It was the dead of night.
Hands in the pockets of his black duster, Angel walked the moon-drenched streets of Sunnydale. His shadow loomed long, and his boot heels were the only sound above the night wind.
Like Angel himself, Sunnydale was cursed. Behind the pastel facades of its houses and the superficial, Southern California pleasantness of its population, terrible things happened as a matter of course. An astonishing number of people died, and in mind-numbingly brutal and savage ways. Children became possessed; babies became vampires. The dead not only walked, they raged.
The place had been known to the Spanish who’d founded it as Boca del Inferno, the mouth of hell. Sunnydale sucked evil in, exhaled it, vomited it. Its appetite for darkness was insatiable.
But evil also died here. Its executioner was Buffy Summers, the Slayer, the one girl chosen from all her generation to fight the demons, vampires, and monsters who long to corrupt and cripple the world. Buffy was a champion, a beacon, and a tragic hero of epic proportions: her battle was to the death . . . hers. Slayers seldom lived long. Their lives were fierce and intense. And then they were over.
Angel’s face was cast in shadow as he stopped before the yellow house on Revello Drive. As the moonlight made hollows of his eyes and cheeks, he stared up at the bedroom where Buffy lay sleeping. Mind and body— yes, and soul—pulsed like a heartbeat with thoughts of her. He was restless and edgy, and he could admit now, in the darkness, that it was his need for her that had driven him out of his apartment to stand here, now.
The ultimate irony in all of this was, of course, that Angel was a vampire, in love with a vampire slayer. Not just any vampire; in his heyday he had been known as Angelus, the One with the Angelic Face. No other vampire could match him in sheer cruelty and unbelievable brutality.
Though he still looked like the reckless young Irishman he once had been, he was over two hundred years old. He was also the only vampire on earth with a soul, tormented by the horrors he had committed after he had been changed.
In Galway, in 1753, his schoolmaster had seen a rogue and a scoundrel. Angel’s father had seen a callow lad who spent his time at the faro tables with bad friends and worse women. Only Darla, the exquisite vampire who had sired him, had sensed the passion in him. The need to live a larger life. The drive to see, and do, and be something other than an Irish gentleman in a provincial town.
How had she known? No mirror could tell Angel what she had seen. Perhaps it had been the hunger in his eyes. The crooked but eager smile when he had approached her. The crack in his voice when he had confessed his longing to see the world.
Darla had known much about longing. About passion.
But Buffy Summers was Angel’s passion.
She’s just a girl, he reminded himself. She would turn seventeen in two days.
But she was also the Slayer. Nightly she faced mortal combat; every morning when she awoke, she knew it might be her last day on earth. As did he. That changed everything.
Or is that how I excuse the fact that I can’t stay away from her?