Prologue

Los Angeles 2004 – The Alley North of The Hyperion

The battle is raging all around them as Illyria sidesteps the sword-strike from her closest opponent and brings her booted foot down hard on the blade as the demon grounds the tip of his sword into the cement. The blade snaps like twig and Illyria punches her assailant in the throat with concussive force, sending him hurtling back and into the advancing demons like a thunderbolt.

Angel blocks high with his sword, catching the down-stroke of an axe on the blade and sending a shower of sparks to the ground. He shifts to the right, side-kicking the axe wielder and knocking him off balance. He follows through with a lightning-fast backhanded sweep and the demon's head rolls away as two more of its brethren charge him.

Gunn slips on the slick cement, unwittingly avoiding decapitation as another of the attackers swings its axe in a broad arc from behind him. Gunn hears the whistling noise above the sound of the down-pouring rain and stabs up and backward, planting his sword blade deep in the guts of the would-be back-stabber. He rolls forward, drawing the sword out of his victim and then engages two more with a whirling attack, grunting in pain as the front of his shirt grows redder by the moment.

Spike catches an attacker's upraised arm in his free hand and neatly pierces it through the chest with his own sword. He plants a foot on the skewered demon and pushes him away, yanking the blade free as he does so. Two more demons spring at him and he ducks one swing and parries another, being driven back despite his best efforts to hold his ground. His features have shifted to their demon form and he collides with something and from long experience, instinctively knows that he's back to back with Angel. Several demons rush forward and he can hear the other vampire yell, "Budapest!" above the clash of combat. Spike reaches back immediately and grabs Angel's free arm, spinning as he does so. Angel duplicates Spike's action and the two vampires swing their sword-arms in a whirling back-handed arc, sending several heads rolling away as their blades whistle through the air. Spike catches a glimpse of Gunn leaning heavily against the wall as the second wave of attackers charge down the alley. None of them were 100 when the fight started and grimacing at the odds, Spike decides that they probably won't live through the second assault. He grips his sword hilt tightly and moves forward to meet the charge when the air ripples behind him. A massive energy blast hurtles past the survivors and smashes into the charging horde in front of him. The demons scream in pain and rage as their front rank dissolves under the impact of the blast.

Both Angel and Spike freeze and then exchange a look when their surprise is interrupted by a mewling screech from above them. The dragon swoops low, its massive jaws agape as it bellows a deafening roar, its huge scaly form driving through the torrential rain and coming in for the kill. Angel cocks his arm and hurls his sword directly at the beast's open mouth with the last of the borrowed strength from Hamilton's blood. The blade rotates twice in the air before slamming into the dragon's upper palate, slicing through the tough flesh and lodging deep in its brain. The beast veers violently to the right, its body crashing into the side of the hotel and rains bricks down into the mouth of the alley. It seems to stagger in mid-air and tries to flap its wings to drive itself upward but then it seems to stall in mid-air and with a horrible shriek, it crashes to the earth, smashing a crater into the cement of the alley and finally twitches briefly before it becomes still.

"Nice throw pop," Connor's voice opines from behind them. The four remaining Champions whirl to see Connor standing beside Faith and Willow, the Slayer with a long bladed dagger in either hand, and the witch's eyes, black and oily looking. Willow raises her arms again and sends another blast down the alley, driving the remaining demon hordes farther back.

"Red? Faith?" Spike stammers in shock. "Come for the fun, have you?"

"I met them outside the Wolfram & Hart building," Connor explains, stooping to lift one of the slain demons' swords. "They were looking for dad and I figured this was where he'd probably go as a last resort."

"Connor, get out of here!" Angel shouts, his eyes wide with sudden fear. "Son, please! Get out while you can!"

"We're all going," Willow says in a low voice, the whole of her eyes still black and glittering in the dim light of the alley. She mutters again and a curtain of energy suddenly envelopes the mouth of the alley, temporarily halting the increasingly furious demon horde. Several of them crash into it but an earth-shaking bellow draws them away as a massive demon, at least three stories tall, approaches the barrier. "And it had better be fast before Kong there decides he wants in."

"What?" Angel glares at the witch and then shakes his head angrily. "No way, this is where it ends." He turns to face the mouth of the alley as the gigantic demon hits the barrier. The force of the impact causes the barrier to shudder, but it manages to hold. Willow spasms from the impact and blood flies from her nose. Angel turns back to the mouth of the alley, gripping the hilt of his sword grimly. "I came here to fight."

