Odalisque

Author: Elen

Parts: 21 - 25

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~Part: 21~

It was a tense group of vampires who were gathered around the dining room table when Willow followed Darla into the dining room the next morning. After her room had been vacated she had laid awake for a while, listening for the sound of the front door opening and closing that would signal William and Dru’s departure, half-afraid that Angelus would come back. Eventually sleep overtook her.

In the salon, Darla and Angelus had listened to Drusilla’s disjointed ramblings about birds and priests. Darla had been more than willing to tune Drusilla out. A passion for religion was something Angelus shared with his lunatic childe, and she could feel William’s impatience and annoyance with the subject, tempered by a hint of concern. Wallowing in bloodshed and violence was fine with him. He didn’t get an extra charge out of it being directed at the church the way Angelus did.

Cook returned with Matilde and William left with him, to go to the place near Josephof where he had followed someone from the wharf on William’s instructions. Angelus and Dru left with Lucius to visit the tavern by the wharf and look into the curiosity that was the girl Lucius had killed who was still living.

That left Darla with Matilde for company. After she had fulfilled her usefulness by drawing a bath, taking down Darla’s hair, and helping her undress, Darla considered waking up Willow for company, and discarded the idea as soon as it had come to her.

In the course of their conversation with the Zlata Ulicka vampires they had formed a pact based on two principals. Mutual tolerance and self-defense. The Stare Mesto vampires were too large and well organized a group for either of them to take on alone, and once they were dealt with, the Zlata Ulicka vampires agreed that they would consider their presence in the city now and in the future, to be at their will. How long that would last remained to be seen. They would return in the morning, before sunrise, to stay the day to plan the attack that had been tentatively set for two days hence.

Eventually, Darla too went to sleep, aware that Angelus and William would probably not enjoy any sleep before their guests arrived in the morning and that by sleeping she was giving up a chance to find out what was going on with Drusilla’s vision and Lucius’ encounter with some unclassified creature.

Darla found Willow in the kitchen, snapping the dog’s leash on. Her face and arms were still pink from her overexposure to the sun yesterday. She had one of Drusilla’s fringed shawls to cover up with today. The shawl was a deep, vibrant green that clashed with the pink dress she was wearing. Pink dress? Sunburned skin? Darla heaved an inward sigh at how she dressed herself with the benefit of a reflection. “Leave the dog. We have company,” she said, gesturing for Willow to join her.

Willow unclipped the leash, coiling it in her hands as she followed Darla. Mr. Buttons ran after her, his nails clicking on the stone floor of the kitchen. He chased the hem of Willow’s skirt, catching it and trying to tug her back to the kitchen while she tried to nudge him away with her foot. “Stop that!” she hissed at him, trying to keep up with Darla, who had reached the stairs and was looking back at her impatiently.

Darla looked at Willow and then at the dog. Moving faster than either of them anticipated, Darla grabbed the dog by the collar and smacked him sharply across the nose with two fingers, making him drop the mouthful of Willow’s hem that he was worrying. “No!” Darla said sternly.

The startled dog abruptly sat down, looking chastened. Willow found herself starting to smile at the startled and almost sheepish expression on his face.

She thought she heard Darla mutter something like, “How hard was that?” as she took the shawl off and laid it over the stair rail with the leash looped on top of it.

Mr. Buttons looked up at her, whining softly. “Shush,” she warned him. “Be glad she didn’t eat you,” she whispered.

“I heard that,” Darla said over her shoulder, entering the dining room.

Willow followed her, nervously smoothing down her skirt. The drapes were drawn, but the chandelier was lit. Several of the leaves had been removed from the table since the dinner party and the extra chairs had been moved to places against the walls. Angelus was sitting at the head of the table flanked by two people Willow did not recognize. William was at the foot of the table. He extended his hand, and she took it as a hint and went to stand beside him. He took her hand, briefly kissing the back of her fingers, but not relinquishing his hold on her.

“This is our witch,” Angelus said.

Willow lifted her head. The words were out of her mouth before she considered the wisdom of saying them. “We have a King Charles spaniel, too.”

There was a pause as all eyes turned to her. “House broken,” William drawled.

Willow looked at him. “More or less,” she agreed.

He wasn’t looking at her. His thumb stroked her palm and he brought her wrist to his mouth, kissing her wrist where her pulse thrummed before he let go of her hand. Dru had left his hair too long in front, and a long lock drooped over his eyebrow. She pushed it back, and still his gaze was trained on the opposite end of the table. His hand came to rest on her waist.

Lulach watched them, willing to be amused. He didn’t understand the comment about the dog, but it seemed that Thomazine did, and that she thought it was at least interesting.

“Does it have a name?” Thomazine asked.

Darla frowned at her. “Willow.”

Willow looked at the vampire to Angelus’ right. “She meant the dog,” William said. “The dog’s name is Mr. Buttons. This,” he nodded to Willow,” is Willow.”

“Willow?” she repeated, looking at Lulach curiously.

“It’s a kind of tree,” he confirmed. “With shallow roots and thin, whippy branches that bow.”

Feeling like the conversation was getting away from him, Angelus gestured to a chair near William. “Join us,” he ordered. “We have a lot of work to do.”

~~~*~~~

The Stare Mesto vampires' lair was an abandoned church on the edge of a cemetery, according to Thomazine. The informal war planning council was interrupted briefly at lunchtime by Lucius’ arrival with a tray for Willow. William had left the table and was standing by the cold fireplace, smoking, using the hearth as an ashtray. She could tell by the contents of the tray that Cook had prepared the meal. There was a bowl of a thick, dark soup with what looked like red onions and bits of meat topped by a dollop of sour cream. It smelled like the soup Joyce made for the New Years dinner she had thrown for the last few years, and Willow thought the meat was probably sausage. The first time she had gone to the Summers New Year’s dinner, Buffy had told them not to ask what was in the soup, but just eat it because it was better than it sounded and Joyce had gotten a startled look on her face and asked Willow if she kept kosher. Xander had started snickering as Willow tried to figure out if she was supposed to give the parentally correct answer or admit that she did not.

It was a bigger deal to her father than her mother. Willow had a hard time imagining that God really cared what she ate, which was kind of odd considering that she was a witch and she used spell components that were very specific to focus the power of deities representing aspects of the natural world. Maybe it was because the God of her childhood imaginings seemed to abstract, or maybe it was because the deities she appealed to seemed less remote.

She didn’t keep kosher, though William occasionally remembered that she was Jewish and he rarely gave her anything to eat that he thought she wasn’t supposed to eat. Sometimes she wondered if he thought being Jewish was like being a vampire and that the foods that she wasn’t supposed to have were somehow harmful. If the wrath of God was going to fall on her head, you’d think the occasional ham sandwich paled beside the whole worshiping false Gods, and weird sex with the undead aspects of her unreal life.

The soup was served with a crusty white bread, a cup of baked custard topped with berries, and a pot of tea. It was the first thing she had had to eat today, and Willow found that she was hungry. She had woken up alone. Despite what he implied before he left, William had not come back. Assuming that he and Drusilla had been out late, and trying not to wonder why he had not come back, she had enjoyed an unusually long bath before dressing with the idea of taking Mr. Buttons out into the garden, since walking in the park seemed to be out for the time being.

She watched him surreptitiously as she ate. He seemed to be in an odd mood. She couldn’t decide if it was because of the other vampires or if it was something else. There was a slightly grim look around his mouth. He caught her peeking at him and raised an eyebrow. She let her attention return to her soup, and then drift back to the conversation around the table.

Relying on whatever surprise they could achieve, they planned an all out assault on the lair. The problem was, as Willow saw it, that the approaches were too easily defended. They had to cross a graveyard, use a long, straight road that cut across the back of the cemetery, or scale a thirty foot wall that separated the back of the church yard from a prosperous neighborhood in Stare Mesto. That was one problem. The real problem was that the optimum time for attack was more or less out of the question. A daylight attack wasn’t in the cards.

Angelus never took a charge in approach. He always had an exit strategy. The terrain suggested the kind of fight that could separate the fighters and when the numbers were not in their favor to begin with, that was a bad idea. The element of surprise only took you so far. She could only see negatives. What Thomazine and Lulach knew about the interior of the building covered the area that was formerly the sanctuary, the largest open space on the interior of the building. Churches weren’t just sanctuaries. There would be other areas of the building, galleries, confessionals, offices, and given the age of the church and the religious wars that had taken place during the reformation, Willow strongly suspected the building was a rabbit warren of hidden spaces and crypts.

She was finishing her lunch when it occurred to her that the tray gave her a reason to leave the room. She didn’t want to be there and she was convinced that William didn’t want her to be there either.

Angelus asked if she had thought of anything that might be useful. “Not anything magical,” she admitted. It was a stone structure, but it was probably framed in wood. They could try burning the building and picking off anyone coming out, but that would attract a lot of attention and the standing around and waiting for anyone to come out could work against them if every possible exit wasn’t known and covered. She was so rusty when it came to that kind of planning that it was depressing. She excused herself, picking up the tray with the idea of making good on her hasty retreat strategy.

William walked over to the end of the table. “This is bullshit,” he announced. “We have a witch who is witch enough to have detected a magical signature that protects your lair. One that she can’t penetrate. You have that kind of power lying about, and you want us to put my girl out there without risking your own,” he said, voicing his distrust of the situation.

“They won’t help,” Lulach said, sounding almost cheerful about it. “It’s what you might call an uneasy co-existence.”

Thomazine shot him a quelling look. Darla sat back with a strangely pleased smile on her face. William had just put his finger on the very thing that was nagging at her about this, and he had done it in his usual rude and irritating way, which meant that she didn’t have to.

“Then make them,” William was cold. “Make them fight. Bring the fight to them. Turn them. I don’t really care. You attacked us, and you have the bloody gall to try to make your problem ours. My vote is for tossing you out on your arse.”

Thomazine’s eyebrows rose. “Interesting. Does your vote actually count for anything?” she wondered.

“At this table? Substantially more than yours does, ducks, and where it comes to my witch, it’s the only one that counts.”

Darla gave a brief nod to confirm that claim. “William makes a good point,” she agreed. “You’ve brought a problem to us that is mostly your problem, of your creation, and we aren’t inclined to assume all of the risk.”

“Ducks?” Thomazine looked at Lulach again. “Aren’t ducks water fowl?”

“It’s a sarcastic form of endearment,” Willow put in as she rose, picking up her lunch tray. “Ducks. Cute, fluffy, quacking ducks,” she said, looking at William who was looking at her like she was vastly off the mark. “Or maybe not,” she allowed, wondering where the term came from. “I’m going to take the dog out to walk,” she tilted her head to one side, looking at William, making it a question.

He gave her a spare nod. “In the garden.”

Willow took her tray and walked to the door. Lulach rose to open it for her and she gave him a shyly wary smile of thanks as she moved past him into the hall with a sigh of relief at having escaped the dining room.

He shut the door behind him. “Charming young woman,” he commented to no one in particular. “I knew Thomazine’s mother for over twenty years. Humans can be interesting companions if you bother to keep them alive,” he nodded politely to William. “Do you have another idea?”

“Who are the local vampire, demon, witch hunters?” William asked. “What’s made you keep your numbers down? You were hunting us for a reason. What rule were we breaking? A city this size could support three times our numbers and go unnoticed.”

Thomazine and Lulach exchanged glances. She spoke. “The Order of St. Ubaldus operates out of Emmaus,” she said. “They are part of the balance of things. Our numbers are too small, and we are too well protected for them to do more than watch.”

William looked up at the ceiling, rocking back on his heels, thinking. “We have to manipulate them into attacking,” he concluded.

Angelus and Darla caught on at once. Drusilla’s vision suggested that agents of the church were stalking them, and the presence of the Order of St. Ubaldus suggested an obvious culprit. Darla and Angelus had been playing similar games for decades.

~~~*~~~

Back in the barren garden, Willow watched Mr. Buttons as he snuffled his way over to the stable, barking at the occupants and scratching at the door. She had not been in the stable since the incident with the coachman. She had gone into the stable with the idea of saddling a horse and riding away on a day like this one, that started out not particularly good or bad, but busy with vampire business since there had been a house full of fledglings to claim everyone’s attention.

The coachman had been methodically beating the small gray mare that was meant to be a riding horse for her, pausing only to snarl at her as she backed out into the sunlight and went to her knees, unable to vomit or cry or feel much except frustrated that she had been foiled again. She stayed there until it started to rain, and then made her way back into the house to tell Angelus what she had seen.

She could do that now. There were advantages to taking them so completely by surprise. Where to go? It didn’t matter, except that experience taught her that it did matter. There were worse things than a cool hand running through her hair and the feeling that she was . . . loved.

Her fingernails cut into her palms. God, she hated him for that. I love you. He didn’t even know her. He loved what he thought he knew and it wasn’t real. The real her wasn’t here at all, was she? The real her was in college, or working at a job, possibly in love with someone and living a life that made normal by the unreal life she was stuck to like flypaper.

