Eighteen Days

Author:  Elen

Parts: 31 - 34

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~Part: 31~

"I was thinking about starting my own gang," Pete sounded defensive. "I thought of it first."

It was interesting, Jeannie decided, that someone who was so into his whole image was so deaf to the way he sometimes came off. Like now. He was whining about Harmony's form a gang plan. While they were in Sacramento she had spent a lot of time as Pete's unofficial sidekick. He talked, she listened. Most of what he talked about was himself, which was at least a topic that he had well-formed opinions on. Jeannie had his whole life story. He grew up in Clarksville, Indiana, which prompted a discussion of 'The Last Train to Clarksville' and favorite re-runs on late-night cable.

Not that 'The Last Train to Clarksville' was about that Clarksville. It wasn't really about any Clarksville in particular and it was supposed to be a war protest song. Why Pete knew all of this stuff about a song she barely remembered knowing made her wonder how old he was. Spike had the kind of age that she could feel in the back of her head without getting too distracted. Colin had a bit of that quality too, and he looked older, but she had never been confused about the fact that Spike actually was quite a bit older. Pete, on the other hand, didn't put off anything that rooted him in her head as particularly old and neither did Georgia.

That question was answered in part when he explained how he came to California because he read an interview in Rolling Stone where Axl Rose, who was also from Indiana, but not Clarksville, said that he just got on a bus and went to Los Angeles and found girls to sleep with and mooch off of, which sounded like a good plan to Pete, except of course when he discovered that he wasn't Axl Rose. The sleeping with and mooching off girls thing had not worked out. The details suggested that he had come to California in the early 90s. There were adventures in low paying jobs and tenuous living, and then he got vamped and pretty much kept doing the same things to get by.

There was a certain lack of self-deprecation to his life story that Jeannie found kind of cute. He would say these things with such an utter lack of irony or self-awareness, and it was funny. He was working up the nerve to drop his James Dean look, so they had spent the better part of the evening combining hunting with window-shopping for a new look that she was starting to recognize. It was monochromatic and black with a punk sensibility. It was Spike. Just thinking about how the older vampire would react to having a vamp adopting his look as a tribute made Jeannie feel the urge to giggle.

Except, she was a vampire, and giggling was so Harmony that she found that she could keep it under control most of the time.

They were walking down Morton toward the abandoned building that was their home. Sort of. The only thing about being a vampire that disturbed Jeannie was the realization that she was still homeless. Before she became a vampire, when she was squatting in an abandoned hotel outside of San Jose, the central reality of her existence the moment-to-moment requirements that had to be met to continue living in some relatively inoffensive way. Her triumphs were entirely private. It really wasn't hard to imagine the reaction if she shared one of the accomplishments that stirred a flicker of pride at her inventiveness.

There was a lady at the transitional housing office that seemed to get it. She was an overweight woman desperately fighting off the appearance of old age. Unlike a lot of the people in the unemployment and social services offices, she had never discovered business casual. She wore heels and suits or dresses and her office was crammed with paperwork and crap. Behind her desk was a bank of cheaply-framed photographs of her kids and grandkids.

But she always stopped, and waited after she asked how Jeannie was getting by. Like she really wanted to know. It was never a perfunctory, ‘hi, how are you?' but a more direct, ‘I'm glad that you made it back. How are you getting by?'

So, Jeannie found herself sharing things like how she had found a job cleaning hotel rooms and how she got her clothes laundered and a hot shower with soap and clean towels. And Mrs. Davenport would smile at her like she had done something not clever, but that she could appreciate and approve of. Jeannie was tempted to ask if she had ever been homeless, but the pictures behind the desk argued against it. They weren't the pictures of pretty, shinny people, but ordinary people. A son who looked like a twelve-yearold in a cap and gown picture that could be tracked through pictures to a man with short, graying hair that was sparse on top.

While Mrs. Davenport read her paperwork, she made up stories in her head about the people in the pictures to distract herself from the inevitable. Transitional housing was waitlisted and homeless with children went to the top of the list. She would have been in an apartment and a job program If she had been stupid enough to compound her problems by being pregnant or making a child to share her crappy life. Last month had been different. Her appointment was for 11:30 and while Mrs. Davenport was reading her application one of her daughters strolled into her office and sat down in the other mismatched chair. She had a big, white bag from a deli and she started unloading food in clear plastic boxes on the corner of the desk.

Mrs. Davenport closed her file and got paper plates out of a drawer. "There's plenty to go around," she told Jeannie. "This is my daughter, Cynthia—"

"Or Carol," the daughter corrected with an amused look at her mother. "We are pretty interchangeable," she joked.

They had bow tie pasta with dried tomatoes and sandwiches on thick, crusty bread, with salt and vinegar potato chips and brownies for dessert. It was too much food, and Jeannie didn't really like the pasta, but she ate anyway because she didn't have anything to say and because she felt like there was a reason for all of this that was going to play out and it hurt a little bit to know that there was something about her that made Mrs. Davenport invite her daughter to her office to pretend to have a casual desk picnic with one of her homeless clients.

She almost decided that the daughter was a social worker. It made sense. People tended to do things that were similar to what their parents did. Jeannie wasn't an alcoholic teetering on the edge of oblivion, but she had the teetering on the edge of oblivion going for her even without the alcoholism that had made her father's life so tenuous after her mother left them.

But nothing like that happened. They had lunch. They talked about stuff. The daughter packed up the empty plastic cartons in the bag they had been delivered in and asked Jeannie if she needed a ride anywhere since she had to drive back to work, but didn't press when she declined, and Mrs. Davenport finished her file, gave her the bad news and scheduled their appointment for next month, also for 11:30. The strange thing was that she thought about it all the time, even now. She couldn't possibly make the appointment, and she wondered what Mrs. Davenport would make of it. She thought about waiting outside the building for her, but sundown was nearly nine in the evening. Sunrise was before seven.

Instead, she called her when she got back to San Jose and told her that she had a job and a place to live and wouldn't be keeping her appointment, and Mrs. Davenport had wished her well. It was probably weird, but she didn't want her to worry about what had happened to her, and at the same time she kind of wanted to eat her even though she was old.

She was still homeless, and every once in a while, like when she woke up in another strange place, she remembered the panic that went with waking up in a strange place. Then she remembered that she was dead and it really didn't matter where she was anymore. Except, maybe to Mrs. Davenport, who didn't know she was dead.

Harmony was back and on this thing about starting her own gang, which was probably funny if you went by the looks Colin and Georgia exchanged. It clearly bothered Pete. He might have thought of it first, but Harmony had a plan and he didn't and Colin was taking her semi-seriously with the planning. Jeannie thought the taking Harmony seriously had a lot to do with wanting Harmony to form her own gang and take it elsewhere, like back to Sunnydale, where Pete and Jeannie were supposed to be right now.

Finding the Slayer had not been hard. All they had to do was hang out on the roof until she showed up and then follow her back to Sunnydale. Pete decided to skip the following part and just go to Sunnydale. They had made good time and arrived in Sunnydale in time to go trolling for leads to find out where the Slayer lived and hung out.

It only figured that it would be a preoccupation in Sunnydale for the demon population to keep up with the Slayer. At Willie's they had found their tour guide, Chas. They had paid him fifty bucks for the deluxe Sunnydale Slayer tour which consisted of their tour guide Chas walking backward, gesturing to places where vamps and demons had been dispatched while tossing around fun facts about Sunnydale and props to his sponsors.

In other words, it was a complete waste of time. So they went looking for the local vamps to find a place to crash for the day and get some information. That hadn't gone particularly well. Apparently Slayer stalking in Sunnydale was considered likely to incur the wrath of the Slayer—the short, cute girl with the ponytail that had wiped out dozen's of vamps a little over a month ago in some big battle at the high school.

In a last ditch effort to establish bona fides, Pete resorted to name-dropping Spike, who had been in Sunnydale off and on for two years. It wasn't that he wasn't remembered fondly or respectfully, but no one was throwing out the welcome mat either. Jeannie got the impression that Spike had gotten his ass handed to him repeatedly by the slayer, but having un-lived to tell the tale was considered quite the accomplishment in Sunnydale.

They slept in the car under an overpass and went back to San Jose without anything useful to report. Colin was okay with that, so she was home, in a manner of speaking.

~~~*~~~

"Holy moley," Xander said, gaping at the chamber.

Luke Holbrooke felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten. This went against everything he taught and had been taught. He was looking at a major archeological find, the kind of thing that made a career and there were too many people in the space that had yet to be studied. "Don't touch anything," he warned for the umpteenth time.

He understood from Giles that there was an object in this room that had to be located and that there was a girl's life at stake. It might have sounded insane, but the market for rare objects had never been more heated. International laws intended to prevent the loss of finds like this to looters had made it more difficult to trade or sell items on the open market, but not impossible, and collectors were not necessarily concerned with the niceties of provenance. The illicitness of a rare object sometimes added to its value.

He didn't believe in the existence of demons and vampires and magic, but he believed in avarice. Seeing the chamber, he had no doubt whatsoever that there was something in this room that someone was willing to kill to get their hands on.

He hated the fact that they were going to succeed. Not for the first time he wondered if he should call the police. Giles had been adamant on that point, and when he had discussed the matter with David Parrish, his mentor had assured him that no matter how strange the request, that Rupert Giles was too much the scholar to disturb an archeological find without very, very compelling reasons.

"We need to lay out a grid and start photographing," Luke spoke. It was, from the blank expressions on the faces of the volunteers, something approaching a non sequitur.

Buffy pointed to the skeleton on the bier. There was a heavy necklace on a gold chain with a large cabochon emerald glinting dully in the light that lay on the exposed rib cage. "Obvious much?" she asked.

Luke turned around, facing them. "You don't even know what you are looking for," he pointed out. "Before we go tearing through this chamber, we need to develop a protocol for a search."

"We have one," Giles told him. "Angel?"

Angel nodded. "This is going to take some time," he pointed out. There were literally hundreds of objects in the room, some of which could be eliminated by deduction, but if they didn't find what they were looking for then they would have to remember everything that they had not tried.

"So, Deadboy puts stuff on and we stake him?" Xander perked up. "Can I volunteer?"

"Er—no," Giles frowned at Xander. "Impervious to holy symbols," he reminded Xander. "I thought a cross might suffice."

Luke frowned. The whole vampire with a soul story about the otherwise normal if overly-gelled Angel had sounded like something out of a bad novel. The casual blood drinking from Styrofoam containers had made him feel slightly nauseous, but his college roommate ate powdered donuts dunked in nacho cheese sauce, and his girlfriend was in SCA and made some unfathomably disgusting authentic meals from the Middle Ages. He had studied with anthropologists who would eat literally anything literature or archeological evidence suggested that people ate. He considered himself inoculated against bizarre eating habits.

So the guy was going to freak if someone pulled out a cross? That was a test? He frowned, wondering if this could possibly get any weirder.

~~~*~~~

Unable to sleep, Willow got up and took a shower, scrubbing at her skin with a washcloth until she felt like she had sandpapered off the layers of dried sweat, the stale smell of beer, cigarettes and sex that clung to her and made her feel slightly nauseous. She still felt queasy after she was done and dressed in the blue jeans and a t-shirt over the slightly damp bra and panties that she had rinsed out in the sink after she bathed last night, or perhaps it was this morning—her sense of the time of day was all out of whack. She hadn't wanted to pick out underwear with Spike hanging around, so she hadn't, which left her with precious little underwear and no socks.

The socks were an omission that she put down to being distracted, even as she slipped her feet into the new tennis shoes and laced them up. For the first time in a long time she was wearing clothes that she might have picked out for herself and they felt like a shroud. The blue jeans were too heavy and saggy around her hips and the eggplant t-shirt—what had she been thinking? The color picked out the greenish tones of the bruises on her face and she turned away from her reflection in the bathroom mirror with a wince, feeling tired and ugly.

There were fruit cups in the refrigerator. Spike must have gotten them at the truck stop. There were no spoons, so she peeled off the foil and ate the fruit from the lip of the cup. Feeling her appetite stir from the fresh infusion of sugar, she had another fruit cup and then got a can of soda before going to the table by the window to work on her crossword puzzle.

The drapes had not gotten the duct tape treatment and she had only to lift an edge to discern why. They were tucked into a corner where the hotel formed an L shape around a portion of the parking lot. No direct sunlight reached the corner, or the window. She could have flung it open, and it might have caused him some mild discomfort, but it wouldn't have been dangerous. She had seen Angel pick his way through sunlit spaces on a few rare occasions.

She tried to concentrate on her crossword puzzle. She had a method. Working across and down in sections, filling in with neat block letters when she was satisfied that the answers matched up. Her attention kept drifting away from the crossword puzzle into a blankness that was smothering. Then she would realize that she had drifted off and feel a certain amount of panic at how her brain was working. Or not working.

She knew that Buffy and Joyce invited her to dinner and sleepovers because it bothered them that she was at home alone so much. It was odd to realize that it didn't bother her. In principal, it bothered her if she thought about why she was alone. In reality, she missed her alone time. If someone came through the door right now to take her home, she would be grateful, but a part of her would dread the long drive home in a car with another person as well as knowing that she wouldn't be allowed to be alone. She closed her eyes, imagining them all pressing in around her, leaving her no space to breath or think or forget. For the first time she thought about not just getting away from Spike, but running away entirely.

Her gaze drifted to the door, becoming slightly unfocused as she imagined walking out of the room. Her lack of resources presented a problem. In her purse, she had a credit card of her own and another credit card that belonged to her parents. She tried to remember the last time she had seen her purse and concluded that it was probably in the trunk of the DeSoto in the year 2000 layer of crap that had accumulated. She didn't see Spike as a 'clean out his trunk' regularly sort of vampire. Her father was big on car cleaning. It was one of his rituals before he left on a trip. He took his late-model Buick to a car wash to do a thorough cleaning, inside and out. When she was a lot younger, she would put on a bathing suit and go with him to help out and splash around barefoot in the sudsy water that accumulated on the concrete floor of the car wash.

She could call her aunt in Arizona. Her circumstances constituted an emergency if she could figure out a way to explain them that didn't sound insane.

