Re-entry

By sockmonkeyhere

Part 11

This was the kind of thing you watched on television or read about in magazines but never experienced yourself, he mused, unless by luck of the draw you found yourself in a sleepy backwater village where the dogs still had no leash law and the most popular road-surfacing material appeared to be topsoil. The sun safely below the horizon, Spike joined the other residents and guests of the odd little motorcourt as they dragged out lawn chairs and ice chests, hosed the bird shit off the picnic table, and saturated the charcoal briquettes with too much lighter fluid in preparation for "Eating Outdoors."

It had been ages since he'd felt this mellow. Elbows resting on the cedar table, a sweating-cold bottle of Dos Equis in his hand, he watched through lazy, half-closed eyes as the tribe (so he had come to call them) milled around the yard and in and out of the house. The slayer kid and her parents, Kay of the flying toothpicks, some doc from the emergency room who'd caught 'Loma's fancy. Nice lot, all of them.

He lit a cigarette contentedly and turned to look at Fred, seated beside him. The weeks here had been good for her. Innocence and joie de vivre were returning to her countenance, and the cerulean hue of her body continued to fade until only a few traces were left in her fingernails and along the edges of her forehead. Now she nursed her beer and stifled a tipsy laugh as Thu, with the oblivion typical of girls her age in the throes of a snit, expounded to an ever-patient Dilip, "...on the phone with my aunt from Cambodia, and when I hung up Shelley and Hayley were standing behind me with these big smirks and Shelley's all, 'What the hell kind of language was that?' and I said, 'It's Khmer, but I can translate into Twat so that you can understand.' God, she's such a bitch!"

Spike chuckled and flicked some ashes into the grass. "Havin' a good time?"

Fred smiled and nodded almost blissfully. A stray breeze caught some wisps of her hair and wafted them into a soft brown nimbus, and her face was pretty and flushed. Spike's thoughts began to drift.

Sort of girl you'd want to take to a hayloft. Air all warm from the sun, skin all warm...sink down into the hay with her where the little sunlight fingers can't reach you and drown yourself in her sweetne-

"THU! WATCH YOUR MOUTH! DO YOU THINK WE'RE RAISING YOU IN A SEWER?"

Fred rested her cheek against her hand and reaching up, slid her fingers through his hair. "'M glad you're lettin' the bleach grow out," she said languidly. "Looks nice. There's some curls at the back, too."

Someone turned on a CD player, and the rockabilly voice of Johnny Rivers twanged out into the night:

Long-Distance Information give me Memphis, Tennessee

Help me find the party that tried to get in touch with me

She could not leave a number but I know who placed the call

When she drew her hand back he almost caught her wrist to stop her; her fingers had felt maddeningly good on his scalp.

'Cause my uncle took a message and he wrote it on the wall.

Help me Information get in touch with my Marie...

Paloma took a seat opposite them and picked up a jar of green jalapeno pepper slices floating in liquid. "Oh, good, there's some left." She and Fred had been consuming the raw peppers enthusiastically all evening; the mere scent of them made Spike's eyes water.

"How the buggary bollocks can you two stand those things?" he shuddered.

"They're good. Clears your sinuses. Cleans your palate." Paloma popped one into her mouth.

"Yeah, well, I'm not tongue-kissin' either one of you."

"You big titty-baby. Jalapenos are a staple of Tex-Mex cuisine. Tastes so good it'll make you slap yer mama." Fred fished a slice out and waved it playfully in front of Spike's nose. "Just one bite. Come on, Skeeter."

Paloma burst into peals of raucous laughter. Her features shifted into their demon configurations, turning her own nose into two ovoid openings flat on the surface of her face. Spike stared at Fred with a mixture of shock and amusement.

"Did you just call me a mosquito?"

Fred began giggling uncontrollably. Spike turned to Paloma and snapped in mock irritation, "'N what're YOU laughin' at, Sheep-Sucker?"

Paloma cheerfully clacked her piranha teeth like windup chattery dentures and gave him the finger.

"Stoat," he replied.

"Sharpei."

"Jack-o'-lantern."

Paloma doubled over in another paroxysm of mirth and the mouthful of Coors she had been about to swallow shot out through her nostrils and sprayed her plate instead.

"GROSS!" Thu shrieked.

Fred smiled blearily. "I wanna stay here forever."

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That's the third time now.

It was long past the hour that Fred was normally sound asleep, and this trotting back and forth to the bathroom was beginning to worry him. She'd been able to sleep through the night with fewer and fewer lights on -- they were now down to the TV set, volume turned on low, and the bulb over the lavoratory. He'd offered once to take another cabin, thinking she might want some privacy. Her response had been an immediate "NO!", spoken almost in panic, followed by, "Unless you want to, I mean; of course it'd be understandable that you'd want your own place, you're used to having one, right? So either way's okay by me," while her eyes had begged him, Don't.

"No, 'course I don't mind sharing. Can't think of a nicer flatmate, and I get lonesome when I'm all by myself." He hadn't intended that last to come out; hadn't even consciously thought it 'til now, but it was true. He'd always liked people, craved company. Five years of existing between two worlds but being accepted by neither had pushed that longing to the farthest back corner of his mind, something he no longer expected or at times even thought he deserved, but still it was there.

The toilet flushed; the bathroom door opened and she was briefly silhouetted in its light: a slim figure clothed modestly in two-piece long-legged cotton pajamas. Then she was tiptoeing across the room and climbing back into her bed.

"Fred? You okay?"

"Yeah, sorry; I didn't mean to wake you up. Beer always makes me pee a lot."

She pulled the covers up to her chest and considered that statement. "I suppose there's ways I could have put that even more crudely."

Spike grinned at the ceiling. "Still feeling a bit soused, are we?"

"A little."

"'S okay; you're cute when you're drunk."

She giggled. "I guess that's better than hearing 'You're cute when I'm drunk'...You know, once when I was nine a friend and I snuck a beer out of a cooler in the back of her daddy's camper and tried to drink it. It'd been sitting in the sun all day and gotten skunky, and was the nastiest thing we'd ever tasted. I think we took about two swallows each and got sick at our stomachs."

"I used to steal into the butler's pantry to sample my mum's claret. Made me sick, too. 'N then they'd dose me with cod liver oil."

That produced another spasm of giggles. "At least...at least you didn't have drivers' licenses you borrowed from people who didn't look anything like you to try to get into clubs. There was this one called 'Tracey's'...it had the best live bands. Everyone wanted to go there."

"Scoobies used to hang out in a place like that," Spike said, almost to himself.

"Scoobies?"

"Buffy and her friends -- Cordelia, Willow."

Fred couldn't help but laugh. "Is that what they called themselves?" When he failed to answer she added quietly, "You miss her a lot, don't you?"

"...Yes."

"Have you ever reconsidered about telling her you're alive?"

"Thought about it once or twice. Wouldn't be much point, though. She never loved me, I don't think...just a bit of affection, maybe, towards the end." There was no resentment in his voice; only sadness and resignation. "I made life too complicated for her. I was supposed to be her enemy. She didn't want anyone to know that we were..." What had they been? "Lovers" wasn't right, because the love had always been one-sided. "Intimate"?

"I tried to be what she wanted, did what she asked, and I screwed it up royally."

"And that's when you decided to get back your soul?"

"Yeah. Wasn't even sure that's what I was after at first. Just knew something had to change, 'n there was a fella in Africa knew how to do it. Had a good reputation for gettin' the job done, y'know."

They'd swapped insanity stories before, keeping each other company in her laboratory while she'd tried to figure out how to get his body back. She wasn't sure that he'd told her everything, but it'd been a relief to have someone to commiserate with.

"Once you'd -- you know, pulled yourself together -- did it make a difference?"

"Some. She said she didn't hate me anymore. And we stopped hitting each other."

Get a grip, Fred reminded herself, This is a slayer and a vampire he's talking about. Fist-fighting each other is a part of their physical and psychological makeup; it's normal to them. What a sad way to live, though. And Andrew said that Spike was helping them fight evil even before he got the soul. Why Willow didn't tell us about him is beyond me. Did they really think so little of him?

Suddenly she began to feel an irrational, growing anger

I WISH TO DO MORE VIOLENCE

(My god, she thought, startled, Where did that come from?) at this Buffy who seemed to rule all men's hearts but value none of them. I'm probably not being fair, she scolded herself.

"Maybe she didn't know how."

Spike turned his head and looked at her quizzically, and she continued: "To love, I mean. Not just you; anyone. Since she was fifteen years old she's been forced to be a killing machine. That's got to have taken a toll on her. And then she lost her mother, and she's still awfully young...maybe she loved you as much as she was able."

They were both quiet then, digesting that. And suddenly he was tired of trying to decipher the enigma that was Buffy. In this room she seemed to have no place, to be merely a large part of an exhausting, self-defeating mess that was now over.

"How'd you get to be so wise, Pet?" he asked the young woman in the bed beside his. He received no reply; her eyes had closed and she was softly snoring.


Part 12

"This is one of the spots, I think." The chupacabra squatted and laid her palm against the ground. "Can you feel it?"

Slayer and vampire knelt beside her and placed their hands on the turf as well. A pendant swung outward from Thu's throat when she bent forward; as it neared Spike's shoulder she snatched it back.

"Sorry," she apologized. "It's a katha. It's sort of like a cross or a Star of David. You might've gotten a burn."

"'S all right." He moved his hand slowly through the grass and soil, and then, distantly, he felt it: the throbbing, just-beyond-consciousness vibration emitted by a hellmouth. Before his ensouling it had been a siren song to him: Come down to us, boy. Come and play. It's lovely down here. He nodded agreement to Paloma.

"It's not very big, but it's a hot spot."

From a duffel bag they brought out the materials Singh had provided them for a sealing ritual -- "Something to jam the lock and grease the doorknob," he had said -- along with some bits to help obscure its presence from all but the most sensitive malevolent noses. (If we had Red here we could probably obliterate it altogether, Spike reflected, and the thought conjured up unwanted memories of Sunnydale, and other unpleasant holes in the ground.)

It didn't take long to perform the task; a final toss of salt and a chant of verses and the job was done. Thu leaned back against a fire hydrant and gazed up at Ashcraft's International House Of Pancakes.

"It's a good thing this wasn't the kind of magic that can only be done at high noon," she commented. "I'll bet the IHOP manager would be pissed if we were out here doing a spell in his flower bed while people were trying to eat."

----------------------------------------------------------------

"You're kind of quiet," Paloma observed on the drive back to the tourist court.

Spike didn't answer right away. "...Been thinkin' about the time in the basement again. After the soul."

"Uh." His loco time. He'd told her a little about it before; it hadn't sounded pretty. "Well, don't let it eat at you, Hermano." She tapped the side of her head with a finger. "Put it in a filing cabinet in your brain in a folder labeled 'Shit That Happened' and just close the drawer for now. It'll always be there if you need it."

"S'pose you're right."

"I KNOW I'm right. I'm- ah, chingada," she swore as the car hit a pothole. "'Course you went crazy. Jesus, you did something INCREDIBLE: you deliberately took your own soul back. No one's ever heard of a vampire doing that!" She shook her head in amazement. "I can't believe those dillhole watchers weren't impressed. Nobody even showed any interest?"

