Angel, newly appointed CEO of Wolfram & Hart, L.A., had often been described as a stoic. Impenetrable. Inscrutable. Totally expressionless. It was common knowledge, in certain dark corners of this dimension, that reading those carved granite features was as difficult as deciphering a sphinx, and twice as dangerous.

Like many "facts" about the former Scourge of Europe, this was a load of utter bollocks. Angel had expressions all right, all kinds of them. But like winter in the tropics, they were subtle and subject to sudden, deadly changes. Good humor and homicidal rage, indifference and obsession, distinguished by nothing more than a slight tightening of the lips or a quirk of one heavy brow. Zero to psycho in less time than it takes to tell it, and woe to you if you didn't learn to read the warning signs. Especially in the bad old days, before Angel gained a soul and lost a syllable.

Having spent his formative years surviving Hurricane Angelus, today Spike didn't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blew. Once upon a time, the current set of his sire's jaw would have had him battening down the hatches and preparing for stormy weather. But under the present conditions he wasn't too worried. Not even Angelus at his most inventive could have rendered grievous bodily harm to someone who didn't have a body to begin with.

"Well well, look who's back from his Roman holiday. What'd you bring me? Jewelry is always appreciated, of course, though I'm rather ill-equipped to accessorize at present. Maybe one of those cunning little Murano glass figurines? At least I can chuck it at one of your flunkies if I get b--"

"Get out of here, Spike. I don't have time to ignore you today." He never took his eyes off the folder in front of him.

In response, Spike slouched insolently into the chair in front of the desk. This simple move was actually a complex maneuver requiring a great deal of bother, since he wasn't really sitting at all, but rather hovering in a slouch-like crouch just above the shiny leather. In fact, walking or leaning or any position much beyond standing and staring was a production these days. Even with Pavayne no longer trying to suck him down the rabbit hole, manifesting properly for sustained periods of time took a level of focus Spike often despaired of mastering. But he'd be damned if he was going to float around flickering in and out at random intervals, like King Hamlet's bloody ghost.

Spike scowled to himself, a fresh wave of bitterness sweeping over him at the thought of all the humiliating inconveniences accompanying his sorry state. He stared at Angel, chiseled and solid as a Rodin sculpture behind his huge mahogany desk. It occurred to him, not for the first time, that some sad bastards never did appreciate their own incredible, undeserved good luck.

"Here I thought a fortnight living la dolce morte would've sweetened your outlook a bit. But oh no, not you," he said, his voice coming out rather sharper than he'd planned. "Look at that tombstone of a face. You may as well have 'Sacred to the Memory' carved on your forehead. All the joys of the Eternal City, wasted on the eternally joyless."

Angel continued paging silently through the thick file folder, acting for all the world as if Spike were inaudible as well as incorporeal. Spike sat back (appeared to sit back) in the chair, thinking hard. He peered at the other vampire more closely, noting the strained set of his shoulders, the way he kept opening and closing his empty left hand, like he was just aching to wrap his fingers around someone's neck and start squeezing. He knew that pose: it was Angelus' frustrated look, the deadly tenseness he got when he wanted something very badly and couldn't have it. In Spike's experience, it was usually succeeded by Tarantino-esque carnage and destruction. As far as he knew, only one person had ever crossed his sire's will and escaped more or less unscathed. He sat forward.

"Maybe it isn't that Rome has lost its charms. Maybe it's that a certain slayer is denying you hers."

Angel's restless hand went abruptly still. Spike smirked.

"Come now, what did you expect? The lass finally frees herself of the Hellmouth and the mantle of Slayerhood, only to hear her light o' love has taken over Monsters, Inc. I knew that wasn't gonna go down well."

Angel favored him with the basilisk stare Spike remembered from his fledgling days. It wasn't quite as impressive when he wasn't holding a cat o' nine tails, though. "Buffy is fine with me being here. She understands."

"Well, that makes one of us," Spike said, not breaking eye contact.

Angel didn't reply, again avoiding what was becoming an increasingly sore subject between them. The glumness on his features might have deepened a tad, but one more layer of gloom atop the geologic strata of ill-humor already etched there told you nothing. Why Angel, Go-to Guy for the Powers that Be, had sold out to their opposite number was the $64,000 question. True, a penthouse suite and a classic car collection was a step up from nylons and chocolate bars, but in the end it still came down to simple bribery. And neither Angel nor his darker counterpart had ever been the type to be swayed by whatever was the current equivalent of thirty pieces of silver. Spike didn't buy the power angle, either. A two-hundred-and-fifty-year-old master vampire with Angel's bloodlines was power: he didn't need to go collaborator to get it.

Spike concentrated, reaching out with the sixth sense their kind relied on almost as much as the other five. Being incorporeal had played merry hell with those--taste, smell, and touch completely gone, sight and hearing reduced to almost human levels--but his ability to touch the intangible was sharper than it had ever been. Perhaps being intangible himself had something to do with it. Spike had always been able to sense the black nimbus of pure power that surrounded Angel, marking him out from your average vamp the way twenty-point horns separate the king of the stags from the herd. But since his return from the Never-Never he could see it: an eddying dark with intermittent streaks of brightness, like comets flashing across a night sky. Sometimes he could even see Angel's moods in it, if he focused hard enough. Right now he didn't have to focus hard at all to see the tension in Angel's aura, a tension experience had already told him was simmering there. But further insight into the bottomless pit of his sire's psyche was beyond him. Dru was the only one who'd ever been able to plumb it with any accuracy, and he was convinced that doing so had driven her even madder than she'd begun.

He emerged from his brown study to see that Angel had begun making notes in the file, ignoring him once more. Spike mentally ground his teeth. Balls to the Vulcan mind meld shite. We'll do this the old-fashioned way.

"So Buffy's hunky-dory with the New World Order, is she? That must have been such a relief," he said. "And then two weeks of gelato and moonrise-over-the-Coliseum with your best girl--I reckon you're just glowing with that old Roman Fever."

Spike made a show of looking Angel over carefully. "Hmmm, no glow. Well, my eyes aren't what they used to be."

Angel threw down his Montblanc pen with an exasperated sigh. "I swear to God, if you don't get the hell out--"

"You'll what? Glare at me some more? Cut me to ribbons with the keen edge of your wit? I am shaking in the visual representation of my will manifesting as my Doc Marten boots."

Angel sighed again, though it was closer to a growl this time. "What will it take, Spike? You can't drink blood or spend money, and you've never been interested in virgins, so what do you want to remove yourself from my office?"

"The truth," Spike said simply.

Angel looked at him, his dark eyes like the smoked glass windows in the company limousines.

"No, not that," Spike clarified. "Hug your dark secret to yourself and much good may it do you. But I know you, Angel, and that's the only thing you've been hugging lately. Seeing how this was supposed to be the big romantic reunion with the love of your unlife, I'm curious."

Angel raised one eyebrow. "Curious, or jealous?"

"Don't flatter yourselves. I'm over it."

Angel's other eyebrow joined the first. "You've been obsessed with Buffy for years. You won back your soul to impress her. You self-immolated in the Hellmouth to save her. And now you're just . . . over it?"

In truth, Spike wasn't sure you ever really got over Buffy. Loving her was like having malaria--you'd think you were cured of the shakes and fever, and then they'd break out again worse than ever. But he definitely considered himself in remission. "She's all yours. I wish you joy of her."

"Since when?"

"Since now," Spike said, giving Angel his own version of the stone face. But secretly relieved that Buffy had at least had the decency not to tell anyone about his final phone call. He was impressed: most people couldn't have kept that sort of high drama to themselves. But then she always had been good at secrets, especially when it came to him.

"Should have told her I was coming," Angel muttered, picking up his pen.

"Why?" Spike asked, puzzled. "The girl wears full make-up to bed, I can't imagine you could possibly catch her off guard unless--" he stopped.

Angel said nothing, seemingly intent on the stack of work in front of him. But his fingers had tightened on the pen's ebony shaft until Spike could have sworn he heard a crack.

"Unless . . . she was with somebody else," he said slowly. "That's it, isn't it? Buffy's finally found herself a human bloke who's not a complete knob, and playing sex chicken with the Prince of Darkness isn't looking so appealing."

"It wouldn't have been sex chicken. The chances of anything going wrong again are close to zero."

"Horseshoes and handgrenades, old son. The last time you two got squelchy, you went mad as a moose and nearly opened the Book of Revelations on us all. I do believe the mad, bad, dangerous to know routine has begun to pall for Our Girl."

"She's not your girl," Angel said automatically, but Spike could tell his heart wasn't in it. "It was a mistake," he said, more to himself than to Spike. "Abandoning everything here to chase after her . . . I shouldn't have gone." His eyes were more opaque than ever, but Spike didn't need windows into his soul to recognize the pain there.

Yep, sodding malaria, he thought.

"Hey, buck up," he said, for a second feeling almost sympathetic. "Lots of good fish in the sea, mate. Nina's still got your number, and she looks pretty tasty." Spike paused for a second, considering. "Or if you're tired of seafood, I'm sure Wes would be more than happy to tell you a thing or two about snails."

Angel went even stiller than usual. "What are you talking about?"

Spike rolled his eyes. "Forgot you hadn't seen a movie since the advent of talkies," he sighed. "I'm talking about the love that dare not speak its name, Angel. Your second-in-command is practically do-lolly with it, and if you'd any consideration at all you'd shag him senseless and put the rest of us out of his misery."

"You're disgusting, Spike," Angel said, in a tone so familiar Spike experienced a painful moment of déjà vu.

"Leave the self-righteous act to Buffy, she's better at it than you are," he shot back. "I've lived with you, and I've hunted with you, and I know your appetites. All your appetites, even the ones you like to blame on your evil twin. So don't come over all coy with me--you're perfectly aware the man's pining away for you. Why else would a Watcher, a Wyndam-Pryce for fuck's sake, follow you into the mouth of Corporate Hell? His precious bloody library? Nobody likes books that much."

Spike shook his head sadly. "I don't know who's more tragic, him or that Frozen Charlotte of a former secretary of yours. But at least Cordelia probably got a quick grope or two out of the deal, while ol' Wes is clearly gagging for it and I'll bet you've never even let him give you--"

"Spike, if you are not out of my sight in three seconds, I'm going to trap your essence in a Resekhian urn and lock you in Deep Storage for the next fifty years." Angel's voice was quiet, almost matter-of-fact, but Spike could sense the rage blazing off him like lightning flashing from a thundercloud.

A Resekhian urn, fucking hell. Where in the name of all that was unholy had Angel scrounged up one of those? Solitary confinement for unquiet spirits, like being buried alive with the added bonus of complete consciousness, forever. A cold hand gripped Spike's non-existent vitals at the thought of half a century trapped in dead grey nothingness, unable to see or speak or move, but fully aware of every endless second.

"You wouldn't," he said, knowing he didn't sound convinced even to himself.

"Try me. One."

"Oh come on, that wouldn't work. Fred said this wasn't a standard haunting so--"

"We'll see. Two."

"But that's not fair! I wasn't even--"

"Three. Say hello to Pavayne for me." Angel pressed a button on his phone. "Harmony, get me Special Collections."

"Fine, I'm off already," Spike said, standing. He refused to run even now, but all the way through the wall he could feel the burn of Angel's anger boring into him like a laser-sight.

"My sire went to Italy and all I got was this lousy death threat," he mumbled, heading into the central lobby.

"You dropped the Wes-bomb, huh?"

Spike raised an eyebrow at the pretty blonde in the low-cut pink sweater sitting behind the desk nearby. Harmony, his ex-squeeze and Angel's current Girl Friday, was not without her useful talents. But insight into the inhuman condition had never been one of them. He looked pointedly at the speakerphone on her desk. "Been listening at keyholes again, pet? I warned you about that."

"Hello, not dying to get sent back to the steno pool here," Harmony sniffed. "I wasn't listening. Angel's been threatening everybody over Wesley for, like, two days now."

"What's Alfred done to get Batman's tights in a twist this time?"

"Maybe if you'd been around the last couple of weeks, you'd know," she said, giving him a reproachful look. "Angel leaves on vacation and poof! You're not here. I mean, even less here than you already were. Honestly, if I didn't know better, I'd think the only reason you come by at all is to bug him."

Spike stared at her, wondering how she'd managed to beg, borrow, or steal a sense of irony in the weeks he'd been on walkabout. Then he realized he was giving her too much credit. Five years after her death, Harmony was the same half-witted teen queen she'd been when her sire first sank fang into her, and a half-wit she'd be when she was Angel's age. Provided she survived that long, which wasn't likely. The Watcher's Council could propagandize all they liked that the Changeover destroyed the person in favor of the demon, but Harmony was (sort of) living proof that Essence preceded Existence.

"Anyway, you want to know about the Wes thing?" Harmony asked, filling the silence. She'd always been uncomfortable with all scrutiny she couldn't read as foreplay.

"If I had any breath, it'd be baited."

"Well, he's gone," she said anti-climactically.

