Chapter Text
Florentine Politics
Part I: Blythgate
by L. Inman
Wesley Wyndam-Pryce woke up with a start in bed, clutching his midriff. At his right ear came the tinny voice of a newsreader relinquishing his program to one of music. Wesley turned his head: the red digital numbers of the battered alarm read 8.00—a.m., he presumed, judging from the sunlight fighting its way through tatty curtains and dustmotes to fall on the discolored rug on his left.
He looked down at himself, his mind tuning out the alarm radio. The blankets and sheets covering him were clean but worn, and he seemed to be wearing a clean pair of pajamas. He drew a breath, an oddly unconstricted breath, and let his head fall back against the single pillow. Beyond anything else, the strangest thing was his feeling of freedom, of a buoyant lack of constraint: an old line occurred to him, its author escaping his mind for the moment—my lines and life are free, free as the road, loose as the wind, as large as store—
And then, Must I then give back what I never stole?
Wesley didn't try to trace these thoughts to their source. He had more pressing concerns, such as what he was doing here in the first place.
He lay for several minutes, cudgelling his brains for some sort of memory that would link him to this place, which seemed to be a boarding room of some sort. But he came up with nothing.
A strident knock came at his door, making him jump. "Come now, Mr Wyndam-Pryce. You've slept long enough. Time for breakfast!" The cheerful, commanding female voice waned at the last sentence, as if its owner were making its rounds. Sure enough, he heard another sharp knock further down the hall, and the same voice, muffled now, rousing his neighbor.
Slowly Wesley sat up, and just as slowly reached out to still the music of his alarm radio. Hanging over a rickety chair in the room were clothes he recognized as his own, brown slacks and a navy silk shirt, along with belt, socks, and shoes. On the dresser lay his wallet and glasses. On the hook on the back of the door hung his leather jacket.
As if in a dream Wesley put his legs over the bedside and stood; began to unbutton his pajama shirt with a growing curiosity as to what he'd find beneath it. The shirt off, he saw: the smooth pale flesh of his torso, pristine except for a small splash of white scar just below his ribcage. He could just scarcely call to mind what had put that scar there: a zombie cop, a whirl of ambulance lights—
This wound is mortal—
"Well, obviously not," Wesley said softly, looking down at himself. His brains were so sluggish; he couldn't remember what voice that was, or why he'd expected—carnage?
Shaking his head, Wesley got dressed and donned his glasses. He pocketed his wallet and shrugged into his jacket.
The hall outside his room was no more familiar than the room itself. Equally dingy, it led to a narrow flight of stairs that took Wesley to the ground floor of what was obviously a down-at-heel boardinghouse.
A woman, clearly the owner of the voice that had roused him, met him in the front hall. "Ah," she said, "there you are. Breakfast in the dining room." She pointed behind her.
"I'm not hungry," Wesley said, automatically.
"Rubbish," she said tartly. If Tyne Daly were a North English landlady, she would look like this woman, fists planted on hips.
Wesley decided not to argue. He went into the dining room, otherwise occupied by only one old doddering man, and chose a seat at a safe distance.
There were several tureens on the table with varying breakfast items in them. Wesley helped himself to some sausage and mash; and found to his surprise that he was in fact quite hungry. He ate second helpings, not minding the sound of his companion muttering into his plate, and finally pushed himself away from the table replete and for the first time, alert.
He left the old man to his muttering and went out into the front hall again, where the landlady was going through receipts at her desk. She looked up.
"So you've finished then. Did you get enough?"
"Yes, ma'am," Wesley said. "Thank you."
"Good." She beamed. "So then I suppose you'll be moving on today."
"Yes," Wesley heard himself say, "I suppose so....Do I—do I owe—"
"No, no," she said. "You're paid up. Not to worry."
"Ah," he said. He opened his mouth, but the question he wanted to ask hadn't formed itself yet.
"I expect you'll be glad to be on your way home," the landlady said, her eyes on her receipts and calculator.
"...Yes," Wesley said. Wherever home was. He opened his mouth again; shut it again.
"Well, good luck to you then," she said.
She was clearly dismissing him. "Right," Wesley stammered. He turned slowly, half tripping over his own feet, and found the front door to let himself out.
He found himself on a street made all the more unfamiliar by its strangely old-fashioned lineaments. A holding hell-dimension, he thought at once, then struggled to recall why that would occur to him. He kept walking, hoping his memory would clear; but the more steps he took the more he realized that not only did he not remember where he had come from, he had no idea where he was going. He was suspended in the present.
