Cordelia felt her stomach clench painfully. For a moment, she couldn't think, couldn't speak, couldn't hear anything but the rushing of her own blood in her ears. "What?"

The others were all staring at Angel with differing levels of displeasure and disbelief. "This Angelus -- has his soul?" Wesley finally asked.

"Angel, that's crazy," Cordelia said. "Angelus tried to turn me. God, he was going to rape me --- when I passed out, he was taking his belt off to do it --"

"That's not why he took the belt off," Angel said. "He made a tourniquet for your arm. He's the one who saved your life, Cordelia. Not me." He motioned at his own belt, which was still at his own waist.

Cordelia flashed back to that moment in the library when she lay beneath Angelus, feeling his Adam's Apple rub against her skin as he drank up the blood spilling from the open veins in her arm. That moment of pure pain and terror and helplessness -- not Angelus?

No. Not possible.

"Back up," Gunn said. "You're saying Angelus saved her?"

"If he -- you -- he -- Angelus wanted to save Cordelia, why did he try to kill her in the first place?" Lorne said, his tone carefully reasonable.

"I can't imagine," Angel said. "In the same way I can't imagine why I would do any of the things he's done here -- but I know what I know. He has his soul."

"How could you do this stuff if you had your soul?" Gunn said.

"That's -- not -- Angel," Cordelia said. "No way. I don't believe it."

"It is," Angel said. "Why else would he have saved you, Cordelia? Why not carry through with the murder? I can tell you, without my soul, I never would have stopped. Never."

"You're -- you're just being paranoid," Cordelia said. "That's it. Paranoid like always. Well, take your guilt trip on your next vacation. Angel, you couldn't have done all this. Destroying the world, or blinding me or -- or killing Buffy! You believe that, don't you? There's no way you would ever have killed Buffy. Not with your soul."

Angel was very still. "I can't imagine doing that," he said. "But -- but I must have."

Wesley shook his head slowly. "Giles said she was dead -- and I assumed..." He trailed off. "He didn't actually say that Angelus was responsible." Wesley looked strange; Cordelia realized that he was actually starting to buy into Angel's crazy theory. His eyes reflected a kind of unpleasant energy -- fear masquerading as anger -- that she hadn't seen in a long time -- not since they'd been afraid Angel was murdering those people, cutting crosses in their cheeks --

Cordelia's memory flashed to Angelus' blade, cutting into her own skin. And she realized, with a lurch of fear, that she was starting to believe Angel too.

No.

She blurted out, "Think about this, would you? Like any old demon-of-the-week could take out Buffy. Wait, I'll prove it. Where's the phone?"

Lorne fetched it for her, and Cordelia checked with directory assistance, then pressed 1 to pay for the exorbitant connection fee. As she waited for the connection to be made, she heard Gunn say to Angel, "I'm hoping, for your sake, that we find out a soul-free Angelus did something real bad to your ex. Because I am not ready to hear that you can do something like that. Or like what we saw today."

"Cordelia's face was a ruin," Wesley said. "Could you have done that to her? Answer me. I want to hear this."

"I can't imagine it," Angel said hoarsely. He was sitting in the center of the room, Cordelia noticed; the attention of the group was focused solely on him, as if he were on trial. Maybe he was. "But I -- Wesley, I don't know what I could have done. I just know what I am."

"Does it matter if -- Angelus -- has his soul or not?" Fred said.

"Oh, yes," Wesley said. He was glowering at Angel now, his stare cold and penetrating in a way Cordelia hadn't known it could be. "It matters very much."

"But not compared to the actual problem of the universe collapsing --" Fred said. Cordelia rolled her eyes. Fred clearly needed to get her priorities straight.

At last, Cordelia heard a click as, at the other end of the line, someone lifted the phone. She motioned at the others to keep quiet.

"Hello?"

"Xander? Hey, it's Cordelia! Good ol' Cordy from Sunnydale High and vampire slayage of yore. Now, I know we haven't kept up like we should have after the bitter, vindictive breakup, and you probably heard I was in the nuthouse and everything. But I just wanted to touch base, and, um, ask you some questions that might sound -- very, VERY strange -- oh, for Pete's sake," Cordelia sighed. "I forget I'm talking to someone who lives on a Hellmouth. I'm not your Cordelia. I'm from an alternate universe."

"Check. What's up?"

"I have to ask you a really difficult question. But the answer is going to tell us something we definitely need to know, okay?"

"I'm ready for any difficult questions you want to throw at me," Xander said cheerily. "Except chemistry. Not so good at that."

