Disclaimers: The usual. All belongs to Joss and Mutant Enemy, and naught to me.
Rating: PG-13 for language until Chapter 11, when it abruptly becomes R. (I caved, all right? So shoot me.)
Setting: AU Season 6
Pairing: S/B, and about damned time
Distribution: Ask and you shall receive, I'd just like to know where it ends up.
Feedback: Why not? rahirah@cox.net
Author’s notes: More or less a sequel to “A Raising In the Sun.” Thanks to Aurelio Zen for lettin' me play with her Zagros demon, and many, many thanks to LA Ward and all the folks at the Redemptionista Writers Group for beta reading.


He didn't want to wake up.
Too late. Consciousness had hold of him now, and the sweet bliss of knowing who he was dissolved into the familiar crawling itch inside his head. Tanner huddled inside his ratty sleeping bag, only his eyes visible. (Important, very important; the Things couldn't get through the cloth.) Sun was down. When no place was yours, no place was proof against the things that prowled the Sunnydale night, it was much safer to sleep during the day. No one visible. Which didn't mean much; he could only see the invisible ones sometimes. Jerk the zipper down, back up, down again. (Very important.) Sit up, slowly, while the fingers crawled through his brain. Check the perimeter.
Still in the park, in the little cave formed by the overhanging myrtle bushes. Tanner twisted round in the sleeping bag, counting off: the rock with the hole in it. The yellow rubber dog. The three matchbooks with one match left, the one on the right-hand end of the back row, bound together with red string. Wards and bounds, marking his territory. Some of the others used crosses, one, two, three, four, planted in the ground, head, feet, one to each side.
No crosses for him. What point when any smart vampire could use a stick and knock them away? He had his own methods. Sometimes he thought he remembered which ones were really magic (The bundle of rowan twigs? The phonograph needle which had only been used once, to play Scriabin's... what?) The knowledge was far away now. Twitching, itching... time to hunt. Past time. He'd put it off too long already. He'd be no help to the others if he didn't do it soon. He struggled out of the sleeping bag and rolled it up, tucking the charms away in its folds as he did so, muttering the right words in the right order.
His outpost was near the playground, a good safe spot, well-lit even at night. Near the squat cinder-block building which guarded the entrance to the public pool. There were showers in there, and bathrooms, and sometimes in the summer you could get good stuff from the lost and found box in the lifeguards' dressing room. The parking lot by the pool house was almost empty, just one lone motorcycle parked there. Tanner eyed it warily as he walked by, lest it pounce. It growled, but it was well-trained, he could see that. It only watched him as he walked up to the pool house.
The lock on the main door was broken and the parks and recreation people had given up trying to replace it long time ago--gangs, they said, or vagrants. Everyone knew it was really vampires. The others just took advantage of the vampires' vandalism, jackals following lions to the watering hole.
What vampires wanted with a men's room Tanner didn't know--probably the same thing he did, a convenient place to wash up when you wanted to pass for human. Look clean and you could get into the Espresso Pump, scavenge some change, spend the evening drinking coffee. They couldn’t see the crawling in your head if you were clean.
Light filtered in from the parking lot outside through high windows paned in heavy pebbled glass. Tanner picked his way past the front desk, placing his feet just so on the spiderweb of cracks in the echoing hall. Men's showers and dressing rooms were on one side, bathroom on the other. Faint scents coiled about him, plucking at his coat sleeves. Chlorine and wet concrete and stale caramel corn, whispering ghosts of summer. A sharp, astringent scent--a stranger--nipped at his ankles. There was water running in the bathroom already. A dark shape loomed over by the sinks. He realized what the sharp smell was. Peroxide.
The man at the sink straightened carefully to avoid banging his head on the tap and sluiced water out of his hair with both hands. He looked over his shoulder, sized up and dismissed Tanner in a glance, and went back to washing the excess bleach out of his hair. He had one of those little traveling shaving kits laid out on the edge of the sink. Tanner recognized him as someone he'd seen around downtown Sunnydale before. One of the night people. Vaguely punkish, Doc Martens or motorcycle boots, black jeans and T-shirt and a black leather longcoat which must have been damned expensive when it was new. And a definite aura of don't-fuck-with-me.
Older memory surfaced--that too-handsome face a-snarl with rage. Tanner's hand went up, touching his nose gingerly. It still hurt when the weather changed. The blond guy falling, strings cut, puppet no more use. But it had hurt him first. Tanner's first impulse was to back away, let the guy leave before going in himself. Second impulse... "You were there. When the air bled lizards."
The blond guy frowned. "No offense, mate, but I lost my taste for deciphering raving loonies a year or two back. Go ahead and use the loo if that's what you're here for."
Tanner didn't move. Manna from heaven. Guy here, alone. Guy’d hurt him. The dogs wouldn't bark for him. That was the singular occurrence, Watson. His fingers jerked at his sides. Three steps. A grab. Fingers twined in bone-white hair. The right words in the right order. Faster than lizards flew, the strings would be cut again and for awhile he, Tanner, would be whole, the crawling itching twitching stilled... Then he heard the voices behind him, out by the front desk. He froze.
The guy at the sink looked up again, irritation twisting his features, and shook water out of his newly-bleached hair. He cocked his pale head to one side, listening. "You expecting company?"
Tanner shook his head, mute, backing into the room and sliding along the wall past the urinals, towards the stalls in back. The blond guy, though obviously tense, took his sweet time turning off the tap, packing up his razor and shaving cream and tossing the plastic gloves and bleach package into the big metal trash can in the corner. That was fine with Tanner. He could play macho. There had been a time when he could have done the same, said a word, made a gesture--but the magic took time now, time to gather scattered thought and marshal them in neat rows. Time you didn't get in a fight. Tanner would hide in the bathroom stalls and if it was human punks maybe they wouldn't find him, and if it wasn't...
...maybe they wouldn't be hungry enough to want him too.


The voices echoed down the damp concrete halls. "Where'd he go?"
"Men's showers. Geez, what stinks in here? Smells like a laundry."
Footsteps in the short hallway, louder, closer. Spike heard scrabbling noises as the homeless guy, whoever he was, clambered desperately up onto the toilet seat, clinging to the wooden partition. Spike sighed and finished his washing-up, not bothering to look at the big sheet of burnished stainless steel they had bolted to the wall in lieu of a mirror. Too dark to see a reflection, even if he'd possessed one, and he had a lot of practice at doing without.
They sauntered around the corner and into the bathroom, yellow-eyed, faces twisted into nightmare shapes. The only heartbeat in the room was the one he could hear thudding violently away in the stall at the back of the room. Spike relaxed. A gang of human marauders he might have had trouble with. Other vampires he could handle. Not that, in the case of these two, he really wanted to soil his hands.
It wasn't unusual for a vampire to pick a style they liked and stick with it for decades, if not forever. Spike did it himself. But sod all, why did so many of them have to pick a look that screamed 'complete git'? The one in front was middling tall and olive-complected, with dark curly hair in a sort of brillo-explosion halo. He was wearing a collection of gold chains and a lemon yellow polyester leisure suit, horrifically wide lapels and all. Very likely the same suit he'd been turned in; that stuff was even more indestructible than the average vampire. The other one was fortyish and balding, with a sort of hunched, apologetic look even in game face. His grey suit was unobjectionable, if dull, and plenty of living humans of his sort would have had the exact same air of having slept in it for at least a week. He looked like an undead chartered accountant.
The first vampire pointed to the stalls. "He's right in--" Then he noticed. His lips twisted in disgust over bared fangs. "Spike."
"None other," Spike replied, squeezing a judicious amount of hair gel into one palm. He set the tube down on the sink, rubbed the gel briskly into his hair and ran a comb through the unruly curls, testing deftly with the other hand to ensure everything was in place. The patent-leather look was easier to keep up, but he'd gotten bored with it. Besides, Buffy had made the off-hand comment after she'd gotten back that she liked the new look. He'd been too embarrassed to admit that the 'new look' had originally been the result of a week's worth of not giving a shit, but rabid wolverines couldn't have made him go back to slicking it completely flat after that. Oh, well. What time he lost getting the hair right he saved on not hanging about waiting for his nails to dry.
"What the hell are you doing here?" the disco-era vampire asked.
Spike rinsed his comb off and put it and the hair gel back into his shaving kit. "Taking advantage of this brilliant invention that came in last century. Indoor plumbing. P'raps you've heard of it?" He sniffed ostentatiously, wrinkled his nose and turned off the faucet. "Guess that would be a 'no'."
Disco-Vamp ignored the insult. "Look, in your condition I don't blame you hanging around and hoping for scraps, but this one's ours."
The smaller one smiled. Nasty expression. "If you're nice we'll let you have sloppy seconds once he's good and dead."
Spike studied him with interest, wondering if he looked that purely evil with a grin on. He hoped so. With a martyred sigh, he pulled his duster off the hook by the sink and shrugged into it. The black leather flared dramatically about his shoulders as he turned to confront the interlopers again. Grinning. The two of them flinched, stepping back in spite of themselves, and then took a belligerent half-step forward. Damn, but he loved doing that. "Just had to do it, didn't you? Here’s poor Spike, completely biteless, and you lot come barging in and not only want to snuff someone right in front of me, you want to tell me all about it in nauseating detail."
Disco looked at Accountant. Accountant looked at Disco and pursed his thin, colorless lips. "I suppose that is inconsiderate of us, considering your... condition."
"Bloody right it's inconsiderate. Think of my feelings." Spike picked up his shaving kit and tucked it into his duster pocket. "D'you think I enjoy playing white hat?" His grin broadened as his hand found the other item in the pocket. "You could have shut your gob and I could have left nice and peaceable, don't ask, don't tell, but no--here you go, forcing my hand." He withdrew his hand, now grasping a wooden stake, from his pocket and swung it in a short sharp arc that terminated in Accountant's chest. "Downright rude, I call it."
Accountant had time for one wounded glance downward before crumbling into dust. "Can't abide bad manners," Spike said cheerfully.
Disco roared, batting the stake out of his hand with one lightning blow and shoving him into the wall. All right, this wanker was older than he looked. Older, and faster, and stronger... ah, well, keep things interesting. His own eyes flaring gold, Spike pushed off the wall and launched himself at the other vampire with a joyful roar. He landed two solid punches, took three, got the bastard into a headlock and rammed his forehead into the edge of the sink a couple of times. Disco managed to hook a foot around his ankle and send them both tumbling to the ground, rolling over and over with fangs snapping inches from one another's throats. Spike freed one arm long enough to flail for the dropped stake. Disco grabbed him before he could get a grip on it, heaved him up into the air and slammed him into the wall by the trash can. Spike dropped to the ground, head spinning. Bloody hell. This wanker was as strong as Angel, and he'd never been able to take Angel in a fair fight...
...which just meant he'd have to fight dirty.
Disco leaped for him. Spike rolled to the side, grabbed the fifty-gallon steel drum and heaved it upwards, catching Disco full in the face. Disco staggered and the drum fell back to the ground with an ear-splitting CLANG! Spike grabbed the bigger vampire's ankles and yanked his feet out from under him, flipping him head over heels into the still-rocking trash can. Before Disco's scream of rage ended Spike had flung himself across the floor and grabbed the stake. Disco's struggles tipped the can over completely, and as he came scuttling out backwards, Spike drove the stake into his back before he had a chance to get his head free.
Spike knelt there beside the pile of dust which had been Disco for a moment, wondering idly why he always started breathing during a fight. "Now that," he said with great satisfaction, "is the way to wake up of an evening." Shaking off his game face, he fished his lighter and cigarettes out of another pocket, tapped one out of the pack and lit up. After a few contented puffs he got to his feet, went over to the paper towel dispenser and repaired the damage the scuffle had done to his clothes. As an afterthought he set the trash can upright. "Oi, mate," he yelled towards the back of the bathroom, "All yours."
No answer. Spike cocked his head to one side. Funny, he couldn't hear the bloke's heartbeat any longer. Had he had a stroke or something, keeled over in the stall? Curious, walked back and opened the door.
There was no one there.
He stood there for a moment, scratching his head. Either the blighter had walked out while the two of them were fighting, and he hadn't noticed, or a dimensional portal had opened up and swallowed him whole. In Sunnydale, both possibilities were equally likely, and which one it was was no business of his. Spike shrugged, and strolled out whistling.