It would be easier to take the keys to the DeSoto and find her purse and just leave. She could buy a bus ticket to anywhere and call Giles and tell him that they didn't have to bother anymore, because she had gotten away from Spike and she was going to keep getting away from Spike, for the rest of her life if that was what it took. He was on the bed, unmoving, the sheet pooled at his hips, unavoidable, even when she closed her eyes.

~~~*~~~

Willow was asleep when he woke up. It was almost seven o'clock in the afternoon. She hadn't slept particularly well, getting up a couple of times through the course of the day to take a shower, dress in a pair of blue jeans and a t-shirt that were slightly too big because she hadn't bothered to try anything on, and maybe because she instinctively sought sexless shapelessness.

She had fallen asleep at the table with her head pillowed on her arms.

The room reeked of sex and sweat and stale beer. He got up and went to the bathroom to take a shower.

He ran his thumb over her damp toothbrush, smiling a little. She had gotten up earlier, moving quietly as she dressed herself and brushed her teeth before pacing and thinking. Even when she was trying to be quiet she was loud. Armed with her new knowledge about his intentions, he half expected her to call his bluff and walk out of the room. He wasn't sure what he was going to do if she did. It wasn't a bluff. He would follow her to Sunnydale and start killing off all of her chums, but it was a lot of trouble when he could simply handcuff her to a chair. Or to a bed. Or to himself, and then watch her try to figure out a way to thwart him.

He had woken up briefly to find her was sitting at the little table by the window. She had found the tabloid that she had asked him for and the pen. The tabloid was open in front of her and the pen was waggling back and forth between her fingers. He hadn't done anything to the drapes this time. He watched her lift a corner, and work it out in her head. Her chin lowered and her lips compressed and then she applied herself to the crossword puzzle with a small sigh, twirling a piece of her hair around one finger as she got involved in the puzzle. He went back to sleep.

He left the bathroom, walking across the room. His cigarettes were on the table near her. When he reached for them, she woke up, shoulders twitching, and looked up at him briefly. Leaning over her, he reached around the drape to unlock the window and slide it back on its track.

She was dressed because she was Willow and lounging around naked just wasn't something that would occur to her, he realized as he smoked his cigarette. He turned the television on and went to the refrigerator, looking for a beer, or something to keep his hands busy. It was half the reason he smoked. There was time to bring her back to bed, removing the clothes that she had put on without ripping anything, without a word passing between them until much later when they were all tangled up and she was complaining again about how complicated it was.

"What do you want for dinner?"

She shook her head. "I don't know," she went back to her crossword puzzle, propping her forehead up on the heel of her hand. Food that wasn't directly in front of her lacked appeal. Thinking about food seemed like too much work.

He gestured to the binder on the table next to her. "There is probably a list of restaurants in there," he pointed out. "Pick something out, and we'll go there."

He saw her shoulders stiffen as she hesitated, holding the pen in one hand. Resentment flashed on her face and she set the pen down sharply, picking up the binder and opening it to the restaurant tab.

He called the watcher's place while she stared at the listings in the binder. There was no answer there or at the Summers' home, which left Angel. He really wasn't in the mood to chat up Angel, so he decided to let it go until later.

He checked up on Pete and Jeannie next. They had gotten lost in Sunnydale, Jeannie reported. Pete hadn't wanted to tell him and they headed back to San Jose to hook up with Georgia and Colin.

"Are you going to stake him?" Jeannie asked, more curious than deeply concerned.

"Probably," Spike told her. "He's pretty useless."

"Harmony is starting her own gang, so Pete decided that he would, too. If I have to pick, I'm thinking Pete."

"What are you going to do if I stake him?"

"Try not to get staked too," she said.

Spike chuckled appreciatively. "Baby's growing up. Makes me feel all—"he tried to think of a Willow word, "sniffy."

"Huh?" Jeannie did a double take. So did Willow.

"Never mind," he shrugged it off, pleased to get a rise out of Willow. "So, what else is going on? How did Harmony manage to fly the coop?"

"I've heard a couple of versions of it. She showed up in Sacramento with the Slayer, and I think it was like San Francisco. They just left without her. Harmony. Go figure? She told Colin and Georgia what you are on to," she revealed, "and I think that was interesting enough for them to keep her around. She's got this big plan to start her own gang, but I already told you that. Pete's pretty jealous. He wants to start his own gang, but he doesn't have a plan. I think he just expects one to sort of form around him."

"A plan or a gang?" Spike asked, amused by the snarking from the quiet minion.

"Both."

"Unlikely," Spike predicted.

"Except, you know, the Harmony thing. If she can actually form a gang, Pete will probably be like, 'let me be in charge and you can be my girlfriend,' which I'm thinking is going to work because Harmony would rather be the girlfriend."

"So, you'll be in the Pete/Harmony gang?" Spike commented, feeling Willow's eyes on him. She was paying attention now.

"Trying not to be staked, too," she finished the thought. "Unless there are better options," she tried to play if off.

"Pet, I'm not really the gang leader sort," Spike told her. "But, not planning on staking you if it counts for anything."

"It's cool," she said. "How is Willow?"

He smiled at the note of genuine interest in her voice, wondering how it was that Willow managed to inspire curiosity, idle or otherwise, from the evil undead. "Alive." He figured that summed it up nicely.

After he finished his conversation with Jeannie, who was shaping up into a minion who could hold up her end of a conversation, Spike smoked another cigarette—Willow looked up sharply when he lit a second after crushing out the first one--and thought about what they were going to do for the next day. Leaving the hotel was a no brainer. There was a body down the hall waiting to be discovered and he preferred for that to happen when they were well away from the hotel. On a purely intellectual level Willow clearly knew that he was killing and feeding, but the sight of the police tape stretched across a door and the sure knowledge that he had killed someone specific a couple hundred yards down the hall was different.

He regretted not having eyes and ears in Sunnydale as they edged closer to the end game but, if it had been important, he would have chosen someone more reliable than Pete. Their next stop would be Los Angeles. It was a big enough city to lose themselves in and he needed to do some scouting to come up with a good location for the trade that they would make.

She emerged from her self-imposed silence with a sigh. She looked a bit shopworn with her fading bruises. "We could just stop somewhere on the way to somewhere else," she said.

He went to the refrigerator and found a soda for her, before he walked over to the table and took a seat in the captain style chair, appropriating her crossword puzzle. She snatched up the pen before he could get it. Her crossword puzzle methodology was very organized. She worked the across and down in sections, probably double-checking her answers before penning in the neat block letters. The upper left hand quarter of the puzzle was complete. Opening the can of soda for her, he pushed it across the table to her and started looking at the next quarter. He held his hand out for the pen.

When she didn't hand it to him, he looked at her. "Don't be a brat. Give me the pen."

"Prick your finger and write in blood," she held her hand out for the crossword puzzle.

"A convention reserved by vampires for signing binding documents," he shot back, reaching across the table to grab her wrist. He pulled the pen out of her hand while she reached for the crossword puzzle. With the pen in hand, he got the crossword puzzle back, frowning at her. "You're in a mood. Wake up on the wrong side of the vampire, kitten?"

She eyed the king size bed. "Why is that in America, where a double room is more or less exactly what you expect to find, do you insist on renting rooms with one bed? I get that you want to have sex, but is there some reason why you have to sleep with me?"

He half expected her to seize on the conversational detour he had tossed out there for her to play with and was slightly disappointed at failing to intrigue her with the comment about signing contracts in blood. She zeroed in on the snark, which suggested that she was dwelling on her unacknowledged attraction to him.

He considered that for a moment, permitting himself a smug grin as he thought of a few ways to explain it to her. "No reason, really," he admitted. "If it bothers you that much, there is always the floor."

Which was so true that her head snapped back in surprise that she hadn't thought of it herself, even though Colin had said something about it before.

He watched her slowly turn red for a moment wondering if she was indignant because he suggested that she sleep on the floor or taken aback at not having thought of it herself and went back to the crossword puzzle. He filled in the answer to seven across, the Sooner state. Oklahoma. Same number of letters required for hellhole or dust bowl. The thought made his lips twitch.

Tonight's battle would probably be about her sleeping in another bed or on the floor. He thought about it for a second. It didn't have to be a battle. He didn't have to have an opinion about when or how or where she slept. Not that that had ever stopped him from having an opinion. She wasn't sleeping on the floor, or in another bed. If her guilty conscience was keeping her awake, it wouldn't indefinitely trump her need to sleep, and the sooner she got used to that, the better off she would be, he told himself without bothering to examine why he had an opinion on the subject.

"If you need some more sleep, you should lie down," he told her. "We've got a few hours before sundown."

Being startled awake on top of not having slept very well had made her irritable. Being told that she was going to die, eventually, had made her not sleep well. It was all a part of the same thing.

"I would rather have my crossword puzzle back," she said, trying to keep her voice even.

He shook his head. "It just galls the hell out of you that by every way that you measure things you keep coming up short." He chuckled. "Eight letter word for stubborn, starts with an ‘O'? Funny, yeah?"

"Obdurate," she muttered, unable to help herself. "Hilarious."

He pursed his lips, blowing her a mocking kiss. "A little show of petulance really doesn't put a crimp in my plans. If your new master plan is to be annoying, have at it, but I don't want to hear it later if you don't like the way I deal with being annoyed."

She hadn't come up with being annoying as a plan, but now that he was suggesting it to her, she could see the benefits of it, at least in terms of the issue of being killed and turned into a vampire. Though, the part about being turned into a vampire was less of concern than the being killed part. She didn't want to be a vampire. She didn't want to be buried either. Cremation seemed more appropriate to her, partially from having patrolled with Buffy in a lot of cemetery real estate over the last few years. Burial had come to feel a bit barbaric to her, but it had occurred to her that since she would be dead anyway, strong feelings about how her remains would be dealt with were a moot point.

On the other hand there was the emotional turmoil her friends would experience when they had to stake her, and given her experience meeting her vampire double, Willow had no doubt that it would end in staking. It would have ended in staking if she hadn't asked Buffy to not stake the other Willow.

She frowned, remembering how they had greeted her when she came in the library, thinking she was dead. Big happy when they discovered that she wasn't dead, but not so much with the deep emotional turmoil before that. Just a lot of ‘back, demon, back' from Xander. Hmm. If she was ever forced to stake one of her friends because they had been turned into a vampire, she was going to work in a heartfelt sorry first.

Silence? Spike filled in an obvious ‘kite' incorporating the K in Oklahoma and glanced up again to observe. The angry flush gave way to a far away look that turned thoughtful. He wondered what she was thinking about. Whatever it was, she was thinking too hard about it and that was never a good thing. If she had a shred of self-confidence she would have laughed in his face last night and told him that he should hope to survive a couple of years around her. She wasn't very bloodthirsty, but given sufficient motivation, time, and a bit of negligence on his part, she might manage to dust him.

Willow liked to think that she had priorities and principals that she was ready to die for, but what exactly did that mean? She had been through some scary moments—nearly burned at the stake ranked up there, but she had been mostly thinking that it would all somehow work out pretty much up until the hem of her pants caught on fire, and then it was just pain and panic.

While he pretended that he wasn't watching her, Willow sat back in her chair, bringing her knees up. She wrapped her arms around her legs, rocking a little.

"George Elliot novel. Begins with M?" he prompted.

"Middlemarch," her voice held the sound of unspoken questions. She had a feeling that he knew the answer and was just asking to make conversation, or maybe to find out if she knew the answer. Her little flush of pleasure at having known the answer faded. There were times when she felt like a trained seal, so obvious and desperately eager for approval that she would do anything to get it.

"What's on your mind, pet?"

"When you kill people, do they seem to know that they are dying?"

An eyebrow rose at that. "Probably not. I don't stop and ask, but I suppose I could," he tapped the pen on the folded tabloid. "It's pretty fast, and shock becomes a factor." He briefly considered explaining the mechanics of feeding. No one had explained it to him and he remembered with a wry grin, the first time he managed to find an artery on the first bite. Instead of letting blood pressure work for him, he had sucked and the increased flow of blood had overwhelmed him, filling his nose and his sinuses in an unpleasant way. He had backed off, coughing violently while Angelus laughed at him, his dinner spraying to the pavement.

No. Probably not something she should hear. She was having a hard enough time wrapping her brain around the idea that he would kill her. Me and my big mouth, he chided himself. Really, what did he expect?

"Why? Do you want a five-minute warning so you can get your affairs in order? Write letters to your friends and family?"

She looked at him, wondering if he would agree to that. "Would you—"

He shook his head. "I already did," he reminded her. "I know you are bored silly, but quit turning it into a drama," he advised, his tone softening a bit. He tapped on the crossword puzzle with the pen to bring her attention back to it. "Let's live dangerously and answer all the questions we can without cross-checking."

"I don't like living dangerously," she grumbled.

"Uh, yeah," he snorted. "Stakes, holy water, vampires, demons, fighting the forces of evil in between trips to the mall, reading up on the dark arts, and snogging your steady—the werewolf," his lips curled into a crooked smile. "You are in less danger on a moment-to-moment basis hanging out with me than you are on any day in Sunnyhell with your mates, and you'd seriously consider jumping out of a moving car if you thought that you could wring some kind of advantage out of it. You know what tipped me off in Sacramento? You were happy. You were having fun." His eyebrows rose, daring her to deny it. "You like living dangerously. If you saw a burlap sack wiggling around in a ditch, you'd open it."

Her nose wrinkled. "It could be kittens or puppies," she defended the hypothetical bag opening. He was wrong anyway. She would get Xander to open the bag.

"Or rats, with beady eyes and sharp teeth."

Her expression cleared. "I like rats," she admitted, watching him lift the beer bottle to his lips. He tipped his head back and drank, throat working in a way that was a little disturbing. Did vampires have extra strong throat muscles from sucking blood out of people? And, eeew! Why did she have to think of things like that? Her life was like a bad horror movie without dead cheerleaders, so why did she have to dwell on thoughts that were guaranteed to freak her out even more?

He smiled at that, licking his upper lip where the tiniest bit of foam clung from the beer. "Figured that you were type that only went for the cute, fluffy animals," he told her, glancing over at her.

She looking at him and hastily redirected her gaze to the soda can he had opened for her, rocking forward in the chair to grab it before settling back and trying to disappear behind her raised knees.

She was such an odd creature. Little Miss 'Go along to get along' until she was backed into a corner and forced to acknowledge that she was outflanked. Some people would have never gotten over acknowledging it, but she had the capacity to look beyond losing battles on a regular basis.

"You made up that bit about signing documents in blood, didn't you?" she accused.

He toasted her with his beer bottle, mentally applauding her for working her way back around to that. His eyes glinted with humor as he considered spinning outrageous vampire lore for her. "Nope. It's true enough," he shrugged. "Blood oath," he rolled his eyes. "But most of it? All the vampy fairy tales and fables? You live forever, and you get bored. Some wanker comes along and makes up a version of social order with its own set of rules. Its mostly bullshit or outdated stuff that no one remembers why it got started."

She thought about that for a moment. "Like laws prohibiting spitting on the sidewalk?"

"I was thinking along the lines of virgin sacrifices, but that'll do for an example," he agreed.

~~~*~~~

The taping and marking of each section of the grid that Dr. Holbrooke had plotted was a bit tedious. Not unlike setting up and taking down the band's equipment before and after a gig. On a night spent talking about nothing in particular while Devon was trying to come down after a gig, Oz had talked about how math and music and logic were all tied together. Devon didn't necessarily agree with him, though he got why someone would think that there was science and order to the structure of sound. The band was the structure, they built the box that he stood inside.

Setting up and taking down equipment was something he was pretty adept at appearing to do without actually participating so much. He worked the room, before and after they played. Working the room was his job. Chris was holding up a white board with scale markings as a backdrop to the photographs that Dr. Holbrooke was taking.

Giles and Angel were still working around the skeleton. Angel would pick up an object, usually a piece of jewelry, put it on, and touch the cross that Giles was holding. The sizzling flesh sound made Dan gag. After the third or fourth go at it, he had enough and left the crypt. Xander and Buffy went with him. Dr. Holbrooke seemed to have decided to block out the weird flesh-burning phenomenon, but blocking it out was absorbing his attention.

No one was watching him. Devon picked up a ring, on the edge of a roughly carved shelf in the stone. It looked like it might have tumbled out of one of the overflowing chests. He considered slipping it into his pocket like it was a hotel ashtray or a box of matches from a club. Compared to the magnificent ropes of pearls and gold and the heavy, ornate cross sticking out of one of the chests in front of him, it was a pretty humble, almost contemporary looking piece of jewelry. Something you might see at a flea market on a tray of crappy jewelry.

He looked at it a little more closely. It was probably the only thing he had seen that he could take and wear that no one would automatically associate with this place. Before he could slip the ring into his front pocket, he heard the now familiar sound of flesh sizzling. Mr. Giles didn't suggest that they stop and Angel didn't ask. It was just one more item eliminated. Devon looked at the ring again.

"I know you've got this whole search pattern thing going," he turned towards them, "I'm getting itchy fingers." He held up the ring. "It looks like something that no one would have noticed that I took," he pointed out. "I probably ought to get out of here."

Dr. Holbrooke paused. A faint, grudging smile appeared. "It happens to everyone," he said. "You see something that stands out, but looks inconsequential, and you think, this is a little bit of nothing. It's not like it's valuable."

"So, I can have it?" Devon started to slip the ring on.

"Er—no," Dr. Holbrooke was emphatic. "The only thing in here that isn't going to a museum is whatever Giles is looking for," he insisted. "And, yeah, you are out of here," he told him with a wry grin. "Put that back exactly where you found it."

Devon started to put the ring back and then stopped, his hand hovering over the spot. He wasn't good at a lot of things, which really didn't bother him very much. He wasn't worried about the future, he didn't think a lot about life's imponderables. This morning he had wanted to be in on the excavation. Right now he wanted a ring. In an hour he'd be thinking about dinner and not having the ring, but missing the rest of the excavation wasn't really going to bother him now that they had gotten to the boring parts.

"If this is what Giles is looking for, and somehow we get Willow back without trading it, could I have it then?"

Chris made an exasperated sound. "Jeez, Dev. You are like a raccoon. Bright shiny object. Ooooh!"

Giles had turned to look at him, and Devon shrugged, miming putting it down even as he slipped the band over his pinkie. "I was just asking," he grumbled, turning toward them, his body between the spot where he had supposed left the ring and their site lines. He could feel his heart pounding. "I know," he slid his hands into his pockets. "I know. I'm out of here," he gave up, slouching past Giles, flashing a weak smile at Chris. "You aren't going to tell Oz, are you?" he asked.

Chris frowned at him. "No. I think he's got enough to deal with."

He almost reached the hole in the floor before Angel, who had was taking a break stopped him. "You didn't put the ring down. I would have heard it, and your heart is beating too fast. It's a dead giveaway," he told him, holding his hand out.

Devon considered lying until Angel opened a styrofoam container full of blood and his face changed. Without a protest he put the ring in Angel's hand. It was quite possibly the most unremarkable of all the objects they had tested so far, Angel decided. A simple gold ring, not particularly well-made, with a murky cabochon stone under a crude overlay of gold. He gave a spare shake of his head as Devon backed down the ladder and put the ring in his pocket. He would put it back when no one was looking. He didn't think Devon meant any harm.

Giles was holding what appeared to be a kind of torque. "Whenever you are ready," he said to Angel, waiting for the vampire to feed.

Figuring out how to get the torque on consumed several minutes, drawing Dr. Holbrooke away to make a study of the piece. It was a solid white gold open circle with gargoyle head end caps. Between the clenched teeth of the gargoyles a table cut ruby hung suspended on a chain.

"I've never seen anything like this chain," Dr. Holbrooke commented. "It reminds me of a safety chain on a bracelet, though it's hard to see how this could be easily removed on its own.

Giles tried to find a catch or hook to deal with the chain, working under one of the halogen lamps that had been brought in to give them light to work by. "Angel? Your eyes are better than mine," he pointed out.

Angel took the piece in his hands, turning it over, examining the chain, like Giles, he was looking for a hinge, a clasp, something that would open the circle. He tried twisting one of the gargoyle heads, feeling a little give in it. He applied a little more force and it started to twist free on threads that probably hadn't seen use in centuries. The opening was still too small for anyone but the smallest of children.

"Maybe it goes on your head," Chris put in.

Angel didn't dismiss the idea. "No. It's a torque," he was puzzled, and then it came to him. "Wait. This makes sense," he said, grasping it in both hands and pulling it apart until it was wide enough to force around his throat.

"Of coarse," Giles breathed. "It was made for a vampire to wear."

The word vampire drew a startled look from Dr. Holbrooke. "Okay!" he said. "The bizarre never stops, does it?"

Chris patted him on the shoulder. "Welcome to Sunnydale."

Angel squeezed the sides back together and found the dangling gargoyle head, screwing it back into place. "Okay," he nodded to Giles. "Let's do it."

