Nan'sJournal

Blood Price, Chapter 9

2005-11-05T12:05:58Z

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 9: Cold (in progress: 9 a)

As Buffy descended the stairs the next morning, toweling her hair after a long, luxurious shower and thinking about all the things she had to get done for the party on Friday, she halted, hearing Dawn and Spike talking in the front room.

He hadn’t come back at all last night. He’d turned his phone off. Still sulking, she’d concluded.

She hadn’t decided how she should feel about that, which meant she felt annoyed and off-balance.

Dawn was explaining, “--a bargain we made. He doesn’t come here when, well, he’s eaten somebody.”

“That what it was, then.” Buffy could hear the shrug in Spike’s voice. “Just as well, then, I suppose. Ow! Leave off, Bit--”

“Sorry, but it’s your own fault. Hold still.”

“Not like it won’t mend on its own, day or so, doesn’t need tending--”

Having adjusted the belt of her robe to a dependable tightness, Buffy sauntered the rest of the way down, flying casual.

From the conversation, she’d expected to see Dawn tending the usual aftermath of a fight: skinned knuckles and the like. Instead, Dawn was kneeling on the couch next to Spike, intently slathering white cream on his very, very sunburned face that he turned in one direction, then another, irritably trying to avoid her attentions without actually stopping her, or leaving.

He has no defenses, Buffy found herself thinking. From Dawn, anyway, he’d put up with just about anything…which was more than he’d do for Buffy, she thought rancorously.

First, she laughed: he was red as a beet. Then that was overwhelmed by a rush of concern because the conspicuous damage could have been so much worse. Stupid vampire!

Leaning against the door arch, Buffy commented, “Overdid a little, did we?”

Spike’s head whipped around, streaked with cream and bright as a tomato: belatedly noticing her. His eyebrows were singed off, and the front of his hair had burned away, too. As his face began to change, he retorted, “Think this is funny, do you?”

“Quit that,” Dawn directed, laying two stiff, greasy fingers on the bridge of his nose, where the flesh was sliding into the corrugations of the vampire mask. “You’re only making it worse.”

“It itches,” Spike grumbled, turning away from them both, now in full sullen game-face.

Persisting, Dawn fingered up more cream from an indigo jar. “Spike, you got to quit doing this. First, explosions and smoke, and now this--”

As Dawn’s hand reached toward his throat, his patience broke and he bolted--into the hall and then up the stairs, three at a bound.

The sisters traded a look of accord that commented on stupid, stubborn vampires that forgot they were flammable. On the floor above, a door slammed. As Buffy swung around to the stairs in slower but relentless pursuit, Dawn called, “Don’t let Angel see.”

Or Spike would never hear the end of it: Buffy nodded understanding, still trying to decide what to feel toward her wayward vampire.

The shower was running. Buffy eased through the bathroom door. Although she shut it quietly behind her, he heard, smelled, knew, the way he nearly always did, and snarled from behind the undulant shower curtain, “Let me be. Took me by surprise, didn’t it? But not the first time I got singed and likely not the last neither. Nothing to get your knickers in a bunch about. Expect it looks worse than it is, Bit just goes all bossy--”

“You get hurt,” Buffy interrupted calmly, unbelting the robe and letting it fall, stepping over the mound of his discarded clothes, “and I inspect the damage. It’s how we do, remember?”

She pushed aside the curtain, got into the shower, and immediately regretted it: the water was frigid.

“Somebody used up all the hot,” Spike commented pointedly, his back to her, hands braced against the wall and his head bent against the tiles under the full of the spray.

His clothes had provided an instant’s protection: long enough for him to dive away from the full sunlight. But his back was mottled with burns, too--from shoulders to shins. It had, Buffy realized, been a near thing.

She touched the back of his neck and felt him flinch. “You know what will help that.” Actually, she was surprised he hadn’t gone for her the second she came into the bathroom.

“No. No need. I’m fed up well enough, don’t need that.”

“Maybe I do,” she countered, tugging carefully at his shoulder, trying to make him turn. “The bite’s gone numb, Spike. I can’t feel it. I think…I think it’s even healing.” Although she knew Spike loved warmth, he was indifferent to cold. Probably the icy water felt good on the burns. She endured it, shivering. “This is partly my fault. Willow told me, and I didn’t pass the warning along, not that you made it easy to tell you anything. And I got distracted, and forgot. Didn’t think it through, didn’t take it seriously enough. Willow knew you couldn’t channel. Something to do with your aura, I don’t know.” Buffy laid her cheek against his shoulder blade.

“Always knew it,” Spike muttered. “Always knew I’d get accustomed to the light, get careless, get burned. Just in a flash, it was, wasn’t looking for it….”

“It was something. Yesterday, when I wouldn’t…. Willow said you just shut down.”

“Oh,” he said in a tone of puzzled discovery. “Something like, I suppose…. Not your fault, pet. You weren’t to know, and I didn’t know how else to ask, everybody there and watching, not be crying wolf, like you told me once, never to do that again--”

It sank in, like the cold water Buffy didn’t really feel anymore, wasn’t even shivering, too distracted by the realization: yesterday in the kitchen, he’d really, truly needed her, a need as urgent as a mortal wound but too easily taken for an unimportant, untimely whim…and she hadn’t known it. Had flung away the nuisance without a moment’s consideration. Intent on her own concerns, she hadn’t heard him at all, hadn’t listened. Hadn’t cared.

“I need diagrams,” she blurted, shaking against his chest. So he’d turned, was holding her, carefully petting her back, smoothing her soaked hair away from her face. He’d turned the water off, too, she noticed dimly. It didn’t help: the cold had settled inward, turned to ice. “With arrows and large print. I need somebody to whack me and make me pay attention. I should know when things are important, and I don’t. And I do the same dumb things over and over again--!”

“Hush, now. Don’t fret yourself. Things are how they are. Don’t…don’t need you to be hovering, worrying about me--that’s what I have Bit for, innit? Just made me know…some things, is all. Made me stop and consider. An’ that’s good, yeah? Know what I’m doing, like. Know what’s needed and what’s not, the best way I can help now.” Guiding her out of the shower enclosure, enfolding her in a huge dry towel, Spike went on, “Here, you’re chilled to the bone, hothouse flower, you are, need the warm….”

Abruptly she lifted her head, looked him straight in the eyes. It was his human face…yet not. With the cream washed away, his sunburned features seemed one great radiant bruise, the browless, lashless blue eyes wide and surprised-seeming. “I need you to bite me. Right now. For--”

“No, pet. Not a good thing now.”

“For both of us. Do it!”

“You can’t afford--”

“Bite me!” Her fist was pounding against his chest. “What am I, that I can’t get a vampire to bite me?”

“What use,” Spike countered quietly, “is a vampire who won’t bite you?”

He stopped after that, as though it were a real question.

If it was, she couldn’t take it in or make sense of it. Vampires bit people. It’s what they did. What they were. Otherwise, there’d be no need of a Slayer.

She leaned into his embrace, let herself be held. Suddenly, she was exhausted and shuddering, feeling the only thing keeping her from shattering into a million pieces was Spike holding her together. “You’re what: a hundred and twenty-seven years old?”

“Something like that.”

“And I’m not. And right now, I feel that. I don’t understand, Spike. Tell me in simple words what you tried to tell me yesterday. I’ll try really, really hard to listen now.”

“Most of it…doesn’t need saying anymore,” Spike said after a few moment’s silence. They were rocking, just a little, back and forth. “Just how things are. When you go to Quor’toth, love, I’m not coming with you, is all.” As she gazed at him wildly, he went on, “Best if I take care of what I can, here, so you’ll have someplace to come back to.”

“But…but maybe we can never get back!”

“Know that.”

“But you can’t…can’t just abandon me!”

“No. Know you got issues about that, makes you think that way. But no. If I could, I’d stop Fudo, open you a fucking portal to Quor’toth, shove you through, lead you back. But I can’t. Need a mage, and I’m not that. Need a warrior, a Champion of the Powers, and I’m not that either. Besides, you already got one of those. Doesn’t love you like I do, but likely you’d get used to each other again over time.”

“No! I didn’t go through all this to be handed off to Mister bloody pigs’ blood like a door prize. Don’t you dare even think it!”

“Knew you wouldn’t like it. But you’ll come to see it’s for the best.”

“No! If you pull out, I’m not going either!”

“If you say so,” Spike rejoined, much too mildly. “You’ll let down your Watcher, who’s desperate to rescue his mage, and Angel, just as desperate to pull out this Destroyer, or whatever it is. ‘Course you will. If you say so.”

“You watch me! I won’t, and nobody can make me! Besides, when we really get down to it, you’ll come. You always come!”

“In one way of speaking, I surely do,” Spike said, trying to do his sexy eyebrow thing without any eyebrows, which didn’t work very well. Then the eyes in that alien face turned somber, resigned…knowing. “For the rest, the Slayer will decide.”

**********

(more to come)

Blood Price, Chapter 8

2005-07-09T11:41:13Z

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 8: Needful Things (complete)

A thunderous bang. Casa Summers bounced as though dropped from a height.

Usually a night owl, Willow scrambled up from the couch and the laptop and ran wild-eyed into the hall, thinking it was attack, a mile-high Fudo trying to breach the wards so automatically chanting to strengthen them--

Spike erupted from the basement, pursued by billowing smoke and waving it off. Soot-streaked from head to bare feet, wearing only jeans, he looked like a cat that had experimentally poked a claw in a socket. And even from two yards away, he stank: pungent, like a haystack of singed herbs.

Vamps claimed magic smelled, tainted its user.

Willow had no trouble detecting this smell. As Buffy burst up the stairs, coughing and wheezing, holding a robe together in front, Willow wheeled to haul open the front door, gasping, “Spike! What in heaven’s name have you done!”

Chin lifted in unconvincing defiance, Spike asserted, "Done nothing. Why d'you think it was me?"

Willow ticked off points on her fingers. "First, you're all singed, and nobody else is. Second, you reek of it. Third, I know you. Should I continue?"

Not replying, Spike brought his right hand to his mouth, licking off blood: another stain for the abused hall carpet. Hugging him from behind, Buffy was demanding, “Are you all right?”

Everybody converged: Dawn in flannel pj’s, leaning over the stair rail halfway down, Angel from the den, Oz and rumpled Giles from the yard, even Mike, uncertainly upright and propped against the den’s doorframe, everybody talking at once, and scorched, seething Spike in the middle of it.

Angel made an odd noise loud enough to make Willow look. He was laughing. Spike barking, “Shut up, Poof!” did no good. Angel tipped against the wall, holding his ribs, emitting big uncontrolled Ha ha’s.

If not for Buffy hanging on, it would have turned into another Spike-Angel thump-fest. Spike subsided, literally fuming. Angel just kept laughing. Willow didn’t think she’d ever heard Angel laugh before.

With the door open, the smoke began to dissipate.

“So,” Giles said, adjusting a too-small orange UC Sunnydale sweatshirt Oz had apparently loaned him to sleep in. “Not Fudo, after all, it seems.” He snorted and turned half away…snickering.

Spike glared. Then within Buffy’s embrace, his shoulders hunched defensively. Looking at the floor, he burst out, “So maybe I don’t have it quite adjusted yet. Piece from here, piece from there, substitutions--what the fuck do you expect?”

“Dedicating the athame,” Willow deduced, arms crossed, tapping fingers. She lifted her head, sniffing judiciously. “Isn’t that hensbane? That’s no part of any dedication spell I ever saw. And…mugwort?”

“Mugwort!” If Angel laughed any harder, he’d fall down.

“Had to improvise, didn’t I?” Spike retorted, sullenly indignant. “Not like it’s something you can buy at a shop, ready-made.”

“No…but you could have asked me,” Willow countered, hurt and somewhat aggrieved that he hadn’t.

“None of your bloody business!”

“None of my-- Oh. I see. That accounts for the blood, then.” Spike, Willow realized, had attempted to power a dedication with blood magic--the most dire, and the most unpredictable, of earth magics. Not intrinsically dark but eminently unwise to mess with. The more you knew, the more you stayed away from such things.

Spike knew just enough to try it, she thought, and not enough to stop him. That's why he hadn't consulted her. “Spike, what exactly were you trying to do?”

Giles managed to quit giggling and discipline his face to something like gravity. “Yes, Spike--do tell us.”

“Yes, tell us about it,” Angel echoed sweetly. Willow scowled at him to no effect: he was enjoying Spike’s discomfiture far too much. “You know so much about magic, what could possibly go wrong?”

Giving Spike’s torso a squeeze, Buffy lifted on tiptoe to murmur in his ear, “I think you should. After all, we’re a team. And you nearly brought the house down on us!”

Wincing away from the volume, Spike shrugged free, complaining, “Try to do something useful, everybody takes it for a joke!”

“No, Spike,” Angel corrected happily, “you’re the joke. Now everybody knows it, that’s all.”

Willow speared him with a glance. “Angel, you’re not being helpful here.”

Angel lifted hands, solemnly disavowing evil intent. Then he grinned broadly, somewhat spoiling the effect. At least he shut up.

Meanwhile Spike had grabbed open the closet door and swiped up a bottle from Oz’s collection stored there. With Buffy in hesitant pursuit, he stormed out onto the porch and gone. As Buffy held the door-edge as though unable to decide between following (in her robe) and shutting the door, there was the noise of a motorcycle starting and roaring off.

Buffy shut the door and slowly attended to belting up the robe.

Appearing from the kitchen, Dawn began fumigating the hall with prolonged blasts from a can of air freshener. Angel winced, and he and Mike retreated back to the den: lavender was so not a welcome addition to the current stink.

Carefully casual, spraying, Dawn commented, “He’s beyond the wards. Should we be worried about this?”

They’d been holed up five days. Except for Oz and Giles, whose first cautious excursion to the van hadn’t provoked a renewed attack from Fudo, and who thereafter had come and gone at will, concluding that Fudo’s targets were currently limited to the principals, the fighters--the Slayer and the vamps. Willow hadn’t ventured out, not wanting to find out her status the hard way.

And Dawn and Angel had been occupied with Mike, semi-ambulatory now.

Looking mildly contrite, Angel leaned out to offer, “I’ll find him, haul him back, if you want.”

Not a great idea, since it would just put both of them at risk. Presumably Angel knew that, going by his lack of enthusiasm.

Buffy shook her head. “Spike really knows this town. If he gets into trouble, he can duck into some sewer. I don’t see how Fudo could go ginormous on him in there. And one on one, size not a factor, Spike can hold his own against anybody.” Turning, she requested, “Will, explain it to me: what was he trying to do?”

“Dedicate the athame. Sort of a magical tool--like a wand--except it’s a knife. You have to…well, charge it. Tune it. To make it answer to your will. It’s a necessary element in casting some spells--not an actual working knife. Blunt blade, small… My guess is that Spike wanted it to be more. An actual weapon. And he mixed weapon elements into the spell, and the mix…blew up on him when he combined them. The vamp blood, maybe.” Willow gestured open-handed: she could think of a score of ways such a spell could have gone wrong, even leaving out the blood magic. Just substituted ingredients, and spells at cross-purposes with one another, would be ample.

He should have consulted her before putting such a boneheaded plan into action. Yeah, sure--like he ever did that.

“I shouldn’t have found it funny,” Giles observed contritely. “Or at least shouldn’t have admitted it. I’m sure he meant well.”

“Nearly brought down the wards,” Willow declared, grimacing. “Not funny at all. Now I have to check every one--see that they’re all water-tight, so to speak. Fudo-proof. Say--where’s Oz?”

Glancing around, Giles speculated, “Gone back to the van? I’ll look.”

“I don’t think so,” Buffy said, starting up the stairs. “He must have left through the kitchen. So I think he’s gone after Spike. So that’s sorted: the two of them should be able to handle anything that comes up. I’m gonna camp out in my room, OK? Until the basement airs out. Spray down there next, Dawn, all right?”

“I’m on it,” Dawn agreed, brisk and cheerful.

Willow shut her eyes, trying to summon the concentration to determine the soundness of the wards. Giles slipped a hand into hers, tacitly offering to let her draw on his stored power. Too cautious, too aware of the cost and the consequences to be an active mage, Giles was a quiet reservoir of energies that he made available to Willow from time to time. His company and support were soothing, strengthening.

“They’re all right,” Willow reported at last. “They held.” She released Giles’ hand to rub her eyes worriedly. “I just hope he has the sense not to try anything away from here.”

“Yes: even from the inside, the wards have a dampening effect. A protection of sorts, limiting the worst sorts of backlash from spellcasting gone awry. I trust he knows that?”

“Whatever he was trying, it was complex; and all his spell components are here, unless he raids the Magic Box, for which Anya would gladly endow him with boils, or worse. So I think we’re all safe from well-meaning amateurs for tonight--him included. Giles, it’s all so complicated! None of us knows what we’re doing or how to do it! None of us really knows what we’re getting into! I don’t yet have a clue what to do about Fudo, much less Quor’toth!”

Giles rested a hand on her elbow. “Do we ever? We’ll deal with the situation as we find it, as we always have. With as much preparation and forethought as is possible, under the circumstances. For instance: I haven’t yet had a chance to report what I’ve learned from Ethan about circumstances in Quor’toth. If the wards are secure, come sit down and I’ll explain.”

**********

It took several hours before Spike was drunk enough to (mostly) forget his intention to cut back on the promiscuous aetherizing. Leaving wolf-boy to watch the doings, he shot free of his body, utterly clear-headed and distracted for only a little while by the first tender, effulgent pinks and golds of morning. Then, recalling his errand, he gave himself a mental shake and was plunging through the wards protecting Casa Summers. He’d been lawfully invited: the wards let him through.

When he stopped, he was in the basement, hovering over the card table on which the athame and the remaining spell components were laid out--trying to suss out what had gone wrong.

Was the fault in the materials, the spell, or the procedure?

When he tried to lift one hand-written page to check the one underneath, he discovered the frustrating downside of being immaterial: he couldn’t touch anything. His fingers just passed through, the same as he’d come through the roof and the intervening floors. Stood to reason, once he considered it, but that didn’t make him any happier about it.

Naturally, he couldn’t lift the athame, either. Its hollow haft was open, ready for the offering--just as he’d left it. But the little knife had been…wakened. Spike felt as though it was considering him accusingly, with a smug, sullen I won’t and you can’t make me! flavor. He didn’t know how he knew. He didn’t smell, see, or hear the impression. It was simply there to senses he didn’t yet know how to put names to. Grokked it, then--as good a word as any, he supposed.

It was personal, this defiance, this rejection. Little bastard of a knife didn’t sodding like him. So maybe all the parts had been correct, but the athame was silently telling him to blow it out his ear. ‘Cause he was a vamp, maybe. Vamps and magic mostly didn’t get on. If so, he was screwed, and his whole idea of making a weapon that could be effective on the aetherial plane…a weapon that could stand against Fudo…was down the tubes.

But maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it’d just been the wrong offering.

He’d settled on the littlest finger on his right hand--the one he’d miss least, the one that wouldn’t cripple him up much while it healed. The thing had blown up the instant he’d begun to cut, after all.

Maybe he’d considered his own comfort too much. Maybe only a true sacrifice--something that would goddam cripple him--was what was called for, proportional to the power he wanted back from the athame.

He found the fingers of his right hand wrapped protectively around his left thumb.

He made them unfold.

“Don’t you dare. Don’t you even think about it.”

Startled, he looked around and it was Joyce--Buffy’s mum. And Dawn’s, after a fashion, too. He blurted, “What the hell are you doing here?”

Showing him a stern expression, Joyce Summers folded her arms. She was all silver-shimmery and semi-transparent. She demanded, “And where else should I be?”

“Oh. You’re a ghost.”

“Bingo. And it’s just no end of frustration, let me tell you. I tried and tried to get through to Dawn, but she thought I was the First. And as to Buffy,” Joyce added, with an eye-roll, rotating in a floaty way to face the far end of the basement, “just forget it. I can’t compete with Slayer dreams. And awake, she doesn’t see me at all!”

“It’s her aura. All in tatters, it is,” Spike replied, drifting alongside, the both of them contemplating the figure almost lost in the huge bed.

She’d come back, Spike realized. Even though the basement probably still stank (he couldn’t tell) and she knew there was next to no chance that, having stormed out, he’d slink back before daybreak, Buffy had crawled under the duvet and cranked the electric mattress pad way up to 10 so everything would be all warm for him whenever he staggered in. Because it was her place now, that he’d set up for her. Their place, really. And even lonesome in the big bed, she wouldn’t sleep anyplace else.

Feelings weren’t the same on the aetherial plane. You felt the same things, sure, but at a distance. Like emotions turned into ideas and you considered them, all cool and deliberate, not caught up blind in them like the usual.

Except now. Finding Buffy there, Spike wanted to curl down inside her. He wanted to make the ragged edges of old pain all smooth and golden, the way he felt they should be. He wanted her to lift out of the body so he could take her careening high, to see the clear, crisp Sunnydale of the mind, everything bathed and revealed in its hurtless light.

Without thought, he reached out…and his hand disappeared into her shoulder. Without contact. Without touching. He pulled his hand back quickly.

“Sometimes, I just want to shake her,” Joyce confessed. “Or hug her. Doesn’t matter, I can’t do either. But with things so upset, I just don’t feel ready to…be anywhere else. Go wherever it is that ghosts go….”

“Heaven, innit?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never been there.”

“Buffy has.”

“Really? So that’s why I couldn’t find her! I looked and looked but I couldn’t find her anywhere. I thought once Dawn called me, and I tried to go, but my body didn’t fit right anymore, somehow, and I didn’t want her to see me that way, so I thought better of it. So. Spike. If that’s the best you can do, don’t even bother. About the little knife there,” she explained, gesturing at the card table in response to his blank and slightly indignant stare.

Having drawn himself up and lifted his chin, Spike met Joyce’s eyes and deflated, bending his head. “It’s me, right? ‘Cause I’m a vamp. I’m not good enough.”

“It’s…inappropriate. The fit isn’t right between the intention and the execution. But that doesn’t mean there’s no merit to the idea,” Joyce added quickly. “The offering will, well, offer itself. And when the fit is right, you’ll know.”

She was just trying to make him feel better about the spell going all pear-shaped on him. Amused Angel and had Rupert snickering but no use beyond that except to make him look a right prat.

He wanted solace.

He wanted Buffy.

Even though he couldn’t touch, he flowed down beside her into the warmth he couldn’t feel, into the wonderful Buffysmell he couldn’t smell, imagining her slow, sleeping heartbeat he couldn’t hear. He felt something, though: when he’d been quiet awhile, he could feel her aura, her life energies--where they were smooth, and where they were ragged, broken, and hurting. He snuggled down over one of the hurting places and petted it slowly, steadily, in much the same half-awake way he’d stroke her arm, or a breast, in the drowsy aftermath of loving.

He wasn’t thinking about Joyce, so he didn’t notice when she left.

The next he knew, he was rousing, still mostly drunk, in a large sewer pipe, with wolf-boy (who he hazily recalled had fetched his boots and a shirt, obliging as a valet) still keeping patient watch, so that was all right. Oz offered a cell phone, and it took Spike a minute to think what to do with it since he mostly relied on the speed dials. Since it wasn’t his phone, he had to make his mind cough up the number, then dizzily make his finger push the right tiny buttons in the right order.

“Who is this?” came Dawn’s suspicious voice.

“Just me. Let me in through the tunnel, Bit. Lost track of the time.”

“It’s ten freaking o’clock in the morning, if you want to know!”

“Yeah, well.” Surveying the curved slimy walls, he saw a mark at a junction and knew where he was. “Be there in about five minutes. Or more like ten,” he amended, staggering to his feet.

“Bike’s parked in the street, right above,” Oz commented with an upward glance.

Spike thought a moment, then pulled the keys out of his pocket and handed them over. “’F you dump her, I’ll take skin in exchange,” he warned.

Oz showed a small, down-pulled smile, not seeming much troubled by the threat.

As Oz went toward the ladder at the junction, Spike turned and started slowly along the walkway, drawing a hand along the wall to keep from stumbling into the sludge. Knuckles scraped and a few lame places, so he guessed he’d got himself into a fight someplace along the line. Even with some bangs and bruises, it was good to be back in the body, though. He’d quit yearning after the astral plane. Gone off it, somehow. Probably for the best, considering.

**********

Willow was in the hall talking to Oz (standing with downcast eyes, not saying much, but that was Oz, so achingly familiar, so awkwardly comfortable, and he might have known what spell Spike had been trying to cast, the spell-go-boom one, at least that’d been Willow’s excuse for accosting Oz when he slouched in the front door a minute or two after the noise of the arriving bike cut off, and he seemed to do a lot of that these days, slouch and look aside, anyplace but at her, except when he thought she wasn’t looking, and his aura so shaded brown and wistful though he didn’t say anything about the them-that-had-been and course neither did she, it would have been too sad, she being so conspicuously totally 100% gay now, so she was just asking him about what Spike might have said, totally good reason, not personal at all) when Dawn came banging up the basement stairs bent and turned half backward to tell off Spike, climbing and then arriving behind her.

Spike looked mussed and…exhilarated, Willow judged. Not like last night. Well, that was Spike, wasn’t it? Things passed off him easily, once he’d blown up and wrecked everything in reach, which fortunately hadn’t been here for a change. They were all wound a bit too tightly, what with the Fudo avoidage and the staying in the house day after day and the not knowing when they’d be leaving and Christmas so close, not that Willow cared about that but Buffy did, angsting in the kitchen, making lists for Oz and Giles (the only ones who could leave without risking the enormousness that was Fudo) of things to fetch for the holiday festivities nobody really cared about but Buffy but, well, Buffy. Any major holiday to her was a Sacred Duty, to prove that nothing had changed when in fact everything had.

Not so much bouncy, Spike, as intent, anticipatory. Ignoring Dawn’s tirade, he immediately located Buffy in the kitchen, his vast, flailing aura preceding him and wrapping around her like wind-driven flames.

“Not now,” Buffy said, irritably shrugging him off and moving a little way around the kitchen island, intent on her list.

No need to be asking Oz when Spike himself was there to be cross-examined: Willow moved into the kitchen doorway, Oz and Dawn (wanting to finish dressing Spike down) behind her.

“Won’t take long,” Spike was wheedling, making puppy eyes, reaching out, but Buffy avoided the hand that would undoubtedly have pulled her into an embrace. “Ten minutes. Couple hours, maybe.”

They’d made one full circuit of the island, Buffy avoiding, Spike pursuing in tentative lunges.

“Spike, not now. Can’t you see I’m busy? You know how close Christmas is and I have nothing, nothing ready! Mom would be so disappointed. I don’t even have a fricking tree! No!” Again, Buffy slipped aside and eluded him, gave him her back but obviously not losing an ounce of her Slayer awareness of a vampire intent on closing with her because every time he reached, she was gone. Like the coordinated dance they did putting away groceries, or sparring, or fighting, each completely aware of the other’s motions without even needing to look. Only not, of course, since it was a dance of avoidance.

Ducking and dodging, circling, Buffy went on, “Not that I expect you to care. Or even understand. Just leave me alone, will you? Is that too much to ask? One fricking peaceful hour when you’re not bugging me, or blowing things up, or laying there like a stone and off in your damn astral realm? Go play with yourself. I’m busy. Some of us have to be responsible around here, not ducking out every chance with the attention span of a gnat! Geez, don’t you ever think about anything else?”

Buffy wheeled, both fists braced on the island-top, list in one hand and pencil in the other--a pencil she was now holding point-up, like a stake. Spike had stopped too, hands flat on the island. They regarded each other across it.

Spike flicked a glance at the doorway--Willow, Oz, Dawn, and now Angel looming behind, Willow noticed--and then replied, “Isn’t like that. Not altogether,” in an embarrassed mutter.

And it was true: instead of the usual blazing crimson of Tantric energies, his aura was shot through with hazy blues and greys--a sort of Cirrus aura like a summer sky with filmy clouds moving fast, high aloft. Buffy’s, by contrast, was sullen slate, with yellow glints of annoyance. Tight against her body contours, it walled her in.

“Not doing that anymore,” Spike said earnestly. “Need…to be here. With you.” Another glance at the door, aware of his audience. “C’mon downstairs. We’ll talk. Only talk. Just a little while.”

He reached toward her face, palm cupped to lay against her cheek, thumb wide to set against her protesting lips. She slapped his hand away, eyes flashing. The two motions almost too quick to see but the result immediate: Spike’s aura just flicked out. Died. Not really, Willow corrected--it just went still, and tight as a sheen of oil: a normal, minimal vamp aura.

Willow began uneasily, “Buffy--” as Spike dipped his head in a moment’s thought, then turned, pushed through them, and disappeared back into the basement with Dawn in startled hot pursuit, calling after him.

Angel murmured, not quietly enough, “Drama queen.”

Elbows on the island, pencil reversed and meditatively bitten, Buffy was again absorbed in her list. She glanced up, annoyed, when Willow tapped her arm. “What is it now? Will, I’m never gonna get done--”

“You think that was nothing. It wasn’t. It was something.”

Buffy hitched a shoulder. “He’ll get over it. I may be his fricking cow, the way vamps view things, but I’m not on call 24/7. I have a life. I have priorities. I’m not all over the place, leaping into whatever comes into my head from second to second. I can concentrate! That is, whenever I’m not getting interrupted--”

Trudging glumly back from the basement, Dawn accused, “He’s gone again, if anybody cares. Thanks so much, Buffy! Why’d you pick now to go all Ice Queen instead of the other eight thousand daily opportunities? Oh, wait--that was your first chance today to dump on him in front of everybody. You didn’t want to waste it. Right.”

“I didn’t dump on him! It’s just…. He gets so….”

“Horny?” Dawn suggested sweetly. “Lonesome? Needy? Hoping not to be treated like dirt? Well, a jolly Ho Ho Ho to you, too. You sure know how to spread the holiday cheer, Buffy! I’ll go make myself useful: sort the surviving ornaments. That’s assuming we can get a tree up before New Years. Geez!” After a frustrated flap of her arms, Dawn exited to the basement, slamming the door behind her.

“Buffy….” Willow said again, but Buffy snatched a down vest off the pegs by the back door and escaped to the porch, shutting the door with a controlled click that was a slam in all except volume.

“Think I’ll use the front door,” Oz remarked to himself.

“Yeah: a farce would need more doors. So everybody could slam their own,” Willow agreed, drifting along beside him. “But…aren’t you tired? You’re not obliged to babysit him every minute.”

“You were right: something changed. I smelled it. Curious,” Oz said with a hint of a smile and worried eyes, “what it might have been. It’s my mandate,” he explained, “from the Powers to get this show on the road. Don’t want to be missing a boxcar when we pull out. Or an engine.” Pulling on a cap, he was zipping his jacket as he went down the front steps and jogged toward the street--taking his van, apparently.

The outside air was frosty. Willow shut the door.

**********

Finally Buffy finished the list of super-secret presents--ironically she’d been working on presents for Spike when he’d made such a pest of himself: he might not care about Christmas, but it was the first since he’d become part of the household and her acknowledged consort, so presents were absolutely due--and got something like lunch together. Since Oz was missing, it seemed Spike wasn’t back either.

Middle of the day. He’d probably laired up someplace to sleep. No big: she’d cell him at sunset. He could sulk to her directly then. Get it out of his system.

Over tuna sandwiches with potato chips and the proper excellent kosher pickles on the side, she asked Willow uncomfortably, “So what was the big hairy deal, before? It’s not like I never said No before. Sometimes, he’s the La Brea tarpits and superglue combined. Or something.” She could feel her face heating at coming even that close to referring to her private life. Sex-with-Spike life. And him propositioning her right in front of everybody, when everybody would know, all insane-o and blatant. She’d promised to back him up, but that had been something entirely else. She still couldn’t believe he’d done it. Dumbass!

“Not now.” Willow threw a meaningful glance at Angel, conspicuously trying to be inconspicuous while fixing mugs of blood for himself and Mike.

Angel was shy about that whereas Spike dumped disgusting things in and loudly slurped and smacked his lips over the result. When he’d still relied on the bagged, that is. Now he had her, he’d quit the bagged stuff entirely. Buffy reflexively rubbed the mark on her neck, expecting the usual tingle and heightened awareness. Nothing. Did she try the wrong side? Quickly she touched the other side, that should be Angel’s mark. As though he’d felt the touch, Angel at once turned and looked at her, wide-eyed and startled, and she was so freaked by that she didn’t notice if she’d had any reaction. Bending her head, she surreptitiously tried again, one side and then the other. Nothing. Just old scars.

Cracking a crisp pickle, pinkie delicately outstretched, Dawn commented, “Not exactly subtle, no. But then the windows rattling and the thumping and the yelling--”

“Dawn!”

“--was hardly covert ops, you know. I was sooo glad when Xander finished sound-proofing the basement and you guys moved down there! I don’t really need a vicarious sex life, you know.” Pausing for an introspective frown, Dawn lowered the pickle from on high and crunched.

Xander. Buffy hadn’t talked to him in weeks. Way before Giles’ arrival. Before the excursion to Terminal Beach, even. Buffy remembered feeling guilty for not inviting him and Anya along, not that she’d known where they were going, but that hadn’t prevented her from feeling guilty for not including them once she was there. And the three SITs. And the cousins--the half dozen or so remaining vamps who acknowledged Mike’s authority. None of them knew anything about what was going on, and that was wrong. She should call a meeting….

But all of them could run errands. Choose a tree. Get the presents (she’d trust Xander with the plastic or Oz of course but nobody else). She had a whole network of potential help she somehow had pretty much forgotten.

A fullscale Christmas party, then. With everybody. The cousins were reasonably well-behaved and if there was liquor, they’d like it. And Spike would keep them in line if Mike couldn’t yet, though it seemed Mike was better, not that she’d paid much attention. She should start a list….

“Huh?” she said, when Willow nudged her and waved fingers in front of her face. She found the kitchen empty except for the two of them.

“I think Dawn’s right: it’s like the napkins.”

“What?”

“When he came in he was pretty serene, like he’d processed the spell that didn’t work. Wasn’t bothered about it anymore. With a big ol’ yen on for you, which,” (Willow shrugged, smiling) “is not exactly unusual. Not that I was looking. Well, I was but only because I’d been noticing Oz’s aura, so I saw Spike’s when he came in, and it was pretty normal for him anyway, all Northern Lights shimmery, not that I’ve ever seen the Northern Lights except on PBS--”

“How much coffee have you had, Will?”

“Enough to finish ordering all my presents. I may be Wicca but I’m not immune to social conventions. Besides, we all need an upper. Wanna know what I got Xander?”

“But you’ve been home.”

“I let magic fingers do the walking. Internet,” Willow explained, happily waggling fingers again, as if on a keyboard. “Even wangled free rush delivery.”

“Oh.” Buffy could have done that. It hadn’t even occurred to her.

“I made a fresh pot, though. Want some?” Willow asked, sliding off her stool.

“Nope. I don’t need caffeine to contemplate the depth of my dumbth. I bet even Giles thought to order over the Internet.”

“Probably. He does e-mail and even occasionally Googles, according to him. Anyway, like I said, here’s Spike all reaching and hoping and flicker-glowy, and then you slap him--”

“Pushed his hand away,” Buffy corrected, glowering.

“It was a slap, Buffy. And his candle went out. Aura down to next to nothing, just a regular vamp aura. Couldn’t channel sunlight with it like that, I bet. Couldn’t access the astral plane if he tried. Major shut-down.”

Buffy set her nibbled-at half sandwich down. “Will, sometimes we do open warfare, with bruises and marks afterward, just for fun. A little push like that, that’s nothing.”

“No. It was something, to get a reaction like that. I think Dawn’s right--something just snapped, like about the napkins. It wasn’t about napkins at all, so this wasn’t just about the slap. I imagine he’d react about that way if we disinvited him, locked him out. That’s all I’m saying, Buffy--that it was something.”

Buffy rested her forehead on her propped fists. Spike was such a prima donna, sometimes. Such a drama queen, blowing up over nothing. Although he hadn’t exploded, hadn’t even twitched, since Angel’s arrival. On what, for Spike, passed for best behavior since then. She’d even seen him with the laptop, working on the translation, a time or two, although without the glasses he was too vain to wear when Giles or Angel might see him, so he’d probably ended up with an eyestrain headache, though she didn’t recall his complaining about one.

Maybe he was due. Maybe it was no more than that. Probably. Though a dignified exit through the basement passage hardly seemed to constitute an explosion….

“I’ll cell him later,” Buffy said around a bite of sandwich. “Let him whine and rant as much as he likes that way, instead of in front of everybody. Isn’t it weird to have to leave the house to get a single scrap of privacy?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?”

Buffy shrugged. “So: about Oz. What’s his aura like, and what are you doing observing it?”

Willow looked uncomfortable, making twisted origami out of a napkin. “It’s mostly like a forest. Greens and browns...and quiet. The wolf of it, I guess. It’s always been like that. Pretty steady state, actually.”

“And you’re checking on it why?”

“He’s different. We’re different. But…not. It’s complicated.”

“Yeah,” said Buffy, carefully casual, neutral. She understood what a big hairy deal it was to admit things out loud and in public. It meant you had to acknowledge them to yourself. And the fastest way to drive Willow into full Oz retreat would be to try to make her say old times there were not forgotten. Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.

Since she and Spike were both unobtrusively hoping for renewed Willow-Oz sparkage, they kept completely mum about it, to not jinx it. Spike was always so insightful about such things. Strange he could be such a dumbass in other ways. Like about napkins: she’d finally remembered the incident.

"Will, how come you know about the napkins? You weren't even there!"

Willow blinked at her. "You were sitting right there when Dawn told me about it. I think you need caffeine!"

“No, thanks," Buffy responded, as Willow actually did get up and go to the coffee maker. "S’cuse me.”

Hustling to the hall table, Buffy scooped up her cellphone and pushed the quick-dial preset for Spike. After five rings, she held the phone away from her ear to find out if she could hear the answering ringing anywhere within the house. (Even though Spike’s phone was pocket-sized, he forgot it more often than not.) She even leaned into the basement for a minute. After thirty rings, nothing. Not even an automated voice announcing that his phone wasn’t in service.

Asleep, then. Probably. And Oz keeping an eye on him, so nothing could happen.

Did Oz have a cellphone? If not, she should see that he got one. She should add that to the equipment list.

**********

As Dawn toted the stacked ornament boxes into the front room, Mike started to get up creakily to help. When she waved him off with the flap of an elbow, he subsided carefully into the big chair as she laid the boxes on the couch and then on the floor.

It wasn’t right to depend on him to do things all the time, just because he was willing. Wanted to, even. Not when otherwise she was always pushing him away, shutting him out. Like Buffy had done to Spike. That had to hurt.

She absolutely didn’t want to hurt him. Didn’t know how to stop, not that he ever complained--just looked straight at her with those wide grey eyes, wolf eyes or maybe an Alsatian, but not pleading puppy eyes. Just seeing across the distance, recognizing it and still looking….

Spinning, she flopped down next to the chair, leaning and reaching over the broad arm to wrap fingers around Mike’s arm, that she didn’t have to be so careful about joggling anymore, blurting, “You should just go. As soon as you can, you should get clear of this. Of us. You got hurt on our account--might have dusted. But it’s--”

“Didn’t, though. Spike and my Sire, they took good care of me. And you helped. All past, Dawn. Almost all healed. No need for you to bother about it.”

“That’s not the point!”

“All right,” he responded amiably. “What is the point, then?”

“This business…about Quor’toth, it’s--”

“About Angel’s son,” Mike interrupted calmly, and Dawn goggled at him. “Angel told me,” Mike explained. “To be sure I knew he had a son and I wasn’t it. And he had get, and I wasn’t that either, though Spike’s his only on one bounce and he made me direct. Didn’t want me thinking things were how they’re not. That I’m anything to him but a responsibility, because Spike made a fuss about it and he needs to stay on Spike’s good side right now to get anything done.”

“Like telling you you’re adopted and shouldn’t expect anything but scraps?” Dawn demanded, indignant on Mike’s behalf.

“Doesn’t matter, so long as the scraps keep coming. Scraps like that. He’s cut me off now, seems like. Figures I can do without. Likely I can. Can do without most things. Don’t need much.” Lifting the mug in his other hand, Mike drank down the last of the blood, then bent to set the cup safely aside on the floor. “Spike’s right,” he commented absently, sagging into the chair, head tipped back and eyes shut. “Pig blood, that’s swill. Only had it a couple times before, never want to again. Maybe tonight I’ll be well enough to get out.”

“And hunt,” Dawn supplied tightly, and got a nod in reply. Mike had never been coy with her about that side of his life.

“Maybe he’d go out with me, see I don’t mess up too bad. Or maybe Spike would, though he’s mostly left me alone since this.” He sketched a thumb diagonally from shoulder to hip. “Didn’t want to be an impediment between me and my Sire, mostly, I think. Let us get on however we could. Hope so, anyway. Hope he don’t feel I’m the impediment, shrugged me off the first chance he got….”

“Oh, no! You shouldn’t think things like that!”

Mike blinked at her sleepily. “Things are how they are. Shouldn’t take things for granted. Don’t need much and got enough to keep going, I guess.”

Dawn was indignant at his lack of indignation, at how patiently he accepted the unacceptable. “That’s what I mean: you should go. Do your own vamp things, like you used to, not just trail around after us. It’s not right. It’s not fair. This isn’t your fight. Nobody asked you to get involved.”

“Nobody said I couldn’t, neither. Until they do, this is what makes sense to me. You want me gone, Dawn?” Mike asked with calm directness, like he didn’t care about the answer, either way…or he already knew what the answer was.

“I think…. I think you should want to go. Be sick of us by now. All of us. The Slayer that tolerates you, the Sire that barely acknowledges you and the almost-sire who’s a genuine asshole sometimes and grudges accepting help from anybody all the time, and the Imperious Key, who won’t, who can’t--”

“Hush, don’t fret yourself about it. I understand.”

“Understand what? Because I don’t!”

“Yes, you do. It’s what you told Spike, and he told me, a while ago: you can be a girl, and go with girl ways, mortal ways. Or you can be the Key and live forever. Can’t do both, though I know it tugs at you, having to give up the one or the other. You can be Spike’s, or you can be mine. But not both. I understand that, finally, and I’m all right with it. Right enough, anyways.” He patted her hand consolingly and she wanted to hit him. Either that or bawl all over him. Mike went on, “There’s noplace to go to, anymore, that I want. There’s only away. And why would I want that? Until I’m stopped, I’ll be with you. You don’t know--might come in handy, a time or two. Like with Fudo.”

“That? That wasn’t handy! That was suicidal! You nearly got killed!”

“Bought enough time for the others to get there, deal with him. Did what I could and what was needful. Spike and my Sire, both, they thought I done good enough to go to the trouble of fetching me back from the edge. Got a feed or so from you, too, I recall.”

“That wasn’t reward, that was me being so scared you were just gonna dust and blow away on the wind, never any Michael any more, never no more--” Leaning and reaching, Dawn hugged him as hard as she dared, likely harder than she should, but he never complained, wrapping arms around her and resting his cheek against hers.

“And all this to convince me I should leave. Going about it wrong, I think.” He kissed her forehead and drew a long, savoring breath against her hair, then held her a little away by the shoulders. “Can’t help with the fence you’re balanced on, Dawn. Can only watch and hope all goes well for you. Things are how they are. Don’t have to concern yourself about me. What’s lacking, between us, is not the most important thing. Only seems so to you. Not important to me at all.”

“Yeah: Sue’s not important!” Dawn accused.

“She’s not. And she knows she’s not. And doesn’t much care, because vamps generally don’t. It’s all convenience and…who’s on top.” Mike gave her a smile as she made a wry face. “Far as my pack’s concerned, she’s on top, and that’s enough to make her happy enough. She’s not the center of the turning world, though. Doesn’t know enough, feel enough, to want that. She’s not jealous of you, just likes to dig the point in a little because she knows she can get your goat that way. No need for you to be jealous of her, neither. She has no goat worth the getting. No goat you want, except to have her not have it, and that’s not very nice, is it?”

“Sometimes I’m not very nice,” Dawn admitted, folding against his chest, so solid and uncluttered by biological creaks and bangs. So unnatural and steadfast. “So have all my arguments convinced you to leave?”

“Nope.”

“Good.”

**********

After trying and failing to make contact with Spike’s cellphone while wandering around the house collecting items to toss into a white wash, Buffy froze on the stairs holding a single grimy white sock. “Will?” she called upstairs, feeling the elevator drop of near-certain suspicion. “What day is it?”

“Today?” Willow’s voice responded from her room.

“Yes, today!” Buffy simultaneously rolled her eyes, thought swear words, and confirmed with a wincing glance at the bottom third of the front window that it was already dark outside, complete with street lights. “Is it Monday or Tuesday?”

“Tuesday, I think…. Yeah, Tuesday.”

OMG, OMG, it was class night!

Skidding into her bedroom, Buffy wrestled into her least wrinkly set of sweats. Twisting up her hair enough to secure it with a scrunchy, she scuffed into sneaks while clambering down the stairs, holding to the rail two-handed, yelling for Dawn, who poked her face out of the den like some funhouse pop-out. Buffy nearly collided with her but skittered around at the last second. “Dawn, supper: order out, organize one of your messes, I don’t care. Or no: I’ll bring back Chinese!” she flung over her shoulder as she dashed for the SUV.

“Buffy,” Dawn called anxiously from the porch, “should you be--”

Belatedly recollecting Fudo, Buffy paused a second before jamming the ignition key determinedly home and screeching over the curb. If Fudo showed, she’d just lock all the doors and drive like a maniac, that’s all. Run red lights. Maybe break speed limits.

The basic attacking-demons drill, in other words.

But she’d found herself the most menacing thing on the street when she wheeled into the side lot of the Community Center and sprinted for the big font doors. Only twenty minutes late--maybe they’d waited. Maybe she could come up with some credible excuse instead of admitting she’d completely forgotten the Safety through Fitness course she taught twice a week and the twenty or so kids had paid actual money for and how could anybody expect her to keep everything straight, with all that was going on--

Navigating the corridor, she braked to a breathless saunter at seeing the lights on in the exercise/dance room at the end; she stopped completely, dumbfounded, when she heard Spike’s voice from inside, through the open door.

“--not exactly what you signed on for, right. But for those who want it easy, there’ll be the usual routine of jerks, easy throws, balance and stance practice. And those that are up for it, you might want to consider the contract escort service, like I said, and you can stop snickering anytime now, Candy. Not that sort of escort service. Paid protection. We’ve got off a bit late for Halloween and Christmas, but we might be able to put things together to cover the New Year’s do’s. Six would be a good number for that. You can let me or Anya know by Thursday, she’ll be putting together the business arrangements, goin’ to the Chamber of Commerce folk, and like that. Yeah--Anya. The lady at the Magic Box. See that a few more of your chums make it home without getting eaten. Jerome?” A pause while an indistinguishable question was asked. Spike responded, “Yeah--the heavy duty action. Patrolling. Thinking about that, a walk-along, anyway, but the girls here and the semi-reliable cousins, over there, for the actual fighting until I think somebody is fit to handle themselves ‘gainst whatever demons we run into that are more annoyance than dangerous. Not a one of you I’d risk yet against a Trisaps, whose basic strategy is to fall on you. All three hundred dripping pounds. And no, you do not want to know what’s dripping, or from what. Or Hellhounds, we get a fair number of those in the cooler weather. They have their annual games just north of here, and a few spill over. Or-- Doris?” Another question. “Yeah, sure, the escorts will need some kind of uniform. Something simple, to start with. You want to take that on? You’re in beginning design. Well, that’s fine. Do up some sketches so I can check you ain’t put on twenty pounds of sparkly shit, tassels, Vatican Guard crap. Oh, you so would!” Laughter. “Functional, yet stylish. Like the-- like Miss Elizabeth does. You can join us anytime, pet.”

He’d heard her--her lone heartbeat out in the corridor. Or smelled her, maybe. As she stood in her grungy sweats, neither stylish nor very functional, wanting to disappear, Spike leaned out the doorway, took in the ensemble with a lifted eyebrow, and leaned back inside, commenting to the class, “Or you could take the utilitarian look: about halfway between ninja and jammies.”

That was plainly her entrance line. Assuming the semi-panicked grin she kept specially for the class, she sidled in and made a small, nervous wave at the blur of faces before her.

There seemed about the usual number. As Spike blessedly kept on talking, drawing the attention of the class away from her in his usual effortless hogging of any available spotlight, literal or figurative, Buffy found the blur resolving into actual known faces, some even with names. And about half the number were in the black-and-red of the colors--the three SITs, Amanda, Rona, and Kennedy; and seven vamps, the latter clustered off to the right, prudently out of striking distance but looking comfortable enough despite Sue and another fledge Buffy didn’t know lounging under the bright fluorescents in open game-face.

Spike’s voice registered again, saying, “--Miss Elizabeth’s here, she’ll take you through your jerks and all, if she’s brought the pads. Or whatever she says. Candy, can you start a sign-up list for the escort business? There’s dosh goes with that, by the by. Let you know how much when we have a few bookings.”

“And the patrols?” Candy asked brightly, the slut, with her artfully disarrayed waterfall topknot and garish purple spandex workout outfit Buffy sometimes suspected of being paint.

Spike shrugged. “Can’t hurt, but ‘m not promising anything at this point. Don’t intend to get anybody more than cracked slightly crooked because dead is real ugly an’ causes talk. Ain’t that right, Sue.”

“If you say so, Spike. I guess you’d know,” Sue responded cheerfully, as though unaware her snarling, snaggle-fanged game face was one of the more hideous examples. Maybe she really didn’t know, Buffy realized: no mirrors.

Then she realized that Spike had eased into the hallway. That he was leaving.

For a second she locked up, wild-eyed and frantically smiling. Then she lunged out into the corridor. Spike was nearly to the front doors, shrugging into his duster as he got a cigarette out for lighting.

“Spike!” A strangled squeak. “Spike!” Sneakers squeaking on the shiny vinyl tile, she pounded down the corridor as he waited quizzically with his back holding the left-hand door open, all slinky black leather and casual. “Spike, we have to talk!”

He waited a beat, conspicuously patient. “Due someplace now, pet. I’ll--”

“No, now! How can we start the escort--”

Something flickered a second in his eyes. Then he attended to lighting the cigarette. “Said I’m due someplace.” He clicked the lighter shut and put it away. “Got my business, and you got yours. All those downy chicks, waiting inside for you. Got them all warmed up for you, didn’t I? So you can take them through their tricks, all in good order.”

“What’s this too cool for school act?”

“Act,” Spike repeated as though mulling the word, turning away, letting the door start to hiss shut. Buffy banged the metal frame with the heel of her hand, arm braced. But her nearly neglected responsibility to the class held her, as he’d known it would, the sneaky bastard.

It galled her that he’d remembered the class, and she hadn’t. It galled her that he was going about his own business and abandoning her to hers instead of backing her up the way he was supposed to.

Payback for her slapping him down, this morning? Maybe. He could be petty when he was ticked off.

It didn’t feel like that, though. He was too aloof, too composed, to be secretly giggling inside at a well-executed gotcha.

It was, as Willow claimed, something. But Buffy, who thought she knew all his moods, didn’t know this one and didn’t like it one bit.

Poking head and shoulders out the door, pushing at tendrils of hair already escaping the scrunchy, she shouted after him, “Turn on your fricking phone!” and got an offhand, over-the-shoulder wave in reply, marked by the swinging coal of the cigarette.

Thinking grimly Later, followed immediately by the agreeable thought of rowdy make-up sex, Buffy trudged back up the corridor, her sneakers going squeeka, squeeka, squeeka like a bad grocery cart.

**********

Standing on the sidewalk, Spike critically watched Mike get down from Oz’s van--a step and then a turn, one hand still cautiously on the doorframe, finding his balance. Not really up to being out on his own yet, and they all knew it.

Leaning on the bench front seat to talk through the open door, Oz asked, “You want me to come with?”

“You eat people?” Spike responded bluntly.

“No. No, hardly ever,” Oz said, trying to make a joke of it.

“Then you don’t want to come. We’ll manage. Swing back in an hour or so.”

As Spike started off, Oz called, “What if Fudo--”

Spike waved and said nothing, walking slow enough that Mike could fall in alongside.

Mike wasn’t gonna admit he was worried about Fudo, but he was looking around in a guarded, slightly spooked way that didn’t go with hunting, so Spike volunteered, “No problem there. Fudo, that is. We came to an arrangement.”

“What arrangement.”

“Sort of ran into him in the pipes, about noontime,” Spike continued. “After I’d sent wolfboy off on an errand. Couldn’t neither of us get an advantage, so I made him a proposition. So far, nobody’s actually done anything that’s harmed his precious Balance, so rightly he shouldn’t come after us until we do. Logical bloke. Idealist, I expect. Living by rules.” Spike tapped out a cigarette and lit it meditatively as they approached the hospital. He surveyed the tiers of lighted windows. “Offered him an advantage later if he’d hold off now, till we’d actually done something. So we have a sort of a truce going. Long as it holds, Fudo’s not a problem.”

“What advantage.”

“Not your concern, Michael. Keep your mind on what’s at hand.”

As usual at St. Elizabeth’s, there were a couple of hospital staff--female: cleaning crew, by the smell, for all that they were muffled up in coats and scarves; anyway, Spike could hear their voices if there’d been any doubt--waiting in the lighted bus shelter. One apiece: seemed about right.

But as Spike and Mike joined them, a bus pulled up and the two chatting women got on, oblivious of their escape. The two vampires traded a glance. Then Spike led off to the hospital itself.

St. Elizabeth’s was in Mike’s hunting territory, but Spike knew it pretty well. Continuing to take the lead, he took the first set of stairs next to the bank of elevators. As Mike eased the door shut, Spike paused on the landing, listening for anyone moving in the stairwell. Finding all clear, he headed down toward the blood bank.

In his chipped days, he’d had an arrangement with Russell, a night shift worker--the occasional blood bag in exchange for a consideration, generally money, but the odd suck job hadn’t been out of the question when he was completely skint. Been all toplofty with him, Russell had, desperation being hard to hide. After the first few times, Russell had been smug besides, figuring Spike needed him too much to do anything permanent, not knowing that the chip kept Spike from taking more than what was freely offered. Spike didn’t need that sort of help anymore, so he figured tonight was payback.

“Well, look who’s here!” Russell commented genially, turning from a computer as Spike entered. “Ain’t seen you in--”

That was all he had time for before Mike swept in and took him.

When the sounds of struggle stopped, Spike quit loading his duster pockets with slippery, thawing bags from the outdated bin, directing over his shoulder, “That’s enough.” When, predictably, Mike didn’t leave off, Spike pried him away, hitting him a few times in the process--short, sharp punches. Mike folded pretty fast. Didn’t yet have the endurance to take on one of his own crew, let alone Spike, which was why Spike had kept them separate tonight--so Mike wouldn’t have to face a challenge less benevolent than Spike’s. Not that Spike didn’t enjoy it, putting the pup down--just didn’t do more than what was needful.

Unconscious Russell still had a pulse, which was likely more than he deserved, but Spike was practicing moderation these days.

“Never know,” he said, dragging Russell nearer the door, “when it might come in handy, having an inside man in a blood bank. Got to be thrifty. Think ahead.”

“Hell with that,” Mike responded, arising heavily, holding the glaringly white counter for support. “I want it all.”

Arranging Russell into a pose of attempted escape, Spike replied absently, “‘Course you do. But you can manage if you try hard enough. Turned that new Dalton, didn’t you?” He conceded, “S’pose your control’s not the best just now. But you hunt with me, you abide by my rules.”

Russell would do, he judged. Having jerked the door off its top hinge, further simulating a break-in and attack, Spike collected another handful of outdated bags, then picked up the phone. Dialing the number of Security from memory, he said, “Help!” in a strangled voice and let the phone drop.

He and Mike were down the hall and into the morgue before the elevator decanted a couple of Security blokes. The morgue held nothing of interest but had its own entrance and its own elevator. The elevator had a keypad control, letters/numbers like a phone, and the combination was DEATH3210: bit of gallows humor that nobody had bothered to change in at least five years. Spike tapped in the code. When he’d herded Mike inside, he hit the button for six: the cancer ward. Go high while Security was going low, find a couple-few unfortunates practically on their last breath anyway, give them a soft send-off and satisfy Mike’s hunger for taking the last, the death.

Spike could do without that now, and the blood was none the worse for the disease, except that it tasted peppery, a bit. Get himself fed too while he was about it, since Russell wouldn’t have survived any additional drain.

Didn’t want to face Buffy again in blood debt and her likely all roused and sparky with him, smelling all kinds of delicious. Likely he’d give in to temptation, not hold to what he’d decided. Slayer, she’d need all her strength from here on, since he’d seen the Balance clear and known there was no place for him on the Quor’toth expedition. More useful for him to see to things here. Build on what they’d begun, like the class and the escort service and the patrolling.

She wouldn’t like it and probably would fight admitting it, that he was no more use to her, not with Quor’toth. A liability, even, given a mixed contingent of humans and vampires for whom it was impossible to pack food for more than a day or so. And never in this world or any other would Buffy OK the vamps living off the land, so to speak.

Angel, with his fucking regimen of pigs’ blood, hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. Neither had Buffy, obviously. But Spike had, and resolved himself to the only available alternative: he’d stay behind.

It’d been enough to satisfy Fudo, for the moment.

That would prevent Dawn from going, given Spike’s promise; and in turn hold Mike in place and therefore any of his crew he might otherwise have bullied into volunteering, once he was up to such again. Keep the vamp contingent to Angel, which would probably please Angel all to hell and be more manageable.

And Buffy wouldn’t always have to be looking over her shoulder for Fudo, could move freely to make whatever preparations were necessary—for fucking Christmas or whatever.

A good bargain. An acceptable truce, however little Spike liked it.

The poverty ward on the cancer unit was pretty much wall-to-wall beds. It stank of pain, diseased organs, death, fear--a banquet to vamp senses. Mike sailed right in, an angel of death in bluejeans and a black T-shirt with the sentiment Hire the Handicapped with a picture of a grinning legless guy speeding along in a wheelchair.

Less avid, slightly afflicted by pity, Spike decided the bagged he’d collected would do for him well enough. Not that he cared all that much, so long as it was human and not completely gone off. And by the smell, most of the terminal patients were doped completely off their heads: he didn’t need that distraction. Leave Mike that fun, then—no sense in the both of them getting too happy-stupid to get away in good order. Have to be sensible, responsible now. Think ahead; do what was needful.

Both vampires began feeding.

Blood Price, Chapter 7

2005-05-13T14:22:34Z

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 7: Convergences (complete)

If it’d been daylight, Dawn thought, she could have kept him from it. He would at least have hesitated, and she could have got in front and shoved, and given him what-for (that was something he said, “what-for”: vague and dire), anyway done freaking something! But it was full winter dark, and there was no hesitation at all. No gap in which she could have inserted herself.

As Fudo appeared on the walk and blared his challenge, Mike attacked: over the rail and at him, vamp fast, vamp heedless. For a second, he and Fudo were almost in proportion--the top of Mike’s head about level with Fudo’s chest. Then Mike leaped for a throat that was no longer in reach, and was trying to bite a kneecap, then an ankle. Stance widening, Fudo extended upward beyond water tower height. He would have been a hazard to low-flying planes. Down from that height sprang a sword of blue lightnings, crackling as it came. Effortlessly it clove Mike at an angle--from the join of neck to shoulder at the left, straight through and down to the point of the right hip. His body slid wetly apart.

Dawn didn’t know how she came to be standing on the grass or what she meant to do as the sword started down a second time. She just flung her head back and yelled as loud as she could, “Stop! He’s mine!”

At once, a Fudo-shaped adult stood before her, empty handed: much broader but only a little taller than she, frowning at her perplexedly. His eyes shone like moonstones in his indigo countenance. His mismatched tusks, one up, one down, were also bright as he asked, “You claim this one?”

“I claim them all!” Dawn declared, with no idea what claiming entailed but grabbing what felt like an opportunity. “They’re all mine, all in this household.”

“Then you should have warned me,” said Fudo gravely. “You said you wouldn’t interfere.”

“I interfere. Because they’re mine. Fix him!”

“I was attempting to do that when you interrupted.”

“No: fix him! Make him like he was!”

“I cannot restore untruth. The blow falls where the fault lies. Each must fix himself. Or herself,” Fudo added, all PC, with a nod of a bow to her.

That was when Spike, Buffy, and Angel piled out onto the porch--all armed with swords snatched from the weapons chest--and Giles after, with a loaded crossbow. And Oz’s van bumped over the curb and came careening across the lawn into a Fudo…who was simply not there anymore, and Dawn had to leap clear as the van went past and crunched into the steps, rebounding and rocking.

As Dawn picked herself up, they all spilled down from the porch to stand around Mike. Dawn pushed through as Mike reported in a whisper, “I can’t feel my legs.”

“They’re over there.” Spike turned as Willow came around the rear of the van. “Red, what’s to be done?”

Willow did a bit of a take, finding Mike in two distinct and separate parts. Then she waved at the porch. “Get him up there. Inside the wards.”

Forehead creased, Buffy asked, “Should we move him? Won’t we…hurt him?”

“As compared to what?” Willow retorted bluntly, leading the way.

After a second’s hesitation, Spike scooped the upper part; with a grimace, Angel took the lower part. They regathered on the porch, Spike and Angel trying to ease the parts they held into alignment. Willow went inside and turned on the porch light. Shakily exiting the van, Oz came up the steps, standing clear, with Dawn, commenting with quiet puzzlement, “Well, at least he hasn’t dusted yet.”

“Munich?” Spike was asking Angel.

“Maybe. But that was only an arm….” Angel pulled at his blood-soaked sleeves distastefully. “I have to get clean.”

As Angel moved to go inside, Spike grabbed and stopped him, saying, “You’re his sire!”

“Oh. That one. You feed him if you want, Spike. You’re elder. That should do as well. He’s gonna bleed out no matter what we do.”

When Angel moved, Spike was there in front of him, blocking the door. “You’re his fucking sire! Nothing else signifies. ‘F you want help with Quor’toth, you see to him!”

“Spike, back off!” It wasn’t a shout, but Spike moved aside as if shoved. So Angel still had it: the power of absolute command gained from the Supplice. When Angel gave a direct command in a certain tone of voice, Spike had to obey; he went yellow-eyed and fangy in reaction.

Why wasn’t anybody DOING anything? Dawn thought despairingly. If it’d been Spike lying on the porch in two pieces, Buffy wouldn’t be just standing there, she’d--

Dawn saw it then, and did it, ducking between the squabbling vampires to drop onto her knees by Mike’s head. She was afraid to touch him, afraid that the alignment was important and she’d mess it up. His pale eyes had gone vague and didn’t move to notice her. But he moved, taking a breath, whispering in all the voice he had, “Dawn.” His attached arm lifted, fingers stroking her hair where it lay on her shoulder, then fell as the effort exhausted him.

She’d thought all she’d need to do was get close, and vamp instinct would take care of the rest. But the choice was left with her.

Just behind her, Oz’s voice commented, “Damn, vamps are tough.”

“Sometimes they need a little help,” Dawn said without turning. “D’you have a knife?”

“Of course.” Oz offered a red-cased knife with the corkscrew gadget extended. Rattled, he pulled it back and worked out the blade, instead, offering it again.

As Dawn grimly cut a line across her forearm, the thick part just below the elbow, Buffy cried out, “Dawn, don’t!”

“You can help next,” Dawn said coolly. “Don’t let him take too much.” Presenting her bleeding arm to Mike’s face, letting the blood fall into his open mouth, Dawn thought what an idiot he was: if he’d just stayed on the porch, within the wards, none of this had to happen. But he was her idiot, and if there was any benefit in Slayer blood, she wanted him to have it.

When Mike’s face changed and the fangs bit deep, she barely winced at all.

**********

Enough bandages to tend an elephant at Casa Summers, so that was no problem. Cold wasn’t a problem either, though warm would have been better….

Sitting back on his heels and dipping his sticky hands in the bowl of cooling water, Spike said to Buffy, “Fetch out the ‘lectric blanket, will you, pet? Can run it off the cord Red’s got in the den there, the one she uses to charge up the computer….”

“It…will get all bloody,” Buffy said from her place by the door--sort of half in, half out. Not wanting to desert in a crisis but not wanting to hover, either.

She’d been plainly relieved when Spike had curtly forbidden her to imitate Dawn, share out her blood. Such things were personal and Spike didn’t share.

He’d let Mike feed off him presently, though. Let him get the good of Dawn’s donation first.

“Then we’ll get another,” he responded patiently. “But it’s not for Michael: s’for Bit.”

“Oh. All right.”

After a few minutes, Buffy opened the den window to feed the cord out. Then she came back onto the porch with her arms full of the blue electric blanket from the broken upstairs bed. While she plugged it in, Spike wrapped it around Dawn’s shivering back, where she sat on the porch by Mike, who was sleeping or something. There was enough left to lay over Mike’s torso, wrapped up in gauze and then yards and yards of ripped bedsheet on top. The sheeting was covered in daisies: looked odd, but helped soak up the mess. The blanket might not get messed up too bad: the blood was no longer coming out faster than it could go in. Surface healing, that always came first. Seal up the skin. Contain the damage.

If nobody got at you in the meantime, while you were down and defenseless….

Sitting, Spike pulled Dawn against his chest and wrapped his arms around, holding the blanket close against her. He could feel it beginning to heat.

“I was hurt as bad, or worse,” he told Dawn quietly, combing fingers through her hair, “after we took on that taskin beastie. All busted up inside. Doubt there was a whole bone left. And wasn’t but a few days, I was up and about again. Mostly thanks to your sis. Slayer blood, that’s a powerful thing. An’ yours as good as hers.”

Still shivering, Dawn stiffly resisted his attempt at reassurance for awhile. Then she said in a wavering voice, “He was cut right in two, Spike!”

“Not worse, only different. Worse to look at, though, I expect. But the demon’s strong, too. And its business is to keep him whole and unchanged from the minute he was taken and turned. Give it enough time, and fuel, and it’ll do its job well enough. He’ll be back to what he was.”

After a few minutes, Dawn leaned back, accepting the comfort. She turned her face in against his shoulder. “He doesn’t even breathe. He’s so dumb, Spike! If he’d just stayed on the porch--”

“Couldn’t do that. Time you think it all out, it’s likely too late. Just throw yourself into it headlong, hope you come out on the other side. I’d likely have done the same.”

“I know. Are you mad…that I let him mark me again?”

“Don’t much like it,” Spike admitted, very conscious of the bandaged mark on her forearm, that signified she’d been taken by another but not devoured, was being saved for later and no interference tolerated. “But s’not up to me anymore, is it? Yours to say, yours to choose. Tisn’t like I’m gonna give him any taste of my Slayer, now am I?”

Dawn chuckled weepily.

Spike continued, “I’ll give him a feed later. When he can take it. And then Angel will--”

“He won’t.”

“He will. I’ll shame him into it. That mostly works. Sometimes…. In a way, it’s family, Bit. And Michael is of his making as surely…as that other.” Spike changed what he’d been going to say: Buffy had come onto the porch.

Bending, Buffy presented a tall glass of orange juice to her sister, who didn’t want to take it. So Spike took and held it.

“My kidneys are afloat!” Dawn protested.

“Drink it,” Buffy directed, still bent, hands on her knees. “You need it. That was more than a pint, and you don’t have that to spare.”

“She’s right, Bit.”

Struggling free of the blanket, Dawn lurched to her feet, swimmy-headed and uncertain as a drunk. Declaring, “I have to pee!” she wavered to the door. Buffy followed along to be sure she made it up the stairs all right. Spike meditatively drank the juice. It tasted slightly off--from the refrigerator being down, most likely.

Since the blanket wasn’t being used, Spike arranged it to let Mike get the good of it. Then, in Dawn’s absence, he lit the cigarette he’d been wanting the past hour.

Presently Buffy returned, silhouetted in the bright doorway. “Can we bring him inside?”

“Wait till morning. When we’ll have to. Set him on a door or something, so as not to bust it all open again. Might clear off the table in the den, lay him out there….”

As Spike tried to think through the logistics, Buffy came and settled behind him, wrapped him around in her arms as he’d wrapped Dawn. “So it’s not a wake, then?” When Spike just shook his head, she went on, “I’m surprised you haven’t gone all astral.”

“Wanted to,” Spike admitted. “No use here. An’ I don’t want that Fudo to get the notion we’re scared of him. Even if I got no answer to him yet, no blade that will cut him….”

“But you didn’t. Sometimes, you’re not entirely stupid.”

“Thought maybe Bit…might need something.”

“That, too. She was out on her feet. I put her to bed.”

“Good. Be a week, anyway, before she can stand to give any more.”

After a little while, Buffy mentioned hesitantly, “I could draw some. In a cup?”

“No. We’ll do for him. Me and Angel. No need of that.”

Buffy shrugged. “You don’t have to get like that. It’s not as if I offered to sleep with him!”

“Fancy him, do you?”

“Not anymore,” Buffy said, so Spike figured they were no longer talking about Mike. Rising, she tugged at him. “Come on. The wake can spare you for five minutes. I have two words for you: hot water. With extras.”

“That’s four words. And…he wants watching.”

“The wards--”

Spike shook his head, uneasy at the thought of leaving Mike laid out on the porch alone, wards or not. Extras or not. Though that was a pull too: stronger than the constant temptation of astral freedom and clarity.

Making a vexed noise, Buffy abandoned him and went inside. Spike sighed and settled, lighting another cigarette.

He was surprised when Angel came out and walked slowly to the glider. “I’ll take a shift.” They traded looks as Angel dropped onto the glider and pushed it to swinging. “I know what to do,” Angel said, irritated, as though Spike had openly doubted his ability or his intentions. “It isn’t like it’s the first time I’ve kept vigil. And…I’ll give him a feed, if he wants it. No big deal. And you’re a bloody mess, Spike: you stink. Go on: have your goddam shower.”

Spike got to his feet, carefully balanced, prepared for this to go wrong in any of a hundred ways. He felt as light-headed and strange as if he’d fed Mike already. He couldn’t imagine what Buffy’d said, to bring Angel out here.

“All right,” Angel burst out, “I get it: it’s family, all right? He’s yours more than mine, just like you were more mine than Dru’s, whether you liked it or not. Turning some total stranger, that’s nothing, means nothing. It’s the connection--” The big hands worked, trying to force understanding without Angel’s having to say the words. Then they dropped to his knees, and he gave the glider another push. “Just go on. Get clean.” A weird little chuckle Spike couldn’t interpret.

Still waiting for it to go wrong, Spike tossed the cigarette over the rail into the yard and edged off to the door. Buffy was waiting just inside. With a quick left/right glance, locating Giles on the couch and the witch scowling at the laptop in the den, they fled up the stairs.

**********

In the shower she’d cranked up just short of blistering, Buffy could tell how weary he was: by the way his shoulders slumped, the exhausted way he lifted his face to the stinging spray. When she started soaping his back with the shower gel, pushing her thumbs in hard, he tilted his head, not quite looking at her, saying, “Don’t have to do that, love. Not like we been on patrol.”

Restraint, holding back, knotted him up, too. But she didn’t say that. She wasn’t in the mood for an argument or even a discussion. She was too busy being glad it hadn’t been him out on the porch with Dawn when Fudo manifested. He would have done exactly what Mike had and suffered the same result. She’d wanted to get her hands on him for hours, to stroke and knead all that splendid unbroken skin.

And he’d been so good with Mike, and Dawn, and even Angel. He deserved a reward. And Buffy figured she did, too.

“Turn around,” she directed, and hugged him close as he turned. Warm now with the shower’s heat, he blinked at her, sleepy-eyed and intent. Waiting, she figured, for her to make the first move. Sometimes, unsure, he needed courting, which didn’t bother her at all. She liked having the initiative.

Most of the blood that had soaked through his shirt had washed off. She took care of the rest with the shower gel and the heels of her hands, gradually pushing him back against the tiles, making room. When she took firm hold of his cock, it jumped, and he thumped his head back with his eyes shut. As she bent, meaning to kneel and apply her mouth where she knew he wanted it, she was suddenly whirled and lifted clear of the spray, high enough to drape her legs over his shoulders, gasping and bucking as he mouthed her coarse curls and the soon-swollen, responsive folds of flesh underneath.

When she was solidly braced, his hands lifted to her breasts--pressing, pinching, pulling--as he continued to nuzzle, tongue, and nip her below, muttering, “That’s right, come for me, sweet, all beautiful for me, could climb inside an’ die there and be happy forever, if I dust that’s what you do, stick me up your sweet quim and it’ll all be fine--”

Something in that bizarre request set her off. She convulsed, wailing, gripping wet handfuls of hair. Held through her climax, she felt herself lifted and dismounted, sliding down the tiles until they were face to face, looking into each other’s eyes.

Locking hands behind his head, she yanked them into a kissing war: seeing who could press hardest, delve deepest, gnaw at swollen lips the most excruciatingly, both breathing hard. When she clasped her legs around his waist he pushed into her, all in one go, and began the frantic rocking that meant he wasn’t gonna last. So she tipped her head aside, offering the mark that was another level of completion for them both.

Immediately he mouthed her there but didn’t bite, muttering the usual litany of hot, good, tight, and assorted graphic obscenities into her ear until he went rigid and incoherent in his release and she clutched with internal muscles to hold him there as long as possible. She had the sense that she was protecting him somehow, holding him safe, as he leaned heavily against her, spent.

They both jumped as the water turned icy.

Spike was out of the shower first, complaining, “Fuck, fuck, fuck! Have to get a bigger boiler, always cuts out just at the wrong time--” Grabbing a big towel off the towel bar, he turned holding it for her, caping her within it and then just holding: not ready yet to be apart.

“I saw stars,” she confessed, almost shyly.

“Bang your head on the tile, that’ll do it.” Taking up a corner of the towel, he began rubbing her hair. “Wanted to get you off first. Make up for me ducking out more than I should.”

“You were there when it mattered. And I guess…it’s new and different, right? On the astral side?” He made an affirmative noise. “What’s it like?”

He paused in his rubbing, and she turned enough to see his eyes, where everything showed. His eyes were unfocused, faraway: blinking; thinking; remembering. “Haven’t yet found the words. Maybe there are none, like the Watcher said…. Best I can say, it’s like the stars on a clear night. And like what the sun would be, perfect, in summer, everything warm and plain, roundabout, and so wonderful you don’t think you can stand it. It’s all the same, and it’s all changed, and you can see it all becoming….” Something like a self-conscious laugh and a bent head, deflecting the intensity. “Said I didn’t have the words, and then I try to tell you.”

“I wish I could see it with you.”

“Wish you could too, sweet. S’all that’s lacking, you there. But…can’t touch proper, there. No surfaces, no outsides. Your outsides are so fine, and your insides, too….” A more emphatic rub, playful, and a hug, before he went on, “An’ I don’t think it’d be, for you, what it is to me. Have to live in the dark a century for it to take hold like it does…. To Bit and the witch, an’ the Watcher too, I suppose, seems like it’s just another kind of place. Not that for me, though.”

“I figured.” Sliding out of the towel, Buffy reached for the hooks on the back of the door…and realized only one robe hung there. Pink chenille: Willow’s.

They looked at each other, then at the pile of dirty and/or bloodied clothes on the floor. Resigned, Spike started to reach down, but Buffy stopped his hand, saying, “Wait.”

Pulling on the robe, she checked the hall, then dashed to her bedroom. Dithering only a moment, she pulled on a nice, filmy, totally impractical black top hung with ribbon bows ready for untying with teeth--she anticipated further extras; possibly several hours’ worth--and the matching high-cut bottoms: like underpants, except sexy. She drew around her one of her ugly, droopy, warm terry robes--white, with blue forget-me-nots along the collar. Collecting the damp chenille robe, she hustled back to the bathroom. Tapping twice, she whispered, “It’s me!” and slid inside.

Spike had the used towel around his hips. When Buffy started to shrug out of the larger robe, to give it to him, he took the damp one instead although it was small on him and barely covered the essentials.

“Smells like you,” he explained, fastening the belt. “And s’not all covered in girly flowers an’ such.”

She’d long since given up being squicked by instances of vampires’ acute sense of smell. Shrugging, she pulled the oversized (to her) terry robe together and they made a reasonably decorous exit to the basement, not counting one small pause at the foot of the stairs when Spike wanted to check on Mike (and display his post-shower-with-extras satisfaction to Angel) and Buffy thought it a bit much and wouldn’t let him.

“He’s accepted it. Us,” she said, herding him downstairs with judicious pushes. “We don’t have to rub his nose in it.”

“He’d like that. He’d like to watch, even. Get him a pencil and a pad, he’s all set. Used to like to draw me an’ Dru--”

“Spike, you’re a pig. And any conversation about you and Drusilla better not contain the word ‘bed.’”

“Wasn’t always a bed,” Spike rejoined, looking around with one of his cocky tongue-to-teeth grins. Then he suddenly sobered, gazing at her as they came to the bottom of the basement stairs. “Sorry. Having him around…makes me remember. Expect it does him, too. One reason we don’t get on. You’re another, of course…. D’you still love me, treasure?” he asked, gone absurdly, sweetly humble. “Bad, rude thing that I am?”

By way of answer, Buffy dropped the robe. By the way Spike’s eyes went wide and dark, it was the right answer.

**********

Still a little dizzy and shaky after her nap, holding the rail and then sliding her hand along the wall where the rail was broken, Dawn crept down the stairs, fully cold-attired in sweats-with-hoodie and a snap-front lilac down vest (Buffy’s: snuck from her closet).

Though the light was still on, the den was vacant; and Giles was camping out with Oz, in the van. So she slipped out the door unobserved.

The porch light was still on, too. She found Mike covered with the electric blanket. Laid over the blanket was what she at first took for Spike’s duster, covering him from neck to knees. Crouching beside him, she located his right hand, cold and heavy: she figured the slight motion of lifting it, clasping it, wouldn’t hurt anything. He was out, didn’t know she was there. That was OK because she knew.

“You shouldn’t do that. He could come up at you.”

She’d subliminally absorbed the squeak-creak of the glider chains and assumed it was Spike. Of course she’d heard the sexual gymnastics in the bathroom--blessedly short, now that they had the bed in the soundproofed basement to retreat to. But she knew Spike wouldn’t leave Mike unattended for long.

Not Spike. Angel: big, dark, idly rocking. In dark slacks and rolled-up shirt-sleeves (fresh shirt) open at the collar.

As quietly, she said, “I know. But he won’t.”

“He could.”

“Not until his spine’s healed. No leverage.”

“He’s got one good hand. That’s all he’d need. Grab you, haul you down, and that would be that.”

“I’m holding that hand. If he moved, I’d know.”

“Not soon enough. It’s not worth the risk.”

Dawn knew Angel was right. Starved and not completely conscious of what he was doing, Spike had gone for her once; and before that, he’d gone for her on Angel’s irresistible command as Angel tested the depth of his control. She figured Angel regarded her as something like a crash dummy, important only because Buffy would be mad at him if Dawn got hurt on his watch. Dawn wasn’t too fond of Angel even if he was right.

Sitting back on her heels, she mentioned, “I know about the child. That he’s yours.”

The creaking stopped. “Damn. Spike.”

“He told me, yes. We consulted about it,” Dawn replied with dignity. “He wanted to help, but there was no way then.”

“You haven’t told.”

Dawn shook her head. “I promised Spike.” Feeling she’d spelled out her allegiance sufficiently, she patted Mike’s cheek once--sunken, dry, corpse-cold, the flesh receding from the bone--then stood up because, after all, Angel was right. A blood-starved vamp tended to take what he needed. Strictly instinctual. She didn’t want to put either herself or Mike at risk for that.

Stuffing her hands into the vest’s pockets, she perched herself primly on the middle of the glider, leaving Angel his personal space. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat on the glider. The past summer had been a bit fraught and frantic. She found she was tall enough now to sit with her feet flat on the porch. Neat!

As she settled into the shared vigil, she found Angel’s company undemanding and peaceful. He wasn’t always jittering around, fiddling with cigarettes, talking just to be talking, the way Spike did. He didn’t mind silence. He was just there.

Like Mike in that way, she realized. Mike had that quiet in him, too, underneath the vamp suddenness. Patient was seldom a word she’d associate with Spike; but Mike was patient as stone. Not indifferent, though, or inattentive: he noticed everything. Just didn’t feel compelled to chatter on about it…except with her, of course. Like on the phone…. To her, Mike would open up, let the raw emotions spill out unconsidered and only lightly censored, for decency.

She wondered what it meant, that she’d claimed him. Well, everybody, really, but Mike was the reason. Clearly Fudo had recognized the Lady in her but he’d taken her for an avatar, not an individual, the same as he had Buffy. She wondered how long it would take Fudo to realize the truth--if he’d still defer to her then. Likely not. All she’d bought them was a little time. Time enough, maybe, for Mike to heal….

Though the coat covering Mike was leather and black, she could see now it was the wrong cut and shape to be Spike's duster. Carefully casual and offhand, she asked, "Your coat?"

"Yeah."

Dawn gave him a sidewise look. "Won't it get blood on it?"

"Nah. He's bled out about as much as he's going to. Hasn't even shorted out the blanket. And it would only be the lining. Linings are easy to replace. It keeps the heat in better." That was about one too many excuses, but Dawn let it pass without remark. Angel gave her a look in turn--just the corner of his eye, minimal head movement. "You like him." It was a prompt rather than a question.

Dawn shrugged and lied, “He’s all right. For a vamp. He’s six years old.”

Silence. She thought Angel was working out the timeline. Eventually he said, “I don’t remember turning him. It’s not generally a thing I’d do.”

“It was Angelus.”

“Oh. Right." Angel made a frowning, reflective hmmm sort of face. "Not so much forgot as didn't bother noticing, I guess. Didn't care.... Spike’s apparently adopted him. Why?”

Almost, she responded Because Spike loves him. But that would be Spike’s to say, not hers. So she replied with another shrug, that was itself a lie.

“Family,” said Angel sourly, answering himself. “What’s he like?”

“Apart from vamp normal? He and Spike fight a lot, to settle who’s boss. It’s not settled yet. I imagine you can understand that.”

“I imagine I can. What else?”

“He…likes how I smell. So he hangs around a lot. I guess…we’re friends. But it’s Sue he fucks,” Dawn spat out with sudden bitterness. “Maybe you remember Sue: she’s a vamp now, but she was one of the SITs. Got herself turned, on purpose, in Chicago, last summer. Stupid bint,” she added rancorously, quoting Spike, figuring Angel would get that too.

“It doesn’t mean anything, Dawn. A vamp will take anything that moves, or that doesn’t move fast enough. We’re not…particular.”

“Mike’s particular. Like a Victorian gentleman with his piece on the side.”

“Don’t talk about what you don’t know,” Angel said curtly. “He’s keeping that away from you. To protect you--”

“I’m not Buffy. And he’s not you!”

“No. Of course. I think I’m right, though.”

“When do you not think you’re right?” Dawn challenged, and got a chuckle.

“There have been times, honestly. I always figured not dusting Spike, that was a mistake. But you like the little bastard too.”

“I love him,” Dawn replied, finding that admission less charged and wanting Angel to be in no doubt about it. “And he loves me. And Buffy. Differently.”

“I sort of figured that. Wouldn’t think he’d be able to keep his obsessions all neat and compartmentalized that way.”

“We work at it. Besides, I don’t smell like Buffy--I smell like me. Smell is a big thing to vamps, I’m told. Also, I’m not a Slayer, and it’s Slayers he has the thing about.”

“Yeah. He does.”

“So no problemo. He marked me once, I made him do it, really, didn’t know any better then…and he was sooo upset! He wouldn’t come within a city block of me until it was taken care of.”

She expected him to say something about that, or about Mike’s fresh mark on her arm. But he didn’t.

“He’s a good fighter,” Angel allowed, and Dawn recollected Angel would have had several chances to observe, even before he knew who Mike was.

“He’s an awesome fighter! The best, next to Spike. He was a mercenary, before.”

“He was just outclassed. Rocket launcher might take that thing out…or maybe not even that. Something that size, that can change so fast….” Angel shook his head. Looping back to a previous topic, he went on, “I was with Darla over a century. I worshipped her, did whatever she said or nearly, because she’d given me this life, this power, this freedom…as it was then, before I knew…. I shared her bed, when she let me. And in all that time, never loved her. Not an ounce. Until she came to me, human and resigned to it, and I tried to keep Dru from turning her. Failed at that…. And afterward, pregnant, dusting herself in that alley so the baby could be born…. I loved her then. When it didn’t matter. When it was too late.”

“It always matters. What’s he like--the baby?”

“Connor. His name is Connor. I named him that. He’s wonderful! So soft, and the little fingers and toes, smelling like milk and shit. I hate diapers, but I didn’t mind, because it was him. The little starfish hands and how he’d sleep, butt in the air, sleep so deep I had to lean down and listen to make sure he was still breathing. And he’d cry, scream his head off, but he’d quiet right down when I held him, he knew it was me.” Angel’s face was animated, the dark eyes alight, the hands sketching the shape of his happiness in the air. He added shyly, “And…he liked it when I changed, showed him the bumpies. Like it was some sort of neat trick, that his daddy could do and nobody else could. He…was wonderful. I miss him. Every day.”

The animation was gone, replaced almost by the usual somber mask. But not quite: Dawn saw it now as clenched, not calm. Braced against pain. Keeping it all inside for Connor, to whom it belonged.

Dawn didn’t recollect ever knowing a doting father. She guessed she now had a benchmark for future comparison. Mindful of Spike’s concerns, she asked, “Not to be heartless, but if we can’t get him back, could you…have another?”

“No. No, I don’t think so. No. He’s all and everything. A miracle. Prophesied as ‘the Destroyer,’ whatever that means. I hate prophecies! And as often as not, a miraculous birth is part of the usual prophecy package. It was him, not me or Darla, that let him come to be. We…we were only the instruments. Not anything special about us, except for that. But we were granted a grace. I don’t know why. Except that it was for him. He was fated to be mine. And he’s still fated. I’ll get him back. I have to. Otherwise, it makes no sense. There are things working in this beyond what we know, or can know. I believe that. Spike, he’s got hold of something, God knows how, and that’s progress. I never even got as far as Fudo.”

“Getting past him,” Spike said, easing onto the porch while lighting the inevitable cigarette, “is what’s gonna be the problem. ‘Lo, Bit, what are you doing up? Be sunrise in an hour, about.”

“I just wanted to see…he was all right. Which he isn’t, but well, you know,” Dawn replied awkwardly.

“Yeah. Guess I do.” Looking to Angel, Spike asked, “You feed him?”

“I’m going to,” Angel replied, glowery and defensive. “Before he’s moved will be best. He’ll get the most good from it then.”

“You see to that, then, while I get the cellar door off its hinges. Move him on that, I figured.”

When Spike went back inside, Angel still didn’t stir. His hands were clasped together, the fingers working uncomfortably over and around each other. He stared straight ahead--past the porch, into the night.

It came to Dawn that she was the hold-up here: Angel didn’t want to feed Mike with her watching. She got the impression he found the prospect embarrassing, though that was ginormously dumb: there wasn’t much about vampires’ personal functions she didn’t know about, hadn’t seen. It wasn’t as if they had to go to the bathroom or anything, except occasionally to throw up, as Spike did, discreetly yakking up in one tidy episode whatever “people food” he’d consumed for the flavor or the sociability. Not as if vamps had a working digestive system, after all; and the imagined alternative would have been supremely ooksome. She shivered.

“I would,” she said, “but I can’t. Slayer healing isn’t part of the package. I have to wait a week, Spike says. So I consider it a personal favor to me, that you offered. You did offer, right?”

“Yeah,” Angel confirmed without enthusiasm.

“Then that’s good. Later, I’ll call Rona, have her pick up some of the bagged at the hospital, although she’ll have to put it on the card, can’t invoice it anymore. But that’s later. Now would be good,” she hinted, nodding encouragingly.

“Maybe,” Angel suggested, heavily thoughtful, “you could get some coffee started. Or tea, whatever’s around.”

“All right.” Poised and obedient, Dawn got up and went inside. She could take a hint when it was the size of a 2x4, ruthlessly applied. She’d let Angel have his privacy if it helped get the job done. Besides, she was willing to grant him bonus points because of the coat.

By the basement door, thumbing out the hinge pins Xander had set with a hammer, Spike asked, “He doing it?”

Continuing into the kitchen, Dawn peered into the refrigerator for the coffee can. The power going out shouldn’t affect coffee…should it? Have to chance it. “He will, now that there’s no audience. And Spike? About that other, you were worried about? That there could be an encore…of the recent ‘miracle’?” She made quote marks in the air with her fingers, trying to choose words delicately and obliquely, in case Buffy suddenly popped up from the basement. “No chance. It was a one-shot, almost literally.”

When there was no immediate response, she paused in filling the (unplugged) coffee maker in the sink to lean and look into the hall. Spike had stopped too, regarding the floor. “He say that? Angel?”

“Yeah. And for whatever it’s worth, I believe him. Believe he believes it, anyway.”

“He told you? Just like that?”

“Not ‘just like that.’ I have my ways,” Dawn announced loftily, resuming her task.

“So you do. Winkle anything out of anybody. Got the makings of a fine spy in you, Bit.”

“I think I’d prefer to be viewed as an interpreter. Or a confidante.”

“Whatever you say. Wasn’t him, then. Or Herself. Just happened, like.”

“Seems so: the word used was ‘instrument.’ I’d think that would ring familiar bells for you…. I judge you’re safe on the spunk front,” Dawn replied, making him cough a startled laugh as he turned back to unhinging the door.

**********

Blood came in all sorts of flavors and textures, spiced with all sorts of emotions. Mike knew that what stayed with him, though fading, that was Dawn. It was energetic--all sparkly and fizzy like champagne, with a rich undertone of fear, concern, and the love she wouldn’t admit but he knew, all the same. Concentrated, somehow: working in him like the first feed after abstinence when you sucked out the last of the life, immediate satisfaction. But every mouthful he’d drawn was like that, like a full feed.

And this time, for nobody else but him. This time, he wasn’t just a convenient carrier, to transfer Dawn’s concern to Spike in a way they’d both accept since Spike wouldn’t feed from her direct, only from the Slayer. Hard to have the taste of it, the gift of it, and know it was only for a little while and not for him. This time, it was his, freely granted--benediction and prize and affirmation that he’d done right, come between her and harm, and this, her ultimate gift, the life of her sweet body, honorably earned.

And he’d marked her: felt it take and hum with achieved possession. She’d consented to it. And she’d first claimed him as hers, to that Fudo-thing.

Things would be different between them now.

He didn’t much mind not being able to move. Didn’t really want to move, all warm somehow and drifting in and out of consciousness, hearing her voice sometimes and happy to know her there, though sometimes he got confused and thought he was being medevaced out of some freefire zone and was worried, not knowing yet how bad he’d been hit, whether he was still all there. Which was foolish, memories from the before. He didn’t have to fear such things anymore. Either he was dusted, gone, or he’d be all right.

There was no pain. That probably should have bothered him, but it didn’t. The lack of sensation freed him to contemplate the wonder of achieved desire.

Gradually, indignantly, he felt himself slipping into blood debt. Shouldn’t need any more than what he had. The least taste should have been enough. Instead he felt odd twinges as though connections were sparking and then shorting out--as though his body was an unseen landscape under an artillery barrage. He felt as though he was somehow collapsing into himself, cracks opening as they did in parched ground waiting for rain.

The blood that came to him then was a revelation. Nothing like Dawn’s--with a completely different power. Vampire blood: that, he knew at once. Not sweet, like human. It was dark, and bitter, and slow--he had to pull hard to get enough to swallow. It was ancient and more powerful than anything he’d ever tasted or even imagined. And yet familiar. He felt his demon leap within him in savage recognition.

This was the blood that had made him.

He knew nothing else until the blood was withdrawn and a voice told him, “That’s enough. Greedy pup, aren’t you? Keep still, don’t move.” The hand that belonged to that voice, to that blood, pushed him flat although he had no consciousness of having stirred.

Faintly, he could feel his whole body like a diagram laid out in electrons, filmy and insubstantial. He wasn’t quite connected to it yet but he knew it was there.

“You think that’s something,” the voice said, “you should have had a taste of the Master, the eldest of our line. Not that he’d have let you. That was only a special treat for those who’d pleased him. He favored Darla, and she was drunk for a month on it. I never pleased him, so I never got any. Never had a taste of the bloodline before, boy?”

He’d had Spike’s blood and thought it fine. But the power he’d tasted there he now knew for an echo. This was the source, the thing itself. He was too dazed and astonished to feel it as disloyalty. It was merely a fact. The sense of connection was beyond argument. Whatever Spike claimed and Mike pretended, this was his Sire.

“Michael.” That was Spike’s voice, close and quiet. “We’re gonna move you now. Inside. The light’s coming--can you feel it?”

Mike knew nothing except the blood, the voices, and, faintly, his body. He tried to say so but couldn’t remember how that worked.

Spike said, “You stay perfectly quiet. Don’t want to get anything out of line. Got a door here, gonna slide it under, put you on it. We’ll be as easy with you as we can.”

Mike thought it was the sunrise. It felt like burning, like every cell in his body had ignited and gone incandescent.

When he next was aware, though, his body felt more solid, more definite. He could feel he had weight, and substance. So he guessed it hadn’t been the sun after all.

He felt a touch, and knew the beloved ambience. “Dawn.”

“I’m right here. In an hour or so, Spike will give you a feed, and that will help. And there’s bagged on order. I’m not allowed.”

She was close, smelling all sweetly like herself, with his mark upon her. So that was all right. He slept.

**********

In Buffy’s opinion, three vampires in the house were several too many. But there was nothing to be done and no place, anymore, to spare since although the basement was pretty much spoken for, she hadn’t yet vacated her bedroom (clothes, makeup, a mirror, etc.) and she was damned if she was gonna have Angel sleep in her room anyway, even on a mattress on the floor. But Angel pretty much had to stay because he was helping feed Mike (who couldn’t move or be moved) in the den.

Spike, arguing with Willow about access to the laptop, was in the kitchen where Buffy despaired of making breakfast--and Dawn was somnambulating here and there like a lost pup in the intervals she wasn’t hovering over the invalid.

Standing in the hall, Buffy told Angel uncertainly, “You could sleep on the couch.”

“I’ll be all right.”

“There’s a mattress upstairs, I could drag it down….”

“Really. Don’t bother. I can--”

The doorbell rang, and it was Rona with a cool box full of packaged blood. Buffy waved her toward the kitchen, where there were mugs and where dirty mugs could be washed. Spike immediately exited to take his turn at feeding Mike and to avoid being in the same room as Angel. Spike made a point of giving Buffy a quick kiss in passing. Since punching him in the nose would only have made things worse and possibly given Angel the wrong impression, Buffy grimly just kept going.

Opening a packet and pouring its repulsive contents into a mug held at arm’s length, Buffy commented over her shoulder, “Spike doesn’t like it heated, says the microwave kills the flavor or something. Should I--”

Angel had his head lifted, sniffing. He frowned, or frowned more--it was hard to tell. “That’s human.”

“Yeah, from the blood bank.” Sensing criticism, Buffy set down the mug to fold her arms. “We buy it, Angel. With money Spike earns, translating for the Council. Are you gonna make a thing about it?”

“Not a thing….” Angel looked uncomfortable. “It’s just…I don’t do human anymore.”

“Fine.” Buffy chased Rona back up the hall and caught her by the door. “One more stop. A couple gallons of pig, from the butcher. They take plastic, right?”

“I passed there on the way to the hospital,” Rona responded, annoyed. “I could have picked it up then, if you’d told me.”

“OK, so I lose efficiency points. Just do it, all right?”

“Is it for Mike? Because since when is he a second-class citizen around here? How come--?”

Buffy shut her eyes. “It’s for Angel, all right? He doesn’t do human.”

“Yeah, I saw: the Generalissimo vamp’s here. How come?”

Buffy sighed. “It’s complicated.”

“Is there an apocalypse, and nobody told us?”

Spike came out of the den, rolling down his sleeve. He noted the empty cool box dangling from Rona’s hand, then looked inquiringly at Buffy. She said, “In the kitchen.”

“Right.”

Rona caught his arm, and he wheeled about and waited while the SIT inspected him. “Spike, you’re more than a quart low. What’s going on here?”

“Nothing you lot will have to mess with. Go on: do like the Slayer said.”

“All right, but I’m telling Ken: we’re part of the team, too!”

Spike’s eyes went yellow under a heavier brow. “You or Ken show up here without you’re called, you’ll get pitched right out again.”

Rona swung toward the door, responding, “We’ll see about that!” She thumped the door behind her.

Everybody was making points.

Face falling back into human contours, Spike gave Buffy a Well, I tried look and continued slowly toward the kitchen. About halfway, he stopped and sagged against the staircase wall.

Half suspecting it was a ploy, Buffy went all the same. Instead of a mug, she filled a plastic pitcher and carried it back to Spike. Passing it over, she inquired tartly, “You need help holding it?” She was a little annoyed at his refusal to feed from her, considering she was there, and willing, and reportedly tasty, and it would have perked him right up again.

Spike just took the pitcher and began drinking, not even complaining about the lack of Froot-Loops or something crunchy to add the extra tang of the uber-disgusting.

Drifting by, Dawn asked him, “When’s the last time you ran a downtown sweep?”

Looking puzzled and dim, Spike quit drinking. “Dunno, Bit. Few days, anyway. Why?”

“Not since we set out for Terminal Beach, right?”

“Maybe. Don’t recall.”

“Ahuh,” Dawn replied in a knowing tone, twirling around the newel post, and went dancing up the stairs with both of them watching her go.

“What was that about?” Buffy asked.

“No clue, love.” Spike raised the pitcher, then stopped, throwing a sharp glance upward. Some penny had dropped, but Buffy was distracted by the doorbell announcing Oz and a rumpled, unshaven, frazzled-looking Giles, who inquired plaintively, “Tea?”

“OK,” Buffy called, loud enough to carry, “everybody out of the kitchen--now! I’m making breakfast!”

“Oh,” said Giles, face falling, “must you?”

