touch, he leaned into her palm, his eyes closing momentarily.  When he opened them again, he noticed she was holding something in her other hand.

“What’s that?”

“Your aunt asked me to give this to you.”  Taking his hand, she deposited an emerald ring into it.

Wesley looked at it in amazement.  It was a small ring that would fit onto his pinky finger, and as he held it up to the light, which caught the deep green, he remembered where he had seen it before.  “My Grandfather Wyndam used to wear this, said it protected him from evil.  According to Roman beliefs, emeralds pale when in the presence of deceit or treachery.”

“I think that’s why she wanted you to have it.”

Nodding, he took the ring and slid it onto his left pinky finger.  Then, he reached over and ran his hand through Fred’s hair before leaning over to kiss her.  “If I don’t have a chance to say this again...I love you.”

“We’ll have plenty of chances,” she told him.  “And I love you, too.”

“I guess we should go find Giles.  My aunt should be calling my father from the hospital in a bit.”

He stood and helped Fred to her feet; then together, they hurried downstairs.

*****

“How exactly did these demons come into being?” Fred asked as they headed to Wesley’s childhood home in Giles’ car.  “I take it from the original Latin name that they’re Roman in origin?”

Glancing into the rearview mirror to look at her in the dim light, Wesley nodded.  “The first Sentio demons were a Roman general and some of his Centurions.  They were fighting in Germania when they lost a battle, one of the few Roman armies to do so.  There were only a handful of survivors left.  The story goes that in order to try to change the outcome and rid themselves of their dishonor, they prayed to the Hell Gods with the offering of a large dark-blue black opal and several women they had captured during their enforced march home to Rome.  The Hell Gods gave them what they wanted, but at a much larger price than they anticipated...”

“They turned them into demons,” she finished.  “To bring them souls to feed off of.”

“Yes.”

“How do we stop them?”

“You can kill individual demons with weapons, like Cordy did the other night.  But once someone has started a sacrifice, the only way to end it and save the intended victim is to destroy the opal.”

“You have to burn it with some lavender,” Giles added.  “The change in temperature causes the opal to become brittle so you can shatter it.”

As Fred took all this in, she sat forward and placed her hand on Wesley’s shoulder.

*****

“There he goes,” Giles said.

As the three of them watched from where they were parked down the road, a tall man came out from a detached house.  He locked the front door, then went to the car sitting in the driveway.  From the way Wesley tensed up upon seeing him, Fred knew that the man was definitely his father.  He walked with his shoulders thrown back and his head high, and even though he was more a distant shadow than anything else, Fred felt as though she had never hated anyone more in her entire life.

Wesley, meanwhile, watched as his father stood at the car for a moment, glancing around him.  Was he looking for something?  Did he know they were there?  Finally, though, he got into the car and drove away in the direction of Worthing Hospital.  And Wes let out a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding in.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Once they were out of the car, Giles went around to the boot and opened it, pulling out several weapons.  “What do you use?” he asked Fred.

“Mostly the crossbow.”

He handed her one along with a dagger before choosing his own sword for protection.  Wesley took out a broadsword like Cordy had used to save Angel from the Rorschach demon.  Giles then shut the boot, and the three of them silently made their way up to the house, going around to the back so as not to attract the attention of any neighbors.

There was a door that lead into the kitchen, which Giles immediately set to work unlocking.  Within moments, they were inside the house where Wesley had grown up.

“Fifteen years,” he muttered under his breath.  “Fifteen years.”

Making their way through the house, they passed a small door beneath the staircase.  Wesley shuddered slightly upon seeing it and took a deep breath before turning his head away.  Giles didn’t notice this, but Fred did, so she stepped closer to him to let him know that he wasn’t alone.  Glancing over, he smiled somewhat wanly at her.  Despite his earlier insistence that she go with his aunt to the hospital, he was glad now that she was there with him.

The staircase creaked as they walked up to the loft, the sound yet again reminding him of the scared boy he had been.  His father’s footsteps booming above his head while he had been locked in the cupboard had echoed in his dreams for years, but he knew that he couldn’t let his childhood demons that still haunted this house distract him from the real demons they were there to vanquish.  So, steeling himself, he continued climbing the steps with Fred and Giles close behind him.

