by Various
Wesley set down the glass. “I really must go.”
Kat put her hand on his arm and gazed at him imploringly. “We’ll be good, we promise. We’re just lonely.”
“That’s right,” P. J. put in. “And it’s not like we’ll be around all that long. All we’re given is one hour every ten years. That’s all the time we have to make some new acquaintances and live it up a little!”
“Huh,” Wesley muttered.
“And you’re the only one who can see us. That has to be for a reason.”
Wesley again felt the weight of the letter from home in his pocket. He’d been uneasy ever since Cordelia found the buried notice that a registered letter from England was waiting for him at the post office, and the contents of the letter he had picked up during the post office’s extended hours had caused him to take his time returning to the hotel, sparking a need to be alone and to consider the ramifications of what it said. Besides, he had known full well that Angel and Cordelia were going to be gone anyway, taking care of some last-minute shopping. But being on his own hadn’t helped him work out what to do about the invitation he’d been given. Perhaps having something else to focus on for a little while might actually help.
“This really is quite a handsome car. Is it a Rolls?”
P. J. hopped out of the car and treated Wesley with a theatrical flourish over the car’s wheel-hugging fenders and sloping chrome grill. “A Duesenberg SJ. A very exclusive automobile, owned by people of great import, like William Randolph Hearst, Mae West, Clark Gable, and, naturally, the MacBrides!”
“That would be you two,” Wesley said. “P. J. and Kat MacBride?”
“The very same,” P. J. said. His grin faded for an instant. “Never heard of us, huh?”
“Oh, it’s not that…”
Kat stroked his arm. “But it is.”
He nodded gently. “Still, this car is amazing.”
“That’s not what the young ladies were admiring,” Kat said, her fingers taking a friendly walk along the nape of Wesley’s neck.
He cleared his throat. “So, spirits are usually bound to certain material objects. Is it safe to say this car was very important to you? Did you, by chance, cease to be in this very auto?”
“Oh, heaven’s no!” Kat laughed. “Nothing like that. Why do you ask?”
“As I said, if I’m to help you move on to your reward, to free you from whatever binds you to this plane, I’ll first need to learn what that is.”
“We don’t need help. We’re perfectly happy as we are.” Kat lounged seductively against the door while her husband stood with his hands in his pockets, looking out at the glittering lights of the theater down the block.
Kat followed his gaze and smiled. “Now that brings back memories,” she said.
“You came here in life?” Wesley asked.
“We met at that theater. I was a candy girl and P. J. was the projectionist. He loved watching me…and I had fun distracting him. One time he forgot to change the reels because of my teasing and that got us both fired!”
“Sorry,” Wesley said.
“Oh, no! That was the happiest day of our lives. P. J. said hang it all and proposed and just on a lark we went on our first audition together and landed the rolls that made us famous.”
Wesley nodded. P. J. and Kat would had to have been successful in order to afford a car like this.
“I want to hear about you,” Kat said, bouncing like a happy child as she positioned herself to face him directly. “You don’t seem like you have a lot of fun. Don’t you have any happy memories that keep you going?”
“Well…” he said, beginning to look around.
“No, tell me,” Kat said, leaning forward, placing one hand on his knee, arresting his gaze with her own.
Looking into her dark green eyes, he found her impossible to resist. “I was happiest when I attended university; it was there, between assignments, that I developed the interests that brought me to the attention of the Watchers. Do you know what a Watcher is?”
She nodded.
“I was happy there. The world made sense. The answers to every question could be found in a book, or in a lecture by one of the professors, or so it seemed. It was similar later, after I graduated from university and I was being trained to be a Watcher. I recall one of my favorite assignments; ten of us were given different demons to research, but our objective was the same: Discover all we could about the demon, learn exactly when in the next few days it would rise, unearth the specific nature of the threat it posed, and come up with plans to help the Slayer stop it.” He sighed, relaxing for the first time since Cordelia had given him the post office notice that she had found buried under an avalanche of catalogs and junk mail in his office. “Travers gave me such praise for my work.”
