Odalisque

Author: Elen

Parts: 11 - 15

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~Part: 11~

The dog Angelus acquired for Drusilla was a silky King Charles spaniel. He was a little old, and very sweet tempered, and when Dru brushed him he would stand, shivering a little, his tail sweeping back and forth. Willow kept him fed and watered and took care of walking him to do his business. Dru named him Mr. Buttons, because his eyes looked like wet, shiny black buttons.

He let Dru tie ribbons in his hair, dress him in her doll clothes, carry him around slung over her arm, and sleep with him under her chin. When he saw Willow he tended to chase at her, latching onto her skirt to yank on it.

Ingrate, Willow thought as he grabbed her skirt, shaking his head back and forth, a low growl vibrating in his throat. She gave her skirt a tug. "Stop it!" she hissed at him.

Mr. Buttons bared his teeth and tugged harder.

Lucius stopped down gracefully and pinched the little dog's ear hard. He relinquished his grip with a yelp, and raced back down the hall to fling himself against Dru's closed door, scratching at the wood panel and whimpering frantically to be let in.

"Thank you," she said to the vampire, who had since risen to his full height.

She didn't expect a response, or receive one, and continued, down the steps. William had made good on his threat to burn her clothes, and a new wardrobe had been procured. She was wearing a yellow morning dress that gathered below her breasts and fell straight to the ground. He watched her. When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she turned left and disappeared from view.

Watching was permitted. He could even speak to her if he wished.

Before he had died, he had thought himself past any desire to hurt her, but he was a vampire, and hurting people came second only to killing them in the order of things he desired. He knew he was not alone in this. Some of the other minions could hardly look at her without their thoughts showing. Lucius liked to think he had a bit more control than that. He liked to watch her. He liked to talk to her. The slight degree of discomfort she had around him wasn't fear, but it was pleasant to witness and feel responsible for creating.

In the midst of a change so profound that Lucius occasionally found himself staring into a middle distance, entranced by the heady feeling of power he now had, the house had a rhythm and demands that had to be met, and he remained a part of that. The four vampires who were lodged on the second floor were at the top of the hierarchy. The minions, of whom he was one, were allowed to sort themselves out with interference that was deliberate, playful, or accidental from above-you could never really tell.

How the girl fit in was that she was off limits, and you had to be careful about ignoring her. Paulus had learned that. She had asked him to carry something for her out of the library and into the salon. The former footman had stared at her for a long moment and very deliberately walked away.

The message was very clear. They were vampires. She was not. They did not have to do anything at the biding of a mere mortal, and would not.

Paulus had disappeared for a day and a half into the dark hole below the kitchen, denied the hunt. William had beaten him, without giving any reason for it, which should have been understood to be unusual. William was nothing if not direct. Darla and Angelus were subtle and cruel. William was brutal and direct.

The way Lucius saw it, they wouldn't ever actually say that the girl had some standing that required respect, obedience, or loyalty. She was human. She was prey. But, at the same time, there was the real possibility of provoking William if he was in a mood to be annoyed, and there was always the possibility that the girl was intent on some task that Darla or Angelus set for her.

Andreas found himself before the Master explaining his failure to render some minor assistance to the girl. Andreas had pointed out that the girl had not told him that the task she had undertaken was on his behalf, and Angelus' attention had switched to her.

"Is that true?" he demanded.

"Yes," she conceded.

"Then how was Andreas to know?" he asked.

She considered that for a moment. "Without asking? Sounds like a riddle to me," she observed, making it clear that she would not make it her problem.

It was the precision in which she spoke that made her position perfectly clear. She could not compel anyone to do anything with a politely worded request, but if they failed to comply they took the risk that they were failing, not her, but the Master. She neatly implied that there was an out-they could ask a relatively simple question before deciding how to proceed. Still, Lucius half expected Angelus to punish her for this, but he simply laughed at her logic and dismissed her with a wave.
~~~*~~~
 

Willow made herself a pot of tea and opened a tin of shortbread that had mysteriously appeared. Long before the family had arrived, arrangements had been made with local merchants for the regular delivery of food, wine and liquor, coal, firewood, ice, and other necessities that reflected the function of a household of the size their numbers indicated. Most of the food left the house to be dispensed to the poor. Twice a week men from the synagogues in the Jewish quarter arrived in the early hours of the morning to take away items that she left for them.

There was a certain amount of danger in this, which ensured that the activity would be conducted with discretion by all involved.

Drusilla consumed nothing but blood. Angelus and Darla enjoyed wine, brandy, sherry, and might sample other luxury goods if the mood struck. William liked to nibble, though his tastes tended to revolve around things that might accompany a good English styled tea. She was the only person in the household that actually required food, and most of the time eating was a chore for her. There was the bother of preparing food for one person, and then the consumption of food that was a constant reminder of the continuation of a life cycle that she was ever conscious of her desire to end.

She took her tea into the library and retrieved the mail placed on a silver salver in the foyer. Wafers were removed to be placed in a section of the rosewood tray where her writing supplies were stored. The mail was then sorted into categories. Calling cards and invitations were stacked for Angelus and Darla to read. The bills from trades people were read over and the sums entered into the ledger for the household expenses and then bundled for the estate agent to deal with.

Her meticulous attention to this task was a way of extending it to consume another chunk of her day.

Invitations to parties had started pouring in immediately after the family had arrived. Angelus and Darla liked to move amongst the best circles. They took subscriptions to the opera and theatre, and Angelus maintained a voluminous correspondence with people he had met and deemed useful over the years.

At mid-day the household began to stir to life. Angelus joined her in the library, and she rose to pour a glass of wine for him, which he sipped while he read through the mail she had set aside for him and wrote the replies that he indicated that she would address for him. Dru wandered in with Mr. Buttons slung under her arm and she dumped the dog in Willow's lap, his sharp toenails digging into her thighs. Angelus frowned at the dog, and at her for her role in saddling them with the dog, and told her to walk the mutt.

She was in the foyer putting her outerwear on when William came down the stairs. Mr. Buttons, in a demonstration of doggy discretion, made sure to put himself on the opposite side of Willow, inadvertently tangling his leash around her skirt, under her coat.

He untangled the leash for her and finished buttoning her coat until the fur collar was snugly secured, the silky fibers tickling her jaw. "When you are done with your walk, I'll expect you upstairs," he told her.

She walked Mr. Buttons. They had a predictable route, twice around the square with a visit to the small park. He was well behaved on their walks, trotting beside her with an eager air of interest in the familiar surroundings that she was unaware that she mirrored, smiling shyly at the accustomed sight of a nanny from one of the neighboring houses whose charges paused to pet Mr. Buttons before going back to their games. Dog walking was a task usually left to servants, so the odd English girl walking her dog had not gone unnoted, and in fact, at times she was observed with great attention by at least one young man who made a point to always walk the park at certain hours of the day.

The temptation to create an opportunity to speak to her was tempered by the presence of his companion. To the casual observer, they were a young man in his mid-twenties, who moved with determination and a pronounced limp, aided by a cane, and a man, perhaps a decade older, who stood ready to offer assistance that was never asked for. The limp was very real. It was the result of a near fatal encounter with a Fiyarl demon in Berlin six months ago in what was meant to be an anthropological exercise that had gone badly when he had gotten too close to the demon he was observing.

He was supposed to have learned a lesson in caution from the experience, but his older companion was ruefully aware of how lightly it was regarded. The girl really wasn't their quarry, but Harry was simply fascinated by her. She had been spotted in Paris and Lisbon, but it was Harry who figured out that she was the same woman, and back tracked through records and notes to find that she had been spotted with the four vampires they were watching at different times, in different places, going back at least six years. She was undeniably human, and possibly, a witch unless her patronage of magic shops in Paris and Lisbon was on behalf of one of the vampires, possibly the mad woman that was rumored to have stunningly accurate visions.

She had rather abruptly disappeared from view about three months ago while the Scourge of Europe was idling in Portugal, and the most obvious conclusion was that she was dead. The four vampires were the Watcher's Counsel's particular interest, so her absence was noted without further inquiry. Once the vampires had been traced to Prague, the two Watchers had been dispatched to observe them.

It was a dangerous business. Other Watchers given similar assignments had disappeared in the past, and for nearly forty years, the Counsel had sealed the records on the Scourge, They moved around too much, and there were more dangerous Masters controlling the vampire populations of major European and Asian cities who demanded more attention. It was believed that the Scourge sprang from the line of Aurelius, headed by a truly ancient and powerful Master vampire who had headquartered himself in London for a century. They represented something of an anomaly, living amongst humans, a quartet loyal only to each other. The minions that they created were simply tools, discarded when they were no longer useful. Building a power base seemed to have no interest to them. They lived like birds of prey, constantly on the hunt, leaving carnage in their wake.

There was a Master in Prague, and the presence of the cadet branch of the Aurelius clan in her territory was a challenge that she had backed away from for the moment, which was bound to cause problems.

Finding the girl in Prague had been a surprise. It suggested that there was more to her presence in the household than the obvious. Harry had immediately posted to London a plan that they take the girl and spirit her to London to be questioned. London had yet to offer a reply to that plan, so they watched her without being too obvious about it. A complete lack of curiosity or attention would have drawn as much attention as not, so it was a fine line they walked as Harry stepped aside on the gravel path, tipping his hat to her as she passed with her dog.

She ducked her head, murmuring a bland greeting in German. The dog's tail wagged and he gave a sharp bark, eyeing Harry's cane with an unmistakable gleam of interest before he lifted his leg.

"Mr. Buttons!" she moaned, mortified, trying to tug the dog away.

Harry laughed heartily, standing slightly behind him, David smiled reassuringly.

"I'm so sorry," she said, having slipped into English, and then realizing her lapse, repeating the apology in German.

"Please don't feel that you need to apologize," Harry said in English, cocking his head as he smiled at her. "It is such a pleasure to hear someone speak English that your dog may consider my walking stick his to-"

"Mr. Wyndham!" David said reprovingly, playing his role perfectly.

"Oh, dear," Harry shook his head, "Now, I'm afraid I must apologize," he said. "I most humbly beg your pardon, dear lady," he said gravely, adding a little bow.

She looked a little flustered, either by the fact that she was talking to two men she had not been introduced to properly, or simply by the fact that she was talking in English. It was hard to know.

David gave her a small bow, "M'am," he said, and she took the moment to urge the dog to move and continued on her way past them.

Harry limped over to a bench to sit for a moment, trying not to look as exhilarated as he felt at having made contact with her. "Pretty little thing," he said blandly, cutting his eyes at David, who looked very annoyed and didn't bother hiding it.

"You ass," he said. "For all you know, she's not to talk to anyone and you are going to get her killed," David Giles told him.

Harry's eyes narrowed. He still had hopes that London would agree to his proposal to take the girl alive and interrogate her.
~~~*~~~
 

Once Mr. Buttons' leash was unsnapped, he took off at a trot, his nose in the air as he sought out Drusilla. In the salon, Darla lifted her head from a book she was reading to watch the former Cook not offer any assistance to Willow as she removed her outerwear. It made him nervous as he wondered if he should take the girl's coat and gloves while his demon rebelled at the notion.

She hung her things up and went up the stairs without taking any notice of his discomfort. She let herself into her room, finding it almost as she left it that morning. The bed was neatly made. A book she was reading rested on the table on what she thought of as her side of the bed. On her pillow was a velvet box.

"Curious?" William asked, his arms sliding around her from behind.

She hadn't heard him come up from behind her, which was deliberate. He liked scaring her like that.

It would have surprised both of them if they knew that the Watchers were speculating about the possibility that they had placed her in any kind of danger by speaking to her.

She looked at the box. From the size and shape of it, it appeared to be jewelry. "Are we going out this evening?" she asked.

He laughed. "Probably. Might take you with us, too," he added, steering her out into the hall, his fingers working the cloth covered buttons at her back until he had loosened them enough to gain access to her exposed back. He steered her down the hall, past Drusilla's door, and through the slightly ajar door to Angelus' room. "We're bored," he told her as she took in the sight before her.

Angelus was sitting in an armchair, naked with Lucius on his knees in front of him, sucking his cock, his hands bound behind him.

Matilde was there too, standing off to one side, watching them. She had that hungry look that minions always seemed to have. William kicked the door shut, making Willow flinch at the sound.

She unbuttoned her sleeves while William finished unbuttoning her dress, smoothing it off her shoulders to slide to the floor. The dress was so loosely fitted that she had not worn stays. William removed her half boots and rolled her stockings down to slip over her feet. She raised her arms to help him take her chemise off. Once she was naked, he kissed the palms of her hands and brought them to his body. By the standards of the day, he was hardly dressed at all, no coat or waistcoat, just a shirt, loosely knotted cravat, braces, trousers, and socks. She worked the knot loose and unwound the cravat.

He took it from her with a thoughtful look, folding it lengthwise between his fingers.

"Take your hair down, pet," he said.

She removed the hairpins with one hand, holding them in her free hand. His hands moved over her, lightly, fingertips grazing her breasts, skimming over her ribs, one hand slipping down to the apex of her thighs to brush against the soft nest of auburn curls there. When she removed the last pin, he took them from her, put them in his pocket, handing her the folded cravat.

She wasn't sure what he wanted her to do with it, so she waited. He ran his fingers through her hair, massaging her scalp, making her shiver as her scalp tingled with the pleasurable pain of having the weight of her hair shifted. His lips brushed her ear. "Cover your eyes," he ordered.

It was the most likely and least frightening of many possibilities. She lifted the cloth cover her eyes and tied it behind her head, tightly, without further instruction.

"Now, finish undressing me," he commanded.

It required concentration and thought. She closed her eyes behind the blindfold, trying to remember exactly what he was wearing. When she had a good mental picture, her hands moved over his chest, seeking the waistband of his trousers, finding the buttons that held it closed. When the waistband was open, her hands moved back to his shoulders to push the braces over his shoulders. She followed their decent on the left side of his body to find the buttons at the cuff of his shirt, unfastening them. His right hand brushed her inner thigh and she automatically opened her legs to him. When he didn't follow up on that she started to bring her feet together, and his foot nudged her leg back.

Her hands moved over him searchingly, finding his right arm, and the brace that had slipped to his upper arm, she move that down to his wrist, slipping it free before returning to his wrist to find the buttons to the cuff of his sleeve while his left hand cupped her breast, his fingers pinching and tugging on her nipple. When she freed his right wrist his hand slid between her legs, his middle finger penetrating her without any preliminaries. Just as abruptly it was gone and the finger he had pushed inside of her was brought to her lips to trace the outline of her upper and lower lip.

"I didn't tell you to stop," he warned her, watching her chest rise and fall unevenly.

Even with his mouth full of cock and his nose buried in the musky, intoxicating scent of the Master, Lucius could smell the rich perfume of the girl's cunt. His cock twitched. The cock in his mouth twitched.

She finished unbuttoning his shirt, tugging it free and sliding it over his shoulders. Having completed that task successfully, William cupped her face in his hands and kissed her mouth lingeringly.

She finished unbuttoning his trousers, pushing them down over his hips, using his body to support herself as she sank to her knees to free one leg from his trousers followed by the sock he wore, and then the other.

"You did that very well, pet," William told her, his hand falling on her head. "Stand up," he ordered. "I want you on the bed. It's behind you. On your knees, with your head down. Do you understand me?"

"Yes," she said, her voice very small, almost childlike.

She found the bed in three steps feeling around as she arranged herself according to his instructions.

With a twist of his hips and a grunt, the Master spilled himself in Lucius' mouth. He waiting impatiently while Lucius swallowed and then licked his semi-hard cock clean, and then pushed him away, snapping his fingers at Matilde, who brought him his lap desk, paper and pencils. William, naked, his erect member bobbing, took a sip of whiskey and lit one of the cheroots he was so fond of, watching his lover. There was a hint of anxiety in his expression.

Angelus glanced at Lucius, who was still sitting at his feet. "Fix me a drink," he ordered in a bored tone of voice, picking up a pencil.

Deprived of sight, Willow tried to make sense of the sounds she heard in the room, which seemed unnaturally loud as she tried to stay still. With her head down, she knew that her ass would be thrust out, her cunt clearly visible to anyone who was in the room. She had lost track of William. Once Matilde and Lucius started moving around, it became too difficult to figure out where everyone was in the room, and for all she knew, Angelus was moving too. The vampires could move with undetectable speed and stealth.

She dug her fingers into the counterpane below her.

The buds of her toes were curled up. Angelus started there, with her cute little feet, slim, with pretty arches, and the curled up toes, indicating a certain amount of tension. He made a mental note to pay attention to her feet as he sketched her in different positions this afternoon. When he got a rough outline completed, he nodded to William who grinned and took a last draw on his cheroot, chased by a mouthful of whiskey.

He pushed her over on her back, an instant later, sliding inside her with a feral growl, braced on his arms, the muscular planes of his chest gleaming in the gaslight, making Lucius' mouth go dry. He had allowed his face to change, amber eyes glowing. To free his hands, he knelt, with his legs under him, his hands lifting her hips. Lucius watched the glistening length of his cock slide out of her, and then disappear within her as his hands forced her back to arch more.

He moved one of her hands to her breast and the other to the soft, springing curls between her legs. The Master watched them intently, his pencil moving, seemingly at random, long, curving lines and hatch marks slowly resolving into a coherent picture. He caught the elegant tension in her neck, and the way her hair fell around her as each thrust shifted her a little on the counterpane.

They weren't quiet, hardly a revelation. The sounds of their coupling were heard in the house with predictable regularity. He was more direct, speaking to her, using his voice as well as his hands to stimulate her. She was less coherent. Color stained her face, from exertion and possibly embarrassment. Their bodies came together wetly, the bed creaked, the Master's pencil scratched softly on paper, her breathless sounds measured out her rising pleasure.

It was monstrous and terrible, tender and beautiful. Nothing like he had imagined.

He felt the flutter of her cunt. Her fingers were rubbing her clit in a slow circular motion that was starting to take her beyond the awkwardness of the moment. She felt a little stiff in his arms, self conscious and worried about doing the wrong thing in front of Angelus. He slid his arms under her back, lifting her, kissing the center of her chest as she wrapped one arm around his shoulders, twisting her hips as she rode his cock with his help. He kissed the upper swell of his breast, his tongue stroking her skin. His fangs sank in, just breaking her skin to taste her, hearing her cry out his name as she came.

He had no more than a sip before he retracted his fangs and licked her broken skin,  the sound of her heart beat loud in his ears. Finding the hand that had been working her clit, he brought it to his mouth, sampling the taste on her fingertips. Once freed from his mouth, her fingers tentatively explored his face.

His hands guided her hips, making her lift up and settle on his cock again, a soft sighing sound escaping her. He turned his face into her palm, kissing it, his lips moved to her wrist. He opened his mouth wider, face changing as he caught her wrist in his teeth, holding it lightly, without breaking her skin, a rumbling purr erupting from his throat as his tongue pressed against her pulse.

Her forehead fell forward, against his jaw, following the shape, her lips sought his throat, imitating his play with her wrist. His head fell back, releasing her wrist, the purr becoming a low frequency growl. She rose and lowered herself on him, getting one foot under her for leverage. One of her hands tangled in his hair, the other counterbalanced her weight, braced over his shoulder as she began to move more confidently.

In his fantasies, Lucius had assigned to her the chilly detachment of the whores that he had known, or the place of the women he had taken since his own change-passive and cringing, glassy eyed with shock as he learned that it was possible to fuck someone to death. His first kill like that had been a tender little redheaded girl that he had found hurrying home shortly after dusk. But, Willow  was wanton, spreading eager kisses over her lover's throat, sucking on his chin as she fucked him, the creamy white ends of the improvised blindfold tangling in the long hair William's hands gathered and sifted through.

The sounds they were making had a certain coherency now. They were sounds each understood and responded to, with caresses and kisses, and changes in the tempo of their bodies coming together. She arched her back to bring her breasts into contact with his chest and his hand followed the arch of her back, resting on the small of her back above her ass, urging her to bear down on him harder with an impatient sound, muffled by their mouths as they kissed passionately.

The bed was the largest in the house, a massive four-poster hung with drapes that could be closed to make a small room. The counterpane was a rich gold brocade. The colors were an homage to the ivory and gold beauty of the true Mistress of the house, but it was hard to imagine that they suited anyone more than the girl wantonly fucking William for the Master's entertainment.

It had become too much for Matilde. She was leaning against the wall beside the sideboard, her simple, drab brown skirt rucked up to her waist, her hand inside her drawers as she fingered herself. The Master paused in his sketching, holding his wineglass up to be refilled. Lucius' hand shook a little, but he managed to pour without spilling a drop.

"You can leave us now, and take that," the Master indicated Matilde, "with you," he smiled. "Since she's so anxious to be fucked, see that she is, by anyone who is willing to rut with her."

Lucius crossed the room, replacing the wine decanter on the table. Suspecting that Matilde's behavior had gotten them both ejected from the room, he wasn't gentle about removing her, feeling cheated.

Angelus set aside his sketchpad and walked over to the bed. From the sound of it, the girl was peaking, her slim body shaking as she reached her second orgasm. William nuzzled her throat, nibbling on her earlobe as her mouth opened, trembling in a soundless cry of completion. He moved in behind his boy, his beautiful seemingly soft, boy. He had never known a creature in life or death that seemed more complete than William. He was willful, and stubborn, and led by his dick, but he drank more fully from life than anyone Angelus knew. He kissed his neck, feeling him tremble. His fingers pinched his nipples, twisting them.

Dru might have sired him, but Angelus had been the one to shape him since Dru was incapable of providing any guidance to her childe. Holding William firmly, with one arm wrapped around his chest, he pushed Willow off of him. William didn't entirely release her, leaning against the arm that restrained him as he eased her down on the mattress, his cock slipping out of her.

Her chest rose and fell rapidly, her sweat dampened body twitching as his cock slid out of her. Angelus ran his thumb over her cunt, marveling at the heat she was giving off. He offered his thumb to William, who accepted it, his hands resting on his lover's thighs to keep her from closing them. Angelus pulled his thumb out of William's mouth, his hand moving to grasp the boy's cock, warm and wet from fucking, pumping it vigorously as he dominated his mouth, With his other hand he cupped his balls, making him groan.

He pushed him down, towards the girl and William took the hint, bracing himself on one arm, caressing her breasts, kissing her mouth, his hips moving sinuously as Angelus stroked his cock with one hand. Reaching between William's thighs, he fondled the lips of Willow's hot, wet cunt, avoiding her clitoris, plunging two fingers into her channel. He moved his fingers, lubricated from the girl's cunt, to William's anus, pushing past the puckered aperture, finding the bulge of his prostate and massaging it roughly as he pumped his cock.

He came with a heartfelt groan, his semen erupting in spurts, splashing over Willow's stomach and breasts as Angelus bit into his neck.

William leaned back against him, shuddering as Angelus licked and sucked on his bite mark, his fingers still pumping slowly in his ass. He slapped Willow's hip, hard enough to get her attention. "Rest break is over, you lazy slut," he said, sounding amused. "Get over here and make yourself useful."

William reached out to her, his hands moving from her legs to bring her to him, sensing some of her confusion and uncertainty at Angelus' lack of detail. His hands cupped her face and he kissed her mouth, his tongue stroking hers.

"That's very sweet. Very romantic," Angelus teased, reaching out to fondle one of her breasts.

William broke off the kiss to look at the older vampire. He smiled suddenly. "Baby? Just like you were when we started, on your knees," he told Willow, pushing her head down towards his cock. Angelus' hand tightened on his cock, nudging it towards her lips. "Suck my cock," he ordered.

Angelus decided to accept the unstated invitation formed by the way the girl was kneeling as she took the head of William's cock into her mouth. He moved around behind her, feeling her tense as he pushed her legs apart. William stroked her hair and her back, making soothing sounds he probably wasn't even aware were coming from his throat.

Angelus eyed her ass, soft, white, beautifully shaped, firm, so, so tempting. He saw William's eyes narrow. He knew better than to refuse him, but he looked angry. Angelus grinned at him, teasing him, though William couldn't be sure of that. His hands gripped Willow's hips and he pushed the head of his cock into her, feeling her seize up at his rough penetration. His cock was a bit thicker than William's, and the unaccustomed girth stretched her, introducing an element of pain that he craved.

She was tucked up neat in her bed when he came home around dawn. Restless, he prowled around the room. She had hung up her yellow dress. In the bathroom she shared with Dru, her rinsed stockings and chemise were neatly hung to dry and the bathtub was clean. He went back into her bedroom and put another log on the fire, stoking the embers, watching the wood catch here and there.

He was feeling something . . . guilt, maybe. He had left her to go out with Angelus and the girls. Left her alone with a couple of resentful minions that would no more help her than . . . sew alter clothes. It didn't feel right to him. He should have at least carried her back to her room, spared her the walk when she was probably barely able to manage it on her own after they'd spent the better part of the day fucking her.

