“I could walk out of here if I wanted, you know.”

“Then why don’t you? Oh wait, I forgot, you really can’t and you’re putting a macho ‘I-meant-for-that-to-happen’ exterior on the whole situation.”

“You make a crappy Darla, you know.”

Darla smiled. “I know. I just can’t be bothered sifting through the countless victims you’ve killed over the centuries and find one that jumps out at me.”

“So you’re going with the old faithful then?”

“Pretty much. I mean, unless you prefer the new faithful.” Darla morphed into Connor and Angel’s heart leaped in his chest.

“Do you prefer this?”

“Doesn’t make a difference, you’re still the same thing.”

Connor kneeled down next to him. “Yeah, but when I’m like this, it makes you seem so much more vulnerable. I think I prefer this form over the last one, thanks for the inspiration.”

“You’re welcome.”

“I wonder what the others would do if they ever found out about your dirty little secret. I really do, you wiped your closest friend’s memories to protect your impossible son…and you have so much guilt about it it’s amazing!”

“Keep talkin’. You couldn’t do it.”

“Oh really? Then let me ask you this, Angel.” He leaned closer. “How do you think I got my new friend to summon you here?”

“Lucky guess. Very powerful sorcerer, direct contact…”

“No. You know, I can’t be bothered sitting here and listening to your pathetic mind sift through the possibilities so I’ll just tell you. I have a source with Wolfram and Hart and he slipped a mystical marker into your blood, the wizard tracked and teleported you using that. The same source can, and will if I tell him to, break into the vaults there and remove whatever curse it is that’s keeping your friend’s memories away from them.”

“You wouldn’t, how could you profit from that?”

“Because then I’d see you suffer.”

“Fine, do it, I don’t care anymore.”

Connor nodded to a Bringer and it walked away.

“This should take a couple of minutes.”

Dread grew in Angel’s mind. Was the First bluffing, as he had just been?

“And no, I’m not bluffing. I can have Connor killed, too. Not the pathetic job you did of having him killed, but good, old fashioned dead.”

Angel didn’t reply, not wanting to get drawn into a battle of words with the First.

A few minutes later, the Bringer walked back inside.

“Ah,” said Connor. “That’s better! Now, let’s get started, shall we?”

Angel was dragged across the ground towards the wooden frame and was strapped to it. Had the Bringer really sent some kind of message back to Wolfram and Hart? He wouldn’t give the First the satisfaction of knowing that it’d rattled him. He was swung over the Seal and cut into as before – he set his jaw and tried not to scream.

The Seal itself was shining with a murky grey light, having retained the energy from its previous sacrifices. Angel’s blood dripped down onto the metal and the First, now disguised as Darla again, nodded to another of the Bringers, who started chanting.

“Now you get to see what I’m about to summon.”

Angel gazed down fearfully at the Seal, which had begun to rumble. The corners raised and unearthly demon flesh pressed against the openings, straining to get out.

“Right before it tears you apart.”

Buffy headed out onto the street to see Robin Wood’s car hurtle down the road and stop in front of the house. He hurried out to meet Buffy.

“Am I late?”

“No, just in time. You’ve heard it?”

Robin nodded. “Just a rumbling. Had a pretty weird run in with a sheet of darkness but that seems to have passed.”

Giles had walked up besides the Slayer. Buffy turned to him.

“Is it happening then?”

“The Apocalypse itself? Doubtful. There haven’t been enough signs for it to be so soon.”

“Alright, then, just some random demon wackiness?”

Giles just nodded and walked back to Willow, who stood with Kennedy, mentally preparing herself – not for the spell they’d been talking about inside, but offensive magic to fight whatever made that rumbling.

Buffy tested the edge of her sword for the tenth time, was satisfied it was sharp enough, and turned to address the crowd gathered behind her.

“Okay, we’re going out to meet this thing. Whatever it is, it’s big. It might have the ability to create a mask of darkness around itself. You’ve never faced anything like this before so follow mine and Faith’s lead and you should all be okay. Remember – the bigger they are, the harder they fall.”

Motivational speech over, she led the crowd towards what she thought was the source of the noises they’d been hearing. She glanced over her shoulder and saw Spike tagging along behind them, keeping to the darkness of the house porches, sprinting the distance in between with a blanket over his head.

Willow caught up to her. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“Want me to do the mojo on Bigfoot?”

“Only if you’re up to it.”

