Odalisque

Author: Elen

Parts: 6 - 10

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~Part: 6~

"I hate you," she said, her voice flat, emotionless.

"I'm not overly fond of you at the moment, ducks, so right back at you," William retorted, his hand on her shoulder forcing her to her back.

He had lit the branch of candles near the bed before he had returned to it. She wiped her snotty nose on the back of her hand, scrubbing at her face like an over-tired child. A man's voice erupted across the hall. "No, God no," he yelled hoarsely.

He watched her lips move, soundlessly, his own thinning. He had lit the candles for more light to get a closer look at her wrist, not entirely sure he hadn't broken it. He gave it his attention, moving her hand this way and that.

"Are they all dead?" she asked in the same toneless voice.

"Does it sound like it?' he shot back, before relenting. "Your majordomo is wriggling on Darla's hook, and the little sloe eyed maid? Heard her giggling down the hall. Seemed to find it pretty bloody amusing that you were getting shagged," he said, knowing that she hated being made fun of just about worse than anything.

Something flickered in her expression, gone too quick for him to identify. "I don't think its broken," he said, "but I don't think you're going to be up to scribbling in one of your journals for a few days either."

Their eyes met and something spiteful flamed to life in hers. "Too bad for you. You always like it better when I use that hand."

His lip curled. Well, fine, he snarled inwardly. Just fucking fine. We can play that game too. His hand fisted in her hair, dragging her up by it, flinging her face down, her hips across his thighs. The firm white globes of her ass were pushed up higher as he got his legs under him, resting his ass on the backs of his legs. He shoved her hair away from her face, clamping his hand down on the back of her neck when she would have turned her face to the mattress.

He ran his hand over her ass, his fingers rubbing in slow circles, testing the pliancy of her skin. She had the most beautiful skin. Ivory toned, and other than the random bite mark and freckles, unblemished. He pushed her thighs apart. "Keep your legs spread, or by God, I'll fuck you with every remotely phallic object in this room and keep you from coming until dawn."

To add emphasis to his threat he roughly thrust three fingers in her cunt, feeling her body stiffen as her vaginal walls resisted the bulk of his fingers stretching her.

He pulled his fingers out of her and started slapping her, working on the tender backs of her thighs, feeling her fighting her own instinct to evade his hand. She bit down on her lower lip to keep from crying out, and he figured that she wasn't quite done with her rebellion for the evening. Coldly angry with her, he refused to be goaded into hitting her hard. The smacks stung, her thighs were turning an angry red, and each one had to hurt like hell, but he wasn't going to be goaded into laying into her.

When his hand came down abruptly on her untouched ass, a yelp escaped her.

He smiled at the sound and ran a soothing hand over the backs of her thighs, using his fingertips only, knowing that she would feel the light, teasing touch more powerfully.

He gave her other ass cheek a stinging slap, his fingers stroking her neck, smoothing her hair. Her breast was peeping out between his thigh and her outstretched arm, he moved his hand down to run his fingers over it using the same light, teasing touch, slapping her ass again.

"Gets you all hot when I spank you," he reminded her, feeling her cunt, warm and damp against his leg.

"I hate you," she whispered again.

His fingers followed the curve of her ass, dipping into the wetness of her cunt, spreading the outer lips apart. Watching the awareness work on her in her eyes. He chuckled. "Mmmm. I'm feeling you hate me," he mocked. "I'm feeling your hot pussy, dripping on my leg. You want to rub your cunt against me, don't you?"

His thumb thrust into her, swirling around, sliding up between the pink cheeks of her ass to press against her tightly puckered anus. Her legs started to clench together, and then she realized what she was doing and moved to separate them.

His thumb pushed into her. She panted, her eyes wild. "Will . . ."

"I love fucking you," he said as his thumb sank into her.

She rolled her hips against his leg, trying to get some friction on her clitoris, and wailed softly as he fucked her ass, hard, with his thumb, knowing she was getting off on the pain as well as the pleasure his fingers were affording her as they slid between the wet folds of her sex.

Her hands were fisting in the disordered mess they had made of the linens, her face contorted, as she gasped and mewled, and shook under his hands.

"Tell me what you want," he demanded. "Tell me, and I might just let you have it, pet."

"Fuck me," she moaned.

His hand left her neck to slap her ass. "Pay attention! I am fucking you," he snarled. "Tell me what you want!"

"Aaaaaah," she wailed as his fingers rubbed her clit.

He slapped her ass again. "Stop that," she was frantically rubbing herself against his leg. "I'm not going to let you come until you tell me what you want."

Gritting her teeth as much from the weird mix of pain and pleasure as frustration, she gritted out, "Fuck me, with your cock, in my cunt."

He pulled his thumb out of her and moved around between her legs, spreading them further apart while she pushed up on her elbows, her legs trembling as she eagerly pushed her hips back.

"Now, that's what I like," he said, holding her hips, and kissing her reddened ass, his cock rubbing against her slit. He lined the head of his cock up with her weeping hole, his hands sliding up her hips to cup her small, firm breasts. "Push back on to it, love," he encouraged.

She pushed back, feeling the head of his cock breach the opening, "Goddess! Will!" she cried out as she felt the walls of her cunt stretch around the cool hardness of his cock, inch by inch as she pushed back.

"Take it all up in you, love," he grunted, throwing his head back as the added tightness coupled with the heat of her made him gasp for unneeded breath.