The jewelry box lay unopened on the pillow she normally slept on. He heard Darla's voice in his head taunting him about chocolates and flowers. He should have followed his own instincts. She gave sod all about jewelry. A box of chocolates, a wild flower next to her morning coffee, and a soft word went farther with her. He frowned at the fire and made himself go over to her, sitting on the edge of the bed, stroking her cheek until her eyelashes fluttered and her eyes opened.

"What time is it?" she asked sleepily.

"Dawn," he said. "I just wanted to see you before I went to bed," he told her. "Make sure you were alright," he added.

"Oh," she looked like she didn't know how to begin to answer that. "I'm fine," she said after a long pause.

"I could stay with you, if you like," he offered.

She stared at him for a long moment, and then nodded slowly.

He leaned over and kissed her forehead. "I'll be a few minutes," he said.

~Part: 12~

David Giles stared at his reflection in the mirror. He was forty-five years old and he had married late. His wife, Catherine, was the daughter of a colleague. If he disappeared off the face of the earth, she would have the comfort, if you could call it that, of knowing, more or less, what had happened to him. She and their two children would be taken care of. After he had left his salad days and gotten past the notion that he had to live to the fullest since the next day could be his last, he had gone the other way. The way of safe investments offering a steady return, and frugal living.

Harry was still in the grip of the adventure of the job. The young woman they talked to yesterday, possibly at the risk of her life, was nothing more to him than the means to an end, which David had to agree, had very definite possibilities for enhancing their knowledge of the four vampires dubbed the Scourge of Europe. He didn't care for Harry's notion of capturing her and taking her to London, and hoped that cooler heads would prevail.

Taking her seemed a fairly simple proposition. She walked the dog at least twice a day, and she was always alone. But it wasn’t that simple. Taking a well-dressed woman of means off a street in a respectable neighborhood presented unique problems. The likelihood of well-intentioned interference from the servants or residents of the neighboring homes was extremely high. The authorities would be drawn into the matter, making it more difficult to spirit the girl out of the country. Harry’s plan was simple, a snatch and run for the train station, and then a train bound for a port city and passage to England.

It sounded simple and workable, but there was no reason to believe that the girl would cooperate with them, which meant that she would have to be kept confined or unconscious for the duration of their journey, which would draw attention and slow them down, making it easier for them to be followed.

He understood Harry’s frustration. He had felt it at one time himself. The object of their mission was to observe, record, and report. It was fairly boring, which was why it was work. Pressing too hard, extending too far from their brief was dangerous.

A contact in the Foreign Office had made it possible for them to lodge with a family with connections in Prague. The pattern for the Scourge, or the Fanged Four, as David had started calling them in his head, was to ingratiate themselves with the local gentry and wealthy merchant families. Once that was accomplished, they tended to feed fairly discreetly for a period escalating into a burst of violent blood letting which usually preceded a migration.

Harry had introduced the topic of the English family two streets over with their hostess at dinner, and she was familiar with them, noting that they had been invited to a supper party hosted by a mutual acquaintance, and if Harry wished a formal introduction to the girl they had encountered, she was confident that she could arrange it.

Since he couldn’t kick his junior under the table, David was left to look blandly pleased for his friend.

“Come on, David, old son,” Harry said impatiently. “It’s time for our daily constitutional,” he was worried that he might miss the girl in the park.

David was praying that they would.

~~~*~~~

The Willow that lived in the not real world didn’t believe in coincidence. There was just enough of a breathless note of falsity in the limping young man’s, “We meet again,” greeting that she felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

Her anxiety stemmed solely from being female and relatively alone with two men, one of whom had yet to politely step off the path to allow her to pass. Mr. Buttons gamboled up to him and barked a sharp greeting, his wispy plume of a tail wagging.

“Hello, there . . . Mr. Buttons, I believe,” he said, leaning heavily on the cane as he awkwardly bent to offer his hand to the dog to sniff.

He snatched his hand back hastily. Mr. Buttons' playful impulses ran to snapping at fingers, and once they were retracted, jumping up after them. Confronted with both behaviors, the Englishman stumbled a bit and his friend caught his arm to steady him.

In charity with the spoiled little dog’s bad manners, Willow bit her lower lip to keep the smirk that was forming from becoming too obvious. While the older gentleman steadied his companion, she stepped off the path into the muddied grass to walk around them.

“Oh, I do beg your pardon, Miss,” the older man had the grace to sound embarrassed about her retreat from the path to pass them and continue on her way.

She ignored it, and kept walking, feeling her anger build with each step. She glanced down at herself, her lips thinning. She was wearing her coat over a very proper dress, with gloves and a hat. In a world where clothing meant a lot, she was practically wearing a sign that proclaimed that she was a respectable person. Respectable young women were not approached in public places, and men did not lie in wait for them for casual conversation. There was a part of her who recognized that these rules were a little silly, and deeply foreign, but they were rules that were generally accepted by the rest of the world that she was forced to participate in.

So, what was it about her, in particular, that had inspired this attention? Was it some kind of signal she wasn’t aware of giving, like the so-called gaydar? Did the two Englishmen see her and form conclusions that were approximate to her ‘station’ in life. What was that? Whore-dar?

Her temper was in no way improved when she reached the house to be confronted with a smirking Lucius. No doubt mentally revisiting all that he had been made privy to the prior afternoon. She unsnapped Mr. Buttons' leash and coiled it up in hands that trembled, opening a drawer in the table against the wall and tucking the leash away before removing her gloves.

“Did the pets enjoy their walk?” he asked.

Rage such as she had never felt burst through her. Normally when she got angry, her heart pounded and her mind went a little blank, leaving her to regret the loss of control and her inability to think of anything really mean to say until it was too late. This was different. This was colder and harder, and while it didn't lend her any immediate assistance with a snappy retort, it led her down another path. Before she could stop herself or think about the inadvisability of what she was doing, her hand shot out and she spoke one word, in Latin, in a register she hardly recognized.

The vampire’s eyes widened when he realized that he couldn’t move. At least not a lot.

“Right now, I could open the door, and with one good push, you’d get your one last walk under the sun,” she told him in a voice that shook. “And I strongly suggest that you keep that in mind the next time you decide to refer to me as a pet.”

William had emerged from the salon, catching the end of her angry outburst. He was frowning, walking in a slow circle around the vampire. He cocked his head to one side and put his hand out to test his immobility. Panic was creeping into Lucius’ eyes.

A small smile played on William’s lips. “Nice speech, love, but it was in English. I don’t think he got more than the idea that he was playing with one very irate witch.”

Ignoring Lucius for the moment, he turned to her, his hands moving towards her. She flinched and took a step back. He lifted an eyebrow and moved more deliberately, practically daring her to take a second step. His hands went to the buttons of her coat, working them free for her, his eyes searching her face.

“Has something upset you?” he asked as the bit of color in her face from the walk or her display of temper washed out of her face. She looked upset.

She didn’t know what to make of his rather bland reaction to her use of power that she was almost positive he didn’t know she had at her disposal.

“Yes,” she said, closing her eyes for a moment, as he stepped behind her to ease her shoulders out of the coat.

He held the coat for a second and went back to Lucius, moving the vampire’s arm until it was extended and slightly bent at the elbow. He draped the coat over his arm with a grin. “I don’t think I care for you making my girl angry,” he told Lucius in German. “Lucky for you that she got her own back, isn’t it?”

He offered Willow his arm. “I’ll make you a cup of tea, and you can tell me about what is bothering you,” he suggested with a charming smile. “Does that go away on its own, or do you have to,” he wiggled his fingers in Lucius’ direction.

She made a twisting motion with her hand, like she was taking something back, and the vampire was free. Following his instinct to attack, he lunged at her, and William caught him easily by the throat, his thumb digging in cruelly. “Ah, ah, ah,” he mocked. “I catch you so much as baring a fang at her, and we’ll be beating you out of the rugs for weeks,” he promised, releasing him with a backwards shove. “Hang her coat, will you?” he pulled Willow along with him, down the long hall to the kitchen.

She thought, any moment now. Any moment now he’s going to start thinking about what he just saw, and . . .She stumbled when they left the hand carved wool carpet runner at the flagstone threshold of the kitchen and his free hand went to her waist to steady her. There was a small step down into the kitchen. The house was oriented on a east/west axis. Shutters had been drawn over the kitchen windows to keep sunlight out. When he was sure that she had her balance, he released her and went to turn the gaslights up for her.

He patted a work stool. “Need a boost up, love?” he asked, looking back at her, hovering just inside the door.

Worrying her lower lip, she approached him, he put his hands out with a small smile. Automatically, she rested her hands on his upper arms as he lifted her up to place on the stool. He cupped her chin, his thumb gently freeing her lower lip. For a moment she thought he was going to kiss her, but he straightened, and tapped the brim of her hat. “Still wearing your hat,” he pointed out. “It’s fetching, but I thought you might want to take it off.”

He walked over to a shelf, retrieved a teakettle, and went to the pump to fill it before setting it on the warm stove, opening one of the jets to heat the water. She removed her hatpin and took the hat off, stabbing the pin back through the crown as she watched him warily. He was locating cups, the teapot, and a tin of tea. The metal ball for steeping the tea was in a drawer of cutlery.

He dangled it. “Always thought these things look like a mace,” he said.

“Morning star,” she corrected. "A mace is a cudgel with spikes. A morning star is attached to a mace . . . it also has spikes . . ." she decided to stop talking.

His eyebrows lifted at that, but he shrugged. “Morning star, then,” he said agreeably, unfastening the catch and filling it with tea leaves. “What happened on your walk?” he asked. Possibly, she was angry about yesterday. She hadn't touched the jewelry box as far as he could tell. Listening to Darla? He should have known better. The plan for the evening had been to go to the opera, and it seemed likely that Willow might go with them when he had bought the necklace, if not she could wear it another time.

“How angry are you?” she needed to know, interrupting his train of thought.

He shrugged snapping the infuser shut and threading the hook through a small hole inside the rim of the teapot feeling like he was forgetting something. “I haven’t decided. One thing at a time. What happened on your walk?”

She looked down at the scarred surface of the wood worktable in front of her. “It wasn’t anything really,” she admitted. “Yesterday, a gentleman spoke to me,” she glanced up at him, shrugging. “It was the dog. He had a cane, and anything that looks remotely tree-like means only one thing to Mr. Buttons,” she said ruefully.

Unexpectedly, William flashed her a conspiratorial smile. He opened a cabinet in search of something to go with the tea. There was a bakery box of biscuit's on the second shelf. “It’s not just trees. The little bastard tried to hump Angelus’ leg yesterday, and Dru was clapping like it was the most wonderful thing she had ever seen saying, ‘do it again’. Darla laughed, so Mr. Buttons lives another day,” he explained.

Willow’s lips turned up in a small smile that quickly faded. She looked down again, her thumb tracing a scorch mark in the wood.

"C'mon, love. It can't be that bad," he said. "Did he drop something on the ground?" he teased. She had what he considered an rather overdeveloped concern about garbage being placed in garbage receptacles.

"No," she looked up at him. “It was,” she frowned, feeling the burn of humiliation again, and feeling a little ridiculous for making so much of it, “Oooh! Surprise? We meet again,” she grimaced. “Just so . . . obvious,” she rolled her eyes, “and, I know . . . I really do know, better than anyone, what I am, but . . . it’s a good neighborhood, and the way I’m dressed? And, how could they know?” she asked the table. Her face felt hot.

Somehow unburdening herself was not making her feel better. He probably thought she was being overly sensitive. “It made me angry.”

He leaned back against the counter, watching her, picturing it, figuring out the parts she wasn’t mentioning. She walked without an escort during the day out of necessity, but also for all of the reasons that she mentioned. She had reason to feel threatened as well as offended by the behavior of the man in the park, and he had every intention of addressing that problem at his earliest opportunity.

Lucius just had the misfortune of making her feel more threatened and offended, and to a certain extent he was mildly amused at the way she had retaliated. On the other hand, it presented another problem.

“Tell me about what happened out there,” he invited. “What was it that you did?”

She fidgeted. “A spell,” she said, and then made a face at the obviousness of that. “It doesn’t work on living things—well, it does, but it stops everything, so they tend to die,” she clarified. She had accidentally killed a rat that way before she figured it out, and you would think that was no big deal, but then there was a rat named Amy, and it was a big deal.

“And, how long have you been able to do that?’ he asked, a little bemused by the guilt that roiled in her expression. What the devil had she killed that had her looking like she had done something awful?

Her eyes lifted to meet his. “Six months?” she sounded less than certain. “We were still in Lisbon, and . . . there were all those rats, from the wharves.”

Ah, a rat. Vermin. That cleared up one point.

He heard the water coming to a boil and turned back to the stove, using a pad to lift the arm of the kettle, pouring the hot water into the teapot. He turned down the jet on the stove and put the lid on the teapot. “What else can you do?”

“What do you mean?”

He shot her a look that was neither amused nor indulgent. It was all business. He gestured to a crock of metal and wood kitchen utensils to her right on the workbench. “Any chance you could send something in there flying across the room.”

Her mouth went dry.

He read the answer in her eyes, and felt fear crawl up his spine. It didn’t set well with him. “Jesus Christ,” he swore. “Are you telling me that if you loose your temper you could stake me?”

She wasn’t telling him that. “I haven’t, have I?”

And, why the hell not? “Why not?”

“I don’t know,” she admitted, looking confused and frightened.

“Think of a better answer, pet,” he warned her. “I’m in no mood for word games.”

“I don’t know!” she clenched her hand into a fist. “Don’t you think I’ve ever thought about it? I don’t know. Sometimes I hate you so much that I don’t think I can breath past the way it fills me. You deserve it. You’re evil, and you are cruel, and you don’t give a damn about anything but what you want,” she said, feeling an odd little part of her rejecting this summation without finding anything in particular wrong with any single part of it.

“That’s the sum of it,” he sneered. “So? What’s stopping you?”

“I don’t know,” vehemence made her space each word out. “I just can’t.”

He moved so fast that she had no time to react, one minute she was sitting on the stool working a new groove into the wood with her fingernail, the next moment she was twisted back over the table with his hand on her throat, the other pushing her skirt up and ripping her under things. Then he was shoving two fingers in her, making her arch her back to get away from him, and the pain he was inflicting on her with an utterly cold look on his face. He let up on her throat enough for her to lift her head and then he slammed it down. Only the mass of her hair, pulled up in a bun spared her head from the impact with the table. He withdrew his fingers and rammed them back into her sore passage, making her cry out involuntarily.

“Getting angry, pet?” he taunted. “What do I have to do to make you mad?”

She was going to have more bruises, she thought dimly, feeling her mind go blank with the pain of what he was doing.

“I can fuck you right here. Would that make you mad?” he used his thumb to assault her clitoris, which was also sore from the previous day, and she turned her attention to the plastered ceiling.

“Look at me!” he roared, infuriated by her passivity. “God damn it, I’m getting some answers from you and if I have to beat them out of you, that’s starting to sound like a good day to me.”

She stared at him. She wasn’t going to beg him not to hurt her.

It had been years since she had done anything like it, and he saw it move through her eyes before the thought was translated into action. She jackknifed her body, swinging her leg around to kick him. Hampered by her skirts, he hardly even felt it, but he thrilled to see a bit of fight in her and relaxed his hold on her enough for her to get free. She scrambled back, swinging her legs over the side of the workbench and picking up the first thing to come to hand, a thin, fragile china plate.

She seemed to realize that as weapons went it was ludicrous, but she drew it in towards her chest, her wrist and arm curving around it, and let it fly, spinning with more force than he might have credited her with. He knocked it aside, vaulting over the table after her as she ran towards a butcher block to yank a long carving knife free.

“C’mon, pet,” he motioned to her. “Let’s play,” he invited.

She backed up, eyes darting, looking for an escape route.

“The only way out of here is through me,” he told her.

She backed up another step, feinting left, and throwing her weight against the butcher block to slow him down as it skidded over the glazed brick floor into him. She ran for the kitchen door throwing the first of the bolts, then kicking the floor bolt free and heaving the door open. He got his arm around her waist and flung her  across the room to collide with a brick wall. This time, hair or no, she felt it when her head hit the brick with a sound that made him wonder if he hadn’t really hurt her this time. She slumped to the floor, one hand braced flat on the floor as she tried to shake off the buzzing in her ears.

He shut the door and re-engaged the bolt before walking across the room to retrieve the knife she had dropped.

“You stupid, bitch. There is no such thing as a fair fight,” he told her, hefting the knife and burying two inches of the blade into one of the wood posts that separated sections of the plastered, white washed outer wall.

When he got closer, her free arm came up to shield her head and she cringed against the wall. He pulled her up by the arm she was trying to cover with, figuring that she had had enough. He didn’t understand it. If she had some way to defend herself that he couldn’t counter or match, she was either being incredibly stubborn in refusing to show it to him, or incredibly stupid not to use it. Or, she didn’t really think he meant to hurt her. Or she didn't care. For some reason that bothered him most of all.

He was trying to process what was most likely  when her head fell against his chest. He had no warning. He had automatically reached out to brace her other arm, unwittingly opening his stance up to her. She wasn't a graceful person. She had trouble at times managing the bulk of her skirt, and he was accustomed to catching her before she fell. She kneed him in the groin, and if he had to breathe, he wouldn’t have been able to. As it was, he dropped to his knees and felt like he was going to puke up his crushed testicles.

“You can call me a bitch, or a whore, or pet,” she spat the last at him, and he had the odd thought that he was up on Lucius in that regard. “But, I am not stupid,” she yelled at him.

“I’m mad now,” she spluttered, hands on her hips, seeming more put out about being goaded into losing her temper for a second time in less than an hour than anything else, “Happy?”

She took a cautious step out of his immediate range and concentrated on the knife. It vibrated for a moment as she tried to free it from the wall. Her lips twisted into a snarl and her eyes . . . William wondered if he was imagining it as he cradled his abused balls. Her eyes turned black. He felt something crawl up his spine, part fear, and part . . . lust.

The knife flew out of the wall with enough force that she threw out her other hand to stop it and it hung in the air, quivering. She stared at it for a moment, seemingly perplexed. When she reached out to touch the handle gingerly, the energies collapsed and the knife fell with a clatter that made her jump back with a startled squeak.

They dove for the knife at the same time. She got there first, but he rolled her over on her back, straddling her hips and pinning her wrist to the ground. He looked down at her. She was wearing a dove gray silk banyan with a bit of cording at the notched throat and cuffed sleeves finished with a silver button set with marcasite in a floral pattern. The cording at her throat was repeated on the double-breasted placate of the dress in a stylized floral pattern.

“This is pretty,” he said, watching her chest heave. He leaned forward to rest on his elbow, making sure that he placed it above her free arm, leaving her with a very limited range of motion if she decided she wanted to fight some more. His finger traced the outer edge of her ear. “Willow, my Willow,” he crooned, sounding remarkably affectionate. “What am I going to do with you, sweet?”

“Master William?” Lucius cleared his throat, standing just inside the kitchen threshold.

Cool blue eyes warned her against speaking. ‘Not a word,’ he mouthed, raising his head. “This better be good,” he warned. “What do you want?”

“I heard . . . something . . . fall—“

“Get out,” William spat, and then changed his mind. “No, wait! There’s a pot of tea steeping,” in an abrupt change of mood, he grinned, tugging on Willow’s earlobe. “Yum. Tea!” he teased her. “I’d like that, and a plate of shortbread, and see if you can’t find some chocolates. There’s a tin in my room, on the bureau, I think. See that tea is waiting for us in my witch’s room.”

He bent his head to Willow’s, resting his forehead on hers, winding a loose strand of her hair around his finger as he held her eyes, feeling her rapid, shallow, humid breath against his skin as Lucius transferred the tea things to a tray and left the room, probably cursing both of them.

Relaxing his grip on the wrist holding the knife, he stretched his index finger to reach the blade, opening a cut on the tip of his finger. He released her wrist, as if the idea of her stabbing him really hadn’t ever concerned him. He traced the outline of her lips with his bleeding finger.

She grimaced when she felt the cool, sticky wetness of his blood on her lips. “The problem—your problem, Willow, my Willow, is that you aren’t bloodthirsty enough. Deep down, you’re too soft,” he told her, lifting his head. He kissed her upper lip, savoring the taste of her lips mixed with his blood. “That’s why you let that harlot sell you when she wasn’t crawling between your pretty thighs. That’s why you let me hurt you,” he frowned  at her. “It’s your own fault, you know. You are smart, but you make stupid choices.”

She felt stupid, holding the knife that she wouldn’t use, that would only do a relatively minor injury if he could goad her to use it.

He took the knife from he unresisting grip, making a tsking sound as he sat up, running the flat of the blade over the corded silk between her breasts, miming a stabbing motion. “Far too trusting,” he mocked, throwing the knife.

It stuck in the wall with a satisfying thwack. He slid his hand under her neck and pulled her head up, licking her lower lip clean before he thrust it in her mouth, making her put her hand up to try to push him away.

He stood up, pulling her up with him, smoothing her skirts down while she swayed. “Oh, by the way, that little trick with your knee? Pull a stunt like that again and I’ll give you to Dru with a request that she pluck every single hair from your body from the neck down,” he told her, delving into a matchless arsenal of threats for something non-lethal, painful, and humiliating.

The green of her eyes turned brilliant with angry tears. “God, you’re beautiful,” he said with a tender smile, tucking her hand in the crook of his arm. “The tea ought to be lukewarm by now, just the way you like it,” he pointed out as he steered her through the kitchen, bits of china crunching underfoot.

They walked up the stairs, William keeping up a light dialog. Lucius was coming down the stairs, and William stopped him, urging Willow to continue up the stairs without him. “I’ll be right up,” he said, waiting until he heard her door shut behind her.

The smile left his face. Standing on the same stair, a half a head shorter, he exuded raw power. “Remember our little chat the day you died?”

Lucius felt the skin on the back of his neck tighten. William’s voice dropped nearly to a whisper. “The things that I would do to you, if you ever fail me or mine, will pale in comparison to what you understand about suffering. That includes her. Especially her.”

“I remember,” Lucius managed to say.

“Run and tattle to Angelus or Darla, and you’ll be looking over your shoulder for me for the rest of your un-life to make good on that,” he promised. “Where are they?” he asked.

“S-sleeping,” he stuttered, startled by the whiplash quality of the question.

William appeared to be thinking about that for a moment. Nodding to himself, he continued up the stairs and let himself into Willow’s room, shutting the door behind him.

~Part: 13~

William picked through the box of chocolates that he had asked Lucius to find for their tea, selecting a milk chocolate with a rosette crown. Willow was sitting beside him on the settee in her bedroom. He had removed the half boots she wore to walk in, and she had tucked her stocking clad feet under her. He found one of the hairpins holding her hair up and loosened it as he offered her the chocolate. She still looked a little wary and uncertain, but she took the offered candy from his fingertips and he slid the hairpin out, watching another section of her neat chignon collapse.

He had to be a little careful. The heavy drapes that blocked out the sun were not pulled completely together and she was sitting so that a ray of direct sunlight was hitting the top of her head. It would have been a simple enough thing to nudge her to her feet and have her close the drapes for him, but he liked the way the sunlight drew out the coppery tones in her hair, so he was content to leave it.

He had nibbled on the biscuits transferred from the bakery box to a Delph blue china plate. The small, oblong biscuits folded over a center dotted with raspberry jam were similar to shortbread with a slightly different, lighter texture. Occasionally, when she got bored, Willow entertained herself with baking. Mostly by trial and error she had developed her own recipe for a shortbread-like biscuit with a layer of tart lemon curd over a filling of slightly sour creamed cheese.

She sipped her tea, holding the teacup with both hands, the fingers of her left hand lightly braced against the thin china. A book she was reading lay on the low table next to the tea things. He picked it up and examined the title embossed on the spine, Flatland, by Edwin Abbott, without recognizing the title or author. She read voraciously, and her tastes were far more eclectic than Angelus', who hadn't seemed to notice that Willow's reading habits were starting to influence his.

"Do you get lonely when we leave you here alone?" he asked, thumbing through the book. She had her page marked with a bookmark Dru must have made judging by the needlework. A motif of swirling ivy that might have been stylized rendered by other hands. Dru's clever needle added details, like a mouse peeking out from between two leaves.

Her gaze drifted downward for a moment as she tried to decide how to answer him. "No," she gave a spare shake of her head. It wasn't entirely true, but not a lie either. She couldn't begin to explain the sort of loneliness that she felt.

The house had running water, and she still found herself reaching for the tap to fill a glass, as if it were so simple. The water that ran through the copper pipes in the house was not potable. The hand pumped spring water in the kitchen was the only source of water in the house that was safe to drink. Simple things like that made her feel alone.

Living amongst other humans for two months, with all of her secrets, made her feel alone.

She no longer thought of what William was doing when he was away from the house after sunset. She knew, and she knew that what she could do about it lay on her  conscience, tangled in theories that she had developed over the years. He no longer took her with him when he hunted, and that was a kind of truce between them. Unspoken, and possibly a misunderstanding of his intentions on her part, but she clung to the margins of it.

He watched her a moment longer, mildly surprised when she did not elaborate on the 'no'. It was a word she was not in the habit of using with him.

"We could go out tonight," he offered. "Just the two of us," he clarified, because he thought that she had to know that right now, it was just the two of them. His hand hovered over the chocolates. "What kind was that? The one you just had?"

"Hazelnut, I think," she set the tea cup on its saucer. "I won't be used to help you kill people," she told him.

He shot her a look. "Never occurred to me," he claimed, selecting a heart shaped dark chocolate.

He turned towards her, running his hand down her back, his thumb following the centerline of her spine. When he reached her waist he exerted just enough pressure to make her lean towards him. He made room for her between his legs, shifting around on the small, uncomfortable settee with his left leg bent at the knee, resting against the cushioned back, settling her against his chest with his arm loosely circling her. He offered her the chocolate and she let him feed her, her head falling back into the space between his shoulder and his neck while he played with the decorative buttons and cording down the front of her dress.

"Or we could stay in," he conceded, rubbing his cheek against her soft sun warmed hair. The heat warmed her scent. She was a constant reminder of the best of things lost with daylight. Angelus and Darla would go out. He wasn't so sure about Dru.

With his free hand, he lifted hers, threading his fingers through hers.

He had removed enough hairpins to leave the chignon unbalanced. A hairpin taking the stress of the weight of her hair was digging into her scalp. She reached up to pull it out. Her hair was too long. She would have never let it grow so long left to her own preference in the matter. A century ago, when lice infestation was more commonplace and wigs were in fashion, short hair was practical, at least according to Darla. Back when Matilde was her maid and not just another vampire who periodically looked tempted to eat her, she had trimmed her bangs and evened up the length.

She removed two more hairpins and a length of cotton wrapped in the collected strands of her own hair that came out of her hairbrush. It gave the chignon its shape, and the hair wound around it further disguised it inside the mass of her hair. Once her hair was free, William abandoned his play with her buttons and reached up to push his fingers into the coiled mass of her hair, his fingers rubbing her scalp.

She closed her eyes, resting her forehead against his jaw. Using so much magic took a little out of her. She had been practicing little things for a long time. Like, levitating objects more or less in place. Lifting it no more than a few millimeters and then holding it there. She had practiced on water glasses until she could move a glass without so much as a ripple across the surface of the water. That kind of magic use was soothing, though if she over did it, she felt a little light headed. The surge of magic she had felt go through her in the foyer left her nerve endings tingling in an unpleasant way. She had a pins and needles sensation inside her skull that had not completely faded.

"Tired?" he asked.

She nodded against his jaw.

He laid the hand he was holding on his thigh and unbuttoned the cuffed sleeve of her dress before working the button on the other wrist free. Then he started unbuttoning her dress, working from the throat down the front on each side. She was wearing a light cotton shift beneath the dress, trimmed across the top in lace. His hands shifted to her waist to urge her to sit up and he eased the dress over her shoulders, finding the hook at the loosely gathered waist to release the last impediment to removing the dress.

He stood up, picking up her book, and tucking it under one arm, offering her the support of the other as she stood up and let the dress slide down to lay in a crumpled heap on the floor. She was still wearing her stockings and the voluminous underpants that always made her feel like she was wearing pajamas under her gown, torn at the crotch from his brutal assault. He unknotted the drawstring and pushed them down over her hips before he led her over to the bed, turning it down for her and stacking the pillows.

"You're in a strange mood," she commented when she was all tucked in, her book in her lap.

"I know," a smile ghosted over his lips.
~~~*~~~