“Uhm…okay, I’ll try, but don’t be putting too much hope into me, I’ll probably just let you down…again.”

“You’ve never let me down, Will,” said Buffy, not breaking the pace of her stride. “You’ve wandered off the beaten track once every so often – okay, you totally wigged out and tried to end the world – but I never once felt disappointed in you, because I could understand why you did it and I wanted to help you through it. Besides, it was mostly the magic anyway -”

“That’s just it, Buffy! How can be sure that the First won’t uber-charge my magic and make me kill you all?”

“Because it won’t! It’s overloaded now, it’s got Angel who’s probably trying to break out every other minute, more people to harass than ever before and a new demon thing which has just crawled up out of the Hellmouth to try and control – and I’m guessing it doesn’t respond to ‘sit’ as well as a Turok-Han.”

Willow smiled. “Okay, Buff. Thanks.”

“Hey, anytime. Now let’s go kick some ass.”

Angel gasped in pain, willing himself not to groan. The Seal was almost totally open now, whatever was on the other side pushing up against the constraint of the small hole.

Darla stood next to the opening, grinning manically.

The Seal opened fully and a sheet of darkness fell upon the hole, expanding to encompass the floor of the entire chamber. Darla raised her arms as one of the Bringers was swallowed up into the blackness.

“Come forth! Come forth, back into the dimension you once roamed freely!”

The blackness swirled around then came together into a ball in front of Darla, leaving the ground as it was before. She smiled and pressed her hand into the swirling nothingness.

“The Slayer,” she said, morphing into Buffy’s image. “Find her and kill her, slowly and painfully.”

The ball hovered in front of the First for a few seconds longer, and then flew out of the chamber leaving a terrible silence.

Buffy smiled up at the totally exhausted Angel, whose blood still dripped onto the closed-again Seal.

“Was that good for you too?”

Angel groaned.

A long rumble echoed from above them, sending little trails of dust from the ceiling.

“That’ll be what’s just come through the Seal. You’d better hope the Slayer can fight as well as she says, ‘cause then she’ll die quick as she gets impaled and eaten.”

Spike dogged along behind the group, and as quick as his vampire self could move, he was slowly falling behind as the Slayer and the rest of them jogged along the road towards the school.

Every time he threw himself forward through the sunlight in between the darkness he felt himself weaken just a little bit more, but as he didn’t know where they were headed exactly he didn’t want to risk going through the sewers as he might lose track of the group.

The blanket’s corners were sizzling, smoke rising from his burning flesh, but still he kept on going, following his Slayer into battle.

His thoughts drifted back to the night before when they slept together again. He couldn’t remember a time when he felt more contented and at one with his…well, his soul, obviously because he hadn’t had it for that long but even so, it was so profound a feeling that he knew he’d never find a rival to it for as long as he lived. Buffy, he knew, felt the same way, because she’d told him so just before she went out to that crypt to confront Caleb – she hadn’t gone to do that, but that’s the way it went down. But then Angel had turned up before Spike could save the day for his girl. He’d followed her out to the crypt, mostly because the others in the house were driving him insane, acting as if they hadn’t thrown Buffy out of her own home a few nights ago, but also because he just wanted to be near to her, no matter what they were doing. The First had tried to get to him again, but because he knew what it was he cooled down and talked it through with Buffy later on, even making up with Angel.

But had he done that? Was the Angel he was talking to in the basement everyone else’s Angel or was it the First trying to throw him off guard? For the first time in centuries he’d gotten his grandsire to understand about everything, because even though they’d spent dozens of decades together, Angel had never really understood Spike and, he’d later admitted to himself, Spike had never really understood Angel. However despite all of that talking and mutual insight into each other’s souls, there was a chance that it wasn’t even Angel. And that upset Spike, not because he’d miss out on a better relationship with his grandsire, but because it would mean the First had put him in a compromising position again, and that was unacceptable to Spike. The First had nearly driven him insane – hell, it’d actually done it by the time Buffy arrived – and even afterwards, kept a control over him with the song his mother used to sing when he was still human. Now, when he was finally free from its influence, it might have got something over on him again. And that pissed him off mightily.

Buffy and the others were coming up onto the school when the sheet of darkness Robin had been talking about swept around the corner of a road up ahead of them and swirled towards the small army. Buffy shouted something and the Potentials scattered into a loose formation across the street while Wesley and Gunn took up flanking positions of the Slayers. Buffy and Faith took point and cautiously stepped towards the churning blackness and Willow and Giles stood to one side, the ex-Watcher obviously in some kind of supporting role as the Wiccan started chanting guttural words. Fred and the demon aimed their weapons but didn’t fire.

