Wesley Wyndham-Price woke to find himself alone, and already, after such a short time to become unaccustomed to that state, felt the lack keenly. Some instinct brought him limping from the bedroom out into the lounge, which the Americans called the living-room, as if one did not actually live within the other rooms of one's house. He found his new bed-partner there, dressed in her running clothes, standing at the bay window with her cheek pressed to the glass. He moved to switch on the lights, but she stopped him with a word, his own name.

"Wesley."

He sat, quietly and properly, on the sofa, sensing that Moira did not want him to come near, any more than she'd wanted him to light the room.

"Have you been running?" he asked her at last. "I wish you would not, Em. Not here, not by night. I must remind you that we are on a Hellmouth."

"There was always a red glow, somewhere in the distance," Moira said, as if she hadn't heard him. "And the scurrying. The scurrying never ceased. And the air smelled of piss."

The crudity took him aback--but she fell into such words sometimes, with their Anglo-Saxon earthiness. Perhaps Moira meant to shock him--Wesley knew that she found him, at times, amusingly prim. She did not seem, however, in any way amused just now.

Moira left the window and began not so much to pace, as to stalk the room. For the first time, Wesley felt the currents of magic snap before her, sharp as whip-cracks, as she went. Again, for the first time, he understood what Moira meant when she called herself LeFaye. "You'll need to organize your report, Your Ladyship," he told her, words she'd spoken to him often. "Begin at the beginning."

"The beginning?" She paused in her circuit of the lounge, a tall spare black shadow cast against the lighter darkness of the wall. "Let's say, then, that there was once a man called Malcolm Bannister--a famous man, a great war hero, who went on holiday to Cornwall, a walking-tour down the coast. Nine years after the War, this would have been. 1954. One day, ambling through the countryside, he entirely lost his way, and found himself in a strange place, a cold, uncanny mist-shrouded place, like that which the evil sorceresses occupy in fairy tales--a place, where no matter how he shouted, his voice only came back to him. The sort of place he might have expected his training to overcome--but it would, and could, not.

"Beneath the light of a full moon, the loveliest red-haired girl walked up to him out of the sea. 'I called you down the moon's path, Malcolm,' this girl said, after which she kissed him, and took him into her arms. He was never sure exactly what happened next, but at length the sun rose, and he took the girl away with him, back to London, his home. For nine months they were happy, I believe. Don't you think they might have been? She was lovely, Lily was--I've seen the photographs. Yes, I'll say they were happy, and leave it there.

"When the nine months had gone, Malcolm brought his Lily to hospital, in those days when fathers were not allowed inside delivery rooms. He stood beyond the door, and heard her screams, and then her silence. He never heard his baby cry at all. Last he saw a horrid bone-faced woman in a black dress leave the room, bearing something in a bundle--and then nothing else, for ten days entire. He fell down unconscious. The doctors said he'd had a stroke, brought on by the stress of his wife's death, and the disappearance of his child, but he'd never known the one had died, or the other vanished. It took months for poor Malcolm to recover any part of his strength at all.

"What happened to the baby?" Wesley asked, feeling, already, that he knew, that she had grown, and stood before him now, telling him this story in the soft Cornish voice that made her seem a stranger to him with its unfamiliarity.

"The little girl? She grew, as babies will, inside a cold gray manor by the coast. She was the only young thing in all that chilly place, surrounded by women in old fashioned black dresses, some of whom might even have been fairly young in years. These women were her aunts, and her great-aunts. Most of them were not unkind, only terribly distant. From infancy, she never knew the touch of a human hand, except in the course of their rituals. She was taught music, and spells, and to keep her body hard and fit, the better to contain the magic. The house was ruled by her grandmother, and ruled with an iron hand. Grandmother's proper title was Lady LeFaye, but as she never left the house, there was no one to speak it. She raised her granddaughter with a proper regard for the traditions of their family, and respect for magic, and a healthy fear of Grandmother herself. If one dared go against the family, she was taught, one would be killed, exactly as her mother had been.