The loft door stood partially open, everything within cloaked in darkness.  Wesley groped around for the cord to turn on the light even though something in him told him not to.  Told him that he could still turn around and leave.

“There’s somethin’ bad in here,” Fred whispered, her eyes making out shadowy shapes.  “I can feel it.”

“Me, too,” he responded, fighting the urge to reach out and pull her into his arms to protect her from whatever they were about to find.

Just then, his hand came in contact with the cord.  With a flick of his wrist, dim light flooded the room, revealing the altar Emily had told them about.  It was low, about two feet off the floor, covered with the dark blue shroud, the closed eyes embroidered in multi-colored threads.  In the middle, a large opal sat, surrounded by Verbena.  Two candles were on the ends, and there were three bowls to the left side.

Wesley almost froze when he saw it – there was no denying it now.

Walking over to the altar, Giles examined the contents of the bowls.  “Elder and bayberry bark.”  Then he looked in the third bowl, which had ash remnants.  “There’s no doubt about it.  He’s started the sacrifice.”

“Wesley...” Fred said.  She suddenly had the feeling that something was about to go very wrong.

He didn’t hear her, instead bending over Giles at the altar.  “We need to destroy the opal right away.  And call the Watchers’ Council.  They must be made aware of this.”

Giles nodded and emptied the ash out of the bowl in order to start a new fire.  Once the flames were going, he pulled out an envelope containing lavender, which he dumped in.

“Wesley!” Fred suddenly screamed.

Whirling around, he found himself staring into the eyes of his childhood demon – his father.

“I should have known that meddling aunt of yours would bring you into this,” Cedric Pryce growled.

Behind him stood three Rorschach demons, tall and foreboding with skin the color of the opal that sat on the altar.  One of them held a struggling Fred, and her crossbow had fallen to the floor, out of her reach.  Wesley immediately tried to push his father out of the way to help Fred, but a hand suddenly closing around his throat stopped him.  A moment later, he was up against the wall while one of the other demons dragged Giles away from the altar.

“I knew something was going on when she called me and asked me to come to the hospital.  She hadn’t cared before if I was there or not.”  Cedric’s hold on his son’s neck tightened, closing off his oxygen supply and causing spots to dance before his eyes.  “You were never a match for me, Wesley.  Always the weakling.  You’re not going to get in the way of my aspirations.  Not this time.  You’re finally going to be out of my life for good.  Gone, like a bad dream.”

As the last demon moved up next to them, Wesley realized in horror what he meant.  Part of his father’s new reality was going to be that Wesley himself had never existed!

“Fred!” he choked out, trying to break his father’s hold, but finding his movements becoming sluggish.

“Once you three are gone, I’ll take care of Emily, then the sacrifice will continue.  You’ll be erased from my life forever.”

Wesley felt the hand holding his neck release him, but he still couldn’t move.  Instead, the Rorschach demon moved closer, muttering a Latin chant, the pattern of his skin seeming to undulate, drawing Wesley’s focus inward and inward...

“Wesley,” Fred cried out, fighting against the demon that held her.  She tried to fumble for her dagger, but before she could reach it, she was pushed against the wall across from Wesley.  The chant of the demon filled her ears, and her eyes became focused on the opal-like skin.

And things became blacker...

*****

“Winnie?”

Feeling as though she was waking up from a dream, Winifred Burkle opened her eyes and looked around.  She was sitting in her cubicle at the university, running an equation on the laptop opened in front of her.  Just as she had been.  But it was the strangest thing.  She could have sworn she was just somewhere else...

“Winnie,” the voice said again.

Turning her head, she saw a man standing at the cubicle entrance.  “What’s up, Jack?”

“Professor Harman is ready to see you now.”

“Thanks,” she said.  Standing up, she stretched and let out a groan.

“Too many hours hunched over that computer?” Jack asked.

“Somethin’ like that.”

“We still on for dinner tonight?”

She nodded, but something nagged at her.  Dinner?  Since when had she been going out with Jack?  For three months now, she reminded herself.

“Hey, what’s that?” he asked, noticing the picture that was tacked up on the cubicle wall.  “I haven’t seen that before.”

She glanced over at it.  “My parents sent it with some stuff the other day.”

“That Windsor Castle?”

She nodded.  “Yeah. I was seven when we went to England on vacation.”