"You can't fight that," Illyria tells him coldly. She grabs his arm. "That is a Malgor; fighting it is like fighting gravity. You will perish within seconds."

"Sounds about right," Angel agrees, shaking off her hand. He picks up a second sword and grits his teeth. "But I'll give it something to remember me by."

"Oh to hell with this," Faith says in a voice laden with frustration. She grabs the exposed end of a piece of rebar protruding from the wall and pulls mightily. It comes free with a horrible groan, a large chunk of concrete still affixed to its end. The Slayer shifts her grip and swings it hard into the back of Angel's head, felling the vampire like a sandbag. She picks the unconscious vampire from the ground and looks at the others grimly. "Where to?"

"Bugger, why didn't I think of that," Spike mutters under his breath. He looks over at Gunn who is still conscious but fading fast. "Where to Charlie? It looks like it's time for a strategic retreat."

Gunn opens his mouth but another crash drowns him out as the Malgor hits the barrier again. Willow jerks violently, nearly falling, but Connor catches her and sets her back on her feet. Gunn shakes his head and gestures to the Hyperion. "Inside. The hotel. Sanctuary spell."

"Right," Connor moves to the wall and goes to break down the door when Gunn stops him.

"I have keys you know," Gunn gasps. He takes a ring from his pocket and tosses them to the younger man. "The one with the blue tab."

Connor fumbles the keys for a moment and then opens the heavy metal door. The others head in just as the Malgor shatters the barrier and the demons start flooding the alley again. He pulls it closed just as the first echelon reach it. The sound of them pounding on the heavy iron door echoes through the deserted hotel and Connor looks around at the strange/familiar surroundings. "I think we need a new plan."

"No shit Sherlock," Faith shakes her head and heads down the service hall to check the lobby. The cast-iron roll-down shutters and heavy iron bars that Angel had installed when they had moved to Wolfram and Hart appear to be intact. The dull red glow of the emergency lights make the rain water running from her face and hair look like dripping blood to the others.

"You clocked him pretty good there luv," Spike remarks admiringly, studying the unconscious Angel as he slips two cigarettes between his own bloodied lips and lights up. He passes a second one to the Slayer and gives her a wry smile as she lights it. "Something happen between you two that I should know about?"

"Hopefully she didn't get him too good," Gunn comments dryly. His voice is wan and shallow . Illyria is tending to his assorted wounds, and it is sufficient to say that she lacks a woman's gentle touch. "We're going to need him for when the Senior Partners catch wise and crack through Lorne's sanctuary spell." He grimaces as Illyria touches one of his many wounds and looks around the musty lobby. "Or, you know, if we ever need food that's not Sweet 'n Lo."

"He'll be fine," Faith murmurs absently, not much sounding as though Angel's plight is of much concern to her. She is pacing the floor, arms crossed over her chest and she isn't even looking at Angel's prone form sprawled over the couch; her eyes are on the large doors, and the uncertain future beyond them.

"Can't you just like, check his pulse or something?" Connor asks. "What's the big deal?"

"Uh, vampire remember?" Spike answers dully. "We're dead. No convenient vital signs. Besides, if your pop here was a goner there'd be nothing left but a little patch of dust."

"Oh, right. That must be weird." He eyes the opaque swirl of Spike's cigarette furl around the vampire's platinum blonde head. "How do you smoke if you don't breathe?"

"Where's Wes and Cordy?" Willow asks looking around the group. The silence that greets her question is answer enough. "Oh, damn."

"He's waking," Faith says quietly. Everyone turns to look at her.

"Oof," says Angel, and everyone turns to look at him. He sits up slowly, flinching and bringing a hand to his head. "What the - where are we?" He straightens and looks around him. "What the - we left? There's a fight left out there damn it, we have to -" He starts to rise but Illyria strides over and clamps a hand on his shoulder, slamming him back to the couch, suggesting that he may still be weak from his head injury.

"Sit down," Willow suggests quietly, turning to lock her eyes on Angel's.

He narrows his eyes. "You," he growls. "This is your doing. Look, Willow, it's been fun, but I have to get back -" He starts to rise again.