Whistling to himself as he made Willow something for dinner, William concluded that living so long with a human was starting to make him weird. The contentment and pleasure that he took in preparing a meal for her, seeing that she was fed, had nothing to do with practicality. It was some sort of bizarre corruption of his need to hunt and feed his . . . childe? Mate? Lover? Something like that. It was like the grooming instinct that made him want to brush her hair, and fuss over her clothes because she should have soft things next to her skin and warm colors and petty luxuries easily afforded.

Seeing what she could do had put him in a contemplative mood. There were reasons why she had not used her abilities against him. Reasons that she couldn't bring herself to acknowledge, perhaps, but no less real. There was a hardheaded, pragmatic part of him that refused to believe what it suggested about how she felt. That was the part of him that found her lack of resolve almost as contemptible as what it implied. There was another part of him, the part that was merrily putting together a hamper for a late night picnic that was convinced that he had discovered another piece of something important about her that made this one of the best days of his un-life.

There was something perversely charming about discovering a metaphorical stake pointed at his unbeating heart in a hand poised to strike.

Dru wandered into the kitchen. The elders were planning to attend the opera tonight. Prague was a city with a musical pedigree that included Smetana and Dvorak. She was playing with a new hairstyle copied from a magazine that depended on creating waves that were held up by hairpins and bisected across the crown with a length of scarf. She had chosen red silk, which set off her dark hair and pale skin perfectly. She wore it with the red velvet gown that he had seen before and an art nouveau ruby necklace.

She took a passing interest in the food he was placing on a plate before curling herself around him, one hand stroking his temple as she stared into his eyes. Charmed, he kissed the end of her nose. "You shame the stars, my love."

Her expression turned thoughtful. She studied the kitchen, her eyes sweeping over the surfaces as if she could read them.

"Miss Willow was naughty," she surmised.

Lucius had cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, but William wasn't surprised that Dru knew they had fought. He pinched her chin. "And that would be mine to deal with, wouldn't it, Dru?" he made it a question.

She was as jealous of his prerogatives as he was, maybe more so. "Yes," she agreed. "Yours, and ours, but only as you wish it."

Her eyes lost focus for a moment and she tilted her head back, the fingers that had been stroking his temple now gracefully pulling at the air. "This will be a night of lovely sounds, like cats all rumbly and growling, and spitting at each other, biting, and tearing."

William grinned at this apt description of the opera-not his favorite entertainment. "I wonder if they'll have orange girls?" he asked. At Covent Garden the orange girls sold fruit, making a tasty after-theatre snack for the hungry vampire while providing a treat for the hungry vampire's lover. He had a fondness for the scent of oranges and loved the way they tasted on Willow's lips and throat when he painted her throat with a section of an orange and drank from her.

Dru kissed the corner of his mouth, patting his cheek, sharing the song in his head without [[without what?]]. "I told you that we would be happy here," she reminded him.
~~~*~~~

Darla, Angelus and Dru had gone out for an evening at the opera, taking the larger of the two carriages, which required a coachman and Lucius to manage. They took Matilde with them as well, mostly for show. Darla liked having a servant or two to hover in the background, lending consequence to her public appearances.

Willow woke up to the sensation of cool lips exploring the back of her knee and lifted one hand to swat at the tickling sensation. William retaliated by pushing the hem of her shift up and kissing the back of her thighs, his hands framing her hips, keeping her from moving too much.

Willow opened her eyes. The room was dark. She had a mildly disoriened feeling, complicated by a fizzy, itchy sensation inside her skull. She wasn't sure what time of day or night it was. She could feel his fingers splay on her skin as he moved up, unerringly finding the sensitive spot above the cleft of her ass and running his tongue over it.

"Wake up," he murmured against her skin.

"I am awake," she told him.

He paused, lifting his head and then tilting it to shake his hair out of his eyes. "Hmm. So you are," he pretended to think about it while she pushed up on one elbow to look at him over her shoulder. "Human," he made it a friendly insult. "You wake up too easily," he complained. "Don't suppose you'd pretend to be asleep?" he asked while his fingers glided over the skin on the inside margin of her hipbone.

Sometimes she did pretend that she was asleep. Not so much when he was coming to bed, but when he stayed the night with her and she woke up to him spooning into her, his hands moving over her. He picked up a lot of her body heat when he slept with her. Sometimes she pretended to sleep and he pretended he wasn't waking her up.

Her stomach growled, reminding her that she hadn't had much more than dry toast and chocolate to eat today. William's hand slid between her body and the mattress under her and he rubbed her stomach, dropping a kiss on her shoulder.

"Nearly everyone is out for the evening," he told her. "It's just you and me and . . . the short git . . ."

"Cook?"

"That's the one," William agreed, hanging over her a second. He climbed off of her and the bed. "Have to admire that actually," he said as he went to her wardrobe to get her dressing gown. There was an ivory satin one with quilted lapels that he had seen before and a fairly tatty looking dark blue wool flannel dressing gown. "How did this escape my attention when we were burning ugly dresses?" he wondered.

She couldn't really see what he was holding up for her, it wasn't more than a shape in the dark. She sat up. "I don't know. I wasn't consulted," she said sourly, the 'as usual' was implied.

He brought it to her as she hung her legs over the side of the bed, feeling for her slippers with her feet. She found one and slid her toes into it, yawning, and then found the other slipper, repeating the process, slowly registering that he was standing in front of her, waiting for her to stand up.

She stood and he held the dressing gown for her to slip her arms into. Recognizing the soft, worn warmth of the robe, she yawned again. "It's nice and soft and comfy," she explained.

"Right," he seemed amused. His arms circled her loosely as he fastened the two inside buttons that secured the dressing gown at her waist.

"You have to admire what?" she asked to avoid a discussion of her wardrobe. His sporadic interest in her clothing was never particularly flattering, or it had to do with getting her to take off whatever she was wearing at the moment.

"Hm?" His hands were moving up to cup her breasts. He picked up the trailing thread of his abandoned observation about the vampire who called himself Cook, feeling her fastening the outer buttons to the dressing gown. There was something he admired about the name. It came to him, "The utility. Cook? It's simple, direct, unaffected. No poncey Latin or Greek," he left off handling her breasts for the moment, smoothing the fabric over her shoulders. "Take Angelus, for instance," he rolled his eyes. "I had my little renaming period," he admitted. "Not so long after I was turned," he grinned at the memory, adopting the East End accent that went with it. "Took to calling myself Spike," he said with a certain relish.

"S-spike?" she went still, feeling a few of the cobwebs in her brain scatter.

"Yeah," his voice turned husky as he wound his wrist in her hair, baring her throat. "Mmm. Say it again, sweet," he urged, breathing in her scent, more potent at her throat, where her hair had trapped it behind her ear. The way she stammered his abandoned name was interestingly full of startled tension.

It was too confusing. She wouldn't let herself think of him as Spike. He wasn't Spike. He was William. She hardly knew Spike. She stalled. "Why?"

He misunderstood the question she was asking. He thought she wanted to know why he had started calling himself Spike. For a second he considered telling her the truth, but then abandoned the notion. She knew what he was, and he didn't have to remind her. His arm slid around her waist, pulling her hips against him. He rubbed himself against her in a deliberate way. "Utility," he reminded her, letting her feel him harden against her.

She frowned a little, knowing that he was lying to her, but not sure why. She remembered Giles explaining where the nickname had come from.

He nuzzled her neck, nibbling on her earlobe. "Say it," he growled in her ear.

She really didn't think she could. In a very crazy way it felt . . . wrong. She made herself touch the side of his face, her index finger tracing the unmarred surface of his eyebrow before slipping into his hair. He abandoned her ear to kiss the corner of her eye, using her hair to tug her head back.

"Will?" her soft voice called to him.

A part of him recognized that she was being stubborn, that she didn't want to call him Spike for some reason, and a part of him recognized that she was the only person in the world who had ever called him Will and made him feel singled out by the silky sound of her voice wrapped around one syllable.

It made him want to kiss her forehead and her cheeks and the space beneath her eyes and every little place on her face that his hands wanted to touch. There was time for that. She had just woken up and she was still sleepy, and he knew from experience that as soon as she really woke up she would want to wash her face and clean her teeth and eat something. She would be distracted. He unwound her hair from his wrist and kissed her upper lip, his tongue flicking out to graze the crisp upper bow of her lip, feeling the dryness of her skin where she had drooled a little in her sleep.

Drooling upside down. It was only something she could manage. He'd find her sleeping sometimes with her head tucked into her chin and the top of her head pushed in between pillows with an armful of bedding gathered under her against her chest. It looked too awkward for sleep, but she did it, and did not like being shifted one bit. He had tried to untangle her once and she had, without waking up, held on to the bedding and muttered a fierce, "No! Mine!"

"Go do your bathroom stuff," he said, releasing her.
~~~*~~~

He found the minion called Cook sitting in the front hall, looking bored out of his mind with guard duty. Barrier wards or no, Angelus was strict about keeping someone on watch at all hours. It was hard to place his age. He was a small, compact man with thinning hair and an unlined round face that looked almost innocent even when his demon was in the forefront.

Earlier William had an idea about taking Willow out for a late night picnic, but he opened the front door and stepped out to gauge the temperature and the weather. It had turned cool and damp, and while that didn't bother him, he knew that it was too chilly for her. He changed his mind about the picnic. It was an idea for another night.

He set the younger vampire to work making dinner for Willow. He made crepes with spinach and a white sauce and chicken, cut into medallions, lightly seasoned, and seared in a frying pan.

He told Willow to come down to the kitchen when she was done performing her ablutions. She padded in, still in her dressing gown and slippers, with her hair down and loose around her shoulders. She hesitated for a moment, her eyes scanning the room for evidence of their earlier fight, her gaze flicking to the vampire at the stove.

"It smells good," she offered gamely, switching to German, so William knew the observation was not entirely for his benefit.

"I wouldn't know," Cook answered. He dipped his pinkie into the white sauce and tasted it, frowning. "Nothing smells or tastes the same. Makes it hard to cook," he admitted.

For some reason, this observation piqued her interest. William poured a glass of wine for her, sitting on the stool he had lifted her up on earlier that day.

She made her way over to a cabinet to retrieve an earthenware cup and then to the sink to work the pump with an intent expression on her face. "Is it like food doesn't taste like much of anything, or is it like your sense of taste is more acute?"

The younger vampire gave her a startled sideways look as she emptied the contents of a headache powder into the cup. When he wasn't dead and was actually a cook, they had talked, probably a bit more than anyone knew. She didn't have to talk to him. He was a cook, not a chef. Food was a funny thing. People talk about food, and the kitchen was a comfortable place. Much too big, in his estimation, but he had learned to cook in galley kitchens on the ships that sailed on the Vltana River and in taverns on the quayside.

He gave an internal shrug at the odd question. "It tastes like food, but it's like tasting food when you're not hungry, or when you want something else."

She let the headache powder dissolve, swishing the water in the half-full cup. "Smell and taste are connected. I thought it might have something to do with smell," she explained. "Like, cheese? Cheese is good. Stinky cheese is . . . eeew!"

William grinned. "Stilton isn't stinky," he inserted.

"Hmpht," Willow snorted. "It's vile," she shuddered, and then drank down her headache medicine, grimacing.

She washed and rinsed the cup, drying it off before returning it to its place in the cupboard. "Is there anything I can help with?" she asked.

For Cook it was like déjà vu, except that the moment that he had experienced in the past came across as somewhat incomplete. It had made him nervous then, when she was the mistress of the house and he was . . . someone she really shouldn't be talking to even if she didn't seem to know that. Now that she was, more or less, reconciled in his mind as the mistress of the vampire watching them, he had the same feeling. She shouldn't be talking to him. The skin on the back of his neck tightened. She wasn't standing that close to him, but he could smell her, distinct from the cooking odors right in front of him on the stove. She smelled like fresh water and milled soap and something warm and rich. It was a smell that was utterly unlike fresh bread baking or a chocolate soufflé rising, but connected in a way those remembered scents had appealed to him.

"Come over here and drink your wine, pet," William called her away.

Cook breathed a sigh of relief when he felt her move towards the workbench. William didn't give up the seat to her, he opened his legs to make a space for her and let his arm rest on her waist when she came to stand beside him at the workbench.

She ate there at the table while Cook cleaned up, scrubbing the skillet, crepe pan, mixing bowl, and the copper bottomed sauce pan as well as the more delicate tea cups and dishes that had been used earlier. She didn't eat all of the chicken, reserving a portion of it that, after she finished her dinner, went into one of the shallow dishes reserved for the dog. She crumbled the meat with her fingers into smaller pieces, rinsing her hands, and wiping them off on a towel.

Cook had resumed his post in the hall when they left the kitchen. He watched them go back upstairs, quietly mulling over the odd relationship.

Mr. Buttons was dozing when Willow let herself into Dru's room to feed him. He had a doggie bed that Dru had made. Angelus was the self-acknowledged artist of the family, but Willow thought Dru surpassed him in most respects. Her needlework was stunning, and she had a way of making things out of nothing that Willow found impressive. The doggie bed had started life as a doll's house. It was one of the forgotten bits of someone else's life that had been found in the attic. Dru had gutted the interior and made a purple cushion finished in a thick section of gold braid that probably belonged to a drapery pull. The interior was elaborately re-painted with an outdoor scene that was rendered in a primitive style. The trees were chunky and squat, dominating the misshapen hills that had been painted in. The windows were inside the hills and trees, the small glass panes painted across without any break.

She refilled his water bowl while he ate and spent a few minutes playing with his silky ears and lightly scratching his small domed head while he settled down again on his pillow to sleep. The headache powder had dispelled the last of her headache, but the wine on top of it made her feel a little lightheaded. When the dog was asleep, she picked up the empty dish he had fed from and took it into the bathroom she shared with Dru to wash it in the sink. She caught herself staring at her own reflection in the mirror, and frowned at the spaciness in her expression. She probably could have managed the headache without the headache powder. She knew they were a little dangerous, especially on top of several glasses of wine. The strength and potency of the medication varied and it was laced with opium, which was not yet widely understood to be addictive.

She dropped the dish into the sink when William's hands slid up her sides. She couldn't see him in the mirror, given his lack of reflection, and she hadn't heard him enter the bathroom from her room.

"Scared you?" he sounded smug.

She shut off the tap. "You're a credit to vampires everywhere," she said, unintentionally waspish.

It made him laugh. "And you, love, are higher than a kite," his voice was a contented purr in her ear. "Look at you," he bade her. One arm moved around her waist to hold her while he probed the back of her head.

When he saw her taking the headache powder it occurred to him that she might be more hurt than she was letting on. He had flung her across the kitchen and she had taken a good deal of the impact across her shoulders and the back of her head.

She stared at herself in the mirror, feeling him against her without seeing him, taking in her slightly dazed expression. She could see her hair moving and knew that it was from the pressure of his fingers. She closed her eyes. "It's making me dizzy," she protested.

He made a sound of agreement in his throat. "Sometimes you do that to me too," he told her. "I look at you, and it makes me feel like I can feel the ground moving under me."

With her eyes closed, she could appreciate the sentiment. She opened her eyes, avoiding the mirror, turning her head towards him. "Can you?" she asked.

"Can I what?"

"Can you feel the ground moving?" she asked. "It is. It's always moving. Can you feel it?"

He rested his forehead against hers. There was a slightly swollen spot on the back of her head, but her skin wasn't broken and he didn't think it was anything serious. He thought about how to answer her question. "In a way, I guess. It's more like you can almost hear it. After the sun goes down, and the ground starts to warm up as it gives up the heat," his hand curled around her head to trace the shape of her ear. She had the prettiest ears. Small, neat, delicate, terminating in petal soft earlobes.

"What does it sound like?"

That was impossible to explain. It sounded like nothing and everything, and it was as unique to the day as the tracery of tiny lines across the palm of a human hand. He had a solid grounding in the classics at Winchester. He had been enchanted by the power of ancient religions so deeply connected to the mysteries of the natural world. He had sat in the garden of his parents' home in London on the rare clear night and stared at the face of the moon and felt that he understood perfectly how it held the graven image of a woman's face, an object of veneration for thousands of years.

He felt the need to worship it. He saw that face in the outlines of Dru's face, raised to the night sky when he emerged from his own grave with the detritus of his coffin and the scattered bones of what he vaguely understood to be his infant sister scattered around him. It had made him pause, half in and half out of his grave.

He had never thought of himself as being preoccupied with death when he was alive, though looking back on it, he supposed that to a certain extent, he was. The deaths he remembered were of women. His sister, Caroline, who had lived less than two years, and his favorite aunt, Merry who had died Christmas day when he was thirteen, and his mother who had been dying for so long that she seemed, even now, poised at the cusp of life and death. Even to him, and he had killed her. His father's death when he was twenty-two had been a more significant event, freeing him from expectations he was bound to disappoint, and handing him responsibilities that he had accepted gladly because they afforded him the opportunity to be in charge of other people's problems.