Leaning in, Jack examined the picture.  “Who’s the boy?”

“Someone named Wesley.  My parents and I were on the castle tour with him and his mother.  He was really nice...”  Breaking off, she stared at the picture, looking at Wesley and getting a strange feeling.  Something was wrong.  Her finger went out to absently run over the image of the young boy.

“Did you two keep in touch?”

“No, unfortunately.”  But for some reason, that answer didn’t sound right.  In her mind, she got a flash – a man with dark hair and glasses who could have been an older Wesley...kissing her.  “At least, I don’t think we did.”

“You don’t think you did?”

She shook her head.  Why would she have a vision of kissing someone else when she was dating Jack?  “I don’t remember.  Somehow, I know that we didn’t, but yet...”

“You feel like you did?”

“Yeah.”  Raising her head to look up at Jack, she shrugged.  “Weird, huh?”

“No more than what I’m used to with you,” he said with a laugh before giving her a kiss.  “Go on.  Before Harman sends down the hit squad to get you.”

She paused at his choice of words.  “What did you say?”

“’Hit squad.’  You know...group that does his dirty work.”

“Right.”  Shaking her head, not knowing why that phrase had caused her to react like that, she hurried out of the T.A. office in the basement of the Physics building and upstairs to Harman’s.

*****

“Wesley.”

Waking with a start, Wesley sat up to find a face looking down at him.  For a moment, he wasn’t sure where he was.  But then he realized.  He was sitting in his study, a book on demons sitting in front of him on the desk.

“I’m still searching, Faith,” he told his charge.  “I don’t know yet what it is that you and Buffy saw.”

“Giles doesn’t know either.”  She hitched herself up onto the desk, only to slide off when Wesley furrowed his brow at her.  Instead, she went over to sit in the chair across from him.  “Could it be some new demon?”

“Possibly but highly unlikely.  I’ll keep looking.  In the meantime, shouldn’t you been in the training room?”

“Yeah, yeah,” she said good-naturedly.  Standing up, she walked over to the door just as it opened.  “Hey, Cordy.  Watch out, he’s deep in the books.”

“Thanks, Faith.”

As Faith disappeared down the hall, Cordelia slipped into the room, shutting the door behind her.  Glancing up, Wesley started.  Shouldn’t her hair be shorter?  No, of course not.  Why would he think that?

“You know,” she said, walking over and closing the book, “you’re gonna go cross-eyed if you keep this up.  You’ve been at it all day.”

“We need to find out what this demon is before Faith and Buffy go out on patrol again tonight,” he told her.  He paused for a moment.  Faith on patrol?  Why didn’t that sound right?

“Well, you can take a break, can’t you?”

“A...a break?  I suppose so.”

Sitting in his lap, she smiled.  “Good.”  She leaned in and gave him a long kiss.

Suddenly, Wesley broke the kiss and sat back, staring at her.  This wasn’t right.  Why was Cordy kissing him like this?  Because they’d been together for almost three years now, his brain told him, ever since her graduation from high school.

“Wes, what’s wrong?” she asked.

“I’m...I’m not sure...”

“I told you that all work and no play makes Wesley a dull boy.”

“You think I’m dull?” he asked.  “I should be hurt.”

“Of course, I don’t.  But I know what you get like when you get to focused on your Watcher duties.”

Watcher duties?  He wasn’t a Watcher.  He had been kicked off the Council.  Hadn’t he?  He tried to think but found it a blur, like a dream that was slipping away.

“Hey, pictures!” she suddenly squealed, picking up the stack of photographs sitting on the edge of his desk.  “Where did these come from?”

“I...I found them while I was looking for this book earlier,” he said as she started to flip through them.

“Is that you?”  She pointed to the picture of a schoolboy in front of the King Henry the Eighth Gate at Windsor Castle, his arm around a young girl.

“Yes.”  His eyes focused on the girl as Cordelia asked who she was.  “I...an American...there on holiday with her parents...really sweet.”

Cordelia turned over the picture.  “No name.  Do you remember?”

“I don’t—.”  An image of a young woman, with long dark hair like Cordy’s but smaller in stature, flashed into his mind.  He was kissing her.  “Winifred.”

“Winifred?  That’s pretty old-fashioned.”

“As is Cordelia.”

“That be true.”