"Fred thought it was great. Everybody else was busy with impending apocalypses, I reckon." He gazed thoughtfully out the window. "Wonder what's stoppin' our latest one from catching up with us?"

Paloma shrugged. "The grace of God? Extraterrestrials in the Superstition Mountains? Quien sabe? Who knows."

They pulled in for gas at one of the enormous truck stops dotting the interstate, where long-distance haulers could find everything from a shave and a shower to a DVD player for the sleeping quarters of their cabs. In the gift shop area Spike found a metal cigarette lighter; the plastic ones cracked too easily and he didn't fancy getting his pockets soaked with lighter fluid in the middle of a fight. Displayed along with the lighters was a selection of costume jewelry, and as he turned to go to the register a piece caught his eye.

It was only an inexpensive opal, teardrop-shaped and suspended from a thin metal chain, but the colors in it were beautiful -- pinks and blues and purples, laced here and there with tiny gold flecks and filaments, and a soft pearlescent luster. He chewed at his lip, wavered...then picked up the necklace and carried it to the checkout counter along with the lighter.

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"You're early."

Winifred smiled and uncurled from her perch on the sofa in Singh's parlor. Being alone was still unnerving to her, and she always waited out the patrols here with the sorcerer and his cat rather than deal with the solitude of an empty cabin, however late the hour. She yawned and stretched and followed Spike out the door. "Run into anything interesting?"

"Evil motorway median and a suspicious-looking bed of petunias. They'll not be makin' any more trouble."

Fred laughed delightedly, and Spike found the sound enchanting. He stopped a few steps from their cabin and drew a package from his jacket pocket.

"Here...never did give you a proper 'Welcome Home' gift."

She looked at him wonderingly and opened the little box, and her eyes grew wide with pleasure.

"How pretty!" she breathed. She touched the pendant with a fingertip and watched the pastel colors dance across the stone. When she looked back at Spike again she was surprised to see that he was standing completely still, hands shoved in his pockets, his face tight and uncertain as if...

(As if I were going to laugh at him? she thought later. As if he was afraid I might throw it back in his face?)

"If it doesn't suit, I can take it back," he said quickly.

She shook her head. I'd keep it even if it didn't suit. "It's from you. I love it."

Relief washed over Spike's features. Relief and...happiness. For the first time since she'd known him, he looked completely, genuinely happy.

Now (Does he know that his face is like an open book?) he seemed to be taken by a sudden inspiration. She waited while he licked his lips nervously, hesitated, took a deep breath...

"Would you like to go on a date?"

The little flame of attraction that had been kindling for some time in the back of Fred's consciousness erupted into a full flashover. She was shocked to find herself breaking into a sweat and blushing furiously. This is crazy, she thought, We're two adults and in another minute we're going to start staring at the ground and shuffling our feet and kicking rocks. All I need is a grass stem in my mouth and I'll look like a complete hayseed.

"I'd love to."

The words brought Spike another flood of relief. "'Kay. Great. Guess we should go to bed now- I mean, you should get some rest. It's late." (Bloody hell, it's 11:30.)

For weeks in their motel room they'd been clumping around each other comfortably and nonchalantly in bathrobes and drawstring pajama bottoms and T-shirts; now suddenly they were very aware of their bodies and were seized with an almost comical shyness.

Lying in their separate beds, in the almost-dark, their minds ran races with thought.

Buffy's his first choice, I know that. I can accept that. God, it's only a date; I'm acting like he's proposed. We're just trying out a date, to see if it could work, the same way Wesley and I tried it. Except I already knew Wesley would do anything to make it work, would kill to make it work; sometimes he scared me...why did I date someone who scared me? Because I was flattered? Because mousy Fred knew a guy who was so obsessed with her that he worshipped her like a goddess and believed that the greatest reward in life was to be her boyfriend?

Don't wanna rush anything. She just lost Pryce. She just escaped from a hell dimension.

If she climbs in bed with me again I'm gonna explode.

Part 13

It felt fine to dress up in a shirt and tie occasionally; better still to know that in a few minutes he'd be joined by a pretty young woman whose company he savored.

To take her to a nice restaurant. ("Good dance floor, good wine list. Here's the address." "You're a peach, Kay.")

In a decent car. ("You can't drive that piece of shit. Take my Camry." "Owe you one, India.")

To gaze into a pair of warm brown eyes and-

"OMIGOD! You look GORGEOUS!"

Thu crashed a heavy bag of weapons onto the floor and beamed in admiration.

"Thanks, Squirrel. Seen Fred comin' out yet?" He glanced anxiously out Singh's parlor window with the uncomfy thought What if she decides to back out? whispering to him like a nasty little disease.

"Here I am. I'm so sorry, the blowdryer conked out and I was waiting for Paloma to get here so I could borrow hers, and I thought about just drying it in the car like I used to do when I was late for work -- you just roll up all the windows and turn the heat and fan on 'High' and aim all the vents at your head, but then I realized that in this weather we'd both be sweating like pigs by the time we got there..."

She wound down like an alarm clock. "I'm sorry I kept you waiting."

"Don't mention it." He distantly heard his own voice, but nothing really registered except how incredibly lovely she was. She had put on a gauzy, sleeveless little summer dress with a pale floral print that lay on her like gossamer and gave her the look of a delicate pastoral nymph. The opal sparkled like a tiny bonfire below her throat. Spike wondered helplessly how he was going to conceal the screaming hard-on saluting her from the front of his pants.

"Oh! Before you guys go! Lemme take your picture!" Thu rolled over the back of the couch and dug a Polaroid camera from one of the kitchen cupboards, giving Spike time to whip around in the opposite direction and reach the shadowed safety of the wall directly behind Winifred.

"Okay, be still," Thu instructed. The Polaroid clicked and whirred, and spat out a print. "It's a Russell Stover moment," she added happily, surveying the resulting image. She turned the camera upside down, examining it from various angles. "I thought vampires didn't make reflections in mirrors. Don't cameras have little mirrors inside them?"

"Yeah, we got reflections, they just can't be seen by human eyes. But they can by camera guts. Camera's not alive, it's a machine; sees everything. That bit of film there's what the camera saw a few minutes ago." To Fred he added in a whisper, "Let's go before she starts quizzing you about digitals."

They fled into the night.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

"I'm trying very hard not to drink too much this time," she announced into her wine glass later that evening. It was going to be awfully difficult: their table was small and intimate with candlelight, and the man seated across from her was mouth-watering.

"I told you, you're cute when you're tipsy."

"No I'm not; I blither like an idiot. So does my mama." She fingered the glass stem worriedly. "I wonder if Michael's ever going to be able to get word to them that I'm okay?"

"He will. He's just trying to come up with a way that doesn't spook the shit out of them and doesn't tell them where we are. Whoever's running the show in L.A. now may have their own little mind-readers tuned into your mum 'n dad's wavelengths, doin' a bit of psychic wiretapping."

Impulsively he chucked her under the chin. "Cheer up, Love. Angel and Charlie'll be here tomorrow, and we'll all make a nice fresh new set of plans. So get just as boozy as you like."

"You REALLY don't want to see that."

Kay had been right: the club section of the restaurant did have a nice dance floor. He led Fred by the hand onto the edge of it, slid an arm across the small of her back, laced her fingers through his and held them against his chest. The music was recorded rather than live, but on a good sound system and with a decent choice of artists: Dido, R.E.M., Edie Brickell And The New Bohemians. Slow, seductive tunes. She found herself staring up into his face, mesmerized by the sharp blue of his eyes, her hand unconsciously kneading his bicep. Miles below, the lower half of her body quietly informed her of a rock-hard erection. As another song began he moved her arms up to encircle his neck and wrapped both of his own around her waist, drawing her tightly against him. Then his hips began to sway slowly in time with the music, sensual and serpentine, carrying hers with them.

The straw that broke the camel's back was a soft little kiss on her earlobe.

She responded with a whimper and nuzzled his neck. She felt him quiver, and suddenly he was maneuvering her into a shadowed, secluded corner, pressing her back against the wall with the length of his body as he caught her face in his hand and brought his mouth down on hers with a raw, intense hunger. His free hand roamed feverishly down her hip and flank and slid underneath her skirt, pushing the filmy material up as he groped her bare thigh. He gripped the underside of it and lifted, wrapping her leg around his own and pinning it there as he continued to kiss her fiercely.

Sweeter than I ever imagined, mouth's like honey, want to put her innocent little mouth all over me, want to be hers...make her happy...make US happy...

With a herculean effort he finally pulled his mouth away from her and released her leg, bracing his hand against the wall instead. He rested his forehead against hers and closed his eyes, panting, his breath hot on her face.

"'M sorry, Pet," he gasped. "I swore I wasn't gonna...oh, hell." He'd fucked it up again. Forced himself on a girl, and this time there hadn't been a history of confusing "no means yes" signals to help explain it. He turned his head away from hers, miserable now. "I'll take you home."

"Good."

And then, incredibly, lips pressed into his palm.

To his astonishment, she wasn't angry. What he saw in her face were all the things he'd hoped to see in the women he fell for: acceptance, approval, serenity, desire.

A chance.

For the third time in his life, he perched upon the precipice.

And leaped off.

"I'm in love with you."

For the first time in his life, the landing didn't hurt.

"I love you, too."

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Home.

Naked.

The almost-dark was bearable now; a solitary lamp illuminating their bodies as they slid and stroked and arched and trembled, touching secret places and crying out in ecstasy.

Sleep, when it came, was deep and peaceful. Toward dawn Spike awoke, resting on his side in the middle of the bed. He opened his eyes to see a vast empty space between himself and the edge of the mattress, and the old, familiar, hollow feel of isolation and hopelessness settled onto him: she was gone, just as Buffy had always been gone when he woke up, even in the final days when she had stopped despising him and sought him out for strength as much as comfort. Lingering, he’d learned, might have implied commitment, and that wouldn’t have done at all.

Then something warm stirred against his bare back. He turned…

And she was there after all, Winifred, pushing herself upright from where she’d been lying on her belly, her long brown hair tangled and tumbling over her shoulders, eyes heavy-lidded with sleep. She blinked for a moment in confusion, then her gaze fell on him and she gave him a languid, loving smile. Her voice came out in a whisper.

“Good morning.”

Through a torrent of silent emotion he reached out and pulled her on top of him.

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“What are all these little scars?”

She lay with her cheek resting on his stomach, fingertips slowly dragging back and forth from his navel to the inside of his thigh. Around her hand, barely visible except at this close range, dozens of faint lines slightly paler than the rest of his skin crisscrossed his chest and abdomen.

The reply was quiet and pained. “When the soul came back, it burned. I thought live coals were inside me. I know now it was from guilt or being off my nut, but it felt real, ‘n it hurt like hell, an’ it wouldn’t stop…so I took a knife and tried to cut it out of me.”

“Oh, my god,” she breathed, looking up at his face in horror. She scooted up the bed and put an arm around his chest and hugged him tightly.

“I wish I’d been there to help. Not help you cut yourself, I mean; just…help.”

He wished it, too. He drew her head up in his hands; studied her.

“You really do love me?” There was an almost childlike wonder in his voice.

She stroked his cheek. “I really do.”

