The streets of London. It’s early evening, not light enough to be alone, but just dark enough for the students of St. Cuthbert’s Preparatory School to feel safer as a group. They chat about class, still in their uniforms. It’s been a long day of exams and education, but are all eager for the weekend.

As they walk down a street, giggling like youths are supposed to, one boy is grabbed from behind by a pale-skinned hand. Having just enough time to gasp, the teens turn and see their mate picked up and his throat smothered in blood, as Angel comes out of nowhere, feeding on the youths in a bloodthirsty frenzy, covering the street with blood.

And then, in his home apartment, sweating, shaking and slightly baffled, Angel awakes in his bed. He wipes the sweat off his brow and whispers to himself, with both fear and relief in his voice.

“Another dream.”

Elsewhere, in Magic Town, Winifred Burkle walks around the streets, familiarising herself with the city and its people. She sees a wooden box full of trash outside an apartment that’s been cleared out. Inside, she sees a boardgame, still intact. It’s a game of Risk, and memories of her past warm her chest.

An hour later, at breakfast, nursing a large cup of coffee in her hands, she’s explaining her feelings to Angel. The vampire seems distracted to her.

“Tiny things…” she starts. “They just sneak up on me and remind me of Wes. And I miss him, of course, but I also think of how much more of the world he saw than me.” She takes a sip of the hot liquid in front of her, breathes in the smell and then puts the cup down. “I mean, I saw Pylea, sure, but I haven’t seen lots of this world. At least not as myself. Plus, I need some de-stressing and space from Koh.”

Angel pulls up a chair opposite her and sits at the table, bringing his own coffee with him. “Where would you want to go?”

“I don’t know,” she says, thanking him as he pours her more java. “Europe’s right there, but travelling via God powers makes it easy to lose track of your passport. Do you need a passport to go to Ireland?”

“Not if you take the ferry,” Angel says. “That just needs ID.”

“That’s where you grew up, right? How about you come with and show me something off the tourist path?”

Angel looks at her, tired from the dreams. “I know you want this, Fred, but I don’t know if we should go.” He puts his coffee pot down and looks at her, tapping the side of his head. “I’ve been having odd dreams of hunting and killing. They feel like memories, but I know they aren’t. I’d remember if I had done these things. And some are too close to the present day. But they feel real.” He stands up, looking at Fred. She can see how worried and concerned he is, but she’s suddenly wondering when Angel vacationed last. But Angel is not convinced. “Anyway, I need to stay here and look into it. Find out if they are more than just dreams.”

Fred, however, is determined. “We can do research while we’re on the road. Try to find out how someone or something might manipulate dreams. That’s what a laptop is for. Isn’t there anywhere you’d want to revisit?”

“This isn’t quite the small village you described, Angel.”

The next evening, after some sea travel that Angel has kept remarkably quiet during, the ferry approaches its destination. Afterwards, it’s a small boat ride up the coast of Ireland to their destination: Galway – the village where Angel, as Liam, was born.

Walking into a small inn, carrying the luggage as they enter, Angel looks at her.

“Well, it’s been a few hundred years.”

As Fred starts looking around the inn’s lobby, her attention is drawn to a rack of flyers, all displaying local tourist spots. Angel goes to the reception area as the innkeeper, a woman in her sixties, comes from a room in the back and asks how she can help. Angel tells her that he has reservations. “It’s under the name Angel. No last name.”

“No last name? You wouldn’t happen to be a rock star or something?” The innkeeper doesn’t look up at Angel until he answers, with as little words as possible.

“No.”

“Well, you’re certainly handsome enough.” She smiles and hands him a set of keys “Here we go, rooms twenty-three and twenty-four. It’s the family deal, so they are connected by a door.”

Fred meanwhile has found a flyer. On it, an image of two killers, their faces resembling vampires. It’s labelled “The 1753 Massacre Tour.” Even with it’s silly cartoon cover, Fred can tell that the vampires resemble Angelus and Darla. She picks up the flyer, turns to Angel.

“Angel, we should go on this. It’ll be a hoot.”

The innkeeper grins at them both, happily. “Oh, that’s my girl Margaret’s Walking Tour.” Then her face changes, like she’s selling tickets. She points at the flyer. “Happened here a few hundred years ago. Absolutely horrid. Ripped-out throats and other maiming. Tons of fun, if you like a good scare. You should give it a try.”

Angel turns to Fred, his face saying no for him. “That doesn’t really sound like relaxing, Fred.”

