Eighteen Days

Author: Elen

Summary: I never liked the Buffy/Angel two part crossover storyline about the Gem of Amara and I decided to re-write it as Spike's summer of exploring his post-Drusilla life. He encounters Willow in San Jose where she is spending the summer house-sitting, angst-ing over Oz, and interning at a dot com start up company. Said company is oblivious to what is about to happen to them in about one year. Summer of 1999.

Warning: Set in the summer after Season 3, spoilers through Season 3. All of the email addresses used for Willow, her friends and parents were made up for this story. Please don't use them.

Notes: Eighteen Days is actually a pretty old piece. I started writing it in March 2003 and it is the begining of a four season spanning story line. The first hundred pages have been beta read by Shannon. If anyone wants to beta the rest of it, I have another hundred pages ready to be read in this part.

The setting for the story is necessarily California, which I am less familiar with than I like. Street names and locations in San Jose, San Francisco and other locales are fictional. Apologies to local residents who find my fictional locations in their cities to be disorienting.

Disclaimer: The characters, settings, and storylines created for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel are the intellectual property of others. No copyright infringement is intended in this derivative work of fiction created for no commercial purpose.

Rating: PG-13 for violence and language. (I'm sure it will end up drifting toward NC-17-my mind just works that way, I guess.)

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~
 
 

~Part: 1~

Willow Rosenberg stood on the poured concrete porch of her cousin Rebecca's house on St. Catherine Court with a broom in hand. After she had gotten off the bus from work she had walked two blocks to her cousin's small house, collected the mail, checked her messages, and changed into a more casual than casual Friday pair of denim overalls and a t-shirt. She didn't want to stay in the house. When she got off the bus she noticed, for the first time that day, that the sky overhead was an extraordinary shade of blue. Cloudless. The leafy greenness of the trees lining the street stood out crisply. It looked like something out of a postcard. It was an unseasonably cool day, a vacation from summer heat kind of day that was rarely to be had in Sunnydale. San Jose was six hours north of Sunnydale, and the climate was noticeably milder.

She thought some of her appreciation had to do with it being Friday, the end of the third week of her internship at a small ISP in San Jose that was angling to be bought by a bigger ISP. At lunch she had received her first paycheck-actually an email advising her that her paycheck had been direct deposited in the checking account she had opened a few days after high school graduation, swelling her account balance in a gratifying way. She had gone out to lunch with her boss and some of the guys from tech support who had told her to consider herself permanently invited to their Friday night dinners.

She heard about the Friday night dinner ritual from her boss, Sara Engstrom. Sara was a former intern who had been with the company for two years and supervised the interns. She had pointed her finger at Willow on the first day when she met her in the lobby and sternly advised her to refuse any job offers and go to college at the end of the summer. She also explained that she was the middle of three children spaced exactly two years apart, and the internship had suckered her with the prospect of fulfilling all of her bossy older sister longings. Willow thought she was kidding, but after two weeks of contact with Sara and overhearing her side of conversations with her sisters Jennifer and Elizabeth, Willow was a believer.

Sara had plans for Friday night that didn't include, as she put it, geeking with the boys in tech support. She suggested that Willow wait for next week. Payday Fridays meant that before dinner everyone would hit the computer and gaming store. The conversation would be heavy on the world of on-line gaming and D&D.

"You just haven't lived until you've been to Buca d'Beppo with a dozen guys who are shouting at each other across the table about the hit points to kill a litch, the downside of the find familiar spell if the game master is a sadist, and the pros and cons of enchanted weapons. Next week, it will be movies, and less weirdness," Sara explained.

Willow had smiled to herself. She could imagine, and she had participated in those kinds of discussions, only they hadn't been for a game.

The prospect of the weekend seemed much more tangible than she ever recalled. Just having the weekend seemed more meaningful after working a fifty-hour week. She had made friends, too. No backsliding into shy girl mode as she feared she would. Stopping at a used bookstore on the way home, she had treated herself to a long browse and a couple of purchases that she was looking forward to enjoying on Rebecca's porch.

Rebecca was spending the summer in Israel, working on her dissertation. Willow loved the house. It was small, built in the 1920s. The porch had been added later. There was a small, tiled entry hall that led into a narrow living room with a scarred hardwood floor and a Spanish influenced tile and plaster fireplace that was almost too big for the room. A sunroom that Willow thought had probably been another addition to the original house since the tile wasn't even a close match to the tile in the entry, was off to the right, making the living room look bigger and filling both rooms with light filtered through the trees that grew down the center of St. Catherine Court.

Through an archway at the end of the living room there was a small dining room that Rebecca had used as a home office. The office space was connected to the kitchen, which could also be reached by entering the hall on the other side of the fireplace. The kitchen hadn't been touched since the 1960s. The cabinets were plain honey colored oak with brass pulls, and the counter tops and appliances were white. Rebecca had a breakfast bar table and two stools crammed in between the back door under the only window. The back door went out to a small fenced in patio that was bordered on all sides with flower beds. There was a pair of Adirondack chairs painted mint green on the paved portion of the patio and Willow liked having her coffee there in the morning, surrounded by plants. The privacy fence was high enough that she could go out and lounge in her pajamas.

There were two bedrooms, so small that Rebecca used both of them. Willow was using the spare, overflow bedroom where Rebecca had a daybed set up. The other bedroom was on the other side of the bathroom, barely big enough for a double bed and dresser.

There was a basement under the kitchen and the larger bedroom where the washer and dryer, hot water heater, and furnace were located. It was small, but more than enough room for one person, and the smallness of the house made it feel like a cottage to Willow. She liked the porch best, though. It was a concrete slab framed in painted brick, wide enough to sit on comfortably. Rebecca had a cushioned wicker couch spray-painted navy blue on the porch and a citronella candle lantern on a tile topped table on the porch. When the living room drapes were pulled back there was plenty of light, even at night, on the porch. She swept the porch off, feeling grateful to Rebecca for trusting her to take care of her home over the summer.

With her chores completed she opened one of the living room windows so she would be able to hear the phone if it rang and lugged her used bookstore treasure to the porch. The book was titled 20,000 Years of Fashion, a topic that might reasonably be assumed to hold little interest for her, but when she had paged through the book, the gorgeous full color plates had made her heart beat faster. There were works by dozens of artists, most of whom she had never heard of illustrating the book. A portrait of a girl by Petrus Christus used to illustrate a chapter on changing headwear during the northern renaissance tugged at her imagination. There was something so striking about the way the artist had captured the compelling stillness of a plain, ordinary, almost colorless girl, looking at the artist out of the corner of her eye. She looked weighed down in clothing and by a fez-like headdress that framed her small head, but she seemed indifferent in the portrait, her careful lack of expression rendering her an eternal mystery.

Willow spent a happy hour or two turning the pages, studying the paintings more than reading the accompanying text. When she started to loose the light and feel a pang of hunger, she closed the book and went into the house to get her bag. The cafe beckoned. She locked the door behind her and went down the stairs, startling one of the cats that claimed the court. It was a big, fluffy marmalade tabby cat with large brown eyes that glowed in the fading light. For a moment they stared at each other and then the cat threw back his head and issued a full-throated yowl. Willow grinned at him. The first time he had done that to her, she had jumped a foot in surprise. "Right back at you," she told him, continuing down the sidewalk.

St. Catherine wasn't a street. It was a closed court with houses on either side facing each other across a strip of common ground that was covered in grass and mature trees that loomed over the houses. It sat up, above Morton Street by nearly ten feet and a pair of stairs led down to Morton flanking a curved retaining wall where two park benches were arranged. The coffee shop was on Morton Street on the other side of St. Catherine, and Willow crossed the open space to the door, pushing it open. It was still early, so she had her choice of seats, but she went to the bar out of habit and took a bar stool, leaning forward on her elbows, offering a quick wave to the rumpled looking gray haired man behind the bar.

"How's my favorite little red headed girl?" Mike demanded.

Mike was Willow's father's age. He owned the coffee shop, a used bookstore, an art gallery, and a novelty shop on either side of St. Catherine Court, Rebecca had made a production of introducing Willow to her neighbors, and in retrospect, Willow was grateful. It had felt like a geek girl moment when Rachel had been leading her around, but she was glad that she knew some people in San Jose other than the people she worked with.

"Hi, Mike," she waved, forgiving him for the little girl business because she knew it was a reference to Charlie Brown's little red headed girl, and that was okay. She took a seat at the bar as he started whipping up a drink for her. Her first coffee, prepared by Mike, was always a surprise, defeating her tendency to re-order things she knew she liked. Mike brought her the coffee, served in an apple green cup topped with whipped cream dusted with cocoa. She took a cautious sip, inadvertently getting whipped cream on her nose, tasting chocolate, orange, and cloves with the coffee.

"What's the verdict?" he asked with a small smile, handing her a napkin and gesturing to her nose. Rebecca Hoffman was a good neighbor and he had agreed to keep an eye on her house sitting teenage cousin when she asked.

"I like it," she said with the mild discomfort of a girl who didn't know how to deal with being the center of attention.

"Hey, Willow," Angie, one of the waitresses, gave her a hug and swiped the whipped cream off her nose. The counter and wait staff had taken Willow out last Saturday night and they had gone to a gay bar for the cabaret. Willow had been fascinated by the men dressed as beautiful women. There was something about the idea of remaking yourself so completely that she found interesting. Not that she was going to go get a blonde wig and a sequined dress. She didn't want to remake herself so much as go back and remake the person she was when things had gone wrong.

Make her a little more like her present day self. A little more confident. More sure of herself and what she wanted. There were things that she was sure she could improve on, or at least have enjoyed a lot more. Like finishing the curse to re-soul Angel before Drusilla killed Kendra, and Giles was tortured. Taking more study time for her SATs. Buying a Wonder Woman outfit from Ethan's the Halloween when they turned into their costumes-she didn't know if there was a Wonder Woman costume, but she had missed her chance to be a super hero. And number one, never, ever, try on formal wear in the same room as Xander Harris, setting in motion a cascade of lust, illicit kissing, and bad break ups. She frowned at herself. She was still, technically, a teenager, but she knew that putting her brief, secretive, smoochie-fest with Xander before re-souling Angel was a little selfish.

She was almost sure Angel wouldn't mind, being guilt ridden and all. It did weird things to your priorities. She was Jewish, and she so got that. Willow sipped her coffee and started thinking more constructively about her list of things that she would do-over. Clearly, it was incomplete, and she needed to give serious thought to the underpinning principals and develop a prioritization system. She could base it on outcomes, she mused. She got her notebook out of her oversized purse and started making notes to herself as the coffee bar started filling up.

She had come to San Jose to house sit and intern at a small Internet company. She was also trying to get some distance from Oz. At least that was the idea when she applied for the internship. If he had picked up the application that she had labored over so ostentatiously and ripped it up, declaring that he couldn't bear the thought that she was exiling herself to a corporate suit summer, that would have been good. Nothing like that had happened. No one at work wore suits either. It wasn't right. She was hopeless.

She had applied for an internship after they had broken up, while Oz wasn't exactly talking to her, or looking over her shoulder at her internship application. She accepted the first offer she received, that made in a fit of pessimism dressed with parental approval sauce, after she more or less threw herself at him at Christmas. She had  thrown herself at him almost immediately after he said he wanted to try again, Oz had been so sweet and caring, insisting that they wait. They had spent the evening together, on the couch, listing to music and, later, standing in the falling snow. He had stayed over, because of the snow, and the fact that they had been awake all night and most of the morning. Snow in Sunnydale was not an event you slept through. They had fallen asleep together on the couch around noon, and when her parents came home in the late afternoon they were still asleep.

It probably looked bad, but sleeping on the couch with Oz was not the worse thing she had ever done, even if her parents didn't know that. Her mother, connecting the dots between teenage daughter and musician boyfriend, sat her down for one of their 'talks', a record two in one year, and made an appointment for Willow to go to her gynecologist for an examination. Dr. Franks, who belonged to the same synagogue as her parents, showed her pictures of sexually transmitted diseases and talked to her about birth control. The whole thing had been humiliating and a little ridiculous.

She had been taking Depo-Provera injections for over a year, though it was not for birth control. Giles had sent Buffy to a doctor for the injections after she had come to Sunnydale because they tended to lessen if not entirely stop menstrual cycles.

Willow had accompanied her to the doctor's office, wondering what was going on since the magazines were all women's magazines, or Mother and Child back issues. After the injection, the nurse had told Buffy to sit in the waiting room for fifteen minutes and given her a pamphlet to read about the injection. Buffy gave it to Willow and had some quality time with an issue of Vogue, working on one of the questionnaires and checking out perfume samples.

Willow had read the fifteen page pamphlet cover to cover. They put it together, after getting past the stunned disbelief that the Watcher's Council was so rude as to put Buffy on birth control without so much as asking if she needed or wanted it. Patrolling during her monthly cycle would be awkward, because of, well, the blood, attracting vamps. After a few mutually grossed out eeeews, Willow decided that she wanted to go on the shots too. Supportive best bud thing, and the thought of being a vampire magnet three days a month really freaked her out. This was effected the next time Giles reminded Buffy she had an appointment after school for one of her 'special shots' and Willow piped up with a request to have a 'special shot' too. Giles had looked mildly uncomfortable, but he had nodded, and muttered something about it being wise.

Her parents had not insisted that she accept the internship, but they had pointed out the advantages. She would earn college credit, and they offered to match whatever she earned from the internship to help her buy a car-though Willow had been thinking new computer, maybe a souped up, ultra thin PC notebook with a docking station to do some serious number crunching database work to compliment her beloved Apple laptop. They had made the connection with cousin Rebecca-Willow's mother insisted on calling Rebecca Rachel-who had a place in San Jose. It wasn't just Buffy's name that escaped Shelia Rosenberg. The fact that Rebecca would be out of town all summer, making Willow a house sitter rather than house guest, shared during a cozy family conference call, made them get that funny look on their faces. The look that Willow could hear in their voices, like the idea of her being on her own in San Jose all summer was not what they had in mind.

Not that they had anything to worry about. The thought had flashed in her mind that Oz could join her, and they could spend the summer together house sitting. When she suggested it to him he had gotten his thoughtful, slightly worried look. He had forgiven her for her indiscretion with Xander. More or less? She was the one who kept pushing for more, not daring to believe that he could put it behind him. He kept telling her not to try so hard. She was so stupid. Her lame little seduction attempts had only made him look . . . bemused. She had tried to get him to have sex with her after prom, mostly because it was prom, and she was grateful that he had forgiven her, and it was prom . . . sort of expected. And she was an idiot.

They finally did it graduation day. With the impending apocalypse-total eclipse during the Mayor's commencement speech triggering the ascension looming over them. The whole time she could hear Xander, in her head, saying something about an exception for impending death scenario the way he did when they were kidnapped by Spike. After the school had been blown up and the dust settled, Oz sat down with her for a 'talk'. He had thought about what he was going to do over the summer while she was in San Jose, and as he said it Willow's heart dropped to the pit of her stomach. She knew he hadn't jumped on the idea of spending the summer together enthusiastically, but she thought after they had had sex the relationship was moving towards more sex and closeness and being together, not spending the entire summer after graduation apart. He was going to spend the summer with the Dingoes.

Did he think that they needed time apart? She chewed on her thumbnail considering that. Was she overeating? Hmm. What was the likelihood of that based on precedent?

Oh, why couldn't she be normal and run away to wait on tables and need to be rescued? Why couldn't she pick a boy who would get it that she wanted to be saved? Instead, she was practical and smart, and maybe even a little ruthless, and she had gone all needy. He probably sensed that. He probably thought that she was planning their wedding and naming their children-not that she hadn't thought about that in a more distant after we finish college sort of way. Did that freak him out? That she was thinking about things like that? Wasn't she supposed to be thinking about things like that? Trying on the idea, so to speak, because they were in love?  Mutually, in love? Falling in love? In really deep like with a dollop of sex on the side?

The house band interrupted an Angel class brood, or at least making Willow aware that she was heading for the land of brood. She frowned at her notebook. No. She was not going to launch a systematic re-hash of her mistakes, she decided. She was going to be brave and not be obsessive, she told herself sternly. Oz loved her. She loved Oz. They were good, and she had her freshman year of college to look forward to, with Oz. He was going to UC Sunnydale too. It would be Oz, Willow, and Buffy at UC Sunnydale, with Xander staying in Sunnydale, maybe, though he had been talking about doing a Jack Kerouake. It was all good. She was not going to let herself ruin her own summer of independent living.

With that settled, Willow found herself bouncing in her bar stool to an acoustic version of 'Hazy Shade of Winter' followed by 'Train in Vain'. The bar was a beautiful thing of carved wood and brass foot rails with floor to ceiling cabinets fitted with mirrors. Between tall bottles of flavoring and exotic liquors she could indulge in a bit of unabashed people watching as the coffee bar slowly filled up. It seemed to happen in waves. She wondered if this was what the Bronze looked like to strangers wandering into the club.

