ANGEL

Chapter Three IN THE DARK

Angel protects a young woman named Rachel from her abusive boyfriend in an alley while Spike watches from a nearby rooftop. At the office, oz holds a ring out to Angel: the Gem of Amarra. Doyle explains that the ring is a priceless talisman which "renders the wearer one hundred percent unkillable, if he's a vampire." Oz tells Angel, Buffy wanted you to have it." Later, alone, Angel hides the ring under a loose brick in one of the sewer tunnels. The next morning Angel receives a call for help from Rachel, but before he can go over, Spike shows up, seeking the Gem of Amarra. The two vampires fight, and cordilia and Doyle rush in just as Angel defeats Spike. Spike runs away.

Later, Angel chases and corners Spike in a dead end blocked by a chainlink fence but is captured by another vampire hired by Spike, who swings a heavy chain around Angel's neck. At Doyle's apartment, Cordelia and Doyle worry that Angel hasn't checked in, the reason being that he is suspended by long, manacled chains from the ceiling of a large warehouse. Spike introduces him to his captor, Marcus, a master torturer with a taste for (eating and torturing) children. Accompanied by the strains of mozarts Symphony #41, the eerily reserved vampire inspects Angel inside and out, asks, "What do you want, Angel?" and rams a red-hot poker through Angel's bared abdomen. Time passes as Marcus works into a rhythm of hurting Angel, then asking what he wants, then hurting him again. Angel refuses to tell them where the ring is, and Spike grows frustrated. Angel tells Spike he's an idiot for believing that Marcus, a vampire, has no interest in obtaining the Gem of Amarra for himself. Unperturbed, Spike dismisses Marcus as a threat, deeming him too single-mindedly obsessed with the art of torture to care about anything else. Spike taunts Angel about "Slutty" the Vampire Slayer, recounting news of her recent rebound disaster. Spike leaves and Marcus continues to shove hot pokers into his captive, then shoots holes in the building's ceiling so that Angel, agonized by any movement, must stretch and hold himself at the limit of his chains to avoid the pencil-thin beams of sunlight. Angel makes Marcus believe he's about to break. He lures his tormentor closer by whispering, truthfully, that what he most wants is forgiveness. Entranced, Marcus draws near enough for Angel to bring his legs up high enough to plunge a wooden stake into Marcus' heart, but before he is able to do so, Spike appears and disarms Angel's feet. Enraged, Marcus punches Angel, and he resumes torturing him with Spike now providing assistance.

Abandoning his fruitless search of Angel's apartment, Spike tells Cordelia and Doyle them that if they want Angel to live, they must find the ring and turn it over before sundown. Doyle is able to find the ring in the sewers by using his demon senses. They meet with Spike at the appointed spot and demand to see Angel before they reveal where they've stashed the ring. Spike takes them to where he and Marcus are holding the now barely conscious Angel. When Spike gloatingly admits he has no intention of going through with the trade, Doyle pulls the ring out of his pocket and throws it across the warehouse floor. Spike reaches for it but is forced to duck and roll when Oz smashes his van through the warehouse wall. Oz holds Spike at bay with crossbows until Cordy and Doyle get Angel into the back of the van and they drive away. To Spike's intense dismay, he finds that Angel was right—under cover of Angel's rescue, Marcus has pinched the Gem of Amarra for himself and run off. Knowing Marcus' predilection for children, Angel tells Oz to head to the boardwalk. They find Marcus focusing on the children there, and Oz uses the van to knock the invincible vampire flying. In spite of having spent most of the day being tortured nearly to death, Angel leaps out of the van, bursting into flame from the sunlight, and tackles Marcus off the pier, falling with him to the water below. In the shade under the boardwalk, the two vampires fight. Angel impales Marcus on a beam, but the Gem of Amarra protects him until Angel yanks the ring off his finger and Marcus crumbles to dust. Angel slides the ring onto his own hand, then steps out into the sunlight for the first time in more than two hundred years.

That evening, enraptured, Angel watches the sun set in an ordinary, smoggy, southern California sky. To Doyle's extreme dismay, Angel has decided not to keep the ring. Angel explains that the Gem of Amarra only appears to be the redemption he seeks, and that keeping it would make him forget about the many people who need a champion to help them at night. When the last sliver of sun disappears, Angel removes the Gem of Amarra and, deliberately, smashes it flat with a chunk of brick. After a moment of silence, Angel slowly begins to smile. "I don't know about you," he says to Doyle, "but I had a nice day...You know, except for the bulk of it, where I was nearly tortured to death." Angel continues to joke with his friend as they leave the rooftop and head down the stairs together.