She shuddered, twisting her hips as she drove herself back on him, her ass snuggled up against his abdomen. His hands moved back down to her hips, holding her there. "Mmmm. I can feel your cunt quivering around me," he said, slipping one hand around to find her clit. "I'm going to make you beg. I'm going to make you scream."

~~~*~~~

Sofia's broken arm lay at an unnatural angle. Her shoulders were on the bed, just barely, leaving her head to hang over the side. One of her eyes bulged as the dark haired man thrust his cock deeper into her mouth. Lucius could see just that much of her face between his hairy legs.

His pants were down around his ankles, and he hadn't bothered to take off anything other than his frock coat, which he had carefully hung up on a padded hanger before handing another padded hanger to the blond woman. He undressed the dark haired girl first, in no hurry about what he was doing. Her blood stained clothes were carefully removed and hung or folded neatly. Together they undressed the woman, caressing her painted body. Her nipples were dark with rouge.

He tried to crawl away and got as far as the door, no longer caring that he was taking the coward's way out, but they hauled him back and striped the heavy drapes of their corded tie backs, tying his wrists tightly and looping the excess around an unused chandelier hook in the ceiling. Pulling and pulling, until he made himself use his legs to keep from having his arms pulled out of the sockets, and still they pulled, hoisting him higher, until he was on his toes.

The dark haired girl tossed Sofia on the bed like she was a rag doll, making her scream as her broken arm was violently jarred, the displaced bone bulging against her skin.

She tore at the maid's simple clothing. The light but sturdy dark blue wool that Sofia had been so proud of, shredded like tissue silk, leaving wicked wheals of blood on her skin that the dark haired girl, the mad girl they called Dru, licked away with inhuman growls and purrs. She buried her dark head between Sofia's thighs, Angelus moving behind her to hold the maid's ankles apart.

Under other circumstances she might have even enjoyed it, Lucius thought. Bold, sloe eyed Sofia had rubbed herself up against him more than once as he recalled, with an unmistakable invitation in her eyes.

She stared blankly at the ceiling her eyes glazed with shock and pain, whispering the words of a prayer she probably learned in the workhouse.

The blonde woman cut his clothes off with a knife that never touched his skin. "I have some skill with a blade," she commented, seeming to take pride in her neatness at splitting seems and leaving him unmarked.

Sofia grunted and jerked. Angelus rested one of her bare feet on his shoulder, unfastening her breeches, he took out his cock, stroking it in one hand, guiding it between the legs of the girl sucking the maid's cunny.

Her name is Dru, he reminded himself. He had them straight in his head now. Dru. Darla. Angelus, and William.

The sound of flesh slapping flesh sounded like a gun crack from across the hall. Dru lifted her head, pink juices staining her face and smirked. "Someone's been naughty," she said in a singsong voice. Her fingers rooted in the maid. "Not to worry," she told her. "William is making it a nice spanking," Angelus slapped her firm ass and she squealed, pushing back against his invading cock. "Slapping, tickling," her tongue danced over Sofia's sex. "So very nice," her eyes rolled back in her head and she turned her head, biting into Sofia's soft white thigh.

"Blood and honey," she pronounced when she lifted her head and watched rivets of blood trickle down the girl's thigh. She pouted. "Hard, Daddy," she said in a complaining tone.

Darla grabbed his chin, brushing her naked body against his; the tips of her breasts were startlingly cold against his chest. Her hand rested against his thigh, squeezing. "Just when I start wondering why everyone thinks that girl is so smart, she surprises me," Darla said.

He wasn't sure who she was referring to so he kept his mouth shut while she prodded and squeezed and explored his body like he was a horse at an auction, all the while, her body brushed against his, the coldness of her skin confusing him. She was freezing.

She stood behind him, her hand stroking his cock to hardness. "You're an impressive specimen," she breathed in his ear.

"Would madam care to see my teeth?" he said coldly.

She kicked his feet apart sending a jolt of tearing pain through his shoulders even as she cupped his sack, working his cock in a relentless way. I won't, I won't I won't, he chanted in his head. "What's your name again?" she demanded.

He refused to answer.

She squeezed his balls hard, making him scream. "Your name!"

He shuddered as she cupped him gently, her cold touch almost soothing to his abused flesh. "Lucius," he groaned.

"Lucius," his name rolled off her tongue sensuously. She kissed his back, his ribs, one of his nipples, sucking on it lightly while her hands continued to work his rod and sack, her thumb swirling around the head, making his cock jerk in her hands.

"Lucius," she murmured. "Are you listening?" she asked, cocking her head to one side, cutting her amused gray eyes to the closed bedroom door across the hall.

He glared at her. He was listening now. Flinching at the sound that came at regular intervals. Slap, slap, slap.

He found himself listening for something else, and not hearing it. She wasn't crying or screaming. It amazed him. For a moment it occurred to him that there was some small victory to wring out of this.

Darla smiled as she saw his expression change. Oh, he was going to be fun to break, she gloated to herself, meeting his eyes. He relaxed into her hands, no longer fighting her.

His lip curled. "I usually pay for this," he said. "What's the going rate?"

She jerked back, eyes narrowing. "Angelus? Dru's not paying any attention to you," she pointed out. The girl was far to busy finger painting bloody patterns on the maid's stomach. "I think it's time for Lucius to find out what the going rate is," she sneered.

Angelus looked over at her, and gave Dru another smack on the ass, pulling out of her with a sickening plop, his breeches barely riding his hips as he strolled over, probably intent on beating him to death for the insult to the 'lady'.

He circled around him, pausing behind him while Lucius' back tensed for the blow that was sure to fall. He was startled to feel the man's hands on his buttocks, roughly pushing them apart. "Oh, no," he moaned, panicked by the idea of what he might do to him. "God, no!" he yelled frantically.

Darla smiled coldly at him. Lucius felt the broad head of Angelus' cock press against him, his hands on his spread open ass keeping him from moving more than a few inches while the strain on his shoulders became nearly unbearable.

"Try to relax, dear. It always hurts the first time," she mocked, picking the scraps of his clothes up off the floor. The mistress' black velvet button fell unheeded by her from the pocket of his ruined waistcoat. Lucius watched it roll across the floor until it was almost hidden from view by the bed hangings, and then all thought, all breath was driven out of his body as the man rammed his cock into his ass. His head fell back, his face forming a mask of agony as Angelus grappled and grunted, hips bucking fiercely as he fought to bury his cock in him.

"Almost," Angelus grunted, "makes me," he started thrusting harder now that Lucius torn passage began to ease becoming less hard to penetrate, but deliciously vise-like, "believe," his large hand grasped Lucius' cock, "in God," he said as he raped him

A wild, hopeless, animalistic sound reached the servant. Tears spilled down his face as he realized that it came from his throat.

"Relax, boy," Angelus said.

>From across the hall, there was a new sound, no more sounds of a beating, but a woman's voice, moaning, with words he was grateful not to understand in between. But he wasn't to be spared that for very long.

Darla rooted around in a drawer and produced what appeared to be a riding crop that she slapped against her hand. "Not being able to speak English is a draw back," she commented, strolling back over. The tip of the riding crop lashed the head of his cock. Compared to the thick cock in his ass, it didn't register, and she brought the crop down on his chest, making him cry out again.

"Don't ignore me when I'm talking," she said with real menace. "We are going to have lessons in English, my boy," she said.

"Tell him about buggering, Darla," Angelus chortled. He kissed Lucius' sweaty throat. "Tell him that I'm not going to stop fucking him until he comes, and I'm not going to come first," he said.

Darla cocked her head to one side. "You do realize that you are speaking in German?"

"That's right," he said. "So, you better start thinking of something that's going to make you spill," he counseled Lucius, "I can fuck something this tight for hours," he slammed into Lucius again.

Dru's victim had passed out, and she prodded her a couple of times and sat up, pouting. "No toys for Dru," she whined, casting a longing look across the hall.

"Daddy will share, my darling," Angelus said to distract her. Contrary to William's thinking on the subject, Angelus had no real desire to see Willow turned yet, and Dru was a little dangerous after so much anticipation.

She clapped her hands delightedly, gracefully gliding off the bed. "May I Grandmummy?" she politely asked for Darla's permission

"Go ahead, Dru," Darla agreed.

To Lucius' amazement, this graceful, delicate, swanlike girl hooked her arms under his knees and pulled him off his feet. For the first time since he had been tied up the ache in his shoulders disappeared as the tension was relieved, and it looked completely effortless on her part.

"Mmmm, nice, Dru," Angelus purred, appreciating the change in the angle of penetration.

She stared into his eyes. "Be with me," she murmured softly, her head moving sinuously. "Be in my eyes," she invited. "Be in me," she breathed.

"What do you see, Princess?" Angelus asked.

Dru gave him a conspiratorial smile. "Grandmummy knows. She's ever so clever," she said. "No, cream for my tea," she said, part of some dialog only she was party to. She leaned forward and swirled her tongue around the head of Lucius' cock. He bucked and writhed in her grasp.

Across the hall, Willow was hoarsely begging William to fuck her. Darla smacked the riding crop over the boy's ribs, providing a mocking translation, while he babbled a litany of pleas for release, bucking up into Dru's mouth until he came with a violent shudder.

Angelus pumped himself into him once, twice, and came with a heartfelt groan on the third stroke. Dru dropped him with an air of 'my work is done' and licked her lips while Angelus steadied the boy until he was sort of on his feet, trails of blood and seminal fluids running down his legs.

Angelus slapped his ass. "You're a good fuck," he told him, biting into his shoulder.

Dru let her face change. "Treats for everyone, Grandmum," she declared, biting into his hip. Darla caressed his lax face, turning his head to the unmarked side and biting in.

Lucius had no idea, no real understanding, of the passing of time as he watched the dark haired man-Angelus-fuck Sofia's mouth. She had a look in that one eye, almost like she was startled, or that, perhaps there was something she wanted to say.

The two women and been rummaging through William's things, talking and laughing at him in the way woman laugh about their men. Age was relative. Drusilla looked and acted the youngest of them, a girl barely out of the schoolroom by the look of her, but from the way they spoke, it was clear that William was the youngest. The conversation drifted in and out of German. Angelus wanted them to speak in German.

He argued with Darla about that. "Don't teach them English," he said, again in German. "We speak German with the minions, and keep English for family business."

Admiration for this way of thinking flashed briefly in Lucius' mind.

"Can you believe all the things that boy has brought for her?" Darla asked. "He can't remember to have his stupid boots polished, but he buys sheet music for her? And-" she started laughing as she held up a seed pearl choker. "Anniversary present? Nothing but jewelry says thank you for being my whore for, what is it, nine years?"

"Eight," Angelus corrected. "Breath through your nose," he instructed Sofia.

Her stare remained unblinking, and desperate, pleading with Lucius, who was having a hard time thinking anything other than better you than me.

It had been quiet across the hall for some time now. The memory of those ardent, anguished, wanton moans and screams made Lucius squeeze his eyes closed as if he could crush his unwanted knowledge. But, when he closed his eyes, he got a mental picture of his mistress, sitting in the red leather chair near the fire in the library, her head thrown back in ecstasy her skirts pushed up past her knees, her legs over the arms of the chair while William fucked her. And she turned her head to see him watching her, smiling in her gentle way, unperturbed by her dishabille, saying "No cream for my tea."

That evil black haired bitch had done something to him to put such a picture in his head.

"Grandmummy," Dru wagged her finger at her. "Mustn't call my William's poppet bad names. She spins and dances in my head, singing lovely songs, all dressed in white like a sweet, darling dolly, with lace, and ruffles, and pink ribbons in her hair." She smacked her forehead repeatedly with the heel of her hand as Angelus grunted his way to a climax. His semen spilled from Sophia's gaping mouth.

"Take a break, slut," Angelus sneered at her. "You'll be on your knees sucking cock for a week the next time you fail to swallow every drop."

She gulped, rolled her head to one side, and vomited weakly on the carpet, making Angelus jump back in disgust. That was almost funny, and Lucius found himself wanting to laugh.

The bedroom door across the hall opened and William emerged. He had pulled his breaches on and a linen shirt that he hadn't bothered to button. He strolled in, looking around, his thumbs hooked in the waist of his pants. "All I have to say is, I'm not picking up after you," he warned them.

Angelus smirked, his mood restored. "It's your room," he pointed out.

"So? I don't have to stay in it," he reasoned, stepping around the slimy mess on the floor under Lucius to go to the dresser. He flipped open a silver box, removed a cheroot and flicked his fingernail over a match to light it, taking a deep drag. He turned around to lean against the dresser, running his hand over his bare chest, the picture of post-coital satisfaction.

"You know what you are?" Darla asked him.

"A good looking bloke?" he guessed.

"A walking cliché," she said, nastily. "What? No chocolate," she dangled the choker. "No armful of roses?"

He snapped his fingers. "Chocolate!" He frowned, looking around the unfamiliar room. "The thing about killing everyone after they have unpacked your luggage is that no one is alive to tell you where they stowed your stuff. Where the hell would someone put a box of chocolates?"

He raised an eyebrow at Darla. "You nosey bints have been pawing through my things, haven't you? Seen a box of chocolates? Its in a tin, about," he spread his hands apart, "this big. Cadbury," he specified.

"We were in Vienna and you bought nasty mass produced chocolate?" Darla looked at him like he had grown a second head.

"She likes the Cadbury, and it's the thought that counts," he retorted.

"No, its not," Darla assured him. "And, pearls? I thought pearls were for debutantes and matrons?"

"Where do you think I got it?" he asked, rolling his eyes. "Got to start killing women with better jewelry. Emeralds?" his eyes narrowed on Darla.

She sniffed, but gave him a grudging nod. "Better," she conceded.

Dru drifted towards the door, but William intercepted her, slinging his arm around her waist and burying his face in her hair. She stroked his hair and face. "Kitten's in a briar, gnawing and biting. Ribbons don't break," she said sagely.

William's facility for deciphering Dru's more obscure rambles was unmatched. "Kitten's sleeping, warm and cozy," he assured her.

"And safe?"

He kissed the palm of her hand tenderly, grateful again to her for even caring. Angelus and Darla never cared beyond how useful his lover was. "Safe as houses, my black beauty."

Her forehead came to rest against his. She seemed utterly unselfconscious about her nudity. "And we must always keep her safe. Miss Edith, and Miss Willow, for they are the most favorite to come and have tea and cakes with Princess."

William made as if he was going to bite her nose, and Dru giggled and swirled around him. "I feel alive," she declared, spinning until Angelus caught her to him and she cuddled against his chest.

Darla found the box of chocolates on the upper shelf of the wardrobe. "Cadbury," she called out her find.

"Oooh, you're a peach," William declared. She tossed the box to him. "Got a bit more smoothing over to do," he admitted.

"Go with the pearls," Angelus suggested, refraining from mocking the notion of making up with a mortal girl. Willow had passed the bounds of ordinary mortals a long time ago, and she was going to be one of them.

William's comment was calculated. It was a toe dipped into the bloodied waters to determine if blood lust had been sufficiently slaked to consider Willow off the menu, if she did leave her room. Not that he was planning to wake her up for a tour of a house full of dead bodies, but just in case she took a flier for the door. She kept him on his toes.

"The pearls?" William frowned. "Chocolate's the thing. She'll eat it. The pearls? She's just as likely to tell me to do something that is, physically impossible, or just damned uncomfortable, to myself, with them," he predicted. "She's gotten a bit a cheek on her over the last two months. I blame you," he told Angelus.

"You haven't rubbed off on her in the slightest," Darla offered slyly.

He shrugged. "Got the fists and fangs to back it up, which my lovely, sadly, lacks at the moment."

Dru's fingers circled one of Angelus' nipples as he played with her hair. She smiled. "I have such a lovely idea," she said with a pretty pout.

"What's that, Dru?" Angelus asked.

"Christmas Eve," she said. "We can have cakes and presents and pretty sparkles, and my William can make Miss Willow no more," she said, clapping her hands together, "and then" she said breathlessly, "on Christmas Day, she will be with us . . . like the Christ child. Our own sweet, Christmas-born childe."

The three other vampires stared at her, bemused at the imagery from the former novice.

"Sometimes I think that the church put as much of the bizarre in her head as either of you," William broke the silence.

"Hmmm. Without the disturbing religious imagery, it isn't a bad idea," Darla conceded.

Angelus grinned. "You just want to avoid a repeat of the Christmas Eve caroler massacre," he accused. It was one of William's more spectacular bloodlettings, and Angelus had let himself be talked into joining in.

"Should have gotten a bloody medal for that. Public service, we were performing. They were butchering the Carol of the Bells, and I rather fancy that one."

Dru started humming it.

"Oh, hell," Angelus glared at him. "Now look what you've started. You can just take yourself off and cuddle up with your bed warmer, but we'll be listening to this for hours."

William just laughed and looked around. "So? What's good to eat? I'm feeling a bit peckish." he eyed the boy, who was sporting several different sets of bite marks. "I think I'll pass on the mobile, if no one objects, and have a spot of . . . this sorry leftover," he gestured to the girl.

Being William, he didn't bother to wait for anyone to object.

~Part: 7~

Willow wasn't asleep. As soon as he left the bed, she woke up, but she lay without moving, hearing the muffled sound of voices. The candles had been extinguished, probably after she fell asleep, held against William's chest, his hand gently stroking her back.

She wanted to get out of the bed, and she desperately wanted a bath. The house had hot and cold running water, water closets, and two baths on the second floor. One was a part of the master bedroom suite that Darla and Angelus would share. The other bathroom was between her room and Drusilla's, with access from either bedroom.

William had warned her against leaving the bed earlier, and she wasn't sure if that injunction still held. He could be forgetful about things like that. When he said she walked a fine line, the sarcastic voice in her head responded with an unladylike snort. She was sore and sticky and the room reeked of sex, and sweat, making her nose wrinkle. She was also hungry and thirsty. Painfully so. The ache in the pit of her stomach was competing with the ache between her legs.

She hoped her stomach would win. The ache between her legs reminded her of what they had done. Not that it was anything new, or different, or worse than anything else, it was just . . . she'd been alone for a while. Scared alone, and lonely alone, and no sex alone. Not even masturbation, though she had been tempted more than once to give herself an orgasm, especially on those nights that she couldn't sleep and she knew that an orgasm would allow her to relax enough to sleep.

There was a little game William used to play with her. It had been a while since they had done it. Basically, he would talk her through an orgasm. It always started the same way. He'd say in a teasing, tempting tone of voice, 'touch your lips' and after the first few times, it always made her wet. She frowned in the dark, bringing her fingers to her dry lips, trying to remember it.

There are always happier things to remember . . .

Touch your lips, her lips formed the words silently.

'Lick your fingertips,' her tongue was like cotton wool.

She smoothed her fingers over the pillowcase, playing with the starchy Battenburg lace. She thought if she pulled her knees up the ache in her stomach might subside a little. She tried it, and gasped.

The muscles in her thighs were still mushy. The weakness was connected to the way they had fucked . . .

She had been on her knees, trying to keep her shoulders off the bed because she had no leverage without them, and he was barely moving at all, except to run his hands over her skin and play with her clit until she was on the verge of an orgasm, and then he'd stop, which had only made her try harder, to make herself come, or to make him let her come, or to make him stop fucking her like it was a contest.

She'd used her body. Fucking him as hard as she could, tightening her abdominal muscles to squeeze his cock. She had begged. She had vocalized every sensation until she was hoarse and lightheaded from lack of breath. She had even cried towards the end when she felt herself tiring on that precipice of arousal and need that he kept pushing her towards and then backing off from. She was starting to wonder if she could have an orgasm at that point. She was just so tired.

Then, finally, he had pushed her head down into the mattress, holding her there with his hand on the back of her neck, fucking her hard, his finger's pinching and twisting her clit until she came, soundlessly, tears rolling down her face.

Then he had been tender and gentle, kissing her tears away, whispering in her ear how he had missed her and how well she had done, and how proud he was of her and how beautiful she was, until she fell asleep.

The bedroom door opened and stayed that way for a moment before he closed it. She heard him moving around in the room, but she kept her eyes closed. Something landed on the bed with a thump near her back, followed by his voice.

"I know that you are awake. Don't pretend."

He sounded edgy, he was pacing. She could hear him. "How long have you been awake?" he asked.

She didn't dare lie. She opened her eyes. "Since you got up."

He sat on the bed beside her, his fingers drumming on something metal, and hollow, near her back. She gingerly rolled over, rubbing her stomach.

"Were you listening to us?" he asked. "You don't lie very well, so don't even think about it, just answer me."

She was confused and more than a little frightened. "No," she said. "Is anyone still-" her throat refused to cooperate, clamping shut.

He grabbed her shoulders, yanking her upright, shaking her. "Tell me the truth Willow before I get angry and I do something that I'll regret later."

"I was just lying here, thinking, and I wasn't eavesdropping on you," she got out.

"Thinking about what?"

"Lots of things, like . . . being alone, and then not, and us, and," she knew wasn't making sense. "And, when you'd say, 'touch your lips' and-"

"What?" she was babbling, and strangely, since he could usually make out most of Dru's rambles, Willow's were harder to unravel.

She felt the color creeping up in her cheeks, and damned herself for being so easily flustered by him. "You used to do this thing," she mumbled, "talking to me, telling me how to touch myself."

He stared at her for a moment, trying to figure out what she was talking about, replaying her words in his head. A slow grin appeared. "Ohhhh. Touch your lips," his hands relaxed on her shoulders. "That was a fun game."

When he realized that she was awake, he had wondered how much she might have overheard. There was no telling how she would react to a family conference about turning her. She might expect it, but she sometimes had a hard time coming to terms with the harsher aspects of the reality of her existence, so he rather doubted it. He was afraid that it would set her back on the road of finding some way to kill herself, armed with a hell of a lot more useful knowledge about how to kill herself in ways that would make it impossible for her to be brought back.

He had kind of made a joke of it earlier, but the truth was that he had missed her desperately and spent most of his evenings getting pissed, and his long, dull days all too mindful of the huge space she occupied in his un-life. Without Willow to talk to and play with, he was stuck with Darla, Angelus and Dru. He had a childe-sire bond with Dru, but with Dru, Angelus came first and last, and he was wedged in on the margins.

He didn't resent her for it. She could barely cope, and coddling him was never in the cards. Angelus was another story. He had resentments that had mated and spawned antipathy, bitterness, and bile where Angelus was concerned. Which had sod all to do with the fact that he'd follow him to hell and back. Angelus and Darla weren't half bad, about half the time, but their spats tended to have a lot of spill over, and he had always been able to take himself off to shag his girl, or take her out for a few hours, just the two of them, to get away from it.

He missed her voice, and her warm, tight little body curled up next to him, and little things, like brushing her hair, or watching her take a bath. He had missed eavesdropping on her tea parties with Dru. He even missed Angelus doing his Pygmalion thing with her, talking about books-which was mostly Angelus telling her what she was supposed to think.

She just satisfied some unnamed craving in him, like nothing and no one else.

And he could have un-lived just fine without knowing that, thank you very much, Angelus. If it hadn't been for that prick's interference, he might not be sitting here right now worrying about the stupid things she could do to herself if he didn't turn her before she realized that was on the schedule for Christmas, after the opening of presents and the wassail. Dru would, he knew, insist on the wassail. Maybe a plum pudding, too.

Christmas? It was nine months away. He couldn't wait that long.

"Will?" her voice was so small and soft. "Are you still mad at me?"

There was a tremor in her voice that made him feel sad. "No, baby," he sighed. "I hate sodding trains. All that noise, and then the quiet. Puts me on edge is all," he scooted her closer, so he could hold her and kiss her.

Her lips were puffy and dry. He lifted his head. "You must be thirsty," he said.

"And hungry," she nodded, her cheek rubbing his chest. "And," her nose wrinkled, "stinky."

He laughed at that. "Want I should draw a bath for you? Find you some decent food and something to drink?"

"I can manage the bath part," she said. "You don't have to do things for me," she said awkwardly. She knew he took a lot of crap from Angelus about spoiling her.

"I like doing things for you, Willow, my Willow," he said, kissing her forehead. "Go on, make yourself smell like a bower for me, and I'll find some food for you," he picked up the box of chocolates. "Got some chocolate for you. Cadbury? You like those, right? Darla said--"

She turned in his arms, flinging hers around his neck and hugging him, hard. "My favorite," she said tightly, passionately, sounding like she was going to start crying again.

"Alright, then," he was more moved than he'd admit under torture. "Anything for my girl," he said, rubbing her back when she didn't let go of him. "Sweetheart?" he could feel her trembling.

She pressed her lips against his throat, which given that her lips were kind of dry, actually felt kind of unpleasant, but he kept that to himself and hugged her back. She practically crawled up his body to get closer.

"I didn't mean it when I said that I hated you," she whispered.

He slid his arms up between their bodies, forcing her to relax her death grip on him so he could meet her eyes. "You meant it when you said. You always do, and," he shrugged. "That's all it is. No more tears and sadness tonight?" his eyebrows lifted questioningly. "Rather have you knee me in the balls than start with the crying again."

She went from puzzled, to curious, to amused in a matter of seconds. "I'll keep that in mind," she told him.

He gave her neck a light squeeze. "You don't leave this room without me. I'll tell you when that changes."

Her gaze drifted downward. "You'll forget," she predicted with a small smile.

She was probably right about that. "Go," he shoo'd her, making her shriek when he thoughtlessly slapped her sore ass.

He winced inwardly. Oops. She scampered into, what he assumed was a bathroom and he got to up again to go look for food.

The unholy trinity were back at it with the boy who was getting what was, given the mess on the floor, a second or third buggering from Angelus. Poor Darla. Her boy would fuck anything moving, and sometimes not moving. He wouldn't be surprised if the maid he left dead wasn't violated some more before she woke. Angelus had some kink about wanting to fuck 'em as they were awakening. Sick bastard.

He quietly slipped past the door and down the stairs, getting a look at the carnage. Someone been a messy eater. The dining room looked like an abattoir. William mentally put a quid on Dru and started looking for a kitchen, getting the lay of the ground floor in the process. There was a nice, cozy library across the hall from the living room. He sniffed, processing the odors in the room. It was a given that Willow spent a good bit of time in here, but her scent was strongest around a red leather chair that looked very much like something Angelus would consider his throne and at the far end of the room where there was nothing but shelves of books.

He sniffed again. Her scent was stronger . . . on the other side of the bookcase? How did that work? He walked out to the hall and tried the next door. Smallish room with a curving wall on the library side. Behind the curving wall, which didn't quite meet the outer wall, there was a nice little bar and a humidor. His thoughtful darling had made sure he had a room to smoke in, maybe lounge in one of the comfortable looking armchairs, and . . .

He reentered the alcove and reconsidered its dimensions before tapping on the wainscoted wall to his left. Hollow as a drum. Interesting. He'd have to do some more exploring, he decided. Tomorrow. For the time being Willow was stuck in her room. It wouldn't do to have her wandering around with a lot of hungry fledges around until they got the pecking order drilled into them.

He found the kitchen and started rummaging around for food, of which there was plenty. He loaded a plate with an apple, cheese, bread, and what looked like a custard tart with blackberries. He found two more bottles of the wine she had been drinking earlier in the icebox and took one. With these provisions, headed up the back stairs where the buggering was still in progress judging from the pained grunts and groans he was hearing.

And, oh, my, it wasn't just the footman getting buggered. Darla's snooping had uncovered a marble dildo he had picked up in Vienna. It wasn't particularly large or long. He'd gotten to use in Willow's ass since she got so hot when he fingered her ass, but she'd never really adjusted to him fucking her there. It was just too painful for her. A little pain and domination got her hot, too much and the discomfort distracted her. Now it was getting christened in Mr. High and Mighty. William smirked to himself, in complete charity with Darla at the moment, despite her appropriation of his toys. Tucking the wine bottle under his arm, he quietly let himself in, making sure to lock the door before he took his finds into the bathroom.

He was a little disappointed to find that she had already washed her hair. Probably over the side of the tub before she let it fill. She had a white towel wrapped around her wet hair and was soaking, one arm on the lip of the tub, the other, the one he had nearly broken, soaking in the water. The glass was all smashed to hell from when he had dropped it and he had forgotten to uncork the wine. He swore softly under his breath, not wanting to disturb her.

"What's wrong?" she asked.

"No cork screw and I broke the wine glass," he told her. "S'not a problem. Just relax," he said.

"Lucius-" she stopped. "There is one on the mantel, I think," she said, "And I can drink from a bottle."

'Lucius' William mimicked in his head, going back to the bedroom and finding a piece of the broken wineglass when he stepped on it. He ignored the minor injury and located the corkscrew in a little metal frame on the mantel. He went back to the bathroom and uncorked the bottle.

"Room enough for me, in there?" he asked.

"I guess so," she moved around until she was in the middle of the tub and he got in, sitting against the higher end of the tub. "Running hot and cold water?" he guessed. "Darla will be pleased. She carried on something fierce about Prague. The back of beyond, and so forth," he elaborated as she sorted through a basket of soaps that had a home on a small ledge in the wall.

"This one is nice," she said. "Sandalwood," She held it out for him to smell.

His hand closed on her wrist to tug her back against his chest, and her lips clamped shut in a grimace before he realized the he was pulling on her sore wrist. He immediately dropped it.

She blinked a couple of times, taking a few quick breaths as she soaped a washcloth.

"Stop that," he jerked his chin back in a 'come here' gesture. He opened his legs to make room for her, "lay back against me," he said when she moved in a confused way trying to wash him. "I just want a nice coze, hmm? Got your wine, and there's food, behind me on the sink. Though, I don't suppose I can reach it, can I? Well, bloody hell," he cursed.

"I'm thirsty," she reminded him, settling against him.

He wrapped one arm around her, and settled on of his legs so it was over her thigh, his foot braced on the bottom of the tub near hers to keep from putting his weight on her leg. He tilted the bottle for her, mindful of her sore wrist, and his arm slipped on the wet porcelain, making the bottle hit her front teeth, sloshing wine down her chin.

She started giggling, and then moaned. "Oooh, don't make me laugh. It makes my tummy hurt," she said, moving his arm and pressing his hand into her tender abdomen.

He massaged her sore abdomen, glad that she was amused. "That isn't hunger," he told her dryly. "That's from you trying to squeeze my cock right off."

"I think I can manage the bottle," she said diplomatically, trying not to feel embarrassed, which was sort of like trying to ignore the elephant in the room. She drank from the bottle greedily, her parched mouth and throat soothed by the coolness of the wine.

"Gently. Slow down, love," he counseled. It was never the same, the way she took things. Right now she was like a child, refusing to look or listen at something bad. Her voice was still a little high, a little edgy.

"Thirsty," she paused to say, casting him a sideways look. "Did you like it?"

He smirked. "You have to ask? You're a marvel. You blush like a virgin, and shag like a Goddess. I loved it."

"But . . . not so much," she said quietly. "Not enough to . . ."

"Come?" he prompted. "Is that what you are saying? I told you, love, I've been in a bit of a mood. Settle down, and drink your wine, and let me hold you," he kissed the side of her head.