He didn’t come back last night, no matter what he implied to the contrary last night, and he was in an odd mood this morning. What did that mean? William’s moods weren’t to be taken lightly. Reading his moods was as much a part of her continued existence as feeding herself, but she knew that her awareness was also tied to an uneasy sensation of loss. She refused to acknowledge it.

~~~*~~~

At dusk, their guests departed. Last night William had gone with Cook to investigate the store front mission that Cook had trailed the old guy fishing off the wharf to, while Angelus had pissed about with Lucius’ mysteriously alive victim, who had disappeared by the time they returned to the tavern. It wasn’t hard to sort out Angelus’ priorities on that. His interest in all things exotic and magical was almost compulsive.

The odd greeting ritual at the mission made William suspicious from the start, and now he was certain that there was a connection. Feeling energized by the prospect for creative mayhem, he was whistling as he sought out his girls, finding them in Willow’s room. She was lying on her chaise reading, while Drusilla worked on the throw she was making for the chaise, sewing buttons on it seemingly at random. There was a pot of tea on the table and a plate of cheese and crackers with a branch of grapes that had probably been Willow’s idea. The dog, curled at Dru’s feet, dashed over to him. William fed him a grape, curious to see what he would do with it. After mouthing it with a perplexed expression, he spat it out and pushed it around on the floor with his nose until it developed enough momentum to roll a few feet. Barking excitedly, he smashed it with his paw and then shook off the mushed grape with an air of disgust.

William plucked another grape and shot it across the floor with a flick of his thumb.

Willow picked up the furry dog toy that Dru had made and shook it to get the dog’s attention after he smashed a third grape missile. He raced across the room and snatched it out of her hand, growling in a doggy show of dominance over the toy. She set aside the book and got up to pick up the squashed grape mess on the floor. William caught her around the waist, drawing her back against him. He nuzzled the bite mark on her throat. She stilled, tensing a little. “What’s wrong, pet?” he asked.

“Nothing,” she said in a tone that could have been read as ‘everything’. He was tempted to let it go, or at least ignore it while he savored the downy texture of her earlobe. Instead he sampled her scent, seeking hidden cues to her current slightly disgruntled attitude. It was a possible miscalculation. She had been out in the sun again, and sun warmed Willow made him forget her unsaid ‘everything’. His hand dropped below her waist, fingers kneading her lower abdomen. She had light, infrequent and painful menses usually proceeded by mood swinging tension.

If that was bothering her, her abdomen would be tender enough to wring a reaction from her other than the patient way she was putting up with his handling of her. He kissed the back of her neck and started unbuttoning her dress. She had a dark mole on her back under her shoulder blade and he kissed that as the dress parted enough for him to slide his hands inside of it to lightly stroke her ribcage with a knowing laugh as she shivered.

Drusilla set aside her sewing to pick up the dog and carry him over to her room. William peeled one capped sleeve down to lay slack against her elbow as Willow brought her arms up to keep the dress from falling away from her chest.

They had argued about using Willow. Angelus had some idea about her casting a glamour to aid his deception campaign. William knew that she wouldn’t help them harm humans again without resorting to extreme persuasion. That line had been drawn in the sand after they had their fight in the kitchen. There were things she could be made to do, things she had been made to do, but that was no long one of them. Aside from that, he didn’t want her anywhere near any agency of the church that had witch hunting on its agenda. She was too likely to view them as potential allies and blunder into a trap that she couldn’t get out of. Burn his witch? His hands tightened briefly on her sunburned arms.

He’d see them in hell. He buried his face in her neck, finding the reassuring thrum of her pulse under his lips, impatiently tugging on her dress to make her let go of it. He wanted it all off. The dress, the chemise she was wearing, the knickers, the stupid wool stockings that he was pretty sure he had suggested burning.

She took a stumbling step forward, stepping on the hem of her dress and pitching forward. Drusilla, gliding back into the room, caught her under her arms and carried her down to the floor, laughing at Willow’s startled expression before her hands delved into her hair, pulling out hairpins and a bit of ribbon wound through her curls. The hairpins and fingers pulling on her hair made her make a sound of pained protest. Dru’s fingers tightened in her hair, her dark eyes drinking in the blanch of pain and the overextended line of Willow’s throat as William undressed, watching them. Willow had managed to get her knees under her and Drusilla held her hair back with one hand, pulling the dress off of her with the other, carelessly scratching her sunburned chest.

His shirt was open when Dru rose on her knees, beckoning to him. With Willow between them, she unbuttoned his trousers, freeing his erection, her cool hand stroking him as she guided the head of his cock to Willow’s lips. She jerked her head back, looking up at him with an expression that held expectations that shouldn’t have been there. He cupped her cheek.

“Where do you think you are going?” he asked in a voice made more threatening for it’s softness.

For a moment, before her eyelashes swept down to veil her expression, before she took him into her warm mouth, he saw something die a little in her eyes and tried to pretend that he was imagining it, concentrating on the skillful way she sucked him, taking him deeper as Drusilla’s hands roved over her body, pushing her legs apart.

He blamed her. Keeping her stupid fucking secrets. That business last night about the wards around the house focusing dark magic, was it truth, guessing, or just a pack of plausible bullshit? Her journal hadn’t gone untouched, but the last few entries were so banal that they were suspicious, nothing more than a rehash of events. There was fodder for more. Nothing about what Dru had done to her the other night. Nothing about their talk under the Charles, and even more curious nothing about the attack on the house except one observation. “When she said Bohemian Reii, I thought, great, vampires with a club, and a name, and a secret handshake. It sounded like something Spike would have said.”

No effort whatsoever to move or find a new hiding place for her journal. He knew that she knew he read her journal. He didn’t expect to open it and find some version of ‘I love him, I love him not’, she simply wasn’t that transparent, but she picked at the edges of every fucking thing, and the fact that she wasn’t picking at the edges of anything that had happened between them was setting off alarm bells. He had enough on his plate not to have to be distracted with whatever crazy scheme was rolling around in her brain.

The nightmares she had had after they took her out of that hospital in London painted a picture of the tender mercies she had been exposed to. She consistently made the mistake of seeking kindness and mercy from people, and she refused to beyond her trifling moral qualms about what he was to what he was to her. She had a beautiful home, and there weren’t any luxuries that he would stint on where she was concerned.

A pained whimper vibrated against the head of his cock and he looked down to see Dru pinching her nipples hard enough to leave bruises. “Dru,” he shook his head, feeling the last twenty-four hours without sleep catching up in a rush. “Don’t hurt her.”

Combing his fingers through Willow’s hair, he pulled back until she understood that she could stop, and he sank to his knees. Lingering anger at her for lying to him kept any semblance of an apology stuck in his throat. Drusilla’s arm circled her waist, her hand slipping between Willow’s thighs as he pushed her back into the cradle of Dru’s body, cupping her breasts and gently laving her bruised nipples, nursing his own feeling of ill-use.

He picked Willow up and carried her to the bed, dropping her there unceremoniously and then went back to find his coat, seeking out his cigarettes as Dru undressed. He lifted the lid on the matchbox on the mantel and lit his cigarette. The sun had gone down enough to push back the drapes and open a window. He made himself comfortable on the chaise, smoking and flicking ash out the window as Drusilla crawled across the bed, pushing Willow’s thighs apart and settling between them.

The wounded look in Willow’s eyes made him grit his teeth. What the fuck was she upset about? To the best of his knowledge the first real lover she ever had was her pimping friend, and long before he ever got anything from her but the satisfaction of fucking something warm, Dru was the one who got her hot, made her whimper, made her arch her back and beg for more. Bitch. Lying, treacherous, scheming bitch.

If Angelus suspected for a second that she was dangerous to any of them, her life wasn’t worth a brass farthing.

He squinted through a cloud of smoke as Drusilla loomed over her, using her thigh to rub against Willow’s cunt as she wound her fingers through her hair and nibbled at her lips until Willow was kissing her back. So coy, he thought with a derisive smirk. Those pretty shows of reluctance, of modesty, of shyness, suckered them every time. He watched as her shoulders flexed as Drusilla copied his gentle approach to her breasts. As sore as her bruised nipples were, every cool, wet touch of Dru’s tongue would send icy little jolts of sensation through her.

He took another drag on his cigarette. Angelus was determined to find some way to make use of Willow’s newly discovered abilities. If she couldn’t be used to further their deception, than he wanted her on hand as they executed the divide and slaughter elements of the plan. Picking off the Stare Mesto vampires. It made sense. It was going to be hard to convince the Stare Mesto vampires that humans were hunting them unless there was a real human to hunt them. Angelus’ plan was to let it get around that the Order of St. Ubaldus had a Slayer. They would be on hand to back her up, to keep her from getting into too much trouble, but it still meant having her out there, staking vampires.

And, hello, they were vampires. What was to stop her from staking one of them?

They were whispering to each other now. Dru’s husky intonations mixed with the silky sound of Willow’s voice, her breathless laugh when Dru did something that tickled. He could feel the heat of the cigarette growing perilously close to where he had it between his fingers. There was a tea cup and saucer on the small table by the chaise. He put the cigarette out and lay back, closing his eyes. He didn’t need a lot of sleep, but he knew that he was tired.

He had not pointed out the downside to encouraging her to kill vampires. He had simply pointed out the high probability that she would be hurt. Or killed. The other night she had demonstrated surprising creativity. In his head he could still hear that slight catch in her throat as she recounted the sequence of events. It started with a plan. A bad plan, and it all went wrong. She went to power that she didn’t know she had, and claimed she had little control over—there’s nothing to focus it, it goes right through me—and from there she had blundered her way into the slenderest of advantages. What he told Dru held true. If it had been them in the yard, they would have killed her. If the vampires who had attacked the house had meant to kill her, they would have killed her.

Angelus' answer to that was to tell him that it would not be like Lisbon. If she was hurt, badly, there would be no waiting to see if she lived. They were no longer in the business of keeping Willow alive. The Zlata Ulicka vampires hadn’t come here to kill her with the idea of revoking the invite protection she provided the house as a human occupant. They came to take her and it went without saying that they intended to turn her.

He rubbed his temples feeling a headache coming on. Fuck, fuck, fuck. A muscle twitched in his cheek as he heard the way her breathing had shallowed out, coming faster, soft pleasured sounds trapped in her throat. Wet sounds, lips and tongue tasting. He could do it. Get it over with, get Angelus off his back. Wipe that pitying look of disdain off of Darla’s face. Make a childe that the two of them would burn with envy over. He didn’t like being manipulated, feeling pushed beyond the timetable that had already been established. There were things that he wanted to do while she was still like this. He wasn’t that impressed with their way of doing things, and he knew her, knew her better than anyone else.

An agonized cry of pain snapped his eyes open even as the scent of fresh blood registered. Dru had bitten into Willow’s thigh and his temper, barely held in check, exploded. “God damn it, Dru. What part of ‘don’t hurt her’ do you not comprehend?” he roared, coming up off the chaise like he had been shot.

Startled, Dru lifted her head, blood dripping from her lower lip, a spray of dark red blood spattering her skin from shoulder to chin. She had knicked the artery. He ripped his shirt off and wadded it up, pressing down hard on the open wound to slow the bleeding.

Dru sat up on her heels, licking her lower lip, looking abashed. “I got carried away,” she confessed. “Voices shouting in my head, so loud,” she murmured, looking at him pointedly.

He frowned at her, and at himself for being so thickheaded. Dru was acutely sensitive to mood, and he was in a mood for violence. He looked down at Willow whose eyes were closed, her face twisted in a grimace of pain. “Pet? Willow!” he snapped at her. “Stay with me, love. I need you to hold this." He placed her hand over the makeshift bandage and went to the door.

Angelus was strolling down the hall, and he made a point of sniffing ostentatiously. “Problem?” he drawled.

William brushed past him to the back stairs, taking them two at a time. In the kitchen he chipped off a large chunk of ice and wrapped it in a clean-ish towel before flying back up the stairs.

Angelus was in the room, leaning against the bedpost with Dru curled up next to him when William returned. “That’s a lot of blood going to waste,” Angelus observed.

His wadded up shirt looked saturated. Willow was still holding the shirt, but she wasn’t pressing down hard enough. Blood was soaking into the counterpane under her.

In Lisbon he had carried her half a mile while her blood soaked his shirt and trousers down past his knee. The bullet had torn through her side, but it still had to be cleaned. There were fragments of wood and cloth that were embedded in the wound. Dru was useless, moaning as Willow screamed and screamed until she passed out. Angelus and Darla refused to help. They were indignant about it.

“It’s not that bad, baby,” he said. Her lips were pale.

“Dru?” Angelus lifted her chin. “Get another towel, Princess,” he said.

Dru scrambled to the bathroom to obey. “You need to elevate her feet,” Angelus added, “and—“

“I know,” William said impatiently. “I know.”

Dru brought a thick bath towel and Angelus ripped it in half and started folding it to make a pad, handing it to William. He switched bandages as Angelus tore strips of toweling to use to tie the bandage and ice pack in place. Darla walked in. “Who opened a tap?” she quipped, taking in the domestic drama. Just another day in the vampire home with a human pet. As soon as William got the bandage tied off, he covered her up by pulling the coverlet and blanket over her from either side of her body.

His hand grasped her jaw. He shook her when her eyes stayed closed. “Open your eyes, Willow,” he insisted.

She opened one eye, peering at him suspiciously. “I’d rather bleed to death,” she started to say.

He answered that with a sharp crack of laughter, his fingers sliding down to test her pulse. It was a little rapid, but strong. “You aren’t dying, pet.”

He realized that she believed him when he saw her grimace. Her tongue stole out to wet her lips. He laid one finger across them, and only then noticed how much of her blood was on his hands. Bloody fingerprints marked her face and throat.

Angelus’ hand landed on Dru’s bare ass with a crack, making her squeal in girlish delight. “Someone has been very naughty,” he told her. “Should I let William punish you, Princess?”

She looked intrigued by the idea. “Oooh, my William?” she breathed, and then nodded. “Yes, please,” she agreed.

Angelus stared at her for a moment a cold smile forming. “Then it isn’t much of a punishment is it?”

Confused, Dru’s eyebrows pulled together and she lowered her head, her shoulders bowing in a kind of cringe that made William want to put his fist through Angelus’ face. “The show is over,” he said, deliberately rude. “If you don’t mind, shut the door on your way out.”

Angelus ignored him, moving from the end of the bed to sit beside Willow. She had enough presence of mind to be frightened. Unexpectedly, Angelus took her free hand, chafing it. “There,” he said. “Nothing to fret yourself about. You’ll be fine. It’s just the shock,” he tucked her hand in close to her heart. “You’ll be yourself in a day or two.”

He looked at William. “Won’t she?” he challenged.

It took him a second to process it. Stupid bastard thought he had fixed it so that Willow couldn’t be used in his master plan. He let him know what he thought of that by rolling his eyes. “She’ll be fine,” he said.

Darla linked arms with Drusilla, “Come along, Dru,” she encouraged, pulling her into the hallway. Angelus tucked the blankets Willow was loosely wrapped in around her closer before he too left the room, shutting the door behind him.

Left in utter silence, William closed his eyes and ran his hand through his hair, rubbing the back of his neck. “You so much as whisper that you want to die and the next words out of your mouth are going to be, ‘I’m hungry’ and it won’t be for a hearty English breakfast unless I can drag that prat you were sitting next to for dinner over.”

He laid down beside her, stroking her head. “Just shut up a while, all right? I’m so fucking tired. I just want to go to sleep.”

He worked his hand in, under the blankets, between her breasts. Her hand curled near her heart brushed the back of his hand. He stared at her face in profile, watching her lick her lips again, and a moment later, again. Closing his eyes for a moment, he sighed. She was so literal minded. He was such an idiot. “You need something to drink, don’t you?”

She nodded.

“Yeah,” he made himself sit up. She needed fluids and something to warm her up. He got up. “I’ll take care of you, baby,” he said, looking down at her.

Dry eyed, she returned his gaze. “Close your eyes. Rest. I’ll be a moment,” he pointed out.

He found Lucius on the third floor in his Spartan room. “I need you,” he said, nothing more, turning on his heel to walk back to Cook’s door, hitting in once with the flat of his hand. “Kitchen. Food for my girl. Now,” he barked, and heard a chair squeak across the floor.

Lucius was right behind him. “I want her bed changed, fresh linens, and a fire laid in with the crap that she likes,” he shot Lucius a look that warned him not to pretend that he didn’t know exactly what he meant. “Four hours after she’s fed, I want another tray ready for her, and again four hours later,” he specified, leaving the stair on the second floor to return to Willow’s room, “And bring up a pitcher of well water before you do anything else.”

From the depths of Angelus’ room he could hear the rattle of chains and Dru. She sounded coherent, but it was early.

~Part: 22~

She felt like she was swimming in dense layers of sleep without any idea of what direction would allow her to break the surface. She could hear William, but she really didn’t want to talk to him. She couldn’t remember why, and decided to go with general principles. Vampire. Bad. Sleep. Good.

“Wake up,” he insisted going to a tone of voice she recognized.

With a groan, she opened her eyes, half expecting to have to cover her eyes with her hand to block out the light before she realized that she had no idea what time it was and strong light wasn’t likely to be a problem with William in the room. He disliked the gaslights and usually turned them down at night.

“Rise and shine, Duchess,” he said, callously cheerful.

Duchess? That was new, and sounded like something that would be shortened to Dutch. Eeeew. Fun facts about social etiquette drilled into her head by Angelus surfaced. “I think the proper form of address is Your Grace,” she said woozily. “I don’t feel . . . right.”

Before she could think about what the wrongness was, William was throwing back the blanket and scooping her up. The top of her head felt funny and she put one hand on it to feel it gingerly. It didn’t hurt. It just felt odd. He moved around the foot of the bed to the other side where several pillows had been stacked. He pushed the hem of a nightgown she didn’t remember putting on up over her hip and started unwrapping a bandage around her thigh.

It was starting to come back.

She stared at his bent head as he checked the bite mark on her thigh, and nodded. “Not bleeding anymore, so you can go without this,” he held up the bandage.

“What happened?” she asked, pushing the hem of her nightgown back down, somewhat relieved that it probably didn’t involve a procedure that removed parts of her brain.

“Knicked an artery,” he was matter of fact. “Hell of a mess, blood spraying everywhere. I had Lucius scrubbing the ceiling half the night.”

He drew a blanket up over her lap and went to get a breakfast tray for her. Willow stared at him feeling like she had dropped into another unreal life. There could be more of them. Infinite versions, and in this one, she was having a strange waking moment with a domestic and cuddlely vampire who was currently unfolding a linen napkin for her.

“This isn’t real,” she told herself.

He stroked her cheek, his hand startlingly warm. When she got started on things not being real it wasn’t a good sign. “None of that,” he scolded.

The unexpected, unreal warmth of his hand made her heart twist in her chest.

“You’re a vampire,” she blurted out.

He tilted his head to the side, peering at her. “What’s wrong?”

She stared at him, baffled. “You’re all warm.”

“Ah,” he nodded, “Carried your tea pot up,” he explained, moving back around the bed to the side that she had vacated. “What did you think it was?”

That was part of the problem. She couldn’t think. Her head felt so thick and fuzzy.

“What’s going on? Why are you being . . . nice? Why do I feel so slow and—“ she figured it out. Laudanum. “You drugged me?” she was incredulous.

“You needed a rest, pet.” He made himself comfortable where she had been sleeping, laying on his side.

Maybe she did, but she still resented it on behalf of her fogged mind. There was something that she was almost remembering that was nagging at her, and she wondered if it was something he had done deliberately, to keep her off balance, though she didn’t have any reason to think that it was anything but what he claimed.

She applied herself to eating her breakfast without helpful interference. It was an English-y breakfast minus the more revolting food groups. There was oatmeal with bits of fruit in it and a pear, cut in half and poached. There were times when she longed for a large bowl of sugary cereal with ice-cold milk, the kind of cereal that was after school snack fare at Xander’s house. His Mother shopped at Sam’s Club Warehouse and bought things like the triple package of Quisp. She and Xander had collected the prizes—glow in the dark stars, moons, and phallic looking space ships that they had added to an old shoe box with the vague notion that someday they would paint a ceiling black and stick the decals on so at night the ceiling would be glow.

Willow had once had a wistful idea that when that day came they would be sharing that room, though at the time, she hadn’t the least notion of how to bring that about. A wealth of experience in the unreal world later, she had ideas that in conjunction with Xander, made her feel a little queasy on top of the disorienting feeling that her head was still swimming around in a half asleep haze of disjointed and inappropriate thoughts.

It made her stop eating for a moment, the spoon resting on the side of the bowl as she closed her eyes.

“Eat a bit more, baby,” William admonished. He had folded her pillow in half and was using it to prop his head up. His eyes were heavy lidded, and she had an impression of him, like a reptile, absorbing the lingering heat on the side of the mattress that she had slept on, lulled into lassitude by warmth. “Then you can go back to sleep.”

She had a brief recollection of him waking her up earlier and forcing her to eat soup. He hadn’t been soft spoken and cajoling then. Her eyes opened. “You were mad at me,” she recalled.

“Was I?” he looked mildly interested. “When was that? I loose track.”

Willow shook her head. She wasn’t that out of it. “Before. You were mad at me about something, and I thought that you had been mad at me all day, but I didn’t know why.”

She stirred the oatmeal. It was congealing around the spoon in a sticky mess. She couldn’t make herself eat another bite. “I don’t want this,” she said, nose wrinkling in disgust. “I hate oatmeal. I’ve always hated oatmeal.”

He sat on the edge of the bed. “Drink your tea, then,” he prompted.

She looked at him warily. “I don’t get to know why you were mad at me?”

He nudged the teacup. “It’s not complicated, pet. You’re up to something, and I know it,” he told her, “So, drink your tea.”

His idea of up to something and hers were mutually incompatible subjects. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “I don’t think I’m up to something.”

That made him smile. “That native to your way of thinking, is it?” he mocked, affecting a thoughtful air. “Well, I think it may be a focal point of dark magic,” he raised an eyebrow. “Does that sound familiar?”

She just looked puzzled. “It’s a theory.”

“You never mentioned it before,” he pointed out, in hint of coolness creeping into his voice.

“You never asked,” she frowned at him. “And,” she warmed to the topic, “I didn’t think you were all that interested either.”

He looked at her like she had said something remarkably stupid.

He had managed to get some sleep around the schedule he had established for feeding her. She kept waking him up, mumbling in her sleep. That was the reason for the laudanum, to force her into a deeper, less disturbed sleep. The drug slowed her heartbeat and respiration to a point that left him lying awake, listening to her. She was going to die. She was dying a little bit every day, and when she was dead, by whatever causes, there would be parts of her that would never come back.

“I’m interested,” he assured her. “I’m interested in everything that has to do with you,” he watched her expression change in degrees. She had secrets and no intention of sharing them with him, possibly ever.

He regretted the laudanum. Drifting through restless dreams, her body caught between the relaxation of sleep and the tension of her dreaming, she felt more alive to him. He was used to her sleepy mumbling. It wasn’t always understandable, but it was coherent. Odd names populated her sleep, names that sometimes appeared in her journals, usually as characters in little stories she told herself.

Once upon a time . . . a different time, in a less exotic place, there was a girl named Willow who loved everyone who ever loved her the least little bit and she was happy without ever understanding that it was mostly because she decided to be happy. That was her real gift, but she didn’t know it. She thought magic was her real gift and that she was meant to make other people happy because magic made her feel her happiness like a drug, and that was what made her think she could change things that were not meant to be changed. She saw the one moment that was crucial to Buffy and Xander and Cordelia and Giles and Jenny and even to Spike, of all people, and she set out to change it.

She drank her tea, and he insisted on the second cup. She needed the fluids, and when she was done, he let her go back to sleep and went back to reading a two year old journal that she probably thought had been lost in Portugal. Angelus was pouring over books about Slayers, unaware that William had one in his hands. It wasn’t Willow’s first story about a Slayer, though it was the one that made him understand that her stories about Jane were stories about a Slayer.

How in the name of hell did a former prostitute from Bristol know anything about Slayers? What was she hiding from him? Why did he have the feeling that it was all there, right in front of him and he simply wasn’t seeing it for what it really was?

