The bar stinks of sweat and stale beer. It’s 1970s London, and everything’s covered in two inches of dust – the tables, the speakers, even the punks making out in the corner. The music isn’t music. It’s noise. Loud, chaotic, unapologetic.

On stage, an 18-year-old Rupert Giles thrashes his guitar like it owes him something. His band roars behind him – full-blown Ripper punk, all leather and eyeliner and fury. He launches into the chorus, voice cracked and defiant:

“We are wretched!”

The crowd surges. Youthful bodies twist and stomp, high on something, maybe everything. By the bathroom doors, unsavoury types deal in shadows. The bar is sticky. The lights flicker. The floor pulses with rebellion.

But in the centre of it all, she stands still.

A slight woman. Early sixties. No-nonsense. The kind of grandmother-type who’d knit you a scarf while telling you off for breathing too loud. Her coat is pressed. Her shoes are polished. She doesn’t belong here – and she doesn’t care.

She watches Rupert with a look that cuts through the noise. Not angry. Not proud. Just knowing. And as the chorus hits again, and the crowd screams louder, she whispers to herself, barely audible beneath the din:

“Well, at least you admit it.”

Backstage after the set, the singer is leaning back on a chair, bottle of booze in his hand. The performance did not go well. He’s embarrassed, but more pissed at himself.

“You were crap out there, Ripper.”

His bandmate, Neville, perches in the doorway, his face not amused. Ripper grins and overdramatises his response, waving his hands amount in mock indignity. “I am cut to the quick. Turn away. I can’t bear for you to see me weep.”

“Come on, mate. Sod the punk ethos. You’re good. One hell of a lot better than you’ve been lately, but you’ve got to make an effort.”

The grin fades from Ripper’s face. His impression turns to scorn. “Why?”

Before Neville can say anything, Tina, the Welsh bar girl, walks in through the beads hanging in the door frame. “Oi, Ripper,” she yells, louder than she should, compensating for the sudden quiet back stage. She adjusts her volume once she’s realised. “There’s a daffy bird outside asking for you!”

“Uh. Why not,” Ripper grins. “Can’t imagine she’s got a thicker moustache than the last one,” he says, a sigh escaping his lips. He always gets the older ones. Tina’s next line makes his face drop even more. “Nah. She’s all posh, like. And old. She says she’s family.”

As Ripper looks up, the illusion fades. He’s Rupert Giles now. His grandmother, Edna Giles, stands in the doorway.

“Gran?”

Neville bursts into riotous laughter. “Gran? Ripper’s got a…”

“Out. Now.” Giles doesn’t ask anymore than that, standing up, pointing to the door, suddenly extremely aware of the whiskey bottle in his hand. As the room clears quickly, Edna Giles turns to her grandson, a sternness on her face which Rupert hasn’t seen in years, her hands on her hips like the ultimate school headteacher, just able to reduce you to six years old again with a look.

“It was quite an effort finding you.” Her tone is fierce, but there’s something there, some twinge of… relief? Rupert can’t tell immediately. He puts on the act as best he can before he speaks. “I’ve been busy.”

His grandmother looks around the room, eyes darting. Her tone is dismissive. “Yes, I can see that.”

He turns to her. He’s nervous and shy. He puts his hand on his head, smooths down his own hair  – tries to appear somewhat presentable, suddenly aware of how long it’s been since he changed his shirt or showered.

“Rupert, I don’t pretend to know all of what you’ve been getting up to since you left Oxford. But I have heard things. Disturbing things.” She pauses, now showing concern in her voice. He finds he still can’t look her in the eyes. “Why are you doing this to yourself?”

That is enough for Rupert to regress. “Oh, Gran. I’ve been such an idiot.” He finally looks at her. He feels tears form behind his eyes, ready to fall, waiting for an embrace. She cups his face in her hands, as he continues, preparing his dread confession. “You always warned me that magic was not to be trifled with. The things I’ve seen… the things I’ve done…”

“No one who walks in our world does so unscathed. We all have our demons, Rupert, often quite literally.” He turns around to pick up his jacket. “One does not give up, Rupert. One perseveres and overcomes them. We cannot escape the dark. But we can refuse to let it own us.”

Rupert takes in her words. “I understand. But what if, in that regard, I’ve already failed?” He hastily pulls his jacket on, covering up his tattoo, the one that reminds him of what they did. The mark of evil. The Mark of Eyghon.

In the Guilford mansion that is home to the demon Eyghon, in the present day, Nadira Kureishi swings her sword yet again, taking off the head of one reanimated corpse, as another tugs at her leg. Slayers lay dead around her, some being fed on, others walking and talking after being knocked unconscious. The remaining Slayers are fighting off the lumbering zombies, but they’re failing. There are simply too many of them.