"Sit down," Faith tells him without looking at him. Angel sees the Slayer for the first time and moves to get up but Willow raises her hand palm up and hits him in the stomach with a small matter transference spell. He falls back into the couch, glaring at Willow petulantly.

"Listen, you two," he growls. "I don't have time for your bullshit right now. My fight is out there, I have to -"

"Sorry for breaking up your evening's plans or whatever, but we came to ask for your help and don't have a lot of time for macho crap. And I figured it would, you know, be a lot harder for you to lend a hand if you were all dead," Willow interjects herself between the Slayer and the now very irritated vampire.

Angel sneers. "And by you asking for my help, I assume you mean that the Watcher's Council is asking for my help." He rises, shooting Willow a warning glance, "Put the magic wand away Sabrina. One more of those mystic nudges and I may get testy."

"Actually, I'm the one doing the asking," Faith tells Angel evenly, brushing past the witch to make herself front and center in the vampire's gaze.

"And why should I help the Council?" Angel asks, his voice now tinged with a note of vindictiveness. "I mean, with all the help they've given me this year, I'm not really seeing much of an incentive."

Willow forgets the bantering and looks at the vampire questioningly. "What are you talking about?"

After a moment of Angel's eyes scouring Willow's face, he nods to Illyria. "That kind of help."

Willow's facial expression is now fraught with the genuine confusion. "What? It's Fred! Fred with kind of a new dominatrix-y thing going on but, hey, who hasn't done that and . . ." Her voice begins to very slowly lose its upbeat tone, in direct correlation to how much her forehead creases. ". . . and maybe she's looking a bit pale and . . . blue-" She trails off. "Crap. What happened?"

Angel is too busy glowering to answer her. Spike, however, is happy to fill her in. "Ancient deity snuck inside her body."

"It burned her out from the inside," Gunn says in a pained voice. "She's just using Fred's body as a shell."

"Fred's gone … dead." Angel concludes, the fire of anger in his voice replaced by a kind of exhausted grief.

Willow looks around at all of their bereaved faces, and then to the smooth, emotionless face of Illyria. She allows her jaw to drop, horrorstruck. "Oh … I … I had no idea." Angel's eyes narrow to anger again. "Really, Angel, no one told me. I had no idea. I'm so sorry." She looks around at the faces again and now her lips tighten as she notices the missing faces. "Is it true about Wes and Cordy?" she asks quietly. Again, silence greets her and Willow feels real pain in her own chest. "We really have lost touch."

Angel surveys her coldly before speaking. "So you can understand my not leaping at the chance to help you."

Willow sighs, irritated. "Look, I liked Fred a lot, and Wes and Cordy and all of you, and I feel horrible that this has happened to her. But you can't ignore your calling because -"

"My calling," he roars, "is out on those streets!"

"You're a pile of dust in about 30 seconds of you're out on those streets," Faith counters softly.

He swallows thickly, his jaw going tight. "Maybe. But, I have to -"

Spike raises his hand. "If I might interject here, I'm quite okay with not being dead … well, again at any rate." He dips his head to the witch, Faith and then Connor. "Red, psycho, tiny Angel, kudos for the ass-saving."

"Ditto," Gunn agrees. "I don't like walking out on a fight either, but I'm liking this whole still-alive thing. And we did it Angel. We took down the Circle. What's the point in dying now?"

Angel makes a frustrated noise in the back of his throat. "It's not about dying! It's about the fight, and -"

"What fight?" Faith interjects forcefully, anger coloring her tone now. "All I saw was a massacre waiting to happen. You can't win out in that alley Angel. No one could. You used to be smarter than that."

"I also agree that this is preferable to death," Illyria comments absently. "Death is much more stagnant than this." She pauses. "And devoid of Crash Bandicoot."

Angel huffs. "Look, I have to go back, I have to finish this -"

Faith eyes him oddly. "It's okay that you're not dead, Angel," she says quietly. "You don't have to die to have won."

He doesn't say anything, just looks down at the floor with a concentration that suggests that he can't see it at all.

"I'm kinda glad you're not dead, if it helps," Connor says softly. "That's, you know, why I let her clobber you upside the head."

Angel looks up at his son, his expression showing that he is mildly surprised that his son is there with him. In his anger he'd forgotten. He begins to speak, but Willow cuts him off.