“Perkins,” said Oz, turning and leading the way back down the steps.

Buffy gave a passing thought to all the fresh groceries (that did not include yummy maple syrup), then grabbed a jacket off the hall peg. “Dawn, Will! Perkins!”

**********

Left in sole custody of the laptop, Spike was compiling the components of a spell, squinting because he didn’t want to try to locate his glasses in the disordered (as in everything shoved everyplace it didn’t belong) den and he’d sooner be roasted on a spit than wear them where Angel could see anyway.

Angel was behind him, waiting for Rona’s delivery of fucking pigs’ blood, which Spike figured would be a nicely awkward thing to comment on while having another round of the good stuff, himself. Not that bagged blood compared to taking it hot from a live…well, he supposed the word had to be victim…much less to Slayer blood, which he wouldn’t be pointing out until Mike was up and about and had no more need to tap the bloodline--better for healing than human because it strengthened the demon in making the body conform to the unchanging template. Wouldn’t allow himself a taste of Buffy until then--not and pass it along. That was his.

So was Mike, but feeding an injured junior of the bloodline took precedence. Spike had limits: until half an hour ago, it'd probably been a week since he'd fed. (And how the hell had Bit twigged to his taking just a little, here and there, on his sweeps?) Although Spike grudged sharing that duty, he felt he had no option but to make Angel accept his responsibility as sire. Mike needed more than Spike had...and his true sire was available: eldest of the bloodline. Had to be realistic about such things.

The fact that he and Angel were uneasily allied over the seemingly unavoidable matter of Quor'toth didn’t mean Spike wanted the brooding bastard to feel anything like at home here. Wouldn’t provoke him to a fight, or laying down one of his damn geases again…but there were little, subtle things Spike could do to make plain that only the circumstances (and Buffy) made Angel welcome here. Spike didn’t.

Shoulder propped against a cabinet, Angel was keeping carefully clear of the light spilling in through the kitchen window. It hadn’t reached the kitchen island where Spike was sitting yet, but it would; Spike was looking forward to that moment.

“You ever used an athame?” he asked idly.

“Seen a few,” Angel allowed. “Not worth much as a dagger. All fancy-schmancy decorations.”

“Oh, that’s the New Age Earth Mother crap, like they stock at the Magic Box. Not what I mean.”

“Then what?”

Ignoring the question, keying a few notes in a drop-down comment box, Spike asked, “Ever make one?”

“Hell, no. What are you playing with crap like that for?”

“Not playing: researching. It’s what I do now.” Spike tried to keep his tone neutral, but some of the sour probably still came through. After all, it was Angel. They knew each other’s nuances, ears tuned to every shading, every silence.

“Yeah. I heard. Took the Council’s shilling.”

“Something like. Far’s it goes…. They get translations of stupid spells that don’t work and some few that do, accounts of idiots that got in over their heads, called what they couldn’t control, and like that. I get…access to the whole of the Watcher archive, or nearly. Got caught at it, but they can’t limit what I can look at without buggering the whole deal, so I still have the best of it. For awhile, anyway…..” Spike shut the drop-down box, carefully saved his notes, and pulled up another source he’d bookmarked--Mesopotamian, this time. Nasty alphabet. Cunieform, like something algebraic. And the tenses were a bitch.

Never could tell when his access might be cut off. Had to collect everything he’d need right away--despite his head being all swimmy from letting Mike feed and a headache coming on besides from the eyestrain--in case that happened. Between the witch and Anya, and maybe the Watcher, he could probably fill in any gaps. Not as though any pre-made spell existed for what he meant to do anyway. Had to be intuition: what could be cobbled together with what, and not blow up in his face.

“So,” Angel said disparagingly. “You’re playing with magic now.”

Spike granted himself a short glance. “Healed Dru, didn’t I? Some other little bits, over the years. Mostly can tell what works from the trash.”

“An athame, that’s what--associated with fire and air, right? Not a good combination for a vamp.” By his voice, Angel had moved off, nearer the hall.

“You’d think so, wouldn’t you,” Spike responded agreeably. Turning, he slid off the chair, full into the blaze of harmless sunlight through the kitchen window of necro-tempered glass. And smiled.

Blood Price, Chapter 6

2005-04-29T21:20:45Z

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 6: Dire Scenarios (complete)

As though the brrring! of the weapons chest phone were a starting gun, Dawn whirled on the stairs. Racing back up to her room, she dove onto her bed, grabbed her cellphone from the bedside table, and hit the #2 speed dial. It rang! The phone was working!

After only twenty rings, she got Mike’s voice slurring, “Ya.”

“Hi! Phones are working again! Severely tremendous!”

If it’d been Spike, she’d have been chewed out for waking him up to pass along such cataclysmic news. But it was Mike. She heard him stirring around for a moment, maybe yawning, changing hands on his phone. She couldn’t imagine it perfectly, she’d never been to his new lair, but she heard the smile in his voice and that was all she really needed. “Dawn. Everything there all right?”

“Now that the power’s back, yeah." Happily, she settled in to chat mode. "You do a sweep last night?”

“Something like.”

“Tell me!”

“Well, nothing much stirring. Saw Spike pass by, ‘bout ninety miles an hour, Slayer at pillion, dunno what that was about, if anything. Everything else all dark. There’s been a lair forming up in Shady Grove, couple of vamps turning everything they could find, about half a dozen fledges. We busted them up, killed most, scattered the rest.”

“Ahuh.” Dawn knew, on a mental map, that particular cemetery was within Mike’s claimed territory. Naturally he was going to roust anything but a lone vamp or two settling in there. “Any losses?”

“Nobody you’d know. Hunted Mercy General afterward. Hospitals, they have generators.”

And would therefore have people out and abroad in something like normal numbers. Dawn understood that too.

Mike didn’t make any big detailed thing out of his hunts, but he didn’t avoid mentioning them, either. Hunting and killing were part of what he was, and although he kept to Dawn’s limits on nights when he came to visit, the rest of the time he attended to vamp priorities and made casually sure she knew it. So she’d appreciate properly what an exception she was, she thought: what allowances he was prepared to make for her. Kind of a compliment, if she wanted to look at it that way.

Some parts of vamp thinking, she could puzzle out pretty well. Some parts, she couldn’t.

She found herself saying, “So how’s Sue?”

“Still here. Not dusted, if that’s what you mean. Sue, she looks out for herself pretty good. May live to a year yet. Didn’t know you had a particular interest in her--”

“I don’t!”

“--to ask after her.” A silence then as he absorbed her protest. “Dawn, why’d you call?”

Dawn shrugged uncomfortably. “I figured it was my turn. Since the phones had been out….”

“No: really.”

Dawn curled up tighter around the phone. “Are you mad at me?”

“What for?” Mike didn’t sound surprised or even puzzled. Only curious.

“I dunno. For anything.”

“For not being Sue, you mean.”

“Maybe. No!”

“You’re like Spike,” Mike commented thoughtfully. “What you don’t want, you still want the ordering of.”

“No! That’s nothing to me, I don’t care about that!”

“And you’re near as terrible a liar,” Mike responded, chuckling.

“I am not lying!” Dawn screeched. It was insupportable that Mike could be so untroubled by what tied her into knots.

“Now, Dawn, don’t you get mad about it when I’m not. You set the limits, not me. And there’s got to be limits. On account of what you are. And I am. No use to complain about that. Just how it is. Always been limits and always will be. Just a matter of where we draw the line. Just ‘cause you ain’t got all of me don’t mean there’s anyone I set higher or think more of. Nobody’s got all of anybody, Dawn…except you take the life that’s theirs and make it all your own. I got no problem with that. Not what I thought you wanted, though….”

“I don’t know what I want!” Dawn wailed.

“Well, I knew that, too. Not impatient about it, though. I got time. How about I swing by this evening, we take a ride. Phone’s all fine, call you anytime I please, and that’s good. But can’t see you. Can’t smell you. Can’t know for certain if your eyes are all sparky or crunched up tight, or if your blood moves calm or fast. Don’t really like the phone all that much, sometimes,” Mike finished, moody and a little wistful.

At least he’d quit being reasonable. She couldn’t stand his being reasonable. Dawn thought she’d feel so much better if he was as confused and miserable as she was.

“Come over,” she agreed, then suddenly realized she had news to impart and sprang upright. “Oz is here! Do you know Oz?’

“Heard Spike speak of him,” Mike responded neutrally. “Werewolf?”

“Ahuh, yes. And Giles, he’s practically camped on the doorstep. He wants us all to go to Quor’toth!”

“What’s that, when it’s at home? Some dimensional thing?” Mike’s tone was way short of pleased.

“Something like that. To rescue Ethan Rayne, of all people! And there’s this thing called Fudo, about eighteen feet high, a kind of Ninja-samurai-demigod thing with a disappearing sword, that doesn’t want us to, and--”

Dawn was amazed to realize the scope and detail of recent developments Mike was ignorant of, that she hadn’t told him about. All kinds of excitement!

As she started to explain about Fudo, and how she’d actually been allowed to sit in on a full-scale Scooby meeting, she noticed Spike standing in her doorway. Breaking off, she tilted her head inquiringly, explaining into the phone, “It’s just Spike.”

Noticed, Spike stalked forward. Batting the phone out of her hand, he seized her wrist and pulled…her out of herself.

Suspended in the pearlescent occluded daylight of a Sunnydale winter morning, Spike was like a fiery cloud. The sparkling motes of his astral body whirled so wildly that he seemed to be flying apart, nearly transparent. Dawn could see through him but not into him. He was exploding like a swarm of hornets.

You told, he accused.

Told what? To who?

Angel. About Quor’toth. Second the phone was working, somebody got on to Angel. He’s coming.

Dawn was accustomed to the fury of Spike’s demon. But the demon had been left behind. This implacable rage made Spike seem a stranger to her. It was of the spirit. Of the soul.

He was staring at her ferociously: as though to sift every molecule of her being--here, where the truth of things could not be concealed or evaded. Know you wanted to. Tried to get me to say you could.

It wasn’t me! I didn’t do it! Anyway, you’re the one who told me, Spike. If it’s this gigantic dire secret, why did you tell me about it in the first place?

Spike’s attention left her, turning inward. The seething energy lurched and swayed, no longer locked on target. Dawn could no longer see his eyes. Hadn’t thought it through, then. What it would mean….

Well, I didn’t! Dawn was talking to herself: Spike’s presence had winked out.

In that instant, she was certain that she and Spike were thinking exactly the same thing: If she hadn’t told, who had?

He’d taken his explosion elsewhere.

**********

Descending the stairs an abstracted amble, Spike was thinking, If not Bit, then who?

Oz and Giles were in the hall, talking with Buffy and Willow. Noticing him first, Buffy glanced around and Giles looked up too, with a smug, sly something in his eyes and about his pursed mouth. Spike went for him in a flying dive.

The next thing he knew, he was on his back with Buffy kneeling grimly astraddle his chest and Oz weighing down his ankles. Buffy smelled scared and furious; wolf-boy smelled anxious and determined: like he might tear Spike’s throat out but he wouldn’t like it. From behind, Willow’s voice commented, “You got to stop doing this, Spike. It’s rotten for morale, and it’s hard on me. I have better things to do with my spells than slap you down, every few days.”

Giles’ face came hazily into Spike’s view. From the floor, Giles looked as tall as Fudo. With a haughty chin lift, Giles said, “I remained within the letter of your prohibition. I recall nothing said about not communicating with Angel.”

The Watcher’s hairsplitting didn’t touch Spike’s sense of betrayal. Spike was ready to go for him again as soon as Buffy let him up. Must have showed: Giles backed off, past where Spike could see, and Buffy whapped Spike and made him look at her. “You don’t do that! Not to our friends!” Then she lifted her aggrieved face to Giles. “Not that I’m real pleased, either, Giles. Why bring Angel into it?”

“Now that it’s certain the Powers are involved, at least consulting him is an obvious course of action since he’s dealt with them far longer than any of us,” Giles replied, not fazed by Buffy’s displeasure either. “There is also…the problem of how to deal with Fudo. Angel may have some useful insights about that.”

“We don’t need him, pet,” Spike told Buffy urgently. “He’ll only take over the doings, you know he will, want everything his way--”

“Unlike you,” Giles mentioned with reserved sarcasm, and Buffy alternated her glare between them. Then she glanced at Willow and calmed, as though that had settled something for her.

She said, “Unless Angel’s willing to put himself through the blanket-in-the-trunk routine, he can’t start before nightfall. So maybe he’s still at the Hyperion and there’s time to head him off.” Buffy warily let him get to his feet. Hands on her hips, she demanded, “Can I trust you out of my sight for two minutes without your going all Taz on somebody? Do I have to have Willow disinvite you too, until you can quit behaving…well, like some insane-o fledge?”

Spike jerked a glance at the bright panels flanking the front door. “It’s daylight out, love.”

“And we have a handy dandy tunnel that’ll take you right into the nice, dark sewers,” Buffy retorted, unimpressed. “Where you can stay until you’ve convinced me you can behave. I’m not putting up with this, Spike--you blowing up in a vamp tantrum every time something doesn’t suit you, doesn’t go your way. You know better! If this is what playing on the astral side does to you, I don’t think you should go there anymore. Well?”

Presented with an excuse, Spike took it. Bending to put a quick, contrite (he hoped) kiss on Buffy’s forehead, Spike said, “Sorry, love. Maybe you’re right. ‘F the Watcher lets me alone, I’ll let him alone.”

“That would sound a lot better,” Buffy said tartly, “if your eyes weren’t yellow.”

“Oh.” Spike concentrated, shut the demon deeper within him. That took some effort. Seemed it was always simmering close to the surface now, taking any opportunity to flash out at somebody. Good thing he’d thought to take Bit across, accuse her there. Otherwise, he might have flashed out at her, and even he found that unacceptable. Had to get a better grip on himself, some way, to have any chance of steering the rolling disaster he felt already in motion, carrying him along toward several dire outcomes. They all couldn’t happen; but deflect it from one, another worse one opened.

Things were getting past him, and he didn’t know what to do about it, and the combination was driving him frantic.

Which didn’t stop him putting on a smooth, non-twitchy mask for Buffy. Wasn’t hard: she seldom looked past the surface. “There. That better?”

“No fighting,” Buffy decreed flatly, poking a finger into his breastbone for emphasis. “Especially, no escalation. If Giles goes all toplofty on you, that’s not your cue to try to rip out his ribs. We’re out of your jurisdiction, Spike: we’re not your crew, that you can pound on anytime you feel like it. And that goes for you and Angel, too…if I can’t stop him.” Worriedly, Buffy headed into the front room and sat on the weapons chest, picking up the phone there.

Spike and Giles exchanged a bland look--smug on Giles’ side, evaluating on Spike’s. No news to him, that nobody paid much heed to his word here. Which didn’t mean he’d allow outright betrayal without payback. But that would have to wait. Buffy was right on the edge of tossing him out and Spike couldn’t let that happen. Had to be here to keep things contained…including himself.

None of his usual ways of settling himself down--brawling, drinking, fucking--seemed on the current menu, unless Buffy would be willing to combine the first and last. Not likely, he thought, watching her talk into the phone. No joy there, evidently: Angel was en route, couldn’t be recalled. Depending on when he’d set out, another hour, maybe, given that Angel hadn't yet been introduced to the benefits of the necro-tempered glass Oz's van was fitted out with and Spike had added afterward to the house repairs, rendering Casa Summers vamp-safe, too. That meant Spike had to keep good watch and be quick off the mark when Angel showed up. So no drinking either, not that there were enough drinkables in the house to produce more than a mild buzz….

He considered Oz a moment, then waved him nearer, into a close conversational huddle near the front door, throwing a congenial, coercive arm over wolf-boy’s shoulders. “Well stocked up with liquor, are you?”

Oz regarded him quizzically. “Some,” he allowed.

“Fetch it in. Gonna need it, I think.”

That set going, Spike trailed after wolf-boy as far as the front porch and lit a cigarette there, blinking against the brightness. Still clouded over, though: should be all right. Too bright for his demon’s comfort, not bright enough for the rest of him, that yearned after the clarity and brilliance of astral sight, wanted to kick free and soar into it, leave all the itchy muddle of halfway things behind. But he wasn’t gonna do that. Not while he was smoking.

Buffy was right: he shouldn’t be doing so much of that. All disrupted, dim, and edgy when he returned, even if he hadn’t been gone but a minute or two. Took him an hour or more to get himself cogged back into the everyday. Couldn’t afford that now. Had to keep good track of things.

Watching Oz trek to his van and return after a few minutes, toting a plastic milk crate clinking with bottles, Spike made his own fidgety circuit of the porch, lighting a fresh cig from the stub of the last and concentrating on that to hold himself in place.

Coming out of the house, Oz commented helpfully, “You should try meditating.” Spike snarled. Turning, descending the steps backward, Oz said, “No, really,” all earnest but with a glint in his eye. As Spike feinted at him, he skipped briskly into the diffuse sunlight, showing a tight, tucked grin, eyes downcast, as he wheeled around to return to the van.

Cheeky bastard.

Willow and Buffy came out, talking, Buffy predictably hugging herself against the outdoors chill and looking glum. She looked around to tell Spike what he already knew: Angel was in transit.

Spike drew hard on the cigarette. “Figured. However, house is all fresh-spelled, and he wasn’t included in the new invite: don’t have to let him in, you know.”

“I know,” Buffy responded unhappily. “I’ve been thinking about it. But I don’t know…if I could look him in the face and tell him he can’t come in.”

“Never bothered you none with me,” Spike responded, indignant.

“That’s different.”

“Different how?”

Coming a step nearer, Buffy wrapped arms around his neck, pulling his head down into a consoling kiss. Easing away, looking into his eyes, she said, “He was less persistent. He’d just go off and sulk. You’d look all astonished and hurt and then try to yell the house down.”

“Did, a time or two.” Recalling, smiling a little, Spike leaned and kissed her fast before she could get away. “Always caved and let me in eventually, though.”

Smiling in reply, but her eyes shadowed and sober, Buffy said, “Spike, you can always come in. Sort of a permanent invitation. When you’re not going all demento on people we really, really don’t want to hurt, anyway.”

“He ain’t seen the half of what he’s got coming,” Spike grumbled.

Buffy didn’t seem quite so pissed-off at him as he’d expected. He wondered about the logistics of sneaking in a quick shag while they waited. Settle him down right nice, that would. And her, too, she was all on edge….

But no. Get lost in it, they always did, and miss the one moment before things went totally to hell.

Affecting casualness, he asked Willow, “Red, anybody ever just leave and set up shop there for good an’ all, there on the astral side?”

“Sure,” Willow replied cheerfully. “We call them ‘ghosts.’”

“Ta, ever so,” Spike said sourly. As bad as wolf-boy, he thought: sick of people glinting at him, like he was the straight man to their comedy act.

As he swung into another restless circuit of the porch, his back to them, Willow called, “No, really! We’re grounded in the physical, Spike. Even you. Though that seems real, this is what is real. Cut off from it, we’d wither and die.”

A laugh and a half, that the witch thought she needed to instruct a vamp on relating to the tangible, living in the goddam moment.

As he reached the far end of the porch and turned, there was Buffy right in front of him. “What’s got you so wound up about this?” she wanted to know.

Spike flung his arms in frustration. “Always disrupts things, doesn’t he? Everything’s got to be his way, his agenda. And you can’t even make up your mind to leave him shut out on the porch thirty seconds.”

Buffy’s face heated. “This time, I’ll back you up,” she promised.

“Fine--you do that. A little less eagerness would be nice. Go inside, dither there, why don’t you?”

Buffy folded her arms. “Because I’m not real keen on a brawl on my front porch!”

“Not gonna hit him, pet, ‘less he hits me first. And I expect he’ll be on his best manners: he wants something from us. And he might have the teaspoon of brains required to know starting something in a confined space, in daylight, would be stupid with a side of suicidal. Not that I haven’t known him to do stupider.” Spike rocked on his heels, happily contemplating for a moment the fact that these days, if the both of them toppled into the yard, Angel would singe a whole lot faster than Spike would.

“I don’t trust that look. We’ll all go inside,” Buffy decided.

When Spike guilelessly displayed the cigarette, his justification for being on the porch, Buffy started back toward the door, declaring over her shoulder, “There better not be fighting! I’m holding you responsible!”

“Don’t you always? I’m to blame for winter, and taxes, and global warming. Price of fish?” he called after her as she and Willow vacated the porch and slammed the door behind them.

So that was sorted. Nothing more to do except wait, smoke, and try not to go off his head.

About four cigarettes later, a big black Mercury sedan pulled up nose to nose with wolf-boy’s van. For a mercy, not the convertible, considering Angel himself was driving. Must really be desperate, risking that the overcast would hold.

The Merc’s purring engine cut off. Then Angel was barreling up the walk, a loud checkered blanket over his head and clutched together in front, already fuming as he took the steps in one hop and hit the porch. Angel dumped the blanket with a scowl, then checked at finding Spike before him, blocking his way.

“All she knows,” Spike said urgently, “is that he’s called ‘The Destroyer.’”

The Immense Forehead creased, taking that in. Then it smoothed in what Spike hoped was relief.

“Right,” Angel said, pushing past to the door. Almost, he knocked. Then his hand moved aside to touch the bell: not wanting to test his welcome. Not wanting to know.

Before the door opened, Spike heard Buffy’s voice, inside, saying, “Angel. Come in.”

Pitching the cigarette, Spike stalked in grimly behind. He’d done his bit. Now it would all have to go how it went.

*********

There were sides, Dawn noticed. And the sides were weird: Angel and Spike against everybody.

Angel, sitting in Spike’s corner chair with no objection from Spike, had his head bent most of the time, uncharacteristically subdued, working his hands together like he didn’t know what else to do with them or he’d really like to have them around somebody’s windpipe but couldn’t because that would spoil all the brittle Yay team togetherness. Except when Oz, or Giles, mentioned anything about the kid, “The Destroyer.” Then he’d shoot a quick look at Spike; and Spike, all bland and blank, sitting nearly opposite on the floor by the couch, next to Buffy’s knees, wouldn’t let on he’d noticed but there’d be a hint of an encouraging nod not visibly aimed at anyone in particular, and Angel would settle back to his anxious glower.

They were back-stopping each other, which was uber-weird.

And then the penny dropped: they were both doing whatever gyrations were necessary to not admit the baby was Angel’s.

After Oz and Giles recapped the difficulties of getting out of Quor’toth, once you’d got in, Angel nodded heavily, volunteering somberly, “That’s what I was told. That the Powers wouldn’t help because the Balance was at issue, and I’d be disrupting it. I thought about it, but then you called,” (he shot one of those quick, guarded looks at Buffy) “and that seemed to take priority.” He turned a hand in explanation. “So I came.”

That would have been about six months back: early summer, when all the SITs had still been here and the opposition had been Bringers, Turok-han, and the First; when Angel had been called in to organize things with his typical iron hand. When Spike had submitted to that brutal vamp ritual, the Supplice d’Allégance, to settle old scores once and for all; when he’d first told Dawn about the baby.

Leaning forward, probably not noticing her hand had landed on Spike’s shoulder (but Spike noticed, pulling a tight, private smile not visibly aimed at anybody, either), Buffy asked Angel, “Why didn’t you say anything about it?”

It was almost funny, watching both vampires go tense and cautious, and Dawn the only one watching them hard enough to notice. “It was a case,” Angel said, checking every few seconds to see if Buffy was buying it, checking with his coach if he was getting it right. “A…ah, kidnapping. There’s a prophecy. A couple, actually. A lot of different sides involved. I was, we were, acting on behalf…of the family. It was a case, Buffy,” Angel said, strangling one hand with the other even harder. “And already dead-ended. You had your own apocalypse you were dealing with. And since I went to L.A., it’s not as if we’ve been exactly communicating. I didn’t think…you’d be interested.”

“The Balance,” Giles commented aridly, from the far end of the couch. “That’s what has got us Fudo’s attention, apparently. Is it possible to separate these two issues? The child, and Ethan?”

Leaning against the door arch, Oz replied, “Seems not. Per the Lady, no ticket out without him. She won’t help, though. Except for that.”

“Won’t get her hands dirty,” Spike observed bitterly. “That’s what she has her damn ‘instruments’ for. I say, leave the whole thing where it is and the hell with the bunch of ‘em.”

“I can’t do that, Spike,” said Giles, folding his hands. “It’s on my account, or at least because of my negligence, that things came to the pass that they did. It never for a moment occurred to me that those Initiative louts could hold Ethan for a score of hours, let alone three years. If I had known…. If I’d been less certain…. Well, it was my fault, you see.”

“Come off it, Watcher: you didn’t make him cut Bit. Or treat me to a non-stop porn show in my head. Or suck up to Digger, take his shilling to open the goddam Hellmouth. He made his own choices. Let him take the consequences.”

“Nevertheless,” said Giles. “Then, I did what was necessary. Now, knowing, I cannot consign him to-- Excuse me.” Abruptly, Giles got up and left the room.

“Sweet on the bugger,” Spike muttered, and Buffy whapped him. He twisted around to look at her indignantly. “Well, he is! Doesn’t make them less a pair of old ponces to hit me for saying so!”

Willow noisily cleared her throat. “Back to the matter at hand,” she suggested, brandishing a notebook. “I’ve made a decision tree here. There’s no point wrangling over the details if we’re rejecting the thing as a whole. What are the pros, and what are the cons? What do we need, and need to know, to come to a decision about this?” She looked around the room alertly, awaiting an answer she could write down.

Dawn figured it was gonna be about like a conference of mice over who was gonna bell the cat. Unfolding, she went after Giles but was distracted by the ringtone of her cellphone, upstairs. Sprinting to her bedroom, she found the little ruby phone languishing in an open drawer: at least Spike hadn’t broken it.

Flipping it open to the accompaniment of its built-in Star Trek communicator chirp, Dawn said, “Yes?”

“Me,” said Mike’s voice, pitched to a growl. “Downstairs. Best open the door if you don’t want it down.”

Oops. Another constituency wanting to weigh in on the issue.

Folding the phone and sticking it in a pocket as she hustled down the stairs, Dawn debated which she should tell--Buffy or Spike.

**********

Mike knew there’d be no point pissing off the Slayer: she’d dust him as soon as look at him, except for deferring to Spike and generally Dawn. That was all right: he had no particular use for her neither. Standing in the upper doorway, that Dawn had nervously escorted him to along the tunnel, Mike told the Slayer, “Got no dispute with you: you look after her fairly well, mostly. It’s Spike hauls her into things, puts her at risk. Guess it’s Spike I have to talk to, then, about this damn Quor’toth nonsense.”

At his shoulder, not having decided between standing by him and ducking behind the Slayer, Dawn piped up, “But it’s Spike who’s against going. And it’s Buffy who’s at least halfway inclined to say we’ll go.”

Mike frowned, puzzling out that unexpected alignment. Then he looked around at Dawn. “And you: what are you inclined to?”

She fluttered her hands, pleased. “You’re asking me? Nobody asks me what I want!”

“Do you want to get into this thing, or not?” Mike asked patiently. Sometime, she was gonna have to come down on something, the one side or the other, and have no excuses afterward how things turned out.

“It would depend,” Dawn formulated slowly, “on who’s going. If it’s everybody, I wouldn’t want to be left here all alone.”

It was as good as a backhand slap, that she considered his company as being alone. But he let it pass, waiting for her to have her say.

“But if it’s just Buffy and a few others…. No, Spike would never stay behind, not when there’s a chance we couldn’t get back. And I have the feeling Angel’s going, regardless. And Giles…. So I guess it depends on what Buffy decides.”

We couldn’t get back. That phrase, said so casually, struck Mike with an unaccustomed chill. Or maybe it was finding that his true sire, that bastard Angel, was apparently mixed up in it.

“That’s not up for discussion,” Buffy put in abruptly. “No matter who goes, or doesn’t, you’re staying. This isn’t gonna be some picnic on a beach, Dawn. Nobody knows what’s there, so we’d have to be prepared for just about anything. A seventeen-year-old girl is not basic combat equipment.”

“Oh,” said Dawn, deflated, relieved, and worried. “But then who…who would take care of me?”

“Willow, probably. Since there’s no magic there, we’d be in no pressing need of a witch.”

“I’m not staying with Willow! I don’t even like Willow that much, most days, except when she makes the funny shapes pancakes, like Tara used to. I won’t, and you can’t make me!”

This wasn’t going anyplace. Rearing back a little, Mike shouted, “Spike!” The basement walls and ceiling were covered now with those soundproofing waffle squares, but the upstairs door was open and Mike was confident any vamp would hear him regardless.

Spike came quick to the doorway, found no mayhem in progress, and ambled halfway down the stairs, taking a seat there. “Need rescuing, do you?”

Mike was reevaluating, too. Maybe it hadn’t been more than a mishap with the phone, that had cut his conversation with Dawn off so suddenly. Certainly Dawn seemed none the worse for it. And Spike seemed easy and casual--not as though he’d done something Mike could rightly call him on. “This notion of dimension-hopping,” he said to Spike, across the Slayer. “However it goes, it’s gonna affect me. If you just take off for any long while, vamps roundabout will figure the lid’s off and anything is fair game.”

Spike plowed both hands through his hair, then told the Slayer, “He’s right. Hadn’t thought about that end of it.”

The Slayer looked vexed. “And we just got it settled down, too. Why do there have to be all these complications!”

“On account of the Balance, I expect,” Spike remarked thoughtfully, watching her. “If we get into this, the Balance goes to hell. Starting here, seems like. Another reason--”

“Don’t say it!” Buffy warned.

Spike sighed and shut his eyes. “I don’t even know what the fucking Balance is, pet, except that Fudo doesn’t like it messed with. And we don’t yet have any counter to Fudo, now do we?”

“We’ll improvise!” Buffy declared, chin stubbornly lifted.

“Yeah, because that always works so well. Love, if you want, I’ll go, do what I can, and you stay here with Bit and--”

“No! Not if-- Not if there’s a chance…you couldn’t get back.”

“Love, there’s always that chance. One way or the other. But you haven’t got rid of me yet--”

“Hello!” Dawn interjected loudly. “Nobody’s listening to me! I’m not staying with Willow, and you’re both being severely dumb here! Spike, who thinks the whole thing is a mistake, is volunteering, and Buffy, who’s all about the team, is figuring how to desert her sister. What’s wrong with this picture?”

The witch, Willow, came down a few steps. “Are you guys gonna come back so we can work on the decision tree?”

Arms rigid and hands fisted at her sides, Dawn took no notice, glaring first at Buffy, then at Spike. “Spike, if you go, I better be with you, you better make sure that I am. Otherwise, I’ll tell!”

“Fuck!” Spike came down in a blur of fast. Suddenly still, he held out a hand. Looking mulish, Dawn slapped hers into it…and her smell changed, and they collapsed, linked, to the floor.

When Mike pulled in a startled breath and started to kneel, Buffy pushed him back upright, saying wearily, “It’s all right: they’re just off again. Their new stupid trick, very boring for onlookers.” Walking obliviously around the two bodies toward the stairs, she added, “You might as well come up--everybody else has. Get the vamp quotient right. I guess that’s important, to have a minimum of two vampires snarking and posturing at each other. Otherwise, how could anything be decided?”

Slowly kneeling, determining that Dawn was still breathing and pumping her blood around but her smell strange, like sleeping, Mike responded absently, “I’ll wait.”

Buffy turned at the bottom of the stairs. “Mike, I don’t want to make a thing about this, but I want you where I can see you. Or else gone. Your pick.”

Thoroughly unnerved and bewildered, Mike obeyed the Slayer’s summons. With several backward glances at the sprawled pair on the basement floor, he followed her up the stairs.

**********

Materializing in the occluded privacy of the middle air, Dawn immediately rounded on Spike, demanding, Why shouldn’t I? Why should I give up what gives me some leverage here? I won’t be left behind, Spike. I won’t! Anyway, who the hell cares if Angel’s got a kid?

Buffy would. Bit, turn one minute from what you think, what you want, and consider. The child we’re s’posed to fetch, the child in Quor’toth, is Angel’s son. Out of Herself, Queen Darla: his Sire. Which shouldn’t even be possible, but I guess it’s something was granted him. As the Champion. And how will that seem to Buffy? That what turned him to Angelus, with her, was blessed with a child with someone else. I can’t even imagine how bad that will hurt her. Like it’s some wrong in her, that prevented it, that made it go bad.

In this place, it was impossible to see or hear the truth and doubt it. And it wasn’t some hypothetical Buffy with her, hurting and frantic to convince her, but an actual (if shimmering and insubstantial) Spike. They were both about the same size this time, and the last time, too, Dawn noted with satisfaction.

That’s stupid! Why should she care what Angel does?

Maybe she shouldn’t. But she does. Angel knows it, too, how it would hit her. Why he’s kept all mum about it. She’d take it personally, Bit; and take it to heart. Make her feel lower than dirt. Maybe can’t keep it from her forever, but right now, if she knew, it would force her decision. She’d throw herself into this like she throws herself into everything: full tilt, straight ahead, blind to all else. To make it up to Angel that she couldn’t be the one to kindle with a child for him. And instead produced a right monster, Angelus, loose in the world again, so she had to slam a sword through him, send him to hell. She’s not forgot, Bit. She’d be hell-bent to present Angel with a goddam child, even if it wasn’t hers.

All maybes and supposes, Dawn challenged.

Bit, you don’t understand. Just don’t understand…. He was quiet a moment, thinking. Then he said, You might think a vamp wouldn’t care, neither. But I’ve seen Dru with her dolls. How she fed on children when we could find them. Liked the notion of a child inside of her—it took her like that. An’ then get all wound up to realize they were all dead. Cry sometimes for days…. Then there’d be a round of punishing her dolls. And me, like as not. And like that, for awhile. And then it would all begin again….

Neither “Eew! Ick!” nor “That’s insane!” seemed an adequate response. And she didn’t think that Spike would understand “TMI,” even yet.

In this place, censors were off. Though it pained him, too, he was saying what he knew and what he believed. And it wasn’t as if she hadn’t asked….

Although it was ugly, and twisted her up inside to hear and partly imagine Drusilla’s warped and deadly child hunger, even more intolerable was for Spike to think Dawn a child, unable to understand grown-up things.

She’d never felt blood-thirst or the compulsion to hunt and hurt, but she could imagine and assign them their fair weight, for a vamp. She knew about the seething intensities of sex by the battered walls and broken furniture left in their wake. She could so know things!

OK, that’s Dru, crazy enough to think women get pregnant by eating babies. That’s not Buffy!

Buffy’s given up, Spike responded simply. Slayers don’t last. Don’t get to have families of their own, children. In that way, if no other, vamps are safe. She had human lovers, a few, and dumped them when she saw there wasn’t no future in it. For her or them, neither one. Part of why she turned to me, I expect. Like Dru, punishing her dolls for what she couldn’t have. S’not like that now…but we had bad spells, too, there for awhile…. Part of why she don’t necessarily treat you all that well but still holds onto you like grim death. ‘Cause you’re as near to a child as she’ll ever have. But what if she found that wasn’t so? That what she’d given up on was possible, after all. Wouldn’t she go for it like she goes for everything? And is it likely, now, Angel would turn her away or refuse her? Once she knows, won’t be long before she kicks me to the curb. ‘Cause I got none of that miracle spunk in me. Can’t do that, give her that. ‘Cause I ain’t yet suffered enough, or done right by the soul once I had it, or some other damn thing. Dunno, just how it is. Won’t make me give her up, though. Not till she tells me…I’m not fit for her no more. Not enough for her…. Not without a fight!

It was good they were something like their actual sizes because it let Dawn hug him close, or try to, anyway. It was like trying to hug smoke. The surfaces never quite connected. But it was the thought that counted, right? You’re just being all insane-o insecure. If it was a miracle, it was probably a one-off, never to be repeated. A prophecy child, after all—not anything normal. And anyway, Buffy doesn’t care about that! She’s said so, over and over.

Yeah: over and over. ‘F she didn’t say it so much, I might believe her better. Wish she’d leave off about it, actually.

Sometimes, Buffy isn’t too bright about some things. I think she was worried you were worried about it, which makes you worry about it even if you didn’t before, so she tells you again, and around and around. Spike, I think you’re making this whole thing up in your head. Because it’s Angel, who has this nasty habit of taking what’s yours. Or trying to. But on the chance you’re not, and because it’s something you’ve managed to tie yourself up in knots about, when Buffy finds out, it won’t be from me. I promise. Dawn could feel the relief pouring off him, like the sweat of a fever breaking. However, in return, I want you to promise that if you go into Quor’toth, I go, too. You have to: we’re connected.

All right, Bit. The way things are piling on, don’t think there’s much chance to dodge it now, for all my trying. May have to smuggle you across in the baggage, but I’ll manage, some way. I’d miss you something terrible, that’s true, though you’re a bitch brat more’n half the time and I don’t know why I put up with you.

Because you love me, Dawn responded smugly, reflecting that one way or the other, her lever had worked, and that was all she cared about. Come on: let’s get back. We’re probably all gross, laying on the basement floor. Mike probably freaked. He doesn’t know about any of this!

As she bounced to her feet and brushed herself off briskly, watching Spike stir and start looking dimly around the basement, it occurred to Dawn that extorting a promise that she could go meant leaving Mike behind—maybe forever. She stifled the pang that gave her by reflecting he’d have Sue to console him. The way vamps focused on the present moment, without much by the way of regrets or expectations, likely he wouldn’t even miss her all that much. She’d been here; now she wasn’t, not even a smell to remember her by; too bad, big deal.

“Bit? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing! Absolutely fricking nothing!” Suddenly in a foul mood, she charged up the stairs.

**********

Well, it’d all gone straight to hell, just as Spike had expected. Climbing the stairs to the first floor hall, Spike found it dark outside. In only a few subjective minutes, hours had passed, and apparently the decision tree was no longer an issue. All the signs said the decision had been made: everybody scattered to different tasks, research mode. The Watcher slumped unconscious on the couch, glasses laid aside, so not likely napping. Most likely, gone astral to natter with his fuck pal Rayne, learn about the doings over there: what passed for reconnaissance. Buffy and Angel head to head in the front room, seemingly discussing weaponry. Bit and Mike passing by, Bit going on twenty to the dozen about Fudo, Mike with head bent, listening but giving nothing away, as they went out onto the front porch. Didn’t see wolf-boy, maybe gone out to the van for something.

“Spike! You put porn on my computer!”

In the den, Willow was half rising from a chair to berate him, eyes wide and face flushed.

“Yeah. So?”

“So my e-mail in-box is now all full of offers how I can enhance my ‘male equipment!’”

Spike shrugged, trying to overcome the sense of being overwhelmed, scattered, everything coming at him at once. “Wasn’t but a few bookmarks, favorites. Didn’t actually keep anything.”

“You’ve polluted my laptop! Do you have any idea how hard it is to clean out the cookies those sites set? Cookies: yech! And once you get on some pervert’s list, you can never get off! I’m gonna have to change my e-mail and everything! Maybe wipe the whole hard drive!”

Only the last part of that registered. And the witch’s furious indignation, of course, that didn’t concern him--not over a little porn. Besides, done was done. Sliding between the table and the wall, Spike took Willow’s place before the laptop and started hitting keys with two fingers. “Don’t wipe nothing, I have all sorts of notes here that I need.” Reaching for his glasses, he further displaced her, oblivious to her indignant squawks.

Her remark about ghosts, on the porch, had set him thinking about something he’d read in the Watchers’ archives he’d been browsing through for months, lately with special attention to all matters dimensional. Hadn’t much noted it at the time, didn’t seem much use to it; but it’d been about some bloke who claimed to have ended a haunting by unconventional means—with a weapon. A sword, or something like, that could cleave the immaterial.

He was still searching when he heard Dawn squeal outside, and a big, unpleasantly familiar voice bellow, “So you haven’t chosen the path of wisdom. Who opposes me? Who is your champion, Slayer? Or will you face me yourself?”

Fudo. Damn.

Blood Price, Chapter 5

2005-04-17T11:43:43Z

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 5: Explanations, Explorations (complete)

Spike’s first impulse was to walk out. But before he could do more than pull his boots in against the chair and stand, Oz was in front of him, crossing the length of the room to him first and directly, saying softly, “Hi, Spike.” Not offering a hand, just waiting for acknowledgement and acceptance by the dominant male of a subordinate.

Pack deference: good manners according to whatever passed for werewolf etiquette.

Didn’t matter that the next second the girls had all crowded around wolf-boy. And Harris, too, pulling him into a back-slapping hug. Head turned, Oz kept his eyes on Spike’s until Spike committed himself to the extent of a curt nod. Only then did Oz consider himself released to the greetings.

Didn’t change anything, really, Spike grumbled inwardly, pacing past the group hug he wanted no part of. Runt was still what he was: willing lapmutt to the Powers, running their errands, unquestioningly doing whatever they told him to--at last notice, through some medium or other in Anaheim. Oz showing up meant one of two things--that the Powers sided with that Acala and wanted them to back off; or that they didn’t, and wanted them to take on that Acala, that sparkled on the plane of the real the way Giles or Bit had (for instance) on the astral plane. That therefore wasn’t rightly, completely here and could call up swords out of noplace, manifest eighteen feet tall or thirty or a hundred (whatever he thought would look intimidating), and manipulate matter at will.

Spike had never taken to shape-changers. You never properly knew where you stood with them. And fighting them was a nasty, prolonged business: they’d take mortal wounds and just shift to a new, unwounded shape. Greasy, slippery, unreliable sort of buggers.

As bad as trying to fight water.

Not Oz, though, Spike admitted, coming to an indecisive halt in the kitchen. Hadn’t but the one shape to shift to and was a shrewd, fearless fighter in it, which Spike supposed was all right. And wolf-boy knew his place, had come to Spike first thing: the dominance had been settled between them on Oz’s previous visit, some months ago. Once put down, he stayed down, so it wasn’t a constant slap-and-turn battle of engagement and backing off, the way it was with Mike. And Oz didn’t carry a grudge about it, neither. Good natured, handy chap in most ways. Knew his showing up wouldn’t be welcome but still came to Spike first.

That did a lot to mollify Spike’s anger.

Besides, he was curious which flavor of bad news the mutt had come to deliver.

He glanced at the rear door, his intended destination, then made up his mind and wheeled to the refrigerator to grab out a six-pack of the minimally acceptable swill that was American beer. Pacing back to the front room, he twisted a can free of the plastic bands and silently offered it to Oz, who’d taken a place on the floor in front of the TV, by Dawn. Oz calmly nodded thanks and took it. Spike settled back into his chair, pulling out a fresh beer for himself and letting the rest of the pack dangle and drop into the gap between the chair and the weapons chest. If Harris wanted another beer, he could crawl and grope for one, or he could ask. Either would be fine with Spike.

Interrupting Oz’s dutiful account of his doings since they’d last seen him, Spike asked bluntly, “So what’s Bit’s mum want now?” and ignored the winces and disapproving looks that earned him. He didn’t care: he didn’t dance to the Lady’s tune and wasn’t shy about saying so.

Oz thought for a minute, likely getting together what he was supposed to say. “That she’s aware of the situation--far more than any of you. There’s a history to it, and I’m to explain about that. She says it’s a matter of complete indifference to her whether you engage or disengage but in either case, there are things you all should know that won’t be found in any arcane text, since they’re internal to the Powers.” Oz nodded apologetically to Giles, at that; Giles nodded to show he’d taken no offense and waved Oz to continue. Reverting to his usual brevity, Oz concluded, “That’s all. Except for the history.”

Giles started to ask for the history but Buffy intervened: “Let’s keep to the order. Willow, it’s your turn: exactly why did you go all Sleeping Beauty on us, with no notice, no anything? You said before that it was you, that set off the mystical alarms. Got chased back here by Acala, brought all that fun down on us. Why? Where were you?”

Nervously picking at sweater pills, seeming unaware of Oz’s steady, warm gaze turned to her, Willow replied, “I made a portal. To Quor’toth. It was easy. Flick of the fingers stuff. But I didn’t go except in astral form. Just hovered, using the portal as a target but still anchored back here. I thought that would be safe enough, and I’d be able to confirm, or not, that Rayne was there. Sorry, Giles: I overheard most of what you two said. No real way not to, it was leaking all over, but it was personal and I didn’t mean to.”

Looking horrified and constipated, Giles responded tightly, “I understand. Go on: did you confirm his location?”

Willow bobbed her head. “And I also know why he can’t get out: Quor’toth’s a magic sink. Natural or created, I don’t know. There are no rifts--none at all--but anybody can get in with the simplest portal spell. On that side, though, the magic can’t recharge. It’s sucked up the minute somebody tries any.”

“Magic sink,” Spike found himself clarifying. “Like what we done to Digger’s lair. That, with the silver.” Then he was annoyed at himself for contributing, for engaging, and downed the rest of the beer and crushed the can in his hand to make himself feel better.

“Yes, but on a grander scale,” Willow confirmed. “That whole dimension is magic-negative. There’s no ambient force to draw on, and it sucks in any that’s supplied from outside. That’s why it’s so easy to make an ingoing portal, I imagine. And why it was so hard for me to stay within it--not be pulled through.” For a moment, she looked pleased with her achievement. Then her face fell. “Then that thing, that Acala came, and it was so big! It was like a near approach from the Death Star, and it was pushing me in! And I ran, I had to, and automatically homed in on the only connection I had--”

“Our conversation,” Giles supplied reservedly. “To me.”

“Yeah. And Spike, a little. Wasn’t listening in, not a bit! But you’re loud, Spike. Even though I don’t listen, I really don’t, you’re just blasting away like a rock station and I can’t help hearing even though I can’t make out the words.”

The comparison made Willow’s admission go down a little easier. Spike didn’t mind thinking of himself as a rock station, even though it meant he was spewing himself, uncontrolled, to the aether. Hadn’t had much chance to practice, had he? And that poet, that git William, was all about the fucking effulgence anyway, and on the astral plane he wasn’t to be confined, like a boy’s first visit to a brothal.

Spike was still uncomfortable and embarrassed about that side of it and kept still.

Willow went on, “Brought it right down on you. Had to get home, to get some leverage: shut it out. And it followed us back here, too. And then this morning. So it’s all my fault. I’m sorry. I thought…. I thought if I went, Spike wouldn’t have to. Again. It had hit him so hard--”

“S’all right,” Spike felt forced to say, gruffly. “Just wasn’t used to it, right at first, is all.” Not looking at the witch, he popped the tab on another beer. “Did better, a little, the second time.”

“Because I was there to keep you on track,” Dawn put in smugly.

“Maybe,” Spike conceded. “Maybe so. Teensy little thing, she was,” he told Buffy, remembering fondly. Likely it was the beer. “You should’a seen her. No bigger than this, and shining green, all tiny Tinkerbell.”

“Not my fault,” Dawn responded quickly, “you went all ‘bestride the universe’ hugeacious!”

“Never said it was, Bit. Guess things there are the size they think they are--right, Red? An’ when it comes to size, I’ve never been one to be modest.” For that, he looked at Buffy a certain way, and it was possible he was smirking.

Oz choked on his beer. Spike sociably offered him another.

“I can see the Peter Pan part,” Buffy said, trying to cut him back down to size, the way she did, not admitting that she loved it except alone, and without words. “Some people never grow up. Not in a century plus. Always, the juvenile snark!”

“That’s all right.” Taking no offense, Spike waved grandly. She was being the Slayer, all business, and he always let her have her way about things then. It was when she was being merely Buffy that he’d lately had trouble giving way, wanting to settle the dominance there, demon wanting to enforce its rights on what, however beloved, was essentially a cow, and subordinate, to its perceptions….

Spike lost the next little bit, turning that realization in his mind, uneasily revolving and tugging at it, because that wasn’t what he meant to do, how he should feel toward her regardless. What he’d been doing, all the same, he now recognized: especially when the demon was all riled up and determined to settle things properly and to its own liking, brooking no opposition. That tussle in the hallway. And the bed-busting shagfest, after--hardly less aggressive, truth be told, but Buffy would put up with it then, at least sometimes….

William, resurgent, meant that Spike was losing control of his demon. Like he couldn’t contain both or control either. That bothered him.

When he’d followed that thought to no conclusion, it was apparently Oz’s turn again, and he was delivering the received wisdom of the Powers about that Acala--who was apparently a Power, too. No joy there, then. And not much surprise.

“They’re called the Guardians of the Balance,” Oz was explaining. “Seems there’s two ways of looking at them--that there are actually five of them, or only one with a fivefold nature, and the rest are avatars.”

Buffy said, “He called me that: an avatar. What’s that mean, Giles?”

“The Godai Myo-o. The Five Great Kings. Excuse me, Buffy, I was thinking. What did you say?”

“Acala. He said he hadn’t expected to run into an avatar of the Slayer. He meant me. What’s an avatar? What did he mean?”

Giles fussed with his papers, giving himself time to consider. Looking up, he replied, “I would imagine he meant that he considers there is only one Slayer, and each individual Slayer, like yourself, is simply that aboriginal, eternal Slayer in a new form. All basically the same, sharing in the nature of the unchanging Slayer essence. The Platonic Form, if you will.”

Spike drank beer, not letting on that he understood.

Giles continued, “For all I know, that may be a correct interpretation. When a Slayer is Called, certain abilities are added to her own and not merely awakened within her. She does, to some extent, partake in the uber-Slayer, with the occasional memories of other Slayers’ experience to call upon, the prophetic dreams…. So it’s a possible interpretation. And one that a being with indwelling avatars, different selves it could assume or send out independently, would be likely to adopt. An interesting question, but one that changes little, from our perspective.”

“Think you’re wrong there, Watcher.” Spike straightened in the chair, finally willing to commit full attention. “That Acala, he dealt with the Slayer with respect. Left off fighting when she did. Fixed her van, admitted junking it was a mistake he’d made before he knew who she was. May have next to no regard for Buffy, no more than he did for me. But the Slayer, or what he thinks is an avatar of the Slayer, that’s got some weight with him.”

“Oh, that was just because Frodo was nervous about offending our ‘august patron.’” Buffy dismissed the idea, but Giles looked thoughtful.

“I believe Spike may have a point. He was there, as I was not. And when it comes to matters of dominance, he can be an acute observer. Vampires are highly sensitive to matters of rank and hierachy. From the initial effort to suppress, subsume, the demon, one supposes. In point of fact, I've written a small monograph on that subject." Giles paused a second to look modest in a prissy, Watcherish way. When it was plain nobody gave a fuck about his scholarship, he went on, "Don’t take it lightly, Buffy--whether it is, in fact, true or not, it could be a basis for negotiation rather than unchecked battle, that Acala may have tentatively classed you as something like an equal. And it seems that he has: having delivered his warning, he disengaged without a fight. And also, unasked, put what you claimed as your property to rights.”

“’Frodo?” repeated Oz quizzically.

“Fudo,” said Giles, making a weary face at Buffy’s habitual mangling of unfamiliar names. “A designation of his principal avatar.”

“Oh,” said Oz, in a tone of discovery.

“You know of Fudo?” Giles asked.

“Sure. Pretty much the patron saint of the samurai. Bushido, the Way of the Warrior, and all that. ‘The Immovable.’ It connects.”

“Certainly. I’d forgotten that aspect of his legend. Willow, do see if the blasted internet is available yet. I must have my books!”

As Willow scrambled up to comply, Oz’s eyes followed her. Only when she was gone did his gaze return to his hands, as though surprised to find himself holding a beer. Then his eyes flicked to Spike--to see if his own interest had been noticed, most like. And Bit was looking too, catching the unspoken byplay. Quick little thing, couldn’t mostly get nothing by her. Spike turned a hand, indicating it was none of his concern if the wolf still fancied the witch, and Oz nodded slightly, relaxing.

Spike wondered what Bit made of that: she wasn’t as used to reading the wolf, and sex things frequently passed right by her unless they made loud noises or broke beds. The one exception. In that one respect, she’d held herself far short of seventeen. Maybe it was an awareness the monks hadn’t thought to build in, not expecting her to last long enough to need it. Maybe it was an effect of her keyness--to keep her ready and charged, like, rather than all hormonal and distracted like most teenagers panting after some git or another.

Not his problem. But hers, maybe; and Mike’s. And so out of step with the rest of her keen awareness, it worried him sometimes, not knowing how he should judge it, feel about it….

A break seemed to be commencing, Buffy standing down and asking Oz if he could stay to supper, Harris wanting to know what the Pacific Northwest was like, interlacing murmurs of conversation. Spike could take time out for a smoke.

That, as much as anything, had helped him push away impulses to turn astral just for the odd unoccupied few seconds, get back to the clarity and brilliance the poet and the soul seemingly couldn’t get enough of: couldn’t smoke there. And every time he gave in, the demon was more insistent on its rights when he got back. Unlike Red's, his jaunts hadn’t yet been detected, that he knew of. And Buffy wasn’t shy about calling him on anything she felt as a separation; and she was right to. It was a separation. And when it came to abandonment, she had sensitive feelers everyplace, alert every minute for that. He couldn’t hope to get by with it, especially with the time not being the same there as here. An entire day could be a minute, or a few seconds could take seven hours in passing, this side.

That awareness didn’t make him want it less. It only made him circumspect, sneaky, and careful. But if he didn't quit, eventually she was sure to catch him out, and then the blow-up would make their dance in the hall look like a picnic.

It was true: the Summerlands came at the price of all you had, and there was no peace afterward. Best to shut it away, try to forget. Be in the moment, in the body, and let the rest go. Not think about it…the way he was doing now.

Couldn’t smoke there. That was enough reason to stop.

Poking in a pocket for his cigs and lighter, he headed for the front porch and its safe evening darkness.

********

Since the power was still off, supper was a grill-out in the chilly yard with Xander, the self-designated Master Griller from the months when all the SITs were in residence, presiding, wearing two towels pinned at the shoulders into a kind of poncho to keep the burgers and hot-dogs from spitting grease on what he claimed were his “good” clothes. Maybe they were: Dawn had seen lots of his other clothes, and they were worse.

Happy and excited by the unusual circumstances and unusual company, Dawn drifted from one conversation to another, snagging a hot-dog and bun and slathers of mustard when tongs-wielding Xander announced the first batch ready.

It wasn’t Terminal Beach, but it was still fun.

Gesturing with her hot-dog, she asked Giles to write down the URL of his study on how dominating the new demon led to vamps’ preoccupation with one-upmanship, who got to boss around who, and he promised to do it once he could reach the CoW database again. The paper sounded interesting and might make better sense of the otherwise demented dance Spike and Mike were doing, that anybody sensible would have backed out of or declared a draw or even a victory, just to stop worrying about it, but not them!

She’d heard from Buffy about the bike-moving incident. If the phones were working, she was sure she’d have had a looong conversation of listening to Mike griping about how ill-used he was, that Spike wouldn’t go thirty feet outside to push his own motorcycle to safety, until it was her turn to try to explain why staying indoors, within the wards, was one of the more sensible things she’d ever known Spike to do. She wondered how badly Mike had been banged up by the hailstones and how long he’d therefore be in healing. If he could be wheedled into returning to the beach next weekend, say, assuming Spike could come out of his drifty funk long enough to open the rift for them.

Although Spike could eat human food, half-burnt burgers on buns weren’t high on his list of favorites. So he’d gone off on his bike, so conspicuously not saying where he was going that he was probably hunting, or scouting for vamps not where he thought they belonged on a Tuesday night, so they could be legitimately dusted per Lex Spikus. Possibly both.

Dawn had wanted to pin him in a corner and quiz him about his new “catch and release” program that left the prey alive but marked in a way only the bravest or stupidest vamp would touch. She wondered if it was working better than the stinky lily perfume Willow had made up at his direction, that Spike had tried (with a notable lack of success) to train vamps to avoid. She thought she still had a couple of squeeze bottles of it someplace….

Obviously Mike had noticed Spike’s new street game, because he’d veered off, respecting the mark. She wondered what Mike thought about it--whether he resented the interference or was copying the strategy himself because Mike could stop, not drink the prey dead, if he really wanted to, since that was her condition for his visiting her.

She hadn’t seen him since yesterday afternoon, when he’d been summoned for guarding-Spike duty, and he’d been all business then, passing her taser back wordlessly before he left, down the tunnel. She wondered if he was mad at her about something she’d done, or not done, or their conversation on the beach….

She shouldn’t be obsessing about Mike. It was dumb. Let him play his kissy-face games with Sue the Skank, it was nothing to Dawn…and nothing to Mike either, or so he said, and that was so gut-twisting frelling confusing…!

Passing by with a droopy paper plate, Buffy locked and burst out, “Dammit! It’s Tuesday, right? Dawn, is it Tuesday?”

“The last I noticed. Why?”

“It’s class night! I’m supposed to be at the Civic Center in…” (There was sleeve shoving and watch checking.) “…in twelve minutes! And I forgot to remind Spike, he won’t show up, I’ll be there all alone…!”

“Buffy. Buffy, wait before you totally freak out. It’s vacation, remember? As in, no school. Notice me not being in school. My own personal self. I don’t think exercising is high on anybody’s list right now. You might have two dorks show up, that obviously need a life, but--”

“If there’s two, even if there are only two, I have to be there. They paid, and that’s like a promise, right? I could have canceled but I never even thought about it, not working has totally screwed up my sense of time, there’s still time to cancel for Thursday, I guess, and two, two wouldn’t be so bad, maybe I could manage two….”

Dawn found herself the trustee of Buffy’s droopy plate as Buffy raced inside to change. As she delivered the collapsing plate to the folding table near the grill, Buffy raced across the far end of the yard, dove into the SUV, and peeled out.

“What,” asked Xander, watching the brake lights and then the headlights come on, “the burger was too well done?”

“Her class,” Dawn sighed, sliding the plate into place near the monster jar of pickle relish. Anya had wangled them a case wholesale, last summer. At a discount. It was probably several lifetimes worth of pickle relish. Dawn was beginning to hate pickle relish, which would make it last even longer. Like those fruitcakes that were never actually eaten, just passed around from one unwary recipient to the next, getting staler and harder until they were the embodied inedible essence of all fruitcakes….

“Forgot, huh?” From sympathetic, Xander went to a slow, secret smile with a quirk at both corners. “And Spike went…where?”

“He didn’t say.”

“A-huh,” said Xander, rocking on his heels and happily gazing toward the street. “Do you want to make the popcorn for the show when he gets back, or should I?”

“You do it, if you want,” Dawn responded listlessly. “I’m all popcorned out.”

She scuffed away, only to be accosted again by the back steps.

“Dawn. Hey.” It was Oz, his head cocked like a dog’s. But that wasn’t fair or nice, all the things Spike called him, so Dawn tried not to think of them.

Another blow-up meant she probably wouldn’t get any sleep tonight, either. Maybe, though, lacking a free upstairs bed, they’d have the common courtesy to take their frelling make-up sex to the basement this time. That was a hopeful thought, but she didn’t feel hopeful about it. Everybody running away or unavailable had her feeling all depressed.

“Hey,” she responded politely to Oz's greeting. Suddenly, her duties as default Summers hostess crackled to life like a charge of static electricity. “Do you have a place to stay?”

Oz nodded toward the street, where something was maybe parked--Dawn couldn’t tell without the street lights. “The van. It’s fine. As long as we don’t get another storm like that. I grew up here, and that’s not normal weather for Sunnydale. Fudo?”

“Seems so.”

“Yeah,” Oz said thoughtfully, then mentioned, “I wasn’t done. I didn’t tell them about the history. Where have….” He paused delicately, but Dawn knew well enough who he was asking about.

“Buffy’s gone to her class, where there’ll be maybe two people. Spike’s gone to try his new brilliant plan of biting people on the neck to keep them safe from any vamp except him. I imagine he has quite a stable by now. Or a barn, considering they’re cows, not horses. I’m sure they’ll both be fascinated, though, when they get back. If they don’t bring down the downstairs hallway, ceiling and all.”

Frowning in puzzled concern, Oz took her arm. She yanked rudely away, screeching, “Leave me alone!” like she thought he was a child molester, and everybody looking at them, at her, and the only possible action was to race upstairs to the bathroom and lock herself in, running the shower so nobody could hear her snuffling into a towel. Spike would have heard her regardless, and cracked the locked door open if he had to, and not put up with her nonsense for a second. But Spike wasn’t here. Likely, after a hearty snack or five, he’d zip across to Never-Neverland, didn’t need her help to get there, he could do it just fine on his own, give the fucking poet a treat, another night out on the town. He’d been sneaking off: a minute here, five minutes there. Dawn knew from the dazed, blank look in his eyes afterward.

She wanted to run off, too. It wasn’t fair everybody could run off but her--even Willow. She’d have settled for being a green twinkle in Neverland, or for stomping and yelling in the soft warm sand of the changeless Terminal Beach. Those being unavailable to unaided Dawns, she took the next best choice: stealthily unlocking the door nobody had noticed was locked, racing to her room, diving under the covers, and turning the electric blanket up to 10 before recalling that the power was out in her room, too.

So she jammed on her headphones and turned the CD player (it ran on batteries) up to 10 instead. The rhythm and wailing of Nine Inch Nails (it was an “oldies” CD, one of Spike’s she’d borrowed without quite remembering to ask) almost drowned out the guilty sound of the shower she’d left running. Use up all the hot water: it would serve them right!

Wondering why she was the one who had to get stuck, why everything had turned so dismal and hopeless, Dawn yanked the covers up over her head.

**********

Methodically and rhythmically, Buffy thumped her forehead against the steering wheel. The fact that there were no street lights, no traffic lights, should have given her a clue. Out the windshield, the Civic Center stood dark and locked. Of course: no electricity. No heat. She was the biggest dunce on the planet.

Off down the street, a single light approached. Smooth as a bird, it banked into the turn, jumped the sidewalk, and came purring across the grass to stop about a foot from her door. Crooking a knee across the saddle (or whatever it was called), Spike lit a cigarette, all the while looking appraisingly at the dark building.

“Figured it’d be shut,” he commented, sliding his lighter away and breathing smoke with what seemed more relish than usual, “but I figured I better check, just in case they had a generator or something. Looks like they don’t, though. Anybody show up?”

Buffy practically fell out the door and onto him. Somehow, he kept the bike balanced and her as well, cupping an unembarrassed hand under her butt and lifting her until she was pretty much perched on his lap, which she considered quite a good place to be.

“Somebody been mean to my little Slayer, then?” Spike crooned into her ear. “So long as it’s not more’n twice as big as the Sears tower, you point it out and I’ll take it out for you. Just say the word.”

Buffy kissed him urgently, overcome that he’d remembered when she hadn’t, and moreover hadn’t said word one of snark about the depth of her dumbth. “I don’t deserve you,” she whimpered.

“So you believe it now, do you? About time.” Carefully he pushed and slid her forward, back onto her feet at the side of the bike. “Get yourself on proper: I don’t hold with that sidesaddle nonsense, not at ninety miles an hour.” As she looked in confused distress at the SUV, he directed, “Lock it and leave it. Expect all the would-be carjackers have been eaten--last night, now. Field day for vamps, it is, tonight. More hunting than finding, though, I guess. Didn’t see a lot of headlights, coming from home, did you?”

Thinking back, Buffy had to shake her head. The fact was, she didn’t remember seeing any.

Spike commented comfortably, “Sensible people keeping to home, what with the dark and the cold. We should, too. Lock it up, ride with me: you know you want to.”

Buffy gave the smirk the kiss it expected and asked for, then firmly pressed the thingie that chirped the SUV’s doors locked. “That’s my girl,” Spike commended as she slid on behind him and clasped him tight around the waist.

“Go.”

“Where, pet? Straight home, is it?”

Buffy shook her head emphatically. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t see it--he’d feel it. He knew. He always knew.

He’d found the beach for her.

It would be freezing on the bike at even moderate speed. She didn’t care. Among his many talents, Spike made a fine windbreak. “Just go.”

“Scenic route it is then,” Spike responded cheerfully, letting the bike roll ahead, pushing the gas a little, leaning them into a perfect turn, smooth and rolling decorously across the parking strip and down the driveway, just a walking pace, maybe five miles an hour. Lifting his head, he looked halfway around, asking without words if she was set, ready. Her answer was to press her cheek to his back and hold on harder.

In under a minute, they must have been doing sixty and Spike was laughing, she could feel it, from the sheer glorious speed of it and still accelerating.

The bouncing headlight beam couldn’t illuminate the road ahead as fast as they reached it. But with vampire night-sight choosing the way, Buffy had no fear of potholes or downed tree limbs. No fear at all.

**********

Oz’s van was kitted out for flood, famine, or flaming doom. It had a generator. It therefore had lights and heat. It had a refrigerator, half filled (by no coincidence) with 20-year-old scotch and Jack Daniels. Bugger must have been told Rupert was likely to be in attendance. Also ice. Spike didn’t want his Jack diluted and took it neat, thanks. Didn’t want any ice: he’d already had hail. Ice enough, right there.

Spike was drunk and quite contentedly getting drunker. Eventually he’d probably pass out but until that happened, he had a lapful of sleepy, giggly Buffy and that was a bit of all right, and if they decided to do something about it, well, there was the basement and the bed just a short stagger away, since Oz had considerately parked the van right in front of their very own house. Convenient. Not Oz’s house of course, but Oz was all right for a werewolf. Most upstanding werewolf Spike had ever met, which actually meant something.

Spike wasn’t sure precisely what it meant, but there was definitely meaning in it, it tingled along all his nerves, made him feel completely wide awake and lucid, almost like on the other side, and he’d been right: live in the moment, be simply in the body, and love his lady if by the time they got done talking he wasn’t too drunk. Not that by that time she’d know the difference, poor cow. Never had held her liquor at all well, but at least was getting the loose and happy of it, not the suspicious and belligerent, like she mostly did.

The bait had even enticed Rupert from the cooling grill, and Oz had offered the hospitality of a bedroll, if the Watcher chose to accept it. Sitting with the rest of them in the back of the van, Rupert was pretending to savor the Scotch, rather than gulp it right down till the desired effect was achieved and then coast there, the way Spike did, poncy sod.

World must be ending: the git had undone his tie. Not taken his jacket off, though: Oz’s little Sterno heater didn’t crank out enough joules, or btu’s, or however they were measuring that sort of thing now….

Spike had a couple of Oz’s blankets wrapped around Buffy and his clasped arms holding them there, and liquor was anti-freeze, innit? So that was all right. She was all toasty again, not shivering at all.

Leaning back awkwardly and craning his neck, Spike looked out to see if there was a light in Bit’s window, then rubbed his face and damned himself for an idiot because of course there wasn’t. Bit wouldn’t have enjoyed this anyway, he thought, vaguely guilty. Couple of old Brits getting sozzled and talking about the old times, that would have bored her to utter tears. And nobody to snuggle up warm against except maybe Oz, whose eyes seemed to be locked on a different star. So maybe just as well to let her sleep. Felt vaguely bad about it though, he did.

Coming over all maudlin and sentimental. Cure for that was another drink. He latched onto the current bottle and poured another round, but barely a dram for Buffy or she’d rue it. Just enough to keep the buzz going.

Oz was telling them the occasionally interesting history of Quor’toth. How it was the nearest-adjacent place of a whole other universe, somewhere so distant even George Lucas couldn’t have come up with enough far’s. But distance didn’t matter so much because space was folded. Rupert nodded solemnly at that, just as if he had the least notion in hell what wolf-boy was talking about. Or maybe he’d only achieved the level of drunk where you nodded solemnly at things.

Anyway, the tale went that sometime in the Middle Ages (“Chivalry times!” put in Buffy wisely, then relapsed to petting and being petted), one Alfonso of Milan had discovered this neat trick. He already knew how to make portals, everybody and his bastard nephew knew how to make portals by then, it was in alchemical scrolls from the Second Dynasty or was that 2nd Century BCE? The fucking Ptolemys, anyway, for God’s sake. The commonist of common knowledge among that era’s Illuminati, anyway. And Our Alfonso found whatever (like his servants, his pets, his assistants, his colleagues, and his ninth wife) he put through one particularly aligned and spelled portal never came back. Either he was an idiot, a truly advanced scientific thinker, a fair-minded man, or just missed wife 9 too much, but he finished up by going through himself and was not heard from further. However, his notes remained, and with the enthusiasm of first discovery, he’d named the realm Quor’toth. Or maybe Kartath. Or maybe….

Medieval Italian was so fucking hard to read. And the spelling of the same word could vary three times in the same fucking sentence. Bless the advent of movable type!

Giles nodded solemn agreement to that, too. They raised their glasses and toasted Herr Gutenberg and movable type.

All chums together, telling tales, each chipping in about whatever piece he had some knowledge of. Or nodding, if that did the job.

So it had naturally got a certain reputation, Quor’toth had (or Kartath, or Cartoth, or…) for being this super place to dispose of things. People. Whatever. According to Oz, some law firm had drawn up a contract for Chicago to dump its toxic waste there, back in the Daley era, and Spike was inclined to believe it. But not New York: New York didn’t play ball, went all haughty, and their people never did lunch with the L.A. people, so the deal never got done.

Then there was this baby….

“Shut up,” Spike said flatly, and was obeyed. Suddenly something approaching sober, or a lot less drunk, Spike checked: breathing, heart rate, smell. It was all right: Buffy was well and truly out, or asleep, or not about to pay any connected attention, anyway. Good enough.

Spike leaned back and shut his eyes for a moment. “Rupert, you breathe a word of any of this, I’ll do for you. Don’t care where you are, how many walls you got between--”

“I do take the general idea, Spike. I’ll be cut into collops and fed to the cat you don’t own. Now do us all the kindness of shutting your pie hole.”

“Just sayin’. Buffy don’t need to know what her true fucking Soul Mate’s got up to--”

Very quietly, Oz asked, “What’s it got to do with Buffy?”

“Nothing, then. Nothing at all.” It was safe to open his eyes and blink then.

Oz waited, puzzled. But if Oz didn’t know, Spike wasn’t about to enlighten him. Didn’t like the way the Watcher was looking at him though--like a bug on a pin. He’d already said too much. Wheels were turning there. Wheels were turning. But at need, he could handle the Watcher, if he had to. Handle Oz, too, if it came to that.

“Spike, I find your game-face distracting and unpleasant. Drop it, please.”

“I look how I want,” Spike responded sullenly, only then realizing he’d changed aspect.

“I’m sure you do. But in the interests of harmony…?”

It took Spike a couple of minutes to calm his demon down, send it back to drowsing. Wasn’t focusing all that well himself, truth be told. Demon, it was specially alert to anything felt as a threat at such times. Not even counting it’d got too fucking independent by half, the last few days. Have to do something about that, some way….

“Anyway,” Oz resumed softly, carefully, “there was this baby. Prophesied as ‘The Destroyer.’ Taken by its guardian into Quor’toth something like a year ago, I forget, to protect him from his enemies. He--”

“It’s a boy, then,” Spike cut in flatly.

“I guess. It seems the Powers are divided over him. Some want him kept until he’s full-grown, can defend himself. Some want him returned, maybe to give the enemies a fair shot. Derail the crisis, whatever future apocalypse he’s supposed to be involved in. Of course, getting him out at all would have to involve the Lady, and there’s been talk a deal has been struck, but the Lady says no, she’s made no binding promises.”

“‘Binding,’” Spike repeated, and this time did feel his eyes turning, could see the small corner lights, that illuminated the rear of the van, seem suddenly brighter. “Minces words real fine, she does. Which side is our Fudo on?”

“The Destroyer will upset the Balance. Fudo likes the Balance the way it is. It’s kind of his job to preserve it. So my best guess is, Fudo wants to keep The Destroyer right where he is, where he can’t affect anything, till he has a long white beard and is fed his supper through a straw. I’m not really sure about that, though,” Oz added apologetically. “The Lady didn’t say anything about Fudo being part of the equation.”

“She wouldn’t. The very skies would fall if she actually did anything,” Spike conjectured bitterly. “Hasn’t even sent me any dreams to get my head screwed around, point me in the right direction. Kept her hands completely clean, she has. Except…she shoved Ethan Rayne into Quor’toth. She must be so fucking pleased with herself!”

“Spike,” said Giles somberly. “You know, or guess, things you aren’t saying, about this. Don’t you.”

“Yes.”

“Will you tell me what they are?”

“No.” Spike let the word hang there, undecorated.

“Will you help…distract, occupy, Fudo whilst I attempt to recover Ethan?”

“It’s the Slayer calls things like that. From where I stand, it’s still none of our concern. Not our apocalypse, here. Maybe never. For me, I’d love to take that thing on. Chop it to mincemeat until all the avatars are used up and there’s nothing more to turn into. Always wanted to take on a samurai…. But it’s the Slayer calls those things. For the both of us. Oz, you tell her your tale. Then, Rupert, you can ask her. An’ then abide her answer. Which is what I’ll do.”

As Spike stirred, beginning to gather Buffy up, Oz said, “One more thing. If you decide to go after Rayne, and if, while you’re there, you come across this baby, The Destroyer, and if you can set up something like a portal, then some arrangement will be made so you can use it. So you can get out. With the baby. And that’s the last of it.”

Spike laughed harshly, trying to figure and manage the logistics of getting Buffy out of the van and home, as drunk as he was. “That’s one thing, is it? Then I’d hate to hear what two would be. You delivered your message, pup. You can run along home now.”

“Well, actually, no. I stay until it’s decided. And if you go, I go with you. The Lady knows what a value you set on your independence. So she won’t do a thing to influence you. Not a single thing. She’s promised.”

“Yeah, fine.” Except start the whole thing going in the first place, Spike thought. And then do her best to tangle us all up in it. Sure, she’s a fucking model of non-interference.

He was too drunk to think about it any more.

Wolf-boy could put it to Buffy in the morning--as much of it as he knew. Then the Slayer would decide.

**********

Buffy had a headache. Not a force 10, maybe a force 4 (diminishing to 3 after the ibuprofen kicked in). She’d awakened in the big new bed, which didn’t have the same worn-in comfortable hollows as her former bed (now an ex-bed, thanks to Spike) and produced stiff, achy places in her shoulders, back, and neck. At least that was what she blamed them on rather than an awkward sleeping position tucked pillowless under and around Spike, who was leadenly asleep, snoring, and just about immovable when she had to get up to go to the bathroom: up two flights instead of just down the hall.

The shower had apparently been running all night, so there was zero hot water. She turned it off, not even wanting to know what bizarre scenario had resulted in its being left on. She just didn’t want to deal with it.

Despite toothpaste and mouthwash, her mouth tasted as though something small and repulsive had crawled in and died. Her first cup of coffee (instant, in cold water: blech!) got her eyes marginally open, enough to search for yogurt in the dark, powerless, and ominous smelling refrigerator. While she was trying to determine if the yogurt had gone off, Dawn grouched in, complaining how yucky PopTarts tasted unheated and trying to make a case for suing the city for non-delivery of services--at least under Mayor Wilkins’ regime, the power had never gone off.

“You weren’t here then,” Buffy pointed out incautiously.

“But I remember!” Dawn hated to be reminded Buffy had survived all those years without a younger sister to torture her.

Buffy shut her eyes. “Whatever. I don’t want to argue about His Honor, the Giant Snakeness.”

“You started it!”

Without warning, the power snapped on. Everything lit up, popped, hummed, trying to make up for lost time. Buffy and Dawn both jumped. Downstairs, there was a bang, and cursing: Spike had fallen out of bed. Buffy had finished the dubious yogurt before he showed up, stalking through the kitchen to the back porch for his first cigarette of the day, protected by an overcast sky that didn’t show any sign of clearing soon.

Slowly remembering and resuming the rightful order of things, Buffy dumped her horrible cold scummy coffee and set up the coffee maker to brew fresh while Dawn gleefully played with the toaster, making sure it clacked and jumped properly before entrusting fresh pastries to it.

The milk had not survived the hiatus. By the time Buffy had poured all three cartons down the sink, the coffee was ready. Pouring two cups, she slid on the down vest hanging handy behind the outside door and carried the cups outside.

“Ta,” Spike said absently, accepting a cup.

Sipping coffee, Buffy put her back against the rail Spike was leaning on, facing the opposite direction. “It’s a judgment,” she said presently.

“What is, pet.”

“All this.” Gesturing vaguely with her cup, Buffy had the sense she was indicating all the weary, headache-producing, contrary things. “Cosmic payback. Because we had fun.”

That got her a quick, pleased look. “Did, didn’t we?”

“Ahuh.” She nodded heavily. “Universe pays you back for that, though. Not allowed.”

Spike put an arm around her. “Don’t you believe it. Doesn’t work like that.”

“Yes, it does.” Gratefully, she leaned. After awhile, she semi-asked, “Giles is still waiting for an answer.”

“Yeah. An’ dog-boy, he has a little history lesson you sort of slept through. He’ll want to repeat it, I expect.”

“You don’t want to get involved.”

“We’re already involved: I figure Fudo, he served notice. Don’t want to go haring off to Quor’toth, no. Don’t like the odds. Getting back seems real iffish. But you call it, pet. Whatever you decide, I’ll abide.”

“That rhymes,” Buffy noticed.

“Fuck. So it does.”

“Quor’toth, it’s a real place, right? My mystical aura mange not a factor.”

“Seems so. Portal entry, no rifts. But no way back without a major boost. Lady, she says she’ll do that on condition.”

“What condition?”

Spike was silent a long minute. Buffy studied his face--deliberately unrevealing, which itself told her he was trying to keep things locked inside. “Seems there’s a prophecy boy there. Called ‘The Destroyer.’ Seems the Lady wants him fetched back. More’n likely, why she stuffed Rayne there to begin with--to get us into it. On account of Rupert. Sneakier, even, than I’d guessed.”

“The Lady,” Buffy clarified.

“Yeah,” Spike confirmed glumly, finishing his coffee and setting the cup on the rail.

“I haven’t had any signs, dreams, anything like that. You?”

“Nothing. ‘F I had, I’d have said.”

“Would you?”

Another long silence. Finally Spike said, “I got other reasons for wanting no part of this. Sometime, if I have to, I’ll tell you.”

“OK…if the reasons are yours, nothing to do with me. Do they? Have to do with me?”

Spike quirked an uneasy smile, caught. “Maybe. Still my reasons, though. Leave a chap a little privacy.”

“This, from the guy who sleeps naked.”

“Well, yeah. Want a morning shag, less to get all tangled up with. Haven’t heard any complaints, ‘less this is one.”

“No complaints. Except you snore.”

“Do not!”

“Do too! I have witnesses!”

“What witnesses?”

“Well, Dawn. She knows you snore!”

“Hell, Bit will say anything to get a rise. Says you’re an ill-tempered dwarf: does that make it so?”

“She says what?”

Spike cut off further discussion with a sudden but lingering kiss, a time-tested way of stopping words altogether. At least an 8 on the hotitude scale. Buffy leaned into it, commenting intelligently, “Mmmmm.”

“Guys?” It was Willow, in fluffy chenille robe and slippers, holding a steaming coffee cup, leaning out the door. Buffy disentangled enough to look around inquiringly. “Phones are working again. Because it rang. It was Angel.” As Buffy moved, Willow said hastily, “He didn’t wait. He said don’t decide anything, don’t do anything. He’s coming. Then he hung up.”

“Shit!” said Spike concisely.

Blood Price, Chapter 4

2005-04-12T19:28:38Z

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 4: Acala

When Dawn bounced down to stretch out full-length on the front room rug, Spike asked, “You ready?” regarding her narrowly.

“I’m fine,” she responded, fluffing her hair so she wouldn’t lie on it, have it pull--an habitual nighttime ritual, though it was only about nine o’ clock. “Don’t worry about me. You just go on and do what you do.”

“I don’t like it,” Buffy said, pacing by the couch. “This’ll be twice in one day, Spike. What if you can’t get back? What if something happens? What if Dawn can’t--”

Though it meant having to arrange her hair again, Dawn sprang up and hugged Buffy and somehow Spike got into it, encircling them both, all macho and protective, which was kind of cute, despite the fact that Dawn was going to protect him. To keep him focused, which she was very good at. Or even to need his protection (fat chance), which anyway would have the same effect.

And there was nothing either Buffy or Spike could say or do to prevent her, Dawn reflected smugly, rather happy to be the middle of a Spike-Buffy hug-a-thon. She felt cool and independent and determined--not afraid at all, though the astral plane was (cue creepy music) the unknown. For herself, she was afraid of things with too many legs, wasps, bees and hornets; unleashed small yappy dogs of uncertain temper; being helpless with the prospect of pain. Physical threats. By Willow’s explanation and Spike’s report, the astral plane contained none of these dangers. In her immaterial astral body, she should be as invulnerable as some kind of freakin’ superhero, and how cool was that?

Buffy would just have to deal. She hadn’t been able to contact Giles, who might already be on some trans-Atlantic flight, winging home, disappointed. Despite the fuss he’d made about going the first time, Spike took the necessity of doing what they could to recover Willow as a given, almost without comment. Dawn suspected any pretext would have done, any excuse to give in to his yearning to get back there, to have the real thing instead of just frustrating memories. Which meant she was going with, to keep him on track. It was all very simple.

Of course she hadn’t the least clue how to do it. But that was merely a minor detail. She was confident that when the time came, she’d know.

The hug broke up, and hair rearrangement was accomplished. Stretched out to her right, Spike extended his left hand (hers because of the tattoo), as if against his better judgment: he’d said he didn’t think she could follow him, and he didn’t want her there. So giving her a point of contact should be bad. Contrarily, if she could and did, he wanted to keep her close. Hence the hand.

Smiling, Dawn took it, wrapping her fingers tightly into his palm, feeling his thumb lock down. She’d expected both of them to have to meditate, prepare. Instead, she felt a pull and went with it, flinging herself in the direction of the pull almost the same as when she followed Spike through a rift, except they were still in Sunnydale.

But very high up. High enough to see the entire town cupped in its valley. But not distant, either. Anywhere she turned her attention was distinct and peculiarly itself: a house on the opposite side of Revello, decrepit and peeling paint, revealed a jolly, teasing personality, its loose shutters tipped at a jaunty angle, imbued with decades of happy, if raffish, habitation. The better-kept house beside it brooded in upright disapproval like a fixed glare.

Dawn tried to understand what she saw.

Neither house looked different, and yet it did. It was like comparing a routine photo, she thought, with a painting of the same subject. A photo showed the shell; in a painting, the subject was luminous with meaning. Or like the difference between meeting a stranger and meeting a friend….

The movie theater, downtown, gave off a strange mélange of eager, innocent dreams, lust, hunger, and dread--no wonder, since it was one of the prime vamp hunting sites. In fact, the first evening show was letting out and the hunt was in progress. It was odd to see the people moving like sleepwalkers, so little aware of who and where they were, a little like watching oblivious fish school and scatter; and the half dozen or so vamps, points of emphatic dark, the sharks of this water, choosing their targets and moving in.

One of the vamps was Mike. Not game-faced yet but intent, focusing on one man and then dismissing him because he had a pungent mark, a healed vamp bite, already on his throat. Someone else’s mark. Spike’s! Dawn conjectured--an astonished realization. Spike’s been playing catch and release!

That thought distracted her, made her wonder where Spike was. Following the pull of connection, she lifted and rose, searching, and rose higher, along the edge of a diffuse glittering fog…. It was Spike. Either he’d grown very large, or Dawn was exceedingly tiny. Maybe both.

His outline was like dust motes shifting in sunlight or like fog illuminated by a moving flashlight beam. Contours hazed into visibility--his legs, set into habitual prepared stance, lead foot and anchor foot, at rest but ready to move, a pose she’d seen him assume a thousand times, so she knew the rest of it, the set of his hips and the power waiting, balanced and coiled, low in the spine--and then faded as some new vista emerged. The spread of his shoulders. The column of neck. Finally his face, lifted and sublime: he was looking at the stars.

So Dawn had to be about the size of a gnat. That didn’t bother her. What bothered her was that he’d forgotten her: utterly caught up in the hyperreality. As she had been, she acknowledged guiltily, deciding not to get on his case about it. At least not right away.

Spike? Aren’t we supposed to be looking for Willow?

He blinked and leaned away, trying to focus, which was funny: apparently in his astral body, he was still farsighted. Or so accustomed to being farsighted that he imposed that on his form. Like having legs, hands, a body at all: his sense of himself, projected. Whereas she was--what?

She felt like herself but couldn’t see herself. She was only a moving perspective, nothing beyond her gaze except any outward form of herself. Like a floating eyeball.

She wasn’t sure if she’d said that or only thought it. She wasn’t sure she could tell the difference.

Bit. You’re green.

Never mind that--let’s do what we came for. Who knows how much time has passed? Buffy will be having kittens!

Buffy….

She’d only succeeded in distracting Spike’s attention in a different direction--back to the house on Revello, and down, and inside, to the front room where Buffy was frozen in mid-pace, one foot hanging suspended in the stopped time as Spike’s avatar swooped down and swarmed all over her, and there Dawn’s body was on the floor, and it was all just too weird. Some way, tiny as she was, she yanked Spike’s avatar out of there back to where he’d been, so power and size weren’t equivalent, and she was considerably ticked off.

Spike! For heaven’s sake, focus!

Yeah. Right. Look for Willow.

What do we look for?

Dunno, do I? I expect…something like us.

Something the size of a water tower or a pea? That’s helpful!

No: something…diffuse. The response was thoughtful, and Dawn quickly realized he was right. The panorama of streets, houses, stores, miscellaneous offices, a gridwork surrounding Sunnydale’s abundant cemeteries, was all solid and definite, almost too detailed to take in. They were of different stuff--more fluid, reconstituting themselves in ambient energy from second to second, like the id monster in Forbidden Planet.

Look for early CGI, Dawn thought, and adjusted to scan on a different frequency.

Although apt to be snagged by the minutiae of the familiar, yet unfamiliar, surround, Spike mostly stayed with her. Like a dog off the leash investigating smells, Dawn thought. Whereas she was pragmatic and purposeful. She was aware of the fairyland enchantment but it didn’t resonate for her as it clearly did for him. Because she wasn’t a poet, maybe; or because, inexperienced though she was, she felt this as a normal mode of being, maybe from the time the Lady had usurped Dawn’s body and Dawn had been left to rusticate in the Lady’s realm, bodiless, exploring the divisions and considerations into which the Lady organized her sphere of interest, the aspects of the multiverse under the Lady’s influence and rule.

It wasn’t nearly so demanding as steering Spike, drunk, but keeping track of his wanderings did take some of Dawn’s attention. So he was the first to spot something, focus, and move to it quick as a thought.

It wasn’t Willow because there were two of it: indistinct humanoid outlines, one shedding inchoate energy like a fountain, the other so dim it was barely a sketch of particles against the void.

Dawn knew the two were in conversation, communion of some sort but could feel only sadness, hopeless longing, desperate frustration.

Rupert, you seen the witch anywhere about? Spike asked.

As the solider phantom lifted its head and became recognizably Giles, the fainter phantom dissolved into the dark and was gone.

Bloody hell! Giles erupted.

So you can reach him, Spike observed. Which logically made the vanished wraith Rayne, Dawn deduced.

Barely, and only under optimal conditions, which you’ve just disrupted!

Dawn decided intervention was in order.

She told Giles, Willow’s spelled and tranced herself and is lying in her bedroom like Snow White, sans casket and dwarves. Buffy couldn’t reach you, so we came looking. Have you seen her?

Dawn? was Giles’ uncertain reaction.

Yeah, Spike replied, gone all Tinkerbell, no notion why. So Quor’toth--if that’s where he is--isn’t so shut as the accounts claim. Traffic back and forth. On this level, anyways.

He’s been haunting me for weeks, Giles replied raggedly. He’s not certain where he is, but the very fact that he can’t create a portal suggests Quor’toth. Primarily, he’s manifested in singularly excruciating dreams. Alone, he hadn’t the energy to do more. I hoped, meeting on this plane, both of us trying, we might be able to establish a more stable connection. Then you lot had to blunder in and overwhelm the rapport!

Making a lot of progress, were you? Spike inquired skeptically. All set to drag his backside through and shove it out the other end?

No, Giles admitted. And he’s forbidden me to try. If a mage of his experience can’t escape, he’s convinced the most I’d achieve is to trap myself with him. Which might be an improvement over the present impasse. But Ethan says I only think that because I have no experience of such a place. He says it would send me barking mad, in point of fact. Spike? Giles’ tone was acerbic. Since you asked, you might at least do me the courtesy of attending.

Material or immaterial, Spike didn’t much do courtesy. He’d let his attention be drawn away, Dawn saw--gazing wide-eyed at the stars. But with purpose, this time. Focus. Because one was moving. Falling.

Dawn wondered if she should make a wish.

Come on, Spike directed curtly and took off, Dawn right with him, toward where the star’s trajectory meant it should impact.

Dawn didn’t think a star should approach screeching, but this one did. Stars didn’t have tails, only comets, but this one was trailed by an energy signature whose eldritch brilliance filled half the sky. Like Giles (arriving to join them) leaking incompletely used magic, only more spectacularly. Mostly, Dawn doubted stars were afraid.

Without impact, it was among them like a cloud. Then with a flick, a change of focus, it was Willow, grabbing at them with immaterial hands, wild-eyed and wailing, “Go! Now! It’s coming!”

Before her connection to Spike dragged her away to sudden breath and solidity, Dawn saw that above, a whole swatch of stars had been occluded by something vast and dark, pursuing.

**********

As the storm broke, it seemed as if the house was under occult attack. Buffy barely had time to wince at the flare and crack of lighting before the visceral boom of the thunder hit like a hard punch to the stomach. It was like being pinned down by an artillery barrage. The Weather Channel (just before the power went out) called it a freak winter storm; a few minutes later, in the dark, as Buffy scrambled for candles, hailstones began pattering, then banging, then roaring, almost drowning out the thunder. Small arms fire, Buffy thought, shakily lighting a third candle.

She’d thought she was being metaphorical until Dawn wrapped long arms around her and shrieked in her ear, “It can’t get in. It can’t get past the wards.”

Buffy felt a flood of relief: they were back, then. Much sooner than she’d hoped, even: only a few minutes had passed. Two or three specially loud bangs of thunder, nearly simultaneous, made them both jump. In the bright-black flicker of lightings, Spike was silhouetted against the front window--game-faced, roaring. Apparently he didn’t think it was a natural storm either. Before Buffy could reach him, he was off into the hall, headed cellarward, which maybe was a good idea if a tornado or two got thrown into the mix. Given the current level of bombardment, Buffy couldn’t rule it out although tornados were unheard-of in any season, west of the Rockies.

Huddled together, the sisters made a sort of sack-race progress along the hall to the basement door, where they found Willow hunched into the triangular niche under the stairs, eyes tight shut, chanting. All three accounted for. Reading her the riot act for taking off like that could wait: pushing candle-holding Dawn ahead, Buffy dragged Willow, still chanting, down the basement stairs.

The freshly soundproofed basement wasn’t quiet, but it cut the deafening bangs and booms by at least half. Able to think, and hear Willow chanting, Buffy ran back up the stairs to slam the door and shove the bolts home. She didn’t know if that was necessary or even useful, but it made her feel better.

Descending, she saw that the other basement door--the one that led into the new escape tunnel--was ajar. Spike. Racing down the black tunnel with arms stretched wide, she crashed into Spike and the door at the far end just as it was opening. For a second they were struggling--she to shut the door, he to pull it farther open. He let go, so she won.

Setting her back against the door, she demanded, “Are you crazy? Dawn says the wards are all that’s keeping it out, whatever it is. And you want to make a hole in the wards?”

She was blind as the proverbial bat, but she knew he was only about a foot away by the harsh pull of his furious breathing. All wound up and probably still in game-face, too. Teetering on the edge of another mindless explosion to vent the rage.

“For a second,” he said, more growl than words. “Just a second, to get out. Shut it behind.”

“So you can do what?” she challenged.

“Face the bloody wanker! ‘F it wants a fight--”

“Face what? Fight what? Rain? A deluge of hailstones that would mash you flat in a second? Oh! The SUV!” Buffy hated to think what the assault of hail was doing to it, parked in the open gravel stretch off the back yard. If its alarm was going off, she couldn’t hear it. Nothing she could do. She found Spike and wrapped arms about him. He was shuddering with the frustrated imperative to go out and challenge whatever was besieging them here. Totally insane. Totally Spike. “My house,” Buffy said. “My rules. We sit this one out until we know what it is we’re fighting. What works best against it. By the numbers: start with research. We’ve never faced a weather demon before, that I remember. Giles will--”

“He’s still here. Someplace. Had to get back to his body, I expect: some motel or another.” Spike’s arms closed about her and his cheek rested against her temple: tacit acceptance of her calling him off. “’F he lasts this out, we got a lot to talk about.”

Buffy filed that as a topic for another time. “You got Willow back. That’s enough accomplished for one day. Come on.”

They turned, her arm around his waist and his around her shoulders, to return to the upper door.

**********

As the house moaned and creaked, buffeted by gusts of wind, Spike found the custom bed’s disassembled frame in a back corner. With nothing better to do, he lifted out headboard, footboard, and side pieces, and began bolting them together. Bolts and locking nuts were all handy in a box on the floor: that Harris was a methodical worker, Spike had to give him that. No wrench, though.

He found if he could snug the wood up good and tight, mitered notches meeting true, he could push the bolt through, then tighten the nut with his fingers enough to hold until it could be done properly. When he moved to the far side of the footboard, Buffy was there, holding the side rail level and ready for connecting. Nodding appreciation, Spike crouched to insert and tighten the next bolt. It was much easier with the side piece held steady and horizontal, the footboard not trying to collapse onto it.

Given what the bed was gonna be used for when the basement was free of onlookers, Spike liked that they were assembling it together. Though the frame was solid oak and therefore weighed a few hundred pounds as a unit, between them, he and Buffy could lift and walk it into position against the wall smoothly, with no effort at all.

Willow, apparently done reinforcing the wards, and Dawn (giving hand signals and supervisory advice) helped with laying the oversized foundation in place, then the mattress on top.

As soon as the mattress was down, Buffy toppled gratefully onto it crosswise, arms flung high and eyes wearily shut. Wasn’t any point, then, to looking around for the bedding, so Spike launched himself and landed hard--by way of a test, like. All the joints held, and the bed barely shifted. Good enough. Buffy curled up against him, all soft in all the right places, warm all down his front, so eminently fuckable that it seemed a pity not to do her then and there, as he wanted to.

But there was Bit, clambering across the half acre of mattress to tuck in at his back; and there was the witch, slowly collapsing like a dying diva, on Buffy’s far side. And there was the storm, still raging full-blast, as best he could tell. Not gonna chase Bit and the witch back upstairs, to the dark and the scary noises, while that was going on. This was sanctuary; they shared it with equal entitlement. And Buffy, she’d be scandalized if he tried to start anything with so much company….

There were also all the as-yet unspoken things a storm like this portended, none of them likely to be a whole lot of fun. That gave an extra layer of comfort and satisfaction to being together, all of them, and entirely in the body. Just the simple pleasures of quiet, the warmth of contact, safety from the deluge and pyrotechnics outside that couldn’t touch them in this cozy refuge.

So on the whole, Spike was willing to be philosophical about not getting his end away, just now. This was good, too--gently holding, warmly held. Giving himself wholly over to the moment, he nuzzled into Buffy’s hair, the fine scent of her, and let himself drift.

**********

No question: the SUV was trashed. All the glass was broken, sagging in crazed, limp sheets where it hadn’t been blown out altogether; black streaks on the hood suggested the engine had taken a direct lightning hit; the air bag had done its thing and collapsed, entirely filling the front seat area; every part of the body was dimpled by hail. And as Buffy approached, walking carefully on the still-crunchy hailstones, she could smell leaking gasoline.

“It’s history,” she called despondently to Spike, who was hovering just within the morning shadow the house cast on the grass--for moral support, maybe.

“Maybe it’s just sleeping,” he called back, and she wheeled and gave him a glare.

“It isn’t funny, Spike!”

“Sorry. So it’s an ex-parrot, you figure?”

Buffy gave a flat rear tire a rancorous kick. The axle collapsed. Throwing her hands in the air, she walked back to where Spike waited. “I don’t know what we’re gonna do. I guess insurance will cover some of it, but what am I gonna claim? Act of God? What--”

“Don’t fret, love. Not much, to get the DeSoto running again. Day or two.”

Spike started to hug her but she shrugged him off, stomping a couple of paces into the full light where he couldn’t follow. She didn’t want to be consoled or presented with reasonable alternatives. She wanted to be upset and miserable and worried about the logistics of transporting groceries. She wanted to contemplate patrolling on foot again, three-quarters of the time taken by just going and coming. She wanted to know who (or what) the hell was responsible for trashing what was, in her mind, at the moment, her sole and only means of getting anywhere. So she could cut it/him/her/them off at the knees.

“Or,” Spike ruminated, “I could sell the bike.” As Buffy swung around--astonished, touched, even--he went on, “No, scratch that. Sell the witch, maybe. She’d fetch a good price in some quarters.”

Buffy set her hands on her hips. “You really, really better be kidding, Spike.”

“Well, s’not like I suggested selling Bit,” Spike rejoined, mildly indignant. “Too skinny. White slavers, they like a little more meat on the bones.”

“Your bike is probably an ex-parrot, too,” Buffy pointed out with a certain satisfaction, refusing to even think about the bizarre suggestions he was coming up with.

Retreating a step as the shadow’s margin slid nearer, Spike turned his head, uncomfortably looking elsewhere.

Checking, Buffy found the motorcycle neither parked at the curb nor smashed to screaming red (with tasteful skull) flinders in the street under one of several downed trees. “What did you do?”

Hands stuffed in pockets, Spike retreated another step. “Got on the cellphone before the whatever, the tower, went down. Told Michael to come, wheel the bike up against the house there in back, by the porch. Seemed like the best place--inside the wards, an’ all.”

“You are the fricking limit! You brought somebody clear across town, in record incredible bad weather, baseball-sized hail, to move your frickin’ motorcycle?!” Buffy cared nothing about Mike--it was just the principle of the thing.