Utilizing a move it had taken him a week to perfect, Spike leaned (appeared to lean) one elbow on the top of her desk. "Took-a-better-offer gone, or devoured-by-revenants gone?" he asked, tilting his head at her encouragingly.

"Nobody knows. He wasn't at work on Monday or Tuesday, so Fred and Gunn went by his place but they didn't find anything. I mean all his stuff was there, but he wasn't. That's when they got Angel back from vacation. He's had all the psychics working on it but they're coming up with nada. So Angel's been interviewing everybody who works with Wes to see if they know anything."

"I'm sure that was a laugh riot for all involved."

"No, he's been really mean," Harmony said seriously. "Sandy from Archives was crying in the ladies' room for like an hour after he got done with her, and y'know she's part Gavrok so when she cries her eyes go all orange and her face breaks out in these little black bumps? I mean, ew? She said she thought Dave in Accounting was going to ask her out but he saw her on the way to the ladies' and he looked all repulsed so now he probably won't, but she's totally delusional because Dave is a hottie and even without the bumps she looks like Paris Hilton if you squished her real short and put fifty pounds on her so there's no way--"

"Harm, despite the fact we're both immortal, life's still too short to stand here and listen to you natter on like a bloody knackered Furby," Spike broke in. "Just tell me what happened."

"I told you, nobody knows," Harmony said, her lipglossed mouth turning down in a pout. "Some of the janitorial staff saw Wes in his office Sunday afternoon, which isn't such a big deal because he's been a total workaholic lately. He piled so much stuff on Alison that I've had to do like all his photocopying, and he'd get really pissy if it wasn't collated right and I kept trying to tell him, 'Wes, these funky occult texts always mess up the document sorter'--I think it's some kind of weird copy protection spell the monks put on 'em or something? So I've had to do it all by hand and most of 'em don't even have page numbers and I don't know Coptic and Old Fyarl so how am I supposed to tell if they're wrong? I mean, the job description said 'typing, pleasant phone voice, and Excel,' not 'reading dead demon languages and doing grunt work for a crazy ex-Watcher with no fashion sense.' You should have seen what he wore to work last Friday--"

Sighing, Spike surrendered to the inevitable. There was only one way to shut Harmony up once her stream of consciousness started flooding, and that option was out of the question right now. It was too bad, really: his ex's everyday utterances might be stuck at the Dick-and-Jane level, but her sexual vocabulary was Shakespearean, an advancement for which Spike took no small personal credit.

The Wesley situation bore thinking about, anyway, and now was as good a time as any. Not that Spike was particularly preoccupied with his fate. In his time he'd had more than a few run-ins with watchers, most of them related in varying degrees to Wesley. The history of the Watcher's Council was as rife with Wyndam-Pryces as it was with Gileses and Travers, all of them cousins of one kind or another, the old families having interbred like the monarchs of Medieval Europe. From what Spike could see, Wes had inherited all the most tiresome traits of his ancestors. Despite the pained politeness he showed towards the great unwashed here at Wolfram & Hart, it was obvious he still thought the only good demon was one gutted and mounted and preserved in the Council Archives. The fact that underneath the tweedy moral superiority he harbored a smoldering sexual obsession with one of the most notorious vampires on record changed nothing. Except to further convince Spike that human beings could achieve a level of perversity at least as profound as any demon's.

No, where the Watcher might have taken (or been taken) off was not a matter of much interest to him. But Angel's reaction to his disappearance--that interested Spike greatly. He saw now that Angel might not be chuffed about being chucked for Joe Normal, but he wasn't ready to banish anybody into a oubliette over it. So why not tell him what was going on before Spike went around ridiculing the dearly departed?

It was Angelus who whispered the answer in his ear:

You're not my fledge anymore, or my second. You're no longer my worthy opponent. Hell, I can't even use you as a punching bag these days. You're nothing, boy. Why would I bother telling a nothing about anything?

"--said, where have you been, Spike?" Harmony whined, waving a be-ringed hand through the middle of his chest.

"None of your bloody business," Spike snapped. Anyway, the frustrations of his recent journey didn't make for scintillating conversation. If the forces that brought him back from beyond had allowed him to choose his corner of the sky, it wouldn't have been the Starbucks-infested wasteland of Los Angeles. But he supposed it could be worse: he'd once come across a ghost whose manifestation was confined to a Pentecostal church outside Mobile, Alabama.

"Hey, I was just asking," Harmony said, looking wounded. Then she smiled, blue eyes sparkling with the shallow allure of a San Fernando Valley swimming pool. "Y'know, if you ever need a place to stay, I've got my own apartment now. It's kinda small, but I could make room for you, Spikey."

A little touched by her offer, Spike restrained himself from speaking the truth--that the Resikhian Urn in Deep Storage was preferable to shacking up with her again. "Thanks, love, but--"

"I've only got one bedroom, but my bed's real big. You wouldn't have to sleep on the couch or anything." Harmony twirled a lock of hair around one French-manicured finger.

"I don't sleep," Spike said shortly. You didn't need to rest when you didn't have a body to get tired out. The sunlight ban also didn't apply to him, since you couldn't burn a body that wasn't there. But the thrill of sitting on the beach and watching all the fine young things go by had palled once he remembered that watching was as far as he could go. The spirit was willing but the flesh was absent.

Harmony leaned forward, giving him an eyeful of the assets that had kept her body and lack-of-soul together on more than one occasion. "That's okay, we could think of something else for you to do."

Oh for fuck's sake. "Harm, you do realize that since I don't have a body that sleeps, I don't have a body that shags, either, don't you?"

"But I heard if you thought really hard, you could bend reality with your mind or something."

"I'm not sodding Dark Phoenix. If I focus my will, I can manipulate small objects for small periods of time. We're talking pencils, pet. Coffee mugs, paperclips, that sort of thing." He picked up her empty Evian bottle and chucked it in the rubbish bin by way of demonstration. "On a good day, I might be able to punch someone in the face, if they were daft enough to stand still for five minutes. Nothing that could satisfy your needs." Or mine, he thought bitterly.

"Oh." Her smile of solicitation had been replaced by the blank frown that was her habitual expression.

"You want to re-think that invite, now? Maybe go see what Dave in Accounting's up to?"

"Why, has he been talking about me?" Harmony said, brightening. "Y'know, I caught him looking down my blouse when he was up here for a meeting yesterday, but I wasn't sure if--"

The speaker on her desk phone squawked to life, making them both jump. "Harmony! Where's my four o'clock?"

"I dunno, Boss. I buzzed him twenty minutes ago," Harmony said. "Do you want me to try again?"

"If you can take time from propositioning every male who wanders by your desk, sure, why don't you do that?"

"God, I hate it when he listens in," she muttered. "Just because he can't get any, he acts like--"

"I can still hear you," the speaker said menacingly.

"Just kidding, Boss," Harmony said with a nervous little laugh. "I'm getting him for you right now."

She picked up the phone and hit a few buttons. "Hey, Suze? Is he on his way? 'Cause Angel's getting kinda antsy--well, then page him or something. He was supposed to be here like fifteen minutes ago and you know how the Big Guy is. Remember Xaxaxel and the fax? They never did find his head--uh-huh, I know he's human but Angel's been in such a mood lately I'm not sure that's gonna make any--" Harmony suddenly looked up at the lobby's central staircase, and her shoulders slumped with relief. "Never mind, there he is."

She hung up the phone and ran one hand nervously over her hair, a pointless gesture since it was pulled into a ponytail and shellacked into place. Then she glanced self-consciously into the mirror-glossy surface of her desk, as if checking to see if her nose was shiny. This was an even more pointless gesture since vampires don't reflect, and even if they did they don't have working oil glands. Spike was expecting her to straighten imaginary seams on her stockings at any second.

He turned to see the cause of all the fuss, and felt his own eyes widen. (Or rather, the visual representation of his will manifesting as his eyes gave the appearance of widening. Whatever.)

"Who is that?" he asked softly.

"That's Brian Kinney," Harmony sighed, in the dreamy, reverent voice she usually reserved for half-off sales at Fred Segal. "The new P.R. guy. Isn't he something?"

For once, Harmony had gotten it right. Brian Kinney was something, all right. Long and lean, with wide dark eyes, tousled dark hair, a Roman nose and the lush red mouth of the hedonist, he should have been painted on the side of some ancient urn, lounging on a divan while a naked maenad fed him grapes. His long neck and slightly shortened chin only added to the classical effect. But the ancient air lessened once he left the staircase. He strode across the lobby with the ruthless arrogance you only see in white American males of a certain class and generation. The ones who wear their silk neckties and $3000 suits like they're the royal purple.

Kinney was a flash bastard, all right, but that wasn't the real reason he drew the eye. Even from across the room Spike could see the energy surrounding him, a crackling blue cloud that stirred the air like heat lightning. Not that this was so strange--lots of Wolfram & Hart employees had a little something extra under the hood. (For Spike, this could sometimes lead to a sensory overload equivalent to a bad hit of Yellow Sunshine acid. Angel's absence wasn't the only reason he'd made himself scarce the last few weeks.) But even given place and circumstance, Kinney stood out. His aura made the pale halos circling some of the paid psychics look like candles after the sun rose.

Harmony really had been stretching it a bit when she called him 'human.'

"He's so . . ." Harmony began, fluttering her hands like she was trying to grab the right adjective. "Yummy," she finally finished. "It's such a tragedy."

"What's a tragedy?"

But by that point Kinney was within earshot. As he drew close, Spike noticed he had an odd, hectic flush on his face, like he'd just run up several flights of stairs instead of sauntering down one.

"Harmony, you're looking fetching today," he said as he approached the desk. "The pink angora is very Ed Wood."

"Aw, thanks," Harmony said, giving him her big empty Barbie Doll smile. "But actually it's Dolce & Gabbana."

Spike snorted, drawing Kinney's attention for the first time. He wasn't surprised it had taken him this long. With those who relied on senses beyond the usual five, he often failed to register right away even when fully manifested. Their powers told them a truth their eyes and ears did not: that solid as he might appear, he wasn't really there at all.

But now that Kinney had made first contact, he quickly made up for lost time. Turning his back to Harmony, he took Spike in from boots to bleach in one long glance. His whiskey-colored eyes lit up with an unmistakable interest.

Did I say maenad? I meant Ganymede, Spike thought, smirking. Poor Harm, she really can't catch a break.

"Hi. I'm Brian," Kinney said, with a smile that couldn't have been a franker invitation if it had been inscribed on vellum and presented on a silver charger. In his peripheral vision, Spike saw Harmony look back and forth between them, her own smile collapsing into a scowl. Kinney couldn't see her from his angle, but at her change in expression his eyes flicked in her direction, the electric blue haze surrounding him sparking like a bug zapper catching a fly.

Empath, Spike realized. A fuck-off powerful one. What the hell is he doing pushing papers?

"And you are?" Brian queried, turning his undivided attention back to him.

"Spike," he replied, relieved Kinney didn't offer to shake hands.

"Spike." Kinney turned the name over in his mouth like a piece of candy. "Nice. I wonder why they call you that."

"He used to tie people up and torture them with railroad spikes," Harmony put in, still scowling.

"Oh, you're into leather," Kinney replied. "Should've guessed when I saw the coat." Shimmering power reached out like a caressing hand, but Spike had no answering aura to be touched. A tiny line of confusion appeared between Kinney's eyes.

"So, what else are you into, Spike?" he said, covering confusion with words.

"Lots of things," Spike replied truthfully.

"Yeah, like the walls," Harmony muttered. Spike shot her an evil look.

"A man with eclectic tastes, excellent," Kinney said, paying no more attention to Harmony than if she were a wall herself. "Look, I have this meeting thing but it won't take long--"

"Oh, I don't know about that," a voice said from behind them.

They both turned around to see Angel looming in the doorway of his office, arms crossed over his chest, dark gaze lasered in on Kinney. For a moment the two men stood there taking each other's measure, their auras crackling and hissing like two gas giants shoved into the same orbit.

"Brian Kinney?"

"That's right." Kinney's eyes had gone as cool as congealed amber. "You must be Angel. I've sure heard about you."

"Really? From who?"

"Various sources. You seem to be the name on everybody's lips these days." One corner of his mouth twisted, like he was remembering a private joke even he didn't think was very funny.

"Apparently your sources didn't tell you that lateness makes me edgy."

"Sorry about that," Brian replied, not sounding sorry at all. "Something suddenly came up."

I'll give you three guesses what that something was, Spike thought dryly, remembering Kinney's odd flush of earlier. And the first two don't count.

Angel stared at his tardy employee expressionlessly for a second longer, before doing something very unexpected. He smiled, a wide, pleasant grin like he was running for president of something.

"No problem. I know how it is the first couple of weeks on the job. But now that you're here, how about we get started?" His tone was as friendly as his smile, but all the while his aura continued to surge and eddy like the sea before a storm. Spike glanced over at Kinney and saw the confused line appear between his eyes again.

"Right," he said, for the first time sounding a little uncertain.