“Oh, come now,” Fred insists, reading the blurb from the back of the flyer. “Listen to this: ‘Over one hundred years before London had Jack the Ripper and the US had Bonnie and Clyde, Galway had its own scourge. A team of mystery killers created terror for the upper crust of the city.’ Plus, it’s free.” She smiles and holds up the flyer, determined.

“Fred, I thought we were trying to have a vacation,” Angel tells her, taking the keys and picking up his luggage from the ground. “This doesn’t sound like the best way to keep your mind off danger and stress. And I do not want a trip down a dark memory lane.” As they’re walking to their room, Angel’s voice softens. “Hearing how history sees the first in the long line of my awful acts doesn’t sound like a good time.”

But Fred thinks it’s possibly helpful. “Are you sure? Maybe it will help you connect some dots and give you a hint about what’s behind your dreams. I mean, if they are tied to memories…”

“Now that’s a bit of a stretch,” the vampire tells her, as she places her case on the bed and starts unpacking. A knock at the door gets Angel’s attention, as Fred flops herself down onto the bed, testing it.

At the door is a young man, a teenager, with bright red hair and a bow tie, with a name tag and the inn’s name on it. “Hi there! I’m with the inn and I just wanted to give you some more information on our spooky, but informative, walking tour.”

“Not interested,” Angel says to him, non-committal.

But the bell hop looks up at Angel, sweating slightly. “Uh, well, you really should reconsider. It’s fun and my boss said the young lady was interested.”

Angel doesn’t even shake his head. “Not my kind of fun.”

“A great way to see the city,” the bell hop insists. He’s sweating even more now, and even pulls his collar out.

“I like to find my own way.” Angel then starts to close the door, the bellhop desperate for attention.

“Well… Uh, it’s really…. Miss?”

“We aren’t interested,” Angel says, finally closing the door as the bellhop tries desperately to get Fred’s attention.

“What was that about?” Fred asks, as she hears him shut the door.

“I don’t know. But something’s not right. He was terrified.” He looks at her, thinking. And then he tells her that he has a plan. “You know, actually you should go on the tour.”

“Really?” Fred asks.

“Yeah. You’ll have fun. You need some of that. Besides, I should stay here and dig into these dreams of mine.” He sits on the bed next to her. She squeals, and Angel smiles – just like the old days.

“This will be a neato way to learn about your hometown!” she yells, slightly more excitable than she expected. She gets up almost instantly and checks her watch. She waves back at him as she walks through the door. “Call me if you need help.”

Half hour later, a tour guide is directing a group of visitors around the town of Galway. Fred is amongst the group, taking it seriously. They approach a small alleyway, near a local pub. “And here’s where a local young man was found in the alleyway. He would be the first of many to fall at the hands of the mysterious woman and man believed to be from Galway.” The tour guide, Margret, is young and knows her stuff. She points at the pub and then back to the alley. “After a night of drinking, this young man’s throat was torn up in what was originally assumed to be a mugging, until the next night, when the victim’s entire family were also found with their throats torn out.”

In the inn, Angel leaves his room, skulks in the corridors. He hears someone, possibly the bell boy, crying out in the distance. From another room. It’s the word ‘no’ being said over and over, by a shrill, scared voice. As he follows the sound, he sees the innkeeper locking the door behind her as she walks off, the cries still coming from within. Angel waits for her to leave.

On the streets below the inn, the tour guide directs the group further into the alley way, delivering her story with a tone of false dread and eeriness: the perfect murder tour guide, Fred thinks.

“Just goes to show that you never know what’s lurking in the shadows.” When nothing happens, the guide walks closer to the alley way, repeats herself, slightly louder. “I said… You never know what’s lurking in the shadows!”

Back at the inn, Angel cracks open a chain that’s keeping the door locked. He breaks it. Inside he finds five young boys, all looking terrified. One is clawing at the walls, his nails scraping through the old wallpaper. They all seem desperate. The bell hop crying out, Angel recognises from earlier. “No, no, no, no, no,” he says, rocking back and forth in a foetal position.

Angel reaches out his hand to help him. “Hey there. Don’t worry. I’m here to help.”

But the bellhop scurries away from Angel’s reach, pulls himself further into a ball and into the nearest corner. “No, no, no, no, no. I can’t. No. No.”

“What did this to you? Is it your boss? Come with me. I’ll…” Angel tries to get closer, but the teen pushes the vampire away frantically.

“GET AWAY!”

Angel backs off, his arms raised in surrender. He calmly talks to the boy. “Hold on. Take a deep breath. I’ll get you some help.”

