Midnight Fawn: Part One

Cordelia shuffled a stack of papers, slotted them neatly into a wallet, and stalked over to the filing cabinet to slip the file away. She closed the cabinet drawer with a satisfying clack, and spun to look over at her boss with a broad smile;

"Cut, dried, filed and successful!" she exclaimed, making a motion like dusting her hands of a case, which of course, they just had done. Sitting over at his desk pulling a flint unenthusiastically over the blade of his fighting axe, Angel looked up briefly and half-smiled at her;

"Another successful case closed," he replied in a low, tired voice, "and only a few more million of them to go"

"Yeah, this redemption stuff is easy!" Cordelia replied enthusiastically, the sarcasm lost on her. She crossed over and perched on the edge of Angel's desk as he laid the axe aside, satisfied that the blade which had been blunted on a Lasair demon's neck earlier that night had now been restored, and sat back a little as Cordelia looked at him expectantly.

"What? You have that look on again" She murmured, gazing down at him with an insuppressable smile tugging her lips,

"What look?"

"The 'It's Not As Simple As All That, And I'm Still SO Tortured' look"

"Well it isn't. You can't just chop the head off a leading figure in the demon world and expect nothing to come of it. If you ask me, there'll be a visit from our latest Closed Case's family pretty soon"

"Well, I didn't ask you," she bent and planted a quick kiss on his forehead, "so since I didn't ask, why don't you come to bed. You're tired, and it'll be day in an hour or so"

Angel smiled back more fully this time, and was about to reply in the affirmative, when the office door opened, and an unfamiliar figure entered: a tall, slightly sturdy young woman with very long and very dark brown locks disguising the shape of her face. Her deep eyes lit up with a smile as she saw the two, and said simply;

"Good evening, Cousin Liam"

Neither Cordelia or Angel had yet moved, and realising the suspension of the moment, Cordy rose from the desk and advanced on the newcomer quickly;

"Can we help you? Because, you know, I don't think you have the right place"

"Angel Investigations? Because that's the place I'm looking for" replied the dark woman. Her voice had a pleasant, rounded softness to it, and as she spoke her eyes glittered. She offered her hand to Cordelia, and ask she took it Cordy winced at the strength of the grip;

"I'm Daimhina, and I'd like to have a talk with you and - " she leaned slightly, to glance at Angel, who had now risen and joined Cordy, " - and your employer about that Lasair you killed tonight"

Cordy let out the slightest little hint of a scream and lunged for the freshly sharpened axe, lifting it with difficulty and swinging it at the woman before Angel, even with his supernatural reflexes, could stop her. The axe sheared the air apart just above Daimhina's head, who had quickly ducked with a short scream herself, and embedded itself in the door frame. Daimhima stared at the quivering axe, then glanced again at Angel, who was watching her with some kind of alarm in his face. She swallowed and took a deep breath;

"Liam, they could have warned me your employees are axe-happy!"

Having recovered her composure a little, Cordelia now flung it down again in a heap "Okay - that's it! Who are you, what do you want, and what's with the Liamising??!"

The smile returned to Daimhina's face as she stepped forward and shook hands with Angel;

"Now that we have the axe-swinging out of the way, could we possibly sit down? I've quite a tale, and it's better told sitting" As requested, the three took an uncomfortable lift-journey down to Angel's sitting room, and when Cordy had pulled a slightly shocked looking Angel down onto the couch beside her, Daimhina took a seat opposite them and began;

"My name is Daimhina Cevin. I'm Irish by birth, and descended from a good family, the Caomhins of County Galway, we go back several hundred years, though in the mid 1700's we suffered quite a setback; the entire family then living in Galway was murdered. Almost entirely. One man escaped from the place and fled to England. It was his gruesome knowledge that the family were killed by a vampire, and so with his anger at the deaths of his kith and kin, he sought out the Watchers Council"

She gazed so intently straight into Angel's eyes that he had to cast them down for shame. Guilt seemed almost to hang on him like a mantle of grey cloud and render him so desolate that he felt the touch of no mortal should fall on him affectionately, and wriggled his hand out of Cordy's grasp. Seeing she had made her impression, Daimhina's features softened into a comforting smile, and she absently pushed one lock of her heavy dark hair away from her face, showing for the first time a set of jaw and cheekbone very familiar to Cordelia's eye, though she couldn't have placed them as being of Angel's family line if she hadn't been told.

"Ahh but now I've made you feel bad. That's to be expected. But you see - when all those years ago you feasted on your family till you could drink no more, and then contented yourself with snapping their necks, you didn't extinguish the branch. You and I are related, but I'm related to Liam, the child with so much promise and poetry in him, not to Angelus, the demon with the face of an Angel. When our common forefather went to the Council he was taken in, and in every generation stemming from him, the eldest child has been sent at the age of twenty-one to seek out evil, and to destroy it. We've no mystical powers, no calling, but it's family duty. That's why I'm here. When you killed tonight, you did not destroy. I'm here because I've fought Lasairs before. You have not. Now, the dawn will be here soon. I like you prefer to rest in the day, so if you wouldn't mind, I shall sleep here today, and tomorrow night we'll hunt"

Having made their strange guest comfortable on the couch, Cordelia lay awake wondering how it would all turn out, what she'd meant when she told them the kill was not destruction. She slipped one hand out and trace her finger lightly and thoughtfully over the winged cat tattoo on her partner's back, before moving closer to him and winding her arm around his waist. She preferred to fall asleep before Angel was sleeping deeply enough for him to simply forget to breathe, since it was only force of habit anyway he stopped breathing when he reached a certain level of unconsciousness. That combined with the eerie silence of his unbeating heart now struck Cordy as she held him tightly round his comfortably cuddly middle, resting her forehead in the hollow between his shoulder blades. She closed her eyes, and sleep came to her in the end; but not before she had pondered a hundred more times the purpose of Daimhina's visit.