Smart lad, Spike thought. But you don't know the half of it. Terrifying as Angelus was in one of his black rages, it was when he stopped glowering that you really needed to back up and cover your vitals.

As if thinking about him had drawn his attention, his sire's eyes moved to Spike. "You. Out." With that terse pronouncement he vanished back into his office. Spike stared after him, anger and humiliation warring within.

"Friend of yours?" Kinney asked.

"No," Spike said tightly.

"I figured. He doesn't strike me as the social type. But you do." He held out a business card, which Spike took. "In case this thing goes long." Aura flaring like a sunspot, he headed into the lion's den without a backwards glance.

Yeah, Angelus's record for one of these little tête-à-têtes is twenty-seven days, Spike thought as he watched him go. Trust me, you won't be feeling very social afterwards.

"What are you gonna do with that?" Harmony pouted, as soon as the office door shut behind Kinney.

"I dunno, a little basil, maybe a nice cream sauce--what do you think I'm gonna do with it, you silly cow?" He tried to throw the card into the rubbish bin but it fell through his hand and fluttered to the ground, his own unsettled emotions ruining his focus. "Not exactly a swinging single these days, am I?"

"Even if you were, I didn't think you swung that way. I know gay is like the new black right now, but geez . . . "

Spike shrugged. "Never hurts to be flexible."

"Oh, but when we were going out and I brought up a threesome with that cute waiter at Willy's, you were all 'that's not my bag, baby,'" Harmony whined, attempting a truly horrible Austin Powers impression. "See, this is why we broke up. You never thought about my needs, even when you--"

Spike tuned her out, still looking at the closed office door. If he strained every sense he had, he could feel Angel and Kinney behind it, their energies rumbling like far-off thunder. "I'm going back in there," he said suddenly.

"Hello, insane much? Angel just threatened you with--whatever he threatened you with--and you're gonna stick around? Did the Hellmouth fry your brain, too?"

"He won't know I'm there." Spike's natural state these days was semi-transparent, it taking concentration and energy to appear as solid as 'real' beings. But he'd learned through experimentation that it was also possible to go the other way, dimming himself down until he was almost invisible. If he kept to the shadows, he could eavesdrop on the whole encounter and none would be the wiser.

"He'll know. He's your sire--they always know."

Spike didn't reply, most of his attention already focused on winking himself out like a candle.

"When he sticks you in Deep Storage, don't expect me to get you out," Harmony persisted. "There are spiders down there. Big ones."

"Thought you said you weren't listening in," Spike said over his shoulder as he headed away. But before Harmony could think of an answer to that, he was already through the wall.

********

Having no desire to end up trapped like a genie in a bottle, Spike chose his observation post with care. Angel's office was subdivided from the conference room next door by a pair of sliding glass panels that were usually left open, rendering the already palatial space that much more impressive. By making his way in through the conference room wall and standing behind the left-hand glass panel, he had the double advantage of an extra layer of camouflage and a front-row seat to the unfolding drama.

Angel and Brian Kinney were ensconced on the leather sofa and chair not ten feet away, as Spike had suspected they would be. Along with guarding his perimeter and tormenting petite blondes, keeping his adversaries off-balance was one of Angelus's first principles, a behavior so ingrained even the kinder, gentler version of the vampire persisted in it. After a week of listening to his traumatized co-workers, Kinney would be expecting pitched battle across that fortress of a desk, a harsh interrogation involving everything short of spotlights and electrodes. Instead, Angel sat there jawing amiably about, of all things, the chances of the Penguins vs. the Kings in this year's Stanley Cup.

Spike knew there was more to Angel's hail-fellow-well-met act than just strategy. He had seen this side of his sire before, remembered it from a hundred scenes that should have long since faded to sepia tones, but remained burned into his brain in lurid Technicolor. The singular good humor meant Angelus was getting ready to play, and in Spike's experience human participants rarely enjoyed his little games. Something about Brian Kinney was bringing out this dangerous mood, and Spike wasn't going to leave until he figured out what it was. It wasn't just Kinney's arrogance, though that didn't improve the atmosphere any. It wasn't even the strong scent of power about him, which to a vampire was like waving a steak in front of a starving dog. No, there was something else, something personal, making Angel smile at his new P.R. man with that predatory gleam in his eyes.

Kinney didn't smile back, his handsome features set in a blank, slightly bored expression that wasn't the best poker face Spike had ever seen on a human. But it was close. There was no mistaking the tension in his aura, though. The brilliant blue haze was sparking and pulsing like a plasma ball. Spike didn't blame him: the contrast between Angel's just-us-boys jocularity and his own aura was awful, that lethal energy continuing to swirl around him in a howling black fury. To someone with Kinney's abilities it would be like getting chatted up by a grinning death's head.

Angel was still talking easily, as though he were completely ignorant of the vicious undercurrents circling in the room, rather than the author of them. The standard small-talk complete, he rose from the chair and headed for the elaborate marble bar to the left of his desk.

"I don't know about you, but after the week I've had I could use a drink," he said.

Kinney raised a cool eyebrow at him. "A little early in the day, isn't it?"

"I won't tell if you won't," Angel said, giving him a conspiratorial wink.

Kinney shrugged carelessly. "Whiskey, rocks."

"A man after my own heart." Angel opened the mini-fridge built into the bar and took out a large chunk of ice. "You've been with us how long, Brian? Four weeks?" He began breaking off pieces of the frozen block, his fingers digging into it with the pungent force of a steel ice pick.

"Brian?"

Kinney blinked and tore his gaze away from Angel's hands. "Closer to five, actually."

"And here we are just getting to know each other," Angel said ruefully. "I usually make it a point to meet with my new people right away, but it's been kind of a hectic month." He sighed as he reached for a bottle of Glenfiddich. "That's how it is when you're in charge--turn your back for two minutes and all Hell breaks loose."

"Guess that's why they pay you the big bucks."

"You have no idea," Angel said with another wink. A drink in each hand, he crossed the brief space between the bar and the sofa. Handing one glass to Kinney, he sat down next to him again, much closer than standard American social distance. Kinney instinctively recoiled as the stormy cloud surrounding Angel touched the outer edge of his own aura, sending up several painful-looking sparks. He retreated a few inches on the smooth leather, a weaker response than Spike had expected. For someone with Kinney's power, shielding from a pernicious aura should be simple as breathing. But perhaps he was conserving energy in case he needed it later. Not a bad idea, really.

Angel didn't appear to notice the other man's discomfort. "So, Brian Kinney, what part of the ould sod do you hail from?" he asked, a touch of Celtic lilt coming into his flat American accent.

Kinney took a tiny, experimental sip of his drink before answering, like he was tasting it for something more sinister than expensive scotch. "My father's people came from Galway," he said at last.

"Did they now? Why, that's my old homeplace," Angel said delightedly, his voice still dipping into the old cadences. Spike wondered if he was even fully aware of it. "I knew some Galway Kinneys once. August Kinney and his wife Claire--good people, had two sons. The elder joined the Navy at thirteen, but the youngest and me were great friends. Jack, his name was."

Kinney's fingers tightened slightly on the whiskey glass. "Jack Kinney?"

"Aye, Jack," Angel replied. "Lovely lad, sweet disposition." He looked at Kinney over the edge of his glass, black eyes knowing. "Very sweet."

Kinney stared at Angel a moment, his gaze gone as dark as Angel's own. "Can't be related to me, then," he said.

"Perhaps that's just as well. He died young," Angel replied, not breaking eye contact. "See, Jack was always a great one for hunting. But one night he came across a creature that was a lot fiercer than him and his little gun, and he wouldn't back down. It tore him to pieces." He frowned regretfully, a gesture that looked as genuine to Spike as a tinfoil Rolex. "Jackie-boy never did know when he was topped."

"Now that sounds like family," Kinney said dryly.

"Could be. There is something about you that puts me in mind of Jack," Angel mused. "Something in the line of the jaw." He made an s-curve in the air, like he was tracing the shape of Kinney's chin and throat. "I always say. . .blood tells." He chuckled, a deep, harsh sound that was no more human than the baying of a wolf.

Kinney's blank, bored mask didn't crack at the sound of it, but his aura went several shades darker, criss-crossed now with navy lines of stress. Spike knew Angel couldn't see it, but his sire had other senses that were just as sharp. They must have been telling him something interesting, because that black cloud around him began to swirl faster.

"What a happy coincidence, you and me coming from the same patch of green," he said, with another one of those deathly smiles. "Why, we're practically kin." Leaning forward, he clapped one huge paw on Kinney's shoulder.

Kinney gasped and pulled away, his face pale and stunned. His entire aura had shuddered with the shock of the touch, black energy crashing into blue in a shower of bruise-colored sparks. Those crackling lines of tension in his aura swelled to twice their original size, twisting and hissing like tortured snakes. That's how getting groped by an angry master vampire would feel to an unshielded empath: as if he'd been submerged in a pit of stinging vipers.

"Something wrong, Brian?" Angel said.

Breathing hard, Kinney stared at Angel with undisguised dread. Then, through what must have been an enormous effort of will, his face smoothed again into that mask of cool control. The move was automatic, practiced, the reaction of someone who'd endured sudden attacks all his life. To Spike's amazement, however, there was no corresponding shielding in his aura. After what Angel had just done to him, Kinney should have been strapping on the psychic equivalent of Kevlar. Something wrong there, he thought.

"I'm fine," Kinney said. He took a long swallow of his whiskey, the only remaining physical evidence of his distress a slight tremor in the hand holding the glass. His aura was still a tortured mess though, riddled with stress fractures like the land after an earthquake. There wasn't a sign of the extra energy he should have been throwing up to curb further onslaughts. The response made no more sense than a concrete bomb shelter with no roof.

"So, how well did you know Wesley?"

Oh clever bastard, Spike thought. Shake him like a snowglobe, then ask the tough questions before the pieces have time to settle. But why was Kinney shaken so easily?

Kinney was still pale beneath his carefully cultivated tan. For the first time Spike noticed faint shadows under his eyes, lurking strain of a man troubled by unpleasant dreams. But when he spoke his voice was impressively neutral:

"Shouldn't you be reading me my rights first, or something?"

Angel gave another one of those wolfish laughs. "No need for that, lad. We're all friends here, aren't we?" For a moment Spike could have sworn his sire's glance flicked to the glass partition he was currently concealed behind. But it was probably just his own paranoid reaction to the high levels of tension in the room.

"So, you and Wesley?" Angel prodded.

"There is no 'me and Wesley,'" Kinney said, bristling a bit. "I had my department, and he had his."

"And I hear you're doing a bang-up job," Angel said soothingly. "But he is your boss. He must check in on you occasionally."

"Very occasionally. I know what I'm doing."

"I'm sure you do," Angel replied, an odd note in his voice. "So, when was the last time you saw him?"

A slight pause. "Last Friday morning. In his office."

"What was the meeting about?"

Another pause. "I needed background on the company."

Angel raised an inquiring eyebrow at him. "Why would you need that?"

"I'm the P.R. Director for Wolfram & Hart. If I'm gonna spin it, I have to know it. Wesley pointed me towards some required reading."

"Hey, that's grand," Angel said cheerfully. "Always happy to hear of employees taking extra initiative. Was that all you discussed?"

Kinney shifted a little in his seat. "Yes."

A vamp fresh from the winding sheet could have seen that Kinney was lying. Empaths were usually better at it than this, their abilities giving them a natural bent for prevarication. Of course, you couldn't fault a man for being fazed after having his cage rattled by a mightily brassed-off master vampire. But that still didn't explain why Kinney had let Angel manhandle him like that in the first place. Or, for that matter, why he needed to lie.

"How did Wes look to you the last time you saw him?" Angel pressed. "He seem odd or preoccupied in any way?"

"He looked like a man who needed a Xanax prescription or three weeks in Aruba." Kinney lifted his chin a little, giving Angel a long, level look. "But I'm sure you already knew that."

"Sure," Angel answered. "I like to have everyone's opinion, though. You never know whose input is going make the difference." He stretched casually, like a man imparting wisdom over a friendly pint. "See lad, building an investigation is a bit like . . . well, assembling that very sharp ensemble you're wearing there. It's the little details that count." He nodded in the general direction of Kinney's waist. "Take that handsome belt--what is it, a Gucci?"

It seemed like an innocent-enough question, but it startled Kinney. He glanced down at his midriff almost guiltily. "Uh, yeah," he said.

"Thought so. I'm sure it cost you a pretty penny, but the effect is obvious." He set down his whiskey glass on the table next to him. "May I see it?"

Kinney's fingers covered the buckle in an unconscious defensive gesture. "Are you serious?"

"I don't have much time for shopping these days. Humor me."

Reluctantly, Kinney took off the belt and held it out to Angel. Spike noticed he was careful to keep his own hand a safe distance from the vampire's. Angel took the whip-thin article and inspected it, running his fingers over the butter-soft leather. "Very nice," he said appreciatively. Then he twisted it into a long circle, looping one end over the other like a makeshift noose. "Very . . . flexible." He looked up at Kinney. "I bet you get a lot of use out of it."