Cordelia took a deep breath. "Xander, how did Buffy die?"

The phone was silent for a while. When Xander spoke again, his voice was subdued. "She died the night after her mother's funeral. She was all alone -- she said she wanted to be alone, so we left her. We never should have done that. A demon caught up with her."

"You're absolutely certain about that?"

"Oh, I'm certain," Xander said bitterly. "It was a -- Giles said it was a Pavneq. We found it two days later. It kept her scalp as a trophy. Thing is, Pavneq demons aren't even all that strong. She could have fought it if she'd wanted to. But Buffy -- she went through a lot, those last few months, and I -- I don't think she wanted to fight anymore." There was a long silence on the other end of the line. "Is that all you needed to know?"

"Yeah," Cordelia said quietly. "That was it. Thanks, Xander."

"Hey, am I, you know -- cool in your universe?"

"Nope. Sorry."

"Figures."

The phone went dead, and Cordelia put it down. Her whole body felt numb.

Angelus didn't kill Buffy.

Angel didn't kill Buffy.

There's no Angelus, she realized. There's just the same Angel who's sitting here in this room. The same one who tried to kill me, tried to turn me --

She turned to the others and forced the words out. "Buffy died the night after her Mom's funeral. A demon got her."

"In our universe, I was there -- I would have protected her -- " Angel's face twisted briefly in pain. Finally, he said, "He has his soul. I don't know why he's doing all this. But I know he's not Angelus, not really. We're trying to stop someone who -- who thinks like I do. So that might help us predict what he's going to do. When he's going to do it. I -- I realize this is disturbing -- it is for me too -- but we have to use this to our --"

"You tore out her eyes," Wesley said. "With your own hands. With your soul in your heart."

"I must have," Angel said brokenly.

The significance of what Xander had said, what it meant, burrowed its way deeper into Cordelia's mind. She stared at her arm. Felt herself start to shake. "That was Angel. Angel did this. Oh, my God."

"No," Fred said. "This is our Angel. And he didn't do any of that. So if we could just get back to the important things --"

"This is important!" snapped Wesley.

"No, it's not!" Fred was almost shouting. "We need to be -- focused -- and calm -- the world is ending!"

"Good point," Lorne said. "Well made. Maybe if we dealt with that little matter for a moment --"

He started talking, but Cordelia wasn't listening. Yeah, she thought. Her world was ending. It had been a nice world, too, for a little while: she'd believed in Bad Angelus and Good Angel, and it was okay to hate one and let the other buy you lunch. But the truth was that the gulf between them wasn't as wide as she'd wanted to believe it was and, really, she'd known it since he'd threatened her just to get a book.

Whatever it was that had opened back up in her heart for Angel these past couple of months -- Cordelia could feel it closing over, sealing up, leaving only the pain and the scar.

"Calm?" Gunn said, cutting Lorne off mid-sentence. "Calm? We just found out that Angel can go all homicidal and world-destroying even with his soul on board."

"We knew that already," Wesley said. His voice had gone utterly cold. "We've known it since he left those lawyers to die."

"Hey, a little attorneycide is a dangerous thing, but it's kind of a far cry from destroying the world, right?" Lorne said. Angel was looking Wesley in the face, but his expression was distant, as though he had withdrawn deep within himself.

The energy in the room was beyond strange now, Cordelia realized; she could almost feel the pent-up anger and fear and blame solidifying between them, pushing them apart. She laughed weakly. "I was just getting ready to trust you again. I am such an idiot."

"I can't control what I've done in this universe --" Angel began.

"Then who's to say you can control what you'll do in future?" Wesley said. "We can't. Can you? Well, can you?"

Angel's face was ashen. "No, I can't. I can't. No matter how hard I try -- I can't ever say that I'm safe."

"You killed Wesley," Gunn said. "You killed my friends. You turned Cordelia into something you can't even imagine, you son of a bitch --"

"Stop it!" Fred shouted. "We have to concentrate on what's in front of us right now. Not what might happen, or might have happened. That's just going to tie you all up in knots -- believe me, I know --"

"Where do you get off attempting to lecture us?" Wesley snapped. "Yesterday you couldn't fixate on anything more substantial than a Taco Bell."

"Hey," Angel said. "Lay off Fred. This isn't her fault. It's mine."

"And how gracious it is of you to admit it so readily," Wesley said acidly. "Yes, this is all your fault. It's your fault that Cordelia is blind and insane. It's your fault that innocent people have been killed. And I can't help remembering that you're also responsible for murdering me. Given all the things you're responsible for, I think I am entirely justified in echoing your words from a few months ago. Angel -- you're fired."