She sipped her coffee as darkness fell outside. She was a half a block from her cousin's small house. The caution after dark that was so much a habit in Sunnydale never seemed to reach her here. She sipped her coffee and felt herself relax in anonymity that was completely comfortable.

~~~*~~~

The sidewalk was thick with Goth punk and skinhead kids, except this was America, and twenty years too late, so it was purely fashion statement adopted by bored teenagers. Colin's bird, Georgia, discovered the intersection of Morton and St. Catherine Court, an indentation on the broad swath of Morton Street created by the closed court where teenagers gathered.

The coffee shop doors were flung open and the sounds of a girl singing, accompanied by a piano, reached the street. Spike didn't go in for folky girl soft rock, but he liked her voice. It had teeth. It had that passionate conviction that teenagers were so good at before they started to see the world as bigger than their petty issues.

He didn't know it, but under the wash of streetlights, to the flock on the street, he and his companions appeared to be everything that was embodied in a fashion statement. The streetlights gave them a preternatural glow, and they parted the crowd effortlessly, drawing stares. The daft chit that Pete had turned was preening, sensing admiration. The great tragedy of her undead life was being deprived of a mirror, which she prattled on about ceaselessly. Since his acquaintances had spent decades cheerfully overlooking Dru's more loopy observations, Spike was forced to ignore the misnamed Harmony and her whiney nasal intonations, which hit a new pitch inside the coffee bar.

"Oh. My. God," she clutched Pete's arm, squealing, "I know her," as she initiated a frantic round of waving.

Spike saw the girl she was waving at, sitting at the bar. She looked familiar; the way people you know look when they are somewhere completely unexpected. The hair on the back of his neck prickled. He knew her. He distracted himself by glaring a cluster of teenagers out of their seats at a table that suited him.

"Willow. Willow Rosenberg! I can't believe it," Harmony said, her voice hitting the high notes of her girlish squeal.

Ah, fuck. Neither could Spike. Willow Rosenberg. Slayer's girly mate and pet witch. He checked her out in the mirror that ran behind the bar. The flash of red hair, the startled way she drew herself from her notebook and looked around, blinking like a startled kitten. What in the name of hell was she doing in San Jose?

"Harmony," vampire hearing being what it was, he picked her voice effortlessly out of the hum of voices in the crowded bar. He found himself smiling at the patently fake social voice. "Wow. Haven't seen you since graduation," she said.

Harmony laughed. "Yeah. Graduation."

"Big snake," Willow said. It sounded like a non sequitur, but it could be some obscure teen code.

"That's Sunnydale," Harmony said. "What are you doing this summer?"

Willow stowed her pen and notebook. Could her life get any more sucky than this? "I have an internship with a dot.com company here in San Jose, and I'm house sitting for my cousin," she said. "What about you?"

Pete tugged Harmony towards the table and she insisted that Willow join them while the girl protested feebly. "Oh that's-you're with your friends and all, um-okay," she gave up, sounding like she was consenting to having her teeth drilled without Novocain.

Spike grinned. This was going to be interesting. Colin and Georgia had already joined him at the table and Colin was looking for a waitress. Harmony kept the witch talking. "I was going to France," she told Willow.

"I'd like to here bugger all about sodding France," Colin sighed, doing a credible spin on Spike's more explosive version of this declaration.

Georgia ran her hand over his bald head. "Poor baby," she said, giggling, winking at Spike.

Georgia was a little bit of all right in his book. She flirted, but it was pure reflex, didn't mean a damn thing. She had been with Colin for nearly twenty years. Colin was an odd bloke. His mum was a vampire. She had turned her son when he was in his late forties. Colin's mum ran a vampire brothel in Newcastle, and there wasn't much Colin hadn't seen or done, but he and Georgia were a bit vanilla. Very comfortable and cozy together. For this evening's excursion, Georgia was got up in blood red leather pants and a little nothing of a top that tied in back. She looked like the child of Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall; Tall, leggy, blonde, fashion model thin, with a pronounced southern accent, and a mouth that was made for sin.

"Uh, thanks," Willow was saying as she sat in a chair that Pete had liberated for her, looking a little startled by the operation. Less so than the sod that had been sitting in the chair, and was looking more astonished than outraged at being ejected from it. Picking back up on Harmony's meandering train of thought, she was rambling about shopping. Again. "France," Willow said, prepared to appreciate. "Yeah. And the museums," she said with a trace of real enthusiasm.

"Huh?" Harmony looked puzzled.

"Museums," Willow repeated, a goofy smile making an appearance. "I heard they had them," she said. "Some crazy rumor," she placated, her gaze shifting from Harmony to her companions until she saw him and froze. Deer caught in the headlights.

"I almost didn't recognize you," Harmony said. "You've changed. It's your hair, right? You got your hair cut!" she pretended to admire it. "It's a good look for you," she said, sounding patronizing.

Spike held her gaze, watching the small changes in her eyes. Her pupils had constricted, and the color, deep, true green, not hazel, seemed to sharpen a bit. She was startled and scared. Fear rolled off her in waves. Her heart was pounding; making the pulse in her throat increase in a very attractive, bite me, sort of way. No doubt reliving their most recent terrifying encounter, he thought smugly, before remembering with an inner wince that he'd been falling down drunk and mostly pathetic, weeping and carrying on about Dru. Nice of her to go straight to terror, it was rather a relief to know that was what she had taken away from the experience. She had handled herself pretty well, as he remembered it. What had she said? 'There will be no bottle in face or having, of any kind, with me.' Not bad for a piss scared seventeen year old. He was curious about what she would do. He watched her bloodless lips form his name.

The waitress spoiled the moment, coming over to take drink orders. She fingered a lock of Willow's bright hair, tugging on it playfully. "Hey, kiddo," she said. "Want me to bring you a sandwich or some soup?" she asked. "You're looking a bit pale," she noticed.

"What?" she tore her gaze away from Spike. "Uh, no. Thanks, Angie," she managed.

"Raspberry mocha?" Angie guessed. It was her favorite.

Willow nodded. Harmony snapped out an order for a tall, skinny caramel latte. The others ordered ales. Harmony rolled her eyes after Angie left to fill their orders. "Gay much?" she sniped. "So, Willow? You and Oz? Still together?" she asked. "Where is he?"

I am in hell, Willow decided. Sitting with four vamps, including Spike, and Harmony-hello, clueless. No stake. No holy water. Holy crap. And Harmony was asking about Oz.

"Still together," she said, "Only, I'm here and he's with the band. They are in LA this weekend."

Harmony smirked. "Oh. A break," she said archly, injecting just enough skepticism to sting.

Willow considered, briefly, just leaving her there. Harmony had picked on her since kindergarten and she hated her. Loathed her. With a sinking feeling, she knew she couldn't do it. She had sized up the situation. They were in a public place, too many witnesses. Spike was not crazy or stupid and he did not appear to be drunk. In fact, he looked relaxed and amused by all of this. She just had to get Harmony away from the table. How?

"How have you been, Red?" Spike asked, studying her face. He liked her hair longer. She had probably gotten it cut to make herself look older. It didn't work. The soft cut framed her face, an old fashioned pretty, creamy skinned cameo face.

Harmony looked from Willow to Spike and back. "You know each other?" she was surprised.

"Yeah," Spike said. "We know each other," he agreed. "Red's got a good shoulder to lean on," he said mischievously. And she smelled like oranges, cloves, innocence, magic, and blood, he remembered. He had not been that drunk.

He saw her eyes soften slightly in sympathy.

No Dru, she realized. When Buffy had explained what had taken place at the Magic Box Willow had been-well, horrified, actually-but willing to concede that it was romantic in a creepy demon demolition sort of way. He really loved Drusilla, and had clearly forgiven her cheating on him, unlike some she could name at the time. Sheesh. It was just a few kisses! She gave her mopey backslide a mental glare-she and Oz were not on a break, he had forgiven her, and everything was fine! Take that, mopey voice in my head. She had kind of hoped it would work out for Spike, and not just because a Spike and Dru far away from Sunnydale was a good thing. He looked like he was dealing, though.

"You seem . . . okay?" she said, the soft lilt of her voice making it a question.

That drew a laugh out of him. God love her, she was a ridiculous little thing. "I'm swell, pet," he mocked. "Colin, Georgia, Pete-you know Harm," he pointed out, "this is Red. Willow," he corrected himself, surprising her. "Say hello, precious," he prompted.

"Hello," Willow said, nervously as Angie returned with their drink orders. Spike knew her name? Her given name? That was not of the good.

Harmony was trying to puzzle out how nerdy Willow Rosenberg knew Spike. Spike was a big deal. He had just shown up in San Jose, and everyone fell in line behind him in some mysterious pecking order that Harmony had not figured out yet. Colin was twice his size and scary looking, and kind of lazy, but he seemed to defer to Spike.

"You must be from Sunnydale," Georgia said. Harmony was from Sunnydale, and Spike had spent some time there, so she connected the dots without effort.

"Yeah," Willow agreed. "Sunnydale," she said. Where she ought to be right now, instead of here. Where there was a Slayer. She sipped her mocha, and regretted it, sure that it was going to back up on her or give her horrible indigestion considering the way her stomach was churning.

"Oh, sorry," Harmony said, belatedly realizing that she had not bothered with introductions, mostly out of habit. She usually did not want to admit she knew Willow, much less introduce her to people. "Willow. Everyone," she waved at them, following up on Spike's introduction. "Sunnydale?" she said with a whiney laugh. "How is everything in Sunnydale?" she asked. She licked foam off her upper lip, inadvertently smudging her lipstick.

Willow seized on the smudged lipstick. "Oh, no," she said with fake concern. "You smudged your lipstick," she said.

Harmony looked horrified. "Damn it," she said. "Is it bad?" she asked.

"Uh . . . kind of," Willow lied. "Let me show you where the bathroom is so you can fix it," she offered. She cast a hard and pardonably triumphant look at Spike, who was smiling as Harmony got up and left the table with her.

"What the hell was that about?" Colin wondered as the two girls maneuvered through the crowd.

Spike was laughing. "She's rescuing Harm from us," he said. Silly bint. "Georgia, be a love and go after them before Harm drains her dry," he requested.

"What? Is this catch and release night?" Pete asked.

"The little redhead is the Slayer's bestest girly mate," Spike said. "We'll have one incredibly brassed off Slayer here if Red turns up minus a few pints," he explained.

Colin nodded to his girlfriend, who followed Harmony and Willow.

Willow realized her mistake as soon as they got to the bathroom. The bathroom, with a huge mirror, behind two sinks. "You know what sucks?" Harmony asked.

Willow looked into the mirror, hearing Harmony's voice. No reflection. Crap. No reflection. Harmony vamped out.

"Actually," Willow figured out what distressed Harmony most about her undead state, the lack of quality time with a mirror. She backed away from her, saying with nerveless cheer,  "On the plus side, you can't see yourself like this. Its not a good look for you," she muttered. Way to go, Willow, insult the vampire who hated your guts when she was just a mean, annoying teenager.

Harmony pouted, stomping her foot. "That's just mean," she whined before lunging. She slammed Willow against the tile wall with enough force to make her mind go blank for a merciful second before Harmony bit her. Hard.

She fought, but the other girl was much too strong, greedily drawing on the wound, making weird little moaning sounds that sounded . . . sexual.  Willow felt herself becoming light headed, and knew in a distant, disbelieving way that she was dying. The irony of it made her grimace. Was it ironic? It was not listed in the non-ironic elements of that Alanis Morrisette song, Oz liked to grumble about. Should have been. She should have gone with her less charitable impulse to leave Harmony with the vampires. Her last thoughts, defining irony, were unsettlingly weird, even for her. As her vision dimmed, she saw the shadow of the bathroom door opening against the ceiling through the blond cotton candy cloud of Harmony's hair, and then nothing.

For Georgia, it was a split second decision. She had known Spike going back almost twenty years, so if he did not want the girl dead, that was reason enough for her. Punching Harmony in the face was simply a bonus. Harmony dropped the girl and she crumpled, bonelessly against the wall, her head smacking the tile floor, bleeding like a slaughtered sheep. Georgia felt her face change as the rich smell of blood reached her, and shook off her true face, grabbing a wad of paper towels. She applied pressure to the wound while Harmony mewled about her broken nose.

"I'll break your damned neck, fledge, if you don't shut up," Georgia snapped. "Wash your face and go get Spike," she said. "Now!"

Harmony splashed some water on her face to rinse off the blood. The cold water restored her human features. She felt her face to reassure herself that she looked human again. She was pouting when she came back to the table. "Everyone spoils my fun," she said.

Pete patted her ass. "We'll get you something yummy on the way home," he promised.

Harmony smirked. "Tummy's full," she said slyly. "This place sucks," she rubbed against him. "Let's go somewhere else," she cooed before looking at Spike. "Oh, yeah," she said, "Georgia told me to get you."

"Fuck," Spike finished his ale with one long pull on the bottle. "I'm assuming that there is a back door," he told Colin. "Get the car, and meet me around back," he ordered, heading off in the direction the girls had taken. There was a chubby dark haired girl outside of the ladies room. She looked excited. "There's a girl in there, passed out," she reported. "I bet its X," she said.

He pushed past her, the rich scent of blood hitting his nostrils, burrowing to the back of his brain as he pushed the door open. Willow was on the floor and Georgia had her. "This is stupid," she told him.

"Yeah," he acknowledged it. The wisest thing at this point might be to finish her off and dump her body somewhere where it would not be found anytime soon. He stripped off his coat, wrapping her limp body in it, lifting her in his arms. "Find us an exit, ducks," he ordered. Georgia was a century his junior. She had enough common sense and smarts to stay undead above a few decades, so he wasn't a prat about it, but he was her senior, and he expected unquestioning obedience.

She responded to the change in his tone of voice. Stuffing the bloodied towels into the trash can, she moved ahead of him, prepared to fight if it came to that. She let her nose guide her to fresh air and found the back door into a narrow alley as Spike followed, carrying the girl.

Colin appeared a moment later, in the adjoining street, getting out of a gunmetal gray BMW long enough to open the back door. Georgia went around to the passenger side as Spike bundled the girl in and shut the door. "Go," he said curtly, and Colin moved back into the flow of traffic, following the speed limit, taking a few meandering turns, waiting for Spike to clarify what was going on.

Spike was busy. The bite mark at the base of her neck was a nasty mess of torn, bruised tissue. The stupid fledge had made a botch of it, missing the sweet spot by centimeters, so the girl wasn't likely to bleed to death. He probed the back of her head, feeling the sponginess of swollen tissue and the stickiness of blood in her hair. She was out cold, but her heart was still beating. Left unattended she would probably survive.

When she woke up? She would call her good friend Buffy, no doubt. Just when he was starting to get settled in San Jose. It wasn't a bad town. No Slayer. No Master. Small, reasonably civil vampire population. And him, more or less what passed for the biggest bad. Damn it. Stupid little chit.

"Spike?" Colin prompted.

"Thinking," he said, eyes narrowing on the middle distance as he considered his options and assets.

Not the follower or leader sort was Colin. Kind of a loner, which was rare amongst vampires. He had his set that he would hang out with, and his bird, but no minions to protect or master to answer to. He was the go along get along sort. He was going along right now, but that might not last.

What to do with the girl? He could finish her off and dump her body, but she had been seen with him. The waitress was going to remember that, he realized, remembering the affectionate way she had played with Red's hair. This was getting complicated. When she disappeared, questions were going to be asked and he was certain the Slayer would put it together, which would set her on his trail, probably with Angel backing her up. Same to be said if he left her at a hospital. Somehow, he doubted he was going to earn points for not killing her.

His eyes narrowed. That left . . . keeping her. The Slayer might come looking for her, but she would want her friend back alive and in one piece. That gave him some bargaining room. A slow, wicked smile curved his lips as he thought of Buffy and Angel's mutual panic when he had kidnapped the girl before. They had gotten downright helpful. They would loose their fucking minds over this. The thought of their distress made him chuckle.

"What's the plan?" Colin asked. That laugh was full of wicked intent.

Spike sifted the girl's silky hair though his fingers. He bent his head to the oozing wound, licking it experimentally, and nearly tossed his latest mind fuck plan right out the proverbial window. Delicious. "I think I may just keep her," he said.

Willow's Email (Unopened)

To:                 Rosenw@clangeek.com

From:             b.summers@uscs.edu

Re:                You-hoo!

Hey Wills!

Xander and I put together my new computer-graduation present from Dad. Our college email accounts are active. Woo hoo! Xander says that since you have had an email account since email was invented this might not be a big deal to you.

We miss you. Tons. Sunnydale is boring without you. I don't see why you can't come home on the weekends. Just say the word and I'll ask my Mom to come pick you up for some weekend bonding and Bronzing. Xander misses you too.

How is everything going with your job? I hope its not all Oz missage.  Have you made any friends? Met anyone interesting? I want details.

Buffy

~Part: 2~

Buffy checked her email box after she finished patrolling. Xander had gone with her, and that had been nice. They hadn't done that too often over the last year. She had been busy patrolling with Faith when she came back to Sunnydale after she ran away. Then  Angel had come back from hell, and she had pretty much cut everyone out of the Buffy loop. Followed by the fall out when it came out that Angel was back and that she had hid it from her Watcher and her friends.

Xander had been so angry with her and vengeful about Angel. They had said some things to each other that had created a bit of distance in their relationship.

Taunting him about being jealous of Angel had not been smart, but she had been  angry, at him for being so pigheaded about Angel, and at herself for hurting her friends by not trusting them with the truth about the miracle that was his return to her. Angry too, because no one seemed to get that. No matter what Angelus had done, for the few seconds before she had killed him to close the door to hell Angelus had opened, he was her Angel, returned to her, and she had killed him, to save the world. Getting him back was a kind of redemption for her. It was a miracle that she had been too shell-shocked to believe in, too stunned to share.

Willow had understood that. She had been as upset as the others, but Buffy knew that she understood, in a way Giles and Xander, and to some extent, Angel, could never understand, what it meant to her.

Earlier that night Buffy and Xander had put together the computer Buffy's dad had sent, even though it was meant for school, and it would have to be repacked and reassembled when she moved into her dorm room at the beginning of the fall term.

She smiled to herself, remembering the day Willow had left for her internship. Oz had driven her to San Jose, and Buffy and Xander had gone to her house to see her off. She had looked so brave, and slightly forlorn, standing there in her size seven Keds and folded down crew socks, wearing a smock-like pale blue jumper with an orange t-shirt. Like a kid version of herself going off to her first day at school, clutching her parting gift from Xander-a Scooby Doo lunch box.

"I'll stay if you want me to, Buffy," she said.

She was making the offer because Angel was gone, not dead or damned, but just two hours away starting a new Buffy-free life in Los Angeles. Buffy had smiled. "Yeah. Because other people's issues are more interesting than your own," she reminded Willow.

She nodded appreciatively, her goofy, sage Willow expression in place. "Completely," she agreed. They had passed that baton back and forth all through high school. "You are okay?" she asked.

"No," Buffy admitted. "I'm a disaster, but I'll get there."

Buffy had been accepted to Northwestern. Willow had been accepted to every school that counted between California and Western Europe. She had decided to stay in Sunnydale, to attend UC-Sunnydale in the fall, because she wanted to continue studying magic and helping Buffy. After Faith went rogue, Northwestern was never really in the cards for Buffy. It was not possible to leave the Hellmouth without a functioning Slayer. The duty had chosen Buffy. Willow chose the duty. Buffy was glad that she was going to have a summer away from it, though it was kind of funny that Willow was nervous about an extra-normal summer minus demon hunting and slaying.

No email in her box. She turned the computer off. She would check again in the morning, maybe. She changed into her pajamas and took out her diary, tapping the pen on the clean page. She wrote the date and started recording the day. What she ate, the techniques she had practiced in training, her observations on patrol. It was still quiet in the post apocalyptic way that things tended to cool off for a while.

She tapped the page with the end of the pen. Ever since Angelus had stolen her diary, she had been a little more reserved in recording her most intimate thoughts and feelings. She wrote a little more, about patrolling with Xander. About friendships that changed and grew, but remained constant, and when she thought she was tired enough, she turned out her light and lay in her bed to sleep. Behind her closed eyelids, she did not weep, not even with the frustration of sleep eluding her. She just felt hollow.

~~~*~~~

Willow's head pounded in time to the beat of her heart. She woke up in a room that was dark, cool, quiet, and unfamiliar in a disorienting way. She closed her eyes, fighting nausea and heard someone cross the room to place a warm, damp washcloth on her forehead, covering her eyes. Breathing made her head hurt. Thinking made her head swim. She tried without success to put both on pause.

"We need to get something in you," a familiar voice said. Familiar in an uh-oh bad things are about to happen way that made her heart speed up, increasing the blinding pain in her skull.

"Where am I?" she asked. Her throat ached. Not sore throat achey. Gaping wound the size of Kansas achey.

The question was ignored. She lifted a hand that felt way too heavy to try to feel her neck. Her hand was brushed aside. "Leave it be. You aren't bleeding," Spike said. She felt her shoulders lifted, her neck supported in the crook of an arm, something cold and wet touching her lip. "Drink," he ordered. Orange juice trickled into her mouth, over her lip, wetting her chin where it dribbled out of her mouth. She swallowed as much as she could before weakly pushing the bottle away, trying to catch her breath.

"A little fucking cooperation, Red," he growled at her. "I'm trying to save your life, here," he said. "You lost a lot of blood," he said.

A woman's voice, someone's weight shifting at the bottom of the bed she was laying in. "She could have brain damage. Did you think of that?"

Willow whimpered. She didn't want to have brain damage. "My head hurts," she whispered. She had had a concussion before. This was worse in many ways. "My head is giant, isn't it?" Déjà vu. She had said that before, under entirely different circumstances. Her eyes swum with tears as she tried to check her head. "Why are you helping me?" It did not make sense.

He snorted. "Yeah. It's enormous," he said sarcastically. "Drink your damned orange juice like a good girl," he ordered.

The bottle clicked against her front teeth and she tried to drink some more, but it was too much and she started choking, feeling sticky orange juice spilling from her mouth.

"Let me do it," the woman said. "You're making a mess," she said. "Just hold her, okay," she said. Willow felt the mattress shift as she moved to the other side of her, using the washcloth to blot the spilled orange juice. She opened her eyes, seeing the blonde girl from the coffee bar. Vampire, she thought, tensing.

She directed Willow's shaking hands to the bottle. "Now, I'm just going to help you hold the bottle, sugar," she said. "You just take your time with it. Feeling pretty puny, huh?" she sounded sympathetic. "Don't pay any attention to Spike. Your head is all normal sized, and no one's hurting you," she said, smoothing Willow's hair.

She concentrated on sipping the orange juice. No more thinking. Just sip, swallow, sip, swallow. Coffee bar. Spike and more vamps. Save Harmony. Oops. Harmony is a vampire, too. When did that happen? How did that happen? Harmony hitting her, biting her. Why wasn't she dead? Why was Spike trying to save her life? That didn't make any sense. Had she lost so much blood that she was hallucinating. Maybe it was brain damage. Maybe she was dead-or undead.

She inhaled a small mouthful of the orange juice on that thought and started coughing, violent spasms racking her body. Wait. Pain, lots of pain, and she could feel her heart beating. Oh, thank the blessed Lady. She was not dead.

She had given blood often enough to know that she was not supposed to feel this bad. Over her head, she heard Spike and the blonde vampire girl talking. "No one seems to have noticed that she is missing yet," Georgia said. "That's good, right?"

"Won't last," Spike said. "I went through her stuff. She's supposed to be at work on Monday morning," he said.

"Call in sick," Georgia said. "Buy some more time," she suggested.

"Good thinking," Spike complimented. "But, eventually someone is going to notice that she is missing," he pointed out.

"And then?" Georgia prompted.

Yeah. And then? Willow wanted to know the answer to that one. She peered at Spike and found him looking right back at her. He grinned. She had been out for nearly twenty-four hours. Spike had been stuck with waking her up periodically to force orange juice down her throat. It had not been pretty. She was a lot more alert, though, worse for wear, but she was going to live. He had had time to work out some ideas of how to make her useful.

Before the Judge had killed Dalton, his favorite minion had been on the trail of something called the Gem of Amara. Dalton had found some references in ancient texts that led him to believe that it was somewhere in Sunnydale while he was looking for Dru's cure. Angelus' return from the land of the soul-having had taken precedence over everything else, but having little else to do but fume over Angelus and Dru while he healed, Spike had gotten acquainted with Dalton's research and had filled that away for future use.

He had made a deal with the Slayer to leave Sunnydale, and he had, more or less, kept up his end of it, deciding that his fly by while drunk off his ass-two scared teenagers and one dead shop keeper to his tally-really didn't count. If the Gem was in Sunnydale, he had just had one hell of a bargaining chip drop in his lap. Let the Slayer and her Watcher do all the work of researching and finding the Gem. He would trade the redhead for it, and keep his deal with the Slayer all in one fell swoop. It was genius. He was a genius, he thought smugly. He had limited patience for the kind of work it would take to find the Gem, so this really was perfect. Direct action was his milieu, not boring research over dusty old manuscripts written in execrable and ambiguous verse.

"Negotiation," he said simply. It did not suit his plans for Red's absence to go unnoticed any longer than it took to cover his tracks. He had already started making plans. They had to find a decent place to hide out. Somewhere close enough for him to get to Sunnydale within a few hours. He had Colin out scouting some locations. Unfortunately, it meant keeping Colin, Pete, Georgia, and Harm close. He didn't want them passing potentially useful information on to the Slayer when she started looking for Red. Colin had a line on a place outside of town. It was an abandoned motel that had gotten lost in a highway construction plan that bypassed it, attracting a few squatters that could be dealt with and turned into something useful. Dinner. Minions. It did not matter. Harmony was bugging Pete about getting minions. Being the low dog on the totem pole was starting to sink into her teeny, tiny brain.

They would shift after sundown and set up camp. "Don't worry, pet," he told Willow. "We're going to take good care of you."

For some reason, that was not a comforting thought.

Willow's Email (Unopened)

To:            Rosenw@clangeek.com

From:            b.summers@uscs.edu

Re:       You-hoo! Part II

Wills? Write back, okay. I have no email. I feel like a loser.

Check this out-- @>------|  Ooooh. Ahhhh. Pretty, huh?

Buffy :)

"Honey, what do you think of this?" Joyce asked, holding up a short plaid skirt with a shiny silver pin stuck through it kilt style.

"I'm thinking 'plaid'" Buffy's nose wrinkled.

"No good?" Joyce guessed. She was thinking plaid skirt, sweater tied around the shoulders, loafers, and a pearl necklace. She smiled at herself. When she was in college, it had been bell bottoms, tie-dyed t-shirts, and funky fringed vests.

"No good," Buffy agreed. Her mother was treating her to a college wardrobe-building day at the mall with lunch. "Too teenage jail bait," Buffy said, thinking plaid shirt, crop top, and thigh high stocking with chunky healed shoes. She grinned. "And, let's face it, Mom," she said with a shake of her head, "I've done that."

Joyce glanced over at her daughter. She knew Buffy was having a hard time with Angel leaving, even though it was for the best, and at least a dozen times a day she had to bite her tongue to keep from saying something to that effect. The flash of humor was unexpected. Humor was good. Humor was a way of coping with the hard things that life handed out. She wanted more of that.

"Can we have a new rule?" Joyce asked. "No more boyfriends who are older than your Mom," she said plaintively. "Unless they have gray hair, and wrinkles, and they look older than your Mom."

Buffy snorted. "How about no hair, and dentures, and the minty freshness of Ben-Gay?" she joked.

"Even better," Joyce agreed. "Ben-Gay and Old Spice," she suggested. "And sock suspenders," she added.

Buffy giggled. "Good one," she complimented, looking over at her mother. "And no boyfriends for you younger than me," she added. "Unless they have braces," she added.

Joyce laughed at that. "I'm a man free zone," she declared.

Buffy cocked her head to one side. "Is that because of Dad?" she asked tentatively. Her mother had not dated a lot since her parents had divorced and they had moved to Sunnydale.

Joyce took the question seriously. She was still a parent. There was no point in telling Buffy that sometimes she really did miss being part of a relationship. Mixed with her misgivings, she had gotten a small vicarious thrill out of Buffy's relationship with Angel, because she remembered what it was like to be in love for the first time. Even more so, she had enjoyed Xander and Willow's romances in their senior year of high school. She had been happy for Xander when he and Cordelia Chase had been dating, seeing how it vindicated him in some way to be found worthy of the most popular girl at school. It ended, but it was high school. That was just the way things happened in the normal world that Buffy spent far too little time in. Willow had looked so cute with Oz when the kids came back to the house after prom.