"Sure. It goes with anything as long as its black," Kinney said casually. But there was nothing casual in his eyes as he returned Angel's stare.

Angel silently held the gaze for a moment longer, his big hands caressing the belt with slow possessiveness. Something about that seemed to bother Kinney, because when he spoke an edge had come into his usually smooth voice. "Is that it, or do you want to see the shoes, too?"

Still silent, Angel handed the belt back to him. Kinney put it on at once, an odd defiance in his face as he buckled it.

What the blue blazes was that all about? Spike thought, glancing from one man to the other in frustration. Sometimes spying on people's lives was like coming into a movie half-way through: you knew when something of significance had happened, but you didn't always know why it was significant.

Whatever it was, it had made all the overdone conviviality drain out of Angel's face. "So, Brian, any thoughts on what had Wesley so perturbed?" he said, his voice low and serious.

"No idea," Kinney answered, free hand playing absently over his reclaimed belt. "But Wes did strike me as the obsessive type. You know, someone who gets stuck on something and won't stop until he's totally tied up in knots over it." He smiled for the first time, a slow smirk full of barely concealed malice. Spike realized then that Angel wasn't the only one in the room bearing some kind of personal grudge.

The effects of Kinney's response showed up in Angel's aura first. The entire swirling mass went dark and still as a starless sky, and as unfathomable. Spike knew a vampire of Angel's age and strength could hide what he was feeling from an empath, even one as powerful as the man in front of him.

Angel's face had gone as quiet as his aura. But it was a terrible quiet, like the ominous calm of a hurricane's eye. "Tell me Brian, how were your relations with Wesley?" he said softly.

"How do you mean?" Kinney replied. His angry defiance had shaded into an angry wariness, whether at the dire change in atmosphere or something else Spike wasn't sure.

"What were you two to each other? Co-workers? Buddies? Friendly rivals?" Angel was still quiet as a statue, but his aura wasn't. As he spoke it began to move again, but differently this time. With purpose. The pitch-black mass hummed and churned like a cloud of wasps, a cloud swarming right for Brian Kinney.

Kinney couldn't see that teeming energy moving towards him, but he could feel it. He moved back a little on the sofa, but their earlier collisions had left him pushed into one corner. Short of standing up, there was nowhere for him to go. And Spike guessed Kinney was too proud to make such an obvious retreat. "I told you, I barely knew--"

He cut off with a gasp as Angel's power crashed into his aura with mortal force. The tortured blue cloud shivered and sparked as the noxious black mass collided against it once, twice, thrice. Then, with an almost audible crack, it punched through the surface into the vulnerable depths below, resolving into jagged black spikes that began tearing through the blue like a razor tears through flesh. Kinney gave a short, strangled cry, his eyes gone glazed. The whiskey glass in his hand overturned, staining the front of his expensive suit jacket and crashing to the floor.

Angel shouldn't have been able to do it. Yes, Spike had seen him inflict this kind of damage before, long ago, on a more puissant psyche than Brian Kinney's. But Drusilla had been Angelus's creature, broken to his will long before he ever brought her to darkness. He should no more have been able to penetrate Kinney's aura like this than a child could pick a Chubb lock. Why doesn't Kinney shield? Spike wondered. What the hell is he waiting for?

And still Angel kept talking, his eyes gleaming like fractured obsidian. "As far as it went, you and Wes got along? No unresolved--" those wicked-looking black spikes tore a little deeper "--tensions?"

"No," Kinney rasped through clenched teeth, clearly in unspeakable agony but too bloody-minded to cry out again. Spike had a sudden flashback of Drusilla, sprawled on the parlor carpet screaming her throat raw, Angelus standing over her with this same savage glee.

Fight back, you bloody useless cunt, he thought angrily. Why don't you fucking fight--

Then it hit him, with the force of a great fist hammering into his brain.

Kinney didn't know what he was.

Angel did, of course. He knew the man's vulnerabilities, and years of dealing with Drusilla meant he knew exactly how to turn them to his advantage.

But unbelievable as it sounded, Kinney couldn't be privy to this vital piece of personal information. It was the only explanation for his strange passivity. Psychic ability tended to run in families, which meant most people who manifested the Gift got the schooling they needed at an early age. But occasionally Mother Nature would take it into her head to throw a genetic sport into an otherwise normal clan. Children born into such unfortunate circumstances almost always came to some bad end. Besides the inevitable problems their powers caused with regular humans, it also left them open and appealing to every supernatural predator who happened along. Brian Kinney must have had the Devil's own luck and a steely streak a mile wide to make it this far in life.

But neither of these advantages seemed to be helping him now.

Angel was speaking softly, reasonably to his prey, even as he continued to tear through his aura like cheesecloth. "I know Wes can be a real pain in the ass. There have been a few times I've wanted to strangle him myself. Don't be afraid to be honest, Brian." But Kinney was unresponsive, having drawn into what looked like a semi-catatonic state, either as a last-ditch effort at self-protection or maybe just sheer shock.

Angel knew exactly how to shake him out of it. His hand shot out like a striking serpent, those vise-like fingers gripping Kinney's neck in a stranglehold.

"You can tell me anything," he whispered.

And that's when everything went white.

Apparently, Brian Kinney was made of sterner stuff than anybody, even Angelus, could have anticipated. At that final, devastating attack, his injured aura kicked in with the fail-safe to end all fail-safes, a rush of raw, primal power such as Spike hadn't seen since his amulet came to life in the Sunnydale Hellmouth. The force of it knocked Angel away like a 50,000 volt taser, sending him crashing into the big leather chair. Meanwhile, Kinney was on his feet and staggering back, his mouth open in an expression of bewildered awe at the psychic shockwave exploding out of him. Spike couldn't know what the man was seeing or feeling, but to him it looked as if Kinney's aura had burst like a blue-white star going supernova. That unbearable light built and built, until it seemed impossible that anyone could survive in the midst of it, that Kinney would surely be reduced to cinders by the force of his own wild talent.

Then, like someone had flipped a metaphysical circuit breaker, with one final surge that fearsome power cut off.

For a moment the room was very silent, the only sound Kinney's labored breathing as he clutched onto the table near the sofa like it was a life preserver. He was pale as a ghost and trembling from head to foot. Then he swayed forward dangerously, like he was going face-forward into the carpet. Angel reached out, the instinctive motion anyone makes when they see another person about to collapse. Kinney jerked back like the vampire's hand was a branding iron.

"Don't touch me. Don't you dare fucking touch me!" he cried hoarsely, that blue-white energy momentarily flaring again. It must have felt as dangerous as it looked, because Angel pulled his hand back and went still as stone, a watchfulness very close to fear passing over his features.

After a minute or two Kinney seemed to regain something like control. His aura calmed again, growing closer to its normal cerulean shade. A bit of color came back into his face and he let go of the table. He straightened his stained suit jacket, an unconscious, self-comforting gesture that would have been a little sad if he hadn't just given a pounding migraine to every psychic in the building.

"This meeting is over," he whispered.

"Yeah. I think that's best," Angel replied, gingerly picking himself up off the floor.

The two men regarded each other from a cautious distance. They were of a height, their dress and coloring close enough that for a second it was like looking at mirror images. Or, more accurately, like Potential and Fulfillment, Spike thought, seeing the pale dismay in Kinney's face, and the keen-eyed wariness in Angel's. Angelus would have snapped his neck already.

The same idea must have occurred to Angel, because he crossed his arms over his chest like he didn't trust his hands.

"Go home and take care of yourself, Kinney," he said. "I'd hate for anything to happen to you."

Never taking his eyes from Angel's face, Kinney nodded slowly. Without another word he exited.

Angel turned towards the huge necro-tinted windows behind the sofa, staring out at the gleaming L.A. skyline for a very long time. Long enough for the bright afternoon sunlight to fade to amber, then pale amethyst; long enough for the lights in the skyscrapers to flare like artificial stars. He stood there silently, head down, arms crossed over his chest, the pose unbroken by a single breath or twitch of muscle. Spike had seen this eerie stillness before, knew it meant all the wheels were turning in his sire's sly, labyrinthine brain. But what revelation was at hand he could not tell. Angel's aura was as murky as the London fogs Spike remembered from his brief human days, the ones that enfolded you in a darkness so deep you were sure you'd never see light again.

After what seemed like forever Angel stirred, his eyes closing and then opening again in a slow, predatory blink, like a rough beast rousing itself to action.

"Come here, Spike."

Spike took an involuntary step back into the shadows. "Am I about to be vacuum-sealed for freshness?"

"Not right this second."

Still reluctant, but realizing retreat would be humiliating as well as pointless, he obeyed, moving into the soft luminance of those remarkable windows. Spike saw the skin of his hands and wrists begin to glow faintly, the sleeves of his duster gleaming scarab-like in the purple twilight. He wondered again what metaphysical paradox allowed light to reflect off what were essentially figments of his own restless imagination.

For several minutes Angel didn't acknowledge him further, just continued to survey his domain, the blank expression on his face saying nothing and everything at once.

"How did you know I was here?" Spike finally asked, unable to bear the weight of silence any longer.

"I can still feel you." Angel answered. "The bloodline, I suppose."

"Pretty impressive, considering on my end there's no actual blood involved."

Angel didn't reply. After a moment he turned slowly and stared at Spike. A stare of cold, pitiless appraisal, like a warrior inspecting a once-favored blade now broken. Spike had to steel himself from taking another step back. The last time Angel looked at him like this had been in an Art Deco mansion in Sunnydale, when he wasn't Angel at all. A night Spike had come within a hair's breadth of being given a pointy wooden cure for his post-Slayer paralysis.

"Kinney talked to you out in the lobby."

"We exchanged pleasantries, yeah," he answered hesitantly, not sure where this was heading.

"What do you think of him?"

Spike blinked in surprise. "Are you saying you want the benefit of my expertise?"

"Yes."

He smiled, but recovered in time to turn it into a smirk. "Sure you don't want to keep playing 'Where's Waldo' all by your lonesome? You seem to be having such a cracking time at it."

"William," Angel said softly, all the warning he was going to give in those two syllables.

"Very well, if needs must," Spike replied. He settled himself on the sofa and stretched his arms casually across the back, the effect of the pose worth the effort it took. "What I think is it's amazing Kinney's still drawing breath."

"You can see what he is."

Spike shot Angel a sour look. "Better than you can, these days."

"I wasn't sure. You haven't been very forthcoming about your condition."

"I wasn't aware anybody gave a damn."

Angel said nothing for a moment, his gaze again fixing on Spike in that old, unsettling way. After a moment he seemed to come to some sort of a decision, because he sat down in the chair next to the sofa. "When was the last time you saw someone like him?" he asked, steepling his hands like an inquisitive don.

Spike considered for a second. "New York--must be thirty years ago. Ran across this homeless man in Hell's Kitchen. There he was, dressed in rags and pushing a cart full of rubbish, screaming to the skies that Carter was an alien, and the power just boiling off him like radiation." Spike shrugged. "Most of the untrained ones with any real juice wind up barking mad." He looked at Angel meaningfully, Dru's screams still echoing in his ears. "Or worse."

Angel had the grace to look a little discomfited by that.

"If Kinney is psychotic, he's hiding it well," Spike went on after a pause.

"Kinney's hiding a lot. I don't think he told me one true thing while he was here."

"I'm not up on these matters, but the belt did look like a Gucci."

Angel's expression darkened. "That belt," he said, spitting the word out. "I could smell Wesley all over it. Sweat and tears and . . . other things."

"Blood?"

Angel's jaw clenched. "No."

"Ah," Spike said. Much that was cloudy had suddenly become clear.

Angel didn't elucidate further. His heavy features were drawn into a petulant scowl, the anger of a spoiled child who wants to keep all the toys to himself. Even the ones he has no plans to play with.

Spike tilted his head at him. "So Wesley and Kinney were playmates, were they? Can't say I'm surprised." He had to admit, Kinney was a more elegant solution than the Buffybot had been. Though probably not nearly so obliging.

"I am," Angel growled. Then quickly, before Spike could argue the point: "But nothing about Wesley's behavior over the past few weeks makes sense. The reports I'm getting don't even sound like the same person--hyperactivity, paranoia, fits of rage. Alison said right before he disappeared it looked like he hadn't eaten or slept in days. Like something was eating him from the inside out."

"You think that something was Brian Kinney?" Spike asked skeptically. "The lad's got mojo to burn, true enough. But he didn't even have the coaching to counter when you started creepy-crawling his psyche. I don't see him throwing Wes a mind-fuck of major proportions."

"Neither do I. But Kinney's the best lead we have right now," Angel said. "Sunday night, Wes left here about six. He headed for an ATM across the street and took out $600. A little while later he showed up at a bar a few blocks away. Some time after eight another man came in, they talked for awhile, then left together. That's the last confirmed sighting we have of Wes. The bartender recognized him from a photograph--said he stiffed him on a $40 bar tab."

"With $600 in his pocket?"