~~~*~~~

Lucius was still alive when William got up near noon the next day. Barely alive. The brown haired Englishman hardly spared him a glance as he strolled into his room, muttering to himself in English.

He stripped off the half buttoned breeches and unbuttoned shirt, unconcerned with his nakedness. Lucius couldn't stir himself to protest. In a bizarre way, it made sense to him that there would be this one thing that he would share with his mistress. Her lover, and this man, this monster, was unmistakably, her lover, would rape him with the same organ that had made her cry out in supplication and pleasure.

He understood it.

But the Englishman was intent on nothing more than changing his clothes. The soiled clothing from the finished day was casually heaped on the ground. He donned a fresh blouse, stepped into a pair of long trousers, pulled on a pair of dark socks. He brushed his hair hastily, pulling on it without regard for anything but getting the worst of the disorder under control. When he was satisfied with this he turned away from the wardrobe, pausing when something caught his eye.

It was the pearl choker. He picked it up where it lay, forgotten the floor, and he walked over to a chair, pulling it away from the wall, turning the back of the chair to Lucius and straddling it like a common day laborer at a pub. He let the choker slip through his fingers, rubbing the small, perfectly matched pearls bracketed at intervals by thin white gold bars that caught what little bit of light had filtered in to let Lucius know that it was now day.

For hours now, he had waited for that door to open. He wanted to see her face. He wanted to know what all of this meant to her. He was past wanting to hurt her, or wanting to ask her. He just wanted to see her face, see the meaning of it in her sad and lovely eyes.

The Englishman cocked his head to one side. He couldn't read minds, but he could read faces and the direction eyes drifted in. "It will never happen," he told him, speaking German now. "She thinks that what she imagines is so much worse than what it actually is, but . . . that isn't true. So, she'll stay behind that door until I say otherwise. And all of this," he gestured around him, "Will be put to rights. It's easier for her," his gaze drifted down to the soiled carpet. "And, that's one thing I can give her."

He held up the pearl chocker, admiring the way the light played on this. "I killed an eighteen year old girl for this because I thought it might suit her. The things that I would do to you, if you ever fail me or mine, will pale in comparison to what you understand about suffering. That includes her. Especially her. If you remember nothing else, remember that," he said.

Lucius wasn't sure why he was telling him these things unless he meant him to live. There was one thing he had to know, because it might explain everything.

"Is she," his voice was thin, raspy, and speaking hurt. His throat was raw. He tried again, "Is she what you are?"

His smile was almost indulgent. "Vampire, is what I am, and no, she's as mortal as you are."

Knowing it hurt more than he could ever have imagined. For him, this was one night, for her, nights beyond counting.

William watched the tears form and fall. More weeping. What? Did he have some kind of sign hanging around his neck inviting people to weep down his shirtfront? At least Lucius was neat about it. They were neat, manly tears. No sobbing. William decided to let it go for now, and leaned back, turning his head until he heard the satisfying crack of vertebrae realigning.

"Well, now, we do have a spot of business," he told him. "You'd be the man in charge of seeing to things around here, right? What's she been taking for breakfast?" he asked.

Lucius frowned at him, watching him play with the choker and wait with what appeared to be growing impatience.

"Were you following along? Because I won't stand for her being neglected because you can't get her breakfast tray. What do I bring her?"

Lucius gave himself a mental shake. "Dry toast, fruit, and tea," he said hoarsely.

He gestured for Lucius to continue. "Luncheon, supper, go on, man. She's going to go on eating after breakfast."

He found himself reciting her routine after a few more sharp questions, providing details about her preferences and needs. It wasn't an exhaustive recitation. She was fairly undemanding, but he found that he wanted her to have this. To have someone who at least knew that a sprig of fresh basil with her supper chased away her headaches from reading, and that she loved cut flowers, but wasn't picky about the kind of flowers. Violets and forget-me-nots, and heather pleased her as much as roses and orchids, that she liked her tea, very sweet, lukewarm, and to steep a clove with the tealeaves, because she liked the scent.

"I'm impressed," William told him when he was finished. "You noticed all these things. I've had her for eight years, and . . ." he sighed. "I suppose it's a matter of paying attention. She likes chocolate," he told him. "You missed that. It's probably her favorite thing after a good book, and-" he grinned boyishly, "other things," he said with unmistakable meaning.

He rose, holding up the pearls. "What do you think? I know they'd look lovely on her. She has such a pretty throat. Do you think they suit? Do you think she'll like them?"

"Y-yes, Both," he managed to say.

William pocketed the pearls, walking over to where the strong cord securing Lucius' wrists was tied. He unknotted it and let the line play out slowly. He had been standing on his toes so long that Lucius didn't realize how much the ropes had been supporting him and he collapsed in the floor, too exhausted to care what he was lying in.

William did care, and gave him a hard kick to get him to crawl a few feet away. "Just changed clothes, so, I'll be neat about it," he said, shoving Lucius head to one side. His fangs bit deep and hard and he drew the last of this life out of him in hungry draughts. Dying, his heart shuddering, Lucius watched as William tore open his wrist.

"This makes you mine," he said. "Like her, only considerably less important to me," he said as his blood dribbled over Lucius's lips.

The taste in his dry mouth was indescribable. His tongue weakly lapped at his bloodied mouth. It was the last thing he remembered.

~Part: 8~

It was dusk when Dru joined them in bed, sliding between the sheets, facing Willow who was sleeping on her side, William's arm holding against his side.

He had brought Willow breakfast and a few books to read before going off on his own to explore the house. It took him three hours and he had been about to resort to brute force, but he figured out the little trick with library wall. The end section of shelves was on a pivot and all it took was to disengage the catch to swing it open to reveal a curving stair down.

The chamber below was probably the original wine cellar. It wasn't a cozy setting, but it was cool and dry. He found several lanterns, candles, and few packing crates stacked on their sides to serve as shelves for books, or storage for the expected assortment of stinky herbs.

It was a private study. He wasn't sure what he expected. Maybe an exit strategy. A store laid in for when she bolted for good, because the next time Willow ran, he was certain that she would have learned from her mistakes in the past and be ready, with money that wouldn't be missed until far too late, documents, and plans.

She'd gotten away from him once for six weeks in London only to be found in a lunatic ward, ironic given that he and Dru had sprung her, with Dru claiming to be her sister while William claimed to be Dru's husband. Very put upon, what with the insanity clearly running in the family. The daft bint unwittingly lent veracity to their story by blurting Dru's name out.

In Berlin, she had coolly walked through the gates of the American Embassy before he even realized that she was no longer a step behind him. The whole step behind him business being another one of Angelus' daft injunctions after Willow joined their happy home. If Angelus had his way, she would have been crawling around on all fours with a collar around her neck so the other vampires would get the hint. William was convinced that the older vampire made half his precious vampire etiquette up. If he wanted to have someone crawling after him, he'd get a damned dog.

Not all of the undead were terribly brilliant. Intellect seemed to play a virtually non-existent role when it came to selecting minions or true childer. Nonetheless, only the newest of the newborns wouldn't recognize a claim, and his scent was all over Willow. A fresh bite mark on her pretty throat and the fact that she was breathing pretty much said back the fuck off to the undead that valued their unlives, without a lot of ridiculous twaddle about her having to walk behind him in public and keep her eyes to the floor, and address everyone as Master or Mistress, and generally be treated like nothing but a convenience to fuck and feed on.

Because, he could get either commodity without keeping it alive, thank you.

He paced the small room, chewing on the inside of his cheek as he tried to decide if he should confront her about this, or let her think she had preserved her little secret. If he should tell Angelus or Darla, or both-no point bringing Dru in on it. He needed to get to the bottom of what she was up to. It could be something fairly innocent, but when Willow was her most innocuous, she was usually up to something. Still, it wouldn't do to discount the possibility that she was hiding her witchy activities from the humans, who might go tattling to the church or the civil authorities.

His eyes scanned the room again. If she showed him the room, it was most likely that she was hiding this from the servants. If she didn't show him the room, the most innocent explanation was that she wanted a truly private space to herself. The alternative was that she was exploring the dark arts for a means of escape, defense, or attack. He was putting his money on the former. Her instincts had always run to flight.

After he left the secret room, he did some more poking around the house. Angelus had joined him, looking for the wine cellar, checking out the dungeon prospects in the adjoining cellars like the big freak he was. They wound up in the kitchen where Angelus lounged around, sipping burgundy and pontificating on his softness while William made soup and cut a quarter of a loaf of bread into neat slices that were piled with wafer thin roast beef. There was also ham.

"She's Jewish," William said when he found the ham.

"Huh?" Angelus responded as if this were a non sequitur.

"Wil-low," William pronounced her name slowly. Ponce. Angelus had been rattling on about her for a painful half an hour. Who the bloody fuck did he think they were talking about?

"She's Jewish," he repeated. "Jews don't eat the flesh of . . . pigs," he said, thinking that it was something more elaborate than just pig, but the ham came from pig, so close enough. "The majordomo character waxed on a good bit about what m'lady fancies. 'Warm foods at luncheon, such as a soup with a cream base, and a few slices of bread with meat. Cook keeps it in the icebox, very thinly sliced'" William mimicked. "Jesus bleeding Christ! And he doesn't know that she loves chocolate and she won't eat ham."

"Should have left the bastard dead," he grumbled.

"Willow is Jewish?" Angelus was having a hard time absorbing that. "How is it that I didn't know that? Oh, and Lucius? Stay out of Darla's way for a few days. She was very put out about that."