Chris and Dr. Holbrooke had stopped working. They watched as Angel touched the cross in Giles' hand, and then wrapped his fingers around it. Nothing happened.

~~~*~~~

"Is this where you and Willow went to grade school?" Oz asked, looking down at the elementary school.

Buffy and Xander were sitting between the open doors in the back of Oz's van. The school had been built in the seventies and it had a kind of institutional bomb shelter look to it, hunkered down low to the ground, built into the side of a hill. Half of the building appeared to be one story, but the other half was two stories across a flat roof that bristled with clumps of equipment that he recognized as having something to do with the heating and cooling system.

"We went to Winkler," Xander said, referring to a school on the other side of town that was now an antique mall.

Buffy knew that from back in the day when Willow was hopelessly fixated on Xander and willing to relive every moment from their childhood. She felt a surge of irritation and anger that made her itch to smack the back of his head for old time's sake. How could he have not known how much Willow had loved him? Or knowing it, have mistaken it so completely?

Xander was looking down at the playground equipment, rocking a little. "We used to come here in the summer, on our bikes. It was out-of-bounds," he nodded to the four-lane road that bisected Sunnydale from its northern hub. "We weren't supposed to cross Hanley, so we went under it and we would come here for the swings and the—" he frowned. "Can't remember what they are called. The thing that spins? It's like a big flat piece of steel with bars and you run beside it and jump on?" He pointed to a bare place in the playground. "It was over there. Willow would get on, and Jesse and I would push."

"She likes swings, too," Oz noted, thinking about Willow on a swing with her eyes closed and her face lifted into the rush of air flowing past her.

Xander nodded. "She's easily entertained, our Will," he put in.

Oz was standing a bit away from them, his hands in his pockets, shoulders hunched forward, leaning into the wind that was picking up. Buffy's irritation with Xander passed. She had never really understood the mystery that was Oz, except the few times that she had caught him watching Willow the way she deserved to be looked at by someone. He was quiet, he had an odd sense of humor, and there was something a little withdrawn or remote about him that she thought was probably the worst thing in the world for someone like Willow, who was too easily pleased by the smallest things.

"There was a swing on the porch at her cousin's house," Oz said. "After we got all of her things in from the van, we ordered a pizza. I wasn't worried about her being there. Away from Sunnydale, because what's to worry about?"

Most of them time he looked alone because he was a bit of a loner, even in a band and a crowded club, he was in his own little world of precise timing and sound. He looked at ease with his aloneness, like he had figured out the big secret of being alone and was savoring it.

On a normal day he might stand like that, and Willow would tuck her hands inside his wrists and rest her cheek on his shoulder, content with that small amount of contact even though she probably wanted more. Buffy gritted her teeth against the sob that rose in her throat when she realized that he was crying.

"I'm never there when she needs me," he said bitterly. "Never."

Buffy got up. "You'll be there," she told him. "You'll—" whatever she meant to say was lost.

"Yes!" Xander shouted, scrambling off the end of the van. He was looking toward the opening of the access tunnel where Angel stood, with Giles, in the late afternoon sunlight that was slanting across the field.

She got the whole ‘yes' thing. It was the Gem of Amara. They had it. Angel was wearing it, standing in the sun. She hadn't thought about what it would feel like, to see him like that. He was holding his hand up to shield his eyes from the sun. Nearing sunset, slanting down at that angle that made things blaze with color, she was suddenly aware of how bright it was. It struck her forcefully how unnatural it was. How vampires weren't meant to stand up to the light of day. This light wasn't kind. In the radiantly white light in darkness where he dwelled he was aptly named, gleaming, and pure somehow. A beautiful boy armed with the seriousness of purpose of a man. In daylight he was leached of color. She felt something like panic claw at her sense of who he was to her. Not a boy. Not a man.

In daylight it was impossible to forget that he was also dead.

She felt Oz moving behind her, pausing, just behind her, a little to one side.

"This is the part I didn't think through," he said.

Buffy nodded, unable to speak.

"Angel's the whitest guy I've ever seen." He gave it a moment, feeling like he was coming back to a life where there was always a way to make things work. "He's really white."

Buffy could only watch as he peered through his fingers at the sunlit world of Sunnydale. This was the part no one thought through, except maybe Angel as Xander joined in with, "Whiter than Larry Bird?"

"Oh, yeah," Oz nodded, but he wasn't unaware of Buffy's distress. He just didn't know what to do with it, so he did something he might have done with Willow. He let his hand brush hers, just to let her know that he was there, and then he jerked his head to one side, catching Xander's eye. "I'm for finding out what's the what," he said. "Are you coming?"

"Yeah," Xander agreed. "Buffy?"

"Give her a minute. It's a lot to take in," Oz told him as they walked towards Angel and Giles.

~Part: 32~

"What does it feel like?" she asked.

He didn't answer for a moment and she looked at him. His eyes were wet, his lashes clumping. They were running a little, probably from the unaccustomed quality of the light.

"Hot," he said. "Maybe I'll rethink wearing black."

She cocked her head to one side. Angel wasn't as humorless as her friends liked to think. He just wasn't jokey. The way he said it made her smile and then go still as he gently unfastened her ponytail holder and let her hair fall into his hands, turning her with the slight pressure of his wrists until the sun was behind her and he was looking at her hair in it.

"I've seen you in sunlight, a lot of times," he said. "I'd stand in the shadows and watch you, but this is different."

"I know," she acknowledged it, feeling her throat go tight.

The uneasiness that she had felt didn't entirely subside, but she would deny it. She would lie about it. She would do the foolish thing and tell him to keep the ring if it made him happy. But not completely happy. Not happy enough to bring back Angelus. There was the strange bit of unhappy happiness in the thought that he had managed to accomplish that only in her. Not even being expelled from hell had equaled the perfect happiness that she represented to him. It was a thought that was gratifying and painful.

"Did I tell you about my theory about the Gem of Amara?" she asked, striving for a light tone.

There were so many colors that he had never seen before in her hair, he marveled. He had dreams of her in sunlight, but the quality of the light was, he realized now, drawn from televisions and movies. Similar enough, but so different that he had the same disoriented sensation that he had experienced after he had crawled out of his grave and experienced the world with preternaturally enhanced senses. It was making him feel a little dizzy. He could hear her talking. He could even hear the slightly nervous tremor in her voice. Was it because he was staring at her?

He took a deep breath to steady himself.

"Oh, what is it?" she asked when Angel failed to respond to her.

He blinked, his gaze switching from her hair to her face. There was just the tiniest hint of hesitation. What was what?

Her eyes searched his face. “Angel? The Gem of Amara?”

The Gem of Amara? For a few moments they thought it was the torque, but as soon as Angel reached the outside of the tunnel they had made, to see Devon sitting on a crate, looking like he had a lot to think about, or indigestion, he remembered slipping the ring into his pocket and somehow he just knew. It was the ring.

He took it out of his pocket and handed it to Giles at the mouth of the sewer access tunnel and put his hand into the light slanting in to confirm it. The torque might have been made for a vampire. It wasn't a bad theory, but the Gem of Amara, it was not.

It gave them ideas, though. They were both inclined to take Spike for granted. Angel couldn't help it. No matter what Spike had claimed to the contrary, there wasn't a doubt in Angel's mind that he could beat Spike. Out-think him. Out fight him. Giles wasn't terribly impressed with him, either. They could pull off a bait and switch. With Willow planted squarely in the middle. If it worked, no more Spike.

If it failed, no more Willow.

He separated his hand from Buffy's hair and brushed the collar of his shirt back. He was wearing what appeared to be a kind of metal collar that rested on his collar bones, capped at the open ends with a pair of leering gargoyle heads holding a chain between their teeth bearing a blood red stone.

"Uh, there's a fashion statement that will appeal to Spike," she grimaced.

"What's your theory?" Angel asked, and was mildly surprised that he sounded normal. Not like he was standing in sunlight with Buffy. Not like he was in the middle of a moment he had never allowed himself to hope that he could have.

"If we cut off his head, will he still be alive, because I'm thinking we can keep it in a box and take it out for major holidays, pickup basketball games, touch football," she was glibly gruesome. "It's a theory worth testing, right?"

He nodded, smiling a little. This wasn't about winning or loosing. It wasn't about saving the world for her. It was about bringing Willow home. She would never go for the bait and switch idea. It was too high-risk.

"You could be right about your theory, but the only way to test it is to take an axe and try to remove my head. I'm probably not going to grow another one."

She made a face. "We can test it on Spike," she said.

And she would. It was the way she did things. One problem at a time. It would work if they believed that the torque was the Gem of Amara. Any hint of deception would be fatal. If it didn't work, she would never forgive him. He wasn't sure he would ever forgive himself.

~~~*~~~

"Denny's," Willow had to hang her head out of the window to read the signs flashing past on the road.

"You threw up the last time you ate there," he reminded her.

Which had nothing to do with Denny's. For a moment, as she slid back into the passenger side of the seat, she considered telling him that. She had the perfect way to conclude the story and for a moment she savored the idea of the summation. ‘These are the lengths I go to—forcing myself to vomit and have sex with you.'

She didn't say it, and she discovered that she didn't need to. Just hearing the words in her head, bright and glassy with spite, made her feel better. A bit of her hair whipped across her face from the open window and she peeled it away, pushing her fingers through her hair, feeling her fingernails lightly scratching her scalp. The fresh air, the giddy malice, and the scrape of her fingernails made her feel tingly.

"I'd really like a pizza."

This touched off a brief discussion of her eating habits, which were crap according to Spike. "Pizza, cheeseburgers, tacos. It's baby food for adults."

"I like salad," Willow told him.

"You like salad dressing."

"It's a part of the salad," she retorted, remembering the salad he had bought in Sacramento that she had largely ignored due to lack of appealing salad dressing.

"The pancakes and maple syrup had to be the single most disgusting thing I've seen you eat. I wasn't eating them, and the smell was enough to make me want to heave."

"Actually," she sounded thoughtful, "I think that's the Denny's factor. They all smell funny."

They ended up at a Chinese restaurant, eating outdoors on a small deck with paper lanterns strung overhead. Spike ordered spring rolls and a hot, spicy chicken dish served on a bed of nearly translucent fried cabbage. The food arrived and she had a choice between chopsticks and a fork.

She had eaten with chopsticks before. Not particularly well, but she was willing to fumble with them awkwardly in hand. The spring rolls had taken the edge off her appetite. The chicken was spicy enough that she wanted to eat it slowly, moving morsels of food to her mouth, washing away the taste with sips of green tea, and then going back in for more as her eyes roved over the mostly empty deck. They were having quiet time, and it wasn't awkward or unnerving. Mostly, it was a relief.

Occasionally she would chance a look at him, only to find him watching her. He wasn't smiling, but he wasn't wearing that expressionless mask that made her feel examined and uneasy, either. She was struck by a resemblance to Oz. It wasn't something that was obvious, but it was there. Oz looked at her like that. Like he was thinking about a million things and nothing in particular all at once. His willingness to let her be her, his patience waiting for her to settle into any particular moment was encompassed in that look. It was an odd thing that they had in common.

Spike was finished eating before she was, occasionally pausing to pluck wrinkled looking peppers out of the path of her consumption. When she had had enough, she wiped her mouth on one of the paper napkins and folded it over her food.

The waiter brought the check and Spike placed a pair of twenties over it without bothering to look at it. "Let's go," he said, gesturing for her to rise, his hand falling on the small of her back as they wove through tables.

She had not entirely given up on her idea of simply leaving and going in the exact opposite direction that he would expect. When they left the hotel, she had stayed close to him, hoping that he would open the trunk to store the items that they were taking with them, but he had tossed them into the backseat. When she got in the car, she had gotten on her knees to look over the back of the front seat while the dome light was still on, creating an eerie glow over the gloom in the interior of the DeSoto.

It was an older car, so the back seat was like its own country. Or a landfill. The light glinted off empty bottles, newspapers, and—

His hand landed on her ass, the sharp smack coincided with her shriek of horror at what appeared to be a small hand reaching up through the crap on the floorboards. She flung herself backward and he caught her, immediately recognizing the fear in her voice.

"Dead baby," she babbled. "Dead baby."

He rolled his eyes. "Calm down," he gave her a small shake. "It's probably one of Dru's dolls, you silly bint."

She looked a little wild. "Probably?"

"I don't eat babies. They smell weird." He made a face. Seeing that she wasn't convinced, and possibly, 'I don't eat babies, it's wrong' might have gone over better, he'd pushed her away and twisted his upper body to reach over to feel around in the back until he found the hand that had set her off. It was attached to a squishy foam doll. Dru usually didn't like dolls that looked like babies, though every so often, one would take her fancy for a few days. This one was infant-sized and it was dressed in an antique christening gown. He tossed it to Willow.

"Doll. Told you," he said when she frowned at it, gingerly holding it away from her.

"Eeew. It's stinky," she said.

He shrugged, shutting the driver's side door, throwing them into darkness. He took the doll from her and pitched it back over the seat back. "Eau de Johnnie Walker Red," he guessed.

Outside the restaurant, she hung back, clearly not looking forward to returning to the car. "Willow?"

"Hmm?" she turned back to him, looking distracted and innocent. "Hey! I've got an idea! We could find a car wash."

And lo and behold, there was one right across the street! It was a self-service place with a couple of stalls for car washing and a long, narrow one story building next to a small liquor store. He had an intuitive flash of her doing this kind of thing most of her life. Willow Rosenberg: girl most likely to helpfully nudge you into the direction she wanted to go in.

"Oooh. Could we?" he mocked. "You want to wash my car?"

And vacuum the interior, and search for her purse, not necessarily in that order. "Uh, yeah. Your car is gross."

That was how he found himself sitting on a low brick wall, smoking, mildly diverted by the spectacle of Willow, in jeans that were saturated courtesy of a leaky hose, crawling across the front seat of the DeSoto wielding the hose from an industrial strength vacuum. All the moment lacked was a cheesy Donna Summers eight track and roller skates, Spike decided. She was nothing if not thorough, though he had drawn the line at the pine-scented Christmas tree air freshener that she had wanted to get from the vending machine.

Excavating the back seat had taken a bit of time. Willow kept pausing to ask if he wanted to keep things. Like the doll. The tentative and slightly sappy look on her face made him wonder if she thought he was attached to the doll because it was Drusilla's. He was about as fond of Dru's dolls as he was of Angelus. Crazy bitch. The thought was tinged with as much fondness as anger and, for a moment, he wondered where she was and what she was up to. Not for the first time, he wondered what Dru would make of Willow. Even in her most lucid moments, it probably would go right over her head that Willow admired his devotion to Dru.

In her most lucid moments, it went over Dru's head that there was a possibility of him being anything but devoted to her. Even when she was doing her fretful 'no one loves me' bit, it was all a set piece for him to respond to with a declaration of his undying devotion. She would smile her satisfaction, or run her long fingernails over his face as if she could memorize him from the tips of her fingernails and engrave him on her bones. At moments like that, his reward for making Dru his whole world was that he was the anchor of her world.

His gaze drifted downward. Willow hadn't expressed her appreciation like it was some sappy, romantic thing. She said it like she understood that it was, at times, an expression of will. He had been a bit put out that she admired anything about him on general principle, but there was a grudging respect in it that was . . . nice. Angelus had always dismissed his feelings for Dru, completely missing the point. It wasn't convenient, or fun, or easy. But, that figured. Loyalty was something that Angelus demanded but never gave.

Loyalty was something Spike gave sparingly but, once it was assigned, it was forever.

It was odd that Red recognized it. He wondered if it meant that she gave it the same meaning. She wiggled backward out of the DeSoto, the vacuum hose slung over her arm as she plucked at the wet fabric clinging to her, wriggling a little. Yeah. Loyalty was one of her vices. She carried it too far, letting him use it to manipulate her. He hopped down from the wall and, at the sound of his boots hitting pavement, she turned to look at him, damp hair sticking to her bruised face.

He felt a totally unexpected wave of tenderness. She was a mess. Sweaty, soaked, reeking of detergent, bruised. She was too thin and too tired. It almost made him want to kill her just to give her a good night's sleep, but the thought of physically trapping her in a moment of weakness was unthinkable. She wasn't weak. She was just worn down a bit.

At the same time, he wanted to peel off her wet clothes and bury his head between her legs and stay there a while, feel her hands in his hair and the tremble under her soft skin as he gave her something that would make her sink into sleep when she was sated and possibly before he was. He was sure that he could be that generous.

She had piled the bags of clothes and food and other crap that they were collecting on the back seat while she tossed trash into a bin and vacuumed the floor. He dug in his pocket for the keys. "I'll do the boot," he offered, gesturing to the bags, "and we can shift that lot in there."

She looked startled at the offer, and not altogether pleased by it. "That's okay. I don't mind," she offered. "It's something to do, and you have interesting garbage. I can't wait to tell Xander about it."

He had a hard time imagining what she found interesting in empty bottles, old newspapers and other bits of rubbish he had collected. Her garbage was genuinely interesting. She was very methodical and neat about how she stowed things when she was through with them. She was doing her plucky kidnap victim thing again. It made him smile a little, wondering idly what she was up to now. He picked a wet lock of hair off her cheek, just watching her with an expression that was studiously patient and slightly suspicious.

She stared back at him. There was a slight change in her heart rate, but nothing dramatic. Her eyes widened a little, becoming slightly unfocused as she kept her gaze as bland as possible. It took him a second to notice the way she was breathing. It was very measured, deep, even breathing. Probably something she had learned right off when she started learning her craft. She was using it to keep her heart rate under control. He had to take a small breath himself to keep from breaking into an appreciative grin.

"You look like hell," he told her, cradling her face in the palm of his hand, letting his thumb slip under her jaw to tilt her chin up. Relief bloomed in her eyes. He could almost see the wheels turning in her head. She was thinking that he just wanted to kiss her. The momentary relief was chased off by a tiny frown that drew in her eyebrows. She wasn't supposed to find being kissed by the Big Bad a relief.

"You should help me," he said instead. "It'll go faster. Unless you want to lie down."

Willow blinked. He was talking about the trunk. "Uh, okay," she agreed. Her purse was probably in the trunk. For a second she debated about just asking if she could have it back, and then decided not to. He implied that she could take off anytime she wanted to. She didn't think that included actively assisting in her departure, and she wasn't all that sure if he was being absolutely literal when he claimed that he wouldn't stop her.

While she was distracted weighing her chances of getting her purse back, his head dipped and his lips brushed hers. He backed off. Her eyes had widened, only this was the real thing, not the fake disingenuous she had tried to bluff with a moment ago.

"Got your attention?" he asked, pleasantly despite the hint of mockery. "You'd be a vision, spread out over the back seat." His fingers moved down her bare arms, circling her wrists.

She reared back, her attention finally wrested from her preoccupation with her purse and flight. She looked around incredulously, aware that it was somewhat spoiled by the fact that there was no traffic to speak of and the restaurant across the street was the only sign of life.

"You want to have sex in a car at a car wash?" she squeaked. It occurred to her for the first time that he was remarkably circumspect in public places, with the lone exception of the night in San Francisco, and even then he had sought some degree of privacy. There had been touching, but no kissing, no groping, no display of her as a trophy or conquest, or whatever she was to him. Which sort of made sense because as he pointed out, she looked awful.

He laughed at her. "Among other things," he nodded, willing to be entertained by her, watching her lips purse as she tried to gauge how serious he was. She was fun to tease. "No?"

She looked wary. "No," she tried it out, wondering if he would snatch it back from her.

His fingers tightened ever so slightly on her wrists. No was not part of the vocabulary of victims. He had to go and crave something more than that, a little bit of coercion to scrape away her reservations. He let go of her wrists and handed her the keys. "Might as well finish anyway."

Now she had the keys and a chance to find her purse in the trunk and the distracting idea that he would have it his way no matter what he appeared to agree to. She moved around him to open the trunk. The lock was a little sticky, but she managed it. When she got the trunk open, she stood, scanning the surfaces, looking for her purse, spotting it in the well of a spare tire. He leaned against the side of the car, looking at her in a way that made her feel every wet spot that had formed on her clothes, sticking to her.