"Yeah, that's when everything gets confusing. I tried to have one of our artists make a sketch of the other man from the bartender's description, but they didn't come up with much. The bartender said the Raiders were playing by the time the guy came in, and he had money on the game so he wasn't paying close attention. All he could remember was that the man was tall, dark, and Caucasian. The description fits Kinney pretty well."

"It also fits you pretty well. You and about a million other blokes in town."

"A million other blokes aren't wearing accessories reeking with Wesley's body fluids," Angel said, that muscle in his jaw clenching again.

"Case you've forgotten, lots of folks crave the kiss of leather," Spike pointed out. "Just because he and Wes liked to played rough doesn't mean Kinney's Jeffrey Dahmer."

"Then why lie about how well he knew him? If they were just . . . involved, why not say so?"

"Maybe he didn't think it was any of your business."

"Maybe it's because he's guilty as hell," Angel seethed.

Spike huffed impatiently. "You're not thinking this through, Angel. I'll bet Wesley's made a lot of fearsome enemies over the years--it's sort of an occupational hazard when you tussle with evil for a living. Don't bin the other possibilities just 'cause you're pissed Kinney put his manicured mitts all over your watcher."

"I am not--" Angel began indignantly, but Spike cut him off.

"You bloody well are. And you can challenge Kinney to pistols at dawn once you've got your precious boy back. But in the meantime don't let your emotions cloud your judgment. Isn't that what you always taught me?"

"What a star pupil you turned out to be," Angel said nastily. When Spike just looked at him he sighed, waving one hand in a gesture that could have been an apology or a dismissal. "Anyway, I also taught you to listen to your gut. And right now mine's telling me Kinney's involved in this somehow."

"If he's got your spidey sense in such a rumpus, why'd you let him walk out of here? He'd be a tough nut to crack, but I seem to recall you knowing a thing or two about pressure points."

"Kinney's human."

"In a manner of speaking. What of it?"

"You said yourself, he could be innocent." Angel's expression betrayed how likely he thought that was.

"I doubt 'innocent' is a word that gets applied to him very often. But in this case, yeah, he could be."

"I can't torture an innocent human for information."

"Course you can," Spike said encouragingly. "Remember St. Petersburg? The Russian Orthodox Bishop?"

Angel flinched a little at the reference, looking down at his hands like he could still see the stains of blood and Communion wine. "That was a long time ago."

"Oh Jesus wept," Spike cried. "You're not gonna let that bloody soul business hamstring you again, are you?"

"You should understand," Angel said, switching from penitence to scorn with typical Catholic ease.

"I understand that if one of my people--someone I really cared about--were in trouble, nothing would stop me from trying to help him. Not my soul, not the bloody Geneva Convention, nothing."

"Then it's a good thing I'm the one in charge and not you."

"You've decided to go the benevolent dictator route, brilliant," Spike sneered. "But how do you plan to get your Mr. Smithers back?"

"I'm going to put Kinney under surveillance," Angel replied complacently, like the answer was obvious.

"This is Wolfram & Hart, Angel. Even the janitors have frequency jammers in their cupboards. And with those oversized antennae of his, Kinney will spot any tail you slap on him in about ten seconds."

Angel's complacent expression deepened into the smallest of smiles. "He didn't spot you."

And Spike understood his earlier scrutiny. "Oh no--"

"The whole time I was questioning him I felt you there, but he didn't," Angel said, continuing like Spike hadn't spoken. "I'd swear to it." He looked at him with smug satisfaction, the expression of a warrior who's discovered that battered old blade isn't quite ready for the scrap heap, after all.

Spike crossed his arms. "I am not playing cloak-and-dagger for the likes of you."

"Not even to rescue a good man, a hero?"

"Is this the same good man who wanted me put down like a lame nag not too long ago?"

"How about to make restitution for the century you spent preying on mankind?"

"That debt was paid in full right around the time my eyeballs started to boil in their sockets." To illustrate his point Spike stood, walking through the end of the sofa rather than around it.

Angel's shoulders tensed in the familiar frustrated way. He started to say something, but Spike interrupted. "Don't even start with that ruddy urn business. You might make me follow him about, but you'd never be able to trust my reports. You know that."

"I can't believe I'm saying this twice in one day," Angel said, with another of those long-suffering sighs. "But--what do you want, Spike?"

He hardly had to think about it. "I want an office somewhere in the building. Above ground--I've had my fill of crypts and basements." Then, seeing Angel's quizzical look: "I have to have somewhere to hang my hat. Even if all my hats are metaphorical these days."

"Why an office? Why not an apartment somewhere?"

"A cozy little one-bedroom flat, complete with full kitchen and spacious bath? None of which I can use? Wouldn't that be cheerful."

"Okay, but why an office here? I could find you space anywhere in town."

Spike started heading towards the door. "Right. Don't want the Phantom Menace cluttering up the place? Train a Doberman to dog Kinney's steps. You've always had a fondness for our canine companions, haven't you? I remember that time in Metz--"

"Fine. We'll find you something here," Angel cut in smoothly. "Since it means so much to you."

Spike ignored that. "Make sure it has a flat-screen telly with cable. The good cable--all the HBOs, Showtime, the works. None of that basic service shite."

"Spike, pull this off and Maintenance can install black lights and paint the place scarlet for all I care."

"That's not a bad idea. You could do with a bit of color around--" Then he stopped, a new thought occurring to him. "Wait, what happens if I don't pull this off?"

"Then you get nothing."

"But if Kinney's a lavender herring? All that work and I'm no better off than when I started."

"That's unlikely. Maybe it isn't the worst-case scenario, but Kinney definitely knows something. It's your job to find out what it is."

Spike looked at Angel closely. "And if it is the worst case-scenario?"

"Then you can have Kinney's office," Angel said. He smiled at Spike, a true one, the look of a man facing a really cheering prospect like a vacation or a hot date. But his eyes were black holes from which no light escaped. "He won't be needing it anymore."

That was the real difference between Angel and his Dark Half. Angelus would have killed Brian Kinney on general principles. Angel would wait for an excuse. Seeing the vicious anticipation in his sire's face, Spike wasn't sure which was the more disturbing decision.

********

Day 13--Thursday, 8:03 AM

"What the fuck are you doing here?"

Spike had a couple of bad seconds before he realized Kinney was talking to his other unwelcome guest, the exquisite young blond man clad only in boxers who was currently raiding his refrigerator.

The man straightened instantly, a carton of orange juice in one tanned hand. "You said I could stay."

Kinney came the rest of the way down the stairs, running his fingers through his tousled hair. "I did," he said, sounding skeptical.

"Your exact words were, 'another blowjob like that, and you can move in,'" Blondie said, smiling.

Kinney rolled his eyes. "Christ, I was wasted." Brushing past him into the kitchen, he flipped the on-switch of the sleek black coffeemaker.

Blondie's smile faltered a little, before rallying valiantly. "Yeah, that was some pretty serious E we were doing. I'm feeling kinda drained myself this morning."

Yeah, I'll just bet you are, Spike thought.

"But it was so worth it. Last night was amazing." Blondie trailed a slow, caressing hand down Kinney's bare back. "You were amazing."

Kinney grunted, opening the freezer and taking out a plastic canister half-full of coffee.

Blondie's hand fell away. "You don't think last night was amazing?"

"Sure, one for the album," Kinney said, grabbing a box of filters from the cabinet. "Look, Jason--"

"Jared," he corrected, looking hurt.

"Right. Jared, my amazing self has to be at work in an hour, so how about making that OJ to go?"

Jared set the carton down abruptly. "Oh. Okay."

Kinney finished putting the coffee on as Jared gathered his clothes from their various locations in the living room. When he was dressed he came back to the kitchen, clutching his UCLA jacket nervously.

"When can I see you again?"

Slow-moving lines of irritation began to traverse Kinney's aura. "You can see me now."

"No, seriously," Jared said, smiling again.

"No, seriously," Kinney replied, again not returning it. "You seem like a good kid and you give great head, but don't go thinking this is more than it is."

"But after last night, I thought--"

"It's nice you enjoyed the performance," Kinney cut in. "But I don't do encores, Jason."

"My name is Jared," he said tightly. Like most normal humans, his aura was nothing more than a pale glow extending an inch or so beyond his body. But Spike could see the emotional morass forming in that sunshine-yellow energy, a dark knot of hurt, anger and desire.

Kinney knew what the boy was feeling, of course. Which is probably why he gave up arguing at that point. "Whatever," he said, turning towards the staircase.

Jared grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. "So that's it? I was just some piece of ass to you?"

Kinney's face was calm, but the lines of irritation in his aura had quickened at the restraining touch. He plucked off Jared's hand and flung it away like a man discarding a dead fish.

"That's right. You're a pretty piece of ass I picked up in the back room at Delirium. Just like the one I picked up Tuesday, and the one I'll pick up today." He leaned in close to the boy. "You don't have a goddamn name."

Jared couldn't have looked more shocked if Kinney had sucker-punched him. "You cold, heartless son-of-a-bitch--"

"Want a meaningful relationship? Here's a tip: Don't suck cock on five seconds' acquaintance." Kinney jerked his head at the front door. "Now get the fuck out of here." Without another word he headed upstairs. A moment later, the wet roar of the shower came on.

Jared just stood there, the dark mass inside him swelling until it pulsed at the edges of his aura like a colossal blood clot. At exactly this wrong time the coffeemaker began to brew, burbling to itself with a sound that could only be described as smug. His gaze focused in on the expensive-looking machine, blue eyes glittering with unshed tears.

Spike saw what he was going to do a second before he did it, not enough time to stop him. Not that he would have, even if he could. Jared picked up the coffeemaker and, holding it over his head for maximum acceleration, hurled it at the hard granite floor. The offending appliance impacted with a really satisfying crash. Bits of glass and plastic ricocheted everywhere, while soggy grounds and half-brewed coffee splattered all over the cabinets. Without even pausing to admire his handiwork, he picked up his jacket and ran out. Spike heard another sob as the door slammed.

He emerged from his lookout behind the television, a giant flatscreen mounted on a brushed-steel stand that was wedged between the two banks of windows. Moving closer to the kitchen, he surveyed the mess with a weary shake of his head. "So much for the afterglow," he sighed.

Almost two weeks of surveillance, and this ugly little scene was the closest he'd come to hearing Brian Kinney have a real, non-work-related conversation with another human being. Thirteen days of witnessing his most intimate moments, and Spike wasn't much closer to understanding him than he'd been after their first meeting in the Wolfram & Hart lobby. (Though he was far less flattered by his attentions that day--the man would've shagged a mannequin if it had the proper orifices.) From what he saw, Kinney worked and fucked. Occasionally, he shopped. This narrow circuit comprised the whole of his life, and he followed it with the bloodless calm of an automaton. If it weren't for the powerful aura surrounding him, Spike would've been tempted to check his back for a circuit board.

Gonna be homeless forever at this rate, he thought, looking around the flat with a mixture of envy and frustration. It wasn't to his taste, but he had to admit the place was stunning, all exciting angles and gleaming modern furniture. He'd done a pretty thorough search of it, given his limitations. Kinney had sheets nicer than most men's suits. His bar was better stocked than his refrigerator. He liked James Dean and Marlon Brando, Sinatra and the Stones, the Cure and Nirvana. Not many books but most of the queer classics: Faggots, Dancer from the Dance, And the Band Played On. Novels by Ayn Rand and Aldous Huxley, marked and highlighted like the textbooks they'd probably been. A sizeable collection of pornography, running the gamut from vanilla to serious kink. None of this told Spike anything he didn't know or couldn't have guessed. The personal effluvia that might have really clued him in was wanting: no pictures tacked up on the fridge, no messages from dear old Mum on the answering machine. There weren't any tell-tale journals or love letters tucked away in Kinney's nightstand, just poppers and sex toys.

It was obvious there was something very wrong with Brian Kinney. But Spike would have wagered his left hand (had he possessed one) it wasn't what Angel suspected. He'd known lots of human predators over the years, from cool-eyed professional assassins to mild-mannered serial killers with minds like a trap-door spider's. Such creatures weren't at all unusual in the circles he had traveled in, men whose urges rivaled a demon's wildest dreams of butchery. He'd learned to catch the scent of moral bankruptcy in a human as quickly as he could smell Cancer or AIDS, for it was really just another sickness: call it Consumption of the Soul.

Kinney wasn't suffering from this spiritual malady, and Spike didn't need a nose to know it. Since joining the choir intangible he'd run across a few humans of this sort, one or two right in the lobby of Wolfram & Hart. Their auras had been as dark and viscous as congealed blood, nothing like the clear blue radiance surrounding Kinney. Nor was his aura marked by the fractured, frenetic energy that would have signaled true madness, a total inability to discern right from wrong.

No, Kinney wasn't evil and he wasn't insane. Which left the burning question of what, precisely, was wrong with him. He had no friends and no close family, just pick-ups and co-workers. He never laughed and he never lost his temper. His easy smiles at tricks and clients were as slick and empty as a politician's handshake, a practiced, illusory connection. Attempts to reach him beyond the professional or sexual level were met with extreme prejudice, as the hapless Jared had just found. It was almost as if some vital part of Brian Kinney had gone missing, leaving behind an empty shell incapable of feeling any of the higher emotions.