"Who is spoilt?" William asked pointedly.

"She's my sire, and she's old," Angelus pointed out. "Willow is human. Do I really have to explain the difference to you?"

"My sire is a woman, too, and by virtue of siring, automatically older," William laid a slice a bread on top of the meat the way he had seen Willow do more times than he could count. "I figure it works better that way. If you have to suck up to someone, might as well be someone with nicer parts to suck on."

"Willow's still human," Angelus drawled.

"Still has my favorite set of parts," William countered. "I'm a simple bloke. I make no bones about it. Out there," he gestured to the wider world. "It's see, want, take, and if someone beats me to it or beats me to get it . . . so be it. There's always another day. But, here? I can put a bit of effort into keeping my girls happy."

Angelus stared at him for a moment. "You really did miss her, didn't you? I thought you were just sulking because it was my idea."

William returned his stare. "What of it?"

Angelus gave a lazy shrug. "Has it ever occurred to you that you've never killed her, turned her," he made a circular motion with the glass, acknowledging that there was never any real question of it being otherwise, "because you don't want to."

"Uh . . . no. If I wanted her dead, she'd be in the ground. If I wanted her turned, she'd be sleeping off a heavy meal. I'll do it. I just don't want to do it now."

"Why?"

He stirred the soup. Like the thinly sliced roast beef, it had been in the icebox in a ceramic bowl covered with a lid. He tasted it to make sure it was soup and not some sauce masquerading as soup. Tasted like soup. He tasted it again. "What the fuck is this? It tastes like a fat lot of nothing in particular."

Angelus sniffed, sampling the cooking smells. "Leek," he said firmly.

"And a leek is?"

"Vegetable. Similar to onion." Angelus refilled his glass. "Going to answer my question?"

"Nope. I said I do it for Christmas, so-" William chuckled, struck by a new thought. "Now, this is oddly appropriate. I'm going to turn a Jew on Christmas Eve to be raised on Christmas Day. I like that. It has a blasphemous kind of charm."

"When are you going to tell her?"

"She'll get the message when I'm draining her."

Angelus nodded. "I think that is wise," he approved. "It will only frighten her. Might make her do something to try to avoid it."

William looked for a bowl for the soup. "Speaking of which," he decided that it was now or never. "There's a small cellar under the library you should look at. Looks like my girl's been doing some of her witchy stuff down there. There are books and the usual magical folderol, all very neat and tidy."

"Have you asked her about it?" Angelus asked.

"Going to see if she spills."

He poured the soup into the bowl as Angelus hopped down from the counter he was perched on and picked up a pot of herbs. "Fresh chives," he explained, sprinkling some on the soup.

"Which tells you, what?" Angelus returned to the topic of Willow.

"If she's hiding from humans or if she's hiding something from us."