"Don't let this hit you on the way out," Gunn said, opening the door.

Night had fallen. Angel stared out into the darkness. Without turning around, he said, "I knew this was wrong. I knew I'd only end up hurting you in the end. I shouldn't ever have dragged you into this."

"No, you shouldn't have." Cordelia loosened the belt tied around her upper arm, slipped it off. Her arm throbbed and prickled as the blood flow returned, and she could feel the pain of the ugly stitches across her wrist. "You know, I always thought you didn't have a choice about how you were. But in this universe, you chose to drive me insane and cut my eyes out. Can you tell me why you made that choice?"

Angel's voice was barely a whisper as he said, "No."

Evenly, Cordelia said, "Then I can't trust your choices anymore, and until I can, I don't want to see you again."

Angel was outside the door now. He turned to go, and Gunn started to shut the door behind him.

But before he could close it, Fred was following Angel out of the apartment. "I'm coming too."

Angel stopped, turned around. "You should stay --" he began, and stopped. He was looking at Fred as if he'd never seen her before, and there was an odd, and oddly familiar, expression on his face. Cordelia recognized it; she'd only ever seen him look at one other person that way.

If he didn't know how Fred feels before, she thought, he does now.

After long hesitation, Angel managed to finish the sentence. "You should stay with the others. They need you to get home."

"So do you," Fred said simply, looking up at Angel in unabashed devotion. Poor pathetic girl, Cordelia thought, with something closer to contempt than pity. She silently thanked whatever trick of fate had kept her from ever falling for Angel herself.

"This isn't open for debate --"

"I'm not in Pylea anymore. I'm not a slave. I do what I want to do, and I want to stay with you."

"Angel might look like a man, but he's a monster," Wesley said. "A monster with a soul, but still a monster. You won't be repaid well for your trust, Fred."

"I already have been," Fred said, with more ferocity than Cordelia had previously given her credit for. "I'm going wherever Angel goes."

"And there's my cue," Lorne said. He gathered up his shopping bags. "There's a little incense in there from Rick's -- keep it to remember me by. Though, if I'd known this was going to be my legacy, I would have gotten something besides Mango Delight."

Cordelia looked at him incredulously. "You're going with them?"

"Love you guys, honestly. But Fred goes where Angel goes, and I go where Fred goes," he said, heading to her side. "A physicist with expertise in multiple dimensions seems like a really good person to have handy right about now. And -- if I may make one little suggestion --"

"What's that?" Gunn said.

"We'll promise not to go home without you if you promise not to go home without us," Lorne said. "Whichever team puts the answer together first gets bragging rights -- but they help the others out. There's some bad blood in this room, but I don't think anybody here actually wants to see anybody else die. Particularly me, because I'm just so gosh-darned endearing. You can find me at the same place you always have. Deal?"

After a moment, Cordelia nodded. "Deal," she said.

Lorne nodded, and left, closing the door behind him.

There were 68 rooms in the Hyperion, and not one of them contained anything noteworthy, unless you found dead bodies interesting.

Darla didn't. At least, not any longer. In nearly four centuries, she'd seen -- and been responsible for -- enough deaths that corpses had lost much of their novelty value.

Novelty. Freshness. She craved both and had experienced neither in too long. Darla descended the stairs into the hotel lobby, dragging one finger along the banister as she went. By the time she'd reached the bottom, her index finger was black and a long trail was visible in the thick dust that coated the railing. She wrinkled her nose in distaste. Nothing in Angelus' latest folly had been fresh for a very long time.

In the short period she'd spent at the hotel, Darla had learned to hate the place with a fervor. It was too hot by day and too cold by night. Nothing worked properly; fifteen bathrooms on the second floor alone, and the shower in every last one of them leaked. Worst of all was the smell -- a miasma of decay hung over the whole building, polluting the air with the stench of irreversible disintegration.

She smiled grimly to herself as she crossed the lobby. Really, she should feel right at home.

The office behind the front desk was cluttered and dark, but Darla knew exactly where to find what she needed. When she returned to the lobby, she was carrying two bottles and a glass. She set the glass on top of the filthy reception desk and half-filled it with vodka.

She'd wanted to go somewhere else. She'd suggested it. Then she'd wheedled and cajoled. Finally she'd threatened. But her threats were empty these days, and they both knew it. The balance of power had shifted between them; just like everything else lately, the rules were changing faster than she could keep up.

Darla poured more vodka into the glass, until it was full. She put the bottle of tonic to one side, unopened.

An angry mewl and the scratch of claws on wood made her look up.