He turned a corner and became aware of the presence of other people, bent on their errands, driving, walking the pavement, all with the secret of their purpose marked on their faces. None of them noticed him: Wesley had the dizzying thought that perhaps he didn't actually exist. In an almost convulsive movement he turned back to look at the street sign at the corner he'd just turned: Blythgate. Remember that, he told himself. If worse came to worst he'd go back to the boardinghouse and try to force a few answers out of the landlady. But he had begun to notice a difference between his feelings standing here and the remembered sense of vague content he'd felt there; if he went back, would he return to the stammering obedience that had prevented him asking questions before?
It was confusing. Wesley stared at the street sign for a while, thinking. He was standing on a weird old street in an unknown town, which looked like being in England, which he hadn't set foot in for several years now, and he'd arrived here without any memory of how, and with no particular place to be going. It was like being born, only without the mother to orient one -- except the boardinghouse lady.
There was his own mother, of course. He could visit her, since he happened to be in England. He'd have to buy a train ticket to Hampshire from -- wherever this was. He remembered his wallet and pulled it out.
The wallet contained his California driving license, a credit card he didn't recognize, a few loyalty cards from shops in Los Angeles, and enough cash in English money for a long train trip. The credit card Wesley distrusted with an instinct born of experience with corporate evil -- not that he could remember the experience right now -- but the cash he could probably use without harm.
He put the wallet away and started walking again, looking for a train station. He followed several winding streets, turning wherever he found a larger one, until he reached the beginnings of a city center. As he went he realized that the city, in addition to being unfamiliar to him in his confused state, was unfamiliar by its own nature. He had, as far as he knew, never been here. He started looking in shop windows for clues to its identity, and at last he came upon a pub whose chalk easel in front declared messily, "Best Bitter in Manchester!"
"Manchester," Wesley said to himself. Then added quizzically, "What the hell?"
That visit to his mother was sounding better all the time.
*
Being on a train oddly exacerbated his discomfort at not knowing where he'd come from or where he was going. Obviously, in a literal sense he was leaving Manchester and going to Winchester. Wesley stared out the window at England going past and tried to think, but it was like using a baby's arm to lift a trunk. He had been in Los Angeles, he thought. He had been hard at work there, with Angel. But oddly he felt no urge of responsibility to head back there; it was as if he had been cut adrift from Angel's whole enterprise. But how? Wesley felt uneasily that he ought to know. But all he knew was that he was free of his obligations there. My lines and life are free, free as the road, loose as the wind, as large as store -- the words chanted themselves to him in the rhythm of the train, and after a long cogitation Wesley brought to his memory that they had been written by George Herbert. Well, that was no help. He wasn't headed to Little Gidding, after all.
Not that he couldn't, if he wanted to. He had some books in storage near Cambridge. He hadn't needed them for a while, but the time to use them may well be at hand.
The day lengthened, and Wesley navigated the delays at the change of trains, remembering but not feeling the anxiety he'd felt doing so when he had first gone off to school; how to do things had always preoccupied him, how to do them and not look like a prat in the process. It didn't seem to matter now, and this was as troubling as anything else on Wesley's mind. He took his place in the crush of people going their own ways, and it seemed to him that there were memories also crushing against the vestibule of his consciousness, and the barrier could come down any time.
It was too much to hope that the missing memories would be good ones.
At last he was nearing home: Winchester, the ancient seat of his family, who'd been Watchers time out of mind. There was the estate in the nearby country, but there was also the little house in town, and Wesley would go there first. If Holton opened the door he would soon know what to expect.
The tide of his travel deposited him in the long vesper light of summer at the stone steps to his family home, familiar as his own hand, down to the weathered chip on the penultimate step that had been there longer than he'd been alive. How many times had he reached this point and felt the troubled safety draw him in? A childhood memory came to him, of a late afternoon with the muted light slanting in an upper window where he sat alone with a book, the motes in the air buoyant with unnameable loss, himself saturated with the sense of it. It was not a pleasant feeling but it was familiar, a feeling one kept in one's own possession, insubstantial and therefore safe from the tangible scrutiny of paternal disappointment.
I don't have to be here, Wesley thought suddenly. Nothing says I have to come back here.
