Table Of Content“HURTS, DOESN’T IT?” SPIKE TAUNTED.
The Judge’s hand was splayed over Angel’s chest. Dru looked on, fascinated,
thrilled, getting on her hands and knees like a lioness.
“Well, you know, it kind of itches a little,” Angel tossed off, wincing. But
nothing else happened. Dru kept waiting for the immolation.
Her Spike was angry. “Don’t just stand there. Burn him!”
Angel made a face. He was obviously enjoying himself. “Gee, maybe he’s
broken.”
“What the hell is going on?” Spike demanded.
Dru got it. She knew.
“There is no humanity in him.” The Judge turned away, losing interest.
“Angel,” Dru breathed, awash in delirious joy.
Angel grinned at her. Looked deep into her eyes with a sinister, wonderful
gleam. They were connecting right here, and right now, and she could barely
contain herself.
“Yeah, baby,” he said, “I’m back.”
Buffy the Vampire Slayer™
Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie tie-in) The Harvest
Halloween Rain
Coyote Moon
Night of the Living Rerun The Angel Chronicles, Vol. 1
Blooded
The Angel Chronicles, Vol. 2
The Xander Years, Vol. 1
Visitors
Unnatural Selection
The Angel Chronicles, Vol. 3
Available from ARCHWAY Paperbacks
Buffy the Vampire Slayer adult books
Child of the Hunt
Return to Chaos
The Gatekeeper Trilogy
Book 1: Out of the Madhouse Book 2: Ghost Roads
Book 3: Sons of Entropy
The Watcher’s Guide: The Official Companion to the Hit Show The Postcards
The Essential Angel
Available from POCKET BOOKS
A novelization by Nancy Holder Based on the hit TV series created by
Joss Whedon Based on the teleplays “Surprise” by Marti Noxon,
“Innocence” by Joss Whedon and “Passion” by Ty King
Published by POCKET BOOKS
New York London Toronto Sydney Tokyo Singapore
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AN ARCHWAY PAPERBACK Original
An Archway Paperback published by
POCKET BOOKS, a division of Simon & Schuster Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
™ and copyright © 1999 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All rights reserved.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address
Pocket Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
ISBN: 0-7434-3118-9
AN ARCHWAY PAPERBACK and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.
In memory of my mother, Marion Elise Jones
Acknowledgments
The Chronicles: Prologue
The First Chronicle: Surprise
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The Second Chronicle: Innocence
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The Third Chronicle: Passion
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
The Chronicles: Epilogue
About the Author
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My deepest thanks to the cast and crew of Buffy, especially Joss Whedon, Marti
Noxon, Ty King, and Caroline Kallas. Thanks, also, to Debbie Olshan at Fox. As
always, my gratitude to my agent, Howard Morhaim, and his assistant Lindsay
Sagnette; to my editor, Lisa Clancy, and assistant editor Liz Shiflett. Todah
rabah, Michael Mantell, Ph.D.; Rabbi Zelig Plisken; and my Babysitter
Battalion: Ida Khabazian, Julie Cross, Bekah and Julie Simpson, Lara and April
Koljonen. Thanks also to my wonderful usual suspects—Charlie and Kathy
Grant, Chris Golden, Leslie Jones, Karen Hackett, and Stinne Lighthart. Thank
you also to Chris Mauricio and the Bronzers, for all their help and support. And
last, but certainly not least, to my dear husband, Wayne, and our miraculous
daughter, Belle . . . we’re on our way.
THE CHRONICLES: PROLOGUE
It was the dead of night.
Hands in the pockets of his black duster, Angel walked the moon-drenched
streets of Sunnydale. His shadow loomed long, and his boot heels were the only
sound above the night wind.
Like Angel himself, Sunnydale was cursed. Behind the pastel facades of its
houses and the superficial, Southern California pleasantness of its population,
terrible things happened as a matter of course. An astonishing number of people
died, and in mind-numbingly brutal and savage ways. Children became
possessed; babies became vampires. The dead not only walked, they raged.
The place had been known to the Spanish who’d founded it as Boca del
Inferno, the mouth of hell. Sunnydale sucked evil in, exhaled it, vomited it. Its
appetite for darkness was insatiable.
But evil also died here. Its executioner was Buffy Summers, the Slayer, the
one girl chosen from all her generation to fight the demons, vampires, and
monsters who long to corrupt and cripple the world. Buffy was a champion, a
beacon, and a tragic hero of epic proportions: her battle was to the death . . .
hers. Slayers seldom lived long. Their lives were fierce and intense. And then
they were over.
Angel’s face was cast in shadow as he stopped before the yellow house on
Revello Drive. As the moonlight made hollows of his eyes and cheeks, he stared
up at the bedroom where Buffy lay sleeping. Mind and body—yes, and soul—
pulsed like a heartbeat with thoughts of her. He was restless and edgy, and he
could admit now, in the darkness, that it was his need for her that had driven him
out of his apartment to stand here, now.
The ultimate irony in all of this was, of course, that Angel was a vampire, in
love with a vampire slayer. Not just any vampire; in his heyday he had been
known as Angelus, the One with the Angelic Face. No other vampire could
match him in sheer cruelty and unbelievable brutality.
Though he still looked like the reckless young Irishman he once had been, he
was over two hundred years old. He was also the only vampire on earth with a
soul, tormented by the horrors he had committed after he had been changed.
In Galway, in 1753, his schoolmaster had seen a rogue and a scoundrel.