On the street, a man, dressed as a noble, clearly based on Angelus, emerges from the shadows of the alley and cries out. The tourists giggle and smile, mostly at his late entrance, and Margret is not impressed.

She touches something resembling a vial, that’s dangling from her neck. As she does, a glow encompasses the crowd that they can’t see. Everyone is surrounded by an orange glow that flows back to the vial. Fred, however, glows blue, marking her of interest to Margret. She takes Fred’s arm specifically and points to a house a short distance away.

“Now, if you’ll just follow me this way, I’ll show you where the family met their bloody end.”

Not long afterwards, Fred returns to the room to find Angel seated, staring at the lap top, researching something. “I’m back.”

He doesn’t turn to look at her as she sits down on the bed. “How was it?”

“Um… All right, I guess,” she says, getting comfortable. “That was certainly a lot of carnage for just a few years. Is that what your dreams have been about?”

“Sort of,” he says, still looking at the screen. “It’s a little of my past, and some is new, like some school kids being murdered.”

Fred watches Angel, frustrated for a moment by a pop up on the screen. He grunts for a moment. Fred smiles. “Are you handling the computer stuff okay? Finding what you need?”

“I’ve actually been looking into that scared bellhop.” He tells her, only now finally facing her. Fred gets off the bed and peers at the screen. “He was terrified of something around here. So I tried to find him while you were out.”

“While I was out? You didn’t want help?” Fred sounds slightly disappointed.

“You wanted to go on the tour.”

“Is he okay?” she asks.

Angel turns to her and relates his story. “He had some kind of breakdown. He and other employees are in a room that they refuse to leave. The door was locked, but I’m pretty sure that’s to stop someone from stumbling in on them.”

Fred is horrified, asks aloud what could be doing that to them, but Angel clicks his mouse and brings up an image of a pentagram. He zeroes in on it, a pictograph of a small demon next to it. Angel moves slightly and gestures at the screen.

“I’ve heard of witches using the Blood of Gachnar to collect fear. They then put that fear into other people to control them. But it that’s the case, the victims who’d had all their fear removed should be showing up in reports of reckless behaviour. Police reports for the area indicate business as usual.”

Fred scrolls through the webpage, frowning. How would someone remove someone else’s fears, she asks. Angel thinks that they must scare the person as much as they can and secure the fear somehow. Then Fred shouts louder, a realisation on her excitable face. “Oh! What if they didn’t take it all from one person?”

Angel turns to look at her. “During the tour, these guys in lame costumes kept jumping out of the shadows to get a rise out of us. It’s a pretty silly gimmick – unless you’re trying to capture fear, right?”

“That could certainly be the case,” Angel says, placing his hand on his chin. “But both the inn owner and the tour guide would need to be carrying the Blood of Gachnar with them in some kind of vessel. Once we find the container, it’s a small matter of taking and destroying it.”

Below Angel and Fred, in the basement of the inn, the innkeeper is sitting at a table. She has the Times in her hand and is pondering the crossword. She turns to another older woman, who’s sitting at a work bench, working on something. “Esme, do you know a fourteen-letter word for an American reality-show star who hates the sun?”

“How should I know?”

Then, Margret the tour guide, still in the same clothes, answers the question without hesitation. “Harmony Kendall?”

“Well, what do you know? It fits!” The innkeeper, called Gytha by her companion, places her paper down on the table with a resounding slap of success and turns to Margret, smiling. “And how was the take today?”

She looks up at Margret, who’s shaking her head, annoyed. “Not very good.”

Gytha gets up from the table, goes to a shelf nearby, talking as she goes. “Now, dearie. This just won’t do. We’ve been burning through our worker’s brains and we are going to need a lot more fear if we are to control the whole city.”

Margaret absent-mindedly twirls the vial around her neck. “It’s not my fault this new guy balls up all his cues. Everyone just laughs, taking the mick out of it.”

Gytha is not impressed. “Now, now. We shouldn’t blame our mistakes on others.”

“Oh! I also ran into something powerful tonight.” Margret then yells, trying to keep on the innkeeper’s good side. She sounds slightly afraid. “The yank girl staying here. There’s something different about her. I don’t know what, but it’s powerful. Maybe we could use her somehow.”

But now Gytha slaps her hands hard down on the table, clearly frustrated. “Oh, stop all this, Margret! We should be focusing on widening our influence to outside the neighbourhood.”

“Gytha,” calls Esme from her bench. She has a small demon in her hand, blood all over her palm and surrounding everything on the workbench. “We should look into this girl Margret has found. After all, this little Gachnar can’t bleed forever.” She puts the demon down and it barely moves. A pentagram, the Mark of Gachnar, is scraped onto the table in blood.