But he did need to find out what he could, and this was the likeliest place to start. Unless they didn't recognize him, and he really didn't exist here. Suppose he was in the wrong dimension? Would there be a chip in the penultimate step if this were a dimension in which he didn't exist?
Well, that would be knowledge of a sort. Wesley stepped forward against his own hesitation and rang the bell.
It wasn't Holton who opened the door. It was his mother. "If it hasn't come," she was calling upstairs, "I'll go out for it myself -- " and then she saw him. Her eyes went round, and she went such a grey that Wesley's hand twitched in an impulse to reach out and steady her. Her lips formed his name; he drew breath to speak, wondering what he was going to say.
He didn't get the chance. She suddenly dropped the basket she was holding and let out a piercing shriek.
Well, Wesley thought, so much for not being recognized.
*
"Roger!" his mother shouted when she recovered from the shriek. And then of course Roger was there, behind her shoulder, with a small crossbow at the ready. When he saw Wesley his back went ramrod straight.
"What do you want here?" he demanded.
This was a bit of a facer. What did Wesley want here? He wished he wasn't having so much trouble thinking. More than usual in his father's presence, anyway.
His mother was clutching the doorjamb, keeping by instinct out of the way of Roger's crossbow, which was still pointed directly his way. They were afraid. Why were they --
"They said you were dead," she said, with an ache of despair in her voice that Wesley knew all too well. She reached for him, and before he knew what he was doing he stepped back, out of range of her touch. Her fingers grasped on empty air, but it seemed as though they had got hold of thoughts and pulled them like endless silk scarves from his mind, silent and horrible.
Illyria. Illyria, and her desecration of Fred's face and voice. Angel pulling down Wolfram & Hart over all their heads. Spike, and Lindsey McDonald, and the way his knife felt in Gunn's stomach. Lilah, serving in perpetuity, and Justine, forced to help him find Angel, and Connor. Connor, who was the key to everything that no one understood, and no one remembered him, because of Vail.
Vail, who had killed him.
Another figure joined his parents in the doorway, with the authoritative step of a Watcher which Wesley would have recognized even without knowing who he was: Michael Robson. But Wesley could hardly even see him for the flood of images that had been loosed to his mind's eye, disorienting by their mere number. In a moment he was going to faint, which was a typical, typical ignominy. He firmed his feet on the doorstep of what had once been his home and held on.
"Wesley -- " His mother made another move to reach for him, but his father stopped her. "Well?" he said to Wesley.
Robson looked as consternated as the others, but he said calmly, "If you're not dead, tell us what has happened."
Wesley had never been able to comprehend Robson's style of peremptory kindness at the best of times, and now it didn't even compute. But he had to respond somehow.
"I came -- I came to --" He had come to find out exactly what he had just found out. He was dead.
His father tossed his head with that little smile that ought to have been good-natured and never was. "Well, spit it out, for heaven's sake. Don't just stand there looking vacant --" which latter command Wesley had heard many times before, in moments when his internal processes had failed to catch up with whatever was being said to him. Indecisive, that was the word his father liked to use of him. Irresolute. Wanting in conviction.
Wesley knew he ought to be standing his ground. He ought to stand his ground and let them take hold of him, draw him inside, ask him questions. He could bear the questions easily; he didn't have any answers, but at least he didn't have any answers it would be fatal to give. He ought to be standing his ground. He had every reason to stand his ground.
But his feet were moving backward: one step, and then another stumbling step, and so backward down to the street, where he turned as if by compulsion and walked swiftly away. His long strides ate up the block; he expected every moment to be hit with his father's crossbow quarrel, and every moment he was not. Neither did they come after him. Wesley turned the first corner, into the long shadows of the evening cast by the rows of buildings on either hand, and the fear hit him then, like the rain behind the wind, and he ran.
*
The last of his cash took him to London and a pub, where he bought two brandies, the first one of which he never tasted as it went down. He was out of cash after that, and was sorry, because the second brandy didn't seem to be touching the shaking deep inside him any more than the first one did. He huddled in a shadowy corner of the pub, clutching his glass and fighting the temptation to succumb to entropy.
Well, there; he had wondered why he felt no need to go back to Angel. For all he knew, Angel was as dead as he was supposed to be. For all he knew, Los Angeles was now a smoking ruin, though it probably wasn't. For all he knew -- but anything could be true. He was supposed to be dead. Free, free as the road, loose as the wind --
It was now imperative to question the landlady at the boardinghouse in Manchester. It was the only thread he could think of to grasp. But it was too late to get a train back there tonight, and anyway he was out of cash.