She felt a little dizzy. Clammy from the cold that seemed to spread against her skin, despite the fact that it was a warm night and she had eaten recently. In the restaurant he had handled the chopsticks with seemingly effortless dexterity that she couldn't copy, even when he put his chopsticks down and corrected the way she was holding them. She had had the odd thought that she had never felt so much the center of someone's attention in a way that wasn't awkward with misunderstanding, except for the time that Oz told her that he wouldn't kiss her, even though he wanted to because he wanted to kiss her when kissing would be about her kissing him.

Her fingernails bit into her palms. He kept doing that. He kept looking at her like he understood things about her and what he understood was not reassuring. It was terrifying. It was wrong. If she lifted the hem of her t-shirt over her head and shimmied out of her wet jeans would he notice that her underwear was getting a little gray from it's inadequate washings in sinks? Would he notice that she was getting a little gray? Would Xander or Oz or her parents be less dead if she managed to keep him from forcing her to watch them die?

Her eyes looked a little glassy and her complexion was chalk. She was no longer trying to hide how she was breathing. Her breath came in shallow little pants. He cocked his head to one side, trying to figure out what was going through her head. Why she suddenly looked so overwhelmed and uncertain.

He followed her gaze to her purse, and realized that he was in the middle of another one of her escape adventures. Only this one wasn't terribly well thought out and she didn't know how to fix it. He picked up an empty carton of cigarettes next to the purse and tossed it in the general direction of the trashcan that she had been using. That got her moving. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly. She put her foot on the bumper and reached for her purse, forced to stretch for it.

"We should make a pile of things to keep," she said, sounding hollowed out. She had already figured this out. The only way to stop him from following through on the threat he had made was to destroy him, and she wasn't sure that she could. Plunge a stake through his heart and watch him come apart the way vampires did. Her stomach heaved a little, and she breathed through her nose to get it under control.

"Right," he agreed, pretending that he hadn't noticed that anything was amiss. It wasn't arrogance on his part. She was running on empty and he was certain that whatever half-formed idea she had in her head, he was more than capable of dealing with it, without scaring her more than he already had or hurting her again. Or letting her hurt herself.

Loyalty was a curious thing. It curled in his gut. He didn't bother to wonder how it had gotten there, and it felt familiar in a good way. No matter what happened from this moment forward, he would feel it. Decisions would be influenced. His priorities would be weighed with it. She had no idea and, if she did it would scare her, but he thought that he could be something to her other than a bad thing.

He found himself reaching out to touch her cheek. He let his fingers smooth back her hair, wet and a little sticky from the detergent that had been used on the exterior of the car. "Your hair is full of soap," he pointed out, tilting his head to the red-roofed building behind them. It was barely a building, more of a shed row in cinder block with a roof that provided cover for the vending machines, but there was a bathroom. "You should rinse it out."

While she was presumably in the bathroom, or working out her hitchhiking technique on the mostly deserted road, or maybe walking in no particular direction with great purpose, he finished stowing the crap that they had accumulated over the last week, throwing out anything that seemed soiled. She had picked out another t-shirt and the second of the two pairs of blue jeans she had bought to replace her wet clothes. In a minute, or ten, he would go look for her. He was a vampire. The idea that she would run and that he would have to catch her didn't bother him in the least.

~~~*~~~

They didn't have anything left to do but wait for Spike to call. Giles wanted to send them home, but he settled for sending them out on patrol.

They went on an uneventful patrol and ended up at the Summers' home. Angel had started to take off the elaborate torque and to leave it with Giles. Xander found that reassuring for some reason, though it also irritated him the way Angel tended to irritate him when he kept doing the right thing, the admirable thing, in a self-conscious sort of way like he was still trying to score points with a higher authority and Buffy. Giles stopped him, pointing out that it was safest in his custody.

It was one of Xander's well-developed theories of Angel that he kept to himself, because he was aware that it sounded like dog in the manger stuff. The worst fight he had ever had with Buffy had been over Angel, and she had accused him of being jealous of him. It was unfair and true all at the same time. He was over his initial crush on Buffy, but there were pieces of resentment that he chose to hang onto. In a Xander-ordered universe there would be no ambiguity about good and bad, and Angel would have never paid enough for what Angelus had done to them.

They killed demons. It wasn't personal. It was like pest extermination. Except with Angel who tried to be good in a relentlessly nauseating noble way and co-existed with the potential to be their worst nightmare. He chained Buffy to impossibility, so while Xander no longer thought of Buffy in a Buffy-dream-date-girl sort of way, she was his friend and he did think of her as being trapped.

Who was ever going to measure up? In a less ambiguous world, Angelus would have gone to hell without a soul and Buffy would have figured out that dating the undead was bad. But no, Buffy had to kill him after he got the soul back, after he was given back to her because nothing could be arranged or done that didn't tie them together in a way that was hard to imagine anyone ever topping.

Oz sat in an Adirondack chair, watching them on the porch. Mrs. Summers was the popular mom. His mother had been a popular mom when they lived in Louisville. She was the mom that it was okay to hang out with in the kitchen, and she still was in a way, only it was usually just Devon, Dan, and Chris from the part of his life labeled music. He wondered if he would have hung out with Buffy and Xander if there were no Willow. The werewolf thing was a factor, and Giles had been instrumental in helping him deal with that, so it was probably a given that they would have hung out.

He looked up at the nearly full moon. Only a couple of days to go. It gave him a bad feeling. Chances were that he would be out of it if the exchange didn't happen tomorrow or in daylight hours.

~Part: 33~

She had fallen asleep around three in the morning, and Spike started looking for a place to stay. He missed her active involvement in the process and settled on a Hilton largely for the room service. He had given her time to pull herself together in the bathroom, smoking a cigarette until he had decided that she had had long enough. She had been ready for him, holding a plunger that had probably been left in the bathroom for emergencies in a two-handed grip. She managed to pin him between the door and the wall with the business end of the plunger, which had made him laugh until he saw her eyes bleed black and a pencil arrowed at his heart while she pivoted away from him.

He had a nice pencil sized hole in the center of his palm. He was pretty sure that it was going to leave a scar and, while the last person that had left a scar on him was dead, he hadn't even spared a thought to killing her. After he had yanked the pencil out of his hand and crushed it for good measure, dripping blood all over the filthy tile floor, he had blocked a few increasingly wild swings with the plunger, fascinated by the darkness that he could practically smell, crackling like ozone, pouring off of her. Black for rage. Black for grief. It wasn't her wolf boy she was mourning. It was the loss of herself.

"I don't hate you anymore," she said. She was supposed to hate him. It was the natural order of things.

In the confined space of a stark public bathroom, under a bare light bulb, she backed herself into a corner between the toilet and the wall, stumbling over a floor drain. It was probably hurting her hands and arms more when one of her swings connected. That was why he hadn't hit her. That was why he let her fight until she was swaying on her feet while he examined his hand and asked her if she got the irony of a wound that could be mistaken for stigmata.

She slid down the wall, crouching in the corner while he rinsed his hand off in the sink, waiting for him to do something. The contents of her purse were strewn over the floor. The wallet that she had been trying to get to was open. He had left the identification, her library cards, her pictures, but he had removed the credit cards a long time ago. If she had thought to grab his keys and wallet when the idea started forming in her head, she would have made the right choice.

He tugged the plunger out of her hands and before she could cringe or shy away from him, he pulled her to her feet. "I'm not mad at you, but if you start crying, I'm not sure I won't be," he warned her, giving her a little push toward the sink. "Go on. Get yourself cleaned up."

He probably should have insisted that she do it, but he picked up the crap that had fallen out of her purse, shoving it back in while she stood at the sink, breathing hard, probably trying to obey his injunction not to cry. She took off the shirt and started using it as a washcloth, and then the bra came off, followed by her jeans that got tangled up in her tennis shoes. She lost her balance trying to get them off, her efforts becoming increasingly frantic, pitching forward without any way to keep from falling. He caught her before her forehead hit the edge of the sink. He found himself with a face full of damp hair as he hauled her against his chest. The rapid beat of her heart couldn't have summed it up better, though it felt weird to identify alarm with a heartbeat.

He shook her a little. One of these days, she was going to fall and crack her stupid skull open, or break her neck. "What did I tell you about paying more attention to your surroundings?" he demanded.

He left her on her side of the car when she fell asleep. She reeked of cheap soap and cleaning solvent, and it was giving him a headache. "It doesn't suit me to have you die just yet. Don't read too fucking much into it," he muttered.

It was excellent advice he thought, with a bitter laugh. He ought to take it since it was lost on Willow at the moment.

The hotel he chose had an indoor garage. He parked on a lower level and, just to be on the safe side since, left to her own devices, she was likely to wander off into heavy traffic, he retrieved the handcuffs from the glove box and handcuffed her to the passenger side door of the car before he went in to secure a room without a view. Standing impatiently at the desk while the night clerk re-keyed plastic door keys for him, he worked out the amount of time he had left to hunt before sunrise.

~~~*~~~

Buffy was asleep in an armchair. Oz had, much to nearly everyone's surprise, decided to go home to sleep in his own bed. He had left them while they were still at the Summers' residence, walking off alone with his hands shoved deep in his pockets even after Xander reminded him that he had left his van parked outside Giles' apartment.

Xander was sleeping on the couch that had become Angel's temporary bed while he was in Sunnydale. He might have stayed just because Giles' phone would eventually ring and he wanted to be there for that. Angel felt like Xander was fighting his own distaste to play chaperone. He could have stayed at the mansion, but it was too much a part of what he had decided to walk away from. It was odd that he was getting ready to go there now, but he had spent too many mornings watching the sun creep into the garden not to go there now and see it from the other side of the shadows.

There was one last container of pig's blood in the refrigerator. He got it out and poured the contents into a mug before carefully opening the microwave, trying not to make enough sound to wake Buffy or Xander. He had been at Giles' long enough to feel like he had a relationship with the microwave, albeit one based on suspicion and mistrust on his part. Electronic devices still frustrated him to some degree. He would get used to one, and then it would be replaced with something similar but not the same, and the learning process would start again.

The effort to master these constantly-changing elements of his environment irritated him. He watched the clock ticking down the seconds, prepared to open the door before the chime went off. He missed it when Buffy walked into the kitchen, looking half-asleep. She opened the refrigerator door and stared blankly at the contents, startled out of her staring by the microwave chime.

Their eyes met. He smiled at her. She smiled back.

From the living room they heard Xander, who was starting to wake up. "Huh? S'not a school day?"

Angel remembered the microwave and opened the door to cut off the electronic beep that was sounding.

"It's not a school day!" Giles grumbled from upstairs. So much for his plan not to wake everyone up, Angel thought with a wince.

Buffy shook her head at Giles' refrigerator and shut the door. She moved to lean against the counter. "Is this the beginning of your day or the end?"

Angel shook his head, letting his blood cool. "I don't know. It could be a beginning of the day," he conceded. "That feels strange to even say."

He had some ideas about what he could do in Los Angeles, but none of them included being part of the daytime world and the night-time world had very limited employment options. All-night convenience store clerk. Bartender. Something like that, except that the idea of doing any of those things was kind of ridiculous. He was a vampire. A vampire with rent to pay in a town that unlike Sunnydale, didn't have a lot of places for people to appropriate as it suited them. Like abandoned warehouses and mansions with slightly nebulous ownership or basement storage rooms converted into a cell-like apartment.

He had an actual apartment with a landlord that expected to be paid rent and the money he had saved wasn't going to last forever. Building a nice nest egg without being able to steal was a problem.

The daytime world was a bit intimidating. He knew about it second- and third-hand, from books, television, and contact with humans. The only adults he had had a lot of contact with were Rupert, Jenny, and Joyce. A librarian, a teacher, and the manager of an art gallery. He had spent a good part of the night thinking about the possibilities that the Gem of Amara opened. Spike wasn't going to get it, so that meant something had to be done with it.

"It will be sunrise soon," Buffy said. "We could sit outside, by the fountain, and watch it—unless you want to be alone," she wasn't sure how to read the uneasy expression on his face. "It'll be your first sunrise in—"

"Not such a long time," he reminded her. He had meant to greet the sun not so very long ago and had been given a kind of reprieve in the form of snow that had piled up almost to Buffy's knees while they walked through Sunnydale past dawn and into early morning. California born and raised, the only snow she had ever seen was on television.

"I thought I'd go to the mansion," he told her. "Do you want to come with me?"

She nodded. "Yeah," she ducked her head to the hall. "I'm just going to brush my teeth and we can go."

When she left the kitchen, he drank his cooling blood. It had a disgusting skin on top and he shuddered a little as a piece of it separated and oozed down his throat. He made himself finish it and rinsed the coffee mug out with hot water before scrubbing it with a sponge that Giles had put out for that purpose. He would need to pick up more blood today, which he could do himself, in person. For a moment he considered stopping at Willie's and getting human blood. The look on Willie's face as he strolled in through the door in broad daylight would be well worth it.

Blood. In bags. Like flash-frozen dinners that came in bags that were boiled in water to heat up.

Not sure where the stray thought came from, he grunted. "Yeah, just like that," he muttered to himself, annoyed with the juvenile fantasy.

"Just like what?" Buffy asked when she returned to the kitchen. She had run a brush through her hair. His brush. He could smell the two of them mingled in her hair. "I borrowed your toothbrush," she confessed, her nose wrinkling. "That's gross isn't it? But, we've kissed, so it's the lesser of all grossness. Morning breath, borrowing Giles toothbrush, or borrowing your toothbrush," she explained. "And, I figured that we could stop on the way back, get donuts, and toothbrushes."

"It's okay," he told her. Probably unsanitary, but not a big issue for him. "We can do all of that," he agreed.

It was still dark when they set out, but he realized that they weren't going to make it to the mansion in time.

Not that it really mattered where he saw the sunrise. It was a sunrise. There weren't a lot of them that he had participated in, even when he was alive. The servants rose before sunrise, and he lolled about in bed, behind tightly shuttered windows, usually hung-over. There was a time before that. He hadn't been born with a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a busty tavern wench in the other. He had been a boy once, but he could barely remember not being an adult. It was impossible to even begin to imagine Darla as a child.

Drusilla shed incoherent bits of a corrupted childhood in her dolls, her wide-eyed stare, and her mannerisms, but it was a fantasy childhood. It was the princess' childhood that she never had that she was faithful to. He was willing to bet that Spike was the only one of them who had any real memory of a sunrise, and it wasn't just because he was the youngest, or more willing to endure some discomfort to witness the end of the evening. He was probably the only one of them that assigned any value to a sunrise while he was still alive. As for remembering his childhood, he hadn't really left it before he died.

"I always thought that this would be a good time for a walk," Angel said as they crossed the street. "It's quiet? Vampires all heading for the sewers or a lair, but no one is up yet," he explained.

In the winter they were. When the sun rose much later in the morning, people were up. Newspapers in Sunnydale were delivered by car. No one was foolish enough to attempt a route on foot or on a bicycle. Buffy's eyes were moving back and forth. It was something she was probably unaware of.

He had to tell her. This was a good time. They were alone, and she could decide what she wanted to do with no pressure. He could make his case, also minus the pressure and suspicion that Xander would bring to it. Except that he knew Xander could no more talk her into something that she didn't want to do than he could. That was the afterglow of her experience with Angelus. Giles would tell her. Angel was surprised that he hadn't done it yet.

"Promise me that when this is over, you don't just leave," she interrupted his train of thought. "I mean, if you have to just leave, if that's how it has to be, I understand, but I don't think it does. I'm glad that you came to help us. But not in a 'I needed you and I can't do this without you way'" she clarified. "More in a 'we can still help each other way,'" she looked up at him to see if he was following her reasoning. "I know that we can't be together," her voice thickened a bit, and she laughed nervously. "Should I try that again?"

He looked at her. "I didn't do it to hurt you," he started to say that he thought it would be easier.

"I know," her voice firmed up. "But this is who we are now. And it is not a drama. You and me? We aren't together, and we aren't tragic. I won't have it be that we are just a sad story. I miss you," she admitted. "Not the you that I was in love with, because," she ground to a verbal stop and out of the corner of his eye he saw the tears that were filling her eyes. She ducked her head, giving herself a moment to finish the thought that obviously pained her.

He could fill it in for her. "Because no matter how many times I came back, you knew."

And it was that simple. His soul was returned and she still had to kill him. He came back from hell and she still couldn't have him. He tried to explain all of this to her and she refused to accept the terms. He left her. But he would come back when she needed, and she needed him to know that she would go to him when he needed her.

The light was changing. It was something he could feel as well as see. He caught her hand. They were near one of the parks they sometimes lingered at on patrol. There was a park bench by a low stone wall. That was the place. That was where he wanted to be. They had sat on the bench and talked before.

"Come on," he said.

"When she saw the bench, she got it, and for a moment he wondered if this wasn't such a great idea, but she rubbed their joined hands against her leg, and nodded to herself. "I miss this." She smiled. "The Dutch boy and his duck?" she reminded him.

When he smiled, he looked so much younger. It was almost possible to pretend. She took what he was anticipating for granted. Sunrise made her feel like a vampire. She saw too many sunrises at the end of a late night, sitting on the back porch cleaning weapons or standing in the bathroom dabbing antiseptic on a scrape or cut.

They weren't tragic. It was a big idea for Angel to absorb, and he thought that she was wrong, but she was eighteen and a Slayer and odds were that she would not live as long as he would with the loss. There was nothing stopping her from finding someone else to love. He had that feeling again, the one that reminded him that he was a vampire and she was human. He was over two hundred; she was under twenty. It was the same feeling he had about her senior prom.

The sun was coming up. It was a flash of white light. There were other colors, though the most entrancing to him was the blue. It was a tricky color. Sky blue, baby blue, pale blue, shades of blue in stained glass or oil paintings, it was in some ways the easiest thing for an artist to represent and the hardest to capture the formless depth of it. He noticed the sky. He noticed the smell—wet and cold, but warming. He noticed the way colors changed in the light, rendering a place he knew fairly well slightly unfamiliar.

He noticed that Buffy was still holding his hand, not taking anything away from the moment no matter how ordinary it might seem to her.

Later, in the grocery store—and how weird was that, as Buffy would have said, that they were pacing the aisles of a grocery store together? The sharp-eyed gaze that Angel was accustomed to seeing applied to the dark margins of alleys and cemeteries was scanning shelves in a predatory way. But later, he wondered if there was more to her idea that they weren't tragic than not wanting to hear it.