Proving once again that there was a devious mind behind the 'I'm a simple bloke' façade William liked to play at.

~~~*~~~

William opened his eyes, resting his chin on top of his lover's head. Her heart was beating slow and steady, which meant she was sleeping deeply. He offered Dru a slow smile.

"Hello, beautiful," he whispered, his eyes shining with love and admiration.

Dru returned his smile, gently lifting a long, curling lock of Willow's hair to rub between her fingers. "Dolly is sleeping?"

He moved the arm around Willow's waist to catch Dru's hand and bring it to rest lightly over his sleeping lover's heart, wondering if she would understand. There was a moment of clarity in her eyes, and then it was gone before she could process it. "Miss Edith is not noisy, and she is awake," she pouted.

"Miss Edith spent her evening quietly, I suspect," William kept his voice low. Willow shifted a bit next to him, her hand moving restlessly until she found his arm and then she made a soft, disgruntled sound. He resettled his arm around her waist, rubbing slow circles against her stomach.

Dru wasn't above pinching or screaming to wake Willow up when she wanted her company, and normally he wouldn't try to dissuade his sire. "Dru? You know when you are having one of your days when the stars are spinning and you can't hear for everything they are whispering all at once, and your head-"

"Hurts," she frowned at him for making her think of such things. "Bad William."

Bad William could precede a pout, a sulk, or a fight. He gathered himself, ready to get Willow out of the combat zone if Dru showed some claw.

"Sometimes it is like that for her, too, my darling," he whispered. "Not the same, but as terrible and she's not as strong as we are."

Dru considered this for a moment, her fingers gently stroking the skin over Willow's heart. "Poor, poppet," she breathed. "I can smash and bash and fill my head with lovely screams and make it all better."

William kissed the top of Willow's head. "She can't. It makes her head hurt and her chest ache, and she needs sleep and soft words? Soft hands?"

Dru kissed Willow's forehead. "There, there," she offered, looking at William to see if she was doing this right.

"I love you," he breathed, looking at her like she was something wonderful.

"Do you love Miss Willow, my William?," she touched her lips to Willow's forehead. "No. That's silly," she realized. "Sometimes I like to pretend that she will be our's, forever and always," she said, careful to add. "I know that she is your's my darling boy, but . . . you will always be mine, and you'll share her with me? Always? Dru, William, and sometimes-our Willow?"

"Not Miss Willow?" Dru rarely spoke of Willow as if she were a person rather than a doll.

"Miss Willow, for now," she acknowledged.

The little twists and turns in her mind were fascinating. The mortal creature in his arms was Miss Willow, and Willow was the creature she would become after he sired her. It reminded him of his aborted experiment with creating another identity for himself in a nom de guerre. Darla and Angelus had refused to indulge his insistence on being called Spike and for a couple of months they had fought over it, and then Willow came along, and he sort of forgot about it.

She cuddled closer to them and Willow roused enough to slip her arm around Dru's waist, her cheek coming to rest on the upper swell of her breast. Dru accepted the change in position with a smile, her graceful hands stroking Willow's hair and skin as she cooed to her.

Oh, no. That won't wake her up, William thought, twisting at the waist to pick up one of the two cheroots that he had carried over from his room. There were times when Willow slept like a rock, through the worst weather, and the noisiest forms of transportation. Dru had taken the initiative to gather more of Willow against her and was busy dropping soft, closed mouth kisses in her hair, and against her temple. He watched Dru's hand moving beneath the sheet, over Willow's waist, her hip, her leg, nearly down to her knee. Dru's arms were unusually long. Not freakishly so, she was nearly his height and long limbed and she moved like one of the ballet dancers they saw in Paris might if it were natural and not some studied idea of grace.

He smiled as he watched them. Dru had slipped one of her legs between Willow's before her hand moved back up. Her hand cupped Willow's breast. William noticed the barely perceptible change in her heart rate. She gave a spare shake of her head, pressing her cheek against Dru's chest, making a dry, kissing sound as she fought to stay asleep.

William and Dru's eyes met. Dru's eyes had a wicked, conspiratorial gleam to them. With both hands, she lifted Willow's head, careful not to pull on it or jar her awake and he uncoiled the arm he had been pillowing his head on. Dru re-arranged Willow's head to rest on his upper arm and he curled it around her, laying his hand possessively on her neck. The change in position gave Dru unimpeded access to her breasts. Her cool tongue traced a red mark in Willow's skin from a wrinkle in the sheets that went all the way down to the nipple of the breast that had been slightly under her as she slept.

Dru took her nipple into her mouth, sucking, her tongue moving in circles around the hardening nipple. Not even Willow at her sleepiest could stay asleep, and William felt her heart pick up speed as she woke, abruptly, her body tensing with a little more than wakefulness. His thumb, nestled under her ear, moved against her skin to let her know that she was still with him. Dru's mouth opened wider, taking more of her breast into her mouth. She stayed still. It wasn't that unusual for Dru to join them in bed and she preferred Willow to be the passive participant in their bed play.

As unfixed as Dru was she was rigid in her relationships. With her precious Daddy and Darla, she was the passive one, her eyes reflecting her need for them to notice her, pay attention to her. Hurt her. Between him and Dru things were more on an even keel. He had been a virgin when she turned him. For months after she had been like a woman he was courting, with the surety of sex. They had been as close, in his mind as any married couple. She had done things, shown him things, that had shocked and delighted him, but she hadn't made him feel like he was anything but her equal.

Then Darla had gone off on one of her mysterious trips, and he had discovered that Dru wasn't his, by her own choice. He'd taken one of the worst beatings of his life from Angelus and lay on the ground unable to move for hours as Angelus put on a demonstration not a dozen feet away.

She became slightly, but decidedly dominant when Willow was in bed with them. Her free hand moved up to cup the other breast, her fingers finding the nipple and pinching it playfully while William kept gently stroking her throat with his thumb, reminding her to be still.

For Willow's part she wasn't precisely confused about what was happening, or even surprised, and a very long time ago she stopped trying to determine what she felt about it since her feelings were of no concern to anyone but William, and even that wasn't a certainty. He had been very solicitous today, but she recognized it as a mood, and William's moods never lasted very long-at least the ones she processed as pleasant did not. She had never been slow to wake. William was, and he tended to be grouchy when woken abruptly-the only caveat to that was when he woke up and had something to vent his temper on.

During one of their sojourns in Spain, questions had arisen about the odd family that occupied the second floor of the inn. Strange, unexplained deaths and disappearances had mounted up. Whispers of strange sounds in the night. Darla had done her usual thing when they reached that town in Catalonia. She made a point of going to mass, heavily veiled, with Willow as her companion, in the evenings. She and Angelus dined with the mayor, the few prominent merchants, and the backcountry hidalgos. It tended to ensure that they had more time and even some warning before it became necessary to move off.

This was one of the public faces of the family. Angelus was the patriarch, and Darla was his wife. Drusilla was usually passed off as Angelus' sister, her apparent madness a topic that was made off limits by a subtle show of offence or a freezing look. William was more often than not passed off as Darla's brother, and Willow, depending on the mood or necessity of anyone even knowing she existed, was shuffled into whatever role appealed at the moment.

The attack had come at dusk, which was the first mistake that the towns people made. They were keeping vampire hours, the second floor of the inn tightly shuttered through the heat of the day, which actually was not so remarkable. They were looking for a girl and a boy who had disappeared the previous night, and it was almost funny, but it was not a disappearance that Darla, Angelus, Dru, or William were remotely connected to, they later determined. Darla and Angelus thought it was something William had done, since he had a talent for killing the wrong people.

When their bedroom door was kicked in he was instantly awake, dragging her out of the bed and pushing her into a corner behind him. The odd thing was that he didn't seem angry. When you kill people with your bare hands, there's a presumption of anger, but he seemed exhilarated, and happy, like someone had thrown a surprise party for him. Angelus had been coldly furious. After the first wave had been cut through with deadly efficiency, he had been in the hallway, dressing, and shouting orders to get the minions hunting the town.

"When you run out of bodies on the streets, start burning them out," he ordered, effectively neutralizing the lack of invitation.

William felt her shudder, and wondered what that was about. She wasn't keen on crawling into bed with Darla or Angelus, a fact that they were aware of and took a certain amount of enjoyment in, so she was careful not to let anything show in her face, completely unaware that her wary detachment gave her away. She wasn't standoffish with Dru, though. The fact that Dru took to her, and that she had a calming influence on his sire was the first thing that he noticed about her beyond the obvious lure of her body. He kissed the top of her head, and went back to his cheroot while Dru fondled her.

Maybe it was the two months on her own, putting ideas into the too fertile soil of her busy little brain. If Dru wanted to dress her up in doll clothes, have her little tea parties, fuck her silly, or just about anything short of killing her, he'd not only allow it, he would actively participate, and if she needed a reminder of that, she was on the verge of getting one.

"I thought you wanted Miss Willow for a tea party, my love," he drawled.

Dru's mouth clamped around the breast she was suckling as she drew back, tugging on the nipple that left her lips with a wet sound. She snapped her teeth in a playful bite that made Willow flinch. He crushed out the cheroot in a saucer on the bedside table.

Smelling the fear that had sharpened her scent, Dru's hand drew back from the other breast, hovering like a cobra about the strike. She flicked her long fingers at Willows face with a growl that he interpreted as playful, and then giggled delightedly at her flinch, before gently patting Willow's cheek.

"I've thought of other games to play," she told William, her fingers exploring Willow's face. She cocked her head to one side. "Miss Edith's eyes are ever so much prettier than hers, but not so naughty." She tapped on the end of Willow's nose. "You were naughty. Spoiling William's fun," her smiling became knowing, "Sometimes I'm naughty, and Daddy makes me scream."

She ground her leg between Willow's thighs and pinched one of her nipples hard enough to make the girl's lips part in a soundless gasp of pain.

Dru attacked her lips, sucking, biting, her tongue pushing into her mouth forcefully, her hand molding the breast she was fondling, her thumb teasing the hard nipple, pinching, tugging lightly as she kissed her voraciously, driving the back of her head into William's shoulder. His semi erect cock hardened as Dru's leg rocked against her rhythmically, driving Willow's hips back against his body. His free hand moved over Dru's side, reveling in the coldness of her skin in contrast to Willow's warmth. He gave her ass a hard smack to get her attention when he felt Willow struggling to breath.

"Dru?" he said dryly.

She abruptly stopped kissing Willow, who sucked in a couple of hard breaths.

"She has to breathe, darling," he reminded her, rubbing his cheek against his lover's hair. It was soft from being so recently washed and smelled of vanilla.

Dru smiled impishly. "Oops," she said. "I got carried away."

He eyed her damp, red lips. God, she was gorgeous. "You carry me away, my love."

She levered herself up to reach his lips. The changing angle of Dru's leg between Willow's thighs made her close her eyes at the unexpected stab of arousal. Dru's long hair fell across her face as she and William kissed. The inside of his arm moved over her as his hand moved over the side of Dru's body, making her apart of the caress whether he intended it or not. Sometimes they got so lost in each other that Willow wondered if they even knew that she was there. She didn't resent it. She knew it had nothing to do with her and everything to do with their peculiar, and unwittingly tragic relationship.

It was the hardest thing she knew about William. He loved Dru with a purity and clarity that was absolute. She was his sun and stars, and he was the firmament that Dru revolved around in her unhinged state. Their dedication to each other was so ingrained that it could almost be forgotten, until they looked at each other a certain way, or kissed, like this. Witnessing such an intimate moment should have made her feel uncomfortable, but in a peculiar way it charmed and calmed the places in her mind and heart that she was most frightened of visiting.

And she wasn't forgotten, not really. Dru was still stroking her breast, her hand gentling even as the kiss she was sharing with William became violent, and his thumb was still moving in a ceaseless sweep under her ear in a rhythm that, she realized, mimicked her pulse.

When Dru sucked away the last drop of the blood she had drawn from his lip, their eyes met and clung. He finger combed her hair over her shoulder, drawing the length away from Willow's face. "Sweet kisses for everyone," Dru murmured, bending her head to delicately lick Willow's kiss swollen lips.

It was like a minuet. She was shifted ever so slightly in William's arm so he could reach her mouth and kiss her while Dru pressed kisses along her neck, shifting downward in the bed to tenderly kiss and lick the reddened nipple she had been fingering. William's hand left the vale of Dru's waist to slide under Willow's knee, lifting her leg over his as he kissed the corner of her mouth. The change in position left her exposed, her legs tangled between his and Dru's, the same coolness, but different textures. The roughness of the hair on his legs contrasted with the smoothness of Dru's thigh.

His hand moved to Dru's much fuller breast and she made a sound in her throat as he crushed it in his hand, roughly abrading her nipple as Dru kissed the underside of Willow's breast.

His hand moved from Willow's throat to the breast that Dru had abandoned as her head moved lower. His hand left Dru's breast and moved down her abdomen, his index finger circling her navel as if to invite Dru's attention to this feature of her body, and then his hand moved lower, his fingers tugging lightly on the curls between her legs. It made the lips of her cunt move just enough for her to moan softly at the sensation he was creating.

One of his long cool fingers slid along the lips of her cunt, tracing an erotic outline while Dru's tongue dipped into her navel. Willow registered the sting of Dru's fang after it left her skin, opening a small cut that welled blood. William's head came up, sharply, his face changing at the scent of blood, the beginnings of a feral growl vibrating in his throat. He watched Dru as she let the slight flow of blood drip into Willow's navel, her tongue delicately scooping the blood up. She sucked on the tip of her blood-coated tongue and bent her head to lap up the blood that had pooled. He was breathing heavily, his face shifting back, his cock rubbing against her back.

His fingers cupped her, pressing into her heated flesh, wringing a moan that was in part relieved, from her as he stared intently at Dru. His fingers rubbed against her, his middle finger penetrating her, making her push herself on his hand as her head fell back into his shoulder and her lips sought his skin, only to be lightly abraded by beard stubble on his jaw.

Dru barely paused, laying a firm hand on Willow's hip to keep her still. A second finger joined the first, twisting, plunging in and out of her while his hips rocked against her and the cool wetness seeping from his cock made a slippery spot on her lower back.

Willow felt her inner walls clenching, prefacing an orgasm that she knew without being told that she would be denied. She licked her lips and kissed his throat. It was too early for that. Between the two of them they could keep her on edge for hours, finding their own release as it pleased them.

She wasn't surprised or disappointed when he withdrew his fingers, leaving her trembling. The sheets had slipped down to pool around their legs. Dru's head blocked her view of her lower body, but not her awareness of herself, spread open, the lips of her sex, wet. William offered his fingers to Dru and she alternated between them, a purr of contentment rumbling in her throat as she lapped at his wet fingers, her tongue milking the small tear in Willow's skin for more blood.

"More?" she requested, and Willow shuddered, eagerly pushing her cunt into his hand when his attention returned to her.

His gaze moved to her face, shifting to reach her mouth, he kissed her lower lip, pulling it into his mouth. His gaze was warmly affectionate. His thumb rotated slowly over her clit while his fingers fucked her.

Using a nail, Dru opened another small cut. She had to draw back and flex her fingers into a fist to shake off the impulse to force her fingernail deeper under the skin. William would not be pleased if she poked holes in his girl before he had an opportunity to do his own kind of poking. She kissed and licked an irregular, round scar in the fleshy part of Willow's side, not remembering so much how it got there, but that it had enraged her childe.

She lifted her head, watching the blood trickle in a bright red ribbon over pale skin. Her eyes flitted to William's hand, and back to the blood, and then to watch them kiss. He was worrying at her lower lip, his head moving as he changed the depth and texture of the kiss.

She gave his hip a hard pinch to get his attention and he chuckled, casting her a look of mock contrition as he offered her his hand again. "Sorry, Princess," he said. Her tongue swept up the rivulets of blood and she took his fingers in her mouth, mixing the tastes together on her tongue. She reached between Willow's legs, retreating to give her wet cunt a caress, her goal, the root of her William's cock. Reading her intent, he made a space for her hand, and groaned as her hand closed around him. When his fingers were clean and the fresh wound was sealed, she signaled her desire to roll the girl between them over on her stomach, resting her cheek on her warm, soft skin as she eagerly took William's cock in her mouth.

He brushed Willow's hair away from her neck and shoulders, wrapping the length of it around one wrist, kissing her shoulders and spine up to the downy hairs at the nape of her neck, blunt teeth nipping her skin in an unmistakable prelude. He could feel her tensing under him as the bites became harder, interspersed with kisses meant to sooth. His other hand played in Dru's silky black hair as she held his hip and took him into her throat. When he felt his balls tighten with his impending climax he let himself change, his tongue roughly stimulating the blood vessels under her skin before his fangs sunk in, deep.

Dru, God bless her, took her hand off his hip to throw her weight more firmly over his lover, whose body had jackknifed with the pain of his deep bite. He drew on her hard, once, before unclenching his jaw and retracting his fangs. Dru hadn't swallowed all of his release, and was milking the last of it with her hand in pearly drops over Willow's lower back while he pressed his tongue against the bite, savoring the spicy tang of her blood.

And Angelus asked why he hadn't killed her by now? How he hadn't greedily drained her dry the first time he had tasted her amazed him. She had been a sixteen-year-old prostitute, new to the trade according to the poxy blond girl who had been pimping her in an alley. It was a specious claim, but the fear and embarrassment in her eyes seemed to lend credence to it while he haggled with her friend, who had been holding out for a simple hand job at a tuppence, because the girl had to learn something that required skills.

Which, as he had pointed out, was hardly any concern of his.

He'd tossed her a half crown and taken her up against a brick wall in a filthy alley while she shook and wept soundlessly as he ruthlessly fucked her dry, tight cunt with every intention of killing her, her friend, and taking back his half crown. Fucking frightened little girls didn't do anything for him, but when he had bit into her, expecting something reasonably young and tasty, he had come from the unbelievable taste of her is his mouth.

She had tasted so good. So right somehow. It was like she was some special flavor he had been seeking without even knowing it. Still, it was odd, that he had made himself stop. Her friend had stopped counting her coins, the vulgar little ditty she had been singing under her breath stopping. With the instincts of a predator recognizing something with bigger, nastier teeth, she had taken off, and he had damn near taken her head off her shoulders when he snapped her neck. The taste of her blood after the ambrosia he had been sampling made him spit out the mouthful he had taken.

And maybe, it had made him think. Not Angelus style deep thoughts. He hadn't had anything in particular in mind when he scooped up the girl he had dropped and carried her home. Angelus, Darla and Dru were busy with one of their torture marathons with a couple they had spent weeks reeling in between fancy parties and the theatre, so he'd kept her, to amuse him, and somehow he managed not to kill her.

Poor baby. She was trying to muffle her sobs in the mattress, as if he couldn't tell from the catch in her throat, or the way her shoulders were heaving that she was crying. She was so serious. She took everything so seriously. His injunction against tears and sadness last night, for instance. No one took him that seriously, and you would think she'd learn by now. He knew damn well that he had hurt her. He wasn't stupid, or entirely lacking in sensitivity. Even Dru had cottoned the fact that she was hurting and she was petting her lower back and ass as she cleaned the mess they had made off of her skin. She was eight years older, maturing into a stunning woman, and there was still a bit of little girl in her.

She had to have known it was coming with a houseful of vamps in new territory, he wouldn't leave her without the protection of an unmistakable claim, and that took more than a bit of blood play to leave.

Dru gathered her in her arms, guiding her head into the crook of her neck, one arm loosely holding her head to her as she made soft, soothing sounds, her fingers brushing away some of the tears. Her longer, stronger legs, sorted them out, pushing Willow's to the outside as she drew her more fully on her body. With some idea of what she had in mind, he moved between the tangle of legs, lifting Willow's hips, his hands stroking her back, moving under her to stoke her breasts.

Dru gave him a dreamy, peaceful smile, and he held her gaze as he kissed Willow's back. Dru's hand moved between her legs, gently petting her, her fingers finding her clitoris and stroking it. One of her fingers found his cock, her fingernail scraping him lightly in invitation.

Willow wasn't oblivious to what was going on around her. It just wasn't as overwhelming as the pain she was in that seemed to wake her pain receptors to her throbbing wrist, the slight burn in the too tight, bruised skin on the backs of her thighs, and the sting of the small cuts on her abdomen. She was also disturbed by her reaction to the bite. Her heart still felt bruised from that hard, brutal pull on it though her veins, and she had nearly bitten through her lip to keep from screaming, which was probably less offensive to William than her crying.

It seemed like he was always telling her to stop crying.

It flooded her with a shame as the uncontrollable tears slipped, hot and oily over her cheeks. She was afraid that her nose was running. It was only one more humiliation amongst many. Snot, tears, flatulence, sweat, all the unpleasant reminders of humanness that vampires didn't suffer that sometimes made her feel painfully conscious of her otherness. For two months, she had been amongst humans, and she was even more aware of these traits. It had actually bothered her. The reek of sweat when Matilde lifted her arms to reach for something on an upper shelf had her nearly shaking with revulsion.

And if Matilde was repulsive to her, what then was she?

Dru's hand cupped her chin, lifting her face to her dark, fathomless eyes. Eyes that reached right into her, into the places she wished to forget existed, but were too close to the surface. "Cry, bitter and salty tears," she whispered to her. "They fall like warm raindrops on my skin, to burn and tingle." She tilted her head, as if she were listening to Willow's disordered thoughts, her fingers tenderly brushing over her lips, making her sniff, and then cough to clear her flooded nose. "No, no. You are nothing if not sweetness and pretty colors," she crooned. "Feel my William, my brightest star, my gentle and vicious boy."

He was there, behind her, the head of his cock breaching her while Dru kissed her, her tongue drawing Willow's out to tangle. Lust flared in Dru's eyes. "You feel him. So . . . so good," Dru's fingers shifted to spread around William's cock as he slowly thrust deep.

Her smile turned sly. "My William will make such pretty colors dancing behind your eyes, like sunlight on water, like firelight, burning you. Burning your cunt, spreading all around until you are burning, burning, hot and cold."

Dru sucked on her bloodied lip and Willow gasped as William moved, thrusting slowly, torturously, around Dru's fingers, into her. Every nerve ending in her slick, wet channel was alive to the sensation of his cock stretching her, sliding deeper inside of her, slowly withdrawing, moving back over the same sensitized flesh.

She knew that she was shaking. She could feel it as his hands moved over her languidly, from her hips and her ass, over the backs of her legs, across her back to the sides of her breasts, leaving gooseflesh to prickle her skin in his wake.

"Please," she whimpered, wanting it. Her hands tangled in Dru's hair, marveling at the softness, like mink.

Dru rolled her shoulders, directing her mouth to her breasts, her long finger hand cupping a creamy breast tipped with a luscious pink nipple. Her eyes twinkled. "Grandmummy rouges her nipples," she confided as if this was the most shocking thing she had ever heard.

Their eyes met again as William hit bottom in her, and Willow found herself giggling at the wonderful absurdity of Dru.

She pinched Willow's clit. "I made her laugh," she said, sounding terribly smug about it, stretching like a cat as Willow's wonderfully warm tongue flicked over her nipple. "More," she demanded. "Harder, lovey." She waggled her finger against Willow's clit and clamped her fingers against William's cock. "Not you, my William," she smiled. "So hard," she breathed as his cock moved through her fingers, wet and warm from Willow.

Willow applied more suction to the nipple between her lips and Dru sighed her approval. "So warm, so wet," she purred, her fingernail lightly scraping Willow's clit, making her moan.

He loved watching them together like this, and fucking Willow slow, feeling her tensing and quivering around his cock as he filled her, feeling the way her hips twitched when he was pushing into her, and the way her breath left her in a rush as he eased out of her. She was soaking wet. His hands spread her thighs a bit more, hearing the strangled sound of her anticipatory moan, knowing the next thrust would send him that little bit deeper inside her.

The insides of her thighs were wet. He ran one of his dampened fingers down the cleft of her ass, painting her tightly puckered anus with her secretions. He smiled as she pushed back against his finger, feeling her legs tremble. He tapped on the opening, patting it teasingly, relatively sure that if he eased his finger into her, she'd go off like a rocket, and he just loved keeping her where she was now, on the edge of a climax.

Perfectly aware of how he was teasing Willow, Dru pursed her lips at him, directing Willow to her other breast.

Not wanting his sire to feel neglected he pulled Willow's hips back enough for Dru to slide out from under her. His arm snaked around Willow, pulling her up against his chest. The change in the angle of his penetration made her cry out his name. He nuzzled the fresh bite mark on her throat as Dru's hands painted erotic patterns on Willow's sweat dampened skin.

"This is just a taste of things to come," he told her as Dru licked her Willow flavored fingers and delved between her thighs again to stimulate her clit while she remained impaled on his cock. She keened, grappling for a hold on him so she could move on his cock. Her blunt fingernails scraped his skin, scoring it and he ground himself into her while she pleaded for him to fuck her hard.

"Are you trying to make me come?" he growled.

"Mmmm. Yes!"

He wrapped his other arm around her, lifting her hips and driving her down on him hard once, twice, and then with a heartfelt groan the third time as he came. Drusilla had taken her hand away, denying her the clitoral stimulation she needed to come and she responded with a frustrated wail that made him laugh softly as he kissed her throat.

"Baby, you wanted me to come," he teased her.

Drusilla chuckled appreciatively, eyeing them hungrily as she arranged herself against the pillows, spreading her legs.

There was something almost obscene about her completely denuded pudenda that Willow always found as disturbing as it was erotic. She had the unpleasant experience of being subjected to Dru's extreme form of grooming on several memorably unpleasant occasions. She used a pair of tweezers to depilate legs, underarms, and pubic hairs. It took hours. The first time Dru had done it was during one of her tea parties, at Miss Edith's suggestion. William had wandered off after an hour, with a stern glare at her that told her she'd experience something more unpleasant if she put up any show of defiance.

After it was over he had suggested a cold bath and ice to reduce the worst of the swelling, leaving her to hunt. When he came home, he had gone down on her and fucked her for hours and she had been afraid that he was going to demand that she maintain herself that way.

He hadn't to her relief. Usually Dru's grooming instincts confined themselves to picking out her clothes or playing with her hair, or using Willow as a mannequin to look at her jewelry, which could kill an entire day easily. Then there were those other occasions when nothing would satisfy her but tweezing every hair off her body. The only line William ever drew was at her hair. It precipitated a fight that featured a lot of foot stomping and yelling, before Angelus of all people took pity on her and removed her from the line of fire to sit at his feet and read to him.

By the time William and Dru stopped screaming at each other to go look for the escaped grooming object, they found her sitting sedately at Angelus' knee, reading from the selected works of Lord Byron while he stroked her hair. It was, what she learned to recognize as one of Angelus' set pieces. A tearful, nearly incoherent Dru standing with her mouth at half mast as she processed the scene, and William looking like he was going to explode, while Angelus calmly stroked her hair, waiting until she finished the long passage that she was reading in a voice that shook to say with absolute finality. "Her hair is very pretty. Exactly where it is. On her head, Drusilla."

Which took the wind out of Dru's sails. Willow had expected retaliation of some kind. Dru could hold a grudge like a terrier and she had the hardest, sharpest fingernails Willow had ever felt. But, the matter was dropped, and her hair stayed on her head.

She felt William pull out of her, still semi-erect. He slapped her ass and pushed her into Dru's arms, springing up from the bed to go light another cheroot. "Give her a moment to catch her breath, Princess," he suggested to Dru before strolling into the bathroom that connected her room to Dru's.

Dru pushed her hair away from her face, drawing Willow down to rest her head against her cool abdomen for a moment. Dru nudged her and Willow obligingly moved until she was lying mostly against her hip and thigh. She smiled wryly to herself when Dru tapped one finger on her cunt, her other hand giving Willow's head a push in that direction.

Dru wanted what Dru wanted when she wanted it and she could be remarkably direct about expressing her needs. When she wasn't, William was the only one who could deal with her. That made being alone with Dru an adventure, but today, she was remarkably coherent and mellow, like a snake sunning herself on the rocks.

Or as William once cheerfully observed, if Dru ever went for her throat, she'd be dead with Dru's hand yanking out her heart before anyone could help her, so it was best to go along and get along.

She folded her legs under her, kneeling between Dru's splayed thighs. Willow used her thumbs on the margins of her cunt to spread the lips open. Dru made an approving sound and Willow slid the pads of her thumbs over the inner lips, finding her wet. Dru tilted her hips up and she dipped her head down to run the tip of her tongue over the edges of her cunt, not unlike the way that William had teased her with his fingers.

Avoiding her clitoris for the moment, confident that Dru would let her know when she was no longer satisfied, Willow took little lip bites of the spread lips of her cunt, swirling the tip of her tongue over the cool smooth flesh.

She had a funny scent, like something old and dry and vaguely floral. Angelus had a theory about the scent and flavor of a woman's secretions that had become a topic of dinner table conversation. He thought it was a product of diet, and he and William had chatted casually about this while she had an odd moment in that she was fully able to follow the arguments, having, by that time, been between enough women's thighs, vampire and human.

She curled her arm under one of Dru's bent legs to rest her hand on her lower abdomen as she nudged Willow with an impatient push of her hips that was a definite, 'get on with it'. She worked her tongue over her slit, letting it flutter against the opening of her vagina before working up to the engorged knot of her clitoris, plucking at it with her lips.

A pleased moan erupted from Dru. Willow brushed her fingers against her while she flicked her tongue over Dru's clit, and she gave a little grunt, tangling her fingers in Willow's hair. She slid two fingers into her, sucking hard on her clit for a moment before relaxing her mouth and using her tongue.

"Hard," Drusilla mewled. "Hard."

She always had to remind herself that she couldn't possibly hurt her, and it wasn't just the vampire thing. Dru's tolerance and craving for pain was beyond Willow's scope. She still had to steel herself to add a third finger, ramming them into Dru as hard as she could.

Her back arched off the bed and Willow pumped her fingers in her, using lips and teeth to alternate between sucking and biting on Dru's clit while her own twitched with what she could only describe as sympathy pains.

William wet a hand towel to clean himself off and rinsed it, squeezing out the excess moisture to carry it back into the bedroom for Willow. She'd been a nice bit of a mess when he'd pulled out of her. He smoked his cheroot, looking at the mess that the bathroom had become. Dru had been in here, leaving her wet towels on the floor and a melting bit of soap in the tub. Willow was used to picking up after her.

He opened the mirrored cabinet to see what she had stowed there. She had her little case of teeth cleaning stuff, and a row of little glass pots with different colored contents. He picked up one with something pink inside. He unscrewed the lid and sniffed at it, smelling peppermint. He shrugged, unable to imagine what that was for. The next one her recognized. It was an ointment-nasty odor to it, best left tightly sealed. The pinkish brown pot contained the stuff she used to cover bruises. He picked up a brown apothecary bottle, reading the label.

Laudanum.

Trouble sleeping or something else? He jiggled the bottle. It was more than half full. There were a couple of small brown envelopes of what he knew to be a headache powder without picking them up. The rest of it was sticking plasters and a tin of alum and another of talc.

He shut the cabinet and flicked ash into the sink. Willow hated him smoking in the bathroom, an opinion she wisely kept unvoiced, but you didn't live with someone for eight years without being able to read thinned lips and flashing eyes. Even when she was trying not to let what she was thinking show she was pretty transparent.

He could hear Dru winding up and went back into the bedroom to join them. A fair bit of rolling around on the bed was in progress. They had moved down to the center of the bed in a tangle of limbs. Dru was still on the bottom, but she had her head between Willow's legs and was gripping her ass hard enough that she was sure to leave bruises. When her tongue wasn't shoved up Willow's cunt she was screaming, "Harder, harder, harder," in a frustrated wail.

He tossed the cheroot into the cold grate, as he crossed the room in a few swift strides, knowing full well Willow couldn't give Dru what she wanted.

He grabbed a fistful of Willow's head, pulling her head up from between Dru's thighs, startlingly an, "Ow, ow, OW!" out of her.

"Tagging in," he explained, ramming his cock into Dru with enough force to send her six inches across the bed and turn her frustrated hisses into a happy purr. He reached down and pinched her clit hard. "Is that what you want, love?" he asked her.

Feeling like a mouse caught between two snarling cats, Willow's hips twisted and Dru only relaxed her grasp enough to slap her overly abused ass while William pulled her into an animalistic kiss that mashed her sore lips against her teeth.

He was pounding into Dru, and she was meeting him, thrust for thrust, his hand tangled in Willow's hair, holding her up until she managed to get one arm up to sort of brace herself on his shoulder. "Good girl," he grunted, turning his attention to Dru. Willow didn't want to know what he was doing to her clitoris. She was scared to death that Dru was going to bite her.

"Like that?" he grunted, giving Dru's clit a hard twist that had her coming, hard. He pulled out of her, still hard himself. "Dru? Let's make my kitten purr."