She lowered her mouth to his and kissed him, softly, and he came undone. With a low growl he rolled them both over but as he entered her she winced in pain.

“Oh, shit!” he gasped, mortified. “Did I hurt you?”

“No, no, I’m just…I’ve never done it so much in one night before.” She gave an embarrassed little smile. “I’m kind of sore.”

He pulled out immediately. “God, Sweetheart, I’m sorry - can I get you something for it?” He wasn’t sure what he could get. Somehow he didn’t think an icebag would cut it.

“It’s all right; we can do it some other way,” she assured him, trying to sound cheerful. She held up her hand brightly and began walking her fingers over his dick. “Itsy-Bitsy-Spider-climbed-up-the-waterspout…”

“Lamb, I’m serious.” He caught her hand and held it carefully, as though it was suddenly made of thin glass crystal. “You’ve got to ALWAYS tell me when I get too rough.”

“I will.”

She contemplated the hand, small and mortal.

“William…if you decide that you’ve bitten off more than you want to chew here, I’ll understand.”

“How’s that again?”

She raised her face to his. “I’m not like any of your other girlfriends - I’m not a slayer, or a vampire. I won’t be able to keep up with you the way they did, in bed or patrolling. I can’t back you up in a fight the way they could, either. I can do lots of things well, but those won’t be among them. And I’ll grow old one day.”

“Hell, Fred, I don’t care about any of that!” he burst out, almost laughing. “And growing old isn’t a problem; there’s plenty of spells’ll take care of that. They’ve got ‘em temporary and permanent, in all speeds. Just gotta find the right witch.”

"No. I won’t use an eternal youth spell. They’re dangerous, and they demand all kinds of sacrifices. The price for them is too high.”

He released her hand to trace the smooth contours of her face.

“I meant an aging spell. For me.”

It took a moment for the enormity of his proposal to sink in. “You’d grow old with me?” she asked in a hushed voice.

“Yes. Hadn’t thought about it before, but…yes. Whatever it takes. Not gonna leave you behind.”

Part 14

What Charles thought he saw, in the fading light between evening and nightfall when everything through the windshield is colored Haze Grey, was a Native American girl standing sentinel before a village of teepees, with sooty plumes from a campfire (Smoke signals?) rising into the air behind her. As their van moved closer, the girl waved at them and sprinted back up the drive, and he realized that she was Asian, not Native, and that the teepees were actually motel rooms and the smoke was the issue of a Weber barbecue grill.

"Did I mention you won't be staying at the Hyatt?" Michael Wight chuckled from behind the wheel.

"Hey, any port in a storm, man. We're just glad you're takin' us in."

The van angled and pulled up to the office. Gunn and Angel dropped from the doors on its right side. Spike rose from a lawn chair. And Winifred stood on the porch, smile lighting her entire face and tears in her eyes.

Gunn was the first to break the silence.

"Oh, lord, Babygirl. Aren't you sump'in."

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Forty-five minutes later they were gathered again, at the picnic table and its satellite ring of folding chairs and TV dinner trays. Drifting in to join them were the demon-hunters of Ass Crack. Their appetites had been sated with hamburgers, underdone quail, and bird blood, and now they all slumped comfortably. Only Angel seemed to still be on edge, but that, Michael had concluded a mere half-hour after meeting him, was his usual state of mind anyway.

"Damn, when was the last time we got to kick back like this?" Gunn tossed Singh's cat a morsel and sighed blissfully. "Y'all got it nice here."

It does help keep things in balance," Michael agreed. "I don't doubt there's been many a night when we've all seen and done things that would make thy knotted and combined locks to part."

Kay, still impeccably dressed and neatly wiping steak sauce from her fingers, added, "One of my coworkers at the bank is always commenting on how germy and dirty currency can be...sometimes I have to bite my tongue to keep from telling her that you don't know dirt until you've had a giant possessed earthworm's butt blow up in your face."

"Have any problems checking out of the hospital, Charles?" Paloma asked the newcomer.

"Nope. We about half-convinced 'em I was a street person who got jumped somewhere and couldn't remember a whole lot, and that Angel and Mike ran a homeless shelter. Oh, hey..." Gunn produced a patient identification bracelet from his pocket and handed it to Fred. "Brought you a souvenir."

Fred beamed and examined the plastic band. "Why, thank you...Flynn, comma, Errol..."

She smiled politely and confusedly. Angel darted his eyes away and muttered, "I liked his movies."

Thu took a Polaroid snapshot of him. "Wasn't he some gay guy who wore tights?"

"No, that was Superman." He turned to his hosts. "We can't stay. We're putting you in danger by being here."

Paloma raised a wry eyebrow. "Yeah, this was a clean, safe hellmouth until you guys showed up."

Angel shook his head. "You don't understand how powerful these people are. And they're relentless. Sooner or later they'll track us down, and you'll be caught in the crossfire. This place is such small potatoes that you don't even register on the Senior Partners' radar, but you will if they discover that you're harboring fugitives from them."

"It's gonna be the same wherever you go. And yeah, they're big but they're not God. They've got shelf lives and expiration dates and Achilles' heels just like everybody else does." Paloma's teeth sank into a piece of pink, bleeding quail flesh and she chewed thoughtfully. "I don't mind takin' our chances with you."

"Nor do I," Michael said quietly.

"Me either." Thu fired the camera again.

"In for a penny, in for a pound," Kay smiled.

Singh said, "We're out of beer."

"Not it."

"Not it."

"Not it."

"Not it."

"Not old enough."

"Hey, that ain't fair," Gunn protested. "Nobody told us the Beer Run rules."

"Ignorance of the law is no excuse," Kay informed him, tossing him an ignition key. Spike grinned and stood up.

"Keep your seat, Charlie; I'll go. You gits are liable to get lost and fall into the Grand Canyon."

"Spike..." Angel began, but the younger vampire ignored him and strolled away.

They don't realize, he thought helplessly. They're like we were once, jumping into a current they think they can swim. I won't lead another group to disaster. It's me the Partners really want...if I'm alone when they catch me they may be satisfied and let the others be.

He looked at Fred, tidying up the grill, in khaki shorts and a little tank top with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. She was humming softly to herself and smiling. I'll protect her this time. Not going to grow complacent and-

She turned as Spike drew abreast of her, and her expression startled Angel: it was the same look of shy adoration she had frequently given him after he'd rescued her in Pylea. She said something; "Hurry back," it sounded like. Spike replied something in kind and kissed her on the mouth, then continued on toward the parking lot.

"Sonofabitch!" Gunn gasped, lurching from his chair and sending Singh's tabby flying. He stared at the spot where his hand had been resting, the spot where a small yellow scorpion now clambered. "Thing almost stung me!"

Thu took an empty cup and nudged the creature into it. "Come on, Mister Pokey," she said into the cup as she carried it to the far edge of the yard and shook it out over the brush.

"You're lettin' it GO?" Gunn sqawked.

Thu rolled her eyes melodramatically. "I don't kill everything."

----------------------------------------------------------------

Spike was almost to the truck when Angel caught up with him.

"Spike."

"Sorry, Angel, I agree with them. The alliance thing AND the need for more beer."

"You and Fred." Angel's voice was low and tense, his face stony with disapproval. "You shouldn't have...Spike, she's vunerable right now. The last thing she needs is you sweet-talking her into some crazy fling."

Spike stared at him. "THAT'S what you're on about? Lions and tigers and bears breathin' down our necks and your big concern is who Fred's dating? You need to get your priorities straight, Mate." He shook his head in disgust. "And not that it's any of your bloody business, but we're not having a 'fling.' I love her."

"It doesn't matter how you feel; it's what's best for her that's important."

Spike scoffed irritably. "God, but you're a piece of work! After everything we've gone through, you still can't bear the thought of one of your harem preferring me. Nothing I do'll ever make me good enough, will it? Well, screw your notion that you 'n I are damned to Hell and not fit to be happy."

He jerked open the truck's door. Then suddenly he wheeled around again, and his face was a canvas of hurt and resentment and fear.

"Don't take her away from me. Not this one. You got all the others." He hissed the words through clinched teeth, and his voice almost broke. "Just...don't."

He held his old rival's gaze angrily for several seconds. Finally Angel dropped his eyes -- whether in concession or contrition he couldn't tell -- and walked wordlessly away.

----------------------------------------------------------------

The moon hung high and white overhead when the party broke up, and the members of the tribe trailed back to their respective vehicles and domiciles. As they reached the cabins Fred turned to Gunn and then to Angel, and gave them each a warm hug.

"I'm so glad you're both here. Good night."

Spike waited, silent, still; felt the knife in his gut twist a quarter-turn ("I just wanna bask.") When she returned to his side he slipped a quick, proprietary arm around her and guided her through their doorway.

"I told them about us," she said happily.

He tried to make his voice nonchalant. "Yeah? What'd they say?"

"Charles was fine with it. He likes you a lot. And Angel was...Angel." She rolled her eyes and grinned. "He really didn't say anything; just made that face of his...the one that looks like he's trying to pass a kidney stone."

The arm around her visibly relaxed. He patted her rump and released her, and crossed to the little closet to shed his shirt and footwear.

Fred sat down on the edge of the bed to remove her own shoes and watched him from beneath lowered lashes. Hard, lean muscles bunched and flexed as he emptied his pockets on the bureau, unbuttoned the fly of his jeans. Tender as he was with her, she knew that a superhuman wildness lay just below that surface, co-existing with the tenderness somehow, usually held in check but always, always there. It had emerged last night, in the shadows of the dance hall and later, here in the motel room. At the height of lovemaking, when he held her straddled in his lap with his lips on her throat, she'd caressed his head and discovered that he was in demon face. He might have bitten her, turned her, but she didn't care because the hard fullness in her was so achingly good, was all that mattered, was so intense that she thought it would split her apart.

And he won't turn me, I know that; as strong and ferocious and dangerous as I know he's capable of being, he won't hurt me.

And she'd breathed into his ear and clutched his back and shoulders and been engulfed in a surge of release.

He won't hurt me. Or anyone else who doesn't deserve it.

I love this man.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Mine. My girl. This darling girl belongs to me. Wants to belong to me. Wants me to be her man.

He had trouble wrapping his brain around it. Love wasn't simple and easy like this; the Brownings of the world were pipe dreamers. Love danced on the end of a string like a carrot, just beyond your reach; try to hold it and it fought and spit and left thorns embedded in your flesh. ("Naughty Willie, don't be cross; Daddy only wanted a kiss. I spread jam on it and dropped it butterside down on the carpet.")

Unseen in the bureau's mirror, he watched Fred watching him. What was it Pavayne had seen in her and wanted a taste of -- "wet, sweet passion"? (And I'll rip your throat out if you ever touch her, you sack of shit.) The fop had been right, for all he was disgusting. She was a passionate little creature, and her kitten-like scratches were every bit as arousing as the violence of Spike's former bedpartners. Better, in fact, now that he gave it some thought. No grand dramatics or screaming bloodlust. Just this pretty little wisp of a bird who bit by bit he'd bared his heart to.

Why does a man do what he mustn't? To be hers.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Maybe I shouldn't interfere. She's an adult; she can do what she wants.