“I sensed you had an agile mind,” Kat said, caressing his knee. “Among other things.”
Wesley cleared his throat. “My report of the Plargg demon earned me such praise from Travers and the others. And when I became a Watcher, I was so proud of myself. I had an entire career ahead of me as a protector of the innocent. Best of all, I was away from home, finally in a position to prove something to my—”
He gasped as Kat’s hand…slipped. He looked around quickly, guilt and worry lighting his eyes—this was another man’s wife, after all, deceased or no—and saw that P. J. was nowhere to be found.
The woman beside Wes did her best to look surprised. “Oh! The Kat’s pajamas did it again.”
“Please!” Wes exclaimed, leaping out of the car. “The two of you planned this! You were distracting me.”
“Really?” asked the flamboyantly dressed spirit as she posed provocatively against the convertible. “It was working?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Wesley mumbled as he went back and snatched her wrist. She giggled, allowing him to drag her toward the theater a few blocks down the street. Wesley was well aware that she could become insubstantial at a second’s notice, or simply wink out of existence and end up somewhere else.
“Why do you think he went to the theater?” Kat asked, her voice high and brimming with overdone innocence.
“Because there are more people there than anywhere else, and people equals mischief, and mischief equals fun for you two. Never trust a ghost indeed!”
A great crowd was gathered at the famous forecourt where celebrities had been placing their handprints and more in cement since 1927. He passed impressions of John Wayne’s fist, R2-D2’s tread marks, and Harold Lloyd’s wire-frame glasses, and placed his attention on the lovely young actress near the entrance who was addressing her adoring public as she readied herself to kneel and put her hands in cement.
“We were great friends of Sid, you know,” Kat said swiftly. “Sid Grauman, the man who built the Chinese theater and the Egyptian. He came up with the idea for movie premieres. Did you know that?”
Wesley scanned the crowd, picking up immediately on the slight shimmer P. J. left as he dashed about the gatherers, pinching a bottom here, whispering a devilish word in an ear there.
“Oh, no, he’s shimmering already,” Kat said. “Where does the time go?”
At the podium, the actress beamed with joy. “And, of course, I’d like to dedicate this to all the great actresses of the golden era of Hollywood,” the actress said, “because they were my true inspiration.”
Easing his way through the crowd, Wesley saw P. J. stop abruptly and focus all his attention on the actress accepting her great honor. She rattled off names like Garbo, Swanson, Turner, and Loy…but no MacBride. He surged through the mass of fans, his shimmering aftertrail a bright crimson as he darted right for the actress.
“Oh, no,” Kat said with a giggle. “I do believe my knight is about to go and defend my honor!”
Wesley released his grip on Kat and struggled to catch up with the angry spirit, but he lacked the ghost’s ability to simply pass through anyone or anything in his way. Shoving, sliding, and apologizing, Wesley caught up with P.
J. just as the flush-faced ghost rose up behind the actress and flicked his wrists like a master conductor about to lead a symphony in an all-out attack on Wagner.
“Here’s mud in your eye!” P. J. roared as he thrust his hands at the actress’s bare back and sent her sprawling—ten-thousand-dollar designer silk gown and all—face first into the gray splatter of the soft wet concrete. It went everywhere, coating her soft golden tresses, her wide brown eyes, and her million-dollar smile. And when the fans, the police, and the paparazzi turned to look at the perpetrator, all they saw was Wesley.
Stinging bright camera flashes seared his retinas as explosive curses burst from the crowd. Then a wail rose up from the muck-encrusted actress and all attention reverted to her—at least for a second.
“Serves you right!” P. J. said, tromping past her, his pointy-toed Harvard Alumni Gold Bond leather shoes leaving no impression in the concrete.
And that bit of business ate up what little time Wesley had been granted to come up with a plan for avoiding jail time and tabloid notoriety for this little incident because everyone, even the actress, looked up at the sound of those callous words.
Yet…P. J. hadn’t spoken with a British accent….