“Well, that’s what minions are for, innit? Do what you tell ‘em? He’s a vamp, Buffy: break all his bones and he’ll still heal. And wasn’t him that storm was after--it was us. Here. And he has an invite, all proper, so he could pass the wards. Who else was I gonna call to see to it? Who else is under my word in this piss-poor excuse for a town? So what if he’s the Master Vamp of Sunnydale in all but name? So long as he comes to my word, I still got something of my own here, some choices of my own left, not just--” Spike stopped himself for a second, but the explosion wouldn’t be held. “--not just trailing along behind--”

“Hi,” said the ten-foot blueblack creature that’d come up without either of them noticing.

It was more or less humanoid, with two visible teeth/tusks, one protruding from the lower jaw, one descending from the upper. Its eyes had epicanthic folds and wandered independently. Large, flattened nose with conspicuous hairy nostrils. Major ugly. Bright red hair--not auburn, not strawberry blond: red--in short flamelike whorls all over his head. Dressed casually in outsized jeans, a blue T-shirt, and a denim jacket.

Buffy thought dazedly, He wouldn’t fit into the bed.

The creature gestured apologetically with his right hand. “I can tell I’ve come at a bad time, you two are having a thing, so I’ll keep it brief. I don’t mean to be crude, but you and your little witch should mind your own business. Respect the Balance and nobody has to get hurt.”

It took the whole speech before Buffy realized the creature was talking past her…at Spike.

She also realized she and Spike were beyond the wards, in broad daylight, and unarmed. And this, apparently, was the opposition.

Sudden as a punch, she shot out her hand, smiling to show every well-aligned, symmetrical, and recently brushed-flossed tooth. “Hi! I’m Buffy Summers. And you are?”

Slightly surprised but deciding to be civil, the monster briefly enfolded her hand with the care of one picking up a pea. So it was tangible: it could be killed. “Make it ‘Cal.’ I have other names, but they’d sound strange to you.”

“Try me!” Buffy encouraged. Information was always of the good. She didn’t like Spike so silent behind her but it didn’t seem a good time to turn and check. “Is ‘Cal’ for ‘Calvin?’”

“No, for ‘Acala.’ It’s a kind of role, a title--like Slayer. So ‘Cal’ is better for conversation. Maybe you’re the sensible one here: you stay where you belong.”

So he not only knew who she was, he knew she hadn’t been part of last night’s expedition.

Buffy shot back, “I go where I’m needed.”

“Well, that’s good. Good. Because there’s no need for interference. Interference threatens to upset the Balance. Which, as a matter of fact, you’ve done on a number of occasions. Not criticizing, just observing. I usually don’t concern myself with internal matters, and you have an august patron.”

That would be Lady Gates. Hence the fence-mending heavy-handed goon visit in person today after trying to smash her house flat last night, Buffy figured.

“So my past misdeeds are not the reason you trashed my SUV?” she inquired pleasantly, still smiling and wide-eyed.

“Incidental damage. I was making a point.”

At the last second, Buffy decided it wouldn’t be a great idea to give her opinion of what he’d been making.

Acala went on, “I wasn’t, at first, aware that an avatar of the Slayer was involved. You didn’t ‘show up on my radar,’ as it were.” Having uttered this pleasantry, the monster showed a few more teeth--crooked, the size of tent pegs. “But rather than let that be an issue….” Acala gestured, and the SUV leaped to attention, tires swelling, pockmarks expanding with a barrage of popping noises. The steering wheel unkinked and slurped up the air bag in stealthy embarrassment. The greasy black flash-fire marks vanished from the hood. All the window glass sprang up and flowed into its accustomed GM-approved curvatures. As a coda, all the locks popped.

“A full tank of gas?” Buffy’s jaw had begun to ache, holding that smile.

“At these prices? Don’t push your luck.”

Buffy shrugged elaborately. “It was worth trying.” Since for the moment they were playing at being all good pals together, she risked a glance over her shoulder.

At the very edge of the shadow, beginning, faintly, to smoke, Spike was standing with two swords.

Assessing the balance, the implicit choreography, of the moment, Buffy mouthed silently, OK. The right-hand sword flew to her and she took it, already whirling. It clanged against Acala’s sword…that hadn’t been there a second ago. It was fully six feet long and shivered like living flame. She had no idea where he could have hidden it but it was there now and solid enough to make her arm tingle with the impact. She countered the block, disengaging, waiting to see what the next turn in the dance would be. And she felt Spike come to her back, at her left shoulder, so they could separate and take the monster between them…in the full sunlight.

There was no choice. Solemnly she raised the sword vertically before her, bowing slightly. Acala also bowed…and vanished.

Dropping the sword, Buffy gave Spike a hearty shove, pitching him all the way back to the front steps, crying, “You idiot!”

“What?” he protested, bouncing up. “I could’ve managed. I was just getting warmed up!”

“You were smoking, Spike!”

“That’s just to get me charged up proper. Then the wing thing kicks in and I channel it. But I have to be right at the point of burning, see, to get it started. I--”

She grabbed and held him hard, face buried against his shoulder, saying indistinctly, “I’ve seen you burn, Spike. And I never want to see it again. Let’s not push our luck.” That reminded her, and she turned to look at the restored SUV. “Cheapskate,” she spat. “The least he could have done was throw in a tank of gas.”

Letting go, turning away, she trudged back into the sunlight to retrieve her sword.

At least the hailstones were melting. So it wasn’t a total loss.

**********

“I’m staying,” Dawn declared, plunking herself down on the floor in easy grabbing distance of the TV's power cord--an implicit threat. The only way Buffy could get her out would be to drag her, and if Dawn went, she was taking the TV with her.

“She’s staying,” Spike agreed, dropping into his usual corner armchair, his eyes steadily on Buffy’s. For good measure, he barricaded Dawn between his outstretched legs and the TV stand. “Lady Gates comes into it, seems like. That’s her patch, Dawn’s. An’ she was with me, t’other side, which was what tripped that Acala’s alarm.”

“No,” said Willow dispiritedly, puddling on the floor past the end of the couch and wilting against it. “That would be me.”

Munching popcorn, seated on the couch with her legs curled under, Anya opined tartly, “As it should be. You were the only one prepared and qualified. The astral plane is noplace for amateurs.”

“I concur: Dawn should remain,” said Giles, opening his briefcase on the coffee table.

Standing alone in the middle of the front room, Buffy twisted her hands anxiously. “I don’t want her to be a part of this.”

Dawn commented quietly, “I’m already a part of this. I’m seventeen now, Buffy. By the time you were seventeen, you’d already died once. Let’s be a teeny bit realistic here.”

Though nobody had yet said the “G” word, Dawn was certain they all had Glory on their minds: ordinary demons could make things happen but they couldn’t make them unhappen with a twitch of a finger--Buffy had already described the untrashing of the SUV. So what, if they did? Dawn wasn’t a helpless, whining child anymore: she could do things. At least, in collaboration with Spike, she could. And anyway, so far there’d been no specific threat to her in particular. She wasn’t the target.

“Could we get started?” Anya put in. “I’m losing valuable retail time and I had to call Wilbur in early. He’ll try to charge me extra for that.” Wilbur Banks, that Dawn mentally tagged “The Chinless Wonder,” was the part-time clerk Anya had recently taken on, now that the Magic Box was open evenings. Mike had told her Anya had courted him for that position but he’d declined, having larger fish to fry than an exciting new career in retail.

A few vamps held steady jobs. Not many, though. They hated routine and conforming to abstract rules like punctuality and not eating the customers. Also, night jobs weren’t plentiful and cut into their fighting, feeding, and fucking time--the traditional three F’s of vampire existence.

Buffy checked her watch, then glanced out the front window at the early winter twilight darkened by the absence of functional street lights. “Xander should be just getting off. He said he’d come straight from the site. So he should be here in a few more minutes….” Taking a step toward the hall, she asked, “Anybody besides me want a soda?”

“Beer,” said Spike, crossing his ankles.

“Beer?” Buffy’s tone was between uncertain and disapproving.

“Beer,” Spike responded firmly. “Sun’s long past the yardarm an’ if I have to sit and listen to you lot yammer on, here in the Summers No Smoking Zone, has to be compensation. Beer. Several. Watcher?”

“I’ll stay with tea, thanks,” said Giles without looking up, inspecting papers from a folder. “Somehow sleep eluded me last night; I’m sure I needn’t explain why.”

Raising a hand, Willow requested, “Citrus Jolt: I’m undercaffeinated.”

“I’m good,” Dawn said, doing a small happy bounce as Spike’s palm settled reassuringly on her head and began stroking her hair.

It was to be a fullscale Scooby meeting, research cum war council, in full session by candlelight, the power not yet having come back on; and she was being allowed to stay, an equal partner. A first, a milestone.

Before Spike had popped the tab on his second beer, Xander arrived, sporting more layers than Finnegan’s Wake from working all day in the cold. Shedding garishly checked and colored flannel shirts and several ragged sweaters, he explained that part of the mall roof had collapsed--a combination of the weight of water and a tree disobligingly toppling onto it--and his construction crew had been detailed to repair it on a rush basis, since their power tools could be run off a generator. Several of the interior shops had already suffered damage to their fixtures and merchandise; their proprietors had banded together to offer triple-time for a super-fast repair job.

Rubbing his hands wearily up and down his dark-stubbled face, Xander also requested beer since “the platinum menace” was being indulged. More from habit than actual annoyance, Dawn thought, Spike showed him two fingers backhanded and stretched out deeper in the chair, cradling the beer can on his chest. Fairly amicably, as Xander reversed the straight-back wooden chair and straddled it, arms folded across the top, they started discussing installing a downstairs bath, complete with humungous tub, until Buffy returned from the kitchen and handed Xander his beer, implicitly calling the meeting to order.

As usual, these days, Buffy presided.

The first thing was to bring Anya and Xander up to speed on the out-of-body experimentation on the astral plane. Willow did that. Then Giles took the floor, explaining with tight control why he had reason to suspect Ethan Rayne had been consigned to Quor’toth, briefly interrupted by Willow’s dashing out to get the laptop, to take notes. Clicking the necessary keys, she reported sadly that the local connection to the Internet was still down, but the battery life was fine and should get them through. But she was really, really wanting to Google the name Acala.

Apparently glad of the change of topic, Giles leaped ahead past the storm to this morning, eliciting from Buffy a description of the critter, with occasional comments by Spike, who seemed otherwise content to let Buffy make the running on that subject. He was working on his third beer and frowning, sometimes muttering a rude word under his breath. Dawn surmised that Buffy’s preventing him from immolating himself still rankled.

When Buffy had got through the magically-appearing sword and the suddenly vanishing ogre, Giles tipped his head back, murmuring, “Acala. Indigo blue: that suggests Hindu iconography. Attributes including a sword, whorled hair. Associated with fire, lighting bolts and their attendant storms, like the Norse Thor. But Oriental eyes.”

“Ring a bell, Watcher?” Spike asked alertly, despite his indolent pose of disengagement. He compensated by sipping more beer.

“A faint one. Perhaps. I wish I had access to my resource materials! The local library…. Even the university library….” A sigh indicated Giles considered them hopelessly inadequate. “My recollection can be amended later, when I can inspect the relevant texts online. But Acala isn’t the name I associate with that image, that set of attributes: it’s Fudo.”

Making screwed-up Incredulous Face, Buffy blurted, “Fido?!”

“Fudo,” Giles repeated with patient over-distinctness. “Or more properly, Fudo Myo-o. A staple of one of the offshoots of Buddhism, chiefly in Japan and principally a discipline and practice of the priestly class rather than the general public. Fudo is the principal member of the Godai Myo-o, the so-called ‘Five Great Kings,’ all fierce and warlike in aspect, who struggle to conquer Illusion and wrong thinking and lead the soul to choose self-abegnation as the path to true enlightment. If memory serves, Fudo is known as ‘The Immovable’--that doesn’t bode well--and is associated with the sun and fire: not that promising a connection for you, Spike. Typically, Fudo is depicted as holding a flaming sword in his right hand and a noose in his left. The noose is for binding demons,” Giles concluded with a Significant Look.

“Not a demon, then,” Spike drawled.

“If anything, a demigod. In some urban syncretic sects, in fact, he’s been identified with Michael, Archangel, and with the Cherubim--apparently a lesser order of angels--set to guard the closed gates of Eden with a flaming sword. Tradition conflates him with Azrael--the Angel of Death.”

“Nasty packet. Well traveled, though.”

“Only suggestions, not firm identities. Iconic images and deities are transmogrified in their passage through various cultures. The divinities of one are often the arch-demons of another if the first is conquered or falls into disfavor and persecution. Moloch, in particular, never traveled well. Infanticide, baby-killing, however tempting on prolonged overseas flights, never endears itself in the long run. Pride of progeny, however annoying, seems a human constant.”

“Dunno about that,” Spike responded, pretending to pick a piece of fluff off his knee. Dawn knew that not being able to get Buffy pregnant (though Buffy swore up and down that children just weren’t in the Slayer’s job description and that vampires therefore made ideal mates, no ucky precautions needed, and Watchers should therefore be all YAY about such pairings, not all Get thee behind me! and Perish the thought! and Fate--literally--worse than death, the way they actually were), was one of the things, like lacking bodily warmth, he was uneasy about.

Dawn knew this, of course, from Buffy, not Spike, who didn’t tell her the really personal stuff anymore.

The doorbell rang, simultaneous with a few measured light knocks. Not urgent, just insistent. Maybe Buffy had ordered pizza delivery. Dawn didn’t stop to think that the power and the phones were out. Calling, “I’ll get it!” Dawn hopped up, grabbed a candle, and sprinted to the door. She wasn’t stupid: before throwing the bolts and pulling the door open, she checked the side window panel. No need for precautions.

“Hi, Oz.”

Standing rumpled and diffident on the dark porch, Oz replied quietly, “Hi, Dawn.”

But not so quietly that vampire hearing didn’t pick it up: from Spike, loudly, “Oh bloody hell!”

Re Part a: Everybody, is this too weird? Can you make sense of it? Can you visualize/imagine it? Please advise.

Blood Price, Chapter 3

2005-04-03T10:34:37Z

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 3: The Doors of Perception (complete)

The minute they had Giles out the door, jet-lagged and headed for some motel, Dawn knew they were gonna get it.

As she edged to escape up the stairs, Spike tried to slide through the front door behind Giles except Buffy shoved the door shut and set her back against it, glaring. He innocently displayed his cigarette pack as excuse to be out in the chill where Buffy wouldn’t want to follow. When that plainly didn’t win him any Buffy points, he shrugged and turned back down the hall to escape in the other direction, onto the back porch.

“We talk. Now. And yes, that means you too, Dawnie,” Buffy snapped when Dawn pointed a Who, me? finger at her own chest. Buffy’s implacable finger pointed toward the front room. Dawn and Spike obeyed it glumly, both of them sitting on the floor: penitents waiting for just chastisement.

“It wasn’t my fault,” Dawn protested at once. “I didn’t know, and still don’t. I just didn’t want to get boxed in. I won’t contact the Lady, and you can’t make me!”

Pacing in the middle of the room, Buffy shot her a dire glance. “You’re next.” She halted in front of Spike, taking a wide-legged stance, arms furiously folded to keep herself from punching him out, then and there. “You lied. To Giles, and therefore to me. Giles, maybe that’s one thing. But you don’t lie to me. Never.”

“Couldn’t know he’d show up on your doorstep, now could I? Caught me on the bounce, like. Thought I could put him off and that would be the end of it. With him right here in my face, nothing for it but to keep on, innit? Wasn’t to know he’d been bloody spying on me, was I?” Spike still sounded aggrieved about that, as if Giles’ sneakiness surpassing his own was a mortal insult.

“Spike. You. Lied. To. Me.”

“Not exactly, no, I didn’t! Didn’t actually know, did I?” Spike defended himself, but halfheartedly, fiddling with an unlit cigarette, walking it up and down between his fingers. The soul was probably getting after him, Dawn surmised.

“If you didn’t know, how did you guess?” Buffy demanded, tapping a slipper toe.

Dawn accused, “You’re gonna hit. If you start hitting each other, I’m out of here. And if you break the new front window, Xander will be sooo pissed! Go have it out in the basement, why don’t you?”

Seeming to think that an idea with merit, Spike started to stand. Buffy clapped hands onto his shoulders and pushed him down again. Spike looked up at her quizzically: they all knew what their fights led into, that sometimes rattled the walls--before, during, and after.

Cheeks flushing, Buffy backed until she hit the couch and flopped to a seat there--safely distant from the temptation of hitting.

Willow, who’d been hovering by door arch, blurted, “This is private. I’ll just--”

“If Giles is in it, and Ethan fricking Rayne, we’re all in it. Sit.” Buffy pointed imperiously at the straight-back chair, and Willow meekly settled there. Nobody much wanted to argue with General Buffy when she had her rant on.

Looking back to Spike, Buffy ordered, “Tell me what you should have told me from the beginning. All of it.”

Spike sighed and slid the cigarette back into the pack and the pack into the pocket of the button-down. “Well, fact is, I didn’t even guess. It was something that Rayne said himself, ranting on about getting his own back on Rupert. By way of revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“For turning him over to those Initiative bastards. And then forgetting about him, seemed like. Three years, they had him, or so he said. Had a pretty bad time of it. No surprise there, of course….”

Dawn thought Spike had a bit of a soft spot toward anyone who hated the Initiative nearly as much as he did, had likewise suffered at their hands. Though not to the point he was all boo-hoo about Rayne’s current situation, of course: that altruistic, Spike wasn’t. Despite the soul, beyond immediate family (herself and Buffy), friends (Willow, likely Anya, and the handful of remaining SITs), and their satellite connections (like Xander), Spike was pretty much ruthless and careless as ever.

(Mike fit in there somewhere, and probably Giles; but Dawn wasn’t sure how and dismissed the issue.)

And it wasn’t as if he didn’t have good reason to hate and despise Rayne on his own account--the mage had bewitched and separated him from Buffy, brought on another bad siege of craziness, and hurt Dawn and meant to hurt her worse in an attempt to reopen the Hellmouth, just a couple of weeks back. Spike didn’t forget or forgive things like that. His sympathies were difficult to arouse; but once he’d accepted you, you were in for keeps. His anger, a lot easier to rouse, was also enduring. All you had to do was remember his century plus of mutual animosity with Angel to know that.

“Anyway,” Spike continued, “he said, Rayne did, that first thing he’d do when he got the Hellmouth open again was shove Rupert through to someplace uncongenial. He named Quor’toth. Then, there at the last of it, he yelled that he wouldn’t really have done it. I thought, after, maybe he knew. Maybe at the last, he made out where he was going. And it’s the sort of thing the Lady would do: make his word his punishment. Symmetrical, like.” Spike turned a hand in a sort-of shrug. “So I started looking. Trying to figure if it was more or less likely a Chaos Mage could work a Chaos Realm so as to get back. Figuring what to do, if he did. Then Rupert called, and I didn’t want to give him any encouragement. ‘Cause I knew if I told him, he’d want to get Bit into it, and likely you. Besides me, of course. Red, you too, maybe. On account of the only ways in being sorcerous.”

“And there are no ways out,” Willow murmured thoughtfully, and Spike bobbed his head in confirmation.

“Far as I’ve been able to tell. Fairly famous for that, actually. And certain sure there’s nobody here we’d want to shoot off there, can’t come back, no point to it. Unless Rupert’s daft enough to want to go himself, keep his…whatever Rayne is to him…company there. Or Harris. Wouldn’t miss him a bit.”

Willow warned, “Watch it, Mister!” and Spike smirked unrepentantly.

But it wasn’t a serious suggestion, and they all knew that.

After a silence, Buffy said to Spike, “You were trying to protect us.”

Spike nodded. “Us. And what we have. Apocalypse, that’s one thing--everything’s at risk then and we do whatever we have to, to get through it. Get it done. But I don’t subscribe to that level of risk just because Rupert’s got the guilts for past oversights or lonesome for his other half, now he’s finally got rid of him. Too bad for him, but s’not ours to see to, any way I can figure.”

Another silence, as Buffy thought it out. Finally she said, “And that’s all of it? All the pieces?”

“Yeah,” Spike lied, lifting a clear, untroubled countenance. “As far as I’ve got so far. Don’t want nothing to do with it. Because there’s nothing of use to do.”

Dawn tried not to squirm too obviously. Although she didn’t know full details, tonight wasn’t the first time she’d heard of Quor’toth. Months ago, in the bad time before they’d shut out the First, Spike had named it. The time when Angel had been here, large and in charge, and in an uncharacteristic fit of sympathy, Spike had inquired about helping him with a small problem. Very small problem--an infant son kidnapped away there. Into Quor’toth.

Dawn had shut down that idea fast and hard then and didn’t like it any better now. It would have involved her importuning, uninvited, her larger self, who above all things didn’t like being meddled with. Any attempt at coercion was a gilt-edged invitation to disaster and a likely termination of the inconvenient Dawn. Likely Spike, too, since he wouldn’t let her go into something like that on her own even if she’d been willing, which she was most extremely not.

Spike had yielded only the first turn of the knot and was plainly prepared to go on lying like a trouper to avoid giving Buffy any reason to yank and undo the rest. The prospect of doing the same made Dawn feel all itchy and uncomfortable. So she invoked the sovereign remedy for awkward situations: blurting, “I have to go to the bathroom,” she escaped upstairs at a dead run.

**********

As Spike and Buffy were talking quietly, Willow was thinking.

To her, the problem of Quor’toth was mainly a puzzle and a challenge--like the ultimate locked room mystery. She’d never taken particular interest in portals or other dimensions, too busy trying to understand, moderate, and control her powers to want to venture far from home and known forces, familiar parameters. Her stint with the coven in Devon had been forced on her, pretty much. Although she’d accepted that she needed the supervision and strict rules, she’d been desperately homesick the whole time.

She’d never created a portal or traveled through one.

Just the same, she didn’t have to twirl and tug at the elements of the puzzle very long before coming up with a different approach and perhaps an answer.

She considered telling Spike privately--let him decide what to do or not do with it. But that notion was entertained only for a moment before being discarded. She didn’t want to be in the position of having to keep things from Buffy…or Giles, for that matter. She imagined his situation as being like her learning an estranged Tara had been consigned to a hell dimension and was being tortured there. The imperative to rescue, to do something, would have been overwhelming. If she’d learned someone had kept from her something that would have let her end that torment, she never would have forgiven them, no matter how pure and well-intentioned their motives. Would have quite likely gone all black-eyed, veiny, and vengeful on them: she was uneasily aware of how close that My will be done mindset was, even now.

So, no. Clearing her throat, she said, “Guys? There might be a way.”

“To get into Quor'toth and then back out again?” Buffy asked. Spike was looking around at Willow too, conspicuously silent. Reading his lack of enthusiasm, Willow made an aimless gesture. “Doesn’t mean you have to actually do anything about it, but I think you should know all your options before we have to deal with Giles again.”

Bright-eyed and interested, Buffy asked, “So? What is it?”

“Basically, portals are for people. Human people,” Willow clarified. “Demons tend to use natural rifts, like the Hellmouth, because they’re more…singular. Focused. Not all-purpose, like humans. Anyway, I was thinking--”

“Cut to the chase, Red.”

“Yeah, all right. Astral travel. Manifestation on the aetherial plane. I bet, with your strong aura, you could do it, Spike. Your astral body is probably at least as coherent--pretty much the same energies, after all. And there’s your soul-tie to Dawn, to keep you anchored and maybe draw you back, if we had to. Whatever you found there wouldn’t be likely affect you, especially not in your astral body--not even fullscale sun, fire, deep water. Being immaterial, it couldn’t even be staked. You could have a look around, then we’d reel you in again. After all, we don’t actually know if Rayne is even there. It would be good to be certain of that before we even consider anything more fullscale.” Willow looked at them hopefully, waiting for their reactions.

Spike got up and started stalking away toward the back porch.

“I’d go too,” Buffy offered, and that stopped him, made him turn.

Pointing at Buffy, Spike said, “You’ll do no such of a thing.”

Buffy was up and on her feet, too. “Since when do you tell me what I can take on and what I can’t?”

“Since now. Anyway, I’m not going, so it’s dumb arguing about it. S'not our concern. That’s the whole point!”

“No, the whole point is that Giles needs our help, and we owe him, Spike. He dropped everything to come and help get you away from Rayne. We couldn’t have done it otherwise. We all owe him: Willow, too. When he comes looking for help, I’m not gonna turn him away. So we go and take a look: how bad can that be?”

Willow cut in uncomfortably, “Buffy, Spike’s right. Sure, you have the super strength and quick reflexes, the super endurance and the fast healing going for you. All the Slayer attributes. But none of that extends to your astral emination. Your aura is filmy and it has big holes and ragged patches. Even a moderate barrier would pull you to pieces. And if you got into trouble, we’d have no way of reeling you back in. You’re not connected to anything the way Spike’s connected to Dawn. Sorry, but it’s true.”

Buffy was making with the sad puppy eyes and trembling lower lip. “I have aura mange? And nobody told me?”

Predictably, Spike melted, went and held her. “Love, you’ve died twice. Been pulled out of heaven once. Things like that, they leave their mark, even if it’s not one that shows in a mirror. You never had to work getting the Slayer part of you all connected to the Buffy part and it’s not a smooth fit.”

“I have aura split ends?” Buffy mourned.

“Just not what you’re cut out for, love. Please.” Hugging her closer, Spike shut his eyes, laying his cheek on her hair. “Please don’t grieve yourself over such a thing--”

“But we’re a team, we go together, I couldn’t bear being left behind--”

“Hush. An’ I couldn’t bear-- Look. All right: if you promise to stay, I’ll go, like Red says. Try it, anyway. Not gonna do it otherwise--not for no persuasion. So you got what you wanted, each of us taking on the part we’re best at. Nothing fragile about a vamp, except maybe in the head. Always send a vamp in first, advance scout, test out what opposition you’re facing so you can choose the best way to meet it. Only common sense, innit? And doesn’t make no sense otherwise. Hush, now. You got your way.”

“You’ve been played, Spike,” Willow mentioned drily.

“Doesn’t signify. Things are how they are, no matter whether I like it or not. So, love.” Leaning a little away, Spike tilted up Buffy’s chin with thumb and forefinger, then put a quick, soft kiss on her lips with the ease and precision of the utterly familiar. “We gonna do this thing? We got a bargain here?”

Buffy’s answer was to rise onto her toes and kiss him back as though it were a wrestling move or one of the lesser known martial arts.

Willow figured that was her cue to exit, start researching methods and safeguards. In the door arch, she turned for a moment, observing. Their entwined auras were huge, completely filling the room, shivering golden with flares of deep tantric red. The tatters and gaps of Buffy's aura no longer showed, no longer mattered. No telling where one began and the other ended.

With a sigh that was only a little envious, Willow went on to begin her research.

**********

Once Spike had decided to do something, he was impatient to begin and could seldom be prevented from beginning, right then and there. But the first experiment was to be tiny training-wheels only, Dawn gathered: to see if Spike could manifest and inhabit his astral body, venturing no farther than the borders of Sunnydale.

All the same, Willow judged it prudent to have Dawn present in case Spike needed help finding his way back.

By midnight, they were ready to begin.

Yawning, Dawn looked on as Spike stretched out on the couch, far too jittery to relax, Buffy kneeling on the floor and holding his hand. Willow had a ceramic smudge pot fuming on the floor. The smoke made Dawn sneeze and her eyes prickle.

Spike jerked upright to direct Buffy, “’F this goes wrong, don’t tell Rupert we even tried, all right?”

Turning to look over her shoulder, Buffy asked Willow, “Are you sure I can’t go along? It’s only Sunnydale, after all.”

Spike snapped, “Sure, with rifts and leftover spells everyplace waiting to suck you in like blowers in a funhouse. Not a chance!”

Buffy objected, “Blowers blow. They don’t suck.”

“No matter. You’re not going. You promised,”

“But that was Quor’toth: this is home!”

Willow interrupted their bickering, thrusting a cup at Spike. “Lie down. Drink this. Relax!”

“’F I lie down, can’t drink it,” Spike grumbled, but chugged the contents of the mug in two deep swallows. There was barely time for Buffy to catch the mug before Spike dropped slack on the couch, his eyes unfocused.

Placing spread fingers on his forehead, Willow remarked apologetically, “A better mage wouldn’t need a potion. But Spike doesn’t meditate, and vamps are so hard to influence magically anyway, have to practically hit ‘em with a hammer but not really, but otherwise we could be all night before we could even get started--”

“Will,” said Buffy tightly, setting the mug aside with her free hand. “Get on with it.”

“Right.” Closing her eyes briefly, Willow muttered a few words, and Spike’s eyes shut. She waited a few minutes, then leaned in close. “Spike. Listen. Hear my voice. You’re anchored here, safe. Feel your aura. Spread it now, as wide as you can.” Her own eyes vague, Willow looked around, obviously checking, then returned her attention to Spike. “That’s good. Feel it extended, aware of the room, and us, and the night. It’s not something strange, it’s you. Feel the wards around the house that keep out anything with ill intent. All safe here. Safe to let go. Your aura is a part of you, you know that, you can feel that. Bring it to a shape that feels good to you. Feels easy and comfortable.” Willow paused for another vague-eyed check. “Good. Now go into it.”

Dawn felt a wrenching something within and made a strangled gulp of distress.

“Dawnie?” asked Willow anxiously.

Whatever had changed, steadied--the soul connection, Dawn guessed. Different, attenuated, but still there. And then a yank--like what she felt when Spike opened a rift and went through alone.

“Dawnie?” Willow asked again, as on the couch Spike went game-faced, snarling--shifting restlessly as if trying to awaken. Buffy and Willow both pounced on him, Buffy holding tight, kissing and petting his changed face, Willow muttering words and tapping him at the magically receptive points of forehead, eyes, heart, groin. He surged up, then subsided, lapsing back into the trance but still game-faced, still making grumbling, growling sounds of discontent.

“What?” Buffy asked Willow, both of them leaning away, leaving off the efforts to calm and constrain.

“I don’t know.”

“Is he all right?”

Dawn put in listlessly, “He’s gone.”

“What do you mean, gone?” Buffy wanted to know.

The drowsy fumes of the smudge made Dawn’s head swim. All at once, she was terribly tired. She curled up on the floor, her head pillowed on an arm, and was instantly asleep.

The agreement was that on this trial run, Spike was only to stay away an hour or so: long enough to get accustomed to inhabiting his astral body, learning how to direct it, how to interpret its perceptions.

When Dawn awoke, the smudge was cold, the front room was full of indirect morning light, and Willow and Buffy were both asleep, leaned awkwardly on the couch--Buffy at the head, Willow at the foot. And Spike was still in game-face, head twitching as though in the throes of dreams of slaughter and mayhem.

Full light, out. Couldn’t be good, might be bad.

Scuffing on her knees, rubbing her eyes, Dawn moved to the couch and closed her hands around Spike’s left arm, that was hers because of the spiral green tattoo he’d had marked there, that signified Dawn. Nothing magical, just the outward representation of the connection between them, but with its own power because of the meaning with which they invested it.

“Spike. Come home now. Come back, it’s daylight. Time to come home and rest, lair up quiet in the safe dark.” Trying to feel the inward connection, pull on the immaterial tether, Dawn kept calling him as first Buffy, then Willow, roused all full of cricks and stiffness and tried in various ways to add to the summoning.

After about fifteen minutes Dawn felt a sudden shift within and knew Spike was back. Game face was smoothed away. But he still seemed entranced--eyes wide and amazed, mouth slightly open, completely still and seemingly unaware of them, no matter what any of them did to try to fully awaken him.

Since he didn’t seem hurt or in any distress, they finally left him to attend to bathroom breaks and breakfast. Distractedly crunching cereal, Willow was arguing with herself about the advisability of peeking into his head, just a little, only for a second, hardly at all, in spite of his unambiguous order that she do no such thing, but these were different circumstances, and--

Dawn carried her plate of toaster pastries into the front room, but found Spike gone. Oops! She checked the den, then left her plate there and dashed for the basement, calling an alert as she passed the kitchen so Willow and Buffy scattered to hunt, too. He wasn’t in any of the shadowed corners of the basement, so Dawn charged up the stairs again--and found him wedged small in the corner under the upstairs staircase--a windowless triangular space where absolutely no natural light could reach.

Calling, “Found him!” Dawn went down on her knees, to meet his eyes on a level. “Spike, are you OK? Just tell me you’re OK, and we’ll leave you alone, if that’s what you want…. Spike?”

She’d never seen him look like this. The only word that came to her was rapturous and the connected words after: enraptured; rapt. As if, in his excursion in spectral form, he’d seen something, done something, been something that’d taken him completely out of himself and from which, even back within his body, he couldn’t disengage. Couldn’t even want to: his eyes, when they flicked to her, were full of happiness and delight. He looked indefinably younger and full of joy, and lifted a hand to her, pulling her down to nestle against his side as though he wanted to share some revelation but hadn’t yet found a way or the words. When Buffy arrived, all worried and concerned, he invited and drew her close, too, and even Willow, reluctantly pulled into the sprawled group hug on the floor. Not unpleasant but uber weird and very unSpikelike. Dawn had the feeling that if Xander had been there, Spike would have wanted to hug him too, which would have freaked Xander out completely.

Willow was already freaked. Leaning away from Spike’s happy attempt to pat her face, she exclaimed worriedly, “What are we gonna tell Giles?”

**********

Buffy was annoyed, upset. First, they couldn’t get Spike to talk. Then they couldn’t get him to shut up. No decrease of weirdness, either way.

After a few mute hours, he started muttering disjointed phrases, about light, and stars, and crunchy grass, and a house that was so very very sad it put him in tears to even think about. Snagging one of Willow’s color-coded notebooks--red, this time--and a pen, he settled on the stairs, a few steps up, alternately scribbling and staring into space. Paying Buffy less than no attention when she went up and down, veering around him; oblivious to her sitting on a higher step and hugging him close from behind.

Leaning to read over his shoulder, she found the whole page full of unpunctuated writing, some words at odd angles to one another as though he was simultaneously trying to draw a diagram and compose a linear narrative. Lots of single words rendered in caps, some circled--STARS; SINGING; SAD. They were the punctuation, standing alone, connected to nothing before or after.

It infuriated and frightened her not to be noticed. It was insupportable that he could be so obviously happy without her, completely absorbed in anything that wasn’t her. She had to stifle the impulse to yank away the notebook and fling it toward the front door. Grabbing one of Spike’s notebooks had once nearly had dire consequences: she wouldn’t do that again.

Finally, that problem was taken care of by Spike himself: after writing, five times, sunrise, sunrise, sunrise, sunrise, sunrise, all in a descending column, he burst out, “Fuck!” and hurled the notebook so hard its wire spiral binding bent as it hit the corner of the den doorway. Gone game-faced and sudden, he grabbed onto the nearest breakable objects, the spindles of the staircase’s outer railing, and started methodically cracking them out, flinging them away.

Buffy had seen him explode like this before: he’d have the whole railing down and afterward start hammering on the walls, ripping out chunks of plaster and lath, before the fury had run its course. The last time, Buffy had stayed clear, waited for it to burn out on its own. Now she was already angry with him and, for the first time in over a year, the whole house was set to rights, everything tidy and repaired. He was not entitled to go into a tantrum and bring as much of the house down as he could get at!

When he brought his arm back to hurl a spindle like a javelin at one of the narrow windows set either side of the door, Buffy grabbed his wrist, tore the spindle away, and started hitting him with it. Locking hands around her throat, Spike tipped backward, off the now rail-less part of the staircase, taking her with him.

After that, it got fast and wild as anything between them, ever. In the confined space of the hallway, they rebounded off the walls, airborne more than half the time, all leverages ferociously exploited. No semi-playful, amorous sparring here. An all-out fight, punishing and savage as anything in the bad old days. Ribs gave; bruises bloomed. The hall table was crushed to legless flinders. When he came within an inch of getting a thumb into her eye, she whirled and kicked him, full strength, in the crotch, slamming him against the opposite wall, leaving a Spike-shaped indentation in the plaster. He was down, holding himself, no more than a second before he surged up again, fangs bared, roaring. In mid-leap, he collapsed: Willow, on the staircase, had made a gesture, said a Word. Everything went still.

Descending the stairs a careful step at a time, holding the wobbly cracked-loose railing, pale and wobbly-looking herself, Willow said in a voice about an octave above normal, “Always knew I’d need that sometime. I don’t care if he is pissed at me: it was an emergency! Wasn’t it, Buffy? An emergency?”

Breathing hard, Buffy was reining in the impulse to kick him in the head. Several times. Hard. She turned around and slammed her fist into the door of the hall closet. It cracked on a diagonal and the top piece fell off. She glared at it stupidly, trying to back off, inside, from full fight mode. Shuddering and dry-mouthed with adrenaline.

“Will, why’s he like this?”

Seating herself on the bottom step, Willow gestured helplessly. “I don’t know. I never heard of a vampire attempting astral travel before. But his aura’s so strong and coherent, he transferred into it all right, there shouldn’t have been any problem--”

“Could something have got at him out there?” Sleepily mussed and in flannel PJs, Dawn was leaning hesitantly over the drooping section of railing. “Nasties on the astral plane?”

“I don’t know, Dawnie,” Willow replied. “We’ll have to wait until he gets back to normal and can tell us.”

Stepping carefully around Willow, Dawn descended to pick up the broken-backed red notebook, soberly scanning the writing. As Buffy considered what Spike could be tied down to that he couldn’t crack and liberate himself from, since the manacles and chains were long gone, Dawn remarked, “Well, at least this tells why he was gone so long.” When they both stared at her blankly, she lifted the notebook as though the conclusion should be self-evident. “He stayed to watch the sunrise.”

That made no sense: every instinct a vamp had was to escape, hide from the sunrise. Buffy shook the thought away. “Dawn, get Mike over here. ASAP.”

As Dawn scampered back upstairs for her cellphone, commenting, “He can come through the tunnel, but he’s real hard to wake up, this time of day,” Buffy made up her mind and headed for the phone on the weapons chest: they were gonna have to bring Giles in on this, no option.

**********

After lunch they convened in the basement, surrounding the steel-framed school desk-chair Spike was almost too thoroughly tied into. Dawn had given Mike her taser in the certainty he’d use it without compunction if they needed to stop Spike in his tracks again. What with the trance spell and then the stop spell, Willow had declared herself all spelled out for the time being, and Buffy didn’t want to risk engaging in another Spike-Buffy go-round for fear of Grievous Bodily Harm on one side or the other. Hence Mike, designated for guard duty.

Evidence of the last go-round was plain--Buffy had sore, swollen knuckles and her ribs bound, preferring to stand; Spike had two gorgeous black eyes, possibly a broken nose, and at least a broken arm, perhaps internal injuries. Nobody had asked what he preferred.

Awake, aware, Spike slouched despondently in the chair, legs out before him, crossed at the ankles. Hints of game-face came and went in his face like shadows. His eyes hadn’t quite turned but seemed to have settled on a half-lidded, muddy green.

Dawn approached him tentatively, trying to avoid upsetting him, which was probably impossible anyway at this point. “Spike? Are you OK now? Are you…yourself?”

Spike’s answer was a surprisingly bitter laugh and a contorted face and harsh breathing, fighting off tears. Finally he said, “Yeah, whatever that’s worth.”

“You didn’t do much damage,” Buffy offered, standing carefully straight.

“But some,” Spike replied flatly, awaiting confirmation.

“Some,” Buffy admitted. “What set you off?”

“Well, I didn’t know it was you, did I?” Spike burst out, as though that were all the explanation needed. “Couldn’t hold onto it, couldn’t make it go into words, dragged back to the fucking demon and it all furious that I’d got away from it even for that little while--”

Dawn interrupted the rant, “Seven hours, Spike. You were gone for over seven hours.”

He finally looked at her, saw her. Focused on her, what she’d said. Frowning, puzzled, responding, “If you say so, Bit. Didn’t seem but the whirl of an instant, all of it coming in, and then the light growing and the sun coming, the shining drops on every leaf of grass, so wonderful….”

With sudden insight, recalling what he’d once told her, Dawn said, “It was like being turned, wasn’t it.” She didn’t need an answer. She simply knew. And apparently when he’d shifted into his astral body, the demon had been left behind--the first time he’d been free of it for over a century. “Everything shining and new, without taint, without shadow,” she hypothesized softly.

“Oh, shadows aplenty,” Spike contradicted. “Hurt and wrong and death everywhere. But I was apart from it, could see it plain. And also birth, the new life shining like stars, and the stars too, so clean, so far away….” His voice had become a rapt whisper. “And then the miracle, the rising sun, pink and golden….” Louder, furious again, he declared, “An’ I can’t keep it. Can’t hold it, what it was. Can barely recall what it felt like, how it seemed. An’ it wouldn’t go into words, I don’t have the words to hold even a bit of it. It’s wasted on me, what I am.” On the school chair’s arms, the narrow one and the broader desk one, his hands were clenching and unclenching in despair and frustration of what he couldn’t hold or communicate well enough even to himself.

From the rear of the group, where he’d been quiet and reserved all this while, seeming rather abashed that Spike had taken on this trial willingly to a purpose that was not his own, Giles quoted quietly, “‘If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.’”

“’And Holy,’” Spike agreed, on a sigh, looking earnestly past Buffy at Giles who maybe understood. “Yeah. Something like that, I guess. Can’t hold onto it, but just for a bit, it was. Or seemed so. But I’m such a fucking hopeless poet, the words wouldn’t come--!” He slammed his hands on the chair arms (the broken bone already aligned and nearly healed, Dawn deduced), and Mike took a step nearer, but Spike merely slumped again.

“For some things,” said Giles gently, “there are no words.”

“But there are!” Spike protested hotly. “There has to be! How can you know it if you can’t fucking say it? The thing itself or the shape around it, all luminous-like, meaning rising from it as thick as smoke but shining, everything shining--!” Choking himself off again, Spike turned his head, chin hard against his shoulder. “An’ then to come back, be pulled back to this, to what I was….”

“Was the soul with you there?” Giles inquired. “Where you were? As you were?”

“Dunno. S’pose so. Hardly know, now. Wasn’t considering myself. Not with all that there, all so plain, so wondrous.”

“You forget,” Buffy said suddenly, gaze fixed on a point high on the wall. “Remember, maybe, what you felt…but not what it was. I was so sick and hopeless, being dragged away from that, back to this. Losing what had been so simple and right and plain, for everything complicated, all the jagged edges, the violent light….” Kneeling stiffly by the chair, she lifted a hand to the side of Spike’s face. “If it’s anything like that, Spike, you mustn’t ever do this again. Not if it’s like losing heaven.”

Spike looked at her then as he’d looked at Giles before--hopeful, agonized, seeking some correspondence to the literally unspeakable he couldn’t entirely remember or forget.

In a low, apologetic voice, Willow commented, “It isn’t, though. Not heaven. Only the astral plane, where things take on their true appearances. Their essential nature. I’ve seen it, and it’s not so much. To me, it wasn’t. Of course, I hadn’t left a demon, an animus, behind that otherwise moderated everything for me. I didn’t have a soul, freshly freed, expanding in joyous awe to at last see things perfectly plain in their spiritual essences. I wasn’t crazy-desperate, afterward, to try to stuff it into words.” She shrugged and spread her hands. “We see only what we can see, I guess. I was all busy, cool, observy gal, totally locked on finishing my errand, whatever it was. Warding the house, or trying to locate and determine influence, or something basically mundane like that. I wasn’t wide open to it, waiting to be struck by the lightning.”

“Wasted on me,” Spike muttered again. “Can’t even hold onto anything but a few scraps of shell, but the bird’s flown. The sunrise, it was golden and pink and indigo, the glory rising, and I knew it all, felt it all…. But couldn’t hold on. An’ my demon, s’telling me it was nothing, nothing like that exists, s’not but a glamour and a fake when about the only thing I know about it for certain is that it was true.”

“Truth,” Giles said, “is best handled in small doses.” Going to the chair, he set a slow, careful hand on Spike’s shoulder. “That you undertook the Siege Perilous on my account is beyond thanks; and it’s wounded you to the heart. Buffy’s right: you must not attempt this again. Not and expect to find peace afterward. Even though I didn’t ask it, it’s too much to ask. I must find some other way.”

“Didn’t do it for you,” Spike responded sullenly. “Done it so Buffy would leave off about it, and so she wouldn’t go barging into it with her skin off. She’s not suited for such. She’s not had the practice I’ve had, being crazy, seeing everything fifteen ways at once and two thirds of it fake, trying to force it into sense. And ‘f you’ve given over your daft plan of getting that Rayne out of a place there’s no getting out from, we’ll give you three rousing cheers as we boot you out the door and wish you Godspeed to wherever’s not here.”

Since Spike seemed about normal again, ill-tempered and ungracious, Buffy apparently felt it was safe to start undoing his bonds.

**********

When it was dark enough, Spike retreated to the back porch to have a cigarette. It wasn’t long before he felt Dawn come out behind him, accusing, “You’re brooding.”

“Am not. No such thing.”

“Are too. You’re Broody McBroodypants.”

“And what would you know about it, Miss I-Have-No-Hips?”

“That’s mean. Also low. And people with really elevated tastes don’t care about hips. The true connoisseur goes for the enticing smell. Or so I hear,” Dawn riposted glumly. “And, moreover, no one but the utterly crass and insensitive would follow trashing the downstairs hall with loudly breaking a bed with a make-up boinkfest.”

Spike had to smile, pensively regarding the coal of his cigarette. “Slayer healing, that’s a fine thing,” he responded obliquely.

“Doesn’t beat vamp acrobatics,” Dawn stated loyally. “Bet you can even lift that arm now.”

Spike lifted the healing arm--still a bit sore, but serviceable--to show yes, he could. Dawn plunked onto the step next to him in the gap thus provided. She leaned in, so he did the necessary: lowering the arm, holding her close. Like Buffy, she was hot as a little furnace. The contact felt good, a living contrast to the isolated place in his mind where he was no more than a passing consciousness contemplating more beauty than he could bear, more significance than he could take in.

That was all he had left--the impact on him, not the thing itself at all. Gold, pink, indigo. The splendid light, powerful and gentle, and he not afraid at all, gazing at the glory, the deadly forbidden.

“You’re doing it again. Zoning out.”

“Am not. Just thinking. Because I’m a thoughtful sort of chap.” Though Dawn was wearing a heavy fleece hoodie, she was shivering. “Here, you should get back in. Catch your death, blood all thin from the summerlands.”

He didn’t lift his arm, and she didn’t move to go.

“My blood’s perfectly fine, thank you. I have it on good authority. Although you’re not much use as a toaster, you make an excellent windbreak. Summerlands. I’ll forego the pun and just put on imploring face,” (which evidently involved rounding her eyes huge, raising her eyebrows, and tilting her head to maybe an angle of 30 degrees) “and say, ‘What’s that, Spike?’”

“Oh, a tale. From when I was a lad. Nurse used to say. That there was an island to westward someplace, hard to find on account of the fogs that were always there, to shield it, like. Where it was always summer, and the good things to eat, and the music. Sailors heard the music and it sent them mad, jumping over the side and swimming until they drowned. Or some washed up on the shore, after a storm, maybe, and some of them got home again after awhile. But they were never content, always listening for that music. Wandering around pale and gaunt, searching for it, always unsatisfied.” Spike hitched the shoulder nearest her in a small shrug. “Fairyland, more or less.”

“Why did you need a nurse?” Dawn asked. “Were you sick?”

“Sometimes. Not a sound pair of lungs in the lot of us. How my two sisters were taken…. But no, not how you mean. When I was a lad, families with the dosh for it had servants. Cook, butler, housemaid, scullery maid, ladies’ maid, groom for the carriage, and considerable more for the higher folk. For children too young to be sent away to school, there’d be a nurse, maybe a tutor or two. Had a nurse, couple of tutors, there for a bit.”

“Oh.” Dawn thought about it for a few minutes, then said, “Well, you’ve got the pale and gaunt down cold. You want to get back to it, don’t you. Quite a lot.”

“Ain’t done it yet,” Spike replied lightly, and patted her head with his off hand. “Arrow’s not short of the mark, though,” he admitted. “But thing about the Summerlands, it comes at the price of all you have. Broke enough furniture for one day, I expect. Don’t want to sacrifice any more, just ‘cause my demon, it’s all out of sorts that I slipped that tether for awhile. Left it behind. Flew free.”

He thought she’d ask how it had been, to have the demon absent and the soul alone centering him. And he’d have answered “Very strange.” But she didn’t ask that.

Instead, she asked acutely, “When were you a poet?”

“Never. Always. The sort who’d go all trembly ‘cause he’d seen a dewdrop perched on the tip of a blade of grass. You know the sort.”

“Like sort of a proto-geek,” Dawn theorized.

“Worse. Sort that chases after an Ideal Beauty bare instead of getting down to a good, hard fuck.” Spike drew in a long breath. “Never mind that, Bit. Shouldn’t say things like that to you. I’m a bit off.”

“I’d noticed,” Dawn responded dryly. “You don’t like the poet much. Why? Wasn’t he nice?”

“Oh, very nice. Nice enough to gag a pig.”

“Uber-nice.”

“At least that. Thought I’d smothered him out of me long since. But last night….”

“--he was back.”

“Yeah. Seems like.” Pitching the butt-end of one cigarette, Spike morosely lit another. “Terrible waste of the space. Give me some time, I’ll starve him out again. Demon can’t abide him one bit. Things all roiled up inside.” With the cigarette hand, he made a circling motion over his chest. “Since the soul, after the crazy, had a kind of truce in there. Not no more.”

“The demon wants to prove it owns everything, runs everything.”

“Well, it’s what’s kept me going all this while. Tending the works, wanting only a tithe of blood for its pay. Doesn’t like bein’ left alone in an empty house, so to say. Expect it’s entitled to be mad. But while it’s all furious, and taking every chance to show it runs things, I’m somewhat on edge and…distracted.”

“No shit, Sherlock. Did you apologize to Buffy, about the hall and the railing?”

Spike bent his head, smiling small. “After a fashion.”

“Ahuh. And that broke the bed.”

“About that, yeah. Not much of a bed anyways. Needed replacing. Way too small for a grown girl like her, with…company.”

“Acrobatic company. Energetic, even. Enthusiastic.”

“I expect. That too. Though she does her share, with the enthusiastic. Or best I can persuade her to. Sorry, Bit. Shouldn’t get into that. Things get ahead of me, past me just now.”

“Because you’re distracted,” Dawn formulated.

“Yeah.”

“And brooding.”

“No! Well, maybe a little. Around the edges.”

“Spike,” Dawn began seriously, pursuing a related thought, “don’t you think somebody should tell--”

“No.”

“--Giles about what else is in Quor’toth? Or even--”

“No. That book’s shut now. I came, I tried, I totally fucked it up. End of story. No need to hurt Buffy with the rest of it.”

“Hurt Buffy?”

“Who’s taking my name in vain?” Buffy enquired cheerfully, leaning out the kitchen door behind them. When nobody replied, she stepped out onto the porch, dutifully shutting the door to conserve the expensive heat. “I’ve interrupted something. Don’t bother denying it--I can tell. I’m a minor expert on the different flavors of awkward silence I can produce. Spike, I know you’ve been busy brooding--”

Dawn barked triumphantly, “Ha!” Presumably she’d scored points with that one.

Spike said, “Afterglow, pet. Enjoying it.”

“Sure, with cigarettes, outside, with Dawn and not me. Sure you were. I believe everything you say, because you’re a fountain of truth. You drip truthfulness. Not! Anyway, have you seen Willow? Supper’s almost ready, and I called, but nothing. Did she say anything to either of you about going out?”

“Nope,” Dawn said.

“Not to me,” Spike agreed. “But she was pretty knackered. Maybe she’s having a lie-down. Put something aside for her, she can heat up later, maybe?”

Dawn leaned away, rearing her head back to give him an incredulous stare. “Sleep? Through that?”

Buffy’s cheeks went hot. And not just her cheeks, neither. Spike admitted, “Well, there’s that, I suppose. Maybe you should go tap at her door, Bit. Then look and see if she’s there.”

“OK, I’ll do the recon.” Dawn bounced to her feet and ran off inside, leaving the door ajar. Grimacing in exasperation, Buffy shut it.

As she turned, Spike began, “Now, pet, about the bed. There’s the one I had run up special. Basement’s just about ready for it now. Place is soundproofed, piping relocated, all set to specifications, except the bath’s not been put in, need to talk to Harris about that…. Anyway, is it time to put it up? Settle in, sort of, till we figure how to fix yours, get another one, whatever you say?”

“No chains?” Buffy asked pointedly. “No manacles? Nothing bolted to the floor?”

“Still don’t see what the problem was with that. But if you don’t want, no. Whatever you want.”

“Then I guess so. Guess we could give it a try. Lose the ‘Stag at Bay,’ ‘Toreador Menaced by Bull,’ and ‘Elvis on velvet’ hangings, though. They’d give me nightmares.”

“It’s what I could find.” Spike was alarmed by another possibility. “You don’t want to girly it all up, do you? Pink ruffles, an’ all?”

“I think we can find some compro--”

Dawn barged out the door, flinging it back so hard it smacked against the siding. Alarm was boiling off her; her face was bloodless. Before she’d got a word out, or needed to, Spike and Buffy were both past her, going for the stairs.

Vibrant auburn hair fanned wide, Willow lay on her bedroom floor in an elaborately chalked circle--several colors employed. Blue for peace; white for focus; red for intensity and intent; green for sustenance, endurance. Some symbols Spike recognized, but he didn’t need that: he knew from the first glance what this was, what it meant.

Buffy almost lunged forward, but Spike caught her arm, kept her clear of the markings. Willow had brought a pitcher of water with her into the circle. A nearly empty glass stood near her hand. Willow had prepared, sort of, for the long haul.

“Don’t disturb her, love. Could make her lose the connection,” Spike advised quietly.

“She’s gone,” Buffy stated tightly. “To look, on her own. Without saying word one to me about it. To any of us.”

“Red knows what she’s about. Has a good bit of power. ‘M sure she figured to come back on her own, no one the wiser. Maybe she’ll still do that. Be a couple-few days, anyway, before she’ll start to go off.” Buffy made a repulsed face; Spike took no notice, thinking. “Rupert due for supper, is he?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t specifically ask him. Things got a bit disrupted today, you might have noticed. I don’t even know if he’s still here!”

As Dawn ran in, hovering anxiously by the door, Spike told Buffy, “Call him then, why don’t you. Might be he’d know if she should be taken to hospital, plugged all full of tubes, or if we should wait it out, see what happens.”

After a backward glance comprised of affection, worry, and anger, Buffy ran off to find the nearest phone.

Blood Price, Chapter 2

2005-03-21T20:35:26Z

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 2: Terminal Beach

Dawn opened and set out the container of potato salad and Buffy dished herself some onto a paper plate while Spike instructed Mike in the fine art of reheating takeout spicy wings in a barbeque basket with a handle not nearly long enough for a vamp, considering the bonfire. As an ex-mercenary, Mike probably knew twenty times what Spike did about camping out but was tactful enough not to let on, accepting the instruction and its fiery result without comment. Probably didn’t care all that much either way, Dawn judged, since he’d already had two cups of blood and likely regarded the spicy wings as dessert.

That was when Buffy innocently asked for a napkin and there weren’t any.

Spike blew up, acting as if her remark about napkins was a coded admission that she didn’t like the place because it was dead and unchanging and not up to her expectations, not fucking good enough for her, and Buffy protested and declared him insane since all it was, was frickin’ napkins, for heaven’s sake, both of them throwing their arms and yelling.

Since Mike had backed off, opting to be merely a large and disinterested feature of the landscape, it was clear that Dawn intervention was called for.

Springing erect, arms tight to her sides, she screeched, “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!” Dawnscreech having achieved the required startled silence, she rounded on Spike, declaring, “There are three convenience stores within a block of the alley. They’re open all night. I’ll go and get some napkins, all right?”

Not looking at anyone, Mike put in quietly, “Not alone.”

That was so self-evidently reasonable that it took discussion to sort out. The upshot, of course, was that Spike would accompany her since it took both of them to open the rift anyway.

Dragging her hoodie on and scuffing into her flip-flops, Dawn said flatly, “Fine. Fine!” and stomped off along the ascending line of their tracks.

Though it was plain, even from this side, where the rift had to be, Spike was forever tuning himself to it and locking on. No focus whatever. They burst through into the dark alley, frigid by contrast. Dawn pulled her shoulders in and hugged herself, walking fast--slap, slap, slap up the alley--refusing to notice whether Spike followed or not. It was all his fault anyway, with his insane-o hypersensitivity about whether Buffy would like his obviously inadequate and napkinless offering. But she had to notice because napkins cost money and she hadn’t thought to ask for any.

Points deducted for that, as well as for overlooking the omission of napkins in the first place: reviewing and finalizing the list had been her responsibility. With Spike scattering in twenty panicked, hysterical directions, obviously somebody had to keep a cool eye and a clear head. Plain who that had to be.

If she didn’t retrieve the situation, she could be into debit points for the whole night.

So she fussed and fumed in the garish light of the Quik-Mart, waiting for Spike to charge the box of napkins and a couple packs of cigarettes on the plastic for a clerk who probably thought he’d seen everything but not a barelegged girl in pink flip-flops in the company of a barefoot, grim-looking tough wearing only jeans, whose face, chest, and hands were bloodily sticky with what was, in fact, barbeque sauce. In December.

“Cookout,” Dawn explained brightly. “Forgot the napkins.”

Didn’t help much to make them seem anything like normal, she could see. So she skittered quickly after Spike, who’d stopped outside to light a cigarette, indifferent to the cold.

“Spike, get a grip,” she implored, dancing and freezing. “It’s not the end of the world, for God’s sake. It’s napkins!”

Spike turned toward the alley, pacing slow. He seemed to be having trouble keeping the cigarette lit, stopping to relight it three times. If he could, Dawn thought, he would have run and finished the evening with a stinking drunk, savage fight up at Willy’s if he could find somebody stupid enough to take him on; but that would mean leaving her alone and Buffy and Mike stuck on the Terminal Beach and he couldn’t quite make himself do that.

He was putting himself through agonies. It was totally demented.

Only not from his own perspective. To him, it was real.

“Look,” Dawn said, catching his arm at the head of the alley, “there are advantages to dead: no ants. No mosquitoes or sand fleas. You’re imagining Buffy sees the place like you do, like any vamp would--barren, sterile, lifeless.”

“What would you know about it,” Spike retorted in a harsh, dismissive mutter.

“I asked Mike, of course. Because he doesn’t like it. He’s only there because I didn’t give him an out. He was willing to admit to ‘nice,’ which translates as ‘tolerable.’ No more life than a mural. Nothing much to touch, nothing at all to fight, no smells, barely light. Everything blood-colored and still. Pretty enough on the surface but only on the surface. Ancient and dead and worn-out underneath. Like the inside of a vamp’s head, blown up to be a world.”

“Thanks a lot.” Spike pitched the cigarette that wouldn’t stay lit and stood uselessly tamping a fresh one on the pack.

“But what you’re not taking account of,” Dawn ran on earnestly, “is that’s not what it is to Buffy. It’s warm, and a break, and a gift, and new to her. We’re there. And that’s enough. It doesn’t have to be perfect to be enough, Spike.”

He set his shoulder against the corner bricks, head bent. “She said. Said it was perfect. Wasn’t.”

“It was as close as we could come in the time we had. She was happy. Until you started throwing a fucking imbecilic tantrum about napkins!”

‘Wasn’t about the napkins. And your sis doesn’t want you talking like that anymore.”

“It’s you I’m talking to: who else is gonna hear, Spike? Let her be happy, even if it’s not your sort of happiness. If she can enjoy it, let her. It was for her, remember? You did what you thought she’d like, what you hoped she wanted. You don’t paint my toenails because my toes are so fascinating, you do it because you love me and we’re together and it’s a connection, a pretext, and it’s fun, Spike! Silly and stupid and fun! It doesn’t have to be the answer to the Meaning of Life, it only has to be fun! And you’re ruining it! Wanting it to be everything, mean everything, when it’s only a Goddamned extradimensional picnic, Spike--!”

Finally moving, Spike gathered her in, elbow crooked around her neck in a sort of loose headlock, thumb and fist under her chin. “Cold. Should get you back to the fire.”

Leaning together, against each other, they sidled along the SUV to the back wall. Maybe it was a better omen that Spike located the rift as easily as lifting a hand to a doorknob.

“Break out the wine,” Dawn advised as they emerged on Terminal Beach. Grabbing the plastic sack from Spike, Dawn flapped it triumphantly overhead as they put fresh footprints on what was becoming a path. “Napkins! We have actual napkins! We’ve saved the day! The world is again safe for the sticky-fingered!” Making a bee-line for the beacon fire, she rotated before it as on an upright spit. The heat was glorious. Her teeth might even stop chattering.

Spike had stopped by Buffy, who was making a point of fastidiously licking her fingers, as though that took the whole of her attention.

After a teetering silence, Spike remarked quietly, “Gonna stow the card and some miscellaneous, wouldn’t do to lose that. Then swim out a ways. Get clean.” Gazing out over the water, he added, “Want to come?”

“In a minute,” Buffy responded coolly. “Don’t worry: I’ll find you.” After he’d turned, trudging toward the cabana, Buffy muttered, “Jerk!”

Dawn approved. The only proper approach when Spike was being stubborn or obnoxious was to ignore him. Offer no encouragement at all. Even Buffy knew that.

The day was rescued from minus points. Dawn figured she’d brought things about even.

**********

Mike accepted the gooey cracker and then a quick-following offered paper napkin, even though that was all backward: he should be attending on Dawn, not the other way around.

He had minions to do to his word, as was proper, in the slowly developing lair toward the east side of town. If they didn’t do as they were told, or didn’t try hard enough to anticipate what he’d want, or tried too hard to be quicker than him and do before they’d been told, like one particularly annoying and ambitious subordinate he hadn’t quite decided to dust, Mike wasted no time putting them in their place…which was under his word, under his hand. He’d learned that from Spike and practiced it ruthlessly, as a Master Vampire should.

He knew precisely where he stood in the complex and ever-shifting hierarchies of vampire societies.

But with Dawn, that was all upside down. She’d commanded him here, commanded him to sit and stay, then waited on him. It was her pleasure to do so, even though he knew perfectly well that she’d wanted him here so she wouldn’t be relegated to least, in the company of just Buffy and Spike. So she wouldn’t have to do all the scut work and the heavy lifting while they went off and fought or fucked or whatever they happened to be doing at the moment. And then she turned around and with happy solemnity concocted s’mores one by one and passed them to him, even though he’d come, and stayed, to her word.

It made no sense.

The s’mores were good, but sticky. He scrubbed his fingers in the sand, then dusted off with the napkin and drank the rest of the jug rosé he’d poured into the plastic cup he’d had some blood in before, for courtesy. He tried never to be in Dawn’s company unless he was fed up, needing nothing from her in that way. His demon mostly minded him now, but he’d made some bad mistakes before, misjudgments, and didn’t want to make any of the predictable ones. Always found some new one to make, seemed like.

“I don’t like that smile,” Dawn announced, so Mike bent his head further and put the smile away, inside, like folding away trueface. “What’s that smile about?”

“Thinking how I want to do right by you, and don’t know how. Knowing I’ll mess up some way, wondering what it’ll be this time.”

“Don’t worry about it,” she responded, with a small smile of her own. “Don’t rush off and do something insane, like get a soul. You do fine, considering you’re only six. You’re not here on a trial basis, Mike. You’re Spike’s declared get, and you get a pass from Buffy, and that’s pretty rare all by itself.”

Mike stopped pouring more wine to point with the cup-holding hand. “See, that’s part of it, right there. Slayer, she’s like his sire--he told me so, and he hops as best he can when she calls ‘frog.’ So that’s plain. And his claiming me as his get, even though it ain’t so, that’s still plain, too. We both know where we stand, or mostly.”

“And where’s that?” Dawn asked, settling down in the sand to nibble at the edges of a s’more she’d finally made just for herself.

“One day, I’m gonna beat him. Then things will change. Don’t know exactly how, but I know they will. He knows it, too. Stays wide of me.” Mike finished pouring the wine, then capped the jug and set it back in the plastic tub about half filled with melting ice. “But that’s strange, too. Couple times, in that business with that Rayne, I thought there was nothing for it, to keep you safe, but to do for Spike. Take him out of the equation and it would fall apart: mage, maiden, and…whatever Spike’s made of himself, don’t know exactly what that is, standing in the sun, opening portals, rifts…. Seems like he’s part mage now but he says no, it’s just the reading, the translation….” Dawn’s eyes were dark and wide and she was breathing a little fast, upset by what he was saying, and Mike guessed he knew why. “Yeah, know you’d be real put out at me if I done that, and there were always complications, so I didn’t. But the thing is, Dawn, I was wrong. He wasn’t what I thought him, he brought it all down his ownself, like I was sure he couldn’t. Kept you from being hurt bad, which I couldn’t see any way to do or I’d have done it. And I don’t know how I could be so wrong about a thing like that, that I think I understand. So how am I to know how to do, how to be, with all that I don’t understand?”

Thing about Dawn, she took his puzzlement as seriously as he felt it. Didn’t wind it around with attitude or try to twist it into something different from what he was feeling or try to convince him he didn’t feel what he did. He could say anything to her straight-out and know she’d answer the same. Plain spoken, almost, as a vamp. Except she wasn’t. She was a Key. And who the hell knew what that meant?

Something of that inner thump of discouragement must have showed, because she asked, “And what was that about?”

Mike shrugged. “Thinking how it’s easy to talk to you. And yet it’s not. Because I don’t know what you are. Or what you want.”

“Most of the time, I don’t, either,” Dawn responded with a wry smile. “Playing it by ear, here. Just like you are. Making myself up as I go by what I choose, what I do. Like Spike does. By who I…care for. Who matters to me. ‘I learn by going where I have to go.’”

Mike knew by the cadence, and her tone, that they were borrowed words: “That’s poetry.”

Dawn cleaned off the last of the s’more from her fingers the same way Mike had: first the sand, then the napkin. It pleased him, that he’d given her something, taught her something, no fuss about it, just there. “Spike has this big overdue library book in the basement. I’m trying to think my way into it, the pieces that connect for me. Try to take in the pieces that don’t, that are out of my reach but I know are there because Spike, he sees them. Explains them to me sometimes, when I ask. When he has time….” She was a little sad, wistful, and Mike was indignant on her behalf.

“He should spend more time with you, now he’s dumped those dumb notions about organizing vamps, and people too, a different way.” Then he stopped, thought. “But that’s wrong. It all came out how he saw it.”

“Mostly. Not exactly, but mostly. Fuzzy logic. Dreams. Knowing how people move and moving himself to be in the right place at the right time. An inexact science, divination.”

“That’s like dowsing. Forked stick.” Mike made the picture with his hands, thumbs together, fingers spread.

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t understand it either. Neither does Spike. He just does it. I don’t know what he is anymore, either. But I know he’s no good whatever at standing still. And that’s what he’s trying to do now.”

“Don’t want to talk about Spike anymore," Mike mentioned sulkily. "Just used that for an example, how I know now I don’t see things clear, or all there is, so I don’t know how to do.”

“You haven’t found the right distance yet. And the pieces keep moving.”

He’d said that. Or maybe she had--about how people related to each other. They’d both remembered it, anyway, which was a touch of connection he felt. Turned him moody, though.

“Don’t know what you want from me, Dawn. Don’t know what the right distance would be, or how to find it.” He looked around the sterile beach, over the sterile ocean, full into the dying sun or whatever it was, moon maybe, he didn’t know.

He hated alien dimensions. Made him feel lost, not knowing where he stood in relation to the most fundamental things. Light. Dark. Life. Death.

The meaningless landscape in which Dawn blazed with light for him--brighter than the bonfire, far brighter than the sun, abundant with life and heat and profound significance. With her here because she wanted him here. It meant so much. And yet he didn’t understand it. And wasn't sure how long he could endure it. Until he couldn't, he supposed. Maybe that would be his next dreadful mistake.

She had her head bowed, her face curtained in her long, smooth hair, hands clasped on her knees. “I don’t know either. But I know it’s important to figure it out. I’m trying, Mike--really I am.” Then she looked up at him, still and intent. “You’re gonna be older than six. But what if I stay seventeen forever? How do hills find the right distance? Or trees, after centuries?” She looked really worked up about it.

Landslides, he thought. Tectonic plates. Vast uprisings, like in the Pacific.

He said, “They move,” and leaned, gathered her in, and she consented to be gathered, so slight a creature to mean so much, and he kissed her carefully, her human face and his, and they were at troubled peace together.

Later, he thought, he’d give Spike a try in the ocean. Never had fought him in water. It might be different there.

**********

Spike was idly taking up the fine sand that had been mountains, birds maybe, towers, brothels, bars…or maybe not. Maybe there never had been any life here…. He let it sift through the hourglass of his fist. Got some more, did it again.

“It’s like a different way of seeing,” he said, because she’d asked.

“Like what?” Buffy prompted, squirming in a really distracting way, apparently trying to scoop the perfect Buffy-hips-shaped depression to lie back in.

Up the beach, Dawn and Mike were tossing a Frisbee, racing back and forth, the pair of them about nine-tenths naked. Well, Bit had started out that way, but because Buffy had nagged Spike into tucking his naughty bits inside the black rubber band she claimed was a swimsuit, after their shower, of course then Mike had to do it too, emerging from the cabana in a similar suit except blue, strutting like a gladiator: showing off how he’d have made at least a couple of Spike, broad and deep. In some respects, anyway, Spike thought complacently, patting his belly and regions south. Don’t recall any complaints.

Hadn’t tried to kick sand in Spike’s face, like that old body-building ad, ninety-pound weakling. That would likely be later.

The sedate elder generation were relaxing, toe to toe, with iced wine in the mostly hypothetical shade of a beach umbrella Spike had liberated from the Sunnydale dump. Never knew when a thing like that might come in handy.

Being under at least nominal shelter muted his demon’s gibbering terror of the sunlight, a constant undercurrent. Likely Mike, he was plagued with it too but doing a fairly good job of holding off blind panic, not letting on. At least Dawn looked happy, racing and shrieking, so that was all right. What Mike was there for, after all. Keep Bit occupied and entertained, freeing Spike for Buffy-shagging that’d been brilliant, so far, and more presently to look forward to. After a nap, maybe.

The unmoving sun played hob with Spike’s sense of time, but he guessed it was about midnight. Whether they’d go back before Sunnydale sunrise or make another day of it here was still under lazy consideration.

“Is it like a mirror with a crack in it?” Buffy continued, stretching out, testing the fit between her butt and the ground. “Or like--”

Spike shook his head. “Nothing that straightforward, pet. Doesn’t go into words all that well, no more than music does.” Since she was still looking at him, all mussed lovely and sleepy-looking, he kept trying to answer. “It’s a mismatch--doesn’t quite fit. Two edges--two, anyway. And the tension of the mismatch vibrates where the edges touch.” Illustrating, he put the side of one hand against the palm of the other, pressing as hard as he could until the muscle tension started a visible shaking. Letting the tension go, leaning to collect the cup of wine, he continued, “And some way, I can feel it. Know it’s there. They’re everywhere. Some, no bigger than a pinhead. Wouldn’t know how to pass through those, haven’t tried. Others, five, ten stories tall--”

“--Like where the Sh’narth come through,” Buffy commented, naming the huge, plodding demons they’d had practically a migration of, in the summer months.

“Yeah. Have to be, innit? Size those things are….” He drank some wine, let the cup rest on his chest like a cool thumb wet from the condensation. “Places, I guess, where the dimensions snag on each other, hang up a bit, and thin where the snags catch together. Not entirely the one thing nor the other. Never much noticed or thought about ‘em before. No reason.”

“Magic?”

“Natural. No stink of magic whatever. Portals, now--that’s another matter, and you’d have to ask Red about that. Portals, they’re all sorcerous, far as I’ve been able to tell. Since that business with Rayne, I been reading up on 'em online--Watchers' archives. Found a 15th century source by a daft bugger who made a study of ‘em, twenty dozen spells to create and manipulate ‘em, there and gone like a sneeze. Chap could get himself clipped neat, halfway through, if he wasn’t spry enough in departing. All the charm of strolling into a bear trap. Rifts, though, they’re more stable and predictable…‘cause they’re part of the Natural order, I expect.”

“Are there more like this? In Sunnydale, I mean?”

“Galore. Hellmouth, that’s like a pry-bar punched clear through a ream of paper. Lots of tears and distortions as reality flexes, like the Lady says it does, around that pin. Layers don’t smooth just because you pull the pry-bar out, unmake it.”

Buffy had her speculating face on, and Spike paid a bit more attention. He nudged her foot with his.

“Oh, I was just thinking,” she responded, collecting her own cup. “Big traveler, me: all the way from Los Angeles to Sunnydale. Globe-trotter. Well, that’s not gonna happen, all right. Things are quieter, but I still have responsibilities and this is still home. I mean…not this this,” Buffy corrected herself incoherently, jerking a hand at beach, ocean, sky. “The other this--Revello Drive. Well, you know what I meant. But I was thinking…day trips? See new places? Really, really new places! One small step, and boldly go, and still back for breakfast. Sort of like traveling, but without the actual traveling, you know?”

Her face shone with enthusiasm (and half a cup of wine), and Spike felt most of the residual tension from the Napkin Incident melt into righteous smugness.

“Might,” he said, casually, just as though he didn’t feel as if he’d successfully palmed an ace and could bet the limit, knowing the hand was his. As if he hadn’t been a frantic week assembling bait, hoping she'd take it, swallow it down. “Might do. If you like.”

He lit a cigarette, leaned back, and blew smoke at the brick-colored sky.

He was contemplating a bright future adventuring with Buffy, successfully liberated from her Puritan workaholism and actually needing him for something, when water descended on him--wet, hard, sudden.

Buffy yelped and jumped, caught by collateral splash. As Dawn stood by, giggling, Mike pitched the bucket and ran straight into the sea.

Spike stood a moment, wiping his stinging eyes clear, then slicking his hair back--resigned as much as irate.

Nothing else for it: pup demanded a lesson. Give him one, then.

Maybe it’d be enough to distract them both from that bloody unnatural sun.

**********

The ice melted. Next, the firewood was exhausted, and the bonfire burned down to coals and at last to ashes. The fresh water for cleaning off the itchy, crusty salt was all gone. So no more swimming. They ordered takeout Chinese for lunch, mystifying the boy delivering it, per directions, to a shadowed, blind alley. Then the blood ran out, and Dawn really thought that would be the end of the party. Instead, Mike requested escort through the rift and pickup in a couple of hours. In the alley, Dawn quietly asked Spike if he wanted to go, too, insisting she didn’t mind, and it was dark enough now not to bother him, but he only said, “No, I’m fine,” although Dawn hadn’t seen him feed in two days, and no fresh sign he’d been snacking on Buffy--more an occasional sex thing, she gathered, than a feeding thing, though they never talked about that.

So she shrugged and they went back to their beachside gin rummy game until Spike thought it should be time. A few minutes after they crossed to the alley, Mike blazed up on his bike with Sue at pillion. Stepping down from the bike and setting the kickstand, Mike remarked, “Thought somebody should keep an eye on things here.”

“Hi, Dawn,” Sue called, with a waggling wave. In game-face, naturally: she was still a fledge, and Dawn wasn’t altogether happy at the way Sue lifted on her toes to bid Mike a very warm goodbye.

But she supposed it was OK because Mike looked faintly irritated and pushed Sue away, following them through the narrow place at the side of the SUV. Dawn couldn’t help noticing that he smelled of his funny cigarettes.

She and Spike opened the rift as easy as pushing a door ajar. She thought they were getting really good at it. Mike lagged a step, then set his shoulders and barged through into the sudden, enveloping warmth.

Braced against the open sunlight, Dawn thought. She knew it bothered them both, though neither had said a word about it.

Guessing her thought, Mike commented, “I’ll be good for awhile, now,” and ahead, Spike choked back a laugh without turning. Mike gave her a glance she couldn’t interpret. Abruptly turned sullen and impassive, Mike took longer strides she had to hustle to keep up with.

His water games seemed to have ended in a draw: he and Spike had returned separately, banged up and lame, neither gloating. Apparently the buoyant quality of the water threw them off, kept either from getting a good hold, landing a solid hit. At least, that was what Mike had blamed it on. Spike hadn’t said anything, unless it was to Buffy.

Since the Napkin Incident they’d gone all couple-y, seldom out of reach or touch with one another. When they were like that Dawn tried to avoid eavesdropping: what wasn’t silence was often embarrassing. Like the Sue/Mike smoochies she was trying not to think about.

Trotting down the beach, Dawn chirped, “At least you could get out. This is beginning to remind me of the Endless Birthday, when nobody could leave.”

“Came back, didn’t I?” Mike responded curtly, as though she’d questioned it, doubted him.

We were not in a good mood this evening.

Arriving first at the umbrella, Spike tossed a small something to Buffy with the comment, “Here you go, pet.”

Dawn had seen him opening the SUV to collect something but hadn’t noticed what it was.

Buffy’s cellphone, Dawn realized as Buffy began pushing buttons to review the missed calls and accumulated text messages.

Buffy gasped a dismayed, “Oh,” then handed the phone up to Spike, who held it at nearly arm’s length, squinting to make out the characters on the tiny display.

He went still, head cocked consideringly.

“What is it?” Dawn asked, reaching for the phone, but he passed it back to Buffy.

Sliding his cigarettes out of his jeans pocket, he lit one, saying to Buffy, “Suppose we should. Or stay a little longer, maybe—let him cool his heels.” He didn’t sound too hopeful, proposing that, and didn’t seem surprised when Buffy replied indignantly, “Of course not!” over her shoulder, bouncing off to change in the cabana.

Spike bent to catch up his T-shirt and slowly pulled it on. Dawn could almost hear the wheels going around.

“What?” she demanded. “Willow gone berserk? Xander has a new demon girlfriend? New apocalypse? What?”

“No, nothing like that,” Spike responded absently, pushing his arms into the sleeves of his button-down shirt, sliding it on, looking around for his boots. Mike, she noticed, was already efficiently gathering the CD/tape/radio and other oddments into one of the empty foam chests, preparing for departure. No way Mike could know; but he apparently didn’t care that he didn’t know, which left Dawn the only one out of the loop and annoyed about it.

Bending to slap sand out of his hair, Spike added, plainly thinking aloud, “Can leave most of the gear, I suppose.” Then he looked up at her. “Bit, collect whatever should go home. Should be bags you can use. Five minutes. Slayer should take at least that long….”

He rambled off down the beach, still in search of his boots.

Since it was plain nobody was going to tell her, Dawn flounced off to help Mike make the judgment calls on what to take, what to leave. Not that Mike needed the advice. Dawn needed to give it--have authority over something!

Pressing the lid onto one chest and setting it aside, Mike remarked, “No need for you to get all bent out of shape about Sue. She’s nothing.”

“I’m not,” Dawn said loftily, vigorously shaking sand out of her hoodie before putting it on. “Why should I care if she’s climbing all over you, kissing and everything? It’s nothing to me. You’re not my personal property. You--”

Mike had straightened: large and calm in the angry light. “Would be, if you’re agreeable. Set my mark on you once, knew where we were then, but that’s all right, that’s over…. Though I’d do it again in a flash, if you once gave the word. Want to. Regardless of what Spike says, or the Slayer, neither. Only yours to call. But you didn’t want that, after Spike marked you and you started to know what it meant, to bear a vamp’s mark, so I saw it got taken off again. Back to the beginning, like I’d never marked you at all. Left you free of that. Because that was what you wanted. So anytime you take a notion to claim me, whatever you figure would be claiming, I wouldn’t say no.”

Dawn was unprepared for the challenge. “I don’t have the right,” she said hastily. “It would be like forbidding you to feed. Or hunt. Or anything else you have to do, that has nothing to do with me.”

“If you asked,” Mike replied steadily, “I’d try. Any of those things.”

And he meant it. Dawn knew he did. Make a promise they both knew he couldn’t keep, and hate himself for failing, and her playing policeman, and it would be awful. “We’re not ready for that,” she said quickly. “I can’t lay down conditions--”

“You already do. And you can’t tell me I don’t abide by them, neither. Don’t come to you except fed up, and not take all of it, so nobody’s died to be the price of your company. Don’t do nothing with you except what you say and want. And it can go on like this, if that’s what you want. Not all I want, though. Not by a long shot.”

Blurting, “I have to find my flip-flops,” Dawn skittered away. She so wasn’t ready for this!

**********

After the SUV was loaded, Buffy shut the hatch and turned to find Spike holding out the keys. Looking at her steadily, he said, “Mike’s gonna take me to collect my bike. I’ll be along in a bit.”

He wanted her to face it all alone. Maybe he wouldn’t show at all--duck out, go unfindable--

“In a bit,” he repeated, knowing perfectly well that she was panicking, and why, the cowardly bastard. “Hour at the most. Couple things I need to do I don’t expect there’ll be time for, later. Time enough to make a proper tea.”

“By now, Willow’s already made tea,” Buffy pointed out, as if that mattered.

Spike didn’t say anything, only waited for her acknowledgment. Not her consent--not the way he’d announced it.

Abruptly exclaiming, “It’s freezing out here!” Buffy pushed past, toggling all the locks, and climbed in on the driver’s side as Dawn slid into the passenger seat. After Mike backed the motorcycle into the street, then blasted off, loud and fast, Buffy keyed the ignition. She immediately turned the heat to max although it would take a few minutes to start warming and blow frigid air until then.

As Buffy eased out of the alley, Dawn asked suddenly, “It’s Angel again, isn’t it?”

“God, no! Don’t even think it! That’s all we’d need!”

“Then what?” Dawn slapped her hands on her knees in frustration. “What’s everybody being all super-secret and mum about? Has my goldfish died and nobody wants to tell me? What?”

“You don’t have a goldfish.”

“But I could, and if it died, you’d be behaving just like this. What’s everybody freaking out about and why won’t you tell me so I can freak out, too?”

Stopped at a light, Buffy held the top of the steering wheel in a death grip and for a moment laid her forehead on her wrists. The heater was finally cranking: a small mercy. Already, she was lonesome for the beach. “It’s nothing. It’s just Giles, come for a visit without telling anybody, so I don’t have anything ready, no food in the house, probably, and maybe I should take a pass by the store first--” (Which appealed not least because it might mean Spike would get there before her. Then he’d have to handle it alone!)

When the light changed, she yanked the SUV into the turn toward the supermarket.

“Oh,” said Dawn, disappointed. “Is that all. It’s that Rayne thing, then. Why show up unannounced about that? Spike already told him he doesn’t know.”

“I totally don’t know, Dawn. After he called, I didn’t think anything of it. And Spike wasn’t-- Wait a minute: Spike talked to him? When was that?”

Dawn squinched up her face, thinking. “About a week ago. Sunday afternoon, I think it was. Spike was working on the translation. Mostly. And I talked to him, too, a little. Said I don’t know, either. The Lady chose, just like Spike said.”

Pulling into the supermarket parking lot, Buffy looked aside at Dawn for a moment. “Then maybe it’s you Giles wants to grill. Not Spike.”

“Oh! Because…of the connection.” Dawn began bouncing anxiously. “I can’t do that, Buffy! I can’t, she’d skin me alive, or come back and force me out of my own personal body again--”

“See? Now you’re freaking. Happy now?”

Buffy took a parking space with no other vehicles around and turned off the key. It was gonna take a long, thoughtful time to choose exactly the right groceries to entertain their guest.

**********

When Spike pulled up to the curb, there was no sign of the SUV.

Well, no matter. At least he’d got himself fed, which was the main thing. Figured it might be a bit of a siege: Watcher hadn’t come all this way to take No for an answer.

Might take awhile before Rupert accepted that that was all the answer he was gonna get.

As Spike stepped down from the Honda Shadow, the front door of Casa Summers opened, spilling light: Watcher, coming out to stand on the porch, arms folded. Heard the bike’s muted rumble of approach, most likely. Well, no use to foot-dragging. Pitching a cigarette, Spike went up the walk.

“Spike,” Giles greeted him gravely as he started up the steps.

“Rupert. Come back inside, then, it’s a bit nippy out. For California.”

“I gather you’ve been away. And incommunicado,” Giles remarked, following him inside, both turning left into the front room and taking their accustomed places: Spike in the big chair next to the weapons chest, Giles on the couch next to where his gear was piled--overcoat, scarf, an overnight bag and a briefcase. On the low table in front of the couch was an empty teacup, saucer, and spoon.

Willow came in then, bearing the usual tea doings on a tray, flashing a glance between Giles and Spike as she set it down on the table. “Oh, good! I heard the door and I hoped that meant-- Where’s Buffy?”

“Oh, she’ll be along, I expect. In a bit. Enough there for two?”

“There will be. I’ll bring you a cup.” She started to hustle off, then turned in the doorway. “What are we doing about supper, do you know?”

Spike shook his head. “Have to ask Buffy. Can always get takeaway, something or other. What time’s it got to be?”

“About six-thirty. Should I call Xander and Anya?”

Was this a crisis Scooby meeting, she meant. Spike thought about it a moment. “No. Or let Buffy call it,” he decided. “Don’t think so, though. Just a nice chat with the Watcher, dropping by, is all. That right, Rupert?”

“You know why I’ve come. And no, Willow--nothing official, not in the sense you mean. Merely a private matter.” As Willow left, and Giles finished messing about with pouring and preparing a fresh cup of tea, then replacing the cozy on the pot, he went on, “Willow didn’t know where you’d gone. Somewhere out of phone range, evidently. And nowhere is out of phone range…on this planet. In any case, she didn’t know. There seems to have been a sudden influx of ignorance here whilst I’ve been gone.”

“Dunno about that.” Scratching the back of a hand, Spike added, “I’m all over salt, sand. Will you be all right on your own for a little? Catch a quick shower, back by the time Red has the tea brewed, all right? Buffy, she should be along any minute now.”

“All right,” Giles responded without looking up. “I’ve waited this long. A few more minutes shouldn’t matter.”

True to his word, Spike made a quick business of showering and toweling off. As he was changing into fresh clothes in Buffy’s bedroom he heard the front door and was down the stairs soon enough to help Buffy and Dawn carry in about fifteen bags of groceries. When everything was piled on the kitchen island, Buffy shot him a look. “You better not have used all the hot water. Dawn, help Spike put everything away. I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

“I have no bathroom rights,” Dawn complained, reaching for a milk jug as Buffy made her escape to the second floor, leaving Spike in charge again.

He smiled at the hand-off dance they appeared to be doing. He hadn’t intended it and didn’t mind, really. He wasn’t afraid of the big, bad Watcher and was utterly determined Rupert would eventually have to leave as empty and unsatisfied as when he’d arrived.

Because once that door was opened, there’d be no end of what came through.

Wound tight as a spring with it, though, the Watcher. And something stubborn and baleful about the eyes, and his willingness to wait. Spike had seen Rupert do that cold resolve before, and it promised to be a pretty fierce dance before it was done. Have to keep Bit clear of it, though, as much as he could….

Crouched to stack cans in the proper cupboard, he said over his shoulder, “When Buffy’s done, you take your turn at the shower--”

“There’ll be no water left!”

“Regardless. Wait a bit first, then, for the boiler to heat a new batch. Anyway, keep to your room. Unless I call you. And I don’t figure to.”

“But I have to have supper! What, am I gonna have a fucking tray sent up, like I was a--”

“Bit, don’t be tiresome.” Spike rose to collect cellophane packets of pasta, boxes of cereal. “I don’t want to bring the Lady into it any more than you do. Watcher’s not in a position to force anything. Not that there’s anything to force. Best if you keep clear, though. As much as you can. Don’t want to get into a fine old punch-out with Rupert…not in front of Buffy. Don’t want it to come to that.”

“Right. You know I can’t, how mad she’d be!”

“The Lady, you mean,” Spike said, clarifying that Dawn was referring to the Power that, for convenience, identified itself as Dawn’s mum. Lady Gates: the Lady of Doorways. When Dawn anxiously bobbed her head in confirmation, Spike said, “Then best you stay scarce. Anyway, you scoot off. I can finish this.”

As Dawn left, Willow came in and started grabbing groceries. Seeing what was needed and doing it, no fuss: a thing he liked about her. She asked worriedly, “Spike, what’s this about?”

“Haven’t exactly talked about it yet, except a little on the phone awhile ago. Best I can make out, Watcher’s bound and determined to find out what's become of Rayne. And no matter what anybody says, you keep completely out of my head or I’ll make you very sorry. I like you an’ all, but that’s out of bounds. Make whatever excuse you want, but don’t you do it.”

Turning from the open refrigerator, Willow gave him a long, assessing look. He looked right back, not shy of her gaze. He could pretty much figure what she was thinking, deducing. Almost as quick as Dawn in that way, sussing things out on the least clue or seemingly none at all. But that didn’t signify, so long as she did what he’d said.

“All right,” she said quietly, returning to her task of stacking yogurt cartons. “It’s not as if I ever do it unless you say, you know. Not for a long time.”

“Know that. Just you keep it in mind, what I said.”

“Your head is inviolate. Right. Yessir.”

Buffy came down, drying her hair and looking perkily nervous, and a poll was taken on what kind of takeaway to order. Then they all made small talk, mostly Giles rabbiting on about who was doing what to who, at the Watchers’ Council, and his chances of being named Head Boy himself, which he now rated as slim to none, since he was here and not there, lining up supporters and advancing his own interests.

“Then why leave?” Buffy asked, honestly confused, and no wonder: she knew the least of any of them present.

“A matter arose,” said Giles distantly, gazing at Spike. “Nothing I’d anticipated. The least, occasional niggling, to begin with. An annoyance that’s gradually become intolerable.”

But Giles left the matter there in the interests of civility until supper had been delivered. As the various cartons were opened and set out, Spike would have taken some up to Dawn but against his advice, she’d come down and helped clear off the table in the den so nobody would have to balance paper plates on their knees.

She whispered to Spike, “Well, it’s not as if he can apply the thumbscrews with everybody here! Besides, I’m hungry!”

It was a stiff, quiet meal until Willow started asking them about where they’d gone, what they’d been doing, and Buffy and Dawn launched into excited accounts of the excursion…suitably sanitized for kiddies and prissy Watchers. Spike had no interest in that and wandered out on the porch to have a cigarette.

In under a minute, Giles came in pursuit, stopping short and trying to look casual when he found Spike had gone no farther than the porch rail.

“Thought I’d do a flit?” Spike asked, idly amused. “Take more than you to drive me from my home, Watcher. After you come all this way, might as well have it out. Tell you again: got no answer for you. Neither has Dawn.”

“Come back inside. I’ve something to show you.”

“When I’m done. Finish your supper.”

“Very well.”

**********

Willow decided what she was hearing was the sound of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object. The aether crackled with it.

Looking with other sight, she found Giles’ aura flexing, roiling, and changing colors with the intensity of his determination, whipping across the space between to lance at Spike--all below the level of consciousness, she was certain, semi-mage that he was. Giles generally contained himself better. Contained himself completely, in point of fact. The energies were only the intensity of his want, made manifest on the aetherial plane--not outright spells or magickal attack. Nothing she needed to intervene or stop.

Because without effort, Spike was fending it off, letting it pass by or through or around. His aura, capable of flaring the width and height of the room, was ice-white and barely extended beyond body contours. Shimmering like crystal, untroubled and unchanging. Channeling the energies away, as he could channel sunlight; deflecting and defending him from the determined influence Giles was trying to exert.

Mundane senses showed her only civilized impasse: Giles on the couch, leaned intently forward with arms braced on knees, slightly frowning, insisting Spike must have noticed something in the instants of Rayne’s transference elsewhere. Anything, some hint to identify the destination.

Spike, leaned back in the big chair, at apparent ease except for the occasional abortive gesture toward the cigarettes in his pocket, his hands otherwise spread and calm on the chair arms, answering with a question: “Why would I take any notice? Just wanted the git gone, and he was, and be damned to him. Felt myself flying to flinders, Watcher--too much, more than I could manage. Losing…containment. Coherence. Can’t much focus on anything when that’s happening.”

Huddled on the floor beside the chair, Dawn looked anxiously back and forth between them as though she were watching the strokes, approaches, and retreats of a tennis game. Perched at the other end of the couch, Buffy merely looked unhappy to have two people she cared about so obviously at odds.

Willow figured they were into the second set. Spike had won the first, insisting he didn’t know where Rayne had been shoved to, and Giles unwillingly forced to concede that point and come at the issue from more oblique angles instead of head-on confrontation.

Changing focus, Giles began in a patient voice, “Dawn--”

“You leave her out of this,” Spike cut in at once, his left hand dropping protectively onto Dawn’s shoulder. “She’s only the key, the conduit. Told you: she don’t know any more than I do.”

“Dawn, I think we must have that talk we’ve deferred now several times in the urgencies of some crisis,” Giles continued smoothly, as Dawn’s eyes grew enormous in her pale face. “I have now no reason to doubt your contention that you are an…avatar, a resident emissary, of one of the Powers of the universe. Only through the action of such a Power could a mage of Ethan’s skill and strength have been summarily translocated against his will. Is Spike correct, that the action was all the Lady’s, that you had no choice or knowledge of what was done through your agency?”

Dawn sat up straighter, her shoulder against the chair. “What’s that in English?” she challenged, and Spike twitched a small, covert smile.

“Oh, I think we understand each other well enough,” Giles responded. All the same, he simpled it down: “Do you know what was done with Ethan? More than that he was merely sent away?”

“Don’t know and don’t care,” Dawn shot back fiercely. “As long as it was bloody painful and permanent, the worse, the better, as far as I’m concerned. He hurt Spike! Nobody does that and gets away with it, not if I have anything to do with it!”

“Bit,” said Spike, leaning toward her, “all good chums here, yeah? Watcher’s not about to bully a child, try to wring knowledge from her she doesn’t have.”

“But could have,” Giles muttered. “Could get.” Louder, he added acerbically, “And she is not a child, not in any meaningful sense of the word.”

“She’s my sister,” Buffy stated, finally weighing in, although addressing the air. “And I’d be really, really upset if anybody tried to force her to do anything she didn’t want to do.” Spreading her hands imploringly, she turned toward Giles. “I know it’s important to you. But Spike’s said he doesn’t know, and we all know what a really wretched liar he is--”

“Thanks, pet,” Spike growled.

“--so why can’t you just accept it, let it drop?”

“Because,” Giles began, then turned suddenly aside to pick up his briefcase and snatch out a sheaf of papers. Brandishing them at Spike, he declared, “Technically, you may not know. But you’ve guessed, haven’t you?”

“What’s that, then?” Smooth and controlled as a cougar, Spike rose and took the sheaf from Giles. He held the packet out, squinting the way he did without his glasses, that he was too vain to wear in front of Giles. All Willow could make out was that it was computer print-out of some sort: multiple columns stretching across the long dimension of the page. Printed landscape, and Spike was trying to read it portrait. Spike shook his head. “Can’t make nothing of this. What is it--footie scores?”

Willow held out her hand. “Can I see?”

Shrugging, Spike passed the sheaf to her. She scanned it quickly, identifying the columns, then more slowly, taking in the data. “It’s a tracking record,” she reported, running her finger down the last column. “Of what user Specialgrant_2 accessed on what days, for how long.”

Specialgrant_2 was Spike’s assigned login name on the database of the Council of Watchers.

Spike was bent forward, staring at Giles. “You been spying on me?”

“Following your recent interests, yes,” Giles replied calmly. “Extracurricular browsing through the source materials. Before the crisis, you downloaded quite a lot of material on the occult properties of silver. Since then….” He held out his hand. “Willow, may I?”

Rising from her straight-back chair, Willow surrendered the print-out back to Giles, shooting a glance at Spike, who now looked angry and sullen at the realization his movements online could be tracked and had been. Willow figured she now knew why he’d been so fierce about her taking unauthorized liberties with the contents of his head.

As Giles said, there was knowing, and then there was knowing. Spike knew something, and Giles had caught him at it.

Running his finger down the final column, Giles was reporting, “23rd November, portals, three separate items. 24th November, portal spells, sixteen items, two downloaded, presumably for further study. 27th November, a few things on the registry actually pertaining to the current translation, amazingly. But after midnight, local time, a raft of descriptions of dimensional realms identified and to some extent classified--particularly those categorized loosely as ‘hell dimensions’--and means of reaching them--natural and sorcerous. 2nd December, when you’d presumably studied and absorbed at least some of this material, we have: Quor’toth--three items. 3rd December, Quor’toth--seventeen items, most highly specious and conjectural because so little is known of that realm. 4th December, Quor’toth--four items. 5th December--”

Dawn burst out, “But that’s where--” As Spike spun and glared at her, she suddenly shut up, clapping a hand over her mouth.

Too late: set and match.

In a most unconvincingly mild tone, Giles inquired, “That’s where what?”

Irritably pulling on the back of his neck, Spike moved a step aside--by no coincidence blocking the line of sight between Giles and Dawn. “So, suppose he’s there. What of it? You any the happier for thinking you can put a name to it now? Changes nothing.”

Buffy raised her hand as though it were a class. When she caught Giles’ attention, she asked, “What’s a Quor’toth?”

“A reasonably infamous Chaos Dimension about which remarkably little is known,” Giles replied.

Spike directed grimly, “Tell her why nobody knows bugger-all about it.”

“Yes, well.” Giles pushed his glasses higher on the bridge of his nose. “Its notoriety is, in part, based on its being used for the disposal of criminals, highly disliked rivals, inconvenient spouses and the like from the Renaissance onward. Links to this dimension appear to be widespread and easy of access. However--”

“One catch,” Spike told Buffy. “Nobody’s ever come back.”

Blood Price, Chapter 1

2005-03-19T07:24:41Z

Here’s the beginning. Chapter 1, complete.

Blood Price
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 1: Let Me Count the Ways (complete)

Mooching along the overgrown abandoned rail spur, hands in jeans pockets and head down, Spike halted.

Dawn came trotting up behind, the beam of her flashlight painting the gravel between the rotted-out ties. “Something?”

“Yeah, something….” Spike shut his eyes, trying to localize the tingle in the air. “Should be better at this,” he muttered, unconsciously tilting his shoulders, leaning, trying to align with what he felt.

“I expect it’s like dowsing,” Dawn commented practically. “The head knowledge can’t help until you’ve digested it: made it body knowledge.”