The cat sat on top of the reception desk, watching Darla with a mixture of hostility and suspicion. It was the same animal she'd seen more and more often around the hotel in the past weeks -- its mangy gray fur and ragged left ear made it easily recognizable. But now that she had the opportunity to study it up close for the first time, she also saw how thin it was. It looked ill. It must be a stray, she decided.

The cat looked at the vodka bottle and licked its chops.

An alcoholic cat. Well, that was new. Darla was amused.

"A toast," she said, holding out her glass to it: "To those of us with multiple lives."

Frightened by the sudden movement, the cat hissed loudly and swiped at her hand. Darla dropped the glass, swore as the liquor soaked into the faded carpet. When she held up her hand, it was marked with white-edged slits where sharp claws had broken the skin. Darla swore again, raised her arm to strike back --

-- and laughed instead.

The cat was feral, untrustworthy and vicious. Darla decided she liked it.

It mewled again, got up and began to move in tight circles on top of the reception desk. At the same time, Darla felt the beginnings of faint vibrations rising up through the building's foundations, shaking her to the core. Too late, she realized the cat hadn't been spooked by her, but by something else.

Damn it, not another one --

As the building began to shake harder, she ran to the door that led to the hotel basement. Halfway across the lobby, she went back for the vodka. The quake was already in progress by the time she got back to the top of the basement stairs. The last thing she saw before she closed the door behind her was the cat streaking toward the Hyperion's back entrance.

The building was shaking so hard now it was difficult to keep her balance as she went down the stairs -- she put one hand against the wall for balance and clutched the bottle in the other. She knew she was no safer down here than above, probably even less so, but the old instincts had protected her for a long time, and Darla wasn't about to stop listening now. When threatened, get underground.

At the bottom of the stairs, the tremors grew so strong it was impossible to stay on her feet, so she fell into a crouching position, hands over her head, bottle of vodka stabilized between her feet. Around her, the accumulated junk of the hotel's last years as a going concern shook and banged against Angelus' more recent additions to the collection. In one corner, a standard lamp fell over, the bulb shattering with a pop, while the manacles attached to the far wall rattled against each other.

It had to stop soon. They never lasted this long --

There was a crash from the other end of the basement, so loud that it briefly drowned out the deafening roar of the quake.

And then it was over.

Darla lifted the bottle and took a long, deep drink. Feeling only marginally more calm, she looked cautiously around the basement. Apart from a liberal scattering of broken china and dented weaponry, she was relieved to find nothing fundamentally different. The quake must have been centered in some other part of the city.

A scraping sound made her start: the trapdoor which led to the sewers underneath the hotel was opening. Darla lifted a sword which had fallen from its mounting on the wall and landed near her feet. She was almost certain she knew who was coming; after a quake, however, it wasn't wise to depend on usual expectations.

The trapdoor flipped over on its hinges and banged against the concrete floor. This time, at least, her expectations were correct: the shape that emerged slowly, pulling itself with difficulty up into the basement, was Angelus.

Relieved, Darla lowered the sword and went to help him. Unceremoniously, she hauled him through the trapdoor so that he was sitting at the edge of the hole. As she helped him, she noticed that his shirt and coat were heavily bloodstained, and he was holding his left arm awkwardly. But his skin was warm to the touch and there were still traces of blood on his lips. He'd fed recently.

"What happened to you?"

Angelus didn't reply. Instead he pointed at the bottle sitting on the ground behind her. "Give me that."

"Someone's had a bad day." She handed him the bottle, and watched with regret as he gulped down what remained of the vodka. "So, did you kill anyone special?"

"No."

She frowned. "Did you get around to checking out your old friends' new home?"

"No."

And that, apparently, was all she was getting. No, "Thank you, Darla, for spending the whole of last night staring at the side of an apartment building. I really appreciate how you endured being cramped and bored on my account." Of course, there'd been a time when he would no more have thanked her for anything than she would have let him: it was a weak, human affectation. So why did she want to hear him say it now?

"So, you haven't seen them yet." Wonderful, she thought. Another night of pacing lay ahead.

"I saw them. I went to the library to prepare the next site. They were there." The empty bottle slipped out of his hand and through the trapdoor to the sewers, where it landed somewhere far below with a faint splash. Now that she was close to him, Darla saw the gash on his forearm, sealing over already but nevertheless still deep.

She took his hand and tugged at it until he stood up. "You should forget about them. They don't matter. They're just shadows, like everything else. They'll be gone with the next shakeup. They're probably gone already."