He pulled out his wallet and lifted the credit card free of its pocket, turning it over once and again. It was unsigned on the back; it had a number on the front but no name. It looked suspiciously like a credit card to a Wolfram & Hart account; if it was, God only knew where the money came from. Nowhere good. However, he himself had never used such a card; he had been high enough on the totem pole that doors opened themselves for him and money changed hands without his having to lift a finger. If Wolfram & Hart was responsible for his resurrection, why give him a credit card?
This was the point at which, presumably, Lilah would slide into the seat across the table and explain the whole thing to him. He looked up expectantly. But she didn't. The denizens of the pub continued placidly with their conversations. The whole world was going on about its business without him, which is what it was supposed to do after one had died.
Whoever is responsible for this, Wesley thought, just put them in front of me and give me a gun.
Wesley got up and left the pub. Outside the lights of London were bright and the world a-chatter with idle celebration. He found a small inn and went in to order a room for the night.
The girl at the desk swiped his credit card -- it seemed to work all right -- and handed it back to him, then pointed out the electronic pad for him to sign the virtual sales draft. Wesley took the lightpen in hand to make the flowing signature of which he was secretly rather vain...and experienced a sudden horrible qualm, as if reeling back from a precipice over blackness.
He couldn't help the sensation that he was about to cement more than a payment agreement with his signature. At the very least, the entity who had brought him back would know where he was; and more than that, Wesley would be indebted to him -- her -- it when he was finally found. And Wesley was not too naive to suppose that they would give him the gun and the opportunity he desired.
"I'm sorry -- " he stuttered to the girl as he dropped the lightpen. "I -- forgot -- I need to -- " For the second time that day he stumbled backward, then turned and walked swiftly away. Out the door and up the street.
And kept walking.
*
The morning found Wesley blowing lightly at the steam from a paper cup of coffee bought with the last bit of change in his pocket. He had walked all night, until the first tube stations opened, and taken the earliest opportunity to hit a vending machine and find an unobtrusive seat on a bench.
During the night hours he had reached, if not clarity, at least a plan for the next twenty-four hours. The first thing he needed was a little ready cash. There was some in a safety-deposit box he maintained in a London bank, along with a passport in an alternate name, and a few other things a field Watcher kept against a time of need. Trying to access the box was a risk, as he didn't know whether the Council would be keeping an eye out for him. They probably would; it had been a foolhardy thing, going to his parents' house (Wesley scarcely noticed he had ceased to call it "home" even in thought), but under the circumstances he wasn't sure what else he could have done.
It was a ridiculous position, really: here he was, walking the streets of London with nowhere to go and no eye resting upon him with any interest, and yet he felt horribly exposed, like a black fly on a white wall. Well, he thought with mirthless whimsy, if you're a fly and you don't want to be swatted, you just don't land anywhere for very long.
*
The bank accepted the story he told them of being on a flying visit from the States, bolstered by a show of his California ID (and a quiet spell spoken before he walked in -- all that study of the Wolfram & Hart archives was paying off). They opened his box for him, and he calmly emptied it of most of its contents. The lovely thing about safety deposit boxes was that unless one mentioned them in one's will, no one else knew about them. He took his property and walked away firmly, disdaining surveillance.
He bought a train ticket to Manchester. He had considered going to Cambridge first, as it was closer; but rationally speaking it was better not to take a predictable route, and he was well associated in the Council's mind with Cambridge. They might even know about his books in storage, though he had shared that secret with nobody. Watchers were a bit like squirrels with their books; it was, as the children's story had it, rude to be overtly curious about the location of another Watcher's stash. The contents, however, were fair game for all the curiosity any Watcher could muster. And when the books he was about to sell hit the market, there would be curiosity.
Non-rationally speaking, of course, Wesley wanted to get hold of that landlady as soon as possible.
Still, when he reached Manchester his first move was to find a hotel and book a night's room. Whatever he found out from the landlady, he wasn't going to spend a second night in that boardinghouse (if indeed he had spent a first one there), and he was going to be in desperate need of sleep very soon. With a room key in his pocket, he then went out and hailed a cab.
"Take me to Blythgate," he said to the driver, and sat back to secure the room key in his wallet. He hadn't looked at the number of the boardinghouse, but he didn't remember Blythgate as a very long street; it wouldn't be difficult for him to cruise it till he saw the right place.