The girl who was the descendent of a long line of mythical warriors who had been called to be heroic and were destined to die because of it, executed a hair flip. "I'm not done," there was in her gaze a hint of stubborn self-awareness. It wasn't a good answer, or the right one, but it was the one that she would live by. "I can't be tragic. I have to go to college."

~~~*~~~
 

The hotel bar had closed at two in the morning, which was just annoying. The room that he had rented came with double beds, which Willow was likely to take as a great moral victory. Both beds came with the requisite headboards bolted into the wall, leaving no obvious way to handcuff her to an immovable object. He settled for a heavy chair.

Trying to escape was expected, but her new fondness for trying to kill him was getting on his nerves. Hadn't he made it clear that he wasn't going to leave her that way? It wasn't like he ran around offering immortal life, fantastic sex, and mayhem to every chit he shagged. The dead teenager that he had drained in a bus shelter had nothing to offer in the way of an opinion, so he used his cell phone to call Georgia.

She sounded moderately pleased to hear from him. "Jeannie says that you know that we know—"

"Gem of Amara," Spike rolled his eyes. "Yeah. You know, Colin knows. Covered that already."

"I had this whole 'you know that we know that you know' speech," she complained. "Katherine Hepburn. The Lion in Winter? And then she says—"

"We're very knowledgeable people. I like the part where John says that if he caught on fire, no one would piss on him to put it out."

"Me too. It's a good line for a vampire," Georgia pointed out.

"It's a good movie for vampires. All the fucked up family dynamics and politics. Makes me feel nostalgic about Darla, and I hated that bitch. In a good way," Spike said.

Spike heard her telling someone that she was talking to him. "Colin?" he guessed.

"You want to talk to him?" Georgia guessed.

"Not particularly," Spike muttered. "Probably ought to," he allowed. There was no response from Georgia. "Am I talking to myself?"

"No," she said slowly. "Um . . ."

"He wants to talk to me and I've put you in an awkward position?"

"Exactly!" she drawled.

Spike heaved a sigh. "Sod him. Tell him Red keeps trying to dust me, and I'm drunk and in a foul mood."

She repeated this. Colin wanted to know if she had drawn blood. "I'll find out," Georgia told him. "Okay. So? Are you serious?"

"I'm not drunk," he withdrew that one. "And . . . she scratched me, so yeah she's drawn blood, but—" he didn't bother going into the near-staking by pencil.

She giggled. "You go, girl!" she sounded impressed. "That's so cute, and spunky!"

"She put you on the ground, love. If she had slowed down to stake you, would that have been cute and spunky?"

"A year from now you'd be bragging about how she bagged a vampire while she was still human," Georgia scoffed, "and you're like a . . . ."

"Triple word score?" he suggested, preening a bit.

"Or the Jeopardy Daily Double," she substituted. "You don't think if she manages to dust you that Drusilla will come looking for her in a crazy revenge way, do you? That would be inconvenient."

"I think it will be moot, because you won't know how to find—" he didn't complete the thought. Harmony. Georgia would know where to find Willow because Harmony would tell her. "Yes," he snapped. "Drusilla, whatever thing she's shagging, a Slayer, Angelus, and a Werewolf will come gunning for you," he predicted sourly.

"Since they are all after you already, and you seem to be one step ahead, I think I can deal," Georgia was complacent. "Anyway, Pete saw your Slayer. He says she's a real cute little girl," she teased. "He came home from Sunnydale with tales of your ass-kickings."

"Sod off," he growled.

"So . . . what are you going to do? I'd really prefer to get her in one piece, but I get that you can't let her keep trying to dust you. That's too much to expect."

"You're bloody right it is," he agreed. "I don't know. I threatened to beat her, and she hit me."

"Did you hit her back?"

Spike rubbed his eyes. "No," he said slowly. "Shagged her rotten, told her I'd get around to killing her, and I wasn't planning on leaving her dead," he grinned at the absurdity of it. A century with Dru had left him ill-equipped to deal with one not-so-insane mortal girl. "I was giving her something to think about."

Georgia chuckled appreciatively. "Not a bad plan, but the wrong stuff to think about," she scolded. "People are funny about the dying part. It freaks them out."

Spike glanced over at his dead bus shelter companion. "Yeah. I suppose I'll give her something else to think about." He rifled through the kid's backpack before getting up and strolling off toward the hotel.

"Good plan," Georgia complimented.

"It's not a plan, it's a theme. A plan has—" he shook his head. "Never mind. I'll figure out something."

~~~*~~~

Willow woke up twice. Spike shook her awake and made her get out of the car. She had a vague memory of trying to pay attention to a new set of bland hallways. Her aunt Carol lived in a gated community in Scottsdale that reminded Willow of the episode of the X-Files when Scully and Mulder went undercover in a gated community to investigate mysterious deaths. Hotels and gated communities had a creepy uniformity. Set her down in one of those places, and she would be a monster magnet, unable to resist fudging the rules for the sake of principled rule-breaking. Or not. She tended to be a rule follower.

Maybe she would have been one of the creepy neighbors?

The next time she woke up she was lying on her stomach across a double bed with her wrist handcuffed to the arm of a chair and she needed to go to the bathroom. Going to the bathroom was not impossible; it was just complicated by having to take the chair with her. Once she wrestled the chair into the bathroom she wasn't in a hurry to leave. That left her sitting on the toilet with her jeans pushed down to her thighs and the chair she was handcuffed to positioned in front of her.

She used it as a footrest to take off her tennis shoes. The bandage that Spike had wrapped around her toe made her nose wrinkle in disgust. It smelled like the inside of the tennis shoes she had been wearing without socks. She picked the tape off with her fingernails and tossed the soiled bandage in the general direction of the trash can.

Where was Spike?

He was out killing someone. She was in a hotel room, with a phone and a possible Internet connection, and how about dragging herself and the chair down to the lobby? Girl handcuffed to chair would be hard to explain. Working one-handed, she got her jeans back up with an inward sigh at recognizing the aptness of having your panties in a bunch and started moving with her chair in front of her like a very awkward walker. She got the door propped open with the chair when Spike strolled around the corner carrying what looked to be a cup of coffee and a white bakery bag.

He shook his head at her. "Foiled again."

Stepping around her, he used the chair as a step and walked over it nimbly to set the bag and the coffee cup down on the dresser before coming back to drag the chair and her away from the door. It shut behind her with a muffled thump. He took his coat off and tossed it on the bed. His t-shirt followed it before he sat to remove his boots. He was in what appeared to be a good mood. Tethered to the chair, Willow sat, facing the door. She tried not to flinch when he came up behind her and unlocked the handcuff. He squatted down beside the arm of the chair, examining her wrist for fresh marks.

"I thought the chair might slow you down," he admitted, looking up at her solemnly, slowly lifting her wrist to his lips to kiss. His plan, worked out over the counter of the bakery downstairs was to be charming and seductive and considerate. Torture worked better with Drusilla, but since Willow wasn't insane or a vampire, he was thinking that working against her expectations would keep her off-balance and distracted, and it was kind of fun to watch her when she was trying to figure something out.

He had undressed down to his jeans. It was distracting. He kissed her wrist, his tongue lazily rubbing back and forth over her skin. Very distracting. Willow tried to treat the room rate and emergency exit information discreetly fixed to the door like it was a vision test, reading past the headings at a distance of approximately seven feet. Possibly not the optimal distance for reading twelve- or fourteen-point type. She had to squint.

He kissed her pulse, not lingering over it in an obvious way. "Do you think you could stand a shower, and then something to eat?" His head ducked into her line of sight, and when she tried to avoid his eyes, he squeezed her hand and reached up to run his fingers over her jaw. "There was a bakery downstairs in the lobby, or there's room service," he pointed out.

It was supposed to be distracting, she realized when she risked a look at him. There was just enough calculation in the way he was watching her to clue her in. She glared at him. "Quit treating me like I'm crazy or broken. I tried to kill you."

His lips twitched. "You failed. It put me in a celebratory mood."

He looked a little tired. The way people looked tired at the end of a good day. She just felt exhausted. Every time she blinked she felt the effort of opening her eyes.

She had probably slept for less than four hours, and she hadn't slept well yesterday either. He eased her out of the chair and pushed it away with his foot. "Come on, a quick shower," he urged.

"Are you trying to get me out of the room so you can call Giles?" she asked.

He leaned against the doorframe, watching as her eyes shifted to the mirror, where she didn't find him, and then away. "Rather I stay and scrub your back?" he made it an offer.

She looked confused. "Go on," he nodded to the shower. "You aren't quite awake, pet."

She was awake enough, Willow thought after she was in the shower. Awake enough to know that he was being inconsistent and weird and it was probably a big setup to something.

There was no complimentary bathrobe, but there was a bath sheet large enough to cover her from her armpits to her knees, and she wrapped that around herself after she got out of the shower and dried off. He was lying on one of the two double beds, propped up against the headboard, restlessly channel-surfing when she came out. He really did look tired, though it worked for him. His preternaturally-boyish face showed lines that were usually not so much in evidence, around his eyes and mouth. He was absentmindedly stroking the scar on his eyebrow.

She padded over to the table to peer inside the paper bag, using the wax paper inside to pick out a flat cinnamon pinwheel Danish drizzled with honey. The cup was hot chocolate, not coffee as she thought when she saw it. She ate the cinnamon Danish and started nibbling on a flaky croissant with raspberry and creamcheese filling between sips of hot chocolate.

He wasn't saying anything. She tried to kill him, and he had nothing to say about that? She hadn't gone into the bathroom thinking that she would try anything of the sort. She just wanted to find her credit cards and her driver's license and then figure out what to do next. She was certain that he would assume that she was heading for Sunnydale as soon as she took off, and he would follow. The Gem of Amara was there. Her friends were there.

She could warn them, of course. She had to warn them. Xander and Oz would be the most vulnerable, the most obvious targets. The list kept expanding. Joyce. Her parents. The Harrisses. Oz's mother. Maybe he would start on the edge and work his way around. Killing people that meant something to her, and then killing the people that meant most to her. It was a horrible idea, but all losses were not equally unbearable.

The only answer was the same one she had come to the night they had left Sacramento, and the number two pencil in her purse seemed to be placed there for no other reason. If she waited long enough, he would come looking for her, and then . . . she would have the element of surprise on her side. It wasn't much, but it was something that made sense to her. She recognized it. The vamp she had staked when the Mayor was holding her hadn't even realized that she had staked him. He hadn't registered surprise or anger or betrayal or fear. It had happened so quickly.

She didn't want to see any of those things. She knew that she should by all rights hate Spike, but for some reason she didn't, and if he was going to disintegrate, to come apart so completely and utterly, she wanted the last thing he felt to be something that was his, and not a part of her staking him. She didn't want to have the memory of his understanding that she had staked him.

And then she went a little crazy. Her hands still felt raw and her fingers were cramping.

"Red?"

He was still sitting against the headboard. She turned to look at him.

He didn't seem to have anything to say. He just stared at her, like he didn't know any better than she did what he was supposed to say.

"I'll go brush my teeth," she said. It was what she did after she ate and before she was kissed or kissing. Could you want to kiss someone that you tried to kill? Oddly, yes. Of all the things that she could do, kissing was not the worst of it, except that the fact that it wasn't the worst of it was wrong.

She stared at herself in the mirror. Her towel-dried hair was a mess. There was a blow dryer attached to the wall, but she ignored it, starring at the girl in the mirror with the fading bruises on her face and the messy hair, wondering who she was right now.

She made herself go back into the room. There were two beds. He had gotten a room with two beds. She climbed into the one that he was in, telling herself that he would move if she didn't, that the other bed wasn't an island or a fortress or even much of a statement of her resolve. She started to move to her side, away from him, and realized that he had all the pillows stacked behind him. Before she could think about it, he leaned forward, surrendering one, and she took it.

It wasn't warm, but it smelled of him. She closed her eyes. He tugged the blanket up over her shoulder. The bath sheet wrapped around her wasn't entirely dry, but she didn't care.

"Are you going to call them?" she asked.

She felt the mattress give as he shifted away from her to turn out the light. "Later," he said.

She closed her eyes again. On the edge of falling asleep she felt the covers move over her shoulder again, and his hand, slipping down her arm to her hand, palm down, under her hand briefly. His hand came to rest on her hip. She was sure it was still there when she fell asleep.

He had seen the expression that crossed her face before she climbed into bed with him. She had decided that he would arrange it so that she was sleeping beside him and had either decided that it wasn't worth a fight or that she could mollify him with a well-timed capitulation.

He wasn't anywhere near as justifiably angry with her as he knew that he ought to be. He told himself last night that it was because it was such a weak effort. The slowly closing hole in this hand belied that. Had he been a second slower to react, he would have been a memory.

His injured hand was resting on her hip. It itched something fierce. He waited for it to stir something. Fear, fury, a mild sense of annoyance. Instead, his head whipped toward her at the sound of a sharply-indrawn breath and a soft cry of distress. She was asleep. She was dreaming.

He waited to see if there was more to it, but she settled down again and he realized that he was massaging her hip. Soothing her. His lips thinned and the annoyance was self-directed. He tried to be objective about it.

She wasn't Dru. She couldn't hold a candle to his ripe, wicked plum. If Drusilla walked through the door, he would beg her to take him back and offer Willow up as a snack in half a heartbeat. He wouldn't think twice about it. Sod the Gem of Amara and the Slayer. He'd skip off with Dru with a song in his dead heart and the taste of the witch's blood on his love's lips and consider it a good day.

He frowned. That sounded right, didn't it?

Of course it did. The Gem of Amara was meaningless measured against Drusilla.

He moved his hand away from Willow, pausing to examine the wound before he reached for his cigarettes. It was filling in from the inside out. It was bound to leave a scar and he didn't have a lot of those, but it would be an interesting scar. He reached for his cigarettes. The first drag was soothing. He savored it, smiling a little. I'm evil, he reminded himself. I even have the evil props. Fangs, leather, a pack of smokes, and a slightly corrupted, but mostly pure at heart, girl at his side. The thought made him smirk. That's all it is, he told himself.

He finished his cigarette and got up to rid himself of his jeans, briefly considering foiling Willow's inexplicable decision to crawl into bed with him by sleeping in the empty bed. Even as he was thinking it, he discarded the idea, slipping into bed behind her, spooning into her towel-clad body. His hand slid under the towel, seeking contact with her skin. He closed his eyes.

~~~*~~~

Years later Giles would remember it as one of the longest days of his life. A day begun with a cup of tea liberally laced with whiskey and lemon because he had a bit of a cold coming on. A day begun with an annoying smell in his living room that he recognized as sweaty teenager. Xander slept until noon. Snoring occasionally. Buffy and Angel came back from their pre-dawn outing with a bag of groceries and blood from the butcher shop. They went back outside. It made sense, and he was just as glad not to have them underfoot.

Xander woke up when they came back in. Angel looked a bit queasy. It was a reaction that Giles felt compelled to examine. The more they knew about the Gem of Amara and how it effected a vampire, the more effective their strategies would be. Angel insisted that he felt fine, aside from a slight feeling of disorientation from being in the sun. Xander listened to the exchange. He seemed puzzled by it, but also grimly pleased.

"Don't get too comfortable with it," he suggested after he had finished stuffing his face with donuts.

Buffy glared at him, and Giles had a sinking feeling. She had already made her mind up that after they got Willow back, Angel should have the Gem of Amara. He wasn't terribly surprised by that. It would be a tremendous gift as well as a burden, and he was willing to concede that Angel was probably capable of bearing it. As long as he was Angel. It was the possibility of him reverting back to Angelus that gave Giles pause. It almost made handing the Gem of Amara over to Spike the more acceptable conclusion.

He had several pages of notes on that outcome. Aside from notifying the Watchers' Council to marshal as much assistance containing Spike as possible, a few other ideas had occurred to him. Sending Angel off to track down Drusilla in the hopes of turning the tables on Spike and forcing him to return the Gem of Amara in exchange for his insane lover was one notion. Raphael's Compendium was curiously silent on the subject of magic resistance conveyed by the Gem of Amara. Vampires and demons had a certain amount of innate resistance to magical compulsion and suggestion, but there were spells and rituals that were specific to vampires, like the un-invite spell Jenny had found for them before she died.

There was the Romany curse. He didn't consider it a course of last resort by any means. The curse, the ingredients required for it, were in his flat, locked in a warded chest against the possibility that they would need it for Angel again. He knew that Willow had a second Orb of Thesela in her possession, probably at her parent's house. If Spike got the Gem of Amara, the first defense against him would be to attempt to restore his soul and hope for the best. There were so many intangibles to the curse, and he had discussed it with Willow at length over the summer when Buffy had run away.

The deep, personal sense of grievance against Angelus felt by the gypsies that cursed him and by Willow after Jenny and Kendra were killed made him wonder if the caster's relationship or feelings toward the object of the curse were not crucial aspects of the curse. Willow had been deeply, desperately afraid of Angelus and what he might do to her and Buffy for months. His concern for Buffy's state of mind had been so consuming that he didn't notice the effect it had on Willow, particularly after Angelus had been inside her home.

He tried to decide if he had the sort of all-consuming anger or fear that had been present when Willow cursed Angelus that could be directed at Spike. There was no doubt in Giles' mind that given the opportunity, he would gladly stake the vampire, but he was a vampire, so that wasn't exactly a revelation. The way that Spike had used Drusilla to violate his memories of Jenny came to him, and he closed his eyes, feeling fury so absolute that it threatened to obliterate the train of thought that had led him to consider just how much he could bring himself to hate Spike.

~~~*~~~

Caffeine wasn't the only substance that had an outsized effect on Willow. Benedryl gave her vivid dreams. Apparently exhaustion and stress had the same effect. All of her dreams were about the same thing. Sex. It was like a feedback loop, only slightly horrifying and gross and oddly funny. It was the sort of dream that had a kind of narrative. In her dream she was married to Percy, which was kind of odd, but she had a minor crush on him in the ninth grade, so not completely without a frame of reference. The little details about her fabulous life in her dream were funny. Apparently her idea of the good life included a chalet that looked a bit like the student center at the University of California-Sunnydale.

In her dream, everyone wanted her, except for Percy who really wasn't around that much or very concerned about the fact that everyone wanted her. Even in her dream he was completely self-involved. Angel wasn't there. She would have felt guilty if he was, but a lot less freaked out than she was by Buffy, who kept trying to hold her in her lap and kiss her.

And that was only slightly less of a complete freak-out than Giles coming on to her and offering to show her what magic could be like when you were writhing naked inside a caster's circle. Okay . . . that was just icky.