The kitchen phone began to ring, derailing the train of Spike's thoughts. He glared at it, wondering not for the first time why Kinney bothered with a land line. The man was barely ever home, and when he was he screened his calls. Too busy having an intense relationship with his mobile--most of the time he deleted the messages on his answering machine without even listening to them.

After five rings, the phone stopped. A brief pause, and then it started ringing again, again stopping after five rings. The caller apparently knew the point Kinney's machine would pick up, and didn't want to be shunted into electronic limbo. The third time around finally garnered a response. Kinney came stalking down the stairs, shaving cream and annoyance on his face.

He stopped dead in his tracks at the entrance to the vandalized kitchen. "Oh fuck me," he said under his breath. His eyes looked as surprised as Spike had ever seen--clearly, he hadn't thought the boy had it in him. Then the land-line began another round of insistent ringing, and his expression shifted back to annoyance. He picked up the receiver and glanced at the Caller ID screen, his countenance not changing as he read the name and number displayed. Muting the phone mid-ring, he went back to surveying the damage at his feet. The irritated lines from earlier were still cutting through his aura like interference in a video signal, but there was no sign of the tangled rage that had been in Jared's. Kinney seemed as incapable of true anger as he was of love or happiness.

After a minute or so his face cleared, settling back into the usual cool impassiveness. He went over to the coffee table where his mobile phone lay, flipping it open and dialing a number. He asked the person who answered if his regular cleaner could come today instead of tomorrow, and take care of "a sudden kitchen situation." At a substantial bonus, of course. Apparently hearing an answer he liked, he shut the phone with a satisfied smirk and went back upstairs to finish his morning ablutions, not sparing the destruction below him another glance. His aura had returned to its usual lovely, pellucid blue.

Moments like this had Spike ready to absolve him of any involvement in Wesley's fate. Not because of the aural evidence: He couldn't imagine Kinney caring enough about Wes to kill him.

Witnessing the awful mess he had left for someone else to clean up, Spike couldn't imagine Brian Kinney caring about anything.

12:27 PM

"Lindsay Peterson is on the line for you."

The name drew Spike's attention away from the corner window, where he'd been idly watching traffic patterns while Kinney cleared his in-box. It was a familiar one by now--Kinney's assistant had made similar announcements several times in the past two days. Lindsay Peterson was also the one playing silly buggers with the answering machine this morning. And doing it all the way from Pittsburgh, according to the Caller ID log.

Whoever this dogged individual from Kinney's hometown was, he wasn't anxious to chat with her. "Tell her I'm in a meeting," he said, not looking up from his computer monitor.

Susan raised a finely arched brow at him. "That's the sixth time you've used that excuse. Nobody takes that many meetings, even in LA."

"Then tell her I'm out sick. My wicked ways have caught up with me and I've taken to my bed."

"Good idea. Except she just said, and I quote, 'tell him not to pull the I've taken to my bed crap--I've already tried him at home.'"

"Persistence always was her most sterling quality," he sighed.

Susan's face pulled down in a fierce frown, the expression sitting oddly on her doll-like features. "Is this woman becoming a nuisance to you? Because all I have to do is make a couple of calls and--"

"One of Wolfram & Hart's flesh-eating restraining orders won't be necessary," Kinney broke in. He glanced at the clock, then clicked off his monitor and stood. "Tell her I'm at lunch."

As he passed by, Susan put a small hand on his arm. He had at least a foot of height on her, and she turned up her little oval face like a flower turning towards the sun. "Promise me you'll have lunch on your lunch hour today?" Seeing his eyebrows draw together she dropped her hand, but continued: "I know you think I nag, but you need to eat more. I don't want to see you waste away."

"Susan, I'm a big boy," Kinney said. "I've been feeding myself for at least a couple of years now."

"Yes, but sometimes you forget. If you get, um, distracted, let me know and I'll order something in."

"Your concern for my well-being is touching, psychotic though it is." But he smiled a little to take the sting from his words. "I'll eat while I'm out."

"Okay," she said, not looking convinced. "What should I say if the Peterson woman calls again?"

"Tell her I'm dead. My wicked ways have finished me off and that's why I haven't answered my phone." He shrugged. "We know it has to happen sooner or later."

Susan looked up at him with her dark, dark eyes, which were tip-tilted at the corners like a cat's. "Oh, you'll be around forever," she said.

"Only if you're very lucky," Kinney replied as he exited.

Spike lingered for a moment before following, watching Susan as she gazed after her boss. Her deep magenta aura had brightened with criss-crossing lines of pulsing pink, a shimmering web of infatuation and unsatisfied lust. But at the center of her energies, closest to the skin, was a curdled darkness that would have given her away even if he didn't already know what she was.

Brian Kinney's relationship with his assistant was the warmest in his life. Though he kept matters between them strictly professional, he appreciated her loyalty and tolerated her fussing. Spike would have found it all rather sweet, if he wasn't fairly sure she was planning to kill him.

1:12 PM

"Ever get the feeling we're in a bit of a rut, lad?" Spike said. He looked around the dingy toilet stall with distaste. "You never take me any place nice anymore."

The lad didn't respond. Judging by the moans and cries coming from the stall next door, he probably wouldn't have responded to weapons of mass destruction.

Kinney had apparently set out with every intention of keeping his word to Susan. The small downtown diner he'd headed to had certainly looked promising enough. But the fine-boned brunet waiter must have looked even more so, because here he was, skipping lunch once again to indulge other appetites.

A small hand appeared over the top of the stall, clutching the edge in a white-knuckled grip. "Oh God--you are the best--oh fuck!"

"Yeah yeah, tell me something I don't know," Spike muttered. He scanned the stall's graffiti for the third time, wishing he'd brought something to read.

Make no mistake, the first few days of following Brian Kinney about had been one spellbinding peepshow. His technique was impressive, and his tastes diverse enough to keep things interesting. But after a fortnight, Spike had pretty much exhausted the delights of voyeurism. There was something profoundly depressing about watching other people enjoy the pleasures of the flesh, when your own was in Cloudcuckooland.

Especially when the people in question pleasured themselves with such frustrating frequency. Besides the nightly pill-popping, bed-hopping Disco Inferno, Kinney usually managed at least one spontaneous hook-up before sundown. He was utterly fearless in regards to place or circumstance: from grubby restaurant toilets to the dressing rooms at Barney's, the steam room of his gym to the third-floor supply closet at Wolfram & Hart, the man gratified his needs with an almost vampiric compulsiveness.

In more ways than one. Like vampires, very powerful empaths could feed from others, though they sucked psychic energy rather than blood. There were limitations to this ability. Usually only the strongest, most primal emotions would do: fear, rage, lust, the real caveman responses. And in every case Spike knew of, the empath drew from just one emotion effectively. He or she could suss out any feeling known to consciousness, but only one revved 'em up like one of those godawful energy drinks Fred's lab grunts were so addicted to.

The shared metal wall between the two stalls began to rattle like a particularly rhythmic earthquake. "Holy mother of--ohfuckmejustlikethat--oh Jesus--"

One guess which feeling Kinney's hooked on, Spike smirked.

Yeah, all those beautiful boys did a lot more for him than he ever knew. Sex with a willing person would make an empath wired for desire feel better, react faster, think more clearly. Unlike vampires, empaths didn't inflict serious damage when feeding--some of Kinney's partners might have gone home with a nasty headache or mild flu symptoms, nothing worse. But taking energy without a by-your-leave was considered tacky by those who cared about such things, the equivalent of rifling someone's wallet when he wasn't looking. Kinney wasn't aware of the rules, which meant he indiscriminately fed from each lover he took. His aura soaked up the extra mojo like a thirsty sponge: it was never so blue or so brilliant as when he'd just drained and discarded some disposable boy toy.

The boy toy du jour gave a sharp cry, the high-pitched noise ringing off the grimy porcelain tiles. The hand at the top of the stall abruptly let go, fingers straightening and then wilting down like the petals of a dying flower. A few moments later the stall door banged open and he tumbled out. His face was pale but his dark eyes were luminous, lips spread in a goofy, dazed grin.

Good to know the toys get something out of it, Spike thought.

Kinney emerged buckling his belt, his aura glowing ultramarine with stolen energy. The waiter, whose name-tag identified him as "Marco," turned to him eagerly, taking an order pad and pencil from his shirt pocket and scrawling something on it with fingers that shook a little. "I've gotta get back to my shift before Andre knows I'm gone. But here's my number. Call me, okay?" He tore off the page and held it out.

"Sure," Kinney said easily, taking the piece of paper and putting it in his pants pocket. He went to one of the water-stained sinks and began washing his hands.

Marco cocked his head to one side like an inquisitive bird, his round, boyish face still a little blanched from their brief encounter. But instead of looking equally wan, his pearl-grey aura shone placidly as ever. That's when Spike was sure of what he'd only suspected before: the waiter had a bit of what Kinney had a whole lot of. A mere spark compared with the other man's incandescence, but enough that Kinney's psychic pickpocketing hadn't left him impoverished.

"I'm never going to see you again, am I?" he said.

"No," Kinney said in that same easy tone. He grabbed a paper towel and dried his hands, then crumpled it into a ball and tossed it into the corner waste bin.

Marco took the news calmly, but he shook his head in real regret. "That's too bad. I get the feeling you'd be something to know in real life."

"This is my real life," Kinney replied. He began straightening his tie, handsome features dulled and distorted in the dented metal mirror.

Marco peered at him closely, aura going silver with concentration. "Yeah, I guess it is," he said after a moment. "But it wasn't always, was it?"

Kinney went still, one hand on the silk knot at his throat. Marco moved a couple of steps closer to him, until the outer edges of their auras were just touching. A few silvery-blue glints showered down between them, bright as a handful of diamonds.

Brows drawn together in confused wariness, Kinney turned slowly from the sink, staring at the small, dark-haired man before him. Marco stared back, his black eyes as deep and serene as a Byzantine saint's. He came still closer, his paler aura caressing along the edges of Kinney's more powerful one, moving gently and soothingly as a friend's consoling hand.

At the feel of it, the most singular expression came over Kinney's face. The wariness was still there, but there was something else present in that dark gold gaze: Desire. Not the easy lust Spike was used to seeing, but a need so intense it shaded to hunger.

"No," Marco said. "That's not how it was at all." Slowly his aura flowed into Kinney's, silver washing over blue like moonlight shining on deep water. Kinney's eyes widened but he didn't move away, as Marco's energies explored his in an act so much more intimate than what they'd just done in the bathroom stall. He gave a shuddering breath and suddenly all that brilliant blue flashed dark, not black so much as an absence of color, like a bolt of negative lightning. The moment came and went so quickly that Spike couldn't begin to guess what the strange surge meant.

Whatever it was, it had made Marco's eyes fill with tears. "I'm so sorry, Brian," he said softly. Reaching up, he touched his face gently.

The physical contact shattered their connection. Kinney flinched away and turned back to the sink, hands clutching onto the stained porcelain like he didn't quite trust his legs to keep him standing. But his aura had returned to that scintillating blue, the simmering surface tension making it impossible to see what was going on underneath. When he raised his head, the face reflected in the mirror was even blanker than usual.

"You'd better go," he said, in a voice so absent of inflection it was like listening to a computer speak.

Marco reached out again, but something in Kinney's slow-boiling energy must have made him think better of it. He dropped his hand, sighing.

He walked to the door and opened it, pausing with his hand on the knob. "You have my number, if you ever want--I mean, we don't have to, you know, we could just talk or . . . " he trailed off, then took a breath and tried again: "You really are something special, Brian."

Kinney didn't respond, frozen in place like an Armani-clad statue.

The bright silver of Marco's aura dimmed with disappointment. With a slow shake of his head, he stepped through and shut the door softly behind him.

Kinney's paralysis ended as soon as Marco exited. For a minute or two he remained at the sink, busying himself with the grooming rituals Spike had seen him perform dozens of times. Rituals Spike had identified as the equivalent of a fakir using yoga to center himself. He brushed off his trousers, straightened his jacket, ran a hand through his hair, movements so practiced as to be unconscious, automatic. It wasn't until he moved to pull his cuffs out of his jacket that he broke routine.

Slowly, he pulled something else out of his right sleeve. A bracelet made of cowry shells strung together on thick black thread, the kind of cheap trinket you'd pick up from a street vendor. It contrasted oddly with the rest of his impeccable ensemble. Spike had noticed it before and wondered about it, as it was the one item in the man's wardrobe that wasn't right off the pages of GQ. And the one item he never, ever took off.