The lion roared. Something went flying, sharp baseball-bat crack against the wall. Smack and thud of fist meeting flesh, gasps and snarls, right outside the door it sounded like. Trapped. Fear knit the frayed edges of his thoughts together, and he looked up at the windows, but there was no escape in that direction. He stood balanced precariously on the toilet seat, gripping the edge of the partition with both hands, layers of heavy flaking paint rough under his thumbs.
There was another guy standing beside him in the stall. Tanner didn't remember him walking in. Maybe the guy'd been invisible. The guy didn't have eyes, but that was OK. Or not OK, but Tanner didn't mind because he was missing things too, more important things than eyes. An eerie calm settled over everything. He couldn't hear the fight going on outside. Couldn't hear anything. Except the guy with no eyes.
"Come with me, Tanner," the guy without eyes said. Some niggling inner voice told him that he ought to be afraid, but the calm felt so good, novocaine for the soul... Tanner shrugged. Not like he had anything better to do. The guy with no eyes opened the door to the stall and walked out, and Tanner followed him. The two combatants were locked together, motionless, in the center of the floor. Be damned. The blond guy was a lion too. "Observe," the guy without eyes said. "Two creatures of perfect evil, existing only to bring..."
"Death," Tanner interrupted. Nasty sharp pointed teeth.
The guy without eyes shook his head, impatient. "No. Death is neither good nor evil. Death... is. They exist to bring pain. Destruction. Chaos. Death is only one means to that end." He stood there, contemplating the frozen tableau. "It's all part of the balance, you see.”
“He hurt me,” Tanner agreed. Then he frowned. “He helped me.”
The guy with no eyes nodded. “Yes. The balance has been perturbed." Tanner shivered. Bad, very bad, worlds out of kilter. The evil geometry of the monkey bars on the playground, black and stark against the sunset.
"You understand," the eyeless man murmured. "Balance must be restored.”
"I--the others," Tanner choked out. "Gotta hunt for 'em."
The eyeless man paused, then nodded. "Yes. I know. That's why we have chosen you. Come with me. There is much yet to do."


“I look like a ratbag.”
Dawn and Willow, who’d been poring over their respective homework in the Summers’ living room, exchanged cautious looks. The words had been spoken in tones of hushed revelation. Buffy was standing in the middle of the Summers’ room, sans makeup, her hair pulled back and knotted at the nape of her neck in what Dawn referred to as ‘Buffy’s skinned weasel look’. She was staring down at her stunning ensemble of baggy sweatsuit and grungy tennis shoes as if she’d really noticed what she was wearing for the first time in weeks. Buffy was clean, Buffy was neat, but Buffy was a far cry from the older sister Dawn remembered agonizing for two hours over what to wear to a fifteen-minute appearance at the Bronze.
Dawn looked up from her exquisitely boring English homework. If she’d realized that her class-cutting last spring would result lowering her GPA to the point that she didn’t qualify for AP classes, she’d... well, she’d still have cut the classes, but... She gave her sister a once-over. “Yeah, you sure do.” A demon of mischief prompted her to add, “So what? It’s only patrol, right? You're gonna go out and get covered in demon guts and vampire dust anyway." She paused before delivering the coup de grace. "Besides, Spike’s seen you look way rattier than this.”
Buffy frowned, not rising to the bait. Darn. “If I’m going out, I should change.” She reached up and touched her cheek tentatively. “I don’t even have any lipstick!”
Dawn could have jumped on the coffee table and cheered; Buffy showing any sign of interest in mundane things like what she looked like was cause for major celebration. “So go buy some,” she said, maintaining a tone of sisterly boredom. “That’s what I do.”
Her sister’s hazel eyes sharpened for an instant in a ‘my little baby sister is wearing lipstick?’ expression. Honestly, sometimes Buffy acted as if she were still twelve. But she didn’t go into freakout mode, just frowned some more. “It’s not in the budget,” she said, and turned and climbed slowly back up the stairs.
“You could borrow some of mine,” Willow called after her.
Buffy turned for a moment, her eyes already regaining that distant, abstracted look which Dawn had grown to hate with a passion in the last month. “Thanks, Will.”
“You know, I could come along on patrol tonight if--”
Buffy didn’t wait for her to finish. “Spike and I can handle it.”
Willow bit her lower lip, her eyes suspiciously bright, and bent over her own book as Buffy disappeared up the stairs. Embarrassed, Dawn tried to lose herself in the exciting compositional possibilities of the gerundive. It didn’t work. The silence in the living room grew thicker and gluier by the moment, until Dawn was sure that if she did get up the nerve to say anything, the words would be trapped like flies in amber and go unheard. The knock on the door was a positive relief. Dawn flung her notebook to the floor and ran for the door. “Hey, Spike! You’re late.”
“‘Lo, Bit,” Spike said, breezing in past her. He was carrying a lethal-looking axe over one shoulder and looked to be in a very good mood. “Ran into some old mates, had to catch up, have a pint, kill them, the usual.” He peered up the stairs. “Where’s your sis? Don’t tell me the Slayer’s still powdering her nose.”
“Weird though it may seem after weeks of Amish Buffy, yeah,” Dawn said. “She’ll be down in a minute.”
“Buffy!” Spike yelled up the stairs. “Get your arse in gear!”
“Get stuffed, Spike!”
“Promises, promises!”
Dawn snickered. “Or maybe she’ll stay up there for an hour to piss you off.” She went back to her chair and draped herself sideways over both arms, in the hopes that the unorthodox study position would make her homework slightly more interesting. It didn’t.
Spike followed her into the living room and began roaming restlessly about, picking up pieces of bric-a-brac off the TV and setting them down again, staring at the family photos on the walls, and finally coming to rest on the end of the couch opposite Willow. He shoved his hands in his pockets and sat there for a few minutes, jogging one booted foot against the coffee table. “Hullo, Will,” he said at last.
“Spike,” Willow said neutrally. The vampire’s expressive face fell and Dawn winced, but before anything further could be said Spike’s keen ears had picked up a noise upstairs and he had turned away. A moment later Dawn heard Buffy’s footsteps on the stairs.
Buffy’s clothes had all been donated to Goodwill after her death. So far she’d been hewing to the constraints of The Budget with iron determination to make the utilities payments and continued apathy towards fun in general. Dawn, on the other hand, had shamelessly played on their father’s tendency to resort to retail therapy as a method of assuaging guilt feelings before he returned to L.A. As a result, Buffy was not entirely without wardrobe, even if, so far, she’d been restricting her dressing up to job interviews. She wasn’t dressed up now--at least, unless you compared her blue tank top and jeans to what she’d been wearing earlier. She’d done her hair up a little differently, too, and was wearing a touch of Willow’s lipstick, but the big difference was in her expression.
You couldn’t really say Buffy’s face lit up when she saw Spike. Not the way Spike lit up when he saw Buffy--it was painfully obvious that no matter what he said about accepting that there could never be anything between him and her sister, he was still hopelessly in love with her. But Spike seemed to light some kind of a fire under Buffy nonetheless; the distant look hardly ever crept into her eyes when he was around. She looked interested, as though being alive were more than just a duty she had to carry out. Maybe it was only because Spike’s boundless supply of nervous energy tended to fizz over and infect everyone in the same room. But maybe, Dawn thought, the fire was starting to smoulder a little even when he wasn’t around.
“About bloody time,” Spike said, bouncing to his feet. “Why it takes a frigging hour to apply a square inch of face paint...”
Buffy rolled her eyes. “Like you have room to talk. Back in the day you wore more eyeliner than I do.”
Spike snorted. "Yeh, and I put it on in three minutes flat with no mirror."
“Walk ten miles uphill through the snow, too? Let’s go, smartass."
Spike picked up his axe. "Later, Bit. We'll bring you some demon guts."
Buffy turned back for a moment. "Dawn, do what Will tells you to for once, OK? Will, if...”
“I’ll be fine,” Willow said tightly. She pulled her feet up under her and buried her nose in her sociology text. “Not like I’m out doing anything that might be dangerous, unlike you and Spike.” There was a little more resentment in the last word than seemed warranted by anything Spike had done since entering the house, and the muscles in the vampire’s jaw twitched as he visibly bit back a retort.
Buffy’s frown returned for an instant, more perplexed than angry. “I’m sorry, Will, it’s just that... I mean, you’re not really recovered yet, are you? Look, I have an interview tomorrow morning, but I’m free after. What say we meet for lunch? We’ll do the whole girly thing.”
Willow hesitated, then nodded, summoning up a smile. “Sure.”
Reassured, Buffy smiled back and went after Spike, who was already standing impatiently at the door. Willow’s smile faded as she watched them leave. “Do the whole girly thing, sure,” she muttered, adding, almost too low for Dawn to hear, “Not good enough to go on patrol, but when lunch is on the line call Willow!”
At least she had the tact not to bring up babysitting duty. “Hey, I never get to go on patrols,” Dawn pointed out. “You’re just, like, recuperating from the resurrection spell, and then you’ll be back on the front lines.”
The witch retrieved her smile for a second, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “I’m totally recuperated now. If Buffy ever decides she can stand to be in the same room with the awful person who brought her back to life for ten minutes at a time. She sure forgave you and Spike fast enough for helping me.” She ran one hand over the arm of the couch, picking absently at the spot where the upholstery was beginning to wear a little thin. “But it’s not your fault, I guess. I shouldn’t bite Spike’s head off.” She looked rueful. “Cookie time again.”
Dawn chewed on the end of her pencil. If Buffy’d remained equally distant from all of them Willow might not be taking this so hard. She didn’t understand the continuing tension between Willow and her sister herself, or why Spike hadn’t come in for the same treatment. She suspected Buffy didn’t know either. Maybe didn’t even realize it was there. Her sister could be stunningly clueless when it came to understanding her own reactions, much less other people’s. “She’s going to be in a restaurant with you for more than ten minutes tomorrow.”
Willow sighed and tucked her hair behind her ears, picking up her textbook once more. “It’s a start.”