Yanking his ID from his coat pocket, Wesley announced, “Everyone, there’s no need to panic. I’m Wesley Wyndam-Pryce of Angel Investigations and I’ve been following a suspect with an unnatural fixation on this lovely and talented woman. She was in danger and I had no choice.”
“Hey, I recognize him,” one of the photographers said, scratching his stubbly beard. “He was with Virginia Bryce—”
Wesley saw P. J. reentering the crowd, angrily using his ectoplasm to shove a few people out of the way. “There he is now!” Wesley pointed right at the ghost, and confusion and chaos soon reigned as one fan looked to another, each thinking the other was responsible for the shoving, and therefore, the stalker.
“Thank you, thank you,” the soaked actress sobbed. And others quickly followed, Wesley assuming the mantle of hero and…well…liking it.
And as P. J. stormed off, pushing and tripping and goosing and grumbling, the madness engulfed the entire proceeding, allowing Wesley the chance to slip away and rendezvous with Kat, who drove up in the convertible. He leaped in alongside P. J. and the car screeched off into the night.
Wesley slid over, easing through the laughing Kat, who was also starting to shimmer, though not as much as her husband. P. J. looked pleased with himself, the incident at the theater apparently already forgotten. Kat snuggled him and cooed something about his heroism.
His heart thundering, his thoughts crackling like lightning, Wesley had to admit that he felt a guilty rush at the thought that he might be in the papers tomorrow as a hero rather than a rake. But…that poor actress…
“Hey, look what I picked up,” P. J. said, whipping out a copy of the Hollywood Reporter that fluttered in the breeze. “I wonder what’s shooting tonight…”
“None of that,” Wesley said. He snatched the magazine from the ghost and jammed it curled-up into one of his coat’s deeper inner pockets.
“But that’s our bible!” P. J. protested.
Kat’s eyes widened. “Our most holy of holies!”
“In a word?” Wesley whispered. “Tough.”
Kat moaned with unearthly volume, clutching her head with both hands, and P. J. coughed and spat. The dramatic gestures were so far over the top that Wesley thought, What a couple of hams. These two make Cordelia look ready for a David Mamet play. No wonder no one remembers them anymore.
Wesley frowned, considering the plight of the humiliated actress he had left behind. Unlike the two college guys in the alley, she’d done nothing to deserve the treatment she’d received other than wound the vanity of his ghostly companions. Even worse, Wesley had managed to let himself feel proud of the way he’d extracted himself from the situation, when all he’d done was cover his backside. These spirits were dangerously seductive. Who knew what they might make a man do if he spent too much time with them?
He clutched the steering wheel with sweaty hands, knowing exactly what he must do.
“Splendid effort back there!” P. J. said. “You’d make quite the dashing hero!”
Wesley growled, “Put a sock in it.”
“What’s that you say?”
“Oh. Ah—my head. There are nights when I think I must have rocks in it. I’m looking for something fun to do with the two of you and the answer was staring me in the face.”
P. J. brightened up, his shimmer a bright sky blue. “We like fun.”
“We live for it,” Kat added.
“Well, then, I was thinking,” Wesley began, “how would you two like to visit an old Hollywood haunt?”
Both ghosts shimmered with joy. Soon they pulled up before the Yamashiro, where a valet took the convertible’s keys. The pagoda sitting beside the vast restaurant had been brought over piece by piece from Japan, and at six hundred years old, it was the oldest edifice in California.
Oldest known, Wesley corrected himself, thinking of a few other structures, not all made by human hands.
If he hadn’t been so distracted, Wesley might have appreciated the sight of the wooden castle a little more. The “mountain palace” was perched more than two hundred feet above Hollywood Boulevard.
“I’ve never eaten here, but I understand the food is wonderful,” Wesley said evenly.
“Oh. This was a social club when we used to come here,” Kat said. “The 400 Club. Oh, P. J., do you remember those brunches with Lillian Gish and Bebe Daniels?”
He smirked. “The ones where everyone would get fresh with you and you’d get fresher back?”