~~~*~~~

He fell asleep on the chaise and when he woke up Willow’s bed was empty and someone was knocking on the door. The bathroom door was closed. The diary he had been reading was half under the throw blanket Dru was still working on. He got up and walked to the door as Angelus was opening it.

He looked at the empty bed. “Where is she?”

“Having a bath,” William guessed. It seemed likely. “What do you want?”

“Dru’s dog needs to be walked,” Angelus pointed out in a tone that was meant to sound unreasonable.

“Just let him out in the garden,” William pushed past Angelus to cross the hall to his own room. “We’ve done this before. Do you think it counts as banter?”

Angelus followed him, called on being nosy and bored enough to seek the two of them out. “You live to entertain me,” he told William, and it was said so dryly that it did constitute a joke, if not actual banter.

“Un-live,” William corrected. “There is a house full of vampires for you to play with Angelus, if you are bored, make more, but if we do this, you have to let me handle it.”

That bordered on insolence, which would have made Angelus angrier if he wasn’t accustomed to it. “You are a rude little shit, you know that?”

He got nothing more than a slightly pleased smirk out of William.

“I thought it was a crazy idea?” Angelus drawled.

“It is a crazy idea,” William nodded, “I didn’t say it couldn’t be made to work.”

“There’s a party tonight,” Angelus tone indicated that this was a reminder, and William looked at him curiously.

“We are all going. Do you think she’s up to it?”

He raked his fingers through his hair. “Probably not,” he thought about it for a moment. “No. Not tonight, tomorrow. Supper party with some middling royal,” Darla had reminded him about it at least a half dozen times.

“And tonight, at the Hamilton’s. Willow was invited for both,” Angelus said.

He remembered the Hamiltons, and shrugged. “She’s indisposed,” he offered up the excuse.

Angelus tilted his head to one side. “It’s a small party. Just us and the Hamiltons,” his voice was silky. “Are you sure you don’t want to bring Willow?”

The tone was the tip off. The Hamilton’s were destined to be the main course at their dinner party. Angelus would have something creative in mind for both of them. He had been cultivating Claire Hamilton, stringing her along. William felt that slightly itchy feeling that he had when he was in the mood for something violent. It wouldn’t just be the brother and sister, either. There would be servants. There were always servants.

“Positive,” he confirmed, without a shred of properly demony shame over his reluctance to expose her to an evening of murder and mayhem. “I keep telling you that we are working out what is amusing and what’s not,” he said, his tone mildly complaining.

He found a fresh packet of cigarettes, the last of them, in the pocket of a coat. The inference was clear. Willow had sensibilities, feelings and opinions that he didn’t share, and as far as he was willing to let it, they counted.

When he looked up, expecting condescension, what he got was something a bit more thoughtful. Angelus looked like he wasn’t surprised by the reciprocity. Mostly he seemed unwillingly intrigued. “How do you do that?”

“Badly, most of the time,” William admitted. “Are we sorted? Yes, I’m going. No, Willow isn’t. She’ll go to the other thing tomorrow night. I want Cook, Paulus and Andreas left here with her. Our new friends have an invite, and I won’t have her left with a token guard. Does that sound about right to you?”

Angelus nodded. “We weren’t planning to leave her without protection.”

William cocked his head to one side. “Is Darla giving this a pass?” he asked.

“Some one has to stay with our ailing cousin,” Angelus pointed out. “Dru isn’t a plausible nursemaid.”

William smiled at that. “Fine, then,” he agreed.

~~~*~~~

He didn’t have long to wonder how Drusilla fared. When he went back across the hall to look for Willow he found the two of them in their bathroom. Dru was sitting on the side of the bathtub while Willow smeared an ointment on her back. She reeked of blood, sex, and arousal. Whatever Willow was putting on her back, it was causing her pain, and she wanted more. Willow was being too gentle. It was like teasing without the malice.

Willow looked like a water sprite. Ethereal, too pale, her wet hair falling in coils that clung to her back and shoulders. A bit of sudsy soap stuck to her jaw, unnoticed, a smudge of cleanness. He sat on the hamper, ignoring the slight sound of the wicker crackling with his weight. Dru’s nose wrinkled. He was smoking in their bathroom, their little sanctum of sweet smelling soaps and fresh water. Angelus had been careful to leave her arms, chest, neck, and face untouched, otherwise she was a mess. He didn’t like seeing her in this condition. Knowing Angelus, he had probably told her that she wasn’t to bathe, and nothing on earth would persuade Dru to defy him.

“We are going out tonight,” he told her.

Willow looked at him, and he gave a spare shake of his head. “Not you, pet. You’ll stay in.”

“With Grandmummy,” Dru’s eyelids slid down. Her hands clutched the lip of the tub, her thighs quivering.

Willow paused in what she was doing. “Am I hurting you?” she asked.

Dru turned to her, her face in profile to both of them, smiling beatifically. “Not nearly enough,” she said, and then she laughed and laughed at the startled expression on Willow’s face.

William was smiling too, seeing the humor in it. Willow didn’t. She managed to get to her feet, yanking the chain that held the drain to empty the tub, staggering a little as she reached for a towel left hanging on a rod near the bathtub. Watching her through a haze of smoke, cigarette clenched between his lips, he felt himself not tensing precisely, but ready to move if she fell, even though Dru was closer and probably wouldn’t let her fall.

Dru plucked the cigarette out of his mouth, crushing it out between her fingertips. “No smoking in the bathroom you bad thing,” she censured.

He slouched against the wall, head tilted back, eyes narrowing as his lips pursed in an unwitting pout of annoyance. Against the white wall behind his head, his hair was honeyed brown with a hint of blond. Spike had looked dangerous. No one could accuse him of false advertising. William still had an almost babyish softness that made Willow wonder if Spike chose to look a certain way for a reason. Was it to impress the other vampires or was it some kind of warning that he chose to wear?

Drusilla dropped the remains of the crushed cigarette on the tile floor, whipping her head around so that the trailing ends of her hair caught him across the face as she stood, stretching, her hands running over her body, pressing into the worst of the bruises. For her to be showing so much damage nine or ten hours after Angelus had finished with her she had to be starving, and yet there wasn’t a flicker of fang in his direction or Willow’s. He had plenty and would have given it gladly, but she wouldn’t ask, and tonight she would be ravenous.

He took a deep breath, annoyance fading, replaced by anticipation.

After Willow’s bath they had a tea party on her bed joined by Miss Edith, Miss Anne, and Miss Georgina a haughty little regency miss with a fringe. Willow brushed her wet hair until William got exasperated with her technique, which was to start at the roots of her hair and tug the brush through it. She fell asleep with her head against his thigh after he took the brush away from her and brushed her hair until it was dry and shining. Dru left the dolls, save for Miss Edith and beckoned to him to follow her into her room.

~Part: 23~

Dreamless sleep eluded her. As if to catch up with the hours lost to laudanum Willow’s mind busily supplied images to her. She woke up with a vague impression of having a long and mostly amiable argument with Spike, who had been invading her dreams more and more of late. Sometimes they were in the old Sunnydale High library, pre-Mayor roasting. He was almost always in motion, pacing in front of the bookshelves, swinging down the stairs to challenge her to snoop in Giles’ office. Today they were in the bathroom, the one with the beige and institutional green decorating scheme, and he was sitting on one sink, his booted foot propped on the other as he smoked and picked at the label on a Snapple bottle labeled passion fruit that looked full of blood while she dyed her hair back to the nearly uniform darker auburn that she had favored going back to high school.

Oh, yeah. Her’s was a subtle mind at work.

The first time she had dyed her hair had been the night before she started her sophomore year at Sunnydale High School. She had the academic success down cold, so this year was going to be about other kinds of success and they required a new look. She made an extensive study of hair color products before settling on a product with henna that would, according to the package, give her not quite red hair a richer, more lustrous color.

The results were exactly what the package suggested, though the only people who had noticed were Xander and Jesse. They knew their stuff and told her it was a great color. Her parents noticed, but pretended that they didn’t, providing no opportunity for her ‘it’s my hair’ speech.

Her hair in the bathroom rinsed red and dried black, and Spike told her it was because it was a more rebellious color. Same as his, but less cool.

Dream Spike was very weird tonight. She kept waiting for him to do something that William would do, like comb her hair or touch her like she was a point of reference, or call her by one of a half dozen pet names, but dream Spike just followed her through empty halls commenting on everything and nothing.

She woke up to the two dolls staring at her. The bedroom door from the hallway was open, the gaslights from the hall spilling light into the room, making the dolls’ glass eyes glisten. Miss Georgina had been rescued from a house in Ghent. Her petticoats had been yellow with age and brittle with dry rot. She had a tiny silk purse dangling from her arm on a cord and inside the silk purse had been a child’s baby tooth, probably forgotten long ago by whomever once had her. She was an expensive doll with a bisque head and arms, human hair, beautifully crafted glass eyes the color of whiskey with sunlight coming through it and a slight overbite.

From what Dru said about her Miss Georgina was more assertive than the other dolls. She had been left alone too long and tended to be bossy and talkative. It was a description that reminded Willow of Buffy and a familiar pang of loss made her close her eyes and try to recapture the sense of long, rambling, pointless conversations that they had had.

“I miss you all,” she included Xander and Giles, her parents, and Oz in her list. Angel had been dropped off a long time ago when she lost the capacity to entirely separate him from Angelus.

Darla was sitting in the arm chair, looking out the window. At the sound of Willow’s voice, she turned her head. For a moment she tried to think of anyone she missed, but drew a blank. “Who do you miss?”

Willow sat up then, clearly startled that she was not alone. “People I used to know,” she stammered. “A long time ago.”

“It’s just you and me,” Darla told her, a malicious smile curving her lips. She knew Matilde was in the hall, listening, and she knew that she would register how utterly she was dismissed.

Willow remembered William saying something about going out for the evening. The smile made her feel uneasy. Darla rose, walking over to her wardrobe, taking out a dress that she held up to the spare light. “This will do, “ she announced. “You and I are going to find out what we haven’t been told about Zlata Ulicka.”

Willow got up and started getting dressed. She shared William’s skepticism about their guests and Darla’s curiosity about what they might be hiding. “How?” she asked.

“You are a witch,” Darla pushed her hands away and helped her button the dress, smoothing her hands over Willow’s corsetless waist.

Angelus had taken the coach, so they were left with the smaller Brougham. Willow had a purse stuffed with notes and coin. She was finishing a hastily prepared sandwich as they crossed the river. Looking out the window, she saw the Palencho Bridge in the distance. She was set down within sight of Zlata Ulicka, and for a moment she hesitated. The sandwich had left her thirsty and a hard spasm of anxiety made her feel like she needed to pee, the two seemingly contradictory messages her body was sending her made her take a deep breath to steady herself.

Zlata Ulicka lacked nothing for atmosphere. She had seen it in daylight on her tour of Hradcany. You saw places like it all over Europe. It was an addition made hastily, and left, like an afterthought, but it had charm in daylight. At night, with a strange fog that seemed to flow up from the cobblestones, it was creepy. The sound of her own sturdy walking boots on the cobblestones made her feel more conspicuous. She was wearing one of Darla’s hooded cloaks, with a fringe of fur and fox tails that hung on the shoulders. The fur served a purpose of sorts. It was meant to compete with her scent, an insight that William had casually dropped once. The evening was too warm for such a heavy garment.

She started to pass a lamp post and then stopped as something cool and fine, a knife edge of sensation, passed through her and she saw not an empty alley but one teeming with shadowy figures that turned towards her with indifferent eyes, and amongst them the more solid forms of people. She had the distinct impression as the knife point rested inside her that if she took one step forward it would all disappear, so she waited until a boy uncurled himself from a seat he had taken on a stoop. He was tall and thin, sharp featured, reminding her of Templeton the Rat from Charlotte’s Web as he slinked towards her in a bad imitation of a vampire’s loose jointed grace.

For a moment she felt dizzy and closed her eyes. When she opened them, a wizened old man stood before her, stroking one of the foxtails in a blatantly lascivious way, begging for a coin, and the knife edge that hovered at her midsection reminded her of Jane’s lessons on the subject of beggars. Never open a purse to them. Never feed anything that won’t work as hard as you did for a coin.

The rat boy was gone. Everyone was gone. She stared at the beggar, refusing to move off the focal point. It was a threshold, or a kind of magical trigger to something. She stared at him as he repeated his request in the same tone.

She breathed in to steady herself and smelled the damp night air and a spicy stew of burning herbs. It was the smell that tipped the scales. In every other detail it was complete down to the buckled, filthy fingernails and skinny fingers, gray with dry, dead skin, except for the scent. Beggars didn’t smell of incense.

Glamour, her mind classified, and the cool, sharp sensation became thinner and finer, feathering under the skin over her breastbone in a way that made her want to shudder.

The rat faced boy was at her side, sketching an elaborate bow. “You’ve got more power than any idea of how to use it of any witch I’ve seen in a long time,” he said conversationally. It sounded like solid, American English, though she knew that was impossible.

He patted a leather pouch on a cord around his neck. “It’s just a charm, and useful,” he told her. “Are you here to buy or sell?”

“Buy,” she said.

He nodded and gestured for her to walk with him. “I’m Gripe,” he said. “If you don’t have a man and you are looking for one, the house numbered 23 comes to me when my old man passes and we wouldn’t have to share a room with anyone else.”

Willow looked at him to decide if he was being outrageous or if he was serious.

He looked at her hopefully, and then sighed. “There’s a man,” he guessed. “Well, you look about a decade too old for me, but it never hurts to ask.”

The part of her that was stuck in remembering who she was at sixteen was shocked into awareness. A decade too old. Eight years gone. They walked past 23 and he stopped at 25. The door was painted blue, with woad. “Don’t bother haggling. The prices are fair and the quality isn’t what you’d find out there,” he gestured to the world beyond the barrier.

He left her there, ambling back to the corner, and she raised her hand to knock on the door, but before the gesture was completed, it was opened and a woman, heavily pregnant with a fringed shawl that Drusilla would have approved of draped over her shoulders smiled at her, gesturing to her, offering what Willow recognized vaguely as a blessing.

“Come in, come in,” she urged, stepping back a little to make more space in the narrow doorway.

Willow found herself in a small room could only be appreciated in layers. “Arik!” the woman called out. “We have a guest!” She nudged Willow towards a couch shaped piece of furniture nearly buried in what appeared to be fresh laundry. “Just push it out of the way. I can’t seem to keep up these days,” the woman told her with an eye-rolling gesture to her rounded stomach.

“Ari—“ before she could finish shouting a short man with curly blond hair appeared. He was wearing a leather apron and gloves and from the lingering pressure marks on his face, Willow guessed that he had taken off some kind of mask to protect his nose and mouth. “Oh! There you are,” the woman beamed at him. “Look what the boy brought us,” she said, gesturing to Willow who started to stand.

Arik waved her back. “I see,” he said, sounding amused. “You’ll be wanting tea, then?”

The woman cocked her head to one side, her shrewd gray eyes appraising Willow. “Don’t stint on the rose hips,” she told him, settling into a rocking chair near Willow. She reached out and took her hand, unceremoniously stripping off her glove. “You are much too warm,” she scolded, waving to the cloak. “Take that off. You can tell Arik what you are here for when he comes back,” she said. “It was starting off as a slow night, and I was hoping for someone to come by, and here you are.”

“Here I am,” Willow agreed, starting to wonder where here was. “How do you know why I’m here?”

“The boy brought you, didn’t he? He wouldn’t have brought just anyone, even if he is a nuisance,” she gave Willow an amused look.

“I think he asked me to come live with him,” she found herself saying.

“Not at all. He probably asked you to marry him. He does that,” she smiled again. “It’s a modern world. Scary, isn’t it? I think it must have been easier when your parents just told you whom you’d marry. If it was a mistake, at least it wasn’t yours.”

Willow undid the silk frogs holding the cloak together and unwound let it slip over her shoulders.

The woman released her hand and Willow removed the other glove. She had a crazy urge to ask if she could help fold the laundry that she was trying not to lean into.

Arik returned with the tea in a round glazed pot with two mugs and a plate of bread and butter. He pushed a small table closer with his foot and set the tray on it before pouring for both of them. He had removed the gloves if not the apron and squatted down a little until he was below eye level. “What will you be needing?” he asked.

Willow opened her purse and took out her list, aware of the couple exchanging pleased looks at the glimpse of crisp banknotes. She handed it to him and he scanned it, nodding to himself. It was a supply list that she had started in anticipation of the trip to London. There was nothing on it that would have set off alarm bells, though some of the crystals she was looking for were very expensive and difficult to come by. They were last minute additions to the list when she realized that Darla wasn’t being close fisted with the money.

“We’ve got most of this lying about save for the red jade sticks. I’ve got a set, but they are brittle, and you don’t want them breaking on you. I can get something better if you can wait a few days. Most of this we can give you tonight.”

She agreed to come back and the woman clapped. “Wonderful!” she chirped. “Try the tea, won’t you?”

Willow found herself smiling back. “My name is Willow,” she said.

“Oh, dear! Manners,” the woman shook her head. “This is my husband, Arik, and I am Terese, and this,” she patted her stomach, “Is my sadly unnamed first child,” she shot a laughing look at her husband. “He wants to name it Baby Bunny. Have you ever heard of anything more ridiculous?”

Arik gave a good-natured sigh. “If you’d agree to winnow the list down to something that doesn’t rival the Book of Saints, I’d be willing to compromise,” he told his wife and then excused himself.

Willow picked up her mug. The tea smelled of chamomile and she sipped it. What was she doing here? She was supposed to be getting an impression of the occupants of Zlata Ulicka. Her first impression was that she liked them in a way that made her chest feel tight.

Terese touched her hand again, to bring her attention back to her, and Willow realized that she had missed something that she had said. “I’m sorry,” she began, embarrassed.

Terese shook her head. “I was just asking how long you’ve been practicing,” she explained.

“Only a few years,” Willow said, looking down at the bread. William had been shoving food at her for the last day. She didn’t want to seem rude, but she didn’t think she could eat another bite.

“Do you, that is, are you a witch?” Willow asked.

Terese let her head fall back against the back of the rocking chair, setting it into motion with her foot. “My mother,” she said with a fond smile. “That’s how I met Arik. We come to Prague every few years. Mother swears by his mugwort.”

To pass the time while Willow waited, Terese gave her the abridged version of the list of baby names that she had settled on. Willow was finishing her second cup of tea when Arik emerged from the back room with her parcels, wrapped in brown paper and twine. He squatted down beside her and went over her list with her, reminding her to wear gloves while handling the more poisonous herbs on her list. She thanked him and opened her purse. He named a figure, and Willow understood the rat faced boy’s injunction not to haggle. She could have had the lot of it shipped from England for less, but she didn’t hesitate, counting out the notes and handing them over.

“Come back in a week for the rest,” he told her, handing the money to Terese, who tucked in inside her blouse.

“I will,” Willow agreed, hoping that she would be allowed to return.

“Stay and have another cup of tea,” Terese invited even though she looked sleepy.

Willow smiled, “Thank you, but I should go,” she said, rising from the couch. Arik went to the door to open it for her as Terese called out a blessing and Willow stepped back into the narrow alley. Mist swirled at her feet, making her feel like she was walking in a cloud. She turned back to the door and Arik was standing there, holding her cloak and her packages. He handed her the packages and settled the cloak around her shoulders. “Remember what I said about the henbane,” he cautioned.

She nodded. “I will, and thank you,” she added.

His hand came to rest on her shoulder for a moment as his eyes scanned the alley. “Maybe you should come back in,” he said quietly.

“Mica, mica, parva stella,” a thin, high voice mocked.

Willow turned slowly to see the small vampire from the attack on the house drifting through the mist toward her. Now that she knew that she wasn’t a child at all but a very old vampire, Willow was amazed that she missed it. Not the vampire part, but the fact that she was not a child when she died.

The rat boy was loping down the alley with a stake in hand. The small vampire looked at him with delight and contempt. He came to a halt a few feet from her. “Don’t you look like a little darling tonight,” he crooned to her. He looked over his shoulder at Willow. “The offer stands, even if you’re a bit old, so off with you,” he gestured to the opposite end of the alley.

“But—“

Arik gave her a nudge. “You should go, quickly,” he advised. “Come back in daylight. It’s safer,” he told her.

“She’s safe if she wants to be,” Sian said. “She killed seven of us with nothing but a pair of minions to help her.”

Arik frowned at that. “All the more reason for you to go,” he told Willow.