~~~*~~~

Darla found Angelus in the cellar below the library. There were hours to go before their minions rose. The next few days would be work. Teaching them to hunt, culling out the ones that were too weak, or wouldn't accept discipline, establishing order. It was something the boys particularly excelled at. It was one of the four reasons why she put up with William. He fought like he was born to it, he kept Drusilla out of her hair, and he gave Angelus someone to argue with other than herself.

If she accidentally drove stake in his chest next week, well, that was next week when the household was in order. Even as she thought it, she knew it would never happen. Drusilla. Angelus was sitting on a crate thumbing through a book. "This lacks nothing for atmosphere," Darla observed as her calculating gray eyes took in the room. "What is this in aid of?" she asked.

Angelus looked up, reaching automatically for her hand. He pressed her fingers to his lips. "I'm not sure, yet. Will found it."

Will? Apparently, today, Angelus was in charity with the brat. He smiled at her, reading her sharp glance. "Told him to mind his manners with you if he knows what's good for him," he told her, well aware that she was angry at his grandchilde.

"Sage advice spread on fallow ground," she retorted icily. William was not as stupid as he sometimes liked to pretend, which made his little misadventures and the liberties he took all the more irritating.

"What are the children up to?" he asked.

Darla rolled her eyes. "What else? I'm surprised you haven't heard them. It's a wonder that Dru hasn't accidentally killed William's little pet."

"Hmm," he agreed. "More lives than a cat, she has. Makes you wonder if at the end of the world the only survivors will be a rat, a cockroach, and Willow," he smiled at the thought.

That was one way to look at it. She had so far shown herself to be a spectacular failure at killing herself, or simply dying of one of the many hazards that lay before any mortal life. Aside from her pathetic attempts to end her own life, the girl had been shot, stabbed, and drowned, she had contracted influenza, pneumonia, and dysentery. She had damn near starved to death before the genius upstairs had the wit to figure out that she wasn't being fed often enough. Her whole life was a comedy of errors, and Darla had no doubt whatsoever that the girl genuinely yearned for an end to it.

And they thought she was cruel. It boggled the mind.

"What is all of this?" she asked again.

"Will's thinking that we take a wait and see approach. She may just have wanted to keep her studies away from the servants to prevent gossip about witchcraft."

"The servants can't read," Darla retorted in a bored tone of voice.

He held up a book with a Pentacle embossed on the cover. "That's plain enough, even for the illiterate, you'd have to agree. There are still places in the world where witches are killed, without a lot of questions asked."

"So?" Darla prompted. "What are we waiting for?"

"She tells us about the room? No secrets, just discretion in front of her kind. She fails to tell us about the room? Well, that's something to be a wee bit concerned about," he tried his charming little grin and realized that she was having none of it.

Darla glared at him. "A witch. A natural born witch? And you encouraged this, Angelus! I told you it was dangerous."

He had encouraged her study like it was an intellectual pursuit, not a potential weapon that could be pointed at them. "William has better sense. He doesn't trust her an inch."

"My love," he wheedled, "she doesn't know that we know," he gave it his most reasonable tone. "And, did you notice? No invite into the house when we arrived," he flipped to a page that she had left marked. A sheet of paper with her handwriting was tucked between the pages. "She took this spell and modified it to create a protection ward that includes us, almost as if we were human."

"So?" Darla looked at him like he was speaking a foreign language.

"So, my darling, she arranged it so that the invite extends to us, not just her."

Darla's lips quirked. "You mean that if a vampire wanted to enter the house, any of us could extend that invitation?"

He nodded. "Very clever of her, and useful," he pointed out.

Moderately appeased, Darla looked thoughtful. "She didn't have to do that," she conceded.

"And, she didn't tell us she did that," she pointed out.

"True," he agreed, "so, we wait and see, but not long. Before she has the run of the house, I want to here something about this from her lips, even if I have to beat it out of her."

~Part: 9~

The dead that had been fed to rise had been moved to the servants' quarters at the rear of the house, behind the kitchens. They included three of the four stable hands, the Cook, one footmen, one maid, and the major domo. It was a larger number than Angelus liked. The dead had been dumped in the cellar below the kitchen for disposal later.

Cleaning up the house was not a high priority. They'd have minions for that soon enough. The dinning room doors had been drawn shut on the spoiling food and blood spattered walls and floor. William's door had also been shut.

These little niceties were for the girl's benefit and Darla found them ridiculous, but Angelus had been the one to take those small precautions. It was a little after nine in the evening before William appeared in the salon with a girl on each arm. Dru was dressed in a blood red velvet gown overlaid with black lace. She had her hair dressed in an elaborate coiffure around an onyx comb and a pair of jet earrings dangled from her ears. She always dressed up for the awakening, swaning around like she was the gift of unlife.

William was in his usual state of dishevelment. He'd tied back his hair, and put on his disgusting boots and a waistcoat that was half unbuttoned under an open frock coat. His cravat was just . . . there.

Willow looked . . . stunning, actually, Darla decided. She was wearing a beautifully cut blue velvet gown that gently draped her shoulders, falling to a natural waist into a deep skirt with contrasting ivory silk panels. Her hair was also up, less elaborately styled, it had been pulled up loosely and a braid of her own hair wrapped around it with the length allowed to fall in natural curls.

There was a deep bite mark on her throat, not yet scabbed over, but not bleeding either. The skin around it looked bruised. It was not necessarily unattractive. Her right wrist, almost hidden in the bell of her skirt was black and blue with bruises. Not a mark on her face, though. Darla made a mental note of that. William had become reluctant to mark up her face over the years. He might not even be aware of it, but it would make the girl more vulnerable to the shock of being hit in the face.

"Are your fingers broken that you can't fasten a button?" Darla sniped at William.

He grinned at her. "Good evening to you, too, Darla," he said, capping it with a mocking bow, catching Willow's hand in his when her hand automatically went to his waistcoat to button it. He brought her hand to his lips, kissing it lightly.

"Are you hungry, Willow?" Angelus asked, he nodded to the sideboard. "There's something for you, if you are."

"Thank you. I might take it up with me when I go upstairs?" she said, the slight rise at the end of the sentence a lingering request for permission.

"Whatever suits you," he agreed. "I can't say when I've ever seen you looking lovelier," he said, looking to Darla. "My Dru's always in looks," he added before a pout could fully form on Dru's face.

"It was my dress for Miss Willow," Dru informed him. "Her wardrobe is full of bad clothes that must be punished severely."

The other four occupants of the room greeted this observation with varying degrees of amusement.

William walked over to the sideboard, still holding Willow's hand as Dru sank to her knees beside Angelus, carefully arranging her skirts around her. Dissatisfied with how they lay, she stood up again and started over.

The food laid out was mostly cheese and fruit. William picked up a ripe red berry and ran it over Willow's lips before he let her take it from his fingers. His hand stroked her back and he kissed her mouth, sucking on her lower lip while she turned pink at the attention. "Sherry, sweetheart? Or wine?"

"I'll get it," she said, giving him a small push. "Sit. I'll bring you a drink."

"I don't think I can bear to be away from you that long," he teased, kissing her blushing cheek. "Now, that's a pretty bit of warmth."

"Wine," she blurted out.

He grinned, knowing that he was making her uncomfortable, but unable to resist. He looked over the selection of wines, chosen by the pretentious one, and settled on a dry Riesling for her, and poured that before going with his usual whisky, neat. She picked up her glass with her left hand and he steered her around him, dropping a kiss on her shoulder. There was a green leather armchair that had him written all over it, but he was pretty sure Darla was going to ring a peel over him if he pulled Willow down into his lap, so he steered her towards the settee and when she would have put a correct hands width between them, applied just enough pressure to keep her next to him.

He rested his arm on the back of the settee, giving one of her long ringlets a tug before winding it around his fingers.

Dru was finally satisfied with the arrangement of her skirt. Her gaze was intensely appreciative, and she might stay that way for hours, admiring herself, if they were lucky, Darla thought.

She was sitting opposite Willow and William. "The house really is lovely, Willow. You've done very well. I haven't seen all of it, yet, but what I have seen is beautiful."

William touched his tumbler to her wineglass. "It's better than a hole," he put in.

Willow's eyebrows pulled together the slightest bit and she gave him a sideways look of exasperation. She wasn't sure, but she suspected that he and Darla were on the outs and he was being annoying for her benefit. "I'm glad that you are pleased," she said.

Angelus' lips quirked with mirth. There was no one like Willow for rendering a polite social phrase. He knew she didn't mean it to sound like she was mouthing rote platitudes, but that was exactly what it sounded like. Darla made her nervous, and William baiting Darla was making it worse.

"I had a bit of a look around," he said. "Tomorrow? We'll go over the house top to bottom, and I'd like a look at the accounts," he told her.

"The account books and petty cash are in the safe in the library," she said. "There is an extra set of passports, travel documents, maps, gold coin, and bearer bonds in the floor safe located in the master bedroom. It opens by key lock. I have all the keys, but I forgot to bring them down."

"Give them to William when you retire," Angelus suggested. "I don't recall suggesting anything about passports and travel documents," his tone was deceptively mild. "Are we going somewhere?"

William felt her tense. "When aren't we?" she asked.

Angelus and Darla exchanged glances. "An excellent point," Darla allowed. "Where are we going?"

William watched the surface of the wine in her glass ripple. She was starting to tremble. He set aside his glass and took her wine glass from her. "Sweet? Just answer their questions. No one is mad at you."

Darla raised an eyebrow as if she might dispute that.

"Antwerp, or Budapest," she said.

Angelus' curiosity was piqued. "Why those places?" he asked.

"Last summer we invested in several dye works in Bruges and Brussels, and a lace factory in Antwerp, so in addition to hard assets, we have contacts in Belgium. Antwerp is centrally located and within a day's ride of three major ports. The dye industry in Europe is in a freefall. Mass produced dyes from England, India, and the United States are too cheap to compete with. The textile industry in Europe still hews to the older more reliable dye works for the production of luxury goods, but the money is in mass produced textiles, so the industry is very sluggishly adapting-"

"What does that have to do with going to Antwerp?" Angelus interrupted.

