“True.” His head bobbed as he ruminated on this. “But you don’t have the same limitations as a vampire. You have a reflection. You can see the sun—or could, if you went someplace where they had the sun.” He paused to examine the whiskey in his glass. The drink had made his indiscernible accent more pronounced. There was a musicality in his voice that hadn’t been there before. “A vampire surrenders their humanity to the bite. The man I was before, in Galway, he’s gone. But you—you get to walk in both worlds. You’re a human and a demon.”

“I left my name behind too,” she admitted. “In Sweden, I was Aud.”

“I mean, you’re still odd, Anya. You’re a thousand years old.”

“No, my name. It was Aud.” She spelled it for him.

“Oh. Huh,” he said. His fingers drummed on the side of his glass for a moment before he said, “I was Liam. Before.”

“Isn’t Liam short for William?”

“It is. But my da. . .” He paused, clearing his throat. With some effort, he forced his vowels flat, Americanized. “My father was called William. As his junior, everyone called me Liam.”

“Wasn’t Spike also called William?” She took another sip of her drink, hoping to aim the liquid directly at the back of her throat and skip further numbing of her tongue. It felt a bit like drowning. Coughing, she continued. “William the Bloody, that’s what Ripper called him. Is that why you both use nicknames? You couldn’t decide who got to be the William?”

Angelus chuckled and swung his feet onto the floor so that he could lean forward. “You know, I never thought about it. Darla started calling me Angelus a hundred years before Dru ever sired Spike.” He drained his glass again. “Drusilla kept her human name. She might be the only vampire who ever did.”

“Drusilla doesn’t seem like she does anything like a regular human or vampire.”

Angelus gazed down at the see-through floor. Around the pool table, the Wellex demons were using their stick limbs to fence with each other. A Fyarl-demon waiter was breaking up the fight. Looking back at Anya, the vampire cocked his head. Anya resisted the urge to fluff her hair.

“You still have a soul,” he observed. “A human soul.”

“How can you tell?” she asked. She looked down at her arms like there was some visible seam tethering her soul to her body. “Does it show? Does it smell?”

“No, you smell like vengeance-demon blood. Like something food-adjacent. You know the white stuff inside an orange peel?” His face scrunched up, in thought rather than vampire bumps. “Pith! That’s the word.”

“I smell pithy?” Anya asked, not liking the sound of it.

“All vengeance demons do, no matter their species,” Angelus said, waving off the idea. “They don’t all have the glow. You look alive. I know you’re old—”