~~~*~~~

The numbers at the dinner table were always guranteed to be uneven. If Willow and Darla had come they would have been seven instead of five. Claire announced that the uneven numbers meant that they should sit anywhere they liked. Her brother looked at her as if he thought this was silly, and he took his place at the head of the table after seating Drusilla to his right. Flustered by the lack of enthusiasm for this idea, Claire allowed her to be seated at the foot of the table and William, following the two paired off couples took the place across from Drusilla.

Bored by the dinner table conversation which was largely a breathless flirtation between Claire Hamilton and Angelus while her brother ineptly tried to engage Dru in conversation while obviously finding his sister’s behavior distracting, William prodded a gray green asparagus spear with the tines of the fork he was pretending to eat with. Mushy. Overcooked, mushy asparagus, yet another reason to thank Dru that he was no longer human and polite. He entertained himself with ideas about what Darla would do to anyone who spoiled one of her soirees with over cooked asparagus.

There was, in addition to the Hamiltons, a houseful of servants. Lucius had their numbers sorted out. Containment was an issue since they were planning to remain in Prague.

He tried one of the beef medalions in a cloying mushroom sauce. The beef was also undercooked, which made it palatable. He scraped the sauce off with the edge of his fork, smiling blandly when George Hamilton caught him at it, and then looked at Drusilla only to notice that she wasn’t eating at all.

“It isn’t to your liking?” he ventured hesitantly.

Dru flashed him a dazzling smile, the kind that could make you feel like you were amazingly perceptive, even as she was confirming his guess.

He smiled back, shyly. William watched all of this with a smirk.

“Would you like something else?” George asked.

Angelus’ head was tilted towards Claire, and now he lifted it just a bit to look at Drusilla. She was wearing a blue silk gown that was as severe as a nun’s habit. He smiled, recalling the first time he had ever seen her, with that pinched look around her mouth, great dark haunted eyes finding him. Despite the severity of the dress, she looked like a little girl with a wonderful secret that she was eager to share. He smiled at her, feeling indulgent. “Do tell Mr. Hamilton what you would prefer, Princess,” he invited.

In a move too fast to follow, William picked up the blunt knife that rested by the edge of his plate and brought it down hard, through the back of George Hamilton’s hand, pinning it to the table.

Drusilla clapped. “Naughty, naughty. Hands aren’t meant to be on the table,” she told their host, whose mouth had fallen open on a gurgling gasp of pain.

In the moment between understanding what she was seeing and seeing it, Claire was simply puzzled by what she had seen. Angelus had turned back to her, unconcerned. “It’s a game,” he said.

The startled footman waiting to serve the next course had stepped toward the table, still holding a wine bottle to refill glasses. William left his chair and feinted left. The footman saw not a man but a man shaped thing wearing a monsters face. He swung the wine bottle like a bludgeon, and was blocked. Absorbing a punch that snapped his head back, he tried to shake it off with no thought of fighting. Turning away from that face was instinctive, and he had a moment to realize that it was also foolish as impossibly strong arms pinned his to his sides seconds before his throat was ripped out.

Claire Hamilton’s hysteria edged scream was all the signal Lucius, in the kitchen needed. He had been whiling away the time in a chat with the servants who were not occupied with the meal that was being served in the dining room. He watched the reactions of the servants, who froze, and then started moving. The English butler who had been with the Hamiltons for over twenty years, rushed to the dining room followed more slowly by the lady’s maid. The cook was a locally hired servant and had not been with the Hamilton’s long enough to have any notion of whether this behavior was odd or alarming.

“Probably a mouse,” the footman standing by the door said.

“It’s not a mouse,” Lucius told him. “Listen,” he nodded to the hall. Claire Hamilton’s undulating scream had been abruptly cut off. A breif moment of silence before the maid screamed.

“That’s not surprise, or anger. That’s terror you are hearing,” he explained to the two men left in the kitchen. He finished the bottle of beer.

The cook picked up a long, sturdy looking butcher knife.

Lucius let his face change. He was across the table and on the footman in a matter of seconds, taking his face in his hands and then snapping his neck with a ruthless twist that he had seen Angelus and William use.

He advanced on the cook holding the knife in front of him like he knew how to use it. For a fat man, he was unexpectly agile, darting around a work bench to grab a poker from the cold kitchen hearth.

“Bad choice,” he observed. “I didn’t run when I had the chance, either.”

William strolled through the door, blood splattered. He wiped his mouth. He paused to nudged the dead body at his feet, and then looked at Lucius. “Ah, a happy trip down memory lane?” he said snidely. His attention switched to the cook, “Just kill him, will you? Nothing worse than juvenile vampires waxing philosophical.”

Armed with the poker, knife, and an arm accustomed to hefting heavy sacks of wheat and cutting meat, the cook was proving to be more of a challenge than Lucius anticipated. William hoped up on a counter drinking from an openned bottle of wine offering suggestions, mostly to the cook, who was sweating heavily, but still fighting.

The poker from the fireplace hurt, but it wasn’t anything that would slow him down, or so Lucius thought until William’s helpful suggestions started to sink in with the cook, and the tide started to turn. “Eyes, throat, groin, and work on his legs,” William called out. “He’s faster than you. Slow him down,” he added, turning at the waist to open a cabinet door to check out it’s contents.

Changing tactics, the cook dropped his head and charged at Lucius, hitting him squarely in the chest while using the knife to stab him in the side. He slid the blade in and twisted it, wrenching an angry howl out of the vampire.

“Hurt him with that one,” William announced as the cook used the poker, beating Lucius’ head with it until he let go of him. The cook staggered back, hunched over, panting as he stared at Lucius, clearly waiting for something.

“You hurt him. Ouch. He’s a vampire. Hurting won’t stop him,” William coached. “Now,” he hopped down from the counter and strolled over. “Vampires? Heard of ‘em, I expect? Fast, strong, bloodsuckers,” he chuckled a little, “though some of us do eat. The asparagus was awful, you know,” he chided the cook.

Lucius started to approach the cook again, but William held up one hand. “Don’t interupt. I had to eat the mushy asparagus. The beef, very rare, not bad, but the mushroom sauce?”

“I’m a pastry chef,” the cook huffed.

“Oh, well then. Something edible for dessert?”

“Bittersweet chocolate tarts with spiced almonds,” the cook nervously shifted his grip on the knife.

William glanced at Lucius to see if he was watching for him to attack. “There are three ways to kill a vampire: Immolation by exposure to fire or direct sunlight. Decapitation. And stabbing them directly in the heart,” he told the cook in a hushed voice.

Holding the poker like a sword, the cook charged, and Lucius waited for him, pivoting at the last moment and propelling him forward into the brick surround of the fireplace. His head hit with a sound like a ripe mellon exploding.

William strolled over, removing the poker from a hand that was twitching. He looked at the poker, smiling to himself, and before Lucius could figure it out, the tip of the poker was punching through the wall of his chest with enough force to drive him back against the wall. He gritted his teeth against the pain.

“That won’t kill me,” he said.

“You are already dead,” William reminded him, pushing the poker in deeper, making the younger vampire moan.

“But, no. It won’t kill you. It just hurts,” he said, pushing the poker in deeper. Lucius could feel it scraping against his spine and went utterly still.

Cold blue eyes bored in. “Last chance,” William told him. “Listen carefully. She’s mine. Menace her, touch her, make her worry, even for a second, neglect her, and it’s me you answer to. In thought as well as deed. You don’t think Angelus kept Dru because she was eccentric, do you? That goes for you and the rest of the minions, and you are the one that is going to make that stick, aren’t you, Lucius?”

He found himself nodding, and then screaming as William jerked the poker out of his chest.

“Next time I’ll poke a few holes in you and fill them with holy water,” William told him, stepping over the cook. “He’s still breathing. Deal with it,” he ordered as he walked over to the countertop by the oven, opening the oven doors. As he suspected the chocolate tarts were left in the oven to keep them warm. “Box this when your done,” he added, grabbing the half empty wine bottle on his way out of the kitchen.

In the dining room, George Hamilton was still alive, and still pinned to the table by the butter knife. A pool of blood was congealing under his hand. Dru had used one of the tiebacks from the drapes to improvise a gag. The butler was dead, and his heart was on a plate in front of George. The maid was still alive but barely breathing, and slumped over the butler’s lap.

Claire Hamilton was on the table, naked, on her hands and knees. She wasn’t a bad looking chit under normal circumstances but no one looked their best when they were crying like that. Mucus ran from her nose over her lips. Dru picked up a napkin and made her blow her nose.

George was being treated to a version of Claire’s relationship with Angelus, and it was probably all true, but Angelus knew just how to make it sound. It was probably never more than a flirtation, stolen kisses in gardens and empty hallways, a little excitement for a girl who hadn’t found anyone interesting enough to marry, but in Angelus’ hands it was an indictment.

William found himself checking his pocket watch. He was fed, he’d given Lucius something to think about and now he was eager to get on with the torture and death portions of the evening. He had a girl to get home to. The thought made him shake his head.

Leaving Angelus enumerating Claire’s sins, William went to walk through the first floor, eventually finding what appeared to be a more masculine room with books. His nose led him to a humidor and he smiled to himself. He had not had a chance to visit the tobacco shop he was patronizing and was nearly out of cigarettes. Cigars would do in a pinch. He had more or less decided to give up the cheroots.

Stuffing an handful in the inside pocket of his coat, he lit a cigar and sat down at George’s desk, going through the drawers without looking for anything in particular. He heard Claire shriek and Drusilla say something about her being a very bad girl, and rolled his eyes. Predictable.

He thumbed through George’s diary, which was full of appointments, mostly evening. The Hamilton’s had been invited to the same party they were going to tomorrow night. He considered for a moment whether the news of their death would be generally known by then. Probably not. George’s diary was unrevealing, so he moved on to George’s correspondance.

It was mostly garbage. Letters from friends in London full of gossip. The Hamiltons were nearly twenty years his junior, there really wasn’t anyone that they might gossip about that might interest him. There was a letter from his bank, very polite, thanking him for the large deposit that cleared an overdraft. William frowned. What were the Hamilton’s doing in Prague if their finances were that tenuous? He waded through a few more letters without finding an answer an decided that in less than four hours it would all be academic anyway.