He looked into the unfocused eyes of the woman he held, hearing her heart pushing blood through her body, and the sound of her breathing while she waited for his answer. "I'll listen to it for you sometime and try to describe it," he promised.
~~~*~~~

The domed ceiling of the opera house had Drusilla's attention. In her lap, her needle flashed as she made a pattern of it with blue thread in a square of a white cotton handkerchief that she had snapped into an embroidery frame carried in Matilde's large bag. The handkerchief was one of William's that she had embroidered with a repeating pattern of their interlocking initials around the graceful branches of a weeping willow in a white on white monochromatic pattern in the corners. The work she was doing now was a pattern piece. She thought that the medallion of the domed ceiling would make a good pattern for a seat cover cushion on the shield backed chairs in the seldom used dining room, or possibly as a theme for a larger medallion on the center of a counterpane.

She paused for a moment as the curving sweep of the D representing her tried to find a space within the slanting bars of two Ws, becoming a bracket, a bowl, an arch, each image collapsing. A small, distressed sound escaped her and Angelus tore his attention away from the stage long enough to take the hand she had inadvertently pricked with her needle to squeeze warningly.

Daddy would be very unhappy if she spoiled his evening. Not unhappy in a good way, but in a go to your room alone way.

Darla was watching the occupants of the other boxes. She didn't need opera glasses for this pursuit, but she used them anyway. The opera glasses were like a domino in a masquerade party, disguising interest and expression. They were seated in the second tier of boxes that circled the opera house, on the left wing, which exposed a great deal of the gallery to her view, though it did not provide cover for her lack of attention for the action on the stage. She wasn't alone in her inattention. Half the assembled audience was similarly occupied.

Only Angelus, and to a lesser extent Lucius, were paying attention to the opera. Standing at attention at the back of the box next to a sideboard laid in with chilled champagne, Lucius felt almost dizzy. The music demanded his attention, but vampiric hearing being what it was, he couldn't quite block out the hum of human voices coming from the boxes and the floor below. A hundred whispers, hushed conversations, and the sounds of people breathing, their hearts beating in different time-it made his head swim.

Matilde was leaning against the wall. She had spent most of the last day and a half 'enjoying' the attention of the four male minions. Her resentment of Lucius was growing. Darla, the oldest and most powerful of the four vampires they followed had turned her. William, who was clearly the least of them, had made Lucius and still Lucius was the favorite. She was slighted. Darla was slighted, even if she did not appear to acknowledge it. ~~~*~~~
 

His concession to smoking in her room was to open a window and to get a fire started in the fireplace. Willow watched the flames lick across the wood. She needed the cool, damp night air to clear the fuzziness in her head. The combination of wine and the headache powder had left her thirsty. William had brought another bottle of wine up from the kitchen while she had been feeding Mr. Buttons.

The dimensions of the bedroom were nagging at her. The room was wider than deep, and the fireplace was on the outer wall flanked by windows that faced the garden. It seemed misplaced to her. The fireplace should have been on the wall that was to the left of the bedroom door, or on the wall facing that wall. Placed as it was, with her bed facing it and the conversation area created by the settee and an armchair in front of the fireplace, it left a mass of furniture in the center of the room.

Her wardrobe and dressing table were to their left, when they probably should have been placed on the right, closer to the bathroom door.

Since the fireplace couldn't be moved, it made more sense to move the furniture, but she had never gotten around to it, being more preoccupied with sorting out the other rooms in the house. William's little used room across the hall from hers had the fireplace at the long end of the room, so while the bed was in a mirror image of her room in terms of placement, the furnishings were more balanced.

She sipped the wine. He had a piece of her hair between his fingers that he wound around his index finger, smoothing it with the pad of his thumb before unwinding it, letting it slip through his fingers before starting the process all over again. She was sitting on the floor, at his feet. He had taken off his boots and was slouched in the armchair with one leg propped on the arm. She could feel the shape of his other leg from the knee down against her back.

When he said earlier that they could go out or stay in, she hadn't expected a quiet evening as the outcome of either choice.

William let the section of her hair he was playing with slip from his fingers. Her eyes were half closed, lending a bit of mystery to her face as the firelight played across it, warming the ivory tones of her skin. She had a bit of a widow's peak that was obscured by the bangs that had come into fashion. He smoothed her hair back from her forehead to find it, smoothing his thumb over it.

"I can feel your head vibrating," he teased. "What are you thinking about?"

"Rearranging the furniture," was her answer. "This room is all out of balance," she started to elaborate.

Rearranging furniture wasn't a topic that interested him, and he knew that she would go on about it at length given the opportunity. "That's not very flattering, pet," he chided.

She looked up at him.

When she turned her head toward him he followed the motion, his fingertips ghosting over the contours of her face. She had always been pretty. Easy to imagine, despite her background, in the life he had left without a single regret. A pretty girl with a face too childishly rounded for a cameo against the carnelian of her hair. Idiot that he was then, he would have noticed her for all the wrong reasons. The echo of his own social awkwardness would have made him uncomfortable. She had lost the lingering baby fat and the delicate bone structure of her face was more obvious. At times she looked almost plain, and then the light would hit her face in a certain way, and she was breathtaking.

He watched as she adjusted to the notion of shackling her mind to the business of pleasing him. She was giving up something in the process and it was there, easily read, a flash of disappointment and hurt that might have been overlooked. She didn't dwell on it, dismissing her own reaction without comment.

Pleasing him was her business. It was the coin of the realm that existed between them, by his design. Pleasing him was the roof over her head and the food in her stomach. It was the warm, pretty, expensive things that clothed her body. All of which he or Angelus, or Darla provided because it was what was expected. After she survived the first few months with him, nothing less would have done. It was nothing if not practical, and ultimately the only kindness she was ever offered. None of which moved her in the least.

She didn't care about the clothes. She had worn the pearl choker that he had brought for her from Vienna once because he had fastened it around her neck. She probably could have lived anywhere, if not very long or very well. Living long or well never seemed to inform her behavior. The coin she treasured was kindness and he offered it to her knowing that it was allowed because ultimately it was the greatest of all the cruelties that she would endure. He was kind and she made too much of that kindness.

She shifted around on the floor, kneeling at his feet, her hand coming to rest on his thigh, her thumb smoothing the fabric beneath her fingers in a caress that was a prelude to more intimate touching. He knew that he should let her do this, and he wanted it. He caught her chin in his fingers instead, holding her unfocused gaze. The medication and alcohol in her system were still effecting her.

He had no real notion of why she wanted to talk about rearranging furniture with him. It was a subject that Darla or Angelus might have taken unfeigned interest in and that Dru would have made into a game. His thoughts on furniture ran to 'comfortable spot to rest my arse' and not much further.

She was still holding her wine glass in her free hand, half forgotten, the bowl of the glass tipping at a precarious angle. He leaned forward from the waist to take it from her. "Are you comfortable there, on the floor?" he asked, stalling. The windows were letting in a draft. "I'd invite you up here," he gestured to his lap, "but," he waved the cheroot he held between his fingers, "I know you don't like breathing my smoke."

The gaslights were off, leaving the room lit only by the fireplace. "The fire is keeping me warm."

Her hand moved up his thigh.

"What do you want to do with the furniture?" he asked. It was too abrupt. She blinked, looking startled by the question. He had a mental image of himself fending off her advances by indulging her desire to talk about furniture that was wrong and strangely apt all at once.

"You want to talk about the furniture?"

He flicked ash in the general direction of the saucer that he was using as an ashtray, feeling mildly irritated. He really didn't want to talk about the furniture, but she said it like it was mind boggling that he would want to talk about furniture. It sounded like something Darla would say, except that Willow hadn't managed to imply at the same time that he had been raised in a barn, which, in point of fact, he had not. Unlike Darla. God only knew what she had been raised in.

He took a drag on the cheroot, held the smoke in for a moment, and let it out in a slow stream, watching her the whole time. "I think you brought it up," he said testily.

She sat back on her heels, reaching for the wine glass he was still holding. He relinquished it to her grip. "I was thinking about moving things," she began. "Everything is bunched up in the middle of the room. If I moved the bed to that wall," she gestured behind them, "and moved the wardrobe and the dressing table over to the wall by the bathroom, that would make it all fit better," she  explained, a slight frown appearing.

He followed all of it. "But, you'd have a big empty space along the hallway wall," he pointed out, thinking that it was the reason for the frown, that she had figured that out.

"I didn't think of that until now," she admitted, sounding like she was now annoyed with herself for bringing it up.

He could see the 'never mind' forming on her lips, and laid his finger across them. "Move the wardrobe and the dressing table and then move the settee and the chair to the corner by the window. It will give you a nice place to read during the day," he suggested. He frowned at the settee. Personally, it was not his favorite piece of furniture, failing his comfortable place to rest his arse test. A settee was essentially a bench, no matter how much you padded it or dressed it up in upholstery fabric. As soon as you found a position you could sink into, you were bound to sink into a hard surface that wasn't going to budge. The settee in the salon wasn't horrible-it was an inducement to good posture, but it was also reasonably large. The one in Willow's room seated two and its chief purpose seemed to be decorative.

"You should have something like a chaise lounge for your bedroom," he said. "I'd have one, but it's too . . . boudoir-ish for me," he claimed with a small smile. "I'll talk to Lucius about having the furniture moved," he offered.

Darla folded her opera glasses and handed them to Matilde as Lucius opened the bottle of champagne. Now that the house lights were coming up, Dru was putting her embroidery hoop away, flexing her long fingered hands. Angelus handed Darla a champagne glass from the tray that Lucius was holding.

The intermission was twenty minutes long. Enough time for people to move around, stretch their legs, enjoy a drink, and mingle in the lobbies and concourses or visit friends in their boxes. Darla hated this part of the evening almost as much as she loved it. The moments between being in the box, without visitors, and the arrival of the first acquaintance made her feel nervous. Angelus came to the opera for the music. She came for the whole thing. The lavishly painted ceiling, the glittering chandelier hanging like a pendant, the costumes, the clothing, the jewels, the mingling at intermission and after the performance all pleased her. The orchestra played through the intermission while voices rose to fill the space under the domed ceiling.

Their first visitor was an English girl accompanied by her mother. They were the daughter and wife of a member of the British legation in Prague, met at a reception at the legation. The daughter remembered Dru, and greeted her warmly. Wolfaert Adorne, a Belgian representing his family's banking firm in Prague that Angelus was cultivating, joined them. Wolfaert in turn introduced them to Alesso Neri and his wife, Isabella, and the box was almost too full. Lucius filled glasses and offered a tray of canapés. ~~~*~~~
 

Willow tipped her head back to catch the last drop of wine from her glass. For a second William thought she was going to lick the rim of the glass. Instead she held it up for him to see. "Empty. More, please?" she asked sweetly.

"Don't you think you've had enough?"

"I'm still thirsty," she argued. Thirst trumps potential drunkenness.

"Switch to water, then," he suggested.

She frowned at him. "Too far away," she held onto his leg as she pulled herself off the floor.

"There is a tap in the bathroom," he pointed out.

"Says the vampire," she shook her head. "Dysentery."

"Ah, Paris?" he placed the episode. He had no idea if tap water was safe to drink or not, but Willow was adamant that it was not. She drank the spring water from the pump in the kitchen. "The kitchen is downstairs . . . says the vampire that has to go out to drink when he is thirsty," he took the bottle from her and filled her wine glass a little more than half full.

She gave him a sidelong look and thanked him.

When he returned the bottle to the table she handed him the replenished glass and went over to the wardrobe to pull out a blanket folded into a neat square. She unfurled it in front of the fire and settled back down at his feet.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"The rug is wool," she pointed out. "It's scratchy."

She reached for her glass, but he held it back, studying her upturned face. "Are you getting drunk?"

"Possibly," she answered gravely, a glint of humor flashing in her eyes. "If I throw up, it will remove all doubt."

That made him laugh and he let her take the wine glass from him.

"You could come down here too," she invited, kicking off her slippers and pushing her bare feet into the blanket. He had picked up one of a half dozen cheroots that he had brought with him from his room while she was feeding the dog. "Or not," she said hastily. "You look comfy up there."

He rose to go to the fireplace, taking one of the long matches in the brass holder on the mantel to get a light. He eyed the long, thin seat cushion on the settee. Might be useful for something, he thought. He could feel her watching him. Having lost his leg to lean against, she had pulled her knees up and had one arm wrapped loosely around them. She sipped her wine, licking the residue off of her lower lip.

He had gone out earlier, right after sundown, while Willow was still sleeping. With no particular destination in mind, he had gone to the park. A sign posted at the gate noted that the park was closed between the hours of nine in the evening and six in the morning. At dusk it was largely empty. The park occupied a space that was the equivalent of two city blocks and in addition to the walking paths, paved in brick with a repeating diamond shaped pattern, there was a groomed trail for riding, and a spring fed pond with a pink sandstone pavilion that was probably modeled on the Vladislav Hall in Prague Castle.

He left the park by the north gate and caught a streetcar, seeking out a tobacco shop he was patronizing. The proprietor talked him into a pack of hand rolled Turkish cigarettes. They felt a bit odd in his hand, but they were easier to carry around than the cheroots he had been smoking for the last decade. He had passed the time with a bit of window shopping and made a quick meal of a prosperous looking bloke, relieving him of his wallet before making his way back to the house in time to see Dru off to the opera, looking utterly smashing.

Working one handed while he smoked, he unbuttoned the waistcoat he was still wearing and dropped it over the arm of the settee. Earlier that evening he had rolled his shirtsleeves up nearly to his elbows and gotten rid of the annoyingly stiff shirt collar that buttoned in around the neck of his shirt. When he had enough of the cheroot, which tasted too sweet after the Turkish cigarettes he had smoked earlier, the balance of the cheroot went into the fire. He took the cushion from the bench seat and placed it on the floor.

While he made himself comfortable, lying on the blanket she had spread out, his head resting on the cushion, Willow turned, sitting at a right angle to him, using the armchair, now at her back to rest against. Her feet were near enough to his hip that he could reach out and wrap his fingers around her ankle. He closed his eyes, listening to the wood hiss and crackle in the fireplace as his fingers moved over her ankle, finding the pulse there, under her skin. His fingers strayed, tracing the curving arch of her foot, feeling the muscles tighten under his fingers. She was ticklish. Her feet were especially ticklish. He could feel her resisting his light hold on her ankle and opened one eye to peer at her.

"I'm not tickling you," he said. Technically, he was correct. He wasn't tickling her deliberately, but his fingers were colder than her skin and she was ticklish, so even his light, firm touch was tickling, and they both knew it.

He rolled over on his side, gesturing to her for the wine glass. She surrendered it and he lifted his head to drink from it before setting it down on the floor beyond the edge of the blanket and the fringed rug on the honey colored wood floor. His attention returned to her foot and he lifted it up, slipping it under his shirt to rest against his abdomen. Her toes curled a bit. He curled his arm under his head, lips pursing as he admired the bit of calf that had been exposed as her dressing gown parted around her legs. His imagination tracked up her leg, savoring the sense memory of her that was firmly entrenched after so many years. There wasn't a place on her body that he hadn't had his hands or mouth on at one time or another.

"You are too far away," he complained, running his hand up the back of her calf. His fingers tightened when he reached the back of her knee, exerting just enough pressure to send a message. She had her head back against the seat of the chair, her eyes open. She turned her head toward him.

"Come here," his tone was wheedling, and in the firelight his blue eyes were dark and nearly impossible to read.

He offered her his hand, and she stared at it for a moment before she lifted her hand to place it in his. His palm slid over hers and his fingers tightened on her wrist. One hard tug on his part, and she would end up sprawled across his chest. She mimicked his hold on her, wrapping her fingers around his wrist, locking their arms together at the wrist. It felt a little strange to hold his wrist like this, it was too much like how he held her wrists, sometimes above her head, sometimes just like this, like his hand on her wrist was a flesh and bone manacle.

Tethered, he pulled her towards him, slowly, giving her time to get her knees under her. His shoulders shifted as he rolled onto his back, lifting his hips to keep the blanket from moving under him, settling back down. He loosened his hold on her wrist, a little amused by the fact that she had quietly forced him to by refusing to let go of his wrist. She held on to his wrist a second longer before relaxing her grip. Pushing himself up on one arm, he brought her hand to his mouth, kissing her fingertips. Her hand was cool, but her fingertips were cold.

Despite the fire, it really was too cold for her with the window open. He gave her wrist a lingering kiss and rose to shut the window. He started to draw the drapes over the view of the bleak garden below when movement in the dark caught his eye.

It was too quick to be anything natural, at the edge of the garden wall. "Love? Those wards that you cast? Are you getting anything?"

She turned at the waist to look at him, her hands hovering over the buttons of her dressing gown. "Around the house?" she rubbed her face with both hands, sitting back on her heels, a slight frown drawing her eyebrows together. She felt a slight tingle over her scalp that spread.

"I don't know," she shook her head, rubbing her hands over her arms. She was cold and the tingly sensation could have come from that or the combination of medication and alcohol, or from the awareness of him.

"I'm kind of in a fuzzy sensory place," she admitted.

It made him smile. A fuzzy sensory place. "Should I be flattered?"

She didn't answer him. His gaze left the garden for a moment, taking her in, looking serious and intent, on her knees in the center of a blanket on the floor. He let the curtain fall to cover the window and went back to her, cupping her face in his hands. "Your hands are like ice," he told her. "Why don't you get in bed? Warm up under the covers. I'm going to have a look around outside." He bent at the waist to kiss her mouth. Her lips were cold in contrast to the heat of her mouth.

"I won't be gone long," he promised.
~~~*~~~
 

Andreas could tell by the way the lead horse was leaning into the harness that the animal had dozed off despite the occasional foot shuffling of the other horse in the harness. If the lead horse was disturbed, he would grunt and bump the other horse or make a soft neighing sound to settle his harness mate down. Horses were unexpectedly interesting. The coachman who had survived the night their masters had arrived had not worked out as a coachman after he had been turned. Either he didn't much like horses or he loved them the way only a vampire could. His attention had been devoted particularly to a gray palfrey that was meant for a lady's hack and a big rawboned bay mare with a lazy disposition. The palfrey had been destroyed. The bay mare was still alive, the left side of her face marred by healing scar tissue.

The coachman was no more. Anything that vicious was useful, but destroying the Master's property was not permitted, so Andreas was driving tonight.

He discovered that he liked the horses. They were uncomplicated and very social. His presence in the stable doors made them all peer out at him. He was too strong now to be concerned about being in close quarters with large animals. He made a clucking sound to settle the more fractious of the pair down and watched the horse's ears swivel back at the sound, then forward again, then back, finally flattening a bit before he tossed his head, jerking on the reins looped loosely in Andreas' hands. His hands tightened on the reins, not pulling on either horses' mouth, but feeling the way they were handling the bit.

The lead horse clamped down on his bit, suddenly alert. Andreas looked down the long line of coaches outside the opera house, standing a bit in the box to see down the road. The doors of the opera house had been flung open and people were just starting to stream out over the stairs. Coachmen were moving along the line of coaches to return to the vehicles from where they had been visiting during the performance.

Lucius would be out on the stairs at some point, looking for the coach. They were a block and a half back in the queue. Once he reached the block the opera house sat on, Lucius would let Angelus know that the coach was there so he could collect Darla and Drusilla. He hoped that they weren't going to be long. Paulus was hunting under the Charles Bridge tonight and Andreas hoped to catch up with him. The lead horse shivered, no longer leaning on the harness, but ready to go to work, probably thinking of the hot bran mash that would be his reward at the end of the evening.

He straightened his hat and gloves, sitting up a bit straighter as he released the brake. There was a man standing at the intersection in a uniform, signaling the coaches to move up as space opened in front of the opera house. Andreas spied Lucius, waiting patiently as he approached. When it was his turn to cross the street, Lucius turned on his heel, like a little Prussian soldier, and entered the opera house. Andreas found it amusing. Paulus and Mathilde thought that Lucius was a bit full of himself, and he was, but Andreas wasn't moved to resentment.

By the time he pulled to a smooth stop in front of the opera house, Lucius was there to turn down the step and open the coach door while Angelus handed Darla and Drusilla in, leaving Mathilde to Lucius. He secured the step and the door and climbed up to take his post beside Andreas. He took something out from underneath his coat and laid it on the bench seat on his other side. He felt under the center of the bench seat for the large pistol that was holstered there, and then straightened, nodding to Andreas to signal him to drive.

"How was it?" Andreas asked, reverting to Czech. The 'family' spoke English when they were being intimate. Lucius had led them in speaking Czech when they were being private. German was the only language that they had in common.

Lucius shrugged. "A lot of noise, and pretty costumes. It was in Italian," he added.
 
 

"Am I driving them home?" he asked.

"Yes. Home," he agreed.

It wasn't until Lucius jumped down to assist at the door that Andreas saw what he had dropped on the seat. It was a handful of blood red peonies wrapped in ribbons. It almost made him smile. He could guess whom the flowers were for.

~~~*~~~

William let himself out the kitchen door. The house was built on the upper end of a rectangular lot that was bounded on both sides by a five-foot wall. There was a covered walkway on the side of the house that ran back to the stables, built at a right angle to the house. The garden was an L shaped space with a long, narrow end on the side of the house where Willow and Dru's bedrooms were. A path bisected the open square of the garden behind the house and was further divided by a path that veered right to the stable and left to an arbor. The center of the intersecting paths featured the only viable piece of landscaping, a sundial on a pedestal surrounded by a bed of scarlet tulips that were black around the edges from frost.

His family's money came from tulips, or at least speculating in tulips in the seventeenth century when a single bulb from a rare or exotic variety could fetch three thousand guilders. The ancestor that made the killing was Sir Christopher Mordaunt, de-frocked priest, failed playwright, and would-be privateer who had made a fortune selling unharvested bulbs, getting out of the trade before the tulip crash of 1637. Most of his friends and business partners lost everything, while he managed to avoid the market collapse.

He walked to the access alley behind the house. The carriage house double doors were closed, and the alley appeared empty. He backtracked and let himself into the stables connected to the carriage house from the garden door. Looking into the carriage house, he saw the Brougham was in its place. The coach was gone, which was expected. He stood still for a moment, listening to the animals.

Horses were creatures of habit. The larger coach that Angelus had taken tonight required two horses. That left two horses and the two hacking ponies. They were a little unsettled by the absence of their stable mates, but not exhibiting any signs of fear or distress that he would expect if anyone had been prowling around in the stables. One of the ponies swung his head towards him, more curious than alarmed. He tossed his head, sniffing loudly, and then settled back down.

He checked the garden again, looking around in the area where he had seen someone moving. There was no doubt in his mind that it was a someone, and that they had been watching the house. His appearance at the window had startled them into motion.

Satisfied that no one was lurking about, he returned to the house, bolted the kitchen door and took the back stairs up to the second floor. He hadn't done much more than pull his boots on and grab a crossbow from his room before he had gone out to investigate. He put the crossbow  away and got rid of his boots before returning to Willow's room.

She was in bed, as he had suggested. She had picked up the blanket from the floor and wrapped it around herself before getting in bed. He eyed the blanket wrapping. "I can only hope that you are naked under that."

She tilted her head to one side. "Was anyone out there?" she asked.

"Earlier? Yes. They've gone now," he didn't sound concerned about it. He was busy pulling his shirt over his head without unbuttoning it and unfastening his trousers. His clothes were discarded casually. She had picked up the blanket, returned the seat cushion to its place, finished her glass of wine, and hung her dressing robe and rinsed her shift in the sink while he was prowling around the garden.

Nude, he walked over to the fireplace to put another log on and rearrange the burning logs around it to ensure that the fire would burn long and evenly. When he was satisfied with that he came around to what Willow thought of as her side of the bed, near the door, and turned back the sheet and blanket, getting in beside her. He only unwrapped part of her blanket, enough to include himself inside of it until they were wrapped up in it together.

Willow wasn't sure what to make of it when he got settled. He smoothed her hair back from her face. She moved a little, trying to find a comfortable position in relation to his body and the blanket that was wrapped around both of them. He untangled his left arm from the blanket, tugging it up, higher, around her shoulders, his hand moving down her back as his right hand, under the blanket found her knee and guided it over his abdomen so that she was held snugly against his side, his shoulder available to rest her head on.

It was probably because he didn't breath that she never had a sense that she was too heavy, laying on him. There was no reminder in the rise and fall of his chest that his body was working against her weight. His hand on her back kept moving, from her shoulder to her raised hip, dipping into the vale of her waist, tracking it upward, over her rib cage, lightly squeezing her shoulder before smoothing her hair and repeating the motion, following her spine. If it was meant to be comforting, and she couldn't imagine that it was, it was failing. The blanket was woven in a windowpane pattern. The yard was soft, and the shifting of the textured pattern over her skin was bringing up gooseflesh.

She lifted her arm over his, curling it under her against his shoulder to prop her chin up on her hand. Her hair fell over her shoulder, pooling on the pillow beside his head, the two colors mixing, his ashy brown mingling with her natural light auburn. There was something smug and amused in his expression. He held her gaze as his hand moved down her spine, pausing briefly to press her into his side when he reached her hip, moving up, following the curve of her hip. She found herself holding her breath, anticipating the skin-tingling brush of his hand over her ribs.

"What is this?" she asked, curious, wary, not really trusting the mood he had been in since they had fought in the kitchen.

She found herself on her back. He shifted his weight, rolling her off of him, pulling the blanket that joined them off his shoulder as it became trapped beneath her. The hem of it fell half across her and he caught the edge of it in his fingers, shifting it teasingly against her skin.

"Seduction," he explained with a small smile that acknowledged that seducing her was unnecessary. His eyes were on her body, giving serious attention to the pebbled texture of her skin, as he pushed the blanket away and ran his fingertips lightly over her breast and ribcage, his index finger tracing a line to her hipbone. The back of his hand grazed the curls at the juncture of her thighs.

"I would know you anywhere," he said. "You could change your name, change the color of your hair, and I could pick your heartbeat out of a crowded room. You could douse yourself in perfume, and I'd still be able to smell you," his head bent until his nose was touching her breastbone and he breathed her, eyes closing as he inhaled, his hand moving down her thigh, nudging her legs apart.

He turned his head to press his lips against the upper swell of her breast, dragging his lips over her skin, his tongue following. She tensed, recognizing the intent behind the caress. His tongue felt slightly rough. He was palpitating the blood vessels under her skin, stimulating the flow of blood. She understood that he probably wasn't thinking about hurting her, at least not hurting her a lot. His hand was moving up her thigh. She closed her eyes, waiting for the stinging sensation of his fangs sinking into her skin as his fingers parted her, dipping into the warm gulf where she was already wet.

Sometimes she reminded herself that the moisture that came from her body was a form of self-defense. It did not necessarily spring from desire, but simply from sufficient warning of imminent penetration. It was one of the things that she had discovered in Bristol. That desire wasn't necessary to produce the substance that eased the passage of a body part inside of her. His fingers collected the moisture, and he made a sound, deep in his throat that vibrated over his tongue against her skin, mocking her attempts to rationalize the sensation between her legs. His fingertips reached her clitoris with a caress that was enough like what his tongue was doing that the two were connected.

The lower half of her body was still tangled in the blanket. The texture of the yarns against her back and legs was a firm caress. She wrapped her fingers around his wrist, fighting the blanket to open her legs wider, to bend her knees to gain the leverage to press herself against his hand. His mouth left the upper swell of her breast, leaving the skin there a little numb. His hand slid under her neck to the back of her head, tangling in her hair until she opened her eyes.

His eyes were nearly incandescent, unearthly, eating light in darkness. No words passed his lips. He wasn't quiet, or given to moments of introspection, and there was in the deliberation of his fingers, working her towards a climax, a certain ruthless quality that was not unappealing. He kicked the blankets and sheet back, gracefully moving to kneel between her legs, freeing them. In that moment when he was hanging over her, he could have done anything, tightened his fingers in her hair to pull her head back, exposing her throat while his cock slid inside of her or bent his head to her breast to finish what he had begun there.

He kissed her. That was all. He kissed her mouth, sucking on her lower lip until her lips parted for him, until she was kissing him back. His hand didn't tighten in her hair. It cupped the back of her head and then he moved it out from under her, catching a few stray hairs that clung to his hand as his fingers moved over her face, tracing the contours of her face. It wasn't an artful caress. His lips sought the spaces his fingers touched. Her hair was too tangled in his fingers, tickling where it brushed her skin, getting caught under his lips where he kissed her. She ignored it until a strand of her hair tickled her nose, and then she moved her head to avoid his lips, trying the brush the annoying strand of her hair away.

He brushed her hand away from her face, and then the strands of her hair, finding them and smoothing them away until she caught his hand, sliding her fingers through his as he braced on his elbow.

His head bowed to her, his nose brushing hers as his eyes drifted shut, and she felt her throat tighten as he breathed her again, until his lips were grazing hers between deep breaths, nipping at hers in soft lip-biting kisses. Her tongue stole out to touch his lower lip as he found a new spot to nibble on, and he lifted his head, eyes opening.

She turned her head just enough to reach the corner of his mouth, feeling his lips part for her as the tip of her tongue slid over that neglected corner. His fingers tightened on hers, squeezing lightly, stretching his palm and fingers inside of her hand. They kissed  until they were both breathing hard, she out of necessity, and he from something as urgent as her need to breathe. He kissed the corner of her mouth and her throat, his fingers sliding inside of her, making her clutch at his shoulders and run her fingers through his hair as her hips rose to meet him. He kissed his way down to her abdomen, his tongue dipping into her navel in a prelude to a more intimate caress that made her stomach clench, and then he was lifting her to his mouth, his hands moving under her hips, slipping around to seek her breasts, and the rough stroke of his tongue across her clitoris had her arching up to grind herself against his mouth.

It felt wrong. The way he was touching her was at variance to her reaction. He was being tender and gentle and she was shoving her cunt in his face. The strangeness of the day was catching up to her.

He felt the change in her as she started to withdraw, emotionally, mentally, shutting herself in one of the spaces in her head reserved for bad moments when she couldn't cope with what was happening to her. He did the only thing he could to reach her, savoring the feeling of sinking into her as he covered her with his body, letting her take more of his weight, knowing that she needed the reassurance of him pressed against her. His thumb stroked her cheek as he moved over her, in her. "Stay with me, Willow," he urged. "Be with me," he whispered in her ear.

There was something in his voice that made her chest ache. It wasn't fair or right. She wanted to turn her head to the wall, to lose herself in the nothingness of a moment that she had the power to make one-sided. He was touching her face and whispering to her, and her mind, floating in a hazy sea of alcohol and headache medication, might have numbed her to his appeal. She only had to keep her eyes closed and let the dizziness that was lurking overwhelm her.

She could feel herself moving with his body and hands as he guided her. A touch on the inside of her right knee, adjusting the angle of her hips, lifting her knee until it was cradling his hip, her foot pressed into the slightly rough weave of the blanket that was under her body. He wasn't selfish when it came to pleasure, though she didn't necessarily see it that way. Sometimes he made her feel more like a doll than Dru ever did; a windup toy for his personal amusement. She was almost startled to find that he was outpacing her now. Her hands moved to his back, feeling the tension there as he drove into her more purposefully.

It brought tears to her eyes as he groaned, pushing his face into her hair, unwittingly trapping her hair, and pulling it enough to be distracting. She closed her eyes, kissing his throat because it was what she could reach, holding him as he stiffened in her arms, resisting his own climax at the last minute, as if it had just reached him that she wasn't there. But, she was. The knot of tension that released wasn't between her legs. It was between each shuddering beat of her heart.

~Part: 14~

There were more reasons why she wouldn't kill William than reasons why she couldn't. Oddly enough that was truer of Drusilla. There were reasons why she would never stake Dru and very few reasons why she couldn't.

Dru's talent for prophecy was unpredictable. She had visions of things that would happen in five minutes, an hour, a day, a week, or sometimes years and decades in advance. The latter point was something only Willow could know. Some of the crazier things that Dru announced would in due time come true. Pictures in boxes, white monsters without faces walking on the moon, a litany of atrocities and natural disasters that she sometimes sang under her breath. Sometime in the night Dru had come into her room.

William woke briefly, opening his eyes at the sound of the door opening. When he saw that it was Dru, he started to rise, but she came to the bed and climbed over him, her long fingered hand stroking his cheek. Willow had woken with him. There was something alarming about the way a tense vampire woke up. He was largely inert in sleep and then, he wasn't. She didn't even have to be touching him to feel the change in his body. It occurred to her mildly hung over brain that he was sleeping close to the door for a reason tonight.

She started to move away from him to make room for Dru, but Dru climbed over Willow too before settling down on the outside edge of the bed, facing her. She had a handful of wilted poppies that she laid between them and a piece of sugar candy, dyed blue, shaped in a mold based on one of the characters in the opera. It was a favor from the opera, smelling strongly of peppermint extract.

It wasn't an unusual thing for her to do. When they went to out, when Willow was left behind, Dru would bring little things back for her. Her choices could be unpredictable and sometimes frightening. She had brought her an earring once, the wire dark with dried blood, a ring, with a finger still attached, dead animals, a piece of cake from a wedding spattered with blood. Willow relaxed when she saw the piece of candy.

Dru had left the door from the hallway open, so there was enough light for Willow to see the blue candy, looking like a piece of glass with tiny bubbles inside of it as Dru held it up between two fingers, making it dance as she hummed a bit of the music she remembered from the performance. She popped the candy into her mouth, and made a face at the peppermint taste, taking it out, and sticking her blue dyed tongue out at Willow, who smiled back at her, feeling tears wash her sleep gritty eyes.

The closest thing she had ever come to having a sister was her relationship with Buffy, who had been an ideal, slightly older sister figure. Dru was much older, and less ideal, and she really didn't think that Willow was a person, but there was in moments like this a sad echo of another life. It wasn't hard to imagine that before Angelus, Dru remembered to cadge a treat for a younger sister left behind for the evening. She brought other things tonight. She had a square of cloth that she had been embroidering, and Willow admired it with unfeigned appreciation.

Drusilla's instincts for self-preservation were impressive. In some ways she was much more deadly and terrifying than Angelus or William liked to think they were. In a test of her resolve to kill and Drusilla's reflexes, she knew Dru would win, and it would be quick and direct.

It was infinitely more complicated than that. She was less helpless than she was in the beginning, when the four vampires in all of their careless brutality were at least a known commodity. They were vampires. They were supposed to hurt her, unlike the people, from the soldiers, to the constable, to the nuns, to the girl who had befriended her who had failed her. The last time she had gotten away from them in London she had taken refuge in a church, telling her story to a sympathetic priest.

They had locked her up in a mental hospital that made her appreciate the more enlightened approach to mental health in the late twentieth century. The things that had happened to her in the two weeks she spent in the hospital had nearly broken her, starting the spiral of depression that culminated with her first attempt to kill herself. She wouldn't stake William for a lot of reasons, but she couldn't stake him because no matter what he did to her, it was never as bad as what could be done to her if he wasn't there, or so she thought.

That was becoming less true. The skills that she had acquired, particularly in the last two years, were going to benefit her eventually. The spells she had used yesterday, with nothing but herself as a focus for the power, suggested as much to her.
~~~*~~~
 