"But how--" Wesley felt his jaw drop, and forced it shut again. "Where was the law? Was there no investigation?"

"Mermorgan Hall isn't England, my dear," Moira told him, patiently. "It's like Rupert's Wild Wood, or the Hellmouth itself, not governed by daylight rules, or British laws. One can be lost there forever. Malcolm was lucky: there's an old field down by the cliffs, filled with the bones of men who presumed, or who were taken. And with the bones of our sons." Her eyes blazed through the dark, green and terrifying.

Wesley tried to speak again, but no sound would emerge.

"Moira St. Ives, being a stubborn child, took all this in, but accepted none of it. Even in her early years she slept only a little, and spent most of her nights haunting the vast library, learning not only the spells her aunts did not teach her, but scaling the high shelves to reach the books she wasn't allowed--the works of Dickens and Shakespeare, hidden away, where they couldn't tempt her with their views of human life.

"One day, when Moira was bathing in the cold sea, she made a wonderful, terrible discovery: the body of a girl nearly her own age, washed up on the coast. Looking down at the drowned girl, Moira saw her chance. She called on her magic, she reshaped the girl's form into a likeness of her own, and she ran. All day and all night she fled, and through the days and nights to follow, until she reached a great city which her aunts had now and then referred to as "The Smoke." She lived there several months alone, sleeping under bridges and in the disused tunnels of the underground, in the stations where the trains no longer ran. She was silent and quick and cold as steel.

"Do you understand what I'm telling you, Viscount Henton-on-Rowe?" Moira asked, dropping down beside him on the sofa. "You heard my title, and my accent, and assumed that you knew who I was."

"No," Wesley answered quietly, "I did nothing of the sort. I knew you weren't like other girls--er--women, I mean. I knew you were like no one I'd ever known. And sometimes, when you were my Handler, I hated you terribly. And sometimes I loved you more than I could bear."

Moira reached to Wesley and touched his cheek--he'd shaved before retiring for the night, unable to stand the scruffiness a moment longer.

"Forgive me," she said. "I, too, should not have assumed. Do you see why I despise my title so?"

Wesley nodded, and Moira leaned over, resting her head on his shoulder, allowing him to gather her into his arms. She smelled, this time, wild and salty, like the sea.

"I think I went a bit mad," she told him, "Living there alone. In just the same way Helena and I were mad together, five years ago. I can't ever remember sleeping, until I met Rupert.

"That was in June, I think," Moira continued. "Must have been. His school had just broken up for the Summer Hols, and he'd come to London, run away to London, much as I'd run, instead of going home. Something in him had broken, and he could not return. I found him sleeping in a park, in Kensington Park, down by the Serpentine. Just under the Peter Pan statue, this was, as I recall. An appropriate spot, for a lost boy."

Moira raised her head a little, twisting to look up at him. "You must not say that I've told you this, Wesley. Not a word of it. Do you understand?"

Wesley ran his hand down her arm, feeling the dreadful scars. He smoothed his own fingers over the tense sinews of her hand. So taut, she was. So unhappy--and he'd no idea how she'd come to this, or how he could make her well again. He'd no idea how to predict the tides of her emotions. He felt useless, and dull-witted, as he so often had since he came into this place--and grateful, too, that he'd never had to suffer, so young, the fears and hardships that it seemed not only his fellow Watchers, but Buffy and her young friends had been forced to survive.

"I'd been drawn to Rupert at once," Moira continued. "From as far away as the Great Russell Road, I tasted the magic that hung about him, just as it hung about me. We weren't like the others who lived below, but in others ways Rupert wasn't like me." She paused. "In some ways, he wasn't even like himself."

Wesley was afraid to ask her to explain, and so he kept still, continuing to stroke her skin, with its softness, and its ridges.

"The one part of him, the part that seems to have grown into the man he is today, was very kind, tender, easily wounded and yet terribly brave. He would cry in the night, as I've said. His father and his sisters had died--oh, I suppose, a bit less than four years previously--under circumstances so dreadful he'd lost the power to relate the tale. To this day, I've never heard the story from Rupert's own lips.