“Yeah,” Spike responded, not really listening, still trying to align. Which actually wasn’t possible, he knew that. It was like sun-knowledge, closest thing--a sense of angle and direction, except that neither was cogged to the geometries of rusting parallel tracks lancing off into the weedy dark or the chilly wind gusting from the sea or stark stars overhead only slightly dimmed by Sunnydale’s haze of lights down in the valley.

It was just off his left shoulder--a tingling seam in the air. At a cross-angle to everything. Facing it didn’t work: made him lose it. He had to stand crosswise to it. No reason why, just how it was.

“We gonna try this one?”

“Me first, Bit. In case there’s no air. Like the last one,” Spike responded absently. “Won’t be but a second, you stay put.”

“I’ve got my taser and my stake,” Dawn asserted, annoyed with the care he took of her…dragging her out of her cosy bed about three on a Saturday night in December, all hush and shivers, prospecting with her flashlight for anything interesting along the rail bed while he dowsed for shimmers and the both of them therefore visible for a good mile, roundabout.

“Turn off the torch.”

“No. It’s creepy. And I found another one!” Juggling flashlight and taser, she dug in a bulging jacket pocket and proudly produced a rusted railroad spike.

Blinking at her, trying not to lose the torque of the dimensional rift, Spike said, “That’s fine. Add it to your collection. Stuff it through your nose. Turn off the torch, Bit. You mind, or I’m not bringing you out any more.”

“Sure, that’s a scary threat. Without me, you can’t budge an inch,” she retorted smugly.

Two vamps sprang out of the ditch, on Dawn before Spike could lunge between. He slammed one away and risked turning his back long enough to stake the one Dawn was flailing at with the flashlight in one hand and the spike in the other. As the dust exploded and Dawn started screeching, Spike didn’t whirl back quite fast enough to keep the other dumb fledge from taking him down, slamming into the cinders. They rolled and struggled, the fledge pounding at Spike with a fist-sized chunk of gravel while Spike tried to double his knees up enough to loft the vamp away with his boots. Dawn should have juggled through her trash and unlimbered the taser long since, but a glance told Spike she’d stayed clear, hopping and wailing like a siren, and another vamp was coming in, drawn by the noise, most like. So best do this one fast.

Twisting, Spike bit the fledge’s rock-holding hand mostly off at the wrist. Enough distraction that Spike could finally pull his knees up under the heavier vamp and then violently uncoil, flinging the fledge off straight at the approaching vamp. The fledge burst into dust that Spike went through in a flying dive, to get between the new vamp and Dawn and what the hell was she doing, just standing like a lump? As he hit, he was deflected aside and tumbled into the ditch, up the next second and back, but Dawn had got in his way, waving and jumping like trying to scare off a cow…and he belatedly recognized the vamp as Mike.

Covered with vamp dust and blood, some of it his, angry at Dawn for being useless and at himself for being distracted and letting them get jumped, angry at the fledges for being too dumb to know him for a vamp and for himself, and angry at his claimed childe for being there and seeing it, Spike sagged a moment where he stood. Having waved off the attack, Dawn relaxed, turning away. Lunging past her, he slammed Mike a good one in the gut. Mike had anticipated and mostly faded back ahead of the blow, but Spike hadn’t actually hit him all that hard anyway and stalked past, stumbling a little on the ends of ties, rubbing at his face with his sleeve.

Trailing a prudent distance behind, Dawn explained anxiously, “I couldn’t. You were tumbling and wrestling around and I couldn’t tell who was who. And if I got you by mistake, we were both toast.”

“Should’a turned off the torch when I told you,” Spike snarled. He suddenly dropped down on the curve of rail bed, fumbled out a cigarette and lit it, hand cupping his temple and waiting for the gash to seal and quit smearing blood into his eyes so that he was nearly as blind as Dawn. She’d finally turned off the flashlight.

The night was again quiet, cold, and still.

Seating herself in a sulky fling about a yard away, perched right on the rail, long overalled legs drawn up almost to her chin, Dawn hurled away a piece of gravel. “Well, excuuuuse me for not being able to see much on bad footing in the middle of the freaking night!”

The blood had finally let up. Spike wearily rubbed at his forehead a final time with his sleeve, then looked favorlessly across at Mike, comfortably crouched on his heels the other side of Dawn, knowing Spike wouldn’t come at him again.

Answering the implicit question, Mike commented mildly, “I was in the neighborhood,” assembling a different sort of cigarette and lighting it with a kitchen match. Not having to look to know Spike’s recoil of annoyed disbelief, Mike went on, more truthfully, “Heard the bike. Then saw it was Dawn with you, not the Slayer. So I drifted along to see what was up, this hour of the night.”

His tone was matter-of-fact, calm; but the implication was critical of Spike's taking Dawn on late night patrols. Didn’t need saying: they both knew. They attended to their smokes while Spike made himself settle further, letting game-face flow into his human mask.

Maybe Mike had the right of it: that first vamp had got at Dawn, after all. Spike wasn’t gonna dispute it with him, anyway--not all that sure, himself, he should be letting Dawn accompany him into situations that could turn risky even though it was as much her idea as his.

Dawn spoke up: “We’re hunting natural portals. Mapping them, pretty much. And going through for a quick look around, to see what they’re like. One was all crystalline, like sections of a glacier, and there wasn’t any air. I felt like I had frost on my eyeballs. And another was underwater.”

“Salt or fresh?” Mike inquired, and let out breath and smoke in a slow, controlled hiss.

“I didn’t notice.” Dawn sounded worried she might lose points for that, like not knowing the mean air speed of a laden African swallow.

“Salt,” Spike put in. “Ocean.”

“Why haul the girl along--”

Dawn interrupted quickly, “He has to. He couldn’t get through by himself. That takes a Key.”

Mike didn’t think Spike was careful enough with Dawn. Spike didn’t see what fucking business it was of Mike’s what they did or how or when they did it. Again, didn’t need saying. They marinated in their separate irritated silences awhile.

Mike finally said, “Slayer know about this?” which was an implicit threat to tell her.

“No,” Dawn blurted, “it’s a surprise. Or will be, when we find the right place. It’s there, somewhere. Spike dreamed it.” Twisting around, she set her hands on Mike’s arm. “You won’t blab it, right? Ruin the surprise?”

“I don’t blab,” Mike responded stiffly, when just the opposite was the case and they all knew it. “Got no call to tell the Slayer nothing. She ain’t nothing to me.”

“You could help us look,” Dawn suggested eagerly, since they now had to keep Mike sweet or he’d blow the whole thing. “We could wait while Spike goes through. Or if we find a good one, you could come with!”

“Don’t like no other dimensions than here,” Mike replied unhelpfully. “Light’s funny and the ground don’t smell right.”

“Don’t tell me you’re scared!”

“Got other things to tend to. Fighting. Hunting. Trying to get things organized again after the total hooraw’s nest somebody’s made of things.”

The somebody was Spike, unmaking the Hellmouth and social-planning at least half of Sunnydale’s vampires into oblivion.

Mike didn’t have much regard for Spike as a social planner. Which again was likely fair enough, Spike supposed, and therefore bit back a retort.

A whole lot of things didn’t need saying, among the three of them. Most things just were. Most things, they just knew.

They continued to sit: the actual and titular Master Vampires of Sunnydale, bracketing the Dimensional Key.

“Need somebody to stand lookout,” Mike allowed presently after taking a heavy hit from the roach, “seems like. When you’re…occupied. Like tonight. Could do that sometime, if you give me notice.”

“All right. Maybe.” Pitching the butt end of his fag, Spike rose, and Mike did, too. “There’s one up ahead just a bit. Was about to check on it when those damn fledges crashed in. Not taking Bit through. But she could wait. With you.”

“Wouldn’t mind,” Mike said as Dawn blurted, "Yes!" as though her side (whatever that was at the moment) had scored a goal.

“Since you’re here and all,” Spike added grudgingly, an accustomed dance of offhand approach and retreat that didn’t require actual asking or ordering, or actual agreement or obedience.

All indirect and circuitous, to neither challenge nor lose face, either one.

Things were difficult and touchy with Mike these days, it never having been fully thrashed out between them who was boss now. Safer that way. But touchy.

And the same between Mike and Dawn, Spike supposed. Things were changing, had changed, and none of them knew precisely what that meant or where they stood with it, each in relation to the others.

He was good with the Slayer, though; and past a certain point, that was all that signified. He figured the rest would sort itself however it had to. Wasn’t up to him, after all.

Mike gave Dawn a hand to help her up but she then disengaged, getting out the damn flashlight again and switching it on. Mike traded a look with Spike but neither of them said anything. At an official seventeen, there was nothing much Dawn could be forced to do or prevented from doing.

“Well, come on, then!” Fragile and imperious, Dawn started back in long tip-toe strides, from one tie to the next, toward where Spike had felt the rift, and the two vampires trailed along in the understood helplessness of males before their intractable, oblivious womenfolk.

**********

Blinking sleepily, Buffy stretched, yawning. And then smiled when Spike gathered her close again without waking.

He was almost always here now, either through the night or at least before sunrise. He had a fresh, abraded bruise at his temple: challenge fight up at Willy’s, probably, or the result of one of the lone, manic sweeps of the downtown streets he persisted in doing though with vamp numbers so reduced, it hardly seemed worthwhile. She didn’t patrol on weekends anymore and only a few nights a week--breaking up new lairs, mostly. Keeping the fledges confused, scattered, thinned out.

Frowning as she rose and reached for her robe, she wondered if, with things relatively placid, Spike was getting bored. Though that’s what they’d been trying to achieve, and Buffy was past ecstatic not to be facing one of the seemingly inevitable periodic apocalypses, a bored Spike swinging off on destructive tangents could be a problem. Spike didn’t do peace all that well.

When she returned from the shower, rubbing her hair dry, Spike was up, looking out a window he’d opened a crack at the bottom because he’d lit a cigarette. As carelessly nude as he was deliberate and particular in costuming himself, he was gorgeous in the cool winter light through the special glass that protected him, though Buffy figured he could mostly handle that himself now, without a blanket, even. She still wasn’t used to seeing him in full daylight; maybe she never would be.

He’d been growing toward the light for a long time, she thought.

Settling at her dresser whose mirror turned him invisible behind her, Buffy commented, “You have pensive face,” as she plugged in a dryer and started running a wide-toothed comb through her hair.

Spike’s hand took the dryer, and his thumb clicked off its noise. Setting the dryer aside, he removed the comb, too, and commenced drawing a brush through her hair with slow, cherishing strokes. She knew he liked doing that, and she didn’t mind a bit of being fussed over. But she hugged herself and shivered: the window was still open.

Making an amused noise, Spike went and shut it, carefully stubbing out the cigarette before he returned.

“Tender little hothouse posy, you are,” he teased, resuming the strokes. “California winters aren’t worth the name. Not even freezing, out there. Practically balmy. Hate to see you face an actual winter--snow, ice, an’ all that.”

“Just because some of us aren’t year-round room temperature doesn’t mean it’s not cold!” Still shivering, Buffy frowned into the mirror, trying to work out if that had come out right. “I hate having to put on fifteen layers, so I look like a barrel!”

“But such a stylish barrel. Trim, kicky boots that’d wilt at the least touch of a puddle--”

“Oh, shut up.” She batted at him. He was always mocking her footwear. As though scuffed steel-toed boots were the height of fashion. In the heat of summer, he wore the stifling duster; in winter, seldom more than a button-down over a T-shirt, usually with the sleeves rolled up and his forearms bare. Conspicuous contrariness--that was his thing. A one-vamp fashion statement…about twenty years out of date.

He had great forearms, that was true. All round and muscle-y. Severely toned, if not tanned. Very nice biceps, too. Not to mention triceps and lats, all corded and slithery under the skin. Wrists solid as cross-sections of I-beams. He could lift a truck if he felt like it. Or uproot a tree.

He was stroking fingers through her hair now, making her scalp tingle, while she leaned back against his chest, rubbing her hands up and down his arms. “Mmmmm,” she commented.

Bending close, he licked the mark, his mark, that bracketed her collarbone, which sent the tingles diving as he purred into her ear, “Could maybe warm you up the old-fashioned way. All pink and glowing.”

“Mmmmm,” she agreed, dropping her arms to let the thin, silky robe slide away.

Warmed up very nicely about half an hour later, sweating a little, even, Buffy flopped her head on Spike’s torso in luxurious, conscious ease. No job. No requirement to show herself until noon unless she wanted, even if it hadn't been Sunday. Long, entwined mornings in bed with suitable diversions. Life was good.

At seventeen, Dawn was surely able to concoct her own breakfast and lunch, too, though the thought of a peanut-butter-and-pickle sandwich or similar Dawnish combination was fairly ooksome. “How’s the translation coming?” she asked idly.

“Got a bit behind,” Spike admitted, rolling to draw up the duvet and tuck it solicitously close around her, gathering her in like a wrapped bundle. Then he changed his mind and slid underneath, too, nuzzling close. He liked warmth well enough, and certain kinds of hot could send him into ecstasies. Just didn’t need it, the way she did, and sometimes was a little self-conscious and apologetic about having no warmth of his own to give her except in the one way. Or two ways, if you counted sparring and fighting….

“Nagging, are you?” he inquired, licking up behind her ear. “Got to keep the tame vamp chained up to the desk, wearing the poncy glasses, trying to--”

“No! Of course not. You know that, don’t you? If the Watchers’ Council fired you tomorrow, no big. We’d manage now, some way. It’s not just you, holding everything together. You know that, right?” She took his ears prisoner, forcing him to meet her eyes, searching his face to make sure he was joking, or mostly joking.

Sometimes she worried about that, too. Because he wasn’t a tame, gutless nerd. He was a fighter, and an awesome one. Not quite as awesome as the Slayer, though they tested that out, various ways, every now and again. Unfortunately, there were no wages in being a Champion of the People, as Buffy had good reason to know. She was a little afraid, though, he’d doggedly chain himself to the responsibility, as he’d been doing the past months, until he either exploded in all directions…or didn’t. Lost the fire that burned in them both. Made them such excellent partners.

“We should go somewhere,” she decided suddenly. “Get away. Holiday break is coming up, no school for Dawn, and we could miss a few patrols, no big. Someplace warm--Mexico, maybe. I know you’ve been there, you’ve been everywhere--” She waved her arms around to indicate the utterness of the everywhere. To hear him tell it, at least.

“Working on that, pet,” Spike said, hitching his head away from her grasp with a very small smile, as though he knew something she didn’t.

“What?” she demanded.

“Nothing, yet.”

“What?” She got her fingers into his ribs and started tickling, and he tried to stop her by wrapping her tighter in the duvet, and they rolled off the bed (it really was too narrow) and wrestled, and that turned into the usual--lazy and playful this time instead of fierce and urgent. With their open, flexible schedules, they came together four or five times a day now, which Buffy considered entirely satisfactory. She wanted as much of that as she could get, things always on the simmer between them, and Spike seemed to feel the same if frequency was anything to go by. At least he never disappointed her and had made no complaints. Seemed to need it as much as she did, after their long while apart and then his period of highly dubious enthrallment by that bastard, Ethan Rayne…

Which reminded her. Rolling over comfortably, her hip pillowed by the folds of duvet, Buffy remarked, “Giles called last night, after you left.”

“What’s Rupert want?” Spike responded in a blurred voice, barely blinking, almost asleep. He was a vampire, after all, and most comfortable with nocturnal habits. He’d probably sleep the day away, then be all bouncy and Tigger and ready to go at sunset. When she was winding down. Still enough overlap, though, to make it good.

“You’ll laugh. It was you he wanted to talk to, actually. He wants to know where you disposed of Rayne. With all the trouble we had to go to, to get rid of that bastard, now Giles wants him back. Isn’t that hilarious?”

Spike cast an arm up across his eyes. “An’ what did you say, pet?”

“Basically, that he could get stuffed,” Buffy replied, giggling guiltily. “Although I didn’t put it quite that way…. Where did you toss him, Spike?”

Buffy had been too busy fighting, and then ducking random portals flaring open and clapping shut, to notice details of Rayne’s enforced exit about a month ago, ending his attempt to reopen the Hellmouth. One second the chaos mage had been there, waving and shouting, and Spike up on the factory beam, blazing and exultant in the final seconds before he began to burn. And the next second, Rayne just wasn’t there anymore and Spike was falling like some character out of mythology, helplessly blazing.

The memory made her shudder.

When Spike didn’t respond, Buffy prompted worriedly, “He didn’t get away, did he? Teleport or something? Like before? Spike?”

Arm still shielding his face, Spike exhaled--a soft, buzzing noise. Snoring.

Buffy’s stomach replied with a reproachful rumble. Time to get decent and finish off that cup of yogurt. Maybe even some super-nonfat crackers.

Bent on tiptoe, pulling on sweats against the chill she again felt, Buffy reflected that Spike swore up and down he didn’t snore. But he did. She should get Willow in as a witness, since Dawn already knew and Spike pooh-poohed her, too. He’d have a harder time refuting Willow, an unbiased witness. But she should cover him up first. And Willow would probably turn beet-red anyway and dive back into the hall with her eyes squinched shut, like she’d never seen Oz naked though not lately, of course, and it would become a big thing and likely not worth the trouble, just to get Spike to admit that he snored.

And the business about Rayne, she could ask him about that later, in case Giles called back, which she had a feeling he would. Not as if it was anything urgent, after all. The important part was that the wily old mage was gone, and good riddance, and so say all of us, Buffy thought rancorously, wrestling into the sweat top with the tasteful green embroidery.

At least, with the sunlight blazing in, the kitchen would probably be warm!

***********

Late that afternoon, Spike was sitting in the den, staring at the computer screen, contemplating adjacent dimensions and making a list of what they’d need, when Dawn leaned in from the hall to report, “Giles on the phone.”

Sliding off the glasses, Spike stuck an earpiece thoughtfully in his mouth without looking around. He’d heard the phone ringing, on the weapons chest in the front room. Ignored it. He figured now that he knew what that was about and didn’t want any part in it whatever.

“You talk to him, Bit.”

“He’s asking for you,” Dawn corrected.

“Don’t care who he’s asking for. You talk to him. Say I’m busy. Doing his fucking translation, aren’t I? No time for idle chit-chat. You tell him.”

Hardly idle chit-chat, transatlantic calls. But Spike didn’t care. Might owe the Watcher for bailing him out of that business with Rayne but that was done, Giles toddled off home to muck about rebuilding the goddamned Council of Wankers, and that was nothing to do with Spike, not anymore. No joy to be had there.

“Spike?” Dawn was back, leaning in the doorway. “He still wants to talk to you.” When no action was forthcoming, Dawn added bluntly, “He knows you’re here.”

Not having come up with a way of stonewalling the Watcher without backlash that would involve Buffy, Spike said finally, “Yeah. All right,” slapped down the glasses and pushed away from the table.

Bending to the weapons chest, Spike scooped up the receiver. “Yeah.”

“Hello, Spike,” came the Watcher’s voice, dry and plummy…and cautious, a bit. “How are you? Enjoying leisure at last?”

“What d’you want?”

“Well, at least your phone manners are intact. Such as they are. I’m fine, incidentally. If a bit vexed at the impossibility of moving even the tatters of this organization at anything beyond a glacial pace…. It’s Ethan, Spike: what did you do with him?”

“Been bothering you, has he?”

A crackling intercontinental silence. Then: “Yes, actually. I suppose one could say that. I find the notion of his being relegated to some abominable hell dimension troubling. And I discover I could actually use him here. His offer to assist with the restructuring of the council was not entirely without merit, I realize, away from the heat of the moment. So? To what exile did you send him?”

“Didn’t miss him before, when the Initiative had him. Forgot him altogether, seems like. Why miss him now?”

“Spike, answer the bloody question,” Giles responded, just as icily.

Spike scratched an eyebrow, thinking. Seemed some of Rayne’s bitterness about what he considered Giles’ betrayal and abandonment had set hooks, could still tug at him with unwanted sympathy. Not that he had any affection, or anything like affection, for the bugger. Just thinking about Rayne made him uneasy.

“Well, I don’t know, do I?” he retorted eventually.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Lady chose, not me. Whatever portal she opened around him, I just booted him through, didn’t I, and got on with the rest. A bit busy at the time, Rupert--doing my Icarus impression an’ all.”

“Yes, quite,” Giles responded in a gentler tone. “So you truly don’t know?”

“Not clue one, here. ‘S why I put you onto Dawn, though she’s got no more clue than I do. Could maybe ask Lady Gates for you, since it’s her mum, more or less. Dunno if she’s allowed. Got nothing to do with me, regardless. I got no special entrée there. Just the Lady’s fucking ‘instrument,’ by her lights. Goddam Powers. Tips me a hint the size of Canada whenever she wants something busted up, slaughtered, destroyed. Pays me no mind, otherwise. Queen Victoria. S’pose she had a headsman--had to, didn’t she? Comes with the job. Bet she didn’t invite him to tea.”

“I…see.”

“So you talk to Bit some more, if you want. I’m done.” Dropping the receiver on the chest, Spike crossed back to the den, commenting to Dawn in passing, “Talk to him, if you want. It’s on his dime.”

After awhile Dawn returned from the front room and settled on the carpet beside Spike’s chair, folding an arm on his thigh and leaning her head on top. Familiar and comfortable. Nobody could get after him as harsh as Dawn could; and nobody he felt easier with.

As she started to speak, Spike said abruptly, “Don’t want to know. Nothing about it. Nothing to do with me. You do whatever you please about it, Bit. Between you and the Lady, innit? Something, or nothing. Don’t care, don’t want to know. Not gonna run messages between ‘em, come to their whistle, run their errands, like that Oz. Not gonna get mixed up in their fucking business again.”

She waited a minute to be sure he was done. “Then I guess you don’t want to know what I said.”

“No interest whatever. No good coming from that direction. Not for us.” Spike ran spread, vexed fingers through his hair. Then, frowning/squinting at the screen, he collected the glasses with one hand and let the other drop to the crown of her shining dark head, slowly petting there.

“You’re scared,” Dawn observed after a peaceful while.

“Yeah. So?”

“So what are you scared of?”

“That they’ll set some damn thing going and try to tangle us up in it. Me. Your sis, she doesn’t need that. Just got it all pretty well settled. Has her class, enough dosh to get by on anyway if I keep the translation up. Her place. Her time. Her choices. You. Her chums. Don’t want that interfered with. Don’t want that…complicated with trash has nothing to do with us unless we’re stupid enough to let ourselves get sucked in. Ain’t been stupid, have you, Bit? More than usual, anyways?”

She thumped a fist on his knee. He tugged her hair.

She asked quietly, “And is that enough for you?”

“Well, has to be, doesn’t it?” Spike responded curtly. “’Cause that’s all there is, or will be. Can slow myself down to everyday. Did, with the chip, didn’t I? Know I was lucky to have blood provided, even that terrible pig swill. A safe place to lair up, even if more often than not I was tied or chained down to it. Not being staked another day.” He shrugged. “Just living. Unliving. Whatever.” He tilted a hand. “Do what you can. The time passes.”

That was all inchoate in his mind. But it was all right, with Bit, not to have it all parceled out tight and logical. All right to think out loud, even if it didn’t make much sense. She didn’t judge him, though she’d bully and nag him quick enough, which was only to be expected. She was outside his choices, not waiting or depending on him for anything. One of the things he loved her for.

Shared context made some things easier with Giles. Could do shorthand--like that about Queen Victoria--and no need for labored explanations. With Bit, though, it was themselves they had in common. After all, she was anchored to this dimension with a piece of his soul: only natural that they mostly understood each other. So a lot of things didn’t need to be said at all.

As he continued working on the list, she got up and leaned on back of his chair, arms folded across his shoulders, reading, because she pointed at the screen, commenting, “Bathing suits.”

“You think?”

“Trust me: bathing suits. And sunscreen. You would forget sunscreen.”

“Well, don’t need it, do I?”

“How do you know?” she countered, eyes bright and wide. “It could be just like, well, sun. Or it could be like anything. Don’t theorize in advance of your data. And so far, we have no data. Just a set of specifications that we’re still adding to.”

“Right you are. Thanks, Ms. Holmes.” Spike dutifully added the items to his list.

“You’re welcome, Watson. Somebody has to be the brains of this operation…. Hey: how about the mall? Climate-controlled and everything. Stores close early, but we could do supper there, wander around. You know. Bet Buffy would like that!”

“Bet she would, at that. You ask her, Princess.”

“No, you should--”

“Busy here, aren’t I? List gets longer, all this trash, gonna need the van to carry it all. You ask her.” Deftly, Spike tucked the list down at the bottom of the screen, disclosing the current translation waiting behind. “Got to get this piece done or we won’t get paid for it by the time the mortgage’s due.” Frowning through the glasses, that he didn’t much mind Dawn seeing him in, he was sure he presented the very picture of intent, scholarly absorption. Enough, anyway, that she flounced off down the hall toward the basement, where Buffy was doing laundry or something or other.

Himself, he didn’t want to offer Buffy any pressure, anything she might feel obliged to accept, reluctant to refuse. Wanted to leave her free in all her ways and her choices. She’d earned that. Wanted to hang back, wait for her cue and her lead and then follow it.

Importunate begging, that was what little sisters were for, wasn’t it?

And as to the surprise he was working on so hard, preparing so carefully, that was different because he already knew she wanted that, and he was gonna give it to her: warm.

He smiled at the screen.

**********

Dawn was the first one out of the SUV after Spike backed it carefully (for Spike) down the length of the alley, leaving just enough space to get the back hatch open. Mike uncovered and started handing things out to her. About twenty bags, foam chests, and miscellaneous stuffed into oddly bulging garbage bags for convenience in handling. Not all that much, considering they’d ferried most of the stuff up last night and she’d managed to guilt Mike into going across to help her and Spike set up. Nervous as a cat with vacuuming in progress, Mike had eventually pronounced the totality “nice.” So he couldn’t very well back out now, right?

That it was a secret meant there was no obligation to invite Willow, Xander, or (heaven forfend!) Anya. And Dawn had no intention of being lone man out while Spike and Buffy had smoochies and probably more than smoochies. Might get some smoochies of her own in, if Mike would cooperate, which he generally did if it was her asking, Dawn thought smugly, setting one of the blood coolers by the wall and swinging back to receive the other. In front of the SUV, as the light faded, Spike could discard the blanket and continue deflecting Buffy from investigating what was being unloaded from the back, which was a good thing to keep him occupied since he’d been maniacally useless all day except for driving, of course.

Buffy was stomping back and forth across the alley in tight dark green fleece pants, a fuzzy beret like a lime halo, and a jade (celadon?) down jacket, hugging herself against the chill. Dressed for the opposite season, Dawn was shivering herself, what with her bare legs and flip-flops showing her freshly-painted toenails (another occupation to keep Spike from coming totally unglued).

Under her knee-length hoodie Dawn was wearing the most skimpy, thong-y bikini (yellow with deep pink hibiscus there was barely enough material to show, with their elongated and highly symbolic pistils, but the matching sheer, floaty overshirt took care of any display problem) she’d been able to wheedle Spike into agreeing to on their swimsuit-buying detour at the mall. They’d had to go: naturally, Spike didn’t own a swimsuit. And he’d gone totally overboard on what he’d bought for Buffy. At least it was 99% spandex, so it should fit despite Spike’s wildly fanciful notions of Buffy’s proportions.

Strange: you'd think he'd know.

While he’d still been dazed with crimson spandex, Dawn had managed to smuggle in something suitable for Mike, just on hopeful spec, and Spike had signed for everything without seeming to notice, so that stratagem had worked out perfectly.

When everything was piled and handy, it was time: nearly sundown on the first day of vacation. They could have come anytime, really, except for vampires’ problems with daylight since although the house had been all fitted up with necro-tempered glass, the SUV still hadn’t and Dawn didn’t want to contend with any more reasons for Mike to opt out than he already had. And there was also the contrast factor.

“OK, Spike,” Dawn called. “We’re ready!”

Sliding between the SUV and the side of the alley, Spike started collecting baggage. Dawn firmly disentangled him from loops and handles and herded him to the alley’s back wall, reminding him, “We’ll collect it later.”

“But somebody could--”

“It’s a blind alley, Spike. Blocked by a locked, parked vehicle only slightly smaller than a bus. Or it will be: Buffy, you can lock up now.”

“Spike has the keys and the thingie,” Buffy pointed out as Spike dragged her by both wrists into the remaining clear space between the rear of the vehicle and the wall, as wild-eyed and frantic as though he thought she was gonna attempt an escape.

It seemed Spike had tossed the keys on the front seat when he’d rid himself of the blanket. As Spike edged off to retrieve them, Mike swung out of the hatch and shut it, offering, “I could take the van back to your place. Come back and fetch you, any time you say.”

“Oh, no you don’t!” Dawn grabbed Mike’s wrist and though he could have swatted her like a bug, that was shackle enough to hold him. “Who’s gonna lay the bonfire right, so it doesn’t catch the cabana?” Leaning close, she imparted the dire whisper, “Who’s gonna dig the latrine?”

“Spike, he knows,” Mike began feebly, falling silent as Spike backed into view, hitting the squeaker that made the SUV chirp a report of being locked, except he hit it again and then had to test the nearest door to determine if two chirps meant it was unlocked again or only locked twice until Dawn took the squeaker away from him and steered him back in front of the baggage.

“Spike, focus, for heaven’s sake! Lock onto the rift: can you feel it?”

Jittering around in place, he shut his eyes, breathing nervously. “It’s gone, Bit. Shut itself off and--”

“It’s done nothing of the kind: these rifts have been in place for centuries. You know that! Deep breath,” she commanded, not sure if he was capable of working himself into hyperventilation, considering he didn’t need the air at all, but not wanting to find out. “Hold. Three Mississippi, two Mississippi, one Mississippi. Release. Now try again. Focus, dammit!”

Slowly he rotated, turning side-on to the wall, left shoulder a little hunched and head tilted, frowning with his eyes tight shut. He lifted a hand for her to take, but Dawn snatched Buffy’s hand instead and set it in Spike’s clasp, taking Buffy’s free hand and determinedly linking to Mike, behind. It didn’t matter where she was in the linkage. Might not even matter that they all be linked, since they weren’t being inserted individually: once the way was open, it was open until released. Spike wouldn’t let it close until they had all the baggage and supplies transferred.

Dawn couldn’t see or feel anything different. Couldn’t sense the rift on her own. But somewhere inside her she felt the slight tug on what she’d learned was the thin skein of soul-stuff that was her connection to Spike: Spike aligned and locked tight to the rift, wanting in. And in some way completely beyond words, she knew how to give him what he wanted. Consent, it was. Permission. Even benediction of a sort. Power, certainly--fine-tuned as a laser beam. Just the right pressure in just the right place. It didn’t come from her but through her, somehow. Not hers, but hers to give and grant.

And his to use.

It required both of them.

The wall was still solidly there, but it had ceased to matter. Hand in hand in hand in hand, they went across.

Buffy was gonna be sooo flabbergasted!

**********

Buffy hated surprises. Hated and loathed them with a fierce passion. Surprises made you look dumb, everybody waiting on your reaction. Not knowing what was expected, what to do.

When she was tugged forward when there shouldn’t have been any forward, when the cold, constricted twilight suddenly became distance, and dim red sunlight glinting off slowly undulating waves, and her boots were sinking into the warm sand of a pristine beach stretching off as far as she could see to either side, she knew exactly where to look, what to do.

She flung herself at Spike, and tried to explore his tonsils with her tongue, and was as thoroughly all over him as she knew how to be and remain more or less vertical, Spike staggering a bit because Buffy’s legs were wrapped around his waist. When she had to leave off a second to breathe, she used the breath to tell him, “It’s wonderful, it’s--”

“--hoped you might like it, nobody around to trouble you, stays just like this--”

“--perfect, however did you find it? You--”

Then they forgot about talking again until Dawn interrupted with rude gakking noises, saying, “Spike. Yoo hoo, Spike! You can let it shut, now, we have everything inside. Or here. Or however you’re supposed to say it. Spike!”

While Spike stepped back to do whatever he did, Buffy flung her fluffy beret in one direction, her jacket in another, and plunked her rear on the sand to haul off her boots.

Warm! Gloriously, stultifyingly warm. Hot, even! A tang of salt in the air but that air unstirring, not so much as a breeze.

As Buffy started to haul up the hem of her sweat top, Spike’s hand on her shoulder stopped her. She looked up at him inquiringly, then followed his gesture, endearingly abrupt and almost shy, to a purple-and-white striped cabana like a miniature circus tent. Or maybe the stripes were blue: the red light made everybody, even Spike, look like bruised plums.

Although Mike looked uneasy, the illumination didn’t seem to be doing the vamps any harm, Spike would have checked on that, of course, so nothing to worry about on that front and she could forget about it. Anyway, the cabana was perfect and it was plain she got first crack at it. She ran for it, bare feet pounding in the sand.

Inside were an enormous pile of towels on one of several canvas chairs, a jerry-rigged shower (a big plastic container with a hose) suspended where two corner poles met, and on a hanger, a wisp of gorgeous crimson nearly nothing that hardly qualified as clothing. Sweet but unnecessary: she would have obliviously stripped, out there on the sand. Nothing either Spike nor Dawn hadn’t seen before, and she was as indifferent to Mike’s gaze as to that of a fish, or a squirrel. But because it was there, she put the bikini on, wishing for a mirror as she tugged out wrinkles in awkward places until the spandex clung smooth as a second skin. Maybe a good soaking would help.

Bursting out of the cabana, she charged straight at the water. Having removed only his boots, Spike was sitting in the sand having a cigarette. Dawn and Mike were conversing between two big shoulder-high piles of wood. Buffy stumbled and nearly fell when she saw the almost transparent float Dawn’s removal of her hoodie left revealed. Catching her balance with an overhead wave, Buffy turned it into a summoning gesture, calling to Spike, “Come on! Last one in’s a rotten egg!”

He bounced to his feet and was running, long floating strides in the red twilight, and hit the water in an arrowing dive just an instant before she did, so she knew she didn’t need to worry about rocks or sucking undertow or any hazards like that.

The water was blood warm--more like a hot tub than an ocean. She stroked out, through and over the placid, undulant waves, to proper swimming depth. That was a surprisingly long way out: the beach must shelve very gradually.

Turning in place and buoyant as a volleyball, throwing her hair back, she started looking around for Spike, both above and below the water. The dim light didn’t penetrate: she couldn’t see anything. And her eyes stung, afterward.

She was sure he was going to grab her leg or porpoise up underneath her. Instead, what must have been a deliberate splash drew her attention farther out. Spike was swimming there. As she watched, he jackknifed, diving. Bare shoulders, bare back, bare…. Oh.

About a minute later, he surfaced near her, balanced upright in the water like a seal. “You’re naked,” Buffy announced blankly, pushing water away from her.

“Don’t have to work so hard, love. Water will pretty much keep you up. More salt in it than you’re used to. You’ll want to sluice off, after. Brought fresh water for that. It’s--”

“I saw it. If I swallow some, is that gonna be a problem?” Buffy looked around her, suddenly registering the alien landscape absent of trees or grass, just dunes rolling down to a sea placid, almost, as a lake. A different motion. A different texture. Stranger than she’d initially noticed.

Like Spike, who was watching her take it in. Not visibly nervous anymore, but still watching. “As to that other, Bit said I should so I did, to shut her up about it. Doesn’t mean I got to wear it, though. Got a couple of changes in the cabana. Have you fetch me a towel when it’s time. Or just tell Bit to squinch her eyes shut, not look if she don’t want to see…. Ain’t got everything. Nothing for you to kill, of an evening, ‘cause there’s nothing alive. At least anyplace I could find, a few miles roundabout…. Nor in the water, neither,” he added, in response to her nervous downward glance. “No fish to nibble your toes, nor seaweed to tangle your legs nor jellyfish to wash up on the shore to poke at with a stick. No shells to collect. All powder, long since. Air’s a bit thinner than what you’re used to, but didn’t leave Bit in serious lack while we were moving things in, setting up, a few hours there, so it should be all right…. No evening, come to that. Always just like this. Old sun, can’t force out enough light to read by proper, much less fry a vamp. Always just there, hand’s breadth from the horizon. Doesn’t rise or set--”

Buffy whispered, “Where are we?”

“No clue. Not the slightest. But we can get back, and that’s all that should signify. If…if you like it, I mean. Enough to stay awhile.”

She knew he was gonna dive, and he did, and she had no trouble staying with him since he wasn’t trying to get away. She latched tight to a handful of hair--enough to bring them face to face, mouth to mouth. The bikini proved to have enough slack to accommodate the needed adjustments and holding on hard, clutching close, was a decent substitute for gravity. The water kept floating them to the surface but they were far enough offshore, Buffy figured it didn’t matter.

When they finally leaned back in the water, separate again except for an arm outflung by each and clasped at the wrists, not even needing to stroke, and Spike took up his self-deprecating recital of ways the place didn’t quite meet his rigorous specifications for Buffy pleasing, wasn’t totally a fantasy beach out of some movie, she dunked him, then hauled him close when he bobbed up again.

Nuzzling under his chin, licking up the outside of the shell of his ear, Buffy stated fervently, “It’s perfect. 100% deep-dyed, no preservatives, no fat perfect. It’s warm!”

Spike allowed himself to be reassured.

Far away, onshore, a bonfire was leaping and small, distant music played. Without asking, Buffy knew the wood wasn’t local and batteries were included. Every likely need provided for. There was therefore food!

After a final (for now) rocking kiss, she and Spike turned and stroked for the shore.

MORE BLOOD

2005-03-05T12:52:09Z

OK, it took me awhile (and a pulled tooth) to recover from post-finishing slump on Blood Rites, but I'm there. And being (temporarily--till next Tuesday) laid off work, I've been thinking (finally). And I've decided to carry on to one more book in the Blood series, and for a particular reason: in gratitude and happiness for the rescuing of me last summer, when I was trying to get through to September and my birthday, when my legal status would change, and I was threatened with foreclosure on my house, and I was having panic attacks, and all that wretchedness. And the fandom rescued me, all unlooked-for.

Words won't come just because you want them. But I've had a story singing in my mind for a week or so, whose topic is, now that Spike and Dawn, between them, can open portals to just about anywhere, there could be an expedition into Quar'toth, called "the Doorless Dimension." I don't recall seeing Quar'toth displayed in any fanfic so far, so it's new ground, despite Barb Cummings' fine imaginings of Pylea. (I find that Barb's and my mind frequently move in similar grooves because we visualize Spike much the same and our stories tend to be Spike-driven/centric.)

As it happens, Ethan Rayne was shunted there at the end of Blood Rites, and Giles feels bad/guilty about that, however belatedly; and, as Spike knows, Angel has a particular interest in getting into Quar'toth, as well, since Angel asked him about it during Blood Kin (formerly Enemy of My Enemy). So to me, an expedition in force into Quar'toth has both storyness and continuity with what's gone before, and builds further on the development of Spike into "his own man/vampire" that I've been recounting--connected to, but not wholly defined by, his relationship with Buffy, Dawn, Giles, the Scoobies...and Mike, his unruly, chosen childe. Dawn is the key, but Spike is the center, in my stories.

Since I've decided to write it, I don' t care if only two people are still interested in reading it (though I *hope* otherwise--a lot! Encouragement would be GOOD!). It may well be awhile--a month or more--before I've thought through what our gang should find Quar'toth to be like, how it should connect and resonate with the essentially closed-in nature of selfhood (especially Spike's)--another and analogous "doorless dimension"--in other words, until I have actual beginning of story done and ready to be shared. I just wanted to share my decision with my online friends so you can be looking forward, as I am, to getting into the new tale.

Where my work is to be found

2005-01-01T12:11:51Z

You know it, I know it: some of the primary Spikefic sites are faltering and seldom updated. AllAboutSpike, fine archive that it is, hasn't been updated for months; Impish Eyes, another site that carried my work, has largely turned its attention to other things. The Bloody Awful Sandlot, a third place my novels are posted, updates about once or twice a month, though clearly fiction is still being submitted there. Only The Crypt is updating on a daily basis, but I understand some browsers have difficulty accessing it.

The website of the Soulful Spike Society, S3, now has my work--all four of the "Blood" novels--posted and available. There are also fine reviews there, thoughtful essays, excellent fanfic (besides my contributions), and many other earthly delights. I invite you to bookmark and visit: http://www.soulfulspike.com/

Also, if anyone knows of (or runs, of course) a good archive site interested in Spikecentric fiction of some considerable length other than those mentioned above, I'd appreciate a recommendation so I could offer my work there. I'm not in a position to manage a website myself these days--lack the software--so I rely on webmasters to make/keep my work available to readers.

And it's readers that fanfic is really all about, right?

Oh--and Happy New Year to all of the Jossverse and particularly to the fanfic writers who have given me so much delight in so many and such surprising ways. My life is on an even keel now (despite being snowed into my house for 9 days, was able to get out only yesterday) and generally good, thanks to the help of many. What my next writing project will be (as you may have noticed, I only write loooong!), I don't yet know. But if/when it's fanfic, be certain that I'll let you know and invite you all along for the ride. I've written all my life since about the age of 7; I certainly don't intend to stop now!

Blood Rites complete

2004-12-19T09:39:54Z

I've finished Blood Rites. The final chapter, Chapter 21, is here:

http://www.livejournal.com/users/nandibble/17193.html

If you feel I've overlooked any necessary loose-thread-tying in this last chapter, please let me know--I want the series to be, and feel, complete.

Thanks for playing along with me in my SpikeSaga.

Chapter 21: Noon

2004-11-20T10:26:50Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 21: Noon (complete; Blood Rites is complete)

All the trace silver had been wakened. No longer neutral and inert, it hungrily absorbed all magic within its range; and its range grew as it fed.

That was no direct problem to Spike, but it was to Rayne, who found, before the night was over, that he could no longer generate the pleasure he used to keep Spike distracted and reasonably cooperative. The silver created static and added the energies to its charge. And losing the distraction--and insulation--of the pleasure, Spike was bored and uneasy. He slept…and dreamed of burning.

He woke with a yell, up and on his feet in an instant, shaking and disoriented.

The next second, Rayne recovered himself from the corner of the caboose where Spike had unthinkingly flung him and was back, holding Spike tight and close from behind, arms around Spike's chest, making soothing sounds until Spike was fully awake and surrendered to the embrace, still shuddering.

That had been a bad one. The worst yet. Heat and flame as deep as he went, and he'd felt himself starting to disintegrate into exploding incandescence. His demon was practically shrieking in terror and he wasn't too sanguine about it himself. No use telling himself it was only a dream, with the certainty of the noontime ceremony before him.

Dreams like that weren't a warning. They were a certainty; and he felt that certainty all through him, fragile and full of dread.

"We can't stay here," Rayne reflected, leaning forward to kiss the hinge of Spike's jaw. "We have to move now, not later."

"Gonna burn," Spike muttered, shutting his eyes and making himself not reach for calm, letting the desperate, involuntary breaths he was pulling in make him dizzy. He too was using distractions, presenting the demon's mostly unreflecting terror or appetites to keep Rayne from looking sharper, deeper than the surface. Spike wasn't sure he could keep doing that--letting his demon have free rein. Couldn't sort the confusion like that. Couldn't keep watch on the patterns, see the convergences he needed, to know what to do and when.

He'd just about lost himself into the demon--the definition of a fledge--when the silver had sparked back at him, interrupting his channeling of the Stone. Couldn't have that. But couldn't risk losing that camouflage, either. He didn't know what to do.

"No you won't," Rayne insisted urgently, hugging him tighter, breathing warm against his cheek. "I won't let you. I'll protect you. But I can't do that here… Come--sit down," Rayne said, pulling and guiding him back to the cot and sitting beside him there, all concerned and consoling, offering his warmth in place of the memory of fire as though he knew how terribly cold Spike was deep inside, with only extremes to choose from.

Helplessness was cold. Fear was cold. Everything that wasn't the consuming fire was cold, even though he dreaded it. Fire and ice, he thought, his mind spinning away into the poetry of apocalypse. He'd always found poetry a refuge, even though he couldn't write it worth shit. Needed it now, to focus, but Rayne had taken it away, the green words on his arm, that he rubbed absently, missing the certainty of what had been written there….

"Would you like a drink?"

"God, yes!"

"I'll have some brought," Rayne decided, getting up as though he really didn't want to, was afraid of Spike bursting completely apart without Rayne's embrace to anchor him. "Won't be but a moment, dear heart," he added anxiously, not leaving: waiting for something from Spike. Agreement, reassurance, maybe.

Spike didn't know, didn't care. Could only feel the formless waiting and expectation. He was seeing in Picasso jaggedness, Monet blurs again. Edges and corners of things that were themselves undefined and unrecognizable. Wrapping arms tightly around himself, he began rocking. That had pattern and made him feel marginally better.

It wasn't Rayne's warmth he missed because it didn't mean anything. A touch from Buffy or from Bit, that would have warmed him all the way through. But couldn't have that now. Had to be away from them, separate, to do what he must. But he hadn't known it would be so dreadfully cold to put himself beyond their reach, except in his mind….

He didn't notice Rayne leaving, but after an unknown, uncounted time noticed him back, pouring liquor into a glass. Spike left him the glass and grabbed the bottle, putting the contents down in long, desperate gulps so that the inside would match the outside, what he felt and what he saw, all blurred incoherence. Couldn't have enough of that, soon enough. Couldn't keep control or fully lose it, neither one.

Wasn't up to this. Really wasn't. Terrible idea to begin with but he was in it now, and had pulled Dawn with him. Hoped she was all right and would forgive him but that was Mike's now, to see to her, and he supposed the forgiving didn't matter since he wouldn't know about it, the one way or the other, until he could hold out his hand to her and await her answer as he'd dreamed of doing so many times--sometimes with one result, sometimes with another, but always the burning. No variation in that. So maybe it didn't signify whether she forgave him or not since it all came out burning in the end.

Holding the glass, Rayne was watching him uncertainly, a small perplexed frown between his brows. With a sort of shrug, Rayne took a sip, then made a face of distaste. Spike didn't care: he was interested only in effect. Rayne watched him again. They were having a dialogue of motions, gestures. How nice.

"Don't get too impaired to walk," Rayne advised, as though the alternative worried him.

Spike quit swallowing long enough to assert, "'M never too drunk to walk." Anyway, it was only a pint: not enough to get properly snockered with.

Rayne continued to look worried and uncertain, then went outside to talk to whatever runner was posted there. Spike could feel the vamp, knew it wasn't Mike anymore, and beyond that didn't care. Rayne was ordering up an escort, his little gaggle of fire mages, and making security arrangements for moving Bit, who'd be needed later. Be simpler with a phone, but Digger, traditional vamp that he was, didn't do phones. Likely didn't know how. Or maybe in the deeps, reception was crap. What you didn't depend on couldn't fuck you up when it failed. Maybe Digger had the right of it, after all.

Finishing the pint, Spike pitched it away. He could feel the chemical warmth start to flow out from his center. Not anything real, and not what he needed, but it would do for now. Drunk could also be good camouflage. Not likely Rayne would look past that, if Spike made himself obnoxious enough. And he'd never had much problem with that.

**********

The kitchen timer went off. Both Buffy and Giles glanced around as Willow, with sleepy concentration, poured the used scrying powder, the materia, off the map onto a saucer, then started preparing the map for the next location spell. Since she’d been methodically checking every hour, the thrill was pretty much gone for the observers: after a sip of tea Giles resumed his explanation of Tannhäuser, and Buffy propped her chin back on her fist.

She said, “So I get that this Venusburg is a sort of operatic whorehouse, and this poet/singer/knight Tanhouse--"

"Tannhäuser."

"--Tan-whatever gets himself enthralled there and then he’s sorry. But what’s that got to do with Spike? I mean, he has a nice enough voice, and he argues about who stole from who about the Billy Idol look, but he’s not a glam rock star or anything. It’s just the look. The image.”

“It’s all about image, really. Contrasting images. The pleasures of the flesh,” Giles went on, looking so prissy and teacherish that nobody would suspect he knew any except from a report, long ago, “as opposed to the exaltation of the spirit. Carnal love as opposed to holy, chaste love, with the Venusburg the exemplar of the former. Tannhäuser tried to embrace both, and it killed him. But the pope’s staff bloomed, you see, so it seems God accepted Tannhäuser’s repentance and forgave him, as the pope could not. At least according to the legend.”

Buffy fiddled with her Diet Coke can. “But this Tan-whatever, he was happy there, right?” She was remembering Spike collared and oiled, stretched languorously by the fire at the mansion.

“Tannhäuser was a git. No matter where he was, he was unsatisfied. In the arms of Venus, he wanted holiness. In respectable society, he proclaimed the primacy of carnal ecstasy.”

“That’s like sex, right?” Buffy formulated dubiously.

“One presumes so.”

“So why throw that up at Spike? He’s never wanted to be holy. Far from it!”

Giles considered her with an expression suggesting he was thinking about all sorts of embarrassing implications he wasn’t gonna actually say out loud. “He wanted you. Quite consistently and absurdly. Perhaps that’s his version.”

“Of what?”

“Of heaven.”

Buffy felt compelled to blurt, “Giles, I’m not holy!”

“Perhaps you are, Buffy--from the viewpoint of a vampire. Which he insists on being and refuses to even try to repudiate. After his fashion, Spike also wants incompatible things. Wants to be, and remain, the Big Bad, and also to be a righteous and honorable man. Your champion and lover, and also the Master Vampire of Sunnydale, with all that entails. Finally, he cannot be both; and I believe he knows it. So in referring to the Venusburg, I suppose I was teasing him a bit about his inconsistencies…and because I knew that he’d understand the reference but probably wouldn’t admit it, from assumed lower-class snobbery. Also, it was apt, given the manner of the enthrallment and the absurdity of that narrow ferret Ethan cast as a blowsy, Teutonic Venus….” Giles made a quick open-handed, dismissive gesture. “Small pedantic joke, of no great moment or profundity.”

“Huh.”

Lifting her head, Willow announced, “They’re moving,” and both Buffy and Giles leaned to study the map, which now showed a bright red dot a finger’s breadth from where it’d appeared before.

Buffy demanded, “Where?”

“Well, I can’t tell yet, can I?” Willow exasperatedly puffed a few strands of hair away from her face.

“Do it again, then.”

Willow shook her head. “If they’re in a car, with Spike stuffed in the trunk or something, they’d be wherever they’re going before we could get mobilized. If they’re walking, they’ll have to zig-zag because, well, pipes. So all I’m gonna get is the general direction until they stop.”

Buffy considered the kitchen window, bright with dawning, as Willow continued, “It’s still early. Either this ritual takes a whole lot of prep or the earth magic, charging the silver, has made Rayne too itchy to stay holed up in the Great Underground Empire. In which case, yay us! We’ve forced them into something like the open, which I doubt was the original plan. Grues, I mean vamps, aren’t too keen on sunlight.”

Reminded and grimly reflecting for a moment on Spike’s dreams of burning, Buffy decided, “If the opposition’s moving, we should be too.” Sliding off her stool, she waited a second for all the creaky joints to get in gear, then headed for the front room where the SITs were variously sleeping or readying weaponry. When the awake ones registered her presence, Buffy said, “Saddle up.”

Rona asked plaintively, “Breakfast first?”

After a moment’s grudging consideration, Buffy nodded. “But we’ll grab it on the way. As soon as we know where we’re going.”

*********

When Spike came out of the fog enough to realize where they were going, he found it irresistibly funny. Flopping on the walk-rim of the tunnel, he put his head down on his arms and laughed until tears came, ignoring attempts by the escort Digger had assigned to haul him back to his feet. Then he demanded more liquor. Demanded smokes. Then he started punching out the nearest vamp, just on general principles. Rayne wanted Chaos? Spike would give him Chaos. And random, he couldn’t be read, so he was as random and contrary as possible until the fog swept back in. Wasn’t hard: he’d had decades of practice pissing people off. Came naturally, pretty much. No thought required.

When next he came to himself, he was actually there: in the factory. Michael had certainly made cats' meat of it, just as Buffy had said. Most of the windows broken: vast slants of morning sunlight blazing in, whole large tracts of the floor it would be flaming death to cross. Rayne was looking around, dismayed. Likely expected the defensive fortress Spike had made of it, not the wreck Mike’s anger had left.

But the back, behind the barricade of dead machinery, was still pretty much intact, and no windows there. Coming through from the only tunnel access, back there, seeing the brightness beyond, none of the dozen or so vamps of the escort had ventured past the wall of machines. No wonder: Spike’s demon was having a bit of a fit, exposed in the open with so much light sizzling just beyond his fingertips. Just Spike and Rayne and Rayne’s three fire mages out on the factory floor.

Slowly, head tilted, Spike experimentally extended his right hand into a sunbeam. There was warmth, then pain, then his fingers starting to smoke. With a cry, Rayne noticed what Spike was doing. Rayne grabbed and shoved him against one of the machines of the barrier hard enough that Spike reeled and stumbled, rebounding. Rayne caught and shoved him again, into the vamps, who manhandled him through the gap into the safer darkness, a few taking quick shots at his middle because they could and Rayne might not catch them at it. Had a fair collection of bruised, aching places, he noticed as he went down. Uneasy, nervous, vamps lashed out. Just how it was. A few kicks, too, before they backed off to let Rayne through.

Hands on hips, glaring down at Spike slowly trying to right himself, Rayne demanded, “Are you insane? Are you five? Can’t I take my eyes off you for an entire minute without your getting yourself into trouble?”

Spike didn’t answer, getting unsteadily to his feet, favoring a knee he wasn’t sure would hold him. Rayne whipped a suspicious glance around the vamp escort, who backed off farther, idly picking up bits of trash from the floor and looking as innocent as game-face allowed.

Spike started limping a wandering path toward the back left corner. “Knackered,” he said to nobody in particular. “Gonna have a bit of a lie-down.” Since nobody prevented him, and the fog held off, he veered around the trashed remains of the office and the spill of broken glass (barefoot, he missed his boots) roundabout to the square pit of the freight elevator shaft. He stood a minute, considering it. No elevator in it anymore: should be a clean drop. Might be trash piled at the bottom, though; and he couldn’t be sure about that knee. Couldn’t make up his mind. Then felt Rayne rummaging around in his head, checking if there was an exit down there (there wasn’t), whether Spike had hatched some plan (he hadn’t), whether Spike needed to be thrown back into mind-fogged restraint. Spike waited out the periodic inspection dully, just feeling blank and tired, hurting in assorted places.

Released so Rayne and his mages could begin setting up for the ritual, Spike blinked at the black shaft, absently licking the back of his hand, then decided the hell with it and stepped into the hole, turning to catch the edge one-handed for a second before completing the drop. There was trash--crates, scraps of broken furniture. He landed in a crooked sprawl. Face to face with Sue.

**********

Rayne’s cowled, robed mages didn’t come for Dawn until mid-morning, and no way was getting out of school worth it. After miles of ascending passages and being hauled up sheer shafts in rope slings, they exited from a shed beside a rusty railroad track overgrown with weeds and overlooked by a water tower like a teetery striding alien just about to succumb to the plague. Dazzled and disoriented, Dawn winced and shaded her eyes, trying to get used to there being a sun up there and light all around and a chilly breeze that made her shiver and hug herself. She felt like some grotty blouse stuffed in the back of a drawer and forgotten--smelly and creased with unappealing wrinkles.

A battered old Ford pulled up, mostly red, coughing smoke in the last stages of automotive emphysema. The mages bundled her into the back seat between them, the third one sliding in by the driver, a nervous teenaged boy. Dawn thought the teen had been hired for the job, on the cheap; his zits did not convey an impression of blinding intelligence.

On the principle of “Nothing ventured, nothing gained,” Dawn was about to wail that she was being kidnapped, as though three robed guys hauling a high-schooler who’d obviously slept in her clothes around an abandoned rail line didn’t have a high enough weirdness factor to make anybody blink, but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was a wheezy squeak. She tried again. Not even a squeak, this time. Some way, the mages had stolen her voice--like the creepy Gentlemen she partly remembered but mostly had heard about. She looked around wildly, pointing at her throat and fish-gasping mouth as though she thought it was some terrible oversight, an unintended mistake they’d correct if she could just make them realize. Which was dumb, she admitted to herself, when she could stop hyperventilating and sagged back between the two mages, arms sullenly folded and bottom lip quivering.

Being kidnapped was almost ho-hum compared to being voiceless. Dawn felt singularly deprived and pitiful, to be dragged to her doom not even able to complain.

She wasn’t surprised when the car passed the mall without turning: too many people, too much activity. The high weirdness of ritual sacrifice might be noticed, even in Sunnydale, in broad daylight even though the mall’s interior was vamp-friendly and therefore there were usually a few vamps around, hunting. Even in Sunnydale, somebody might be inclined to try to interfere or at least report it to mall security. There could be complications.

But her eyes opened wider when the car turned off the highway onto the potholed industrial drive. Could they be headed for…Yes! she shouted inwardly as the Ford bumped uphill, turned, and nosed in near the familiar sentry-post alcove of the factory. Spike’s factory.

She didn’t know why the sight of it made her feel so much better, so much more hopeful that she didn’t even struggle or kick, being hauled out of the car and inside, with the protesting teenager being hustled along right behind her.

Nobody on duty at the sentry post, check. And the inside like the aftermath of a tornado, heaps of junk, broken windows, and parts of the sheet-metal roof gone so the sunlight came right in, all the shadows pitch black by contrast, that she was being forced toward.

On the far side of the barrier, a couple of vamps took the teenager off the mages’ hands. He was unceremoniously eaten. As Dawn winced away, the mages let go of her: obviously, there was no longer any place to run.

Automatically, Dawn continued toward the office--not realizing, in the dimness, that it’d been battered into flinders until her shoes crunched on glass. As her eyes adjusted, she saw the tumbled heap that used to be wall supports, a desk, the broken shells of molded pink fiberglass chairs… Off to her right, halfway to the tunnel access hatch, Rayne and his mages were drawing the containing circle on the concrete floor by the light of a lantern a vamp was holding high like a really ugly, oversized lawn ornament.

No sign of Spike, which was puzzling but not worrying: his presence was required, as hers was. When the time came, Dawn knew he’d be there. All the same, she wanted to see him, see if he was right in the head yet, find out what he planned to do when push came to shove.

Because all of this had to mean something, right? Spike, who never left off fighting, never gave up, caving so easily to capture and deep bewilderment--there had to be a reason, right? Had to be a reason why he’d as good as asked her to stay in prime, pure sacrificial condition, not that she’d really intended otherwise, but it wasn’t normally the sort of thing she and Spike talked about. So why bring it up if he didn’t have a plan and that was something needed to fit into it?

Unless the plan had gotten lost as he had, with the craziness and the rocking….

Figuring he was probably on the lower level in the erstwhile fledges’ dormitory, since that was about the only other place to be, she carefully circled the spills of glass until she bumped into one of the steel elevator supports and hung on there. She tried to call his name before remembering she had no voice, and made a wry face. She thought a moment, then took hold of the taskin fang on its cord, intending to bang on the support and at least make a noise that way. A voice quietly saying her name made her turn.

In game-face, Mike was laying out fast-food clamshells on the floor. As Dawn hesitantly approached, he remarked, “Vamp that was supposed to fetch you breakfast sort of forgot. Sort of had an accident. So Digger, he gave me leave to bring it. Don’t want the Lady to have no complaint, how you were treated. Mostly cold. Couldn’t help that. Think I got some of the things you like, anyway….” Laying out plastic cutlery in a twist of napkin, he stopped, stilled: head still bent, features still downcast, an ill-trimmed wing of hair falling over his forehead. “You mad at me, Dawn? That I ain’t got you out of this yet?”

Realizing he was taking her silence as reproach, Dawn tapped his shoulder. When he looked up, Dawn made talky-mouth with her hand, slapped the other hand over her mouth, and lifted the talky-mouth hand palm-up, helplessly. She could tell, even in game-face, when he got it. His face cleared for a moment, then clenched into a scowl as he looked over his shoulder at the mages.

Dawn found it strange how the situation changed because Mike was in it. Nothing was different and everything was different. She was happy and at ease in his company. Maybe her body would be shed today. And maybe her being afraid of that was just a reflex. Habit. She was the least pinch of an awareness, and a force, perhaps as old as Time itself; and even bodiless, she’d still known the parts that were her, and collected them to her, and bound them with a bit of soul, and been herself. And Mike was a vampire--six, going on forever. She smiled at him fondly.

Then she tapped his shoulder again, recalling his attention. Leaning and reaching, she pulled at his upper arm, and he was willing but puzzled, not knowing what she wanted from him. She sank down and drew his big hand, palm-up, into her lap as though she were a gypsy going to read the lines. But with her fingertip she wrote on his open hand invisible lines for him to read: L I A R.

Because as close a watch as Digger had set on him, as close confined as Digger had kept him, there was no way Digger would have let him go waltzing out to mess into the Working his Sire was to be forced to perform, the Working whose centerpiece was the sacrifice of the human girl Mike had defected trying to protect. No matter how furious Mike claimed to be with Spike, Digger plainly had his doubts and reservations, and had put Mike on very obvious probation he’d openly violated in coming. Totally AWOL. When Digger found out, Mike either ran or he was dust.

They didn’t have to talk, she found, to understand each other.

Mike’s golden eyes had gone fierce and hot. The brow ridge seemed even heavier and more pronounced. Reaching out a careful finger, she stroked across his brows. Vamps liked that.

In a choked voice slightly slurred by fangs, he muttered, “Not gonna let them do you. Not Rayne. Not no one at all. But I don’t know how to play it with vamps in the mix, and Goddam fucking mages. What does for one won’t do for the other. They’d just take me down and go on. Ain’t been able to figure how to manage it, all on my own.”

Dawn tapped his forehead until he looked up at her again. Tilting her head toward the elevator shaft and rigging, she mouthed, Ask Spike.

For a second he was puzzled. Then the anger and frustration smoothed into his usual impassivity and Dawn wondered what he was thinking. Leaning in, he took a good deep breath by her neck, the bridge of his nose resting for a moment against her jaw. Then he rose casually, looked around to see who was attending to what, strolled to the shaft and vanished.

Dawn tore into the clamshells. She was starving!

**********

Mike wasn’t much surprised to find that the remnants of Spike’s crew had laired up here. It was a good enough place, he supposed…and where else were they to go, masterless, with no protection except each another?

“He’ll tell on us,” Sue muttered anxiously to Huey, but the three other vamps--dour Huey, uncertain Toby, and Mary who was about the only dangerous one among them--didn’t move. Mike stayed where he’d landed, balanced, waiting until he was reasonably sure he wasn’t gonna have to take on all four of them, then looked around until he spotted Spike curled up asleep in a pile of blankets and bedding.

As Mike took a step in that direction, Huey eased between, asking, “Digger send you?”

It was a pointed and delicate question. Mike thought about it a minute before shaking his head. “I’m here to get Dawn out.”

Rousing, Spike sat up stiffly, saying, “Afterward. If there’s an afterward. Not now.”

He looked trashed and thrashed, but with him awake, the other vamps relaxed and went on about their business: stripping off the colors and sorting through discarded clothes for replacements.

Mike didn’t like it, that Spike was still granted authority. Didn’t like it that Spike still expected to call the shots after the way he’d fucked it all up, and the other vamps were letting him. Didn’t like it that, having put Dawn in such jeopardy, Spike wasn’t frantic to get her out of it. The way Mike was. Who had no plan, no authority, and no backup. Mike’s hands closed into fists, and he was scowling, but he made himself say, “Got Digger’s place mined, but then the party moved out, so that’s no use.”

Spike asked, “What time is it?”

Automatically Mike pulled out the watch and snapped it open. “Ten minutes of noon.” Then he was annoyed at himself, to be so easily obedient.

Eyes shut and arms out before him, Spike had a slow, bone-cracking stretch. “Yeah, I can see that,” he reflected softly. “You lot, you’re Digger’s and you came with Michael ‘cause Digger had word the Slayer sussed out the move and is gonna try again to bust it up. Digger sent Michael to see to it. Huey, can you play that?”

“Slayer coming?” Huey asked.

“I expect.”

“Keep her out?” Huey sounded dubious.

“Let her in. Toby, you take the sentry door. Don’t expect anything to come that way--”

“They’ll know,” Toby blurted, “we weren’t sent. Know we’re not Digger’s. Digger’s vamps, the mages--”

“Hit him for me,” Spike directed wearily, with a wave, and when Huey had clouted the smaller vamp off his feet, Spike slowly stood, working soreness out of his shoulders, twisting his back to one side, then the other. “What you’re not taking account of,” he told Toby patiently, “is how much they don’t care. Digger said come, they came. While they’re here, Rayne gives the orders, and Rayne wouldn’t know one vamp from another unless they came color-coded.” He looked down at himself--no duster, no shirt, no boots, just flimsy black harem pants--then sharply up at Mike, who prudently said nothing.

Mike had nothing, and knew it. Spike, maybe, had a plan or at least an idea. And supporters, who’d rather have the illusion of security that orders gave them than think for themselves. Mike would let Spike call it…until he saw a chance to get Dawn clear. Then all bets were off.

Mike was unimpressed: Spike was obviously making it up on the fly. What would Spike have done if the remnants of the crew hadn’t chosen to lair up here, if Mike hadn’t shown up? Taken on the opposition himself? More likely, caved into craziness and done whatever Rayne wanted. Let Dawn be sacrificed. Let it all go to hell, the way he had the sweeps, the factory, and the crew.

Spike was behaving as though everything was going as he’d expected. Mike didn’t believe it for a second.

It was just a chance convergence, not a plan. Mike was going along with it only because he didn’t have anything better.

Spike was continuing, “Michael, you’re lead. Huey, you’re second. Mingle. Don’t start anything till the mages are distracted. Then do all the vamps, quick as you can.”

Still sensibly on the floor, Toby whined, “How’ll we know when the mages are distracted?”

Spike gave him a long look but didn’t have Huey inflict more discipline. “Just don’t you get distracted. Michael’s lead, Michael calls it. When he--”

Spike went silent, and everybody else faded back, because a vamp was approaching the top of the shaft. Spike dove for the bedding. The vamp called down a summons from Rayne. Getting no response, the vamp jumped to the lower level. He had a leg pulled back for a kick when Mike’s hand closed over his mouth, Huey held him, and Sue fiercely dispatched him with a piece of scrap wood.

As Huey brushed off his unbuttoned shirt, Mike mentioned neutrally, “You know we’re outnumbered about three to one. Not counting the mages.”

Rising, Spike was looking assessingly at the top of the shaft. “Don’t count the mages. I’ll do for them. Or they’ll do for me, maybe….”

Jumping, Spike caught the lift rail about halfway up, then hitched himself the rest of the way to the top and over the edge.

“Wait,” Mike told Huey absently. “I’ll clear the hatch. Then you all drift along the back, make like you came in that way. Sue, you know best after me how Digger runs things. Anybody asks, you do the talking.”

Standing beside Huey, Sue set her hands on her hips. “You turned on Spike. Now you’re double-crossing Digger. Who you gonna turn on next, Michael?” Spike’s way of referring to him was a snarl in her mouth.

That was rich, coming from her, after her Lady MacBeth night at the Bronze.

She was still only a fledge, Mike thought, moving to whatever wind that blew. He was the steady, consistent one, even though he couldn’t have explained it to her and had no interest in trying.

If they hadn’t been there, he would have dusted Spike without compunction, then got Dawn clear some way in the confusion. Spike, he thought, knew that perfectly well, yet had set him at lead.

Mike had no confidence in plans made by the certifiably insane.

**********

Spike swung out on the upper floor and stood for a moment, head bowed. Certainly not praying, proper vamps never did that, totally counterproductive: just being still, getting a clear sense of himself, settling himself to the thing at hand. Then he lifted his chin, sniffed in a short breath, and clapped his hands like a gunshot, stepping out briskly toward the others, hollering, “Let’s get this bloody thing done, then. What’s the holdup?”

The concentric circles were made, with their Nerfi and H’loon protection spells. Mages and Dawn inside, vamps outside; and this time the outer line of writing would keep them out: Spike was halted at the edge as if by an uncrossible doorway. The air stank of magic, the mix of junk burning in the brazier, and faintly, Dawn’s fear. Her eyes were huge.

He couldn’t think about that. Make a noise, pull all eyes to him to distract from Mike and the crew sliding out of the shaft in the dimness behind.

Spike spun on his heel (missing the duster’s weight and swirl, missing his boots to come down solidly) and started pacing the rim, declaring, “You’re gonna miss your time, wankers, an’ all this for nothing.” He locked his eyes on Rayne, holding the shut box. “So gimme the thing, trinket, bloody lawn ornament shot-put, hey?”

Rayne opened the box, revealing the Stone, and Spike could feel its unshielded keening like electricity everywhere, jittering on his last nerve. He didn’t flinch, held himself still as Rayne came toward him with the Stone, kept an expression of bored and generally pissed-off, but Rayne wasn’t fooled. Could see it in his eyes, maybe, or just know that if Spike had been human, he’d have been covered in muck sweat. Terrified to take the thing, attune himself to it and let it take him; terrified of what would come after--what he’d dreamed of so many times.

Stopping in reach, carefully between the runes, Rayne insisted softly, “It will be all right. The sun can’t get at you. And there are four of us to protect you.”

“Yeah, sure. Hand it over.”

“You’ll bring it all down. Glorious destruction. What you were made for.”

“I was made by a bint with an itch in an alley. Ain’t gonna persuade me, mage. An’ keep out of my head now: it’s distracting.”

That was a thing Spike was depending on--that once he touched the stone, Rayne would have to leave him alone to do the Working, fearing to break his concentration, unable to tolerate the forces loosed by and through the Stone. Touching the Stone, he’d be free.

The dread and reluctance hid the eagerness banked like black fire within him.

Because he had to, smiling, the mage let the Stone’s rough weight fall into Spike’s hands.

Spike reeled back an involuntary step.

It was like being dropped into a storm, lightning and lashing wind, rain from every direction; like stumbling from silence into a rock concert blaring at full blast, so loud you couldn’t make out the words, much less the tune. And beyond and above those was being pulled every which way simultaneously inside: terror and fierce exhilaration and hunger for more as strong as bloodthirst. For an instant, he was overwhelmed. But he’d always liked LOUD, and crazy was no novelty anymore. He steadied and joined the party, grinning.

**********

On the theory the opposition would expect them from topside, through the sentry post, Buffy opted for the sewer line. Hunched, listening, under the ladder with Willow and Giles as the SITs caught up and silently formed up behind them, Buffy was calculating the logistics of forcing the hatch when it opened, admitting dim light, and a voice ordered softly, “Stay put.”

The weird thing was, she knew that voice. At once, without question. Mike. And the even weirder thing was, she relaxed from her crouch and straightened: accepting Mike’s word, despite everything.

A moment later, Willow flinched against Buffy’s back. “It’s started.”

Buffy heard, felt nothing. Huh.

Just as well, she supposed. No distractions from taking out all the vamps (well, maybe not Mike) to leave Willow and Giles clear to deal with Rayne.

There was noise, then: vamps howling, shouting. The noise didn’t come closer, so it wasn’t that they’d been discovered. Probably. When Mike’s voice directed, “Come on,” Buffy was already halfway up the ladder and pushing the hatch out of her way.

As soon as her feet were on the floor she moved aside to let the rest come up behind her, taking quick stock of the situation.

Vamps were fighting vamps on the near side of a large circle chalked on the floor. Inside the circle were Rayne and three mages, all robed in different colors, like the mages in the mall parking lot. All chanting and gesturing. Rayne held Dawn, whose arms were bound in front of her, both arms bleeding from long cuts, shoulder to wrist.

As soon as they were clear of the hatch, Willow began doing magic-y things, her left hand clasping Giles’ to draw on his stored power. That was Willow’s business, and Buffy left them to it, leading the SITs against the vamps.

It wasn’t a general melee, she realized as Sue slid into place next to Rona, and another vamp--a strapping black woman Buffy vaguely recognized--joined the formation of Kennedy, Molly, and Amanda as the point of an unequal triangle, giving the SITs her back, engaging the nearest vamp with smoothly coordinated ferocity.

The remainder of Spike’s crew--five, it seemed, counting Mike--going up against what therefore had to be Digger’s vamps, and nothing so simple as colors to distinguish which were which. But fortunately, it seemed the SITs knew the difference, most of them having done sweeps with Spike’s people for months, in and out of the factory almost daily. Out of the corner of her eye, Buffy saw Kennedy start to plunge a stake into the back of a lanky male vamp, then turn the blow enough to deflect against his shoulderblade and shove him aside to plow into the vamp he’d been engaged with. He joined the formation of Chloe, JoAnne and Lisa, and they adjusted to include him at lead just as though they’d drilled the change. Mike, fighting alone, suddenly had backup: all the SITs knew him, in game face or not. That part being handled, then.

Willow (with Giles) seemed to be managing the mages. One was down; another was tearing at his robes as though he’d been doused in itching powder.

Buffy spotted Spike when he moved: springing to the top of the barrier machines and from there to the nearest of the rafter beams no vamp could reach directly. Bare to the waist and white-pale against the dark as he jumped, he landed and stood in the open sunlight shafting down from a broken place in the roof. Face lifted to the blaze of light, holding the Stone in his two hands, he started to burn.

**********

He had it now. Or it had him--same difference. He’d cogged himself to it, could tune and alter its pitch and frequency. Like playing a bloody theremin, all the vibrations tuned by touch, a cacophonous music no ear could hear. Could only be felt, modulated, as it passed through him. Couldn’t see the spectral “wings” Red had told him about but could feel his substance spread achingly wide to encompass and channel such huge and chaotic input, the narrow-point bottleneck between energized infinities.

As the mages directed and connected, like calling to like, Spike could feel the linked somnolent grumble of the Hellmouth waking as the dimensional torques that formed it began to shift in response to the Stone’s song. A harmonic echo so huge that within seconds the Stone’s cacophony was lost into it and Spike was wrestling with the waking fury of the Hellmouth itself, the Stone his point of contact. Like holding a ravening, bounding tiger by an ear, or maybe a whisker.

Wasn’t gonna do it, too much for him to handle, but he’d known that, going in. He’d blow out like an overtaxed fuse and the Hellmouth would explode into this plane again, driven by the pressured impingement of all the dimensions it was potentially connected to separately or simultaneously. Needed more juice to manage something like that, someone who for all his century plus was finally as mortal as the next idiot.

He jumped for the machines and then on to the rafter where the sun was--a coherent force, all colors and no color, and it was enough. Streaming through him, pure and deadly, it pushed him out beyond what he could consciously control, stretched him to his absolute limits, and for a moment they were in balance, the natural sunfire and the unnatural tectonic howl of dimensions meeting and trying to slide into one another, open into one another, with him as the focal point. Then it was too much. He felt himself coming apart, losing coherence on a molecular level.

Couldn’t hold such force together, much less wield it. Guessed it was time, then.

Opening his eyes to the dazzle, blind with it (he hadn’t thought about that), he couldn’t distinguish Dawn at all, or anything much. He could feel her, though, all stretched thin almost as air as he was: a single spark of green energy that was neither Hellmouth, Stone, nor sun. A connection, as immaterial as a skein of soul, between them. Enough, or had to be. Spike held out his hand, asking for what he needed along the connection of what was his, theirs, shared alike. Dawn wouldn’t know, and wouldn’t know how, but the Lady would, and he’d put himself where he was meant to be, to take it. She’d grant it, or she wouldn’t: through Dawn, to him, already on the cusp of incandescence.

From the Lady of Doorways, the Lady of Dimensions, the power rushed along the thread of soul-stuff, sufficient to his need.

**********

To Mike, it felt like silence then. But it wasn’t, because up on the beam, Spike was shimmering, burning, but unconsumed. Something was happening.

He didn’t know, didn’t care, what because Rayne had swung the knife high to plunge it into Dawn. Mike dove for the circle, past the circle, unquestioning how, and took them both down. Came up fast with Dawn in his arms and got her out the quickest way: by tossing her at the dark rafter next on from the one where Spike was perched. Couldn’t nobody get at her there. That was what was important, not the knife plunged into his side, though that hurt like hell. Only metal, wouldn’t do him no serious hurt, though it stank of magic and the pain flared up his whole side and he couldn’t seem to find his balance.

Slayer, she had her arm up and was yelling, “Here! Now!” with the witch hanging onto her other arm, holding her in place, and everybody going for the called mark with dreamlike slowness. A different circle was building, shimmering almost into sight, a dome reacting to whatever Spike was doing up above. Best to get there, maybe, if the witch was half as scared as she looked. Mike took a second to slap the mage away and check that Dawn had made the rafter all right, hanging over it and scrabbling her knees around to get onto it, then crossed back over the circle and fell inside the dome a second before the vamps still outside went up like guttering candles and were gone.

**********

Like teasing open a knot, Spike unwove the dimensions from one another, easing them apart. Easy enough, when you knew how and could draw on infinite force to do it. Could identify each skein with simple knowing and tuck it back into itself, adjusting the dimensional imbalance.

The Hellmouth shuddered and finally collapsed into normalcy. Only dirt, rock, air, water left. However, there was considerable residual geologic force to dissipate somewhere. Spike knew right where he wanted it and shrugged it off that way: into Digger’s warren. With knowing that came to him with the Lady’s power, he felt the levels cascade onto one another, punctuated by occasional hiccups that were the charges Mike had set in the shafts, to bring it down all tidy and all at once. Spike liked that.

Expansive and full of joyous destruction, he popped portals into being randomly. Dozens, then hundreds, winking open, oval or rectangular with the light of otherwhere shining through or swirling blackness. He’d been studying the Council’s collection of spells for months. He understood the concepts, could make the words become without even having to speak them. Drawing on the Lady's force, he could flick a portal into being with a thought.

He looked for vamps but found none except under a warning dome that had Red’s flavor about it so he left that alone and looked elsewhere for prey. The remains of the office went away, and most of the back wall.

Some way, the protective circle had been breached--Dawn's blood on it, felt like--and he found he had access. He popped a portal right over one of the mages still standing, then shut it on him like the mouth of a purse or a really large and fangy fish. And the mage was gone, except for his wailing cry left behind, a second or so. He’d done another the same way when he felt Rayne battering into his mind, to reassert control.

But Spike and his demon were no longer separate, and the soul was happily in touch with the infinite, totally blissed out on a level nothing mortal could normally contain. Rayne’s blandishments of pleasure could find nothing to hold to, not in the full of the sunlight and the Lady’s favor.

Spike ate a prone mage while trying to decide what special horror to open for Rayne. But there were so many and all he had was the least flavor and taste of each, and he felt his coherence slipping as he tried to know and encompass them all.

“I wouldn’t really have done it!” Rayne protested in Spike’s mind, with a strong impression of indignant you idiot. “I loved him!”

With all the madness he’d suffered and the passivity he’d endured, the violation and perversion of desire, with all the rage that it’d come to this instead of what he’d wanted, Spike threw the mage blindly into whatever opened to receive him. Let the Lady choose. Spike just wanted him gone.

When that portal clapped shut, leaving the floor empty except for the dome, the Lady was done and withdrew. Used beyond its capacity, the Stone crumbled in his hands. All the varied forces that had passed through and shielded him were gone and he was left blind and vacant in the sunlight.

As he’d known it would, the burning began.

**********

The idiot wasn’t coming down, hadn’t the sense to fall. Was burning already, as she’d seen a dozen vamps go, consumed in seconds.

Warned by the dreams, Buffy had brought a sheet of mylar to cover him but he’d put himself out of reach, and mylar didn’t throw worth beans. It didn’t unfold particularly handily, either.

Frantically wrestling with the crinkly silver stuff within the confines of the protective dome, Buffy bumped Willow, demanding, “Take it down. Now!”

“What? Oh, sure--”

Before Buffy could move, someone had gone past her. A vamp’s agility and speed, onto the machines and then straight into Spike, carrying them both off the beam and both blazing as they fell. Buffy was right on it, tossing the far end of the mylar to the nearest SIT and pulling it into place over the two burning vampires, horribly afraid she’d see it collapse with only dust underneath. Back in the empty office space, up on the rafter, Dawn was screeching for somebody to come get her down, catch her, something.

The mylar held, tenting the shapes, smoke wafting up from underneath. So maybe she’d been quick enough, maybe….

They’d fallen onto a sunny patch of floor: Buffy didn’t dare lift the mylar. Spotting a blue tumbling pad overlooked on her last visit, she ran and grabbed it, slapped it down next to the mylar, and got whatever was underneath rolled onto it by touch (nasty scary crackly sensation). Then it was easy to drag the pad back through the gap between the machines, with SITs holding the mylar in place, into the safe darkness or at least indirect light, considering that most of the back wall was gone.

Uncovered, they looked like mummies. Blackened bone showed. Now that she saw, Buffy didn’t dare touch for fear something would break off.

“No, not yet,” Dawn was snapping, running from the back to stand…and look…and bleed on the mummies. “Shouldn’t go to waste,” she commented absently, watching the steady drops fall from her wounded arms.

One of the mummies suddenly moved, lurched, and latched onto Dawn’s arm above the elbow, feeding. Since Dawn did nothing but shut her eyes and stand there, Buffy uneasily let them alone. The blackened, crisped skin flaked off, revealing fresh, whole skin underneath, bone and muscle reknitting as they all stood around watching. Too broad-shouldered to be Spike. Spike must be the other one. That wasn’t moving.

Amanda produced a knife and without hesitation slashed a forearm, then held the knife out blindly for someone to take. And she did, and did the same. Within a minute, all nineteen SITs were bleeding on Spike, making various wry, wincing faces but doing it just the same. After Amanda threw up and Rona fainted, the three volunteers from the class came and took the knife and offered their contribution.

They hadn’t all come to Buffy’s summons. One SIT was pregnant; three had too great a distance to come--Europe; Canada; New Jersey--to get there in time; one couldn’t wheedle the money from her parents and tried to hitchhike. That hadn’t gone well--she’d ended up having to conk the driver and been stranded, with a wrecked car, in downtown St. Louis. But all who could had come to Buffy’s claim that Spike was in desperate need of help and backup.

Not for her, or for the Hellmouth. For Spike.

Who was nearly back and naked and mostly surrounded by underage girls. Buffy adjusted the mylar to waist-high and got a few oh, come on! glares for her efforts before the girls shifted their interest to Mike, likewise pantsless, now folded into Dawn’s arm that Willow wasn’t bandaging.

Spike’s body was no longer absorbing the blood, it was just running off, so everybody seemed to agree that was enough. They paired off and began bandaging one another with supplies from Willow’s kit.

Spike’s hair was coming in sandy-brown and longer than he usually tolerated. Bemused, Buffy bent and touched it--soft, ungelled, slightly curly. She’d never seen its natural state. So she wasn’t prepared when he came up at her, golden-eyed and game-faced, and sank his fangs into the join of her neck and shoulder.

It was euphoric. It was too much. It probably wasn’t a good idea.

After he’d fed for a minute or so, Buffy held him, her cheek against his, rubbing circles on his back and telling him softly, “It’s OK. It’s OK,” until, more aware, he licked the wound shut and just rested against her.

She’d be a little lightheaded from it, it was more than he usually took, but the blood would regenerate by morning. They were a good team that way, she thought.

**********

Spike woke vaguely, gradually, to the sound of familiar children’s voices.

Dawn was saying, “--couldn’t even yell ‘Help! Get me down from here!’ and bleeding all over the place--”

“You should watch that tendency to get sliced up,” put in Amanda’s dry earnest voice, the one she used when she thought she was trying to make a joke. “Not only will people start to talk--in a house full of vampires, you could get a reputation as a tease.”

“It’s not full of vampires,” Dawn huffed. “Only one!”

“In residence, anyway.” Rona’s drawl. “The other one just hanging around, all mopy and lovelorn--”

General laughter and the sound…of a pillow being thrown. Took Spike a moment to identify it. Then Candy, of the top-knot and edible-looking unitards, piped up breathlessly, "Anybody else see it? I saw it, just like before, only, like, more so. Like he was made of light, and these big wings spreading out, past the walls and the roof, even.... He's an angel! Like, totally!”

"Yeah, right," responded Rona, unimpressed. "And I'm Aaliyah.”

Molly put in, “What’s this business about Mike getting stabbed with an enchanted knife?”

“Oh, that was good,” Dawn responded eagerly. “It wouldn’t close, and you can’t kill a vamp by simple blood loss, but he was all twisted around about tasting me, well, drinking from me, really, without my saying he could, and frankly, he was just a mess. Not even counting the burnage he was so disgusted about, he pretty much saved Spike’s life, well we all did, but afterward? He’s all, ‘It’s so dumb, doesn’t know what got into him to do such a dumb thing,’ so he won’t have to admit why he did it, you know how he is.”

“Lunkhead,” agreed Sue fondly. “Pretty much always been like that. Decorative, though. Always thought so. Then, after I got vamped, I--”

“Nobody wants to hear about that, Sue,” Amanda put in quellingly.

“I do,” Kennedy objected. “Vamps got a right to talk, same as anybody.”

“Leave it, Ken,” said Rona. “Sue, full details of your disgusting love life later. In private.”

“Anyway,” Dawn said firmly, reclaiming the floor, “so you remember about the silver, about Willow turning it magic-negative, big magic suckage? Well, Buffy was there when she did it, and she had this sterling anklet, seveeere icky with a skull on it and everything--”

“From Spike,” commented Kennedy. “No brainer.”

“Well, obviously. So it was affected too, see? Anyway, Willow made Buffy take off the anklet and laid it on the wound and it closed up, just like that. Right while you looked.”

“Was this the same knife that cut you?” Amanda asked in a deliberate, puzzled voice, worrying at a detail. “They why--”

“Well, that’s nothing,” Dawn responded, sounding embarrassed. “Well, if you must know, I healed myself. I could have done it anytime. But I didn’t. Because Spike, he needed the pure sacrifice and everything. To do what he was doing. For his plan. My mom was with me for a little while there, and she showed me how but it had to be later, you see, in case…. Well, in case.”

“What are you going to do about him?” inquired Kennedy.

“About who?”

“Don’t be cute. About Mike, of course.”

“Is he an angel, too?” Candy gushed and was ignored, except for Dawn, who replied, patient sage instructing naive acolyte, “There are all sorts of spiritual beings. Maybe some of them are angels. Most of them...not so much. Not in Sunnydale, anyway. We get the fangy kind. The other kind move to L.A.” (Some knowing snickers.) “As to Mike, I don’t see that I need to do anything about him,” Dawn went on in the tone that usually went with flipping hair. “He’s fine just as he is. Doesn’t need improving. We talked a long while last night on the phone, and--”

“Is he your boyfriend or not?” Rona demanded.

“Why does he have to be anything? We’re what we are, and it suits us. Is Spike Buffy’s boyfriend? Are they making wedding plans? Not hardly! They are, and they do, what suits them. I don’t see why I can’t do the same.”

“That’s not realistic,” put in Amanda sadly. “You can’t be seventeen forever.”

A silence. Then Dawn said, “I don’t see why not. Real is relative, ‘Manda. And seventeen seems a pretty good age to be. Have it all and not give up anything. Anybody. When you get involved with vamps—”

“So are you?” Rona interrupted avidly. “Involved with vamps?”

“Well, of course: Spike! And I’m certainly not gonna leave him with nobody but Buffy to watch out for him. And Mike…well, he likes how I smell. And how I taste. Likes it a lot. Not high on the traditional boyfriend-o-meter, but it’s important to him. When you hang out with vamps you have to be flexible about things like that.”

“If you say so,” commented Amanda dubiously.

Still mostly asleep, listening to the children’s voices happily bickering and gossiping, Spike wasn’t sure when he was. Couldn’t make it fit together. Seemed as if he was back in Casa Spike, half the SITs quartered there and underfoot at all hours. But Casa Spike was gone, burned; and Sue hadn’t been a vampire then. But he’d heard Molly’s voice, and Chloe’s, and others from that time that weren’t a part of things anymore. Not Kim, though. He’d been waiting for Kim to chime in, laughing and blunt, the way he remembered her…. And Candy was from the class, didn't fit with a gaggle of SITs, yet here she was, vapid and visionary. All a jumble of past and present he couldn't make sense of.

Blinking slowly, Spike pushed up onto his elbows and saw he was in Buffy’s room. In Buffy’s narrow bed, alone in it, more’s the pity. And starkers under the sheet, might as well be covered with fucking cellophane for all the good it did in a room full of children--

Who were crying, “Oh, he’s awake! Buffy, he’s awake!” and pounding out into the hall to lean over the stair railing to report such remarkable news.

Very strange.

Dawn was still here, though. He noticed as he reached down for the blanket, to put another layer between his naughty bits and the unaccountable audience of chattering girlflesh certain to note every detail. Once they came back, which he was sure they would. Unless prevented…. Dawn waggled fingers at him, saying, “Hi,” like she expected him to growl and bark at her.

“What’s all this, then?” Spike asked, sitting up now he was decently covered and pushing both hands through his hair, finding it in deplorable condition, every which way and too long and he didn’t know how that had happened. Likely looked like a dandelion puff.

“How much do you remember?” Dawn asked cautiously. “Have you noticed your arm?”

Spike looked, and the green writing was back, spiraling around his left arm. The line of poetry that meant Dawn he’d incised into himself, that he’d meant for forever.

“I think it never really went away,” Dawn said. “He couldn’t change it, so he hid it. To make you feel alone, unconnected. But it was always there, between us. Like the soul. You gonna leave off about that now, Spike? Nagging me to get a different connection? Because I won’t. Ever.”

She watched him rub the tat, though there was nothing different to the touch. Not a whit magical. Pure symbol, pure meaning, deeply felt. A good antidote for all Rayne’s powerful unreality that meant nothing, that he’d accepted but never believed.

“Fetch me some pants, Bit,” Spike directed absently, thinking back. He could remember as far as the burning. Whatever came after, he knew nothing about.

So maybe those dreams would leave off now. Maybe with no Hellmouth to tempt and roil things up, Michael would be able to manage things fine on his own. Spike wanted none of it back. And Buffy, she could have her escort service without half of ‘em getting eaten the first night, and run her class…or whatever she pleased, didn’t matter to him, so long as it was what she wanted. Vamp population should be manageable several years, anyway: take that long for any of Digger’s lot to inchworm back to the surface and make anything like a nuisance of themselves.

And he could settle down to the translation so long as the fucking Council didn’t renege, or renege further…and likely Rupert might be a help with that, if they could ever get the bloody wanker to actually leave and then stay gone…. And the odd challenge fight up to Willy’s, just to keep things interesting and remind anybody who cared who the true Master of Sunnydale was even if he left the day-to-day matters to Michael.

Or just decide hour to hour, minute to minute, what he felt like doing. Be in the moment, like proper vamps did.

He was done with plans.

When Dawn pulled out a pair of folded black jeans--didn’t have to hunt for the right drawer, he noticed: must have come across it in secret Buffy-clothes-borrowing reconnaissance--and set it on the foot of the bed, he said, “Now you clear out. Don’t need anybody to teach me how to put m’ pants on. Don’t need an audience, neither.”

“Not a morning person,” Dawn observed wisely. “Just a second, then, before the thundering herd stampedes back. I understand now. About why you wanted me as the pax bond, why you had me taken. Because you wanted you taken, and it would need both of us to do it. We both had to be there.”

Wrapping the blanket around him as he rose, Spike responded, “Yeah. So?”

“Well, I’m forgiving you, is what. You could at least appreciate it!”

“Morning?” Spike wondered, looking to the bright windows.

Buffy came in then, and came straight at him, and lifted on her toes to clasp hands around the back of his neck and pull his head down for a nice long snog, and Spike didn’t notice when Dawn left or when he forgot about holding the blanket in place.

“It’s Saturday,” Buffy explained simply, when she finally had to break for air. “You slept all yesterday afternoon, and then all night. Nearly twenty-four hours of your famous horizontal funeral statuary impression. Not a twitch, not a breath. I was beginning to get a little worried.”

Putting on pants didn’t seem all that important anymore. Taking Buffy’s arms at the elbow, Spike flopped back on the bed, pulling her with him.

As he started undoing the buttons of her blouse, Buffy pushed at his shoulder, not very hard, protesting, “But they’re all waiting to see you. They’ll know!”

“Hate to break it to you, pet, but they’ve known what we get up to some time, now. Why didn’t you pick a sweatshirt, like a sensible woman?”

Buffy slapped his hand away, no harder than a kitten paw, and set to work on the buttons herself. Eyes downcast, she asked, “Are you back now? Really back back?”

“Let you be the judge of that,” Spike said, and pounced her backward.

Popped buttons flew everywhere.

Finis</i>

nandibble @ 2004-10-18T00:21:00

2004-10-17T21:21:13Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 20: Midnight (complete)

Shortly after slipping unnoticed out of Dawn's room and pulling his clothes back on, Mike found himself sent off to attend on Rayne.

It was past midnight: the lair was bustling with activity, since that was vamps' normal time to be most alert and active, their wake/sleep cycle the reverse of humans'.

Overall, Mike found it a relief to fall back into traditional ways. Spike's penchant for doing things in the daytime meant that Mike hadn't had a good day's sleep in months. And then the sweeps through half the night, on top of it. Besides aching from the evening's beating, he was exhausted and slept every chance he could get.

Though Digger was keeping him on a very short leash, that was normal and expected, almost reassuring--Mike knew precisely where he stood: under Digger's orders, every minute (or nearly), dancing attendance and under the elder vamp's critical and highly suspicious eye. Watching for any sign of willful independence and raining down punishment whenever Digger caught or imagined one…or just for no reason at all except exerting a Master Vamp's prerogative to pound on the juniors in his regime. Mike didn't mind, particularly. It was normal--what he'd been brought up to, as a fledge here. It was Spike's freethinking ideas that were a puzzlement and an annoyance. The rules changed from one day to the next. Confusing and tiring. Coming back to Digger's predictability had felt like coming home.

Not that he wouldn't do the old bastard anytime he saw a good chance. Which of course Digger knew and expected. How vamps were, mostly. Again, it was Spike who was the aberration--wanting and expecting connections other than force and dominance; socializing with the food and letting himself be swayed by their opinions and expectations. Mike had accepted it, but he'd never understood it.

Simpler, lots simpler, just to be a vamp and not yearn after things that made no sense. Live in the moment and the hell with the rest.

Except for the problem of Dawn, Mike would have been reasonably content.

But that was a big except and probably a deal-breaker, once Mike came up with an alternative plan.

Rayne had been assigned quarters near the surface. Humans didn't like the dank, entombed air of the deeper passages or the darkness or the imagined weight of all that tunneled earth a tremor could collapse in a smothering, crushing mass, burying them alive. California shook itself frequently; and Sunnydale sat on the deepest fault line of all--the Hellmouth, with not only tectonic but dimensional torques at work, forces actively engaged and at only uneasy and temporary equilibrium.

Hauling himself out of a vertical shaft with some difficulty because of the stiff joint of a dislocated and swollen shoulder, Mike limped along the passage, passing a couple of sentries, not giving the least damn what Rayne wanted. Merely going where he'd been sent.

The chamber was a natural cavern, made minimally habitable with partitions and odds and ends of furniture. Likely been used for equipment storage and a staging area for the deeper levels, back in the day. The wooden partitions were hardly more than head-high, with the cave's rocky, irregular ceiling maybe twenty, thirty feet higher than that, so the place had the feel of a stage set, not an actual dwelling. A partial toy house set up in, and dwarfed by, an immense and inimical surround not made by hands.

Following the scent of prey and the petulant rise and fall of Rayne's voice, Mike wandered through bare "rooms" like abandoned boxcars, rooms with shelves, and rooms with stacked crates some way along in the process of collapsing into dust until he reached an open doorway he found he couldn't pass. Bespelled. Supposed he should have expected that.

Calling, "Digger sent me," Mike waited with perfect indifference to either be let in or not.

"Oh, come on," Rayne directed in an annoyed voice, and a poke of Mike's fingers informed him that the barrier was gone.

The room he stepped up into actually was a train car, a caboose--about 30's vintage, as a guess. Mike could smell the wheels rusting. It was bright inside: half a dozen lanterns were hung between the blank and mostly broken windows, two to a side, that framed views of the surrounding dark. The enclosed space stank of blood and magic, an uneasy combination. Easy to tell where the bloodsmell came from: a grimy, keening cow, a malodorous woman, was handcuffed to the handle of a fold-down cot just inside the doorway. The cot on the opposite wall had also been pulled down. Spike was stretched out on his side there in what looked like black satin sweat pants or pajamas, maybe, giggling and twisting around but not fastened down that Mike could see. Trueface coming and going, plainly completely off his head, wide no-color changing eyes wandering unfocused, babbling something about being Queen of the May.

Kneeling beside that cot, Rayne was trying to get Spike to lie flat so Rayne could finish fingerpainting symbols on Spike's torso and arms in some kind of thick, slateblue clay. Spike was behaving as though he was being tickled, and Rayne looked all put out with him.

Without even glancing around, Rayne directed, "Hold him still," reaching for a wide, shallow bowl on the floor about half full of the blue stuff. That was the source of the magic stink, then.

Going to the head of the cot, Mike set his hands on Spike's shoulders and leaned. No stinging oil. Would have interfered with the clay markings, maybe.

Mike had it clear in his mind that it would take a triangle to make Rayne's plan go: the mage, the monster, and the maiden. Take any away, and the thing wouldn't go. So while easily holding Spike down (Spike twitched and giggled and tried to roll as Rayne resumed his fingerpainting, but didn't offer any organized resistance) Mike gave some thought to twisting his head off. At least slow things down, maybe give Mike time to think of a way to get Dawn out before Rayne could come up with a replacement. But although it'd be done, and Spike gone to dust, before Rayne knew or could stop it, Mike thought his own chances of surviving the next entire minute were pretty low, which would leave Dawn with no protection whatever. So regretfully Mike set the idea aside for now.

Eventually rising, wiping his hands on a towel, and stowing the bowl in a built-in cabinet at the rear of the car, still not having spared Mike a glance and turned half away from him, Rayne remarked, "He won't feed. He did before. What's the problem?"