But his mind had suddenly recalled something, and as his eyes unfocused, he murmured, “They called her Fred.”

“Her parents?”

“We did...”

“We?  Wesley, are you all right?”

He blinked, uncertain as to what had just happened.  “What?”

“Never mind.  You really need a break.”  Standing up, she took his hands to pull him out of his chair.  “Let’s go for a walk.”

With one last glance at the picture, Wesley allowed himself to be pulled out of the room and down the hall toward the front door, just as the bell rang.  Both of them wondered who it could be as Cordy opened the door to reveal an older man standing there with a smile on his face.

“Father,” Wesley said in surprise.

*****

“Ah, Winifred, come in,” Harman said.  “Have a seat.”

“Thank you, Professor.”  She sank into one of the leatherback chairs in front of her mentor’s desk.

“I’ve just been going over the work you’ve submitted so far.  Well done.  In fact, all your work these last few years has been exceptional.”

“Last few years?  But I’ve been in Pylea,” she blurted out without thinking.  As soon as it was out of her mouth, her eyes opened wide in disbelief.  Where had that come from?  And what in the world was Pylea?

Harman raised an eyebrow at her outburst.  “Pylea?  Is that what you T.A.s are calling the office pit nowadays?”

“No, it’s a...”  She stopped just before the words “alternate demon dimension” came to her lips.  What kind of dreams had she been having lately?  “Never mind.  I’m sorry, Professor.”

“As I was saying, I have a feeling that once you finish your doctorate work, you’ll have your choice of any university in the country.  Have you given any thought to where you’d like to go?”

“I was thinking home to Texas would be nice.”

“I know some people in the Physics department at Texas A and M.  I’ll be glad to speak to them when the time comes.”

She gave him a broad smile.  “Thank you, Professor.”

“Sure...although I still have time to convince you to stay in L.A.  Our department could always use your talents.”

A little while later, she exited the Physics building, her satchel with her laptop in it slung over her shoulder.  It was so strange.  With everything Harman had said, she should have been walking on air, but for some reason, she felt as though something was wrong.  This just didn’t seem right.  Nothing seemed right.

It was as though her life, this life, was a lie.  She was supposed to be somewhere else.  She could feel it in her soul.

Sitting on the steps, she set her bag at her feet and pulled out the picture from Windsor Castle.  When she had packed up to head for home, she had grabbed it, out of some need to have it with her.  Somehow, seeing it, seeing him, made her feel better.  Like she could find a piece of her heart that was missing in it.

As she stared at the picture, her hand absently went up to the cross pendant she wore around her neck.  Only, instead of finding just the cross, her fingers grazed across something else.  Something that felt like a stone.  Looking down, she saw the blue gem and pulled the chain up to look at it more closely, trying to remember where she had gotten it.  It seemed to shimmer from within in an almost ghostly but beautiful way.

“It’s a moonstone.  It’s associated with love...”

Her head came up as she heard the words echo in her head, their speaker distinctly British.  Who had said that?  Confused, she focused her eyes on the stone again.  The color reminded her of his eyes...

His eyes?

Jack’s eyes were green.

“Wear this, and I’ll always be with you.  I love you, Fred.”

“I love you, too,” she whispered.

Suddenly, a hand came down on her shoulder, and she turned, the name coming from her mouth without thought.

“Wesley?”

*****

“Hello, son,” Cedric Pryce greeted, reaching out to pull his son into an embrace.  Wesley stood there in shock for a second before wrapping his arms around him.  “You look well.”

“Thank you,” Wesley replied, not sure why he was so stunned.  “Won’t you come in?”

Cedric stepped into the house, a broad smile on his face.  “Cordelia!  Wonderful to see you again.”

“You, too, Cedric,” she told him as she gave him a hug as well.

Wesley watched his father in disbelief.  Why was he acting like this?  Like he loved him, like he cared.  But didn’t he always act like this?  He had always had a good relationship with his father.  Why was he thinking that he should be acting like a monster?  No one would want to think that about his father.

“What brings you to Sunnydale?” Wesley asked once they had settled in the sitting room.

“Giles called about the problem you were having tracking down this mystery demon.  I thought I’d fly over and help.”

“That’s nice of you.”

“Anything I can do for my son.”

“Aw, that’s so sweet,” Cordelia said from her perch on the arm of Wes’ chair.  “Wish my dad was like yours.”