"They're real," Angelus said. There was a quality in his voice -- conviction, animation -- that had been missing for so long she had almost forgotten what it sounded like. It reminded her of the vitality that had first drawn her to him, so long ago now --

Darla moved a little closer to him. He didn't notice. Distracted, he said, "I thought she was like Cordelia -- but she is Cordelia -- she tasted more real, more alive than I ever thought --"

"And you drank her up." Darla slipped her arms around his body and stretched up to press her mouth against his. For a second he resisted, then his lips parted, just enough to let her tongue inside his mouth. He tasted of blood and cheap liquor. Always a potent mixture.

She kissed him harder, ran her hands lightly over his back, then brought them around the front of his body so they rested on the waistband of his pants. His belt was missing -- odd, because he always wore one -- and it took only a second to undo the zipper, work her fingers between layers of fabric and skin. Already she could feel him hardening at her touch.

He turned slightly, trying to break the contact. She expected this; it was part of the game. He could never resist for very long.

"No," he said.

"Yes," Darla said, and ran her nails lightly down his length. She felt his whole body stiffen against her as he tipped his head back, shut his eyes and gasped involuntarily. He wouldn't stop now; she had him.

It was good to know some games were still played by the old rules.

Again he maneuvered away from her, but this time he made no real effort to escape her touch. She circled with him; they were turning around on the spot, slow dancing without music.

Darla turned, opened her eyes just long enough to see --

"Angelus!"

At the far end of the basement, the brass-framed mirror which had formerly had place of honor over the reception desk was propped at an angle against the wall. It must have fallen during the quake, Darla realized -- that had been the final crash she had heard. The sheet which had covered the mirror lay in a crumpled heap at its base, revealing that the impact had broken the glass. A spider's web of cracks radiated outwards from its center; instead of one mirror, there were now a dozen, each one reflecting a slightly different aspect of the basement.

And each fragment also reflected, in the midst of the junk and debris, two figures caught in their old dance.

The expression on the face of Darla's reflection was one of consummate shock; Angelus' image simply nodded. "I saw my reflection in the bathrooms at the library," he said.

Darla gaped at him. "And you didn't think that was worth mentioning?" She pointed at the multiplicity of reflections. Simultaneously, the reflections pointed back at her. "This isn't possible."

"Everything's possible now," Angelus said. "Even the things that aren't."

He stared for a moment at the mirror, and at himself reflected in it, holding Darla. Then he broke contact with her and zipped up his pants. "The quakes are getting stronger. And they're coming more frequently. Come on."

At least something was coming more frequently, Darla thought sourly as she followed him up the basement stairs. At the top, she waited behind him as he tried to open the door; it opened halfway, then stuck. Angelus leaned against it, tried to force it fully open. The door refused to budge an inch further. He squinted through the narrow gap at the lobby beyond, and frowned. "Something's changed."

"What?"

He shook his head. "I'm not sure..."

The gap was wide enough to squeeze through, so Darla did. The hotel lobby was uncomfortably bright after the basement's dark shelter, and it took her a moment to understand what she was seeing.

What she was looking at was impossible.

The lobby's main doors and the area next to the reception desk were exactly as she had left them. But the alcove by the back entrance, next to the stairs, was different.

Bones, bleached white and fused together in impossible ways, erupted from the floor, ripping up the carpet and scraping against the stair rails as they twisted and climbed toward the ceiling. Fingerbones sprouted from femurs; elsewhere a humerus ended in a dangling collection of teeth. The structure spread out as it grew higher, branches tapering into smaller and finer bones.

Suspended from the end of each branch was a human rib cage, the bones bending together at the top and bottom to create an enclosed space. Each cage of bones, except one, held a collection of ragged feathers which might once have been a songbird.

Darla stared at the tree of bones. She had grown wearily used to the endless stream of changes and inconsistencies that had lately undermined any attempt at a normal daily existence, but this was something new again. This change in reality wasn't just something different, or out of place -- it was crazily wrong, impossible. The bone-tree could only exist in a world that had stopped making sense.

She heard a grunt, and looked around to see Angelus forcing his way out of the basement behind her.

He stared at the bone-tree for a long time, his expression unreadable. Then, unexpectedly, he put his arms around Darla's waist and pulled her toward him. He touched her with barely-suppressed violence, as if the closeness of such a shrine to death had finally stirred a long-buried sense of urgency in him.

This was the beginning of the end, and he knew it.

At the top of the bone-tree, the broken and twisted body of a stray cat stared down at Darla from between the smooth white bars of the highest rib cage, one ragged ear moving in the draft.

"How much longer?" she asked.