There had been too much sadness about Buffy's prom date. Poor Angel, corralled into a teen ritual, and painfully aware of how inappropriate it was, and how it defined everything that was flawed about his relationship with Buffy.

"I'm a parent," she said after a moment. "It's hard to explain, but sometimes I just feel like my life is too full to make room for someone else. I have you, and a home to take care of, I have friends, and the gallery to run," she enumerated. "My life is pretty full. It feels selfish sometimes. I don't feel like I have enough left for someone else." She frowned. "I don't want to have anything else."

"I've been married. I've done all of that. I wanted to work things out with your Dad, but there is a part of me that looks back on it and is relieved to be in a place where its just me," she looked at Buffy, wondering if she could understand what it felt like to be . . . free. "I've never really been on my own. I graduated from college. Even in college, though, it was just me and Hank, and it was great. Hank and I got married, and then we started a family," she smiled.

There were years in her marriage that had seem unendurably long, and in the same slipstream was the rapid passage of time that was her life with her daughter. I'm sending my daughter to college, Joyce marveled.

"I'm a little scared of it too, with you going away to school-not that you are going that far," she pointed out, "but, still, I'm pretty sure I can be alone in the house and be okay with that, which is a little scary. It's not what I expected for myself."

Buffy thought about that. "Its not because of the thing that happened with Ted, is it?" she asked.

Joyce shook her head, and then stopped. "Well, maybe," she allowed. "It was exciting to feel that way again, but it was also-" she thought about it for a moment, "too much," she admitted, her nose wrinkling. "This whole pairing up thing . . . when your grandmother was your age, she dated a lot of boys, you know."

Joyce smiled as she saw Buffy grin at the notion of Joyce's mother, dubbed Grand-Anne by Buffy when Buffy was five, as a teenager, dating.

"You go, Grand-Anne," Buffy's tone was teasing. Her mother's Mom was all about twin sets, pearls, bridge, and golf. She bore an uncanny resemblance to Barbara Billingsley, and she had great legs. She had seen pictures of her from the early fifties, looking confident and self-assured.

"It was expected. You didn't fix your interest with one person until you were ready to get married," Joyce explained. "And that makes more sense, because it was okay to make it known that that was what you were looking for, instead of just dating one person exclusively and then finding that you aren't in the relationship for the same things. I think I'd like to do that. Just date, just meet people, and have someone to go to the movies with and dinner, and not feel like it's a big deal."

Buffy flipped through a rack of tops, thinking about that. "I guess I understand what you are saying, but sometimes it does work," she said. "Willow never really dated a lot of boys. She and Oz just fit together."

Joyce's eyebrows lifted. "Buffy? They are eighteen. They have at least four years of college ahead, and given what Willow is capable of, maybe more. That's a long time. Things happen. People change. Their lives pull them in unexpected directions. How many people actually end up with the first person they fell in love with?" she asked.

"It happens," she answered her own question, "but less often than you would think. Your father and I got married because we were in love and college was over and we thought we were supposed to get married at that point. We fell into it. I think, in retrospect, it would have been better if we had wanted to get married and then fallen in love, because we would have started from the same place. Your father loved me, and he adores you, but he didn't really want to be married, and as time went on that was something he struggled with and it hurt him. It made him feel like he failed us," Joyce's voice softened perceptively.

"He did," Buffy pointed out tartly, with all the compassion of a teenager.

"He feels bad about that," Joyce told her. "You want me to start throwing stones at Angel?" she asked. "I'm past feeling good about hearing anyone say bad things about your father. Even when I was mad enough at him to say bad things myself, it made me feel worse to hear them. It still does."

Buffy frowned. "I think I get what you are saying." She knew it didn't really apply to her relationship with Angel. All the things that they could not be together were things that Angel longed for as much as she did. Possibly more. It wasn't the same, but she didn't argue. She reached out and squeezed her mother's hand. It was Mom and Buffy time. This really wasn't about Angel, or dating. It was about them talking, woman to woman, learning about each other. "I love you, Mom. Next to Willow and Xander, you are my best friend."

Joyce smiled back at her. "Thank you," she said, pleased to be regarded that way. "But, I'm still your Mom," she reminded Buffy, "and your Mom is saying 'no' to that," she said, examining the price tag on a semi-transparent lace skirt Buffy was holding up.

"Too expensive?" Buffy concluded.

Joyce cocked her head to one side. "Too everything," she muttered.

Willow's Email (Unopened)

To:            Rosenw@clangeek.com

From:            b.summers@uscs.edu

Re:       Do I Have the Right E-mail Address

Willow? Are you there? Hell-o? Is this your email address? If you are not Willow Rosenberg please reply so I can stop sending email to the wrong person.

If you are Willow . . . I've left you four messages and a bunch of emails. You don't call. You don't write. You are freaking me out. Sheesh. Are they keeping you that busy? Am I that bored? Are you mad at me?

Mom and I had a big shopping day. It was actually a really good day. We talked a lot about stuff, like woman to woman stuff, and its given me a lot to think about.

Miss you. Please call or write, okay?

Buffy

~Part: 3~

The next seventy-two hours passed, for Willow, in a nightmarish blur. She was clear headed when they started. She was shaken awake by Spike, who tossed her none too clean clothes at her and told her, "We are leaving. You have ten minutes to get dressed. Make the most of it, Red."

He didn't leave. He was going to stand there while she was getting dressed. Willow's mind boggled at the notion of getting dressed in front of him. Then she considered the alternative of staying naked, with nothing but a sheet to cover her and found motivation. Gritting her teeth, and taking a quick inventory of her clothes, she sat up gingerly and dropped the sheet she was holding to her chest, grabbing her bra first. Arms in, the two hooks in the back snapped into place. She reached for her t-shirt, blocking out his presence in the room. Panties, and then her overalls.

She was reaching for her socks when he made a noise, sounding impatient. "Come on, Red. Move it along."

He was in a big hurry. Why? Angry mob? Had someone found them? "You said  ten minutes," she pointed out.

"It's an expression," he countered, speaking slowly and carefully.

She started to argue the point, but his hand grasped the bib front of her overalls and he jerked her to her feet.

"Don't make me angry," he warned in case she didn't understand the tone of
voice.

"Right. Or you'll . . . kidnap me, threaten me, and . . . glare at me," she fought her rising panic, mentally gritting her teeth. "Now, let go," she remembered that she had managed to back him down once before. "You are bigger than me, faster than me, and you can kill me without trying hard. I get that. May I put my shoes on?"

His fingers tightened in the bib of her overalls for a moment. His eyebrows rose. She looked like she needed help to stand, and she was ready to play plucky little heroine? How . . . cute. He let go of her.

"Hurry up," his voice softened, but it was no less menacing.

She sat on the edge of the bed, feeling like the puppet strings had been cut. She bit her lower lip, picking up one sock and sliding it on, and then the other. "Are we going anywhere in particular?" she asked. "Is this going to be another, you threaten me and I agree to do something for you, and you say if I fail you'll kill-"

"It was special for me, too, Red," Spike cut her off.

He half carried, half dragged her through what appeared to be an abandoned house, from the dust and cobwebs. She insisted on taking her purse with her, which he carried. It was dusk, and Willow found herself shoved, rudely, into the Desoto, from the driver's side. She dove towards the passenger side door and was pulled up short by his hand in her hair.

"Bigger, faster, stronger than you, remember," Spike sang out mockingly, unwittingly sounding like a British version of the intro to the Six Million Dollar Man that Willow used to watch with Xander and Jesse after middle school while trying to figure out the market value of the bionics, updated for the nineties.

He produced a set of handcuffs and cuffed her to the passenger side door. She stared at them, amazed at her good fortune. Unlocking handcuffs was something she had actually practiced as an exercise, probably because she was girl most unlikely to be in handcuffs for any law enforcement related reason. There was the whole being burned at the stake thing, and then being caught helping Angel and Buffy break into the Mayor's office to steal a box of nasty face sucking crab things, which had involved quasi legitimate civil authority, but in both cases, being able to open handcuffs would have been a definite plus.

Then downside reached her. She had practiced with handcuffs, but she had never quite managed to get them off, though Giles said her concentration was
improving.

Spike watched her. She had curled up in a defensive ball when he grabbed her hair, cringing as if she expected him to hit her. No wrestling around to get the cuffs on, since she had been so good as to bring her arms up to protect her head. When the handcuffs went on she raised her head a bit to look at them, and he could see some of the tension in her body dissipate. Why? She was a witch. She had put a wrench in some of Angelus' plans a time or two with some surprising spell casting. He would have to stay on top of her.

"Smart girl. I will hit you," he told her. "It won't bother me in the least," he added. "Now sit still and you won't have any bruises to show for it. Or not," he shrugged.

"Either way works for me," he backed off enough to let her up, his hand still in her hair, tugging her upright.

She sat up cautiously, peering at him through a fall of her hair, wincing at the pull of his hand in her hair. He gentled his grip, rewarding her for compliance, and let it go, smoothing her hair out of her face. He waited to see what she would do. Her eyes were huge in her face, a bright, luminous green. Her lips trembled.

"Poor Spike," there was a hint of malice that would have been more effective
if not for the quaver in her voice and the fact that she was shaking like a leaf. "Reduced to hair pulling," she said pithily.

That was brave. He chuckled. "Banter? That's new. I liked that snarl on your face when you tried to brain me, that night at the high school, when I took you and the boy," he chuckled,  "that, and the screaming. " The back of his hand was so close to her face that he could feel the warmth coming off of her. Her skin, normally creamy, with her pink and white complexion, was ashy.

"I said to myself, Spike-I talk to myself, you know," he confided, watching her chest rise and fall with short, shallow breaths, right there on the edge of panic. He remembered that too. The race of her heart, the heady scent of her penetrating his alcohol fogged rage, the intent way, puzzled way she listened to him, unwillingly, resentfully, pulled out of her more immediate problem of being more or less at his mercy to be engaged by his, let's face it, infinitely more interesting break up with Dru.

"Where was I? Ah," he laughed quietly, shaking his head. Okay, he was making this up. At the time he had been thinking along the lines of get Dru to crawl back to him, and acquire more whiskey, but she didn't need to know that.

"I said, Spike, now that's the kind of girl you chase. Slow enough to catch, smart enough to run, and a good screamer."

His unexpectedly friendly tone of voice scared her more than when he was threatening her. She expected to be threatened. He threatened, she caved. It was a depressing, but comfortably familiar pattern. She did not understand why he had not gotten to the point. There was some reason for all of this-unless there was not, unless this was all a spur of the moment, fly by the seat of his pants thing. She closed her eyes, feeling tears welling up to fall on her cheeks.

He opened her purse and started rummaging through her things. She did not have much in her purse. Keys. A thin wallet with a driver's license, an American Express Gold Card, a video rental card, and several library cards. More than one library card? He flipped through them. Sunnydale High School Library, Sunnydale Public Library, University of California-Sunnydale Library-Jesus, it was ridiculous. Some CDs, probably for work since they   were labeled neatly with labels like 'Firewall Patches' and 'OS Patches-Test Server', a day planner, notebook, and a pencil. He rolled the pencil between his fingers.

"Hmm. I think maybe you should keep this, you might get lucky," he taunted. He started to formulate a joke about rubbing him out. Pencil. Eraser? Get it? And decided that it was beneath him.

"And the notebook," he insisted. "Paper cuts. Fucking hate them," he tossed her purse over his shoulder into the back seat, having decided that while the contents were decidedly non-threatening, no stakes or holy water, the ID and access to money were too useful if she tried to escape. Next stop, the purse would go into the boot of the Desoto.

"Why are you doing this? I'm not important or anything," she pointed out, feeling deeply shamed by the woeful sound of her voice.

He started the car. "Red," he shook his head. "In a free market economy the value of a thing is in what others can be induced to pay for it. You should know that. You're a bloody American. You grew up on bottled water, right? You silly sodding people buy water when it's free from any open tap."

He had a point.

~~~*~~~

They were on the road, traveling, or in a sleazy hotel room. As the first day, or night, wore on it started to blur. In the end it would all run together for her. She lost track of time. Sleep deprived, tired, filthy, and starving. It did not occur to her that there was method in this.

The tactics were the same Spike would have applied to a minion. Soften them up. Get them dependent. Blood loss and her injuries made her more susceptible to manipulation. She had almost gotten away the first night that they moved. They had stopped at a place on the highway for fuel, smokes, and a trip to the bathroom and food for her. It was a little after ten in the evening, the beginning of a long night.

She should have been more suspicious when she was allowed to go to the bathroom by herself. She managed to get a window open, climbing out. The effort left her in a crumpled heap outside with scraped hands and knees, but
she had stumbled to her feet, one hand braced against the cinder block wall.

Dazed and bleeding, she had looked for an escape route. For a moment, she simply stood there while every instinct she possessed clamored for flight. She did not have an inexhaustible reserve of energy. She had a tiny pool of strength, resolve, and continued consciousness that she was going to hoard like a miser against a real plan. She followed the side of the building, one hand on the wall, moving like an old woman. They were at a roadside gas station, one of the all-in-one places with the conveniences of a gas station, a quick mart and fast food all under one roof, proximate to a highway exit. The bland sameness of it, the store, the highway less than a half a mile away, was disorienting. She could have been absolutely anywhere in America, though she was sure she was still in California. They simply had not been traveling that long.

There were two service islands. At one, a teenage boy was carefully cleaning the windows of his car while he filled up. A man, with a little girl ridding his hip, crossed the parking lot to put the child inside a car seat on the passenger side of a green mini-van. A navy blue Jeep Cherokee pulled in, up to the side of the Building where Willow was lurking. The door popped open and he driver, a woman in her early forties with frosted ashy brown hair got out. Something in the way her expression sharpened with concern when she saw Willow standing there reminded her of Joyce Summers.

She looked at Willow, almost curiously, wary, but concerned. "Hey! Are you alright?" she asked.

Relieved, Willow started to cry. She didn't need a plan. She was going to get away. "Please," she managed between breathless sobs. "I'm in big trouble."

The woman looked toward the fat, cylindrical tower of air that flanked the building at a distance of some three yards, "I was going to check my tires," she said, gesturing to the pump. "Why don't you get in the car?" she suggested. "It's okay. Come on. Get in the car. You can tell me on the way," she said gently. "You poor thing," she reached out to take Willow's arm. "Come on. I'll help you."

Willow didn't know if she meant that she would help her to the car or just help her. She had to tell her that checking the tires would have to wait, and she was afraid if she did it would seem demanding or pushy, and then maybe she would change her mind, and she didn't want that. "I have to-"

"That's okay," Spike came swaggering out the shadows behind Willow-or so it seemed to her. He actually came around a large display of coolant and windshield wash fluid on pallets stacked five feet high on the end of the wide sidewalk fronting the store. He had not only anticipated the break for freedom, he had practically orchestrated it in order to provide a small demonstration.

"The girl is with me, luv," he said, smiling a little half smile. The smile was calculated to disarm, and it almost always worked. He had the East London accent down cold, slurring the endearment around the half smile, as his gaze drifted downward. Slinking around the girl, who was too startled by his sudden appearance to react.

He wasn't big, like Angelus, whose hulking physicality and brooding scowl was effortlessly intimidating. Smaller, slimmer, oozing charm, just a little too pretty in an incongruous way that belied the fashion statement that he had perfected, he was intriguing at first glance. Deprived of a mirror for over a century, he measured the impact of his appearance in the reactions it produced. His gaze lifted and he let the smile develop as their eyes met. This was a mature woman, probably in her mid-forties. She wasn't missing the posturing, but there was something almost appreciative in her gaze as she tried to work out what she had inadvertently been drawn into.

He could get out of this without causing a scene. One solid punch, and she would be out cold. He could talk his way out of it. He knew what he was doing and Willow didn't, which gave him a huge edge on her.

"Get in the car, Red," he said, pitching his voice for her. The smile that had softened him didn't reach his voice.

The hair on the back of Willow's neck prickled as she began to grasp that she wasn't the only one in danger from Spike.

It was the subtle change in his tone of voice that tipped the older woman off. Her lips thinned and her eyes went to Willow, taking in the totality of her appearance. She looked terrified, and there was simply no way that she was going to stand by and act like there was nothing wrong.

Willow took an unsteady sidestep in the direction of the Desoto, watched by the woman who had gotten out of the Jeep. Her distraction was a gift. She would never see it coming. Spike started to lean to his right as if he was following Willow and then he smoothly changed directions.

But Willow saw it. In a way everything slowed down. She wasn't fast or graceful or particularly quick thinking in a crisis. She had a tendency to panic first and think later. She deeply envied Buffy's quick thinking and ability to be glib and trendy in the face of danger in the way you can admire or envy something that you simply know will never be within your grasp. She was also tired and scared, and a little sick to her stomach as she looked down at the blood on her hands where she had scraped them on the window sill.

"I cut my hands," she announced.

It was starting to hurt in the way that shallow surface cuts do. She drew herself up stiffly. "I'm not a bad person," she said suddenly, loudly. "I have a disease! Okay?" she shouted.

Unsuspecting victim on hold, Spike swung around to stare at the girl, who was starting to bear a certain creepy resemblance to Dru. She licked the blood off her hand without grimacing and stuck her tongue out at him. "And I'm not taking any more Thorazine!" she shouted at him. "If you think it's so great, you take it!"

The woman behind him backed up to her open car door, looking startled and kind of like she was kicking herself for thinking that Spike was the bad guy. Willow could just see her giving herself a mental smack for reading into the very toned down homage to punk that Spike had going on. Mr. Bad Ass Vampire didn't even have a scary looking piercing. Candy ass.

"Common side effects may include lethargy, sleepiness, low blood pressure, dry mouth, blurred vision, constipation, weight gain, difficulty urinating or stiffness," she chanted in a weird parody of the ubiquitous drug commercial. "Less common side effects may include dizziness, racing heartbeat/palpitations, weakness, sexual problems, restlessness, skin rash, seizures, low white blood cell count, tremors or involuntary facial/tongue movements," her voice rose to a shriek.

"And I'm the crazy one!" she looked around. "Can you believe this?"

The funny thing was Spike, looking completely taken aback. It made her giggle. She stabbed one finger at him. "Welcome to my world, Mister. I'm the freak in the freak club," she told him with a certain degree of satisfaction. She turned her attention back to the woman clutching the door of her car.

"Yeah," she jeered. "That's right, lady. You're just like the people at the hospital. They say they want to help you but then they're holding you down, jabbing needles into you, turning you into a mindless drone for their experiments."

The driver's side door of the green mini-van slammed shut and the engine roared to life, leaving the service island and accelerating to the drive. The teen-ager cleaning his car windows stood, open mouthed, watching the show.

Over the speaker attached to the service station, a male voice announced. "Please get in your car and lock your doors. The Glenn County Sheriff's Office has been called."

For a second there, he had been thinking complete melt down, but when she slipped in the over-the-top bit about 'experiments' he knew he was witnessing a performance. He was impressed. She was drawing a hell of a lot of unwanted attention, and he had a moment there when he had thought, oh, hell no. Nothing is worth baby-sitting the insane Part II.

"Red, Get in the car," he said grimly. "Now!"

For a second she thought she had him. The woman in the Jeep had gotten back in her car and locked her doors. She was pulling around the building to leave. Nearly dizzy with relief, Willow closed her eyes for a moment, wondering how long she had to stall before the police got there.

Spike however, knew damn well that they had, maybe, five minutes, and he had no intention of waiting around. She just wasn't fast enough to evade him. He grabbed her around the waist and picked her up. To the avid observers inside the store and at the service island, it looked like a dance. He moved toward her, she sidestepped and then spun around to run, shouting, "Vampire, help!" and he scooped her up, with one arm around her waist and the other pinning her arms down to her side as she twisted and tried to kick him.

"That was very, very stupid," he told her, shaking her with each word. He half carried, half dragged her over to the Desoto.

The boy cleaning his windows watched them, seeing a guy wearing a leather coat despite the heat, and a formerly pretty girl, her face ravaged by tears and . . . mental illness. It was sad. It always amazed him what girls would put up with from guys like that, and now he was even more amazed by what guys like that would put up with. The car caught his attention. He had noticed it when he pulled in to fill up. A car like that, needing a bit of work, but still, a pretty cool car for an antique.

Spike opened the driver's side door and using his body, maneuvered her inside, working up to a good hard shove that sent her across the front seat. She banged her head against the dashboard and curled up in a defensive ball, clutching her head.

"Ow!."

He slid in behind the steering wheel and slammed the driver's side door. For a second he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

She was rubbing her head. "I'm going to have brain damage if you don't quit throwing me around head first," she announced.

He hauled her upright with a fistful of her hair. "And, how is that my problem?" he snarled, reaching across her for the handcuffs. " Do you think I won't kill you, or are you just testing the idea?"

He clamped the handcuff around her right wrist, seeing pain blossom in her eyes as his hand clamped down on the handcuff. It was too tight, and he knew it, which meant that he was going to have to loosen it. He left it for the time being.

If she hadn't been little Miss Independent Thinker, none of this would have been necessary.

"Next time you decide to go off on a stroll, pet, look around at all the people I'll kill before I catch up to you."

After that exhibition, she had gotten the message. Her guilt over what might have happened to the woman who had stopped to help her-he had no idea how she had identified her with Joyce Summers-gnawed at her. She was supposed to help people, not help them get killed. Spike would have been amazed to discover that even without a trail of dead bodies, the object lesson he wanted her to absorb was delivered when she realized that he would kill her would-be rescuer.

As for testing the idea of his tolerance out, that hadn't been her intention, but now that he had brought it up, she couldn't stop thinking about it. He said he wouldn't kill her? What did he want?

~~~*~~~

It was two in the morning and Oz was at a Denny's outside of Los Angeles, staring at a pay phone like it was an oracle. To call Willow, or not to call Willow? She would, he knew, be asleep. They had agreed that he would call her on Saturday morning, which sounded good in theory but didn't work in practice. They hadn't had enough cash for a hotel after they played Friday night, so they camped, and that was okay, but the only pay phone at the camp ground was out of order and he had stayed up late talking with Devon and slept in. When he woke up, the van was gone because Chris and Dan wanted to go see a movie. Bottom line, he had never gotten around to calling her. He tried to get her at work earlier today, but he just got voice mail.

He was not so good with the guilt. A mental image of Willow sitting around all day Saturday steadily feeling worse about the fact that he had notcalled, which she would deny when he talked to her, but he was pretty sure was accurate, made him unhappy.

He put his hand on the receiver without picking it up. He should call her, even if it was late. Even if she was asleep and had to get up in the morning. Sleep wasn't that big a deal to Willow. She certainly wouldn't be mad about it. He was pretty sure that she would be . . . sweet sleepy sounding Willow.

He started to pick up the receiver and the lead singer from the band that had played the smaller upstairs stage taped on his shoulder.

"Need to use the phone," she said, looking up at him through her eyelashes.