But she doesn't know Spike the way I do. She doesn't know the things he was capable of, she hasn't seen the things we- he did. Doesn't understand that the call to feed never stops, that a soul doesn't change it. Souls WON'T wash away our sins. Doesn't he GET that?

There were men in the world who seemed to land on their feet like cats, Angel reflected, regardless of what they were thrown from. And they waltzed through the world following everything but Good Sense, never pondering the consequences.

She's a grown woman. It's her business.

At least he wasn't slathering his habitual Aren'tICharming on her, Angel had to give him that. In fact he'd actually been solicitous and protective all evening, the way he'd always been with Dru. With Buffy...?

There's nothing I wan- need to know about that.

Something had happened, though. Spike had been able to harness his demon somehow. Had embraced it, even, and STILL retained his humanity. And was able to love with or without a soul.

Why couldn't I?

Traffic passed in the distance, the sound carrying over the desert floor and through the hrumm of the cabin's air conditioner.

Connor's out there. And Nina. Does she have to use the shackles now, or did she find another cage...

-----------------------------------------------------------------

I tire of formlessness.

I tire of floating.

I want the shell again.

Part 15

Restlessness and worry drove Angel across the road and into the desert as the town, and the motor court, slept. He strode purposefully at first, though he had no destination, then slowed to an aimless meander. It was damned lonely out here, and it matched his mood. Unbidden memories rose up: of Darla, of Cordy...

The moon washed the landscape in a pale, unearthly light; cactus and chaparral brush hunkered against the low hillsides like shadowy gnomes. At the top of a ravine he caught a sudden whiff of sulphur, and looked across to see three figures on the opposite bank. Two were naked, their hairless bodies supporting a slaughtered deer apiece across their shoulders. The third was clad in jeans and a football jersey, and sparse black hair hung from its scalp. Moonlight bounced off their skin -- no, make that scales -- with an iridescent sheen. Clicking, chittering sounds passed among them as they conversed in an unknown tongue.

The two naked creatures caught sight of Angel and turned to their clothed companion in apparent apprehension. That one glanced Angel's way, turned back to the others, spoke a few unintelligible words. It seemed to relieve them; their conversation picked up again briefly. Then, with a nod and a wave to Angel, they shifted their kill higher up on their shoulders and began walking away. A liquid-like oval light appeared before them; they stepped through it and were gone.

The remaining figure came down across the dry creekbed, shape-shifting as it moved. By the time it reached Angel, it became the familiar face and body of Paloma.

"Hola," she greeted him. "Que pasa? Couldn't sleep?"

"Not much for sleeping at night." He looked toward the now-vanished oval. "Relatives of yours?"

"Yeah, my cousin and a buddy of his. Neither of them are any good at morphing, so they gotta do their hunting here after dark. Game's pretty thin at home this time of year, so a lot of my people are dimension-hopping to this world to pick up some extra food. Wish they'd stay out of the humans' domestic herds, though. One of these days they're gonna try to snag a pig or a cow and some farmer's gonna fill their butts with buckshot."

She gestured out at the surrounding countryside with a jerk of her head. "Wanna go track something? I heard a rumor that there's a wild burro herd in this area. Plenty of coyotes, too, if you like carnivore blood. They're next to impossible to catch, though."

"Thanks, but I guess I'll pass." It actually sounded tempting, in a strange way. But killing to feed was different from killing for defense, particularly when the feeding was for taste rather than hunger. It was too close to being Angelus. And you're never coming out again, my friend. Not on my watch.

"How'd you come to be here?" he asked the goat-sucker. "I mean to this town, helping these people?"

Paloma shrugged. "I was gathering food, like everybody else. See, when I was a kid my mother had a lot of human friends in northern Mexico. She can pass for human as well as I can. And if there was a drought in our world and supplies got scarce, we'd come to your world and get jobs, and buy stuff to send back through the portals. I was here in Ashcraft when the vampires started showing up a few years ago. I just felt really sorry for the humans, you know? I mean hunting's one thing, but this was torturing, and killin' just for the hell of it. EVIL shit."

"Yeah." How well he knew exactly that.

The chupacabra suddenly laughed. "Don't know if Michael's already told you this, but back in the spring, a few weeks after Thu was elected or chosen or whatever the hell they call it, this guy phoned her house while we were there having dinner. Said he was with the Council of Watchers and he wanted to discuss her 'new condition' and what it meant. And Mr. Khiem -- that's Thu's dad -- he hit the speakerphone button so we could hear and said, 'So you're one of the sonsabitches that puts spells on little girls without asking their families' permission. Who the HELL do you think you are, playing God like that? You aren't training my daughter to do jackshit.' An' I guess the COW guy was using a speakerphone too, 'cause this woman comes on and says, 'Listen, I'm a slayer and a Tae Kwon Do red belt and my girlfriend's one of the most powerful witches on the planet, so you damn well better cooperate!' An' Khiem just laughs at her and says, 'Little Miss Red Belt, you got a bullet-deflecting kata?'"

"What was the watcher's name?" Angel's voice turned sharp.

"I dunno. Sounded British. I think Michael could probably remember it. Arrogant bastardos."

"Did they ever call back?"

"A couple of times. The Brit guy was real rattled and apologetic about what the bitchy slayer'd said on the phone, and then the bruja called and SHE apologized for having a rude girlfriend, and then she and the bitchslayer got into a big fight while the phone was still off the hook. They quit calling after that, but I don't think any of them really got it through their heads that the Khiems just weren't interested in handing Thu over to them. Poor kid was scared to death, too; we even sent her to stay with my parents for a few weeks in case the COW sent one of their goon squads to kidnap her."

For a brief second an image of Andrew in fatigues and nightvision goggles and driving a tank flashed through Angel's mind. "I don't think this new Council's quite as militant as the old one. I'm pretty sure I know the watcher who called. And the witch. They do mean well, but..."

"That's what we decided. Until we know more about 'em, we'll keep ourselves to ourselves. Better safe than sorr- "

She stopped suddenly and both she and Angel raised their heads skyward. A strange draft had passed them, reeking of ozone, and the air pressure around them had inexplicably risen. Now both phenomena were gone. Paloma wheeled, expecting to see others of her kind appear again, but found nothing. She narrowed her eyes, baffled.

"It felt like a portal opening..."

"The Senior Partners."

The next instant they were tearing across the road, across the driveway, into the cabins one by one, Angel sickened at the thought of what they might find.

----------------------------------------------------------------

In Cabin 1 the television glowed with reassuring light and images, murmured with reassuring noises. Fred dozed and Spike slept soundly, following a warm bath in the tub and then an even nicer warm bath in the bed (This is how a cat must feel when its mate grooms it...ohGOD what this man can do with his tongue.) One of his legs lay heavily across her own; when the weight became uncomfortable she squirmed until he rolled over with a grunt, then stretched herself along the length of his body and sighed contentedly. Maybe tomorrow they could rent some movies -- National Lampoon's Vacation, or Sunset Boulevard. She wondered how many of the really old ones Spike had seen when they first came out. Boulevard was from the '50s, she thought, and oh my gosh, there was Reefer Madness from practically the Flapper era, one puff and poor Bill and Mary had become psychotic loonies without even inhaling, according to the film's high school principaHUH?

SHOVE.

Something was grabbing her, pinning her, pressing on her from above and pulling at her from below, something thick and invisible and stinking of ozone and metal; dragging her down through the mattress (SPIKE WAKE UP), through the Earth, into the dark

NOT THE DARK!

past the dark...

----------------------------------------------------------------

Grey stone above, high stone ceiling, grey walls and columns. Hard stone under her back. Light filling the space around her from an archway, opening onto...outdoors?

I'm lying on a floor.

Fred jerked upright, afraid to move but more afraid of remaining prostrate and exposed in what looked like a medieval Greatroom with no furniture. Instinct fired her limbs and sent her scuttling backward to crouch behind a pillar, five years of experience reminding her that to hide, you must make yourself small. In places her retreat left a track on the dust-covered floor, but as she crawled her hands and knees sometimes sank into the stone surface as if it were only a mirage -- or as if her hands and knees were not really there.

It was a massive room, with only the scattered stone columns to break up the space. Along the walls arched doorways revealed corridors and low, broad flights of stairs. The wall nearest her was an exterior one, through whose opening she glimpsed an alien landscape: groundcover of fat yellow tubers that waved and rippled like sea anemones; bloated sun continually circling the horizon; white, harsh sky. The sun's activity frightened her in a way she couldn't explain -- suns shouldn't move rapidly and visibly like time-lapsed photography come to life -- and she looked quickly away and down to her bare toes floating in the dirt.

"You are Fred."

The voice was in her mind, not her ears. It had no discernible age or gender, little emotion. No use in hiding now. She summoned up a reply, and sensed her own words mentally rather than audibly. "What do you want?"

"Your shell."

Illyria. The thing that had sickened her, killed her, altered her body to suit itself, the thing that but for the passage of time and the frailty of the human form would have laid waste to the planet.

Now it -- he? she? -- was speaking again.

"When the seer returned your spirit to your body my spirit was released. That was satisfactory. But in this state I cannot affect things, I can only view them- "

"You affected me. You brought me here."

"That I cannot explain. I wished it so, and it was. I suspect it is the shell that bonds us. It is a poor choice of vessel, but it is all that I can find. My acolytes have all vanished -- the Knox creature claimed that there were many..."

The voice trailed off, almost sadly. Fred felt the churning nausea and fury that Knox's name aroused ever since she'd learned of his true nature. Anger at Illyria began to well up now, too.

"So you expect me to -- what? -- just hand my body over to you? You STOLE it from me!" She eyed the space around her warily and pulled her knees up tight against her chest. "You turned me weird colors, you screwed up my insides...I can't have babies anymore!"

"Your genitalia is intact." The voice sounded puzzled. "Was a womb so necessary? Your species is overpopulated as it is."

I could run now, get out that doorway and onto the lawn.

Then where? What if the stuff on the ground is poisonous? What if I fall off the edge of the world? She could barely feel herself now; couldn't feel the floor at all.

Illyria became irritated. "I have tried to enter other hosts. I cannot. I do not know the rituals, the necessary materials. All those who would know are dead or missing. Allow me to do this thing."

The voice paused.

"Please."

It was asking permisson? Then...

"You can't take my body without my consent. You can pull me out of it, but you can't get into it yourself without help from me." She listened, waiting to see if she had guessed correctly.

The voice was lower now. Humble. Pleading.

"Please."

It helped us. It fought alongside Angel and the others. It didn't want to at first, but Spike didn't want to at first, either.

"I can try..." She would never have believed she would be saying this, to this being. "I'm willing to try to help you. But I don't want to be without a body any more than you do." She bit back a moan as the feeling in her legs and arms vanished completely. "And I'll NEVER go back to the void."

"The void?"

"The place where I was trapped the first time you kicked me out of my 'shell.' No light, no sound, nothing to taste or touch..."

"I've never heard of this place."

"It was agony."

Agony indeed -- what she'd sometimes imagined it would feel like to be slowly pulled into a hell dimension, or be buried alive in the ocean, or...

"Was it like that for you, in your sarcophagus?"

Illyria was silent for a moment. Then,

"...Mostly I slept."

"...I tried to."

For several seconds they were both quiet, both waiting for a decision. Beyond the doorway the alien sun raced its bizarre path around the edge of the heavens. The tubers made soft whispering noises as they rubbed together.