The shadow stopped just in front of the Slayers and there was some kind of communication between the two because they stabbed forward at the same time, but to no effect. The shadow floated there for a moment longer, and then spun around, becoming smaller and smaller until Spike couldn’t see it from where he was standing. It suddenly expanded, becoming solid again, turning into an enormous, multi-limbed demon the likes of which Spike had never seen before. It lazily swung a tentacle-like appendage which struck Faith square in the chest, sending her soaring through the air backwards to land on a Potential. Buffy took immediate action, slicing at the arm that had gotten Faith but it swung sideways, knocking her off her feet.

Gunn and Wesley opened fire on the creature, knocking it backwards slightly before it started lumbering slowly towards them, before Willow, palms outstretched, sent a fireball into the centre of the demon, making some of its flesh burn.

The Potentials fanned out into a semicircle and slowly moved forwards towards the demon. It leaned sideways, further than Spike thought it could move, and snatched one of the girls in one of its arms, crushing her. Spike heard the girl’s scream die down into a bloody gurgle and then to nothing, and it dropped the girls body without even looking at her. Spike felt a terrible rage build up inside of him, and he decided to do something about it.

Lorne saw the girl tumble lifeless to the ground and realised with a gut wrenching feeling that it was the girl he’d read earlier and lied to her. Suddenly the grief turned into anger, and for the first time Lorne could consciously remember, he became enraged – he’d been angry before, but nothing like this. This was something similar to, if not the thing he was experiencing, battle rage.

He drew the pistol and fired at the big demon, until he ran out of bullets. Then he tossed the gun to the ground and fired every crossbow bolt at it. After he ran out of the wooden bolts, he snatched a dagger from the belt of a Potential and charged towards the demon, darkness slightly tingeing his eyes as all conscious thought left his body.

Spike saw the demon charge at his bigger cousin and knew he’d be dead before he even reached one of its limbs.

He shouted a warning, then after a split-second’s consideration, plunged into the beaming sunlight, sprinting as fast as his weakened body would carry him. His flesh began to burn and smoke pored openly from underneath the blanket, which was without a doubt the only thing keeping him alive.

He threw himself at the smaller demon just as the bigger creature’s arm swung at where Lorne had been standing a second ago. Spike was flung backwards and lay on his back in the middle of the road, the lack of a blanket exposing him to the clear blue sky above.

Faith leaped to her feet and charged at the enormous demon, diving and grabbing hold of one of its arms and stabbing it, sending torrents of blood seeping down its body and over Faith’s arms. She screamed for the life of the dead Potential and, like a bucking horse, the arm thrashed so wildly she was once more thrown back onto the hard concrete.

She sprang back up, looking for Buffy as she did so. She was taking on another of the demon’s arms on the other side of its body to Faith.

Faith turned back to the demon to see an arm heading straight for her head. The only thing she could manage to do was blink as a reflex action when a blast shot across her shoulder and splattered the arm of the demon, knocking it to the ground and rolling to stop at her feet. She looked back and saw Wesley reloading the rifle, smiled at him and he nodded back. She brought her sword up and leaped forward once more towards the newest minion of the First.

Angel spat blood onto the Seal unconsciously and it flared up slightly as before. The First smiled up at him.

“Thanks. Every little helps.”

Angel didn’t speak – he was too physically exhausted to threaten the First, knowing that he couldn’t follow through on any of them due to the incorporeal thing.

“Geez, you’re not very good company, are you? Here I am, trying to start up a conversation…”

It was disguised as Connor again. It smirked up at him.

“Soon there’ll be another one to keep that company,” he said as another rumble vibrated through the cavern. “And then another…and then soon after that I’ll be corporeal and I can do all of the things my Bringers have done to you again, all by myself.”

“Sorry, I’m afraid I’ll have to disappoint you,” said Angel weakly. “I’m not sure there’s enough blood left in me to raise a Rodents demon, try again later.”

Connor laughed. “What makes you think I’m gonna bleed you? There’s a whole gang of Potential Slayers up there, and once I’m through with them, all that’s left is to bleed the big girls themselves. And after that…no more Chosen One…ever.”