Slightly fuddled from lack of sleep, he was a moment noticing that the driver hadn't moved to put the car in gear. Wesley looked up, and the driver said, "Say again?"
"Blythgate," Wesley said. "The street. It shouldn't be too far from here."
"Ain't no such street," the driver said.
"Don't be ridiculous," Wesley said. "I've been there myself. It's east of the city center and several streets north."
The driver raised one meaty eyebrow, and Wesley wished he'd chosen his words more carefully. But he must have looked sufficiently at a loss, because the driver picked up his comm and called in to his center. "D'you know of a street called Blythgate? East and north of the city center." He asked Wesley for the spelling and repeated it in.
It was a long moment before the answer came back. "Sorry, no such street in the listings."
"I see," Wesley said numbly.
"I could -- "
"No," Wesley said. "Never mind." He opened the cab door and handed the driver a pound note. "Thanks."
*
He found his way to the Manchester Central Library and buried himself in the local history section. After an hour of patient search, he found that the cab driver was right: there was no such street. But there had been; Blythgate had been a small connecting street in the area Wesley remembered, until the Christmas Blitz, when its houses and structure had been damaged beyond repair. The city had razed the street and rezoned the area; what was there now was a series of industrial parks. The place where he had waked up was probably in the middle of a warehouse, or a parking lot.
Buoyantly calm, Wesley left the library and went back to his hotel. He took off his clothes, turned on the shower as hot as he could stand and stood under it for a long time without moving. After a while he stirred himself to wash; then blindly he got out and dried himself. Stumbled naked to the neatly-made hotel bed and crawled in.
He slept like the dead, and the nightmares didn't even start till morning.
*
Right, so he'd been disjected back into the world after his death -- how long after his death? -- time to look at the news -- through the vestibule of a street that no longer existed, with just enough resources to sustain his first hours there, and an uncertain means of getting more resources that probably beaconed him back to whoever had done it. Wesley would be damned (probably literally) if he played the game exactly as it was laid out. He dearly hoped it hadn't been laid out by Vail, who would be holding all the cards except one -- that damned credit card. Wesley needed a backroad plan.
So first to Cambridge. Then to someone who had resources in either lore or underground news who could sell or give him the information he needed. Probably a Watcher. A Watcher under cover. A Watcher not in England. There were a lot of those now; the First Evil had exterminated a large portion of the Council and the field Watchers directly associated with Potentials, and the rest had gone into deep cover. This could work to Wesley's advantage; otherwise the Council would have alerted all of Watcherdom at once that Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, who was supposed to be dead, was walking the earth and looking for information.
But it didn't mean he had time to waste finding it out.
When he arrived in Cambridge he stopped for a cup of tea and a newspaper and carefully observed his surroundings. He didn't see any Watchers making sweeps looking for him, but it didn't mean they weren't there. Casting another glamour over himself wouldn't go amiss.
It had been more than a month since his death. No wonder his parents had got the word. Los Angeles, as he suspected, was still intact, though there was a small headline about the recovery from the oddly localized earthquake damage in the central part of the city.
So the Apocalypse, as Lindsey had said, was still going on. Though technically it wasn't. The word's actual meaning referred to a revelation, a lifting of the curtain to people who knew how or when to look. The curtains, as far as Wesley could see, were all down again.
Especially in his case. He sighed, and got up to go and plunder his books.
*
He returned to London with a canvas bag heavy with valuable tomes, and called at the home office of a dealer he knew of. Banning Edwards was a civilian, but he had an uncanny sense of the proper price for any book, whether occult or mundane. He was getting too old to search out books himself, but had established enough of a reputation that people now brought books to him, and he could see down any number of twisting avenues of gossip.
Edwards received him now with gentle ceremony and looked over the items Wesley showed him. "Oh, these are very nice specimens, Mr...Blake, did you say? Yes. They've been kept in a climate-controlled environment, I see. Yes, very nice. I know one or two people who would be very pleased to have a look at them. Yes, very pleased indeed."
After about ten minutes of benevolent haggling, Edwards took out his checkbook. Wesley decided now was the time to feel for information.
"Have you had any dealing with Zachary Dennison lately?" he asked. "I keep meaning to look him up again."
Edwards looked up at him mildly, his fountain pen never pausing. He was clearly nobody's fool; he knew Wesley's question wasn't casual. But his reputation for never asking the unnecessary question was good.