It also occurred to him that he was starting to act like Angelus, snooping through desk drawers while Angelus and Dru entertained themselves. He frowned at the idea, fairly horrifying, and yet undeniably funny, that he had switched places with Angelus tonight. Checking his pocket watch again, he folded his hands over his chest. “If I was a pompous, arrogent, sadistic bastard, what would I be doing?” he asked himself aloud, doing what he considered a credible immitation of Angelus’ brogue.

It took him less than a full minute to figure it out and then he was out of the room and taking the stairs two at a time in search of Claire’s room. Her diary was lying out on a bedside table next to her bed. He picked it up and went down to rejoin Angelus and Dru.

~~~*~~~

Despite her well earned reputation within the family for impatience, waiting was something that Darla endured patiently. She let her head rest against the upholstered seat cushion and stared straight ahead until her eyes lost focus in the middle distance. She could have had Paulus light the lamps inside of the Brougham, but she didn’t need the light to see even if Willow did. Angelus was thinking in the short term about Prague. Darla was not. She liked the city and the house, and it had already occurred to her that it could be home before attack on the house, and before they met the Zlata Ulicka vampires.

Angelus was content with a mutual non-agression pact, but Darla was looking past the immediate problem of the Stare Mesto vampires. Eliminate the older vampires in the city, and they could rule it. Angelus would see to the day to day details while she kept her eye on the horizon. As tempting as it was to write Drusilla out of that picture, her timely warning about the Order of St. Ubaldus had proven again that no matter how difficult her madness made her to deal with, she was worth the effort. William had impressed her today, and Willow . . . well, it remained to be seen what would be made of her, but Darla was cautiously optomistic.

She let her mind wander. One part of it was quietly going over a mental list of things that needed to be done. Dru was hard on clothing, and she was almost constantly in need of new dresses. She sewed her own small clothes which were also frequently in need of replacement. Willow’s oyster satin was ruined, and she needed at least one more evening dress and a day dress. She made a mental note to schedule an appointment with a dressmaker for both of them.

Another part of her mind was planing for tomorrow night, sifting through her own wardrobe, though she knew exactly what she would wear and had decided on it as soon as she had received the invitation. In some ways William was a better judge of social situations than Angelus. He was handicapped by an utter lack of concern, but she had absorbed a quick impression that in relative terms Princess Stavarsky, their hostess for tomorrow night’s supper party, was of no greater or lesser consequence than an English Countess. Angelus wasn’t always clear on the nuances of their social interactions, but William had been raised with the hope that he would participate in what he once refered to sneeringly as ‘elevated company’.

Darla had the most vague impression of him when he was still human. For years she puzzled over Dru picking him out, literally plucking him out of no where. It was the kind of thing Dru would normally have forgotten, but the boy was hardly in the ground when she began her vigil at his grave, waiting like a child on Christmas morning for him to claw his way out.

The antagonism Darla felt towards him was most habitual. In his early years he had wavered between a need to please that had earned her contempt to a violent, rebellious attitude that had threatened their ability to pass unnoticed. Then Willow came along, and he started settling down. He kept her because it pleased Dru and irritated Angelus, and ultimately because it suited him, and they allowed it because it suited them all, completing them in a wholely unexpected way.

He had been on edge for days. Going out for the evening with Angelus and Dru was just what he needed to remind him of what he was. He had been spending so much time with Willow lately, and he didn’t understand what had been obvious to her, and to Angelus when since Lisbon. His instinct was to save her, and he might not recognize the moment when she was beyond saving. It made sense to Darla. She wasn’t sure what love was, or that she had ever felt it, but she knew what it felt like to know that someone was utterly yours, even if it only came in moments.

She could be patient. It would all work out in the end, and it it didn’t, they could spend the fall in London and bide there until a better idea came along.

~~~*~~~

Cutting someone’s throat with a dull butter knife just wasn’t as fun as it used to be, William reflected. George Hamilton had gotten off easy. After William had brought Claire’s journal down and read a few amusing passages aloud, Angelus claimed the volumn and was chortling over Claire’s wistful entries.

That left William with nothing to do but toy with George. Lucius had finished off the cook and footman, draining both. The extra blood helped close the wound in his chest, though he still moved like it hurt.

Drusilla and Angelus were busy with the girl. He had seen it all before and done most of it himself, though he tended to get bored and move on to the killing faster, before the begging started. Not the please, no begging, but the please kill me begging. Stupid girl had gotten there too early. She was no where near dead, and Angelus was inclined to draw it out if they got there too fast. It was annoying. He was inclined to tell her to stuff a sock in it. A short list of some of the things Willow had survived made him want to tell her that a little pain and humiliation was the least of it.

Except that she wasn’t going to survive. Darla would have Angelus’ balls on a platter if he brought this one home.

He held her gaze while her brother died in front of her, finding it interesting that she wasn’t looking at George. William had taken off the soiled gag and he was making a wet, gurgling sound as air passed through his crushed windpipe around the butter knife. She was still on her hands and knees and her arms were shaking. Her journal was open, resting on the small of her back as Angelus turned pages with one hand and worked his fingers into her with the other.

She was looking at him, almost hopefully, and he smiled at her, leaning down to listen to her whisper, “Please, I want to die.”

It reminded him of Willow, except that she had never sounded so abject, and she had more reason to. When Willow said she wanted to die there was enough determination in it that he knew that she didn’t want to be killed. Killing herself was quite another thing.

He shook his head. “We don’t always get what we want,” he told her.

He straightened and Drusilla came to him, winding herself about him. “Not staying?” she guessed.

He cupped her cheek, wiping away a bit of blood from the corner of her mouth. “There’s not enough to go around anymore,” he pointed out. “And, I’m full.”

Drusilla raised her hand to rap her knuckles on his forehead. “It’s too early,” she pouted, and then tucked her head against his shoulder, smoothing her hand over his lapel. “Stay?”

It took it a moment to sink in. Drusilla, who was always best content playing with Angelus, was asking him to stay. It didn’t happen very often. He kissed the top of her head. “If you like,” he agreed.

They left Angelus and Lucius in the dining room with Claire and went off to explore the house.

~~~*~~~

While William and Dru went on their tour of the house—Dru could distract herself for hours searching for something only she would recognize as being a perfect memento for the evening, Angelus changed tactics with Claire, removing his fingers from her cunt, wiping his hand clean on a napkin. He removed the open journal that had rested against her lower back and helped her down, off the table, wetting the napkin in a water glass that had not been spilled with the tableware and food that littered the floor, he wiped her face off.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sounding like he meant it, “but you’ve seen what they are,” he said, sorrowfully.

It wasn’t enough for trust or forgiveness, but it awoke something in her eyes that he recognized as hope mingled with shame. Her brother was dead. The butler, a long time family servant, was dead, her maid was dying, and she was discovering that she really didn’t want to die herself. Angelus wished William was here to see the idea reach her, because he thought that the younger vampire put too much stock in Willow’s periodic suicide dramas. Even in their worst moments, people wanted to live.

She slapped him. It wasn’t a ladylike slap. She put her arm into it and slapped him hard, and might have slapped him again, if he hadn’t stepped back, taken his suit coat off, and wrapped her up in it, effectively trapping her arms.

“They are monsters,” Claire spat at him. “And you . . . you are a monster, too,” she said, her voice shaking.

“I was a man once,” he told her. “I wasn’t a very good man, but I was a man once, and then Darla came. I’d never seen anything like her before. She offered me the world, and I don’t know if I would have said no even if I knew what she meant to do.”

Sitting on the edge of the table, her back to her dead brother, Claire stared at him. “Are you going to kill me?”

His smile was tender. “Of course,” he assured her. “But, you won’t mind so much. Being dead. Waking up again. It will be dark. It’s always dark, but there will be a string, touching your face. Remember that. A string, and you’ll pull on it. A string attached to a bell that will ring for you, and I’ll be there, because you will leave that grave and you’ll be like us.”

She didn’t know what to say, distracted by the soreness between her legs where he had forced his fingers into her, not for his pleasure or hers, but to hurt her, to humiliate her with the crudest possible interpretation of what she desired, her mind was blank. “Why me?”

“Because you aren’t good either,” he told her without malice. “Not like Drusilla and William once were. They were good and well meaning if flawed people wallowing in the pain of being good and well meaning people in a world that never prizes those qualities.”

She reminded him of Darla, despite her darker blond hair and the upper crust accent that came so easily to her. It was the slight hint of calculation in her gaze.

~~~*~~~

Leaving the alley, Willow crossed the avenue and considered, briefly, her options. She had a purse that was lighter, but filled with notes and coin. Enough for a carriage, enough for a train ticket, though she suspected that it would not take her far. She had no papers. The spell ingredients she had purchased were worth something, and there was enough in there to cast a spell, similar to the tongues charm the boy in the alley had used. She had read about such charms. They could be used to enhance the wearer’s charisma to the point that they became highly persuasive.
 

A little lost in these thoughts, she didn’t notice the vampire who had quietly fallen in step beside her until he spoke, startling her badly.

He apologized at once, and not just for the fright he had just given her. “Sian isn’t used to loosing,” he explained. “But, she wouldn’t have hurt you.”

She blurted out the first thing that came to mind. “How old are you?”

Rather than take offense, he laughed, seemingly charmed by the blunt question. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I was born in a time when what year it was was a great debate that took place in hearts and minds caught between the death of one world of ideas and another. I was born in a place whose name is lost,” he sounded like he was savoring the idea, “I make up stories about it,” he admitted. “When you live so long, you do that, but after a while, it’s hard to remember what is true. I saw MacBeth on the stage, and they got it wrong. He wasn’t a monster or even a bad king.”

“It’s a good play,” she ventured.

“Yes, it is,” he agreed. “Your carriage is over there,” he gestured to it. Paulus was on the box, standing, watching them, clearly unsure about what to do.

“It will keep a moment,” he told her. “While you think about what you’ve seen. I thought you might have questions,” he smiled. “Thomazine would not have answered them, so it was inevitable that you would come here. Did you enjoy the visit?”

She had. “Yes.”

“No questions?” he seemed surprised by that, studying her face, and then he took her parcels from her. “These are too heavy for you,” he said. “You look like you need to sit down for a moment,” he took her arm in a light grip, meant to do nothing more than guide her. They crossed the street like that and he handed the parcels up to Paulus before opening the carriage door for her, looking at it in a puzzled way as it dawned on him that it sat up too high for her to climb into, and there was something like a chair in the way. He smiled when he figured it out and he put the stair down for her and held out his hand to steady her as she climbed in.

She sat, straightening her skirt as he put the step back up and then rested his arms on the padded surface that could be used for a seat for a third passenger. Darla did not seem startled to see him again. She made a brief mental note at how he used his hands, careful to conceal the long, talon-like fingernails that had been clipped and filed as much as they ever could. She thought it was amazingly stupid that he gave such an obvious sign of his discomfort about how he was changing.

“You are welcome to return, day or night,” he told Willow, and grinned at Darla. “Not you,” he said without rancor. “Even if you got past the wards, crossbows, from the second story windows,” he explained.

“Why do they let you stay?” Willow asked.

“We were there at the beginning,” he told her. “When they were brought here from every corner of Europe and the East. It’s a long story,” he said, “and I like long stories too much to stint on it, but dawn will come before I could finish the beginning,” he looked at Darla. “Tell your childer that nothing would persuade Ekaterina to return to Zlata Ulicka. She lost that battle two centuries ago.”

He stepped back and closed the door carefully. Willow automatically leaned forward, despite the dark and secured the latch on the inside of the carriage door before sitting back against the upholstered seat back, feeling tired and energized at the same time. The complexity of the ward that she had passed through went beyond anything she had imagined and made her own seem crude even if it was effective.

“Did you find out anything useful?” Darla began, only to be interrupted by Paulus who wanted to know if they were leaving.

“Home,” she said, and he snapped the small window between the driver’s box and the interior of the carriage shut. A moment later, the carriage lurched into motion, and Willow banged her knee against the jump seat while Darla hissed in annoyance.

“Andreas is a better driver,” Willow noted, rubbing her bruised knee.

Andreas wasn’t as sharp as Paulus or Cook, but he was steadier, which is why Darla left him behind with Cook and Matilde. For a moment Darla wished that Angelus was there. He was better at asking questions. “Just tell me what happened,” she said, returning to the topic at hand.

On the drive home, Willow went over it. She had a tendency to babble that Darla found irritating. Her voice warmed with enthusiasm and unspoken admiration of the wards that protected Zlata Ulicka. The general impressions she gathered were that the wards were sophisticated and interesting to Willow, that the occupants of Zlata Ulicka were prepared to defend themselves, and that Willow liked them, in a wistful way that was a little interesting to Darla. Ever since Angelus had decided that Willow’s presence would be more or less acknowledged as a part of the public face of their family, Darla had opportunities to observe her interacting with other humans.

The supper party a few nights ago was a good example of this. She was polite and a little reserved, if not standoffish with the people she came into contact with. She was the person at a party who was talked to, but not talked about. An excessive amount of interest in her made her visibly nervous, probably because she was afraid of what conclusions were being drawn about her and possibly because she had learned not to consider attention as being flattering or benign in intent.

The hint of wistfulness was new. There was something about these people that she was attracted to, though what it might be eluded Darla. Willow was still talking when they returned to the house. Paulus drove up the alley behind the house without bothering to bring them around to the front door to be let down. They went through the carriage house and stable into the garden. The flagstone path had been weeded and swept recently, and Darla wondered what made Willow bother. The only sign of life in the garden were the overgrown tulips around the sundial in the center.

Darla sat on the bench under the slight overhang that provided cover for the coal bin beside the house. Willow sat next to her after a slight hesitation. Andreas opened the kitchen door for them and after giving them an incurious look, went to the stable to help Paulus unhitch the horses. Matilde hovered in the doorway.

Darla interrupted Willow to ask if she wanted anything, gesturing to Matilde.

“No, thank you,” Willow answered.

Darla nodded. “We don’t need anything,” she told Matilde pointedly, and she was forced to withdraw.

There was an odd moment of silence that lingered and then Darla nodded in the general direction of the ruined garden. “What do you think about when you sit out here?”

Willow followed her gaze. The garden was more desolate and beautiful at night. In full sunlight it was depressingly dead, but at night, the desiccated plant life had a stark, austere beauty, black against the radiant light in darkness from the stars, the streetlamps, the filtered light from the house.

“I think about . . .” she hesitated for a fraction of a second, an almost imperceptible pause, “what was, what might have been.”

“It doesn’t change anything,” Darla observed.

“It reminds me of who I was,” Willow did not add, ‘who I might have been’, but it was there, unsaid, hanging between the small, sharp thorns of a dead rose bush caught in the open space like the cobweb that was spun in the branches.

“It passes the time,” Darla acknowledged, casting her a sideways look.

Even in the worst moments, maybe more so in the worst moments, Willow found that it was possible to be glad for something. During the time in Bristol, she had been glad for Jane. Glad to be not left alone, even when she was numbly holding the mass of her skirts above her waist, her shoulders pressed hard into rough brick as the commercial property below her waist, her only commodity was filled and fucked and vacated to ensure that she wouldn’t starve.

You think you’d rather starve, but she knew from experience that starvation was too slow.

She had been glad to not be alone. Glad to have someone to tell about herself and her friends, no matter how sick it made her feel inside to know how badly she had screwed up. Glad to promise, and mean it, that when she figured out a way to reverse the spell—and she had thought in those days that she would figure it out—that she would bring Jane with her. She would have the room across from Willow’s in her parent’s house and they would never talk about what had happened, only what could happen.

It helped to remember that she was once an ordinary girl with a small gift who saved people, especially when she could not save herself.

With that sideways look, Darla revealed that she knew the value of anything that helped pass the time.

Their gloved hands touched, the edge of Darla’s pinkie nudging hers until Willow lifted her finger the slightest bit and Darla curled her finger around Willow’s.

“And sometimes, you don’t think of anything at all,” Willow said, her voice raw to her own ears.

Darla’s finger tightened briefly. “Sometimes it’s too much,” she agreed, sounding like she was talking about yesterday and a hundred years or more of living.

The weight of breathing against the pressure in her chest made Willow close her eyes and grit her teeth. The glimpse of a world that she was no longer part of left her painfully aware of how limited her options were, and how futile her efforts had been. She sought to change something small, and the only thing changed was her.

“Say the word, and I will make it go away,” Darla said.

She was tempted enough to want to lay conditions on it, to make it something simple and final. To have someone take her head in their hands, almost tenderly, and kiss her forehead before severing her spinal cord in one short, welcome burst of violence. Darla might be persuaded to do this for her, but her mind supplied another face, stark and pure. It flashed through her mind that she would have to remember to ask Spike the next time she dreamt him, if he would do that one thing for her.

She started to say ‘yes’, with no conditions, in the fragile hope that Darla would understand what she was agreeing to, but William walked through the open kitchen door with a lit cigar in one hand and an open wine bottle in the other, and the moment was lost. He joined them, cool blue eyes picking out the tentative hand holding and registering surprise before his eyelids lowered and a smirk twisted his lips.