Spike wasn't there either, though she was waiting for him to show up.

She kept saying no, because she knew that she was supposed to. Xander wanted to spank her, which was funny and creepy and sexy all at the same time.

And then she was somewhere dark and she couldn't move. At least not a lot, but she could feel. Hands and mouths on her skin, more than one, and she didn't care who it was or wasn't. She just wanted more.

She woke up with a gasp, and for a moment she was afraid that there was something horribly wrong with her. More wrong than she ever imagined. So wrong that it made her usual worries about being a spaz seem ridiculous.

She was alone in the bed and the drapes were pulled back from the window. Her heart pounded and she sat up, feeling the bath sheet tucked around her give way, chafing the skin under her arms where the tape finish on the edge of the towel cut into her skin. Spike emerged from the bathroom, a towel draped around his hips, looking alert and alarmed.

"What is it?" he demanded.

She stared at him, baffled by the question.

She had been asleep for over eight hours. He had slept a bit and watched some television, wondering when she was going to wake up. He had started to wake her up around six, but she hadn't responded to his attempt to wake her. He decided to let her sleep. She needed it.

At sundown he took a shower and started thinking about what was next on the agenda. Calling the Watcher, possibly checking in with Georgia again, and either moving or extending their stay another day depending on what state Willow was in when she woke up. He had just finished brushing his teeth when he heard her. It was a combination of things that all spelled sudden and overwhelming fear and he came out of the bathroom ready to . . . save her.

"What is wrong?" he asked again, seeing no immediate threat.

"Bad dream," she mumbled, finding the bath sheet in the bedding and pulling it around herself before she got out of bed, stumbling a little and steadying herself with one hand on the wall before slipping around him to go into the bathroom, shutting the door behind her.

"Right. I was done in there," he addressed the closed door.

It popped open and she stuck her head out. "Um, I kind of have to—"

He waved at her. "Go ahead," he said, deciding that he was in favor of staying put after all. He glanced over at the bag of clothing that he had chosen to bring in from the car more or less at random, and wondered if there was something in there that she could wear. The hotel had a restaurant on the twentieth floor. He wondered if that black frock that Georgia had picked out was still in there. When Willow had left the bed he had an impression of her hair, messy and finger combed, curling a bit. He had a sudden urge to see her in the demure dress with her hair messed up.

She'd be naked under it. He had found her knickers and bra on the floor in the bathroom and tossed them in the trash, partly out of spite, but mostly because they were a bit disgusting.

He nudged the bag again with his foot and spied a bit of black fabric. Snagging it, he pulled the dress out. Unfortunately, it was a bit wrinkled he decided as he held it up. She chose that moment to leave the bathroom. She looked at the dress and at him. "It's your color," she commented, her sense of humor apparently restored.

He tossed the dress on the bed. "Put it on," he ordered brusquely, upending the bag to look for the shoes that went with it. He found the pearls too, spilling out in a tangled pile from the bottom of the bag. There was a scarf, and he knew exactly were it was. It was still in his coat pocket.

She picked up the dress and started to go back to the bathroom, probably looking for underwear. "Just put it on," he said, finally finding the irritation that had eluded him for the better part of the day.

With a modesty that was sneer-worthy, she pulled the dress on over her head and released the towel when she was covered to mid-thigh. The dress fell into place, gaping in the back where the zipper had been lowered when she took it off. She tried to find the small metal tab to the zipper to close it, but it kept slipping through her fingertips.

"I think it's stuck," she said, smoothing her hands over her hips and giving the skirt a little shake to work out the wrinkles in the knife edged pleats.

He picked up the pearls, fastening them around her throat. The zipper was stuck, leaving the fabric to gape and he probably could have zipped it up, but his hands slid inside the dress to cup her breasts instead. Dressing her up to fuck was what he was doing. If Drusilla walked in the room he would be inside her, fucking her warm, wet pussy, pulling the front of her skirt up in handfuls to offer her to Dru to share.

Willow was mostly confused. One minute he was barking at her to get dressed like he was in a hurry to get somewhere and the next his hands were inside her dress. It was too much like her dream and she started to panic when she felt his lips on her neck. In her dream, Buffy, Giles, Xander, and even Oz had been vampires. A not-so-little detail that she had tried to ignore.

He shook her. "Don't do that!" he growled at her.

"What?"

There was a hint of semi-hysterical desperation in her tone that reached him. She didn't know what he wanted her to quit doing, but she was willing to do it if he would stop mauling her. For a split second he was genuinely confused. He wasn't sure how hard he was holding her, and it loomed in his head that it was a distinct possibility that he was hurting her. He concentrated as much as he could on the way her breasts felt in his hands and realized that he was just cradling them. It was the way he was mouthing her neck. Even when he became aware of it, he couldn't stop. His tongue was palpitating the artery.

If he bit her, she would be dead in five minutes or less and he would have a day, maybe two, to wait for her to wake up again to discover what she was.

Evil and dead. Like him. Like every fledge that woke before her. He spun her around, the crepe of her skirt brushing his skin. It was a beautiful dress. The kind of thing she could have worn out to dinner or to her grave. "I was wrong," he said. "I don't want you in the dress," his weight carried her down to the bed behind them. "I just want you," he kissed her before she could say anything.

"It's you, okay?' he muttered between kisses, feeling her hands on his shoulders as she tried to put some distance between them. He knew where the scarf was and why he had kept it and he would have gotten it now to wrap around her wrists if he could have made himself stop. "The way you smell," he threaded his fingers through her hair, trying not to pull it as he nibbled on her earlobe. His hips rocked against hers, through the towel that was slowly parting and the crepe skirt that was slightly rough against his skin. "I want—"

Everything.

She was trying to catch her breath and wriggle out from under him and she was looking at him like he had said out loud what he had been thinking. It scared her? Well, of course it did. Evil soulless demon loves slightly tarnished good girl. It was the stuff that launched a thousand sappy romance novels that conveniently ignored the fact that the complete inability to share a single goal made a relationship a non-starter. Even if it wasn't precisely love, since he loved Drusilla.

He loved Drusilla, he reminded himself. Willow was just convenient and interesting and she said that she didn't hate him anymore.

"You are blaming this on me?" she wasn't scared. She was furious. "I didn't do anything! You said to put on the dress. I put on the dress," she huffed. "And then you—" she seemed to be at a loss for a way to describe what he had done. "I don't smell like whatever it is that you want."

That made him laugh. It was funny, the way she said it, the stubborn set of her mouth, the way her nose wrinkled. All of it. He lifted himself off her a bit and held her face in his hands, kissing the tip of her nose.

"You smell exactly like what I want," he told her, good humor restored. "Warm and creamy and delicious, like—"

"Pudding?" she frowned at him. "Because I'll bet the snack pak pudding was right next to the fruit cups unless you mean some kind of really gross English pudding. Giles tried to make us eat one once at Christmas," she babbled nervously.

He covered her mouth with his fingers. "Shut up," he grinned at her. "Sometimes when you start prattling, I feel like I have to do something to get you to stop."

He bent one arm to let his elbow take more of his weight and ran his index finger over her upper lip, tracing the edge of it. She started to say something and he tapped his finger lightly against her lips. "No," he shook his head. "You'll start on about the pudding again," he grumbled. "I slipped. Given your own verbal excesses, you'd think you'd give a bloke a break, but no! You taunt me with my pudding comparison," he lowered his head to nuzzle the inside of her arm, nipping at her skin with his lips.

He lifted his head. "I was going to suggest that we go out to dinner," he told her somberly. "Thought you'd like someplace posh, with a view," his eyebrows lifted. "Don't know what I was thinking. You would be worried about whether anyone could tell you weren't wearing knickers, and I'd be thinking of little else but the fact that you weren't wearing knickers."

She frowned at him, and he lifted his finger off her lips, pretty sure that he knew what she was going to say.

"I would so be wearing knick—underpants," she amended.

"I threw them out," he kissed her, thoroughly, taking his time about it, chasing her tongue with his, sliding his arm under her neck and rolling them over so she was sprawled across his chest, her bare legs tangled in his. Shoving the skirt aside, he ran his hand up the back of her leg.

When she lifted her head he used his fingertips to tickle the inside of her thigh, grunting when she squirmed and almost kneed him in the groin to get away from the tickle.

"You threw them out?" She managed to sound outraged, appalled, and worried all at the same time. "I don't have any underwear?"

The dress was rucked up and slightly to one side and her lips looked just warmed up for kissing. He put one arm behind his head, smiling at her. "Feel a little naughty?" he asked, sounding hopeful.

She frowned at him. "Not the way you mean," she grumbled. "I have more shoes than underwear. Do you have any idea how weird that is? For me?" The last she added hastily.

He shrugged, "Kidnapped by vampire," he pointed out. "The underwear situation, while dire, doesn't quite measure up."

"I wear underwear, and socks, and—"

"Right," he drawled. "You are nothing if not relentlessly wholesome. It's kind of desperate, isn't it? Who are you trying to convince? Me?" He shook his head. "Even if you tried, even if you stood in front of mirrors for hours practicing unwholesome expressions, I'm actual evil. Hmm? I'm the kind of bad that doesn't need to find a good reason to do a bad thing. Unlike you."

Willow felt like she was bracing for impact. There was a cruel comment waiting in the wings. A cutting reminder of how she had sold herself? An unwelcome observation about Oz? She didn't want to hear it. The half-unzipped dress was slipping off her shoulders. She tried to put the dress to order instead, plucking at the waist until it was more or less lying properly.

Spike's eyes narrowed. His hand moved over his chest, drawing her attention back to him. Their eyes met and held. There wasn't a lot of light, just the light from the bathroom that was spilling through the half open door and the spare light of day fading to night that managed to get in around the draperies. When his gaze moved from hers to her mouth she was in the odd position of watching him watch her. She didn't understand it. She was never going to understand how he could look at her like she was an interesting problem. His eyes closed and his hand moved lower. The towel he had wrapped around his hips had fallen open.

"Ah-ah," he scolded when he felt her uneasy movement, like she was gathering herself to bolt. His eyes opened. "Let's stay here tonight," he suggested, as if he had to talk her into it.

Willow found herself nodding. As if she had a choice in the matter. She started to open her mouth to share that idea, but he lifted an eyebrow and gave a spare shake of his head. It wasn't a lot to go on but she got the idea that he understood what she had been about to say and that he didn't want to hear it any more than she wanted to hear him say something unpleasant.

She took a deep breath. "That sounds like a good idea," she said instead.

He responded with a lazy smile. "Want me to give you a good reason to do a bad thing?"

"What kind of bad thing?" Willow shifted her weight more to her knees, on the mattress near his hip. She could push with one hand and roll and then she would be on her side of the bed.

"Me, of course," he shook his head at her, "keep up."

She had a crazy desire to laugh, and it wasn't that funny. He was making her nervous, his voice low, pitched for her to hear, as if they were at the movies or in a library.

"So pretty," he teased. "Come here, baby. Ever had a man at your mercy? Have you ever been on top, riding his cock, giving him what he's supposed to want but keeping your body covered? Cheating him of seeing you? Making him crazy for the want of seeing you? For watching his cock fill you? For watching your hips rock forward and your pretty tits sway as you arch your back?"

She stared at him, not knowing how to answer. It was sort of a question, and she knew it was an invitation as well. To do those things, with him. She wanted to break it down into parts. She had had sex without taking all of her clothes off more often that she had had it with all of her clothes off. But not the way he made it sound, like she was doing it on purpose or to make it more exciting, and it had never occurred to her that when she was having sex with Oz that he wanted more than to be close to her.

She was also appalled and fascinated by the way he talked about sex. It was about power and craving. It was politics and psychology. It was complicated. It was the unvoiced needs that she wished that Oz would just figure out that she suspected that she would have to tell him about. Not that it would be bad, to tell him, just a little embarrassing and less exciting than if he figured it out on his own. It was like a test without actual questions, and she knew it was unfair.

She was thinking about something. He could see it in the way her gaze became inwardly focused. It took her away from him for a moment, but he found that he didn't mind. The disordered bed was full of her scent and he swam in it.

She was sitting with her legs under her, knees parted, the skirt falling like the bell of a dark flower around her. He sat up. He didn't mind it that she tended to get lost in thought, but that didn't mean that he couldn't bring her attention back around to him. He slid his hand up the inside of her knee.

Her eyes flew to his face, and he nodded. "Welcome back," his hand moved up higher, feeling her tense a little. "Dinner," he reminded her. He had been talking about taking her out to dinner before they got sidetracked about her lack of underwear. "Table? Candle? Near the window," he set the scene for her. "I'd want so much to be touching you like this," he breathed. "I'd drive myself crazy thinking about how you feel in my hand,"

He sat up, uncoiling really, Willow decided as she watched him move. His shoulders rolled forward and he bent at the waist. She had plenty of time to scoot away from him. His fingers had reached the apex of her thighs, plucking at the soft curls there. His eyes closed and he ducked his head. "So soft," his tongue stole out to wet his upper lip and she found herself wetting her own lips.

His fingertips moved over her, gently slipping between her legs to be met by a rush of thick, heavy fluid that made her shift to slip away from him. She looked startled, as if she hadn't understood that she was wet until he touched her. His eyes opened, gleaming with something too close to triumph, but mitigated by pleasure. "No one is watching," he told her, and then smiled a little, picking up her hand and bringing it to his cock. His eyes narrowed as he rocked against her palm.

"I'd want you so much, but I wouldn't want anyone to see you. Wouldn't want anyone to see the way you look when I have my fingers inside you," his fingertips were pressing lightly at the opening of her body. His thumbnail scraped over her clitoris and she bit her lower lip to keep from moaning.

His eyes were warm. "Like that," he nodded. "I'd kill anyone who heard the sweet sounds you make when I'm fucking you," his fingers were entering her, and she wanted to open her legs wider and bear down on them. "Can you hear that, baby? Hear how wet you are for me?" he asked.

She wanted to cover her ears and utter nonsense sounds to drown out the wet sounds muffled by the layer of fabric that hid what he was doing from her view. His thumb moved back and forth over her clitoris, and suddenly she understood what he meant about feeling cheated.

Her hand had grown still on him and he covered it again, showing her how he wanted to be touched.

"I'd want to rip that dress off. Lay you back on the table with it spread out around you, and I'd cover your eyes, love. I wouldn't let you watch me. Couldn't bear it. It would be too much to feel you watch me while I fuck you."

She wasn't even sure how it happened. One minute she was trembling on the verge of an orgasm, trying to keep from moaning or to grab his hand and hold it as she pushed herself down on his fingers, and the next moment the dress was over her head, the half open zipper scratching her skin as it was pulled over her head, and no more than that. He left it to her to free her arms as he kissed her stomach.

She froze when she realized that he was moving her up to his mouth as he was sliding down between her legs. One of his arms was under her left leg and the other was wrapped around her hips, urging her down to his mouth. Her mind rebelled against what he wanted. It wasn't a matter of right or wrong. It was just mind bogglingly . . . rude. The chorus of a Monty Python song threatened to get stuck in her head, possibly forever.

Feeling her try to wriggle out of his grasp, he looked up at her, seeing the blush and the frank distress. "Come on," he coaxed. "It's not like I have to breath."

Seeing the resolution forming, he gave up and rolled them over so she was on her back. "Right, then," he drawled, "not the sort of girl that goes about shoving her twat in a bloke's face. Very considerate of you," he grumbled.

She finally managed to free herself from the dress and she threw it at him, annoyed at the way he was making fun of her. "Get off of me," she yowled, trying to kick him. "You are a pig."

He wrapped his arm around the leg she tried to kick him with and kissed the inside of her thigh. He paused for a moment to admire the picture she made. Messy, rumpled, disgruntled expression, and a double strand of pearls pooled against her throat, glowing against her skin. "Pearls," his tongue danced over her clitoris. "The single most erotic jewel," his tongue flicked over her lazily, making her wonder if he was really commenting on a necklace.

The thought made her squeeze her eyes shut and grab the necklace, holding it to her neck in case he got any ideas. That was not going to happen ever again. The fact that she could think of it as an ever again rather than an ever made her grimace and then gasp as he quit teasing her and did something with his mouth that made her hips lift as she looked down, unable to help herself. He changed the angle of his head and did it again. It was like a hard open-mouthed kiss with suction and one of his fingers rubbing her clitoris between flicks of his tongue. How did he even know or figure out, or think of these things?

He could tell from the way that she was lifting up and opening her legs wider that she wanted his fingers in her. She could have them, as soon as she figured out that she would have to ask. He wasn't in any hurry. It was going to go exactly as he told her, with her on top, skin shimmering with a fine sheen of sweat as she worked herself up and down on his cock, and even with her eyes shut, she would know he was watching her, watching them, joined together.

Only nothing worked out like that for him. It was all to specification. A lot of delicious work breaking down her reluctance to tell him what she wanted and then giving it to her until she was on top and moving in a way that was less about driving him insane with lust than her cramping muscles and his frustration, rapidly collapsing into her awareness of how very sweaty and uncoordinated she was.

So he sat up, and guided her arms over his shoulders, not unaware of the way she steadfastly avoided his eyes. His arms slid under her thighs, feeling the tension quivering under her skin. She was hot and wet, so he grabbed a part of the sheet and used it to blot the parts of her he could reach, kissing her shoulders and throat, rocking her against him until he could feel her clutching at him inside of her. That was when he looked at her. Really looked at her while she tried desperately not to look at him, and saw her for what she was. She wasn't confused. She wasn't in love with him. She was barely eighteen and overwhelmed and she didn't know what to do anymore.

There wasn't a damn thing he could do that wasn't going to hurt her in the end.

~Part: 34~

Sunnydale was small enough to walk from one side of town to the other and back and still have the balance of the evening to kill if you weren't killed first. It was nice, though Oz knew that he really wasn't supposed to think that. He had grown up in a place where everywhere that you would want to go was too far away. Within walking distance were a tiny strip mall, two gas stations, a Burger King, and a lot of houses and churches, but no cemeteries. Sunnydale had seventeen.

He chose St. Louis for his werewolf den. It was the farthest from home, closest to campus, and it was his favorite cemetery. In a space that was roughly oval, there was an angel perched on a column, one cool marble hand outstretched, fingers curled lightly. Tonight she was holding waxy white flowers with dark green foliage. On a night like tonight with the moon nearly full, soft radiant light fell on her face. Her gaze was trained on the grave she was poised over.