Then Rayne looked around, and there was something about his eyes Mike didn't like at all. Straightening too, Mike stuck a hand in the pocket where the watch was and closed his fist around it, hoping it could keep Rayne out or prevent the mage from throwing any goddam compulsion at him.

Rayne said, "You're his claimed get, so I presume you know him as well as anyone does. Enlighten me. Why won't he feed?"

Mike shrugged, holding the watch hard. "He's always been weird about that. One way or another. Slayer's his cow. Could be, it's spoiled him for anything else."

"Well, I happen to have no Slayers on hand," Rayne rejoined, irritated, "and he must feed to be ready for tonight."

"Don't know what to tell you, then," Mike replied, holding tight within himself the knowledge that there was no difference worth noting between Slayer blood and what ran in Dawn's veins. Though Mike had never tasted the Slayer herself, just by the smell, you knew. Wasn't a thought he wanted to put into the mage's head.

Spike had had Dawn's blood a time or two and had even marked her once, but it hadn't gone well. Mike didn't think Rayne would think of it for himself, intent on Dawn's blood for another purpose altogether. As magic, not as food.

And Rayne seemed not to have picked up the knowledge from him. The watch worked. A good watch. Spike had donated the watch itself; Willow had provided and activated the charm inside; and Dawn had given it to him. Mike felt the watch as a set of powerful and puzzling connections that opened some doors and shut others. A good watch. It even kept time.

"You're human," Mike observed dryly. "He gone for you yet?"

Rayne just maintained his cold stare, indicating he wasn't on the menu.

So Mike said, "Maybe he's not hungry. Been known to happen."

"I think you should find a solution. I think you should find it very quickly."

Thing to do was make feeding a non-issue, Mike decided: get Rayne's mind off it altogether.

Mike didn't blame Spike for not wanting to feed on the trull--cows didn't improve with keeping: at the last, they weren't even very afraid, so the dregs were flat and bland, not properly charged with terror. But whether or not Spike was hungry, Mike was. Digger kept him short in that respect, too. Short rations slowed healing and made it hard to focus on anything else. Mike was proud of himself that he hadn't even asked for a taste at Dawn and hadn't let the cow distract him.

He took her fast, the killing bite to the jugular, and locked jaws into the bite as she pumped her life into him. The taste exploded into his mouth: she was fresh enough to be frightened, though without the strength to struggle as he drank her down. In a few minutes, he had the last of it. Letting the body drop onto the cot, Mike turned, stalling a moment, feeling the blood working in him, diminishing the soreness, knitting bones. Then, while Rayne watched impassively with arms folded, Mike set fangs to his own forearm and presented the hot blood of the fresh kill to his claimed sire. Immediately Spike went to trueface and latched on, drawing powerfully. At least he wasn't too crazy for that.

Behind him, Rayne said, "I thought vampires couldn't feed from one another."

It was like the tribute again, in the hospital parking lot: the deepest of connections. Mike shuddered with it and shut his eyes. "Don't know a lot about vamps then, do you?"

When Spike lapsed back without sealing the wound, Mike lifted his bloodied arm and did it himself. Spike hadn't taken even half what Mike had acquired by the kill: he felt the healing progressing, felt strong and clear-headed.

"Wait outside," Rayne directed, again kneeling by the cot. "I may want you for something later."

Dismissed and as good as ignored, Mike did as he'd been told. Hunkering down within call, he used the time to faithfully wind the watch and reconsider all the options.

Short of taking up with a Slayer, Mike figured this was the stupidest thing Spike had ever done. Up to Mike, it seemed, to make it right.

**********

Spike’s demon was happy.

When he eventually woke in the golden fog, from dream into dream, there was nothing to worry about or plan, nothing to do but hazily relax into the pleasure with no objection from soul or self, that seemed not to have wakened yet or taken notice of the mage or this new, interesting smelling lair deep underground, so no need to think about sunrise, except that there was something about the idea of midnight he shied away from and forgot as quickly as possible. Easy to forget, and just be, lost in sensation.

When the mage said words to him he paid no attention, not with all the splendid fucking pleasure rolling into him and over him like a tide, nothing to do but just enjoy it, which was all very well but you couldn’t live off it. Finally coming out of the deep crash he’d fallen into when the pills wore off, he was hungry. Well, no surprise--he was hungry all the time: he was a demon. The surprise was that he felt no constraint on how the bloodthirst could be satisfied.

Rolling over, pushing clear of the golden fog enough to notice, he eyed the mage speculatively, weighing the likelihood of losing the pleasure (without knowing how he knew, he was aware that the mage commanded the pleasure: thin stuff, as such things went, but abundant and here and the demon wasn’t particular) against crunching down and gulping hot, fresh blood. Being considered with a predator’s unblinking stare made the mage nervous: he had a cow delivered, but Spike’s demon wasn’t interested in such. If he went for her, soul and self would wake and give him bloody hell about it and it was so much nicer as it was, being dominant without interference (except what the mage was doing to him, of course, not that he objected), just idle, silly, floating, drifting--like being zoned out on opium.

Prospect of a fight would have made him rouse completely and would have been nice if didn’t mean surrendering dominance to the other consciousnesses with which he shared the body. Better to do without, not risk it. He was too lazily content.

The mage said more words, still nervous and vexed, too, that the demon hadn’t taken the offered prey, which left his scrawny self still potentially on the menu. Spike’s demon was mildly amused. Might still taste him a little when the one appetite overruled the other, and soul and self likely wouldn’t object if he didn’t drink to completion--the death of the prey. They seemed to have an agreement about such things now. But at the moment the demon was too lazy and sated to bother.

He felt the Red Witch stirring at the edges of his consciousness and mentally snapped at the intrusion. With something like an eep of alarm, she pulled away, and well she should. Had no business messing with his head. Nobody liked it. Bad enough to have the mage glancing in from time to time. Then he vaguely recalled something the self had laid on him, to tell the witch if she came, and sullenly contemplated it when he felt her creeping back. Silver. He kept the shine of it in his mind, how it nestled raw in seams in the rock like tinder carelessly scattered about. Didn’t mean a thing to him, but that was what the self had required that he do whenever he felt the arrival of the witch’s immaterial presence. Didn’t like the thought: it connected somehow to the midnight he wasn’t thinking about in the pleasant now. But it had been laid on him, and he did it, long enough anyway that the witch surely caught it if she wasn’t a total moron.

Mage didn’t notice the exchange, pottering about with powders and stinks and liquid in a bowl. Nothing interesting to the demon until the mage started painting stinky magic onto Spike’s front. Unlike the pleasure, it was an actual touch--real. It tickled and opened and bound him in uncomfortable ways. He giggled helplessly, unable to focus enough to resist. Wasn’t supposed to resist. Only supposed to let things happen however they would, relax into the amber wash of stoned, drunken pleasure and let things become.

Mage had no respect for him anyway. Some uneasiness but no fear, expecting the steady wash of pleasure to keep him quiet and malleable, as it had before. Show only the expected and the mage wouldn’t guard against what was held in reserve, still deep asleep. Wouldn’t know there was more to Spike than the evident demon luxuriating in the abundance.

Another demon came and was present, sizzling and yet somehow aloof, like a color. Blue, maybe--bright and controlled. Oh: Mike. So that was all right, then.

When Mike suddenly took the cow, drank her straight down, Spike’s demon didn’t like it. The cow had been his to eat or not, not Mike’s. But it seemed Mike knew that because he immediately offered the kill second-hand in deference. That was allowed and accepted. After all, the cow was already dead, and Spike’s demon was hungry and nothing if not pragmatic.

When the blood began to cool and change, Spike’s demon found he’d had enough of it. The charge of Mike’s deference, the meaning of the exchange, was strong and vital enough to make up the difference.

Bloodthirst quieted, though not fully satisfied, there remained no reason to bother holding on to consciousness. Happy and content, he lapsed into passive dream.

Midnight was still far off and maybe the burning would never come.

**********

“Well?” Buffy demanded anxiously as Willow roused from her trance of concentration.

Willow shook her head. “Not much there--he has his demon to the fore, and the demon doesn’t exactly think much. Maybe it’s deliberate--to present a surface with nothing much to read. I don’t know. There was one thing, though…came through clear. But I don’t know what to make of it.”

Buffy said, “What?” and Giles looked attentive, the three of them sitting around the kitchen island. It was nearly four in the morning and Buffy had been pacing and frantic the whole time since they’d lost Rayne and therefore Spike and Dawn. But Willow had simply tipped over and conked, completely wiped, and Buffy could only shove a pillow under her head, toss a blanket over her, and wait impatiently for her to wake up.

Willow still had dark circles under her eyes. Even her hair looked limp and dispirited. She kept brushing it absently out of her eyes. “Silver,” she reported, puzzled.

“As in Hi-yo Silver, away?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Just plain silver. Metal-y. I mean, not jewelry or anything like that.”

“What, are we dealing with werewolves, now? What’s with the silver? What does it mean?”

“Well,” Giles ventured, “silver is a magically sensitive and conductive metal. Might Rayne’s spell somehow involve it?”

“Maybe.” Willow spread her hands helplessly. “That’s all I got. Silver. In the ground, I think. Just plain old silver.”

“Wait,” said Giles, and the two women watched while he fussed with his tea and visibly concentrated. Finally looking up, Giles said, “Thinking about its being available to Ethan…in sufficient quantity to help power a spell…but no. There’s no affinity between silver and a portal spell. That I’ve ever heard of. I could research it--” Giles started to rise, then settled again. “Insufficient time,” he commented bleakly. “We have only approximately eighteen hours to come up with a way of blocking the spell. Or preventing it from being cast at all. Since you’re still able to contact Spike,” he said to Willow, “might you be able to, well, incapacitate him? Sufficiently that Rayne couldn’t use him?”

Willow made a wry face. “He’s already incapacitated. High as ye proverbial kite. Nothing but pretty basic stuff going on.” She tapped her forehead. “Not much higher function at all, that I could tell.”

“But Rayne will need him cognizant, competent, when the time comes. Could you interfere then?”

“Rayne will have wards set. I’m surprised he hasn’t set them already. To punch through those wards and then affect Spike at all, that would be about like doing brain surgery in boxing gloves. And blindfolded. And I’ve never even attempted that level of control. Giles, I’m certain I’d screw it up. Do permanent damage.”

“Nevertheless,” Giles responded steadily, “it would disable the spell. Lacking a viable alternative, I believe we must consider it.”

“No,” said Buffy, folding her arms. “I don’t care what you throw at Rayne. But Spike and Dawn, they’re mine. We protect them. We don’t hurt them. We don’t even consider it.”

She leveled a glare at Giles because he was the one who’d advocated killing Dawn to stymie Glory’s plans. Not acceptable. Not then, and not now.

“Rule out magic,” Giles responded tartly, “and what’s left? Force?”

Buffy lowered her eyes and sighed. “No, I’ve already given up on the idea of barging in with Super Soakers full of holy water. It’s a big, dark place, and none of us know it. And with only three SITs left, that won’t get it done. Direct assault is out.”

“There might be some of Spike’s crew left, that haven’t defected,” Willow mentioned hesitantly.

Buffy shook her head. “I wouldn’t trust any of them at my back. It would be like going in already surrounded. They’d be stupid not to go where the power is. And if they’re that stupid, I don’t want ‘em.”

She was angry, frustrated, and jealous. Oh yeah, despite Willow keeping decorously mum, she knew perfectly well what Spike was addled with, and his retreating to let the demon enjoy it didn’t make it OK by her. But that made her mind cast back to how earnest and serious he’d been about her not mixing into it, in their talk-and-hit-and-talk conversation in the Civic Center parking lot. How it was a vamp matter, and vamps would have to settle it.

What had changed, since then? Except Spike and Dawn captured and irretrievable, of course. He’d meant Mike to blow up and leave, to be in place when Dawn arrived. Therefore, improbable as it seemed, he might have meant this, too. Might mean it wasn’t the disaster it seemed but was in fact intended, all along, to get everybody (except her) within striking distance of Rayne and inside Digger’s stronghold.

Trojan horse sort of thingie. Maybe.

If it was, her bursting in and disrupting it would be the last thing Spike would want her to do. What he’d so earnestly argued against, there in the parking lot. He’d want her to trust him to make the running and hold back on the response he’d known she’d otherwise reflexively make, diving in headlong, unprepared, and underpeopled as though force were the only answer she was capable of.

Buffy could do trust. Buffy could do subtle, if somebody banged her head against it solidly several times first.

“OK,” she said abruptly, “here’s what we do. We make a show of force with the SITs and anybody I can collect, but not to the point of actually getting inside. Because that’s what Digger and everybody will expect. So we show them that. A feint. Meanwhile,” she continued, looking at dispirited Willow, “you and Giles figure out how silver comes into it. It does, because Spike said so. He didn’t explain because then Rayne would know--pick it out of his mind. He’s depending on us to understand. For once, we play this Spike’s way. It’s his thing, he knows what he’s doing. He’s the lead, we’re the backup. So that’s what we do.”

Giles looked at her over his glasses’ tops. “Buffy…do you really consider that wise?”

“No, but it’s what we’re gonna do anyway.” She hopped off her chair to collect her cell phone: she had a lot of calls to make. Turning in the doorway, she added, “And as soon as I have things rolling, Giles, you’re gonna tell me what this frickin’ Venusburg thing means!”

**********

Spike woke to Rayne’s voice inquiring if he’d had a nice nap.

He woke not because he wanted to but because he had to: Rayne’s voice had acquired the power to compel him. Rayne had cut the pleasure off, too, the bastard--probably to force Spike to be something like coherent, something like aware.

Spike resented missing it, but the fact was, he ached to have it back, have it flood over him again. Had felt so good to let go and let himself be engulfed, everything coming in, drowned in sensation.

Waking felt like being tossed out of a tawdry second-rate heaven--everything too bright, too sharp, too solid. A little, maybe, like Buffy had felt after Red and the others had called her back from the real thing.

Cut-rate heaven of the senses, bloody Venusburg, was likely as close as a vampire would ever get.

“Yeah--good one: don’t remember it,” he said, offhanded despite being forced to answer because it’d been a direct question. Mage seemed to have set some kind of truth spell on him, but Spike knew his way around those: just pretend he was Anya and drown the asker in meaningless details until they gave over asking or offer the Cliff’s Notes version, so brief and compressed it was as good as a lie. “So why’d you wake me up?” he grumbled.

“I want to ask you…about the Initiative.” Rayne sounded almost shy, as though the topic embarrassed him. He smelled angry, though.

Spike didn’t give a fuck. Since it wasn’t a question, he wasn’t forced to respond and didn’t.

Swinging his legs over the side of the cot, he sat up, scrubbing fists into his eyes and yawning, reaching to a pocket for cigarettes. No pockets. Right. No shirt, no jeans, just silky pajama-bottom sort of togs like he was gonna appear as a rent boy in a grade-Z porn flick. Right.

And stuff painted over his chest and arms. Well, an improvement over it being cut into him, he supposed, like the First had done, deep enough that the scars still showed in certain angles of light….

Stank of magic. Wards, most like. And compulsions, as noted. Have to see how that went.

“Have a nice cuppa.” Rayne was holding out a mug of strong tea, sweetened almost to syrup. Had another, the same, in his other hand. “Though lacking most of the amenities, the service here is excellent.”

Spike closed his hands around the offered mug but only held it on a knee, savoring the heat and the odor, looking around.

Fucking caboose. Well, he’d known Rayne was a back-door man, but shacking up in an ancient caboose did seem a bit over the top, symbolically. If one went in for symbolic, which Spike did, lately. On account of the fucking dreams, most like--trying to figure them out. Paradigms and patterns and such….

He still felt muzzy-headed and drifty, but that was all right. Not time yet to be anything else, only a few hours past daybreak by the felt angle of the sun.

Dead cow on the other cot. That came back to him hazily, and Mike here awhile but gone now by the smell. And the fact of his absence, of course, as Spike blinked and looked around. Spike remembered feeding from him, and no least trace of Dawn in the mix. Apparently Mike was still minding his manners in regard to her; so that part was all right.

Spike was fed and rested, for once with no dreams of burning (that he remembered, anyway); the crazy was close but still a little way off. Not bad for someone who’d been cored out like an apple, pulled apart like an orange, then shakily reassembled as if by somebody who’d lost the Japanese instructions.

Taking a mouthful of the scalding, intensely sweet tea, Spike reflected you could get used to just about anything, even being off your head and hallucinating in Technicolor and SurroundSound more than half the time. At least, he thought bleakly, he didn’t seem to have killed anybody or delivered any severed hands.

Rayne had settled into a wooden folding chair by the foot of the cot, sipping tea and regarding him over the mug like a squirrel with a nut. “The Initiative,” Rayne prompted. “How did you escape?”

“Oh. Yeah.” Spike twitched a shoulder dismissively. “Took the first chance and scarpered.” That was true…as far as it went.

“Someone didn’t rescue you? Buffy, for instance?”

Spike laughed. “Not hardly. Wasn’t on that kind of terms with the Slayer then. She didn’t even know I was back in Sunnyhell, to miss me.”

“Or Dawn?”

Spike had trouble not admitting that Dawn hadn’t existed in those days, except for faked retroactive memories. “No,” was still true, and enough to satisfy the compulsion. “'F I was on fire, none of the Scoobies would have pissed on me to put me out.”

Hadn’t meant to say that, or at least not quite that way. Have to put a better curb on his tongue.

Holding the mug to his chest, Rayne prompted, “Ask me how I escaped.”

“So how’d you escape?” Spike responded obediently, startled to realize those wankers’d had Rayne too, apparently.

“I didn’t,” said Rayne brightly. “Thanks for asking.” His twitch of a smile wasn’t the least convincing. Rage was coming off him like smoke though his face didn’t admit it. “I gave him every opportunity to ask, inquire after my three fucking years in hell, three years of unremitting torture. I waited for it. Practically pleaded for it. Some least recognition of what he’d done to me. Even without an apology, I would have forgiven him. But quite plainly, it wasn’t merely a prison…or a laboratory, for that matter: it was quite literally an oubliette--a forgettery. He handed me over to those military savages…and never once troubled to wonder what had become of me. If I’d died, or gone mad, or been carved up into specimens for boffins to gawk at.”

There were, Spike observed, different compulsions, and Rayne was in the throes of one. “That’d be after you’d turned him into a Fyarl. Good one, that,” he added objectively.

“I thought he’d lose a few inhibitions. Have to admit to raging insecurity and anger at how he’d caged himself away from his true feelings, his true nature. I thought it would be instructive, as well as amusing.”

“Slayer nearly staked him. But she does that to most of her friends, so it’s nothing special.”

“There, you see? The merest prank. For which I was dragged off to that obscene place, and tortured for the greater good of science, and forgotten. For three bloody years!”

Spike stuck a finger in his ear and wiggled it. “So how’d you get out, then?”

Rayne had a hand to his mouth, biting at the knuckle not quite hard enough to make it bleed. After a moment, he said, “I didn’t. I didn’t escape. Was never rescued, never freed. The whole place was forgotten, it seems. Abandoned. Took me at least a week after the food was gone and the last of the water ran out to think to try the cage door. Standing was an issue, you see. And forget about walking. I crawled, and couldn’t remember if the door opened inward or outward, and wasted absolute hours trying to push it when all I needed to do was crawl clear of the swing and pull.” With another rictus smile, Rayne added, “I won’t bore you with the other tiresome details, dear boy. You’ve been in their hands: you know.”

“Yeah. I do. Haven't much liked hospitals, anyplace white with bright lights, since. Smell of--"

“--Betadine. Yes. We know." Rayne tipped his head up, drawing a long, strangled breath. "And not for putting me there but for forgetting, for not even bothering to care what had become of me, when the Hellmouth opens all the ways and dimensions, I intend to find the most painful and chaotic dimension, possibly Quar’toth. I shall drop him into it and then seal the gate for all time. See how he likes being forgotten, with all his Council airs and authority and his priggish denial of everything vital and real in him! Wouldn’t you like to help me, dear heart? You can have no great affection for the Council in any of its incarnations; and Rupert merely tolerates you because Buffy gives him no choice. We're natural allies, you and I: both children of Chaos, after our own fashion. Wouldn't you prefer to be free? Help me willingly?”

Spike had to admit the idea had some appeal, if only to see the expression on Rupert’s face. Soul didn’t like it, insisting that Rupert had changed, showed him proper respect lately. Even helped get him out of the fog he couldn’t have escaped on his own, though that was mostly the Lady, stuffing the soul back into him, so the soul was bound to put a favorable spin on it.

Rayne wanted comradeship here. Wanted willing cooperation based on shared misery. Which was rather a stupid thing to want of a vampire.

“Oh,” Spike drawled, “so I have a choice about it, then? An’ Bit--does she get a choice, too?”

“You are missing the point!”

“If you say so.”

“Are you expecting the Slayer to come and rescue you? She won’t. She can’t. You’re here at my pleasure as long as I have use for you. And you’ll come to accept it. Like it, even. Or do you like it enough already, that the thought of being without it forever sends shockwaves through your lovely, delicious system?”

It was lucky Spike couldn’t answer all the parts of that at once. The jam of competing responses gave him time to choose what to say and how to say it. He lifted a shoulder in a negligent shrug. “Slayer will come for me. I know that. Wish she wouldn’t, it will only bollocks things up, but she will. It’s what she does. No matter how I've failed her, fucked everything up.... Just how she is, how she does. Won’t work, I know that already. And as to the mindfuck, demon likes it well enough. Probably could get him to roll over and beg, if you haven’t already, just for chuckles. As for me, I’ll do what I have to and what I can, just like always. Not quite to the rolling over and begging stage because the sound track is bloody awful and the visuals make my eyes ache. So I expect--”

The wave crashed in and took him away into half-resented bliss. Piss ‘em off, that’s the ticket, he thought dimly, look how well it worked with that hellbitch Glory, in the instant before there was no more thought, only the demon roaring satisfaction.

**********

Drinking herbal tea and trying to find the calm part of awake, thinking blankly silver, silver, silver, Willow slapped her forehead and dashed for the den…and the laptop, sitting open on the table, just as Spike had left it. It was turned off, though (Better be, she thought rancorously, since if left running, it would have exhausted the battery by now). While waiting for it to boot and load, she ran back to the kitchen for her tea, set it down to the left of the keyboard, and then forgot it altogether while mousing and punching and frowning at the screen, navigating the levels and branches of the Council of Watchers database until she located Spike’s directory. She’d set it up, but that had been months ago, and she’d forgotten.

Naturally, it was password-protected. But it was Spike. Her third guess, Ramones, opened the file listings to her and she was off and running--specifically, running a search on silver. Five entries. Five of the documents Spike had translated. The first one was nothing goop on the completely fanciful effects of silver on vampires, which was nothing, nada, as Spike had annotated in the margin drop-down commentary box with scathing, profane glee. The next one concerned a magical artifact, the Mirror of Aelron, whose polished silver surface supposedly displayed the future if viewed under particular conditions, with elaborate preparations. That one worked, Spike commented, except that, like Dru’s visions, what one saw was completely incomprehensible without the surrounding context…which the mirror did not show. Without being able to read the meaning, the visions were pretty…meaningless. Magical but useless, was his conclusion.

Before diving into the next file, Willow stepped back mentally and realized that Spike apparently had been concentrating on documents involving silver--choosing them rather than other files to work on. And he’d made a directory called “REF.” She went into that and found about thirty discussions of the alchemical properties and uses of silver from the Council’s main archive: just scanned in as-is, some with handwritten commentaries from earlier scholars/alchemists/mages, in a wild variety of languages. Likely the ones she couldn’t read, Giles could, so she picked the ones in languages she knew fairly well--her Medieval Spanish wasn’t that great, but with the heavy Latin influence, she could make out the gist of things--whether it was a spell or a recipe for stewed chicken. She half rose, intending to call Giles (napping in the front room’s big chair), then forgot as she’d forgotten the tea, intently reading through a discourse on the fundamental nature of unworked, unspelled silver. Raw in the ground: the impression she’d gotten from Spike's demon, she recalled, now that she saw it in pointy Gothic capitals.

Ten minutes later, she was shaking Giles’ shoulder, and he was blearily reaching for his glasses, set aside on the chair’s broad arm.

Willow blurted, “I know what it is, what to do. Earth magic!”

**********

When Mike insinuated himself as one of her guards, moving up the slant of the corridor, Dawn asked him sourly, “And how was your day?”

By her watch, it was just past eleven o’clock, and despite all the sleep--there was nothing to do in the wretched storeroom--she was achy, dirty, sore, thirsty, and miserable. And scared. Mustn’t leave out scared.

This was it, then: Rayne was gonna cut her. Her own fault: she was still a stupid virgin. Having refused Mike, she’d had no other opportunity. She wondered if he held that against her.

He was wearing a blue tee tonight with the slogan “Happiness is a warm puppy” and a picture of a young, floppy Dalmatian on the front, all big feet and big eyes and flocked white spots. On the back was the name, phone number, and website of the Animal Rescue League. Mike paced beside her silently--maybe assigned to her escort by Digger; certainly wouldn’t be here without Digger’s knowledge and consent.

Last night, he’d been implicitly willing to be dusted for her. Now, by his silence and the way he didn’t look at her, he’d distanced himself from such pointless impulses. Distanced himself from her.

She sort of guessed he hadn’t come up with an alternative plan.

She imagined he felt really bad about it. Might feel really bad about it for a century or longer…when he bothered to remember…whereas she’d be rendered into her constituent elements and energies in less than an hour. It didn’t seem fair.

They brought her at last into a cavern only slightly smaller than an airplane hanger, all cut up with partitions she would have blindly banged into except that her escort could see really well in the darkness and steered her around the turns with sudden jerks that made her flinch and stumble. They carried no flashlights or lanterns because they didn’t need any; and making a frightened human girl more comfortable wasn’t on anybody’s agenda.

The only light she could see was a dim splotch on the ceiling. Then her escort turned another corner and it was like finding a campfire in a clearing in the woods--sudden brightness but so much smaller than the surrounding dark. Lanterns were hung at the corners of the big bay, and a flickering green-tinged flame burned in a brazier in the middle of it. Rayne was finishing drawing chalked lines to define the magical space, with an obvious corridor left open to let Dawn and her escort come in without touching any of the lines.

She saw Spike then: sitting on the ground in the dark circle below the brazier. Head and torso slumped forward onto arms folded over his knees, just the pale curve of his bent back showing. Not moving, not looking at anything. Not even rocking. Just puddled there like some street-corner beggar or homeless person too beaten down to even lift his eyes to the passers-by. If somebody was looking for a model for “hopeless despair,” there he was, all set.

When Dawn recalled him doing the power walk entering the gym, that first time, all swagger and self-assurance, like he was the king of the world and cheerfully slumming among the peons with his entourage of SITs and crew fanned out behind, all in sublime, arrogant synchronicity, it made her stomach hurt and her eyes sting.

She dropped down on her knees beside him, flopping to sit with her legs tucked next to her before the knee scabs and bruises could protest too much. Patting his elbow tentatively, she greeted him hoarsely, “Hey.”

Her touch startled him. He flinched away, huddling even tighter into himself.

“It’s just me,” she explained, lifting her hand, uncertain. “Only the star attraction, the headliner. The unique soon-to-be-bloody-sacrifice-Summers, appearing for one midnight only.” She rested fingertips on his temple, stroked down the edge of his ear. “Your not being all charged up and rah for this makes me wonder if I should be worried. Spike?”

He wasn’t taking it in, wasn’t reacting. Seemed oblivious to her presence.

Rayne came then and gripped her elbow, raising and pulling her off to the inside periphery of the chalked circle. While one of the attendant vamps held her from behind with one hand gripping her shoulder and the other bent under her chin, around her neck, Rayne briskly secured her ankles, then fastened her wrists in front of her with narrow, very tight cord. It didn’t budge when Dawn experimentally pulled against it. As he stooped and bobbed, checking his handiwork, Dawn barely restrained the impulse to knee him in the chin, mainly because she couldn’t. With her ankles lashed together, all she could have managed was a small bunny-hop quickly followed by a humiliating falling-down.

When Rayne straightened, she took some satisfaction finding herself taller by at least an inch. Just the right height to spit straight into his face. Her mouth was dry: by sucking her teeth, she'd saved up spit against this opportunity. “My sister is so gonna get you for this!”

“Doubtful,” Rayne said, going to a small table set up by the brazier and returning with a potato-sized crystal he moved here and there before her like a light meter. It shone yellow, whatever that meant. “Fine. Exactly as advertised….” Strolling back to the table and fussing with the stuff there, Rayne continued, over his shoulder, “I’m told that the Slayer has already made her appearance, about an hour ago, at one of the lesser-used entrances, and been soundly beaten back. Strong and fierce, but not wise, with her little party of inept followers. Threatened bloody mayhem, but couldn’t deliver on it. I’d think even she would now be persuaded of the futility of trying to interrupt our ceremony. But she’s welcome to try as many times as she likes…in the small time remaining.” Bringing back a wet cloth, Rayne proceeded to remove, with small, precise dabs, what Dawn guessed were smudges on her face, squinting critically like a cosmetician applying makeup. Or a technician preparing a clinically eviscerated corpse to be pretty for public viewing.

Dawn shut her eyes, unable to prevent tears from leaking from under her eyelids.

Buffy’s try at rescue had failed. Spike was practically comatose, withdrawn, and probably crazy. Mike had no plan except blowing everything up and bringing down several gigillion tons of ceiling on them, which really wasn’t likely to help. Nobody was gonna save her. She hoped Spike was fucking happy she’d maintained her fucking purity on his say-so, done what she’d promised despite all misgivings. Herself, she didn’t take much satisfaction in it. It was all such a waste….

With her wrists tied and without a tissue, she couldn’t even blow her nose.

Bent over Spike, Rayne roused him enough that when Rayne proffered the rough, irregular globe that was the Stone, Spike accepted it and set it in his lap, clasping it in wide-spread hands. Head raptly thrown back, Spike was in game face: stark, beautiful, and alien in the flickering illumination. Serpentine blue markings down the tensed muscles of his arms shimmered and seemed to crawl.

Although Dawn could sense nothing of whatever opening arpeggios he was performing through the Stone, the vamps around were reacting, dragged a pace toward the center: hunched forward in palpable desire, their faces more bestial and feral, their yellow eyes wide and seeming moon-blinded; close pairs turned on each other in sudden indignation, snarling, squaring off. Things nearly blew up then, Dawn wildly hoped they would, only belatedly realizing, as Rayne angrily hauled the Stone away from Spike (who didn’t want to let go and let himself be dragged rather than release it), that if all hell broke loose, she would be one of the first casualties. So she supposed it was just as well Rayne did something to Spike that made Spike lose his hold on the Stone and collapse, arms still outstretched.

Again, Dawn could only infer the cause from the effect.

Stalking to the table, Rayne thumped the Stone down there and then proceeded to scuff-erase enough of the containing circle that the vamps could pass through, single file. Vamps could have jumped to beyond the circle without even a running start; but clearly Rayne didn’t know that, just as he plainly hadn’t anticipated the vamps’ reaction to the siren Stone.

When he’d remade the circle with quick strokes, and only the three of them were left inside, Rayne strolled slowly back to look down at Spike, arms folded. “That wasn’t very nice.”

Raising himself on braced arms, Spike lifted a fanged vampire grin, and the two of them regarded each other for a long moment.

“Why did you do that?” Rayne inquired--as though he took it personally, as though he really wanted to know.

Spike’s features shifted to his human countenance. No longer grinning, he looked sullen, weary. “’Cause I could. ’Cause it shuts out that other, that you keep pushing in on me. Takes up a bloke’s whole attention, making that rock sing. ’Cause while I do that, you’re not cutting Bit.”

“But you don’t want to miss the moment,” Rayne responded, as though reminding Spike of something they both knew. “You dread the alternative.”

The defiance slumped out of Spike’s pose. He turned his face away.

Rayne went on gently, “You’ve ruined, killed, or corrupted everything and everyone you’ve ever touched. You’ve sown Chaos on a scale worthy of admiration…but you take no joy in it anymore. You perceive it as failure and let it hurt you when you should glory in it as the creature of Chaos that you are. Succeed at this and you will be freed--”

“No. I’ll burn.”

Going down on one knee, Rayne stroked and soothed Spike’s face with his hands, saying something to him that was to Dawn only a murmur. Then, all sincerity and solicitude, he leaned and kissed Spike on the mouth, which Dawn considered fairly ewww but wasn’t all that surprised at, everything considered. Everybody reacted to Spike passionately, one way or another. Nobody was indifferent. Spike wouldn't tolerate it. He cultivated extremes.

She’d been concentrating on doing a little heel-and-toe sidewise maneuver that inched her to the innermost line. She scuffed and broke it, then heel-and-toed herself back to about where she’d been, standing straight and innocent, like when Buffy challenged her about the doneness of homework. Dawn had no idea what effect breaking the line would have, but whatever it was, Rayne would be caught in it too, and Spike, well, Spike could survive anything. And with Rayne gone, Spike would be himself again--wouldn’t want to lean against the mage and be comforted and convinced.

Still holding Spike’s face in his hands, Rayne said, “We must do this now, dear heart. Or we’ll miss the moment. Are you going to be good for me? When I can’t allow you to be distracted?”

Whatever he saw apparently reassured him, or at least he acted as though it did--going to collect the Stone, then formally offering it as he had before. Rocking to sit upright, Spike took it and bowed over it, immediately absorbed in whatever effect he and the Stone were having on one another. It was like music, Dawn thought, that only he could hear. But he was done fooling around: this was a Working, and this time, Dawn could feel it as an uneasy jitter in her bones. The vast shadows seemed to twist and loom eagerly. And Rayne approached her, chanting, with glittering eyes. In his hand he held upraised a large, simple dagger, without ornament or markings--as stripped to its sole purpose as a vampire’s fangs or the taskin tooth swaying uselessly between her breasts.

It was like one of those dreams where you couldn’t run. Except, of course, that it was real. Forgetting her bonds, trying to back away, Dawn fell, scrabbling with her heels on the cavern floor, still trying to push herself away. Rayne bent to take a fistful of hair and braced a leg behind her. She couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. The frantic beat of her heart was all she could hear until, at Spike’s shout, everything went still.

Instantly, Rayne released her to go to Spike, who was curled up tight, arms wrapped around his head, sobbing. The Stone had rolled away, ignored as Rayne tried to determine what the problem was and Spike, plainly devastated, got out that the Stone had “kicked back at him” somehow, locked him in an agonizing feedback loop of some sort with no outlet. It was everywhere, sucking him out of himself, he couldn’t help it, the harder he tried, the worse it got….

Seeming to accept Spike’s incoherent explanation without the least question, or perhaps with confirmation beyond the words, Rayne looked around the cavern, then made a gesture and spoke a Word. Everywhere, tiny lights appeared. Like thin, still lightning bolts threaded through the rock. The cavern shone with its own eldritch luminescence.

“Bloody hell!” the mage cried, sounding very like Spike in a rage, as the lights began to fade. “Ashteroth damn her to the uttermost stinking pit of the Hell of Tulips! That never to be sufficiently vilified witch has charged the native silver! It’s become one huge magic sink, prepared to absorb anything within its range, interfering-- It could hardly be worse if she’d blessed it, but that would have taken actual power whereas the rankest amateur-- Here, it’s all right, dear heart. You were not to know--it wasn’t your fault. I know it meant a lot to you for this to go well, for us not to be forced to the fallback. You tried your best. It was a flawless beginning, truly. I could feel the universe trembling on its hinges and beginning to open.” Blurting reassurances, Rayne was down on his knees again, cradling Spike inconsolably sprawled in his arms.

Definitely ewww, but Spike always had been a sucker for anybody who treated him kindly, acted as if they liked him. Never having had much occasion, he’d never had much defense against it, and had lost most of that, what with Buffy and everybody, even Xander, treating him at least civilly. Some of them outright loving him.

And Rayne was obviously a sucker for hurt/comfort. The more Spike hurt, the more irresistible Rayne found him. Vaguely, she wondered if Spike had noticed that.

By her watch, it was 12:06.

Yay, Willow! Dawn thought exultantly, lying trussed on the floor, aching with relief and the buzzing aftermath of terror and panic. She wasn’t saved, wasn’t rescued, but Willow had bought her a twelve hour stay of execution. Rayne had missed his “moment,” and as she recalled, the next opportunity would be mid-day…when Light was ascendant; away from the perpetual midnight of the magic-sink caverns and shafts, the impregnable fortress.

Change the rules, change the game, maybe change the outcome.

But Spike, so puzzlingly strange, so far beyond her reach…that worried her.

Life update

2004-10-07T20:59:08Z

Dear friends, readers, and visitors, I have good news after being MOST unexpectedly hit with a threat of foreclosure on my house and monthly mortgage payments raised to $1,200+ by an insane mortgage company determined to lose me as a client when if they'd been the least bit flexible, I could have stayed with them another 10 years, to their profit. However, as of today, a mortgage broker has found a mortgage company willing to refinance my mortgage and bring the monthly payments down to a little under $400. That's entirely do-able. The appraiser will be out Saturday, and the broker expects to close on the new mortgage late next week at the latest.

Out of that refinancing will come a number of good things, besides the lowered monthly payment. The approximately $1,000 owing on my computer will be paid off. The $1,800 property taxes will be paid. THERE IS NO ESCROW: I pay the property taxes next year (and thereafter) out of my own pocket, which is what I prefer. I will get about $1,500 in cash (with which I can get current on last winter's power bills, finally, and be ready for this winter's increase) and get my TV cable reconnected. I should be able to buy a used car to get around in during the snowy/icy months (usually Jan/Feb and the first half of March, here), since though officially retired, I'm still working and on my beloved scooter. But I appreciate car backup in icy weather. And I'll go through October and November with no mortgage payments at all, letting me build up a little reserve. All to the good.

AND OF COURSE NO FORECLOSURE! (WHEE!)

In simple, I will be solvent and likely to become even more so with each passing month. So the news is all good from here. Eventually, I'll calm down and my blood pressure will return to something like normal, and I'll start working on Blood Rites again.

On the occasion of my birthday

2004-09-08T17:42:12Z

Today, I am 62. I made it this far, with the help of many.

I'm not home free yet, but I've taken the first step: applied for official retirement via Social Security. I was downtown all day doing the paperwork. I'll continue to work and have now been promised a full-time job (rather than being a temp) where I'm currently working, with a slight raise in salary, medical benefits (which I've been without for nearly 3 years), and the opportunity to apply for any jobs available within the company (Convergys) perhaps more suited to my skills and experience than what I'm now doing.

My retirement money apparently won't start until mid-November; all I have to do is get from here to there.

I cannot begin to thank you all (well, I can *begin,* but I'd never finish) adequately for your help. I would never have made it through without the kindness of those willing to share, from the little they had, to support the less I had during this extremely difficult time. The benenoia has been rescue and kindness beyond all expectation or reckoning. I will never forget it.

Though there have been no cake, no candles, no presents to unwrap, I think this has been my best and most meaningful birthday ever, thanks to my dear S'cubies and other friends unmet and unknown but somehow still caring about me enough to keep me going. I know I have never earned such kindness. I hope my thanks and gratitude are even remotely proportional to the deserving.

Thank you so much!

Blood Rites, Chapter 19: Alice Down the Rabbit Hole

2004-08-29T12:21:46Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 19: Alice Down the Rabbit Hole (complete)

Having re-warded the house and everything appertaining thereto, making it a hermetic bubble not quite synched anymore to the outer world, which left her sweating and wrung out, Willow joined the others in the swap party at the end of the tunnel and they all went through. Xander, who'd begged off work to come along, handed her a lantern. They went last, to not interfere with Spike's dark-sight, Xander with the stake bag over his shoulder and a medium axe in his hands, the kind that could be swung in tight spaces without slicing up your companions.

When Willow stumbled wearily, Xander's hand was there, catching her up by an elbow, squeezing her arm reassuringly before letting go. Then Giles dropped back, offering a hand without comment, with different meaning. Willow gratefully clasped it and sucked up a draft of raw power, energy taken from many sources and stored the night before.

A slight bit squicky, using Giles that way, but he was so gravely calm about it all that Willow tried to be matter-of-fact about the implicit ick of it, the way Buffy was about Spike living off her, pretty much, nothing anymore in the refrigerator so you had to figure. They didn't talk about it, just how it was, so Willow tried to be similarly offhanded about making herself a sort of life-energy vampire.

But after that first pull, she disengaged, smiling weakly and waving fingers in thanks. Giles' power was for containing Rayne, helping her bind the mage, and she didn't dare draw too much lest it not be there when she most needed it. Because she'd be pretty much alone in that. Anya had supplied a bushel of crystals, herbs, magical implements and artifacts (on loan, payable only if they were broken or used up, which was pretty generous because, well, Anya) but wasn't coming within a mile of the house today because, well, Anya. Willow would have to do this pretty much on her own. She'd studied all night, learning the spells designed to cage Chaos within Order, if only for a time.

She wished she had a nice, hot espresso. Several. Triple sugar. That gave her a thought and she hustled a little faster, passing Giles, Dawn, and Buffy, to fall into step with Spike, in the lead. "You have any of those pills on you? The waker-uppers?"

She knew he did: she could see the effect in the unnatural alertness and the pause it took him to process anything said to him. Like Casa Summers, he wasn't quite synched to the normal anymore.

He gave her a narrow, dubious look. "You'll pay for it, later on."

"I know. But that's later. Give." She held out her hand and waited out the pause while he thought about it and decided, producing and uncapping the vial, tipping one of two remaining pills into her palm. She bit her lip. "You're almost out."

"Doesn't matter," he responded, putting the vial away. "Use what you got while you got it."

Buffy was watching and overhearing but making no comments about not needing two pill freaks in the party, Buffy knew about accommodation and necessity, so Willow swallowed her uncertainty and guilt and the pill, swallowing hard until everything went down. She meekly stood aside to let everybody pass her, rejoining Xander at the rear.

Xander was telling Dawn, "What is it--about an hour or so? Not counting the going and coming, of course. Piece of cake. What can go wrong in an hour? Wait, don't answer that."

Dawn didn't even smile, strolling along in pink corduroy overalls and a plain white long-sleeved mock-turtleneck with a droopy white sweater on top, her hands stuffed deep in the pockets.

"Just trying to cheer you up a little," Xander offered, starting to chuck her under the chin, but she winced her head away.

"It's OK, I'm good with it," Dawn commented, pulling a fist from a pocket to rub at her eyes. "Notice the not-screaming-and-complaining of me. It's only a swap to secure the meeting. Just like last time, right? Except without the kidnapping part, and we get a good swap in exchange, not Digger's skanky ho. So all plus and with-it-ness here, no problemo."

She lied like a rug, she was scared to death, but it wouldn't do any good to say so, so Willow kept shut, just admiring Dawn's shaky courage.

"Might even be candy again," Dawn added, pulling a smile out of someplace it'd been stuffed down tight, folded, and full of wrinkles. It wobbled, but she wore it. "Double points for candy, since it's a proven fact that chocolate solves everything."

Willow noticed Dawn was wearing a double necklace: the shield against mental influence/intrusion, in its locket, and the pierced fang on a thin cord--the keepsake of her defeat of the dragonlike taskin, something Willow thought she was secretly proud of; but since the Road Trip from Hell, Willow had never known her to wear it. All her defenses, magical and otherwise, conspicuously in place.

Willow asked, "Do you have your taser?"

Dawn shook her head, smooth hair flying. "They'd only take it. Can't expect even a vamp to be that stupid about the same thing twice." She shrugged. "It will be all right. Nobody's gonna hurt me. I'm only of use virgo intacta and all that." Another shrug. "And like Xander says, it's only for an hour or so. What could go wrong?"

Willow hastily made a sign against ill-omen, that was supposedly also good against the Evil Eye, but the whole thing was superstitious nonsense, not a proper ward at all. Still, it made her feel better.

She didn't like the bit about virgo intacta, since that only applied to the conditions of blood magic and maybe Dawn's keyness, since bloodletting had been involved in that, too. Both highly dangerous and waaay from the Dark Side of the magickal spectrum, too risky even to know much about, let alone use. But Rayne wasn't gonna be there, he'd be under ward at Casa Summers as a counter-hostage, so maybe it was nothing.

With Giles' help and the Council's resources, she'd considered and consolidated every recorded way of locking down a mage and disabling his powers. She just had to trust in that. As Dawn did. Surely Buffy and Spike wouldn't have agreed to the exchange unless they were sure it would work, right?

Ahead, Spike had stopped short of the junction of a cross pipe, so everybody stopped behind him, fanning out a little into fighting formation, just like on patrol except with Dawn protected in the middle. Willow understood: you took your stance at a defensible position, where nothing could come at you from the sides, and having secured your retreat. That was Xander's job, mostly, and he stayed a few paces back, attending to the pipe they'd come through.

"There's a ladder and a cover," Spike said, lighting a cigarette, then crumpling and pitching the pack, "about halfway back to the last junction. Everybody notice it?"

"Yeah," said Buffy, for all of them, though the fact was that Willow hadn't noticed.

In a rush, she felt the pill take effect: better than a double espresso, tingling with wide-eyed alertness. She recalled it was roughly three o'clock on a sunny afternoon, and with Spike gone on ahead to the meeting, all they had to do--

"All you have to do is get topside," Spike was continuing, "if this goes sidewise, an' then run like hell. No vamp's gonna follow you. But I dunno that vamps is all Digger's got to call…." Voice trailing off, he looked away, up the pipe, head lifting. Glancing back, he'd gone to game-face, stark and bronze-eyed. "Showtime."

**********

Ethan Rayne strolled clear of his vamp escort as though he hadn’t a care in the world. He paused by Spike to whisper something Spike recoiled from: snarling, indignant. The mage laughed, patting Spike companionably on the shoulder (another flinch) before coming on and linking an arm through Giles’ and starting to turn with him before Giles stiffly removed the too-familiar appendage like an offending dead fish somebody had draped on him. They squared off a moment, heads cocked alike but Rayne’s face open and pleased and Giles’ shut and forbidding. Giles held out a hand stiffly to Willow, and she took it, weaving the power to lock temporary wards that weren’t absolute since they had to move Rayne back to Casa Summers and weren’t about to carry him unless they had to. But the wards prevented movement in time and dimension except for a limited oval she’d extend as needed to get where they were going. Once inside the heavily warded house, she could be more specific and absolute in her controls.

Spike had already moved off, out of sight; Buffy hugged her sister close, refusing to surrender her until the counter-hostage was secured.

Having prevented him from moving except within a restricted range, Willow proceeded to cut Rayne’s connections to the ambient magic he might otherwise have drawn upon, undistracted by his claim, “Ooh, that tickles,” or Giles’ demanding the mage turn out his pockets. Willow found surprisingly few nodes of active connection (apparent in his aura) and concluded he’d expected this. No matter, what he’d expected: Willow sealed them all grimly, methodically, the active and inactive. That required touching them, something Rayne could have made salacious and embarrassing, since they included the genitals; but he just watched, dark eyebrows high as though interested and amused, judging her procedure, until she put a thumb to the “third eye” space in the central forehead. He shut his non-mystical eyes at that, looking momentarily drawn and grim, commenting, “Now that’s a deprivation. But I suppose I must endure it for the good of the team and all, since I’m your prisoner.”

Blinking, rousing, he laid his hand on top of Giles’ and Willow’s. Giles shook off the touch impatiently: such power-sharing could only be done by consent. Rayne couldn’t tap into it uninvited, though Willow could feel him trying.

“Ah, well,” he said. “What can’t be cured must be endured. Shall we be all evening about this, Ripper? Not that I don’t adore being your guest, but I’m a bit peckish. There’s tea laid on, I hope? I trust we needn’t be totally uncivilized about this--I did volunteer for it, after all. Some minimal courtesy would seem indicated.”

Giles didn’t reply, festooning the mage with a variety of charms and sigils on chains or cords. Then Giles secured Rayne’s wrists behind his back with the very latest in handcuffs: sturdy plastic strips, the sharp end poking through the loop end and pulled tight, locked.

Not being a natural material, plastic (vinyl, really) was extremely hard to manipulate magically.

Rayne said, “Ah--now at last we know how the Dormouse was suppressed. Are you going to do me here, dear, or not until--”

Giles silenced the babble with a length of silver duct tape, smoothing it into place with fastidious fingertip touches, from one cheek to the other, covering the wide, smiling mouth. Rayne’s eyes were still bright with mischief and amusement. Giles stepped back, head bowed, arms at his sides--disengaging, withdrawing.

Willow asked carefully, “Are you OK?”

Giles muttered what sounded like sodding prat. Looking to Buffy, he declared formally, “I believe the pax bond is secure.”

Hands on Dawn’s shoulders, Buffy gave her taller sister a searching, enquiring look as if to say nothing was required, Dawn could still back out if she wanted, which of course wasn’t true, not with Spike already gone on and surrounded by now, on enemy ground and undefended except for the exchange of the pax bonds.

Dawn said tightly, “Yeah.” Pulling out of the tight hug that followed, she turned and walked steadily away to join her waiting vamp captors, who hustled her off without any formality of binding. Obviously, none was needed: she was only a slender child, with no power she herself could draw upon. Like a princess surrendered to the Visigoths as tribute, Willow thought.

Buffy watched them out of sight, then turned, remarking harshly, “Let’s get this show on the road.”

Xander went first, with the lantern. Buffy was behind as rearguard. Between were Giles and Willow, and compliant Rayne moving amiably between them. Bound with magical and mundane restraints though he was, Willow still had the sense of leading a pacing tiger on a string--controlled only as much as he consented and pretended to be, content to play this game for awhile, as long as it was entertaining.

Unnerved but incredibly alert, extending the free space ahead and pulling up behind the area in which Rayne could move, Willow stood ready to slap him down at a second’s notice. If she got a second.

**********

Buffy didn’t like it. She didn’t like any part of it whatever, not even a little. She hated operating on nothing stronger than faith: nothing she could confirm with touch, nothing she could shove or hit.

Standing in the hall while Willow and the mage, Rayne, found places to sit in the front room and Giles went past to arrange tea in the kitchen, Buffy was on guard, on watch--against what, she didn’t know, and didn’t like that feeling.

Rayne was constrained mainly because Willow was plainly convinced he was. Wary, anxious, even a little belligerent, of the “You better watch yourself, Mister!” variety but not expecting anything to happen right now. Buffy had to take Willow’s unspoken word for it that this minute, right now, Rayne was not an active threat.

Spike was away, in the middle of the danger, because he’d maneuvered and contended to be so. She had to believe he knew what he was doing, even though “Spike has a plan” was a phrase to rouse dismay in the most confident of hearts.

Spike’s plans had a tendency to exhibit major suckage. Either he’d overlooked something, or he got bored and lunged into action any old how, or something went egg-shaped, and the result bore no resemblance to the prediction. For instance, the conspicuous fiasco that was the smell.

But they’d talked, after the class. For quite a long while, actually. In front of the Civic Center, after they’d stowed the pads away in the SUV, Spike had paced and smoked and flung his arms, and she’d called him names and actually bopped him in the nose once, but since it all came down to Buffy’s concern for him and her uneasiness at feeling shut out, the radius of Spike’s circles grew smaller and his gestures less grandiose, their glances longer and more assessing. They ended standing in each other’s arms, foreheads touching.

“This is mine, now, pet,” he’d told her quietly. “Mine to see to. You can’t take it from me or do it for me. Can’t make it go away.”

“But I get the hard choices! I’m the Chosen One, not you!”

“And so you are, love,” he’d agreed, nuzzling her cheek with his poor bopped nose, then leaning back a little to smile uneasily into her eyes. “And brilliant at it, too. But this isn’t a thing a Slayer can fix. Took on the ending when I took on the beginning: claiming the rights of Master Vampire of Sunnydale. This comes with the package. Have to leave me to it, love. To do it the best I can, to stop it so it won’t come back and bite us in the ass again down the way sometime. Keep the Hellmouth shut and locked so tight, next idiot comes with an itch to open it will see how hard it’s shut, how well it’s guarded, and not even bother trying. If I don’t manage, you’ll have to. So I’ll manage,” he’d promised earnestly, grimly--wanting her to believe, stroking her cheek in reassurance. “Not how you’d do it, fair fight an’ all. How I do it. How vamps do things. Different way of thinking, love. This part, this is for me and Bit to settle, ‘cause she’s a part of it, too. Always the Key.”

“But you’re hurt,” she’d protested, “and confused, and it’s all just a mess, with the Lady, and Digger, and Rayne, and Mike all mixed into it, and now Dawn--”

“And you. All coming from different directions, but it all comes together. I can see how it moves, love--how it has to be. You can’t be there. It’s vamp business. Mage business. Not Slayer business…until afterward. Just have to trust me on that.”

As Giles returned with tea things on a tray, Buffy looked hard into the hall mirror, pulling her collar aside to confirm that the mark still showed.

It had always been her fear that Spike could be dusted somewhere and she’d never know. Just an absence, a lack. In their talk, Spike had reminded her that as long as the mark, his visible claim on her, was there, he was still in one piece, still fighting to get back to her. Only at his final death would it fade.

Considering the scar, her worried reflection, Buffy took some reassurance from it…but not much.

She wanted the confirmation of his presence, his body, his stillness and his suddenness. She wanted his voice and his eyes and how he tasted, how he was; his offhand shy gentleness, his stubbornness, and his volcanic temper; the way he looked when he came to her and when he came, the astonishment in his face every time, above her or beneath her, no matter, when they were together in that way. She didn’t like it that he had a life apart from her, independent, that she couldn’t know or take part in.

But however grudgingly, she accepted it: as she did with Willow, and Giles, and Xander, and Dawn--the other people that she loved. Love wasn’t ownership. Spike wasn’t hers exclusively. This whole business of Master Vampire of Sunnydale had made her feel that most keenly--that Spike had his own priorities, his own choices, separate from her.

And she accepted that, mostly. But she didn’t have to like it.

Rubbing her neck, Buffy turned from the mirror and resumed her sentry duty in the hall.

An hour, maybe two. Then she’d have Spike back, Dawn back, safe and close. Then there’d be time to make a plan that actually had some chance of working. Something they could all contribute to and do together.

**********

Turning his teacup (his wrists had been freed--after all, inside the house, and nobody was gonna feed him, for Goddess’ sake) and then lifting it to take a sip, Rayne shot a glance at Giles, asking casually, “Is this the part where you try to teach me the error of my ways?”

“I shouldn’t have been surprised,” Giles replied aridly. “You’ve worked for demons before: Larconis, the baby-eater.”

“No, I was employed by the vampire, Trick. Ah--oops. Does rather prove your point, doesn’t it? Creature of habit, then, it seems. But they do come up with such inventive plans, vampires--completely mismanaged and unlikely of result. Need a firm guiding hand, as it were.” Rayne displayed a hand, fingers spread, and waved it around theatrically. “It’s really too bad of you, Ripper, to deprive me of my newest pet just when I was getting him nicely trained to come to my hand for…certain things. Jealous, are we? Or merely playing dog in the manger? Is nobody to have fun in your vicinity?”

“We are not discussing this,” Giles declared, setting his cup down on the low table between them. He folded his arms. “You were better than this. You at least had conviction and were pursuing something real, however misguided. You--”

“With a passion. So I was. But you know what, Rupert? After you really get in to it, all the way, Chaos is pretty much all of a muchness. Random, and occasionally terrifying of course, but not particularly distinct. As a steady diet, even the best porridge eventually palls. I’ve found the best antidote is the particular. Taking on someone else’s purpose, something they’re all passionate about. All that delicious energy and purposefulness and want. The bright glitter and intensity. Vampires never do things halfway, do they? Throw themselves into sensation completely, utterly…. But oh, pardon, we’re not to talk of that. I forgot. Your ground, your rules. After all, I’m the hostage here, in obedience to their banal customs…. They even pay me, not realizing that their refreshing linear muddle-headedness would be quite enough reward in itself.”

“You batten on them. Like a leech.”

Rayne tilted his head, considering. After a minute, he said, “Psychic vampire? Hadn’t thought about it precisely that way, but I suppose. You always had to be the dominant one, putting names to things, thinking that would control them, limit them to the names and natures you assigned. But it doesn’t, dear heart: reality always transcends names, is finally ungovernable. Do you know that even a little, now? Have you begun to discover the limits of Order, as I have of Chaos? Is there finally a middle ground, where a rapprochement is possible?” He bent his head, looking at Giles through his lashes. “I’d so much rather batten on you.”

“No.”

“And you’d like it,” Rayne rushed on, unheeding. “You know you would. I’ve learned things, connections, enhancements of the most profound kind. Break you right out of your stolid shell into ecstasy unending.” Rayne made a wry face. “Except to eat, now and again. That sort of thing. We’re still mortal, after all; and the years have touched us. Let me show you. Just let down your wards one instant, let me through, and I’ll show--”

“No, Ethan. You may not have access. You’re not trustworthy. For the right inducement, you’d abandon Digger and his plans in an instant. I know quite well what you are--now we’re merely haggling over the price.”

Rayne giggled, then outright laughed. “I was your whore first, dear heart, so it’s not really kind to throw that in my face. But you were very seldom kind. I liked that in you, actually. Something to fling myself against, cling to…. The intensity of your angers and your passions, flailing about. So delicious, even though I didn’t then know half what I do now about how such intensity can be shared. Enjoyed…. You ground me, I free you. An equal partnership--does that have no appeal? Dear heart, the dark is coming down whatever we say or do. Why not warm one another with our opposites while we can?”

Willow had been embarrassed for some time. It was plain both men had forgotten her completely, deep in the throes of what was obviously a heartfelt courtship, at least on Rayne’s side. She’d had the vague impression there was old subtext between them. She hadn’t been prepared to have it become overt text, and present--in Ethan’s cajoling; in Giles’ stormy eyes and expression.

Willow, the conspicuously and outspokenly gay, had in principle no objection to that kind of subtext. But it made her feel all squirmy that two old guys, and one of them Giles, should be making doe-eyes at one another and openly acknowledging passion past and anything but dead or forgotten by either of them, whether to invoke it or refuse it.

It was almost as bad as having to listen while your parents had sex. Supremely ooky.

“I knew,” Rayne continued, “that if I answered the advert and came here, it would draw you. Out of the new routines you’ve been trying so hard to impose, to remake the Council into something more humane and workable, less rigid, paranoid, and insane. The irony: instead of bringing Order out of Chaos, Ripper trying to instill a bit of healthy Chaos into a fossilized and moribund Order. Oh, yes, I know about that. The news went out instantly, within the general demon community, when the Council was decimated. So I was eager to find a pretext to put myself in your way. Or what would surely become your way, if I presented an…inconvenience to your Slayer. You’re the reason I’m here, dear heart. And the only reason for me to leave is your company. I could be so useful to you! And I would! And we’d be happy--”

Willow leaped from her seat and went to join Buffy, glowering in the hall. Safely out of earshot of whatever reply Giles made.

“What’re they talking about?” Buffy asked, frowning, meaning Why is it taking so long?

Willow was reasonably good at translating sideways Buffy-speak.

She shrugged elaborately. “British guy stuff. Order and Chaos, blah, blah, blah. We don’t have to worry about Giles, though. He’s tweed all through.”

“Why don’t they just get on with it, then? And why would we worry about Giles? Are they talking about Spike?”

“Not exactly.”

“Not exactly? Are you going all commercial on me? What’s that mean--not exactly?”

Willow was too frazzled to be circumspect. “It means they’re using him for code, for things still too sore to talk about. For who and what they used to be.”

“Giles was a vampire?” Buffy blurted, horrified.

Willow’s eyes were drawn by motion. Setting down his cup, Rayne rose from the couch and bent to place a sudden, dry kiss to Giles’ forehead. Then, like a soap bubble bursting, he was gone.

**********

Spike had got Digger onto the subject of the wholesale turning and recruiting of fledges, and Digger was being coy about it and blustering, when he felt the witch in his mind, announcing frantically, Rayne’s gone!

Spike hadn’t paid much attention--any, really--to the two robed humans in the back of the chamber. So he hadn’t noticed them gesturing and muttering, except to be sure the hands held no weapons and weren’t pointing in his direction. All the same, he wasn’t surprised when Rayne materialized between them, dusting off his arms with a look of frustrated distaste.

No, Spike replied. He’s here.

A retrieval spell. Must have been. I stopped anything he could do, didn’t think about somebody else retrieving him. I’m so sorry! What should I do?

Turning, Rayne looked at him, showing a foxlike, welcoming smile, his eyes bright and feral.

Everything went golden, sweet, and slow.

With a sense of relief, like stepping off a cliff, Spike fell into the shining eyes.

**********

Dawn had won $ 11.47 at poker from her two vamp captors (neither an itchy fledge, fortunately) with only minimal cheating and was holding trip queens when another vamp leaned in and gave an obviously prearranged signal. The two vamps grabbed her, one complaining, “But I had aces! Aces!” as they hustled her back into the pipe from the alcove they’d used as a holding area.

Dawn thought Oops! but she wasn’t truly surprised. Couldn’t hold Rayne, most likely. And with the cross-hostage free, nothing to prevent Digger from collecting her into more secure custody, valuable virgo intacta and all.

She tripped, and one of the vamps smacked her, and she stabbed him good with the taskin tooth dagger before backing away. “I’m to be delivered! Delivered, you moron! Digger will likely dust you for that!”

“Then I got nothing to lose, do I?” the vamp countered, grabbing her wrist so she couldn’t stab him again. The other vamp intervened half-heartedly, preventing his chum from closing with her. Dawn twisted at the end of her tethered arm.

At close quarters, the vamps stank. Like wet moldy dirt and old blood and nameless filth. Spike never smelled like that. Because he paid attention to himself and had people to remind him if he forgot. People who cared about him. If she was here, what was happening to Spike?

As the two vamps bickered about the merits of eating her, another bunch came up from behind and swept them acrimoniously along, apparently in haste lest the Slayer get between them and the lair before they were safely inside. A couple of times, there was what seemed to Dawn a sudden change of direction, and she imagined Willow doing a location spell on her and the van careening around corners with Buffy at the wheel, trying to reach a good intercept point. Or maybe it was Spike, maybe he’d had warning and got clear in time and was coming after her, he’d never abandon her to this, it was possible--

She fell and skinned her knees and scraped her hands and thought that was it, she was gone, because some of the party around her were fledges and the bloodsmell sent them completely insane. She curled up tight while the fight proceeded over and around her, thinking about Frodo in Minas Morgul and the orcs falling out over looting his mithril chain mail, maybe she’d have a chance to run but she was just so scared and could barely see and before she could even uncurl she’d been grabbed and draped over a vamp’s smelly back, and they were all running, full-out, the way vamps rarely had to, that almost felt like floating, arrowing along through the dim tunnel.

When the smell changed to dirt, the darkness was complete, and the pace slowed to a shambling lope, Dawn knew that the run had been the final sprint to home and safety and that doors were now shut between her and any who followed. There were shafts recklessly descended by rope, kicking off the walls to land in different passages, some of them lit with candles or torches on the walls, always descending. When she began to notice shoring overhead and to the sides, she remembered how the basement passage had been supported and reinforced, remembered Mike telling her that the core of Digger’s lair was a long-abandoned mine from pioneer days. Silver, he’d thought, which was ironic, given that silver was an antagonistic element to all unnatural creatures--some more, some less. Didn’t bother vamps particularly unless it was blessed or enchanted. Maybe whatever traces remained helped to keep the more ferocious demons away, since vamps were pretty low on the demonic prestige scale according to Anya, who wasn’t prejudiced about that, not at all….

Dawn was dumped onto her feet and roughly steadied until she found her balance, then forced forward just by the pressure of the vamps behind--fewer than there’d been before, she thought, though some might have peeled off. Since none attacked her, no undisciplined fledges were left in her escort anyway. So her situation had stabilized that much, at least--she wasn’t gonna be drained and discarded, some vamp’s fortuitous dinner, before being delivered. She moved along as fast as she could, to reach Digger and Rayne, maybe, that knew her true value--nothing separable from her, like a mithril shirt--and could be expected to take good care of her on that account.

When her escort burst through an open doorway into a largeish room lit with lanterns, dazzlingly bright to her eyes, she was unsurprised to hear a voice that she remembered rumbling, “Well, Missy. So you’ve come to be my guest again.”

Digger.

Blinking, she made out the frog-faced old vamp: seated at a table. As her escort dispersed, Dawn brushed at herself crossly with her stinging palms. “If this is how you treat your guests, you don’t deserve to have any!”

“Fetch water,” Digger ordered someone curtly, and they left through a different door. Of course he’d noticed the blood, right away. Vamp. Duh. “We’ll get you fixed up in a minute, right as rain,” Digger said cordially, pushing out of his chair and coming to guide her into it, then turning it sideways to the table so the vamp returning with a basin and a cloth could get at her properly. And it was Mike--game-faced and sullen, not lifting his eyes as he took each of her hands to pat them clean of blood, dirt, and grit.

Still, Mike. Something frozen inside her relaxed. No matter what went on between him and Spike, Dawn had never had the least fear of Michael. It was hard to be afraid of somebody you’d sat through whines and tears and misery with, nodding and commiserating with the cell pressed tight to your cheek.

When he paused, clearly debating how to clean her knees with the impediment of her torn overalls, Dawn reached and patted his hair, feeling greatly daring. He jerked back, finally looking her in the face, his own all transformed and fangy, golden-eyed. “You’re so dumb,” he declared. “Never thought you’d be so dumb as to do it anyway. I made it so you wouldn’t have to. Now look what you got yourself into.” With fingers and thumbs, he took the overalls at the seam, near the rip, and tore the fabric jaggedly apart above the knee with no more effort than if it’d been a paper towel. Simple: impediment gone. Then he rocked and settled, staring at her bleeding knee. Breathing deep.

Not so simple.

Dawn found herself saying, “It’s OK. It will heal better if you do, anyway.”

As Mike started to lean, Digger belted him, then followed and kept hammering at him. Grabbing a rock off a shelf, Digger used it to hammer some more. Arms wrapped around his head, Mike took it, curling into himself protectively but making no move to defend himself. Dawn had never seen him submit to Spike so unconditionally…but she’d never seen Spike go after him that way, either--with the fury of a Master Vampire disciplining a minion.

Methodically bludgeoning Mike, Digger was pointing out that Mike fed only when Digger said, only when Digger gave him leave, not otherwise, and Digger would beat him back to a fledge if he had to, to remind him of that basic fact of vampiric life.

Dawn itched to jump in and pummel the old vamp, stab him painfully if not usefully with the taskin dagger, but knew enough of vamps to know that would only make it worse, prolong the discipline. Not impossible that Digger, distracted, might lash out at any interruption, and that would likely bring Mike actively into it, defending her, and it could get awful real fast.

Spike had dusted crew for open insubordination. And he’d broken Mike to incoherent, uncontrolled fledge-hood once, rather than dust him: done what Digger only threatened. And Spike was relatively benign, as Master Vamps went.

She wouldn’t be helping Mike, getting in Digger’s way. It was a vamp thing. Hard as it was, she had to leave them to it.

Bending, she picked up the damp cloth and began patting gingerly at her skinned right knee, trying not to hear the noise of the beating. If vamps didn’t dust, they healed. And if Digger had wanted to dust Mike, he would have done it to begin with. Mike would heal and be OK. She repeated that to herself several times, a mantra of shaky reassurance.

It was Rayne who came in and stopped it--scooping the stone from Digger’s upraised hand, tching over its bloodied condition. And Dawn realized then that it wasn’t a stone: it was the Stone, with Chaos forces roiling within it beyond anything she could sense, that Digger had grabbed as a casual hammer. As Digger straightened, gulping down his fury to present a controlled face to the mage, Rayne passed the stone back, directing, “Best if it were cleaned. Quickly. Don’t want nasty vampire all over my implements.”

Digger cast a glance at the pink water in the basin, decided against, and kicked Mike in the stomach. “Clean it,” he directed, setting the Stone on the floor. It took two tries, but Mike managed to collect the Stone and rise, wavering toward the farther door where apparently the water was.

Leaving Dawn alone with the Master Vampire and the Chaos Mage.

“Well,” said Rayne, considering her amiably, acutely. “Bloodied but unbowed, I see. Which am I entertaining? The maiden or the ancient?”

Patting at her other knee, Dawn responded clearly, “Go fuck yourself.”

“Ah. My best regards to the Lady, then, in hopes of her continued absence. She must have found this plane…uncomfortable. Limiting.” He continued studying her awhile, then said, “Amenities. Are you hungry? Need to use the…facilities? There are facilities, aren’t there?” he inquired of Digger, in a mildly menacing fashion, as though there’d be trouble if there weren’t. “Since someone has been so unkind as to obliterate all my places topside in a fit of petty spite, I find myself in need of temporary accommodations. And now for my guest, as well.”

“If this is how you treat your guests--” Dawn began, figuring he hadn’t heard her use that snark before.

“So you’ve read Wilde!” Rayne responded, unnervingly quick. “How delightful! We’ll have to get together a discussion of that fine old fop. You. And Spike. And I.”

So Spike was in it too. It had all gone to hell. Dawn was disappointed at how unsurprised she was. She hadn’t had much hope to begin with. But Spike had said it was important, and necessary, to risk her the same as he would himself. And now it had all collapsed, and he was caught in it too. Conscious of Rayne watching for her reaction, she only shut her eyes for a minute, then looked at the mage steadily. “Where’s Spike? Is he hurt?” She couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t have gone down fighting.

“Quite the contrary. He’s having a bit of a lie-down now--seems the first proper rest he’s had in ever so long, poor pet. Have to get him all rested and glossy, for us three to be about our work. You to power, and him to guide. To open the Way. The Hellmouth, as you call it here.” Glancing again at Digger, he repeated, pointedly, “Facilities? Food?”

“I’ll get something put together,” Digger responded, and ambled off through the main door, bellowing for “Star.”

Dawn granted herself another eyes-shut moment, trying to assess how bad things really were. When she looked again, Rayne spread his hands apologetically as if to say What could you expect? Vampires, after all.

Dawn was not charmed. “Where’s Spike? I want to see him. See that he’s OK.”

“That wouldn’t…be advisable. He’s not entirely himself at the moment, if you take my meaning. Mightn’t be altogether safe.”

“You want my cooperation?” Dawn challenged. “Then humor me. Keep me happy. Show me Spike.”

She wanted to see if he’d relapsed to the rocking and head-banging stage: if he was reachable at all. See what Rayne had done to him.

“You’re under a misapprehension. I don’t need your cooperation. Only your certified virginal Key blood. And that will be shed only when and as I direct.” Rayne’s eyes were as hard and flat as nickels. “So, no: much as it pains me to refuse a young lady, you will not be allowed within striking distance of my pet until he’s fed, and to repletion. He’s not terribly discriminating at the moment, and I’d hate for there to be an accident. To either of you. I’ve gone to some pains to secure you both. If it’s any solace, your captivity will be relatively short: only until midnight, tomorrow. And be certain, I’ll take excellent care of you both until then.”

Somehow, Dawn didn’t find that reassuring.

************

She was fed cold take-out from Mickey D’s, with flat soda, though a clueless vamp offered her some vodka: she knew it by the smell and judiciously accepted, though it tasted wretched and made her cough and she couldn’t see why anybody without banged, hurting knees and no aspirin would tolerate it. After awhile, though, it was warm and made her head swimmy, and she considered that an improvement.

She’d been allotted what looked like a storage chamber not far from Digger’s main quarters, with a heavy, lockable door--as much for protection, she thought, as for confinement, considering all the fledges wandering around. At least she wasn’t being quartered with the pitiful cows she knew had to be around somewhere, to supply all those ravenous fledges. That would have been just too horrible. But maybe Rayne had been leery of “mistakes” and had her allotted a private room. Or at least semi-private: there was a vamp on watch outside the door, and sometimes he told her the things he’d like to do to her. In graphic detail.

It wasn’t, she found, anything like Spike’s stories. Because she was in the coal bin now, and all that was keeping the vamp out was the certainty that Digger would dust him if he tried anything. About ten, by the backlit face of her watch, she heard Rayne’s voice outside--a final check on things, she guessed. And then she was left to the mercy of the vamp’s voice again, detailing what interesting things could be done with eyes. She was determined not to be afraid: he’d smell it, and she didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But it was hard to be brave alone in the utter dark, with the vamp outside getting anatomical and obviously from personal experience.

She used the facilities, that consisted of an improvised chamber pot, then curled up miserably in the pillowless mound of quilts and comforters with which she’d been provided. Finally she poked a hole in one of the quilts with the taskin dagger and pulled out enough stuffing to wad into ear-plugs. Didn’t shut up the vamp, but at least she could no longer hear him.

It wasn’t as though she was a real person, after all. Manufactured by monks. Not much different from the pitiful bot that had never truly known it was a bot, heartbreaking in its mangled perkiness and devotion to Spike, who couldn’t stand the sight of it during that summer: when Buffy was…gone. Maybe it had never been real, his love for her. Just a habit and one he didn’t need anymore, once he had Buffy again. He’d had Dawn poetry painted into his skin when the Lady had taken her back, but vamps did outrageous things like that and anyway the tat was gone now: Rayne had erased it somehow. Maybe erased more than that, if Spike hadn’t even bothered to check on her, that she was OK, which she decidedly wasn’t. The fries sat like lead in the bottom of her stomach and she was uncomfortable however she tossed and turned, placing and replacing the bedding and finally resting her cheek on her bent arm.

All well and good to say she had a bit of his soul, but what did that matter when she couldn’t feel it?

She must have slept because she woke in a panic because there was a big hand clamped over her mouth. Cold. Clean vampire smell, that was nearly no smell at all.

For a second she thought, hoped, it was Spike, warning her not to make a sound. Come for her finally, after all. Then he moved, more awkwardly than vamps generally did: settling beside her, stretching out on top of the covers, the other hand brushing hair away from her face in the blind dark. And without a sound and no glimmer of sight, she knew it was Mike and knew what dangerous action was on his mind.

She just hung onto him convulsively, gone all liquid in relief that somebody cared for her enough to come, though it really changed nothing and he was nearly as much a prisoner as she was.

Touching his brow, his mouth, she knew he’d dropped game face and knew he was looking down at her with that stillness that was particularly Mike.

She whispered, “Where can I hold, that won’t hurt?” Not hearing herself made her remember the ear-plugs. She hastily pulled them out and pitched them away.

“Don’t matter,” he muttered back. Barely words. Barely breath. “Won’t hurt you more than I can help. But it’s…what you are, they want you for. Change that, they won’t have no more use for you.”

“Fine,” she whispered into his neck, right under his ear, exasperated, “then they kill me. Or keep me for a cow, to get some use out of me. And then kill me.”

“Maybe could get you out first. I know this place. If I was fast--”

“But you’re not: you’re hurt. And I’m not fast--not like a vamp, or a Slayer.” She petted his smooth forehead. “You’re dreaming, Mike.”

“Could slow ‘em up a bit. Digger, he don’t know everything happens at the edges of things. Planted some charges. Collapse the main shafts. Bring the roof in on him. He’d be years digging out again. Could try, Dawn. Can’t leave you to this. If they didn’t want you, couldn’t use you, maybe there’d be a chance….”

He was dreaming, but it was a powerful dream. Not what she’d ever dreamed of, but full of kindness and caring and desperation…and she felt that doing the sex thing with him, giving up her hateful virgin status, would somehow make her real and solid--not a construct, not an un-person, not a mystical Key to anything. Just a girl, afraid in the dark, facing impossible choices and offered something like escape. Something like solace. Something very like love.

She made up her mind to do it, because surely the consequences couldn’t be any worse than what was certainly ahead and at least the Hellmouth would remain shut, and because he’d settled on his elbows over her to kiss and taste her and it felt so good, so comforting, all blind sensation, the solidity and strength of him so protective over her, even though Spike had told her not to and asked her solemnly to stay just as she was. It wouldn’t be breaking faith with Spike, she thought rebelliously. He couldn’t have known this would happen, the fear (and the French fries) whooshing around in her gut like clothes in a washer and yet the warmth gathering there too, which was so strange considering Mike wasn’t warm at all.

Tremulously, she lifted to his mouth and kissed him: probably awkward and not at all what he was used to, but that didn’t matter because what they were doing wasn’t about that. Yet she wanted to be good for him--the way Buffy was good for Spike, you could tell when he wandered downstairs in the morning, still barely awake and deeply happy, all loose and carelessly bed-headed, swooping in to tickle her or just looking long out the kitchen window into the sunlight….

Well shagged, he'd say when she commented on his good humor, smiling with his eyes and everything, not shy about it in the least.

She found Mike's bare shoulders with her fists and pushed hard until he lifted, breathing, waiting.

“They’d not only know what--they’d know who. When Digger smelled you on me--!”

“Don’t matter,” Mike responded in a muzzy, sleepy voice, bending his mouth again to silence the argument. But she jerked her head, put the point of her elbow into his cheek, shoved and twisted in the covers until no way could he not know her flailing refusal to have him sacrificed on the altar of her virginity, that she knew was as sure as sunrise if she gave in now.

He wouldn’t force her. Not even to save her. Rolling clear, he lay beside her on his back, breathing hard; and she had the strong suspicion that he wasn’t wearing any clothes at all.

“You always smell so good,” he said, all soft acceptance. “So nice. Always liked that about you.”

She pushed his arm. “Get out. Before you’re caught. Digger would dust you so fast--!”

“In a while. Sleep now, rest easy. When you wake up, I’ll be gone.” She felt him turn to look at her, felt the phantom warmth of his gaze. “Would have been worth it. Just so you know. I’ll just think of something else, that’s all. Some way, I’ll get you clear of this, even if you were dumb enough to let yourself get talked into it. You just rest and let me think on it some more.”

His chest was nicer than a pillow. Still quietly lifting and falling as he breathed her in and out. Leaning into his loose embrace, the puffy soft layers of the bedding still between them, she felt solid and definite, centered within herself. Even though they hadn’t transformed her into a dud virgin. Huh. She asked, “You do the vamp on the door?”

“Sort of had to. Nobody I had any use for.”

“Good. Had a nasty mouth on him.”

“I expect. Didn’t like it, that he scared you. Could smell it…. Took him real fast, before he even knew.”

“Yeah.”

Snuggled close and safe, Dawn slept.

WriterCon copies of PLOT

2004-08-13T12:43:42Z

The copies of PLOT I ordered to fulfill orders at WriterCon have just arrived (Friday, 3:45 p). I'll package them up and send them off tomorrow (Saturday), book rate. Those who ordered them should have them sometime next week.

Thanks for patronizing the author with your orders! I get to keep half, instead of 10%!

Chapter 18: Splints and Patches

2004-08-09T12:10:22Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 18: Splints and Patches (complete)

Buffy sat up abruptly in bed, roused not by motion but by the comfort and homeness that was Spike's body against hers gone rigid with his absence, exactly like being in bed with a day-old corpse. She turned and held him, shook him. "Spike, wake up! It's nothing, a dream. It's OK: wake up!"

Finally, he stirred and blinked at her: not altogether believing, not altogether back. His hand lifted to trail fingers down her cheek, wonderingly. "Buffy." Then his eyes shut and he was shuddering in the dream's aftermath. But it was OK now. He was awake, knew himself with her. He would come back on his own now. Buffy held him through the deep shuddering.

"What was it?" she asked eventually. "The Hellmouth again?"

"Dunno it's the Hellmouth," he responded, turning his face into her collarbone, tasting there. "Dunno. Only burning. Just…burning."

The force of her fingers sliding vicelike up and down the tendons of his neck would have been painful to anybody but him. But it was always him, and she better than anyone knew the power of true dreams--the ones that came strongly or often. Spike had them now, maybe had always had them, but she could deny that for him because she was outside and looked from a different place. "You won't. I've got you."

"So you have."

"It's OK," she insisted.

"If you say so." He didn't sound snarky or sarcastic--only vastly exhausted, too resigned to argue. He placed a kiss on the hinge of her jaw, then rolled away to sit on the bed's edge, absently fisting his eyes. "You go back to sleep, love. I'll muck about awhile."

As answer, she leaned forward, clasping him around the middle, her cheek against the flat of his shoulderblade, breathing warm against his skin the way she knew he liked. She loved the back of his neck, seeming always vulnerable to her, in need of her fingers' support and reassurance. Her right hand lifted and resumed stroking there, thumbing the last of the stiffness and working it away.

"You'd have done that," he said after awhile. "Gone to be the pax bond. On my word."

"You helped with the class. My thing. I want to help with yours. The Slayer is a weapon. But I'm yours. All the way back and all the way forward."

He turned and held her hard, arms tight and fingers digging in: a force of holding that would have hurt anybody else. She felt it as a seizure of claiming. Not the body but what was inside the body reaching out, trying to touch the like part of her that was singing I'd do anything, go anywhere, to keep this connection. You are the whole of my desire.

Because he'd begun breathing, he knew it, heard it, even though she never had the right words or never could say it right except by silence, by touches, by the white-hot ferocity of loving him from moment to moment.

He tasted at the mark, his tongue wet and cool--somewhere between wanting to bite down and wanting to heal it. Give her back to herself, whole and independent. So she bit his shoulder to say No, I don't want that, and felt him change against her. The thickened brow, the fanged mouth. The subtle shift of muscle and tendon all through him that was his demon, which she also loved and which loved her, all passionate, all urgency. When he needed to love her like that, she met him always with all her unacknowledged hungers, trying to force away all thought of befores and afters, to be wholly in the immediacy of the now, waiting with a separate suspense for the other orgasm of the bite. When it came, the fulfillment of his nature and her only chance to wholly surrender and satisfy her yearning for death, so she had no need to seek it elsewhere anymore, only with him, only this vital connection, she drifted a little while on the joyous rapture of it.

She supposed she'd slept, because she woke. Alone in the bed, warm under the blue duvet, all untidiness smoothed away, with early light through the safe windows. Full of well-being and bodily happiness…and starving. She pulled on pajamas and a robe, used the bathroom, then went quietly downstairs. Light from the den made her surmise, and she leaned past the doorway.

Spike was working at Willow's laptop, frowning through the glasses, hair all askew as though he'd been plowing his fingers through it, in his usual indoor costume of T-shirt and jeans. Completely intent and absorbed, she thought: like a student methodically, frantically studying for final exams. Behind him, the window was bright with morning but had no power to hurt. The whole house was safe for him now and he'd made it so.

He'd been moving away but all the while preparing to come back and be with her here. Not everything had failed. She should tell him so, make him know it.

"Morning, love," he said distractedly, keys clicking rapidly. "Just need to finish this last piece, then it can get sent. An' that's the mortgage, and another month's feed for the fledges. If there's any left in need of it. Michael, he trashed the computer up at the factory 'fore he left. So I'll have to impose on Red's good nature, to have the use of this one awhile longer."

"Dalton tell you?" Buffy inquired, leaning on the doorway.

He shook his head. "Sue. Called from Rona and Kennedy's place. Was patrolling with them when Michael started taking things apart. Laired up there, she did, when she caught wind of the bust-up and so stayed clear of the executions. Dalton, he's gone. Michael made him and unmade him. Likely for the best, considering. Likely should go up there later, see if any of the equipment's left. Got that class tonight. What'd Anya say: civic center now?"

"I think so. I'll double-check with her when it gets to be a civil hour."

He was being all factual, dispassionate. So maybe it didn't matter to him too much, the collapse of his regime. Buffy hung in the doorway a moment longer, watching Spike and considering, until her stomach growled audibly. She needed juice: lots and lots of juice. She pushed away and headed for the kitchen.

**********

Phone to his ear, talking and listening to Giles while pacing the downstairs hall, Spike absently rubbed his chest every now and again. The ache where the taser had hit him was just to the left of center. No mark, anymore, but a steady deep soreness. Right where a stake would go. Directly over the heart.

Appropriate.

Mike had been moderate, considering. Hadn’t wanted a full-out dominance fight, only wanted to put him down as fast and economically as possible. Had clearly figured Spike was gonna flash out at him, sooner or later, and come prepared. Thought it all out beforehand, the wanker, all cool and deliberate like his true sire, Angelus.

No fair chance to settle things, fight it out. Just put him down like a dog that’d got just a little too annoying--swift, almost casual. Like you’d swat a fly. Then trash the factory, spend the rage on that instead of face to face, hand to hand.

Holding the place that hurt, Spike was telling the Watcher, “You and Red, you cobble something together. Likely have a good couple hours’ custody of the bloke. To try to turn him from this, or find a weak place, or just keep him locked down that long.”

“But you have no power base,” Giles’ voice responded, sounding embarrassed. “Why would Digger agree to meet with you now?”

“Brag. Get off on it. Don’t care why the hell he does, so long as he does. I’m still standing. He still has to deal with me. Setting it up, that’s my lookout. Your job, and Red’s, to make good use of the time.”

“Tomorrow, you said.”

“Yeah. Red says the best time for another full-out try at opening the Hellmouth will be Friday--midnight or noon. Conjunction of planetary influences, footie scores, the price of fish, I dunno why the hell then, just what she says. So the meeting has to be set back from that, and one spare day for maneuvering room. Tomorrow, that would be good. Daytime. That will put the swap of the pax bonds belowground and it’s more controllable there. I’ll give you precise times in a little. I’ll catch Red after her--”

The phone gave a little twittering signal. Holding it away and glaring at it, Spike recalled this one had the deluxe package, caller ID and call waiting, on it. Raising it to his ear, he said, “I’ll tell you when I know. Got another call coming in here. Talk to you later.” Squinting, he located the tiny button that ended the current call and picked up the other. “What?”

“Spike,” said Sue’s voice. “We’re by the tunnel door.”

“Who’s we?”

“Me, Rona, and Ken. Huey. Couple others.”

“Put Rona on.” Spike waited until Rona’s voice said something, then cut in, asking, “You go to the dentist, like I told you?”

“What? You never told me to go to no dentist! What you going on about?”

That wasn’t Rona scared or Rona sly: that was Rona reacting normally to a bizarre question. So likely it was OK--she wasn’t under duress.

Rona was continuing, “Went up to that clinic, me and Ken, and they said--”

“All right,” Spike interrupted, pacing, hand lifting to his forehead, trying hard to think it all out, if he should let them into the empty house. Sue didn’t have an invite, far as he knew; Huey surely didn’t. But Mike did, and it hadn’t been revoked. And he wasn’t altogether sure of Mike’s intentions anymore. Might use the others as a stalking horse, be waiting on the other side….

Then he stopped thinking about it. There were just too many maybes for him to pursue them all. Made him feel everything was about to dissolve into impinging Cubist colored shapes and spaces devoid of meaning. “All right, go to the junction nearest Revello and Brown,” he directed. “Meet you there.”

A wary dash from shade to shade took him to the sewer lid at the corner and so down. He lit a cigarette and paced, hearing their approach along the reverberant tube long before they took the final bend and came into sight, three abreast. Sue, of course; and Huey a step or two behind, and Mary, that he hadn’t expected, all of them in the colors; and behind them, the second rank was comprised of tall Rona, grim-faced Kennedy, and that little twerp Toby or Tony or whatever the idiot’s name was--the one Spike had lessoned about messing up on sentry duty.

No sign or smell of Mike. So Spike guessed it was probably all right and no more than it seemed. Maybe.

The closer they got, the slower they came, the SITs embarrassed and uneasy and the vamps politely looking at his chest, or aside, so as not to present a challenge. All except Sue. Heedless of manners or subtlety, she came on into touching distance, already talking, something about fledges. She went on sudden pause when Spike said neutrally past her, to Huey, “Come about the bounty, have you?”

The lanky vamp’s long, creased face was blank enough for poker. “Nah, not worth it. Anyway, Digger’s adjusted that somewhat.”

“Yeah? What’s it now?”

“Two cents.”

“That so.”

“Yeah.”

Spike didn’t know what reaction Huey expected and found he didn’t care. Too much work, trying to puzzle out things like that. No immediate threat, so Huey no longer registered: Spike switched attention to Sue. She went off pause, running on from where she’d left off.

With the SITs chiming in now and again, the gist seemed to be that they’d gotten a handle on the fledge factory. Came on a couple of vamps holding a human, a cow--multiple bite marks; weakened but not dead--in a corner of Elmhurst cemetery. Doing nothing. Just waiting. By a fresh grave. Waiting for a fledge to rise. The cow therefore brought to feed and thus subdue the ravenous fledge…and then be turned and buried for later collection, etcetera, repeat at will, and like that.

They’d backed off and gotten into a whispered argument, Sue and the SITs, whether to dust the whole crew, minders and new-risen fledge, and rescue the cow, or to check back with Spike and let him call it. But they couldn’t get him on the phone.

“Yeah,” Rona put in, “you’re real bad about that, Spike.”

“Otherwise occupied,” Spike responded.

“Yeah,” said Rona, much muted. “We heard about that too. Afterward.”

Resuming her tale, Sue explained that by that time, the fledge had risen and the cow been consumed and interred, not just dumped, which had given them the assembly line concept of how the thing was run, all methodical and thrifty, not have to dig a new grave every time. They had the what but not the who, since Elmhurst was in District Seven, under a vamp named Winslow: not on Digger’s ground at all. And Kennedy had been determined to find out if Winslow had contrived this all on his own or at somebody else’s direction.

So they’d followed long enough to see the fledge delivered to one of the entry-points to Digger’s warren.

“So they’re for Digger,” Sue concluded. “But we still couldn’t get hold of you, and I wanted to take down the two resurrectionist vamps, torture them a little--you know, for information?--before we dusted them, but Ken said no, we should leave them alone, give no sign we’d caught on, and while we were arguing, we ran into Benny. Not Big Benny but Little Benny Blackhead from District Two by the water treatment plant, you know, who ate the twins last week? Anyway, word was out that Mike was on the move and not doing the sweep, everything open for the taking, and first we were scared that Mike had done you and we didn’t know what to do and Ken said I could lair up at their place, and then this morning Huey called so we knew about the factory, so we all got together to see what you wanted us to do, and here we are!”

In her rattled exuberance, Sue reminded Spike for a moment of Harmony. But Sue was a much cooler, shrewder article than Harm had ever been. The two SITs bore her mark and subtly deferred to her--most noticeable in acerbic Kennedy: all quiet and watchful, not saying much, which mostly wasn't her way. Sue had come up in the world, from pure random fledge at everybody's mercy. Her holding to the mission despite Mike's breakaway, and her mostly benign assertiveness, showed she had no intention of losing what she'd gained.

Huey commented to Spike, “If Winslow’s doing it, chances are good they all are.”

“Yeah,” Spike agreed. And the fledges channeled to Digger, who had the experience and the space to supervise them. In under a month, a pocket army--stupid, reckless, and undisciplined but fierce and strong in their numbers, and Digger more than able to replace losses. Like the mass attack thrown at the theater.

“And you’re telling me this why?” Spike inquired of Sue, letting the process of lighting a fresh cigarette show how bored he was with the whole topic.

Sue and both SITs looked taken aback. Then Kennedy pointed out curtly, “You said to find out. We did.”

“Full stop. Well, that’s just fine. Now you can go on about your business.”

“What business?” Kennedy shot back. “What are you gonna do about it? About Mike? About the sweeps?”

Spike stuffed hands in his pockets, turning away, singing softly, “‘For I’m to be Queen of the May, Mother, I’m to be Queen of the May!’”

Because there was damn-all he could do about it, and probably fuck that up too, and he didn’t care where the hell they went or what the hell they did, they couldn’t be on his side because he had no side to be on and he wanted very badly to kill something and present company wasn’t necessarily excluded, which would be such a disappointment to them, considering the high expectations he’d pretty much required that they have of him.

Just too fucking much.

Behind him, Sue sang out, “I’m not going back to Digger!"

Didn’t trust Mike to favor and protect her there, with his own status so iffy and uncertain: quite plain. Sue was looking out for Sue, and the other vamps almost certainly the same. Looking for advantage, protection. Not a gnat’s worth of altruism or loyalty in the lot of them. Vamp normal. Right now, Spike despised vamps. Never wanted to see another one. Good thing vamps didn’t reflect in mirrors or Casa Summers would be awash in mirror shards.

“‘For I’m to be Queen of the May, Mother, I’m to be Queen of the May!’”

But he still had the fucking meeting to set up, and he’d lost his go-between. Fist on his chest to contain the hurt, Spike halted at the ladder. Then he made himself turn back.

Didn’t matter who he picked to set it up. Any one of ‘em would do.

**********

Dragging home from school, Dawn plunked down on the porch steps and dug her cell out of her backpack. Making a wincing face, she turned the cell on. It didn’t ring. She slumped and rubbed her eyes. When she’d waited several minutes, she sighed and punched in the number. She got the automated message that the other cell was either out of range or turned off.

Praise Alexander Graham Bell, it seemed Mike had finally wound down enough to sleep.

It had been a lot like incoherent early-morning Spike-O-Grams, only worse. Mike must have called her over twenty times, generally right in the middle of classes, some of the calls less than a minute apart as some new blurt occurred to him. She’d mostly mollified the teachers by claiming an ongoing family emergency and been allowed to leave class and sit outside the door to listen to the current rant. Most of the time, they were both crying, which was good: gave credibility to her excuse. When a teacher wouldn’t let her leave, required she turn the cell off, it would ring the second she hit the hall at class change and turned it on, and there would be Mike again, emoting all over her.

That was how he was, how he did--she’d learned that, over the past months. All cool and impassive, distant in person and in a crisis. But afterward, he’d come unglued and demand to share that with her as long as it took for him to settle again. Maybe because he was an Aurelian, she thought--they were all a heaping mess of emotions. It just came out differently in each of them. Spike was most likely to erupt into violence; Mike dissolved into a puddle of self-pitying goo. Angel, she gathered, brooded.

And Mike’s hurt was real: Dawn couldn’t distance herself from it. Appealed to, trusted, wanted so desperately, she couldn’t disbelieve or deny him, even when it was a nuisance.

She’d thought at first that Mike had appointed her the custodian of his humanity--that that was the attraction, her appeal for him, other than the mark. But she’d come to suspect that the cool reserve was his humanity: if she’d met him before he was turned, that was all she would have seen, all he’d have let her know about. Maybe all he’d have known about himself. He’d been a mercenary, after all. She now thought it was being turned that had loosed all that in him, inhibitions destroyed; and for any vamp to admit such vulnerability to another was pretty much suicidal. Absolutely Not Done. After events brought them together, he’d turned to her in grief or confusion and found himself not rejected or ridiculed. Now he trusted her to extend her sympathy anytime he needed it--pretty much blind to her circumstances or how it affected her, with a pretty typical vamp blindness. But he made up for it with kindness and steadfastness the rest of the time, so she didn’t grudge him his blowouts, any more than Buffy grudged Spike the occasional mayhem committed on furniture when things got to be too much and he exploded. Vamps were not real big on repression, and in opening up to a human, no face was lost. It was safe.

In a lot of ways, it was true: Mike was six. Not a fledge anymore, a Master, even, but coming into what probably would continue to be a stormy adolescence, in vampire terms.

Being a teenager herself, Dawn could generally imagine his side of things, even given the warp of vampire nature. She felt for him. She couldn’t have shut him out even if she’d wanted to. When the calls came, she answered. And listened. And cried.

He was relieved, and miserable, about finally resolving the unbearable tension between him and Spike. Usually so politely spoken, he was profanely furious at Spike for even considering using her that way, putting her into obvious jeopardy, and furious at her for being fool enough to go along with it. He knew she, Spike, and Buffy were very angry with him for putting Spike down and thus ending the alliance but as he’d told her repeatedly (and tearfully), there was no other way to play it. Couldn’t go along with risking her, couldn’t stand still for a thing like that. So he’d done what was necessary. But he hated being back under Digger’s thumb. Being, at base, a gentleman, Mike didn't offer details, which only prompted Dawn to imagine the worst of Spike's non-PC tales of the bad old days and the unsavory range of vamp domination games.

The bottom line was that Mike had consigned himself to a circle of vamp hell to prevent her having to go there. Dawn found it extremely hard to be angry with him under those circumstances.

He had to be rescued. And Dawn had not the least idea how that could be accomplished. Have to have Spike help her figure that out.

Putting the phone away and heaving a great sigh, Dawn went inside and heard voices in the front room. Giles and Willow were talking, serious and animated, Giles on the couch and Willow cross-legged on the floor, open books and sheaves of notes strewn around them. Spike was sitting in but mostly silent in the big chair in the back corner, with the slightly glazed stare that meant he’d been doing pills to stay awake through the day, mechanically rubbing the place on his chest where Mike’s taser had hit him.

As Dawn crossed the room, she realized they were discussing preparations for a meeting with Digger. Which was obviously still on. Which meant she was gonna have to go after all.

Feeling everything in her sink and go cold, Dawn turned on her heel, fled up to her room, and slammed her door behind her. As usual, she didn’t think anybody noticed.

**********

The notice Anya had put up for the class’s new venue had named the inconvenient hour of six-thirty--right in the middle of what generally was the supper hour at Casa Summers, though conveniently right after closing, if you were Anya. Which very few people were, Buffy thought sourly, changing into exercise gear in her bedroom. She’d picked up an electric green unitard and thought she looked pretty pert and bouncy in it because it showed absolutely every smooth curve and Spike was gonna trip over his tongue when he saw it. And she’d done her hair up in a sort of pony-tail fountain secured by so many pink and orange scrunchies it couldn’t possibly fall out, she’d probably have to cut the scrunchies off afterward, which would result in a sexy cascade so that was all right too.

She might have been fired but she wasn’t gonna be shabby, picking up with the class where she’d left off, sort of, because an open vampire attack, a couple of deaths, Spike in vampface, and some grievous bodily harm had intervened and that might produce awkwardness. Maybe nobody would be there, paying for what they’d once had for free. Maybe there’d be scads, all curious and wanting the answers Spike had vaguely promised them.

Either way, it was obviously Spike’s job to sort and therefore nothing Buffy had to worry about.

At the head of the stairs, Buffy called at Dawn’s shut door, “Supper’s gonna be a little late, so don’t stuff yourself on junk.” Though she got no reply she figured Dawn was in there--the radio or CD player was warbling rhythmic female angst--so she added, “You can get your homework done in the meantime.”

On that virtuous thought, Buffy bounced down the stairs and stopped by the hall table to collect her bag, car keys, and wallet.