He paced around the room. “And it’s all thanks to Buffy. Or more exactly, her Witch. She raised a Slayer back from the dead, and that upset the balance of things. You know there was actually another Slayer out there, not that any of you cared to find out. That’s how I managed this whole thing, she was trying to take out a group of my Bringers in China and all of a sudden, her power just left. Needless to say, they found her and killed her, but the mystic in the enclave did a magical trace on her blood to find out what happened to the Chosen One’s power, and it lead her, to Sunnydale. Buffy getting resurrected returned her power to where it was before, and it was that which broke the cycle. It’d never happened before. And on top of finding that out, my mystic in China also found out the locations of every Potential Slayer in the world – every last one. And so I began hunting them down, and the rest, like they say, is hist -”

Connor suddenly clenched his eyes shut and shouted in agony – but the sound blinked on and off, like someone somewhere was pressing a mute switch on a remote on and off. Connor’s form disappeared then reappeared, then switched suddenly to Darla’s form, looking extremely pissed off. She stormed out of the cavern, probably to speak to a Bringer, leaving Angel alone.

Angel dropped the façade of being physically exhausted and leaned as far as he could across to his right, straining against the bonds that held him in place above the Seal.

The strap holding his left arm in place snapped, and he did the same to his right. He was then dangling by his feet, when a Bringer wandered in. Without a moments hesitation, Angel reached across and snapped the Bringer’s neck, then lifted himself up to untie his feet.

He dropped onto the Seal with a dull, metallic thump, then grabbed his coat from the corner of the room and hurried out of the cavern.

The battle was going badly. Three more Potentials had died, and another lay whimpering on the ground. She couldn’t see Spike or Lorne. Gunn lay on the ground, unconscious. Wesley had run out of ammo and was hacking away at the demon’s appendages.

Buffy ran forward again, desperate to kill the demon but couldn’t find any kind of weakness she could take advantage of. It was bleeding from dozens of pretty bad wounds but kept attacking, possibly even more ferociously than before.

Suddenly an explosion rocked the side of the demon. Buffy was thrown to the ground, dazed for a few seconds, and the demon staggered sideways. Buffy looked for the source of the explosion, and saw Xander with Anya, Andrew and the soldiers who came with Angel from L.A. holding some kind of grenade launcher. They fired again, wounding the demon more seriously than before. It actually grunted in pain, and Anya threw something across the road to Willow, who grabbed it.

She threw her arms wide and screamed in a high pitched tone which sent the demon haywire, stumbling around aimlessly but still managing to knock several people off their feet.

Buffy scrambled to her feet again and ran forward, stabbing at the demon’s arms. But saw Spike’s duster lying on the street. A hopeless despair filled her heart and she stood, stunned at the implications of seeing his coat there, unaware that the demon was now focusing entirely on her and was swinging three of its arms towards her, intent on crushing her alive.

Angel hurried along the sewers, trying to remember the way towards the Summers’ residence, hopelessly out of practice after living in L.A. for four years. He caught the scent of the Slayer, but then it was gone again.

“Dammit,” he whispered.

He turned down one section and hoped for the best, carrying on towards the end of the tunnel. All of a sudden he heard her voice.

“…Anytime. Now let’s go kick some ass.”

He hurried along towards the source of the voice and decided they were heading towards the sound of the rumbling as he’d kept track of it along the course of the sewer.

He tried calling out to Buffy but it was no use, it was a fluke he’d heard her at all and there was no guarantee he was even anywhere near her now, he could be going the wrong way.

Setting his jaw, he carried on down the sewer and hoped for the best.

Spike stared up at the sky, gaping uselessly for a few vital seconds. His mind recognised that he was in mortal danger, but his limbs wouldn’t move despite his best intentions. All of a sudden he regained conscious control of his body and he went to sprint away towards the nearest cover of shadow, but realised he hadn’t burst into flames yet. He dumbly looked around and saw he’d been lying in the shadow of the demon – and as it was a mystical creature of darkness, its shadow was as dark as night.

Spike looked around for any other kind of cover. Seeing none, he dodged sideways as the demon moved around, staying in its shadow with nowhere else to go.

“Bloody marvellous,” he muttered, and skipped sideways again as the creature moved.

He decided to make the best of a bad situation and still attack the demon, but as soon as he punched one of its arms he regretted the decision.