He wasn't sure why he liked her so much, but before he had any need to find another place to lock himself up during the full moon, he would find himself here to look at her, serene, solemn, but not without joy, and rarely without a flower loosely clasped in her outstretched hand like an offering.

The crypt was in the center of the cemetery, built into the ground, with weeds growing up between the stone stairs. It was the same crypt where they had incarcerated Harmony, and after he left the angel and started walking toward the crypt, he realized that no one had bothered to clean it out.

Reluctant to go in alone, at night, even armed with a stake, he headed home, more or less retracing his steps from Buffy's house. He lived closest to her. Xander was closer to the center of town and Giles. Willow was farthest away, but nearer to the burnt-out high school.

He came in through the front door, and walked through the darkened house, half-expecting his mother to be in bed, but she was out on the enclosed porch behind the kitchen. He made a bowl of cereal and went out to join her. She looked tired when she smiled at him.

He had a memory of her not long after they moved into the house on Mamoroneck Drive. It was the first day of school and he was in the second grade. The elementary school was across a four-lane street. There was supposed to be a crossing guard out there, but for some reason the guard wasn't there when they reached the corner, and the traffic was heavy.

There was just time to walk him to the corner before she had to go to work, and barely that, and he had felt her trying not to walk too fast the whole way to the corner. Now that they were there, with no one to stop the traffic, and time passing, there was no clear way to cross the street. But she smiled, like it was expected, to reassure him, and he thought that she looked tired. Like now.

It worked out, though. A bus, pulling into the school driveway had stopped on the diagonal of the intersection and opened its door to activate the lights and stop sign on the bus. The traffic stopped, and he crossed the street.

"Devon called," she told him, moving over to make room for him on the cushioned wicker sofa. "He's found a house to rent near campus and wants to know if you want to look at it or if he should just go ahead and rent it," she tilted her head to one side. "I told him as far as the money went it was in the right price range."

"I'll call him in the morning."

She waited for a moment. "No news?"

He gave a spare shake of his head. "It's late. Don't you have to work tomorrow?"

"I keep thinking about them. The Rosenbergs. They don't know, and . . . it makes me angry. At them," she clarified. "In the first few months, after-" she glanced over at him, feeling suddenly that she had started to tell him something that he didn't need to know on top of everything else.

A film of milk clung to his lower lip and the smell of milk and sugary cereal reached her.

When she stopped, he looked over at her, wondering which 'after' she was thinking of. He didn't really remember the before of his life when his father was still a part of it. His earliest memories were divided between spending the night, which sometimes stretched into a weekend or a week at his grandparents, and an apartment that felt like someone else's home to him. He preferred staying with his grandparents. Probably because they let him do anything he wanted to, like make tents of sheets thumbtacked to walls. The memory of that made him smile. He knew that his mother's relationship with her parents was difficult. Distance had improved it, but it had something to do with the fact that they were no longer necessary.

His aunt Christie had explained it to him before they moved, when his mother and grandparents were fighting over the prospect of their moving to California. It was something she wryly described as boundary issues. His grandparents needed to feel needed. His mother needed to not feel like a failure for needing them. She probably had not meant to imply that needing people was a bad thing. None of them had. It was just the way it worked out.

There was something that she needed to say. That was the hardest thing of all. Needing help to pay the rent or the car payment could be frightening and humiliating, but needing to say things and always having to gauge the appropriateness of those boundaries because they had been broken was harder.

Aunt Christie had explained that too. "We know too much about our parents' lives. Things that we should never have been told, and your mother is scared of doing that to you. She's scared of making you the bearer of her burdens."

They sat like that for a while. He finished his cereal, but he stayed on the sofa, holding the bowl with the milk warming, feeling the smell of it crawling over nerve endings in an increasingly unpleasant way.

"It's so fragile," she said at last. "You think that you can go through life without ever being touched by bad things. By stories that you read in the newspaper or see on television, by incomprehensible things. And then something happens and you see that it was always like that. The distance from the door to your car. The space of nighttime, when you should be sleeping, is full of hazards that have nothing to do with you. It isn't because of something you did or didn't do. It makes me angry that they don't know that, and it makes me angrier that I might have to tell them and shatter that."

He understood what Christie meant now. How there were things that you could be told by your parents that made you the bearer of their burdens. Not things about your parents, but things about yourself.

"I'm sorry," he said.

She smiled at that, thinking that he meant that he was sorry that she might have to tell the Rosenbergs that Willow was missing or worse. "Don't be. What you are doing is so much more. It scares me to think of what you are dealing with, but I'm so proud of you."

He got a surprisingly good night's sleep and started the next day without calling Giles or Buffy, instead retrieving the van and picking up Devon. They went to see the house that Devon had found for them to rent a few blocks off campus. He dropped Devon off at his house and went back to the cemetery to clean out his cell. It smelled strongly of vampire, and specifically of Harmony. The weirdness of being able to identify the scent as Harmony's made him wonder about how much stronger his sensory perceptions were becoming.

In the beginning, he was almost completely unaware of the changes in him. They were violent and frightening physiological effects that were incomplete, fragmented memories. Sharp demarcations between his humanity and the wolf. He was becoming increasingly aware of the enhancement of his senses. Blocking that out was the only real exercise that he engaged in. There were times, in clubs, when it threatened his equilibrium, and the only thing that seemed to help was to concentrate on one thing. Playing his music. Finding something to focus on.

Willow.

She had no idea. He wouldn't tell her. She thought that he had forgiven her for Xander, and he had, but the need to forgive her was complicated by needing her. The sweater she sometimes slept in was in his bedroom, and the scent of her it carried soothed him. When he felt overwhelmed by the sensory input that swamped him, he concentrated on her, he sought her, and the ferocity of that focus on her could make the whirlwind subside.

It was too much for anyone to bear, to be a totem. The angel in the cemetery was marble. It would never feel the weight of his stare or know itself to be in some way connected to his hold on himself. It would never feel responsible for him. It would never worry about upsetting him. Willow would, which is why he couldn't tell her.

He would not make her the bearer of his burdens.

~~~*~~~

It was almost eleven in the evening when Spike called. Near the end of the longest day of Rupert Giles' life. Having averted at least three arguments between Xander and Angel, they had settled down after dinner to play Castle Risk on a board that he had had since he was in training with the Watchers' Council at their facility on the Isle of Muck. He had once participated in a seventeen-hour game of Risk that ended deadlocked when the brilliant and unpredictable Madeline Chisholm had played the Franco-Austrian block Giles had formed against the Russo-Turk block that their classmate John Grant had formed by weaksiding her defenses against the rival power when she was threatened. She refused offers of alliance on each side, and all but dared them to attack each other.

She died two years later in Tibet, on an assignment; a terrible loss. At the time he thought that the WC had lost a woman who was destined to be the best Watcher, the most obvious choice to guide a Slayer, of their generation. Now he was less than certain of that. It wasn't, in his experience, his job to be brilliant and unpredictable. It was his job to make sure that his Slayer was.

Risk was an interesting game. It was, in some ways, quite revealing. Xander drew England, a small territory, but to Giles' mind the best defensive position on the board. By agreement, since they were short players, the player drawing England also got Turkey and the player drawing Germany was awarded Austria. Xander was prepared to complain until Buffy drew Germany, and then he subsided. Giles had Russia and Angel had France.

Xander kept playing Alliance cards against Buffy in an obvious attempt to diffuse any alliance he suspected that she had already struck with Angel. The cut and thrust of alliances and secret pacts that made Risk so entertaining was paralleled in an all-too-real way in the relationships that existed between them. He was withholding information from his Slayer. So was Angel. Xander didn't trust Angel or Buffy, where Angel was concerned, but he implicitly trusted Giles and left himself open to attack from the north in Turkey.

He didn't whine about it. He didn't suspect that he was being set up, or that Buffy was-not that that was part of Giles' game strategy, just his awareness that what he was doing was likely to be thought of unforgivable. He very, very badly needed to be drunk.

Every time the phone rang, everyone jumped. It was Oz or Joyce checking in, and then Joyce calling again because a message had been left by Shelia Rosenberg while Joyce was at work wondering if they had heard from Willow. To his surprise, Buffy and Xander finally allowed for the possibility that Willow's parents would have to be told some version of the truth.

Giles didn't entirely understand the Rosenbergs. Their somewhat hands-off approach to childrearing seemed odd and inevitable to him. He suspected that the Rosenbergs were luckier than they would ever know in their daughter. The first time he had met them was at the hospital after Willow had been injured in Drusilla's raid on the high school. They were not involved parents, but they were not uncaring either. They had come straight from a golf course in Arizona. Without changing clothes or packing their bags and from the airport, they had come directly to the hospital. That implied a degree of earnest parental concern.

He expected them to have questions that would be difficult to answer, but they barely acknowledged him. If they had noticed his very obvious injuries they gave no sign of it. They weren't interested in how Willow had been injured, and they swallowed the police report whole. It was the doctors and nurses who bore their intense attention. They wanted to know the extent of her injuries and the details of the care plan that had been developed. He was reminded of Willow as he observed. Her ability to shut out distractions and apply herself to problems in a highly-focused way had provenance in her parents' reactions.

He was a pseudo parent. He had been drawn into the odd world of teenagers where friends were relied upon to supply what completed a family. Over the previous summer he spent a great deal of time with Joyce Summers, who did need to understand what had happened and how she had failed to see it happening in front of her. He liked to think that he could have been a parent like Joyce, but he understood that he probably had more in common with Shelia and Ira.

Giles, Joyce, and Marilyn Osbourne had already conferred about this. The truth was simply too difficult and confusing. They had agreed that they would offer to send Xander or Oz to San Jose to check in on Willow, mirroring Oz's call to Joyce that had alerted them to the fact that Willow was missing. If she wasn't back in a day or two, they would have to tell Shelia and Ira that Willow was missing and that they needed to return home.

It was less cruel than to tell them that their daughter was in the hands of a psychopath.

Xander and Buffy left briefly to go by the Rosenbergs' house to pick up mail and then to pick up Oz and dinner from a diner across from the hospital. While they were gone he had an opportunity to get started on a much-needed drinking binge.

"Is it possible that he knows that we have it and that he is playing us?"

It was clear from his expression that Angel had not considered this a possibility. "Because he hasn't called since . . ." he tried to remember the last time Spike had called and realized that it had been a while. "since he talked to Buffy."

Giles nodded. "I've thought that leaving Harmony was a mistake. We could end up dealing with two vampires seeking the same thing."

Angel was prepared to dismiss Harmony as a threat. She was the sort of fledgling that you could size up in an instant and know that they'd never survive. The two older vampires that she had recognized were another matter. "If it doesn't help Spike, I consider it a bonus at this point," Angel said.

Giles finished his drink and poured another one before stepping away from the bottle and sinking into his favorite chair. He gestured to the bottle in a help yourself gesture, but Angel shook his head and sat back in the couch. "We give up the fake Gem of Amara, and we kill him. It's simple."

"He will want to test it before he surrenders Willow," Giles pointed out.

Angel shrugged. "Xander will get to indulge his fantasy of staking me."

"Or I will," Giles muttered to his drink. His attention shifted to Angel, but he wasn't surprised. In fact, he looked like he felt it was deserved.

"Oh, don't be a bloody martyr," Giles growled at him.

He shrugged. "Sorry."

"She'll never forgive us, which is all very well and good for you, but I'm her Watcher. We have . . . trust. And she lives in a world where there is so very little to trust." Giles made a face. "Bloody brilliant. Two fingers of scotch and I'm mawkish."

"At the risk of being accused of being a martyr again, I've already thought about that," Angel leaned forward, lowering his voice. "There is no reason that she needs to know that you knew. I took the ring from Devon when he was leaving. We were testing the torque. I was the only one who knew that it could have been anything else. I never told you. You never knew. Giles . . . she didn't need me to be here for this. She doesn't need me. But, she needs you. And if it goes bad, she will need you even more."

"I know you think we should tell her, and I know why. She may even agree with us. The best chance that everyone has to survive is to try to outsmart Spike. Spike doesn't trust me. He doesn't know you. Xander and Oz aren't even on his radar. If Buffy believes it is the Gem of Amara, Spike will believe it. I don't care what he promised Willow, he will not be able to resist attacking Buffy. That's why Buffy can't know. She has to believe it. He has to look in her eyes and know that she knows that he is coming for her next."

Giles stared at him for a moment. It was no more and no less risky than actually giving Spike the Gem of Amara. This was not about choosing between Buffy and Willow. He tossed back the rest of the drink. "Agreed."

"We will bring her home," Angel said.  For a moment he considered telling Giles what he suspected was going on with Spike. He hadn't called because he was otherwise occupied. It wasn't a strategy. It was distraction.

~~~*~~~

Spike put off calling. He knew it was bound to change things between them tonight. She'd get guilt-stricken and tense and remember that she mostly hated him even if she had some absurd idea that she didn't hate him. He fed her the rest of the pastry and ordered food from room service. They ate out on the little balcony with the crappy view, blocked by the hotel parking garage.

When she started to look like she knew that she was not supposed to be enjoying it, he pulled her down into his lap and nuzzled her throat. "Softening me up for your next escape attempt, pet?"

She looked startled.

He shook his head, willing her to play along. "You aren't fooling me for a second," he warned.

She sucked in a shallow, startled breath and held it for a second before she let her head rest against his. She looked at him, eyes steady and a little uncertain, but grateful for the pretense.

He put it off for a bit longer. They had pay per view and an Internet connection. Against his better judgment he let Willow log on to the latter. She sat cross-legged on bed that was still made up, with the keyboard in front of her, chewing on her lower lip as she made adjustments to the angle of the keyboard and struggled with the sluggishness of the keyboard. He watched her navigate her way into her email account. Computers had never really interested him, but she had looked startled and so genuinely excited about being able to get on the Internet that he had found himself annoyingly aware of how charmed he was by her enthusiasm.

She didn't have any new mail from Buffy or Oz, which was a little surprising. She had managed to get online before and they didn't give her any credit for that. Willow opened the neglected emails from her parents instead, aware that Spike was reading them too. For dinner he had ordered the appetizer sampler and a steak and baked potato and a bottle of white Zinfandel. The meal came with extra salad dressing. She was almost unpleasantly full and slightly woozy from two glasses of wine.

She read through her parents' notes to her, not really all that surprised that they attributed her lack of response to AOL. Computers were her acknowledged area of expertise and she was scornful of AOL with its Internet for beginners approach to organizing content, clumsy email filters, and aggressive expansion at the cost of reliability.

When she got to the last note she used the remote control to navigate to the reply button, opening a new window. For a moment her hands hovered over the keyboard while she wondered what to say to them. All of their notes came through at once and she was glad that they were enjoying their trip? Everything was going okay for her, but she missed her friends? Eventually they were going to figure out that she had lost her summer internship. The thought made her stomach knot.

When she hit the reply button Spike wondered what she was up to, and stared at the screen as she composed, with a lot of revision, a fairly bland summary of what she had been up to for the last few weeks. From what he had gleaned from the notes she had read her parents were in Europe. Based on the note she was writing, it wasn't hard to figure out that they knew nothing about her extracurricular demon fighting activities with Buffy. There wasn't anything in the note to object to, and it would satisfy any concern that her parents might develop over her silence.

She re-read it before picking up the remote to direct the cursor to the send button, suddenly feeling tired, and too full, and hot with shame. Everything wasn't okay and she could never explain how she had gotten to this point. If her parents had found her in a hotel with a man, half-undressed, the conclusions they would draw-that she had lost her mind, that she was acting out, or abusing their trust in her good sense, would have been unfair, but, at least in part, accurate.

They would see Spike and think, what? That she was infatuated? Fascinated? That he was a big make-up for being a geeky high school loser person? In a way he was all of those things. After he had called room service, he had pulled on his discarded jeans and the blue shirt he wore over the ubiquitous t-shirt, leaving it unbuttoned. He hadn't bothered to restore order to his disordered hair. He was watching her, a bit covertly, at least in that he wasn't letting whatever he was thinking show on his face.

It was an ability she resented almost as much as the inevitable comparison to Oz.

At some point she was going to have to deal with the fact that for reasons that were probably very bad, she was attracted to him. She had an Internet connection and she was a search engine away from articles on Stockholm syndrome, though she instinctively rejected psychosis. It felt too much like an excuse. He had qualities that she responded to. Under her dress she could feel her skin prickling with awareness of him, and she knew what would follow. Sitting Indian style with the pleated skirt of the half-unzipped dress belled around her she was aware of herself in a way that was unnervingly acute.

She had wanted Xander to love her. She had wanted Oz to be her boyfriend. She just wanted Spike. Enough that she could wonder what he would do if she slipped her hand under her skirt and ran her fingers over the parts of her that he was more familiar with than she was. She didn't need to do that; she could simply enjoy the idea of him smiling crookedly if she did. Spike didn't insist that she prove that she wanted him before he let himself want her. He didn't notice her because someone else had. There were probably a half dozen creepy reasons why he did want her, but they were his reasons and he didn't seem to expect her to adopt them as a guide to who she was supposed to be with him.

He saw her expression change. While she was typing she looked intent on her confabulatory exercise. It made him feel slightly uneasy to realize how good she was at lying. He had grown accustomed to thinking otherwise. This summer would be a summer layered in lies that she told her parents, her friends, her boyfriend, and most of all, herself. In a way that he didn't want to examine he recognized it. There were versions of reality that were adapted by need. There were lies that you told until they felt true, until you were as perceived as deceiving.

Willows fingers tightened around the edges of the keyboard. She saw herself bashing Georgia over the head with it and almost felt nostalgic about the burst of violence. Hitting people or people-shaped things was easy in principle. It was a bit more complicated when you could feel the shock of impact running up your arms through a blunt object or hear the wet sound of a soft tissue injury. Gross and awful, really, though she hadn't been thinking that when she hit Georgia the second time. It had been about expediency. It had been like breaking the glass door at the gas station in San Francisco. She didn't know how Buffy kept it all in perspective.

Except she did. Buffy didn't get confused about evil and Angel had helped her with that when he lost his soul and became someone entirely different.

Bashing Spike over the head probably wasn't a great plan. He wasn't preoccupied the way Georgia was. On the balcony, settled in his lap, forced to relax in his grip because he had shifted his hips and propped on foot up on her abandoned chair, using gravity to create a cradle of his body, not looking at him, but out into the uninteresting view of a multilevel parking garage where fat and lazy pigeons circled and settled on the ledges, outlined by the orange light that illuminated the floors of the garage, she was aware of his awareness of her. His fingers moved through her hair, over her neck, skipping under and then over the dress that covered her shoulder. His index finger rested in the crook of her elbow.