Fred licked her lips, not feeling it, and finally spoke into Illyria's mind again. "We'd have to cooperate. Neither of us has much of a choice, I mean if one of us balks we'll both be up Shit Creek without a paddle, so we've got to work out a schedule or a set of signals or something, and practice so that we're not pulling me, I mean my body, in two directions at once..."

She stopped abruptly.

"I want to see what you look like."

The Illyria voice made a sound of surprise. "You would not find it pleas- Very well."

It was there, suddenly, monstrous in size, a torso and head reaching almost to the vaulted ceiling, covered with limbs that writhed in a serpentine fashion. Blue spots and streaks dotted the base cover of frogbelly-white. Eyeballs bulged, blinked, and receded in its face; a lipless mouth parted slowly. Here and there, other mysterious orifices winked a greeting.

They stared at one another, David and Goliath, the Old One peering down on the puny, naked form that both of them coveted.

---------------------------------------------------------------

Lamplight penetrating the thin flesh of his eyelids interrupted Spike's dreams; Angel's voice jolted him wide awake. He glared at the older vampire standing in Cabin 1's doorway. "'The hell'r you doin'?"

"Is Fred all right?" Angel's hand was still fixed over the wall light switch he'd snapped on; his expression looked terrified.

"Huh? 'Course she's all right." Spike blinked, exasperated, and pulled the sheet up over the sleeping girl's shoulders.

Relief flooded Angel's face. "I thought -- there was something outside; a current, something. I thought the Senior Partners had found us." Behind him, Gunn could be heard approaching the cabin while Paloma called out from the office, "Everything here's okay." He blushed suddenly, embarrassed at having burst in on a nude and obviously post-coital Winifred and profoundly grateful that she hadn't woken up.

"Well...keep an eye out," he stammered.

"Yeah, we'll do that. Now are you shutting the door, or is everyone coming in to sit on the bed in their pajamas?"

Grimacing a little, Angel exited, forgetting to flip the light switch off.

"Wanker," Spike muttered. He reached over and pushed back the tousled curtain of hair that had fallen across Fred's face, and froze.

Her eyes were open.

Open, and fixed and glassy as though she were in a coma. Her mouth hung slightly ajar as well, and beneath it a small patch of drool dampened the pillow.

"Oh God." He tried to move, tried to call Angel back, but found himself unable to do anything more than stare in shock and horror.

"Baby?"

Thin blue streaks appeared in Fred's eyes, creeping out of the pupils and snaking across her irises until both orbs were covered by the dreadful color.

Then her scent disappeared.

"Fred, don't...no, don't go, do you HEAR ME?" In a panic he grabbed the sides of her face, his thumbs digging into soft cheeks that remained slack and unresponsive.

Not givin' up this time, goddamnit. Not gonna sit back and let that bitch kill you again. Gettin' you back if I have to drag Red here with my teeth and

"William."

The blue was gone. Brown eyes looked up at him now; warm, brown, human eyes along with a perfume that was as distinctive as a fingerprint: Essence Of Fred. Spike's voice came out in a whisper.

"It's YOU, isn't it? It's my sweet girl?" Before she could answer he was smothering her face with kisses, running his hands all over her to assure himself that she was real. When he had calmed down somewhat, she stroked her fingers along his jaw and ears and mouth; traced the scar on his eyebrow.

"It's me. I'm here. But...I didn't come back alone."

Part 16

It took a quarter of an hour for Fred to tell her tale to the group assembled in Michael Wight's living room. When she finished, they continued to stare at her in dumbfounded silence.

"Well...'Balls of fire,' said the monkey as he slid down the flagpole," Michael finally managed.

"It's not forever," Fred insisted again. "Just until we can figure out...something else," she finished lamely.

"And until we do, you're gonna time-share yourself with a big phantom Illyria," Gunn intoned.

"Is she looking out at us now? Hi!" Thu leaned forward and waved in Fred's face as if it was a security camera.

Fred sighed. "Not as far as I know. She agreed to tell me if she wants to lurk. And whenever she's at the wheel, I'll be lurking -- that sounds kinda trashy, doesn't it, like I'm crawlin' around in the neighbors' bushes -- anyway, I won't be knocked into that godawful void again, and she says she won't want to drive me that often- "

"Only on Sunday afternoons and to do the marketing," Spike muttered glumly. He sat slumped on the edge of a sofa with his elbows resting on his knees and a look of resignation on his face. Beside him, Kay studied the crude sketch of the Old One that Fred had drawn for them.

"I can't help but feel sympathy for her, though," she said thoughtfully. "If my only two options were to live as a shade or be put into the body of a gerbil, say, or an oyster; to never be my true human form again..."

"Well, the shade bit's no bloody picnic; I can vouch for that."

"Fred, you're positive you can't contact Illyria unless she initiates it?" Angel halted in the midst of pacing the room.

"I don't think so, not at this early stage of the game. But with practice we may be able to improve our symbiosis. It could be sort of interesting, actually; it's been a while since I've gotten to work on a puzzle like this." The young physicist's face began to brighten. "Just think what I could learn from her -- time-travel, alternate universes..."

"Places to look for a body of her very own..." Angel reminded her.

"With no guarantee that she wouldn't revert back to her old nation-conquering ways..." Gunn added.

"I know, I know..." Fred fiddled with the hem of her blouse uncomfortably. "Look, let's just try it this way for now and see how it goes. Lord knows we've done weirder things."

"Paloma ate a mouse once," Thu offered.

The clump of booted footsteps crossing the porch brought everyone's heads up. "That's probably Ronnie Osterberg," Michael said. "He's bringing over a toy that's suspected of demonic possession."

He rose and opened the front door to a heavyset man in a policeman's uniform. The officer's face was pale. He thrust a clear plastic bag at Michael, holding it by the corner and at arm's length. Inside the bag was a Fisher-Price Little Wooden Person. "Here," he said quickly.

Michael took the bag and looked at Osterberg with concern. "Are you all right, Ronnie?"

Osterberg nodded. "Just glad to be rid of it. About halfway over here I heard the goddamn bag crinkle all by itself. I pulled over and carried it the rest of the way on foot. No way in hell I was gonna stay shut up in a car with it. If it hadn't been broad daylight on a busy street I'd probably a' just left both it and the car there 'til morning." He glanced through the doorway and noted the roomful of people. "Tell all these folks to be careful. Don't go in a room with it by yourself." He turned and hurried off the porch steps and back down to the sunlit world of lawnmowers and driveway basketball.

Michael closed the door and placed the bag on the coffee table. It was stout; the type of heavy plastic bag that bedspreads and ready-made draperies were sold in. Its zippered seal was encrusted with a white, crumbly paste. In its far corner was the toy figurine, barely one and a half inches tall and one inch wide, consisting of a round wooden ball attached to a round wooden cylinder. The cylinder-body was green. The ball-head was pink. Eight tiny brushstrokes of paint formed its hairdo, two dots its eyes, a turned-down curve its nose, and a turned-up curve its mouth. No arms, no legs, no hands or feet.

"That's cold," Gunn said sadly. "Makin' Little Wooden People do evil. Man, I played with these when I was a kid."

"So did I," Kay replied. "They're all big and plastic nowadays. I had the airport and the amusement park and everything. I think they even made a Sesame Street Little Wooden Mr. Hooper."

"Could we...you know, get back to the evil part?" Angel asked patiently.

Michael continued. "The paste on the zipper is Communion wafers ground up and mixed with holy water. The toy belongs to a local woman who'd been fooling around with a Ouija board -- Maxine Lopez," he interjected in response to Thu's wide-eyed "Who?" expression. "Something began replying to her questions with the board's planchette a few weeks ago. It claimed to be the ghost of a lost child and asked if it could live in the toy. Maxine felt sorry for the 'child' and agreed."

"And gave it a name, too, I suppose." Spike rolled his eyes.

"Naturally," Michael sighed. "A classic case: demon beguiles sympathetic human into inviting it in and assigning it a personality, then proceeds to take control of the household. It didn't help that the Lopez family was unhappy anyway -- a son failing school, rumors of an affair, that sort of thing -- Possession demons are typically more powerful in environments where there's constant turmoil. It wasn't long before the usual unsettling noises and visions started up, and furniture began rearranging itself, and then physical attacks by forces nobody could see. And at each occurrence this toy would be found in the room somewhere."

"How are the Lopezes doing now?" Gunn asked.

"Gone. They packed up and fled town, leaving us literally holding the bag."

"So what do we do with the little wooden guy? Burn it?"

"I'm not sure yet. The entity doesn't have a physical form as far as we know, but it seems to be able to bump things around anyway. Which makes it harder to handle than the incorporeals with no physical capabilities at all."

At Thu's growing look of confusion, Paloma spoke up. "There are some evil spirits whose only control over anything is the power of suggestion. They can't move or physically affect stuff themselves; they don't even have an electrical charge. They have to talk someone else into doing things for them. So they look for someone who's mentally unstable, or emotionally fucked up; people who're really scared, angry, unhappy, unsure of themselves...and then they sidle up to 'em and start dicking with their minds. Convince 'em of all kinds of stupid shit. An' if that person's fucked up enough, he'll believe it." She looked over at Spike and Angel. "Nothin' personal."

"Holy crap," Thu murmured.

Paloma waved her hand contemptuously. "Yeah, those assholes are full of themselves. 'I'm the Greatest Evil,' 'I'm Original Evil,' 'I'm Sin Incarnate.' Some of them can mimic dead people, but it's just a visual trick; your hand will pass right through them."

"The Lopezes' priest sealed the bag up," Dilip said. "I'll throw as much containment magic as I can at it, too. But I think we should stay up in shifts of three or four people tonight to keep watch. And we should all sleep in the same room."

"I hope the Lopezes have sense enough to do the same," Gunn commented dolefully, "In case this thing decided to follow them instead of the doll."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Michael's house was old and large, with a wrap-around porch and tall, fragrant hedges. In the gloaming, Fred followed the odor of cigarette smoke around the side of the building to the dim cave between hedge and house, where an orange, glowing speck hovered in the darkness.
"Spike?"

"'M right here, Love."

He crushed out the cig and drew her up against him, wrapping his arms around her from behind and leaning back against the wall. Up and down the block streetlights and porchlights blinked on; a dog barked; children's voices rose and fell as they moved their play toward the safety of indoors. He squeezed Fred gently and listened to the sounds, and to other sounds that were beyond her hearing range. His mind drifted back to another neighborhood, with another house in which another little girl once lived, and another young woman.

Thu's so much like Dawn used to be. Loud-mouthed, ridiculous, good-hearted. I miss you, Niblet. I wish you hadn't grown to hate me.

He pulled himself back into the present and listened to Fred's steady, quiet breathing.

"It'll work out," she whispered. "Illyria and I. We'll work it out. Don't worry."

Spike inwardly shook his head. He didn't care for the Illyria arrangement one damn bit, but his lady was clever; she knew what she was about. They stood in silence again, and Fred made only soft moaning noises when he lifted her skirt and entered her from behind. He turned her so that she could brace herself against the wall and took her slowly, prolonging the pleasure for them both.

In the darkened dining room window above them, four Little Wooden People looked out through the glass.