His long, graceful fingers lingered over the bracelet, carefully ticking off each shell like he was making sure they were all still there. As he did so, his expression began to change. All that carefully cultivated coldness was melting, melting, into an emotion of which Spike wouldn't have believed Kinney capable: Anguish. Soul-deep anguish, the kind that eats away at you like an incurable cancer. Those wide dark eyes went even wider and suspiciously shiny, full red lips trembling with a pain that went far beyond the physical. The energy around him darkened and swirled fitfully, like a loch stirred by some sinister creature, about to break surface and show itself for the first time.

At last we come to it. Spike moved closer, never taking his eyes from Kinney' face.

Those red lips opened as if to speak, but what he might have confessed to himself in the silence of that grungy little room Spike was never to know. For just then the silence was broken by a familiar high-pitched chirp. Kinney started like a man awakened from an unpleasant dream.

Oh bugger Alexander Graham Bell all to bloody hell, Spike thought, exasperated.

Kinney reached into his coat pocket and took out his mobile phone. He flipped it open and stared blankly at the display dial for a moment. But with vision sharpened by experience, Spike saw the momentary tightening of his jaw, caught the frustrated crackle in his aura. With a quick vicious motion, Kinney chucked the pricy piece of metal at the waste bin. Without looking to see how it landed, he strode out of the mens' room.

Spike waited a moment, then headed over to the trash. Kinney's aim was true--his phone lay in the middle of a mountain of paper towels, still ringing. The sound seemed almost plaintive now, like a crying baby left abandoned on the orphanage steps. He read the name on the neon green display without the slightest bit of surprise.

"So, Ms. Peterson," he said. "We meet again."

He sighed, knowing now what had to be done. He'd been facing this dark prospect for several days, hoping against hope that some alternative would present itself. But this curious scene had convinced him he had no other choice.

My office better have one fucking fantastic view, Spike thought, walking through the wall with as much enthusiasm as a man heading to his own hanging.

1:58 PM

"Harmony, my little blanc mange. You busy?"

She certainly looked it. Her desk was covered in a blizzard of paper, much of it closely printed in what looked like several languages. Spike noticed that she'd already organized some of the sheets into three thick piles. On top of each pile was a stiff beige form containing an elaborate seal and Angel's bold signature at the bottom, written in a rusty red that could only be dried blood.

"Like you care," she said, giving him a wounded glare. "Thirteen days, Spike. That's how long it's been since you came by. I could be dead for all you'd know."

"You are dead, duckie," he returned. "Anyway, couldn't be helped. Pressing affairs of business and all that." Leaning through her desk, he tugged at the edge of the nearest pile. "What is it you're working on there?" He managed to pull the top form close enough to get a better look at the seal, a stylized sun with stars interlaced between the wavering rays that pointed south, southeast, and southwest. "Bloody hell, that's the seal of Aurelius. What devil's bargain is Angelus waging now?"

"Hey, get away from there!" Harmony exclaimed. She snatched up the three forms, holding them protectively to her chest. "God, Spike, nosy much?"

"Mea culpa, pet. Didn't realize I needed a security clearance to see what my sire was up to these days."

"Yeah, well, you do," she said. "This is personal and private business." Stacking the three forms carefully, she shoved them into her bottom desk drawer. "What do you want, anyway?"

"To watch my little busy bee improve her shining hours," Spike said with his best winning smile. "Did I mention you're looking particularly captivating today? That blouse is absolutely--"

"Uh-huh," she broke in. "What do you really want?"

His charms must be tarnished if he couldn't even bedazzle Harmony with them. Sighing, he decided to just lay it out.

"I need a file from Archives and a private place to look it over."

"So? Go down there and ask Aleydis about it. She's the Archives librarian, not me."

"Aleydis and me aren't exactly simpatico. It's a long, tragic tale going back to the old days. I won't bore you with it."

"Is this about that time you borrowed all that money from her and wouldn't pay it back, and she got you thrown in a Turkish jail for like six years?" She grinned. "Val told me about that."

"Six months," Spike said tightly. "Look, are you gonna help me out or not?"

"Maybe," she replied, pursing her lips in a considering way. "What file is it?"

"Brian Kinney's dossier."

Her big eyes narrowed to slits. "Oh, you have got to be--uh-uh. No way, Spike."

"Whyever not?"

"Don't think I don't know what you've been up to, mister," she said, pointing an accusing finger at him. "Aren't you tired of stalking people by now? I mean, it was bad enough when you were chipped but now you can't even--"

"Where'd you hear that?" Spike said sharply.

"--have sex with anybody much less bite them so even if Brian Kinney goes nuts like Buffy and decides he likes you, it's not like you can--"

"Harm, where did you--"

"--do anything about it and even if you could, Brian's like a total manwhore so you'd prob'ly just end up with some nasty--"

Spike reached forward, grabbed the end of her French braid and yanked hard.

"OW! What are you doing?" Harmony cried, jerking away from him.

"That's my personal and private business you're blabbing, you silly bint," he said. "I swear to God, if you've been spying again--" He made another grab for that shining plait. But in a rare burst of vamp speed, Harmony shot out of her seat and a good five feet away.

"I wasn't!" she protested. "I feel it when you're around, that's all, and lately you're always around him. I can't help it if I know you're there even when you go all Spike-lite."

Realization dawned, bright as the rays on the seal of Aurelius. "The bloodline," he said slowly. "That's how you found me out."

"I guess," she said, inspecting the end of her hair. She turned accusing eyes on him. "That really hurt, Spike."

"I'm sorry, lovey," he said, meaning it. "I didn't know the family mojo filtered down to cadet branches."

"Valentine was one of Darla's just like Angel," she pouted. "Just 'cause somebody's not her little lapdog for years doesn't mean they doesn't count."

Actually, that's exactly what it meant. But Harmony had always been understandably sensitive about her sire's humble beginning as one of Darla's eat-and-runs. His goal as yet unachieved, Spike decided not to argue the point.

She had settled back into her seat, hands folded primly on the desk. "I will not enable you in your cycle of self-abuse anymore," she said, sounding like she was quoting from something. "I mean, next thing you know you'll be asking me to put on an Italian suit and screw one of the mail boys in the supply closet. Which, by the way, I would totally never--" she stopped, biting her lip. When she continued, it was in that reciting voice again. "Unless it was as a healthy expression of a committed and loving relationship."

"Oh, is that what this is about," Spike said softly. "A relationship."

Silent for once, Harmony stared at him, her open features unusually opaque. But the pulsating lines in the coral-pink energy surrounding her gave him all the answer he needed.

"You know until the Powers decide to make me a real boy again, anything of that sort's out of the question."

Something stirred in the shallow depths of Harmony's eyes, a shift echoed in the dark heart of her aura. "I can wait."

He peered at her closely. "What heavy thoughts are weighing down that fluffy head of yours?"

She took the papers out of her desk drawer again. "Do we have a deal, or do I go back to my collating?"

Spike mentally ground his teeth. In the Olympiad of Misery he'd endured in recent months, bartering his non-existent body to Harmony took the gold metal for mortification. But there was really no getting around it. Requesting more resources from Angel would be a no-go: he'd been engaged for straight surveillance, nothing more. Any attempt to alter the deal might queer it entirely, especially if Angel got the idea his new hire was second-guessing his investigative process. From long experience, Spike knew it was easier to ask his sire for forgiveness rather than permission, especially if what he was asking forgiveness for had led to some favorable outcome. Asking Gunn or Fred for help in the meantime was also out. Though they'd been the most welcoming of Angel's people, Spike never forgot they were Angel's people, and might go bearing tales. Harmony's loyalties were easily bought--but the price was high. His one consolation was that it was unlikely he'd be in a position to pay up anytime soon.

"Very well," he sighed. "Find me the file and a decent work space, and if the day ever comes that I'm back to my old self . . . we'll see what we can work out."

Harmony gave him a smile that would have done Darla proud. "Yes," she said. "We will."

2:50 PM

"You've got to be bloody joking."

"Hey, you said private," Harmony said defensively. "Trust me, after the way Angel scared the bejeezus out of everybody, no one is gonna come in here."

"But Wyndam-Pryce's office?" Spike said. He glanced around the large, luxuriously appointed room, which was still rather disarranged from the search Angel's crew had given it last week. "Seems a bit cheeky."

"It's not like he'll be needing it."

He gave her a long, sideways glance. "Think he's gone for good, do you?"

She shrugged. "I grew up in Sunnydale. One thing you learn there--when people disappear, they don't come back."

"No, I s'pose they don't." His gaze traveled over the mussy piles of Wesley's books and personal artifacts. The scattered remnants of a man's life, already growing dusty with disuse. "What will Angel do without his good right arm?" he said, more to himself than to her.

"Maybe he'll use the left one," Harmony replied, with another of those strange little smiles.

"Okay, out with it," he said, rounding on her. "What are you all kitten-got-the-cream about?"

"Nothing," she said innocently, her eyes going round and blue as willow-ware. "It's just, um, really cool that I'll never have to do Wesley's xeroxing again." She shoved the file at him so fast he barely had time to adjust his energies to support it. "Here you go. Bring it back when you're done. No hurry, take your time, but I gotta motor."

"Harm--"

"Sorry, Spikey--you know how Angel gets if I'm late with his afternoon blood." Turning so fast her braid lashed around like a platinum whip, she almost sprinted from the room.

An impossible idea arose in Spike's mind for about half a second, before he remembered who had put it there and thoroughly submerged it. The lass was clearly cracked--whatever meager brain nature had gifted her with had no doubt been pickled like an egg by all that hairspray and peroxide. Dismissing her from his thoughts without too much effort, he headed over to the desk and set his burden down.

The file on Brian Kinney, employee #HO29433LA, was four inches thick. A mere précis by Wolfram & Hart standards, where room-sized vaults devoted to a single colorful character were not uncommon. Still, it was daunting enough to make Spike glad fatigue was no longer an issue with him. Too bad Fred and her minions hadn't finished scanning all the company records into her ingenious new system, which allowed a huge amount of information to be transferred directly into the viewer's brain in mere minutes. Though now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure the system would work on someone whose eyes and brain were basically imaginary.

With a small sigh, he opened the file's heavy grey cover.

Brian August Kinney, DOB 4/4/71, Mercy Hospital, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Aries with a Leo moon, stubborn as a ram and vain as a cat, no surprises there. Parents John Patrick (deceased) and Joan Marie, neé Murray. One older sibling, Claire Marie, DOB 6/15/68, only five-and-a-half months after Jack and Joan exchanged vows at St. Paul's Cathedral. The familiar pattern--one baby to snare him, another to tie him down permanently. Nice work, Joanie.

Then again, maybe not. Paging through the information on Kinney's parents, he saw another familiar pattern emerge. On 9/17/68, Joan was admitted to the ER at Mercy with a broken nose. Walked into a door, said the admitting physician's report. Spike wondered wearily if people were buying that excuse even back then. They must have, as the young Mrs. Kinney was patched up without comment and sent home. The same was done when she returned on 10/22/70, coughing blood from a broken rib that had punctured her lung. She told them she'd tripped and fallen down a flight of stairs--you know how clumsy expectant mothers can be. No more pregnancies after that, and no more accidents for awhile, either. Not until Christmas Day 1974--two black eyes and a re-broken nose, reportedly a combination of too much egg-nog and those vicious doors at the Kinney residence.

Joan's clumsiness seems to have cleared up by the mid-'70s. Unfortunately, around that time her youngest child began to show signs he'd inherited his mother's lack of grace. Brian Kinney was seen at Allegheny General for two broken fingers in the late spring of 1976. Slammed them in a door when he was rushing through the house--young boys can be so rambunctious. The injury didn't slow him down. He was back with a severe burn to the palm of his right hand on 2/12/78 (playing with the kitchen stove) and a bucket-handle fracture to his left arm on 12/25/80 (tripped over a stump while distracted by the light saber he got for Christmas). There was no official response to all this painful awkwardness until the fall of 1982. A nurse conducting the required physical for his participation in pee-wee soccer saw the welter of fresh and half-healed bruises on the boy's back and promptly called Social Services. Someone had finally decided that Brian Kinney might be less accident-prone out of his father's reach.

Kinney didn't agree. He denied any abuse, a claim backed by his mother, sister, and various friends and neighbors. Jack Kinney was a hard-working family man who attended the parish church regularly. He paid his union dues and was a loyal member of the Moose Lodge. Sure, he enjoyed a drop or two now and then, but what Irishman didn't? Spike pored over the testimonials, fascinated as always by the human instinct to protect the nuclear family at any cost. Most disturbing was the interview with the alleged victim. His descriptions of playing catch and homework help were touching, as he must have known they would be. He wouldn't have come into anything like his full powers at eleven, but even an embryonic empath could con a social worker. The reason for the deceit was obvious--bad as life at home must have been, a child as wary as Brian Kinney would have feared foster care might be worse.

And the atmosphere in the Kinney household did seem to improve after that. There were no more trips to the ER for anyone in the years that followed. Jack had either been scared straight, or at least motivated to pull his punches. Or maybe the littlest Kinney just learned to duck.