"Look, Angel," she says. "It's over here. Your fight here is finished. But the war, the one that we've all fought for the past eight years . . . I know it may not matter to you that we need you, and it sure as hell doesn't matter to you that the Council needs you." She pauses, studying his face. He is listening passively, which - while not really the get up and go vigor that she would like to see- isn't blind anger, so she decides to count it as a win until Faith interrupts her.

"I need you." The Slayer pauses before continuing. "And Buffy needs you. The world needs you and your ashes being flushed down a gutter in the rain out there doesn't help anyone."

He sighs, finally allowed his muscles to relax. It takes him a moment to speak. "Alright," he says softly. "What do you need?"

Willow showers him with a radiant smile that he doesn't even pretend to return. Spike breaks into her happy triumph. "Don't mean to be a buzz-kill here, kids, but we've still got to get out of here before Angel's ex-employers find a way to beat that spell. We've got some serious evil wanting us very dead, and, as a very special bonus for us fanged types, it's going to be dawn soon."

Gunn comes to his feet, weak and wincing from his wounds but looking not the least bit worried. "No problem."

Connor regards him with disbelief. "No problem? That sounds like a lot of problem."

"We'll just take the jet," he replies.

Connor looks intrigued and turns to his father. "Jet? You have a jet?"

Spike snorts. "Yeah, I'm sure the Senior Partners - they're the ones trying to kill us, remember - won't mind us nipping out in the company bird. I'm sure there'll be peanuts and mimosas."

Gunn smiles. "Technically, Angel is still the CEO of the L.A. branch of Wolfram and Hart. His contract specifically says that he is free to kill all the outside demons that he wants and any employees of the Senior Partner's in self-defense so he hasn't technically violated that contract. We should have no problem gaining access to the company jet."

Connor beams at Angel. "It is so cool that you have a jet."

Angel hazards a half smile at his son.

Willow speaks up cautiously. "I don't know if I can keep a protection spell as powerful as we'll need up long enough for us to get to the airport."

Gunn smiles again. "Not a problem. There're a million ways to get out of this place without the baddies catching the wiser."

"Hey, I remember that," Connor comments as Gunn leads them to one of the million ways of getting out of the Hyperion without catching baddies the wiser. The boy turns his attention to Angel coming up behind them. "Do you think I could fly the jet for a bit once we're in the air?"

"No offense Connor, but in my timeline you're still toilet-training. I'm not sure I'm ready for you to pilot a jet."

"Oh, come on!"

"I . . . we'll see."

He grins. "Awesome."

Part 1

Ghosts of the Machina

London 2004 - Head Quarters of the Council of Watchers

Rupert Giles curses under his breath as the pile of paperwork on his desk teeters and spills to the floor. All he'd done was reach for his teacup when his elbow has jostled the stack of folders for the briefest of seconds and sent the whole bloody thing to the floor. He stakes off his glasses and rubs his eyes briefly before punching the intercom on his desk. "Meghan? Could you come in and assist me for a few moments? I need some help sorting some things out."

"Certainly Mr. Giles," Meghan's voice is crisply professional and seconds later come three brisk knocks at the heavy oak doors of his office before his assistant walks in. Everything about Meghan screams efficiency, from her sensible low heels to the immaculate crease in her slacks, right down to the perfect sweep of every strand of her silver hair into its sensible bun at the back of her head. She makes an admonishing cluck with her tongue as she sees the scatter of papers all over the floor and in seconds she is knelt down among them, sorting with an almost ruthless speed and grace.

"Thank you Meghan," Giles sighs. From the moment she'd been assigned to him he'd felt like an inept schoolboy in her presence. He'd forgotten just how intimidating a proper British matron could be after all of his time in America. His mother had been one of those women and more than anything else, this had driven his youth towards the black-arts.

