The Adventures of Deadboy and Zeppo

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Xander leaned against the cement brick of a wall and let his eyes fall closed. He had no idea where to go from here. The faint scent of his sire had faded within a hundred yards of the hotel and now he was just wandering the street aimlessly. Tilting his head up slightly, Xander opened his mouth so that he could better scent the air even though, as expected, he didn't find anything at all. In a city this size, he could wander the streets for months without finding Angel, and that was assuming Angel was alive and still in the city.

Xander shivered at the idea that his sire could be dead or imprisoned somewhere that Xander would never find him. He breathed deeply and categorized the various smells: rotting food, car fumes, sewer water, dog feces, human body odor, ashes, smog, a Pylean demon, drying paint, musty paper.

The only conclusion Xander reached was that he hated L.A. as a vampire even more than he had hated it as a human. He rubbed his nose to try and ease the stinging, sharp smell of garbage, but absolutely nothing in the air told him where to look for his sire. Xander was about to push off from the wall to continue the search when a body hit his, shoving him toward an alley.

Another fledge might have gone into game face, but Xander found his instincts in that matter were a little less than vampirely, which had at one point in the recent past led to a round of taunt the vampire from Spike. Now it allowed him to keep his human mask in place as three teenagers shoved him into the alley.

"Hand over your wallet and you won't get hurt," the tallest teen, a Hispanic boy with long stringy hair, hissed his order. Xander smiled slowly even though the shortest had a dull knife pushing into his stomach. The thought of these three threatening him was so ludicrous that it approached amusing. Oh hell, it was amusing. Xander breathed deeply, enjoying the smell of aggression and fear that drifted of their bodies.

"Small problem. Don't have one," Xander shrugged as he arranged his features into helpless submission. The couple in the car he had killed out of need and hunger. Right now he didn't need anything from these three, and he wasn't particularly hungry yet, but they had sealed their fate when they had challenged him. They were vermin trying to challenge his superior strength, and Xander loved the feeling of knowing that he wasn't the one in danger here. They were the Zeppos in this alley, and he was just about to make their final lesson a memorable one.

"Don't fuck with us," the tall one hissed in a thick accent, and Xander held up his hands as if in surrender.

"Not fucking with you. Not fucking you either considering you smell, but most definitely not fucking *with* you." The comment caught the three so off guard that the one with the knife backed off a half step. Xander took that moment since he really didn't want to see Angel's shirt ruined by a knife thrust. He reached out and grabbed the short one's knife hand, yanking as hard as he could. With his vampire strength, that was hard enough that the boy's feet lost contact with the ground a half second before his face made contact with the concrete wall with a squishing thud.

"Ew," Xander complained sarcastically as he gave a sly smile. Turning his head to the two remaining attackers, he watched as they stood helpless with shock.

"Fucking assh..." The tall one didn't get any farther since Xander's fist drove his nose back and into his brain. Xander could feel the bone and cartilage yield under the force of his hand, and the sheer power exhilarated him.

"Oh man, just... you know, we only wanted...." The last gang member was reduced to random babbling, and Xander remembered what that had felt like. He remembered babbling when Dru had appeared in the hallway of his apartment building gliding toward him seductively. He remembered the terror of knowing that his life and death was totally out of his control. The gang member had backed himself into a blue dumpster that smelled of rotting lettuce, and Xander stalked forward.

By now his human self would have been running, screaming for help. Hell, his human self had run screaming from Dru, nearly breaking his neck on the stairs, and then a skank-faced minion and appeared below him.

He had crashed into the vamp, rolling them both down a flight of stairs with the vamp on the bottom and taking most of the heavy blows. Xander had slammed into the wall at the bottom and had been stunned enough to lay there struggling for breath for a moment. He had gotten up to run again, but he had been just a little too slow. Still, he had died doing everything he could to escape.

"God, you really are pathetic. You're just standing here waiting to die," Xander said as he let his hands fall on the metal dumpster on either side of the teenager's head. The dull metallic thud made the would-be mugger flinch. "So weak. So pathetically and humiliatingly weak." Xander lowered his head to scent the wonderful fear that flowed off the body trapped between him and the dumpster. Xander was about to bite when another smell hit him like needles in his nose. Sneezing, Xander backed off a step and considered the shaking creature with urine flowing down its leg.

"You're too pathetic to even bother with," he said with a sneer. The boy stood trembling, and Xander turned his back to consider the first two attackers. A scrambling noise behind him told him that the boy with the weak bladder had run for it, but he didn't care. He wasn't about to eat something that smelled like that.

The first gangster lay in a pool of fresh blood that seeped from a cracked skull. Snarling at the wasted blood that now pooled on the dirty pavement, Xander grabbed the second gangster, the one he punched, and sunk his teeth into the neck. Without the heart to pump blood up to him, he had trouble pulling enough blood from the body to truly satisfy him; however, he drew a pint or two into his mouth before dropping the body on the pavement again.

Xander checked his shirt and pants to make sure he was still respectable looking before stepping out of the alley and picking a direction. A car passed on the street, even in this bad neighborhood, even at this late hour. Humans, going on their lives without ever knowing they passed a demon. Well, most humans did. Xander wondered if Willow and Cordy would have a problem with him feeding on the gang member, not that either woman would ever find out. No, Xander thought he had seen the last of his former friends. They were right. He wasn't Xander and he wouldn't become Xander even to earn their trust.