Paulus had the first watch, starting at dawn, so had he been able to sleep, Lucius could have found a bed and slept away the early morning hours. He was awake, however, staring at the ceiling in the room that had been his since he entered the house. It was a nice enough room, on the third floor, above the more lavish suites, directly above the dressing room that separated the master bedroom suite into his and her halves with a spiral staircase that provided direct access to the dressing room. At a tug on one of the bell pulls in either room below, he could be available in a matter of minutes. There was a similar arrangement across the hall where Matilde slept.

If she could she would be on a pallet on the floor beside Darla's bed. Lucius would not have been surprised if she slept on the floor with her ear pressed to it to listen.

The pull of the bond to the vampire who had killed him and made him a vampire had hardly been noticeable after the first miserable day of his awakening. William had demonstrated a marked lack of interest in him, and to some extent while Lucius resented the disinterest, he observed the almost compulsive way Matilde seemed to crave Darla's approval and attention and considered himself above that. More independent. More his own vampire.

He had been reminded that he belonged to William. It had been no less unsettling than the startling discovery that the girl who belonged to William was not as helpless as he believed she was.

He had cleaned up the mess in the kitchen without being asked, cursing them as he performed the service. Through the long hours at the opera house he had tried to lose himself in the music, in the simple expectations his role held, and in the sound and scent of so much living, breathing flesh under the domed roof. There was an unavoidable still point in his mind that was caught in a snare.

He had belonged to her once, by his choosing, despite the fact that she was unaware of this. He belonged to William now, who she belonged to, utterly and completely. He understood that. He belonged to both of them. William made it so, and he didn't understand that at all, but he knew it was true.
~~~*~~~
 

William woke up to an empty bed. His hand tested the place where Willow had slept beside him, detecting no lingering warmth. She had probably been up for some time. He got up and walked across the hall to his own room to dress. It was mid-afternoon. With any luck, he was up in time for tea.

The salon was empty, so he tried the library. Angelus was there, sitting by the fire with Dru perched on the arm of his chair. Darla was nowhere in sight. "Where is Willow?" he asked.

"Walking the dog," Angelus told him. "She's not been gone long."

He had meant to tell her he didn't want her walking alone. Had he? He frowned. It might have slipped his mind. "I don't want her walking alone," he said it now.

Angelus yawned. "That's a bit of a problem, then. Who is to walk with her on a sunny day such as today?" He his lolled back against the back of the chair. He looked lazy and sated. Dru gave him a smile full of unspoken secrets.

William watched them for a moment, feeling a familiar irritation and jealousy rising. He pushed it aside. "There was someone watching the house last night," he said, "lurking by the garden wall on the west side of the house."

That got Angelus' attention. It was meant to. "Cook didn't mention it."

William shrugged. "Didn't notice it," he corrected. "Moved too fast to be anything human."

Angelus' eyes narrowed slightly. "Probably the local vampires sniffing around," he said dismissively. If a vampire tried to enter the house and was repelled, they would assume that the barrier protection was vested in the human who lived with them, which made killing her a prerequisite to any attack on the house. There were demons and humans who could move in daylight hours that might work for vampires.

"Dru? Willow's not to leave the house alone to walk your dog," Angelus told her.

"What do you know about the local vamps?" William wanted to know. There was a cabinet built into the wall around the fireplace and he found a crystal tumbler and poured himself four fingers of whisky, neat from a decanted bottle.

"Small community," Angelus warmed to the topic. "Standoffish. They don't make a lot of new vamps."

"Any real reason to think that they would go in for hiring out help?" William asked. It suggested a whole new set of possibilities for the not so casual way Willow had been approached in the park.

Angelus thought about it. "None," he admitted, a small smile appearing.  "We'll have an evening in," Angelus said. "With parlor games. Would you like that, Princess?"

William sat across from him in the twin to Angelus' armchair. "I'm taking Willow out," he said before Dru could answer. Angelus' parlor games involved systems of reward and punishment that he would rather not involve Willow in at the moment. He would as soon tell Angelus that as open one of her veins and invite him to have a snack.

Dru pouted. "It's not as much fun without Miss Willow. She makes the best noises."

Darla arrived in time to have caught the general drift of the conversation. She looked at William thoughtfully. "Where are you taking her?" she asked.

Caught, he simply smiled. "Hadn't given it that much thought."

Darla exchanged a glance with Angelus. William was being his usual provoking self. Or there was something more to his sudden desire to take his pet out of play. It might be no more than a spasm of retaliation for the way Dru was hanging on Angelus.

"I want you to take her to one of those little taverns under the Charles Bridge," Angelus said. "Paulus and Andreas have been hunting there," he looked over Dru's head at Darla. "William thinks we had someone prowling around last night," he explained.

"You want to draw them out?" William guessed. "I don't fancy the idea of using Willow for bait," he admitted. He didn't fancy being bait, but he could take care of himself. She would slow him down considerably. "I'll take Lucius," he substituted.

"And Willow," Darla insisted. William's instincts went straight to fight. Willow's presence would create an impediment to that. He would be more cautious if she was there, and she was a potentially useful observer.

William looked annoyed. "She'll slow us down if we have to fight," he complained.

Angelus gave a quick bark of laughter. "That's the point, boy. We aren't sending you there to fight. Just to look pretty and helpless, eh, my love?"

Dru nodded sagely. "It's like playacting," she agreed. "It will be great fun. My William will be a good and virtuous page," she mimed turning over a card. "But he shall be as the Knight of Wands."

Darla and Angelus looked at William who shrugged. "Haven't a bloody clue," he admitted. "Which one is the knight of wands, Dru?"

Her eyes twinkled and she got a conspiratorial look on her face. She put her finger to her lips. "Not telling," she said. "It's a secret."

She looked so pleased with herself that he found himself smiling back at her. "I thought we didn't have secrets," he cajoled.

She tilted her head to one side. "This is our secret," she insisted with a degree of severity. He was the knight of wands, so he had to know what he was. She was too polite to point it out, but sometimes he was disappointingly obtuse.

His eyebrows lifted at that, and his eyes cut to Darla long enough for a spare shake of his head to let her know that he didn't know what Dru was talking about.  "So, I'm to look helpless and find out what they want? Is that the game?"

"More or less," Darla agreed.

"And not get myself tortured or staked?" he added sourly, since he didn't think Darla gave a damn either way.

"Probably works best for you that way," she agreed.
~~~*~~~
 

For Willow it was much later in the day than she normally chose to walk the park. This was in part by design and in part by circumstances. She had woken up with what she recognized as a mild hangover. She never slept well or deeply when she had too much to drink. She had fallen asleep again with Dru rubbing her temples soothingly and woken up a few hours later feeling refreshed. William was still sleeping. She had a bath and dressed for the day in a silvery, pale blue dress that buttoned up the back. She had gone to Dru's room looking for help with the buttons and found Angelus there, lounging in the canopied bed.

Her first instinct was to back out of the room as fast as her feet could take her, but Dru darted forward to catch at her hands, pulling her into the room.

She should have just woken William up and asked him to help with her buttons. Dru was wearing a nightgown that hung off one shoulder. It had once been white, finished in lace and delicate embroidery. Dru told her once that when she was in the convent she made nightgowns like the one she was wearing now that were gifts for brides. It was blood stained in odd patterns that had been made from the fabric pressing against her skin where it had been broken.

Dru had pulled her across the room towards the bed. Her options were limited. She could scream. It would probably wake William up, and he might simply remove her from the room. Or her might join them. Dru was running her fingernails over her bare back. When the back of her legs hit the mattress she knew she was running out of time as Angelus moved behind her.

To her intense relief, he simply buttoned her dress.

"Take the dog out for a walk. Lucius let him out for a while, but he's been whining for you all day," he told her.

Saved by Mr. Buttons. She walked him around to the pond pavilion and sat on one of the low walls framing a view of the pond. It probably wasn't very ladylike, but it was late enough in the afternoon that the park was practically deserted. She let Mr. Buttons off the leash and he took off like a shot to chase the geese at the edge of the pond where an old woman with an umbrella was feeding them.

Unimpressed by the small dog, the geese huddled for a moment and then started toward the dog, honking fiercely, making Willow laugh. The old woman looked amused too.

Startled, Mr. Buttons came to a halt, dancing around nervously before he raced back over to her, muddy paws dragging over her coat.

Savior and bane of her existence, Willow decided. She snapped the leash back on and they continued on their walk. He didn't get enough exercise in the house. She gave him an extra turn around the park to apologize for laughing at him when the geese had retaliated.  She saw no one else in the park and was relieved.

When she returned to the house she picked Mr. Buttons up and carried him into the kitchen to wet a towel to wipe his feet on before he tracked mud all over the house. He really wasn't a bad little dog. He tolerated this, wriggling in her lap and licking her fingers, trying to push his cold wet nose in to the palm of her hand. She took the hint and smoothed her hand over his domed head before resuming her paw cleaning.

William and Dru came into the kitchen while she was cleaning his feet. Seeing Dru, Mr. Buttons erupted in a series of sharp, excited barks. "Come to Mummy," Dru cooed at the dog. Willow let go of the dog and he ran to Dru who picked him up and slung him under her arm. He never appeared to mind this treatment, and was licking Dru's fingers.

She went to the sink to wash her hands off. She had found the picnic hamper earlier and ate some of the bread for a snack. She was hungry now. She opened the icebox to look for something to eat. There was a ceramic bowl full of raw chicken livers. Yuck. She certainly hoped that was for the dog. Nothing on earth would induce her to eat chicken livers.