The demon Eyghon towers above her. It’s disciple, the reanimated corpse of Rupert Giles, talks in unison with the creature, with a voice that sounds like an echo – a shriek that sounds like an abyss opening before her. “You all belong to Eyghon.” Jess puts one of her daggers through a zombie’s arm, yelling at Nadira that the enemy won’t fall! Nadira decapitates another, advising her to go for the heads. Daphne’s on the other side of the room. “Vanessa’s not a zombie! She just got knocked out!”

Nadira stumbles, throws her blade up to counter an attack from Giles. “I know. They’re trying to knock us all unconscious. That seems to let the demon possess us!” As she says the words, Vanessa comes forward, a green glow in her eyes, and underneath her skin. “You’ll like being Eyghon. No more pain. No more confusion.”

She launches herself at Daphne, who receives a warning slightly too late from Nadira. She’s pinned against a wall, Vanessa preparing to choke her to death. Daphne doesn’t want to hurt her friend though and hesitation is enough for Vanessa to knock her head against the wall. She looks back at her friend with no obvious head wound, but her eyes glowing the same luminous green. “Hell,” Nadira whispers to herself.

There are only five of them left now, and they’re surrounded on all sides. “This has all gone pear shaped. We have to get out and get away,” Nadira tells her group. “There’s too many! We’re boxed in!”

The lurching forms start talking to the Slayers, asking them to submit.

“You will be among the chosen.” 

“You will have the privilege of seeing the glorious world to come.”

Suddenly an arrow penetrates straight through the zombie’s head, silencing it’s requests. Nadira is stunned! What? Where did that come from? A voice pierces through the zombies noise and Eyghon’s proclamations. It’s a familiar one. Irreverent. Sharp. Confident.

And Bostonian.

“Hey, Chatty Cathy! Hardcore fans don’t like zombies who run. You keep talking, you’re gonna break the internet.”

Faith Lehane and Angel come pounding through the oak doors to the chamber, weapons already prepared. Angel has already swung his sword, drawing blood. Faith’s crossbow is being reloaded before she finishes her sentence.

“And me, Faith?”

Faith stops at the voice. She turns quickly, but to her it feels like slow motion. Her eyes look in the direction of the familiar voice. “Don’t you want to talk to me?”

Giles walks towards her, hand extended.

“Oh my God. Giles?” Her voice shakes, she lowers the crossbow. Tears form behind her eyes and a smile, small and insecure, starts to begin on her face.

Angel, some distance away, looks over his shoulder and sees Giles approach Faith. He tries to shout a warning, but she doesn’t hear him, either because of the battle, or maybe, he thinks, because she doesn’t want to. He thinks back to the Lorophage – has she really recovered completely?

Faith is still standing in shock as Giles comes closer. Finally, Angel’s second warning gets through, just a fraction too late.

“It’s not him!” As the words reach Faith’s ears and process through to her brain, she’s rattled, as Giles responds to Angel’s impulse. “But it is me. Under new management.” He hits Faith across the face with the hilt of his blade. It doesn’t put her out for the count, but Faith still raises her hand to her head. Her eyes flicker slightly, before finally closing.

“Faith! Listen to my voice” Whatever you do, don’t black out!”

But it’s too late. Angel can only watch as Faith’s eyes start to glow green.

With a roar, Nadira spins and slices her blade straight across Faith’s gut, drawing blood that spurts out onto the ground in front of her. Faith falls to her knees, but she’s herself. No possession. “Ow!” She yells in anger and looks straight up at Nadira in disbelief. “I cut you. Shallow, so you’d stay awake.”

She picks up her mentor. “Fighting each other’s not an option right now.”

Faith turns to see Angel kicking Giles through another set of oak doors. He orders Faith to get the Slayers out of there and regroup. He ignores Ethan Rayne, still standing to the side of the demon, avoiding any physical fighting. “I’ll cover the retreat,” he says and leaps towards Eyghon. He heads for the demon’s massive neck, beginning at the back of the creature’s head – he slices as hard as he can, hacking through the flesh. Eyghon, however, barely seems bothered.

He rises up to his full height, throwing Angel back down onto the floor. “Ah, the vampire with a soul. I’ve been waiting for this.” His tail swishes around, slamming Angel into a nearby pillar.

“I can hold a grudge a long time. Ask your late friend,” Eyghon says to the vampire, gesturing down at Giles. “It’s true,” the former Watcher says, as Eyghon picks Angel up and pins him to the floor with his huge claws. He digs them in deep to Angel’s back. Angel, to his credit, refuses to scream.

Faith has gotten the other Slayers outside, and she reassures them that Angel will be fine. Nadira runs past her and taunts. “You’re worried about him. I’m concerned about leaving our friends.”

