to be looked at. There was something very wrong there.
Squishbeans purred on his chest, and Buffy did her thing on his computer, and for a moment he could forget about graveyards stretching into alternative dimensions, two people he was starting to care about who had probably been dead for over a century, and gender-bending ghosts with perceptive, vulnerable green eyes.
Gateway
“DO WE have to?” Angel asked, not sure why this made her so uncertain.
“Take apart the bed? Yes.”
Tucker stalked around the thing, taking a look at the way the frame was put together. In the last two days, he had moved the desk into the corner, stripped the windows, removed the light fixtures, and—in his words—“felt up the creepy-assed wallpaper.” But it was now time to move the bed.
Angel wasn’t so sure it would ever be time to move the bed.
“What if something awful happened there!” Angel asked, feeling a little desperate.
Tucker grunted. “Yeah, well, I’ve been there, done that. It was horrible. I don’t look forward to doing it again. But right now, it’s either feel up the rest of the stuff on the desk—”
“You slept for twelve hours,” Angel said humbly. She was beginning to think that Tucker was a much more powerful empath than his aunt Ruth. Angel’s involvement in his visions was far more immersive—both in the pleasure and the pain.
The fact that Angel hadn’t noticed that, had simply been swept away by them, had felt more connected to Tucker than she ever had to Ruth—that was part of the power.
It hadn’t felt like a vision. It had been real.
And what it had done to Tucker had been real too. He’d been exhausted, sleeping for twelve hours and wandering the house like a zombie for eight hours after that before going back to sleep. Angel had ordered groceries for the next morning, wanting there to be fresh eggs and cheese—lots of protein for Tucker, to sustain his work as an empath. But that had only been the surface reason.
The truth was, Angel saw Tucker as needing her, far more than Ruth had ever needed her. Ruth had treated her as a friend, a nemesis, an irritant, and Angel had responded that way. Of course, it hadn’t been until the old woman had passed away that Angel had realized humans don’t always ask for what they need.
Tucker was an object lesson in this idea.
He didn’t ask for anything, but when Angel gave him something unexpected, the gratitude, the relief on his face, told Angel far more about what he had grown to think life would give him than any plea for help.
So now that Tucker was ready to move on with the cleansing of the house—literally—Angel found she was unwilling to let him. Not when they both knew the cost.
“Tucker, you don’t have to do this,” Angel begged. “Please.”
“Aw, Angel,” Tucker teased, “are you worried about me?”
“Yes,” Angel said, and then backtracked, because that had sounded far too enthusiastic. “If you were to be unable to carry out your duty, the house would fall to ruin. The spiritual excess—”
“Is already forging a psychic void to a hell dimension,” Tucker said dryly, obviously referring to the graveyard. “When are we going to check that out again?”
Angel whimpered. Honest to heaven, whimpered. “Do we have to?” she asked, sitting down on the old mattress and picking reluctantly at the blue-and-white striping. Tucker had stripped the bed completely and taken the bedclothes to a laundry service, asking them to treat the linens as delicates to help preserve them as long as possible and to simply steam the quilts and spot-wash them.
“Angel, it’s terrifying over there. You have to see.”
“But….” Angel choked, a little abashed. “We’re working as fast as we can. This is the only way I know to do this task. How do we—”
“Well, for starters, you let me take apart the bed.” Tucker winked at her, and Angel bit her lip, afraid and frustrated—and tingly.
He was so damned irrepressible.
“Fine,” she said, running her hand over the bedrails. She felt the waves of it, thundering through her energy field. “Are you wearing clean underwear?”
Tucker wrinkled his nose and thought about it for a moment, tunneling his fingers through his hair. “No,” he said after a moment. “I mean, they were clean this morning, but we’ve been mucking around a lot in the heat and the dust, so yeah, in an hour or two, I’ll be grateful to shuck them and jump in the shower.”
Angel rolled her eyes. “More grateful than