She looked up and for a moment their eyes met and held in mutual recognition of the quiet tension that was building while they were lost in their own thoughts. She thought he would say something when he moved, but he was just bringing another cigarette to his lips, and then pausing. She knew he was going to kiss her, and under the dress her skin prickled, starting somewhere around her shins, almost painfully. She could feel the razor-sharpened stubble poking through her skin. Without prompting, she tilted her head enough to be kissed and let her eyes shut as he turned his head to reach her lips.

The first time he had kissed her it had been a distraction from what Georgia was doing. Deliberate and calculating, she realized now with a heavy feeling in her chest. They had probably talked about it before. His lips were hard, pinching her upper lip before relaxing against hers, like he wanted to kiss her urgently, and then appeased by the contact, simply wanted to kiss her. His hand cupped her elbow and then moved down her forearm with enough pressure that she awkwardly touched him, trying to keep her hand outside his open shirt, gripping the collar as his tongue touched hers.

His hand stroked the underside of her arm while his tongue slid against hers in a slow kiss that grew softer and wetter and less urgent, and then gracefully terminated with the withdraw of his tongue, passing over her lower lip lingeringly before his lips caught it, tugging lightly before separating with a sound like a sigh. She thought he would kiss her again, and when he didn't, she opened her eyes.

The corner of his lip turned up in a half smile and he moved to let her up before going back to the business of lighting the cigarette that he still had in his hand.

Even now, his expression was deliberately unreadable. There was just enough wariness in the way he was almost avoiding her gaze to suggest that he didn't really want her to know what he was thinking.

The sliding glass door to the balcony was open and the sheers under the drapes with their heavy backing were pulled out to curl around the open doorway, which suggested that the smoke was getting sucked out in that direction as well. Willow logged out of her email account and was returned to the mail menu. She made herself get up to go into the bathroom. Her stomach felt crampy from too much food and she was too warm. She considered taking another shower. She was probably the cleanest kidnap victim ever. Washing the smell of cigarette smoke and sweat and sex off her skin, covering it with the cloying perfume of soap.

The wine had left a sour taste in her mouth. She brushed her teeth instead, flossed, and then brushed again before washing her face. In one part of her mind she recognized her pre-bedtime rituals. Turning the hot water down, she rinsed the washcloth out and slid the dress down her shoulders to wipe her neck and shoulders, unfastening the pearl necklace when it got in her way. For a moment she examined the clasp, thinking that she had probably been wearing it wrong. The clasp was a tongue and groove mechanism hidden by a silver flower with rhinestones on the petals and faceted black glass or crystal in the center. It looked fussy and old lady-ish to her, like something someone's grandmother would wear.

But most of her kidnapping wardrobe had been selected by vampires that were older than her parents or her grandparents, so that sort of made sense. She dropped the necklace on the countertop and rinsed the washcloth out again before swiping it over her chest in an effort to reduce the overly warm feeling that she had, half-expecting the bathroom door to swing open. She leaned forward to examine the small scabs on her left breast and stomach, trying to decide what they looked like. The bite mark on her neck was pretty unmistakable, and it was going to take buckets of mineral oil and massage to reduce the scar that was bound to form. The other bite marks were more delicate-looking.

She had an unnerving sense of the control that was implied by them that made her drop the washcloth and step back from the mirror. At the time, while he was biting her, she hadn't thought about much more than the fact that it hurt and that she was bleeding and that it was rude. That seemed a little silly, but there it was. It was her blood and it was supposed to be inside her body, and there he was, nibbling on her like she was a candy bar. Since then she hadn't felt much more than relieved and angry on the occasions when he seemed to be thinking about biting her again and refrained.

She pulled the dress back up to cover herself and turned the tap off before leaving the bathroom. Spike was out on the balcony, finishing his cigarette.

When he came back in he asked her if she wanted to pick out a movie to watch, and then he frowned. "What's wrong?"

"I had too much to eat," she said, wanting not to look at him, but feeling compelled to anyway. The same negative pressure that was tugging the sheers out the sliding glass door was pulling the shirt he had put on and not buttoned away from his ribs. Flat, dark nipples contrasted sharply with his skin. She was unnerved by how much she wanted to slip her arms under his shirt and rest her forehead against his chest.

Stockholm syndrome. Research sexual attraction of kidnappee for kidnapper. She tried to take a mental inventory to determine if she felt like she had lost her mind. She didn't feel like she had been driven crazy by anxiety or boredom, and psychosis was sounding better to her with every passing minute. It sounded depressingly like an excuse. She and Buffy had read the Watchers' Diaries about Angelus and his stalking of Drusilla. He driven her mad by utterly and completely destroying her life. It was a consequence of a deliberate campaign and she felt a sharp stab of shame at seeking an easy way out.

He tilted his head to one side. "No," he said. "It's something else. You look like you've seen a ghost, pet."

She went to sit in one of the two chairs at the table that served as both desk and table. Spike had angled the chair to the television. It was the same chair that she had been handcuffed to when she woke up, so sometime while she was sleeping he had dragged the chair here to watch television. In her mind's eye it was alarmingly easy to picture, right down to the slouch.

"I'm having a regularly scheduled freak-out," she told him tightly. "Is that okay?"

His lips pursed. "Don't be snippy."

"It goes with slutty, and it's alliterative."

He smiled at that. "Want to fight?" he asked, like it was nothing more than an alternative to movie watching or kissing or sex.

It probably was from his point of view, she decided, and since he excelled at combat, verbal and otherwise, and was likely to win, she didn't feel like indulging him.

"No, thank you," she said, distracted by the idea of movie watching and kissing that didn't necessarily lead to sex. When she ran her tongue over her lower lip she could feel him there, grasping her lower lip between his.

He walked over to her, squatting down in front of her, his hands grasping the supports of the armrest, effectively trapping her in the chair. "Rather sulk?" He made it sound like a poor choice.

"If you are bored, watch television," she suggested, ready to give fighting its due because it was a lot less confusing. "I'm not an entertainment." She hugged herself to keep from planting a foot against his chest and shoving him away from her.

He studied her defensive posture for a long moment, eyes narrowing thoughtfully. He was pretty sure that he knew what this was about, and she was picking a fight, which wasn't so smart, but probably inevitable. "There's a set of handcuffs somewhere around here. We can put them on you and pretend that what happens next is all about me making you do something and nothing at all about you liking it."

She surprised him. There was a blush creeping into her cheeks, but no embarrassment, or head-ducking confusion. She looked him in the eye. "Oooh, baby," she deadpanned.

"That's not it? I thought you were having a moment because you like shagging me."

She pressed the heel of her hand into her stomach. That should have been exactly it, she realized as the crampy feeling in her stomach intensified.

She waited for him to follow it up with a leer or some other overture that was intended to remind her of her place, but he just tilted his head a little to the side looking like he was trying to figure something out. She touched his face experimentally, catching surprise that flashed in his eyes before his eyelids swept down. Under her fingertips his cheek was slightly raspy, but not unpleasantly so, and his skin was slightly warmer than usual, but he had just come back in from the balcony and it was a warm night.

"You are very stupidly attractive," she told him, sounding solemn, and feeling foolish.

She felt the muscles in his cheek move as his lips twisted into a familiar smirk. The expression was allowed to develop before his eyelids lifted, slowly. It was all so deliberate and calculated, and she felt a wave of  . . . something that felt like affection rise, because he was so unaware that he was doing these things-or it seemed that way to her. He was just being Spike.

She leaned forward, sliding her fingers into his disordered hair, kissing his forehead. "I wish I didn't notice," she told him, stroking the back of his head. If she wasn't crazy, then there had to be some other explanation for the appeal of him. Touching him like this was a kind of experiment.

His eyes drifted shut as he absorbed the sensation of her fingers ruffling and smoothing his hair. She kissed his forehead and the bridge of his nose. He turned his head the slightest bit to find her cheek, zeroing in on the warmth that she shed, nipping at the apple of her cheek while she laid her other hand on his throat. It was, he realized as he felt the tip of her finger feather over his earlobe, the first time she touched him spontaneously, without him insisting on it, or because she was holding onto him while he was touching her in ways that made her feel like she needed to hold on to something.

His hands tightened on the arms of the chair as he waited to see what she would do with it, assuming that her inner Scooby didn't wake up and spoil it for him. She kissed the side of his nose. Inwardly, he rolled his eyes in exasperation, turning his head back toward her lips to give her a hint.

She paused at the corner of his mouth. "This doesn't mean that I l-love you," she stumbled over the word, sounding awkward and looking slightly horrified that she even used the word. "It just means that I like you more than I should."

He had started to turn his head to chase her lips, tired of waiting for her to kiss him, when what she said reached him and he hesitated. When she was solemn and uncertain, she sounded like a little girl, her voice thickening silkily, but for once she had foregone her slightly silly, babyish vocabulary, as if she recognized that she couldn't hide behind it. There was a gaping pit opening up right in front of him. The sensible thing to do would be to ignore it, to catch her lower lip between his, take the initiative away from her, and lead her down the infinitely safer path of sex and emotional ambiguity. He backed off to look at her instead. She wasn't crying or on the verge of hysterics, which was good. She looked like she shared his reluctance to examine what liking him more than she should meant.

Willow looked at him warily, not sure what to expect. He had been quiet after her pronouncement, and he was looking at her now with an expression and that was hard to read. His lips were pursed in thought. With his hair mused, it made him look younger and less sure of himself. It was the last thing she wanted to see in him. It made her realize how ruined he was. If he wasn't a vampire and evil and selfish and deadly, then he might have been so much more. There were little glimpses of it. He was smart. Much more so than they had ever given him credit for being, and he had a quick, quirky sense of humor, and he could be likable when he wasn't being scary, and sometimes when he was being scary, and you could see the sheer joy of it in him and it almost hurt to think what it might be like to be included in that feeling.

Without the scariness. She drew in a quick, startled breath, feeling the hair on the back of her neck prickle as her mind stumbled over the idea that this was part of what she was attracted to. Not the scariness, but the way he enjoyed it. The way he enjoyed what he was. It wasn't the idea that she liked having sex with him that was scary. She had sorted that out a while ago, with his helpful commentary on nerve endings and hormones as the supplemental text. It was the idea that she liked him that was wrong, not just in a handful of qualities that she saw glimpses of and to some extent admired, but in a way that could see something likeable in his worst qualities.

He likes to kill people, she reminded herself.

Angel hated being a vampire. Angelus just hated with a coldly clinical passion for destruction. His was a personality, even in duality, that was informed by resentment. For Spike, hate was like the coat, something he wore lightly that he cast off as it suited him, something that disguised him. What remained the same was the engagement. Right now it was directed at her, and it there was something in it that answered a need she didn't want to know that she had.

If Oz loved her the way it seemed that Spike could . . . would she have ever thought about Xander again? Would she have ever closed her eyes and imagined Oz doing things to her that Spike did?

His gaze flicked to her, and his eyes narrowed slightly. Her heart thudded dully in her chest. She half-expected him to say something awful, though she wasn't quite sure what would be hard to hear.

Belatedly realizing that her hands were keeping him in front of her, she started to withdraw them, and he made an almost imperceptible sound that she registered as a protest. He heard it too, and his expression turned rueful, a half smile twisting his lips.

"You must think I'm dumb," she said, wondering why he was holding back on the observation. It really wasn't like him.

"No," he gave a spare shake of his head. Actually, he was kind of amazed that she had figured it out in a way that made sense. He didn't love her, though he liked her enough to wonder about it in an uneasy sort of way, and was relieved that there was an alternative explanation. It was the lack of disloyalty to Drusilla that had puzzled him, and if he liked her, if he was fond of her after a fashion, amused and entertained, and drawn to her, then she didn't encroach on what he felt about Dru in any way. It was as simple as that. He liked her. He had seen things in her that he was moved to appreciate.

And it wasn't casual. He thought that she recognized that too. For a long puzzled moment he tried to find a common point of reference. He had lived for a century and more. He had to have known someone that shared some quality with her that he would recognize. He liked Georgia, but she didn't inspire inconvenient loyalties or a peculiar sense of responsibility. That complicated things a bit, and he could see that she was aware of it too. He had no vocabulary for what she was to him, just a growing awareness that it was more than he expected and that it wasn't a bad feeling.

He tilted his head toward the television. "Movie?" he asked, willing to let it drop if she was.

She nodded, feeling relieved when he released the arms of the chair and stood, pivoting away from her to look for the remote control to the television. For a few seconds her field of vision was restricted to his abdomen, and the movement of muscles under skin, casually draped by his open shirt above the waistband of his jeans. It wasn't mind bending to grasp the attraction. He was attractive. The idea that she liked him wasn't really new either. After Angelus, she had regarded Spike with a certain degree of sympathy. Unlike Angelus or Drusilla, he hadn't killed any of her friends-unless you counted Shelia, and Willow wasn't sure that she did, or even that Spike killed her, though it seemed certain that he was involved when she tried to kill Buffy on Parent Teacher night.

She didn't count Ford either, because he went looking for a vampire to help him and offered to betray Buffy in exchange for joining the soulless undead. There were times when she thought that Xander oversimplified because he was . . . determined to put himself on the simple side of everything, but to Xander there was no difference between the vampire that killed Jesse, the vampire that Jesse became, and any other vampire. But he had staked Jesse, and he had to believe that there was no difference.

The fact that Spike killed people at all was bad-but he hadn't hurt her. Not really, not in any way that he would have grasped. In an evil, amoral, relentless sort of way, he was actually nice to her most of the time.  The thought made her frown at the realization that she had startlingly low standards.

She still liked the idea that she was going crazy better.

He had logged her off the Internet and was in the pay per view menu, scrolling through the options. She didn't want to watch a movie.

'Call them,' the voice in his head nagged. The mood that he had been reluctant to spoil with reality was gone. "See anything that you want to watch?" he asked instead, putting it off.

Willow stood up. He was right there in front of her. When he put the shirt on the collar, limp from wear, had gotten caught against his neck. She was surprised that he hadn't noticed it before now. Maybe it had gotten tucked down against his neck when they were on the balcony. Had she done that when he was kissing her? He was particular about his clothes. His t-shirts were always tucked in, smoothed down from the ribs before he finished zipping and buttoning his jeans and fastening his belt. She reached up to straighten it, keeping her eyes level with his neck as she slipped her fingers in against his neck to free the shirt point and turn it down on the outside of the collar.

He watched her out of the corner of his eye, wondering what she would do next, relatively sure that if he said anything it would be wrong. She didn't look like she had any idea what she was doing. Once she had the shirt collar sorted, her fingers rested on him for a moment and then she withdrew her hand and stepped around him to the space between the two beds.

Hotel beds were not designed for comfort, at least not for sitting up in bed and watching movies. Spike appropriated the pillows from both beds. There was an awkward moment when he caught her arm, at the elbow, standing behind her while he slipped the loose dress over her shoulders, letting the weight of the fabric carry it down to her waist where it caught. She closed her eyes, feeling her head spin a little as he kissed her neck, certain that he was looking over her shoulder, down her chest, observing the impact of his lips and tongue on her throat.

Kill me now, she thought, lips compressed to keep the words from escaping just in case he decided to take it literally.

For a moment it was hard to breathe. The weight that settled on her chest was crushing her. His hands rested on her waist for a moment and he did something completely unexpected. He rubbed her slightly-distended, overly-full stomach. It made her open her eyes and turn her head to look at him, but he ducked his head and kissed her shoulder, pushing the dress over her hips to fall at her feet.

"Get in bed," he said, nudging her toward the bed. After she moved away from the inside edge to the side of the bed near the wall, he pulled the sheet and blanket up around her, tucking them around her. It wasn't uncomfortable. She rearranged the pillows to tuck one between her shoulder and cheek and settled in to watch the movie she had selected as he moved around the room, turning out most of the lights, smoking a cigarette near the open sliding door to the balcony. He stepped out to retrieve the bottle of wine.

In the flickering light from the television, she watched him undress while she wished that she could pretend that she wasn't and then wondered why she should. He watched her. When he was doing things to her with his mouth and fingers, when he was inside her and she opened her eyes for a moment that was one thing she could count on. He would be watching her. Colored light washed over his shoulders as he took the shirt off, outlining his hip as it was exposed.

She half expected him to call her on it, to wait to catch her, and then to revel in her discomfort at being caught, but he walked past the television and she could hear him locking the door to the hallway. The bed gave as he got in, behind her, outside the blanket he had tucked around her. He worked his arm under the pillows, under her neck while the other settled over her, his hand splayed over her stomach. She waited for his hand to drift lower, to press against her intimately.

Waited, feeling him behind her as his weight shifted and settled. Wanted it so badly that the words formed in her mouth and stuck there as she realized that he wasn't doing anything more than making it easier for her to rest against him.

It wasn't uncomfortable. Oz didn't like to snuggle like this and they were too much the same height to fit together comfortably. He was high enough in the bed to be able to see the television without having to lift his head to see over hers. She bent her legs at the knee and he folded into her adjustment neatly. With a pang, she remembered before Oz, when she used to imagine being like this with Xander, snuggled up watching movies together and she would hug herself, imagining that it was him, and the weight that squeezed her chest came back with a vengeance.

Spike misinterpreted it, feeling her tense and hearing the slight change in her breathing, he rubbed her stomach soothingly until she untangled the arm under his and caught his wrist, her fingers wrapping around it, holding it until he stilled. She no longer knew what she wanted, except that she did know. She just couldn't bring herself to say it. She carried his hand to her mouth, pressing his palm against her lips until he shifted his wrist and lightly covered her mouth in a tiny moment of recognition that was acknowledged with nothing more than his hand, covering her mouth in a parody of coercion as he shifted behind her, pulling her more firmly against his body.

She thought he would do something more, say something in her ear, but he just held her, watching the movie and for some reason she felt comforted. No one ever hugged her hard enough or long enough. His hand wasn't pressing against her lips so much as holding her face.

There was a simple reason for all of this, Willow thought, and made herself repeat it in her head while he touched her, feeling his thumb make a circuit that started with her eyebrow and swept down over her cheek before starting again. She didn't know what it was, but there had to be a reason and once she understood it she would know how to deal with it. She liked him, but it could be that she was crazy, and that was okay for now.

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