“Nadira, get your head out of your ass!” Faith shouts at her. “We were tracking Ethan Rayne, equipped to fight zombies. You got the girls into this. We can’t stop them without killing them. We’ve gotta run, come back in better shape to save them or we all die. So, MOVE!”

She looks back at Angel, who’s gotten up off the floor. “Unless you want to get into the middle of that.”

Angel is impaled on one of Eyghon’s claws, but this doesn’t stop him. He slices at one with his sword and snaps the one sticking through his chest. Eyghon, finally, feels some of the pain, and screams in agony. As Angel frees himself, he races up the demon’s scales, his heel smacking Eyghon’s facial ridges as he hits the top.

“That’s twice you’ve hurt me,” the demon roars. “Death is too good for you!” Angel hooks himself above the demon, and, as Eyghon swings to grab ahold of the vampire, Angel spins and crashes through a window, taking not just the glass, but the whole wooden frame away with him. He hears Eyghon’s words as he leaps to the ground.

“I’ll dismember you. Make you watch your friends die in agony, while your limbs grow back and are cut off again!”

Angel ignores the gaping wound in his abdomen as the massive demon barges through what’s left of the wall and rises again, taking out much of the roof of the building in the process.

“But first, you’ll see them tortured! Degraded!” The demon is still hurling threats and promises, which just makes Angel move quicker. How does something so big move so fast? he thinks as he runs, as fast as he can, for Faith’s car, which has already started up ahead of him, on the hill surrounding the estate.

Behind him, the demon continues his somewhat pointless threats. “And I’ll grant them just enough awareness to know what’s happening – to know they have you to blame!”

Faith yells at Angel to hurry and, just as Eyghon’s talons miss him by centimetres, Angel leaps for the door and lands inside with a thud. Faith doesn’t waste anytime, the car making an horrific screech as it races away, exhaust fumes in it’s wake.

“Idiots,” the demon says, quietly. “I know everything about you. Where you’ll run. Where you’ll hide. Who you care for. Anything you love that is not already mine, soon will be. He rests his talons amongst the possessed Slayers who have joined him on the hillside, and they watch as the car speeds away in the distance.

In the car, Nadira is at the wheel, already planning her next move. “We need better weapons. Machine guns. Explosives.” She makes her list aloud. Faith joins in, telling her that he’s using their friends as human shields. “Anything powerful enough to hurt him is gonna take them out too.”

“And there’s no guarantee it’ll work. We need to fight smart.” Angel offers, asking to borrow a cell phone. “There’s someone else who can help. Nadira, head for London. We need magical items and ours were all stolen. Which means we need Alasdair.”

A short time later, in Alasdair’s spacious townhouse, the Slayers are sitting around, while Angel, patched up, asks Alasdair Coames if there’s a way to break Eyghon’s hold on their people.

“Only by killing him.”

Faith smiles. “Bonus. We were gonna do that anyway.”

Alasdair looks at them both with caution written across his greying features. “This is not good news Faith. The only method of permanently killing Eyghon is to decapitate his true body. Otherwise, he can reincarnate in another victim. All the while you fight him, any of you killed or knocked unconscious instantly becomes one of the enemy.”

Nadira reacts in anger to his words. Is he honestly asking them to abandon their friends? “Not at all,” Alasdair assures her, handing a large broadsword to Angel. “Simply that you must fight intelligently. With magical weapons. Like these.” He gestures at the sword. Faith looks at Angel. “But you smoked this guy once already, right Angel?”

“I thought I had,” the vampire responds. “But I should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy.”

Angel remembers the last time he fought Eyghon. He had finally come for Giles then, coming after him for his debt. It had gotten closer: this time Eyghon had possessed Jenny Calendar, Giles’ true love. Then Willow Rosenberg posited a theory: the demon wouldn’t survive a battle in Angel’s body as his own demon would force Eyghon out. The battle seemed to go just as planned, with Eyghon dissipating into nothing in front of Angel and Buffy’s eyes.

But Angel now knows different.

“I found out, when I was Twilight, gathering intel on supernatural power players. One of them turned out to be Eyghon. I thought he’d been destroyed, or at least banished, when he tried to jump into me and the demon in there threw him out. There weren’t any dead or unconscious bodies around for him to escape to.”

“No human ones. He jumped into a dead rat. From there he took over a passed-out homeless man. When Eyghon enters a corpse, it can’t handle his energies for long. Sooner or later, it just dissolves. With an unconscious person it’s different.”

Alasdair nods at him, bringing an open book over from his desk. “Yes,” he begins, “the ancient writings say that if the victim cannot be exorcised, eventually Eyghon will be ‘born from within the host’. His true form, birthed into our world.” He looks up from the book in dawning realisation.

“It’s easy to imagine what followed. Eyghon is no fool. He’d been undone by his limitations, so he laid low, until he’d shed those limitations. Now fully on our plane he is ready to revenge himself: upon his old disciples Ethan Rayne and Rupert Giles.”