But this isn’t what my dad is like, Wesley thought before he could stop himself.  It’s what I wish he had been like.

What in the hell was going on with him?  Why was he thinking like this?

“Now, there’s a question,” he heard Cedric saying, so he tried to push away the strange thoughts he was having and focus on his father.  “When are you two going to marry?”

“Marry?” Wesley asked.  How could he think that he was going to marry Cordelia?  Not when he was in love with...

In love with...

“We haven’t really talked about it.”  Cordelia smiled down at Wesley and squeezed his shoulder.  “But I’m sure that it’ll be soon.”

Glancing down at his hands, Wesley noticed the emerald pinky ring that he had received from his grandfather.  For some reason, it seemed paler than its usual brilliant deep green.  So pale in fact that...

“Well, what would you two think of marrying in England?  There are some magnificent places in West Sussex.”

“Oh, that would be wonderful!” Cordelia sighed dreamily.

No.  This wasn’t right, Wesley thought.  He couldn’t marry Cordelia.  It wasn’t Cordelia he loved.  Cordy was like a sister to him.  His heart belonged to someone else.  Someone who wasn’t here, someone that he felt incomplete without...

“Every day since I met you, you’ve been there – supporting me, protecting me, loving me.  I know that I can face anything now because you’re here with me...no matter what it is.”

“No!  This isn’t right!” Wesley yelled, standing up.  “I can’t marry you, Cordy!  I don’t love you!  I love Fred!”

*****

“What do you mean, ‘Wesley’?” Jack asked.  He regarded her with a hurt expression.  “I thought you said that you didn’t keep in touch with him.”

“We haven’t...I thought...that is...when you...”

“What’s going on, Winnie?  You’ve been acting strangely all day, like you’re not really here.”

“I don’t know what’s going on,” she told him.  “It’s just that I feel like...”

This isn’t my life.

As the thought crossed her mind, she saw a flash of something.  An opal.  She remembered an opal.

“This is wrong...” she said, glancing around her.  “This isn’t real.”

“What do you mean?  Winnie, what in the hell are you talking about?  Of course this is real.”

Jack moved to touch her again, but she jerked away.  “My name isn’t Winnie.  It’s Fred!  This isn’t my life!  I was in Pylea for five years!  Not here!  Not in school!  I was a slave until...until they rescued me!  And I’m not dating you!  I’m in love with Wesley!”

As she said this, suddenly the world around her began to come apart.  Jack disappeared, and everything became a swirling opal pattern before her eyes.  Fred felt as though she was paralyzed, but she fought against it.

“WESLEY!”

*****

Cordelia looked up at Wesley in shock, her mouth hanging open for several moments before she was finally able to say anything.  “What do you mean, you’re in love with Fred?  Are you saying...you’re a homosexual?”  She rose from the arm of the chair.  “Oh, this is just perfect.  Three years of my life, wasted!  Why couldn’t you tell me before?  Is that why our first kiss was such a disaster?”  She glanced over at Cedric.  “Did you know about this?”

Wesley’s father shook his head.  “No, but even if he is...Wesley, I still love you.”

“Stop this!” Wesley yelled, putting his fingers to his temples in an attempt to block all this out.  “Stop!  This isn’t real.  You don’t love me, Cordy, not like this, and you...”  He pointed to his father.  “You have never loved me!  You abused me!  You burned my arm with your cigar!”

Cedric looked at him askance.  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!  I would never hurt you!”

“Yes, you do!  And you did!”  He reached for his sleeve to pull it up, to show him what he knew would be there.

“WESLEY!” a voice screamed in his head, causing him to freeze.  He knew that voice.

It was...

“FRED!”

Suddenly, the world came apart around him.

*****

“Wesley!” Fred cried out again as she came back into reality.

She was being held up against the wall by the Rorschach demon.  Struggling against the paralysis, she willed her hand to reach for the dagger in her pocket.  The demon’s skin seemed to shimmer more erratically, and his chant became louder, as he tried to draw her focus back in, so she closed her eyes and started singing as loud as she could to distract herself.

“I’m crazy...crazy for loving you!”