"Hungry?" William guessed. "I thought we would go out tonight. I'll take you somewhere for dinner."
~~~*~~~
 

They didn't take the Brougham. It was the smaller of the two carriages with a passenger compartment for two and a box for a driver. "I thought we would take the streetcar," William told her as they left the house, Lucius trailing behind them.

While she was still in her dressing gown, changing into something to wear for their evening out, William had come into her room with an armful of clothing that he had dumped on her bed. She recognized the cloth jacket. It was square and boxy, with an inverted pleat in the back and an inch wide band of black velvet around the waist. It was Sofia's. She had bought it used and she and Matilde had refurbished it with the ribbon and silver buttons that had come off an old coat of Willow's.

The dress was one of Sofia's too. It was a kind of smock that was worn over a shirt, gathering at the waist with a tie that went through a loop of fabric half hidden in the waistband that fastened at the waist. Sofia had not survived the night Angelus, Darla, Dru and William came to Prague. Wearing the dead woman's clothing should have bothered her, but having worn clothes removed from dead people more than once, Willow only felt a brief twinge of guilt, more over having given so little thought to Sofia, than for wearing her clothes now.

The clothes made more sense to her now  that she knew they were taking the streetcar.

They went through the park. She wasn't surprised that William was familiar enough with it to lead her unerringly to the north gate. Because she walked the park in daylight, he would have familiarized himself with it at night. She half expected, when they came to the park, that he would insist that she go over her encounter with the two men the previous day. He could be territorial about things like that, and she knew with a certain degree of regret and a more profound sense of failure that she had, inadvertently set up the two men who had spoken to her.

It was a by-product of loosing her temper. The burst of anger had felt good, but it left in its wake an uneasy feeling of loss. The hard core of anger that she kept reigned in was hers alone. It was the numb, cold fist inside her that held the last shreds of who she once was, and any loosening of her grip on it threatened what she held inside.

Lucius was, it turned out, in charge of managing the schedule and fares for their streetcar excursion. After they boarded a mostly empty car, William's arm came to rest on the back of her seat, loosely circling her shoulders. Lucius sat directly across from them, his long legs crossed at the ankle. She had never seen him adopt so casual a pose and recognized it as one of William's when his hands, loosely clasped, came to rest over his abdomen.

"I thought we would go to London in the fall," William said, reminding her of Angelus' promised reward for her good behavior on her own in Prague. "Does that suit you?"

A lot of things could happen before fall. He was brushing his knuckles over her shoulder. The solicitous mood that had started after they had fought was holding.

When she didn't respond immediately to his question, he dipped his head to peer at her. "That wasn't a rhetorical question, love," he chided. "Does it suit you?"

"Oh," she shook her head. "I'm still . . . streetcar . . . neat," she admitted. "Fall is fine,"

He looked amused by that. Only Willow, with a houseful of servants and a carriage at her disposal would look at riding a noisy streetcar as a treat. She liked trains too. He had taught her to ride, and she could stay in the saddle, but she didn't care for it. Perched on a sidesaddle she looked like she was all too aware of the possibility of falling.

"Fancy it?" he asked.

He got one of her head ducking smiles for an answer when she nodded, looking out the window, giving him a view of the back of her head. She had put her hair into a simple but neat twist at the back of her head. Before they had left the house he had wrapped one of his seldom-used black cashmere scarves around her neck under the loose collar of the jacket she was wearing. It covered most of her neck save for a spot under her ear that was smooth and soft between the dark scarf and the downy auburn of her hairline.

He found himself holding one of her gloved hands, watching as her head turned when something caught her eyes. Angelus had spent a considerable amount of time teaching her to draw. She had no talent for drawing people or plants, but she was fairly good at drawing maps or sketching buildings with a decent sense of scale and proportion.

His indolent pose duly noted, at least by Willow, Lucius had nothing to do but watch them together. She was dressed more casually than he had ever seen her in a faded red jacket with velvet trim and silver buttons. The gloves she wore with it probably cost more than the rest of her clothing combined. The plan for the evening was to take her out to shop before the stores near the town square closed and then to find someplace to feed her near the river. She did not go out nearly as much as anyone else in the household at night, and it was not permitted for her to be out alone after dark, an injunction that made a lot of sense from the vampire point of view until you knew that she wasn't entirely helpless. Except that they were still pretending that she was helpless. He grasped her reasons for the deception. It was not unlike reserving English for private conversation. William's reasons were harder to fathom.

She was looking out the window, one gloved hand lying in her lap, the other loosely held by William who looked, either deliberately or accidentally, like he was completely absorbed by her. Color climbed into her cheeks. A woman on the streetcar, dressed in a dark, ugly green dress with three bands of contrasting black trim at the bottom of her skirt giving away a dress refurbished for a taller frame than the original wearer, watched them with an expression that was wistful and a little envious.

Almost without meaning to Willow started thinking about the logistics of their trip. It was a useful way to distract herself. She could feel Lucius watching her. It was not yet full dark outside, but closer to dusk. The overcast sky was blue gray around the smoky whisps of cloud cover that seemed to almost hang over the city. It was the kind of sky that made her think rain, and she had considered taking an umbrella with her. William had seen her reaching for one and had given her a spare shake of his head. He was rarely wrong about the weather. If he thought an umbrella wasn't necessary, then it probably was not going to rain anytime soon.

William had property of his own in London. He owned a small house on Charlotte Street that would be the most likely place for them to stay while they were in London. The house was leased when they weren't in London, which was more often than not, so she would need to write to his cousin in London that handled the property to see that the house was vacated for the duration of their stay.

William George Spencer Mordaunt was, for all intents and purposes, the victim of a tragic murder on the streets of London in 1880. He was interred at St. Marylebone Cemetery in the family plot, with a sister who had died in infancy, a not uncommon method of internment. His mother simply disappeared after his death, a mystery that had gone unsolved leaving the property that the family owned in legal limbo for years. One of the most startling things that Willow had discovered about William was that he had a human family that still lived in and around London that he remained in contact with in sporadic correspondence and the occasional visit. How they resolved his dead, but not quite dead status amongst themselves was a mystery, but they seemed to find it a great joke. His younger cousins, only vaguely recalling his funeral eighteen years ago, seemed to divide him into two different but closely related people.

Who she was to his family was every bit as odd. In a spur of the moment bit of truth and fiction, she had been introduced to his family as nothing more, nothing less than his mistress, a status that was accepted with a degree of bland tolerance tinged with eye rolling humor. The humor came with a highly edited version of his discovery of her in Bristol. In part the tolerance was papered over in money. The Mordaunt's weren't aristocratic, but they were wealthy in the odd second or third generation English way, with pretensions to gentry that were still largely perceived as pretensions within the family. Outwardly, they were Anglican, public school educated, with enough entrée into what was considered society to be invited to parties where the hostess' triumph might be a Viscount of someplace obscure to lend consequence to the evening. William's part of that wealth was considerable, and he wasn't deeply interested in it, which allowed the cousins to control the holdings that were the most profitable and kept any one of them from gaining more control over the wealth than the others.

The only evidence Willow had ever seen that they really suspected that there was something deeply wrong about him was an avid interest in the occult, and a fascination with secret societies which really wasn't that odd in Victorian England. His maternal aunt Lucy Spencer Douglas had a collection of creepy artifacts including a shrunken head kept in an ornate box that she claimed talked to her. She also believed that a family of fairies lived inside of the floorboards of her house and held séances to chat up old school chums that had died.

William's ease with Dru never made more sense to her than after an unnerving hour of high tea with Lucy Douglas and her mummified shrunken head companion.

They left the streetcar a few blocks from the Charles Bridge and Willow found herself walking between them over a paved sidewalk on a street of three story buildings that reflected nearly five hundred years of architectural variation. Hand lettered signs with iconic illustrations provided some sense of what shops were located on the street. William had drawn her hand into the crook of his arm. Lucius had moved up to place himself between her and the street. William led her into a confectioners. His answer to any problem she was having was a piece of chocolate, which was both sweet and irritating at times. He bought a bag of mixed nuts and a slice of orange freshly dipped into warm chocolate and left to harden on a sheet of wax paper. The later he offered to her with a grin, knowing that she wasn't above eating in public.

They left the confectioners shop and strolled past a half dozen other shops before coming to a bookstore. Willow automatically slowed, looking at the titles displayed in the window. Most of their books were purchased at a bookseller in London who selected titles for them and shipped the books to any location Angelus requested. They went in and Willow found an English language Baedeker for Prague that they purchased. It barely fit into the cloth purse she was carrying.

At the beginning of the next block was a shop selling glass that Willow would have walked past, but William reached for the door and steered her in. They had a collection of tiny crystal figurines in a display case that Willow knew Dru would have enjoyed. The shopkeeper was eying them with a degree of skepticism. Willow knew it had everything to do with the way she was dressed. She had shopped with Darla, whose couture clothing, fur-trimmed coats, and jewelry had an electrifying effect on shopkeepers.

"Come here, pet," William extended his hand to her, pulling her towards a display case with faceted glass bead jewelry. He pointed to a necklace with blue beads spaced with smaller beads.

"Very pretty," she said automatically.

He gestured to the shopkeeper who retrieved the necklace from the case while William loosened the scarf around her neck. He fastened the necklace around her throat leaning back to admire the play of light on the blue beads against her white skin. He smiled at her, and looked over her shoulder, nodding to Lucius who completed the transaction, paying for the necklace.

Three stores and no dead bodies. Willow started to relax. They walked on for another block before William pulled her across the street, wrapping one arm around her waist when they reached the other side. His lips hovered by her ear. "I thought you might like to look at furniture, to find something that would suit you, for your room," he said.

Trailed by a shopkeeper, they looked at several pieces of furniture, some used and refurbished, others new. A rosewood seating group drew her eye. Upholstered in a dark red fabric, there was a chaise lounge with graceful, curving lines and a more masculine armchair. A round table with a deep skirt of carved wood completed the set. "Is this what you want?" he asked.

"I like it," she admitted. "Do you?"

His eyebrows rose. "I'm not Angelus. This is not a test," he told her, eying her choice. He didn't like the rosewood setting. The hard curving line of the back of the chaise was pretty, but he thought it was more decorative than functional. "We'll look at bit more?" he suggested.

She looked confused. Tactful and William did not go together. "It's not a bloody test," he insisted, "but, look at that back," he drew her eye to it. "It's going to hit the back of your head and there's no give to it," his hands on her waist directed her to the chaise. "Sit on it, and you'll see what I mean."

Armed with a better understanding of what William was looking for, the shopkeeper directed them to a chaise lounge with an adjustable back. The back of the chair fit into bracketed grooves at that allowed the back to be raised and lowered from a sitting position to reclining. Staring at the chair while the shopkeeper demonstrated its repositioning features, Willow realized that she was looking at a very early version of a recliner. The chair was covered in gray velvet. She was wildly tempted to ask if it was available in naugahyde for a moment.

"What do you think?" William asked.

"It's perfect," she told him.

Delivery was arranged for the following day after a price was settled on. The shopkeeper agreed to take a look at the settee that was being replaced.

"We need to find you something to eat," William said as they left the store. He switched to German and asked Lucius to suggest a place where she could dine.

Lucius' suggestion took them two city blocks from the street they had shopped on, towards the Vltana River. The gas lit Charles Bridge came into view and without thinking about it, Willow found herself pulling on William's arm. The Charles was a stone bridge with sixteen pillars supporting the arches under the bridge. In the distance, Hradcany Castle, or Prague Castle rose majestically almost overwhelming the gothic bridge tower rising on the opposite side of the river.

"It's beautiful," she said, looking at the light spilling over the water. A steamboat traveled up the river, its decks brightly lit, the strains of a waltz spilling across the water.

William made up his mind then and there to make sure that she had an opportunity to sail on the Vltana while they were in Prague.

The tavern Lucius found for them had a dining room on the second floor with a good view of the river. The house specialty was carp in sour cream sauce, but Lucius suggested the potato soup, and Willow followed his suggestion. After a bottle of wine and two large tankards of ale were delivered William fished the bag of mixed nuts from a pocket of his coat.

He offered her a cashew, brushing her jaw with the back of his fingers before resting the tip of his index finger in the hollow behind her ear. In the mellow light her pupils were enlarged, turning her eyes darker than normal. She looked like she was thinking. Her skin felt warm in the way it did when she was adjusting to a change in temperature. She had taken off her gloves when they were seated, and when he picked up one of her hands he wasn't surprised to find that her fingers were damply warm.

She was leaning forward a little to look out the window they had been seated near. He brought her fingers to his mouth. That got her attention back where he wanted it, on him. He watched her blink, frowning a little as she tried to assess the probability of him carrying things further. Her nose wrinkled a little. She disliked being fondled in public places. He wondered if it had something to do with her former life in Bristol.

He kissed the palm of her hand, and decided to quit teasing her. "So? London," he returned to the topic. "You've probably got it all organized already."

Her gaze moved to Lucius. William had switched back to English when he spoke to her about their trip to London. It wasn't a conversation that Lucius could follow or participate in, and he was sitting at the table with them. "Not really," she said. "I didn't know if you would want to stay in the house or somewhere else," she admitted.

"The house, of coarse. I'll write to Edward and tell him to arrange it," William started to pour a glass of wine for her. Lucius took a clean handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped the glass off first. William's eyebrows lifted at this, but he waited and poured the wine when he was done.

She opened the drawstrings of her purse to take out the Baedeker. There was just enough light to read by and she was curious about the bridge and the castle in the distance. Now the book selection made sense to William. It was a prop, a distraction, and a way for her to shift the attention away from her, to an object of fairly benign intent. There was some kind of clock described in the guidebook that she wanted to see. Lucius said that he knew where it was.

Her meal was served a few moments later. The soup was served in a glazed earthenware bowl with a basket of bread.

They were not so far from the Town Hall where the clock Willow wanted to see was located. After her supper was finished, William left Lucius to settle the bill and they walked a short distance on the cobblestone walkway under the arch of the bridge. It was dark here, despite the streetlights. Willow's gloved hand was tucked into his. When they entered the walk under the bridge, her free hand slipped under the cuff of his sleeve.

He gave her fingers a light squeeze before releasing them to pat himself down for a cigarette. He located the pack of Turkish cigarettes he had purchased last night and shook one of the thin cylinders out, grabbing it with his lips before returning the pack to his inside pocket and searching for a match. He flicked the match against his thumbnail to light it and cupped his hand around the flame as he lit the cigarette. Willow was watching this operation with an odd expression on her face, caught momentarily in the flicker of the match before William tossed the spent match away.

She rubbed her arms through the thin jacket she was wearing. It had warmed up again during the day. Yesterday it had been a clear sky and cold. Today, it was overcast and warmer. They were waiting for Lucius to settle the bill . . . but Willow knew better.

She took a step away from William, closer to the other side of the arch they were standing under. There was a small house on the other side of the bridge, almost snuggled up to it at this angle, a little out of place beside the impressive architecture of the bridge and the taller, more substantial structures built in the same scale as the bridge. It had been white washed at some point, acquiring a patina of grime with the original brickwork leaching through.

He stood in the shadows cast by the bridge, watching her. She was fair skinned, and in the streetlights her skin had an ivory toned glow that clarified what she was. Living, breathing, human, ordinary in contrast to the preternatural glow streetlights gave to a vampire, and extraordinary, at least in his eyes. At this distance, even with the sounds of the city all around them, he could hear her heartbeat; feel her awareness of him even as she made a study of their surroundings. She had questions that were trapped inside of her. Talk was cheap. Silence cost her something. There were subtle hints of tension in her face, in the way she clasped her hands together.

It was a strange feeling. He had it too. Eight years they had been together. He knew her well enough to read her posture and her carefully averted gaze. He knew her well enough to know that she had secrets that she would never willingly share with him. He knew her well enough to register her confusion like a smell, complimenting his own. He was confused, but it didn't bother him the way it troubled her. His confusion could be satisfied in a dozen ways, by holding her hand, or breathing her in, or listening to her heartbeat, or pulling her into the shadows and taking her up against a wall, holding her high enough to bury his face in her neck. It was in not taking what he wanted, in the unfamiliar restraint, that he felt confused.

It was in understanding that he didn't like what he had seen in her face when she told him about her encounter in the park. It wasn't jealousy or possessiveness exactly. It was the idea that someone had hurt her with nothing more or less than what she was to him. That was what kept him from pulling her into his lap in the tavern, and what would keep him from drawing her into the shadows now. It wasn't part of his system of values, because he had never thought worse of her for any of those things. He had never thought anything more than how beautiful she was in the moonlight, or how pretty she was when she was blushing, her eyes hot with distress.

It made him feel a little tired. He was making concessions to what she thought was important, and it would never be enough. There would always be some part of her that he couldn't reach. She had no idea how much restraint it required not to demand it of her. There would always be that between them. He would give and give and she would hold back the only thing he really wanted from her, and he would grow impatient, loose his temper, forget that the restraint got a facsimile of what he wanted from her, and it would come apart and he would take what she wouldn't give him.

They had been over this ground a thousand times, and the steps only became more elaborate.

All she had to do was turn to him. Slip her hand inside of his, lay her head on his chest. He didn't have to have the words. He didn't have to break her or drive her to her knees. He just needed some little sign that she understood. He willed her to do it now, the cigarette pinched between his fingers almost forgotten as he stared at her.

Willow felt him watching her. The hair on the back of her neck prickled. She had mixed feelings about being out with him, even with Lucius along. Her sense of him as a predator was more acute when they went out in the evening. He was being terribly circumspect, and she had a feeling that when he tired of his present benign mood, that bad things would happen. It made her tense, and her tension fed his, like a feedback loop, only now it was worse because she had a feeling that when his mood broke the goading that had gone on in the kitchen was going to seem like friendly teasing compared to what would come. She didn't know how to stop it from happening.

She didn't know if she should. In a frightening way, she knew that she could forgive too much when he was like this. It appealed to something in her that he . . . . made an effort. That even at his worst, he drew back from killing her, that for some reason, he wanted and needed her enough to keep her. How many people had died between the day he had found her in Bristol and this night? How many more would die? How did his failure to kill her make up for what he was?

She made herself look at him, seeing the glowing tip of his cigarette, and the shape of him in the dark. He looked like he was expecting something from her and was prepared to be disappointed.

Her stomach twisted. Uncomfortably full from the soup and rich blackberry wine, she felt a spasm of nausea cramp her stomach.

He watched her hands loosen and then press against her stomach. "What's wrong?" he asked.

She made a face. "I ate too much."

"Come here," he ordered gruffly.

She walked back to him and let him pull her into his chest. His hand moved beneath the hem of her short jacket to rub her back. She adjusted a little, standing on her toes, resting her chin on his shoulder while he rubbed her back. Sometimes she thought that she was physically incapable of burping. Xander and Jesse used to tease her about it. She couldn't burp or spit. Actually, the whole concept of spit made her gag, which had put a very abrupt end to her brief flirtation with the clarinet in the third grade. William rubbed her back and her stomach made rumbling, squeaking noises that made him chuckle.

"God, you are a mess," he said, kissing her temple. "Just relax. Stop fighting it. I'm not going to be disgusted if you burp," he told her. He thought it was all in her head. Someone had convinced her that she shouldn't burp, and being Willow, she had taken that stricture to heart.

"Good for you," she muttered. "I'm pretty sure I am," she grumbled.

He patted her back between her shoulder blades, and felt the bubble of air inside her crawl up from her stomach to erupt in a sound more like a sigh than a burp. He snorted.  "That's it? That's all you've got?" he gibed. "You look like you are in pain."

"I am," she said, feeling another air bubble expanding as he alternated between patting and rubbing her back. "This must look odd."

He looked around. "Well, yes, but if there was anyone around to see it, I wouldn't do it. I've got my evil vampire dignity, you know. Somewhat in tatters, but I can put on a good show."

She frowned a little at that, adjusting to rest her forehead against his shoulder. "Is it because you are being nice?" she asked. "Because it won't last," she reminded them both.

His hand slowed. "It could," he said cautiously, his tone matching the slow way he was rubbing her back. "It could be made to last."

He believed it. When she was like this, loosely inside the circle of his arms, he could believe it. He shrugged his shoulders to make her look up at him, and when she took the hint, he threw the cigarette away and brought his hand up to cup her cheek, his head lowering to kiss her. She tried to avoid it. "I'm all burpy," she protested. "And the soup had onions in it. It's icky," she said, like she was trying to avoid breathing on him.

For someone that had an unhealthy preoccupation with killing herself, she was very weirdly obsessed with oral hygiene. She was almost twenty-five years old, and God only knew what kind of life she had had before he had found her, and she had all of her teeth, in excellent condition, and seemed determined to keep them that way.

He kissed her, probing the seam of her lips with his tongue until she gave up her reservations about letting him into her mouth. It made him moan, not her. She made a sound that was mostly distressed. She was thinking about burping and cleaning her teeth, and he was thinking about finding some way to never hurt her again, or see the hurt in her eyes. Her mouth was warm with the milky aftertaste of the soup and the rich sweetness of wine, and textures that reminded him of so many other parts of her under his mouth. He could have gone on like this for hours, running his tongue over her lips, feeling her tongue touch his, retreat, and come back.

She pulled back, shoulders straining, gasping a little as she tried to catch her breath. Her eyes were wide with surprise, like she had some inkling that there was more to the kiss than him fucking her mouth with his tongue because he wanted to and because he could. He saw that look in her eyes, the look that he thought he never wanted to see again. So much sadness. She was smart. It was one of the things about her that intrigued him. The quiet intelligence that made her shine, that made the sadness hanging in her gaze compelling. There was something to be said for stupid. Stupid didn't question or examine or weigh things the way she did. Stupid didn't claw at itself for what couldn't be changed.

Stupid didn't draw a shocked breath and whisper his name like it was a prayer and a plea and an apology.

"Don't," he began. If she said something else, something that went with the tone, he knew he was going to react badly, which, unfortunately for her, probably meant that she was going to take the brunt of it.

She understood how he felt about Drusilla. It was where he was most consistent. It was the place where William and Spike intersected, and she thought that it was a sign that her presence in the past or an alternate version of the past had not changed the essential realities of his life. She understood it, and had on occasions been invited inside of it, and it was always the one thing about him that she admired. It scared her to think that there was room for her inside that feeling, that without knowing it, he had made room for her and that it was her space, distinct from Dru's, and that in some way it hurt him.

"You talk to much," he resumed, in a more normal tone. "Gets on my nerves," he told her, eyes narrowing on her face, looking for a flinch or some sign that the criticism bothered her. She hated being criticized.

If she heard him, it didn't register in any way. She was just staring at him like she had figured something out that was a little unnerving.

He needed another cigarette. He needed to do something with his hands. It was either that or the nearest alley, and he knew that he'd wipe anything she was thinking out of her eyes or half kill her trying. She was a prostitute for the love of hell. Where she got off looking at him like he was something beneath her was a mystery.

"Will," she tried again. She didn't really know what to say. He was patting himself down for the pack of cigarettes. She felt something burst inside of her, like warm rain, a weird mix of tenderness and arousal that normally she would have been loathe to acknowledge. "Will?" she said a bit more sharply than she intended, because he was ignoring her now.

His gaze flicked to her, and she was reminded yet again that he was so much more the predator when they were out in the night. Self-preservation suggested in a loud clear voice inside her head that she leave him alone, that she let him do whatever he needed to do to keep from whatever was in his eyes. But she had a glimpse of something that made saving herself seem petty.

She bit her lower lip. "I want it to last," she said after a long moment.

He went absolutely still, rolling it around in his head. From her point of view, extending their present truce of mutual accommodation, made sense, but even as he thought it, he knew that wasn't what she was offering. When it came to selling herself, she was the world's most inept whore, giving away the wrong things too cheaply. She was brilliant and stupid all at once, and he wanted to point it out to her. He wanted to explain it to her because, God help her, she was better than this, better than anything he could offer her, and she was so fucking unaware of it that it was staggering.

He took a deep breath, extending his hand to her.

She took it, not just with one hand, but with both, the one hand that slid inside his, and the other that slipped under the cuff of his coat to rest between his skin and the fabric. His expression turned rueful. "At the risk of being turned into something slimy, you really are stupid sometimes," he told her.

"Yeah? Well, you are stupider," she retorted.

"Darla and Angelus would endorse that notion," he agreed.

She started working on her lower lip again. "So, how does this work?" she asked uncertainly.

He reeled her in, one hand on her waist. "Haven't a bloody clue," he admitted. "Let's call it a truce for now. I'll be nice," he made a face, "and you'll be . . ."

"Nice," she put in.

"That's not much of a truce," he said dryly. "Nice is easy for you."

She tilted her head to one side. "Is it so hard for you?" she asked, sounding like she really didn't want to hear the answer.

Well, fuck. He was caught. It wasn't that hard. The hard part was not getting what he wanted from her, and not wanting it if he had to explain it to her, which was, he realized, a bit unfair. He found himself looking at the glass beads at her throat. "It's like a dance," he said slowly. "I hold out my hand," he squeezed hers, "and you take it in yours," his gaze lifted to meet her eyes, "and I put my hand on your waist," his fingers moved to remind her where his hand was, "and you step in, towards me."

The analogy was puzzling her, but she stepped in closer, sliding her hand out of his sleeve like she was going to take up the proper position in his arms. "No, love," he stopped her. His analogy no longer worked for him. Too much of what happened between them was entirely predictable. "We do these things with each other because they are expected, but when you slide your hand inside my sleeve, that's just you. That's the part of you that could make me do almost anything to have that feeling."

This was more dangerous and stupid than anything she had ever done, including casting a spell she didn't half understand to fix things that fate had ordained at tremendous cost. The more she read about Wicca, the more she respected the three fold rule. Resented it too. She had paid with her body and mind, and before it was done, she had a feeling that it was going to be carved on her heart and soul. Something awful and tragic to balance things for Angel and Buffy to have each other the way that they seemed meant to. When she was sixteen the idea would have appealed to the romantic in her, but not so much now, it just seemed unfair and inevitable.

He sighed, looking away from her. "I'd rather have you angry and willful and stubborn," he said.

She blinked at the abrupt change in mood, not realizing that he had seen something in her expression that prompted it. "What? Why?" she asked.

"Because it's better than seeing you look so sad," he told her.

The idea that he was reacting to her mood was fairly novel. It took her a moment to process it. "I can't help it," she said in a small voice.

"Right," he nodded, looking around for Lucius. "Where the hell is Lucius?" he wondered aloud.

Willow refrained from comment. She knew where Lucius was, and so did he. He shook his hand loose to get a cigarette. He eyed her through a thin stream of smoke. "Do you want to see your clock, or go home?" he asked.

"What time is it?" she asked, automatically reaching for the pocket watch he kept in his waistcoat. She opened it and tried turning it to get enough light to read the dial without success. He took it from her. "Quarter to midnight," he told her after a quick glance. "Why? Does it matter?"

"Uh-huh. According to the guide book, there are mechanical figures that move at the top of the hour," she said informatively. "If we can get there in fifteen minutes, the clock, then home, or if not, home," she established her priorities. "Unless you want to do something else," she added hastily.

One corner of his mouth turned up in a crooked smile. "There is nothing I want to do that you would not prefer doing at home," he said, lifting her chin with the tips of his fingers. The blush came, but she didn't lower her eyes, or look away, or retreat into any one of a dozen ways to deny him. His fingers tested the heat in her cheek and she turned her face into his hand to kiss his wrist, the way he kissed hers more times than he could count.

"Shouldn't we look for him?" she asked.

"Lucius?" William frowned. Normally, he would. He really had been gone too long, and there was no good reason for his extended absence. "No," he said. "We shouldn't." If Lucius was caught in someone's snare, he wasn't offering himself or Willow up to the same trap.

He saw her open her mouth to argue with him, and then shut it when she realized what she was doing. Her lips parted again, and then pressed shut, a tiny frown appearing. Diverted by the show, he waited, eyebrows raised. The frown deepened and her lips pursed. She pulled one side of her lower lip in and bit down on it hard.

"Willow?"

"Hmm?" she didn't stop chewing on her lip, but she was looking at him, a question in her own eyes.

He smiled. "What? You've got my curiosity piqued. You have some observation burning away. What is it?"

"Oh," she looked like she didn't know how to start. "Well . . . I like Lucius. I liked him better before he was a vampire," she admitted in what was from her tone of voice, vast understatement, "but, he's not so . . . grrrr! 'I'm a vampire. You are a lowly human,' annoying," she sighed. "Never mind. You don't really care, do you? He could be a big pile of dust, and it would be a very mild inconvenience."

"That isn't exactly how I would put it," William refuted. It was close. The inconvenience factor would register. It wasn't like he was fond of Lucius. If he felt anything at all for him it was a mild dislike tempered by the fact that he was reasonably useful. "You like him?" he repeated. "I bet you wouldn't like him if you had the least notion of what he would do to you given the opportunity."

It occurred to her to point out that it probably wasn't anything he hadn't done, but she thought that would violate the truce that they had declared, and she was in the habit of keeping pithy observations to herself.
~~~*~~~
 

Lucius was in the alley behind the tavern. The girl who had waited on them had extended her life by about fifteen minutes by taking him out of his trousers and into her mouth. She was wearing a cap with a frill and he had watched it move with her head as he leaned into the wall and let her get on with it. She seemed to have a pretty good idea of what she was about. There had been a time when he would have been too distracted by a vague sense of guilt and overwhelmed by sensation to just appreciate the skill that went into taking a cock that far back into her throat. Having performed the same act, he was a bit more appreciative, and less repelled.

A warm mouth holding him. He was tempted to close his eyes, and indulge himself in a way that he never would have before he had been made into a vampire. Until he had seen it for himself, he didn't have the capacity to imagine her doing this. There were too many distractions for him at the moment. The ripe scent of the river and of compost nearby, the glimpses he got of the large breasts swaying against his thighs, the long, dark hair under the cap, all made it impossible to distract himself.

She let him slip out of her mouth, looking up at him, breathing a little hard. "I have to go back to work," she said, almost apologetically since he hadn't come. Her hand stroked him.

He pulled her to her feet, one arm around her waist, the other working her skirt up. "How much more to fuck you?" he asked, cupping her mound. He flexed his fingers against her clitoris, rubbing her through her thin undergarments. She clutched at his arms, shuddering a little.

A breathy little moan escaped her when his thumb hooked the waistband of her loose pantaloons, slipping inside. "Your hands are cold," she said. It didn't sound like a complaint. He smiled at the observation, watching her face with an interest that was almost clinical as he slid two fingers into her, wrenching another moan out of her.

"I'm thinking you'll let me fuck you," he said.

She had his coin in her purse. It wasn't what she would have asked for if she knew that he wanted to fuck her, but she wasn't going to haggle. Still, she was working, and if she was gone too long, she would loose more money than she was making. She rubbed herself against his fingers. "Hurry," she said breathlessly, hardly having to act.

He looked around the alley. There was a woodbin, about waist high, not a yard away. It would do nicely. He moved her toward it, spinning her around so that her back was to him. She braced her hands on it without protest while he pushed her skirt up over her hips and slipped her drawers down. In the dark, she could have been anyone at all. He guided his cock into her, listening to her moan as he sank into her. The moan wasn't terribly genuine.

His hand worked to find her through the mass of her skirts. He rubbed her warm, wet cunt, his hips pumping. His free hand freed one of her plump breasts, rolling the nipple between his thumb and his forefinger. Her breathy moans grew in volume.

"Harder?" he asked. "You want it harder?"

"Yes!" she wasn't loud, or unaware of where they were. She was too practical for that. He might have liked her for the streak of practicality, and for the way she clenched around him, sighing her pleasure. When they were done, he helped her straighten her clothes, earning an almost shy look at this unexpected gallantry.

She hesitated. "If you come back, around closing," she began.

"I won't," he told her. Her cap was slightly askew. He straightened it and then went to straighten his own clothing.

She started to walk around him. She would never know how close she was to living another day. He moved that fast. One arm around her, trapping her arms at her side, the other, covering her mouth, even as he pulled her head to the side. His fangs slid into her neck. It was a fatal bite, deep, severing her jugular, tearing through muscle until all he had to do was seal his mouth over the wound and let the blood pump into his mouth.