“...so frustrating!” Buffy said as they went down the front walk. “Anya keeps saying I should charge for slaying, and I can’t even begin to list the number of ways that’s deeply wrong...”
Spike looked thoughtful. “I dunno, pet, there might be something in that. Can’t you hit up the Council of Wankers? They pay Rupert a pretty penny. I know, I nicked his bank book once.”
Buffy made a face. “Giles is looking into that, actually, but I’m not even sure I want to take the Council’s money. They’d own me again.”
“So will anyone who signs your paycheck,” Spike countered. Buffy made another face, complete with gruesome choking noises. He shrugged. “Better the devil you know.”
“I’d feel a lot better taking your advice if your idea of financial planning wasn’t ‘beat up demon, take its stuff, and hope it’s got something worth pawning’.”
He chuckled. “Don’t knock it, pet, it keeps me in blood and fags. You could do worse than to go in for a bit of looting yourself. If you’re going to be killing the slime-covered set right and left anyway, you might as well be doing it for fun and profit.”
Buffy frowned and pursed her lips. “We’re getting on the train which is not going there now.” Spike was only half joking, and she didn’t want to think too hard about which half. He didn’t kill humans any longer, but it was little things like this which made it impossible for her to forget the whole absence of soul business. And the annoying part was that she felt bad about shooting him down when he really thought he was making a good suggestion. Time for a blatant change of subject. “So where did you get this monstrosity, anyway?” she asked, eying the motorcycle parked in the driveway. She wasn’t up on motorcycles, but if there was a kind particularly suited to vampires with a basic black fetish, this was one of them, all dark and gleaming and... there had to be some other word besides ‘sexy’ to complete the description, but she couldn’t think of it at the moment. “And why did it come equipped with an axe holder?”
Spike’s eyes lit with that cool-new-toy look he usually reserved for especially impressive implements of destruction. He shoved the axe handle through the loops on the side of the bike and made sure the blade was secure. “As you said--beat up demon, take its stuff. The former owner made the mistake of trying to run me down with it a little bit before you got back.” He swung himself onto the saddle and eased the weight of the motorcycle off its kickstand. “Helmet, pet.”
“You’re not wearing a helmet,” Buffy grumbled, but she grabbed the one he tossed her and strapped it on. It was powder blue, had seen better days and didn’t match the menacing jet black bike in the slightest. He’d probably scavenged it from the dump. Or stolen it from a much girlier demon than the one who’d owned the bike. She slipped in behind him on the seat. Ooh, leather. Comfy.
“I can survive twenty-story falls on my head, too.” He gunned the engine and the bike roared to life. “Where’re we off to tonight?”
“East Sunnydale Memorial.” It was a small cemetery on the outskirts of town, and they hadn’t been there in awhile. It wasn’t all that popular amongst Sunnydale’s vampire population, but Buffy felt that it was worthwhile to drop through every now and then and make sure it didn’t get popular. She frowned. “He tried to run you down?” That didn’t sit well. She was the only one allowed to beat up Spike, damn it, even if she had been dead at the time.
“Operative word is tried.” He flashed that who-am-I-kidding-I-love-to-brag grin over his shoulder. “Shortly thereafter he and the bike parted ways and he didn’t seem interested in it any more, so yours truly took it off his hands--what was left of ‘em.”
Buffy laid her cheek against his leather-clad back and wrapped her arms round his waist as Spike let out the brakes. They tore off down Revello Drive. The bike picked up speed, parting the night before them like a knife. Wind whipped over and around her, threatening to tug her hair free of her helmet, and her body vibrated in time with the throb of the engine. Between the howl of the wind and the engine noise it was impossible to talk, so she just gave herself up to enjoying the ride.
Dawn had a sentimental fondness for Spike’s old DeSoto, but as far as Buffy was concerned, the DeSoto had been yuck on wheels, and if Spike never drove the thing again she’d shed no tears. Riding around in that huge antique boat of a car with its blacked-out windows and all-pervading smell of old cigarettes and spilled bourbon had possessed a certain edge, but nothing like this. This was wild and exhilarating. Spike was a really good rider, not that she had any plans to feed his ego further by telling him so. It felt good leaning into him as they rounded a corner and roared up the on ramp, her body pressed tightly to his. No heart beat beneath her ear, but it was hard to imagine anything feeling more vibrantly alive than the unliving body in her arms. The flat hard muscles of his stomach tensed under her hands as he shifted his weight from side to side, effortlessly weaving from lane to lane and occasionally white-lining it through heavier traffic. There was something utterly satisfying about speeding down the road with a sleek, powerful, savage beast purring between her thighs, wholly at her command...
And the motorcycle’s pretty nice, too.
As quickly as the thought bubbled up out of her subconscious her conscious grabbed it, clubbed it over the head, and stuffed it back where it belonged. There had been so many times in the last month when she’d wanted nothing more than to curl up in someone’s arms--anyone’s--and be held, wallow in the ancient, primal comfort of touch. She just wasn’t on hugging terms with anyone at the moment. It was a little too weird with Willow or Tara, and Anya would get jealous with Xander, and Dawn was fifteen and prolonged physical contact with close relatives was hopelessly uncool and Giles would get all embarrassed and Spike... well, it would have been the height of unfairness to ask anything of the kind of him, knowing how he felt about her.
But it was OK to hold on to your undead-soulless-ex-mortal-enemy-talking-buddy when you happened to be riding behind him on a motorcycle.
Buffy really liked the motorcycle.
Spike’s sharp intake of breath jolted her out of her reverie in an instant. “Holy bleeding fuck!” The man had staggered out onto the highway not thirty feet in front of them. Drunk, or sick, or heaven knew what, he was wandering around in little circles in the middle of the right-most lane, making swoopy gestures with both arms at oncoming traffic. In a few seconds he was going to be worm food.
Spike swerved, avoiding the man by a hair’s-breadth. Buffy yanked on his shoulder and pointed back; he gave her a “You’re crazy!” look and hauled on the handlebars without hesitation, slewing into a turn which would have sent anyone without supernatural strength and reflexes skidding into oblivion. He circled back, riding the lane divider into oncoming traffic. Buffy was crouched on the back of the seat now, one hand on his shoulder and the other on the back end of the bike. As they barreled past the dazed-looking man in the road, she leaped, kicking off of the bike and soaring through the air. She hit the man head on, hoping for momentum to carry them both out of the road, but instead of rolling, he collapsed to his knees on the grease-stained concrete, carrying her with him.
Buffy scrambled to her feet. Headlights the size of Ghora eggs were blazing towards her and she heard the squeal of air brakes and the frantic blare of a horn. She bent down, lifted the man up bodily, and flung him back to the side of the road and safety. The words I’m going to die. Again. crystalized in her brain. The thought was curiously uninvolving. A heartbeat later the motorcycle roared up behind her and Spike grabbed her around the waist, yanking her off her feet. They made it onto the shoulder two breaths before the semi thundered past.
Spike held on to her, shaking like a leaf and muttering “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck...” as devoutly as any prayer she’d ever heard.
OK. No death today. “Spike,” she said, a bit strangled. “Let go. ‘Cause inhaling, you know? Important.”
He blinked, then released his death-grip a little. “Oh. Sorry, love.”
Rubbing her bruised ribs, Buffy detached herself from the vampire’s side and walked shakily over to the object of their rescue. He sat there, sprawled anyhow, blinking dazedly up at her, a thin, weak-chinned man with receding hair and a long nose. His face was strangely familiar, but it took Buffy a minute to place it. She hadn’t seen him in long time. “Willy?” she asked, disbelieving. “Willy the Snitch?”
Willy giggled inanely and pawed at the air in the direction of the oncoming headlights. “Pretty shiny fishy,” he said. “Slishy fishy.” He squinted, faint recognition sparking in his watery eyes. “Slayer? Don’t break the fishy, pleeeease...”
Spike got off the bike and walked over, rubbing the back of his neck and looking perplexed. “Bloody hell, what’s happened to him?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think I threw him that hard.” She poked gingerly at Willy’s lank disordered hair. “I don’t see any injuries...”
The vampire sniffed. “No blood. Or not enough for me to smell it over the diesel fumes, anyway.”
“We need to get him off of the highway.” Buffy glanced around. All right, the DeSoto did have its good points after all. “Can all three of us fit on the bike?”
“Sure, love. If we’re completely insane.” At her look he sighed. “Maybe we could tie him to the handlebars or something.” He dropped to a crouch and waved a hand in front of the bartender’s eyes. “Oi, Willy, about that tenner...”
Willy’s rat-like face broke into a sweet, foolish smile. “Wheee! Talk to the hand!”
Spike sucked in his cheeks and rocked back on his heels. “The old skinflint really is gone if he doesn’t remember...” He stopped, an evil smile slowly illuminating his angular features. “Of course we’ve got to help the poor bloke,” he said piously, getting to his feet. “Only decent thing for hero-types to do, innit? Come on then, Slayer! Give us a hand.” He hauled Willy to his feet and led the scrawny man towards the bike.
Buffy gave him another look. “Spike, what are you up to?”
“You have a nasty suspicious mind, Slayer.”
“Someone gives me lots of practice.” Buffy patted Willy down and pulled a shabby brown leatherette wallet out of the appropriate pocket. She began going through it. “Huh. There’s still a good hundred dollars in here, and credit cards--” She smacked Spike’s hand away without looking up and he pouted. “--so if he was mugged it wasn’t by a very efficient thief.” She pulled out a California driver’s license and peered at the small print in the chancy light of the freeway floodlights. “4520 West Endicott, Apartment 23D. That must be where he lives.” She stuffed the card back into the wallet and folded it up. “I guess we could take him there,” she said doubtfully. “I’d say hospital, but the way he’s acting, it’s like...”
“Yeh.” Spike took her meaning immediately. “Like Tara was when Glory got to her.” His dark brows dipped together for a moment as if he were trying to remember something, and he shook his head slightly, as if that could dislodge the thought he wanted. “But Glory’s dead.”
Buffy shivered. “Yeah. Really quite sincerely dead. Show of hands for everyone in this conversation who’s also been dead?” Spike grimaced, conceding the point. Her mouth firmed. “Well, he’s got to go somewhere, and I’m not feeling Mother Theresa enough for it to be my place.” She opened up the wallet again, looking for someone to contact in cases of emergency, but there was nothing. Not surprising; in the circles Willy moved in, you were healthy or you were dead, with very little middle ground. “If he’s like Tara, someone will have to feed him and stuff, and I’m sorry, but eww, Willy.”
She could have sworn there was a twinkle in Spike’s eyes, but maybe it was the floodlights. “Keep in mind that if you take him back to his place--assuming the address on the license is current--you’ll still have to take care of any feeding yourself, as yours truly won’t be able to walk in the door.”
Buffy gave him the evil eye. “Willy,” she cooed, “Can Spike come inside your apartment?”
Willy goggled up at her. “Spikey in the morning...?”
“The invite’s got to be done at the door in question anyway, pet,” Spike said with considerable amusement.
She smiled sweetly. “I’m sure I can talk him around by the time we get there.”

Getting Willy off the highway ultimately entailed hog-tying him with his own suspenders and balancing him between them, draped across Buffy’s lap like a trophy deer. Buffy found this considerably less enjoyable than the previous arrangement, and Spike wasn’t any too happy about the situation either. They took the next exit and followed surface streets to Willy’s place at a speed which, for Spike, approached sedate.
The apartment complex was old and grungy. Several flavors of loud music battled for dominance in the night air and no one seemed inclined to pay attention to two people lugging a body across the parking lot. Willy’s apartment was a one-bedroom roach trap on the bottom floor which looked as if he’d offered to store all his neighbors’ spare grunge. After finally discovering the keys in another pocket (Buffy made Spike search this time, because eww, Willy) Buffy dragged Willy inside and dumped him unceremoniously on the couch. Five minutes of coaching on her part finally induced Willy to say something which satisfied whatever supernatural laws prevented uninvited vampires from entering private dwellings and allowed Spike to follow them in.
“Well,” Spike said, surveying the room with hands on hips. “Couch, telly, two-foot stack of Hustlers, and windows covered with tin foil. I feel right at home. Wonder if he’s got any blood in the fridge. I always suspected he was holding out with the good stuff.” He began rummaging through the mess of dirty magazines, old newspapers, and empty beer cans on the table while Buffy untied their oblivious host. He came up with a somewhat gnawed-upon ballpoint pen and a pad of yellow legal paper and began scribbling away, squinting slightly at his work.
Willy sat on the couch and looked around vaguely. Buffy looked at him, at a loss for what to do now. “I guess we should call Willow. Maybe she and Tara can do something for him.”
“Best bet,” Spike agreed. He handed Willy the pen and shoved the legal pad in front of him. “Sign here, there’s a good Willy.”
“Round and round, all the fishies,” Willy said, making a wild whorl with the pen. Spike guided his hand back to the bottom of the paper.
“Just write your name, nice big legible letters...” He took the pad back, ripped off the page, folded it up and tucked it into his inside coat pocket.
Buffy looked up from the phone where she was dialing her own house. “Spike, what...?”
He looked as innocent as it was possible for a vampire to look, which was not very. “Private business matter, pet. I’m not diddling him out of the family farm or anything, just taking care of a few loose ends.”
She gave him a good long look. She seemed to be doing a lot of that tonight. “I trust you, Spike.”
God, it was incredible when his eyes softened like that. “It’s nothing you’d want to stake me for, love, I promise. Here.” He pulled the paper back out. Buffy took it trepidatiously and began deciphering Spike’s surprisingly lovely but old-fashioned handwriting.
“‘In consideration for services rendered to me by William the Bloody a.k.a. Spike this night of November 28th, 2001, I hereby cancel any outstanding debts owed by the aforementioned William the Bloody to the Alibi Room or to...’ You’re trying to get rid of your bar tab? She bit back a laugh and returned the paper to him. “Um. I can’t exactly say I approve, but no, I don’t want to stake you for it. Besides, I don’t think he’s gonna consider that binding when he comes to. I don’t think Willy knows what ‘aforementioned’ means.”
Spike, who’d been watching her reaction with surprising anxiousness, relaxed. “Probably not, but a bloke’s got to try.” As she waited for Willow to pick up the phone, he looked at the sheet of paper thoughtfully, lower lip caught in his teeth. After awhile he heaved a rueful sigh and tore it into four neat pieces. “It’s the little things, you know,” he said, examining the scuff marks on the toes of his boots intently. “Where I get lost. I mean killing people and eating them, it’s bloody obvious that’s not... but all this other rubbish you have to do to be good...”
“Spike...”
He glanced up, still worrying at his lower lip. “I know, love, I can’t be. Not really. But still... I don’t want you to be ashamed of knowing me.”
He has got to be the weirdest vampire on the planet. But it’s a sweet kind of weird, sometimes... She coiled the phone cord around her hand as the answering machine kicked in, and waited impatiently for it to get through its spiel. “Spike, I’ve hated you, despised you, been a little--very little, and it was a long time ago, so don’t get a swelled head--scared of you once or twice, wanted to kill you more times than I can count--but I can honestly say I’ve never been ashamed to know you.”
He cocked his head to one side and smiled--not his usual cocky grin or self-satisfied smirk, just a pleased smile. The corners of his eyes crinkled up in the nicest way when he did that... “Ah. Well, that’s--that’s good to know.”
Was the fact that he could take something like that as a compliment more on the weird side or the sweet side? The tension in the phone cord brought her up short. Somehow or other she’d taken several steps closer to him. Spike was looking down at her with his hands buried in his duster pockets as if he didn’t trust them out in the open. Funny how she always thought of Spike as being tall, when he wasn’t, really, well, taller than her of course, most people were, but--
A nasal drawl behind them said, “Aww, isn’t that sweet?”
Spike whipped round, his eyes going yellow, and Buffy almost dropped the phone. She could hear the beep as someone hit the button to turn the recorded message off and Willow’s tinny voice from the receiver saying “Hello? Summers residence. Hello?”
“Uh, never mind, Will, it’s under control,” Buffy said, slamming the phone back into its cradle.
Willy the Snitch was sitting on his couch, rubbing his temples with both hands and glaring impartially at the two of them. “I have the Slayer and her pet vampire making googly eyes in my living room. I get it. I’m in hell.” He cowered reflexively at Spike’s growl, then straightened up and poked a belligerent index finger in the vampire’s direction. “I’m not scared of you, Spike! That chip in your head’ll put you flat on your back if you so much as lift a finger against me, so just get out before I throw you out! And don’t think about comin’ back later ‘cause I’m having someone do the spell to uninvite you so fast that--”
Despite Willy’s bravado there was a panicky note in his voice and Spike didn’t look particularly intimidated; he might not be able to hurt Willy, but it was unlikely that Willy could do much to hurt him, at least not without a lot of help. Buffy walked over to the couch, flicked her hair over her shoulder, put her hand in the center of Willy’s chest, and shoved. He sat back very suddenly. “Hey!” he whined, rubbing his sternum.
“One of us can still hit people, Willy, so if I were you? No more googly eye remarks, especially about people who’ve just taken an hour out of their busy schedule to keep you from becoming a pancake on the 405.” She bent over to look him in the eye. “Don’t take this personally, but why are you rational?”
“Why am--” All of a sudden memory of the last several hours hit, and Willy hunched his shoulders and shrank in upon himself, trying to sink into the ancient stained fabric of the couch. “I--I dunno.”
“Can you remember what happened to you?”
Willy pinched the bridge of his nose in concentration. “I was in the office--at the bar, y’know? I hear this noise out back and went to see, we get bums goin’ through the garbage all the time lookin’ for empties that ain’t empty, if ya know what I mean. There was this guy out in the alley...” He trailed off and rubbed his mouth. “Didn’t look exactly like a bum, though. Too clean. Middle-aged guy, pretty good shape, dark hair, a little grey maybe...” He shook his head, baffled. “Wasn’t a vampire or nothin’, I can tell ‘em near as good as you can, Slayer. Just a guy. I ask him what he’s doin’ out there, he says just passing through, and I say fine, and he says--then it all gets confused.” He looked around. “Shit! If the back door was left open those assholes will clear me out! I gotta get--” He got unsteadily to his feet and lurched across the room to the front door before a dizzy spell hit. He grabbed the doorknob and leaned heavily on the grimy doorpost before sliding to his knees.
Just a guy. Ben had been just a guy. Ben was dead. Which was why Glory was dead, which was... damn. “We’ll make sure the back door’s locked. We’ve got to make a stop there anyway.”
Willy pulled himself to his feet. “Well, in that case, ain’t you gonna offer me a ride?”
Spike smiled--definitely of the evil. “I think we can arrange that.”