One floor above, in reception, Fred is pouring through the paperwork. “Shouldn’t we look for the tour guide or the innkeeper directly?”

“If we destroy the supply first, they can’t control…”

Suddenly, one of the bell hops comes behind Angel and swings at his head with a baseball bat. Fred yells Angel’s name as he falls to the ground.

Hearing her voice, a growl rising in his throat, Angel gets up, uninjured, and turns to the bell hop, his fangs on full display. “Sorry about this.”

He swings, punching the bell hop unconscious. He turns around to face Fred, only to see her being bundled away by more bellhops. As they drag her away from the vampire, she looks at him and nods. “Let me go with them, so we can find the witches.”

“Are you sure?” Angel says, concerned. “What if Illyria..?”

But Fred just whispers at him. “Trust me.”

Seconds later, the bell hops have dragged Fred to the basement, where Gytha is waiting at the bottom of the stairs. “Are you sure about this, Margret? She doesn’t seem like much.” As Fred is brought nearer to Gytha, she spots the vial, identical to the one she saw around Margret’s neck. She grabs it, snaps it loose from Gytha’s neck and yells out.

“Angel!”

Having trailed them, Angel’s at the top of the stairs. She throws the vial at him, which he catches in his hands. Within a second, he’s cracked it completely. Fred watches as he leaps down the stairs, taking out one bell hop. Fred breaks free and turns, delivering a well-aimed kick to another bell hop’s nether-regions.

The older woman, Esme, screams at her fellow witches and they race towards her. “Margret! Gytha! Quickly!” They link hands and, standing in a circle, they begin chanting to the almost dead demon on the workbench. “By Gachnar’s blood, you will bow to our command!”

Green light emerges for them, seemingly granting them more power. They aim their power at Fred, intending to scare her, but as the light crackles around her, it changes colour. Angel looks on concerned. It’s no longer green, but a familiar shade of blue.

As Fred gives in, Illyria is suddenly in her place, terrifying the witches. “You dare try to pit your insignificant power against mine?” She flips the table at them, and they fall back.

As Illyria fades back into Fred, the powers of Gachnar are not strong enough and engulf the trio. Angel runs forward, green energies swirling around him, and grabs matching vials from the necks of Margret and Esme. He shatters them while they’re still around their necks.

The power then fades, leaving silence in the basement.

Later, as police and ambulances arrive at the scene, Fred and Angel have faded into the background across the street, sitting at an open air restaurant. Fred has a mug of steaming coffee in her hand. “I really thought I had Illyria covered and could relax. I need to remember that she’s always there. Just waiting for a reason to surface.”

“It’ll be hard to control her, but you can do it.” Angel smiles, no doubt on his face.

“Thanks. I..” But Fred’s voice is cut off by Angel’s cell phone ringing. The vampire takes his phone from his coat pocket, takes one look at the caller’s name and grunts loudly. He answers the call and doesn’t speak – lets the person on the other end start.

“Hello wanker.”

Sighing, Angel just looks irritated. Extremely. “You’d think I would’ve blocked your number by now.”

Spike, on the other end, in San Francisco, is in his apartment, Giles standing, horrified to his left. “Is that any way to treat someone who is calling with valuable, save-your-sorry-ass information?”

“What do you want, Spike?”

Spike then explains their most recent mission. “This nasty Big Bad named Archaeus has been messing with my head, thanks to a link that comes from being my great-great-great-grandsire. I expect he’s been doing the same to you.” He pauses for a moment. “So have you been dreaming of kills that happened even though you couldn’t have done them?” He waits for Angel to react, checking his black nail-polish while he waits.

Angel doesn’t answer. That’s enough for Spike. “I’ll take that as a yes on the dreaming then.”

Angel doesn’t say much else. “How bad is it?”

“Bad enough that I’m calling your huge Forehead in. We need your help taking him on.”

“I’ll be there as soon as possible.” He doesn’t say goodbye to Spike. He turns to Fred, apologising. “Fred, I…”

“But what about looking into your dreams?” she asks him, standing up with him.

“There’s a link to them in San Francisco. They need my help digging into it. Could you head back to London and research any recent and unexplained deaths of the vampire variety? Some of the victims in my most recent dream were students and Sophie and Lavinia should have some information about a vampire named Parnell. There might be a connection there.”

She nods. He turns to her. “Faith can help.”

But that’s not what worries Fred. As she takes his arm and they walk towards the port, she looks at him with a smile.

“Can we call ourselves Angel Investigations?”