It was a flirting thing, he realized, feeling mildly flattered. She was kind of cute, with streaky blond hair.

"If you aren't going to be long, I can wait," she offered.

That made his decision for him. Oz placed his call to Willow's work phone number. He didn't expect to reach her there. After four rings, her voice mail picked up. He should have gotten a cell phone so she could call him back, he thought.

He listened to her voice mail greeting with a half smile. "Hello. You've reached voice mail for Willow Rosenberg. Please leave a message with your name and phone number, and I will call you back as soon as possible. If you need immediate assistance, please dial 'O' for customer service.".

He waited for the beep. "I was just missing you, baby," he said. "I hope you have a good day at work. Try to be home around seven, okay? I'll try you again."

He hung up. The blonde girl smiled at him. "Girlfriend?' she guessed.

"Yeah," Oz stepped out of her way to let her have the phone.

She watched him go back to his table with a speculative look on her face.

~~~*~~~

Spike wouldn't let her sleep for long. She was trapped with him in the un-air conditioned Desoto at night with a window cracked a bare inch, cigarette smoke filling the space faster than the passage of air on his side of the car could clear the air. The blacked out windows kept her from absorbing any impression of the passing landscape. She might as well have been in a moving coffin.

Inside the car, he kept her handcuffed to the passenger side door. For the first time in her life, Willow got motion sick. He had brought her a cheeseburger and french fries with a Coke earlier. Being the thoughtful kidnapper he had checked her handcuffed hand and refastened the cuff a little more loosely. It was either kindness or a new twist on torture. The pins and needles sensation in her hand was vicious.

The unaccustomed sugariness of the soda left her thirsty with an odd taste in her mouth. She didn't drink sodas with sugar, combined with the caffeine they tended to make her jittery. The food made her unbearably sleepy. She slipped into an uneasy, stuporous slumber, and to her at least, it seemed like he was waking her up immediately, roughly shaking her.

She had a moment of clarity. "I'm going to be sick," she rasped.

Gravel crunched beneath the wheels of the car as he pulled off onto the shoulder. Reaching across her, he opened the door. In her eagerness to be out of the car, on terra firma, she lost her footing in the gravel, wrenching the wrist that was still handcuffed to the door. She threw up until she was empty and racked with dry heaves, the bitter and sour taste of vomit in her mouth, burning the lining of her throat as she cried.

He had not gotten out of the car, and now he insisted that she get back in. She was sure that she really would rather die. He simply slid over to the passenger side and grabbed a handful of her overalls in the back, and tugged her into the car. She banged her head, almost exactly where Harmony had thrown her against the bathroom wall. She came to a rest against the passenger door with her arm pulled over her abused head. They pulled in to a deserted rest stop forty minutes later and Spike herded her towards the women's restroom.

At the door, Willow balked. "You can't come in," she insisted in a sudden show of stubbornness.

"Don't be absurd," Spike said, possibly misinterpreting her on purpose. He pushed the door with one hand and the small of her back with the other, propelling her forward.

"No barrier," he pointed out, checking out the large bathroom. He sat on the lip of one of the sinks lining the walls. He studied the flaking black nail polish on one hand. "Made this stop for you, Red. I suggest you do what you need to to take care of yourself. I'm not going to do it for you," he told her.

"I hate you," she said quietly, and she felt it. Really felt it. In the same, shaking inside way that she felt about Faith after all that she had done to them. She had not really hated Spike before.

Feared him. Vampire, duh!

When he showed up in Sunnydale, luring Buffy out of the Bronze, standing back to watch her fight another vamp that he had ruthlessly set up for no more reason than to study his opponent in action, he had been nothing like any of the vamps they had come across before. Buffy hadn't been able to dust him, though she managed to stay one step ahead of him through the season of fear that was their junior year in high school. After Angelus emerged, she almost felt ostalgic about Spike, who had never been interested in anything but killing the Slayer in a strictly impersonal, completely business-like way. Angelus was into torture, committed to inflicting maximum mental and emotional torment before the real suffering began, and everyone around Buffy was fair game.

He gave a bark of a laugh. "I should say so, pet," he said. "Like dolphins hate sharks-the sharp teeth and the eating habits," he pointed out mockingly. "You know a vampire?" he shook his head disapprovingly, patting himself down for another cigarette. "Nothing more unnatural than that, really. Thank Angel for corrupting you on that one. You're supposed to hate my kind. That's the way it works," he lit a cigarette and waved in the direction of the sinks. "Don't have all night, Red," he reminded her.

She went to the sink and blocked out the vampire as much as she could, rinsing her mouth out. The sour taste lingered, tormenting her nasal passages, but it wasn't as bad. She splashed water on her face and shut off the water, going to one of the empty stalls and shutting herself in to use the bathroom. When she came back out of the stall he was crushing the cigarette out in the sink he had been using as an ashtray. She went back to the sink to wash her hands.

He started pulling paper towels out of a dispenser in handfuls, and turned the nearest tap on to soak them in cold water. He walked over to her. "Lift your hair up," he ordered.

Her hands shook and she closed her eyes, half expecting him to sink his teeth into her exposed neck. He slapped the wet towels on the back of her neck instead. Rivulets of cold water slid down her back, soaking her t-shirt. She was feeling less like she wanted to die. Kneeling in the gravel with the smell of vomit thick around her, she had given up. She had known if he left her there, she would have curled up in the thick underbrush on the side of the barren highway and willed herself dead. It made her feel ashamed. Her Nana Rosenberg had survived Belsen-Bergen when she was younger than Willow was.

She had no right to give up.

She held onto that thought when she was back in the car, shackled to the door. As mile after mile crawled by, she concentrated on the needs her body expressed. Her stomach ached like she had done too many sit ups. She was filthy. The neck of the t-shirt she was wearing was stiff with dried blood. She hadn't had a shower since Thursday evening.

What day was it? Friday when she encountered Spike and company at Mike's. They had been on the road a day and a half. Sunday? Maybe Monday? Oz usually called her on Saturday morning, no matter where he was. Buffy would have been expecting her to call. She would definitely be missed at work-though she remembered something about Spike and the other vampire talking about calling in for her, claiming she was sick. She had to believe that eventually she would be found. Her only job was to stay alive long enough to be found.

As dawn approached, Spike took an exit off the highway and pulled into the parking lot of a Red Roof Inn. He glanced over at her. She was awake and very quiet. Thinking again, her firm little chin stuck out in a picture of grim determination.

Aware that he was watching her she made herself look at him. "I scream or try to flag down help and people die horribly?" she guessed, sounding bitter.

"Hmmm," he pretended to consider. "Works for me," he agreed. "I'm going to get a room. No wandering off," he admonished with a smirk, seeing as how she was tethered to the car by the handcuffs.

He left the car running when he went in. Willow could not resist seeing if she could slide over far enough to reach the steering wheel and the gas pedal after she estimated that he was inside the lobby. The handcuff bit into her wrist cruelly as she stretched. The focus and emotional control that it took to work magic eluded her, not that she hadn't tried, but her concentration kept slipping into a sleepless stupor, and when she started to sleep in the car, she automatically tensed up anticipating Spike's typical reaction to her sleeping. He would shake her awake, or slap her, not hard, but in a stinging kind of way that never failed to get her attention.

She was almost there. Leg over the shallow hump in the center of the front seat, hand on the steering wheel. The dense black spray paint on the windows posed a problem, leaving her virtually blind even in the streaks where the paint was thin enough for someone with preternaturally enhanced vision to see through in the dark. He was badly parallel parked to the curb. She had felt that when he had pulled into the parking space. She forced herself to think methodically to the steps behind getting the car out of the parking space and in motion. She gripped the steering wheel and tugged on it, feeling the sluggish tension in it. No power steering?

Could she drive a car one handed without power steering and manage not to kill herself? It was a heavy car. It would probably hold together if she crashed into something. The handcuff was cutting into her right wrist, reminding her that she would probably loose her hand in such an event.

She found herself half laughing, half crying in frustration as she tried to decide if this was her moment in the metaphorical woods, caught in some trap, where she was willing to take off her own hand to escape. She was running out of time to decide, she realized. She grasped the steering wheel shift, trying to make out the indicator to see if the car was in park.

The driver's side door opened. There was enough light from the parking lot lights for her to see that the car was in drive. "Emergency brake," Spike told her dryly. "Christ! You didn't hear it? You can't reach it from there, Red," he pointed out. Thought of that, too, ducks, he thought to himself, feeling smug as he watched her take it in, feel the leash he had set on her snap her back into her place.

He didn't sound angry, and she cautiously retreated to her side as he got in. He drove around to the back of the property and got out, coming over to her side to uncuff her from the door. Once inside the room, he cuffed her to a chair, where she remained for the next hour, sleeping fitfully.

Spike went out, probably to make a quick meal of some unfortunate. From the contents of a bag he brought back, and casually tossed on the table just out of her reach, she guessed that he had taken the Desoto somewhere for gas and picked up a few essentials. Cigarettes, junk food, and a bottle of water, just out of reach. He took a shower, and emerged with a towel wrapped loosely around his waist; skin gleaming wetly as he turned on the television.

Willow was uncomfortably aware of just how filthy she was, and hungry, thirsty, and how naked Spike was with nothing but a towel loosely slung around his hips. He was not as tall or physically overwhelming as Angel. There was a time when she had liked that about him, because Angel made her nervous without really meaning to, and Spike only scared her on purpose, which was less confusing.

Without his usual costume of unrelieved black, he was sleek and sinuous; all sharp angles and lean muscle. No fat. Did vampires get fat? Could you get fat on a diet of blood, or did you stay fat eternally if you were a fat person when you were turned? She felt a surge of irritation at her loopy train of thought.

He stretched out on the bed, settling in for a nice, long cozy nap, content to pretend that she was not there. All in the service of breaking down her resistance.

Had she known that was his plan, she would have given him credit for his success. He had felt her attention shifting from the food she was probably craving, to him, to the bathroom, in a confused sort of way. Dark shadows ringed her eyes. Physically she was in worse shape than when they had started out. She did not want to draw his attention to herself, but she also couldn't figure out how to get what she wanted without doing that.

"Spike?"

"Red?"

"I'm thirsty, and I need to . . . go to the bathroom," she admitted, sounding defeated.

"Hmmm," he glanced over at her. "Should have thought of that before you decided to try to drive off with my car," he told her.

She frowned at the unfairness of that. The one had nothing to do with the other. "I saw a McDonald's," she lied. "I was thinking: breakfast. I didn't want to put you out since you've been so considerate."

He snorted. "Right," he said, but he smiled at the absurd improvisation and the sarcasm. Not bad. "Are you going to stop trying to escape?" he asked.

She considered lying, and discarded the notion. "Probably not. There are unwritten rules that have to be observed." She was amazed at how coherent that sounded.

Unwritten rules? Right. Prisoners were supposed to try to escape. Their keepers were supposed to be sadistic bastards. He could do that.

"Then, sit there. I'm doing my part."

~Part: 4~

Devon's mother had a friend who knew someone at the southern campus at the San Francisco Theological Seminary, who had a contract for group rates at the Claremont Inn. The Dingoes were lodged in two rooms, connecting, for $39.95 a night at the price of a campus visit by Devon, who would have to pretend to be a prospective seminary student.

It was Claremont rather than LA, and the Claremont Inn was a little on the run down side, but it was clean, there was cable, and the breakfast buffet was not bad.  On Friday and Saturday night, they could only get one room, but as the hotel emptied on Sunday, the manager had made the connecting room available for an extra ten bucks. They had cleared enough money over their weekend in LA to barely afford it.

"Does that mean, that you're like going to have to pretend you want to be a priest?" the Dingoes drummer, Dan asked with a grin.

"Should I wear a tie or something?" Devon wondered.

"Do you have a tie?" Oz asked.

"No," Devon looked appalled. "A tie? No way."

"Then, no tie," Oz pointed out. "You don't want them to want you, do you?"

Devon thought about that for a moment. "I guess not," he admitted. "But, I kind of feel like I should at least pretend like I'm really interested. I'm getting the free continental breakfast," he pointed out, waving his 'Welcome to San Francisco Theological Seminary' folder. He had one remaining complimentary buffet coupon clipped to the folder by a plastic paper clip with a cross on it.

Looking at it, Oz thought it was something that Willow would like to have. A plastic paper clip with at cross on it, protecting her homework from vampires.

Oz sat on one of the double beds next to the phone as Chris, the Dingoes bassist came in from the connecting room. Chris was in charge of food. He had an envelope full of coupons his mother collected for him.

"'Kay, we've got the 5 for 5 bucks Arby's-" this was greeted with groans. Everyone was tired of Arby's. "And," Chris shook his head at the reaction, "Buy one large Papa John's pizza, get a second large pizza for three bucks," he said, "Or, we've got some KFC coupons . . ."

"Pizza, show of hands," Dan called it. "Did anyone notice that someone was running across the roof last night?" he asked.

Devon threw in with pizza, and Oz shrugged and nodded. "Pizza is good," he agreed. And yes, he had noticed. The running across the roof, toilets flushing, the loud couple having sex, and the amazing amplification properties of the hallway.

He was sharing one room with Devon, who had woken up in the middle of their neighbors' 'oooh oooh oooh' moment of sexual tension to ask Oz to let the owl out. It was moments like these that he really loved about being in a band. The performing, the urban camping, the penny pinching negotiations over food. He didn't even try to imagine Willow in this setting. She belonged to a different compartment of his life that occasionally intersected, but weren't meant to be joined together.

He refused to feel guilty about it. When he was away from her, he missed her, and he liked the feeling of missing her. She was a line from a sonnet that they had studied in senior English; she was his ever fixed mark.

Chris negotiated them down to two ingredients and went to the other room to order the pizza. Oz checked his watch. It was ten after seven. He asked Willow to be home at seven. He picked up the phone, dialed his calling card number, and then dialed the San Jose number he now had memorized. It had been four days since he had talked to Willow, an unusually long time. Dan had followed Chris into the other room to argue with him about the two-ingredient stipulation. Devon was reading through his folder of campus information about the seminary.

"Dude," he said to Oz, "this is for a master's degree. I haven't finished college," he pointed out.

Oz grinned, and shook his head, the phone was ringing and at any second she would pick up. Maybe sounding breathless and as anxious to talk to him as he was to hear her voice. That would be nice.

When he got no immediate response, Devon looked up from his campus map and saw Oz on the phone. He nodded. "Calling your girlfriend?" he guessed. "You want me to get lost?" he nodded towards the door to the adjoining room.

The answering machine picked up. Oz missed the clicking sound of it coming on with Devon talking and just heard, "Hi. I'm not able to get to the phone right now, so please leave a message and I will call back. Promise!" recorded by Willow when she moved in. He frowned. Not home? It was after seven. Where was she? Was she all right?

He shook his head at Devon, waiting for the beep to record a message, "Wills, it's Oz. Starting to get a little worried, baby. Where are you? Give me a call," he read the phone number off the phone and gave the room number. "Give me a call as soon as you get in, okay? Don't worry about what time it is," he added before hanging up.

"Not there, huh?" Devon was sympathetic. "Maybe they're making her work late,"

"Yeah," Oz thought it was possible. He dialed her office and got voice mail again. He repeated his message and hung up.

Dan came back in to get the keys to the van to go pick up sodas and the pizza. Chris volunteered to go with him. After they were gone, Oz sat watching television without absorbing any of it.

Devon tossed his folder of seminary information aside. "How long has it been since you talked to her?" he asked.

"Friday morning," Oz admitted. "I was supposed to call her on Saturday. We agreed to that. Friday was just a spur of the moment thing."

It sounded like a long time, even to Devon. Willow Rosenberg was an odd girl. Smart, and kind of pretty. She was the sort of person you could rely on, though Devon knew a lot of odd things happened around Willow and her friends.

"She hasn't been home?" he guessed.

Oz looked over at him. "It's not like she has to sit around at home waiting for me to call," he pointed out.

Devon nodded, "True, but this is Willow. She would so sit around at home waiting for you to call," he pointed out. "Maybe you should call one of her friends."

Oz considered it for a moment, and then he picked up the phone and dialed Buffy.

It was dinnertime at chez Summers. Joyce Summers was eating in the kitchen at the breakfast bar. With teenage Slayer enhanced telephone reflexes, Buffy usually got to the phone first, but she was out with Xander.

She left the stool and walked over to the wall phone. "Hello?"

"May I speak to Buffy," a boy asked.

"She's not here right now," Joyce told him. "Would you like me to have her call you later?"

"Mrs. Summers? This is Oz, uh, Daniel Osborne, that is," he said. "I'm-"

"Willow's boyfriend. I know who you are Oz," Joyce was amused. "Would you like Buffy to call you? Where are you?" she asked. "How is your band doing?"

"We are outside of LA," he answered, "And, good. Not starving or sleeping in the van, good," he qualified. "Sunnydale is the same?"

"Quiet," Joyce informed him. "Most of the vamps in town got dusted during the Ascension," she sounded remarkably matter-of-fact.

"Right. That's of the good," Oz said. He came to the point of his call. "Actually, um, I've been trying to reach Willow for a couple of days, and I'm getting voice mail everywhere. Do you know if Buffy has talked to her?"

He was over reacting. She was probably busy, and he was impossible to reach since he was out in the evenings when she was at home.

Buffy had complained at breakfast about not getting any of her emails to Willow answered. "Buffy's father gave her a computer for her graduation present, and she's been trying to email her, but she isn't sure if she has the right email address," Joyce said.

Oz sat up. Willow, who checked her email before she finished getting dressed in the morning and spent the entire day online at work, had not responded to email messages? That sounded very not right to him. The phone line hummed.

"This is Buffy. She may have gotten the email address wrong," Joyce pointed out. Not that her daughter was stupid, but she always had so much on her mind. In that way, Willow was the perfect compliment to Buffy. She tended to be more organized and she was always willing to pick up the slack and be Buffy's memory, tutor, or study buddy.

"Friday around noon was the last time I talked to her," Oz said. "This doesn't feel right to me."

"Is there any way that you could go to San Jose? Or, wait a minute. I guess we are closer. Maybe Xander could go?" she suggested.

"Yeah," Oz said. "That's a good idea," He kind of wanted to go himself, only he was driving the van, with all the band equipment and band members, who would be stranded in Claremont if he took off. It wasn't that he didn't want Xander to go. He was all over that. Willow was with him because that was what she wanted. She had made that more than clear to him. "I think I'll go myself."

"It's probably nothing," Joyce said, hearing how anxious he was, in what he wasn't saying. "You have a Sunnydale mindset," she reminded Oz.

"Sure. It probably is nothing," Oz agreed, "Thanks, Mrs. Summers-"

"Oz, call me Joyce," she corrected. "Why don't you call as soon as you get there? I'll let Buffy know to expect you to call."

"Thanks, Joyce," Oz said. Somehow he had felt more like an adult calling Buffy's mom Mrs. Summers than using her first name. "No matter how late?" he confirmed.

"No matter how late," she agreed. "Willow is family."

"Right," Oz agreed. "Okay, then," he said. "So I'll talk to Buffy or you in a couple of hours," he added. "It's probably nothing."

Devon, who had heard Oz's side of the conversation, was philosophical. "It's not like we have a gig lined up for Wednesday night." Monday and Tuesday were club weekend days, with no action to be had unless you were willing to play for free. "And we can crash on your girlfriend's floor, or something," he pointed out, not demanding to be talked into the eight hour journey north.

~~~*~~~

The conversation with Oz bothered Joyce more than she let on. There could be a lot of reasons why Willow was not returning phone calls, though none of them were particularly reassuring. After she finished her dinner and before she started cleaning up the kitchen, she called Rupert Giles, intending to leave a message there for Buffy to call home if she stopped by the Watcher's apartment or called to report in after her patrol.

Despite the fact that the Watcher's Council had fired him, he had remained an uninterrupted presence in Buffy's life. Resentment and gratitude colored Joyce's feelings toward him. She would always resent the Watcher's Council and the way that they had kept her in the dark for so long. Encouraging Buffy to lie to her had been unforgivable. She was grateful, though, that Giles' loyalties were to Buffy, and not to the organization he had served. She was more appreciative of how he had adapted to meet Buffy's needs rather than trying to mold her into a perfect little Slayer.

There remained a fair amount of awkwardness between them. She heard it in his voice when he recognized hers. "Ah, hello, Joyce," he said. "Buffy is not here right now, if you are looking for her," he said, sounding very much like he hoped that was the reason for her call.

"If she stops in, could you have her call me?" she asked. "She went out with Xander. I think they were going to the Bronze, or maybe to the movies?" she wasn't sure. "It's important," she stressed.

"Yes, of course," he said, and then, cautiously, "Is anything wrong? That is, is there anything I can-uh, help with, or-"

"Oz called looking for Buffy," Joyce interrupted. "He hasn't been able to reach Willow, and he's worried," she said. "It may be nothing, but he was asking if Buffy had spoken to her recently," she explained. "He's going to San Jose tonight to check on her, and he's going to call when he gets there."

~Part: 5~

Briefed on the situation with Willow not answering her calls, over the pizza and a two liter of soda, by Devon, the Dingoes agreed en masse that a road trip to San Jose was in order even if it did mean giving up the sweet deal on the rooms at the Claremont Inn. They finished dinner and got organized to check out. Devon, claiming a family emergency, got the charges for both rooms refunded, so they were set for gas money.

Oz appointed Dan navigator, though once they got on I-5 it was pretty much a clear shot north. He drove a lot faster than his usual five miles over the speed limit, keeping the accelerator on the floor. They spent a lot of their time talking, with Dan hanging in the open space between the two front seats, occasionally offering a comment on the time they were shaving off the eight and a half hour driving time. Devon claimed the front seat, and Chris was sacked out on the floor of the van, wedged in tight between equipment and sleeping bags.

They would talk, but the subject kept circling around to Willow, and how there probably was a perfectly good explanation for her failure to answer the phone. Their good-natured insistence was growing strained as they reached San Jose, and Oz started to feel a degree of dread.

Willow. She was a very conscientious girl, and Oz knew it was true though it did not begin to sum her up. He could not imagine her not answering calls. It wasn't like her. She took such quiet pleasure in having messages to answer. He had worried that she wouldn't get out and do things while she was in San Jose. She was still basically shy, though she had started to come out of her shell in the time since he had known her.

It was unfair. If you lived in Sunnydale long enough, you learned to expect bad things to happen, especially if your girlfriend was a witch and her best friend was the almighty Chosen One designated to slay bad things. Oz had seen some amazing and terrifying things since he had come to Sunnydale, and all too often, Willow was at the off center of them, backing up Buffy. She was such a quiet girl, outwardly meek, but inside, she was a lot tougher than that.