The faded letters on the front of the building said ‘The Alibi Room’, but no one ever called it anything but Willy’s. Willy’s bar greatly resembled its owner--small, shabby, and furtive, it crouched between two larger buildings as if trying to escape notice. As soon as the motorcycle rolled to a stop in the parking lot said owner unfolded himself from his awkward perch and lit out for the front door, a look of absolute terror in his watery eyes.
Buffy watched him go. “Did you absolutely have to make him ride on the handlebars?”
Spike paused, lighter halfway to cigarette, and thought about it for a moment. “Yeh.”
“Just checking.” She reluctantly let her arms fall from his waist and got off the bike, checking out the parking lot warily. “Is it safe for you to be here? Last I heard you weren’t very popular in Demonsville.”
Spike took a drag on his cigarette and snorted smoke. “I’ve got a big strong Slayer to protect me, haven’t I? ‘Course it’s not safe, that’s half the fun.”
“This ‘fun’ you speak of, it’s one of those English words that translates to ‘nerve-wracking terror’ in American?”
Spike growled and lunged for her; Buffy dodged, laughing, then stopped so abruptly that he nearly ran into her. “‘Smatter, love, losing your touch?” he asked teasingly.
Laughing. She’d been laughing. For a moment there, she’d felt...good. Really good. Alive, and happy to be so. Astounded, she tried to grasp the sensation, analyze it, clutch it to her heart--and of course it dissolved under her scrutiny, fraying away into bewilderment. She avoided his eyes. “No, no, this is just--we can’t be playing around. Business, now, here.”
She could feel that blue gaze burning into the top of her head, heard a faint sigh. “You’re in charge, Slayer.”
Willy was already there when they arrived in the alley behind the bar, scouting suspiciously around the loading dock to see what had been stolen in his absence. Buffy examined the alley in minute detail, determined to do or say nothing which could remotely be described as googly. There were empty crates and a big cube of crushed cardboard boxes on the loading dock, and a dumpster full of assorted bar trash down in the alley proper, presumably what the mystery guy had been going through when Willy discovered him. A smaller container stamped ‘SUNNYDALE RECYCLES’ stood nearby, half-full of empty beer cans and broken bottles. She wasn’t sure what she’d expected to find, but if anything useful was here, it wasn’t in a form she could recognize. Spike paced around looking at things in a less organized fashion, the faint frown back on his face, nostrils flaring every now and then as he tried to pick up a scent. He’d put his cigarette out, which meant he was really serious about it.
“I give up,” Buffy said at last. “If there are clues here, I’m missing ‘em. Unless... Spike, is that clue-face?”
He came to a halt in the middle of the alley, took his half-smoked cigarette from behind his ear and re-lit it. He ran one hand through his hair, ruffling the pale waves further. “This is ‘What have I sodding forgotten?’ face. There’s something... familiar here, but I can’t suss it out.” He jerked his chin at the bar. “Ought to see if anyone inside knows who this bloke is. ‘Sides, I’m famished.”
Buffy didn’t think that it was very likely that any of the patrons would recognize Willy’s vague description if Willy himself, who knew everything worth knowing about Sunnydale’s less than savory inhabitants, didn’t know who the guy had been. But... it was closing in on eleven, and maybe a break would clear her head. “OK. Let’s go.”
The dim lights inside Willy’s did little to conceal the accumulated grime. The flyspecked mirror behind the bar failed to reflect a good third of the patrons, and probably wished it couldn't reflect another third. The crowd wasn’t a large one, but from the moment they crossed the threshold every eye in the bar that wasn't on her was on Spike, half a dozen sullen gazes pinned to the center of their backs, evenly divided between preparations for fight or flight. Normally when Buffy dropped by Willy’s, broken furniture and smashed glass resulted.
Spike, having undergone an instant transformation into Big Bad mode the moment he’d crossed the threshold, was eating it up. He strutted over to the bar, platinum blond head held high, all cocky swagger and knowing smirk. Enjoying himself, and the knowledge that one wrong word, one wrong move on his part would precipitate a brawl. He leaned one elbow on the bar top and flashed the natural-born-killer grin at the female Bracken demon behind the bar.
“O-neg with a Guinness chaser and a club soda for the lady.”
The bartender looked uncertain. “Um...there’s...you...”
“Cash on the barrelhead or get out, Spike,” Willy snapped, bustling up behind her.
Spike raised an eyebrow at Buffy. “There, you see? No good deed goes unpunished.” He turned back to Willy, obviously ready to argue the point. Buffy put a hand on his shoulder.
“Charge it to the Magic Box, and give us a receipt,” she said firmly. “We’re on the job, it’s a slaying business expense,” she added at Spike’s inquisitive look. “Anya’ll charge it back to the Council of Watchers, or deduct it from the shop’s taxes, or something financially brilliant like that.”
Spike looked as if he weren’t sure whether to be pleased at getting free drinks or annoyed at being cheated out of a skirmish, but finally settled on pleased. He smirked at the bar girl, or demon. “In that case, give us some nachos too.”
Buffy started to object, then shrugged. It couldn’t hurt. After all, this was strictly business.

Buffy took her club soda and left the bar to find a table while Spike collected the rest of his order. Over in the corner, someone put a quarter in the ancient jukebox and it started wheezing out “What’s Love Got To Do With It?” Story of my life, Buffy thought, watching Spike stroll back towards their table, balancing his beer, a plastic baggie of blood, a glass and a plate of nachos piled high with things which were mercifully unidentifiable beneath a thick layer of orange cheese-like substance. And who says supernatural agility is only good for slaying?
A Zagros demon left its booth and shuffled past him on its way to the bar, brushing belligerently close to his shoulder. Spike twisted lithely to one side in time to avoid spilling his beer, and rounded upon the demon, his eyes flaring from blue to feral yellow. Zagros and vampire growled at one another for a moment, and then, with a resentful glance over at Buffy, the Zagros lowered its dorsal crest and shuffled off. Having the Slayer in the place did tend to put a bit of a damper on the hijinks.
Spike slid into the chair across from her and plunked his food down on the graffiti-scarred tabletop, obscuring 'Lanark the Gouger Loves Mindy, 1977'. Buffy looked pointedly over at the Zagros’ demon’s table. “If you think I'm going to save your bacon if you antagonize everyone here into beating you up in the alley, you've got another think coming."
He grinned, wholly unrepentant. "If I antagonize everyone into beating me up in the alley, the last thing I want is your help. Got a bloody reputation to maintain." Suiting action to word, he ripped a corner off the plastic baggie of blood with his teeth, poured it into his glass, and gulped down a hefty swallow. He crumpled up the baggie in the ashtray and sat back with a satisfied sigh. Angel had never liked feeding in front of her, even when it was pig’s blood sipped from a coffee mug. Spike would happily scarf down human blood to her face and make yummy noises. There was a lesson in that. I wish I knew what it was.
Spike shoved the nachos into the center of the table. "Here you go. Not as good as you get at the Bronze, but you get enough of that cheese stuff on it--"
Buffy poked at the gluey pile with a forefinger. "Not hungry.”
His eyes did that softening thing again, real concern in the blue depths. "Come on, love, you need to keep your strength up. I eat more than you do, and I only do it for amusement."
God, did he have to do that, slip from snarky to sweet and back again in the space of two breaths? It kept her off balance, and the last thing she needed was to be off balance around Spike. Go with the snark. The snark is your friend. "It might help if you offered me something containing shreds of actual nutrition." She poked the nachos again suspiciously. "What goes into those things?"
"Excess poker chips, most like," Spike replied, callously stuffing a handful of chips, cheese and mystery meat into his mouth. "Live dangerously."
Buffy glared across the table at him, trying to suppress a smile. Her ire failed to make much impression; the vampire took another swallow of blood, followed by a swig of Guinness, and settled back in his chair with an expression of perfect content. Well, of course. Spike enjoyed hanging out in grungy bars, especially when he could run up an exorbitant tab and charge it to the Watcher's Council as a business expense. This was probably his idea of heaven. She picked up a chip and nibbled on it. Not bad, for a hideous concoction of cholesterol-dripping goo. “All right, I give in. A plate of chips, a glass of seltzer, and thou, beside me bitching in Willy’s...”
He chuckled. “And Willy’s is paradise enow.”
It took a second.
“You finished that,” Buffy said accusingly.
Spike’s angular face suffused with guilty alarm, as if she'd caught him out at something. “You started it.” After a moment he added cautiously, “Didn’t know you went in for that sort of thing.”
They regarded one another warily, a pair of fencers each expecting a jab in a vulnerable spot. Buffy picked up another chip and ate it without thinking about what might be hiding under the cheese sauce. “I just happened to remember it from the half of my intro poetry class I managed to get through last year. It was very... seize the day. Which used to be my motto, though now it's more like 'Seize the day very carefully since it's probably covered with sharp pointy things.'”
“Always liked old Omar myself.” Honestly, Spike sounded as if he were confessing to a sordid addiction. He looked round to make sure no one else was within listening distance. “Which edition did they give you? Fourth?”
“Editions? Um...”
He sat forward, gesturing with his beer bottle as he warmed to the subject. “Yeh, the Rubaiyat was like ‘Leaves of Grass’, Fitzgerald revised the whole thing top to toe three or four times, so it was really a work in progress as long as the bloke was alive--” At her astonished expression he cut himself off, clearly embarrassed despite his inability to blush, raking his fingers through his hair nervously. “Anyway, there’s a bloody sight more than a few verses. Don’t need to bore you with the details.”
“No! I mean, not bored. I didn’t know there was more. There were just a few verses in the textbook and we hadn’t gotten to that chapter by the time I had to drop out of college.” As he didn’t seem too inclined to snicker at the idea of her struggling through a poetry class, she added a little wistfully, “I wish I could have read more of it.”
“There are such things as libraries, Slayer,” Spike rejoined with his customary sarcasm, “And I’ve heard they’ll let just anyone in here in the colonies. But...” He ducked his head and muttered, “gotacopyyoucouldborrowifyouwant.”
Buffy blinked a few times, realized she wasn’t saying anything, and managed, “Sure. I’d like--” I’m sitting in Willy’s and talking about poetry with Spike. There is something deeply weird with this picture. “--that. Do you ice skate?”
Spike looked askance at the change of subject, but went with it. “Not since I was twelve. I fell through the ice and caught pneumonia. Nearly died--worse, got stuck in bed the whole of Christmas holidays and half-way into next term. My mum had a fit. Put me off skating. Why?”
This time it was her turn to grin at him. “Just wanted to make sure I hadn’t fallen into a parallel universe where we had things in common. Ten more minutes and that's it," she said firmly. She reached for another nacho and discovered to her surprise that there were only a few broken bits left. “Then we get back to hunting for Willy’s mystery guy. Maybe the other bartender knows him.”
Spike gazed speculatively over at the bar. “Could chat her up a bit. I think she likes me.”
“Yeah, I can feel the love from here. I've got to hit the bathroom. Just try to keep the Big Bad posing down to a minimum, huh?"
Spike laughed. "Posing? Who's posing?"