Willow and Giles appeared to have finished their conference because they were gathering up the piles of notes and stacking the books.

“Are we all set for tomorrow, then?” Buffy asked.

Seeing her outfit, Giles raised a Spocklike eyebrow, saying, “I believe we’re as prepared as we can be,” and Willow went all frowny and worried-looking as though she thought that wasn’t nearly prepared enough.

“Stay if you want,” Buffy told Giles. “Supper’s after the class, and I’m thinking we’ll bring back pizza.”

“No anchovies,” Willow said at once.

“Will, when was the last time I got anchovies?”

“When Spike answered the door in game-face, practically gave the delivery boy a coronary, and we got the wrong order.”

Buffy shrugged. She’d forgotten about that. “OK, no anchovies. Giles?”

“I think I’ll forego the pleasure,” Giles replied absently, sliding a stack of books under an arm. “I have some calls to make and a bit more research to do. Willow--”

As Giles proceeded to make reassuring noises at Willow, Buffy switched her attention to the chair by the weapons chest. Spike was sprawled out nearly full length, as though propped on an invisible diagonal plank: legs straight and ankles crossed, arms folded protectively over his chest, and head thrown back--not noticing her or anything. Plainly out of gas, stalled, and inert. Dropping onto one knee by the chair, Buffy poked and joggled him until he opened a dim eye.

“Saddle up, Tonto.” She jabbed knuckles into his shoulder lightly as she rose. “Class.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

Leading the way to the front door, Buffy prodded, “Like the outfit?”

“Look fine, pet,” Spike responded obediently, patting his pockets.

Disappointed, Buffy commented, “A new start. So I thought--”

Willow interrupted brightly, “Mistrust any enterprise that requires new clothes,” looking mysteriously pleased with herself until Buffy shot her a blank look. “Henry David Thoreau,” Willow explained.

As Buffy grumped, “That’s a downer, Will,” Spike muttered something that sounded like, “Distrust.” Looking around at him, Buffy asked, “What?”

“Nothing. Got no fags. Have to stop, get some.”

After a quick glance at Spike, Giles got a pursed, quizzical expression, inquiring, “Prepared for another siege in the Venusburg?”

Flicking a return glance, Spike twitched a scowl. “Shut up. Dunno what the hell you’re talking about. Let’s get going here.” Passing Buffy, he snatched open the front door and banged out onto the porch.

After trading perplexed looks with Willow and Giles, Buffy strode after him, collecting a white fiber-fill vest from a hall peg. Fastening the vest snaps and stepping off the porch, she turned right, toward the graveled parking area, before realizing Spike was headed straight, toward the twilight street and his bike. Not an absolute parting of the ways, but a definite divergence. “Spike? SUV.” She pointed.

Spike broke pace as though he’d stumbled over something, wheeling half around. He hesitated, then shook his head and kept going, saying something unintelligible about fags and fucking opera.

He clearly figured to take his bike and expected her to climb on behind, to zip off with all kinds of style. She’d planned to take the SUV because the stack of tumbling pads was in it.

There was a moment’s stalemate until she offered to stop at a convenience store. Spike capitulated, dumping himself sulkily into the passenger side as Buffy started up.

“Xander helped disassemble stuff,” she explained, backing into the street, then looking both ways. “The big stuff that could be salvaged is in his truck. I played lookout and bodyguard, and I took the pads…. The place is really trashed, Spike. Most of the windows have broken panes, and there’s lots of water in the back. A cracked pipe, Xander thought. The office has been pulled apart--like somebody played ‘She loves me, she loves me not’ with the wall panels.” She glanced to see how bad he minded. He was staring straight ahead, drumming fingers on his knee. “On the up side,” she offered, “it’s all bright and airy now.”

“Yeah,” Spike responded unhelpfully--obviously stewing about something completely else.

Buffy was used to his moods and his irritability, his fidgets and sudden explosions. They didn’t bother her particularly. But she didn’t like the sense that he was a thousand miles away inside his own head, thinking things he’d given her no clue about. Distant. Shutting her out.

She asked, “He still playing with the Stone? Rayne?”

His head jerked, startled, and he noticed her. “Something like. But no. No fun playing with himself when most vamps are still asleep, hardly notice. Just demons, and hardly worth it, just for that. Expect it will start up presently. No. Not that. Only the usual.”

“And what’s the usual?”

Spike was silent a minute. “Expect he didn’t fight much, letting me loose, ‘cause he wasn’t ready yet anyhow. Time wasn’t right, and he hadn’t practiced…controlling things. Time’s coming up now. So he’s…leaning on me a bit more. In my head. Sort of. There,” he said, pointing at the garishly lit convenience store. “Pull over.”

By the time he’d gone inside and returned, opening a pack of cigarettes and lighting up, his mood had changed: he was looking around, assessing the dusk more alertly and with less strained gloom.

As he settled back beside her and yanked the door shut, Buffy asked, “Why’s this meeting with Digger so important?” as she reversed and pulled out of the parking lot.

“Always got to keep good track of the opposition.”

“Specifically, Spike,” Buffy pursued patiently. “Worth risking Dawn for.”

“No risk. Or not much. Michael, he’s there now: he’ll look after her, what time she’s there.”

Buffy ran a yellow light, then jammed on the brakes. Fortunately, not much traffic was moving, and the truck behind her was some distance back and had good brakes. Also a horn, that she ignored. “You set that up!” she accused. “Last night!”

“Never 100% certain how people are gonna jump, pet,” Spike responded, which sounded like a denial but really wasn’t, she thought. “But I expect he’ll be more use to me in Digger’s hole, for a bit, than up to the factory. His call. But Michael, he’s a pretty predictable lad. Doesn’t surprise me too often. So I figured, yeah, that’s a likely way it could go. Cost the computer set-up an’ a few of the crew, but may be worth it. Have to see.” His hand, holding the cigarette, briefly fisted against his chest, then moved back to the open window.

The truck pulled past with shouting. Buffy eased the SUV over to an open stretch of curb. Shoving the shift into PARK, Buffy stated belligerently, “Spike, I’m not stupid.”

He quirked a smile. “You’re like me, sweet: brain’s not your best part, and you think with your fists.”

Buffy shook her head hard. “Not that. You think you can get away with things because I don’t know enough to ask, or what to ask. Because I don’t know what the fricking Venusburg is, or whatever it was that Giles was being ultra-subtle about. But I see you, all closed up in dreams of burning, and I know it isn’t right. I’m part of this, and it’s Dawn, and it’s you, and I want to know what’s coming, that you see and I don’t.”

“Gonna be late for the class, pet,” he evaded calmly.

Fuming, Buffy shoved the vehicle into D and pulled out, belatedly checking the mirror. She didn’t like it that he looked so drawn and exhausted and she couldn’t tell if it was the toll of past trials or in expectation of what was coming. She didn’t like his being there but unreachable, opaque, closed to her. She didn’t like it that he’d collected only a single pack of cigarettes, not a carton.

After the class, they were gonna have a major talk.

She was not gonna let herself get shut out!

**********

By planning ahead, Buffy bounced out and beat Spike to the hatch. She put her back against it, smiling wide with extra perkiness. “No, you go ahead, I’ve got this.”

“Pet, I can--”

“No, you just go ahead. Take attendance or something. I’ll be right there. Really!” She kept her rear pressed against the hatch lock until Spike turned uncertainly and wandered off toward the floodlit façade of the Sunnydale Community Center.

No way was she gonna go in there first, face all those…faces. Assuming there were faces…. Anyway, it was clearly Spike’s job to brave the unknown and get everything all squared away before she got there. What he was doing now, right? Advance guard against the universe. She got to lag behind, do the baggage, for a change. Showed her confidence in him, didn't it?

The pads didn’t weigh much, but they were stiff and bulky, nearly as large as mattresses: she couldn’t fit more than one, folded, under her arm, and it kept trying to unfold, like an ineptly made one-slice sandwich. However, the pads had neat little straps on the sides, she discovered, and she could grab the straps of four together with the pads sort of concertina’d under her elbows, and carry eight, both hands, that way.

Having locked up the SUV with the remote thingy, she got the eight pads to the wide front step, laid them aside to open the door, then pitched them inside in bunches. Somehow, inside, they seemed fatter: she could manage four straps in her right hand but only three in her left. Shrugging, she punted the lone pad skidding ahead of her down a long, lighted hall with doors at intervals on both sides. By each door, a glassed frame contained a curly computer-lettered ad for the evening's scheduled activities. Advanced Macramé was in progress, 6:00-7:00. Beginning Beadwork was empty, didn't start until 7. Nearly at the end of the hall, the ad frame of the door to the left read "Safety Through Fitness, 6:30-7:30." She pushed the door in just enough to confirm yup, this had to be it, Spike’s voice and quite a lot of intent young faces, everybody seated on the shiny wooden floor. She leaned the pads haphazardly against the wall and started repeating the process of put-and-take to get them inside.

As she pushed and wrestled the first few in, Andy hustled up to take over the job, which freed her to stand inside and look things over.

Even allowing for no bleachers, the room was much smaller than the gym--about 20 x 40, as a guess. The long back wall to her left was mirrored, maybe for dance or aerobic classes, and she was a bit startled to realize the dark wall to her right was all windows--so people passing outside could see all the fun things happening inside, obviously. The walls were rough-pitted cinderblock. A wide strip was painted red above the windows and mirrors, all the way around; a narrower strip of cobalt blue ran below. Except for the boundary strips, the scant remainder was white. The room was as brilliantly lit as the inside of a running microwave.

Spike was sitting crosslegged with his back to the windows; the class of about twenty-some were spread around in small clusters, facing him. Buffy found the faces vaguely familiar. Not really listening, she gathered Spike was trying to give a reason there wasn’t gonna be any more of the smell, saying the first field trial was over and the results were being evaluated and similar nonsense he didn’t seem very interested in or confident about himself. Meanwhile a notebook, likely a sign-in sheet, was circulating from one group to another with nudges and reaches.

“--so don’t nobody depend on it,” Spike was advising, shoving a hand through his hair so it stood up in crooked tufts. “You take all care, bein’ out after dark. ‘Cause there’s nasties out there, some of you know that now, an’ they’re not gonna be put off by how you smell. You--”

Somebody raised an arm high. When Spike rambled on without noticing, the girl stood up, demanding, “What was that, at the theater? You said you’d explain!”

Spike shifted uncomfortably, reaching for a pocket and making himself stop. “So I did, Laura. You all look there--in the mirror.” As they turned and looked, then turned back, having seen nothing but themselves, Spike waved them around again. “Keep looking. Don’t quit till you’ve seen what you’re missing.”

It took a full minute before the first one noticed, nudged someone sitting close, and then a tidal stir in the whole room. And when they swiveled back around, variously frowning and puzzled, to report their uncanny realization, there was Spike in game-face.

“Yeah,” he said, lighting a cigarette, golden eyes frowned half-shut against the smoke. “I’m one of ‘em. That some of you didn’t quite see plain, there in the theater with the film still running and all. That ate George and hurt more than a few of you, some still in hospital but most not, I’m glad to see. So there it is, what nobody wants to see or admit, what’s invisible-like in the mirrors of your daylight world. But we’re there, and sometimes we come in amongst you, mostly in the dark. Look again: there’s more than me you ain’t seeing. Two of you see each other, you move aside. You don’t see your neighbor, you find somebody you do see, and confirm it, then you both move aside. Sheep and goats here.”

As Spike smoked, waited, and looked on, the class nervously sorted itself in a series of doubtful discoveries, herding in pairs to Spike’s right as he’d gestured them to do. Four at the back remained--plainly there, but empty space in the mirrors, as Spike was. Sue, Buffy recognized. The other female vamp had been to one of the classes--Bea, Buffy thought her name was. Digger’s. Then there was a crease-faced, rail thin male vamp Buffy recalled having seen at the factory. He and Sue were wearing the colors. The last male vamp, in jeans and a blue T-shirt, was sitting on his heels with his head bent, fiddling with something. When he lifted his face, all bland and self-contained, it was Mike and what he was playing with was a stake, rolling it between his palms. Probably still had his taser, too.

Buffy jerked forward but halted just as fast when Spike commented, “S’all right, pet. He’s our designated spy for tonight, just wants to look on to what we do here, then report back. He’s paid up, he’s entitled to be here. Might be up for a bit of a demonstration later. We’ll see if he wants the fun and games or has something else in mind….” Regarding the class, Spike went on, “So you see, what you see isn’t necessarily what you see. Or isn’t all there is to see. Sue, you can settle, we’re all friends here now.”

With a grimace of relief, Sue let her features flow into the vampire mask, producing a strangled, girly shriek from the huddle on the right. The grim-looking skinny vamp, Bea, and Mike stayed in human face.

The point was made: the monsters could look just like anybody, and did, most of the time.

Buffy noticed a number of people doubtfully checking her out in the mirror. The attention made her feel itchy.

“Last I knew or counted,” Spike continued, “there were twenty-six kinds of demon living in Sunnydale and I dunno how many other kinds passing through. Lump in the ghouls, shape-changers, marrow-suckers, and other miscellaneous in there too. Most make at least small mischief.” He gave them the unnerving experience of a full, fanged vampire grin. That slowly faded and he just stared at them until they started to twitch and shift uneasily. “Most do more. And then there’s vamps: like me and that lot there. For which the humans roundabout are the blue-plate special and the dish du jour. ‘Cousins,’ we call each other. You, we call ‘food.’ You’re in a war zone, children, and you never even knew it, though maybe some suspected something was off. And what you saw in the theater, that was just one of the skirmishes--not even about you. Vamps, we’re bad news no matter how you meet us. Coming or going. And going, that’s where your teacher, Miss Elizabeth, comes in.” He swung around to look at her, his face relaxing into human as he turned, and everybody looking at her, and Buffy understood he really, really wanted to hand it off to her now. Wanted to quit being the chief exhibit of the freaky, scary monster and fade into the unremarkable background.

“You’re doing just fine,” Buffy assured him.

“Pet, I could get things set up--”

“No, you do this kind of thing so much better than I do,” Buffy responded desperately.

“But you had that notion…about an escort service an’ all? Time to tell ‘em why you began this.”

“Spike, it’s not time,” Buffy protested. “Exercises--” She did a half-hearted jumping jack that sagged and stopped.

“Love, it’s what they’re here for, to know the why of it. An’ that’s you. I’ll just--” He waved the cigarette, using that as an excuse to unfold and back a couple of steps toward the door, almost tripping over the stack of pads. Then he turned and bolted, leaving Buffy in the mirrored work-out room with about twenty frightened children and four vampires.

Deserter. Coward. He knew how much she hated standing up in public, in front of strangers! She was so gonna get him for this!

Buffy shifted and took a stance in her beetle-green unitard. Lead foot for direction and rear foot tensed and solid for balance and pushing off or pivot, hips slightly turned to keep the knees nice and springy and support a shoulder-thrust, everything ready and poised. Facing the class but keeping the vamps in view as well, knowing that they couldn’t reach her in a single leap and that she could therefore take down at least two immediately and buy time to improvise a weapon to deal with the others, assuming all four came at her at once. Unless Mike used the taser…. Mike met her eyes with his usual placid expression, showing nothing of his intentions. Buffy glared, hoping that would be enough to hold him in place.

Head high, she said, “I’m Buffy,” and swallowed hard around the boulder in her throat. “The Vampire Slayer.”

**********

Looking in through the long window at Buffy lecturing a new set of potentials--potential whats still to be determined--Spike paced and smoked and tried his hardest not to be nuts.

He couldn’t afford it. Wasn’t time yet.

He understood now. When the foreground blurred and shimmered and all the meaning dropped out and everything disconnected, the relationship of the overlooked background skeins shone with occult, sidewise significance. That was when sometimes, you could see: discern the patterns that underlaid the obvious or the now piece of them anyway and the stretch back to where they’d come from and where maybe they’d tangle and cross further on, in what had not yet come to be.

His best explanation to himself was that he’d finally come into his full inheritance from Dru, bless her, that he’d missed when with her, having to be all sane and present and reasonable to take care of her all those years. Only being forcibly and unwillingly cast loose of sanity had made him begin to see--the dreams, first, and now the not-quite-connections and patterns hidden behind and within the everyday.

Hadn’t wanted it and didn’t like it, but he’d use it if he could. But it wasn’t time yet to put himself at the mercy of the pattern, throw himself helplessly into the weft of what was coming, that he could feel and see but not articulate, any more than Dru ever could: babbling prescient nonsense, naming all the stars the same. Any more than he could have described the potential coming-together click and impact of seeing and executing a complex collision on a pool table, sink the six ball in the corner pocket and move the rest into a useful configuration for the next shot. It just was, and you saw it, and you did it, and it became. Natural-like.

Nuts, but natural-like, all the same.

He was still hanging on. He saw the normal, sane things and could put names to them, mostly. Grass, not the normal kind in the lush childhood parks of home he hadn’t realized he even remembered but minute thickets of the mutant stuff they planted here because it was drought-resistant and needed less mowing. Bermuda, was it? Zoysia?

Trees roundabout, a few November, needle-dropping sparse California pines and stinky ginkgoes along the street and those damn mutant Bradford pears that fruited little hard pellets but no matter since the birds still liked them, not to mention the vertical pineapples that were palms, no branches or shade to speak of but native here and not difficult to climb.

No elms anymore, though. Pity about that.

And cement and cinderblock and vast swaths of glass, unthinkable in his youth, the cramped, enclosed panes of the Crystal Palace (that his mum had taken him to, a babe in arms, after it was moved to Sydenham and formally reopened there by Queen Victoria herself) notwithstanding, and plasterboard--drywall, they called it--and he was not being nuts, he was just naming things, insects swarming the street lights and peeping nighthawks swooping the crossways, hunting them, and they all had names and discrete identities and he knew that, really knew that if he concentrated and stayed the hell out of the dreams that tried to flow into everything like a slow wash of syrup, all golden and sticky, and he didn’t like that at all because that was the beginning of the burning, that happened when he was all caught up in the pattern, locked into it and all burning and it was terrible and frightened him worse than almost anything.

But that wasn’t bonkers, it was just sensible to avoid that as long as he could. Until it would mean something and maybe what it should, that he could feel tingling off in the not-yet.

Reminded, he got the pill vial out of his pocket and dry swallowed two. Should have thought of it before, but he’d been out of cigarettes and then the Slayer wanting to go a different way than he’d seen and that’d distracted him. Do it now, anyway, and presently he’d have the good of it, the stoned clarity that was nothing at all like sleep.

A nice-smelling girl with tight, bright purple skin swooped past on a bicycle, up to the bike rack on the fan-shaped cement apron by the front door. Dismounting, the girl hastily pushed the front wheel of her bike between the vertical rails, then mistrustfully threaded a cable through and locked it. And of course her skin wasn’t purple, that was her costume, that showed her tits completely and most of the rest of what she had. Her skin was just skin-colored, except for the sodium lights that tinted everything with yellow.

“Is it over?” she called to him worriedly. “Did I miss it? My stupid brother was late and mom wouldn’t dish up supper and then I couldn’t find my shoe--”

Candy, her name was. He knew that. A few yards away, she reeked of the smell, that’d been just wishful thinking on his part. A community that wasn’t wholly vamp or wholly human but something between, mediated by imposed, magically enhanced significance. Lilies--a smell of formality and funerals. Enough, almost, to mute the smell of live blood, that was their true connection. No use, anymore, pretending otherwise.

But he was fine. Had Slayer blood still whirling in him. He’d be fine for awhile longer. Didn’t really want to eat her much. Could still choose and be social to her.

He waved at the long brilliant window. “Still goin’ on, you ain’t missed it all.”

“Is there something bad out here?” Candy demanded anxiously. “That you’re here, not there, and all nearly-wingy--?” She flung her arms wide, demonstrating something or other, the girl was definitely odd and it wouldn’t be civil to take too much notice of such.

“Only me. You get on inside.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

Spike demonstrated the coal of the cigarette, and she seemed to understand that, whirling and racing inside to sprint to the light. After a minute, he saw her enter the workout room, all apologies and gestures and bouncing on her toes like Bit did sometimes.

But Bit would be all right, he was reasonably sure of that, with Mike in place now even smelling like he did and both of them, Digger and Mike, making sure Spike knew it, too: little enclosed space like that, no way not to know it, but Mike was a vamp, tough and thick-skinned when it came to such things, he’d be all right and would keep it from Bit, him instead of her, and Mike would be content with that once he understood, Spike was certain. Or nearly certain. Anyway it’d been Mike’s call and he’d just have to endure it now, wouldn’t he? He’d be all right. Eventually. Probably. Unless Spike had to put him down first, a really bad prospect but one way it could go, once the syrup settled in, locking them all in sickly-sweet amber. Of course, Mike might do him, instead, after Bit showed up: that was another likely scenario, not much to choose between them. Still too far off to make that call.

Spike pressed a fist to his chest, where the hurt was.

Inside, behind the window, like one of the new barless zoos, the children were actually doing exercises now. Warming up. Might get a few throws in before the time ran out that they were scheduled for and had paid for. Tidy sum, actually. Almost enough for a new computer away afterward, that he couldn’t see yet, past the burning. No point making any long-term commitments until that was past. Had the current batch of translation (another stupid spell) done and sent in good order, and that would see Casa Summers through the next month right there. Everything had been parked safe in the virtual place that was his own corner of the Watchers' invisible and intangible online library, so nothing vital had been lost with the factory computer. Except nearly all his bookmarks, and he could reconstruct them, given time.

Mike was by the window now, looking out at him with his usual no-expression that Spike currently interpreted as baleful, a straight-on stare. Not an “I’m so pissed I can’t wait to dust you” stare, which would have been a problem; more a sulky resentful “Look what you made me do, you rotten bastard!” stare, and he could deal with that.

But not with the smell, that had his demon all alert and wanting more of it, wanting to roll around in it like a dog in carrion. Bait, likely. An undertow of temptation. Spike didn’t have a lot of practice resisting temptation and wasn’t sure the soul was a strong enough mooring to keep him from it if he didn’t put distance and a few walls between.

Vamps were immune to physical addiction. If you didn’t dust, all damage regenerated. The same dose was always the same, always enough, which was lucky, considering nearly all vamps had a taste for one thing or another and figured too much of a good thing was just fine. Was that way himself and had never had reason to think otherwise. But something in your head, that was different and hard to ignore. And in the back of his head, always, there was the niggling itch of his connection to Rayne and all that went with that and how wretchedly good it had felt and still felt and would feel again, the minute he turned loose and let it take him. Not a voice or even a pressure, just the awareness that he didn’t have to feel so awful, be so exhausted just holding himself in place, be anything beyond the demon and what it wanted. Didn’t have to keep trying so hard to be sane and responsible, bring all the names to mind, be the unfitting one in a human world that made less and less sense to him the longer he tried to live in it except for Buffy, of course. And Bit. And sometimes Red or the Watcher, they had their moments of stark clarity to him, bronze and goddam fucking Venusburg, throwing into myth things he felt but didn’t think about.

Dru, she’d adored opera, loved the glitter and extravagant emotion of the singing and the music, brass railings and plush seats and private boxes whose beautifully gowned and fancy-dressed occupants you could eat, all unnoticed, during the performance and prop just so, to have the best view of all the portrayed passion howling its collective wigged head off from the stage, so of course he had to take her, four continents. Naturally, she specially liked Wagner, they’d done the whole overwrought Ring cycle in Bayreuth in the twenties, the whole Willkommen bei den Bayreuther Festspielen: just moved from box to box and champagne and chocolates in the intervals, living in it and on it like honey, one of those full-immersion type things that seemed as though they could go on forever while they lasted. Damn near fucking was forever, more than a week of it, Woodstock for the lumpenproletariat and postwar half-starved hausfraus with their mended white silk gloves and the fine Damen with their long white arms, the taste of their blood had really been entirely something else.

Buffy had never shown any interest in such. Shuddering, pitching the last of the cigarette, Spike hoped she never did. Altogether too much like being crazy and he had quite enough of that already, thanks ever so.

Angelus, he’d liked opera, too. Might still do, for all Spike knew.

Knew nothing and cared less.

Deciding, he returned to the van, leaning against a nearby bad-smelling tree (ginkgo, most like) because the van alarm would yelp violation if he rested against the side of the van and he really didn’t need that now. She’d get him for it, Buffy would, for abandoning the class, making her tote all the pads back when it was over. But he wasn’t going back in there, with the sexual undertow of the smell and all the hopeful faces expecting him to do something and the glowering face insisting he already had.

They didn’t understand. Best that way, likely. Best, anyway, that he could contrive.

Feeling the pills kick in, all the lights gone glittering and stark, Spike lit another cigarette of his dwindling supply and settled himself to wait.

Chapter 17: Balance

2004-07-01T21:11:35Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 17: Balance (complete)

Up in the middle of the night because it was his time to be awake and his time sense was all turned around, because the bed was really too small for two without the distraction of sexual stacking, because he was restless and couldn't settle, because he'd wakened from a dream of burning, because he was vibrating inside from the permitted quick, charged sips of Slayer blood that were all he allowed himself, and likely for a hundred niggling unexamined reasons, descending the stairs with the vague intention of ducking outside for a smoke, Spike set his bare foot on a magazine. The slick pages slid. A flailing cartwheel punctuated by bumps and bangs landed him in a blinking, startled heap at the bottom.

Gathering himself, he charged back up the stairs, snatching the magazine and rolling it into a tight cylinder as he barged into Dawn's room. "So what's this, then?" he barked, shaking the cylinder as evidence. "You got some little navvy I don't know about, s'posed to trail behind and pick up after you? What if it'd been Red on the stairs? Or you? What the hell's the matter with you?"

Pushing up in bed, knuckling her eyes, Dawn responded indignantly, "What the hell's the matter with you, Spike? What are you doing in here?"

"Can't be bothered," Spike rolled on, "leave your trash any old where--" He could see it so plainly: Dawn or Willow slumped unmoving at the foot of the stairs, gone in an instant: one careless move and gone beyond recovery. They were so fragile, the humans. So easily broken. Couldn't trust them to protect themselves from the ordinary dangers so how could he expect them to survive actual threats?

They were both yelling, Spike ranting on about carelessness and Dawn demanding why he was blaming her, it could be anybody's magazine, and Spike flinging it at her because sure, Buffy was real likely to be toting around an issue of Seventeen featuring the vacuous faces of some boy band, when Willow came in a blue robe and fuzzy slippers, hesitantly asking, "Is something wrong?"

"Insane-o Spike's been sleepwalking--" Dawn accused, pitching the magazine back at him.

Spike slapped it aside. "Have not!"

"--and fell downstairs and somehow it's all my fault--"

"Is your fault! Have to watch you every fucking minute--!"

"Get out! Get out! Get out!"

That was when Buffy weighed in. Or rather the Slayer, armored in a silky green robe he'd had off her not two hours ago, not letting on she knew she smelled all warm and delicious, not caring to know what had happened, just demanding that they all shut up and settle down and Willow meanwhile protesting that she hadn't done anything, had just heard the bang and then the yelling, and Spike wasn't gonna hang around for the Slayer to pass judgment, wasn't gonna try to explain himself to her because that never worked, total lost cause there.

He spun off, pushed past the Slayer and slammed down the stairs, barefoot and bare-chested, grabbing his duster off a hall peg in passing. Out to his new motorbike and straddling it, getting the engine roaring full-throated before pushing the bike off the kickstand and screeching away. The chill wind felt good in his face as the street lights flashed by overhead, switching between bright and dark and then a steady blur.

Noplace left to be that was his, that he had the ordering of. Just out in the nowhere, moving fast and alone in the dark. All wound up inside with fury and dread and the sense that he was crooked, off, unbalanced in some way despite the bike humming along straight and sweet and true, slanting into a curve and straightening again, arrowing ahead as he sent it.

Tired of being slow and careful, examining every detail. Sick to death of it, actually. The headlong motion was good but not enough. Hadn't dared show his face at Willy's for a month. All cautious and prudent. Hell with that. Duck in, get a bottle, then out again before any trouble could gather. What was the harm in that?

If he kept moving fast, nobody could catch or confront him. Maybe outrace even the sunrise.

**********

There were advantages to being unemployed, Buffy mused, and one of them was sleeping late. She stretched luxuriously, finding herself just slightly lame and sore in good places. Having lazily dressed and brushed her hair, she mooched downstairs to have breakfast. Or would it be brunch?

Finding Dawn glooming over a bowl of soggy cereal, Buffy did a take and counted back: yup--Monday. “Why aren’t you in school?”

“Didn’t feel like it. You’ll write me a note, right?”

“Are you sick?” Despite Dawn’s ducking, Buffy pressed the back of her hand to Dawn’s forehead. Their mom always did that but hadn’t revealed the mom-secrets behind it. Buffy wasn’t sure if it was good or bad that Dawn’s forehead was cool. Was her nose supposed to be red, or did that just mean she’d been crying?

“Sick of some things,” Dawn grumped, plashing her spoon on the top of the wilted flakes and milk. “Like Spike being all sensible and normal, then blowing up over nothing.”

“At least without furniture breakage this time,” Buffy commented lightly, opening the fridge and checking for eatables. She found some vanilla yogurt and uncapped it, banging the fridge door shut with her hip even though she intended to get some juice, too. She felt guilty at the idea of leaving the fridge open in the meantime. In the kitchen, momrules still prevailed, like a spell.

As Buffy spooned up yogurt and reached down a glass from a cupboard, Dawn continued moodily, “He didn’t come home last night. Why is he back, when he’s not back? When he doesn’t stay?”

“I guess he has a lot going on right now,” Buffy replied vaguely, untroubled. “It’s sort of like he’s out of work, too: doesn’t quite know what to do with himself.”

“Yeah: going on in his head!” Dawn sneered and irritably brushed hair back from her face. “It’s like…he’s been pulling away, and pulling away, and now he can’t stop. Can’t be close without getting all fidgety and weird. I thought we were good. Yesterday we had toe-bonding and everything, and then the mall, and racing Mike home and beating us even though he had to run red lights and cut over onto the sidewalk to do it. Then one lousy fucking magazine slides off the pile I was taking up to my room, and I was gonna go back for it but there was this song came on the radio and--”

“Watch the French,” Buffy cut in coldly.

“Why? How come Spike can get away with twenty synonyms for ‘fuck’ and crude body parts and insane-o British swear-words, and I say ‘drat’ and you’re all over me?”

“Because he’s a century-plus older than me, and it’s how he thinks, and I don’t expect ever to change how he thinks. It’s taken him….” She counted on her fingers. “…six years to quit smoking in the house. Whereas you are a growing girl and there’s time to stop the bad habits before they get locked in and automatic. Girls swearing isn’t attractive, Dawn.”

“Oh, great, attractive. Like I’m ever gonna have a love-life, dates, have to keep myself untouched and pure so I can be a frelling virgin sacrifice-- I’m allowed ‘frelling,’ right?”

Buffy pulled out the bottle of OJ, shut the fridge door, and thoughtfully poured. “What’s that all about? The virgin thing?” Buffy remembered Dawn referring to that yesterday, sounding resentful and frightened.

“Oh, the usual: overprotective vamp, doesn’t want me growing up, changing. Put me in a box if he could,” Dawn replied, but her eyes slid away evasively. “Scared I’ll get hurt in ways he can’t prevent or help. Like the frelling magazine on the stairs. Blew up at me not because I forgot it but because in his head, it was me that had fallen and that scared him. I understand that part. But then why does he….”

As Dawn’s voice trailed off, Buffy put the juice away. “Is this about Mike?”

“Isn’t everything? What is it about Summers women and vamps? I just let him feed from me a few times and he thinks that’s the same as going steady or something. No more mark, look at me, all markless, but here he still is, hanging around, making sad puppy eyes at me, except they’re grey, so it would have to be Alsatian eyes. Wolf eyes, maybe.” Pushing away the bowl, Dawn went to the cabinet above and to the right of the sink and pulled down a box of pop-tarts from the top shelf: the one Buffy couldn’t reach without jumping or kneeling on a chair.

Buffy drank juice cold enough to make her sinuses quiver, considering carefully. Once, she’d have dusted Mike without a second thought. Your basic anonymous vamp. Now, though, she knew he was key to what Spike had been setting up and that he and Spike had connections between them--vamp connections and mostly unaccountable, but connections, all the same. You could see it in the way they danced around each other, suddenly breaking and going head to head, then dancing back again short of finality. Neither wanted the other gone but always testing each other sort of in a guy way, love all mixed up with antagonism, dominance games, and weird vamp one-upmanship according to rules no human could hope to understand.

Looking into her glass, Buffy asked, “Is Mike…pressuring you?”

“God, no!” Dawn blurted, slapping down the toaster lever. “All gentleman-like, treats me like I’m made of spun glass, for all he calls me ‘Dawn Dragonslayer’ and has to know better. He’s barely risked a hug!”

“Then…what’s the problem? The wolf eyes, or that the eyes aren’t wolf enough?”

“Oh, it’s all messed up,” Dawn wailed, face crumpling and the tears starting to flow again though she tried to fist them away. “And it’s gonna be messed up worse when Mike finds out--”

Setting the glass on the countertop, Buffy gathered in her sister, noting absently that Dawn could lower her head and sob directly into Buffy’s shoulder. Might need to kneel on a chair for that too, one of these days. Buffy asked, “Finds out what?” and alarms went off in her head as Dawn went all stiff and pulled away, ripping off a paper towel to hide her face in.

“Oh, nothing. Well, something but it’s just an idea, not really a plan, Spike doesn’t do plans anymore, all retired or something. I know where I stand, it’s not that, it’s just that I’m not all that keen on standing there. I’m sure Spike will talk to you about it too. Eventually.” Dawn crumpled up the paper towel, disclosing an anxious Oops: have I blown it? face.

As the toaster went off like a gunshot, Buffy replied calmly, "I'm sure he will." And she was really, really sure he would--the second she could get her hands on him.

She went back upstairs for her cell phone and punched the #1 speed dial. She made a face when Spike’s new phone obediently rang…from the top of the chest to the right of the bed.

The way he’d barged out at 3:12 in the morning, it was lucky he’d had his bike keys and cigarettes.

The soul was back. Buffy was trying to stay in patient, supportive, good-girlfriend mode. But there were limits.

**********

Returning from her last class of the day, Willow turned from shutting the door to find Spike standing in the front room.

In the full glare of sunlight.

Through the new window.

Besides the natural startlement and successive self-remindings that, though odd, this was not a suicide in progress, he was an arresting sight: he shone--as though the window were a large rectangular spotlight trained on him. All stark toner black and chalk white, every detail blazing and vivid. But it was an illusion. Invoking mystical sight with a blink and a gesture, she found his aura damped down to nearly nothing, not flared into immense wings of sparkling energies. About vamp normal. Which in turn meant just a hair above what an actual dead body would generate. The signature of the animating animus (she’d given up calling it a demon as imprecise, superstitious, and prejudicial).

When she went in and bent to lay her bookbag and purse on the couch, he greeted her absently, “’Lo, Red,” without turning.

“Spike, I’ve been wanting to talk to you, but there’s been no chance. About a lot of things. Mostly what happened in the alley, but there’s other stuff, too. I have a list.”

Glancing around, he quirked an eyebrow. “Don’t doubt it in the slightest.” Facing the window again, he added, “Slayer’s out, an’ Bit’s at school, I expect.”

Willow knew different but didn’t want to get into that now. “You shouldn’t depend on me,” she announced bluntly. “I never faced an experienced mage before, and every shield I threw up, he knocked down. Easily. As though it was just nothing.” She sat on the couch, working her hands together. “Giles says I shouldn’t be upset about it because a chaos mage can call on and use forces an earth mage won’t touch. He said those forces gradually eat out and randomize anybody who attunes themselves to them, and the effects are short term, dissipating into the normal order of things. But I am. Upset.” Looking up anxiously, she realized what she hadn’t noticed before: Spike’s eyes were unblinking, blank, and unfocused. Not following or watching whatever was passing on the street. The blue irises huge and whited out by the steady blaze of sunlight, and the pupils contracted to pinprick points. She wondered if he was on something.

“Can see it but not go out into it,” Spike remarked quietly, as though he hadn’t heard what she’d been saying. “Sends my demon gibbering terrified, for all it feels good. Bright, warm. Doesn’t connect up, like.”

“Enjoying a panic attack?” Willow inquired wryly.

“Trying to make the demon accept that what I know doesn’t match up with what is.”

“And how’s that working for you?”

Finally, Spike blinked. “Not so well,” he admitted, turning, leaving the light. He settled on the stairs, a few steps up, and leaned against the wall with his eyes shut. He reported, “Got all sorts of red and black smears swimming around. Can’t see a thing, with them between. That the way it’s s’posed to be?”

He’d been looking straight into the late afternoon sun, Willow realized, and had another set of layered reactions. (1) That was an insane thing to do, everybody knew better. (2) He was a vampire and therefore (3) all damage healed so (4) it probably meant nothing at all, except as an idle experiment deliberately freaking out his demon (animus) which (5) was strange but probably only idiotic, not insane. About on a par with sticking your finger in a candle flame to see what would happen.

Leaning on the flat-topped newel post, Willow replied tartly, “If you haven’t burnt out your retinas, it will pass. You still busy freaking out, or can you listen now?”

“Heard you: feel you failed, can’t be depended on. Wound up about that and wondering what use you are, if your magic’s not enough. Feel you let everybody down an’ they’re disappointed and don’t think so much of you as they did. Feel like you ought to have LOSER tattooed across your forehead and worried it might already be there, plain to everybody but you. Feel obliged to warn everybody not to trust you--me, for example. Something along about like that, yeah?”

“I didn’t say all that,” Willow responded in a small voice.

“That’s what I heard. Sounds real familiar, if you hadn’t guessed. Got to learn your limits all over again. Accept what you can’t do…and what you can. Bit of technological hocus-pocus, I can stand in the light. But that’s a lie, an’ I know it’s a lie, and have to keep knowing it’s a lie because the truth would turn me into cinders in a second. Because of what I am. You’d think I’d have that all settled by now, no surprises.”

“Always surprises. Just…not always good ones. So all right: you understand.”

“Been thinking about it. Amongst other things….” He rubbed at his eyes, then opened them--locating her face, doing slow, cartoon blinks. “So what else is on your list?”

“The smell. Is it really doing any good? Is it worth making more, since it doesn’t really do anything, mean anything, except for you enforcing it?”

“And I’m not in a position to enforce anything anymore.” Spike put words to what she’d thought but not said. “Dunno how Michael looks at it--if he’s gonna stay with that or let it go. Likely he hasn’t thought about it either. One more detail to take account of…. I’ll ask him. Tonight.”

“Monday: patrol night.”

“Yeah. He’s tagging along, get some things settled, him and the Slayer. And me.” Changing the subject, he went on, “Thing you could do, that would be useful. There’s better times to open portals, and worse times. Could be Rayne has enough power to grab it and tune it any time. But chances are, he’ll go for the optimal time--when the dimensional folds are at their thinnest and most strained. Less work to it. Be a real help if you could figure out when that would be.”

I can do that! Willow reflected happily, though it was about like being asked to cut out paper dolls, compared to wielding the lightnings of real magic. A task for beginners. Mostly research. But it really, truly needed to be done, and she could do it. Spike still considered her as part of the team…that it sounded like he wasn’t altogether sure he still belonged to.

She repeated, “‘Optimal?’” in a challenging, teasing voice.

Spike sighed and leaned his head on the wall again. “Too much translation. Gets to you, it does. Which reminds me: trying to work out an arrangement with the new Dalton for the translation. Can I use your laptop, nights when you don’t need it, of course? And is there a way we could both be working on the same thing, same time, and talk back and forth about it?”

“Sure: it’s called a telephone.” As Spike rolled his eyes, either at her snark or his missing the obvious, Willow went on, “There’s probably a way of multi-tasking with the word-processing program and a live chat on the same screen, but truly, it would be easier to just talk. And sure, you can use the laptop. I know finances are a bit strained until the next batch of translation gets turned in, so you don’t want to invest in another desktop right now.”

“All right. Thanks. Anything else on your list?”

“Yeah,” said Willow, considering him warmly and a little shyly. She knew it was personal, and touchy. “How are you? Since the tribute blood’s been stopped, are you getting enough to eat? There’s nothing, no blood, in the refrigerator….”

Spike was silent a long minute, obviously deciding whether to say anything or shut her out. “I’ve been better,” he admitted finally. “As to that other, that’s no problem. Or not much. And no, I’m not goin’ back to pig’s blood out of a jug. Haven’t been knocked back so far as that…. Rayne, he’s pretty much walked over the both of us. An’ first you get mad, then you get discouraged. Just how it goes,” Spike said soberly, regarding his hands, fisted together on a knee. Looking up, he continued, “Thing is, to get past all that crap and start thinking, if one thing doesn’t work, what’s left, that might? Rupert’s beat him at least once, and Rupert can’t call on anything like the power you can. Talk it out with him. And find us that date. I’m figuring to have a meeting with Digger in a few days. Michael, he’s setting it up. Be good to know before then.”

“I’ll get right on it,” said Willow, and started to edge up the stairs past him. Spike clasped her wrist, halting her.

“Two things I’ve always trusted you for: always saying the truth, and never quitting. Still do.”

Meeting his calm gaze, Willow felt herself blushing extravagantly. Finding nothing to say, she gave him a quick jerk of a smile, then hustled on upstairs, reflecting that what he’d said was nice but didn’t depend in any way, shape, or form, on her doing magic. Since magic was the thing in her life that she felt was most important, that defined her, she tried to decide if that was a good thing or a bad one.

**********

While Buffy and Mike talked patrol routes, Spike leaned over the open weapons chest as though deciding what to choose for himself. Actually resisting the impulse to barge right between them. Name the mark, make them take notice. Declare and decide something, not merely tag along.

He’d never had any problem with Buffy leading out. On patrols, she called the tune. She was the Slayer.

But with Mike added to the equation it was different, and Spike minded it more than he’d expected.

He shut his eyes, trying to achieve balance, focus. Like he’d been trying all day and having shit luck doing it, too. Stare at the fucking sun--as if the sun cared. No kind of contest there, just dumbass tricks trying to make himself back off, settle.

He thought, Did it in the fucking wheelchair and took everything that bloody bastard Angelus threw at me when I was an idiot fledge, about a decade of it before he got the soul pushed into him and went all to broody shards and cat scraps. Well, nearly everything, there was that time in Paris… Never mind, fuck Paris. Endured the Supplice. Can do it now.

But those things had been forced on him. This abdication, he was forcing on himself. Because it was necessary, and he knew it, even though it had about the appeal of cutting his balls off with blunt scissors and his demon wild with indignation over being told to back off, sing small, not challenge the new order of things in which Spike didn’t count for much of anything.

Soul was no bloody help at all. Hadn’t an instinct for surrender like the instinct the demon had for dominance, and Mike’s choosing a fucking big battle-axe for the patrol wasn’t really rubbing it in, Mike wasn’t much for edged weapons and had used that sort of axe against the Turok-han so it would be the most familiar of what was on offer. Demon took it as provocation but it took Mike’s simple presence as provocation, itching for a fight, for putting the lad down and restoring the rightful balance of things with Spike his own master and answerable to none except as he chose. Which would make everything go smash, but the demon didn’t care about that, even liked the notion of everything coming loose and falling into jagged chaos.

Spike was truly helpless if he couldn’t even keep his own demon in line, make it obey. And feeling helpless was what the demon raged against.

Blinking at the weapons chest, Spike angrily grabbed up the usual weapon, a smallish hand axe, then slammed the lid down and went out on the front porch to have a cigarette and pace, pinballing off the railings.

He barely noticed Dawn slipping outside and seating herself neatly on the front steps until she announced, “I’m waiting for the speech.”

He gave her a favorless look. She had her chin lifted, looking straight ahead, plainly in a pissy mood.

She went on, “Aren’t you gonna ask me what speech?”

Spike made a derisive noise and wheeled into another circuit of the porch. No need to ask: plainly she was gonna tell him, asked or unasked.

“‘I’m sorry I yelled at you, Dawn,’” she coached. “‘Sorry I behaved like an insane-o parental unit over a little innocent oops with a magazine and barged into your own personal bedroom and woke you up in the middle of the fucking night.’ That speech. I’m waiting.”

Buffy and Mike came out then, so Spike didn’t have to answer. When Dawn skipped down the steps and joined the formation at Spike’s right, hustling along with her head down and her arms tucked tight to her sides, Buffy registered the addition with a glance at Spike that was a silent demand for an explanation, then asked Dawn, “What, precisely, do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m coming. Spike said,” Dawn replied in a mulish whine. “I’m the stake-carrier.” She shook the bag over her shoulder, sounding the wooden clunk of a couple dozen freshly cut stakes.

When Buffy looked to him again, Spike admitted, “Told her she could. I’ll look after her.”

Dawn had been whinging on about not being allowed to patrol for years, so likely Buffy would think there was no more to it than that. And as Spike had expected, she wasn’t about to get into a jurisdictional brangle with him in front of Mike. Frowning, Buffy said only, “You better,” and faced front, picking up the pace.

Although Dawn lacked the endurance and native athleticism of the Potentials, she was an experienced runner and knew her place: to Spike’s right and no more than a pace behind. In Spike’s time with the SITs, she’d run with the pack as Spike’s adjutant, a role both useful and familiar.

The fact that they were currently annoyed with each other had no effect on the deep compact between them. Dawn was here because Mike was here, and tonight, Spike was gonna tell them his intention about the pax bond.

His awareness of Dawn loping at his shoulder--her warmth, the beat of her heart, the pull of her breath, the long-legged strides that steadily matched his yet still had something of a coltish scamper, nervous energy rather than Buffy’s determined striding-out--was comfortable, companionable. He’d missed it. Missed her. They were sufficiently in synch that as he turned his head, Dawn glanced around and was suddenly grinning, exhilarated with the motion and the night. Spike couldn’t help it: he offered his right hand, and Dawn clasped it, and there was no trouble between them anymore.

It almost made up for it being Mike--quiet, for all his size; unbreathing; silent and steady as black nemesis--pacing at Buffy’s left, a decent distance away, allowing for the swing-radius of the battle-axe. Lead (the Slayer) and second (his place! his role!) with secondary support and ammunition trailing behind. All in good order and understood, and hateful to his demon, which wanted to overtake and give Mike a hearty shove, enforce his rightful prerogatives.

By how the street lights flared and brightened, he realized he’d changed aspect and with an effort damped the demon down. Jealousy was colossally stupid, he told himself: not as if she fancied the chap, after all. Buffy’s attitude toward Mike had never warmed beyond wary acceptance, and she’d stake him in a second if he set a wrong hand on Bit or marked her again. And yet somehow Spike had to open his hand and loose Dawn toward his enemies, risk her as he’d risk himself, and how could he imagine that, let alone do it?

“Ow,” Dawn complained, twisting her hand in his punishing clasp until Spike realized and let go.

Which was pretty much the shape of it, right there.

**********

Mike had turned out for the patrol in a fairly good mood since he had a secret and was itching to tell it. But it would have to be brought out right, in a way that would let it seem casual, not just to be showing off, bragging in front of Dawn, that he hadn’t expected to be along anyway. Had expected it to be just the Slayer and likely Spike, not Dawn along too. That bothered him. Wasn’t right, her being exposed to the same risks as the rest of them, just a human girl, after all. Hadn’t liked finding her at the theater, neither, and had words with Spike about it afterward. Thought it was settled because he’d made himself real clear about not liking it. But here she was again, and on Spike’s invite, too. So Spike as usual was doing whatever he pleased, taking no account of anybody else. Arrogant high-handed bastard, same as always, and no point expecting sense from such.

So it wasn’t the same situation as he’d had in his mind, to let out, all casual-like, that he’d entertained himself in the course of last night’s sweep by fire-bombing every place he’d identified where Ethan fucking Rayne had laired up in Sunnydale.

He’d saved the big, fancy place on Crawford Street for last, and it had gone up real nice, windows blowing out when the blaze got going good, nearby trees catching and lifting towers of flame that jerked and swayed like dancers, and the huge wash of sparks when part of the roof caved in. Fledges were nervous so he’d let them go on, not yet ready, himself, to stop watching the glorious destruction he’d brought forth. Only thing that would have made it better would have been seeing Rayne’s face when the news got to him, but you couldn’t have everything.

Not as though Rayne owned the places, had anything invested in them. But he’d still know he’d been targeted and hit, even though no damage to him personally. He’d still know there was somebody out there who didn’t like him a whole lot and willing to put him on notice of that fact. Wouldn’t know who, neither, which might make him just the least bit nervous.

Mike smiled to himself, then got down to business.

The Slayer mostly targeted and took out fledges, which Mike had no objection to. Mostly he viewed it pretty much as Digger did: till a fledge could develop some control, it was a danger to itself and all other vamps in the area, since fledges had no sense and no caution and besides getting themselves dusted, they could rouse a general hunt of the villagers-with-pitchforks-and-torches variety and everybody have to lie low and starve for awhile till the hunt died down.

The patrol routes were therefore centered on graveyards, where new-risen, confused fledges were most likely to be found. No surprise, Restfield had been re-colonized since Spike hadn’t been clearing it anything like regular for several months. Two of the mausoleums at the north end, where packs had laired up in the past, were occupied again on account of the convenient location.

First one, Slayer went in and flushed the occupants, and Mike took ‘em down as they tried to escape. Beheaded the first couple as they came, then turned the axe and used the butt-end to punch through the chests of those that came after, all tidy and businesslike if he did say so himself. Checking to see if Spike approved, he found Spike leaning against a tree and smoking, paying no particular attention.

So, fine. Mike had come out because the Slayer had asked him, not to show off his edged weapons skills to his claimed Sire or even to Dawn, for that matter. She was by the tree too, with a stake in either hand, ready to use it or pitch it to whoever wanted one. As the Slayer exited the crypt, Mike wandered over to the tree, figuring a stake or two might be handy for the close work.

“Spare me a couple of those?” Mike asked, axe tipped comfortably over his shoulder, pointing a finger at the sack.

“Sure. You take these, I’ll get more.”

As Dawn passed over the stakes, Spike looked around, eyes greened halfway to gold, remarking, “You let her go in alone.”

Mike held his temper, poking the stakes through belt loops where they’d be handy. “Her call, her choice. How she wanted to play it.”

“You didn’t watch her back.”

“Not a whole lot of room in a crypt to swing an axe. Weapon like this, best to stay back. You standing on some glue or something, kept you from going in, if that’s what you wanted to do?”

“I cleared this crypt single-handed.”

Dawn set both hands on Spike’s arm, pointing out, “He knows you did. He was here. So was I, remember?”

“Point is,” Spike responded, as though through gritted teeth, “s’not about grandstanding now, for the effect. Point is, this is a patrol. Lead and second. Second follows, watches the lead’s back. Or the lead could get hurt, real quick.”

“Well, I wasn’t there,” Mike shot back, “when you were out running with your girls, making all these rules. I’m here because I was asked, fighting the best way I know. You don’t like it, you take it up with the Slayer. Ain’t heard her complain.”

Standing with hands on hips, Buffy called, “What’s the hold-up?”

“No hold up,” Dawn called back quickly, looking from Spike to Mike as though she thought she could impose harmony with her eyes. She smelled nervous. Something going on between her and Spike, something they neither of them had yet put words to but Mike could tell, all the same. So more secrets than his, simmering unsaid. Dawn added, “Just discussing tactics. All done now--right?” Her anxious eyes demanded agreement.

Mike cocked an eyebrow at Spike, silently inquiring if he was done grousing now, if they could get on with it.

Spike said, “Ah, hell,” and pitched the cigarette.

Mike joined the Slayer and they moved out.

**********

Watching Buffy and Mike double-team a large, lumbering beastie a little like a horned hippo and Spike hang back yet again, like he wasn’t interested or didn’t care except for his eyes and his twitchiness, taking a glance and then jerking his eyes away, plainly seething but still doing nothing, so unlike himself, Dawn sidled nearer and muttered, “You’re so off, you’ve earned your own zip code.”

For a few seconds, Spike didn’t react. Then he hitched a shoulder, turning away.

“It’s what I’m out here for,” Dawn persisted in a whisper. “What we came to do. So just do it, already! Tell them! What are you waiting for?”

“’F you’re so fucking eager, you tell ‘em,” Spike rejoined, checking on the fight’s progress with another of those wincing glances.

As Spike retreated into the deeper dark behind a tall tombstone so old its lettering had weathered away, Dawn pursued, “Sure, fine: I can’t, dumbass--some way, you never got around to telling me the particulars, and isn’t that amazing? Is it that you’re scared to spell it out because even I’m gonna see how lame it is? Is it yet another ingenious way of snatching disaster from the jaws of the merely so-so?”

When his head turned, his eyes glinted golden. Dawn halfway hoped he’d flash out at her: give him something safe to vent at, break the inner paralysis, maybe. But he didn’t, displacing the impulse to actually do anything into lighting about his dozenth cigarette of the evening from the coal of the previous one. “Got to be set up right. Got to keep my head on straight, keep to the point.”

“Oh, so we’re giving ourselves little pep talks now, are we?”

Gazing past, Spike suddenly called, “Oi, Slayer! Watch out!”

Dawn whirled to find out why.

Three game-faced vamps had come out of noplace--probably heard the struggle and come to investigate if there was food in it for them. Since the blatting demonic beastie had just lunged at Mike, separating him from Buffy, the trio closed around Buffy, who had to choose between engaging the vamps and helping Mike finish off the enraged beastie. Had to choose between the sword she’d been using and the two stakes she’d accepted and stuck through her belt loops. She pitched the sword and went for the vamps bare-handed because they were already on her and there was no time.

Spike was up on his toes, miming the fight with ducks and pulled blows but essentially not moving, which Dawn considered insane. Slapping a stake into his hand, she gave him a hearty shove, which seemed to be all he needed. Engaging the largest of the vamps, Spike spun him around, whip-kicked him in the face to push him away from the others, then proceeded to take him apart, joint by joint, in a textbook demonstration of all-out Spike ferocity. The vamp was almost certainly a fledge, to take on the Slayer even three to one. He would have had no chance to get Spike pissed at him in a personal way. But that was how Spike was behaving, systematically breaking bones and ignoring chances to dust the vamp outright. The fledge was being dealt nasty, bloody punishment for somebody else’s sins, Dawn thought.

Maybe it was a good thing Spike hadn’t vented at her after all, if this was what he’d been holding the lid on.

Buffy had pitched one of her pair into the side of a mausoleum. She went after the other with a stake in her fist. In less than a minute, that vamp was dust. The other, belatedly prudent, started running: head down, elbows pumping. Buffy took off after him, both vanishing like squeezed grapefruit seeds into the dark. Spike was still engaged in seeing how many more bones he could break before the fledge became completely helpless. Both the fledge’s arms hung useless and seemed dislocated at the shoulders. He could barely stagger because Spike had stomped his kneecaps. Only when the fledge went down and refused to move did Spike consent to end it. The burst of dust coincided with Buffy reappearing around the mausoleum, trying to recapture hair that had escaped her pony-tail, and with the beastie finally thudding to its knees with Mike’s axe buried in its neck. Spike straightened and stepped back as Mike set a foot on the beastie’s ribs to work the axe free. Buffy looked at them both as though not particularly pleased with either.

Bending to collect the sword, she continued past to a stone bench flanked by two big planters of droopy, desiccated bronze chrysanthemums and plunked herself down there. “Now’s as good a time as any,” she commented, with a glance at Spike. “Enlighten us. About this virgin thing.”

Swinging about, axe freed, Mike enquired flatly, “What virgin thing?” He looked to Spike first, then to Dawn: immediately making that connection.

And though she’d already decided to let Spike make the running on this, since he knew the details and she’d only guessed toward them, Dawn felt compelled to blurt, “The meeting with Digger. Can’t have a meeting like that without pax bonds in place, naturally. To keep everything civil. Spike thought it would be a good way to get Rayne delivered into our hands. Our custody. If Digger can make him or if he agrees, considering Giles and all. Either way.” Nervously, Dawn spread her hands as though that was all there was to it or the rest should be obvious. Which she was afraid it was. Because Mike immediately said, “No,” in a voice past argument, staring at Spike.

“‘No’ what?” Buffy asked, slower to make the leap because vamp customs took thinking about, weren’t automatic. Having finished refastening her hair, she sat looking up attentively.

Dawn remembered to breathe. Her fingers found the taser in her pocket and made sure the safety was on. Her glance to Spike got no response, the bastard: if she was stupid enough to make the running, Spike wasn’t gonna step in and take the burden from her. “Well, we’ll need somebody as a pax bond from our side, of course. To swap for Rayne, to guarantee the meeting. Just like before. And…I’ll do it. Just like before.”

“No,” said Mike again, grounding the axe head and folding his arms over the haft. “No way.”

He and Spike stared at each other for a strained minute. Spike broke first, turning to Buffy, saying, “It’ll be all right. She wasn’t hurt before an’ won’t be now. Digger’s got no reason whatever to hurt her an’ good reason to keep her safe, if she’s traded for Rayne, that’s his partner now. That he needs. If Rayne won’t stand for swap, then that’s the end of it, right there. But it’s worth trying, to get Rayne into a little sit-down with Rupert and Red. Get some things ironed out there. That’s the meeting, you see? What Digger says or does, that don’t signify.”

“It signifies,” Buffy replied, “if he has Dawn. I don’t like it, Spike. And what’s that got to do with, well, the virgin thing?”

Spike hung his head after shooting Dawn a glance. He ambled closer to the bench: sidling, slump-shouldered, full of jitters and twitches. Utterly unconvincing. Only his killing had been sincere. Because he couldn’t keep his hands still, he lit another cigarette, then gestured with it. “Well, that’d give her value, like. Mage like Rayne, he knows there’s power in such. Make him figure it for an equal swap.”

“Yeah, I saw how mages value virgins,” Buffy shot back, leaned forward with elbows on knees. “Tied up to posts in the mall parking lot. Set afire. If it’s a reason to accept her, it’s also a reason to keep her.”

Dawn put in, “Not unless Rayne’s with you guys, don’t you see? To Digger, I have no special value, except as half of the pax bond. No more than anybody, I mean. I don’t think old frog-face cares much about virgins, the one way or the other.” Or at least Dawn sincerely hoped he didn’t. Spike’s face was uncommunicative.

“I’ll go,” Buffy decided astonishingly, and suddenly Spike had fifty dozen reasons why she shouldn’t, mustn’t, couldn’t. Because Buffy was a player, determining the balance, Digger might risk losing Rayne to kill her. Might even turn her, and where’d they all be then?

When Spike paused, Buffy said, “I was just trying to be helpful,” in a small voice.

“I know that, love, but you can’t--”

Both Spike and Mike froze and turned like twin compasses pointing north. Game-faced, leaned forward, shuddering like struck tuning forks.

“What?” Buffy demanded. “What is it?”

Spike muttered a bad word, wrapping arms around himself, grimly regarding his boots. “Just that Rayne. Playin’ with himself again. With the Stone. Been doing that, lately, on and off….” He dragged himself back to the point. “So, no, love: can’t be you. Has to be Bit, and she’s agreed to it, haven’t you, Bit? Knows it will be all right.”

Dawn, who knew no such thing, was prepared to lie like a trooper when Mike came out of his crouch: still one second, then still the next, but Spike somehow down and getting his knees under him in the interval. As Spike came up, Mike kneed him in the face. Spike came up fast again and barreled straight into him and they went at it, a blur of motion punctuated by the thud of boots and blows. All sudden, before even Buffy could lunge to intervene, Spike went bonelessly backward, and hit, and stayed, arms flung wide, not moving. Glaring down at him, still game-faced, Mike snarled, “Not putting up with your crap no more. Not running your messages. Meeting’s off.” He stuck his hand, and the taser in it, back into his pocket. He gave Dawn an impassive look, then stalked away, leaving the axe as it had fallen.

Dawn was torn between running after him and keeping Buffy from doing the same. Considering that Mike was armed with the unexpected taser, the result wasn’t a foregone conclusion, and the last thing Dawn wanted to see was a serious face-off between Buffy and Mike, explosively wound up as she figured he was from the hellish threnody of the Stone and the Hellmouth singing to one another, that had likely set him and Spike off in the first place. So she dumped herself in front of Buffy and hung on until Buffy quit trying to lunge free or pry her off. They both ended up on their knees next to Spike, still unconscious from the taser charge.

“I tried to support him, I really did,” Buffy wailed, getting Spike tipped up and then leaned back against her, his head lolling loosely in the crook of her arm. She bent to kiss his smoothed features.

Dawn caught up one of Spike’s hands and held it, looking off the way Mike had gone.

How great a disaster she’d just witnessed, all the ramifications, she couldn’t think out. But it was bad, awful, that the jittery alliance had collapsed. That Mike had broken with Spike over her coerced volunteering as a pax bond. Mike couldn’t hold things together on his own and he probably knew that. So he’d have to ally with some other player…which almost certainly meant Digger.

Disaster.

She was upset for them both and with them both--for Mike, departed in a regretful huff, breaking with her and with Spike rather than be a party to risking her, which made her feel at once infuriated, weepily touched, and despairing; and for Spike, finally unable to hold his temper for all his trying to keep himself backed off, cool, and reasonable, trying to get everybody to agree on his insane-o plan. It was just so frickin’ typical. Just so…Spike. She alternated between wanting to hug him and hit him.

Anxiously patting Spike’s hand, waiting and dreading his coming to and realizing how totally messed up things were, Dawn was light-headed with relief: now she wouldn’t have to go.

Chapter 16: Renewals

2004-06-05T08:26:06Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 16: Renewals (complete)

Soaping Spike's shoulders and back, Buffy had a satisfying sense of continuity. Post-patrol shower check was part of the usual drill and one of the pleasanter parts, as well.

The water was cranked up as near scalding as Buffy could tolerate because tired or battered or both, Spike craved heat and craved close, both of which Buffy was totally on board with. Typically he was sleepy and soft and biddable, quietly announcing ow when she touched something sore, identifying the place for monitoring the healing's progress.

Today his torso was a mass of bruises just coming on, and he had several lumps under his hair that she found by touch and determined had quit bleeding; there were probably broken ribs, and he showed general evidence of having been considerably knocked about. About par for daybreak on a Sunday morning. With good rest and feeding, everything would likely be 90% healed by nightfall. But Buffy still liked checking. All that warm, wet skin and her fingers identifying the muscle knots for later luxurious kneading. All that comfortable and accustomed intimacy.

She had a banged-up shoulder and a sore foot some clown had tramped on. The usual. She always appreciated the warmth and closeness too and had been known to do him either in the shower or on the cold tile floor with its famous small skating rug: shiversome but urgent and satisfying. Slaying generally left her wildly turned on, and Spike would be there and always interested: one of the benefits of having a vampire lover.

Similarly, if Spike hadn't burned off enough energy, his checking out her injuries would turn rowdy and randy, leading into sessions of hot shower sex done in frantic haste to beat the chill blast that followed emptying the water heater. But this morning he was quiet, accepting whatever it pleased her to do to him, and that was always good too.

It seemed months since they'd performed this customary small ritual. Buffy had missed it, and him, desperately. Since it was plain the opposition could now locate him no matter where he was, the point of staying away was gone. He'd made no objection to coming back. That interval was done, the soul back in place, and Buffy was heartily glad to have it so. Glad he was finally home and wholly hers again.

She bent her forehead against his back while the shampoo washed out. Then she went up onto tiptoe to murmur, "Let's get dry. Then I want to do some loving on you."

Spike didn't respond except to cut off the water and step out of the enclosure, bending to collect the oversize towels. She loved him sleepy-eyed, with his hair in an untended tumble. After minimal drying came robes and a quick scuttle from the bathroom to the bedroom. Buffy had cranked the electric blanket up to the max beforehand, get the bedding all toasty. As soon as he'd shut the door, Spike shed the robe and slid under the covers with a soft hiss of satisfaction. Buffy paused to pull on lace-trimmed babydolls because she never was comfortable naked, and she liked feeling she looked nice though she suspected Spike would like her just as well slathered in peanut butter (though not crunchy-style--that hurt!) or nothing at all.

When she padded toward the bed, Spike rolled over and opened his arms for her. But his eyes were still tired, not full of glee and mischief, and she shook her head, bending to the bedside cabinet and pulling a zip bag out of the drawer. She'd had Mike bring down the whole pill stash from the factory, and he'd patiently sorted the pills by color and told her what each color meant so she could label the bags. The red-and-white capsules were the pain pills. She picked one out with thumb and forefinger, then sealed the bag again. "Nuh-uh, Crash, the deal is that I love on you, you don't get to do anything." She leaned with the pill and a glass of water she had ready on the cabinet, and he took them, eyes uplifted, not bothering to check what kind of pill it was.

He'd mixed them into a complete muddle, she thought. He didn't like what happened to him being all that predictable. Hurting, he wouldn't have known what kind to choose. He needed her.

The thought made her smile, setting the glass aside.

She'd already decided that with both his forearms jaggedly sliced from wrists to elbows, play with the silk scarves in the bottom of the cabinet wasn't on the menu. Some hurt was fun; some wasn't. And this was for him: her welcome, her praise. So she started with some general cuddling and petting, kissing slow and wet and thorough, until she felt a little of the bracing release and his eyes hazed over, wide and deep. The pill had kicked in.

"Headache?" she asked softly.

"Bit of one, yeah," he admitted, sagging back even more bonelessly, gazing at the ceiling.

No wonder, with multiple concussions--all those lumps.

So then she admitted to the sore foot and turned around, head to toe, to let him work those muscles with his strong, clever fingers: he liked to do for her, and this was something he could do without exerting himself. "Left shoulder's bad, too," he mentioned after awhile. "Come back up here, an' I'll see to it."

She lifted her head to look around. "Nope, I'm just fine and comfy here," she commented, returning to what she'd been doing--playing with his personal "dangly bits," as he called them. He was aroused, of course, but not specially interested. She stretched the well massaged foot and rubbed the side of his face with it.

Enough foreplay, she decided. Time to get down to the main event. Nosing into the wiry pubic curls, she began giving his shaft the serious lollipop treatment with mouth and with fingers. Though he'd certainly felt what she was up to, there was a big indrawn breath of startled reaction, held too long.

His abs went rigid. He was not enjoying this. But he hadn't said anything to stop her, either.

She lifted her head to look again. In the faint light through the new windows, he was braced up on his elbows, head thrown back, eyes shut. His beautiful chest and his face were all piebald with the full bloom of bruises now: purple shadows cast by no light. His hands were fisted tight in the bedclothes. Buffy scuttled quickly around to kiss and cuddle him, asking, "What?"

He shook his head.

Buffy tried to ignore the idiot keen of He doesn't want me! Doesn't want me! that her insecurity instantly started whining. Babble, though, was harder to stop. "It's OK, we don't have to, if you just want to sleep or something, it's OK, I just wanted it to be good for you, easy, I could--"

He pounced her. All of a sudden she was flat on her back and being unceremoniously entered, hard and fast, and the sudden gulp of surprised breath was hers. His face, over her, was intent and almost angry, inward-focused the way it sometimes was when the play had been rough and he was all wound up with it and turning loose. Good times too, though. The babble became the noises he wanted and the incoherent encouragements, she'd been aching for him nearly forever, and she could do sudden role changes, dancing the new dance with him because finally it was all the same dance, the shock and turn and pressure of them-coming-together in all the weathers they could be, serene or stormy.

He was done before she was, and she wasn't surprised. It'd felt like it would be like that. After a minute or two of collapse, he had his face bent into her neck, shuddering and sobbing and saying hoarsely, "Sorry, sorry," arms everywhere as though he wanted to hold her but had forgotten how or didn't dare, and the next minute he'd be flying--down to the basement or even out the door, just had to move when he was this wound up. She grabbed his face, held him still a second, wrapped both legs around his thighs and locked at the ankles. "Wrong side," she told him, and he just blinked at her, not taking it in. She turned her head, offering the right side of her neck. "Go for the mark. Remember: dessert?"

There was the familiar slight grating of the bones adjusting, fangs elongating. Then his weight shifted, heavy upon her, and the good pain of his biting into the scarred flesh of the claim mark. Instantaneous rapture. All sensation magnified manyfold. The ecstasy of deep communion obliterating awareness of anything else. The joy of being wanted, needed, and sufficient to so great a need and hunger and knowing it was joy to him, too. The perfection of Slayer and vampire, sufficient to one another and at last satisfied and still.

Dozily content, Buffy pushed fingers through his hair and then stroked his shoulders. She couldn't have said how much he'd taken. Not a lot, though. Enough. When he'd had what he needed, he stopped. The mark itched and tingled with its renewal.

Kissing his again fangless mouth, she whispered, "You home yet?"

"Nearly. Working on it. You…all right, love?"

"Fine. Very fine. Rest now: we have all day."

She held him until he slept, until they both did.

********

They’d all slept late. Stumbling downstairs about noon, Dawn found Spike in the front room, sitting on the floor in front of the couch and staring in the direction of the TV, currently showing an infomercial about some device to suck disgusting stuff out of carpets. Going on to the kitchen, she had a glass of extremely cold orange juice that sort of woke her up, then took the paper plate of hot toaster pastries back to the front room and settled down next to Spike.

It was very nice to find him there and she’d missed him, what with him being away and her being away, but he’d know that so nothing had to be said about it. Cracking off an oozy corner of pastry and touching her tongue to the filling to see if it was edible yet, she asked, “What’cha not watching?”

He looked around lazily. “Dunno. Some crap or other.”

“Are we bored yet?” Deciding the corner was sufficiently cool, Dawn dropped it into her mouth and chewed.

“Dunno. Too shagged-out to tell.”

By mutual agreement, Dawn didn’t ask how literally he meant that and Spike didn’t offer details.

It was as though they were underwater, she thought, and floating among tall, stirring weeds. Everything slow and languid. But not easy with each other, the way floating things should be: he was holding himself carefully separate and moved away when she started to lean on him.

She knew what would be great for that and raced up to her room. Returning, she dumped the bottles and tissues and the separators that were like pink foam brass-knuckles, on the rug. “I have indigo,” she announced, setting the bottle upright. “Also black, if you want to be a pig about it, as per usual.”

“Yeah, all right,” he decided eventually.

She worked the separator between the toes of his right foot and set seriously to work. Since he hadn’t specified, she chose the indigo: almost charcoal-dark, but with a slate tone that also came through. While his toes were drying for the second coat, she straddled his knees and offered her fingers for being done in violent chartreuse. He did the first nail meticulously, then set it aside on the shelf of his forearm to do the next one.

The undersides of his arms were healed smooth again, she’d noticed. And the other bruises were on the yellow-brown side of green and fading. As he finished a second finger, she lifted her hand to brush pensive fingertips along the freshly unmarked back of his left arm, hand to elbow: where the tattoo that meant Dawn had been. Then she obediently set the fingers back on the right-arm shelf without needing to be told.

“Do tattoos hurt?” she asked.

He hitched a shoulder without changing the precision of the brush strokes. “Some. I expect. Was asleep pretty much the whole time, if you must know. Stings awhile, after. Though you wouldn’t have to soak it in vinegar to have it set, like a vamp would. Thinking of having yourself done?”

“Might. Sometime. How’d Rayne get it off?”

“Dunno. Don’t recall.”

Noticing how his face tightened, she dropped the topic and went on about where tattoo designs came from, if you could search them on the Web, what custom designs cost--was it by the inch or by the color, and were all colors available, and were some more expensive than others?--steadily getting more and more comfy in each other’s space. When she leaned forward to inspect the job so far, and her hair was in danger of sliding onto her hand, Spike casually smoothed and held it clear until she straightened, and that was good.

She was perched on the couch and Spike was stretched out on the floor, doing the toes of her first foot propped in the separator, the two of them in a fanciful argument about which new musical instrument needed inventing and what it should sound like, when Xander came in, sliding a high but narrow rectangular box over the sill--another new window, no doubt. He’d been doing two or three a weekend, as they arrived from the manufacturer, fitted with the special glass.

Catching sight of them, Xander stopped, doing a take.

“We’re toe bonding,” Dawn announced regally.

“Don’t wanna know about it,” Xander responded, letting the box rest and setting hands on hips, above his tool belt. “Just clear out, OK? Because this is the big baby, the front window, and the sun’s coming in here for awhile, and that could be poof time. Unless of course you want to practice your new trick, fangless, in which case, you can help get the plywood off.”

“Ruin m’nails,” Spike declined, displaying the back of his one completed hand with its indigo nails and flipping Xander the two-fingered British “bird” in the process. Dawn giggled, and Xander only pretended to look insulted. Spike and Xander were working on finding their comfortable distance again, too, Dawn thought, carefully collecting what Spike would call “the doings” into overall pockets and the fold of a bent arm held tight against her ribs.

After a consultation of glances, they reconvened the toe bonding outside, in lawn chairs dragged into the patchy shade of the big maple. While her second foot was finished, Dawn looked wistfully past the hedge: where Casa Spike had been. She missed the shaded porch and the lazy summer mornings there, with all two-dozen plus SITs doing exercises and drills in the sunlight and she and Spike steadily carving stakes and chatting about nothing much, just being happily in each other’s presence in the part of their day that overlapped, she just awakened and he slowing toward sleep after the night’s patrol or fighting or whatever, casting a critical eye at the SITs and calling a comment or correction from time to time.

“It’s too chilly out here,” Dawn announced suddenly, wrapping arms around her. “No, stay--I’m only gonna get a sweater or something, I’ll be right back.”

But she brought more than a sweater, carefully assumed to avoid smearing the polish: she brought an armload of the drooping lengths of rough pine 1x1 stock Xander supplied, nobody asked from where, and her own sharp knife and a paring knife from the kitchen for Spike, whose genuine Sheffield folding knife had gone somewhere in the events of the summer. Dawn knew fine blades were made in Sheffield because Spike said so.

Dumping the wood, Dawn explained, “That sack last night was about the last. We’ve been…otherwise occupied, and there was nobody to fill in. Do your other hand, though, first.” Settling on the empty facing chair and pointing to her knee, she uncapped the indigo polish and began work when Spike obediently set his spread fingers where she’d pointed. After a few fingers, she asked offhandedly, “You haven’t nagged once about my anchor. Why is that? Or shouldn’t I ask?”

“Been thinkin’ about that.”

“And?” Dawn prompted.

“Still thinkin’ about it.” Spike had his head bent, so she couldn’t read his expression. “Need me a new knife, I guess. Get one up to the mall, there’s a store there. Buy it, even. You could come with. If you want.”

“Well, be a little offhand, why don’t you?” Dawn responded, brandishing the brush in a threatening manner. “Supper?”

“Sure, why not.” After a moment’s thought, he added, “Have to ask Buffy for her card, though. Mine’s gone west.”

“A lot’s gone west. Now that the soul’s back, and you’re back, and I’m back, it should feel the same. It doesn’t, though.”

“Need a new cell phone of my own, too, now I think of it. Way it is, I’m clear out of the loop: out of touch with everybody, everything that’s going on.” It was clear he knew, as she did, that they’d begun cautiously treading the edges of the dangerous ground, because after the seeming digression, he swung right back like a shark: “What’s doing now, between you and Michael?”

“None of your business. I’m seventeen now.”

“Michael is mine, and that makes it my business. And last I knew, you were mine. ‘Less that’s changed, that makes it my business from the other end, too. An’ I expect you know why Rayne wants you. What qualifies you.”

Dawn’s head made a quick, embarrassed bob. “I know: because I’m a freakin’ virgin. Magically pure and potent, and channel besides for quite a lot of energy for anybody who can take it, or that I’d give it to. Glory’s gone but I still have my Keyness.”

“Yeah,” said Spike quietly. “And I’m kind of wondering what you mean to do about that--the part you can change.”

“I’m thinking about it,” snapped Dawn tartly, giving him some of his own back. “And when I make up my mind, it won’t be you I tell.”

“Never expected it would be. That’s for you to choose and say. Never wanted that from you. Except that while, when I’d marked you….” Spike looked up at her then, the blue eyes piercing and steady, making her hold completely still. “Don’t. Not till this is all over and settled, anyways.”

“Why?” Dawn challenged.

“Because all the players are in place now. Where and as they need to be. I can feel it. Makes the right shape in my mind, like lining up a pool shot. Can’t explain it any better than that. You consult with the Lady, if you want, if you can. She’ll say the same as me.”

“But…he was in my mind, Spike! And I couldn’t do anything! When I tried to throw him out, I just fell down, I couldn’t do anything! And I don’t like him, he giggles--”

“Don’t like him neither,” Spike cut in, making the habitual cigarette-getting gesture for about the fifth time since they’d come outside, each time aborted or changed into something else. This time, he reached out and smoothed her hair, then cupped her cheek. “Can’t promise you won’t get hurt, Bit, but that’s what you signed on for when you latched onto me, the way you did. An’ you know that. May need to risk you like I’d risk myself. Figured you’d be up for that, ‘f we talked it through first, maybe.”

And never, she thought, but didn’t finish the thought. And never…. Wringing her neatly en-greened fingers in an agony of uncertainty, perfectly aware she was being addressed as an adult and not wanting to fall short of that, she blurted, “Will it hurt him? Hurt him really bad?”

“Bad as I can contrive. Figures, Rayne does, I’m just a mutt moron. Pretty, maybe, and nice for a toy for a day or a few but not much of a tool except I can work the Stone. And he’s got other ways for that ‘f he needs to. But I’ve been thinking.” Spike sat forward in his chair, frowning thoughtfully, hands folded on his knees. “Lady, she pushed and she nagged, but she’s never forced me to nothing, never. And whenever I put out my hand, she set power in it, as much as I could handle or understand. She sent the amulet, guided Red an’ Demon Girl to it, same as. Sometimes she can’t stand me…but she’s always respected me. Always left me my choice. If she’s pulled out now, it’s because she figures everything’s in place that needs to be, to end this. And she don’t care to do things direct, barge in and force events. Ain’t got the fine touch for that, I expect. Scale is too small for the kind of thing she could do. Like trying to hit a fly with a mallet, knock down the wall. Seems that’s how Powers are, or we’d all be flat, long since…. Instrument. That’s what she’s called me. And so long as we see the same and want the same, I got no objection to that. Won’t be her dog, run to her heel, bay at her moon like some…. But seems as though she’s prepared to put up with that. Settle for what I’m willing…what I can give. Not so much, maybe, as I thought. But I see this lining up, like I said….”

“Spike, nine tenths of that was utter nonsense,” Dawn mentioned, perfectly fairly, “and the rest was vague to the point of uselessness. You know that, right?”

Spike tilted his head and gave her a slow smile. “Let me tell you about this tower there was, one time, in Northumbria. Had ivy on it so thick, there were whole stretches you couldn’t see an inch of stone. A bit nasty in the wintertime but this was October, still warm days and the trees roundabout a riot, lots more trees then than nowadays, go for miles and miles and never see anything else. Anyway, we were up there because Herself had taken some notion or the stars had told Dru staying where we were was bad luck, or some such nonsense, nobody explained it to me because nobody ever did then, s’how it was--I wasn't but a fledge. Now then, Angelus, he--”

It wasn’t often, anymore, that Spike would spin her a tale of the bad old days. Maybe he figured she was now old enough. Or he was.

He’d made it completely clear it would be impossible to drag him back to the point. So he was cracking the one-inch stock into stake lengths with his hands and regaling Dawn with the unsuitable, gruesome, perverse part when Buffy came out onto the porch, looking around under her hand. “Oh, there you are,” she called, and came toward them. “What’cha doing?”

Holding out her bare green chilly toes for Buffy’s admiration, Dawn said, “Spike is being incredibly non-PC and I think I’ve been blinded with balderdash into promising to die a virgin, but I’m not entirely sure, it was all so philosophical and like that.”

Buffy did a blinking take, pushing a sheaf of uncombed blonde hair off her shoulder and not-so-incidentally revealing a freshly swollen and reddened mark low on the right side of her neck. “Well, I was only gonna say, I’ve invited Giles for supper. He says he has news, so I thought we might as well all hear it together….” Her voice trailed off uncertainly. Face twisting, she demanded, “Die what?”

Dawn and Spike traded a glance that meant Mall now and efficiently separated to collect the necessary.

**********

At a junction in the pipes nearest the factory, Spike set the parcels down and had a solitary cigarette before going further. Buffy, that was one thing, she’d never live to grow old, never die of a disease, and she had that Slayer healing thing going, near as good as a vamp, repairing all damage, both obvious and subtle. But Bit, now, that was a different matter. Coming back into this reformed body, she’d been given the option of continuing always exactly as she was: seventeen because she said so and the right date had rolled ‘round. Said that was what she wanted and had fixed on, but Spike didn’t know, there seemed some wavering from that direction lately. And anyway it seemed an Elvish kind of immortality, like that Arwen Evenstar--eternal youth, sure, but only if they stayed out of harm’s way. Knife or a fall off a roof, drowning, fire, that sort of thing, that’d kill ‘em just like anybody. Spike didn’t want to be the one to put that to the test. Decided he wouldn’t smoke anymore around her, or any of the SITs, or basically anybody with the habit of breathing.

Been a pariah, he had, for the past decade or so. Nothing new, just one more reason to mind what he did around the humans, that were so fragile it scared him sometimes. That would be where his unlife was, far ahead as he could see. So begin as he meant to go on.

Stubbing out the butt, he got the parcels together and put them into the shopping bag, which he hadn’t bothered doing before, then walked the rest of the way. He stopped at the ladder to announce himself, and the sentry up above was a fledge (that Toby or some such stupid name) who dithered and then let him come, though of course he didn’t know the password. Unsatisfactory. Spike set down the bag and belted him as soon as he was clear of the hatch.

“You go by what you were told. Let just anybody past, you won’t last long.”

“Knew it was you, perfectly plain,” the fledge protested, from the floor. “Smelled you, and--”

“That don’t signify. Anybody don’t say the password, an’ you ain’t been given a go-ahead in advance, you leave the hatch locked and yell for somebody else to make the call, if you’re not sure.”

“But I was sure!”

“Shut up. Tell Michael I’m here.”

The fledge looked, if possible, even more nervous. “But he’s…busy.”

Cocking his head, Spike made out raised voices from out past the barrier wall. Mike and…Kennedy, it was, and the fledge nervous of approaching, afraid of becoming collateral damage. Spike told the fledge to carry on, and left the bag by the hatch. Passing, he noticed the Dalton in the office, bent over the computer, but getting things sorted with Mike had to come first. Find out how the lad meant to play things, then make the hand-off in good order, plain, where everybody could see.

Or there’d have to be a fight, which was in nobody’s best interests.

The two of them, arguing, were out in the open space, everybody else backed off or up in the rafters: staying well clear. Kennedy had a clipboard and was waving it about, looking as though she’d try to swat Mike with it any minute, absolutely within Mike’s striking distance, which was dumb, but maybe she’d forgot to take such things seriously in her time with Spike. So that would have to be sorted, too.

Arms folded to not just swat her, Mike was glowering and looming, like he did--Angelus’ get, after all: same demon, and like calls to like--and spending much too much time and attention on whatever was wrong between him and Kennedy, considering everything else going on. Should just deal with it and go on. But that would be for Mike to learn and not up to Spike anymore.

Mike flicked him a glance as he approached, but it took Kennedy longer to notice him. When she did, she wheeled around (that put Mike, unwatched, at her back, and that was wrong, too) demanding heatedly, “Spike, am I some kind of concierge, goes with the place? Did you give me away and not tell me? Where does he get off, giving me orders?”

“Getting that sorted now. Michael, I’m claiming the SITs for mine. Slayer’s, actually, but mine as far as here’s concerned. Marked ‘em, now, so that’s how it will go. You need ‘em for something, you go through me or the Slayer, either one. Oh, an’ I lessoned your sentry on the pipe ladder, and I shouldn’t have. Yours to see to, how that’s set up. Sorry. Wasn’t thinking.”

“That’s all right,” Mike responded slowly, watching him steadily, accepting the awkwardness of what they were doing.

It was mostly the fledges, Spike noted, up along the rafter-beam. Showed sense: when there was a scrap, no matter who between, it would be the fledges that got hurt first.

Spike had been most of the day working up to this, how it should go. Going to the mall first, that had been good. No issues of dominance, ever, between himself and Bit. Got himself some fresh plain T-shirts, black, nothing special, but Bit, she’d enjoyed choosing them out for him. And got herself one of those wash-off marker tattoos of a star on her cheek, all pleased with that. Lovely and quick and shrewd and glad-hearted, she’d done a lot to settle him down to the unheard-of thing he was doing and had meant to do all along.

Scratching an eyebrow, Spike went on, “Came up to collect my bike. Few other things. On account of I won’t be up here so much. Got other things to see to. Except where I say directly, whatever Michael says, goes. You all, you go by his word an’ his authority. He’s got that already pretty much settled, I expect, but I don’t want anybody in any uncertainty whatever that he’s who you have to mind. Anything I want done, I’ll relay through Michael. Like about the sweeps an’ all. This place, an’ blood deliveries for the fledges, that’s all set up now like it should be. So now Michael, he has the running of it. So I can tend to other things, like I said. You got any problem with anything, you go to Michael with it, or whoever he says. You hear that, Huey?”

“Hear you, Spike,” Huey answered, from back by the wall.

“Then that’s sorted. Michael, this all suit you?”

Mike knew what this was: a thinly disguised abdication. Kept any change of expression off his face; but he smelled sad, and uneasy.

They both knew Spike’s role as titular Master of Sunnydale had to continue--neither Mike nor his regime would survive without it, without Spike plainly seen, and felt, to be in charge. But for Spike to cede to Mike the day-to-day running of things, and to thereafter defer to that delegated authority--to another Master on his own ground, among his own people--could be an acceptable compromise, not requiring a fight to publicly settle the dominance.

“Sooner you stayed,” Mike said wistfully, and likely there was some truth to that. Not a lot, but some.

“Can’t. You need me for something, you know where to find me. An’ ain’t real eager to run a Supplice d’Allégance on you, Michael. Don’t neither of us have the time for that. Just have to trust you to be true. Like you have to trust me. Hell of a thing.”

Mike nodded, acknowledging this terrible state of affairs, for vamps to have nothing more reliable than trust to keep them from each other’s throats. Blow that in a second, generally.

Glancing at the rafters, Spike added, “Sue, you come down, follow along. Keep clear of Ken. Ken, you come along, too. Michael,” Spike said, strolling toward the barricade wall of big, dead machines, “there’s a couple of people I need you to keep boarding, ‘cause I ain’t got a place for them yet. But I want the use of them. Answerable to me. Sue, here…an’ the new Dalton. Need ‘em for doing my stuff, not be thrown out on sweeps or other risky stuff. Long as they make their manners to you and don’t start trouble, you let ‘em be, all right?”

“Got no trouble with that,” Mike allowed. “Spike….”

“Later,” Spike directed, as they passed through the barricade.

Dalton, or Cyrus, was cranky today. For one thing, he was a brand-new fledge, and the blood ration was late today, and Kennedy was human, and though he knew he was forbidden to go after her, that barely registered. Second, if he couldn’t have Ken, he wanted Spike. But Mike was his sire, and Mike could beat him down and make him mind, and Spike sent Ken farther away, outside the glassed-in enclosure, and stood in the doorway himself while Mike enforced the necessary discipline. Spike noted that they both kept carefully clear of the computer, which normally Spike wouldn’t let any fledge get within falling distance of. But a Dalton without his materials was useless.

Curled on the floor, Cyrus rubbed his bleeding nose and licked the hand, reporting, “That is truly annoying. Does that continue any considerable time, Sire? Master? Bizarre, uncontrollable urges. It’s almost something like being a teen-ager again. A time I loathed.”

Spike set a hip on the corner of the desk, looking down sympathetically. “Lasts till you can make it stop. Years, for some. But you look at Sue, here: turned just a few months ago, can control her demon pretty well if she keeps her mind on it. Michael, he’s your sire, he’ll teach you what he can, what you need.”

“I could find nothing online,” complained Cyrus, pushing to his feet, only a little wobbly after a beating that would likely have killed a human. “Only some ridiculous mysticism. Master, I have nothing to do. I don’t have access.”

“An’ you ain’t gonna have, neither. Ain’t gonna give you my log-in or passwords. But I’ll pull up enough for you to work on, offline, an’ have Red set up an e-mail account for you. When you get a piece roughed out, send it on to me, and then we’ll work on it together. Maybe there’s some way we can do that live, from different locations. Current piece is Russian…that’s the location, anyway. Some ice demons, six hundred years or so back. Cognate with Cyrillic, anyway--using that alphabet, close enough if you can make out the sounds of it in your head. How’s your spoken Cyrillic?” Talking, Spike had slid behind the desk, logged in, and was downloading the first document from his own personal directory in the Watcher Database. When the download commenced, he got his glasses out of the second desk drawer and put them on, so the screen resolved for him without squinting.

“Wretched,” confessed Cyrus, looking ashamed and worried, like he thought he might get dusted for not knowing every language extant and all its cognates. “All but non-existent. I don’t believe I’ve ever heard it spoken.”

“Well, skip that first one, for now,” Spike said, considering the list of alternatives as the first download finished, “Go for the one titled ‘Concerning Urns’ that’ll be second down.” Spike clicked that entry, starting the download. “And lose the contempt for the mysticism real fast, because what you’ll mostly be translating is spells, and a good third to a half of ‘em work. So don’t say ‘em aloud. Never. You clear on that, Dalton? Or Cyrus, whatever--”

“But that’s magic!” Cyrus protested in a scandalized tone suitable for referring to pornography.

Looking up, Spike pointed out, “You’re here. You work it out. What d’you want to be called?”

The fledge put a thoughtful forefinger to his lips. “I gather that’s the sire’s prerogative, to say how his get is to be called. But…. I gather that Dalton is a more a function than a person. Is my impression correct? Because no one other than you and my sire has designated me so.” Off Spike’s nod, the fledge continued, “If given the choice, then, I’d be ‘Cyrus, the Dalton,’ to honor my predecessor and preserve continuity.”

“Fine,” said Spike, who could possibly have cared less, but only with an effort. Starting the third download, he absently sent Sue to collect his bag and, when she brought it, flipped a plastic-wrapped cell phone and its boxed charger stand onto an open part of the desk. “This is yours. Keep track of it. Michael will give you my number. I have this one. Once we get rolling, we’ll likely talk or pass stuff back and forth at least once a day. This is the whole reason you’re here, so this is where all your attention goes.”

“I understand,” replied the Dalton formally, folding his hands in front of him and bowing his head in acknowledgement.

They left him unwrapping the charger, joining Kennedy waiting near the wall of machines. Going toward her, Spike was keenly aware of his mark on her and realized for likely the first time ever, his basic reaction to Kennedy was liking, not barely-controlled irritation. He felt proprietary toward her. She was property, accessible anytime he chose. He knew exactly where he stood in regard to her, and all that had been complex and difficult was rendered simple, comfortable, and direct.

That Kennedy would have no such changed feelings toward him was pretty much a given. But it was easier on his end, anyway, which counted for something.

He put his glasses in their case and slid the case into a pocket. “Kennedy, you don’t have to come up here anymore. Ain’t gonna be here myself, and ain’t gonna need…whatever it is, you been doin’ for me. I need you, I’ll yell. The rest of your time, it’s your own. Get you and Michael out of each other’s faces. But there’s a thing I’d like you to do. You and Sue and Rona and ‘Manda, if she’ll go for it. The three of you, if she can’t, some nights. Run your own patrols, those places you’re most likely to find fledges just rising. Stake ‘em or not, I don’t care. Main thing is to find out who turned ‘em. Since I took over as Master of Sunnydale, there’s been more fledges than adult vamps by something like a factor of four. Somebody’s making a real business of it. I want to know who. Appearance ain’t likely to do much good: at the time, humans are so locked into being scared and their first sight of game-face, they’re not taking in much. ‘Less they’re told, most vamps don’t know who sired ‘em. Location’s useful, though. Time of day, maybe. Were they come at from the left side, or the right? Was the vamp taller than them, or about the same? Did the vamp say anything? When you get started, you’ll think of other things. Sue, you’re point and lead. Kennedy, you plan out the patrols and take notes. Rona’s for third, or however the three of you decide to sort it.”

“I’m lead?” Sue asked, quivering and excited. “And I get to go out? Every night?”

“You all three of you know the drill. Should run well together. Soon as possible, Sue, you set your mark on the other two, but separate--one to look on and call ‘enough,’ case things start getting carried away. Then some other night, the other. It’ll keep ‘em safe from you, calm your demon down toward them. You’re let off all other patrolling and sweeps to do this, all three of you.”

“I don’t think we need ‘Manda for this,” Kennedy reflected. “Three’s a good number, and ‘Manda has her midterms coming up.”

Sue said, “Ken, you gonna have a problem about me at lead? Or me covering Spike’s mark?” Her voice ascended to a strangled squeak at the daring of it.

“Oh, I imagine we’ll work something out, if you’re past the acute bitey phase,” Kennedy drawled, and shifted the clipboard to hold out her hand. When Sue cautiously took Kennedy’s hand, the shorter, dark-haired girl drew her in and hugged her, murmuring, “Welcome home, Sue.”

The two SITs went off with arms clasped around each other, so it looked to Spike as though that might work out all right. “They’re gonna have some sort of Scooby thing,” Spike said to Mike, at his back, “tonight, after dinner. Sit in, if you want. Eight or so. Or I’ll relay back to you anything I figure you’d want to know. Whatever you say.”

Mike laid a big hand on his shoulder and turned him, so they were facing each other, Mike looking sober and a bit wary. “No way you’re gonna just walk away from all this.”

“Watch me,” said Spike flatly, lighting up now that the human was gone. Looking around at the big dark space and the lit cube, he went on, “Hate this place, near as much as Harris does. Hate being here. Hate doing this. Having to think it all out, every second--not just do. Schooled myself to it awhile, but it’s itch and misery and drought to me an’ always has been. Never meant to keep it. Just to get things settled an’ regular, so you wouldn’t have more to contend with than you could handle. Always meant it for you, Michael.”

“That was the watch,” Mike guessed, pulling it from a pocket and considering it.

“That…and other things. And already, things have changed between us. Always have been changing between us, from the first. Ain’t gonna walk off on you now. Give you whatever space you want, an’ you’ll need it. But don’t want what you got. Not even a little. Slayer, she’s what I want and what I mostly have, as much as I ever will. Come down to it, she’s why I made this--to give her the space she needs. And a living place, not a devastation…or a battlefield. Thought I could see it farther along, tried to, but….” Spike shrugged. “Peace you made with her, working together on things, each respecting the other, that’s a fine thing. So maybe it was just as well I made such a mess of it all, so you had to go past me to keep it all from coming apart right there. Dunno. S’how it was, anyway.” Spike dropped the butt and stepped on it. “You’re welcome at Casa Summers anytime. Come through the pipes, call, and somebody will let you in.” Pointing, Spike added, “And you hurt Bit, I’ll still tear your head off, quicker than looking.”

“Could try,” Mike responded, with a slow, spreading grin. “But there’ll be no need. You taught me right: no Dawn, never no more, that ain’t an option here.”

Spike had his own ideas about that, but wasn’t gonna voice them to Mike. “Got to get going now: she’s waiting for me to collect her.”

Glancing at the bag as Spike picked it up, Mike surmised, “Mall parking lot? I’ll come with. And she can pick who to ride pillion with.”

Spike’s expectation of Dawn happily holding on, arms around his middle and warm cheek against his back, began to fade. He let it go. Her choice. Always had been. And he and Bit, they were another thing and always had been, too. Not as though she still bore his mark, after all, and well that was done, it would have been a nightmare and Buffy would never have stood for it. Made him faintly sick, even imagining it.

“Then let’s get gone,” he said, heading for the outer door.

“She always hates it if I make her late for dinner,” Mike agreed, rolling into step alongside.

**********

Dawn found it an interesting meeting, not least because everybody was there: all the original Scoobies except Oz and Cordelia, if you counted Cordelia, which apparently nobody did. Oz was missed, though, as he had been at Giles’ going-away party.

Anya was all proud of having talked the Chamber of Commerce into funding a Downtown Watch, which funding would go direct to Spike, Inc., on condition that the streets were patrolled from sunset to sunrise, every single night. Most of the downtown merchants, having seen a conspicuous upturn in evening business since the sweeps began, had agreed to pitch in under the impression they were subsidizing a street gang, which in a way, they would be. That the street gang weren’t human and hunted in their free time, the same as other vamps, were facts Anya hadn’t considered it necessary to burden the Chamber with.

Since no overhead and no wages were required, the weekly take would have been quite substantial, but of course it was protection money in all but name, which incensed Buffy and horrified Giles and Xander, and Spike and Mike had to try to explain to Anya that (1) trying to stop downtown hunting completely would provoke a general riot; (2) there weren’t enough vamps in the colors to cover even most of the downtown 10/7 or so; (3) Spike wouldn’t authorize it and Mike wouldn’t do it because it left no open time for the important vamp activities of drinking, fornicating, and brawling; and (4) all in all, it was far too much like actual work to go down well with the troops. They’d be angry and bored, and angry, bored vamps tended to do things not on the Chamber’s list of approved activities.

While Anya sulked at her under-appreciated commercial coup, Giles diplomatically suggested that the matter be tabled for now and reviewed at a later date.

Then, with diffident and unhappy resolution, Giles dropped his bombshell: no more tribute blood. Apparently some Council operative in France had heard about Spike’s claiming the title of Master of Sunnydale on the international demon grapevine. From that to the red-on-black recruiting website was no huge leap. And it had all unraveled from there, almost instantaneously. Nobody ever claimed Council intelligence (in the sense of spying) was bad--after all, they’d been locating and identifying Slayers for centuries--or that the Council was stupid. But few had ever had reason to claim the Council was altruistic or generous, either. A portion of the Council had seized Giles’ absence to ram through a nullification of the grant to the notorious (and evidently active) vampire, William the Bloody.

Spike went ballistic. Worse than when the tribute blood had been offered in the first place. In graphic terms he listed all the reasons he hated the Council, itemized starting a century past, with their willful misinformation about vampires, and continuing through to the present, with their barbarous, niggardly, authoritarian, treacherous, obtuse treatment of the one treasure of which they were the inadequate custodians: the Slayer. On his feet, at the top of his voice, spinning and slicing the air with bladed hands, punching it with furious fists.