“I’m not interrupting anything, am I?” he wondered.

Willow and Darla answered at the same time. Willow’s ‘no’ was defensive. Darla’s ‘yes’ was curt.

He drank from the bottle, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Where did you go?” he asked.

“Zlata Ulicka,” Darla told him. “Where are the others?”

Their night of killing had not ended at the Hamilton’s. They had gone from there to the cemetery abutting the Stare Mesto vampire’s lair. Lucius had dug a grave and on the freshly tilled earth, they had taken turns raping Claire Hamilton. Angelus had pushed her semi-conscious body into the casket that Lucius had broken open and closed her up inside it. Sick fucker that Angelus was, he buried her alive. He had read about it in a volume of short stories. The vamps that frequented the cemetery would hear her.

What they would do about it was anyone’s guess.

If he had come home early he would have missed the denouement. A part of him appreciated the artistry of it. They were vampires. All of them, except for Lucius, had clawed their way out of a grave. It had a special meaning for them. He was blood gorged and the need for violence was sated, and another part of him wanted to seal up the evening, call it complete and fall asleep between cool sheets inside of a warm body.

Thinking about why Darla had seen fit to take Willow on her fishing expedition or why she was flirting with her in a Darla-ish sort of way, was the last thing he wanted to do.

Lucius had brought the larger carriage around to the alley where it stood for the moment. Willow remembered her parcels and went to retrieve them, leaving Darla alone with William. He waited for her to volunteer something that would explain what was going on, but she rose from the bench, looking out at the garden. Drusilla drifted through the doorway, eager to tell Darla about their evening.

“Tell me upstairs,” Darla interrupted her, and Dru linked arms with her, pausing to run her hand over William’s face.

He kissed her dirt caked fingertips. “Are you coming?” she asked.

“I’ll wait for Willow,” he said.

Dru smiled. “Is she coming?”

“No,” Darla answered for him. “You would give her nightmares, Dru.”

Dru made a dismissive sound. “She has her own,” she said, as if this were a foregone conclusion.

Darla’s brittle laugh rang out. Drusilla’s gift for saying the most obvious and unwittingly funny things was almost endearing.

~Part: 24~

It was so unusual for her to be the only one awake in the house at night that it almost felt like an adventure. William had been waiting for her when she came back from the stables with her parcels. He was drinking from the bottle of wine, but he wasn’t drunk. He pointed out the dessert that he had brought home for her and followed her as she went to the library.

She took her supplies down to her cubbyhole under the library and started unpacking the contents. He had prowled around restlessly until she thought that he would tell her to leave it and come to bed with him, but he said something about wanting a bath, without a shred of innuendo, and he left her alone to finish with her organizing and sorting.

When she finally came up, near dawn, Cook was dozing in a chair by the door and she almost made it past him before he opened one eye and sort of smiled at her, without really smiling. She went into the kitchen and found the chocolate tarts, taking one with her to eat with a glass of water before brushed her teeth and went to bed.

He was in her bed, reading, when she came in, and he looked up from his book briefly, before returning to it. She decided to save the tart and the water for when she woke up, and left them on the table in front of the window. The bathroom was a mess. William had left his damp towels and dirty clothes on the floor and she shoved them into the hamper before completing her nighttime rituals.

When she came to bed, he turned down the linens on her side of the bed without comment. She was just starting to fall asleep when she felt him find her hand under the covers, holding it lightly, his thumb stroking the side of hers once before falling still, and she felt a pang at how familiar it felt before she finally fell asleep. When she woke up a few hours later, he was still awake, still reading. She turned her head enough to read the embossed title on the spine. It was a volume of stories by Edgar Allan Poe.

If they were normal people, this might have been mistaken for cozy domesticity, but they weren’t normal people. He must have gotten up at some point while she slept, probably to make sure that the windows were covered. He was lying on top of the coverlet, one knee slightly bent. Feeling oddly removed, Willow watched her hand move from under the covers to over them, to rest on his bare hip. Not looking at his face, her field of vision was restricted to his narrow, well-defined abdomen and thighs. A sparse line of light brown hair arrowed down below his navel to denser, wirier pubic hair that looked coarse and felt silky. Her half asleep mind automatically drifted to a catalog of body hair textures she associated with him until she made herself stop.

In the cradle of his thighs, his flaccid cock lay motionless. She remembered wanting to ask Xander what it was like to have an appendage, and saving the question up for some time when she really felt like freaking him out, just to see the horrified look on his face.

She used her fingernail to trace the line of hair downward, and heard him turn a page, and felt him briefly touch her hair. If they were normal people, would she feel this need to take him in her mouth while he was like this, soft and quiet and undemanding, and make him hard? She knew that if she kept touching him, she wouldn’t have the opportunity to feel the softness that would disappear.

A moment later, she discovered that she was right. She took all of him into her mouth, and he made a sound like he had just remembered to start breathing. She let her lips slide over the hardening length of him twice, which was all it took. He was hard and full, coolly silky under the press of her tongue.

She felt him moving around as he put the book away and adjusted the pillows at his back before running his hand up her spine to tangle briefly in her hair.

He edged down in the bed and touched her, fingers slipping through her hair, over her back. His hands providing direction until she was poised over his mouth, shuddering at the light, teasing pressure of his tongue. Making him shudder in turn at the scrape of her fingernails on the inside of his thighs. His hand massaged her ass, staying as far away from the bruise on her other thigh as possible, working out the tension in her hip since she had unwittingly favored the leg where Drusilla had bit her so hard.

She wanted more. His fingers in her while he took his time, nibbling and sucking on any part of her his mouth lingered on. Later, when they kissed she thought if they were normal people they might have kissed at least once before they had come in each other’s mouths, but what did she really know about what normal people did anyway?

He might have settled between her thighs, but his hand brushed the scabbed over bite mark that Drusilla had left and he had a quick flash, not of the other day, watching them together while he silently seethed, but of tonight. Angelus holding Claire’s ankles, her legs spread, her bruised cunt, swollen and smeared with traces of blood and semen and he rolled Willow over on her side, supporting her uninjured thigh with his own as he guided himself inside her, and the feeling eclipsed the lingering memory of the last few hours. The scent of incense was thick in her hair.

He watched her pull her lower lip into her mouth as her eyelids drifted down, the back of her head settling against his shoulder. He rested his chin on her head, his own eyes closing as he concentrated on the way she felt around him and against him.

“Do you ever wonder what this would be like if we were just normal people?” she asked.

His eyes opened and he lifted his head to look at her. “Died a virgin. I don’t know what normal people do.”

“Me either,” she said, touching his face. “Sometimes, when you are behind me, and I can’t see you, I imagine you, and you’re,” her hand curved into a claw, “Grrr,” she growled at him in an almost comic version of a vampire.

“Yeah?” he thought it was one of the oddest things that she ever told him. He started to tell her that if she was that curious about what it looked like, Angelus could show her sketches of them together like that. Sketches of beauty, unaware, defiled by a monster who was all too aware, and savoring every inch of her. He kissed the corner of her mouth instead. “Don’t close your eyes,” he said. “We’ll pretend to be normal, if that suits you.”

“How?” she asked.

Good question. How? He sifted through a sea of memories that were available to him. A bit of her hair tickled his nose, distracting him, and he smoothed it back, behind her ear, which proved to be another distraction. He traced the outer edge of his ear feeling something like awe at the delicate shape and texture of the humble curve. Other body parts tempted, all available to be touched or rubbed up against. He sank into her a little deeper, feeling the way her ass nestled against him. Then he smiled, and kissed the corner of her mouth again.

“You are probably thinking we should put the lights out,” he said. “But, I think I’d want to look at you, and if we were normal, I’d need the lights for that.”

She turned her head a little more towards him, and he read in her eyes a willingness to indulge in this game that she had started between them. “I’m shocked,” she said, a little too mechanically, and she rolled her eyes at how trite that sounded.

He nodded, acknowledging her contribution. “I can tell,” he teased, bending his head to kiss the upper swell of her breast. “I’d be thinking about how I wanted to shove my hands inside your dress all night, how I drove myself crazy thinking about playing with your sweet tits and kissing all your freckles, and maybe how this would be the night that I’d figure out a way to convince you to hold still while I tasted your cunt.”

To his delight, a hint of color stained her cheeks. She frowned at him. “You already did that,” she pointed out a bit tartly.

His lips found her nipple, and he closed his eyes, his tongue swirling around it before he caught it between his lips, tugging, feeling muscles in her back flex in reaction. He drew back enough to give his admiring attention to her breast. “And I’d think about how pretty your tits are after I’ve had my hands and mouth on them.” He blew on her damp nipple, feeling her shiver. “See?” His tongue etched a wet circle around her nipple, “hard, and wet, and so fucking pretty.”

She tugged on his hair. “Hey! Language,” she sniped. “I don’t think normal people talk about ti—breasts,” she substituted. “And nipples. And they don’t say fuck.”

He laughed. “Of course not, darling. They just think it. I was telling you what I was thinking,” he stressed. “Tell me what you’d be thinking,” he urged, giving the slow, shallow movement of his cock inside of her a slight twist of his hips.

He watched her absorb the sensation. It was the little things with her that fascinated him. The small ‘oh’ of surprise and pleasure that was there for a second, channeled into curiosity and recognition, or in this case curiosity, recognition, and reluctant interest.

“I’d wonder what you’d think if I took your hand and showed you how to touch me,” she said, with a hint of triumph in her expression.

A wickedly pleased smile curved his lips. “I’d think I was the luckiest bloke on the face of the earth,” he told her, “but, I’d want more—“

She snorted. “There’s a shock,” she interrupted.

He kissed her to shut her up. The position was more awkward for him than her. He couldn’t quite get deep enough with his upper body slewed around the way it was, and she elbowed him in the ribs trying to squeeze her arm out from between them as he greedily rubbed his tongue against hers, trying to suck it into his mouth while his hips rocked into the yielding softness of her ass.

When he managed to drag his mouth away to let her breath, he rolled her on her stomach, nudging her legs further apart with his knees. “I always want more,” he agreed, propping himself up on one elbow to keep some of his weight off of her, though he wanted to stretch out against her, hold her down with his chest and arms and fuck her until she was shuddering from his cock. Her hair had started sliding down over the side of her face and he finger combed it back, sweeping it over to pool over his arm.

“Sometimes I’d hate you for that. I’d imagine that I’d been caught, because you never looked like a girl I’d want to fuck into a mattress. You always seemed too quiet, and shy for that,” he kissed the back of her neck. “I’d think about witches and red gold hair, and wonder that I didn’t see it coming,” his fingers tightened in her hair, almost painfully. “Look at this hair,” he breathed. “It was meant to catch someone’s eye.”

The lamplight muted the auburn in her hair and caught the gold.

She got one elbow beneath her and twisted around, frowning at the way he was pulling her hair. “I’m a normal girl, I mean, woman,” she corrected herself. “I’m not a witch.”

He laughed at that, feeling her push back against him as she tried to disentangle herself from a pillow caught under her. Or maybe she was just pushing back against him because he was fucking her so slowly.

He let her hair fall back, spilling from his fingers, half covering her face, kissing her shoulders and any part of her back that he could reach as he got his knees under him. His hands shaped and then lifted her hips. She had to brace her other elbow on the mattress to keep from falling back into the pillows or hitting her head on the headboard. He watched himself withdraw from her, and then slowly slide back into her, feeling her legs quiver as he filled her.

“Normal girl,” he felt her fingernails scrape him when she got her hand between her legs. “Showing me how she likes to be touched,” he withdrew until the head of his cock was just outside of her, and she made a frustrated sound. His fingertips stroked her hip bones, just inside the margin of the underlying bones where she was ticklish. Her left shoulder was against the mattress at an awkward angle and he moved his hands up, spanning her waist, her rib cage, coaxing her to lift up a bit so he could cup her breasts as he slid back into her with a sigh that was eclipsed by her moan.

“I was going to make you talk to me,” he told her, he withdrew from her again, one hand moving up, following the shape of her arm, trembling a little from holding herself up. “Make you tell me all your ‘normal witchy girl-woman’ thoughts on the subject,” he kissed her back. His cock brushed her fingers and she nudged the head of his cock back where she wanted him, pushing back when she felt him against her, and the sound that vibrated in her throat made him laugh again.

Annoyed with being teased, she lashed out with the hand that had been between her legs, and he caught it, his fingers closing around her wrist, and then wrapping the arm holding her wrist around her waist.

“Want to fight me for it?” he asked.

“You’re an asshole,” she sounded bitter about it. “I don’t know why I ever tell you anything. You just rub my nose in it and laugh at me.”

If she had burst into tears, he would have been less astonished. Annoyance crept in. When was the last time he’d had a decent shag without someone, including him, enacting a drama? He was mildly tempted to say something along the lines of ‘you started it’, but it was beneath him.

He couldn’t see her face, too much of her hair was in the way. Just fuck her and let it go, he counseled himself, even as he was slipping out of her body and making her roll over on her back. She started messing about with her hair, pushing it out of her face and out from under her shoulder, stubbornly avoiding his eyes.

“What in the name of hell do you want from me?” he demanded.

She frowned. “To not make it a contest that you have to win without ever once admitting that the deck is stacked in your favor.”

Oh. That. It was so apt a description of the substance of their relationship that he was left to sit back on his heels without a comeback in sight. It wasn’t something he was inclined to even want to change, because he liked winning, though it was less about beating her since she was also his prize. His hands stroked her skin, feeling how warm it was, and damp. He moved enough to stretch out, propping himself up on one elbow, her thigh beneath his armpit.

“How is the deck stacked in my favor?” he asked, and he was doing it again, pushing her to bend to everything between them that made it possible for him to come out ahead.

“Why were you reading Poe?” she asked, declining to answer.

She felt him react, though he hid it well, ducking his head to spread kisses over her stomach while he lazily stroked the inside of her thigh.

“What did you do tonight?” she asked. Foreboding was a sensation that gathered in her lower back and crawled up her spine.

He looked up at her, and there was something a little pitying and pitiless in his eyes. “Don’t do this, Willow,” he warned. “I’ll tell you, and it won’t bother me in the least, but it will hurt you.”

He had no intention of telling her. If she knew that Angelus had buried Claire Hamilton alive, she’d go crazy trying to get to her, not having an idea where to start looking. Angelus might tell her. He would make her work for it, and then he would watch Willow dig his latest victim up with her bare hands for fun as soon as it was sundown. Except that they had a party to go to and Darla was looking forward to it, so there would be hell to pay if anyone ruined her plans.

He changed the subject. “What did you do tonight? What put the idea of what normal people do into your head?” He could tell that he had scratched at something that was bothering her when she looked away.

He kissed the underside of her breast, feeling her heart beat, thick and heavy. Heartache has a sound. “Tell me,” he coaxed, kissing his way up between her breasts, absorbing the salt of her skin.

She tried to shrug it off. She met people, who were not exactly normal she conceded, but . . . and it was all there in as much what she didn’t say. A pregnant woman, a happy couple, a small, cozy, safe home; the substance of a life that she would never have. He didn’t point out that she had lost any hope of those things long before he came along, because it didn’t really matter what had taken them from her. It didn’t ease the hurt of it. It didn’t matter that he couldn’t give her children, because she couldn’t have them. Her painful and irregular menses hinted at problems that could never be resolved. He didn’t point out that if he hadn’t come along she would have lived a short and brutal life, among the ‘normal’ people who would have never seen her beyond what she did in dark alleys, against the side of a building.

He reminded her of who she was, with his hands and his mouth, and words whispered against her hot skin when she had run out of words and there was nothing but her fingernails scoring his back as she struggled to hold him.

“Nothing normal would have ever been enough for you,” he told her.

She didn’t say that he was wrong, but it was there, in her eyes, in the stubborn set of her mouth. Trapped, like she was, because if she said it and was proven wrong it would be too hard to bear.

He didn’t turn it into a debate. He let his eyelids drift down and shifted her around to hold her more comfortably while they slept, feeling her fingertips move over his throat as her hand folded in against his chest. He let his chin rest on the top of her head. He had no desire to be what she thought of as normal, but it was there, in his head, the idea of them. He unlived, suspended at the moment of his death. She would have been a child. There were other reasons he would have never known her, or even more likely, would have looked away had he ever had occasion to meet her.

It wasn’t as hard to suspend his disbelief as he thought.

“Are you still awake?” he asked.

She made a sleepy sound, nodding and moving just a bit, pushing her forehead into his chest. “I’m hungry,” she admitted. “Too tired to eat. Tired of eating.”

He had made a point of making sure that she ate as much as she could stand over the last day. “Go to sleep. Dream about being normal. I’ll be here when you wake up, and there will be chocolate for breakfast and I’ll wash your hair for you, if you like.”

She frowned into his chest. “Will?”

“Hmm?”

“Are you still pretending that we are normal?”