Part 17

Thu the Slayer sagged back in a canvas sling chair and watched the bag from between her propped-up feet. It still sat on the coffee table where Michael had left it when he and five other members of the party retired to bed on the sofa and cots and mattresses scattered around the living room, and its Communion wafer seal was now reinforced with a ring of some kind of sanctified soil that Dilip had gathered from the grounds of a kiva or a temple. Or maybe from his cat's litterbox; that soil was pretty powerful, Thu reflected. She laced her fingers together on top of her stomach and waggled her toes and began to sing an old Girl Scout tune -- "The Lord-said / to No-ah / there's gon- / na be- / a floody, floody..." under her breath.

Near the door to the dining room Fred sat at a battered office desk, typing into a computer and humming peacefully. Angel watched over her shoulder for awhile. Then, feeling somewhat useless -- half of the stuff she was pulling up was incoherent gibberish to him -- he took a seat near the fireplace and joined Thu in bag-monitoring.

"How come you never eat anything?" Thu asked abruptly. "Besides blood, I mean. Other vampires do."

"Nothing else has much taste, I guess. I don't know why."

"Maybe it's psychological," Thu mused, "Like some people, when they get under a lot of stress, their hair falls out...has your hair ever fallen out?"

"No."

"There's a guy here in town who got laid off of his job and his eyelashes fell off. They grew back in a different color."

Angel looked off into the shallow little fireplace with its antique tiled hearth and ornately-carved oak surround. "I suppose some people don't cope with being dead as well as others do." God, was that ever an understatement. He'd accepted the loss of the Shanshu promise, but at times it still hurt him keenly. To never be my true human form again...

"You're not dead," Thu contradicted.

"Well, yeah, I am."

"No, you're not."

"Yes, I am."

"No, you're not."

"Do you argue like this with your teachers at school?"

Thu considered seriously for a moment. "Only the dickheaded ones."

Angel blinked, wondering if he had just been insulted, when the slayer added sadly, "One of these days I'll probably have to kill one of my friends."

Her face was mournful now, older than its years. Angel understood what she meant: someone that she knew or loved might someday be turned, and she'd have to stake them. Statistically that possiblity was very real, and he hated it for her.

"CHARLES!" Fred suddenly screamed.

The entire room jerked awake at once and gaped around in confusion. Then a cot crashed over on its side and Gunn was on the floor, eyes wide and terrified, groping at his throat and clawing inside his mouth. Angel reached him first and pulled him upright, and heard faint, desperate wheezing.

"Hiney lick!" Thu yelled, scrambling over the furniture towards them.

That's it. He's choking. Angel encircled Gunn with his arms and pushed his fist sharply against the struggling man's upper abdomen in the classic Heimlich maneuver. On the second thrust something small and solid shot out of Gunn's mouth and clattered onto the floor. Gunn drew in a huge, gulping lungful of air and sank to his hands and knees in exhaustion.

"What was it?" Kay asked, horrified and baffled. All eyes turned to the object that had just been expelled from Gunn's windpipe.

It was a Little Wooden Person.

"Bloody hell. The little whoremaster broke out!" Spike exclaimed angrily as he helped move Gunn to the sofa. The bag on the table was empty, a hole melted through its crusty zipper. Where the toy had apparently crossed the containment circle, the soil was turned to ash.

"Jesus," Gunn gasped, "I just woke up with it stuck in my throat!"

Michael brought him a glass of water as the others seated themselves and viewed the remains of the miniature prison. Paloma used the fireplace tongs to pick up the figurine and place it back on the table, then took up the poker as though she were awaiting a chance to bash the tiny wooden man with it.

"We'll have to come up with a stronger container," Angel announced, ignoring Spike's muttered "Oh, brilliant." He found himself wishing they'd been able to swipe some of the handier items from Wolfram & Hart's supply cabinets on their way out of L.A. "But at least we've recovered the toy."

"It's not the same one."

Angel looked across the table at the slayer. "What?"

"The one in the bag was green. This one's orange. I know it was green; I stared at it for, like, ever."

"You mean the possessed one's running around here under the furniture someplace?" Fred asked. Several pairs of feet instantly jerked up off the floor.

"How the hell are we supposed to find it?" Gunn wondered, eyeing the baseboards warily. "This is a BIG honkin' house. Think you could home in on it, Psychic Mike?"

"I'll certainly try. It may be able to cloak itself, though."

"Maybe we can make a trap out of a garbage can tilted on its side like you use for catching escaped hamsters," Thu volunteered.

Paloma smiled. "What'll we bait it with, Chica?"

"A little wooden woman?" Spike suggested with a cheerful leer.

Gunn managed a grin. "I always thought the Sesame Street Little Wooden Susan was kinda hot."

"The problem is," Kay pointed out, "We can keep re-catching this thing 'til we're blue in the face, but it doesn't mean we've caught the entity itself. It may not even be in the toy anymore."

"She's right," Fred agreed. "It's displaying the typical Possessionist mentality: play elaborate, pointless games; instill and feed off of chaos and fear. Right now it seems to enjoy teleporting objects into and around the house."

She paused and drew a breath as her eyes traveled beyond the table. "Like...that."

A See 'N Say 'The Farmer Says' was sitting on the hearth.

For several seconds no one moved. They regarded the new manifestation silently. Finally Spike heaved an exasperated sigh.

"Right, fine; we'll do it your way," he snapped out into the air, "Seein' as you're too much of a cowardly little tosser to take one of us on hand-to-hand." He picked up the latest toy, a round plastic disk about a foot in diameter with an arrow that pointed to various animal pictures, and pulled the string on its side. The arrow spun in a slow circle as its tinny voice announced, "The cow says, 'Mooooo.'"

Spike shrugged and pulled the cord again.

"The bird says, 'Tweeterchirp, tweetercheep.'"

"The accountant says, 'I'm going to hang myself from the upstairs balustrade.'"

Michael started as he heard his own voice coming out of the speaker box. The arrow began turning without the aid of the pullstring.

"Here is a vampire," the farmer's voice declared, accompanying an eerie Angelus giggle.

"Do you hear the banker?" followed by a recording of agonized Kay-like screams.

"Listen to the scientist." Groans and other outcries came out of the box now, and Fred blanched in embarrassment as she recognized the sound of herself in the throes of orgasm.

"That's enough," Spike hissed. Furious, he shifted into gameface and slammed his fist through the See 'N Say, shattering it to pieces. He hurled the broken bits into the fireplace. The farmer cackled wildly and shrieked out a string of obscene babbling in a reedy, metallic voice.

Dilip ducked as a shard of the rigid plastic suddenly shot through the air and flew past his head. The lightbulbs in the room began to dim. "We need to get out of here," he warned. "It's getting stronger."

Thu scurried to the front door and grasped the knob, which refused to budge. Scowling, she whirled herself around ninety degrees in a spinning wheel kick and smashed a hole in the door. Paloma finished it off, wielding the poker like a sledgehammer, and moments later they were all stumbling across the porch and then the yard to what seemed to be the relative safety of the sidewalk.

As they stood there, looking back at the house and catching their breaths, the lights came on in the upstairs windows.

Lined up inside the windows' ledges were dozens of Little Wooden People

Part 18

"This one's dead, too."

The van was the last of their vehicles to be tested; parked closest to the house, they'd approached it quickly and cautiously, half-expecting it to blow up or to trap some of them inside it and asphyxiate them with carbon monoxide. Instead, it simply refused to respond at all, either to ignition key or to hot-wiring. The cars parked along the road were similarly disabled. The entity had apparently drained the batteries of all of them.

"We could walk to my apartment," Kay suggested, as Paloma hurried out from under the carport, shoving the van keys back into her pocket, and rejoined the others on the curb. "It's not more than half a mile from here, and Thu's home is just a few blocks further."

Gunn took in the houses around them. "Shouldn't we warn the neighbors about your Feng Shui problem?" he asked Michael. "I'd hate for one of 'em to see the busted front door and come stickin' his head in to see if anything's wrong."

"He's got a point," Angel agreed, "Some of us should stay here and keep an eye on the place. We can watch it from the house across the street. The rest of you go on; see what you can round up to fight this thing."

"Angel, you can't stay here 'til morning!" Fred protested.

"It'll be all right. He can duck into the Garcia's garage. They're used to the weird shit that goes on around here. I'll stay, too." Paloma tossed the fireplace poker to Gunn. "Wanna make it a trio?"

"Yeah, why not." He caught the weapon deftly and tapped the middle of it against his palm.

"Be careful, then," Michael cautioned them, and putting a hand on Thu's shoulder, he lead the rest of the group to the corner and away.

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Between streetlights, the night enveloped the six hikers; clouds obscured the stars and moon, and shadows seemed to reach at them from all directions. As they passed a privacy fence, Spike pulled off a loose board and broke it into foot-long pieces. "Toy Monster's not the only spook abroad tonight, I'll wager," he reminded them as he passed out the stakes. He tucked an extra one into Fred's skirt pocket and murmured to her, "Stay close."

Thu holstered her stake in the front pocket of her jeans. "It's funny -- funny strange, not ha-ha funny -- I should be scared when stuff like this happens, and I am, a little, kind of, but mostly I'm just excited, or mad, or both. Paloma said that's probably the way slayers are supposed to feel, on account of we're hunters. It's the way she feels when she hunts. Do vampires feel like that, too, Spike?" As she spoke she leaped and kicked playfully at his head, her foot coming within a hair's-breadth of his face.

Spike felt his heart wrench as he smiled back at her friendly grin.

Pray God she never grows bitter, doesn't come to hate life, doesn't turn into a cold, unfeeling little stone. Don't let it break her.

"Yeah, they do, Pullet, and don't you forget it. They'd have your head on a pike if they could, and mine, and anyone else's who tried to cross 'em -- I know, nice pun -- Lot of 'em are scared of us, but that doesn't mean they won't be right bastards in a fight."

"I won't forget." Thu made her expression solemn, but as they resumed their march it was plain by the bounce in her step that she was very close to breaking into skipping.

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They'd have your head on a pike if they could.

The sentence niggled in Dilip Singh's mind, and the memory of a trip to the grocery store three years ago rose to the surface.

October of 2001, and in the checkout lane of the supermarket two Caucasian men, early twenties, give him hostile looks as they fall in line behind him. The young woman cashier notices a box of saffron rice among his items and tells him, "Those are on sale today."

"Are they? Charge me for two, then; I'll go get another."

As he walks away toward the shopping aisles he hears one of the young men snarl something unintelligible, hears the cashier scold, "Shut up, he's from India. India don't have nothin' to do with the Taliban." Hears the man give a nasty laugh and reply, "So? They're all goddamn ragheads."

Minutes later, leaving the store, he passes the two men as they lounge against the side of the building. "Hey, Osama," one of them jeers in a low, taunting voice. He ignores them -- foolish young boys with no common sense and a chip on their shoulders -- and steps onto the parking lot.

"Camel jockey!" the other calls out, and both break into brays of laughter. Still he ignores them, and continues toward his car.