Despite his best efforts, Rupert Giles had never grown to like rules. His uncle, Everett Giles had tried to interest the bright young man in Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, Alexander Dumas and Robert Louis Stevenson as a child and young Rupert had taken quite fond of the stories his uncle had told him at bedtime, despite his mother's firm stance that such tales were nonsense and of no use to the boy. The tales had been full of swordplay, good versus evil, daring and adventure; capturing the young man's mind like a moth to a lamp before he'd grown to adolescence. Reading under his blankets late at night had shifted to playing guitar and listening to The Who and Pink Floyd on an old Delco record player he'd salvaged from the attic as the young Rupert Giles had reached his teens however. When he had reached the age of 18 his uncle had let the young Rupert in on a secret, a secret that not many young men or old were privy to. Monsters and magicks were real. All the old stories of the boogie-man under the bed and the trolls under the bridge turned out to be not as absurd as one might think. He began to study voraciously and by the time he was 21, "Ripper" as he was known to his friends had been the leader of a East-side London gang of youths known as the "Disciples of Eyghon"; a group of brash young men and women who had dropped out of Cambridge and were doing their level best to create a niche for themselves in the London underworld by exploiting the darker side of what they had learned in secret from men who called themselves "the Watchers".

One night, sitting in a pub in Soho, Ripper was sipping absently at a pint of bitter stout and listening to his best mate Ethan Rayne espouse on what was to take place later that evening. "Ripper mate, if we can nail down that last hieroglyphic we can be coasting a wave of euphoria by sunrise." The lanky Rayne slipped into the booth in the back of Fiddleman's Pub with the grace of a seal sliding into the water off of an ice floe. "Everyone's in. Phillip, Deidre, Randall, all of us." Rayne sighs contentedly into his pint of malt. "All we need is a go-ahead."

"Right," Ripper sips at his Guinness and nods fractionally, allowing a few stray strands of his hair to fall down into his eyes for effect; more a Sid Barrett than Keith Moon look, he thinks. "It ought to be a lot more stable with the five of us than when it was just you and I."

"Never picked you for the orgy type Ripper," Rayne grins at his friend as the band on the tiny stage of the pub strike up a new tune. "But you're right. Strength in numbers helps beat back the bloody Hun, what?"

Ripper laughs, and just then another young man with sandy hair and crushed velvet pants arrives. "Right. Hey Ripper, we gonna really do the deed tonight?"

"All hands to it," Ethan says with a grin and a nod. Giles just cocks his head and gives the newcomer a mischievous grin.

"So we are doing it then?" the young man frowns uncertainly.

"Aye, a dangerous new past-time for some dangerous men Phillip." Rayne grins.

"You mean..." Phillip looks at Ripper and at Ethan and back again. "You two already did it? You contacted Eyghon?"

"Just a little taste," Ethan says. "Don't look so frightened, Phillip." He looks at Ripper with a gleam in his eye. "Tell the boy what it was like."

Ripper leans back and says nonchalantly, "It's a bloody trip."

Philip's eyes widen and he swallows, "Right then."

"Well look at these three sorry bastards. Grinnin' into their pint glasses and makin' up lies to tell the ladies devil a doubt. What ya all talkin' about?" A tall young man with long blonde hair asks, a good-natured smile on his face. He's accompanied by a petite brunette wearing a pillbox hat.

"Randall, nice of you to drop by finally," Ethan says sarcastically. "Was there a line up at the ladies room?"

Randall runs a hand through his long blond hair. He's a newcomer to the group, "I like to be fashionably late. Keeps folk interested."

"Wouldn't that require you to be fashionable on occasion?" Ripper jabs.

The brunette snickers and Ethan snorts, "Good one, mate."

"What? You're worse," Ripper tells him. "I seem to recall a pair of white and black striped pants that you picked up after that Lou Reed concert last year."

That sets the group off. Ethan's taste, or lack of, was always a topic of great amusement. Ethan glares at his friend, "Sod off, Ripper." The laughter dies down and the others watch as the two glower at each other. An easy smile is displayed across Ripper's face, but his eyes are set in a stone serious gaze, the smile not touching them at all. Ethan returns the stare, but after a moment his eye twitches. He knows better than anyone, not to get in a fight with Giles. Soft tone of voice aside, then man had a volcanic temper and Ethan didn't fancy getting the shit beaten out of him tonight. The band on stage strikes up a cover of a Roger Daltrey song.

Can you see the real me? Can you, can you?

Ethan scoffs, then jabs Ripper in the shoulder, "C'mon lad. Y'know it's all in fun."

Ripper nods and the group seemed to let out a collective sigh. "Well then," Randall clasps his hands together, "Shall we get on then?"

The black haired man nods. "Hey, are we doin' it now?"

Ripper shakes his head, "Later. Now's no good."

"Why not?" Ethan challenges. Not the smartest move.