Tanner sat at the end of the bar and nursed the beer that an hour of genteel panhandling (“I just need to use the phone, my car’s...”) had bought him. There was a dollar and some change lying on the bar two seats down, but he didn’t make a move towards it. He prided himself on not being a thief. Except, of course, for necessary things.
The bartender’s soul had tasted of old clothes and the mouse-nibblings of fear. The astringent flavor lingered in the back of his throat. Not the good stuff. Wouldn’t have lasted him a day even if he’d taken it all. Tanner was selective, when he could afford to be. Had to be, with the others depending on him. He’d taken only what he needed from the bar owner for tonight. The bar owner--he’d heard someone call him Willy--bustled by, swiping a glass with a dirty rag, his close-set beady eyes passing over Tanner without a flicker of recognition. He was relieved to see the thin, nervy man had come back--he’d intended to shove him back inside the bar once he’d taken what was necessary, but Willy’d taken fright and run away.
“He will not know you,” the guy with no eyes proclaimed. The guy with no eyes was not much on merely saying things.
“I know. I’ve done this before.” Tanner shifted restlessly on his seat. Even without magic involved he knew how to escape notice. He had one of those faces, a little lined, a little tired, a lot ordinary. Combine that with the shapeless off-the-rack jacket and slacks and defeated slouch and he could have been any of a thousand men in a hundred bars.
The eyeless man, on the other hand, was just plain invisible, which was a little more bothersome with Willy’s stolen rationality holding his thoughts together. Fortunately there was nothing unusual about someone sitting in a bar and mumbling to himself. Tanner sipped his drink and stared at his own reflection in the mirror behind the bar. There was grey in his hair. When had he gotten that old? This was the reason he put off hunting sometimes--it was more comfortable when you couldn’t remember how much you’d lost.
The blond man from the pool house was sitting at one of the tables across the room with a young woman, small and pretty if rather too thin. If he wanted to he could watch her in the mirror, talking animatedly to empty air. Right. Vampire. If he wanted to see the man too he’d have to turn around and watch them directly. Since everyone else in the bar was doing the same thing it probably wouldn’t hurt. The woman looked familiar. A memory of her swinging a hammer almost as big as she was flashed across his mind’s eye. She was someone important... the Slayer. Yeah. She’d been there too, when the walls of the worlds had dissolved. Now the two of them sat here, talking, laughing, as absorbed in one another as any couple he’d ever seen at the Bronze. Normal. Well, except for him being a vampire and her being able to swing magic hammers like they weighed nothing. Mostly normal. If he’d had the energy to spare he could have hated them for that.
“So what is it exactly you want me to do?” Tanner asked. “I was never much of a wizard, even before...”
The eyeless man was silent for a moment “The Slayer has... encountered us before. She will be wary of our usual methods. You must prepare our way in her heart and in the hearts of her friends.”
“And how do I do that?”
“You have a skill,” the eyeless man whispered. “Use it. Observe them. All evil is born of fear. Find their fears, find the one whose fears rule them. Find her fear. We will do the rest.”
“I do this, and you restore the others?”
“They will all be made whole. I swear upon the Seal of Akhun.”
“And none of us will owe you anything further?”
The eyeless man’s lips sketched a sere, horrible smile on his parchment face. The was a note of pity, or perhaps amusement, in his voice when he spoke again. “You own nothing else worth our taking. Your souls are as your lives: dry leaves upon the wind. You made no difference to the balance when you were alive. You will make no difference to the balance when you are dead.”
“You are lying,” Tanner said, setting his glass down. “I’m insane, not stupid. Remember that.” The eyeless man was right about one thing--the balance had been out of whack ever since last May, stresses building up like pressure along an earthquake fault. When you’d lived on a Hellmouth for most of your life you got good at noticing the signs. Which way it was out of balance... well, that was more difficult to say. “I’ll do what you ask because it may help the others, and I see no other way of doing that. I won’t be surprised if we all end up dead, or worse. But you know what?” He stared at the wrinkled, empty sockets, each sewn shut with a double X of coarse twine. “That might be an improvement.”

Buffy sidled down the cramped, ill-lit hallway to the bathrooms. “Sorry,” she said to the man who brushed past her on his way out, then “Hey! Watch the hair!” Her good mood dissipated. They were wasting their time here; for all she knew, that hair-stroking perv had just been their target.
Things with far too many legs scuttled out of the way when the lights flipped on. Buffy surveyed the tiny room with distaste; she was fairly certain that some of the things on the floor were developing their own ecologies. She stared at the toilet for several minutes before deciding that she could wait for something a little less Third World. She bent over the sink and turned on the cold water tap, letting it flow for awhile to get the rust stains out. Once the water was running reasonably clear, she splashed a little on her face.
Her own reflection stared back at her from the grimy mirror over the sink. Big haunted hazel eyes, a waifishly thin face framed in long hair slowly reverting to its natural brown--she hadn't bothered to lighten it since her... return. Mouth a little too wide, nose with that funny bump to it that never seemed to bother anyone else but which drove her to distraction. Reassuring. Reflections meant Not-Vampire Buffy. Something that had been a real fear at one point--it hadn't been much, but she had tasted vampire blood that once. But she hadn't risen in the night, hadn't clawed her way with desperate strength through a layer of hardwood and six feet of earth, hadn't come back from the dead. Not in the few nights after her death.
No, it had taken a few months.
Willow meant well. Willow always means well.
She couldn’t remember what it had been like to be dead. All she remembered was the moment just before, when for the first time in years she’d been completely at peace. All of them had meant well, Willow and Spike and Dawn in trying to bring her back, Giles and Tara and Xander in trying to prevent it. They’d all been doing what they thought was right... mostly, anyway. The whys of it didn’t matter now anyway. She was alive again, and had to... live with it. So she got up dutifully each morning and went through the motions, trying to be grateful. Every now and then, just for a minute or two, the world would click into focus around her and she’d be alive, not just existing. The wonder of those moments was enough to keep her going, hoping for the next one, fearing it wouldn’t come.
I used to feel like that all the time.
Tonight had been good. Strange, but enjoyable. That summed up a lot of her interaction with Spike lately. It wasn’t that she didn’t like hanging with the others, but it could be a strain. They desperately wanted her to be all right, and she felt guilty when she couldn’t be. Spike didn’t expect her to be all right. It was very relaxing.
There were a couple of demons of indeterminate species lounging outside the end of the hallway as she left the bathroom, and Buffy slowed as she approached them, composing herself. She could see Spike over at the bar again, buttering up the bartender and ordering what looked like several bottles of whiskey before his free drink ticket ran out. OK, that was wrong. Bad Spike, no biscuit. She couldn’t get too upset about it; after the way the Council’d jerked them all around, paying for Spike’s liquor was the least they could do. The vampire gave the Bracken woman behind the bar a rakish grin, and Buffy had to admit that a little part of her thought that having brash, cocky Spike back at least part time was...fun.
The Bracken nodded in response to whatever Spike had said, bent over and rummaged around below the level of the bar, and came up a moment later with several small plastic baggies filled with red fluid. Spike collected his booty, alcoholic and otherwise, and sauntered back to their table to stow it away in various pockets in his duster.
Fun? the responsible world-saving part of her mind piped up. Excuse me, but when did Spike stockpiling human blood become ‘fun’?
The blood Willy served to his undead clientele was kosher; she’d checked into that long ago--obtained from human patrons who donated in exchange for liquor, or 'liberated' from the hospital. No one had died for it. But still... Buffy examined her own reactions of the evening uneasily. She knew Spike still preferred human blood to pig when he could get it; he made no secret of the fact. But... shouldn’t she be more wiggy over it? Drinking human blood was wrong, and... and vampire-y, no matter how he got it... wasn’t it? He’d told her this very night that he still had trouble fighting his basic urge towards the bad. Was she just making it more difficult for him to stay on the straight and narrow in the long run by tolerating these minor slips? And how minor a slip was this, anyway? Was the fact that Spike was the only person she felt really comfortable with these days making her cut him slack she shouldn’t be cutting?
"...putting on airs," one of the demons at the end of the hall said as she approached. It was tall and thin and bile-colored. "Thinks because he's here with the Slayer no one's gonna lay a hand on his traitorous ass? I say we get Durgo and the boys from the clan and have a little talk with him later. He’s obviously forgotten the last one."
The other one, short, scaly and possessed of at least one more arm
than it really needed, chuckled nastily. "You know Spike. He never struts higher but when some bitch has him on a short leash," Short-n'-Scaly said. Its voice was deep and gravelly, like a laryngitic bullfrog. "And you can't get much bitchier than the Slayer."
"Oh, really?" Buffy said brightly. "You must move in really limited circles."