"Dennison...ah yes. St. Petersburg. Yes, I consulted him about a book on Rasputin a few months ago. Poor soul." This was the sort of thing most people said about Dennison, whose status as an object of pity would be complete were it not for his encyclopedic knowledge and eidetic memory.
"Well, that's nice," Wesley said, taking his check and folding it away. "Thank you for your business."
"I look forward to seeing more books from you, Mr Blake. Say hello to Dennison for me."
Wesley grinned suddenly. "I will."
*
A few days later, Wesley arrived in St. Petersburg carrying only a satchel with a change of clothing and a toiletry kit. It had taken a little time to establish a full identity for Weston Blake, but it was worth the ease in air travel. He looked forward to meeting Dennison with some trepidation: he had spoken with him once on the telephone, but not in person. He would be lucky to get him to allow an interview at all.
After some trouble, he located the dingy flat-block in a wet back street and pressed the button on the intercom panel labeled with the Russian form of Dennison's name in painfully exact Cyrillic script. "What do you want?" snapped the voice who answered, in Russian.
"Mr Dennison," Wesley said, "I need to speak with you. I'm -- "
Dennison cut him off, still in Russian. "What do you want?"
Had he not understood Wesley's English? or had he disregarded it? Wesley decided not to try to draw on his own scanty Russian. "Mr Dennison, I need to speak with you. My name is --" the alias would waste both their time -- "Wesley Wyndam-Pryce."
"Fuck off, dead man!" came the reply, in English.
"I'm not dead," Wesley said, trying to be patient.
"Bullshit!" said Dennison. "Authority too good."
"Whose?" Wesley couldn't quite mask the note of desperation in his voice.
"Never guess," he snarled, "never guess. Not talking to a dead man. Go away."
"No," Wesley said, "I'm not going away. I need to speak with you."
There was silence on the other end, and after several long seconds Wesley decided that was the end of the interview.
But then a door opened in the damp corridor, only a few inches, and a wild pale eye fixed itself on Wesley's face. After a second in which Wesley felt himself scanned from head to toe -- and despite the risk it was somewhat of a relief to be looked at with interest in his own name -- the door opened a little further and Dennison jerked his head to summon him inside.
He followed Dennison up a narrow staircase made even narrower by stacks and piles of newsprint, parchment, and periodicals of all kinds, and found himself in a tiny flat that was even more cluttered and dirty than its outside suggested. It was an unsavory nest of papers and books, which Dennison wouldn't even need if his reputation were true, and when Dennison, muttering, ushered him to a chair at a rickety table, Wesley resisted the temptation to wipe at the seat before taking it.
Dennison himself, though English and American by birth, looked like something out of a Russian novel, which made Wesley wonder if he'd chosen to settle in St. Petersburg on purpose. He wore a raveling jumper which had probably once been yellow, his uncut black hair was inadequately washed and brushed, and he had a lazy eye that was weirdly even more direct than his straight one. "Dead man," he said to Wesley.
"Well, apparently not now," Wesley said, watching Dennison put on a battered kettle for tea.
"Dead man, dead man. Why can't people stay dead in this day and age?" He gave Wesley a canny glance that might have passed for the glimmer of a sense of humor, though Wesley only suspected it because he had read several of Dennison's monographs, which were masterpieces of fluent and civilized discourse. Had he been as skilled in personal communication, he'd have been a celebrated speaker in Watcher circles. As it was, he was highly sought after for interviews of the kind Wesley found himself in, and people considered themselves lucky if Dennison answered their letters. Best of all, he never betrayed a confidence, though he often refused to receive confidences. Wesley could see why.
"I need information," Wesley said. "Since I'm here."
"Bullshit," Dennison said again. "Look east. Look east, look east. Like the watchman and the magus. Gold, frankincense, and myrrh." He poured water from the steaming kettle into a chipped blue teapot.
"I should be looking east?" Wesley said, patiently.
"Look east. But not before you fuck a bunch of things up. Dead man. Where's your blue nightmare?"
Wesley submerged his startlement and accepted the cup of tea Dennison gave him. "I haven't seen Illyria since the battle." Gingerly he took a sip of the tea and found it delicious.
"Nor will you. The watchman and the magus are your guides. Maga," he corrected himself, planting himself against a food-crusted tin-faced counter.
Wesley couldn't help it. He put down his tea and glared at the man. "Never."
Dennison shrugged. "Then you're fucked. As usual."