"It's just not," Ripper tells him, a warning tone to his voice.

Just then a gorgeous black girl of about 17 with slanting eyes and impossibly pouty lips sidled up and took Giles' arm warmly in her hands. "I thought you said that you were coming here to meet me," the words slip through her mouth like perfumed oil as her dark eyes sparkle briefly in the dim and smoky room.

Ripper looked up at her and smiled slowly before turning back to the group at the table.
"Maybe later, Phillip," he tells the other man before locking his eyes back with Ethan's and then rising.

"Hello Olivia. Right. Later then" Rayne says evenly. His eyes don't flinch from Giles'. He then nods to the dance floor. "You two should dance. Ripper likes this song."

The girl I used to love lives in this yellow house

Yesterday she passed me by,

She doesn't want to know me now

Can you see the real me? Can you, can you?

Ripper looks at her and relents, "Fine." He glances at Ethan once more while Olivia leads him away, through the smoke. The others sit around.

"What's with Rupert t'night?" the Deidre asks Phillip.

"Dunno," he replies shortly, his eyes following Ripper and Olivia to the tiny dance-floor. "And you should call him Ripper," Ethan says after a moment.

"S'cuse me?" Randall asks, a little chuckle slipping out.

Ethan turns to the taller man, "Ripper. His name you dolt, it's Ripper."

"Ripper?" Randall repeats the name uncertainly. "Why's that?"

"Because that's who he is now. He's on a new kinda high," Ethan says, watching his two friends move together on the dance floor thoughtfully. After a second he shakes his head and then grins up at Randall. "What say I pummel you at darts again Randall? Do I need to spot you points again or did you finally leave the dress at home?"

"Mr. Giles?" Meghan's clipped voice drew the Head-Watcher back to the present with a start. He looked up to see his assistant with the files all sorted and stacked neatly on the edge of the desk again. "Everything seems to be in order. Will there be anything else?"

"No, no, thank you Meghan. That's quite enough." He smiles at her and she returns it stiffly. "Any appointments this afternoon?"

"Just young Mr. Wells," the contempt in her voice barely concealed. "He's due in just a moment or two actually."

"Marvelous," Giles grumbles. "That will be all then Meghan." His assistant nods and sweeps out of the office and Giles stifles a grin as he imagines the gears and cogs whirring in his assistant as if she was some sort of secretarial automaton. His good humor is fleeting however as he remembers sourly that Andrew will be in his office in just a minute or two.

Giles had begrudgingly taken the young man in as a member of the Council more out of desperation than any desire. As Willow had quite cogently pointed out when they had recuperated from the battle in Sunnydale for a few days, there were hundreds of new Slayers that required Watcher's and hardly any of the old guard left. Andrew knew the legacy, had fought alongside them and was almost encyclopedic in his knowledge of demons and ancient languages. Plus the younger man had been so blasted eager to help that Giles had found it impossible to refuse taking him on to help with the rebuilding of the Council. What he hadn't anticipated was all of the other Sunnydale alumni scattering so quickly, Buffy and Dawn to Italy, Willow and Kennedy to South America, Robin and Faith staying in America and Xander being detailed to find, well, no one but a few key members of the Council new the exact details of Xander's mission in Africa; and he'd been left with the day-to-day charge of turning Andrew into a Watcher.

A knock on the door announced the arrival of his 2 o'clock appointment and Giles steeled his nerves for Andrew's arrival. In the young man's defense, he had immediately volunteered to retrieve Dana when Angel had called all of those months ago and his report of the activities of the Wolfram and Hart office in L.A. had left Giles with distinctly mixed feelings. It was important to retrieve the girl, but his report had been highly useful. The knowledge of Spike's continued existence had shocked all of them at the Council, but finding out that Spike was a free-lance Champion and demon-fighter now had been even more disconcerting. What the Hell were they up to there? Well that's why he'd sent Willow and Faith wasn't it? That and the fact that they were in dire need of help.

"Mr. Giles?" The door to Giles' office had swung open fractionally and Andrew Wells pokes his head in through the crack.

"Yes, right here Andrew," the Head Watcher replies tiredly and beckons the young man inside. Andrew grins and sweeps through the door theatrically, a large manila envelope in his hand and hustles across the plush carpet of the office and plumping down in the seat across from his superior's desk. Giles gives him a sour smile and leans back slightly in his expensive swivel chair. "So what news do you have for me?"