"Uh . . . to un-slug it," Willow's brow wrinkled at her attack of verbal spasticity. She made a hand rolling gesture. "We have to go to Antwerp at once, those fools are loosing money by the fistful . . ." she declaimed in an unnaturally deep voice that had William laughing heartily.

"Do it again, with a bit of the brogue, pet," he invited.

Her nose wrinkled. "I thought I was," she ducked her head to say.

Even Darla smiled. "Avoid the stage, my dear," she suggested.

Angelus leaned back in his chair. "And Budapest?"

She looked the tiniest bit guilty or embarrassed. "Well, we've never been there, and it looked interesting in the atlas-and did I mention that my Grandfather was born in Hungary? He's dead now, but . . . Magyars! Goulash, Paprikash-" she shook her head, "You don't care about food," she snapped her fingers. "Oh! Alum! Center of alum trade in Eastern Europe, which makes Antwerp still good for-"

"Those fools!" William recapped, still chuckling. "So, you thought Budapest, and had to figure out a way to make it work?"

"More or less," she said under her breath. She looked up at Angelus. "It's not so much your, er, track record with an angry mob," she began.

"Oh, I'm hurt," William clutched her to his chest. "You wound me, sweet. Kiss it better," he chased her lips.

Darla cast a long-suffering look at Angelus. "We could have gotten a puppy," she said. "They are as cute, and they make nice snacks."

Dru looked up at Angelus. "I should very much like to have a puppy," she announced.

"Dru, dear, you already have William," Darla said in an acid edged tone.

"Hey, now," he left off kissing Willow. "I'm in the room! And, about that thing that you are upset with me about, uh . . . sorry. Didn't realize."

She debated about accepting the apology while she responded with a wintry smile. "It was already forgotten."

And if you believed that, Willow thought, there was a nice bog in a stinky corner of hell that you might be interested in for a summer home. She covered the desire to smile at her own wit by touching William's knee lightly. "May I have my wine glass?" she asked softly.

He reached over to the table on his right to get it for her.

"Any other interesting things you want to tell us about?" Angelus asked.

'Subtle' William mouthed over Willow's head, rolling his eyes.

She sipped her wine, thinking. "Mmmm. The house has some interesting features," she said. "It's roughly one hundred and twenty years old and built on the foundations of an older structure destroyed in a fire. The water is spring fed, so it's drinkable---not that you drink water," she allowed. "And, there are three old cellar's beneath the foundation. Two that I've found. The third one maybe under the main staircase, but ripping out the wainscoting seemed . . . unnecessary," she said, taking another sip.

William let his hand drift to her shoulder. "Under the library there's a cellar that is accessed through a section of the shelving that is on a pivot," she smiled suddenly, brightly. "Secret rooms," she bubbled over, infectiously.

He kissed her shoulder, relieved that she was telling them. He didn't want to think what Angelus and Darla might have done to her.

"Daddy!" Dru interrupted. "I want a puppy!"

"Not, now, Dru. Daddy's busy," he said, quelling. "Willow?"

She shot him an apologetic look. "Sorry," she offered meekly. "It's not a very useful space. Small. Can't be secured. I've been using it to store my books and magic supplies."

There we go! That's my girl. Not keeping any secrets. William twisted his head, to realign a couple of vertebrae.

Darla glared at him. "Must you? It's disgusting, that sound!"

"We're vampires. We snap necks all the time. Right and left," he barked back. "Makes me feel right at home when I do mine."

Uh oh. Darla looked like she had decided not to accept his apology and Dru was too busy pouting about Angelus not finding her a puppy to deflect attention to him. Willow made herself turn to him. "Will?"

His fingers brushed her cheek. He was in a staring contest with Darla. "Pet?"

"Well . . . I mean, it is kind of . . . ooky," she softly.

Jaws dropped. That was an unmistakable siding with the enemy, soft-spoken rebuke.

It also lost him the staring contest as he looked at her like she had lost her mind. "Ooky? That isn't even a word."

She made a face and shuddered. "Ooky. It's like," she put her hands up into claws and bared her teeth, "Grrrr. Also not a word, I'll admit, but it's . .  ." she frowned. "You do know what 'Grrr' means, don't you?"

He had two choices. Backhand her to the floor, or laugh. He chose the later, pinching her chin. "I can guess," he told her with a small frown.

Angelus had that look he sometimes got on his face when he was watching Willow. It was contemplative, and curious, and amused, and just a tiny bit covetous.

William's lips moved silently, 'Mine.' And then he smirked.

"Tell me about the other room, Willow," Angelus prompted.

"That's the grand prize, so to speak," she turned back to him. "It's secure behind a two inch thick reinforced door, and it has . . . sewer access."

For a moment he just stared at her, and then he smiled broadly. "Now does it, lass? That's a bit of good luck."

"Right now, it's a weapons locker, because it's pretty much the most secure room in the house. Access is through the butler's pantry. The stairs are a little creaky, but I didn't think you'd want just anyone knowing it was there, so I didn't call a carpenter in to look at them."

"You've done very well," Angelus pronounced. "I think some reward is in order, don't you Darla?"

Darla gave her one of her brittle smiles. "What would you like, dear?" she asked.

A one way ticket to London? That would not go over, she thought, looking down at her lap. She hated these kinds of moments. They'd expect her to think of something that she wanted, and the reality was that they would never give her what she wanted. The hell with it. She was going to say something that was at least what she actually wanted.

She looked up at them. "I'd like to go to London," she said.

"To London," William repeated.

"England. London, England. There are other Londons. It's in the Atlas," she insisted when he frowned at her. "Like, there's a London, Kentucky. Also a Paris, Berlin, Lebanon, and Frankfort, just in Kentucky. In the United States. East of the Mississippi, which is the longest river in North America, and there's a London in-"

He laughed. "I get the idea, pet," he said dryly, looking at Angelus briefly, thinking that it was none of his business where he took Willow, but if it was on Angelus wallet, then he wasn't going to object. "We could do that," he said agreed. "Go to London. Take a train to Calais and a night ferry across the Channel. I haven't pissed off anyone that counts in London in at least a decade," he kissed her bare shoulder again. "We'll make a holiday of it," he watched her face. She might have actually meant go to London alone, but he was sure she would accept going to London with him as a reasonably pleasant compromise.

A tiny frown knit her brow. "What's in London?" Angelus wanted to know, wondering why London, and not, Paris or Berlin, or the oh-so fascinating Budapest?

Because the Watcher's Council is there? "Where to start? Well, the last time I was there hardly counts. I've read so much about London since then. Its like there is a London I've been to, and a London I've . . . been to, in books and plays. And, there are the plays, and museums, the Tower of London, and Buckingham Palace, and I want to see if there really is a 221B Baker's Street-"

Angelus laughed. "That's an interesting question," he agreed, though the significance of the address was not shared by anyone else in the room.

"And there are magic shops in London. That fortune teller in Lisbon told me that the best magic shops in the world are in London and Edinburgh."

Darla watched as she got swept up in all the things that she wanted to do, that William had no interest in and would probably spare very little time for. The animation, the glow in her eyes, the rush of color in her face, the enthusiasm in her voice, it was all very appealing. If she met her at a party, she would probably find her interesting and entertaining. But it was, in a way, new. She had probably been moving toward this very interesting place in her life for years, unnoticed, tending to slip into the background. Her two months on her own, with no way to hide herself, had been like forcing a tulip bulb to burst out of dormancy.

For the first time it actually occurred to Darla that Willow might eventually become someone she might actually like. Her interest in Angelus was purely confined to getting what she wanted, which wasn't Angelus himself but things he could make available to her. Her attachment to William was no more than what it appeared to be. She fucked him, he kept her alive and reasonable well cared for. There was a gritty, hardheaded pragmatism to the girl that she liked.

William sat back mentally reviewing her list of the attractions London offered. Hmm. There were plays. He could take her to a play-no bloody opera. One play. Check.

The tourist-y sites were all daytime only venues, which counted him out, though he supposed that maybe she could go by herself. She'd spent two months in Prague and behaved herself. A day trip around London wasn't a stretch.

The mysterious address that made Angelus smile? Ask a cabbie and be done. As for magic shops . . . aside from the fact that they smelled foul and attracted a strange crowd, he had never been keen on magic. He had met a witch or two in his time, and they were generally not to be messed about with, and the serious practitioners of the dark arts gave him the willies.

Not that she had ever done anything really alarming. Floating a feather or a flower was the most witchy thing he'd ever seen her do. Most of her books read like an apothecary manual with instructions to make ointments and pleasant things like the pillow she had made for Dru to help with her headaches that always worked like a charm. For a few months she made bath oils and soaps and cosmetics by the gross as she worked her way through another book. Angelus joked that they were the cleanest and best smelling vamps in Western Europe. It all appeared to be harmless crap that kept her busy, but there was a part of him that was skeptical. They weren't burning witches for centuries, and there weren't biblical injunctions against witchcraft over trading recipes for the home remedies.

"That reminds me," Angelus said. "How did you manage the non-invite. You didn't invite Darla and I in, but there was no barrier."

It was so obvious that he didn't know how he missed it. In fact, he couldn't recall that she invited him in, and he and Dru had walked in beside her. He looked at her.

"I did research on three types of spells," she said. "Protection wards, household blessings, and spells to cast out, which are similar too, but not quite the same as a protection ward. I did some experimenting-" she winced. "In fact, there is one room in the attic that I'm pretty sure I'm never going to be able to get into, but I sent Matilde in and she didn't have a problem. I wasn't sure if it was going to work because I didn't have a vampire to . . . test it on."

"The long and short of it is that I did a modified protection ward and a blessing on the grounds, and nothing can get in without an invite. Not a mouse, not a stray cat, not a demon or vampire, not even humans. Invitation required to all beings not specifically included in the blessing. The ward is just a extension of that, but" she frowned "I'm not sure if it worked. It's kind of a stay away ward, and if anyone clears it, I get a little pins and needles sensation, which is kind of unpleasant, so if it doesn't work, I'd like to dispel it and recast it without the barrier whammy."

"Why don't you make it so someone breeching the barrier would feel it?" Darla wondered.

"And every time someone casually approaches the place, or even walks by, they get a prickly feeling? It's easier for me to just look out a window if it persists more than a few seconds."

"Right, then," William said. "Or we just hang a big fucking sign that says, 'Keep Out, Evil Vampire Lair, PS We Have A Witch. PSS: She'll Turn You Into A Rat.'"

Willow bit her lower lip to keep from laughing. She looked down and caught Dru staring at her with a pout. She nodded to her and looked up. "Oh, and I would very much like for Dru to have a puppy," she added.

~Part: 10~

None of this is real.

Five words. They appeared on the first page of every journal that Willow kept. Sometimes they repeated, over and over, in her neat handwriting. He remembered her saying it under her breath in a litany, a long time ago. He had found her smacking her forehead against a wall once, and it had become a blurred together sound, "Notrealnotrealnotrealnotreal."

It was something you might say when everything became too much. When you were at the end of your rope. He had come to think of it as a kind of alarm bell. When she started with the chanting, she was losing it, and it was time to back off. And then every once in a while she would do something, like walking out in front of a carriage, and he'd wonder if she was testing the idea. It was like her. She'd think of something, or read something, and then she would want to test it.

Her journals weren't what you'd expect. There was a bit of 'this is what I did today' to them, and then they would go off the rails in odd directions. She wrote summaries of books she read. Sometimes she would go off on a tear about a novel, and practically re-write the entire thing from start to finish, filling journal after journal with it until she was onto some new thing. She wrote about her magic studies. She made lists. She wrote about him, and it wasn't all hearts and flowers either, not that he expected it to be.

She knew he read her journals. She hid them, he found them. It was a game, or she didn't care, he was never quite sure of which was the case. The first few volumes had been largely dedicated to Jane, her 'friend' from the alley where he had found her. That she ever considered that pox-ridden bitch her friend was beyond pathetic. Meal ticket, more like. Jane, if that's what her name really was, was a whore beyond her prime earning years, pimping a younger and more attractive girl, that, from what he had gleaned from Willow, she had latched onto in the workhouse.

She wrote little stories to herself about Jane. They were what you would expect of a girl in her teens, variations on a theme of redemption. Jane always ended up doing something virtuous or respectable, and some of it was fairly imaginative, too. Far fetched, but entertaining.

He had gotten angry at her about something, and had told her exactly what her precious Jane had been about, and that, since she was confused on this point, Jane was dead. He had killed her.

She'd pushed herself up on her elbows, looking him right in the eye-and this was long before Angelus had given up on the downcast gaze bit-green eyes wet with tears, glittering like gems, full of contempt, and she spat out, "Duh!"

It wasn't a word, just a sound, pregnant with meaning, and he had broken three of her ribs without thinking much about it, though he really wasn't as mad as he knew he ought to be. That stare had been not unlike the experience of drinking her, a moment of recognition. A moment when he saw something in her that he . . . wanted.

William found the journal he was paging through now by the light of a lantern under a pillow cushion in the small room behind the library. It was full of observations about Prague, as if she were writing a guide book, and considering that she knew he'd find her journal, he decided that it was possible that she was. There were street maps sketched out, and odd little notes, like reminders that she had hastily scribbled, prefaced by the initials NTS.

Note To Self. She sometimes muttered the phrase under her breath.

Her syntax in writing was different. She wrote in great torrents, the lines becoming fat when she was in too great a hurry to be bothered with sharpening her pencil. Peculiar sounds expressed as words littered her writing. Oooky, grrrr, eeeew, ick, and so on. There was a rhythm to it, too, a verbal integrity that was peculiar, but unforced. This was the way her mind spoke to her. This is what she sounded like in her own head, he concluded.

They had gotten a taste of it tonight. She had been unusually animated, even bold, and he had never seen her speak so long and with so little discipline in front of Darla or Angelus. With Dru, she could rattle on for hours. They had tea party conversations that were hilarious because Dru couldn't stay on topic and Willow didn't need to in order to entertain her. Usually with Angelus and Darla she was on her very best behavior, alert, speaking when spoken to, providing answers that were direct.

His gaze wandered up the wall blankly, wondering if having no one but her journal to talk to for two months had played a part in the small changes he had noticed in her.

He took a deep breath, through his nose. The book, leather bound, was saturated with her scent from frequent handling. He could smell her on his skin as well. He sucked on his lower lip, eyes narrowing as he sought the taste of her there, under the whiskey and tobacco. They'd spent nearly the entire day shagging, eating, and sleeping. Dressing for the impromptu family gathering-Angelus couldn't wait a single fucking day to grill her-had turned into a tender coupling in Dru's room.

Dru had been dressed for the evening's program, and she hated musing her clothes or her hair after she was all dressed up, but she had gotten that frenzied look in her eyes after she had done Willow's hair and Miss Edith didn't like it. For a stupid doll, Miss Edith had a good eye, William thought with a grin. He didn't like Willow's hair arranged in tight curls, like she was some kind of garden-variety debutante.

Dru needed a distraction, and Willow was there, so he whispered in her ear that what would really give her a nice glow was a good shag, and Dru had blown him a kiss and helped him undress her-though he would have been just as happy to have her with all that blue velvet spread out around her. Dru didn't want her dress spoiled.