"He'd a foolish indifferent mother somewhere, and a stepfather who was like a different sort of vampire--the kind that will drain all the strength and the hope and the life from a boy, and leave only a shell. The goodness in him must have been very strong indeed, to survive such a man in any part. He'd three aunts, but they lived abroad, and weren't to know. And he'd another half--the part I named Ripper, the portion of him that was a cold, violent swaggerer--extremely handy in a fight. He wasn't a large boy at fourteen, but Ripper would throw himself into the fray as if there was no question of him dying, and when he did, other, quite larger men were known to run away. It was brilliant, that. Utterly brilliant."

"But how did you live?" Wesley asked her, envisioning the London urchins of Oliver Twist, or Fagin and Bill Sykes.

"Well, we slept in the tunnels, as I've said. And we stole, of course. Ripper had a positive genius for picking locks and hot-wiring cars, and I was rather the reigning queen of the snatch-and-grab. And there was the magic too: the odd curse, the occasional love-spell, a bit of something to improve a man's odds at the betting track. There are always those willing to pay for such things.

"Come winter, we found ourselves a squat--there's quite a lovely law, you know, that allows one to post a notice of intent to occupy, change the locks and move in. The coppers aren't, in that case, allowed to move you along. It gets cold, naturally, but we'd a fireplace, and could burn bits of rubbish to keep nearly warm. And by then I'd lied about my age and found a regular job at an art college--these middle-class tossers who fancied themselves artists could draw me all day, before going home to their mummies and daddies in Knightsbridge and Kensington. I'd sit naked under the cold yellow lights, the gooseflesh rising on my skin, listening to the scrabble of their pencils, and their foolish, childish, self-aggrandizing talk. One advantage of growing up among sorceresses: one doesn't balk at removing one's clothes; it was such a great part of the magic we performed."

Wesley couldn't think what to answer, horrified as he was both by Moira's tale, and the casual way in which she told it.

"They liked it, I suppose, the shape of me," she added.

"You are a very lovely woman," Wesley said, clearing his throat. "I'd imagine--"

"No, I mean they liked the shape of Sebastian inside me. The way he changed and grew, though I suppose it rather disgusted them as well." He felt Mora shrug. "One of the patrons of the college was a woman called Gemma Delacoeur. I said a spell to bring her near to me. She'd have been around fifty at the time, a childless woman with a warm heart. I remember her watching, from the back at the room, with those soft gray eyes she had, a sweet, plump little creature, with such a kind face. I remember her coming up to me once the classroom cleared out. 'You're never eighteen, love,' she said, in her quiet, posh voice. I liked her, and I needed her--but I would have killed her if I'd thought for a minute she'd have told. 'You mustn't say that,' I answered, in a low, dangerous voice. 'Ma'am, I need the work.'

"'Have you no family?' she asked, and I shook my head. 'Does the baby's father look after you at all?' She sat down across from me, in one of the hard wooden seats, with her little crossed ankles, and her tiny folded hands. I knew what I must do, but I could hardly say the words.

"'You want a child,' I told her. 'A son. You and your husband both--it's nearly all you think of, and the secret's hung between you, never spoken, year after year, until it's nearly driven you apart. I want you to take my baby, when he's born.' Gemma fell back in her seat. I could see the pulse beat in her throat, and in her eyes, all the excitement and the fear.

"'I've done the right things,' I told her, 'Haven't smoked, or drank, and I've eaten the right foods, and taken the vitamins, as best I could. We're bright enough, Rupert and I, and both of us come from what's called good families--he won't be a shame to you, my boy.' I bent forward, and clasped at her hands. 'Please, say you will. Please. My family mustn't know. They would kill him.' I let her see my LeFaye eyes, so that she'd know I meant what I said. 'He's to be called Sebastian,' I told her, 'That's all I ask. The rest is up to you.'