It was almost ten in the evening before they reached San Jose. Dan had the in town directions mapped out, and soon they were turning onto Morton. They almost missed St. Catherine Court, but Oz recognized the neighborhood from his trip to San Jose three weeks ago, and he found a place to parallel park on the curb. Oz and Devon piled out and led the way back a half a block to the court, Chris and Dan trailed, checking out the neighborhood stores. The porch light was on at the address of the house where Willow was staying. They knocked and rang the bell to no answer.

"Now what?" Devon asked. Man, it was after midnight. Willow Rosenberg out after midnight in Sunnydale was not so odd, though it was probably more dangerous given the weird shit that went down in Sunnydale, but Willow out after midnight in a strange town was just wrong on too many levels.

Oz was sniffing, trying not to be too obvious about it. Even during the parts of the month when the wolf was dormant, he retained some of the heightened senses. Willow's scent was faint, almost undetectable. She was not here. He looked around on the small porch. At her parent's house Willow kept an emergency key near the door in case she needed to get in the house fast. There were four rolled up newspapers on the porch, a mat, a wicker settee, and a small table with a lantern. He checked under the lantern and found the key.

Devon was impressed. "Good guess," he said as Oz unlocked the front door.

There was a pile of mail on the floor where it had been pushed through the mail slot. The sight of the untidy pile of mail reached each of them. Willow had not come through the front door in . . . days, or she was real messy. Devon thought about that. "Dude, I'm thinking this would be a good time to call the police," he said.

Oz turned on a light and found the phone. The answering machine next to it had a read out of the number of messages stored. It read seventeen. His heart sank. He picked up the phone and dialed the Summer's home.

Willow's Email (Unopened)

To:            Rosenw@clangeek.com

From:            drswooffices@aol.com

Re:            fwd:Vacation Pictures & News

Had to take the pictures out! My email bounced back with one of those impenetrable messages from AOL. File size too large, perhaps?

We miss you!

Dad

----- Original Message -----

To:            Rosenw@clangeek.com

From:            drswooffices@aol.com

Re:            Vacation Pictures & News

Quick note with pictures attached from the Parthenon. Your mother and I leave for Budapest in the morning. We've been hop scotching all over Europe, and it has been an interesting experience persuading your mother to play things by ear. We are compromising. When we start a 'what do you want to do' go round, your mother can get her itinerary out. Best of both worlds.

Your mother is very excited about the prospect of visiting the village where her great-grandfather was born. She's looking forward to trying out her Hungarian. She has been going to sleep listening to the Foreign Service Institute tapes. I'm looking forward to seeing Budapest. If you would like to learn more about Budapest, follow this link: http://www.fsz.bme.hu/hungary/budapest/ there are some fantastic pictures on the web site.

We plan to be in Budapest for seven days. We are staying at the Danubius Hotel Gellert. I'll be delivering the paper I presented at the Berkeley symposium at a small conference for mental health professionals on crisis intervention. I hope it isn't too naïve. Some of the attendees are coming from war zones. My paper focuses on aftercare for refugees. BTW, I'm using the PowerPoint presentation you helped me with during your holiday break. Thanks again for the assist!

I hope that you are enjoying your summer. Your mother and I are so proud of you for taking the opportunity to get some experience in a field that you are interested in. If you need anything and you can't reach us, remember that you can call on your aunt and uncle in Scottsdale.

Love,

Dad

This was an all too familiar place to be in, Giles thought. He was sitting at the breakfast bar in the Summers' kitchen. Xander was in the hallway, pacing restlessly. Buffy was on the porch, sharpening a stake. Joyce Summers was sitting across from him looking tired. The poor woman had a business to run in addition to the occasional late night crisis. She had made tea for him, pulling out the good china, largely, he suspected, to give herself something to do.

Buffy and Xander could think of no good reason why Willow had been out of touch with everyone for what appeared to be at least four, possibly five, days. Neither could Giles. The usual rules of teenage living simply did not apply to Willow. It was inconceivable to him that she would have ignored so many calls, not to mention Buffy's emails.

The phone rang shortly after two in the morning. He found himself reaching the phone first, and hesitating simply because it was not his phone to answer.

"Please answer it," Joyce urged as Buffy came through the back door and Xander rushed down the hallway. He nodded and answered the phone.

It was Oz, of course. No one else would call so late, except perhaps Willow, had he found her at home with some perfectly plausible reason for her failure to get in touch with anyone. "It's Rupert Giles, Oz."

"Uh, yeah," Oz acknowledged. "I guess you're there because Buffy's worried," he said.

"We are all concerned," Giles told him.

"She's not here," Oz told him. "I'm calling the police," he added. "The mail is piled up and there's newspapers on the porch since Saturday," he sounded worried.

When they made a stop at a quickie mart on their third night, circling back toward San Jose, Willow stuck close to Spike's side, trembling. It was not the first stop of the evening. They had stopped at one of those mail box places, though Spike had left her in the car while he . . . checked his mail? Did vampires get mail? Then they had gone shopping at Target. He had purchased a case of bottled water and food that she assumed was for her, though he had not consulted her on his selections.

She looked like hell. She had barely slept, and being confined to the chair all day long, forced to sleep through endless hours of daytime television and her growing hunger, thirst and desperate need to use the bathroom, had left her with a crick in her neck that had advanced through the day and early evening into a vicious headache.

The people in the store were more scared of her, the filthy, shaking, crazy looking girl. People were strange that way. Danger was sexy and suffering was scary, and Willow was definitely suffering. Spike watched an older woman glare at the girl when she inadvertently made eye contact.

She stumbled against him and he cupped the back of her head, holding her against him. "Sssh," he soothed. "We need to get you something to eat," he said to distract her, switching gears to solicitous with terrifying ease. "What do you want, Red? Want some ice cream?" he steered her to the freezer case.

"Go on, you pick, pet," he urged. He glared at the older woman on principal. Stupid bitch. Humans. Idiots, most of them.

Willow knew this was all wrong. Spike was the bad guy. He was being all soft soothing voice and pick out something you'd like guy, and if she stepped the least little bit out of line, he would start killing people. She was not supposed to feel safe or comforted the least little bit by the change in his demeanor. It was probably all for show, anyway. A dizzying bit of role reversal that made him appear to be the good guy, and her to be whatever made the older woman looking at the doughnut case with ill disguised longing recoil from her. However, she did feel something that felt alarmingly like safe, and made her eyes burn with tears because she had not felt safe in so long.

He got her a toothbrush, toothpaste, cereal, milk, bread, and peanut butter as well as beer and cigarettes for himself. When they were back in the car, he shook his head. "I don't know, Red. Maybe next time you should ask someone to help you. I promise, I'll kill anyone who tries to stay out of it first," he joked.

She just looked more confused. "That was a joke," he told her. "Never mind," she was too out of it to get it.

He located the motel Colin had found for them. Way off the highway, a rundown, hastily constructed World War II vintage motel that had undergone a cheap renovation in the sixties. There was a moldering putting course with a dinosaur theme. Colin, Georgia, Pete, and Harm had taken up residence two days ago, routing the squatters and taking over the main building. They were waiting for him when he arrived, having taken over what had once been a cocktail lounge. He had given Colin specific instructions about minions. Only keep the ones that looked useful in a fight and get rid of the rest. Colin had taken him at his word, and he was pleased.

Georgia got up from where she was sitting behind a water-damaged piano and walked towards them. "Spike," she shook her head at him. "What have you done to our baby girl?" she scolded. "She looks terrible."

Harmony laughed. "Smells terrible, too," she agreed, waving her hand in front of her nose. She was cheered up by the opportunity to pick on Willow.

Willow clutched her pint of melting ice cream. She had not let go of it even for a second since she had pulled it out of the freezer. She had no spoon to eat it with, though she had not complained about that.

"No clothes," Spike said. "She'll clean up," he pointed out.

Georgia went behind the bar and found a dusty spoon. She wiped it off. Spike pushed the girl into a chair and pried the container out of her hands. She had never quite believed she was going to be allowed to keep the ice cream. He ripped the top off and took the spoon from Georgia before giving it back to her. It was all squishy and it kind of made her feel sick, but she ate it anyway while Spike peppered the assembled vampires with questions and looked over the minions.

Pete and Colin were taking them out to hunt. "I'm hungry now," one of the minions complained. "Why can't we eat her?" he asked.

"Eeeew," Harmony made a face. "She's all smelly," she said. "It's enough to turn your stomach."

Spike backhanded her. Time to remind everyone of who was in charge. "Shut your stupid mouth," he said, without any particular venom as Harmony stared at him in shock, looking at Pete to see what he would do. He just smiled.

He pointed at the girl. "That is mine," he said. "Touch her, and I'll introduce you to a dimension of pain that will leave you begging for a stake," he completed the thought.

The minions stared at him uneasily. He was not a big guy. In fact, he was kind of small and wiry, but they could sense power that confused them.

Spike watched them sorting it out in a bewildered way. That's right children. I'm the big bad here.

Willow had stopped eating her ice cream to watch. She was not sure what was going on here either, and Spike looked outnumbered to her, but she could see the vampires nodding. Well, most of them were nodding. The vampire who wanted to eat her-yuck!-was not nodding with the rest of the class. He was looking skeptical and hungry, and gigantic as he shifted restlessly from one foot to the other. Willow guessed that he was well over six feet tall. He looked heavy through the middle, and his hair was long and bushy, drawn back in a partial ponytail. He was wearing heavy black boots and ripped jeans with a sleeveless sweatshirt.

Where was her pencil when she needed it? She wiped her mouth off with the back of her hand. "Is this going to be a really gross, blood everywhere before he gets dusty thing, or a top ten most humiliating ways to get dusted thing," she wanted to know. "Because on top of the ice-cream, if there is a lot of blood and screaming, and torture, I'll probably get sick."

She wondered if vampires were more sensitive to the smell of vomit than humans. Not that she had noticed Spike making gagging sounds when she had thrown up when they were on the road. Guess not, then.

Everyone except Spike looked at her in varying degrees of astonishment.

"I heard about that time you and Dru tortured Angel, with the holy water dripping," she made a face, and then shuddered, "it made me pretty sick just hearing about it," she muttered.

Spike turned his head to look at her, one scarred eyebrow raised. "Oh . . . being quiet now," she said, interpreting the look.

Looking at Spike for permission, and getting a curt nod, Georgia approached Willow. "Come on, dumpling. Let's get you cleaned up. I'll find you some clothes to wear. We'll let the boys sort themselves out."

Willow looked uncertain. "You can keep your ice cream," Georgia added.

"Put her in my room," Spike said.

Willow sighed. He barely let her out of his sight even to go to the bathroom.

Georgia took her out of the lounge and down a hallway. All of the windows were covered with black spray paint, and the lingering smell made her feel sick to her stomach. They went up a wide set of stairs to a second story. The floor was covered with a faded carpet that smelled of mildew and dust.

"It's not the Hilton," Georgia announced, "but, we cleaned out a couple of rooms, so it's not as bad as it seems," she wondered if the girl was going to throw up.

"We saved the honeymoon suite for Spike," she said with a grin. It was the biggest room in the hotel and close to the lounge. Pete had gotten a back-up generator running, so there was limited electricity and running water.

She got Willow into the bathroom and let her finish her ice cream as the water warmed up in the shower. The girl cried as Georgia made her take off her filthy clothes, which weren't fit for anything at this point but a bonfire. Georgia peeled the filthy bandage off her neck and sniffed at the wound, satisfied that there was no telltale odor of infection.

"In you go," she directed Willow into the shower stall with a bar of soap and a small bottle of shampoo.

Spike wandered in with a paper bag that he dropped on the counter. "Do you mind staying in with her?" he asked, having already decided to leave Georgia to baby-sit while he went hunting with his minions.

Georgia sighed. "I guess not," she conceded, looking in the bag. Tooth brush, toothpaste. It was a start. "She needs clothes," she told him. "And-"

"Make a list," Spike cut her off.

"Aspirin," Willow said from the shower.

His eyebrows shot up. She had not said a single word in twenty-four hours, then the surprising outburst in the lounge. Fifteen minutes of Georgia fussing over her and she was helping with the list making, unfazed by them talking on the other side of the dense shower curtain. That was adorable.

"Anything else?" he asked over the shower. "Girly stuff? A pointy stake?" he quipped.

"Deodorant," Harmony's harping on how bad she smelled had made her cringe. "A hairbrush. And a stun gun," she stammered back.

Georgia grinned. It was funny. The red head had a sense of humor. Spike rolled his eyes. "You washing behind your ears, Red?" he barked. "Between your toes?" He lowered his voice for Georgia. "There's some food for her, too."

She nodded. "I'll take care of her," she agreed. "Never had a pet before," she observed, cocking her head to one side.

"Dru did," Spike sighed. God, but he missed the looney bitch. "She'd dress 'em up. Always forgot to feed them."

Georgia had met Dru. Spike's devotion to Dru had always struck Georgia as a character flaw. "I'm not Dru," she dared to say. She was too smart to offer a more concrete criticism.

He did not take offense. For a moment, he just looked tired. "No one is," he told her. That was the problem. No one could be Dru. Done with the brooding, though. Bigger and better things. Gem of Amara, and then rule any fucking corner of the world that took his fancy. In the back of his head, the idea that just maybe, his dark Goddess would be impressed enough to come crawling back to him.

~Part: 6~

Two uniformed police officers had come by the house after Oz called them to report Willow missing. They sat on the coach in the living room and filled out their report dutifully, polite, but not consumed with concern. There were a lot of reasons why Willow might not be where she was expected to be, including the possibility that she simply didn't want to be found, though they didn't mention that to Oz. There was no sign of a break in, or anything missing, and the girl's purse was gone, which proved that she had at least left of her own volition. They suggested that Oz call her family and friends in Sunnydale to make sure that she had not simply gotten home sick and gone home.

After the police left, Oz called Rupert Giles. His conversation with Giles earlier had been short. Alarmed by the fact that Willow was not home,  everyone agreed that he call the police immediately. Giles was going to return to his apartment, and asked him to call back as soon as he was done talking to the police. Buffy and Xander made plans to go to Giles' apartment after a short nap. By the time Buffy got to Giles, her Watcher was awake, still dressed, and making coffee. Xander arrived a few minutes later and while they waited for Oz to call Giles asked them when they had last talked to her, and how she had sounded.

Oz called after six in the morning and recapped the interview with the police. Giles made a few notes and asked Oz to check with the neighbors in the morning and then call him. He was sending Buffy and Xander to the Rosenberg house in Sunnydale to see if Willow had come back home or called there. Shelia and Ira Rosenberg were in Europe for the summer. He asked Oz to check Willow's computer for their itinerary.

Oz had canvassed the neighborhood. The next-door neighbors had not seen Willow in days, and the man in the house to the right suggested that he go to the used bookstore on Morton. The owner of the used bookstore ran the coffee shop on the corner, and Willow spent a lot of time there. The proprietor knew Willow. He was suspicious at first, but after Oz explained who he was, he relaxed, and admitted that he was worried about her.

Apparently, she came in virtually every day and she had last been seen on Friday night. He called one of his waitress' at home who remembered Willow joining a party that included two women and three men. She offered to meet Oz at the coffee shop at ten that morning. Dan and Chris went out to get a cell phone for Oz, since having mobile communication seemed like a good idea to them and Devon accompanied him to the coffee shop. The waitress arrived on time and introduced herself.

"You must be Oz," she said with a smile. "Recognize you from your picture," she explained. Willow carried wallet-sized pictures of all her high school friends in her wallet. Oz introduced Devon. "I'm Angie."

At the beginning of Angie's shift, Willow had been at the bar, but then she joined a group at a table, she recounted.

"Do you remember anything about them?" Oz asked.

"The two girls were blondes. Really hot blondes," she noted with a small, appreciative smile. "But I don't think Willow knew the other girl. She was wearing leather, and she looked a bit older. Mid twenties, maybe? The younger blond girl was kind of snippy, too."

"She left with them?" Oz was frowning.

"Maybe," Angie said. "They left in a hurry," she said. "One round, and I didn't have time to check back on them. They were gone," she frowned. "Left two twenties on the table, which more than covered the tab."

Oz asked her to describe the men. "It was five days ago," Angie reminded him ruefully.

Devon looked around. "Do you remember where they were sitting?"

She pointed out a table, in the front third of the long, narrow end of the bar positioned near a solid section of wall between two long store front windows. "They were here. This is a good table. A popular table," she looked over at them wondering if they understood what she meant. There was always a table in a station that people liked better than the others. This one was closer to the wall, and round, with good sight lines to the door, the bar, and the small stage at the far end of the room. It was near windows, but not directly in front of them.

Devon nodded. He could see it. The lights would be dimmed at night. It would have felt a little more private than the square tables between the round table and the bar where the foot traffic would be heaviest.

"I had another party parking there. I was glad when I saw that they had moved," she said.

She walked over to the table to orient herself. She pointed at empty chair. "Bald guy, ordered for most of the table. Ale. Forty-ish, in good shape, and the older woman blond was practically in his lap but kind of flirting with the blond guy they were with," she moved on, clockwise to the chairs to the right.

"The younger girl was with a guy maybe a few years older. Long hair. Preppy goth. Do you know what I mean? James Dean gone goth," she said, pushing the chairs around. It was a round table with four chairs, when she was done moving furniture, there were six chairs arranged around the table.

"Willow was sitting here," she said, resting her hands on the back of a chair that was at an angle to the bar, and turned more towards the door. "The snippy blonde was here. Tall, skinny caramel latte," she pointed at the chair to the left, looking thoughtful. "Her guy was on the other side of her," she nodded to herself.

People from work? Had she met friends from work here, Oz wondered. His next stop was going to be her office, so he needed to get the descriptions clear in his head. Angie's organizing them around the table was helping. He stood behind the first chair.

"Bald guy?" he looked at her, and she nodded. "In his forties. Younger blond girlfriend," he recounted. "You said he was in good shape? What do you mean?"

"Clean shaven, built," Angie remembered. "No tats, but he looked like the type that would have a few. Weekday broker, weekend biker?"

He knew from Willow talking about work that most of her co-workers were in their twenties. He moved to the next chair. "Blond girl. How long was her hair?" he asked.

"Long," Angie gestured to mid-forearm. "Shampoo commercial hair. She was wearing a red leather dress," she moved around to adjust the chairs. "She was sitting here," she pushed the chair closer to the bald guy's chair, "but flirty with," she pointed to the next chair.

Devon cocked his head to one side. "That's the other blond girl's boyfriend?"

"No," Angie shook her head, "The blond guy . . . he looked kind of like . . . oh, damn!" she tried to think of a name. "Eighties, punk rock, um, bleached blond hair, British . . ." her head bobbed as she tried to come up with a name. She hummed a few bars of 'White Wedding'. "That guy? I can't think of his name."

"Billy Idol?" Devon supplied. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Oz's head snap back like someone had punched him.

"Billy Idol," she said with a grin. "Oh, yeah. Bleached blond. He was wearing a leather coat-it was like 85 degrees, so that was different, and-"

Oz's spoke. "Leather coat? Did he have a scar on-"

Angie's eyes widened. "Eyebrow! He had a scar on his eyebrow!" she remembered. "Do you know him?" she asked.

Devon shrugged. "Do we, Oz?"

"Spike," Oz said, flatly, the wolf snarling inside his head. Spike.

Why? What would have made Willow leave with Spike and at least four other vamps? It didn't make sense. She would have known that she was safest in a public place.

Armed with enough information to pinpoint the when and where of Willow's disappearance, Oz searched every corner of the coffee shop. He went back to the house and called Giles again to report.

~Part: 7~

Spike was watching television. The reception was lousy since there was no cable. He was watching Oprah. Go figure. Spike watches Oprah. She could not wait to tell Xander. She hoped she would get a chance to tell Xander. During a commercial break, Spike walked over to the bed where she was sitting with her back against the headboard that was bolted to the wall to lift the book she was reading. "The Bible. Why?" he asked.

"I need something to read."

She was stuck with out of date tourism brochures and a dusty copy of the Gideon Bible. She wondered if she should just skip ahead to the New Testament since, being Jewish, she had never read it before. Maybe she would convert to Christianity. Her Dad would love that. Her Mom would call it a phase.

"Not religious, then?" he guessed.

She eyed him warily. "I'm a Jewish Wicca living in a patriarchal Christian world," she said. "I like Christmas, Easter Egg hunts, and Hanukkah. I'm probably going straight to hell. According to this," she waggled the book.

He snorted at the idea. "Doubt it, pet. Anyway, Christmas trees and Easter eggs are pagan, not Christian. Can't see you in hell. You'd screw up the suffering and what not," he told her. "You want a soda?"

She wasn't so sure about messing up the suffering. Her mother would probably start an encounter group Willow decided with an inward smile at the thought.

He had bought her diet Coke on his 'take the minions out and teach them how to kill people' field trip. "Uh, okay."

He wandered off to the mini refrigerator and returned with a soda for her and a beer for him. "Thank you," she said automatically.

"Your welcome," he mocked her. There was nothing on television. Oprah was rattling on about her bloody diet. No disaster victims. Pity. That left it up to Red to entertain him. She was reading and massaging Harmony's bite mark with mineral oil.

"What's the story with the mineral oil?" he asked.

"It helps minimize scarring," she explained. "I don't want to go around with a Harmony bite mark on me."

She said the oddest things. He lay across the foot of the bed on his side. "Does it work?"

"Yeah," she leaned forward, pushing her hair aside, peeling back her t-shirt a bit. "I've got another one," she said. "Right, uh," she frowned, feeling for the spot, "Here."

He leaned forward to look at her shoulder. Even with her pointing it out, he could barely see the mark. It was a little nothing of a bite mark. "Hardly a bite at all," he scoffed. "Another fledge?" he asked, lifting the bottle to his lips.

"Nope. Darla," she said.

He managed to swallow. "You got away from Darla?" he hooted. That was one for the books. "How did you manage that?"

"Buffy," she said, as if that explained everything.

"Ah, yes. The Slayer," his lip curled. Bitch. "If it weren't for that bitch . . . " his eyes narrowed. "Slutty the Vampire Layer," he intoned. "Tell me, pet," he invited. "When your good friend was knocking boots with Angel, were you thinking romance or bleeding farce?"

She looked at him like he was truly repellent. "They loved each other," she said quietly.

"You are a piece of work, Red," he sneered. "Don't try to dignify it. It's like humans mating with sheep," he told her, watching her flinch. "Didn't your Mum ever scold you for playing with your food? It's not romantic."

The analogy did not work. "I can talk to my food, but it doesn't talk back."

Score one for Red, he thought. "So, let me get this straight. Some noble, poofy demon git goes all swoon-y for you, and he gets in your knickers? Or is this one standard for the Chosen One, and another standard for the," his gaze raked her, "sidekick?"

Oz had. She shrugged. "Maybe," she allowed. "My boyfriend is a werewolf."

He vaguely recalled Angelus mentioning that. "I thought the bloke I kidnapped you with before was your guy?"