He could tell that she really, really did not want to do this. She had bathed, and she was already getting nervous about the command performance in the salon, and she was sore. He had seen the indignation flash in her eyes when Dru announced that Miss Edith didn't like her hair. Her eyes had flown to the mirror, puzzled and a little hurt, because she did like it. She thought it looked swell.

It came down slowly, a little bit at a time, hairpins sliding out while he was sliding in. At some point in the middle of it, Dru consulted with Miss Edith, and the proper hair style was agreed upon, and Dru picked up her brush, starting at the ends of Willow's hair, gently removing the pins, brushing her hair to shining while he slowly fucked her over the arm of a chair, her head in Dru's lap. The scent of her cunt and her tears burrowed into the back of his brain.

Some day she would understand. Sometimes he made her cry just for the pleasure of licking the tears off her face.

The fledge on the floor started to stir, so he tucked the book inside his coat pocket and sat with his arms across the back of the chair he was straddling, waiting. This was the last of the lot to wake, and it was near dawn. There would be no time to hunt before he was awake, which meant a long, sorry day of misery for him. William's philosophy on managing minions was predicated on one point. Can't hunt, can't feed. He wasn't in the game to take care of minions. If they didn't have the wit to feed themselves, then they weren't worth keeping.

He laced his fingers together and cracked his knuckles one by one as the fledge turned to him at the first sound and then stared at him, unblinking as he worked his way through the remaining nine fingers.

"I'm hungry," Lucius said.

Of coarse you are, mate, William thought. He had never really forgotten the terrible hunger that had been the all-consuming awareness of his own awakening. A hunger so terrible that you'd claw yourself out of a coffin. Out of the ground.

"That's too bad," he said in a tone that suggested a distinct lack of sympathy. "It's nearly dawn, and too late in the day for us to hunt, so you'll go hungry. House rules. You feed yourself. I don't feed you."

He looked puzzled, and frustrated, and the panic was starting to seep in. They always panicked when they started to realize that there was something wrong.

He threw his head back, listening. Sniffing. Sampling the air, and then realizing that he didn't need it to breath. Eventually he would try to get out of the room. The need to feed was too strong, and that's when he would get to work, to plant another idea. The need to please him, as primal as the need to feed.
~~~*~~~

None of this is real.

Willow let her fingertips rest on a pane of glass, looking out onto the shadowy tangle that was the unkempt garden. Angelus had given her no instructions about a garden, and she had taken no action to have the garden below tended. It was dead and overgrown except for a small spot around by the kitchen where the Cook had potted herbs and she had started growing common spell ingredients.

In a day or two she would start seeing vampires who wore the faces of people she had hired to work in this house. They would remember her. They would be told who she was. They wouldn't be offended or angry, and if they wanted to survive another day, they wouldn't be covetous either, because that would end badly for them.

They had no hope. They had no real chance at life before they came here, she reminded herself. They were like Jane, who thought she was a shark, but really was a guppy in the shark pool.

The desolation of the garden below was soothing. All dead, and it would stay that way, falling into rot, and then, perhaps, reseeded to create new life. And it would be new life, fed from death, with its own uniqueness and integrity.

"I could smash my head right though the glass. I could use the shards to cut my wrists. I could throw myself from the windowsill. A two and half story fall might do it," she whispered to the glass, trying to find her eyes in her reflection to gauge her own resolve. "I can do these things," she whispered.

"But you won't."

She spun around, tripping clumsily on her skirt and almost making good on it; when her back hit the glass it only rattled, but did not break. Darla was standing in the open doorway of her bedroom, and Willow's heart started beating faster as she wondered how long she had been there.

"At least, not tonight," Darla said with a small smile. She gestured to one of the two chairs in front of the fireplace. "Sit," she said.

It was not an invitation. Willow went to the appointed chair and she sat. When Darla did not join her in the opposite chair, and instead wandered around the room, she wished that she could find a space in her head that would allow her to list prime numbers, or the periodic table of elements, or conjugate verbs in French. She wished that she could find a charm that would give her that distance and objectivity.

"You must have changed the sheets," Darla said, running her hand over the neatly arranged counterpane.

She had changed the entire bed and cleaned the bathroom and taken an extremely hot bath, attacking each item as it became available. Dru and William bathed. They retired from the bathroom to Dru's room where Dru had tried on dress after dress before she sent William to get her, to dress her.

She had created an elaborate hair style for her on the first attempt, using rolls of cotton to form the shapes, holding it all together with hairpins, but Miss Edith disapproved and it had to be taken down, and Dru got frustrated. Never a good thing when she was armed with a brush or sharp objects, so the dress was removed and hung up and Miss Edith was placed on the bed, decorously arranged with her back to the room, and William and Dru indulged in a tried and true method to deal with Dru's frustrations.

Her fingernails cut into her palms.

"There are things that you should know that the boys think that they should not tell you," Darla said. "I disagree."

No matter what Angelus liked to pretend, Darla was the real seat of power in the household.

"I think its time that we talk about your future," she said.

It was an alien concept. The only future she wished to have was in her present past, or not present future. The fact that Darla was suggesting that she had a future had implications that made her feel lightheaded.

"My future?" she repeated, because it was becoming painfully obvious that she was expected to participate in this conversation.

Fear flooded her scent. That was to be expected. Darla knew she was frightening. She worked at it, and the girl wasn't stupid. She walked over to her, her hard, cold fingernail lifting Willow's chin until her head was tilted back at an uncomfortable angle.

"It is inevitable, you know," her tone was conversational. "Vampires don't keep humans for eight years to watch them grow old and die."

The reek of fear gradually subsided, leaving only discomfort in its wake. Darla was impressed in spite of herself. Willow understood. She understood completely.

"Don't think about it," she advised. "When my time came, I was already dying. It was a choice between dying faster, with less pain and humiliation, or living. I chose living. Dying a little bit at a time, seeing everything stripped from you . . . it makes you appreciate the prospect of having power over life and death. Most of us don't have that luxury. It wasn't offered to Angelus, or Dru, or William, but I give it to you. There is still time. If your answer would be to die faster, with less pain and humiliation, there is time for you to make that choice."

None of this is real.

It was the only explanation that made Willow had been able to accept. None of this is real.

She said it out loud, chanted it under her breath as a mantra after she tried every spell she half knew to reverse a spell while two men held her down and another raped her. She was saying it the next morning when the watch was called by a passerby who found the spectacle of a filthy, half-naked woman huddled against a wall sufficiently annoying or alarming to call in the civil authorities.

Television informed her perspective on what would happen next as she was roughly bundled into a dark, swaying vehicle. She would be seen by a doctor, and she knew, dimly that she needed to be seen by a doctor, and maybe a counselor, and then her parents, and then she would have to see her friends, who might know or guess what had been done to her. She hoped that someone would know or guess because she didn't think she could ever talk about it.

But that wasn't what happened. No one talked to her. She was taken from one workhouse to another while the constable grew impatient, unnerved by her mutterings, which were putting off the supervisors of Bristol's workhouses. So, he shook her and slapped her until she stopped with her mad little chant, which worked like a charm. She was quiet when they got to the Poor Clare's workhouse, and the sisters took her without a demur.

Days passed. There was a routine to it that was almost comforting and the nuns weren't unkind. They bathed her, a process in which she stood in a cold room, naked while one woman armed with a brush and an expression of piously grim determination scrubbed while the other two, armed with buckets of cold water, rinsed, until they were satisfied that she was clean and lice free. Then they cut off her hair.

She had a narrow cot to sleep on in a dormitory filled with women. When she woke up screaming the first night, the girl beside her wasn't unsympathetic, but she was tired and she told her that if she carried on like that every night someone would put a pillow over her head. She had seen it before.

Her name was Jane. That was what the nuns called her. The next morning when they were set to picking oakum and Willow muttered, "This isn't real" under her breath, Jane gave an appreciative chuckle, showing teeth that were chipped and blackened.

Jane was her friend. Sort of. When the weather warmed up and Willow started showing, the nuns told her that she would have to leave, which confused her. She didn't have anywhere to go, but Jane was leaving too, explaining that she only stayed in the workhouse through the worst of the winter months. It was maybe another day later when three things were born in on her. In the unreal world she was a prostitute-it explained the hours spent picking oakum while one of the sisters read from the bible and from tracts about the sins of the flesh. It was just another example of the unrealness of where she was. She wasn't even who she was in the where of wherever she was. She was pregnant. This was a finding that should have occurred to her before, but hadn't. A fact that she should have been aware of, but wasn't until Jane explained it to her. She didn't feel pregnant. Lastly, she could not remain pregnant, which actually didn't bother her so much when Jane explained it to her, because she didn't feel pregnant, and she certainly didn't want to be pregnant.

She couldn't be pregnant. She was a college bound honor roll student and a member of the Computer Club, and she had read Changing Bodies, Changing Lives before she even got her period because her parents considered her a smart and sensible girl who would make good decisions about boys and sex. Not that it really mattered because she didn't know any boys who were interested her, even remotely, in that way.

Except, maybe, for Oz.

They had no money. This didn't bother Jane in the least. She set off at a brisk walk for a neighborhood that Willow didn't need to be told was bad. She had nowhere else to go, so she followed her, a little glassy eyed at all of the things inflicted on her senses. She told herself to pay more attention, because at some point she wanted to remember this, the walking through an unreality so complex.

She witnessed her first act of prostitution while standing awkwardly behind a wagon on the quayside clutching her small bundle of belongings that included a bible, what was described as small clothes, and a wooded cross strung on a piece of yarn. The cross was comfortingly familiar. She had the same feeling that she had when Marcy Walker had lit a cigarette behind the gym at school, defying the smoking ban on campus, and well, just, smoking, which in and of itself was something Willow couldn't understand wanting to do.

She kept her gaze carefully averted, shifting from one foot to the other while she watched the man Jane had approached with a phrase that sounded like a song. A vulgar song that made her want to laugh in a shocked kind of way.

This performance was repeated three times, while Jane's mood improved with the completion of each transaction. It wasn't the sex that pleased her. That had been performed with mechanical efficiency, though the men she serviced seemed pleased enough and utterly unperturbed by Willow's presence, which made Willow wonder if she was just seeing this and was herself unseen. It was the money. She had money, and she was proud of the fact that she had earned it so quickly.

Willow found herself standing in the filthy hallway of what appeared to be a tenement while Jane haggled with a woman who had a small child on her hip who eventually gave in to Jane's argument and produced a key and a very large sack that the two of them hauled up three flights of stairs.

"You are new at this, aren't you, ducks?" Jane said with a rough kind of pity as Willow stood in the middle of a very small room that seemed to be filled with discarded bottles, refuse, and a sour smell that made her stomach turn.

The pity began and ended there. Jane explained what she needed to do to survive, while Willow stared at her in stunned disbelief. "Look, forget all that twaddle the nuns stuffed you with. You've got no references. Hiring out as a maid is a dream. It won't happen. No one with sense would hire out of the workhouse, and if they do, like as not you'll find yourself in a box, hired out at all hours at a penny a poke, and you won't see tuppence for it," she said.

It was better to work the streets, preferably in pairs because it discouraged most of the worst of the lot, as Jane put it.

The sack was full of clothing and wigs and cosmetics, and Jane inventoried it carefully to make sure that it was all there exactly as she left it, then she got dressed.  When she was done with that  she turned her attention to Willow, who also got dressed. It reminded her of the last Halloween, when they had turned into her costumes and she thought at one point that night that it had been a lucky thing that Buffy's costume hadn't belonged to Jane at one point.

It was the thought that made her cry, not the thing that she was doing with Jane muttering instructions at her.

Before she made enough money for the business of making herself no longer pregnant, an event that she had decided she simply couldn't think about, she was climbing the stairs to the room when a fierce cramp shot through her and she collapsed on the stairs.

The landlady's husband found her there, a weird mix of pity and disgust written on his pleasant face. He had red hair, like her. She still remembered that. Looking up at him and saying, "I have red hair, too."

He helped her the rest of the way up the stairs and she curled up on the pallet on the floor that was now her bed. That night, Jane helped her clean herself up and brought her into her narrow bed, curling around her. The added warmth was nice. She felt so cold.

That night she told Jane why it wasn't real. It was a spell, and the real her, the real Willow was in Sunnydale with Xander, and Oz, and Buffy, and Mr. Giles and her parents were at a conference in Buffalo. They were staying in New York with some cousins and coming home in time for her birthday.

It became a ritual after that night. She knew that Jane thought she was crazy. Jane had told her as much on several occasions, warning her against crazy talk, but when they were alone, she would rest her chin on Willow's shoulder, spooned up against her back, and ask for another story. And she would kiss her and pet her, like she was a child, or at least that's what it seemed to Willow until the petting became something else, and in a way she didn't mind. It didn't hurt, and it seemed to make Jane happy.

And, above all, it wasn't real. None of it was.

She stopped wearing her cross. She kept it in the pocket in the dress she wore when they were working. It wasn't Jane's favorite, but she said it suited Willow. It was pink, and the top of it looked like it was just slung over the tops of her arms to leave her shoulders bare. She wore it with a blond wig that made her head itch, which was a bonus really. The itchy wig demanded her attention when she most needed it to wander, reserving the internal litany of 'it isn't real' to be reserved for those moments when she most needed to believe that none of it was real. There was an end to the unreality.

She did not expect it to come at the hands of a vampire. There was a certain irony to that. Well, there was that, and the fact that she didn't recognize him.

Jane did the talking. Jane always did the talking. It was their con. Willow would stand back, removed from the whole business while Jane would explain as how she was new at the trade and barely more than a child, and so on. Claims that were usually met with skepticism or outright scorn, or a laugh, before the real haggling began.

Willow had stopped looking at the men. She hardly registered this one as he pushed her skirts up and slammed into her. For a moment she cursed Jane with the most vulgar language she had picked up. He was huge and hard, and strong enough to make her feel like she was suffocating as the pain of his intrusion made her stomach clench. Jane was busy counting her coin, and watching the alley. She had a knife and swore that she knew how to use it. Occasionally she glanced over at Willow to give her a wink or a reassuring grin.

She was looking at Jane when he bit her. That felt real enough. She had been curious about what it was like to be bitten and drained. When your best friend is a Slayer, and your dead friend from childhood is made into a vampire, and you've met yourself from another dimension as a vampire, you think about things like that. And the answer was, not surprisingly, that it hurt. A lot. But it also seemed an oddly appropriate conclusion as she felt herself slipping away, her heart skipping as it occurred to her that maybe this was what was supposed to happen and she would wake up in her bed, or maybe in her U.S. History class, with Xander sitting two rows over, covertly watching Cordelia.

But that wasn't what happened at all.

There is a phenomena, about seeing people in unexpected places, where they become unrecognizable due to lack of context, Willow concluded after thinking about it later. She couldn't understand how so much time could have passed before she realized who he was, and in a way that was a part of the unrealness of it because in any real life or death moment she was positive that she would have recognized the vampire known as Spike, formerly known as William the Bloody.

It wasn't like they had chatted or they actually knew each other. The sidekick and archvillian didn't know each other socially, but she knew who he was, what he was, and she had been more afraid of him than anyone until Angelus showed up.

In the real world? Spike was in Sunnydale. In the unreal world, there was William, and she was so long in the habit of thinking of them as different people that she really no longer knew what to think.

Long after Darla had left her alone, Willow stared in the middle distance. If none of this was real, she had no choice.

And if it was real . . . no choice was a choice.

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