When he was done, he let her drop, not quite dead, but close enough to it. Stepping over her body, he wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. It really wouldn't do to return to her with blood dripping from the corner of his mouth.
~~~*~~~
 

Lucius joined them a moment later. Without being told, William knew that he had fed, and a bit more. Annoyance at being left to wait for him made him eye the younger vampire with a cold and unwavering stare.

Willow looked from William to Lucius. There was a slight resemblance between them that she had not noticed before. Lucius was taller, but he had a similar build, lean bodied and sinewy. His features were more bluntly masculine. He looked like he was secretly amused about something, and that was very like William.

"You wanted to see that clock," he reminded her before she could tell Lucius that she had been worried about him. He took her hand and tucked it into the crook of his arm, his eyes picking at Lucius like he was making an inventory.

The astronomical clock was everything Willow might have hoped for. Situated at the base of the town hall, with a pair of uniformed guards impassively flanking it, the triple faced clock was a confluence of art and science. Originally built in the fifteenth century it had been renovated as recently as the 1860s. The upper most clock face displayed the exact position of the sun and stars relative to the earth timed to sundials in the courtyard daily. Superimposed over the astronomical clock was the Sphere, showing the movements of the sun and moon. The bottom clock was the calendar.

The clock was nearing the top of the hour. They were, more or less, alone. There were two guards dressed in uniform, looking bored out of their respective skulls.

For a moment there, Lucius thought that he was in trouble, but as soon as they reached the square, William's attention switched back to Willow. He had his head tilted towards hers, listening to her as she identified the features of the clock, a conversation begun in German that was steered by William back to the privacy of English.

She was probably still talking about the clock, a feature that he had seen dozens of times without giving much thought to. She was pointing to something on the upper clock, and William's gaze followed the gesture, his eyes narrowing a bit. Lucius took in her face in profile. He felt peaceful. Soothed. He wanted to know what she was saying, but he had to settle, at least for now, for hearing the sound of her voice.

She was pointing out the part of the dial that showed the exact time of sunrise. He had been raised with a lot of ideas about gender roles that had been smashed by Darla and Dru, neither of whom was particularly helpless, and even more so by Willow. The idea that science was a masculine area of study, for instance, was mostly shattered by Willow who saw science in everything.

When they were in Paris, while Willow was recovering from the dysentery episode, Angelus gave Dru a talking doll. Talking and walking dolls had been around for at least a century, but this was a relatively new sort of doll modeled on a human baby. Dru wasn't terribly impressed with it. She mostly wanted to know how it made the crying sounds that it produced since her other dolls had what she called their own voices. Willow dissected the doll without destroying it, in an elaborate procedure that had delighted Dru, though it had the unfortunate side effect of inducing Dru to find other things for Willow to dissect, ranging from real babies to dead animals.

He had managed to head off most of these experiments before Willow found out about them, though there were a couple of dead animals that Dru managed to sneak past him.

He shifted her around until she was mostly in front of him, with his arm around her waist, her back to his chest. She paused to look up at him sideways. He grinned at her and nodded to the clock. "I think it's starting," he told her.

The figure of a skeleton holding an hourglass pulled a bell cord. Two windows above the uppermost clock opened and the figures of St. Paul and St. Peter appeared, dividing the apostles into two groups that rotated into view, each figure representing an allegorical aspect of the apostles. William's Church of England background came back to him as he deciphered the figures for her, assuming that the Christian imagery would be lost on her. Willow's head was tilted back as she watched the moving figures rotate past the windows.

When it was over she gave a little sigh, and turned toward him. "That was nice," she said. She actually found the clock itself more interesting than the mechanical show that came at the top of the hour.

"Let's find a hack and go home," William suggested. "Lucius?" He switched back to German and told him to find a hack.

The younger vampire nodded, and moved ahead of them to find a suitable conveyance. William kept one eye on him. "Will? Are you angry about something?" she asked.

"A bit," he admitted. "Nothing to trouble yourself over."

"Are you angry because Lucius was gone for so long?" she ventured.

He looked at her, one eyebrow lifting. "Why would I be angry about that?" he asked.

"Because it was rude?" she took a stab at it.

He laughed at that. "Bloody rude, but no. Try again," he invited.

She shook her head. "I don't know," she admitted.

"I didn't bring him for the pleasure of his company," he said pointedly. "He's here for no other reason than to be useful to me if I need him."

Her nose wrinkled. "How nice for you," she muttered.

~Part: 15~

William was looking out the window of the coach, fingers drumming restlessly on the battered armrest of the seat they shared. Lucius faced them inside the coach. There wasn't enough light for her to see well, but in the dark his eyes seemed luminous. Hungry. Minions and fledglings always looked hungry and inhuman, a little too blank when they were maintaining their human features, like the effort cost them too much.

The small Brougham and the larger coach that were kept were extravagances in the city. Between the streetcars and the availability of coaches for hire, the expense of keeping the vehicles and horses was, at least in Willow's mind, unwarranted. The streetcar had the saving grace of novelty. The hired coach's only saving grace was that it was reasonably clean, which wasn't always a sure thing.

The interior of the coach had been cleaned recently. It had that smell Willow had learned to recognize. Like wet wool, like the undercoat of a dog let out in the rain, the smell of things that were damp and dirty beneath the faint reek of harsh soap. If she could smell it, then it had to worse for them. She had an impulse to touch him, to thread her hand through his arm and rest her head on his shoulder. She knew it would be welcomed. The fingers restlessly drumming on the armrest would rest lightly on her face. She held herself still, resenting the effort it took not to touch him. What would it hurt? What would it cost? It might preserve the beguiling mood he had been in for another hour and another day. Ultimately, it was her hurt, and her cost.

It was exactly what he wanted. He had said as much. What did it mean?

They returned to the house without incident. It was still early. She half expected to be told to go to her room, but William's hand on her back directed her to the salon where Angelus was holding court, reading aloud to Darla. Lucius had disappeared. He was probably somewhere close. He always managed to be within earshot.

Angelus was reading Persuasion, Jane Austin's last novel, and Willow's favorite. He finished the chapter before he closed the book around a thin sliver of a silver bookmark. His gaze settled on Willow and he smiled at her. "Home early, are you?" he asked. "I thought you'd be out half the night, and we would be denied the pleasure of your company."

"No reason to think otherwise," William interjected. "Even if we are home early."

Darla seemed to find that amusing. "No one is happy tonight," she observed. Dru was pouting in her room. After William and Willow left with Lucius, she had noticed that she was left behind. No hunting tonight. No plays or parties or parlor games. No one to entertain Princess. If she told William, he would fix it, because that was what he did, but Darla didn't feel like telling him.

"Were you followed?" she asked instead.

Willow was a little surprised to find that Darla was looking at her like she expected an answer from that quarter. She looked at William, puzzled by the question. William's hand slid down her back. "Fix me a drink, pet," he drawled, going over to the settee. He flopped down on it, crossing his legs at the ankle, his booted feet precariously close to the seat cushion.

Willow went to the sideboard and poured him a drink. "No. We weren't followed," he answered the question while she poured. Whiskey, neat, the way he usually took it. She brought it to him, wondering at his animosity towards Darla tonight.

He brought her hand to his lips for a moment, his fingers stroking her palm. "Or, if we were, they kept their distance."

Dressed as she was, Willow felt out of place in the salon. That was it. There wasn't a stomach-churning undercurrent of tension in the room, or the sense that things were happening that might go badly and were beyond her control. She wondered where Dru was.

William moved enough to make room for her to sit, and when she did, he settled back down, resting his head in her lap, a tumbler of whiskey resting on his abdomen, his feet now propped on the end of the settee. He took Willow's hand, threading his fingers through hers. "It was a quiet evening out. I bought a chaise for Willow's room. It will be delivered tomorrow," he said. "And no one took the least interest in us," he added.

"Not that you were paying any attention," Darla concluded.

"Not that I was," William agreed. He looked up at Willow, moving their joined hands to rest over her heart. "Give me a kiss, and go upstairs, pet," he ordered. "Be in my room when I come up."

She kissed his hand, because it was less awkward, and started to slide out from under him when he let her up. Angelus stopped her with a gesture. "Stay a moment, Willow. What didn't you want her to hear?" he asked William

"Lucius was gone for thirty minutes," William said. "He's not that stupid," he pointed out. "You might want to let Dru crawl around inside his skull and see what he's gotten himself into."

"Why don't you want Willow to know that?" Angelus asked.

"Don't give a toss if she knows," William refuted before finishing his drink. "I just don't feel like sharing tonight," he said pointedly. "Or posing for sketches, or playing sodding parlor games. Now," he rose, and extended his hand to Willow, pulling her to her feet. "I'm going to see about getting her furniture moved to suit her, and then I'm going to . . . get myself suited," he announced, his eyes on Willow.

Darla ran her fingers through the fringe on one of the pillows with a small smile on her lips. "What happened yesterday?" she asked, in a tone that was at once light and amused and insistent.

William paused, pretending to think. "Well, I was standing at the window to close it, and I saw something out of the corner of my eye, moving too fast to be anything human," he recounted. "Had a look around-"

"In the kitchen," Darla corrected. "What happened yesterday in the kitchen?"

William shrugged, his fingers tightening on Willow's hand, just enough to keep her attention on him. "We had a quarrel," he smiled. "She's gotten independent playing lady of the house. We are still working out which parts of that are amusing and which aren't."

Angelus snorted back a laugh. "I'll just bet you are," he said.

Darla said nothing. She knew he was lying, but she didn't know what he was lying about. "Lucius is your responsibility," she said. "You made him."

William cocked his head to one side. "Bloody hell," he sighed. "Fine. I'll deal with him. Annoying prat walked off and left me cooling my heals. So . . . I'll go stake the little bastard. He has wasted enough of my time tonight."

Willow was startled. The night they arrived, William had been with her. When had he found time to kill Lucius? Why had he made time for it? Why did it bother her now that he had? Did she really think that he had avoided participating in the slaughter of the people that she had brought into the house to spare her feelings? The answer to that question was obvious. She had, on some level, thought that was exactly what he had done. Instead, he had killed the one person who had, more than anyone else, been kind to her.

Angelus watched the ripple of emotion across Willow's face. This was better than a play, he decided. She hadn't known about Lucius, and it bothered her, he marveled. It really bothered her that William had killed him. That was interesting. William was watching her as well, and coming to the same conclusions. You could almost see it, except that he was much better at covering than Willow was.

"What do you think should be done?" he asked Willow.

Darla and William both looked at him, nonplussed by the question, directed to Willow.

Lucius was dead, she reminded herself. The thing left behind was not the young man who had once made her feel a little less alone. She would not look at William. Angelus was waiting for an answer. Not for the first time she felt a stab of resentment. If she answered wrong, he would make her listen to a monologue on vampire politics or the management of minions or strategy. If she answered right, he would bask in the idea that he had put every idea she ever had into her head.

The image of a chessboard flashed in Willow's mind. All her moves were those of the knight, forward or backward and cornering sideways. "The simplest explanation is the most likely one," she said. "I would ask him where he was."

"How would I know if he is lying?" Angelus asked.

She considered that for a moment. Before she could answer, William's hands came to rest on her waist, lightly squeezing. "Go upstairs, Willow," he maneuvered her away from Angelus and Darla, through the open double door to the hall. "It may be a while before I come to bed," he said, giving her a little push.

He watched her go up the stairs, turning his head just enough to see Lucius standing in the hallway. He laced his fingers together, cracking his knuckles. "Have a bone to pick with you," he said softly, taunting the younger vampire.

Lucius looked wary. William was still speaking in English and he didn't understand what he was saying, but the icy stare directed at him was a little unnerving.
~~~*~~~
 

Willow brushed her teeth while the bathtub filled. The chalky toothpaste she was using was made by Colgate in a collapsible tube that looked enough like what she had grown up with to be familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Not unlike the toothbrush itself, which was not plastic and nylon, but ivory with serrated boar bristles. She rinsed her mouth. When William sent her upstairs, she walked down the hall, past her own room to the back stairs that went up to the third floor and down to the kitchen. In the kitchen, she filled a small pitcher with water from the pump before going back upstairs.

She undressed and added her discarded clothing to the same hamper that usually received used towels. Normally, she did not dispose of her clothing this way. The fabrics her clothes were made from usually required careful cleaning and labor intensive ironing to maintain, making her careful to hang them up, even when they were soiled and in need of attention. These clothes weren't hers and she didn't plan to make them hers. She hesitated a moment before adding the red jacket to the pile, fingering the band of velvet that had been hand stitched to the waist.

She made herself push the jacket down into the hamper, dropping the lid. The bathtub was half full. She got in, grimacing a little at the heat of the water and the cold of the porcelain. She didn't plan to make a production out of bathing tonight. If she was alone in the house, she might have brought a book into the bathroom with her to read while she had a long, luxurious soak in the tub. She left her hair up to keep it from getting wet and concentrated on washing.

Dru came in from her bedroom and Willow gave an inward sigh. It was too much to hope that she might be left alone. Dru sank to the floor beside the bathtub, facing her, her dark eyes resting on Willow with a hint of expectation. Her hand trailed over the surface of the water, flicking water playfully at Willow's face. She had picked up the necklace Willow had removed and left on the lip of the sink, holding it up to spin and glitter in the light, reminding Willow of the translucent blue candy Dru had brought home from the opera last night.

Catching the trailing end of the necklace's toggle clasp, Dru brought the necklace to her forehead. With it draped against her white skin, dark hair and dark eyes, she looked exotic and mysterious.

Willow responded with a small smile. She would have preferred to have been left alone, but Dru was sometimes good company. She didn't ask awkward questions or make demands that made her feel bruised inside. Dru didn't care how she felt or what she wanted, and she didn't pretend that they were in any way equal. When she was bored with playing with the necklace, she put it around Willow's throat, slipping the silver bar through the circle, her fingers sliding under the necklace, laying it bead by bead against Willow's skin.

Her fingertips trailed over the soap clouded water. Expecting to get more water flicked in her face, Willow drew her knees up to her chest and Dru sighed. She was wearing a buttery yellow dress with blonde lace that fell from the three-quarter sleeve, contracting into a sodden mess in the water. Willow's gaze moved from the lace to Dru's face. She could be very particular about her clothing.

As swift as a striking snake, Dru's hand was against her throat, the glass beads of the necklace pressed into her skin as Dru's hand drove her back against the porcelain, a low, purring growl vibrating in her throat. Willow knew that with the slightest pressure, Dru's wickedly sharp fingernails would slide into her throat. She could feel the slight tremor in her fingers against her throat.

Dru's gaze shifted abruptly to the door, her expression growing mischievous. "I knew you were there," she said, eyes shining.

"Did you, my love?" William sounded amused. "I need you, darling," he said, walking over to look down at Willow in the tub. He rested his hands on the sides of the tub, looming over her, his eyes lingering on her breasts, under water. He leaned down to kiss her forehead, but he was looking at Dru when he did it. "Let go of her?" he suggested.

Dru pouted. "She didn't even scream this time," she pointed out, sounding like a child with a defective toy.

William laid his hand over Willow's heart, breathing her in. She smelled of toothpaste and milled soap and fear and her heart was beating fast and hard. "Beg to differ, Princess," he said with a smile for her.

Dru's hand slid up her throat and she pinched Willow's chin. "Everyone left me alone tonight," she complained.

A muscle twitched in William's cheek. It was a reproach to him, and he accepted it. Dru's need for attention was, in part, the reason he existed. He turned his wrist and caught hers in a hard grip, yanking her hand away from Willow's face. "I'm here now," he pointed out.

Willow scooted back away from them in the tub. Dru's eyes were on William, a strange, pleased smile curving her lips as she resisted his pull on her arm that became incrementally brutal as he forced her up away from the tub, bending her back over the closed hamper. Dru threw her head back and laughed softly. "There's my darling boy," she crooned. "So impulsive and greedy," it was praise as she said it.

She lifted her free hand to his face, threading her fingers into his hair, pulling it out of the queue at the nape of his neck. Angelus wore his hair longer than was fashionable for men, shoulder length, but loose. William's hair was nearly as long, but he tended to pull the length back from his face and neck. It was a hairstyle that had been out of vogue for nearly a century, long before William had been born, before Drusilla had been born.

"Nothing between us," she whispered. "Not even flesh made wet with blood." She pulled him down to her, licking his throat, nipping at it with sharp teeth.

"Not even that," he agreed, pleasure at the caress tightening the muscles in his face. It wasn't just minions that could look that hungry.

She pursed her lips, rubbing her cheek against his. "We'll make something bleed tonight?" she guessed, her eyes finding Willow.

"It might come to that," he allowed, relaxing his grip on her, stepping back to draw her to her feet. "There's a game I need you for," he told her.

She pressed her fingers to his lips, her eyes studying his. Her smile became knowing. "You don't need me," she said, amused. "You just like to share."

He grinned. "True," he allowed, he looked over his shoulder at Willow who was watching them with an expression that was tense and wary.

Dru slipped around him, her hand flying across the water to flick water into Willow's face. She laughed at Willow's startled expression and skipped out of the bathroom into her connecting bedroom.

William watched her leave before his attention returned to Willow. She had managed not to say anything, but she gave so much away without words. She flinched when he leaned over the side of the tub, his hands coming to bracket her face. Her eyes shut as his thumbs wiped away the water spattered over her face. He waited patiently for her to open her eyes and almost smiled at the resentment that had kindled in her gaze.

"Do you have everything you need for the night?" he asked.

She blinked, trying to process the meaning behind the question. "Yes," she said slowly.

He drew her to him, wet and slippery, and less pliant than he would have liked. He lowered his head, kissing her mouth. She tasted strongly of toothpaste, nearly overwhelming the more familiar warm, wet taste of her mouth. He rested his forehead against hers, his eyes on her lips. "I won't be coming to bed before dawn," he told her. "Sleep in my room tonight, and don't go wandering around the house. If you need something, use the bell pull."

"What's going on?" she asked, unable to help herself.

She could tell at once that he had no intention of answering her. He kissed her again. "I'll leave you alone to finish your bath," he said, sounding like he was tempted to stay.
~~~*~~~
 

Lucius found himself hanging by his wrists. The heavy silk curtain tie backs he had once been restrained with would have been easy for him to break now. The manacles that were digging into his wrists were iron. They had been used before. The coachman who had destroyed the small gray hack had been kept chained up for days, not permitted to feed, reinforcing the notion for anyone who cared to consider it that destroying the Master's property was not a good idea.

In his case, he wasn't sure this was meant for punishment. It might simply be a form of entertainment. It might even be an enjoyable form of entertainment. If Darla decided to start cutting his clothing off again, he was not going to put up a show of resentment or be encumbered with moral qualms about being used to satisfy her. Angelus had done the chaining, drawing him up on his toes while Lucius pretended to strain to maintain his footing and balance. When he relaxed a little, Angelus gave the chain a final adjustment, nearly wrenching Lucius arms from the socket and drawing a chuckle out of him.

"Back where we started," Angelus observed, walking around him.

They were in the seldom used dining room. Seldom used because the household had no need to eat at a table and because the one member of the household that did eat dinner would probably lack for appetite in the room. The blood stained rug had been burned, and the floors had been cleaned, but the blood that had congealed on the floor and walls in a colorful spray had left stains in the wood and plaster, which would require more than a simple cleaning to erase. The room was usually kept closed, which meant that the scent of blood, and fear and death that had permeated the room lingered, mixing with the scent of pine cones and cinnamon from a silver bowl on the fireplace mantel.

Lucius tried to relax as much as he could. He was chained to the chandelier. Every movement of his body made the crystals hanging thickly chime. The chandelier had never been converted to gaslight and Paulus was standing on a ladder lighting the white candles that filled the tulip shaped holders. It didn't bother him in the least that Angelus had chained him. It bothered him greatly that Paulus was a witness to it.

When he was done lighting the candles, Darla told him to get out. Angelus retrieved a chair and set it in front of him. The dining room furniture was old. The table was eight feet long without the leaves that extended it to twelve feet. The end chairs were large, heavy armed chairs with high backs covered in damasked silk the color of burnt sienna. The color was repeated in the curtain swags, and it was close enough to the color of dried blood that stained the plaster that it almost seemed to be something other than an accident.

Had she thought, when she chose it from the fabric swatches, that this was a color that went well with dried blood?

He had watched her deal with them, and there was more of a lesson in it than anything Angelus, Darla or William had taught him. She did what was demanded of her, and did it well, but she did not allow herself to be distracted or defined by it. She did not beg or plead or break, nor would he. Had they chained her to a chandelier, he was sure that she would have stood still and waited for what would come.

She.

Even in the privacy of his own mind she was a nameless presence.

The dining room pocket doors rolled open and Drusilla spilled through them, her hair drawn up on the sides in fat ringlets that swayed independent of her body. He remembered again, seeing her in the dining room, seemingly full of life, looking like she was on the verge of dancing. He recognized the exhilaration now, he knew what it signaled. William crossed the threshold behind her, clapping his hands together, the sound deliberately explosive.

"Well, now," he began. "Let's start with a lesson in good manners," he said, shutting the pocket doors behind him. The irony of the statement was not lost on him.
~~~*~~~
 

Her journal was hidden under a seat cushion in the library. Willow had not thought of it when William asked if she had everything that she needed for the evening, and she knew that she was thinking of it now because it was out of reach. Not unlike her own bedroom. From the sound of it her furniture was being moved. She was stuck in William's seldom used room, for reasons that were unknown to her. It probably wasn't anything she wanted to know.

Their rooms were very similar. The bed was a four poster with a solid canopy. Inside the canopy there were hidden rails for drapes that where usually pulled back, but could be released to turn the bed into its own self contained room within the room. She had considered keeping this room for herself when she saw the bed, but the colors were more masculine, and the proximity of the bathroom to the other bedroom was more logical for her than William.

Aside from the bed and the bedside tables, there was a wardrobe and a dresser in his room. He had a writing desk rather than a dressing table and a pair of arm chairs rather than the armchair and settee in her room. Their bedrooms were towards the front of the house, though his was set back slightly due to the footprint of the house that had the foyer and salon set back into an L shaped lee of the house.

She made herself get into bed, moving to the middle of the bed, and propping herself up in a half sitting position by stacking the pillows. It made her feel like she was sinking into a nest. She hugged one of the pillows to her, propping her chin on the top of it, waiting for sleep to remove the burden of not thinking.
~~~*~~~
 

"Where did you disappear to?" William asked.

He was taller than William by at least four inches, and standing precariously on his toes, so he was that much taller. That was interesting. Feeling his height while chained to a chandelier, the object of interest and amusement for the older three vampires. His identification of William as the youngest of the family was never more acute.

He did not pretend that he didn't understand the question. He knew as soon as he rejoined William under the Charles that he was annoyed about being kept waiting.

"I was feeding," he said.

With a slight curl to his upper lip, William removed his frock coat, tossing it to Drusilla, who caught it and dropped it on the dusty surface of the table. "Right," he nodded to himself. "We are vampires. We do that, don't we?"

He eyed Lucius for a moment. The younger vampire was still fully dressed. Probably anxious to be otherwise. This part of the evening wasn't going badly for him. Yet. William rocked back on his heals, studying him. His attention was still mostly on Angelus, sitting behind him on his little throne with Darla at his side. William turned his head to look at her. She had a remote look on her face. It was similar to a look that Willow sometimes got under extreme stress, only on Darla it was full of creamy satisfaction.

His hand shot out, stabbing with nothing but his fingers through cloth and flesh and bone, separating ribs before Lucius lost his balance. He was saved from serious injury by the fact that he was hanging from his wrists, swinging freely with the force of the blow. William stepped back to allow him to get his feet back under him. He looked down at himself like he expected to see one of his separated ribs punching through his shirt front.

"Where were you?" he asked again.

There was a tiny glimmer of uncertainty in his eyes. "Behind the tavern, in the alley," he said.

William grinned. "See how easy this is?" he mocked. "Eventually, I'll get around to asking what you were doing." He looked at Dru, extending his hand to her.
~~~*~~~
 

She found herself in a familiar place. It started with her looking down a long hallway at a series of unrelated rooms. The first room was reached through a doorway. She paused there, looking down. It was a tricky threshold, the kind that was found in houses that had been added on to. There were two steps down into the room, flanked on either side by cabinets with deep drawers and fancy draw pulls that fit neatly into recessed wells in the face of each drawer. She had gone through the drawers before in her dreams. They were full of things that no one would look for or miss if she took them. Things wrapped in tissue paper that no one would use every day, like the crystal swan salt cellars with their tiny silver spoons that were lined up neatly in a box covered in burgundy velvet.

She had taken them out before to hold up in the light, and she had considered slipping one into her pocket to keep, with a stab of guilt at the larcenous thought, unease at her covetousness, and bewilderment at the attraction of a crystal swan made to hold salt. Even in her dream, these were not her things to look at and touch.

She walked through the room. It was empty, with sunlight slanting across the honey colored hardwood floor, dust motes swirling in the air, sparkling in the light. It reminded her of Nana Zalazny's house in Milwaukee. After she died, and the house had been emptied, there were rooms like this, full of dust and sleek wood floors, and her cousin Richard from St. Louis had taken off his shoes to slide across the floor in stocking feet. She had tried it too and slid into a glass fronted cabinet head first, cracking the glass, making Richard's mother, Cousin Carol, scream when she saw the blood sheeting down her face.

Her mother had pressed some wadded up Kleenex to the cut on her forehead, sitting on the stairs with her between her knees as her father took care of the business with the cousins from St. Louis. Her mother told her about visiting Nana Zalazny when she was a little girl and how she locked herself in the bathroom. After the bleeding had stopped, she took her up to the bathroom and showed her the glass door knob that she had been playing with when she locked the door, and Willow felt better about her accident.

The next room was dark. She knew what she would find here. There was a bank of Laundromat dryers against the wall to her right. No washing machine. She smiled a little at the odd omission. There was never a washing machine, just the three dryers, a refrigerator, a stove, and a workbench with tools on a pegboard against a wall. A broken toaster lay on its side.

The appliances had the clumsy charm of the 1950s. They were a little too big. Sweetly clutsy and almost cartoonish compared to her memory of sleek modern appliances. This was almost her favorite room. The details changed, except for the Laundromat dryers that were always there sans washing machine. Sometimes there was an enormous dishwasher, the kind that you would find in a restaurant where the workbench was. Sometimes there was a shower.

She had a feeling of relief to find the room waiting for her. She knew what came next.

It was the basement of Xander's house from their childhood. Not the hang-out, retreat of their teen years. It was full of boxes of discarded things. His mother's wedding dress hung inside a clear plastic bag from a hook buried in one of the exposed beams in the ceiling. There were plastic laundry baskets full of toys that they had outgrown, including her headless Barbie.

A mattress and box spring leaned against the wall. There was a large stain on it in the shape of South America, if you turned your head just right and squinted at it. There was, at the bottom, a gap between the wall and the box springs, just wide enough to squeeze into if you were playing hide and seek. Or building a fort. Or looking for a magic kingdom. She made herself slip through the space, even though it had to be too small for her now.

The door was still there. The narrow door hidden behind the mattress. She twisted the knob, turning sideways to slip through the narrow opening.

This part of her dream was not always the same, but there were places that she recognized that the door delivered her to. Never bad places or scary places, but places where she felt reasonably safe. She tried not to feel bad about not finding her old bedroom here, or the library in the high school, or the kitchen of the Summers' house. Sometimes she found herself in a room with a peaked ceiling and a glass wall with rain sheeting against it. Sometimes she found herself outside on the hill above the old elementary school looking down on the playground.

She was in the Charlotte Street house. That was a little different. She was standing beneath the false landing on the first floor. The staircase was behind her. The pocket doors to the front parlor were pulled almost closed. The door on the left had a tendency to stick. She could hear Mrs. Crump talking to the long haired marmalade cat she had rescued from the alley and named Napoleon. He was the companion cat to the snow white and stone deaf Wellington.