But as Angel was so fond of saying, blood tells. The good people at Immaculate Heart, a private Catholic school for grades K-8, had their hands full with Kinney right from the start: fights with other students, backtalk to teachers, frequent truancy. At ten he was caught putting alum in the faculty coffee pot, receiving a three-day suspension for that little prank. At twelve, he replaced the lecture slides for his science class with pornography. He wasn't punished that time, since no one could prove he'd been anywhere near the audio-visual room. But the school counselor, Father Anthony Clericuzio, knew Kinney of old and wasn't fooled. A note went into his permanent record anyway. That same year he was found in the boiler room with a fellow seventh-grader named Kelly Gunderson, which earned them both two weeks' detention and a required essay on Respecting One's Body. Six months later he was found there again--with an eighth-grader named Martin Banks. The incident was passed off as class-cutting, but the school secretary dutifully noted Kinney was scheduled for a series of counseling sessions with Father Anthony in the weeks following. Sessions which the usually meticulous priest left no notes about at all.

Kinney lasted at the school for as long as he did out of sheer charisma. His second-grade teacher best summed up the faculty's consensus: "Brian can be a bright, charming little boy, when he isn't in one of his 'tempers.' If I could get him to stop hitting the other children and pay attention, he'd be my star student." His grades were mediocre, not reflecting his Stanford-Binet, which identified him as "exceptionally gifted." That was one way of putting it. It surely helped a great deal that he was always a remarkably pretty lad, as his school portraits attested. Pretty gained you an amazing amount of slack, Spike had reason to know.

In late May of his last year at Immaculate Heart, Brian Kinney was expelled for brutally assaulting his gym teacher. According to Father Anthony's report, Kinney and the teacher, one Edward Nelson, were talking quietly by the gym office door when suddenly Kinney snapped. He tackled Nelson to the ground and began beating the man's head repeatedly against the ground, all the while screaming obscenities. What made the incident so odd was that he had been one of the teacher's pets. "It is unknown why Brian would perpetrate such a vicious and unprovoked attack against Coach Nelson," Father Anthony wrote in his pompous style. "Especially considering the many hours the Coach has devoted to instructing him after school and on weekends, the boy showing great talent as a soccer player. I fear that Brian's inability to control his worst impulses--which I'd hoped was merely a sign of immaturity--might in fact be evidence of some deeper disturbance."

Kinney's only comment on the incident, made in the school office while they waited for his parents, was recorded in an expurgated version by Father Anthony: "Ask Ed when he wakes up, he f---ing knows why. Godd--n liar." Then he burst into tears.

Spike read the cleric's report on the attack three times. Then he flipped back to the excerpts from the Immaculate Heart yearbook for 1985. The facsimile of the soccer team's group photo was excellent. Kinney, as captain and one of the tallest members, stood in the back next to the Coach. Nelson had one arm around him, and Kinney's face was turned from the camera, smiling at his teacher.

Spike looked at the photograph for a long while.

Coach Edward Nelson was tasty, if you liked white bread. Blond and fair, with patrician features and the slender, wiry build of a dancer, he would have looked at home standing purposefully on the deck of the Mayflower. The photo showed him to be not much bigger than his not-quite fourteen-year-old student, but the arm around Kinney was muscular and firm. A little too firm, for just the friendly hug of a doting teacher. Almost grasping, his long fingers curling possessively into the tanned flesh of the boy's neck. Kinney's smile in the picture was open and adoring, nothing like the mischievous half-smirk of his school portraits. Nelson's expression was unreadable.

Ask Ed . . . he fucking knows why. Goddamn liar.

At eleven, Brian Kinney had coolly lied to the authorities about his father beating him black-and-blue on a regular basis. The social worker remarked on his self-possession, so incredible in a child that age. But three years later, a quiet talk with his soccer coach sent him into violent hysterics.

Guess it's hard to keep your cool when you've been buggered and abandoned by the only adult you trusted.

Of course, nothing like that was ever suggested in Father Anthony's account. Edward Nelson, when he awoke in the hospital a few hours later, declined to press charges against his favorite student but claimed to have no idea what set Kinney off. No amount of charisma could keep the boy from being summarily booted, but the institution was inclined to show mercy to its troubled son. He was allowed to pass eighth grade, though his parents were informed he would not be welcome at Immaculate Heart's sister school, Holy Spirit High.

By the time everything was decided, Kinney wasn't around to appreciate all this leniency. He'd been missing since the evening of the assault. It took his mother three days to file a report with the police, the delay suggesting it wasn't the first time he'd taken a hiatus from the family bosom. Joan reported that he'd snuck out his bedroom window after she brought him home from school, before his father returned from work and heard the news. You had to admire that kind of survival instinct.

Kinney was found a month later. The cops busted him scoring downers from a small-time dealer in the South Street area of Philadelphia. How he'd lived those four weeks, and how he'd come by the $517 that was found on him, was never addressed in the official record. His mental state was described as "confused" and "agitated" by the arresting officer, a condition attributed to the drugs he was taking. Nobody really wanted to send a pretty white boy from a nice family to Juvie, so Kinney was soon returned to Pittsburgh. Due to the timely intervention of Father Anthony, he was remanded by his parents to a small Catholic facility for troubled teenagers known as St. Jude's House.

The day after Kinney's arrival he viciously attacked his roommate. The roommate, a quiet seventeen-year-old named John Massey who was in for attempted suicide, seemed more bewildered than angry at Kinney's outburst.

Noted in the margins of the page in Angel's bold hand: John Wayne Massey, arrested in 1998 and charged with the murder of seventeen young men and boys in Oregon and Washington State. Known as "Jeffrey Dahmer Jr." by law enforcement officials, Massey had a penchant for necrophilia and cannibalism. Convicted on all counts, he committed suicide in prison, 1999.

A striking image, culled from the incident report in Kinney's patient file composed by Sister Bridget O'Lynn, staff psychiatrist at St. Jude's: the painfully thin fourteen-year-old, clad in nothing but pajama bottoms, struggling against two burly orderlies like an enraged wildcat and yelling at the top of his voice, "He wants to eat my cock! Really eat it! Don't you fucking people get it?"

Kinney was taken to the isolation ward, where his status did not improve. He was kept in restraints and given injections of Thorazine to calm him down. Sister Bridget diagnosed him as suffering from Bipolar Disorder, with extreme manic episodes that resulted in psychotic delusions. She prescribed Lithium and psychotherapy, and directed he remain in isolation until his condition stabilized.

He emerged from the ward a week later a changed man. Though he avoided his former roommate like the plague, there was no more flying into a passion over him. Indeed, Kinney seemed utterly dispassionate about everything. In the records from the facility, Sister Bridget provided a description of her patient that sounded eerily familiar: "flat affect," "lack of appetite and disrupted sleep patterns," "evasive about personal relationships," "aside from several sexual encounters (see Fr. Harper's disciplinary report) exhibits a profound alienation from his peers."

She worried he might be entering a major depressive phase. "Brian has been calm and lucid since the incident," she wrote. "But I fear under that quiet exterior lies a vein of deep rage which, if not properly explored, will do untold damage to his future well-being." She advocated keeping him at St. Jude's under a strict regimen of medication and therapy until real improvement was observed. A not-unastute diagnosis, and a fairly humane course of treatment. But Sister Bridget had no idea what she was really dealing with.

Psychics are invariably sharp, sensitive children. But they don't develop any real power until puberty, when the full force of their ability hits them like a runaway train. The transition to adult powers is invariably difficult. Even those from the old families, with a world of support at their disposal, sometimes trip right out of their supercharged skulls.

Spike could only imagine how it must have been for Brian Kinney. To awaken one day and be able to feel the emotions of everyone around you, joy and rage and grief flying at your unshielded mind like bullets. If you were already loathe to trust people, how it would shake you to suddenly know, not just suspect, the darkest desires of human nature. Every dirty little secret, every buried passion. At once to understand how largely you figured in other people's fantasies. And all the while to have no idea where this knowledge came from, or how to shut it out of your tortured brain. Add on top of this an affair with a man twice your age and a family right out of a Chekhov novel, and you have the psychological equivalent of Chernobyl. All it would take is one bad day to cause a fatal meltdown.

On May 21^st, 1985, Brian Kinney went China Syndrome. He should never have come back from it. When Kinney's parents removed him from St. Jude's in September--against Sister Bridget's sternest warnings--and enrolled him in public school, the result should have been disaster. Kinney going Columbine when Columbine wasn't cool.

But astoundingly, he blossomed at North Allegheny High. Notes from his early sessions with Dr. Lester Poole, the school psychologist he saw for one hour a week during his freshman year, depicted the same icy disaffection described in Sister Bridget's reports. But by January, Dr. Poole noted a real change in his outlook. He was less withdrawn and hostile, more interested in school activities and classmates. He talked with real engagement about a new interest of his, which was wholesome and age-appropriate: comic books.

It sounded like another snow job to Spike, but surprisingly, Dr. Poole's hopeful prognosis was borne out by succeeding events. From 1986 onwards, Kinney's file read like a Horatio Alger story--Young Man Overcomes Tragic Childhood and Makes Good. Problem was, Horatio Alger was bollocks. After a century and a half of existence, Spike knew the first law of human behavior was that a body in crisis will stay in crisis, unless acted upon by an outside force. And in Kinney's case, that force would've had to be considerable. But there was no trace of it in the official documents.

A similar thought must have crossed Angel's mind. Written at the bottom of the last page of Kinney's stellar college transcripts was a single word, underlined for emphasis: sociopath.

Spike didn't think so. Yeah, it happened sometimes with empaths, especially the ones who had been abused. People who no longer gave a damn for others, but retained the ability to read their deepest needs and fears and make use of them. They were some of the scariest human beings imaginable.

But there was too much evidence in Kinney's file that he did, indeed, give a damn. In late 2000, he had fathered a child by the persistent Lindsay Peterson. It was unclear whether the pregnancy began with a fling or a favor: Kinney seemed staunchly same-sex oriented, but he wasn't the type to deny himself something he wanted, whether or not it had a Y-chromosome. In any case, he continued to pay substantial child support for the little boy, though he'd given up parental rights to a Melanie Marcus--presumably Peterson's female lover--years ago. Peterson and her son were also the beneficiaries of a very substantial insurance policy he'd taken out soon after the child's birth.

This generosity extended to other relationships. There were checks to a number of repeating names over the years, obviously loans to friends: Jeff Cramer (deceased), Lindsay Peterson again, Emmett Honeycutt, Debbie Novotny. Some to his sister (though those had stopped recently) and even some to his father, right up to the man's death two years ago. That year he also co-signed a small business loan for one Theodore Schmidt. For four semesters he paid the expensive tuition at Pittsburgh Institute of Fine Arts for a young man named Justin Taylor. In 2001, Kinney was mentioned in several newspaper articles as intervening in a vicious attack on this same young man, an act of heroism for which he'd received some kind of award. A rather snippy editorial in the local gay rag about the award strongly hinted that he and the barely legal Taylor were romantically involved.

Against all expectations, until six months ago Brian Kinney had managed to create a stable, successful life for himself in Pittsburgh. Then everything imploded. His partnership in Vangard Advertising, one of the largest firms in the state, dissolved under murky circumstances. Though his ruinous financial contributions to a radical political group called Concerned Citizens for the Truth, which had targeted one of Vangard's biggest clients, probably had something to do with it. A few months later he took the job at Wolfram & Hart, leaving behind friends, family, and his lover. Now he was alone in L.A., exhibiting the same symptoms that attended his breakdown all those years ago.

Spike slammed the file shut in frustration. None of it made any sense. Brian Kinney had fallen apart at fourteen, under pressures that would have shattered a cast-iron psyche. Somehow he welded himself back together six months later, and barring a few cracks the work had lasted almost twenty years. So why was he going to pieces now?

Something important missing here, he thought. Missing from Kinney's file, and missing from Kinney himself. Till I find it, I don't think I've a snowball's chance of figuring out what he did with Wesley. If, indeed, he did anything.

He glanced over at Wesley's antique brass clock, seeing with some surprise that it was nearly eight. Kinney would probably be at his flat by now, having finished his daily debauch at the gymnasium. With a weary sigh, Spike realized there was nothing for it but to return to the regularly scheduled stalking. Maybe he'd get lucky and Lindsay Peterson would be in the bushes outside, babe in one hand and high-powered binoculars in the other. He was beginning to think it was his only hope of solving this whole sad conundrum of a case.

Focusing his will, Spike picked up the file, intending to lug it out to Harmony's desk and leave it there for her to return in the morning. Still preoccupied, he didn't focus hard enough. He hadn't gone two steps before the thick binder went tumbling to the floor, stray papers flying out and strewing everywhere. "Oh for fuck's sake," he muttered, reaching to pick up the scattered sheets. A few had floated under the desk, and he crouched through it to get them. It was dark under there, which made retrieval awkward--it was hard to focus when you couldn't see what you were supposed to be focusing on. He finally had to push them along the carpet to get them out.

His gaze was caught by a tiny bright object that had been pushed out with them. Forgetting about the papers, he picked it up for a better look. When he realized what it was, he w