His eyes opened and he leaned back to see her face. “A bit,” he allowed, watching her eyes open and settle on him. The hand curled against his chest, moved to his jaw, resting there for a moment until he realized that she was trying to bring him closer. Her lips brushed his and then came back, fastening on his lower lip and kissing it tenderly while her fingers stroked his cheek.

“Tell me that you love me?”

He bit his lower lip, savoring the lingering warmth from her mouth. “I love you.”

For a moment he thought she was going to say it. He could see it wash over her face, chased by doubt and he laid his fingers over her lips, willing to loose himself in the look in her eyes until her eyelids started to droop and they kissed again, softly.

They had the party Darla wanted to go to in the evening, and he knew that would be nothing remotely normal for Willow. He caught her looking at herself in a mirror when she was dressed for some soiree, taking pleasure in a pretty dress and he wondered if she ever thought about how far she was from the night they had met. He never forgot it. He puzzled over it. Marveled at it and her in all of her mysterious, incongruent aspects. On the edge of sleep, he smiled crookedly at the memory of the elderly cousin keeping his house in London, and her disapproval, not of Willow, but of what he made of her.

He let himself go to sleep with the idea of a picnic in bed, a long meandering chat about their trip to London—half the fun of which for Willow was in the planning—and a quiet afternoon before they had to dress to go out. For the briefest moment he had a glimpse of her, of what they might have been under entirely different circumstances. It wasn’t cruel or disturbing to imagine. It was a validation. If he had known that she was part of all that awaited him on the other side of his grave, he would have bared his throat to Dru and asked her to bite harder.

~Part: 25~

Darla clenched her fists, glaring at Dru. “No,” she said between gritted teeth. “You cannot bring the dog to dinner. Angelus!” she appealed to him.

Dru was equally adamant. “Mr. Buttons is a very good dog, and Miss Edith says he shall go!” she ended on a shriek, stamping her foot.

Mr. Buttons yowled when she smashed one of his feet and danced around before crawling under the hem of Willow’s skirt. “Please don’t bite me, please don’t bite me,” she chanted under her breath.

William reached under her skirt to fish the dog out, holding it by the scruff of his neck. “I say we kill him, and have him stuffed,” he told Darla. “With any luck, she’ll think he’s just like Miss Edith.”

Darla’s eyebrows rose at this remarkably astute idea.

Willow looked down at the ground trying to summon some kind of feeling for Mr. Buttons that didn’t greet the prospect of his untimely end with relief.

“Naughty William,” Dru pouted at him, retrieving her dog. Conscious of her clothes, she held him at arm's length with a frown and then turned to Willow, ready to dump the dog in her arms.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” Angelus got between them. “You take the dog, and he’s your responsibility, Dru. No dumping him on Willow when you get bored, or he starts barking to go out. She can’t walk alone at night.”

Dru scowled. She looked at the dog and at her dress. The dress won. She shoved him in Matilde’s arms, patting him on the head. “Bye, bye, Mr. Buttons. Mummy will be home soon and shall tell you all about the pretty people.”

Still offended by Darla for starting the argument, she linked arms with Willow instead, her elegant fingers smoothing the smoky gray of her bodice. Willow’s dress was very simple. The bodice was gray satin with a soft drape of nearly translucent tissue silk in a matching shade of gray that swathed her shoulders. A jet lozenge chocker circled her throat. A matching bracelet circled her wrist. The skirt was black, and sewn with tiny black beads that glittered in the light.

She still looked a little under the weather. There was a slight chalkiness to her complexion that the gray silk underscored.

Darla was wearing a more elaborate evening gown with huge sleeves that narrowed at the elbow in lace from the elbow to the wrist in shades of gold and cream. A pendant pearl hung above her décolletage. She ignored Dru’s display of petulance, frankly relieved not to have her hanging on her as she donned her outerwear, carefully arranging the hooded cape over her elaborately styled hair.

Willow dipped her head towards Dru. “You look very . . . regal,” she said.

Dru was wearing a purple velvet gown. It was a newer style. The bodice appeared to crisscross from waist to shoulder forming a modified raised collar to frame a softened v-neckline. The overskirt was velvet, pulled up towards a slight bustle and held with velvet roses in white. The underskirt was ivory.

“I am a princess,” Dru reminded her.

When everyone was ready to go and the carriage was drawn up at the door, they left the house, trailing Angelus and Darla who occupied one seat while Dru, William and Willow were forced to squeeze in on the opposite side. William solved the space problem by picking Willow up and seating her in his lap.

Angelus watched them. William was being very pointed in his attentions to Willow over the last two days. There had been the incident with Dru, who had been more confused than anything about why she had almost accidentally killed Willow, shooting down Angelus’ theory that William had goaded her into it to make it impossible to incorporate Willow into his plans. When it came time to walk the dog today, William flatly refused to let Willow leave her bed, slamming the door shut and apparently joining her there.

One of the minions was dispatched to take the dog out on the semi-shaded shed side between the house and the stable, so it wasn’t a problem but it was odd that William hadn’t acquiesced. Dru wanted the dog walked by Willow and what Dru wanted, William made his mission to provide. He had also made it very clear that he didn’t welcome any further interruptions.

He took a discreet sniff of the air, wondering if the girl was bleeding. Her periods were light and irregular, something to do with her checkered past, according to Darla. When she was having one, William was more possessive and attentive.

He picked up no trace of blood in her scent.

They weren’t going far, barely two blocks, that could easily have been walked, but Darla wouldn’t even consider walking, and he knew better than to suggest it even if he privately agreed with William that it took more time to go by carriage, especially since they had to wait in a slow-to-advance queue of arriving guests, similarly minded.

William’s head bounced on the upholstered back of the seat. “Bloody hell,” he muttered. “We’ll be here half the sodding night,” he grumbled, sliding his hands inside of Willow’s cloak.

She made a protesting sound as he settled her against his chest. “Oh, hush,” he grinned at her. “I’m cold, and you’re all toasty warm in there.”

“Miss Willow is deliciously warm, especially between her legs,” Dru observed.

Darla’s fingernails dug into Angelus’ arm. “Angelus,” she growled.

He sighed. “Drusilla? Company manners, princess,” he reminded her.

Dru waved her hand airily. “Miss Willow does not mind.”

William rubbed her back, and Willow allowed herself to feel comforted, though for all she knew he was just warming his hand on her.

The carriage lurched into motion and Darla snapped her fingers at William. “Behave!” she hissed at him. “When that carriage door opens, I do not want to see Willow hopping off your lap like a bar maid.”

He cast a long-suffering look at Dru. “Shove over a bit, Princess,” he requested, setting Willow between them. Dru took her hand to hold lightly.

When they arrived, Angelus was the first to exit the couch, handing Darla down. William followed him to help the girls and they approached the door as a group. This was always a tricky moment. Willow felt herself tensing as they approached the open double doors and the barrier that the vampires could not penetrate without an invitation, though Angelus had her working on a spell to negate that that she, in turn, had no intention of ever finding.

The majordomo welcomed them formally to the house, bowing the party in. The host and hostess were standing at the back of an oval-shaped foyer on a gleaming black and white marble floor. Willow guessed that their hostess chose her dress with the colors in mind. She was wearing crimson satin, and she looked very striking against the black and white of the floor.

“Princess Stavarsky,” Darla executed a very credible curtsey when she was introduced to the woman.

Princes and princesses were, at least in certain parts of Europe, a dime a dozen, on the order of an English baron or earl depending on the country of origin. The Prince and Princess Stavarsky were from Walachia. The princess was an Anglo-Irish hybrid from Boston whose father had made a fortune. Her husband was an older, thin, graying man who might have looked distinguished if he'd been able to tear his gaze away from Darla’s breasts.

Angelus introduced Drusilla, “My sister, Drusilla,” he introduced.

Dru’s courtesy was deep and graceful. “I am a princess too,” she announced loftily.

Darla’s brittle laugh sounded as she launched into a sotto voce explanation that was cut off by the Princess Stavarsky who clasped Dru’s hand. “Anyone could see that,” she said kindly.

Dru preened, shooting Darla a triumphant look before graciously allowing herself to be introduced to the prince.

“Our cousin, Miss Willow Grant, and my wife’s brother, William Crawford,” Angelus completed the introductions.

Concentrating on controlling her skirt and executing a credible curtsy, Willow found herself committing the social solecism of “How do you do?”

But the princess, recognizing both the greeting and the accent, simply smiled at her. “An American! How wonderful,” she enthused. “Where are you from?” she asked.

“C-california,” the improbable, but utterly true answer came.

“California! How exciting!” the princess enthused, handing her guest to her husband before greeting the last of the group. “Welcome to our home, Mr. Crawford,” she murmured as he air-kissed the back of her hand.

They were ushered into a grand salon that was at least four times the size of the room, but with the same dignity as their smaller and much more modest town house. Two huge rock crystal chandeliers glittered from above. Willow guessed that there were at least two dozen people milling around the room, more seated and perhaps a dozen more waiting in the foyer. She concentrated on not stepping on anyone else’s skirt, as well as her own. The unnatural profile of skirts never seemed so perceptible as in a crowded room when her natural inclination was to draw in her shoulders and make herself a little smaller.

She felt William’s hand tap her waist lightly and realized that she was doing the thing with her shoulders, and made herself stand with her shoulders back without looking down to see if her shoulders were back too far, in which case her chest would be sticking out in a terribly embarrassing way.

Harry saw her in the shifting crowd, and felt an enormous sense of relief. David had torn a strip off of him for being so forward with her in the park. Sensitivity wasn’t something he expected to find in a young woman who had spent years as the consort or pet of a vampire, but David insisted that she was embarrassed and alarmed by his behavior. Now that he had a chance to observe her, Harry wondered if perhaps David hadn’t exaggerated. She looked absolutely charming, and beautiful in a very simple evening gown, but also uncomfortable from the slightly stiff way she was standing, as if she was trying very hard not to fidget.

He felt a shiver of excitement. The man whose hand was resting very lightly on her waist was, if he wasn't mistaken, none other than William the Bloody. What was less clear was which of the three vampires sired him, but it had happened in London approximately eighteen years ago.

David joined him, careful to put his shoulder between Harry and the vampires who had joined the party. “Need I remind you that it is very unlikely all of the people in this room would survive if they provoked into an attack?” he asked pointedly in a very low voice.

“No,” Harry admitted. Actually, he hadn’t given it a thought and it was a difficult thought to hold on to now that they were so close. “I think that may be—“

“There’s no mystery to it,” David handed him the calling cards that he had gotten from a footman, steering Harry to a window, so he could paw through them without being noticed.

Bold as brass, their names were engraved on cream vellum, with assumed surnames that he ignored. Darla. Sired by Heinrich Joseph Nest. Angelus, sired by Darla. Drusilla, sired by Angelus. William, again a bit of a question as to his origins, but undoubtedly sired by one of the elder trio, and, he came to the last card. Willow. It was an unusual name. Pretty. It suited her very well, he thought before he handed the cards back to David who tucked them in an inside pocket.

“Well . . . “ Harry grinned. “Shall we mingle?” he suggested.

Frau von Borselin was looking for them as the room filled up. “There you are,” she waved them over.

David wanted very much to throttle Harry, who made his way over with difficulty. “I was just telling Herr and Frau O’Niall how anxious you were to make the acquaintance of the young lady with the dog,” she said. “This is Lieutenant Windom, and Mr. Giles,” she introduced the pair to Angelus and Darla.

“Ma'am,” Harry bowed over Darla’s hand. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance,” he said. “Mr. O’Niall.”

David followed with bland greetings.

“You’ve met our Willow?” Darla said, sounding like she didn’t much care for the sound of that.

“Hardly that, ma’am,” Harry hastened to assure her. “I have seen her walking her dog,” he gestured awkwardly with the cane. “Part of my convalescence is to hobble around useless with Mr. Giles to keep me from falling flat on my face,” he said with a self-deprecating air. “I had the great fortune of being mistaken for a sapling by the dog,” he said wryly, “and occasion to speak to her very briefly. I’m afraid I imposed on our inadvertent acquaintance and may have offended the young lady.”

Curious, Angelus scanned the crowd for William and gestured for him to join them. He arrived a few moments later while Harry was still apologizing for any offense he might have caused, and accepting a scolding from Frau van Borselin, who thought she smelled a potential romance in the air.

Willow’s step slowed when she saw who Angelus and Darla were speaking with, and William handed Dru to Angelus to be introduced.

Harry started to explain the Mr. Buttons connection and Dru, delighted to have someone to talk to about her beloved dog, happily chatted with him, giggling over his account of his two meetings with Mr. Buttons.

She heard Angelus making the introductions. Lieutenant Wyndham. Mr. Giles. Wyndham. Giles. Wyndham. Giles. WyndhamGiles WyndhamGiles WyndhamGiles. The two names crashed around crazily in her head. It was too ridiculous. It was . . . there were no coincidences in the unreal world, she reminded herself, wondering if she looked over her shoulder, would she see characters from the Mad Hatter’s tea party, or maybe Xander in a really old-fashioned suit.

Then Angelus was introducing her, and she knew that everyone was watching her, waiting for her to say something, but she was terrified of what might come out of her mouth if she let her lips part. They would think she was crazier than Dru. She felt the room swimming around her. Overly-loud voices, Harry Wyndham bending over her hand—he looks nothing like Wesley, and yet he sounds like a prig. She heard David Giles responding to something Angelus was saying, and there was nothing of Rupert Giles in him that she could see.

William put it together effortlessly. He rested his hand on the small of Willow’s back, keeping her by his side as they were introduced, feeling through the silk how her heart started to pound. His arm circled her a bit more firmly, not sure exactly what set her off, but aware that something was frightening her. Not giving a good rat’s ass what anyone made of it, he gently turned her face to his.

“It’s too close in here for you, isn’t it?” he said. Her eyes were huge and a little wild and she was as white a sheet.

“There’s a chair over hear,” Frau van Borselin said, shooing an acquaintance out of the chair for the faint-looking English girl.

“I’ll get a glass of sherry,” David volunteered. He had a very bad feeling about this. His concern that they were going to get the girl killed resurfaced.

Willow forced down her rising hysteria, taking a deep breath, then another. She cast an apologetic look around. “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I never can seem to relax when there are so many people around,” she offered. “Hello . . . Lieutenant Wyndham, is it?”
He bowed over her hand and she had to resist the impulse to snatch it back. “And Mr. Giles?” she inclined her head, managing to evade his eyes, afraid of what she would find there.

“You met in the park?” Darla questioned.

“Mr. Buttons makes your acquaintance whether you like it or not,” Willow pointed out, feeling William beside her, standing too close from the looks Darla was shooting him. Replaying the comment in her head, she felt her cheeks warming as she realized how rude it sounded.

“Mr. Crawford, your obedient servant,” Harry declaimed, tongue firmly in cheek.

William’s left eyebrow lifted. “And yours,” he batted back.

Harry Wyndham’s head cocked to one side. “Crawford? You didn’t go to Charterhouse? 82?” he asked.

“Winchester,” William corrected. “Why?”

“No reason. Thought you looked familiar. Played cricket,” he said. “Not much of a batsman. You didn’t play, did you?”

“No,” William said shortly. “I was a bit of ponce, back in the day. Nose stuck in a book.”

Willow resisted the crazy desire to slip in an, “Eh, wot, old chap.”

“Giles, here is a Wellie,” he said. “Right, old man?”

A semi-hysterical giggle escaped Willow. Pretentiousness could be a hereditary trait she thought.

“It is ridiculous,” Giles followed up on her giggle. “Grown men, prattling about their old schools. We would be in a scrum over who has the best cricket tradition, were we not shamed by your mirth, Miss Grant.”

For the briefest moment their eyes met, and David Giles felt old and a little shaken at the fleeting glimpse he had of a soul in real torment.

William lifted her hand to his lips, catching a warning glint in Darla’s eyes if he raised eyebrows about the nature of his relationship with his brother-in-law’s cousin, Willow’s official designation in the family of late.

“I don’t suppose I have any hope of convincing you to allow me to take you in to supper, Miss Grant?” Lt. Wyndham begged.

“Not a single shred of a hope,” William answered before she could.

There was an awkward silence which Angelus filled, with a cough, and a blandly improvised, “There’s been no formal announcement, being as it is a bit awkward that they are living under the same roof,” he said to Frau van Borselin in a tone that conveyed awkwardness with the subject. “But, it is understood that—“

“Oh. Oh!” she caught on at once. “Of coarse,” she smiled her understanding, slipping her arm through Harry’s. “Miss Drusilla could not lack for escort, I’m sure,” she hinted.

Dru, in no way annoyed at being second choice, beamed at him happily. “We shall have ever so much to discuss,” she said, leaving Giles to offer his arm to Frau van Borselin when supper was announced.

They were dining in a conservatory, which delighted Dru. It was very informal, Willow deduced. There were several buffets scattered the length of the room and round tables set for as many as twelve and as few as four. They ended up at a table for twelve. Harry Wyndham made a beeline for the chair beside Willow, but Dru, accustomed to sitting next to William ,simply ignored him, forcing him to hastily follow her to assist with the cane-backed chair at William's side.