"'Oh, my dear,' Gemma said. I found myself, at last, kneeling on the floor, my head on her neat little lap, her tiny hand stroking my hair. I wanted to be sick, but would not allow myself to be so. 'How old are you really, love? You can't be more than fourteen, I'd say. Let me take you home with me, and look after you 'til the baby's born. I can tell you're a good girl, really.' I looked up at her, into those soft, grey eyes. 'I don't know my age,' I told her. 'I haven't a birthday. And I can't come home with you--there's Rupert, you see. He's ill, and I must get home to him.' Gemma looked a bit more apprehensive at that, but she said, 'If he's ill, then you must bring him, as well. We'll see that he's looked after.'

"Rupert as he is now would have taken to her immensely, just as I had--they became great friends, in fact, after he was grown. But he couldn't be Rupert then, the way we lived--he was Ripper, most of the time, and I would not bring Ripper into this kind lady's home. 'Give me your number,' I told her. 'When the time comes, I'll ring you.' Which I did. When the time came, Gemma was there with me, and her husband Clive. I held Sebastian only a few minutes in my arms, then gave him over to the Delacoeurs, and walked out on my own. I went home to Rupert in our cold, squalid flat, and I cried and I cried. He'd caught pneumonia, quite badly, but ill as he was, he held me in his arms, never understanding why I wept as I did.

"'From that day, all the light went out between us. He eventually recovered, but I could not let him touch me again. A month or so later, we were found, and Rupert was taken by the Watchers, rather forcibly. They returned him to one of their special schools."

"And you, Moira?" Wesley asked. He could not believe the sheer sadness of her story. It was nothing he'd ever expected of her. And her son, if he'd lived, must be nearly his own age. His Moira, his lovely Em, had been suffering through such hardships whilst he himself was in nappies. The whole of it only added another layer to his feeling of being callow, and inexperienced--perhaps the deepest layer of all.

"They nearly took me--Grandmother, and my Aunt Ivy. But I eluded them. I ran, quite deserting poor Rupert, and I jumped off a bridge, into the Thames."

"You were rather amazingly lucky not to be killed," Wesley said, experiencing a swoop of vertigo as he considered those high spans that stretched across the grey-green waters of London's greatest river.

"Yes, I suppose. There's a happy ending, of sorts, after all. I eventually found my dad, Malcolm Bannister, and went to him. Perhaps, by that time, I wasn't the daughter he wanted, but we tried. The both of us, we tried. He, too, was a Watcher, you know, Wesley."

"I hadn't known," Wesley answered, but he supposed it must be: only rarely were Candidates brought in from outside, one was always considered by one's family lines.

"By the time I met up with Rupert again, at Oxford, we were such different people that we hardly knew ourselves. Grandmother, by then, had died, and I was Lady LeFaye. The eldest born of us is always the strongest, and the others could not argue with me. Changes were made at Mermorgan Hall--though sometimes I wonder how they keep to that whilst I'm away.

"We weren't like the other students, Rupert and I, not even like the graduate students--but how could we have been? We were a Bannister-St. Ives, and a Giles. The Council was happy enough to have us, in their way, our other little talents aside. I've never understood if we two ended up in Mr. Merrick's care through fate or deliberate choice on their part--maybe he was given all the broken ones to Handle. I don't know. And now I don't suppose it matters."

Moira moved in closer to Wesley, her arm curling across his body, holding him with such tightness it nearly hurt. "I'm very tired," she said. "I'm so very, very tired. Promise me when I wake, Wesley, that I won't wake alone."

Wesley lurched to his feet with as much grace as he could manage, leading his beloved slowly back toward his bed. Toward their bed, he reminded himself--hers as much as his. Moira lay down with a little sigh, and her body pressed against his, more for warmth and comfort than for anything else. Tenderly, he tucked the covers up round her shoulders, and lay down beside her, feeling the tension slowly drain from Moira's muscles, her shadowed face relaxing in sleep.

He lay there unmoving, holding her with all the tenderness he could summon, watching over her rest, in that room that was quiet and pleasant and warm, though still little bare.