She felt Angelus' fangs scrape her neck, his cold lips on her skin. "Not long."

"I'll leave you at the Longhorn," Angel said. "You'll be safe there."

>From the passenger side of the Plymouth, Lorne looked at him. "I'm getting two things from that. One -- you're going somewhere else, and, two -- the somewhere else you're planning on going is emphatically not safe."

"I'm going back to the Hyperion," Angel said flatly.

Fred's face creased in concern. "The other you might be there. The bad you."

"That's the idea," Angel said. He was surprised by how calm he felt. "It'll be hard to drive a stake through his heart if he isn't."

Lorne lifted his hands and made a T-shape in the air in front of his chest. "Time OUT. What precisely is that going to achieve? Apart from dragging your psyche to even more convoluted depths of Freudian complexity?"

"What if you fight him and lose?" Fred asked, sounding upset. "I mean, you should wait -- or get a plan, or --"

Lorne twisted around to address her directly. "Good thinking, munchkin. Just one flaw -- that approach would require our very own dark and stormy knight here to approach this situation rationally. And he doesn't want to do that. He wants to go and start a fight which won't help us get home but which will probably end up with him being swept up by a dustpan and brush. Anf even if he wins, it won't achieve anything."

"It'll make me feel better," Angel said.

"No," Lorne said, "it won't. And you know why it won't? Even if you went over there right now, even if you reduced him to a small pile of ashes and scattered them to the four winds, you wouldn't feel any better. Because YOU would still be standing."

As Lorne spoke, Angel saw again the scene from the library restrooms; Cordelia, slumped in a wide slick of her own blood, a mirror image of himself crouched over her. And when Angelus had looked up, voiced the thought in Angel's mind, met Angel's gaze -- at that moment, Angel had known the truth. If the eyes were a window on the soul, Angel had seen his own essence staring back at him.

And now Cordelia, Wesley and Gunn had seen it too; not in his face, or in the shape of the demon he had been in Pylea, but in the legacy of his actions in this universe. He had murdered Wesley, tortured Cordelia until she broke.

A monster with a soul.

"Now," Lorne said, "what say we take a few steps back from all this and just chill until we regain our sense of perspective, hmm? How about dinner?"

"I'm hungry," Fred said, a little too quickly.

Lorne smiled broadly. "Then I declare the motion, 'This house would prefer to have dinner than get involved in a meaningless fight to the death' carried two votes to one. Driver, I spy an outpost of old Mexico ahead which should suit the senorita in the back. Pull in."

"What is this place called? Taco Casa?" Fred wrinkled her nose. "Maybe we could go another couple blocks for a Taco Bell --"

"Don't push it," Lorne muttered.

At least, Angel thought as he parked, this was one way of getting them out of the car. If necessary, he could disappear while they ate.

Inside, the restaurant was busy, and there were few tables left. After a brief search, they found a vacant booth, hidden in a secluded corner behind a bank of cheap, fake potted plants. While Angel and Lorne slid into the turquoise-plastic seats, Fred joined the lengthy line at the counter.

"You know," Lorne began conversationally. "It's at times like this I like to remember the immortal words of --"

"I don't want to hear it," Angel said.

Lorne was undaunted. "You don't know what I'm going to tell you, yet."

"I don't care what you're going to tell me. I don't want to hear homilies or pearls of wisdom. I don't want to be cheered up, encouraged, reassured or heartened. I don't want to think. I don't want to talk."

"Excuse me. Hey, excuse me! I want to speak to the manager."

The voice was so loud that Angel looked around despite himself. A group of young men had shoved their way to the front of the line and were leaning over the counter. Angel looked around for Fred and saw that she had been pushed to one side. She was frowning in obvious annoyance. A woman in a staff uniform with a jacket had been summoned from the back of the kitchen area. She smiled politely as she asked, "Do you have a complaint, sir?"

The leader of the gang was dressed in a biker's leather coat and pants. He grinned at his companions before facing her over the counter. "Do you serve black people in this restaurant?"

"Sir, we serve everybody who wants to eat here. Now, if you'd like to place your order --"

"Do you serve white people?"

"We serve everybody," repeated the manager. Her smile had vanished, and many of the people behind the bikers in the line were grumbling loudly.

"Do you serve yellow people?"

The manager's tone was openly frosty now. "We serve everyone."

"So -- you serve all kinds of people. That's what you're saying." The biker turned to his companions again, then back to the restaurant manager. "Well, that's great. We'd like to order some black people, some white people and some yellow people. To go."