He noticed that Drusilla did little more than move food around on her plate, not even bothering to taste the punch in the dainty cup she had been provided with. There was a kind of art to not eating at these things, or at least not appearing to have eaten a lot, so this behavior went unremarked. William, who had not even bothered with a plate, wasn’t above eating from Willow’s, occasionally catching the disapproving glare of the older female vampire and responding with an utterly unrepentant grin.

Giles was also observing the interactions, and marveling at how effective they were. Darla was perfect as the disapproving and somewhat put-upon wife and sister saddled with a charming but mentally-deficient sister-in-law and a rather provoking, borderline rude brother. Angelus played off her neatly as patriarch, and protective older brother, keeping one ear cocked for any conversational drifts Drusilla meandered off on, gently steering her back on topic. The younger vampire was a bit more playful and astonishingly demonstrative and affectionate with the lone human in their bizarre ménage.

In a slight break with protocol, the Princess Stavarsky had graced their table sitting beside Willow, which is how David and Harry discovered that the girl was an American. It was the reason the princess had made a point of joining their party. It disrupted the male/female composition of the table, and required the removal of a place setting, since the prince was dining at the other large table nearby in an effort to divide their attention amongst the large party.

“California?” the Princess prompted. “It might as well be another country,” she commented. “How did you come to live there?” she asked.

“I was born there, Your Highness,” Willow explained.

“Where?” she asked. “Your Highness from a fellow American sounds . . . very undemocratic.”

“And that would be the trouble with hereditary monarchies . . . ma’am,” Willow substituted gamely.

“Very true,” the Princess murmured. “You were telling me where you are from in California,” she prompted.

Nope, just stalling, really, Willow thought. “Sunnydale,” she said, and she made a face. “It sounds ridiculously prosaic, doesn’t it?”

“Massachusetts is full of Indian and English names. Penobscott on top of Quincy,” she pointed out. “Sunnydale,” she repeated. “It sounds charming.”

“Well, it’s not,” Willow assured her. “It’s a little bit of nowhere in particular with not much more than missionaries and repressed indigenous people.”

“Ah, and since you aren’t a repressed indigenous person, I take that your parents were missionaries,” the Princess deduced.

“Were,” Angelus, looked up at the ceiling, “God bless them. Taken in '79 in an epidemic of typhus,” he said. “Tragic loss. Wonderful, Godly people,” he told her. “Willow’s mother was my cousin on my mother’s side, one removed. Darla and I,” he gave Darla a mournful look, “were devastated to learn that the very mission, to bring the word of our lord and savior to the savages of the plains, that we underwrote, took dear Clara and Daniel from us, leaving Willow an orphan.”

Willow stared at Angelus, indignant. These were her fake parents, not his. “My father would turn over in his grave if he heard you referring to the Chumash as savages,” she told him. “They were a peaceful tribe, driven off their land, hunted into extinction, and left to die in squalor and disease.”

Sensing a kindred spirit the princess seized her wrist. “Tell me, what are your views on suffrage?” she asked eagerly. "I heard Mrs. Stanton speak at a Unitarian Church in Boston, and I must tell you, she was absolutely thrilling!”

Suffrage. Oh, crap. Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ratified . . . when? She had no idea. Most of the newspapers that Angelus favored were published in Europe and news from the United States was sparse. “In the United States? It’s hard to follow U.S. politics in Europe, but since the territories have been enfranchising women, it seems to me that it is a tide that has turned,” she ventured cautiously. “As for the ownership of property, I would say to anyone who is foolish enough to believe that my cousin,” she inclined her head to Darla, “is anything but competent to make decisions and to act on her behalf in any realm, that they have made a grave mistake.”

Princess Stavarsky turned her attention to Darla, and Willow practically slumped in her seat in relief. “Care for a stroll?” William suggested, since supper was drawing to a close.

Darla wasn’t that lost in her conversation. “Take Dru with you,” she told William when he rose, giving his hand to Willow.

David Giles watched as annoyed resignation appeared on the younger vampire’s face. His expression cleared when he looked at Drusilla, becoming openly affectionate. “Princess? Shall we walk under the stars?” he asked her.

“Walk, and spin, and dance,” Drusilla agreed with a dreamy smile.

“No dancing. There’s no music in the garden,” Angelus told her.

“William can make music,” Dru announced.

He offered her his free arm, but Dru was looking at Mr. Wyndham expectantly. Willow’s eyes flew to his cane. “Dru, it is dark, and with Mr. Wyndham’s--,” her mind sorted through words, rejecting them as too personal or pointed or overly aware that Mr. Wyndham had legs, which she understood to be a bit of a gaffe. Stupid manners.

“How very considerate of you to notice Harry’s difficulty getting around,” David rescued her. “And, Harry, really, old man. You should rest a bit. I’m sure Mr. Crawford is happy to walk with the ladies while you wait here.”

“I’m fine, David,” Harry bit out as he rose, leaning on the cane. He knew why David did not want him to go out in the garden, and yes, it was dangerous. But, my God, the opportunity. To be able to say that you dined and chatted with half of the Scourge of Europe in the thick of a night in a foreign city. David had the heart and soul of an archivist. He lacked the imagination to appreciate the opportunities their work afforded.

“I think I can manage a simple turn around a garden,” he said testily, not about to be denied. “Miss Drusilla?”

Dru looked up, eager to be out under the star-strewn sky. “Let’s walk outside,” she smiled beatifically.

There was a terrace beyond the conservatory and they were not the first who thought to explore it, and the gardens laid out on three levels below with a fountain spraying a large plume of water on the second to lowest level.

Dru wanted to dance and William was his usual obliging self, humming something suitable to waltz to for her. They were off to one side of the second-to-lowest level of the garden, which was paved with broad, flat stones. A balustrade created a barrier to what appeared to be a steep slope, populated with tall, thin evergreens and scrub. Lt. Wyndham let his weight rest against the balustrade with a sigh of relief that seemed genuine.

“I’m afraid that I let my stubbornness exceed my stamina,” he said ruefully. “I did not expect to contend with so many stairs. Mr. Giles is a good friend, but he can be a bit of a mother hen at times. It’s embarrassing,” he confessed.

Willow cocked her head to one side, wondering what was really going on. She did not think that encountering William the Bloody in Bristol was an accident. The presence of two men who bore the surnames of the two watchers she knew in the real world was probably not a coincidence.

William and Dru were dancing farther away, carried in great, swooping circles. It was in part due to their enhanced physical abilities. When she danced with William, she always felt the twitchy restraint as he held himself in to keep from moving too fast for her to follow.

She could hear the music of their voices. William humming, and Dru chattering away. They were too far for her to make out the words. Vampire hearing, being what it was, she shrugged and hoped for the best. She was facing away from the two vampires, and it was always possible that they were too wrapped up in each other to be paying attention to her.

“I’ve never met watchers without a slayer, except once, and I wasn’t impressed,” she said. “I’m still not impressed. If this is an exercise in observation, you’ve already failed. You’ve drawn too much attention to yourselves.”

This cool, emotionless appraisal left Harry gaping at her.

“What do we know about you? You are foreigners, guests of Frau van Borselin,” she recounted. “You’ll be missed if you disappear entirely, but there is no guarantee that you will meet such an easy end. Angelus or Darla might consider either of you an interesting project, in which case, they will probably turn you and learn everything you know,” she said softly. “And then? Maybe send you back to the Council in . . . London?” she guessed. “Start looking over your shoulder from this night on, Lt. Wyndham,” she advised.

He recovered his composure. “I mistook you,” he bluffed. “You are very much their creature, aren’t you?”

“Are you laboring under the delusion that they give fair warnings?”

His gaze flicked to the two vampires, judging the distances. “What you must know of them,” he began. It was another misstep, he realized, trying to read her closed expression, though he wasn’t sure why. “We could guarantee you sanctuary under the Council's protection,” he offered rashly, too flustered to remember David’s advice about how she should be dealt with, and that he had absolutely no authority to offer her anything. He was simply curious as to how she would react to the offer.

“In exchange for which, I trade one cage for another,” she concluded. She knew what her choice would be, but she had no illusions about it, either.

He had a feeling that she would know if he lied, so he said nothing.

“Well, we all die,” she observed with a shrug. “But I won’t die stupidly, and I won’t deal with you,” she added. “Tell your Mr. Giles that.”

Before he could respond, she walked over to a rose bush, seemingly intent on admiring the flowers.

The dancing slipped the restraints that Dru had maintained on her wavering sanity. She wasn’t violent, but she was in her stream-of-consciousness mode, which meant that anything could come out of her mouth at any moment. She flitted over to Willow, stripping rose petals by the handful and showering them over her head, raising her torn palms and fingers to her mouth to lick the blood off of them with a wicked, mischievous look on her face.

Her arms slid around Willow’s waist and she leaned forward to whisper in her ear. “The stars whisper lovely things, psst, psst, psst,” she said teasingly, “Midnight tea parties, honey and cakes,” she swayed sinuously. “We should have a garden. I would braid flowers into your hair,” she promised.

On the plus side, it was a good mood, Willow thought with a sigh. “Then, we should go home,” she said diplomatically, raising her voice to carry. “Lt. Wyndham, if you would be so kind as to let my cousins know that William and I are taking Drusilla home, I would be in your debt,” she said.

William looked amused. “That’s right. We’d be eternally grateful,” he mocked, collecting his two girls and leading them to the house, leaving Harry to limp behind them.

He lost sight of them before he reached the house and had no choice but to rejoin the party at the table, conveying the message Willow had charged him with. There were sympathetic looks all around that could be interpreted as, ‘pity, such a lovely girl, but clearly not all there’, which left David to marvel again at how adept they were at playing this game.

~~~*~~~

“We’ll see you home, pet,” William told her as they walked back to the house.

She knew without his saying anymore that he was taking Dru out to hunt. Mostly she felt relief at the prospect of having a few hours alone to process the events of the evening, and then the wrongness of that as the inevitable conclusion of their hunting nibbled at her awareness.

He used to take her with them. Sometimes he used her as bait, playing on her past, or what he understood of it, recreating the night in the alley when he had met her, only in a bizarre twist he ‘rescued’ her from her fate before it went too far, killing the men who thought that they were getting a quick fuck in some filthy alley from a whore.

The subtext to this was, she supposed, that they had it coming. That they deserved it. In William’s twisted mind it was purely, she suspected, because they had been stupid enough to be lured. In her mind, it was more complex. The attitudes that shaped her understanding of prostitution and the hideous plight of the women and children forced into the trade made her see the seller as a victim and the buyer, holding all of the power, as an aggressor. It wasn’t that simple. Jane carried a knife for a reason, not just to protect herself, but to enforce her position in a territory that she considered her own.

In Calais, it had been a private establishment for gentlemen and women with exotic tastes. She had thought that they were going to a party, and had been moved to a mild sense of wonder when she saw herself fully dressed for the evening. It had been in the early 80s, when full skirts were just passing out of fashion. The dress was oyster satin with tiny puff sleeves. The overskirt was caught up with satin roses.

Her hair, just growing out to shoulder length was pulled up to the crown of her head and carefully arranged in artless curls and a long pearl necklace was doubled around her throat and secured with a ribbon tied in a neat bow at the nape of her neck.

She had felt like a fairy princess, watching the great bell of the skirt float around her. Unable to process the conventions that would have told her that all was not as it appeared, she was completely unaware of what kind of establishment they had entered. There were other equally well-dressed people, mingling in nicely-furnished rooms, and they fell into conversation with another English couple, retiring to what appeared to be a sitting room, sipping champagne.

Stupidly, she had fought, not realizing that that was what was expected, even desired. With her wrists tightly secured in leather manacles over her head, her face to the paneled wall, the older English girl, blond, beautifully dressed, with a blasé accent, beat her with a flogger. It didn’t hurt particularly much. It was a toy, designed to deliver an element of pain without damaging the skin. It was just . . . startling, and humiliating, and it made her feel stupid for being so naïve.

And deep down, as each blow fell, she knew what was bound to happen.

She was on the floor, in the tattered remnants of her seemingly virginal ball gown, the wool carpet fibers scratching the raw, reddened skin of her back. A bolster pillow had been pushed under her hips to force them up at an obscene angle and the English girl, still dressed, a hair hardly out of place, had her head buried between her thighs. She could see the hairpins and the false hairpieces worked into her coiffure.

On the sofa, William had the man bent over, his trousers down around his knees, groaning and writhing as he fucked him. He pushed his head to one side, licking his victim’s exposed throat and drained him dry in a matter of seconds while his wife, or lover, or whatever she was to him, frantically flicked her tongue over Willow’s clit, two fingers fucking her. With each stroke Willow could feel a ring scraping the delicate, tightly stretched tissue at the gulf of her vagina.

Later, William had ripped the ring off her finger, holding it up to the light. It was a cluster of four pearls with small diamonds. He had pocketed it while Willow numbly dressed in the dead woman’s clothes and he arranged the bodies in a grotesque tableau that made her think of a History Channel program that she had watched about serial killers and their habits.

When she didn’t dress as quickly as he wanted, he simply pushed her hands aside and finished it for her, dragging her out into the night. She had thrown up somewhere between the house and the lair, and he had finally given up on her walking and picked her up, humming a bit of a song that sounded familiar.

When he stopped taking her hunting, she had stopped worrying about who he was killing. It wasn’t right, but it was a kind of conditioned response that kept her from losing her mind. Dru was gliding ahead of them, graceful, powerful, and completely batty. Her insanity frightened Willow as much as she sometimes envied Dru her most uncomplicated moments.

William unearthed a cheroot from an inside pocket. He had smoked the last of the cigars pilfered from the Hamilton’s and he was out of cigarettes as well. He had more or less decided to give up cheroots altogether. Willow hated the things. They stunk worse than cigarettes. He started to light a match and looked at her with a playful smile. “Don’t suppose you could, presto, give me a light?” he said.

“In case you’ve forgotten. You are a vampire. Highly flammable,” she reminded him. “Want me to practice on you?”

He chuckled, “Put that way, no, but it would be bloody convenient in a strong wind or absent a match,” he pointed out. “Feel free to practice on the more annoying minions,” he joked. “Just don’t get caught at it,” he warned, so maybe he wasn’t joking.

Dru was walking along the edge of the curbstone, like a tightrope walker, without her arms extended for balance.

“Did you get enough to eat tonight? You picked at your dinner,” he pointed out. “Do you want me to order someone to bring you a tray?”

“No, thank you,” she said. “I’ll fix something if I get hungry. I’d probably find a dead rat or ground glass in anything the minions prepared.”

He shot a sharp look at her. “That’s a joke, isn’t it? Has anyone threatened you?”

If there was one thing she understood a little of, it was the dynamics of vampire relationships, which were predicated on proximity to the golden circle, of which Angelus reigned supreme. Nothing endeared a minion to a master like personal attention, even of the most unpleasant variety. “I’m human. They hate me. It’s a vicious cycle. I trust them as far as I could throw them.”

“Well, keep your baby claws sheathed, kitten. If anyone seems intent on hurting you, you bring it to me and let me deal with it,” he counseled. “Lose your temper again, and I will be cross,” his tone was light.

Dru spun around, walking backward on the curb. “The night calls,” she reminded him.

“Give me a mo’, princess,” William said, walking Willow up the stairs. The door opened revealing Andreas, on duty.

“Safely home,” he announced. “You? Take her things and hang them up. I’m sick and tired of you stupid bastards playing your silly sodding rivalries out. You ought to be ashamed of yourself. You’re a demon, not a four-year-old. Grow a set and quit worrying about what is no bloody concern of yours in the first place.”

Andreas opened his mouth and shut it with a snap of teeth. “Thank you. I’m sure that will clear everything up,” Willow told him.

“Ah-ah,” he pointed at his lips. “None of your cheek, if you please. Give me a kiss and go inside,” he demanded.

Feeling oddly shy about it, standing on one step above him so that they were nearly eye level, Willow leaned forward and placed a dry, chaste kiss on his lips.

He looked amused by that. “You call that a kiss?” he scoffed, giving her a little push to get her moving, “I’ll collect on that later,” he told her.

Left in the foyer with a very annoyed vampire, Willow removed her gloves and the dressy cloak she was wearing, looking apologetic. “I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s bossy. He just gets that way sometimes. It has more to do with making you do what he wants than anything else. It makes him . . . happy, I guess.”

Like the rest of the minions, Andreas had a full compliment of memories of the young woman before him. The only thing he had against her really is that she smelled like something he wanted to eat and was forever out of reach. Which really wasn’t her fault. She was some peculiar fetish of Master William’s, who was not one to be crossed. After the set to after the dinner party it was apparent to him that she was probably not as helpless as had been assumed.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said neutrally, and then cursed himself for assigning a title of respect to her. “Is there anything else you require?”

She looked a little taken aback at the question. “Is everyone out this evening?” she asked.

“Yes,” he nodded.

“Oh . . .” she gestured to the stairs. “I’m going up to my room, then,” she said. “Thank you, Andreas.”

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