She shook her head. "Xander?" she rolled her eyes. "He barely knew I was a girl," she said. "Well, except . . ." she frowned, "he did notice, and there was the kissing, and then Oz-" she looked depressed by the memory.

"A couple of stolen kisses?" he made a face. "Piffle. It's a wolf thing. They're bloody possessive. What a tosser. Better off without him." He looked disapproving. "And what were you thinking dating a wolf anyway?"

"Only three days a lunar cycle," she defended her boyfriend. "The rest of the time he's just Oz. He knew all along how I felt about Xander," she said with a far away look. "And he was okay with it. He gave me time to make up my mind," she smiled, looking down.

"It was wrong," she said softly, and then she looked up, teary green eyes kindling with ire. "But, we're past that, and I'm not better off without him," she added.

What did he know about it? She might be dating a werewolf, but the object of his affection was insane. Who was he to give unsolicited dating advice?

"I'm a million times worse off. I took this stupid internship, and look what happened! Maybe I'll never see him again," her voice broke on a sob. "I could have spent the whole summer with Oz."

She conveniently forgot that Oz's summer plans didn't actually include her.

Kidnapping doesn't wind her up; thinking about her trifling teen romance does the trick? He really hated weeping women.

"Don't starting crying," he warned. "Hey. It's not my fault that you were in San Jose, or that you had to go and be little Miss Save the Daft Bint with Harmony."

She sniffed wetly. "Sorry," she grumbled. "I miss him." She closed the Bible with a thump. "It wouldn't have mattered anyway," she reminded herself. "He's in a band. Spending the summer with his friends, playing in clubs and stuff."

Even if she had spent the summer in Sunnydale, Oz wouldn't have been there. "I guess, he needs his space, or something," she said sadly.

'Needs his space' indeed. If he were up to that sort of pap he would have left Oprah on. Spike refrained from rolling his eyes. It took some effort; on the other hand, she wasn't paying enough attention to him to appreciate the non-verbal sarcasm behind the gesture.

"Cheer up, Red. On the bright side, your big disappearing act may remind him that you might not be around forever, waiting in Sunnyhell, or passing the time being a Slayer groupie or doing something nauseatingly wholesome until he shows an interest," he said. "It'll get his attention."

He could tell that this thought had not occurred to her and that it had her attention now. She got this goofy, far away look on her face, her eyes widening. It was a trick of the light, or sumptuous bone structure, but for a second, her eyes were Disney kid big, luminous with tears. He had to bite the inside of this cheek to keep from laughing.

Then her eyes narrowed, and she looked mildly disgusted. Like it had just dawned on her that she was thinking of ways to make being kidnapped work for her.

Don't worry, precious, Spike's got that angle covered, he thought. She really was rather amusing, he decided.

"You are-"

"Evil," he finished for her. "Vampire. Keep up, pet."

She looked sad. "They do tend to go together," she conceded. "That's why I couldn't tell with Harmony. She's pretty much the same either way."

"Really? I thought: brain damage."

She giggled at that. "No. She's the same Harmony," she sighed. "That was . . . disturbing!" she shuddered, thinking of her near death experience.

She shot him an annoyed look. "You must have thought it was hilarious."

A slow smile appeared and his scarred eyebrow lifted. "You saving Harmony? It was moderately amusing," he conceded. "There was a huge mirror behind that bar, pet. If you'd just turned your head, just enough to watch yourself for a second, you would have seen for yourself."

That hadn't occurred to her before now, though she really didn't think it mattered now. She didn't go around checking herself out in every mirror that she passed.

They were on kidnapping, Part II, Day five. D-day. She had been officially missing for twelve hours. The police had not been called, or at least there was nothing on the news to suggest that a massive manhunt had been launched to find her. She wasn't a local girl, so no one was getting real worried about her yet. He didn't call in for her today. His previous calls had hinted at playing hooky.

Yesterday when he had called her supervisor just sounded annoyed, and told him to tell Willow that they did expect her to come to work if she wanted to keep her internship. It was time for him to get in touch with the Slayer or her Watcher and start making his demands before some busy body got the police involved and complicated things.

He was puzzling over how he was going to establish his bona fides with the Slayer. He'd taken a cell phone off a three-martini business snack last night. He would make the call and . . . what? Announce that he was offering a deal on missing redheads? Offer to cut off a recognizable body part to prove he had her?

"I met myself as a vampire," she said.

His lips twitched. Red as a vampire?  "Do tell," he invited, willing to be distracted. Plenty of time to think through his ransom demand later. That she had stopped weeping about her object of infatuation was a conclusion to be encouraged.

"It's a long story, involving a vengeance demon," she began, not really sure why she had thrown that out there. Amuse the kidnapper. Entertain the vampire. Keep him thinking cute, fluffy, and harmless.

Spike gestured with his beer for her to continue.

"And an amulet that got lost in an alternate universe that was created by someone wishing that Buffy had never come to Sunnydale," she explained. "Anya-it was her amulet-sort of tricked me into helping her open a temporal fold to get it back," she said. "But she spilled the potion on me, so we got me-except in that reality me-er, I, was a vampire."

"And wackiness ensued?" he guessed.

"More or less."

"You met? Face to face?"

"Or, tongue to neck," she muttered. "What is it with you guys and the grabbing people from behind? Don't you have enough of an advantage as it is?"

"Feeding isn't really a fair fight moment, pet," he told her. "Hard to get staked by a victim when their chest is between their hands and your heart." He got a wistful expression, "and it feels kind of nice to have someone all warm and panic stricken against you while you drain 'em."

"Eeeew!" She grimaced. "Sorry I asked."

His eyes danced. "So vampire you was all ready to do you?" he prompted.

She blushed. "Uh . . . yeah. She was . . . in a couple of hours in Sunnydale, she had minions, and she took over the Bronze, and she scared people that pretty much ignore me, or didn't notice I existed," she frowned at that thought. "It was like evil me. Successful evil, skanky, leather wearing, dominatrix me, and with the inappropriate touching and-kinda gay," she recounted.

Spike chuckled. "Sorry I missed that. She sounds like a treat."

"Or not," she said. "Maybe she knew you too. She knew Angel. He was in her world, with the soul, she called him Puppy. He was mad about that-" "What?" Spike sat up. Astonished glee made him look almost boyish.

"Puppy," Willow repeated. She didn't roll her eyes. This was Xander's favorite part, too. Well, go figure. This was almost too easy. The one thing Xander and Spike had in common was a passionate dislike of Angel. It had taken her a while to hit on her new indulge the kidnapper strategy. Amuse him. Keep him happy. It wasn't a plan. It was a holding pattern until she figured out a plan. They had been talking for a while without threat of violence, which suited her.

"She kept him in a cage, and . . . you know . . . you do know, don't you?" she checked worriedly, because she was not telling that part. Not that she had pressed her vamp-self for details, but she could fill in the blanks too.

Spike's shoulders shook with silent laughter.

"Xander thought it was funny, too," Willow's tone was dry. Hilarious, in fact. The idea of a skanky, leathery version of her making Angel her bitch was a sure fire way to cheer him up. Thinking of things that cheered Xander up was oddly comforting, it was like slipping into a nice, soft, comfy angora sweater. Her mind drifted over a short list. Jelly donuts, badly dubbed movies, calling late and discovering that they were watching the same thing on television, talking each other to sleep on the phone.

"It was funny," she admitted, mostly to herself. "But I try not to be mean, even if he did kill my goldfish and Ms. Calendar, because that was Angelus. Angel feels bad about that-more about Ms. Calendar than my goldfish-and he's already depressed enough. Oh," she snapped her fingers as she thought of another reason not to be mean about Angel, "He saved me from Faith's evil Watcher," she reminded herself. "Which cancels out the goldfish, if you think about it, though the goldfish might not feel that way."

"That's hilarious," Spike said. Halfway through her babble, he had tuned out. "Funnier if you imagine it with you. Fuzzy lavender sweater wearing teen witch you, but still funny with the leather and attitude."

"E-rase!" Willow made scrubbing motions.

He looked skeptical. "Your heart never beat faster for the King of Brood?"

She just stared right back at him for a moment. Her nostrils flared the tiniest bit.

Guess not, Spike concluded.

She took a deep breath. "May I ask you a question?"

So polite. He gestured for her to continue. He was sure he knew where this was going.

"Is there a point to all of this?" she asked. "You saved me from being eaten by Harmony-which ranks up there in the ten most humiliating ways to die-and I'm grateful for that. There's karma involved. I'm not sure why you did it, but I really don't want to be dead. But-"she pursed her lips. "You dragged me around for days, and scared me, and kidnapped me, and now you are being almost friendly. So what is this really about?"

He was mildly curious. What did she think it was about? "Maybe I'm just making it up as I go along."

She frowned at him. "Do you want me to do that love spell for you? I've had some more practice," she thought about it for a moment before appending a condition. "I think you should promise that there won't be torture involved, because even though Drusilla killed Kendra, I don't think I should help you bring her back to torture her because, she's insane, and maybe not so good with the decision making," she reasoned, before adding, "I kind of owe you. For not killing me," she clarified in case that was in doubt. "And, you know, not killing me later is sort of a condition, too."

"That's really . . . sweet of you," he said. God, it actually was. If he bit her now he would probably go into sugar shock. "But, I'm past all that, pet. Thanks for the offer." He was lying through his teeth, but feeling all manly about denying his pain.

It wasn't that. Her face fell. "It's because you think I'm not a good witch?" She had been a little flattered to be kidnapped the first time to do a spell. It was a weird kind of endorsement to be kidnapped by a completely terrifying master vampire who had come all the way from Brazil looking for a witch and had picked her.

Okay, so she had done the math on that.

Her disappointment was evident. "Souled Angel up, didn't you?" he pointed out. "Did that un-invite spell."

She nodded, not understanding where he was going with this.

"Very impressive." Angelus hadn't seen the univite spell coming and it had pissed him off mightily, he recalled. "S'not like there are souled demons all over, and you'd think there would be if any old witch could do that," he said, completely unaware that she thought he had come to Sunnydale with a plan.

He had come to Sunnydale, drunk off his ass, with a vague notion of inviting Angel and Buffy into his world of pain, and he had gotten the idea of kidnapping her to perform a love spell when she was in the magic shop chatting with the shopkeeper. He had been thinking boils, plague, and leprosy before that, for Angel. The Slayer could pick up his rotting parts as they fell off. Now that would have been proper.

She looked pleased. "Well . . . "she bounced a little. "Thanks. Most of my spells go kind of wonky, but the big ones seem to work."

"You're interesting, Red," he told her. "Kind of amusing. And so far, you've acquitted yourself well," he graced her with an indulgent half smile, his gaze slightly averted. "Let's say I like you?" he proposed to the ceiling.

"I like you?" he tried it out, and looked directly at her, the indulgent quality of the smile disappearing, though the smile remained. His eyes were cold.

Willow felt her mouth go dry. A shiver climbed her spine. He kills people every day. People like the woman who would have helped her.

"I'd still kill you in a heartbeat, without a single regret," he said watching the color wash out of her face. "I'd drain you drier than the Sahara, and enjoy a smoke for a chaser, and I'd still like you," he said with a smirk.

"You're alive because you're too valuable to kill. I'm betting you're worth something, ducks. So, I'll see what I can barter you for," he told her, getting to the crux of her question. "I probably won't hurt you," he ladled a bit of doubt in that. "As long as you appear to be more valuable alive, and more or less intact-and you aren't more trouble than I'm willing to put up with."

She wished she hadn't asked.

"Have none of these people heard of call waiting?" Spike wondered aloud, glaring at the cell phone. He got the Watcher, the Slayer, and Angel's phone numbers out of Willow's day planner. Angel's phone number had a neat line crossed through it, but it was not disconnected. He wondered about that. He had decided to call the Watcher, though it would have been a kick to chat up Joyce Summers again. She'd probably hang up and call the police. He remembered the Watcher taking a mace to Angelus after his bird had been left dead in his bed, and holding up like an obstinate bastard under Angelus' torture.

English, of course. Yea for the mother country's stubborn sons.

After his fourth attempt-the librarian must live on the telephone, Spike concluded; the line was answered with a diffident 'Hello'.

"Watcher," Spike intoned. He kind of liked being a kidnapper. All dark and ominous and evil. It gave him a warm feeling all over.

There was a moment of silence. "Who is this?" he asked.

"Three guesses," Spike offered. "Not bloody Angelus. That was free."

"Spike," the Watcher sighed. Based on the description Oz had gotten from the waitress at the coffee shop, as wildly improbable as it seemed, it sounded too much like Spike for anyone's comfort.

Nice to know he was still on the radar in Sunnydale. "Very good, Rupert," Spike said. "I've got your witch, old man."

"Not bloody likely," Giles growled. He was determined to make Spike prove it.

"Oh, I don't know about that, Watcher," Spike drawled. "Five' two-ish, red hair-don't care for the new look. Rather fancied her hair long enough to wrap around my wrist," he mused. "Lovely little beauty mark under her right shoulder. Freckles . . . everywhere," this was fun. "Any of this sound familiar?" he asked. "Ran into her in San Jose. Imagine my surprise," he gave it a beat before continuing, "Or imagine hers," he purred.

"I want to talk to her," Giles refused to be baited.

"Don't believe me?" Spike teased.

"I want proof that she is alive," Giles retorted. "Otherwise, I'm considering this the vampire version of a crank call," he bluffed. Spike had no idea that they already suspected that he had Willow, so he had the advantage.

"Hmm," Spike considered. "Hold that thought," he said, taking the stairs two at a time and going into the room where he kept Willow.

She was sitting on the bed with Georgia doing her toenails. She looked up at him curiously. He was across the room and twisting his hand in her hair before she could do much more than gasp. She cringed, whimpering in pain. Much better. He shoved the phone in her face. "Say hello, pet," he ordered. "Watcher."

"H-hello?" she stammered. "Giles? Is that you?"

"Willow," he breathed. Worst-case scenario now confirmed. It was Willow and she sounded terrified.

Spike took the phone away from her ear, and she went after it and him. Two whole days of food and regular baths, and she was ready to fight? He pushed her down on the bed, pinning her there. She looked at Georgia for help, but the blonde vampire had vacated the bed and was just watching this with a small frown that had a lot to do with the fact that her toenail polish had gotten smudged during her evacuation maneuver.

"What do you want, Spike?" the Watcher demanded.

"Good. Stay on topic," Spike said, "because this is all about what I want, Rupert." He felt the girl's struggles lessen. She probably wanted to hear this too. "I want the Gem of Amara."

"That is a myth," Giles scoffed. "It is the vampire version of the Holy Grail. It doesn't exist," he insisted.

Spike made a buzzer sound. "Wrong," he sang. "It does exist. It is real. It is in Sunnydale, and you are going to find it and deliver it to me. When you do, I'll give her back. You'll be receiving a package in the mail. It has Dalton's research in it. Should get you going in the right direction," Spike said.

Willow twisted enough to get her arm free and slammed her elbow into Spike's face. Which even she knew was not exactly a good idea.

"Hold on," Spike said into the phone before he tossed it down and unfastened his belt, yanking it through the belt loops of his jeans. He flipped Willow over, his hand heavy on the back of her neck, pushing her face into the mattress. He smacked her hard across the ass. The first time he hit her, she cried out in surprise. By the fourth stroke, she was crying in pain. "You want to fight some more?" Spike's fingers tightened unpleasantly on the back of her neck.

"Bastard," she choked.

"That's better. No argument here. You hit me. I hit back. Stick to a fight you can win," he advised. He let go of her and picked up the phone.

"I'll check in on your progress. When you have it, we'll work out the details of the trade," he said. "I want the Gem of Amara, Watcher. Make a project of it. I'll do what I can to keep you motivated, but my patience is fairly limited."

"Then you will see to it that she is returned to us, unharmed in any way," Giles said, practically choking with rage.

Spike didn't bother to respond. He thumbed the disconnect button and pocketed the phone. He leaned over Willow, smoothing her hair away from her face. Her tear filled eyes clung to him even as she arched away from him as much as she dared. "I meant what I said, Red," he warned her. "You hit me. I hit back." His finger traced the curve of her ear. "Understand?"

She gritted her teeth and nodded.

He backed off and she scrambled off the bed on the opposite side. If looks could kill, Spike thought, he'd be fit for the dustbin. She was still breathing hard, her small fists clenched. "What is the Gem of Amara?" she asked.

"It doesn't matter," he told her. "If it exists, if it can be found, the ever resourceful Slayer will find it," he guessed.

~Part: 8~

Panic was not an option. Not for Rupert Giles. Five minutes and one broken fertility god statue after Spike had cut him off-rude little pillock-Rupert Giles was seated at his desk with a notebook open before him. In the margin of a legal pad, he wrote in quick, firm strokes everything he remembered about the Gem of Amara. He also made a short checklist of questions that he would have for Buffy and Xander when they arrived.

He called Xander's home first. The boy had a summer job delivering pizzas that Giles was afraid would become more than a summer job if he did not re-think going to college with the girls in the fall. Sometimes Buffy and Willow were too gentle, too easy on Xander. He needed a bit of a kick in the seat of his pants every now and again to keep him moving in the right direction. Xander's mother woke him, and Giles rolled his eyes. It was after one in the afternoon, Willow was missing, and Xander was sleeping? "Hey G-man!" Xander said, sounding half asleep.

"Xander," Giles said. He sounded calm. "I need you to come over as soon as possible," he said.

"Yeah?" Xander yawned. "O-kay," he said sleepily. "Soon as I get up," he said.

"Which would be now. I'm calling Buffy, next. We will be expecting you," Giles warned.

"Have you got a line on Willow?" Xander woke up. "Tell Buff I'll swing by her place and pick her up," he said.

"Yes. It's not good news," he added. "I'll call Buffy, just get here as soon as you can," Giles insisted.

He hung up and dialed his Slayer. Technically, Giles was no longer a Watcher and the Slayer had decided that she no longer had any use for the Watcher's Council or any Watcher they might send to her. For Giles this meant that he no longer collected a paycheck from the Watcher's Council or enjoyed the privilege to call on his superiors for information or assistance. To his infinite surprise, he tended to get things done more efficiently without dealing with the Council's languid bureaucracy. The phone at the Summers' home was answered on the second ring by Buffy.

"Hey, Giles," she said, sounding let down. Probably hoping that it was Willow calling. "What's up?"

"I need you to come over, immediately," he said. "I've already called Xander."

The post apocalyptic summer had been quiet. The vampire population had taken a beating on graduation day when the Mayor led them into a counter attack that had involved most of the senior class and one souled vampire who had walked off into the night and out of Buffy's life. Quiet was not necessarily good. It meant dealing with Angel leaving, which had been put off for a couple of weeks of R&R in her summer visit with her father.

"Willow?" Buffy mimed a staking, feeling a tingle in the pit of her stomach that she recognized. "What's the what, Giles?"

"Yes, though I'd rather not go into it over the phone," he put her off. He was determined to remain calm, under control, and organized about this latest crisis. "I need you here as soon as possible," he said briskly.

"Research? Road trip to slayage?"

"Research," Giles told her. "Xander said he would pick you up." Giles took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. Find the Gem of Amara. This was going to be infinitely harder, if not impossible, without Willow. "Buffy? I need to call Angel," he told her, not sure how she would react. While she was sad about his leaving, Giles had the distinct impression that she had come to terms with the necessity of Angel's absence from her life. This was her first test, and his Slayer tended to be stubborn about how she met the tests her calling imposed upon her.

"Maybe," she said, armed with less knowledge. "Why Angel, specifically?"

"I'd rather talk to you and Xander at the same time, but I think we are going to need more help and some specialized knowledge that Angel can provide. I'll make the call," he told her and Buffy agreed to get there as soon as possible and hung up. He hung up the phone and opened a drawer, taking out an old, battered address book held together with a rubber band.

Opening the address book, he paged through it, scanning the entries, some lined through to denote contacts that had fallen away over the years. Names leapt out at him. Dr. Porter Breckinridge. Expert in folklore and ancient artifacts. He made a note on his legal pad. Porter might be helpful.

UC Sunnydale's head of the archeology department was new. Giles had been introduced to him at a fund raising party for the new UC Sunnydale cultural center. The name eluded him. He opened a decoupage box on his desktop, a Christmas gift from Jenny the year before she died, and sorted through business cards the box held until he found a card for Luke Holbrooke. Youngish fellow, mid thirties, who had fled the crowded ranks of East Coast academia for California. Giles turned the card over to read his own notes about the man. 'Studied under with D&C Parrish' he had written.

David Parrish was a cultural anthropologist with some unconventional views. His wife Carol was an archeologist and a natural skeptic. The only question was which perspective had formed Dr. Holbrooke's training in his field. Possibly useful.

He continued through his address book. With an inward sigh, he picked up the phone and dialed a more recent entry for a cell phone that was answered almost immediately.

"Angel, Rupert Giles calling," Giles said, wincing at the how officious he sounded to himself. He was never going to feel comfortable around Angel, though in the last year he had managed to get past his grief and rage over what Angelus had done.

"I know," Angel said. "I recognized the number, Rupert," he said quietly, marking his place in the book he was reading and setting it aside. "Is Buffy all right?" he asked. He knew her Watcher wouldn't call him unless it was important. He was almost grateful that he had called, even as he rationalized that something serious must have happened. How many times had he punched the numbers into the cell phone and left his thumb hovering over the talk button, wanting no more than to hear her voice? Knowing that it was unfair, even cruel, to appease that longing?

"Buffy is fine," Giles said. "This is about Willow."

"Willow?" Angel repeated. "She's in San Jose this summer, isn't she?" Angel remembered something about an internship, and Willow working hard to sound brave and enthusiastic about her summer opportunity to work for a dot com business and house sit for a relative. He understood why she had accepted the internship, but not the forced enthusiasm. It wasn't like her. She worked so hard to please nearly everyone that she sometimes made him feel vaguely uncomfortable.

If someone as guileless as Willow Rosenberg was worried about being good enough, then he really had a long row to hoe, not that this was a competition, but still. She was the kind of girl that happily embraced summer reading lists and homework, although he really didn't know her that well. He knew that he was pigeonholing her into a stereotype. Just when you were ready to write Willow off as a sweet, shy, smart kid who hung out with Buffy she would surprise you with an insight or inner strength that had gone unnoted. Or with the revelation of elements of her character that emerged in her vampire doppelganger. He smiled to himself, remembering her calling him a jerk and ripping into him for not having time to do things with Buffy.

"What's the problem?" he asked.

"Spike," Giles said. "It defies imagination but he has kidnapped her. Again."

"Spike," Angel growled. He had kidnapped Willow and Xander last fall in a falling down drunk bit of idiocy to get Willow to cast a love spell to bring Dru back to him. It smacked of spur of the moment bumbling. Fortunately, Spike had been too drunk to do much more than beat Xander up and scare the crap out of Willow before he had had an epiphany and took off to track Dru down and torture her back into love with him.