Spike slouched comfortably down in his chair, sipping his beer and keeping an unobtrusive eye on the rest of the patrons. So far he was having a ripping night. He’d gotten in a good fight with a couple of kills right off, he’d given that git Willy a proper scare, he’d gotten Buffy to smile a couple of times, he’d just taken care of half his shopping for the month on the Council’s shilling, and he’d made the astonishing discovery that the Slayer had not only read one of his favorite poems, but had liked it. And hadn’t immediately skewered him for his admission that he’d liked it.
Bet she’d like Robert Service. And Kipling. And--bloody hell, rein yourself in, William! She took half of one poetry class and said she liked one poem in it. Don’t be more of an over-eager ponce than you can help .
“...get Spike when they leave...”
Spike set his Guinness down and unslouched himself. His vampiric hearing was perfectly capable of picking up a whispered conversation on the opposite end of a large and moderately noisy room. Like anyone else, he didn’t listen to most of what he heard--heartbeats and mice crawling behind the walls and boring bar conversations--but there were a few sounds to which he was always attentive: certain dangerous tones of voice, for example, or his own name... He concentrated on picking out that voice from the desultory chatter and the music of the jukebox. There. The two demons over by the hall leading to the restrooms.
An anticipatory shiver ran through him, lifting the hairs on the backs of his arms. If they decided to try him alone, he could probably take both of them, or at least make it a difficult enough fight that they’d think twice about pressing it to its conclusion. If they went and got all the friends they were talking about, though... that could turn nasty. He had no expectation that Buffy’d back him up; she’d said as much, and she’d never gotten involved in his ongoing feud with the rest of Sunnydale’s demons before. Spike looked around the bar thoughtfully. Besides the two by the bathroom hall and the Zagros demon, there were two vampires playing darts over in one corner and a scattering of humans and vampires on barstools and at various tables. No more than a dozen people all told; it was a slow night.
He had no qualms about turning tail and running from unfavorable odds when it was only his own hide on the line, but he hadn’t been lying when he’d told Buffy he had a reputation to maintain. Sheer fighting prowess wasn’t what kept the demon population of Sunnydale from ganging up and crushing him like a bug--he was good, but not that good. There were plenty of creatures in the demon world stronger and faster than a vampire only halfway through his second century. What kept him in one piece was the general belief that if you went up against William the Bloody, you had a good chance of dying, and William the Bloody didn’t give a damn if he died in the process of killing you. That made enough of his potential opponents think twice about taking him on to ensure his continued sojourn in the land of the unliving.
He had the option of trying to leave, with or without Buffy, before Muff and Jeff over there decided to go collect their mates, but it would make a more lasting impression on the populace if he carried the fight to them before they could carry it to him. They couldn’t very well go collect their mates with broken kneecaps, could they?
One of the other sounds he always paid attention to interrupted his deliberations. Buffy’s voice. She’d come out of the hall and was frowning up at the taller of the two demons, who was making the obligatory threatening remarks. He had no worries of her being in real danger--if he could take those pillocks, she could wipe the floor with them--but she sounded angry, and it made a perfect excuse for him to stroll over and give them a piece of what for. Besides, buggered if he’d let her have all the fun. Spike tossed back the last of his blood, licked his lips and got up, drifting across the barroom floor as silently as smoke. With luck, he was going to get his skirmish after all.
Both demons were fully occupied with Buffy, and didn’t notice him stalking up behind them. The short one was making nervous motions of attempted escape; the taller one looked disgusted at its companion's sudden reversal of attitude. "This isn't your ground, Slayer," it rasped out. "It would behoove you to exercise caution."
Buffy planted one fist on her hip, looking incredulous. "Or what, you'll practice your Word-A-Day on me? If so I suggest you get a new calendar, cause ‘behoove’? Not scary." Her eyes met Spike’s for an instant. "I'm only saying this once. Remember it. Spike’s working with me these days, and the only one allowed to lay hands on his traitorous ass is me."
Her expression dared him to make anything of it, but Spike was too pleased and stunned at the unexpected backup to come up with anything beyond "Awfully flattering, Slayer." Both demons jerked round to face him as if pulled by one string. “Show’s that way, boys,” he said with as straight a face as he could manage.
Buffy shot the demons a disdainful look and tossed her hair over her shoulder. “Show’s over. Come on, Spike. We’ve got places to go.”
She brushed past him and headed for the door. He watched her retreating back (and other more interesting parts) for a second, then shrugged. “Sorry, boys,” he said with a smirk at the taller demon. “Can’t oblige you tonight, I’ve got a little strutting to take care of.”
He caught up with Buffy as she passed their table, grabbed his duster off the back of his chair, and fell in step beside her. The Zagros demon he’d faced off with earlier looked up with a startled grunt, then rose and shuffled towards the door ahead of them. “They’re signaling to the Zagros demon,” he said conversationally. “Probably going to jump me once we get outside. If you’re not inclined to participate while they beat me up in the alley, mind the motorbike for us, will you? I don’t want it scratched.”
Buffy gave him a distracted “Mmmf” of acknowledgment. Something was obviously biting her arse--she was still frowning, lower lip pushed out in that delightfully edible-looking pout... She took a deep breath and looked up at him with those big eyes, the irises gone grey with thought. “Spike...”
“Yeh, love?”
“Go put the blood back. We’re not paying for your nummy people snacks.”
That had not been on the list of things he’d expected to hear. Spike suppressed a growl of exasperation. “I think not, pet. Do you have any idea how hard it is for me to get hold of the good stuff these days? The Council can afford it. Think of it as keeping me on retainer.”
She came to a full stop, folded her arms, and locked eyes with him--the serious, I’ve-been-thinking-hard-about-this look. Damn. “Look, Spike, I know there are certain things you can’t help about the whole being a vampire biz. I don’t expect you to take up sunbathing any time soon. But this isn’t one of them. You do fine on pig’s blood.”
The prim, all for your own good tone made his hackles rise, but his unerring sense of what would brass Buffy off the most prevented him from exploding. Keep it all calm and logical. He shoved his hands in his coat pockets and faced her down. “Fine? Yeh, and you do fine without chocolate, but I don’t see you giving it up.”
Her frown deepened and he could see her counting to ten. She started for the door again. “It’s not the same thing, Spike! Chocolate’s not sentient!”
“Neither are most of the people who donate blood to Willy’s.” He took a quick half-step ahead and grabbed the door for her. “How exactly is it not the same thing if I legally purchase a freely offered commodity? Illuminate me, Slayer! You against free enterprise? Bloody un-American of you.”
Buffy stopped dead in the doorway, blocking his exit, her face set in the expression of mulish determination which always boded ill for whatever was opposing her. “We’re not out of here till you take it back.”
To hell with calm and logical. Go for the throat. That was what vampires did, and he was still a sodding vampire, despite Buffy’s apparent conviction that he was a Pekingese. Well, and why shouldn’t she be convinced when he’d done nothing since her return but trot after her with his tongue hanging out, hoping for a pat on the head? “I suppose we’ll be spending the night, then. Why the sudden attack of squeamishness, Slayer? Getting along a little too well with the monster for comfort, are we?” He draped himself lazily against the doorframe, close enough to feel her body heat, and favored her with his nastiest smirk. Her grey-green eyes widened and her mouth made that little wounded twitch--bullseye. Not his imagination, then, that electricity in the air. He should have stopped there, but his demon temper couldn’t resist a further dig. “Is the problem that you’re bothered by my choice of liquid refreshment, or that you’re not bothered?”
The mulish look blossomed into pure Buffy-fury, her face shining with that glorious inner light that made him want to grab her and ravish her right then and there, even as he battled an equally strong desire to shake her till her teeth rattled. When she spoke her voice was low and intense. “By the fact that you don’t give a damn where your liquid refreshment comes from, Spike. I’ve seen some of the people Willy taps, remember? Run-down winos the blood bank wouldn’t touch. They’re dying by degrees, but a vampire’s killing them all the same.”
He rolled his eyes. “Oh, very poetic. I’m responsible for the welfare of every sot in town now, is it? Next you’ll be on the second-hand smoke. How often do you put in time down at the soup kitchen, Slayer?”
“That has nothing to do with this!”
He pushed himself off the doorframe and they stood toe to toe, glaring at one another. He was breathing just as hard as she was and the air was heavy with the scent of anger and arousal. “Doesn’t it, then? Tell you what, Slayer, you want to take these back--” He patted the blood bags in the pocket of his coat. “--you come get them.”
Her lip quivered for a second. “Damn you, Spike, you can’t fight me!”
She was poetry when she moved, when she danced, when she fought: free verse, a complex visual meter of deadly lines and curves. He would have given much (but not anything--no, he knew now that there were things even more important than the touch of her hand) to be able to dance with her again, in any sense of the word. He took a step closer, voice dropping to a low, sensual growl. “Who said anything about fighting?”
“We did,” said a far less pleasant growl from outside. The anemic glow of the lone parking lot light shone down on the Zagros demon, who was flanked by Short-n-Scaly, Tall-n-Thin, and several more hulking indistinct shapes further back. They must have gone out the back way and circled round the building. The Zagros demon slapped a length of lead pipe against one horny palm.
Spike welcomed the painful-pleasurable stretch of bone and muscle as his demonic visage emerged. Yeah, he wanted blood tonight, and not in plastic baggies, either. Buffy’s eyes narrowed and the corners of her usually generous mouth went tight as she turned to face them, an equally ominous sign for anyone who knew her. “Do you mind? This is a private conversation.”
“We don’t have any quarrel with you, Slayer,” Tall-n-Thin rasped. “You’re free to leave.”
Buffy sighed. “I really hate it when I take the trouble to make elaborate threats and people just don’t listen. I work hard on those, you know.”
Spike glanced down at her and ran his tongue over his fangs. He carefully removed his duster and laid it down on the sidewalk, not about to take the chance of breaking two bottles of Jack Daniels in a free-for-all. “Just this once what say we skip the witty banter and go straight to the killing things part?”
Buffy’s shoulders tensed and she rocked lithely on the balls of her feet, ready to pounce. “Good idea,” she breathed. “Very good idea.”

An hour later the bike came to a halt in the driveway and the engine rumbled to a halt. For a few seconds the two of them sat there, motionless, and then Buffy pulled away, wincing a little as she got off. Her right leg was still sore; she knew she was lucky it wasn’t broken. She pulled off the powder-blue helmet and handed it to Spike, who took it without comment and hung it on its hook. He was moving pretty cautiously too; she hoped that the ribs were only cracked. Maybe, just maybe, taking on seven-to-two odds when unarmed had been a little bit foolhardy. At least they’d finally maneuvered the fight close enough to get Spike’s axe off the motorcycle.
Yeah, but you should see the other guys.
She reached out and brushed a thumb lightly across the raw scrape above his right eye. It had mostly stopped bleeding; lack of circulation had its advantages. “You gonna be OK?”
“Always am. You?”
“Nothing a hot bath and ten hours sleep won’t fix.” She searched his face. His eyes smouldered with bloodlust and tenderness, anger and love and longing--how could such a cold shade of blue burn so? “We’re not finished with this, you know.”
There was more than one meaning to that. Spike shrugged. “I know. So... same time tomorrow?”
She nodded. “I’m still mad at you.”
He just looked at her. Reached up and removed her hand from his forehead, holding it in his own. In one swift stroke, dipped his head and licked his own blood from her thumb.
And looked up, and smiled. “Mutual.”

Tara padded down the hall. Her bare feet made no sound on the carpet, and every so often she halted, listening for any slight movement behind the closed doors. The house was eerily silent. She had always been an early riser, and the habit stood her in good stead now--in all likelihood, her opponent was still snuggled obliviously beneath her covers--
WHAM! Dawn’s door flew open. Dawn shot out into the hallway, blue cotton nightgown whipping round her thin calves, and skidded through the bathroom door in front of Tara. “Yeah!” she whooped, bare feet beating out a victory dance on the tiles. “I win, you lose, I rule, you suck!”
“Dawn, I’ve got an early class today!”
Dawn pulled the shower door open, looking at Tara over her shoulder and batting dark lashes over those great big innocent blue eyes. “But I got here first. Dibs. It’s the law. Besides, you guys have Mom’s bathroom. Eww...” She made a face at the bottom of the tub. “Buffy! You left gross Slayer scum all over the bathtub!”
“Scrub it out,” came Buffy’s muffled and unsympathetic reply.
Dawn stamped a foot. “It’s your scum!”
“So?” A moment later a tousle-haired Buffy emerged from her own room, muffled in a robe and yawning. “You keep claiming I’m not the Mom of you. I concede. Not the Mom, therefore, not in charge of housework. If my scum offends you, give me the shower first.”
“And let you leave me twice as much scum? Besides, I’m faster. You take about ten years to wash your hair.”
“Never bring your sister back from the dead if you aren’t willing to embrace her hair care rituals. Move!”
“You move!”
Scuffling ensued. Tara sighed and turned back to the master bedroom to see if Willow was through with the bathroom there. She wasn’t at all sorry they’d decided to move into Buffy’s house. Renting Joyce Summers’ old room was cheaper than the dorm and gave Buffy a much-needed source of income, and it was quieter and more private than the dorm too. Usually. Behind her the sound of Dawn shrieking “Ahhh! No fair!” and Buffy caroling “I rule, you suck!” rang through the hall. There were times when she could work up nostalgia for student housing.
Still... it was good to see Buffy engaged with the rest of the world this morning. Her flashes of connection were getting more frequent, and lasting longer. Maybe things would work out. Maybe they’d all been cosmically lucky, and there really would be no more serious consequences from Willow’s spell. Maybe... the bedroom was buzzing. Tara stopped just outside the doorway with her hand on the knob, puzzled. The vibration wasn’t entirely physical, and it made her fingertips tingle. She tightened her grip on the knob and turned it, apprehension in the set of her shoulders.
Opening the door revealed the low, penetrating hum to be of very worldly origin. Willow sat cross-legged in the middle of the floor, among the piles of schoolbooks and laundry and boxes they hadn’t finished unpacking yet, wrapped up in a green silk robe. Her hair fanned across her shoulders like a fall of glowing embers in the morning light, and a huge old book bound in flaking brown calfskin lay open upon her lap, the pages bright with illuminated text in red and blue and gold. Her elfin face was set in concentration as she traced the words of a spell with one finger. The hum intensified as she did so.
“Willow?”
Her lover looked up, startled. The intricate patterns of power in the air shivered and dissolved, falling apart into nothing, and Willow’s face fell with them. A wounded little “Oh!” escaped her lips. Willow closed the book and essayed a bright, painful smile. “Done with the shower.”
Tara knelt and glanced briefly at the cover of the grimoire. Thaumaturgie Made Plaine. An old standard, full of cures for warts and spells for making chickens lay and love spells that didn’t work. Easy, simple magics which shouldn’t be any strain on Willow’s recovering faculties. Nothing scary about this one, but Willow had promised her she’d wait before jumping back into magic. “Hon, I thought--weren’t you going to wait on the spellcasting till I could monitor you? You could hurt yourself! Which spell were you doing?”
She didn’t mean for her tone to be wary, or suspicious, or accusing. Maybe it wasn’t any of those things; maybe it was only that the lingering tension between them had never quite dispelled since Willow had performed the Raising, or maybe it was part and parcel of her disappointment over the failed spell. Willow’s brows slanted and her lips compressed to a thin angry line. “What, you didn’t listen at the door long enough to tell?” She scrambled to her feet and skinned out of her robe, pulling clothes from the closet at random.
Tara winced. “I didn’t mean--I was j-just wondering. I know you weren’t really--” Most of the spells in that particular book required material components to cast; in speaking the words without them, Willow could only have been doing a dry run, a mental exercise. Not technically a violation of their agreement. And she’d messed it up at the first minor distraction, which made Tara all the more concerned that they stick to that agreement, but she could tell Willow wasn’t in a mood to be reminded of that. Tara tugged on a strand of honey-colored hair, trying to come up with the right words. “It’s just--are you sure you’re ready?”
Willow grabbed a pair of jeans and began tugging them on. “Why doesn’t--anyone--believe me? I’m fine! I’ve been fine for weeks! I’ve cast difficult spells before, and recovered just fine, and--and--” All of a sudden her face crumpled and a panicked sob escaped her. “It shouldn’t be this hard!”
It only took a moment to rise to her feet and close the distance between them. Tara took the smaller woman in her arms and held her fiercely close while Willow clung to her and tried to still her jerky breathing. “Something’s wrong,” she moaned into Tara’s shoulder. “I can still do the spells, but it’s so hard! Even the easy ones! It used to be like... like breathing, I just did it, it just happened, and now I have to make it happen and I don’t get it, nothing’s changed, I still--”
“Shh, shh, it’s all right,” Tara crooned, stroking her hair. “You shut down a dimensional gate practically all by yourself, on sheer willpower. Or Will power.” Willow managed a quavery smile. “It’s only been a month. The aether out by the factory is still all shaken up. Is it any wonder you are, too? Give yourself time to heal.”
She felt Willow take a deep shuddering breath and let it out. A moment later she pushed away slightly; in the morning light Tara could see the charcoal smudges of weariness around her eyes, lying just below the transparent porcelain of her skin. Beautiful had never seemed a sufficient word to describe Willow. Willow had something beyond beauty, some fey quality that caught at your heart from half-way across the room and drew you closer, desperate just to be near this creature whose every breath and movement scattered magic with careless generosity in her wake. For the first few months she’d known her, Tara had been terribly afraid that she’d wake up one morning and discover that Willow had only been a dream.
And she wasn’t, of course--she was a living, breathing woman, stubborn and loving and heedless and brilliant, fearless with the courage of one who has never truly known defeat and terrifying for the same reason. “Maybe... maybe it’s...better this way. That you slow down a little. You’ve been pushing yourself so hard all summer, and between slaying and school...”
Willow’s eyes clouded. “The things we fight don’t slow down.”
“You can’t save the world all by yourself.” Tara put a finger beneath Willow’s chin and lifted her head. “That’s Buffy’s job. And even she’s got help.”
A sigh. “Oh, all right, if you’re going to use rational argument on me...” Willow cuddled into her shoulder. “I’ll try to be less spazzy. Promise. But I still think--”
“Later,” Tara said firmly. “Breakfast now.”

