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The Assistant part 4
Angelus calls three more times over the next five days, and each time Wesley puts Spike on to listen for clues. Angelus knows they're doing it--he can tell when Spike's on, because he can't hear Wesley's breathing anymore. Each time he calls, he lets Spike hear that Xander is still alive. But nothing else, no way of knowing where he is. It's agonizing.
On the third call, all he says is, "The Pair-a-Dice Motel, Wes. Just outside Reno, on 80. I'm leaving you boys a little something."
Xander is curled under the sink in the bathroom, in a blood-soaked T-shirt with the neck ripped open, a pair of stained and torn khakis. His feet are bare. His skin is chalky. His blood has pooled against the edge of the bathtub, because the floor isn't even. To Wesley's first glance, it looks about an inch deep.
He's already lowered the crossbow--fatal mistake if Angelus is still here, but as it turns out he isn't, he's on the other side of the state by now--and taken a step into the bathroom. He should check for a pulse; there's still a chance. There's a first aid kit in the car. But the color of Xander's skin exerts a freezing power, and after that first step Wesley just stands there, staring. No one alive can be that pale.
"Get back," Spike says, pushing Wesley aside and half out of the room. He kneels down in the blood and pulls Xander's right eye, the good one, open with his thumb. It strikes Wesley as a grotesque, unnecessary gesture.
"What are you doing?" His tongue feels numb and clumsy.
Spike doesn't say anything. He studies Xander's eye--white, off-angle, staring--then lets the lid go and pats him gently on the cheek. Xander's face is bloody and bruised, but not unrecognizable. It's what Wesley finds himself staring at, instead of the throat. The room smells strange, he realizes. Like an abbatoir.
"Come on," Spike says, still patting.
"Spike," Wesley says, saliva rushing into his mouth. "Stop it." He's going to throw up.
"Come on," Spike says, and slaps Xander once, on the cheek.
"For Christ's sake," Wesley says, and then Xander rolls his head to the side and lifts his hand. Carefully, woozily, as if he's just coming out of a long, drunken sleep.
The pieces assemble in Wesley's brain, and for a brief moment he wonders how he could possibly be so stupid, after all this time. Then he thinks, I really am going to throw up.
He walks quickly out of the room and does it in the little white gravel bed by the parking lot. It only takes a minute. Then he wonders if he's going to fall down, because the world is dark and weaving, full of the rushing of cars on the freeway and the fat battering of moths against the lamp above his head. He stands there with one hand braced against the rough stucco, trying to catch his breath. It seems to take a very long, lonely time.
Finally he feels able to go back in without disgracing himself, and he does it. Spike is sitting on the bed, alone. There's blood on his hands and knees. The bathroom door is open, and through it Wesley can see that Xander's still in there, lying on the floor.
Spike looks pensive, as if he's trying to do a very difficult maths problem in his head.
"I'm sorry," Wesley says, wiping his mouth with his free hand. He's still got the crossbow in the other. "I...I don't know why I did that."
"Because you're not a monster," Spike says, but it doesn't sound like much of a compliment.
They stand there in silence. After a moment there's a faint sound of movement from the bathroom, and Wesley's stomach heaves again. He swallows hard.
"What do we do?" he asks.
"I don't know," Spike says.
They look at each other, obliquely. It's ironic, Wesley thinks. He's spent so many years becoming independent, becoming someone who can run things competently and without supervision, who can make decisions and call the shots. And now, when he knows exactly what has to happen next, he can't make himself say it out loud.
Absurdly, he misses Angel.
"I can--" he says, but that's not the way to say it. He lifts the crossbow and takes a deep breath. "I'll do it."
"Hang on," Spike says.
Wesley stands there with the crossbow lifted, waiting. Spike stares at the floor between his feet. After a minute he starts sorting through his pockets--the old, familiar hunt for cigarettes. It's irritating, at a time like this.
"What?" Wesley asks. "You know what we have to do."
"No," Spike says. "I don't." He finds his cigarettes in his back pocket, pulls one out of the packet, and frowns because it's bent. It takes him a couple of seconds to straighten it out, rotating it gently between his fingers. Wesley watches him, frozen like the tin woodman.
"You want to use that?" Spike asks, nodding at the crossbow. Wesley glances at it and grimaces.
"For God's sake, Spike, how can you ask me that?"
"Seems like you're pretty ready to, that's all."
"Do you think he'd want me to do anything else?"
"I think if you go in there and ask him if he wants a piece of wood jammed through his heart, he's going to say no thanks." Spike pulls his lighter out of his jeans and strikes the flint, lights the crumpled cigarette, and drags deeply. As an afterthought, he holds the packet out to Wesley. "Smoke?"
Wesley stares at the packet. Spike waggles it. "Take the taste of puke out, at least."
With a sense of things becoming rapidly more surreal, Wesley takes a cigarette. His hand is trembling. Spike has to dance the lighter around to catch up with him.
They smoke for a couple of minutes in silence. In the bathroom, there's a soft dragging sound.
"The important thing," Spike says, with greater force in his tone, "is not to do anything stupid. Angelus's playing us."
"I'm aware of that," Wesley says dully.
"Right, so we play him back. Don't do what he expects."
A tide of frantic disbelief is rising in the corners of Wesley's mind, and he recognizes it as hysteria. He's a hair from breaking into yelps of laughter, or just yelps. Grimly, he forces it back down.
"I hardly think," he says, "that strategy figures in to this situation."
"That's where you're wrong," Spike says, pointing a finger at him. "With Angelus, strategy always figures in. He expects us to stake Harris. So I say we don't."
"And do what instead?"
Spike takes a long drag of his cigarette and regards Wesley narrowly. "Take him home."
Wesley forces himself to look at the bathroom. Xander's managed to pull himself a few inches further in, as if he knows what they're talking about and is trying to escape.
"I can't believe we're discussing this," Wesley says, standing up. He has to do something--if he doesn't do something he's going to yell, or hit Spike, or throw up again. "He's been turned, Spike. The conversation is moot."
"I was turned too," Spike says. "I think that makes it pretty bloody far from moot."
Spike was turned too, and so was Angel, and for centuries they murdered and pillaged and brought agony to innocent people. But here he is in a substandard motel room, outside Reno, Nevada, smoking a cigarette with William the Bloody. And somewhere out there, Angelus is still at large. Doing God knows what, to God knows who.
"He might be able to help us," Spike says, as if he's had the exact same thought as Wesley, at exactly the same moment. "And frankly, I think we owe him one."
Wesley stands there holding his crossbow and his cigarette, feeling sick, wishing for home.
Spike loads Xander's unresisting body into the back of the car. Wesley wipes up the mess as well as he can, with the hotel towels. No point in traumatizing the housekeepers.
They drive for L.A. with the needle holding steady at ninety, and by the grace of God, they aren't pulled over on the way.