"I guess Dru's running true to form and she's left him again."

"That is in question. I don't know if she is with him or not," Giles said. He was hoping for not. Spike was bad enough on his own. Paired with Drusilla, they were a disaster zone. He made a quick note on his legal pad. This was a question that required an answer. They had to know what they were up against. Drusilla had some impressive weapons of her own and could not be dismissed. "He says that he wants to trade her for the Gem of Amara," Giles explained.

Angel sucked in a surprised breath. Not that he needed to breathe. It was an involuntary reflex. "You have the Gem of Amara?" It boggled the mind. He knew what it was, or at least, what it purported to be in vampire legend. A devise that made a vampire impervious to harm. Sought for hundreds of years all over the world.

"No. Frankly, I don't believe it exists," Giles was blunt. "He expects us to find it for him."

Angel leaned forward, thinking. "That doesn't sound like Spike. He's more bird in hand than flights of fancy, and he isn't a big student of history. Kind of a natural skeptic when it comes to lore," he said.

Giles sighed, "Well, that as may be, he claims that a vampire named Dalton was on the trail of the Gem. He has his research and he says he is sending it to us. He expects us to find it and make a trade for Willow."

Angel remembered Dalton. Older, quiet, bookish minion who had been with Dru and Spike when they came to Sunnydale. "That is plausible," he conceded. "Are you sure he has Willow?" Willow was missing and Buffy hadn't called him? He filed that away for the moment.

"He put her on the phone long enough for me to know it was her," Giles' throat tightened in grief and fury. "And then he beat her," he gritted out. "I could hear her crying."

Angel closed his eyes for a moment, getting a mental picture. "That was probably as much for your benefit as anything else," he said. "Spike's ruthless and a prick, but as long as he thinks she's no threat to him and valuable, he'll keep her alive." If he doesn't get bored, or frustrated, or simply loose his temper.  Angel kept those thoughts to himself.

"Pardon me for finding that cold comfort," Giles tone was sour. "I don't trust Spike. He could be doing this to distract us or simply to inflict maximum damage before he kills her. This whole business about the Gem of Amara could be pure mischief and spite."

Angel didn't argue with him. It was true. Spike could be setting them up with an impossible task just for the fun of watching them scramble about. The only problem with that scenario was that his attention span was too short. He would get bored. Again, he kept the thought to himself. Giles had enough to worry about without his thoughts on Spike's impulse control issues. "How can I help?"

"Could you come here? We will need help with the research," Giles was direct. "I want to see what can be done to run him to ground. We may have to take more direct action to rescue Willow. His insistence on our finding the Gem of Amara may buy us time."

"Presumably he found her in San Jose, which means he's been there recently," Angel said. "I can't go there. If he is still in the area, he'll just move or consider the deal void, in which case-"he left the consequences unsaid.

"Oz is already there."

"I'll leave for Sunnydale at sunset," he promised. "We will find her and bring her home, Giles."

Giles was hanging up when Buffy knocked on the door and stuck her head in. "Hey," she said brightly, coming in with Xander behind her. She clapped her hands like a child promised a treat. "Give me something to beat the crap out of, Giles," she invited.

If only it were that simple. He gestured to the couch. "Please sit down, both of you," he invited. "I have some bad news, and we have a lot of work to do."

Xander sat on the edge of the couch. His right knee bounced with pent up nervous tension. Giles felt guilty for thinking that the boy had slept soundly despite the news that his best friend had gone missing. He looked like he had barely gotten any sleep at all and the blue-black stubble on his face made him look . . . too much like what he was. A boy on the cusp of adulthood who had seen too much, and knew that wherever Willow was she was alone in a world he had learned to be somewhat fearful of. He had none of Buffy's gifts, or Willow's talents. What he brought was unwavering loyalty and love to his friends.

Buffy leaned against the arm of the couch, resting her hand on Xander's shoulder. "I think we are braced, Giles," she looked at Xander, who met her gaze and nodded.

"Very well, then," Giles took a seat in an armchair. "This is what we know," he said. "Oz phoned earlier from San Jose. He believes Willow disappeared on Thursday evening. She went to a coffee shop in the neighborhood, and that was the last place she was seen. She joined a group that included someone whose description-male, bleached blond, wearing a leather coat, English accent . . ."

Buffy's fingers tightened on Xander's shoulder, hard enough for him to yelp, "Fingernails of slayerly strength, Buff," even as it was sinking in.

"Spike?" Buffy relaxed her grip on Xander. She shot him an apologetic look. "Sorry," she mouthed, then she turned back to Giles. "Spike." His decision to call Angel now made more sense to her.

Giles nodded. "He called right before I called you," he said. "To let us know that he had Willow and was willing to trade her."

"Spike?" Xander was dumbfounded. "How could Spike have Willow? She's in San Jose," he pointed out.

"That I can't answer," Giles told him regretfully. "There are a lot of things about this that we don't know, but I assure you of this: I spoke to her, very briefly," he said. "She is alive," Giles really didn't know that. The thought flashed through his mind that she might actually be dead and under Spike's control or authority, a vampire herself. He forced it aside for the moment. "She sounded frightened, which is to be expected. Spike wants us to find an artifact," he took his glasses off, tapping them on his knee for a moment while he felt in his pocket for a linen handkerchief. "Buffy? Raphael's Compendium, please," he requested, gesturing to the shelf that housed the volume.

Buffy went to the bookshelf to look for it, and hefted a fat book bound in worn oxblood leather. She handed it to Giles and leaned over the back of his chair to read over his shoulder as he finished cleaning his glasses and flipped through the book. "Ah. Gem of Amara. There was a great deal of vampiric interest in locating it in the 10th century," Giles said, finding what he was seeking. "Source of some enormous power . . . conveniently vague . . . hm . . . questing vampires combed the earth . . ." Giles read on, disheartened at how little was actually known about the Gem of Amara.

Xander rubbed his face. "That is what he wants to trade Will for? This Gem of Amara?"

Buffy looked puzzled. "Isn't that the name of a video game?" she asked.

"Hmm . . . what?" Giles looked up at her.

She gave a spare shake of her head. "Nothing," she muttered. "So, research?" she guessed.

"Yes," Giles agreed. He went to his desk to review his notes. "We need to start researching all the references that mention the Gem of Amara," he said. "Angel intends to come to Sunnydale to lend his assistance. He can help with the research, and his insights about Spike will be valuable," Giles looked at Xander, expecting a protest from that quarter.

He scowled, but he nodded his acquiescence.

~Part: 9~

A little after ten in the evening there was a knock on Rupert Giles' apartment door. He went to answer it, expecting Angel or a pizza delivery. He found both. The pizza delivery girl was first, with Angel entering the courtyard behind her. The delivery girl knew Xander and they exchanged hellos as Giles paid her with a twenty. She turned to leave, and sidestepped Angel, glancing back at him curiously.

"Rupert," Angel greeted him.

"Come in, please," Giles extended the invite. "I hadn't given it much thought, but you are welcome to stay here if you like while you are in town."

Angel could have reoccupied the Crawford Street mansion, but he was reluctant to. He had driven by it on the way through town with the mixed feelings that he associated with the mansion. It was haunted for him, full of memories. The months he had lived there after he had returned from hell had been penance.

"I may take you up on that," he said as he entered the apartment.

Xander was on the couch, bent over a book, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He stirred old feelings in Angel. He was so awkward and resentful, reminding Angel of himself at the same age. Xander's rebellion had been channeled into helping Buffy. He was grounded by his devotion to Buffy and Willow, which was unwavering despite some miscues with both girls. He looked up, craning around to see, dislike flattening his expression. He looked away as Buffy uncurled from the floor where she was hunched over another book.

She was still for a moment. Lamplight turned her hair to antique gold. Her lips tightened in an expression that was part pleasure, part pain, and then she moved, launching herself at him.

Giles took the pizzas into the kitchen to get plates and a pizza wheel. Xander followed him after a moment, leaving the two of them alone, which was more graceful and generous than Giles expected. He studied Xander's face as the boy opened the refrigerator to retrieve a two-liter bottle of soda. He had the closed look that hinted of frustration and confusion. Giles almost expected some kind of unpardonable teenage cruelty to spill from his lips. A snipping comment about how it was good of Willow to get kidnapped so Buffy could have some handholding time with Angel would have been par for the course. For once, Xander kept his mouth shut, moving woodenly to the cabinet for glasses.

"We need him," Giles told him, keeping his voice down. "I would not have brought him into this if it wasn't necessary."

Xander had figured that out already. No one had more reason than Giles to be less than forgiving where Angel was concerned. His own feelings were more complex than he liked. Before Angel had left, they had worked together to organize the defense that allowed Buffy to lead the Mayor into the trap she had set for him. He had done his part and walked away from it, as he promised. Xander had been impressed.

"I'm good," he told Giles.

~~~*~~~

Angel rested his cheek against her hair, feeling her arms around his waist. He swallowed hard, stroking her back. There was a teenage girl in her that he hardly understood half the time no matter how beguiling he found her. She was wearing some artlessly uncomplicated scent . . . Anais Anais, perhaps, girlish and warm from her skin. Her forehead was pressed into his chest and she was fisting her hands into his coat. She would leave dampened wrinkles he suspected.

Her head lifted. Their eyes met. She tried to smile and failed miserably. She started to thank him, and he gave a spare shake of his head. "We'll find her," he promised.

Something flared in her sherry colored eyes. He recognized it. It was the streak of tough mindedness in her that he loved. She looked small and pretty, and ordinary. There were a million girls in the world that she could have been, leading a life that was indifferent to the hazards that loomed. When her jaw tightened, and she got a certain look in her eye, she became something more. He thought that her duty had simply honed it, sharpening her focus. She would have, in time, discovered that she was a person of deep convictions. He was sure that, left to her own devises, she would have spent her life doing something meaningful, probably helping people.

"Spike's gone too far this time."

She was angry, and determined. So was he. "You'll stop him," he said. "You always do."

~~~*~~~

Spike returned to the room after dawn and found the witch pretending to be asleep. She was lying on the bed, under a blanket, her hands crossed under her breasts and over the blanket. Possibly pretending to be a corpse, he thought with a grin. She was not a tidy or restful sleeper. She hogged the blankets and tended to sleep on her side after a lot of careful wriggling around to settle in.

One of the more reliable female minions had been left to guard her while they hunted. He had a bag of crap that Georgia had gotten for the girl at a twenty-four hour drug store. Tomorrow's robbery and murder story. They had cleaned out the cash registers, destroyed the security tapes, and fed on the employees and a couple of unfortunate  customers. Georgia had thoughtfully bagged cough medicine, some kind of allergy medicine, nail polish, bath gel, a box of chocolate, a notebook and pen, and a couple of books for Red.

He left her alone. With any luck, she would actually fall asleep. He took a shower and got in bed next to her. They had slept in the same bed since the night he had taken her. At first she had been too sick and frightened to lend much significance to the arrangement. After they had taken up residence in the motel she had looked troubled about it, but she seemed to work out that she was probably safest in his presence or Georgia's. He guessed that after he had taken his belt to her ass she had re-thought that, which accounted for her wakefulness now. Still safer with me, pet, he thought.

Georgia was starting to develop a bit of a fixation on her. The vampire equivalent of a crush. Red, tending to drift towards the naïve, seemed to mistake Georgia's attention as maternal without getting that a vampire's maternal interests were centered around sex and blood, not cuddles and hot cocoa.

He rolled over on his side to watch her, wondering how long it would take her to break. She talked a lot. So did Harmony. Willow's verbal excesses were infinitely more interesting though.

It was odd to think that they were the same age and had grown up in the same town. Harmony, daft bint that she was, had grown up on the Hellmouth and remained oblivious to it. She thought it was hilarious that anyone, any vampire, was wary of Buffy Summers. To her the Slayer was a teenage girl who had been a part of the high school nerd patrol that Willow belonged to. She was too stupid to figure out that the Slayer was dangerous and that Willow, by virtue of the fact that she was still alive, without the benefit of Slayerly abilities, had demonstrated that she was either extraordinarily lucky or had some hidden depths.

He smelled tears. She had been crying recently. He wondered if it was from his relatively mild retaliation-she really did not seem to have any appreciation of how badly she could be treated in comparison to how she was actually treated.

If Angelus had taken her, he would have left her chained up in a hole, kept alive on a diet of bread and water, and tortured within an inch of her life. If she had dared to strike him in front of a minion, he would have taken a body part in payment for it. Spike wasn't bored enough to indulge in that kind of play, nor did he have Angelus' uncanny instinct for the limits of human tolerance.

Accidentally killing her was too high a probability, he concluded. There was also his lamentable fair fight ethic. The cards were stacked against her doing any real harm to him, and he met her on that level. The belt had stung, he was sure, but he hadn't done any permanent damage to her. Just got her attention and scared her. In her case, a little fear was a good thing. It would make her tread a bit more warily.

It worked out pretty well. The Watcher had gotten an earful, and that would get his attention better than cutting her ear off and sending it with a blood stained note. He needed to keep the Slayer and the Watcher focused on finding the Gem of Amara and not dividing their efforts between that goal and trying to find and rescue the girl. If they believed that she was being seriously harmed, they might concentrate their efforts in the wrong direction. It was all about pressure. Applying the right kind of pressure at the right time. That was where Angelus went wrong with them. Killing that teacher and threatening Willow and Joyce had gotten them past any reservations they had harbored about destroying him.

He fingered a lock of her hair, diverted by the color against his skin. In the dark, it was blood red, with a shine to it. The texture was finer than it appeared. You expected thick hair to be a little coarse, but her hair was like corn silk, heavy enough to hang straight, though there was a little bit of a wave to it. He watched her face in profile, seeing a muscle near her mouth twitch. Being so still was an effort for her.

She was a pretty little thing. Lingering baby fat softened her features, but didn't entirely obscure the underlying bone structure. She had a widow's peak that appeared like a demure arrow, drawing an imaginary line down her smooth forehead to her straight, slightly upturned nose, to her soft, slightly full lips, to her firm chin. The height of her brow and the soft rise of her cheekbones built a nice little theater for her eyes. It was a trick of sumptuous bone structure that made her eyes appear big but proportional. She had fantastic coloring. Red hair, creamy skin, and green eyes. Luscious, luminous green eyes.

He took the bit of hair he was playing with and used it to tickle her nose. Her eyes flew open, uneasy and alarmed. She started to smack his hand away from her and hesitated at the last minute. Smart girl. Learned that lesson. Instead, her lips tightened and her eyes narrowed.

"You have got to be kidding," she spat at him. "Is beating someone your version of hair pulling? Oh, I forgot, hair pulling is part of your repertoire."

He grinned. Actually, it was, though he hadn't been thinking along those lines, it was interesting that she was. "Waited up for me, Red?" he teased.

She was reduced to an impotent glare. "What do you want?"

He shrugged. "Nothing," he said. "Just marveling over the novelty of not being kneed in the back or having to fight you for the blankets," he commented. "You do a pretty good imitation of a corpse when you are pretending to be asleep. Here's a tip. You snore," he told her. "You also talk in your sleep, and you like to cuddle."

She looked outraged. "I do not snore!"

He laughed. "Yeah, you do," he did a fair imitation of her snuffling, snoring sounds and pawed at the blankets until they were balled up against his chest and then squished down between them.

"That's about right," he said. "Minus the knee in the back and the cuddling," he added. He had woken up more than once with her arm across his back, her knee resting on his ass, and her drool coating his shoulder like he was some kind of vampire body pillow. "I'm not complaining, though I could un-live without the drool."

The mental image made her squeeze her eyes shut. "God. I hate you," she said feelingly. [[maybe 'bitterly' would be better?]]

She knew what he was saying was true. She had woken up yesterday with her head on his chest and her legs tangled up with the linens and his legs. When she had untangled herself and moved as far away from him as she could and he hadn't moved, she figured that he was still asleep and oblivious. Apparently not. This was more humiliating than being smacked around.

"I can't help it. I probably thought you were Oz."

He chuckled at that. "Right, pet. You and the wolf boy have been having lots of cozy sleepovers."

She couldn't quite hide her wince. What was that about? He nudged her hip with his knee. "Come on, Red. This is where you tell me that the wolf boy is an animal in the sack, thank you very much," he prompted. "You have to keep up this end of it. Don't spare me my blushes. It's pretty much expected. Or is this a teenage 'we have to shag in the backseat of the family car' deal?" He looked amused. "Can't quite see you giving it up in a car, but hormones and true love are powerful incentives."

"Gross much?" she sniped.

He chuckled. "Now, see, pet, you aren't getting it," he mocked. "Gross much isn't going to make your wolf boy feel all manly. Makes it sound like he wasn't getting the job done," he explained, relishing her discomfort. She was more fun than a sack of kittens.

"He's not here," she pointed out.

"True," Spike agreed, "but given your tendency to spew out whatever you are thinking, you ought to practice. That way when one of your mates says something like, 'was it good?' you can slag 'em off with something wicked."

"My friends don't say stuff like that."

"You and the Slayer don't swap stories about your girlish conquests?" he sounded dubious.

She turned her head to look at him. "You mean like Buffy telling me that she had sex with Angel and it was so great that he lost his soul. Yea!" she was scornful. "Or me telling Buffy, who can't ever be with the man she loves-" Spike rolled his eyes at the dramatic phrasing, but she ignored him, "stuff about me and Oz having sex?"

"I guess not," he conceded with a small smile at her vehemence. "Kind of rubbing her nose in it, huh?"

Actually, Willow thought it was more like rubbing her own nose in it. Oz hadn't lost his soul, his mind, or his heart to her efforts to show him how much he meant to her. It had been in the back of his van, not in a bed, and there was cuddling, but the cuddling was the best part, which had felt vaguely wrong coupled with her sense of relief at getting it over with and her inadequacy. Could her life suck any worse than this?

"We talk," she said. "About the important things. Feelings, and stuff," she frowned at the water stained ceiling. She knew it was true. The things that she valued in her relationship with Oz, the feelings that she fought for, no matter how ineptly, were more important than sex. She had never had anyone think and care about her the way Oz did. He was the one that kept putting the brakes on their relationship, not because he didn't want her, but because he recognized that what she wanted was tangled up in her fears about being abandoned or found unworthy, and he had been so gentle and caring about explaining that to her.

She kept pushing him, almost demanding that he push her away. She had taken his decision to spend the summer touring with the Dingoes as a rejection of her even though he had insisted that it wasn't. What he had said was that they needed some time apart, and that he would be back in the fall when school started. She was the one who had wavered on the brittle edge of fear that it was a milder, gentler prelude to breaking up when maybe it really was exactly what he said. He said he was uncomfortable with her insistence on having sex when they really weren't ready for that.

Spike watched her frown and chew on her lower lip. She looked like she was working something out in her head. The lower lip she was worrying with her blunt white teeth was wet and swollen. He understood what Georgia saw in her. She was a teenager. A potent little stew of innocence and carnality just wanting to be warmed up and tasted. Too small, skinny, and fragile for his tastes. His preferences ran to tall, dark, ripe and wicked women who could match him in and out of bed. He frowned. Fuck. She was human and female. Eventually she'd start her cycle and he'd have hell's own time keeping the minions off of her, he realized. Unless, of course, he got there first. None of them was stupid enough to start playing with a master vampire's toys.

He grimaced at the thought. He had nothing but contempt for vampires with human pets. The stupid slave collar affectation and the cringing humans that wore them disgusted him. Used for feeding and fucking until they were too weak and useless to turn, most of them blank eyed from thrall and over use. No real challenge in it. On a certain level, he liked Red. She was smart, interesting, and she had a plucky sense of humor that kept her from being annoying, even when she was scared. He'd taken a belt to her ass, and she was pissed about it, no doubt about that, but she wasn't whining and crying about it either, and she seemed to be taking his advice about keeping their confrontations on a playing field she could compete on.

He could just close his eyes and think of England. Alternatively, think of Peaches going batshit when he realized that Spike had sampled the goods. That was a thought with definite appeal. Angel would have a complete fucking melt down over one of his love's innocent little mates being corrupted, and Angelus would howl in his souly prison at being denied the opportunity to be the one to do it.

Spike grinned at his success at setting the table for his appetite for mayhem. How to do it? He could just over power her and have his way with her tender little body, but that would hardly impress Angel. In fact, he probably would expect it. That was Angelus' game. Rape, torture, push 'em right over the edge to madness and toss them away like so much refuse. Willow was too useful now to risk damaging her too much.

Seduction. Make her want it. Make her love it. Then send her back to her mates all guilty and confused. She was the conscientious sort. In love with some moron too stupid to lap it all up and treat her like a woman.

The on again off again nature of Dru's devotion had made him appreciate the thrill of having someone passionately devoted to him. This poor little girl wanted to love someone so bad it practically shouted at him. He could feel her pain and confusion radiating off her in waves. She was too young, too inexperienced to grasp that loving someone like that was an act of will, that it was a reflection of her own need to be loved.

Yeah, he decided. He could do this. Even enjoy it, though he would have to be careful. He laid his finger on her lower lip, getting her startled attention. "Are you trying to draw blood?" he asked.

She looked frightened by the intimacy. "What?"

He rubbed her lower lip, extracting it from the grip of her teeth. "You were biting your lip, pet," he pointed out. "Doesn't that hurt?" he asked.

"Uh . . . no," she mumbled. Confusion, a nice spot of fear, and concern flashed in her eyes.

He levered himself up on his elbow, pretending to examine her lower lip. He could feel her tensing up, prepared to push him away, but holding off. The memory of him hitting her was fresh enough to keep her still. Her breathing shallowed out as her heart beat sped up. He tapped the end of her small upturned nose. "Red?"

She didn't trust herself to speak. He was so close that she could smell his skin. He smelled like leather, tobacco, the humid California night air that still clung to him, and something dry and delicious that she couldn't quite identify.

"There are certain conventions that you need to observe," he told her. Back to business. "This is more important to you than me, so listen carefully. Don't challenge me in front of the others. Got that? No back talk. No fighting. It will get you nothing but hurt," he said. "I can't have them thinking that I'm not in charge. Got it?"

She nodded slowly.

"Good girl," he said. "Now, close your pretty eyes and go to sleep, love."

A confused flash of pleasure filled her eyes before her eyelids obediently fell. He smirked, hanging over her an extra second. Praise. The ego craved it. "That's my good little girl," he cooed, feeling his demon cringe at his softness.