"Loads mon capitain," Andrew sets the envelope on the desk and extracts a sheaf of documents and photos from inside. "I did like you asked and contacted Commander Finn at Special Ops in Fort Bragg and he sent me everything." He gives Giles a curious look. "He wanted me to ask if you've been nuzzled to death lately. Any idea what he was talking about?"

Giles nearly spits the mouthful of tea he'd just sipped onto the desk blotter in front of him and coughs into his hand before replying. "Not a clue. Pray continue with the briefing."

"Well it seems that the subject Rayne broke out of the military facility in Nevada last September in a fairly spectacular fashion." Andrew shuffles through some of the documents, "It seems that he had lots of outside help. First they took out the power-grid for the whole facility which is no small feat since they have two redundant generators, one of which is about 40 feet below ground in a concrete sleeve with lead shield about 3 feet thick. Its supposed to be able to withstand a 10 megaton nuclear blast within 5 kilometers and EMP proof so we can rule out any conventional means. That only leaves a mystical answer." Giles grimaces and nods for the younger man to continue.

"Now if that wasn't enough, the facility is guarded my an entire regiment of marines, and the whole thing is rigged to shut down completely in the event of a catastrophic power interruption. To get to Rayne's cell would require any potential rescuer to get past several hundred armed gaurds, blast through 9 solid steel barricade doors, several more gates made of reinforced titanium bars and then manage to get him out and away before the standby units arrived from Groom Lake in Apache attack helicopters 17 minutes after the power initially went down." Andrew shakes his head admiringly. "Like I said, pretty spectacular," he pauses frowning. "Now I suppose it would be possible if you had access to some pretty hefty dark magicks, plus the eye witness reports recorded a whole platoon of these ninja looking guys running around and they cut a swathe through the marines like Jedi through Stormtroopers. Then they pull this whole Keyser Soze deal and," he holds a closed hand up to his mouth and blows into it, opening his fingers as he does so. "Like that, he's gone."

"Quite," Giles grunts, fidgeting a little. "So that's the whole report? He just vanished?"

"Well not quite," Andrew says and pulls a photo out from the pile of documents and sets it in front of the older man. "They found this in the cell." Giles leans over and examines the photo closely. It's a black and white high resolution photo of a symbol that seems to have been burnt into the solid cement floor of a prison cell. The symbol appears to be of a circle with two radial lines extending through its lower half, the one on the left that of an arrow with a barbed head and the one on the right ending with a bulbous tip. Just to the right of the arrow is a smaller circle offset from the much larger central circle.

"The Left Hand Path," Giles breathes, slightly awestruck. Andrew nods vigorously.

"Not a nice bunch," the younger Watcher says quietly. "But I thought they were Satanists? What do a bunch of Satanists want with a guy like Rayne?"

"Not Satanists Andrew," Giles corrects him. "Some Satanic groups have taken up the symbol but its origins are far older and darker than college kids playing Black Sabbath records backwards." Giles looks up from the photo and closes his eyes, leaning back in his chair again. "Like most supposedly Satanic symbols, this has its roots in a much older religion that Christianity and its original meaning was bastardized by the church. Any pagan symbols that predated Christianity were usually demonized by the church to cloud their true origins and paint any of their users and followers as heretics and Satanists. Like most faiths, the Christian churches of old were jealous masters and tolerated no rivals." He opens his eyes and taps the photo.

"This particular symbol can trace its roots back to ancient Hindu and was often associated with the cult of Thugee, worshipers of the goddess Kali. Skulls, cemeteries, and blood are associated with her worship. Images of her usually depict her as black and emaciated. Her face is blue, streaked with yellow and her eyes are ferocious. Her disheveled and bristly hair is usually shown splayed and sometimes braided with green serpents." Giles grunts again before continuing. "She wears a long necklace of human skulls or intestines and a belt of severed arms; sometimes even with children's corpses as earrings and cobras as bracelets. Her four arms usually hold either weapons or the severed heads of demons."

"I see," Andrew says quietly, his face very pale. "So this isn't good then?"

"No, I'd have to say it's very, very bad." Giles grimaces and reaches for his tea. "If the people who got Rayne out had called on the power of Kali, I'd have to say it can't get much worse actually."

TBC