Not even Buffy could get in a word edgewise.

“Hate the fuckers! Worst thing about the First, it wasn’t thorough enough by half. Slaughter a few dozen Potentials, blow up the bloody ugly Georgian architecture, but leave as many of those gits standing as they offed. Try to accomplish something, set something up that could last, God damned fucking vipers cut the ground right out from under you first chance they get! Miserable penny-pinching pissants!”

Still blazing, Spike flung himself away down the hall. The back door in the kitchen slammed thunderously as final punctuation.

Willow offered shakily, “I think Spike’s kinda upset.”

Standing by the couch, Giles took off his glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. “I anticipated he…. But he had to be told. No alternative. He was fair: didn’t assume I was responsible or condoned such…. He’ll manage. He always has. A setback, true, but not…not utter disaster.”

“So,” said Xander, leaning against the wall, holding a can of beer. “What do you guys think of the new front window?”

Mike’s phone buzzed. He rose to get it out of his pocket and stood with it held to his ear, thoughtfully frowning, and was in Buffy’s way when she started to go after Spike. So Dawn bolted in pursuit and slammed the door behind her too, scanning the dark yard from the porch. No Spike. Then she smelled cigarette smoke and slowly followed it diagonally across the grass until she was standing under the big corner maple.

She heard Spike’s voice muttering quietly and looked up until she located him: about halfway up in the tree, seated astride a branch, back against the main trunk. The coal of his cigarette disappeared, and there was a tiny beep as he shut off the phone.

Dawn performed a slow clap. The next thing she knew, she’d been grabbed under the armpits, lifted, and plopped side-saddle across the branch, with Spike perched next to her, farther out the branch, holding her until she found her balance.

“What gave me away?” he asked, cheerful and companionable.

“No, it was a very convincing rant,” Dawn assured him. “Reduced Giles to incomplete sentences, even. Just the small problem that you already knew. Had to.”

Spike chuckled. “Rona called, little while ago. Just after we’d got back. I’d left my new number on their machine. Hospital wouldn’t fill her standing order or whatever the hell they call it because the last invoice had been refused. All worked up about it, didn’t know what she should do. Fuck ‘em. Fuck ‘em all, the bastards.”

“Then why the tirade?”

“Don’t need ‘em anymore, the great galumphing gits.” Angry, Dawn had noticed, Spike sometimes ran to promiscuous alliteration. “Would only have added it to the fledges’ ration anyway. Not gonna give ‘em the satisfaction, though, knowing how it’s actually fallen out. Knowing I’m off the dead stuff altogether, an’ Buffy, she’s all right with it. Goddam honorarium, pat on the fucking head for being a nice harmless bloody lapdog of a vamp, grateful for their charity. Knew it wouldn’t last. Never depended on it. Bloody back-stabbing parsimonious wankers.”

Spike was truly angry and stirred-up, Dawn decided, although not to the extent he’d pretended. He added moodily, “Nothing they do toward me, now or that before, signifies anyway. It’s how they treat Buffy, or try to, that drives me spare. And what she’s got rightly coming, I pry out of ‘em with the translation. Now I got that Dalton, get that caught up in a week or so. Can put in the time on it now, if Red will let me use her laptop, nights when she don’t need it. Till the kitty’s built up, get the mortgage paid off an’ all that, and what Harris has been doing, get the house right again….”

“If you’re through with your theatrical snit, shouldn’t we go back inside?”

“Presently…. Bit, told you might be I’d have to throw you into something, risk you like I’d risk myself for a good enough reason. You still game for that?”

Dawn felt her breath catch, and every bit of courage she had seemed to drain out through her dangling toes. “Yeah, I guess. What are you throwing me into?”

“Gonna have Michael set up a meeting with Digger. Need to exchange pax bonds for that. Gonna require that Digger put up Rayne. And I’ll put up you. Like before.”

Swinging her feet, Dawn picked nervously at her sweater, recollecting the old frog-faced vamp and the huge stash of indiscriminately chosen candy he’d figured was appropriate for keeping a young girl quiet, not bursting into hysterics at capture and captivity.

“Rayne knows what I am,” she said quietly. “He knows about the Lady. Knows about the Keyness. More than I do, probably. And my…other qualification. Last night…he was in my head. Checking around about this and that. It was me they came after.”

“I know. But you an’ me, we’re the only ones that do. Like to keep it that way.”

Dawn nodded slowly, seeing it. “Mike, he’ll have a fit. You haven’t told him yet.”

“Not sure how he’ll jump, when I tell him that part,” Spike confirmed soberly. “Not a good time to be at odds with Michael--still too much unsettled there. Need to get it squared away with you, first. So you can help get Michael to go along with it. Let on it’s just the same as before and you’re not worried about it. Even if you are.”

“Buffy?”

“Believe I can manage Buffy. So long as you can stay steady about it. But it’ll take the both of us to finesse Michael, the way things are.”

“Is it? Is it the same as before?”

Spike took time lighting a cigarette, then made an annoyed noise and pitched it away, down on the grass. “Don’t expect it will fall out that way, no.”

“Gonna tell me why?”

“Can see the shot. Where the balls need to be. Matter of balance, angle, force, reaction. How they hit, how they’ll bounce.”

“In other words,” Dawn deduced, “no.”

“That Rayne, he’s got too much access for me to spell it out much, even for myself. Just feel it, see it shaping and coming together. Thing is, he looks but he don’t see. ‘Cause he don’t know the proper value to put on things. Doesn’t know what it means, that I’d risk you and you’d agree to be risked, just on my word. Doesn’t know what it means, that Rupert would set everything down to come back…before that Rayne had dragged me off to a place I couldn’t come back from. Doesn’t know what it means that the Lady will delegate what she wants done, keep to the limits she’s set herself.”

“Doesn’t know,” Dawn cut in, remembering Giles’ warning, “what it means to have the Triune Goddess fully arrayed against him. So the precautions he’ll take are the wrong precautions. His staff is too long and he’s digging in the wrong place. But will he accept being surrendered as a hostage to the meeting? A pax bond? Could Digger make him? Because Rayne doesn’t know vamp ways.”

“A chance to see Rupert again, and gloat, and preen, and Rupert can’t do a damn thing about it? He’d fight for the chance.”

“I’ll do it,” Dawn decided. “I don’t know what it is, but I’ll do it.”

Chapter 15: Convergence

2004-05-10T21:20:55Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 15: Convergence (complete)

Dawn took one glance at the map Willow held, with its single red dot, and grabbed Buffy's arm. "Let me do it." Cutting off whatever protest Buffy was about to make, Dawn persisted, "He won't freak, with me. I'm going." Still, she waited until her non-question was answered by Buffy's turning aside: tacit permission.

Mike the imperturbable was pacing. He knew, but he wouldn't say: at a guess, he'd promised not to. Freakin' big secret: Spike was hid out at abandoned Casa Mike, all of a block away. Mike responded to Dawn's indignant glance with an apologetic dip of his head and didn't say anything, which he was very good at.

Dawn sprinted the distance in a couple of minutes, then hung up outside, trying to figure the best approach to a suicidally depressed vampire. The usual, she decided: be annoying enough to get him talking and then wing it from there.

She opened the door. Cautiously, in case he was right inside, since it was still light out.

Once she'd determined Spike hadn't returned to the factory last night, Buffy had wanted him to come back under his own steam, of his own choice, and forbidden a direct hunt, opting for putting verbal thumbscrews to Mike, instead. Only when it was plain that was going nowhere had she given the OK for Willow to do a locator spell.

Casa Mike: practically next door, Casa Spike having been fire-bombed and burned to rubble. Not hard to interpret: he could have come home, but hadn't. The whole invite mixup, maybe. Didn't want to wake up a rightful resident at five in the morning to let him stumble in, formally invited. They'd both been pretty drunk, according to Mike, and Dawn didn't doubt it. The uppers, too, which ensured a hard crash, coming down. He'd likely still be asleep.

He wasn't sacked out on the couch in the dusty living room. He wasn't in the kitchen in back, either. Nor tucked up in any of the ground-level closets. There was a stairway up and a stairway down. On a hunch, she took the stairway down, flicking the light switch futilely (power finally cut off for non-payment, or maybe just a blown bulb), then taking the steps sideways, bent low to look.

He was sitting on the floor in the inside corner, farthest from the high windows. Back bent, arms slack at his sides, head bowed right into the corner. Made Dawn think of a punished doll. And not expecting anybody to see him that way, so that pose, that was just for him. The way he most felt like being. Fairly grim, she thought, approaching at a cautious sidle in case he was asleep.

But he wasn't. "Bit, you ever do like I said, get Red to fix you some different anchor?"

She leaned against the wall where she could see his profile. "Nope. Not gonna, either."

He didn't move or open his eyes. At least he wasn't rocking, and sounded sane. "You should. Nearly was gone a couple times last night, never thought till after about how you'd be tied into it. Sorry. For not thinking."

She slid down against the wall and hugged her knees. Taking a page from Mike's book, she said nothing. If Spike felt like talking, she wanted to listen. Sometimes silence drew better than questions.

"'F you're hangin' on 'cause you think that'll make me careful, it don't work like that. I don't think it out that far. Can't, I guess. Don't, anyway. So don't you consider me, that don't signify. You just consider you. 'F you don't want to talk to Red about it, some reason, I'll do it."

"When are you coming home?"

Long silence. Dawn waited. "Dunno," he said finally in a colorless voice. "Some time, I expect. When I'm wanted for something or other."

"You're wanted now, Spike. They're having a meeting about what to do about the sweep, tonight. They--"

Spike interrupted quietly, "I'm no use for that," like it was an obvious fact past arguing.

"Why? On account of the soul?"

"Oh, I can talk well enough," Spike responded, with the first edge of bitterness he'd allowed himself. "Just can't do nothing about it, not of any use. An' she'd want to know why, always wanting to know why, and that's not on the agenda. Not far's I'm concerned."

"I want to know why. You might have noticed," Dawn mentioned. "Mike's sitting in, so you don't have to worry about giving anybody vampire cooties. That's already all taken care of."

"Let Mike sort it, then. He's better off if I don't mix in."

"He's pacing. Doing his trademark strong, silent routine. Waiting for you."

Spike looked around sharply, yellow-eyed. "He tell you I'd laired up here?"

"The soul of discretion," Dawn denied, hands lifted virtuously.

"How, then? Oh. Had Red hunt me. Expect that Rayne, he can do that too, now…."

"Murder at sundown, news at eleven?"

"Got enough of my kit now, likely track me easy." Another long silence: working out the likelihood of an attack in force, here in this basement, as soon as it was dark. Another fire-bombing maybe, Dawn thought. "Have to have that talk with Red, I guess," Spike decided, and stiffly unfolded, bracing a hand on the wall. Still had the brass bangle on his right wrist, she noticed. But the other one was gone.

Following along, Dawn figured it out far enough to know the tricky part wasn't getting him to come--it would be getting him to stay. Whatever was coming, he'd want to draw it away, have it be him alone. And the necessary preliminary to that was cutting her loose: a strong enough reason to make him face the dreaded why.

Of course it wouldn't go that way, but if she could follow his thought, she could get ahead of him and block him when it would matter. It was enough, now, to have started him moving.

Except that he opened the front door and walked right out into the late sunlight. No preparation, no blanket, nothing. Dawn was frozen in the doorway, waiting for him to burst into flame.

He didn't. Catching a quick gulp of breath, Dawn saw he was unhurriedly aiming for the speckled shade of the nearest tree that still had most of its leaves. Slamming the door behind her, she sprinted to the tree and grabbed him there in a strangling hug.

"Dammit, give a girl some warning! You just scared me--"

"Sorry," he responded reflexively. "Didn't think about it. Just how it is now."

She somehow kept herself from saying the dreaded why, just held on harder, and was rewarded with his cheek against her hair.

"Sorry, Bit. Didn't mean to scare you. Didn't think…."

"You owe me seventy-five cents," Dawn announced in a dire voice, pulling back to look him in the eyes (currently pale blue).

He did the head tilt, puzzled, waiting for an explanation.

"Every time you say 'sorry,' you owe me a quarter."

"Says who?"

"Says me." Studying his face, she touched his cheek with experimental fingertips. Warm. And so were his hands. Maybe a little pink--she couldn't be sure. "New parlor trick?"

He shrugged. "Just noticed, is all. Some of it…." He frowned, searching for words. "Think some of it just…radiates. Like I'm channeling it. And the rest heals, fast as it burns. Long as I'm fed up good, anyway. Or that's how it's seemed. Long as the sun's low and I don't push it too far. Feels something like running a fever, as best I recall, which isn't much. Minute or so, though, it's gone."

She laid her palm on his forehead, then took both his hands. Cool again. "Even for a vamp, you're a freak," she reported, and he smiled slightly, waiting for her to finish her inspection. In his way, quieter than Mike…and that was very strange. She wasn't sure she approved. "What's the next mark?"

"Tree at the corner should be in range. If it's not, I'll tuck into that shadow by the big bush." He pointed, and Dawn confirmed the strategy. They zigzagged together from mark to mark, Dawn resisting the impulse to run, to drag him. He kept a steady pace, and she kept hold of his hand, feeling the heat build and then dissipate.

"This is so neat!" she couldn't resist telling him when they reached the large shadow of the house that had formerly been the neighbor of Casa Spike. "Think we can make the back porch all in one go?"

Spike considered the distance: the whole width of the yard of Casa Summers, plus a little. "From the hedge, maybe."

"Wait--I'll get a blanket, something. I want to see if you can do it. If you can't, just drop and I'll cover you up till you're cool again, OK?" Not waiting for any argument, she dashed to the break in the hedge, then on to the back porch and hammered on the door until Buffy came to let her in. Running for the stairs, she called, "Everybody onto the sidewalk, you gotta see this! No, Mike: you stay! I'll tell you afterward." Grabbing the chenille spread off her bed, she raced down, grabbing up ends and fistfuls of trailing fringe to avoid tripping herself, ordering, "Quiet, and watch the back hedge, OK?"

Dropping off the back porch, she went four long paces out into the yard and shook out the spread, figuring if Spike got into trouble, it would be nearer to the house than to the hedge. She looked around to check that the audience was in position with a clear line of sight, then called, "OK, Spike, I'm ready! Come on."

He came through the hedge at the same unhurried stroll, smiling at her as he passed, went up the porch steps, and then locked there, in front of the open door.

She'd forgotten about the disinvite.

Dumping the spread, Dawn ran, took the steps in two jumps, and whirled in the kitchen, blurting breathlessly, "Spike, come in, for God's sake!"

He came inside vamp-fast and was in the hall before she could turn to face him. Definitely pink, this time. "Cut it a bit fine," he commented, hugging himself nervously.

"Sorry--I forgot!"

"Down to fifty cents, now: debit you a quarter."

"Bet I make it back within fifteen minutes," Dawn riposted, going out to retrieve the spread. And encountered the audience, spilling into the yard via the driveway, too impatient to get an explanation to circle back through the house. Pulling up successive heavy drapes of chenille and clutching them against her, Dawn reported Spike's theory, finishing by fixing Buffy with a gimlet stare. "Now I've told you all there is to tell. Don't ask him why. Don't ask him why anything. And every sorry costs him a quarter, and I'm keeping count, so don't bankrupt the corporation, all right? You were right, Buffy: don't push him. Wait and let him come to you. And that's really good advice, and I hope you take it. Because otherwise, he's gonna be gone and you're gonna be sorry, and we're talking major money here."

Clutching the armload of spread, she led the parade back into the house.

*********

Spike was absently patting pockets for a pack of smokes and the lighter and there was nothing, not so much as a matchbook, when he found all the Scoobies gathered around him, smiling in goofy benevolence: fucking puppy had done a trick. Well, he was having none of that, thank you very much. Nobody here he wanted to talk to excepting Red, to get the thing done.

Drunk had cleared nearly all the fog away, he could make her out plain, and was just about to explain about Bit, what had to be done, when Willow informed him brightly, “You’re bronze.”

And the poncy habit kicked in from God knew where and he responded blankly, “Excuse me?”

“You used to be all silver and shadow,” the witch continued, formulating a thesis. “Mirrored, almost. Taking the image of whatever was around you, none of your own. Quicksilver, the cool liquid metal that’s slow death to the touch. That’s why the Mad Hatter was mad: mercury poisoning used to be an occupational disease of hat-makers. But now you’re bronze, a blended metal. Yet one thing all through.”

Head reared back, Spike considered her sternly. “Have you gone completely ‘round the bloody bend?”

“No, you have. And back again.”

Complete nutcase bonkers. Or, he thought uneasily, maybe it was him. That stopped him, made him uncertain. Backing against the staircase wall, he reached out a hand. “Bit…?”

She came to him, his touchstone, quick and graceful. Casually folding fingers into his braceleted hand, she slid between, her back to him to face the confusion and keep it from him. Dawn told the witch, “You’re freaking him. Could we maybe do the fun metal folklore some other time?”

From the back, Buffy’s humorless voice suggested they all reconvene in the front room again, but that was nothing to do with him anymore and he stayed where he was until Willow leaned to start after Harris. Then Spike stepped into her path. “Need you to do a thing.”

“We can talk about it,” Willow offered amiably, “after--”

“Now.”

Willow settled, and after an assessing glance, Dawn evidently found the level of weird acceptable and released his hand. Not about to just leave them to it, though: heading into the kitchen, Dawn commented, “He wants to cut me off. Dawnectomy. I say, first, do no harm. Leave things as they are. So there’s nothing to talk about.”

“’S my soul,” Spike argued, past Willow. “Don’t want you hitched to it. Piece you have, you stole, never asked, just latched onto it. I should have rights what’s hitched up to it or not.”

Dawn leaned out, just her head and the hanging scarf of hair, to say, “I didn’t hear any complaints at the time.”

“Doesn’t signify. Connect up to your sis or whatever, up to you, that side of it.” Because the Slayer was no safe connection neither, and that realization had so much that came with it, it hung him up with his eyes shut to not be totally distracted. Hold to the point. He told Willow, “’S a waste, otherwise, an’ she’s just being provoking. Most things, I’d let her have her way. Not this. Needs doing, and needs doing now. Her holding on ain’t gonna change nothing that happens, except to get her hurt too. Cut her loose.”

“You do,” Dawn warned the witch, “and I’ll make you sorry.”

Willow said, “I really don’t like being in the middle of you two arm-wrestling. And I have no idea how to go about doing what you want, Spike. I can loose souls or restore them--I never read anything that tells about de-fractioning them. Giles? A second opinion needed here.”

When the Watcher came mooching out of the front room, hands in pockets, all smooth reserved surface, Spike was almost as startled as if it’d been Angel. It rearranged reality: not anything he thought about, just something he knew beyond question--that the Watcher was gone. That taking care of the Slayer fell solely to Spike now. That guarding her back wasn’t good enough anymore--Spike had to scout ahead, too, and clear the way before her. The task he’d fallen down on, been inadequate to.

The last of the heat dissipated, leaving him cold and still in his surprise.

Regarding him, Giles remarked quietly, “Hello, Spike. I’ve been here several days, but I gather you weren’t in a position to notice. Oddly enough, I came for you. Because of Ethan.”

Spike backed against the wall again but Giles touched him anyway, setting a hand on his shoulder. Spike vibrated under it, with noplace left to back to. Couldn’t just swat the ponce. He was at a loss. He felt his features shift aspect. His throat was tight with the beginnings of a snarl. Dawn came across the hall fast and took his hand again, telling the Watcher, “Being personal pushes the wrong buttons right now. You should know that.”

“I do know that,” Giles said, not budging, continuing his sober inspection of Spike. “I know exactly what buttons it pushes. And I believe it’s important that he know that I do. Spike. You’re not alone in this. In…difficult circumstances, you’ve done very well.”

Spike burst out, “Fucking hell!” and twisted out from under the touch, pulled away from Dawn, heading for the front door. Couldn’t tolerate the Watcher’s pity…or his understanding. Sun was almost gone, he should manage all right. Get someplace fucking else, that was all. Stupid to have laired up so close, but he’d needed that--

Buffy was suddenly at the door, her back against it, blocking his way. Her eyes said she wasn’t about to move, neither.

Boxed between people he couldn’t hit, Spike flung himself up the stairs and out Buffy’s bedroom window onto the roof. Shrouded within clouds now, the sun offered an even light, directionless, everywhere the same. Some low level of burn to exposed skin but Spike processed that automatically, vaulting over the roof peak to descend and crouch at the edge like a gargoyle. He heard, felt, Buffy behind him, relentlessly pursuing. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t want to.

Coming down the low slant to stand beside him, she wordlessly offered a pack of cigarettes and a silver lighter. Bobbing his head in acknowledgement, he took them and shakily lit up.

“It all can be replaced,” she remarked, looking out over the darkening yard. Her scent flowed across him, surrounded him. “All of it except you. Lighters are easy. This--this is hard, though. Why is this so hard?”

“Dunno,” Spike muttered. “Just is. Let the bloody side down, didn’t I? Not nothing to be proud of. Not up to it. Not good for nothing, like this. Can see it but not do it. An’ before, do it all just fine, couldn’t see the way. Or the meaning. Ramifications. Consequences. In short, fucked. For the mongrel bastard freak I am. Can’t go neither forward nor back, can’t stand still. Doesn’t matter, though. Be gone soon, won’t matter.” Heat that felt like the sun’s burning roiled within him and he didn’t know how to shed it. Let it take him, then. Had it coming. Icarus.

Buffy settled down beside him, legs stretched out, feet dangling, and for a long time neither of them said anything. Spike pitched the butt-end and started another, just to have something for his hands to do.

“Never thought I’d ever do this,” Buffy remarked eventually. “Sit with you in the last of the light. Guess I should have known, though. You’re always surprising me. I no sooner say ‘never,’ and you’ve popped up and done it. I shouldn’t be so quick with the ‘never,’ I guess.”

When he chanced a glance, she wasn’t looking at him--both a disappointment and a relief.

After awhile, she commented, “I figured it out, you know. Why you started this. After the Hellmouth was shut, you waited for me to decide what way to go on. And I decided on the Slayer…and you. And the minute we got back, you started this: set the soul aside, began laying the infrastructure. Got Mike sorted, to be your right hand on your side of things. Began pulling away, so I wouldn’t get sucked into it and because you knew parts of it…wouldn’t be things I could accept. It was for me. To help me make Sunnydale a place a Slayer could live in, and be a Slayer with her vampire lover, and maybe not die quite so soon. Building it up from the vamp side of things, that I don’t really want to know about and I guess never will. Knowing better than I could what that would mean and require. It’s been for me.”

“’S always been for you, pet. Made a hash of it, though. ‘M sorry. Gonna be worse now than if I never started.” Spike pitched the second fag, though a good half of it was left. Had to pitch something, and himself off the roof wasn’t an option.

“No,” she responded thoughtfully, “you took it far enough that all the pieces are in place. It hasn’t fallen apart. And it won’t. We can take it from here, I think. Mike and I have been talking today, in our strange, un-talky way. And we’re both willing to try. Want to, actually. Because the dream you had is a good dream, and you brought it far enough that we both can see it. Most of it. Some of it.” She shrugged. “But it can’t work without you. You have to do the hand-off, then come in for the things nobody else can do. Nobody else is the one true heir of the Order of Aurelius. Nobody else commands Digger’s respect…and caution. Nobody else sees the whole of it, what it can be when it’s done and self-sustaining. Giles helped me see that part of it, because I’m blind as a bat when it comes to you. You know that. I look, and all I’m thinking is Yum, pretty, hot, I want that! Which isn’t too helpful for long-range strategy.” Another shrug and a wry smile.

She was so beautiful. Nothing like her ever before or ever again.

Impossible that she not be let down by his failure. But she was forever impossible. Forever surprising him. Forever dear and precious beyond measure.

He’d long since shifted back out of his demon aspect. Not comfortable to him anymore, most of the time, and soul got real indignant when he left his demon with the running of things. But curiously, neither soul nor demon was nagging at him at the moment. Both content and serene, not trying to grind him to powder between them.

Bronze, he thought, with a glimmer of what Red had been getting at. A true amalgam, not just the disparate pieces. Bronze. Maybe. Might be.

So right away, he came out with the worst of it: “Can’t keep on like I been doing. Goddam tribute blood, pig’s blood, s'all the same. Can’t tolerate it. For awhile I could tell myself I could make do like that, Angel does, an’ Angel ain’t got the option of a taste of you, every now and again. S'not enough. Got to hunt and take it live. That’s one thing that…whatever it was, with Rayne, taught me, made me know. It’s the life I’ve got to have. Starved, without. What I am. 'M not Angel, can’t do like he does. ‘F it's not live, has no meaning, and I need that. The meaning, as much as the blood. What I live on. Anything else, it’s just death in tiny sips. For me. Sorry. Can’t.”

“You now owe Dawn fifty cents,” said Buffy, and slid closer to gather him in against no resistance. He felt as though her scent and her warmth were soaking into him. She went on, “I know you’re not Angel. I’ve never wanted you to be. It’s not Angel I love--not anymore. Maybe Angel could have planned this all through, carried it out step by deliberate step, and made something like the Thousand Year Reich. But what would it be, what would I be, at the end of it? You’re not a cold-blooded planner. You’re a fighter. Like me. And you made the best start of it any fighter ever could. And brought it to the place we can take it on from here. It’s a good thing you were trying to do, and it will be a good thing when we’re done. Not 100%, but we live in Sunnydale, not heaven. And in Sunnydale, vamps are what they are. And I can’t wish them all gone. I just can’t. So I accept the forest, even though I’ll keep whacking at the individual trees whenever they deserve it. Or get in my way. Or have a real unlucky day. And we’ll do it together. If live blood is what you must have, then that’s what you get, however you have to. First you were forced, and afterward you tried, fair and square. For years. If you say it’s not enough, I’ll take your word for it. It’s not all one thing or all the other. You find out where the balance is. I told you, I love you all the way back and all the way forward, as far as we can go. I know I can’t have you feed on just me, can't be enough all by myself, though it feels great when we do it. If you don’t kill, and I know you don’t, anymore, I’m OK with it. Now the soul’s back, I have no problem letting you, and it, make that call. No explanation or apology needed, ever. You do what you do. I’m not your jailer or your judge. And not your executioner, ever. I only love you and think you’re the finest vamp that ever was or will be. And I don’t want you any different than you are. Scars and all.”

Her finger stroked the criss-cross scar on his brow, that was from a Slayer’s magicked blade, and she kissed his eyes, and maybe it wasn’t so hopeless as he'd believed, after all. So long as she still loved him.

**********

Spike was slouched in front next to Buffy, who was driving with her usual grim determination, as though the SUV had to be wrestled into submission at every turn and stop sign, most of the traffic signals having turned to blinking yellow or blinking red so late on a Saturday night. Buffy (Dawn thought) equated a blink with a flinch and gave such indecisive lights no quarter, barging through without touching the brakes at all.

Willow had the front passenger side, reviewing spells with a penlight, muttering under her breath. Glowering and cranky, Mike was with Dawn in the middle seat. They had to drop him up at the factory to choose the crew for the sweep, and he tried out a tentative roster on Spike, who only said, “Anybody you please.”

Mike leaned forward, objecting, “That’s no answer.”

“S’your call.”

Mike didn’t like that either, subsiding with a scowl.

“Keeping that Len as your second?” Spike inquired after a minute or so.

“Why shouldn’t I?” Mike shot back.

“No reason. Just wondered.”

“He’ll keep the fledges in line.”

“Oh. You’re gonna take fledges, then.”

“What of it? Gonna need ‘em, and they’re no loss.”

“Guess so.”

Buffy ran the yellow lights faster.

It was a relief to reach the factory’s driveway, where Mike got out and vanished into the dark as Buffy backed into the road to head back to the named mark.

Easing off on the gas now that stormcloud Mike had been ejected, Buffy asked Spike tightly, “How are you doing? If you say ‘fine,’ I’m gonna smack you.”

“All right, not fine then. That make you happier, pet?” Spike sounded tired and discouraged.

That was good, Dawn judged: it meant he wouldn’t start in about her anchor again for awhile. As Dawn leaned forward, arms folded along the seat back, Buffy demanded, “What’s got into Mike? What’s he so mad about? We agreed to help with the sweep.”

“Bit, you tell her.”

“Power vacuum noises?” Dawn hazarded.

“Something like.”

Buffy persisted, “What’s that mean when it’s in people-speak?” Although Buffy’s voice was sharp, Dawn saw that Buffy had her arm tucked through Spike’s, both her hands dutifully on the wheel. Spike was the only one-handed driver in the family. “Is he on board with this agreement or not?”

“His word’s good,” Spike replied. “He’ll do what he says, though maybe not the way anybody else would want him to. Dunno how he’ll jump. S’hard for him right now.”

“Does that mean you trust him?”

Sighing audibly, Spike slid lower, his knees against the dashboard.

He was unfocused, vague, drifty, uncertain--the most “off” Dawn had ever seen him, sober. Vulnerable. And Mike was affected by it: demanding orders Spike didn’t want to give and Mike resented taking.

“It’s like when Mom was sick,” Dawn formulated suddenly, “and you had to make my lunches. You had to do it because Mom couldn’t, but you hated doing it because that meant things weren’t right and you wanted Mom to get better so you could go back to being a kid again, and Slayer, of course, but she didn’t, and I was miserable because, well, Mom, and complaining about PB&J every day and being a brat because you weren’t Mom and you wouldn’t give me lunch money. And like that,” Dawn finished breathlessly. “Patterns all mixed up and conflicted. And in case I forgot to say, I’m sorry about being such a brat. And Mike absolutely hates not knowing where he stands. A fight would clear the air but, well, fight. Big mess.”

“Huh,” Buffy responded thoughtfully.

The mark was the theater again because it was a high traffic area every night and well lit by streetlights for several blocks in all directions. Buffy parked in front of Evans’ Florist, and Dawn knew what that meant: Buffy wanted to keep the SUV close as retreat or escape, and to protect it. Their Armored Personnel Carrier, fortress, and tank. As everybody got out, Dawn saw a couple figures on the opposite side of the street turn just a little too fast and vanish. Vamps. In a few minutes, the word would be out that no matter what anybody had expected, the sweep was on with the theater as the mark…and Spike was present and apparently presiding.

Giles had emphasized how crucial that was, and neither Spike nor Mike had argued although neither had seemed to like it. Spike had to be seen, and seem in control of things, as if nothing had changed. Otherwise, things would start coming apart real fast. Even though about the last thing Spike wanted tonight was to get into a fight, as off as he was. Dawn heard him mutter, accepting a hand axe from the stock in the back of the SUV, “Forgot to pay my dues in the scarecrow union.”

According to Giles, Rayne would want Spike left alone, hoping to reassert control and use him to manipulate the Chaos Stone. So it was reasonable that Digger would hold off on presenting a major challenge.

Spike had repeated, “Reasonable,” in a certain tone of voice, and Giles had admitted, “Yes, quite. Better double it, then.”

Because if anything was certain, it was that vamps didn’t go by what was reasonable--they saw weakness, vulnerability, and went after it in proper predator fashion.

Even his own. Even Mike, who showed up on his motorcycle a few minutes later, with the chosen crew piling out of three lame-looking vehicles like a bunch of circus clowns, only a lot less funny. Mike couldn’t give an order without half the crew looking to Spike for confirmation and the other half wandering ever-so-subtly into Spike’s personal space, bumping his shoulder or otherwise jostling him. By the time Xander arrived with the SITs, the whole vamp contingent was game-faced and edgy, not just the half-dozen fledges, who’d had to be sent to the back of the alley to keep them from coming at Dawn.

Spike had done that. Predictably and reassuringly. It was why Dawn was there, against Spike’s objections--to need protecting.

Officially, she was present to be a power source Willow could draw on if the mark came under attack. Unofficially, she was there to insure that Spike would actually fight if he had to, not just stand there and get dusted, as both she and Buffy were worried he’d do, left on his own.

After Mike had divided the crew into squads and given them their individual marks, he wandered over, still gloriously game-faced, and murmured, “Dawn Dragonslayer. Got your taser?”

“Right here,” Dawn said, showing him, and shook the bag of stakes slung over her shoulder by way of further demonstration that she was prepared to fight if the opposition didn’t do the sensible thing and came straight for Spike.

“Don’t you do that. If it turns into a scrap back here, you get inside the van, lock everything, and holler. Cell’s your best weapon here. Show me that.”

Dawn pulled the cellphone out of her overalls pocket, but Mike still wasn’t satisfied and made her call him to be sure both cells were charged and working. Then, his face smoothing, he just looked at her: not wanting her there any more than Spike did, but accepting that it wasn’t up to him. Stuck between what he wanted and what he could have, even in this.

It was so plain and so sweet that, having poked her cell away, Dawn caught up one of his hands in both hers, and it just sort of seemed natural that his arm turned her and curled around, enclosing her in a careful steady hug--their backs to Spike, she couldn’t help noticing.

“Don’t like this,” Mike’s voice rumbled in her ear. “Don’t like this at all.”

“I know. It will sort itself out. It’s the between that’s hard.”

A gulped chuckle. “Ain’t gonna say what I’m thinking. ‘Cause I’m a vamp, I expect.”

“Better let go,” Dawn advised, not pulling away, “or Buffy will have a fit.”

He didn’t stir either. “No, that’s fine now. She’s lifted her forbidding. Not up to nobody but you now.”

“What’d you hit her with?”

“Somewhat of a trade. Had something she wanted, so we worked it out.”

“The agreement,” Dawn realized, finally pulling away and turning to look him in the face, not sure if she liked being bartered like that.

Mike let her go, lifting a shoulder slightly. “Might have come into it anyway. But it was a good trade. Good reason.”

Better, he meant, than inadmissible worry about Spike, that would have been awkward for both vamps. Dawn shrugged in turn and scuffed a foot to show she understood the delicate balance of honor, power, and necessity Mike was trying to move through in a way that wouldn’t require settling dominance quite yet.

She told him, “We’re good,” and gave him a smile.

“That so,” he responded, smiling back--his eyes, mostly. “Have to explain to me what that means, sometime.”

“I haven’t figured that out yet myself. There are layers. And complications.”

Mike’s phone squawked, and he immediately put it to his ear, listened a moment, then said, “Yeah,” before stowing it in a front jeans pocket. “Got to go. Len’s got himself and the fledges into something.”

He waited for her nod, and looked for Spike’s acknowledgement, before swinging onto his bike and roaring off.

Dawn found Spike looking at her with no particular expression, but his only comment was, “Like he said--‘f this goes pear-shaped, you get in the van.”

There were just the three of them left. Buffy, the SITs, and Xander were one squad, sweeping an area four blocks on a side, centered on the mark, in constant touch with Willow, who’d set her spell book on a pile of empty cardboard boxes just inside the alley and was bent over, still studying it, the penlight poised in one hand and her cell held to her ear with the other.

Spike had picked a wall to lean against and smoke, looking bored and half asleep. Dawn didn’t see the axe and didn’t know what he’d done with it.

Wandering over, Dawn said, “I should have brought the headphones. Sorry--I didn’t think of it,” just to be saying something.

“Fine: only owe you twelve dollars and fifty cents,” Spike responded, naming the accrued total of the “sorry” penalties. “You hear anything lately from the Lady?”

“Nope. You?”

Spike shook his head, a frown between his half-shut eyes. “Wish I knew what the hell she wants to come out of this. If I’m even s’posed to still be here.”

“She put back your soul,” Dawn offered. “Kind of a waste, if you dusted right away.”

“Yeah. I guess.” Spike studied the coal of his cigarette. “I expect she just don’t want Rayne to have me. Past that, it’s all good.”

“Drama queen,” Dawn accused.

“That too. Got the kit for it….” Dawn thought he added, “And a lot of fucking bloody use….” Pitching the cigarette, he headed slope-shouldered down the alley to check something or maybe to avoid increasing his “sorry” debt.

The front of the theater had become busier, the last few minutes--one show was letting out, and people were lining up to buy tickets for the final show: on a Saturday, nearly always a creepfest of some sort. Big market for that in Sunnydale, Dawn had thought sourly more than once. Watch on the screen what they wouldn’t admit seeing on the street.

Naturally, that was ringing the dinner bell for vamps. All that inattentive food wandering out into the night, trying to recall where they’d parked, scattering into small groups, pairs, and singletons. That was the main reason the theater was a regular gathering-mark--to keep unauthorized vamps off the people leaving, especially those wearing the smell. And sure enough, Dawn spotted some vamps drifting in, casual and inconspicuous except for the glide of their walk and the calculating way they eyed the flow of the people around and past them.

Because they were coming through, straight for the alley. At least half a dozen: none game-faced, none in the colors. Using the crowd as cover to get close.

Backing deeper into the alley, taser extended, Dawn sang out, “Spike!”

***********

Spike was thinking about architecture. Towers, in particular. With gothic angles and swoops. Flying buttresses and the like. The sort rarely seen in California, where flat was much admired, or cheaper, or something or other. Tapered towers in Slovenia or whatever the hell it was now, with roofs like fish scales, nasty to climb but neat to look at, like the tower was a living thing. And then you had your medieval Norman towers with arrow-slit windows you could skinny through although it made the place fucking cold in the wintertime, never get warm no matter how you built the fires up after you’d eaten all the inhabitants and there was no other source of warmth handy though enough brandy helped some with that. Lacework Spanish towers, all symmetrical, builders expecting to get struck by lightning or something if one of the patterns actually made a picture though you couldn’t help looking for them (habit probably, or not being in the right mind-set for the Moorish influence), beautiful by moonlight.

He’d got into the habit of tower climbing whenever he was ejected from the current residence for Angelus to have both the women for himself, the bastard, and Spike left to cool his heels, useless, frustrated, and furious. So he had quite a collection of towers in his mind to review, since the mood was on him again, though he didn’t have Angelus to blame for it, not even for the fact of being a fucking vampire, since that was Dru’s whim and none of Angelus’ doing.

Nothing worth the name in Sunnydale, not even a church steeple (lots of Mission-style flat) except for Glory’s rickety, jerry-built model that he didn’t like to think about even yet.

Probably for the best, since if he’d had one and tried to climb it, he probably would have fucked that up too. Useless git.

Pacing the alley, he felt Rayne at the edges of his mind but that didn’t signify, he wasn’t interested in that at all now, not even his demon, that was embarrassed to have been so easily sucked in for something that was only in the head, fake, nothing real. Sullen and silent within him, temporarily tamed by the lash of his contempt. Fucking bitch, roll over and beg for more, give it up to the first smooth-talker that asked, bloody stupid ugly worthless cunt of a demon.

When Dawn yelled, Spike barely took any notice. Witch would take care of that though vamps were coming from the back of the alley too, both directions. He felt it pass through him like the shock of hitting a disinvite--a bubble of force that closed off the alley and the three of them inside it. Opposition couldn’t get through. Nothing he needed to do about it, just as he’d expected. He pitched one cigarette and lit another, recollecting a tower in Prague.

A lance of force pierced the bubble and it collapsed. Grabbing Dawn’s hand and the both of them retreating toward him, the witch remade the invisible wall but it felt shaky now, flowing and changing like a soap bubble. Spike began to be concerned. Then Dawn went down all in a heap and the witch swung around, pale and wide-eyed, and it was a fight after all.

It’d been stupid to toss the axe onto the boxes, being so certain he’d have nothing to do. Should have expected that would be wrong. He went past the Witch and over Dawn in a rolling forward dive, catching up the long band of the bag of stakes, and plowed into the front wave of vamps swinging the bag to back them off: wood hurt, no matter what part of a vamp’s anatomy it hit. Less effective in the sack, though. As quick as he could, he grabbed a pair out and was in business, Willow meanwhile dragging Dawn against the nearer wall to put it at her back and casting baseball-sized clumps of glowy stuff at the vamps coming in from behind. Not much power in those, though: the vamps startled and held for a second when they were hit, then came on, not hurt at all that Spike could tell.

He’d taken out three vamps, and that left about ten remaining, and he was only engaged with four of them. The fight wasn’t balancing and he couldn’t cast the choreography, the flow of it, out in his mind. Didn’t matter, he supposed: Buffy and the SITs would be along soon to sort it. Only have to hold awhile, long enough for them to arrive, and afterward didn’t matter.

But the vamps he was engaged with should have swarmed him by now, two were big sods he recalled seeing sometime at Willy’s, but they were treating him like an incidental nuisance, belting him into walls and such but not locking him down for the kill. More intent on getting past him, he thought while hooking a leg out from under one of the smaller pair and stomping the knee before spinning out of what’d been meant as a headlock, with no time to place the stake. When the witch yelled in fury, behind him, he understood: they weren’t after him. They were after Dawn.

It felt like waking up, all over. His demon roused at the insult and even the soul was incensed, aflame with the need to defend, protect. Everything slowed down slightly because he was seeing it all, the true target at the center and therefore all the other motions comprehensible, even predictable.

Being flung into the wall for maybe the fifth time slowed him down a little but he had it mapped now, how to weave the blows, one, two, three, and duck and ease back, spin, take out the last one and be clear to confront the bunch behind.

It wasn’t gonna wait for Buffy, he already knew that, and if the witch couldn’t keep them off, there were enough to keep him engaged while Bit was hurt or taken or whatever they meant to do to her. Go to the fallback, then.

He’d used the alley of the theater as the mark often enough that he knew every inch and had a whole variety of contingency plans formulated and stored. Most didn’t cover this situation, with Bit down and the witch not able to jump the twenty feet to the bottom of the fire escape. So he went with another option, using the relative freedom of not being specifically targeted to get past and haul open the metal fire door, illegally locked to prevent anybody from sneaking in and seeing their crappy movies for free, setting off alarms inside, and that was fine with Spike: the more noise and confusion, the better. He yanked harder and took the whole door off its hinges and slammed it edgewise into as many vamps as he could reach, then flung it flat into the rest. That bought enough time for the witch to drag Dawn inside as the first panicked patrons came the other way, tangling with the vamps just getting themselves sorted again.

Spike shoved and elbowed himself inside with the half-formed intention of yelling “Fire!” to stir things up even more. Instead, some weird freak of habit made him lift an arm and yell, “Here!” as he backed Willow into the angle between the side of the stage and the rear wall and took a stance to guard the corner.

One, and then two, and then another pair, and then five, weren’t running. Hearing, they came to him, the untried ignorant children, veterans of the class, helping keep that corner protected from the storm surge of bodies trying to get out the door all at once. He saw Candy’s erect topknot and the two improving trippers and a couple of other known faces, and when he directed, “Lock arms. Stand,” they did that, swaying as they needed to, to make and hold contact with one another until the crowd thinned, most having headed for the front when the alarms started going off.

With the counter-flow easing, the vamps came in. So did Buffy and the SITs. The children had no business mixing into that, so Spike told the nearest one, “Stand. Stay put,” and dove into the melee.

The SITs had their tasers and it seemed to be settling nicely, with all but two down and then dusted, the SITs fighting efficiently by threes, two engaging and the lead going for the kill, when a new bunch barged in and they were fighting all over the clear area between the first seats and the stage, and some of the children were getting hurt and tossed around, unable to hold. But the tasers were still the margin: get in a charge clean, and the vamp was down, could be tended to later. SITs, they could mind themselves: Spike turned to get the children out of it. Some injuries as he pried them away from attacking vamps and shoved them clear, but that was better than getting their throats torn out. Stupid fucking movie still playing, everything flickering from the change of scenes and angles, screaming on the speakers as some idiot teens or other ran from some lame monster doing about an inch a year and still being overtaken, watch out for the root, oops, same every time, and until he caught the terror in the children’s faces, he hadn’t bothered to think he’d gone game-faced, of course he had, needed the velocity and the sight and the ferocious single-mindedness of his demon, didn’t he, and not about to shed it to avoid frightening teenagers who’d otherwise be so much dead meat.

It was Mike who had the good manners and consideration. Spike stuck to what he knew: direct, bloody mayhem.

And when they had that nearly all sorted, and Buffy coming toward him in the headache-inducing flicker, with the worst possible timing in the world, more reinforcements arrived: that Len and the fledges, who knew enough to veer around Buffy and the SITs but came straight at the children, many of which were deliciously bleeding.

Spike foresaw the awfulness, shaped in his mind as clear as if it’d already happened, and put himself inevitably between, calling, “Stand. Whoever budges is gone.”

But they were only fledges, and their demons hadn’t yet learned to mind them, let alone anybody else. They came on--swift, unheeding, and ravenous. He took the first two and pitched them into the rest, they were dust already by his word except for Mike’s thrift, and he’d carry out the execution himself if he had to. They checked and looked at him, assessing and smelling, and he knew they were thinking of taking him down. He’d taken damage, no hiding it; and the urge to challenge and pull down a wounded leader was instinctual. He’d watched Mike fighting it for hours. He’d done it himself a few times.

Likely he could take them all. That was one way things could go. If Buffy and the SITs couldn’t keep out of it, any tentative alliance she’d made with Mike was done, right there. That was another way things could go.

Spike twisted and broke the bangle. Using the jagged edge, he opened his right arm from elbow to thumb--offering the fledges a third alternative.

They weren’t of his bloodline. But blood as old as his had its own draw for any fledge--for its rarity, if nothing else. And they were his. He’d said so. They had more claim on his protection than the children.

He opened the other arm and stood waiting.

The first one to come was Sue--latching on high, above the cut, and biting deep. Leaving room for two others, farther down. The next was a stupid little fledge, called himself Teddy, really dumb name for a vamp, have to think of something better sometime. After Teddy, a vamp turned later than most, all starved bone and stretched flesh, smell of dirt, smell of paper, books, dirty clothes, floppy ill-trimmed grey hair, and this must be the new Dalton, the former Cyrus Smith, and Mike had no business letting him out so soon where he might get hurt, Spike would have to have words with Mike about that. Vamp Cyrus made wet, humming noises as he fed.

Couldn’t kill a vamp by draining. Might be awhile feeding up again and might well get dusted while he was weak and unable to defend himself properly, but draining alone wouldn’t do it. So once the fledges were all latched on and occupied, Spike didn’t worry about the situation anymore, let the fog roll in however it pleased because what he was doing goddam meant something, it was a goddam transaction, and nobody would get dead from it, so that was all right and enough. Didn’t hurt a bit.

And Buffy, bless her, knew enough not to interrupt.

When the dizziness got strong enough that he couldn’t hold stance and went down, he figured somebody would come at his throat, to do the thing properly. But nobody did, which was odd. Muzzy headed, he found the fledges all backed off and being chewed out by Len and Mike, except for Sue, kneeling maybe a foot away. When their eyes met, Sue said, “I’m yours. To come and go from your hand and by your word. I remember how that was now.”

After awhile he thought of what to say in reply: “You’re mine, Suzanne. You come and go from my hand. I’ll keep you from true death, the best I can.”

Then Cyrus, all bloody-faced and goggling, apparently with a thing for ceremony, came and said the same thing as Sue had, more or less, since he said it in Bensht, a defunct demon tongue, and Spike had to think how to answer him the same, since Bensht was full of glottal stops and awkward to pronounce.

When Spike had made the reply, Cyrus added, “Eternities of language. Thank you for choosing me.” His face practically glowed. Or maybe it was the yellow eyes.

“Yeah, we’ll talk about how great it was you were turned some other time. Now fuck off.”

“Of course, Master Spike.” Cyrus backed off, still on his knees, making way for the next one. Two was precedent: now they all wanted to do it. Fucking fledges, bending to any wind that blew. Now Mike was going at it with Len, who probably wouldn’t be second anymore, assuming Mike didn’t just wring his head off. Mike seemed really pissed off.

Nothing to do with Spike. He didn’t have to worry about that anymore.

Spike didn’t pay much attention, mechanically acknowledging the declarations, until he realized the person in front of him was Amanda. As usual on sweep or patrol, she was in the colors. But it wasn’t usual that the neckband of the tee had been raggedly cut and pulled apart, hanging in a flap in front, baring her neck and part of her shoulder.

Spike said, “You don’t have to do this.”

Amanda glanced favorlessly at the fledges, now all backed off and meek as milk. “They’re outgo. We’re income. We have a bargain, Spike.”

He couldn’t recall if he’d promised or not, so he said, “Hell with the bargain.”

“Doesn’t work like that,” said Rona, coming and hunkering down. Kennedy stood behind her, looking peeved, which didn’t mean much because she mostly looked that way. Both SITs had torn, dangling neckbands too. Spike shut his eyes and tried not to hear their heartbeats. Rona went on, “We’ve been through this all the ways from Sunday, Spike. You said we were in, and this is part of being in. Don’t be an asshole about it, OK?”

“It would mark you,” Spike objected.

“Funny thing,” said Rona, “we all forgot to bring our little tin cups. Have to do it the old-fashioned way.”

And Kennedy said, “Spike, don’t you think we’re marked already?”

Spike couldn’t think of any good answer to that, so he said, “Ain’t given you the weapons practice you wanted.”

“That’s lame,” Amanda commented to Kennedy. “That’s the lamest thing yet. Will you quit trying to find excuses and get on with it? I have a chemistry test on Monday that I haven’t studied for.”

“Buffy?” Spike looked around for her, found her watching with her arms folded.

“We’ve had this discussion,” she commented flatly. “It’s live, it’s willing, and I’m not getting you off the hook here. Do, or do not: your call, Master Yoda. Besides, I’m dessert.” She grinned at him smugly.

Spike leaned in fast, figuring Amanda would flinch and that would be the end of it. But she didn’t. Then he waited for the soul to kick in, give him hell about it. He was vaguely surprised when that didn’t happen either. Apparently donation wasn’t quite as disgusting as feeding that was forced, involuntary, coerced. Done the soul good, maybe, sticking it out in the noplace for awhile: made it a fraction less absolute and unreasonable.

Very slowly Spike let himself lean the final inch, tasting the place a moment, breathing in the sweet skinscent of healthy young girl. This girl: Amanda. Herself and no other. No more than the barest touch needed to break the skin. Then the fast, hot, blood leaping to him, in him completely like an electrical charge or getting drenched in a storm, no part more than another. He was, literally, alive with it. But even more, with the meaning of it. He’d likely said it wrong or maybe hadn’t understood it well himself. But it was the meaning--the care, the gift--that came into him, that sufficed.

When he gently pressed and licked the bite shut, Amanda protested anxiously, “You barely took any. There’s more!”

“You’re now officially a cow, Amanda,” said Rona, shuffling closer on her knees. “Kindly shut up and move away from the loading area. Next tanker’s here.”

“Wasn’t I good? Did I do something wrong?” Amanda bleated.

Out of the center of a great peace and exasperated affection, Spike told her, “You’re perfect, love. Any more perfect, you’d be in heaven for a saint and Buffy’d have her nose out of joint for…well, forever. ‘Tisn’t like bangers and mash here, by the pound, so much to the quid. S’magic, pet.” He wondered if he’d ever truly realized that himself, or if he’d once known and somehow forgotten. Didn’t stink like magic, maybe because nobody had made it. It just was.

Eyes falling shut, he leaned to Rona and tasted the contour of her neck with the bloodbeat underneath and her good smell that was hers alone, nothing else ever like her, and then the deeper taste, and the vibration as her voice gasped, “Oh, lordy!” But she wasn’t afraid, he could taste that, taste it all, the whole of her. Demon considered it would have been better if she was terrified and subdued to it, soul considered it quite fine just as it was. Spike let them have it out between them, wholly in the moment and in no hurry whatever to be done.

When he had it all, all the meaning, he nuzzled at her breasts, then pushed lower. Ah. Taint of cancer in the blood, very faint. Not her breasts: down below, in her woman-parts. He’d tell her later. There’d be time. Or maybe not. Couldn’t depend on time.

Straightening, he touched her chin, made her look at him, all game-faced as he was. “Rona, first thing tomorrow, you get up to the clinic. Buffy, she’ll tell you who to ask for. Nothing real wrong yet, and ‘f you see to it now, there won’t be. Will you do that?”

Now she was scared. Not with a vampire at her throat. Seldom in a fight. Only now. “You’d just nag me to death if I don’t, right?”

“Certain sure. Some things, you just don’t fuck about with, figure if you don’t admit you notice, they’ll bugger off all on their own, like a proposition from an ugly guy. This ugly guy stays till you chuck him out, good and proper.”

“Yeah, Spike. All right. Ken, you’ll come with me, right?”

“I’m the backup, in case the doc gets personal and needs punching out,” Kennedy drawled, theorizing. “I’m always up for a good fight. Have to check my busy social calendar, but I think the morning’s open. Come on, Spike. Things to break, people to do.”

As Rona pushed to her feet, Kennedy knelt down and Spike leaned to her. She was rigid, vibrating, terrified, angry. Anywhere close, he’d have known it. He stopped, sighed.

In a choked, almost soundless whisper, she said, “You are not gonna not do this. Doesn’t matter if you hate it, or I hate it. Not gonna not do it.”

Because the meaning of his excluding her would be wrong. He understood that completely and bit down. Her blood was full of rage and dread. Extremely charged, flavorful. Determination didn’t have a taste, but he knew it was there, past the reach of his senses.

Didn’t take much to have it all. He licked shut the wound he’d made.

Looking him steadfastly in the eyes, Kennedy challenged, “You sending me anyplace? Got a specialist in mind?”

He let game face fade, having no present need of it. “No. S’all right, inside, best I can tell.”

“It is?” She sounded surprised.

“The rest, that’s nobody’s business but yours. An’ knew it anyway, pretty much.”

Easing back from Kennedy, he flipped to his feet and looked around, a little surprised they hadn’t been interrupted, what with the alarms still going on and all. But maybe proprietors in Sunnydale had a sensible reluctance to investigate large fucking melees in the middle of the night. Most likely they’d scarpered, like the rest.

As he’d expected, Buffy was only a few steps off, trying not to glower and looking stiff, sour, and pissed off in consequence. Never would be easy with his feeding off anybody but her, regardless of what anybody paid lip service to. He had the feeling he was gonna hear about this later, from some different direction than where it really was coming from.

“Dessert?” Buffy asked, trying to fake enthusiasm.

“Not just now, love. Bit? You with us?”

“Yeah, Spike. Newest member of ‘I hate it when somebody fucks with my head’ club present and accounted for.” She was leaning on the edge of the stage. Looked a little wobbly and she’d sicked up on the floor, standing on tip-toe well clear of the puddle. Good thing, he decided, to get her away from it.

“Fetch the kit from the van. ‘Manda--”

Still in surly game face, Mike showed Amanda some teeth, warning her off as escort, claiming that position for himself, and the two of them went off.

Spike considered the children. One of the trippers, George, was down and dead, nothing to be done about it. Broken neck, by the look of it. The other one, Andy, was on his feet and had armed himself with a stake from the bag Spike must have dropped sometime in the festivities. The rest were huddled behind, against the front of the stage. Considerable bloodsmell in that quarter, he’d known that before: what had drawn the fledges, that Mike seemed to have sent off, likely to finish their sweep. No present problem from that direction anyway.

Terror sweat coming off them like fog. But they were balanced on a point, waiting. Or maybe just frozen in shock, too many things they really didn’t want to know, all at once and still there, not to be denied or rationalized away.

Spike first thought one way, that it would be best to hang back and let Buffy and the SITs tend to them, judge if any needed to go to hospital, they had a lot of practice with that. Then he thought another way, and strolled toward them, then turned to shove one of the seats open and drop into it, a wide sprawl: not so close they’d take it as threat, not knowing yet how fast he could move when he wanted to. Well within striking distance, every one of them.

“Decent,” he told Andy, “for a first engagement. Wasn’t set up well, though: we took losses. Too many hurt that needn’t have been. But you stood your ground, and--”

“What are you?” Andy demanded, face twisting. “No kind of an angel!”

So Candy, she’d been blabbing. No real surprise there.

“Not hardly. Same as I’ve been all along. The class, and now. Figured to show some of you that side of things…but not yet. And not like this.” As Mike and Dawn came back, Mike toting the big metal first-aid case so that Dawn was absurdly escorting him, Spike went on, “It’s done now, for the moment. Nobody here means you any harm whatever. Get you patched up and sorted, see who needs more tending, who’s mostly all right and fit to go. Then those that want to, we can have that talk.”

Mike opened the case on a nearby seat, and the three SITs gathered in to talk to the children and assay the damage. Dawn plunked down on the seat to Spike's left to keep him company and try to bruise his fingers with the strength of her grip.

“Not your usual disorganized vamp fight,” she commented, looking straight ahead and talking to the air. “He was ready for us. Each of us and all of us. Didn’t know or forgot about the phones, though. I think. Or we’d have been in deep trouble.”

“Yeah,” Spike agreed absently, pushing out of the chair as Amanda called him to help replace a dislocated shoulder. Buffy could have done it, just as well. But he’d made up his mind: these children were not to be allowed to be afraid of him. So he took care of it himself, afterward moving among them as he was called or needed.

Fed up so fine, he found the blood no distraction, no temptation.

Blood Rites, Chapter 14--Chaos

2004-04-22T12:04:47Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 14: Chaos (complete)

What Spike saw was a moving cubist collage. Blocks of bright, patches of color he supposed were the lawn, trees, and houses opposite, oblongs of varied darks that were shadows, smeared contrails that maybe were passing cars. He could guess, make tentative assignments, but it wouldn't resolve. Add to that the sense of whirling, and it was pretty much like viewing the world from a spinning roundabout.

Only Buffy was he certain of.

Her scent, her voice, the motions of her hands and the warmth of her body were a tether, an anchor, an escape from confusion. He tried to focus just on that but all the rest was too strong. His head was still full of fog.

He guessed they were on the front porch, sitting together on the glider (which he knew because it moved slightly whenever he needed to rock to keep from being swept away) because…well, in back, in the kitchen, the mid-morning sun had been coming in. So that would rule out the back porch, right there. And he still fought off the associations of the upstairs room that was hers, where he'd hurt her, or the demon had, or something like that, he couldn't get it straight except to know he must stay away until he knew better what he was doing. Had done. Might do. Something like that.

Her voice said, "I don't want to push--I want to understand."

"Then that makes two of us." Freeing his hand from the clasp of hers but leaning against her, keeping the contact down the length of his arm, hip and leg against leg, he opened the cigarette pack and lit up--nearly all of it by touch. Trusting muscle memory to get him through. Considering the cigarette, he remarked, "Dunno why I keep doing this. Could stop anytime, but I don't. Need something to do with my hands, some way, seems like. Should take up knitting. Smoke, that's not good for you or Bit. Should quit."

Undistracted, Buffy asked bluntly, "What did he do to you?"

"Nothing that hasn't happened, or I haven't done, before. Had a bit more choice about it other times, is all. Mostly. Except…. Nothing I think…you'd understand." He bent his head, to not meet her eyes.

"I'm a big girl, Spike. I know it wasn't your choice. But I want you to tell me."

Her demand compelled him. Trying to make sense of it for her might help him make sense of it for himself. He shut his eyes, trying to get his thoughts in order. “Well, he fancied me, didn’t he? An’ he could get at my demon direct. Demon, it don’t say no to that sort of thing. Real or not. Demon, it’s not particular--no more than about what it feeds on. Never thought you’d hear me say I’d got more of that than I wanted, did you?” He was embarrassed—not because of what he’d done in that regard but what he thought she’d make of it.

He continued, "Fact is, problem is, it meant nothing. Generally doesn't, to vamps. No more than scratching an itch, forget it the next second, unless you're playing power games, that sort of thing. Not like it is to humans. Not like…us. But so much of it. So strong. Like bein' forced to drink from a fire hose. Can't disconnect from it and can't really want to. And you'd do pretty much anything to keep it coming, stay connected there, even though it's at the price of everything else. Everything you actually want; everything that matters.

"All the sense...all the sense runs out of things. Everything. Bleeds away. Soul, it wants it all settled and tidy. What's right. What's wrong. And it won't go like that." He waved at the yard and the sidewalk. "See the sunlight, there, and know quite plain it's death to me, and I still halfway forget that, or don't care, or something. I look at it and it's just bright and empty. Doesn't mean to me what it should. Expect it will sort itself out some way. But…can't right now. Can't let it get mixed up with that other…that didn't mean nothing. But was all...."

The glider moved: he'd started to rock again. Buffy hugged him, held him close, until he could settle and be still. She said quietly, "So--you miss it."

"Yes. No. Demon, it's all satisfied. It...." A memory surfaced and he locked tight, rigid with it. "Oh god."

"What? Spike, what is it?" She shook him.

The fog was thicker, rolling in blood-tinged, cutting him off from everything else.

He'd been somewhere. Not here. He'd hunted and fed like a ravenous fledge--to repletion and beyond. If it'd been left up to him, he'd still be doing it. He'd been freed and loosed to it, the whole of his desire. A feast to all his senses. An orgy of bloodlust it had taken the oil, and more immediate sensations, to draw him out of to the point that he could attend to new instructions. He remembered, and the soul sickened so that he felt it as horror, not only as satisfaction. But that, still, too. Because he still wanted it. And mustn't. Soul was repulsed by what the demon craved. And he couldn't reconcile them.

So he just said NO. Not aloud, likely--only inside. The soul didn't force him but the soul gave him a place to stand and the leverage. He could not want this. He could not choose it. It still dragged at him but couldn't wholly carry him away without his consent; and that, he did not give.

Like Rayne himself, whom Spike hadn't even begun to consider, apart from his effects. Who to some degree still had access, still could get at him. But could no longer force Spike's acceptance, lacking the complicity of Spike's demon yearning toward the mage's sensual blandishments and dragging Spike along.

Once he'd endured agonies to get to YES and surrender. Now he fought the pull of pleasure unending and meaningless to maintain a NO and refusal.

NO: I will not do that, be that. NO: I will not want what the demon wants and delights in. NO: I will not give up choice.

Non serviam. Non serviam. Non serviam. Non serviam.

**********

Dawn leaned in at the front room arch, where Buffy and Giles were in solemn conference, to report, “He’s having another ‘Oh, god!’ moment--at the computer this time.”

Rising, Buffy asked Giles, “What is that--the fifth? Or the sixth?”

Dawn led the way across the hall.

Recovered from the basement, the laptop sat on the long den table cleared of birthday decorations. Spike was leaning over it, talking in mostly incoherent phrases full of swearing over the phone: “--don’t care, just get it the fuck out of there. Right now. And how do we stop ‘em? What d’you mean, you don’t know?”

Until she’d seen it, Dawn hadn’t realized that Spike, Inc. had a web page. Red on black, natch. And full of recruitment (read: bounty) notices. What was on offer for a “specialist in pain application:” a torturer, Dawn figured. Delivered FOB, the going rate (described as a finder’s fee) was $ 1,000. Not to be paid to the torturer, apparently, but to the one who located and delivered the recruit. Another listing was for a “martial arts trainer, black belt level” but was listed as “filled:” Dawn guessed somebody had been recruited (or kidnapped) to fill that position, and the recruiting bounty paid.

Before she could read any more, Spike refreshed the page, which vanished. “Revoke it,” he said to the phone. “I don’t know, put up a notice. Say no more recruiting, no bounty gonna be paid, nothing. I don’t care about the goddam fucking type style, just do it!”

“Hey!” Dawn protested when Spike held the phone away with the clear intention of pitching it against the opposite wall. “That’s my phone!”

“Right. Right.” Spike carefully set the phone down, arm’s reach away. Then he buried his face in his hands.

Buffy leaned against the door casing, arms folded. “So what is it this time, Spike?”

It was plain to Dawn that these successive epiphanies of guilt were wearing down Buffy’s capacity for sympathy.

Spike slid his hands so his eyes showed. Through the day, he’d looked more and more exhausted. Worn out, Dawn thought, by the effort of trying to connect. Which wasn’t being helped by the inventory the soul seemed determined to make of everything Spike had done in its absence and then pointing out to him, in glaring clarity, why that had been the worst possible thing to do, letting him know he was a monster and a stupid monster, at that. She wished the soul would shut the hell up and grant him a little peace. But it seemed perfectly merciless and paid no heed to anybody’s preferences except its own.

“The Dalton was due to be delivered today,” he announced, in helpless misery. “Likely too late to stop it.”

“China?” Giles inquired.

“No, Chicago.”

Buffy put in, “Start at the beginning. What’s a Dalton?”

“The real one, the first one, was the Master’s. Master that was. Expert on ancient languages, mystical texts. I inherited him, but he didn’t last long. Big Blue, the Judge, wiped him out, just like that. For no reason at all. Been missing him,” Spike explained listlessly. “Need help with the translation. Need a new Dalton. And I’d got to talking with this chap at the University of Chicago, good knowledge of Sumerian and related languages. Been sending him some pieces I’d had trouble getting straight, context was ambiguous. Cyrus Smith. Another chap at Oxford, but the transport would have been a problem, so I’d settled on this Smith to be my new Dalton. Sent him this made-up thing about a grant, total shit but enough to get him interested….”

Giles said quietly, “You were going to have him turned,” and Spike bobbed his head.

“Simpler that way than having it done at the other end, and there’s no control over who does the turning. Could ruin him.”

Even Dawn was vaguely appalled by the matter-of-fact explanation.

Face pulling into an expression of acute distaste, Buffy said, “People turned on demand? On order? Spike, that’s terrible!”

Spike lifted his head and looked at her with an expression that said he knew exactly how awful it was. “It’s how it’s always been done. How Dalton was done, most like.”

Giles looked as though he wanted to make notes.

Buffy said grimly, “You have to stop it.”

“Dunno if I can. He was supposed to come today. This morning. Had a driver gonna collect him at the airport. Maybe it’s already done. Have to get onto Huey, see where it stands. And Mike.”

“Why Mike?” Dawn inquired, and Spike just looked at her with that horribly weary blank-eyed expression, leaving her to figure out for herself that of course Spike wasn’t gonna turn anybody himself, hated the very idea. But Mike, who’d do nearly anything for him, would have no qualms about doing that. “Oh.”

Spike said to Buffy, “Told you there were parts of this just can’t be done with a soul. It’s gonna all go smash now. Can’t do what’s needed. Can’t even think it out right. Best if I’d never tried.”

“I didn’t say that!” Buffy responded hastily, and went to put her arms around his shoulders. “It was a good idea. It still is!”

Spike shook his head. “Might as well just go on up to the factory and dust ‘em all. Get it over with. Do me too while you’re about it.”

“Now you’re just being all depresso-guy. Because of the soul. It’s good, that you got it back, but I guess it takes some getting used to if you’ve been without it awhile. Don’t try to make these sweeping decisions until you’re more rested. Connected,” Buffy advised anxiously.

Reaching for the phone, Spike said, “Have to get onto Huey,” and dialed with Buffy hovering over him.

Dawn and Giles retreated to the hall, watching, then traded a thoughtful glance.

“This isn’t good,” Dawn commented. “Between Rayne and the Lady, they’ve just about done him in.”

“They’ve certainly incapacitated him from functioning as the de facto Master of Sunnydale. But is that altogether a bad thing?”

“Would you prefer Digger? And the Hellmouth open, blasting the ‘Come one, come all’ dinner bell and making Sunnydale an attractive piece of demon real estate again?” Dawn retorted. “Without Spike, it’s a power vacuum, Giles. And power vacuums have a way of filling themselves. Spike’s the best of the available choices. He’s the cornerstone and the connection. Without him, everything will fall apart. Let’s have some realpolitik here, please.”

She found Giles regarding her quizzically. He inquired, “Dawn?”

She felt herself flushing. “Yes, I’m me. Just because I’m seventeen doesn’t mean I don’t know things!”

“Quite. If I implied otherwise, I apologize. I’m going to contact Ethan now. See if it’s possible to make him see reason. That or threaten him effectively. I’d meant to have Spike in attendance, but….” Giles was again viewing the den.

“Not such a great idea,” Dawn agreed. “Are you inviting me to sit in?”

“I believe some objectivity is called for, yes. Ethan and I…have history.”

“I’d already figured that out. But if you want a referee, an impartial observer, I’m not it: I want that bastard dead. For what he’s done to Spike.”

“I am duly warned. Ethan tends to inspire that view.... I think it would be unwise to involve Willow further at this point. And Buffy doesn’t present an effective threat in this particular instance, since Ethan is human. Regrettably. You, however, are an unknown quantity, especially if Ethan can’t be sure the Lady is no longer in residence. Let’s leave it that way, shall we?”

“I’ll try not to pop my gum or say anything too blatantly teenish.”

“Let’s be about it, then.”

Dawn followed Giles into the front room.

**********

“Why, Ripper!” Ethan Rayne purred. He had no eyelids, Dawn noticed--at least none that showed. Eyes set--black, lively, and sardonic--flush to the face, as though slits had been cut, showing sparking blackness underneath.

About half life-size, the image of the Chaos Mage’s head and shoulders hovered like a hologram within what had to be a genuine crystal ball on the coffee table. Like a low-tech picture-phone. Dawn was seated on the couch next to Giles, violet overalled knees decorously together, intending to be a silent audience unless Giles gave her a cue to be otherwise.

That was gonna be hard, though: anybody as pleased with himself as Rayne made her want to do wretched things to his kneecaps.

“What a delightful surprise,” Rayne continued, all sly mischief. “But I should have known you wouldn’t be able to keep away, sending your little contact niggle. You’d think I’d have forgotten it after all this while, but somehow I haven’t. Now that you’ve seen the makeover, isn’t he sinfully decadent? And surely all bewildered and confused over what he’s been playing at. Rumpled and pliable. Aren’t they delicious when they’re like that? I know I was. Or at least so I was told.”

“He has a soul now, Ethan. You--”

“What a coincidence! So did I!”

“--You won’t be able to recapture him easily.”

“Ah, then it will have to be hard. Hard boy, our vampire. Or is he? Ours, that is. Hard is really a given, with vampires. And if you think the censorious miss will make me curb my tongue out of dire shame for what she may infer, remember how keen you used to be about the proper education of the young? I’ve come around to your way of thinking: catch ‘em when they’re still credulous and trusting, so as to waste the least possible time in corrupting them. If--”

Giles broke in wearily, “Don’t be such a prat,” and Rayne paused and cocked his head, smiling a surprised, more genuine smile.

“I’m used to being the annoying one. Must see if I’m still the reigning champion, don’tcha know.”

“Ethan, you’ve been in his mind: you know his current obsession. It’s certainly not knackered old retired librarians.”

“But why ever not, dear boy? The librarian was merely one mask; this is only another. Halfway mage, halfway magister, a succession of pious timidities. But we know one another’s true faces, don’t we?”

Rayne’s face changed. The tight lines vanished. The cheeks filled; the forehead smoothed. Dawn was looking at the face of a boy her own age: humorous, intelligent, alert. But the eyes…the eyes were the same.

Giles shut his eyes, looking pained. “Merely another mask.”

“Reality is malleable, dear boy. Infinitely so. I’ve told you and told you but you still won’t admit you see it. It’s very vexing of you.”

“Appearance is malleable,” Giles contradicted curtly. “Reality is rather something else. But you’re far beyond being able to tell them apart anymore. I’m attempting to give you warning, so kindly leave off the piffle.”

The mage’s face slid back to its former fortyish appearance. “But I’m so good at it,” Rayne complained, pouting.

“The reality is that in interfering in this matter, you’ve made some serious enemies.”

“What, my newest pet? I doubt it. Vampires are all children of Chaos, as you well know. I am their natural mentor.”

“Not this vampire. I doubt you’ve known many if you don’t realize to what degree he’s turned his nature to consistency and Order. But I wasn’t speaking of him. This isn't your typical mischief that you've undertaken, Ethan: you've engaged not merely individuals, but forces. You’ve antagonized the Slayer: the oldest and most powerful there has ever been. Who has allied and bound herself to this vampire, and he to her--much against my advice, I might add. An injury to one is an injury to both; it will be repaid in full measure. And she is the guardian of the Hellmouth. And then, there’s the Lady of Doorways, who’d gladly have your guts for garters. This matter of the Hellmouth is within her purview, and she was at some pains to have it shut. She’s taken a personal interest in seeing that it remains that way. Not a good enemy to have. Add a third female and you face the Triune Goddess, terrible and merciless. If you persist, they will have you dead, Ethan. I’ve never wanted that. Soundly thrashed, yes. Not dead.”

Rayne said nothing for a moment--remarkable in itself--as the two men regarded one another. Then Rayne turned his face aside, his mouth twisted in bitterness. “I’m touched by your concern. Since our ways parted, I’ve known the Slayer was no friend to me. And when have the Powers ever been kindly disposed to Chaos or those who worship infinite change?” Abruptly smirking, offensively cordial and familiar, he went on, “As to the third, are you put out with me, Dawnie, for giving our Spike a little treat, a small holiday from responsibility? He’s been so glum, so mum-faced, of late. I merely showed him a good time: all the three F’s that define vampire nature, in full measure.”

“Yeah, I just bet you did!” Dawn shot back. “You hurt him, and nobody does that and gets away with it! I’ll make you sorry!”

“Temper, temper,” chided Rayne, the smirk fading into a thoughtful expression.

“All three,” Giles mentioned quietly. “The Hellmouth is nothing to you. If you persist, it will be your undoing. Go play your tricks elsewhere. Leave it, for pity’s sake.”

“My goodness: a chance to annoy three remarkable females and you, in the bargain. However could I give that up? Achieve my greatest work to date--opening a dimensional gate not merely to anywhere but to everywhere simultaneously, random energies flooding out to disrupt and transmogrify mundane reality with the faery kiss of the deeply strange. How could I forego that? Besides, I’ve been paid. I have a contract,” declared Rayne, prim and smug. “Surely, Rupert, you’re not suggesting that I default on my responsibilities? My sworn word?”

Giles, mouth pulled tight, said nothing. And the crystal was suddenly empty. Removing his glasses to rub his eyes, he commented, “Well, at least I tried.”

Dawn thought it was more a matter of “Hell hath no fury like an Ethan scorned,” but she tactfully didn’t say so. After all, she was seventeen and supposed to be cool about such things.

**********

Cyrus Smith was dead and expected back shortly. Day or so. The new Dalton.

Spike set the phone down on the table with immense care since it was Bit’s and he didn’t want to break it. Too much already broken. Everything, it seemed to him. And no fixing it.

He shut his eyes rather than watch the eddy-spin of shapes and colors that wouldn’t resolve into any sense he could take in or understand.

Michael, he’d been so proud of himself, stopping to let the dying man feed. Never done such a thing before. Might know the one thing that couldn’t be undone, that’d be what Mike would do, exact to orders.

“Too late,” Buffy’s voice surmised.

Spike nodded. He made a graphic throat-cutting gesture, then let the hand thump onto the table top as though he'd lost control, it didn't belong to him anymore. “Michael didn’t do nothing except what I said. S’all on me: the responsibility. You go ahead, do what you have to.” He sagged back in the chair, eyes still shut, not even waiting. Couldn’t bring himself to care. Had it coming, didn’t he, for messing things up so bad.

The blow to his chest barely registered. The punch to his nose, though, he noticed since he hadn’t expected it or actually anything past an initial short, sharp shock.

Buffy’s angry voice ordered, “Look at me!”

No point to that. Already knew he’d failed her and she was furious with him for it. Could smell the rage boiling off of her, hear the quick breath and the blood pounding fast.

“Look at me! I’m not gonna be forced to do that. Not again. You don’t get to give up, leave it all on me. I won’t, and you can’t make me! We work through this together, God damn it! Look at me!”

She commenced slapping at him but it was the crying that hurt. He never could bear her crying. Soul told him it was all his fault and that was certainly no news and no help either and he couldn’t even wish himself rid of the fucking thing because he acknowledged he was pretty well blind without it--do things like decide to dispatch the fledges wholesale, have a new Dalton turned, all blithe and confident. Without it came things like the demon’s eager submission to that Rayne and the orgy of feeding wherever it was he’d been. And the unendurable chasm of distance from Buffy.

Demon, it wanted to fight back against the pain, lash out and make it stop, never mind how. Soul told him any idiot would have made a better job of protecting Buffy than he’d done and now it would all fall apart and be worse than if he’d never begun. Territorial warfare on the streets of Sunnydale and the Hellmouth open again, vamps and others drifting in from a hundred miles roundabout, more than Buffy could ever deal with, and all of it his doing, his fault. Trapped between them with noplace to stand.

Seemed he’d lost some time there because he was struggling on the porch just short of the brightness and had an arm cocked to belt Bit, clinging to his knees, and of course that was wrong so he didn’t and everything whirling and then suddenly he was in the kitchen leaning on the counter there and Buffy had cut herself and was telling him to feed from her and he recoiled because that was wrong too, must never do that again, not if she didn’t love him, and some more spinning and he was someplace dark and quiet except there was small music somewhere, so small as to almost be silence, and he was breathing, which was stupid and useless, so he stopped.

“Hey, evil undead,” came a casual voice, “as long as you’re down here, make yourself useful. Yeah, Spike, I’m talking to you. Hold this door while I get the hinges set. Come on, you’re paying for it, so the least you can do is lend a hand.”

Spike couldn’t get his mind around that, why his paying for it should oblige him to do the work, but hold the door, that he could take in. Guessed he must be back down in the basement and not even token chains anymore to remind him to take care, only the bracelets still there. He rubbed at them uneasily, frowning, because he was hungry and he didn’t think he’d lost so much time as that. And of course Harris was only prey to the demon, food on the hoof and nearby, could smell him and sense him perfectly plain though all his eyes rendered was the heat-blur of hunting sight, which let him know that his demon aspect was ascendant and manifest, the demon running things because Spike was all unfocused and useless.

But he could hold a door, once his hands had been guided to it. So he did that, distracting himself with keeping it steady. Demon couldn’t make him lunge aside and take the unwary food like it wanted to.

Mike feeding on him: that was why he was in blood-debt. So that was all right, then: he’d puzzled out the sense of it.

He winced at the noise of the drill, close by his ear, but otherwise stayed still because he could do that. Not do anything right but at least not do anything wrong.

“You can let go now,” Harris’ voice commented quietly, almost a question there but Spike didn’t understand anything but the words and obediently made his hands open. The door stayed in place, so it must be fastened, hinged, something. No more need of holding. As he turned away, Harris added, “Come on, we’ll get the other one now. Finish up. Then Wills can get ‘em both magicked tight, right?”

Spike felt himself taken by the arm (hot human hands) and steered, cool dirt underfoot and the smell of raw earth and the demon leaning closer and ready to bite but Spike pulled away, stumbling aside into the dirt wall and down on his knees there and Harris much too close, bending to him, and noplace deeper to hide that would let him in. So Spike shoved: a small violence to prevent a larger one. Not that he had any affection for Harris but the witch did, Willow, and Buffy too, some, so Spike had therefore always exempted the oaf from what he otherwise would have done to him, consulting only his own inclinations.

“What’s your problem here, Spike?” Harris inquired, not nearly as nervous as he should be, well within striking distance of a game-faced vampire huddled on the ground. Spike knew himself to be totally pathetic if not even Harris was afraid of him anymore. “Thought you were all into making yourself useful these days. Getting Casa Summers safer than safe. Keeping the streets free of obvious mayhem. Helping Buffy out with her class. Nice tame bagged blood and everything. Soul even back, they tell me. Regular Boy Scout, right? So be useful: hold the door so I can set the hinges and then the lock plate.” Again leaning close, Harris gave him a light punch on the shoulder. Spike bared fangs and snarled, braced and ready for a second, then sagging at the recollection that Harris was protected and not to be taken or even flashed out at. Mustn’t do that. Mustn’t make things worse than he already had. Despite himself he was breathing again and grabbing at the bracelets to remind himself. One broke and fell off. Everything broke. Everything twisted tighter and tighter…then went helplessly slack.

“Get off your lazy butt, fangless, and be some help around here,” Harris demanded, nudging him with a boot. “Got to get that door set before something that’s actually evil gets in. Come on. Hold the door.”

You’d almost think Harris was trying to provoke him, and even Harris couldn’t be that stupid, could he?

But Harris was right: the door at the end of the tunnel needed to be set and shut and secure against the dark. Spike remembered that and didn’t need to puzzle out why because his sense of threat was overwhelming. The people he loved were in terrible danger that he’d put them into and was incapable of keeping from them. Wrong, useless, guilty, and rightly unloved. The least he could do was hold the door in place.

Exhaustedly he pushed to his feet and followed the blood-red blur that was Harris down the tunnel.

**********

“God, he’s spooky,” said Xander, shuddering and rubbing his arms as if against cold, standing in the front room’s door arch to deliver his report. “Game-faced the whole time and itching to come at me, trying so hard not to that he’d shove his face into the dirt rather than look my way. That is one totally screwed-up vampire.”

“Tell us something we don’t know,” commented Dawn scathingly, glumly hugging her knees.

Buffy, sitting next to Dawn on the couch, said nothing. They were none of them in any danger from Spike. Hadn’t been for ages and on some level, even Xander knew it, to volunteer to see what kind of response he could prod out of the profoundly withdrawn vampire.

“Couldn’t get him to talk,” Xander continued, “but he’s listening OK. Give him an order in words of one syllable and he can take it in, do it. About like Bruno, in my crew. I thought maybe giving him something tangible to latch onto might help. But….” Xander’s shrug said the rest.

Dawn judged, “It’s the goddam soul, that’s what it is. It’s punishing him for putting it away, just when he was trying so hard to keep everything balanced. It’s not fair!”

“I actually feel sorry for the creep,” Xander confessed with a wry expression. “And you did not just hear me say that. But I never figured he’d get as far as he has, under harness, so to speak. Not our well-known poster boy for attention deficit hijinks. I expected maybe a week of good intentions, token efforts, and then he’d get drunk or into some brawl and blow it all off, not just keep plugging at it.”

Willow, who’d come in on the tail end of that, commented soberly, “Vampires obsess. He took that as his obsession and threw absolutely everything he had into it. Including us. Since Rayne broke that connection, he hasn’t been able to latch onto it again for some reason. I wish I understood why he started it to begin with, since he doesn’t want it. I’ve seen him up there—more than anybody, I think. At the factory. And it’s a chore. He doesn’t enjoy it.” Tight-lipped, she shook her head. “Oh, I’ve set the wards. For magical purposes, the tunnel is part of the house, and nothing with unfriendly intentions is gonna want to get near it, much less be able to come in. I’ve sealed the doors to the frames and the frames to the bedrock. It’s as secure as I know how to make it.” She crossed to the weapons chest and sat down on it, looking discouraged.

“I’ll get him a new watch,” Dawn announced. “That might help, don’t you think? Buffy?”

“If you want,” Buffy responded, her thoughts elsewhere. Rising, she said, “I’ll start supper. Xander, you staying?”

“And miss the wonders of lukewarm Thai take-out? You betcha!”

Buffy nodded and went off to the kitchen. Spaghetti, she thought, since there’d be four of them, Giles having taken his jet-lagged self back to the motel. Spaghetti was always good for quantity. She rose on tiptoe to inspect the contents of the freezer: she always made extra garlic bread for Spike—

She leaned hard against the refrigerator as a pang struck her, strong as a knife in the gut.

Vamps were killing and turning people, doing their usual vamp thing…under Spike’s authority and on Spike’s orders. Maybe more discreetly than before, not in the streets and scaring the horses. But it was still going on, all the same. And always would, as long as there were vamps in Sunnydale. The turning of the new Dalton had crystallized uneasiness she’d been able to keep formless and unacknowledged until then. And she’d been implicitly condoning it, turning a blind eye. Because what was the alternative? What alternative had Spike left her?

He’d acknowledged the responsibility and offered, for the hundred-nth time, to let her stake him. He knew. And certainly knew, by now, she’d never take him up on that offer. It was unspeakable, unthinkable. But the offer hadn’t been made cynically, not considering it’d been followed by a blind bolt for the porch. Suicide by Slayer; and absent that, by sunlight. He’d rather be dust than try to sort out the ramifications and the loose ends in which he’d left her entangled.

Tomorrow midnight, sweeps should resume. Tuesday, there was supposed to be a class: Anya had somehow pulled strings with the Chamber of Commerce and maybe others, calling in favors, to get the use of the workout room at the Civic Center. Spike’s active, sane presence was crucial to both of these. Without him, they’d collapse. Then the fallout would begin.

He’d gotten her into this. No way would she tolerate his not helping them get out of it. And trying to tempt him with hot garlic bread was so not gonna do the job!

And sobbing on the fridge’s Matte Ivory enamel wasn’t either.

Impatiently wiping her eyes on a paper towel it was convenient to blow her nose with after, she returned to the den, collected Dawn’s cell phone, and made a call. That done, she returned to making supper and fed the ravening multitudes. As they were finishing, she took the plate of extra garlic bread out of the oven where it’d been left to stay crunchy and warm and took it down to the basement.

Spike looked asleep, curled up small on the lawn chair pads in his grief posture that she’d seen a lot more of than she ever wanted to. Wrists thrust between his knees, trying to manacle himself with his own body: that was new, she thought aridly. Still game-faced. She’d never known him to sleep like that. Some comfort in it, maybe. Like the rocking, before. But he was inert now. If he was aware of her, it was too much trouble to stir or show acknowledgement.

Somehow knowing he wouldn’t touch it, she still thumped the plate down on the floor in easy reach, then went to the tunnel door no longer coyly concealed behind the screen and shot back the bolts: this door wasn’t made to be opened from the outside.

Lighting her way with a flashlight, she trudged down the tunnel and opened the door there. As directed, Mike was waiting outside. She gave him points for prompt.

“Come in,” Buffy said formally. “You’re welcome here.”

“Don’t need to do that,” Mike complained, evidently annoyed by empty gestures, sliding past her. “Had an invite, been here before, you recall?”

Slamming each bolt home again, Buffy replied coldly, “The whole house has been re-spelled. All invitations are revoked. Spike can go out but he won’t be able to come back without a fresh invitation. Tell him, so he’s not surprised. Doesn’t take it wrong. Which of course he will anyway.” She led Mike back up the tunnel, ignoring the alarms the awareness of a not-Spike vamp close behind her set off, and showed Spike to him in the garlic reek of the basement. Nobody moved for awhile. Gnawing at the edge of a thumb, Buffy demanded, “What’s wrong with him?”

“That Rayne,” said Mike at once. “Took him out of himself. He ain’t got back.”

“Not good enough,” Buffy snapped. “I’ve had vamp lore up to yo, and I want an explanation. I know he’s not back, I can see that. I want why.”

Mike looked around at her and didn’t say anything.

It’d probably been too much to expect, that Mike could explain it to her. Vamps weren’t into subtleties, nuances. Not into relationships, not really, beyond dominance and competition, spaces for their own egos to bloom.

Willow said Spike’s sense of himself had been injured, and what the hell did that mean? Dawn seemed to think it was the lack of the watch: that Spike couldn’t tell time properly without it, when all vamps knew dawn and dusk with precision, to the second, with no need of watches. Watches were alien: for appointments, agendas, not the unfolding now that the new Dalton would wake to experience. Along with the crazy hunger of a fledge. And the creature that’d turned him was standing beside her, unrepentant. Proud even of his restraint, his control, to be able to do such a thing, if Spike had been right about that.

Probably was: Spike had been interpreting vamps for her for a long time, trying to make her understand, and she never would. His word for such things would have to be good enough.

They were what they were. It was either dust them out of hand, where they stood, or accept that. Nothing between. There weren’t gonna be any compromises. Or any accommodation, without Spike to enforce it.

She looked at Mike: wary, self-contained, comfortably silent, with no need to speak to her; without the human need to reach out, offer explanations, make contact. Impervious to her regard. As long as she didn’t come up with a stake, he’d tolerate her company and even respond to her summons, for Spike’s sake. But she had no relationship with this creature. None at all. Their only connection was through Spike.

She felt it—the alienness of it. Spike was tame, compared to this. He’d made himself tame. For her. Until he couldn’t do that anymore. Sleeping in his demon.

“Take him up to Willy’s,” she directed abruptly, “or wherever you want, wherever you think is best. Get him drunk. Start a fight, get him into it. Or if that doesn’t work, if he won’t, then beat the crap out of him yourself.”

“Don’t need me for that.”

“From me, he’d take it,” Buffy responded bitterly.

“Maybe. Maybe,” Mike conceded, finally turning his attention back to Spike. “You giving up your claim on him?”

“Never!”

“That Rayne, he’s marked him. But I’ll see to that. By me, you still got first claim.”

“All right,” said Buffy, not sure what she was agreeing to or why Mike had felt obliged to tell her that. Finally not caring as long as she got the results she wanted.

“And you take the forbidding off Dawn,” Mike added, and Buffy was startled. “She ain’t mad at me no more. Talking to me again. Ain’t nothing gonna happen to her except what she wants, not when I’m close by. So no need of a forbidding. And…she’s seventeen now.”

“All right,” Buffy said again, stifling uneasiness. “But you hurt her, or turn her, I’ll come after you and you’ll be dust on the breeze!”

“Sure. If you could,” agreed Mike indifferently.

“She’s my sister! Mine!”

“She’s her own. Spike made me see how that was. And Dawn herself, of course. Nobody has rights over her except the Lady, and I ain’t yet seen there’s anything to be done about that. Just so it’s clear, then.”

“All right,” Buffy said a third time and made herself turn and go up the stairs, surrendering Spike into the custody and care of his claimed childe, hoping that was what Spike needed now, that she was doing the right thing.

She had to get him back. Whatever it cost.

**********

Obviously the first thing was to get him some replacement boots: he couldn’t be seen in public with his bare shins hanging out like some wino. Since it was Friday, the mall stores would still be open, but Mike didn’t head that way. Best place for boots, in his opinion, was the Bronze. Parking behind some crates in the broad back alley, he ducked in long enough to get Spike a fifth of decent whiskey to keep him company on the bike, then went back inside to make a more leisurely appraisal. Choosing out a rowdy biker everybody would be glad to see gone, he picked a fight, broke some furniture before taking the fight outside, and presently had a fairish pair of boots to try on his charge, all sorts of straps and rings, as well as a gaudy shirt to go over the undistinguished black T.

Spike wasn’t cooperating but he wasn’t objecting, either. So maybe that was good, Mike thought, and maybe it wasn’t. Anyway the boots seemed to fit well enough: Mike thought he had a good eye for such things, and he knew Spike had much smaller feet than you’d think, getting one in the gut.

One of Mike’s T-shirts had the picture of a snarling Chihuahua with the sentiment, Not the size of the dog in the fight, the size of the fight in the dog. That was Spike. What he lacked in size and weight, he more than made up for with sneakiness, skill, and passion. Mike had seen him take on vamps four or five at a time and dust them all, with verve and glee. For a number of reasons, Mike didn’t like the idea of the Slayer’s final command, to beat the crap out of Spike. One bad possibility was that he’d lose. The other bad possibility was that he wouldn’t.

He’d had a couple of showdown fights with Spike so far, testing the limits, and hadn’t yet come out on top. But other than being awake and balancing with the bike, which was pretty much automatic, Spike had yet to say a word or take good notice of anything, which upped Mike’s chances considerably. A fair chance he could have the fight over before Spike had noticed it had begun.

The bad side of that was that it wouldn’t mean anything, any more than if he’d jumped Spike drunk or asleep. The other bad side was that it would. More than one Master Vampire had been dusted in his sleep, choosing the wrong sentry or the wrong bed partner, and sporting or not, they were just as dead.

Mike, the ex-mercenary and expert sniper, had never much concerned himself about fair odds. Nothing counted but the mortal practicalities: who was still moving at the end of things. But now, the idea of taking Spike down without Spike even knowing about it made him feel itchy, uneasy in his skin somehow.

Table that, Mike thought, and instead considered where to go next. Then he noticed that the bottle of J.D. was still capped: listlessly held, likely for no more reason than Mike had closed Spike’s hand around it, figuring he’d do the rest. Well, that wasn’t gonna get the job done.

A fifth, that was just for openers: not enough to get drunk on. Uncapping the bottle himself, Mike downed some thoughtfully although he preferred rum--the thicker, the better. He smiled at the memory of Willow’s rum punch, compared with which Jack was thin, sour tea. But good enough, he supposed, if you liked that sort of thing. Certainly felt warm and got your motor running.

But it wasn’t food; and Mike thought Spike had a starved look that said he hadn’t put back what Mike had taken from him last night. That was just downright stupid in a house full of warm humans with heartbeats let along bagged blood delivered twice a day, if you please; but Spike could be stupid about the most peculiar things. He’d been muy weird about feeding as long as Mike had known him. Deal with that first, then. Then more drinking, when the liquor had something more substantial to float on the top of.

He’d always wanted to hunt with Spike anyway. This was his chance.

The current approved prey was druggies and pushers, but Mike was wary of getting a heavy dose of unknown chemicals with such a meal and did his cruising elsewhere. He liked the hospitals. Had two, just in his own assigned territory--the only thing more numerous, in Sunnydale, was cemeteries. Mercy General and St. Elizabeth's. He'd spent whole evenings observing, learning their rhythms and their ways. People coming and going at all hours, and some incoming injured that could be diverted and just be speeding the inevitable. Nurse’s aides were also nice, every now and again, as a change from the comatose, diseased, and dying.

So he immediately noticed the Mercy Gen candy-striper, wearing a white cable-knit cardigan over her pastel blouse, waiting in the lit bus enclosure at the front of the parking lot. Usually he’d just invite one for a ride, but that was no good since he already had someone at pillion.

Scrunching up his forehead worriedly, he pulled up to the enclosure and asked hoarsely, “Are you a doctor?” Over her flustered who, me? reaction, he continued, “Think my buddy got some bad stuff, but I can’t find the emergency entrance. Been around this frickin’ parking lot at least a dozen times and I can’t see where it lets off. Can you help me?” Throwing different signals at her too fast for her to question any of them, looking all earnest and dumb, he edged the kickstand down so the bike wouldn’t fall over, then pointed urgently at the Emergency Entrance sign, at least big enough to be advertising a motel, demanding, “See?” to direct her attention that way.

No more was needed: he had her. Big enough to fold her to him, all seeming romantic if anybody bothered to notice, which nobody did. Noticing wasn’t common in Sunnydale.

He himself was fed up fine, what with last night and then the new Dalton, today, even though he’d had to give some back. So he didn’t need to drain the nicely terrified girl completely. Only to the point where her heart started to falter and she was limp in his supporting arms. He could stop, distract his demon the same way he’d distracted the girl and enforce his will on both. Choose to kill or not, proving he was in control, not his demon. Not a fledge any longer.

He tucked the limp girl neatly back on the bench in a pose of sleep, more or less. Shift change was in less than fifteen minutes: she’d be found and all handy for care and a few transfusions, everything the way Spike would like it, nobody dead and therefore no reason to refuse.

He opened his left forearm and presented it, saying formally, “Sire.”

That got Spike’s dim attention. No bagged blood smelled like that, with all the mingled flavors of respect and terror and fresh, desperate, vigorous life. Wouldn’t stay good long, not like Slayer blood in that way, but for a little while, Spike could feed direct from him and have all the good of it.

Couldn’t turn away from a thing like that, true tribute blood; and Spike didn’t. But he didn’t just plow right in, neither, the way Mike expected. The teeth exploring the wound Mike had made stayed blunt, and eyes slowly blinking were deep indigo blue in the harsh sodium lighting over the bus kiosk. The suction became deep and regular, and Mike leaned against the bike, feeling a little drifty. Then he fumbled in the right-hand saddlebag for the bottle, got it open, and finished it off, passing that along, too.

Would have been too complicated, maybe impossible, to shove Spike into going after the girl himself. But maybe, Mike thought lazily, this was better. A communion. A sort of hazy rapture. A sacrifice. A gift. So many things, all twined together, for the blood to mean. He and Spike leaned heavily together, Mike rather dizzy from the transaction. The wound was closing. Spike licked it clean, accepting the natural term.

“Wouldn’t have been good much longer anyway,” Mike found himself commenting sadly.

“Was good,” Spike responded, head bent against Mike’s biceps. “Was real.” At last he looked up. “Where’s the bottle got to?”

“Dead soldier,” said Mike, and pitched it overhand as hard and as far as he could. He heard it smash satisfyingly on a windshield in the MD RESERVED section, the sound immediately followed by the yelping indignant squeals and warbling siren of the vehicle's alarm. “Could be more, if you want.”

“Yeah. Let’s do that, then.”

**********

“Shut up,” Mike said tightly.

“But it’s true,” Sue said, leaning boozily on an elbow to stare into his eyes, “and you know it. You don’t need him. With all his restrictions and complications, he only gets in your way, slows you down. You’re a Master in your own right now. Don’t have to run around all the time licking his feet or else get pounded on. What if he takes another crazy spell and takes it into his head to dust you?”

Spike wouldn’t do that. Had too much invested by way of time and teaching to end it in a casual puff of dust. He’d given Mike the watch. “Shut up.”

Sue attended to trying to sip her pink drink through the stirrer, under the impression it was a straw, still shooting him telling glances from time to time. Friday, past midnight, at the Bronze, was too noisy to hear yourself think. Mike was getting a headache and was in an increasingly foul mood.

He’d opted for Willy’s, but Spike wouldn’t get off the bike. Wanted noise and dancing, not an assassination attempt. Not even a fight that could easily get out of hand in a demon bar that actively encouraged fighting. Could turn in a flash into a pitched battle, with only him and Spike doing the pitching on the side of the colors.

He didn’t like Spike being all cautious and prudent. Didn’t like him ducking a fight which in fact was the whole point of the outing. Mike had collected four of the crew by the theater in their usual spot, trolling for prey in the departing rush, for an escort in force, but even then Spike wasn’t satisfied. Stepped down from the bike and started walking toward the Bronze, face golden-pale as he lit a cigarette, so Mike had no option except to trail after, feeling like an idiot.

Once inside, though, Spike took a corner booth away at the back and went blank-eyed and comatose again, reeking misery. Not even drinking much, just watching the dancers as though they were all Buffy and all had dumped him.

Shouldn’t have never told him about the general disinvite at Casa Summers. Only factual, but he’d taken it personally, just as the Slayer had said he would. It galled Mike to admit that in some ways, Buffy knew Spike better than he did.