"Coming back here wasn't my idea," Wesley said, and to his own horror he heard emotion unraveling in his own voice, like Dennison's jumper.
"Wasn't anybody's idea," Dennison said. There was an obscure comfort in the fact that Dennison could read his emotion without either responding to it in pity or disdaining it as weakness.
"How do you know about it?" This was one thing Wesley could not leave here without knowing.
Dennison waved a dismissive hand. "Watchers, Watchers, Watchers. Peddling, peddling. The city of angels fucked you."
"I'll say," Wesley muttered. He sought refuge in another sip of tea.
"You don't have much time." It sounded ominous coming from Dennison: but then, everything did.
"I need to know how it happened." Wesley swallowed. "Did it...did it have something to do with Vail?"
Instead of answering, Dennison took a long sip of his own tea and stared out the tiny smeared kitchen window. His half-bared arm showed an old tattoo, like a sailor's, and Wesley wondered what he'd been like before the blows to his sanity, many years ago now. The stories had been legend at the Watcher's Academy.
"Many Slayers now," Dennison said finally, pursing his mouth after a drink of tea. "Many Slayers. Dreaming. Sharing the load. Not good at sharing. Watchers and Slayers. Ancient and new."
"I'll go anywhere but to Buffy," Wesley said.
Again Dennison shrugged. "Then you'll go anywhere."
Wesley sighed wearily. "Thank you."
"Young dead man."
"Not so young anymore," Wesley said ruefully.
"Young dead crazy man."
Wesley was near the bottom of his tea. As he watched, Dennison put down his cup and began to rummage in first one pile of garbage and then another. He seemed to find one item of interest in a wad of half-crumpled notes, and carried it with him to ruffle his hand over a pile of monographs. He worked one out from the center and sheafed it awkwardly in one hand as he returned to Wesley.
He plucked Wesley's tea out of his hand before he could drain the last sip and handed him first the wad of notes. Wesley smoothed the creases with his fingers and read over the first page. Names and places, in different inks, in different languages. The names were all female.
"Read," Dennison snarled at him. "Memorize. Destroy."
Wesley nodded. "Thank you."
Then the relatively unscathed monograph. "For your enjoyment and edification," Dennison said. It was definitely a twinkle in his eye now, and for a moment he even looked like the Watcher he had been. Wesley shut his teeth against the return of emotion.
"Thank you," he murmured again, blinking fast.
"Now go away," Dennison said.
*
At the airport Wesley studied the list of names -- read, memorize, destroy -- and tried to think where next he wanted to go. If he had interpreted Dennison right, Slayers were a key to what he wanted. Perhaps their prophetic abilities had found an access point to images or knowledge of his return. Or maybe Dennison just wanted someone on which to palm off his knowledge of Slayer locations. What was he supposed to do with it, besides reading, memorizing, and destroying?
There was supposedly a Slayer in Istanbul. Wesley could easily go there. Or wait, there was a name associated with Cairo...and a Watcher's name as well. Wesley suddenly realized what he was looking at: Dennison's collection of references to Slayers found by Watchers in the last year. Buffy Summers probably knew about some of these, but not all. This was a very valuable list. Worth a lot of book sales and plane trips. Worth, too, his newly-restored life. Wesley didn't care about that so much -- he remembered a distinct school's-out feeling on dying, and wouldn't mind having that feeling again -- but if he was here he was surely here for some useful reason, and knowing what it was would help him either to do it or refuse it. This looked to be a good thread to pull.
Thoughtfully Wesley folded away the list of names in his breast pocket and took up the monograph. It was one of Dennison's own, written five years ago about the religious history of Malta and the tradition of the Maltese Oracles, a tiny clan of women devoted to prayer who had been gifted with clear sight across certain meridians of time. The subject for its own sake was engaging, and Wesley read the article through to the end. It was at the end that he was rewarded: Dennison had interviewed one of the younger Oracles and mentioned her by a single name. But that single name rang a bell.
Wesley pulled out the list again. Yes, there it was. Melita (surely a religious name) Saidon, Gozo. No Watchers' names. Perhaps Dennison had found this one himself. But if Wesley was going to do this at all, he was going to have to risk meeting Watchers who might be less generous than Dennison -- who certainly would be if they knew how much Dennison had given him. The thought gave Wesley a grim pleasure.
Wesley got up from his seat and went to arrange himself a trip to Malta.