“But they’re dead. He was too late,” Alasdair tells them. “They wore his mark. Allowed him to possess them repeatedly. They sold their souls to Eyghon decades ago.”

Angel nods and looks at the keen blade of the ancient sword Coames has given him. It reminds him of his old favourite, the one Doyle gave him all those years before. “That’s why I knew I could bring Giles back to life. His soul never left Earth. It went to it’s rightful owner.”

He smiles. “I’ve been gathering pieces of Giles’s essence, his soul.” His smile disappears as quickly as it arrived. “But the core of it is in Eyghon. I knew I had to kill him to get it.”

Alasdair shrugs. It will be a difficult kill, but his weapons are the best chance they have. But he has a concern: what if Eyghon chooses to take his hostages and regroup elsewhere before they can get to him again? Faith reasons that the demon will stay put. “Before Nadira cut me, I was part of him. Just for a second, but I saw it. I know what he wants.”

When the Seed of Wonder was smashed, Eyghon was stuck on this earthly plane. If he couldn’t get home, he was going to re-create his realm here. With his massive form, the creature is a lot more powerful than usual and he can play puppet master to more people at once.

She turns to Angel. “You thought Ethan Rayne’s body got burned up with all the other evidence in that bunker, but Eyghon possessed a sleeping soldier, got inside, and marched zombie Ethan out like it was a prisoner transfer. He was never reported dead. He was Eyghon’s face in the human world. He bought a base of operations, started putting together an army.”

She sighs. “Problem is, Eyghon’s energy is still too much for a human body. Sooner or later, they burn out. The one’s with souls, Giles and Ethan, the unconscious, will last longer, but they still have an expiration date. The more magic that’s in you, the longer you keep.”

As she concludes, she also mentions that since there’s not much magic going around, Eyghon hooked up with some other familiar foes – Whistler, Pearl and Nash – and he gave them all the magical items he could get his hands on.

Angel’s concern is written all over his face. “They’re trying to create a plague from the stored energy in these items. It’ll bring magic back by making it a part of us. We’ll evolve. Except the couple of billion who die.” Alasdair, Faith and Angel share a glance, all thinking the same thing. “Eyghon gets them,” Angel voices aloud.

“Eyghon gets a continent and billions of magic-soaked zombies to populate it with. Sure, even they’ll wear out, sooner or later, but as long as people die, he’ll get more where they came from. He’ll be the new world order’s first superpower and create a Hell on Earth.”

Silence fills the room as the end goal is revealed. Nobody wants to speak, apart from Nadira. She gets up. “But why does he want us? I got the feeling he lured us there, specifically. If he just wants bodies for his armies, there’s easier prey.” Faith looks at her, putting the pieces together aloud. “He doesn’t want easy prey. He wants Slayers.”

Angel tells them that Eyghon isn’t stupid – he’d be a fool to trust Pearl and Nash. Whistler may be a concern, since he’s all about balance, but the demon knows they don’t like sharing power. “Greed recognises greed. They’ll try a double cross.”

He crosses to Alasdair’s weapons cabinet and starts handing them out to the Slayers. Alasdair points out that Eyghon will be counting on the fact that Angel and Faith won’t want to hurt their friends. Angel knows, and asks if Alasdair has any hand-cuffs, specifically any with ward protection. Alasdair opens a drawer full of artifacts, but tells Angel that he has nothing that can handle a power as strong as Eyghon.

Alasdair suggests a strategy: use their weapons on the undead, remove their friends from the fight any way they can and allow Angel to take on the demon since, having been possessed before, he’s immune. He’ll have to be the one to kill Eyghon.

Angel nods. “Except, even with a magic sword, I don’t stand a chance against a demon in it’s purest form.” Nadira looks at him and cackles. “We’re hardly footballers’ wives,” she sneers.

Angel sighs. “That’s not what I meant. You’re all incredibly capable and that’s a problem if Eyghon turns you. I’m immune, but we need someone else Eyghon can’t possess. That’s what the call I made was about.”

Faith looks at him, confusion on her face. “We need people we can trust. Who’d you have in mind? Harmony? She’d sell us out faster than…” Angel interrupts her, “Not Harmony,” he says, his face filled with genuine horror. “Another vampire with a soul.”

Faith looks at him with absurdity. “Hold on. Are we talking about..?” A voice from the front door stops her in her tracks.

“Right.”

Faith turns, as do the Slayers. Angel rolls his eyes, regretting the decision already. “No more weeping and moaning ladies. And yes, Angel, I saw you there.”

Angel turns to greet his guest.

Spike stands in the doorway, waiting to be invited in out of the rain, his arms folded, cigarette lit in his hand. “Spike’s come to save the day. As bloody usual.”