Xander set a strong walking pace down the street as he continued searching for the scent of his sire. He wasn't really anything. He wasn't Xander, he wasn't a minion, he wasn't a childe, he wasn't a normal vampire, but he didn't have a soul. Hell, he didn't even have a chip that bought him a ticket into... well, Spike wasn't exactly in Buffy's good graces, but the chip had earned him a place in the Scooby gang. And he refused to start brooding about that. Buffy could have Spike with all his sire-issues. It wasn't like it was Xander's fault that Dru had eaten him without ever looking Spike up for a quick roll in the sack.

Xander froze as a particular scent drifted by him. He tasted the air, certain that he had made a mistake, but he found the scent again. Xander turned around and scanned the street behind him. A broken street light left a large section of the street dark, and Xander closed his eyes for a moment before pulling up his demon vision. With his true eyes, he could spot movement far quicker and the dark didn't bother him at all. His search didn't discover anything more interesting than the sharp-edged outline of two cars and one van parked along the street as well as a cat walking a fire escape.

Tilting his head, he again found the smell of the human that had invaded the hotel courtyard teasing his nose. He could smell the prey, but he couldn't see it. Xander started wandering back the way he came, walking into the wind so that he could find the source of that smell. A low growl rumbled from his throat, and he knew he should stop before the prey went running the other direction, but he couldn't quite seem to find the off switch.

After passing one car, Xander focused on the van. Suddenly, the side-panel door slid open and four men in suits jumped out. Xander went into full game face and leapt forward before his brain could point out that men trying to jump a vampire could possible know about vampires and might just have a defense against vampires.

Xander felt the burning pain slash into his chest as the tazer's wires hit him. He immediately tore them out and reached forward to grab his attacker, a white man old enough to have small wrinkles at the edges of his eyes. Xander's hand closed around the man's suit jacket, and instantly his hand felt as though it was dipped in fire. Xander screamed in pain and anger before slamming the human into the side of the van with a satisfying thud.

A burning pain traveled from his leg up to his chest, making Xander fall forward so that his forearms left two long dents in the side of the van. Reaching back, he ripped the new tazer wires from his body and tried to turn; however, his feet became tangled in the body at his feet. Oversized shoes and Zeppo instincts overcame the demon's advantages, and Xander fell to the concrete sidewalk on one knee hard enough that he could smell his own blood almost instantly.

Another man in a suit, this time a black man with sharp eyes, hit him with another tazer, and Xander struggled to his feet. Xander took the hit in the arm, and his whole body shook in pain. The hand that had touched the first attacker still burned, and his knee felt like he just might have broken it.

Xander snarled his frustration and leaped onto the roof of the van in one move… of course the landing made his knee hurt so bad that he immediately collapsed, but he escaped the tazers. After sliding down the front of the van and over the hood, Xander took several running steps away from the attackers when the black man shouted something that made Xander pause.

"Angel!" the deep rumbling voice of the human called, and Xander stopped right in the middle of the street. A passing driver laid on his horn as he swerved to avoid hitting Xander, but Xander ignored that annoyance as he watched the three remained suits take defensive positions. A fifth man had come out of the van and knelt next to the injured man whose heartbeat Xander could hear stuttering. He smiled at the evidence that at least one of the human would probably pay for the attack.

Xander stood waiting as the three approached, his instinct to attack or flee rising with every inch closer.

"Where is he?" Xander demanded.

"He's with our colleagues," the spokesman announced, and Xander started walking backwards as the men tried to get within range of the tazers.

"Let him go," Xander snarled about two seconds before his brain could point out his stupidity in even making the demand. Yeah, guys with suits in unmarked vans. Xander watched Le Femme Nikita. He knew things. He didn't expect people who kidnapped 250 year old Master Vampires to be intimidated by him.

"Can't do that," the man admitted with a shrug. "We have a little job for him, but he isn't as cooperative as we would hope. If he's not helpful…" the man's words trailed off, and he gave a small indifferent shrug.

"Job?" Xander pressed. He stopped backing up when he reached the far sidewalk, and the three stooges stopped trying to surround him. Xander idly wondered if they didn't want to get too far from the van or if they were waiting for some backup.

"We need some help with a security issue, only Angel is not very helpful."

"You want him to kill someone," Xander clarified. Sometimes he missed things, and he couldn't afford to misunderstand now.

"Yes."

"He won't kill."

"Then he'll die." The man spoke as if killing Angel was no more important than smashing a bug, and Xander snarled his response with his fangs showing. "Of course we might still make a deal," the spokesman suggested.

"You want me to kill," Xander said. He usually was the last to catch on, but this guy was putting the dots pretty close together.

"It would certainly suggest that Angel still had value. Of course, perhaps, like him, you value human life too much to make such a trade."

"I'd kill a hundred humans for him," Xander answered honestly, and he had to suppress the groan of frustration that attempted to escape right after. Nice. He had just given these guys reason to keep Angel hostage. He should just write 'sucker for hire' on his forehead for telling them just how much leverage they held over him as long as they had Angel. Then again, killing a hundred humans took time, especially if these guys wanted a hundred specific humans dead. Xander decided he couldn't take those words back, so he could only hope they made Angel's situation better rather than worse. Maybe Wesley and Cordy could find Angel given time.

"Well that might be a deal our employers would consider," the spokesman said with false sincerity and a wave of his hand. Xander didn't back up this time as the two suited men flanked him. He shifted back into his human face to avoid possible tongue damage and waited with his eyes locked on the spokesman.

"Hurt him, and you're the one I'll find," Xander promised as the electricity ripped into him from both sides, and he went down right on his injured knee. Oh yeah, the universe hated Xander Harris, he thought as darkness stole in and replaced the burning pain.