Dawn and Buffy were already in the kitchen when they came downstairs. It was a bright, sunny November morning. Willow winced. Pale clear light streamed in through the windows, and outside the sky was blue and the birds were probably singing, but thankfully Willow couldn't hear them. It was difficult to believe that this was a town situated over a Hellmouth. Except, of course, for the fact that at this minute she felt like hell. She only hoped that Tara wouldn’t notice. Her eyes were gritty with the aftermath of her magical exercises, and there was a slow, sullen pounding in the back of her head. She would have gone over and pulled down the blinds to keep the stabby sunlight out, or at least asked Dawn to do it, except for the fact that then they'd have asked what was wrong, and she really didn't want to talk about it.
Dawn, seated across the kitchen table from her sister and looking far too bright and chipper to be allowed, was scarfing down Coco Puffs and reading the back of the cereal box. Buffy was stirring her own cereal, which was slowly disintegrating into chocolate gruel, in languid circles. She held up her spoon and let brown, gluey milk dribble back into the bowl, watching the drops fall with utter fascination. Looked like the connection with the world had some static in it.
“Are you going to eat that?”
Buffy started and blinked. “Oh.” She looked down at her cereal. “I think it’s left the realm of chocolate goodness and entered the realm of performance art.”
“Waste not, want not,” Dawn said from the safety of her cardboard defensive emplacement.
Buffy gave her a look, picked up the cereal bowl, went to the kitchen door, opened it and emptied the bowl into the flowerbed. “Not waste. Mulch.” She came back and poured herself a new bowlful.
Was that old Buffy humor or new Buffy weirdness? Willow decided to assume the former and mustered a laugh. “Succinct, yet mildly disturbing.” She eyed the Coco Puffs and decided against them. She didn’t think she could face a sugar high right now. She opened the refrigerator and pawed through the contents--leftover macaroni and hotdog casserole, yuck, Buffy’s stash of yogurt fruit cups, yuck, milk jug half-full of pig’s blood for Spike, double yuck... bread. Boring squishy Wonder Bread. With which one could make toast. Bland, dry, boring toast. Yes. Bland was of the good.
Dawn and Buffy kept up a mild sisterly snipefest as she waited for the toast to pop, which would have been annoying except that it was such a relief to see Buffy reacting to things again. Dawn kept peering at her round the cereal box as if she couldn't quite believe she was having a normal argument with her bossy older sister.
“You seem to be in a good mood this morning, Buffy,” Tara observed, coming in with the morning paper. Willow felt a surge of justification, balm after the last month, and even her magic-induced headache seemed to ease off. When even Tara had to admit the Raising had worked, had been, in the end, a good thing...
Buffy made a dismissive half-shrugging gesture. “Spike and I had a fight last night, and--”
“That’s too bad--oh, cool! Look, here’s the advertisement Anya put in for the Magic Box!” Dawn pulled the paper over to admire Anya’s entrepreneurial genius as Tara gathered up her books. Tara kissed the top of Willow’s head. “Byzantine history calls. See you later, sweetie.”
“Bye.” Willow sat down, maintaining a surreptitious watch on Buffy’s expression--well, maybe, if surreptitious meant ‘eyes glued anxiously to face while trying desperately to appear otherwise’. Improving? Not improving? Buffy gave her a flinchy, worried look and Willow forced herself to be cool. “Fight? I thought the two of you were getting on like gangbusters.” She took a nervous bite of toast and swallowed it a little too quickly, coughing as the crumbs scratched her throat. “Though gangbusters, it does sound pretty fighty, doesn’t it?”
“You didn’t hit him again, did you?” Dawn asked accusingly. “It's totally not fair when he can’t hit back.”
“No, I did not hit him,” Buffy said, taking a stab at her innocent coffee cup with a spoon, as if practicing staking moves. “We were in the middle of Willy’s, and I’m not about to have a public fistfight with Fang-face. We just had... words.”
Willow scraped margarine over her toast. Nothing like gossip to alleviate pain. “And these words filled your heart with chipperness? So, dish.”
Buffy considered. “Not as such. It was just...” She made a vague swirly gesture with both hands. “...a non-revelation. Before the fight started I was happy and trying to figure out why I was happy, so I could, I don’t know, use the scientific method to duplicate the process or something. And couldn’t. I went to bed all worried about it last night, and when I woke up there was the answer. An answer. A thought, at least. It doesn’t matter why. It just matters that I was--until Mr. Ooh-what-a-big-pair-of-fangs-I’ve-got had to go all contrary, anyway--because that means I can. And that means I will be. Sometimes. Which is all anyone gets, right? No one’s happy all the time.”
“That’s... that’s really great, Buffy. But...”
“The fight? It’s complicated.” She looked significantly at Willow. “I’llway elltay ouyay atway unchlay, enwhay Awnday’s otnay aroundway otay efendday ethay annoyingway ampirevay.”
Dawn rolled her eyes, the teenage personification of sarcasm. “Golly gee, I just don’t know how you guys manage to hide your secrets so well. I am baffled, I tell you, baffled. Hey, if you were at Willy’s, were the guys in back still playing for kittens? ‘Cause I really wanted one and Spike said I’d have to--"
Buffy's eyes narrowed. "How do you know about Willy's back room?"
A flicker of alarm crossed her sister's face and disappeared in record time. Dawn shrugged, elaborately casual. "Spike must have mentioned it." She began shoveling spoonfuls of soggy chocolate into her mouth. "Gaw geh t' schoo."
"Did Spike take you to Willy's? You, underage human-type girl? Willy's, gross disgusting demon bar?" Buffy leaned forward over the table with a fair approximation of the look her mother used to use when grilling her about her own unsavory teenaged wandering. "If he took you to Willy's he is SO dust. Spike, stake. Stake, Spike."
Unfortunately Dawn was far more resistant to The Look than Buffy had ever been. Or maybe Buffy just wasn't doing it right--it was hard to wrap oneself in the cloak of quasi-parental authority with a spoonful of Coco Puffs in your hand. “Um, Buffy...” Willow pointed. Buffy looked down, confused. Her hair was dragging in the cereal. She jerked upright and swiped at the ends of her hair with a napkin.
Whatever the reason, Dawn's big innocent blue eyes simply got bigger, bluer, and more innocent, and she rolled them piously ceilingward as she grabbed her book bag and slung it over one shoulder. "Geez, Buffy, chill. You know I hung out with Spike a lot over the summer, while he was playing ‘My bodyguard the vampire’ all the time. We might have stopped at Willy’s once or twice when he had to buy blood. Which would you rather, he take me inside with him or leave me in the parking lot by myself? Besides," she added, "who's calling who underage?"
"Excuse me, I'm almost twenty-one and legal in lots of states," Buffy retorted. "Just not this one. You are barely fifteen and... not. And stop changing the subject!"
Dawn didn't crack. She tucked her hair casually behind her ear and smiled a cool, superior smile. "I thought the subject was underage bar-hopping? Which one of us has been doing within the last twenty-four hours? That one not being me?" A horn sounded outside. "That's Lisa's mom. Can I go now, or are you going to play Spanish Inquisition some more?"
Buffy gave up and buried her nose in her coffee. "Oh, go to school." Dawn grabbed her book bag and bounced out the front door, Buffy frowned into her coffee cup and stirred in another packet of Sweet-N-Low. “I bet she’s lying through her pearly white teeth. If I really want to know the details, I’ll have to grill Spike. He’s more crackable... of course, that would mean deliberately seeking out Spike. My interview's at ten. When do you want to meet for lunch?"
"Sociology lets out at eleven-thirty. Noon?"
"It is the traditional lunch hour, true. Can I see the paper a sec? Anya'll get all sniffly if I can't say I've seen her ad."
Willow handed her the community section. "Page six. Right next to that article about the guy that freaked out in the Espresso Pump."
"Freaked out in..." Buffy frowned and folded the paper in half, perusing the article more carefully. "This says it’s just another of the rash of mysterious mental collapses over the last year... the last year? As in not stopping since Glory went away? This can't be good. Wills, we so need to talk--a bunch of non-Spikey non-fighty stuff came up last night that we’re going to need you in on.”
“Really?” Willow knew she sounded cranky but was too headachey to make the attempt to overcome it. “Cause last night, it sounded like not so much.”
“Last night it was freakout, one, temporary. Willy’s not exactly a well-beloved member of the community; anyone could have gotten torqued off and done a freakout spell on him.” She tapped the newspaper article with a forefinger. “Now according to this it’s freakouts, plague of, continuing long past the point they should have stopped. So Will, I hope you’re right about being ready to make with the magic again. We’re going need you.”