Her hand finally, painfully, closed around the dagger in her pocket and pulled it out.  Then, with all the strength she could muster, she slashed upwards with it, catching the demon across its eyes.  Screaming in pain, the demon stumbled away, letting Fred go.  She tumbled to the ground, the dagger falling from her hand.  After regaining her bearing, she looked up just in time to see Wesley’s eyes open as he began struggling against the demon that held him.

“Wesley!  The eyes!  Strike his eyes!”

While she picked up the dagger and ran over to take care of the demon holding Giles, Wesley, fighting against the demon’s paralysis with all his might, reached for the broadsword hanging off his belt.  When he felt his fingers wrap around it, he brought it up.  The demon howled and let go of him.

Slumping against the wall, he saw Fred thrusting her dagger at third demon and noticed a shadow moving toward her, something metallic flashing in the light.  His father!

“Fred, look out!” he yelled, flying across the room to tackle Cedric before his father could get to her.  “Stay the hell away from her!”

Giles came out of his paralysis just as Wes and Cedric went down in a tangle of arms and legs.  A knife flew out of Cedric’s hands, skittering across the floor of the loft.  “What the—?”

“Get the opal!” Fred yelled, seeing that the demons were starting to recover.

Running over to the altar while Fred picked up the broadsword Wes had dropped, Giles grabbed the opal from the center of the table and threw it into the fire that he had started before they had been attacked.  When he did so, the demons starting screaming again, their cries of pain echoing through the loft.  After a few seconds on the fire, Giles turned over the bowl to dump out the gem onto the altar.  Then, he grabbed the sword on his belt and brought the hilt down onto the opal, shattering it into thousands of pieces.

With a final horrific roar, the Rorschach demons disappeared.

“No!” Cedric yelled, struggling against his son.  “You’ve destroyed everything!”

Meanwhile, Wesley, oblivious to this, found himself focused on the man who had tortured him his entire life.  Who had wanted to sacrifice his mother for the sake of his “career”.  Who would have murdered the love of his life given the chance.  He rolled over, so he was above his father, his hand going to Cedric’s throat.

“No more!” Wesley hissed, shoving him into the floor as he choked him.  “Do you hear me!  No more!  No more beating!  No more locking me in the cupboards!  No more telling me that I’m not good enough!  You’re not going to rule my life anymore!  You’re not going to hurt Mum anymore!”

Cedric looked up at him with a sick grin.  “Go on...hit me.  Kill me,” he taunted through breathless gasps.  “I know you can’t do it because you’re Weakling Wesley.  You don’t have the guts!”

Growling, Wesley filled with a fury he hadn’t felt since the night that he had been exposed to Billy’s blood.  He had to end this.  He raised his hand up, ready to bring it down into the older man’s face.  He had been trained; he knew how to kill a man.

“Wesley!” a voice cried out, bringing him back to his senses.

Raising his head, he saw Fred standing there, watching him with wide brown eyes.  Slowly, his hand came down as he realized what had almost happened.  He had almost willingly become what he hated, the thing he feared most.

“I won’t become you!” he told his father, pushing himself away.

“Weakling Wesley, can’t finish a fight,” Cedric coughed out.  “I knew you didn’t have the guts.”

“No...I’m not the schoolboy you tortured anymore, the child who could never stand up to you.  I’m choosing to walk away.  I’m ending this now and reclaiming my life.  The Council will decide your punishment.”

As Giles dragged Cedric to his feet, Wesley crossed over to Fred, wrapping his arms around her to hold her close to him.  In that moment, he knew that he would never allow himself to be without her again.

*****

“Wes, you’re gonna wear a hole in the carpet if you keep pacing like that.”

“I’m sorry, love,” he told Fred as he dropped down onto the bench next to her.  “I suppose I’m nervous.  I must admit that I never thought I’d be here again.”

Nodding, Fred glanced around the room they were sitting in.  “I have to admit that when you spoke about the Watchers’ Council, this wasn’t the sort of place I envisioned them meeting.”

“What exactly did you expect?”

The Watchers’ Council headquarters was located in what looked to be any generic British society club on the outside – a five-story building located in one of London’s more upscale boroughs.  There were several rooms on the first floor filled with books for research, and Wesley had told her that there were training rooms for acolyte Watchers on the second floor.