It swung at him, tossing him into the sunlight. Cursing, he scrambled back into the demons shadow on his hands and knees and was promptly lifted off into the air again, sending him even further into the deadly light. He ran for the cover of the beast, but before he even made it back, he was grabbed by the creature’s mouth by his coat and he lifted off the ground ever so quickly before his arms slid out of his sleeves and he dropped back down to the ground. He tried to sprint back into the shadow but was lifted off his feet by the hardest hit yet, and, smoke pouring from his skin, was sent flying through the air and into the side of a building, knocking him unconscious.

Fortunately for him, however, he lay in the shadow of the house.

Buffy was lifted off her feet an instant before the arms hit and was sent tumbling onto the ground in a tangle of limbs with the person who’d rescued her from death.

Explosions slammed into the side of the demon again, and it screamed in pain, swinging its arms out further than seemed possible and knocked the newcomers of the fight into a mass of grenade launchers and limbs.

Buffy jumped to her feet and charged the demon once more after a quick visual check over of the soldier who’d dived into her to see if he was okay. She saw Faith dive at the demon only to be knocked back once again, and another fireball from Willow impacted the demon’s side, setting more of it on fire.

She suddenly realised their heavy support had gone with the wind after Xander and the others had been knocked down and suddenly began to doubt whether or not they could finish it off.

Which was when she heard the scream behind her.

She spun around to see a figure, dressed all in black, speed towards her on a motorcycle, screaming at top speed down the road.

She looked back at the demon to see another arm head towards her –

And suddenly she was on the ground, the same soldier as before having knocked her there and taking the hit for her. She rolled along the ground to avoid the stamping arms and leaped to her feet just as the figure on the bike sped past her with a sword outstretched and sliced one of the demon’s arms clean off its body. It wailed in pain and Xander was back on his feet, sending another shell into the demon’s body. The bike rider stopped further down the road, revved up the engine and sped back towards the demon.

She dived forward and plunged her sword into its side, and then, of all the things that could have happened, Angel flew up out of a sewer grating in the middle of the street by the side of the demon and embedded the steel circle into the side of the creature.

Willow sent another fireball and the bike rider made another pass, taking off another one of the arms. Xander fired another round into the side of the demon and gore splattered the area, fatally wounding the demon. Willow chanted with Giles, and the demon’s body became a sheet of darkness again, before spinning into a ball and then winking out of existence.

Angel’s flesh began to sizzle, and Buffy sprinted towards him with Spike’s coat, covering his upper body and forcing him towards the side of the nearest house.

Buffy looked around. “Is everyone okay?”

She received a few weary nods, then realised that the soldier who’d knocked her out of the way wasn’t moving. She sprinted over to where he lay and checked for his pulse and his breathing.

The balaclava still covered his face. She reached down and pulled the mask over the top of his head, and her mouth fell open.

“Oh my God…”

Fred watched Willow chant and the demon disappear, and then she sank to her knees next to Gunn, who had just regained consciousness.

“What the hell happened…?” he asked groggily.

“That demon happened,” replied Wesley, strolling up to where they were lying and kneeling, respectively. “Are you alright?”

Gunn nodded slowly. “Just another bump on the noggin.”

Lorne wandered over looking completely deflated. “Remind me to never kamikaze a greater demon from a hell dimension again.”

Fred smiled at Lorne wearily. Then realised something. “Oh my gosh, Angel!”

They all wandered over to where their friend lay, half naked and covered in Spike’s leather coat, Wesley supporting Gunn, and gazed at him for a moment.

Angel realised they were standing there and looked up at them, noticing the strange looks on their faces.

“What?”

Wesley regarded him for a moment. “We know.”

“Know what?”

They didn’t answer him, and Angel put two and two together.

“Oh. That.”

Wesley just nodded, and the foursome couldn’t make up their mind quite what they wanted to say to Angel.

“Why did you do it?” asked Wesley finally.

“Because…because it was better this way,” was the reply.

Wesley nodded, half understanding Angel’s reasoning.

“You could’ve told us,” said Gunn.

“If I had have done that, it wouldn’t have worked,” said Angel. “It was all or nothing.”

Fred nodded, understanding.

The bike pulled up behind them.

The rider stepped off of the bike.

Angel looked past Fred’s shoulder and the four looked behind them at the mystery rider.

The biker pulled the helmet over their head.

Angel’s face went slack.

“Hi, Dad,” said Connor.

*******
I was gonna leave you all hanging but the temptation was just too great. You’ll all have to wonder about who that soldier is though, won’t you? And no, no clues. Please review! Please, please, please! I’ll update soon!