“A girl’s got to stay in shape somehow. Flirting is a fine art.”
Wesley used his ID once more and told the maitre d’ he was meeting an important client and needed to rely on the man’s discretion. He was shown inside immediately. The moment they were inside, Wesley was engulfed by the tempting aromas of sumptuous feasts from all over the CalAsian restaurant. The spicy tang of exotic herbs and spices mixed with the rich smells of beef, chicken, and seafood being prepared in the kitchen.
“Couldn’t you just go for a little bite?” Kat asked, nibbling on Wesley’s ear.
The sudden craving for takeout, among other things, rocketed into his thoughts, but Wesley pushed such distracting desires out of his head. He had to deal with these wayward spirits then decide what to do about the invitation he’d received.
“Oh, we used to love coming here,” Kat said, her arm around Wesley’s. P. J. strutted happily as they drifted through the main dining area, draining drinks before astounded eyes, removing hats and plopping them on the heads of surprised socialites a dozen feet away, and committing half a dozen other supernatural pranks. Wesley would have commented if he thought it would do any good, but he restrained himself. He had a plan for dealing with these two, and as difficult as they were making it, he would stick to it.
Looking out from behind the restaurant, the view of Los Angeles was nothing short of spectacular. The Yamashiro sported acres of lush, beautifully landscaped gardens, waterfalls, and koi ponds, as well as a fourteenth-century pagoda. Because they were slightly above the smog that covered Los Angeles, the air smelled unusually crisp and clean. Like at home in England. Wesley reveled in it.
“Remember when this town was nothing but glamour?” Kat said wistfully to her husband.
“And mystery, my sweet. Particularly after dark.”
Brooding with the best of them, Wesley thought of the decision he still needed to make and said, “There are still mysteries aplenty.”
“Naturally,” Kat said seductively, pinching his backside and making him yelp. “So long as the human heart exists, that’s not a bullet anyone can dodge.”
The group soon arrived at a lovely old wood bridge overlooking a koi pond. Wesley heard the wood creak as he walked onto the bridge, but there was no sound when the ghosts followed him onto the wooden structure. Th
e easily excitable orange fish scattered as the ghosts peered down at them.
“Skittish little devils, aren’t they?” P. J. observed.
“Perhaps the spirits moved them,” Wesley said with a shrug.
Kat looked up at Wesley in amazement. “Oh, you yummy little dish. You made your first pun!”
The easily excitable female ghost allowed her hands to wander again.
Clearing his throat, Wesley gestured grandly at the pond. “There’s a secret history to this place, one I think might interest you two.”
Kat clapped her hands together. “Do tell!”
“About five years ago, a djinn was defeated here. As a result, a strange magick has risen up. To quote from a classic, ‘Fairy tales can come true. It can happen to you.’”
“How romantic!” P. J. exclaimed.
Kat could barely contain herself. “How does it work? You must tell us!”
“I’ll do better than that, I’ll show you exactly how a wish might be granted.” He nodded at the frigid water. “Jump in.”
“It’s like a wishing well!” Kat said, leaping before she looked, her husband bounding after her. They splashed about, further frightening the fish. Fortunately, the pond was secluded enough that their mischief did not draw attention from anyone inside the restaurant.
“What now?” Kat called.
Wesley smiled thinly. “Ah, yes, you see, the wish is granted to the one standing on the bridge, and my wish is that you both remain where you are for, say…an hour?”
P. J.’s shimmer flared crimson once more. He squinted in concentration and began to levitate from the water, then stopped with a jerky motion, as if someone had grabbed him by the loafers and was holding him in place. The story about the djinn had been made up. In truth, he had set traps like this all over Los Angeles, traps that would only respond to him, and he had done so in case he ever got into a situation he couldn’t handle otherwise. It was an idea he had gotten from reading books—adventure novels in which a single hero trapped in a remote locale took out countless adversaries by digging deep holes and covering them up, or placing trip wires with nets in clearings. This was simply the magickal equivalent.