The top two floors held the Council chambers, where the Watchers were now gathered, holding an emergency session for the trial of Cedric Pryce.  Though Giles was acting as prosecutor, Wesley and Fred had not been allowed inside during the deliberations since they were not members.  Instead, they sat in the small anteroom directly outside the Chambers, waiting to hear the Council’s verdict.

“I’m not sure...a castle, I guess,” she said with a shrug.  “Somethin’ gothic.”

“I think the castle burned down years ago.”

Fred stared at him for a few moments, not sure if he was kidding or not.  “There wasn’t a castle, really.  Was there?”

Wesley just smiled, earning him a swat from her.

“You’re horrible, you know,” she told him.

“Maybe so...but I have you to straighten me out,” he said, stretching an arm around her and pulling her closer to kiss her.

Suddenly, the door to the Council Chamber opened, and a Watcher that Wesley didn’t know stepped out, her gaze falling directly on the couple.  They immediately pulled apart and stood up.

“The Council’s judgement is about to be passed down.  You’ve been granted permission to enter,” she informed them.

“Come on,” Wesley said as they walked toward the doors.

But the woman put her hand up.  “Just you.”  She pointed to Wesley.  “She has to stay out here.”

Shaking his head, he tightened his grasp on Fred’s hand.  “She’s coming with me.”

With that, he brushed past the woman, and the two of them entered the Chambers, which resembled a two-level courtroom.  As they made their way forward to where Giles was standing, he was quite aware of the eyes upon them both, of the astonished whispers and murmurs at his breaking the rules by bringing an uninitiated in there.  The last time Wesley had been in here, he had been thrown off the Council in disgrace, and many of the people there now had been the ones who had made that decision.

When they reached Giles, the older man motioned for them to sit beside him.  Wesley noticed his eyes narrow slightly as he glanced from him to Fred, but he also saw understanding.  After all, Giles himself had broken several Watcher rules in his time because of his fatherly love for Buffy.

Sitting down, Wesley gazed across the chambers to his father, whose face was impassive.  But he could see the darkness in those eyes, eyes that had always looked down upon him.  Eyes that had never once brightened in his presence and had haunted his nightmares for years.  But as they stared at each other, Wes knew that those nightmares were finally over.  He had proven to himself that he wasn’t his father.  That he never would be.

“It is this Council’s judgement,” Quentin Travers intoned, standing before the gathering, “that Cedric Pryce is guilty of breaking the most sacred Watcher commandment: Not to use evil for evil purposes.  He has also been found guilty of other transgressions against both innocents and his fellow Watchers.  We have no other choice, therefore, than to mete out our most severe punishment.”

He turned to face Cedric, whose face continued to appear as though it was made of stone.  “Cedric Pryce, you are hereby banished to the realm of Tantalus.  May the Powers have mercy on your soul.”

As Cedric rose from his seat, several Watchers moved forward and escorted him out of the Chambers.  Watching him disappear, Wesley knew that he would never see his father again.

“Now...we have more item of business before this Council,” Travers said.  “Wesley Wyndam-Pryce.”

Immediately, he stood though he kept a hold of Fred’s hand.  “Yes, Ducis?”

“You have turned us down once before, but we ask again.  Will you agree to rejoin the Watchers’ Council and resume your duties with the Chosen One Faith?  The skills you have acquired during your time away from us are much needed in our continued fight against the growing forces of darkness.”

Wesley didn’t answer immediately.  Based on some of the prophecies he had translated in the Niazian scrolls, he knew that the gifts of a slayer might prove invaluable.  But could he do it?  Could he work with Faith after all that had happened?  Tilting his head down, he locked eyes with Fred.  The expression in her eyes told him that she would support whatever decision he made.  She would be there with him every step of the way.

“Only if my conditions are met,” he finally said, turning his eyes back toward the rostrum.

“And those are?”

“That we remain in Los Angeles, as part of Angel Investigations.”

“And?”

“That the Watchers’ Council does not interfere with my work or my decisions.”

Travers raised an eyebrow in surprise at the confidence with which Wesley spoke.  This was certainly not the same young man he had seen walk out of the Chambers just a few years before, head bent with shame after being dismissed.  He glanced briefly around at the other Watchers gathered.

“Your conditions shall be agreed to.  Welcome back, Watcher.”

*****

“How is she doing?”

Emily smiled up at her nephew as he and Fred entered the hospital ward.  “Better.  The doctor says that since whatever was wrong seems to have passed, she can go home tomorrow.”