"SAND- "

Suddenly he's had enough; he wheels around, glaring at the two offenders with anger and disdain. Locking his gaze on theirs, he whispers an incantation, one learned secretly in his youth from an aged fakir, and the two men are immediately pinned against the wall by an invisible hand. As their bodies freeze in fear, he lifts them up the wall, slides them up like mercury rising in a thermometer, and lets them dangle for a long, satisfying moment before dropping them on their shocked and cowering asses. One of them, he notes with pleasure, has pissed his pants.

Driving away, the feeling of triumph fades, and he becomes a bit ashamed of himself. Certainly the brats had deserved a smacking, needed to be taught some manners, but the thought persists that in frightening them so badly, he has engaged in a little terrorism of his own.

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"Mike! Miiiiii-chael! Psst! What's Number Four?"

Pretends not to hear them, tries to focus on his own paper, but it's hard to do so when your buddies know that you somehow can see the teacher's answer sheet to the test in Mrs. Lindgren's file cabinet (how many of them are your buddies only because they know this?)

Knows he should claim ignorance, maybe even put a few wrong answers on his own paper to prove it to them, but finally the desire to please them and to be one of the cooler kids of the fourth grade wins out, and he closes his eyes, mentally flips through the file cabinet's tabs and labels and pages, and whispers back, "South Dakota."

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My name is Fred Burkle and I live in a hotel room, which is not as bad as the cave I used to live in, gosh no, in the room the walls are smooth which makes for much better writing, and you need to write to keep the equations straight, equations are things you can always rely on, everything should be as constant and dependable as math, math doesn't snatch you up and send you to dark places and nightmare places where people with horns want to eat you, if you've got math you don't have to remember that you had a mama and daddy but now you can't find them and the bad dream is real...gosh no...

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"Kay Baby, something real sad happened last night; Grandmommy had a stroke and passed away."

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It's supposed to be a place of sanctuary, according to Victor Hugo, but so far it isn't doing much other than reminding him that he's got no place here. No place anywhere, really, except maybe Hell, which is where the sorrowful and righteous voices in his head keep advising he go. Sodding poets knew nothing of true abject misery, he's discovered; Poe, perhaps, had come close...

Buffy in front of him now, reaching for him.

"No touching! Am I flesh to you? Feed on flesh. Nothing else. Not a spark."

Voice whispers in answer, one he's saddened but not surprised by. She's made it clear it's all he's good for.

"Oh, right; flesh then. Solid through. Get it hard; service the girl."

Hands slapping him, his own striking back, staggering blow that sends him crashing to the floor. Hears her demanding, "Spike, have you completely lost your mind?"

"Well, YES. Where've you been all night?"

"You thought you could just come back and...be with me?"

"First time for everything."

From her hiding place in a corner of the chapel, Fred crawled on her hands and knees, cautiously. She halted in front of Spike and studied him with wide eyes as he sat numbly amid the splintered pews. In one hand she clutched a fat felt-tip marker. She ducked and yelped in alarm when Buffy snapped, "This is all you get. I'm listening. Tell me what happened."

"I tried to find it, of course," Spike answered, struggling to put it into words. "The spark. The missing...the piece. That fit. That would make me fit." He sounded on the verge of tears.

Fred crept closer; touched him timidly on the knee. She too looked ready to cry. "You can stay in my room if you want to," she offered. "It's a real nice room. Maybe you'll fit there."

He gazed at her, bewildered and lost. "Are the voices there?" he asked finally.

She thought it over and shook her head. "I never heard any."

As if on cue, Spike clamped his hands over his ears and sobbed, rocking back and forth in apparent terror. Frightened by the outburst, Fred drew back and quickly huddled over the floor where she began to scribble frantically with her marker.

She was unable to ignore his distress for long, however, and after a moment raised her head and peered at him through the loose strands of hair hanging in front of her face. Chewing her lip, she laid the marker down and moved back to crouch beside him. She slid her arms around his shoulders and hugged him awkwardly. "Don't be scared," she whispered. "Please don't be scared."

It seemed to help; he began to grow calmer, and the rocking slowed down. Fred sat back on her haunches and dipped her head to scrutinize him again. "Is it better now?" she asked him, still whispering, her eyes huge and round, as if they were sharing a dire secret.

He removed his hands from his ears carefully and whispered back, "I'm insane, you know."

"That's okay. I don't mind bein' around crazy people." She barked out a silly, nervous laugh. "They say I'm half-crazy, too."

From a pew across the aisle, Kay leaned out toward them with a surprised, tear-stained face. "Fred? Spike? What are you doing at my grandmother's funeral?" Dilip set his bag of groceries down on the coffin that rested near the altar, next to a framed portrait of an elderly black woman, and exclaimed something in Hindi.

"It's the demon. It must be a telepath. It's picking up traumatic memories from our brains and trying to unnerve us with them." Michael strode through the chapel's entryway brusquely, passing through Buffy's body as he spoke. "This church is an illusion."

And suddenly they were all on the street again.

"Oh, my god," Kay breathed, "Remind me not to let my mind wander."

Spike wiped a shaking hand over his mouth. "Much...oh, shit...how much farther to your flat?"

"Only a couple more blo- Wait. This is wrong."

The street seemed skewed somehow, unrecognizable and unnatural; lightposts bending and buildings set at impossible angles. The sky was no longer black but a dull, brassy shade, neither day nor night, and the air had become hot and dusty.

"THU!" Michael shouted.

They saw her several houses down, seemingly unaware of their presence, looking and listening intently in all directions. The space around that house was as dark as everything had been moments earlier, and a streetlight illuminated the girl. Twice she appeared to call out. The sound was muted, though, and then Thu was gone as well, racing back the way they'd come, taking the night with her. As she passed from their line of sight, the odd, surreal lighting covered everything.

----------------------------------------------------------------

In Micheal's neighborhood, the Ministers Of Grace and the Little Wooden People continued to stare at one another. The latter had not moved; the former squirmed uncomfortably in cast-iron chairs. Gunn once turned to ask something of Paloma and was almost startled off of his seat: in her half-dozing state her body had taken on its natural form, with scales and claws and gaping nasal cavity. As Gunn tried to recall his question, he became aware of the approaching sound of sneakers smacking on concrete, moving at an incredible speed.

Angel was already on his feet, catching the small slayer by the arm as she pounded into the yard.

"They disappeared." She bent over and gripped her thighs to catch her breath. "We were walking along and they just...vanished."

Part 19

To a passerby, Michael might have appeared to be sound asleep standing up. His companions waited, studying their new surroundings and trying not to get seasick. Objects seemed to change position when they looked away and then looked back; some things were audacious enough to move while they watched, although the movement was so subtle that they couldn't swear for sure that it was actually happening. Like that movie Dru was so crazy about, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," Spike thought. Before the Talkies; black and white; German artsy-fartsy Modernist tripe, but he hadn't been able to drag her out of the theater until he'd promised to bring her back later and let her eat the organist. This place had that same feel: all crooked angles and tricks on the mind.

Michael opened his eyes and shook his head. "I'm not getting anything."

Well, I think it's safe to assume we're in another dimension." Kay crossed her arms nervously. "I'm guessing Toy Monster brought us here somehow during the interactive flashbacks."

"But why not Thu?" Fred asked. "And I didn't see her in the memory replay, either."

"She was happy."

They looked at Spike.

"Said it yourself, Mikey, it's harder for Possession demons to get their mitts on someone who's in a good mood. You saw the kid; she was havin' a damn good time strolling across town in the middle of the night. She was in her element."

Michael nodded, stuck his hands in his pants pockets, and heaved a sigh. "Any suggestions? We can stay here, since this is probably near the entrance hole, and hope that the others can find us. Or we can risk exploring this place ourselves."

"Staying here makes more sense."

"I think so, too."

"I agree."

----------------------------------------------------------------

"How long was that?"

"Fourteen minutes."

"I think that's a new record for staying in one place."

"Yep. The last time we waited about eleven seconds."

----------------------------------------------------------------

It was a town utterly deserted. For five blocks they walked, counting intersections and noting landmarks -- not that they expected them to still be there if they returned. The street signs were of no use; all were marked simply "Street," as though an imbecile had laid out the city. There was no visible sun overhead to tell direction, either. Everything was washed in the same brassy color of the sky. Spike felt a hand slide into his, and looked down into Fred's face. "Staying close," she explained, and squeezed his fingers.

"Levittown," Dilip observed. "Cookie-cutter houses. They're all the same."

They were almost identical; small, boxy structures painted grey or white, with small, bland lawns. A sprinkler started up in one of the yards, flinging water listlessly into the air. Fred had a pretty good idea that the water would taste rusty. Her eyes followed the path of the sprinkler's hose to the house, and widened when she spied a figure in one of its front windows.

Not a live figure, though.

A department store mannequin.

She suppressed a shudder.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain," Kay joked half-heartedly.

Their street had been sloping progressively upward. Now as they crested this hill, they saw that the houses suddenly ended and gave way to a campus of some sort: large modern buildings, glass-fronted, perhaps two or three stories tall, connected by interlocking greens and parking areas. There was activity here -- actual people walking around.

"Or what appear to be people," Michael reminded them. They made their way onto the complex quietly, seeming to blend in with the populace. It was impossible to tell whether the institution was collegiate or industrial, as the directory in front of each building was merely a garbled hodge-podge of letters, neither English nor any other language they recognized.

"Need directions?" an amiable-looking young man stopped and inquired.

Michael chose his words carefully. "Is there any place here where we could find a map of the city?"

"A city map..." The young man smiled. "Well, now, there are maps and there are maps. Hard to say which one would do you any good." A malicious glint came into his eye. He continued to smile, and the smile stretched, splitting slowly across his cheeks until the corners of his mouth reached his ears. "Just awfully hard to say."

"Never mind, then, Guv," Spike smiled back, and made a facial shift of his own. The young man's Cheshire Cat grin halted. He stared at Spike's vampire visage, took a few steps backward, then scurried off fearfully.

"Minion," Spike snorted with contempt.

"Guys," Kay said softly, "Look at the sky."

Above the buildings, the air was turning green. No more than a few miles beyond, black clouds formed and roiled, growing in size until the entire upper atmosphere in that quadrant of the sky was a dark, ominous wall. Some of the pedestrians on the campus noticed the "wall" and began to chatter in alarm; the rest seemed oblivious.

"Get inside," Michael said automatically. He gripped Kay by the arm and pushed her toward the building's doors. Dilip followed.

"Wait! What?"

Fred pulled at Spike and echoed Michael's command. "Get inside. It's a tornado."

The building's interior was devoid of people. Fred and Michael darted from door to door, tugging on handles and looking inside. Shit, Spike wondered in near panic, Where is it you're supposed to go in a tornado? Doorway? No, fuck, that's for earthquakes...

"Here's a downstairs," Dilip called. It was an open stairwell, built against a wall of windows. They clattered down it and found a large basement conference room. The windows here were set high on the walls, at outdoor ground level; unfortunately every wall had them.

How can they? Fred thought distractedly. It's physically impossible. The building above this room is so much wider! "Michael," she gasped, "Can you tell if this is a hallucination?"

"I don't know." He yanked chairs away from one of the tables and scanned the room hurriedly. "Push this table against that wall, under the windows. If the glass blows in we're better off underneath it than facing it."

One long table was shoved upright against the wall with an end in the corner; the other they flipped sideways and set against the upright one to form a tunnel. Before crawling into it they stepped on top and took one last look outside.