Buffy slid into the booth and set her purse down on the vinyl seat beside her with a sigh. The interview had gone... well, it had gone. She’d never interviewed well, and it didn’t help that she hadn’t wanted a job as office help at Sunnydale Affordable Mortgage and Loan in the first place. This was impossible. She not only had to find a job that would support her and Dawn, but one which had flexible enough hours to allow for vampire slaying and occasional world saveage. Getting herself up in office drag, plastering a fake smile over her face and talking with the interviewer about actualizing her goals and being a team player was... surreal. 'Previous experience. One three-month stint as a waitress, six apocalypses averted. Last night I beat up three demons, killed two vampires and almost kissed a third... What was that noise? Oh, nothing, just the superego pounding the id with a mallet again...
The situation wasn't panic-worthy yet; they had the tail end of Mom's life insurance and the money from the sale of the gallery, and the child support checks for Dawn still arrived regularly from their father's bank. As a last resort, she could tuck her tail between her legs and appeal to said father, not that she had any intention of doing so save as an absolute last resort. They weren’t going to starve in the streets, but she hated, hated, hated having to agonize over whether or not she’d been right to run out this morning and blow some of The Budget on a re-stock of decent makeup. She’d rationalized it as a purchase that would help her on Employment Quest, but she was well aware that it was a rationalization.
“Hey,” said Willow breathlessly, sliding into the seat across from her. “Sorry I’m late. Professor Sorenson had this three-page hand-out, and there was this unfortunate collating incident. “So what’s up that you didn’t want Dawn to hear?”
Buffy looked carefully around the café. The lone waitress was attending to another table and everyone around them seemed to be absorbed with their own lunchtime travails. She leaned forward and placed both palms flat on the table. “Rule Number One, no freaking.”
Willow looked a little uneasy, but nodded. “Agreed. Designated freak-free zone starts here.”
“Rule Number Two... I can’t think of a Rule Number Two, but it sounded silly to have a Rule Number One all by itself.” Babbling. You’re babbling. Stop it. Willow will get you for trademark infringement . She took a deep breath. “OK, Will, I know you’re with Tara now and all, but you still... um... notice guys, right?”
“I’m an equal opportunity noticer,” Willow said, cautious. “Though any conclusions drawn from the noticing are purely academic.”
Buffy rubbed the base of her right thumb, trying to ignore the sense-memory of that cool agile tongue flicking over her skin, soft and wet but not too wet... “So... if I said I’d started to notice that Spike’s, um, nice-looking in certain lights, would you consider me completely insane?”
“Uh...” Willow rubbed her nose, perplexed, but was saved from immediate response by the arrival of the waitress. “Tuna salad sandwich on rye, and can I get it with the little froofy things on the toothpicks? Those things are so cool... What do you want, Buff? I still get parental subsidies, I’m buying.”
“Caesar salad, dressing on the side.” Buffy watched the departing waitress suspiciously, then turned back to her friend. “So, would you?”
Willow stared at her for a long moment, and to Buffy’s everlasting gratitude did not ask if she were under another spell. “I’d consider you insane if you didn’t think Spike was nice-looking in certain lights. You just now noticed this?”
“Yes. I mean, no. I mean... in the abstract. Spike’s... nice-looking.” In the lean, panthery, drop-dead-gorgeous sense of ‘nice’. “It’s just that the looks of Spike are pretty much irrelevant given the soulless-killerness of Spike, and until... well... right this minute... the back of my mind looked like the end of that Indiana Jones movie, with rows and rows of neatly crated wrong lusty Spike thoughts stretching off to infinity, and now for some reason they’re starting to break out of the crates. And worse?” She leaned forward, her eyes gone wide and tragic. “I think... I think I’m starting to... like him.”
“I can see where that would be unsettling,” Willow said, poker-faced.
Buffy sat back and folded her arms across her chest, pouting. “This isn’t funny, Will! I was having fun last night! The kind of fun I have with you guys. Spike’s not allowed in the Buffy Fun Club. Or he shouldn’t be.”
A busboy appeared and deposited ice water and napkins. Willow picked up her glass, slurped up an ice cube and began crunching it noisily. “Why not? We didn’t exactly spend the summer ignoring him. It wasn’t unknown for Spike to engage in extracurricular Bronzing with us, and he and Xander had that whole dueling CDs thing going for awhile--” She dissolved into little snorts of laughter. “You should have--he--with the Patsy Cline, and the expression on Spike’s face--”
“A laugh riot, but you had to be there?”
Willow wiped her eyes, looking guilty. OK, maybe a little heavy on the irony there, Buff. “Um, yeah. And Giles--Giles is all mad at us now because of the whole...” Her eyes slid away from Buffy’s and glued themselves to a spot on the tabletop, and she began twisting her paper napkin into a corkscrew. “..return from the dead thing, but there were, you know, definite signs of restrained British bonding before that.”
“Oh.” Buffy propped her chin on her fist and frowned. “Did you know Spike likes poetry?”
This proved sufficient to distract Willow from the mutilation of her napkin. Her brows quirked. “He never told me so in so many words, but he was helping me catch up with my Western Lit when I was out of school for that week--" Right after you brought me back from the dead, but let’s not go there, “--and no one knows that much about archy and mehitabel if they don’t like poetry. Plus he helped Dawn with her English while she was in summer school. You knew that. Didn’t you?”
“Oh. Again.” Buffy felt vaguely disconcerted. She’d been getting rather fond of the idea that she’d discovered something about Spike that no one else knew. “I haven’t been noticing things very well lately. The things I should notice, anyway.”
“Look, Buff, have you ever considered that maybe these noticings are connected somehow? Spike’s gotten... um...”
“Much less homicidal?”
“That’s a good way of putting it. I don’t know if he’ll ever be all the way good, but he’s... not bad. You saw how mad Giles and Tara were at both of us after we... you know... but neither one of us got shown the door and asked never to darken his doorstep again. Maybe it’s just because Giles still needs us to finish up that big interview paper thingy I’m helping him with, but the point is we both get to stick around and get yelled at. Spike’s one of us now.” She stopped and looked at Buffy curiously. “That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”
“Yes... yes, it was. I just... I never thought about it involving... me.” Buffy frowned and stirred her slowly melting ice cubes while Willow squirmed slightly. The food arrived. Buffy speared a lettuce leaf and let her fork hover over the dressing for a second, then sighed and popped the greenery into her mouth bare. Those nachos last night had probably contained a million calories, all migrating straight to her hips at this moment. All Spike’s fault; probably some weird vampire ability to divine that cheese was her culinary downfall.
Willow interrupted her musings. “Maybe your crates are breaking open because you’re starting to like him. Because you can start to like him, because he’s turning into someone likeable. And you’re not insane, because the rest of us are liking him too.” She grinned. “Some more than others, of course.”
“I guess that makes sense.” Buffy wrinkled her nose. “I’m new improved Clue-Free Buffy with thirty percent less insight. I’ll deal. Now we get to the exciting post-fun argument.” Willow clasped her hands in front of her and looked expectant. “While we were at Willy’s, we got drinks--seltzer, seltzer!--and I was going to charge them to the Council as a slaying expense. Giles said if he couldn’t get me a salary then we could at least do a little creative accounting with his. And Spike ordered human blood, of course, and I didn’t even think to call him on it until he tried to get take-out later. Then I said I wasn’t going to pay for it, and told him to take it back, and he got mad, and I got mad, but my moral high ground was severely eroded from not having objected right away, and then we got distracted by demons, and... other things... and--DAMMIT, he ended up taking the stuff home after all!” Buffy smacked the table and the silverware jumped.
“Welll...” Willow appeared torn. “The human blood thing is of the bad, technically, but it’s not like he gets it very often, and...honestly? We’ve kind of looked the other way when he does. It doesn’t seem to, um, affect him for the worse, if you know what I mean--not like he chugs a bag and gets all nostalgic for killing people.”
“Maybe,” Buffy grumbled, “but it’s still wrong.”
“I don’t see the problem,” Willow said. “Angel drank bagged people blood all the time. He had a whole fridge full. Of course he had a lot more money than Spike does...”
Buffy fixed Willow with an evil glare. What was up with this using of reason and logic? “Angel never rubbed my nose in it.” Uncomfortable silence. “All right, I admit it, I’m wigging unduly over something that never wigged me before, and do you know why? I hope so, because I don’t.”
“I don’t think it’s that difficult, Buffy. You’ve got an incredibly hot guy who’s head over heels for you and he just happens to be a vampire. Think back to the last time this happened.”
“Whoa.” Buffy held up both hands. “So not going there.”
“Exactly! Last time you fell for a vampire the world almost ended. And with the chip, potential Spike-related heartbreak abounds if it ever goes blooey. So naturally you’re going to try to avoid it happening again, and hence, the wig.”
“But it’s not! I am nowhere near falling for Spike. I merely find him somewhat attractive in a purely academic, non-touchy sense, and if I can go back to avoiding thinking about it, everything will be exactly the way it used to be.”
“Except that you used to hate him and now you like him.”
“And that makes everything complicated and annoying.” Buffy stabbed vindictively at her salad. “This is the badness that comes of liking vampires. It never happened with Angel.” Uncomfortable silence. “Not that I didn’t like Angel. I loved Angel.” The even more uncomfortable memory of a night three years gone, standing at Angel’s side in the Magic Box, while Spike’s contemptuous North London voice drawled You’ll never be friends... “OK, ‘like’ could never fit into the same room with me and Angel, given that all the space was taken up by buckets of romantic angst, and--that’s it, Will!” She thumped the table again and Willow grabbed her water glass. “I shouldn’t run from this whole friend thing, I should embrace it, because friendship equals death to romantic weirdness!”
“When did romance make an entrance?” Willow asked. Buffy paid no attention.
“Spike. Friend. Yes. The perfect solution. It’ll be just like me and Xander. Slaying partners. Talking buddies. No more noticing of--” Electric blue eyes that crinkle when he smiles and knife-edge cheekbones and expressive, deadly hands and the intriguing twitch of muscles beneath that ubiquitous black t-shirt and we don’t go any lower than that because Spike absolutely, positively does not exist below the belt buckle and the memory of his reaction to you squirming around on his lap under the influence of that engagement spell which by the way was ALSO all Willow’s fault never, EVER kept you up at night-- “--stuff. The thing is, just because I can notice doesn’t mean I should be. Spike’s... he doesn’t care about people, Will. About me, about Dawn, about the rest of you, yeah. But about Willy, or some random guy on the street? No. He can’t. No soul. And what’s it say about me if I... accept someone like that as--as...”
“A friend?” Willow said quietly.
Buffy moaned and dropped her forehead to the table, narrowly avoiding her side bowl of dressing. She sat back up straight and said with great determination, “Freakouts. We’re going to talk about freakouts now. We need to know how many of them there’ve been since last spring. Can you find that out for me?”
Willow nodded, looking pleased. “I can do a search of the newspaper’s archives tonight, and maybe hack into the hospital admissions records and the police’s missing persons files--well, no, that’s so huge it would be pointless. When do you need it?”
She looked so eager that Buffy was tempted to say “Fifteen minutes” and see what happened. A guilty pang went through her. She’d been avoiding Willow, she knew that, and now that she was starting to get a grip on the world again, she was beginning to feel bad about it. “The sooner the better. Let me know when you’ve got the info and we’ll rally the troops.” A thought struck her. “Do you know what happened to the rest of Glory’s crazies?”
Willow shook her head. “No. We were distracted. They just wandered off, I guess. We could check at the hospital, or...”
“Of course,” said Buffy, resigned. “My favorite place in all the world. Hospital it is. You said you were ready to fire up the spells again. You’re sure about that?”
There was the barest hesitation before Willow nodded again. “I am. What do you need?”
“For a start, the spell you cured Tara with. I have a feeling we’re going to need it.”

Evening. Friday. On Friday he checked the others. Always the first thing.
Tanner scrambled over the piles of refuse, shards and pieces of other people’s lives, other people’s minds. Avoid the caretaker’s trailer, touch the rusted “No Private Dumping” sign, follow the barbed wire fence back along its snarled length to the cluster of sheet-metal and cardboard hovels hidden from view by the mounds of trash. Some of the others were out already, gathered around a fire in an old oil drum. Still more were hidden away inside their lairs. He could feel them, all of them connected inside by the fingers crawling from mind to mind, hunting and never finding. Dana, Ronnie, Jim. The Rabbit Guy. Blondie. Their eyes followed him as he passed by, wary, scared, madder than his own. He counted them off one by one. Fourteen. The list had been longer once, then shorter, and now it was longer again. That was good. Meant he was doing his job.
“I’m hungry, Tanner,” Blondie whined at him. He didn’t answer her. Food wasn’t his problem. She’d chewed off the Press-On nails again and her fingertips looked raw and bloody. Stupid. You could be crazy in Sunnydale and live, but not stupid. Walk around smelling of fresh blood and the list would be one name shorter, if not tonight then soon. He didn’t care...
“Ah, shit,” he muttered. If the list got shorter he was a bad person. “Ronnie, do we have band-aids?”
Ronnie, small and grey and balding, ceased his rocking back and forth on the upturned paint can and shook his head.
“All right. I’ll get some. Can you take her over to...” Where? “The One Small Step headquarters? We haven’t hit them for a month. Get her hands cleaned up.”
Ronnie nodded and looked at the ground. Went back to rocking. Tanner sighed. He could feel it slipping away, what he’d taken, fizz fizz fizz in little green sparks leaking out of eyes and ears and dribbling from his mouth with every word spoken. Time again. The Rabbit Guy started screaming. Oh, yeah. Way past time.
Tanner headed back towards the exit from the dump, following the winding path beaten by the sanitation trucks. “Get people together, Ronnie. We’re hunting tonight.”

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