Mrs. Crump was the housekeeper. She was a distant cousin of William's, and her residence in the house was uninterrupted, even when it was rented. She was, like most of William's family, a bit odd. When they were in London, staying in the Charlotte Street house, Mrs. Crump always made sure that she had hot chocolate for breakfast and she looked at William like she was strongly tempted to box his ears if she found him in her room in the morning.

Rather than take offence, he seemed amused by this behavior.

She couldn't remember any time when she had this dream where there had been other people in it. She remembered the wandering from place to place, never stopping anywhere very long. Mrs. Crump was coming closer, and Willow felt a strong urge to . . . hide. She turned to the staircase, finding the small brass knob to the closet nestled under the stairs and opened it, stepping in and pulling the door shut behind her with a soft snick.

She waited in the dark, listening, and it came to her slowly, that she was no longer in the closet. She laid her hand on the surface in front of her and realized that it was cold. She took a step backwards, wondering where she was, and heard a sound-actually a series of sounds. Snick, whoosh, snap. After a short pause, it repeated. She turned towards the sound. Snick, whoosh-a flare of light out of the corner of her eye caught her attention, and she turned toward it.

Snick, whoosh-caught in the brief flare of light was a quick impression. White blond hair, sharp cheekbones, and blue eyes that could eat light. The snap of the Zippo shutting made her jump.

"Red? What the bloody hell are you doing here?"
~~~*~~~
 

Blood ran down his arm. Every time he lost his balance, the manacles punished him, digging into his wrists and the meaty part of his hand. His fingers were wrapped around the chain. The bruised muscles in his back where protesting the effort of holding himself up, but it was better than having his shoulder dislocated, and it gave Lucius something to concentrate on.

The prospect for this becoming an interesting evening had faded. William wasn't torturing him. Darla and Drusilla weren't tormenting him. Angelus hadn't moved from his chair. William was just beating him and he wasn't even trying hard or consistently. He seemed bored.

He told him everything, and Lucius was getting angry. William seemed to be more bored. You would have thought that you chained up a vampire to force them to endure something otherwise intolerable, not to have a punching bag. Lucius grunted as he landed a punch near his kidney.

"You aren't very good at this, are you?" Lucius observed.

William circled around. Actually, he was pretty bored. He was sure that he knew what was behind Lucius' petty rebellion. He thought that he was in on the big secret, and that that made him something more like a peer. Which, William was willing to concede, might actually be the case. It wasn't knowing something that he didn't necessarily want Darla or Angelus to know that gave Lucius power. It was what he did with that knowledge.

"You have something to share that is worth more effort?" William countered. He looked over at Dru, who smiled sweetly at him, and glided across the room to wrap her arms around his waist, her chin coming to rest on his shoulder.

"You've crawled around inside of his noggin, haven't you darling?" he crooned to her.

The hair on the back of Lucius' neck prickled. He remembered a bit of that experience, and it made him uneasy.

Dru reached out to lay her fingers on Lucius' cheek. The tips of her fingernails drew blood. She smeared it across her fingertips and licked it off, eyes narrowing.

Darla straightened at the smell of blood, nostrils flaring. He had fed, recently, on something. Not something human, but something. She looked at Angelus to see if he had picked up on it. His fingers were steepled, resting lightly against his lips.

"You are an idiot," William told him. "You fed? Next time make sure what you are feeding on is human."

Confused, Lucius stared at him. "It was the serving girl. You saw her."

"Was it?" William sounded skeptical. "Dru? Think you can shatter his illusions?"
~~~*~~~
 

"Spike . . ."

In a way it made sense. William asking her to call him Spike, and he had started smoking cigarettes in the last two days, which reminded her of Spike, and they had talked about going to London, so the Charlotte Street house . . . she sighed.

"What are you doing here?" he asked again.

"Hiding from Mrs. Crump," she admitted.

He used the lighter to light a candle, and she looked around. She expected to find that they were in a crypt, but in the spare light from the candle she made out the cold, cavernous interior of the Crawford Street mansion with a sense of disbelief at the choice. She was in serious need of psychotherapy. This wasn't even remotely a safe place.

"Why here? Why  you?" she asked. There was furniture here, and beyond that, the boarded up, broken space that led to the garden. She headed towards that. It was a kind of door, and in this dream, walking through a door was the thing that usually took her somewhere else. Anywhere else was fine by her.

She walked into the garden, and it stayed the garden. He followed her. "Mrs. Crump?" he repeated.

She looked at him over her shoulder. "I was at the house on Charlotte Street," she told him. "Mrs. Crump? Your second cousin twice removed-or whatever. Widowed? Any of this ring a bell?"

"Right," he said. "That Mrs. Crump," he peered at her. "How the hell do you know about Charlotte Street or my dearly departed relatives?"

Massive amounts of psychotherapy. Dream Spike was not with the program. "Because I cast a spell that was supposed to find the curse and re-soul Angel before anything really terrible happened, but it went wonky and I ended up in the 1890s living with you. So, I know Mrs. Crump, and your crazy Aunt Lucy with-"

"The shrunken head?" he started laughing. "That's hilarious."

She stared at him. This was too weird. "Um  . . . yeah. Hilarious. Question? How is it that any of your family is alive? Isn't that the first thing you do? Kill your family?"

"If you are Angelus," he sneered a little. "There was a bloody great lot of them, and what was to be done with Aunt Lucy's shrunken head? You know that is how she got it. She killed her husband. The damn thing talks. It's creepy. And, shouldn't you know this since we 'live together'" he air quoted.

"I try to avoid discussing killing people with William," she retorted.

She saw him mouth his own name with a grimace. "God. You're serious? I'm shacked up with you? I'm William, shacked up with you?" he sounded horrified. "What did you do? Give me a soul and then bollocks up any possibility of perfect happiness?"

"That's exactly it," she said spitefully. "You have a soul, and you . . . made your family invest all of your money in an orphanage, and you read improving literature to the children every night. They call you Uncle William," she improvised. "Oh, and did I mention? You write children's books."

"Oh, yeah. No doubt now about the perfect happiness with you shrilling at me like a harpy," he glowered at her, eyes narrowing. "What kind of children's books? The kinds with lots of nasty beasties eating bad children, eh?" He swaggered away from the wall. "Scary, nasty children's books," he ducked his head to look her in the eyes. "No?"

She backed away from him. "N-no," she stammered.

He looked amused. "Not just no, but no fucking way, pet. Aunt Lucy's shrunken head would have told them to stake me before giving up the money. Getting between a Morduant and money is a bad idea."

"It doesn't talk," Willow told him, returning to the topic of the talking head. This was more for her benefit than his. She had a feeling the shrunken head would be making an appearance in a dream soon, so it was best to head this off.

"Fat lot you know about it," he snorted. "William didn't tell you about the shrunken head. Good for him."

He walked over to her. "I guess that explains the big assed pentacle on the floor of the living room? So, now you are back? Is that how this works, Red? The Scoobies have been looking for you for a couple of days. I'm surprised the Slayer didn't bring the Poof back to help look for you."

She stared at him for a moment, the hair on her arms lifting.

"This isn't real," she reminded herself.

He grinned wolfishly. "Let's test that theory."
~~~*~~~
 

Lucius was slumped on the floor with a dazed expression while Dru crawled over him, opening his skin with her sharp fingernails and lapping at the blood that welled up. From the description of the demon that Dru had managed to give before she went into a frenzy over the blood that she was lapping up, Lucius had had an encounter with some variety of fey, which was reclassified from point of concern to a minor curiosity.

Except to Dru, who might end up bleeding him dry before the night was out. Or maybe to Angelus, who looked almost envious. It had to be the Irish in him. Magical creatures had an almost childlike appeal for him. William shared a glance with Darla as Angelus left his chair to go over to where Dru was straddling Lucius. If it wasn't a threat or something useful, Darla wasn't interested, a sentiment William didn't always share, but he had better things to do tonight than watch Dru and Angelus play with Lucius.

He nodded towards the door while he had Darla's eye to let her know that he was retiring for the evening. She followed him while he wondered if she had misinterpreted the gesture.

"What really happened in the kitchen?" she asked when they were in the hall. "And don't lie to me this time."

"Not lying," he said. "We're sorting out what is amusing, and what isn't," he insisted, his eyes drifting up the stairs. His chin lifted. "That notion of hers, of going to London? It will keep her busy for a while. We'll go in the fall. If you don't want to spend the winter in England, we'll join you. Before . . . Christmas," he said.

Darla's eyebrows lifted. She wondered if he understood that he was acting like he had something that he did not want to share, and decided that it was more than possible that he did not. "Angelus and I will discuss it. Maybe we will spend the winter in England."

He left her in the foyer and went up the stairs, pausing in front of his bedroom door. He crossed the hall to Willow's room to see that his instructions had been carried out. The bed and other furnishings were rearranged exactly as he had specified. He spotted the book Willow had been reading and imagined for a moment how annoyed she must have been to have found that she had forgotten it while stuck in his room. He picked the book up and left her room, shutting the door behind him.

Entering his room, he found that she was asleep. He wasn't as late as he anticipated, but he wasn't surprised to find that she was asleep either. He set the book on the bedside table where she had left a pitcher of water and a glass and started undressing, dropping his discarded clothing on one of the two armchairs near the fireplace. She was sleeping in the center of the bed curled up around a pillow.

As he was getting in bed, two things occurred to him. First, he wasn't particularly tired or sleepy. There wasn't any reason for him to be coming to bed unless he was planning to wake her up. The second thought was that he didn't want to wake her up. He might have changed his mind about that if she was wearing a nightgown, but when he slipped under the covers and found her naked, that was enough for him, just to lie there with her, listening to her heartbeat. It had nothing to do with what had happened in the kitchen, or having been deprived of her for two months.

He curled his arm behind his neck looking up at the carved wood above his head. There had been a bed in a place they had stayed in Nice that had a mirror inset in a similar bed. He had found making love under it fascinating, but she had hated it. She refused to look at it, and he thought it was because she couldn't stand what he was, but he had seen her flinch away from mirrors since then, and he knew it was more than that.

He shifted around to see her better. She had not bothered to wash her hair tonight and it still had a bit of a wave in it from the way it had been wound and twisted up in the back. One fat lock was nestled in against her throat. She was sleeping on her side, and beneath the blanket covering her, he explored the hold she had on the pillow. The arm on the bottom was bent at the elbow, her hand fisted in the pillow. The other arm was just laying across it. Her knees were pulled up, the bottom of the pillow resting on the top of her thighs.

Using his knee, he nudged her legs apart, enough to slip his knee in, smiling a little when her legs tightened on his, one foot flattening on his calve like she was hugging that too. He found the bottom of the pillow, two inches of eiderdown, warm from her body, squashed down against her. He pressed with his hand, pushing it between her thighs, barely able to discern the shape of her even as he moved his hand in a slow up and down movement. The leg trapped under his moved, just enough for her to push her foot into the back of his knee as she canted her hips forward with a small sound.

He scooted closer to her, easing one of the pillows under her head out from under her to rest his head on, taking the place of the arm he slid between her shoulder and neck. She tried to find a comfortable place for her head, moving until her cheek was resting on his upper arm before she settled down again. He curled his hand around the back of her head to finger comb her hair, baring her neck. His fingers massaged her through the pillow. He was rewarded with a sleepy sigh as she rubbed her cheek against his arm.

She used her foot to lever herself against the pressure between her legs. He was a little surprised that she hadn't woken up. His mind started supplying images of how he might wake her up. If he had been behind her, he would have rolled her over on her stomach, fucking her awake, slow and hard. Nothing sweeter than feeling her wake as he was filling her body with his cock. If she was on her back, he might have eased her legs apart and taken her warm, wet flesh into his mouth, working her clitoris with the flat of his tongue, savoring the warm, clean taste of her, waiting for her to open her eyes long after she had actually woken.

He was facing her, her body fitting around his like a puzzle piece as she unwittingly bared her neck to him, the scent, trapped by her hair, all the more rich and tempting. He hadn't fed in the last day, but it wasn't simple hunger that tantalized him as his eyes fastened on her neck. He didn't feed on her to simply satisfy his appetite. If he was truly hungry, he would have stopped and left her to hunt.  It was so much more. His eyes lingered on the pale blue vein that was throbbing attractively under her skin. He could have started with the tips of her fingers, her toes, the back of her knee, any sweetly familiar mouthful of her would have given him momentary relief.

His fingers found her neck, stroking his thumb over her pulse, feeling it quicken for him. He felt her mouth open on his arm and he hung there for a moment, poised over her, wanting the sensation of her lips opening for him, on him. He kissed her shoulder, looking down into the shadowy vale of her breasts where the pillow she was hugging was pressed. He felt her jerk as she woke up, like someone or something had frightened her, in a convulsive, uncoordinated start from deep sleep to full awareness.

She stared at him blindly, and what he saw in her eyes was terror and rejection. She let go of the pillow to use her arms to push at his chest. He adjusted his hold on her, cradling her head, even as he felt her straining to get away from him, rubbing her back with his other hand as he made shushing noises.

"You were dreaming, love," he soothed, kissing the top of her head. "It was just a dream."

She heart was racing. Even as he was stroking her back he could feel it, and it was wonderful. The shudder and quake of her heartbeat, the slight tremble in her limbs. Nicer if it was from shagging, but still nice enough. He wrestled the pillow away from her, keeping it in contact with her skin by sliding it under her. He paused for a moment to admire the effect. She had twisted her upper body sideways and the pillow under her forced her back into a graceful arch. The warmth of her body had been trapped by the pillow, and into the cooler air against her bare skin she was giving off heat, her skin contracting with the change in temperature, pebbling with gooseflesh.

He wanted to lick every inch of her, taste the salt and sweetness of her skin. He cupped her cheek with one hand, trying to get her to focus on him. "It was just a dream," he reminded her. "Look at me, Willow. You are awake now."

She heard him. It wasn't a particularly reassuring notion. She was awake now. Oh God, she was awake. It had been a dream, nothing more than that. Exceptionally vivid. She closed her eyes. It was so close that she felt herself slipping back into the lingering impressions, half wanting to hang onto them, half hating herself for wanting to hang on to them. She saw Spike lunging towards her in a moment of perfect irony. The thought had occurred to her that she had made it home in time to be killed by the century older version of the vampire that she knew intimately, unencumbered by any of her memories of him.

But he didn't bite her. Suddenly they were in the kitchen, in a dizzying change of the background from the devastated garden that she barely remembered to the odd kitchen of her dreamscape. On the stove there was a large copper clad pot full of water, at a rolling boil, with swollen bags of blood bobbing in the water. She kept one eye on it, afraid that it would boil over. Spike was there . . . she winced at the memory. She was sitting on a counter that she couldn't remember ever seeing before with her legs wrapped around him, over his bare hips, under the cover of his ubiquitous leather coat as she felt him enter her.

"No, no, no," William crooned to her. "Wake up, sweet. It's too soon to go back to sleep," he said.

Because she might slip back into the dream of being almost home. If she ever got there, if she ever figured out a way to go home, Spike would be there.

She opened her eyes, and William tilted his head to one side. "Big scary, nasty dream, was it?" he asked.

She couldn't speak. She just nodded. He ducked his head, pressing his lips to her chest, over her heart. "Your heart is racing," he observed, taking a deep breath, his tongue stealing out to taste the skin he was kissing. His hand moved up to rest under her breast, his thumb and index finger making a bracket for the underside of her breast as his head turned with the stroke of his tongue and soft lip biting kisses. She watched as he reached her nipple. His tongue curled around it. "You have the prettiest tits," he said. "The prettiest, sweetest nipples," his lips closed around her nipple, tugging as his tongue worked back and forth over the surface of her nipple.

They were all tangled up. His legs and hers. There was an ache in the small of her back from the pressure of her trapped lower body and the twisting extension of her upper body. It was almost enough to distract her from the tight feeling in her chest and the growing realization that she was wet.

She could feel the equally wet head of his cock brushing against her, and she was a little shocked at how much she wanted it. Wanted him inside her, now. She must have made a sound or moved in some way that suggested as much to him. He lifted his head, reluctantly surrendering her nipple and shifted his hips to rub against her more deliberately.

Then he lifted himself off of her, untangling their legs, holding hers apart as he looked down at her. "So beautiful," he said with a hint of a smile in his voice. He was too far away from her, and she couldn't see him clearly in the dark. With her head still full of her dream, it was too easy to make him Spike as well as William.

"Don't leave me." She was startled, maybe even more than he was by the raw sound of her voice.

He didn't even think about it. "What's this?" he teased. "I'd never leave you," he said. It was a ridiculous idea. She was the one who was always leaving or trying to leave, not that he held it against her. Not really. It was more or less expected, and he thought he had almost given up getting angry with her over it.

Leaving one hand to lie flat, fingers splayed over her upper left thigh, William slid his arm under her right knee, turning his face to the side to kiss the crease of her knee, working his way backward to her foot. He kissed the inside of her ankle. Her feet were very ticklish, and she had on more than one occasion accidentally kicked him while he was playing with her feet. That was half the fun of it.

"Gently, love," he cautioned, stroking the back of her leg, exposed to him, as much as he could while still supporting her leg. If he had been Angelus, this would have been all about testing her restraint, and if she had kicked the older vampire, that would have gone badly for her. William was willing to let it be anything that it could be. Less a test than an exploration, with distraction. He massaged the thigh laying open and neglected under his hand.

His tongue etched a cool, damp line, following the arch of her foot, feeling it contract sharply as her toes curled up. She made a sound, mostly protesting. More distraction was required, he concluded, using nothing more than the tip of his thumb to part the lips of her cunt, not quite reaching her clitoris with the caress as he sucked on the ball of her foot, his upper lip brushing the pad of her great toe.

"Will," it was a moan and a plea.

"Ssssh," he soothed. "Such pretty feet you have," he murmured. "I love feeling them pushing into the back of my knees when I'm inside of you."

She closed her eyes, in another searing flash, she imagined not his cool skin under the soles of her feet, but wear softened denim. She shook her head, rejecting the weird train of thought that her dream had fueled. Was she doomed to never think about sex with anyone normal again? Why dream about Spike, and not Oz? Why dream of being home again only to find Spike?

Taking no chance that she would kick him, William held her ankle before he took her great toe into the cool recesses of his mouth, feeling her react almost violently as her leg jerked. He laughed a little, curling his tongue into the crease under her toes where she was most ticklish.

She squirmed. "Will, please, no," she begged.

The angle was slightly awkward, but he moved his hand from her thigh to her abdomen. The tip of one finger dipped into her navel while his thumb found her clitoris, stroking it in a slow, teasing back and forth motion. He let her toe slide out of his mouth, nibbling on the tip of it. "You are so wet," he breathed. "Feel that?" His thumb rotated over her clit. "Feel how wet you are? All spread open for me, my sweet, sleepy, girl. Are you waking up, yet?" his tongue stroked the underside of her toes.

The sensation was suddenly connected to the feeling between her legs and her hips rose. His thumb left her clitoris, slipping inside of her, thicker than his fingers, but more shallow. He took her great toe back into his mouth and her head fell back, her foot unselfconsciously pushing against his head as her hips moved with his thumb, slowly fucking her.

"So beautiful, so perfect," he crooned. "Touch your lips. I can't reach them, but God, I wish I could. I'd cover your lips with my hand, feel you moaning against them, while I covered your lips with this," his fingers slid over her labia, dredging up the fluids that made her feel like she was melting. "I'd want so much to lick the taste of you off your lips."

She lifted one hand to her lips, licking them before her fingertips touched them. "That's it," he encouraged. "Get your fingers wet for me," his thumb slid out of her, wet from her, to press against the tight sphincter of her asshole while two of his fingers slid inside of her and his mouth engulfed three toes, making her cry out at the confusing mix of sensations.

She was sucking on two of her fingers. "That's it, baby," he encouraged. "Your nipples are so hard, aren't they? Touch them for me."

Her hands moved to her breasts, cupping them, finding her nipples and using her fingers to pinch and tug on them as his fingers fucked her and his thumb pressed deeper, filling her ass while he laved her smallest toe. Overwhelmed by sensation, her back arched like a bowstring,  the leg he was supporting trembling violently as she mewed in frustrated pleasure. One hand left her breast to find her abandoned clitoris, needing the contact to bring herself over the peak he had brought her to.

She half expected him to push her hand away, but he just made a soft sound, deep in his throat that she wanted to press the soul of her foot against and feel vibrating against her. She no longer needed to see him. He was no one to her but Will, and the relief of that recognition was so profound that it brought tears to her eyes as she came.

She was still feeling the aftershocks of her orgasm when his fingers slipped out of her and she felt the head of his cock butting against her. With an odd burst of tenderness, she realized that he wanted to be inside of her while she was still feeling the effects of her orgasm and she shifted to accommodate him, sighing as his cock filled her. His fingers, still wet from being inside of her, touched her lips and she shuddered as his mouth followed his fingers, his tongue licking her lips.

She wrapped her arms and legs around him, hearing him moan as the movement brought him deeper inside of her, or maybe it was just being held as they kissed that pleased him. With the dream banished, her head was full of the things he had hinted at under the bridge.

"Does it feel good?" he asked between kisses. "Is this what you need? Tell me you need me inside of you," his voice held a teasing note that almost disguised the plea.

She let her hand rest on his cheek, panting a little from the kissing and the exertion. She hadn't quite caught her breath from her orgasm. "It feels good," she assured him.

He turned his head to kiss her wrist, one arm under her hips to lift her higher against him. Each thrust and twist of his hips sent him into her deep, rubbing against her clit. "I love fucking you," he said, resting on his elbows, his hands gathering up her hair. "I love the way you feel. So warm. I feel so much when I'm inside you. Can you feel it? Can you feel me fucking you with how good you feel to me? Can you feel it when I'm fucking you hard, so hard, can't get deep enough, can't make it hard enough, want you so much that I can't ever have enough of you?"

Coherency eluded her. Her mind just sort of went blank, and nothing could have escaped the tightness in her throat, except the sounds that punctuated the movement of their bodies. His hands delicately bracketed her jaw, holding her head back so he could get at her throat. His head twisted as he opened his mouth over her throat, not biting, just absorbing her sounds against his lips and tongue.

"I'll never leave you. I'll never give you up," he said, driving into her harder and faster.

She felt him turning her head to expose the side of her neck, and panicked a little, bringing her hands up to push against his shoulders. It was no use. He didn't even seem to notice that what she was doing. So close to her ear, his change from the benign human form to vampire was a thing that could be heard. A shift in muscle and bone that sounded violent, even painful. She had never asked him if it was. Did it hurt to have your face change like that?

Her deepest fear was that someday she would be able to answer that question for herself. Dimly, she recognized that he was trying not to hurt her. She could feel the tension his shoulders. She could hear the rumbling, purring growl in his throat that was probably meant to be soothing. Tears spilled over her cheeks as his fangs broke her skin, and she heard him groan at the effort of not drawing on her, sparing her the pain of feeling veins contract. He was shaking with the effort of just letting her blood flow into his mouth, his lower body jerking in rough spasms as his orgasm reached him. The tight grip on her head never eased, which was probably to her benefit. She didn't think she could have held still, and the sharp fangs buried in her throat would have caused more damage if she had jerked away from him.

A sob escaped her when she felt his fangs retract. He was breathing hard into her neck, licking the bite mark, moaning a little, his cock still buried in her as he rocked against her. His hold on her head gentled, and he stroked her hair, making soft sounds against her throat. Without leaving her body, he sat up with her, arranging her so that she was straddling him, his hands moving up and down her back. When he was satisfied that she was no longer bleeding, his lips moved to her tear dampened face and he stilled.

What could he possibly say? That he hadn't meant to hurt her? That had been preordained. That she tasted like nothing on earth? That the experience of filling his mouth with her blood was an unholy communion? That even now he needed more of her. He needed to kiss away her tears and that he was aching to bury his tongue inside her and taste them all mixed together. The pressure of useless words, of ideas that were too alien even now for her to understand made his chest feel tight.

She tried to rest her head against his shoulder, not because she wanted to be held, but to avoid his eyes. He held her head in his hands, forcing her to look at him. Until the day she died in his arms, he was faced with this. The vast hurt and sorrow that was the only thing she could give him now. The notion that a vampire's bite was erotic was a load of crap. It bloody well hurt to have a mouthful of sharp teeth digging into your throat. It was nothing short of terrifying to be held by someone infinitely stronger who could easily, even accidentally end your life in a matter of seconds. For him it was nothing short of a religious experience, replete with fear and sex.

He gave her the only thing he had left, knowing that it fell far short. Knowing that it was the cruelest truth. "I love you," he said.

Her eyelids squeezed shut. He could feel her chest heaving and let her have the peace of laying her head on his shoulder while he absorbed the throbbing beat of her heart and the feeling of her shaking with pent up emotion. He cradled her against his chest, rocking her like she was a child.

She didn't answer him, and he knew, deep down, she never would.

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