“That’s wonderful news,” Wesley told her.  He glanced over to see his mother upright in bed.  “Will she talk to me?”

“Yes.  I told her what I could, but I know she wants to hear it from you.”  Emily put a hand on his arm.  “Thank you, Wes.”

He covered her hand briefly and gave it a squeeze.  “Thank you for making me come over.”

Reaching up, she gave his face a pat before heading out into the corridor.  Wes then took Fred’s hand and led the way over to his mother’s bed.  The older woman raised her head as they approached.

“Wesley,” she said softly.

“Mum,” he replied, leaning down to embrace her.  She clung to him tightly as if she didn’t want to let him go.  Finally, though, he had to pull away.  “Mum, I’d like to introduce Winifred Burkle...the woman I love.”

Niamh held out her hand to Fred with a smile, and as the younger woman took it, a question formed in her eyes.  “You seem very familiar.  Have we met before?”

Grinning broadly, Fred glanced over at Wesley.  “Yes, actually.  Almost twenty years ago, at Windsor Castle.”

It took her a few moments to place her, but then realization dawned.  “You were the little American girl!”  Blushing slightly, Fred nodded.  “My goodness...how on earth did the two of you ever find each other again?”

“It is a long story,” Wesley told her.  “And we’ll tell you all about it sometime.  For right now, let’s just say that it was meant to be.”

“I’m so happy for you, Wesley.”

“Thank you, Mum.”

They stood there for a few minutes, none of them really wanting to break the moment by bringing up the painful ordeal they had all just gone through.  Finally, though, Niamh asked, “Is what Emily said true?  Is Cedric gone?”

He nodded.  “Yes.  He’s been banished by the Watchers’ Council for what he did to you.  He’ll never hurt you again.”

“I feel like I should cry for him,” she told her son.  “But I can’t, Wesley.  Not after everything he did, not after what he tried to do to me.  I feel like I’ve finally been freed, and I can’t grieve for that.”

“Neither can I, Mum...neither can I.”

*****

“I suppose that we should be returning to Los Angeles soon,” Wesley said as he and Fred walked down the Worthing pier a few evenings later.  “That last phone call home made it sound like things were getting difficult again.  And I have to prepare for Faith’s release.”

Nodding, Fred stepped closer to him.  “Too bad, though.  I was kinda enjoying the time off.”

“Me, too.  But I guess it goes with the life we lead.”

They came to the end of the pier where Fred leaned against the railing with Wesley behind her, his arms around her.  Both of them stared out at the dark, star-filled sky over the water for a few minutes.

“Wes?”

“Hmmm?”

“If you...you had the chance to actually live the reality that the demons showed you...without getting your soul sucked out...without any consequences...would you?”

Running his hand over her hair, he took a deep breath before answering.  “Part of me always wondered what it would be like to have grown up in a household like you did.  With a father that loved and supported me no matter what.  And that was what I saw...but no, I wouldn’t.  Because I would have been incomplete.”  He turned her in his arms to face him.  “I wouldn’t have had you here with me.”

Fred felt tears forming in her eyes as she looked up at him.  “It was the same with me.  For a long time, I wished that I hadn’t had to endure Pylea.  But when I realized that if I hadn’t, I never would have found you again...I knew that I could live with the price.  Because I would have been missing—.”

“The other part of our soul,” he finished, then kissed her softly on the lips.  “Fred, I’ve been wanting to ask you something.”

Before she could wonder what, he dropped to his knees in front of her.  As she suddenly felt her breath catch in her throat, he took off the emerald ring he had been wearing on his pinky finger and held it up to her.

“I told you that my grandfather said this ring protected him and could identify deceit.  But emeralds have also been universally associated with love and fidelity in many ancient cultures.  So I want to give you this ring as a symbol of my love and our bond.  Winifred Burkle, will you honor me by consenting to be my wife?”

“Yes,” she told him, her heart soaring.

Wesley had never been happier than in that moment when he slid the ring onto her finger.  It fit perfectly.  Then, picking her up, he spun her around in the moonlight before capturing her lips in a long, loving kiss.

He knew that with Fred, he would finally have the family he wanted.  He didn’t need demons to make it a reality.  Just the other half of his soul, and she was there with him.