The wall cloud was closer than ever now, hanging menacingly at the edge of the complex. In the open space between two buildings, a semi-triangular shape lowered from the cloud's bottom edge. Many of the people had dropped to the ground and lay flat, but as before, others were apparently unaware of the danger, and no one seemed to have sense enough to move indoors.

"There's not time to do anything for them now," Michael said. One by one, the members of his group scooted into the table tunnel, and braced themselves.

-----------------------------------------------------------------

If this is another mind-screw we’re going to feel really, really stupid.

Their ears were filled with roaring. Smaller winds screamed and whined, but the blast of that roar was deafening. The light from the brassy false day disappeared.

When the windows exploded, Spike gouged his nails into the tables’ wooden legs and dug his heels into the floor. Objects whapped around the room like so many pieces of corn popping, and he was thankful that they’d all left their stakes in the stairwell behind a tightly-closed door. The tipped-down table bucked in his grip; tried to leap away from them. Then he felt it jerk back into place and realized with relief that Kay was holding the table’s other end, and the table above them as well. He could just make her out in the darkness, fisting her hands in front of her face and concentrating.

At last, finally, the wind began to die. Tarnished light filtered through the windows once more. The group sat in silence under the tables, breathing heavily, stealing Do-You-Think-It’s-Safe-Now glances at one another. Then they emerged, picking their way carefully through the broken glass and Conference Room shrapnel, and made their way back up the stairs and outdoors.

The grounds had been swept bare. Anything not bolted or rooted was gone. The sky was once again its metallic, uniform color.

“There should be bodies,” Fred whispered. “There were so many people...there should be bodies everywhere!”

“EVERYWHERE!” a voice boomed out, and a blow like a lightning bolt knocked them all off their feet. Something hazy and amorphous rippled in the air in front of them.

“That’s it,” Michael grunted, “The thing from my house.”

“My house,” the Thing hissed. A maw opened up in the foggy shape, and it spread blanket-like and loomed over Michael.

“Amateur.”

The fog whipped around. Fred was standing, anger in her voice. Pindot pupils fixed on the entity, almost boring holes in it. Her voice had dropped an octave, and it could later be said with absolute certainty that blue was not her best color.

“Excrement. Dung of pigs. Your stench annoys me.” She took a step forward and smiled wickedly. The entity curled in upon itself, pretzeling.

“You play at fledgling games. I devour worlds. I am ILLYRIA! Bow before me...”

The pitch of her voice rose suddenly, and in a nasal Southern twang she finished:

“...gelatinous grub.”

“Fred!” Spike shouted. He flung himself toward her as the entity bellowed and shot an arm of vapor at her body. She stared at it, frozen, horrified. The instant before it hit her she went blue again.

The impact slammed her backward, smashing her into one of the useless directories. She sat stunned for a moment amid the debris, one shoe blown completely off and her blouse and skirt in tatters. Then she threw the mess aside, furious, and began climbing to her feet again.

Spike reached her and grabbed at her arm. “Blue, don’t try it. It’ll snap her like a twig!”

“It vexes me, Vampire.” She shook him off. “How dare it challenge one of us! We held dominion EONS before it-"

Her steps turned awkward, like a marionette's, and Fred appeared briefly: "Oh crap, call her off! "

Illyria again: "-crawled from its putrescent spawning ground." She took another halting step and looked down at her legs, perplexed. Fred returned and flung her arms out to catch her balance. Illyria lowered them. Spike thought crazily that he was watching a blinking neon sign.

"I will smite this larva and smear its remains across my teeth."

"Not in the shell, you won't," Spike hissed, "This thing's an incorporeal. Like Pavayne was. Like I was. Like you."

He wasn't sure at first that she'd heard him.

But then the entity screamed, a shrill, high, piercing scream of terror, and Spike watched in awe as another fog a dozen times larger than the first welled up from the ground. The ghost of a body could be seen in its shape: bulbous, tentacled. Spectral eyes bulged and receded; a lipless mouth parted slowly. It hung motionless over the entity.

Then, with a snap, it ate it.

Part 20

"That was most satisfactory."

Blue flowed over the "shell" again, and Illyria flicked her tongue along her teeth and smiled.

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"You know, for a dollar more you could have gotten fries and a drink with it," Kay said on the way back. At the Old One's blank look she added, "Joke."

Retracing their steps was proving easier than anticipated; the Possession demon's death seemed to have stabilized the environment somewhat. At a few of the houses people could be seen, disheveled and bloody, but tending to their flower beds and bringing in their laundry as though nothing was out of the ordinary.

"I see no need for redistributing our clothing," Illyria argued. The tail and sleeves of Dilip's shirt flapped around her as she walked, and she frowned at the sorcerer in his undershirt. "This garment is extraneous and ill-fitting."

"Well, Fred's not keen on trotting about in public in her knickers, so be a love and just keep it on 'til we get home, all right?" Spike coaxed reasonably.

"It is confusing.." Illyria wrinkled her brow. "Before, I could affect nothing as a spirit. Now I am able to consume a lesser being."

"Got to want it bad enough," Spike guessed. "Sometimes-"

He remembered Pavayne's world. "-Sometimes reality bends to desire. How'd it taste, by the way?"

"Like tacos."

They had reached the block where they entered the dimension. Spike went to the lamppost there and examined a point on it about shoulder-height. "It's the right one," he told the others. "I scratched this little zigzag mark on it with my thumbnail before we left. Call me Hansel."

The sorcerer and the seer renewed their hunt for a portal, Dilip muttering magic and Michael peering with his inner eye. As they crossed the third driveway, Michael stopped in his tracks. "Try here," he instructed. Dilip shut his eyes and raised his palms outward with thumbs and forefingers touching, as though he was operating a divining rod. An oval formed in front of him, man-sized, with a surface like liquid glass. The surface began bulging outward in two places.

The places took the shape of claws.

And as Fred gasped and Illyria departed, the claws broke through the surface, and Paloma's head and shoulders popped into view.

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Four hours after sunrise, Michael began gathering up the abandoned Wooden People from his windowsills and dropping them into a bucket. "Somewhere in the world a Toys R Us stockboy is probably getting fired right about now."

"Can I have them?" Thu asked, looking into the bucket. "If they come to life I'll give them back."

"How large of you," Michael answered dryly.

He left the slayer to finish collecting the toys and descended the staircase to the first floor of his house -- quietly, so as not to disturb the rest of the tribe, most of whom had returned to bed. He discovered Angel on the porch.

"I'm going back," the vampire announced.

Michael crossed the porch, splintered bits of the front door crunching under his feet. He sat down on a faded wicker chair. "To Los Angeles, you mean?"

Angel nodded. "There's people I left there...people I want to make sure are all right. I appreciate your hospitality, but I can't sit still any longer."

"I understand. If it'll make your path lighter, the latest word is that Wolfram & Hart's L.A. branch is gone for good. I saw where Fred had hacked into a satyrs' chat room last night with my computer, and the scuttlebutt is that everything salvageable has been carted off and the building's scheduled for demolition."

"I hope there's some truth to that."

"Are you going alone, or taking one of your team with you?"

"Alone. I don't want to risk anyone but myself." Angel shifted his stance and stared out over the hedge. "I might be bringing someone back to Phoenix...or sending her if I don't make it back myself. She's a lycanthrope -- a werewolf. I was taking care of her before, helping her with it. She may be doing okay on her own, but..."

But I miss her.

He looked over at the slight, pale little man with the glasses like Coke bottle bottoms and was suddenly very glad that Michael Wight was on their side. "If she comes without me, could you see that she finds Spike and the others? That she's got a safe place to stay when the moon is full?"

"Of course," Wight nodded, and then flashed Angel a small smile. "From the City of Angels to the City of Rebirth...well, here's to pilgrims and their progress."

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One of the house's back bedrooms contained a foldout sleeper sofa. Spike collapsed into it, as weary in mind as in body, and waited for the lethargy to take him under. He heard the door open and close, then felt the mattress sag slightly, as Fred joined him in the bed.

Angel's going back to L.A., to look for Nina," she said quietly.

"Come again?"

"That's what he told me just now at the foot of the stairs. He thinks it might be safe enough for him to slip into the city undetected."

"He'd better bloody well hope so!" Spike chewed the news over a moment. "...I reckon he didn't like leaving her high and dry like that; no more nice sturdy cage or anything."

"I think he's lonely for her."

"Could be," Spike conceded, "Suppose even Baron von Broodsabit can only take so much isolation. Maybe he likes her company. 'N I guess shaggin' her can't make him perfectly happy since he'll always be worrying about the Great Perfect Happiness Curse, so that works out nicely."

His hand slid beneath Fred's shirt, but only to wrap his arm around her bare middle. It wasn't sex he was seeking right now, she realized, but simple human contact. To touch at all was a thing to be treasured; even a god-king Old One understood that, and certainly so did a vampire's ghost and a void-trapped human. The reassuring touch of a companion was inestimable. She remembered what she'd witnessed of his Sunnydale memories.

"You shouldn't have been left in that basement," she whispered. "Someone should've come. They should have gotten you out as soon as they found you. I know what it's like to be scared and crazy; no one should be left alone when they're scared." Her words grew increasingly raw and rushed. "I shouldn't have left you alone at Wolfram & Hart all those nights when you were trapped there, and off I went, to some stupid Chinese food party or whatever it was that we thought was so damn important, and I'm so sorry."

Spike came fully awake and stared at Fred in surprise. Her face -- fragile, fine-boned face, as delicate in his eyes as a porcelain teacup -- was bright with anger and self-recrimination. Not at me, he marveled. For me. Even the rabbity little creature in the church -- PyleaFred, he guessed -- had stayed by him.

"Christ, Pet, you've done nothing to apologize for! You made the entire thing bearable."

He touched his mouth gently to her cheek, and felt her face relax and soften.

"And you healed my broken heart."

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Later, in the quiet of the Happy Trails tourist court, Fred went to Paloma's teepee and removed a sweater box from under the bed. She lifted the lid and placed her palm on the leathery catsuit, the heavy boots. The dormant bits of Old One awoke from their hibernation, liquefied, absorbed into her hand, and disappeared.

"Better." Illyria's low voice spoke aloud as she flexed and relaxed within the shell; began to fall in synch with Fred and her rhythms. Then Illyria withdrew and Fred took control again, smoothly, peacefully. She too spoke aloud.

"Better."

She tucked the box back under the bed and returned to her cabin and her man and her life.

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That same week the Chamber of Commerce replaced the graffiti-damaged "Welcome to Ashcraft" sign with a new, fiberglass model.

Within three hours it was tagged again.

 

~Fin~

 

Author's Note: Reentry is my first attempt at fiction writing; I hope you've all enjoyed it, and thank you for your feedback. For anyone interested in more, I've begun posting a sequel called Canis Familiar (still Spike/Fred), which will include the return of Oz, because you just can't keep a good werewolf down.

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Author's Notes:

The lyrics "Long-Distance Information", etc., are from the song Memphis by Johnny Rivers, 1964.

The line "thy knotted and combined locks to part" is from Act I, Scene V, of the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, 1600.

Spike/Buffy dialogue is from "Beneath You" TV episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 7; 2002.