The biker vamped out and lunged over the counter, grabbing the manager by the lapels of her jacket. As he hauled her toward him, the rest of the gang bared their fangs and began rounding up the restaurant patrons closest to them.

Lorne exhaled heavily. "Vampires. Loud, obnoxious -- and they never know how to conduct themselves in public." He looked at Angel. "Present company excepted."

"I'll handle this," Angel said.

He stood up and made his way through the melee. The biker vamp was leering into the face of a terrified middle-aged man when Angel tapped the vampire on the shoulder. "You really don't want to do this."

The vampire's teeth hovered over his victim's neck. Then he dropped the man, who passed out and slumped on to the floor at his feet. The vampire turned around to face Angel. "Maybe you'd like to tell me just why the FUCK not --" He froze.

"Because," Angel said quietly, "I've had a very, very bad day. And if you make it any worse, you'll regret it. But not for long."

"Angelus." The vampire blinked. In a second, his attitude changed entirely, from predatory self-confidence to abject deference. "I'm -- we're -- I didn't know this was your turf, man. We thought you only hunted on the north side." He reached down and picked up the limp body at his feet, exposing the neck. "Uh, hey, you want first bite?"

Angel snarled and knocked the unconscious man from the vampire's grip. "Get out of here." He stood back and addressed the other members of the gang. "Get out. Now."

Biker Vamp spread his hands and stepped back. This wasn't merely deference, Angel realized. It was terror. "Sure, man. Whatever you say. We're gone, we're outta here." He nodded to the rest of his gang: "Moving out!"

Slowly, the vampires began to assemble in the empty space in front of the main counter. All around the restaurant, patrons sat perfectly still, or cowered behind chairs and tables. The manager was pressed against the base of the counter, her breathing shallow and her eyes wide.

The air was saturated with fear, and it smelled so good --

The vampires were halfway to the door now. The leader turned around and, as an afterthought, gestured around the silent, fearful restaurant patrons. "I mean, man, you want 'em, they're yours. Plenty more out there. Just take 'em. Take 'em all."

Suddenly, Angel felt a faint tremor through the soles of his boots. It grew rapidly more intense, and within seconds the tables throughout the restaurant were shaking drinks and plastic trays of half-eaten Mexican food on to the floor.

Fred had fallen to her knees; she was clinging to a giant cardboard burrito for the little support it could provide. As Angel caught her gaze, she mouthed, Quake -- and then her eyes widened at something behind him.

He turned around, and saw what Fred had already seen.

The vampires were changing, transforming even as he watched. Their skin darkened, becoming scaly and rigid, like armor, while ugly spikes sprouted from their faces.

No, Angel thought. Please, no. Not again. Not now, not here --

The floor shuddered one last time as the quake ended. Angel reached out a hand to steady himself and watched with helpless revulsion as his nails lengthened into talons, his fingers twisting and becoming clawlike. He could feel the change overtaking him, twin sensations of strength and hunger surging through him, threatening to overwhelm him --

But this time, they didn't.

He felt the same intoxicating rush of power he had in Pylea, like a red mist falling behind his eyes, but somehow it was still possible to think through it. Angel pushed the table he was leaning on and watched with satisfaction as he was able to rend the metal base in two. He reveled in his strength, and in the knowledge that he was still in control.

All the vampires had now degenerated into their pure, demonic forms. Angel snarled at them. He was looking forward to this.

He picked out the gang's leader, then rushed him. The collision was brutal, the pain sweet. Angel bore down on his opponent, easily pinning him down. He lifted the vampire's head and, with savage enjoyment, slammed it into the floor, over and over and over and over --

He didn't stop until the vampire's body went lax beneath him. Angel leapt to his feet, oblivious to the screams and hubbub around him. He looked around the restaurant, taking in the plastic molded benches and tables, the plastic displays advertising plastic food positioned between plastic greenery -- dammit, wasn't there anything made of wood in here?

He heard a noise from behind him and turned around just as another of the vampires gave a guttural cry of rage and started to run at him. Bending down, Angel lifted Biker Vamp's unconscious body and threw it at the approaching vamp, hard. The force of the impact slammed the running vampire into the table behind him, while Biker Vamp landed on the serving counter, where he slid along the metal surface for some distance before flopping out of view behind it, in the kitchen area.

Angel ran, jumped and hurdled the counter with ease. He heard roars behind him as the remaining vampires, galvanized by his attack on their leader and their superior numbers, started to follow.

The kitchen staff had fled; there was no one to stop Angel tipping over the nearest deep fat fryer. A tide of slippery, sizzling fat washed over the floor, instantly raising the temperature in the kitchen by ten degrees. As the slick reached the fallen form of the lead vampire, his scaly skin started to blacken and smoke.