*
As it turned out, Wesley had to fly through Istanbul to get to Malta, but he didn't stop. As Dennison had asked, he had read, memorized, and destroyed the list of Slayers on the plane to Istanbul, then slept fitfully the rest of the flight.
He had prepared himself for bad news, for attack, for discovery by his ghosts, for all sorts of things he had learned to be prepared for; but there was one thing he'd forgotten.
He hadn't adequately prepared himself for the fact that Malta was beautiful.
The Oracles' enclosure was, sure enough, on Gozo, along a cliffside path that one would have to be a mountain goat to have cut in the first place, and as he picked his way along it under the bright summer sun, with the stiff breeze bending grasses to tickle at his trouser cuffs, he gradually awoke to what he was seeing and hearing and smelling.
There was a world of blue sky over his head, endless and achingly luminous. Where it met the sea at the horizon, it shaded up into the delicate color of the inside of a songbird's egg. The sea, too, was luminous in its way, catching and holding light in its depths, releasing it at the margins, whispering restlessly to everyone and no one; and Wesley couldn't stop himself taking a deep lungful of the air and savoring it.
He was suddenly aware that his feet had stopped on the path just short of the brow of a hill, and that the tears on his face were not just from the wind, and that he had been gripped by a suffocating fright so complete that he couldn't even flee in the privacy of his mind. There was nowhere to flee to.
"No," he whispered, "no -- "
There was nowhere to flee to. He swiped at his face, grieving he knew not what, and forced himself to continue up the hill. He was back in the world, back to being who he was, Wesley Wyndam-Pryce, who could never go home again, who had received kindness from a madman who could so easily have been himself -- fucked by the city of angels, indeed -- who ought to be dead and wasn't. School was back in. My lines and life are free, free as the road, loose as the wind, as large as store -- Wesley suddenly remembered how that poem ended, and laughed bitterly.
He crested the hill and looked down. At the bottom was tucked the pale-stone abbey and enclosure with its squat square belltower; a long staircase cut into the rock led down to the sweeping sea; and ten yards away a near-grown young woman was gathering grasses into a basket, her faded grey habit whickering in the stiff breeze. She looked up at him and wiped a strand of dark hair from her face.
"What are you doing here?" she said, in English.
Wesley was getting tired of that question. "You tell me," he said.
She shook her head. "I thought you would figure out you didn't need to come here."
"What?" Wesley stared at her, then down at the compound, half-expecting to see enemies come pouring like ants out of the doorways.
"I saw you in London," she said simply, and he turned his eyes back to her.
"You're Ms Saidon," Wesley said, his wits catching up with the situation.
"Sister Melita," she said, with a small, graceful dip toward the earth.
"Sister Melita," he repeated. "Did you see me in Manchester?"
She shook her head. "I can't help you with that. I saw you in London, trying to figure out what to do. I think," she added, "you've had some additional advice since."
He merely gave her a level look.
"Advice which you didn't like. Well, I haven't anything else for you."
Wesley was very nearly on the verge of losing his temper. She was right, of course: she was an Oracle as well as a Slayer, and appeared to have all the cheek of both, and he had tramped out to the middle of the Mediterranean to solicit her useless advice.
"Can you at least," he said with withering asperity, "give me any clue as to why this is happening?"
"There is no 'why,'" she said. "There's only 'what.'"
"People aren't resurrected by a random accident," Wesley almost shouted. "I was dead. I was done. Now I'm back here. I want to know how it happened."
"You are curious?" she said, cocking her head to one side so that the covering on her hair gave a flap in the wind against her shoulder.
"Curious?" Wesley's hands clenched; he unclenched them with an effort. "I'm trying to avoid falling into a trap."
"Nonsense," she said, rearranging the grasses in her basket. "You spring as many traps as you fall into. You need to start looking at the 'what' of things. Maybe you should pay a visit to your former colleague. He's in Oxford now, you know. In the meantime, come down to the guest house and have something to eat."
"I am not," he said, "going to throw in my lot with Buffy Summers. For the last time!"
She gave him a long tranquil look. "Still, you should go and see your former colleague. It would be to your advantage."
"Why," Wesley said bitterly, "is my destiny so bound up with Giles-who-is-in-Oxford-now?"
"No," she said.
"Then perhaps you could tell me something about what my destiny is bound up with." Wesley hadn't let go with quite so much sarcasm in a long time, and it felt good, in a melancholy sort of way.
She smiled gently, and the wind played with her habit.
"You don't have one," she said.
*