One eye opened to gaze at him with a combination of patent disbelief and annoyance. "I'm not a little girl," she informed him. "And I'm not yours."

~~~*~~~

Willow's Email (Unopened)

To:          Rosenw@clangeek.com

From:          drswooffices2@aol.com

Re:     <No Subject>

Willow,

Your father has his acid reflux face on tonight. He ate too much of the lamb stew that was served for dinner. It was spicy, but quite good, and your father can never resist rich food.

I spent the day in Oroszlany. My grandfather was born here. His father was a baker, and I found the bakery, which is still in operation. The people who own it have been there since the sixties-no relation to my grandfather, but it was still exciting to find a landmark from his childhood intact. I didn't expect to get that lucky. We had a nice time talking between my barely passable Hungarian and their much better grasp of English. I took some pictures and made a rubbing of the cornerstone of the building with the date it was built. I spent some more time just walking around to get some impressions of the place.

Tomorrow, I plan to take a tour of a glassworks. Your father thinks that we have compromised on our itinerary. He's quite pleased with himself over that, but he doesn't last long before he hints that he would be willing to accept a suggestion about something to do. He stayed at the hotel to read while I went out today, so I imagine that he will want to join me tomorrow.

I wish that you had come with us. I know we didn't talk about it. You had your internship plans, and it is a wonderful idea. It struck me today, that you are going to college this fall. All the trips that you have missed because we didn't want you to miss school suddenly felt like lost opportunities. You are growing up so fast. Correction. You have grown up so fast. I never wanted to be a managing parent. I firmly believe that people in my generation spend entirely too much time directing and vicariously enjoying their children's lives. Even now, I know that I would like to have you here to see things through your eyes.

You probably don't want to spend your break time with your parents-and we don't expect you to give up your well earned time to entertain us. You are your own person, with your own interests and friends. Your father and I are planning to spend the last half of December in Chicago. You are welcome to join us for however long you like, though don't feel like you have to if you have other plans.

I'm sending some things I bought for you in Greece by mail. I hope you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed picking them out.

Love,

Mom

~Part: 10~

The witch was still asleep when he woke up five hours later. She had pulled her pillow to one side, creating a small but effective barrier between them. She had rolled into the bulk of the pillow and stopped there, one hand balled up in a loose fist near her parted lips. She was breathing heavily through her mouth. What was it that Georgia had bought for her? Cough medicine. Cold and sinus remedies. Perhaps she had been right about that. The abandoned motel wasn't his idea of the comfort, but it was isolated and there was electricity and running water. Humans required a bit more than that, didn't they?

His eyes narrowed. It seemed improbable. When he had been human, he had lived in London. Filthy, stinking, disease ridden, London, where teenage prostitutes slept in alleys and unheated, crowded rooms within the reek of raw sewage, eating food prepared by street vendors with dubious notions of sanitation and no concept of cross contamination. Even with the comforts of an existence that had included having his fireplace stoked in the early morning hours and a cup of hot, bitter chocolate in bed, his had not been the easy, soft existence this girl was accustomed to with the modern conveniences of central air, cheap and plentiful food, and good climate.

Could he have faired so well? Minus a few pints, dragged around, sleep deprived, half starved, and bounced back with little more than a trifling cold? Probably not, he conceded. Red was a bit tougher than she looked.

Mankind had come a long way in a century. Sanitation, healthcare, good food easily gotten, at least in the West, travel, universal education. He knew he was supposed to deplore the educational standards of the day. Angelus liked to sneer over the fluffy curriculum and lack of culture, but what the fuck did he know? He was mostly self taught fueled by two centuries of boredom and eight decades of angst and guilt. Angel's human self had been an Irish country farmer's son, layabout, and drunk. The human Spike had once been had enjoyed what passed for a gentleman's education and the  eighteen year old girl sleeping beside him had an additional century of knowledge distilled into her education on topics that would have seemed fantastic when he was her age. Physics, chemistry, computer sciences, advanced mathematics, God knew what else.

She lay there with her soft, perfect skin, and strong, straight teeth smelling of bath gel and the lingering cinnamon of her mouthwash. He smiled at the thought. Wandering the aisles of the all night drug store last night he had been amused by the conveniences that everyone took for granted today. Take cigarettes, for example. Neat, uniform cylinders packed tightly together in paper and cellophane. They stayed fresh for months like that, and the taste-always the same. You learned to take it for granted, though he vaguely remembered the anxiety he had felt before lighting a hand rolled Turkish cigarette, never really knowing until the first draw if it would satisfy the taste as much as the craving for nicotine. Then there was the satisfying little miracle of the Zippo lighter. Wind resistant, reliable with the minor maintenance of changing the flint and refilling the tank. Solid in his hand, smooth, with the small sounds that attended its use. Marvelous.

He located his cigarettes on the bedside table, a sleek, modern looking blond oak veneer table with a cantilevered top that reflected the edgy innocence and optimism of America in the sixties when space travel had made everything seem possible. He could remember staying awake after dawn to watch the rocket launches, amazed to still be around to witness such marvels.

The motel was a faded time capsule of the sixties when Americans had started using their cars to take themselves from their ordinary lives to enjoy the fruits of their modernity. He rested a cheap black plastic ashtray on his abdomen, his hand brushing the slightly scratchy polyester bedspread. He grimaced. Polyester. Not a good moment in history, but you couldn't bake a cake without breaking some eggs.

Sitting up a bit, he fingered a lock of her hair. So smooth and shiny. the product of good nutrition and cosmetics as much as genetics. She slept heavily, he had noticed. Perhaps still suffering the effects of being a snack food for that idiot Harmony. He had ground shipped Dalton's notes to the Watcher on day three of their little jaunt through northern California, making sure that the origination point of the package would provide a cold trail. They would get the package sometime today. He wondered how long it would take them to find the Gem, and conversely, how long it would take them to get frustrated looking for the Gem and divide their efforts to look for him.

The longer he had the girl, the more desperate they would become. He made a note to himself to round up another cell phone and give them a call that night. He wasn't sure how traceable the calls might be, so his strategy for now was to keep changing phones and avoid land lines that might reveal his location through the area codes and exchanges. They couldn't stay in one place too long. The rising mystery murder rate and flurry of robberies would draw too much attention. His little tribe was becoming more efficient, and he had built up a nice nest egg of cash from their late night hunts.

Finishing the cigarette, he turned his attention back to his oblivious bed warmer. Her body threw off heat like a little furnace. There was a pretty flush to her cheeks. He had woken up more than once with her wound around him, all smooth skin and the softness of lingering baby fat, and humid breath on his skin. The first time it had happened he had just pushed her away, annoyed. He was getting accustomed to the warmth, though. It was nice. Reminded him of the warm flush of fresh blood filling his body after a kill, he reflected. He grinned wolfishly, imagining her horror if he shared that comparison with her.

He set aside the ashtray, moving down in the bed until they were more or less face to face, rolling on his side, folding the thin pillow he was using under his head. The arm beneath her body was curved over her head around the lengthwise pillow. He touched her hand, finding it cold. She would wake up to a dead arm and the agony of pins and needles as circulation was restored. Imaging her eyes cloudy with confusion and pain was appealing.

His attention turned to her mouth. Her sleep-slackened lips were pale pink, and at this distance, he could see a few freckles marring the dry surface of her lips. When she had been unconscious, he had seen her naked body-granted, he had not been looking at her as a naked woman. She had been too sick and weak to stimulate prurient interest. She was wearing a thin t-shirt and shorts to sleep in and he could fill in the blanks. Small, firm breasts with surprisingly large pale brownish pink nipples, a long, slim torso with a slight rise below her navel, slim hips, a tight, sweet little ass, and shapely legs that hinted at a less than sedentary lifestyle. Trooping around in the Slayer's wake meant physical hardship that would tax the endurance of ordinary mortals. She had been wearing a pair of pale pink panties with tiny white polka dots when Georgia had undressed her. He got a look at the tangle of cinnamon curls between her legs, a color less vibrant than her rich hair color, but still rather exotic. She had potential.

Possibly thinking of England and giving it up for the sake of hell and all-purpose evil would not enter into the equation. She was regrettably on the thin side, and a bit small and sweetly girlish enough to make him want to heave, but she was not, on the balance, repellent, or unappetizing. He slipped his hand in between her fist and her mouth, gently nudging her hand away from her mouth. Her heartbeat remained steady, a bit slow, but steady. He touched her lower lip with his thumb, feeling the slight roughness there from her irritating habit of chewing on her lower lip. She seemed unaware that she was doing it, and he half expected her to draw blood.

The mental image of a perfect drop of her blood hanging on her lip like a ruby made his morning hard on twitch. At almost the same moment, her tongue stole out to swipe her lower lip, slipping over his thumb. A nearly imperceptible frown pinched her eyebrows and her tongue came back to explore. He pushed his thumb over her lips, just inside her mouth to see what she would do. To his surprise, her fisted hand uncoiled and latched on to his wrist, her fingers stroking his skin as her lips closed around his thumb.

She made a contented sound, deep in her throat, sucking lightly on the tip of his thumb. It was probably the nicotine. She spent all of her time trapped in a room with a smoker. He had seen her small nose wrinkle in protest and disgust when he lit a cigarette in front of her. She probably didn't understand that she was absorbing some of the nicotine from his cigarettes, stirring a mild craving for the stimulant. He started to move his hand away from her mouth, but her fingers tightened on his wrist and she bit his thumb, taking more of it into her mouth.

Well, well, well, isn't this interesting, he thought with a leer. He feathered his fingers over her jaw, and she nestled into her pillow, eyes opening slowly, blinking away sleep.

The exact moment that she became aware of what she was doing her heartbeat changed, becoming erratic and her eyes widened in obvious panic and confusion. She spat his thumb out, jerking her head back with a startled gasp.

He chuckled. "It's just me. Your favorite vampire chew toy, Red," he said, enjoying her panic. He wiggled his wrist. "You want to let go or start working on another finger?"

She lifted his wrist, staring at it in blank surprise for a moment before she dropped it like it had suddenly become hot. The pale flush in her cheeks darkened, spreading splotchy color to her chest. "Oh, God," she moaned, mortified. "I-you, uh-" her eyes closed as she winced. "Just kill me now," she muttered.

He laughed at her. "Really, pet," he chided. "Not a smart thing to say to the undead," he tsked. "Though, I've never been much for volunteers. Something about their eagerness to be dead just turns me off. Like that idiot that tried to trade the Slayer for a chance to become a vampire?"

Billy Fordham. Willow remembered him with a frown. He had had cancer and he was so afraid of dying that he had sought out Spike with an offer to walk Buffy into a trap if he would promise to vamp him. "I didn't volunteer for this," Spike spoke callously of his own death. "It seems unnatural to turn something that willing."

"Or you were just being perverse."

She was almost grateful for the conversational detour. It was giving her something else to think about other than waking up with-she ran her tongue over her lower lip, tasting Spike. Oh God. What had she been thinking about to get herself in such a weirdly intimate place? Had she been dreaming? She didn't remember dreaming about anything. Please let me have been dreaming, she prayed. About Oz, about cinnamon candies, about anything, other than Spike.

She had to hold her end of the conversation up. Stick to dissecting Billy Fordham, and avoid topics that had to do with anything remotely personal, she directed herself.

"Buffy staked him," she said, picking up the thread of the conversation. Whew!

"What a surprise," Spike retorted. Perverse? "I think you meant contrary." That sounded about right to him. "Probably waited by his grave to do him," he returned from his vocabulary sidebar.

She pursed her lips. "That doesn't bother you?" she asked. "Didn't you, uh, vamp him?"

"Uh," Spike mimicked her verbal pause, "no. Had a minion do it. A deal is a deal. He asked to be turned. He was turned. What? Did you think I'd take the annoying git under my wing?"

"I'm sticking with perverse," she mumbled, and then to answer his question, "I don't know," Willow said. "Do vampires care about the people they turn into vampires after they," she winced as she moved her left arm. It felt like something dead. She poked it experimentally. Oh great. When the blood started flowing again, this was going to hurt, "uh, turn them," she finished, gingerly lifting her arm and cradling it against her chest as she rolled on her back.

"Care?" Spike repeated. "Depends. Minions?" he shrugged. "I can't say I'm too attached to them right off. They are useless at first. Once you teach them to hunt, you weed out the ones who aren't useful."

"Weed out?"

"Stake 'em," he was blunt. "Not wasting time on minions who don't work out," he explained.

"Oh," she looked surprised. Giles had said something once about vampires not getting along with other demons, and not really getting along with other vampires either. Guess that was what he meant. Spike didn't sound broken up over the idea of destroying his . . . creations.

"Childe-sire bonds are something different, though," he added. "Take Georgia. Colin sired her. They've been together going on twenty years. That's pretty much the norm."

She knew a little more about that from the Watcher's Diaries and Angel talking about Drusilla in a very stilted kind of way that hinted at some kind of deep and mysterious attachment.

"How do you know a minion isn't working out?" She had met a few of Spike's minions, not that they were friends or anything like that, but if they weren't working out maybe someone should point it out. Give them a little push in the right direction. It might keep him from creating more minions to replace the duds.

The topic and her interest in it struck him as odd. "They aren't efficient hunters. I won't keep a minion that can't feed itself," he explained. "Or they won't follow instructions. Can't have that," he said decisively.

She could help with the following instructions thing, but she had no tips to share for being an efficient killer. Another plan foiled. Unbeknownst to her, Willow's eyes reflected disappointment. She rubbed her arm to get the circulation going again. Her gaze focused on the water stain in the ceiling. She stifled a yawn, which only made it grow bigger until she had to stop rubbing her arm to cover her mouth.

Spike left the bed. He was naked. He always slept naked. He didn't even seem to notice he was naked, and Willow would have gladly followed suit, but she couldn't quite convince herself that she was blasé about being in the same room with a naked vampire. A full body impression of him, pale, sinewy, and graceful, seared her retina before she squeezed her eyes shut. Fortunately, the renewed circulation in her arm was becoming painful.

Think about anything else, she told herself sternly.

She felt his weight shift the mattress when he returned to the bed. Something lumpy with hard edges landed on her tummy and her eyes flew open to find him regarding her in a smugly amused way. He had pulled on a pair of jeans. Whew. "Thanks," she said, and then wished that she hadn't.

He raised an eyebrow, took in her blush, and looked down at his half clothed body, and gave a spare shake of his head. "Georgia got a few things for you," he told her.

She investigated the contents of a plastic bag with a familiar chain drug store logo. Nail polish in sheer pink and pearl white. Georgia's only comment after Spike had hit her had been to tell her that she would give her a French manicure, like beating people with a belt simply wasn't comment worthy. Probably wasn't to a vampire.

There was a box of chocolates-nutty, crunchy, and chewy. Her favorite food groups. Vanilla bath gel. "Oooo," she crooned. A notebook. College ruled. Yea. And a package of ballpoint pens with the cushy grip. Double Yea.

"Books," she sat up. They were both mysteries. John Grisham's The Street Lawyer and Patricia Cornwell's Point of Origin in paperback. Willow preferred Anne Perry and Laurie King, but Georgia's choices beat reading the New Testament, so she was not complaining. She scanned the back of the Cornwell novel, rocking back and forth in a small burst of delight. Books!

"There's some cough medicine, cold remedy crap, too," Spike pointed out since she seemed to have forgotten everything else.

She made herself look. "That was thoughtful," she said automatically. Then she cocked her head to one side. "Vampires? Snot? Not a problem?" she hazarded a guess.

A small laugh escaped him. "Not a problem."

She made a face. "Geez, doesn't that figure," she sighed. Tired of waiting for her arm to wake up the slow way she started rubbing it more vigorously, her lips thinning as the sensations sped up.

"Hurts?" he sounded hopeful.

She looked at him skeptically. "Is this like, entertaining for you?"

"Moderately. Throw in a few tears and a quivering chin, and I'd call it a show."

"Sadistic, much?" she shot back, and then shook her head. "Never mind. I don't want to know," she said hastily.

He shrugged, "You're safe enough if you don't annoy me too much."

"Am I going to know if I'm annoying you too much before you . . . hit me again?" she asked, and there was a definite edge in her voice.

"Nothing in it for me if you do," he said. "I'd beat your ass for the pleasure of licking the tears off your face, pet," he practically purred. That sounded nicely evil and dastardly. Half the fun of being bad was having someone to bounce the badness off of, he decided.

Her lip curled. "Eeew. I do have snot issues, especially when I cry, so bon appetite, mister," she muttered, unnerved.

~~~*~~~

Buffy picked at a stack of pancakes that Xander had made in Giles' tiny kitchen. They had slept over, camping out in Giles' living room. Angel had arrived a little before midnight and he had gone on patrol with her. Her Watcher was on the phone with a colleague on the East Coast, asking to borrow several apparently rare and expensive books that he thought would be useful. They were in a holding pattern, waiting for the package Spike claimed he would send to arrive. Angel was lying on the couch, sleeping.

Buffy stabbed the pancake stack with her fork in a random pattern, watching the butter and syrup soak in the perforated stack. Willow liked chocolate chip pancakes with butter and strawberry jam. Or banana nut pancakes with peanut butter. Buffy considered herself a pancake traditionalist. Buttermilk pancakes, maple syrup, and real butter.

She was intensely grateful to Giles for calling Angel. He had taken the choice away from her. When Angel walked into Giles' apartment Buffy had launched herself into the safe haven of his arms. It had to be wrong to be so glad to see him when what brought him back was the danger Willow was in. She wasn't sure she could get through this without him-and even as she thought it, there was a small, but more astringent voice in her head that mocked her. She was the Slayer. When did she ever stop doing things that she didn't think she could do?

She felt jumpy. The adrenaline had been flowing since Giles had laid it out for them. Since the seriousness of the situation had turned Xander grim faced, he was as edgy as she was, aching for something to do, anything except wait. Once the package arrived, the research would begin. Buffy knew the value of research. It had saved her butt a couple of times, provided her tools to fight with, made her more effective as a Slayer. She did not have Willow's patience and intuition, or her friend's stream of consciousness that could pick out patterns and put together creative, innovative conclusions.

When Giles explained the magnitude of the project that they were forced to engage in, Xander had given a short bark of laughter. "Spike so kidnapped the wrong Scooby," he snorted.

It was true. Willow would have been infinitely more help with the research than she or Xander would be.

She nodded to herself. They would work harder. There was no other option. She caught Xander watching her pick at the pancakes and made herself take a bite. Chew. Swallow. The sugary sweetness of the syrup made her feel a little queasy. She tried to smile, and Xander tried to smile back. They failed miserably.

"Have we heard anything more from Oz? Do we know how to get in touch with Oz?" Xander asked.

"I don't know where he is right now," Buffy admitted. "San Jose. Maybe at Willow's place there? Giles talked to him last."

A little before noon the doorbell rang. Xander managed to get there first, over Giles' protests. It was a UPS delivery guy in a familiar brown uniform saying, "Package for-" quick consultation with the packing slip, and a small smile, "Rupert Giles."

"That would be me," Giles came forward, gently brushing Xander out of his way. He  signed for the package, taking it from the deliveryman.

Angel had gotten up, but stayed well clear of the sunlight streaming in from the open door. The other windows had been vamp proofed with curtains and shutters. Giles told Xander to shut the door and carried the package over to his desk while Angel, instantly awake at the sound of the doorbell ringing, moved closer to study it.

"Uh, guys? Maybe we should open it?" Buffy prompted.

Giles fished a penknife out of his pocket and started to methodically slit the brown packaging paper the package had been wrapped in. The box beneath it was a cardboard stationery box. He lifted the lid while Angel studied the shipping label. The vampire wandered over to a book shelf to get a California road atlas to locate the point of origin. He found the town, about a hundred miles north of San Jose.

"He sent this three days ago, Giles," Angel observed. "From Redding."

Giles tore his gaze away from the cache he was uncovering. There was a leather bound diary with meticulous notes in a clear hand, a few very, very old documents neatly stored in clear melinex envelopes and sleeves, and a very old manuscript wrapped in paper, bound in tooled leather with a rather ornate gold cross on the front cover. He had to geographically re-orient himself to what Angel was saying. "Moving north?" he concluded.

"Or he wants us to think he is," Angel thought that was even more likely. "I'll call Oz and let him know that we will need him to go to Redding after he's done in San Jose."

Giles nodded. "If you don't mind, I'd like to familiarize myself with the material. Buffy? Why don't you and Xander get out for a while. Fresh air. Take a nap?" he waved at the door. "I'd like to read through this and get organized. Meet back at five?" he suggested. "We'll need everyone fresh tonight," he added bracingly. "We have a lot of work to do."

After Buffy and Xander were persuaded to leave and while Giles read, Angel called Oz.

Angel asked him to visit the offices of the San Jose Mercury News to check crime reports, looking for anything that smacked of a vampire attack, missing persons, or particularly violent or mysterious robberies. Spike and Dru had had money, but between fleeing Prague in a hurry and his own incapacitating injuries, Spike would be low on cash. Impressed by this reasoning, Oz agreed to make that his first stop and to call him with his findings. They could decide if he needed to go to Redding after that.

Angel hung up, ready to pick up anything Giles had finished reading, but he found the former librarian watching him thoughtfully. "You think you can find him?"

Angel rubbed his jaw. "Honestly? I think we have to find him," he said. "The Gem of Amara?" he shook his head. "It's a legend, and it is the most highly sought artifact in the vampire world. But, what is it? How will we know if we find it?"

"Actually, that is partly why I asked you to come here. Anything we find, we will have to field test," Giles said pointedly.

Angel's eyebrows lifted and a grudging smile appeared. "Good thinking."

"I can't just find any vampire to test it on. If it works, they will become impervious to holy water, crosses, stakes, and sunlight. Literally impossible to kill. It might be difficult to persuade them to return it under the circumstances," he commented dryly.

Angel looked down, frowning, "You trust me?" he asked, keeping his tone studiously neutral.

Never forgetting that this was the same vampire who had murdered Jenny Calendar, tortured him, and terrorized his Slayer, her mother, and her friends, or that this was the man who had saved them countless times and shown what he was by leaving Buffy so she could have a normal life, Giles nodded. "I suppose I do."

Angel looked at Giles, nodding gravely. "Thank you," he said softly. He didn't deserve the chances these people kept giving him, but he was determined to be worthy of them. He shook his head, clearing his throat. "Still, it's a long shot," he told Giles. "Finding the Gem of Amara," he clarified. "Finding Spike can't be as hard, and he may have learned some new tricks, but I think I may be able to figure them out."

Giles nodded. "Perhaps you should look at this," he gestured to the materials he was studying. "I think . . . ah, Dalton," he retrieved the name from memory, "was on to something. He found some notes in a text by du Lac that started his research," Giles explained. "He got no further on the issue of what the Gem of Amara is, though conclusions may be drawn from its use."

Angel pulled a chair over to the desk and sat. "I was thinking about that. It's probably not a weapon. A contact item, though? Armor, jewelry, something that could be worn."

"My thought as well," Giles agreed, "Not that I am ruling anything out at this point. We know from Rafael's Compendium that according to the legends, the Gem of Amara was hidden in the valley of the Sun."

Angel winced. "Almost too easy," he groaned. "Generic enough to be a puzzle. Obvious sounding if you've been to Sunnydale."

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