Two more vampires jumped the counter successfully, only to fall immediately on the treacherous floor. They screamed as glutinous layers of boiling oil splashed on to their hands and faces, raising ugly red welts on the flesh and filling the air with the smell of cooking flesh.

Angel smiled, grimly satisfied.

A single gas flame somehow still burnt on the stove behind him. Angel ripped a handful of paper towels from the dispenser above the sink and held them over the blue flame until they caught alight. Then he threw the burning mass into the middle of the pool of oil, and basked in the whoosh of heat and light that resulted.

When the flames had died down, he stepped over the faint, charred stains that marked where the vampires had incinerated, and returned to the main part of the restaurant.

It was completely empty.

Patrons and staff had fled, and the restaurant -- which not ten minutes earlier had been a busy, congenial establishment -- was a derelict husk. The fire in the kitchen had triggered the automatic sprinkler system; sprays of water drummed the floor, turning abandoned half-eaten meals into unappetizing mush.

Angel looked around feeling, if anything, disappointed. For the first time since they had arrived, he felt he'd achieved something. The simple, cleansing efficiency of the fight had left him feeling focused, battle-ready, eager for more --

He knew what he wanted to do. Angelus. He would face Angelus like this. Show him who was stronger, Make him suffer just as he had made Wesley and Cordelia suffer --

"Angel?"

He turned around. Not everyone had gone, after all.

"THIS is what he looks like when he gets out of the bed on the wrong side?" Lorne asked. "It's more disturbing than Cher without makeup."

"Angel?" repeated Fred.

Angel opened his mouth to reassure her -- and couldn't.

He tried again, and heard himself make only a series of incomprehensible grunts. This form, he realized, simply wasn't equipped for speech.

He pointed at the door, then at them -- I'm going; you stay.

Fred took a step forward, but Lorne placed a gently restraining hand on her arm. "I wouldn't, sweetie. Handy survival hint: if something with claws that sharp wants to leave, don't get between it and the exit."

"But -- it's Angel."

"Not right now, it isn't."

I am, he wanted to say. And there was more he wanted to tell them: that he was going, but he would be back. That everything would be fine once he'd found Angelus and made him pay. But not speaking -- not being able to communicate with his friends anymore -- appeared to be the price of his powerful new form. He started to make for the door.

Behind him, he heard Fred say, "Angel?"

He looked back, suddenly overcome with the urge to make one last effort to speak to her. Fred had moved closer to Lorne, who had placed his hands on her shoulders. They had no way to be sure he was coming back -- but he would, just as soon as he had faced Angelus, made everything right again.

Except that it wouldn't be, Angel thought suddenly. Killing Angelus wouldn't get them home any sooner. Or get his friends back.

And allowing himself to lash out in anger -- to start a violent, unnecessary brawl -- hadn't brought either of those objectives any closer to being achieved, either.

He could have let the biker vampire and his gang walk away, Angel realized. Angelus' reputation in this universe was obviously such that they'd been ready to leave simply at his command. But he'd chosen to fight; he'd wasted time and energy which would have been better used to wage other battles. More important ones.

"It is Angel," Fred said. "It is. Look at his eyes."

Lorne's voice belied his reservations. "Actually, I was looking at the teeth and claws."

Angel raised his hands, forced himself to look at the razor-sharp talons. They were perfect weapons, ideal for tearing and mauling. But these hands couldn't hold a pen to write. Couldn't touch someone else without piercing fragile skin.

He closed his eyes, sought a control he wasn't sure he had --

-- and when he opened them again, the hands he was looking at were bloodied and covered in scratches, but were unmistakably those of a man, not a monster.

Fred was smiling broadly. "You came back again."

"I came back," Angel said. It was a relief to hear his own voice.

"So," Lorne asked dryly, "have you successfully exorcised your self destructive urges for now, or would you still like to go and fight your only-slightly-more-insane half to the death, just to round the evening off?"

Feeling chastened, Angel said, "I'm not going to go looking for him tonight."

"So what are we going to do?" asked Fred.

Angel looked around the ruined restaurant, taking in the extent of the destruction. Fire sprinklers still hissed in the kitchen area, where burning oil had reduced most of the equipment to warped and blackened husks. In the main restaurant, everything which hadn't been bolted down had been scattered in the quake or used as a projectile in the subsequent fight. This particular Taco Casa wouldn't be serving food again any time soon, if ever.

"For a start," Angel said, "I think we should just skip dinner."