The Angel Chronicles

The Chronicles
It was over.

The last two surviving vampires burst out of the Sunnydale club known as the Bronze and fled down the alley, terror on their faces.

Amazed, Angel stepped from the shadows into the moonlight and watched them go. "She did it. I'll be damned."

That beautiful young Slayer had thwarted the Harvest. The threat was over... for now.

But the vampires would be back, in full force. Their leader, the Master, imprisoned beneath the earth in a ruined church, would throw everything at the girl until he claimed victory... and she died. On that night all the demons, vampires, and other dark forces who walked the night would dance with glee on her grave.

But if he, Angel, believed the Slayer was doomed, why had he followed her that first night, on her way to the Bronze? To warn her of what was to come? Why had he sought her out, to warn her yet again?

Why was he thinking of her now, and every other waking moment?

He smiled -- a slight, almost cold smile -- for Angelus, once the scourge of Europe, could never fully let go of his remorse over the terrible evils he had committed. Or of the hatred for what he had once been: the most ruthless vampire who ever hunted down human beings and reveled in their destruction.

Yet recalling his first meeting with Buffy Summers, the Vampire Slayer, he could smile a little.


* * *
It was the night he had given her the cross.

As she walked to the local hangout, the Bronze, she had known he was trailing her. Any Slayer would have. And while it was true that she'd caught him by surprise, launching herself down from an overhanging pipe as he turned into the alley to follow her, that was also what he should have expected from the Chosen One.

But he hadn't been prepared for her wit or her beauty. She played with words; she was sarcastic. And yet she grasped both the wonder and the burden of her life as the Slayer.

And, truth be told, he had liked looking into her face when it mirrored her fascination with him. He was used to being admired by women -- did the Watcher Diaries not record his full name as "Angelus, the one with the angelic face"? But he was not used to anyone looking past that face into his soul.

His poor soul.

He had not been ready to tell her everything, just to join forces. "I want the same thing you do," he had told her. "To kill them. To kill them all."

Then he had tossed her the jewelry box containing the cross -- which he dare not touch himself -- and said, of the Harvest, "Don't turn your back on this. You've got to be ready."