So he’d had an assortment from the pill stash fetched down from the factory to cut some of the gloom. On a free night, nobody much up there, except for Huey tied down with keeping watch over the new Dalton and Emil stuck with guard duty. So Mike had picked Sue to summon, to bring the pills. Figured she’d be all excited and bubbly, allowed to leave the lair for her first permitted public outing, even though she flashed in and out of trueface faster than a yellow caution light. The corner was dark and if she kept her back to the room, nobody was apt to notice. Bought her a couple-few drinks, for a treat. Had been fucking her on and off, mostly because she was there when he had nothing better to do, but women always tried to make something personal out of that and she’d been mouthing off lately about being his exclusively, using his minimal interest to scare off her least-liked partners. Women did that. Specially fledges, who needed all the leverage they could get, indiscriminately used by anybody who was older and stronger, that they didn’t dare say No to. Mike didn’t grudge her that and hadn’t disputed her claims. Showed her a bit of favor, even: bringing her things, a nurse once all to herself as a change from the bagged blood she didn’t get her full share of anyway, elbowed aside by the male fledges. Didn’t cost him all that much and she had energetic ways of showing her appreciation.

Now Spike was drunk and manic, having a shouting, arm-waving argument with the bass player between sets over who was the greatest jazz singer ever. And Mike was drunk and sullen, with Sue gone all Lady Macbeth on him, on the strength of Spike’s ducking out on his responsibilities and Mike’s turning the new Dalton. Change was in the air, electric, and Mike didn’t like it. Yet it pulled at him. Because what Sue said was true.

If Spike couldn’t straighten out and get back to normal soon, all he’d put together and held together by main force was gonna start coming unglued. And Digger would capitalize on every weakness, maybe even commit to the attack in force that’d been simmering ever since the sweeps began. Nobody liked the Sunday through Wednesday curfew on the prime downtown hunting district. A fight over that was coming, of a certainty: they all knew it. The only question was when.

Since Rayne had taken him, Spike the Master of Sunnydale was swiftly deteriorating into Spike the liability. And the smart thing would be to get him out of the way as fast as possible and assert and establish Mike’s own authority before strong opposition could organize. He had one foot solidly planted: in Spike’s absence, Huey and the crew obeyed him. All he had to do was set the other foot down hard and assume the stance. Quick, while there was still a place to stand.

“If you switch sides now,” Sue pointed out, giving the straw pointed and intense suction, “while you still have something to bargain with, I bet Digger would grant you a real good territory. He likes you.”

“Shut up.” Mike knocked back his drink and poured another, scowling.

He liked Spike well enough. But not enough to go down with him if he failed, which now seemed increasingly likely. He’d see to Rayne, certain sure: couldn’t afford to have a mage running around loose with a yen for dominating the strongest vamp he could find. Just common sense, really, to do him before his whim turned in some different direction. Hit him before he saw anything coming.

Wandering back from the bandstand as the musicians got ready for another set, Spike had his head lifted and his eyes shut as though listening to music nobody else could hear. More of the random crazy. Mike pushed the bottle toward him, checking that the escort were still around and paying good attention. Each was ready for his inspection, meeting his eyes in the intermittent flash of the rotating mirror globe overhead. A lot more alert than Spike, still standing rapt in his own private world.

Then Spike’s eyes opened, slow and dark and sad, gazing steadily down into Mike’s. And Mike knew without question that Spike knew everything Sue had been saying, all that Mike had been thinking, down to the least detail. And accepted it.

Intolerable.

Bolted down, the table was only wrenched half loose when Mike shoved it out of his way and came up at Spike. Full of rage and indignation and a dozen other conflicted emotions, Mike knocked Spike halfway across the room, disrupting the dancers, setting off a panic. Slapping away converging bouncers, Mike kept going, determined to pound Spike into the floor, make him fight back, force some unnamed acknowledgement from him. Not knowing what else to do, the four vamps in the colors slid in and started clearing the space, trying to keep interlopers from butting in. Plowing through the confused brawl like a truck, Mike paid no attention, focused only on Spike, who was simply waiting for him, letting it happen, which absolutely wasn’t to be borne. Mike pitched him into the bandstand, musicians and instruments flying everywhere and a huge feedback drone erupting from the sound system, reverberating in the bones. Mike went into one of his rare battle flashbacks, translating the crack of breaking chairs into small arms fire and the harsher reports of AK-47s, the flashing, broken light as tracers and grenade bursts, and the surrounding swirl of fighting bodies as the fierce mayhem of direct hand-to-hand. Whatever he touched, he broke.

“He has it open,” murmured Spike’s voice in his ear, close as a lover’s, quiet and casual.

“What?” Mike stopped with an arm cocked, ready to pound down again into Spike’s belly.

“The box. Has the box open, and he’s playing with the Stone. Can’t you hear it singing?”

Going still within himself, Mike realized that he could. Not the voice of the Hellmouth of old but very like, a shrill threnody that ran up and down his nerves like rats, at once disruptive and attractive. Not quite a sound or a scent, nothing known with the senses but felt deeply, everywhere. An Influence. A door cracked ajar on wild, chaotic energies like his vision of battle. Feeding his rage that went cold, separated from it; feeding his confusion, that scattered like dry leaves the moment he identified the influence and knew it as outer, not within himself. His demon was all frantic and disrupted with it, but Mike stood apart, listening. He could do that now.

“Always thought it would be Buffy,” Spike continued dreamily. “But that’s all right. You’ll do well enough. Might as well get on with it, then. Best, all round.”

Mike couldn’t hold the clarity: the rest came roaring back, sweeping over him. Utterly overwhelmed and deep in his demon, he found himself clutching Spike close and sobbing into his chest, inconsolable. In desperate need of his sire’s close presence and reassurance that the ambient craziness could not unweave him wholly into flapping tatters. Needing his protection and wisdom and strength.

Besides, if he’d actually gone ahead and done anything terminally bad to Spike, Dawn would never have forgiven him.

Blood Rites, Chapter 13--Connection

2004-04-14T10:47:41Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 13: Connection (complete)

"It's like double super-strength Ben-Gay or something!" Buffy told Giles, scrubbing her hands futilely on the bottom of her jacket as Giles, carefully not touching, contemplated the logistics of getting Spike, who wouldn't uncurl and was covered in the stuff, from the floor to the car. "Willow--is there a spell? Something?"

As Willow responded with a wincy-faced lip bite, Dawn held up a finger and in a TA-DA voice, specified, "The Official Designated Tatty Emergency Blanket! Keys?"

Buffy pitched them to her and she raced off.

"Will?" Buffy appealed again. It wasn't the uber-stinging oil so much as that Spike wasn't responding. To the rescue. To her. He was out there someplace inside his head and she literally couldn't touch him and that was driving her spare (she thought that was the phrase). Playing harpsichord on her last nerve. Driving her totally around the bend. She could feel more tears welling and she hated that, hated that, and Giles would eventually run out of handkerchiefs and then the world would end.

With a helpless gesture, Willow said, "He's so all…stunk up with magic, I don't dare, since I don't know what it is."

Frowning thoughtfully, Giles set spread fingers on an uncovered part of Spike's face and said a Word. Glancing up, he commented, "He's asleep now. We can deal with the rest later."

As Giles began to rise, Dawn came back with her arms full of blanket, announcing with proud casualness that she'd brought the SUV right up to the door. Though Buffy gave her a dire look, unlicensed teens manhandling SUVs over curbs was low priority and Buffy let it go. They laid out the blanket. Then Buffy pushed Spike onto it and rolled him up, conspicuously with no help from anybody. Giles was vexedly scrubbing at his fingers with another handkerchief and Willow took care to stay well clear. But once Spike was wrapped and non-contaminant, Giles consented to take the legs while Buffy took the head end, and they toted their awkward burden out the empty doorway.

Where they found their way barred by Mike, a bunch of vamps in the colors, and the other two SITs, the SITs pushing forward and asking anxiously if Spike was dead--nonsensically since (1) he was already, always dead (2) if he had been, what was left of him could have been put in a teacup and wouldn't have to be lugged around like a roll of carpet. Tucking Spike's legs under one arm, Giles fended the girls off, explaining, "You don't want to touch him: it rather stings."

Gazing calmly past them, Mike said, "We can take it from here."

Buffy quickly let her end of the carpet-roll down, then exploded, "I'm not gonna argue goddam jurisdiction with you! He's mine! Now get the hell out of my way!"

"Mike," Willow intervened, "there's magic. And things. We have to take him home. And don't you have a sweep or something to see to?"

Bending, taking up the whole roll in his arms (which Buffy could have perfectly well done herself, but Giles had wanted to help and Spike would have absolutely hated her doing that), Mike replied, "Thursday. No sweep." Looking around to the other vamps, he added, "Lockdown at the factory till sunrise: Digger may not like what we done. Tell Huey he's lead till I get back. Or Spike does." Then he stepped back, waiting for somebody to open up the SUV.

Buffy glared. But rather than have a stupid snatching match over it, with Spike in the middle, she stomped off to the far side of the SUV, triggered all the doors, and waited, fuming, behind the wheel until everybody got themselves in. Then she shoved the SUV roughly into gear. The vehicle’s wheels tore up the yard—she had to turn, and back (crunching over the flung door), and turn, dodging a tree that had no right to be there—then bump-thumped down the curb.

Behind her, Dawn asked, "Was that you? In the park?"

Mike's voice replied softly, "I guess."

"What was it?"

"Couple-few of Digger's crew, sent to mix things up."

"How did you know to come? Were you following?"

"Got my own ways. Slayer, she do for that Rayne?"

"No. He poofed. Teleported."

A chuckle from Mike. "Poofed. I guess so. Get another crack at him, then."

Dawn blurted anxiously, "Don't unwrap him! He's all burny or something!"

"Know that."

"Oh, right. In the basement. Yeah. Doesn't…doesn't it burn you, too?"

"Doesn't signify. Washes off." After a minute, Mike added, "Can barely smell him, for the stink of the magic on him. He smells hurt, though."

"It's fairly ick, smelling him like that," Dawn mentioned delicately.

"Don't need your say-so. Not doing you no harm. He get hit with something?"

"Not that I saw, but it was dark. Except for his soul, of course."

Buffy avoided plowing into a parked car. Checking the rearview mirror, all she could see was Dawn turned in earnest conversation with the air.

Spike's soul had been put back? This was finally over?

"Is it?" Mike's voice responded. "Can't tell, what with the rest of the stink. Lady do that?"

"Yeah. He earned it once, so I guess he was entitled to have it back, no extra charge. He won't be happy about it," Dawn reflected.

"Why's he not waking up, then?"

"Giles put a sleep on him. Until we can wash off the oil. Maybe he'll wake up then. Does it sting really bad?"

"You can wait, Dawn. Don't get it on-- Do as you please, then."

"It's been so long," Dawn commented apologetically. "I've missed him so much…. It's not so bad. Burny, sure, but not like you're gonna catch fire or anything. Do you think he chose the collar himself? Because it matches."

Beside Buffy in the front seat, Giles said unexpectedly, "I think not. The whole Nijinski effect, that would be Ethan. He likes to play-- Never mind."

Buffy fumed. Everybody getting to paw at Spike except her. She stepped on the gas.

But still--the soul was back! Everything would be OK now!

Pulling into the driveway at Revello, she tolerated Mike carrying now-unwrapped Spike as far as the porch, then wheeled and took a stance in front of the doorway, blocking it.

"The hand-off is here. My place. My vampire. I'll disinvite you if you try to make a thing about it."

With Dawn beside him, irritably scrubbing her right hand on her overalls, Mike handed Spike over with no fuss--not quite as impassive as maybe he wanted to be.

Patting his arm consolingly, Dawn said, "You can get washed up in the kitchen. Then maybe you'd take Kennedy and Xander home? Do you know where Xander lives? I can--"

Buffy didn't listen to the rest, thumping up the stairs to the bathroom.

Starting the shower, she stepped right in with him. And he started fighting. It was crazy and bad: with the oil, it was impossible to get a good hold, and he was flailing out in every direction. He kicked the whole glass panel of the shower door out of its track, and it smashed on the tiles. When she had to drop him, she fell on top and held him down, which was easier. He didn't go game-faced on her, just struggled and twisted, trying to get away.

A squeeze bottle of shampoo had been knocked down. With nothing better in reach, she slowed him with an elbow to the temple long enough to twist the cap off. Then she poured the whole thing over him, explosions of suds. As the burning faded from her hands, the fight gradually went out of him. As she scrubbed the shampoo everyplace she found the flare and fade of the oil, his agitated breathing slowed and at length stopped completely. He hadn't fallen back into the spelled sleep, though: his eyes blinked every now and again, mostly when a drift of suds washed into them.

But he wasn't there. Just inert. Which was good: let her straddle him backwards and get the unbelted pants off (he was barefoot) and smear the remaining shampoo over the rest of him without worrying about being bitten in the rear.

When the shampoo ran out, she could flip him and do the other side, less frantically, with a bar of soap and a sponge. Finally unfasten the damn collar and hurl it away.

Collaring him didn't seem like such a funny idea to her anymore.

When the water ran clear and her fingers found no more places that made them want to jerk back, like touching a hot kettle, she stood up, dripping, considering how to proceed. The bathroom floor was covered with glass from the broken panel, but her sneaks should be enough protection if she didn't dance around in it. Drying off was just a habit, not a necessity.

Risking leaving him alone for a moment, she peeked into the hall and found Dawn and Willow waiting there. "If you don't want a free show, cover your eyes," Buffy directed shortly, then ducked back to collect Spike. Wet, he was slippery, but nothing like the oil, and she could heave him up over her shoulder in something like a fireman's carry. Get a good view of his ass, if they peeked, but that was their look-out.

She shouldered into the hall, heading for her bedroom. And it all started again, the flailing and fighting. And this time, there was no solution as simple as shampoo. She finally had to knock him down and sit on him, holding his wrists locked on the runner and staring into his wide, panicked eyes as he threw his head back and forth, still struggling.

Like Mike, she thought, in the troll dimension, only plainer. Something about the bedroom was setting him off. She hung her dripping head and accepted it, even though she didn't understand it. Someplace else, then.

"I'll get something set up," Dawn offered, "in the basement."

As Dawn ran off, Buffy wearily met Willow's eyes. "Can you put him to sleep again?"

Wide-eyed and pale, Willow shook her head hard. "He shouldn't have been able to throw off what Giles set on him. I don't dare. I don't know what's been done to him."

"You dared at the gym, and you didn't know then either," Buffy snapped.

"It's different. He was still tracking then--pretty much normal. This isn't normal. Did Dawn say he had his soul back?"

"I think so. Yes. That's what she said."

"Good! It's of the good, I think. But it complicates everything."

"Doesn't it always. You think that's why he's this way? Because of the soul?"

"Buffy, I just don't know. When he quiets down, I can check him again. Like I did before, at the gym. Right now, I can tell you that his aura is all but nonexistent. For all the fighting, he's putting out almost no energy--like it's all just reflex. There's basically nobody home. Everything shut down, except the fighting…like that's the last thing to go." Willow's face twisted in alarmed unhappiness. "I didn't mean it like that!"

"How did you mean it, then?"

"Not like that." Willow wrung her hands, then darted off into her room and shut the door.

"I'm not peeking," Dawn called from midway up the stairs. "The cot's broken and gone, but I think I've got something set up that will do. Not peeking at all."

There were fewer and fewer niceties that seemed to matter. Buffy dragged Spike toward the stairs. The farther from the bedroom, the less he struggled. So Buffy heaved him up again in the fireman's carry and carefully negotiated the two flights of stairs.

One hand over her eyes, Dawn pointed with the other.

Down by the sink end of the basement, Dawn had laid out two lounge chair cushions side by side with a pillow and a blanket from the linen closet. Buffy gratefully deposited him there and got the blanket over him. Then she at last allowed herself to lean forward and kiss him, long and deep.

No reaction. Absolutely none. Still locked tight, inside of himself.

From the upstairs hall, Willow called, "Rona put the tribute blood in the vegetable crisper. Should I bring some?"

"No," Buffy called back. "He's fed. Might as well throw it out. I don't care if there are starving vamps in Africa."

"Is it OK to look now?" Dawn asked, absurdly whispering.

"Yeah: he's decent. Or as decent as he gets."

As Buffy straightened, Dawn came with a big towel and caped it over Buffy's shoulders. "You're in drowned rat mode."

"Well, at least I don't have to go to work tomorrow," Buffy commented sourly.

"Oh, yeah. There's that…."

They both stood looking at Spike. As though the towel had chilled her, Buffy pulled it around her.

With the eyeliner and the oil washed away and his hair drying in ungelled curls, Spike no longer looked like something exotic and alien. Almost normal. Almost like hers. Except it wasn't like him to be so still. His eyes were half-shut. Buffy didn't think he'd stirred since she'd laid him down. Not moving, she commented, "I should get into something dry. And the bathroom's all full of glass. Have to be swept up."

"Willow said she'd take care of it."

"Yeah. All right. Good."

"Is he asleep?" Dawn whispered. "He always looks like he's dead when he's asleep."

"He's home," Buffy stated, mostly to herself. "He's in one piece. He has his soul back. He's not trying to give you severed hands. All of the good, right?"

"But generally he breathes, every now and again," Dawn commented, as though she hadn't heard. "Sometimes he even snores, though he swears up and down that he doesn't."

"Yeah," Buffy sighed. "I know."

**********

Sitting in an opened lawn chair, Dawn wrote addiction on the notebook page. Under that, watching Spike rock and occasionally bang his head against the wall, listening to him break into occasional sieges of tuneless humming, she wrote:

withdrawal?
tattoo gone
watch gone
X me
X time
collar
X connections
rocking = rhythmic motion
wall banging = self-stimulation? self-punishment?

Willow came downstairs with a bowl of magical oddments. Looking at Dawn with head cocked, she asked, “Dawnie, shouldn’t you be asleep?”

“It’s my birthday. I can stay up if I want to,” Dawn responded absently.

Willow looked a little longer, then went and knelt down by the lawn chair pads. She already had the liquid pre-mixed this time. Before beginning the ritual, she said, “Spike? It’s just me, Willow. Spike?” When he didn’t respond, she looked disappointed and worried, then commenced anointing Spike with the feather at pulse points and heart.

However, there wasn’t exactly no reaction. Spike leaned back against the wall, both hands clasped tightly together. His gaze still wandered around the basement without fixing on anything. No more motion or head-banging. During the time it took Willow to complete the ritual, no humming.

He knew Willow, or somebody other than Dawn, was there. He didn’t want to interact with her.

Giles had come down earlier, before going to find somewhere to stay, and stood quite a while studying Spike, much as Dawn was doing. Spike hadn’t moved or breathed the whole time Giles was there. There’d been the hand-clasping, too. After awhile, Giles had gone away without saying anything.

When Buffy had come down and insisted on touching him, he’d locked up completely--the Willow/Giles reaction only more so. Rigid. Shaking. Breathing in tense little hitches. If he could have flinched through the wall, Dawn thought, he would have. Like Willow, Buffy had tried to talk to him. It had taken a good half hour before Buffy seemed to catch on that she was upsetting him and announced to the air that she was going to bed.

It was only afterward that the rocking, head-banging, and humming had started.

Once, he’d turned and patted at the wall, reaching: searching for something, maybe. Whatever it was, he hadn’t found it and had let his hands drop again.

Writing functional autism? in her notebook, Dawn asked, “How’s his aura?”

Willow was quiet perhaps a minute, presumably observing. “The same. Minimal. About vamp normal.”

“And magic?”

“Nothing at all. No reason why he’s like this. Not magical, anyway.”

Dawn made a neutral noise. As Willow passed, Dawn asked, “Could I borrow your laptop a while?”

Willow rubbed a wrist across her eyes. “Sure, if you promise not to delete anything. Yes, I know you know better, but just saying. Council archives?”

“Just something I want to look up. Would you bring it to me?”

“I guess. All right.”

While Willow was gone, Dawn added to her list:

clasped hands = manacles?
fear
humming--?
music is rhythmic
no focus
oil—punishment? Not strong enough: Mike indifferent. Vamps have a higher tolerance for pain and sometimes enjoy it (e.g., Dru, per Spike. Also Spike, per Spike, convo that time he was drunk that summer.)
oil—counter-irritant?

The humming had just started again when Willow returned, delivering her laptop. The humming stopped immediately. Clasped hands again and retreat--back against the wall.

Setting up one of the outdoor tray-tables to open the laptop on, Willow commented, “It has about six hours on the battery pack, so remember to turn it off when you’re done. If it’s completely drained, I can’t recharge it. In other words, don’t go to sleep with it still on. If you’re gonna save things, make your own directory, OK?”

“I save things in the notebook. I won’t forget to turn it off.”

“What are you doing?” Willow bent to kibitz.

“Observing. Residual effect of the Lady, maybe.”

“Is…. Do you still hear her?”

Dawn shook her head. “Not a peep since we left the mansion. Other fish to fry, probably. I don’t think she’s ever confined herself to the microcosm before. Certainly never for that long at a stretch. I think she was getting claustrophobic. She doesn’t have to be here to watch--that’s what she has me for.”

“And you don’t know when she’s watching?”

“Good night, Willow.”

“Do you want a blanket or something? It’s pretty chilly down here.”

“There’s a dryer full of towels. I’ll be fine.”

“Well, good night, then.”

“Yeah.”

Dawn wrote mute: X words.

After Willow had gone back upstairs, and Spike had relaxed into alone mode, Dawn thought awhile, watching him rock.

When he’d been retrieved from the First, intermittently hallucinating, Spike had been uneasy about her coming down unless the shackles were in place. He’d been visibly relieved, reassured, to get them locked and secure. Because he knew that no matter what weirdness popped up, he couldn’t mistake her for Angel or a Succoth demon (or whatever) and take a swipe at her.

Although the chains and manacles were long gone and gladly discarded, it might be possible to improvise.

Laying the notebook on the chair, she went to her room and poked through the contents of her jewelry box, concentrating on the metal pieces. She only had one click-shut bangle bracelet and one other solid one, of brass. She chose out a couple of her sturdier necklaces, removed their pendants, and hitched them together into one loop about two feet across. Should hold, she thought, against a moderate pull, though of course they’d be no real restraint.

The important thing wasn’t actual restraint, she thought, but the perception. The meaning.

On the way down, she took a freezer marker out of the kitchen pencil pot, then returned to her chair in the basement.

She waited a little while to let Spike settle if he needed to, although she’d heard the humming before she’d descended the stairs. She ventured being a little glad that her presence was about the same to him as being alone.

She spent awhile reading up on autism, confirming her impression that it was a matter of degree, not a yes/no absolute. Everybody had a certain amount of disconnect, refusal (or inability) to process sense data. A good example, she thought, was Buffy and vamp names and recognition. Unless Buffy really beat it into herself and made herself memorize it by sheer stubbornness, she found it almost impossible to retain a vamp’s basic identifying info from one night to the next. Dawn blanked out on algebra but sailed through plane geometry because it was visual and logical, not just numbers. Something about numbers made her brain go into a stupor. She could add a column of figures six times and come up with six different totals. Yay, calculators!

When she’d finished the third article, she unfastened the looped chain and threaded it through the fixed bangle, then refastened it. She went over to Spike and picked up his lax right hand. Though his hand was broader than hers, she folded it as narrow as it would go and worked the bangle up, millimeter by millimeter, wryly thinking, Where’s oil when you need it? Then she thought of something funny about the oil and giggled, trying to decide who she’d share it with.

Fortunately, vamps were more flexible than other sorts of people. Eventually she edged the bangle past the protrusion of Spike’s folded thumb and onto his wrist, where it fit snugly. Probably have to cut it off. No matter.

Through all this process, Spike had rocked and ignored her, letting her do anything she pleased with his hand. She probably could stick her pinkie in his eye with no result beyond maybe a heavy-lidded blink. Not that she wanted to, of course: she was only testing parameters.

Catching up the chain, she waved it in front of him. She let it fall a few times, to let him hear the chime of the links, feel the weight and the coolness of the metal. Finally, making as much of a show and a noise about it as she could, she put it through the open bangle and clicked the bangle shut around his left wrist.

“All fastened up safe now,” she commented, patting his cheek casually.

Then she returned to her chair and read some more. After another article, she checked and was momentarily disappointed to see only the same “alone” behavior. Then she smacked her forehead and called herself a dodo: there’d be no true test until somebody else came downstairs.

“How is he?” The shadow by a three-panel screen set next to the dryer was Mike. He glanced at her. “Sorry, thought you knew I was there. Was watching you…do whatever you were doing. Didn’t set out to surprise you.”

Dawn gulped and let go her death grip on the laptop. “You could make a noise, you know.”

“Did.” He wandered past, studying Spike.

“What were you gonna do if he was up in Buffy’s room: peek in? Sneak in?”

“Light’s been off, up there, quite some time. Could tell you were down here.”

“Me? Or just somebody?”

“You. Smelled you. Spike, too, when I got closer.”

“From outside?” Dawn demanded incredulously.

Mike glanced around at her briefly. “Down along that tunnel over there. Harris better set those doors. No vamp can get in without an invite. But there’s plenty of bad things that ain’t vamps could come, invitation not required.” Turned back to Spike, sitting slowly down onto his heels, Mike added, “Thought I’d stand sentry till daybreak. Should be all right then.”

“Thanks. I guess.” She thought, Tunnel?

Then she noticed: the humming had stopped. But that wasn’t definitive: that was on and off anyway. The rocking, though--Spike was still doing that. Not all rigid and still, as he’d been when Willow and Giles were here. She hoped for a moment, but Mike didn’t hold his attention: Spike’s vague, half-lidded gaze passed him by indifferently.

But the hands weren’t clasped. Wrists still set on knees, hands hanging.

“Still not definitive,” Dawn muttered, vexed. It might be that Spike wasn’t as anxious about hurting Mike as the occupants of Casa Summers. He might figure, down deep where he was, that Mike was capable of defending himself and the protection of even symbolic shackles wasn’t required.

“What?” Mike said, when Dawn left the chair and started for the stairs.

“I need a better test. I’ll be right back. Watch his hands.”

Willow was always easy to rouse, startled by the least noise. Not that she really woke up, but her eyes were open though the brain wasn’t in gear. She was apt to be up and down at all hours. Without explaining, Dawn was able to persuade her, in robe and fuzzy slippers, to come back to the basement. And when Dawn looked at Spike, while Willow blurrily tried to find a non-existent website Dawn claimed she needed, there was confirmation: Spike was backed off against the wall again. No handclasp. Instead, he was tightly holding opposite wrists: assuring himself the token shackles were in place.

“It says the site doesn’t exist,” Willow reported, bent over the laptop. Yawning, she noticed and asked, “What’s Mike doing down here?”

“Helping me watch. It’s all right, maybe I got the reference link wrong. Sorry.”

Dawn shepherded Willow back up the stairs and watched her fill a glass of water, then raced down again, triumphant, ready to launch a test of her next theory.

“Mike, I need you to leave. All the way to the end of the tunnel, wherever that is--where Spike can’t notice you.”

“He’s not noticing me now,” Mike pointed out.

“He is. You just don’t know what to watch for.”

“I watched his hands. Like you said. Minute you and Willow hit the hall, he clenched up, and--” Mike demonstrated the wrist grab. “Only he’s not doing that no more. Still smells hurt, but I don’t smell any magic about him. So why’s he like this?”

“It’s a theory. I’m testing it. I don’t want to say, in case it turns out to be dumb.”

Mike straightened. “With me?” he responded, merely surprised.

“For myself. Please, Mike--” Dawn asked, looking up at him.

“All right. If you say. I’ll go to where I can’t hear your heartbeat. Should be far enough. But I’ll still stand sentry. Nothing’s gonna bother you here. Except for me, and I’ll quit doing that.”

Dawn didn’t see or hear him go, uncapping the marker. Sitting down beside Spike on the pads, Dawn waited until he relaxed, then reached across him to claim his left forearm. All in capitals, she wrote on it D A W N. From his wrist to the bend of his elbow.

He smelled the marker odor, she thought: his head moved slightly. After a while of not moving at all, he appeared just slightly puzzled. After a longer while, his right hand lifted and rubbed slowly at the letters.

Maybe ten minutes later, hoarse and uncertain, he said, “Bit?”

Dawn hugged him hard.

**********

Dawn formulated, “Vampires have a desperate hunger for meaning. For things to make sense to them. More than blood, or fighting, or anything. They need things to matter. Because otherwise, what are they? Parasites. Empty motion across a landscape of empty time. They invest themselves in elaborate hierarchies, to matter to each other, because nobody else cares. They’re the mutts of the demon world. Finally, even if they’re successful at that, top of the tree, it’s not enough. Because they’re not impressing anybody except a bunch of mutts. So either to make an impact on the world or in despair of ever doing so, they set out to destroy it. Sour grapes, writ large.”

“You know what that is?” Spike commented, still rocking and staring blankly around. But out of that could come words now, to her. A connection had been made and was open--like a phone line. “That’s a total crock of shit, that is. That what the Lady thinks?”

“Shut up: I’m practicing.”

“Oh, fine, practicing. Gonna out-git Rupert, are you?”

“Shut up. What do you know about it, anyway?” It was a leading question: Dawn smiled to herself.

“Oh, nothing much. Hundred twenty-some years of nothing much. Hardly any vamp has big plans. Live in the now. In the moment. Sometimes bad, sometimes….”

He’d drifted away again. Eyes open, but blank. He couldn’t stay with her very long at a time. It was two in the morning.

Dawn poked him with an elbow. “The three F’s: feeding, fighting, and fucking.”

“Yeah,” he said, vaguely. “Yeah. S’not enough, though. Don’t make anything. Accomplish anything. Water all smooths out again." He seemed quite unaware that he was confirming her crocky theory. Jumping the tracks, he continued, "S'not like fucking, not really. No fun to it. Sort of takes up all your attention, though. Just happens and happens and happens.”

“Yeah?” Dawn encouraged, though she knew she wasn’t following all the connections. Neither was he.

“Yeah. Oil, that was nice. Balanced it out. Was real. Could feel it, all the time. Not like fucking in your head. Nothing to touch. Sure, hurt a little, but what doesn’t? Smell it, touch it, even taste it if you were desperate. Have to be, wouldn’t you? Like licking battery acid. But you sure knew was definitely something there. Not all in your head, like that other. Since you weren’t there to sort it for me. He’d took that.”

“The verse,” Dawn guessed, and Spike bobbed his head, his empty eyes bereft. He rubbed his arm, where the printed name was: where the spiraling tattoo had been.

“Took it all. Nothing left but me, and what he was doin’ to me. S’not enough. Or too much, maybe. Dunno.” A few minutes’ silence, rocking, trying to find a loose end of thought to hold on to. “Can have it put back, if you want. Didn’t mean to lose it. Was a promise, wasn’t it.”

“Yeah,” Dawn said quietly. Confirming that connection, that meaning.

“Didn’t mean to lose it. Just forgot, some way. That other, it’s real distracting. Demon liked it, too. Liked it real well. Better than the real, because, well, no waiting. Nothing to do, to get there. Earn it, like. Nothing to give and nobody to give it to. Just come in and come in and come in….”

Dawn hugged him until he could settle.

“Without the oil, though, there was nothing at all. Couldn’t take that. Sure, quit hurting, but…. Nothing at all. Tried music in my head, but I can’t do that. No good at it. Has to be outside to be any good.”

When Dawn hopped up, he started breathing anxiously. She patted him, reassuring, “I’ll only be gone a minute. I have an idea.”

“No.”

“I’ll be right back.”

“No.”

She lost him then to the rocking, the rhythms that kept him aware of his own body. Stimulating the kinesthetic sense. The way the oil had kept him aware, inside his skin.

The oil had looked pretty, too. On him. She suspected Ethan Rayne was into pretty. To buy exactly the right collar and then put it on and make Spike not mind wearing it.

Beautiful pain. The price of the awareness of being alive, not lost in a fog of meaningless but powerful stimulation.

Since he’d already lost contact, five minutes would be the same to him as an hour or a minute. A sense of the time was another thing Rayne had stolen from him, along with his watch. So Dawn didn’t hurry, going upstairs to her room and pawing in her school backpack for the CD player Buffy had finally broken down and bought her in replacement for the one Buffy had crunched some months back.

The player itself was no good: Spike wouldn’t like her music.

Detaching the headphones, she dug in a bottom drawer until she located the Tiny Tuner: a radio receiver smaller than a deck of cards. Plugging in the headphones, she searched up and down the minute dial until she found a 70’s heavy metal station. It wouldn’t be appreciated if she blasted everybody out of their beds.

Almost immediately, the sound began to fade. The batteries were too old. She shouldn’t have left them in, they’d corrode the connections. That was an ironic thought. Tripping back down to the kitchen, she replaced the exhausted batteries with fresh ones from the oddment drawer, then returned to the basement.

We were having a session of head-banging now. Well, Dawn had a pretty good replacement for that. She put on the headphones first, cranking up the volume as high as she could stand without wincing. Of course he could hear it, even without the headphones: the banging stopped, his head turned, and he looked at her.

“Bit?” he said, in the same uncertain way he had before, looking for confirmation.

“Yeah, me. I’ve only been away a few minutes. I have a couple of more things I have to do, but I brought you something to keep you company.”

“No.”

“Most of the time, I’ll be here. You can see me, see that I’m here. Or if you want, Mike could come--he’s doing sentry on the tunnel….”

She’d lost him. Too many free-floating nouns he hadn’t yet reconnected with. He looked puzzled and wary, which was one of the ways he showed scared. Nouns had never been his strong suit anyway: he was much more attuned to verbs. He was a verb, much of the time.

Leaving out extraneous nouns, she said, “There’s blood in the fridge, I think, unless it’s already been thrown out. Do you--?”

“God, no!”

That was a bad one. He didn’t unlock for over ten minutes, and she didn’t want to surprise him with the headphones--add to the undifferentiated storm of sensory input already bombarding him.

Induced autism was as good a name as any. An analogy, a guess, not a clinical diagnosis; it wasn't as if Spike could look for professional treatment, and Dawn’s choices of ways to reach him, based on observation and conjecture, so far seemed to be more helpful than disastrous. Whatever it was called, it involved overwhelming Spike with charged sensory input he couldn’t avoid or retreat from, then taking it all away. Absolute overload followed by absolute deprivation. Fracturing and impairing his synergies with his demon. Then throw a soul into the mix--couldn’t forget that. She couldn’t truly imagine it, but the result was pretty devastating.

“Bit? Did I do something? Hurt you?”

This, this was just plain scared, no interpretation needed. She set the headphones down to seize his hands. “No, nothing like that. Spike? You only went back inside your head and slammed the door for a little while. It’s OK: you do that when you need to. You have a door, so you’re entitled to shut it. Whenever the inside or the outside is too much.”

“Thought I’d hurt you. Never mean to, but I don’t properly know what I’m doing, some of the time,” he confided. “Losing the time. In big chunks, sometimes. Lost the whole agenda. Never get caught up now.”

He was breathing again. Beginning to be overwhelmed as more pieces of the puzzle made themselves known to him, looming out of the fog.

“It’s OK. Mike’s taken care of--”

Spike started looking around him wildly. “Where’s the cell? Have to call Michael, he’s gonna--”

Dawn got up and took two steps toward the screen. “Mike? Spike needs-- Oh.”

Prompt as a genie when its name was spoken, Mike appeared from behind the screen and hunkered down in front of Spike: silent, waiting. They looked at each other for awhile, Spike rocking slightly, getting accustomed to the fact that Mike was there. Spike’s breathing slowed, growing less anxious.

“Michael. Said something bad, something that shouldn’t happen. Maybe it’s happened already. Dunno--”

“Noun, Spike,” Dawn prompted gently.

“Yeah. Yeah. Those fledges. That were digging. Told you to see they got dusted. Sue and all. Did…did that get done?”

“No,” Mike responded warily. “We got use for them. So I didn’t, till I’d argued it out and you’d said it twice. Didn’t do it like you said.”

Spike hauled off and hit him. Knocked him off his feet, flat on his back. Mike lifted his head and they looked at each other some more. Then Spike tipped his head crooked and shut his eyes, and too fast to see, Mike was suddenly bent over him and biting down. Dawn got out of the way not quite as fast, but as fast as she could, retreating to the lawn chair and finally remembering to turn the laptop off. Willow would kill her otherwise.

Watching Mike feed from Spike was scary and important in ways she had no words for. It was noisy and messy, some blood escaping and running down Spike’s naked chest. Dawn didn’t know if Mike was gonna stop and except for screaming, there wasn’t a thing she could do about it: she didn’t have her taser. And screaming probably wouldn’t do any good in time and would upset everyone. So she just held onto the chair arms as hard as she could.

Finally, in a shaky voice, she got out, “Leave some for later?”

That registered in Mike’s back. Then his head moved. He leaned away onto his heels again, licking his bloody mouth, in magnificent leonine game-face, wonderful and deeply scary. He said to Spike, “That’s all right, then.”

Spike, leaned back on his elbows and looking very dim, didn’t respond. Dawn guessed if anything was apt to be too much, what she’d just witnessed fit the description. Maybe the headphones would be good now. They were still blaring away, tiny and tinny: even Dawn could hear it. So it wouldn’t be a surprise. Kneeling on the lounge chair pads, she slipped the headset into place, adjusted the fit, and kept a hand on Spike’s shoulder and watched hard to check his reaction.

Nothing for a minute or so. Then, eyes still shut, he smiled. A happy, almost drunk-loose smile. He tipped over on his side and maybe was asleep, it didn’t matter. He was connected to the music. Plugged in. Dawn rearranged the blanket and reached for the pillow, but it was too far. Mike handed it to her.

“Mike, what time is it?”

“Going for four. Something like that. You need exactly?”

“No, that’s good enough.” Dawn got the pillow set so the earpiece of the headphone wasn’t pressing on it. That always hurt, when you did that. Pulling her knees up, she snuggled against Spike’s chest, and he knew she was there, shifting to let her find a more comfortable way to lie. “It’s been a real long day, and I’m not on a vamp schedule. I think Buffy’s gonna have to write me a note. Even if she lost her job, she should still be able to write me a note, right? Just gonna nap here a little while….”

She felt Mike drawing a corner of the blanket over her. She knew nothing would get in, not while Mike was watching. She could practice her explanation more later. It was OK to sleep.

**********

Spike looked, Buffy thought, like the visiting head of state of a country with which they might soon be at war.

He wandered into the front room after-breakfast Scooby conference accompanied by his interpreter (Dawn). Plonking himself down in the big chair by the weapons chest (Dawn perched solicitously on the arm, leaning against his shoulder), he proceeded to ignore everybody.

He had headphones emitting tiny loud music, like a hornet yelling, hung around his neck--to Buffy, an unpleasant reminder of the collar, that she’d flung in the trash this morning with vicious satisfaction. Sitting with bare feet stuck out and crossed at the ankles (another pair of boots gone missing), mostly still, he was nevertheless pacing, or at least the feel of it was the same: working a circle of loose chain over and over between his hands. Like doing a violent rosary or something. Thin bracelets on each wrist--one brass, one silver. New fashion statement there. Or maybe he missed his watch.

Dawn leaned in and whispered to him from time to time. Spike said nothing and rarely glanced up when anything was said to him. When Buffy asked him if he wanted coffee, a tight headshake was all the answer she got. He didn’t look at her. With his head bent, she couldn’t see his eyes.

He’s not happy, Buffy thought. He doesn’t want to be here. He’s mad about the soul. Or he’s mad about being rescued. If he keeps this up, I’m gonna belt him. Why won’t he look at me?

Despite the addition of Giles, it was a diminished group since Xander and Anya were separately absent. Xander had to work, and on the phone, Anya had declared herself much too busy to attend. Just Buffy, Willow, Giles, and the delegation from Mars.

Willow had given a tense report on the fight from her perspective, mainly making the point that if Rayne became able to access and focus the stone’s random energy flow, she doubted she’d be able to do anything effective against it.

“A Chaos Mage,” mused Giles, collecting the last muffin half, “attempting to turn what is currently an instrument of chaos into one of order, capable of being directed and of processing energy in a coherent manner. Ironic. The trouble with that, for Ethan, will be that he likes it best the way it is. Even against his best interests, he’ll be reluctant and possibly slow to attempt to manipulate it himself.” Giles put down the muffin to sip tea. “Much more likely, he’ll try to acquire another cat’s paw to work it for him. A circle of mages might possibly be able to do so. Or he may attempt to reassert influence over the one he had.” Giles looked at Spike a moment, then shifted his attention to Dawn and asked, “What may we expect from the Lady at this juncture?”

“I think,” Dawn responded slowly, “she’s done as much as she’s going to. She’s left it up to us.”

“You’re not expecting her back, then.”

Dawn did a quick headshake. “I don’t think so. No. She hated it here.”

“We noticed,” Buffy put in sourly.

“We can’t expect any further intervention, then, from that quarter?” Giles asked.

“Nope. Not likely. That’s what she has minions for. And please ignore me doing the Dance of Jubilation and Freedom over here.”

Giles said, “So it becomes fairly urgent that we know how susceptible Spike remains to Ethan's influence,” and waited.

Everybody looked at Spike, and he knew it: shoulders pulling tight, working faster with the chain.

“I’m all right,” he said finally without looking up.

“He’s not,” Dawn contradicted. “He’s better, but he’s still having an awful time making any sense of things. Connecting. Sorry, Spike, but they have a right to know.”

“S’all right, Bit. You do whatever you have to,” Spike muttered.

“Are you still aware of him?” Giles inquired gently, if bluntly.

Spike hitched a shoulder. “Suppose so. Some. Demon’s…pretty shagged out, though. Not taking much notice. An’ it gets lost in the…whirl. Of the everything.” One hand lifted listlessly to mime spinning, then went back to the chain, moving it quickly along the sprockets of his knuckles.

“‘Shagged out,’” Giles repeated, tight-faced and narrow-eyed, inspecting the dregs of his tea for omens. “Just how literally do you mean that?”

Spike didn’t say anything for long enough it was plain he wasn’t going to.

Buffy looked from Giles, to Spike, to Giles again, and gulped faintly, “Oh.”

“S’not like that, pet,” Spike said suddenly without lifting his eyes. The chain was quiet in his hands, gripped tightly. “Don’t mean nothing. Means a whole lot of nothing. Demon don’t care, just like it don’t care what it feeds on. Demon’s not particular. Real distracting, is all. Can’t focus on much else. At all, really. I--”

The chain popped. Part slithered to the floor.

Dawn and Giles broke in together to stop the dreadful explanation, then went into the verbal equivalent of a doorway dance, each trying to move aside and invite the other past and only continuing to get in each other’s way.

“No,” said Giles, “do continue, Dawn. Please.”

“I made some notes,” Dawn said distractedly, stroking Spike’s neck as he hunched tighter in the chair, his empty hands seizing one another so hard you could practically hear the bones crunch. “Vampires need meaning. Starved for it. They--”

Announcing, “Can’t do this,” Spike erupted out of the chair and stalked toward the hall. “Need a fag. What kind of house is it, bloke can’t find a fag anyplace?”

“Cigarette,” Giles translated faintly, as Dawn scampered after Spike. “I should have thought. I’ll get some.”

“No, I will,” Buffy decided, and grabbed the keys out from the weapons chest saucer.

It took longer to park than it did to drive to the corner pharmacy, a few blocks away, and buy a couple of packs of cigarettes. He’d need a new lighter, too, she realized, and chose the silver Zippo most similar to Spike’s Old Faithful.

He’d lost everything, she thought, returning to the SUV. Pride, dignity, self-control, and god, the credit card, on which she’d just charged the purchases.

She drove home fast and reported her realization to Willow. Collecting the laptop from the basement, Willow didn’t take long in confirming the worst: the account had been cleaned out, and even a little more. There were overdraft charges.

“I’ll take care of reporting it,” Willow commented grimly, as Buffy sat stunned and chilled. Carrying the laptop over to the weapons chest, Willow got on the phone there.

“Not to worry,” Giles commented. “Given the circumstances, I arranged for theft protection when the account was set up. The funds should be recoverable. Though it may take some time, getting it all sorted. A lawyer’s services may be required. Has a lawyer been retained?”

“I have no idea,” Buffy said, not really taking Giles’ reassurance in. All she fixed on was gone and lawyer. “I should give Spike his fags.”

She headed for the basement but passing the kitchen, she heard the miniscule din of the headphones. Spike was holding onto the edge of the kitchen island like grim death, his back to her, inches short of where a big crooked rectangle of sunlight slanted in through the window. “Here,” Buffy said, slapping down the two packs of cigarettes and then the lighter.

“Ta,” he whispered, not moving.

“You can smoke in the basement, if you want.”

“Yeah.”

“The credit card’s been maxed out,” Buffy informed him. “Willow and Giles are trying to get it fixed. And I’ve lost my job. Because of the dance. Or whatever it was.”

For no one reason, she was terribly angry at him. It seemed to her that everything was falling apart for lack of him at the center. She didn’t know where he was, except noplace he’d let her reach him.

He started rocking forward and back, hanging onto the edge of the island. In and out of the slant of sunlight. His hair was starting to smoke. She grabbed him convulsively and yanked him back. He pushed and fought to get away, but not in any coordinated way. More the way he’d balked, last night, at being taken into her bedroom.

“What is wrong with you?” she demanded, holding on tight, backing into the hall. “Do you miss your boyfriend, is that it? Miss the goddam oil? I’m not totally stupid, you know! What’s--”

He sagged: suddenly dead weight in her arms. Slowly, she bent and let him slide onto the carpet runner. He puddled into crash position: curled up tight, fingers laced over the back of his neck, head clutched between protective arms.

“Way to go, Buffy,” Dawn commented cuttingly, leaning over the banister and then coming the rest of the way down. “A whole night’s progress, pfft!” Pushing between, Dawn bent over Spike, stroking his back, patting his shoulders, softly speaking his name. The headphones continued a miniature orgy of attenuated sound.

Numb and frightened, Buffy backed away as Willow and Giles came out of the front room and stood beside her, observing Dawn’s attempts to get Spike to uncurl.

“Not a good sign,” Willow commented, biting at the edge of a thumb.

“What’s the matter with him?” Buffy demanded in a small voice. “Why is he like this?”

“It’s my fault,” Giles said, removing his glasses for ritual polishing. “I was wrong to force that particular issue. I suppose…." His lips set in a grim line, he resumed the glasses and put the handkerchief away. “My objectivity in that area seems to be nil. It’s not as though he courted it. I believe I owe him an abject apology. It’s Ethan I should be dealing with. I shall make arrangements to do so. Perhaps I can persuade him to abandon this game before matters become even worse. Now that he’s lost his current pet.” His tone was savage. Adding, “I have some materials in the hire car,” Giles turned and left.

“Will, can you get into his head?” Buffy asked.

“He hates when I do that,” Willow responded uneasily.

“Anything has to be better than this. If he doesn’t like it, I’m the one who said so. He can take it up with me, if he wants.” She was thinking of vamp protocols: Spike vamp-Mirandizing her and Mike in the dark graveyard, spelling out their respective rights, then grimly slapping the taser into her hand. “He can talk to Dawn. He can talk to Giles. He’d probably talk to you if he had anything to say. I’m the only one that’s poison, that throws him into a fit. I have to know why. It’s pretty plain he’s not gonna tell me. Even if he could. When he’s conscious. You still can, right?”

“Once a connection like that has been opened, it can never be completely shut,” Willow confirmed, gnawing the thumb some more. “I don’t listen in, though. Not unless he specifically tells me to. And…I think he’s still got Rayne in there. Two might be a bit much.”

“Can Rayne hurt you? On the bounce like that?”

“I don’t think so. If the link were strong enough for that, Spike wouldn’t still be here: Rayne would have reeled him in again. He’s holding against that. The soul, maybe.... Dawn?” Willow appealed for a second opinion.

“Go ahead. I thought I had him stabilized. He said he was OK to come to the meeting. Now we’re back to square one. Maybe square zero or even minus,” Dawn responded in a dispirited voice.

“OK,” Willow said with no enthusiasm, and closed her eyes. Her fingers made a stiff gesture at her side. She recoiled with a wincing expression, like a twitch, a few times. Buffy and Dawn both kept still, watching her. After awhile, the corners of Willow’s mouth drooped and her shut eyes squinched tight, as though she was about to break into tears. Instead, she blinked and looked at Buffy. “It’s no fun in there,” she reported. “Something like strolling into the leading edge of a hurricane. Like they show on TV, I mean. I’ve never been in one. Not a lot of left coast hurricanes. But with all the sideways rain, and the wind, and the lightning, signs and traffic lights flapping, and like that.” Willow waved her arms around, demonstrating. “But there’s something I think you should see. It’s quiet there, otherwise. Maybe I can cut through just the edge to it, like the center. The ‘eye,’ they call it, though that’s only a metaphor here, it’s more deep than it is middle. Pay no attention to the babbling witch behind the curtain. Except to take my hand, that is. It won’t make a lot of sense, at first, but wait and it will. You’ll make the sense, because that’s what people do. They have to.”

Willow offered her hand. With about a ton of reservations but resolutely, Buffy took it.

And Willow had been right: it was like getting whirled around, blown from every direction, slapped hard by a drenching rain. Crashes of thunder and lightning bolts scarily close. Or maybe that was only the influence of the image Willow had given her for what she was experiencing. What interpretation she was therefore predisposed to apply to the primal confusion, to make any sense of it at all. But she was also conscious of direction, Willow pulling her steadily along, a light and a force dauntingly vast. I won’t peek, Willow’s intention said clearly in Buffy’s mind, I’ll just connect, because it’s personal. Private.

The rushing confusion was gone, just like that. At first, nothing replaced it. Only a void. Only emptiness. But there was a voice steadily muttering. Spike’s voice. She couldn’t make out anything more than that and tried to hear better, go closer. The quiet resolved into a room. Small, like an attic. She had to bend down, otherwise she’d bang into something. She had to crouch and get as small as she possibly could to get closer.

She couldn’t make him out plainly but she could see the position: all curled up tight, arms around his head, forehead against knees, bare feet lying pale and vulnerable looking. Without pause, over and over in manic repetition, he was muttering, “Don’t hurt the girl. Don’t hurt the girl. Don’t hurt the girl. Don’t--”

She grabbed him. Curled around him as tight as he was curled around himself. Was somehow all around him everywhere like a liquid and a barrier, so nothing could get at him, hurt him. Loving him entirely. You didn’t. You won’t. I’m not afraid. Nothing scares me except the distance. You pulling away from me, shutting me out. Nothing between. No distance. I’m here.

She had no thought or awareness of anything else, anywhere else she could be. Any other way to be. Yet she found herself in the hall, on the floor, clutching Spike just as hard as she could. Trying to gather him in, be everywhere around him, which was impossible as well as undignified and slightly embarrassing with people looking on. She held on just the same because it was impossible to imagine letting go.

Within her anaconda embrace, Spike stirred, asking uncertainly, hesitantly, “Buffy?”

Blood Rites, Chapter 12--A Hole in the Air

2004-04-09T18:44:29Z

Blood Rites
by Nan Dibble

Chapter 12: A Hole in the Air (complete)

Leaning wearily on the edge of the half-open door, Buffy said, "And the fun just keeps on coming."

Clustered on the front porch--the two guys in front and the rest huddled anxiously behind--about a dozen kids from the safety class looked back at her with expressions variously hopeful, indignant, worried, and glum.

The lead guy said, "When we went to the gym, there was a sign that the class was canceled. And then Mona said she'd seen you clearing out your office this morning. So…I guess there was a problem about the dance?"

"Seems so, Andy."

The guy pointed to his companion. "He's Andy. I'm George." He looked embarrassed for her mistake.

Buffy shut her eyes. In the den, Dawn and Lady Gates were arguing over who should have present tenancy of the body. In the front room, Mike was refusing to sit down to recover from a probable concussion and Willow and Anya were trying to keep him from bolting before he'd said what had happened in the basement. Xander was off conveying Janice and Luanne to their respective homes, charged with coming up with some explanation of Dawn's screaming fit that wouldn't stir up still more trouble. And still no sign of Spike, which had begun to worry her.

Just when it seemed there was no way things could be more bizarre and nerve-wracking, the doorbell rang and Buffy found herself confronting a deputation from the course.

Before Buffy had thought of anything to say, Anya and Willow came backing out ahead of a thunderously scowling Mike: a rather scary prospect with blood in his hair and soaked into his shirt's neckband. Buffy wheeled, blocking the door with her body, and Mike hauled up short, then pivoted (Willow dodged out of his way) and started off down the hall.

"Mike," Buffy called, finding within herself a flat voice of command, knowing force would be a real bad thing to try here. "Stay put five minutes, until I understand what's going on. All right?"

Mike didn't answer, but he halted.

Meanwhile Anya had been listening to the deputation's grievances and concerns with exclamations of "No!" and "I had no idea! That's terrible!" Turning to Buffy, she said, "They canceled your class?"

Buffy shrugged. "Sort of goes with the whole being-fired dealie."

"Well, all of you come by the Magic Box tomorrow afternoon, and I'll have a notice posted of the new schedule. And anyone who's short of the new experimental scent, I have it on sale for only ten dollars a bottle, so you can stock up." Anya smiled at them brilliantly.

George (or Andy, whichever it was) said, "So you're going on with it, Ms. Summers?" seeking Buffy's confirmation.

"Of course she is!" Anya declared. "Other arrangements will have to be made, that's all. And there may be a small fee involved, since it's no longer a school-sponsored activity. Overhead, you understand. But you all appear suitably affluent, so I'm sure it will be no hardship."

One of the girls in the back--Buffy thought it was Candy--chirped, "And Spike: he's still part of it, right?"

"Of course! Spike's always involved. That's a given where Buffy is concerned. Now don't forget, come by the Magic Box tomorrow and the new schedule will be posted. Goodbye!" Shoving the door shut with her back, Anya lost the smile. "Buffy, I don't understand you at all. You should have told me immediately! You've developed this fine commercial possibility and there's just no follow-through. I don't understand at all. You've left me barely any time to negotiate a different venue. I'll have to call Albert at home, very unprofessional, but I trust he'll understand." Going into the front room, she sat sideways on the weapons chest, dialing the fixed phone that lived there.

Willow asked softly, "What was all that about?"

"I have no idea." Taking a steadying breath, Buffy got everybody into the front room and more or less seated, except Mike, who leaned against the wall, sullenly inspecting his boots.

Standing in the door arch, arms folded, Buffy said to him, "What you ran into, in the basement--Spike, right?"

Mike shook his head. "Didn't say that. Not saying nothing."

Looking around, Anya interrupted her call to direct Buffy, "Tell everybody about the Chaos Stone being stolen."

"To put this all in context," what was plainly Lady Gates began, back in control, just as Xander blew in the front door, a grocery bag in his arms, voicing the desperate plaint, "Beer?"

So everything stopped and there was yet another sorting--mainly beer distributed and snacks set out--before the conference resumed. Ducking Anya's solicitous approach with a wet towel, Mike got himself cleaned up and smoked a funny smelling cigarette on the porch. He seemed calmer when he came back, consenting to sit on the floor by the TV and turning a cold beer can around and around in his hands without opening it.

Perched prissily on the couch like a posed mannequin, undeterred by the interruption, Lady Gates began again, "To put this all in context and starting from the top, a Chaos Mage called Ethan Rayne is gathering materials and forces needed for an attempt to reopen the Hellmouth. Whichever of them initiated the contact, it's plain that he's currently in collaboration with a vampire called Digger and a witch named Amy Madison, as well as calling other mages, wizards, and the like, of various disciplines, to him. Since the mass virgin sacrifice was aborted by you and Spike," (the Lady nodded at Buffy,) "Rayne has instead secured for a power source a magical artifact, a dimensional key known as the Chaos Stone. However, this artifact alone, untuned, is not sufficient for the task. As it currently is, it scatters any power directed into it and might well scorch severely…or kill…any mage, however skilled, who tried to manipulate it. He--"

"This is all your fault," Anya told Willow, glowering. "I told you about the stone in the strictest confidence, and you blabbed!"

"I never!"

"Anya," said the Lady, and Anya shut up instantly, looking nervous. "Your injudicious prattle has been more extensive than you evidently remember. Though my contact has been interrupted, Spike knew the stone's location--you'd told him in the course of a phone call. That's how Rayne learned about it: he now has access to whatever Spike knows. As a means of securing and controlling the stone, and in furtherance of Digger's aims, Rayne has bespelled Spike and compelled him to become his instrument and agent. And I don't like it. I won't tolerate it. We've claimed Spike for our instrument and will not have that subverted. However, in any direct contest for control between us and Rayne, Spike would be…broken. That outcome is intolerable to the part of us that is Dawn. Her perspective and sensibilities are now part of our view and must be taken into account, in terms of what action we determine to take."

"See?" Willow declared to Anya, who seemed to take no notice, gazing at Mike with hard, suspicious eyes.

"Michael. Who killed Olaf? You didn't say, so I assumed you didn't know. You let us assume that."

Everybody then looked at Mike, who very largely and loudly said nothing.

Buffy called back into her mind the image of Olaf's huge, unsightly corpse. She could remember no evidence of a weapon. Olaf had been "done" by hand. Quietly, she said, "Mike, you have to tell us. We have to know what's happened to know what to do."

"Don't got to tell you nothing!" Mike burst out. "Don't know what I'm supposed to be doing here, with you people. Don't know how you're apt to act. I got my own line to follow. I'll listen here a little, if that's what you want, because Spike sets value on you and I figure he'd want me to not cross you, go along with what you want some ways. But-- No." He shook his head, setting the beer can away from him, to avoid bursting it with his hands. "No."

Looking around, Xander said, "Spike's gone? Then who's gonna approve the invoices?"

"What invoices?" Buffy asked.

"Never mind," Xander said, retreating by stuffing his mouth with cheese puffs.

Rising from the couch in her party finery, Lady Gates was suddenly natural with it, inhabiting it in a way she hadn't before. Settling onto the floor by Mike, she brushed her hair back from her face in an automatic gesture, and Buffy realized it was Dawn. "Mike, do you trust me?"

A silence while Mike considered her. "I guess," he responded finally.

"We have to find Spike. We have to get him out of this. I can't promise that nothing bad will happen. But it won't be your fault unless you try to take it on, all on your own. It will take all of us. Half the problem is that we all know a little but nobody knows it all. We're all split up, divided. In Spike's place, I'm telling you: tell us what you know and what you think. We need you for this."

Another long, considering silence. "All right." After a moment, Mike added, "Does this mean you're talking to me again?"

"Guess so," Dawn admitted, looking aside and twisting a pinch of her skirt.

Mike nodded, then looked up at Buffy, calm and open-faced. "What do you want to know?"

Somebody leaned on the doorbell.

As the one nearest, Buffy said resignedly, "I'll get that," and yanked open the door. She stared: it was Giles--disheveled in an unbuttoned overcoat, unshaven, red-eyed, jet-lagged, hair standing up in crooked tufts as though he'd been plowing his fingers through it. "Giles," she said blankly. "What are you doing here? Of course I'm glad to see you, but--"

"Yes, quite," Giles said curtly. "May I come in?"

For a second, Buffy had the unnerving thought Giles had been turned. She seized his hand: warm. And of course: he was just Giles. A pull on his hand drew him inside. She let go to shut the door.

Catching sight of Giles, Willow and Anya ran out to greet him, Willow offering to take his coat, Anya commenting gaily on how terrible he looked. Behind, in the arch, Xander silently proffered a beer.

Giles ignored their greetings and attentions. "Never mind that," he said, grim and direct. "Where's Spike?"

**********

Mike knew who Giles was but hadn’t had much contact with him. So it was pure discovery and satisfaction to watch the man take charge, and all the rest fall into place: everybody knowing where they stood in relation to the others and what they were supposed to be doing. It was as though the Scoobies (as Spike sometimes called them) suddenly came into focus, became comprehensible. A missing center, returned, made sense of the rest.

Not that Mike was a part of it. His only connection was to Dawn. But that was enough.

She was being Lady Gates again at the moment, but that didn’t signify to Mike as much as it had. Dawn was close and knew all that went on; when she was the best one to deal with something, her immediacy and fire as compared to the Lady’s cool distance, then it was Dawn that was present. To him, she could be Dawn, and he suspected she didn’t know what it meant for him to say he trusted her. Or maybe she did. It would be nice if she did, knew what a huge exception he made for her, considering that he didn’t entirely trust Spike. Vamps weren’t particularly inclined to trust. Just not how it was.

But she was being the Lady now to deal with Giles as one ancient to another and not have her young girl aspect mixing in and confusing things between them. Ancients didn’t need to explain much to one another: the right phrase or two, and they just knew.

Just as Giles had clearly known, from that scrap of phoned conversation, that he had to come, and set down everything and got on a plane within a couple hours and came straight on until he was here. Go right at a thing, head on: Mike understood that.

The Lady had sketched in the present lay of things, and the affront to her authority that Spike’s being taken was, in only a few words.

Giles came back, sure and bitter, “Ethan is a fribble soul: he cares nothing for the Hellmouth. Returning to Sunnydale to reopen it, much less risking himself to do so, would never have occurred to him. He’s been put up to it. The potential for disruption is what would have appealed to him.”

The Lady looked around at Mike sharply, as though he’d said something, but he hadn’t. “Mike, please set your watch aside.”

Mike thought about that a minute, then slipped the watch from his pocket and laid it on the floor, still in easy reach.

“What’s this,” she said, “about a severed hand?”

“Something was down there,” Mike said, falling back into the comfortable habit of report--giving all the pertinent factors as concisely as possible. “Turned out, it was Spike, completely off his head. Said he was supposed to come up to give Dawn this ripped-off human hand, fresh, as a present. But he’d been putting it off. Fighting doing it. My going at him let him break it off, leave. He was pulled two ways about it,” Mike continued soberly. “Wanted to be here, yet didn’t. Wanted to see Dawn, give her something, but not that. Whatever was pushing at him--this Rayne, I guess--was going half the distance on what Spike wanted, himself. The rest, that was what Rayne wanted him to do.”

The Lady reflected, “So some capacity to resist still remains. Control is not complete.”

“It’s variable,” Giles commented bleakly, looking up as Buffy came in with a mug of strong tea on a tray for him. As she set it out, he continued, “Having a slave is no fun. Ethan only enjoys collecting pets: creatures capable of surprising and entertaining him. He enjoys their frustration and confusion. He…rewards them for it. Addiction, rather than outright enslavement. As far as I know, he’s never had a vampire for a pet before. They wouldn’t interest him: too simple; too direct. Too insensitive to magic. Whereas Spike….” Picking up the mug, Giles took a cautious sip.

Buffy asked softly, “What’s he doing to Spike?”

“Whatever he pleases. If it’s allowed to continue, not even the fact that he needs Spike to be reasonably coherent to manipulate the stone will matter. Ethan breaks his toys. And then discards them. He loses interest, walks away, leaving others to clean up his messes. Others would have to…dispose of whatever was left.” Giles met Buffy’s anxious eyes squarely. “Spike is formidable enough in himself. After Ethan was done with him, he would be wholly random. Wholly out of control. That…would have to be dealt with.”

“No,” said Buffy. “No way!”

The Lady said coolly, “Ending would be a kindness. So it must not be allowed to reach that point."

Willow, who’d been sent off to do a locator spell, came back downstairs then carefully carrying a folded map and a small glass jar half full of red powder. She knelt down by Giles, showing him the map, commenting, “He’s not anyplace. Not here, not in the state, not in North America. I’d have to get some different maps to check anyplace else.”

“No need,” said Lady Gates in a distant voice. “They’re dimension-hopping. Rayne is opening portals, perhaps to test out the stone and Spike’s ability to tune and focus it.”

“What makes you think so?” Buffy challenged.

“My dear, consider who I am,” said the Lady dryly. “When a portal is opened anywhere, it’s through me, and I know it. That is my nature and my power.” She looked to Giles. “Most cross-dimensional traffic is random and accidental. The interstices gape and close to accommodate the flexing of the space-time continuum, and sometimes things fall through. It’s not hard to open a portal and pass through if you don’t care where you end up. However, inter-dimensional motion to and from a fixed point is unusual, especially within a limited span of time. I should be able to locate them; and the next time they return, lock them down. But to do that, I need full access to my own resources.”

Giles nodded politely. “I understand.”

“Geezul Pete, I thought she’d never leave!” Dawn exclaimed, springing up and spinning around on her toes. Coming to a halt, she did a friendly little finger wave. “Hi, Giles.”

“Hello, Dawn.”

“How come you know all this about what Ethan Rayne wants, how he behaves, how he treats his pets?”

“I’ve made something of a study of it,” Giles said, which wasn’t an answer but was plainly all he intended to say. “Is there any least chance of something resembling a sandwich?”

“Baloney?” Buffy offered. “Or I could make baloney and peanut butter.”

Giles shuddered. “If you must.” As Buffy headed for the kitchen, Giles asked, “Dawn, how long is the Lady apt to be?”

Dawn made an open, airy gesture. “Could be an hour or a year.” Then she frowned and changed her mind. “Not long. Not considering Spike…. Willow, if she can lock them into this dimension, I guess the rest will be up to you: stopping whatever he tries until we can take Spike back. How will you do that? Have you ever faced a Chaos Mage?”

“No,” Willow admitted. “I’ve never been in a full-scale wizard’s duel, and now that I think about it, I really don’t like the idea. Giles, can’t you--?”

“I hold myself ready to assist,” Giles said, finishing the tea and setting the cup down. “However, Dawn is right--the actual opposition will fall to you, Willow. I can store a certain amount of power that you can draw upon.”

“Me, too,” Dawn chimed in.

“Are there rules?” Willow asked Giles worriedly. “Do you take turns? Where should I look to research this?”

Collecting his watch and putting it away, Mike asked Dawn, “They done with me here?”

She looked surprised and disappointed. “Don’t you want to stay and help?”

“Got my own line on that and my own business to tend to. Don’t know much about magic except it smells bad, so there’s not a lot of help I’m apt to be with whatever you all will be doing.” Feeling extremely daring, he smoothed her hair down her cheek and patted her shoulder. “I expect I’ll get my oar in some way…. I’m real glad you’re talking to me again. I won’t never do what made you fall out with me before.” He smiled ruefully. “Find some new way to be dumb, most like.”

“It’s hard, without a soul, to know where the limits are,” Dawn commented, which maybe was forgiveness. “Or even why there are any limits to begin with. If it’d been me you were taking pot-shots at, you would have held back, wondered if I’d be mad or truly hurt. But since it was Spike, you figured you knew. You just didn’t take me into account.”

“I won’t never not take you into account again. Not on purpose. Except if I don’t know no better,” offered Mike humbly.

She slipped fingers into his palm. “If you don’t have to go this minute, maybe you’d help me with my presents. I didn’t really have much chance to look at them, and I have to know what’s from who to write the thank-you notes.”

“Oh, I’d bet you’d know, all by yourself,” Mike said, accepting being towed across the hall to the den by that fingertip touch. “For instance, guess who gave you a stock certificate.”

“Just as long as one of ‘em isn’t a severed hand. I think that would be pretty major industrial-strength ick.”

“He didn’t want to,” Mike said earnestly, as Dawn seated herself by the scatter of open presents and wrapping paper. “He was trying his best not to.”

“Yeah, one thing Spike isn’t is a practical joker. So we’re spared that, at least.” Lips pursed and face solemn and intent, Dawn took up the small glass dragon carefully by the back and set it in her open palm. Not looking up, she commented, “I guess I know who gave me this.”

“Expect you do. Sort of like giving you a snowflake: you know it’s not gonna last. Don’t you be upset if it gets busted--it’s just for now, to remember. Not to keep. It’s not strong that way, to last.”

“Maybe it could,” Dawn argued. “Maybe it will. It’s a dragon, after all, and I found out the hard way that no matter how delicate they look, they’re really strong and fierce and dangerous!”

“Won’t dispute it with you. If anybody would know, it’d be you. Just didn’t want you to expect of it anything it didn’t have in it, to give. Didn’t want to give you something you’d feel responsible for…or something that would ever make you sad.”

“And aren’t we all about the subtext tonight!” Dawn set the dragon down on an open part of the table and looked up at him brightly. Then her expression shifted to curious, pensive. “Or maybe not. Maybe the text is all there is, and it’s not fair to read more into it. OK: who gave me this spectacularly ugly scarf?” She held it up with two fingers as though it were a dead rat.

“That was from Janice.”

“I always suspected Janice was colorblind. So that’s two accounted for. How about the earrings?”

“That was Harris.”

Mike had been gradually circling the table, pushing chairs in to get by, and had now arrived at Dawn’s side, at her right hand, as she continued to inventory the presents. He breathed her scent, that rose to him. She smelled exactly like herself, and that was part of how her eyes flashed, amused, wary, and curious, when she glanced at him, and part of how her fingers grasped things, all precise, like calipers. Part of the odd angle her elbow made, lifted a little away from her, when she reached. Part of the solemn part in her hair, right down the center, and the smooth curve of forehead and the hair so silken and soft to either side, falling from there past her shoulders.

Doing his own inventory, Mike found all as it should be. He touched her hair, at the back of her neck. If she felt the touch she didn’t object, which probably was all that mattered.

**********

Taking the bike, Mike was back at the factory within fifteen minutes. Checking with Huey, he found all as it should be: the fledges who’d been digging were drunk and unconscious. Mike was under orders to dispose of them. But he’d thought about that on the way back and come to a different decision.

“Lock ‘em down,” he told Huey, “and let ‘em be. You keep watch. Nobody comes in or goes out except I say so.”

“Spike said--”

“Spike ain’t here. Till he is, you go by my word. You too, Emil,” Mike added over his shoulder. “A straight matter of stand up, or stand down. You want to try me on?”

Emil, as big as Mike and a good deal older, lifted both hands, taking himself out of contention. “What you call is fine by me. No objection here.”

Mike switched his attention to Huey, who plainly wasn’t happy with the situation and was even older than Emil. Huey responded bluntly, “Don’t like it. Don’t think you’re up to being in charge. Spike never named you second, not in so many words. But he did name you his get, and he’s been using you for lead, most times, so I guess it’ll have to do. You answer for it, though.”

“I will,” Mike agreed. “If Spike wants to take it out of my hide later, then that’s how it will be. In the meantime, I have the call. Let the fledges sleep it off. Huey, you double check everything Spike had going, make sure it’s running right, they’re not waiting for something from us to go ahead. If they do, and it’s money, Slayer, she has the same rights over the account as Spike does. She’ll see to it. If you find any like that, make a list. I'll deal with her. Anybody Spike was supposed to meet with, put ‘em off, say we’ll get back to ‘em. Don’t give no reason. As far as anybody else goes, Spike’s here and nobody knows any different. Nobody knows his business or has any right to. Except the Slayer, and I’ll deal with her however’s needed.”

It occurred to Mike that more than Huey and Emil needed to know this. So he sent Emil to gather up the crew while he and Huey split up contacting the SITs. Spike had always included them, so Mike would do the same. Whether or not they chose to go along, that was up to them.

Since Amanda was the one always least eager, most likely to pull out, Mike did that call himself. When he’d got through a layer of parents and a younger brother and actually was talking to her direct, he said, “’Manda, it’s Mike. We’re having a thing tonight. Has to do with Spike. I’m briefing on it in fifteen. If you’re coming, you be here. Yeah: at the factory.” Without waiting for any answer, Mike ended that call and hit the number for Kennedy, but only got the machine she and Rona shared at the boarding house. He left pretty much the same message for them there and figured his duty toward them was done. Either they’d show, or they wouldn’t, and Mike didn’t much care which.

Wanted to play it, as far as he could, the way he thought Spike would have wanted but wasn’t gonna let himself be hamstrung by that neither.

He hadn’t fed yet today, and that was all right. He figured it gave him a bit of an edge, and he might well need that.

Emil had rousted out what of the crew still happened to be around: fifteen fighters, not counting Huey or Emil. Three short. Probably off helling around, hunting. Mike would give them a lesson in what “on call” meant, next chance he got.

“All right,” he said, surveying them. “Spike’s been taken, and we’re gonna take him back. Nobody says a word about it, outside. I’ll personally dust anybody who--”

Mary interrupted grimly, “Digger?”

“Don’t think so. Not directly. Though he may send back-up, and if he does, we take them out. Not a one gets through. And if he does, we’ll know and settle up for it later. The one we know about is that he-witch I’ve had you tracking, the last couple of nights. Huey and Emil, they're minding the store. Gonna split the rest in half. One bunch, check out everyplace we’ve found so far where he’s been lairing. If they’re all empty, the mark is the freshest one found, that big place on Crawford. If he’s gone back to one of the others, and you get fresh trace, call and tell Huey and he’ll relay to me.”

A new fighter, called himself Fury, piped up, “Don’t have enough phones.” Len, still intent on getting above himself, smacked him before Mike did, pointing out that there were public call boxes on nearly every corner. Fury backed off. So that was settled.

“It’s possible,” Mike resumed, “but not likely, you may run across Spike himself, or his trace. If you do, take him down and hold him. He’s off his head.” He saw several vamps shaking their heads or otherwise looking real unwilling to take Spike on, crazy or not. Mike reconsidered. “All right, do this instead. You come on him, you shadow along and send word, like I said before. Don’t think it’ll happen, but if it does, that’s what you do. All right?”

Len asked, “What’ll the other half be doing?”

“Some to lay an ambush, a little away from the mark, for any back-up Digger sends. The rest, I have another errand for. Julia, you lead off checking the lairs--you get four, besides yourself. Choose ‘em out. Len, you lead off on the ambush. You get five. The rest are with me, to run my errand. Ford, bring the car around.”

Everybody looked, because there was hammering on the outside door. Emil went off to check and returned with Amanda and Rona, in street clothes: they hadn’t even taken time to change into the colors.

Scowling, Rona called, “This better be good!”

Spike always allowed the SITs a lot of latitude, didn’t slap ‘em down for mouthing off to him, so Mike put up with it too. For now.

“You heard from the Slayer?” he asked.

Amanda shook her head, and Rona said, “Not a peep, at least that I know of.”

“You’re with me, then.”

Hands on hips, Rona demanded, “What’s with Spike?”

“Tell you later,” Mike decided.

“But it ain’t even fifteen minutes yet!”

“I lied. Len, take two more on the ambush. SITs are with me. We'll hook up with you later." Looking around, he asked, "You got your tasers?”

“What do you think we are: stupid?” Rona came back at him.

“Maybe. You’re not wearing the smell. So you’d best stick close,” Mike commented, heading for the door. The pair not chosen out by the leads he’d named knew enough to follow. Which gave him four, besides himself. Plenty enough for the errand he had in mind.

When they’d all piled into the ancient, sagging car, Mike directed, “Casa Mike.”

Except for the SITs, none of them was armed. That was how Spike liked it. Kept the fighting pretty even, everything hanging on the balance of strength, skill, and ferocity. Mike, he’d always thought a different way.

It was his incendiaries that’d taken out most of the Turok-han. He was, by training and inclination, a sniper, even though that was from the before. Mike liked the odds in his favor and liked the things that modern weaponry could do. With no present need, he’d moved his small armory to the basement of Casa Mike and added to it any time the chance to acquire good ordnance on the cheap presented itself.

Fuck magic. Mike was a hell of a lot more comfortable with an M-16 firing .50 caliber armor-piercing rounds. Take a vamp’s head right off or blow a hole in its chest big enough to stick your fist into, except of course they’d dust first. Plastique, if there was leisure to place a few shaped charges. Some incendiary grenades. Against vamps, even highway flares could be good weapons, and he had those in quantity. See how Digger liked them apples, not to mention that bastard, Ethan Rayne. Mike had something extra special in mind for him.

Let the Slayer take the inside and do him if she could, her and the witch. But if he got past them, if he came outside and tried to get clear, Mike would blow that fucker into confetti. Then see what kind of magic he could do.

**********

Dawn was pleased not to have to fight about going along, even though it was because of the Lady. It was the Lady who’d determined what Rayne’s go-back-to point was: the mansion on Crawford, that had been Angel’s (as much as it was anybody’s: Dawn doubted Angel had ever held title). Spike would know its advantages of defensibility and isolation, so Rayne had chosen it for a base.

And without Dawn as conduit, the Lady wouldn’t have the eyes and ears she needed to follow what was going on while retaining access to her own powers.

It made Dawn feel a bit like a hole in the air, everybody looking past her, beyond her, or through her, but better to be in charge of her own body than be a helpless bystander as she’d been since the Lady had decided to usurp her and take up residence.

But not everybody looked through her: Mike hadn’t. And he knew for certain, instantly, whether it was her driving, or the Lady, even when she hadn’t said a word or twitched so much as a finger. Smell, maybe. Anyway, he knew, and that was a good counterbalance to Dawn’s bouts of suspecting that she wasn’t really real, the way Buffy was, or Xander, or Willow. That she was just a fiction everybody had tacitly agreed to accept, not an actual person in her own right. A dimensional key: just like the sodding Chaos Stone, that nobody could ever mistake for a person.

A tool; an open door; a hole in the air.

Since her displacement, her confidence in her own reality was pretty much at an all-time low. She wished Mike had stayed. Or that Spike was here, where he should be. They’d all forgotten her once, and that had been scary and horrible. Everybody except Spike, who’d slowly forced them all to remember or at least accept that he did. Spike had held on.

Now she figured it was her turn. If not feeling quite real was the price of catching hold of Spike and hauling him back to a safe shore, then she didn’t grudge it, or the Lady’s voice periodically muttering in the back of her mind, wanting to know this, or wanting her to say that: not in residence, but not absent, either. When real people had voices talking to them in their heads, they were crazy…or occasionally telepaths. But Dawn was neither. She wasn’t 100% sure, anymore, what she was. That scared her.

Buffy accepted her, loved her; but Buffy had forgotten like the rest and didn’t worry about ridiculous things like not being real.

But Dawn’s connection to Spike, that was bedrock. They’d sometimes get fed up with each other and go off like rockets, but those times were just the passing storms that punctuated weather.

If it was her turn to hold on, she certain sure wasn’t letting go. Whatever that came to entail.

Right now it entailed having the Front Seat of Honor between Buffy, driving, and Giles, trying hard not to watch her drive. Willow and Xander were in the middle seat, Willow anxiously researching in a big book laid across her lap, Xander helpfully holding a flashlight for her. Anya had claimed other business. Kennedy was in the back.

They hadn’t been able to reach Rona, but Amanda’s mom said there’d been a call for ‘Manda and she’d gone out, the mom mildly concerned that it was a school night and now past nine. Dawn had learned long since that ‘Manda had somehow ended up with all the guts in that family: all the rest were wispy, indecisive doofuses. Doofi? Anyway, from that, there seemed a good chance they were with Mike--maybe for tonight's sweep, on the principle that with Spike or without, the show had to go on, right?

Willow was ticked because she’d hoped to have all three SITs for an energy drain, via Giles. Dawn privately thought that was idiotic, just nervousness, since through Dawn Willow had one of the Powers of the universe to draw on. Maybe Lady Gates’ power tasted funny or something. Or maybe Willow was afraid of it--like it would be too much, more than Willow could handle without going black-eyed and veiny-faced.

Turning and kneeling on the seat--no seat belt constraining the middle position--Dawn inquired buoyantly, “What if it’s a trap?”

Looking, wide-eyed, up from her spell book, Willow exploded, “Geez, Dawn, be a little depressing, why don’t you?”

“Well, it could be,” Dawn argued reasonably. “Maybe he doesn’t really want Spike at all, or much, and he’s just bait to bring you into it. Or Buffy. I’m sure Digger would love a chance to get rid of Spike and the Slayer at one go. Then he could do whatever he pleased.”

Giles said flatly, “It’s not a ruse. Ethan needs Spike to manipulate the Chaos Stone. Or at least not primarily a ruse…. A valid point. Buffy?”

Facing straight front, Buffy said, “Get in, get Spike, get out. How’s that for a plan?”

Dawn looked back and forth between them like a tennis match.

“Perhaps slightly lacking in subtlety,” Giles commented mildly. “Might an initial reconnaissance be in order?”

“You just don’t want to go back to the mansion,” Buffy charged.

“It’s not among my favorite places, no. But that’s of no consequence. I didn’t come several thousand miles to stop short a few meters from the goal. If you can face the unpleasant memories embedded in that place, I can certainly do the same. Dawn, explain to me about Mike, please. On the phone, he identified Spike as his sire. At first, I assumed that meant Spike was hunting again, and Mike was some unfortunate he’d turned. But now that I’ve met him, I know that’s not the case. He’s not a stupid fledge, overwhelmed with the change. I gather he occupies a position of some authority and responsibility within Spike’s developing court. So in what way can he regard Spike as his sire?”

Accepting the blatant change of topic, Dawn slid back down on the bench seat. “Angelus turned him, about six years ago.”

“Ah, yes: the demonstration. Now I recollect where I’ve seen him before. Persuading Angel that there is actual inheritance through the demon, and the same demon is transferred in the turning. I’ve produced some preliminary notes on the subject; when there’s time, I’d like to do a full-scale monograph for the Council journal. Privately circulated, of course, but quite prestigious in certain circles. It is, to put it mildly, a revolutionary concept: nothing along those lines has ever been suggested, much less documented. So that’s the Michael concerned, that I’ve written several reams about. How embarrassing, not to have recognized him. I hope I didn’t offend him, not greeting him properly.”

“Mike’s different,” Dawn responded, thinking it out. “He’s just on the edge of becoming a mature vamp. So he acts different and probably looks different--sharper, quicker, more confident than even a few months ago. Not looking, every minute, for somebody to tell him what to do…or not do. Standing his ground. Taking calculated risks, not just diving in blind. It’s no big deal, your not knowing him, Giles. Hardly anybody bothers to tell one vamp from another. Except for Spike. He won’t tolerate being ignored. Mike, he’s cool with it.”

She wished Buffy had accepted her suggestion to let Mike know Rayne had chosen the mansion as a base, to bring him into it. But to Buffy, the idea of vamps as back-up (any that weren't Spike) wasn't worth considering.

Now that she no longer had to be officially mad at him, Dawn would have felt better if Mike was along. And she knew that nobody, not even Buffy, would be more determined to get Spike out in one piece than Mike. Sometimes somebody utterly single-minded and way dangerous was very comforting to have on your side. But Buffy wouldn't hear of it and the Slayer was nothing if not stubborn and bossy.

“Which still doesn’t explain why he’d claim to be Spike’s get,” Giles pointed out. “True, he’d be of the Aurelian bloodline….”

“It was Spike who claimed him,” Dawn replied. “Publicly. And if Spike says, and Mike agrees, who’s gonna argue with them?”

“Still another…connection of Angel’s that Spike’s inherited, then. He seems to make rather a habit of it.”

They both waited, but Buffy was attending strictly to the driving and offered no comment.

Giles continued, “I thought my mild sense of deja vu was merely because….”

“Because he looks as though he could be Riley Finn’s cousin,” Dawn supplied accurately. “Buffy thought so, too. Spike puts it down to something he calls ‘the Wild Geese syndrome.’ Mike was a soldier and then a mercenary, in the before. And then Riley, with the Initiative.”

“Yes, I see. Hired violence: Ireland’s chief export, for centuries. He’s become Spike’s enforcer, then?”

“Spike is his own enforcer.”

“Yes, quite.”

“What’s Ethan doing to him?” Dawn asked, echoing Buffy’s earlier question.

Giles sighed and bowed his head. In a voice as distant and cold as stars, he replied, “Bewitching him. It’s what he does. Until he grows bored, or his…pet successfully defies him.”

There was subtext there. Giles probably didn’t think Dawn could hear it, but she did. She wondered, Did you defy him? Or did he just get bored and indifferent, and let you leave? And are you entirely sure which? But with new tact that maybe was part of turning seventeen, she didn’t ask.

Buffy braked the SUV, set the hand brake, and turned the key. “We’re here. Or close, anyway. Per the plan of our master strategists, I’ll go have a look around. Willow, you get charged up, or whatever you do. Then we’ll go in.”

Everybody got out. Buffy retrieved her favorite sword and a bag of stakes from the back, then vanished into the adjoining park. Holding hands, Giles and Willow began chanting quietly on the sidewalk. Presently each held out a hand: Willow to Xander, and Giles to Kennedy, who looked decidedly nervous and not all that eager to hold hands with two guys. Because after a minute or so, Xander and Ken were directed to make contact, completing the circle. The air around them seemed to thicken like lemon Jell-O with chopped carrots, except the carrot bits were wandering sparks.

Dawn mooched off down the block, because she wasn’t a direct part of any of it. She didn’t scout; she didn’t do magic. She was only the vehicle and the vessel for the Lady, who well might do both. Though probably not: the Lady didn’t think Spike could survive, caught in the middle of a direct confrontation between a Chaos Mage and one of the Powers. Sure, the Lady could likely squash Rayne like a bug. But not without squashing Spike, too, because of the connection there. And the Powers mostly didn’t squash people like bugs--it wasn’t their style. They watched, and hung back, and debated endlessly, involved but not concerned.

If they decided to act, it was by pushing, and nagging, and bringing intangible pressures to bear to edge events in one direction or the other, generally so glacially slowly that nobody would notice anything had moved until a couple of centuries afterward, if at all. As bad as Ents for godawful slow. Except sometimes, when something they considered important had come to crisis sooner than they’d expected. Then they’d choose an Instrument or a Champion and shove him headlong into the middle of it. Whether he wanted to or not. Whether he survived it or not. Whether it entirely fucked up the rest of his life or not. As long as their purpose was achieved, what did they care?

(The Lady imparted, “You misvalue the long view; through you, we’ve gained some appreciation for the short term and the immediate. Both have their wisdoms.”)

Dawn shot back rancorously, “Fuck the wisdoms. Spike is crazy again, and hurting, and you don’t give a single damn.”

(“If he can be spared, he will be spared. And you are spared knowing what a wretched, self-centered, sybaritic, sadistic reptile this Rayne is. If you would be a child forever, you’ll be spared such things. Cherish your innocence: it comes at a price others pay, that you may have this luxury. Be grateful. Now hush and don’t interrupt me. I’m tying a dimensional knot.”)

Dawn stuck out her tongue and rancorously kicked a stone. Then she patted her overalls pocket, where her taser was. At least maybe she could fight. Hard to ignore somebody zapping you in the ghoolies. That would give her great satisfaction.

**********

Buffy gave the mansion a cursory once-around because Giles thought she should. She didn’t expect to see anything, and she didn’t.

The chimney breathed smoke. It was a cool evening: the mage had lit a cozy fire in the fireplace. How nice.

At least it was confirmation that Rayne was resting after the day’s dimension-hopping exertions. In place and now locked in, thanks to the Lady’s closing the ways against him.

Once, Buffy had known the mansion so well. Every dip in the ground, every vista through the trees, all of it golden and dreamlike. Now the ground was ankle-deep in fallen leaves and untended, forlorn. Dropping down from the retaining wall, she was in the paved pocket garden where she’d had her final fight with Angelus. Its fountain was dry and clogged with slimy leaves. All the riot of flowers were dead brittle stems. Angel had literally courted the light, she recalled: trimmed away branches to let it shine at noon into this little sunken court so he could gaze at it from a safe distance out the window. Enough to keep the flowers alive….

She’d been driven back against the wall, just there. Against Angelus’ hateful jeering that she’d lost everything and had nothing left, she’d found herself declaring that she had herself and catching the descending sword blade between her two hands. The fight had turned then, on that realization.

Then, being alone and knowing it had been a strength. With only herself on the line, all fights were simple, although she’d lost a few along the way. Died a couple of times. Not until Spike had she ever truly let anyone into her essential Slayer solitude. Her friends, they helped, sure. But when push came to shove, she was the one in the lead and on the line. They were concerned but not committed--they could walk away anytime. Like Oz had. Like Angel had. Like even Willow and Xander had, after a fashion. Unavailable to her, anyway.

Not Spike, though. Spike stayed--even when she hadn’t wanted him to. Like candle lighting candle, he took his purpose from hers and was right out there on the line along with her unless she forced him away, refused him completely. Once, she’d actually succeeded in driving him away, and she’d thought he was gone for good: when he’d been off winning the soul. It had been a bitter satisfaction.

And then, despite everything, he’d come back. Crazy, filthy, starving, frightened, helpless, a whirlwind of confusion. A burden and a responsibility, not a help. Not at first. Except that just the fact of him made her know she wasn’t alone. Couldn’t be, even when she wanted to. She was half of a wacky set, all crooked edges and sharp points, and she’d finally resigned herself to that. It’d been a while longer before she’d taken any joy from the connection; any peace; any love. But they’d been there for her all along, if she’d only had the eyes to see and the grace to accept.

Love was finally such a little word, such a Hallmark sentiment, for what Spike was to her now.

So all breath was driven from her body when she looked in the window and saw them there, by the fire: Rayne, with his neat, dry, creased, quizzical face and flying dark eyebrows, like he knew a naughty secret and was gonna inflict it on you, sitting across Angel’s big wood chair, one leg thrown over the arm padding, back propped at crooked ease into the corner, looking down and laughing, all lazy gaiety. Laughing back at him was Spike, stretched out on the carpet like a great pale cat; eyes wide and wild and drawn oblong with liner, like an odalisque’s; all smooth power in repose, his torso painted with chocolate shadows and tangerine highlights by the flames and shining beyond that: oiled, sleek, leaned easily on a bent arm, hand propping his tilted head.

Rayne was feeding him something--offering, then drawing away, happily teasing and playful. The faint blush on Spike’s skin meant he’d already fed well and to his satisfaction.

Around Spike’s neck was a broad black leather collar dotted with steel studs. The match to his watchband and to his belt. Very decorative. Very deliberate.

Buffy wrenched away and threw up into the dry fountain.

Spike would hear. Couldn’t be helped.

She took the wall at a bound, still fighting the impulse to heave.

She’d visualized something like his captivity by the First: chains; bruises; wounds. Not luxurious collared ease. Nothing like this. Nothing she’d ever imagined.

She ran, practically headlong, into Giles. Until he offered her his handkerchief, she didn’t realize she was crying, and ducked her head and let herself be walked away a little distance from the others, all standing by the SUV and staring at her.

“Buffy, what is it?” Giles asked her with all the quiet and concern she so conspicuously lacked. That she’d missed so terribly, but couldn’t say so because Giles was a grown-up and had his own life, and rebuilding the Council and monographs on Mike and yada yada.

She clutched his lapels and sobbed. She was the Slayer. She was allowed.

“My dear child. What has he done?”

“I think maybe,” (Buffy blew her nose explosively, then scrubbed at her eyes: wrong order, didn’t care) “we should just leave it, OK? Lady Gates is this big Power, why can’t she just shut off the Hellmouth, too? Why does she need Spike to stop it? Why can’t she just let him alone and…and let him just be happy? He looked happy, Giles. And if he can be, why not just let him be? Why do I have to jump in and ruin everything?”

“Buffy.” Giles patiently teased the handkerchief out of her fist and presented her with another from a hip pocket. She imagined him producing an endless stream of handkerchiefs like a magician pulling scarves out of people’s noses, which was gross and not at all magical. She was giggling and sobbing at the same time. “Buffy, it’s an enchantment. A spell. You’ve been bespelled yourself, a time or two--remember? While it lasts, it’s utterly convincing. You can’t see past it or around it. It simply is. Which is among the reasons why I came. Age sometimes grants perspective, Anya aside.” He waited for her to notice his small, pursed smile.

“But…he looked happy. And strange. And…not mine,” she blurted.

“Would Spike, of his own volition, ever deliver to Dawn a severed human hand?”

“No,” Buffy admitted.

“He has no choice, or very little, in what he does, how he seems. We all have monsters within that can be teased out, flattered into complaisance…captured, for a time. Spike’s is merely more accessible. Closer to the surface, unsouled as he is. And unsouled as he is, he has nothing that can withstand such beguilement. It would be most unfair to judge him by what he cannot help and can’t control. What’s been imposed on him by another. Give any of us what we believe to be our heart’s desire, even if it’s a complete fraud, and there are few of us who could resist being ensnared. In that place, Drusilla came to me as Jenny and I told her without murmur what I’d endured torture rather than reveal. Don’t judge him, Buffy.”

“But…there was oil. And a frickin’ collar!”

“That’s right: be angry. We must go and do this now. Spike is helpless, and in prison, even though the walls may not be visible to us. We cannot leave him there. For his sake, and for ours. When the spell is lifted, you’ll see things more clearly, more truly. Wipe your eyes. It’s time.”

**********

Dawn was nervous, going to confront whatever had freaked Buffy so totally. Buffy, all grim and furious, wouldn’t talk about it, just led off down the sidewalk. Spell book at last set aside, Willow trotted after, and Giles, and Dawn last, glancing at shadows, clutching her taser.

After feebly protesting, Xander and Kennedy were tucked, fast asleep, in the back of the locked SUV. Drained, they weren’t up to much. So it was just the four of them.

A ruckus started up in the park, off to the right, out of sight. Buffy’s head whipped around, but she just went faster. They all broke into a run.

Following Buffy, they were headed straight for the front door: real subtle, Dawn thought. Maybe it was locked. Didn’t really matter, because Buffy tucked her sword under her arm, grabbed the ornate looped opener thingy two-handed, and hauled the door off its hinges, bang, and pitched it into the yard. Buffy tended to do things like that.

(“Stand ready,” directed the Lady’s cool intention, within her.)

Yeah, right. Ready for what?

What came off was the door. What came out was about half a dozen vamps, snarling and stinky. Buffy went high, with the sword. Dawn went low, with the taser. Willow dithered and Giles economically took out the vamps Dawn had downed, with stakes produced from his deep overcoat pockets. There was a lot of dust. They went inside.

“Why, Ripper!” somebody caroled from out of sight. “What a surprise! Sorry, must dash. Things to subvert, people to do.”

It was something Spike said, slightly skewed. Suddenly Dawn was hot with indignation.

Giles replied coolly, “I think you may find that difficult, Ethan. You have something of ours. We want it back.”

Sidling in behind, Dawn found herself in a large, paneled room. Across from the door, to her left now, there was a fireplace with a fire burning in it. Behind her she’d noticed another door, smaller, with a window to either side. Everything was old and dusty. Moths had been feasting on the carpet. A big padded wooden chair by the fire had been overset, trailing scraps of canvas lining. Everything smelled like dust, mildew, and mice. If the house wasn’t haunted, it should have been.

The Chaos Mage, Ethan Rayne, was a skinny, unprepossessing guy in grey suit pants, a blue shirt, and what Dawn thought was called a smoking jacket--kind of a short robe with red plush panels at the shoulders. Pretty much backed up against the far wall, in front of a ratty looking but ornate couch with curved legs and lion paw feet. Grinning broadly, as though this eruption into his Vincent Price living room was the most delightful thing he could imagine.

Yeah, right. Sure.

Crouched beside him was Spike: bare-chested, in some outfit that made him look like a circus performer in search of a trapeze. Black, of course, and shiny. All greased up, as though for a Turkish wrestling match, like the one in Topkapi, except none of the wrestlers had worn a big black studded collar, that Dawn recalled. Absolutely Spike’s style: she wondered if he’d gotten it at skins, at the mall, where they’d found the belt to match the watch band. Of the watch he wasn’t wearing.

That was when she noticed both arms were the same: the tattoo, her verse, the poetry that meant Dawn was gone. She was so shocked she almost barged right past except the Lady told her the field had to be secured, or some crap like that, and she only rocked against Giles’ back for a second. Lucky she didn’t have her finger on the taser trigger.

Now that she was freaked, Buffy was calm. “We’ve come for Spike.”

“The Slayer, come to reclaim her pet--how touching. But what if he chooses not to go?” Rayne laid spread fingers on Spike’s shoulder, his grin gone a little rigid. “Now would be a good time, dear boy.”

Spike flashed to game face yet somehow looked no different. He hadn’t said a word or shown any sign of recognizing them, or understanding that this was supposed to be a rescue. Both his arms were braced forward, and his hands were set on a chunk of rock: presumably the fabled Chaos Stone. Otherwise known as the ugly chunk of rock that was doing absolutely nothing whatever.

(“Of course not,” the Lady contributed to the general sense of everybody being strange and off-balance. Profoundly off. “Be prepared to stand aside.”)

Spike bent crooked and flinched: Rayne was hurting him.

Taking Willow’s hand, Giles said, “The ways have been shut. Release Spike and you can go where you will.”

The whole room went strange then in a way Dawn could only see, not describe. It wavered. It seemed new and rich, and tatty and old, each shading into the other. Then it seemed like a mouth about to bite down with big black teeth. Dark snapped like a burnt-out bulb, then flickered. Willow and Giles were doing the yellow Jell-O thing, and Willow had one arm extended, fingers spread, in a sort of stop gesture. She was muttering and sometimes shouting in some language Dawn had yet to acquire and the Lady didn’t bother interpreting for her. In one of the flickering moments, Dawn saw that although the contest was presumably between Rayne and Willow, he and Giles were the ones looking at one another with a terrible sadness.

Then she was shoved aside, within herself, but still enough present to feel her hand go out and fling something invisible, hot, and tingly. She seemed to have thrown it at Spike, since he cried out a vowel sound and collapsed, curling into himself and making a keening noise, rocking and trying to curl tighter still.

He’d fallen away from the stone. The black smacked down like a blown fuse and then was gone. The room was its tatty self again, and Willow was crying and leaning into Giles’ supporting arms. The stone was gone. And so was Ethan Rayne.

(“Not inter-dimensional,” observed the Lady in a vexed tone of mind. “Teleported. The wretch must have had a retrieval spell set on himself, ready to be triggered. Devious. At least he was unable to take Spike with him.”)

Buffy had dropped the sword and was down on her knees next to Spike, trying to get him to uncurl. He wouldn’t, twisting away from her, wrapping arms over and around his head, dragging back whatever she tried to ease straight, still making that noise. Still suffering.

Dawn dazedly figured out she was back at the wheel again and demanded, “What did you do?”

Her sense of the Lady was distant now: retreating. (“He entrusted you with it. It was therefore symmetrical he receive it again from your hand. We have returned his soul to him. That in turn allowed him to choose. He has chosen.”)

Sitting back on her heels, Buffy was holding up both hands, shiny with whatever grease or oil Spike’s skin was covered with. Looking up at Giles in surprised distress, she announced, “It burns.”